The children pressed round her, and her hands were soon at their proud and anxious work: coaxing stray curls into their place; proving the strength of the little arms; slipping a sock, to show the marbled rose of the round limbs.

"Just feel Emmy's legs. She's as firm as firm. And look at Baby, how beautifully he's made. They're all healthy. There isn't an unsweet, unsound spot in one of them."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'There isn't an unsweet, unsound spot in one of them'"]

"No, no, they look it. They're magnificent. And they're you all over again."

"Barbara wasn't. She was the very image of her father." Her love of him conquered the stubborn silence of her grief, so that she did not shrink from the beloved name.

"Susie," she said, when the little procession had, at its own pet.i.tion, filed solemnly out again, "you can't say you've seen too much of them."

Susie smiled sadly as she looked at the wreck that was poor Aggie. "No, my dear; but I haven't seen quite enough of you. There isn't much left of you, you know."

"Me?" She paused, and then broke out again, triumphant in her justification: "No matter if there's nothing left of me. _They're_ alive."

She raised her head. Worn out and broken down she might be, but she was the mother of superb children. Something stronger and more beautiful than her lost youth flamed in her as she vindicated her motherhood. She struck even Susie's dull imagination as wonderful.

Half an hour later Aggie bent her aching back again over her work. She had turned a stiff, set face to Susie as she parted from her. John had come and gone, and it had not been awkward in the least. He was kind and courteous (time and prosperity had improved him), but he had, as Susie said, no eyes for any one but his wife.

As Aggie worked she was a.s.sailed by many thoughts and many memories. Out of the past there rose a sublime and patient face. It smiled at her above a butchery of little lambs.

Yes, Susie was right about her John. There was no weak spot in him. He had not a great intellect, but he had a great heart and a great will. Aggie remembered how once, in her thoughtful maiden days, she had read in one of the vicar's books a saying which had struck her at the time, for the vicar had underlined it twice. "If there is aught spiritual in man, it is the Will." She had not thought of John as a very spiritual person. She had dimly divined in him the possibility of strong pa.s.sions, such pa.s.sions as make shipwreck of men's lives. And here was Arthur--he, poor dear, would never be shipwrecked, for he hadn't one strong pa.s.sion in him; he had only a few weak little impulses, incessantly frustrating a will weaker than them all. She remembered how her little undeveloped soul, with its flutterings and strugglings after the immaterial, had been repelled by the large presence of the natural man. It had been afraid to trust itself to his strength, lest its wings should suffer for it. It had not been afraid to trust itself to Arthur; and his weakness had made it a wingless thing, dragged down by the suffering of her body.

She said to herself, "If I had known John was like that--"

She stopped her brain before it could answer for her! "You wouldn't be sitting here now st.i.tching at that coat."

She st.i.tched on till she could see to st.i.tch no more; for tears came and blinded her eyes, and fell upon the coat.

That was just after she had kissed it.

X

It was Easter, three weeks after Susie's visit; and Arthur was going away for a fortnight, his first real holiday in seven years. For some time he had been lengthening out his office hours, and increasing his salary, by adding night to day. And now he had worn himself out by his own ferocious industry. He knew, and Aggie knew, that he was in for a bad illness if he didn't get away, and at once. He had written in his extremity to a bachelor brother, known in the little house at Camden Town as the Mammon of Unrighteousness. The brother had a big house down in Kent; and into that house, though it was the house of Mammon, Arthur proposed that he should be received for a week or two. He took care to mention, casually, and by way of a jest after the brother's own heart, that for those weeks he, Arthur, would be a lonely widower.

The brother was in the habit of remembering Arthur's existence once a year at Christmas. He would have had him down often enough, he said, if the poor beggar could have come alone. But he barred Aggie and the children.

Aggie, poor dear, was a bore; and the children, six, by Jove (or was it seven?), were just seven (or was it six?) blanked nuisances. Though uncertain about the number of the children, he always sent seven or eight presents at Christmas to be on the safe side. So when Arthur announced that he was a widower, the brother, in his bachelor home, gave a great roar of genial laughter. He saw an opportunity of paying off all his debts to Arthur in a comparatively easy fashion all at once.

"Take him for a fortnight, poor devil? I'd take him for ten fortnights.

Heavens, what a relief it must be to get away from 'Aggie'!"

And when Arthur got his brother's letter, he and Aggie were quite sorry that they had ever called him the Mammon of Unrighteousness.

But the brother kept good company down in Kent. Aggie knew that, in the old abominable Queningford phrase, he was "in with the county." She saw her Arthur mixing in gay garden scenes, with a cruel spring sun shining on the shabby suit that had seen so many springs. Arthur's heart failed him at the last moment, but Aggie did not fail. Go he must, she said. If the brother was the Mammon of Unrighteousness, all the more, she argued, should he be propitiated--for the children's sake. (The Mammon was too selfish ever to marry, and there were no other nieces and nephews.) She represented the going down into Kent as a sublime act of self-sacrifice by which Arthur, as it were, consecrated his paternity. She sustained that lofty note till Arthur himself was struck with his own sublimity. And when she told him to stand up and let her look at him, he stood up, tired as he was, and let her look at him.

Many sheepfolds have delivered up their blameless flocks to Mammon. But Aggie, when she considered the quality of the G.o.d, felt dimly that no more innocent victim was ever yet provided than poor, jaded Arthur in his suit of other years. The thought in her mind was that it would not do for him to look _too_ innocent. He must go--but not like that.

So, for three days of blinding labor, Aggie applied herself to the propitiation of Mammon, the sending forth of her sacrificial lamb properly decked for the sacrifice. There never had been such a hauling and overhauling of clothes, such folding and unfolding, such st.i.tching and darning and cleansing and pressing, such dragging out and packing of heavy portmanteaus, such a getting up of shirts that should be irreproachable.

Aggie did it all herself; she would trust no one, least of all the laundress. She had only faint old visions of John Hurst's collars to guide her; but she was upheld by an immense relief, born of her will to please, and Arthur, by a blind reliance, born of his utter weariness. At times these preparations well-nigh exasperated him. "If going meant all that fuss," he said, "he'd rather not go." But if he had been told that anything would happen to prevent his going, he would have sat down and cursed or cried. His nerves clamored for change now--any change from the office and the horrible yellow villa in Camden Town.

All of a sudden, at the critical moment, Aggie's energy showed signs of slowing down, and it seemed to both of them that she would never get him off.

Then, for the first time, he woke to a dreary interest in the packing. He began to think of things for himself. He thought of a certain suit of flannels which he must take with him, which Aggie hadn't cleaned or mended, either. In his weak state, it seemed to him that his very going depended on that suit of flannels. He went about the house inquiring irritably for them. He didn't know that his voice had grown so fierce in its quality that it scared the children; or that he was ordering Aggie about like a dog; or that he was putting upon her bowed and patient back burdens heavier than it should have borne. He didn't know what he was doing.

And he did not know why Aggie's brain was so dull and her feet so slow, nor why her hands, that were incessantly doing, seemed now incapable of doing any one thing right. He did not know, because he was stupefied with his own miserable sensations, and Aggie had contrived to hide from him what Susie's sharp eyes had discovered. Besides, he felt that, in his officially invalid capacity, a certain license was permitted him.

So, when he found his flannels in the boot cupboard, he came and flung them onto the table where Aggie bent over her ironing-board. A feeble fury shook him.

"n.o.body but a fool," he said, "would ram good flannels into a filthy boot cupboard."

"I didn't," said Aggie, in a strange, uninterested voice. "You must have put them there yourself."

He remembered.

"Well," he said, placably, for he was, after all, a just man, "do you think they could be made a little cleaner?"

"I--can't--" said Aggie, in a still stranger voice, a voice that sounded as if it were deflected somehow by her bent body and came from another woman rather far away. It made Arthur turn in the doorway and look at her.

She rose, straightening herself slowly, dragging herself upward from the table with both hands. Her bleached lips parted; she drew in her breath with a quick sound like a sob, and let it out again on a sharp note of pain.

He rushed to her, all his sunken manhood roused by her bitter, helpless cry.

"Aggie, darling, what is it? Are you ill?"

"No, no, I'm not ill; I'm only tired," she sobbed, clutching at him with her two hands, and swaying where she stood.

He took her in his arms and half dragged, half carried her from the room.

On the narrow stairs they paused.

"Let me go alone," she whispered.

She tried to free herself from his grasp, failed, and laid her head back on his shoulder again; and he lifted her and carried her to her bed.

He knelt down and took off her shoes. He sat beside her, supporting her while he let down her long, thin braids of hair. She looked up at him, and saw that there was still no knowledge in the frightened eyes that gazed at her; and when he would have unfastened the bodice of her gown, she pushed back his hands and held them.

"No, no," she whimpered. "Go away. Go away."

"Aggie--"

"Go away, I tell you."

"My G.o.d," he moaned, more smitten, more helpless than she. For, as she turned from him, he understood the height and depth of her tender perjury.

She had meant to spare him for as long as it might be, because, afterwards (she must have felt), his own conscience would not be so merciful.