All this innocent ecstasy of Baby the young man met with silence and austerity and somber eyes.

With Winny's eyes on him he indeed lifted Baby up, disclosing, first, his pathetically bunched and bundled back, and then his face, exquisitely contorted.

And Winny, who had _forgotten_ for a minute, laughed.

"He is funny, isn't he? He smiles just like you do, all up in the corners like."

At that the young man's arms tightened, and he gripped Baby with pa.s.sion to his breast. He kissed him, looking down at him, pa.s.sionately, somberly.

Winny saw, and the impulse seized her to efface herself, to vanish.

"I must be going," she said, "or I shall be late for dinner. Can you manage, Ranny? There's a beefsteak pie. I made it yesterday."

As she turned Dossie trotted after her; and as she vanished Dossie cried, inconsolably.

He managed, beautifully, with the beefsteak pie.

His sense of bereavement which still weighed on him was no longer attached in any way to Violet. He could not say precisely what it _was_ attached to. There it was. Only, when he thought of Violet it seemed to him incomprehensible, not to say absurd, that he should feel it.

CHAPTER XXV

In the afternoon Winny came again for the children, so that he could go to Wandsworth unenc.u.mbered. The weather was favorable to her idea, which was not to be in Ranny's house more than she could help, but to be seen, if seen she must be, out of doors with the children, in a public innocence, affording the presumption that Violet was still there.

Above all, she was not going to be seen with Ranny, or to be seen by him too much, if she could help it. With her sense of the sadness of his errand, the sense (that came to her more acutely with the afternoon) of things imminent, of things, she knew not what, that would have to be done, she avoided him as she would have avoided a bereaved person preoccupied with some lamentable business relating to the departed.

He was aware of her att.i.tude; he was aware, further, that it would be their att.i.tude at Wandsworth. They would all treat him like that, as if he were bereaved. They would not lose, nor allow him to lose for an instant, their awestruck sense of it. That was why he dreaded going there, why he had put it off till the last possible moment, which was about three o'clock in the afternoon. His Uncle Randall would be there.

He would have to be told. He might as well tell him while he was about it. His wife's action had been patent and public; it was not a thing that could be hushed up, or minimized, or explained away.

As he thought of all this, of what he would have to say, to go into, to handle, every moment wound him up to a higher and higher pitch of nervous tension.

His mother opened the door to him. She greeted him with a certain timidity, an ominous hesitation; and from the expression of her face you might have gathered, in spite of her kiss, that she was not entirely glad to see him; that she had something up her sleeve, something that she desired to conceal from him. It was as if by way of concealing it that she let him in stealthily with no more opening of the door than was absolutely necessary for his entrance.

"You haven't brought Vi'let?" she whispered.

"No."

They went softly together through the shop, darkened by the blinds that were drawn for Sunday. In the little pa.s.sage beyond he paused at the door of the back parlor.

"Where's Father?"

She winced at the word "Father," so out of keeping with his habitual levity. It was the first intimation that there was something wrong with him.

"He's upstairs, my dear, in His bed."

"What's the matter with him?"

"It's the Headache." She went on to explain, taking him as it were surrept.i.tiously into the little room, that the Headache had been frequent lately, not to say continuous; not even Sundays were exempt.

"He's a sad sufferer," she said.

Instead of replying with something suitable, Ranny set his teeth.

She had sat down helplessly, and as she spoke she gazed up at him where he remained standing by the chimney-piece; her look pleaded, deprecated, yet obstinately endeavored to deceive. But for once Ranny was blind to the pathos of her deception. Vaguely her foolish secrecy irritated him.

"Look here, Mother," he said, "I want to talk to you. I've got to tell you something."

"It's not anything about your Father, Ranny?"

"No, it is not."

(She turned to him from her trouble with visible relief.)

"It's about my wife."

"Vi'let?"

"She's left me."

"Left you? What d'you mean, Ranny?"

"She's gone off--Bolted."

"When?"

"Last night, I suppose--to Paris."

She stared at him strangely, without sympathy, without comprehension. It was almost as if in her mind she accused him of harboring some monstrous hallucination. With her eternal instinct for suppression she fought against it, she refused to take it in. He felt himself unequal to pressing it on her more than that.

"Would she go there--all that way--by herself, Ranny?" she brought out at last.

"By herself? Not much!"

"Well--how--"

And still she would not face the thing straight enough to say, "How did she go, then?"

He flung it at her brutally, exasperated by her obstinacy.

"She went with Mercier."

"With _'im_--? _She_--"

Her face seemed suddenly to give way under his eyes, to become discolored in a frightful pallor, to fall piteously into the lines of age.

This face that his words had so crushed and broken looked up at him with all its motherhood, mute yet vibrant, br.i.m.m.i.n.g in its eyes.