Miranda of the Balcony Part 12

"Why didn't you s.n.a.t.c.h at it?" he exclaimed with irritation.

"Why did you wish me to s.n.a.t.c.h at it?" she replied.

"Because--because," he said angrily, "you have made me feel real mean, as mean as a man in the commission of his first dishonourable act towards a woman, and I wanted you to look mean at all events; it would have made my business easier to handle. Well, let's have done with it.

I know Ralph Warriner is alive. I can give information which may lead to his capture; and there's always the disgrace to publish."

He blurted out the words, ashamed and indignant with her for the shame he felt. Miranda, in spite of herself, was touched by Wilbraham's manner, and she answered quite gently: "Very well. I will buy your silence."

"Coals of fire!" he replied with a sneer. Miranda understood that he was defying her to make him feel ashamed. "Is that the ticket, Mrs.

Warriner? It won't lessen the amount of the per annum I can a.s.sure you. What I propose is to live for the future in some more or less quiet hole, where none of my acquaintances are likely to crop up.

Tarifa occurred to me; for one thing I can reach you from Tarifa; for another I can do the royal act at Tarifa on a moderate income; for a third it is a quiet place where I can have a shot at--well, at what I want to do," and his voice suddenly became shy. She looked at him and he coloured under her glance, and he s.h.i.+fted in his seat and laughed awkwardly.

Miranda was familiar with those signs and what they signified.

Wilbraham wanted her to ask him to confide in her. Many men at Gibraltar had brought their troubles to her in just this way, with just these marks of diffidence, this fear that the troubles would bore her. She had been called upon to play the guardian-angel at times and had not shrunk from the responsibility, though she had accepted it with a saving modesty of humour at the notion of herself playing the guardian-angel to any man.

"What is it you want to do?" she asked, and Wilbraham confided in her.

The position was strange, no doubt. Here was a woman whom he had bullied, whom he meant to rob, and on whom he meant to live until he died, and he was confiding in her. But the words tumbled from his lips and he did not think of the relations.h.i.+p in which he stood to her. He was only aware that for fifteen years he had not shared a single one of his intimate thoughts with either man or woman, and he was surcharged with them. Here was a woman, frank, reliable, who asked for his confidence, and he gave it, with a schoolboy's mixture of eagerness and timidity.

"Do you know," said he, "the Odes of Horace have never been well translated into English verse by anyone? Some people have done an ode or two very well, perhaps as well as it could be done--Hood for instance tried his hand at it. But no one has done them all, with any approach to success. And yet they ought to be capable of translation.

Perhaps they aren't--I don't know--perhaps they are too wonderfully perfect. Probably I should make an awful hash of the job; but I think I should like to have a shot. I began years and years ago when I was an attache at Paris, and--and I have always kept the book with me; but one has had no time." As he spoke he drew from his side pocket a little copy of Horace in an old light-brown cover of leather very much frayed and scratched. "Look," said he, and half stretched it out to her, as though doubtful whether he should put it into her hands or refuse to let her take it at all. She held out her hand, and he made up his mind and gave it into her keeping.

The copy was dated 1767; the rough black type, in which all the s's looked like f's, was margined by paper brown with age and sullied with the rims of tumblers and the stains of tobacco; and this stained margin was everywhere written over with ink in a small fine hand.

"You see I have made a sort of ground-work," said Wilbraham, with a deprecating laugh, as though he feared Miranda would ridicule his efforts. The writing consisted of tags of verse, half-lines, here and there complete lines, and sometimes, though rarely, a complete stanza.

"You must not judge by what you see there," he made haste to add. "All I have written on the margin is purely tentative; probably it's no good at all." Miranda turned over a page and came upon one ode completely translated. "I did that," explained Wilbraham, "one season when I s.h.i.+pped as a hand on a Yarmouth smack. We got bad weather on the Dogger Bank, out in the North Sea at Christmas. We spent a good deal of time hove to with the wheel lashed, and on night-watches I used to make up the verses. Indeed, those night-watches seem the only time I have had free during the last fifteen years. The rest of the time--well, I have told you about it. I got through one complete ode out in the North Sea, and did parts of others."

Mrs. Warriner began to read the ode. "May I?" she asked.

"Of course," said he, with a flush of pleasure, and he watched her most earnestly for the involuntary signs of approval or censure. But her face betrayed neither the one nor the other; and he was quick to apologise for the ode's shortcomings.

"You mustn't think that I had a great deal of time on those night-watches. For one thing we did not get over-much sleep on the voyage, and so one's brains no doubt were a trifle dull. Besides, there were always seas combing up above the bows and roaring along the deck. You had to keep your eyes open for them and scuttle down the companion before they came on board. Otherwise, if the weight of the water took you, it was a case of this way to the pit. The whole hull of the smack disappears, and you just see the foresail sticking up from the hungry, las.h.i.+ng tumble of green water. So, you see, it stands to reason that ode is subject to revision."

But Miranda was not thinking of the ode. She had a vision of the smack labouring on a black night in the trough of a black sea flecked with white, at Christmas time, and a man on the watch, who had been an attache at Paris, and was, even with the rude sailor-folk for his companions, engaged in translating Horace; and the vision had an exquisite pathos for her.

"What was the beginning of it all?" she asked in a low voice, and since Wilbraham was in the train of confidences, he told her that too.

He told her perhaps more than he meant to tell. It was an old story, the story of the faithless woman and the man who trusts her, and what comes of it all. The story of Helen and Menelaus, but disfigured into a caricature of its original by the paltriness of the characters and the vulgarity of the incidents. The throb of primitive pa.s.sion was gone from the story, and therefore all dignity too. Subtle and intricate trivialities of sentiment took the place of pa.s.sion, and made the episode infinitely mean. Menelaus was an attache at Paris: Helen lived at Knightsbridge, and the pair of them were engaged to be married. Helen was faithless merely through a cheap vanity, and a cheaper pose of wilfulness, and even so she was faithless merely in a low and despicable way. It was an infidelity of innumerable flirtations. She pa.s.sed from arm to arm without intermission, and almost allowed those who fondled her to overlap. Yet all the day she talked of her pride, and was conscious of no inconsistency between the vulgarity of her conduct and the high words upon her lips. She practised all the small necessary deceits to conceal her various meetings and appointments, and was unaware of the degradation they involved; for still she talked loudly of her pride. And when Menelaus lifted his hat and wished her good-morning, she only felt that she was deeply aggrieved.

Menelaus, however, was in no better case. He had not the strength to thrust her from his mind, but let his thoughts play sensuously with his recollections, until he declined upon a greater and a greater weakness.

"I went back to Paris," continued Wilbraham. "I had good prospects, but they came to nothing. Even now men going in for Mods. have to get up a book which I once wrote, and as for the service, if I were to tell you my real name, it is just possible that you might have heard it, for I was supposed to have done something quite decent at Zanzibar. Well, I went back to Paris. It's a hard thing, you know, to discover that the woman you have been working for, and in a way succeeding for, isn't worth the nicotine at the bottom of your pipe-bowl. At that time I reckon I would rather have been the wreck I am now, and believed it was all my fault, for, you see, I might then have imagined that if I had done all right, I should have won the desirable woman.... Anyway, after I got back to Paris, a little while after, there was trouble." Wilbraham examined his cane and drew diagrams upon the ground. "The woman blabbed, in a moment of confidence ... to her husband. There was a sort of a scandal.... I had to go. I didn't blame the woman who blabbed; no, Mrs. Warriner, I blamed the first woman, the woman in Knightsbridge. Was I right? I came back to England. I was a second son, and my father slammed the door in my face. Then, Mrs. Warriner, I blamed all women, you--you--you amongst the others, even though I didn't know you." He spoke in a gust of extraordinary violence, and so brought his confidences to an end. "Now your income is--" he resumed, and fetched out his pocket-book again. "I made a note about your estate when I was doing business with Warriner," he said. "The note comes in usefully now."

He found the details of which he was in search, and made a neat little sum at the corner of the leaf, to which Miranda paid no attention whatsoever. The queer inclination towards pity which had moved her to ask for his confidence, had been entirely and finally destroyed by the confidence she had asked for. The story was so utterly sordid; the characters in it so utterly puny. Before he told it he had acquired in her eyes even a sort of dignity, the dignity of a man battered and defeated in a battle wherein his wits were unequally matched against the solid forces of order; but in the telling he had destroyed that impression. Miranda had no feeling now but one of aversion for the wreck of a man at her side. She looked at the Horace, which still lay open on her lap, and the contrast between the fine scholar's handwriting and the stains of the pothouse had no longer any power to touch her. She set the book down on the bench, and stood up.

Wilbraham stopped his calculations, and, with the stump of his pencil in his mouth, looked at her alertly and furtively. She took a step or two towards the parapet of the Alameda. Wilbraham instantly laid his pocket-book on the seat with the pencil to mark the place, and without any noise, stood up. Miranda reached the railings at the edge of the gardens and leaned her arms upon it. The next moment she felt a firm grip upon her elbow. She turned round and saw Wilbraham's face ablaze with pa.s.sion. "I suspected that," he said fiercely, "when first I saw where you had brought me," and he shook her elbow.

"Suspected what?" exclaimed Miranda, and she drew away to free herself from his grasp. Wilbraham's next movement answered her question. For he slipped between her and the railings with a glance at the precipice below.

"But you shall not do it," he continued. "I was robbed that way once before; I'll take care the robbery is not repeated." He leaned his back against the railings and shook his finger at her.

"Besides, there's no sense in it," and he jerked his head backwards to signify the abysm. "You are crying out before you are hurt. You don't even know how much I want; I shan't ruin you. I made a mistake that way once; I had the best secret conceivable, and ran my man down across two continents. Then I was fool enough to put my hand too deep in his sky, and I suppose he thought--well, he blew his brains out that night, and then was I robbed."

Mrs. Warriner stared at him with a growing horror in her eyes. "You murdered him," she said slowly.

"We won't quarrel over words," said Wilbraham, callously.

Miranda walked back to the bench. She was not troubled to explain Wilbraham's misconception of her movement. She was only anxious to be rid of him. "What income do you want?" she asked.

"You have three thousand a year," he returned. "Of that I take it Warriner takes a largish slice."

Miranda flushed. "My husband has never asked for a farthing since the _Ten Brothers_ slipped out of Gibraltar. He has never received a farthing," she said angrily.

"An imprudent remark," said Wilbraham. "I might feel inclined to raise my price."

"At all events you shall not slander him."

Wilbraham looked at her with his head c.o.c.ked on one side. "You are very loyal," said he, with genuine admiration. "I will not raise my price."

Miranda did not, by any gesture or word, acknowledge his compliment.

She stood over against him with a face just as hard and white as he had shown to her.

"I say seven hundred a year," he said briefly. "I will call for it myself every quarter."

"I will send it to you," she interrupted.

"I prefer to call for it," said he; for so he concealed his own address and kept her within his reach. "You will not leave Ronda even for a week without giving me due notice of your destination. I will take a quarter's payment to-day. You draw on a bank in Ronda, I suppose, so a cheque will serve."

"If you will wait here, I will bring you the cheque."

Twenty minutes afterwards she returned with it to the Alameda, where she found Wilbraham seated on the bench with his Horace in his hand.

He put down the book awkwardly, and rose. He had the grace to feel some discomfort as he took the cheque, and that discomfort his manner expressed.

Miranda had no word, no look, for him. He stood perhaps for the s.p.a.ce of a minute fingering the cheque. Then he said suddenly: "I can't imagine what a woman like you sees in Ralph Warriner to trouble about.

In your place I should have let him go his own way, without paying to keep him out of prison."

Miranda kept her reasons to herself, as she had done with the reason of her return to Ronda. She waited for him to go, and he walked sullenly away--for ten yards. Then he returned, for he had left his copy of Horace lying upon the bench. He picked it up with a curious and almost timorous glance of appeal towards Miranda. She did not move but waited implacably for his departure. Wilbraham worked his shoulders in discomfort.

"My clothes don't fit and G.o.d hates me," he cried irritably. Then this jack-in-the-box of fortune slunk out of her sight.

CHAPTER IX

SHOWS THE USE WHICH A BLIND MAN MAY MAKE OF A DARK NIGHT A WEEK

A week after Wilbraham's departure from Ronda, the night fell very dark at Tangier. In the Sok outside the city gate, the solitary electric lamp from its tall mast threw a pale light over a circle of the trampled gra.s.s, but outside the circle all was black. There was no glimmer in the tents of the shoemakers at the upper corner of the Sok; nor was there any stir or noise. For it was past midnight and the world was asleep--except at one spot on the hill-side above the Sok, and a little distance to the right.