The Wharf by the Docks by Florence Warden (novel24 TXT) 📖

his blow, he saw nothing but the old-fashioned, dirty paper on the wall, apparently without a hole or tear in it.

The discovery made him feel sick.

He turned to make his escape from the house, to which he felt that he was a fool to have returned at all, when the door by which he had entered opened slowly, and the girl came in.

A little flash, as of pleased surprise, passed over her white face. Then she said, under her breath:

"So you have come back. I didn't think you would. I--I am sorry you did."

Max looked rather blank. The girl's attraction for him had increased during the short period he had been absent from her. He had had time to think over his feelings, to find his interest stimulated by the process. Imagination, which does so much for a woman with a man, and for a man with a woman, had begun to have play. He had come back determined to find out more about the girl, to probe to the bottom of the mystery in which, perhaps, consisted so much of the charm she had for him.

Even now, upon her entrance, the first sight of her face had made his heart leap up.

There was a pause when she finished speaking. Max, who was usually fluent enough with her sex, hesitated, stammered and at last said:

"You are sorry I came back? Yet you seemed anxious enough to make me promise to come back!"

He observed that a great change had come over her. Instead of being nerveless and lifeless, as he had left her, with dull eyes and weak, helpless limbs, she was now agitated, excited; she glanced nervously about her while he spoke, and tapped the finger-tips of one hand restlessly with those of the other as she listened.

"I know," she replied, rapidly, "I know I was. But--Granny has come back. She came in while you were gone."

Max glanced at the wall, where he had fancied he saw the pair of watching eyes.

"Oh," said he, "that explains what I saw, perhaps. Where is your grandmother?"

"She has gone upstairs to her room under the roof."

"Ah! Are you sure she is upstairs? That she is not in the next room, for instance, watching me through some secret peep-hole of hers?"

The girl stared at him in silence as he pointed to the wall, and as he ran his hand over its surface.

"I saw a pair of eyes watching me just now," he went on, "from the middle of this wall. I could swear to it!"

The girl looked incredulous, and passed her hand over the wall in her turn. Then she shook her head.

"I can feel nothing," said she. "It must be your fancy. There is no room there. It is the ground-floor of an old warehouse next door which has been to let for years and years--longer than this."

He still looked doubtful, and she added, sharply:

"You can see for yourself if you like."

As she spoke, she was turning to go back into the outhouse, with a sign to him to follow her. But even as she did so, another thought must have struck her, for she shut the door and turned back again.

"No," she said, decisively, "of course you don't want to see anything so much as the outside of this gloomy old house. Don't think me ungrateful; I am not, but"--she came a little nearer to Max, so that she could whisper very close to his ear--"if Granny knew that I'd let a stranger into the place while she was away, I should never hear the last of it; and--and--when she's angry I'm afraid of her."

Max felt a pang of compassion for the girl.

"If you are afraid of her being angry," said he, "you had better let her see me and hear my explanation. I can make things right with her. I have great powers of persuasion--with old ladies--I assure you; and you don't look as if you were equal to a strife of tongues with her or with anybody just now; and I'd forgotten; I've brought something for you."

Max took from the pocket of his overcoat the little flat bottle filled with brandy with which he had provided himself; but the girl pushed it away with alarm.

"Don't let Granny see it!" she whispered.

"All right. But I want you to taste it; it will do you good."

She shook her head astutely.

"I am not ill," she said, shortly, "and I don't know that I should take it if I were. I see too much of those things not to be afraid of them. And, now, sir, will you go?" After a short pause she added, in an ominous tone--"while you have the chance."

Max still lingered. He had forgotten his curiosity, he had almost forgotten what had brought him to the house in the first instance. He did not want to leave this girl, with the great, light-blue eyes and the scarlet lips, the modest manner and the moving voice.

When the silence which followed her words had lasted some seconds, she turned from him impatiently, and leaving him by the door, crossed the little room quickly, opened one of the two wooden doors which stood one on each side of the fireplace, revealing a cupboard with rows of shelves, and took from the bottom a few chips of dry wood, evidently gleaned from the wharf outside, a box of matches and part of a newspaper, and dropping down on her knees on the hearth, began briskly to rake out the ashes and to prepare a fire.

Max stood watching her, divided between prudence, which urged him to go, and inclination, which prompted him to stay.

She went on with her work steadily for some minutes, without so much as a look behind. Yet Max felt that she was aware of his presence, and he knew also, without being sure how the knowledge came to him, that the girl's feeling toward himself had changed now that she was no longer alone in the house with him. The constraint which might have been expected toward a person of the opposite sex in the strange circumstances, which had been so entirely absent from her manner on their first meeting, had now stolen into her attitude toward him.

Yet, although the former absence of this constraint had been a most effective part of her attraction for him, Max began to think that the new and slight self-consciousness which caused her to affect to ignore him was a fresh charm. Before, while she implored him to come into the house with her, it was to a fellow-creature only that the frightened girl had made her appeal. Now that her grandmother had returned, and she was lonely and unprotected no longer, she remembered that he was a man.

This change in her attitude toward him was strikingly exemplified when, having lit the fire, she rose from her knees, and taking a kettle from the hob, turned toward the door.

"You haven't gone then?" said she.

"No!"

She came forward, taking the lid off the kettle as she walked.

"You won't be advised?"

She was passing him swiftly, with the manner of a busy housewife, when Max, encouraged by her new reserve, and a demure side-look, which was not without coquetry, seized the hand which held the kettle, and asked her if he was to get no thanks for coming to her assistance as he had done.

"I did thank you," said she, not attempting to withdrew her hand, but standing, grave and with downcast eyes, between him and the door.

"Well, in a way, you did. But you didn't thank me enough. You yourself admit it was a bold thing for a stranger to do!"

The girl looked suddenly up into his face, and again he saw in her expressive eyes a look which was altogether new. Like flashes of lightning the changes passed over her small, mobile features, to which the absence of even a tinge of healthy pink color gave, perhaps, an added power of portraying the emotions which might be agitating her. There was now something like defiance in her eyes.

"What was your boldness compared to mine?" said she. "You are a man; you have strong arms, at any rate, I suppose. I am only a girl, and you are a gentleman, and gentlemen are not chivalrous. Who dared the most then, you or I?"

"So gentlemen are not chivalrous?" said Max, ignoring the last part of her speech. "All gentlemen are not, I suppose you mean? Or rather, all the men who ought to be gentlemen?"

"No," answered the girl, stubbornly. "I mean what I said. You with the rest. You'd act rightly toward a man, I suppose, as a matter of course. You can't act rightly toward a woman, a girl, without expecting to be paid for it."

Max was taken aback. Here was a change, indeed, from the poor, clinging, pleading, imploring creature of twenty minutes before. He reddened a little and let her hand slip from his grasp.

"I believe you are right," he said, at last, "though you are rather severe. But let me tell you that the word 'chivalry' is misleading altogether. It is applied to those middle-aged Johnnies--no, I mean those Johnnies of the Middle Ages--who were supposed to go about rescuing damsels in distress, isn't it? Well, you don't know what happened after the rescue was effected; but I like to suppose, myself, that the girl didn't just say 'Thanks--awfully' and cut him dead forever afterward."

"You think the knight expected payment, just as you do, for his services?"

"I think so. A very small payment, but one which he would appreciate highly."

The girl leaned against the wall by the door and looked at him with something like contempt for a moment. Then she smiled, not encouragingly, but with mockery in her eyes.

"You have a tariff, I suppose," said she, cuttingly, "a regular scale of charges, as, perhaps, you will say the knights had. Pray, what is your charge in the present instance? A kiss, perhaps, or two?"

Now, Max had, indeed, indulged the hope that she would bestow upon him this small mark of gratitude. It came upon him with a shock of surprise that a girl who had been so bold as to summon him should make so much fuss about the reward he had certainly earned. He had expected to get it with a laugh and a blush, as a matter of course. For his modest suggestion to be taken so seriously was a disconcerting occurrence. He drew himself up a little.

"I don't pretend I should have been generous enough to refuse such a payment if you had shown the slightest willingness to make it," said he. "But as it's the sort of coin that has no value unless given voluntarily, we will consider the debt settled without it."

He made a pretense of leaving her at this point, without the slightest intention of persisting in it. This curious conference had all the zest of a most novel kind of flirtation, which was none the less piquant for the girl's haughty airs.

There are feminine eyes which allure as much while they seem to repel as they do when they consciously attract; and the light-blue ones which shone in the white face of this East End enchantress were of the number.

Max opened the door and slowly stepped into the outhouse. At the moment of