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Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton
by
`Faint though I was, I could almost have laughed. Good heavens! was THAT all he wanted: that I shouldn’t go back there? Did he suppose I wanted to go back there–with HIM? Was I the Duke’s prisoner on parole? What was there to prevent me from just walking off to the railway station? I turned to do so.
`He accompanied me on my way. I thought that when once I had passed through the lodge gates he might vanish, satisfied. But no, he didn’t vanish. It was as though he suspected that if he let me out of his sight I should sneak back to the house. He arrived with me, this quiet companion of mine, at the little railway station. Evidently he meant to see me off. I learned from an elderly and solitary porter that the next train to London was the 4.3.
`Well, Braxton saw me off by the 4.3. I reflected, as I stepped up into an empty compartment, that it wasn’t yet twenty-four hours ago since I, or some one like me, had alighted at that station.
`The guard blew his whistle; the engine shrieked, and the train jolted forward and away; but I did not lean out of the window to see the last of my attentive friend.
`Really not twenty-four hours ago? Not twenty-four years?’
Maltby paused in his narrative. `Well, well,’ he said, `I don’t want you to think I overrate the ordeal of my visit to Keeb. A man of stronger nerve than mine, and of greater resourcefulness, might have coped successfully with Braxton from first to last–might have stayed on till Monday, making a very favourable impression on every one all the while. Even as it was, even after my manifold failures and sudden flight, I don’t say my position was impossible. I only say it seemed so to me. A man less sensitive than I, and less vain, might have cheered up after writing a letter of apology to his hostess, and have resumed his normal existence as though nothing very terrible had happened, after all. I wrote a few lines to the Duchess that night; but I wrote amidst the preparations for my departure from England: I crossed the Channel next morning. Throughout that Sunday afternoon with Braxton at the Keeb railway station, pacing the desolate platform with him, waiting in the desolating waiting-room with him, I was numb to regrets, and was thinking of nothing but the 4.3. On the way to Victoria my brain worked and my soul wilted. Every incident in my stay at Keeb stood out clear to me; a dreadful, a hideous pattern. I had done for myself, so far as THOSE people were concerned. And now that I had sampled THEM, what cared I for others? “Too low for a hawk, too high for a buzzard.” That homely old saying seemed to sum me up. And suppose I COULD still take pleasure in the company of my own old upper-middle class, how would that class regard me now? Gossip percolates. Little by little, I was sure, the story of my Keeb fiasco would leak down into the drawing-room of Mrs. Foster-Dugdale. I felt I could never hold up my head in any company where anything of that story was known. Are you quite sure you never heard anything?’
I assured Maltby that all I had known was the great bare fact of his having stayed at Keeb Hall.
`It’s curious,’ he reflected. `It’s a fine illustration of the loyalty of those people to one another. I suppose there was a general agreement for the Duchess’ sake that nothing should be said about her queer guest. But even if I had dared hope to be so efficiently hushed up, I couldn’t have not fled. I wanted to forget. I wanted to leap into some void, far away from all reminders. I leapt straight from Ryder Street into Vaule-la-Rochette, a place of which I had once heard that it was the least frequented seaside-resort in Europe. I leapt leaving no address–leapt telling my landlord that if a suit-case and a portmanteau arrived for me he could regard them, them and their contents, as his own for ever. I daresay the Duchess wrote me a kind little letter, forcing herself to express a vague hope that I would come again “some other time.” I daresay Lady Rodfitten did NOT write reminding me of my promise to lunch on Friday and bring “Ariel Returns to Mayfair” with me. I left that manuscript at Ryder Street; in my bedroom grate; a shuffle of ashes. Not that I’d yet given up all thought of writing. But I certainly wasn’t going to write now about the two things I most needed to forget. I wasn’t going to write about the British aristocracy, nor about any kind of supernatural presence…. I did write a novel–my last–while I was at Vaule. “Mr. and Mrs. Robinson.” Did you ever come across a copy of it?