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They both heard then steps on the stair. They stopped and listened. The room was at once ominous, alarmed.
"When are you going to be married?"
BOOK II
[Pg 77]
"Who's there?" he asked.
When he finally recovered himself and was once more standing, a man again amongst men, his pince-nez on his nose, he had his books under his arm, but his hat was gone, gone hopelessly, nowhere to be seen. It was not a very new hata dirty grey and shapelessbut Henry, being in the first weeks of his new independence, was poor and a hat was a hat. He was supremely conscious of how foolish a man may look without a hat, and he hated to look foolish. He was also aware, out of the corner of his eye, that there was a smudge on one side of his nose. He could not tell whether it were a big or a little smudge, but from the corner of his eye it seemed gigantic.
Half-an-hour's investigation among these papers told Millie a great deal about Miss Platt. Soon she was deep in her task. The heavy marble clock in the big room muttered on like an irritable old man who hopes to get what he wants by asking for it over and over again.
"I'll tell you one day."
She seemed then suddenly to have said enough. She leant back against the cushion, not regarding any more the two men, brooding. . . .
Ghosts rose about herthe ghosts of Victoria Platt's confused,[Pg 59] greedy, self-seeking world. Millie soon began to long to catch some of these pirates by their throats and wring their avaricious necks. How they dared! How they could ask as they did, again and again and again! Ask! nay, demand! She who was of too proud a spirit to ask charity of any human being aliveunless possibly it were Henry, who, poor lamb, was singularly ill-fitted to be a benefactorseemed, as she read on, to be receiving a revelation of a new world undreamt of before in her young philosophy. Her indignation grew, and at last to relieve her feelings she had to spring up from the desk and pace the room.
"That's enough, Mrs. Martin," she said sharply. "I did not call you dishonest. I do not now. But as you seem incapable of looking at this book I will show it to Miss Platt and she shall discuss it with you. That's everything, thank you, good morning."
Young Henry Trenchard, one fine afternoon in the Spring of 1920, had an amazing adventure.
"I daresay. He's always reading something queer."
"He's only careless because he's a genius," she said.
[Pg 278]
The drawing-room was just such a place as Millie had expected, a perfect menagerie of odds and ends of furniture and the walls covered with pictures ranging from the most sentimental of Victorian to the most symbolic and puzzling of Cubists. But what a nice room this could be did it contain less! Wide, high windows welcomed the sun and a small room off the larger one could have the most charming privacy and cosiness. But the smaller room was at the moment blocked with a huge roller-top desk and a great white statue of a naked woman holding an apple and peering at it as though she were expecting it to turn into something strange like a baby or a wild fowl at the earliest possible moment. This statue curved in such a way that it seemed to hang above the roller-top desk in an inquiring attitude. It was the chilliest-looking statue Millie had ever seen.
"And what are you doing for yourself?"
Mrs. Tenssen thrust her head forward, producing an extraordinary evil expression with her white powdered face, her heavy black costume and her hanging podgy fingers. "Call me a liar, do you? That's a nice, pretty thing to call a lady, but I suppose it's about as much manners as you have got. He's always talking about the police, my dear," turning round to Mrs. Arm[Pg 285]strong. "It's a mania he's got. Although what good they're going to do him I'm sure I don't know. And a pretty thing for Christina to be dragged into the courts. He's mad, my dear. That's all there is about it."
The two women made a strange, contrast as they faced one another, Millicent with her youth, beauty and happiness, the other scowling, partly at the sudden sunlight, partly at the surprise of finding a stranger there.
"Well, then," she said smiling. "Now I will try to tell you how I am. That womanthat horrible womanwhom they call my mother, and I too, to my shame, call her soshe was the wife of my father. From my birth she was cruel to me, she always hated me. When my father was at home she could not touch mehe would not allow herbut when he was at sea then she could do what she wished. My father was a hero, he was the finest of all Danish men, and when a Dane is fine no one in the world is as fine as he. He loved me and I loved him. Every one must love him, how he sang and danced and played like a child! After a time he hated the woman he'd married, because she was cruel, and he would have taken me away with him on his ship, but of course he could not. And then father was drownedone night I knew it. I saw him. He came to my bed and smiled at me and he was all dripping with water. Then that woman was terrible to me, and my two uncles, father's brothers, who were almost as fine as he, tried to take me away, but she was too quick for them. And when they quarrelled with her, she ran away in the night and brought me over here."
He told no jolly stories of other tenants nor of life about town such as Henry would have liked him to tell. He had, Henry was sure, a great contempt for Henry. He was not, from any point of view, a lovable human being.