From the car she had seen the incredible vision of Louis walking down the lane from the house. He and John"s Ernest had not noticed each other, nor had Louis noticed that his wife was in the car.
Louis stopped now and looked back, hesitant.
There he was, with his plastered, pale face all streaked with greyish-white lines! Really Rachel had difficulty in believing her eyes. She had left him in bed, weak, broken; and he was there in the road fully dressed for the town and making for the town--a dreadful sight, but indubitably moving unaided on his own legs. It was simply monstrous! Fury leaped up in her. She had never heard of anything more monstrous. The thing was an absolute outrage on her nursing of him.
"Are you stark, staring mad?" she demanded.
He stood weakly regarding her. It was clear that he was already very enfeebled by his fantastic exertions.
"I wonder how much farther you would have gone without falling!" she said. "I"ll thank you to come back this very instant!... This very instant!"
He had no strength to withstand her impetuous anger. His lower lip fell. He obeyed with some inarticulate words.
"And I should like to know what Mrs. Tams was doing!" said Rachel.
She neither guessed nor cared what was the intention of Louis"
shocking, impossible escapade. She grasped his arm firmly. In ten minutes he was in bed again, under control, and Rachel was venting herself on Mrs. Tams, who took oath that she had been utterly unaware of the master"s departure from the house.
CHAPTER XV
THE CHANGED MAN
I
Exactly a week pa.s.sed, and Easter had come, before Rachel could set out upon an enterprise which she both longed and hated to perform. In the meantime the situation in the house remained stationary, except that after a relapse Louis" condition had gradually improved. She nursed him; he permitted himself to be nursed; she slept near him every night; no scene of irritation pa.s.sed between them. But nothing was explained; even the fact that Rachel on the Sat.u.r.day morning had overtaken Louis instead of meeting him--a detail which in secret considerably puzzled Louis, since it implied that his wife had been in the house when he left it--even this was not explained; as for the motor-car, Louis, absorbed, had scarcely noticed it, and Rachel did not mention it. She went on from one day into the next, proud, self-satisfied, sure of her strength and her position, indifferently scornful of Louis, and yet fatally stricken; she knew not in the least what was to be done, and so she waited for Destiny. Louis had to stop in bed for five days. His relapse worried Dr. Yardley, who, however, like many doctors, was kept in complete ignorance of the truth; Rachel was ashamed to confess that her husband had monstrously taken advantage of her absence to rise up and dress and go out; and Louis had said no word. On the Friday he was permitted to sit in a chair in the bedroom, and on Sat.u.r.day he had the freedom of the house.
It surprised Rachel that on the Sat.u.r.day he had not dashed for the street, for after the exploit of the previous Sat.u.r.day she was ready to expect anything. Had he done so she would not have interfered; he was really convalescent, and also the number of white stripes over his face and hair had diminished. In the afternoon he reclined on the Chesterfield to read, and fell asleep. Then it was that Rachel set out upon her enterprise. She said not a word to Louis, but instructed Mrs.
Tams to inform the master, if he inquired, that she had gone over to Knype to see Mr. Maldon.
"Are you a friend of Mester Maldon"s?" asked the grey-haired slattern who answered her summons at the door of Julian"s lodgings in Granville Street, Knype. There was a challenge in the woman"s voice. Rachel accepted it at once.
"Yes, I am," she said, with decision.
"Well, I don"t know as I want any o" Mester Maldon"s friends here,"
said the landlady loudly. "Mester Maldon"s done a flit from here, Mester Maldon has; and," coming out on to the pavement and pointing upward to a broken pane in the first-floor window, "that"s a bit o"
his fancy work afore he flitted!"
Rachel put her lips together.
"Can you give me his new address?"
"Can I give yer his new address? Pr"aps I can and pr"aps I canna, but I dunna see why I should waste my breath on Mester Maldon"s friends--that I dunna! And I wunna!"
Rachel walked away. Before she reached the end of the frowsy street, whose meanness and monotony of tiny-bow-windows exemplified intensely the most deplorable characteristics of a district where brutish licence is decreasing, she was overtaken by a lanky girl in a pinafore.
"If ye please, miss, Mester Maldon"s gone to live at 29 Birches Street, "anbridge."
Having made this announcement, the girl ran off, with a short giggle.
Rachel, had to walk half a mile to reach the tram-route. This re-visiting of her native town, which she had quitted only a few weeks earlier, seemed to her like the sad resumption of an existence long forgotten. She was self-conscious and hoped that she would not encounter the curiosity of any of her Knype acquaintances. She felt easier when she was within the sheltering car and rumbling and jerking through the gloomy carnival of Easter Sat.u.r.day afternoon in Knype and Cauldon on the way to Hanbridge.
After leaving the car in Crown Square, she had to climb through all the western quarter of Hanbridge to the very edge of the town, on the hummock that separates it from the Axe Moorlands. Birches Street, as she had guessed, was in the suburb known as Birches Pike. It ran right to the top of the hill, and the upper portion consisted of new cottage-houses in groups of two or three, with vacant lots between.
Why should Julian have chosen Birches Street for residence, seeing that his business was in Knype? It was a repellent street; it was out even of the little world where sordidness is at any rate dignified by tradition and anaemic ideals can support each other in close companionship. It had neither a past nor a future. The steep end of it was an horizon of cloud. The April east wind blew the smoke of Hanbridge right across it.
In this east wind men in shirt-sleeves, and women with ap.r.o.ns over their heads, stood nonchalantly at cottage gates contemplating the vacuum of leisure. On two different parcels of land teams of shrieking boys were playing football, with piles of caps and jackets to serve as goal-posts. To the left, in a clough, was an enormous yellow marlpit, with pools of water in its depths, and gangways of planks along them, and a few overturned wheelbarrows lying here and there. A group of men drove at full speed up the street in a dogcart behind a sweating cob, stopped violently at the summit, and, taking watches from pockets, began to let pigeons out of baskets. The pigeons rose in wide circles and were lost in the vast dome of melancholy that hung over the district.
II
No. 29 was the second house from the top, new, and already in decay.
It and its attached twin were named "Prospect Villas" in vermilion tiles on the yellowish-red bricks of the facade. Hot, and yet chilled by the wind, Rachel hesitated a moment at the gate, suddenly realizing the perils of her mission. And then she saw Julian Maldon standing in the bay-window of the ground floor; he was eating. Simultaneously he recognized her.
She thought, "I can"t go back now."
He came sheepishly to the front door and asked her to walk in.
"Who"d have thought of seeing you?" he exclaimed. "You must take me as I am. I"ve only just moved in."
"I"ve been to your old address," she said, smiling, with an attempt at animation.
"A rare row I had there!" he murmured.
She understood, with a pang of compa.s.sion and yet with feminine disdain, the horrible thing that his daily existence was. No wonder he would never allow Mrs. Maldon to go and see him! The spectacle of his secret squalor would have desolated the old lady.
"Don"t take any notice of all this," he said apologetically, as he preceded her into the room where she had seen him standing. "I"m not straight yet.... Not that it matters. By the way, take a seat, will you?"
Rachel courageously sat down.
Just as there were no curtains to the windows, so there was no carpet on the planked floor. A few pieces of new, cheap, ign.o.ble furniture half filled the room. In one corner was a sofa-bedstead covered with an army blanket, in the middle a crimson-legged deal table, partly covered with a dirty cloth, and on the cloth were several apples, an orange, and a hunk of brown bread--his meal. Although he had only just "moved in," dust had had time to settle thickly on all the furniture.
No pictures of any kind hid the huge sunflower that made the pattern of the wall-paper. In the hearth, which lacked a fender, a small fire was expiring.
"Ye see," said Julian, "I only eat when I"m hungry. It"s a good plan.
So I"m eating now. I"ve turned vegetarian. There"s naught like it.
I"ve chucked all that guzzling an swilling business. It"s no good. I never touch a drop of liquor, nor a morsel of fleshmeat. Nor smoke, either. When you come to think of it, smoking"s a disgusting habit."
Rachel said, pleasantly, "But you were smoking last week, surely?"
"Ah! But it"s since then. I don"t mind telling you. In fact, I meant to tell you, anyhow. I"ve turned over a new leaf. And it wasn"t too soon. I"ve joined the Knype Ethical Society. So there you are!" His voice grew defiant and fierce, as in the past, and he proceeded with his meal.
Rachel knew nothing of the Knype Ethical Society, except that in spite of its name it was regarded with unfriendly suspicion by the respectable as an illicit rival of churches and chapels and a haunt of dubious characters who, under high-sounding mottoes, were engaged in the wicked scheme of setting cla.s.s against cla.s.s. She had accepted the general verdict on the Knype Ethical Society. And now she was confirmed in it. As she gazed at Julian Maldon in that dreadful interior, chewing apples and brown bread and sucking oranges, only when he felt hungry, she loathed the Knype Ethical Society. It was nothing to her that the Knype Ethical Society was responsible for a religious and majestic act in Julian Maldon--the act of turning over a new leaf.
"And why did you come up here?"
"Oh, various reasons!" said Julian, with a certain fict.i.tious nonchalance, beneath which was all his old ferocious domination.