If Ida felt any relief when, at the end of four miserably long days,
Jimmy returned to town, she did not say so, even to her husband. It had
been a trial in many ways, but, at the same time, she was conscious of
having done her duty. She had impressed her brother with a sense of what
he owed to the family in the matter of conduct, and his very depression
seemed to show that he had taken the matter to heart.
"Jimmy's nerves are all wrong. He's like a man on wires. He wants a
comfortable home and a wife to look after him," Fenton ventured to
remark whilst his brother-in-law was upstairs, packing; but Ida brushed
the theory aside scornfully.
"I am surprised at you, Joseph. It is not at all the way to speak of
marriage. The Griersons have always waited until they were in a position
to marry, and have never held those disgusting ideas of nerves and so
on. Jimmy most emphatically cannot think of marrying for many years to
come. He is perfectly well, or he would be if he did not smoke and drink
so much. He has the remedy in his own hands."
Fenton shrugged his shoulders and turned away, wondering inwardly
whether the Grierson strain would predominate in his own children. He
almost wished Jimmy had not come down. It was annoying to be disturbed
and made to think after having got out of the habit of so doing.
The men and women of the type Ida usually invited to the house never
worried him in that way, belonging as they did to the class which can
afford to take its theories as facts.
Jimmy had heard once from Lalage, a brief little note, just
acknowledging his letters, and telling him nothing. Mrs. Fenton had
watched carefully whilst he was reading it--she had detected a woman's
handwriting--but he had managed to keep his composure, and then, the
better to deceive her, he had rolled the paper into a ball and tossed it
on to the fire, though it cut him to the heart to part with anything
which had once been Lalage's.
He had hoped the girl would have been waiting for him at the station;
but he failed to see her tall figure on the platform, so, jumping into a
cab, he told the driver to take him to the mansions. However, as they
went up the last street, he caught sight of Lalage coming out of a
hairdresser's shop. A moment later he was beside her.
Jimmy's first impression was one of delight at the look of genuine
pleasure which, had come into her eyes; then he noted with concern how
worn and pale she looked.
"I didn't expect you quite so soon," she said. "I must have made a
mistake in the time, and I wanted to get my hair done nicely before you
got back."
"What has been the matter with you? Why didn't you write, dear?" he
asked.
She parried the questions until they got inside the flat, when he
repeated them, holding her hands, and looking into her eyes. She tried
to avoid his scrutiny.
"I've been all right," she answered, "only there was nothing to write
about."
But he would not be put off like that, and at last, with a sob, she told
him. "It's over now, and I didn't mean you to know. I--I've had the
brokers in." She was speaking hurriedly, in a low voice. "You see,
someone has been paying my rent, and I expected it the day you went
away--it should have come that morning--and it was due next day. I never
heard, and I only had a few shillings, so they put the brokers in at
once. These landlords always do."
Jimmy cursed silently. "Why didn't you wire to me? You know I would have
sent it at once."
She shook her head. "No, no. I hate taking money from you, above
everyone."
"What did you do in the end?"
She looked up and faced him, with a kind of desperate courage. "I got it
by going away for two days. It's no good disguising things, trying to
make out that I don't."
It was a question which was the paler, the man or the woman. It had come
home to him, as it had never done before. He dropped her hands and went
over to the window, where he stood very still, staring out with
absolutely unseeing eyes; whilst she watched him with a deadly pain at
her heart, thinking she had killed the love which she knew had grown up
in him.
"Perhaps it's best, after all, perhaps it's best." She tried desperately
hard to say the words to herself, then, almost unconsciously, she took a
step towards him. Possibly her action altered the whole course of two
lives, for, like a flash, he turned round, seized her in his arms, and
covered her face with kisses.
"I don't care, now I've come back, because it'll never happen again, it
can't happen again, and what went before has nothing to do with me.
We'll start afresh, dearest, we'll start afresh." He repeated the words
several times, savagely, as though wishing to assure himself that it
would be so.
Lalage was crying on his shoulder, sobbing quietly without noise or
movement, as overwrought women do; but it was soon over, and she pulled
herself together bravely.
"I think you're very tired and we had better have some tea now," she
said, smiling at him with wet eyes. He kissed away her tears, then
released her, and sat down whilst she hurried into the kitchen to
prepare the tray.
It was very much later, in fact not until after they had finished the
supper, which she insisted should come from the next street--"Because it
was so nice last time," she explained--that he went back to the subject
of their future. He was so desperately in earnest that he succeeded in
blinding himself to the financial difficulties ahead; and, though
perhaps he did not convince either Lalage or himself, they were both in
the mood to risk things.
"I'll give up my rooms at Mrs. Benn's, thankfully, and we can take some
others, somewhere near Fleet Street, until we can get on our feet," he
went on.
But Lalage demurred. "I can't give up this flat, at least not without
losing all I've paid on the furniture, until the end of my agreement, in
six months' time. Why shouldn't we stay on here?"
Jimmy frowned. He loathed the place and all its associations, but he was
not in a position to give her another home of her own, as yet, and he
could not answer her argument, especially when she added:
"I can tell them at the agent's office that we are married, and we can
give them some name or other."
She said it simply, without the least intention of hurting him; but the
words cut him like a whip, for though, for one mad moment, he had
thought of marriage, real marriage, he had put the idea on one side as
utterly impossible. He was a Grierson, owing a duty to the family, and
he could not do the thing. Only he had the grace not even to hint of it
to her, and she gave no sign that she had the least expectation of any
promise from him. She had recovered her spirits, and, apparently, was
quite content with the arrangement he proposed. He was fully conscious
that Society would condemn him unsparingly, if it found out, and he
could not justify his own conduct, even to himself; but Lalage never
seemed to consider the moral aspect of the question, that curious
element of irresponsibility, almost childishness, which he had marked at
the very outset, was now more noticeable than ever.
Suddenly, a new fear gripped him. "It will never do to give my people
this address," he said. "They would make inquiries at once, and
then----" He gave a grim little smile.
Lalage's face grew hard. "Why should they hunt you like that? If they
really cared, they would have looked after you, instead of sending you
to those lodgings. They want you to be like a little boy, to do just
what they say, and never to have a mind of your own--oh, yes, but they
do. They ought to have seen that after all you've been through, you need
care and love."
He looked up with a queer light in his eyes. "Do you love me, Lalage?
You've never said so."
"I like you very, very much," she answered.
But he was not satisfied. "Do you love me?" he repeated.
"I like you better, much better, than anyone else I ever met," and with
that he had to be content.