Kept Page 11

  Presently he fell asleep over the fire—the old clerk, stealing into his room, watched him for a moment and then crept silently away—but the dreams he dreamed were not pleasant ones. A cat that in fine weather sunned itself on the steps came loitering through the half-open door to curl up next his feet; a cracked old gentleman with a suppositious interest in a Chancery case who had been bringing Mr. Crabbe his petitions these twenty years or more got a quarter way up the staircase before being smartly repulsed by the old clerk, but Mr. Crabbe heard neither of them. When he awoke it was gone four o’clock, the fire had burned down, the cat was investigating the crevices of the wainscoting and there was snow falling beyond the window onto the dark trees. And Mr. Crabbe watched it in silent wonder, as he and Mr. Guyle had watched it fall on the turrets and pinnacles of old Windsor in the days of King George III.

  Mr. Pardew, when he emerged beyond the high stone gate of Lincoln’s Inn, did not, as he had suggested to his clerk, make his way to his club. Instead he boarded a second omnibus at the corner where Chancery Lane meets High Holborn and had himself conveyed along the Marylebone Road and then northwards in the direction of St. John’s Wood. Once arrived at this desirable locality, and having brushed from his boots several pieces of straw that he had brought with him from the omnibus, he set off in a purposeful manner along two or three side streets until he reached an avenue of secluded villas, each set back from the road and established behind hedges of laurel and cedar. It was growing steadily colder, and Mr. Pardew as he walked pulled the collar of his coat up to his chin. An onlooker who had studied his passing, here on this grey January afternoon beneath a darkling sky, would perhaps have noted that he appeared to be in a remarkably good humour, smiling to himself and on one occasion, such was his apparent delight, stopping at the pavement’s edge to laugh out loud. Turning in at the gate of one of the laurel-shrouded villas, and having been admitted by a servant girl in a white cap and a pinafore, he made his way into a drawing room, very daintily furnished, with pink and white paper on the walls and copies of pictures by Frith and Etty hanging in gilt frames, where sat a woman of perhaps twenty-nine or thirty years with a complexion as pink and white as the paper, reading, or perhaps only affecting to read, the Pall Mall Gazette.

  “Why, Richard,” this person remarked when she saw him—her friendly tone perhaps masking a faint anxiety—“you are quite a stranger here.”

  “I don’t believe that I am quite…that,” replied Mr. Pardew, standing on the hearthrug and jingling his money in his pocket. “It is but a week, surely?”

  “Nine days. Ten days. But I declare, had you come only a little later you would have found me out.”

  “Indeed? And where would you have gone?”

  “I had thought of going to see the people in Islington.”

  “Had you now?” Mr. Pardew’s face as he said this was set in the same cast as when he had discussed the little matter of Donaldson’s bill with his clerk. “You know I don’t care for you paying such calls.”

  “It is only my sister, Richard. And besides, what else is there for me to do? I declare, since I last saw you I have left the house only once, and that was to visit the milliner in Marylebone High Street.”

  By way of an answer Mr. Pardew looked down his nose, took off his coat and scarf, both of which he placed on the sofa, and seated himself in an armchair. An onlooker who observed this scene—one of the cupids, perhaps, gazing down from the frame of Mr. Etty’s picture of the Crystal Palace Exhibition—would possibly have drawn two conclusions from it: first, that the young woman with the pink and white complexion, though dressed in accordance with the latest dictates of fashion, was not what is generally known as a lady; second, that though his relation to her might not be outwardly clear, Mr. Pardew brought to his surroundings the same proprietorial air that had been in evidence at his office.

  “But let us not say another word about that, Richard,” continued the young woman, whose name was Jemima, “for I am very glad to see you.”

  Mr. Pardew did not reply, but the look on his face seemed to suggest that he, too, was glad. Jemima hastened to press home her advantage.

  “You will take tea?”

  “Tea? Certainly I will. Let the girl bring it in. Upon my word, Jemima, you’re looking uncommon handsome.”

  Jemima laughed, but there was something in the laugh that suggested she did not find Mr. Pardew’s compliment wholly to her liking. The tea having been brought by the very respectable maid, she busied herself with its infusion, rattling the tongs against the sugar basin and standing meekly at Mr. Pardew’s side as he accepted his cup.

  Drinking a certain portion of his tea off at a gulp, Mr. Pardew looked at her sardonically. “Upon my word! Anyone would think that you had been a parlourmaid once. There’s a way they deal out the sugar, I have remarked it.”

  “That is very ill-natured of you, Richard. A girl can’t help where she comes from.”

  “I don’t suppose she can. I meant nothing by it, so don’t take on. Shall I tell you what I have been about?”

  “If you will.” She hovered attentively by his side, not knowing whether he desired her to remain or to return to her seat.

  “Well, today I hoodwinked an old lawyer. Well—not hoodwinked him. Played upon his vanity rather.”

  “Gracious, Richard! Do you mean you took his money?”

  “Nothing so grievous. Let us say that I placed him in a position where he may be able to do a service for me.”

  “What kind of a gentleman was he?”

  “Don’t be a goose! The most respectable old lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn. Lives in a big house at Belgravia and dines with half the Cabinet, I shouldn’t wonder. Should you like to see him? Why, we could call upon him if you like.”

  “No indeed! I should like nothing less.”

  But there was a colour in Jemima’s cheeks as she said this, over and above the pinkness of her complexion, that suggested she liked to hear such stories, and that Mr. Pardew’s tales of the world he inhabited were among her greatest solaces. “But, Richard, how can he be of service to you if you have…hoodwinked him, as you say?”

  “Why, he has a name, you see. That’s the beauty of dealing with men who have names. Have a Treasury lord vouch for you and you’ve twice the credit you began with. It’s a trick I wish I’d learned long before.”

  “But why is it that you need…credit, as you say?”

  “Well…” Mr. Pardew was always circumspect in his dealings with the persons around him, but Jemima’s pink and white complexion was so agreeable to him that he was perhaps less cautious than he should have been. “Let us say that I have a little scheme in mind, with which this gentleman may be able to assist me.”

  All this conversation was very pleasant to Jemima, and she hung upon it, wishing in fact that it could be indefinitely sustained. In truth she knew very little of Mr. Pardew’s affairs—he was perhaps careful that she did not—but what she did interested her beyond measure, interested her, it might be said, rather more than did Mr. Pardew himself. But it could not, of its nature, be indefinitely prolonged, or perhaps it was merely that on this particular afternoon Mr. Pardew did not wish to prolong it. At any rate, when the servant girl had returned to the drawing room to clear away the tea things, he ceased to talk affably of his affairs and stood by the window looking out into the gathering darkness.

  “I declare it is starting to snow. You had better tell the girl to go.”

  Jemima did as she was bidden. Soon there came the sound of a door closing and footsteps receding into the distance. Returning to the drawing room, Jemima placed herself in its very centre, in the manner of one who awaits some signal. Finding that Mr. Pardew continued to stand by the window, she angled her head in a gesture that he appeared to understand as he twitched two or three fingers of his left hand and she retired once more. Presently her movements could be heard in the room above.

  Mr. Pardew continued to watch the snow keenly: soft, regular flakes of snow,
beneath which the summit of the laurel hedge had already begun to disappear. In his mind he could see it falling elsewhere: down the river at Greenwich, up on the heath a mile or so distant from where he now stood, upon the strawberry fields at Hammersmith, piling up in drifts upon the islands of the Thames at Twickenham and Teddington. It reminded him of certain other snowfalls he had witnessed, several thousands of miles distant, and of times when fate had not smiled on him in the way it seemed now to be smiling and there were no grand schemes in his head on which to brood.

  The noises from above him had ceased. The house was altogether quiet. Seizing a lighted lamp from where it lay on the sideboard next to the door, he began to move soundlessly up the staircase.

  VII

  CURIOUS BEHAVIOUR OF MR. CRABBE

  I will own that I am a curious man. And yet my curiosity is, as it were, of an altogether curious kind. A sealed casket holds no charms for me. A locked door seldom makes me yearn for a key and the right to admittance. Rather, my fascination lies with great people and the moment when their greatness has, albeit temporarily, been put aside. How does a bishop conduct himself when, retiring to the bosom of his family, he divests himself of his mitred hat? What does Lord John, coming back from the Treasury chambers, say to his wife, his butler or the domestic who hands him his tea? Half the charm of fiction resides in these imaginings. Write a novel about a ploughman in his field or a City Croesus striding about the floor of ‘Change with his hands plunged into his trouser pockets and no one will read it, but let a distinguished nobleman, the heir to broad acres and the confidant of half the Cabinet, tell his wife that he has the gout or that he will lend no more money to her scapegrace brother and the public is instantly agog!

  Say by some chance that a spyglass could be brought to bear on Mr. Crabbe’s innocent recreations; what would it show? It is late, very late indeed, on a black January night in Lincoln’s Inn, yet still a light burns in the upper storey of Mr. Crabbe’s chambers. Three hours have passed since the sucking barristers and the high-collared young men went home to their families and their landladies, and all that time Mr. Crabbe has sat absorbed among his books and his solitary lamp so that even the old clerk, now waiting at the foot of the staircase and noting the crack of light under Mr. Crabbe’s door, now descending to some bolt-hole of his own in the building’s lower depths, marvels at it and thinks it odd. Lincoln’s Inn is shut up and deserted, with the shadows marshalled under the great door and the wind bristling over the inky grass, and the old clerk wonders if his master has fallen asleep over the fire or some other eventuality. But no, here is Mr. Crabbe’s footstep on the stair and the sight of Mr. Crabbe’s fingers buttoning his waistcoat and the lamplight spilling from his room to illumine his downward passage to the door.

  “Decidedly cold,” Mr. Crabbe murmurs in his soft voice to the old clerk as he steps out into the night air, and the old clerk nods, for it is cold, decidedly cold indeed, and watches his master pad cautiously away in the darkness like an old ghost rising out of his catafalque until a black wall of shadow looms up to swallow him and he disappears. (Where does the old clerk sleep? I declare I think he doubles as nightwatchman and lives on the premises.) The great gate of Lincoln’s Inn is shut, but Mr. Crabbe avails himself of a side door and emerges with his hat in his hand and his coat pulled up to his chin into a public thoroughfare dominated by a cab rank, a workmen’s brazier and a baked potato stall. Given his age and eminence, Mr. Crabbe might be forgiven for resorting to a hansom, but no, he scuttles off, rather in the manner of his namesake, in the direction of High Holborn. On the corner of this thoroughfare there is an ancient law dining house named the Eldon—very sombre in its furnishings, with grim grey waiters in black stocks—and here Mr. Crabbe stops almost without knowing that he does it, scuttles inside, hangs up his coat and under the approving eye of the head waiter—Mr. Crabbe has been coming here since before that head waiter was born—orders a chop and a pint of watered sherry.

  But something is agitating Mr. Crabbe. Why else does he pull a slip of paper from his waistcoat pocket, stare at it and replace it, only to repeat the operation two minutes later? An elderly legal acquaintance, so old and shaky in his movements that one almost expects to see a periwig on him and a pair of knee breeches, totters over to shake his hand, but Mr. Crabbe, though he is civil, has no eyes for him; his mind is bent entirely on the slip of paper, now lodged again in his breast pocket but soon brought out once more to be dandled in his white old palm. The head waiter notices that Mr. Crabbe don’t eat much of his chop, the wine waiter remarks that he don’t drink much of his sherry (excellent Marsala it is, that you or I would willingly entertain) and presently Mr. Crabbe rises from his table, leaving chop and sherry to be carried back into the kitchens, and sets out once more into the night.

  It is very cold now, past nine o’clock—the legions of the street have all but gone away—and Mr. Crabbe’s breath rises into the dark air in a veritable fume of condensation. There is a cab bowling along High Holborn towards him, and Mr. Crabbe considers it for a moment before raising his hand and with the slightest imaginable movement compels it to stop. Where to? the cabman wonders, and Mr. Crabbe tells him Grosvenor Square in a tone so mild and coming from so deep inside his coat that the man has to ask him to repeat the name of that very distinguished neighbourhood. But even now, in his cab, whipping off in the direction of Oxford Street, Mr. Crabbe does not seem at ease. There are workmen out on the road, grubbing up a portion of the pavement, with a stretch of lanterns suspended over their heads like the illuminations of the Chinese pantomime, and Mr. Crabbe stares at them altogether indifferently, as if to say, “So this is how the world conducts itself? Well, I neither approve nor disapprove,” before returning to his meditations.

  At Oxford Circus he takes an old lawyer’s brief out of some inner pocket, very grey and curled up at the edges, and dabs gingerly at it with a pencil stub, and halfway down Bond Street he puts brief and pencil stub back into the same recess inside his coat, and that is the solitary diversion of Mr. Crabbe’s journey. At Grosvenor Square the cabman puts him down in front of a grand house positively aswarm with carriages, policemen, bowing butlers, and Mr. Crabbe steps down from his chariot, sniffs the air like an old charger about to re-enter the fray after long years in the paddock and feels himself rejuvenated, tips the cabman threepence, to that gentleman’s great disgust, and marches up the great steps to the vestibule, where amidst a chaos of human traffic—ladies in evening dresses, gentlemen furling and unfurling umbrellas, perilously borne trays and suchlike—a servant divests him of his hat, coat and scarf and murmurs that His Grace is in the drawing room. Mr. Crabbe nods his head at this intelligence, accepts a glass of champagne from a flunkey in a gorgeously damasked tailcoat, strides out across the wide hall, where so many ladies are standing fanning themselves that the candles burning on the marble tables about them are in danger of being extinguished, and proceeds up the great staircase.

  Many of the great people clustered on the landing at its summit know Mr. Crabbe, and he them. Here he shakes a hand, there he listens attentively as a lady whispers something in his ancient ear. And thus Mr. Crabbe makes his way through the succession of rooms, past great glaciers of ice on which lie salmon sent down that morning from His Grace’s estate in Perthshire, and hecatombs of fruit forced prematurely into ripeness in His Grace’s glasshouses in Kent, through veritable ornamental gardens of fresh flowers purchased at I don’t know what expense that forenoon in Covent Garden, until he comes at last to an inner sanctum, much smaller than its predecessors, with a red-faced footman standing guard and a mere half-dozen persons glimpsed dimly within its half-open door. And here a very great gentleman indeed rises stiffly from a chair, offers Mr. Crabbe two fingers of his right hand to shake, commands the red-faced footman to replenish Mr. Crabbe’s glass and remarks that it is a fine night if somewhat cold (to which Mr. Crabbe dutifully replies that it is a fine night if somewhat cold) and—this in valediction—wonders, h’m, what
Mr. Crabbe thinks of, h’m. Whatever Mr. Crabbe says in return is lost in a sudden swirl of conversation, the sound of music, faint yet distinct, starting up beneath the floor, a rattle of glasses on a newly emerging tray, and the great gentleman draws himself up, nods at Mr. Crabbe as if their recent colloquy had entirely escaped his memory, murmurs that he is exceedingly pleased to see him (a sentiment Mr. Crabbe heartily reciprocates) and that Her Grace is probably in the ballroom.

  Whereupon Mr. Crabbe moves off once more through His Grace’s anterooms, past the ranks of His Grace’s guests, brought in that evening from Belgravia and Kensington, down His Grace’s marbled staircase, and having retrieved his belongings in the hall—now a kind of pandemonium of gentlemen calling for their carriages and a lady overcome with faintness having sal volatile administered to her by the housekeeper—steps out once more into the street. It is ten o’clock now, early by the Mayfair timepiece—His Grace will not see his bedchamber until ever so many more hours have passed—but Mr. Crabbe, who had perhaps pondered the notion of a game of whist at his club, decides that the evening has afforded him sufficient diversion and that his own home were a better solace than rack punch and cigars at the Megatherium. Another cab is summoned, accordingly, by one of His Grace’s footmen, and Mr. Crabbe is borne away—very small and pale he looks, staring out of the cab’s dark interior—through the great squares to his house in West Halkin Street.