"Why did you keep supper for me?" he mumbled.

"I thought you might find you weren't well enough to travel," she answered thoughtfully, with her face still bent over the work which she was spoiling with every clumsy, feverish st.i.tch.

This surprising and ingenious untruth came from her without the slightest effort. It seemed to invent itself.

"Well," said Louis, "I don't happen to want any supper." His accent was slightly but definitely inimical. He perceived that he had an advantage, and he decided to press it.

Rachel also perceived this, and she thought resentfully: "How cruel he is! How mean he is!" She hated and loved him simultaneously. She foresaw that peace must be preceded by the horrors of war, and she was discouraged. Though determined that he should not escape from the room unreconciled, she was ready to inflict dreadful injuries on him, as he on her. They now regarded each other askance, furtively, as dire enemies.

Louis, being deficient in common sense, thought of nothing but immediate victory. He well knew that, in case of trouble with Jim Horrocleave, he might be forced to humble himself before his wife, and that present arrogance would only intensify future difficulties. Also, he had easily divined that the woman opposite to him was a softer Rachel than the one he had left, and very ready for pacific compromise. Nevertheless, in his polite, patient way, he would persist in keeping the att.i.tude of an ill-used saint with a most clear grievance. And more than this, he wanted to appear absolutely consistent, even in coming home again. Could he have recalled the precise terms of his letter, he would have contrived to interpret them so as to include the possibility of his return that night. He fully intended to be the perfect male.

Drawing his cigarette-case and match-box from his hip pocket, by means of the silver cable which attached them to his person, he carefully lit a cigarette and rose to put the spent match in the fire. While at the hearth he looked at his plastered face in the gla.s.s, critically and dispa.s.sionately, as though he had nothing else in the world to do.

Then his eye caught some bits of paper in the fender--fragments of his letter which Rachel had cast into the fire and on to the hearth. He stooped, picked up one white piece, gazed at it, dropped it, picked up another, gazed at it, dropped it fastidiously.

"Hm!" he said faintly.

Then he stood again at his full height and blew smoke profusely about the mantelpiece. He was very close to Rachel, and above her. He could see the top of her bent, mysterious head; he could see all the changing curves of her breast as she breathed. He knew intimately her frock, the rings on her hand, the buckle on her shoe. He knew the whole feel of the room--the buzz of the gas, the peculiarities of the wall-paper, the thick curtain over the door to his right, the folds of the table-cloth. And in his infelicity and in his resentment against Rachel he savoured it all not without pleasure. The mere inviolable solitude with this young, strange, provocative woman in the night beyond the town stimulated him into a sort of zest of living.

There was a small sound from the young woman; her breathing was checked; she had choked down a dry sob. This signal, so faint and so dramatic in the stillness of the parlour, at once intimidated and encouraged him.

"What have you done with that money?" he asked, in a cold voice.

"What money?" Rachel replied, low, without raising her head. Her hand had ceased to move the needle.

"You know what money."

"I took it to Julian, of course."

"Why did you take it to Julian?"

"We agreed I should, last week--you yourself said so--don't you remember?" Her tones acquired some confidence.

"No, I don't remember. I remember something was said about letting him have half of it. Did you give him half or all of it?"

"I gave him all of it."

"I like that! I like that!" Louis remarked sarcastically. "I like your nerve. You do it on the sly. You don't say a word to me; and not content with that, you give him all of it. Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you ask me for the money?"

Rachel offered no answer.

Louis proceeded with more vivacity. "And did he take it?"

"I made him."

"What? All of it? What reason did you give? How did you explain things?"

"I told him you'd had the rest of the money, of course, so it was all right. It wouldn't have been fair to him if some one hadn't told him."

Louis now seriously convinced himself that his grievance was tremendous, absolutely unexampled in the whole history of marriage.

"Well," said he, with high, gloomy dignity, "it may interest you to know that I didn't have the rest of the money.... If I'd had it, what do you suppose I've done with it?... Over five hundred pounds, indeed!"

"Then what--?"

"I don't think I want any of your 'Then what's.' You wouldn't listen before, so why should you be told now? However, I expect I must teach you a lesson--though it's too late."

Rachel did not move. She heard him say that he had discovered the bank-notes at night, under the chair on the landing. "I took charge of them. I collared them, for the time being," he said. "I happened to be counting them when you knocked at my bedroom door. I admit I was rather taken aback. I didn't want you to see the notes. I didn't see any reason why you should know anything about my aunt's carelessness.

You must remember you were only a paid employee then. I was close to the fireplace. I just scrunched them up in my hand and dropped them behind the fire-screen. Of course I meant to pick them up again instantly you'd gone. Well, you didn't go. You seemed as if you wouldn't go. I had to run for the doctor. There was no help for it.

Even then I never dreamt you intended to light the fire in that room.

It never occurred to me for a second.... And I should have thought anybody lighting a fire couldn't have helped seeing a thing like a ball of bank-notes on the top of the grate. I should have thought so.

But it seems I was wrong. When I got back of course the whole blooming thing was up the chimney. Well, there you are! What was I to do? I ask you that."

He paused. Rachel sobbed.

"Of course," he continued, with savage quietude, "you may say I might have forced you to listen to me this last week. I might. But why should I? Why should I beg and pray? If you didn't know the whole story a week ago, is it my fault? I'm not one to ask twice. I can't go on my knees and beg to be listened to. Some fellows could perhaps, but not me!"

Rachel was overwhelmed. The discovery that it was she herself, Pharisaical and unyielding, who had been immediately responsible for the disappearance of the bank-notes almost dazed her. And simultaneously the rehabilitation of her idol drowned her in bliss.

She was so glad to be at fault, so ravished at being able to respect him again, that the very ecstasy of existing seemed likely to put an end to her existence. Her physical sensations were such as she might have experienced if her heart had swiftly sunk away out of her bosom and left an empty s.p.a.ce there that gasped. She glanced up at Louis.

"I'm so sorry!" she breathed.

Louis did not move, nor did his features relax in the slightest.

With one hand raised in appeal, surrender, abandonment and the other on the arm of her chair, and her work slipping to the floor, she half rose towards him.

"You can't tell how sorry I am!" she murmured. Her eyes were liquid.

"Louis!"

"And well you may be, if you'll excuse me saying so!" answered Louis frigidly.

He was confirmed in his illusory but tremendous grievance. The fundamental lack of generosity in him was exposed. Inexperienced though he was in women, he saw in Rachel then, just as if he had been twenty years older, the woman who lightly imagines that the past can be wiped out with a soft tone, an endearment, a tear, a touching appeal. He would not let her off so easily. She had horribly lacerated his dignity for a week--he could recall every single hurt--and he was not going to allow himself to recover in a minute. His dignity required a gradual convalescence. He was utterly unaffected by her wistful charm.

Rachel moved her head somewhat towards his, and then hesitated. The set hardness of his face was incredible to her. Her head began to swim. She thought, "I shall really die if this continues."

"Louis--don't!" she besought him plaintively.

He walked deliberately away and nervously played with an "ornament" on the sideboard.

"And let me tell you another thing," said he slowly. "If you think I came back to-night because I couldn't do without you, you're mistaken.

I'm going out again at once."

She said to herself, "He has killed me!" The room circled round her, gathering speed, and Louis with it. The emptiness in her bosom was intolerable.

II

Louis saw her face turning paler and paler, till it was, really, almost as white as the table-cloth. She fell back into the chair, her arms limp and lifeless.