FullReads

I always heated the coffee myself over the parlour fire. It was already bubbling on the hob. Directly she had left I went to the kitchen, and got a second cup. I felt much better since I had had supper. And as I took the cup from the shelf the fantastic idea came into my mind to ask my protegee to come in and drink her coffee by the fire in the parlour. I must frankly own it was foolhardy; it was rash, it was even dangerous. But there it is! One cannot help the way one is made, and I am afraid I am not of those who invariably take the coldly prudent course and stick to it.

I turned the idea over in my mind. I could put down sheets of brown paper–I always have a store–from the door to the fire, and an old mackintosh over the worst armchair, which was to be re-covered. Besides, I had not had a good look at her yet, or made out the real woman under the prison garb. That she was a person of education and refinement may appear hardly credible to my readers, but to one like myself, whose metier it is to probe the secrets of my own heart and those of others–to me it was sufficiently obvious from the first moment that, though I had to deal with a criminal, she was a very exceptional one, and belonging to my own class. I went out to the stable, and suggested to her that she should come in.

“How do you know that I am not a man in disguise?” came a voice from the darkness; and it seemed to me, not for the first time, that she was amused at something. “I’m tall enough. Just think how stupendous it would be if, when I was inside and the door really locked, I proved to be a wicked, devastating, burglarious male.”

“I wish you would not say things like that,” I said. “On your honour, are you a man?”

She hesitated, and then said in a changed voice:

“I am not. I don’t know what I am. I was a woman once, just as a derelict was a ship once. But whatever I am, I am not fit to come into a self-respecting house. I am one solid cake of mud.”

Something in her reluctance made me the more determined. Besides, one of the truths on which I have insisted most strongly in my “Veil of the Temple” is that if we show full trust and confidence in others, they will prove worthy of that trust. Her coming indoors had now become a matter of principle, and I insisted. I even said I could lend her a dressing-gown and slippers, so that her wet clothes might be dried by the kitchen fire.

She murmured something about a good Samaritan, but still demurred, and asked if I had a bath-room. I said I had.

That decided her. She seemed to have no difficulty in making up her mind. She did not see two sides to things, as I always do myself.

She said that if I liked to allow her to go to the bath-room first, she should be happy to accept my kind invitation for an hour or so. If not, she would stay where she was.

* * * * *

Half an hour later she was sitting opposite me in the parlour, on the other side of the wood fire, sipping her coffee. I had not put down the brown paper or the mackintosh. It was not necessary. Her close-cropped, curly grey hair, still damp from the bath, was parted, and brushed stiffly back over her ears. It must have been very beautiful hair once. Her thin hands and thinner face and neck looked more like brown parchment than ever, as she sat in the lamplight, my old blue dressing-gown folded negligently round her, and taking picturesque folds which it never did when I was inside it. Those long, gaunt limbs must have been graceful once. Her feet were bare in her slippers–in my slippers, I mean. She looked rather like a well-bred Indian.