The Combined Maze Part 38

Ranny had recovered and was coming downstairs again. As he came in he saw at once what she had been doing.

"You've been crying, Winny?"

She said nothing.

"I wouldn't if I were you," he said. "There's no need."

She rose and faced him bravely, for there were things that must be thought of.

"What are you going to do, Ranny?" she said.

"Nothing. What is there to be done?"

"Well--" She paused, breathing painfully.

"Look here, Winny, you're dead-beat and you must go home to bed. Do you know it's past ten?"

She drew herself up. "I'm not going."

"You must, dear, I'm afraid."

He smiled, and the smile and his white face made her heart ache. Also they made her more determined.

"You must have somebody. You can't be left like this all by yourself. Do you think I can go and leave you, when you're ill and all?"

"I'm all right now. I wish I could see you home, but I can't leave the house with the kids, you see, all alone."

"Ranny," she said, "I'm not going." She was very grave, very earnest, absolutely determined, and, child that she still was, absolutely unaware of the impossibility of the thing that she proposed. She was blind to herself, blind to all appearances, blind to all aspects of the case, but one, his desolation and his necessity.

"I can't leave you. I wouldn't be happy if I didn't stay. You might be taken bad or something, in the night."

"You can't stay, Winny. It wouldn't do." They were the words she had used to him, in her wisdom, when he had asked her to make her home with him and Violet.

But the vision of propriety, which he raised and presented thus for her consideration, it was nothing to her. She swept it all aside.

"But I _must_," she said. "There's Baby."

He remembered then that little one, above in Violet's deserted room.

Almost she had persuaded him, but for that secret sanity which had him in its care.

"I'll take him. You must go now," he said, firmly. "Now this minute."

He looked for her hat and coat, found them and put her into them, handling her with an extreme inflexibility of manner and tenderness of touch, as if she had been a child.

"Well, then," she compromised. "Let me help you move him."

He let her; and they went upstairs and into Violet's room. Winny had removed every sign of disorder left by Violet in the precipitancy of her flight. Between them, very gently, they carried the cot, with the sleeping baby in it, out of the room of the love knots and the rosebuds into Ranny's room. They set the cot close up against the side of his bed with the rail down so that Ranny's arms might reach out to Baby where he lay. Dossie's little bed was drawn up at the foot. They stood together for a moment, looking at the two children, at Dossie, all curled up and burrowing into her pillow, and at Baby, lying by Ranny's bed as a nursling lies by its mother.

They were silent as the same thought tore at them.

Night after night, for years, as long as Dossie and Baby were little, Ranny would lie like that, on that narrow bed of his, shut in by the two cots, one at his side and the other at his feet. And to Winny it had come, for Ranny had rubbed it into her (tenderly enough; but he had rubbed it in), that this was the last night when she could stand beside him there. She had tried so hard to hold him and Violet together; and all the time it had been Violet who had held her and him. It was Violet's presence that had made it possible for her to go in and out with Ranny in his house.

She stooped for a final, rea.s.suring look at Baby.

"Can you manage with him?" she whispered.

He nodded.

"I've made him his food in that saucepan. You'll have to heat it on the gas ring--in there."

"In there" was Violet's room.

They went downstairs together.

"I wish I could see you home," he said again.

"I'm all right." But she paused on the doorstep. "You ought to have somebody. You can't be left all alone like this. Mayn't I run down and fetch your mother?"

"No," he said, "you mayn't. I'll go down myself to-morrow morning, if you wouldn't mind coming in and looking after the kids for a bit."

"Of course I'll come. Good night, Ranny."

"Good night, Winky. And thanks--" His throat closed with a sharp contraction on the words. She slipped into the darkness and was gone.

He was thankful that he had had the sense to see the impossibility of it, of her spending the night in his house with n.o.body in it but the two of them and the two children.

But it was only when, in the act of undressing, he was reminded of Violet's letter by its bulging in his breast pocket, that he glimpsed the danger they had escaped. Up till then he had only thought of Winny, of her reputation, of her post at Johnson's (imperiled if she were not in by eleven), of all that she would not and could not think of in her thought for him. Now, that inner sanity, that secret wisdom which had made him preserve Violet's letter as a possibly valuable doc.u.ment, suggested that if Winny had stayed all night in the house with him that doc.u.ment would have lost its value. Not that he had meant to do anything with it, that he had any plan, or any certain knowledge. Those two ideas, or rather, those two instinctive appreciations, of the value of the doc.u.ment, and of the awfulness of the risk they ran, were connected in his mind obscurely as the stuff of some tale that he had been told, or as something he had seen sometime in the papers. He put them from him as things that he himself had no immediate use for; while all the time subconscious sanity guarded them and did not let them go.

But that was all it did for him. It did not lift from him his oppression, or fill with intelligible detail his blank sense of calamity, of inconsolable bereavement. This oppression, this morbid sense, amounted almost to hallucination; it prevented him from thinking as clearly as he might about all that, the value of the doc.u.ment, and the rest of it, and about what he ought to do. It was with him as he lay awake on his bed, shut in by the two cots; it, and the fear of forgetting to feed Baby, got into his dreams and troubled them; they watched by him in his sleep; they woke him early and were with him when he woke.

Dossie woke too. He took her into his bed and played with her, and in playing he forgot his grief. A little before seven he got up and dressed. He washed Dossie and dressed her as well as he could, with tender, clumsy fingers that fumbled over all her little strings and b.u.t.tons. Pain, and pleasure poignant as pain, thrilled him with every soft contact with her darling body. He tried to brush her hair as Winny brushed it, all in ducks' tails and in feathers.

He went down and busied himself, hours earlier than he need, making the fire, getting ready Dossie's breakfast and Baby's and his own. Foraging in the larder, he came upon a beefsteak pie that, evidently, Winny had made for him, as if in foreknowledge of his need. When he had washed up the breakfast things and the things that were left over from last night, he went upstairs and made his bed, clumsily. Then he went down again and tidied the sitting-room. In all this he was driven by his determination to leave nothing for Winny to do for him when she came. He went to and fro, with Dossie toddling after him and laughing.

Upstairs, Baby laughed in his cot.

And all the time, Ranny, with his obsession of bereavement and calamity, was unaware of the peace, the exquisite, the unimaginable peace that had settled upon Granville.

At half past eight Winny looked in (entering by the open door of Granville) to see what she could do.

She found him in the bathroom, trying to wash Baby. He had put the little zinc bath with Baby in it inside the big one.

"Whatever did you do that for, Ranny?" Winny asked, while her heart yearned to him.

He said he had to. The little beggar splashed so. Good idea, wasn't it?