"Oh, come--" he ventured.

But Violet wouldn't come. She was off, borne from him on the rising tide of hysteria.

"It's true! It's true!" she cried. "Else you wouldn't use me like you do."

"But look here. Whatter you goin' on about? Just because I don't want you to have anything to do with Mercier."

She raised her flaming face at that.

"It's a lie! It's a beastly lie! I never had anything to do with Mercier."

"Who said you'd had anything to do with him?"

"You did. And I hardly know him. I've hardly seen him. I've hardly spoken to him be--be--before."

"I never said you had."

"You thought it."

"You know I didn't. How _could_ I think it?"

"You _did_. That's why you wouldn't let him come. You won't trust me with him."

"Trust you with him? I should think I _would_ trust you. Him! The flabby swine!"

Violet's sobs sank lower. They shook her inwardly, which was terrible to see.

And as he looked at her he remembered yet again how in the beginning he had wronged her. _That_ was what made her think he wouldn't trust her.

There would always be that wrong between them.

He drew her (unresisting now) to the other side of the room and lowered her to the couch that stood there. He looked into the teapot, where the drained leaves were still warm. He filled it up again with boiling water from the kettle on the gas ring, and poured out a cup and gave it her to drink, supporting her stooping head tenderly with his hand. Her forehead burned to his touch.

"Poor little Vi," he said. "Poor little Vi."

She glanced at him; slantwise, yet the look made his heart ache.

"Then you _do_ trust me?" she muttered.

"You _know_ I do."

They sat there leaning against each other till the room grew dim. Then they rose, uncertainly; and hand in hand, as it were under the old enchantment, they went upstairs into the dark room where the Baby slept.

To-night he did not look at it.

CHAPTER XX

That was on the eighth of June.

He remembered, because it was a Sat.u.r.day, Sat.u.r.days and Sundays being the landmarks of his existence by which alone he measured the distances and marked the order of events. The habit of so regarding them was contracted in his early days at Woolridge's, when only in and by those hours s.n.a.t.c.hed from Woolridge's did he live. All other days of the week were colored and had value according to their nearness to Sat.u.r.day and Sunday. Monday was black, Tuesday brown, Wednesday a browny gray, Thursday a rather clearer gray (by Thursday you had broken the back of the week), Friday distinctly rosy, and Sat.u.r.day and Sunday, even when it rained, a golden white.

He hadn't been married a year before all the seven were shady; the colors ran into each other till even Sundays became a kind of grayish drab. And still he continued to date things by Sat.u.r.days and Sundays; as he did now in his mind, exultantly, thus: "Sat.u.r.day, the eighth: Jujubes knocked out in the first round."

Not that the dates went for very much with Ranny, to whom interesting things so seldom happened. He remembered this one more because of his scoring off Jujubes than because of the scene with Violet and its sequel. He was used to scenes and sequels, and was no longer concerned to note their correspondence and significance. So that he never noted now that it was on and after Thursday, the thirteenth, that what he called the Great Improvement had begun.

He meant the improvement in Violet's appearance. He had accepted the fact that, in all household matters, his wife was a s.l.u.t and a slattern; yet it staggered him when it first dawned on him that, in the awful deterioration of Granville and the Baby, the standard of her own toilette had gradually lowered. Then gradually he got inured to it. The tousled, tumbling hair, the slipshod feet, the soiled blouse gaping at the back, were, he reflected bitterly, in perfect harmony with Granville, and of a piece with everything. He had ceased to censure them; they belonged so inalienably to the drab monotone; they were so indissolubly a part of all his life. And somehow she bloomed in spite of them. Ranny's unconquerable soul still cried "Stick it!" as he grappled with her shameless blouses.

And now, suddenly, she had changed all that. She had become once more the creature of mysterious elegance, of beauty charged with magical reminiscence, in the trim skirt and stainless blouse, clipped by the close belt; and with the bit of narrow black velvet ribbon round her throat. Even in the morning she appeared once more with a clear parting in her brushed and burnished hair. Even in the morning her soft skin was once more sweet in its sheer cleanness. And in the evening there soaked through and fell and hung about her that old fragrance of violets that invariably turned his head.

And she had bought new stockings and new shoes; openwork stockings that showed her white feet through, and little, little shoes with immense steel buckles. And her new mushroom with the big red roses round it a.s.saulted, battered, and beat into c.o.c.ked hats all the other mushrooms in the Avenue.

But it was the stockings and the shoes that made him kiss her feet when, on Sunday, the sixteenth, he first saw them coming down the stairs.

"Do you like my shoes?" she said. And she stuck them out one after the other. As she was standing four steps above him they were on a level with his mouth; so he kissed them one after another, on the instep, just above the buckles.

"Do you like my dress?"

"It's ripping."

"Do you like my hat?"

"It's an A 1 hat; but it's those feet that fetch me."

He had not been so fetched for a whole year. It was a most peculiar fetching.

They went to church together (they had hired a little girl for the last week to mind the toddling Baby in the mornings). It might have been for church that she had put on that hat. It could only be for him that she wore the shoes. All through the service Ranny's heart was singing a hymn to the blessed little feet that had so fetched him, the blessed little tootsy-woots in the blessed little shoes. He knelt, adoring, to the hem of the new white dress. He bowed his head under the benediction of the hat.

The fact that Mercier was established in the chemist's pew opposite, and was staring at the hat, and under it, did not interfere with his devotions in the least. He could even afford to let old Jujubes walk home with them, though he managed to shake him off adroitly at his shop door. Nothing could really interfere with his devotions. For he felt that those things, especially the shoes, were the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Some grace that had descended out of Heaven upon Violet.

The signs would be, no doubt, expensive; they should not have been so much as dreamed of before Michaelmas, when he would get his rise; that splendiferous get-up would in all probability just about clean him out, rise and all; but he tried not to look on the dark side of it. He was not one to quench the spirit or the smoking flax.

But, as the hours and the days went by, it was borne in upon him that there was absolutely no connection between Violet's inward state and that regenerated outside. This perturbed him; and it would have perturbed him more but that he had other things to think of, and that in any case he believed that a woman's clothes do not necessarily point to an end beyond themselves.

Now, if he had been less preoccupied and had paid more heed to dates, he would have noted three things: that it was on and after the evening of Thursday, the twentieth, that her mood of gay excitement and of satisfaction died and gave place to restlessness, irritation, and expectancy (a strained and racking, a dismayed and balked expectancy); that Thursday, the twentieth, was early-closing day in Southfields; and that consequently Leonard Mercier was at large. And having gone thus far in observation, he must have seen that it was on and after Thursday, the twenty-seventh (early-closing day again) that she became intolerable.

Intolerable. There was no other word for it. The "_joie de veeve_" was so intense that it was not to be borne. She had days of stupor now that followed fits of fury. He didn't know which was the worse, the fury or the stupor.

But it was the stupor that made him burst out one night (at supper; it was always at supper that these things happened).

She had brought it on herself by asking what he wanted _now_ when he had broken the frightful silence by addressing her affectionately as "Vikey."

"What I want," said Ranny then, "is a change. I want bracing; and bright surroundings, and entertaining society. I shall go and live at Brookwood."

At last it was too much for anybody (the fury, this time). It was too much for the charwoman, even once a fortnight, and she refused to come again. It was too much for the little girl who minded Baby in the mornings, and she left. Her mother said she wouldn't "have her put upon," and complained that Mrs. Ransome had served her something shameful. Ransome hardly liked to think how Violet could have served the little girl.

Before long he had an inkling. For presently a new and incredible quality revealed itself in Violet.