PAGE 6
The Lowest Rung
by
The window was only a yard from the ground, and I got out somehow, encumbered in my shawl, which a grateful reader had crocheted for me. She had, however, to help me in again directly I was out, for, between us, we had forgotten the stable key, which was underneath the cushion of my armchair.
The rest was plain sailing. We stole down the garden path to the stable, and I unlocked the door and let her in.
“Kindly lock me in and take away the key,” she said, vanishing past me into the darkness, and I thought I detected a tone of relief in her brisk, matter-of-fact voice.
“I will bring some food as soon as I can,” I whispered. “If I knock three times, you will know it’s only me.”
“Don’t knock at all,” she said; “it might be noticed. Why should you knock to go into your own stable?”
“I won’t, then. And how about your wet things?”
“That’s nothing. I’m accustomed to being wet.”
I crawled back to the cottage, and managed to scramble in by the parlour window, only to sink once more into my armchair in a state of collapse. I had always entered so acutely into the joys and sorrows of others, their love affairs, their difficulties, their bereavements (I had in this way led such a full life), that I was surprised at this juncture to find my nervous force so exhausted, until I remembered that ardent natures who give out a great deal in the way of helpfulness and interest are bound to suffer when the reaction comes. The reaction had come for me now. I saw only too plainly the folly I had been guilty of in harbouring a total stranger, the trouble I should probably get into, the difficulty that a nature naturally frank and open to a fault would find in keeping up a deception. I doubted my own powers, everything. The truth was–but I did not realise it till afterwards–that I had missed my tea.
I could hear my servant laying my evening meal in the houseplace. In a few minutes she tapped to tell me it was ready, and I rose mechanically to obey the summons. And then, to my horror, I found I was still in morning dress. For the first time for years I had not dressed for dinner. What would she think if she saw me? But it was too late to change now; I must just go in as I was. My whole life seemed dislocated, torn up by the roots.
There was not much to eat. Half a very small cold chicken, a lettuce, and a little custard pudding, fortunately very nutritious, being made with Eustace Miles’s proteid. There were, however, a loaf and butter and plasmon biscuits on the sideboard. I cut up as much as I dared of the chicken, and put it between two very thick slices of buttered bread. Then I crept out again and took it to her. She got up out of the hay, and put out a gnarled brown hand for it.
“I will bring you a cup of coffee later,” I said. I was beginning to feel a kind of proprietorship in her. She would have starved but for me.
My servant always left at nine o’clock, to sleep at her father’s cottage, just over the way. I have a bell in the roof, which I can ring with a cord in case of fire or thieves.
To-night she was, of course, later than usual, but at last she brought in the coffee, and then I heard her making her rounds, closing the shutters on the ground floor, and locking the front door–at least, trying to do so. I had already locked and bolted it. Then she locked the scullery door on the outside, abstracted the key, and I heard her step on the brick path, and the click of the gate. She was gone.