Well, let it be a scandal! As the minutes and hours pa.s.sed in grim meditation, the more attractive grew the lost freedom of the bachelor and the more ready he felt to face any ordeal that lay between him and it.... And just as it was occurring to him that his proper course was to have fought a terrific open decisive battle with her in front of both Maggie and Ingpen he had fallen asleep.

Upon awaking, barely in time to arouse Hilda, he knew that the mood of the night had not melted away as such moods are apt to melt when the window begins to show a square of silver-grey. The mood was even intensified. Hilda had divined nothing. She never did divine the tortures which she inflicted in his heart. She did not possess the gumption to divine. Her demeanour had been amazing. She averred that she had not slept at all. Instead of cajoling, she bullied. Instead of tacitly admitting that she was infamously wronging him, she had a.s.sumed a grievance of her own--without stating it. Once she had said discontentedly about some trifle: "You might _at any rate_----" as though the victim should caress the executioner. She had kissed him at departure, but not as usual effusively, and he had suffered the kiss in enmity; and after an unimaginable general upset and confusion, in which George had shown himself strangely querulous, she had driven off with her son,--unconscious, stupidly unaware, that she was leaving a disaster behind her. And last of all Edwin, solitary, had been forced to perform the final symbolic act, that of locking him out of his own sacred home!

The affair had transcended belief.

All day at the works his bitterness and melancholy had been terrible, and the works had been shaken with apprehension, for no angry menaces are more disconcerting than those of a man habitually mild. Before evening he had decided to write to his wife from Auntie Hamps's,--a letter cold, unanswerable, crushing, that would confront her unescapably with the alternatives of complete submission or complete separation.

The phrases of the letter came into his mind.... He would see who was master.... He had been full of the letter when he entered Auntie Hamps's lobby. But the strange tone in which Maggie had answered his questions about the sick woman had thrust the letter and the crisis right to the back of his mind, where they had uneasily remained throughout the evening. And now in the rocking-chair he was reflecting:

"She's asleep in some room I've never seen!"

He smiled, such a smile, candid, generous, and affectionate, as was Hilda's joy, such a smile as Hilda dwelt on in memory when she was alone. The mood of resentment pa.s.sed away, vanished like a nightmare at dawn, and like one of his liverish headaches dispersed suddenly after the evening meal. He saw everything differently. He saw that he had been entirely wrong in his estimate of the situation, and of Hilda.

Hilda was a mother. She had the protective pa.s.sion of maternity. She was carried away by her pa.s.sions; but her pa.s.sions were n.o.ble, marvellous, unique. He himself could never--he thought, humbled--attain to her emotional heights. He was incapable of feeling about anything or anybody as she felt about George. The revelation concerning George's eyesight had shocked her, overwhelmed her with remorse, driven every other idea out of her head. She must atone to George instantly; instantly she must take measures--the most drastic and certain--to secure him from the threatened danger. She could not count the cost till afterwards. She was not a woman in such moments,--she was an instinct, a desire, a ruthless purpose. And as she felt towards George, so she must feel, in other circ.u.mstances, towards himself. Her kisses proved it, and her soothing hand when he was unwell. Mrs. Hamps had said: "Eh, dear! What a good mother dear Hilda is!" A sentimental outcry! But there was profound truth in it, truth which the old woman had seen better than he had seen it. "I daresay there never was such a mother--unless it's Clara!" Hyperbole! And yet he himself now began to think that there never could have been such a mother as Hilda. Clara too in her way was wonderful.... Smile as you might, these mothers were tremendous. The mysterious sheen of their narrow and deep lives dazzled him. For the first time, perhaps, he bowed his head to Clara.

But Hilda was far beyond Clara. She was not only a mother but a lover.

Would he cut himself off from her loving? Why? For what? To live alone in the arid and futile freedom of a Tertius Ingpen? Such a notion was fatuous. Where lay the difficulty between himself and Hilda? There was no difficulty. How had she harmed him? She had not harmed him.

Everything was all right. He had only to understand. He understood. As for her impulsiveness, her wrongheadedness, her bizarre ratiocination,--he knew how to accept them, for was he not a philosopher? They were indeed part of the incomparable romance of existence with these prodigious and tantalising creatures. He admitted that Hilda in some aspects transcended him, but in others he was comfortably confident of his own steady, conquering superiority. He thought of her with the most exquisite devotion. He pictured the secret tenderness of their reunion amid the conventional gloom of Auntie Hamps's death-bed.... He was confident of his ability to manage Hilda, at any rate in the big things,--for example the disputed points of his entry into public activity and their removal from Trafalgar Road into the country. The st.u.r.diness of the male inspired him. At the same time the thought of the dark mood from which he had emerged obscurely perturbed him, like a fearful danger pa.s.sed; and he argued to himself with satisfaction, and yet not quite with conviction, that he had yielded to Maggie, and not to Hilda, in the affair of the journey to London, and that therefore his masculine marital dignity was intact.

And then he started at a strange sound below, which somehow recalled him to the nervous tension of the house. It was a knocking at the front-door. His heart thumped at the formidable m.u.f.fled noise in the middle of the night. He jumped up, and glanced at the bed. Auntie Hamps was not wakened. He went downstairs where the gas which he had lighted was keeping watch.

CHAPTER XIX

DEATH AND BURIAL

I

Albert Benbow was at the front-door. Edwin curbed the expression of his astonishment.

"h.e.l.lo, Albert!"

"Oh! You aren't gone to bed?"

"Not likely. Come in. What's up?"

Albert, with the habit of one instructed never to tread actually on a doorstep lest it should be newly whitened, stepped straight on to the inner mat. He seemed excited, and Edwin feared that he had just learnt of Auntie Hamps's illness and had come in the middle of the night ostensibly to make enquiries, but really to make a grievance of the fact that the Benbows had been "kept in ignorance." He could already hear Albert demanding: "Why have you kept us in ignorance?" It was quite a Benbow phrase.

Edwin shut the door and shut out the dark and windy glimpse of the outer world which had emphasised for a moment the tense seclusion of the house.

"You've heard of course about the accident to Ingpen?" said Albert. His hands were deep in his overcoat pockets; the collar of the thin, rather shabby overcoat was turned up; an old cap adhered to the back of his head. While talking he slowly lifted his feet one after the other, as though desiring to get warmth by stamping but afraid to stamp in the night.

"No, I haven't," said Edwin, with false calmness. "What accident?"

The perspective of events seemed to change; Auntie Hamps's illness to recede, and a definite and familiar apprehension to be supplanted by a fear more formidable because it was a fear of the unknown.

"It was all in the late special _Signal_!" Benbow protested, as if his pride had been affronted.

"Well, I haven't seen the _Signal_. What is it?" And Edwin thought: "Is somebody else dying too?"

"Fly-wheel broke. Ingpen was inspecting the slip-house next to the engine-house. Part of the fly-wheel came through and knocked a loose nut off the blunger right into his groin."

"Whose works?"

Albert answered in a light tone:

"Mine."

"And how's he going on?"

"Well, he's had an operation and Sterling's got the nut out. Of course they didn't know what it was till they got it out. And now Ingpen wants to see you at once. That's why I've come."

"Where is he?"

"At the hospital."

"Pirehill?"

"No. The Clowes--Moorthorne Road, you know."

"Is he going on all right?"

"He's very weak. He can scarcely whisper. But he wants you. I've been up there all the time, practically."

Edwin seized his overcoat from the rack.

"I had a rare job finding ye," Benbow went on. "I'd no idea you weren't all at home. I wakened most of Hulton Street over it. It was Smiths next door came out at last and told me missis and George had gone to London and you were over here."

"I wonder who told them!" Edwin mumbled as Albert helped him with the overcoat. "I must tell Maggie. We've got some illness here, you know."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Auntie. Very sudden. Seemed to get worse to-night. Fact is I was sitting up while Maggie has a bit of sleep. She was going to send round for Clara in the morning. I'll just run up to Mag."

Having thus by judicious misrepresentation deprived the Benbows of a grievance, Edwin moved towards the stairs. Maggie, dressed, already stood at the top of them, alert, anxious, adequate.

"Albert, is that you?"

After a few seconds of quick murmured explanation, Edwin and Albert departed, and as they went Maggie, in a voice doubly hara.s.sed but cheerful and oily called out after them how glad she would be, and what a help it would be, if Clara could come round early in the morning.

The small Clowes Hospital was high up in the town opposite the Park, near the station and the railway-cutting and not far from the Moorthorne ridge. Behind its bushes, through which the wet night-wind swished and rustled, it looked still very new and red in the fitful moonlight. And indeed it was scarcely older than the Park and swimming-baths close by, and Bursley had not yet lost its nave pride in the possession of a hospital of its own. Not much earlier in the decade this town of thirty-five thousand inhabitants had had to send all its "cases" five miles in cabs to Pirehill Infirmary. Albert Benbow, with the satisfaction of a habitue, led Edwin round through an aisle of bushes to the side-entrance for out-patients. He pushed open a dark door, walked into a gaslit vestibule, and with the a.s.sured gestures of a proprietor invited Edwin to follow. A fat woman who looked like a char-woman made tidy sat in a windsor-chair in the vestibule, close to a radiator. She signed to Albert as an old acquaintance to go forward, and Albert nodded in the manner of one conspirator to another. What struck Edwin was that this middle-aged woman showed no sign of being in the midst of the unusual. She was utterly casual and matter-of-fact. And Edwin had the sensation of moving in a strange nocturnal world--a world which had always co-existed with his own, but of which he had been till then most curiously ignorant. His pa.s.sage through the town listening absently to Albert's descriptions of the structural damage to Ingpen and to the works, and Albert's defence against unbrought accusations, had shown him that the silent streets lived long after midnight in many a lighted window here and there and in the movements of mysterious but not furtive frequenters. And he seemed to have been impinging upon half-veiled enigmas of misfortune or of love. At the other end of the thread of adventure was his aunt's harsh bedroom with Maggie stolidly watching the last ebb of senile vitality, and at this end was the hospital, full of novel and disturbing vibrations and Tertius Ingpen waiting to impose upon him some charge or secret.

At the top of the naked stairs which came after a dark corridor was a long naked resounding pa.s.sage lighted by a tiny jet at either end. A cough from behind a half-open door came echoing out and filled the night and the pa.s.sage. And then at another door appeared a tall, thin, fair nurse in blue and white, with thin lips and a slight smile hard and disdainful.

"Here's Mr. Clayhanger, nurse!" muttered Albert Benbow, taking off his cap, with a grimace at once sycophantic and grandiose.

Edwin imagined that he knew by sight everybody in the town above a certain social level, but he had no memory of the face of the nurse.