It was a moment later as he crossed over to the client"s chair that Myra caught sight of him from the schooner"s deck. The child cowered back into the shadow of the deck-house, her eyes intent again on the listener leaning out from the quay-door. He could not even see what she had seen; and if Tom was in talk with anyone inside her own ears caught no sound of it. Nevertheless her uncle"s att.i.tude left no room to doubt that he was playing the spy, and trying, at least, to listen.
"What name?" asked Hester, dipping her pen.
"What name? Eh, to be sure,"--Tom Trevarthen hesitated for a moment.
"Put down Harriet Sands." She glanced up, and he nodded. "Yes, that"ll do--Harriet Sands, of Runcorn."
"She must have some nearer address than that. Runcorn is a large town, is it not?"
He pondered, or seemed to ponder. "Then we"ll put down "Sailors" Return Inn, Quay Street, Runcorn." That"ll find her, as likely as anywhere."
Hester wrote the address and glanced up inquiringly; but his eyes were fastened on the desk where her hand rested, and on the virgin sheet of notepaper placed ready for use.
"A public-house? It wanted only that!" she told herself. Aloud she said, ""My dearest Harriet"--Is that how you begin?"
He appeared to consider this slowly. "I suppose so," he answered at length, with a shade of disappointment in his voice.
"And next, I suppose, you say, "This comes hoping to find you well as it leaves me at present.""
"Don"t "ee--don"t "ee, co!" he implored her almost with a cry of pain; and then, scarcely giving her time to be ashamed of her levity, he broke out, "They tell me you can guess a man"s thoughts and write "em down a"most before he speaks. Why won"t you guess "em for me? Write to her that when we parted she was unkind; but be she unkind for ever and ever, in my thoughts she will be the best woman in the world. Tell her that whatever she may do amiss, in my eyes she"ll last on as the angel G.o.d A"mighty meant her to be, and all because I love her and can"t help it. Say that to her, and say that there"s degrees between us never to be crossed, and I know it, and have never a hope to win level with her; but this once I will speak and be silent all the rest o" my days. Tell her that there"s bars between us, but the only real one is her own self; that for nothing would she be beyond my reach but for being the woman she is."
Hester laid down the pen and looked up at him with eyes at once dim and shining.
"I cannot write this," she said, her lips stammering on the words.
"I am not worthy--I laughed at you."
"Tell her," he went on, "that I"m a common seaman, earnin" two pound a month, with no book-learning and no hopes to rise; tell her that I"ve an old mother to keep--that for years to come there"s no chance of my marryin"; and then tell her I"m glad of it, for it keeps me free to think only of her. Write all that down, Miss Marvin."
"I cannot," she protested.
Very gently but firmly he laid a brown strong hand over hers as it rested on the letter. In a second he withdrew it, but in that second she felt herself mastered, commanded. She took up the pen and wrote.
"I have used your own words and none of mine," she said, when she had finished. "Shall I read them over to you?"
"No." He took the letter, folded it, and placed it in the envelope she handed him. "Why didn"t you put it into better words?" he asked.
"Because I could not. Trust a woman to know what a woman likes.
If I were this--this Harriet."--Her voice faltered and came to a halt.
"Yes?" He waited for her to continue.
"Why, then, that letter would make me a proud woman."
"Though it came from a common sailor?"
"She would not think first of that. She would be proud to be so loved."
"Thank you," said he slowly, and, drawing a shilling from his pocket, laid it on the desk. "Good-night and good-bye, Miss Marvin."
He moved to the window and flung up the sash. Seated astride the ledge, he looked back at her with a smile which seemed to say, "At last we are friends!" The next moment he had reached out a hand, caught hold of the _One-and-All"s_ forestay, and swung himself out into the darkness.
Hester, standing alone in the little office, heard a soft sliding sound which puzzled her, followed by the light thud of his feet as he dropped upon deck. She leaned out for a moment before closing the window.
All was silent below, save for the lap of the tide between the schooner and the quay-wall.
As Tom Trevarthen opened the window and leaned out to grasp the forestay, Myra, still cowering by the deck-house, saw her uncle swing himself hurriedly back into the shadow of the quay-door. She too retreated a pace; and with that, her foot striking against the low coaming of an open hatchway, with a clutch at air she pitched backward and down into the vessel"s hold.
She did not fall far, the _One-and-All_ being loaded to within a foot or two of the hatches. Her tumble sent her sprawling upon a heap of loose china-clay. She felt it sliding under her and herself sliding with it, softly, down into darkness. She was bruised. She had wrenched her shoulder terribly, but she clenched her teeth and kept back the cry she had all but uttered.
The sliding ceased, and she tried to raise herself on an elbow out of the choking smother of clay-dust. The effort sent a stab of pain through her, exquisite, excruciating. She dropped forward upon her face, and there in the darkness she fainted.
Hester, having closed the window, put out the lights quietly, pausing in the outer office for a glance at the raked-out stove. Outside, as she locked the door behind her, she paused again at the head of the step for an upward look at the sky, where, beyond the clouds, a small star or two twinkled in the dark square of Pegasus. She never knew how close in that instant she stood to death. Within six paces of her crouched a man made desperate by the worst of terrors--terror of himself; and maddened by the worst of all provocatives--jealousy.
He had come to her on a forlorn hope, believing that she only--if any helper in the world--could be his salvation from the devil within him.
Not in cruelty, but in fear--which can be crueller than cruelty itself--he had packed off the helpless blind boy beyond his reach. He had promised himself that by dismissing the temptation he could lay the devil at a stroke and finally. On his way back from the station he had heard whispered within him the horrible truth: that he was a lost man, without self-control.
He had sought her merely by the instinct of self-preservation. She had cowed and mastered him once. In awful consciousness of his infirmity he craved only to be mastered again, to be soothed, quieted. He nodded to the men and women he pa.s.sed in the streets. They saw nothing amiss with him--nothing more than his habitual straight-lipped visage and ill-fitting clothes.
He had dogged her to the office and listened outside for one, two, three hours. In the end, as he believed, he had caught her at tryst with his worst enemy--with the man who had knocked him down and humiliated him.
Yet in his instant need he hated Tom Trevarthen less as a rival in love, less from remembered humiliation, than as a robber of the sole plank which might have saved him from drowning.
So long had the pair been closeted together that a saner jealousy might have suggested more evil suspicions. His jealousy pa.s.sed these by as of no account. He could think only of his need and its foiled chance: his need was more urgent than any love. He had come for help, and found her colloguing with his enemy.
In his abject rage he could easily have done her violence and as easily have run forward and cried her pity. Between the two impulses he crouched irresolute and let her pa.s.s.
Hester came down the steps slowly, pa.s.sed within a yard of him, and as slowly went up the dark courtyard. For the last time she paused, with her hand on Mr. Benny"s door-latch; and this was what she said there to herself, silently--
"But why Harriet?--of all the hateful names!"
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE RESCUE.
"Style," said Mr. Joshua Benny, "has been defined as a gift of saying anything, of striking any note in the scale of human feelings, without impropriety. We cannot all have distinction, Mr. Parker--what I may call the _je ne sais quoi_"--
Mr. Joshua put this with a fine modesty, the distinction of his own style being proverbial--in Spendilove"s Press Supply Bureau at any rate. He might have added with a wave of the hand, "You see to what it has advanced me!" for whereas the rest of Spendilove"s literary men toiled in two gangs, one on either side of a long high-pitched desk, and wrote slashing leaders for the provincial press, Mr. Joshua exercised his lightness of touch upon "picturesque middles" in a sort of loose-box part.i.tioned off from the main office by screens of opaque gla.s.s. This den--he spoke of it as his "scriptorium"--had a window looking out upon an elevated railway, along which the trains of the London, Chatham, and Dover line banged and rattled all day long. For Spendilove"s (as it was called by its familiars) inhabited the second floor of a building close to the foot of Ludgate Hill. The noise no longer disturbed Mr. Joshua, except when an engine halted just outside to blow off steam.
Mr. Joshua leaned back in his writing-chair, tapped a galley proof with admonitory forefinger, and gazed over his spectacles upon Mr. Parker--a weedy youth with a complexion suggestive of uncooked pastry.
"We cannot all have distinction, Mr. Parker, nor can it be acquired by effort. Vigour we may cultivate, and clearness we must; it is essential.
On a level with these I should place propriety. Propriety teaches us to regulate our speech by the occasion; to be incisive at times and at times urbane; to adapt the "how" to the "when," as I might put it. I do not think--I really do not think--that Christmas Eve is a happily chosen moment for calling Mr. Disraeli "a Jew adventurer.""
"Mr. Makins, sir, who wrote yesterday"s Liberal leader for the syndicate, wound up by saying the time had gone by for mincing our opinion of the front Opposition Bench. He warned me last night, when I took over his job, to pitch it strong. He had it on good authority that the const.i.tuencies have been a good deal shaken by Mr. Gladstone"s Army Purchase _coup_, and some straight talk is needed to pull them together, in the eastern counties especially."