The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories Part 25

Her voice would go no further; there came a choking sound. Miss Shale allowed her eyes to rest triumphantly for an instant on the troubled face and figure, then remarked to her mother--

'It's really nothing to me, as I told you. I suppose this person may leave the room now?'

It was fated that May Rockett should go through with her purpose and gain her end. But fate alone (which meant in this case the subtlest preponderance of one impulse over another) checked her on the point of a burst of pa.s.sion which would have startled Lady Shale and Miss Hilda out of their cold-blooded complacency. In the silence May's blood gurgled at her ears, and she tottered with dizziness.

'You may go,' said Lady Shale.

But May could not move. There flashed across her the terrible thought that perhaps she had humiliated herself for nothing.

'My lady--I hope--will your ladys.h.i.+p please to forgive my father and mother? I entreat you not to send them away. We shall all be so grateful to your ladys.h.i.+p if you will overlook--'

'That will do,' said Lady Shale decisively. 'I will merely say that the sooner you leave the lodge the better; and that you will do well never again to pa.s.s the gates of the Hall. You may go.'

Miss Rockett withdrew. Outside, the footman was awaiting her. He looked at her with a grin, and asked in an undertone, 'Any good?' But May, to whom this was the last blow, rushed past him, lost herself in corridors, ran wildly hither and thither, tears streaming from her eyes, and was at length guided by a maidservant into the outer air. Fleeing she cared not whither, she came at length into a still corner of the park, and there, hidden amid trees, watched only by birds and rabbits, she wept out the bitterness of her soul.

By an evening train she returned to London, not having confessed to her family what she had done, and suffering still from some uncertainty as to the result. A day or two later Betsy wrote to her the happy news that the sentence of expulsion was withdrawn, and peace reigned once more in the ivy-covered lodge. By that time Miss Rockett had all but recovered her self-respect, and was so busy in her secretarys.h.i.+p that she could only scribble a line of congratulation. She felt that she had done rather a meritorious thing, but, for the first time in her life, did not care to boast of it.

THE RIDING-WHIP

It was not easy for Mr. Daffy to leave his shop for the whole day, but an urgent affair called him to London, and he breakfasted early in order to catch the 8.30 train. On account of his asthma he had to allow himself plenty of time for the walk to the station; and all would have been well, but that, just as he was polis.h.i.+ng his silk hat and giving final directions to his a.s.sistant, in stepped a customer, who came to grumble about the fit of a new coat. Ten good minutes were thus consumed, and with a painful glance at his watch the breathless tailor at length started. The walk was uphill; the sun was already powerful; Mr. Daffy reached the station with dripping forehead and panting as if his sides would burst. There stood the train; he had barely time to take his ticket and to rush across the platform. As a porter slammed the carriage-door behind him, he sank upon the seat in a lamentable condition, gasping, coughing, writhing; his eyes all but started from his head, and his respectable top-hat tumbled to the floor, where unconsciously he gave it a kick. A grotesque and distressing sight.

Only one person beheld it, and this, as it happened, a friend of Mr.

Daffy's. In the far corner sat a large, ruddy-cheeked man, whose eye rested upon the sufferer with a look of greeting disturbed by compa.s.sion. Mr.

Lott, a timber-merchant of this town, was in every sense of the word a more flouris.h.i.+ng man than the asthmatic tailor; his six-feet-something of sound flesh and muscle, his ripe sunburnt complexion, his att.i.tude of eupeptic and broad-chested ease, left the other, by contrast, scarce his proverbial fraction of manhood. At a year or two short of fifty, Mr. Daffy began to be old; he was shoulder-bent, knee-shaky, and had a pallid, wrinkled visage, with watery, pathetic eye. At fifty turned, Mr. Lott showed a vigour and a toughness such as few men of any age could rival. For a score of years the measure of Mr. Lott's robust person had been taken by Mr. Daffy's professional tape, and, without intimacy, there existed kindly relations between the two men. Neither had ever been in the other's house, but they had long met, once a week or so, at the Liberal Club, where it was their habit to play together a game of draughts. Occasionally they conversed; but it was a rather one-sided dialogue, for whereas the tailor had a sprightly intelligence and--so far as his breath allowed--a ready flow of words, the timber-merchant found himself at a disadvantage when mental activity was called for. The best-natured man in the world, Mr. Lott would sit smiling and content so long as he had only to listen; asked his opinion (on anything but timber), he betrayed by a knitting of the brows, a rolling of the eyes, an inflation of the cheeks, and other signs of discomposure, the serious effort it cost him to shape a thought and to utter it. At times Mr.

Daffy got on to the subject of social and political reform, and, after copious exposition, would ask what Mr. Lott thought. He knew the timber-merchant too well to expect an immediate reply. There came a long pause, during which Mr. Lott snorted a little, shuffled in his chair, and stared at vacancy, until at length, with a sudden smile of relief he exclaimed, 'Do you know _my_ idea!' And the idea, often rather explosively stated, was generally marked by common-sense of the bull-headed, British kind.

'Bad this morning,' remarked Mr. Lott, abruptly but sympathetically, as soon as the writhing tailor could hear him.

'Rather bad--ugh, ugh!--had to run--ugh!--doesn't suit me, Mr. Lott,'

gasped the other, as he took the silk hat which his friend had picked up and stroked for him.

'Hot weather trying.'

'I vary so,' panted Mr. Daffy, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

'Sometimes one things seems to suit me--ugh, ugh--sometimes another. Going to town, Mr. Lott?'

'Yes.'

The blunt affirmative was accompanied by a singular grimace, such as might have been caused by the swallowing of something very unpleasant; and thereupon followed a silence which allowed Mr. Daffy to recover himself. He sat with his eyes half closed and head bent, leaning back.

They had a general acquaintance with each other's domestic affairs. Both were widowers; both lived alone. Mr. Daffy's son was married, and dwelt in London; the same formula applied to Mr. Lott's daughter. And, as it happened, the marriages had both been a subject of parental dissatisfaction. Very rarely had Mr. Lott let fall a word with regard to his daughter, Mrs. Bowles, but the townsfolk were well aware that he thought his son-in-law a fool, if not worse; Mrs. Bowles, in the seven years since her wedding, had only two or three times revisited her father's house, and her husband never came. A like reticence was maintained by Mr.

Daffy concerning his son Charles Edward, once the hope of his life. At school the lad had promised well; tailoring could not be thought of for him; he went into a solicitor's office, and remained there just long enough to a.s.sure himself that he had no turn for the law. From that day he was nothing but an expense and an anxiety to his father, until--now a couple of years ago--he announced his establishment in a prosperous business in London, of which Mr. Daffy knew nothing more than that it was connected with colonial enterprise. Since that date Charles Edward had made no report of himself, and his father had ceased to write letters which received no reply.

Presently, Mr. Lott moved so as to come nearer to his travelling companion, and said in a muttering, shamefaced way--

'Have you heard any talk about my daughter lately?'

Mr. Daffy showed embarra.s.sment.

'Well, Mr. Lott, I'm sorry to say I _have_ heard something--'

'Who from?'

'Well--it was a friend of mine--perhaps I won't mention the name--who came and told me something--something that quite upset me. That's what I'm going to town about, Mr. Lott. I'm--well, the fact is, I was going to call upon Mr. Bowles.'

'Oh, you were!' exclaimed the timber-merchant, with gruffness, which referred not to his friend but to his son-in-law. 'I don't particularly want to see _him_, but I had thought of seeing my daughter. You wouldn't mind saying whether it was John Roper--?'

'Yes, it was.'

'Then we've both heard the same story, no doubt.'

Mr. Lott leaned back and stared out of the window. He kept thrusting out his lips and drawing them in again, at the same time wrinkling his forehead into the frown which signified that he was trying to shape a thought.

'Mr. Lott,' resumed the tailor, with a gravely troubled look, 'may I ask if John Roper made any mention of my son?'

The timber-merchant glared, and Mr. Daffy, interpreting the look as one of anger, trembled under it.

'I feel ashamed and miserable!' burst from his lips.

'It's not your fault, Mr. Daffy,' interrupted the other in a good-natured growl. 'You're not responsible, no more than for any stranger.'

'That's just what I can't feel,' exclaimed the tailor, nervously slapping his knee. 'Anyway, it would be a disgrace to a man to have a son a bookmaker--a blackguard bookmaker. That's bad enough. But when it comes to robbing and ruining the friends of your own family--why, I never heard a more disgraceful thing in my life. How I'm going to stand in my shop, and hold up my head before my customers, I--do--not--know. Of course, it'll be the talk of the town; we know what the Ropers are when they get hold of anything. It'll drive me off my head, Mr. Lott, I'm sure it will.'

The timber-merchant stretched out a great hand, and laid it gently on the excited man's shoulder.

'Don't worry; that never did any good yet. We've got to find out, first of all, how much of Roper's story is true. What did he tell you?'

'He said that Mr. Bowles had been going down the hill for a year or more--that his business was neglected, that he spent his time at racecourses and in public-houses--and that the cause of it all was my son.

_My son?_ What had my son to do with it? Why, didn't I know that Charles was a racing and betting man, and a notorious bookmaker? You can imagine what sort of a feeling that gave me. Roper couldn't believe it was the first I had heard of it; he said lots of people in the town knew how Charles was living. Did _you_ know, Mr. Lott?'

'Not I; I'm not much in the way of gossip.'

'Well, there's what Roper said. It was last night, and what with that and my cough, I didn't get a wink of sleep after it. About three o'clock this morning I made up my mind to go to London at once and see Mr. Bowles. If it's true that he's been robbed and ruined by Charles, I've only one thing to do--my duty's plain enough. I shall ask him how much money Charles has had of him, and, if my means are equal to it, I shall pay every penny back--every penny.'

Mr. Lott's countenance waxed so grim that one would have thought him about to break into wrath against the speaker. But it was merely his way of disguising a pleasant emotion.

'I don't think most men would see it in that way,' he remarked gruffly.

'Whether they would or not,' exclaimed Mr. Daffy, panting and wriggling, 'it's as plain as plain could be that there's no other course for a man who respects himself. I couldn't live a day with such a burden as that on my mind. A bookmaker! A blackguard bookmaker! To think my son should come to that! _You_ know very well, Mr. Lott, that there's nothing I hate and despise more than horse-racing. We've often talked about it, and the harm it does, and the sin and shame it is that such doings should be permitted--haven't we?'

'Course we have, course we have,' returned the other, with a nod. But he was absorbed in his own reflections, and gave only half an ear to the gasping vehemences which Mr. Daffy poured forth for the next ten minutes.

There followed a short silence, then the strong man shook himself and opened his lips.

'Do you know _my_ idea?' he blurted out.