Part 12 (2/2)
”I suppose you won't be staying here long,” demanded Mrs. Challice.
”Oh no!” he said. ”I shall decide something.”
”Shall you take another place?” she inquired.
”Another place?”
”Yes.” Her smile was excessively persuasive and inviting.
”I don't know,” he said diffidently.
”You must have put a good bit by,” she said, still with the same smile.
”Or perhaps you haven't. Saving's a matter of chance. That's what I always do say. It just depends how you begin. It's a habit. I'd never really blame anybody for not saving. And men----!” She seemed to wish to indicate that men were specially to be excused if they did not save.
She had a large mind: that was sure. She understood--things, and human nature in particular. She was not one of those creatures that a man meets with sometimes--creatures who are for ever on the watch to pounce, and who are incapable of making allowances for any male frailty--smooth, smiling creatures, with thin lips, hair a little scanty at the front, and a quietly omniscient 'don't-tell-_me_' tone. Mrs. Alice Challice had a mouth as wide as her ideas, and a full underlip. She was a woman who, as it were, ran out to meet you when you started to cross the dangerous roadway which separates the two s.e.xes. She comprehended because she wanted to comprehend. And when she could not comprehend she would deceive herself that she did: which amounts to the equivalent.
She was a living proof that in her s.e.x social distinctions do not effectively count. Nothing counted where she was concerned, except a distinction far more profound than any social distinction--the historic distinction between Adam and Eve. She was balm to Priam Farll. She might have been equally balm to King David, Uriah the Hitt.i.te, Socrates, Rousseau, Lord Byron, Heine, or Charlie Peace. She would have understood them all. They would all have been ready to cus.h.i.+on themselves on her comfortableness. Was she a lady? Pis.h.!.+ She was a woman.
Her temperament drew Priam Farll like an electrified magnet. To wander about freely in that roomy sympathy of hers seemed to him to be the supreme reward of experience. It seemed like the good inn after the bleak high-road, the oasis after the sandstorm, shade after glare, the dressing after the wound, sleep after insomnia, surcease from unspeakable torture. He wanted, in a word, to tell her everything, because she would not demand any difficult explanations. She had given him an opening, in her mention of savings. In reply to her suggestion, ”You must have put a good bit by,” he could casually answer:
”Yes, a hundred and forty thousand pounds.”
And that would lead by natural stages to a complete revealing of the fix in which he was. In five minutes he would have confided to her the princ.i.p.al details, and she would have understood, and then he could describe his agonizing and humiliating half-hour in the Abbey, and she would pour her magic oil on that dreadful abrasion of his sensitiveness.
And he would be healed of his hurts, and they would settle between them what he ought to do.
He regarded her as his refuge, as fate's generous compensation to him for the loss of Henry Leek (whose remains now rested in the National Valhalla).
Only, it would be necessary to begin the explanation, so that one thing might by natural stages lead to another. On reflection, it appeared rather abrupt to say:
”Yes, a hundred and forty thousand pounds.”
The sum was too absurdly high (though correct). The mischief was that, unless the sum did strike her as absurdly high, it could not possibly lead by a natural stage to the remainder of the explanation.
He must contrive another path. For instance--
”There's been a mistake about the so-called death of Priam Farll.”
”A mistake!” she would exclaim, all ears and eyes.
Then he would say--
”Yes. Priam Farll isn't really dead. It's his valet that's dead.”
Whereupon she would burst out--
”But _you_ were his valet!”
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