21. XXI
It was repeated the next day; it went on for three days; and at the end
of that time she knew what to think. When, at the beginning, she had
emerged from her temporary shelter Captain Everard had quitted the shop;
and he had not come again that evening, as it had struck her he possibly
might--might all the more easily that there were numberless persons who
came, morning and afternoon, numberless times, so that he wouldn't
necessarily have attracted attention. The second day it was different
and yet on the whole worse. His access to her had become possible--she
felt herself even reaping the fruit of her yesterday's glare at Mr.
Buckton; but transacting his business with him didn't simplify--it could,
in spite of the rigour of circumstance, feed so her new conviction. The
rigour was tremendous, and his telegrams--not now, mere
pretexts for
getting at her--were apparently genuine; yet the conviction had taken but
a night to develop. It could be simply enough expressed; she had had the
glimmer of it the day before in her idea that he needed no more help than
she had already given; that it was help he himself was prepared to
render. He had come up to town but for three or four days; he had been
absolutely obliged to be absent after the other time; yet he would, now
that he was face to face with her, stay on as much longer as she liked.
Little by little it was thus clarified, though from the first flash of
his re-appearance she had read into it the real essence.
That was what the night before, at eight o'clock, her hour to go, had
made her hang back and dawdle. She did last things or pretended to do
them; to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was
literally afraid of the alternate
self who might be waiting outside.
He
might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him she
was afraid. The most extraordinary change had taken place in her from
the moment of her catching the impression he seemed to have returned on
purpose to give her. Just before she had done so, on that bewitched
afternoon, she had seen herself approach without a scruple the porter at
Park Chambers; then as the effect of the rush of a consciousness quite
altered she had on at last quitting Cocker's, gone straight home for the
first time since her return from Bournemouth. She had passed his door
every night for weeks, but nothing would have induced her to pass it now.
This change was the tribute of her fear--the result of a change in
himself as to which she needed no more explanation than his mere face
vividly gave her; strange though it was to find an element of deterrence
in the object that she regarded as the most beautiful in the world. He
had taken it from her in the Park that night that she wanted him not to
propose to her to sup; but he had put away the lesson by this time
--he
practically proposed supper every time he looked at her. This was what,
for that matter, mainly filled the three days. He came in twice on each
of these, and it was as if he came in to give her a chance to relent.
That was after all, she said to herself in the intervals, the most that
he did. There were ways, she fully recognised, in which he spared her,
and other particular ways as to which she meant that her silence should
be full to him of exquisite pleading. The most particular of all was his
not being outside, at the corner, when she quitted the place for the
night. This he might so easily have been--so easily if he hadn't been so
nice. She continued to recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her
dumb supplication, and the only compensation he found for it was the
harmless freedom of being able to appear to say: "Yes, I'm in town only
for three or four days, but, you know, I
would stay on." He struck her
as calling attention each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he
exaggerated to the point of
putting it that there were only two days
more, that there was at last, dreadfully, only one.
There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a special
intention; as to the most marked of which--unless indeed it were the most
obscure--she might well have marvelled that it didn't seem to her more
horrid. It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the disorder of
his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision of his putting
down redundant money--sovereigns not concerned with the little payments
he was perpetually making--so that she might give him some sign of
helping him to slip them over to her. What was most extraordinary in
this impression was the amount of excuse that, with some incoherence, she
found for him. He wanted to pay her because there was nothing to pay her
for. He wanted to offer her things he knew she wouldn't take. He wanted
to show her how much he respected her by giving her the supreme
chance to
show
him she was respectable. Over the dryest transactions, at any
rate, their eyes had out these questions. On the third day he put in a
telegram that had evidently something of the same point as the stray
sovereigns--a message that was in the first place concocted and that on a
second thought he took back from her before she had stamped it. He had
given her time to read it and had only then bethought himself that he had
better not send it. If it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle--where she
knew her ladyship then to be--this was because an address to Doctor
Buzzard at Brickwood was just as good, with the added merit of its not
giving away quite so much a person whom he had still, after all, in a
manner to consider. It was of course most complicated, only half
lighted; but there was, discernibly enough, a scheme of communication in
which Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within
limits, one and the same person. The words he had shown
her and then
taken back consisted, at all events, of the brief but vivid phrase
"Absolutely impossible." The point was not that she should transmit it;
the point was just that she should see it. What was absolutely
impossible was that before he had setted something at Cocker's he should
go either to Twindle or to Brickwood.
The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend herself
to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew. What she knew was
that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a situation:
therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the P.O. might
really stand? It was more and more between them that if he might convey
to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away into a closed
chapter, her own case might become different for her, she might
understand and meet him and listen. But he could convey nothing of the
sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power. The
chapter wasn't in the least closed, not for
the other party; and the
other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole attitude
and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated her not to
remember and not to mind. So long as she did remember and did mind he
could only circle about and go and come, doing futile things of which he
was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. Buzzard; he went out
of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the paper again and thrust it
into his pocket. It had been an abject little exposure of dreadful
impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too ashamed to come back.
He had once more left town, and a first week elapsed, and a second. He
had had naturally to return to the real mistress of his fate; she had
insisted--she knew how to insist, and he couldn't put in another hour.
There was always a day when she called time. It was known to our young
friend moreover that he had now been dispatching telegrams from other
offices. She knew at last so much that she had quite lost
her earlier
sense of merely guessing. There were no different shades of
distinctness--it all bounced out.