"But Mr. Porter's dead!"
"Yes...." The little voice was now the merest whisper. "But he'll come all the same.... He always does what he says!"
The two women waited, listening. Miss Allen could hear the old lady's heart thumping and leaping close to her own. Through the opened windows came the sibilant rumble of the motor-buses. Then Mrs. Porter gently pushed Miss Allen away. "Sit on a chair, Lucy dear. I must tell you everything. I must share this with someone."
She seemed to have regained some of her calmness. She sat straight up upon the sofa, patting her lace cap with her hands, feeling for the cameo brooch at her breast. Miss Allen drew a chair close to the sofa; turning again towards the mantelpiece, she saw that it stood out boldly and clearly; the tick of the clock came across to her with almost startling urgency.
"Now, dear Mrs. Porter, what is it that is alarming you?" she said.
Mrs. Porter cleared her throat. "You know, Lucy, that I was married a great many years ago. I was only a very young girl at the time, very ignorant of course, and you can understand, my dear, that my father and mother influenced me very deeply. They liked Mr. Porter. They thought that he would make me a good husband and that I should be very happy.... I was not happy, Lucy dear, never from the very first moment!"
Here Mrs. Porter put out her hand and took Miss Allen's strong one. "I am very willing to believe that much of the unhappiness was due to myself. I was a young, foolish girl; I was disturbed from the very first by the stories that Mr. Porter told me, and the pictures he showed me. I was foolish about those things. He saw that they shocked me, and I think that that amused him. From the first it delighted him to tease me. Then—soon—he tired of me. He had mistresses. He brought them to our house. He insulted me in every way possible. I had years of that misery. God only knows how I lived through it. It became a habit with him to frighten and shock me. It was a game that he loved to play. I think he wanted to see how far I would go. But I was patient through all those many years. Oh! so patient! It was weak, perhaps, but there seemed nothing else for me to be."
"The last twenty years of our married life he hated me most bitterly. He said that I had scorned him, that I had not given him children, that I had wasted his money—a thousand different things! He tortured me, frightened me, disgusted me, but it never seemed to be enough for him, for the vengeance he felt I deserved. Then one day he discovered that he had a weak heart—a doctor frightened him. He saw perhaps for a moment in my eyes my consciousness of my possible freedom. He took my arm and shook me, bent his face close to mine, and said: 'Ah, you think that after I'm dead you will be free. You are wrong. I will leave you everything that I possess, and then—just as you begin to enjoy it—I will come and fetch you!' What a thing to say, Lucy, dear! He was mad, and so was I to listen to him. All those years of married life together had perhaps turned both our brains. Six months later he fell down in the street dead. They brought him home, and all that summer afternoon, my dear, I sat beside him in the bedroom, he all dressed in his best clothes and his patent leather shoes, and the band playing in the Square outside. Oh! he was dead, Lucy dear, he was indeed. For a week or two I thought that he was gone altogether. I was happy and free. Then—oh, I don't know—I began to imagine ... to fancy.... I moved from Wimbledon. I advertised for someone, and you came. We moved here.... It ought to be ... it is ... it must be all right, Lucy dear; hold me, hold me tight! Don't let me go! He can't come back! He can't, he can't!"
She broke into passionate sobbing, cowering back on to the sofa as she had done before. The two women sat there, comforting one another. Miss Allen gathered the frail, trembling little body into her arms, and like a mother with her child, soothed it.
But, as she sat there, she realised with a chill shudder of alarm that moment, a quarter of an hour before, when the room had been dimmed and the clock stilled. Had that been fancy? Had some of Mrs. Porter's terror seized her in sympathy? Were they simply two lonely women whose nerves were jagged by the quiet monotony and seclusion of their lives? Why was it that from the first she, so unimaginative and definite, should have been disturbed by the thought of Mr. Porter? Why was it that even now she longed to know more surely about him, his face, his clothes, his height ... everything.