12. XII
She was occasionally worried, however this might be, by the impression
that these sacrifices, great as they were, were nothing to those that his
own passion had imposed; if indeed it was not rather the passion of his
confederate, which had caught him up and was whirling him round like a
great steam-wheel. He was at any rate in the strong grip of a dizzy
splendid fate; the wild wind of his life blew him straight before it.
Didn't she catch in his face at times, even through his smile and his
happy habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which a bewildered victim
appeals, as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps didn't
even himself know how scared he was; but she knew. They were in
danger, they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it beat
every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe
sentiment;
she thought of herself and blushed even more for her tepid
response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to feel that in
another relation--a relation supplying that affinity with her nature that
Mr. Mudge, deluded creature, would never supply--she should have been no
more tepid than her ladyship. Her deepest soundings were on two or three
occasions of finding herself almost sure that, if she dared, her
ladyship's lover would have gathered relief from "speaking" to her. She
literally fancied once or twice that, projected as he was toward his
doom, her own eyes struck him, while the air roared in his ears, as the
one pitying pair in the crowd. But how could he speak to her while she
sat sandwiched there between the counter-clerk and the sounder?
She had long ago, in her comings and goings made acquaintance with Park
Chambers and reflected as she looked up at their luxurious front that
they of course would supply the ideal setting for the ideal
speech. There
was not an object in London that, before the season was over, was more
stamped upon her brain. She went roundabout to pass it, for it was not
on the short way; she passed on the opposite side of the street and
always looked up, though it had taken her a long time to be sure of the
particular set of windows. She had made that out finally by an act of
audacity that at the time had almost stopped her heart-beats and that in
retrospect greatly quickened her blushes. One evening she had lingered
late and watched--watched for some moment when the porter, who was in
uniform and often on the steps, had gone in with a visitor. Then she
followed boldly, on the calculation that he would have taken the visitor
up and that the hall would be free. The hall
was free, and the
electric light played over the gilded and lettered board that showed the
names and numbers of the occupants of the different floors. What she
wanted looked straight at her--Captain Everard was on the third. It was
as if, in the immense intimacy of this, they were, for the instant and
the first time, face to face outside the cage. Alas! they were face to
face but a second or two: she was whirled out on the wings of a panic
fear that he might just then be entering or issuing. This fear was
indeed, in her shameless deflexions, never very far from her, and was
mixed in the oddest way with depressions and disappointments. It was
dreadful, as she trembled by, to run the risk of looking to him as if she
basely hung about; and yet it was dreadful to be obliged to pass only at
such moments as put an encounter out of the question.
At the horrible hour of her first coming to Cocker's he was always--it
was to be hoped--snug in bed; and at the hour of her final departure he
was of course--she had such things all on her fingers'-ends--dressing for
dinner. We may let it pass that if she couldn't bring herself to hover
till he was dressed, this was simply because such a process for such a
person could only be
terribly prolonged. When she went in the middle of
the day to her own dinner she had too little time to do anything but go
straight, though it must be added that for a real certainty she would
joyously have omitted the repast. She had made up her mind as to there
being on the whole no decent pretext to justify her flitting casually
past at three o'clock in the morning. That was the hour at which, if the
ha'penny novels were not all wrong, he probably came home for the night.
She was therefore reduced to the vainest figuration of the miraculous
meeting toward which a hundred impossibilities would have to conspire.
But if nothing was more impossible than the fact, nothing was more
intense than the vision. What may not, we can only moralise, take place
in the quickened muffled perception of a young person with an ardent
soul? All our humble friend's native distinction, her refinement of
personal grain, of heredity, of pride, took refuge in this small
throbbing spot; for when she was most conscious of the abjection
of her
vanity and the pitifulness of her little flutters and manoeuvres, then
the consolation and the redemption were most sure to glow before her in
some just discernible sign. He did like her!