Part 84 (2/2)

”Ill? Why couldn't you _tell_ me he was ill?”

”But he isn't. I was only----”

”Does Henry say he's ill?”

”Henry? Oh Lord, no.”

”You're lying. I'll go to him and see----”

She made a rush for the window. He sprang after her and caught her. She struggled in his arms.

”Jinny, you little fool. There's nothing--nothing----He's bursting with health.”

”What did you mean, then?”

”I meant--supposing he were ill----”

”You meant to frighten me?”

She sat down and he saw her fighting for her breath. He knelt beside her and took her in his arms, murmuring inarticulate things in his terror.

At his touch she turned to him and kissed him.

”Hugh, dear,” she said, ”don't frighten me again. It's not necessary.”

All that week, and for many weeks, she busied herself with the child and with the house. It was as if she were trying, pa.s.sionately, to make up for some brief disloyalty, some lapse of tenderness.

Then, all of a sudden she flagged; she was overcome by an intolerable fatigue and depression. Brodrick was worried, but he kept his anxiety to himself. He was afraid now of doing or saying the wrong thing.

One Sat.u.r.day evening Jinny came to him in his study. She carried the dreadfully familiar pile of bills and tradesmen's books.

”Is it those horrible accounts?” he said.

She was so sick, so white and hara.s.sed, so piteously humble, that he knew. She had got them all wrong again.

”I did _try_ to keep them,” she said.

”Don't try. Leave the d.a.m.ned things alone.”

”I _have_ left them,” she wailed. ”And look at them.”

He looked. A child, he thought, could have kept them straight. They were absurdly simple. But out of their simplicity, their limpid, facile, elementary innocence, Jinny had wrought fantasies, marvels of confusion, of intricate complexity.

That was bad enough. But it was nothing to the disorder of what Jinny called her own little affairs. There seemed at first to be no relation between Jinny's proved takings and the sums that Jinny was aware of as having pa.s.sed into her hands. And then Brodrick found the cheques at the back of a drawer, where they had lain for many months; forgotten, Brodrick said, as if they had never been.

”I'm dreadful,” said Jinny.

”You are. What on earth did you do before you married me?”

<script>