LXV
Therewas only one thing to be done now. Mr. Mitchell’s hour was up, but there was no help for it. The Workhouse, as the girl had said—she might, in June’s opinion have had a claim to good looks if she had not suffered from “a rush of teeth to the head”—was not more than five minutes away if you followed her instructions.
As June had the matter in hand, the instructions were followed to the letter and they arrived at the Workhouse without delay. But as the pile, dark and grim, came into view at the far side of the canal, an odd emotion suddenly brought them up with a round turn.
A long moment they gazed at the bleak and frowning thing before their eyes. And then June said with a laugh, “I’m thinking that’s where you’ll be one day, if you don’t find someone who isn’t a genius to look after you.”
The words came from the heart, yet William did not appear to hear them. “Reminds one,” he murmured half to himself, “of that little thing of Duclaux’s called The Poor House.”
June’s puzzlement was revealed by a frown.
“There’s an exhibition of his pictures just now atthe Bond Street Gallery. Wonderful line. A great sense of mass effect.”
“You can’t tell me,” said June, “there’s beauty in a thing like that—in that old Workhouse?”
“Duclaux would say so, with that dark cloud cutting across the gable. And that bend of the Canal in the foreground is not without value.” He smiled his rare smile which never had looked so divine. But June was a little afraid of it now. She kept her eyes the other way.
“Canal,” she said with brevity. “Not without value. I should say so. As we say at Blackhampton, ‘where there’s muck there’s money.’”
She glanced at her wrist again. Another ten minutes credited now to Mr. Mitchell’s account.
“Duclaux, I suppose, would see it this way.” The queer fellow stepped back two paces, put up his hand to shade his eyes and adjust his vision to look at the Workhouse.
This was Pure Pottiness, the concentrated essence in tabloid form. However, Miss Babraham had already impressed upon June the deep truth that genius must be allowed a margin.
A little faint of heart she rang the bell of the gloomy and forbidding door. The summons was heeded, tardily and with reluctance, by its janitor, a surly male.
“Can we see Mrs. Stark?” asked June.
“Eh?” said the janitor. He must have been deaf indeed not to have heard the question in its cool clarity. June repeated it; whereon the keeper of the door looked her slowly up and down, turning over the name in his mind as he did so.
“Mother Stark she was called,” said June, for his further enlightenment. “She sold all kinds of old rubbish at a shop that used to be opposite Middleton’s Dairy at the top of Love Lane.”
“Mother Stark you say!” Light was coming to the janitor. “No, you can’t see her.”
“Why not? The matter’s important.”
“She’s been in her grave this two month—that’s why not,” said the janitor.
“Oh,” said June; and then after brief commerce with the eye of William: “Has she any relations or friends?”
The answer was no. Mother Stark had had a parish burial.
William thanked Diogenes with that courtesy which was never-failing and inimitable; and then after one more swift glance at each other, they turned away, feeling somehow, a little overcome, yet upheld by the knowledge of being through at last with the matter of the poor old thing’s annuity.
Returning in their tracks across the canal footbridge, across the recreation ground, up the lane, past the site of the new picture house, past Middleton’s Dairy, they entered the High Street, without haste, in spite of Mr. Mitchell, and with a gravity new and strange, as if they both felt now the hand of destiny upon them.
Heedless of all the Mr. Mitchells in the universe, they walked very slowly to draw out the last exquisite drop of a moment of bliss that, no matter what life had in store, they could never forget. And then for some mystic reason, June’s brain grew incandescent. It became a thing of dew and fire. Ideas formed within it, broke from it, took shape in the ambient air. Shemight have been treading the upper spaces of Elysium, except that no girl’s feet were ever planted more firmly or more shrewdly upon the pavement of High Street, Crowdham Market.
Four doors from the Unicorn Inn was the most fashionable jeweller’s shop in the town, perhaps for the reason that there was no other; and as they came level with the window a spark flashed from its depths and met an instant answer in the eye of June. Nearly an hour behind the schedule they were now, yet they lingered one moment more, while June drew William’s attention to a coincidence. The vital spark it seemed, owed its being to a gem set in a ring which was almost a replica of the one worn by Miss Babraham in honor of its giver, who of course was a gentleman in the Blues.
“It’s as like Miss Babraham’s engagement ring as one pea is like another pea,” said June in a soft voice.
In the course of their friendship, William had been guilty of many silences of a disgraceful impersonality; and he was now guilty of one more. He glanced at the ring with a wistful eye, sighed a little, and then with slow reluctance moved on. June accompanied him to the very threshold of the Unicorn Inn. And upon its doorstep of all places, within hearing of the Office, wherein lurked Miss Ferris, the landlady’s daughter, he faced about, and then by way of an after-thought, his head apparently still full of Duclaux, began to stammer.
“Miss June if I go back and get that ring will you—will you promise—to—to——?”
Miss Ferris was in the Office; the top of her coiffure was to be seen above the frosted glass. And the Officedoor was wide open; June, therefore, gave her answer in a very low and gentle voice.
Her answer, for all that, did not lack pith. “If only you’ll cut out the Miss, I’ll wear it like Miss Babraham—on my heart finger.”