The Second Fiddle Part 9

"If you please, sir, it's four o'clock, and Miss Waring hasn't been out to lunch yet." Mr. Travers merely ran his eye over Mr. Belk as a fishmonger runs his eyes over vulnerable portions of cod laid out for cutting, and brought down his chopper at an expert angle.

"Since when, Mr. Belk," he asked, with weary irony, "has Miss Waring's lunch been on your list of duties?"

Then he pa.s.sed swiftly into his office and faced Stella, closing the door behind him. Temper shook him as a rough wind shakes an insignificant obstacle. He could not hold it; it was gone. It blew inside out like a deranged umbrella. He glared at Miss Waring. There was nothing in her slight, bent figure, with its heavy, brown hair neatly plaited in a crown about her head, which should have roused any town clerk to sudden fury.

"It's abominable," Mr. Travers exclaimed, bringing his trembling hand down with a bang upon Stella's table, "how women behave!"

Stella said out loud, "One hundred pounds, ten s.h.i.+llings, and sixpence,"

and then looked up at her employer. She asked very quietly who had vexed him. There might have been a fugitive gleam of laughter at the back of her eyes, but there were shadows under them that made her look too tired for laughter.

"You, of course," he cried. "How are we ever to get through with our work if you won't eat? It's so silly! It's so tiresome! It's so uncalled for! Why are you doing these wretched lists now?"

"Because," said Stella--and now the laughter ran out at him unexpectedly and tripped him up--"the town clerk has a meeting at five o'clock at which these statistics must be at hand to justify him in having his own way!"

"Put them down!" said Mr. Travers savagely. Stella laid down her pen with the ready obedience which can be made so baffling when it proceeds from an unconsenting will. "Now go out and get something to eat," he went on, "while I do the wretched things. And don't let this occur again. If you have too much to do,--and I know the correspondence gets more and more every day,--mention it. We must get some help in."

She was gone before he had finished his sentence--gone with that absurd dimple in the corner of her cheek and the sliding laughter of her eyes.

She had left behind her a curious, restless emptiness, as if the very room itself waited impatiently for her return. It was half an hour before she came back. The town clerk had had to answer three telephone messages and four telegrams. If the outer office had not known that he was there and Miss Waring wasn't, he would have had more interruptions.

Nevertheless, the figures had helped Mr. Travers to recover his temper.

He was an expert accountant, and you can take figures upon their face-value. They are not like women; they have no dimples.

Mr. Travers was prepared to be the stern, but just, employer again. He remained seated, and Stella leaned over his shoulder. He had not expected that she would do this.

"What have you had to eat?" he asked. It was not at all what he had intended to say to Stella.

"A cup of tea, two ham sandwiches, and a bun:--such a magnificent spread for seven-pence!" replied Stella, cheerfully. "You've forgotten to put in what the insurance will be--there at the bottom of the page."

Mr. Travers rose to his feet. He was taller than Stella, and he considered that he had a commanding presence. Stella slid back into her seat.

"You ought to have had," said Mr. Travers, with labored quietness, "beefsteak and a gla.s.s of port."

"Anybody could tell," said Stella, tranquilly, "that you are an abstemious man, Mr. Travers. Port! Port _and_ steak! You mean porter.

All real drinkers know that port is sacred. Bottles of it covered with exquisite cobwebs are kept for choice occasions; they are brought in softly by stately butlers, walking delicately like Agag. It is drunk in companionable splendor, tenderly ministered to by nothing more solid than a walnut, and it follows the courses of the sun. There, you did quite a lot while I was away, and if you don't mind just looking through those landlords' repairing leases on your desk, I dare say I shall have finished this before five."

Mr. Travers opened his mouth, shut it again, and returned to his repairing leases. He was not an employer any more. He was not an icy, mysterious tyrant ruling over a trembling and docile universe: his own secretary had literally told him to run away and play!

But it was in the night watches that the worst truth struck him. He had been furious with Miss Waring for not spending more upon her lunch, he had upbraided her for it, and she had never turned round and said, "Look what I earn!" The opportunity was made to her hand. "How can women secretaries earning a hundred a year eat three-and-sixpenny lunches?"

That ought to have been her answer. Why wasn't it? She hadn't been too stupid to see it. She had seen it, and she had instantly, before he had had time to see it himself, covered it up and hidden it under that uncalled-for eulogy on port. It was not fear. She hadn't been afraid to stand up to him (uncalled-for eulogies _were_ standing up to him); besides she had previously called him unfair to his face. It was just something that Miss Waring _was_--something that made the color spring into Mr. Traver's face in the dark till his cheeks burned; something that had made Mr. Belk dare his chief's displeasure to get her lunch; something that wasn't business.

"She wouldn't take an advantage, because I'd given it to her," he said to himself. "I thought everybody took an advantage when they had the sense to see it; but she doesn't, though she has plenty of sense. But the world couldn't go on like that."

This brilliant idea rea.s.sured Mr. Travers; he stopped blus.h.i.+ng. He was relieved to think that the world couldn't go on like Stella; but there was something in him, a faint contradictory something, that made him glad that Stella didn't go on like the world.

He went to sleep with these two points unreconciled.

CHAPTER XII

Stella had always known that it would come; she had spent two months far-seeing it. It had usually taken the form of a telegram falling out of Mrs. Waring's wool, or Eurydice standing upon the steps, Ca.s.sandra-like, to greet her with a message from Marian. Marian would come to give her the message, but she wouldn't wait; she would drive swiftly away in a motor, and leave the broken universe behind her. But disasters do not come as we have planned their coming.

It was a dull November day, the streets were full of dying leaves, and at the end of all the cross-roads surrounding the town hall a blue mist hung like a curtain. Marian, in black velvet and furs, with old Spanish ear-rings gleaming from her sh.e.l.l-like ears, stood in disgust upon the steps of the town hall. Her small face was frozen with unexpected pain, but she could still feel annoyed with the porter. She stood in the thronged corridor and asked decisively for Miss Waring.

The porter told her that Miss Waring worked in No. 7, or, at any rate, No. 7 would know where she was working.

Marian stared slightly over the porter's head.

"My good man," she said, "how am I to know where No. 7 is? Go and tell her to come to me. Here is my card."

All the way to No. 7 the porter concocted brilliant retorts to this order. He would tell her he was not a footman and that this wasn't Buckingham Palace. He would say roughly that, if she had eyes in her head, she could find No. 7 for herself. But he was intimidated by Marian's ear-rings. A secret fear that she might turn out to be the lord mayor's daughter drove him to No. 7.

Stella was filing letters when he knocked, and when he saw the card she knew the messenger had come; but she did not forget to say as usual, "Oh, thank you, Humphreys."

She finished filing the letters before she looked for Mr. Travers.

He was coming out of the council chamber at the top of a flight of stairs. She stood there for a moment, holding him with her eyes, her lips parted. She looked like a bird that has been caught in a room and despairs of finding the way out.

Her face was strained and eager, and her sensitive eyebrows were drawn together in a little tortured frown; but she spoke quietly as soon as her breath came back to her.

"Mr. Travers, a friend of mine is in trouble. May I go to her for the afternoon? There is still a great deal to do,--I know I ought not to ask you to let me go,--but Mr. Belk and Miss Flint are so kind that I am sure they would help me. I--I should be very grateful if you could spare me."

"Certainly not," said Mr. Travers, sharply. "I mean, of course, you can go; but I won't have Mr. Belk or Miss Flint near me. I will do the work myself."

"Oh," she cried, aghast at this magnanimous humility on the part of her employer, "please don't! Do let me ask them! I'd so much rather--"

Mr. Travers waved her away. He wanted to do the work himself, and he wanted her to be aghast. He descended the stairs rapidly beside her.

"You may leave immediately, Miss Waring," he said sternly as they reached No. 7; "and I will make my own arrangements about your work."

Stella fled. Again he felt the sense of wings, as if he had opened a window, and a bird had flown past him into liberty.

He did not want her to be grateful, but he thought she might have looked back. She had noticed him only as a barrier unexpectedly fallen. She had not seen how strange it was that a barrier of so stubborn and erect a nature as Mr. Travers should have consented to fall.

If any one else had asked him for an afternoon with a friend in trouble, Mr. Travers knew that he would have said, "Your friends' troubles must take place outside office-hours." But when he had seen Stella's face he had forgotten office-hours.

Marian was sitting on a chair in the corridor. Her expression implied that there was no such thing as a town hall, and that the chair was a mere concession to unnecessary s.p.a.ce. She said, as she saw Stella:

"Please be quick about putting your things on. Yes, it's bad news about Julian."

Stella was quick. Marian said no more until they were seated together in the motor; then she gave Stella a letter she had received from Lady Verny. Lady Verny wrote:

My dear Marian: You must prepare yourself for a great distress.

Julian is in England, but he is very much injured. I want you to go to him at once. Whenever he is conscious he asks for you. My dear, if he recovers,--and they think that if he has an incentive to live he will live,--he will be partially paralyzed. I know that he will want to free you, and it will be right that you should even now feel free; but till then--for a month--will you give him all you can? All he needs to live? It is a great deal to ask of you, but I think you are good and kind, and that I shall not ask this of you in vain. His life is valuable, and will still be so, for his brain is not affected. Before he relapsed into unconsciousness he was able to give the Government the information he acquired. I think it is not wrong to help him to live; but of course I am his mother, and it is difficult for me to judge. All this is very terrible for you, even the deciding of whether you ought to help him to live or not. If I might suggest anything to you, it would be to talk about it with that friend of yours, Miss Waring.