"I should be glad if you could let me have it," she said, grimly.

The appeal, besides being unpersuasive in manner, was too general; it did not particularize. There was no frankness between them. She saw his suspicions multiplying. What did he suspect? What could he suspect? ... Ah! And why was she herself so timorous, so strangely excited, about going even to the edge of Dartmoor? And why did she feel guilty, why was her glance so constrained?

"Well, I can't," he answered. "Not now; but if anything unexpected turns up, I can send you a cheque."

She was beaten.

The cab stopped at the front-door, well in advance of time.

"It's for Janet," she muttered to him, desperately.

Edwin's face changed.

"Why in thunder didn't you say so to start with?" he exclaimed. "I'll see what I can do. Of course I've got a fiver in my pocket-book."

There were a number of men in the town who made a point of always having a reserve five-pound note and a telegraph-form upon their persons. It was the dandyism of well-off prudence.

He sprang out of the room. The door swung to behind him.

In a very few moments he returned.

"Here you are!" he said, taking the note from his pocket-book and adding it to a collection of gold and silver.

Hilda was looking out of the window at the tail of the cab. She did not move.

"I don't want it, thanks," she replied coldly. And she thought: "What a fool I am!"

"Oh!" he murmured, with constraint.

"You'd do it for her!" said Hilda, chill and clear, "But you wouldn't do it for me." And she thought: "Why do I say such a thing?"

He slapped all the money crossly down on the desk and left the room.

She could hear him instructing Ada and the cabman in the manipulation of the great portmanteau.

"Now, mother!" cried George.

She gazed at the money, and, picking it up, shovelled it into her purse.

It was irresistible.

In the hall she kissed George, and nodded with a plaintive smile at Ada.

Edwin was in the porch. He held back; she held back. She knew from his face that he would not offer to kiss her. The strange power that had compelled her to alienate him refused to allow her to relent. She pa.s.sed down the steps out into the rain. They nodded, the theory for George and Ada being that they had made their farewells in the boudoir.

But George and Ada none the less had their notions. It appeared to Hilda that instead of going for a holiday with her closest friend, she was going to some recondite disaster that involved the end of marriage.

And the fact that she and Edwin had not kissed outweighed all other facts in the universe. Yet what was a kiss? Until the cab laboriously started she hoped for a miracle. It did not happen. If only on the previous night she had not absolutely insisted that n.o.body from the house should accompany her to Knype! ... The porch slipped from her vision.

CHAPTER XIV

TAVY MANSION

I

Hilda and Harry Hesketh stood together in the soft warm Devonshire sunshine bending above the foot-high wire-netting that separated the small ornamental pond from the lawn. By their side was a St. Bernard dog with his great baptising tongue hanging out. Two swans, glittering in the strong light, swam slowly to and fro; one had a black claw tucked up on his back among downy white feathers; the other hissed at the dog, who in his vast and s.h.a.ggy good-nature simply could not understand this malevolence on the part of a fellow-creature. Round about the elegant haughtiness of the swans cl.u.s.tered a number of iridescent Muscovy ducks, and a few white Aylesburys with gamboge beaks that intermittently quacked, all restless and expectant of blessings to fall over the wire-netting that eternally separated them from the heavenly hunting-ground of the lawn. Across the pond, looking into a moored dinghy, an enormous drake with a vermilion top-knot reposed on the bal.u.s.trade of the landing-steps. The water reflected everything in a rippled medley--blue sky, rounded woolly clouds, birds, shrubs, flowers, gra.s.ses, and browny-olive depths of the plantation beyond the pond, where tiny children in white were tumbling and shrieking with a nurse in white.

Harry was extraordinarily hospitable, kind, and agreeable to his guest.

Scarcely thirty, tall and slim, he carried himself with distinction.

His flannels were spotless; his white shirt was spotless; his tennis shoes were spotless; but his blazer, cap and necktie (which all had the same multicoloured pattern of stripes) were shabby, soiled, and without shape; nevertheless their dilapidation seemed only to adorn his dandyism, for they possessed a mysterious sacred quality. He had a beautiful moustache, nice eyes, hands excitingly dark with hair, and no affectations whatever. Although he had inherited Tavy Mansion and a fortune from an aunt who had left Oldcastle and the smoke to marry a Devonshire landowner, he was boyish, modest, and ingenuous. n.o.body could have guessed from his manner that he had children, nurses, servants, gardeners, grooms, horses, carriages, a rent-roll, and a safe margin at every year's end. He spoke of the Five Towns with a mild affection. Hilda thought, looking at him: "He has everything, simply everything! And yet he's quite unspoilt!" In spite of the fact that in previous years he had seen Hilda only a few times--and that quite casually at the Orgreaves'--he had a.s.sumed and established intimacy at the very moment of meeting her and Janet at Tavistock station the night before, and their friendship might now have been twenty years old instead of twenty hours. Very obviously he belonged to a cla.s.s superior to Hilda's, but he was apparently quite unconscious of what was still the most deeply-rooted and influential inst.i.tution of English life. His confiding confidential tone flattered her.

"How do you think Alicia's looking?" he asked.

"Magnificent," said Hilda, throwing a last piece of bread into the water.

"So do I," said he. "But she's ruined for tennis, you know. This baby business is spiffing, only it puts you right off your game. As a rule she manages to be hors de combat bang in the middle of the season. She has been able to play a bit this year, but she's not keen--that's what's up with her ladyship--she's not keen now."

"Well," said Hilda. "Even you can't have everything."

"Why 'even' me?" He laughed.

She merely gazed at him with a mysterious smile. She perceived that he was admiring her--probably for her enigmatic quality, so different from Alicia's--and she felt a pleasing self-content.

"Edwin do much tennis nowadays?"

"Edwin?" She repeated the name in astonishment, as though it were the name of somebody who could not possibly be connected with tennis. "Not he! He's not touched a racket all this season. He's quite otherwise employed."

"I hear he's a fearful pot in the Five Towns, anyway," said Harry seriously. "Making money hand over fist."

Hilda raised her eyebrows and shook her head deprecatingly. But the marked respectfulness of Harry's reference to Edwin was agreeable. She thought: "I do believe I'm becoming a sn.o.b!"

"It's hard work making money, even in our small way, in Bursley," she said--and seemed to indicate the expensive s.p.a.ciousness of the gardens.

"I should like to see old Edwin again."

"I never knew you were friends."

"Well, I used to see him pretty often at Lane End House, after Alicia and I were engaged. In fact once he jolly nearly beat me in a set."

"Edwin did?" she exclaimed.

"The same.... He had a way of saying things that a feller somehow thought about afterwards."

"Oh! So you noticed that!"

"Does he still?"

"I--I don't know. But he used to."