Man and Maid Part 13

"Oh, please!" he pleaded, taking the marmalade jar up in his helpless hands. She took the jar from him.

"Yes, I am," she said firmly; "and you can just sit down and try to remember who I am."

He obediently withdrew to the window-seat and watched her as she took away the ugly crockery and the uglier food to hide them in his little kitchen; and as he watched her he remembered many things. The lonely childhood in a country rectory--the long, dull days with no playfellows; then the arrival of the new doctor and his little daughter Rosamund Rainham--and almost at the same time, it seemed, the invalid lady with the little boy who lodged at the Post Office. Then there were playfellows, dear playfellows, to cheer and teach him--poor Stephen, he hardly knew what play or laughter meant. Then the invalid lady died, and Stephen's father awoke from his dreams amid his old books, as he had a way of doing now and then, enquired into the circ.u.mstances of the boy, Andrew Dornington, and, finding him friendless and homeless, took him into his home to be Stephen's little brother and friend. Then the long happy time when the three children were always together: walking, boating, birdsnesting, reading, playing and quarrelling; the storm of tears from Rosamund when the boys went to College; the shock of surprise and the fleeting sadness with which Stephen heard that the doctor was dead and that Rosamund had gone to America to her mother's brother. Then the fulness of living, the old days almost forgotten, or only remembered as a pleasant dream. Stephen had never thought to see Rosamund again--had certainly never longed very ardently to see her; at any rate, since the year of her going. And now--here she was, grown to womanhood and charm, clearing away his breakfast things! He could hear the tap running, and knew that she must be was.h.i.+ng her hands at the sink, using the horrid bit of yellow soap with tea-leaves embedded in it. Now she was drying her hands on the dingy towel behind the kitchen door. No; she came in drying her pink fingers on her handkerchief.

"What a horrid old charwoman you must have!" she said; "everything is six inches deep in dust--and all your crockery is smeary."

"I am sorry it's not nicer," he said. "Oh, but it's good to see you again! What times we used to have! Do you remember when we burned your dolls on the 5th of November?"

"I should think I did. And do you remember when I painted your new tool-chest and the handles of your saws and gimlets and things with pale green enamel? I thought you would be so pleased."

She had taken her place, as she spoke, in the depths of the one comfortable chair, and he answered from his window-seat; and in a moment the two were launched on a flood of reminiscences, and the flight of time was not one of the things they remembered. The hour and the quarters sounded, and they talked on. But the insistence of noon, boomed by the Law Courts' clock, brought Miss Rainham to her feet.

"Twelve!" she cried. "How time goes! And I've never told you what I came for. Look here. I'm frightfully rich; I only heard it last week. My uncle never seemed very well off. We lived very simply, and I used to do the was.h.i.+ng-up and the dusting and things; and now he's died and left me all his money. I don't know where he kept it all. The people on the floor above here wrote me about it. I was going to see them, and I saw your name; and I simply couldn't pa.s.s it. Look here, Stephen--are you very busy?"

"Not too busy to do anything you want. I'm glad you've had luck. What can I do for you?"

"Will you really do anything I want? Promise."

"Of course I promise." He looked at her and wondered if she knew how hard it would be to him to refuse her anything: for Mr Guillemot had been fancy free, and this gracious vision, re-risen from old times, had turned his head a little.

"Good! You must be my solicitor."

"But I can't. Jones----"

"Bother Jones!" she said. "I shan't go near him. I won't be worried by Jones. What is the use of having a fortune--and it's a big fortune, I can tell you--if I mayn't even choose my own solicitor? Look here, Stephen--really--I have no relations and no friends in England--no man friends, I mean--and you won't charge me more than you ought, but you will charge me enough. Oh, I feel like Mr Boffin--and you are Mortimer Lightwood, and Andrew is Eugene. Do you call him Dora still?"

It was the first question she had asked about the boy who had shared all their youth with them.

"Oh, Dornington is all right. He'd be awfully sick if you called him Dora nowadays. He's got on a little--not much. He goes in for journalism. He's at Lymchurch just now; he lives here with me generally."

"Yes--I know; I saw his name on the door." And Stephen did not wonder till later why she had not mentioned that name earlier in the interview.

"Here, give me paper and pens, the best there is time to procure. Now tell me what to say to Jones. I want to tell him that I loathe his very name; that I know I could never bear the sight of him; and that you are going to look after everything for me."

He resisted--she pleaded; and at last the letter was written, not quite in those terms, and Stephen at her request reluctantly instructed her as to the method of giving a Power of Attorney.

"You must arrange everything," she said; "I won't be bothered. Now I must go. Jones is human, after all. He knew I should want money, and he sent me quite a lot. And I am going away for a holiday--just to see what it feels like to be rich."

"You're not going about alone, I hope," said Stephen. And then, for the first time, he remembered that beautiful young ladies are not allowed to clear away tea-things in the Temple, without a chaperon--even for their solicitors.

"No; Constance Grant is with me. You don't know her. I got to know her at Girton. She's a dear."

"Look here," he said, awkwardly standing behind her as she pinned her hat and veil in front of his gla.s.s, "when you come back I'll come to see you. But you mustn't come here again; it's--it's not customary." She smiled at his reflection in the gla.s.s.

"Oh, I forgot your stiff English notions! So absurd! Not going to see one's old friend _and_ one's _solicitor_! However, I won't come where I'm not wanted----"

"You know----" he began reproachfully; but she interrupted.

"Oh yes, it's all right. Now remember that all my affairs are in your hands, and when I come back you will have to tell me exactly what I am worth--between eight and fourteen hundred thousand pounds, they say; but _that's_ nonsense, isn't it? Good-bye."

And with a last switch of white skirts against the dirty wainscot, and a last wave of a white-gloved hand, she disappeared down the staircase.

Stephen drew a long breath. "It can't be fourteen hundred thousand," he said slowly; "but I wish to goodness it wasn't four-pence."

II

The tide was low, the long lines of the sandbanks shone yellow in the sun--yellower for the pools of blue water left between them. Far off, where the low white streak marked the edge of the still retreating sea, little figures moved slowly along, pus.h.i.+ng the shrimping-nets through the shallow water.

On one of the smooth wave-worn groins a girl sat sketching the village; her pink gown and red j.a.panese umbrella made a bright spot on the gold of the sand.

Further along the beach, under the end of the gra.s.s-grown sea-wall, a young man and woman basked in the August sun. Her sunshade was white, and so were her gown and the hat that lay beside her. Since her accession to fortune Rosamund Rainham had worn nothing but white.

"It is the prettiest wear in the world," she had told Constance Grant; "and when you're poor, it's the most impossible. But now I can have a clean gown every day, and a clean conscience as well."

"I'm not sure about the conscience," Constance had answered with her demure smile. "Think of the millions of poor people."

"Oh, bother!" Miss Rainham had laughed, not heartlessly, but happily.

"Thank Heaven, I've enough to be happy myself and make heaps of other people happy too. And the first step is that no one's to know I'm rich, so remember that we are two high-school teachers on a holiday."

"I loathe play-acting," Constance had said, but she had submitted, and now she sat sketching, and Rosamund in her white gown watched the seagulls and shrimpers from under the sea-wall of Lymchurch.

"And so your holiday's over in three days," she was saying to the young man beside her; "it's been a good time, hasn't it?"

He did not answer; he was piling up the pebbles in a heap, and always at a certain point the heap collapsed.

"What are you thinking of? Poems again?"

"I had a verse running in my head," he said apologetically; "it has nothing to do with anything."

"Write it down at once," she said imperiously, and he obediently scribbled in his notebook, while she took up the work of building the stone heap--it grew higher under her light fingers.

"Read it!" she said, when the scribbling of the pencil stopped, and he read:

"Now the vexed clouds, wind-driven, spread wings of white, Long leaning wings across the sea and land; The waves creep back, bequeathing to our sight The treasure-house of their deserted sand; And where the nearer waves curl white and low, Knee-deep in swirling brine the slow-foot shrimpers go.

Pale breadth of sand where clamorous gulls confer Marked with broad arrows by their planted feet, White rippled pools where late deep waters were, And ever the white waves marshalled in retreat, And the grey wind in sole supremacy O'er opal and amber cold of darkening sky and sea."

"Opal and amber cold," she repeated; "it's not like that now. It's sapphire and gold and diamonds."

"Yes," he said; "but that was how it was last week----"

"Before I came----"

"Yes, before you came;" his tone put a new meaning into her words.

"I'm glad I brought good weather," she said cheerfully, and the little stone heap rattled itself down under her hand.