Five minutes, and they would be down at the turning. He stood at the window, waiting. If only that fellow did not come in! Through the partition wall he could hear him still tramping up and down the dining-room. What a long time a minute was! Three had gone when he heard the dining-room door opened, and Fiorsen crossing the hall to the front door. What was he after, standing there as if listening? And suddenly he heard him sigh. It was just such a sound as many times, in the long-past days, had escaped himself, waiting, listening for footsteps, in parched and sickening anxiety.
Did this fellow then really love--almost as he had loved? And in revolt at spying on him like this, he advanced and said:
"Well, I won't wait any longer."
Fiorsen started; he had evidently supposed himself alone. And Winton thought: 'By Jove! he does look bad!'
"Good-bye!" he said; but the words: "Give my love to Gyp," perished on their way up to his lips.
"Good-bye!" Fiorsen echoed. And Winton went out under the trellis, conscious of that forlorn figure still standing at the half-opened door. Betty was nowhere in sight; she must have reached the turning. His mission had succeeded, but he felt no elation. Round the corner, he picked up his convoy, and, with the perambulator hoisted on to the taxi, journeyed on at speed. He had said he would explain in the cab, but the only remark he made was:
"You'll all go down to Mildenham to-morrow."
And Betty, who had feared him ever since their encounter so many years ago, eyed his profile, without daring to ask questions.
Before he reached home, Winton stopped at a post-office, and sent this telegram:
"Gyp and the baby are with me letter follows.--WINTON."It salved a conscience on which that fellow's figure in the doorway weighed; besides, it was necessary, lest Fiorsen should go to the police. The rest must wait till he had talked with Gyp.
There was much to do, and it was late before they dined, and not till Markey had withdrawn could they begin their talk.
Close to the open windows where Markey had placed two hydrangea plants--just bought on his own responsibility, in token of silent satisfaction--Gyp began. She kept nothing back, recounting the whole miserable fiasco of her marriage. When she came to Daphne Wing and her discovery in the music-room, she could see the glowing end of her father's cigar move convulsively. That insult to his adored one seemed to Winton so inconceivable that, for a moment, he stopped her recital by getting up to pace the room. In her own house--her own house! And--after that, she had gone on with him!
He came back to his chair and did not interrupt again, but his stillness almost frightened her.
Coming to the incidents of the day itself, she hesitated. Must she tell him, too, of Rosek--was it wise, or necessary? The all-or-nothing candour that was part of her nature prevailed, and she went straight on, and, save for the feverish jerking of his evening shoe, Winton made no sign. When she had finished, he got up and slowly extinguished the end of his cigar against the window-sill;then looking at her lying back in her chair as if exhausted, he said: "By God!" and turned his face away to the window.
At that hour before the theatres rose, a lull brooded in the London streets; in this quiet narrow one, the town's hum was only broken by the clack of a half-drunken woman bickering at her man as they lurched along for home, and the strains of a street musician's fiddle, trying to make up for a blank day. The sound vaguely irritated Winton, reminding him of those two damnable foreigners by whom she had been so treated. To have them at the point of a sword or pistol--to teach them a lesson! He heard her say:
"Dad, I should like to pay his debts. Then things would be as they were when I married him."He emitted an exasperated sound. He did not believe in heaping coals of fire.
"I want to make sure, too, that the girl is all right till she's over her trouble. Perhaps I could use some of that--that other money, if mine is all tied up?"It was sheer anger, not disapproval of her impulse, that made him hesitate; money and revenge would never be associated in his mind.
Gyp went on:
"I want to feel as if I'd never let him marry me. Perhaps his debts are all part of that--who knows? Please!"Winton looked at her. How like--when she said that "Please!" How like--her figure sunk back in the old chair, and the face lifted in shadow! A sort of exultation came to him. He had got her back--had got her back!
XVIII
Fiorsen's bedroom was--as the maid would remark--"a proper pigsty"--until he was out of it and it could be renovated each day. He had a talent for disorder, so that the room looked as if three men instead of one had gone to bed in it. Clothes and shoes, brushes, water, tumblers, breakfast-tray, newspapers, French novels, and cigarette-ends--none were ever where they should have been; and the stale fumes from the many cigarettes he smoked before getting up incommoded anyone whose duty it was to take him tea and shaving-water. When, on that first real summer day, the maid had brought Rosek up to him, he had been lying a long time on his back, dreamily watching the smoke from his cigarette and four flies waltzing in the sunlight that filtered through the green sun-blinds. This hour, before he rose, was his creative moment, when he could best see the form of music and feel inspiration for its rendering. Of late, he had been stale and wretched, all that side of him dull; but this morning he felt again the delicious stir of fancy, that vibrating, half-dreamy state when emotion seems so easily to find shape and the mind pierces through to new expression. Hearing the maid's knock, and her murmured: "Count Rosek to see you, sir," he thought: 'What the devil does he want?'
A larger nature, drifting without control, in contact with a smaller one, who knows his own mind exactly, will instinctively be irritable, though he may fail to grasp what his friend is after.
