The side door of Miss Emery's shop was in Brick Passage, and not in the
main street, so that a man, even a man of commanding stature and
formidable appearance, might by insinuating himself into Brick Street,
off King Street, and then taking the passage from the quieter end,
arrive at it without attracting too much attention. This course was
adopted by John Hessian. From the moment when he quitted his own house
that Friday evening in June he had been subject to the delusion that
the collective eye of Bursley was upon him. As a matter of fact, the
collective eye of Bursley is much too large and important to occupy
itself exclusively with a single individual. Bursley is not a village,
and let no one think it. Nevertheless, John was subject to the delusion.
The shop was shut, as he knew it would be. But the curtained window of
the parlour, between the side-door and the small shuttered side-window
of the shop, gave a strange suggestion of interesting virgin spotless
domesticity within. John cast a fearful eye on the main thoroughfare.
Nobody seemed to be passing. The chapel-keeper of the Wesleyan Chapel
on the opposite side of Trafalgar Road was refreshing the massive
Corinthian portico of that fane, and paying no regard whatever to the
temple of Eros which Miss Emery's shop had suddenly become.
So John knocked.
'I am a fool!' his thought ran as he knocked.
Because he did not know what he was about. He had won the toss, and
with it the right to approach Annie Emery before his brother. But what
then? Well, he did desire to marry her, quite as much for herself as
for his sister's fortune. But what then? How was he going to explain
the tepidity, the desertion, the long sin against love of ten years? In
short, how was he going to explain the inexplicable? He could decidedly
do nothing that evening except make a blundering ass of himself. And
how soon would Robert have the right to come along and say HIS say?
That point had not been settled. Points so extremely delicate cannot be
settled on a slate, and he had not dared to broach it viva voce to his
younger brother. He had been too afraid of a rebuff.
He then hoped that Annie's servant would tell him that Annie was out.
Annie, however, took him at a disadvantage by opening the door herself.
'Well, MR HESSIAN!' she exclaimed, her face bursting into a swift and
welcoming smile.
'I was just passing,' the donkey in him blundered forth. 'And I
thought--'
However, in fifteen seconds he was on the domestic side of the
sitting-room window, and seated in the antimacassared armchair between
the fire-place and the piano, and Annie had taken his hat and told him
that her servant was out for the evening.
'But I'm disturbing your supper, Miss Emery,' he said. Flurried though
he was, he could not fail to notice the white embroidered cloth spread
diagonally on the table, and the cold meat and the pastry and the
glittering cutlery and crystal thereon.
'Not at all,' she replied. 'You haven't had supper yet, I expect?'
'No,' he said, not thinking.
'It will be nice of you to help me to eat mine,' said she.
'Oh! But really--'
But she got plates and things out of the cupboard below the
bookcase--and there he was! She would take no refusal. It was wondrous.
'I'm awfully glad I came now,' his thought ran; I'm managing it rather
well.'