It was repeated the next day; it went on for three days; and at the end
of that time she knew what to think. When, at the beginning, she had
emerged from her temporary shelter Captain Everard had quitted the
shop; and he had not come again that evening, as it had struck her he
possibly might—might all the more easily that there were numberless
persons who came, morning and afternoon, numberless times, so that he
wouldn’t necessarily have attracted attention. The second day it was
different and yet on the whole worse. His access to her had become
possible—she felt herself even reaping the fruit of her yesterday’s
glare at Mr. Buckton; but transacting his business with him didn’t
simplify—it could, in spite of the rigour of circumstance, feed so her
new conviction. The rigour was tremendous, and his telegrams—not now
mere pretexts for getting at her—were apparently genuine; yet the
conviction had taken but a night to develop. It could be simply enough
expressed; she had had the glimmer of it the day before in her idea
that he needed no more help than she had already given; that it was
help he himself was prepared to render. He had come up to town but for
three or four days; he had been absolutely obliged to be absent after
the other time; yet he would, now that he was face to face with her,
stay on as much longer as she liked. Little by little it was thus
clarified, though from the first flash of his re-appearance she had
read into it the real essence.
That was what the night before, at eight o’clock, her hour to go, had
made her hang back and dawdle. She did last things or pretended to do
them; to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was
literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside.
_He_ might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him
she was afraid. The most extraordinary change had taken place in her
from the moment of her catching the impression he seemed to have
returned on purpose to give her. Just before she had done so, on that
bewitched afternoon, she had seen herself approach without a scruple
the porter at Park Chambers; then as the effect of the rush of a
consciousness quite altered she had on at last quitting Cocker’s, gone
straight home for the first time since her return from Bournemouth. She
had passed his door every night for weeks, but nothing would have
induced her to pass it now. This change was the tribute of her fear—the
result of a change in himself as to which she needed no more
explanation than his mere face vividly gave her; strange though it was
to find an element of deterrence in the object that she regarded as the
most beautiful in the world. He had taken it from her in the Park that
night that she wanted him not to propose to her to sup; but he had put
away the lesson by this time—he practically proposed supper every time
he looked at her. This was what, for that matter, mainly filled the
three days. He came in twice on each of these, and it was as if he came
in to give her a chance to relent. That was after all, she said to
herself in the intervals, the most that he did. There were ways, she
fully recognised, in which he spared her, and other particular ways as
to which she meant that her silence should be full to him of exquisite
pleading. The most particular of all was his not being outside, at the
corner, when she quitted the place for the night. This he might so
easily have been—so easily if he hadn’t been so nice. She continued to
recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her dumb supplication, and
the only compensation he found for it was the harmless freedom of being
able to appear to say: “Yes, I’m in town only for three or four days,
but, you know, I _would_ stay on.” He struck her as calling attention
each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he exaggerated to the
point of putting it that there were only two days more, that there was
at last, dreadfully, only one.
There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a
special intention; as to the most marked of which—unless indeed it were
the most obscure—she might well have marvelled that it didn’t seem to
her more horrid. It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the
disorder of his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision
of his putting down redundant money—sovereigns not concerned with the
little payments he was perpetually making—so that she might give him
some sign of helping him to slip them over to her. What was most
extraordinary in this impression was the amount of excuse that, with
some incoherence, she found for him. He wanted to pay her because there
was nothing to pay her for. He wanted to offer her things he knew she
wouldn’t take. He wanted to show her how much he respected her by
giving her the supreme chance to show _him_ she was respectable. Over
the dryest transactions, at any rate, their eyes had out these
questions. On the third day he put in a telegram that had evidently
something of the same point as the stray sovereigns—a message that was
in the first place concocted and that on a second thought he took back
from her before she had stamped it. He had given her time to read it
and had only then bethought himself that he had better not send it. If
it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle—where she knew her ladyship then
to be—this was because an address to Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood was
just as good, with the added merit of its not giving away quite so much
a person whom he had still, after all, in a manner to consider. It was
of course most complicated, only half lighted; but there was,
discernibly enough, a scheme of communication in which Lady Bradeen at
Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within limits, one and the
same person. The words he had shown her and then taken back consisted,
at all events, of the brief but vivid phrase “Absolutely impossible.”
The point was not that she should transmit it; the point was just that
she should see it. What was absolutely impossible was that before he
had setted something at Cocker’s he should go either to Twindle or to
Brickwood.
The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend
herself to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew. What she
knew was that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a
situation: therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the
P.O. might really stand? It was more and more between them that if he
might convey to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away
into a closed chapter, her own case might become different for her, she
might understand and meet him and listen. But he could convey nothing
of the sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power.
The chapter wasn’t in the least closed, not for the other party; and
the other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole
attitude and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated
her not to remember and not to mind. So long as she did remember and
did mind he could only circle about and go and come, doing futile
things of which he was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr.
Buzzard; he went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the
paper again and thrust it into his pocket. It had been an abject little
exposure of dreadful impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too
ashamed to come back. He had once more left town, and a first week
elapsed, and a second. He had had naturally to return to the real
mistress of his fate; she had insisted—she knew how to insist, and he
couldn’t put in another hour. There was always a day when she called
time. It was known to our young friend moreover that he had now been
dispatching telegrams from other offices. She knew at last so much that
she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no
different shades of distinctness—it all bounced out.