VII
Darkness and silence then descended on the house. In one of the upper rooms a light would appear behind the blind; a light which sometimes moved from room to room, as though someone were carrying it about; and it had been seen, also, in the shop through the chinks of the shutters. But, although the curious had often lingered round the door, no one had ever been seen to emerge after dark.
The face of the house and the closed door kept their counsel as to whatever might be enacted behind them. All that the town ever knew was that evening after evening Lydia Protheroe was undisturbed at her own occupations, and although it was improbable to imagine that occupations otherwise than innocent could engage the leisure of so decent and correct a lady, there grew up, nevertheless, an impression of some mischievous background to the frontage of honest trade which everyone was allowed to see.
Why did she remain in this insignificant town, she who both by wealth and repute was amply justified to move herself and her chattels to London? Why had she chosen this ancient house, with its latticed windows and overhanging gables in a narrow side-street, rather than one of the new buildings in the main street, where were the other shops that, unashamed, did not have to tuck themselves away? Why did she sleep there alone at nights, among her oddments that were enough, when the mystery of dusk began to shroud them, to give an ordinary Christian the shivers? Why did she hold herself so frigidly aloof from the conviviality of the town? Perfectly civil always, they would say that much for her; and quite the lady, they would say that too. And good to the poor; oh, absurdly! That was only another one of the grievances they had against her: she spoilt the market for everybody else. But why—the questions would begin again. There was a mutter of innuendo; and yet, when they were pinned down to it, there was not one of her fellow townsmen who could say that she was otherwise than harmless. And they were all afraid of her, although she never said a sharp word; and they all respected her, grudgingly, and admitted her rigid integrity. But when these admissions had been extracted from them, the questions and the mutter would begin again.
Nobody knew whether she herself was aware of them; if she was, then she treated them with complete indifference. In point of fact, her mental isolation was such that she had long since ceased to bother her head about what people might say or might leave unsaid; she imagined herself encased in armour like the knight who stood eternally on the lowest step of her stair. She was happy. If she was forbidding, it was because she wanted no intimacy; she wanted to keep her happiness to herself. There were moments when she even resented the intrusion of customers into her shop, and the presence of the three assistants and the servant, but she tried to be severe with herself over this crotchet. Generally her severity was successful; but sometimes her resentment gained the upper hand, and on those occasions she would observe her hirelings with real dislike, angry with them because they, poor souls, went innocently on with their business, turning over the wares in the course of serving customers, until Miss Protheroe, unable longer to endure the sight of their hands fumbling among the objects got together by her and so dear to her heart, descended upon them from behind the counting-desk and brushed them aside, not rudely, for Miss Protheroe was never rude, but with a thin disdain that was twice as humiliating. For years she was deeply ashamed after these manifestations; then she grew to be less ashamed, and they increased in frequency. She became, coldly, more autocratic; would not have anything touched without her permission; received any comment with a scornful disapproval that would not permit her to answer. She was happy, but she was only truly and completely happy after six o’clock, when she had turned the key in the lock and was left alone in the house.
And yet she had a weakness, an inconsistency; she fretted over the defection of her family.
It was absurd. She wanted independence, and she had got it, full measure, pressed down and running over. She had been glad. She had been unobserved, left alone to do the little daring, extravagant things which bubbled up so surprisingly from beneath that ladylike exterior, little things like pretending she was a boy in her brother’s overcoat, and drawing his pipe from the pocket to put it between her teeth. She had always done them surreptitiously, even though she knew she was quite alone. Sometimes she had made up her face with her own grease-paints, and, to the light of her candle, minced round the shop in a wig and a bustle. These were not things she would have had the courage to do with her family in the neighbourhood. She had believed that she would shed her family quite lightly, blissfully, and for some time she had even deluded herself into the conviction that this was so. Then she was forced to the realization that their conduct had, in fact, sunk very deeply into the tender parts of her being. This realization took a long time to come. She had her first misgivings when she found that she could not think of them without a surge of anger uneasily allied to a surge of pain. Their silence had surprised her extremely. Daily she had expected to have some news of them; she had expected that they would trace her out—nothing easier—and many times in her mind she rehearsed the scene when one of their number, probably Bertie, would appear in the doorway of the room, and turn by turn, menacing, cajoling, and alarmed, would try to persuade her to return. These persuasions she would reject; of that she had been fully determined. It was not that she hankered after forgiveness and the evening circle round the lamp; it was not that she had desired the rôle of the prodigal child, picturesque and doubly precious after her escapade; no, it was not that she had wanted her family, but rather that she had wanted her family to want her. And not that alone. It was not, as she told herself plaintively, merely the petty, personal grievance that had hurt her. It was a wider, deeper injury. She despised them—she was compelled to despise them—because of their miserable cautiousness, their rejection of her, who was of their own blood, when she became a danger to their respectability. How politic they had been! how sage! She hated them because they had made her ashamed of them. They had become, to her, symbolic of that wary, chary majority whose enemy she was.
For the appearance of Bertie, however, she had waited in vain. They had made no attempt to retrieve her, nothing to show that they cared whether she lived or died, starved or prospered. Her expectation had turned to surprise, surprise to indignation. When it had finally become quite clear that they intended to take no steps towards getting her back, she accepted their indifference with a shrug that she tried to make equally indifferent. But the sore had remained; more, it had eaten its way down into her. There was no affection left now; but before she died she would be even with them. It was not a sore that impaired her happiness. Rather she nursed it, as she nursed all the secrets of her inner life; and it provided an incentive, if she had needed one, a sort of aim and raison d’être. Not a day passed but she wondered whether they heard the name of the celebrated Lydia Protheroe, and connected it with that of the little Alice they had so improvidently driven from their midst. She hoped so; spitefully she hoped so. She even contemplated going to London, where her reputation would widen with more chance of reaching their ears; but she could not uproot herself from her old clandestine house. She loved it, for the sake of six o’clock and the turning of the key in the lock.
So she lived with her two passionate secrets side by side: her vindictiveness and her absorption in the unreality of her own existence.
The one intensified the other. An outcast from the auspices of middle-class propriety, she was driven into the refuge of her queer fantastic world. She sought that refuge fanatically, it was a facet of her vindictiveness. From out of that world of shadows she should, some day, thrust the rapier of mischief into the paunch of their gross solidity. It was all a little confused in her mind. But she felt that she owned, by right of citizenship—unshared citizenship, and consequent sovereignty, a sovereignty like that of Adam in Eden—she felt that she owned those privileges which had always given to the hero of mythical combat an advantage so preponderatingly unfair and so divine: the cap of invisibility, the armour that no sword could pierce, the sword that could pierce all armour, the winged shoes, the nightingale for counsellor, the philtre of oblivion, the mirror of prophecy. And at night, flitting round her house or down into her shop, to the echo of her own low laughter, now masked, now sandalled, now casqued within a head incongruous to the body and more incongruous to the feet, like the unfolding in a game of drawing Consequences, she knew herself elusive, evanescent, protean.
But no one must know, no one must suspect.