Flossie was so shy that when you spoke to her she never answered all at once; so shy that when she spoke to you she never turned her head to look at you, but left you to judge of the effect you made on her by the corners of her mouth and eyes. So now he had to look very carefully at her to see whether she were saying yes or no. Casually again (as if this course were not necessarily involved in acceptance) he inquired whether he might have the pleasure of taking her.
Miss Bishop looked another way. Her loose mouth hung desirous. (Miss Bishop"s face was flagrantly frank, devoid of all repose. None of these people had any repose about them except Flossie.) Flossie was dubious and demure. Was he quite sure it was a pleasure? He protested that in a world where few things were certain, that, at any rate, admitted of no doubt. Flossie deliberated whether this further step were or were not a departure from her ideal of propriety. And it was not until he showed signs of retracting his proposal that she intimated her consent. But as for pleasure, if Flossie were pleased she did not allow it to appear. And although her heart beat excitedly under her blue blouse, it was on the side that was not next to Mr.
Rickman.
Then Miss Roots began to talk of incomprehensible things excitedly.
So excitedly, that she had, for the moment, quite a colour. And while they talked, all the other boarders turned in their places and watched Mr. Rickman as if he had been some wonderful enchanter; Mr. Soper alone emphasizing by an att.i.tude his entire aloofness from the general interest.
And all the time Miss Roots was talking, Flossie, without saying a word, contrived to seize upon the disengaged portion of his mind. He wondered what she was thinking about.
She was thinking, first, that it really paid to put on your best blouse every evening. Next, that it wasn"t worth while if he would keep on talking to the lady on his right. Then that she couldn"t decide the point until she knew where he was going on Sunday.
That she never knew; but she went to the play with him on Sat.u.r.day, and on many Sat.u.r.days after that. There was n.o.body so gay that spring as Flossie.
Coming fresh to Flossie after a long estrangement, Rickman couldn"t recognize her from his old account of her as a poor little girl who worked too hard and never had any fun to speak of. In so describing her, no doubt he had been influenced by the melancholy of his earlier mood. But there were other reasons why he still insisted on regarding her in this pathetic light. It provided him with several very agreeable sensations, and the most agreeable of all was the voluptuous pa.s.sion of pity. It kept him detached, always in the superior position of a benefactor. Benefactor, indeed! He was in a fair way of becoming Flossie"s deity, her Providence, the mystic source of theatre-tickets and joy. No really brave man ever shrinks from the dangers of apotheosis, when the process involves no loss of personal dignity. And apart from the gratification of his natural healthy vanity, Rickman"s heart was touched by the thought that the little thing turned to him instinctively for all her innocent pleasures.
Then all at once the innocent pleasures ceased. They ceased just as Flossie"s palpitating heart told her that she was really making an impression on this singularly unimpressionable young man. She knew it by the sudden softening of his voice as he spoke to her, by the curious brilliant dilation of his eyes as they followed her about the room. For after much easy practice on Mr. Spinks she knew precisely by what movements and what glances she could best produce these interesting effects. And yet nothing could be farther from Flossie"s fancy than flirtation. The little clerk was nothing if not practical, even under the tender impulse of her dream.
Flossie was determined that whatever else she failed in she would not fail in her woman"s trade. She would have considered herself disgraced by such bankruptcy. Not that she feared it. Nature had started her with a sufficient capital of fascination, and at Mrs. Downey"s she had, so to speak, established a connection. And now it seemed there had come a period of depression. It still rained tickets, more tickets than ever, but there was no Mr. Rickman to escort her to the concert or the play; Mr. Rickman always had another engagement, never specified. No Mr. Rickman to take her into the suburbs on a Sunday; Mr. Rickman was off, goodness knew where, scouring the country on his bicycle. No Mr. Rickman to talk to her at dinner; Mr. Rickman took all his meals in his own room now. For these and all other delinquencies his invariable excuse was that he was busy; and Flossie, mind you, was sharp enough to see through _that_.
No. Mr. Rickman had changed, suddenly, unaccountably, without a moment"s warning. First of all, the other boarders noticed that he had become most frightfully irritable in his temper. He had not been over polite to any of them lately, but to her he was insufferably rude, most ungentlemanly, she called it. He would pretend not to see her if by any chance she looked his way, not to hear her if by any chance she spoke to him. Once (they were quite alone) he had broken off in the middle of an exciting conversation and rushed out of the room, out of the house. She saw him over the balcony railings, walking up and down the street like a lunatic, with his hands thrust down into his pockets and no hat on. And he was not only ungentlemanly but positively unkind. If they met on the stairs (somehow they did this very often) he would draw himself up flat against the wall as if he was afraid of the frill of her dress touching him. If she came into the drawing-room he would walk out of it; or if he stayed, it was only to sit staring at her (poor innocent little Flossie, who was so pretty) with an ugly scowl on his face. There were times when poor innocent little Flossie said to herself that she positively believed he hated her. And she was so innocent that she couldn"t think what she had done to make him hate her.
She was right about the hatred. An indignant anger was certainly what he felt when he first realized that she had power to make him feel at all. Her prettiness tormented him; therefore he hated her, and everything about her. He hated the sound of her little tongue upraised among the boarders, and of her little feet running up and down the stairs. He hated every glance of her black eyes and every att.i.tude and movement of her plump little body. More than all he hated the touch of her soft arms as they stirred against him at the tightly packed dinner-table. Therefore he avoided the dinner-table, and the drawing-room; he avoided as far as possible the house, filled as it was with the disastrous presence. He fatigued himself with excesses of walking and cycling, in the hope that when he flung himself into his bed at midnight he would be too tired to feel. And sometimes he was.
At last poor Flossie, weary of conjecture, unbent so far as to seek counsel of Miss Bishop. For Miss Bishop gave you to understand that on the subject of "gentlemen" there was nothing that she did not know. It was a little humiliating, for only a month ago Flossie had said to her in strictest confidence, "I feel it in my bones, Ada, that he"s going to come forward this spring."
Ada laughed coa.r.s.ely, but not unkindly, at the tale of her perplexity.
Ada had every reason to be sympathetic; for Mr. Rickman once securely attached, Mr. Spinks would be lonely, unappropriated, free. "Don"t you worry," said she, "_he"s_ all right."
"All right? Can"t you see how frightfully rude he is to me?"
"I should think I did see it. A jolly lot you know about gentlemen.
You"ve nothing to go on when they"re so everlastingly polite, but when they turn mad like that all of a sudden, you may be sure they"re coming to the point. To tell you the truth, I didn"t use to think you"d very much chance, Flossie; but when I saw him walk out of the room the other day, I said to myself, "She"s got "im!""
"I wish I knew. I don"t want it hanging on for ever."
"It won"t. If he doesn"t propose in May, he will in June, when you"ve got a new dress and a new hat."
Flossie shook her head despairingly. "I wonder," said she, "what I"d really better do. I think sometimes I"d better go away."
"Well, sometimes that _does_ fetch them; and then, again, sometimes it doesn"t. It"s risky. Some girls," she added reflectively, "try doing their hair another way; but I wouldn"t, if I was you. That"s risky, too. If they"re really fond of you, as often as not it only puts them off."
"Then what _am_ I to do?"
"If you take my advice," said Miss Bishop, "you"ll not do anything.
You"ll just go on the same as before, as if you hadn"t noticed anything out of the way."
And Flossie went on just the same as before, with the result that every morning Mr. Rickman sighed more and more heavily as he heard the early patter of those feet upon the floor.
CHAPTER XLVI
Flossie had been working with one eye on the clock all afternoon. At the closing hour she went out into Lothbury with the other girls; but instead of going up Moorgate Street as usual, she turned out of Prince"s Street to her right, and thence made her way westward as quickly as she could for the crowd. It was September, a day when it was good to be out of doors at that hour. The sunlight filtered into the dusty thoroughfare from the west, on her left the sprawling mounted legends over the shops were so many gold blazons on an endless field of grey; on her right, a little way ahead, the tall plane-tree in Wood Street hung out its green leaves over Cheapside like a signal.
Thither Flossie was bound.
As she sidled out of the throng into the quiet little lane, Mr.
Rickman came forward, raising his hat. He had been waiting under the plane-tree for twenty minutes, and was now beguiling his sylvan solitude with a cigarette. Two years had worked a considerable change in his appearance. His face had grown graver and clearer cut. He had lost his hectic look and had more the air of a man of the world than of a young poet about town. To Flossie"s admiration and delight he wore an irreproachable frock-coat and shining linen; she interpreted these changes as corresponding with the improvement in his prospects, and judged that the profession of literature was answering fairly well.
They shook hands seriously, as if they attached importance to these trifles. "Am I dreadfully late?" she asked.
"Dreadfully." He smiled with one corner of his mouth, holding his cigarette firmly in the other, while he took from her the little cape she carried over her arm.
"I expect I"ve kept you waiting a good bit?" A keen observer of Flossie"s face might have detected in it a faintly triumphant appreciation of the fact. "I"m awfully sorry I got behind-hand and had to stay till I"d finished up."
"Never mind, Flossie, it don"t matter. At any rate it"s worth it." The words implied that Mr. Rickman"s time was valuable, otherwise he would not have given it to Flossie. "Where shall we go, and what shall we do?"
"I don"t much care."
"Shall we have tea somewhere while we"re making up our minds?"
"Well--I wouldn"t mind. I hadn"t time to get any at the Bank."
"All right. Come along." And they plunged into Cheapside again, he breasting the stream, making a pa.s.sage for her. They found a favourite confectioner"s in St. Paul"s Churchyard, where they had sometimes gone before. He noticed that she took her seat with rather a weary air.
"Floss, you must come for a walk on the Embankment. You look as if you didn"t get out enough. Why will you go up and down in that abominable underground? You"re awfully white, you know."
"I never had a red face."
"Then what"s the matter?"
"Nothing, I shall be better when I"ve had my tea."
She had her tea, which after a proper protest on her part was paid for by Rickman. Then they turned into the cathedral gardens, where it was still pleasant under the trees. Thus approached from the north-east, the building rose up before them in detached incoherent ma.s.ses, the curve of its great dome broken by the line of the north transept seen obliquely from below. It turned a forbidding face citywards, a face of sallow stone blackened by immemorial grime, while the north-west columns of the portico shone almost white against the nearer gloom.
"It"s clever of it to look so beautiful," murmured Rickman, "when it"s so infernally ugly." He stood for a few minutes, lost in admiration of its eccentricity. Thus interested, he was not aware that his own expression had grown somewhat abstracted, impersonal and cold.
"I call that silly," said Flossie, looking at him out of the corner of her black eyes. Had he come there to pay attention--to the Cathedral?
"Do you? Why?"
"Because--I suppose you wouldn"t say I was beautiful if I were--well, downright ugly?"
"I might, Flossie, if your ugliness was as characteristic, as suggestive as this."
Flossie shrugged her shoulders (not, he thought, a pretty action in a lady with so short a neck). To her St. Paul"s was about as beautiful as the Bank and infinitely less "suggestive." Mr. Rickman interpreted her apathy as fatigue and looked about for a lonely seat. They found one under the angle of the transept.