Chapter V: A Startling Visit

Mrs. Rose was not a woman of acute perceptions, but even she was vaguely conscious that there was something not quite satisfactory about the account Mrs. Haybrow had given of her visit to “The Towers.”

Surely it was very strange that, after being so sure that Mrs. Dale was an old friend of hers, she should have discovered that she was mistaken! And again, if the pretty widow had really proved to be a stranger, why should Mrs. Haybrow, tired as she was after her journey, have stayed at “The Towers” so long?

And besides, Mrs. Rose could not help thinking that she had heard some name like “Dolly Leatham” before, although she had forgotten that it was from the lips of Mrs. Bonnington, and that it had been part of the backstairs gossip which Mr. Rose would have been angry with her for encouraging.

Mrs. Rose was a person in whose mind few facts long remained in a definite shape. Accustomed to have all mental processes performed for her by her husband, she lived in a state of intellectual laziness, in which her faculties had begun to rust. Mr. Rose had complete confidence in Mrs. Haybrow, who was indeed a staid, solid sort of person who inspired trust. If, therefore, Mr. Rose trusted to Mrs. Haybrow’s judgment, and Mrs. Haybrow saw no objection to Mabin’s visit, surely there was no need to fatigue one’s self by hunting out obstacles to a very convenient arrangement.

And so it fell out that, when Mrs. Haybrow’s visit was over, and the Roses started for Switzerland, Mabin saw them all off at the station, and then returned to “Stone House,” to pack up the few things she had left out which she would want during her stay at “The Towers.”

She had reached the portico, and was going up the steps of her home with leisurely steps, rather melancholy at the partings which had been gone through, and with a few girlish fears about her visit, when the door of the house was opened suddenly before she could ring the bell, and the parlormaid, one of the two servants who, at the request of the new tenant, had been left behind, appeared, with her finger to her lips.

Mabin stopped on the top step and looked at her with surprise.

Langton came out, and spoke in a whisper:

“Shall I pack up your things, and send them in to Mrs. Dale’s to-night, Miss Mabin? Mr. Banks has come, and he seems such a queer sort of gentleman, I don’t quite know how to take him yet. He came upon us quite sudden, almost as soon as the ’bus with the luggage had turned the corner, and asked sharp-like, if they were all gone. And I said ‘Yes,’ and he seemed relieved like, and so I didn’t dare to mention you were coming back to fetch your things.”

Mabin stared gloomily at Langford, who was evidently anxious to get rid of her.

“What’s the matter with him? Do you think it is Mr. Banks, and not some man who’s got into the house by pretending to be he?”

“Lor’, Miss Mabin, I never thought of that!” cried poor Langford, turning quite white.

She had evidently entertained faint suspicions of her own, for at this suggestion she was about to fly into the house in search of the new-comer, and perhaps to brand him as an impostor, when Mabin, smiling at her alarm, caught hold of her to detain her.

“No, no, you silly girl. Of course it’s all right. It’s sure to be all right. He’s probably eccentric, that’s all. Doesn’t he look the kind of person you would expect?”

“Oh, yes, Miss Mabin, he’s every inch a gentleman. But--” She hesitated, apparently unable to put into appropriate words the impression the new tenant had made upon her.

“But what?”

“He is rather--rather strange-looking. I--I think he looks as if he wouldn’t live long. His face has a sort of gray look, as if-- Well, Miss Mabin, it’s a queer thing to say, but he looks to me half-scared.”

“Mad?” suggested Mabin, more with her lips and eyebrows than with her voice.

Langford nodded emphatically.

“Oh, dear!”

Then Mabin was silent, trying to recollect all that she had heard in the family circle about the gentleman who was so anxious to take the house. And she found that it did not amount to much. A rich man, a bachelor, of quiet habits, who disliked unnecessary fuss and noise, and whose references Mr. Rose’s lawyer had declared to be unimpeachable--this was the sum of the family knowledge of Mr. Banks.

“Did he come quite alone?” asked Mabin, in spite of the mute entreaties of Langford that she would take herself off.

“Yes, Miss Mabin, quite alone. And he said his luggage would be sent on.”

After a short pause, during which Mabin made up her mind that there was nothing to be done but to accept the new-comer as the genuine article until he proved to be an impostor, she turned reluctantly to go.

“Good-by, Langford. Bring me my things, and mind you don’t forget to feed my canary. And you might come and see me sometimes in the evening, when you can get away. I think I shall be lonely.”

And indeed there were tears in the eyes of the girl, who was already homesick now that she found herself thus suddenly denied admittance at the familiar portal.

It was in a very sober and chastened mood that the young girl arrived, a few minutes later, at the gate of “The Towers,” but the welcome she received would have put heart into a misanthrope.

Mrs. Dale was waiting in the garden, her pretty, fair face aglow with impatience to receive her friend. She drew the arm of Mabin, who was considerably taller than herself, through hers, and led her at once into the house, to the room which Mabin had been in before.

The table was laid for luncheon, and Mabin observed with surprise that there were two places ready, although she had not promised to come till the afternoon.

“There!” cried Mrs. Dale, triumphantly, pointing to the table, “was I not inspired? The fact is,” she went on, with a smile which was almost tearful, “I was so anxious for you to come that I had begun to tell myself that I should be disappointed after all, so I had your place laid to ‘make believe,’ like the children. And now you are really here. Oh, it seems too good to be true!”

Mabin was pleased by this reception, as she could not fail to be, but she was also a little puzzled. She was conscious of no attractions in herself which could explain such enthusiasm on her account.

“I am afraid,” she said shyly, “that I shall turn out a bitter disappointment. You can’t know much about girls, Mrs. Dale, or you would feel, as they all do at home, that there is a time, which I am going through now, when a girl is just as awkward and as stupid and as generally undesirable as she can possibly be.”

“Hush, hush, child! You don’t know anything about it. Don’t you know that girls are charming, and that part of their charm lies in that very belief that they are ‘all wrong,’ when as a matter of fact they are everything that is right?”

“Ah! You were never gawky and awkward!”

“I wasn’t tall enough to be gawky, as you like to call yourself. But five years ago, when I was eighteen, I was just as miserable as you try to make yourself, believing myself to be in everybody’s way. It led to awful consequences in my case,” added Mrs. Dale, the excitement going quite suddenly out of her face and voice, and giving place to a look and tone of dull despair. Mabin, who had been made to take off her hat, put her hand in that of the little widow.

“Come and see if you like your room,” said Mrs. Dale, springing quickly toward the door, with a rapid change of manner. “I must tell you frankly I am afraid you won’t, because this place has been constructed haphazard, without any regard to the comfort or convenience of the unfortunate people who have to live in it. Every fireplace is so placed that the chimney must smoke whichever way the wind is, and every window is specially adapted to let in the rain, when there is any, and the wind, when there isn’t.”

Mrs. Dale led the way as she spoke from the dining-room, and Mabin followed.

Mrs. Dale certainly exaggerated the defects of the house, but that it was inconvenient could not be denied. The side nearest to the road, where the dining-room was, had once been the whole house. It had a basement, and out of the warren of small rooms of which it had once consisted, a fairly large hall and a few fair-sized rooms had been made.

The newer but not very new portion of the house had no basement, and it was by a short flight of steps that you descended from the hall into the drawing-room, and by another short flight that you ascended to the bedroom floor. Here the same irregularity was apparent. A corridor ran through the house from end to end on this floor, broken where the new part joined the old by half a dozen steep steps.

It was to a bedroom on the higher level at the old end of the house that Mrs. Dale conducted Mabin.

“Why, it’s a lovely room!” cried the girl, surprised to find herself in a big, low-ceilinged corner room lighted by three windows, and looking out, on one side, to the road, with a view of fields and sea beyond, and on the other to the garden at the back of the house, where apple-trees and gooseberry-bushes and the homely potato occupied the chief space, while the nooks were filled with the fragrant flowers of cottage gardens, with sweet-william and sweet-pea, mignonette and wallflower.

“Do you really think so? I’m so glad. I went over to Seagate the other day and got some cretonne for the curtains and the easy-chair. The old chintz there was in the room would have given you the nightmare.”

Mabin had not recovered from her first impression of astonishment and admiration. The dingy dining-room, with its mahogany and horsehair, had not prepared her for this. A beautiful rug lay in front of the fireplace, which was filled with a fresh green fern.

“This will be put in the corridor outside at night,” Mrs. Dale was careful to explain.

The hangings of the little brass bedstead were of cretonne with a pattern of gray-green birds and white flowers on a pale pink ground: these hangings were trimmed with lace of a deep cream tint. The rest of the furniture was enamelled white, with the exception of a dainty Japanese writing-table in one window, and a low wicker arm-chair in another.

But it was not so much in these things as in the care and taste with which all the accessories had been chosen, the silver candlesticks and tray on the dressing-table, the little Sèvres suit on the mantelpiece, that a lavish and luxurious hand was betrayed. Mabin’s delighted admiration made Mrs. Dale smile, and then suddenly burst into tears.

“Don’t look at me, don’t trouble your head about me, child,” she cried, as she turned away her head to wipe her eyes. “It was my vanity, the vanity I can’t get rid of, that made me want to show you I know how to make things pretty and nice. I made the excuse to myself that it was to please you, but really I know it was to please myself!”

“But why shouldn’t you please yourself and have pretty things about you?” asked Mabin in surprise. “Is there any harm in having nice things, if one has the money to buy them and the taste to choose them? I suppose it helps to keep the people that make them.”

“That is what I used to say to myself, dear,” said Mrs. Dale with a sigh. “But now I don’t buy pretty things any more--for--for a reason.” And again a look of deep pain swept across her face. But at Mabin’s interested look she shook her head. “No, no,” she added, in a frightened whisper, “I wouldn’t tell you why for all the world!”

“But you wear pretty clothes! Or is it only that you look so pretty in them?” suggested Mabin, blushing with the fear that she was blundering again.

Mrs. Dale shook her head smiling slightly: “I have my frocks made to fit me, that’s all,” she said simply. “And as for these,” she touched the flashing rings on her fingers, “I wear them because I’m obliged to.”

Which was all sufficiently puzzling to the young girl, who, having washed her hands, was drying them on a towel so fine that this use seemed to her a sacrilege. She refrained from further remark, however, upon the luxury in which she found herself installed, and as the luncheon bell rang at that moment the two ladies went downstairs together.

But after the beautiful appointments of her room, Mabin was struck by the contrast afforded by the rest of the house, which was furnished in the usual manner, with worn carpeting in the corridor and on the stairs, and with cheap lamps on brackets and tables in the hall and passages.

At luncheon Mrs. Dale was again in high spirits. She chattered away brightly for the amusement of her young companion, who, entirely unaccustomed to so much attention, was happier than she ever remembered to have been in her life before. Mrs. Dale did not spare the eccentricities in walk and dress of the ladies in the neighborhood any more than they had spared hers.

“I don’t know how you can ever be dull when such funny things come into your head!” cried simple Mabin, wiping her eyes over a hearty fit of laughing.

Mrs. Dale grew suddenly grave again.

“Ah, nothing is amusing when one is by one’s self, or when one has--thoughts!” she ended in a low voice, with a different word from the one which had been in her mind. “And now let me show you my den. No, it is not a boudoir; it is nothing but a den. Come and see.”

She opened a door which led from the dining-room at once into a small room, even more bare, more sombre than the other. It had evidently once served the purpose of a library or study, for there was a heavy old bookcase in one corner and a row of empty book-shelves in another. And there was the usual horsehair sofa.

By the one window, however, there was a low and comfortable, though shabby wicker chair.

“I have had this other door fastened up and the cracks filled in,” said Mrs. Dale, showing a door opposite to the one by which they had entered. “It goes down by a flight of break-neck stairs into the drawing-room, a loathsome dungeon into which I never penetrate. The draught used to be strong enough to blow me away. So I thought,” she went on with curious wistfulness, “I might just have that done.”

Again Mabin wondered at the penitential tone; again she glanced up. But Mrs. Dale recovered herself more quickly this time, and putting the girl gently into the wicker chair, while she curled herself up on the horsehair sofa, she drew Mabin out and encouraged the girl by sympathetic questions, and by still more sympathetic listening, to lay bare some of the recesses of her young heart.

The afternoon passed quickly; and when Mrs. Dale, springing suddenly off the sofa after a silence, ran away into the dining-room to ask about certain dainties which she had ordered from town for Mabin’s benefit, but which had failed to arrive that morning, the girl was left in a state of happy excitement, thinking what a picture the little golden-haired creature had made as she sat curled up on the sofa, and wondering how she could have been so ungrateful as to imagine she could be anything but happy under the same roof with Mrs. Dale.

Mabin looked idly out of the window, and craned her neck to see if she could catch a glimpse of the sea. But this was the north side of the house, and the sea was on the southwest; so she failed. But as she looked out, she saw a fly drive slowly up the road, and was surprised to find that the solitary occupant, an elderly lady with gray hair, and a hard, forbidding face, stared at her fixedly through a pair of gold eyeglasses as if she felt some personal interest in her. Mabin felt herself blush, for she was sure she had never seen the lady before.

Just as she drew her head in she heard the cab stop at the front gate. Mrs. Dale’s voice, talking brightly to the parlormaid, came to Mabin’s ears through the door, which had been left ajar. Then she heard a knock at the front door, and the parlormaid went to answer it.

“Mabin, come here,” cried Mrs. Dale from the next room. “I want to show you----”

The words died on her lips; and Mabin, who was in the act of coming into the dining-room in obedience to her call, stopped short, and, after a moment’s consideration of what she ought to do, retreated into the smaller room and shut the door behind her.

But she had been in time to witness a strange meeting. For the elderly lady whom she had seen in the cab had appeared at the outer door of the dining-room as she had shown herself at the inner one, and it was at the sight of her that Mrs. Dale had stopped short in her speech, with a look of abhorrence and terror on her face.

The elder lady spoke at once, in a harsh, commanding voice. She was very tall, erect, and stately, handsomely dressed in black, altogether a commanding personality. Her voice rang through the room, and reached Mabin’s ears, striking the girl with terror too.

“I am afraid I have taken you by surprise.”

“I suppose,” answered Mrs. Dale in a low voice, “that was what you intended to do.”

“I am sorry to see you meet me in that spirit. I have come with every wish for your good. I think it is not right that you should be left here by yourself, as you hold no intercourse, of course, with the people of the neighborhood.”

There was a pause, which Mrs. Dale would not break.

“I propose, therefore,” went on the elder lady, “to stay with you myself, at least for a little while.”

Mrs. Dale, who had remained standing, as her visitor did also, turned upon her quickly:

“That I will not put up with.”

“That is scarcely courteous, surely?”

“There is no question of lip-courtesy between you and me. You, and no one else, have been the cause of all that has happened, and I refuse, absolutely refuse, to stay under the same roof with you for a single day.”

In the mean time poor Mabin, frightened and uncertain what to do, had in the first place put her hands to her ears so that she might not play the part of unwilling eavesdropper. But as the voices grew too loud for her to avoid hearing what the ladies said, she made a frantic rush for the door, and presented herself, breathless, blushing, in the doorway.

“Oh, I--I can’t help hearing what you say!” cried she, glancing from the forbidding face of the visitor to Mrs. Dale, who looked prettier than ever in her anger.

“My dear, it doesn’t matter,” said Dorothy gently.

But the elder lady broke in:

“It does matter very much. This is not a fit house for a young girl while you live in it.”

And turning to Mabin, she said with a sudden burst of vindictive feeling: “Go home at once to your proper guardians. The woman you are now with is a----”

Before she could utter the word which was ready to her lips, Mrs. Dale interrupted her. Springing between the other two women with a low cry, she addressed the elder lady with such a torrent of passion that both Mabin and the visitor could only listen without an attempt to stop her.

“You shall not say it! You shall not tell her?! You know that she was safe with me, as if she had been in her own home. You have spoilt her happiness with me, because you knew it made me happy. But you shall not contaminate her with your wicked words. Go, child.” She seized Mabin by the arm, and ran with her to the outer door of the dining-room. “Run away. I will find you when this woman is gone.”

And the next moment Mabin found herself in the hall, with the dining-room door closed.