VIII SEA-GREEN

The first night, I remember, was not so bad. One braces oneself, I suppose, for a first encounter with people who have power over one. I was a free man, according to any legal fiction that may prevail; but I was young, and poor, and ambitious. Youth, poverty, and ambition put you in the clutch of the older, richer, and devilishly detached people who dally with the notion of giving you a living wage in return for services rendered. If I had refused to be in the Fenbys’ power, I should presently have been in the clutch of a bony allegorical figure you might call Destitution. So I use the phrase advisedly. Poor Ralph had taken my last cent—my last ten-dollar bill, anyhow—so that it was important for me to get on with these Fenbys. Old Crowninshield had recommended me to them as tutor for their grandson. It was the first and last thing old Crowninshield ever did for me; and I have never known whether to be grateful or not.

My drive from the station was accomplished in the leisurely twilight of late May; but there was afterglow enough to show me that the region had neither physical charms nor social resources. The mansion seemed to have been left high and dry by the retreating human wave. We passed one darkened factory and a bunch of gaunt wooden tenements—stuck in the fields a mile beyond the station, with the casual gesture industry sometimes makes in our older Eastern states. There was not a hill, not a lake, not a brook, even, for all it was such open country. The man who drove me had a kind of taciturn humor. I placed him at once: an old Irish dependent who had by this time forgotten all about Ireland. His type was so familiar to me (I had been brought up in the next state) that I could almost foretell the drawing-room furniture. It would not, of course, be called the “drawing-room.” The carriage was comfortable and had once had style. After three-quarters of an hour I alighted at the steps of an ugly stone house, built evidently in the ’fifties. The figure on the threshold was obviously my employer. A lantern swinging from the porch roof enabled me to decide that at once. He leaned on a gold-headed stick—of course. Any man to whom Old Crowninshield confidently recommended you would lean on a gold-headed stick.

Mr. and Mrs. Fenby had waited supper for me; and I came down from my neat, faded, comfortable room, as soon as possible, to sit with them. The little boy had gone to bed, I was told. A gaunt maid served us with excellent food—things that, belonging peculiarly to supper, make you wonder why we are ever such fools as to dine at night. I can scarcely say that our talk was lively, but I had a vivid sense that they meant it to be so. Whether they were bent on proving that they were not out of the current, or merely anxious to set me at my ease, I could not tell. Old Mr. Fenby was both pompous and nervous; evidently accustomed to be deferred to, yet suspicious of the world’s having gone beyond him. His wife seemed—but of course I knew my imagination might be playing me tricks—to be secretly deriding, in some polished corner of her mind, both his pretensions and his fears. She was a small woman, white-haired and very wrinkled, and her mouth twisted a little to one side. She scarcely spoke, except to ask me a question or to agree very positively with her husband. Probably it was the unnatural twist of her lips that gave at once a sardonic effect to her stilted, harmless talk. The first night, as I said, was not so bad. The Fenbys seemed, if not precisely eager to please me, at least unwilling that I should think ill of them. Old Mr. Fenby, I remember, mentioned explicitly various privileges that would be mine—the run of his library for my own purposes, complete control over Carol’s mind and morals, a horse to ride if I cared for one, and (this from him surprised me exceedingly) breakfast in my own room. Of course, nothing of any sort could be settled off-hand; I should have to grow into the house and its ways. I merely expressed myself politely with reference to his kind suggestions. As the clock struck, I saw by certain mechanical gestures, some little involuntary stir on their part, that something usually happened at that hour.

“We retire very early,” began Mr. Fenby.

“And always have prayers at nine,” his wife concluded for him.

Four women entered the room. My coachman was evidently exempt. Three of them—the maid who had served us and two others—might have been (forgive the undignified word) triplets. I had not noticed the waitress particularly; but their joint effect was very grim. They were like the Grææ. The fourth was younger and of a different mould and race. The three who had not yet seen me—the young one and two of the Grææ—gave me one respectful, curious stare. I was puzzled by the respectfulness of the youngest one. She did not have the air, as she came in, of respecting any one in the room except me. Prayers over, Mrs. Fenby mentioned to me the names of the maids, as they filed out: “Hannah” (the waitress) “you know; Martha—the cook; Rachel—the chambermaid.”

“And—?” I pointed to the back of the younger woman.

Mrs. Fenby looked at her husband and busied herself with extinguishing one of the lamps.

“Miss Susan.” Mr. Fenby answered me. “She would prefer to be called Miss Susan. She is accustomed to it. Her position is a little anomalous, perhaps, but we are used to her. She has no employment, yet we keep her busy. She sews for my wife, puts up preserves, orders the meals. She”—he smiled a little—“she does not consider herself precisely a servant. Nor do we. She has been with us a great many years.”

“I see,” and I was turning away.

“No, perhaps you do not see. We have spoiled her, I admit, but she is not of the servant class. We treat her more or less as one of the family. She is a dependent, but of good birth. I only mention all this to explain to you why perhaps it would be better for you not to ask any service of her. She makes herself indispensable to us, but she has never lived with any one in a menial capacity. Indeed, she has never lived in any house but this.”

“Except, of course, her parents’.” Again Mrs. Fenby concluded her husband’s sentence for him.

“Of course, except her parents’. Mr. Sladen understood me. I meant ‘lived’ as one says it of servants. I really need not have gone into it so extensively, but I wished to warn Mr. Sladen not to treat her like the others. Miss Susan is so quiet that her own manner might not have made it clear.”

“Quite so. Good-night, Mr. Sladen.” Mrs. Fenby offered me an exquisite claw. “You will not see much of Miss Susan, in any case. She sits with me a good deal; and Carol is not fond of her. He is delighted that you have come. I could hardly get him to go to sleep to-night. Hannah will leave a tray outside your door at eight.”

Mr. Fenby saw me to my room.

It did not take me long to get acquainted with my pupil. He did indeed seem glad to see me; and who could blame him? The Fenbys were obviously respectable and rich; and I gathered vaguely that they intended to send Carol to a good preparatory school (if I could get him ready) and then to the oldest college in the country. Their moral attitude seemed to have been transmitted to them intact from worthy ancestors. But they were not cheerful people for a child to consort with, especially as all future benefits to Carol were explicitly contingent on his good behavior. I did not believe for a moment that his grandparents, if he turned out badly at school, would send him to work in the gaunt factory beyond their gates, but if Carol had said that he believed it, I should not necessarily have thought him stupid. The Fifth Commandment was all over the place, and there was, besides, a tang of Isaac Watts in the air. The old people seemed fond of the boy, yet anxious to conceal their fondness both from him and from all the other inmates of the household. That twist of attitude I had seen before: they were simply marching with their own generation, in the rut of their racial tradition.

I grew fond of him, of course. He was an attractive child, with something mutinous and elfin in him that occasionally gave me pause. He would grow up into either a charmer or a beast, was my conclusion at the end of a few weeks. He had good parts, but loathed coercion; was willing to learn like lightning at certain hours, or to have adorable manners when he happened to be in a ruffled and powdered mood. He was very fond of me, I may say, so far as I could tell; and I kept him with me as much as possible. After all, it didn’t matter what he said before me, and I jealously didn’t want him making temperamental breaks before his grandparents, who might not like them. We worked in the morning, and walked or did other outdoor things in the afternoon. After supper Carol went to bed; and the big library—really a fine collection in a rather magnificent old room—stood open to me during the evening hours. Mr. Fenby always sat with his wife after supper; and they went to bed after nine-o’clock prayers. Many enchanted midnights found me beneath a mild old lamp in the Fenbys’ library. That was real freedom; they asked of me only to remain in the room five minutes after extinguishing the lamp, and to go up-stairs without a candle. Old Mrs. Fenby was mortally afraid of fire; as well she may have been, for no help could have come to us except from the coachman and gardener. By the time anything arrived from the town, the place would have been in ruins.

It was a curious household—so much bodily comfort and so little amenity. The Gray Sisters cooked, cleaned, and waited with a grim and noiseless perfection; but I never saw one of them smile, even at Carol. They were, of course, not really sisters—could not have been, I mean; for I never knew the facts. Nature does not provide three such in one hour of labor. But they might easily have been kin in the spiritual sense—lay sisters of some harsh and secret order, fruit of some strange Protestant aberration. Their silent co-operation seemed more than habit: they seemed to be bound by a like vow; their minds, like their faces, were all in one mould. I inwardly congratulated Mrs. Fenby; no triumph of perfectly matched footmen could equal the psychologic indistinguishability of Hannah, Martha, and Rachel. Miss Susan was another matter. Perhaps, I thought, you have to pay for three such maids with a discord like Miss Susan. She was as quiet as Mrs. Fenby had said; and I hardly ever had occasion to speak to her. I gathered from Carol that she sometimes came to meals with them when they were alone; but she never did while I was there. “Doesn’t want to, I suppose,” he suggested in his charming treble. “Does what she pleases, I guess. I don’t like her.” I could not discover the ground of his dislike. Certainly she never, so far as I could see, interfered with him in any way. I didn’t like to probe Carol; but I wondered whether he, with his sensitive precocity, had noticed, as I had, the strange barometric effect of her changing expression. There were times when, scarce seen, she lowered over the house like a dull and thunderous sky; and once, coming upon her at the turn of a winding corridor, I seemed to be face to face with a wandering flame. For the most part, however, she effaced herself into oblivion; and it has often happened to me to be startled, on passing Mrs. Fenby’s open door, to see Miss Susan sitting beside the old lady’s couch. I did not mean, a moment since, to hint that Miss Susan was beautiful. Usually you passed her by without looking or wishing to look. She wore habitually a black frock with a white apron; her eyes were always lowered; her thick chestnut hair was done precisely like Hannah’s or Rachel’s. She spoke, if at all, so briefly that one scarcely knew if her voice or her diction were good. Carol’s remarks surprised me. I should have said that she was terribly afraid of both her employers; afraid, in true servile fashion, of endangering her position, losing her asylum. I did not hear her subjected to verbal harshness, but Mrs. Fenby had a way of watching her that was scarcely short of insult.

I am recording all this because I feel that it is important: it clears up a little for me that turbid interlude to recall, back to the very beginning, any detail I can of the Fenby household. These scattered notes of memory may be insignificant, considering the shape events presently took, yet I like to clarify my recollections to that extent.

One night in early July, I was sitting late in the library. The day had been hot; the evening was blessedly cool. With a kind of wonder I had heard the family and servants depart to their rooms. How could one refuse to await Nature’s apology for the heat of noon? A west wind wandered in through the screened windows, carrying with it the close-blended sweetness of flowering shrubs outside on the lawn. Even the oil-lamp beside me did not oppress. I found no end of things, first and last, in old Mr. Fenby’s library—books that I had always meant to read and never had read. There was time in those peaceful evening periods for works in many volumes. There was nothing to hurry me: it would take me a year at least to get Carol ready for any school.

I was turning a page of Sir Charles Grandison, somewhere midway of the work, where he is practising his steps among Clementina’s relatives. You can imagine that, if I had time for eight volumes of punctilio and smelling-salts, I was wrapped thick in leisure. It must have been near midnight; and that I was not weary of Harriet Byron shows, I think, that I was not sleepy.

It was not a noise that reft me from Harriet Byron; it was a vague visual sense of a companion in the room. Slowly I looked up, wondering; for it was three hours since every one else in the house had gone to bed. It is difficult to trace the history of a sense-impression on its path to the brain, but I must have thought that it was Mrs. Fenby, for I remember rising, alarmed that such a frail old creature should be wandering about at night without a candle. The woman shut the door, very slowly and softly—as slowly and softly as she must have opened it—and I saw, completely at a loss to know why, that it was Miss Susan.

She glided—only thus can I express her noiseless progress—across to the window, and closed that, with infinite precaution, and still without speaking. We were now shut into the library together. Apparently then she felt safe, though she breathed heavily and her hand went to her heart in the typical feminine gesture. She came and stood very close to me before she spoke. Her chestnut hair was loosened about her face, and was drawn forward over her shoulders in two magnificent braids. Her face was very white, with two beautiful feverish spots of color on the cheek-bones. She was swathed from neck to foot in some sort of dressing-gown—a wadded, brocaded, sea-green garment, shapeless and rich and ancient like a cere-cloth; something, I judged automatically, that Mrs. Fenby must have pulled out of a cedar chest and given to her in a fit of irony. It became her well; which is simply to say, I suppose, that, clad in a rich stuff, the whole texture of her seemed immediately to have changed. Her skin, I saw, was fine; one imagined a supple sleekness of body beneath those sea-green folds. I remembered Cinderella and the ball.

I had time for this impression before she spoke—bending very close to me and almost whispering the first words:

“May I ask you a question? Will you excuse my intruding?”

The tone and words did not go with the vision. She spoke as humbly as if Mrs. Fenby had sent her.

“Surely, surely—” I stammered out. “Won’t you sit down?”

She shook her head, and we remained standing.

“It is only that—I don’t quite know how to explain.” Miss Susan twisted one lustrous braid of hair in her hand nervously.

“Why not?” I smiled a little to put her at her ease.

“It is only this.” She tossed her head, shaking her braids back. Her voice grew stronger. She was now speaking in almost a normal tone. “I am very ignorant. I have never had the chance to learn as much as I wanted. Could you sometimes let me have one of Carol’s old lesson-books? History, geography, arithmetic, Latin—anything. I have a good deal of time to myself.”

“Do you, indeed, Miss Susan? I should not have thought it.”

“Oh yes.” Her affirmation had a sharp edge—whether of bitterness or boredom I could not say; but certainly of some very un-Cinderella-like emotion. “Evenings, for example. I go to sleep very late, and I really am anxious to learn. Of course I want only the books that Carol has finished with.”

“You don’t use the library, then?”

“Mr. Fenby would not like that. But how could he object to my using old school-books? And I thought you would know which ones Carol did not need.”

“He needs very few.”

“Is he clever?” Again there was an edge—was it of hostility?—in her tone.

“Rather!”

“Then he will be through with his books all the sooner. May I have them?”

“Of course, there is no conceivable objection on my part,” I began. “They aren’t my books, even, you know.”

“No, they’re theirs. Or Carol’s, perhaps. I don’t know about those things.” She paused a moment, then looked up at me sharply from under the thick brown ridge of her eyebrows. “Are you afraid to give them to me for fear Mr. and Mrs. Fenby will mind?”

“No. Why should I be? I suppose I thought it odd that you didn’t speak to them instead of to me.” My honest thought came out thus. Then I wondered.... “If there is anything in the world that I can do, I shall be glad to—if you really want to begin Latin, for example. I am just starting Carol.”

She appeared to consider. “But he would be using the book himself, wouldn’t he?”

“Not at any hour when you would be using it.” I laughed. “Especially not in the evening.”

“I wouldn’t ask you many questions, and I could always return the books here in the early morning.”

“Done, then. What do you most want? I will get them for you to-morrow.”

“Oh, almost anything. What Carol has had will do for me to begin on.” She smiled gratefully, but not at me. She looked away as she smiled. Apparently her errand was quite finished, for she moved towards the door.

“Miss Susan!” I could not help it. I felt I must ask her. “Why should the Fenbys mind your teaching yourself out of the boy’s books? Why do you think they would? Do you fancy they would be afraid—”

“That I might better myself if I had more education?” She took the words out of my mouth—though I may say I shouldn’t have uttered just those. “Yes, I think they would be afraid of that. That’s why I don’t like to ask them.”

“But why haven’t you bought text-books long since?”

“Oh, if I had had money to buy text-books with—” She shrugged her shoulders and turned her back on me, moving again towards the door. But I had seen the sudden crimson in her cheeks before she turned; and I did not pursue her with more words. She opened the library door and shut it again behind her, as quietly as she had done it before.

In a few moments I blew out the lamp; and I sat loyally in the dark for five minutes, keeping my promise to Mrs. Fenby. The elegant Harriet Byron no longer intrigued me, whereas poor Miss Susan did. I was forced to infer that she served my employers for food and shelter rather than for wages. It seemed rather niggardly of them, for there was evidently plenty of money. I wondered a little why she had never married. For under the lamplight the truth had come out—Miss Susan, give her half a chance, was handsome. Not only that: she was handsome in no forbidding way. There was, in her presence, a potential—mind, I don’t say actual—invitation to woo. She wasn’t a bit like the Grææ. There was enough reticence there to banish the thought of intrigue; but that she shouldn’t have married in her lustrous youth seemed odd—a pretty little problem in fatalities. After all, though (it came to me as I mounted the dark stairs), any suitor would have had to walk many miles to reach her in that mansion; and an anomalous position like hers is not the predestined setting for a bride. She had ambition, evidently, still; but a worn and warped ambition that asked only for Carol’s old school-books. Hang the Fenbys! She should have them. I would teach her the Greek verb at midnight if she thought it would please her. Her hair had been magnificent against that sea-green stuff.

The encounter which I have just related was the first of three. I saw Miss Susan daily, as I saw the Gray Sisters; but my casual meetings with her about the house—when, as of old, she slipped by me, eyes lowered, in her black dress—were empty of personal savor. I did not even, for many days, have a chance to hand over the school-books I had sifted out for her. Mrs. Fenby’s régime for her was iron. Sometimes I even wondered if Miss Susan had really visited me—if, rather, she had done anything save “appear” as a ghost does. Was it perhaps some eidolon of her, some unconscious projection of a stifled desire, that had met me face to face in the library? Had she walked in her sleep? Or, more precisely, had some aspect, some fragment, of her personality visited me while the familiar part of her lay sleeping? In such reflections—when Carol left me time for reflection—I spent the next ten days. Most of all in the library at night, alone with my eighteenth-century books, did I wonder; and more than once I lifted my eyes to see if the door would open on a sea-green shape.

They were to be three, my genuine encounters with Miss Susan under that roof—each one violently and strangely different from the others. They deepened—those three scenes—to the climax, as cunningly as if they had been staged. I do not think she ever knew that, or thought for one instant what must be the dramatic history of my attitude to her. The first chute de rideau she might have planned; the others, in essence, she was innocent of. I do not believe she ever once calculated her effect on me.

Ten days after her request for school-books—a request that, as I explained, she had never given me the chance to fulfil (for, after all, she had to seek me out; I could not mount to her attic), I sat again late in the library. July was heavy upon us, and there was no cool west wind. For very heat, I could not go to bed, and I marvelled that others could. Mrs. Fenby had the immunity to heat of her fragility. She was one of those thin old creatures who wear a shawl in the hottest weather, as if their veins stored ice that was in perpetual need of thawing. Her husband, however, was of a sanguine constitution, full-fleshed and flushing easily. I should have expected him to share my vigils, though I was always grateful to hear his heavy footsteps following his wife’s up-stairs. Night by night they ascended together, like an aging mastiff and a decrepit parrot. Hannah, Martha, and Rachel would follow presently, dogging each other closely, the three making a single indistinguishable smudge on the twilit staircase. Miss Susan usually preceded them all.

The night was hotter than any other even in that hot July. I could not read with comfort, and while I got over a good many pages, it was by dint of changing my position constantly and drinking ice-water in great gulps. Some time after eleven I went out through the French window to the porch. The covered porch was as hot as the room; I stepped down on the lawn. At least the ceiling of the lawn was high! I strolled up and down, wondering if I shouldn’t simply fling myself down on cool turf to spend the night under the stars. Of course, though, if I did, I should have to go in first and put out that wretched lamp. Instinctively, with the thought, I looked toward the house. Framed in the French window of the library was a sea-green figure.

“Oh!” That ejaculation was wrenched from me. Why, on such a hot night? Well, I would give her the books and then come out and throw myself on the grass. I walked across to the long window. She stepped aside for me to enter.

I found the books for her and handed them over with a few curt words. It was, for some reason, annoying to have waited vainly all those days, and now, at this torrid moment, to be called to account. My enthusiasm for this spinster’s schooling had ebbed. Yet, as she stood beside me, asking eager questions, the second self of Miss Susan—call it what you will—wrought upon me again. My second impression was more vivid than my first had been, probably because it had the first, for past, to go upon. Suspicions resolved themselves into conclusions. I did not need to note again details I had already noted. The whiteness of her skin, the sheen of her hair, the suppleness of her form beneath its rich shroud, I took for granted now; and I proceeded to take in other details: a vague scent about her sea-green draperies, a small foot pushed out in its slipper beneath the swirling hem of her gown, the excellent shape of her slightly roughened hands. But most of all, as we faced each other across the marble chimney-piece (having withdrawn by common impulse from the tropic radius of the lamp-ray), were her eyes revealed to me. I met them, glowing in the dimness, with a kind of shock. In point of fact, as I realized, I had never seen Miss Susan’s eyes before. She seemed quite unconscious of the kind of figure she cut: I dare say she was. No intention was revealed to me, at all events; only an unsuspected capacity—for what? Well, for being like other women; that was all. Imagine how little like other women she must have seemed, day by day, going about the Fenbys’ business! And a sea-green gown, of no fashion and unquestioned age, had done it. The only malice you could record against Miss Susan was her wearing it at all—her thinking it worth while, for the sake of some starved sense in her, to masquerade to herself in a bit of cast-off finery. I did not even then believe that she had “dressed up” for me. If it had occurred to me, I could have felt only pity for an instinct that had to satisfy itself with a dressing-gown that came from Mrs. Fenby’s grandmother.

So we stood, exchanging a few words about the Latin grammar. “You are very kind,” was the most personal thing said between us, and she said it as humbly as if I had tipped her.

“If you have any questions, I should be glad to answer them. And surely you don’t need to sit up to all hours to ask them. Almost any time in the day when I see you—”

“I don’t dare in the day-time. Really, it is better not.” Her acknowledged fear sat oddly on her magnificence. So, too, did her desire for book-learning. You could have imagined her—in sea-green—wanting a personal success; I couldn’t readily imagine her—in sea-green—caring to spell correctly. That creature ought to have despised the technique of respectability—though she looked, too, as innocent as gunpowder that has never heard of a gun. I felt all this a little thickly and incoherently. I can’t give you her effect so logically as I should like. I was very young when I encountered Miss Susan.

She was starting to go away, I think—at all events, she had removed her vague, burning glance from me—when I heard a voice in the hall. Immediately the door was thrown open—quietly; but no other human being could quite achieve the soundlessness of Miss Susan’s performance.

Mr. Fenby, candle in hand, confronted us. The books—she was just taking them from my hand—dropped to the floor with a little crash. The noise woke me to a daylight reality. I almost expected the sea-green wrapper to change in a twinkling to black stuff, and the braids of hair to arrange themselves in compact Cinderella fashion on Miss Susan’s head. But she did not change in any respect. She was evidently too much surprised to adventure even into another manner all at once.

“What is this?” He stormed impartially at us both.

“Miss Susan asked me for some text-books. I found them and gave them to her. She was just taking them up-stairs.”

“Carol’s text-books?”

“Yes,” I answered, “Carol’s text-books. He is quite through with them. Have you any objection, Mr. Fenby?”

Miss Susan had not crumpled yet. She was quite self-possessed.

“Of course I have.” Mr. Fenby didn’t precisely shout, but his voice sounded to my nervous ear like summer thunder. “What right have you to Carol’s books? They belong to my dead son’s boy. Pick them up.”

I stooped and gathered up the books. I was not going to see any woman obeying orders issued in that tone.

“Your dead son’s boy.” She spoke musingly. “No, I never did care for your dead son.”

“And you come here, at night, in that costume”—he pointed a scornful finger at her—“to get up an intrigue with this young man!”

“Nothing of the sort, Mr. Fenby,” I said, roundly. “I don’t know why Miss Susan wants text-books, but neither could I be supposed to see why she shouldn’t have them. She has been here only five minutes, and I have been explaining to her how she had better begin. We have had no conversation whatever on any other subject, so you will kindly reverse your opinion.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, young man. I don’t suppose you’d look at her. But you”—he turned to Miss Susan—“traipsing around my house at midnight—not even in a decent dress—your hair down—It’s disreputable, you—”

I won’t repeat the word he used. It’s sufficiently well known to be guessed.

Before I could reply, either for myself or for Miss Susan, a tottering figure stood in the doorway. Mrs. Fenby had crept down after her husband, and was now making her way to his side. She stood there, hunched and rounded and frail in dressing-gown and shawl, facing her husband and the other woman.

“That is no word for you to use to Susan, Horace.” Her voice was very thin and piping, but she got an effective emphasis all the same.

He did not answer at once, but his rage against Miss Susan appeared to abate. Or, at least, rage seemed to pass out of him, like air from a deflated balloon. His wife’s eyes and his fixed each other during this shrinking process; to my imagination, dark accusations passed silently between them. When those few instants had passed, Mrs. Fenby turned to Miss Susan. Her words came shrill and sudden.

“Go, woman! My husband is right. I have no doubt of your intentions. But it shall not happen again. What deceptions you have practised on this misguided young man it is not for me to say or to know. But they shall not be practised any further. My household is safe from you. Do you understand? Safe! I will see to that. Carol’s tutor should have been sacred even to you.”

“Mrs. Fenby!” I, in my turn, almost shouted. “I have already told your husband that Miss Susan came to me with a request for some paltry school-books. She said she wished to study by herself. I gave them to her. I don’t know the meaning of all your abominable talk, but it has nothing to do with any facts I know anything about. If you choose to insult her privately, I can’t control it, I suppose; but you shall not insult her in my presence with lies. I did not see at first why she had to conceal so innocent a request from you and Mr. Fenby, but I do see now, and I shouldn’t have believed it possible!”

Miss Susan came forward and offered her hand to me. “Thank you,” she said. “I didn’t know men ever spoke the truth. Apparently they do. You’re good for that, whether you are good for anything else or not.” She smiled straight into my face, maliciously—as if she had, after all, in many ways found me wanting. Then she turned to Mr. and Mrs. Fenby. “As for you two”—some word seemed to stick in her throat—“I apologize. It shall not happen again. Your grandson’s books shall be sacred.”

And, lifting the little pile from the chimney-piece, she flung them on the floor. Apparently the gesture relieved her pent emotion, for with it all passion—and likewise all lustre—seemed to ebb from her. In spite of her costume, she looked like her daily self once more. “I apologize,” she repeated. “I wouldn’t have done it if I had known.”

The words were spoken to Mrs. Fenby alone. She turned her back on the husband.

Miss Susan’s movements had brought her very near the mistress of the house; and at this point Mrs. Fenby, with a myopic start, caught at the sea-green sleeve and held it to her eyes. “Wretched girl!” she piped. “You wore this—down here—at midnight!”

“Yes, I did. But I never will again,” and the sea-green figure passed out into the hall.

“I am cold, Horace—cold!” All Mrs. Fenby’s shrillness had gone. She cowered against her husband in a shivering revulsion. Apparently she was crying.

“Of course you are cold. You must go back to bed,” he said, vaguely, while with one hand he mopped the sweat from his own brow. “Take my arm. Or—if Mr. Sladen will go up-stairs ahead of us, I will give you my dressing-gown to put round you.”

Mrs. Fenby’s teeth were chattering. There was nothing for it but to put out the lamp and precede them, letting Mr. Fenby give his wife that extra covering. This I did. After all, I wanted an interval of solitude before the inevitable explanations came.

But the inevitable explanations, paradoxically, did not come. Mr. Fenby, in his wife’s presence, the next day, apologized to me for anything that might incidentally have offended me the evening before. His words were as vague and inclusive as that. There was nothing for me to take up, I saw by daylight, unless Miss Susan chose to appeal to me. Whatever dark stuff of hatred they had woven between them was not for me to lift unchallenged. Miss Susan was not visible to me for some days; but by the end of the week she appeared again about the house. She seemed to take pride in not altering her accustomed demeanor—in neither lifting her eyes to mine nor quickening her pace when she had occasion to pass me. I gave her chances; for, though I did not like her, I thought her oppressed. She took none of them; and as I had now no reason to think her either stupid or simple, I ceased to occupy myself with her.

That last statement is of course not quite true. I ceased to put myself, however unobtrusively, in her way; but my hours of solitude were full of wild surmises. I tried to keep away from the subject; for a time, I went to my own room after prayers, eschewing the library. These people were my employers; I needed their money; I was fond of Carol; I almost respected them for not explaining to me things that most people—if they did not turn me out of the house at once—would have bitten their tongues in their haste to explain. Their power over Miss Susan was certainly a moral power; for she had had chances to give me a sign, and did not take them. The decent thing to do—since I wasn’t prepared to chuck my position—was to forget. And yet, how could I?

There is scarcely a thinkable solution that my brain did not work out to its passionate, illogical end. I sailed with the wind straight into Sophoclean tragedy; I tacked—into Dumas fils. What had there been between Miss Susan and Horace Fenby that stirred the crackling ire of his wife? Or, had she embittered the son’s brief marriage? Carol’s mother had died in childbirth, I had learned; his father, of typhoid, not long after her. Or did it all go further back, and was Miss Susan herself a result, not a cause, of scandal? Above all, had there been any reason, any precedent, for their implication that she had sought me out with no holy emotion? I could not think it; though I remembered the malice of her final glance at me. What hold had she on people who hated her so? Why did she stay with people she so detested? What strange situation kept the balance between them—a claim they acknowledged so meanly; a hatred that she could not keep from being humble? I made nothing of it; and, as I say, I was not sure that I had the right to wonder too cleverly, had I been able. They were paying for the full bloom of my mental powers. I could not cheat Carol of that.

Yet, even so, my curious fever would not abate at once. It waxed with the waxing heat of July. By August the heat was even greater, and other symptoms began to possess me. A strange inward coolness took the place of my brief delirium; my chill mind seemed to react against the physical torridity and save me. I longed only for autumn to reconcile once more the temperatures of body and brain. Perhaps the massive fixity of the household hypnotized me. I took to sitting in the library again at night; and after the first few evenings I ceased to expect a sea-green shape to rise upon the threshold. Perhaps we had all been mad together; crazed by the highest temperature in years.

In any case, it was upon a state of mind from which all expectancy had been wrung that my third encounter with Miss Susan fell. I had gone back to Richardson—not to Sir Charles Grandison, which indeed I have never finished; but to Pamela. I was wondering idly what it would feel like to be “Mr. B.”; I was even wondering, with equal idleness, what “Mr. B.” would have made of the Fenby household. My brain was scarcely working, as you can see, and it took me some moments to authenticate the smell of smoke in my own nostrils. I was slow about investigating; it was a nuisance to get up, and probably the kerosene-lamp beside me was guilty. But the odor was too strong and significant. I suddenly realized that, and my limbs as suddenly ceased to be lazy. I walked quickly across the library and opened the door. A great acrid gust choked me, and I dashed up-stairs, where, in the darkness, I already heard a mild commotion. The Gray Sisters rushed by me in weird nightgear. Two of them went to Mrs. Fenby’s room, where I heard Mr. Fenby shouting encouragement to her. The other fled before me down the corridor that led to Carol’s room in the wing. That was the path I took instinctively, myself; and I called through the smoke to the maid—Martha, the cook—to go to the stables and wake the coachman and gardener. She turned and shuffled away through the smoke.

That moment was such a chaos of sensations that even memory cannot straighten it out. I know that I had a purpose at the back of my mind—to get every living creature out of the house, and then, with the other men, to see what could be done. The Fenbys and the servants were awake and aware; but no sound had come from Carol. I intended, I know, to carry the child outside, myself, in my own arms, before that terrible air grew hotter. I could not yet see flames anywhere, but I heard cracklings and rumblings. Mrs. Fenby’s fear had materialized. I heard her excited moaning somewhere behind me as I rushed down to Carol’s room; I heard the others pleading with her; but I did not stop. The smoke grew greasier, hotter, thicker, with each step I took towards Carol. I judged it—as far as in that dash I could judge anything—to have started in the floor or walls above that wing; I hoped, beyond Carol’s own room.

The child was sleeping, but woke, choking and spluttering, as I felt for him roughly in the dark. He was frightened, but surrendered himself to me without too much kicking. Common sense came to my rescue in a single flash. I flung a blanket round him, picked up his slippers and put them on his feet. His weight was more than I had bargained for, though; I could not be sure of stumbling ahead fast enough with him in my arms. I felt for the washstand, dipped a towel in the pitcher against emergencies, and bade him walk quickly by my side, holding my hand. The sleep was jolted out of him by this time, and he obeyed, whispering and asking absurd questions. It seemed an age before I got him down the hall to the main staircase; but the flames did not reach us, though they were creeping stealthily down towards us now from the end of the wing.

Mrs. Fenby was calling in her piping shriek for Carol. I shouted that I had him safe, and I heard them bumping down the stairs. Evidently they had to carry her, among them. I told them we were following close behind, and by this time they could hear Carol’s own voice still asking angry questions. Their rickety progress was resumed. Martha had not yet brought the men back from the stables. The whole group got, finally, into the outer air, and Mr. Fenby and I rushed back for wraps. There could be no question of trying to save anything on the upper floors. Just as we came out of Mrs. Fenby’s room, staggering laden through the smoke, feeling for the hand-rail of the staircase, something turned me sick and nearly knocked me over. Not one of us had thought of Miss Susan! I flung my load over the banisters into the hall below and turned to the third-story staircase. Old Mr. Fenby started down, and I let him go without speaking to him. It was too hideous to mention, that we should not have thought of her. There was light now—the awful apocalyptic light of flame where flame should not be. And as I approached the attic stairs—no speech is quick enough to tell all this, nor yet confused enough—a sea-green figure came half falling, half running down them. I tried to stop Miss Susan, but could not. Her face and hair were singed, and one blackened hand was bleeding. She tore past me to the wing, straight into the beginning conflagration. “Carol! Carol!” I heard her cry, as she dashed past me through the smoke.

“He is safe! He’s outdoors!” I shouted to her, but she did not hear me. She tore her way into the fire, beating a passage through the smoke with her wounded hand.

“Carol! Carol! I’m coming!”

“Miss Susan!” I screamed it in her ear. “I took him down. He’s safe. Every one is safe.”

She heard me then and gripped my arm. “You swear it?”

“I swear it. I went for the boy first of all, of course. For God’s sake, come! The ceiling is falling in.”

She turned. “It started in the attic next my room, I think. My door got jammed. I had to fight my way out. It’s all burning up there. The windows are all open. Where is he? Where is he?”

I led her down, almost at a run, my arm around her waist; for the second floor was already doomed.

“Carol!” she called in the hall below. But there was no answer. The family had gone, I realized afterward, to the far end of the lawn. “Carol!” she called again in the doorway. And when no answer came, she struck at me and ran back to the staircase. I clutched her, willing to be brutal if necessary, for she was far gone in hysteria. By God’s providence, at that moment Carol’s own cry came authentically from outside. He ran across the lawn, wrapped in his blanket, elfin and comic in the lurid glow.

“My son! my son! my own little son!” Neither Hannah nor Rachel could get him, for a moment, out of Miss Susan’s clutch, though the boy, frightened, no doubt, writhed to get free from her blackened face and arms. At last, for sheer physical weakness, she let him go. But I had heard the cry, and so had the maids and Mr. Fenby, who now stood beside them.

“Take the boy to his grandmother,” he commanded. “You have frightened him sick, Susan.”

He ran to meet the two men who had just reached the house, and tried to pull me along with him. I half gave to his pull, but before I actually moved from the spot I spoke to Miss Susan. “They have taken chairs off the porch. Go over there and rest. You can’t do anything now. We must try to save some of the books.”

“Rest?” She looked about her wildly. “Where should I rest? With my mother over there, who has taken my boy away from me? I’ll stay here.”

And, wrapping her green garment about her, she flung herself face downward on the turf.

“Get a blanket, Martha!” I called. Even in that instant I remembered it was Martha who had tried first to save Carol. I managed finally to get Miss Susan up from the ground and lead her to a wicker couch under a tree. We had got wraps from the lower floor, and the women, at the far end of the lawn, were protected from chill. Miss Susan would not have her couch placed near the others when she saw that Carol’s sleepy head was on his grandmother’s lap. Mrs. Fenby called to her peevishly, but Miss Susan gave her only a curt reply as she passed.

“God has cursed me in my daughter, and now he has taken my home. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” That solemn whimper of Mrs. Fenby’s in sight of her blazing house haunts me still.

Then Susan Fenby turned on her. “You have frightened me with God long enough, mother. You will never do it again. I see now that you are only a fool.”

“Grace is not in you, Susan.” It was hardly more than a whisper, for all its shrillness. The old woman’s chin dropped wearily on her breast, and she was silent in her coil of wrappings. Miss Susan flung herself upon her couch and gazed, unwinking and speechless, at the burning house.

After this bitter little interlude I ran back to help Mr. Fenby and the men with the books. The silver, carefully carried up-stairs every night to Mrs. Fenby’s room, we could not go for. We saved a few volumes—more or less at random, I am afraid, for it was impossible either to turn Mr. Fenby out or to disobey him, and he had completely lost his head. The house was doomed from the start, and when, an hour later, the engines came from the town, there was little they could do save fling some water on what seemed the very spirit of fire.

The morrows of such nights are strange. By dawn we persuaded the women to go down to the stables. Before dawn not one of them would stir. It was eight o’clock before I went down myself; and when I got there I found that Mr. Fenby, Carol, and all the women had been driven to the hotel in the town. The gardener’s wife gave me breakfast, and I ate it hungrily. The morning I spent in groping about among the ruins, estimating the usefulness of the walls that were left, picking up charred objects from the débris, waiting for Mr. Fenby’s return. I could hardly divine what my next move would be until I had seen him.

It must have been noon when I was suddenly confronted, in the middle of what had been the library, by a strange figure. Susan Fenby, in cheap gingham, stood before me under the August sun.

“I walked back,” she said, simply. “They are all sleeping except Mr. Fenby, who is seeing the insurance people. He will be here pretty soon. I shan’t see you again.”

“Do you know what they are going to do?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Go somewhere, probably, until the house can be rebuilt.”

“How is Mrs. Fenby?” I dared not be the first to mention Carol.

“Asleep, I told you.”

“And you think they won’t need my services any more?”

“They’ll never keep you on.” She shook her head. “They will have to keep me. That will be bad enough—after last night. They’ll be very nice to you; you won’t suffer. But you can be sure they will never want to see you again.”

“Probably not,” I mused. “And you will still stay on—after last night?” I was deeply embarrassed. But, leaning against the cracked marble of the fireplace, in that roofless room, under the crude August sun, it seemed to me that nothing was too strange to be said.

“I shall stay. It’s in the bargain. I have done everything they made me—standing up, sitting down, and on my knees—for the sake of being near Carol. If you are out of the way, it will all go on as before. If it hadn’t been for the fire, I should never have broken out again. And I shan’t now, as long as Carol is still at home. I’m not afraid of God any more, as I used to be—nor of them. But I have learned how to hold my tongue. Only, of course, you’ll have to go. They couldn’t stand it with any one who knew—except the maids, and they have always known. They’ve been with us since I was born.”

“But what about Carol?”

“They’re already hoping he’s forgotten, in the excitement. I dare say he has.” She passed her handkerchief nervously over her lips with her bandaged hand, then broke out, passionately: “I did keep my word. I should never have told him if I hadn’t been mad with fear for him.”

She closed her eyes convulsively. Her whole face twitched.

“What I really came for,” she said, dully, “was to advise you to ask your own price. I mean, for going away like a gentleman and holding your tongue. Probably you would do it, anyhow, but they might as well pay.”

“Miss Susan!” I exclaimed. “What do you take me for?”

“I don’t know anything about you, but if any one can get anything out of them, it’s all to the good.”

“Besides,” I went on—for she laid no leash on curiosity—“what is there for me to tell?”

“I should think that it was clear enough,” she said, indifferently. “My name is Susan Fenby, and Carol is my son. That is more than enough for them, anyhow. I was their only child, remember.”

“How they have had to lie!” I murmured.

“Of course they’ve had to. And they don’t like it, either; so that shows you how they feel about it—if they can lie like that when they think it’s a sin to lie. They had to come here to this God-forsaken place to live, too. I’m not defending myself, you understand. I used to think I was as bad as my mother said I was. I never took much stock in what my father said. He was no saint himself, I guess, in the beginning. I don’t think anything much, now—and I guess it’s ‘pull Dick, pull devil,’ between us. He has a temper, and she is as cold as ice. I’m like both of them. That’s all.” She began to pick her way out of the débris. “I only came to tell you to ask, in reason, what you like. They’ll give it to you. They can afford to. I must go now, or he’ll find me when he comes.”

“Miss Susan—” I stopped her—“why do you give me this advice?”

“Because you were kind about the school-books. I did want to keep up with Carol. And I liked having his books in my hands. But—” Suddenly she turned wholly round to me, her deep blush making her almost handsome again. In that most unbecoming scene and light she had been like the Miss Susan I used to see slip through the corridors slavishly intent on Mrs. Fenby’s business. “They were quite wrong, that night. It was only the school-books. Though”—she raised her eyes to mine with one desperate grip on honesty—“I don’t blame them. They had no reason to trust me. Good-bye!” She would not take my hand; would not even let me help her, in spite of her crippled arm; and I watched her pick her way out of the ruined house. Five minutes later Mr. Fenby had returned.

I did not follow up Miss Susan’s suggestion of putting a price on my silence. But I fell in with Mr. Fenby’s idea of an immediate departure, and I accepted his own offer of paying me six months’ salary the more readily because I knew how grateful he was for the chance to give it. I agreed with him very gravely that we had all gone off our heads the night before. He trusted me to the point of letting me spend one long morning alone with Carol. Carol talked to me, as freely as a running brook, of all that had happened; but he mentioned Miss Susan only casually. I honestly believe that, in the drugged sleep which followed close on such excitement, he had forgotten.