Miranda of the Balcony: A Story

by A. E. W. Mason

CHAPTER XII

[THE HERO, LIKE ALL HEROES, FINDS HIMSELF IN A FOG]

At eight o'clock the next morning Charnock was crushing the remainder of his clothes into a portmanteau. A couple of corded trunks stood ready for the porters, while the manager of the line sat in the window overlooking Algeciras Bay, and gave him gratuitous advice as to totally different and very superior methods of packing.

The manager suddenly rose to his feet.

"Here's the P. and O. coming into the bay," he said. "Man, but you have very little time. I'm thinking you'll miss it."

Charnock raised a flushed face from his portmanteau, and so wasted a few seconds. He made no effort to catch them up.

"I'm thinking, too, you would not be very sorry to miss it," continued the manager, sagely. "Though what charms you can discover in Algeciras, it's beyond my powers to comprehend."

Charnock did not controvert or explain the manager's supposition. He continued to pack, but perhaps a trifle more slowly than before.

"You have got my address, Macdonald?" he said. "You won't lose it, will you?"

He shut up the portmanteau and knelt upon it.

"You will forward everything that comes--everything without fail?" he insisted.

"In all human probability," returned Macdonald, "I will forward nothing at all. For I am thinking you will lose the boat."

There was a knock on the door; Charnock's servant brought in a letter. The letter lay upon its face, and the sealed back of the envelope had an official look.

"Open it, will you, Macdonald?" said Charnock, as he fastened the straps. "Well, what's it about?"

"I cannot tell. It's written in a dialect I do not understand," said the manager, gravely, and Charnock, turning about, saw that he dangled and deliberated upon a long white kid glove.

Charnock jumped up and snatched it away.

"It's a female's," said the manager, sagely.

"It's a woman's," returned Charnock, with indignation.

"You are very young," observed Macdonald. "And I'll point out to you that you have torn your letter."

Charnock was turning the glove over, and showed the palm at that moment. He smiled, but made no answer. He folded the glove, wrapped it in its envelope, took it out again, and smoothed its creases. Then he folded it once more, held it for a little balanced on his hand, and finally replaced it in the envelope and hid the envelope in his pocket.

"Man, but you are very young," remarked Macdonald, "and I'm thinking that you'll lose--"

"There's a train to Ronda pretty soon?" interrupted Charnock.

"There is," replied Macdonald, drily, "and I'll be particular to mind your address, and forward everything that comes. Eh, but you have paid your passage on the P. and O."

Charnock, in spite of that argument, took his seat in the train for Ronda, and travelled up through the forest of cork trees whose foliage split the sunshine, making here a shade, there an alley of light. The foresters were at work stripping the trunks of their bark, and Charnock was in a mood to make parables of the world, so long as they fitted in with and exemplified his own particular purposes and plans. He himself was a forester, and the rough bark he was stripping was Miranda's distress, so it is to be supposed that the bare tree-trunk was Miranda herself; and, to be sure, what simile could be more elegant?

Charnock's dominant feeling, indeed, was one of elation. The message of his mirror was being fulfilled. He had the glove in his pocket to assure him of that, and the feel of the glove, of its delicate kid between his strong fingers, pleased him beyond measure. For it seemed appropriate and expressive of her, and he hoped that the strength of his fingers was expressive of himself. But beyond that, it was a call, a challenge to his chivalry, which up till now, through all his years, had never once been called upon and challenged; and therein lay the true cause of his elation.

The train swept out of the cork forest, and the great grass slopes stretched upwards at the side of the track, dotted with white villages, seamed with rocks. Charnock fell to marvelling at the apt moment of the summons. Just when his work was done, when his mind and his body were free, the glove had come to him. If it had come by a later post on that same day, he would have been on his way to England. But it had not; it had come confederate with the hour of its coming.

The train passed into the gorge of tunnels, climbing towards Ronda. He was not forgetful that he was summoned to help Miranda out of a danger perhaps, certainly out of a great misfortune. But he had never had a doubt that the misfortune from some quarter, and at some time, would fall. She had allowed him on the balcony in St. James's Park to understand that she herself expected it. He knew, too, that it must be some quite unusual misfortune. For had she not herself said, with a complete comprehension of what she said, "If I have troubles I must fight them through myself"? He had been prepared then for the troubles, and he was rejoiced that after all they were of a kind wherein his service could be of use.

At the head of the gorge he caught his first view of Ronda, balanced aloft upon its dark pinnacle of rock. It was mid-day, and the sun tinged with gold the white Spanish houses and the old brown mansions of the Moors; and over all was a blue arch of sky, brilliant and cloudless. At that distance and in that clear light, Ronda seemed one piece of ivory, exquisitely carved and tinted, and then exquisitely mounted on a black pedestal. Charnock was not troubled with any of Lady Donnisthorpe's perplexities as to why Miranda persisted in making that town her home. To him it seemed the only place where she could live, since it alone could fitly enshrine her.

The train wound up the incline at the back of the town and steamed into the station. Charnock drove thence to the hotel in the square near the bull-ring, lunched, and asked his way to Mrs. Warriner's house. He stood for a while looking at the blank yellow wall which gave on to the street, and the heavy door of walnut wood.

For the first time he began to ponder what was the nature of the peril in which Miranda stood. His speculations were of no particular value, but the fact that he speculated at this spot, opposite the house, opposite the door, was. For, quite unconsciously, his eyes took an impression of the geometrical arrangement of the copper nails with which it was encrusted, or rather sought to take such an impression. For the geometrical figures were so intricate in their involutions that the eyes were continually baffled and continually provoked. Charnock was thus absently searching for the key to their inter-twistings when he walked across the road and knocked. He was conducted through the patio. He was shown into the small dark-panelled parlour which overlooked the valley. The door was closed upon him; the room was empty. A book lay open upon the table before the window. Charnock stood in front of this table looking out of the window across to the sierras; so that the book was just beneath his nose. He had but to drop his eyes and he would have read the title, and known the subject-matter, of the book, and perhaps taken note or some pencil lines scored in the margin against a passage here and there, for the book had been much in Miranda's hands these last few days. But he did not, for he heard a light step cross the patio outside and pause on the threshold of the door.

Charnock turned expectantly away from the table. The door, however, did not open, nor on the other hand were the footsteps heard to retreat. A woman then was standing, quite silent and quite motionless, on the other side of that shut door; and that woman, no doubt, was Miranda. Charnock was puzzled; he, too, stood silent and motionless, looking towards the door and wondering why she paused there and in what attitude she stood. For the seconds passed, and there must have been a lapse of quite two minutes between the moment when the footsteps ceased and the moment when the door was flung open.

For the door was flung open, noisily, violently, and with a great bustle of petticoats an unknown woman danced into the room humming a tune. She stopped with all the signs of amazement when she saw Charnock. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "why didn't they tell me?" She cast backwards over her shoulder that glance of the startled fawn which befits a solitary maid in the presence of a devouring man. Then she advanced timidly, lowered her eyes, and said: "So you have come to Ronda, then?"

This unknown woman had paused outside the door, yet she had swung into the room as though in a great hurry, and had been much surprised to see her visitor. Charnock was perplexed. Moreover, the unknown woman wore the semblance of Miranda. She was dressed in a white frock very elaborate with lace, he noticed; there was a shimmer of satin at her throat and waist, and to him who had not seen her for these months past, and who had thought of her as of one draped in black,--since thus only he had seen her,--she gleamed against the dark panels of the room, silvered and wonderful.

"So you have come to Ronda?" said she.

"Of course."

She held out her hand with a gingerly manner of timidity, and pressed his fingers when they touched hers, as though she could not help herself, and then hastily drew her hand away, as if she was ashamed and alarmed at her forwardness. Charnock could not but remember a frank, honest hand-clasp, with which she had bidden him goodbye in London.

"Is this your first visit to Ronda?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Sure?" She looked at him with her eyebrows raised and an arch glance of provocation. "Sure you have not come up once or twice just to see in what corner of the world I lived?"

"No; I have been busy."

Miranda shrugged her shoulders.

"I had no right to expect you would." She pushed out a foot in a polished shoe beyond the hem of her dress, contemplated it with great interest, and suddenly withdrew it with much circumstance of modesty. Then with an involuntary gesture of repugnance which Charnock did not understand, she went over to the window and stood looking out from it. From that position too she spoke.

"You promised that night, if you have not forgotten, at Lady Donnisthorpe's, on the balcony, to tell me about yourself, about those years you spent in Westminster." And Charnock broke in upon her speech in a voice of relief.

"I understand," said he.

"What?"

"You," he replied simply.

"Oh, I hope not," she returned; "for when a woman becomes intelligible to a man, he loses all--liking for her," and she spoke the word "liking" with extreme shyness as though there were a bolder word with which he might replace it if he chose. "Is not that the creed?"

"A false creed," said he, and her eyes fell upon the open book. She uttered a startled exclamation, threw a quick glance at Charnock, closed the book and covered it with a newspaper.

"Let us go into the garden," said she; "and you shall talk to me of those years in which I am most interested."

"That I can understand," said he, and she glanced at him sharply, suspiciously, but there was no sarcasm in his accent. He had hit upon an explanation of the change in her. She stood in peril, she needed help, and very likely help of a kind which implied resource, which involved danger. She knew nothing of him, nothing of his capacity. It was no more than natural that he should require to know and that she should sound his years for the knowledge, before she laid him under the obligation of doing her a service.

He sat down on the chair in which M. Fournier had sat only yesterday.

"It will sound very unfamiliar to you," he said with a laugh. "My father was vicar of a moorland parish on the hills above Brighouse in Yorkshire. There I lived until I was twelve, until my father died. He had nothing but the living, which was poor--the village schoolmaster, what with capitation grants, was a good deal better off--so that when he died, he died penniless. I was adopted by a maiden aunt who took me to her home, a little villa in the south suburbs of London of which the shutters had never been taken down from the front windows since she had come to live there three years before."

"Why?" asked Miranda, in surprise.

"She was eccentric," explained Charnock, with a smile, and he resumed. "Nor had the front door ever been opened. My aunt was afraid that visitors might call, and, as she truly said, the house was not yet in order. The furniture, partly unpacked, with wisps of straw about the legs of the chairs, was piled up in the uncarpeted rooms. For there was only a carpet down in one room, the room in which we lived, and since the room was in the front and the shutters were up, we lived in a perpetual twilight."

"But did the servants do nothing?" exclaimed Miranda.

"There were no servants," returned Charnock. "My aunt said that they hampered her independence. Consequently of course we made our meals of tinned meat and bottled stout, which we ate standing up by the kitchen table in the garden if it was fine. But wet or fine the kitchen table always stood in the garden."

Here Miranda began to laugh and Charnock joined with her.

"It was a quaint sort of life," said he, "but rather ghostly to a boy of twelve."

"But you went to school?"

"No, my schooldays were over. I just lived in the twilight of that house, and through the chinks of the shutters watched people passing in the street, and lay awake at night listening to the creak of the bare boards. The house was in a terrace, and since we went to bed as soon as it grew dark to save the gas, I could hear through the wall the sounds of people laughing and talking, sometimes too the voices of boys of my own age playing while I lay in bed. I used to like the noise at times; it was companionable and told me fairy stories of blazing firesides. At times, however, I hated it beyond words, and hated the boys who laughed and shouted while I lay in the dark amongst the ghostly piles of furniture."

Miranda was now quite serious, and Charnock, as he watched her, recognised in the woman who was listening, the woman he had talked with on the balcony over St. James's Park, and not the woman he had talked with five minutes since.

"Only to think of it," she exclaimed. "I was living then amongst the Suffolk meadows, and the great whispering elms of the Park, and I never knew." She spoke almost in a tone of self-reproach as she clasped her hands together on her knees. "I never knew!"

"Oh, but we had our dissipations," returned Charnock. "We dug potatoes in the garden, and sometimes we paid a visit to Marshall and Snelgrove."

"Marshall and Snelgrove!"

"Yes, those were gala days. My aunt would buy the best ready-made bodice in the shop, which she carried away with her. From Marshall and Snelgrove's we used to go to Verrey's restaurant, where we dined amongst mirrors and much gilding, and about nine o'clock we would travel back to our suburb, creep into the dark house by the back door, and go to bed without a light. Imagine that if you can, Mrs. Warriner. The clatter, the noise, the flowers, the lights, of the restaurant, men and women in evening dress, and just about the time when they were driving up to their theatres, these people, in whose company we had dined, we were creeping into the dark, close-shuttered villa of the bare boards, and groping our way through the passage without a light. I used to imagine that every room had a man hiding behind the door, and all night long I heard men in my room breathing stealthily. It was after one such night that I ran away."

"You ran away?"

"Yes, and hid myself in London. I picked up a living one way and another. It doesn't cost much to live when you are put to it. I sold newspapers. I ran errands--"

"You didn't carry a sandwich-board?" exclaimed Miranda, eagerly. "Say you didn't do that!"

"I didn't," replied Charnock, with some surprise at her eagerness. "They wouldn't have given a nipper like me a sandwich-board," and Miranda drew an unaccountable breath of relief. "Finally I became an office boy, and I was allowed by my employer to sleep in an empty house in one of the small streets at the back of Westminster Abbey. There weren't any carpets either in that house, but I was independent, you see, and I saved my lodging. I wasn't unhappy during those three years. I understood that very well, when I heard the big clock strike twelve again on Lady Donnisthorpe's balcony. It was the first time I had heard it since I lived in the empty house, and heard it every night, and the sound of it was very pleasant and friendly."

"Then you left London," said Miranda.

"After three years. I was a clerk then; I was seventeen, and I had ambitions which clerking didn't satisfy. I always had a hankering after machinery, and I used to teach myself drawing. The lessons, however, did not turn out very successful, when I put them to the test."

"What did you do?" asked Miranda.

"I went up North to Leeds. There's a firm of railway contractors and manufacturers of locomotives. Sir John Martin is the head partner, and I had seen him once or twice at my father's house, for he took and takes a great interest in the Yorkshire clergy."

"I see. You went to him and told him who you were," said Miranda, who inclined towards Charnock more and more from the interest which she took in a youth so entirely strange, and apart from her own up-bringing, just as he on his part had been from the first attracted to her by the secure traditional life of which she was the flower, of which he traced associations in her simplicity, and up to this day, at all events, her lack of affectations.

"No," replied Charnock, "it would have been wiser if I had done that; but I didn't. I changed my name, and applied for a vacancy as draughtsman. I obtained it, and held the post for three weeks. Why they suffered me for three weeks is still a mystery, for of course I couldn't draw at all. At the end of three weeks I was discharged. I asked to be taken on as anything at thirteen shillings a week. I saw Sir John Martin himself. He said I couldn't live on thirteen shillings; I said I could, and he asked me how." Charnock began to laugh at his own story. "I told him how," he said. "I lived practically for nothing."

"How?" said Miranda. "Quick, tell me!" Charnock laughed again. "I had been three weeks at the works, you see, where hands were continually changing. I lived in a sort of mechanics' boarding-house, and I lived practically for nothing, on condition that I kept the house full, which I was able to do, for I got on very well with the men at the works. Sir John laughed when I told him, and took me into the office. So there I was a clerk again, which I didn't want to be; however, I was not a clerk for long. One Sunday Sir John Martin came down to the boarding-house and asked for me. It was dinner time, and he was shown straight into the dining-room, where I was sitting, if you please, at the head of the table, in my shirtsleeves, carving for all I was worth. He leaned against the door and shook with laughter. 'You are certain to get on,' he said; 'but I would like a few minutes with you alone.' I put on my coat, and went out with him into the street. 'Is your name Charnock?' he asked, and I answered that it was. 'I thought I knew your face,' said he, 'and that's why I took you into my office, though I couldn't put a name to you. So if you are proud enough to think that I took you on your own merits, you are wrong. You might as well have told me your real name, and saved yourself some time. Look at that!' and he gave me a newspaper, and pointed out an advertisement. A firm of solicitors in London was advertising for me, and the firm, I happened to know, looked after my aunt's affairs. I went to London that night. My aunt had died sixteen months before, and had left me six hundred a year. The rest was easy. I took Sir John's advice. 'Railways,' he said, 'railways; they are the white man's tentacles;' and Sir John gave me my first employment as an engineer."

Miranda was silent for a long while after Charnock had ended his story. Charnock himself had nothing further to say. It was for her to speak, not for him to question. She had sent the glove. She knew why he had come. Miranda, however, took a turn along the flagged pathway, and leaned over the breast-high wall and pointed out a vulture above the valley, and talked in inattentive, undecided tones upon any impersonal topic. It was natural, Charnock thought, that she should wish to con over what he had told her. So he rose from his chair.

"Shall I come back to-morrow?" he asked, and she rallied herself to answer him.

"Will you?" she exclaimed. "I should be so glad," and checking the ardour of her words, she explained, "I mean of course if you have nothing better to do," and she examined a flower with intense absorption, and then looked at him pathetically over her shoulder, as he moved away. So again he lost sight of the Miranda of the balcony, and carried away his first impression, that he had met that afternoon with a stranger.

His fervour of the morning changed to a chilling perplexity. He wondered at the change in her. Something else, too, seized upon his thoughts, and exercised his fancies. Why had she stood so long outside the door before she hurried in with her simulated surprise? How had she looked as she paused there, silent and motionless? That question in particular haunted him, for he thought that if only he could have seen her through the closed door he would have found a clue which would lead him to comprehend and to justify her.

Absorbed by these thoughts he sat through dinner unobservant of his few neighbours at the long table. He was therefore surprised when, as he stood in the stone hall, lighting his cigar, a friendly hand was clapped down upon his shoulder, and an affable voice remarked:--

"Aha, dear friend! Finished the little job at Algeciras, I saw. What are you doing at Ronda?"

"What are you?" asked Charnock, as he faced the irrepressible Major Wilbraham.

"Trying to make seven hundred per annum into a thousand. You see I have no secrets. Now confidence for confidence, eh, dear friend?" and his eyes drew cunningly together behind the glowing end of his cigar.

"I am afraid that I must leave you to guess."

"Guessing's not very sociable work."

"Perhaps that's why I am given to it," said Charnock, and he walked between the stone columns and up the broad staircase.

The Major looked after him without the slightest resentment.

"Slipped up that time, Ambrose, my lad," he said to himself, and sauntered cheerfully out of the hotel.

Five minutes later Charnock passed through the square at a quick walk. Wilbraham was meditating a translation of the Carmen Sæculare, but business habits prevailed with him. He thrust the worn little Horace into his breast-pocket and followed Charnock at a safe distance. By means of a skill acquired by much practice, he walked very swiftly and yet retained the indifferent air of a loiterer. There was another picture of the tracker and the tracked to be seen that evening, but in Ronda instead of Tangier, and Charnock was unable to compare it with its companion picture, since, in this case, he was the tracked. The two men passed down the hill to the bridge. Charnock stopped for a little and stood looking over the parapet to the water two hundred and fifty feet below, which was just visible through the gathering darkness like a ridge of snow on black soil. Wilbraham halted at the end of the bridge. It seemed that Charnock was merely taking a stroll. He had himself, however, nothing better to do at the moment. He waited and repeated a stanza of his translation to the rhythm of the torrent, and was not displeased. Charnock moved on across the bridge, across the Plaza on the farther side of the bridge, up a street until he came to an old Moorish house that showed a blank yellow wall to the street and a heavy walnut door encrusted with copper nails.

Then he stopped again and looked steadily at the house and for a long while. Wilbraham began pensively to whistle a slow tune under his breath. Charnock walked on, stopped again, looked back to the house, as though he searched for a glimpse of the lights. But there was no chink or cranny in that blank wall. The house faced the street, blind, dark, and repellent.

Charnock suddenly retraced his steps. Wilbraham had just time to mount the doorsteps of a house as though he was about to knock, before Charnock passed him. Charnock had not noticed him. Wilbraham descended the steps and followed Charnock back into the Plaza.

Charnock was looking for a road which he had seen that afternoon from Miranda's garden, a road which wound in zigzags down the cliff. The road descended from the Plaza, Charnock discovered it, walked down it; behind him at a little distance walked Wilbraham. It was now falling dark, but the night was still, so that Wilbraham was compelled to drop yet farther and farther behind, lest the sound of his footsteps upon the hard, dry ground should betray his pursuit. He fell so far behind, in fact, that he ceased to hear Charnock's footsteps at all. He accordingly hurried; he did more than hurry, he ran; he turned an angle of the road and immediately a man seated upon the bank by the road-side said:--

"Buenas noches."

The man was Charnock.

Wilbraham had the presence of mind not to stop.

"Felices suenos," he returned in a gruff voice and continued to run. He ran on until another angle of the road hid him. Then he climbed on to the top of the bank, which was high, and with great caution doubled back along the ridge until Charnock was just beneath him.

Charnock was gazing upwards; Wilbraham followed his example, and saw that right above his head, on the rim of the precipice, an open window glowed upon the night, a square of warm yellow light empanelled in the purple gloom.

The ceiling of the room was visible, and just below the ceiling a gleam as of polished panels. At that height above them the window seemed very small; its brightness exaggerated the darkness which surrounded it; and both men looked into it as into a tiny theatre of marionettes and expected the performance of a miniature play.

All that they saw, however, was a shadow-pantomime thrown upon the ceiling, and that merely of a tantalising kind--the shadow of a woman's head and hair, growing and diminishing as the unseen woman moved away or to the candles. A second shadow, and this too the shadow of a woman, joined the first. But no woman showed herself at the window, and Charnock, tiring of the entertainment, returned to his hotel.

Wilbraham remained to count the houses between that lighted window and the chasm of the Tajo. He counted six. Then he returned, but not immediately to the hotel. On reaching the Plaza he walked, indeed, precisely in the opposite direction, away from the Tajo, and he counted the houses which he passed and stopped before the seventh.

The seventh was noticeable for its great doors of walnut-wood and the geometrical figures which were traced upon it with copper nails.

The Major cocked his hat on one side, and stepped out for the hotel most jauntily. "These little accidents," said he, "a brigantine sighted off Ushant; a man going out for a walk! If only one has patience! Patience, there's the secret. A little more, and how much--a great poet!" And he entered the hotel.

Charnock rose from a bench in the hall, "Pleasant night for a stroll," said he.

"Business with me, dear old boy," replied the Major. "I fancy that after all I have made that seven hundred per annum into a thou. I am not sure, but I think so. Good-night, sleep well, be good!" With a flourish of his hand over the balustrade of the stairs, the Major disappeared.

Charnock sat down again on the bench and reflected.

"Wilbraham's at Ronda. I find him at Ronda when I am sent for to Ronda. Wilbraham said good-night to me on the road. Wilbraham was following me; Wilbraham's clothes were dusty: it was Wilbraham who kicked his toes into the grass on the top of the bank while I sat at the bottom. Have I to meet Wilbraham? What has his seven hundred per annum to do with Mrs. Warriner? Well, I shall learn to-morrow," he concluded, and so went to bed.