"George Tanqueray helped me."
He frowned.
"Well, you can leave it to me now," he said.
"It takes it out of me more than all the books I ever wrote."
That touched him, and he smiled in spite of himself.
"If," said she, "we only had a housekeeper."
"A housekeeper?"
"It"s a housekeeper you want."
She put her face to his, brushing his cheek with a shy and fugitive caress.
"You really ought," she said, "to have married Gertrude."
"You"ve told me that several times already."
"_She_ wouldn"t have plagued you night and day."
He owned it.
"Isn"t it rather a pity that she ever left?"
"Why, what else could the poor woman do?"
"Stay, of course."
He had never thought of that solution; he would, if he had been asked, have judged it unthinkable.
"Supposing," said Jinny, "you asked her, very nicely, to come back--don"t you think that would save us?"
No; he never would have thought of it himself; but since she had put it that way, as saving them, saving Jinny, that was to say; well, he owned, wouldn"t it?
"I say, but wouldn"t you mind?" he said at last.
"Why should I?" said she.
In the afternoon of the next day, which was a Sunday, Brodrick appeared at the house in Augustus Road. He asked to see Miss Collett, who was staying there with her cousin.
She came to him, as she used to come to him in his study, with her uplifted, sacrificial face, holding herself stiffly and tensely, half in surrender, half resisting the impulse that drew her.
He laid the situation before her, curtly.
"If you were to come back," he said, "it would solve all our problems."
She reddened, suspecting, as was her way, significance in everything that Brodrick said. Did he, she wondered, recognize that she too had her problem; and was he providing for her too the simple and beautiful solution? It was possible, then, she argued inwardly, that in some way that was not any other man"s way, in some immaterial and perfect way, he cared. There was after all a tie. He desired, as she had desired, to preserve it in its purity and its perfection.
Putting all that aside, it remained certain that she was indispensable.
There was a deepening in the grey shallows of her eyes; they darted such light as comes only from the deeps. Her upper lip quivered with a movement that was between a tremor and a smile, subtler than either.
"Are you sure," she said, "that Mrs. Brodrick wouldn"t mind?"
"Jinny? Oh dear me, no. It was her idea."
Her face changed again. The light and flush of life withdrew. Her sallowness returned. She had the fixed look of one who watches the perishing under her eyes of a beloved dream.
"And you," she said, as if she read him, "are not quite sure whether you really want me?"
"Should I ask you if I didn"t want you? My only doubt was whether you would care to come. Will you?"
He looked at her with his intent look. It bore some faint resemblance to the look he had for Jane. Her light rose. She met his gaze with a flame of the sacrificial fire.
"I"ll do whatever you want," she said.
That was how Gertrude came back to Brodrick"s house.
"And now," Jane wrote to Sophy Levine, "we"re all happy."
But Sophy in her wisdom wondered. As soon as she heard of Gertrude"s installation she rushed over to Putney at the highest speed of her motor-car.
She found Jane on the lawn, lying back in her long chair. An expression of great peace was on her face.
She had been writing. Some sheets of ma.n.u.script lay under the chair where she had thrust them out of Sophy"s sight. She had heard the imperious trump of the motor-car, sounding her doom as it swung on to the Heath.
Sophy looked at her sister-in-law and said to herself that, really, Henry did exaggerate. She could see nothing in the least abnormal about Jane. Jane, when you took her the right way, was just like anybody else.
Gertrude was out. She had gone over to Roehampton to see Frances. Sophy judged the hour propitious.
"It works," said Jane in answer to her question; "it works beautifully.
You don"t know, Sophy, what a hand that woman has. Just go indoors and look about you. You can see it working."
"I couldn"t stand another woman"s hand in my house," said Sophy, "however beautifully it worked."
"Is it my house? In a sense it"s hers. There"s no doubt that she made it about as perfect as a house could be. It was like a beautiful machine that she had invented and kept going. n.o.body but Gertrude could have kept it going like that. It was her thing and she loved it."
Sophy"s face betrayed her demure understanding of Gertrude"s love.
"Gertrude," said Jane, "couldn"t do my work, and it"s been demonstrated that I can"t do hers. I don"t believe in turning people out of their heaven-appointed places and setting them down to each other"s jobs."
"If you could convince me that Gertrude"s heaven-appointed place is in your husband"s house----"
"She"s proved it."