E. W. Hornung

It was the hour before sunset when Harry Ringrose took the train from Earl's Court to Richmond, and, referring to an envelope which Lowndes had given him overnight, inquired his way to Sandringham, Greville Road, Richmond Hill. Having no experience of suburban London, he was prepared to find a mansion not absolutely unworthy of its name, and was rather astonished at having to give that of the road to the policeman who directed him. He had half expected that officer to look impressed and say, "Oh, yes, Mr. Lowndes's; the large house on the hill; you can't mistake it." For though he gathered that Lowndes was only about to become a millionaire, and that his contempt for creditors was founded upon some former personal experience of that obnoxious class, it nevertheless appeared to Harry that his friend must be pretty well off as it was. At all events, he thought nothing of losing the last train and driving all this way home.

Harry had never been in Richmond before, and the picturesque features with which its narrow streets still abound were by no means lost upon him. Here a quaint gable, and there a tile roof, sunken and discoloured with sheer age, reminded him that he was indeed in the old country once more; and he rejoiced in the fact with a blessed surcease of the pain and shame with which his home-coming had been fraught. May was in his blood; and as he climbed the hill the words of the old song, that another Richmond claims, rang so loud in his head that he had a work to keep them back from his lips:—

"On Richmond Hill there lives a lass,

More bright than May-day morn;

Whose charms all other maids' surpass—

A rose without a thorn.

This lass so neat, with smiles so sweet,

Has won my right good will.

I'd crowns resign to call her mine,

Sweet lass of Richmond Hill!"

The young fellow could not help thinking that it was a lass of Richmond Hill he was about to meet, and wondering whether her smiles would prove sweet, and her charms superior to those of all other maids. Harry Ringrose had never been in love. He had been duly foolish in his callow day, but that was nothing. From the firm pedestal of one-and-twenty he could look back, and lay his hand upon his heart, and aver with truth that it had never been irretrievably lost. Nevertheless, Harry was quite prepared to lose his heart as soon as ever he realised the ideal which was graven upon it; or he had been so prepared until the revelation of these last days had hurled such idle aspirations to the winds. But, for some reason, the memory of that revelation did not haunt him this evening; and, accordingly, he was so prepared once more.

One of the many inconveniences of preconceiving your fate lies in the nervous feeling that it may be lurking round every corner in the shape of every woman you are about to meet. Even when he met them Harry was not always sure. His ideal was apt to be elastic in the face of obvious charms. It was only the impossibles that he knew at sight, such as the girl who was climbing the hill ahead of him at this moment. Harry would not have looked twice at her but for one circumstance.

She was tall and well-built, on a far larger scale than Harry cared about, and yet she was continually changing a bag which she carried from one hand to the other. It was a leather travelling-bag, of no excessive size, but as she carried it in one hand her body bent itself the other way; and she never had it in the same hand long.

The hill was steep and seemed interminable; it was the warm evening of a hot day; and Harry, slowly overhauling the young woman, might have seen that she had pretty hair and ears, but he could think of nothing but her burden and her fatigue. He could not even think of himself and his ideals, and had so ceased committing his besetting sin. What he did see, however, was that the girl was a lady, and he heartily wished that she were not. He longed to carry that bag for her, but he could not bring himself to offer to do so. He had too much delicacy or too little courage.

Irresolutely he slackened his pace; he was ashamed, despite his scruples, to pass her callously without a word. He was close behind her now. He heard her breathing heavily. Was there nothing he could say? Was there no way of putting it without offence? Harry was still thinking when the knot untied itself. The girl had stopped dead, and put the bag down with a deep sigh, and Harry had caught it up without thinking any more.

"What are you doing?" cried the girl. "Give that back to me at once."

Her voice was very indignant, but also a little faint; and the note of alarm with which it began changed to one of authority as she saw that, at any rate, she was not dealing with a thief.

"I beg your pardon," said Harry, very red, as he raised his hat with his unoccupied hand; "but—but you really must let me carry it a little way for you."

"I could not dream of it. Will you kindly give it me back this instant?"

The girl was now good-humoured but very firm. She also had coloured, but her lips remained pale with fatigue. And she had very fine, fearless, grey eyes; but Harry found he could defy them in such a cause, so that they flashed with anger, and a foot—no very small one—stamped heartily on the pavement.

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I did; but——"

"Give it to me!"

"It's so heavy."

"Give it to me!"

He was wondering whether the bag was full of jewels, that she was in such a state about it, when all at once she grabbed at the handle he still hesitated to relinquish. The bag came open between them—and to his amazement he saw what it contained.

Coals!

A few fell out upon the pavement. Harry stooped, put them in again, and shut the bag. The young lady had moved away. She was walking on slowly ahead, and from her shoulders Harry feared that she was crying. He followed miserably but doggedly with the bag.

She never looked round, and he never took his eyes from those broad, quivering shoulders. He felt an officious brute, but he had a certain fierce consolation too: he had got his way—he had not been beaten by a woman. And the heaviness of the bag, no longer to be wondered at, was in itself a justification; he also had changed it from hand to hand, and that more than once, before they came to the top of the hill.

Here he followed his leader down a broad turning to the left, and thence along a smaller road until she stopped before the low wooden gate of a shabby little semi-detached house. Evidently this was her destination, and she was waiting for her bag. And now Harry lost confidence with every step he took, for the girl stood squarely with her back to the gate, and her eyes were dry but very bright, as though she meant to give him a bit of her mind before she let him go.

"You may put it down here."

Harry did so without a word.

"Thank you. You are a stranger to Richmond, I think?"

The thanks had sounded ironical, and the question took Harry aback. The grey eyes looked amused, and it was the last expression he had expected in them.

"How did you know that?" he simply asked.

"You are too sunburnt for Richmond, and—perhaps—too gallant!"

"Or officious?"

Her pleasant tone put him at his ease.

"No; it was very kind of you, and one good turn deserves another. Were you looking for any particular road or house?"

"Yes, for Sandringham, in the Greville Road."

She stood aside and pointed to the name on the little wooden gate.

"Why, this is it!" gasped Harry Ringrose.

"Yes; this is Sandringham," said the girl, with a sort of shamefaced humour. "No wonder you are disappointed!"

His eyes came guiltily from the little house with the big name. "Then are you Miss Lowndes?" he inquired aghast.

"That is my name—Mr. Ringrose."

Spoken with the broadest smile, this was the last straw so far as Harry's manners were concerned.

"How on earth do you know mine?" cried he.

"I guessed it in the road."

"How could you?"

"How did I know you were a stranger to Richmond?" rejoined Miss Lowndes. "Anybody could see that you have come from foreign parts; and I had heard all about you from my father. Besides, I expected you. I only hoped to get home first with my coals. And to be caught like this—it's really too bad!"

"I am awfully sorry," murmured Harry, and with such obvious sincerity that Miss Lowndes smiled again.

"I think you may be!" said she. "One may find that stupidity in the kitchen has run one short of coals at the very moment when they are wanted most, and the quickest thing may be for one to go oneself and borrow a few from a friend. But it's hard lines to be caught doing so, Mr. Ringrose, for all that!"

So this was the explanation. To Harry Ringrose it was both simple and satisfying; but before he could say a word Miss Lowndes had changed the subject abruptly by again pointing to the grand name on the gate.

"This is another thing I may as well explain for your benefit, Mr. Ringrose; it is one of my father's little jokes. When he came here he was so tickled by the small houses with the large names that he determined to beat his neighbours at their own game. It was all I could do to prevent him from having 'Buckingham Palace' painted on the gate. So you are quite forgiven for finding it difficult to believe that this was the house, and also for upsetting my coals. And now I think we may shake hands and go in."

He took with alacrity the fine firm hand which was held out to him, and felt already at his ease as he followed Miss Lowndes to the steps, again carrying the bag. By this time, moreover, he had noted and admired her pretty hair, which was fair with a warm tinge in it, her rather deep but very pleasant voice, and the clear and healthy skin which had her father's freshness in finer shades. She was obviously older than Harry, and stronger-minded as well as less beautiful than his ideal type. But he had a feeling, even after these few minutes, which had not come to him in all the hours that he had spent with Gordon Lowndes. It was the feeling that he had found a real friend.

But the surprises of the evening were only beginning, for while Harry contemplated a warped and blistered front door, in thorough keeping with the poverty-stricken appearance of the house, it was opened by a man-servant not unworthy of the millionaire of the immediate future. And yet next moment he found himself in a sitting-room as sordid as the exterior. The visitor was still trying to reconcile these contradictions when Miss Lowndes followed him slowly into the room, reading a telegram as she came.

"Are you very hungry, Mr. Ringrose?" said she, looking up in evident anxiety.

"Not a bit."

"Because I am afraid my father will not be home for another hour. This is a telegram from him. He has been detained. But it doesn't seem fair to ask you to wait so long!"

"I should prefer it. I shall do myself much better justice in an hour's time," said Harry, laughing; but Miss Lowndes still appeared to take the situation seriously, though she also seemed relieved. And her embarrassment was notable after the way in which she had carried off the much more trying contretemps in the road. It was as though there were something dispiriting in the atmosphere of the poky and ill-favoured house, something which especially distressed its young mistress; for they sat for some time without a word, while dusk deepened in the shabby little room; and it was much to Harry's relief when he was suddenly asked if he had ever seen the view from Richmond Hill.

"Never," he replied; "will you show it to me, Miss Lowndes? I have often heard of it, and I wish you would."

"It would be better than sitting here," said his companion, "though I'm afraid you won't see much in this light. However, it's quite close, and we can try."

It was good to be in the open air again, but, as Miss Lowndes observed, it was a pity she had not thought of it before. In the park the shadows were already deep, and the deer straggling across the broad paths as they never do till nightfall. A warm glow still suffused the west, and was reflected in the river beneath, where pleasure-boats looked black as colliers on the belt of pink. It was the hour when it is dark indoors but light without, and yellow windows studded the woody levels while the contour of the trees was yet distinct. Even where the river coiled from pink to grey the eye could still follow it almost to Twickenham, a leaden track between the leaves.

"I only wish it were an hour earlier," added Miss Lowndes when she had pointed out her favourite landmarks. "Still, it's a good deal pleasanter here than indoors." She seemed a different being when she was out of that house; she had been talkative enough since they started, but now she turned to Harry.

"Tell me about Africa, Mr. Ringrose. Tell me all the interesting things you saw and did and heard about while you were out there!"

Harry caught his breath with pleasure. It was the unconscious fault of his adolescence that he was more eager to convey than receive; it was the complementary defect of the quality of enthusiasm which was Harry's strongest point. He had landed from his travels loaded like a gun with reminiscence and adventure, but the terrible return to the old home had damped his priming, and at the new home the future was the one affair of his own of which he had had time or heart to think. But now the things came back to him which he had come home longing to relate. He needed no second bidding from the sympathetic companion at his side, but began telling her, diffidently at first, then with all his boyish gusto as he caught and held her interest, the dozen and one experiences that had been on his tongue three days (that seemed three weeks) ago.

To talk and be understood—to talk and be appreciated—it was half the battle of life with Harry Ringrose at this stage of his career. It is true that he had seen but little, and true that he had done still less, even in these two last errant years of his. But whatsoever he had seen or done, that had interested him in the least, he could bring home vividly enough to anybody who would give him a sympathetic hearing. And to do so was a deep and a strange delight to him; not, perhaps, altogether unconnected with mere vanity; but ministering also to a subtler sense of which the possessor was as yet unconscious.

And Miss Lowndes listened to her young Othello, an older and more critical Desdemona, who liked him less for the dangers he had passed than for his ingenuous delight in recounting them. The talk indeed interested, but the talker charmed her, so that she was content to listen for the most part without a word. Meanwhile they were sauntering farther and farther afield, and at length the new Desdemona was compelled to tell Othello they must turn. He complied without pausing in the story. Her next interruption was more serious.

"Don't you write?" she suddenly exclaimed.

"Write what?"

"Things for magazines."

"I wish I did! The magazine at school was the only one I ever tried my hand for. Who told you I wrote?"

"Mrs. Ringrose has shown things to my father, and he thought them very good. It only just struck me that what you are telling me would make such a capital magazine sketch. But it was very rude of me to interrupt. Please go on."

"No, Miss Lowndes, I've gone on too long as it is! Here have I been talking away about Africa as though nothing had happened while I was there; and it's only three days since I landed and found out—everything!"

His voice was strangely altered: the shame of forgetting, the pain of remembering, saddened and embittered every accent. Miss Lowndes, however, who had so plainly shared his enthusiasm, as plainly shrank from him in his depression. Harry was too taken up with his own feelings to notice this. Nor did he feel his companion's silence; for what was there to be said?

"You should take to writing," was what she did say, presently. "You have a splendid capital to draw upon."

"Do you write?"

"No."

"It is odd you should speak of it. There's nothing I would sooner do for a living—and something I've got to do—only I doubt if I have it in me to do any good with my pen. I may have the capital, but I couldn't lay it out to save my life."

He spoke wistfully, however, as though he were not sure. And now Miss Lowndes seemed the more sympathethic for her momentary lapse. She was very sure indeed.

"You have only to write those things down as you tell them, and I'm certain they would take!"

"Very well," laughed Harry, "I'll have a try—when I have time. I suppose you know what your father promises me?"

"No, indeed I don't," cried Miss Lowndes.

"The Secretaryship of this new Company when it comes out!"

For some moments the girl was silent, and then: "I'd rather see you writing," she said.

"But this would mean three hundred a year."

"I would rather make one hundred by my pen!"

Harry said that he would, too, as far as liking was concerned, but that there were other considerations. He added that of course he did not count upon the Secretaryship, which seemed far too good a thing to be really within his reach, for it would be many a day before he was worth three hundred a year in any capacity. Nevertheless, it was very kind of Mr. Lowndes to have thought of such a thing at all.

"He is kind," murmured the girl, breaking a silence which had influenced Harry's tone. And it was a something in her tone that made him exclaim:

"He is the kindest man I have ever met!"

"You really think so?" she cried, wistfully.

"I know it," said Harry, at once touched and interested by her manner. "It isn't as if he'd only been kind to me. He was more than kind three days ago, and—and I didn't take it very well from him at first; but I shall never forget it now! It isn't only that, however; it's his kindness to my dear mother that I feel much more; and then—he was my father's friend!"

They walked on without a word—they were nearly home now—and this time Harry thought less of his companion's silence, for what could she say? But already he felt that he could say anything to her, and "You knew my father?" broke from him in a low voice.

"Oh, yes; I knew him very well."

"He has been here?" said Harry, looking at the semi-detached house with a new and painful interest as they stopped at the gate.

"Yes; two or three times."

"When was the last?"

But the latch clicked with his words, and Miss Lowndes was hastening up the path.