Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 78

Suddenly Stella caught hold of his arm.

"Look here," she said. "You absurd old Quixote, listen. I'm going to do all in my power to stop your marrying Lily. But meanwhile go up to town and leave her here. I promise to declare a truce of a fortnight, if you'll promise me not to marry her until the middle of April. By a truce I mean that I'll be charming to her and take no steps to influence her to give you up. But after the fortnight it must be war, even if you win in the end and marry her."

"Does that mean we should cease to be on speaking terms?"

"Oh, no, of course; as a matter of fact, if you marry her, I suppose we shall all settle down together and be great friends, until she lands you in the divorce court with half a dozen co-respondents. Then you'll come and live with us at Hardingham, a confirmed cynic and the despair of all the eligible young women in the neighborhood."

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that about Lily," said Michael, frowning.

"The truce has begun," Stella declared. "For a fortnight I'll be an angel."

Just before dusk was falling, the gale died away, and Michael persuaded Lily to come for a walk with him. Almost unconsciously he took her to the wood where he and Stella had talked so angrily in the morning.

Chaffinches flashed their silver wings about them in the fading light.

"Lily, you look adorable in this glade," he told her. "I believe, if you were a little way off from me, I should think you were a birch tree."

The wood was rosy brown and purple. Every object had taken on rich deeps of quality and color reflected from the March twilight. The body of the missel-thrush flinging his song from the bare oak-bough into the ragged sky, flickered with a magical sublucency. Michael found some primroses and brought them to Lily.

"These are for you, you tall tall primrose of a girl. Listen, will you let me leave you for a very few days so that I can find the house you're going to live in? Will you not be lonely?"

"I like to have you with me always," she murmured.

He was intoxicated by so close an avowal of love from lips that were usually mute.

"We shall be married in a month," he cried. "Can you smell violets?"

"Something sweet I smell."

But it was getting too dusky in the coppice to find these violets themselves twilight-hued, and they turned homeward across the open fields. Birds were flying to the coverts, linnets mostly, in twittering companies.

"These eves of early Spring are like swords," Michael exclaimed.

"Like what?" Lily asked, smiling at his exaggeration.

"Like swords. They seem to cut one through and through with their sharpness and sweetness."

"Oh, you mean it's cold," she said. "Take my arm."

"Well, I meant rather more than that, really," Michael laughed. But because she had offered him her arm he forgot at once how far she had been from following his thoughts.

Michael went up to London after dinner. He left Lily curled up before the fire presumably quite content to stay at Hardingham.

"Not more than a fortnight, mind," were Stella's last words.

He went to see Maurice next morning to get the benefit of his advice about possible places in which to live. Maurice was in his element.

"Of course there really are very few good places. Cheyne Walk and Grosvenor Road, the Albany, parts of Hampstead and Campden Hill, Kensington Square, one or two streets near the Regent's Ca.n.a.l, Adelphi Terrace, the Inns of Court and Westminster. Otherwise, London is impossible. But you're living in Cheyne Walk now. Why do you want to move from there?"

Michael made up his mind to take Maurice into his confidence. He supposed that of all his friends he would be as likely as any to be sympathetic. Maurice was delighted by his description of Lily, so much delighted, that he accepted her as a fact without wanting to know who she was or where Michael had met her.

"By Jove, I must hurry up and find my girl. But I don't think I'm desperately keen to get married yet. I vote for a house near the Ca.n.a.l, if we can find the right one."

That afternoon they set out.

They changed their minds and went to Hampstead first, where Maurice was very anxious to take a large Georgian house with a garden of about fifteen acres. He offered to move himself and Castleton from Grosvenor Road in order to occupy one of the floors, and he was convinced that the stable would be very useful if they wanted to start a printing press.

"Yes, but we don't want to start a printing press," Michael objected.

"And really, Mossy, I think twenty-three bedrooms more than one servant can manage."

It was with great reluctance that Maurice gave up the idea of this house, and he was so much depressed by the prospect of considering anything less huge that he declared Hampstead was impossible, and they went off to Regent's Park.

"I don't think you're likely to find anything so good as that house,"

Maurice said gloomily. "In fact, I know you won't. I wish I could afford to take it myself. I should, like a shot. Castleton could be at the Temple just as soon from there."

"I don't see why he should bother about the Temple," said Michael. "That house was rather bigger."

"You'll never find another house like it," Maurice prophesied. "Look at this neighborhood we're driving through now. Impossible to live here!"

They were in the Hampstead Road.

"I haven't any intention of doing so," Michael laughed. "But there remains the neighborhood of the ca.n.a.l, the neighborhood you originally suggested. Hampstead was an afterthought."

"Wonderful house!" Maurice sighed. "I shall always regret you didn't take it."

However, when they had paid off the cab, he became interested by the new prospect; and they wandered for a while, peering through fantastic railings at houses upon the steep banks of the ca.n.a.l, houses that seemed to have been stained to a sad green by the laurels planted close around them. Nothing feasible for a lodging was discovered near Regent's Park; and they crossed St. John's Wood and Maida Vale, walking on until they reached a point where at the confluence of two branches the ca.n.a.l became a large triangular sheet of water. Occupying the whole length of the base of this triangle and almost level with the water, stood the garden of a very large square house.

"There's a curious place," said Michael. "How on earth does one get at it?"

They followed the road, which was considerably higher than the level of the ca.n.a.l, and found that the front door was reached by an entrance down a flight of steps.

"Ararat House," Michael read.

"Flat to let," Maurice read.

"I think this looks rather promising," said Michael.

It was an extraordinary pile, built in some Palladian nightmare. A portico of dull crimson columns ran round three sides of the house, under a frieze of bearded masks. The windows were all very large, and so irregularly placed as completely to destroy the cla.s.sic illusion. The stucco had been painted a color that was neither pink nor cream nor buff, but a mixture of all three; and every bit of s.p.a.ce left by the windows was filled with banderoles of illegible inscriptions and with plaster garlands, horns, lyres, urns, and Grecian helmets. There must have been half an acre of garden round it, a wilderness of shrubs and rank gra.s.s with here and there a disl.u.s.tered conservatory. The house would have seemed uninhabitable save for the announcement of the flat to be let, which was painted on a board roped to one of the columns.

They descended the steps and pressed a bell marked Housekeeper. Yes, there was a flat to let on the ground floor; in fact, the whole of the ground floor with the exception of this part of the hall and the rooms on either side. The housekeeper threw her ap.r.o.n over her shoulder like a plaid and unlocked a door in a wooden part.i.tion that divided the flat called Number One from the rest of Ararat House.

They pa.s.sed through and examined the two gaunt bedrooms: one of them had an alcove, which pleased Michael very much. He decided that without much difficulty it could be made to resemble a Carpaccio interior. The dining-room was decorated with Spanish leather and must have been very brilliantly lit by the late tenants, for everywhere from the ceiling and walls electric wires protruded like asps. There was also a murky kitchen; and finally the housekeeper led the way through double doors into the drawing-room.

As soon as he had stepped inside, Michael was sure that he and Lily must live here.

It was a room that recalled at the first glance one of those gigantic saloons in ancient Venetian palaces; but as he looked about him he decided that any a.s.signment in known topography was absurd. It was a room at once for Werther, for Taglioni, for the nocturnes of Chopin and the cameos of Theophile Gautier. Beckford might have filled it with orient gewgaws; Barbey d'Aurevilly could have strutted here; and in a corner Villiers de l'Isle Adam might have sat fiercely. The room was a tatterdemalion rococo barbarized more completely by gothic embellishments that nevertheless gave it the atmosphere of the fantasts with whom Michael had identified it.

"But this is like a scene in a pantomime," Maurice exclaimed.