MR. KELLER cleared a space near the fire, and elaborately arranged a second screen, which June did not fail to notice was decorated with nude figures.
“There you are,” he said. “That’ll keep you snug. And if you sit on a stool by the fire with a rug over your knees, you’ll be as warm as a kitten.”
June paled, but she did not speak.
“Begin as soon as you like, the sooner the better. Are you quite sure you won’t have just a spot?” Again he pointed to the bottle on the table. “You look as if you want a drop of something.”
Once more June declined the offer in a voice which in her own ear seemed absurdly small and faint.
“Pity,” said Mr. Keller cheerfully, as he looked at her. “It’d put some life in you.” And then, as she was still inert, he went on in a tone which pleasantly mingled gentlemanliness and business, “I always pay a sovereign an hour, you know—for the altogether.”
A light of fear came into June’s large eyes. “Does it mean,” she asked, shyly and awkwardly, as she looked away from him, “that I shall have to take off my clothes?”
“Why, of course,” he said, matter-of-factly. Her obvious embarrassment was not lost upon him, but the knowledge did not appear in his manner.
June shivered slightly. In that shiver a deep instinct spoke for her. “I couldn’t do that,” she said.
“Why not?” He lit a cigarette. “Aren’t you well?”
June was very far from well. She felt within an ace of being overcome by all that had happened to her. Besides her bruised shoulders were still aching horribly. Even without the deep instinct that governed her, it would not have been possible to expose them.
“No-no,” she said, “I—I’m not well.”
As she spoke, she had to fight a powerful desire to burst into tears. But her latent fear of this man had suddenly grown. Overdriven as she was, however, she was yet conscious of a stern need to keep a hold upon herself. She knew nothing, less than nothing of her host, beyond the fact that he was smooth of speech. On the surface he was a gentleman, but as he stood looking down at her now she glimpsed in his dark eyes that which seemed to countervail everything.
Again she shivered. The sense of helplessness was paralyzing. It was as if a chasm had abruptly opened right under her feet. She was at his mercy. But she must not give one thought, so long as a spark of will remained with her, to the possibility of throwing herself upon it.
He continued to stand looking at her while she fought against a welling weakness that must have been only too patent. Then, as if a little puzzled by her, he went and fetched a glass from another part of the studio. He poured out a small quantity of spirit and offered it neat.
“Drink this. It’ll do you good.”
His voice, for the first time, had the grip of authority. He held the glass to her lips, but as if containing deadly fumes they shrank from contact with it.
“Don’t be a little fool.” The sharp tone was like the touch of a whip. “Why don’t you do as you are told?”
She had not the strength to resent the command even if she was able to muster the power to resist it.
“Look here,” he said, confronted by a limit to patience. “Why have you come? What’s the matter with you? Tell me.”
She remained mute. There was nothing she could tell. A lodging for the night, food, advice, protection were what she sought. Dominated completely as she was by hard necessity, she yet dare not confide in Keller. The subtle change that had come upon him since he had fixed up the screen and poured out the whisky filled her with an intense longing to get away. In spite of a growing weakness, which now threatened dire collapse, the subtle feelers of her mind were on the track of danger.
With a slow gathering of will that was a form of agony, she tried to collect the force to rise from the perilous comfort of the low wicker chair. But she was not able to rouse herself to action before the effort had been nipped by his next remark.
“If you’ve no intention of sitting to me, you’d better say in two words why you’ve come here.”
The voice was no longer smooth; there was a cutting edge to it, lacerating to June’s ear.
“I wanted you to lend me a sovereign.”
It was the literal truth. But the unguarded words slipped from her before she could shape or control them. Almost before they were uttered she realized their bitter unwisdom.
“You can have a sovereign—if that’s all you want.” His tone grew light again. “But it’s only fair and reasonable that you should earn it first.”
Strive as she would, she was not able to keep a faint dew of tears from filming her eyes.
“No need to take off more than your bodice, if that’s what’s troubling you.”
With her shoulders on fire, she could not take off her bodice, even had she wished to do so.
She sat inert while he continued to stand before her. The thread of will she still had, fully concentrated though it was on getting away from him, was now unequal to the ugly challenge of his voice and eyes.
“Let me go,” she half whimpered.
Suddenly, in her own despite, her defences had begun palpably to fail. The blunder was fatal—if the cry of nature overdriven can be called a blunder. His eyes pinned hers. Trembling under the spell of their hard cunning she began to perceive that it was now a case of the serpent and the bird.
A frown darkened his face as he cast back to the first meeting with this girl. He tried to recall their conversation in the teashop two days ago. At the time it had interested him considerably, but he had laughed over it since, and decided to dismiss it from his mind. She had told him a cock-and-bull story about a picture. He could not recall the details of an absurd yarn which had not seemed worth his while to remember. At the best it was a bald and unconvincing narrative. But it concerned a Rembrandt. No, not a Rembrandt. A Van Roon!
With a heightening of curiosity, Adolph Keller gazed at the hunted creature now shrinking from his eyes. By Jove, she looked as if she had been through it! Something pretty bad must have happened to her quite recently. But why had she come to him?
Thoughts of the picture set his active mind to work. She had come to him because she was in want of money. So much, at least, was clear. To judge by the look of her, she had probably, at a moment’s notice, been turned out of house and home. A domestic servant, no doubt, and no better than she should be, although a certain taste about her much-rumpled clothes and an attempt at refinement of manner suggested the wish to rise above her class.
In the midst of this quick mind process, Adolph Keller saw the brown paper parcel. It was in the place where his visitor had laid it when she had first sat down. He noticed that she had cunningly reared it by the farther side of her chair, so that it might be beyond the immediate range of his eye.
Keller’s pulse quickened, yet he allowed no hint of his intriguing discovery to shew in his manner. Once again it changed towards his guest. The tone of sharp authority vanished. Twisting a dark moustache round strong, yet delicate fingers, his air of extreme gentlemanliness verged upon the sugary, as he said: “I don’t like to see you like this. I don’t really.”
The tone’s unexpectedness, perhaps even more than its kindness, moved June to further tears.
“You had better tell me, hadn’t you, just what’s upset you?”
She shook miserably. And then, thrown off her guard, by this new note of concern, she found the courage to venture again: “Please lend me a sovereign and let me go. I promise solemnly to pay it back.”
He smiled in a way obviously to reassure. “What’s your hurry, my dear girl?” Soft, as were the words, they yet caused the design to fail.
Their non-effect was clearly visible in the girl’s tragic eyes. She was caught in a trap; all his trimmings and posturings seemed only to emphasize the fact that she had no means of getting out.
Like a powerful drug the brutal truth attacked her brain. It was as if its higher nerve centres could no longer act. She was completely in the power of this man. And only too well did she know that he knew it.
Inevitably as fate, those slim fingers dipped towards the side of her chair. “What have we here?” The inflexion was lightly playful, yet it drove all the blood from her heart. “May I look?” His hand closed on the parcel before she could muster one futile finger to stay it.
Galvanized, as if by electricity, she sprang up from her chair without knowing what she did. “Please—it’s mine!” Without conscious volition she tried weakly to defend her property.
He put her off with the cheery playfulness of a teasing brother. “Just one little peep,” he said. The treasure was yielding its wrappings already to those deft fingers. Smiling all the time, he treated the thing as a mere joke. And he was able to give the joke full effect, because, not for an instant did he expect it to turn out anything else.