Clayhanger Part 79

When he was in the pa.s.sage he heard the sound of a sob. Prudently, he had not banged the door after him. He stopped, and listened. Was it a sob? Then he heard another sob. He went back to the drawing-room.

FOUR.

Yes! She stood in the middle of the room weeping. Save Clara, and possibly once or twice Maggie, he had never seen a woman cry--that is, in circ.u.mstances of intimacy; he had seen women crying in the street, and the spectacle usually pained him. On occasion he had very nearly made Maggie cry, and had felt exceedingly uncomfortable. But now, as he looked at the wet eyes and the shaken bosom of Hilda Cannon, he was aware of acute joy. Exquisite moment! d.a.m.n her! He could have taken her and beaten her in his sudden pa.s.sion--a pa.s.sion not of revenge, not of punishment! He could have made her scream with the pain that his love would inflict.

She tried to speak, and failed, in a storm of sobs. He had left the door open. Half blind with tears she dashed to the door and shut it, and then turned and fronted him, with her hands hovering near her face.

"I can't let you do it!" she murmured imploringly, plaintively, and yet with that still obstinate bitterness in her broken voice.

"Then who is to do it?" he demanded, less bitterly than she had spoken, nevertheless not softly. "Who is to keep you if I don't? Have you got any other friends who'll stand by you?"

"I've got the Orgreaves," she answered.

"And do you think it would be better for the Orgreaves to keep you, or for me?" As she made no response, he continued: "Anybody else besides the Orgreaves?"

"No," she muttered sulkily. "I'm not the sort of woman that makes a lot of friends. I expect people don't like me, as a rule."

"You're the sort of woman that behaves like a blooming infant!" he said.

"Supposing I don't help you? What then, I keep asking you? How shall you get money? You can only borrow it--and there's n.o.body but Janet, and she'd have to ask her father for it. Of course, if you'd sooner borrow from Osmond Orgreave than from me--"

"I don't want to borrow from any one," she protested.

"Then you want to starve! And you want your boy to starve--or else to live on charity! Why don't you look facts in the face? You'll have to look them in the face sooner or later, and the sooner the better. You think you're doing a fine thing by sitting tight and bearing it, and saying nothing, and keeping it all a secret, until you get pitched into the street! Let me tell you you aren't."

FIVE.

She dropped into a chair by the piano, and rested her elbows on the curved lid of the piano.

"You're frightfully cruel!" she sobbed, hiding her face.

He fidgeted away to the larger of the two windows, which was bayed, so that the room could boast a view of the sea. On the floor he noticed an open book, pages downwards. He picked it up. It was the poems of Crashaw, an author he had never read but had always been intending to read. Outside, the driver of his cab was bunching up his head and shoulders together under a large umbrella, upon which the rain spattered. The flanks of the resigned horse glistened with rain.

"You needn't talk about cruelty!" he remarked, staring hard at the signboard of an optician opposite. He could hear the faint clanging of church bells.

After a pause she said, as if apologetically--

"Keeping a boarding-house isn't my line. But what could I do? My sister-in-law had it, and I was with her. And when she died...

Besides, I dare say I can keep a boarding-house as well as plenty of other people. But--well, it's no use going into that!"

Edwin abruptly sat down near her.

"Come, now," he said less harshly, more persuasively. "How much do you owe?"

"Oh!" she cried, pouting, and s.h.i.+fting her feet. "It's out of the question! They've distrained for seventy-five pounds."

"I don't care if they've distrained for seven hundred and seventy-five pounds!" She seemed just like a girl to him again now, in spite of her face and her figure. "If that was cleared off, you could carry on, couldn't you? This is just the season. Could you get a servant in, in time for these three sisters?"

"I could get a charwoman, anyhow," she said unwillingly.

"Well, do you owe anything else?"

"There'll be the expenses."

"Of the distraint?"

"Yes."

"That's nothing. I shall lend you a hundred pounds. It just happens that I've got fifty pounds on me in notes. That and a cheque'll settle the bailiff person, and the rest of the hundred I'll send you by post.

It'll be a bit of working capital."

She rose and threaded between chairs and tables to the sofa, several feet from Edwin. With a vanquished and weary sigh, she threw herself on to the sofa.

"I never knew there was anybody like you in the world," she breathed, flicking away some fluff from her breast. She seemed to be regarding him, not as a benefactor, but as a natural curiosity.

SIX.

He looked at her like a conqueror. He had taught her a thing or two.

He had been a man. He was proud of himself. He was proud of all sorts of details in his conduct. The fifty pounds in notes, for example, was not an accident. Since the death of his father, he had formed the habit of never leaving his base of supplies without a provision far in excess of what he was likely to need. He was extravagant in nothing, but the humiliations of his penurious youth and early manhood had implanted in him a morbid fear of being short of money. He had fantastically surmised circ.u.mstances in which he might need a considerable sum at Brighton. And lo! the sequel had transformed his morbidity into prudence.

"This time yesterday," he reflected, in his triumph, "I hadn't even seen her, and didn't know where she was. Last night I was a fool. Half an hour ago she herself hadn't a notion that I was going to get the upper hand of her... Why, it isn't two days yet since I left home! ... And look where I am now!"

With pity and with joy he watched her slowly wiping her eyes.

Thirty-four, perhaps; yet a child--compared to him! But if she did not give a natural ingenuous smile of relief, it was because she could not.

If she acted foolishly it was because of her tremendous haughtiness.

However, he had lowered that. He had shown her her master. He felt that she had been profoundly wronged by destiny, and that gentleness must be lavished upon her.

In a casual tone he began to talk about the most rapid means of getting rid of the bailiff. He could not tolerate the incubus of the bailiff a moment longer than was absolutely unavoidable. At intervals a misgiving shot like a thin flying needle through the solid satisfaction of his sensations: "She is a strange and an incalculable woman--why am I doing this?" Shot, and was gone, almost before perceived!

VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER SIX.

THE RENDEZVOUS.

In the afternoon the weather cleared somewhat. Edwin, vaguely blissful, but with nothing to occupy him save reflection, sat in the lounge drinking tea at a Moorish table. An old Jew, who was likewise drinking tea at a Moorish table, had engaged him in conversation and was relating the history of a burglary in which he had lost from his flat in Bolton Street, Piccadilly, nineteen gold cigarette-cases and thirty-seven jewelled scarf-pins, tokens of esteem and regard offered to him by friends and colleagues at various crises of his life. The lounge was crowded, but not with tea-drinkers. Despite the horrid dismalness of the morning, hope had sent down from London trains full of people whose determination was to live and to see life in a grandiose manner. And all about the lounge of the Royal Suss.e.x were groups of elegant youngish men and flaxen, uneasily stylish women, inviting the a.s.sistance of flattered waiters to decide what liqueurs they should have next. Edwin was humanly trying to publish in nonchalant gestures the scorn which he really felt for these nincomp.o.o.ps, but whose free expression was hindered by a layer of envy.

The hall-porter appeared, and his eye ranged like a condor's over the field until it discovered Edwin, whom he approached with a mien of joy and handed to him a letter.

Edwin took the letter with an air of custom, as if he was anxious to convince the company that his stay at the Royal Suss.e.x was frequently punctuated by the arrival of special missives.

"Who brought this?" he asked.

"An oldish man, sir," said the porter, and bowed and departed.