She was occasionally worried, however this might be, by the impression
that these sacrifices, great as they were, were nothing to those that
his own passion had imposed; if indeed it was not rather the passion of
his confederate, which had caught him up and was whirling him round
like a great steam-wheel. He was at any rate in the strong grip of a
dizzy splendid fate; the wild wind of his life blew him straight before
it. Didn’t she catch in his face at times, even through his smile and
his happy habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which a bewildered
victim appeals, as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps
didn’t even himself know how scared he was; but _she_ knew. They were
in danger, they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it
beat every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe
sentiment; she thought of herself and blushed even more for her tepid
response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to feel that in
another relation—a relation supplying that affinity with her nature
that Mr. Mudge, deluded creature, would never supply—she should have
been no more tepid than her ladyship. Her deepest soundings were on two
or three occasions of finding herself almost sure that, if she dared,
her ladyship’s lover would have gathered relief from “speaking” to her.
She literally fancied once or twice that, projected as he was toward
his doom, her own eyes struck him, while the air roared in his ears, as
the one pitying pair in the crowd. But how could he speak to her while
she sat sandwiched there between the counter-clerk and the sounder?
She had long ago, in her comings and goings made acquaintance with Park
Chambers and reflected as she looked up at their luxurious front that
_they_, of course, would supply the ideal setting for the ideal speech.
There was not an object in London that, before the season was over, was
more stamped upon her brain. She went roundabout to pass it, for it was
not on the short way; she passed on the opposite side of the street and
always looked up, though it had taken her a long time to be sure of the
particular set of windows. She had made that out finally by an act of
audacity that at the time had almost stopped her heart-beats and that
in retrospect greatly quickened her blushes. One evening she had
lingered late and watched—watched for some moment when the porter, who
was in uniform and often on the steps, had gone in with a visitor. Then
she followed boldly, on the calculation that he would have taken the
visitor up and that the hall would be free. The hall _was_ free, and
the electric light played over the gilded and lettered board that
showed the names and numbers of the occupants of the different floors.
What she wanted looked straight at her—Captain Everard was on the
third. It was as if, in the immense intimacy of this, they were, for
the instant and the first time, face to face outside the cage. Alas!
they were face to face but a second or two: she was whirled out on the
wings of a panic fear that he might just then be entering or issuing.
This fear was indeed, in her shameless deflexions, never very far from
her, and was mixed in the oddest way with depressions and
disappointments. It was dreadful, as she trembled by, to run the risk
of looking to him as if she basely hung about; and yet it was dreadful
to be obliged to pass only at such moments as put an encounter out of
the question.
At the horrible hour of her first coming to Cocker’s he was always—it
was to be hoped—snug in bed; and at the hour of her final departure he
was of course—she had such things all on her fingers’-ends—dressing for
dinner. We may let it pass that if she couldn’t bring herself to hover
till he was dressed, this was simply because such a process for such a
person could only be terribly prolonged. When she went in the middle of
the day to her own dinner she had too little time to do anything but go
straight, though it must be added that for a real certainty she would
joyously have omitted the repast. She had made up her mind as to there
being on the whole no decent pretext to justify her flitting casually
past at three o’clock in the morning. That was the hour at which, if
the ha’penny novels were not all wrong, he probably came home for the
night. She was therefore reduced to the vainest figuration of the
miraculous meeting toward which a hundred impossibilities would have to
conspire. But if nothing was more impossible than the fact, nothing was
more intense than the vision. What may not, we can only moralise, take
place in the quickened muffled perception of a young person with an
ardent soul? All our humble friend’s native distinction, her refinement
of personal grain, of heredity, of pride, took refuge in this small
throbbing spot; for when she was most conscious of the objection of her
vanity and the pitifulness of her little flutters and manoeuvres, then
the consolation and the redemption were most sure to glow before her in
some just discernible sign. He did like her!