'We must go!'
Of all things that happened this was the most astonishing.
We did go.
'By the way, doc.,' said Mr Brindley, in the doctor's wide porch, 'I
forgot to tell you that Simon Fuge is dead.'
'Is he?' said the doctor.
'Yes. You've got a couple of his etchings, haven't you?'
'No,' said the doctor. 'I had. But I sold them several months ago.'
'Oh!' said Mr Brindley negligently; 'I didn't know. Well, so long!'
We had a few hundred yards to walk down the silent, wide street, where
the gas-lamps were burning with the strange, endless patience that
gas-lamps have. The stillness of a provincial town at night is quite
different from that of London; we might have been the only persons
alive in England.
Except for a feeling of unreality, a feeling that the natural order of
things had been disturbed by some necromancer, I was perfectly well the
same morning at breakfast, as the doctor had predicted I should be.
When I expressed to Mr Brindley my stupefaction at this happy sequel,
he showed a polite but careless inability to follow my line of thought.
It appeared that he was always well at breakfast, even when he did stay
up 'a little later than usual'. It appeared further that he always
breakfasted at a quarter to nine, and read the Manchester Guardian
during the meal, to which his wife did or did not descend--according to
the moods of the nursery; and that he reached his office at a quarter
to ten. That morning the mood of the nursery was apparently
unpropitious. He and I were alone. I begged him not to pretermit his
GUARDIAN, but to examine it and give me the news. He agreed, scarcely
unwilling.
'There's a paragraph in the London correspondence about Fuge,' he
announced from behind the paper.
'What do they say about him?'
'Nothing particular.'
'Now I want to ask you something,' I said.
I had been thinking a good deal about the sisters and Simon Fuge. And
in spite of everything that I had heard--in spite even of the facts
that the lake had been dug by a railway company, and that the excursion
to the lake had been an excursion of Sunday-school teachers and their
friends--I was still haunted by certain notions concerning Simon Fuge
and Annie Brett. Annie Brett's flush, her unshed tears; and the
self-consciousness shown by Mrs Colclough when I had pointedly
mentioned her sister's name in connection with Simon Fuge's: these were
surely indications! And then the doctor's recitals of manners in the
immediate neighbourhood of Bursley went to support my theory that even
in Staffordshire life was very much life.
'What?' demanded Mr Brindley.
'Was Miss Brett ever Simon Fuge's mistress?'
At that moment Mrs Brindley, miraculously fresh and smiling, entered
the room.
'Wife,' said Mr Brindley, without giving her time to greet me, 'what do
you think he's just asked me?'
'_I_ don't know.'
'He's just asked me if Annie Brett was ever Simon Fuge's mistress.'
She sank into a chair.
'Annie BRETT?' She began to laugh gently. 'Oh! Mr Loring, you really
are too funny!' She yielded to her emotions. It may be said that she
laughed as they can laugh in the Five Towns. She cried. She had to wipe
away the tears of laughter.
'What on earth made you think so?' she inquired, after recovery.
'I--had an idea,' I said lamely. 'He always made out that one of those
two sisters was so much to him, and I knew it couldn't be Mrs
Colclough.'
'Well,' she said, 'ask anybody down here, ANY-body! And see what
they'll say.'
'No,' Mr Brindley put in, 'don't go about asking ANY-body. You might
get yourself disliked. But you may take it it isn't true.'
'Most certainly,' his wife concurred with seriousness.
'We reckon to know something about Simon Fuge down here,' Mr Brindley
added. 'Also about the famous Annie.'
'He must have flirted with her a good bit, anyhow,' I said.
'Oh, FLIRT!' ejaculated Mr Brindley.
I had a sudden dazzling vision of the great truth that the people of
the Five Towns have no particular use for half-measures in any
department of life. So I accepted the final judgement with meekness.