The Lowest Rung Part 3

She could not indeed. I felt I might be absolutely powerless to get the muddy footprints out of the matting. And no doubt there were some in the houseplace too.

"If I go through the scullery, I may be seen," she said, the water pattering off her on to the newspaper. "So lucky you take in the _Times_; it's printed on such thick paper. Where does that window look out?"

She pointed to the window at the farther end of the room.

"On to the garden."

"Capital! Then we can get out through it, of course, without going through the scullery."

I had not thought of that. I opened the window, and she was through it in two cautious strides.

"Now," she said, looking back at me, "I'm comparatively safe for the moment, and so is the matting. But before we do anything more, get a duster--a person like you is sure to have a duster in a drawer. Just so, there it is. Now wipe up the marks of my muddy feet in the room we first came into as well as this, and then see to the paint of the window. I have probably smirched it. Then roll up the _Times_ tight, and put it in the waste-paper basket."

She watched me obey her.

"Having obliterated all traces of crime," she said when I had finished, "suppose we go on to the stable. Let me help you through the window. I will wipe my hands on the gra.s.s first. And would not you be wise to put on that little shawl I see on the sofa? It is getting cold."

The window was only a yard from the ground, and I got out somehow, enc.u.mbered in my shawl, which a grateful reader had crocheted for me.

She had, however, to help me in again directly I was out, for, between us, we had forgotten the stable key, which was underneath the cus.h.i.+on of my armchair.

The rest was plain sailing. We stole down the garden path to the stable, and I unlocked the door and let her in.

"Kindly lock me in and take away the key," she said, vanis.h.i.+ng past me into the darkness, and I thought I detected a tone of relief in her brisk, matter-of-fact voice.

"I will bring some food as soon as I can," I whispered. "If I knock three times, you will know it's only me."

"Don't knock at all," she said; "it might be noticed. Why should you knock to go into your own stable?"

"I won't, then. And how about your wet things?"

"That's nothing. I'm accustomed to being wet."

I crawled back to the cottage, and managed to scramble in by the parlour window, only to sink once more into my armchair in a state of collapse.

I had always entered so acutely into the joys and sorrows of others, their love affairs, their difficulties, their bereavements (I had in this way led such a full life), that I was surprised at this juncture to find my nervous force so exhausted, until I remembered that ardent natures who give out a great deal in the way of helpfulness and interest are bound to suffer when the reaction comes. The reaction had come for me now. I saw only too plainly the folly I had been guilty of in harbouring a total stranger, the trouble I should probably get into, the difficulty that a nature naturally frank and open to a fault would find in keeping up a deception. I doubted my own powers, everything. The truth was--but I did not realise it till afterwards--that I had missed my tea.

I could hear my servant laying my evening meal in the houseplace. In a few minutes she tapped to tell me it was ready, and I rose mechanically to obey the summons. And then, to my horror, I found I was still in morning dress. For the first time for years I had not dressed for dinner. What would she think if she saw me? But it was too late to change now; I must just go in as I was. My whole life seemed dislocated, torn up by the roots.

There was not much to eat. Half a very small cold chicken, a lettuce, and a little custard pudding, fortunately very nutritious, being made with Eustace Miles's proteid. There were, however, a loaf and b.u.t.ter and plasmon biscuits on the sideboard. I cut up as much as I dared of the chicken, and put it between two very thick slices of b.u.t.tered bread.

Then I crept out again and took it to her. She got up out of the hay, and put out a gnarled brown hand for it.

"I will bring you a cup of coffee later," I said. I was beginning to feel a kind of proprietors.h.i.+p in her. She would have starved but for me.

My servant always left at nine o'clock, to sleep at her father's cottage, just over the way. I have a bell in the roof, which I can ring with a cord in case of fire or thieves.

To-night she was, of course, later than usual, but at last she brought in the coffee, and then I heard her making her rounds, closing the shutters on the ground floor, and locking the front door--at least, trying to do so. I had already locked and bolted it. Then she locked the scullery door on the outside, abstracted the key, and I heard her step on the brick path, and the click of the gate. _She was gone_.

I always heated the coffee myself over the parlour fire. It was already bubbling on the hob. Directly she had left I went to the kitchen, and got a second cup. I felt much better since I had had supper. And as I took the cup from the shelf the fantastic idea came into my mind to ask my protegee to come in and drink her coffee by the fire in the parlour.

I must frankly own it was foolhardy; it was rash, it was even dangerous.

But there it is! One cannot help the way one is made, and I am afraid I am not of those who invariably take the coldly prudent course and stick to it.

I turned the idea over in my mind. I could put down sheets of brown paper--I always have a store--from the door to the fire, and an old mackintosh over the worst armchair, which was to be re-covered. Besides, I had not had a good look at her yet, or made out the real woman under the prison garb. That she was a person of education and refinement may appear hardly credible to my readers, but to one like myself, whose _metier_ it is to probe the secrets of my own heart and those of others--to _me_ it was sufficiently obvious from the first moment that, though I had to deal with a criminal, she was a very exceptional one, and belonging to my own cla.s.s. I went out to the stable, and suggested to her that she should come in.

"How do you know that I am not a man in disguise?" came a voice from the darkness; and it seemed to me, not for the first time, that she was amused at something. "I'm tall enough. Just think how stupendous it would be if, when I was inside and the door really locked, I proved to be a wicked, devastating, burglarious male."

"I wish you would not say things like that," I said. "On your honour, _are_ you a man?"

She hesitated, and then said in a changed voice:

"I am not. I don't know what I am. I was a woman once, just as a derelict was a s.h.i.+p once. But whatever I am, I am not fit to come into a self-respecting house. I am one solid cake of mud."

Something in her reluctance made me the more determined. Besides, one of the truths on which I have insisted most strongly in my "Veil of the Temple" is that if we show full trust and confidence in others, they will prove worthy of that trust. Her coming indoors had now become a matter of principle, and I insisted. I even said I could lend her a dressing-gown and slippers, so that her wet clothes might be dried by the kitchen fire.

She murmured something about a good Samaritan, but still demurred, and asked if I had a bath-room. I said I had.

That decided her. She seemed to have no difficulty in making up her mind. She did not see two sides to things, as I always do myself.

She said that if I liked to allow her to go to the bath-room first, she should be happy to accept my kind invitation for an hour or so. If not, she would stay where she was.

Half an hour later she was sitting opposite me in the parlour, on the other side of the wood fire, sipping her coffee. I had not put down the brown paper or the mackintosh. It was not necessary. Her close-cropped, curly grey hair, still damp from the bath, was parted, and brushed stiffly back over her ears. It must have been very beautiful hair once.

Her thin hands and thinner face and neck looked more like brown parchment than ever, as she sat in the lamplight, my old blue dressing-gown folded negligently round her, and taking picturesque folds which it never did when I was inside it. Those long, gaunt limbs must have been graceful once. Her feet were bare in her slippers--in my slippers, I mean. She looked rather like a well-bred Indian.

It was obvious that she was a lady, but her speech had already told me that. What amazed me most where all amazed me was her self-possession.

I wondered what her impression of me was, as we sat, such a strangely a.s.sorted couple, one on each side of the fire. Did I indeed seem to her the quixotic, impetuous, and yet withal dreamy creature which my books show me to be? But I have often been told by those who know me well that I am much more than my books.

"I have not sat by a fire for how many months?" she said, her black eyes on the logs. "Let me see, last time was in a lonely cottage on the Cotswolds. It was a night like this, but colder, and a helpless old couple let me in, and allowed me to dry my clothes, and lie by their fire all night. Very unwise of them, wasn't it? I might have murdered them in their beds."

I began to feel rather uncomfortable.

"You are not undergoing a sentence for murder, are you?" I asked.

She looked at me for a moment, and then said:

"The desperate creature who escaped from gaol three days ago, and who was in for life for the murder of the man she lived with, and whose convict clothes I am wearing--whose clothes, I mean, are at this moment drying before your kitchen fire--is not the same woman who is now drinking your excellent coffee."

"Do you mean to tell me you have never been in prison?"

"Yes, for a year; but I served my time and finished it four years ago."

I wrung my hands. I was deeply disappointed in her. Her transparent duplicity, which could impose on no one, not even so unsuspicious a nature as mine, hurt me to the quick.

"Oh! you poor soul," I said, "don't lie to me. Indeed it isn't necessary. I will do all I can for you. I will help you to get away. I will give you other clothes, and money, and we will bury these--these garments of shame. But don't, for G.o.d's sake, don't lie to me."

She looked gravely at me, as if she were measuring me, and seeing, no doubt, that I was not deceived, a dusky red rose for a moment to her face and brow.

"It is not easy to speak the truth to some people," she said, her eyes dropping once more to the fire, "even when they are as compa.s.sionate and kind as you are."