Silent and self-reproachful, he was the first to hear the singing outside the window.
‘Listen, there’s some carol-singers!’ His voice, which was breaking, plunged and croaked.
The others all stopped talking and smiles spread over their faces.
‘Quite good, aren’t they?’
‘The first we’ve had this year,’ said Mrs. Marriner.
‘Well, not the first, my dear; they started coming days ago, but I sent them away and said that waits must wait till Christmas Eve.’
‘How many of them are there?’
‘Two, I think,’ said Jeremy.
‘A man and a woman?’
Jeremy got up and drew the curtain. Pierced only by a single distant street-lamp, the darkness in the garden pressed against the window-pane.
‘I can’t quite see,’ he said, coming back. ‘But I think it’s a man and a boy.’
‘A man and a boy?’ said Mr. Marriner. ‘That’s rather unusual.’
‘Perhaps they’re choristers, Daddy. They do sing awfully well.’
At that moment the front-door bell rang. To preserve the character of the house, which was an old one, they had retained the original brass bell-pull. When it was pulled the whole house seemed to shudder audibly, with a strangely searching sound, as if its heart-strings had been plucked, while the bell itself gave out a high yell that split into a paroxysm of jangling. The Marriners were used to this phenomenon, and smiled when it made strangers jump: to-night it made them jump themselves. They listened for the sound of footsteps crossing the stone flags of the hall, but there was none.
‘Mrs. Parfitt doesn’t come till washing-up time,’ said Mrs. Marriner. ‘Who’ll go and give them something?’
‘I will,’ Anne said, jumping up. ‘What shall I give them, Daddy?’
‘Oh, give them a bob,’ said Mr. Marriner, producing the coin from his pocket. However complicated the sum required he always had it.
Anne set off with the light step and glowing face of an eager benefactor; she came back after a minute or two at a much slower pace and looking puzzled and rather frightened. She didn’t sit down but stood over her place with her hands on the chair-back.
‘He said it wasn’t enough,’ she said.
‘Wasn’t enough?’ her father repeated. ‘Did he really say that?’
Anne nodded.
‘Well, I like his cheek,’ Even to his family Mr. Marriner’s moods were unforeseeable; by some chance the man’s impudence had touched a sympathetic chord in him. ‘Go back and say that if they sing another carol they shall have another bob.’
But Anne didn’t move.
‘If you don’t mind, Daddy, I’d rather not.’
They all three raised questioning faces to hers.
‘You’d rather not? Why?’
‘I didn’t like his manner.’
‘Whose, the man’s?’
‘Yes. The boy—you were right, Jeremy, it is a boy, quite a small boy—didn’t say anything.’
‘What was wrong with the man’s manner?’ Mr. Marriner, still genial, asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know!’ Anne began to breathe quickly and her fingers tightened on the chair-back. ‘And it wasn’t only his manner.’
‘Henry, I shouldn’t——’ began Mrs. Marriner warningly, when suddenly Jeremy jumped up. He saw the chance to redeem himself in his own eyes from his ineffectiveness over the Christmas shopping—from the general ineffectiveness that he was conscious of whenever he compared himself with Anne.
‘Here’s the shilling,’ Anne said, holding it out. ‘He wouldn’t take it.’
‘This will make it two,’ their father said, suiting the action to the word. ‘But only if they sing again, mind you.’
While Jeremy was away, they all fell silent, Anne still trying to compose her features, Mr. Marriner tapping on the table, his wife studying her rings. At last she said:
‘They’re all so class-conscious nowadays.’
‘It wasn’t that,’ said Anne.
‘What was it?’
Before she had time to answer—if she would have answered—the door opened and Jeremy came in, flushed and excited but also triumphant, with the triumph he had won over himself. He didn’t go to his place but stood away from the table looking at his father.
‘He wouldn’t take it,’ he said. ‘He said it wasn’t enough. He said you would know why.’
‘I should know why?’ Mr. Marriner’s frown was an effort to remember something. ‘What sort of man is he, Jeremy?’
‘Tall and thin, with a pulled-in face.’
‘And the boy?’
‘He looked about seven. He was crying.’
‘Is it anyone you know, Henry?’ asked his wife.
‘I was trying to think. Yes, no, well, yes, I might have known him.’ Mr. Marriner’s agitation was now visible to them all, and even more felt than seen. ‘What did you say, Jeremy?’
Jeremy’s breast swelled.
‘I told him to go away.’
‘And has he gone?’
As though in answer the bell pealed again.
‘I’ll go this time,’ said Mrs. Marriner. ‘Perhaps I can do something for the child.’
And she was gone before her husband’s outstretched arm could stop her.
Again the trio sat in silence, the children less concerned with themselves than with the gleam that kept coming and going in their father’s eyes like a dipping headlight.
Mrs. Marriner came back much more self-possessed than either of her children had.
‘I don’t think he means any harm,’ she said, ‘he’s a little cracked, that’s all. We’d better humour him. He said he wanted to see you, Henry, but I told him you were out. He said that what we offered wasn’t enough and that he wanted what you gave him last year, whatever that means. So I suggest we give him something that isn’t money. Perhaps you could spare him one of your boxes, Jeremy. A Christmas box is quite a good idea.’
‘He won’t take it,’ said Anne, before Jeremy could speak.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he can’t,’ said Anne.
‘Can’t? What do you mean?’ Anne shook her head. Her mother didn’t press her.
‘Well, you are a funny girl,’ she said. ‘Anyhow, we can but try. Oh, and he said they’d sing us one more carol.’
They set themselves to listen, and in a moment the strains of ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’ began.
Jeremy got up from the table.
‘I don’t believe they’re singing the words right,’ he said. He went to the window and opened it, letting in a puff of icy air.
‘Oh, do shut it!’
‘Just a moment. I want to make sure.’ They all listened, and this is what they heard:
Jeremy shut the window. ‘Did you hear?’ he croaked.
‘I thought I did,’ said Mrs. Marriner. ‘But it might have been “bless”, the words sound so much alike. Henry, dear, don’t look so serious.’
The door-bell rang for the third time. Before the jangling died down, Mr. Marriner rose shakily.
‘No, no, Henry,’ said his wife. ‘Don’t go, it’ll only encourage them. Besides, I said you were out.’ He looked at her doubtfully, and the bell rang again, louder than before. ‘They’ll soon get tired of it,’ she said, ‘if no one comes. Henry, I beg you not to go.’And when he still stared at her with groping eyes, she added:
‘You can’t remember how much you gave him last year?’ Her husband made an impatient gesture with his hand.
‘But if you go take one of Jeremy’s boxes.’
‘It isn’t a box they want,’ he said, ‘it’s a bullet.’
He went to the sideboard and brought out a pistol. It was an old-fashioned saloon pistol, a relic from the days when Henry’s father, in common with others of his generation, had practised pistol-shooting, and it had lain at the back of a drawer in the sideboard longer than any of them could remember.