The Man Within

supper and we ate with him down here. But after supper, because he was a quiet, brooding man who did not seem to care for company, we would take any work we had to do upstairs to our bedroom. I don’t know what he did all by himself but think and perhaps sleep in a chair by the fire, but sometimes I would wake in the very middle of the night and hear him going to his room. Perhaps he was one of those poor people who find it hard to sleep. You saw his face. Don’t you think there was something sleepless about it?”

“It was a cunning wicked face, I thought,” Andrews said.

“Oh, no,” Elizabeth protested, without anger. “He was cunning perhaps, but he was not wicked. He was kind to me in his own way,” and she brooded for a moment on the past with a frown of perplexity.

“Well, one night,” she said, “after supper we were rising as usual to go upstairs, when he asked us to stay. It seemed astonishing to me, but my mother was quite undisturbed. She was a fatalist, you know, and it made her very serene but altogether unpurposeful. We stayed sitting there, I impatient to know the reason, but my mother apparently entirely uninterested. She took up her work and began to sew, as if it had always been her custom to work in this room. After a while he spoke. ‘I’ve been very comfortable here,’ he said. My mother looked up and said, ‘Thank you,’ and went on with her sewing. Her answer seemed odd to me. I felt that he should have thanked her, not she him.”

“Was your mother pale and lovely,” Andrews asked, “with dark hair and quiet eyes?”

“She was dark,” Elizabeth said, “but plump and with a lot of colour in her cheeks.”

“You have colour in your cheeks,” Andrews said thoughtfully, not as though he were paying a compliment but as though he were dispassionately discussing an inanimate beauty, “but it is on a white background, like a flower fallen on snow.”

Elizabeth smiled a little, but paid no other attention to him. “Mr. Jennings,” she said, “bit his thumbnail⁠—a habit with him⁠—and watched my mother suspiciously. ‘You’ll die one day,’ he continued. ‘What will happen to this cottage then?’ I watched my mother in a still fright, half expecting her to die there and then before my eyes. ‘It will be sold,’ she said, ‘for the child here.’ ‘Suppose,’ Mr. Jennings said, ‘you sell to me now,’ and then, because he thought my mother was going to make some amazed comment, he continued very hurriedly, ‘I will give you your price, and you shall stay on here with your child as long as you like. You can invest the money to the child’s advantage. I am very comfortable here, and I don’t want the risk of being turned away when you die.’ It was astonishing the quiet way in which he assumed that she would die first, although they were both much of an age. I don’t know whether he could see some trace of sickness in her which I could not see, but she died within the year. Of course, she had taken the offer.”

Something rather the reflection of sorrow than sorrow itself crossed Elizabeth’s face, and she went on with her story with an air of hurry and a somewhat forced abstraction. “He seemed hardly to notice that my mother was dead,” she said. “I stayed and cooked his meals as my mother had done and swept the floors. For some weeks I was afraid that he would turn me out, but he never did. Every week he gave me money for the house, and I never had to touch what my mother left me. He no longer went to work and he would spend his time in long walks along the top of the downs or in sitting beside the fire reading the Bible. I don’t think he ever read it consecutively. He would open it at random and put his thumb on a passage. When what he found pleased him he would read on, and when it displeased him he would fling the book aside and go for another of his long walks, until he came back tired and weary looking like a beaten dog. He very seldom spoke to me.

“It was a very lonely life for a child and one day I picked up my courage and asked whether I could go to school again. He wanted to know how much it would cost and when he found how little it would be he sent me off and even gave me a note to the mistress, asking that they should pay particular attention to Scripture. From that time on he paid me more attention. I would read to him in the evening and sometimes even argue small theological points.”

“What a strange, staid child you must have been,” Andrews said.

“Oh no,” Elizabeth laughed protestingly. “I was like all children. There were times of rebellion, when I would disappear down into Shoreham to play with other children or go to an entertainment, a circus or a fair. At first he would not notice my absence, which was humiliating, but after I had begun my Bible readings he grew more particular and sometimes beat me. Sometimes, too, at meals I’d look up and find him watching me.”

Again Andrews felt that absurd twinge of jealousy. “How could he be satisfied with watching you through those years?” he broke out.

“I was a child,” she said simply in final answer and then added slowly, “He was very much taken up with his soul.”

Andrews laughed harshly, remembering the little cunning lines around the mouth, the stubbly untidy beard, the coarse lids. “He must have had need,” he said. He longed to be able to shatter any feeling of friendship or gratitude which Elizabeth might still feel for the dead man.

Her eyes sparkled and she raised her chin in a