Convict B 14: A Novel

by R. K. Weekes

His cousin Lettice—Lætitia Jane Smith—had been in his life for many years, since she, with her mother and sisters, came to settle in the village of which Canon Merion-Smith was incumbent. Rosabel and Stella were charming, half Irish and half French; but Lettice, the eldest, had always been Denis's ally. She was deliberate where they were quick, silent while they chattered, methodical instead of happy-go-lucky. They were clever, but she was the born student, patient, accurate, thorough. The household was always short of money, so Lettice, who suffered in that atmosphere of elegant muddle, left home as soon as she could and set up for herself. She was very fond of her relations, and they of her, but she found them trying to live with. Lettice had a temper; she said herself it was a dumb devil. Still, since it was very strictly dumb, you had to know her well, and watch her carefully, before you discovered its existence.

She now occupied an attic in Pimlico, and worked all day in the British Museum library. She might have been more comfortable in a boarding-house, but she preferred solitude, or rather silence; she was perennially interested in her fellow-creatures, but she did not want to be talked to by them. She was always the spectator, never the actor, having eyes, and ears, a synthetic mind, and that delicate sense of humor, pity and irony in one, which is a lamp to the feet of its possessor.

But what marked Lettice off from other people was her passion for self-obliteration. Most of us in our hearts love to fill the center of the stage. Lettice was miserable there. She liked to be the fly on the wall. Yet she was unselfish as well as selfless, gentle, accommodating, all things to all men. She was like a penny-in-the-slot machine for doing good: you put in your need, out came her response: and she asked no more gratitude than the machine. To thank her was like touching the horns of a snail. A harmless whim in many ways, yet with elements of danger; for tastes of this sort strengthen as they grow, and Lettice's friends were beginning to fear she would fade away altogether to an impersonal ghost, unless something happened to call her back.

She should have been Merion-Smith too; she owed the affix to the same Irish grandmother from whom Denis had inherited his profile, his accent, his superstitions, and his family pride. He had been known to send back a letter addressed to the name of Smith. Lettice, on the other hand, had dropped the hyphen with all celerity. Denis might lecture her on her slackness; she concurred amiably so long as she was with him, and then went on her way exactly as before. Lettice on the surface was all sweet pliability, but underneath lay solid rock. Denis faced the world as an obstinate, pugnacious Irishman, whereas a skilful hand could guide him with a silken thread. Lettice read him like a book and made soft fun of him, but always with a reserve of peculiarly tender affection; she thought a great deal of her cousin. And Denis thought a great deal—a very great deal—of her. He was aware that in half her innocent speeches she was, to put it gracefully, having him on; but what did that matter? Lettice was Lettice. He did not analyze his friends; he idealized them.

Denis was received at No. 33 Canning Street by the daughter of the house, a smart young person in silk stockings who invited him, with never a "Sir" to her sentence, to step up and find Miss Smith in the top back attic. The stairs were dark; Denis, gloomily reflecting on the decadence of the lower classes, fell over a pair of boots and trod in a dust-pan which flew up and hit him. He was not in the best of tempers when he knocked at his cousin's door.

"Come in!" called out an abstracted voice, wearily raised; and he obeyed. There stood Lettice in the middle of the floor, holding out with both arms before her nose a newspaper which enwrapped her, mind and body. Lettice had been known, when she came in from the Museum after her day's work, to read through the whole of a novel, standing under the gas, before she moved to take off her hat. It took some time for Denis's presence to penetrate, and then she lowered her arms slowly and looked round.

"O-oh," she said. "I thought you were the milk. Sit down, sit down."

She folded up her paper and poked it under a book, took away his hat and stick, and fetched the milk from the passage, hurrying slowly, as her custom was. Denis sat down, and discovered that he was very glad to be with her again. A cooling fountain in life's dry, dreary sand, that was what Lettice represented. She was not a beauty; she had none of the attributes of a heroine. Her nose was nondescript, her complexion poor, her mouth large, though there was character in the full under lip; character also, and brains, in the big forehead which she hid beneath her soft brown hair. For the rest, she had drooping shoulders and a long slim neck; she chose and put on her clothes like a Frenchwoman; but her best points were the set and shape of her graceful little head, and the somewhat misleading sweetness of her hazel eyes.