The Price of Love Part 45

"Come!... Please don't make it any more awkward for me."

With her right arm she raised the pillow and his head on it. He drank, his sick lips curling awkwardly upon the rim of the cup, which she held for him. When he had drunk, she put the cup down on the night-table, and tidied his bed, as though he had been a naughty child. And then she left him, and drank tea slowly, savouringly, by herself in a chair near the dressing-table, out of the same cup.

VI

She had lied about the scullery door being open when she went downstairs on the night of the disappearance of the bank-notes.

The scullery door had not been open. The lie was clumsy, futile, ill-considered. It had burst out of the impulsiveness and generosity of her nature. She had perceived that suspicion was falling, or might fall, upon Louis Fores, and the sudden lie had flashed forth to defend him. That she could ultimately be charged with having told the lie in order to screen herself from suspicion had never once occurred to her.

And it did not even occur to her now as she sat perched uncomfortably on the chair in the night of desolation. She was now deeply ashamed of the lie--and she ought not to have been ashamed, for it was a lie magnanimous and fine; she might rather have taken pride in it. She was especially ashamed of her repet.i.tion of the lie on the following day to Thomas Batchgrew, and of her ingenious embroidery upon it. She hated to remember that she had wept violently in front of Thomas Batchgrew when he had charged her with having a secret about the loss of the notes. He must have well known that she was lying; he must have suspected her of some complicity; and if later he had affected to ignore all the awkward aspects of the episode it was only because he wished to remain on good terms with Louis for his own ends.

Had she herself all the time suspected Louis? In the harsh realism of the night hours she was not able positively to a.s.sert that she had never suspected him until after Julian's confession had made her think; but, on the other hand, she would not directly accuse herself of having previously suspected him. The worst that she could say was that she had been determined to believe him guiltless. She loved him; she had wanted his love; she would permit nothing to prevent their coming together; and so in her mind she had established his innocence apparently beyond any overthrowing. She might have allowed herself to surmise that in the early past he had been naughty, untrustworthy, even wicked--but that was different, that did not concern her. His innocence with regard to the bank-notes alone mattered. And she had been genuinely convinced of it. A few moments before he kissed her for the first time, she had been genuinely convinced of it. And after the betrothal her conviction became permanent. She tried to scorn now the pa.s.sion which had blinded her. Mrs. Maldon, at any rate, must have known that he was connected with the disappearance of the notes. In the light of Louis' confession Rachel could see all that Mrs. Maldon was implying in that last conversation between them.

So that she might win him she had been ready to throttle every doubt of his honesty. But now the indubitable fact that he was a thief seemed utterly monstrous and insupportable. And, moreover, his crime was exceptionally cruel. Was it conceivable that he could so lightly cause so much distress of spirit to a woman so aged, defenceless, and kind? According to the doctor, the shock of the robbery had not been the originating cause of Mrs. Maldon's death; but it might have been; quite possibly it had hastened death.... Louis was not merely a thief; he was a dastardly thief.

But even that in her eyes did not touch the full height of his offence. The vilest quality in him was his capacity to seem innocent.

She could recall the exact tone in which he had exclaimed: "Would you believe that old Batch practically accused me of stealing the old lady's money?... Don't you think it's a shame?" The recollection filled her with frigid anger. Her resentment of the long lie which he had lived in her presence since their betrothal was tremendous in its calm acrimony. A man who could behave as he had behaved would stop at nothing, would be capable of all.

She contrasted his conduct with the grim candour of Julian Maldon, whom she now admired. It was strange and dreadful that both the cousins should be thieves; the prevalence of thieves in that family gave her a shudder. But she could not judge Julian Maldon severely.

He did not appear to her as a real thief. He had committed merely an indiscretion. It was his atonement that made her admire him. Though she hated confessions, though she had burnt his exasperating doc.u.ment, she nevertheless liked the manner of his atonement. Whereas she contemned Louis for having confessed.

"He thought he was dying and so he confessed!" she reflected with asperity. "He hadn't even the pluck to go through with what he had begun.... Ah! If I had committed a crime and once denied it, I would deny it with my last breath, and no torture should drag it out of me!"

And she thought: "I am punished. This is my punishment for letting myself be engaged while Mrs. Maldon was dying."

Often she had dismissed as childish the notion that she was to blame for accepting Louis just when she did. But now it returned full of power and overwhelmed her. And like a whipped child she remembered Mrs. Maldon's warning: "My nephew is not to be trusted. The woman who married him would suffer horribly." And she was the woman who had married him. It seemed to her that the warnings of the dying must of necessity prove to be valid.

Some mysterious phenomenon on the window-blind at her right hand attracted her attention, and she looked round, half startled. It was the dawn, furtive and inexorable. She had watched dawns, and she had watched them in that very bedroom. Only on the previous morning the dawn had met her smarting and wakeful eyes, and she had imagined that no dawn could be more profoundly sad!... And a little earlier still she had been desolating herself for hours because Louis was going to be careless about his investments, because he was unreliable and she would have to watch ceaselessly over his folly. She had imagined then that no greater catastrophe could overtake her than some material result of his folly!... What a trivial apprehension! What a child she had been!

In the excitement and alarm of his accident she had honestly forgotten her suspicions of him. That disconcerted her.

She rose from the chair, stiff. The stove, with its steady faint roar of imperfectly consumed gas, had thoroughly heated the room. In careful silence she put the tea-things together. Then she ventured to glance at Louis. He was asleep. He had been restlessly asleep for a long time. She eyed him bitterly in his bandages. Only last night she had been tormented by that fear that his face might be marked for life. Again the trivial! What did it matter whether his face was marked for life or not?...

It did not occur to her to attempt to realize how intense must have been the spiritual tribulation which had forced him to confess. She knew that he was not dying, that he was in no danger whatever, and she was perfectly indifferent to the genuineness of his own conviction that he was dying. She simply thought: "He had to go through all that.

If he fancied he was dying, can I help it?" ... Then she looked at her own empty bed. He reposed; he slept. But she did not repose nor sleep.

She drew aside one of the blinds, and as she did so she could feel the steady slight current of cold air entering the room from the window open at the top. The street seemed to be full of daylight. The dawn had been proceeding in its vast secrecy and was now accomplished.

She drew up the blind slowly, and then the gas-flame over the dressing-table seemed so pale and futile that she extinguished it, from a sort of pity. In silence she pulled out the iron bolts in the window-sash that had been Mrs. Maldon's device for preventing burglars from opening further a window already open a little, thus combining security with good hygiene. Louis had laughed at these bolts, but Mrs.

Maldon had so instilled their use into both Rachel and Mrs. Tams that to insert them at night was part of the unchangeable routine of the house. Rachel gently pushed up the lower sash and looked forth.

Bycars Lane, though free from mud, was everywhere heavily bedewed. The narrow pavement glistened. The roofs glistened. Drops of water hung on all the edges of the great gas-lamp beneath her, which was still defying the dawn. The few miserable trees and bushes on the vague lands beyond the lane were dripping with water. The sky was low and heavy, in scarcely distinguishable shades of purplish grey, and Bycars Pool, of which she had a glimpse, appeared in its smooth blackness to be not more wet than the rest of the scene. Nothing stirred. Not the tiniest branch stirred on the leafless trees, nor a leaf on a grey rhododendron-bush in a front garden below. Every window within sight had its blind drawn. No smoke rose from any house-chimney, and the distant industrial smoke on the horizon hung in the lower air, just under the clouds, undecided and torpid. The wet air was moveless, and yet she could feel it impinging with its cool, sharp humidity on her cheek.

The sensation of this contact was delicious. She was surrounded, not by the slatternly Five Towns landscape and by the wretchedness of the familiar bedroom, but by the unanswerable, intimidating, inspiring mystery of life itself. A man came hurrying with a pole out of the western vista of the lane, and stopped in front of the gas-lamp, and in an instant the flame was reduced to a little fat worm of blue, and the man pa.s.sed swiftly up the lane, looking straight ahead with bent shoulders, and was gone. Never before had Rachel actually seen the lamp put out. Never before had she noticed, as she noticed now, that the lamp had a number, an ident.i.ty--1054. The meek acquiescence of the lamp, and the man's preoccupied haste, seemed to bear some deep significance, which, however, she could not seize. But the aspect of the man afflicted her, she did not know why.

Then a number of other figures, in a long spasmodic procession, pa.s.sed up the lane after the man, and were gone out of sight. Their heavy boots clacked on the pavement. They wore thick, dirty greyish-black clothes, but no overcoats; small tight caps in their hands, and dark kerchiefs round their necks: about thirty of them in all, colliers on their way to one of the pits on the Moorthorne ridge. They walked quickly, but they did not hurry as their forerunner hurried. Several of them smoked pipes. Though some walked in pairs, none spoke; none looked up or aside. With one man walked stolidly a young woman, her overskirt raised and pulled round her head from the back for a shawl; but even these two did not converse. The procession closed with one or two stragglers. Rachel had never seen these pilgrims before, but she had heard them; and Mrs. Maldon had been acquainted with all their footfalls. They were tragic to Rachel; they infected her with the most recondite horror of existence; they left tragedy floating behind them in the lane like an invisible but oppressive cloud. Their utterly incurious indifference to Rachel in her peignoir at the window was somehow harrowing.

The dank lane and vaporous, stagnant landscape were once more dead and silent, and would for a long time remain so, for though potters begin work early, colliers begin work much earlier, living in a world of customs of their own. At last a thin column of smoke issued magically from a chimney down to the left. Some woman was about; some woman's day had opened within that house. At the thought of that unseen woman in that unknown house Rachel could have cried. She could not remain at the window. She was unhappy; but it was not her woe that overcame her, for if she was unhappy, her unhappiness was nevertheless exquisite.

It was the mere realization that men and women lived that rendered her emotions almost insupportable. She felt her youth. She thought, "I am only a girl, and yet my life is ruined already." And even that thought she hugged amorously as though it were beautiful. Amid the full disaster and regret, she was glad to be alive. She could not help exulting in the dreadful moment.

She closed the sash and began to dress, seldom glancing at Louis, who slept and dreamed and muttered. When she was dressed she looked carefully in the drawer where he deposited certain articles from his pockets, in order to find the bundle of notes left by Julian. In vain!

Then she searched for his bunch of keys (which ultimately she found in one of his pockets) and unlocked his private drawer. The bundle of notes lay there. She removed it, and hid it away in one of her own secret places. After she had made preparations to get ready some invalid's food at short notice, she went downstairs.

VII

She went downstairs without any definite purpose--merely because activity of some kind was absolutely necessary to her. The clock in the lobby showed dimly a quarter past five. In the chilly twilit kitchen the green-lined silver-basket lay on the table in front of the window, placed there by a thoughtful and conscientious Mrs. Tams. On the previous morning Rachel had given very precise orders about the silver (as the workaday electro-plate was called), but owing to the astounding events of the day the orders had not been executed. Mrs.

Tams had evidently determined to carry them out at an early hour.

Rachel opened a cupboard and drew forth the apparatus for cleaning.

She was intensely fatigued, weary, and seemingly spiritless, but she began to clean the silver--at first with energy and then with serious application. She stood at the table, cleaning, as she had stood there when Louis came into her kitchen on the night of the robbery; and she thought of his visit and of her lost bliss, and the tears fell from her eyes on the newspaper which protected the whiteness of the scrubbed table. She would not think of the future; could not. She went on cleaning, and that silver had never been cleaned as she cleaned it then. She cleaned it with every attribute of herself, forgetting her fatigue. The tears dried on her cheek. The faithful, scrupulous work either drugged or solaced her. Just as she was finis.h.i.+ng, Mrs. Tarns, with her immense bodice unfastened, came downstairs, ap.r.o.nless. The lobby clock struck six.

"Eh, missis!" breathed Mrs. Tams. "What's this?"

Rachel gave a nervous laugh.

"I was up. Mr. Fores was asleep, and I had to do something, so I thought--"

"Has he had a good night, ma'am?"

"Fair. Yes, pretty good. I must run up and see if he is awake."

Mrs. Tams saw the stains on Rachel's cheeks, but she could not mention them. Rachel had an impulse to fall on Mrs. Tams' enormous breast and weep. But the conventions of domesticity were far too strong for her also. Mrs. Tams was the general servant; what Louis occasionally called "the esteemed skivvy." Once Mrs. Tams had been wife, mother, grandmother, victim, slave, diplomatist, serpent, heroine. Once she had bent from morn till night under the terrific weight of a million perils and responsibilities. Once she could never be sure of her next meal, or the roof over her head, or her skin, or even her bones. Once she had been the last resource and refuge not merely of a house, but of half a street, and she had had a remedy for every ill, a balm for every wound. But now she was safe, out of harm's way. She had no responsibilities worth a rap. She had everything an old woman ought to desire. And yet the silly old woman felt a lack, as she impotently watched Rachel leave the kitchen. Perhaps she wanted her eye blacked, or the menace of a policeman, or a child down with diphtheria, to remind her that the world revolved.

CHAPTER XIII

DEAD-LOCK

I

Louis had wakened up a few minutes before Rachel returned to the bedroom from that most wonderfully conscientious spell of silver-cleaning. He was relieved to find himself alone. He was ill, perhaps very ill, but he felt unquestionably better than in the night.

He was delivered from the appalling fear of death which had tortured and frightened him, and his thankfulness was intense; and yet at the same time he was aware of a sort of heroical sentimental regret that he was not, after all, dead; he would almost have preferred to die with grandeur, young, unfortunate, wept for by an inconsolable wife doomed to everlasting widowhood. He was ashamed of his bodily improvement, which rendered him uncomfortably self-conscious, for he had behaved as though dying when, as the event proved, he was not dying.

When Rachel came in, this self-consciousness grew terrible. And in his weakness, his constraint, his febrile perturbation which completely destroyed presence of mind, he feebly remarked--

"Did any one call yesterday to ask how I was?"

As soon as he had said it he knew that it was inept, and quite unsuitable to the role which he ought to play.

Rachel had gone straight to the dressing-table, apparently ignoring him, though she could not possibly have failed to notice that he was awake. She turned sharply and gazed at him with a look of inimical contempt that aggrieved and scarified him very acutely. Making no answer to his query, content solely to condemn it with her eyes as egotistic and vain, she said--

"I'm going to make you some food."

And then she curtly showed him her bent back, and over the foot of the bed he could see her preparations--preliminary stirring with a spoon, the placing of the bright tin saucepan on the lamp, the opening of the wick, seizing of the match-box.