"Matter? Nothing. Why?"
"You look so queer."
"Well--you come along with these shocks." He gave a short, awkward laugh. He felt and looked guilty, and he knew that he looked guilty.
"You looked queer when you came out."
"You"ve upset yourself, my child, that"s all." He now realised the high degree of excitement which he himself, without previously being aware of it, had reached.
"Edwin, who is it in there?"
"Don"t I tell you--it"s a customer."
He could see her nostrils twitching through, the veil.
"It"s George Cannon in there!" she exclaimed.
He laughed again. "What makes you feel that?" he asked, feeling all the while the complete absurdity of such fencing.
"When I ran out I noticed somebody. He was reading a newspaper and I couldn"t see him. But he just moved it a bit, and I seemed to catch sight of the top of his head. And when I got into the street I said to myself, "It looked like George Cannon," and then I said, "Of course it couldn"t be." And then with this business about Auntie Hamps the idea went right out of my head."
"Well, it is, if you want to know."
Her mysterious body and face seemed to radiate a disastrous emotion that filled the whole office.
"Did you know he was coming?"
"I did not. Hadn"t the least notion!" The sensation of criminality began to leave Edwin. As Hilda seemed to move and waver, he added:
"Now you aren"t going to see him!"
And his voice menacingly challenged her, and defied her to stir a step.
The most important thing in the world, then, was that Hilda should not see George Cannon. He would stop her by force. He would let himself get angry and brutal. He would show her that he was the stronger. He had quite abandoned his earlier att.i.tude of unsentimental callousness which argued that after all it wouldn"t ultimately matter whether they encountered each other or not. Far from that, he was, so it appeared to him, standing between them, desperate and determined, and acting instinctively and conventionally. Their separate pasts, each full of grief and tragedy, converged terribly upon him in an effort to meet in just that moment, and he was ferociously resisting.
"What does he want?"
"He wants me to help him to go to America."
"_You!_
"He says he hasn"t a friend."
"But what about his wife?"
"That"s just what I said.... He"s left her. Says he can"t live with her."
There was a silence, in which the tension appreciably lessened.
"Can"t live with her! Well, I"m not surprised. But I do think it"s strange, him coming to you."
"So do I," said Edwin drily, taking the upper hand; for the change in Hilda"s tone--her almost childlike satisfaction in the news that Cannon would not live with his wife--seemed to endow him with superiority.
"But there"s a lot of strange things in this world. Now listen here.
I"m not going to keep him waiting; I can"t."
He then spoke very gravely, authoritatively and ominously: "Find George and take him home at once."
Hilda, impressed, gave a frown.
"I think it"s very wrong that you should be asked to help him." Her voice" shook and nearly broke. "Shall you help him, Edwin?"
"I shall get him out of this town at once, and out of the country. Do as I say. As things are he doesn"t know there is any George, and it"s just as well he shouldn"t. But if he stays anywhere about, he"s bound to know."
All Hilda"s demeanour admitted that George Cannon had never been allowed to know that he had a son; and the simple candour of the admission frightened Edwin by its very simplicity.
"Now! Off you go! George is in the engine-house."
Hilda moved reluctantly towards the outer-door, like a reproved and rebellious schoolgirl. Suddenly she burst into tears, sprang at Edwin, and, putting her arms round his neck, kissed him through the veil.
"n.o.body but you would have helped him--in your place!" she murmured pa.s.sionately, half admiring, half protesting. And with a backward look as she hurried off, her face stern and yet soft seemed to appeal: "Help him."
Edwin was at once deeply happy and impregnated with a sense of the frightful sadness that lurks in the hollows of the world. He stood alone with the flaring gas, overcome.
IV
He went back to the private room, self-conscious and rather tongue-tied, with a clear feeling of relief that Hilda was disposed of, removed from the equation--and not unsuccessfully. After the woman, to deal with the man, in the plain language of men, seemed simple and easy. He was astounded, equally, by the grudging tardiness of Mrs. Cannon"s information to Hilda as to the release, and by the baffling, inflexible detraction of Hilda"s words: "Well, I"m not surprised." And the flitting image of Auntie Hamps fighting for life still left him untouched. He looked at George Cannon, and George Cannon, with his unreliable eyes, looked at him. He almost expected Cannon to say: "Was that Hilda you were talking to out there?" But Cannon seemed to have no suspicion that, in either the inner or the outer room, he had been so close to her. No doubt, when he was waiting by the mantel-piece in the outer room, he had lifted the paper as soon as he heard the door unlatched, expressly in order to screen himself from observation.
Probably he had not even guessed that the pa.s.ser was a woman. Had Simpson been there, the polite young man would doubtless have said: "Good night, Mrs. Clayhanger," but Simpson had happened not to be there.
"Are you going to help me?" asked George Cannon, after a moment, and his heavy voice was so beseeching, so humble, so surprisingly sycophantic, so fearful, that Edwin could scarcely bear to hear it. He hated to hear that one man could be so slavishly dependent on another. Indeed, he much preferred Cannon"s defiant, half-bullying tone.
"Yes," said he. "I shall do what I can. What do you want?"
"A hundred pounds," said George Cannon, and, as he named the sum, his glance was hard and steady.
Edwin was startled. But immediately he began to readjust his ideas, persuading himself that after all the man could not prudently have asked for less.
"I can"t give it you all now."
Cannon"s face lighted up in relief and joy. His black eyes sparkled feverishly with the impatience of an almost hopeless desire about to be satisfied. Although he did not move, his self-control had for the moment gone completely, and the secrets of his soul were exposed.
"Can you send it me--in notes? I can give you an address in Liverpool."
His voice could hardly utter the words.
"Wait a second," said Edwin.
He went to the safe let into the wall, of which he was still so navely proud, and unlocked it with the owner"s gesture. The perfect fitting of the bright key, the ease with which it turned, the silent, heavy swing of the ma.s.sive door on its hinges--these things gave him physical as well as moral pleasure. He savoured the security of his position and his ability to rescue people from destruction. From the cavern of the safe he took out a bag of gold, part of the money required for wages on the morrow,--he would have to send to the Bank again in the morning. He knew that the bag contained exactly twenty pounds in half-sovereigns, but he shed the lovely twinkling coins on the desk and counted them.