Alvina would have died of shame. She began to laugh nervously and hurriedly at the very thought.
"No, I can"t. I really can"t. Thanks, awfully," she said.
"Can"t you really!" said Albert. "Oh well, we"ll say another day, shall we?"
"When I feel I can," she said.
"Yes, when you feel like it," replied Albert.
"That"s more it," said Arthur. "It"s not the time. It"s the nervousness." Again Albert beamed at her sympathetically, and said:
"Oh, I"ll hold you. You needn"t be afraid."
"But I"m not afraid," she said.
"You won"t _say_ you are," interposed Arthur. "Women"s faults mustn"t be owned up to."
Alvina was beginning to feel quite dazed. Their mechanical, overbearing way was something she was unaccustomed to. It was like the jaws of a pair of insentient iron pincers. She rose, saying she must go.
Albert rose also, and reached for his straw hat, with its coloured band.
"I"ll stroll up with you, if you don"t mind," he said. And he took his place at her side along the Knarborough Road, where everybody turned to look. For, of course, he had a sort of fame in Woodhouse.
She went with him laughing and chatting. But she did not feel at all comfortable. He seemed so pleased. Only he was not pleased with _her_. He was pleased with himself on her account: inordinately pleased with himself. In his world, as in a fish"s, there was but his own swimming self: and if he chanced to have something swimming alongside and doing him credit, why, so much the more complacently he smiled.
He walked stiff and erect, with his head pressed rather back, so that he always seemed to be advancing from the head and shoulders, in a flat kind of advance, horizontal. He did not seem to be walking with his whole body. His manner was oddly gallant, with a gallantry that completely missed the individual in the woman, circled round her and flew home gratified to his own hive. The way he raised his hat, the way he inclined and smiled flatly, even rather excitedly, as he talked, was all a little discomforting and comical.
He left her at the shop door, saying:
"I shall see you again, I hope."
"Oh, yes," she replied, rattling the door anxiously, for it was locked. She heard her father"s step at last tripping down the shop.
"Good-evening, Mr. Houghton," said Albert suavely and with a certain confidence, as James peered out.
"Oh, good-evening!" said James, letting Alvina pa.s.s, and shutting the door in Albert"s face.
"Who was that?" he asked her sharply.
"Albert Witham," she replied.
"What has _he_ got to do with you?" said James shrewishly.
"Nothing, I hope."
She fled into the obscurity of Manchester House, out of the grey summer evening. The Withams threw her off her pivot, and made her feel she was not herself. She felt she didn"t know, she couldn"t feel, she was just scattered and decentralized. And she was rather afraid of the Witham brothers. She might be their victim. She intended to avoid them.
The following days she saw Albert, in his Norfolk jacket and flannel trousers and his straw hat, strolling past several times and looking in through the shop door and up at the upper windows. But she hid herself thoroughly. When she went out, it was by the back way. So she avoided him.
But on Sunday evening, there he sat, rather stiff and brittle in the old Withams" pew, his head pressed a little back, so that his face and neck seemed slightly flattened. He wore very low, turn-down starched collars that showed all his neck. And he kept looking up at her during the service--she sat in the choir-loft--gazing up at her with apparently love-lorn eyes and a faint, intimate smile--the sort of _je-sais-tout_ look of a private swain. Arthur also occasionally cast a judicious eye on her, as if she were a chimney that needed repairing, and he must estimate the cost, and whether it was worth it.
Sure enough, as she came out through the narrow choir gate into Knarborough Road, there was Albert stepping forward like a policeman, and saluting her and smiling down on her.
"I don"t know if I"m presuming--" he said, in a mock deferential way that showed he didn"t imagine he _could_ presume.
"Oh, not at all," said Alvina airily. He smiled with a.s.surance.
"You haven"t got any engagement, then, for this evening?" he said.
"No," she replied simply.
"We might take a walk. What do you think?" he said, glancing down the road in either direction.
What, after all, was she to think? All the girls were pairing off with the boys for the after-chapel stroll and spoon.
"I don"t mind," she said. "But I can"t go far. I"ve got to be in at nine."
"Which way shall we go?" he said.
He steered off, turned downhill through the common gardens, and proposed to take her the not-very-original walk up Flint"s Lane, and along the railway line--the colliery railway, that is--then back up the Marlpool Road: a sort of circle. She agreed.
They did not find a great deal to talk about. She questioned him about his plans, and about the Cape. But save for bare outlines, which he gave readily enough, he was rather close.
"What do you do on Sunday nights as a rule?" he asked her.
"Oh, I have a walk with Lucy Grainger--or I go down to Hallam"s--or go home," she answered.
"You don"t go walks with the fellows, then?"
"Father would never have it," she replied.
"What will he say now?" he asked, with self-satisfaction.
"Goodness knows!" she laughed.
"Goodness usually does," he answered archly.
When they came to the rather stumbly railway, he said:
"Won"t you take my arm?"--offering her the said member.
"Oh, I"m all right," she said. "Thanks."
"Go on," he said, pressing a little nearer to her, and offering his arm. "There"s nothing against it, is there?"
"Oh, it"s not that," she said.
And feeling in a false position, she took his arm, rather unwillingly. He drew a little nearer to her, and walked with a slight prance.
"We get on better, don"t we?" he said, giving her hand the tiniest squeeze with his arm against his side.