Part 7 (1/2)
”I'm not going to stay. Neither are you,” replied Mr. Grig curtly.
”We'll shut the place up.”
Her face fell.
”But----”
”We'll shut up for to-night.”
”But we're supposed to be always open! Supposing some work does come in!
It always does----”
”No doubt. But we're going to shut up the place--at once.” There was fatigue in his voice.
Tears came into Lilian's eyes. She had expected him, in answer to her appeal to him to depart, to insist on staying with her. She had been waiting for heaven to unfold. And now he had decided to break the sacred tradition and close the office. She could not master her tears.
”Don't worry,” he said in tones suddenly charged with tenderness and sympathetic understanding. ”It can't be helped. I know just how you feel, and don't you imagine I don't. You've been splendid. But I had to promise Isabel I'd shut the office to-night. She's in a very bad state, and I did it to soothe her. You know she hates me to be here at nights--thinks I'm not strong enough for it.”
”That's not her reason to-night,” said Lilian to herself. ”I know her reason to-night well enough!”
But she gave Mr. Grig a look grateful for his exquisite compa.s.sion, which had raised him in her sight to primacy among men.
Obediently she let herself be dismissed first, leaving him behind, but in the street she looked up at her window. The words ”Open day and night” on the blind were no longer silhouetted against a light within.
The tradition was broken. On the way to the Dover Street Tube she did not once glance behind her to see if he was following.
IV
The Vizier
Late in the afternoon of the following day Mr. Grig put his head inside the small room.
”Just come here, Miss Share,” he began, and then, seeing that Millicent was not at her desk, he appeared to decide that he might as well speak with Lilian where she was.
He had been away from the office most of the day, and even during his presences had seemingly taken no part in its conduct. Much work had been received, some of it urgent, and Lilian, typing at her best speed, had the air of stopping with reluctance to listen to whatever the useless and wandering man might have to say. He merely said:
”We shall close to-night, like last night.”
”Oh, but, Mr. Grig,” Lilian protested--and there was no sign of a tear this time--”we can't possibly keep on closing. We had one complaint this morning about being closed last night. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to worry you.”
”Now listen to me,” Mr. Grig protested in his turn, petulantly.
”Nothing worries me more than the idea that people are keeping things from me in order that I shan't be worried. My sister was always doing that; she was incurable, but I'm not going to have it from anyone else.
If you hide things, why are you silly enough to let out afterwards that you were hiding them and why you were hiding them? That's what I can't understand.”
”Sorry, Mr. Grig,” Lilian apologized briefly and with sham humility, humouring the male in such a manner that he must know he was being humoured.
His petulancy charmed her. It gave him youth, and gave her age and wisdom. He had good excuse for it--Miss Grig had been moved into a nursing home preparatory to an operation, and Gertie was stated to be very ill in his house--and she enjoyed excusing him. It was implicit in every tone of his voice that they were now definitely not on terms of employer and employee.
”That's all right! That's all right!” he said, mollified by her discreet smile. ”But close at six. I'm off.”