Part 47 (2/2)

”Yes. It is rather sudden, isn't it?” Janet tried to smile, but she was exceedingly self-conscious. ”To a Mr Cannon. She's known him for a very long time, I think.”

”When?”

”Yesterday. I had a note this morning. It's quite a secret yet. I haven't told father and mother. But she asked me to tell you if I saw you.”

He thought her eyes were compa.s.sionate.

Mrs Orgreave came smiling into the room.

”Well, Mr Edwin, it seems we can only get you in here by main force.”

”Are you quite better, Mrs Orgreave?” he rose to greet her.

He had by some means or other to get out.

”I must just run in home a second,” he said, after a moment. ”I'll be back in three minutes.”

But he had no intention of coming back. He would have told any lie in order to be free.

In his bedroom, looking at himself in the gla.s.s, he could detect on his face no sign whatever of suffering or of agitation. It seemed just an ordinary mild, unmoved face.

And this, too, he had always felt and known would come to pa.s.s: that Hilda would not be his. All that romance was unreal; it was not true; it had never happened. Such a thing could not happen to such as he was... He could not reflect. When he tried to reflect, the top of his head seemed as though it would fly off... Cannon! She was with Cannon somewhere at that very instant... She had specially asked that he should be told. And indeed he had been told before even Mr and Mrs Orgreave... Cannon! She might at that very instant be in Cannon's arms.

It could be said of Edwin that he fully lived that night. Fate had at any rate roused him from the coma which most men called existence.

Simple Maggie was upset because, from Edwin's absence and her father's demeanour at supper, she knew that her menfolk had had another terrible discussion. And since her father offered no remark as to it, she guessed that this one must be even more serious that the last.

There was one thing that Edwin could not fit into any of his theories of the disaster which had overtaken him, and that was his memory of Hilda's divine gesture as she bent over Mr Shus.h.i.+ons on the morning of the Centenary.

VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER ONE.

BOOK THREE--HIS FREEDOM.

AFTER A FUNERAL.

Four and a half years later, on a Tuesday night in April 1886, Edwin was reading in an easy-chair in his bedroom. He made a very image of solitary comfort. The easy-chair had been taken from the dining-room, silently, without permission, and Darius had apparently not noticed its removal. A deep chair designed by some one learned in the poses natural to the mortal body, it was firm where it ought to be firm, and where it ought to yield, there it yielded. By its own angles it threw the head slightly back, and the knees slightly up. Edwin's slippered feet rested on a ha.s.sock, and in front of the ha.s.sock was a red-glowing gas-stove.

That stove, like the easy-chair, had been acquired by Edwin at his father's expense without his father's cognisance. It consumed gas whose price swelled the quarterly bill three times a year, and Darius observed nothing. He had not even entered his son's bedroom for several years.

Each month seemed to limit further his interest in surrounding phenomena, and to centralise more completely all his faculties in his business. Over Edwin's head the gas jet flamed through one of Darius's special private burners, lighting the page of a little book, one of Ca.s.sell's ”National Library,” a new series of sixpenny reprints which had considerably excited the book-selling and the book-reading worlds, but which Darius had apparently quite ignored, though confronted in his house and in his shop by mult.i.tudinous examples of it. Sometimes Edwin would almost be persuaded to think that he might safely indulge any caprice whatever under his father's nose, and then the old man would notice some unusual trifle, of no conceivable importance, and go into a pa.s.sion about it, and Maggie would say quietly, ”I told you what would be happening one of these days,” which would annoy Edwin. His annoyance was caused less by Maggie's 'I told you so,' than by her lack of logic.

If his father had ever overtaken him in some large and desperate caprice, such as the purchase of the gas-stove on the paternal account, he would have submitted in meekness to Maggie's triumphant reminder; but his father never did. It was always upon some perfectly innocent nothing, which the timidest son might have permitted himself, that the wrath of Darius overwhelmingly burst.

Maggie and Edwin understood each other on the whole very well. Only in minor points did their sympathy fail. And as Edwin would be exasperated because Maggie's att.i.tude towards argument was that of a woman, so would Maggie resent a certain mulishness in him characteristic of the unfathomable stupid s.e.x. Once a week, for example, when his room was 'done out,' there was invariably a skirmish between them, because Edwin really did hate anybody to 'meddle among his things.' The derangement of even a brush on the dressing-table would rankle in his mind. Also he was very 'crotchety about his meals,' and on the subject of fresh air.

Unless he was sitting in a perceptible draught, he thought he was being poisoned by nitrogen: but when he could see the curtain or blind trembling in the wind he was hygienically at ease. His existence was a series of catarrhal colds, which, however, as he would learnedly explain to Maggie, could not be connected, in the brain of a reasonable person, with currents of fresh air. Maggie mutely disdained his science. This, too, fretted him. Occasionally she would somewhat tartly a.s.sert that he was a regular old maid. The accusation made no impression on him at all. But when, more than ordinarily exacerbated, she sang out that he was 'exactly like his father,' he felt wounded.

TWO.

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