Bye-Ways Part 44

He ate steadily for a couple of hours, pitying himself all the time.

Next day Mrs Lorton re-appeared in a very bad temper. Her seclusion, although it had enabled her to score several points off her rival, had been in other respects wearisome and vexatious. She barely nodded to Burnham, and went out towards the shelter alone. He followed furtively, longing, as usual, for condolence, and presently saw her seat herself facing the sea. The strained relations between them seemed to forbid his placing himself at her side. The back-to-back posture would be more ill.u.s.trative of the exact position of affairs, and Burnham's nicety and accuracy of mind induced him accordingly to face Westgate. Their positions of the first day were thus reversed. She looked at the sea; he stared at the villas. Strange turmoil of life, in which we never know which way we shall be facing next! It struck Burnham suddenly, and so forcibly, _a propos_ of his and Mrs Lorton's reversal, that the ready tears sprang to his eyes. How would it all end? Man spins about like a tee-to-tum, bowing to all points of the compa.s.s. The time comes when the tee-to-tum runs down--and what then? Burnham was certainly run down.

That must be his excuse for what he did. He glanced behind him through the gla.s.s screen, and saw by the motion of Mrs Lorton's back that she was sobbing. In truth, the sight of the dancing waves had set her thinking of all the poor people who have been drowned in water since the beginning of things. Poor dead folk! She was trembling with emotion, and still wept mechanically when she found Mr Burnham on her side of the shelter proposing to her with all his might and main. He was asking her to comfort him, to be a true woman and s.h.i.+eld him with her strength, to support his tottering footsteps along the rugged ways of life, to dry his tears and stay the agonies of his shaken soul.

"Your health will help my weakness," he said. "Your vigour will teach me to be strong."

It was a strange proposal, and she began to defend herself from his imputations, stating her maladies, marshalling her symptoms of decay in an imposing procession.

But it was no good. He had taken her unawares and got the start of her.

She felt it, and his determined weakness obtained a power over her which she could never afterwards explain.

His influenza triumphed, for she forgot her resolution.

A wave of morbid pity for him swept over the woman in her. If he was disorganised now, what would be his condition if she refused him?

"Have I the right," she asked herself, "to devote a fellow-creature to everlasting misery?"

Her influenza told her plainly that she had not.

People say that the marriage will really come off.

Jack Burnham announced it everywhere before Mrs Lorton got thoroughly well, and Mrs Lorton told everybody while Jack Burnham was still what his friends called "awfully d.i.c.ky."

One can but hope that their married life will be pa.s.sed on the same side of the shelter. If he persists in facing the sea, and she in staring at the villas--well, they will live most of Ibsen's plays!

But at least they will be modern.

And so the tee-to-tum, thought of pathetically by Burnham on a memorable occasion, spins round, and the sea and the villas are the two aspects of life.