into the empty corridor. A pace or two beyond the threshold my heart seemed to swell up in my body, for it seemed that at the head of the staircase lay stretched the still form of my mother as I had found her in the cold midnight hours long ago. It was but a play of light, a trick of fantasy. I recovered my breath and went on.
To leap from stair to stair was far too formidable a means of progression. I should certainly have dashed out my brains. So I must sit, and jump sitting, manipulating my candle as best I could. In this sidling, undignified fashion, my eyes fixed only on the stair beneath me, I mastered the first flight, and paused to rest. What a medley of furtive sounds ascended to my ear from the desolate rooms below: the heavy plash of raindrop from the eaves, scurry and squeak of mouse, rustle of straw, a stirring—light as the settling of dust, crack of timber, an infinitely faint whisper; and from without, the whistle of bat, the stony murmur of the garden stream, the hunting screech of some predatory night-fowl over the soaked and tranquil harvest fields. And who, Who?—that shape?… I turned sharply, and the melted tallow of the guttering candle welled over and smartly burned the hand that held it. The pain gave me confidence. But better than that, a voice from below suddenly broke out, not Pollie’s but Adam Waggett’s, hollaing in the porch. Adam—the wren-slaughterer—prove me a coward? No, indeed. All misgiving gone, I girded my dressing-gown tighter around me, and continued the descent.
It was a jolting and arduous business, and as I paused on the next landing, I now looked into the moon-bathed vacancy of my father’s bedroom. Dismantled, littered with paper and the fragments of wood and glass of a picture my mother had given him, a great hole in the plaster, a broken chair straddling in the midst—a hideous spectacle it was. An immense moth with greenly glowing eyes, lured out of its roosting place, came fluttering round my candle, fanning my cheek with its plumy wings. I shaded the flame and smiled up at the creature which, not being of a kind that is bent on self-slaughter, presently wafted away. The lower I descended the filthier grew my journey. My stub of candle was fast wasting; and what use should I be to Pollie’s messenger? When indeed in the muck and refuse left by the Sale, I reached the door, it was too late. He was now beating with his fists at the rear of the house; and I must needs climb down the last flight of the back wooden staircase used by the servants. When at last the great stagnant kitchen came into view, it was my whole inward self that cried out in me. Its stone flags were swarming with cockroaches.
These shelled, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures are among the few insects that fill me with horror. By comparison the devil’s coachman may be worse-tempered, but he is a gentleman. The very thought of one of them rearing itself against my slippered foot filled me with disgust; and the males were winged. They went scurrying away into hiding, infants seemingly to their mothers, whisper, whisper—I felt sick at the sight. There came a noise at the window. Peering from round my candle flame I perceived Adam’s dusky face, with its long nose, staring in at me through the glass. At sight of the plight I was in, he burst into a prolonged guffaw of laughter. This enraged me beyond measure. I stamped my foot, and at last he sobered down enough to yell through the glass that Pollie’s mother had sent him to see that I was safe and had forgotten to give him the house-key. Pollie herself would be with me next morning.
I waved my candle at him in token that I understood. At this the melted grease once more trickled over and ran scalding up my arm. The candle fell to the floor, went out; the pale moonshine spread through the air. I could see Adam’s conical head outlined against the soft light of the sky; though he could no longer see me. Horror of the cockroaches returned on me. Instantly I turned tail, leaving the lump of tallow for their spoil.
How, in that dark, high house, I managed to remount those stairs, I cannot conceive. Youth and persistency, I suppose. I doubt if I could do it now. Utterly exhausted and bedraggled I regained my bedroom at last without further misadventure. I sponged the smoke and grime from face and hands in my washbowl, hung my dressing-gown where the morning air might refresh it, and was soon in a dead sleep, from which I think even the Angel Gabriel would have failed to arouse me.
Chapter Seven
When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in flood after the rains shook the air at my window, and there sat Pollie, in her outdoor clothes, the rest of the packing done and she awaiting breakfast. Unstirringly from my pillow I scrutinized the plump, red-cheeked face with its pale-blue prominent eyes dreaming out of the window; and sorrow welled up in me at the thought of the past and of how near drew our separation. She heard me move, and kneeling and stooping low over my bed, with her work-roughened finger she stroked the hand that lay on my coverlet. A pretty sight I must have looked—after my night’s experiences. We whispered a little together. She was now a sedater young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes. And whether or not it is because early custom is second nature, she is still the only person whom my skin does not a little creep against when necessity calls for a beast of burden.
Her desertion of me the night before had been caused by the untimely death of one of her father’s three Alderney cows—a mild, horned creature, which I had myself often seen in the meadows cropping among the buttercups, and whose rich-breathed nose I had once had the courage to ask to stroke with my hand. This ill-fated beast at first threat of the storm, had taken shelter with her companions under an oak. Scarcely had the lightnings begun to play when she was struck down by a “thunderbolt.” It was a tragedy after Pollie’s heart. She had (she said) fainted dead off at news of it—and we bemoaned the event in concert. In return I told her my dream of the garden. Nothing would then content her but she must fetch from under her mattress Napoleon’s Book of Fate, a legacy from Mrs Ballard.
“But, Pollie,” I demurred; “a dream is only a dream.”
“Honest, miss,” she replied, thumbing over the pages, “there’s some of ’em means what happens and comes true, and they’ll tell secrets too if they be searched about. More’n a month before Mrs Ballard fell out with master she dreamed that one of the speckled hens had laid an egg in the kitchen dresser. There it was clucking among the crockery. And to dream of eggs, the book says, is to be certain sure of getting the place you are after, and which she wrote off to a friend in London and is there now!”
What more was there to say? So presently Pollie succeeded in turning to “Pears” in the grease-grimed book, and spelled out slowly:—
“Pears.—To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which means riches, miss); and that you will rise to a much higher spear than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and suchlike, miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and happiness in the marriage state.”
Her red cheeks grew redder with this exertion of scholarship, and I burst out laughing. “Ah, miss,” she cried in confusion, “laugh you may, and that’s what Sarah said to the Angel. But mark my words if something of it don’t hap out like what the book says.”
“Then, Pollie,” said I, “there’s nothing for it but to open a butcher’s shop. For live in great state I can’t and won’t, not if the Prince of Wales himself was to ask me in marriage.”
“Lor, miss,” retorted Pollie in shocked accents, “and him a married man with grown-up sons and all.” But she forgave me my mockery. As for the Dream Book, doubtless young Bonaparte must often have dreamed of Pears in Corsica; and no less indubitably have I lived in “great state”—though without much eleviation.
But the day was hasting on. My toilet must be made, and the preparations for our journey completed. Now that the dawn of my new fortunes was risen, expectancy filled my mind, and the rain-freshened skies and leaves of the morning renewed my spirits. Our train—the first in my experience—was timed to leave our country railway station
