Part 85 (1/2)
”George Tanqueray helped me.”
He frowned.
”Well, you can leave it to me now,” he said.
”It takes it out of me more than all the books I ever wrote.”
That touched him, and he smiled in spite of himself.
”If,” said she, ”we only had a housekeeper.”
”A housekeeper?”
”It's a housekeeper you want.”
She put her face to his, brus.h.i.+ng his cheek with a shy and fugitive caress.
”You really ought,” she said, ”to have married Gertrude.”
”You've told me that several times already.”
”_She_ wouldn't have plagued you night and day.”
He owned it.
”Isn't it rather a pity that she ever left?”
”Why, what else could the poor woman do?”
”Stay, of course.”
He had never thought of that solution; he would, if he had been asked, have judged it unthinkable.
”Supposing,” said Jinny, ”you asked her, very nicely, to come back--don't you think that would save us?”
No; he never would have thought of it himself; but since she had put it that way, as saving them, saving Jinny, that was to say; well, he owned, wouldn't it?
”I say, but wouldn't you mind?” he said at last.
”Why should I?” said she.
In the afternoon of the next day, which was a Sunday, Brodrick appeared at the house in Augustus Road. He asked to see Miss Collett, who was staying there with her cousin.
She came to him, as she used to come to him in his study, with her uplifted, sacrificial face, holding herself stiffly and tensely, half in surrender, half resisting the impulse that drew her.
He laid the situation before her, curtly.
”If you were to come back,” he said, ”it would solve all our problems.”
She reddened, suspecting, as was her way, significance in everything that Brodrick said. Did he, she wondered, recognize that she too had her problem; and was he providing for her too the simple and beautiful solution? It was possible, then, she argued inwardly, that in some way that was not any other man's way, in some immaterial and perfect way, he cared. There was after all a tie. He desired, as she had desired, to preserve it in its purity and its perfection.