CHAPTER X ASPARAGUS AND CATS
Charles Bevan followed his cousin to the house. His orderly mind could never have imagined of its own volition a ménage like that of the Lamberts. He revolted at it, yet felt strangely fascinated. It was like watching people dancing on a tight rope half cut in two, sailors feasting and merry-making on a sinking wreck, children plucking flowers on the crumbling edge of a cliff.
Tea was laid in state in the drawing-room, a lovely old room with tapestried walls, and windows that opened upon the garden; or at least that part of it which had been robbed of its roses and converted into a kitchen-garden during one of George Lambert's economical fits.
"That is the asparagus bed," said Fanny proudly.
It was like a badly-ploughed field, and Charles' eye travelled slowly over its ridges and hollows.
"Have you a potato bed?" he asked, his mind subconsciously estimating the size of the Lamberts' Highgate estate on the basis that their potato crop was in proportion to their asparagus.
"Oh, we buy our potatoes and cabbages and things," said Fanny; "they are cheap."
"But asparagus takes such a time to grow—four years, I think it is."
"Oh, surely not so long as that?" said the girl, taking her seat at the tea-table. "Why, oak trees would grow quicker than that; besides, James said we would have splendid asparagus next spring, and he was a professed gardener before his misfortunes overtook him. Do you take sugar?"
"Yes, please," said Charles, wearily dropping into a low chair and wondering vaguely at the angelic beauty of the girl's face.
"And what, may I ask, were the 'misfortunes' that overtook James?"
"His wife, poor thing, took to drink," said she, with so much commiseration in her tone that she might have been a disciple of the new criminology, "and that broke his heart and took all his energy away."
"Do you believe him?"
"Why not? He is a most devoted creature; and he is going to give up the business he is in and stay on when father pays Mr Isaacs. I hope we will never part with James."
Susannah, in honour of the guest, had produced the best tea service, a priceless set of old Sèvres. The tray was painted with Cupidons blowing trumpets as if in honour of the victory of Susannah over mischance, in that she had conveyed them upstairs by some miracle unsmashed.
There was half a cake by Buszard; the tea, had it been paid for, would have cost five shillings a pound, but the milk was sky blue.
As Fanny was cutting up the cake in liberal slices as if for a children's party, two frightful-looking cats walked into the room with all the air of bandits. One was jet black and one was brindled; both looked starved, and each wore its tail with a pump-handle curve after the fashion of a lion's when marauding.
Fanny regarded them lovingly, and poured out a saucerful of the blue milk which she placed on the floor.
"Aren't they angels?"
"Well, if you ask me," said Charles Bevan, as if he were giving his opinion on some object of vértu, "I'd say they were more like—the other things."
"I know they are not pretty," said Fanny regretfully, "but they are faithful. They always come to tea just as if they were invited."
"I wonder your poodle—I mean the dog, lets them in."
"Boy-Boy?—Oh, he only barks at things at night when they can't see him; he would run from a mouse, he's such a dear old coward. Aren't they thirsty?"
"Where did you get them? I should think they would be hard to match."
"I didn't get them: they are not ours, they just come in."
"Do you mean to say you let stray cats in like that?"
"I don't let them in, they come in through a hole in the scullery window."
"Goodness gracious!"
"Sometimes the kitchen is full of cats; they seem to know."
"That fools live here," thought Charles.
"And Susannah spends all her time turning them out—all, of course, except the black ones."
"Why not the black ones?"
"Because they are lucky; did you not know that? It's frightfully unlucky to turn a black cat out."
"Why not fill up the hole and stop them from getting in?"
"Susannah has stuffed it up with old stockings and things till she's weary; they butt it in with their heads."
"Why not have a new pane put in?"
"Father has talked of that, but I have always changed the conversation, and then he forgets."
"You like cats?"
"I love them."
Charles looked gloomily at the grimalkins.
"Seems to me you must have your food stolen."
"We used to, but Susannah locks everything up now before she goes to bed."
She inverted the milk jug to show the cats that there was no milk left, and the intelligent creatures comprehending left the room, the black leading the way.
"Faithful creatures!" sneered Charles.
"Aren't they! Oh, but, Cousin Charles—I mean Mr——"
"No; call me Cousin Charles."
"—I've given the cats all the milk!"
"No matter," said Charles magnanimously. "The poor beggars wanted it more than I. I never drink more than one cup of tea; it makes me nervous."
"How good you are!" she murmured. "You remind me of father."
Charles moved uneasily in his chair.
From somewhere in the distance came the sound of Susannah singing and cleaning a window, a song like a fetish song interrupted by the sound of the window being closed to see if it was clean enough, and flung up again with a jerk, that spoke of dissatisfaction. These sounds of a sudden ceased.
They were succeeded by the murmur of voices, a footstep, then a tap at the door, followed by the voice of Susannah requesting her mistress to step outside for a moment.
"I know what that always means," murmured the girl in a resigned voice, as she rose from the table and left the room.
Charles Bevan rose from his chair and went to the window.
"These people want protecting," he said to himself frowning at the asparagus bed. "Irresponsibility when it passes a certain point becomes absolute lunacy. Fanny and her father ought to be in a lunatic asylum with their ghosts, and cats, and rubbish, only I don't believe any lunatic asylum would take them in; they would infect the other patients and make them worse. Good Heavens! it makes me shudder. They must be on the verge of the workhouse, making asparagus beds, and drinking champagne, and flying off to Paris, and feeding every filthy stray cat with food they must want for themselves. Poor devils—I mean damned fools. Anyhow, I must be going." The recollection of a certain lady named Pamela Pursehouse arose coldly in his mind now that Miss Lambert was absent from the room, and the little "still voice," whatever a still voice may be, said something about duty.
He determined to flee from temptation directly his hostess returned, but he reckoned without Fate.
The door opened and Fanny entered with a face full of tragedy.
She closed the door.
"What do you think Susannah has told me?" She spoke in a low voice as if death were in the house.
"What?"
"James has come in and he has—had too much!"
"You don't mean to say that he is intoxicated?"
"I do," said Fanny with her voice filled with tears.
"How disgraceful! I will go down and turn him out." Then he remembered that he could not very well turn him out considering that he was in possession.
"For goodness sake don't even hint that to him, or he may go," cried Fanny in alarm, "for, when he gets like this, he always talks of leaving at once, because his calling is a disgrace to him, and if he went, Susannah would follow him."
"But, my dear girl," cried Charles, "how dare that wretched Susannah—ahem—why, he's a married man, you told me so; surely she knows that."
"Yes, she knows that, but she says she can't help herself."
"I never met such people before!" said Charles, addressing a jade dragon on the mantelpiece—"I mean," he said, putting his hands in his trousers' pockets and addressing his boots, "such a person as Susannah."
"Her mother ran away with her father," murmured Fanny in extenuation, "so I suppose it is in the blood. But I wish we could do something with James. If he would even go to bed, but he sits by the kitchen fire crying, and that sets Susannah off. She will be ill for days after this. He said it was a cigar some one gave him that reminded him of his better days——"
"Bother his better days!"
"——and he went to try and drown the recollection of them. It is so stupid of him, he knows how drink flies to his head; you would never imagine if you could see him now that he has only had two glasses of beer."
"I will go down to the kitchen and speak to him," said Charles.
"But, Cousin Charles," said Fanny, plucking at his coat, "be sure and speak gently."
"I will," said Mr Bevan.
"Then I'll go with you," said she.
James, a long ill-weedy looking man, was seated before the kitchen fire on a chair without a back; Susannah, on hearing their footsteps, darted into the scullery.
"Now, James, now, James," said Charles Bevan, speaking in a paternal voice, "what is the meaning of all this? How did you get yourself into this condition?"
James turned his head and regarded Charles. He made a vain endeavour to speak and rise from his chair at one and the same time, then he collapsed and his tears returned anew.
At the sound, Susannah in the scullery threw her apron over her head and joined in, whilst Fanny looked out of the window and sniffled.
"I never saw such a lot of people!" cried Charles in desperation. "James, James, be a man."
"How can he," said Fanny, controlling her voice, "when he is in this terrible state? Cousin Charles, don't you think you could induce him to go to bed?"
"I think I could," said Charles grimly, "if you show me the way to his room."
PART II
CHAPTER I A REVELATION
"When will your father come back?" asked Charles as he returned to the kitchen, having deposited the man of law on his bed and shaken his fist in his face as a token of what he would get if he rose from it.
"Not till this evening, late," said Fanny.
"Then I must wait till he returns, or till this person recovers himself. I cannot possibly leave you alone in the house with a tipsy man."
"Oh yes, do stay till father returns. I want you to meet him so much," said Fanny, all her grief vanishing in smiles.
"Susannah, we'll have supper at eight."
"Yes, miss."
"I am almost glad," said Fanny, as she tripped up the kitchen stairs before her cousin, "I am almost glad James took it into his head to get tipsy, you'd have gone away if he hadn't, without seeing father; it seems almost like Providence. Mercy! it's six o'clock."
She glanced at the great old hall clock ticking away the moments, even as it had done when George the Third was king, and Charles took his watch out to verify the time, but he did not catch the old clock tripping.
"Now we must think about supper," said Fanny, in a busy voice. "You must be dying of hunger. What do you like best?"
"But you have not dined, Fanny."
"Oh, we always call dinner 'luncheon,' and have it in the middle of the day; it saves trouble, and it is less worry." Then, after a moment's pause: "I wish we had a lobster, but I don't think there is one. I know there is a beefsteak."
She went to the kitchen stairs.
"Susannah!"
"Yes, miss," answered a dolorous voice from below.
"Have you a lobster in the house?"
"No, miss."
"You have a beefsteak?"
A sound came as of search amongst the plates on the dresser.
"The beefsteak is gone, Miss Fanny."
"Now, where can that beefsteak have gone to?" murmured the girl, whilst Charles called to mind the criminal countenances of the two faithful cats, and the business-like manner in which they had left the room.
"Search again, Susannah."
A frightful crash of crockery came as a reply.
"Susannah!"
"Yes, miss."
"Don't look any more, I will go out and buy something."
"Don't mind me," said Charles. "Anything will do for me; I am used—I mean——"
"I am not going to have father come back and find you starved to death; he'd kill me. I'm going out marketing; will you come?"
"With pleasure."
"Then wait till I fetch my hat and a basket."
"May I light a cigar?"
"Yes, smoke everywhere, every one does," and she rushed upstairs for her hat. A moment later she returned, hat on head, and bearing in her hand a little basket adorned with blue ribbons: a pound of tea would have freighted it.
"How on earth is she going to get the dinner into that?" thought her companion, as he unbarred the hall door and followed her down the steps.
Then they found themselves walking down the weed-grown avenue, the birds twittering overhead in the light of the warm June evening.
That he should be going "a-marketing" in Highgate accompanied by a pretty girl with a basket did not, strangely enough, impress Charles Bevan as being an out-of-the-way occurrence.
He felt as if he had known the Lamberts for years—a good many years. He no longer contemplated the joyous tragedy of their life wholly as a spectator; he had become suddenly and without volition one of the actors, a subordinate actor—a thinking part, one might call it.
The fearful fascination exercised by these people seemed, strange to say, never so potent as when exercised upon hard-headed people, as Major Sawyer and many another could have told.
"I love marketing," said Fanny, as they trudged along, "at least buying things."
"Have you any money?"
"Lots," said Miss Lambert, producing a starved-looking purse.
She opened it and peeped in at the three and sixpence it contained, and then shut it with a snap as if fearful of their escaping.
"What do you like next best to marketing?" asked Charles in the sedate voice of a heavy father speaking to his favourite child.
"Opening parcels."
"I don't quite——"
"Oh, you know—strange parcels when they come, or when father brings them, one never knows what may be in them—chocolate creams or what. I wonder what father will bring me back this time?"
"Where has he gone to?"
"He has gone to get some money."
"He will be back this evening?"
"Yes, unless he finds it difficult getting the money. If he does, he won't be home till morning." She spoke as an Indian squaw might speak, whose father or husband has gone a-hunting, whilst Charles marvelled vaguely.
"But suppose—he doesn't get any money?"
"Oh, he will get it all right, people are so good to him. Poor, dear Mr Hancock——"
She stopped suddenly.
"Yes, yes."
"He said we weren't to tell."
She spoke in a secretive voice which greatly inflamed her companion's curiosity.
"You might tell me, but don't if you don't want to."
"Yes," said Fanny. "I don't think it matters now that you are friends with us, and we're all the same family. Father's dividends had not come in, and he lent us the money to pay the bills."
"What bills?"
"The butcher's bill, and Stokes the baker's bill, and the milk bill, and some others."
"Hancock lent you the money to pay your bills?" cried Charles, feeling like a person in a dream.
"Yes, old Mr Hancock, your Mr Hancock."
"But he never told me he was a friend of your father's; besides, he is my solicitor."
"He never saw us before this week."
"Tell me all about it, and how you came to know him so intimately, and how he paid your bills," commanded Mr Bevan.
There was, just here on the road, a seat dropped incontinently by the County Council; they sat upon it whilst she told her tale.
"It was the other day. Father had not slept all night thinking of the action. He came into my bedroom at two in the morning to tell me that if he lost it before the House of Lords, he would take it before the Queen in Council. He had been sitting up reading 'Every Man his Own Lawyer.' Well, next morning a lot of people came asking for their money, the butcher and all those, and we hadn't any.
"Father said it was all your fault, and he wished he had never seen the fish stream. I was so frightened by the way he was bothering himself about everything—for, as a rule, you know he is the most easy-tempered man in the world as long as he has got his pipe. Well, a friend advised me to go privately to your lawyer and try to stop the action. So I went to Mr Hancock.
"At first he seemed very stiff, and glared at me through his spectacles; but, after a while, as I told him all about ourselves, he stopped shuffling his feet, and listened with his hand to his ear as if he were deaf, and he took a smelling bottle out of a drawer of his desk and snuffed at it, and said, 'Dear me, how very extraordinary!' Then he called me his 'Poor child!' and asked me had I had any luncheon. I said 'Yes,' though I hadn't—I wasn't hungry. Well, we talked and talked, and at last he said he would come back with me home, for that our affairs were in a dreadful condition and we didn't seem to know it. He said he would come as a friend and try to forget that he was a lawyer.
"Well, he came here with me. Father was upstairs in his bedroom, and I poked my head in and told him your lawyer wanted to see him in the drawing-room.
"I didn't tell him it was I who had fetched him, for I knew he would simply go mad if he thought I had been meddling with the action; besides, Mr Hancock said I had better not, as he simply called as a friend.
"Down came father and went into the drawing-room. I was in an awful fright, too frightened even to listen at the door. I made Susannah listen after a while, and she said they were talking about roses—I felt so relieved.
"I sent Susannah in with wine, and Mr Hancock stayed to supper. After supper they had cigars and punch, and I played to them on the piano, and father sang Irish songs, and Mr Hancock told us awfully funny stories all about the law, and said he was a bachelor and envied father because he had a daughter like me.
"Then he talked about our affairs, and said he would require more punch before he could understand them; so he had more punch, and father showed him the housekeeping books, and he looked over them reading them upside down and every way. Then he wrote out a cheque to pay the books, with one eye shut, whilst father wrote out bills, you know, to pay the cheque, and then he kissed me and said good-bye to father and went away crying."
"But," cried Charles, utterly astounded at this artless revelation of another man's folly, "old Hancock never made a joke in his life—at least to me—and he's an awful old skinflint and never lent any man a penny, so they say."
"He made lots of jokes that night, anyhow," said Fanny, "and lent father over twenty pounds, too; and only yesterday a great bunch of hothouse flowers came from Covent Garden with his card for me."
"Old fool!" said Charles.
"He is not an old fool, he's a dear old man, and I love him. Come on, or the shops will be closed."
"You seem to love everything," said Mr Bevan in a rather stiff tone, as they meandered along near now to the street where shops were.
"I do—at least everything I don't hate."
"Whom do you hate?"
"No one just now. I never hate people for long, it is too much trouble. I used to hate you before I knew you. I thought you were a man with a black beard; you see I hadn't seen you."
"But, why on earth did you think I had a black beard?"
"I don't know. I suppose it was because I hate black beards."
"So you don't hate me?"
"No, indeed."
"And as every one you don't hate, you—— I say, what a splendid evening this is! it is just like Italy. I mean, it reminds me of Italy."
"And here are the shops at last," said Fanny, as if the shops had been travelling to them and had only just arrived.
She stopped at a stationer's window.
"I want to get some envelopes. Come in, won't you?"
She bought a packet of envelopes for fourpence. Charles turned away to look at some of the gaudily-bound Kebles, Byrons, and Scotts so dear to the middle-class heart, and before he could turn again she had bought a little prayer-book with a cross on it for a shilling. The shopman was besetting her with a new invention in birthday cards when Charles broke the spell by touching her elbow with the head of his walking stick.
"Don't you think," said he when they were safely in the street, "it is a mistake buying prayer-books, these shop-keepers are such awful swindlers?"
"I bought it for Susannah," explained Fanny. "It's a little present for her after the way James has gone on. Look at this dear monkey."
A barrel organ of the old type was playing by the pavement, making a sound as if an old man gone idiotic were humming a tune to himself. A villainous-looking monkey on the organ-top, held out his hand when it saw Fanny approaching. It knew the world evidently, or at least physiognomy, which is almost the same thing.
"He takes it just like a man," she cried, as the creature grabbed one of her pennies and then nearly broke its chain trying to get at her to tear the rose from her hat. "Look, it knows the people who are fond of it; it is just like a child."
Charles tore her from the monkey, only for a milliner's shop to suck her in.
"I must run in here for a moment, it's only about a corset I ordered; I won't be three minutes."
He waited ten, thinking how strange it was that this girl saw something attractive in nearly everything—strange cats, monkeys, and even old Hancock.
At the end of twenty minutes' walking up and down, he approached the milliner's window and peeped into the shop.
Fanny was conversing with a tall woman, whose frizzled black hair lent her somehow the appearance of a Frenchwoman.
The Highgate Frenchwoman was dangling something gaudy and flimsy before Fanny's eyes, and the girl had her purse in her hand.
Charles gave a sigh, and resumed his beat like a policeman.
At last she came out, carrying a tissue-paper parcel.
"Well, have you got your—what you called for?"
"No, it's not ready yet; but I've got the most beautiful—Oh my goodness me!—how stupid I am!"
"What?"
"I have only three halfpence left, and I have forgotten the eggs and things for supper."
"Give me your purse, and let me look into it," he said, taking the little purse and turning away a moment. Then he handed it back to her; she opened it and peeped in, and there lay a sovereign.
"It's just what father does," she said, looking up in the lamp-light with a smile that somehow made Mr Bevan's eyes feel misty. "What makes you so like him in everything you do?" And somehow these words seemed to the correct Mr Bevan the sweetest he had ever heard.
Then they marketed after the fashion of youth when it finds itself the possessor of a whole sovereign. Fanny laying out the money as the fancy took her, and with the lavishness so conspicuously absent in the dealings of your mere millionaire.
They then returned to "The Laurels," Charles Bevan carrying the parcels.
The dining-room of "The Laurels" was a huge apartment furnished in the age of heavy dinners, when a knowledge of comparative anatomy and the wrist of a butcher were necessary ingredients in the composition of a successful host.
Here Susannah, to drown her sorrows in labour and give honour to the guest, had laid the supper things on a lavish scale. The Venetian vase, before-mentioned, stood filled with roses in the centre of the table, and places were laid for six—all sorts of places. Some of the unexpected guests were presumably to sup entirely off fish, to judge by the knives and forks set out for them, and some were evidently to be denied the luxury of soup. That there was neither soup nor fish mattered little to Susannah.
The cellar, to judge by the sideboard, had been seized with a spirit of emulation begotten of the display made by the plate pantry, and had sent three representatives from each bin. The sideboard also contained the jam-pot, the bread tray, and butter on a plate: commestables that had the abject air of poor relations admitted on sufferance, and come to look on.
Here entered Fanny, followed by Mr Bevan, laden with parcels.
The girl's hat was tilted slightly sideways, her raven hair was in revolt, and her cheeks flushed with happiness and the excitement of marketing.
Susannah followed them. She wore a wonderful white apron adorned with frills and blue ribbons, a birthday present from her mistress, only brought out on state occasions.
"Three candles only!" said the mistress of the house, glancing at the table and the three candles burning on it. "That's not enough; fetch a couple more, and, Susannah, bring the sardine opener."
"Why don't you light the gas?" asked her cousin, putting his parcels down and glancing at the great chandelier swinging overhead.
"I would, only father has had a fight with the gas company and they've cut it off. Now let's open the parcels; put the candles nearer."
Mr Bevan's parcels contained a box of sardines, a paysandu ox tongue, and a basket of peaches; Fanny's, the before-mentioned prayer-book, envelopes, and in the tissue-paper parcel a light shawl or fichu of fleecy silk dyed blue.
She cast her hat off, and throwing the fichu round her neck, hopped upon a chair, candle in hand, and glanced at herself in a great mirror on the opposite wall.
"It makes me look beautiful!" she cried. "And I have half a mind to keep it for myself."
"Why—for whom did you buy it, then?"
"For James' wife, Mrs Regan."
"Oh!"
"She is ill, you know, and I am going to see her again to-morrow. I hate going to see sick people, but father says whenever we see a lame dog we should put our shoulders to the wheel and help him over the stile, and she's a lame dog, if ever there was one. That's right, Susannah, put the candles here, and give me the can opener; I love opening tins, and there is a little prayer-book I got for you when I was out."
"Thank you, miss," said Susannah in a muffled voice, putting the little prayer-book under her apron with one hand, and snuffing a candle with the finger and thumb of the other. "Can I get you anything more, miss?"
"Nothing. Is James all right?"
"He's asleep now, miss," answered the maid, closing her mouth for once in her life by some miracle of Love, and catching in her breath through her nose.
"That will do, Susannah," hastily said her mistress, who knew this symptom of old, and what it foreboded; "I'll ring if I want you. Bring up the punch things at ten, just as you always bring them."
Susannah left the room making stifled sounds, and Fanny, with Mrs Regan's fichu about her neck, attacked the sardine tin with the opener.
"Let me," said Charles.
"No, no; you open the champagne, and put the peaches on a plate, and I'll open the tins. Bring over the bread and butter and jam. I wish we had some ice for the champagne, but the fishmonger—forgot to send it. Bother this knife!"
She laboured away, with her cheeks flushed; a lock of black hair hanging loose lent her a distracted air, and made her so lovely in the eyes of Charles that he put the bread platter down on top of the butter plate, so that the butter pat clung to the bottom of the bread platter, and they had to scrape it off, one holding the platter, one scraping with the knife, and both hands touching.
"We have had that bread plate ever since I can remember," she said, as they seated themselves to the feast, "and I wouldn't have anything happen to it for earths, not that the butter will do it any harm. Isn't the text on it nice?"
Charles examined the bread platter gravely.
"'Want not,'" he read. He looked in vain for the "Waste not," but that part of the maxim was hidden by the carved representation of a full ear of corn.
"It's a very nice—motto. Have some champagne?"
"No thanks, I only drink water, wine flies to my head; I am like James. I am going to have a peach—have one."
"Thank you, I am eating sardines. You remind me of the old gentleman—he was short-sighted—who offered me a pinch of snuff once when I was eating a sole."
Fanny, with her teeth set in the peach, gave a little shriek of laughter, but Mr Bevan was perfectly grave. Still, for perhaps the first time in his life, he felt his possibilities as a humorist, and determined to exploit them.
"Talking about ghosts"—ghosts and mothers-in-law, to the medium intellect, are always fair game,—"talking about ghosts," said he, "you said, I think, Cousin Fanny——"
"Call me Fanny," said that lady, who, having eaten her peach, was now helping herself to sardines. "I hate that word 'cousin,' it sounds so stiff. What about ghosts?"
"About ghosts," he answered slowly, his new-found sense of humour suddenly becoming lost. "Oh yes, you said, Fanny, that a ghost was haunting this house."
"Yes, Fanny Lambert. I told you she hid her jewels before she hung herself. When people see her she is always beckoning them to follow her. We found James insensible one night on the landing upstairs; he told us next morning he had seen her, and she had beckoned him to follow her, and after that he remembered nothing more."
"A sure sign there were spirits in the house."
"Wasn't it? But why, do you think, does she beckon people?"
"Perhaps she beckons people to show them where the jewels are hidden."
"Oh!" cried Fanny; "why did we never think of that before? Of course that is the reason—and they are worth two hundred thousand pounds. We must have the panels in the corridor taken down. I'll make father do it to-morrow. Two hundred thousand pounds: what is that a year?"
"Ten thousand."
"Fancy father with ten thousand a year!" Mr Bevan shuddered. "We can have a steam yacht, and everything we want. I feel as if I were going mad," said Miss Lambert, with the air of a person who had often been mad before and knew the symptoms.
The door opened and Susannah appeared with the punch things. "Susannah, guess what's happened—never mind, you'll know soon. Have you got the lemon and the sugar? That is right."
And Miss Lambert, forgetting for a moment fortune, turned her attention to the manufacturing of punch.
Susannah withdrew, casting her eyes over Fanny and Charles as she went, and seeming to draw her under-lip after her.
When the door was shut, Miss Lambert looked into the punch bowl to see if it was clean, and, having turned a huge spider out of it, went to the sideboard.
"You are not going to make punch in this great thing?"
"I am," said Fanny, returning with a bottle in each hand and one under her arm.
"Go on," said Charles resignedly. "May I smoke?"
"Of course, smoke. Open me this champagne."
"You are not going to put champagne in punch?"
"Everything is good in punch. Father learned how to make it in Moscow, when he was dining with the Hussars there. After dinner a huge bowl was brought in, and everything went in—champagne, whisky, brandy, all the fruit from the dessert; then they set it on fire, and drank it, burning."
"Has your father ever made punch like that?"
"No, but now I've got him away, I am going to try."
Pop went the champagne cork, and the golden wine ran creaming into the bowl.
"Now the brandy."
"But this will be cold punch."
"Yes, it's just as good; milk punch is always cold."
"I'm blest if this is milk punch," said Mr Bevan, as he looked fearfully into the bowl; "but go on."
"I am going as quick as I can," she replied. Then the whisky went in, and half a tumblerfull of curaçoa also, the lemon cut in slices and the peaches that remained.
"I haven't anything more to throw in," said Fanny, casting her eye over the sardines and the ox tongue. "We ought to have grapes and things; no matter, stir it up and set it on fire, and see what it tastes like."
"But, my dear child," said the horrified Charles, as he stirred the seething mixture with the old silver ladle into whose belly a guinea had been beaten. "You surely don't expect me to drink this fearful stuff? I thought you were making it for fun."
"You taste it and see, but set it on fire first."
He struck a match.
"It won't catch fire!" he cried. "Knew it wouldn't."
"Well, taste it cold; it smells delicious."
She plucked a rose from the vase and strewed the petals on the surface of the liquid to help the taste, whilst Mr Bevan ladled some into a glass.
"It's not bad, 'pon my word it's not bad; the curaçoa seems to blend all the other flavours together, but it's fearfully strong."
"Wait"—she ran to the sideboard for a bottle of soda water.
"Mix it half and half, and see how it tastes."
"That's better."
"Then we'll take it into the library, it's more comfortable there. You carry the bowl, and I will bring the candles."
"What are these?" asked Mr Bevan, as he removed some papers from the library table to make room for the punch bowl.
"Oh, some papers of father's."
"The Rorkes Drift Gold Mines."
"Yes," she said, glancing over his shoulder. "I remember now; those are the things I am to get a silk dress out of when they go to twenty. Father is mad over them; he says nothing will stop them when they begin to move, whatever that means."
"Well, they have moved with a vengeance, for only yesterday I heard they had gone into liquidation."
"All the good luck seems coming together," said Fanny with a happy sigh, as Charles went to the window and looked out at the moon, rising in a cloudless sky over the forsaken garden and ruined tennis ground. "Not that it matters much if we get those jewels whether the old mines go up or down; still, no matter how rich one becomes, more money is always useful."
"Yes, I suppose it is," said he, looking with a troubled but sentimental face at the moon. "Tell me, Fanny, do you know much about the Stock Exchange?"
"Oh, heaps."
"What do you know?"
"I know that Brighton A's are called Doras—no, Berthas—no, I think it's Doras—and Mexican Railways are going to Par, and the Kneedeep Mines are going to a hundred and fifty, and father has a thousand of them he got for sixpence a share, and he gave me fifty for myself, but I'm not to sell them till they go to a hundred. Aren't stockbrokers nice-looking, and always so well dressed? I saw hundreds of them one day father left me for a moment in Angel Court whilst he ran in to see his broker—Oh yes! and the bears are going to catch it at the next settlement."
"Do you know what 'bears' are?"
"No," said Fanny, "but they're going to catch it whatever they are, for I heard father say so—Oh, what a moon! I am sure the fairies must be out to-night."
"You don't mean to say you believe in such rubbish as fairies?"
"Of course I believe in them; not here in Highgate, perhaps, for there are too many people, but in woods and places."
"But there are no such things, it has been proved over and over again; no one believes in them nowadays."
"Did you never see the mushrooms growing in rings? Well, how could they grow like that if they were not planted, and who'd be bothered planting umbrella mushrooms in rings but the fairies?"
"Does your father believe in them?"
"Never asked him, but of course he does; every one does—even Susannah."
She went to the table and blew out the candles.
"What are you doing now?"
"Blowing out the lights; it's so much nicer sitting in the moonlight. Fill your glass and sit down beside me."
"Extraordinary child," thought Mr Bevan, doing as he was bid, whilst she opened the window wide to "let the moon in."
Other things came too, a night moth and a perfume of decaying leaves, the souls of last year's sun-flowers and hollyhocks were abroad to-night; the distant paddock seemed full of cats, to judge by the sounds that came from it, and bats were flickering in the air. The voice of Boy-Boy, metallic and rhythmical as the sound of a trip hammer, came from a distant corner of the garden where he had treed a cat.
"Quick," said Fanny, drawing in her head and pulling her companion by the arm, "and you'll be in time to see our tortoise."
Charles regarded the quadruped without emotion.
"I don't see the necessity for such frightful haste."
"Still, if you'd been a moment sooner the moonlight would have been on him; he was shining a moment ago like silver. Do you know what a tortoise is? it's a sign of age. You and I will be some day like that tortoise, without any teeth, wheezing and coughing and grubbing along; and may-be we will look back and think of this night when we were young—Oh, dear me, I wish I were dead!"
"Why, why, what's the matter now—Fanny?"
"I don't want to grow old," pouted Miss Lambert.
"When two people grow old together," began Mr Bevan in whose brain the punch was at work, "they do not notice the—that is to say, age really does not matter. Besides, a woman is only as old as she feels—I mean as she looks."
The fumes of the punch of a sudden took on themselves a form as of the pale phantom of Pamela Pursehouse, and the phantom cried, "Begone, flee from temptation whilst you may."
Before him the concrete form of Miss Lambert sitting in the corner of the window-seat and bathed in moonlight, said to him, "Hug me."
Her eyes were resting upon him, then she gazed out at the garden and sighed.
Charles took her hand: it was not withdrawn. "I must be going now," he said.
She turned from the garden and gazed at him in silence.
A few minutes later, feeling clouds beneath his feet and all sorts of new sensations around his heart, he was walking down the weed-grown avenue, Boy-Boy at his heels barking and snarling, satisfied no doubt by some preternatural instinct that do what he might he would not be kicked.
Ere he had reached the middle of the avenue he heard a voice calling, "Cousin Charley!"
"Yes, Fanny."
"Come back soon!"