Chapter 10. The Chasm

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_ CHAPTER X. THE CHASM

I

It is true that Rachel held Councillor Thomas Batchgrew in hatred, that she had never pardoned him for the insult which he had put upon her in the Imperial Cinema de Luxe; and that, indeed, she could never pardon him for simply being Thomas Batchgrew. Nevertheless, there was that evening in her heart a little softening towards him. The fact was that the councillor had been flattering her. She would have denied warmly that she was susceptible to flattery; even if authoritatively informed that no human being whatever is unsusceptible to flattery, she would still have protested that she at any rate was, for, like numerous young and inexperienced women, she had persuaded herself that she was the one exception to various otherwise universal rules.

It remained that Thomas Batchgrew had been flattering her. On arrival he had greeted her with that tinge of deference which from an old man never fails to thrill a girl. Rachel's pride as a young married woman was tigerishly alert and hungry that evening. Thomas Batchgrew, little by little, tamed and fed it very judiciously at intervals, until at length it seemed to purr content around him like a cat. The phenomenon was remarkable, and the more so in that Rachel was convinced that, whereas she was as critical and inimical as ever, old Batchgrew had slightly improved. He behaved "heartily," and everybody appreciates such behaviour in the Five Towns. He was by nature far too insensitive to notice that the married lovers were treating each other with that finished courtesy which is the symptom of a tiff or of a misunderstanding. And the married lovers, noticing that he noticed nothing, were soon encouraged to make peace; and by means of certain tones and gestures peace was declared in the very presence of the unperceiving old brute, which was peculiarly delightful to the contracting parties.

Rachel had less difficulty with the supper than she feared, whereby also her good-humour was fostered. With half a cold leg of mutton, some cheeses, and the magnificent fancy remains of an At Home tea, arrayed with the d'oyleys and embroidered cloths which brides always richly receive in the Five Towns, a most handsome and impressive supper can be concocted. Rachel was astonished at the splendour of her own table. Mr. Batchgrew treated this supper with unsurpassable tact. The adjectives he applied to it were short and emphatic and spoken with a full mouth. He ate the supper; he kept on eating it; he passed his plate with alacrity; he refused naught. And as the meal neared its end he emitted those natural inarticulate noises from his throat which in Persia are a sign of high breeding. Useless for Rachel in her heart to call him a glutton--his attitude towards her supper was impeccable.

And now the solid part of the supper was over. One extremity of the Chesterfield had been drawn closer to the fire--an operation easily possible in its new advantageous position--and Louis as master of the house had mended the fire after his own method, and Rachel sat upright (somewhat in the manner of Mrs. Maldon) in the arm-chair opposite Mr. Batchgrew, extended half-reclining on the Chesterfield. And Mrs. Tams entered with coffee.

"You'll have coffee, Mr. Batchgrew?" said the hostess.

"Nay, missis! I canna' sleep after it."

Secretly enchanted by the sweet word "missis," Rachel was nevertheless piqued by this refusal.

"Oh, but you must have some of Louise's coffee," said Louis, standing negligently in front of the fire.

Already, though under a month old as a husband, Louis, following the eternal example of good husbands, had acquired the sure belief that his wife could achieve a higher degree of excellence in certain affairs than any other wife in the world. He had selected coffee as Rachel's speciality.

"Louise's?" repeated old Batchgrew, puzzled, in his heavy voice.

Rachel flushed and smiled.

"He calls me Louise, you know," said she.

"Calls you Louise, does he?" Batchgrew muttered indifferently. But he took a cup of coffee, stirred part of its contents into the saucer and on to the Chesterfield, and began to sup the remainder with a prodigious splutter of ingurgitation.

"And you must have a cigarette, too," Louis carelessly insisted. And Mr. Batchgrew agreed, though it was notorious that he only smoked once in a blue moon, because all tobacco was apt to be too strong for him.

"You can clear away," Rachel whispered, in the frigid tones of one accustomed to command cohorts of servants in the luxury of historic castles.

"Yes, ma'am," Mrs. Tams whispered back nervously, proud as a major-domo, though with less than a major-domo's aplomb.

No pride, however, could have outclassed Rachel's. She had had a full day, and the evening was the crown of the day, because in the evening she was entertaining privately for the first time. She was the one lady of the party; for these two men she represented woman, and they were her men. They depended on her for their physical well-being, and not in vain. She was the hostess; hers to command; hers the complex responsibility of the house. She had begun supper with painful timidity, but the timidity had now nearly vanished in the flush of social success. Critical as only a young wife can be, she was excellently well satisfied with Louis' performance in the role of host. She grew more than ever sure that there was only one Louis. See him manipulate a cigarette--it was the perfection of worldliness and agreeable, sensuous grace! See him hold a match to Mr. Batchgrew's cigarette!

Now Mr. Batchgrew smoked a cigarette clumsily. He seemed not to be able to decide whether a cigarette was something to smoke or something to eat. Mr. Batchgrew was more ungainly than ever, stretched in his characteristic attitude at an angle of forty-five degrees; his long whiskers were more absurdly than ever like two tails of a wire-haired white dog; his voice more coarsely than ever rolled about the room like undignified thunder. He was an old, old man, and a sinister. It was precisely his age that caressed Rachel's pride. That any man so old should have come to her house for supper, should be treating her as an equal and with the directness of allusion in conversation due to a married woman but improper to a young girl--this was very sweet to Rachel. The subdued stir made by Mrs. Tams in clearing the table was for Rachel a delicious background to the scene. The one flaw in it was her short skirt, which she had not had time to change. Louis had protested that it was entirely in order, and indeed admirably coquettish, but Rachel would have preferred a long train of soft drapery disposed with art round the front of her chair.

"What you want here is electricity," said Thomas Batchgrew, gazing at the incandescent gas; he could never miss a chance, and was never discouraged in the pursuit of his own advantage.

"You think so?" murmured Louis genially.

"I could put ye in summat as 'u'd----"

Rachel broke in a clear, calm decision--

"I don't think we shall have any electricity just yet."

The gesture of the economical wife in her was so final that old Batchgrew raised his eyebrows with a grin at Louis, and Louis humorously drew down the corners of his mouth in response. It was as if they had both said, in awe--

"She has spoken!"

And Rachel, still further flattered and happy, was obliged to smile.

When Mrs. Tams had made her last tiptoe journey from the room and closed the door with due silent respect upon those great ones, the expression of Thomas Batchgrew's face changed somewhat; he looked round, as though for spies, and then drew a packet of papers from his pocket. And the expression of the other two faces changed also. For the true purpose of the executor's visit was now to be made formally manifest.

"Now about this statement of account--_re_ Elizabeth Maldon, deceased," he growled deeply.

"By the way," Louis interrupted him. "Is Julian back?"

"Julian back? Not as I know of," said Mr. Batchgrew aggressively. "Why?"

"We thought we saw him walking down Moorthorne Road to-night."

"Yes," said Rachel. "We both thought we saw him."

"Happen he is if he aeroplaned it!" said Batchgrew, and fumbled nervously with the papers.

"It couldn't have been Julian," said Louis, confidently, to Rachel.

"No, it couldn't," said Rachel.

But neither conjured away the secret uneasiness of the other. And as for Rachel, she knew that all through the evening she had, inexplicably, been disturbed by an apprehension that Julian, after his long and strange sojourn in South Africa, had returned to the district. Why the possible advent of Julian should disconcert her, she thought she could not divine. Mr. Batchgrew's demeanour as he answered Louis' question mysteriously increased her apprehension. At one moment she said to herself, "Of course it wasn't Julian." At the next, "I'm quite sure I couldn't be mistaken." At the next, "And supposing it was Julian--what of it?"

II

When Batchgrew and Louis, sitting side by side on the Chesterfield, began to turn over documents and peer into columns, and carry the finger horizontally across sheets of paper in search of figures, Rachel tactfully withdrew, not from the room, but from the conversation, it being her proper role to pretend that she did not and could not understand the complicated details which they were discussing. She expected some rather dazzling revelation of men's trained methods at this "business interview" (as Louis had announced it), for her brother and father had never allowed her the slightest knowledge of their daily affairs. But she was disappointed. She thought that both the men were somewhat absurdly and self-consciously trying to be solemn and learned. Louis beyond doubt was self-conscious--acting as it were to impress his wife--and Batchgrew's efforts to be hearty and youthful with the young roused her private ridicule.

Moreover, nothing fresh emerged from the interview. She had known all of it before from Louis. Batchgrew was merely repeating and resuming. And Louis was listening with politeness to recitals with which he was quite familiar. In words almost identical with those already reported to her by Louis, Batchgrew insisted on the honesty and efficiency of the valuer in Hanbridge, a lifelong friend of his own, who had for a specially low fee put a price on the house at Bycars and its contents for the purpose of a division between Louis and Julian. And now, as previously with Louis, Rachel failed to comprehend how the valuer, if he had been favourably disposed towards Louis, as Batchgrew averred, could at the same time have behaved honestly towards Julian. But neither Louis nor Batchgrew seemed to realize the point. They both apparently flattered themselves with much simplicity upon the partiality of the lifelong friend and valuer for Louis, without perceiving the logical deduction that if he was partial he was a rascal. Further, Thomas Batchgrew "rubbed Rachel the wrong way" by subtly emphasizing his own marvellous abilities as a trustee and executor, and by assuring Louis repeatedly that all conceivable books of account, correspondence, and documents were open for his inspection at any time. Batchgrew, in Rachel's opinion, might as well have said, "You naturally suspect me of being a knave, but I can prove to you that you are wrong."

Finally, they came to the grand total of Louis' inheritance, which Rachel had known by heart for several days past; yet Batchgrew rolled it out as a piece of tremendous news, and immediately afterwards hinted that the sum represented less than the true worth of Louis' inheritance, and that he, Batchgrew, as well as his lifelong friend the valuer, had been influenced by a partiality for Louis. For example, he had contrived to put all the house property, except the house at Bycars, into Julian's share; which was extremely advantageous for Louis because the federation of the Five Towns into one borough had rendered property values the most capricious and least calculable of all worldly possessions.... And Louis tried to smile knowingly at the knowing trustee and executor with his amiable partiality for one legatee as against the other. Louis' share, beyond the Bycars house, was in the gilt-edged stock of limited companies which sold water and other necessaries of life to the public on their own terms.

Rachel left the pair for a moment, and returned from upstairs with a grey jacket of Louis' from which she had to unstitch the black _crepe_ armlet announcing to the world Louis' grief for his dead great-aunt; the period of mourning was long over, and it would not have been quite nice for Louis to continue announcing his grief.

As she came back into the room she heard the word "debentures," and that single word changed her mood instantly from bland feminine toleration to porcupinish defensiveness. She did not, as a fact, know what debentures were. She could not for a fortune have defined the difference between a debenture and a share. She only knew that debentures were connected with "limited companies"--not waterworks companies, which she classed with the Bank of England--but just any limited companies, which were in her mind a bottomless pit for the savings of the foolish. She had an idea that a debenture was, if anything, more fatal than a share. She was, of course, quite wrong, according to general principles; but, unfortunately, women, as all men sooner or later learn, have a disconcerting habit of being right in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. In a single moment, without justification, she had in her heart declared war on all debentures. And as soon as she gathered that Thomas Batchgrew was suggesting to Louis the exchange of waterworks stock for seven per cent. debentures in the United Midland Cinemas Corporation, Limited, she became more than ever convinced that her instinct about debentures was but too correct. She sat down primly, and detached the armlet, and removed all the bits of black cotton from the sleeve, and never raised her head nor offered a remark, but she was furious--furious to protect her husband against sharks and against himself.

The conduct and demeanour of Thomas Batchgrew were now explained. His visit, his flattery, his heartiness, his youthfulness, all had a motive. He had safeguarded Louis' interests under the will in order to rob him afterwards as a cinematograph speculator. The thing was as clear as daylight. And yet Louis did not seem to see it. Louis listened to Batchgrew's ingenious arguments with naive interest and was obviously impressed. When Batchgrew called him "a business man as smart as they make 'em," and then proved that the money so invested would be as safe as in a stocking, Louis agreed with a great air of acumen that certainly it would. When Batchgrew pointed out that, under the proposed new investment, Louis would be receiving in income thirty or thirty-five shillings for every pound under the old investments, Louis' eye glistened--positively glistened! Rachel trembled. She saw her husband beggared, and there was nothing that frightened her more than the prospect of Louis without a reserve of private income. She did not argue the position--she simply knew that Louis without sure resources behind him would be a very dangerous and uncertain Louis, perhaps a tragic Louis. She frankly admitted this to herself. And old Batchgrew went on talking and inveigling until Rachel was ready to believe that the device of debentures had been originally invented by Thomas Batchgrew himself with felonious intent.

An automobile hooted in the street.

"Well, ye'll think it over," said Thomas Batchgrew.

"Oh I _will_!" said Louis eagerly.

And Rachel asked herself, almost shaking--"Is it possible that he is such a simpleton?"

"Only I must know by Tuesday," said Thomas Batchgrew. "I thought I'd give ye th' chance, but I can't keep it open later than Tuesday."

"Thanks, awfully," said Louis. "I'm very much obliged for the offer. I'll let you know--before Tuesday."

Rachel frowned as she folded up the jacket. If, however, the two men could have seen into her mind they would have perceived symptoms of danger more agitating than one little frown.

"Of course," said Thomas Batchgrew easily, with a short laugh, in the lobby, "if it hadna been for _her_ making away with that nine hundred and sixty-odd pound, you'd ha' had a round sum o' thousands to invest. I've been thinking o'er that matter, and all I can see for it is as her must ha' thrown th' money into th' fire in mistake for th' envelope, or with th' envelope. That's all as I can see for it."

Louis flushed slightly as he slapped his thigh.

"Never thought of that!" he cried. "It very probably _was_ that. Strange it never occurred to me!"

Rachel said nothing. She had extreme difficulty in keeping control of herself while old Batchgrew, with numerous senile precautions, took his slow departure. She forgot that she was a hostess and a woman of the world.

III

"Hello! What's that?" Rachel asked, in a self-conscious voice, when they were in the parlour again.

Louis had almost surreptitiously taken an envelope from his pocket, and was extracting a paper from it.

On finding themselves alone they had not followed their usual custom of bursting into comment, favourable or unfavourable, on the departed--a practice due more to a desire to rouse and enjoy each other's individualities than to a genuine interest in the third person. Nor had they impulsively or deliberately kissed, as they were liable to do after release from a spell of worldliness. On the contrary, both were still constrained, as if the third person was still with them. The fact was that there were two other persons in the room, darkly discerned by Louis and Rachel--namely, a different, inimical Rachel and a different, inimical Louis. All four, the seen and the half-seen, walked stealthily, like rival beasts in the edge of the jungle.

"Oh!" said Louis with an air of nonchalance. "It came by the last post while old Batch was here, and I just shoved it into my pocket."

The arrivals of the post were always interesting to them, for during the weeks after marriage letters are apt to be more numerous than usual, and to contain delicate and enchanting surprises. Both of them were always strictly ceremonious in the handling of each other's letters, and yet both deprecated this ceremoniousness in the beloved. Louis urged Rachel to open his letters without scruple, and Rachel did the same to Louis. But both--Louis by chivalry and Rachel by pride--were prevented from acting on the invitation. The envelope in Louis' hand did not contain a letter, but only a circular. The fact that the flap of the envelope was unsealed and the stamp a mere halfpenny ought rightly to have deprived the packet of all significance as a subject of curiosity. Nevertheless, the different, inimical Rachel, probably out of sheer perversity, went up to Louis and looked over his shoulder as he read the communication, which was a printed circular, somewhat yellowed, with blanks neatly filled in, and the whole neatly signed by a churchwarden, informing Louis that his application for sittings at St. Luke's Church (commonly called the Old Church) had been granted. It is to be noted that, though applications for sittings in the Old Church were not overwhelmingly frequent, and might indeed very easily have been coped with by means of autograph replies, the authorities had a sufficient sense of dignity always to circularize the applicants.

This document, harmless enough, and surely a proof of laudable aspirations in Louis, gravely displeased the different, inimical Rachel, and was used by her for bellicose purposes.

"So that's it, is it?" she said ominously.

"But wasn't it understood that we were to go to the Old Church?" said the other Louis, full of ingenious innocence.

"Oh! Was it?"

"Didn't I mention it?"

"I don't remember."

"I'm sure I did."

The truth was that Louis had once casually remarked that he supposed they would attend the Old Church. Rachel would have joyously attended any church or any chapel with him. At Knype she had irregularly attended the Bethesda Chapel--sometimes (in the evenings) with her father, oftener alone, never with her brother. During her brief employment with Mrs. Maldon she had been only once to a place of worship, the new chapel in Moorthorne Road, which was the nearest to Bycars and had therefore been favoured by Mrs. Maldon when her limbs were stiff. In the abstract she approved of religious rites. Theologically her ignorance was such that she could not have distinguished between the tenets of church and the tenets of chapel, and this ignorance she shared with the large majority of the serious inhabitants of the Five Towns. Why, then, should she have "pulled a face" (as the saying down there is) at the Old Parish Church?

One reason, which would have applied equally to church or chapel, was that she was disconcerted and even alarmed by Louis' manifest tendency to settle down into utter correctness. Louis had hitherto been a devotee of joy--never as a bachelor had he done aught to increase the labour of churchwardens--and it was somehow as a devotee of joy that Rachel had married him. Rachel had been settled down all her life, and naturally desired and expected that an unsettling process should now occur in her career. It seemed to her that in mere decency Louis might have allowed at any rate a year or two to pass before occupying himself so stringently with her eternal welfare. She belonged to the middle class (intermediate between the industrial and the aristocratic employing) which is responsible for the Five Towns' reputation for joylessness, the class which sticks its chin out and gets things done (however queer the things done may be), the class which keeps the district together and maintains its solidity, the class which is ashamed of nothing but idleness, frank enjoyment, and the caprice of the moment. (Its idiomatic phrase for expressing the experience of gladness, "I sang 'O be joyful,'" alone demonstrates its unwillingness to rejoice.) She had espoused the hedonistic class (always secretly envied by the other), and Louis' behaviour as a member of that class had already begun to disappoint her. Was it fair of him to say in his conduct: "The fun is over. We must be strictly conventional now"? His costly caprices for Llandudno and the pleasures of idleness were quite beside the point.

Another reason for her objection to Louis' overtures to the Old Church was that they increased her suspicion of his snobbishness. No person nourished from infancy in chapel can bring himself to believe that the chief motive of church-goers is not the snobbish motive of social propriety. And dissenters are so convinced that, if chapel means salvation in the next world, church means salvation in this, that to this day, regardless of the feelings of their pastors, they will go to church once in their lives--to get married. At any rate, Rachel was positively sure that no anxiety about his own soul or about hers had led Louis to join the Old Church.

"Have you been confirmed?" she asked.

"Yes, of course," Louis replied politely.

She did not like that "of course."

"Shall I have to be?"

"I don't know."

"Well," said she, "I can tell you one thing--I shan't be."

IV

Rachel went on--

"You aren't really going to throw your money away on those debenture things of Mr. Batchgrew's, are you?"

Louis now knew the worst, and he had been suspecting it. Rachel's tone fully displayed her sentiments, and completed the disclosure that "the little thing" was angry and aggressive. (In his mind Louis regarded her at moments, as "the little thing.") But his own politeness was so profoundly rooted that practically no phenomenon of rudeness could overthrow it.

"No," he said, "I'm not going to 'throw my money away' on them."

"That's all right, then," she said, affecting not to perceive his drift. "I thought you were."

"But I propose to put my money into them, subject to anything you, as a financial expert, may have to say."

Nervously she had gone to the window and was pretending to straighten a blind.

"I don't think you need to make fun of me," she said. "You think I don't notice when you make fun of me. But I do--always."

"Look here, young 'un," Louis suddenly began to cajole, very winningly.

"I'm about as old as you are," said she, "and perhaps in some ways a bit older. And I must say I really wonder at you being ready to help Mr. Batchgrew after the way he insulted me in the cinema."

"Insulted you in the cinema!" Louis cried, genuinely startled, and then somewhat hurt because Rachel argued like a woman instead of like a man. In reflecting upon the excellences of Rachel he had often said to himself that her unique charm consisted in the fact that she combined the attractiveness of woman with the powerful commonsense of man. In common with a whole enthusiastic army of young husbands he had been convinced that his wife was the one female creature on earth to whom you could talk as you would to a male. "Oh!" he murmured.

"Have you forgotten it, then?" she asked coldly. To herself she was saying: "Why am I behaving like this? After all, he's done no harm yet." But she had set out, and she must continue, driven by the terrible fear of what he might do. She stared at the blind. Through a slit of window at one side of it she could see the lamp-post and the iron kerb of the pavement.

"But that's all over long ago," he protested amiably. "Just look how friendly you were with him yourself over supper! Besides--"

"Besides what? I wasn't friendly. I was only polite. I had to be. Nobody's called Mr. Batchgrew worse names than you have. But you forget. Only I don't forget. There's lots of things I don't forget, although I don't make a song about them. I shan't forget in a hurry how you let go of my bike without telling me and I fell all over the road. I know I'm lots more black and blue even than I was."

If Rachel would but have argued according to his rules of debate, Louis was confident that he could have conducted the affair to a proper issue. But she would not. What could he say? In a flash he saw a vista of, say, forty years of conjugal argument with a woman incapable of reason, and trembled. Then he looked again, and saw the lines of Rachel's figure in her delightful short skirt and was reassured. But still he did not know what to say. Rachel spared him further cogitation on that particular aspect of the question by turning round and exclaiming, passionately, with a break in her voice--

"Can't you see that he'll swindle you out of the money?"

It seemed to her that the security of their whole future depended on her firmness and strong sagacity at that moment. She felt herself to be very wise and also, happily, very vigorous. But at the same time she was afflicted by a kind of despair at the thought that Louis had indeed been, and still was, ready to commit the disastrous folly of confiding money to Thomas Batchgrew for investment. And as Louis had had a flashing vision of the future, so did Rachel now have such a vision. But hers was more terrible than his. Louis foresaw merely vexation. Rachel foresaw ruin doubtfully staved off by eternal vigilance on her part and by nothing else--an instant's sleepiness, and they might be in the gutter and she the wife of a ne'er-do-well. She perceived that she must be reconciled to a future in which the strain of intense vigilance could never once be relaxed. Strange that a creature so young and healthy and in love should be so pessimistic, but thus it was! She remembered in in spite of herself the warnings against Louis which she had been compelled to listen to in the previous year.

"Odd, of course!" said Louis. "But I can't exactly see how he'll swindle me out of the money! A debenture is a debenture."

"Is it?"

"Do you know what a debenture is, my child?"

"I don't need to know what a debenture is, when Mr. Batchgrew's mixed up in it."

Louis suppressed a sigh. He first thought of trying to explain to her just what a debenture was. Then he abandoned the enterprise as too complicated, and also as futile. Though he should prove to her that a debenture combined the safety of the Bank of England with the brilliance of a successful gambling transaction, she would not budge. He was acquiring valuable and painful knowledge concerning women every second. He grew sad, not simply with the weight of this new knowledge, but more because, though he had envisaged certain difficulties of married existence, he had not envisaged this difficulty. He had not dreamed that a wife would demand a share, and demand it furiously, in the control of his business affairs. He had sincerely imagined that wives listened with much respect and little comprehension when business was on the carpet, content to murmur soothingly from time to time, "Just as you think best, dear." Life had unpleasantly astonished him.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say to Rachel, with steadying facetiousness--

"You mustn't forget that I know a bit about these things, having spent years of my young life in a bank."

But a vague instinct told him that to draw attention to his career in the bank might be unwise--at any rate, in principle.

"Can't you see," Rachel charged again, "that Mr. Batchgrew has only been flattering you all this time so as to get hold of your money? And wasn't it just like him to begin again harping on the electricity?>"

"Flattering me?"

"Well, he couldn't bear you before--if you'd only heard the things he used to say!--and now he simply licks your boots."

"What things did he say?" Louis asked, disturbed.

"Oh, never mind!"

Louis became rather glum and obstinate.

"The money will be perfectly safe," he insisted, "and our income pretty nearly doubled. I suppose I ought to know more about these things than you."

"What's the use of income being doubled if you lose the capital?" Rachel snapped, now taking a horrid, perverse pleasure in the perilous altercation. "And if it's so safe why is he ready to give you so much interest?"

The worst of women, Louis reflected, is that in the midst of a silly argument that you can shatter in ten words they will by a fluke insert some awkward piece of genuine ratiocination, the answer to which must necessarily be lengthy and ineffective.

"It's no good arguing," he said pleasantly, and then repeated, "I ought to know more about these things than you."

Rachel raised her voice in exasperation--

"I don't see it, I don't see it at all. If it hadn't been for me you'd have thrown up your situation--and a nice state of affairs there would have been then! And how much money would you have wasted on holidays and so on and so on if I hadn't stopped you, I should like to know!"

Louis was still more astonished. Indeed, he was rather nettled. His urbanity was unimpaired, but he permitted himself a slight acidity of tone as he retorted with gentle malice--

"Well, you can't help the colour of your hair. So I'll keep my nerve."

"I didn't expect to be insulted!" cried Rachel, flushing far redder than that rich hair of hers, and paced pompously out of the room, her face working violently. The door was ajar. She passed Mrs. Tams on the stairs, blindly, with lowered head.

V

In the conjugal bedroom, full of gas-glare and shadows, there were two old women. One was Mrs. Tams, ministering; the other was Rachel Fores, once and not long ago the beloved and courted girlish Louise of a chevalier, now aged by all the sorrow of the world. She lay in bed--in her bed nearest the fireplace and farthest from the door.

She had undressed herself with every accustomed ceremony, arranging each article of attire, including the fine frock left on the bed, carefully in its place, as is meet in a chamber where tidiness depends on the loyal cooperation of two persons, but through her tears. She had slipped sobbing into bed. The other bed was empty, and its emptiness seemed sinister to her. Would it ever be occupied again? Impossible that it should ever be occupied again! Its rightful occupant was immeasurably far off, along miles of passages, down leagues of stairs, separated by impregnable doors, in another universe, the universe of the ground floor. Of course she might have sprung up, put on her enchanting dressing-gown, tripped down a few steps in a moment of time, and peeped in at the parlour door--just peeped in, in that magic ribboned peignoir, and glanced--and the whole planet would have been reborn. But she could not. If the salvation of the human race had depended on it, she could not--partly because she was a native of the Five Towns, where such things are not done, and no doubt partly because she was just herself.

She was now more grieved than angry with Louis. He had been wrong; he was a foolish, unreliable boy--but he was a boy. Whereas she was his mother, and ought to have known better. Yes, she had become his mother in the interval. For herself she experienced both pity and anger. What angered her was her clumsiness. Why had she lost her temper and her head? She saw clearly how she might have brought him round to her view with a soft phrase, a peculiar inflection, a tiny appeal, a caress, a mere dimpling of the cheek. She saw him revolving on her little finger.... She knew all things now because she was so old. And then suddenly she was bathing luxuriously in self-pity, and young and imperious, and violently resentful of the insult which he had put upon her--an insult which recalled the half-forgotten humiliations of her school-days, when loutish girls had baptized her with the name of a vegetable.... And then, again suddenly, she deeply desired that Louis should come upstairs and bully her.

She attached a superstitious and terrible importance to the tragical episode in the parlour because it was their first quarrel as husband and wife. True, she had stormed at him before their engagement, but even then he had kept intact his respect for her, whereas now, a husband, he had shamed her. The breach, she knew, could never be closed. She had only to glance at the empty bed to be sure that it was eternal. It had been made slowly yet swiftly; and it was complete and unbridgable ere she had realized its existence. When she contrasted the idyllic afternoon with the tragedy of the night, she was astounded by the swiftness of the change. The catastrophe lay, not in the threatened loss of vast sums of money and consequent ruin--that had diminished to insignificance!--but in the breach.

And then Mrs. Tams had inserted herself in the bedroom. Mrs. Tams knew or guessed everything. And she would not pretend that she did not; and Rachel would not pretend--did not even care to pretend, for Mrs. Tams was so unimportant that nobody minded her. Mrs. Tams had heard and seen. She commiserated. She stroked timidly with her gnarled hand the short, fragile sleeve of the nightgown, whereat Rachel sobbed afresh, with more plenteous tears, and tried to articulate a word, and could not till the third attempt. The word was "handkerchief." She was not weeping in comfort. Mrs. Tams was aware of the right drawer and drew from it a little white thing--yet not so little, for Rachel was Rachel!--and shook out its quadrangular folds, and it seemed beautiful in the gaslight; and Rachel took it and sobbed "Thank you."

Mrs. Tams rose higher than even a general servant; she was the soubrette, the confidential maid, the very echo of the young and haughty mistress, leagued with the worshipped creature against the wickedness and wile of a whole sex. Mrs. Tams had no illusions save the sublime illusion that her mistress was an angel and a martyr. Mrs. Tams had been married, and she had seen a daughter married. She was an authority on first quarrels and could and did tell tales of first quarrels--tales in which the husband, while admittedly an utterly callous monster, had at the same time somehow some leaven of decency. Soon she was launched in the epic recital of the birth and death of a grandchild; Rachel, being a married women like the rest, could properly listen to every interesting and recondite detail. Rachel sobbed and sympathized with the classic tale. And both women, as it was unrolled, kept well in their minds the vision of the vile man, mysterious and implacable, alone in the parlour. Occasionally Mrs. Tams listened for a footstep, ready discreetly to withdraw at the slightest symptom on the stairs. Once when she did this, Rachel murmured, weakly, "He won't--" and then lapsed into new weeping. And after a little time Mrs. Tams departed.

VI

Mrs. Tams had decided to undertake an enterprise involving extreme gallantry--surpassing the physical. She went downstairs and stood outside the parlour door, which was not quite shut. Within the parlour, or throne-room, existed a beautiful and superior being, full of grace and authority, who belonged to a race quite different from her own, who was beyond her comprehension, who commanded her and kept her alive and paid money to her, who accepted her devotion casually as a right, who treated her as a soft cushion between himself and the drift and inconvenience of the world, and who occasionally, as a supreme favour, caught her a smart slap on the back, which flattered her to excess. She went into the throne-room if she was called thither, or if she had cleansing or tidying work there; she spoke to the superior being if he spoke to her. But she had never till then conceived the breath-taking scheme of entering the throne-room for a purpose of her own, and addressing the superior being without an invitation to do so.

Nevertheless, since by long practice she was courageous, she meant to execute the scheme. And she began by knocking at the door. Although Rachel had seriously warned her that for a domestic servant to knock at the parlour door was a grave sin, she simply could not help knocking. Not to knock seemed to her wantonly sacrilegious. Thus she knocked, and a voice told her to come in.

There was the superior being, his back to the fire and his legs apart--formidable!

She curtsied--another sin according to the new code. Then she discovered that she was inarticulate.

"Well?"

Words burst from her--

"Her's crying her eyes out up yon, mester."

And Mrs. Tams also snivelled.

The superior being frowned and said testily, yet not without a touch of careless toleration--

"Oh, get away, you silly old fool of a woman!"

Mrs. Tarns got away, not entirely ill-content.

In the lobby she heard an unusual rapping on the glass of the front door, and sharply opened it to inform the late disturber that there existed a bell and a knocker for respectable people. A shabby youth gave her a note for "Louis Fores, Esq.," and said that there was an answer. So that she was forced to renew the enterprise of entering the throne-room.

In another couple of minutes Louis was running upstairs. His wife heard him, and shook in bed from excitement at the crisis which approached. But she could never have divined the nature of the phenomenon by which the unbridgable breach was about to be closed.

"Louise!"

"Yes," she whimpered. Then she ventured to spy at his face through an interstice of the bedclothes, and saw thereon a most queer, white expression.

"Some one's just brought this. Read it."

He gave her the note, and she deciphered it as well as she could--

DEAR Louis,--If you aren't gone to bed I want to see you to-night about that missing money of aunt's. I've something I must tell you and Rachel. I'm at the "Three Tuns."

JULIAN MALDON.

"But what does he mean?" demanded Rachel, roused from her heavy mood of self-pity.

"I don't know."

"But what can he mean?" she insisted.

"Haven't a notion."

"But he must mean something!"

Louis asked--

"Well, what should _you_ say he means?"

"How very strange!" Rachel murmured, not attempting to answer the question. "And the 'Three Tuns'! Why does he write from the 'Three Tuns'? What's he doing at the 'Three Tuns'? Isn't it a very low public-house? And everybody thought he was still in South Africa!... I suppose, then, it _must_ have been him that we saw to-night."

"You may bet it was."

"Then why didn't he come straight here? That's what I want to know. He couldn't have called before we got here, because if he had Mrs. Tams would have told us."

Louis nodded.

"Didn't you think Mr. Batchgrew looked very _queer_ when you mentioned Julian to-night?" Rachel continued to express her curiosity and wonder.

"No. I didn't notice anything particular," Louis replied vaguely.

Throughout the conversation his manner was self-conscious. Rachel observed it, while feigning the contrary, and in her turn grew uneasy and even self-conscious also. Further, she had the feeling that Louis was depending upon her for support, and perhaps for initiative. His glance, though furtive, had the appealing quality which rendered him sometimes so exquisitely wistful to her. As he stood over her by the bed, he made a peculiar compound of the negligent, dominant masculine and the clinging feminine.

"And why didn't he let anybody know of his return?" Rachel went on.

Louis, veering towards the masculine, clenched the immediate point--

"The question before the meeting is," he smiled demurely, "what answer am I to send?"

"I suppose you must see him to-night."

"Nothing else for it, is there? Well, I'll scribble him a bit of a note."

"But I shan't see him, Louis."

"No?"

In an instant Rachel thought to herself: "He doesn't want me to see him."

Aloud she said: "I should have to dress myself all over again. Besides, I'm not fit to be seen."

She was referring, without any apparent sort of shame, to the redness of her eyes.

"Well, I'll see him by myself, then."

Louis turned to leave the bedroom. Whereat Rachel was very disconcerted and disappointed. Although the startling note from Julian had alarmed her and excited in her profound apprehensions whose very nature she would scarcely admit to herself, the main occupation of her mind was still her own quarrel with Louis. The quarrel was now over, for they had conversed in quite sincere tones of friendliness, but she had desired and expected an overt, tangible proof and symbol of peace. That proof and symbol was a kiss.

Louis was at the door ... he was beyond the door ... she was lost.

"Louis!" she cried.

He put his face in at the door.

"Will you just pass me my hand-mirror. It's on the dressing-table."

Louis was thrilled by this simple request. The hand-mirror had arrived in the house as a wedding-present. It was backed with tortoise-shell, and seemingly the one thing that had reconciled Rachel the downright to the possession of a hand-mirror was the fact that the tortoise-shell was real tortoise-shell. She had "made out" that a hand-mirror was too frivolous an object for the dressing-table of a serious Five Towns woman. She had always referred to it as "the" hand-mirror--as though disdaining special ownership. She had derided it once by using it in front of Louis with the mimic foolish graces of an empty-headed doll. And now she was asking for it because she wanted it; and she had said "my" hand-mirror!

This revelation of the odalisque in his Rachel enchanted Louis, and incidentally it also enchanted Rachel. She had employed a desperate remedy, and the result on both of them filled her with a most surprising gladness. Louis judged it to be deliciously right that Rachel should be anxious to know whether her weeping had indeed made her into an object improper for the beholding of the male eye, and Rachel to her astonishment shared his opinion. She was "vain," and they were both well content. In taking it she touched his hand. He bent and kissed her. Each of them was ravaged by formidable fears for the future, tremendously disturbed in secret by the mysterious word from Julian; and yet that kiss stood unique among their kisses, and in their simplicity they knew not why. And as they kissed they hated Julian, and the past, and the whole world, for thus coming between them and deranging their love. They would, had it been possible, have sold all the future for tranquillity in that moment.

VII

Going downstairs, Louis found Mrs. Tarns standing in the back part of the lobby between the parlour door and the kitchen; obviously she had stationed herself there in order to keep watch on the messenger from the "Three Tuns." As the master of the house approached with dignity the foot of the stairs, the messenger stirred, and in the classic manner of messengers fingered uneasily his hat. The fingers were dirty. The hat was dirty and shabby. It had been somebody else's hat before coming into the possession of the messenger. The same applied to his jacket and trousers. The jacket was well cut, but green; the trousers, with their ragged, muddy edges, yet betrayed a pattern of distinction. Round his neck the messenger wore a thin muffler, and on his feet an exhausted pair of tennis-shoes. These noiseless shoes accentuated and confirmed the stealthy glance of his eyes. Except for an unshaven chin, and the confidence-destroying quality that lurked subtly in his aspect, he was not repulsive to look upon. His features were delicate enough, his restless mouth was even pretty, and his carriage graceful. He had little of the coarseness of industrialism--probably because he was not industrial. His age was about twenty, and he might have sold _Signals_ in the street, or run illegal errands for street-bookmakers. At any rate, it was certain that he was not above earning a chance copper from a customer of the "Three Tuns." His clear destiny was never to inspire respect or trust, nor to live regularly (save conceivably in prison), nor to do any honest daily labour. And if he did not know this, he felt it. All his movements were those of an outcast who both feared and execrated the organism that was rejecting him.

Louis, elegant, self-possessed, and superior, passed into the parlour exactly as if the messenger had been invisible. He was separated from the messenger by an immeasurable social prestige. He was raised to such an altitude above the messenger that he positively could not see the messenger with the naked eye. And yet for one fraction of a second he had the illusion of being so intimately akin to the messenger that a mere nothing might have pushed him into those vile clothes and endowed him with that furtive look and that sinister aspect of a helot. For one infinitesimal instant he was the messenger; and shuddered. Then the illusion as swiftly faded, and--such being Louis' happy temperament--was forgotten. He disappeared into the parlour, took a piece of paper and an envelope from the small writing-table behind Rachel's chair, and wrote a short note to Julian--a note from which facetiousness was not absent--inviting him to come at once. He rang the bell. Mrs. Tams entered, full of felicity because the great altercation was over and concord established.

"Give this to that chap," said Louis, casually imperative, holding out the note but scarcely glancing at Mrs. Tams.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Tarns with humble eagerness, content to be a very minor tool in the hidden designs of the exalted.

"And then you can go to bed."

"Oh! It's of no consequence, I'm sure, sir," Mrs. Tams answered.

Louis heard her say importantly and condescendingly to the messenger--

"Here ye are, young man."

She shut the front door as though much relieved to get such a source of peril and infection out of the respectable house.

Immediately afterwards strange things happened to Louis in the parlour. He had intended to return at once to his wife in order to continue the vague, staggered conversation about Julian's thunderbolt. But he discovered that he could not persuade himself to rejoin Rachel. A self-consciousness, growing every moment more acute and troublesome, prevented him from so doing. He was afraid that he could not discuss the vanished money without blushing, and it happened rarely that he lost control of his features, which indeed he could as a rule mould to the expression of a cherub whenever desirable. So he sat down in a chair, the first chair to hand, any chair, and began to reflect. Of course he was safe. The greatest saint on earth could not have been safer than he was from conviction of a crime. He might be suspected, but nothing could possibly be proved against him. Moreover, despite his self-consciousness, he felt innocent; he really did feel innocent, and even ill-used. The money had forced itself upon him in an inexcusable way; he was convinced that he had never meant to misappropriate it; assuredly he had received not a halfpenny of benefit from it. The fault was entirely the old lady's. Yes, he was innocent and he was safe.

Nevertheless, he did not at all like the resuscitation of the affair. The affair had been buried. How characteristic of the inconvenient Julian to rush in from South Africa and dig it up! Everybody concerned had decided that the old lady on the night of her attack had not been responsible for her actions. She had annihilated the money--whether by fire, as Batchgrew had lately suggested, or otherwise, did not matter. Or, if she had not annihilated the money, she had "done something" with it--something unknown and unknowable. Such was the acceptable theory, in which Louis heartily concurred. The loss was his--at least half the loss was his--and others had no right to complain. But Julian was without discretion. Within twenty-four hours Julian might well set the whole district talking.

Louis was dimly aware that the district already had talked, but he was not aware to what extent it had talked. Neither he nor anybody else was aware how the secret had escaped out of the house. Mrs. Tarns would have died rather than breathe a word. Rachel, naturally, had said naught; nor had Louis. Old Batchgrew had decided that his highest interest also was to say naught, and he had informed none save Julian. Julian might have set the secret free in South Africa, but in a highly distorted form it had been current in certain strata of Five Towns society long before it could have returned from South Africa. The rough, commonsense verdict of those select few who had winded the secret was simply that "there had been some hanky-panky," and that beyond doubt Louis was "at the bottom of it," but that it had little importance, as Mrs. Maldon was dead, poor thing. As for Julian, "a rough customer, though honest as the day," he was reckoned to be capable of protecting his own interests.

And then, amid all his apprehensions, a new hope sprouted in Louis' mind. Perhaps Julian was acquainted with some fact that might lead to the recovery of a part of the money. Had Louis not always held that the pile of notes which had penetrated into his pocket did not represent the whole of the nine hundred and sixty-five pounds? Conceivably it represented about half of the total, in which case a further sum of, say, two hundred and fifty pounds might be coming to Louis. Already he was treating this two hundred and fifty pounds as a windfall, and wondering in what most pleasant ways he could employ it!... But with what kind of fact could Julian be acquainted?... Had Julian been dishonest? Louis would have liked to think Julian dishonest, but he could not. Then what ...?

He heard movements above. And the front gate creaked. As if a spring had been loosed, he jumped from the chair and ran upstairs--away from the arriving Julian and towards his wife. Rachel was just getting up.

"Don't trouble," he said. "I'll see him. I'll deal with him. Much better for you to stay in bed."

He perceived that he did not want Rachel to hear what Julian had to say until after he had heard it himself.

Rachel hesitated.

"Do you think so?... What have you been doing? I thought you were coming up again at once."

"I had one or two little things--"

A terrific knock resounded on the front door.

"There he is!" Louis muttered, as it were aghast. _

Read next: Chapter 11. Julian's Document

Read previous: Chapter 9. The Married Woman

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