True Tilda Part 5

"She _promised_ to call here at twelve-thirty, an' I was to meet her.

But"--here Tilda had to keep a tight hold on her voice--"per'aps I'm early?"

"It's close upon one o'clock," said Doctor Gla.s.son, with a glance towards the mantelshelf. "What is your aunt's name, and her business?"

"She's called Brown--Martha Brown--_Mrs._ Martha Brown, and she keeps a milliner's shop in the Edgeware Road, London," panted Tilda.

"I should have asked, What is her business with me?" Doctor Gla.s.son corrected his question severely.

"I think--I dunno--but I _think_, sir, she might be wantin' to enter me for a orphlan. My pa, sir, was knocked down an' killed by a motor-car.

It was in the early days," pursued Tilda, desperate now and aghast at her own invention. The lies seemed to spring to her lips full grown.

"Pa was a stableman, sir, at Buckin'am Palace, and often and often I've 'eard 'im tell mother what'd be the end of 'im. He 'd seen it in a dream. And mother, _she_ was a stewardess in a Sou'-Western boat that got cut in two last year. Maybe you read of it in the papers?"

Tears by this time filled the child's eyes. She was casting about to invent a last dying speech for her mother, when Doctor Gla.s.son interrupted.

"If your aunt wishes to place you here, it might perhaps be managed, for a consideration. Just now we have no room for-er--non-paying children.

But you began by asking for Arthur Miles."

"Surname Chandon."

"Yes--quite so--Chandon." He picked up a pencil and a half-sheet of paper from the desk, and wrote the name. "Born at Kingsand--I think you said Kingsand? Do you happen to know where Kingsand is? In what county, for instance?"

But Tilda had begun to scent danger again, she hardly knew why, and contented herself with shaking her head.

"Someone wants to see him. Who?"

"She's--an invalid," Tilda admitted.

"Not your aunt?"

"She's a--a _friend_ of my aunt's."

Doctor Gla.s.son pulled out a watch and compared it with the clock on the mantelshelf. While he did so Tilda stole a look up at his face, and more than ever it seemed to her to resemble a double trap--its slit of a mouth constructed to swallow anything that escaped between nose and chin.

"Your aunt is far from punctual. You are sure she means to call?"

"Sure," answered Tilda still hardily. "'Twelve-thirty' was her last words when she left me at the doctor's--my 'ip bein' 'urt, sir, through tumblin' out of a nomnibus, three weeks ago. But you never can depend on 'er to a few minutes up 'an down. She gets into the streets, watchin' the fas.h.i.+ons, an' that carries 'er away. P'r'aps, sir, I 'd better go back into the street and 'ave a look for her."

"I think you had better wait here for her," said Doctor Gla.s.son, shutting his lips with a snap. "There are some picture-books in the drawing-room."

He led the way. The drawing-room lay at the back of the house--an apartment even more profoundly depressing than the one she had left.

Its one important piece of furniture was a circular table of rosewood standing in the centre of the carpet under a bra.s.s gaselier, of which the burnish had perished in patches; and in the centre of the table stood a round-topped gla.s.s case containing a stuffed kestrel, with a stuffed lark prostrate under its talons and bleeding vermilion wax.

Around this ornament were disposed, as the Doctor had promised, a number of alb.u.ms and ill.u.s.trated books, one of which he chose and placed it in her hands, at the same time bringing forward one of a suite of rosewood chairs ranged with their backs to the walls. He motioned her to be seated.

"You shall be told as soon as ever your aunt arrives."

"Yes, sir," said Tilda feebly. For the moment all the fight had gone out of her.

He stood eyeing her, pulling at his bony finger-joints, and seemed on the point of putting some further question, but turned abruptly and left the room.

As the door closed--thank Heaven, at least, he did not bolt this one also!--a dry sob escaped the child. Why had she told that string of falsehoods? She was trapped now--imprisoned in this horrible house, not to be released until this fict.i.tious aunt arrived, which, of course, would be never. The book on her lap lay open at a coloured lithograph of Mazeppa bound upon his steed and in full flight across the Tartar steppes. She knew the story--was it not Mr. Maggs's most thrilling "equestrian _finale_," and first favourite with the public? At another time she would have examined the picture eagerly. But now it swam before her, unmeaning. She closed the book, threw a glance around the four corners of the room, another at the stuffed kestrel--whose pitiless small eye strangely resembled Doctor Gla.s.son's--and dragged herself to the window.

The lower panes of the window were filled with coloured transparencies representing in series the history of the Prodigal Son. They excluded a great deal of daylight and the whole of the view. Even by standing on tip-toe she could not look over them, and she dared not try to raise the sash.

By-and-by a thought struck her. She went back to her chair, lifted it, carried it to the window and climbed upon it; and this was no small feat or succession of feats, for as yet her thigh pained her, and fear held her half-paralysed.

What she looked upon was an oblong s.p.a.ce enclosed by brick walls ten or twelve feet high, and divided by a lower wall--also of brick--into two parallelograms of unequal width. Of these the wider was a gravelled yard, absolutely bare, in extent perhaps an acre; and here, in various knots and groups, were gathered some two dozen children. Alongside of the yard and upon its left--that is to say, as Tilda guessed, between it and the ca.n.a.l--ran a narrower strip of kitchen garden, planted with leeks, cabbages, potatoes, and ending in a kind of shed--part gla.s.s-house, part out-house--built in lean-to fas.h.i.+on against the terminal wall, which overtopped it by several feet. The children in the yard could not look into this garden, for the dividing wall reached far above their heads.

Tilda, too, had no eyes for the garden, after a first glance had a.s.sured her it was empty. The children engaged all her attention. She had never seen anything like them; and yet they were obviously boys and girls, and in numbers pretty equally divided, What beat her was that they neither ran about nor played at any game, but walked to and fro--to and fro--as though pacing through some form of drill; and yet again they could not be drilling, for their motions were almost inert and quite aimless. Next, to her surprise, she perceived that, on no apparent compulsion, the boys kept with the boys in these separate wandering groups, and the girls with the girls; and further that, when two groups met and pa.s.sed, no greeting, no nod of recognition, was ever exchanged.

At any rate she could detect none. She had heard tell--indeed, it was an article of faith among the show-children with whom she had been brought up--that the sons and daughters of the well-to-do followed weird ways and practised discomfortable habits--attended public wors.h.i.+p on Sundays, for instance, walking two and two in stiff raiment. But these children were patently very far from well-to-do. The garments of some hung about them in rags that fell short even of Tilda's easy standard.

The spectacle fascinated her. For the moment it chased fear out of her mind. She was only conscious of pity--of pity afflicting and indefinable, far beyond her small understanding, and yet perhaps not wholly unlike that by which the great poet was oppressed as he followed his guide down through the infernal circles and spoke with their inhabitants. The sight did her this good--it drove out for a while, along with fear, all thought of her present situation. She noted that the majority were in twos or threes, but that here and there a child walked solitary, and that the faces of these solitary ones were hard to discern, being bent towards the ground . . .

The door-handle rattled and called her back to terror. She had no time to clamber down from her chair. She was caught.

But it was a woman who entered, the same that had opened the front gate; and she carried a tray with a gla.s.s of water on it and a plate of biscuits.

"The Doctor told me as 'ow you might be 'ungry," she explained.

"Thank you," said Tilda. "I--I was lookin' at the view."

For an instant she thought of appealing to this stranger's mercy.

The woman's eyes were hard, but not unkind. They scrutinised her closely.

"You take my advice, an' get out o' this quick as you can."

The woman thumped down the tray, and made as if to leave the room with a step decisive as her speech. At the door, however, she hesitated.

"Related to 'im?" she inquired.

"Eh?" Tilda was taken aback. "'Oo's 'im?"

"I 'eard you tell the Doctor you wanted to see 'im."

"An' so I do. But I'm no relation of 'is--on'y a friend."

"I was thinkin' so. Lawful born or come-by-chance, the child's a little gentleman, an' different from the others. Blood al'ays comes out, don't it?"

"I s'pose so."

Tilda, still perched on her chair, glanced out at the children in the yard.

"You won't see 'im out there. He's in the shed at the end o' the kitchen garden, cleanin' the boots. If you've got anything good to tell 'im, an' 'll promise not to be five minutes, I might give you a run there while the Doctor's finis.h.i.+n' his dinner in his study. Fact is,"

added this strange woman, "the child likes to be alone, an' sometimes I lets 'im slip away there--when he's good, or the Doctor's been extra 'ard with 'im."

"Beats 'im?" asked Tilda, and suddenly, still erect on her chair and looking down on the woman, felt her courage flowing back full and strong. "He's a beast, then."

"You musn' talk like that," said the woman hurriedly, with a glance back at the half-open door. "Hut he's 'ard if you cross 'im--an' the child's pay bein' be'ind--'and--"

"What's your name?" demanded Tilda.