Part 22 (1/2)

Exactly--because over that very little greengrocer's shop in Fetter Lane--the two windows above the shop itself--was where he lived.

For a moment she gazed at him in astonishment; then she stared out into the traffic before her. Back through her mind raced the sensations she had experienced that day when she had lunched with him. The secrecy, the novelty, the stuffy little eating-house, it had all seemed very romantic then. The tablecloth was not as clean as it might be, but the high-backed seats had been there for nearly two hundred years. One thing weighed with another. The waiter was familiar; but, as John had explained to her, the waiters knew everybody, and you might feel as much annoyed at their familiarity as you had reason to at the age of the poll-parrot and the remarks that he made about the cooking. They all combined to make Wrigglesworth's--Wrigglesworth's; and she had taken it for granted in the halo of romance. But to live there! To sleep at night within sight and sound of all the things which her unaccustomed eyes and cars had seen and heard! She suddenly remembered the type of people she had seen coming in and out of the doorways; then she looked back at John.

”Then you're very poor?” she said gently.

”If you mean I haven't a lot of money,” he said.

”Yes.”

”Then poor is the word.”

He sat and watched her in silence. She was thinking very fast. He could see the thoughts, as you see cloud shadows creeping across water--pa.s.sing through her eyes. Even now, he knew that she would understand in the face of all upbringing, all hereditary ideas. But he waited for her to speak again. The moment was hers. He trusted her to make the best of it.

”Why didn't you ask me to come and see your rooms after we'd had lunch at Wrigglesworth's?” she said presently and, expecting simplicity, counting upon understanding, even he was surprised.

”Ask you there? To those rooms? Over the little greengrocer's shop?

Up those uncarpeted wooden stairs?”

And then they found themselves under the portico of the Opera House; in another moment in the crush of people in the vestibule; then making their way round the cheaply-papered boxes along the ugly little pa.s.sages to the stage-box on the third tier.

The attendant threw open the door. Like children, who have been allowed down to the drawing-room after dinner, they walked in. And it was all very wonderful, the sky of brilliant lights and the sea of human beings below them. It was real romance to be perched away up in a little box in the great wall--a little box which shut them in so safely and so far away from all those people to whom they were so near. Her heart was beating with the sense of antic.i.p.ation and fear for the fruit which their hands had stolen. For the first ten minutes, she would scarcely have been surprised had the door of the box opened behind them and her mother appeared in a vision of wrath and justice. Some things seem too good to be true, too wonderful to last, too much to have hoped for. And Romance is just that quality of real life which happens to be full of them.

From the moment that the curtain rose upon the life of these four happy-go-lucky Bohemians, to the moment when it fell as Rudolfo and Mimi set off to the _cafe_, these two sat in their third-tier box like mice in a cage, never moving a finger, never stirring an eye. Only John's nostrils quivered and once or twice there pa.s.sed a ripple down Jill's throat.

At last fell the curtain, one moment of stillness to follow and, shattering that stillness then into a thousand little pieces, the storm of the clapping of hands.

Music is a drug, a subtle potion of sound made liquid, which one drinks without knowing what strange effect it may or may not have upon the blood. To some it is harmless, ineffectual, pa.s.sing as quietly through the veins as a draught of cool spring water; to others it is wine, nocuous and sweet, bringing visions to the senses and pulses to the heart, burning the lips of men to love and the eyes of women to submission. To others again, it is a narcotic, a draught bringing the sleep that is drugged with the wildest and most impossible of dreams.

But some there are, who by this philtre are imbued with all the knowledge of the good, are stirred to the desire to reach forward just that hand's stretch which in such a moment but separates the divine in the human from the things which are infinite.

This was the power that music had upon John.

While the applause was still vibrating through the house, while the curtain was still rising and falling to the repeated appearances of the players, he slipped his hand into his pocket, took something quickly out, and when she turned after the final curtain fall, Jill beheld, standing upon the velvet railing of the box, a little man all in bra.s.s, with one hand resting aristocratically upon his hip and the other stretched out as though to take her own.

Surprise and question filled her eyes. She looked up at John. She looked back at the little bra.s.s man, and the little bra.s.s man looked back at her. It may not have been that he raised his hat; but he had all the appearance of having just done so.

”Did you put that there?” she asked.

John nodded. She picked him up, and once her fingers had touched him, the spell of his dignity was cast.

”What is he? Where did you get him? What does he mean?” One question fell fast upon another.

”He's my little bra.s.s man,” said John. ”He's an old seal, over a hundred years old----” And he told her the whole story.

When he had finished, the curtain rose once more--outside the _Cafe_ Momus with the babel of children and the hum and laughter of a crowd that only a city southeast of the Thames can know or understand.

Through all the act, Jill sat with the little bra.s.s man standing boldly beside her. When it was over, she turned to him again.

”Aren't you very miserable when you have to--to part with him?” she asked.