CHAPTER LX
Wherein Betty feels the Keen Breath of Winter
Nolltook it all very much for granted, this large-hearted service of Betty to her fellows. He felt that it reflected the very greatest credit on her womanhood. It added stature to her natural dignity.
When Betty had been away, watching over the last flickering days of Moll Davenant, it seemed natural enough—it was perhaps a little lonely at moments—but he arranged to pass the days pleasantly in closer good-fellowship with rollicking companions. When Molly was gone, put away in the obliterating earth; whilst the mystery of the corruption of the white body (that had lived so strenuously and laughed and wept and loved so fiercely itself and others only to end in the grave), whilst the why and the whence and the whither of it all roused the most profound emotions in the vibrant imagination of Betty, Noll had settled into a very merry and slovenly way of life; and he kept up the untidy habit.
For Betty’s entertainment he would occasionally forego some meeting of his boon companions, and show a boisterous rally of the old comradeship, as on Christmas Day, which was kept by them all in right jovial English fashion.
The whole crew of them dined at a students’ restaurant, and everything wasà l’anglais, a fact not in the least discounted by the strangeness of each dish to English eyes and palate. Indeed, the plum-pudding alone awakened the familiar recognition, for it had a piece of holly a-top, and Gaston Latour got enough delight out of setting on fire the encircling brandy in the dish to comfort him for the suppression of the hunting-horn by the police.
The generous humours of the occasion were only marred by a slightly too generous flow of wine; the which had been of small moment in itself, had it not chanced that it loosed Noll’s tongue, and he, growing somewhat garrulous under the ruddy excitement, and feeling compelled to shine, did not hesitate to give more than a sly cut at Betty in the midst of the railleries, crying out in mock defence of her that when shedidfinish her masterpiece it might make a noise in the world,though it certainly took a long time in the making! Betty became aware at a stroke that for months hehad been criticizing her, silently fretting at her industry. It were as if he had lashed at her with a whip. He could not leave it alone. He had another cut, a cheerfully ironic reference to Casauban’s unfruitful pedantry in hisKey to All the Mythologiesthat never came to anything but the threat of its promise, the work that the prig is alwaysgoing to do—the jibe was intended as a veiled reference to Betty’s careful workmanship, and to enhance the fact that he himself “knocked off” his successes with something of the facility of a great gift.
Betty’s sensitive ear lost no slightest shade of the sneer amidst all the jovial manner; it was not wasted upon her. It stung her to the quick. From any other mouth it would have passed her by, a dog’s snap. It revealed to her in one ugly moment that all the work she had done to increase his ease for work, all her forbearing patience to his encroachment upon her own working hours, all her care to free his hands from drudgeries and release his wits to the full concentration on his career, all was already largely forgotten—worse, had been scarcely appreciated. And, somehow, the wild spirits of the evening failed to reach her; she was in a daze, she had received a buffet full in the face from the hand from which she had least feared it. And it was the sign of her splendid selflessness that she was sickeningly struck with pity that he could be guilty of this meanness—she was filled with a strange bewildering shame, not because the blow had been delivered, not because it had struck her, but that it had come from the one in all the world who, more than any, fouled his hand in the act. She flinched from that punishment as from an abyss that yawned.