Kitabı oku: «These Twain», sayfa 5

"I can't wake him," said Hilda, back in the drawing-room.

"What do you want to wake him for, foolish girl?" Edwin demanded.

She enjoyed being called "foolish girl," but she was not to be tranquillised.

"Do you think he is in bed?" she questioned, before the whole remaining company, and the dread suspicion was out!

After more journeys upstairs, and more bangings, and essays with keys, and even attempts at lock-picking, Hilda announced that George's room must be besieged from its window. A ladder was found, and interested visitors went into the back-entry, by the kitchen, to see it reared and hear the result. Edwin thought that the cook in the kitchen looked as guilty as he himself felt, though she more than once asseverated her belief that Master George was safely in bed. The ladder was too short. Edwin mounted it, and tried to prise himself on to the window-sill, but could not.

"Here, let me try!" said Ingpen, joyous.

Ingpen easily succeeded. He glanced through the open window into George's bedroom, and then looked down at the upturned faces, and Ada's apron, whitely visible in the gloom.

"He's here all right."

"Oh, good!" said Hilda. "Is he asleep?"

"Yes."

"He deserves to be wakened," she laughed.

"You see what a foolish girl you've been," said Edwin affectionately.

"Never mind!" she retorted. "You couldn't get on the window. And you were just as upset as anybody. Do you think I don't know? Thank you, Mr. Ingpen."

"Is he really there?" Edwin whispered to Ingpen as soon as he could.

"Yes. And asleep, too!"

"I wonder how the deuce he slipped in. I'll bet anything those servants have been telling a lot of lies for him. He pulls their hair down and simply does what he likes with them."

Edwin was now greatly reassured, but he could not quite recover from the glimpse he had had of George's capacity for leading a double life. Sardonically he speculated whether the heavenly penknife would be brought to his notice by its owner, and if so by what ingenious method.

III

The final sensation was caused by the arrival, in a nearly empty drawing-room, of plump Maggie, nervous, constrained, and somewhat breathless.

"Bert has turned up," she said. "Clara thought I'd better come along and tell you. She felt sure you'd like to know."

"Well, that's all right then," Hilda replied perfunctorily, indicating that Clara's conceited assumption of a universal interest in her dull children was ridiculous.

Edwin asked:

"Did the kid say where he'd been?"

"Been running about the streets. They don't know what's come over him-because, you see, he'd actually gone to bed once. Albert is quite puzzled; but he says he'll have it out of him before he's done."

"When he does get it out of him," thought Edwin again, "there will be a family row and George will be indicted as the corrupter of innocence."

Maggie would not stay a single moment. Hilda attentively accompanied her to the hall. The former and the present mistress of the house kissed with the conventional signs of affection. But the fact that one had succeeded the other seemed to divide them. Hilda was always lying in wait for criticism from Maggie, ready to resent it; Maggie divined this and said never a word. The silence piqued Hilda as much as outspoken criticism would have annoyed her. She could not bear it.

"How do you like my new stair-carpet?" she demanded defiantly.

"Very nice! Very nice, I'm sure!" Maggie replied without conviction. And added, just as she stepped outside the front-door, "You've made a lot of changes." This was the mild, good-natured girl's sole thrust, and it was as effective as she could have wished.

Everybody had gone except the two Orgreaves and Tertius Ingpen.

"I don't know about you, Johnnie, but I must go," said Janet Orgreave when Hilda came back.

"Hold on, Jan!" Johnnie protested. "You're forgetting those duets you are to try with Ingpen."

"Really?"

"Duets!" cried Hilda, instantly uplifted and enthusiastic. "Oh, do let's have some music!"

Ingpen by arrangement with the Orgreaves had brought some pianoforte duets. They were tied to his bicycle. He was known as an amateur of music. Edwin, bidding Ingpen not to move, ran out into the garden to get the music from the bicycle. Johnnie ran after him through the French window.

"I say!" Johnnie called in a low voice.

"What's up?" Edwin stopped for him.

"I've a piece of news for you. About that land you've set your heart on, down at Shawport! … It can be bought cheap-at least the old man says it's cheap-whatever his opinion may be worth. I was telling him about your scheme for having a new printing works altogether. Astonishing how keen he is! If I'd had a plan of the land, I believe he'd have sat down and made sketches at once."

Johnnie (with his brother Jimmie) was in partnership with old Orgreave as an architect.

"'Set my heart on?'" Edwin mumbled, intimidated as usual by a nearer view of an enterprise which he had himself conceived and which had enchanted him from afar. "'Set my heart on?'"

"Well, had you, or hadn't you?"

"I suppose I had," Edwin admitted. "Look here, I'll drop in and see you to-morrow morning."

"Right!"

Together they detached the music from the bicycle, and, as Edwin unrolled it and rolled it the other side out to flatten it, they returned silently through the dark wind-stirred garden into the drawing-room.

There were now the two Orgreaves, Tertius Ingpen, and Hilda and Edwin in the drawing-room.

"We will now begin the evening," said Ingpen, as he glanced at the music.

All five were conscious of the pleasant feeling of freedom, intimacy, and mutual comprehension which animates a small company that by self-selection has survived out of a larger one. The lateness of the hour aided their zest. Even the more staid among them perceived as by a revelation that it did not in fact matter, once in a way, if they were tired and inefficient on the morrow, and that too much regularity of habit was bad for the soul. Edwin had brought in a tray from the dining-room, and rearranged the chairs according to Hilda's caprice, and was providing cushions to raise the bodies of the duet-players to the proper height. Janet began to excuse herself, asserting that if there was one member of her family who could not play duets, she was that member, that she had never seen this Dvorak music before, and that if they had got her brother Tom, or her elder sister Marion, or even Alicia, – etc., etc.

"We are quite accustomed to these formal preliminaries from duet-players, Miss Orgreave," said Ingpen. "I never do them myself, – not because I can play well, but because I am hardened. Now shall we start? Will you take the treble or the bass?"

Janet answered with eager modesty that she would take the bass.

"It's all one to me," said Ingpen, putting on spectacles; "I play either equally badly. You'll soon regret leaving the most important part to me. However…! Clayhanger, will you turn over?"

"Er-yes," said Edwin boldly. "But you'd better give me the tip."

He knew a little about printed music, from his experiences as a boy when his sisters used to sing two-part songs. That is to say, he had a vague idea "where a player was" on a page. But the enterprise of turning over Dvorak's "Legends" seemed to him critically adventurous. Dvorak was nothing but a name to him; beyond the correct English method of pronouncing that name, he had no knowledge whatever of the subject in hand.

Then the performance of the "Legends" began. Despite halts, hesitations, occasional loud insistent chanting of the time, explanations between the players, many wrong notes by Ingpen, and a few wrong notes by Janet, and one or two enormous misapprehensions by Edwin, the performance was a success, in that it put a spell on its public, and permitted the loose and tender genius of Dvorak to dominate the room.

"Play that again, will you?" said Hilda, in a low dramatic voice, at the third "Legend."

"We will," Ingpen answered. "And we'll play it better."

Edwin had the exquisite sensation of partially comprehending music whose total beauty was beyond the limitations of his power to enjoy-power, nevertheless, which seemed to grow each moment. Passages entirely intelligible and lovely would break at intervals through the veils of general sound and ravish him. All his attention was intensely concentrated on the page. He could hear Ingpen breathing hard. Out of the corner of his eye he was aware of Johnnie Orgreave on the sofa making signs to Hilda about drinks, and pouring out something for her, and something for himself, without the faintest noise. And he was aware of Ada coming to the open door and being waved away to bed by her mistress.

"Well," he said, when the last "Legend" was played. "That's a bit of the right sort-no mistake." He was obliged to be banal and colloquial.

Hilda said nothing at all. Johnnie, who had waited for the end in order to strike a match, showed by two words that he was an expert listener to duets. Tertius Ingpen was very excited and pleased. "More tricky than difficult, isn't it-to read?" he said privately to his fellow-performer, who concurred. Janet also was excited in her fashion. But even amid the general excitement Ingpen had to be judicious.

"Delightful stuff, of course," he said, pulling his beard. "But he's not a great composer you know, all the same."

"He'll do to be going on with," Johnnie murmured.

"Oh, yes! Delightful! Delightful!" Ingpen repeated warmly, removing his spectacles. "What a pity we can't have musical evenings regularly!"

"But we can!" said Hilda positively. "Let's have them here. Every week!"

"A great scheme!" Edwin agreed with enthusiasm, admiring his wife's initiative. He had been a little afraid that the episode of George had upset her for the night, but he now saw that she had perfectly recovered from it.

"Oh!" Ingpen paused. "I doubt if I could come every week. I could come once a fortnight."

"Well, once a fortnight then!" said Hilda.

"I suppose Sunday wouldn't suit you?"

Edwin challenged him almost fiercely:

"Why won't it suit us? It will suit us first-class."

Ingpen merely said, with quiet delicacy:

"So much the better… We might go all through the Mozart fiddle sonatas."

"And who's your violinist?" asked Johnnie.

"I am, if you don't mind." Ingpen smiled. "If your sister will take the piano part."

Hilda exclaimed admiringly:

"Do you play the violin, too, Mr. Ingpen?"

"I scrape it. Also the tenor. But my real instrument is the clarinet." He laughed. "It seems odd," he went on with genuine scientific unegotistic interest in himself. "But d'you know I thoroughly enjoy playing the clarinet in a bad orchestra whenever I get the chance. When I happen to have a free evening I often wish I could drop in at a theatre and play rotten music in the band. It's better than nothing. Some of us are born mad."

"But Mr. Ingpen," said Janet Orgreave anxiously, after this speech had been appreciated. "I have never played those Mozart sonatas."

"I am glad to hear it," he replied with admirable tranquillity. "Neither have I. I've often meant to. It'll be quite a sporting event. But of course we can have a rehearsal if you like."

The project of the musical evenings was discussed and discussed until Janet, having vanished silently upstairs, reappeared with her hat and cloak on.

"I can go alone if you aren't ready, Johnnie," said she.

Johnnie yawned.

"No. I'm coming."

"I also must go-I suppose," said Ingpen.

They all went into the hall. Through the open door of the dining-room, where one gas-jet burned, could be seen the rich remains of what had been "light refreshments" in the most generous interpretation of the term.

Ingpen stopped to regard the spectacle, fingering his beard.

"I was just wondering," he remarked, with that strange eternal curiosity about himself, "whether I'd had enough to eat. I've got to ride home."

"Well, what have you had?" Johnnie quizzed him.

"I haven't had anything," said Ingpen, "except drink."

Hilda cried.

"Oh! You poor sufferer! I am ashamed!" And led him familiarly to the table.

IV

Edwin was kept at the front-door some time by Johnnie Orgreave, who resumed as he was departing the subject of the proposed new works, and maintained it at such length that Janet, tired of waiting on the pavement, said that she would walk on. When he returned to the dining-room, Ingpen and Hilda were sitting side by side at the littered table, and the first words that Edwin heard were from Ingpen:

"It cost me a penknife. But it was dirt cheap at the price. You can't expect to be the Almighty for much less than a penknife." Seeing Edwin, he added with a nonchalant smile: "I've told Mrs. Clayhanger all about the answer to prayer. I thought she ought to know."

Edwin laughed awkwardly, saying to himself:

"Ingpen, my boy, you ought to have thought of my position first. You've been putting your finger into a rather delicate piece of mechanism. Supposing she cuts up rough with me afterwards for hiding it from her all this time! … I'm living with her. You aren't."

"Of course," Ingpen added. "I've sworn the lady to secrecy."

Hilda said:

"I knew all the time there was something wrong."

And Edwin thought:

"No, you didn't. And if he hadn't happened to tell you about the thing, you'd have been convinced that you'd been alarming yourself for nothing."

But he only said, not certain of Hilda's humour, and anxious to placate her:

"There's no doubt George ought to be punished."

"Nothing of the kind! Nothing of the kind!" Ingpen vivaciously protested. "Why, bless my soul! The kids were engaged in a religious work. They were busy with someone far more important than any parents." And after a pause, reflectively: "Curious thing, the mentality of a child! I doubt if we understand anything about it."

Hilda smiled, but said naught.

"May I enquire what there is in that bottle?" Ingpen asked.

"Benedictine."

"Have some, Mr. Ingpen."

"I will if you will, Mrs. Clayhanger."

Edwin raised his eyebrows at his wife.

"You needn't look at me!" said Hilda. "I'm going to have some."

Ingpen smacked his lips over the liqueur.

"It's a very bad thing late at night, of course. But I believe in giving your stomach something to think about. I never allow my digestive apparatus to boss me."

"Quite right, Mr. Ingpen."

They touched glasses, without a word, almost instinctively.

"Well," thought Edwin, "for a chap who thinks women ought to be behind the veil…!"

"Be a man, Clayhanger, and have some."

Edwin shook his head.

With a scarcely perceptible movement of her glass, Hilda greeted her husband, peeping out at him as it were for a fraction of a second in a glint of affection. He was quite happy. They were all seated close together, Edwin opposite the other two at the large table. The single gas-jet, by the very inadequacy with which it lighted the scene of disorder, produced an effect of informal homeliness and fellowship that warmed the heart. Each of the three realised with pleasure that a new and promising friendship was in the making. They talked at length about the Musical Evenings, and Edwin said that he should buy some music, and Hilda asked him to obtain a history of music that Ingpen described with some enthusiasm, and the date of the first evening was settled, – Sunday week. And after uncounted minutes Ingpen remarked that he presumed he had better go.

"I have to cycle home," he announced once more.

"To-night?" Hilda exclaimed.

"No. This morning."

"All the way to Axe?"

"Oh, no! I'm three miles this side of Axe. It's only six and a half miles."

"But all those hills!"

"Pooh! Excellent for the muscles of the calf."

"Do you live alone, Mr. Ingpen?"

"I have a sort of housekeeper."

"In a cottage?"

"In a cottage."

"But what do you do-all alone?"

"I cultivate myself."

And Hilda, in a changed tone, said:

"How wise you are!"

"Rather inconvenient, being out there, isn't it?" Edwin suggested.

"It may be inconvenient sometimes for my job. But I can't help that. I give the State what I consider fair value for the money it pays me, and not a grain more. I've got myself to think about. There are some things I won't do, and one of them is to live all the time in a vile hole like the Five Towns. I won't do it. I'd sooner be a blooming peasant on the land."

As he was a native he had the right to criticise the district without protest from other natives.

"You're quite right as to the vile hole," said Hilda with conviction.

"I don't know-" Edwin muttered. "I think old Bosley isn't so bad."

"Yes. But you're an old stick-in-the-mud, dearest," said Hilda. "Mr. Ingpen has lived away from the district, and so have I. You haven't. You're no judge. We know, don't we, Mr. Ingpen?"

When, Ingpen having at last accumulated sufficient resolution to move and get his cap, they went through the drawing-room to the garden, they found that rain was falling.

"Never mind!" said Ingpen, lifting his head sardonically in a mute indictment of the heavens. "I have my mack."

Edwin searched out the bicycle and brought it to the window, and Hilda stuck a hat on his head. Leisurely Ingpen clipped his trousers at the ankle, and unstrapped a mackintosh cape from the machine, and folded the strap. Leisurely he put on the cape, and gazed at the impenetrable heavens again.

"I can make you up a bed, Mr. Ingpen."

"No, thanks. Oh, no, thanks! The fact is, I rather like rain."

Leisurely he took a box of fusees from his pocket, and lighted his lamp, examining it as though it contained some hidden and perilous defect. Then he pressed the tyres.

"The back tyre'll do with a little more air," he said thoughtfully. "I don't know if my pump will work."

It did work, but slowly. After which, gloves had to be assumed.

"I suppose I can get out this way. Oh! My music! Never mind, I'll leave it."

Then with a sudden access of ceremoniousness he bade adieu to Hilda; no detail of punctilio was omitted from the formality.

"Good-bye. Many thanks."

"Good-bye. Thank you!"

Edwin preceded the bicyclist and the bicycle round the side of the house to the front-gate at the corner of Hulton Street and Trafalgar Road.

In the solemn and chill nocturnal solitude of rain-swept Hulton Street, Ingpen straddled the bicycle, with his left foot on one raised pedal and the other on the pavement; and then held out a gloved hand to Edwin.

"Good-bye, old chap. See you soon."

Much good-will and appreciation and hope was implicit in that rather casual handshake.

He sheered off strongly down the dark slope of Hulton Street in the rain, using his ankles with skill in the pedal-stroke. The man's calves seemed to be enormously developed. The cape ballooned out behind his swiftness, and in a moment he had swerved round the flickering mournful gas-lamp at the bottom of the mean new street and was gone.

CHAPTER VI
HUSBAND AND WIFE

I

"I'm upstairs," Hilda called in a powerful whisper from the head of the stairs as soon as Edwin had closed and bolted the front-door.

He responded humorously. He felt very happy, lusty, and wideawake. The evening had had its contretemps, its varying curve of success, but as a whole it was a triumph. And, above all, it was over, – a thing that had had to be accomplished and that had been accomplished, with dignity and effectiveness. He walked in ease from room to lighted empty room, and the splendid waste of gas pleased him, arousing something royal that is at the bottom of generous natures. In the breakfast-room especially the gas had been flaring to no purpose for hours. "Her room, her very own room!" He wondered indulgently when, if ever, she would really make it her own room by impressing her individuality upon it. He knew she was always meaning to do something drastic to the room, but so far she had got no further than his portrait. Child! Infant! Wayward girl! … Still the fact of the portrait on the mantelpiece touched him.

He dwelt tenderly on the invisible image of the woman upstairs. It was marvellous how she was not the Hilda he had married. The new Hilda had so overlaid and hidden the old, that he had positively to make an effort to recall what the old one was, with her sternness and her anxious air of responsibility. But at the same time she was the old Hilda too. He desired to be splendidly generous, to environ her with all luxuries, to lift her clear above other women; he desired the means to be senselessly extravagant for her. To clasp on her arm a bracelet whose cost would keep a workingman's family for three years would have delighted him. And though he was interested in social schemes, and had a social conscience, he would sooner have bought that bracelet, and so purchased the momentary thrill of putting it on her capricious arm, than have helped to ameliorate the lot of thousands of victimised human beings. He had Hilda in his bones and he knew it, and he knew that it was a grand and a painful thing.

Nevertheless he was not without a considerable self-satisfaction, for he had done very well by Hilda. He had found her at the mercy of the world, and now she was safe and sheltered and beloved, and made mistress of a house and home that would stand comparison with most houses and homes. He was proud of his house; he always watched over it; he was always improving it; and he would improve it more and more; and it should never be quite finished.

The disorder in it, now, irked him. He walked to and fro, and restored every piece of furniture to its proper place, heaped the contents of the ash-trays into one large ash-tray, covered some of the food, and locked up the alcohol. He did this leisurely, while thinking of the woman upstairs, and while eating two chocolates, – not more, because he had notions about his stomach. Then he shut and bolted the drawing-room window, and opened the door leading to the cellar steps and sniffed, so as to be quite certain that the radiator furnace was not setting the house on fire. And then he extinguished the lights, and the hall-light last of all, and his sole illumination was the gas on the first-floor landing inviting him upstairs.

Standing on the dark stairs, on his way to bed, eager and yet reluctant to mount, he realised the entity of the house. He thought of the astounding and mysterious George, and of those uncomprehended beings, Ada and the cook in their attic, sleeping by the side of the portrait of a fireman in uniform. He felt sure that one or both of them had been privy to George's unlawful adventures, and he heartily liked them for shielding the boy. And he thought of his wife, moving about in the bedroom upon which she had impressed her individuality. He went upstairs… Yes, he should proceed with the enterprise of the new works. He had the courage for it now. He was rich, according to Bursley ideas, – he would be far richer… He gave a faint laugh at the memory of George's objection to Bert's choice of a bicycle as a gift from heaven.

II

Hilda was brushing her hair. The bedroom seemed to be full of her and the disorder of her multitudinous things. Whenever he asked why a particular item of her goods was in a particular spot-the spot appearing to him to have been bizarrely chosen-she always proved to her own satisfaction, by a quite improvised argument, that that particular spot was the sole possible spot for that particular item. The bedroom was no longer theirs-it was hers. He picnicked in it. He didn't mind. In fact he rather liked the picnic. It pleased him to exercise his talent for order and organisation, so as to maintain his own comfort in the small spaces which she left to him. To-night the room was in a divine confusion. He accepted it with pleasure. The beds had not been turned down, because it was improper to turn them down when they were to be used for the deposit of strangers' finery. On Edwin's bed now lay the dress which Hilda had taken off. It was a most agreeable object on the bed, and seemed even richer and more complex there than on Hilda. He removed it carefully to a chair. An antique diaphanous shawl remained, which was unfamiliar to him.

"What's this shawl?" he asked. "I've never seen this shawl before. What is it?"

Hilda was busy, her bent head buried in hair.

"Oh, Edwin, what an old fusser you are!" she mumbled. "What shawl?"

He held it up.

"Someone must have left it."

He proceeded with the turning down of his bed. Then he sat on a chair to regard Hilda.

When she had done her hair she padded across the room and examined the shawl.

"What a precious thing!" she exclaimed. "It's Mrs. Fearns's. She must have taken it off to put her jacket on, and then forgotten it. But I'd no idea how good it was. It's genuine old. I wonder how it would suit me?"

She put it round her shoulders, and then stood smiling, posing, bold, provocative, for his verdict. The whiteness of her deshabille showed through the delicate pattern and tints of the shawl, with a strange effect. For him she was more than a woman; she was the incarnation of a sex. It was marvellous how all she did, all her ideas and her gestures, were so intensely feminine, so sure to perturb or enchant him. Nervously he began to wind his watch. He wanted to spring up and kiss her because she was herself. But he could not. So he said:

"Come here, chit. Let me look at that shawl."

She obeyed. She knelt acquiescent. He put his watch back into his pocket, and fingered the shawl.

Then she said:

"I suppose one'll be allowed to grumble at Georgie for locking his bedroom door." And she said it with a touch of mockery in her clear, precise voice, as though twitting him, and Ingpen too, about their absurd theoretical sense of honour towards children. And there was a touch of fine bitterness in her voice also, – a reminiscence of the old Hilda. Incalculable creature! Who could have guessed that she would make such a remark at such a moment? In his mind he dashed George to pieces. But as a wise male he ignored all her implications and answered casually, mildly, with an affirmative.

She went on:

"What were you talking such a long time to Johnnie Orgreave about?"

"Talking a long time to Johnnie Orgreave? Oh! D'you mean at the front-door? Why, it wasn't half a minute! He happened to mention a piece of land down at Shawport that I had a sort of a notion of buying."

"Buying? What for?" Her tone hardened.

"Well, supposing I had to build a new works?"

"You never told me anything about it."

"I've only just begun to think of it myself. You see, if I'm to go in for lithography as it ought to be gone in for, I can't possibly stay at the shop. I must have more room, and a lot more. And it would be cheaper to build than to rent."

She stood up.

"Why go in more for lithography?"

"You can't stand still in business. Must either go forward or go back."

"It seems to me it's very risky. I wondered what you were hiding from me."

"My dear girl, I was not hiding anything from you," he protested.

"Whose land is it?"

"It belongs to Tobias Hall's estate."

"Yes, and I've no doubt the Halls would be very glad to get rid of it. Who told you about it?"

"Johnnie."

"Of course it would be a fine thing for him too."

"But I'd asked him if he knew of any land going cheap."

She shrugged her shoulders, and shrugged away the disinterestedness of all Orgreaves.

"Anyone could get the better of you," she said.

He resented this estimate of himself as a good-natured simpleton. He assuredly did not want to quarrel, but he was obliged to say:

"Oh! Could they?"

An acerbity scarcely intentional somehow entered into his tone. As soon as he heard it he recognised the tone as the forerunner of altercations.

"Of course!" she insisted, superiorly, and then went on: "We're all right as we are. We spend too much money, but I daresay we're all right. If you go in for a lot of new things you may lose all we've got, and then where shall we be?"

In his heart he said to her:

"What's it got to do with you? You manage your home, and I'll manage my business! You know nothing at all about business. You're the very antithesis of business. Whatever business you've ever had to do with you've ruined. You've no right to judge and no grounds for judgment. It's odious of you to asperse any of the Orgreaves. They were always your best friends. I should never have met you if it hadn't been for them. And where would you be now without me? Trying to run some wretched boarding-house and probably starving. Why do you assume that I'm a d-d fool? You always do. Let me tell you that I'm one of the most common-sense men in this town, and everybody knows it except you. Anyhow I was clever enough to get you out of a mess… You knew I was hiding something from you, did you? I wish you wouldn't talk such infernal rot. And moreover I won't have you interfering in my business. Other wives don't, and you shan't. So let that be clearly understood." In his heart he was very ill-used and very savage.

But he only said:

"Well, we shall see."

She retorted:

"Naturally if you've made up your mind, there's no more to be said."

He broke out viciously:

"I've not made up my mind. Don't I tell you I've only just begun to think about it?"

He was angry. And now that he actually was angry, he took an almost sensual pleasure in being angry. He had been angry before, though on a smaller scale, with less provocation, and he had sworn that he would never be angry again. But now that he was angry again, he gloomily and fiercely revelled in it.

Hilda silently folded up the shawl, and, putting it into a drawer of the wardrobe, shut the drawer with an irritatingly gentle click… Click! He could have killed her for that click… She seized a dressing-gown.

"I must just go and look at George," she murmured, with cool, clear calmness, – the virtuous, anxious mother; not a trace of coquetry anywhere in her.

"What bosh!" he thought. "She knows perfectly well George's door is bolted."

Marriage was a startling affair. Who could have foretold this finish to the evening? Nothing had occurred … nothing … and yet everything. His plans were all awry. He could see naught but trouble.

She was away some time. When she returned, he was in bed, with his face averted. He heard her moving about.