by Grant Allen
Douglas Harrison jammed his hat firmly on his head, and stood with his hand on the door as the warder opened it. ‘I don’t care a pin for that,’ he answered warmly. ‘I could never sleep in peace another night in my bed if I persuaded a jury to turn such a man as you loose upon the world once more to rob and murder.’
‘Then all I’ve got to say to you, sir,’ Mr. Roper remarked, taking a parting shot at the foe as the cell door closed tight with a bang behind him, ’is, that you’re no gentleman. To worm yourself into a professional man’s confidence, and then round upon him like that! Preposterous! Disgusting! You may take it from me, sir, that you’re no gentleman.’
CHAPTER III.
TÊTE-À-TÊTE.
When Douglas Harrison left the rooms in Clandon Street that morning, he left Basil Maclaine in possession, with his elbow on the mantelpiece, in the very act of setting out for the office.
But as soon as Basil found himself alone there with Linda, he certainly displayed no remarkable alacrity in preparing to sally forth, as in duty bound, to the service of his country. On the contrary, he stood still, with his cigar pointing downward and his eyes following Linda all round the room in mute observance, as though annatto and jute and the Board of Trade had never existed at all in this United Kingdom. Imports and exports moved him not to budge. Since Linda entered, his zeal for red tape had diminished visibly.
As for Linda herself, she went on clearing away the breakfast things in spite of him in a most business-like manner, absolutely free from all trace of self-consciousness, and therefore from any silly coquettish airs and graces of the lodging-house order. She knew, indeed, that Basil Maclaine was eyeing her hard; but for the first two minutes or so she took no notice of his rapid glances. Then she looked up suddenly, and said in the most matter-of-fact tone possible, ‘You’ll be late for the office, Mr. Maclaine. You told Mr. Harrison you were going off three minutes ago.’
Basil took out his watch once more — that bran-new gold watch, with crest and monogram neatly engraved upon it: whose crest, heaven knows — as he answered quietly, ‘I’ve got twenty-five more minutes to wait, Linda. Oh no, you needn’t stare. That’s a positive fact. I meant to walk it; now I’ll take a cab. A cab rattles you down in twenty minutes, easy.’
‘Why have you changed your mind, then?’ the girl asked, all trembling within, but outwardly calm, and turning her great brown eyes in full flood upon him.
‘Because I don’t often get such a chance as this, you know, my child,’ the young man answered in a very soft voice, advancing a step towards her. Linda made no effort to retreat archly round the table, as most ill-bred young women would have done in her place, but stood her ground like a sentry, and looked him back in the face with perfect frankness. Anybody could see at half a glance that whatever her artificial position in life might be, well-grounded self-respect was Linda Figgins’s leading characteristic.
‘I’ve asked you before not to call me “my child,”’ she said with quiet reserve. ‘It surprises me very much you should go on doing it when I’ve told you it annoys me.’
‘Linda,’ the young man said, dropping at once his flippant manner, ‘you know your will’s law to me. I’ll try never to say those words again if you don’t like them. But they come up to my tongue all of themselves, somehow, whenever I’m not thinking.’
‘I’d rather you did think, then,’ the girl answered, moving away with a certain confident ease, and continuing her work. ‘You’d please me far better by avoiding what I dislike, and by doing what I ask of you, than by saying such silly things as that my will’s law to you.’
Basil Maclaine paused, and glanced at her admiringly. She was a confounded handsome girl, Linda; there was no denying it. And she had such a quiet knack of keeping her place and yet preserving her dignity. He didn’t know how it was, but if she’d been a lady born, he could hardly have been more afraid of her, after all this time, than he was now with that London lodging-house young woman. Not that she repelled his advances exactly; on the contrary, he knew she rather liked them; but she insisted he should make them exactly as he would have made them — well, to one of his own equals. ‘One of his own equals,’ he thought grandiosely to himself; for Basil Maclaine, Esquire, of the Board of Trade, though neither particularly high-born nor particularly well-bred, had a very good opinion, after all, in a certain sort of way, in his own inmost soul, of his own importance.
‘Harrison’s here alone with you, often enough, half the day,’ he went on after a pause, by way of saying something to hide his sheepishness; ‘but I can hardly ever get you for five minutes to myself without his poking in his nose to hear what I’m talking about. This is jolly good news about this brief of his, though; if he gets work at the Bar, that’ll take him out more in the day, thank goodness!’
The girl swept off the crumbs from the tablecloth with her brush as she answered, somewhat dubiously, ‘Well, I’m not quite so sure of that myself. It’s not exactly the sort of work I’d like to see Mr. Harrison doing. He’s too good for such business. I don’t want him to be mixed up with thieves and burglars.’
‘Linda,’ the civil servant exclaimed with a reproachful intonation, ‘why on earth do you always talk to me so much about Harrison?’
‘Because I like him so much,’ Linda answered, looking up. ‘He’s so kind and good. I like him and admire him.’
Maclaine came round her side of the table once more. ‘I believe,’ he said, half piqued, ‘you like him better than you do me!’
‘In some ways I do,’ the girl assented frankly.
‘But not in others?’
Linda let her eyelids drop slightly with a natural movement. ‘But not in others,’ she repeated rather lower.
‘How do you like him best, Linda?’ the young man asked, dropping his own voice in concert, and pressing his advantage.
Linda stood irresolute, with the crumb-brush poised idly and lightly in her hand. ‘Well, it’s hard to describe,’ she said, looking up at the gas-lamp now. ‘I admire and respect him for his simplicity and sturdiness and goodness, I fancy.’
‘And you don’t respect me?’
‘No,’ the girl answered decisively. ‘I don’t respect you at all, Mr. Maclaine. There’s not so much to respect and admire in you, you know, as in Mr. Harrison.’
‘But you love me, Linda?’
The girl drew back a pace, and her lips quivered. ‘I never said so, Mr. Maclaine,’ she answered, palpitating. ‘But it isn’t always the best men one loves most easily.’
‘Why Mr. Maclaine?’ the young man persisted, taking her hand in his, half unresisted. ‘Why not Basil?’
Linda let that deft and capable hand of hers lie unmoved for a second or two in his without reproof. Then she withdrew it hurriedly, and motioned him back with an imperious wave. ‘You mustn’t touch me,’ she said quickly, in a tone of command. ‘How often shall I have to tell you, Mr. Maclaine, that you mustn’t touch me?’
‘And how often shall I have to tell you, Linda,’ the young man retorted, smiling, ‘that you mustn’t call me Mr. Maclaine, but must call me Basil?’
‘That’s quite a different matter,’ the girl answered, drawing a deep sigh, and going on with her work once more in a most business-like manner, as one who sternly stifles a foolish fancy. ‘I have a right to ask you not to touch me. My hand’s my own. You have no right at all to ask me to call you Basil. You’ve no right, indeed, even to call me Linda — though I’ve spoken to you about that so often that I’m tired of speaking.’
‘But you let Harrison call you Linda when you’re alone with him,’ the young man pleaded.
‘How do you know that?’ the capable woman asked, looking up sharply.
‘I didn’t know it. I guessed it. But I know it now, anyhow. And if he calls you so, why shouldn’t I, I’d like to know, if you please, Miss Figgins?’
‘That’s quite another matter,’ Linda answered, folding up the tablecloth, the opposite end of which Maclaine, darting forwar
d, instinctively held for her. ‘He calls me so as a friend. You try to put it on a different footing.’
‘Harrison’s very fond of you, too,’ the young man objected.
‘I think he likes me,’ Linda admitted, replacing the tablecloth in its accustomed drawer.
‘Likes you!’ Maclaine repeated. ‘Why, Linda, what nonsense! Of course he likes you. He worships you. He adores you. How the dickens could he help it? Who on earth could live in the house with you for a week at a time and not fall over head and ears in love at once with you? You know yourself it’s simply impossible. He likes you every bit as well as I do, and you know he does, perfectly. In other words, he’s just simply mad for you.’ And he tried once more, in spite of previous warnings, to take that smooth brown hand of hers in his by a rapid flank movement. It was one of those olive-brown hands more attractive by far than any mere dead white one.
‘If you persist in doing what I ask you not to do,’ Linda said severely, ‘I shall have to go away and send up the stipendiary to wait upon you in future. I only come up now as a concession to friendship. If you won’t allow me to do as I wish, I must withdraw altogether.’
Maclaine fell back yet again. ‘Well, but, Linda,’ he said, pleading, ‘if Harrison’s so fond of you, and you let him call you Linda, and he calls you so as a friend, why on earth should you put me on a different footing?’
Linda lifted the tray and stood hesitating by the door for half a moment. ‘You know very well why,’ she answered at last, all tremulous.
‘No, I don’t,’ Maclaine retorted. ‘Do tell me, Linda.’
The girl faltered a second, with the tray just dexterously poised on one strong hand and wrist. ‘Because ... I don’t love him,’ she answered slowly.
‘And you do love me?’ the young man cried in eager accents, his face lighting up as he spoke with genuine pleasure.
‘I never said that,’ the girl answered still lower. But her heart beat loud against the steels in her bodice as she uttered those words, and the tray trembled insecurely on its dexterously-adjusted balance.
What might have happened next, or what use of his vantage Basil Maclaine might have made, if a sudden chance hadn’t intervened to checkmate him, heaven only knows. For as the young man and maiden stood there irresolute, facing one another with a bashful countenance, as is the way of those who have just arrived at an understanding on such subtle points, a man’s voice from below broke the perfect stillness, through which they could almost hear their own hearts beat, with a repeated cry of ‘Linda, Linda!’
The girl started, and moved quickly, but not as if flurried or surprised, to the sitting-room door. ‘My brother’s calling me,’ she said. ‘All right, Cecil. I’m coming in a moment. I’m only just clearing up the breakfast in the drawing-rooms.’
‘Good-morning, Linda,’ Basil Maclaine murmured in a low voice, picking up his hat and glancing carelessly at his cigar, which had gone dead out meanwhile. Then he looked across at her with a meaning look once more, and murmured a second time, in still softer accents, ‘Good-morning, Linda,’ with a long-drawn intonation on that forbidden Christian name.
‘Good-morning — Mr. — Maclaine,’ the girl answered slowly. And Basil Maclaine knew from the faint catch in her voice as she spoke those words that she had almost yielded for the first time in her life and called him Basil. Then she walked away from the room with the same erect carriage and firm step as ever to go down to her brother. As soon as she was gone, Basil Maclaine, consulting his watch languidly for the third time, and relighting his cigar, observed to himself as he strolled away towards the landing, ‘She’s a confounded fine girl, upon my soul! Linda is; and I really do believe, if it hadn’t been for that nuisance of her brother’s interrupting us, I should actually at last have got a kiss out of her this time.’
With which consolatory and self-flattering reflection of an end almost achieved, he drove off in an exceptionally good humour to the Board of Trade, admiring the twirl of his own moustache as he went in the little strip of mirror at the side of the handsome which the acute commercial instinct of the carriage-builder has conceded of late as a peace-offering to the genius of human vanity.
CHAPTER IV.
CROSS-PURPOSES.
Basil Maclaine and Douglas Harrison occupied the first-floor suite of rooms — technically known as ‘the drawing-rooms’ — in Miss Figgins’s Furnished Apartments for Gentlemen in Clandon Street, Bloomsbury. The suite below — technically described as ‘the parlours’ — were filled by Linda herself and her brother Cecil. It was nothing short of grotesque, Douglas Harrison always felt, to address that queenly creature in her statuesque beauty by such a ridiculously plebeian name as Miss Figgins; but since Providence and her progenitors had so willed it, he consoled himself with the thought that in all probability before many years were out she would see cause to exchange it for another and more euphonious one. Meanwhile, he minimized the evil as far as possible by employing to her in private life her Christian name of Linda. He had first adventured such familiarity in fear and trembling as a tribute to friendship; but Linda’s gracious permission to use the shorter mode of address was so frankly and readily conceded that he used it now, in spite of his native shyness, with perfect freedom.
‘What were you doing so long upstairs, Linda?’ her brother asked, when she went down to ‘the parlours,’ tray in hand, after clearing the breakfast-table.
Any other girl in her place would most likely have answered: ‘Taking away the tea-things, Cecil.’ But Linda’s ways were not as other girls’ ways — she was infinitely more independent and more transparent. ‘Talking to Mr. Maclaine,’ she replied truthfully.
‘You talk a great deal too much to Mr. Maclaine, in my opinion,’ her brother said, half displeased.
‘That’s entirely a matter for my own consideration,’ Linda answered, not haughtily, but with a quiet self-respect. ‘My talking can only hurt myself; and we’re nothing here, surely, if not individualist. What have you come back for so early, Cecil? Are you looking for anything?’ For her brother had returned from the tube works in his working clothes, at a most unaccustomed hour, and, standing on a chair, was rummaging ineffectually among the tacks and screws of the tool-box in the corner cupboard.
‘I can’t find that magnesium wire,’ the journeyman engineer replied curtly, without noticing his snub. ‘There’s a job on at the works just now I’m showing the foreman how to do, and I want an end of wire to light up the inside with a little. It’s a ticklish piece of machinery for these rough fellows to attempt; it needs a quick, trained hand and plenty of light to do it.’
‘The magnesium wire’s precisely where you left it last, my dear boy,’ his sister answered with provoking coolness, producing it, ‘here in that coil you were working at yesterday. You’re a first-rate mechanician, Cecil, you know, and a wonderful fellow for electric apparatus; but you must admit yourself you’re not strong on tidiness. If you hadn’t got me to clear up things behind you, I don’t know how you’d ever get along with your models, anyhow.’
The engineer looked down with fraternal admiration into her great brown eyes. ‘I don’t want to flatter you up, Linda,’ he said in a tone of profound conviction, taking the little roll of wire from her hands gingerly with his black, begrimed fingers; ‘but I certainly don’t know how I’d ever get along without you at all, in that or in anything. You’re just the very helpfullest and most methodical woman I ever did come across.’
‘“It was the best butter,” said the March hare,’ Linda quoted, laughing. ‘Now, after all that, sir, what do you want me to do next for you?’
Her brother smiled. ‘Not such a bad shot,’ he answered good-humouredly. ‘Do copy that drawing of the crank attachment out on a clean sheet before I come home, there’s a dear, good girl. Are you busy this morning?’
‘Not very,’ Linda replied, glancing aside at the type-writer that stood idle in the corner. ‘I’ve just got to help the stipendiary, as Mr. Harrison calls her, to mak
e the beds and dust the rooms; and then I’ve got to see about the pudding for dinner; and then I shall finish type-writing that manuscript of Mr. Hubert’s — it’s got to go into the printer’s to-night, you know, for Saturday’s Athenæum — and after that, why, I shall be quite at leisure. I’ll have time to copy out the crank before they’re back in the evening, if nothing unforeseen interferes to prevent me. Anyhow, I’ll do it for you to-night at latest.’
‘That’s right,’ her brother exclaimed with a grateful nod (for he wouldn’t touch and stain her clean hands for worlds with his own labour-soiled fingers). ‘You are a brick, Linda, and no mistake! You’re worth any man a clear hundred a year. He’ll be a lucky fellow, whoever gets you. Though what’ll become of the models and things when you’re married and done for, Heaven only knows. But there, my best comfort is, that the nicest girls never by any chance manage to get married.’ And with that concise epitome of the philosophy of matrimony as his parting gift for his sister’s consolation, the brisk young engineer dashed hastily through the hall, down the front-steps, and round the corner to the neighbouring tube works.
But Linda stepped briskly upstairs, all outward calm, to make the beds with Emma, the lodging-house factotum, whom they called the stipendiary, while within, her heart was full of Basil Maclaine and the easy, meaningless, captivating things he had said to her just before in the privacy of the drawing-rooms.
An hour or so later Douglas Harrison returned, somewhat dispirited, from his visit to the gaol. As soon as his footsteps fell dull on the stairs, Linda ran up, all inquiry, from the kitchen, where she was engaged in the manufacture of that pudding for dinner — her famous Mrs. Thorpe — and caught a glimpse of his back as he disappeared slowly and heavily towards the drawing-rooms. The very look of that back told her quick feminine eye at once all was not well, and she tried to slink away unperceived into the kitchen again. But Douglas had caught her light footfall upon the landing as she slunk off, and called over eagerly, ‘Is that you, Miss Figgins?’
