CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SAM HEARS GOOD NEWS
KAY came out into the garden of San Rafael. Darkness had fallen now, and the world was full of the sweet, wet scents of an autumn night. She stood still for a moment, sniffing, and a little pang of home-sickness shot through her. The garden smelled just like Midways. This was how she always remembered Midways most vividly, with the shadows cloaking the flower beds, the trees dripping and the good earth sending up its incense to a starlit sky.
When she shut her eyes she could almost imagine that she was back there. Then somebody began to whistle in the road and a train clanked into the station and the vision faded.
A faint odour of burning tobacco came to her, and on the lawn next door she saw the glow of a pipe.
“Sam!” she called.
His footsteps crunched on the gravel and he joined her at the fence.
“You’re a nice sort of person, aren’t you?” said Kay. “Why didn’t you come back?”
“I had one or two things to think about.”
“Willoughby dashed in for a minute and told me an incoherent story. So the man got away?”
“Poor Lord Tilbury!” said Kay, with a sudden silvery little bubble of laughter.
Sam said nothing.
“What did he want, by the way?”
“He came to tell me that he had had a cable from my uncle saying that I was to go back at once.”
“Oh!” said Kay with a little gasp, and there was silence. “Go back—to America?”
“Yes.”
“At once?”
“Wednesday’s boat, I suppose.”
“Not this very next Wednesday?”
“Yes.”
There was another silence. The night was as still as if the clock had slipped back and Valley Fields had become the remote country spot of two hundred years ago.
“Are you going?”
“I suppose so.”
From far away, out in the darkness, came the faint grunting of a train as it climbed the steep gradient of Sydenham Hill. An odd forlorn feeling swept over Kay.
“Yes, I suppose you must,” she said. “You can’t afford to offend your uncle, can you?”
Sam moved restlessly, and there was a tiny rasping sound as his hand scraped along the fence.
“It isn’t that,” he said.
“But your uncle’s very rich, isn’t he?”
“What does that matter?” Sam’s voice shook. “Lord Tilbury was good enough to inform me that my only way of making a living was to sponge on my uncle, but I’m not going to have you thinking it.”
“But—well, why are you going then?”
Sam choked.
“I’ll tell you why I’m going. Simply because I might as well be in New York as anywhere. If there was the slightest hope that by staying on here I could get you to—to marry me——” His hand rasped on the fence again. “Of course, I know there isn’t. I know you don’t take me seriously. I haven’t any illusions about myself. I know just what I amount to in your eyes. I’m the fellow who blunders about and trips over himself and is rather amusing when you’re in the mood. But I don’t count. I don’t amount to anything.” Kay stirred in the darkness, but she did not speak. “You think I’m kidding all the time. Well, I just want you to know this—that I’m not kidding about the way I feel about you. I used to dream over that photograph before I’d ever met you. And when I met you I knew one thing for certain, and that was there wasn’t ever going to be anyone except you ever. I know you don’t care about me and never will. Why should you? What on earth is there about me that could make you? I’m just a——”
A little ripple of laughter came from the shadows.
“Poor old Sam!” said Kay.
“Yes! There you are—in a nutshell! Poor old Sam!”
“I’m sorry I laughed. But it was so funny to hear you denouncing yourself in that grand way.”
“Exactly! Funny!”
“Well, what’s wrong with being funny? I like funny people. I’d no notion you had such hidden depths, Sam. Though, of course, the palmist said you had, didn’t she?”
The train had climbed the hill and was now rumbling off into the distance. A smell of burning leaves came floating over the gardens.
“I don’t blame you for laughing,” said Sam. “Pray laugh if you wish to.”
Kay availed herself of the permission.
“Oh, Sam, you are a pompous old ass, aren’t you? ‘Pray laugh if you wish to’!... Sam!”
“Well?”
“Do you really mean that you would stay on in England if I promised to marry you?”
“Yes.”
“And offend your rich uncle for life and get cut off with a dollar or whatever they cut nephews off with in America?”
“Yes.”
Kay reached up at Sam’s head and gave his hair a little proprietorial tug.
“Well, why don’t you, Sambo?” she said softly.
It seemed to Sam that in some strange way his powers of breathing had become temporarily suspended. A curious dry feeling had invaded his throat. He could hear his heart thumping.
“What?” he croaked huskily.
“I said why—do—you—not, Samivel?” whispered Kay, punctuating the words with little tugs.
Sam found himself on the other side of the fence. How he had got there he did not know. Presumably he had scrambled over. A much abraded shin bone was to show him later that this theory was the correct one, but at the moment bruised shins had no meaning for him. He stood churning the mould of the flower bed on which he had alighted, staring at the indistinct whiteness which was Kay.
“But look here,” said Sam thickly. “But look here——” A bird stirred sleepily in the tree.
“But look here——”
And then somehow—things were happening mysteriously to-night, and apparently of their own volition—he found that Kay was in his arms. It seemed to him also, though his faculties were greatly clouded, that he was kissing Kay.
“But look here——” he said thickly. They were now, in some peculiar manner, walking together up the gravel path, and he, unless his senses deceived him, was holding her hand tucked very tightly under his arm. At least, somebody, at whom he seemed to be looking from a long distance, was doing this. This individual, who appeared to be in a confused frame of mind, was holding that hand with a sort of frenzied determination, as if he were afraid she might get away from him. “But look here, this isn’t possible!”
“What isn’t possible?”
“All this. A girl like you—a wonderful, splendid, marvellous girl like you can’t possibly love”—the word seemed to hold all the magic of all the magicians, and he repeated it dazedly—“love—love—can’t possibly love a fellow like me.” He paused, finding the wonder of the thing oppressive. “It—it doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, a fellow—a man—a fellow—oh, I don’t know.”
Kay chuckled. It came upon Sam with an overwhelming sense of personal loss that she was smiling and that he could not see that smile. Other, future smiles he would see, but not that particular one, and it seemed to him that he would never be able to make up for having missed it.
“Would you like to to know something, Sam?”
“What?”
“Well, if you’ll listen, I’ll explain exactly how I feel. Have you ever had a very exciting book taken away from you just when you were in the middle of it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, I have. It was at Midways, when I was nine. I had borrowed it from the page boy, who was a great friend of mine, and it was about a man called Cincinnati Kit, who went round most of the time in a mask, with lots of revolvers. I had just got half-way in it when my governess caught me and I was sent to bed and the book was burned. So I never found out what happened in the little room with the steel walls behind the bar at the Blue Gulch Saloon. I didn’t get over the disappointment for years. Well, when you told me you were going away, I suddenly realised that this awful thing was on the point of happening to me again, and this time I knew I would never get over it. It suddenly flashed upon me that there was absolutely nothing worth while in life except to be with you and watch you and wonder what perfectly mad thing you would be up to next. Would Aunt Ysobel say that that was love?”
“She would,” said Sam with conviction.
“Well, it’s my form of it, anyhow. I just want to be with you for years and years and years, wondering what you’re going to do next.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do at this moment,” said Sam. “I’m going to kiss you.”
Time passed.
“Kay,” said Sam.
“Yes?”
“Do you know—— No, you’ll laugh.”
“I promise I won’t. What were you going to say?”
“That photograph of you—the one I found in the fishing hut.”
“What about it?”
“I kissed it once.”
“Only once?”
“No,” said Sam stoutly. “If you really want the truth, every day; every blessed single day, and several times a day. Now laugh!”
“No; I’m going to laugh at you all the rest of my life, but not to-night. You’re a darling, and I suppose,” said Kay thoughtfully, “I’d better go and tell uncle so, hadn’t I, if he has got back?”
“Tell your uncle?”
“Well, he likes to know what’s going on around him in the home.”
“But that means that you’ll have to go in.”
“Only for a minute. I shall just pop my head in at the door and say ‘Oh, uncle, talking of Sam, I love him.’”
“Look here,” said Sam earnestly, “if you will swear on your word of honour—your sacred word of honour—not to be gone more than thirty seconds——”
“As if I could keep away from you longer than that!” said Kay.
Left alone in a bleak world, Sam found his thoughts taking for a while a sombre turn. In the exhilaration of the recent miracle which had altered the whole face of the planet, he had tended somewhat to overlook the fact that for a man about to enter upon the sacred state of matrimony he was a little ill equipped with the means of supporting a home. His weekly salary was in his pocket, and a small sum stood to his credit in a Lombard Street bank; but he could not, he realised, be considered an exceptionally good match for the least exacting of girls. Indeed, at the moment, like the gentleman in the song, all he was in a position to offer his bride was a happy disposition and a wild desire to succeed.
These are damping reflections for a young man to whom the keys of heaven have just been given, and they made Sam pensive. But his natural ebullience was not long in coming to the rescue. One turn up and down the garden and he was happy again in the possession of lavish rewards bestowed upon him by beaming bank managers, rejoicing in their hearty City fashion as they saw those missing bonds restored to them after many years. He refused absolutely to consider the possibility of failure to unearth the treasure. It must be somewhere in Mon Repos, and if it was in Mon Repos he would find it—even if, in direct contravention of the terms of Clause 8 in his lease, he had to tear the house to pieces.
He strode, full of a great purpose, to the window of the kitchen. A light shone there, and he could hear the rumbling voice of his faithful henchman. He tapped upon the window, and presently the blind shot up and Hash’s face appeared. In the background Claire, a little flushed, was smoothing her hair. The window opened.
“Who’s there?” said Hash gruffly.
“Only me, Hash. I want a word with you.”
“Ur?”
“Listen, Hash. Tear yourself away shortly, and come back to Mon Repos. There is man’s work to do there.”
“Eh?”
“We’ve got to search that house from top to bottom. I’ve just found out that it’s full of bonds.”
“You don’t say!”
“I do say.”
“Nasty things,” said Hash reflectively. “Go off in your ’ands as likely as not.”
At this moment the quiet night was rent by a strident voice.
“Sam! Hi, Sam! Come quick!”
It was the voice of Willoughby Braddock, and it appeared to proceed from one of the upper rooms of Mon Repos.