"Sit down, dear," she said. "You'll be tired standing."

He sat down, mechanically, in the nearest chair, bending forward, contemplating his clenched hands. His posture put him at her mercy. She came over to him and laid one hand on his shoulder; the other touched his hair, stroking it. He shrank as if she had hurt him and leaned back.

She moved away, and took up a position in a seat that faced him. There she sat and gazed at him, helpless and pa.s.sive, panting a little with emotion; until a thought occurred to her.

"Who's looking after the little children?"

"Winny--Winny Dymond."

"Why didn't you send for _me_, Ranny?"

"It was too late--last night."

"I'd have come, my dear. I'd have got out of me bed."

"It wouldn't have done any good."

There was a long pause.

"Were you alone in the house, dear?"

He looked up, angry. "Of course I was alone in the house."

She sat silent and continued to gaze at him with her tender, wounded eyes.

Outside in the pa.s.sage the front-door bell rang. She rose in perturbation.

"That's them. Do you want to see them?"

"I don't care whether I see them or not."

She stood deliberating.

"You'd better--p'raps--see your uncle. I'll tell him, Ranny. Your Father's not fit for it to-day."

"All right."

He rose uneasily and prepared himself to take it standing.

He heard them come into the shop, his Uncle and his Aunt Randall. He heard his uncle's salutation checked in mid-career. He heard his mother's penetrating whisper, then mutterings, commiserations. Their communion lasted long enough for him to gather that his mother would have about told them everything.

They came in, marking their shocked sense of it by soft shufflings at the door of the parlor, his sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy.

He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful deference, as a person visited by G.o.d and afflicted with unspeakable calamity.

And they did. It was an affair of downcast eyes and silent, embarra.s.sed and embarra.s.sing hand-shakings. Ransome met it with his head in the air, clear-eyed, defiant of their sympathy.

"I think," his mother said, "we'd better come upstairs if we don't want to be interrupted." For on Sundays the back parlor was a.s.signed to the young chemist, Mercier's successor, who a.s.sisted Mr. Ransome.

Upstairs, the ordered room, polished to perfection, steadfast in its s.h.i.+ning Sunday state, appeared as the irremovable seat of middle-cla.s.s tradition, of family virtue, of fidelity and cleanliness, of sacred immutable propriety. And into the bosom of these safe and comfortable sanct.i.ties Ranny had brought horror and defilement and destruction.

His Uncle Randall, try as he would, could not disguise from him that this was what he had done. Because of Ranny's wife, Respectability, the enduring soul of the Randalls and the Ransomes, could never lift up its head superbly any more. All infamies and all abominations that could defile a family were summed up for John Randall in the one word, adultery. It was worse than robbery or forgery or bankruptcy; it struck more home; it did more deadly havoc among the generations. It excited more interest; it caused more talk; and therefore it marked you more and was not so easily forgotten. It reverberated. The more respectable you were the worse it was for you. If, among the Randalls and the Ransomes, such a plunge as Violet's was unheard of, it made the more terrific splash, a splash that covered the whole family. The Ransomes, to be sure, stood more in the center, they were more deplorably bespattered, and more, much more intimately tainted. But, by the very closeness of their family attachment, the mud of Violet's plungings would adhere largely to the Randalls, too. The taint would hang for years around him, John Randall, in his shop. He had hardly entered his sister's room before he had calculated about how long it would be before the scandal spread through Wandsworth High Street. It wasn't as if he hadn't been well known. As a member of the Borough Council he stuck in the public eye where other men would have slipped through into obscurity. It was really worse for him than any of them.

All this was present in the back of John Randall's mind as he prepared to deal efficiently with the catastrophe. Having unb.u.t.toned his coat and taken off his gloves with exasperating, slow, and measured movements, he fairly sat down to it at the table, preserving his very finest military air. The situation required before all things a policy. And the policy which most appealed to Mr. Randall, in which he showed himself most efficient, was the policy of a kindly hus.h.i.+ng up. It was thus that for years he had dealt with his brother-in-laws' inebriety. Ranny's case, to be sure, was not quite so simple; still, on the essential point Mr.

Randall had made up his mind--that, in the discussion that must follow, the idea of adultery should not once appear. If they were all of them as a family splashed more or less from head to foot with mud of a kind that was going to stick to them, why, there was nothing to be done but to cover it up as soon as possible.

It was in the spirit of this policy that he approached his nephew. It involved dealing with young Mrs. Ransome throughout as a good woman who had become, somehow, mysteriously unfortunate.

"I'm sorry to hear this about your wife, Randall. It's a sad business, a sad business for you, my boy."

From her seat on the sofa beside Ranny's mother, Aunt Randall murmured inarticulate corroboration of that view.

Ranny had remained standing. It gave him an advantage in defiance.

"I've never heard anything," his uncle continued, heavily, "that's shocked and grieved me more."

"I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, Uncle."

At that Mr. Randall fumed a little feebly, thereby losing some of the fineness of his military air. It was as if his nephew had disparaged his importance, ignored his stake in the family's reputation, and as good as told him it was no business of his.

"But I _must_ worry about it. _I_ can't take it like you do, as cool as if nothing had happened. Such a thing's never been known, never so much as been named in your mother's family, or your father's, either.

It's--it's so unexpected."

"I didn't expect it any more than you did."

"You needn't take that tone, Randall, my boy. I'm sorry for you, but you're not the only one concerned. Still, I'm putting all that aside, and I'm here to help you."

"You can't help me. How can you?"

"I can help you to consider what's to be done."

"There isn't anything to be done that I can see."

"There are several things," said Mr. Randall, "that can be done." He said it as if he were counsel giving an opinion. "You can take her back; you can leave her alone; or you can divorce her. First of all I want to know one thing. Did you give her any provocation?"

"What do you mean by provocation?"

"Well--did you give her any cause for jealousy?"

Ranny's mother struck in. "He wouldn't, John." And his Aunt Randall murmured half-audible and shocked negation.

Ranny stared at his uncle as if he wondered where he was coming out next.

"Of course I didn't."

"Are--you--quite--sure about that?"

"You needn't ask him such a thing," said Ranny's mother; and Ranny fairly squared himself.

"Look here, Uncle, what d'you want to get at?"