Windsor Magazine/'London Town'

by Flora Annie Steel

"LONDON TOWN."

By FLORA ANNIE STEEL

 

"YOU must find this dull, sir, after London town," said a thin, old voice.

Jack Dacre turned quickly from the window. He was a man of forty, without anything to boast of save a very charming manner with women; for, as his faults had never lain towards their injury, he had kept his respect for them.

So he smiled pleasantly, even though the woman who spoke was old—sixty or thereabouts, small, frail, worn exceedingly like the lappets of lace concealing her thin hair and her thin throat and hands, the tout ensemble suggesting a wonder as to how long the covering, both of body and soul, could last.

"You used to live in London, I suppose?" he asked, phrasing the question in the past tense, because the long journey to Monte Carlo seemed impossible to her present condition.

The faint tremble of her head and hand grew fainter, she sat straighter in the big arm-chair by the cold marble mausoleum of a mantelpiece—for there was no fire in the salon of the pension.

"I do live there," she replied sharply. "I have only been detained here by my health. I shall return next spring. It must have been looking very pretty when you left. The hyacinths out in the parks, I suppose. It always seems a pity to go away for Easter; but one must, of course. Everyone does."

There was that indefinable tone of conviction in her voice which comes with the constant repetition of any formula of faith.

"I suppose one must," replied Jack Dacre politely, though it was years since he had been of those who recess at Easter. The recollection made him return to his previous occupation of frowning out of the window at a blank wall, though you cannot expect a view, even at Monte Carlo, in a four-lire pension! Not that he would have cared for one, his chief wants in life being a cheap bed and breakfast, and proximity to a gambling-table. The "Hôtel et Pension de Londres" supplied him with both for two francs a day. His frown, therefore, was for the world beyond the blank wall. He was getting tired of it; yet there seemed no way out of it, for even a bullet through one's brain did not fit with the steady meanness of his luck, which habitually gave him enough cash for cigarettes and absinth, but no more! If he could only lose that five-pound note he kept sewn up in his coat pocket, or win enough to let him start decent stakes, he might be able to make that choice between death and life. He could not now.

There was an impatient tapping, as of a foot, on the parquet behind him as he stood silent. Then the thin, old voice began again.

"Lady Dashford's ball must have been a great success. I hear she brought out her youngest daughter. A pretty creature; though, naturally, no one has a chance against Miss Abiram cent. the Chicago heiress, for looks, if, of course, you except the Duchess of Bedlam, who is also American, isn't she?"

Jack Dacre felt as he used to do in school when called upon for a declension. For a second he felt inclined to tell the truth—namely, that the society of ladies and duchesses was far from him; but there was something so wistful in the old face, raised appealingly to his, that he replied in the affirmative.

The shrunken figure leant back contentedly.

"I thought so," it said. "But one can scarely be expected to know everybody when one's health prevents one taking much notice of new comers. But I shall begin my social duties again next spring, and it really doesn't matter this year. The season must be dull with the Court in mourning. How pretty the poor Princess was, wasn't she?"

"Very pretty," assented Jack. He was not thinking of the Princess at all, but of the face before him. It must have been very pretty once. He moved closer to it and stood leaning against the marble mausoleum, a gentlemanly figure despite its seedy clothes.

"It was dreadfully sad, wasn't it?" went on the thin, appealing voice. "I don't remember anything more so for years, except, of course, poor young Davenport's death. What a charming fellow he was, wasn't he?"

Jack Dacre did not hesitate this time. He said young Davenport was perfect, though he did not know him from Adam; and five minutes afterwards, when Tonio, the factotum, appeared with a flourish of a very dirty serviette and an announcement that breakfast was ready. Jack Dacre felt it was time. He was beginning to inhabit a world where all the men were charming, all the women beautiful.

This one had been so, at any rate; beautiful and beloved—witness the little dignified wave of her thin hand with which she had dismissed him to his breakfast with the hope that they might renew their conversation later on.

Who the dickens was she? And was there no one else in the dreary little pension? Tonio, the factotum, was dignified also over both these questions. The chief rooms were being kept, of course, for the English milords, who thought the hotel the finest in Europe. The Signor could see this under their signatures in the visitors' book. As for the Signorina Bellasis, she had been there a long time, on arrangement. The maître d'hôtel was always open to moderate reduction, on arrangement, and if the Signor—— Jack Dacre, who, despite years of wandering from watering-place to watering-place, was still curiously observant of the stains on the tablecloth, and the smeariness of knives and forks, interrupted this digression sharply, and Tonio returned to the Signorina. She had been there? Yes! for years, but she was going to return to London next spring, certainly. She had a palazzo in London. They would be sorry to lose her, for she never complained of the food or said a harsh word of anyone, or failed to pay her bill weekly, with a pourboire, of course, for attendance.

The Honourable John Dacre, as he chose to call himself, ate the rest of his greasy meal in silence. He refused a compôte, made of orange peel and melon rinds, politely. He did not call the claret vinegar. He even sipped the decoction Tonio called "café nero" without a murmur.

Such virtue was not unattainable, and pourboires were a necessity of personal comfort. But he had not paid a pension bill weekly for years, and he did not intend to; yet a faint twinge of remorse rose with him from the stained tablecloth as he went off to gamble.

He did not return from the Casino till play ceased for the night, so he saw no more of the little old lady. But as he went up to bed, the guttering candle, left out for him by Tonio (and pourboire), showed him a pair of very small, very well-worn shoes outside the next door to his. His own boots when he put them out stood close beside the shoes, and the comparison in size and delicacy struck him.

Tonio and the pourboire knew better than to disturb a man who required a candle left for him overnight, before noon; but when he did rouse Jack Dacre, he brought with him a neat white packet sealed with wax. It was from the Signorina, he said gravely. Her room was next the Signer's. She had been disturbed by hearing him cough once or twice in the night. So she sent her compliments, some pâte de guimauve, and advised him to stay in bed, as chills caught on a journey from London were apt to settle on the lungs. Her brother had died of one.

Jack looked at the packet with a kindly smile, but ordered his usual glass of absinth.

Nevertheless, he felt bound to give a word of thanks to the little figure in the salon when he went downstairs. It was great kindness on her part, he said, to a total stranger.

"No one is a stranger to me," she said with dignity, "who comes from London town. Besides, you belong to us." And then with infinite aplomb she handed him her card, saying there was no need for him to return the compliment, as she had read his name in the visitors' book.

Jack Dacre, as he read "The Honourable Eva Bellasis" on the card given him, felt another twinge of remorse, though, as he told himself cynically, her title might be of the same class as his own. Meanwhile they could converse on equal terms about the aristocracy; which they did, for Jack Dacre was a man of the world, and had given himself relations as well as a name. So, once more, the Honourable John Dacre went back for a few minutes to a life where all the men are honourable, all the women virtuous; for the Signorina's London town was peopled by heroes and angels.

It bored him on the whole, and he would most likely have eschewed the salon altogether, but for a chance meeting that day with an old friend, a frequenter like himself of gambling resorts, who prided himself on knowing everybody and everything connected with them.

"So you're at he 'Londres,'" said this worthy. "That's where 'London Town' boards. What? You don't know the story? She was Charley Raymond's half-sister. Years older, but they say one of the prettiest girls you ever saw. Money, too. Mothered him, refused to marry, and all that. He went to the bad utterly, but she hadn't an idea of it, and the doctor didn't tell her. So she brought him south, and talked of lungs and inherited delicacy. Young cub! He might have done her the service of dying decently, but he didn't. Shot himself one night at the Casino. They hushed it up, of course. I don't think even she knew the truth; but they couldn't hide the fact that he had not only lost all his money, but got at hers. She had brain fever and never got quite right. Refused to budge—though the Syndicate would have paid her way home—until Charley had a tombstone! So, as her people only allowed her bare bread, Charley is waiting for a monument still. Ha, ha!"

Jack Dacre, to his own surprise, felt so much inclined to fling his absinth in the laugher's face that he swallowed it at a gulp and walked back to the Casino. But he was off play; so he took a cigarette into the gardens. Their beauty, however, did not satisfy him, and he passed on aimlessly, till, again to his own surprise, he found himself wandering about the cemetery. If he sought anything, he did not find it, so he strolled back to the "Hôtel de Londres" at such a virtuous hour that Tonio, aghast, asked what was the matter? Whereupon Jack Dacre swore at himself for a cursed fool and straightway returned to the Casino, where he had a turn of slightly stronger luck, the result being that his candle guttered very much indeed on its way upstairs just before the dawn, and he nearly stumbled over the little shoes which had worn so thin upon the path of virtue! He did not, however, otherwise disturb their owner, for, when he came down, still later, next morning to the salon the inmate of the chair by the mausoleum began by congratulating herself and him on the soothing effect of the pâte de guimauve. The memory of the unopened packet in his room upstairs, and the headache remaining over from a very different sedative, gave Jack Dacre a third twinge of remorse, and that made him discourse still more affably of the beautiful and the good. So that when Tonio summoned him to the stained table-cloth, he remembered, as he sat down to it; that people sometimes said grace. He did not say it, however.

But, after this, it became a recognised part of his day to go into good society for a few minutes with the Honourable Eva Bellasis. It made him feel a little dizzy sometimes; for his recollections of London town were not hers. So far as they went it was a heaven upon earth!

So the days passed and his slightly better luck at the tables continued. Nevertheless, when at the end of the first week he found himself actually paying his bill, he swore at himself under his breath once more and told himself that he must not get into the bad habit.

Still he was not sure of himself, and felt quite grateful when Providence put it out of his power to be so virtuous again, since on the very next settling day he found something better to do with his money. For the arm-chair by the mausoleum was vacant when he came down to the salon that morning, and Tonio, when he came in with the perennial flourish of the dirty serviette, brought him a note—a pretty little note full of sweets and sentiments. Mr. Dacre had been so kind, it ran, that the writer was going to ask a tiny favour, as Tonio was always so busy in the morning, and she had had a bad fainting fit in the night. But as Mr. Dacre must pass the flower market, would he order a two-lire wreath to be sent to her? The note was signed, "Ever yours, dear Mr. Dacre, most sincerely," and there was a postscript, "It is my dear dead brother's birthday, and I want it for him."

Jack looked at the note many times during his barmecidal breakfast, began an answer on some flimsy paper loaned by Tonio, tore this up again because the flimsiness seemed to invade the words, and finally sent a message that Mr. Dacre would be glad to help Miss Bellasis in that and every possible way. He kept his word, too; for, finding the market people demur to sending the wreath at once, he took it back himself.

"Jesu Maria!" exclaimed Tonio when he saw it. "How pleased the Signorina will be! It is a wreath fit for a saint! The Signor must show it to her. She is in the salon now, though she ought to be in her bed."

Of that there could be no doubt, and Jack Dacre, noticing a faint droop of her lip and a hesitation in her speech, told himself that the fainting fit was possibly a slight stroke. Yet her mind was clear enough, for after one look at the wreath she flushed up and said nervously that flowers must be very cheap that morning if it had been only two lire!

"They were dirt cheap," replied Jack calmly, and then in a sudden impulse he asked if—as she was manifestly unable to get out herself—he could take the wreath for her anywhere? She flushed up again like a girl and laid a trembling hand on the flowers. He was very kind, she said, very, very kind. She had meant to ask Tonio; but it would be far nicer if he did not mind, for he was one of themselves, as it were, and Charley had always been so sensitive.

Jack Dacre found the suicide's grave this time. There was a dead two-lire wreath hanging on one of the arms of the plain black cross, and he felt uncertain whether to say it was good enough for the memory of the man who lay underneath it, or admire himself for the superior merits of the new one which had prevented him from paying his bill! For, naturally, a man must have a margin for cigarettes and absinth!

When he and the guttering candle went upstairs that night there were no shoes outside the door next to his; the feet to which they belonged had not been strong enough for the path of virtue.

Nevertheless, their owner was down in the salon before him next day, and looked up with a sigh of relief as he entered. "I've been wanting to explain so much," said the thin voice. "I forgot you did not know and would wonder at the wooden cross. It is only temporary. There is really a white marble Runic cross. His mother was a Cornish woman, you know. It has three steps to the pedestal, for the name and date; but there is nothing on the cross itself but the text, 'Blessed are the pure.' That seems to suit him best, doesn't it?"

Jack Dacre said gravely that it was most appropriate, adding, why he scarcely knew, that he had quite understood the wooden cross to be purely temporary. But she sat twisting her trembling fingers together nervously.

"It ought to have been put up long ago, but—but——" She paused, looked at him, and then went on. "You will understand, Mr. Dacre, for you are one of us, as it were. But after the bills are paid there is very little left—sometimes nothing at all; and, of course, the bills must be paid, mustn't they?"

Jack replied hurriedly that it was quite out of the question not to pay bills, and tried to change the subject by talking of the Countess of Clewers's fancy ball. But even "London Town" could not divert her attention. It was getting close to the end, she said; spring would soon come; it seemed, sometimes, as if it—the cross—would never be begun.

It seemed so, indeed; and as he sat down to the stained tablecloth he remarked to Tonio that the Signorina was not so well that morning.

Tonio gave a flourish of the dirty serviette towards his eyes; but if he was tearful, he was also frank with the frankness of his class. "Not so well?" he echoed. "The Signorina will never be well. She will never see the palazzo in London town, for she will never leave the 'Hôtel de Londres' till the good brothers carry her downstairs feet foremost. The Blessed Mary be praised! It is better so; she will not weary for a monument when she is in Paradise."

In the meantime, however, she wearied for one sadly. Something ought to be done, she said helplessly, and Jack Dacre, as usual, assented to the proposition. He even talked of estimates, of payment by instalments, of men being able to manage tradesfolk better than women.

Finally, he never knew exactly how, he found himself one day buying a child's paint box and some tracing-paper with which he sat up in his room instead of going to the Casino. And next morning there was no need to distract attention artfully by tales of "London town," since there was a real plan and estimate of a Runic cross in white Carrara marble to discuss. It took a long time, a very long time, to thresh out all the contingencies, partly because they seemed to come fresh each time to the brain which had puzzled over them so long.

Thus nearly a fortnight passed, and yet the faint reflection on that blank wall—which was all the "Hôtel et Pension de Londres" had for view—of a sunset that was making all the rest of Monte Carlo into a dream city, found him one day still bending, with the plan in his hand, over a sofa set in that upper room, at the door of which the well-worn shoes had stood.

"'Sacred to the memory of Charles,'" he read mechanically. The quiet head—its lace covering had given up its task for some days now—upon the pillow stirred. "'The Honourable,' please," said the thin voice. "I wonder at your forgetting that, when you are——"

Jack Dacre interrupted her. "Certainly! we must not forget 'The Honourable.'" Then he read on.

"It sounds right. I—I should like to see how it looks again, please."

He slid his arm beneath the pillow and raised her. The pale reflection of the sunset had almost gone. The room grew grey to match her face.

"It looks beautiful. I don't think they could have done it better in London town," said the thin, old voice. "Thank you so much. It will be such a comfort to think of it when I am there; for I must go back, of course, when the recess is over."

•••••

The Honourable John Dacre and Tonio were chief mourners at the funeral. The former brought a magnificent wreath of lilies to lay on the little heap of new-turned earth whence, for a time, the black wooden cross had disappeared; but Tonio stuck to a two-lire offering of immortelles. They would last longer, he said, and the dear dead were always content in Paradise; even the Signorina would not care now what lay above her and her brother.

"It will be such a comfort to think of it when I am, there" The words, contradicting Tonio's, haunted Jack Dacre as he sat at the tables trying to recoup himself for lost opportunities and the wreath of lilies.

"Faites vos jeux, messieurs! Le jeu est fait! Rouge gagne et couleur perd!"

The monotonous chant went on, but the muck-rake spared Jack Dacre's stake so often that he rose from the table with eighty pounds in his pocket. Not a grand coup in itself, but enough to make a grand coup on the morrow.

Yet next morning, to Tonio's astonishment, Jack Dacre came down to the empty salon early and asked for his bill. He paid it, wrote his name in the visitors' book once more, opposite an assertion that he had found nothing to complain about in the "Hôtel de Londres." Then, having presented Tonio with a liberal pourboire, he bade his luggage be sent to the station, and so, with the remainder of the eighty pounds in his pocket, strolled into the town. There he paid a few trifling bills, including his washing—a thing he had not done for years!

It was well on into the afternoon before he picked his way, through a forest of broken pillars, and funeral urns, and weeping angels, to the office of the largest marble works in Monte Carlo, and gave a most business-like order for a Runic cross to be placed over grave 4016 in the cemetery. The money was lodged with the English chaplain, who had promised to see the order properly executed.

He had just enough money when he arrived at the railway station for a glass of absinth, a daily paper, and a second class ticket, somewhere over and above, of course, the five-pound note which he always kept religiously sewn up in his coat pocket. But he had often been in similar case, so it was not that which made him hesitate whether to take that ticket east or west. To Nice and its naughtiness, or to Genoa with its harbour whence one man at least had sailed to find a new world.

What held him irresolute before the booking-office was the fact that, for many a long year past, he had never left a place as he was leaving Monte Carlo that day, without owing a farthing!

So he stood, a solitary figure in the sunshine, looking at his portmanteau on which was emblazoned—

"The Honble. John Dacre."

After a time, a train came up and he got into it. Whether he went east or west is uncertain, but, whichever it was, he had paid off some old scores.