To Love Part 14

"They are not half sweet enough for you," he managed to say, stuttering furiously.

Joan had a moment's uneasiness. Surely the wretched little man was not going to fall in love with her? She glanced sideways at him during the cla.s.s and what she saw rea.s.sured her. His clothes, his dirty hands, his whole appearance, put him in a different world to herself. However kind she might be to him, he surely could not fail to recognize that it was only the same kindness which would prompt her to cross the road to give a penny to a beggar?

Unfortunately Mr. Simpson belonged to a cla.s.s which is very slow to recognize any difference in rank save that of wealth. He was a humble little man before Joan, but that was because he was by nature humble, and also because he was in love. He thought her very wonderful and beautiful beyond his range of words, but he imagined her as coming from much the same kind of home as his own, and she seemed to exist in the same strata of life.

A night or two after the flower episode he fixed adoring eyes on her and asked if he might be allowed to see her home.

"Well, it is rather out of your way," Joan remonstrated, she had so often seen him trudge off in the opposite direction.

"That is of no consequence," he replied, with his usual stutter.

The streets were dark, quiet, and deserted. Now and then as they hurried along, for Joan walked as fast as she could to ward off conversation, they pa.s.sed a solitary policeman doing his beat, and dim, scarce seen lovers emerged out of the shadows holding each other's hands.

"Will you not take my arm?" Mr. Simpson ventured presently. He was slightly out of breath in his effort to keep up with her.

"No, thank you," Joan answered. The whole occurrence was too ridiculous, yet for once in her life her sense of humour was failing her. "And I wish you would not bother to come any further, it is quite unnecessary."

Her tone was more than chilly. Mr. Simpson, however remained undaunted.

His slow and ponderous mind had settled on a certain course; it would need more than a little chilliness to turn it from its purpose.

"I was going to ask you," he went on, "whether you would do me the honour of coming to the theatre one evening? If you have a mind that turns that way sometimes."

"No, thank you," answered Joan once more. "I never go to theatres, and I shouldn't go with you in any case," she added desperately, as a final resource.

"I meant no offence," the man answered, humble as ever. "I should always act straight by a girl, and for you----"

"Oh, don't, please don't," Joan interrupted. She stopped in her walk and faced round on him. "Can't you see how impossible it would be for me----" she broke off abruptly, rather ashamed of her outburst. "I am going to be a sn.o.b in a minute, if I am not careful," she finished to herself.

"I know I am not amusing, or anything," the man went on; "but you have always seemed so kind and considerate. If I have offended in any way, I am more than sorry."

Joan felt that he was frowning as he always frowned in hopeless perplexity over his shorthand.

"I am not offended," she tried to explain more gently. "Only, please do not ask me to go out with you again, or offer to walk home with me. Here we are anyway, this is where I live." She turned at the bottom of Shamrock House steps and held out her hand to him. "Good-night," she said.

Simpson did not take her hand, instead he stared up at her; she could see how shiny and red his face was under the lamp.

"You are not angry with me?" he stuttered.

"Why, no, of course not," Joan prevaricated. Then she ran up the steps and let herself into the hall without looking back at him.

For two or three days she attempted to ignore the man's presence in cla.s.s next her, and Simpson himself in no way intruded. He had taken her snubbing like a man; from the height of his dreams he had fallen into an apathetic despair; the only effect it had on him was to make him stupider than ever at his work. Then one evening, with a face working rather painfully, he told her that he did not intend to come any more.

"I am going to another centre," he said, gathering his books together and not looking at her.

"Has Mr. Phillips been too much for you?" she asked, wilfully ignoring the deeper meaning behind his words.

"No," he answered, "it is not that. It may seem quite absurd," he went on laboriously, "but I want to ask you to let me have your note-book. I have got a new one to give you in its place." He produced a packet from his pocket and held it out to her.

Later on, when she thought over the thing, she smiled. A note-book seemed so singularly unromantic, but at the time she felt nearer tears.

The look in his eyes haunted her for many days. She had been the one glimpse of romance in his dreary existence, and she had had to kill the dream so ruthlessly.

CHAPTER XIV

"It seems her heart was not washed clean Of tinted dreams of 'Might have been.'"

RUTH YOUNG.

There followed a weary time for Joan. The poem she had repeated on her first morning at Shamrock House had to be recalled again and again and fell away finally from its glad meaning in the bitter disillusionment which looking for work entailed. Wherein lay the value of cheerfulness when day after day saw her weary and dispirited from a fruitless search, from hope-chilling visits to registry offices, from unsuccessful applications in answer to the advertis.e.m.e.nts which thronged the morning papers? She went at it at first eagerly, hopefully. "To-day I shall succeed," was her waking motto. But every evening brought its tale of disappointment.

"There is no one in the world as useless as I am," she thought finally.

"It is only just a bad season," Rose Brent tried to cheer her up; "there is lots of unemployment about; we will find something for you soon."

But to Joan it seemed as if the iron of being absolutely unwanted was entering into her soul.

There was only one shred of comfort in all this dreariness. Life at Shamrock House was so cheap that she was eating up but very little of Uncle John's allowance. She wondered sometimes if the old people at home ever asked at the Bank as to how her money matters stood, or had they shut her so completely out of their lives that even that was of no interest to them? Miss Abercrombie wrote fairly regularly, but though she could give Joan news of the home people she had to admit that Aunt Janet never mentioned or alluded to her niece in any way.

"She is harder than I thought she could be," wrote Miss Abercrombie; "or is it perhaps that you have killed her heart?"

Once Joan's pride fell so low that she found herself writing Aunt Janet a pathetic, vague appeal to be allowed to creep back into the shelter of the old life. But she tore the letter up in the morning and scattered its little pieces along the gutter of Digby Street. Digby Street was sucking into its undercurrents her youth, her cheerfulness, her hope; only pride was left, she must make a little struggle to hold on to pride, and then news came from Miss Abercrombie that Aunt Janet had been ill and that the Rutherfords had gone abroad. Apart from her fruitless journeys in search of work, her days held nothing. She so dreaded the atmosphere of Shamrock House that very often she would have to walk herself tired out of all feeling before she could go back there; sometimes she cried night after night, weak, stupid tears, shut up in the dreariness of her little room, and very often her thoughts turned back to Gilbert--the comfort of their little flat, the theatres, the suppers, the dances and the pa.s.sion-held nights when he had loved her.

More and more she thought of Gilbert as the dreariness of Digby Street closed round her days.

If her baby had lived, would life have been easier for her, or would it only have meant--as she had first believed in her days of panic that it would mean--an added hardship, a haunting shame? It was the lack of love in her life that left so aching a void, the fact that apparently no one cared or heeded what became of her. The baby would at least have brought love to her, in its little hands, in its weak strength that looked to her for shelter.

"I should be happier," she said once stormily to Rose, "if I could have a cat to keep. I think I shall buy a kitten."

The other girl had looked at her, smiling dryly. "Pets are strictly against the rules in Shamrock House," she reminded her.

It was in one of her very despondent moods that Joan first met the young man with blue eyes. She never knew him by any name, and their acquaintance, or whatever it could be called, came to an abrupt end on the first occasion when he ventured to speak to her. Womanlike, she had been longing for him to do so for some time, but resented it bitterly when he did. Perhaps something faintly contemptuous, a shadowed hint that he had noticed her interest in him, flamed up the desire to snub him in her heart, or perhaps it was a feeling of self-shame to find herself so poor a beggar at friendship's gate.

For a week he had met her at the same place and followed her on her way down Victoria Street. Then one night, just as they came under the lights of Vauxhall Clock tower, he spoke to her.

"Doing anything to-night?" he said. "Shall we dine together?"

She turned from him in a white heat of anger, more with herself than with him, though that, of course, it was not given him to know. But he caught a glimpse of her face and read his answer, and since he was in reality a nice boy, and insult had been the last thought in his mind, he took off his hat quickly and apologized.

"I am sure I beg your pardon," he said; "I can see that I have made a mistake."

Joan did not answer him, she had moved quickly away in the direction of Digby Street, but as she pa.s.sed by the dingy houses she knew that he was not following any more, and she felt the hot, hard lump in her throat which is so difficult to swallow. She had wanted to go to dinner with him, she had wanted to, that was the thought that mocked at her all night.

It was one evening about a fortnight after that episode that Rose called Joan into her room on their way upstairs.

"I want to talk to you," she said, closing the door behind them. "Has Miss Nigel spoken yet?"