"I married a long while ago." She stood in front of him like a slim child. It seemed impossible. "Yes, before I knew anything--to get away from home. Our marriage did not go smoothly. After three years I ran away--oh, not with any one I cared for; he happened to be there, that was all. After a month he deserted me in Italy. I have fortunately some money of my own and a few friends who did not turn me down--Lady Splay, for instance. There!"
She moved to a table and poured out for Hillyard a whisky-and-soda.
"My question was thoughtless," he said. "I did not mean that you should answer it as you did."
"I preferred you to know."
"I am honoured," Hillyard replied.
Stella Croyle sat down upon a low stool in front of the fire. Hillyard sank into one of the deep-cushioned chairs. The day of tension was over, and there was no doubt about the success of "The Dark Tower." Stella Croyle sat very quietly, with the firelight playing upon her face and her delicate dress. Her vivacity had dropped from her like the pretty cloak she had thrown aside. Both became her well, but they were for use out-of-doors, and Hillyard was grateful that she had discarded them.
"You are tired, no doubt," he said, reluctantly. "I ought to go."
"No," she answered. "It is pleasant before the fire here."
"Thank you. I should like to stay for a little while. I did not know until I came into this room with how much anxiety I had been looking forward to this night."
He leaned forward with his hands clenched, and saw pa.s.s in the bright coals glimpses of the long tale of days when endeavour was fruitless and hopes were disappointed. "Success! Lord, how I wanted it!" he whispered.
Stella Croyle looked at him with a smile.
"It was sure to come to you, since you wanted it enough," she said.
"Yes, but in time?" exclaimed Hillyard.
"In time for what?"
Hillyard broke into a laugh.
"I don"t know," he answered. He was silent for a little while, and the comfort of the room, the quiet of the night, the pleasant sympathy of Stella Croyle, all wrought upon him. "I don"t know," he repeated slowly.
"I am waiting. But out of my queer life something more has got to come--something more and something different. I have always been sure of it, but I used to be afraid that the opportunity would come while I was still chained to the handles of the barrow."
Hillyard"s life, though within a short time its vicissitudes had been many and most divergent, had probably not been as strange as he imagined it to be. He looked back upon it with too intense an interest to be its impartial judge. Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him altogether. At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without tradition.
His father, a partner in a small firm of shipping agents which had not the tradition of a solid, old-fashioned business, had moved in Martin"s boyhood from a little semi-detached villa with its flight of front steps in one suburb, to a house in a garden of trees in another. The boy had been sent to a brand new day-school of excessive size, which gathered its pupils into its cla.s.s-rooms at nine o"clock in the morning and dispersed them to their homes at four. No boy was proud that he went to school at St. Eldred"s, or was deterred from any meanness by the thought that it was a breach of the school"s traditions. The school meant so many lessons in so many cla.s.s-rooms, and no more.
Hillyard was the only child. Between himself and his parents there was little sympathy and understanding. He saw them at meals, and fled from the table to his own room, where he read voraciously.
"You never heard of such a jumble of books," he said to Stella Croyle.
"Matthew Arnold, Helps, Paradise Lost, Ten Thousand a Year, The Revolt of Islam, Tennyson. I knew the whole of In Memoriam by heart--absolutely every line of it, and pages of Browning. The little brown books! I would walk miles to pick one of them up. My people would find the books lying about the house, and couldn"t make head or tail of why I wanted to read them. There were two red-letter days: one when I first bought the two volumes of Herrick, the second when I tumbled upon De Quincey. That"s the author to bowl a boy over. The Stage-Coach, the Autobiography, the Confessions--I could never get tired of them. I remember buying an ounce of laudanum at a chemist"s on London Bridge and taking it home, with the intention of following in the steps of my hero and qualifying to drink it out of a decanter."
Stella Croyle had swung round from the fireplace, and was listening now with parted lips.
"And did you?" she exclaimed, in a kind of eager suspense.
Hillyard shook his head.
"The taste was too unpleasant. I drank about half an ounce and threw the rest away. I was saved from that folly."
Stella Croyle turned again to the fire.
"Yes," she said rather listlessly.
Yet Hillyard might almost have become a consumer of drugs, such queer and wayward fancies took him in charge. It became a fine thing to him to stay up all night just for the sake of staying up, and many a night he pa.s.sed at his open window, even in winter time, doing nothing, not even dreaming, simply waiting for the day to break. It seemed to him soft and wrong that a man should take his clothes off and lie comfortably between sheets. And then came another twist. When all the house was quiet, he would slip out of a ground-floor window and roam for hours about the lonely roads, a solitary boy revelling even then in the extraordinary conduct of his life. There was in the neighbourhood a footpath through a thick grove of trees which ran up a long, high hill, and, midway in the ascent, crossed a railway cutting by a rustic bridge.
"That was my favourite walk, though I always entered by the swing-gate in fear, and trembled at every movement of the branches, and continually expected an attack. I would hang over that railway bridge, especially on moonlit nights, and compose poems and thoughts--you know--great, short thoughts." Hillyard laughed. "I was going to be a poet, you understand--a clear, full voice such as had seldom been heard; my poems were all about the moon sailing in the Empyrean and Death. Death was my strong suit. I sent some of my poems to the local Press, signed "Lethe,"
but I could never hear that they were published."
Stella Croyle laughed, and Hillyard went on. "From the top of the hill I would strike off to the west, and see the morning break over London. In summer that was wonderful! The Houses of Parliament. St Paul"s like a silver bubble rising out of the mist, then, as the mist cleared over the river, a London clean and all silver in the morning light! I was going to conquer all that, you know--I--
""Silent upon a peak of Peckham Rye.""
"I wonder you didn"t kill yourself," cried Stella.
"I very nearly did," answered Hillyard.
"Didn"t your parents interfere?"
"No. They never knew of my wanderings. They did know, of course, that I used not to go to bed. But they left me alone. I was a bitter disappointment in every way. They wanted a reasonable son, who would go into the agency business, and they had instead--me. I should think that I was pretty odious, too, and we were all of pa.s.sionate tempers.
Besides, with all this reading, I didn"t do particularly well at school.
How could I when day after day I would march off from the house, leaving a smooth bed behind me in my room? We were th.o.r.n.y people. Quarrels were frequent. My mother had a phrase which set my teeth on edge--"Don"t you talk, Martin, until you are earning your living"--the sort of remark that stings and stays in a boy"s memory as something unfair. There was a great row in the end, one night at ten o"clock, when I was sixteen, and I left the house and tramped into London."
"What in the world did you do?" cried Stella.
"I shipped as a boy on a fruit-tramp for Valencia in Spain. And I believe that saved my life. For my lungs were beginning to be troublesome."
The fruit-tramp had not been out more than two days when the fo"c"sle hands selected the lad, since he had some education, to be their spokesman on a deputation to the captain. Martin Hillyard went aft with the men and put their case for better food and less violence. He was not therefore popular with the old man, and at Valencia he thought it prudent to desert.
Stella Croyle had turned towards him again. There was a vividness in his manner, an enjoyment, too, which laid hold upon her. It was curious to her to realise that this man talking to her here in the Bayswater Road, had been so lately a ragged youth scouting for his living on the quays of Southern Spain.
"You were at that place--Alicante!" she cried.
"Part of the time."
"And there Mario Escobar saw you. I wonder why he was frightened lest you too should have seen him," she added slowly.
"Was he?"
"Yes. He was sitting on the same side of the table as you, so you wouldn"t have noticed. But he was opposite to me; and he was afraid."
Hillyard was puzzled.
"I can"t think of a reason. I was a shipping clerk of no importance. I can"t remember that I ever came across his name in all the eighteen months I spent in Alicante."
When Martin Hillyard was nineteen, Death intervened in the family feud.
His parents died within a few weeks of each other.
"I was left with a thousand pounds."