Click any page to read it larger.
THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 130.)
CHAPTER VII.
On Delivery.
In which Clemency reads the Warden below stairs, a turtle goes along the railings, and the right author walks east, the wrong way home.
The Albemarle and the Ludgate came into Salisbury Square together on the first of December, under Kit’s arm, in a frost; and Kit, who had carried them from the Temple gate without opening either, which for Kit was a kind of Lent, put them down among the cups and stood over the teapot warming his hands, and said that he would read the Mortimers first, because the Warden would keep.
“The Warden always keeps,” said Lucy. “Like salt fish.”
Kit read the eighth number aloud, as he had read every number since the summer: standing, with his back to the fire, in the voice he kept for Mr. Pelham’s opinions, which was a little deeper than his own. He read Mr. Mortimer through quarter-day. He read him into the housekeeper’s room, where no Mortimer had set foot in
eight numbers, and out of it again, a poorer and a quieter man; and he read the sentence near the end without stopping at it, because he did not know that it had been written for anybody:
Mr. Mortimer had lived fifty years in the persuasion that whatever was broken in his house was mended in the night, like his linen, by nobody, for nothing at all; and he learned on quarter-day, from the housekeeper’s book, that every stitch of it had been mended by somebody, and that the somebody had kept the account.
“There,” said Kit, with deep satisfaction. “That’s Hindley. That’s the counting-house all over. Pelham says no gentleman would know there was a book.”
“Pelham has never kept one,” said Lucy.
Mrs. Lydiard, who was turning the cuffs of Kit’s second shirt, stopped
with the needle half through, and looked across the table at her elder daughter for about the time it takes to draw a thread; and then she drew it, and went on to the next. Clemency, who had been looking at the fire, went on looking at it. It was a very good fire. It had been paid for on the tenth of November, in silver, and she knew to a lump how long it would last.
When they had gone to bed she took the Albemarle through to the back room, where it was cold enough to see her breath, and read the thirteenth number of the Warden in her shawl, with her feet on the fender of a grate that had not been lit since March.
It began where the twelfth had left him, at Ludlow, at Martinmas; and for a page it was as cold as it had ever been: the March in frost, the hostages counted, the King’s letter read twice and answered once. Then, on the second page, without the least warning, the Warden got up from the high table and went out by a door that was not his, and down a stair that was not his either, out of the light:
He went down by the kitchen stair, which no Warden had used since the castle was built, and came out into the one room in Ludlow where a fire was kept for the whole of a castle; and he found that the people about it knew to a penny what every man above them cost, and had known it three hundred years,
and had not thought it worth telling him.
She read it, and put the book down on her knee, and sat for some time without reading anything.
He had gone down. She had sent a kitchen-maid to the foot of the area steps in the seventh number, to look up; and in the same weeks, by another stair, he had gone down: not to argue, as he had argued about the footman, nor to finish her sentence for her, as he had finished the keeper’s, but only to go and look. She could not tell whether he had read the seventh before he wrote it. The dates would allow it, and the sentence did not need it. Nobody in the Albemarle had ever been below stairs before. Mr. Wray would say, she supposed, that the Warden had caught the Mortimers’ complaint, and would find a disease of the lower orders to compare it to. She did not care what Mr. Wray said. She sat in the cold with the Warden in his kitchen, and was nearer to being happy than she had been since Bread Street, and that she did not trust it in the least.
For she knew the man who had written it.
She had not known that she knew it until she put the book down. Then it was there, all of it, as a sum is there when one stops adding and looks at the foot of the column. A gentleman on his own pavement, who had heard
her say that she read the Albemarle for the Warden, and had looked down into his own area, as though something there wanted his attention. I am told that the gentleman is not paid at all. She had taken it for Albemarle Street gossip; and so it was, but only one man in Albemarle Street could have known it without being paid to forget it. Then he is either a fool or very rich. And he had said, I believe he is both, without the least expectation of being believed; and she had taken it for a joke at some other man’s expense, because it had not occurred to her that a gentleman could say such a thing of himself on his own pavement, and mean it. And then Kit, at supper: a Mr. Kinross, who sits in the garden of an afternoon marking his books with a pencil. Nobody marks a magazine in pencil but the man who must answer for it. And the thing folded back under the pencil, on the bench in August, had been, she would have laid money on it now, her own fourth number; for somebody had told Mr. Wray where the railings went, and she had seen that long face shut when she said so.
She did not want it to be true. She went over it as she would have gone over a bill that came to more than she expected, item by item; and every item was correct, and the total was the Warden of the Marches, who had stood on his own pavement in Gros
venor Square and defended the Mortimers to her with more warmth than anybody had ever spent on them, and who did not know who she was.
That was the only comfort in it, and she held on to it. He did not know who she was. He knew a young person who had come about a place and had not taken it; he knew her boots, which half Grosvenor Square knew by now; and he knew a sentence she had not finished. He did not know that the Mortimers had a name, or that the name was Lydiard, or that the Lydiards lived two pair of stairs up over a law-stationer’s in Salisbury Square, where a man who sat in the Temple garden might have thrown a stone and hit them, if he had been the kind of man who threw stones.
The ninth number lay in the drawer, finished, nine days before it was wanted. She took it out. She read it through to the last leaf but one, where Miss Mortimer walks in St. James’s Park with her maid on a December morning, to be out of the house while the housekeeper’s book is gone over; and she sat for a long while with the pen, while the candle went down; and then she wrote in, between the maid’s chilblains and the water, a single sentence, and did not cross it out.
By the water a gentleman stood marking a magazine in pencil, with the look of a man who is quite certain that nobody is reading him.
She put him in St. James’s Park because she would not put him in the Temple. The Temple would have had him in a sentence: Mr. Pelham by the Saturday, the garden by the Monday, and Lord Ashcombe by the soup; and she did not choose that anybody in London should have him from her. In St. James’s Park he was nobody, and every gentleman in town had a magazine. Only one reader would know the pencil.
She did not ask herself why she had written it. She knew, as she generally knew things, to the farthing; and she did not choose to add it up.
Mr. Kinross was in Albemarle Street by eight, as on the first of every month; and Mr. Radcliffe had the sale for him on a half-sheet by the door, as on the first of every month, and gave it in the same voice. It was down forty on November.
“The kitchen,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “I told you.”
“You told me twenty pounds.”
“I told you more than twenty pounds, and I was right.”
Twenty pounds. Mr. Kinross had heard the sum lately in another voice,
on his own pavement, and it had stopped short before the end, as though it had heard itself. He put that away with the rest, and noticed that the place where he put such things was getting full.
Mr. Radcliffe put the half-sheet under the inkstand. “There are letters. Two clergymen have written to say that a Warden of the March would never have gone into a kitchen, and a lady in Clapham to say that she is glad he did, and will he now go into the nursery. I have answered none of them. My successor may answer them all. Have you found him?”
“No.”
“You have three weeks and three days.” Mr. Radcliffe took up his hat, which he did not need, since he was not going anywhere yet. “The Ludgate is on the table. Baldock has had it printed after all. I do not know how, and I do not ask.”
Mr. Kinross read the eighth number of the Mortimers standing at the window with his hat still on, as Mr. Radcliffe read things for the price. He had read every number since May. He had read the last three in a manner he would not have liked to describe to anybody: the seventh twice at a sitting, on the first of November, and again at night, by the library fire, with the door shut. And he had not known, until his hand went out to the table that
morning before his hat was off, that he had been waiting a month for the eighth.
He found the sentence near the end, and knew it at once, because it had his own words in it.
He read it again. He had written, on a night in September, with more pleasure than he had felt in a sentence for a year, that the women of the March mended what their lords broke, for nothing at all; and he had thought it the truest thing in the Warden, and the kindest, and had been a little proud of the kindness. And the Author of the Mortimers had read it, and had gone to the housekeeper’s book, and had sent him in the account.
It was perfectly just. It was so exactly just that he laughed aloud, in Mr. Radcliffe’s front office, at a quarter past eight in the morning, which nobody in that office had ever heard him do; and Mr. Radcliffe, at the desk with his hat, looked up, and considered him with interest, and then looked down again and wrote something in the margin of the letter from Clapham.
He went out into Albemarle Street with the Ludgate under his arm, which he had not meant to take, and stood on the step in the frost; and he thought, as he had thought at some hour of every day for a fortnight, of a young person in mended boots who had stood under
his coal-plate and looked up.
He had not meant to think of her. He was not a man who thought about young persons; he had been told so by his aunt, at intervals, as one tells a man that his house wants painting. But he had found, since the fifteenth of November, when she stood on his pavement in the dusk and talked to him of railings, that a great many things led to her. Boots led to her, and he looked at them now in the street as other men look at faces. The Albemarle led to her, since she read it for one sentence, and he had not yet discovered which. His own area led to her, so that he could not go up his own steps without looking down into it; and the somebody who kept the account led to her this morning, by a road he could not have mapped. Mrs. Pratt said that she had lied, and Mrs. Pratt, who had not known how to spell fricassee, was a judge of lying. She had lied about her letters. She had very likely lied about the rest of it; and there was one place in London where the rest of it could be had for the asking.
Fenwick had given him the direction on the Monday, and had not asked why it was wanted.
The register-office was in Oxford Street, over a staymaker’s, up a stair that smelt of wet umbrellas: a long room with a fire at one end and a bench down one side, on which six
young women sat in their best bonnets with their characters in their laps, and looked at him as he came in, and then, as one, at the floor. At the other end, behind a table and a large book, sat a stout woman in a cap with a pen behind her ear, who looked at him and did not look at the floor at all.
“Mr. Kinross’s,” she said, before he had given his name. “Your butler wrote to say you might call, and he writes a very good hand. Grosvenor Square, north side. Kitchen-maid, fourteen guineas, tea and sugar found.” She opened the book and turned back through it, wetting her thumb. “Entered on the Tuesday, the fifth of October, in the morning. We sent Sarah Pike on the Thursday, and she cried. We sent Ann Rudd on the Saturday, and Mrs. Pratt sent her back. We sent two more in the week after, and the place is filled since the twentieth of November by a girl from Uxbridge that Mrs. Pratt found for herself, which I don’t hold against her.”
“And on the Tuesday?”
“The Tuesday, sir?”
“The fifth. A young person came to my house on the Tuesday afternoon, about the place, and was taken below.”
The woman put her finger on the page, and ran it down, and ran it down again; and then she shut the book, which made a sound in that room like
a door.
“Nobody on the Tuesday, sir. The place wasn’t on the book till eleven, and I’d nobody fit to send till the Thursday.”
“Then who was she?”
“Not one of mine.” She said it without the least uncertainty. “Mine come with their characters in their pockets, and I know every one of them by the time they’ve sat on that bench a week. If there was a young person at your door on the Tuesday, sir, nobody sent her.” She looked at him over the book with a kind of professional pity. “Whoever she was, she sent herself.”
He went down the stair that smelt of umbrellas and out into Oxford Street, and stood on the pavement among the carts.
She had not come for the place. She had sent herself down his area steps, unasked and in her own boots, to stand under his coal-plate and look up; and the seventh number of the Mortimers, in which a kitchen-maid stood under a coal-plate and looked up, had come out on the first of November. Nobody wanted a kitchen seen from below but the person who meant to write one.
He knew what that meant. He had known it, after a fashion, since the afternoon in November when he wrote three words on a slip at the Temple and did not strike them out; and he stood in Oxford Street with the slip in his
pocket-book, where he had carried it since he took it out of his drawer at the Temple a fortnight before, and found that he would go a long way round rather than take it out. For if she had gone and looked for herself, then the best thing in London was being written in boots mended at the toe, by a young woman whom he had taken for a kitchen-maid on his own pavement and asked what her place paid; and he had a great deal more to answer for than a margin.
So he went round. He told himself that she had gone and looked on the Author’s behalf: that the Author, whoever he was, had somebody to go and look for him, a clerk, a wife, any woman who went and looked for a man. It was not a good argument. It was a Temple argument, and he knew it for one, and held on to it, because it let him walk. And he found, between a dray and a hackney-coach, that what it let him walk into was worse; for he did not know what she was to the Author, and he minded it extremely; and since he had never in his life minded what any woman was to any man, and had supposed himself as incapable of it as some men are of whistling, he was so much astonished that he walked as far as the Pantheon before he remembered that he had meant to take a coach.
For a fortnight after that Mr. Kinross was on his own pavement at
half past three on most afternoons, for reasons that he gave himself with great clearness and did not examine: a letter to post, the light, the frost on the railings, which wanted looking at. Nobody came along the north side at half past three but the people who came to look at the railings, and the muffin-man with his bell. And on the ninth afternoon the kitchen window went up under his feet.
“She’ll not come, sir,” said Mrs. Pratt, to the railings. “Not a third time. Not that one.”
The window went down again before he could ask her how she knew; which was as well, since he could not have asked it without admitting the question.
By Friday the tenth Mr. Baldock’s house was half in crates.
Clemency came up the stairs at nine with the ninth number under her cloak, and found the front office stripped to its shelves and the shelves to their dust, and Mr. Baldock sitting in the middle of it at the one desk that was going with him, among thirty years of the Ludgate tied up in string by the year, like a man sitting among his own tombstones and finding them, on the whole, well cut.
“Twelve guineas,” he said. “To the Author, on delivery. It is the last time I shall say it in this room, and I find I have grown attached to the sentence.”
He counted it out on the desk, and did not ask her to count it after him, and she did not. “There will be a Ludgate on the first of January. Tuckett will print it on condition that he is paid before he sets a line, which is the first time in my life that I have paid a printer before he did anything whatever; and he was so much affected that he asked to have it in writing.”
“And after January?”
“After January there will be a Ludgate when I have a house to put it in.” He took off his spectacles, and looked at them, and put them on again, which was not his way of changing the subject but of declining to. “They are making a law at Westminster this fortnight by which every man who publishes anything cheap and often is to find sureties for his good behaviour, like a drunken man before the magistrates. The Ludgate comes out too seldom to be caught by it. It is the first advantage I have ever found in being monthly.”
He weighed the ninth number in his hand, as he always did; and then he opened it at the first leaf and looked at it for a moment without reading it, and shut it again.
“I shall not read it here,” he said. “I shall read it in proof, at home, on Sunday, with my feet on the fender. I have never done that with a number of the Ludgate. I was always reading the
next.” He put it in the drawer, and did not lock the drawer, since there would shortly be nothing in the house worth locking. “Radcliffe has your terms.”
“And?”
“He takes them. Twelve guineas, no name, the tenth of every month. He has underlined the fourth.” Mr. Baldock found the letter, and gave it to her across the desk. “He says that he has never in five-and-twenty years had a contributor who would not dine, and that he looks forward to the novelty. He would like the February number, and he asks for the Author’s answer by the tenth of January.”
Clemency read it. It was very short, and it did not waste anything, and at the end of it, below the signature, in the same small commercial hand, Mr. Radcliffe had written: The Author’s eighth was worth the twelve. She gave it back.
“The Author is considering it.”
“The Author has a month.” Mr. Baldock folded the letter into his pocket-book. “Gedge will be here at ten for the copy. You need not stay for him.”
But she stayed; and Gedge came at ten, with his hat in his hand and a Methodist’s opinion of crates, and bowed to the lady by the window, as he always did, without asking who she was; and took the ninth number away under his coat to be set, with a sentence in it about a gentleman by the
water, which he would set, she supposed, as he set everything, letter by letter, in the order in which it came, without the least idea that it had been written for anybody.
Mr. Baldock walked down the stairs with her.
“The back-room door,” he said, at the foot of them, “still does not shut. I have told the landlord so. It is the only thing in this house that I shall leave him with pleasure.”
She went home by Ludgate Hill with twelve pounds twelve shillings in her stocking-purse, of which twelve pounds would go to the landlord at Lady Day, now that Christmas was in hand, and twelve shillings to the coal-merchant on the Saturday; and she was a little ashamed of how little it now surprised her to carry it.
On the Tuesday night, which was the night before the dinner, Kit woke at one o’clock and could not tell why, and lay listening; and then he knew why, because there was a line of light under the back-room door, and he had seen it there before.
He had seen it a good many times since the summer. He had told himself that it was letters to Bread Street, and then that it was accounts, and then, in October, that it was nothing that concerned him; and he had very nearly believed the last, because Kit could be
lieve almost anything that let him go back to sleep. Tonight it was colder than it had been all the winter, and the frost had got into the passage and was standing on the inside of the window at the end of it; and he got up, in his stockings, and took his greatcoat off the nail, and went in.
She was not writing. She was sitting with the pen laid down and both hands round the candle, as one holds a cup; and she looked up at him with a face that he had never seen on her, which was the face of somebody who has been caught being happy and is ready to deny it.
Kit put the greatcoat round her shoulders without a word. It smelt of the Temple: of sea-coal and ink and the river, and of Mr. Pelham’s snuff, which got into everything. She did not take it off.
“Pelham says it’ll freeze hard by Christmas,” said Kit. “He says the river will go above the bridge.”
“Does he?”
“He’s generally wrong.” Kit looked at the desk, and at the paper on it, which was face down, and at the second finger of her right hand, which had ink on it, as his own had; and he looked away again, at the frost on the window. He had wanted since he was twelve years old to be the one in the family who knew things first. He found, standing in the doorway of the
back room at one o’clock in the morning in his stockings, that there was one thing he would rather be told than find out; and he went back to bed without asking it, which was the hardest thing he had done since he was twelve, and for which nobody would ever thank him, because nobody would ever know.
She sat in his coat until the candle was out.
The turtle arrived in Grosvenor Square at seven o’clock on the morning of the fifteenth, from a West India ship in the river by way of a dealer in the City, in a cart, and alive; and at a quarter to eight, when Mr. Kinross came out on his steps, it was on his pavement, going east along his railings at the pace of a creature that has been told it is to be dinner and has not agreed, with one of Lord Ashcombe’s footmen walking behind it, uncertain of the etiquette.
Mr. Kinross, who had been waiting a fortnight for somebody to come along his railings, stood back and let it pass.
They were five at table that evening: his lordship at the head, with Mr. Hindley, his Mortimers, on his right hand, and Mr. Dalgleish, his Warden, on his left, as he had planned it since October; Mr. Tillotson at the foot, with the Albemarle and the Ludgate beside his plate, marked with slips of paper like briefs at the assizes; and Mr.
Kinross a little down the side on which Mr. Dalgleish sat, where he could see both of them without being looked at, to make up the table and say nothing.
Mr. Dalgleish was pinker than in October, and more resigned. He had the look of a man who has been accused of a crime so often that he has begun to take an interest in the particulars. Mr. Hindley had a new coat, which did not yet fit him across the shoulders and had very likely not been paid for, and the twice-soled boots, which no coat could have hidden; and he had got rid of his cold and kept his voice, and he played it on his lordship, who liked it, like a good instrument hired for the evening.
They had the turtle.
“Turtle,” said his lordship, “is the only soup in which a man may be certain what he is getting. Tillotson, that is a thing Froissart might have said.”
Mr. Tillotson believed that Froissart had said something very like it.
Mr. Kinross, who had met the turtle that morning and had liked it, did not care for the soup.
“Now,” said his lordship, when the plates had gone round, “I have had a notion since October, and I mean to have it out before the fish. Every man who writes a book knows what he meant by it, and will not tell you. Very well. I shall not ask him. I shall ask the other fellow. Dalgleish, you shall tell me what Hindley means,
and Hindley, you shall tell me what Dalgleish means; and Kinross shall hear you both, and say nothing, and tell me afterwards which of you was lying. Tillotson, the Albemarle. The twelfth. The place I marked.”
Mr. Tillotson found the place, and read it, in the voice in which he read the lessons; and Mr. Kinross heard his own sentence go round Lord Ashcombe’s table, not for the first time, past the salt and the epergne, to the end, where the women of the March mended what their lords broke, for nothing at all.
“There, Hindley,” said his lordship. “For nothing at all. What does he mean by it?”
Mr. Hindley had come prepared, Mr. Kinross saw, for a good many things that evening, but not for this; and he looked at his soup, and then across the table at Mr. Dalgleish; and then he put down his spoon.
“I’m a plain man, my lord,” he said, “and I’ll tell you plain. He means it kindly, and he’s wrong. Nothing’s mended for nothing. I’ve been in a mill since I was twelve years old. Somebody mends it, and somebody’s paid, or somebody’s owed; and if nobody’s paid, there’s a book somewhere with the debt in it, and it’ll come in.” He was quite serious. It was the first thing he had said all evening, Mr. Kinross thought, in his own voice and not in the
hired one. “In my trade a thing’s paid on delivery, or it isn’t paid at all.”
Mr. Kinross felt something that was like a stair missed in the dark: a small drop, with nothing under it, and the foot coming down again on the next step before the mind has understood that there was a step to miss. He did not know what it was. He looked at Mr. Hindley, and Mr. Hindley was looking at his lordship.
“There, Dalgleish!” His lordship was delighted. “He has answered you out of the counting-house. Now defend yourself.”
“I am a conveyancer, my lord,” said Mr. Dalgleish unhappily.
“Then defend yourself as a conveyancer.”
Mr. Dalgleish considered the sentence, which was not his, with the gravity of a man who has been handed another man’s deed and told to find the flaw in it before the fish; and Mr. Kinross, watching him, was ashamed, as he had been ashamed in October, and could do nothing about it, as he had done nothing then.
“I can only say,” said Mr. Dalgleish at last, “that if a thing is done for nothing at all, it is a voluntary conveyance, and good between the parties. But it may be set aside by the creditors.”
Mr. Hindley took up his spoon again, and put it down. Nobody noticed it but Mr. Kinross, who had spent a
month noticing things that nobody noticed, and did not yet know what to do with them.
“Set aside by the creditors!” His lordship repeated it with relish, as a phrase he meant to keep. “Now the other. Tillotson, the Ludgate. Find me something.”
“There is no need to look far, my lord,” said Mr. Tillotson, who had found it on the Tuesday and had been waiting ever since to be asked. “The Mortimers have the very words. For nothing at all. At the end of the eighth number.”
“The very words?” His lordship looked from one side of his table to the other, and was enchanted. “Then they write to each other! Dalgleish, Hindley, you are in correspondence, the pair of you, in the public prints, and you never said a word of it to me. Read it, Tillotson.”
Mr. Dalgleish and Mr. Hindley looked at each other across the table, as two men look who have just been told that they are cousins; and Mr. Tillotson read the sentence about Mr. Mortimer and the housekeeper’s book; and Mr. Kinross, who knew it by heart, and had laughed at it aloud in Albemarle Street, sat with his hands in his lap and heard it read in a chaplain’s voice at a peer’s table, and thought that it was the best answer he had ever
been given, and that he did not know to whom he owed it.
“Dalgleish,” said his lordship. “What does Hindley mean?”
“If the account was rendered, my lord,” said Mr. Dalgleish, who had found his feet, “and Mr. Mortimer did not object to it within a reasonable time, it would be an account stated, and he would be bound by it.”
“Bound! Hindley, do you hear? He says you have bound the Warden.”
“That’s what I meant, my lord,” said Mr. Hindley, in the hired voice again, and very comfortably. “The account comes in. It always does. And I’ll tell your lordship something about that number that’s not in it.” He leaned back. “It was paid for. Twelve guineas, on the tenth, on delivery, and not a day’s credit asked or given. There’s not three literary men in London can say as much.”
His lordship laughed, and said that there was not one; and the fish came in.
It pays on delivery.
He heard it in her voice, on his own pavement, in the dusk, with an onion coming up out of the area and a barouche going round the Square for the third time: It pays on delivery. —On delivery of what? — Of whatever is wanted, sir, on the day it is wanted.
Mr. Kinross understood, between the turtle and the fish, that he had been told.
He had been told on his own pavement, a month before, by a young woman in mended boots, what the Mortimers paid and when; and he had not heard it, because his cook had told him she was a kitchen-maid, and a kitchen-maid’s place does not pay on delivery. A place in the City. It is not a quiet one. Paternoster Row was not quiet. Twelve guineas, on the tenth: on the day it is wanted. She had given him the terms. She had given them to his face, in the voice in which she might have given him the price of coals, and then she had curtseyed to his cook and gone away along the north side at the pace of a woman walking a little ahead of weather; and he had stood on his pavement and supposed that she belonged to somebody.
She belonged to nobody. There was no Author on whose behalf she had gone and looked. There was a young woman who had wanted to see a kitchen from below, and had gone down eleven steps in Grosvenor Square to see it, because that was the only way to know; who had priced his book to the pound on his own pavement, because she priced everything, and the price was the whole of her art; and who had sent him in the account. She was paid twelve guineas on the tenth, and she went in boots mended at the toe; and he had not been able to put the two together, because nobody had
ever sent him the bill. He had spent a fortnight jealous of a man who did not exist, because it was easier than the truth; and the truth had come in with the fish. And he found, now that the man had gone, that he was not relieved, as he would have expected, but frightened, which he would not.
He looked at his plate. The fish had come, and he did not know what it was. He was aware of his hands, which were not perfectly steady, and he put them under the table.
“Kinross!” said his lordship. “You’re very quiet. Quieter than common, which I’d not have thought it possible to be.”
“I was thinking of the turtle, sir,” said Mr. Kinross. “I believe we had met.”
This was a great success. His lordship had the whole story out of him, and then told it himself, better: how the creature had got clean out of the cart, and gone along the north side as if it had read the seventh number of the Mortimers and meant to see the railings for itself; and Mr. Hindley laughed, in the hired voice, and Mr. Tillotson laughed because his lordship had, and Mr. Dalgleish laughed with the particular relief of a man who has heard a joke that has nothing to do with him. Mr. Kinross ate a little of the fish. It was turbot, he discovered later.
At the time it might have been anything.
“And on the tenth of January,” said his lordship, warming to his evening, “I shall be in the Row at nine o’clock in the morning to see it delivered. I have never seen a book delivered. I have seen a calf. Hindley, you shall not deliver without me.”
Mr. Hindley’s face did not change. But Mr. Kinross, who had begun that evening to look at faces as he had lately looked at boots, saw that it was the face of a man who has been told that the bailiffs will dine with him; and he saw, which was worse, what would come up a publisher’s stairs in the Row at nine o’clock on the tenth of January, Baldock’s if Baldock still had stairs, or Baldwin’s if Radcliffe had his way, with the number under its cloak, and find a peer of the realm on the landing, and Mr. Tillotson with him, and Mr. Hindley, white, between them.
“I could accompany your lordship,” said Mr. Tillotson.
“If you go to the Row at nine on the tenth, sir,” said Mr. Kinross, “Mr. Wray will have it by noon.”
His lordship stopped with his glass half-way.
“Wray?”
“He has friends in every coffee-house in the Row.” Mr. Kinross did not look at Mr. Hindley. He did not look at
anybody. He said it to the epergne, in his dry Scotch voice, without any expression at all. “A peer on a publisher’s stair at nine in the morning, waiting for a parcel, will be all over town by night. I think he would call it Waiting on the Mortimers.”
He did not know whether it was true. It was the first thing he had said at a dinner-table in his life without knowing whether it was true, and he found that he did not mind at all.
“The puppy!” His lordship put down his glass. “He would, too. He would make a paragraph of it, and the town would have it with its breakfast.” He looked down the table with great indignation at the place where Mr. Wray would have been sitting if Mr. Wray had ever been asked. “No. No, we shall not give him the satisfaction. Hindley, you shall deliver without me, and I shall hear of it afterwards, which is how a gentleman hears of most things. Kinross, I am obliged to you. You don’t say much, but when you do, it’s to the purpose.”
Mr. Hindley drank off his wine. Then he looked across the table at Mr. Kinross, with his small shrewd eyes, and did not look away.
They had the mutton, and Froissart with it; and after the cloth was drawn his lordship gave them the King, and then, because it was nearly Christmas, Mr. Dalgleish.
“I gave you till Christmas, Dalgleish,” he said, with great affection, “and you have ten days.”
“I am a conveyancer, my lord.”
“So you are. So you are.” His lordship passed the port. “Well, Kinross? You have heard them both. Which of them was lying?”
Mr. Kinross looked at Mr. Dalgleish, who could not be corrected without being confessed, and at Mr. Hindley, who could not be confessed without being ruined, and at the decanter, which was between them.
“Neither of them, sir,” he said, “about anything he knew.”
His lordship was enchanted. He said that it was diplomatic, and that Kinross should have gone to Vienna, and he said it again to Mr. Tillotson, who had heard it the first time; and the evening went on, as Lord Ashcombe’s evenings did, until eleven, when it stopped.
In the hall, while the footmen looked for the hats, Mr. Hindley came and stood by him.
“You’ll not give me away, Mr. Kinross.”
It was not a question, and it was said in his own voice, low, so that it did not reach the footmen.
“I have nothing to give.”
“You’ve something. I’ve watched you since the fish.” Mr. Hindley took his hat from the footman and looked
into it, as though he expected to find something there. “There’s a house in Mosley Street that’s been in my family sixty year, and it’ll not see Lady Day in it without help. A lord’s table at Christmas is worth a thousand pound of credit to a house like ours; a lord’s table as a literary man is worth two. I never said I wrote them. I said to Baldock I’d not said I wasn’t, which in Mosley Street is a different thing; and then his lordship said it for me, and I let him.” He put the hat on. “I’m a plain man. That’s all it was.”
“Then deliver nothing,” said Mr. Kinross, “and do not go looking for whoever does.”
Mr. Hindley looked at him for a long moment, from under the hat.
“I’ve a notion, Mr. Kinross,” he said, “that you’ve a notion.”
And he went out into the frost, in his twice-soled boots, and walked away across the Square towards Oxford Street, since he had given up hackney-coaches for the quarter, and did not look back.
Mr. Kinross, watching him go, understood that he had just shown the one man in London who must not see it that he cared who was found.
He did not go up his own steps. He stood on Lord Ashcombe’s pavement until Mr. Hindley had gone round the corner, with the frost settling on his
hat; and then he turned east, which was the way she had gone, and walked.
He went down Mount Street, past the public-house and the workhouse and the dark areas of a great many houses that were not elegant, and looked down into every one of them; and through Berkeley Square, where the frost lay on the grass of the garden like something spilt, and out into Piccadilly, with the Green Park black on the other side of it. He looked, as he went, at doorsteps and area gates, and at the boots of the people he passed, which at that hour were mostly watchmen’s. He was not looking for her. She was not in Piccadilly at midnight. He was looking at what she had looked at, which was the only thing he could do.
He passed the end of Albemarle Street, and did not turn his head; and he was half-way to the Haymarket before he noticed that he had not, and that for the first time in a twelvemonth he had gone by it without a thought of the Warden.
At the top of the Haymarket a line of verse came into his head, which he had not asked for and did not want.
He knew where it came from: from a lord who had since gone to Italy. It had been sung at Mr. Kinross, to Mr. Nathan’s music and by his aunt’s arrangement, at a succession of pianofortes, until he could not hear the first line without wishing to leave the room. He
had even been present at its occasion, in the summer of the year fourteen: a party at which a Mrs. Wilmot came in late, in black with spangles on it, and the lord went home, the town said, and wrote the lines in the morning. Mr. Kinross had thought the lines very good, and the lady very handsome, and the connexion between them a little too good to be true.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
He said it aloud at the corner of Cockspur Street; and a watchman in a box there, who had not been asleep, put out his lantern and his head together and said, “Past twelve o’clock, and a frosty night,” with great severity, to a gentleman who had dined.
Mr. Kinross agreed that it was.
He had not looked at her eyes. He would have said so on his pavement; and he went over it under King Charles at Charing Cross. He had looked at them a great deal, without knowing it, and could see them now more clearly than the lamps.
They were green. He would have said grey, if he had been asked, and been wrong: a pale, clear green, ringed with dark, like the river at the Temple stairs when the sun is on it. They had been doing a sum the whole time
she talked to him, steadily and without hurry; they had gone up once, when she spoke of the strip of sky with the railings across it, as though the sky were there above the area and she could see it; and they had come out at the foot of the sum once, when she laughed, all at once, as if it had come out right and she had not expected it to. He had seen Mrs. Wilmot’s eyes in the summer of the year fourteen, and everybody had said that they were fine, and so they were; but they had looked at a room to see who was looking at them. They had not been extraordinary, and these were. These had looked at his pavement to see what it cost, and who had paid, and whether the sky came into it; and they had looked at him as at a sum not quite finished, that she might come back to.
He considered, going down the Strand, whether she was beautiful; and she was; and the poem, he thought, had been reaching past the lady in the spangles, as poems will, for something that was not in the room.
It came to him outside Exeter Change, with the beasts asleep in the menagerie over the shops, that he was in love. He had never been in love, and had a low opinion of the condition as poets described it; and he examined it all the way to Somerset House, like a disputed reading, and could find nothing wrong with it except that he did not
know the lady’s name.
Since he was one-and-twenty his aunt had put a great many young women of intellect in his way, and he had not been able to love one of them, and had concluded, with her, that the fault was in him. It was in him; but it was that he could not love a mind put on for company, like a gown, and had been waiting all those years, without knowing it, for one that did not care whether anybody saw it. An unpretending intellect: the rarest thing in London, and the one he had supposed, until that evening, that he possessed himself, alone, in Albemarle Street, unsigned. It was the first time it had ever occurred to him that this was a vanity.
She had none. She had written eight numbers of the best thing in London and let a cotton-man dine on them. She had come down his area steps in her own boots, to know, and gone up them again without a word to anybody. He had written, on a bench in August, that she was competent; and he thought of the word, going by St. Mary’s, and was ashamed of it.
The line came back to him there, uninvited, like a tune from a barrel-organ two streets off; and he had stopped wishing to leave the room.
He meant to marry her. That came to him under the tower of St. Clement’s, and it was not a discovery
but a fact, like the river behind the houses, going down in the dark to the sea whether anybody looked at it or not. He thought it very unlikely that she would have him. It made no difference whatever.
And she must be kept from all of them: from his lordship, waiting on a stair to see a calf delivered; from Mr. Wray, who would make a paragraph of her; from Mr. Hindley, who had a notion; and from his aunt. She had kept her name from London for eight months. He would not be the man who gave it away.
He could have asked. Mr. Baldock knew; Radcliffe, by February, would very likely know. He would ask neither of them. To ask was to tell. Baldock would refuse him, and Radcliffe would keep it, as he kept everything; and both would know that somebody wanted to know, and so, within the week, would she. He would do as she had done with his kitchen. He would go and look.
He came to Temple Bar a few minutes before one, and stood under it,
where Westminster stops and the City begins; and up the street, on St. Dunstan’s clock, the two giants lifted their clubs and struck one.
Fleet Street went away from him eastward in its double row of lamps, down to the dark at the bottom where the Fleet ran under it, and up again to Ludgate and St. Paul’s: courts and alleys on either hand, and printers and law-stationers and coffee-houses, and lodgings over shops, and not one window lit that he could see. She was somewhere east of where he stood, in a place that was not a quiet one, asleep, or not asleep; and she did not know that anybody in London was looking for her.
He did not know her name. He knew the price of her boots, and the colour of her eyes, and that she could read a slate upside down across a kitchen table. It was not much to go on. It was a good deal more than she had had of him in October; and she had gone and looked.
(To be continued.)
THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 130.)
CHAPTER VII.
On Delivery.
In which Clemency reads the Warden below stairs, a turtle goes along the railings, and the right author walks east, the wrong way home.
The Albemarle and the Ludgate came into Salisbury Square together on the first of December, under Kit’s arm, in a frost; and Kit, who had carried them from the Temple gate without opening either, which for Kit was a kind of Lent, put them down among the cups and stood over the teapot warming his hands, and said that he would read the Mortimers first, because the Warden would keep.
“The Warden always keeps,” said Lucy. “Like salt fish.”
Kit read the eighth number aloud, as he had read every number since the summer: standing, with his back to the fire, in the voice he kept for Mr. Pelham’s opinions, which was a little deeper than his own. He read Mr. Mortimer through quarter-day. He read him into the housekeeper’s room, where no Mortimer had set foot in eight numbers, and out of it again, a poorer and a quieter man; and he read the sentence near the end without stopping at it, because he did not know that it had been written for anybody:
Mr. Mortimer had lived fifty years in the persuasion that whatever was broken in his house was mended in the night, like his linen, by nobody, for nothing at all; and he learned on quarter-day, from the housekeeper’s book, that every stitch of it had been mended by somebody, and that the somebody had kept the account.
“There,” said Kit, with deep satisfaction. “That’s Hindley. That’s the counting-house all over. Pelham says no gentleman would know there was a book.”
“Pelham has never kept one,” said Lucy.
Mrs. Lydiard, who was turning the cuffs of Kit’s second shirt, stopped
with the needle half through, and looked across the table at her elder daughter for about the time it takes to draw a thread; and then she drew it, and went on to the next. Clemency, who had been looking at the fire, went on looking at it. It was a very good fire. It had been paid for on the tenth of November, in silver, and she knew to a lump how long it would last.
When they had gone to bed she took the Albemarle through to the back room, where it was cold enough to see her breath, and read the thirteenth number of the Warden in her shawl, with her feet on the fender of a grate that had not been lit since March.
It began where the twelfth had left him, at Ludlow, at Martinmas; and for a page it was as cold as it had ever been: the March in frost, the hostages counted, the King’s letter read twice and answered once. Then, on the second page, without the least warning, the Warden got up from the high table and went out by a door that was not his, and down a stair that was not his either, out of the light:
He went down by the kitchen stair, which no Warden had used since the castle was built, and came out into the one room in Ludlow where a fire was kept for the whole of a castle; and he found that the people about it knew to a penny what every man above them cost, and had known it three hundred years, and had not thought it worth telling him.
She read it, and put the book down on her knee, and sat for some time without reading anything.
He had gone down. She had sent a kitchen-maid to the foot of the area steps in the seventh number, to look up; and in the same weeks, by another stair, he had gone down: not to argue, as he had argued about the footman, nor to finish her sentence for her, as he had finished the keeper’s, but only to go and look. She could not tell whether he had read the seventh before he wrote it. The dates would allow it, and the sentence did not need it. Nobody in the Albemarle had ever been below stairs before. Mr. Wray would say, she supposed, that the Warden had caught the Mortimers’ complaint, and would find a disease of the lower orders to compare it to. She did not care what Mr. Wray said. She sat in the cold with the Warden in his kitchen, and was nearer to being happy than she had been since Bread Street, and that she did not trust it in the least.
For she knew the man who had written it.
She had not known that she knew it until she put the book down. Then it was there, all of it, as a sum is there when one stops adding and looks at the foot of the column. A gentleman on his own pavement, who had heard
her say that she read the Albemarle for the Warden, and had looked down into his own area, as though something there wanted his attention. I am told that the gentleman is not paid at all. She had taken it for Albemarle Street gossip; and so it was, but only one man in Albemarle Street could have known it without being paid to forget it. Then he is either a fool or very rich. And he had said, I believe he is both, without the least expectation of being believed; and she had taken it for a joke at some other man’s expense, because it had not occurred to her that a gentleman could say such a thing of himself on his own pavement, and mean it. And then Kit, at supper: a Mr. Kinross, who sits in the garden of an afternoon marking his books with a pencil. Nobody marks a magazine in pencil but the man who must answer for it. And the thing folded back under the pencil, on the bench in August, had been, she would have laid money on it now, her own fourth number; for somebody had told Mr. Wray where the railings went, and she had seen that long face shut when she said so.
She did not want it to be true. She went over it as she would have gone over a bill that came to more than she expected, item by item; and every item was correct, and the total was the Warden of the Marches, who had stood on his own pavement in Grosvenor Square and defended the Mortimers to her with more warmth than anybody had ever spent on them, and who did not know who she was.
That was the only comfort in it, and she held on to it. He did not know who she was. He knew a young person who had come about a place and had not taken it; he knew her boots, which half Grosvenor Square knew by now; and he knew a sentence she had not finished. He did not know that the Mortimers had a name, or that the name was Lydiard, or that the Lydiards lived two pair of stairs up over a law-stationer’s in Salisbury Square, where a man who sat in the Temple garden might have thrown a stone and hit them, if he had been the kind of man who threw stones.
The ninth number lay in the drawer, finished, nine days before it was wanted. She took it out. She read it through to the last leaf but one, where Miss Mortimer walks in St. James’s Park with her maid on a December morning, to be out of the house while the housekeeper’s book is gone over; and she sat for a long while with the pen, while the candle went down; and then she wrote in, between the maid’s chilblains and the water, a single sentence, and did not cross it out.
By the water a gentleman stood marking a magazine in pencil, with the look of a man who is quite certain that nobody is reading him.
She put him in St. James’s Park because she would not put him in the Temple. The Temple would have had him in a sentence: Mr. Pelham by the Saturday, the garden by the Monday, and Lord Ashcombe by the soup; and she did not choose that anybody in London should have him from her. In St. James’s Park he was nobody, and every gentleman in town had a magazine. Only one reader would know the pencil.
She did not ask herself why she had written it. She knew, as she generally knew things, to the farthing; and she did not choose to add it up.
Mr. Kinross was in Albemarle Street by eight, as on the first of every month; and Mr. Radcliffe had the sale for him on a half-sheet by the door, as on the first of every month, and gave it in the same voice. It was down forty on November.
“The kitchen,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “I told you.”
“You told me twenty pounds.”
“I told you more than twenty pounds, and I was right.”
Twenty pounds. Mr. Kinross had heard the sum lately in another voice, on his own pavement, and it had stopped short before the end, as though it had heard itself. He put that away with the rest, and noticed that the place where he put such things was getting full.
Mr. Radcliffe put the half-sheet under the inkstand. “There are letters. Two clergymen have written to say that a Warden of the March would never have gone into a kitchen, and a lady in Clapham to say that she is glad he did, and will he now go into the nursery. I have answered none of them. My successor may answer them all. Have you found him?”
“No.”
“You have three weeks and three days.” Mr. Radcliffe took up his hat, which he did not need, since he was not going anywhere yet. “The Ludgate is on the table. Baldock has had it printed after all. I do not know how, and I do not ask.”
Mr. Kinross read the eighth number of the Mortimers standing at the window with his hat still on, as Mr. Radcliffe read things for the price. He had read every number since May. He had read the last three in a manner he would not have liked to describe to anybody: the seventh twice at a sitting, on the first of November, and again at night, by the library fire, with the door shut. And he had not known, until his hand went out to the table that
morning before his hat was off, that he had been waiting a month for the eighth.
He found the sentence near the end, and knew it at once, because it had his own words in it.
He read it again. He had written, on a night in September, with more pleasure than he had felt in a sentence for a year, that the women of the March mended what their lords broke, for nothing at all; and he had thought it the truest thing in the Warden, and the kindest, and had been a little proud of the kindness. And the Author of the Mortimers had read it, and had gone to the housekeeper’s book, and had sent him in the account.
It was perfectly just. It was so exactly just that he laughed aloud, in Mr. Radcliffe’s front office, at a quarter past eight in the morning, which nobody in that office had ever heard him do; and Mr. Radcliffe, at the desk with his hat, looked up, and considered him with interest, and then looked down again and wrote something in the margin of the letter from Clapham.
He went out into Albemarle Street with the Ludgate under his arm, which he had not meant to take, and stood on the step in the frost; and he thought, as he had thought at some hour of every day for a fortnight, of a young person in mended boots who had stood under his coal-plate and looked up.
He had not meant to think of her. He was not a man who thought about young persons; he had been told so by his aunt, at intervals, as one tells a man that his house wants painting. But he had found, since the fifteenth of November, when she stood on his pavement in the dusk and talked to him of railings, that a great many things led to her. Boots led to her, and he looked at them now in the street as other men look at faces. The Albemarle led to her, since she read it for one sentence, and he had not yet discovered which. His own area led to her, so that he could not go up his own steps without looking down into it; and the somebody who kept the account led to her this morning, by a road he could not have mapped. Mrs. Pratt said that she had lied, and Mrs. Pratt, who had not known how to spell fricassee, was a judge of lying. She had lied about her letters. She had very likely lied about the rest of it; and there was one place in London where the rest of it could be had for the asking.
Fenwick had given him the direction on the Monday, and had not asked why it was wanted.
The register-office was in Oxford Street, over a staymaker’s, up a stair that smelt of wet umbrellas: a long room with a fire at one end and a bench down one side, on which six
young women sat in their best bonnets with their characters in their laps, and looked at him as he came in, and then, as one, at the floor. At the other end, behind a table and a large book, sat a stout woman in a cap with a pen behind her ear, who looked at him and did not look at the floor at all.
“Mr. Kinross’s,” she said, before he had given his name. “Your butler wrote to say you might call, and he writes a very good hand. Grosvenor Square, north side. Kitchen-maid, fourteen guineas, tea and sugar found.” She opened the book and turned back through it, wetting her thumb. “Entered on the Tuesday, the fifth of October, in the morning. We sent Sarah Pike on the Thursday, and she cried. We sent Ann Rudd on the Saturday, and Mrs. Pratt sent her back. We sent two more in the week after, and the place is filled since the twentieth of November by a girl from Uxbridge that Mrs. Pratt found for herself, which I don’t hold against her.”
“And on the Tuesday?”
“The Tuesday, sir?”
“The fifth. A young person came to my house on the Tuesday afternoon, about the place, and was taken below.”
The woman put her finger on the page, and ran it down, and ran it down again; and then she shut the book, which made a sound in that room like a door.
“Nobody on the Tuesday, sir. The place wasn’t on the book till eleven, and I’d nobody fit to send till the Thursday.”
“Then who was she?”
“Not one of mine.” She said it without the least uncertainty. “Mine come with their characters in their pockets, and I know every one of them by the time they’ve sat on that bench a week. If there was a young person at your door on the Tuesday, sir, nobody sent her.” She looked at him over the book with a kind of professional pity. “Whoever she was, she sent herself.”
He went down the stair that smelt of umbrellas and out into Oxford Street, and stood on the pavement among the carts.
She had not come for the place. She had sent herself down his area steps, unasked and in her own boots, to stand under his coal-plate and look up; and the seventh number of the Mortimers, in which a kitchen-maid stood under a coal-plate and looked up, had come out on the first of November. Nobody wanted a kitchen seen from below but the person who meant to write one.
He knew what that meant. He had known it, after a fashion, since the afternoon in November when he wrote three words on a slip at the Temple and did not strike them out; and he stood in Oxford Street with the slip in his
pocket-book, where he had carried it since he took it out of his drawer at the Temple a fortnight before, and found that he would go a long way round rather than take it out. For if she had gone and looked for herself, then the best thing in London was being written in boots mended at the toe, by a young woman whom he had taken for a kitchen-maid on his own pavement and asked what her place paid; and he had a great deal more to answer for than a margin.
So he went round. He told himself that she had gone and looked on the Author’s behalf: that the Author, whoever he was, had somebody to go and look for him, a clerk, a wife, any woman who went and looked for a man. It was not a good argument. It was a Temple argument, and he knew it for one, and held on to it, because it let him walk. And he found, between a dray and a hackney-coach, that what it let him walk into was worse; for he did not know what she was to the Author, and he minded it extremely; and since he had never in his life minded what any woman was to any man, and had supposed himself as incapable of it as some men are of whistling, he was so much astonished that he walked as far as the Pantheon before he remembered that he had meant to take a coach.
For a fortnight after that Mr. Kinross was on his own pavement at half past three on most afternoons, for reasons that he gave himself with great clearness and did not examine: a letter to post, the light, the frost on the railings, which wanted looking at. Nobody came along the north side at half past three but the people who came to look at the railings, and the muffin-man with his bell. And on the ninth afternoon the kitchen window went up under his feet.
“She’ll not come, sir,” said Mrs. Pratt, to the railings. “Not a third time. Not that one.”
The window went down again before he could ask her how she knew; which was as well, since he could not have asked it without admitting the question.
By Friday the tenth Mr. Baldock’s house was half in crates.
Clemency came up the stairs at nine with the ninth number under her cloak, and found the front office stripped to its shelves and the shelves to their dust, and Mr. Baldock sitting in the middle of it at the one desk that was going with him, among thirty years of the Ludgate tied up in string by the year, like a man sitting among his own tombstones and finding them, on the whole, well cut.
“Twelve guineas,” he said. “To the Author, on delivery. It is the last time I shall say it in this room, and I find I have grown attached to the sentence.”
He counted it out on the desk, and did not ask her to count it after him, and she did not. “There will be a Ludgate on the first of January. Tuckett will print it on condition that he is paid before he sets a line, which is the first time in my life that I have paid a printer before he did anything whatever; and he was so much affected that he asked to have it in writing.”
“And after January?”
“After January there will be a Ludgate when I have a house to put it in.” He took off his spectacles, and looked at them, and put them on again, which was not his way of changing the subject but of declining to. “They are making a law at Westminster this fortnight by which every man who publishes anything cheap and often is to find sureties for his good behaviour, like a drunken man before the magistrates. The Ludgate comes out too seldom to be caught by it. It is the first advantage I have ever found in being monthly.”
He weighed the ninth number in his hand, as he always did; and then he opened it at the first leaf and looked at it for a moment without reading it, and shut it again.
“I shall not read it here,” he said. “I shall read it in proof, at home, on Sunday, with my feet on the fender. I have never done that with a number of the Ludgate. I was always reading the next.” He put it in the drawer, and did not lock the drawer, since there would shortly be nothing in the house worth locking. “Radcliffe has your terms.”
“And?”
“He takes them. Twelve guineas, no name, the tenth of every month. He has underlined the fourth.” Mr. Baldock found the letter, and gave it to her across the desk. “He says that he has never in five-and-twenty years had a contributor who would not dine, and that he looks forward to the novelty. He would like the February number, and he asks for the Author’s answer by the tenth of January.”
Clemency read it. It was very short, and it did not waste anything, and at the end of it, below the signature, in the same small commercial hand, Mr. Radcliffe had written: The Author’s eighth was worth the twelve. She gave it back.
“The Author is considering it.”
“The Author has a month.” Mr. Baldock folded the letter into his pocket-book. “Gedge will be here at ten for the copy. You need not stay for him.”
But she stayed; and Gedge came at ten, with his hat in his hand and a Methodist’s opinion of crates, and bowed to the lady by the window, as he always did, without asking who she was; and took the ninth number away under his coat to be set, with a sentence in it about a gentleman by the
water, which he would set, she supposed, as he set everything, letter by letter, in the order in which it came, without the least idea that it had been written for anybody.
Mr. Baldock walked down the stairs with her.
“The back-room door,” he said, at the foot of them, “still does not shut. I have told the landlord so. It is the only thing in this house that I shall leave him with pleasure.”
She went home by Ludgate Hill with twelve pounds twelve shillings in her stocking-purse, of which twelve pounds would go to the landlord at Lady Day, now that Christmas was in hand, and twelve shillings to the coal-merchant on the Saturday; and she was a little ashamed of how little it now surprised her to carry it.
On the Tuesday night, which was the night before the dinner, Kit woke at one o’clock and could not tell why, and lay listening; and then he knew why, because there was a line of light under the back-room door, and he had seen it there before.
He had seen it a good many times since the summer. He had told himself that it was letters to Bread Street, and then that it was accounts, and then, in October, that it was nothing that concerned him; and he had very nearly believed the last, because Kit could believe almost anything that let him go back to sleep. Tonight it was colder than it had been all the winter, and the frost had got into the passage and was standing on the inside of the window at the end of it; and he got up, in his stockings, and took his greatcoat off the nail, and went in.
She was not writing. She was sitting with the pen laid down and both hands round the candle, as one holds a cup; and she looked up at him with a face that he had never seen on her, which was the face of somebody who has been caught being happy and is ready to deny it.
Kit put the greatcoat round her shoulders without a word. It smelt of the Temple: of sea-coal and ink and the river, and of Mr. Pelham’s snuff, which got into everything. She did not take it off.
“Pelham says it’ll freeze hard by Christmas,” said Kit. “He says the river will go above the bridge.”
“Does he?”
“He’s generally wrong.” Kit looked at the desk, and at the paper on it, which was face down, and at the second finger of her right hand, which had ink on it, as his own had; and he looked away again, at the frost on the window. He had wanted since he was twelve years old to be the one in the family who knew things first. He found, standing in the doorway of the
back room at one o’clock in the morning in his stockings, that there was one thing he would rather be told than find out; and he went back to bed without asking it, which was the hardest thing he had done since he was twelve, and for which nobody would ever thank him, because nobody would ever know.
She sat in his coat until the candle was out.
The turtle arrived in Grosvenor Square at seven o’clock on the morning of the fifteenth, from a West India ship in the river by way of a dealer in the City, in a cart, and alive; and at a quarter to eight, when Mr. Kinross came out on his steps, it was on his pavement, going east along his railings at the pace of a creature that has been told it is to be dinner and has not agreed, with one of Lord Ashcombe’s footmen walking behind it, uncertain of the etiquette.
Mr. Kinross, who had been waiting a fortnight for somebody to come along his railings, stood back and let it pass.
They were five at table that evening: his lordship at the head, with Mr. Hindley, his Mortimers, on his right hand, and Mr. Dalgleish, his Warden, on his left, as he had planned it since October; Mr. Tillotson at the foot, with the Albemarle and the Ludgate beside his plate, marked with slips of paper like briefs at the assizes; and Mr. Kinross a little down the side on which Mr. Dalgleish sat, where he could see both of them without being looked at, to make up the table and say nothing.
Mr. Dalgleish was pinker than in October, and more resigned. He had the look of a man who has been accused of a crime so often that he has begun to take an interest in the particulars. Mr. Hindley had a new coat, which did not yet fit him across the shoulders and had very likely not been paid for, and the twice-soled boots, which no coat could have hidden; and he had got rid of his cold and kept his voice, and he played it on his lordship, who liked it, like a good instrument hired for the evening.
They had the turtle.
“Turtle,” said his lordship, “is the only soup in which a man may be certain what he is getting. Tillotson, that is a thing Froissart might have said.”
Mr. Tillotson believed that Froissart had said something very like it.
Mr. Kinross, who had met the turtle that morning and had liked it, did not care for the soup.
“Now,” said his lordship, when the plates had gone round, “I have had a notion since October, and I mean to have it out before the fish. Every man who writes a book knows what he meant by it, and will not tell you. Very well. I shall not ask him. I shall ask the other fellow. Dalgleish, you shall tell me what Hindley means,
and Hindley, you shall tell me what Dalgleish means; and Kinross shall hear you both, and say nothing, and tell me afterwards which of you was lying. Tillotson, the Albemarle. The twelfth. The place I marked.”
Mr. Tillotson found the place, and read it, in the voice in which he read the lessons; and Mr. Kinross heard his own sentence go round Lord Ashcombe’s table, not for the first time, past the salt and the epergne, to the end, where the women of the March mended what their lords broke, for nothing at all.
“There, Hindley,” said his lordship. “For nothing at all. What does he mean by it?”
Mr. Hindley had come prepared, Mr. Kinross saw, for a good many things that evening, but not for this; and he looked at his soup, and then across the table at Mr. Dalgleish; and then he put down his spoon.
“I’m a plain man, my lord,” he said, “and I’ll tell you plain. He means it kindly, and he’s wrong. Nothing’s mended for nothing. I’ve been in a mill since I was twelve years old. Somebody mends it, and somebody’s paid, or somebody’s owed; and if nobody’s paid, there’s a book somewhere with the debt in it, and it’ll come in.” He was quite serious. It was the first thing he had said all evening, Mr. Kinross thought, in his own voice and not in the hired one. “In my trade a thing’s paid on delivery, or it isn’t paid at all.”
Mr. Kinross felt something that was like a stair missed in the dark: a small drop, with nothing under it, and the foot coming down again on the next step before the mind has understood that there was a step to miss. He did not know what it was. He looked at Mr. Hindley, and Mr. Hindley was looking at his lordship.
“There, Dalgleish!” His lordship was delighted. “He has answered you out of the counting-house. Now defend yourself.”
“I am a conveyancer, my lord,” said Mr. Dalgleish unhappily.
“Then defend yourself as a conveyancer.”
Mr. Dalgleish considered the sentence, which was not his, with the gravity of a man who has been handed another man’s deed and told to find the flaw in it before the fish; and Mr. Kinross, watching him, was ashamed, as he had been ashamed in October, and could do nothing about it, as he had done nothing then.
“I can only say,” said Mr. Dalgleish at last, “that if a thing is done for nothing at all, it is a voluntary conveyance, and good between the parties. But it may be set aside by the creditors.”
Mr. Hindley took up his spoon again, and put it down. Nobody noticed it but Mr. Kinross, who had spent a
month noticing things that nobody noticed, and did not yet know what to do with them.
“Set aside by the creditors!” His lordship repeated it with relish, as a phrase he meant to keep. “Now the other. Tillotson, the Ludgate. Find me something.”
“There is no need to look far, my lord,” said Mr. Tillotson, who had found it on the Tuesday and had been waiting ever since to be asked. “The Mortimers have the very words. For nothing at all. At the end of the eighth number.”
“The very words?” His lordship looked from one side of his table to the other, and was enchanted. “Then they write to each other! Dalgleish, Hindley, you are in correspondence, the pair of you, in the public prints, and you never said a word of it to me. Read it, Tillotson.”
Mr. Dalgleish and Mr. Hindley looked at each other across the table, as two men look who have just been told that they are cousins; and Mr. Tillotson read the sentence about Mr. Mortimer and the housekeeper’s book; and Mr. Kinross, who knew it by heart, and had laughed at it aloud in Albemarle Street, sat with his hands in his lap and heard it read in a chaplain’s voice at a peer’s table, and thought that it was the best answer he had ever been given, and that he did not know to whom he owed it.
“Dalgleish,” said his lordship. “What does Hindley mean?”
“If the account was rendered, my lord,” said Mr. Dalgleish, who had found his feet, “and Mr. Mortimer did not object to it within a reasonable time, it would be an account stated, and he would be bound by it.”
“Bound! Hindley, do you hear? He says you have bound the Warden.”
“That’s what I meant, my lord,” said Mr. Hindley, in the hired voice again, and very comfortably. “The account comes in. It always does. And I’ll tell your lordship something about that number that’s not in it.” He leaned back. “It was paid for. Twelve guineas, on the tenth, on delivery, and not a day’s credit asked or given. There’s not three literary men in London can say as much.”
His lordship laughed, and said that there was not one; and the fish came in.
It pays on delivery.
He heard it in her voice, on his own pavement, in the dusk, with an onion coming up out of the area and a barouche going round the Square for the third time: It pays on delivery. — On delivery of what? — Of whatever is wanted, sir, on the day it is wanted.
Mr. Kinross understood, between the turtle and the fish, that he had been told.
He had been told on his own pavement, a month before, by a young woman in mended boots, what the Mortimers paid and when; and he had not heard it, because his cook had told him she was a kitchen-maid, and a kitchen-maid’s place does not pay on delivery. A place in the City. It is not a quiet one. Paternoster Row was not quiet. Twelve guineas, on the tenth: on the day it is wanted. She had given him the terms. She had given them to his face, in the voice in which she might have given him the price of coals, and then she had curtseyed to his cook and gone away along the north side at the pace of a woman walking a little ahead of weather; and he had stood on his pavement and supposed that she belonged to somebody.
She belonged to nobody. There was no Author on whose behalf she had gone and looked. There was a young woman who had wanted to see a kitchen from below, and had gone down eleven steps in Grosvenor Square to see it, because that was the only way to know; who had priced his book to the pound on his own pavement, because she priced everything, and the price was the whole of her art; and who had sent him in the account. She was paid twelve guineas on the tenth, and she went in boots mended at the toe; and he had not been able to put the two together, because nobody had ever sent him the bill. He had spent a fortnight jealous of a man who did not exist, because it was easier than the truth; and the truth had come in with the fish. And he found, now that the man had gone, that he was not relieved, as he would have expected, but frightened, which he would not.
He looked at his plate. The fish had come, and he did not know what it was. He was aware of his hands, which were not perfectly steady, and he put them under the table.
“Kinross!” said his lordship. “You’re very quiet. Quieter than common, which I’d not have thought it possible to be.”
“I was thinking of the turtle, sir,” said Mr. Kinross. “I believe we had met.”
This was a great success. His lordship had the whole story out of him, and then told it himself, better: how the creature had got clean out of the cart, and gone along the north side as if it had read the seventh number of the Mortimers and meant to see the railings for itself; and Mr. Hindley laughed, in the hired voice, and Mr. Tillotson laughed because his lordship had, and Mr. Dalgleish laughed with the particular relief of a man who has heard a joke that has nothing to do with him. Mr. Kinross ate a little of the fish. It was turbot, he discovered later.
At the time it might have been anything.
“And on the tenth of January,” said his lordship, warming to his evening, “I shall be in the Row at nine o’clock in the morning to see it delivered. I have never seen a book delivered. I have seen a calf. Hindley, you shall not deliver without me.”
Mr. Hindley’s face did not change. But Mr. Kinross, who had begun that evening to look at faces as he had lately looked at boots, saw that it was the face of a man who has been told that the bailiffs will dine with him; and he saw, which was worse, what would come up a publisher’s stairs in the Row at nine o’clock on the tenth of January, Baldock’s if Baldock still had stairs, or Baldwin’s if Radcliffe had his way, with the number under its cloak, and find a peer of the realm on the landing, and Mr. Tillotson with him, and Mr. Hindley, white, between them.
“I could accompany your lordship,” said Mr. Tillotson.
“If you go to the Row at nine on the tenth, sir,” said Mr. Kinross, “Mr. Wray will have it by noon.”
His lordship stopped with his glass half-way.
“Wray?”
“He has friends in every coffee-house in the Row.” Mr. Kinross did not look at Mr. Hindley. He did not look at anybody. He said it to the epergne, in his dry Scotch voice, without any expression at all. “A peer on a publisher’s stair at nine in the morning, waiting for a parcel, will be all over town by night. I think he would call it Waiting on the Mortimers.”
He did not know whether it was true. It was the first thing he had said at a dinner-table in his life without knowing whether it was true, and he found that he did not mind at all.
“The puppy!” His lordship put down his glass. “He would, too. He would make a paragraph of it, and the town would have it with its breakfast.” He looked down the table with great indignation at the place where Mr. Wray would have been sitting if Mr. Wray had ever been asked. “No. No, we shall not give him the satisfaction. Hindley, you shall deliver without me, and I shall hear of it afterwards, which is how a gentleman hears of most things. Kinross, I am obliged to you. You don’t say much, but when you do, it’s to the purpose.”
Mr. Hindley drank off his wine. Then he looked across the table at Mr. Kinross, with his small shrewd eyes, and did not look away.
They had the mutton, and Froissart with it; and after the cloth was drawn his lordship gave them the King, and then, because it was nearly Christmas, Mr. Dalgleish.
“I gave you till Christmas, Dalgleish,” he said, with great affection, “and you have ten days.”
“I am a conveyancer, my lord.”
“So you are. So you are.” His lordship passed the port. “Well, Kinross? You have heard them both. Which of them was lying?”
Mr. Kinross looked at Mr. Dalgleish, who could not be corrected without being confessed, and at Mr. Hindley, who could not be confessed without being ruined, and at the decanter, which was between them.
“Neither of them, sir,” he said, “about anything he knew.”
His lordship was enchanted. He said that it was diplomatic, and that Kinross should have gone to Vienna, and he said it again to Mr. Tillotson, who had heard it the first time; and the evening went on, as Lord Ashcombe’s evenings did, until eleven, when it stopped.
In the hall, while the footmen looked for the hats, Mr. Hindley came and stood by him.
“You’ll not give me away, Mr. Kinross.”
It was not a question, and it was said in his own voice, low, so that it did not reach the footmen.
“I have nothing to give.”
“You’ve something. I’ve watched you since the fish.” Mr. Hindley took his hat from the footman and looked into it, as though he expected to find something there. “There’s a house in Mosley Street that’s been in my family sixty year, and it’ll not see Lady Day in it without help. A lord’s table at Christmas is worth a thousand pound of credit to a house like ours; a lord’s table as a literary man is worth two. I never said I wrote them. I said to Baldock I’d not said I wasn’t, which in Mosley Street is a different thing; and then his lordship said it for me, and I let him.” He put the hat on. “I’m a plain man. That’s all it was.”
“Then deliver nothing,” said Mr. Kinross, “and do not go looking for whoever does.”
Mr. Hindley looked at him for a long moment, from under the hat.
“I’ve a notion, Mr. Kinross,” he said, “that you’ve a notion.”
And he went out into the frost, in his twice-soled boots, and walked away across the Square towards Oxford Street, since he had given up hackney-coaches for the quarter, and did not look back.
Mr. Kinross, watching him go, understood that he had just shown the one man in London who must not see it that he cared who was found.
He did not go up his own steps. He stood on Lord Ashcombe’s pavement until Mr. Hindley had gone round the corner, with the frost settling on his
hat; and then he turned east, which was the way she had gone, and walked.
He went down Mount Street, past the public-house and the workhouse and the dark areas of a great many houses that were not elegant, and looked down into every one of them; and through Berkeley Square, where the frost lay on the grass of the garden like something spilt, and out into Piccadilly, with the Green Park black on the other side of it. He looked, as he went, at doorsteps and area gates, and at the boots of the people he passed, which at that hour were mostly watchmen’s. He was not looking for her. She was not in Piccadilly at midnight. He was looking at what she had looked at, which was the only thing he could do.
He passed the end of Albemarle Street, and did not turn his head; and he was half-way to the Haymarket before he noticed that he had not, and that for the first time in a twelvemonth he had gone by it without a thought of the Warden.
At the top of the Haymarket a line of verse came into his head, which he had not asked for and did not want.
He knew where it came from: from a lord who had since gone to Italy. It had been sung at Mr. Kinross, to Mr. Nathan’s music and by his aunt’s arrangement, at a succession of pianofortes, until he could not hear the first line without wishing to leave the room. He had even been present at its occasion, in the summer of the year fourteen: a party at which a Mrs. Wilmot came in late, in black with spangles on it, and the lord went home, the town said, and wrote the lines in the morning. Mr. Kinross had thought the lines very good, and the lady very handsome, and the connexion between them a little too good to be true.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
He said it aloud at the corner of Cockspur Street; and a watchman in a box there, who had not been asleep, put out his lantern and his head together and said, “Past twelve o’clock, and a frosty night,” with great severity, to a gentleman who had dined.
Mr. Kinross agreed that it was.
He had not looked at her eyes. He would have said so on his pavement; and he went over it under King Charles at Charing Cross. He had looked at them a great deal, without knowing it, and could see them now more clearly than the lamps.
They were green. He would have said grey, if he had been asked, and been wrong: a pale, clear green, ringed with dark, like the river at the Temple stairs when the sun is on it. They had been doing a sum the whole time
she talked to him, steadily and without hurry; they had gone up once, when she spoke of the strip of sky with the railings across it, as though the sky were there above the area and she could see it; and they had come out at the foot of the sum once, when she laughed, all at once, as if it had come out right and she had not expected it to. He had seen Mrs. Wilmot’s eyes in the summer of the year fourteen, and everybody had said that they were fine, and so they were; but they had looked at a room to see who was looking at them. They had not been extraordinary, and these were. These had looked at his pavement to see what it cost, and who had paid, and whether the sky came into it; and they had looked at him as at a sum not quite finished, that she might come back to.
He considered, going down the Strand, whether she was beautiful; and she was; and the poem, he thought, had been reaching past the lady in the spangles, as poems will, for something that was not in the room.
It came to him outside Exeter Change, with the beasts asleep in the menagerie over the shops, that he was in love. He had never been in love, and had a low opinion of the condition as poets described it; and he examined it all the way to Somerset House, like a disputed reading, and could find nothing wrong with it except that he did not know the lady’s name.
Since he was one-and-twenty his aunt had put a great many young women of intellect in his way, and he had not been able to love one of them, and had concluded, with her, that the fault was in him. It was in him; but it was that he could not love a mind put on for company, like a gown, and had been waiting all those years, without knowing it, for one that did not care whether anybody saw it. An unpretending intellect: the rarest thing in London, and the one he had supposed, until that evening, that he possessed himself, alone, in Albemarle Street, unsigned. It was the first time it had ever occurred to him that this was a vanity.
She had none. She had written eight numbers of the best thing in London and let a cotton-man dine on them. She had come down his area steps in her own boots, to know, and gone up them again without a word to anybody. He had written, on a bench in August, that she was competent; and he thought of the word, going by St. Mary’s, and was ashamed of it.
The line came back to him there, uninvited, like a tune from a barrel-organ two streets off; and he had stopped wishing to leave the room.
He meant to marry her. That came to him under the tower of St. Clement’s, and it was not a discovery
but a fact, like the river behind the houses, going down in the dark to the sea whether anybody looked at it or not. He thought it very unlikely that she would have him. It made no difference whatever.
And she must be kept from all of them: from his lordship, waiting on a stair to see a calf delivered; from Mr. Wray, who would make a paragraph of her; from Mr. Hindley, who had a notion; and from his aunt. She had kept her name from London for eight months. He would not be the man who gave it away.
He could have asked. Mr. Baldock knew; Radcliffe, by February, would very likely know. He would ask neither of them. To ask was to tell. Baldock would refuse him, and Radcliffe would keep it, as he kept everything; and both would know that somebody wanted to know, and so, within the week, would she. He would do as she had done with his kitchen. He would go and look.
He came to Temple Bar a few minutes before one, and stood under it, where Westminster stops and the City begins; and up the street, on St. Dunstan’s clock, the two giants lifted their clubs and struck one.
Fleet Street went away from him eastward in its double row of lamps, down to the dark at the bottom where the Fleet ran under it, and up again to Ludgate and St. Paul’s: courts and alleys on either hand, and printers and law-stationers and coffee-houses, and lodgings over shops, and not one window lit that he could see. She was somewhere east of where he stood, in a place that was not a quiet one, asleep, or not asleep; and she did not know that anybody in London was looking for her.
He did not know her name. He knew the price of her boots, and the colour of her eyes, and that she could read a slate upside down across a kitchen table. It was not much to go on. It was a good deal more than she had had of him in October; and she had gone and looked.
(To be continued.)
Edited by Michael Cummins. Written in full collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude models, and set here as it might have appeared in a London magazine of 1820, with its rules turned in mourning for the King. Read the announcement, with the plan of London.
