It was the ostler, with the idiot smile on his face of one who this time has made no mistake. In his hand was a note.

“’Twas the same boy, sir. I asked ‘un, sir. ‘E sez ‘twas the same woman as before, sir, but ‘e doan’ know ‘er name. Us all calls ‘er the—”

“Yes, yes. Give me the note.”

Sam took it and passed it to Charles, but with a certain dumb insolence, a dry knowingness beneath his mask of manservitude. He flicked his thumb at the ostler and gave him a secret wink, and the ostler withdrew. Sam himself was about to follow, but Charles called him back. He paused, searching for a sufficiently delicate and plausible phrasing.

“Sam, I have interested myself in an unfortunate woman’s case here. I wished… that is, I still wish to keep the matter from Mrs. Tranter. You understand?”

“Perfeckly, Mr. Charles.”

“I hope to establish the person in a situation more suited… to her abilities. Then of course I shall tell Mrs. Tranter. It is a little surprise. A little return for Mrs. Tranter’s hospitality. She is concerned for her.”

Sam had assumed a demeanor that Charles termed to himself “Sam the footman”; a profoundly respectful obedience to his master’s behests. It was so remote from Sam’s real character that Charles was induced to flounder on.

“So—though it is not important at all—you will speak of this to no one.”

“O’ course not, Mr. Charles.” Sam looked as shocked as a curate accused of gambling.

Charles turned away to the window, received unawares a look from Sam that gained its chief effect from a curious swift pursing of the mouth accompanied by a nod, and then opened the second note as the door closed on the servant.

No doubt for lack of wax, this note was unsealed, which explained why it was couched in governess French. It was written, scribbled, in pencil, as if composed in haste at some cottage door or in the Undercliff—for Charles knew that that was where she must have fled. The boy no doubt was some poor fisherman’s child from the Cobb—a path from the Undercliff descended to it, obviating the necessity of passing through the town itself. But the folly of the procedure, the risk!

The French! Varguennes!

Charles crumpled the sheet of paper in his clenched hand. A distant flash of lightning announced the approach of the storm; and as he looked out of the window the first heavy, sullen drops splashed and streaked down the pane. He wondered where she was; and a vision of her running sodden through the lightning and rain momentarily distracted him from his own acute and self-directed anxiety. But it was too much! After such a day!

I am overdoing the exclamation marks. But as Charles paced up and down, thoughts, reactions, reactions to reactions spurted up angrily thus in his mind. He made himself stop at the bay window and stare out over Broad Street; and promptly remembered what she had said about thorn trees walking therein. He span round and clutched his temples; then went into his bedroom and peered at his face in the mirror.

But he knew only too well he was awake. He kept saying to himself, I must do something, I must act. And a kind of anger at his weakness swept over him—a wild determination to make some gesture that would show he was more than an ammonite stranded in a drought, that he could strike out against the dark clouds that enveloped him. He must talk to someone, he must lay bare his soul.

He strode back into his sitting room and pulled the little chain that hung from the gasolier, turning the pale-green flame into a white incandescence, and then sharply tugged the bellcord by the door. And when the old waiter came, Charles sent him peremptorily off for a gill of the White Lion’s best cobbler, a velvety concoction of sherry and brandy that caused many a Victorian unloosing of the stays.

Not much more than five minutes later, the astonished Sam, bearing the supper tray, was halted in midstairs by the sight of his master, with somewhat flushed cheeks, striding down to meet him in his Inverness cape. Charles halted a stair above him, lifted the cloth that covered the brown soup, the mutton and boiled potatoes, and then passed on down without a word.

“Mr. Charles?”

“Eat it yourself.”

And the master was gone—in marked contrast to Sam, who stayed where he was, his tongue thrusting out his left cheek and his eyes fiercely fixed on the banister beside him.

26

The effect of Mary on the young Cockney’s mind had indeed been ruminative. He loved Mary for herself, as any normal young man in his healthy physical senses would; but he also loved her for the part she played in his dreams—which was not at all the sort of part girls play in young men’s dreams in our own uninhibited, and unimaginative, age. Most often he saw her prettily caged behind the counter of a gentleman’s shop. From all over London, as if magnetized, distinguished male customers homed on that seductive face. The street outside was black with their top hats, deafened by the wheels of their carriages and hansoms. A kind of magical samovar, whose tap was administered by Mary, dispensed an endless flow of gloves, scarves, stocks, hats, gaiters, Oxonians (a kind of shoe then in vogue) and collars—Piccadilly’s, Shakespere’s, Dog-collar’s, Dux’s—Sam had a fixation on collars, I am not sure it wasn’t a fetish, for he certainly saw Mary putting them round her small white neck before each admiring duke and lord. During this charming scene Sam himself was at the till, the recipient of the return golden shower.

He was well aware that this was a dream. But Mary, so to speak, underlined the fact; what is more, sharpened the hideous features of the demon that stood so squarely in the way of its fulfillment. Its name? Short-of-the-ready. Perhaps it was this ubiquitous enemy of humankind that Sam was still staring at in his master’s sitting room, where he had made himself comfortable—having first watched Charles safely out of sight down Broad Street, with yet another mysterious pursing of the lips—as he toyed with his second supper: a spoonful or two of soup, the choicer hearts of the mutton slices, for Sam had all the instincts, if none of the finances, of a swell. But now again he was staring into space past a piece of mutton anointed with caper sauce, which he held poised on his fork, though oblivious to its charms.

Mal (if I may add to your stock of useless knowledge) is an Old English borrowing from Old Norwegian and was brought to us by the Vikings. It originally meant “speech,” but since the only time the Vikings went in for that rather womanish activity was to demand something at axeblade, it came to mean “tax” or “payment in tribute.” One branch of the Vikings went south and founded the Mafia in, Sicily; but another—and by this time mal was spelled mail—were busy starting their own protection rackets on the Scottish border. If one cherished one’s crops or one’s daughter’s virginity one paid mail to the neighborhood chieftains; and the victims, in the due course of an expensive time, called it black mail.

If not exactly engaged in etymological speculation, Sam was certainly thinking of the meaning of the word; for he had guessed at once who the “unfortunate woman” was. Such an event as the French Lieutenant’s Woman’s dismissal was too succulent an item not to have passed through every mouth in Lyme in the course of the day; and Sam had already overheard a conversation in the taproom as he sat at his first and interrupted supper. He knew who Sarah was, since Mary had mentioned her one day. He also knew his master and his manner; he was not himself; he was up to something; he was on his way to somewhere other than Mrs. Tranter’s house. Sam laid down the fork and its morsel and began to tap the side of his nose; a gesture not unknown in the ring at Newmarket, when a bow-legged man smells a rat masquerading as a racehorse. But the rat here, I am afraid, was Sam—and what he smelled was a sinking ship.