It was not till the end of October that she saw Captain Everard again,
and on that occasion—the only one of all the series on which hindrance
had been so utter—no communication with him proved possible. She had
made out even from the cage that it was a charming golden day: a patch
of hazy autumn sunlight lay across the sanded floor and also, higher
up, quickened into brightness a row of ruddy bottled syrups. Work was
slack and the place in general empty; the town, as they said in the
cage, had not waked up, and the feeling of the day likened itself to
something than in happier conditions she would have thought of
romantically as Saint Martin’s summer. The counter-clerk had gone to
his dinner; she herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs, in the
midst of which she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently
been in the shop a minute and that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.
He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she saw
him and their eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an exaggerated laugh
in which she read a new consciousness. It was a confession of
awkwardness; it seemed to tell her that of course he knew he ought
better to have kept his head, ought to have been clever enough to wait,
on some pretext, till he should have found her free. Mr. Buckton was a
long time with him, and her attention was soon demanded by other
visitors; so that nothing passed between them but the fulness of their
silence. The look she took from him was his greeting, and the other one
a simple sign of the eyes sent her before going out. The only token
they exchanged therefore was his tacit assent to her wish that since
they couldn’t attempt a certain frankness they should attempt nothing
at all. This was her intense preference; she could be as still and cold
as any one when that was the sole solution.
Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants
struck her as marking a step: they were built so—just in the mere
flash—on the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was she
would do for him. The “anything, anything” she had uttered in the Park
went to and fro between them and under the poked-out china that
interposed. It had all at last even put on the air of their not needing
now clumsily to manoeuvre to converse: their former little postal
make-believes, the intense implications of questions and answers and
change, had become in the light of the personal fact, of their having
had their moment, a possibility comparatively poor. It was as if they
had met for all time—it exerted on their being in presence again an
influence so prodigious. When she watched herself, in the memory of
that night, walk away from him as if she were making an end, she found
something too pitiful in the primness of such a gait. Hadn’t she
precisely established on the part of each a consciousness that could
end only with death?
It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an irritation,
after he had gone, remained with her; a sense that presently became one
with a still sharper hatred of Mr. Buckton, who, on her friend’s
withdrawal, had retired with the telegrams to the sounder and left her
the other work. She knew indeed she should have a chance to see them,
when she would, on file; and she was divided, as the day went on,
between the two impressions of all that was lost and all that was
re-asserted. What beset her above all, and as she had almost never
known it before, was the desire to bound straight out, to overtake the
autumn afternoon before it passed away for ever and hurry off to the
Park and perhaps be with him there again on a bench. It became for an
hour a fantastic vision with her that he might just have gone to sit
and wait for her. She could almost hear him, through the tick of the
sounder, scatter with his stick, in his impatience, the fallen leaves
of October. Why should such a vision seize her at this particular
moment with such a shake? There was a time—from four to five—when she
could have cried with happiness and rage.
Business quickened, it seemed, toward five, as if the town did wake up;
she had therefore more to do, and she went through it with little sharp
stampings and jerkings: she made the crisp postal-orders fairly snap
while she breathed to herself “It’s the last day—the last day!” The
last day of what? She couldn’t have told. All she knew now was that if
she _were_ out of the cage she wouldn’t in the least have minded, this
time, its not yet being dark. She would have gone straight toward Park
Chambers and have hung about there till no matter when. She would have
waited, stayed, rung, asked, have gone in, sat on the stairs. What the
day was the last of was probably, to her strained inner sense, the
group of golden ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy sunshine
slant at that angle into the smelly shop, of any range of chances for
his wishing still to repeat to her the two words she had in the Park
scarcely let him bring out. “See here—see here!”—the sound of these two
words had been with her perpetually; but it was in her ears to-day
without mercy, with a loudness that grew and grew. What was it they
then expressed? what was it he had wanted her to see? She seemed,
whatever it was, perfectly to see it now—to see that if she should just
chuck the whole thing, should have a great and beautiful courage, he
would somehow make everything up to her. When the clock struck five she
was on the very point of saying to Mr. Buckton that she was deadly ill
and rapidly getting worse. This announcement was on her lips, and she
had quite composed the pale hard face she would offer him: “I can’t
stop—I must go home. If I feel better, later on, I’ll come back. I’m
very sorry, but I _must_ go.” At that instant Captain Everard once more
stood there, producing in her agitated spirit, by his real presence,
the strangest, quickest revolution. He stopped her off without knowing
it, and by the time he had been a minute in the shop she felt herself
saved.
That was from the first minute how she thought of it. There were again
other persons with whom she was occupied, and again the situation could
only be expressed by their silence. It was expressed, of a truth, in a
larger phrase than ever yet, for her eyes now spoke to him with a kind
of supplication. “Be quiet, be quiet!” they pleaded; and they saw his
own reply: “I’ll do whatever you say; I won’t even look at you—see,
see!” They kept conveying thus, with the friendliest liberality, that
they wouldn’t look, quite positively wouldn’t. What she was to see was
that he hovered at the other end of the counter, Mr. Buckton’s end, and
surrendered himself again to that frustration. It quickly proved so
great indeed that what she was to see further was how he turned away
before he was attended to, and hung off, waiting, smoking, looking
about the shop; how he went over to Mr. Cocker’s own counter and
appeared to price things, gave in fact presently two or three orders
and put down money, stood there a long time with his back to her,
considerately abstaining from any glance round to see if she were free.
It at last came to pass in this way that he had remained in the shop
longer than she had ever yet known to do, and that, nevertheless, when
he did turn about she could see him time himself—she was freshly taken
up—and cross straight to her postal subordinate, whom some one else had
released. He had in his hand all this while neither letters nor
telegrams, and now that he was close to her—for she was close to the
counter-clerk—it brought her heart into her mouth merely to see him
look at her neighbour and open his lips. She was too nervous to bear
it. He asked for a Post-Office Guide, and the young man whipped out a
new one; whereupon he said he wished not to purchase, but only to
consult one a moment; with which, the copy kept on loan being produced,
he once more wandered off.
What was he doing to her? What did he want of her? Well, it was just
the aggravation of his “See here!” She felt at this moment strangely
and portentously afraid of him—had in her ears the hum of a sense that,
should it come to that kind of tension, she must fly on the spot to
Chalk Farm. Mixed with her dread and with her reflexion was the idea
that, if he wanted her so much as he seemed to show, it might be after
all simply to do for him the “anything” she had promised, the
“everything” she had thought it so fine to bring out to Mr. Mudge. He
might want her to help him, might have some particular appeal; though
indeed his manner didn’t denote that—denoted on the contrary an
embarrassment, an indecision, something of a desire not so much to be
helped as to be treated rather more nicely than she had treated him the
other time. Yes, he considered quite probably that he had help rather
to offer than to ask for. Still, none the less, when he again saw her
free he continued to keep away from her; when he came back with his
_Guide_ it was Mr. Buckton he caught—it was from Mr. Buckton he
obtained half-a-crown’s-worth of stamps.
After asking for the stamps he asked, quite as a second thought, for a
postal-order for ten shillings. What did he want with so many stamps
when he wrote so few letters? How could he enclose a postal-order in a
telegram? She expected him, the next thing, to go into the corner and
make up one of his telegrams—half a dozen of them—on purpose to prolong
his presence. She had so completely stopped looking at him that she
could only guess his movements—guess even where his eyes rested.
Finally she saw him make a dash that might have been toward the nook
where the forms were hung; and at this she suddenly felt that she
couldn’t keep it up. The counter-clerk had just taken a telegram from a
slavey, and, to give herself something to cover her, she snatched it
out of his hand. The gesture was so violent that he gave her in return
an odd look, and she also perceived that Mr. Buckton noticed it. The
latter personage, with a quick stare at her, appeared for an instant to
wonder whether his snatching it in _his_ turn mightn’t be the thing she
would least like, and she anticipated this practical criticism by the
frankest glare she had ever given him. It sufficed: this time it
paralysed him; and she sought with her trophy the refuge of the
sounder.