The Post-Girl. Edward Charles Booth
for her station. She had dipped her nose meekly into the tumbler and was letting the sparkles play about her lips momentarily, with dropped eyelids; then the glass went down to the table, and her eyes opened wide upon the Spawer as though casting up the full column of her liabilities, resolved to shirk nothing.
"You don't drink," he said, with a voice of solicitude. "I have n't made it too weak for you? ... Surely! I took great care—I might have been making it for myself. Or is there anything else you 'd rather have?"
He found her soft voice entangled in his inquiry, and stopped.
"... Ever so much," he drew up in time to hear. "But it 's not that..." The frank lips were wrestling to pronounce sentence upon her crime, but they broke down in the task and transferred their self-imposed judgment to him. "I don't know what you must think of me..." she said.
The Spawer laughed light-hearted indulgence upon the admission.
"To tell the truth," he said, "I hardly know what to think myself, so it 's no use saying I do. I thought perhaps ... poultry, first of all; but your voice does n't sound a bit like poultry, and I 'm sure you don't look it. And I don't think it was apples either, though you 'd got the right gate for those. Besides, apples don't count ... that way. I 've gathered them myself at this time of night before now, and been hauled back over the wall by a leg. We don't think anything of that."
"It was the piano," she explained unsteadily, and for a moment the steadfast flames in her eyes flickered under irresolute lids.
"The piano?" The Spawer raised his voice in amused interrogation. "Heavens! you were n't going to try and take that away, were you? It took ten of us and a bottle of whiskey to get it in, and threepence to Barclay's boy for sitting on the gate and telling us by clockwork 'Ye 'll get stuck wi' 'er yet before ye 're done,' and half-a-crown to the man that let the truss down upon my toes. Surely you were n't thinking of tackling an enterprise like that single-handed, were you?"
For the first time he drew forth the faint fore-glimmering of what the girl should be like in smiles; a sudden illuminated softening of the features, as when warm sunlight melts marble, that spread and passed in a moment.
"I was listening," she said.
"But that 's a dreadful confession." His eyebrows went up in tragic surprise and his voice departed to the mock-horrified aloofness of a whisper. "Listeners never hear any good of themselves, you know, and never come to any." He slipped from the pseudo-serious with a sly laugh. "Tell me the worst," he begged. "How much did you hear?"
"Oh! I don't know...." She searched his inquiry for a space with her luminous eyes. "Only very little. Perhaps ... perhaps I 'd been half an hour."
"Half an hour," he said, "with the classics. Lord! you 've been punished for your offence."
"But I was n't by the window all the time," she made haste to assure him. "I was standing in the lane ... by the kitchen gate." And then, with the vial of confession in her fingers, she let it drain before him in dropped sentences. "And I did n't mean to come any nearer than that. All I wanted was the music. Only ... when you played ... what you played last..." Her voice stumbled a little with her here, but she picked up the falter with a quick, corrective tilt of the nose, and walked more wardedly down the path of speech, her eyelids lowered, like one who moves by spiritual impulse. "I felt ... oh! I don't know how I felt—as though, somehow, somebody were beckoning me to the window, where the music was. And so I came. And then, when I 'd got there, all of a sudden things came back upon me that I knew I 'd known once ... and forgotten. I saw my mother ... as she was ever so many years ago, before she died, playing to me ... and crying over the keys; and the old room—ever so plain—that I could hardly remember, even when I tried. And all at once a great lump came up into my throat. I could n't help it.... And I sobbed out loud—as I 'd sobbed before when I was a little girl. And then..."
The tears, never wholly subjugated since their first turbulent rebellion, rose up swiftly against her words at the recital here. She made a valiant endeavor to ride through the tumult on her trembling charger of speech, but memory plucked at the bridle, and unhorsed her into the hands of her besetters; a fair, virginal captive—beautiful under subjection.
"And then..." he said, catching up the girl's own words, and simulating a careless stroll towards the window to give her time, "... I came in—came out, I mean." He flicked a chord off the treble end of the keyboard in passing that drew the girl's eyes towards him at once, watchful through tears. "But we won't talk about that part of the business, if you 'll be so good as not to mind. One of us needs kicking very badly for his share in it, and knows he does." He stooped down to resolve the chord briefly with both hands, and spun round, outspread against the piano, with his fingers behind him, touching extreme treble and bass. Only an inactive tear or two on the girl's lashes marked the recent revolt, and the way to her eyes lay clear. He sent his words pleasantly out to them at once in friendly hazard. "You don't mean to say you 're a neighbor of mine?" he suggested, smiling interested inquiry from his spread-eagle pinnacle by the piano, "... and I have n't known it all this time?" For who was this strange nocturnal visitant of his, with a soul for the sound of things? "... Or are you..."—the alternative came twinkling in time to join the previous inquiry under one note of interrogation—"just a ... spawer, I think they call it, like me?"
The girl shook her head at the latter suggestion.
"It 's my home here," she said.
"At Cliff Wrangham?" he asked, and brought his right leg over the left towards her, in attitude of increased attention.
"No-o."
She must have felt a sense of isolation in abiding by that one word; as though it were a gate snecking her off from the Spawer's friendly reach in conversation, for she passed through it almost immediately and added the specific correction: "At Ullbrig."
"Ah!" His internal eye was soaring over the Ullbrig of his remembrance in an endeavor to pounce upon stray points of association for the girl's identity. "I 'm afraid," he said, "that I don't know my Ullbrig very well. It 's a part of my education here that 's been sadly neglected. But you were n't going to walk back there alone? To-night, I mean?"
She looked at him with mild surprise.
"Oh, yes," she told him.
"Jove!" he said. "Are n't you afraid?"
"Afraid?" She gathered the word dubiously off his lips. "What of?"
"Oh," he laughed. "Of nothing at all. That 's what we 're most afraid of, as a rule, is n't it? Of the dark, for instance."
She smiled, shaking her head.
"I 'm not afraid of that," she said.
"Ah," he decided enviously, "you 're no newspaper reader. That 's plain." Then taking new stock of inquiry. "But we 're not in the habit of passing by ... at this time, are we?" he asked. "I thought all good people were between the blankets by nine in the country?"
A queer little flame of resolve began fighting for establishment about her lips, like the flickers of a newly-lighted taper, that burnt up suddenly in speech.
"I was n't ... passing by," she said, the flame reddening her to candor.
"No?"
"I came ... on purpose."
The Spawer's eyebrows ran up in a ruffle of surprise and friendly amusement.
"Not ... to hear me?"
She clasped her teeth in repression upon her lower lip, and nodded her head.
"And you 've actually trudged all the way out from Ullbrig?"
"It 's nothing," she said apologetically.
"But at night!" he expostulated, in friendly concern.
"There was no other time..." she explained. "Besides ... I thought—They said ... it was only after supper."
"Only after supper?" echoed the Spawer. "What 's that? Indigestion? Nightmare?"
"The music," she said.
"I see."