Flames Part 37

"Oh, that," she said, and a sort of strange, suppressed blush struggled up under the rouge on her face. "Well, that's mother."

"I like her face."

"Yes. She thinks I'm dead."

The lady turned away abruptly.

"I'll just carry the tray down to Mrs. Brigg," she said, and she clattered out with it, and down the stairs.

Julian heard her loudly humming a music-hall song as she went, the requiem of her dead life with the old woman who held the Bible on her knees. When she returned, her mouth was hard and her eyes were s.h.i.+ning ominously. Julian was still standing by the mantelpiece. As she came in he pointed to the photograph of Marr.

"And this?" he asked. "Who's this?"

The lady burst into a shrill laugh of mingled fear and cunning.

"That's the old gentleman!"

"What do you mean?"

"What I say,--the old gentleman, Nick, the devil, if you like it."

"Now you are trying to take a rise out of me."

"Not I, dear," she said. "That's the devil, sure enough."

Either the tea and toast had rendered her exuberant, or the thought of the old woman who believed her to be dead had driven her into recklessness. She continued:

"I'd been with him that night I met you, and I was frightened, I tell you. I'd been mad with fright."

"Why? What had he done to you?"

Julian strove to conceal his eager interest under a light a.s.sumption of carelessness.

"Done!--never mind. It don't do to talk about it."

She laid her thin hand on his arm, as if impelled to be confidential.

"Do you believe in people being struck?" she said.

"Struck! I don't understand."

"Struck," she repeated superst.i.tiously. "Down, from up there?"

Her eyes went up to the ceiling, like the child's when it thinks of heaven.

"Was he?" Julian asked.

She nodded, pursing her red lips.

"That's what I think. It came so sudden. Just when I was going to scream somethin' seemed to come over him, like madness it was. He seemed listening. Then he says, 'Now--now!' And he seemed goin' right off. He stared at me and didn't seem to know me. Lord, I was blue with it, I tell you, dear! I was that frightened I just left him and bunked for it, and never said a word to anybody. I ran downstairs and got out of the house, and I daren't go home. So I just walked about till I met you."

She sighed.

"I did enjoy that coffee, I tell you straight, but when you began about seein' things, I couldn't stow it. My nerves was shook. So off I trotted again."

Julian put a question to her.

"Do you know what has become of him?"

"Not I. He'll never get in here again. Mrs. Brigg won't let him. She never could abide him."

She shook her shoulders in an irrepressible shudder.

"I wish he was dead," she said. "I never go out but what I'm afraid I shall meet him, or come back late but what I think I shall find him standin' against the street door. I wish he was dead."

"I knew him. He is dead."

She looked at him, at first questioning, then awe-stricken.

"Then he was struck? Lord!"

Her red mouth gaped.

"It was in the papers," Julian said, "At the European Hotel."

"That was the place. Lord! I never see the papers. Dead is he? I am glad."

Her relief was obvious, yet almost shocking, and Julian could not question her good faith. She had certainly not known. He longed to find out more about her relations with Marr, and his treatment of her, but she s.h.i.+ed away from the subject. Obviously she really loathed and detested the remembrance of him.

"But why do you keep his photograph?" Julian asked at last.

The lady seemed puzzled.

"I dunno," she said at last. "I don't seem as if I could burn it. But if he is gone--dead, I mean--really--"

"He is."

"I know."

She sat thoughtfully. Then she said:

"He didn't look a fellow to die. It seems funny. No; he didn't look it."

And then she dropped the subject, and nothing would induce her to return to it. Presently they heard a church clock strike. It chimed seven. Julian was astonished to find that time had gone so quickly.

"I must be going," he said.

The lady looked at him with an odd, half-impudent, half-girlish, and wistful scrutiny.