The Black Cabinet

by Patricia Wentworth

  Mr. Monody opened it in his shirt sleeves. When he saw Chloe he rumpled his hair and said: “I can’t come down and eat cake at this hour—and what’s more, I won’t. If you could get Mrs. Moffat to believe that I won’t, I shall never stop being grateful to you. She’s a most pertinacious woman.”

  “Yes,” said Chloe. “Will you lend me some money, please?” She spoke without a tremor, and held out her hand just as a child might have done.

  With equal simplicity Mr. Monody replied:

  “How much?”

  “A pound.” She dropped her voice because a sound came up from below.

  Mr. Monody extracted a pound note from his waistcoat pocket and gave it to her.

  “Thank you,” said Chloe. “I’ll pay it back. Good bye.”

  Without another word she went to the top of the stairs and stood there listening. Then she went down four steps and looked over the banisters. She held her parcel in her left hand.

  Without any warning Michael burst out of Mrs. Moffat’s sitting-room. She had no time to move or go back. She saw him cross the hall at a stumbling run. He wrenched the front door open and plunged out. The door banged with a violence that set the gas pendant swaying and rattling; the tiny flakes from the broken mantle fluttered down from it like snow. Chloe watched them fall.

  The hall was empty. She came down into it noiselessly, and reached the front door. It opened, and she slipped out and stood for a moment on the step. Michael’s car still stood by the kerb. But there was no sign of Michael. The door closed gently, gently. She let go of the handle, and went down into the street.

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chloe went down the street, crossed over, and took the first turning that she came to. She kept on walking and taking turnings without thinking where she was going. She had not, indeed, begun to think at all. She only wanted to get away, to hide, to bury herself where Michael couldn’t find her.

  She did not remember what she had said to him, or what he had said to her; but the unspoken clash between them had been so violent that the instinct of each was the same—blind headlong flight. She thought of Michael’s rush through the hall, the momentary glimpse that she had had of his face convulsed with rage, and fierce little stabs of anger began to break through the icy cold which had come upon her when she bent over the register and read Michael’s names. In Eliza Moffat’s sitting-room he had looked at her as if he would like to take her up and break her; she had at least stung him to that. And, for the rest, he should never find her—never.

  She found herself all at once on a crowded bus route. She could get away quicker by bus. She got into the first one that stopped, and sat rigidly upright, her parcel on her lap, staring out at the shops, the other buses, the streams of people flowing like water along the pavement.

  “Where to?” said the conductor.

  Chloe had no idea. She said, “A pennyworth;” and took her ticket. She crumpled the thin cardboard in her hand and tried to think. She couldn’t go to Maxton because Michael would look for her there. She couldn’t go to Mrs. Rowse. She couldn’t go to Danesborough. She couldn’t go any distance by train because Mr. Monody’s pound and her own two and sevenpence halfpenny were all the money she had, and you can’t go very far or live for very long on twenty-two and sevenpence halfpenny.

  She went on looking out of the window, and presently saw the great block of The Luxe slide into view. The bus stopped with a jerk, and as it stopped, Chloe got up and followed the stream of descending passengers. She crossed over and walked up the steps of The Luxe, a composed, shabby figure carrying a brown paper parcel. The ice in her was fast melting into flame, and between icy pride and flaming anger there was no place at all for self-consciousness or shyness. She walked into the hall and approached the porter.

  “I am Mrs. Mostyn Llewellyn’s secretary. I have a message for Miss Cross, one of the clerks employed here.” Neither voice nor manner failed her, and the porter actually ceased to be conscious of the brown paper parcel. He said, “Certainly,” waved to an underling, and a minute later Chloe was resting her parcel on a counter of polished mahogany and looking over it at Connie Cross.

  “Hullo!” said Connie, looking up; and then added in a different tone, “My! You do look bad! Anything wrong, dear?”

  Chloe shook her head. She didn’t quite know why she had come to Connie. She had just seen The Luxe and walked in without having any definite idea of what she was going to do next. In the daylight Connie’s hair looked several shades more improbable than it had by night. But Connie’s voice was friendly.

  “You do look bad all the same,” she repeated.

  “I’m all right,” said Chloe. She stood at the counter, leaning on it a little and looking down at its polished surface.

  Connie put a warm hand on her wrist.

  “Look here, what is it? For the Lord’s sake, don’t go fainting in here!”

  Chloe pulled herself together just in time.

  “I want a place to go to—a room. I thought—can you help me?”

  “Well, dear——” Connie began, and then broke off, considering; the new wedding ring had caught her eye.

  “Just for you?” she asked.

  Chloe followed the direction of her eyes. The gold band stood out on her ungloved left hand. She turned so white that she frightened Connie, and said: “I’m alone—I’m quite alone.”

  “My!” said Connie. “Has he let you down already? Don’t you take it too much to heart—that’s my advice. Men aren’t worth it—that’s the truth. Ernie now, that I told you about, he’s treated me something shameful—took up with that girl that was trying to get him away from me. Well, she’s got him, and I hope she likes her bargain.” She tossed the impossibly golden head. “I’m not going to break my heart for him, not if I know it. I shan’t lose my beauty sleep worrying over Ernie. And my advice to you is, keep smiling and don’t let any man think you care enough to worry. There, that’s good advice, dear,—you can take it from me it is. Leave ’em and they come running after you; but you start running after them, and, Lord help you, they’ll keep you running.”

  “Don’t!” said Chloe. Then she looked Connie straight in the face. “I’ve nowhere to go,” she said in a piteous whisper.

  The easy tears sprang into Miss Cross’s large blue eyes. She gave them a perfunctory dab with a highly scented handkerchief.

  “Oh, Lord, dear, don’t talk like that, or I shall cry. Look here, you can share with me till you get something else. Aunt’s the difficulty of course; but you take care she sees your wedding ring, and she’ll be all right. I wish I could come along with you myself. But I’ll write you a line—and don’t you take any notice if she’s disagreeable or inclined to talk pious, because that’s just her way. She’s not such a bad old sort; only she thinks a girl’s going straight to the devil if she powders her face and has a gentleman friend. And what I say is, where’s the harm?—and, anyhow, what’ud life be like if you didn’t?”

  She scribbled rapidly on a piece of paper as she spoke, scrawled her name at the bottom, and resumed:

  “There, you give her this. And tell her I’ll be home at my usual. Here’s what I’ve said:

  ‘Dear Aunt,

  ‘This is my friend Mrs. Dene,—“Will that do?”—‘Her husband has had to go off and leave her most unexpected, and I’ve told her she can share with me while she looks round for something.’”

  She wrote the address,

  Mrs. Cross,

  7, Blanesbury Terrace,

  Tooting.

  and added some practical advice as to the shortest way of getting there.

  “And mind you keep smiling, dear,” she concluded. “See you this evening.”

  Chloe said “Thank you.” She tried to say more, but the words wouldn’t come. Contact with human kindness had thawed the last of the ice. Pride was gone; she felt defenceless against pain.
She went out of The Luxe, and followed Connie’s directions carefully. With all her heart she hoped that she would reach 7, Blanesbury Terrace before the last of her strength gave way. She found she was talking to herself, as she used to talk to herself when she was a child: “You can’t cry in a bus. You mustn’t cry in a bus. You mustn’t cry or faint in front of all these people.” An old man opposite her was reading The Poultry Keeper’s Journal. She wondered what he would think if she were to break down suddenly. “You mustn’t do it. You can’t do it—not in a bus.”

  She came to Blanesbury Terrace at the end of her tether, and put Connie’s note without a word into the hand of the tall, grim woman who opened the door of No. 7. She did not speak, but she searched Mrs. Cross’s face for comfort; it did not promise very much. A conviction of the sinfulness of most other people had drawn hard lines about the eyes and mouth. The iron-grey hair was tightly plaited after an obsolete fashion. The black alpaca dress reached almost to the floor.

  Mrs. Cross looked up from her niece’s note with sharp grey eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in the stiffest of stiff voices. “I’m sorry; but Connie’s taken too much on herself. She rents a room in my house, but I’m not prepared for her to share it with her friends. Good morning, Mrs. Dene.”

  She began to shut the door. Chloe took a step forward, caught at the door-post, and clung there.

  “Mayn’t I come in?” Mrs. Cross could hardly catch the words.

  “Connie takes too much on herself,” said Mrs. Cross. “I don’t let apartments.”

  Chloe had ceased to mind what she said or did. She looked at Mrs. Cross with the eyes of a hurt animal and said:

  “I’ve nowhere to go.”

  Mrs. Cross became a little more erect than before, her voice carefully refined.

  “I’m reelly very sorry.”

  Chloe’s eyes shut. She said “Oh!” quite softly, and sank down fainting at Mrs. Cross’s feet. When she recovered, it was to the feel of horsehair under her cheek. She was, in fact, lying full length on the old-fashioned horsehair sofa in Mrs. Cross’s parlour; there was a very hard bolster under her head, with a horsehair button at either end. There was an antimacassar on every chair, and spangled shavings in the fireplace. The room was very cold, and her hair was wet.

  Chloe sat up, and as she did so, Mrs. Cross came into the room with a cup of hot soup in her hand. When Chloe had drunk the soup, Mrs. Cross looked at her searchingly.

  “You’re a married woman?”

  Chloe remembered that she was married; she remembered that she had married “Stran.” She looked as if she was going to faint again as she caught her breath and said:

  “Yes.”

  Mrs. Cross took the empty cup, put it down, and planted herself grimly on a chair. Chloe, shivering on the edge of the sofa, saw purpose in the very way in which the bony hands were folded.

  “Where is your husband?” said Mrs. Cross.

  “I don’t know.” The words shook and tumbled over one another.

  “Has he deserted you?”

  “N’no,” said Chloe out of her breaking heart. A gleam of pleasurable triumph altered for a moment Mrs. Cross’s harsh contours.

  “I knew it,” she announced. “And what, may I ask, do you make of your duty and of the Bible? ‘Wives obey your husbands’, Mrs. Dene,—what do you make of that, may I ask?”

  Chloe put out her hand and laid it on Mrs. Cross’s knee.

  “Did you ever trust anyone very much, and have them fail you?” she asked.

  The older woman frowned.

  “Put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no help in them,” she said.

  “No, there isn’t, is there?” said Chloe with the tears running down her face. “I thought he was good; and he isn’t.”

  “What’s he done?” said Mrs. Cross sharply.

  “I can’t tell you—I can’t tell anyone. I came away because if I’d stayed, he would have tried to make me do a wicked thing.”

  “Lord, have mercy!” said Mrs. Cross. “Was it as bad as that?”

  “It was money,” said Chloe. “I couldn’t take it because it had been come by wickedly. But if I’d stayed, he would have tried to make me take it. I had to come away.” She spoke to something in this forbidding woman which she could trust. Mrs. Cross looked at her very hard. Chloe rose to her feet.

  “I’m sorry I troubled you. I’ll go now. It was kind of you to give me the soup.”

  “I’m a woman that does her duty,” said Mrs. Cross. “No one can ever say I’m not. I took Connie without a penny; and I’d have brought her up pious if she’d have let me. If you can give me your word that you’re a fit companion for her, you may stay. No one can say I’m the woman to turn any respectable young woman from my door if she’s got nowhere to go to. Look me in the face, Mrs. Dene, and tell me the gospel truth. Are you a good-living young woman, and fit to be with Connie? For mind you Connie’s worldly, and takes no heed of religion; but she’s a good-living girl, and some day, I’m in hopes, she’ll turn her mind to serious things.”

  Chloe’s eyes met the hard, grey stare with perfect simplicity.

  “I won’t hurt Connie,” she said; and quite suddenly a most dreadful desire to laugh came over her. She buried her face in her hands, and Mrs. Cross saw her shoulders heave.

  “I’m dishing dinner,” she said. “You come along in and sit down.”

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Mrs. Cross proved to be a woman of some efficiency. Within an hour or two of Chloe’s arrival she had actually obtained work for her with a little dressmaker who attended the same chapel.

  “She can’t afford much in the way of wages, but she’s a God-fearing woman, and you won’t hear any loose talk in her house.”

  Chloe took the work thankfully, and submitted to a thorough examination by Mrs. Cross, at the close of which her contribution to the household expenditure was assessed.

  “You won’t do better than that anywhere else—and seeing that you’re here, it may be that it’s laid on me to look after you. There’s plenty of roaring lions going about seeking whom they may devour, and a young married woman that isn’t living with her husband can’t be too careful.”

  Chloe settled down to a life of outwardly placid routine. All day she worked for Miss Morrison, who made terrible clothes for the elder members of the congregation. In the evening she sat and mended her own things, whilst Connie went out to meet a “gentleman friend.” It was only by the most constant mending that Chloe’s things held together at all. Mrs. Cross approved her industry, and, herself occupied in like manner, discoursed at length on such exhilarating subjects as:

  The Worldly Tendencies of The Young;

  The Iniquity of Face Powder;

  The Prevalence of Divorce; and

  The Danger of Gentlemen Friends.

  Chloe grew thin and lost her colour. The nights were the worst. Towards two or three in the morning she would have welcomed the gloomiest and most acid of Mrs. Cross’s discourses. She lay cold and rigid in the narrow iron bed next to Connie’s, listening to her hearty breathing, and struggling to repress the low, heart-broken sobs which threatened to overwhelm her during the long, dark hours. If she could have gone on feeling proud and angry it would have helped; but it wasn’t in Chloe’s heart to go on being angry with anyone. Her anger against Michael was all gone. The trouble was that the Michael she had known was gone too. He was quite gone. It was like the old stories where a person changed before your eyes into something horrible—wild beast or dragon. She had trusted him and loved him with all her heart. But the Michael whom she had loved and trusted had never really existed. She was lonely and cold and heart-broken for Michael. But there wasn’t any Michael; there never had been any Michael. There was only Stran.

  As she lay awake through the long hours, she went over and over all
the things about Stran. Mr. Dane’s warning, “Don’t trust him a yard.” The endorsements on those terrible letters: “From Stran”—“Two letters from Stran.” The first thought of the letters brought her bolt upright in bed, her hands clutching the sides of it. She had given the letters to Michael to destroy. No—no—no—there wasn’t any Michael: she had given the letters to Stran. That was the very bitterest moment of all. She had gone through so much to save the letters, and then in the end she had let herself be tricked into handing them over to Stran.

  Even as the thought stabbed her she saw Michael’s face looking at her as he had looked when she gave him the letters, and again when he told her how he had destroyed them. How could he look like that if he was Stran? There was no answer.

  Chloe had been at Blanesbury Terrace for about ten days. She had saved five shillings towards repaying her debt to Mr. Monody, and she had written to Eliza Moffat. Connie posted the letter on the other side of London; it was very short:

  “Dear Moffy,

  “You were heavenly good to me, and I shall never forget it. Don’t think me an ungrateful beast.

  Chloe.”

  “She will, of course,” Chloe thought. “They all will, unless they think I’m mad. Oh, why can’t one just wake up and find it’s all a horrible dream?”

  Sometimes she just let herself think that it was nothing but a dream after all, and that at any minute she might wake from it and find Michael. She didn’t dare to do this very often because it hurt so much, and she mustn’t cry in the day time, she mustn’t think of anything but her mending and what Mrs. Cross was saying.

  “Aunt loves you because you’re such a good listener,” Connie said, laughing. “I’m fond enough of her, but I can’t be bothered listening to all the old stuff she talks. It stands to reason a girl’s bound to be fed up with being told she’s going to hell. I told her so straight only the other day. ‘If I was going to be hanged, Aunt,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t want some one telling me about it all the time first.’”