MORE OF THE ITINERANT OPTIMIST; ALICE DU CANE
ASKS MARADICK A FAVOUR
 
Maradick awoke very early on the next morning. As he lay in his bed, his mind was still covered with the cobwebs of his dreams, and he saw the room in a fantastic, grotesque shape, so that he was not sure that it was his room at all, but he thought that it might be some sea with the tables and chairs for rocks, or some bare windy moor.
The curtain blew ever so slightly in the wind from the crevice of the door, and he watched it from his bed as it swelled and bulged and shrunk back as though it were longing to break away from the door altogether but had not quite courage enough. But although he was still confused and vague with the lazy bewilderment of sleep, he realised quite definitely in the back of his mind that there was some fact waiting for him until he should be clear-headed enough to recognise it. This certainty of something definite before him that had to be met and considered roused him. He did not, in the least, know what that something was that awaited him, but he tried to pull himself together. The sea receded, the beating of its waves was very faint in his ears, and the rocks resolved into the shining glass of the dressing-table and the solemn chairs with their backs set resolutely against the wall, and their expressions those of self-conscious virtue.
He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes; he knew with absolute certainty that he should not sleep again. The light was trying to pierce the blind and little eyes of colour winked at him from the window, the silver things on the dressing-table stood out, pools of white, against the dark wood.
He got out of bed, and suddenly the fact stared him in the face: it was that he was committed, irrevocably committed, to help Tony. He had, in a way, been committed before, ever since Lady Gale asked him for his help; but there had always been a chance of escaping, the possibility, indeed, of the “thing” never coming off at all. But now it was coming off, and very soon, and he had to help it to come.
He had turned the whole situation over in his mind so very often, and looked at it from so very many points of view, with its absurdities and its tragedies and its moralities, that there was nothing more to be said about the actual thing at all; that was, in all conscience, concrete enough. He saw it, as he sat on the bed swinging his feet, there in front of him, as some actual personality with whom he had pledged himself in league. He had sworn to help two children to elope against everybody’s wishes—he, Maradick, of all people the most law-abiding. What had come over him? However, there it was and there was nothing more to be said about it. It wasn’t to be looked at again at all with any view of its possible difficulties and dangers, it had just to be carried through.
But he knew, as he thought about it, that the issue was really much larger than the actual elopement. It was the effect on him that really mattered, the fact that he could never return to Epsom again with any hope of being able to live the life there that he had lived before.
The whole circle of them would be changed by this; it was the most momentous event in all their lives.
Maradick looked again at the morning. The mists were rising higher in the air, and all the colours, the pale golden sand, the red roofs, the brown bend of the rocks, were gleaming in the sun. He would go and bathe and then search out Punch.
It was a quarter past five as he passed down the stairs; the house was in the most perfect stillness, and only the ticking of innumerable clocks broke the silence. Suddenly a bird called from the garden; a little breath of wind, bringing with it the scent of pinks and roses, trembled through the hall.
When he reached the cove the sea was like glass. He had never bathed early in the morning before, and a few weeks ago he would have laughed at the idea. A man of his age bathing at half-past five in the morning! The water would be terribly cold. But it wasn’t. He thought that he had never known anything so warm and caressing as he lay back in it and looked up through the clear green. There was perfect silence. Things came into his mind, some operas that he had heard, rather reluctantly, that year in London. The opening of the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca,” with the bell-music and the light breaking over the city. He remembered that he had thought that rather fine at the time. The lovers in “Louise” on Montmartre watching the lights burst the flowers below them and saluting “Paris!” He had appreciated that too. A scene in “To Paradise,” with a man somewhere alone in a strange city watching the people hurrying past him and counting the lamps that swung, a golden chain, down the street. Some picture in the Academy of that year, Sim’s “Night Piece to Julia.” He hadn’t understood it or seen anything in it at the time. “One of those new fellows who just stick the paint on anyhow,” he had remarked; but now he seemed to remember a wonderful blue dress and a white peacock in the background!
How funny it was, he thought, as he plunged, dripping, back on to the beach, that the things that a fellow scarcely noticed at all at the time should be just the things that came into his mind afterwards. And on the sand he saw Toby, the dog, gravely watching him. Toby came courteously towards him, sniffed delicately at his socks, and then, having decided apparently that they were the right kind of socks and couldn’t really be improved on, sat down with his head against Maradick’s leg.
Maradick tickled his head and decided that pugs weren’t nearly so ugly as he had thought they were. But then there was a world of difference between Toby and the ordinary pug, the fat pug nestling in cushions on an old lady’s lap, the aristocratic pug staring haughtily from the soft luxury of a lordly brougham, the town pug, over-fed, over-dressed, over-washed. But Toby knew the road, he had seen the world, he was a dog of the drama, a dog of romance; he was also a dog with a sense of humour.
He licked Maradick’s bare leg with a very warm tongue and then put a paw on to his arm. They were friends. He ratified the contract by rolling over several times on the sand; he then lay on his back with his four paws suspended rigidly in the air, and then, catching sight of his master, turned rapidly over and went to meet him.
Punch expressed no surprise at finding Maradick there at that hour of the morning. It was the most natural thing in the world. People who came to Treliss were always doing things like that, and they generally spent the rest of their lives in trying to forget that they had done them.
“I’ve been wanting to see you, Mr. Maradick, sir,” he said, “and I’m mighty glad to find you here when there’s nothing to catch our words save the sea, and that never tells tales.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, Garrick,” said Maradick, “I came down after you. I meant to have gone up to your rooms after bathing, but as you are here it’s all the better. I badly want to talk to you.”
Punch sat down on the sand and looked quite absurdly like his dog.
“I want to talk to you about Morelli, Garrick.” Maradick hesitated a moment. It was very difficult to put into words exactly what he wanted to say. “We have talked about the man before, and I shouldn’t bother you about it again were it not that I’m very fond of young Tony Gale, and he, as you know, has fallen in love with Morelli’s daughter. It’s all a long story, but the main point is, that I want to know as much about the man as you can tell me. Nobody here seems to know very much about him except yourself.”
Punch’s brow had clouded at the mention of Morelli’s name.
“I don’t rightly know,” he said, “as I can say anything very definite, and that being so perhaps one oughtn’t to say anything at all; but if young Gale’s going to take that girl away, then I’m glad. He’s a good fellow, and she’s on my mind.”
“Why?” said Maradick.
“Well, perhaps after all it’s best to tell what I know.” Punch took out a pipe and slowly filled it. “Mind you, it’s all damned uncertain, a lot of little things that don’t mean anything when taken by themselves. I first met the man in ’89, twenty years ago. I was a young chap, twenty-one or so. A kind of travelling blacksmith I used to be then, with Pendragon up the coast as a kind o’ centre. It was at Pendragon I saw him. He used to live there then as he lives in Treliss now; it was a very different kind o’ place then to what it is now—just a sleepy, dreamy little town, with bad lights, bad roads and the rest, and old tumbled down ’ouses. Old Sir Jeremy Trojan ’ad the run of it then, him that’s father of the present Sir Henry, and you wouldn’t have found a quieter place, or a wilder in some ways.”
“Wild?” said Maradick. “It’s anything but wild now.”
“Yes, they’ve changed it with their trams and things, and they’ve pulled down the cove; but the fisher-folk were a fierce lot and they wouldn’t stand anyone from outside. Morelli lived there with his wife and little girl. ’Is wife was only a young thing, but beautiful, with great eyes like the sea on a blue day and with some foreign blood in ’er, dark and pale.
“’E wasn’t liked there any more than ’e is here. They told funny tales about him even then, and said ’e did things to his wife, they used to hear her crying. And they said that ’e’d always been there, years back, just the same, never looking any different, and it’s true enough he looks just the same now as he did then. It isn’t natural for a man never to grow any older.”
“No,” said Maradick, “it isn’t.”
“There were other things that the men down there didn’t like about ’im, and the women hated ’im. But whenever you saw ’im he was charming—nice as ’e could be to me and all of ’em. And he was clever, could do things with his ’ands, and make birds and beasts do anything at all.”
“That’s strange,” said Maradick. “Tony said something of the same sort the other day.”
“Well, that ain’t canny,” said David, “more especially as I’ve seen other animals simply shake with fear when he comes near them. Well, I was telling you, they didn’t like ’im down in the cove, and they’d say nothing to ’im and leave ’im alone. And then one night”—Punch’s mouth grew set and hard—“they found Mrs. Morelli up on the moor lying by the Four Stones, dead.”
“Dead!” said Maradick, startled.
“Yes; it was winter time and the snow blowing in great sheets across the moor and drifting about her dress, with the moon, like a yellow candle, hanging over ’er. But that weren’t all. She’d been killed, murdered. There were marks on her face and hands, as though teeth had torn her. Poor creature!” Punch paused.
“Well,” said Maradick excitedly, “what was the end of it all?”
“Oh! they never brought it ’ome to anyone. I ’ad my own thoughts, and the men about there kind o’ talked about Morelli, but it was proved ’e was somewhere else when it ’appened and ’e cried like a child when ’e saw the body.”
“Well,” said Maradick, laughing, “so far it isn’t very definite. That might have happened to any man.” But it was, nevertheless, curiously in keeping with the picture that he had in his mind.
“Yes,” said Punch, “I told you already that I ’adn’t got anything very definite. I don’t say as ’e did it or had anything to do with it, but it’s all of a piece in a way. Thing got ’ot against ’im in Pendragon after that and ’e ’ad to go, and ’e came ’ere with ’is girl. But they say that ’e’s been seen there since, and in other places too. And then I’ve seen ’im do other things. Kill rabbits and birds like a devil. ’E’s cruel, and then again ’e’s kind, just like a child will pull flies to bits. ’E is just like a child, and so ’e isn’t to be trusted. ’E’s wild, like Nature. ’E likes to have young things about ’im. That’s why ’e’s taken to young Gale, and ’e loves that girl in a way, although I know ’e’s cruel——”
“Cruel to her?” said Maradick.
“Yes, ’e beats her, I know. I’ve been watching a long way back; and then again ’e’ll kiss ’er and give ’er things and play with ’er, and then one day ’e’ll kill ’er.”
Maradick started again. “Kill her?” he said.
“Yes. ’E’ll do anything when ’e’s mad. And a minute after ’e’ll be sobbing and crying for sorrow over what ’e’s hurt; and be like a drunkard when ’e’s angry.”
“Then what do you make of it all?” said Maradick.
“Make of it?” said Punch. “I don’t know. There ain’t another like ’im in the kingdom. There’s more in the world than folk ’ave any idea of, especially those that keep to towns. But it’s out on the road that you’ll be seeing things, when the moon is up and the hedges purple in their shadows. And ’e belongs to all of that. ’E’s like Nature in a way, cruel and kind and wild. ’E’s not to be believed in by sober folks who laugh at spirits, but there’s more in it than meets the eye.”
And that was all that Maradick got from him; and after all it did not amount to very much except a vague warning. But there was this definite fact, that Janet was in danger where she was, and that was an added impulse, of course, for going on with the whole adventure. To the initial charm of helping a delightful boy was now added the romantic sensation of the release of a captive lady; Maradick, knight! Forty and married for a lifetime; oh! the absurd world.
Then Maradick went up for breakfast.
Mrs. Maradick’s first thought in the morning was her hair, and then, at some considerable distance, the girls. It never happened that they were both “right” simultaneously, and she would indeed have been considerably surprised and felt a certain lack if there had been no cause for complaint on either score.
On the present morning everything was as it should be. Her hair “settled itself” as though by magic, the girls had given no possible cause of complaint; she came down to breakfast with an air of surprise and the kind of mind that is quite sure something unpleasant is going to happen simply because nothing unpleasant has “happened” so far. She presented, as she came down the hotel staircase, a delightful picture of neat compact charm; her girls, in precise and maidenly attendance behind her, accentuated her short stature by their own rather raw, long-legged size, but there was nothing loose or uncouth about her. In her colouring, in her light carnation silk waistband, in her high-heeled shiny shoes, she was neatness personified.
In the eyes of everyone except Mrs. Lawrence she had perhaps just a little too much the air of being “somebody,” because really, of course, she was nothing at all, simply Mrs. Maradick of Epsom; but then when you were so small you had to do something to make up for it, and an “air” did help undoubtedly. Her husband, coming in from the garden, met her at the bottom of the stairs, and she treated him very graciously. He kissed the girls with a “Well, Lucy!” and “Well, Annie!” and then Mrs. Maradick, with a final feeling for her hair and a last pat to the carnation riband, led the way in to breakfast.
It appeared that she was inclined to treat him graciously, but in reality she was trying to make up her mind; she was not a clever woman, and she had never been so puzzled before.
She had, indeed, never been forced to puzzle about anything at all. In her orderly compact life things had always been presented to her with a decency and certainty that left no room for question or argument. She had been quiet and obedient at home, but she had always had her way; she had married the man that had been presented to her without any hesitation at all, it was a “good match,” and it meant that, for the rest of her life, she would never be forced to ask any questions about anything or anybody. For a wild week or two, at first, she had felt strange undisciplined sensations that were undoubtedly dangerous; on their wedding night she had suddenly suspected that there was another woman there whose existence meant storm and disorder. But the morning had come with bills and calls and “finding a house,” and that other Mrs. Maradick had died. From that day to this there had been no cause for alarm. James had soon been reduced to order and had become a kind of necessity, like the sideboard; he paid the bills. Child-birth had been alarming for a moment, but Mrs. Maradick had always been healthy and they had an excellent doctor, but, after Annie’s appearance, she had decided that there should never be another. James presented no difficulties at all, and her only real worry in life was her “hair.” There was not very much of it, and she spent her mornings and her temper in devising plans whereby it should be made to seem “a lot,” but it never was satisfactory. Her “hair” became the centre of her life, her horizon. James fitted into it. If the “hair” were all right, he didn’t seem so bad. Otherwise he was stupid, dull, an oaf.
And so she had come down to Treliss and life had suddenly changed. It had really changed from that first evening of their arrival when he had been so rude to her, although she had not realised it at the time. But the astonishing thing was that he had kept it up. He had never kept anything up before, and it was beginning to frighten her. At first it had seemed to her merely conceit. His head had been turned by these people, and when he got back to Epsom and found that he wasn’t so wonderful after all, and that the people there didn’t think of him at all except as her husband, then he would find his place again.
But now she wasn’t so sure. She had not been asleep last night when he came to bed. She had seen him bend over with the candle in his hand, and the look in his eyes had frightened her, frightened her horribly, so that she had lain awake for hours afterwards, thinking, puzzling for the first time in her life. During all these twenty years of their married life he had been, she knew, absolutely faithful to her. She had laughed at it sometimes, because it had seemed so absolutely impossible that there should ever be anyone else. He did not attract people in Epsom in the least; he had never made any attempt to, and she had imagined him, poor fellow, sometimes trying, and the miserable mess that he would make of it.
And now she had got to face the certainty that there was some one else. She had seen it in his eyes last night, and she knew that he would never have had the strength to keep up the quarrel for nearly a fortnight unless some one else had been there. She saw now a thousand things that should have convinced her before, little things all culminating in that horrible picnic a few days ago. It was as though, she thought, he had come down to Treliss determined to find somebody. She remembered him in the train, how pleasant and agreeable he had been! He had arranged cushions for her, got things for her, but the moment they had arrived! Oh! this hateful town!
But now she had got to act. She had woke early that morning and had found that he was already gone. That alone was quite enough to stir all her suspicions.
Perhaps now he was down there in the town with some one! Why should he get up at an unearthly hour unless it were for something of the kind? He had always been a very sound sleeper. At Epsom he would never have thought of getting up before eight. Who was it?
She put aside, for a moment, her own feelings about him, the curious way in which she was beginning to look at him. The different side that he was presenting to her and the way that she looked at it must wait until she had discovered this woman, this woman! She clenched her little hands and her eyes flashed.
Oh! she would talk to her when she found her!
His early escape that morning seemed to her a sign that the “woman” was down in the town. She imagined an obvious assignation, but otherwise she might have suspected that it was Mrs. Lester. That, of course, she had suspected from the day of the picnic, but it seemed to her difficult to imagine that a woman of the world, as Mrs. Lester, to give her her due, most obviously was, could see anything in her hulk of a James; it would be much more probable if it were some uncouth fisherwoman who knew, poor thing, no better.
She looked at him now across the breakfast-table; his red cheeks, his great nostrils “like a horse’s,” his enormous hands, but it was not all hostility the look that she gave him. There was a kind of dawning wonder and surprise.
They had their table by the window, and the sun beat through on to the silver teapot and the ham and eggs. Annie had refused porridge. No, she wasn’t hungry.
“You should have bathed, as I did, before breakfast,” said Maradick.
So he’d bathed before breakfast, had he? She looked across at him smiling.
“You were up very early,” she said.
“Yes, I slept badly.” They were down again, those blinds! She saw him drop them down as though by magic. He was playing his game.
“Well, next time you must wake me and I&rsq............