CHAPTER II

FLIGHT

In her utter helplessness Sent forth a sudden sharp and bitter cry, As of a wild thing, taken in a trap, Which sees the trapper coming through the wood. --TENNYSON.

Outside, the raw March day was drawing to its unbeautiful close. They crept together along by the railings, as sorry a couple of cripples as ever started forth into the world together. Young Vanston could not walk without reeling--the only thing that held him in control was his anxiety respecting the girl, whose face was still ashen, and who gasped and panted as she moved. He had solicitously felt her ribs--a proceeding rendered easy by her thinness and emptiness, poor child. He had ascertained that no bones were broken, though the pain was severe, and he vaguely diagnosed it to himself as "something internal."

But she was driven by some overmastering impulse of flight which blotted out even the physical distress. To get away was her idea. She had been willing to do so at the cost of life itself. But now that life persisted, and she had escaped from her prison, the desire to live returned in some obscure, muffled fashion. As for him, his apprehensions on her account had for the moment driven clean out of his mind his own desperate intention.

Coming out of Hawkins Row, they crawled along a dark, dreary alley, which brought them out into a main thoroughfare, where traffic of all kinds roared and seethed. Just at the corner a cocoa-room poured its blaze of newly-lit gas across the street.

"Pull yourself together and get across the floor steady," whispered Felix; and the two crept in, and with a last effort sank down into seats in a far corner, near the stove.

It was not a cold evening, except to the starving, and the table which stood inconveniently near the stove was vacant. The girl wore no hat, but, except for this deficiency, they were, in point of costume, rather above than below the average of those present.

Felix had the sense to know that he must not "wolf" his food, or he would increase, and not allay, the pain that rent him. He sat forcing himself to sip the warm cocoa, which tasted like the nectar of the gods. The girl was not so ravenous as he; she had been fed the day before. She was very scared and timid, starting at each new customer that entered, in fear lest it should be the man she dreaded. She sat with her eyes upon the door, keeping a ceaseless guard. For about a quarter of an hour they did not speak.

But when the first demands of bodily craving were satisfied they began to talk.

"Tell me your name," said the girl, peremptorily.

He considered a moment. "My name is David--David Smith," he said at last. He felt unable to give away the name he loved and had dishonored.

"Mine is Veronica--Veronica Leigh, but I am always called Rona." She gazed into his face with some kind of wistful intentness. "You are the first young man--I mean, of the real human kind--that I have ever spoken to," she said earnestly.

The color sprang up under his white face. "I'm not the human kind--that is--I'm all wrong," he said hastily. "No respectable person would speak to me. I have no right to talk to you, or to any good girl. Are you a good girl?"

"I want to be," said Rona, looking at him with startled eyes. "What have you done? You seem--I don't know how to say it, but to me you seem--right--the kind of person I understand--not a beast--not a demon. The men in London," she concluded seriously, "are all beasts and demons."

"I don't know which class I am," said Felix, "but you had better know the worst of me. I have served a term of two years' imprisonment. That means that hardly any walk of life is open to me. I am a man without a character."

She looked at him with a shrinking horror. "In prison! Oh! What _did_ you do?"

"I was in prison for my political opinions, not for theft or anything of that kind."

She seemed to ponder this. "I didn't know they could put people in prison for their political opinions. I thought they passed an Act--the Mother Superior taught us that in England everybody was free."

The young man's eyes darkened. "We won't talk about it," he said shortly. "I have confessed to you the sort I am. Are you sorry you did not leave me to starve?"

She still sat considering him gravely. Her eyes were very dark blue, and the intensity of their gaze was embarrassing. "Are you sorry now for having done the thing they put you in prison for?" she asked at last.

He gave a brief, scoffing laugh. "Well, if you must know, I am," he said. "I was young, and a fool, and I got carried away. I am still a red-hot socialist, but I don't believe in dynamite as I used to do. I find the belief has not a pretty effect upon men's characters."

The admission was a visible relief to his companion. "I am glad," she said.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, suddenly leaning forward. "Is the pain getting at all less?"

"Yes," she returned, "it is less. It hurts a great deal, but I am beginning to feel as if I might be only badly bruised. I did not fall far, and I broke my fall with my arms, somehow." She showed two livid bruises, caked with dried blood, under her sleeves.

"Before we leave here," said Felix, "I wish you would try to tell me a little more. I mean," he broke off in great embarrassment, "perhaps you are not going to tell me anything, nor to trust me. There is nobody in the world who either likes or trusts me, and if you don't either, I shall not be surprised. But if you feel that you could trust me, I would like to help you if I can."

"I don't see how you are to help me," she replied in a hopeless kind of way. "My uncle brought me to London. At least, he says he is my uncle. I have been brought up at a convent school in the north of England. I never saw or heard from any relative until a month ago. I was always there, terms and holidays too, except once or twice when a girl asked me to her home for a few days. You see, I am as lonely as you!"

"Yes," said Felix, "I have a step-brother, but he hates me."

"Well," continued Rona, "about a month ago the Mother Superior told me my uncle had written to say he was coming to fetch me away. He wanted to see me, to judge what I was best fitted for, as I should have to earn my own living. I was rather pleased, for I had always been so lonely. You don't know what it is like to live in a school where letters come, and presents, and parcels, for everybody but you; and visitors and holidays for everybody but you. I had not even known that I had an uncle. But the Mother Superior said it was all right; the letter came from the firm of solicitors who had always paid my school bills. So he came, and I was sent for, and the very first moment I saw him I knew he was all wrong. I knew I should hate him. I could see the Reverend Mother was miserable too. She did not like to let him take me away. But of course she had to. She could not prevent it."

She broke off, as at some recollection which turned her sick. She shuddered.

Felix had had a bowl of porridge and an egg. He was now able to give her his undivided attention.

"Till he came," slowly said Rona, fixing her eyes, heavy with unshed tears, upon the tablecloth, "I had never spoken to a man, except Father Lawson. But I had an idea that men were young, and handsome, and good, and that it was their mission to care for women and protect them." Suddenly she laughed harshly, pushing her cup from her, leaning her elbows on the table and hiding her face. "I know better now," she said in an undertone. "I know better now! They are creatures that sell girls, body and soul, for money. They only care for money and what it will get. My uncle said he was going to train me for the stage. He heard me sing, and said I should have my voice trained, and be taught to dance.... He has taken me every day to a place where they handle girls as if they were apes or pet dogs. I have been made to put on horrible clothes--to dance with hardly any clothes on at all, while men stood and made remarks about the way I was made. Other girls," she said, looking up in a pitiful wonder--"there were others who didn't seem to mind--others who laughed at me for minding. But, you see, I have been taught to say my prayers, and to shrink from all immodesty. Oh, if you could know what I have undergone!"

Felix growled. He clenched his hands and cursed his own physical weakness. "Well," he said--"well, what then?"

"A few days ago a man came to the dancing school who offered to buy me from my uncle. He was a man with an oily face and black curls, and had a grin like the demons that are carrying off the lost souls in the altarpiece at the Convent. He hung about all day watching me, and in the evening he said to uncle that he could train me, but he should want to take me over entirely. My uncle was in a savage mood, for he and I had battles every evening. I said I would earn my living in any honest way he liked. I would sit in a workroom ten hours a day, I would scrub or do anything he told me; but he said there was no money in such work, and I had got to make money for him. I think he was beginning to find out that he could not manage me, and was afraid I should run away. So--though at first he refused the man's offer, and said he knew a good thing when he saw it, and that in twelve months I should be setting London ablaze--still, after a bit, they came to terms. He was to pay my uncle a sum down, undertake the whole care of me, and my training, and he bound himself to pay some percentage on my earnings to my uncle when I came out. If you will believe it, all the other girls seemed to think I was fortunate. But I made up my mind that I would run away. However, my uncle suspected that, so when we got home he gave me a thrashing, and locked me in with bread and water, and said I should stay there until I had come to my senses. He had not beaten me before that, and it turned me into a tiger. I held out for five days--think of it--five days in that room, staring down on those trains, all alone, nothing to do, nothing to read, hardly anything to eat! And I was getting weak--so weak that I began to be afraid I should give in. I felt that if my uncle were to come in with a cane in his hand I should be too sick with fear to resist. So I said my prayers, and decided the only thing I could do was to kill myself. I knew that if I got into the power of the man with the black curls I should be--lost--and it was better to die. So I jumped--that's all. Oh, do let us go out! I am so nervous, I fancy every moment they may walk in--my uncle and he."

"From what you tell me," said Felix, "they are most unlikely to come here. They would go to a bar, not a cocoa-house."

"I suppose so," she said, faintly, her face livid, either with pain or fear.

Felix folded his arms, leant back, and thought profoundly. "I should think," he said, "the best thing--the only thing--would be for me to take you back to the Convent, would it not?"

She considered this, her wide gaze once more intent upon his face. "But he might go there and ask for me, and what could the Mother say?"

"She could not keep you there, of course, because you could not pay her. But she would find you some honest way to earn your living."

She nodded. "I believe she would--and not tell him that I had come to her. Yes!"--laying her two hands upon the table before her she looked him bravely in the eyes. "I will go with you," she said.

They paid their reckoning, rose with difficulty, for both were stiff, and reluctantly left the warmth of the fire and crept out into the street. Dusk had fallen, and the air was thick, but not what Londoners would call a fog. As they came out of the door an omnibus stopped close to the curb, and two men descended.

One was middle-aged, heavily built, fleshy, and well dressed; he looked like the proprietor of a low-class music-hall. The other was lean, shabby, wolf-like--a debased type: a man who had evidently sunk in the social scale.

Felix felt upon his arm the grip of a desperate thing. "Run--run--never mind if we are killed, run," she uttered, gaspingly. "It's they--it's they!"