“Just precisely what I say, sir; through the trap-door by the steps, and up among the chimney-pots. He’d been there with her before, and perhaps she thought she’d find him hiding among the stacks. He called himself an astronomer; but it’s my belief it was another sort of star-gazing. I couldn’t stand it at last, and I had to give her notice.”
It was falling near a gloomy midday when I again entered the flat, and shut myself in with its ghosts and echoes. I had a set conviction, a set purpose in my mind. There was that which seemed to scuttle, like a little demon of laughter, in my wake, now urging me on, now slipping round and above to trip me as I mounted. I went steadily on and up, past the sitting-room door, to the floor above. And here, for the first time, a thrill in my blood seemed to shock and hold me for a moment. Before my eyes, rising to a skylight, now dark and choked with snow, went a flight of steps. Pulling myself together, I mounted these, and with a huge effort (the bolt was not shot) shouldered the trap open. There were a fall and rustle without; daylight entered; and, levering the door over, I emerged upon the roof.
Snow, grim and grimy and knee-deep, was over everything, muffling the contours of the chimneys, the parapets, the irregularities of the leads. The dull thunder of the streets came up to me; a fog of thaw was in the air; a thin drizzle was already falling. I drove my foot forward into a mound, and hitched it on something. In an instant I was down on my knees, scattering the sodden raff right and left, and—my God!—a face!
She lay there as she had been overwhelmed, and frozen, and preserved these two months. She had closed the trap behind her, and nobody had known. Pure as wax—pitiful as hunger—dead! Poor Lucy Rivers!
Who was she, and who the man? We could never learn. She had woven his name, his desertion, her own ruin and despair into the texture of her broken life. Only on the great day of retribution shall he answer to that agonized cry.
THE FAIR WITH GOLDEN HAIR
Ho! bring me some lovers, fat or lean,
That I may crunch ’em my teeth between!
I could eat so many, so many, so many,
That in the wide world there would not be left any.
Ho! Here is Avenant to be seen,
Who comes to draw your teeth so keen;
He’s not the greatest man to view,
But he’s big enough to conquer you.
Planché’s “D’Aulnoy,” slightly misquoted.
Sir Richard Avenant came home from Abyssinia to an interesting notoriety. He had been associated—a sort of explorative free-lance—with the expedition of Mr. Bruce, who was not yet returned from his adventures up the Nile in quest of the sources of that bewildering water; and, upon his arrival in London, he found himself engaged to a romance which was certainly remote from his deserts.
Now he was a strong, saturnine man, but apt to whimsical decisions, whose consequences, the fruits of whatever odd impulses, he never had a thought but to hold by; and as the self-reserved must suffer the character accorded to their appearance (the only side of them confessed), Sir Richard found himself accredited, by anticipation, with deeds adapted to the countenance he had always addressed to the world.
He was strolling, some days after his return, through the streets, when he was accosted by an acquaintance, a preux chevalier of the highest ton, curled, be-ruffed, and imperturbably self-assured.