"How is he?" he asked awkwardly, fingering his hat.

The girl merely raised her eyebrows.

"You mustn't stay," said she, in a mincing but rather loud voice that matched her lips.

"Oh no, I won't!"

"I suppose _I'd_ better stop outside!" said Benbow.

Edwin followed the nurse into a darkened room, of which the chief article of furniture appeared to be a screen. Behind the screen was a bed, and on the bed in the deep obscurity lay a form under creaseless bedclothes. Edwin first recognised Ingpen's beard, then his visage very pale and solemn, and without the customary spectacles. Of the whole body only the eyes moved. As Edwin approached the bed he cast across Ingpen a shadow from the distant gas.

"Well, old chap!" he began with constraint. "This is a nice state of affairs! How are you getting on?"

Ingpen's enquiring apprehensive dumb glance silenced the clumsy greeting. It was just as if he had rebuked: "This is no time for How d'ye do's." When he had apparently made sure that Edwin was Edwin, Ingpen turned his eyes to the nurse.

"Water," he whispered.

The nurse shook her head.

"Net yet," she replied, with tepid indifference.

Ingpen's eyes remained on her a moment and then went back to Edwin.

"Ed," he whispered, and gazed once more at the nurse, who, looking away from the bed, did not move.

Edwin bent over the bed.

"Ed," Ingpen demanded, speaking very deliberately. "Go to my office. In the top drawer of the desk in the bedroom there's some photos and letters.... Burn them.... Before morning.... Understand?"

Edwin was profoundly stirred. In his emotion was pride at Ingpen's trust, astonishment at the sudden, utterly unexpected revelation, and the thrill of romance.

He thought:

"The man is dying!"

And the tragic sensation of the vigil of the nocturnal world almost overcame him.

"Yes," he said. "Anything else?"

"No."

"What about keys?"

Ingpen gave him another long glance.

"Trousers."

"Where are his clothes?" Edwin asked the nurse, whose lips were ironic.

"Oh! They'll tell you downstairs. You'd better go now."

As he went from the room he could feel Ingpen's glance following him.

He raged inwardly against the callousness of the nurse. It seemed monstrous that he should abandon Ingpen for the rest of the night, defenceless, to the cold tyranny of the nurse, whose power over the sufferer was as absolute as that of an eastern monarch, who had never heard of public opinion, over the meanest slave. He could not bear to picture to himself Ingpen and the nurse alone together.

"Isn't he allowed to drink?" he could not help murmuring, at the door.

"Yes. At intervals."

He wanted to chastise the nurse. He imagined an endless succession of sufferers under her appalling, inimical nonchalance. Who had allowed her to be a nurse? Had she become a nurse in order to take some needed revenge against mankind? And then he thought of Hilda's pa.s.sionate, succouring tenderness when he himself was unwell,--he had not been really ill for years. What was happening to Ingpen could never happen to him, because Hilda stood everlastingly between him and such a horror.

He considered that a bachelor was the most pathetic creature on the earth. He was drenched in the fearful, wistful sadness of all life....

The sleeping town; Auntie Hamps on the edge of eternity; Minnie trembling at the menaces of her own body; Hilda lying in some room that he had never seen; and Ingpen...!

"Soon over!" observed Albert Benbow in the corridor.

Edwin could have winced at the words.

"How do you think he is?" asked Albert.

"Don't know!" Edwin replied. "Look here, I've got to get hold of his clothes--downstairs."

"Oh! That's it, is it? Pocket-book! Keys! Eh?"

II

Edwin had once been in Tertius Ingpen's office at the bottom of Crown Square, Hanbridge, but never in the bedroom which Ingpen rented on the top floor of the same building. It had been for seventy or eighty years a building of four squat storeys; but a new landlord, seeing the architectural development of the town as a local metropolis and determined to join in it at a minimum of expense, had knocked the two lower storeys into one, fronted them with fawn-coloured terra cotta, and produced a lofty shop whose rent exceeded the previous rent of the entire house.

The landlord knew that pa.s.sers-by would not look higher up the facade than the ground-floor, and that therefore any magnificence above that level was merely wasted. The shop was in the occupation of a tea-dealer who gave away beautiful objects such as vases and useful objects such as tea-trays, to all purchasers. Ingpen's office, and a solicitor's office, were on the first floor, formerly the second; the third floor was the headquarters of the Hanbridge and District Ethical Society; the top floor was temporarily unlet, save for Ingpen's room. n.o.body except Ingpen slept in the building, and he very irregularly.

The latchkey for the sidedoor was easy to choose in the glittering light of the latest triple-jetted and reflectored gaslamps which the corporation, to match the glories of the new town-hall, had placed in Crown Square. The lock, strange to say, worked easily. Edwin entered somewhat furtively, and as it were guiltily, though in Crown Square and the streets and the other squares visible therefrom, not a soul could be seen. The illuminated clock of the Old Town Hall at the top of the square showed twenty-five minutes to four. Immediately within the door began a new, very long and rather mean staircase, with which Edwin was acquainted. He closed the door, shutting out the light and the town, and struck a match in the empty building. He had walked into Hanbridge from Bursley, and as soon as he began to climb the stairs he was aware of great fatigue, both physical and mental. The calamity to Ingpen had almost driven Auntie Hamps out of his mind; it had not, however, driven Minnie out of his mind. He was gloomy and indignant on behalf of both Ingpen and Minnie. They were both victims. Minnie was undoubtedly a fool, and he was about to learn, perhaps, to what extent Ingpen had been a fool.

Each footstep sounded loud on the boards of deserted house. Having used several matches and arrived at the final staircase, Edwin wondered how he was to distinguish Ingpen's room there from the others without trying keys in all of them till he got to the right one. But on the top landing he had no difficulty, for Ingpen's card was fastened with a drawing-pin on to the first door he saw. A match burnt his fingers and expired just as he was shaking out a likely key from Ingpen's bunch.

And then, in the black darkness, he perceived a line of light under the door in front of which he stood. He forgot his fatigue in an instant.

His heart leaped. A burglar? Or had Ingpen left the gas burning?

Ingpen could not have left the gas burning since, according to Albert Benbow, he had been in Bursley all afternoon. With precautions, and feeling very desperate and yet also craven, he lit a fresh match and managed quietly to open the door, which was not locked.

As soon as he beheld the illuminated interior of the room, all his skin crept and flushed as though he had taken a powerful stimulant. A girl reclined asleep in a small basket lounge-chair by the gas-fire. He could not see her face, which was turned towards the wall and away from the gas-jet that hung from the ceiling over an old desk; but she seemed slim and graceful, and there was something in the abandonment of unconsciousness that made her marvellously alluring. Her hat and gloves had been thrown on the desk, and a cloak lay on a chair. These coloured and intimate objects--extensions of the veritable personality of the girl--had the effect of delightfully completing the furniture of a room which was in fact rather bare. A narrow bed in the far corner, disguised under a green rug as a sofa; a green square of carpet, showing the unpolished boards at the sides; the desk, and three chairs; a primitive hanging wardrobe in another corner, hidden by a bulging linen curtain; a portmanteau; a few unframed prints on the walls; an alarm-clock on the mantelpiece,--there was nothing else in the chamber where Ingpen slept when it was too late, or he was too slack, to go to his proper home. But nothing else was needed. The scene was perfect; the girl rendered it so. And immense envy of, and admiration for, Ingpen surged through Edwin, who saw here the realisation of a dream that was to marriage what poetry is to prose. Ingpen might rail against women and against marriage in a manner exaggerated and indefensible; but he had at any rate known how to arrange his life and how to keep his own counsel. He had all the careless masculine freedom of his condition,--and in the background this exquisite phenomenon! The girl, her trustfulness, her abandonment, her secrecy, that white ear peeping out of her hair,--were his! It was staggering that such romance could exist in the Five Towns, of all places--for Edwin had the vague notion, common to all natives, that his own particular district fell short of full human nature in certain characteristics. For example, he could credit a human nature dying for love in Manchester, but never in the Five Towns. Even the occasional divorces that gave piquancy to life in the Five Towns seemed to lack the mysterious glamour of all other divorces.

He thought:

"Was it because he was expecting her that he sent me? Perhaps the desk was only a blind--and he couldn't tell me any more. Anyhow I shall have to break it to her."

He felt exceedingly awkward and unequal to the situation so startling in its novelty. Yet he did not wish himself away.

As timidly, hat in hand, he went forward into the room, the girl stirred and woke up, to the creaking of the chair.

"Oh! Tert!" she murmured between sleeping and waking.