Chapter 1 — CHAPTER I.<br>THE STRANGE MAN’S ARRIVAL

The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and
a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from
Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his
thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his
soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the
snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest
to the burden he carried. He staggered into the “Coach and Horses”
more dead than alive, and flung his portmanteau down. “A fire,” he
cried, “in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!” He
stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall
into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction,
that and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters
in the inn.

Mrs. Hall lit the fire and left him there while she went to prepare him a meal
with her own hands. A guest to stop at Iping in the wintertime was an
unheard-of piece of luck, let alone a guest who was no “haggler,”
and she was resolved to show herself worthy of her good fortune. As soon as the
bacon was well under way, and Millie, her lymphatic maid, had been brisked up a
bit by a few deftly chosen expressions of contempt, she carried the cloth,
plates, and glasses into the parlour and began to lay them with the utmost
éclat. Although the fire was burning up briskly, she was
surprised to see that her visitor still wore his hat and coat, standing with
his back to her and staring out of the window at the falling snow in the yard.
His gloved hands were clasped behind him, and he seemed to be lost in thought.
She noticed that the melting snow that still sprinkled his shoulders dripped
upon her carpet. “Can I take your hat and coat, sir?” she said,
“and give them a good dry in the kitchen?”

éclat

“No,” he said without turning.

She was not sure she had heard him, and was about to repeat her question.

He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. “I prefer to keep
them on,” he said with emphasis, and she noticed that he wore big blue
spectacles with sidelights, and had a bush side-whisker over his coat-collar
that completely hid his cheeks and face.

“Very well, sir,” she said. “As you like. In a bit the
room will be warmer.”

As

He made no answer, and had turned his face away from her again, and Mrs. Hall,
feeling that her conversational advances were ill-timed, laid the rest of the
table things in a quick staccato and whisked out of the room. When she returned
he was still standing there, like a man of stone, his back hunched, his collar
turned up, his dripping hat-brim turned down, hiding his face and ears
completely. She put down the eggs and bacon with considerable emphasis, and
called rather than said to him, “Your lunch is served, sir.”

“Thank you,” he said at the same time, and did not stir until she
was closing the door. Then he swung round and approached the table with a
certain eager quickness.

As she went behind the bar to the kitchen she heard a sound repeated at regular
intervals. Chirk, chirk, chirk, it went, the sound of a spoon being rapidly
whisked round a basin. “That girl!” she said. “There! I clean
forgot it. It’s her being so long!” And while she herself finished
mixing the mustard, she gave Millie a few verbal stabs for her excessive
slowness. She had cooked the ham and eggs, laid the table, and done everything,
while Millie (help indeed!) had only succeeded in delaying the mustard. And him
a new guest and wanting to stay! Then she filled the mustard pot, and, putting
it with a certain stateliness upon a gold and black tea-tray, carried it into
the parlour.

She rapped and entered promptly. As she did so her visitor moved quickly, so
that she got but a glimpse of a white object disappearing behind the table. It
would seem he was picking something from the floor. She rapped down the mustard
pot on the table, and then she noticed the overcoat and hat had been taken off
and put over a chair in front of the fire, and a pair of wet boots threatened
rust to her steel fender. She went to these things resolutely. “I suppose
I may have them to dry now,” she said in a voice that brooked no denial.

“Leave the hat,” said her visitor, in a muffled voice, and turning
she saw he had raised his head and was sitting and looking at her.

For a moment she stood gaping at him, too surprised to speak.

He held a white cloth—it was a serviette he had brought with
him—over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were
completely hidden, and that was the reason of his muffled voice. But it was not
that which startled Mrs. Hall. It was the fact that all his forehead above his
blue glasses was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears,
leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose.
It was bright, pink, and shiny just as it had been at first. He wore a
dark-brown velvet jacket with a high, black, linen-lined collar turned up about
his neck. The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the
cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest
appearance conceivable. This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike what she
had anticipated, that for a moment she was rigid.

He did not remove the serviette, but remained holding it, as she saw now, with
a brown gloved hand, and regarding her with his inscrutable blue glasses.
“Leave the hat,” he said, speaking very distinctly through the
white cloth.

Her nerves began to recover from the shock they had received. She placed the
hat on the chair again by the fire. “I didn’t know, sir,” she
began, “that—” and she stopped embarrassed.

“Thank you,” he said drily, glancing from her to the door and then
at her again.

“I’ll have them nicely dried, sir, at once,” she said, and
carried his clothes out of the room. She glanced at his white-swathed head and
blue goggles again as she was going out of the door; but his napkin was still
in front of his face. She shivered a little as she closed the door behind her,
and her face was eloquent of her surprise and perplexity. “I
never,” she whispered. “There!” She went quite softly
to the kitchen, and was too preoccupied to ask Millie what she was messing
about with now, when she got there.

never

now

The visitor sat and listened to her retreating feet. He glanced inquiringly at
the window before he removed his serviette, and resumed his meal. He took a
mouthful, glanced suspiciously at the window, took another mouthful, then rose
and, taking the serviette in his hand, walked across the room and pulled the
blind down to the top of the white muslin that obscured the lower panes. This
left the room in a twilight. This done, he returned with an easier air to the
table and his meal.

“The poor soul’s had an accident or an op’ration or
somethin’,” said Mrs. Hall. “What a turn them bandages did
give me, to be sure!”

She put on some more coal, unfolded the clothes-horse, and extended the
traveller’s coat upon this. “And they goggles! Why, he looked more
like a divin’ helmet than a human man!” She hung his muffler on a
corner of the horse. “And holding that handkerchief over his mouth all
the time. Talkin’ through it! ... Perhaps his mouth was hurt
too—maybe.”

She turned round, as one who suddenly remembers. “Bless my soul
alive!” she said, going off at a tangent; “ain’t you done
them taters yet, Millie?”

yet

When Mrs. Hall went to clear away the stranger’s lunch, her idea that his
mouth must also have been cut or disfigured in the accident she supposed him to
have suffered, was confirmed, for he was smoking a pipe, and all the time that
she was in the room he never loosened the silk muffler he had wrapped round the
lower part of his face to put the mouthpiece to his lips. Yet it was not
forgetfulness, for she saw he glanced at it as it smouldered out. He sat in the
corner with his back to the window-blind and spoke now, having eaten and drunk
and being comfortably warmed through, with less aggressive brevity than before.
The reflection of the fire lent a kind of red animation to his big spectacles
they had lacked hitherto.

“I have some luggage,” he said, “at Bramblehurst
station,” and he asked her how he could have it sent. He bowed his
bandaged head quite politely in acknowledgment of her explanation.
“To-morrow?” he said. “There is no speedier delivery?”
and seemed quite disappointed when she answered, “No.” Was she
quite sure? No man with a trap who would go over?

Mrs. Hall, nothing loath, answered his questions and developed a conversation.
“It’s a steep road by the down, sir,” she said in answer to
the question about a trap; and then, snatching at an opening, said, “It
was there a carriage was upsettled, a year ago and more. A gentleman killed,
besides his coachman. Accidents, sir, happen in a moment, don’t
they?”

But the visitor was not to be drawn so easily. “They do,” he said
through his muffler, eyeing her quietly through his impenetrable glasses.

“But they take long enough to get well, don’t they? ... There was
my sister’s son, Tom, jest cut his arm with a scythe, tumbled on it in
the ’ayfield, and, bless me! he was three months tied up sir. You’d
hardly believe it. It’s regular given me a dread of a scythe, sir.”

“I can quite understand that,” said the visitor.

“He was afraid, one time, that he’d have to have an
op’ration—he was that bad, sir.”

The visitor laughed abruptly, a bark of a laugh that he seemed to bite and kill
in his mouth. “Was he?” he said.

Was

“He was, sir. And no laughing matter to them as had the doing for him, as
I had—my sister being took up with her little ones so much. There was
bandages to do, sir, and bandages to undo. So that if I may make so bold as to
say it, sir—”

“Will you get me some matches?” said the visitor, quite abruptly.
“My pipe is out.”

Mrs. Hall was pulled up suddenly. It was certainly rude of him, after telling
him all she had done. She gasped at him for a moment, and remembered the two
sovereigns. She went for the matches.

“Thanks,” he said concisely, as she put them down, and turned his
shoulder upon her and stared out of the window again. It was altogether too
discouraging. Evidently he was sensitive on the topic of operations and
bandages. She did not “make so bold as to say,” however, after all.
But his snubbing way had irritated her, and Millie had a hot time of it that
afternoon.

The visitor remained in the parlour until four o’clock, without giving
the ghost of an excuse for an intrusion. For the most part he was quite still
during that time; it would seem he sat in the growing darkness smoking in the
firelight—perhaps dozing.

Once or twice a curious listener might have heard him at the coals, and for the
space of five minutes he was audible pacing the room. He seemed to be talking
to himself. Then the armchair creaked as he sat down again.