_Wherein Betty feels the Keen Breath of Winter_
Noll took it all very much for granted, this large-hearted service
of Betty to her fellows. He felt that it reflected the very greatest
credit on her womanhood. It added stature to her natural dignity.
When Betty had been away, watching over the last flickering days of
Moll Davenant, it seemed natural enough--it was perhaps a little lonely
at moments--but he arranged to pass the days pleasantly in closer
good-fellowship with rollicking companions. When Molly was gone, put
away in the obliterating earth; whilst the mystery of the corruption
of the white body (that had lived so strenuously and laughed and wept
and loved so fiercely itself and others only to end in the grave),
whilst the why and the whence and the whither of it all roused the most
profound emotions in the vibrant imagination of Betty, Noll had settled
into a very merry and slovenly way of life; and he kept up the untidy
habit.
For Betty’s entertainment he would occasionally forego some meeting
of his boon companions, and show a boisterous rally of the old
comradeship, as on Christmas Day, which was kept by them all in right
jovial English fashion.
The whole crew of them dined at a students’ restaurant, and
everything was _à l’anglais_, a fact not in the least discounted by
the strangeness of each dish to English eyes and palate. Indeed, the
plum-pudding alone awakened the familiar recognition, for it had a
piece of holly a-top, and Gaston Latour got enough delight out of
setting on fire the encircling brandy in the dish to comfort him for
the suppression of the hunting-horn by the police.
The generous humours of the occasion were only marred by a slightly too
generous flow of wine; the which had been of small moment in itself,
had it not chanced that it loosed Noll’s tongue, and he, growing
somewhat garrulous under the ruddy excitement, and feeling compelled
to shine, did not hesitate to give more than a sly cut at Betty in
the midst of the railleries, crying out in mock defence of her that
when she _did_ finish her masterpiece it might make a noise in the
world, _though it certainly took a long time in the making_! Betty
became aware at a stroke that for months he had been criticizing her,
silently fretting at her industry. It were as if he had lashed at
her with a whip. He could not leave it alone. He had another cut, a
cheerfully ironic reference to Casauban’s unfruitful pedantry in his
_Key to All the Mythologies_ that never came to anything but the threat
of its promise, the work that the prig is always _going to do_--the
jibe was intended as a veiled reference to Betty’s careful workmanship,
and to enhance the fact that he himself “knocked off” his successes
with something of the facility of a great gift.
Betty’s sensitive ear lost no slightest shade of the sneer amidst all
the jovial manner; it was not wasted upon her. It stung her to the
quick. From any other mouth it would have passed her by, a dog’s snap.
It revealed to her in one ugly moment that all the work she had done
to increase his ease for work, all her forbearing patience to his
encroachment upon her own working hours, all her care to free his hands
from drudgeries and release his wits to the full concentration on his
career, all was already largely forgotten--worse, had been scarcely
appreciated. And, somehow, the wild spirits of the evening failed to
reach her; she was in a daze, she had received a buffet full in the
face from the hand from which she had least feared it. And it was the
sign of her splendid selflessness that she was sickeningly struck with
pity that he could be guilty of this meanness--she was filled with a
strange bewildering shame, not because the blow had been delivered, not
because it had struck her, but that it had come from the one in all the
world who, more than any, fouled his hand in the act. She flinched from
that punishment as from an abyss that yawned.