The Complete Five Towns Collections. Bennett Arnold

bother about explaining it; there it is, and if I can help you in any way just now, you must tell me."

      "Thank you, I will." She said it with perfect simplicity. Richard was conscious of a scarcely perceptible thrill.

      "You must have had an awful time last night, all alone," he said.

      "Yes, but I was too annoyed to feel upset."

      "Annoyed?"

      "Because uncle has brought it all on himself by carelessness. I do think it's a shame!" She stopped rocking, and sat up, her face full of serious protest.

      "He's not the sort of man to take care of himself. He never thought—"

      "That's just it. He should have thought, at his age. If he dies, he will practically have killed himself, yes, killed himself. There's no excuse, going out as he did, in spite of all I said. Fancy him coming downstairs last Sunday in the state he was, and then going out on Monday, though it was warm!"

      "Well, we'll hope he will get better, and it may be a lesson to him."

      "Hark! What was that?" She sprang to her feet apprehensively and listened, her breast pulsing beneath the tight black bodice and her startled inquiring eyes fixed on Richard's. A very faint tinkle came from the rear of the house.

      "Perhaps the front-door bell," he suggested.

      "Of course. How silly of me! I fancied.... Who can it be at this time?" She went softly into the passage. Richard heard the door open, and then a woman's voice, which somehow seemed familiar,—

      "How is Mr. Aked to-night? Your servant told our servant that he was ill, and I felt anxious."

      "Oh!" Adeline exclaimed, discomposed for a moment, as it seemed to Richard; then she went on coldly, "Uncle is about the same, thank you," and almost immediately closed the door.

      "A person to inquire about uncle," she said to Richard, with a peculiar intonation, on re-entering the room. Then, just as he was saying that he must go, there was a knock on the ceiling and she flew away again. Richard waited in the passage till she came downstairs.

      "It's nothing. I thought he was dying! Oh!" and she began to cry freely and openly, without attempting to wipe her eyes.

      Richard gazed hard at the apron string loosely encircling her waist; from that white line her trembling bust rose like a bud from its calyx, and below it the black dress flowed over her broad hips in gathered folds; he had never seen a figure so exquisite, and the beauty of it took a keener poignancy from their solitude in the still, anxious night—the nurse and the sick man were in another sphere.

      "Hadn't you better go to bed?" he said. "You must be tired out and over-excited." How awkward and conventional the words sounded!

      Chapter XV

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      In Adeline's idiosyncrasy there was a subtle, elusive suggestion of singularity, of unexpectedness, which Richard in spite of himself found very alluring, and he correctly attributed it, in some degree, to the peculiar circumstances of her early life, an account of which, with characteristic quaintness, she had given him at their second meeting.

      * * * * *

      The posthumous child of Richard Aked's brother, Adeline, who had no recollection of her mother, lived at first with her maternal grandparents and two uncles. She slept alone at the top of the house, and when she arose in the morning from the big bed with its red curtains and yellow tassels, she always ran to the window. Immediately below here were the leads which roofed the great projecting windows of the shop. It was her practice at night to scatter crumbs on the leads, and sometimes she would be early enough to watch the sparrows pecking them; more often all the crumbs had vanished while she was yet asleep. The Square never failed to interest her in the morning. In the afternoon it seemed torpid and morose; but before dinner, more especially on Saturdays and Mondays, it was gaily alert—full of canvas-covered stalls, and horses and carts, and heaped piles of vegetables, and pigs grunting amidst straw, and rough rosy-faced men, their trousers tied at the knees with string, who walked about heavily, cracking whips. These things arrived mysteriously, before the sun, and in the afternoon they dwindled imperceptibly away; the stalls were unthatched, the carts jolted off one by one, and the pigs departed squeaking, until at five o'clock the littered Square was left deserted and forlorn. Now and again a new stall, unfolding vivid white canvas, stood out brightly amid its soiled companions; then Adeline would run downstairs to her favourite uncle, who had breakfast at 7.30 so that he might be in charge of the shop while the rest were at table: "Uncle Mark, Uncle Mark, there is a new stall up at the top of the Square, near the New Inn!" "Perhaps it is only an old one with its face washed," Uncle Mark would say; and Adeline, raising her right shoulder, would put her head on it and laugh, screwing up her eyes.

      In those days she was like a little Puritan girl, with her plain frocks and prim gait. Her black hair, confined by a semicircular comb which stretched from ear to ear over the top of her head, was brushed straight away from her forehead, and fell across the entire width of her shoulders in glossy, wavy lines. Her grey eyes were rather large, except when she laughed, and they surveyed people with a frank, inquiring look which frightened some of the commercial travellers who came into the shop and gave her threepenny bits; it seemed as if all one's secret shames stood revealed to that artless gaze. Her nose was short and flattened, but her mouth happened to be perfect, of exactly the classic form and size, with delectable lips half hiding the small white teeth.

      To her the house appeared to be of immense proportions; she had been told that once, before she was born, it was three houses. Certainly it possessed more than the usual number of staircases, and one of these, with the single room to which it gave access, was always closed. From the Square, the window of the disused chamber, obscured and bare, contrasted strangely with the clear panes, white blinds, and red pads of the others. This room was next to her own, the two staircases running parallel; and the thought of its dread emptiness awed her at nights. One Saturday night in bed she discovered that grandma, who had been plaiting her hair for Sunday, had left a comb sticking in it. She called aloud to grandma, to Uncle Mark, to Uncle Luke, in vain. None of them came to her; but she distinctly heard an answering cry from the shut room. She ceased to call, and lay fearfully quiet for a while; then it was morning, and the comb had slipped out of her hair and down into the bed.

      Beneath the house were many cellars. One served for kitchen, and Adeline had a swing there, hung from a beam; two others were larders; a fourth held coal, and in a fifth ashes were thrown. There were yet two more under the shop, to be reached by a separate flight of stone steps. Uncle Mark went down those steps every afternoon to turn on the gas, but he would never allow Adeline to go with him. Grandma, indeed, was very cross if, when the door leading to the steps happened to be open, Adeline approached within a yard of it. Often, chattering to the shop-girls, who at quiet times of the day clustered round the stove with their sewing, she would suddenly think of the cellars below, and her heart would seem to stop.

      If the shutters were up, the shop was even more terribly mysterious than either the cellars or the disused room. On Sunday afternoons, when grandpa snored behind a red and yellow handkerchief in the breakfast-room, it was necessary for Adeline to go through the shop and up the show-room staircase, in order to reach the drawing-room, because to get to the house staircase would involve disturbing the sleeper. How strange the shop looked as she hurried timorously across! A dim twilight, worse than total darkness, filtered through the cracks of the shutters, showing faintly the sallow dust-sheets which covered the merinos and the chairs on the counters, and she always reached the show-room, which had two large, unobstructed windows, with a sob of relief. Very few customers were asked into the show-room; Adeline employed it on weekdays as a nursery; here she nursed her dolls, flew kites, and read "Little Wideawake," a book given to her by a commercial traveller; there was a cheval glass near the front window in which she contemplated herself long and seriously.

      She never had the companionship of other children, nor did she desire it. Other children, she understood, were rude and dirty; although Uncle