Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she
should never see him again. He too then understood now: he had made out
that she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl
at the P.O. might have her complications. With the charm she had cast
on him lightened by distance he had suffered a final delicacy to speak
to him, had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her
alone. Never so much as during these latter days had she felt the
precariousness of their relation—the happy beautiful untroubled
original one, if it could only have been restored—in which the public
servant and the casual public only were concerned. It hung at the best
by the merest silken thread, which was at the mercy of any accident and
might snap at any minute. She arrived by the end of the fortnight at
the highest sense of actual fitness, never doubting that her decision
was now complete. She would just give him a few days more to come back
to her on a proper impersonal basis—for even to an embarrassing
representative of the casual public a public servant with a conscience
did owe something—and then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she was
ready for the little home. It had been visited, in the further talk she
had had with him at Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had
especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the
niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find
means to fit.
He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations
had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the
greatest impression he had ever made on her. It was a stroke superior
even again to his handling of the drunken soldier. What she considered
that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker’s for was something she
could only have described as the common fairness of a last word. Her
actual last word had been, till it should be superseded, that she
wouldn’t forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick
and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour. This other
friend had shown so much beauty of conduct already that he would surely
after all just re-appear long enough to relieve her, to give her
something she could take away. She saw it, caught it, at times, his
parting present; and there were moments when she felt herself sitting
like a beggar with a hand held out to almsgiver who only fumbled. She
hadn’t taken the sovereigns, but she _would_ take the penny. She heard,
in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the copper. “Don’t put
yourself out any longer,” he would say, “for so bad a case. You’ve done
all there is to be done. I thank and acquit and release you. Our lives
take us. I don’t know much—though I’ve really been interested—about
yours, but I suppose you’ve got one. Mine at any rate will take
_me_—and where it will. Heigh-ho! Good-bye.” And then once more, for
the sweetest faintest flower of all: “Only, I say—see here!” She had
framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image
of how again she would decline to “see there,” decline, as she might
say, to see anywhere, see anything. Yet it befell that just in the fury
of this escape she saw more than ever.
He came back one night with a rush, near the moment of their closing,
and showed her a face so different and new, so upset and anxious, that
almost anything seemed to look out of it but clear recognition. He
poked in a telegram very much as if the simple sense of pressure, the
distress of extreme haste, had blurred the remembrance of where in
particular he was. But as she met his eyes a light came; it broke
indeed on the spot into a positive conscious glare. That made up for
everything, since it was an instant proclamation of the celebrated
“danger”; it seemed to pour things out in a flood. “Oh yes, here it
is—it’s upon me at last! Forget, for God’s sake, my having worried or
bored you, and just help me, just _save_ me, by getting this off
without the loss of a second!” Something grave had clearly occurred, a
crisis declared itself. She recognised immediately the person to whom
the telegram was addressed—the Miss Dolman of Parade Lodge to whom Lady
Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last occasion, and whom she had
then, with her recollection of previous arrangements, fitted into a
particular setting. Miss Dolman had figured before and not figured
since, but she was now the subject of an imperative appeal. “Absolutely
necessary to see you. Take last train Victoria if you can catch it. If
not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way.”
“Reply paid?” said the girl. Mr. Buckton had just departed and the
counter-clerk was at the sounder. There was no other representative of
the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the
street or in the Park, been so alone with him.
“Oh yes, reply paid, and as sharp as possible, please.”
She affixed the stamps in a flash. “She’ll catch the train!” she then
declared to him breathlessly, as if she could absolutely guarantee it.
“I don’t know—I hope so. It’s awfully important. So kind of you.
Awfully sharp, please.” It was wonderfully innocent now, his oblivion
of all but his danger. Anything else that had ever passed between them
was utterly out of it. Well, she had wanted him to be impersonal!
There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself; yet
she only took time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp at him:
“You‘re in trouble?”
“Horrid, horrid—there’s a row!” But they parted, on it, in the next
breath; and as she dashed at the sounder, almost pushing, in her
violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she caught the bang with
which, at Cocker’s door, in his further precipitation, he closed the
apron of the cab into which he had leaped. As he rebounded to some
other precaution suggested by his alarm, his appeal to Miss Dolman
flashed straight away.
But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes before
he was with her again, still more discomposed and quite, now, as she
said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its mother. Her
companions were there, and she felt it to be remarkable how, in the
presence of his agitation, his mere scared exposed nature, she suddenly
ceased to mind. It came to her as it had never come to her before that
with absolute directness and assurance they might carry almost anything
off. He had nothing to send—she was sure he had been wiring all
over—and yet his business was evidently huge. There was nothing but
that in his eyes—not a glimmer of reference or memory. He was almost
haggard with anxiety and had clearly not slept a wink. Her pity for him
would have given her any courage, and she seemed to know at last why
she had been such a fool. “She didn’t come?” she panted.
“Oh yes, she came; but there has been some mistake. We want a
telegram.”
“A telegram?”
“One that was sent from here ever so long ago. There was something in
it that has to be recovered. Something very, very important, please—we
want it immediately.”
He really spoke to her as if she had been some strange young woman at
Knightsbridge or Paddington; but it had no other effect on her than to
give her the measure of his tremendous flurry. Then it was that, above
all, she felt how much she had missed in the gaps and blanks and absent
answers—how much she had had to dispense with: it was now black
darkness save for this little wild red flare. So much as that she saw,
so much her mind dealt with. One of the lovers was quaking somewhere
out of town, and the other was quaking just where he stood. This was
vivid enough, and after an instant she knew it was all she wanted. She
wanted no detail, no fact—she wanted no nearer vision of discovery or
shame. “When was your telegram? Do you mean you sent it from here?” She
tried to do the young woman at Knightsbridge.
“Oh yes, from here—several weeks ago. Five, six, seven”—he was confused
and impatient—“don’t you remember?”
“Remember?” she could scarcely keep out of her face, at the word, the
strangest of smiles.
But the way he didn’t catch what it meant was perhaps even stranger
still. “I mean, don’t you keep the old ones?”
“For a certain time.”
“But how long?”
She thought; she _must_ do the young woman, and she knew exactly what
the young woman would say and, still more, wouldn’t. “Can you give me
the date?”
“Oh God, no! It was some time or other in August—toward the end. It was
to the same address as the one I gave you last night.”
“Oh!” said the girl, knowing at this the deepest thrill she had ever
felt. It came to her there, with her eyes on his face, that she held
the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil, which
might have broken at that instant in her tightened grip. This made her
feel like the very fountain of fate, but the emotion was such a flood
that she had to press it back with all her force. That was positively
the reason, again, of her flute-like Paddington tone. “You can’t give
us anything a little nearer?” Her “little” and her “us” came straight
from Paddington. These things were no false note for him—his difficulty
absorbed them all. The eyes with which he pressed her, and in the
depths of which she read terror and rage and literal tears, were just
the same he would have shown any other prim person.
“I don’t know the date. I only know the thing went from here, and just
about the time I speak of. It wasn’t delivered, you see. We’ve got to
recover it.”