This House to Let

“I had no real friends,” she went on; “but in the course of a wandering life – when my father owed too much in one place he removed to another – I had picked up a few acquaintances. With these I made a home, on and off, for longer or shorter periods.”

“And you have come to anchor here with Mrs L’Estrange, who is your cousin, one of the few relatives who did not visit the sins of the fathers on the children.”

Her voice was a little scornful. “The cousinship is a very distant one. And, as she is an inveterate gambler herself, but more lucky than my father, she could hardly look upon gambling in another as a deadly sin.” He nodded his head in agreement. He did not want to talk himself, for fear he should interrupt the flow of her reminiscences; she was evidently in a confidential mood this afternoon.

“I saw her a few times when quite a child, and then she vanished like the others. A couple of years ago, we met in Devonshire at the house of a mutual acquaintance. She seemed to take a fancy to me. In the end, she proposed that I should, for the present, make my home with her. She has only one interest in life, play. She is a very lazy woman. She hates writing the briefest note, and housekeeping is abhorrent to her. I attend to her correspondence, I order the dinner and look after the servants. I am not exactly eating the bread of charity,” she concluded with a little mirthless laugh, “because I give some work in exchange for my food. My own little pittance provides me with clothes.”

He wondered what the little pittance represented in annual hard cash. She was dressed quietly but in good taste, and he was judge enough of woman’s apparel to know that the material of her dress was expensive. On her slender fingers glittered a few valuable rings, heirlooms probably saved from the clutches of the gambling father. She did not convey the impression of poverty, but perhaps she was clever, and knew how to make the best of a small income.

There was a long silence, and it almost seemed as if she had forgotten his presence. For she sat with a musing look in her beautiful eyes, her thoughts evidently in the past, conjuring up Heaven knows how many painful memories.

Then she came back to herself, and turned to him with an apologetic smile. “I am afraid I have bored you to tears with my stupid personal history, but I will finish by telling you one little thing that may amuse you.”

He protested, of course, that he had not been in the least bored, only too painfully interested.

“Well, I am not a person easily crushed, and although a physical coward and frightened of raids and thunderstorms, I am not a moral one. When I began to review my position, I tried to hit upon some way of making money.”

Was she fond of money, he wondered? Well, perhaps, like most women, she wanted money to buy herself pretty things. There was nothing unusual in that.

“When I was a schoolgirl, I was supposed to show some artistic talent; I got several prizes. So I set to work and painted some half-a-dozen small things, in what I conceived to be a popular style, and took them round to as many dealers. In a week my hopes were shattered. One straightforward creature told me frankly that they just attained the schoolgirl level of excellence, but that I should never become an artist. It was not in me.”

“A crushing blow, indeed,” said Spencer sympathetically.

“I then turned to writing. Here, at any rate, was a profession that required no previous painful training, only powers of observation, some imagination, and a certain fluency of expression. I wrote some short stories which I thought good, which I still think good. History repeated itself. I sent them to a dozen editors, one after another. In every case, they were declined with thanks.”

“I daresay they were quite good, and they were not taken because you didn’t happen to be in the ring,” was Spencer’s consoling comment.

“Well,” she exclaimed brightly, “there is an end of my reminiscences for to-day. Let us talk of anything and everything else. Have you seen Mr Esmond lately? He has not been near us since the night he came with you.”

Shortly afterwards he took his leave, he had stayed unconsciously long as it was.

“I shall come again soon, if I may, to listen to some more reminiscences,” he said, as he shook hands. And she had given him permission, with the brightest of smiles.

He had not learned half as much as he wanted, but he had gathered something. The bounder cousin was the son of a self-made man, a parvenu. And Stella Keane was not absolutely penniless, she had enough money to buy herself clothes. Did Tommy Esmond know as much as this? And if he did, why had he not said so?

Chapter Twelve

Although unsuspicious by nature, Guy Spencer had mixed much in the world and seen a good deal of life. Attracted as he was by the charming Stella, there was a something about the atmosphere of that flat in Elsinore Gardens which created an unfavourable impression.

Of Mrs L’Estrange’s antecedents there was no question. She was a woman of good family, she could produce chapter and verse for her ancestors. And yet, why was she not in a better environment?

Clearly, she was on the downward slope. But was there anything remarkable in that? Heaps of members of aristocratic families were in the same sort of predicament, from various causes, through certain circumstances.

Had he not received a letter a few days ago from the daughter of a well-known earl, imploring him for a loan of ten pounds, for the sake of old friendship?

The writer was some twenty years his senior, and she had tipped him when he was at Eton. She now dated her letter from a suburb in the extreme west of Kensington. If she, with all her advantages of birth and connection, had fallen by the wayside, why not a comparatively obscure person like Mrs L’Estrange?

It was very easy to see it. Mrs L’Estrange was of a Bohemian temperament, and probably a great spendthrift. She had made considerable inroads into whatever fortune she originally possessed, and had developed into an adept card-player, with a view to supplementing the little income that was left to her.

And Stella Keane, that beautiful, sad girl, with the tragic history of worthless parents behind her, was the victim of fate. She was not happy in her cousin’s home, amidst this gambling, card-playing set. She, at least, was pure, whoever else might be defiled. On that he would stake his existence.

For a few days he thought a great deal about the subject, and during those few days he kept away from Elsinore Gardens and denied himself the pleasure of listening to a further instalment of Miss Keane’s reminiscences of her unhappy history.

If he were going to fall in love, he told himself sternly, he would fall in love with a woman of his own world, not with a girl, however beautiful and interesting she might be, who was only a hanger-on of a woman well-born, but evidently déclassée, a woman no longer moving in the sphere to which she had been accustomed. In these reflections, he showed sound sense.

But for a certain event that happened in the course of the next few days, he might have adhered to his good resolutions and have finally dismissed Miss Keane from his serious thoughts. And, in that case, this story would not have been written.

And then the event happened. Returning home to his rooms one night, about twelve o’clock, his man told him that Mr Esmond was waiting for him in the sitting-room.

He found the little rotund man sitting in an easy-chair, white-faced, the marks of agitation written all over his countenance.

Wondering at this unusual spectacle – Tommy was frequently fussy, but always self-contained – Spencer advanced, and held out his hand.

“What’s up, Tommy? You’re a late visitor, but always welcome.” He pointed to the decanters standing on the sideboard. “I hope you have helped yourself?”

To Spencer’s great surprise, the little man did not take the proffered hand. He spoke in a hoarse, choking voice, his lips twitching.

“I’ve helped myself once too often, Spencer. And I can’t take the hand of an honest man, for reasons. You’ve got it at once.”

Spencer had average brains, but he was not very quick to realise the meaning of unexpected situations. At first, he thought the little man had been drinking.

“Sit down, Tommy, and get it off your chest. What in the name of wonder is the matter?” he said kindly. He was rather fond of Tommy in a casual sort of way.

Esmond did not sit down at once, but went over to the sideboard, and mixed himself a stiff tumbler of whisky-and-soda. He gulped it down at a draught, and then took an armchair.

“You won’t begrudge me that, I know,” he said, speaking in the same strained, hoarse voice. “It’s the last drink I’ll have in your rooms, the last drink in any house in England, I should say. I’m done for, old man, to-morrow I clear out, eat my heart away in some beastly foreign hole.”

No, Spencer’s first surmise had been incorrect. The man was not drunk, not even elevated. His face was chalk-white, and he was trembling all over as if he had been stricken with palsy. But he was perfectly sober.

Spencer took a chair himself, and spoke a little sternly. “Pull yourself together, old man, and speak out. At first I thought you had had a drop too much. But I see that’s not the case. Out with it. You’ve been waiting some time, my man informs me. You want to tell me something. Tell it.”

Tommy Esmond moistened his dry lips with his tongue, and spoke.

“I don’t quite know what instinct prompted me to come to you. We haven’t known each other so very intimately, after all, but I always felt you were a bit more of a Christian than the other chaps I have known, less of a Pharisee – that you would be more likely to find excuses for a poor devil who had yielded to temptation.”

“Do get on,” said Spencer a little impatiently. He did not at all like the turn the conversation was taking.

Tommy spoke brokenly, he could not put his words together very coherently, it appeared. But his halting utterance was simply due to emotion.

“I was at Elsinore Gardens to-night, playing cards. You know Elsinore Gardens, Mrs L’Estrange’s flat?”

He was quite sober, but his agitation made him wander a bit, or he would not have put the question.

“Of course I know Mrs L’Estrange’s flat. It was you who took me there,” said Spencer.

“Yes, we went there on the night of the raid, but I was not playing at your table. I remember you lost, and I won. Well, somebody has to lose, and somebody else has to win.”

Spencer made no comment on this obvious truism. Tommy Esmond again moistened his dry lips with his tongue. He was a long time in coming to the point, but he came to it at last.