Volume Four--Chapter Four.

Volume Four--Chapter Four.In Preston Street.He said, “I happened to be in Brighton, so I thought I’d just call, and—I thought I’d just call.”She stared at him, frowning, in the dim diffused light of the street.“I’ve been seeing your little boy,” he said. “I thought perhaps as I was here you’d like to know how he was getting on.”“Why,” she exclaimed, with seeming bitterness, “you’ve grown a beard!”“Yes,” he admitted foolishly, apologetically.“We can’t stand here in this wind,” she said, angry with the wind, which was indeed blowing her hair about, and her skirts and her duster.She did not in words invite him to enter, but she held the door more widely open and drew back for him to pass. He went in. She closed the door with a bang and rattle of large old-fashioned latches, locks, and chains, and the storm was excluded. They were in the dark of the hall. “Wait till I put my hand on the matches,” she said. Then she struck a match, which revealed a common oil-lamp, with a reservoir of yellow glass and a paper shade. She raised the chimney and lit the lamp, and regulated the wick.Edwin kept silence. The terrible constraint which had half paralysed him when Janet first mentioned Hilda, seized him again. He stood near the woman who without a word of explanation or regret had jilted, outraged, and ruined him ten years before; this was their first meeting after their kisses in his father’s shop. And yet she was not on her knees, nor in tears, nor stammering an appeal for forgiveness. It was rather he who was apologetic, who sought excuses. He felt somehow like a criminal, or at least like one who commits an enormous indiscretion.The harsh curves of her hair were the same. Her thick eyebrows were the same. Her blazing glance was the same. Her intensely clear intonation was the same. But she was a profoundly changed woman. Even in his extreme perturbation he could be sure of that. As, bending under the lamp-shade to arrange the wick, she exposed her features to the bright light, Edwin saw a face marred by anxiety and grief and time, the face of a mature woman, with no lingering pretension to girlishness. She was thirty-four, and she looked older than Maggie, and much older than Janet. She was embittered. Her black dress was shabby and untidy, her finger-nails irregular, discoloured, and damaged. The aspect of her pained Edwin acutely. It seemed to him a poignant shame that time and sorrow and misfortune could not pass over a young girl’s face and leave no mark. When he recalled what she had been, comparing the woman with the delicious wistful freshness of the girl that lived unaltered in his memory, he was obliged to clear his throat. The contrast was too pathetic to be dwelt on. Only with the woman before him did he fully appreciate the exquisite innocent simplicity of the girl. In the day of his passion Hilda had not seemed to him very young, very simple, very wistful. On the contrary she had seemed to have much of the knowledge and the temper of a woman.Having at length subjugated the wick, she straightened her back, with a gesture that he knew, and for one instant she was a girl again.Two.“Will you come this way?” she said coldly, holding the lamp in front of her, and opening a door.At the same moment another door opened at the far end of the hall; there was a heavy footstep; a great hand and arm showed, and then Edwin had a glimpse of a man’s head and shoulders emerging from an oblong flickering firelight.Hilda paused. “All right,” she called to the man, who at once disappeared, shutting the door and leaving darkness where he had been. The large shadows cast by Hilda’s lamp now had the gaunt hall to themselves again.“Don’t be alarmed,” she laughed harshly. “It’s only the broker’s man.”Edwin was tongue-tied. If Hilda were joking, what answer could be made to such a pleasantry in such a situation? And if she were speaking the truth, if the bailiffs really were in possession...! His life seemed to him once again astoundingly romantic. He had loved this woman, conquered her. And now she was a mere acquaintance, and he was following her stiffly into the recesses of a strange and sinister abode peopled by mysterious men. Was this a Brighton boarding-house? It resembled nothing reputable in his experience. All was incomprehensible.The room into which she led him was evidently the dining-room. Not spacious, perhaps not quite so large as his own dining-room, it was nearly filled by one long bare table. Eight or ten monotonous chairs were ranged round the grey walls. In the embrasure of the window was a wicker stand with a withered plant on its summit, and at the other end of the room a walnut sideboard in the most horrible taste. The mantelpiece was draped with dark knotted and rosetted cloth; within the fender stood a small paper screen. The walls were hung with ancient and with fairly modern engravings, some big, others little, some coloured, others in black-and-white, but all distressing in their fatuous ugliness. The ceiling seemed black. The whole room fulfilled pretty accurately the scornful scrupulous housewife’s notion of a lodging-house interior. It was suspect. And in Edwin there was a good deal of the housewife. He was appalled. Obviously the house was small—he had known that from the outside—and the entire enterprise insignificant. This establishment was not in the King’s Road, nor on the Marine Parade, nor at Hove; no doubt hundreds of such little places existed precariously in a vast town like Brighton. Widows, of course, were often in straits. And Janet had told him... Nevertheless he was appalled, and completely at a loss to reconcile Hilda with her environment. And then—“the broker’s man!”At her bidding he sat down, in his overcoat, with his hat insecure on his knee, and observed, under the lamp, the dust on the surface of the long table. Hilda seated herself opposite, so that the lamp was between them, hiding him from her by its circle of light. He wondered what Maggie would have thought, and what Clara would have said, could they have seen him in that obscurity.Three.“So you’ve seen my boy?” she began, with no softening of tone.“Yes, Janet Orgreave brought him in one morning—the other day. He didn’t seem to me to be so ill as all that.”“Ill!” she exclaimed. “He certainly wasn’t ill when he left here. But he had been. And the doctor said that this air didn’t suit him—it never had suited him. It doesn’t suit some folks, you know—people can say what they like.”“Anyhow, he’s a lively piece—no mistake about that!”“When he’s well, he’s very well,” said George’s mother. “But he’s up and down in a minute. And on the whole he’s been on the poorly side.”He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she never quitted her native Turnhill. He looked round the lamp at her furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his admiration. (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly foreign to the Five Towns.) That this quality should have survived in her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique. Unique she had been, and unique she still remained. He did not know that he had long ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision. He imagined in his simplicity, which disguised itself as chill critical impartiality, that he was adding her up with clear-sighted shrewdness... And then she was a mother! That meant a mysterious, a mystic perfecting! For him, it was as if among all women she alone had been a mother—so special was his view of the influence of motherhood upon her. He drew together all the beauty of an experience almost universal, transcendentalised it, and centred it on one being. And he was disturbed, baffled, agitated by the effect of the secret workings of his own unsuspected emotion. He was made sad, and sadder. He wanted to right wrongs, to efface from hearts the memory of grief, to create bliss; and he knew that this could never be done. He now saw Hilda exclusively as a victim, whose misfortunes were innumerable. Imagine this creature, with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night! Imagine her solitary in the awful house—with the broker’s man! Imagine her forced to separate herself from her child! Imagine the succession of disasters that had soured her and transformed seriousness into harshness and acridity! ... And within that envelope, what a soul must be burning!“And when he begins to grow—he’s scarcelybegunto grow yet,” Hilda continued about her offspring, “then he will need all his strength!”“Yes, he will,” Edwin concurred heartily.He wanted to ask her, “Why did you call him Edwin for his second name? Was it his father’s name, or your father’s, or didyouinsist on it yourself, because—?” But he could not ask. He could ask nothing. He could not even ask why she had jilted him without a word. He knew naught, and evidently she was determined to give no information. She might at any rate have explained how she had come to meet Janet, and under what circumstances Janet had taken possession of the child. All was a mystery. Her face, when he avoided the lamp, shone in the midst of a huge dark cloud of impenetrable mystery. She was too proud to reveal anything whatever. The grand pride in her forbade her even to excuse her conduct to himself. A terrific woman!Four.Silence fell. His constraint was excruciating. She too was nervous, tapping the table and creaking her chair. He could not speak.“Shall you be going back to Bursley soon?” she demanded. In her voice was desperation.“Oh yes!” he said, thankfully eager to follow up any subject. “On Monday, I expect.”“I wonder if you’d mind giving Janet a little parcel from me—some things of George’s? I meant to send it by post, but if you—”“Of course! With pleasure!” He seemed to implore her.“It’s quite small,” she said, rising and going to the sideboard, on which lay a little brown-paper parcel.His eye followed her. She picked up the parcel, glanced at it, and offered it to him.“I’ll take it across on Monday night,” he said fervently.“Thanks.”She remained standing; he got up.“No message or anything?” he suggested.“Oh!” she said coldly, “I write, you know.”“Well—” He made the gesture of departing. There was no alternative.“We’re having very rough weather, aren’t we?” she said, with careless conventionality, as she took the lamp.In the hall, when she held out her hand, he wanted tremendously to squeeze it, to give her through his hand the message of sympathy which his tongue, intimidated by her manner, dared not give. But his hand also refused to obey him. The clasp was strictly ceremonious. As she was drawing the heavy latch of the door he forced himself to say, “I’m in Brighton sometimes, off and on. Now I know where you are, I must look you up.”She made no answer. She merely said good night as he passed out into the street and the wind. The door banged.Five.Edwin took a long breath. He had seen her! Yes, but the interview had been worse than his worst expectations. He had surpassed himself in futility, in fatuous lack of enterprise. He had behaved liked a schoolboy. Now, as he plunged up the street with the wind, he could devise easily a dozen ways of animating and guiding and controlling the interview so that, even if sad, its sadness might have been agreeable. The interview had been hell, ineffable torture, a perfect crime of clumsiness. It had resulted in nothing. (Except, of course, that he had seen her—that fact was indisputable.) He blamed himself. He cursed himself with really extraordinary savageness.“Why did I go near her?” he demanded. “Why couldn’t I keep away? I’ve simply made myself look a blasted fool! Creeping and crawling round her! ... After all, shedidthrow me over! And now she asks me to take a parcel to her confounded kid! The whole thing’s ridiculous! And what’s going to happen to her in that hole? I don’t suppose she’s got the least notion of looking after herself. Impossible—the whole thing! If anybody had told me that I should—that she’d—” Half of which talk was simple bluster. The parcel was bobbing on its loop against his side.When he reached the top of the street he discovered that he had been going up it instead of down it. “What am I thinking of?” he grumbled impatiently. However, he would not turn back. He adventured forward, climbing into latitudes whose geography was strange to him, and scarcely seeing a single fellow-wanderer beneath the gas-lamps. Presently, after a steep hill, he came to a churchyard, and then he redescended, and at last tumbled into a street alive with people who had emerged from a theatre, laughing, lighting cigarettes, linking arms. Their existence seemed shallow, purposeless, infantile, compared to his. He felt himself superior to them. What did they know about life? He would not change with any of them.Recognising the label on an omnibus, he followed its direction, and arrived almost immediately in the vast square which contained his hotel, and which was illuminated by the brilliant façades of several hotels. The doors of the Royal Sussex were locked, because eleven o’clock had struck. He could not account for the period of nearly three hours which had passed since he left the hotel. The zealous porter, observing his shadow through the bars, had sprung to unfasten the door before he could ring.Six.Within the hotel reigned gaiety, wine, and the dance. Small tables had been placed in the hall, and at these sat bald-headed men, smoking cigars and sharing champagne with ladies of every age. A white carpet had been laid in the large smoking-room, and through the curtained archway that separated it from the hall, Edwin could see couples revolving in obedience to the music of a piano and a violin. One of the Royal Sussex’s Saturday Cinderellas was in progress. The self-satisfied gestures of men inspecting their cigars or lifting glasses, of simpering women glancing on the sly at their jewels, and of youths pulling straight their white waistcoats as they strolled about with the air of Don Juans, invigorated his contempt for the average existence. The tinkle of the music appeared exquisitely tedious in its superficiality. He could not remain in the hall because of the incorrectness of his attire, and the staircase was blocked, to a timid man, by elegant couples apparently engaged in the act of flirtation. He turned, through a group of attendant waiters, into the passage leading to the small smoking-room which adjoined the discreetly situated bar. This smoking-room, like a club, warm and bright, was empty, but in passing he had caught sight of two mutually affectionate dandies drinking at the splendid mahogany of the bar. He lit a cigarette. Seated in the smoking-room he could hear their conversation; he was forced to hear it.“I’m really a very quiet man, old chap,veryquiet,” said one, with a wavering drawl, “but when they get at me— I was at the Club at one o’clock. I wasn’t drunk, but I had a top on.”“You were just gay and cheerful,” the other flatteringly and soothingly suggested, in an exactly similar wavering drawl.“Yes. I felt as if I wanted to go out somewhere and have another drink. So I went to Willis’s Rooms. I was in evening-dress. You know you have to get a domino for those things. Then, of course, you’re a mark at once. I also got a nose. A girl snatched it off me. I told her what I thought ofher, and I got another nose. Then five fellows tried to snatch my domino off me. Then Ididget angry. I landed out with my right at the nearest chap—right on his heart. Not his face. His heart. I lowered him. He asked me afterwards, ‘Was that your right?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and my left’s worse!’ I couldn’t use my left because they were holding it. You see? Yousee?”“Yes,” said the other impatiently, and suddenly cantankerous. “I see that all right! Damned awful rot those Willis’s Rooms affairs are getting, if you ask me!”“Asses!” Edwin exploded within himself. “Idiots!” He could not tolerate their crassness. He had a hot prejudice against them because they were not as near the core of life as he was himself. It appeared to him that most people died without having lived. Willis’s Rooms! Girls! Nose! Heart! ... Asses!He surged again out of the small room, desolating the bar with one scornful glance as he went by. He braved the staircase, leaving those scenes of drivelling festivity. In his bedroom, with the wind crashing against the window, he regarded meditatively the parcel. After all, if she had meant to have nothing to do with him, she would not have charged him with the parcel. The parcel was a solid fact. The more he thought about it, the more significant a fact it seemed to him. His ears sang with the vibrating intensity of his secret existence, but from the wild confusion of his heart he could disentangle no constant idea.

He said, “I happened to be in Brighton, so I thought I’d just call, and—I thought I’d just call.”

She stared at him, frowning, in the dim diffused light of the street.

“I’ve been seeing your little boy,” he said. “I thought perhaps as I was here you’d like to know how he was getting on.”

“Why,” she exclaimed, with seeming bitterness, “you’ve grown a beard!”

“Yes,” he admitted foolishly, apologetically.

“We can’t stand here in this wind,” she said, angry with the wind, which was indeed blowing her hair about, and her skirts and her duster.

She did not in words invite him to enter, but she held the door more widely open and drew back for him to pass. He went in. She closed the door with a bang and rattle of large old-fashioned latches, locks, and chains, and the storm was excluded. They were in the dark of the hall. “Wait till I put my hand on the matches,” she said. Then she struck a match, which revealed a common oil-lamp, with a reservoir of yellow glass and a paper shade. She raised the chimney and lit the lamp, and regulated the wick.

Edwin kept silence. The terrible constraint which had half paralysed him when Janet first mentioned Hilda, seized him again. He stood near the woman who without a word of explanation or regret had jilted, outraged, and ruined him ten years before; this was their first meeting after their kisses in his father’s shop. And yet she was not on her knees, nor in tears, nor stammering an appeal for forgiveness. It was rather he who was apologetic, who sought excuses. He felt somehow like a criminal, or at least like one who commits an enormous indiscretion.

The harsh curves of her hair were the same. Her thick eyebrows were the same. Her blazing glance was the same. Her intensely clear intonation was the same. But she was a profoundly changed woman. Even in his extreme perturbation he could be sure of that. As, bending under the lamp-shade to arrange the wick, she exposed her features to the bright light, Edwin saw a face marred by anxiety and grief and time, the face of a mature woman, with no lingering pretension to girlishness. She was thirty-four, and she looked older than Maggie, and much older than Janet. She was embittered. Her black dress was shabby and untidy, her finger-nails irregular, discoloured, and damaged. The aspect of her pained Edwin acutely. It seemed to him a poignant shame that time and sorrow and misfortune could not pass over a young girl’s face and leave no mark. When he recalled what she had been, comparing the woman with the delicious wistful freshness of the girl that lived unaltered in his memory, he was obliged to clear his throat. The contrast was too pathetic to be dwelt on. Only with the woman before him did he fully appreciate the exquisite innocent simplicity of the girl. In the day of his passion Hilda had not seemed to him very young, very simple, very wistful. On the contrary she had seemed to have much of the knowledge and the temper of a woman.

Having at length subjugated the wick, she straightened her back, with a gesture that he knew, and for one instant she was a girl again.

“Will you come this way?” she said coldly, holding the lamp in front of her, and opening a door.

At the same moment another door opened at the far end of the hall; there was a heavy footstep; a great hand and arm showed, and then Edwin had a glimpse of a man’s head and shoulders emerging from an oblong flickering firelight.

Hilda paused. “All right,” she called to the man, who at once disappeared, shutting the door and leaving darkness where he had been. The large shadows cast by Hilda’s lamp now had the gaunt hall to themselves again.

“Don’t be alarmed,” she laughed harshly. “It’s only the broker’s man.”

Edwin was tongue-tied. If Hilda were joking, what answer could be made to such a pleasantry in such a situation? And if she were speaking the truth, if the bailiffs really were in possession...! His life seemed to him once again astoundingly romantic. He had loved this woman, conquered her. And now she was a mere acquaintance, and he was following her stiffly into the recesses of a strange and sinister abode peopled by mysterious men. Was this a Brighton boarding-house? It resembled nothing reputable in his experience. All was incomprehensible.

The room into which she led him was evidently the dining-room. Not spacious, perhaps not quite so large as his own dining-room, it was nearly filled by one long bare table. Eight or ten monotonous chairs were ranged round the grey walls. In the embrasure of the window was a wicker stand with a withered plant on its summit, and at the other end of the room a walnut sideboard in the most horrible taste. The mantelpiece was draped with dark knotted and rosetted cloth; within the fender stood a small paper screen. The walls were hung with ancient and with fairly modern engravings, some big, others little, some coloured, others in black-and-white, but all distressing in their fatuous ugliness. The ceiling seemed black. The whole room fulfilled pretty accurately the scornful scrupulous housewife’s notion of a lodging-house interior. It was suspect. And in Edwin there was a good deal of the housewife. He was appalled. Obviously the house was small—he had known that from the outside—and the entire enterprise insignificant. This establishment was not in the King’s Road, nor on the Marine Parade, nor at Hove; no doubt hundreds of such little places existed precariously in a vast town like Brighton. Widows, of course, were often in straits. And Janet had told him... Nevertheless he was appalled, and completely at a loss to reconcile Hilda with her environment. And then—“the broker’s man!”

At her bidding he sat down, in his overcoat, with his hat insecure on his knee, and observed, under the lamp, the dust on the surface of the long table. Hilda seated herself opposite, so that the lamp was between them, hiding him from her by its circle of light. He wondered what Maggie would have thought, and what Clara would have said, could they have seen him in that obscurity.

“So you’ve seen my boy?” she began, with no softening of tone.

“Yes, Janet Orgreave brought him in one morning—the other day. He didn’t seem to me to be so ill as all that.”

“Ill!” she exclaimed. “He certainly wasn’t ill when he left here. But he had been. And the doctor said that this air didn’t suit him—it never had suited him. It doesn’t suit some folks, you know—people can say what they like.”

“Anyhow, he’s a lively piece—no mistake about that!”

“When he’s well, he’s very well,” said George’s mother. “But he’s up and down in a minute. And on the whole he’s been on the poorly side.”

He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she never quitted her native Turnhill. He looked round the lamp at her furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his admiration. (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly foreign to the Five Towns.) That this quality should have survived in her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique. Unique she had been, and unique she still remained. He did not know that he had long ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision. He imagined in his simplicity, which disguised itself as chill critical impartiality, that he was adding her up with clear-sighted shrewdness... And then she was a mother! That meant a mysterious, a mystic perfecting! For him, it was as if among all women she alone had been a mother—so special was his view of the influence of motherhood upon her. He drew together all the beauty of an experience almost universal, transcendentalised it, and centred it on one being. And he was disturbed, baffled, agitated by the effect of the secret workings of his own unsuspected emotion. He was made sad, and sadder. He wanted to right wrongs, to efface from hearts the memory of grief, to create bliss; and he knew that this could never be done. He now saw Hilda exclusively as a victim, whose misfortunes were innumerable. Imagine this creature, with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night! Imagine her solitary in the awful house—with the broker’s man! Imagine her forced to separate herself from her child! Imagine the succession of disasters that had soured her and transformed seriousness into harshness and acridity! ... And within that envelope, what a soul must be burning!

“And when he begins to grow—he’s scarcelybegunto grow yet,” Hilda continued about her offspring, “then he will need all his strength!”

“Yes, he will,” Edwin concurred heartily.

He wanted to ask her, “Why did you call him Edwin for his second name? Was it his father’s name, or your father’s, or didyouinsist on it yourself, because—?” But he could not ask. He could ask nothing. He could not even ask why she had jilted him without a word. He knew naught, and evidently she was determined to give no information. She might at any rate have explained how she had come to meet Janet, and under what circumstances Janet had taken possession of the child. All was a mystery. Her face, when he avoided the lamp, shone in the midst of a huge dark cloud of impenetrable mystery. She was too proud to reveal anything whatever. The grand pride in her forbade her even to excuse her conduct to himself. A terrific woman!

Silence fell. His constraint was excruciating. She too was nervous, tapping the table and creaking her chair. He could not speak.

“Shall you be going back to Bursley soon?” she demanded. In her voice was desperation.

“Oh yes!” he said, thankfully eager to follow up any subject. “On Monday, I expect.”

“I wonder if you’d mind giving Janet a little parcel from me—some things of George’s? I meant to send it by post, but if you—”

“Of course! With pleasure!” He seemed to implore her.

“It’s quite small,” she said, rising and going to the sideboard, on which lay a little brown-paper parcel.

His eye followed her. She picked up the parcel, glanced at it, and offered it to him.

“I’ll take it across on Monday night,” he said fervently.

“Thanks.”

She remained standing; he got up.

“No message or anything?” he suggested.

“Oh!” she said coldly, “I write, you know.”

“Well—” He made the gesture of departing. There was no alternative.

“We’re having very rough weather, aren’t we?” she said, with careless conventionality, as she took the lamp.

In the hall, when she held out her hand, he wanted tremendously to squeeze it, to give her through his hand the message of sympathy which his tongue, intimidated by her manner, dared not give. But his hand also refused to obey him. The clasp was strictly ceremonious. As she was drawing the heavy latch of the door he forced himself to say, “I’m in Brighton sometimes, off and on. Now I know where you are, I must look you up.”

She made no answer. She merely said good night as he passed out into the street and the wind. The door banged.

Edwin took a long breath. He had seen her! Yes, but the interview had been worse than his worst expectations. He had surpassed himself in futility, in fatuous lack of enterprise. He had behaved liked a schoolboy. Now, as he plunged up the street with the wind, he could devise easily a dozen ways of animating and guiding and controlling the interview so that, even if sad, its sadness might have been agreeable. The interview had been hell, ineffable torture, a perfect crime of clumsiness. It had resulted in nothing. (Except, of course, that he had seen her—that fact was indisputable.) He blamed himself. He cursed himself with really extraordinary savageness.

“Why did I go near her?” he demanded. “Why couldn’t I keep away? I’ve simply made myself look a blasted fool! Creeping and crawling round her! ... After all, shedidthrow me over! And now she asks me to take a parcel to her confounded kid! The whole thing’s ridiculous! And what’s going to happen to her in that hole? I don’t suppose she’s got the least notion of looking after herself. Impossible—the whole thing! If anybody had told me that I should—that she’d—” Half of which talk was simple bluster. The parcel was bobbing on its loop against his side.

When he reached the top of the street he discovered that he had been going up it instead of down it. “What am I thinking of?” he grumbled impatiently. However, he would not turn back. He adventured forward, climbing into latitudes whose geography was strange to him, and scarcely seeing a single fellow-wanderer beneath the gas-lamps. Presently, after a steep hill, he came to a churchyard, and then he redescended, and at last tumbled into a street alive with people who had emerged from a theatre, laughing, lighting cigarettes, linking arms. Their existence seemed shallow, purposeless, infantile, compared to his. He felt himself superior to them. What did they know about life? He would not change with any of them.

Recognising the label on an omnibus, he followed its direction, and arrived almost immediately in the vast square which contained his hotel, and which was illuminated by the brilliant façades of several hotels. The doors of the Royal Sussex were locked, because eleven o’clock had struck. He could not account for the period of nearly three hours which had passed since he left the hotel. The zealous porter, observing his shadow through the bars, had sprung to unfasten the door before he could ring.

Within the hotel reigned gaiety, wine, and the dance. Small tables had been placed in the hall, and at these sat bald-headed men, smoking cigars and sharing champagne with ladies of every age. A white carpet had been laid in the large smoking-room, and through the curtained archway that separated it from the hall, Edwin could see couples revolving in obedience to the music of a piano and a violin. One of the Royal Sussex’s Saturday Cinderellas was in progress. The self-satisfied gestures of men inspecting their cigars or lifting glasses, of simpering women glancing on the sly at their jewels, and of youths pulling straight their white waistcoats as they strolled about with the air of Don Juans, invigorated his contempt for the average existence. The tinkle of the music appeared exquisitely tedious in its superficiality. He could not remain in the hall because of the incorrectness of his attire, and the staircase was blocked, to a timid man, by elegant couples apparently engaged in the act of flirtation. He turned, through a group of attendant waiters, into the passage leading to the small smoking-room which adjoined the discreetly situated bar. This smoking-room, like a club, warm and bright, was empty, but in passing he had caught sight of two mutually affectionate dandies drinking at the splendid mahogany of the bar. He lit a cigarette. Seated in the smoking-room he could hear their conversation; he was forced to hear it.

“I’m really a very quiet man, old chap,veryquiet,” said one, with a wavering drawl, “but when they get at me— I was at the Club at one o’clock. I wasn’t drunk, but I had a top on.”

“You were just gay and cheerful,” the other flatteringly and soothingly suggested, in an exactly similar wavering drawl.

“Yes. I felt as if I wanted to go out somewhere and have another drink. So I went to Willis’s Rooms. I was in evening-dress. You know you have to get a domino for those things. Then, of course, you’re a mark at once. I also got a nose. A girl snatched it off me. I told her what I thought ofher, and I got another nose. Then five fellows tried to snatch my domino off me. Then Ididget angry. I landed out with my right at the nearest chap—right on his heart. Not his face. His heart. I lowered him. He asked me afterwards, ‘Was that your right?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and my left’s worse!’ I couldn’t use my left because they were holding it. You see? Yousee?”

“Yes,” said the other impatiently, and suddenly cantankerous. “I see that all right! Damned awful rot those Willis’s Rooms affairs are getting, if you ask me!”

“Asses!” Edwin exploded within himself. “Idiots!” He could not tolerate their crassness. He had a hot prejudice against them because they were not as near the core of life as he was himself. It appeared to him that most people died without having lived. Willis’s Rooms! Girls! Nose! Heart! ... Asses!

He surged again out of the small room, desolating the bar with one scornful glance as he went by. He braved the staircase, leaving those scenes of drivelling festivity. In his bedroom, with the wind crashing against the window, he regarded meditatively the parcel. After all, if she had meant to have nothing to do with him, she would not have charged him with the parcel. The parcel was a solid fact. The more he thought about it, the more significant a fact it seemed to him. His ears sang with the vibrating intensity of his secret existence, but from the wild confusion of his heart he could disentangle no constant idea.

Volume Four--Chapter Five.The Bully.The next morning he was up early, preternaturally awake. When he descended the waiters were waiting for him, and the zealous porter stood ready to offer him a Sunday paper, just as though in the night they had refreshed themselves magically, without going to bed. No sign nor relic of the Cinderella remained. He breakfasted in an absent mind, and then went idly into the lounge, a room with one immense circular window, giving on the Square. Rain was falling heavily. Already from the porter, and in the very mien of the waiters, he had learnt that the Brighton Sunday was ruined. He left the window. On a round table in the middle of the room were ranged, with religious regularity, all the most esoteric examples of periodical literature in our language, from “The Iron-Trades Review” to “The Animals’ Guardian.” With one careless movement he destroyed the balanced perfection of a labour into which some menial had put his soul, and then dropped into a gigantic easy-chair near the fire, whose thin flames were just rising through the interstices of great black lumps of coal.The housekeeper, stiff with embroidered silk, swam majestically into the lounge, bowed with a certain frigid and deferential surprise to the early guest, and proceeded to an inquiry into dust. In a moment she called, sharp and low—“Arthur!”And a page ran eagerly in, to whom, in the difficult corners of upholstery and of sculptured wood, she pointed out his sins of omission, lashing him with a restrained voice that Edwin could scarcely hear. Passing her hand carelessly along the beading of a door panel and then examining her fingers, she departed. The page fetched a duster.“I see why this hotel has such a name,” said Edwin to himself. And suddenly the image of Hilda in that dark and frowzy tenement in Preston Street, on that wet Sunday morning, filled his heart with a revolt capricious and violent. He sprang to his feet, unreflecting, wilful, and strode into the hall.“Can I have a cab?” he asked the porter.“Certainly, sir,” said the porter, as if saying, “You ask me too little. Why will you not ask for a white elephant so that I may prove my devotion?” And within five seconds the screech of a whistle sped through the air to the cab-stand at the corner.Two.“Why am I doing this?” he once more asked himself, when he heard the bell ring, in answer to his pull, within the house in Preston Street. The desire for a tranquil life had always been one of his strongest instincts, and of late years the instinct had been satisfied, and so strengthened. Now he seemed to be obstinately searching for tumult; and he did not know why. He trembled at the sound of movement behind the door. “In a moment,” he thought, “I shall be right in the thick of it!”As he was expecting, she opened the door herself; but only a little, with the gesture habitual to women who live alone in apprehension, and she kept her hand on the latch.“Good morning,” he said curtly. “Can I speak to you?”His eye could not blaze like hers, but all his self-respect depended on his valour now, and with desperation he affronted her. She opened the door wider, and he stepped in, and at once began to wipe his boots on the mat with nervous particularity.“Frightful morning!” he grinned.“Yes,” she said. “Is that your cab outside?”He admitted that it was.“Perhaps if we go upstairs,” she suggested.Thanking her, he followed her upwards into the gloom at the head of the narrow stairs, and then along a narrow passage. The house appeared quite as unfavourably by day as by night. It was shabby. All its tints had merged by use and by time into one tint, nondescript and unpleasant, in which yellow prospered. The drawing-room was larger than the dining-room by the poor width of the hall. It was a heaped, confused mass of chairs, sofas, small tables, draperies, embroideries, and valueless knick-knacks. There was no peace in it for the eye, neither on the walls nor on the floor. The gaze was driven from one ugliness to another without rest.The fireplace was draped; the door was draped; the back of the piano was draped; and none of the dark suspicious stuffs showed a clear pattern. The faded chairs were hidden by faded antimacassars; the little futile tables concealed their rickets under vague needlework, on which were displayed in straw or tinsel frames pale portraits of dowdy people who had stood like sheep before fifteenth-rate photographers. The mantelpiece and the top of the piano were thickly strewn with fragments of coloured earthenware. At the windows hung heavy dark curtains from great rings that gleamed gilt near the ceiling; and lest the light which they admitted should be too powerful it was further screened by greyish white curtains within them. The carpet was covered in most places by small rugs or bits of other carpets, and in the deep shadows beneath sofas and chairs and behind the piano it seemed to slip altogether out of existence into black nothingness. The room lacked ventilation, but had the appearance of having been recently dusted.Three.Hilda closed the draped door with a mysterious, bitter, cynical smile.“Sit down,” she said coldly.“Last night,” Edwin began, without sitting down, “when you mentioned the broker’s man, were you joking, or did you mean it?”She was taken aback.“Did I say ‘broker’s man’?”“Well,” said Edwin, “you’ve not forgotten, I suppose.”She sat down, with some precision of pose, on the principal sofa.“Yes,” she said at length. “As you’re so curious. The landlords are in possession.”“The bailiffs still here?”“Yes.”“But what are you going to do?”“I’m expecting them to take the furniture away to-morrow, or Tuesday at the latest,” she replied.“And then what?”“I don’t know.”“But haven’t you got any money?”She took a purse from her pocket, and opened it with a show of impartial curiosity. “Two-and-seven,” she said.“Any servant in the house?”“What do you think?” she replied. “Didn’t you see me cleaning the door-plate last night? Idolike that to look nice at any rate!”“I don’t see much use in that looking nice, when you’ve got the bailiffs in, and no servant and no money,” Edwin said roughly, and added, still more roughly: “What should you do if anyone came inquiring for rooms?” He tried to guess her real mood, but her features would betray nothing.“I was expecting three old ladies—sisters—next week,” she said. “I’d been hoping I could hold out till they came. They’re horrid women, though they don’t know it; but they’ve stayed a couple of months in this house every winter for I don’t know how many years, and they’re firmly convinced it’s the best house in Brighton. They’re quite enough to keep it going by themselves when they’re here. But I shall have to write and tell them not to come this time.”“Yes,” said Edwin. “But I keep asking you—what then?”“And I keep saying I don’t know.”“You must have some plans?”“I haven’t.” She put her lips together, and dimpled her chin, and again cynically smiled. At any rate she had not resented his inquisition.“I suppose you know you’re behaving like a perfect fool?” he suggested angrily. She did not wince.“And what if I am? What’s that got to do with you?” she asked, as if pleasantly puzzled.“You’ll starve. You can’t live for ever on two-and-seven.”“Well?”“And the boy? Is he going to starve?”“Oh,” said Hilda, “Janet will look after him till something turns up. The fact is, that’s one reason why I allowed her to take him.”“‘Something turns up,’ ‘something turns up!’” Edwin repeated deliberately, letting himself go. “You make me absolutely sick! It’s absolutely incredible how some people will let things slide! What in the name of God Almighty do you think will turn up?”“I don’t know,” she said, with a certain weakness, still trying to be placidly bitter, and not now succeeding.“Where is the bailiff-johnny?”“He’s in the kitchen with one of his friends, drinking.”Edwin with bravado flopped his hat down forcefully on a table, pushed a chair aside, and strode towards the door.“Where are you going?” she asked in alarm, standing up.“Where do you suppose I’m going? I’m going to find out from that chap how much will settle it. If you can’t show any common sense for yourself, other folks must show some for you—that’s all. The brokers in the house! I never heard of such work!”And indeed, to a respected and successful tradesman, the entrance of the bailiffs into a house did really seem to be the very depth of disaster and shame for the people of that house. Edwin could not remember that he had ever before seen a bailiff. To him a bailiff was like a bug—something heard of, something known to exist, but something not likely to enter the field of vision of an honest and circumspect man.He would deal with the bailiff. He would have a short way with the bailiff. Secure in the confidence of his bankers, he was ready to bully the innocent bailiff. He would not reflect, would not pause. He had heated himself. His steam was up, and he would not let the pressure be weakened by argumentative hesitations. His emotion was not disagreeable.When he was in the passage 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 circumstances 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! Damn her! He could have taken her and beaten her in his sudden passion—a passion 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 nobody 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 shifting 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 circumstances 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!

The next morning he was up early, preternaturally awake. When he descended the waiters were waiting for him, and the zealous porter stood ready to offer him a Sunday paper, just as though in the night they had refreshed themselves magically, without going to bed. No sign nor relic of the Cinderella remained. He breakfasted in an absent mind, and then went idly into the lounge, a room with one immense circular window, giving on the Square. Rain was falling heavily. Already from the porter, and in the very mien of the waiters, he had learnt that the Brighton Sunday was ruined. He left the window. On a round table in the middle of the room were ranged, with religious regularity, all the most esoteric examples of periodical literature in our language, from “The Iron-Trades Review” to “The Animals’ Guardian.” With one careless movement he destroyed the balanced perfection of a labour into which some menial had put his soul, and then dropped into a gigantic easy-chair near the fire, whose thin flames were just rising through the interstices of great black lumps of coal.

The housekeeper, stiff with embroidered silk, swam majestically into the lounge, bowed with a certain frigid and deferential surprise to the early guest, and proceeded to an inquiry into dust. In a moment she called, sharp and low—

“Arthur!”

And a page ran eagerly in, to whom, in the difficult corners of upholstery and of sculptured wood, she pointed out his sins of omission, lashing him with a restrained voice that Edwin could scarcely hear. Passing her hand carelessly along the beading of a door panel and then examining her fingers, she departed. The page fetched a duster.

“I see why this hotel has such a name,” said Edwin to himself. And suddenly the image of Hilda in that dark and frowzy tenement in Preston Street, on that wet Sunday morning, filled his heart with a revolt capricious and violent. He sprang to his feet, unreflecting, wilful, and strode into the hall.

“Can I have a cab?” he asked the porter.

“Certainly, sir,” said the porter, as if saying, “You ask me too little. Why will you not ask for a white elephant so that I may prove my devotion?” And within five seconds the screech of a whistle sped through the air to the cab-stand at the corner.

“Why am I doing this?” he once more asked himself, when he heard the bell ring, in answer to his pull, within the house in Preston Street. The desire for a tranquil life had always been one of his strongest instincts, and of late years the instinct had been satisfied, and so strengthened. Now he seemed to be obstinately searching for tumult; and he did not know why. He trembled at the sound of movement behind the door. “In a moment,” he thought, “I shall be right in the thick of it!”

As he was expecting, she opened the door herself; but only a little, with the gesture habitual to women who live alone in apprehension, and she kept her hand on the latch.

“Good morning,” he said curtly. “Can I speak to you?”

His eye could not blaze like hers, but all his self-respect depended on his valour now, and with desperation he affronted her. She opened the door wider, and he stepped in, and at once began to wipe his boots on the mat with nervous particularity.

“Frightful morning!” he grinned.

“Yes,” she said. “Is that your cab outside?”

He admitted that it was.

“Perhaps if we go upstairs,” she suggested.

Thanking her, he followed her upwards into the gloom at the head of the narrow stairs, and then along a narrow passage. The house appeared quite as unfavourably by day as by night. It was shabby. All its tints had merged by use and by time into one tint, nondescript and unpleasant, in which yellow prospered. The drawing-room was larger than the dining-room by the poor width of the hall. It was a heaped, confused mass of chairs, sofas, small tables, draperies, embroideries, and valueless knick-knacks. There was no peace in it for the eye, neither on the walls nor on the floor. The gaze was driven from one ugliness to another without rest.

The fireplace was draped; the door was draped; the back of the piano was draped; and none of the dark suspicious stuffs showed a clear pattern. The faded chairs were hidden by faded antimacassars; the little futile tables concealed their rickets under vague needlework, on which were displayed in straw or tinsel frames pale portraits of dowdy people who had stood like sheep before fifteenth-rate photographers. The mantelpiece and the top of the piano were thickly strewn with fragments of coloured earthenware. At the windows hung heavy dark curtains from great rings that gleamed gilt near the ceiling; and lest the light which they admitted should be too powerful it was further screened by greyish white curtains within them. The carpet was covered in most places by small rugs or bits of other carpets, and in the deep shadows beneath sofas and chairs and behind the piano it seemed to slip altogether out of existence into black nothingness. The room lacked ventilation, but had the appearance of having been recently dusted.

Hilda closed the draped door with a mysterious, bitter, cynical smile.

“Sit down,” she said coldly.

“Last night,” Edwin began, without sitting down, “when you mentioned the broker’s man, were you joking, or did you mean it?”

She was taken aback.

“Did I say ‘broker’s man’?”

“Well,” said Edwin, “you’ve not forgotten, I suppose.”

She sat down, with some precision of pose, on the principal sofa.

“Yes,” she said at length. “As you’re so curious. The landlords are in possession.”

“The bailiffs still here?”

“Yes.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“I’m expecting them to take the furniture away to-morrow, or Tuesday at the latest,” she replied.

“And then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“But haven’t you got any money?”

She took a purse from her pocket, and opened it with a show of impartial curiosity. “Two-and-seven,” she said.

“Any servant in the house?”

“What do you think?” she replied. “Didn’t you see me cleaning the door-plate last night? Idolike that to look nice at any rate!”

“I don’t see much use in that looking nice, when you’ve got the bailiffs in, and no servant and no money,” Edwin said roughly, and added, still more roughly: “What should you do if anyone came inquiring for rooms?” He tried to guess her real mood, but her features would betray nothing.

“I was expecting three old ladies—sisters—next week,” she said. “I’d been hoping I could hold out till they came. They’re horrid women, though they don’t know it; but they’ve stayed a couple of months in this house every winter for I don’t know how many years, and they’re firmly convinced it’s the best house in Brighton. They’re quite enough to keep it going by themselves when they’re here. But I shall have to write and tell them not to come this time.”

“Yes,” said Edwin. “But I keep asking you—what then?”

“And I keep saying I don’t know.”

“You must have some plans?”

“I haven’t.” She put her lips together, and dimpled her chin, and again cynically smiled. At any rate she had not resented his inquisition.

“I suppose you know you’re behaving like a perfect fool?” he suggested angrily. She did not wince.

“And what if I am? What’s that got to do with you?” she asked, as if pleasantly puzzled.

“You’ll starve. You can’t live for ever on two-and-seven.”

“Well?”

“And the boy? Is he going to starve?”

“Oh,” said Hilda, “Janet will look after him till something turns up. The fact is, that’s one reason why I allowed her to take him.”

“‘Something turns up,’ ‘something turns up!’” Edwin repeated deliberately, letting himself go. “You make me absolutely sick! It’s absolutely incredible how some people will let things slide! What in the name of God Almighty do you think will turn up?”

“I don’t know,” she said, with a certain weakness, still trying to be placidly bitter, and not now succeeding.

“Where is the bailiff-johnny?”

“He’s in the kitchen with one of his friends, drinking.”

Edwin with bravado flopped his hat down forcefully on a table, pushed a chair aside, and strode towards the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked in alarm, standing up.

“Where do you suppose I’m going? I’m going to find out from that chap how much will settle it. If you can’t show any common sense for yourself, other folks must show some for you—that’s all. The brokers in the house! I never heard of such work!”

And indeed, to a respected and successful tradesman, the entrance of the bailiffs into a house did really seem to be the very depth of disaster and shame for the people of that house. Edwin could not remember that he had ever before seen a bailiff. To him a bailiff was like a bug—something heard of, something known to exist, but something not likely to enter the field of vision of an honest and circumspect man.

He would deal with the bailiff. He would have a short way with the bailiff. Secure in the confidence of his bankers, he was ready to bully the innocent bailiff. He would not reflect, would not pause. He had heated himself. His steam was up, and he would not let the pressure be weakened by argumentative hesitations. His emotion was not disagreeable.

When he was in the passage 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.

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 circumstances 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! Damn her! He could have taken her and beaten her in his sudden passion—a passion 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 nobody 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.”

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 shifting 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.

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 circumstances 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 Sussex were groups of elegant youngish men and flaxen, uneasily stylish women, inviting the assistance 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 nincompoops, 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 Sussex 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.The handwriting was hers. Probably the broker’s man had offered to bring the letter. In the short colloquy with him in the morning, Edwin had liked the slatternly, coarse fellow. The bailiff could not, unauthorised, accept cheques, but his tone in suggesting an immediate visit to his employers had shown that he had bowels, that he sympathised with the difficulties of careless tenants in a harsh world of landlords. It was Hilda who, furnished with notes and cheque, had gone, in Edwin’s cab, to placate the higher powers. She had preferred to go herself, and to go alone. Edwin had not insisted. He had so mastered her that he could afford to yield to her in trifles.Two.The letter said exactly this: “Everything is all right and settled. I had no trouble at all. But I should like to speak to you this afternoon. Will you meet me on the West Pier at six?—H.C.” No form of greeting! No thanks! The bare words necessary to convey a wish! On leaving her in the morning no arrangement had been made for a further interview. She had said nothing, and he had been too proud to ask—the terrible pride of the benefactor! It was only by chance that it had even occurred to him to say: “By the way, I am staying at the Royal Sussex.” She had shown no curiosity whatever about him, his doings, his movements. She had not put to him a single question. He had intended to call at Preston Street on the Monday morning. And now a letter from her! Her handwriting had scarcely changed. He was to meet her on the pier. At her own request he now had a rendezvous with her on the pier! Why not at her house? Perhaps she was afraid of his power over her in the house. (Curious, how she, and she almost alone, roused the masculine force in him!) Perhaps she wanted to thank him in surroundings which would compel both of them to be calm. That would be like her! Essentially modest, restrained! And did she not know how to be meek, she who was so headstrong and independent!He looked at the clock. The hour was not yet five. Nevertheless he felt obliged to go out, to bestir himself. On the misty, crowded, darkening promenade he abandoned himself afresh to indulgence in the souvenance of the great critical scene of the morning. Yes, he had done marvels; and fate was astoundingly kind to him also. But there was one aspect of the affair that intrigued and puzzled him, and weakened his self-satisfaction. She had been defeated, yet he was baffled by her. She was a mystery within folds of mysteries. He was no nearer—he secretly felt—to the essential Her than he had been before the short struggle and his spectacular triumph. He wanted to reconstruct in his fancy all her emotional existence; he wanted to getather,—to possess her intimate mind,—and lo! he could not even recall the expressions of her face from minute to minute during the battle. She hid herself from him. She eluded him... Strange creature! The polishing of the door-plate in the night! That volume of Crashaw—on the floor! Her cold, almost daemonic smile! Her sobs! Her sudden retreats! What was at the back of it all? He remembered her divine gesture over the fond Shushions. He remembered the ecstatic quality of her surrender in the shop. He remembered her first love-letter: “Every bit of me is absolutely yours.” And yet the ground seemed to be unsure beneath his feet, and he wondered whether he had ever in reality known her, ever grasped firmly the secret of her personality, even for an instant.He said to himself that he would be seeing her face to face in an hour, and that then he would, by the ardour of his gaze, get behind those enigmatic features to the arcana they concealed.Three.Before six o’clock it was quite dark. He thought it a strange notion, to fix a rendezvous at such an hour, on a day in autumn, in the open air. But perhaps she was very busy, doing servant’s work in the preparation of her house for visitors. When he reached the pier gates at five minutes to six, they were closed, and the obscure vista of the pier as deserted as some northern pier in mid-winter. Naturally it was closed! There was a notice prominently displayed that the pier would close that evening at dusk. What did she mean? The truth was, he decided, that she lived in the clouds, ordering her existence by means of sudden and capricious decisions in which facts were neglected,—and herein probably lay the explanation of her misfortunes. He was very philosophical: rather amused than disturbed, because her house was scarcely a stone’s-throw away: she could not escape him.He glanced up and down the lighted promenade, and across the broad muddy road towards the opening of Preston Street. The crowds had disappeared; only scattered groups and couples, and now and then a solitary, passed quickly in the gloom. The hotels were brilliant, and carriages with their flitting lamps were continually stopping in front of them; but the blackness of the shop-fronts produced the sensation of melancholy proper to the day even in Brighton, and the renewed sound of church bells intensified this arid melancholy.Suddenly he saw her, coming not across the road from Preston Street, but from the direction of Hove. He saw her before she saw him. Under the multiplicity of lamps her face was white and clear. He had a chance to read in it. But he could read nothing in it save her sadness, save that she had suffered. She seemed querulous, preoccupied, worried, and afflicted. She had the look of one who is never free from apprehension. Yet for him that look of hers had a quality unique, a quality that he had never found in another, but which he was completely unable to define. He wanted acutely to explain to himself what it was, and he could not.“You are frightfully cruel,” she had said. And he admitted that he had been. Yes, he had bullied her, her who, he was convinced, had always been the victim. In spite of her vigorous individuality she was destined to be a victim. He was sure that she had never deserved anything but sympathy and respect and affection. He was sure that she was the very incarnation of honesty—possibly she was too honest for the actual world. Did not the Orgreaves worship her? And could he himself have been deceived in his estimate of her character?She recognised him only when she was close upon him. A faint, transient, wistful smile lightened her brooding face, pale and stern.Four.“Oh! There you are!” she exclaimed, in her clear voice. “Did I say six, or five, in my note?”“Six.”“I was afraid I had done, when I came here at five and didn’t find you. I’m so sorry.”“No!” he said. “I thinkIought to be sorry. It’s you who’ve had the waiting to do. The pier’s closed now.”“It was just closing at five,” she answered. “I ought to have known. But I didn’t. The fact is, I scarcely ever go out. I remembered once seeing the pier open at night, and I thought it was always open.” She shrugged her shoulders as if stopping a shiver.“I hope you haven’t caught cold,” he said. “Suppose we walk along a bit.”They walked westwards in silence. He felt as though he were by the side of a stranger, so far was he from having pierced the secret of that face.As they approached one of the new glazed shelters, she said—“Can’t we sit down a moment. I—I can’t talk standing up. I must sit down.”They sat down, in an enclosed seat designed to hold four. And Edwin could feel the wind on his calves, which stretched beyond the screened side of the structure. Odd people passed dimly to and fro in front of them, glanced at them with nonchalant curiosity, and glanced away. On the previous evening he had observed couples in those shelters, and had wondered what could be the circumstances or the preferences which led them to accept such a situation. Certainly he could not have dreamed that within twenty-four hours he would be sitting in one of them with her, by her appointment, at her request. He thrilled with excitement—with delicious anxieties.“Janet told you I was a widow,” Hilda began, gazing at the ferule of her umbrella, which gleamed on the ground.“Yes.” Again she was surprising him.“Well, we arranged she should tell every one that. But I think you ought to know that I’m not.”“No?” he murmured weakly. And in one small unimportant region of his mind he reflected with astonishment upon the hesitating but convincing air with which Janet had lied to him. Janet!“After what you’ve done”—she paused, and went on with unblurred clearness—“after what you’ve insisted on doing, I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding. I’m not a widow. My husband’s in prison. He’ll be in prison for another six or seven years. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”“I’m very sorry,” he breathed. “I’d no idea you’d had this trouble.” What could he say? What could anybody have said?“I ought to have told you at once,” she said. “I ought to have told you last night.” Another pause. “Then perhaps you wouldn’t have come again this morning.”“Yes, I should!” he asserted eagerly. “If you’re in a hole, you’re in a hole. What difference could it possibly make whether you were a widow or not?”“Oh!” she said. “The wife of a convict... you know!” He felt that she was evading the point.She went on: “It’s a good thing my three old ladies don’t know, anyhow...! I’d no chance to tell you this morning. You were too much for me.”“I don’t care whose wife you are!” he muttered, as though to himself, as though resenting something said by some one who had gone away and left him. “If you’re in a hole, you’re in a hole.”She turned and looked at him. His eyes fell before hers.“Well,” she said. “I’ve told you. I must go. I haven’t a moment. Good night.” She held out her hand. “You don’t want me to thank you a lot, do you?”“That I don’t!” he exclaimed.“Good night.”“But—”“I really must go.”He rose and gave his hand. The next instant she was gone.There was a deafening roar in his head. It was the complete destruction by earthquake of a city of dreams. A calamity which left nothing—even to be desired! A tremendous silence reigned after the event.Five.On the following evening, when from the windows of the London-to-Manchester express he saw in the gloom the high-leaping flames of the blast-furnaces that seem to guard eternally the southern frontier of the Five Towns, he felt that he had returned into daily reality out of an impossible world. Waiting for the loop-line train in the familiar tedium of Knype platform, staring at the bookstall, every item on which he knew by heart and despised, surrounded once more by local physiognomies, gestures, and accent, he thought to himself: “Thisis my lot. And if I get messing about, it only shows what a damned fool I am!” He called himself a damned fool because Hilda had proved to have a husband; because of that he condemned the whole expedition to Brighton as a piece of idiocy. His dejection was profound and bitter. At first, after Hilda had quitted him on the Sunday night, he had tried to be cheerful, had persuaded himself indeed that he was cheerful; but gradually his spirit had sunk, beaten and miserable. He had not called at Preston Street again. Pride forbade, and the terror of being misunderstood.And when he sat at his own table, in his own dining-room, and watched the calm incurious Maggie dispensing to him his elaborate tea-supper with slightly more fuss and more devotion than usual, his thoughts, had they been somewhat less vague, might have been summed up thus: “The right sort of women don’t get landed as the wives of convicts. Can you imagine such a thing happening to Maggie, for instance? Or Janet?” (And yet Janet was in the secret! This disturbed the flow of his reflections.) Hilda was too mysterious. Now she had half disclosed yet another mystery. But what? “Why was her husband a convict? Under what circumstances? For what crime? Where? Since when?” He knew the answer to none of these questions. More deeply than ever was that woman embedded in enigmas.“What’s this parcel on the sideboard?” Maggie inquired.“Oh! I want you to send it in to Janet. It’s from her particular friend, Mrs Cannon—something for the kid, I believe. I ran across her in Brighton, and she asked me if I’d bring the parcel along.”The innocence of his manner was perfectly acted. He wondered that he could do it so well. But really there was no danger. Nobody in Bursley, or in the world, had the least suspicion of his past relations with Hilda. The only conceivable danger would have been in hiding the fact that he had met her in Brighton.“Of course,” said Maggie, mildly interested. “I was forgetting she lived at Brighton. Well?” and she put a few casual questions, to which Edwin casually replied.“You look tired,” she said later.He astonished her by admitting that he was. According to all precedent her statement ought to have drawn forth a quick contradiction.The sad image of Hilda would not be dismissed. He had to carry it about with him everywhere, and it was heavy enough to fatigue a stronger than Edwin Clayhanger. The pathos of her situation overwhelmed him, argue as he might about the immunity of ‘the right sort of women’ from a certain sort of disaster. On the Tuesday he sent her a post-office order for twenty pounds. It rather more than made up the agreed sum of a hundred pounds. She returned it, saying she did not need it. “Little fool!” he said. He was not surprised. He was, however, very much surprised, a few weeks later, to receive from Hilda her own cheque for eighty pounds odd! More mystery! An absolutely incredible woman! Whence had she obtained that eighty pounds? Needless to say, she offered no explanation. He abandoned all conjecture. But he could not abandon the image. And first Auntie Hamps said, and then Clara, and then even Maggie admitted, that Edwin was sticking too close to business and needed a change, needed rousing. Auntie Hamps urged openly that a wife ought to be found for him. But in a few days the great talkers of the family, Auntie Hamps and Clara, had grown accustomed to Edwin’s state, and some new topic supervened.

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 Sussex were groups of elegant youngish men and flaxen, uneasily stylish women, inviting the assistance 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 nincompoops, 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 Sussex 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.

The handwriting was hers. Probably the broker’s man had offered to bring the letter. In the short colloquy with him in the morning, Edwin had liked the slatternly, coarse fellow. The bailiff could not, unauthorised, accept cheques, but his tone in suggesting an immediate visit to his employers had shown that he had bowels, that he sympathised with the difficulties of careless tenants in a harsh world of landlords. It was Hilda who, furnished with notes and cheque, had gone, in Edwin’s cab, to placate the higher powers. She had preferred to go herself, and to go alone. Edwin had not insisted. He had so mastered her that he could afford to yield to her in trifles.

The letter said exactly this: “Everything is all right and settled. I had no trouble at all. But I should like to speak to you this afternoon. Will you meet me on the West Pier at six?—H.C.” No form of greeting! No thanks! The bare words necessary to convey a wish! On leaving her in the morning no arrangement had been made for a further interview. She had said nothing, and he had been too proud to ask—the terrible pride of the benefactor! It was only by chance that it had even occurred to him to say: “By the way, I am staying at the Royal Sussex.” She had shown no curiosity whatever about him, his doings, his movements. She had not put to him a single question. He had intended to call at Preston Street on the Monday morning. And now a letter from her! Her handwriting had scarcely changed. He was to meet her on the pier. At her own request he now had a rendezvous with her on the pier! Why not at her house? Perhaps she was afraid of his power over her in the house. (Curious, how she, and she almost alone, roused the masculine force in him!) Perhaps she wanted to thank him in surroundings which would compel both of them to be calm. That would be like her! Essentially modest, restrained! And did she not know how to be meek, she who was so headstrong and independent!

He looked at the clock. The hour was not yet five. Nevertheless he felt obliged to go out, to bestir himself. On the misty, crowded, darkening promenade he abandoned himself afresh to indulgence in the souvenance of the great critical scene of the morning. Yes, he had done marvels; and fate was astoundingly kind to him also. But there was one aspect of the affair that intrigued and puzzled him, and weakened his self-satisfaction. She had been defeated, yet he was baffled by her. She was a mystery within folds of mysteries. He was no nearer—he secretly felt—to the essential Her than he had been before the short struggle and his spectacular triumph. He wanted to reconstruct in his fancy all her emotional existence; he wanted to getather,—to possess her intimate mind,—and lo! he could not even recall the expressions of her face from minute to minute during the battle. She hid herself from him. She eluded him... Strange creature! The polishing of the door-plate in the night! That volume of Crashaw—on the floor! Her cold, almost daemonic smile! Her sobs! Her sudden retreats! What was at the back of it all? He remembered her divine gesture over the fond Shushions. He remembered the ecstatic quality of her surrender in the shop. He remembered her first love-letter: “Every bit of me is absolutely yours.” And yet the ground seemed to be unsure beneath his feet, and he wondered whether he had ever in reality known her, ever grasped firmly the secret of her personality, even for an instant.

He said to himself that he would be seeing her face to face in an hour, and that then he would, by the ardour of his gaze, get behind those enigmatic features to the arcana they concealed.

Before six o’clock it was quite dark. He thought it a strange notion, to fix a rendezvous at such an hour, on a day in autumn, in the open air. But perhaps she was very busy, doing servant’s work in the preparation of her house for visitors. When he reached the pier gates at five minutes to six, they were closed, and the obscure vista of the pier as deserted as some northern pier in mid-winter. Naturally it was closed! There was a notice prominently displayed that the pier would close that evening at dusk. What did she mean? The truth was, he decided, that she lived in the clouds, ordering her existence by means of sudden and capricious decisions in which facts were neglected,—and herein probably lay the explanation of her misfortunes. He was very philosophical: rather amused than disturbed, because her house was scarcely a stone’s-throw away: she could not escape him.

He glanced up and down the lighted promenade, and across the broad muddy road towards the opening of Preston Street. The crowds had disappeared; only scattered groups and couples, and now and then a solitary, passed quickly in the gloom. The hotels were brilliant, and carriages with their flitting lamps were continually stopping in front of them; but the blackness of the shop-fronts produced the sensation of melancholy proper to the day even in Brighton, and the renewed sound of church bells intensified this arid melancholy.

Suddenly he saw her, coming not across the road from Preston Street, but from the direction of Hove. He saw her before she saw him. Under the multiplicity of lamps her face was white and clear. He had a chance to read in it. But he could read nothing in it save her sadness, save that she had suffered. She seemed querulous, preoccupied, worried, and afflicted. She had the look of one who is never free from apprehension. Yet for him that look of hers had a quality unique, a quality that he had never found in another, but which he was completely unable to define. He wanted acutely to explain to himself what it was, and he could not.

“You are frightfully cruel,” she had said. And he admitted that he had been. Yes, he had bullied her, her who, he was convinced, had always been the victim. In spite of her vigorous individuality she was destined to be a victim. He was sure that she had never deserved anything but sympathy and respect and affection. He was sure that she was the very incarnation of honesty—possibly she was too honest for the actual world. Did not the Orgreaves worship her? And could he himself have been deceived in his estimate of her character?

She recognised him only when she was close upon him. A faint, transient, wistful smile lightened her brooding face, pale and stern.

“Oh! There you are!” she exclaimed, in her clear voice. “Did I say six, or five, in my note?”

“Six.”

“I was afraid I had done, when I came here at five and didn’t find you. I’m so sorry.”

“No!” he said. “I thinkIought to be sorry. It’s you who’ve had the waiting to do. The pier’s closed now.”

“It was just closing at five,” she answered. “I ought to have known. But I didn’t. The fact is, I scarcely ever go out. I remembered once seeing the pier open at night, and I thought it was always open.” She shrugged her shoulders as if stopping a shiver.

“I hope you haven’t caught cold,” he said. “Suppose we walk along a bit.”

They walked westwards in silence. He felt as though he were by the side of a stranger, so far was he from having pierced the secret of that face.

As they approached one of the new glazed shelters, she said—

“Can’t we sit down a moment. I—I can’t talk standing up. I must sit down.”

They sat down, in an enclosed seat designed to hold four. And Edwin could feel the wind on his calves, which stretched beyond the screened side of the structure. Odd people passed dimly to and fro in front of them, glanced at them with nonchalant curiosity, and glanced away. On the previous evening he had observed couples in those shelters, and had wondered what could be the circumstances or the preferences which led them to accept such a situation. Certainly he could not have dreamed that within twenty-four hours he would be sitting in one of them with her, by her appointment, at her request. He thrilled with excitement—with delicious anxieties.

“Janet told you I was a widow,” Hilda began, gazing at the ferule of her umbrella, which gleamed on the ground.

“Yes.” Again she was surprising him.

“Well, we arranged she should tell every one that. But I think you ought to know that I’m not.”

“No?” he murmured weakly. And in one small unimportant region of his mind he reflected with astonishment upon the hesitating but convincing air with which Janet had lied to him. Janet!

“After what you’ve done”—she paused, and went on with unblurred clearness—“after what you’ve insisted on doing, I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding. I’m not a widow. My husband’s in prison. He’ll be in prison for another six or seven years. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

“I’m very sorry,” he breathed. “I’d no idea you’d had this trouble.” What could he say? What could anybody have said?

“I ought to have told you at once,” she said. “I ought to have told you last night.” Another pause. “Then perhaps you wouldn’t have come again this morning.”

“Yes, I should!” he asserted eagerly. “If you’re in a hole, you’re in a hole. What difference could it possibly make whether you were a widow or not?”

“Oh!” she said. “The wife of a convict... you know!” He felt that she was evading the point.

She went on: “It’s a good thing my three old ladies don’t know, anyhow...! I’d no chance to tell you this morning. You were too much for me.”

“I don’t care whose wife you are!” he muttered, as though to himself, as though resenting something said by some one who had gone away and left him. “If you’re in a hole, you’re in a hole.”

She turned and looked at him. His eyes fell before hers.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve told you. I must go. I haven’t a moment. Good night.” She held out her hand. “You don’t want me to thank you a lot, do you?”

“That I don’t!” he exclaimed.

“Good night.”

“But—”

“I really must go.”

He rose and gave his hand. The next instant she was gone.

There was a deafening roar in his head. It was the complete destruction by earthquake of a city of dreams. A calamity which left nothing—even to be desired! A tremendous silence reigned after the event.

On the following evening, when from the windows of the London-to-Manchester express he saw in the gloom the high-leaping flames of the blast-furnaces that seem to guard eternally the southern frontier of the Five Towns, he felt that he had returned into daily reality out of an impossible world. Waiting for the loop-line train in the familiar tedium of Knype platform, staring at the bookstall, every item on which he knew by heart and despised, surrounded once more by local physiognomies, gestures, and accent, he thought to himself: “Thisis my lot. And if I get messing about, it only shows what a damned fool I am!” He called himself a damned fool because Hilda had proved to have a husband; because of that he condemned the whole expedition to Brighton as a piece of idiocy. His dejection was profound and bitter. At first, after Hilda had quitted him on the Sunday night, he had tried to be cheerful, had persuaded himself indeed that he was cheerful; but gradually his spirit had sunk, beaten and miserable. He had not called at Preston Street again. Pride forbade, and the terror of being misunderstood.

And when he sat at his own table, in his own dining-room, and watched the calm incurious Maggie dispensing to him his elaborate tea-supper with slightly more fuss and more devotion than usual, his thoughts, had they been somewhat less vague, might have been summed up thus: “The right sort of women don’t get landed as the wives of convicts. Can you imagine such a thing happening to Maggie, for instance? Or Janet?” (And yet Janet was in the secret! This disturbed the flow of his reflections.) Hilda was too mysterious. Now she had half disclosed yet another mystery. But what? “Why was her husband a convict? Under what circumstances? For what crime? Where? Since when?” He knew the answer to none of these questions. More deeply than ever was that woman embedded in enigmas.

“What’s this parcel on the sideboard?” Maggie inquired.

“Oh! I want you to send it in to Janet. It’s from her particular friend, Mrs Cannon—something for the kid, I believe. I ran across her in Brighton, and she asked me if I’d bring the parcel along.”

The innocence of his manner was perfectly acted. He wondered that he could do it so well. But really there was no danger. Nobody in Bursley, or in the world, had the least suspicion of his past relations with Hilda. The only conceivable danger would have been in hiding the fact that he had met her in Brighton.

“Of course,” said Maggie, mildly interested. “I was forgetting she lived at Brighton. Well?” and she put a few casual questions, to which Edwin casually replied.

“You look tired,” she said later.

He astonished her by admitting that he was. According to all precedent her statement ought to have drawn forth a quick contradiction.

The sad image of Hilda would not be dismissed. He had to carry it about with him everywhere, and it was heavy enough to fatigue a stronger than Edwin Clayhanger. The pathos of her situation overwhelmed him, argue as he might about the immunity of ‘the right sort of women’ from a certain sort of disaster. On the Tuesday he sent her a post-office order for twenty pounds. It rather more than made up the agreed sum of a hundred pounds. She returned it, saying she did not need it. “Little fool!” he said. He was not surprised. He was, however, very much surprised, a few weeks later, to receive from Hilda her own cheque for eighty pounds odd! More mystery! An absolutely incredible woman! Whence had she obtained that eighty pounds? Needless to say, she offered no explanation. He abandoned all conjecture. But he could not abandon the image. And first Auntie Hamps said, and then Clara, and then even Maggie admitted, that Edwin was sticking too close to business and needed a change, needed rousing. Auntie Hamps urged openly that a wife ought to be found for him. But in a few days the great talkers of the family, Auntie Hamps and Clara, had grown accustomed to Edwin’s state, and some new topic supervened.

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