The Story Of Louie Part 21

Students who only came in the evenings were of a slightly inferior order to those who came during the day.

"I suppose he had his brown paper parcel with him?" Kitty said, with more mirth in her peering little eyes.

Louie remembered that Mr. Jeffries had carried a brown paper parcel.

Kitty twittered.

"Bet you can't guess what was in it--that is, if you haven't heard it?"

She said "it" as if it had been a riddle or some sort of a joke. Louie admitted that she could not guess what had been in Mr. Jeffries'

parcel.

"Good old brown paper parcel!" Kitty chuckled. "You'll get to know it by-and-by! You see," she explained, "he goes to Archie's for a bath.

Isn't it killing?"

"I--I don't quite see what you mean," said Louie. She honestly did not.

"Why, for a bath--you know, a common or garden bath, with hot water. I peeped into it once (the parcel, I mean; for shame, you dreadful girl!) and it had a clean s.h.i.+rt and a pair of socks in it. I suppose he wraps those he takes off up when he's done."

Louie's eyes had opened very wide indeed. A man to have to ask another man for a bath! Well, that was something learned about London! A bath--a thing so necessary that its existence was a.s.sumed--how extremely amusing! She knew that entertaining word, "poor," but what was this other, this new and side-splitting word that meant that a man had to ask another man for a bath? She had never heard of anything so--so--there was no adjective that quite fitted the humour of it.

The next moment she had wasted an irony on Kitty.

"Hasn't he--a tidy bit?" she asked.

But it took far more than this to get through Kitty's hide. She gave another little laugh and drew her gloves more smoothly over her thin hands.

"Him? The Mandrill? (I always call him the Mandrill, my dear.) Not a penny to bless himself with; look at him!"

"Nor a permanency?" Louie asked.

"What, with those clothes? I ask you, now: it isn't a cold night to-night, is it? Well, why does he keep that heavy old coat on all the evening? Enough said, my dear. He works somewhere in the City, I believe--'something in the City'--sounds most prosperous, doesn't it?

And Archie's awful kind to him, I think, but of course he is frightfully clever, and does help Archie with his work sometimes, so Archie gives him a bath (I don't mean what you mean, I mean lets him have one). Here's Evie. Are you coming along?"

But Louie, besides being tickled, smarted a little too. To have to beg for a bath--and then to have the gift made a matter of common knowledge and a joke!--

Well, if these people were different, differences, after all, were what she was here to see.

She turned to Mr. Weston.

What Mr. Weston wanted to say to her she could not guess; but he had hardly spoken twenty words before she was smiling at herself for not guessing. The examinations were to be held just before Christmas, and unless Louie could be ready for her Elementary by that time she would have a good many months to wait before she could enter for the examination again. What Mr. Weston had to propose was, in a word, that he should coach her privately.

She knew what that meant. It meant that he would come to Sutherland Place on Sundays and talk about Richenda.

Well, even talk about Richenda would make shorter that _dies non_.

"It really would be a great furtherance of your aims, Miss Causton,"

Weston said wistfully.

Louie smiled at the periphrasis, and then considered.

"It might be the best thing to do," she said; "but of course I should accept it only on one condition."

"May I venture to inquire what that condition is?" Weston inquired deferentially.

"That you let me pay you for it," said Louie promptly.

But Weston put up a peremptory hand. "Oh no--no, no, no--I should be ashamed after all your kindnesses----"

Louie laughed again. "Good gracious, what kindnesses?"

"Ah, you once s.h.i.+elded an individual very dear to me and took the blame upon yourself, Miss Causton----" His tone was reverential, his eyes did her homage. Louie had forgotten all about the box-room rebellion and Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. She laughed once more.

"Well, just as you like. But no pay, no coaching, that's all."

Weston sighed. No doubt his acquiescence cost him a pang. If he took money for giving lessons, lessons he must give, and the talk about Richenda must go.

"Do you dwell on the point with insistence?" he asked.

"Very much."

"I am far from denying that it would be of some a.s.sistance in the furnis.h.i.+ng of our future nest, if I may use the expression----"

"Of course it would. So that's agreed?"

"So be it," said Weston.

Louie half expected him to add: "Amen."

She was in the habit of dispensing money a little largely, and for the present she could quite well afford to do this. For Chaff had done more than pay his debt. That very day she had had a letter from him, forwarded by the bank. He had paid one hundred pounds into her account, asking her to regard the extra twenty-five pounds as interest on his unceremonious borrowing. But she did not for a moment believe his cheerful tale that "things were all right again now"; poor old boy, ten to one he had borrowed pretty ruinously elsewhere in order to pay her. At all events, Weston should not give up his Sundays for nothing, and she might, after all, allow him an outpouring about Richenda and the future nest once in a while. It was only half-a-crown a week.

But as she left Weston she was thinking of something else that half-a-crown a week had power to buy. Half-a-crown a week would have bought this big shabby student a bath almost every day.

To have to carry a change of underclothing in a brown paper parcel to another man's place----

And to have that parcel peeped into----

How d.a.m.nable--no, how funny, she meant!

In the light of her knowledge of this extraordinary economy Mr.

Jeffries had to practise she felt--she didn't know why--almost shy in his presence the next time she saw him. She felt that she possessed something of his--namely, this knowledge--which she ought not to have possessed. She wondered whether he knew how he had been given away.

Something about him almost suggested that he might.

Perhaps it was his mouth. It looked, except when he deliberately opened it, as if it might very well not have opened during the whole of the twenty-eight or twenty-nine years Louie guessed him to have had a mouth at all. The rest of his face, which would have been too large for any man less huge, was an unrelenting slab. It was in the mouth if anywhere that sensitiveness must be looked for. Certainly there was none in the eyes. These Louie found (it was on a Wednesday night that she noticed these things; she had seen him first on a Monday) remarkable.

They were the eyes of a lion--clear amber, sherry-coloured. They were made more than ever to resemble the eyes of a lion by that tawny ulster he never removed, and she remembered Kitty's sinister and mirthful suggestion. Did his keeping on of that ulster mean something hardly less stark and laughable than the circ.u.mstance of the bath itself? (Louie felt that she was learning.) Then she noticed his hands. She always noticed hands. He stopped in pa.s.sing to pick up a pen for her. The hand that returned it was not only a magnificent engine of sinew and bone and muscle, powerful and heroic; it was also (this was not so funny) exquisitely kept. Her own hand, pale and slender as the leaf of a willow by contrast with his, was not in its different way more perfect. He might cadge for a bath, but his hands he could look after himself for nothing. And that was true of his hair also. It was tawny, close-cut, and took the light as cleanly as a new silk-hat; hair-brus.h.i.+ng was evidently cheap also. The man did what he could. She would have liked to hear his voice, but he handed her the pen in silence and pa.s.sed on.

"Well, he looks forbidding," was her comment on him as the great church-door of his back disappeared into the typewriting-room, "and he has got too big a face and a rather frightening jaw; but he does shave it properly, and I don't see where the 'Mandrill' comes in--wretched little creature with her pound a week! And he is like a lion, with those eyes and that ulster----"

And merely because he seemed to be a person to be scored off and given meanly away, she was already prepared, had she been challenged, to vow that he was handsome--in his heavy and unhumorous way. As a matter of fact, if Roy Lovenant-Smith resembled the little terra-cotta head in the Tanagra Gallery of the Museum, this Mr. Jeffries suggested something from the a.s.syrian Gallery downstairs--something in black basalt, that might carry the doorway of a temple on its head. In any case, with the ulster, the eyes, and the silky tawny hair, he was as like a lion as needs be.