Clayhanger Part 73

"Oh well! Never mind!" Edwin soothed her.

She gazed at him in loving reproach. And he felt guilty because he only went to chapel about once in two months, and even then from sheer moral cowardice.

"Can you give me those measurements, Maggie?" Mrs Hamps asked suddenly. "I'm on my way to Brunt's."

The women left the room together. Edwin walked idly to the window.

After all, he had been perhaps wrong concerning the motive of her visit.

The next moment he caught sight of Janet and the unaccountable nephew, breasting the hill from Bursley, hand in hand.

VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER TWO.

JANET'S NEPHEW.

Edwin was a fairly conspicuous object at the dining-room window. As Janet and the child drew level with the corner her eye accidentally caught Edwin's. He nodded, smiling, and took the cigarette out of his mouth and waved it. They were old friends. He was surprised to notice that Janet blushed and became self-conscious. She returned his smile awkwardly, and then, giving a gesture to signify her intention, she came in at the gate. Which action surprised Edwin still more. With all her little freedoms of manner, Janet was essentially a woman stately and correct, and time had emphasised these qualities in her. It was not in the least like her to pay informal, capricious calls at a quarter to ten in the morning.

He went to the front door and opened it. She was persuading the child up the tiled steps. The breeze dashed gaily into the house.

"Good morning. You're out early."

"Good morning. Yes. We've just been down to the post-office to send off a telegram, haven't we, George?"

She entered the hall, the boy following, and shook hands, meeting Edwin's gaze fairly. Her esteem for him, her confidence in him, shone in her troubled, candid eyes. She held herself proudly, mastering her curious constraint. "Now just see that!" she said, pointing to a fleck of black mud on the virgin elegance of her pale brown costume. Edwin thought anew, as he had often thought, that she was a distinguished and delightful piece of goods. He never ceased to be flattered by her regard. But with harsh masculine impartiality he would not minimise to himself the increasing cleft under her chin, nor the deterioration of her once brilliant complexion.

"Well, young man!" Edwin greeted the boy with that insolent familiarity which adults permit themselves to children who are perfect strangers.

"I thought I'd just run in and introduce my latest nephew to you," said Janet quickly, adding, "and then that would be over."

"Oh!" Edwin murmured. "Come into the drawing-room, will you? Maggie's upstairs."

They pa.s.sed into the drawing-room, where a servant in striped print was languidly caressing the gla.s.s of a bookcase with a duster. "You can leave this a bit," Edwin said curtly to the girl, who obsequiously acquiesced and fled, forgetting a brush on a chair.

"Sit down, will you?" Edwin urged awkwardly. "And which particular nephew is this? I may tell you he's already raised a great deal of curiosity in the town."

Janet most unusually blushed again.

"Has he?" she replied. "Well, he isn't my nephew at all really, but we pretend he is, don't we, George? It's cosier. This is Master George Cannon."

"Cannon? You don't mean--"

"You remember Mrs Cannon, don't you? Hilda Lessways? Now, Georgie, come and shake hands with Mr Clayhanger."

But George would not.

TWO.

"Indeed!" Edwin exclaimed, very feebly. He knew not whether his voice was natural or unnatural. He felt as if he had received a heavy blow with a sandbag over the heart: not a symbolic, but a real physical blow.

He might, standing innocent in the street, have been staggeringly a.s.sailed by a complete stranger of mild and harmless appearance, who had then pa.s.sed tranquilly on. Dizzy astonishment held him, to the exclusion of any other sentiment. He might have gasped, foolish and tottering: "Why--what's the meaning of this? What's happened?" He looked at the child uncomprehendingly, idiotically. Little by little-- it seemed an age, and was in fact a few seconds--he resumed his faculties, and remembered that in order to keep a conventional self-respect he must behave in such a manner as to cause Janet to believe that her revelation of the child's ident.i.ty had in no way disturbed him. To act a friendly indifference seemed to him, then, to be the most important duty in life. And he knew not why.

"I thought," he said in a low voice, and then he began again, "I thought you hadn't been seeing anything of her, of Mrs Cannon, for a long time now."

The child was climbing on a chair at the window that gave on the garden, absorbed in exploration and discovery, quite ignoring the adults.

Either Janet had forgotten him, or she had no hope of controlling him and was trusting to chance that the young wild stag would do nothing too dreadful.

"Well," she admitted, "we haven't." Her constraint recurred. Very evidently she had to be careful about what she said. There were reasons why even to Edwin she would not be frank. "I only brought him down from London yesterday."

Edwin trembled as he put the question--

"Is she here too--Mrs Cannon?"

Somehow he could only refer to Mrs Cannon as "her" and "she."

"Oh no!" said Janet, in a tone to indicate that there was no possibility of Mrs Cannon being in Bursley.

He was relieved. Yes, he was glad. He felt that he could not have endured the sensation of her nearness, of her actually being in the next house. Her presence at the Orgreaves' would have made the neighbourhood, the whole town, dangerous. It would have subjected him to the risk of meeting her suddenly at any corner. Nay, he would have been forced to go in cold blood to encounter her. And he knew that he could not have borne to look at her. The constraint of such an interview would have been torture too acute. Strange, that though he was absolutely innocent, though he had done nought but suffer, he should feel like a criminal, should have the criminal's s.h.i.+fting downcast glance!

THREE.

"Auntie!" cried the boy. "Can't I go into this garden? There's a swing there."

"Oh no!" said Janet. "This isn't our garden. We must go home. We only just called in. And big boys who won't shake hands--"

"Yes, yes!" Edwin dreamily stopped her. "Let him go into the garden for a minute if he wants to. You can't run off like that! Come along, my lord."

He saw an opportunity of speaking to her out of the child's hearing.

Janet consented, perhaps divining his wish. The child turned and stared deliberately at Edwin, and then plunged forward, too eager to await guidance, towards the conquest of the garden.

Standing silent and awkward in the garden porch, they watched him violently agitating the swing, a contrivance erected by a good-natured Uncle Edwin for the diversion of Clara's offspring.

"How old is he?" Edwin demanded, for the sake of saying something.

"About nine," said Janet.

"He doesn't look it."

"No, but he talks it--sometimes."

George did not in fact look his age. He was slight and small, and he seemed to have no bones--nothing but articulations that functioned with equal ease in all possible directions. His skin was pale and unhealthy.

His eyes had an expression of fatigue, or he might have been ophthalmic. He spoke loudly, his gestures were brusque, and his life was apparently made up of a series of intense, absolute absorptions.

The general effect of his personality upon Edwin was not quite agreeable, and Edwin's conclusion was that George, in addition to being spoiled, was a profound and rather irritating egoist by nature.

"By the way," he murmured, "what's Mr Cannon?"

"Oh!" said Janet, hesitating, with emotion, "she's a widow."