The Wharf By The Docks Part 14

Max stood watching her, divided between prudence, which urged him to go, and inclination, which prompted him to stay.

She went on with her work steadily for some minutes, without so much as a look behind. Yet Max felt that she was aware of his presence, and he knew also, without being sure how the knowledge came to him, that the girl's feeling toward himself had changed now that she was no longer alone in the house with him. The constraint which might have been expected toward a person of the opposite s.e.x in the strange circ.u.mstances, which had been so entirely absent from her manner on their first meeting, had now stolen into her att.i.tude toward him.

Yet, although the former absence of this constraint had been a most effective part of her attraction for him, Max began to think that the new and slight self-consciousness which caused her to affect to ignore him was a fresh charm. Before, while she implored him to come into the house with her, it was to a fellow-creature only that the frightened girl had made her appeal. Now that her grandmother had returned, and she was lonely and unprotected no longer, she remembered that he was a man.

This change in her att.i.tude toward him was strikingly exemplified when, having lit the fire, she rose from her knees, and taking a kettle from the hob, turned toward the door.

"You haven't gone then?" said she.

"No!"

She came forward, taking the lid off the kettle as she walked.

"You won't be advised?"

She was pa.s.sing him swiftly, with the manner of a busy housewife, when Max, encouraged by her new reserve, and a demure side-look, which was not without coquetry, seized the hand which held the kettle, and asked her if he was to get no thanks for coming to her a.s.sistance as he had done.

"I did thank you," said she, not attempting to withdrew her hand, but standing, grave and with downcast eyes, between him and the door.

"Well, in a way, you did. But you didn't thank me enough. You yourself admit it was a bold thing for a stranger to do!"

The girl looked suddenly up into his face, and again he saw in her expressive eyes a look which was altogether new. Like flashes of lightning the changes pa.s.sed over her small, mobile features, to which the absence of even a tinge of healthy pink color gave, perhaps, an added power of portraying the emotions which might be agitating her.

There was now something like defiance in her eyes.

"What was your boldness compared to mine?" said she. "You are a man; you have strong arms, at any rate, I suppose. I am only a girl, and you are a gentleman, and gentlemen are not chivalrous. Who dared the most then, you or I?"

"So gentlemen are not chivalrous?" said Max, ignoring the last part of her speech. "All gentlemen are not, I suppose you mean? Or rather, all the men who ought to be gentlemen?"

"No," answered the girl, stubbornly. "I mean what I said. You with the rest. You'd act rightly toward a man, I suppose, as a matter of course.

You can't act rightly toward a woman, a girl, without expecting to be paid for it."

Max was taken aback. Here was a change, indeed, from the poor, clinging, pleading, imploring creature of twenty minutes before. He reddened a little and let her hand slip from his grasp.

"I believe you are right," he said, at last, "though you are rather severe. But let me tell you that the word 'chivalry' is misleading altogether. It is applied to those middle-aged Johnnies--no, I mean those Johnnies of the Middle Ages--who were supposed to go about rescuing damsels in distress, isn't it? Well, you don't know what happened after the rescue was effected; but I like to suppose, myself, that the girl didn't just say 'Thanks--awfully' and cut him dead forever afterward."

"You think the knight expected payment, just as you do, for his services?"

"I think so. A very small payment, but one which he would appreciate highly."

The girl leaned against the wall by the door and looked at him with something like contempt for a moment. Then she smiled, not encouragingly, but with mockery in her eyes.

"You have a tariff, I suppose," said she, cuttingly, "a regular scale of charges, as, perhaps, you will say the knights had. Pray, what is your charge in the present instance? A kiss, perhaps, or two?"

Now, Max had, indeed, indulged the hope that she would bestow upon him this small mark of grat.i.tude. It came upon him with a shock of surprise that a girl who had been so bold as to summon him should make so much fuss about the reward he had certainly earned. He had expected to get it with a laugh and a blush, as a matter of course. For his modest suggestion to be taken so seriously was a disconcerting occurrence. He drew himself up a little.

"I don't pretend I should have been generous enough to refuse such a payment if you had shown the slightest willingness to make it," said he.

"But as it's the sort of coin that has no value unless given voluntarily, we will consider the debt settled without it."

He made a pretense of leaving her at this point, without the slightest intention of persisting in it. This curious conference had all the zest of a most novel kind of flirtation, which was none the less piquant for the girl's haughty airs.

There are feminine eyes which allure as much while they seem to repel as they do when they consciously attract; and the light-blue ones which shone in the white face of this East End enchantress were of the number.

Max opened the door and slowly stepped into the outhouse. At the moment of glancing back--an inevitable thing--he saw that she looked sorry, dismayed. He took his gloves out of his pocket and began to draw them on, to fill up the time. By the time the second finger of the first glove was in its place, for he was deliberate, the girl had come into the outhouse, pa.s.sed him, and was drawing water from the tap into her kettle. He watched her. She knew it, but pretended not to notice. The circ.u.mstance of the water flowing freely in the house which was supposed to be deserted made an excuse for another remark, and a safe one.

"I thought they cut the water off from empty houses; that is, houses supposed to be empty."

She turned round with so much alacrity as to suggest that she was glad of the pretext for reopening communications. And this time there was a bright look of arch amus.e.m.e.nt on her face instead of her former expression of outraged dignity.

"So they do. But--the people who know how to live without paying rent know a few other things, too."

Max laughed a little, but he was rather shocked. This pretty and in some respects fastidiously correct young person ought not surely to find amus.e.m.e.nt in defrauding even a water company.

The fact reminded him of that which the intoxication caused by a pretty face had made him forget--that he was in a house of dubious character, from which he would be wise in escaping without further delay. But then, again, it was the very oddness of the contrast between the character of the house and the behavior of the girl which made the piquancy of the situation.

"Oh, yes; of course; I'd forgotten that," a.s.sented Max, limply.

And then he fell into silence, and the girl stood quietly by the tap, which ran slowly, till the kettle was full.

And then it began to run over.

Now this incident was a provocation. Max was artful enough to know that no girl who ever fills a kettle lets it run over unless she is much preoccupied. He chose to think she was preoccupied with him. So he laughed, and she looked quickly round and blushed, and turned her back upon him with ferocity.

He came boldly up to her.

"I'm so sorry," said he, in a coaxing, confidential, persuasive tone, such as she had given him no proper encouragement to use, "that we've had a sort of quarrel just at the last, and spoiled the impression of you I wanted to carry away."

He was evidently in no hurry to carry anything away, though he went on with the glove-b.u.t.toning with much energy.

She listened, with her eyes down, making, kettle and all, the prettiest picture possible. There was no light in the outhouse except that which came from a little four-penny bra.s.s hand-lamp, which the girl must have lit just before her last entrance into the inner room. It was behind her, on a shelf against the wall; and the light shone through the loose threads of her fair hair, making an aureole round the side view of her little head.

She was bewitching like that, so the susceptible Max thought, while he debated with himself whether he now dared to try again for that small reward. And he reluctantly decided that he did not dare. And again there was something piquant in the fact of his not daring.

The girl, after a short pause, looked up; perhaps, though not so susceptible as he, she was not insensible to the fact that Max was young and handsome, well dressed, a little in love with her, and altogether different from the types of male humanity most common to Limehouse.

"If," she suggested at last, with some hesitation, "you really think it better to see my grandmother, she will be down very soon. I'm going to make some tea; and you could wait, if you liked, in the next room."

"I should be delighted," said Max.

Off came the gloves; and as the girl tripped quickly into the adjoining room, he followed with alacrity.

"Mind," cried she suddenly, as she turned from the fireplace and stood by the table in an att.i.tude of warning, "it is at your own risk, you know, that you stay. You can guess that the people who belong to a hole-and-corner place like this are not the sort you're accustomed to meet at West-End dinner tables, nor yet at an archbishop's garden-party.

But as you've stayed so long, it will be better for me if you stay till you have seen Granny, as she must have heard me talking to you by this time."

Now Max, in the interest of his conversation with the girl, had forgotten all about less pleasant subjects. Now that they were suddenly recalled to his mind, he felt uneasy at the idea of the unseen but ever-watchful "Granny," who might be listening to every word he uttered, noting every glance he threw at the girl.

And then the natural suspicion flashed into his mind: Was there a "Granny" after all? or was the invisible one some person more to be dreaded than any old woman?

Another glance at the girl, and the fascinated, bewildered Max resolved to risk everything for a little more of her society.