It was after the last of these interesting statements that she was suddenly aware of the sound of her own voice, as though it had been a brazen gong beating stridently in the vastness of a deserted Cathedral.
She saw the old lady take two pieces of b.u.t.tered toast from the china dish, hold them tenderly in her hand and fling them a swift, bird-like glance before she devoured them; during that moment"s vision Maggie discovered what so many people of vaster experience both of life and of Mrs. Warlock had never discovered; namely, that the old lady cared more for her food than her company. Maggie was suddenly less afraid of the whole family. She looked up then at Martin as though she thus would prove her new courage and, he glancing across at the same moment, they smiled. He left his father"s side and, coming over to her, sat down close to her. He dropped his voice in speaking to her.
"I"ve been wanting to see you," he said.
"Why?" she asked him.
"Well," he answered, smiling at her as though he wanted to tell her something privately. "I feel as though we"d got a lot to tell one another ... I"m a stranger here really quite as much as you."
"No, you"re not," she said. "You can"t be so MUCH a stranger anywhere because you"ve been all over the world and are ready for anything."
"And you?"
"I don"t seem to manage the simplest things. Aunt Elizabeth and I get lost the moment we move outside the door ... Do you like my dress?" she asked him.
"Why!" he said, obviously startled by such a question. "It"s--it"s splendid!"
"No, you know it isn"t," she answered quickly, dropping her voice into a confidential statement. "It"s all wrong. I thought you"d know why as you"ve been everywhere. Caroline Smith helped me to choose it, and it looked all right until I wore it. It"s me ... I"m hopeless to fit.
Caroline says so. I don"t care about clothes--if only I looked just like anybody else I"d never bother again--but it"s so tiresome to have taken so much trouble and then for it to be all wrong."
Martin was then aware of many things--that this was a strange unusual girl, that she rea.s.sured him as to her interest, her vitality, her sincerity as no girl had ever done before, that his sister was aware of their intimate conversation and that she resented it, and that he must see this girl again and as soon as possible. He was as liable as any young man in the world to the most sudden and most violent enthusiasms, but they had been enthusiasms for a pretty face, for a sensual appeal, for a sentimental moment. Here there was no prettiness, no sensuality, no sentiment. There was something so new that he felt like Cortez upon his peak in Darien.
"It"s all right," he rea.s.sured her urgently. "It"s all right. I promise you it is. The great thing is to look yourself. And you"ll never be the least like any one else." He meant that to be the first open declaration of his own particular discovery of her, but he was aware that his sentence could have more than one interpretation.
Uncomfortably conscious then of his sister"s regard of them, he looked up and said:
"Amy, Miss Cardinal"s been telling me how confusing London is to her.
You"ve got as good an idea of London as any one in the world. You should take her to one or two places and show her things."
Amy Warlock, every line of her stiff body firing at them both her hostility, answered:
"Oh, I don"t think Miss Cardinal would care for me as a guide. _I_ shouldn"t be able to show her interesting things. We have scarcely, I should fancy, enough in common. Miss Cardinal"s interests are, I imagine, very different from my own."
The tone, the words, fell into the sudden silence like a lighted match into water. Maggie, her head erect, her voice, in spite of herself, trembling a little, answered:
"Why, Miss Warlock, I shouldn"t think of troubling you. It"s very kind of your brother, but one must make one"s discoveries for oneself, mustn"t one? ... I am already beginning to find my way about."
After that the tea-party fell into complete disruption. Maggie, although she did not look, could feel Martin"s anger like a flame beside her. She was aware that Aunt Anne and Mr. Warlock were, like some beings from another world, distant from the general confusion. Her one pa.s.sionate desire was to get up and leave the place; to her intense relief she heard Aunt Anne"s clear voice:
"I think, Mrs. Warlock, we must be turning homewards. Shall I send you those papers about the Perteway"s Mission? ... Such splendid work. I think it would interest you."
It was as though a hole had suddenly opened in the floor of the neat little drawing-room and they were all hurrying to leave without, if possible, tumbling into it. There was a general shaking of hands.
Mrs. Warlock said kindly to Maggie:
"Do come soon again, dear. It does an old lady good to see young faces."
Martin was near the door. He almost crushed Maggie"s hand in his: "I must see you--soon," he whispered.
Free from the house Maggie and her aunt walked home in complete silence. Maggie"s heart was a confusion of rage, surprise, loneliness and pride. No one had ever behaved like that to her before. And what had she done? What was there about her that people hated? ... Why? ...
Why? She felt as though, in some way, it had all been Aunt Anne"s fault. Why did not Aunt Anne speak? Well, if they all hated her she would go on her own way. She did not care.
But alone in her room, her face, indignant, proud, quivering, surprising her in the long mirror by its strangeness, and causing her to feel, because it did not seem to belong to her, more lonely than ever, she burst out:
"I can"t stand it. I CAN"T stand it. I"ll get away ... so soon as ever I can!"
CHAPTER III
MAGGIE AND MARTIN
That moment in her bedroom altered for Maggie the course of all her future life. She had never before been, consciously, a rebel; she had, only a week before, almost acquiesced in the thought that she would remain in her aunts" house for the rest of her days; now Mr. Magnus, the Warlocks, and her new dress had combined to fire her determination.
She saw, quite suddenly, that she must escape at the first possible moment.
The house that had been until now the refuge into which she had escaped became the jumping-off place for her new adventure.
Until now the things in the house had been there to receive her as one of themselves; from this moment they were there to prevent, if possible, her release. She felt everything instantly hostile. They all--Thomas the cat, Edward the parrot, the very sofas and chairs and cushions--were determined not to let her go.
She saw, more than ever before, that her aunts were preparing some religious trap for her. They were very quiet about it; they did not urge her or bully her, but the subtle, silent influence went on so that the very stair-carpet, the very scuttles that held the coal, became secret messengers to hale her into the chapel and shut her in there for ever. After her first visit there the chapel became a nightmare to her--because, at once, she had felt its power. She had known--she had always known and it had not needed Mr. Magnus to tell her--that there was something in this religion--yes, even in the wretched dirt and disorder of her father"s soul--but with that realisation that there was indeed something, had come also the resolved conviction that life could not be happy, simple, successful unless one broke from that power utterly, refused its dictates, gave no hearing to its messages, surrendered nothing--absolutely nothing--to its influence. Had not some one said to her once, or was it not in her little red A Kempis, that "once caught one might never escape again"?
She would prove that, in her own struggle and independence, to be untrue. The chapel should not have her, nor her father"s ghost, nor the dim half-visualised thoughts and memories that rose like dark shadows in her soul and vanished again. She would believe in nothing save what she could see, listen to nothing that was not clear and simple before her. She was mistress of her own soul.
She did not, in this fashion, think things out for herself. To herself she simply expressed it that she was going to lead her own life, to earn her own living, to fight for herself; and that the sooner she escaped this gloomy, damp, and ill-tempered house the better. She would never say her prayers again; she would never read the Bible again to herself or any one else; she would never kneel on those hard chapel kneelers again; she would never listen to Mr. Warlock"s sermons again--once she had escaped.
Meanwhile she said nothing at all to herself about Martin Warlock, who was really at the root of the whole matter.
She began at once to take steps. Two years before this a lady had paid, with her sister, a short visit to St. Dreots and had taken a great liking to Maggie. They had made friends, and this lady, a Miss Katherine Trenchard, had begged Maggie to let her know if she came to London and needed help or advice. Miss Trenchard divided her life between London and a place called Garth in Roselands in Glebeshire, and Maggie did not know where she would be now--but, after some little hesitation, she wrote a letter, speaking of the death of her father and of her desire to find some work in London, and directed it to Garth.
Now of course she must post it herself--no allowing it to lie on the hall-table with old Martha to finger it and the aunts to speculate upon it and finally challenge her with its destiny.
On a bright evening when the house was as dark as a shut box and an early star, frightened at its irregular and lonely appearance, suddenly flashed like a curl of a golden whip across the sky, Maggie slipped out of the house. She realised, with a triumphant and determined nod of her head, that she had never been out alone in London before--a ridiculous and shameful fact! She knew that there was a pillar-box just round the corner, but because she had a hat upon her head and shoes upon her feet she thought that she might as well post it in the Strand, an EXCITING river of tempestuous sound into which she had as yet scarcely penetrated. She slipped out of the front door, then waited a moment, looking back at the silent house. No one stirred in their street; the noise of the Strand came up to her like wind beyond a valley. She must have felt, in that instant, that she was making some plunge into hazardous waters and she must have hesitated as to whether she would not spring back into the quiet house, lock and bolt the door, and never go out again. But, after that one glance, she went forward.
She had never before in her life been on any errand alone, and at this evening hour the Strand was very full. She stood still clinging to the safe privacy of her own street and peering over into the blaze and quiver of the tumult. In the Strand end of her own street there were several dramatic agencies, a second-hand book and print shop with piles of dirty music in the barrow outside the window, a little restaurant with cold beef, an ancient chicken, hard-boiled eggs and sponge cakes under gla.s.s domes in the window; everywhere about her were dim doors, glimpses of twisting stairs, dusty windows and figures flitting up and down, in and out as though they were marionettes pulled by invisible strings to fulfil some figure.
These were all in the dusk of the side-street; a large draper"s with shirts and collars and grinning wax boys in sailor suits caught with its front windows the Strand lamps. It was beside the shop that Maggie stood for an instant hesitating. She could see no pillar-box; she could see nothing save the streams of human beings, slipping like water between the banks of houses.
She hesitated, clinging to the draper"s shop; then, suddenly catching sight of the pillar-box a few yards down the street, she let herself go, had a momentary sensation of swimming in a sea desperately crowded with other bodies, fought against the fierce gaze of lights that beat straight upon her eyes, found the box, slipped in the letter, and then, almost at once, was back in her quiet quarters again.
She turned and, her heart beating, hurried home. The house door was still ajar. She pushed it back, slipped inside, caught her breath and listened. Then she closed the door softly behind her, and with that little act of attempted secrecy realised that she was now a rebel, that things could never be, for her, the same again as they had been a quarter of an hour ago. That glittering crowd, the lamps, the smells, the sounds, had concentrated themselves into a little fiery charm that held her heart within a flaming circle. She felt the most audacious creature in the world--and also the most ignorant. Not helpless--no, never helpless--but so ignorant that all her life that had seemed to her, a quarter of an hour ago, so tensely crowded with events and crises was now empty and barren like the old straw-smelling cab at home. She did not want to offend her aunts and hurt their feelings, but she was a living, breathing, independent creature and she must go her own way. Neither they nor their chapel should stop her--no, not the chapel nor any one in it.
She was standing, motionless, in the dark cold hall, wondering whether any one had heard her enter, when she was suddenly conscious of two eyes that watched her--two steady fiery eyes suspended as it seemed in mid air. She realised that it was the cat. The cat hated her and she hated it. She had not realised that before, but now with the illumination of the lighted street behind her she realised it. The cat was the spirit of the chapel watching her, spying upon her to see that she did not escape. The cat knew that she had posted her letter and to whom she had posted it. She advanced to the bottom of the stair and said: "Brr. You horrid thing! I hate you!" and instantly the two fiery eyes had vanished, but now in their place the whole house seemed to be watching, so silent and attentive was it--and the odour of damp biscuits and wet umbrellas seemed to be everywhere.
Just then old Martha came out with a lamp in her hand, and standing upon a chair, lit the great ugly gas over the middle of the door.
"Why, Miss Maggie," she said in her soft, surprised whisper, looking as she always did, beyond the girl, into darkness.
"I"ve been out," said Maggie, defiantly.