IVIn the middle of the night Edwin kept watch over Auntie Hamps, who was asleep. He sat in a rocking-chair, with his back to the window and the right side of his face to the glow of the fire. The fire was as effective as the size and form of the grate would allow; it burnt richly red; but its influence did not seem to extend beyond a radius of four feet outwards from its centre. The terrible damp chill of the Five Towns winter hung in the bedroom like an invisible miasma. He could feel the cold from the window, which was nevertheless shut, through the shawl with which he had closed the interstices of the back of the chair, and, though he had another thick shawl over his knees, the whole of his left side felt the creeping attack of the insidious miasma. A thermometer which he had found and which lay on the night-table five yards from the fire registered only fifty-two degrees. His expelled breath showed in the air. It was as if he were fighting with all resources against frigidity, and barely holding his own.In the half-light of the gas, still screened from the bed by the bonnet-box and the Bible, he glanced round amid the dark meadows at the mean and sinister ugliness of the historic chamber, the secret nest and withdrawing place of Auntie Hamps; and the real asceticism of her life and of the life of all her generation almost smote him. Half a century earlier such a room had represented comfort; in some details, as for instance in its bed, it represented luxury; and in half a century Auntie Hamps had learnt nothing from the material progress of civilisation but the use of the hot-water bag; her vanished and forgotten parents would have looked askance at the enervating luxuriousness of her hot-water bag--unknown even to the crude wistful boy Edwin on the mantelpiece. And Auntie Hamps herself was wont as it were to atone for it by using the still tepid water therefrom for her morning toilet instead of having truly hot water brought up from the kitchen. Edwin thought: "Are we happier for these changes brought about by the mysterious force of evolution?" And answered very emphatically: "Yes, we are." He would not for anything have gone back to the austerities of his boyhood.He rocked gently to and fro in the chair, excited by events and by the novel situation, and he was not dissatisfied with himself. Indeed he was aware of a certain calm complacency, for his commonsense had triumphed over Maggie's devoted silly womanishness. Maggie was for sitting up through the night; she was anxious to wear herself out for no reason whatever; but he had sent her to bed until three o'clock, promising to call her if she should be needed. The exhausted girl was full of sagacity save on that one point of martyrdom to the fullest--apparently with her a point of honour. For the sake of the sensation of having martyrised herself utterly she was ready to imperil her fitness for the morrow. She secretly thought it was unfair to call upon him, a man, to share her fatigues. He regarded himself as her superior in wisdom, and he was relieved that anyone so wise and balanced as Edwin Clayhanger had taken supreme charge of the household organism.Restless, he got up from the chair and looked at the bed. He had heard no unusual sound therefrom, but to excuse his restlessness he had said: "Suppose some change had occurred and I didn't notice it!" No change had occurred. Auntie Hamps lay like a mite, like a baby forlorn, senile and defenceless, amid the heaped pillows and coverings of the bed. Within the deep gloom of the canopy and the over-arching curtains only her small, soft face was alive; even her hair was hidden in the indentation made by the weight of her head in the pillows. She was unconscious, either in sleep or otherwise,--he could not tell how. And in her unconsciousness the losing but obstinate fight against the power which was dragging her over the edge of eternity still went on. It showed in the apprehensive character of her breathing, which made a little momentary periodic cloud above her face, and in the uneasy muscular movements of the lips and jaws, and in the vague noises in her throat. A tremendous pity for her re-entered his heart, almost breaking it, because she was so beaten, and so fallen from the gorgeousness of her splendour. Even Minnie could have imposed her will upon Auntie Hamps now; each hour she weakened.He had no more resentment against her on account of Minnie, no accusation to formulate. He was merely grieved, with a compassionate grief, that Auntie Hamps had learnt so little while living so long. He knew that she was cruel only because she was incapable of imagining what it was to be Minnie. He understood. She worshipped God under the form of respectability, but she did worship God. Like all religious votaries she placed religion above morality; hence her chicane, her inveterate deceit and self-deceit. It was with a religious aim that she had concealed from him the estrangement between herself and Clara. The unity of the family was one of her major canons (as indeed it was one of Edwin's). She had a passion for her nephew and nieces. It was a grand passion. Her pride in them must have been as terrific as her longing that they and all theirs should conform to the sole ideal that she comprehended. Undeniably there was something magnificent in her religion--her unscrupulousness in the practice of it, and the mighty consistency of her career. She had lived. He ceased to pity her, for she towered above pity. She was dying, but only for an instant. He would smile at his aunt's primeval notions of a future life, yet he had to admit that his own notions, though far less precise, could not be appreciably less crude. He and she were anyhow at one in the profound and staggering conviction of immortality. Enlightened by that conviction, he was able to reduce the physical and mental tragedy of the death-bed to its right proportions as a transiency between the heroic past and the inconceivable future. And in the stillness of the room and the stillness of the house, perfumed by the abnegation of Maggie and the desolate woe of the ruined Minnie whom the Clayhangers would save, and in the outer stillness of the little street with the Norman church-tower sticking up out of history at the bottom of its slope, Edwin felt uplifted and serene.He returned to the rocking-chair."She's asleep now in some room I've never seen!" he reflected.He was suddenly thinking of his wife. During the previous night, lying sleepless close to her while she slept soundly, he had reflected long and with increasing pessimism. The solace of Hilda's kiss had proved fleeting. She had not realised--he himself was then only realising little by little--the enormity of the thing she had done. What she had deliberately and obstinately done was to turn him out of his house. No injury that she might have chosen could have touched him more closely, more painfully,--for his house to him was sacred. Her blundering with the servants might be condoned, but what excuse was it possible to find for this precipitate flight to London involving the summary ejectment from the home of him who had created the home and for and by whom the home chiefly existed? True the astounding feat of wrong-headedness had been aided by the mere chance of Maggie's calling (capricious women were always thus lucky!),--Maggie's suggestion and request had given some afterglow of reason to the mad project. But the justification was still far from sufficient. And the odious idea haunted him that, even if Maggie had not called with her tale, Hilda would have persisted in her scheme all the same. Yes, she was capable of that! The argument that George's eyes (of whose condition she had learnt by mere hazard) could not wait until domestic affairs were arranged, was too grotesque to deserve an answer.Lying thus close to his wife in the dark, he had perceived that the conflict between his individuality and hers could never cease. No diplomatic devices of manner could put an end to it. And he had seen also that as they both grew older and developed more fully, the conflict was becoming more serious. He assumed that he had faults, but he was solemnly convinced that the faults of Hilda were tremendous, essential, and ineradicable. She had a faculty for acting contrary to justice and contrary to sense which was simply monstrous. And it had always been so. Her whole life had been made up of impulsiveness and contumacy in that impulsiveness. Witness the incredible scenes of the strange Dartmoor episode--all due to her stubborn irrationality! The perspective of his marriage was plain to him in the night,--and it ended in a rupture. He had been resolutely blind to Hilda's peculiarities, dismissing incident after incident as an isolated misfortune. But he could be blind no more. His marriage was all of a piece, and he must and would recognise the fact.... The sequel would be a scandal! ... Well, let it be a scandal! As the minutes and hours passed in grim meditation, the more attractive grew the lost freedom of the bachelor and the more ready he felt to face any ordeal that lay between him and it.... And just as it was occurring to him that his proper course was to have fought a terrific open decisive battle with her in front of both Maggie and Ingpen he had fallen asleep.Upon awaking, barely in time to arouse Hilda, he knew that the mood of the night had not melted away as such moods are apt to melt when the window begins to show a square of silver-grey. The mood was even intensified. Hilda had divined nothing. She never did divine the tortures which she inflicted in his heart. She did not possess the gumption to divine. Her demeanour had been amazing. She averred that she had not slept at all. Instead of cajoling, she bullied. Instead of tacitly admitting that she was infamously wronging him, she had assumed a grievance of her own--without stating it. Once she had said discontentedly about some trifle: "You mightat any rate----" as though the victim should caress the executioner. She had kissed him at departure, but not as usual effusively, and he had suffered the kiss in enmity; and after an unimaginable general upset and confusion, in which George had shown himself strangely querulous, she had driven off with her son,--unconscious, stupidly unaware, that she was leaving a disaster behind her. And last of all Edwin, solitary, had been forced to perform the final symbolic act, that of locking him out of his own sacred home! The affair had transcended belief.All day at the works his bitterness and melancholy had been terrible, and the works had been shaken with apprehension, for no angry menaces are more disconcerting than those of a man habitually mild. Before evening he had decided to write to his wife from Auntie Hamps's,--a letter cold, unanswerable, crushing, that would confront her unescapably with the alternatives of complete submission or complete separation. The phrases of the letter came into his mind.... He would see who was master.... He had been full of the letter when he entered Auntie Hamps's lobby. But the strange tone in which Maggie had answered his questions about the sick woman had thrust the letter and the crisis right to the back of his mind, where they had uneasily remained throughout the evening. And now in the rocking-chair he was reflecting:"She's asleep in some room I've never seen!"He smiled, such a smile, candid, generous, and affectionate, as was Hilda's joy, such a smile as Hilda dwelt on in memory when she was alone. The mood of resentment passed away, vanished like a nightmare at dawn, and like one of his liverish headaches dispersed suddenly after the evening meal. He saw everything differently. He saw that he had been entirely wrong in his estimate of the situation, and of Hilda. Hilda was a mother. She had the protective passion of maternity. She was carried away by her passions; but her passions were noble, marvellous, unique. He himself could never--he thought, humbled--attain to her emotional heights. He was incapable of feeling about anything or anybody as she felt about George. The revelation concerning George's eyesight had shocked her, overwhelmed her with remorse, driven every other idea out of her head. She must atone to George instantly; instantly she must take measures--the most drastic and certain--to secure him from the threatened danger. She could not count the cost till afterwards. She was not a woman in such moments,--she was an instinct, a desire, a ruthless purpose. And as she felt towards George, so she must feel, in other circumstances, towards himself. Her kisses proved it, and her soothing hand when he was unwell. Mrs. Hamps had said: "Eh, dear! What a good mother dear Hilda is!" A sentimental outcry! But there was profound truth in it, truth which the old woman had seen better than he had seen it. "I daresay there never was such a mother--unless it's Clara!" Hyperbole! And yet he himself now began to think that there never could have been such a mother as Hilda. Clara too in her way was wonderful.... Smile as you might, these mothers were tremendous. The mysterious sheen of their narrow and deep lives dazzled him. For the first time, perhaps, he bowed his head to Clara.But Hilda was far beyond Clara. She was not only a mother but a lover. Would he cut himself off from her loving? Why? For what? To live alone in the arid and futile freedom of a Tertius Ingpen? Such a notion was fatuous. Where lay the difficulty between himself and Hilda? There was no difficulty. How had she harmed him? She had not harmed him. Everything was all right. He had only to understand. He understood. As for her impulsiveness, her wrongheadedness, her bizarre ratiocination,--he knew how to accept them, for was he not a philosopher? They were indeed part of the incomparable romance of existence with these prodigious and tantalising creatures. He admitted that Hilda in some aspects transcended him, but in others he was comfortably confident of his own steady, conquering superiority. He thought of her with the most exquisite devotion. He pictured the secret tenderness of their reunion amid the conventional gloom of Auntie Hamps's death-bed.... He was confident of his ability to manage Hilda, at any rate in the big things,--for example the disputed points of his entry into public activity and their removal from Trafalgar Road into the country. The sturdiness of the male inspired him. At the same time the thought of the dark mood from which he had emerged obscurely perturbed him, like a fearful danger passed; and he argued to himself with satisfaction, and yet not quite with conviction, that he had yielded to Maggie, and not to Hilda, in the affair of the journey to London, and that therefore his masculine marital dignity was intact.And then he started at a strange sound below, which somehow recalled him to the nervous tension of the house. It was a knocking at the front-door. His heart thumped at the formidable muffled noise in the middle of the night. He jumped up, and glanced at the bed. Auntie Hamps was not wakened. He went downstairs where the gas which he had lighted was keeping watch.CHAPTER XIXDEATH AND BURIALIAlbert Benbow was at the front-door. Edwin curbed the expression of his astonishment."Hello, Albert!""Oh! You aren't gone to bed?""Not likely. Come in. What's up?"Albert, with the habit of one instructed never to tread actually on a doorstep lest it should be newly whitened, stepped straight on to the inner mat. He seemed excited, and Edwin feared that he had just learnt of Auntie Hamps's illness and had come in the middle of the night ostensibly to make enquiries, but really to make a grievance of the fact that the Benbows had been "kept in ignorance." He could already hear Albert demanding: "Why have you kept us in ignorance?" It was quite a Benbow phrase.Edwin shut the door and shut out the dark and windy glimpse of the outer world which had emphasised for a moment the tense seclusion of the house."You've heard of course about the accident to Ingpen?" said Albert. His hands were deep in his overcoat pockets; the collar of the thin, rather shabby overcoat was turned up; an old cap adhered to the back of his head. While talking he slowly lifted his feet one after the other, as though desiring to get warmth by stamping but afraid to stamp in the night."No, I haven't," said Edwin, with false calmness. "What accident?"The perspective of events seemed to change; Auntie Hamps's illness to recede, and a definite and familiar apprehension to be supplanted by a fear more formidable because it was a fear of the unknown."It was all in the late specialSignal!" Benbow protested, as if his pride had been affronted."Well, I haven't seen theSignal. What is it?" And Edwin thought: "Is somebody else dying too?""Fly-wheel broke. Ingpen was inspecting the slip-house next to the engine-house. Part of the fly-wheel came through and knocked a loose nut off the blunger right into his groin.""Whose works?"Albert answered in a light tone:"Mine.""And how's he going on?""Well, he's had an operation and Sterling's got the nut out. Of course they didn't know what it was till they got it out. And now Ingpen wants to see you at once. That's why I've come.""Where is he?""At the hospital.""Pirehill?""No. The Clowes--Moorthorne Road, you know.""Is he going on all right?""He's very weak. He can scarcely whisper. But he wants you. I've been up there all the time, practically."Edwin seized his overcoat from the rack."I had a rare job finding ye," Benbow went on. "I'd no idea you weren't all at home. I wakened most of Hulton Street over it. It was Smiths next door came out at last and told me missis and George had gone to London and you were over here.""I wonder who told them!" Edwin mumbled as Albert helped him with the overcoat. "I must tell Maggie. We've got some illness here, you know.""Oh?""Yes. Auntie. Very sudden. Seemed to get worse to-night. Fact is I was sitting up while Maggie has a bit of sleep. She was going to send round for Clara in the morning. I'll just run up to Mag."Having thus by judicious misrepresentation deprived the Benbows of a grievance, Edwin moved towards the stairs. Maggie, dressed, already stood at the top of them, alert, anxious, adequate."Albert, is that you?"After a few seconds of quick murmured explanation, Edwin and Albert departed, and as they went Maggie, in a voice doubly harassed but cheerful and oily called out after them how glad she would be, and what a help it would be, if Clara could come round early in the morning.The small Clowes Hospital was high up in the town opposite the Park, near the station and the railway-cutting and not far from the Moorthorne ridge. Behind its bushes, through which the wet night-wind swished and rustled, it looked still very new and red in the fitful moonlight. And indeed it was scarcely older than the Park and swimming-baths close by, and Bursley had not yet lost its naïve pride in the possession of a hospital of its own. Not much earlier in the decade this town of thirty-five thousand inhabitants had had to send all its "cases" five miles in cabs to Pirehill Infirmary. Albert Benbow, with the satisfaction of a habitué, led Edwin round through an aisle of bushes to the side-entrance for out-patients. He pushed open a dark door, walked into a gaslit vestibule, and with the assured gestures of a proprietor invited Edwin to follow. A fat woman who looked like a char-woman made tidy sat in a windsor-chair in the vestibule, close to a radiator. She signed to Albert as an old acquaintance to go forward, and Albert nodded in the manner of one conspirator to another. What struck Edwin was that this middle-aged woman showed no sign of being in the midst of the unusual. She was utterly casual and matter-of-fact. And Edwin had the sensation of moving in a strange nocturnal world--a world which had always co-existed with his own, but of which he had been till then most curiously ignorant. His passage through the town listening absently to Albert's descriptions of the structural damage to Ingpen and to the works, and Albert's defence against unbrought accusations, had shown him that the silent streets lived long after midnight in many a lighted window here and there and in the movements of mysterious but not furtive frequenters. And he seemed to have been impinging upon half-veiled enigmas of misfortune or of love. At the other end of the thread of adventure was his aunt's harsh bedroom with Maggie stolidly watching the last ebb of senile vitality, and at this end was the hospital, full of novel and disturbing vibrations and Tertius Ingpen waiting to impose upon him some charge or secret.At the top of the naked stairs which came after a dark corridor was a long naked resounding passage lighted by a tiny jet at either end. A cough from behind a half-open door came echoing out and filled the night and the passage. And then at another door appeared a tall, thin, fair nurse in blue and white, with thin lips and a slight smile hard and disdainful."Here's Mr. Clayhanger, nurse!" muttered Albert Benbow, taking off his cap, with a grimace at once sycophantic and grandiose.Edwin imagined that he knew by sight everybody in the town above a certain social level, but he had no memory of the face of the nurse."How is he?" he asked awkwardly, fingering his hat.The girl merely raised her eyebrows."You mustn't stay," said she, in a mincing but rather loud voice that matched her lips."Oh no, I won't!""I supposeI'dbetter stop outside!" said Benbow.Edwin followed the nurse into a darkened room, of which the chief article of furniture appeared to be a screen. Behind the screen was a bed, and on the bed in the deep obscurity lay a form under creaseless bedclothes. Edwin first recognised Ingpen's beard, then his visage very pale and solemn, and without the customary spectacles. Of the whole body only the eyes moved. As Edwin approached the bed he cast across Ingpen a shadow from the distant gas."Well, old chap!" he began with constraint. "This is a nice state of affairs! How are you getting on?"Ingpen's enquiring apprehensive dumb glance silenced the clumsy greeting. It was just as if he had rebuked: "This is no time for How d'ye do's." When he had apparently made sure that Edwin was Edwin, Ingpen turned his eyes to the nurse."Water," he whispered.The nurse shook her head."Net yet," she replied, with tepid indifference.Ingpen's eyes remained on her a moment and then went back to Edwin."Ed," he whispered, and gazed once more at the nurse, who, looking away from the bed, did not move.Edwin bent over the bed."Ed," Ingpen demanded, speaking very deliberately. "Go to my office. In the top drawer of the desk in the bedroom there's some photos and letters.... Burn them.... Before morning.... Understand?"Edwin was profoundly stirred. In his emotion was pride at Ingpen's trust, astonishment at the sudden, utterly unexpected revelation, and the thrill of romance.He thought:"The man is dying!"And the tragic sensation of the vigil of the nocturnal world almost overcame him."Yes," he said. "Anything else?""No.""What about keys?"Ingpen gave him another long glance."Trousers.""Where are his clothes?" Edwin asked the nurse, whose lips were ironic."Oh! They'll tell you downstairs. You'd better go now."As he went from the room he could feel Ingpen's glance following him. He raged inwardly against the callousness of the nurse. It seemed monstrous that he should abandon Ingpen for the rest of the night, defenceless, to the cold tyranny of the nurse, whose power over the sufferer was as absolute as that of an eastern monarch, who had never heard of public opinion, over the meanest slave. He could not bear to picture to himself Ingpen and the nurse alone together."Isn't he allowed to drink?" he could not help murmuring, at the door."Yes. At intervals."He wanted to chastise the nurse. He imagined an endless succession of sufferers under her appalling, inimical nonchalance. Who had allowed her to be a nurse? Had she become a nurse in order to take some needed revenge against mankind? And then he thought of Hilda's passionate, succouring tenderness when he himself was unwell,--he had not been really ill for years. What was happening to Ingpen could never happen to him, because Hilda stood everlastingly between him and such a horror. He considered that a bachelor was the most pathetic creature on the earth. He was drenched in the fearful, wistful sadness of all life.... The sleeping town; Auntie Hamps on the edge of eternity; Minnie trembling at the menaces of her own body; Hilda lying in some room that he had never seen; and Ingpen...!"Soon over!" observed Albert Benbow in the corridor.Edwin could have winced at the words."How do you think he is?" asked Albert."Don't know!" Edwin replied. "Look here, I've got to get hold of his clothes--downstairs.""Oh! That's it, is it? Pocket-book! Keys! Eh?"IIEdwin had once been in Tertius Ingpen's office at the bottom of Crown Square, Hanbridge, but never in the bedroom which Ingpen rented on the top floor of the same building. It had been for seventy or eighty years a building of four squat storeys; but a new landlord, seeing the architectural development of the town as a local metropolis and determined to join in it at a minimum of expense, had knocked the two lower storeys into one, fronted them with fawn-coloured terra cotta, and produced a lofty shop whose rent exceeded the previous rent of the entire house.The landlord knew that passers-by would not look higher up the façade than the ground-floor, and that therefore any magnificence above that level was merely wasted. The shop was in the occupation of a tea-dealer who gave away beautiful objects such as vases and useful objects such as tea-trays, to all purchasers. Ingpen's office, and a solicitor's office, were on the first floor, formerly the second; the third floor was the headquarters of the Hanbridge and District Ethical Society; the top floor was temporarily unlet, save for Ingpen's room. Nobody except Ingpen slept in the building, and he very irregularly.The latchkey for the sidedoor was easy to choose in the glittering light of the latest triple-jetted and reflectored gaslamps which the corporation, to match the glories of the new town-hall, had placed in Crown Square. The lock, strange to say, worked easily. Edwin entered somewhat furtively, and as it were guiltily, though in Crown Square and the streets and the other squares visible therefrom, not a soul could be seen. The illuminated clock of the Old Town Hall at the top of the square showed twenty-five minutes to four. Immediately within the door began a new, very long and rather mean staircase, with which Edwin was acquainted. He closed the door, shutting out the light and the town, and struck a match in the empty building. He had walked into Hanbridge from Bursley, and as soon as he began to climb the stairs he was aware of great fatigue, both physical and mental. The calamity to Ingpen had almost driven Auntie Hamps out of his mind; it had not, however, driven Minnie out of his mind. He was gloomy and indignant on behalf of both Ingpen and Minnie. They were both victims. Minnie was undoubtedly a fool, and he was about to learn, perhaps, to what extent Ingpen had been a fool.Each footstep sounded loud on the boards of deserted house. Having used several matches and arrived at the final staircase, Edwin wondered how he was to distinguish Ingpen's room there from the others without trying keys in all of them till he got to the right one. But on the top landing he had no difficulty, for Ingpen's card was fastened with a drawing-pin on to the first door he saw. A match burnt his fingers and expired just as he was shaking out a likely key from Ingpen's bunch. And then, in the black darkness, he perceived a line of light under the door in front of which he stood. He forgot his fatigue in an instant. His heart leaped. A burglar? Or had Ingpen left the gas burning? Ingpen could not have left the gas burning since, according to Albert Benbow, he had been in Bursley all afternoon. With precautions, and feeling very desperate and yet also craven, he lit a fresh match and managed quietly to open the door, which was not locked.As soon as he beheld the illuminated interior of the room, all his skin crept and flushed as though he had taken a powerful stimulant. A girl reclined asleep in a small basket lounge-chair by the gas-fire. He could not see her face, which was turned towards the wall and away from the gas-jet that hung from the ceiling over an old desk; but she seemed slim and graceful, and there was something in the abandonment of unconsciousness that made her marvellously alluring. Her hat and gloves had been thrown on the desk, and a cloak lay on a chair. These coloured and intimate objects--extensions of the veritable personality of the girl--had the effect of delightfully completing the furniture of a room which was in fact rather bare. A narrow bed in the far corner, disguised under a green rug as a sofa; a green square of carpet, showing the unpolished boards at the sides; the desk, and three chairs; a primitive hanging wardrobe in another corner, hidden by a bulging linen curtain; a portmanteau; a few unframed prints on the walls; an alarm-clock on the mantelpiece,--there was nothing else in the chamber where Ingpen slept when it was too late, or he was too slack, to go to his proper home. But nothing else was needed. The scene was perfect; the girl rendered it so. And immense envy of, and admiration for, Ingpen surged through Edwin, who saw here the realisation of a dream that was to marriage what poetry is to prose. Ingpen might rail against women and against marriage in a manner exaggerated and indefensible; but he had at any rate known how to arrange his life and how to keep his own counsel. He had all the careless masculine freedom of his condition,--and in the background this exquisite phenomenon! The girl, her trustfulness, her abandonment, her secrecy, that white ear peeping out of her hair,--were his! It was staggering that such romance could exist in the Five Towns, of all places--for Edwin had the vague notion, common to all natives, that his own particular district fell short of full human nature in certain characteristics. For example, he could credit a human nature dying for love in Manchester, but never in the Five Towns. Even the occasional divorces that gave piquancy to life in the Five Towns seemed to lack the mysterious glamour of all other divorces.He thought:"Was it because he was expecting her that he sent me? Perhaps the desk was only a blind--and he couldn't tell me any more. Anyhow I shall have to break it to her."He felt exceedingly awkward and unequal to the situation so startling in its novelty. Yet he did not wish himself away.As timidly, hat in hand, he went forward into the room, the girl stirred and woke up, to the creaking of the chair."Oh! Tert!" she murmured between sleeping and waking.Edwin did not like her voice. It reminded him of the voice of the nurse whom he had just left.The girl, looking round, perceived that it was not Tertius Ingpen who had come in. She gave a short, faint scream, then gathered herself together and with a single movement stood up, perfectly collected and on the defensive."It's all right! It's all right!" said Edwin. "Mr. Ingpen gave me his keys and asked me to come over and get some papers he wants.... I hope I didn't frighten you. I'd no idea----"She was old! She was old! That is to say, she was not the girl he had seen asleep. Before his marriage he would have put her age at thirty-two, but now he knew enough to be sure that she must be more than that. She was not graceful in movement. The expression of her pale face was not agreeable. Her gestures were not distinguished. And she could not act her part in the idyll. Moreover her frock was shabby and untidy. But chiefly she was old. Had she been young, Edwin would have excused all the rest. Romance was not entirely destroyed, but very little remained.He thought, disdainfully, and as if resenting a deception:"Is this the best he can do?"And the Five Towns sank back to its ancient humble place in his esteem.The woman said with a silly nervous giggle:"I called to see Mr. Ingpen. He wasn't expecting me. And I suppose while I was waiting I must have dropped off to sleep."It might have been true, but to Edwin it was inexpressibly inane.She seized her hat and then her cloak."I'm sorry to say Mr. Ingpen's had an accident," said Edwin.She stopped, both hands above her head fingering her hat."An accident? Nothing serious?""Oh no! I don't think so," he lied. "A machinery accident. They had to take him to the Clowes Hospital at Bursley. I've just come from there."She asked one or two more questions, all the time hurrying her preparations to leave. But Edwin judged with disgust that she was not deeply interested in the accident. True, he had minimised it, but she ought not to have allowed him to minimise it. She ought to have obstinately believed that it was very grave."I do hope he'll soon be all right," she said, snatching at her gloves and going to the door. "Good night!" She gave another silly giggle, preposterous in a woman of her age. Then she stopped. "I think you're gentleman enough not to say anything about me being here," she said, rather nastily. "It was quite an accident. I could easily explain it, but you know what people are!"What a phrase--"I think you're gentleman enough!"He blushed and offered the required assurance."Can I let you out?" he started forward."No, thanks!""But you can't open the door.""Yes I can.""The stairs are all dark.""Please don't trouble yourself," she said drily, in the tone of a woman who sees offence in the courtesy of a male travelling companion on the railway.He heard her stepsdiminuendodown the stairs.Closing the door, he went to the window, and drew aside the blind. Perhaps she would pass up the Square. But she did not pass up the Square which was peopled by nothing but meek gaslamps under the empire of the glowing clock in the pediment of the Old Town Hall. Where had she gone? Where did she come from? Her accent had no noticeable peculiarity. Was she married, or single, or a widow? Perhaps there was hidden in her some strange and seductive quality which he had missed.... He saw the slim girl again reclining in the basket-chair.... After all, she was a woman, and she had been in Ingpen's room, waiting for him!Later, seated in front of the open drawer in the old desk, gathering together letters and photographs--photographs of her in adroitly managed poses, taken at Oldham; letters in a woman's hand--he was penetrated to the marrow by the disastrous and yet beautiful infelicity of things. The mere sight of the letters (of which he forebore to decipher a single word, even a signature) nearly made him cry; the photographs were tragic with the intolerable evanescence of life. By the will of Tertius Ingpen helpless on the bed in the hospital, these documents of a passion or of a fancy were to be burnt. Why? Was it true that Ingpen was dying? Better to keep them. No, they must be burnt. He rose, and, with difficulty, burnt them by instalments in a shovel over the tiny fender that enclosed the gas-stove,--the room was soon half full of smoke.... Why had he deceived the woman as to the seriousness of Ingpen's accident? To simplify and mitigate the interview, to save himself trouble; that was all! Well, she would learn soon enough!His eye caught a print on the wall above the bed,--a classic example of the sentimentality of Marcus Stone: departing cavalier, drooping maiden, terraced garden. It was a dreadful indictment of the Tertius Ingpen who talked so well, with such intellectual aplomb, with such detachment and exceptional cynicism. It was like a ray exposing some secret sinister corner in the man's soul. He had hung up that print because it gave him pleasure! Poor chap! But Edwin loved him. He decided that he would call again at the hospital before returning to Auntie Hamps's. Impossible that the man was dying! If the doctor or the matron had thought he was in danger they would have summoned his relatives. He might be dying. He might be dead. He must have immediately feared death, or he would not have imposed upon Edwin such an errand.... What simple, touching, admirable trust in a friend's loyalty the man had displayed!Edwin put out the gas-stove, which exploded, lit a match, gave a great yawn, put out the gas, and began the enterprise of leaving the house.III"Look here! I must have some tea,now!" said Edwin curtly and yet appealingly to Maggie, who opened the door for him at Auntie Hamps's.It was nearly eight o'clock. He had been to the hospital again, and, having reported in three words to Ingpen, whose condition was unchanged, had remained there some time. But he had said nothing to Ingpen about the woman. At six o'clock the matron had come into the room, and the nurse thenceforward until seven o'clock, when she went off duty, was a changed girl. Edwin slightly knew the matron, who was sympathetic but strangely pessimistic--considering her healthy, full figure."The water's boiling," answered Maggie, in a comforting tone, and disappeared instantly into the kitchen.Edwin thought:"There are some things that girl understands!"She had shown no curiosity, no desire to impart news, because she had immediately comprehended that Edwin was, or imagined himself to be, at the end of his endurance. Maggie, with simple and surpassing wisdom had just said to herself: "He's been out all night, and he's not used to it." For a moment he felt that Maggie was wiser, and more intimately close to him, than anybody else in the world."In the dining-room," she called out from the kitchen.And in the small dining-room there was a fire! It was like a living, welcoming creature. The cloth was laid, the gas was lighted. On the table was beautiful fresh bread and butter. A word, a tone, a glance of his on the previous evening had been enough to bring back the dining-room into use! Happily the wind suited the chimney. He had scarcely sat down in front of the fire when Maggie entered with the teapot. And at the sight of the teapot Edwin felt that he was saved. Before the tea was out of the teapot it had already magically alleviated the desperate sensations of physical fatigue and moral weariness which had almost overcome him on the way from the hospital in the chill and muddy dawn."What will you have to eat?" said Maggie."Nothing. I couldn't eat to save my life.""Perhaps you'll have a bit of bread-and-butter later," said Maggie blandly.He shook his head."How is she?""Worse," said Maggie. "But she's slept.""Who's up with her now? Minnie?""No. Clara.""Oh! She's come?""She came at seven."Edwin was drinking the divine tea. After a few gulps he told Maggie briefly about Tertius Ingpen, saying that he had had to go "on business" for Ingpen to Hanbridge."Are you all right for the present?" she asked after a few moments.He nodded. He was eating bread-and-butter."You had any sleep at all?" he mumbled, munching."Oh yes! A little," she answered cheerfully, leaving the room.He poured out more tea, and then sat down in the sole easy-chair for a minute's reflection before going upstairs and thence to the works.Not until he woke up did he realise that there had been any danger of his going to sleep. The earthenware clock on the mantelpiece (a birthday gift from Clara and Albert) showed five minutes past eleven. Putting no reliance on the cheap, horrible clock, he looked at his watch, which had stopped for lack of winding up. The fire was very low. His chief thought was: "It can't possibly be eleven o'clock, because I haven't been down to the works, and I haven't sent word I'm not coming either!" He got up hurriedly and had reached the door when a sound of a voice on the stairs held him still like an enchantment. It seemed to be the voice, eloquent, and indeed somewhat Church-of-England, of the Rev. Christian Flowerdew, the new superintendent of the Bursley Wesleyan Methodist Circuit. The voice said: "I do hope so!" and then offered a resounding remark about the weather being the kind of weather that, bad as it was, people must expect in view of the time of year. Maggie's voice concurred.As soon as the front-door closed, Edwin peeped cautiously out of the dining-room."Who was that?" he murmured."Mr. Flowerdew. She wanted him. Albert sent for him early this morning."Maggie came into the room and shut the door."I've been to sleep," said Edwin."Yes, I know. I wasn't going to have you disturbed. They're all here.""Who are all here?""Clara and the children. Auntie asked to see all of them. They waited in the drawing-room for Mr. Flowerdew to go. Bert didn't go to school this morning, in case--because it was so far off. Clara fetched the others out of school, except Rupy of course--he doesn't go--""Good heavens! I never came across such a morbid lot in my life. I believe they like it."Clara could be heard marshalling the brood up the stairs."You'd better go up," said Maggie persuasively."I'd better go to the works--I'm no use here. What time is it?""After eleven. I think you'd better go up.""Does she ask for me?""Oh yes. All the time sometimes. But she forgets for a bit.""Well, anyhow I must wash myself and change my collar.""All right. Wash yourself, then.""How is she now?""She isn't taking anything."When Edwin nervously pushed open the bedroom door, the room seemed to be crowded. Over the heads of clustering children towered Clara and Albert. As soon as the watchful Albert caught sight of Edwin, he made a conspiratorial sign and hurried to the door, driving Edwin out again."Didn't know you were here," Edwin muttered."I say," Albert whispered. "Has she made a will?""I don't know."The bedroom door half opened, and Clara in her shabby morning dress glidingly joined them."He doesn't know," said Albert to Clara.Clara's pretty face scowled a little as she asked sharply and resentfully:"Then who does know?""I should ha' thoughtyou'dknow," said Edwin."Me! I like that! She hasn't spoken to me for months, has she, Albert? And she was always frightfully close about all these things.""About what things?""Well, you know."It was a fact. Auntie Hamps had never discussed her own finance, or her testamentary dispositions, with anybody. And nobody had ever dared to mention such subjects to her."Don't you think you'd better ask her?" said Clara. "Albert thinks you ought.""No, I don't," said Edwin, with curt disdain."Well, then I shall," Albert decided."So long as you don't do it while I'm there!" Edwin said menacingly. "If you want to ask people about their wills you ought to ask them before they're actually dying. Can't you see you can't worry her about her will now?"He was intensely disgusted. He thought of Mrs. Hamps's bed, and of Tertius Ingpen's bed, and of the woman at dead of night in Ingpen's room, and of Minnie's case; and the base insensibility of Albert and Clara made him feel sick. He wondered whether any occasion would ever have solemnity enough for them to make them behave with some distinction, some grandeur. For himself, if he could have secured a fortune by breathing one business word to Auntie Hamps just then, he would have let the fortune go."There's nothing more to be said," Clara murmured.In the glance of both Clara and Albert Edwin saw hatred and envy. Clara especially had never forgiven him for preventing their father from pouring money into that sieve, her husband, nor for Hilda's wounding tongue, nor for his worldly success. And they both suspected that either Maggie or Auntie Hamps had told him of Albert's default in the payment of interest, and so fear was added to their hatred and envy.They all entered the bedroom, the children having been left alone only a few seconds. Rupert, wearing a new blue overcoat with gilt buttons, had partially scrambled on to the bed; the pale veiled hands of Auntie Hamps could be seen round his right hand; Rupert had grown enormous, and had already utterly forgotten the time when he was two years old. The others, equally altered, stood two on either side of the bed,--Bert and young Clara to the right, and Amy and Lucy to the left. Lucy was crying and Amy was benignantly wiping her eyes. Bert, a great lump of a boy, was to leave school at Christmas, but he was still ranked with the other children as a child. Young Clara sharply and Bert heavily turned round to witness the entrance of their elders."Oh! Here's Uncle Edwin!""Edwin!""Yes, Auntie!"The moral values of the room were instantly changed by the tone in which Auntie Hamps had murmured "Edwin." All the Benbows knew, and Edwin himself knew, that a personage of supreme importance in Auntie Hamps's eyes had come into the scene. The Benbows became secondary, and even Auntie Hamps's grasp of Rupert's hand loosened, and, having already kissed her, the child slipped off the bed. Edwin approached, and over the heads of the children, and between the great darkening curtains, he could at last see the face of the dying woman like a senile doll's face amid the confusion of wrappings and bedclothes. The deep-set eyes seemed to burn beneath the white forehead and sparse grey hair; the cheeks, still rounded, were highly flushed over a very small part of their surface; the mouth, always open, was drawn in, and the chin, still rounded like the cheeks, protruded. The manner of Auntie Hamps's noisy breathing, like the puzzled gaze of her eyes, indicated apprehension of the profoundest, acutest sort."Eh!" said she, in a somewhat falsetto voice, jerky and excessively feeble. "I thought--I'd--lost you." Her hand was groping about."No, no," said Edwin, leaning over between young Clara and Rupert."She's feeling for your hand, Edwin," said Clara.He quickly took her hot, brittle fingers; they seemed to cling to his for essential support."Have you--been to the works?" Auntie Hamps asked the question as though the answer to it would end all trouble."No," he said. "Not yet.""Eh! That's right! That's right!" she murmured, apparently much impressed by a new proof of Edwin's wisdom."I've had a sleep.""What?""I've been having a sleep," he repeated more loudly."Eh! That's right! That's right.... I'm so glad--the children have been to see me.... Amy--did you kiss me?" Auntie Hamps looked at Amy hard, as if for the first time."Yes, Auntie."And then Amy began to cry."Better take them away," Edwin suggested aside to Albert. "It's as much as she can stand. The parson's only just gone, you know."Albert, obedient, gave the word of command, and the room was full of movement."Eh, children--children!" Auntie Hamps appealed.Everybody stood stockstill, gazing attendant."Eh, children, bless you all for coming. If you grow up--as good as your mother--it's all I ask--all I ask.... Your mother and I--have never had a cross word--have we, mother?""No, auntie," said Clara, with a sweet, touching smile that accentuated the fragile charm of her face."Never--since mother was--as tiny as you are."Auntie Hamps looked up at the ceiling during a few strained breaths, and then smiled for an instant at the departing children, who filed out of the room. Rupert loitered behind, gazing at his mother. The mere contrast between the infant so healthy and the dying old woman was pathetic to Edwin. Clara, with an exquisite reassuring gesture and smile picked up the stout Rupert and kissed him and carried him to the door, while Auntie Hamps looked at mother and son, ecstatic."Edwin!""Yes, Auntie?"They were alone now. She had not loosed his hand. Her voice was very faint, and he bent over her still lower in the alcove of the curtains, which seemed to stretch very high above them."Have you heard from Hilda?""Not yet. By the second post, perhaps.""It's about George's eyes--isn't it?""Yes.""She's done quite right--quite right. It's just--like Hilda. I do hope--and pray--the boy's eyesight--is safe.""Oh yes!" said Edwin. "Safe enough.""You really think so?" She had the air of hanging on his words.He nodded."What a blessing!" She sighed deeply with relief.Edwin thought:"I believe her relations must have been her passion." And he was impressed by the intensity of that passion."Edwin!""Yes, Auntie.""Has--that girl--gone yet?""Who?" he questioned, and added more softly: "Minnie d'you mean?" His own voice sounded too powerful, too healthy and dominating, in comparison with her failing murmurs.Auntie Hamps nodded. "Yes--Minnie.""Not yet.""She's going?""Yes.""Because I can't trust--Maggie--to see to it.""I'll see to it.""Has she done--the silvers--d'you know?""She's doing them," answered Edwin, who thought it would be best to carry out the deception with artistic completeness."She needn't have her dinner before she goes.""No?""No." Auntie Hamps's face and tone hardened. "Why should she?""All right.""And if she asks--for her wages--tell her--I say there's nothing due--under the circumstances.""All right, Auntie," Edwin agreed, desperate.Maggie, followed by Clara, softly entered the room. Auntie Hamps glanced at them with a certain cautious suspicion, as though one or other of them was capable of thwarting her in the matter of Minnie. Then her eyes closed, and Edwin was aware of a slackening of her hold on his hand. The doctor, who called half an hour later, said that she might never speak again, and she never did. Her last conscious moments were moments of satisfaction.Edwin slowly released his hand."Where's Albert?" he asked Clara, merely for the sake of saying something."He's taking the children home, and then he's going to the works. He ought to have gone long ago. There's a dreadful upset there.""I suppose there is," said Edwin, who had forgotten that the fly-wheel accident must have almost brought Albert's manufactory to a standstill. And he wondered whether it was the family instinct, or anxiety about Auntie Hamps's will, that had caused Albert to absent himself from business on such a critical morning."I ought to go too," he muttered, as a full picture of a lithographic establishment masterless swept into his mind."Have you telegraphed to Hilda?" Clara demanded."No.""Haven't you!""What's the use?""Well, I should have thought you would.""Oh, no!" he said, falsely mild. "I shall write." He was immensely glad that Hilda was not present in the house to complicate still further the human equation.Maggie was silently examining the face obscured in the gloom of the curtains.Instead of remaining late that night at the works, Edwin came back to the house before six o'clock. He had had word that the condition of Tertius Ingpen was still unchanged. Clara had gone home to see to her children's evening meal. Maggie sat alone in the darkened bedroom, where Auntie Hamps, her features a mere pale blur between the over-arching curtains, still withheld the secret of her soul's reality from the world. Even in the final unconsciousness there was something grandiose which lingered from her crowning magnificent deceptions and obstinate effort to safeguard the structure of society. The sublime obstinacy of the woman had transformed hypocrisy into a virtue, and not the imminence of the infinite unknown had sufficed to make her apostate to the steadfast principles of her mortal career."What about to-night?" Edwin asked."Oh! Clara and I will manage."There was a tap at the door. Edwin opened it. Minnie, abashed but already taking courage, stood there blinking with a letter in her hand. "Ah!" he breathed. Hilda's scrawling calligraphy was on the envelope.The letter read: "Darling boy. George has influenza, Charlie says. Temp. 102 anyway. So of course he can't go out to-morrow. I knew this morning there was something wrong with him. Janet and Charlie send their love. Your ever loving wife, Hilda."He was exceedingly uplifted and happy and exhausted. Hilda's handwriting moved him. The whole missive was like a personal emanation from her. It lived with her vitality. It fought for the mastery of the household interior against the mysterious, far-reaching spell of the dying woman. "Your loving wife." Never before, during their marriage, had she written a phrase so comforting and exciting. He thought: "My faith in her is never worthy of her." And his faith leaped up and became worthy of her."George has got influenza," he said indifferently."George! But influenza's very serious for him, isn't it?" Maggie showed alarm."Why should it be?""Considering he nearly died of it at Orgreaves'!""Oh!Then! ... He'll be all right."But Maggie had put fear into Edwin,--a superstitious fear. Influenza indeed might be serious for George. Suppose he died of it. People did die of influenza. Auntie Hamps--Tertius Ingpen--and now George! ... All these anxieties mingling with his joy in the thought of Hilda! And all the brooding rooms of the house waiting in light or in darkness for a decisive event!"I must go and lie down," he said. He could contain no more sensations."Do," said Maggie.
IV
In the middle of the night Edwin kept watch over Auntie Hamps, who was asleep. He sat in a rocking-chair, with his back to the window and the right side of his face to the glow of the fire. The fire was as effective as the size and form of the grate would allow; it burnt richly red; but its influence did not seem to extend beyond a radius of four feet outwards from its centre. The terrible damp chill of the Five Towns winter hung in the bedroom like an invisible miasma. He could feel the cold from the window, which was nevertheless shut, through the shawl with which he had closed the interstices of the back of the chair, and, though he had another thick shawl over his knees, the whole of his left side felt the creeping attack of the insidious miasma. A thermometer which he had found and which lay on the night-table five yards from the fire registered only fifty-two degrees. His expelled breath showed in the air. It was as if he were fighting with all resources against frigidity, and barely holding his own.
In the half-light of the gas, still screened from the bed by the bonnet-box and the Bible, he glanced round amid the dark meadows at the mean and sinister ugliness of the historic chamber, the secret nest and withdrawing place of Auntie Hamps; and the real asceticism of her life and of the life of all her generation almost smote him. Half a century earlier such a room had represented comfort; in some details, as for instance in its bed, it represented luxury; and in half a century Auntie Hamps had learnt nothing from the material progress of civilisation but the use of the hot-water bag; her vanished and forgotten parents would have looked askance at the enervating luxuriousness of her hot-water bag--unknown even to the crude wistful boy Edwin on the mantelpiece. And Auntie Hamps herself was wont as it were to atone for it by using the still tepid water therefrom for her morning toilet instead of having truly hot water brought up from the kitchen. Edwin thought: "Are we happier for these changes brought about by the mysterious force of evolution?" And answered very emphatically: "Yes, we are." He would not for anything have gone back to the austerities of his boyhood.
He rocked gently to and fro in the chair, excited by events and by the novel situation, and he was not dissatisfied with himself. Indeed he was aware of a certain calm complacency, for his commonsense had triumphed over Maggie's devoted silly womanishness. Maggie was for sitting up through the night; she was anxious to wear herself out for no reason whatever; but he had sent her to bed until three o'clock, promising to call her if she should be needed. The exhausted girl was full of sagacity save on that one point of martyrdom to the fullest--apparently with her a point of honour. For the sake of the sensation of having martyrised herself utterly she was ready to imperil her fitness for the morrow. She secretly thought it was unfair to call upon him, a man, to share her fatigues. He regarded himself as her superior in wisdom, and he was relieved that anyone so wise and balanced as Edwin Clayhanger had taken supreme charge of the household organism.
Restless, he got up from the chair and looked at the bed. He had heard no unusual sound therefrom, but to excuse his restlessness he had said: "Suppose some change had occurred and I didn't notice it!" No change had occurred. Auntie Hamps lay like a mite, like a baby forlorn, senile and defenceless, amid the heaped pillows and coverings of the bed. Within the deep gloom of the canopy and the over-arching curtains only her small, soft face was alive; even her hair was hidden in the indentation made by the weight of her head in the pillows. She was unconscious, either in sleep or otherwise,--he could not tell how. And in her unconsciousness the losing but obstinate fight against the power which was dragging her over the edge of eternity still went on. It showed in the apprehensive character of her breathing, which made a little momentary periodic cloud above her face, and in the uneasy muscular movements of the lips and jaws, and in the vague noises in her throat. A tremendous pity for her re-entered his heart, almost breaking it, because she was so beaten, and so fallen from the gorgeousness of her splendour. Even Minnie could have imposed her will upon Auntie Hamps now; each hour she weakened.
He had no more resentment against her on account of Minnie, no accusation to formulate. He was merely grieved, with a compassionate grief, that Auntie Hamps had learnt so little while living so long. He knew that she was cruel only because she was incapable of imagining what it was to be Minnie. He understood. She worshipped God under the form of respectability, but she did worship God. Like all religious votaries she placed religion above morality; hence her chicane, her inveterate deceit and self-deceit. It was with a religious aim that she had concealed from him the estrangement between herself and Clara. The unity of the family was one of her major canons (as indeed it was one of Edwin's). She had a passion for her nephew and nieces. It was a grand passion. Her pride in them must have been as terrific as her longing that they and all theirs should conform to the sole ideal that she comprehended. Undeniably there was something magnificent in her religion--her unscrupulousness in the practice of it, and the mighty consistency of her career. She had lived. He ceased to pity her, for she towered above pity. She was dying, but only for an instant. He would smile at his aunt's primeval notions of a future life, yet he had to admit that his own notions, though far less precise, could not be appreciably less crude. He and she were anyhow at one in the profound and staggering conviction of immortality. Enlightened by that conviction, he was able to reduce the physical and mental tragedy of the death-bed to its right proportions as a transiency between the heroic past and the inconceivable future. And in the stillness of the room and the stillness of the house, perfumed by the abnegation of Maggie and the desolate woe of the ruined Minnie whom the Clayhangers would save, and in the outer stillness of the little street with the Norman church-tower sticking up out of history at the bottom of its slope, Edwin felt uplifted and serene.
He returned to the rocking-chair.
"She's asleep now in some room I've never seen!" he reflected.
He was suddenly thinking of his wife. During the previous night, lying sleepless close to her while she slept soundly, he had reflected long and with increasing pessimism. The solace of Hilda's kiss had proved fleeting. She had not realised--he himself was then only realising little by little--the enormity of the thing she had done. What she had deliberately and obstinately done was to turn him out of his house. No injury that she might have chosen could have touched him more closely, more painfully,--for his house to him was sacred. Her blundering with the servants might be condoned, but what excuse was it possible to find for this precipitate flight to London involving the summary ejectment from the home of him who had created the home and for and by whom the home chiefly existed? True the astounding feat of wrong-headedness had been aided by the mere chance of Maggie's calling (capricious women were always thus lucky!),--Maggie's suggestion and request had given some afterglow of reason to the mad project. But the justification was still far from sufficient. And the odious idea haunted him that, even if Maggie had not called with her tale, Hilda would have persisted in her scheme all the same. Yes, she was capable of that! The argument that George's eyes (of whose condition she had learnt by mere hazard) could not wait until domestic affairs were arranged, was too grotesque to deserve an answer.
Lying thus close to his wife in the dark, he had perceived that the conflict between his individuality and hers could never cease. No diplomatic devices of manner could put an end to it. And he had seen also that as they both grew older and developed more fully, the conflict was becoming more serious. He assumed that he had faults, but he was solemnly convinced that the faults of Hilda were tremendous, essential, and ineradicable. She had a faculty for acting contrary to justice and contrary to sense which was simply monstrous. And it had always been so. Her whole life had been made up of impulsiveness and contumacy in that impulsiveness. Witness the incredible scenes of the strange Dartmoor episode--all due to her stubborn irrationality! The perspective of his marriage was plain to him in the night,--and it ended in a rupture. He had been resolutely blind to Hilda's peculiarities, dismissing incident after incident as an isolated misfortune. But he could be blind no more. His marriage was all of a piece, and he must and would recognise the fact.... The sequel would be a scandal! ... Well, let it be a scandal! As the minutes and hours passed in grim meditation, the more attractive grew the lost freedom of the bachelor and the more ready he felt to face any ordeal that lay between him and it.... And just as it was occurring to him that his proper course was to have fought a terrific open decisive battle with her in front of both Maggie and Ingpen he had fallen asleep.
Upon awaking, barely in time to arouse Hilda, he knew that the mood of the night had not melted away as such moods are apt to melt when the window begins to show a square of silver-grey. The mood was even intensified. Hilda had divined nothing. She never did divine the tortures which she inflicted in his heart. She did not possess the gumption to divine. Her demeanour had been amazing. She averred that she had not slept at all. Instead of cajoling, she bullied. Instead of tacitly admitting that she was infamously wronging him, she had assumed a grievance of her own--without stating it. Once she had said discontentedly about some trifle: "You mightat any rate----" as though the victim should caress the executioner. She had kissed him at departure, but not as usual effusively, and he had suffered the kiss in enmity; and after an unimaginable general upset and confusion, in which George had shown himself strangely querulous, she had driven off with her son,--unconscious, stupidly unaware, that she was leaving a disaster behind her. And last of all Edwin, solitary, had been forced to perform the final symbolic act, that of locking him out of his own sacred home! The affair had transcended belief.
All day at the works his bitterness and melancholy had been terrible, and the works had been shaken with apprehension, for no angry menaces are more disconcerting than those of a man habitually mild. Before evening he had decided to write to his wife from Auntie Hamps's,--a letter cold, unanswerable, crushing, that would confront her unescapably with the alternatives of complete submission or complete separation. The phrases of the letter came into his mind.... He would see who was master.... He had been full of the letter when he entered Auntie Hamps's lobby. But the strange tone in which Maggie had answered his questions about the sick woman had thrust the letter and the crisis right to the back of his mind, where they had uneasily remained throughout the evening. And now in the rocking-chair he was reflecting:
"She's asleep in some room I've never seen!"
He smiled, such a smile, candid, generous, and affectionate, as was Hilda's joy, such a smile as Hilda dwelt on in memory when she was alone. The mood of resentment passed away, vanished like a nightmare at dawn, and like one of his liverish headaches dispersed suddenly after the evening meal. He saw everything differently. He saw that he had been entirely wrong in his estimate of the situation, and of Hilda. Hilda was a mother. She had the protective passion of maternity. She was carried away by her passions; but her passions were noble, marvellous, unique. He himself could never--he thought, humbled--attain to her emotional heights. He was incapable of feeling about anything or anybody as she felt about George. The revelation concerning George's eyesight had shocked her, overwhelmed her with remorse, driven every other idea out of her head. She must atone to George instantly; instantly she must take measures--the most drastic and certain--to secure him from the threatened danger. She could not count the cost till afterwards. She was not a woman in such moments,--she was an instinct, a desire, a ruthless purpose. And as she felt towards George, so she must feel, in other circumstances, towards himself. Her kisses proved it, and her soothing hand when he was unwell. Mrs. Hamps had said: "Eh, dear! What a good mother dear Hilda is!" A sentimental outcry! But there was profound truth in it, truth which the old woman had seen better than he had seen it. "I daresay there never was such a mother--unless it's Clara!" Hyperbole! And yet he himself now began to think that there never could have been such a mother as Hilda. Clara too in her way was wonderful.... Smile as you might, these mothers were tremendous. The mysterious sheen of their narrow and deep lives dazzled him. For the first time, perhaps, he bowed his head to Clara.
But Hilda was far beyond Clara. She was not only a mother but a lover. Would he cut himself off from her loving? Why? For what? To live alone in the arid and futile freedom of a Tertius Ingpen? Such a notion was fatuous. Where lay the difficulty between himself and Hilda? There was no difficulty. How had she harmed him? She had not harmed him. Everything was all right. He had only to understand. He understood. As for her impulsiveness, her wrongheadedness, her bizarre ratiocination,--he knew how to accept them, for was he not a philosopher? They were indeed part of the incomparable romance of existence with these prodigious and tantalising creatures. He admitted that Hilda in some aspects transcended him, but in others he was comfortably confident of his own steady, conquering superiority. He thought of her with the most exquisite devotion. He pictured the secret tenderness of their reunion amid the conventional gloom of Auntie Hamps's death-bed.... He was confident of his ability to manage Hilda, at any rate in the big things,--for example the disputed points of his entry into public activity and their removal from Trafalgar Road into the country. The sturdiness of the male inspired him. At the same time the thought of the dark mood from which he had emerged obscurely perturbed him, like a fearful danger passed; and he argued to himself with satisfaction, and yet not quite with conviction, that he had yielded to Maggie, and not to Hilda, in the affair of the journey to London, and that therefore his masculine marital dignity was intact.
And then he started at a strange sound below, which somehow recalled him to the nervous tension of the house. It was a knocking at the front-door. His heart thumped at the formidable muffled noise in the middle of the night. He jumped up, and glanced at the bed. Auntie Hamps was not wakened. He went downstairs where the gas which he had lighted was keeping watch.
CHAPTER XIX
DEATH AND BURIAL
I
Albert Benbow was at the front-door. Edwin curbed the expression of his astonishment.
"Hello, Albert!"
"Oh! You aren't gone to bed?"
"Not likely. Come in. What's up?"
Albert, with the habit of one instructed never to tread actually on a doorstep lest it should be newly whitened, stepped straight on to the inner mat. He seemed excited, and Edwin feared that he had just learnt of Auntie Hamps's illness and had come in the middle of the night ostensibly to make enquiries, but really to make a grievance of the fact that the Benbows had been "kept in ignorance." He could already hear Albert demanding: "Why have you kept us in ignorance?" It was quite a Benbow phrase.
Edwin shut the door and shut out the dark and windy glimpse of the outer world which had emphasised for a moment the tense seclusion of the house.
"You've heard of course about the accident to Ingpen?" said Albert. His hands were deep in his overcoat pockets; the collar of the thin, rather shabby overcoat was turned up; an old cap adhered to the back of his head. While talking he slowly lifted his feet one after the other, as though desiring to get warmth by stamping but afraid to stamp in the night.
"No, I haven't," said Edwin, with false calmness. "What accident?"
The perspective of events seemed to change; Auntie Hamps's illness to recede, and a definite and familiar apprehension to be supplanted by a fear more formidable because it was a fear of the unknown.
"It was all in the late specialSignal!" Benbow protested, as if his pride had been affronted.
"Well, I haven't seen theSignal. What is it?" And Edwin thought: "Is somebody else dying too?"
"Fly-wheel broke. Ingpen was inspecting the slip-house next to the engine-house. Part of the fly-wheel came through and knocked a loose nut off the blunger right into his groin."
"Whose works?"
Albert answered in a light tone:
"Mine."
"And how's he going on?"
"Well, he's had an operation and Sterling's got the nut out. Of course they didn't know what it was till they got it out. And now Ingpen wants to see you at once. That's why I've come."
"Where is he?"
"At the hospital."
"Pirehill?"
"No. The Clowes--Moorthorne Road, you know."
"Is he going on all right?"
"He's very weak. He can scarcely whisper. But he wants you. I've been up there all the time, practically."
Edwin seized his overcoat from the rack.
"I had a rare job finding ye," Benbow went on. "I'd no idea you weren't all at home. I wakened most of Hulton Street over it. It was Smiths next door came out at last and told me missis and George had gone to London and you were over here."
"I wonder who told them!" Edwin mumbled as Albert helped him with the overcoat. "I must tell Maggie. We've got some illness here, you know."
"Oh?"
"Yes. Auntie. Very sudden. Seemed to get worse to-night. Fact is I was sitting up while Maggie has a bit of sleep. She was going to send round for Clara in the morning. I'll just run up to Mag."
Having thus by judicious misrepresentation deprived the Benbows of a grievance, Edwin moved towards the stairs. Maggie, dressed, already stood at the top of them, alert, anxious, adequate.
"Albert, is that you?"
After a few seconds of quick murmured explanation, Edwin and Albert departed, and as they went Maggie, in a voice doubly harassed but cheerful and oily called out after them how glad she would be, and what a help it would be, if Clara could come round early in the morning.
The small Clowes Hospital was high up in the town opposite the Park, near the station and the railway-cutting and not far from the Moorthorne ridge. Behind its bushes, through which the wet night-wind swished and rustled, it looked still very new and red in the fitful moonlight. And indeed it was scarcely older than the Park and swimming-baths close by, and Bursley had not yet lost its naïve pride in the possession of a hospital of its own. Not much earlier in the decade this town of thirty-five thousand inhabitants had had to send all its "cases" five miles in cabs to Pirehill Infirmary. Albert Benbow, with the satisfaction of a habitué, led Edwin round through an aisle of bushes to the side-entrance for out-patients. He pushed open a dark door, walked into a gaslit vestibule, and with the assured gestures of a proprietor invited Edwin to follow. A fat woman who looked like a char-woman made tidy sat in a windsor-chair in the vestibule, close to a radiator. She signed to Albert as an old acquaintance to go forward, and Albert nodded in the manner of one conspirator to another. What struck Edwin was that this middle-aged woman showed no sign of being in the midst of the unusual. She was utterly casual and matter-of-fact. And Edwin had the sensation of moving in a strange nocturnal world--a world which had always co-existed with his own, but of which he had been till then most curiously ignorant. His passage through the town listening absently to Albert's descriptions of the structural damage to Ingpen and to the works, and Albert's defence against unbrought accusations, had shown him that the silent streets lived long after midnight in many a lighted window here and there and in the movements of mysterious but not furtive frequenters. And he seemed to have been impinging upon half-veiled enigmas of misfortune or of love. At the other end of the thread of adventure was his aunt's harsh bedroom with Maggie stolidly watching the last ebb of senile vitality, and at this end was the hospital, full of novel and disturbing vibrations and Tertius Ingpen waiting to impose upon him some charge or secret.
At the top of the naked stairs which came after a dark corridor was a long naked resounding passage lighted by a tiny jet at either end. A cough from behind a half-open door came echoing out and filled the night and the passage. And then at another door appeared a tall, thin, fair nurse in blue and white, with thin lips and a slight smile hard and disdainful.
"Here's Mr. Clayhanger, nurse!" muttered Albert Benbow, taking off his cap, with a grimace at once sycophantic and grandiose.
Edwin imagined that he knew by sight everybody in the town above a certain social level, but he had no memory of the face of the nurse.
"How is he?" he asked awkwardly, fingering his hat.
The girl merely raised her eyebrows.
"You mustn't stay," said she, in a mincing but rather loud voice that matched her lips.
"Oh no, I won't!"
"I supposeI'dbetter stop outside!" said Benbow.
Edwin followed the nurse into a darkened room, of which the chief article of furniture appeared to be a screen. Behind the screen was a bed, and on the bed in the deep obscurity lay a form under creaseless bedclothes. Edwin first recognised Ingpen's beard, then his visage very pale and solemn, and without the customary spectacles. Of the whole body only the eyes moved. As Edwin approached the bed he cast across Ingpen a shadow from the distant gas.
"Well, old chap!" he began with constraint. "This is a nice state of affairs! How are you getting on?"
Ingpen's enquiring apprehensive dumb glance silenced the clumsy greeting. It was just as if he had rebuked: "This is no time for How d'ye do's." When he had apparently made sure that Edwin was Edwin, Ingpen turned his eyes to the nurse.
"Water," he whispered.
The nurse shook her head.
"Net yet," she replied, with tepid indifference.
Ingpen's eyes remained on her a moment and then went back to Edwin.
"Ed," he whispered, and gazed once more at the nurse, who, looking away from the bed, did not move.
Edwin bent over the bed.
"Ed," Ingpen demanded, speaking very deliberately. "Go to my office. In the top drawer of the desk in the bedroom there's some photos and letters.... Burn them.... Before morning.... Understand?"
Edwin was profoundly stirred. In his emotion was pride at Ingpen's trust, astonishment at the sudden, utterly unexpected revelation, and the thrill of romance.
He thought:
"The man is dying!"
And the tragic sensation of the vigil of the nocturnal world almost overcame him.
"Yes," he said. "Anything else?"
"No."
"What about keys?"
Ingpen gave him another long glance.
"Trousers."
"Where are his clothes?" Edwin asked the nurse, whose lips were ironic.
"Oh! They'll tell you downstairs. You'd better go now."
As he went from the room he could feel Ingpen's glance following him. He raged inwardly against the callousness of the nurse. It seemed monstrous that he should abandon Ingpen for the rest of the night, defenceless, to the cold tyranny of the nurse, whose power over the sufferer was as absolute as that of an eastern monarch, who had never heard of public opinion, over the meanest slave. He could not bear to picture to himself Ingpen and the nurse alone together.
"Isn't he allowed to drink?" he could not help murmuring, at the door.
"Yes. At intervals."
He wanted to chastise the nurse. He imagined an endless succession of sufferers under her appalling, inimical nonchalance. Who had allowed her to be a nurse? Had she become a nurse in order to take some needed revenge against mankind? And then he thought of Hilda's passionate, succouring tenderness when he himself was unwell,--he had not been really ill for years. What was happening to Ingpen could never happen to him, because Hilda stood everlastingly between him and such a horror. He considered that a bachelor was the most pathetic creature on the earth. He was drenched in the fearful, wistful sadness of all life.... The sleeping town; Auntie Hamps on the edge of eternity; Minnie trembling at the menaces of her own body; Hilda lying in some room that he had never seen; and Ingpen...!
"Soon over!" observed Albert Benbow in the corridor.
Edwin could have winced at the words.
"How do you think he is?" asked Albert.
"Don't know!" Edwin replied. "Look here, I've got to get hold of his clothes--downstairs."
"Oh! That's it, is it? Pocket-book! Keys! Eh?"
II
Edwin had once been in Tertius Ingpen's office at the bottom of Crown Square, Hanbridge, but never in the bedroom which Ingpen rented on the top floor of the same building. It had been for seventy or eighty years a building of four squat storeys; but a new landlord, seeing the architectural development of the town as a local metropolis and determined to join in it at a minimum of expense, had knocked the two lower storeys into one, fronted them with fawn-coloured terra cotta, and produced a lofty shop whose rent exceeded the previous rent of the entire house.
The landlord knew that passers-by would not look higher up the façade than the ground-floor, and that therefore any magnificence above that level was merely wasted. The shop was in the occupation of a tea-dealer who gave away beautiful objects such as vases and useful objects such as tea-trays, to all purchasers. Ingpen's office, and a solicitor's office, were on the first floor, formerly the second; the third floor was the headquarters of the Hanbridge and District Ethical Society; the top floor was temporarily unlet, save for Ingpen's room. Nobody except Ingpen slept in the building, and he very irregularly.
The latchkey for the sidedoor was easy to choose in the glittering light of the latest triple-jetted and reflectored gaslamps which the corporation, to match the glories of the new town-hall, had placed in Crown Square. The lock, strange to say, worked easily. Edwin entered somewhat furtively, and as it were guiltily, though in Crown Square and the streets and the other squares visible therefrom, not a soul could be seen. The illuminated clock of the Old Town Hall at the top of the square showed twenty-five minutes to four. Immediately within the door began a new, very long and rather mean staircase, with which Edwin was acquainted. He closed the door, shutting out the light and the town, and struck a match in the empty building. He had walked into Hanbridge from Bursley, and as soon as he began to climb the stairs he was aware of great fatigue, both physical and mental. The calamity to Ingpen had almost driven Auntie Hamps out of his mind; it had not, however, driven Minnie out of his mind. He was gloomy and indignant on behalf of both Ingpen and Minnie. They were both victims. Minnie was undoubtedly a fool, and he was about to learn, perhaps, to what extent Ingpen had been a fool.
Each footstep sounded loud on the boards of deserted house. Having used several matches and arrived at the final staircase, Edwin wondered how he was to distinguish Ingpen's room there from the others without trying keys in all of them till he got to the right one. But on the top landing he had no difficulty, for Ingpen's card was fastened with a drawing-pin on to the first door he saw. A match burnt his fingers and expired just as he was shaking out a likely key from Ingpen's bunch. And then, in the black darkness, he perceived a line of light under the door in front of which he stood. He forgot his fatigue in an instant. His heart leaped. A burglar? Or had Ingpen left the gas burning? Ingpen could not have left the gas burning since, according to Albert Benbow, he had been in Bursley all afternoon. With precautions, and feeling very desperate and yet also craven, he lit a fresh match and managed quietly to open the door, which was not locked.
As soon as he beheld the illuminated interior of the room, all his skin crept and flushed as though he had taken a powerful stimulant. A girl reclined asleep in a small basket lounge-chair by the gas-fire. He could not see her face, which was turned towards the wall and away from the gas-jet that hung from the ceiling over an old desk; but she seemed slim and graceful, and there was something in the abandonment of unconsciousness that made her marvellously alluring. Her hat and gloves had been thrown on the desk, and a cloak lay on a chair. These coloured and intimate objects--extensions of the veritable personality of the girl--had the effect of delightfully completing the furniture of a room which was in fact rather bare. A narrow bed in the far corner, disguised under a green rug as a sofa; a green square of carpet, showing the unpolished boards at the sides; the desk, and three chairs; a primitive hanging wardrobe in another corner, hidden by a bulging linen curtain; a portmanteau; a few unframed prints on the walls; an alarm-clock on the mantelpiece,--there was nothing else in the chamber where Ingpen slept when it was too late, or he was too slack, to go to his proper home. But nothing else was needed. The scene was perfect; the girl rendered it so. And immense envy of, and admiration for, Ingpen surged through Edwin, who saw here the realisation of a dream that was to marriage what poetry is to prose. Ingpen might rail against women and against marriage in a manner exaggerated and indefensible; but he had at any rate known how to arrange his life and how to keep his own counsel. He had all the careless masculine freedom of his condition,--and in the background this exquisite phenomenon! The girl, her trustfulness, her abandonment, her secrecy, that white ear peeping out of her hair,--were his! It was staggering that such romance could exist in the Five Towns, of all places--for Edwin had the vague notion, common to all natives, that his own particular district fell short of full human nature in certain characteristics. For example, he could credit a human nature dying for love in Manchester, but never in the Five Towns. Even the occasional divorces that gave piquancy to life in the Five Towns seemed to lack the mysterious glamour of all other divorces.
He thought:
"Was it because he was expecting her that he sent me? Perhaps the desk was only a blind--and he couldn't tell me any more. Anyhow I shall have to break it to her."
He felt exceedingly awkward and unequal to the situation so startling in its novelty. Yet he did not wish himself away.
As timidly, hat in hand, he went forward into the room, the girl stirred and woke up, to the creaking of the chair.
"Oh! Tert!" she murmured between sleeping and waking.
Edwin did not like her voice. It reminded him of the voice of the nurse whom he had just left.
The girl, looking round, perceived that it was not Tertius Ingpen who had come in. She gave a short, faint scream, then gathered herself together and with a single movement stood up, perfectly collected and on the defensive.
"It's all right! It's all right!" said Edwin. "Mr. Ingpen gave me his keys and asked me to come over and get some papers he wants.... I hope I didn't frighten you. I'd no idea----"
She was old! She was old! That is to say, she was not the girl he had seen asleep. Before his marriage he would have put her age at thirty-two, but now he knew enough to be sure that she must be more than that. She was not graceful in movement. The expression of her pale face was not agreeable. Her gestures were not distinguished. And she could not act her part in the idyll. Moreover her frock was shabby and untidy. But chiefly she was old. Had she been young, Edwin would have excused all the rest. Romance was not entirely destroyed, but very little remained.
He thought, disdainfully, and as if resenting a deception:
"Is this the best he can do?"
And the Five Towns sank back to its ancient humble place in his esteem.
The woman said with a silly nervous giggle:
"I called to see Mr. Ingpen. He wasn't expecting me. And I suppose while I was waiting I must have dropped off to sleep."
It might have been true, but to Edwin it was inexpressibly inane.
She seized her hat and then her cloak.
"I'm sorry to say Mr. Ingpen's had an accident," said Edwin.
She stopped, both hands above her head fingering her hat.
"An accident? Nothing serious?"
"Oh no! I don't think so," he lied. "A machinery accident. They had to take him to the Clowes Hospital at Bursley. I've just come from there."
She asked one or two more questions, all the time hurrying her preparations to leave. But Edwin judged with disgust that she was not deeply interested in the accident. True, he had minimised it, but she ought not to have allowed him to minimise it. She ought to have obstinately believed that it was very grave.
"I do hope he'll soon be all right," she said, snatching at her gloves and going to the door. "Good night!" She gave another silly giggle, preposterous in a woman of her age. Then she stopped. "I think you're gentleman enough not to say anything about me being here," she said, rather nastily. "It was quite an accident. I could easily explain it, but you know what people are!"
What a phrase--"I think you're gentleman enough!"
He blushed and offered the required assurance.
"Can I let you out?" he started forward.
"No, thanks!"
"But you can't open the door."
"Yes I can."
"The stairs are all dark."
"Please don't trouble yourself," she said drily, in the tone of a woman who sees offence in the courtesy of a male travelling companion on the railway.
He heard her stepsdiminuendodown the stairs.
Closing the door, he went to the window, and drew aside the blind. Perhaps she would pass up the Square. But she did not pass up the Square which was peopled by nothing but meek gaslamps under the empire of the glowing clock in the pediment of the Old Town Hall. Where had she gone? Where did she come from? Her accent had no noticeable peculiarity. Was she married, or single, or a widow? Perhaps there was hidden in her some strange and seductive quality which he had missed.... He saw the slim girl again reclining in the basket-chair.... After all, she was a woman, and she had been in Ingpen's room, waiting for him!
Later, seated in front of the open drawer in the old desk, gathering together letters and photographs--photographs of her in adroitly managed poses, taken at Oldham; letters in a woman's hand--he was penetrated to the marrow by the disastrous and yet beautiful infelicity of things. The mere sight of the letters (of which he forebore to decipher a single word, even a signature) nearly made him cry; the photographs were tragic with the intolerable evanescence of life. By the will of Tertius Ingpen helpless on the bed in the hospital, these documents of a passion or of a fancy were to be burnt. Why? Was it true that Ingpen was dying? Better to keep them. No, they must be burnt. He rose, and, with difficulty, burnt them by instalments in a shovel over the tiny fender that enclosed the gas-stove,--the room was soon half full of smoke.... Why had he deceived the woman as to the seriousness of Ingpen's accident? To simplify and mitigate the interview, to save himself trouble; that was all! Well, she would learn soon enough!
His eye caught a print on the wall above the bed,--a classic example of the sentimentality of Marcus Stone: departing cavalier, drooping maiden, terraced garden. It was a dreadful indictment of the Tertius Ingpen who talked so well, with such intellectual aplomb, with such detachment and exceptional cynicism. It was like a ray exposing some secret sinister corner in the man's soul. He had hung up that print because it gave him pleasure! Poor chap! But Edwin loved him. He decided that he would call again at the hospital before returning to Auntie Hamps's. Impossible that the man was dying! If the doctor or the matron had thought he was in danger they would have summoned his relatives. He might be dying. He might be dead. He must have immediately feared death, or he would not have imposed upon Edwin such an errand.... What simple, touching, admirable trust in a friend's loyalty the man had displayed!
Edwin put out the gas-stove, which exploded, lit a match, gave a great yawn, put out the gas, and began the enterprise of leaving the house.
III
"Look here! I must have some tea,now!" said Edwin curtly and yet appealingly to Maggie, who opened the door for him at Auntie Hamps's.
It was nearly eight o'clock. He had been to the hospital again, and, having reported in three words to Ingpen, whose condition was unchanged, had remained there some time. But he had said nothing to Ingpen about the woman. At six o'clock the matron had come into the room, and the nurse thenceforward until seven o'clock, when she went off duty, was a changed girl. Edwin slightly knew the matron, who was sympathetic but strangely pessimistic--considering her healthy, full figure.
"The water's boiling," answered Maggie, in a comforting tone, and disappeared instantly into the kitchen.
Edwin thought:
"There are some things that girl understands!"
She had shown no curiosity, no desire to impart news, because she had immediately comprehended that Edwin was, or imagined himself to be, at the end of his endurance. Maggie, with simple and surpassing wisdom had just said to herself: "He's been out all night, and he's not used to it." For a moment he felt that Maggie was wiser, and more intimately close to him, than anybody else in the world.
"In the dining-room," she called out from the kitchen.
And in the small dining-room there was a fire! It was like a living, welcoming creature. The cloth was laid, the gas was lighted. On the table was beautiful fresh bread and butter. A word, a tone, a glance of his on the previous evening had been enough to bring back the dining-room into use! Happily the wind suited the chimney. He had scarcely sat down in front of the fire when Maggie entered with the teapot. And at the sight of the teapot Edwin felt that he was saved. Before the tea was out of the teapot it had already magically alleviated the desperate sensations of physical fatigue and moral weariness which had almost overcome him on the way from the hospital in the chill and muddy dawn.
"What will you have to eat?" said Maggie.
"Nothing. I couldn't eat to save my life."
"Perhaps you'll have a bit of bread-and-butter later," said Maggie blandly.
He shook his head.
"How is she?"
"Worse," said Maggie. "But she's slept."
"Who's up with her now? Minnie?"
"No. Clara."
"Oh! She's come?"
"She came at seven."
Edwin was drinking the divine tea. After a few gulps he told Maggie briefly about Tertius Ingpen, saying that he had had to go "on business" for Ingpen to Hanbridge.
"Are you all right for the present?" she asked after a few moments.
He nodded. He was eating bread-and-butter.
"You had any sleep at all?" he mumbled, munching.
"Oh yes! A little," she answered cheerfully, leaving the room.
He poured out more tea, and then sat down in the sole easy-chair for a minute's reflection before going upstairs and thence to the works.
Not until he woke up did he realise that there had been any danger of his going to sleep. The earthenware clock on the mantelpiece (a birthday gift from Clara and Albert) showed five minutes past eleven. Putting no reliance on the cheap, horrible clock, he looked at his watch, which had stopped for lack of winding up. The fire was very low. His chief thought was: "It can't possibly be eleven o'clock, because I haven't been down to the works, and I haven't sent word I'm not coming either!" He got up hurriedly and had reached the door when a sound of a voice on the stairs held him still like an enchantment. It seemed to be the voice, eloquent, and indeed somewhat Church-of-England, of the Rev. Christian Flowerdew, the new superintendent of the Bursley Wesleyan Methodist Circuit. The voice said: "I do hope so!" and then offered a resounding remark about the weather being the kind of weather that, bad as it was, people must expect in view of the time of year. Maggie's voice concurred.
As soon as the front-door closed, Edwin peeped cautiously out of the dining-room.
"Who was that?" he murmured.
"Mr. Flowerdew. She wanted him. Albert sent for him early this morning."
Maggie came into the room and shut the door.
"I've been to sleep," said Edwin.
"Yes, I know. I wasn't going to have you disturbed. They're all here."
"Who are all here?"
"Clara and the children. Auntie asked to see all of them. They waited in the drawing-room for Mr. Flowerdew to go. Bert didn't go to school this morning, in case--because it was so far off. Clara fetched the others out of school, except Rupy of course--he doesn't go--"
"Good heavens! I never came across such a morbid lot in my life. I believe they like it."
Clara could be heard marshalling the brood up the stairs.
"You'd better go up," said Maggie persuasively.
"I'd better go to the works--I'm no use here. What time is it?"
"After eleven. I think you'd better go up."
"Does she ask for me?"
"Oh yes. All the time sometimes. But she forgets for a bit."
"Well, anyhow I must wash myself and change my collar."
"All right. Wash yourself, then."
"How is she now?"
"She isn't taking anything."
When Edwin nervously pushed open the bedroom door, the room seemed to be crowded. Over the heads of clustering children towered Clara and Albert. As soon as the watchful Albert caught sight of Edwin, he made a conspiratorial sign and hurried to the door, driving Edwin out again.
"Didn't know you were here," Edwin muttered.
"I say," Albert whispered. "Has she made a will?"
"I don't know."
The bedroom door half opened, and Clara in her shabby morning dress glidingly joined them.
"He doesn't know," said Albert to Clara.
Clara's pretty face scowled a little as she asked sharply and resentfully:
"Then who does know?"
"I should ha' thoughtyou'dknow," said Edwin.
"Me! I like that! She hasn't spoken to me for months, has she, Albert? And she was always frightfully close about all these things."
"About what things?"
"Well, you know."
It was a fact. Auntie Hamps had never discussed her own finance, or her testamentary dispositions, with anybody. And nobody had ever dared to mention such subjects to her.
"Don't you think you'd better ask her?" said Clara. "Albert thinks you ought."
"No, I don't," said Edwin, with curt disdain.
"Well, then I shall," Albert decided.
"So long as you don't do it while I'm there!" Edwin said menacingly. "If you want to ask people about their wills you ought to ask them before they're actually dying. Can't you see you can't worry her about her will now?"
He was intensely disgusted. He thought of Mrs. Hamps's bed, and of Tertius Ingpen's bed, and of the woman at dead of night in Ingpen's room, and of Minnie's case; and the base insensibility of Albert and Clara made him feel sick. He wondered whether any occasion would ever have solemnity enough for them to make them behave with some distinction, some grandeur. For himself, if he could have secured a fortune by breathing one business word to Auntie Hamps just then, he would have let the fortune go.
"There's nothing more to be said," Clara murmured.
In the glance of both Clara and Albert Edwin saw hatred and envy. Clara especially had never forgiven him for preventing their father from pouring money into that sieve, her husband, nor for Hilda's wounding tongue, nor for his worldly success. And they both suspected that either Maggie or Auntie Hamps had told him of Albert's default in the payment of interest, and so fear was added to their hatred and envy.
They all entered the bedroom, the children having been left alone only a few seconds. Rupert, wearing a new blue overcoat with gilt buttons, had partially scrambled on to the bed; the pale veiled hands of Auntie Hamps could be seen round his right hand; Rupert had grown enormous, and had already utterly forgotten the time when he was two years old. The others, equally altered, stood two on either side of the bed,--Bert and young Clara to the right, and Amy and Lucy to the left. Lucy was crying and Amy was benignantly wiping her eyes. Bert, a great lump of a boy, was to leave school at Christmas, but he was still ranked with the other children as a child. Young Clara sharply and Bert heavily turned round to witness the entrance of their elders.
"Oh! Here's Uncle Edwin!"
"Edwin!"
"Yes, Auntie!"
The moral values of the room were instantly changed by the tone in which Auntie Hamps had murmured "Edwin." All the Benbows knew, and Edwin himself knew, that a personage of supreme importance in Auntie Hamps's eyes had come into the scene. The Benbows became secondary, and even Auntie Hamps's grasp of Rupert's hand loosened, and, having already kissed her, the child slipped off the bed. Edwin approached, and over the heads of the children, and between the great darkening curtains, he could at last see the face of the dying woman like a senile doll's face amid the confusion of wrappings and bedclothes. The deep-set eyes seemed to burn beneath the white forehead and sparse grey hair; the cheeks, still rounded, were highly flushed over a very small part of their surface; the mouth, always open, was drawn in, and the chin, still rounded like the cheeks, protruded. The manner of Auntie Hamps's noisy breathing, like the puzzled gaze of her eyes, indicated apprehension of the profoundest, acutest sort.
"Eh!" said she, in a somewhat falsetto voice, jerky and excessively feeble. "I thought--I'd--lost you." Her hand was groping about.
"No, no," said Edwin, leaning over between young Clara and Rupert.
"She's feeling for your hand, Edwin," said Clara.
He quickly took her hot, brittle fingers; they seemed to cling to his for essential support.
"Have you--been to the works?" Auntie Hamps asked the question as though the answer to it would end all trouble.
"No," he said. "Not yet."
"Eh! That's right! That's right!" she murmured, apparently much impressed by a new proof of Edwin's wisdom.
"I've had a sleep."
"What?"
"I've been having a sleep," he repeated more loudly.
"Eh! That's right! That's right.... I'm so glad--the children have been to see me.... Amy--did you kiss me?" Auntie Hamps looked at Amy hard, as if for the first time.
"Yes, Auntie."
And then Amy began to cry.
"Better take them away," Edwin suggested aside to Albert. "It's as much as she can stand. The parson's only just gone, you know."
Albert, obedient, gave the word of command, and the room was full of movement.
"Eh, children--children!" Auntie Hamps appealed.
Everybody stood stockstill, gazing attendant.
"Eh, children, bless you all for coming. If you grow up--as good as your mother--it's all I ask--all I ask.... Your mother and I--have never had a cross word--have we, mother?"
"No, auntie," said Clara, with a sweet, touching smile that accentuated the fragile charm of her face.
"Never--since mother was--as tiny as you are."
Auntie Hamps looked up at the ceiling during a few strained breaths, and then smiled for an instant at the departing children, who filed out of the room. Rupert loitered behind, gazing at his mother. The mere contrast between the infant so healthy and the dying old woman was pathetic to Edwin. Clara, with an exquisite reassuring gesture and smile picked up the stout Rupert and kissed him and carried him to the door, while Auntie Hamps looked at mother and son, ecstatic.
"Edwin!"
"Yes, Auntie?"
They were alone now. She had not loosed his hand. Her voice was very faint, and he bent over her still lower in the alcove of the curtains, which seemed to stretch very high above them.
"Have you heard from Hilda?"
"Not yet. By the second post, perhaps."
"It's about George's eyes--isn't it?"
"Yes."
"She's done quite right--quite right. It's just--like Hilda. I do hope--and pray--the boy's eyesight--is safe."
"Oh yes!" said Edwin. "Safe enough."
"You really think so?" She had the air of hanging on his words.
He nodded.
"What a blessing!" She sighed deeply with relief.
Edwin thought:
"I believe her relations must have been her passion." And he was impressed by the intensity of that passion.
"Edwin!"
"Yes, Auntie."
"Has--that girl--gone yet?"
"Who?" he questioned, and added more softly: "Minnie d'you mean?" His own voice sounded too powerful, too healthy and dominating, in comparison with her failing murmurs.
Auntie Hamps nodded. "Yes--Minnie."
"Not yet."
"She's going?"
"Yes."
"Because I can't trust--Maggie--to see to it."
"I'll see to it."
"Has she done--the silvers--d'you know?"
"She's doing them," answered Edwin, who thought it would be best to carry out the deception with artistic completeness.
"She needn't have her dinner before she goes."
"No?"
"No." Auntie Hamps's face and tone hardened. "Why should she?"
"All right."
"And if she asks--for her wages--tell her--I say there's nothing due--under the circumstances."
"All right, Auntie," Edwin agreed, desperate.
Maggie, followed by Clara, softly entered the room. Auntie Hamps glanced at them with a certain cautious suspicion, as though one or other of them was capable of thwarting her in the matter of Minnie. Then her eyes closed, and Edwin was aware of a slackening of her hold on his hand. The doctor, who called half an hour later, said that she might never speak again, and she never did. Her last conscious moments were moments of satisfaction.
Edwin slowly released his hand.
"Where's Albert?" he asked Clara, merely for the sake of saying something.
"He's taking the children home, and then he's going to the works. He ought to have gone long ago. There's a dreadful upset there."
"I suppose there is," said Edwin, who had forgotten that the fly-wheel accident must have almost brought Albert's manufactory to a standstill. And he wondered whether it was the family instinct, or anxiety about Auntie Hamps's will, that had caused Albert to absent himself from business on such a critical morning.
"I ought to go too," he muttered, as a full picture of a lithographic establishment masterless swept into his mind.
"Have you telegraphed to Hilda?" Clara demanded.
"No."
"Haven't you!"
"What's the use?"
"Well, I should have thought you would."
"Oh, no!" he said, falsely mild. "I shall write." He was immensely glad that Hilda was not present in the house to complicate still further the human equation.
Maggie was silently examining the face obscured in the gloom of the curtains.
Instead of remaining late that night at the works, Edwin came back to the house before six o'clock. He had had word that the condition of Tertius Ingpen was still unchanged. Clara had gone home to see to her children's evening meal. Maggie sat alone in the darkened bedroom, where Auntie Hamps, her features a mere pale blur between the over-arching curtains, still withheld the secret of her soul's reality from the world. Even in the final unconsciousness there was something grandiose which lingered from her crowning magnificent deceptions and obstinate effort to safeguard the structure of society. The sublime obstinacy of the woman had transformed hypocrisy into a virtue, and not the imminence of the infinite unknown had sufficed to make her apostate to the steadfast principles of her mortal career.
"What about to-night?" Edwin asked.
"Oh! Clara and I will manage."
There was a tap at the door. Edwin opened it. Minnie, abashed but already taking courage, stood there blinking with a letter in her hand. "Ah!" he breathed. Hilda's scrawling calligraphy was on the envelope.
The letter read: "Darling boy. George has influenza, Charlie says. Temp. 102 anyway. So of course he can't go out to-morrow. I knew this morning there was something wrong with him. Janet and Charlie send their love. Your ever loving wife, Hilda."
He was exceedingly uplifted and happy and exhausted. Hilda's handwriting moved him. The whole missive was like a personal emanation from her. It lived with her vitality. It fought for the mastery of the household interior against the mysterious, far-reaching spell of the dying woman. "Your loving wife." Never before, during their marriage, had she written a phrase so comforting and exciting. He thought: "My faith in her is never worthy of her." And his faith leaped up and became worthy of her.
"George has got influenza," he said indifferently.
"George! But influenza's very serious for him, isn't it?" Maggie showed alarm.
"Why should it be?"
"Considering he nearly died of it at Orgreaves'!"
"Oh!Then! ... He'll be all right."
But Maggie had put fear into Edwin,--a superstitious fear. Influenza indeed might be serious for George. Suppose he died of it. People did die of influenza. Auntie Hamps--Tertius Ingpen--and now George! ... All these anxieties mingling with his joy in the thought of Hilda! And all the brooding rooms of the house waiting in light or in darkness for a decisive event!
"I must go and lie down," he said. He could contain no more sensations.
"Do," said Maggie.