These Twain Part 84

Never before had Hilda spoken so freely to anyone, not even to Janet.

Fierce pride had always kept her self-contained. But now she had no feeling of shame at her outburst. Tears stood in her eyes--and yet she faced Janet, making no effort to hide them.

"My dear!" breathed the deprecating Janet, shocked out of her tepid virginal calm by a revelation of conjugal misery such as had never been vouchsafed to her. She was thinking: "How can the poor thing face her guests after this? Everybody will see that something's happened--it will be awful! She really ought to think of her position."

There was a silence.

The door opened with a sharp sound, and Hilda turned away her head as from the suddenly visible mouth of a cannon. The music could be heard plainly, and beneath it the dull shuffling of feet on the bare boards of the drawing-room. Manna Host came in radiant, followed by Edwin and Tom Swetnam.

"Well, Hilda," said Edwin, with a slight timid constraint. "I've got rid of your house for you. Here are the deluded victims."

"We have seen every corner of it, Mrs. Clayhanger," said Manna Host, enthusiastically. "It is lovely. But how can you wish to leave it? It is so practical!"

Perceiving the agitation of Hilda's face, Edwin added in a lower voice to his wife:

"I thought I wouldn't say anything until it was settled, for fear you might be let in for a disappointment. He'll buy it if I leave fifteen hundred on mortgage. So I shall. But of course he wanted her to have a good look at it first."

"How unfair I am!" thought Hilda, as she made some ba.n.a.l remark to Miss Host. "Don't I know I can always rely on him?"

"Mr. Clayhanger made us promise not to----" Miss Host began to explain.

"It was just like him!" Hilda interrupted, smiling.

She had a strong desire to jump at Edwin and kiss him. She was saved.

Her grandiose plan would proceed. The house sold, Edwin was bound to secure Ladderedge Hall against no matter what rival; and he would do it.

But it was the realisation of her power over her husband that gave her the profoundest joy.

About an hour later, when everyone felt that the party was over, the guests, reluctant to leave, and excited afresh by the news that the house had changed hands during the revel, were all a.s.sembled in the drawing-room. A few were seated on the chairs which, with the tables, had been pushed against the walls. George had squatted on the carpet rolled up into the hearth, where the fire was extinct; he was not wearing his green shade. The rest were grouped around Manna Host in the middle of the room.

Miss Host, the future mistress of the abode, was now more than ever the centre of regard. Apparently as fresh as at the start, and picking delicately at a sweet biscuit, the flushed blonde stood answering questions about her views on England and especially on the Five Towns.

She was quite sure of herself, and utterly charming in her confidence.

Annunciata Fearns envied her acutely. The other women were a little saddened by the thought of all the disillusions that inevitably lay before her. It was touching to see her glance at Tom Swetnam, convinced that she understood him to the core, and in him all the psychology of his s.e.x.

"Everybody knows," she was saying, "that the English are the finest nation, and I think the Five Towns are much more English than London.

That's why I adore the Five Towns. You do not know how English you are here. It makes me laugh because you are so English, and you do not know it. I love you."

"You're flattering us," said Stephen Cheswardine, enchanted with the girl.

Everybody waited in eager delight for her next words. Such t.i.t-bits of attention and laudation did not often fall to the district. It occurred to people that after all the local self-conceit might not be entirely unjustified.

"Ah!" Manna pouted. "But you have spots!"

"Spots!" repeated young Paul Swetnam, amid a general laugh.

She turned to him: "You said there were no spots on Knype Football Club, did you not? Well, there is a spot on you English. You are dreadfully exasperating to us Danes. Oh, I mean it! You are exasperating because you will not show your feelings!"

"Tom, that must be one for you," said Charlie Fearns.

"We're too proud," said Dr. Stirling.

"No," replied Manna maliciously. "It is not pride. You are afraid to show your feelings. It is because you are cowards--in that!"

"We aren't!" cried Hilda, inspired. And yielding to the temptation which had troubled her incessantly ever since she left the boudoir, she put her arms round Edwin and kissed him. "So there!"

"Loud applause!" said young George on the roll of carpet. He said it kindly, but with a certain superiority, perhaps due to the facts that he was wearing a man's "long trousers" for the first time that night, and that he regarded himself as already almost a Londoner. There was some handclapping.

Edwin's eyes had seduced Hilda. Looking at them surrept.i.tiously she had suddenly recalled another of his tricks,--tricks of goodness. When she had told him one evening that Minnie was prematurely the mother of a girl, he had said: "Well, we'll put 130 in the savings bank for the kid." "130? Whatever are you talking about?" "130. I received it from America this very morning as ever is." And he showed her a draft on Brown, Shipley & Co. He said 'from America.' He was too delicate to say 'from George Cannon.' It had been a triumphant moment for him. And now, as before them all Hilda held him to her, the delicious thought that she had power over him, that she was shaping the large contours of his existence, made her feel solemn in her bliss. And yet simultaneously she was reflecting with a scarcely perceptible hardness: "It's each for himself in marriage after all, and I've got my own way."

And then she noticed the whiteness of his shirt-front under her chin, and that reminded her of his mania for arranging his linen according to his own ideas in his own drawer, and the absurd tidiness of his linen; and she wanted to laugh.

"What a romance she has made of my life!" thought Edwin, confused and blushing, as she loosed him. And though he looked round with affection at the walls which would soon no longer be his, the greatness of the adventure of existence with this creature, to him unique, and the eternal expectation of some new ecstasy, left no room in his heart for a regret.

He caught sight of Ingpen alone in a corner by the piano, nervously stroking his silky beard. The memory of the secret woman in Ingpen's room came back to him. Without any process of reasoning, he felt very sorry for both of them, and he was aware of a certain condescension in himself towards Ingpen.