Noughts and Crosses Part 5

The voices broke off, and a rat-tat sounded on the front door.

"Say that we never give to beggars, under any circ.u.mstances,"

murmured Miss Susan, waking out of her lethargy.

The servant entered with a sc.r.a.p of crumpled paper in her hand.

"There was a woman at the door who wished to see Miss Lefanu."

"Say that we never give--" Miss Susan began again, fumbling with the note. "Bunce, I have on my gold-rimmed spectacles, and cannot read with them, as you know. The black-rimmed pair must be up-stairs, on the--"

"How d'ye do, my dears?" interrupted a brisk voice. In the doorway stood a plump middle-aged woman, nodding her head rapidly. She wore a faded alpaca gown, patched here and there, a shawl of shepherd's plaid stained with the weather, and a nondescript bonnet. Her face was red and roughened, as if she lived much out of doors.

"How d'ye do?" she repeated "I'm Joanna."

Miss Bunce rose, and going discreetly to the window, pretended to gaze into the street. Joanna, as she knew, was the name of the old ladies' only step-sister, who had eloped from home twenty years before, and (it was whispered) had disgraced the family. As for the Misses Lefanu, being unused to rise without help, they spread out their hands as if stretching octaves on the edge of the table, and feebly stared.

"Joanna," began the elder, tremulously, "if you have come to ask charity--"

"Bless your heart, no! What put that into your head?" She advanced and took the chair which Miss Bunce had left, and resting her elbows on the table, regarded her sisters steadily. "What a preposterous age you both must be, to be sure! My husband's waiting for me outside."

"Your husband?" Miss Charlotte quavered.

"Why, of course. Did you suppose, because I ran away to act, that I wasn't an honest woman?" She stretched out her left hand; and there was a thin gold ring on her third finger. "He isn't much of an actor, poor dear. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he has been hissed off two-and-thirty stages in Great Britain alone.

Indeed, he's the very worst actor I ever saw, although I don't tell him. But as a husband he's sublime."

"Are there--" Miss Charlotte began, and broke down. "Are there," she tried again, "are there--any--children?"

"Ah, my dear, if there were, I might be tempted to repent."

"Don't you?" jerked out Miss Bunce, turning abruptly from the window.

There was a certain sharp emotion in the question, but her face was in the shadow. Joanna regarded her for a moment or two and broke into a laugh.

"My dears, I have been an actress and a mother. I retain the pride of both,--though my little one died at three months, and no manager will engage me now, because I refuse to act unless my husband has a part. Theoretically, he is the first of artists; in practice-- You were asking, however, if I repent. Well, having touched the two chief prizes within a woman's grasp, I hardly see how it is likely.

I perceive that the object of my visit has been misinterpreted.

To be frank, I came to gloat over you."

"Your step-sisters are at least respectable," Miss Bunce answered.

"Let us grant that to be a merit," retorted Joanna: "Do I understand you to claim the credit of it?"

"They are very clean, though," she went on, looking from one to the other, "and well preserved. Susan, I notice, shows signs of failing; she has dropped her spectacles into the teacup. But to what end, Miss--"

"Bunce."

"To what end, Miss Bunce, are you preserving them?"

"Madam, when you entered the room I was of your way of thinking.

Book after book that I read"--Miss Bunce blushed at this point-- "has displayed before me the delights of that quick artistic life that you glory in following. I have eaten out my heart in longing.

But now that I see how it coa.r.s.ens a women--for it _is_ coa.r.s.e to sneer at age, in spite of all you may say about uselessness being no better for being protracted over much time--"

"You are partly right," Joanna interrupted, "although you mistake the accident for the essence. I am only coa.r.s.e when confronted by respectability. Nevertheless, I am glad if I reconcile you to your lot."

"But the point is," insisted Miss Bunce, "that a lady _never_ forgets herself."

"And you would argue that the being liable to forget myself is only another development of that very character by virtue of which I follow Art. Ah, well"--she nodded towards her stepsisters--"I ask you why they and I should be daughters of one father?"

She rose and stepped to the piano in the corner. It was a tall Collard, shaped, above the key-board, like a cupboard. After touching the notes softly, to be sure they were in tune, she drew over a chair, and fell to playing Schumann's "_Warum?_" very tenderly. It was a tinkling instrument, but perhaps her playing gained pathos thereby, before such an audience. At the end she turned round: there were tears in her eyes.

"You used to play the 'Osborne Quadrilles' very nicely," observed Miss Susan, suddenly. "Your playing has become very--very--"

"Disreputable," suggested Joanna.

"Well, not exactly. I was going to say 'unintelligible.'"

"It's the same thing." She rose, kissed her step-sisters, and walked out of the room without a look at Miss Bunce.

"Poor Joanna!" observed Miss Susan, after a minute's silence.

"She has aged very much. I really must begin to think of my end."

Outside, in the street, Joanna's husband was waiting for her--a dark, ragged man, with a five-act expression of face.

"Don't talk to me for a while," she begged. "I have been among ghosts."

"Ghosts?"

"They were much too dull to be real: and yet--Oh, Jack, I feel glad for the first time that our child was taken! I might have left him there."

"What shall we sing?" asked the man, turning his face away.

"Something pious," Joanna answered with an ugly little laugh, "since we want our dinner. The public has still enough honesty left to pity piety." She stepped out into the middle of the street, facing her sisters' windows, and began, the man's voice chiming in at the third bar--

"In the sweet by-and-bye We shall meet on that be-yeautiful sh.o.r.e." . . .

PSYCHE.

"_Among these million Suns how shall the strayed Soul find her way back to earth?_"

The man was an engine-driver, thick-set and heavy, with a short beard grizzled at the edge, and eyes perpetually screwed up, because his life had run for the most part in the teeth of the wind. The lashes, too, had been scorched off. If you penetrated the mask of oil and coal-dust that was part of his working suit, you found a reddish-brown phlegmatic face, and guessed its age at fifty.

He brought the last down train into Lewminster station every night at 9.45, took her on five minutes later, and pa.s.sed through Lewminster again at noon, on his way back with the Galloper, as the porters called it.

He had reached that point of skill at which a man knows every pound of metal in a locomotive; seemed to feel just what was in his engine the moment he took hold of the levers and started up; and was expecting promotion. While waiting for it, he hit on the idea of studying a more delicate machine, and married a wife. She was the daughter of a woman at whose house he lodged, and her age was less than half of his own. It is to be supposed he loved her.

A year after their marriage she fell into low health, and her husband took her off to Lewminster for fresher air. She was lodging alone at Lewminster, and the man was pa.s.sing Lewminster station on his engine, twice a day, at the time when this tale begins.