"I say, I'm most awfully sorry. I hadn't the faintest notion this afternoon she was any worse--not the faintest. Otherwise I shouldn't have dreamt--I met the doctor just now in Moorthorne Road, and he told me."

"What did he tell you?" asked Rachel, still with averted head, picking at her frock.

"Well, he gave me to understand there's very little hope, and nothing to be done. If I'd had the faintest notion--"

"You needn't worry about that," said Rachel. "Your coming made no difference. The doctor said so." And she asked herself why she should go out of her way to rea.s.sure Louis. It would serve him right to think that his brusque visit, with Mr. Batchgrew's, was the origin of the relapse.

"Is there any change?" Louis asked.

Rachel shook her head "No," she said. "We just have to sit and watch."

"Doctor's coming in again to-night, isn't he?"

Rachel nodded.

"It seems it's an embolus."

Rachel nodded once more. She had still no conception of what an embolus was; but she naturally a.s.sumed that Louis could define an embolus with exact.i.tude.

"I say," said Louis, and his voice was suddenly charged with magical qualities of persuasion, entreaty, and sincerity--"I say, you might look at me."

She flushed, but she looked up at him. She might have sat straight and remarked: "Mr. Fores, what do you mean by talking to me like that?"

But she raised her eyes and her crimson cheeks for one timid instant, and dropped them. His voice had overcome her. With a single phrase, with a mere inflection, he had changed the key of the interview. And the glance at him had exposed her to the appeal of his face, more powerful than ten thousand logical arguments and warnings. His face proved that he was a sympathetic, wistful, worried fellow-creature--and miraculously, uniquely handsome. His face in the twilight was the most romantic face that Rachel had ever seen. His gestures had a celestial charm.

He said--

"I know I ought to apologize for the way I came in this afternoon. I do. But if you knew what cause I had ...! Would you believe that old Batch had come to my place, and practically accused me of stealing the old lady's money--_stealing_ it!"

"Never!" Rachel murmured.

"Yes, he did. The fact is, he knew jolly well he'd no business to have left it in the house that night, so he wanted to get out of it by making _me_ suffer. You know he's always been down on me. Well, I came straight up here and I told auntie. Of course I couldn't make a fuss, with her ill in bed. So I simply told her I hadn't got her money and I hadn't stolen it, and I left it at that. I thought the less said the better. But I had to say that much. I wonder what Julian would have said if he'd been accused. I just wonder!" He repeated the word, queerly evocative: "Julian!"

"What did Mrs. Maldon say?" Rachel asked.

"Well, she didn't say much. She believed me, naturally. And then old Batch came. I wasn't going to have a regular scene with him up there, so I left. I thought that was the only dignified thing to do. I wanted to tell you, and I've told you. Don't you think it's a shame?"

Rachel answered pa.s.sionately--

"I do."

She answered thus because she had a tremendous desire to answer thus.

To herself she said: "Do I?... Yes, I do." Louis' eyes drew sympathy out of her. It seemed to her to be of the highest importance that those appealing eyes should not appeal in vain.

"Item, he made a fearful fuss about you and me being at the cinema last night."

"I should like to know what it's got to do with him!" said Rachel, almost savagely. The word "item" puzzled her. Not understanding it, she thought she had misheard.

"That's what I thought, too," said Louis, and added, very gravely: "At the same time I'm really awfully sorry. Perhaps I oughtn't to have asked you. It was my fault. But old Batch would make the worst of anything."

Rachel replied with feverish conviction--

"Mr. Batchgrew ought to be ashamed. You weren't to blame, and I won't hear of it!"

Louis started forward with a sudden movement of the left arm.

"You're magnificent," he said, with emotion.

Rachel trembled, and shut her eyes. She heard his voice again, closer to her, repeating with even greater emotion: "You're magnificent."

Tears were in her eyes. Through them she looked at him. And his form was so graceful, his face so nice, so exquisitely kind and lovable and loving, that her admiration became intense, even to the point of pain. She thought of Batchgrew, not with hate, but with pity. He was a monster, but he could not help it. He alone was responsible for all slanders against Louis. He alone had put Mrs. Maldon against Louis.

Louis was obviously the most innocent of beings. Mrs. Maiden's warning, "The woman who married him would suffer horribly," was manifestly absurd. "Suffer horribly"--what a stinging phrase, like a needle broken in a wound! She felt tired and weak, above all tired of loneliness.

His hand was on hers. She trembled anew. She was not Rachel, but some new embodiment of surrender and acquiescence. And the change was delicious, fearful.... She thought: "I could die for him." She forgot that a few minutes before she had been steeling herself against him.

She wanted him to kiss her, and waited an eternity. And when he had kissed her, and she was in a maze of rapture, a tiny idea shaped itself clearly in her mind for an instant: "This is wrong. But I don't care. He is mine"--and then melted like a cloud in a burning sky. And a sense of the miraculousness of destiny overcame her. In two days had happened enough for two years. It was staggering to think that only two days earlier she had been dreaming of him as of a star. Could so much, indeed, happen in two days? She imagined blissfully, in her ignorance of human experience, that her case was without precedent.

Nay, her case appalled her in the rapidity of its development! And was thereby the more thrilling! She thought again: "Yes, I could die for him--and I would!" He was still the star, but--such was the miracle--she clasped him.

They heard Mrs. Tams knocking at the door. Nothing would ever cure the charwoman's habit of knocking before entering. Rachel arose from the sofa as out of a bush of blossoms. And in the artless, honest glance of her virginity and her simplicity, her eyes seemed to say to Mrs.

Tams: "Behold the phoenix among men! He is to be my husband." Her pride in the strange, wondrous, incredible state of being affianced was tremendous, to the tragic point.

"Can ye hear, begging yer pardon?" said Mrs. Tams, pointing through the open door and upward. "Her's just begun to breathe o' that'n [like that]."

The loud, stertorous sound of Mrs. Maldon unconsciously drawing the final breaths of life filled the whole house. Louis and Rachel glanced at each other, scared, shamed, even horrified, to discover that the vast pendulum of the universe was still solemnly ticking through their ecstasy.

"I'm coming," said Rachel.

CHAPTER IX

THE MARRIED WOMAN

I

Wonderful things happen. If anybody had foretold to Mrs. Tams that in her fifty-eighth year she would accede to the honourable order of the starched white cap, Mrs. Tams could not have credited the prophecy.

But there she stood, in the lobby of the house at Bycars, frocked in black, with the strings of a plain but fine white ap.r.o.n stretched round her stoutness, and the cap crowning her grey hair. It was Louis who had insisted on the cap, which Rachel had thought unnecessary and even sn.o.bbish, and which Mrs. Tams had nervously deprecated.

Not without pleasure, however, had both women yielded to his indeed unanswerable argument: "You can't possibly have a servant opening the door without a cap. It's unthinkable."

Thus in her latter years of grandmotherhood had Mrs. Tams cast off the sackcloth of the charwoman and become a glorious domestic servant, with a room of her own in the house, and no responsibilities beyond the house, and no right to leave the house save once a week, when she visited younger generations, who still took from her and gave nothing back. She owed the advancement to Rachel, who, quite unused to engaging servants, and alarmed by harrowing stories of the futility of registry offices and advertis.e.m.e.nts, had seen in Mrs. Tams the comfortable solution of a fearful problem. Louis would have preferred a younger, slimmer, nattier, fluffier creature than Mrs. Tams, but was ready to be convinced that such as he wanted lived only in his fancy.

Moreover, he liked Mrs. Tams, and would occasionally flatter her by a smack on the shoulder.

So in the April dusk Mrs. Tams stood in the windy lobby, and was full of vanity and the pride of life. She gazed forth in disdain at the little crowd of inquisitive idlers and infants that remained obstinately on the pavement hoping against hope that the afternoon's marvellous series of social phenomena was not over. She scorned the slatternly, stupid little crowd for its lack of manners. Yet she ought to have known, and she did know as well as any one, that though in Bursley itself people will pretend out of politeness that nothing unusual is afoot when something unusual most obviously _is_ afoot, in the small suburbs of Bursley, such as Bycars, no human or divine power can prevent the populace from loosing its starved curiosity openly upon no matter what spectacle that may differ from the ordinary. Alas! Mrs. Tams in the past had often behaved even as the simple members of that crowd. Nevertheless, all ceremonies being over, she shut the front door with haughtiness, feeling glad that she was not as others are. And further, she was swollen and consequential because, without counting persons named Batchgrew, two visitors had come in a motor, and because at one supreme moment no less than two motors (including a Batchgrew motor) had been waiting together at the curb in front of her cleaned steps. Who could have foreseen this arrant sn.o.bbishness in the excellent child of nature, Mrs. Tams?

A far worse example of spiritual iniquity sat lolling on the Chesterfield in the parlour. Ignorance and simplicity and a menial imitativeness might be an excuse for Mrs. Tams; but not for Rachel, the mistress, the omniscient, the all-powerful, the giver of good, who could make and unmake with a nod. Rachel sitting gorgeous on the Chesterfield amid an enormous twilit welter and litter of disarranged chairs and tables; empty teapots, cups, jugs, and gla.s.ses; dishes of fragmentary remains of cake and chocolate; plates smeared with roseate ham, sticky teaspoons, loaded ash-trays, and a large general crumby mess--Rachel, the downright, the contemner of silly social prejudices and all nonsense, was actually puffed up because she had a servant in a cap and because automobiles had deposited elegant girls at her door and whirled them off again. And she would have denied it and yet was not ashamed.

The sole extenuation of Rachel's base worldliness was that during the previous six months she had almost continuously had the sensations of a person crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and that now, on this very day, she had leaped to firm ground and was accordingly exultant. After Mrs. Maldon's death she had felt somehow guilty of disloyalty; she pa.s.sionately regretted having had no opportunity to a.s.sure the old lady that her suspicions about Louis were wrong and cruel, and to prove to her in some mysterious way the deep rightness of the betrothal. She blushed only for the moment of her betrothal. She had solemnly bound Louis to keep the betrothal secret until Christmas. She had laid upon both of them a self-denying ordinance as to meeting.

The funeral over, she was without a home. She wished to find another situation; Louis would not hear of it. She contemplated a visit to her father and brother in America. In response to a letter, her brother sent her the exact amount of the steerage fare, and, ready to accept it, she was astounded at Louis' fury against her brother and at the accent with which he had spit out the word "steerage." Her brother and father had gone steerage. However, she gave way to Louis, chiefly because she could not bear to leave him even for a couple of months.

She was lodging at Knype, at a total normal expense of ten shillings a week. She possessed over fifty pounds--enough to keep her for six months and to purchase a trousseau, and not one penny would she deign to receive from her affianced.