The Price of Love, Arnold Bennett [important of reading books .TXT] 📗

CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I. MONEY IN THE HOUSE

II. LOUIS' DISCOVERY

III. THE FEAST

IV. IN THE NIGHT

V. NEWS OF THE NIGHT

VI. THEORIES OF THE THEFT

VII. THE CINEMA

VIII. END AND BEGINNING

IX. THE MARRIED WOMAN

X. THE CHASM

XI. JULIAN'S DOCUMENT

XII. RUNAWAY HORSES

XIII. DEAD-LOCK

XIV. THE MARKET

XV. THE CHANGED MAN

XVI. THE LETTER

XVII. IN THE MONASTERY

XVIII. MRS. TAMS'S STRANGE BEHAVIOUR

XIX. RACHEL AND MR. HORROCLEAVE



CHAPTER I


MONEY IN THE HOUSE

I


In the evening dimness of old Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room stood the youthful virgin, Rachel Louisa Fleckring. The prominent fact about her appearance was that she wore an apron. Not one of those white, waist-tied aprons, with or without bibs, worn proudly, uncompromisingly, by a previous generation of unaspiring housewives and housegirls! But an immense blue pinafore-apron, covering the whole front of the figure except the head, hands, and toes. Its virtues were that it fully protected the most fragile frock against all the perils of the kitchen; and that it could be slipped on or off in one second, without any manipulation of tapes, pins, or buttons and buttonholes--for it had no fastenings of any sort and merely yawned behind. In one second the drudge could be transformed into the elegant infanta of boudoirs, and _vice versa_. To suit the coquetry of the age the pinafore was enriched with certain flouncings, which, however, only intensified its unshapen ugliness.

On a plain, middle-aged woman such a pinafore would have been intolerable to the sensitive eye. But on Rachel it simply had a piquant and perverse air, because she was young, with the incomparable, the unique charm of comely adolescence; it simply excited the imagination to conceive the exquisite treasures of contour and tint and texture which it veiled. Do not infer that Rachel was a coquette. Although comely, she was homely--a "downright" girl, scorning and hating all manner of pretentiousness. She had a fine best dress, and when she put it on everybody knew that it was her best; a stranger would have known. Whereas of a coquette none but her intimate companions can say whether she is wearing best or second-best on a given high occasion. Rachel used the pinafore-apron only with her best dress, and her reason for doing so was the sound, sensible reason that it was the usual and proper thing to do.

She opened a drawer of the new Sheraton sideboard, and took from it a metal tube that imitated brass, about a foot long and an inch in diameter, covered with black lettering. This tube, when she had removed its top, showed a number of thin wax tapers in various colours. She chose one, lit it neatly at the red fire, and then, standing on a footstool in the middle of the room, stretched all her body and limbs upward in order to reach the gas. If the tap had been half an inch higher or herself half an inch shorter, she would have had to stand on a chair instead of a footstool; and the chair would have had to be brought out of the kitchen and carried back again. But Heaven had watched over this detail. The gas-fitting consisted of a flexible pipe, resembling a thick black cord, and swinging at the end of it a specimen of that wonderful and blessed contrivance, the inverted incandescent mantle within a porcelain globe: the whole recently adopted by Mrs. Maldon as the dangerous final word of modern invention. It was safer to ignite the gas from the orifice at the top of the globe; but even so there was always a mild disconcerting explosion, followed by a few moments' uncertainty as to whether or not the gas had "lighted properly."

When the deed was accomplished and the room suddenly bright with soft illumination, Mrs. Maldon murmured--

"That's better!"

She was sitting in her arm-chair by the glitteringly set table, which, instead of being in the centre of the floor under the gas, had a place near the bow-window--advantageous in the murky daytime of the Five Towns, and inconvenient at night. The table might well have been shifted at night to a better position in regard to the gas. But it never was. Somehow for Mrs. Maldon the carpet was solid concrete, and the legs of the table immovably embedded therein.

Rachel, gentle-footed, kicked the footstool away to its lair under the table, and simultaneously extinguished the taper, which she dropped with a scarce audible click into a vase on the mantelpiece. Then she put the cover on the tube with another faintest click, restored the tube to its drawer with a rather louder click, and finally, with a click still louder, pushed the drawer home. All these slight sounds were familiar to Mrs. Maldon; they were part of her regular night life, part of an unconsciously loved ritual, and they contributed in their degree to her placid happiness.

"Now the blinds, my dear!" said she.

The exhortation was ill-considered, and Rachel controlled a gesture of amicable impatience. For she had not paused after closing the drawer; she was already on her way across the room to the window when Mrs. Maldon said, "Now the blinds, my dear!" The fact was that Mrs. Maldon measured the time between the lighting of gas and the drawing down of blinds by tenths of a second--such was her fear lest in that sinister interval the whole prying town might magically gather in the street outside and peer into the secrets of her inculpable existence.


II


When the blinds and curtains had been arranged for privacy, Mrs. Maldon sighed securely and picked up her crocheting. Rachel rested her hands on the table, which was laid for a supper for four, and asked in a firm, frank voice whether there was anything else.

"Because, if not," Rachel added, "I'll just take off my pinafore and wash my hands."

Mrs. Maldon looked up benevolently and nodded in quick agreement. It was such apparently trifling gestures, eager and generous, that endeared the old lady to Rachel, giving her the priceless sensation of being esteemed and beloved. Her gaze lingered on her aged employer with affection and with profound respect. Mrs. Maldon made a striking, tall, slim figure, sitting erect in tight black, with the right side of her long, prominent nose in the full gaslight and the other heavily shadowed. Her hair was absolutely black at over seventy; her eyes were black and glowing, and she could read and do coarse crocheting without spectacles. All her skin, especially round about the eyes, was yellowish brown and very deeply wrinkled indeed; a decrepit, senile skin, which seemed to contradict the youth of her pose and her glance. The cast of her features was benign. She had passed through desolating and violent experiences, and then through a long, long period of withdrawn tranquillity; and from end to end of her life she had consistently thought the best of all men, refusing to recognize evil and assuming the existence of good. Every one of the millions of her kind thoughts had helped to mould the expression of her countenance. The expression was definite now, fixed, intensely characteristic after so many decades, and wherever it was seen it gave pleasure and by its enchantment created goodness and goodwill--even out of their opposites. Such was the life-work of Mrs. Maldon.

Her eyes embraced the whole room. They did not, as the phrase is, "beam" approval; for the act of beaming involves a sort of ecstasy, and Mrs. Maldon was too dignified for ecstasy. But they displayed a mild and proud contentment as she said--

"I'm sure it's all very nice."

It was. The table crowded with porcelain, crystal, silver, and flowers, and every object upon it casting a familiar curved shadow on the whiteness of the damask toward the window! The fresh crimson and blues of the everlasting Turkey carpet (Turkey carpet being the _ne plus ultra_ of carpetry in the Five Towns, when that carpet was bought, just as sealskin was the _ne plus ultra_ of all furs)! The silken-polished sideboard, strange to the company, but worthy of it, and exhibiting a due sense of its high destiny! The sombre bookcase and corner cupboard, darkly glittering! The Chesterfield sofa, broad, accepting, acquiescent! The flashing brass fender and copper scuttle! The comfortably reddish walls, with their pictures--like limpets on the face of precipices! The new-whitened ceiling! In the midst the incandescent lamp that hung like the moon in heaven!... And then the young, sturdy girl, standing over the old woman and breathing out the very breath of life, vitalizing everything, rejuvenating the old woman!

Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room had a considerable renown among her acquaintance, not only for its peculiar charm, which combined and reconciled the tastes of two very different generations, but also for its radiant cleanness. There are many clean houses in the Five Towns, using the adjective in the relative sense in which the Five Towns is forced by chimneys to use it. But Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room (save for the white window-curtains, which had to accept the common grey fate of white window-curtains in the district) was clean in the country-side sense, almost in the Dutch sense. The challenge of its cleanness gleamed on every polished surface, victorious in the unending battle against the horrible contagion of foul industries. Mrs. Maldon's friends would assert that the state of that sitting-room "passed" them, or "fair passed" them, and she would receive their ever-amazed compliments with modesty. But behind her benevolent depreciation she would be blandly saying to herself: "Yes, I'm scarcely surprised it passes you--seeing the way you housewives let things go on here." The word "here" would be faintly emphasized in her mind, as no native would have emphasized it.

Rachel shared the general estimate of the sitting-room. She appreciated its charm, and admitted to herself that her first vision of it, rather less than a month before, had indeed given her a new and startling ideal of cleanliness. On that occasion it had been evident, from Mrs. Maldon's physical exhaustion, that the housemistress had made an enormous personal effort to _dazzle_ and inspire her new "lady companion," which effort, though detected and perhaps scorned by Rachel, had nevertheless succeeded in its aim. With a certain presence of mind Rachel had feigned to remark nothing miraculous in the condition of the room. Appropriating the new ideal instantly, she had on the first morning of her service "turned out" the room before breakfast, well knowing that it must have been turned out on the previous day. Dumbfounded for a few moments, Mrs. Maldon had at length said, in her sweet and cordial benevolence, "I'm glad to see we think alike about cleanliness." And Rachel had replied with an air at once deferential, sweet, and yet casual, "Oh, of course, Mrs. Maldon!" Then they measured one another in a silent exchange. Mrs. Maldon was aware that she had by chance discovered a pearl--yes, a treasure beyond pearls. And Rachel, too, divined the high value of her employer, and felt within the stirrings of a passionate loyalty to her.


III


And yet, during the three weeks and a half