to manage this place as best she can. Fortunately, her health's
improved. She can make it pay very well if she likes. It's a handsome
living for her. My deposit on the Chichester and so on will have to be
forfeited."

"And you?" she murmured.

His back was towards her. He turned his head, looked at her
enigmatically for an instant, and resumed his packing.

She desired to help him with the packing, she desired to show him some
tenderness; her heart was cleft in two with pity; but she could not
move; some harshness of pride or vanity prevented her from moving.

When he had carelessly finished the portmanteau, he strode to the door,
opened it wide, and called out in a loud, firm voice:

"Louisa!"

A reply came weakly from the top floor:

"Yes, sir."

"I want you." He had a short way with Louisa.

After a brief delay, she came to the bedroom door.

"Run down to the King's Road and get me a cab," he said to her at the
door, as it were confidentially.

"Yes, sir." The woman was like a Christian slave.

"Here! Take the portmanteau down with you to the front door." He gave
her the portmanteau.

"Yes, sir."

She disappeared; and then there was the noise of the front door opening.

George picked up his hat and abruptly left the room. Hilda moved to and
fro nervously, stiff with having stood still so long. She wondered how
he, and how she, would comport themselves in the ordeal of adieu. In a
few moments a cab drove up--Louisa had probably encountered it on the
way. Hilda waited, tense. Then she heard the cab driving off again. She
rushed aghast to the window. She saw the roof of the disappearing cab,
and the unwieldy portmanteau on it.... He had gone! He had gone without
saying good-bye! That was his device for simplifying the situation. It
was drastic, but it was magnificent. He had gone out of the house and
out of her life. As she gazed at the dim swaying roof of the cab,
magically the roof was taken off, and she could see the ravaged and
stricken figure within, sitting grimly in the dark between the wheels
that rolled him away from her. The vision was intolerable. She moved
aside and wept passionately. How could he help doing all he had done?
She had possessed him--the memories of his embrace told her how utterly!
All that he had said was true; and this being so, who could blame his
conduct? He had only risked and lost.

Sarah Gailey suddenly appeared in the room, and shut the door like a
conspirator.

"Then--" she began, terror-struck.

And Hilda nodded, ceasing to cry.

"Oh! My poor dear!" Sarah Gailey moaned feebly, her head bobbing with
its unconscious nervous movements. The sight of her worn, saddened
features sharpened Hilda's appreciation of her own girlishness and
inexperience.

But despite the shock, despite her extreme misery, despite the anguish
and fear in her heart and the immense difficulty of the new situation
into which she was thus violently thrust, Hilda was not without
consolation. She felt none of the shame conventionally proper to a girl
deceived. On the contrary, deep within herself, she knew that the
catastrophe was a deliverance. She knew that fate had favoured her by
absolving her from the consequences of a tragic weakness and error.
These thoughts inflamed and rendered more beautiful the apprehensive
pity for the real victim--now affronted by a new danger, the menace of
the law.

BOOK VI
HER PUNISHMENT

CHAPTER I
EVENING AT BLEAKRIDGE

When Hilda's cab turned, perilously swaying, through the gate into the
dark garden of the Orgreaves, Hilda saw another cab already at the open
house door, and in the lighted porch stood figures distinguishable as
Janet and Alicia, all enwrapped for a journey, and Martha holding more
wraps. The long façade of the house was black, save for one window on
the first floor, which threw a faint radiance on the leafless branches
of elms, and thus intensified the upper mysteries of the nocturnal
garden. The arrival of the second cab caused excitement in the porch;
and Hilda, leaning out of the window into the November mist, shook with
apprehension, as her vehicle came to a halt behind the other one. She
was now to meet friends for the first time after her secret and unhappy
adventure. She feared that Janet, by some magic insight of affection,
would read at once in her face the whole history of the past year.

Janet had written to her, giving and asking for news, and urging a
visit, on the very day after the scene in which George Cannon admitted
his turpitude. Had the letter been sent a day or two sooner, reaching
Hilda on her honeymoon, she would certainly have replied to it with the
tremendous news of her marriage, and, her marriage, having been made
public in the Five Towns, her shame also would necessarily be public.
But chance had saved her from this humiliation. Nobody in the district
was aware of the marriage. By a characteristic instinct, she had been
determined not to announce it in any way until the honeymoon was over.
In answer to Janet, she had written very briefly, as was usual with her,
and said that she would come to Lane End House as soon as she could.
"Shall I tell her, or shan't I?" she had cogitated, and the decision had
been for postponement. But she strongly desired, nevertheless, to pay
the visit. She had had more than enough of Preston Street and of
Brighton, and longed to leave at any price.

And, at length, one dull morning, after George Cannon had sailed for
America, and all affairs were somehow arranged or had arranged
themselves, and Sarah Gailey was better and the autumn season smoothly
running with new servants, she had suddenly said to Sarah: "I have to go
to Bursley to-day, for a few days." And she had gone, upon the impulse,
without having previously warned Janet. Changing at Knype, she had got
into the wrong train, and had found herself at Shawport, at the far,
lower end of Bursley, instead of up at Bleakridge, close by the
Orgreaves! And there was, of course, no cab for her. But a cabman who
had brought a fare to the station, and was driving his young woman back,
had offered in a friendly way to take Hilda too. And she had sat in the
cab with the young woman, who was a paintress at Peel's great
manufactory at Shawport, and suffered from a weak chest; and they had
talked about the potters' strike which was then upheaving the district,
and the cab had overtaken a procession of thinly clad potters, wending
in the bitter mist to a mass meeting at Hanbridge; and Hilda had been
thereby much impressed and angered against all employers. And the young
woman had left the cab, half-way up Trafalgar Road, with a delicious
pink-and-white smile of adieu. And Hilda had thought how different all
this was from Brighton, and how much better and more homely and
understandable. And now she was in the garden of the Orgreaves.

Martha came peeping, to discover the explanation of this singular
concourse of cabs in the garden, and she cried joyously:

"Oh, Miss Janet, it's Miss Hilda--Miss Lessways, I mean!"

Alicia shrieked. The first cab drew forward to make room for Hilda's,
and Hilda stepped down into the glare of the porch, and was plainly
beheld by all three girls.

"Will they notice anything?" she asked herself, self-conscious, almost
trembling, as she thought of the terrific changes that had passed in her
since her previous visit.

But nobody noticed anything. Nobody observed that this was not the same
Hilda. Even in the intimacy of the affectionate kiss, for which she
lifted her veil, Janet seemed to have no suspicion whatever.

"We were just off to Hillport," said Janet. "How splendid of you to come
like this!"

"Don't let's go to Hillport!" said Alicia.

Janet hesitated, pulling down her veil.

"Of course you must go!" Hilda said positively.

"I'm afraid we shall have to go," said Janet, with reluctance. "You see,
it's the Marrions--Edie's cousins--and Edie will be there!"

"Who's Edie?"

"Why! Tom's fiancée! Surely I told you!"

"Yes," said Hilda; "only I didn't just remember the name. How nice!"

(She thought: "No sooner do I get here than I talk like they do! Fancy
me saying, 'How nice'!")

"Oh, it's all Edie nowadays!" said Alicia lightly. "We have to be
frightfully particular, or else Tom would cut our heads off. That's why
we're going in a cab! We should have walked,--shouldn't we, Janet?--only
it would never do for us to _walk_ to the Marrions' at night! 'The
Misses Lessways' carriage!'" she mimicked, and finicked about on her
toes.

Janet was precisely the same as ever, but the pig-tailed Alicia had
developed. Her childishness was now shot through with gestures and tones
of the young girl. She flushed and paled continuously, and was acutely
self-conscious and somewhat vain, but not offensively vain.

"I say, Jan," she exclaimed, "why shouldn't Hilda come with us?"

"To the Marrions'? Oh no, thanks!" said Hilda.

"But do, Hilda! I'm sure they'd be delighted!" Janet urged. "I never
thought of it."

Though she was flattered and, indeed, a little startled by the
extraordinary seriousness of Janet's insistence, Hilda shook her head.

"Where's Tom?" she inquired, to change the subject.

"Oh!" Alicia burst out again. "He's gone off _hours_ ago to escort his
ladylove from Hanbridge to Hillport."

"You wait till you're engaged, Alicia!" Janet suggested. But Janet's
eyes, too, twinkled the admission that Tom was just then providing much
innocent amusement to the family.

"You'll sleep in my room to-night, anyhow, dear," said Janet, when
Martha and Hilda's cabman had brought a trunk into the hall, and Hilda
had paid the cabman far more than his fare because he was such a
friendly young cabman and because he possessed a pulmonary sweetheart.
"Come along, dear!... Alicia, ask Swindells to wait a minute or two."

"Swindells," Alicia shouted to the original cabman, "just wait a jiff!"

"Yes, miss." The original cabman, being old and accustomed to evening-
party work in the Five Towns, knew the length of a jiff, and got down
from his seat to exercise both arms and legs. With sardonic pleasure he
watched the young cabman cut a black streak in the sodden lawn with his
near front-wheel as he clumsily turned to leave. Then Martha banged the
front door, and another servant appeared in the hall to help the trunk
on its way upstairs.

"No! I shall never be able to tell them!" thought Hilda, following the
trunk.

Alicia had scampered on in front of the trunk, to inform her parents of
the arrival. Mrs. Orgreave, Hilda learnt, was laid up with an attack of
asthma, and Osmond Orgreave was working in their bedroom.

II

Hilda stood in front of the fire in Janet's bedroom, and Janet was
unlocking her trunk.

"Why! What a pretty bodice!" said Janet, opening the trunk. She stood
up, and held forth the bodice to inspect it; and beneath Janet's cloak
Hilda could see the splendour of her evening dress. "Where did you get
it?"

"In London," Hilda was about to answer, but she took thought. "Oh!
Brighton." It was a lie.

She had a longing to say:

"No, not Brighton! What am I thinking of? I got it in London on my
honeymoon!"

What a unique sensation that one word would have caused! But she could
not find courage to utter it.

Alicia came importantly in.

"Mother's love, and you are to go into her room as soon as you're ready.
Martha will bring up a tray for you, and you'll eat there by the fire.
It's all arranged."

"And what about father's love?" Hilda demanded, with a sprightliness
that astonished herself. And she thought: "Why are these people so fond
of me? They don't even ask how it was I didn't write to tell them I was
coming. They just accept me and welcome me without questions.... No! I
can never tell them! It simply couldn't be told, here! If they find out,
so much the worse!"

"You must ask him!" Alicia answered, blushing.

"All right, Alicia. We'll be ready in a minute or two," said Janet in a
peculiar voice.

It was a gentle command to Alicia to leave her elders alone to their
adult confidences. And unwilling Alicia had to obey.

But there were no confidences. The talk, as it were, shivered on the
brink of a confidence, but never plunged.

"Does she guess?" Hilda reflected.

The conversation so halted that at length Janet was driven to the
banality of saying:

"I'm so sorry we have to go out!"

And Hilda protested with equal banality, and added: "I suppose you're
going out a lot just now?"

"Oh no!" said Janet. "We go out less and less, and we get quieter and
quieter. I mean _us_. The boys are always out, you know." She seemed
saddened. "I did think Edwin Clayhanger would come in sometimes, now
they're living next door--"

"They're in their new house, then!" said Hilda, with casualness.

"Oh, long ago! And I'm sure it's ages since he was here. I like
Maggie--his sister."

Hilda knelt to her trunk.

"Did he ever inquire after me?" she demanded, with an air of archness,
but hiding her face.

"As a matter of fact he _did_--once," said Janet, imitating Hilda's
manner.

"Well, that's something," said Hilda.

There was a sharp knock at the door.

"Hot water, miss!" cried the voice of Martha.

The next instant Martha was arranging the ewer and the can and some
clean towels on the washstand. Her face was full of joy in the
unexpected arrival. She was as excited as if Hilda had been her own
friend instead of Janet's.

"Well, dear, shall you be all right now?" said Janet. "Perhaps I ought
to be going. You may depend on it I shall get back as early as ever I
can."

The two girls kissed, with even more freedom than in the hall. It seemed
astonishing to Hilda, as her face was close to Janet's, that Janet did
not exclaim: "Something has happened to you. What is it? You are not as
you used to be! You are not like me!" She felt herself an imposter.

"Why should I tell?" Hilda reflected. "What end will it serve? It's
nobody's business but mine. _He_ is gone. He'll never come back.
Everything's over.... And if it does get about, well, they'll only
praise me for my discretion. They can't do anything else."

Still, she longed timorously to confide in Janet. And when Janet had
departed she breathed relief because the danger of confiding in Janet
was withdrawn for the moment.

Later, as the invalid had ordained, Hilda, having eaten, sat by the fire
in the large, quiet bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Orgreave. The latter was
enjoying a period of ease, and lay, with head raised very high on
pillows, in her own half of the broad bed. The quilt extended over her
without a crease in its expanse; the sheet was turned down with
precision, making a level white border to the quilt; and Mrs. Orgreave
did not stir; not one of her grey locks stirred; she spoke occasionally
in a low voice. On the night-table stood a Godfrey's Chloride of Ammonia
Inhaler, with its glass cylinder and triple arrangement of tubes. There
was only this, and the dark lips and pale cheeks of the patient, to
remind the beholder that not long since the bed had been a scene of
agony. Mr. Orgreave, in bright carpet slippers, and elegant wristbands
blossoming out of the sleeves of his black house-jacket, stood bending
above a huge board that was laid horizontally on trestles to the left of
the fireplace. This board was covered by a wide length of bluish
transparent paper which at intervals he pulled towards him, making
billows of paper at his feet and gradually lessening a roll of it that
lay on the floor beyond the table. A specially arranged gas-bracket with
a green shade which threw a powerful light on the paper showed that
Osmond Orgreave's habit was to work in that spot of an evening.

"Astonishing I have to do this myself, isn't it?" he observed, stooping
to roll up the accumulated length of paper about his feet.

"What is it?" Hilda asked.

"It's a full-sized detail drawing. Simple!... But do you suppose I could
trust either of my ingenious sons to get the curves of the mouldings
right?"

"You'll never be able to trust them unless you begin to trust them,"
said Mrs. Orgreave sagely from the bed.

"Ha!" ejaculated Osmond Orgreave satirically. This remark was one of his
most effective counters to argument.

"The fact is he thoroughly enjoys it, doesn't he, Mrs. Orgreave?" said
Hilda.

"You're quite right, my dear," said Mrs. Orgreave.

"Ah!" from Mr. Orgreave.

He sketched with a pencil and rubbed out, vigorously. Then his eye
caught Hilda's, and they both smiled, very content. "They'd look nice if
I took to drink instead of to work, for a change!" he murmured, pausing
to caress his handsome hair.

There was a sharp knock at the door, and into this room also the
watchful Martha entered.

"Here's the _Signal_, sir. The boy's only just brought it."

"Give it to Miss Hilda," said Mr. Orgreave, without glancing up.

"Shall I take the tray away, 'm?" Martha inquired, looking towards the
bed, the supreme centre of domestic order and authority.

"Perhaps Miss Hilda hasn't finished?"

"Oh yes, I have, thanks."

Martha rearranged the vessels and cutlery upon the tray, with quick,
expert movements of the wrists. Her gaze was carefully fixed on the
tray. Endowed though she was with rare privileges, as a faithful
retainer, she would have been shocked and shamed had her gaze,
improperly wandering, encountered the gaze of the master or the guest.
Then she picked up the tray, and, pushing the small table into its
accustomed place with a deft twist of the foot, she sailed erect and
prim out of the room, and the door primly clicked on her neat-girded
waist and flying white ribbons.

"And what am I to do with this _Signal_" Hilda asked, fingering the
white, damp paper.

"I should like you to read us about the strike," said Mrs. Orgreave.
"It's a dreadful thing."

"I should thing it was!" Hilda agreed fervently. "Oh! Do you know, on
the way from Shawport, I saw a procession of the men, and anything more
terrible--"

"It's the children I think of!" said Mrs. Orgreave softly.

"Pity the men don't!" Mr. Orgreave murmured, without raising his head.

"Don't what?" Hilda asked defiantly.

"Think of the children."

Bridling, but silent, Hilda opened the sheet, and searched round and
about its columns with the embarrassed bewilderment of one unaccustomed
to the perusal of newspapers.

"Look on page three--first column," said Mr. Orgreave.

"That's all about racing," said Hilda.

"Oh dear, dear!" from the bed.

"Well, second column."

"The Potters' Strike. The men's leaders," she read the headlines. "There
isn't much of it."

"How beautifully clearly you read!" said Mrs. Orgreave, with mild
enthusiasm, when Hilda had read the meagre half-column.

"Do I?" Hilda flushed.

"Is that all there is about it?"

"Yes. They don't seem to think it's very important that half the people
are starving!" Hilda sneered.

"Whose fault is it if they do starve?" Osmond Orgreave glanced at her
with lowered head.

"I think it's a shame!" she exclaimed.

"Do you know that the men broke the last award, not so very long since?"
said Osmond Orgreave. "What can you do with such people?"

"Broke the last award?" She was checked.

"Broke the last award! Wouldn't stick by their own agreement, their own
words. I'll just tell you. A wise young woman like you oughtn't to be
carried away by the sight of a procession on a cold night."

He smiled; and she smiled, but awkwardly.

And then he told her something of the case for the employers.

"How hard you are on the men!" she protested, when he had done.

"Not at all! Not at all!" He stretched himself, and came round his
trestles to poke the fire. "You should hear Mr. Clayhanger on the men,
if you want to know what hard is."

"Mr. Clayhanger? You mean old Mr. Clayhanger?"

"Yes."

"But he isn't a manufacturer."

"No. But he's an employer of labour."

Hilda rose uneasily from her chair, and walked towards the distant,
shadowed dressing-table.

"I should like to go over a printing-works," she said abruptly.

"Very easy," said Mr. Orgreave, resuming his work with a great expulsion
of breath.

Hilda thought: "Why did I say that?" And, to cover her constraint, she
cried out: "Oh, what a lovely book!"

A small book, bound in full purple calf, lay half hidden in a nest of
fine tissue paper on the dressing-table.

"Yes, isn't it?" said Mrs. Orgreave. "Tom brought it in to show me,
before he went this afternoon. It's a birthday present for Edie. He's
had it specially bound. I must write myself, and ask Edie to come over
and meet you. I'm sure you'd like her. She's a dear girl. I think Tom's
very fortunate."

"No, you don't," Osmond Orgreave contradicted her, with a great rustling
of paper. "You think Edie's very fortunate."

Hilda looked round, and caught the architect's smile.

"I think they're both fortunate," said Mrs. Orgreave simply. She had
almost no sense of humour. "I'm sure she's a real good girl, and clever
too."

"Clever enough to get on the right side of her future mother-in-law,
anyway!" growled Mr. Orgreave.

"Anyone might think Osmond didn't like the girl," said Mrs. Orgreave,
"from the way he talks. And yet he adores her! And it's no use him
pretending he doesn't!"

"I only adore you!" said Osmond.

"You needn't try to turn it off!" his wife murmured, beaming on Hilda.

Tears came strangely into Hilda's eyes, and she turned again to the
dressing-table. And through a blur, she saw all the objects ranged in a
long row on the white cloth that covered the rosewood; and she thought:
"All this is beautiful." And she saw the pale blinds drawn down behind
the dressing-table, and the valance at the top, and the draped curtains;
and herself darkly in the glass. And she could feel the vista of the
large, calm, comfortable room behind her, and could hear the coals
falling together in the grate, and the rustling of the architect's
paper, and Mrs. Orgreave's slight cough. And, in her mind, she could see
all the other rooms in the spacious house, and the dim, misted garden
beyond. She thought: "All this house is beautiful. It is the most
beautiful thing I have ever known, or ever shall know. I'm happy here!"
And then her imagination followed each of the children. She imagined
Marian, the eldest, and her babies, in London; and Charlie, also in
London, practising medicine; and Tom and Janet and Alicia at the party
at Hillport; and Jimmie and Johnnie seeing life at Hanbridge; while the
parents remained in tranquillity in their bedroom. All these visions
were beautiful; even the vision of Jimmie and Johnnie flourishing
billiard-cues and glasses and pipes in the smoky atmosphere of a
club--even this was beautiful; it was as simply touching as the other
visions.... And she was at home with the parents, and so extremely
intimate with them that she could nearly conceive herself a genuine
member of the house. She was in bliss. Her immediate past dropped away
from her like an illusion, and she became almost the old Hilda: she was
almost born again into innocence. Only the tragic figure of George
Cannon hung vague in the far distance of memory, and the sight thereof
constricted her heart. Utterly her passion for him had expired: she was
exquisitely sad for him; she felt towards him kindly and guiltily, as
one feels towards an old error.... And, withal, the spell of the home of
the Orgreaves took away his reality.

She was fingering the book. Its title-page ran: _The English Poems of
Richard Crashaw_. Now she had never even heard of Richard Crashaw, and
she wondered who he might be. Turning the pages, she read:

    All thy old woes shall now smile on thee,
    And thy pains sit bright upon thee,
    All thy sorrows here shall shine,
    All thy sufferings be divine:
    Tears shall take comfort, and turn gems,
    And wrongs repent to diadems.

And she read again, as though the words had been too lovely to be real,
and she must assure herself of them:

    Tears shall take comfort, and turn gems,
    And wrongs repent to diadems.

She turned back to the beginning of the poem, and read the title of it:
"A Hymn, to the name and honour of the admirable Saint Teresa--Foundress
of the Reformation of the discalced Carmelites, both men and women: a
woman for angelical height of speculation, for masculine courage of
performance more than a woman: who yet a child outran maturity, and
durst plot a martyrdom."

The prose thrilled her even more intimately than the verse. She cried
within herself: "Why have I never heard of Richard Crashaw? Why did Tom
never tell me?" She became upon the instant a devotee of this Saint
Teresa. She thought inconsequently, with a pang that was also a
reassurance: "George Cannon would never have understood this. But
everyone here understands it." And with hands enfevered, she turned the
pages again, and, after several disappointments, read:

    Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires!
    By all thy dower of lights and fires;
    By all the eagle in thee, all the dove:
    By all thy lives and deaths of love:
    By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
    And by thy thirsts of love more large than they:
    By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,
    By this last morning's draught of liquid fire:
    By the full kingdom of that final kiss----

She ceased to read. It was as if her soul was crying out: "I also am
Teresa. This is I! This is I!"

And then the door opened, and Martha appeared once more:

"If you please, sir, Mr. Edwin Clayhanger's called."

"Oh... well, I'm nearly finished. Where is he?"

"In the breakfast-room, sir."

"Well, tell him I'll be down in a minute."

"Hilda," said Mrs. Orgreave, "will _you_ mind going and telling him?"

Hilda had replaced the book in its nest, and gone quickly back to her
chair. The entrance of the servant at that moment, to announce Edwin
Clayhanger, seemed to her startlingly dramatic. "What," she thought, "I
am just reading that and he comes!... He hasn't been here for ages, and,
on the very night that I come, he comes!"

"Certainly," she replied to Mrs. Orgreave. And she thought: "This is the
second time she has sent me with a message to Edwin Clayhanger."

Suddenly, she blushed in confusion before the mistress of the home. "Is
it possible," she asked herself,--"is it possible that Mrs. Orgreave
doesn't guess what has happened to me? Is it possible she can't see that
I'm different from what I used to be? If she knew... if they knew...
here!"

She left the room like a criminal. When she was going down the stairs,
she discovered that she held the _Signal_ in her hand. She had no
recollection of picking it up, and there was no object in taking it to
the breakfast-room! She thought: "What a state I must be in!"

CHAPTER II
A RENDEZVOUS

"I suppose you've never thought about me once since I've left!"

She was sitting on the sofa in the small, shelved breakfast-room, and
she shot these words at Edwin Clayhanger, who was standing near her. The
singular words were certainly uttered out of bravado: they were a
challenge to adventure. She thought: "It is madness for me to say such a
thing." But such a thing had, nevertheless, come quite glibly out of her
mouth, and she knew not why. If Edwin Clayhanger was startled, so was
she startled.

"Oh yes, I have!" he stammered--of course, she had put him out of
countenance.

She smiled, and said persuasively: "But you've never inquired after me."

"Yes, I have," he answered, with a hint of defiance, after a pause.

"Only once." She continued to smile.

"How do you know?" he demanded.

Then she told him very calmly, extinguishing the smile, that her source
of information was Janet.

"That's nothing to go by!" he exclaimed, with sudden roughness. "That's
nothing to go by--the number of _times_ I've inquired!"

II

She was silenced. She thought: "If I am thus intimate with him, it must
be because of the talk we had in the garden that night." And it seemed
to her that the scene in the garden had somehow bound them together for
ever in intimacy, that, even if they pretended to be only acquaintances,
they would constantly be breaking through the thin shell of formality
into some unguessed deep of intimacy. She regarded--surreptitiously--his
face, with a keen sense of pleasure. It was romantic, melancholy,
wistful, enigmatic--and, above all, honest. She knew that he had desired
to be an architect, and that his father had thwarted his desire, and
this fact endowed him for her with the charm of a victim. The idea that
all his life had been embittered and shadowed by the caprice of an old
man was beautiful to her in its sadness: she contemplated it with vague
bliss. At their last meeting, during the Sunday School Centenary, he had
annoyed her; he had even drawn her disdain, by his lack of initiative
and male force in the incident of the senile Sunday School teacher. He
had profoundly disappointed her. Now, she simply forgot this; the
sinister impression vanished from her mind. She recalled her first
vision of him in the lighted doorway of his father's shop. Her present
vision confirmed that sympathetic vision. She liked the feel of his
faithful hand, and the glance of his timid and yet bellicose eye. And
she reposed on his very apparent honesty as on a bed. She knew, with the
assurance of perfect faith, that he had nothing dubious to conceal, and
that no test could strain his magnanimity. And, while she so reflected,
she was thinking, too, of Janet's fine dress, and her elegance and
jewels, and wishing that she had changed the old black frock in which
she travelled. The perception that she could never be like Janet cast
her down. But, the next moment, she was saying to herself proudly: "What
does it matter? Why should I be like Janet?" And, the next moment after
that, she was saying, in another phase of her pride: "I _will_ be like
Janet!"

They began to discuss the strike. It was a topic which, during those
weeks, could not be avoided, either by the rich or by the poor.

"I suppose you're like all the rest--against the men?" she challenged
him again, inviting battle.

He replied bluntly: "What earthly right have you to suppose that I'm
like all the rest?"

She bent her head lower, so that she could only see him through the veil
of her eyelashes.

"I'm very sorry," she said, in a low, smiling, meditative voice. "I knew
all the time you weren't."

The thought shot through her mind like a lance: "It is incredible, and
horribly dangerous, that I should be sitting here with him, after all
that has happened to me, and him without the slightest suspicion!... And
yet what can stop it from coming out, sooner or later? Nothing can stop
it."

Edwin Clayhanger continued to talk of the strike, and she heard him
saying: "If you ask me, I'll tell you what I think--workmen on strike
are always in the right... you've only got to look at them in a crowd
together. They don't starve themselves for fun."

What he said thrilled her. There was nothing in it, but there was
everything in it. His generosity towards the oppressed was everything to
her. His whole attitude was utterly and mysteriously different from that
of any other man whom she had known.... And with that simple, wistful
expression of his!

They went on talking, and then, following in secret the train of her own
thoughts, she suddenly burst out:

"I never met anybody like you before." A pause ensued. "No, never!" she
added, with intense conviction.

"I might say the same of you," he replied, moved.

"Oh no! I'm nothing!" she breathed.

She glanced up, exquisitely flattered. His face was crimson. Exquisite
moment, in the familiarity of the breakfast-room, by the fire, she on
the sofa, with him standing over her, a delicious peril. The crimson
slowly paled.

Osmond Orgreave entered the room, quizzical, and at once began to tease
Clayhanger about the infrequency of his visits.

Turning to Hilda, he said: "He scarcely ever comes to see us, except
when you're here." It was just as if he had said: "I heard every word
you spoke before I came in, and I have read your hearts." Both Hilda and
Clayhanger were disconcerted--Clayhanger extremely so.

"Steady on!" he protested uncouthly. And then, with the most naïve
ingenuousness: "Mrs. Orgreave better?"

But Osmond Orgreave was not in a merciful mood. A moment later he was
saying:

"Has she told you she wants to go over a printing-works?"

"No," Clayhanger answered, with interest. "But I shall be very pleased
to show her over ours, any time."

Hilda struck into silence, made no response, and instantly Clayhanger
finished, in another tone: "Look here, I must be off. I only slipped in
for a minute--really."

And he went, declining Mr. Orgreave's request to give a date for his
next call. The bang of the front door resounded through the house.

Mr. Orgreave, having taken Clayhanger to the front door, did not return
immediately into the breakfast-room. Hilda jumped up from the sofa,
hesitant. She was disappointed; she was even resentful; assuredly she
was humiliated. "Oh no!" she thought. "He's weak and afraid.... I dare
say he went off because Janet wasn't here." She heard through the
half-open door Mr. Orgreave's slippers on the tiles of the passage
leading to the stairs.

Martha came into the room with a delighted, curious smile.

"If you please, miss, could you come into the hall a minute?... Some one
to speak to you."

Hilda blushed silently, and obeyed. Clayhanger was standing in the chill
hall, hat in hand. Her heart jumped.

"When will you come to look over our works?" he muttered rapidly and
very nervously, and yet with a dictatorial gruffness. "To-morrow? I
should like you to come."

He had put an enchantment upon her by this marvellous return. And to
conceal from him what he had done, she frowned and kept silent.

"What time?" she asked suddenly.

"Any time." His eagerness was thrilling.

"Oh no! You must fix the time."

"Say between half-past six and a quarter to seven. That do?"

She nodded. Their hands met. He said adieu. He pulled open the heavy
door. She saw his back for an instant against the pale gloom of the
garden, in which vapour was curling. And then she had shut the door, and
was standing alone in the confined hall. A miracle had occurred, and it
intimidated her. And, amid her wondrous fears, she was steeped in the
unique sense of adventure. "This morning I was in Brighton," she
thought. "Half an hour ago I had no notion of seeing him. And now!...
And to-morrow?" The tragic sequel to one adventure had not impaired her
instinct for experience. On the contrary, it had strengthened it. The
very failure of the one excited her towards another. The zest of living
was reborn in her. The morrow beckoned her, golden and miraculous. The
faculty of men and women to create their own lives seemed divine, and
the conception of it enfevered her.

AT THE WORKS

That night, late, Hilda and Janet shut themselves up in the bedroom
together. The door clicked softly under Janet's gentle push, and they
were as safe from invasion as if the door had been of iron, and locked
and double-locked and barred with bars of iron. Alicia alone might have
disturbed them, but Alicia was asleep. Hilda had a sense of entire
security in this room such as she had never had since she drove away
from Lessways Street, Turnhill, early one morning, with Florrie Bagster
in a cab. It was not that there had been the least real fear of any room
of hers being attacked: it was that this room seemed to have been
rendered mystically inviolate by long years of Janet's occupation.
"Janet's bedroom!"--the phrase had a sanction which could not possibly
have attached itself to, for instance, "Hilda's bedroom!" Nor even to
"mother's bedroom"--mother's bedroom being indeed at the mercy of any
profane and marauding member of the family, a sort of market-place for
the transaction of affairs.

And, further, Janet's bedroom was distinguished and made delicious for
Hilda by its fire. It happened to be one of the very few bedrooms in the
Five Towns at that date with a fire, as a regular feature of it. Mrs.
Orgreave had a fire in the parental bedroom, when she could not
reasonably do without it, but Osmond Orgreave suffered the fire rather
than enjoyed it. As for Tom, though of a shivery disposition, he would
have dithered to death before admitting that a bedroom fire might
increase his comfort. Johnnie and Jimmie genuinely liked to be cold in
their bedroom. Alicia pined for a fire, but Mrs. Orgreave, imitating the
contrariety of fate, forbade a fire to Alicia, and one consequence of
this was that Alicia sometimes undressed in Janet's bedroom, making
afterwards a dash for the Pole. The idea of a bedroom was always, during
nearly half the year, associated with the idea of discomfort in Hilda's
mind. And now, in Janet's bedroom, impressed as she was by the
strangeness of the fact that the prime reason for hurrying at top-speed
into bed had been abolished, she yet positively could not linger, the
force of habit being too strong for her. And she was in bed, despite
efforts to dawdle, while Janet was still brushing her hair.

As she lay and watched Janet's complex unrobing, she acquired knowledge.
And once more, she found herself desiring to be like Janet--not only in
appearance, but in soft manner and tone. She thought: "How shall I dress
to-morrow afternoon?" All the operations of her brain related themselves
somehow to to-morrow afternoon. The anticipation of the visit to the
printing-works burned in her heart like a steady lamp that shone through
the brief, cloudy interests of the moment. And Edwin Clayhanger was
precisely the topic which Janet seemed, as it were, expressly to avoid.
Janet inquired concerning life at Brighton and the health of Sarah
Gailey; Janet even mentioned George Cannon; Hilda steadied her voice in
replying, though she was not really apprehensive, for Janet's questions,
like the questions of the whole family, were invariably discreet and
respectful of the individual's privacy. But of Edwin Clayhanger, whose
visit nevertheless had been recounted to her in the drawing-room on her
return, Janet said not a word.

And then, when she had extinguished the gas, and the oriental sleeve of
her silk nightgown delicately brushed Hilda's face, as she got into bed,
she remarked:

"Strange that Edwin Clayhanger should call just to-night!"

Hilda's cheek warmed.

"He asked me to go and look over their printing-works to-morrow," said
she quickly.

Janet was taken aback.

"Really!" she exclaimed, unmistakably startled. She spoke a second too
soon. If she had delayed only one second, she might have concealed from
Hilda that which Hilda had most plainly perceived, to wit, anxiety and
jealousy. Yes, jealousy, in this adorably benevolent creature's tone.
Hilda's interest in to-morrow afternoon was intensified.

"Shall you be able to come?" she asked.

"What time?"

"He said about half-past six, or a quarter to seven."

"I can't," said Janet dreamily, "because of that Musical Society
meeting--you know--I told you, didn't I?"

In the faint light of the dying fire, Hilda made out little by little
the mysterious, pale heaps of clothes, and all the details of the room
strewn and disordered by reason of an additional occupant. The adventure
was now of infinite complexity, and its complexity seemed to be
symbolized by the suggestive feminine mysteriousness of what she saw and
what she divined in the darkness of the chamber. She thought: "I am here
on false pretences. I ought to tell my secret. That would be fair--I
have no right to intrude between her and him." But she instinctively and
powerfully resisted such ideas; with firmness she put them away, and
yielded herself with a more exquisite apprehension to the anticipation
of to-morrow.

II

The order of meals at Lane End was somewhat peculiar even then, and
would now be almost unique. It was partly the natural expression of an
instinctive and justified feeling of superiority, and partly due to a
discretion which forbade the family to scandalize the professional
classes of the district by dining at night. Dinner occurred in the
middle of the day, and about nine in the evening was an informal but
copious supper. Between those two meals, there came a tea which was
neither high or low, and whose hour, six o'clock in theory, depended to
a certain extent, in practice, on Mr. Orgreave's arrival from the
office. Not seldom Mr. Orgreave was late; occasionally he was very late.
The kitchen waited to infuse the tea until a command came from some
woman, old or young, who attentively watched a window for a particular
swinging of the long gate at the end of the garden, or listened, when it
was dark, for the bang of the gate and a particular crunching of gravel.

On this Tuesday evening, Osmond Orgreave was very late, and the movement
of the household was less smooth than usual, owing to Mrs. Orgreave's
illness and to the absence of Janet at Hillport in connection with the
projected Hillport Choral Society. (Had Janet been warned of Hilda's
visit, she would not have accepted an invitation to a tea at Hillport as
a preliminary to the meeting of the provisional committee.) Hilda was in
a state of acute distress. The appointment with Edwin Clayhanger seemed
to be absolutely sacred to her; to be late for it would amount to a
crime: to miss it altogether would be a calamity inconceivable. The
fingers of all the clocks in the house were revolving with the most
extraordinary rapidity--she was helpless.

She was helpless, because she had said nothing all day of her
appointment, and because Janet had not mentioned it either. Janet might
have said before leaving: "Tea had better not wait too long--Hilda has
to be down at Clayhanger's at half-past six." Janet's silence impressed
Hilda: it was not merely strange--it was formidable: it affected the
whole day. Hilda thought: "Is she determined not to speak of it unless I
do?" Immediately Janet was gone, Hilda had run up to the bedroom. She
was minded to change the black frock which she had been wearing, and
which she hated, and to put on another skirt and bodice that Janet had
praised. She longed to beautify herself, and yet she was still
hesitating about it at half-past five in the evening as she had
hesitated at eight in the morning. In the end she had decided not to
change, an account of the rain. But the rain had naught to do with her
decision. She would not change, because she was too proud to change. She
would go just as she was! She could not accept the assistance of an
attractive bodice!... Unfeminine, perhaps, but womanly.

At twenty-five minutes to seven, she went into Mrs. Orgreave's bedroom,
rather like a child, and also rather like an adult creature in a
distracting crisis. Tom Orgreave and Alicia were filling the entire
house with the stormy noise of a piano duet based upon Rossini's
_William Tell_.

"I think I'll miss tea, Mrs. Orgreave," she said. "Edwin Clayhanger
invited me to go over the printing-works at half-past six, and it's
twenty-five minutes to seven now."

"Oh, but, my dear," cried Mrs. Orgreave, "why ever didn't you tell them
downstairs, or let me know earlier?"

And she pulled at the bell-rope that overhung the head of the bed. Not a
trace of teasing archness in her manner! Hilda's appointment might have
been of the most serious business interest, for anything Mrs. Orgreave's
demeanor indicated to the contrary. Hilda stood mute and constrained.

"You run down and tell them to make tea at once, dear. I can't let you
go without anything at all. I wonder what can have kept Osmond."

Almost at the same moment, Osmond Orgreave entered the bedroom. His
arrival had been unnoticed amid the tremendous resounding of the duet.

"Oh, Osmond," said his wife. "Wherever have you been so late? Hilda
wants to go--Edwin Clayhanger has invited her to go over the works."

Hilda, trembling at the door, more than half expected Mr. Orgreave to
say: "You mean, she's invited herself." But Osmond received the
information with exactly the same polite, apologetic seriousness as his
wife, and, reassured, Hilda departed from the room.

Ten minutes later, veiled and cloaked, she stepped out alone into the
garden. And instantly her torment was assuaged, and she was happy. She
waited at the corner of the street for the steam-car. But, when the car
came thundering down, it was crammed to the step; with a melancholy
gesture, the driver declined her signal. She set off down Trafalgar Road
in the mist and the rain, glad that she had been compelled to walk. It
seemed to her that she was on a secret and mystic errand. This was not
surprising. The remarkable thing was that all the hurrying people she
met seemed also each of them to be on a secret and mystic errand. The
shining wet pavement was dotted with dark figures, suggestive and
enigmatic, who glided over a floor that was pierced by perpendicular
reflections.

In the Clayhanger shop, agitated and scarcely aware of what she did, she
could, nevertheless, hear her voice greeting Edwin Clayhanger in firm,
calm tones; and she soon perceived very clearly that he was even more
acutely nervous than herself: which perception helped to restore her
confidence, while, at the same time, it filled her with bliss. The
young, fair man, with his awkward and constrained movements, took
possession of her umbrella, and then suggested that she should remove
her mackintosh. She obeyed, timid and glad. She stripped off her
mackintosh, as though she were stripping off her modesty, and stood
before him revealed. To complete the sacrifice, she raised her veil, and
smiled up at him, as it were, asking: "What next?" Then a fat, untidy
old man appeared in the doorway of a cubicle within the shop, and Edwin
Clayhanger blushed.

"Father, this is Miss Lessways. Miss Lessways, my father....
She's--she's come to look over the place."

"How-d'ye-do, miss?"

She shook hands with the tyrannic father, who was, however, despite his
reputation, apparently just as nervous as the son. There followed a most
sinister moment of silence. And, at last, the shop door opened, and the
father turned to greet a customer. Hilda thought: "Suppose this fat old
man is one day my father-in-law? Is it possible to imagine him as a
father-in-law?" And she had a transient gleam of curiosity concerning
the characters of the two Clayhanger sisters, and recalled with
satisfaction that Janet liked the elder one.

Edwin Clayhanger, muttering, pointed to an aperture in the counter, and
immediately she was going through it with him, and through a door at the
back of the shop. They were alone, facing a rain-soaked yard. Edwin
Clayhanger sneezed violently.

"It keeps on raining," Edwin murmured. "Better to have kept umbrella!
However--"

He glanced at her inquiringly and invitingly. They ran side by side
across the yard to a roofed flight of steps that led to the printing-
office. For a couple of seconds, the rain wet them, and then they were
under cover again. It seemed to Hilda that they had escaped from the
shop like fox-terriers--like two friendly dogs from the surveillance of
an incalculable and dangerous old man. She felt a comfortable, friendly
confidence in Edwin Clayhanger--a tranquil sentiment such as she had
never experienced for George Cannon. After more than a year--and what a
period of unforeseen happenings!--she thought again: "I _like him_." Not
love, she thought, but liking! She liked being with him. She liked the
sensation of putting confidence in him. She liked his youth, and her
own. She was sorry because he had a cold and was not taking care of
it.... Now they were climbing a sombre creaking staircase towards a new
and remote world that was separated from the common world just quitted
by the adventurous passage of the rainy yard.... And now they were amid
oily odours in a large raftered workshop, full of machines.... The
printing-works!... An enormous but very deferential man saluted them
with majestic solemnity. He was the foreman, and labelled by his white
apron as an artisan, but his gigantic bulk--he would have outweighed the
pair of them--and his age set him somehow over them, so that they were a
couple of striplings in his vasty presence. When Edwin Clayhanger
employed, as it were, daringly, the accents of a master to this
intimidating fellow, Hilda thrilled with pleasure at the piquancy of the
spectacle, and she was admiringly proud of Edwin. The foreman's immense
voice, explaining machines and tools, caused physical vibrations in her.
But she understood nothing of what he said--nothing whatever. She was in
a dream of oily odours and monstrous iron constructions, dominated by
the grand foreman: and Edwin was in the dream. She began talking quite
wildly of the four-hundredth anniversary of the inventor of printing, of
which she had read in Cranswick's History... at Brighton! Brighton had
sunk away over the verge of memory. Even Lane End House was lost
somewhere in the vague past. All her previous life had faded. She
reflected guiltily: "He's bound to think I've been reading about
printing because I was interested in _him_ I don't care! I hope he does
think it!" She heard a suggestion that, as it was too late that night to
see the largest machine in motion, she might call the next afternoon.
She at once promised to come.... She impatiently desired now to leave
the room where they were, and to see something else. And then she feared
lest this might be all there was to see.... Edwin Clayhanger was edging
towards the door.... They were alone on the stairway again.... The
foreman had bowed at the top like a chamberlain.... She gathered, with
delicious anticipation, that other and still more recondite interiors
awaited their visit.

IV

They were in an attic which was used for the storage of reams upon reams
of paper. By the light of a candle in a tin candlestick, they had passed
alone together through corridors and up flights of stairs at the back of
the shop. She had seen everything that was connected with the enterprise
of steam-printing, and now they were at the top of the old house and at
the end of the excursion.

"I used to work here," said Edwin Clayhanger.

She inquired about the work.

"Well," he drawled, "reading and writing, you know--at that very table."

In the aperture of the window, amid piles of paper, stood a rickety old
table, covered with dust.

"But there's no fireplace," she said, glancing round the room, and then
directly at him.

"I know."

"But how did you do in winter?" she eagerly appealed.

And he replied shortly, and with a slight charming affectation of pride:
"I did without."

Her throat tightened, and she could feel the tears suddenly swim in her
eyes. She was not touched by the vision of his hardships. It was the
thought of all his youth that exquisitely saddened her--or all the years
which were and would be for ever hidden from her. She knew that she
alone of all human beings was gifted with the power to understand and
fully sympathize with him. And so she grieved over the long wilderness
of time during which he had been uncomprehended. She wanted, by some
immense effort of tenderness, to recompense him for all that he had
suffered. And she had a divine curiosity concerning the whole of his
past life. She had never had this curiosity in relation to George
Cannon--she had only wondered about his affairs with other women. Nor
had George Cannon ever evoked the tenderness which sprang up in her from
some secret and inexhaustible source at the mere sight of Edwin
Clayhanger's wistful smile. Still, in that moment, standing close to
Edwin in the high solitude of the shadowed attic, the souvenir of George
Cannon gripped her painfully. She thought: "He loves me, and he is
ruined, and he will never see me again! And I am here, bursting with
hope renewed, and dizzy with joy!" And she pictured Janet, too, wearying
herself at a committee meeting. And she thought, "And here am I...!" Her
bliss was tragic.

"I think I ought to be going," she said softly.

They re-threaded the corridors, and in each lower room, as they passed,
Edwin Clayhanger extinguished the gas which he had lit there on the way
up, and Hilda waited for him. And then they were back in the crude glare
of the shop. The fat, untidy old man was not visible. Edwin helped her
with the mackintosh, and she liked him for the awkwardness of his
efforts in doing so.

At the door, she urged him not to come out, and referred to his cold.

"This isn't the end of winter, it's the beginning," she warned him.
Nobody else, she knew, would watch over him.

But he insisted on coming out.

They arranged a rendezvous for three o'clock on the morrow, and then
they shook hands.

"Now, do go in," she entreated, as she hurried away. The rain had
ceased. She fled triumphantly up Trafalgar Road, with her secret,
guarding it. "He's in love with me!" If a scientific truth is a
statement of which the contrary is inconceivable, then it was a
scientific truth for her that she and Edwin must come together. She
simply would not and could not conceive the future without him.... And
this so soon, so precipitately soon, after her misfortune! But it was
her very misfortune which pushed her violently forward. Her life had
been convulsed and overthrown by the hazard of destiny, and she could
have no peace now until she had repaired and re-established it. At no
matter what risk, the thing must be accomplished quickly... quickly.

CHAPTER IV
THE CALL FROM BRIGHTON

On the next afternoon, at a quarter-past two, Hilda and Janet were
sitting together in the breakfast-room. The house was still. The men
were either theoretically or practically at business. Alicia was at
school. Mrs. Orgreave lay upstairs. The servants had cleared away and
washed up the dinner-things, and had dined themselves. The kitchen had
been cleansed and put in order, and every fire replenished. Two of the
servants were in their own chambers, enfranchised for an hour: one only
remained on duty. All six women had the feeling, which comes to most
women at a certain moment in each day, that life had, for a time,
deteriorated into the purposeless and the futile; and that it waited, as
in a trance, until some external masculine event, expected or
unforeseen, should renew its virtue and its energy.

Hilda was in half a mind to tell Janet the history of the past year. She
had wakened up in the night, and perceived with dreadful clearness that
trouble lay in front of her. The relations between herself and Edwin
Clayhanger were developing with the most dizzy rapidity, and in a
direction which she desired, but it would be impossible for her, if she
fostered the relations, to continue to keep Edwin in ignorance of the
fact that, having been known for about a fortnight as Mrs. George
Cannon, she was not what he supposed her to be. With imagination on
fire, she was anticipating the rendezvous at three o'clock. She reached
forward to it in ecstasy; but she might not enjoy it, save at the price
which her conscience exacted. She had to say to Edwin Clayhanger that
she had been the victim of a bigamist. Could she say it to him? She had
not been able to say it even to Janet Orgreave.... She would say it
first to Janet. There, in the breakfast-room, she would say it. If it
killed her to say it, she would say it. She must at any cost be able to
respect herself, and, as matters stood, she could not respect herself.

Janet, on her knees, was idly arranging books on one of the lower
bookshelves. In sheer nervousness, Hilda also dropped to her knees on
the hearthrug, and began to worry the fire with the poker.

"I say, Janet," she began.

"Yes?" Janet did not look up.

Hilda, her heart beating, thought, with affrighted swiftness: "Why
should I tell her? It is no business of anybody's except _his_. I will
tell him, and him alone, and then act according to his wishes. After
all, I am not to blame. I am quite innocent. But I won't tell him
to-day. Not to-day! I must be more sure. It would be ridiculous to tell
him to-day. If I told him it would be almost like inviting a proposal!
But when the proper time comes,--then I will tell him, and he will
understand! He is bound to understand perfectly. He's in love with me."

She dared not tell Janet. In that abode of joyful and successful
propriety the words would not form themselves. And the argument that she
was not to blame carried no weight whatever. She--she, Hilda--lacked
courage to be candid.... This was extremely disconcerting to her
self-esteem.... And even with Edwin Clayhanger she wished to temporize.
She longed for nothing so much as to see him; and yet she feared to meet
him.

"Yes?" Janet repeated.

A bell rang faintly in the distance of the house.

Hilda, suddenly choosing a course, said: "I forgot to tell you. I'm
supposed to be going down to Clayhanger's at three to see a machine at
work--it was too late last night. Do come with me. I hate going by
myself." It was true: in that instant she did hate going by herself. She
thought, knowing Janet to be at liberty and never dreaming that she
would refuse: "I am saved--for the present."

But Janet answered self-consciously:

"I don't think I must leave mother. You'll be perfectly all right by
yourself."

Hilda impetuously turned her head; their glances met for an instant, in
suspicion, challenge, animosity. They had an immense mutual admiration
the one for the other, these two; and yet now they were estranged.
Esteem was nullified by instinct. Hilda thought with positive savagery:
"It's all fiddlesticks about not leaving her mother! She's simply on her
high horse!" The whole colour of existence was changed.

II

Martha entered the room. Neither of the girls moved. Beneath the
deferential servant in Martha was a human girl, making a third in the
room, who familiarly divined the moods of the other two and judged them
as an equal; and the other two knew it, and therefore did not trouble to
be spectacular in front of her.

"A letter, miss," said Martha, approaching Hilda. "The old postman says
it was insufficiently addressed, or it 'ud ha' been here by first post."

"Was that the postman who rang just now?" asked Janet.

"Yes, miss."

Hilda took the letter with apprehension, as she recognized the
down-slanting calligraphy of Sarah Gailey. Yes, the address was
imperfect--"Miss Lessways, c/o Osmond Orgreave, Esq., Lane End House,
Knype-on-Trent," instead of "Bursley, Knype-on-Trent." On the back of
the envelope had been written in pencil by an official, "Try Bursley."
Sarah Gailey could not now be trusted to address an envelope correctly.
The mere handwriting seemed to announce misfortune.

"From poor Sarah," Hilda murmured, with false, good-tempered
tranquillity. "I wonder what sort of trouble she thinks she's got into!"

She thought: "If only I was married, I should be free of responsibility
about Sarah. I should have to think of my husband first. But nothing
else can free me. Unless I marry, I'm tied to Sarah Gailey as long as
she lives.... And why?... I should like to know!" The answer was simple:
habit had shackled her to Sarah Gailey.

She opened the letter by the flickering firelight, which was stronger on
the hearthrug than the light of the dim November day. It began: "Dearest
Hilda, I write at once to tell you that a lawyer called here this
afternoon to inquire about your Hotel Continental shares. He told me
there was going to be some difficulty with the Company, and, unless the
independent shareholders formed a strong local committee to look after
things, the trouble might be serious. He wanted to know if you would
support a committee at the meeting. I gave him your address, and he's
going to write to you. But I thought I would write to you as well. His
name is Eustace Broughton, 124 East Street, in case. I do hope nothing
will go wrong. It is like what must be, I am sure! It has been
impossible for me to keep the charwoman. So I sent her off this morning.
Can you remember the address of that Mrs. Catkin?..." Sarah Gailey
continued to discuss boarding-house affairs, until she arrived at the
end of the fourth page, and then, in a few cramped words, she finished
with expressions of love.

"Oh dear!" Hilda exclaimed, rising, "I must write some letters at once."
She sighed, as if in tedium. The fact that her fortune was vaguely
threatened did not cause her anxiety: she scarcely realized it. What she
saw was an opportunity to evade the immediate meeting with Edwin--the
meeting which, a few minutes earlier, she had desired beyond everything.

"When? Now?"

Hilda nodded.

"But what about Master Edwin?" Janet asked, trying to be gay.

"I shan't be able to go," said Hilda carelessly, at the door. "It's of
no consequence."

"Martha has to go down town. If you like, she could call in there, and
just tell him."

It was a reproof, from the young woman who always so thoughtfully
studied the feelings of everybody.

"I'll just write a little note, then, thanks!" Hilda returned calmly,
triumphing after all over Janet's superiority, and thinking, "Janet can
be very peculiar, Janet can!"

For more than twenty hours, Hilda was profoundly miserable. Towards the
evening of the same day, she had made herself quite sure that Edwin
Clayhanger would call that night. Her hope persisted until half-past
nine: it then began to fade, and, at ten o'clock, was extinct. His name
had been mentioned by nobody. She went to bed. Having now a room of her
own, which overlooked the Clayhanger garden and house, she gazed forth,
and, in the dark, beheld, with the most anxious sensations, the building
in which Edwin existed and was concealed. "He is there," she said. "He
is active about something at this very instant--perhaps he is reading.
He is close by. If I shouted, he might hear...." And yet she was utterly
cut off from him. Again, in the late dawn, she saw the same building,
pale and clear, but just as secretive and enigmatic as in the night. "He
is asleep yet," she thought. "Why did he not call? Is he hurt? Is he
proud?"

She despaired, because she could devise no means of resuming
communication with him.

Immediately after dinner on the next day, she went with Janet to Janet's
room, to examine a new winter cloak which had been delivered. And, while
Janet was trying it on, and posing coquettishly and yet without
affectation in front of the glass, and while Hilda was reflecting
jealously, "Why am I not like her? I know infinitely more than she
knows. I am a woman, and she is a girl, and yet she seems far more a
woman than I--" Alicia, contrary to all rules, took the room by storm.
Alicia's excuse and salvation lay in a telegram, which she held in her
hand.

"For you, Hilda!" cried the child, excited. "I'm just off to school."

Hilda reached to take the offered telegram, but her hand wavered around
it instead of seizing it. Her eye fastened on a circular portion of the
wall-paper pattern, and she felt that the whole room was revolving about
her. Then she saw Janet's face transformed by an expression of alarm.

"Are you ill, Hilda?" Janet demanded. "Sit down."

"You're frightfully pale," said Alicia eagerly.

Hilda sat down.

"No, no," she said. "It was the pattern of the wall-paper that made me
feel dizzy." And, for the moment, she did honestly believe that the
pattern of the wall-paper had, in some inexplicable manner, upset her.
"I'm all right now."

The dizziness passed as suddenly as it had supervened. Janet held some
ineffectual salts to her nose.

"I'm perfectly well," insisted Hilda.

"How funny!" Alicia grinned.

Calmly Hilda opened the telegram, which read: "Please come at once.--
GAILEY."

She gave the telegram to Janet in silence.

"What can be the matter?" Janet asked, with unreserved, loving
solicitude. The cloud which had hung between the two enthusiastic
friends was dissipated in a flash.

"I haven't an idea," said Hilda, touched. "Unless it's those shares!"
She had briefly told Janet about the Hotel Continental Limited.

"Shall you go?"

Hilda nodded. Never again would she ignore an urgent telegram, though
she did not believe that this telegram had any real importance. She
attributed it to Sarah's increasing incompetence and hysterical
foolishness.

"I wonder whether I can get on to Brighton to-night if I take the six
train?" Hilda asked, and to herself: "Can it have anything to do with
George?"

Alicia, endowed with authority, went in search of a Bradshaw. But the
quest was fruitless. In the Five Towns the local time-table, showing the
connections with London, suffices for the citizen, and the breast-pocket
of no citizen is complete without it.

"Clayhangers are bound to have a Bradshaw," cried Alicia, breathless
with running about the house.

"Of course they are," Janet agreed.

"I'll walk down there now," said Hilda, with extraordinary promptitude.
"It won't take five minutes."

"I'd go," said Alicia, "only I should be late for school."

"Shall I send some one down?" Janet suggested. "You might be taken dizzy
again."

"No, thanks," Hilda replied deliberately. "I'll go--myself. There's
nothing wrong with me at all."

"You'll have to be sharp over it," said Alicia pertly. "Don't forget
it's Thursday. They shut up at two, and it's not far off two now."

"I'm going this very minute," said Hilda.

"And I'm going this very second!" Alicia retorted.

They all three left Janet's bedroom; the new cloak cast over a chair-
back, was degraded into a tedious banality--and ignored.

In less than a minute Hilda, hatted and jacketed and partially gloved,
was crossing the garden. She felt most miraculously happy and hopeful,
and she was full of irrational gratitude to Alicia, as though Alicia
were a benefactor! The change in her mood seemed magic in its swiftness.
If Janet, with calm, cryptic face, had not been watching her from the
doorway, she might have danced on the gravel.

CHAPTER V
THURSDAY AFTERNOON

She was walking with Edwin Clayhanger up Duck Bank on the way to Bursley
railway station. A simple errand and promenade,--and yet she felt
herself to be steeped in the romance of an adventure! The adventure had
surprisingly followed upon the discovery that Alicia had been quite
wrong. "Clayhangers are bound to have a Bradshaw," the confident Alicia
had said. But Clayhangers happened not to have a Bradshaw. Edwin was
alone in the stationery shop, save for the assistant. He said that his
father was indisposed. And whereas the news that Clayhangers had no
Bradshaw left Hilda perfectly indifferent, the news that old Darius
Clayhanger was indisposed and absent produced in her a definite feeling
of gladness. Edwin had decided that the most likely place to search for
a Bradshaw was the station, and he had offered to escort her to the
station. Nothing could have been more natural, and at the same time more
miraculous.

The sun was palely shining upon dry, clean pavements and upon roads
juicy with black mud. And in the sunshine Hilda was very happy. It was
nothing to her that she was in quest of a Bradshaw because she had just
received an ominous telegram urgently summoning her to Brighton. She was
obliviously happy. Every phenomenon that attracted her notice
contributed to her felicity. Thus she took an eager joy in the sun. And
a marked improvement in Edwin's cold really delighted her. She was
dominated by the intimate conviction: "He loves me!" Which conviction
excited her dormant pride, and made her straighten her shoulders. She
benevolently condescended towards Janet. After all Janet, with every
circumstance in her favour, had not known how to conquer Edwin
Clayhanger. After all she, Hilda, possessed some mysterious
characteristic more potent than the elegance and the goodness of Janet
Orgreave. She scorned her former self-deprecations, and reproached her
own lack of faith: "I am I!" That was the summary of her mood. As for
her attitude to Edwin Clayhanger, she could not explain it. Why did she
like him and like being with him? He was not brilliant, nor masterful,
nor handsome, nor well dressed, nor in any manner imposing. On the
contrary, he was awkward and apologetic, and not a bit spectacular. Only
the wistful gaze of his eyes, and his honest smile, and the appeal of
his gestures...! A puzzling affair, an affair perfectly incomprehensible
and enchanting.

They walked side by side in silence.

When they had turned into Moorthorne Road, half-way up whose slope lies
the station, she asked a question about a large wooden building from
whose interior came wild sounds of shouting and cheering, and learnt
that the potters on strike were holding a meeting in the town theatre.
At the open outer doors was a crowd of starving, shivering, dirty,
ragged children, who romped and cursed, or stood unnaturally meditative
in the rich mud, like fakirs fulfilling a vow. Hilda's throat was
constricted by the sight. Pain and joy ran together in her, burning
exquisitely; and she had a glimpse, obscure, of the mystical beauty of
the children's suffering.

"I'd no idea there was a theatre in Bursley," she remarked idly, driven
into a banality by the press of her sensations.

"They used to call it the Blood Tub," he replied. "Melodrama and murder
and gore--you know."

She exclaimed in horror. "Why are people like that in the Five Towns?"

"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," said he.

She started, sensitively. It seemed to her that she had never understood
the secret inner spirit of the Five Towns, and that by a single phrase
he had made her understand it.... 'Our form of poetry'! Who but he could
have said a thing at once so illuminating and so simple?

Apparently perplexed by the obvious effect on her of his remark, he
said:

"But you belong to the Five Towns, don't you?"

She answered quietly that she did. But her heart was saying: "I do
_now_. You have initiated me. I never felt the Five Towns before. You
have made me feel them."

II

At the station the head porter received their inquiry for a Bradshaw
with a dull stare and a shake of the head. No such thing had ever been
asked for at Bursley Station before, and the man's imagination could not
go beyond the soiled time-tables loosely pinned and pasted up on the
walls of the booking-office. Hilda suggested that the ticket-clerk
should be interrogated, but the aperture of communication with him was
shut. She saw Edwin Clayhanger brace himself and rap on the wood; and
instead of deploring his diffidence she liked it and found it full of
charm. The partition clicked aside, and the ticket-clerk's peering,
suspicious head showed in its place, mutely demanding a reason for this
extraordinary disturbance of the dream in which the station slumbered
between two half-hourly trains. With a characteristic peculiar slanting
motion Edwin nodded.

"Oh, how-d'ye-do, Mr. Brooks?" said Edwin hastily, as if startled by the
sudden inexplicable apparition of the head.

But the ticket-clerk had no Bradshaw either. He considered it probable,
however, that the stationmaster would have a Bradshaw. Edwin had to
brace himself again, for an assault upon the fastness of the
stationmaster.

And in the incredibly small and incredibly dirty fastness of the
stationmaster, they indeed found a Bradshaw. Hilda precipitately took it
and opened it on the stationmaster's table. She looked for Brighton in
it as she might have looked for a particular individual in a city. Then
Edwin was bending over it, with his ear close to her ear, and the sleeve
of his overcoat touching her sleeve. She was physically aware of him,
for the first time. She thought, disconcerted: "But he is an utter
stranger to me! What do I know of him?" And then she thought: "For more
than a year he must have carried my image in his heart!"

"Here," said Edwin brusquely, and with a certain superiority, "you might
just let me have a look at it myself."

She yielded, tacitly admitting that a woman was no match for Bradshaw.

After a few moments' frowning Edwin said:

"Yes, there's a train to Brighton at eleven-thirty to-night!"

"May I look?"

"Certainly," said he, subtly condescending.

She examined the page, with a serious deliberation.

"But what does this '_f_' mean?" she asked. "Did you notice this '_f_'?"

"Yes. It means Thursdays and Saturdays only," said Edwin, his eyes
twinkling. It was as if he had said: "You think yourself very clever,
but do you suppose that I can't read the notes in a time-table?"

"Well--" She hesitated.

"To-day's Thursday, you see," he remarked curtly.

She was ravished by his tone and his manner. And she became humble
before him, for in the space of a few seconds he had grown mysteriously
and powerfully masculine to her. But with all his masculinity there
remained the same wistful, honest, boyish look in his eyes. And she
thought: "If I marry him it will be for the look in his eyes."

"I'm all right, then," she said aloud, and smiled.

With hands nervously working within her muff, she suddenly missed the
handkerchief which she had placed there.

"I believe I must have dropped my handkerchief in your shop!" she was
about to say. The phrase was actually on her tongue; but by a strange
instinctive, defensive discretion she shut her mouth on it and kept
silence. She thought: "Perhaps I had better not go into his shop again
to-day."

They descended the hill from the station. Hilda was very ill at ease.
She kept saying to herself: "This adventure is over now. I cannot
prolong it. There is nothing to do but to go back to the Orgreaves, and
pack my things and depart to Brighton, and face whatever annoyance is
awaiting me at Brighton." The prospect desolated her. She could not bear
to leave Edwin Clayhanger without some definition of their relations,
and yet she knew that it was hopeless and absurd to expect to arrive
immediately at any such definition: she knew that the impetuosity of her
temperament could not be justified. Also, she feared horribly the risk
of being caught again in the net of Brighton. As they got lower and
lower down the hill, her wretchedness and disquiet became acute, to the
point of a wild despair. Merely to temporize, she said, as they drew
opposite the wooden theatre:

"Couldn't we just go and look in? I've got plenty of time."

A strange request--to penetrate into a meeting of artisans on strike!
She felt its strangeness: she felt that Edwin Clayhanger objected, but
she was driven to an extremity. She had to do something, and she did
what she could.

They crossed the road, and entered the huge shanty, and stood
apologetically near the door. The contrast between the open street and
the enclosed stuffiness of the dim and crowded interior was
overwhelming. Hundreds of ragged and shabby men sat in serried rows,
leaning forward with elbows out and heads protruding as they listened to
a speech from the gimcrack stage. They seemed to be waiting to spring,
like famished and ferocious tigers. Interrupting, they growled, snarled,
yapped, and swore with appalling sincerity. Imprecations burst forth in
volleys and in running fires. The arousing of the fundamental instincts
of these human beings had, indeed, enormously emphasized the animal in
them. They had swung back a hundred centuries towards original crude
life. The sophistication which embroiders the will-to-live had been
stripped clean off. These men helped you to understand the state of mind
which puts a city to the sack, and makes victims especially of the
innocent and the defenceless. Hilda was strangely excited. She was
afraid, and enjoyed being afraid. And it was as if she, too, had been
returned to savagery and to the primeval. In the midst of peril, she was
a female under the protection of a male, and nothing but that. And she
was far closer, emotionally, to her male than she had ever been before.

Suddenly, the meeting came to an end. In an instant, the mass of
humanity was afoot and rounding upon them, an active menace. Hilda and
Edwin rushed fleeing into the street, violently urged by a common
impulse. The stream of embittered men pursued them like an inundation.
When they were safe, and breathing the free air, Hilda was drenched with
a sense of pity. The tragedy of existence presented itself in its true
aspect, as noble and majestic and intimidating.

"It's terrible!" she breathed.

She thought: "No! In this mood, it is impossible for me to leave him! I
cannot do it! I cannot!" The danger of re-entering the shop, which would
be closed now, utterly fascinated her. Supposing that she re-entered the
shop with him, would she have the courage to tell him that she was in
his society under false pretences? Could she bring herself to relate her
misfortune? She recoiled before the mere idea of telling him. And yet
the danger of the shop glittered in front of her like a lure.

The future might be depending solely on her own act. If she told him of
the lost handkerchief, the future might be one thing: if she did not
tell him, it might be another.

The dread of choosing seized her, and put her into a tremble of
apprehension. And then, as it were mechanically, she murmured (but very
clearly), tacking the words without a pause on to a sentence about the
strikes: "Oh, I've lost my handkerchief, unless I've left it in your
shop! It must have dropped out of my muff."

She sighed in relief, because she had chosen. But her agitation was
intensified.

IV

In search of a lost handkerchief, they regained the Clayhanger premises
by an unfamiliar side door. She preceded him along a passage and then,
taking a door on the left, found herself surprisingly in the shop,
behind a counter. The shop was lighted only by a few diamond-shaped
holes in the central shutters, and it had a troubling aspect of portent,
with its merchandise mysteriously enveloped in pale sheets, and its
chairs wrong side up, and its deep-shadowed corners. Destiny might have
been lurking in one of those baffling corners. From above, through the
ceiling, came the vibration of some machine at work, and the machine
might have been the loom of time. Hilda was exquisitely apprehensive.
She thought: "I am here. The moment of my departure will come. When it
comes, shall I have told him my misfortune? What will have happened?"
She waited, nervous, restless, shaking like a victim who can do naught
but wait.

"Here's my handkerchief!" she cried, in a tone of unnatural childish
glee, that was one of the effects of her secret panic.

The handkerchief glimmered on the counter, more white than anything else
in that grey dusk. She guessed that the shop-assistant must have found
it, and placed it conspicuously on the counter.

They were alone: they were their own prisoners, secure from the street
and from all interruption. Hilda, once more and in a higher degree,
realized the miraculous human power to make experience out of nothing.
They had nothing but themselves, and they could, if they chose, create
all their future by a single gesture.

Suddenly, there came a tremendous shouting from Duck Square, in front of
the shop. The strikers had poured down from Moorthorne Road into Duck
Bank and Duck Square.

Edwin, who was in the middle of the shop, went to the glazed inner
doors, and, passing through into the porch, lifted the letter-flap in a
shutter, and, stooping, looked forth. He called to her, without moving
his face from the aperture, that a fight was in progress. Hilda gazed at
his back, through the glass, and then, coming round the end of the
counter, approached quietly, and stood immediately behind him, between
the glazed doors and the shutters. The two were in a space so small that
they could scarcely have moved without touching.

"Let me look," she stammered, unable any longer to tolerate the
inaction.

Edwin Clayhanger stepped aside, and held up the letter-flap for her with
his finger. She bent her head to the oblong glimpse of the street, and
saw the strikers engaged in the final internecine folly of strikers:
they had turned their exasperated wrath upon each other. Within a
public-house at the top of the little Square, other strikers were
drinking. One policeman regarded them.

"What a shame!" she cried angrily, dropping the flap, and then withdrew
quickly into the shop, whither Edwin had gone. As she came near him, her
mood changed. She smiled gently. She summoned all her charm; and she
knew that she charmed him.

"Do you know," she said, "you've quite altered my notion of poetry--what
you said as we were going up to the station!"

"Really?" He flushed.

Yes, she had enchanted and entranced him. She had only to smile and to
use a particular tone, soft and breaking.... She knew that.

"But you _do_ alter my notions," she continued, and her clear voice was
poured out like a liquid. "I don't know how it is..." She stopped. And
then, in half-playful accents: "So this is your little office!"

Her hand was on the knob of the open door of the cubicle, a black
erection within the shop, where Edwin and his father kept the accounts
and wrote letters.

"Yes. Go in and have a look at it."

She murmured kindly: "Shall I?" and went in. He followed.

For a moment, she was extremely afraid, and she whispered, scared: "I
must hurry off now."

He ignored this remark.

"Shall you be at Brighton long?" he demanded. And he was so friendly and
simple and timorous and honest-eyed, and his features had such an
extraordinary anxious expression that her own fear seemed to leave her.
She thought, as if surprised by the discovery: "He is a good friend."

"Oh, I can't tell," she answered him. "It depends."

"How soon shall you be down our way again?" His voice was thickening.
She shook her head, speechless. She was afraid again now. His face
altered. He was standing almost over her. She thought: "I am lost! I
have let it come to this!" He was no longer a good friend.

He began to speak, in detached bits of phrases:

"I say--you know--"

"Good-bye, good-bye," she murmured anxiously. "I must go. Thanks very
much."

And foolishly, she held out her hand, which he seized. He bent
passionately, and kissed her like a fresh boy, like a schoolboy. And she
gave back the kiss strongly, with all the profound sincerity of her
nature. His agitation appeared to be extreme; but she was calm; she was
divinely calm. She savoured the moment as though she had been a watcher,
and not an actor in the scene. She thought, with a secret sigh of bliss:
"Yes, it is real, this moment! And I have had it. Am I astonished that
it has come so soon, or did I know it was coming?" Her eyes drank up the
face and the hands and the gestures of her lover. She felt tired, and
sat down in the office chair, and he leaned on the desk, and the walls
of the cubicle folded them in, even from the inanimate scrutiny of the
shop.

V

They were talking together, half-fearfully, and yet with the confidence
of deep mutual trust, in the quick-gathering darkness of the cubicle.
And while they were talking, Hilda, in her head, was writing a fervent
letter to him: "... You see it was so sudden. I had had no chance to
tell you. I did so want to tell you, but how could I? And I hadn't told
anybody! I'm sure you will agree with me that it is best to tell some
things as little as possible. And when you had kissed me, how could I
tell you then--at once? I could not. It would have spoilt everything.
Surely you understand. I know you do, because you understand everything.
If I was wrong, tell me where. You don't guess how humble I am! When I
think of you, I am the humblest girl you can imagine. Forgive me, if
there is anything to forgive. I don't need to tell you that I have
suffered."

And she kept writing the letter again and again, slightly altering the
phrases so as to improve them, so as to express herself better and more
honestly and more appealingly.

"I shall send you the address to-morrow," she was saying to him. "I
shall write you before I go to bed, whether it's to-night or to-morrow
morning." She put the fire of her love into the assurance. She smiled to
entrance him, and saw on his face that he was beside himself with joy in
her. She was a queen, surpassing in her prerogative a thousand elegant
Janets. She smiled; she proudly straightened her shoulders (she the
humblest!), and her boy was enslaved.

"I wonder what people will say," he murmured.

She said, with a pang of misgiving about his reception of her letter:

"Please tell no one!" She pleaded that for the present he should tell no
one. "Later on, it won't seem so sudden," she added plausibly. "People
are so silly."

The sound of another battle in Duck Square awoke them. The shop was very
chilly, and quite dark. Their faces were only pale ovals in the
blackness. She shivered.

"I must go! I have to pack."

He clasped her: and she was innocently content: she was a young girl
again.

"I'll walk up with you," he said protectively.

But she would not allow him to walk up with her, and he yielded. He
struck a match. They stumbled out, and, in the midnight of the passage,
he took leave of her.

Walking up Trafalgar Road, alone, she was so happy, so amazed, so
relieved, so sure of him and of his fineness and of the future, that she
could scarcely bear her felicity. It was too intense.... At last her
life was settled and mapped out. Destiny had been kind, and she meant to
be worthy of her fate. She could have swooned, so intoxicant was her
wonder and her solemn joy and her yearning after righteousness in love.

CHAPTER VI
MISCHANCE

Twelve days later, in the evening, Hilda stood by the bedside of Sarah
Gailey in the basement room of No. 59 Preston Street. There was a bright
fire in the grate, and in front of the fire a middle-aged doctor was
cleansing the instrument which he had just employed to inject morphia
into Sarah's exhausted body. Hilda's assumption that the ageing woman
had telegraphed for her on inadequate grounds had proved to be quite
wrong.

Upon entering the house on that Thursday night, Hilda, despite the
anxious pale face of the new servant who had waited up for her and who
entreated her to see Sarah Gailey instantly, had gone first to her own
room and scrawled passionately a note to Edwin, which ran: "DEAREST,--
This is my address. I love you. Every bit of me is absolutely yours.
Write me.--H. L." She gave the letter to the servant to post at once.
And as she gave it she had a vision of it travelling in post office,
railway vans, and being sorted, and sealed up in a bag, and recovered
from the bag, and scanned by the postman at Bursley, and borne up
Trafalgar Road by the postman, and dropped into the letter-box at
Edwin's house, and finally seized by Edwin; and of it pleasing him
intensely,--for it was a good letter, and she was proud of it because
she knew that it was characteristic.

And then, with her mind freed, she had opened the door of Sarah's
bedroom. Sarah was unquestionably very ill. Sarah had been quite right
in telegraphing so peremptorily to Hilda; and if she had not so
telegraphed she would have been quite wrong. On the previous day she had
been sitting on the cold new oilcloth of the topmost stairs, minutely
instructing a maid in the craft of polishing banisters. And the next
morning an attack of acute sciatica had supervened. For a trifling
indiscretion Sarah was thus condemned to extreme physical torture. Hilda
had found her rigid on the bed. She suffered the severest pain in the
small of the back and all down the left leg. Her left knee was supported
on pillows, and the bed-clothes were raised away from it, for it could
tolerate no weight whatever. The doctor, who had been and gone, had
arranged a system of fomentation and hot-water bottles surpassing
anything in even Sarah's experience. And there Sarah lay, not feverish
but sweating with agony, terrified to move, terrified to take a deep
breath, lest the disturbance of the muscles might produce consequences
beyond her strength to endure. She was in no danger of death. She could
talk. She could eat and drink. Her pulse was scarcely quickened. But she
was degraded and humiliated by mere physical anguish to the condition of
a brute. This was her lot in life. All through that first night Hilda
stayed with her, trying to pretend that Sarah was a woman, and in the
morning she had assumed control of the house.

She had her secret to console her. It remained a secret because there
was no one to whom she could relate it. Sarah had no ear for news
unconnected with her malady. And indeed to tell Sarah, as Sarah was,
would have been to carry callousness to the point of insult. And so
Hilda, amid her enormous labours and fatigue, had lived with her secret,
which, from being a perfumed delight, turned in two days to something
subtly horrible, to something that by its horror prevented her from
writing to Edwin aught but the briefest missives. She had existed from
hour to hour, from one minute apprehensively to the next, day and night,
hardly sleeping, devoured inwardly by a fear at once monstrous and
simple, at once convincing and incredible. As for the letter which
mentally she had composed a hundred times to Edwin, and which she owed
to him, it had become fantastic and then inconceivable to her.

II

One of the new servants entered the room and handed a letter to Hilda,
and left the room and shut the door. The envelope was addressed "Miss
Lessways, 59 Preston Street, Brighton," in Edwin Clayhanger's beautiful
handwriting. Every evening came thus a letter, which he had posted in
Bursley on the previous day. Hilda thought: "Will this contain another
reproach at my irregularity? I can't bear it, if it does." And she gazed
at the handwriting, and in particular at her own name, and her own name
seemed to be the name of somebody else, of some strange young woman. She
felt dizzy.... The door of Sarah's wardrobe was ajar, and, in the mirror
of it, Hilda could see herself obscurely, a black-robed strange young
woman, with untidy hair and white cheeks and huge, dark, staring heavy
eyes, with pouches beneath them. The image wavered in the mirror. She
thought: "Here it is again, this awful feeling! Surely I am not going to
faint!" She could hear Sarah's sighing breath: she could hear the
singing of the shaded gas-flame. She turned her gaze away from the
mirror, and saw Sarah's grey head inadvertently nodding, as it always
nodded. Then the letter slipped out of her hand. She glanced down at the
floor, in pursuit of it: the floor was darkly revolving. She thought:
"Am I really fainting this time? I mustn't faint. I've got to arrange
about that bacon to-night and--oh, lots of things! Sarah is not a bit
better. And I must sit with her until she gets off to sleep." Her legs
trembled, and she was terrorized by extraordinary novel sensations of
insecurity. "Oh!" she murmured weakly.

"You've only fainted," said the doctor in a low voice.

She perceived, little by little, that she was lying flat on the floor at
the foot of Sarah's bed, and that he was kneeling beside her. The bed
threw a shadow on them both, but she could see his benevolent face,
anxious and yet reassuring, rather clearly.

"What?" she whispered, in feeble despair. She felt that her resistance
was definitely broken.

From higher up, at the level of the hidden bed, came the regular
plaintive respiration of Sarah Gailey.

"You must take care of yourself better than this," said the doctor.
"Perhaps this is a day when you ought to be resting."

She answered, resigned.

"No, it's not that. I believe I'm going to have a child. You must..."
She stopped.

"Oh," said the doctor, with discretion. "Is that it?"

Strange, how the direct words would create a new situation! She had not
told the doctor that she had been through the ceremony of marriage, and
had been victimized. She had told him nothing but the central and final
thought in her mind. And lo! the new situation was brought into being,
and the doctor was accepting it! He was not emitting astounded 'buts--!'
Her directness had made all possible 'buts' seem ridiculous and futile,
and had made the expression of curiosity seem offensive.

She lay on the floor impassive. She was no longer horrified by
expectancy.

"Well," said the doctor, "we must see. I think you can sit up now, can't
you?"

Three-quarters of an hour afterwards, she went into Sarah's room alone.
She was aware of no emotion whatever. She merely desired, as a
professional nurse might have desired, to see if Sarah slept. Sarah was
not sleeping. She moaned, as she moaned continually when awake. Hilda
bent over her trembling head whose right side pressed upon the pillow.

"How queer," thought Hilda, "how awful, that she didn't even hear what I
said to him! It will almost kill her when she does know."

Sarah's eyes blinked. Without stirring, without shifting her horizontal,
preoccupied gaze from the wall, she muttered peevishly:

"What's that you were saying about going to have a child?"

Startled, Hilda moved back a little from the bed.

"The doctor says there's no doubt I am," Hilda answered coldly.

"How queer!" Sarah said. "I quite thought--but of course a girl like you
are couldn't be sure. I should like another biscuit. But I don't want
the Osbornes--the others." She resumed her moaning.

IV

On the following Saturday morning--rather more than a fortnight after
her engagement to Edwin Clayhanger--Hilda came out of the kitchen of
No. 59 Preston Street, and shut the door on a nauseating, malodorous
mess of broken food and greasy plates, in the midst of which two
servants were noisily gobbling down their late breakfast, and disputing.
With a frown of disgust on her face, she looked into Sarah Gailey's
bedroom. Sarah, though vaguely better, was still in constant acute pain,
and her knee still reposed on a pillow, and was protected from the upper
bed-clothes, and she still could not move. Hilda put on a smile for
Sarah Gailey, who nodded morosely, and then, extinguishing the smile, as
if it had been expensive gas burning to no purpose, she passed into the
basement sitting-room, and slaked the fire there. With a gesture of
irresolution, she lifted the lid of the desk in the corner, and gazed
first at a little pile of four unopened letters addressed to her in
Edwin's handwriting, and then at a volume of Crashaw, which the
enthusiastic Tom Orgreave had sent to her as a reward for her
appreciation of Crashaw's poems. She released the lid suddenly, and went
upstairs to her bedroom, chatting sugarily for an instant on the way
with the second Miss Watchett. In the bedroom, she donned her street
things, and then she descended. She had to go to the Registry Office in
North Street about a new cook. She stopped at the front door, and then
surprisingly went down once more into the basement sitting-room.
Standing up at the desk, she wrote this letter: "DARLING JANET,--I am
now married to George Cannon. The marriage is not quite public, but I
tell you before anybody, and you might tell Edwin Clayhanger.--Your
loving H. L." Least said soonest mended! And the conciseness would
discourage questioning. She inserted the letter into an envelope, which
she addressed and stamped, and then she fled with it from the house, and
in two minutes it was in a letter-box, and she was walking slowly along
the King's Road past the shops.

The letter was the swift and desperate sequel to several days'
absolutely sterile reflection. It said enough for the moment. Later, she
could explain that her husband had left her. She could not write to
Edwin. She could not bring herself to write anything to him. She could
not confess, nor beg for forgiveness nor even for sympathetic
understanding. She could not admit the uninstructed rashness which had
led her to assume positively, on inadequate grounds, that her union with
George Cannon had been fruitless. She must suffer, and he also must
suffer. Rather than let him know, in any conceivable manner, that, all
unwitting, she was bearing the child of another at the moment of her
betrothal to himself, she preferred to be regarded as a jilt of the very
worst kind. Strange that she should choose the rôle of deceiver instead
of the rôle of victim! Strange that she would sooner be hated and
scorned than pitied! Strange that she would not even give Edwin the
opportunity of treating her as a widow! But so it was! For her, the one
possible attitude towards Edwin was the attitude of silence. In the
silence of the grave her love for him existed.

As she walked along the chill promenade she looked with discreet
curiosity at every woman she met, to see her condition. This matter,
which before she had never thought of, now obsessed her; and all women
were divided for her into two classes, the expectant and the others.
Also her self-consciousness was extreme, more so even than it had been
after her mother's death. She was not frightened--yet. She was assuredly
not panic-struck. Rather her mood was grim, harsh, and calmly bitter.
She thought: "I suppose George must be informed." It affected her
queerly that if she took it into her head she need never go back to
Preston Street. She was free. She owed nothing to anybody. And yet she
would go back. She would require a home, soon. And she would require a
livelihood, for the shares of the Brighton Hotel Continental Limited
promised to be sterile and were already unsaleable. But apart from these
considerations, she would have gone back for Sarah Gailey--because Sarah
Gailey was entirely dependent on her. She detested Sarah, despite
Sarah's sufferings, and yet by her conscience she was for ever bound to
her.

The future loomed appalling. Sarah's career was finished. She could not
be anything but a burden and a torment; her last years would probably be
dreadful, both for herself and for others. The prospects of the
boarding-house were not radiant. Hilda could direct the enterprise, but
not well. She could work, but she had not the art of making others work.
Already the place was slightly at sixes and sevens. And she loathed it.
She loathed the whole business of catering. Along the entire length of
the King's Road, the smells of basement kitchens ascended to the
pavement and offended the nose. And Hilda saw all Brighton as a colossal
and disgusting enlargement of the kitchen at No. 59. She saw the
background and the pits of Brighton--that which underlies and hides
behind, and is not seen. The grandeur of the King's Road was naught to
her. Her glance pierced it and it faded to a hallucination. Beyond it
she envisaged the years to come, the messy and endless struggle, the
necessary avarice and trickeries incidental to it,--and perhaps the
ultimate failure. She would never make money--she felt that! She was not
born to make money--especially by dodges and false politeness, out of
idle, empty-noddled boarders. She would lose it and lose it. And she
pictured what she would be in ten years: the hard-driven landlady, up to
every subterfuge,--with a child to feed and educate, and perhaps a
bedridden, querulous invalid to support. And there was no alternative to
the tableau.

She went by the Chichester, which towered with all its stories above her
head. Who would take it now? George Cannon would have made it pay. He
would have made anything pay. How?... She was definitely cut off from
the magnificence of the King's Road. The side street was her destiny;
the side street and shabbiness. And it was all George's fault--and hers!
The poverty, if it came, would be George's fault alone. For he had
squandered her money in a speculation. It astounded her that George, so
shrewd and well balanced, should have made an investment so foolish. She
did not realize that a passion for a business enterprise, as for a
woman, is capable of destroying the balance of any man. And George
Cannon had had both passions.

And then she saw Florrie Bagster, on the other side of the street,
walking leisurely by the sea-wall, alone. If Mr. Boutwood had had a more
generous and wild disposition he might have allowed Florrie to ruin him
in six months of furs and carriages and champagne. But Mr. Boutwood,
though a dog, was a careful dog, especially at those moments when the
conventional dog can refuse nothing. Florrie was well and warmly
dressed,--no more; and she was on foot. Hilda's gaze fastened on her,
and immediately divined from the cut and fall of the coat that Florrie
had something to conceal from every one but her Mr. Boutwood. And
whereas Florrie trod the pavement with a charming little air that
wavered between impudence and modesty, between timid meekness and
conceit, Hilda blushed with shame and pity. She on one footpath and
Florrie on the other!

"Soon," she thought, "I shall not be able to walk along this road!"

She had sinned. She admitted that she had sinned against some quality in
herself. But how innocently and how ignorantly! And what a tremendous
punishment for so transient a weakness! And new consequences, still more
disastrous than any she had foreseen, presented themselves one after
another. George had escaped, but a word of open scandal, a single
whisper in the ear of the old creature down at Torquay, might actuate
machinery that would reach out after him and drag him back, and plant
him in jail. George, the father of her child, in jail! It was all a
matter of chance; sheer chance! She began to perceive what life really
was, and the immense importance of hazard therein. Nevertheless, without
frailty, without defection, what could chance have done? She began to
perceive that this that she was living through was life. She bit her
lips. Grief! Shame! Disillusion! Hardship! Peril! Catastrophe! Exile!
Above all, exile! These had to be faced, and they would be faced. She
recalled the firiest verse of Crashaw and she set her shoulders back.
There was the stuff of a woman in her.... Only a little while, and she
had seen before her a beloved boy entranced by her charm. She had now no
charm. Where now was the soft virgin?... And yet, somehow, magically,
miraculously, the soft virgin was still there! And the invincible vague
hope of youth, and the irrepressible consciousness of power, were almost
ready to flame up afresh, contrary to all reason, and irradiate her
starless soul.

NOTE:--_The later history of Hilda Lessways and Edwin Clayhanger will
form the theme of another novel._

Footnote 1:   See the author's novel, _Clayhanger_.