She stooped for a final, reassuring look at Baby.

"Can you manage with him?" she whispered.

He nodded.

"I've made him his food in that saucepan. You'll have to heat it on the gas ring—in there."

"In there" was Violet's room.

They went downstairs together.

"I wish I could see you home," he said again.

"I'm all right." But she paused on the doorstep. "You ought to have somebody. You can't be left all alone like this. Mayn't I run down and fetch your mother?"

"No," he said, "you mayn't. I'll go down myself to-morrow morning, if you wouldn't mind coming in and looking after the kids for a bit."

"Of course I'll come. Good night, Ranny."

"Good night, Winky. And thanks—" His throat closed with a sharp contraction on the words. She slipped into the darkness and was gone.

* * * * *

He was thankful that he had had the sense to see the impossibility of it, of her spending the night in his house with nobody in it but the two of them and the two children.

But it was only when, in the act of undressing, he was reminded of Violet's letter by its bulging in his breast pocket, that he glimpsed the danger they had escaped. Up till then he had only thought of Winny, of her reputation, of her post at Johnson's (imperiled if she were not in by eleven), of all that she would not and could not think of in her thought for him. Now, that inner sanity, that secret wisdom which had made him preserve Violet's letter as a possibly valuable document, suggested that if Winny had stayed all night in the house with him that document would have lost its value. Not that he had meant to do anything with it, that he had any plan, or any certain knowledge. Those two ideas, or rather, those two instinctive appreciations, of the value of the document, and of the awfulness of the risk they ran, were connected in his mind obscurely as the stuff of some tale that he had been told, or as something he had seen sometime in the papers. He put them from him as things that he himself had no immediate use for; while all the time subconscious sanity guarded them and did not let them go.

But that was all it did for him. It did not lift from him his oppression, or fill with intelligible detail his blank sense of calamity, of inconsolable bereavement. This oppression, this morbid sense, amounted almost to hallucination; it prevented him from thinking as clearly as he might about all that, the value of the document, and the rest of it, and about what he ought to do. It was with him as he lay awake on his bed, shut in by the two cots; it, and the fear of forgetting to feed Baby, got into his dreams and troubled them; they watched by him in his sleep; they woke him early and were with him when he woke.

Dossie woke too. He took her into his bed and played with her, and in playing he forgot his grief. A little before seven he got up and dressed. He washed Dossie and dressed her as well as he could, with tender, clumsy fingers that fumbled over all her little strings and buttons. Pain, and pleasure poignant as pain, thrilled him with every soft contact with her darling body. He tried to brush her hair as Winny brushed it, all in ducks' tails and in feathers.

He went down and busied himself, hours earlier than he need, making the fire, getting ready Dossie's breakfast and Baby's and his own. Foraging in the larder, he came upon a beefsteak pie that, evidently, Winny had made for him, as if in foreknowledge of his need. When he had washed up the breakfast things and the things that were left over from last night, he went upstairs and made his bed, clumsily. Then he went down again and tidied the sitting-room. In all this he was driven by his determination to leave nothing for Winny to do for him when she came. He went to and fro, with Dossie toddling after him and laughing.

Upstairs, Baby laughed in his cot.

And all the time, Ranny, with his obsession of bereavement and calamity, was unaware of the peace, the exquisite, the unimaginable peace that had settled upon Granville.

* * * * *

At half past eight Winny looked in (entering by the open door of Granville) to see what she could do.

She found him in the bathroom, trying to wash Baby. He had put the little zinc bath with Baby in it inside the big one.

"Whatever did you do that for, Ranny?" Winny asked, while her heart yearned to him.

He said he had to. The little beggar splashed so. Good idea, wasn't it?

Almost he had forgotten his bereavement.

Winny shook her head.

"Anyhow, I've washed him all right."

"Yes," said she. "But you'll never dry him."

"Why not?"

"You can't. Not in here. There isn't room for you to set. Where's your chair and your flannel apron?"

"Flannel apron?"

"Yes. If you don't wear one you'll not get any hold on him. He'll slip between your knees before you know he's gone."

"Not if I keep 'em together."

"Then there's no lap for him. What he wants is petticoats."

(Petticoats? That was the secret, was it? He had tried to soap Baby, bit by bit, as he had seen Winny do, holding him, wrapped in a towel, on his knees—a disastrous failure. It was incredible how slippery he was.)

"There's his blanket. I thought I'd dry him on the floor."

"He'll catch his death of cold, Ranny, if you do. There, give him to me. We'll take him downstairs to the fire."

He gave her the little naked, dripping body, and she wrapped it in the warm blanket and carried it downstairs.

"You bring the towels and the powder puff, and all his vests and flannels and things," said Winny.

He brought them. She established herself in the low chair by the fire downstairs. He played with Dossie as he watched her. And all the time, through all the play, his obscure instinct told him that she ought not to be there. It suggested that if he desired to preserve the integrity of the document, Winny and he must not be known to be alone in the house together.

But it was a question of petticoats. He realized it when he saw Baby sprawling in the safe hollow of her lap. He had meant to tell Winny that she mustn't stay; but she had him by those absurd petticoats of hers, and behind her petticoats he shielded himself from the upbraidings of his sanity.

But Winny knew. She was not going to stay, to be there with him more than was strictly necessary. When, with exquisite gentleness, she had inserted Baby into all his little vests and things, she put on him his knitted Baby's coat and hat, and gave him to Ranny to hold while she arrayed Dossie in her Sunday best. Then she packed them both into the wonderful pram, and wheeled them out into the Avenue, far from Ranny.

For she knew that Ranny didn't want her. He wanted to be left alone to think.



CHAPTER XXIV

He had been incapable of thinking until now, the first moment (since it had happened) that he had been left alone. Last night the thing had stupefied him so that he could not think. If he had tried to describe what had been before him last night, he would have said there was a lot of cotton wool about. It had been all like wool, cotton wool, nothing that the mind could bite on, nothing that it could grasp. Last night Winny had been there, and that had stopped his thinking. It was absurd to say that what had happened had disturbed his night's rest. What had disturbed his night's rest had been his fear lest he should forget to feed Baby. And in the morning there had been too many things to do, there had been Dossie and Baby. And then Winny again.

And now they were all gone. There was silence and a clear space to think in. His brain too was clear and clean. The clouds of cotton wool had been dispersed in his movements to and fro.

As an aid to thinking he brought out of his breast pocket Violet's letter. He spread it on the table in the back sitting-room and sat down to it, seriously, as to a document that he would have to master, a thing that would yield its secret only under the closest examination. He was aware that he had not by any means taken it all in last night.

That she had gone off with Leonard Mercier, that he had indeed grasped, that he knew. But beyond that the letter gave him no solid practical information. It did not and it was not meant to give him any clue. In going off Violet had disappeared and had meant to disappear. He gathered from it that she had been possessed by one thought and by one fear, that he would go after her and bring her back.

"What on earth," he said to himself, "should I go after her for?"

She made that clear to him as he read on. Her idea was that he would go after her, not so much to bring her back as to do something to Mercier, to inflict punishment on him, to hurt Mercier and hurt him badly. That was what Violet was afraid of; that was why she tried to shield Mercier, to excuse him, to take the whole blame on herself. And, evidently, that was what Mercier was afraid of too. That was why he had bolted with her to Paris. They must have had that in their minds, they must have planned it months before. He must have been trying for the post he'd got there. Ransome could see further, with a fierce shrewdness, that it was Mercier's "funk" and not his loyalty that accounted for his "holding off." "He held off because I was his friend, did he? He held off to save his own skin, the swine!"

And now she drew him up. What was all this about Winny Dymond? He must have missed it last night. "She was always fond of you. It was a lie what I told you about her not being. I said it because I was mad on you. I knew you'd have married her if I'd let you alone."

She was cool, the way she showed herself up. That's what she'd done, had she? Lied, so that he might think Winny didn't care for him? Lied, so that he mightn't marry her? Lied, so that she might get him for herself? For her fancy, for no more than a low animal would feel. He could see it now. He could see what she was. A woman who could fancy Mercier must have been a low animal all through and all the time.

How he had ever cared for her he couldn't think. There must have been some beastliness in him. Men were beasts sometimes. But he was worse. He was a fool to have believed her lie. Even her beastliness sank out of sight beside that treachery.

Well—she'd been frank enough about it now. She must have had a face, to own that she'd lied to him and trapped him! After that, what did it matter if she had left him? "I dare say you know who I've gone with." What did it matter who she'd gone with? Good God! What did it matter what she'd done?

He could smile at her fear and at the cause of it. Mercier must have terrified her with his funk. The postscript said as much. "You can do anything you like to me, so long as you don't hurt Leonard." He smiled again at that. What did she imagine he'd like to do to her? As for Mercier, what should he want to hurt the beast for? He wouldn't touch him—now—with the end of a barge-pole.

Oh, well, yes, he supposed he'd have to leather him if he came across him. But he wouldn't have any pleasure in it—now. Last year he would have leathered him with joy; his feet had fairly ached to get at him, to kick the swine out of the house before he did any harm in it. Now it was as if he loathed him too much in his flabbiness to care for the contact that personal violence involved.

Yet, through all the miserable workings of his mind the thought of Mercier's flabbiness was sweet to him. It gave him a curious consolation and support. True, it had been the chief agent in the process of deception; it had blinded him to Mercier's dangerous quality; it had given him a sense of false security; he could see, now, the fool he'd been to imagine that it would act as any deterrent to a woman so foredoomed as Violet. Thus it had in a measure brought about the whole catastrophe. At the same time it had saved him from the peculiar personal mortification such catastrophes entail. In comparison with Mercier he sustained no injury to his pride and vanity of sex. And Mercier's flabbiness did more for him than that. It took the sharpest sting from Violet's infidelity. It removed it to the region of insane perversities. It removed Violet herself from her place in memory, that place of magic and of charm where if she had remained she would have had power to hurt him.

When he considered her letter yet again in the calmness of that thought, it struck him that Violet herself was offering him support and consolation. "You shouldn't have married me. You should have married a girl like Winny Dymond."—"I knew you'd marry her if I let you alone." Why, after all these years, had she confessed her treachery? Why had she confessed it now at the precise moment when she had left him? There was no need. It couldn't help her. No, but it was just possible (for she was quite intelligent) that she had seen how it might help him. It was possible that some sort of contrition had visited her in that last hour, and that she had meant to remind him that he was not utterly abandoned, that there was something left.

That brought him to the lines, almost indecipherable, squeezed in her last hurried moment into the margin of the letter. "You mustn't be afraid of being fond of Baby. There was nothing between me and Leonard before July of last year."

She had foreseen the supreme issue; she had provided for the worst sting, the unspeakable suspicion, the intolerable terror. It was as if she had calculated the precise point where her infidelity would touch him.

Faced with that issue, Ranny's mind, like a young thing forced to sudden tragic maturity by a mortal crisis, worked with an incredible clearness and capacity. It developed an almost superhuman subtlety of comprehension. He looked at the thing all round; he controlled his passion so that he might look at it. It was of course open to him to take it that she had lied. Passion indeed clamored at him, insisting that she did lie, that lying came easier to her than the truth. But, looking at it all round without passion, he was inclined to think that Violet had not lied. She had not given herself time or space to lie for lying's sake. If she had lied, then, she had lied for a purpose. A purpose that he could very well conceive. But if she lied for that purpose she would have given importance and prominence to her lie. She wouldn't have hidden it away in an almost invisible scrawl on an inadequate margin.

Of course, she might have lied to deceive him for another purpose, for his own good. But there again conscious deception would have made for legibility at the least.

Besides, she had put it in a way that left no room for doubt. "You needn't be afraid of being fond of Baby." Even passion had to own that the words had the ring of remorse, of insight, of certainty, and, above all, of haste. Such haste as precluded all deliberation. Evidently it was an afterthought. It had come to her, inopportunely, in the last moment before flight, and she had given it the place and the importance she would naturally give to a subject in which she herself was not in any way concerned.

There remained the possibility that she might be mistaken. But the dates upheld her. In the beginning he and she had, of necessity, gone very carefully into the question of dates. He remembered that there had been a whole body of evidence establishing the all-important point beyond a doubt. All of his honor that he most cared for she had spared. She had not profaned the ultimate sanctity, nor poisoned for him the very sweetness of his life.

* * * * *

There were sounds in the front garden. Winny was bringing in the children. He went out to meet them as they came up the flagged walk. Dossie toddled, clinging to the skirts of Winny, who in all her tenderness and absurdity, with her most earnest air of gravity and absorption in the adventure, pushed the pram. In the pram, tilted backward, with his little pink legs upturned, Baby fondled, deliciously, his own toes. He was jerking himself up and down and making for the benefit of all whom it might concern his very nicest noises.

Ranny stood in the doorway, silent, almost austere, like a man escaped by a hair's breadth from great peril.

When he caught sight of the silent and austere young man in the doorway, Baby let go his fascinating toes. He chuckled with delight. He jerked himself more than ever up and down. He struggled to be free, to be lifted up and embraced by the young man. Silence and austerity were no deterrent to Baby, so assured was he of his position, of his welcome, of the safe, warm, tingling place that would presently be his in the hollow of the young man's arm. The desire of it made Baby's arms and his body writhe, with a heartrending agitation, in his little knitted coat.

All this innocent ecstasy of Baby the young man met with silence and austerity and somber eyes.

With Winny's eyes on him he indeed lifted Baby up, disclosing, first, his pathetically bunched and bundled back, and then his face, exquisitely contorted.

And Winny, who had forgotten for a minute, laughed.

"He is funny, isn't he? He smiles just like you do, all up in the corners like."

At that the young man's arms tightened, and he gripped Baby with passion to his breast. He kissed him, looking down at him, passionately, somberly.

Winny saw, and the impulse seized her to efface herself, to vanish.

"I must be going," she said, "or I shall be late for dinner. Can you manage, Ranny? There's a beefsteak pie. I made it yesterday."

As she turned Dossie trotted after her; and as she vanished Dossie cried, inconsolably.

He managed, beautifully, with the beefsteak pie.

His sense of bereavement which still weighed on him was no longer attached in any way to Violet. He could not say precisely what it was attached to. There it was. Only, when he thought of Violet it seemed to him incomprehensible, not to say absurd, that he should feel it.



CHAPTER XXV

In the afternoon Winny came again for the children, so that he could go to Wandsworth unencumbered. The weather was favorable to her idea, which was not to be in Ranny's house more than she could help, but to be seen, if seen she must be, out of doors with the children, in a public innocence, affording the presumption that Violet was still there.

Above all, she was not going to be seen with Ranny, or to be seen by him too much, if she could help it. With her sense of the sadness of his errand, the sense (that came to her more acutely with the afternoon) of things imminent, of things, she knew not what, that would have to be done, she avoided him as she would have avoided a bereaved person preoccupied with some lamentable business relating to the departed.

He was aware of her attitude; he was aware, further, that it would be their attitude at Wandsworth. They would all treat him like that, as if he were bereaved. They would not lose, nor allow him to lose for an instant, their awestruck sense of it. That was why he dreaded going there, why he had put it off till the last possible moment, which was about three o'clock in the afternoon. His Uncle Randall would be there. He would have to be told. He might as well tell him while he was about it. His wife's action had been patent and public; it was not a thing that could be hushed up, or minimized, or explained away.

As he thought of all this, of what he would have to say, to go into, to handle, every moment wound him up to a higher and higher pitch of nervous tension.

His mother opened the door to him. She greeted him with a certain timidity, an ominous hesitation; and from the expression of her face you might have gathered, in spite of her kiss, that she was not entirely glad to see him; that she had something up her sleeve, something that she desired to conceal from him. It was as if by way of concealing it that she let him in stealthily with no more opening of the door than was absolutely necessary for his entrance.

"You haven't brought Vi'let?" she whispered.

"No."

They went softly together through the shop, darkened by the blinds that were drawn for Sunday. In the little passage beyond he paused at the door of the back parlor.

"Where's Father?"

She winced at the word "Father," so out of keeping with his habitual levity. It was the first intimation that there was something wrong with him.

"He's upstairs, my dear, in His bed."

"What's the matter with him?"

"It's the Headache." She went on to explain, taking him as it were surreptitiously into the little room, that the Headache had been frequent lately, not to say continuous; not even Sundays were exempt.

"He's a sad sufferer," she said.

Instead of replying with something suitable, Ranny set his teeth.

She had sat down helplessly, and as she spoke she gazed up at him where he remained standing by the chimney-piece; her look pleaded, deprecated, yet obstinately endeavored to deceive. But for once Ranny was blind to the pathos of her deception. Vaguely her foolish secrecy irritated him.

"Look here, Mother," he said, "I want to talk to you. I've got to tell you something."

"It's not anything about your Father, Ranny?"

"No, it is not."

(She turned to him from her trouble with visible relief.)

"It's about my wife."

"Vi'let?"

"She's left me."

"Left you? What d'you mean, Ranny?"

"She's gone off—Bolted."

"When?"

"Last night, I suppose—to Paris."

She stared at him strangely, without sympathy, without comprehension. It was almost as if in her mind she accused him of harboring some monstrous hallucination. With her eternal instinct for suppression she fought against it, she refused to take it in. He felt himself unequal to pressing it on her more than that.

"Would she go there—all that way—by herself, Ranny?" she brought out at last.

"By herself? Not much!"

"Well—how—"

And still she would not face the thing straight enough to say, "How did she go, then?"

He flung it at her brutally, exasperated by her obstinacy.

"She went with Mercier."

"With 'im—? She—"

Her face seemed suddenly to give way under his eyes, to become discolored in a frightful pallor, to fall piteously into the lines of age.

This face that his words had so crushed and broken looked up at him with all its motherhood, mute yet vibrant, brimming in its eyes.

"Sit down, dear," she said. "You'll be tired standing."

He sat down, mechanically, in the nearest chair, bending forward, contemplating his clenched hands. His posture put him at her mercy. She came over to him and laid one hand on his shoulder; the other touched his hair, stroking it. He shrank as if she had hurt him and leaned back. She moved away, and took up a position in a seat that faced him. There she sat and gazed at him, helpless and passive, panting a little with emotion; until a thought occurred to her.

"Who's looking after the little children?"

"Winny—Winny Dymond."

"Why didn't you send for me, Ranny?"

"It was too late—last night."

"I'd have come, my dear. I'd have got out of me bed."

"It wouldn't have done any good."

There was a long pause.

"Were you alone in the house, dear?"

He looked up, angry. "Of course I was alone in the house."

She sat silent and continued to gaze at him with her tender, wounded eyes.

Outside in the passage the front-door bell rang. She rose in perturbation.

"That's them. Do you want to see them?"

"I don't care whether I see them or not."

She stood deliberating.

"You'd better—p'raps—see your uncle. I'll tell him, Ranny. Your Father's not fit for it to-day."

"All right."

He rose uneasily and prepared himself to take it standing.

He heard them come into the shop, his Uncle and his Aunt Randall. He heard his uncle's salutation checked in mid-career. He heard his mother's penetrating whisper, then mutterings, commiserations. Their communion lasted long enough for him to gather that his mother would have about told them everything.

They came in, marking their shocked sense of it by soft shufflings at the door of the parlor, his sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy. He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful deference, as a person visited by God and afflicted with unspeakable calamity.

And they did. It was an affair of downcast eyes and silent, embarrassed and embarrassing hand-shakings. Ransome met it with his head in the air, clear-eyed, defiant of their sympathy.

"I think," his mother said, "we'd better come upstairs if we don't want to be interrupted." For on Sundays the back parlor was assigned to the young chemist, Mercier's successor, who assisted Mr. Ransome.

Upstairs, the ordered room, polished to perfection, steadfast in its shining Sunday state, appeared as the irremovable seat of middle-class tradition, of family virtue, of fidelity and cleanliness, of sacred immutable propriety. And into the bosom of these safe and comfortable sanctities Ranny had brought horror and defilement and destruction.

His Uncle Randall, try as he would, could not disguise from him that this was what he had done. Because of Ranny's wife, Respectability, the enduring soul of the Randalls and the Ransomes, could never lift up its head superbly any more. All infamies and all abominations that could defile a family were summed up for John Randall in the one word, adultery. It was worse than robbery or forgery or bankruptcy; it struck more home; it did more deadly havoc among the generations. It excited more interest; it caused more talk; and therefore it marked you more and was not so easily forgotten. It reverberated. The more respectable you were the worse it was for you. If, among the Randalls and the Ransomes, such a plunge as Violet's was unheard of, it made the more terrific splash, a splash that covered the whole family. The Ransomes, to be sure, stood more in the center, they were more deplorably bespattered, and more, much more intimately tainted. But, by the very closeness of their family attachment, the mud of Violet's plungings would adhere largely to the Randalls, too. The taint would hang for years around him, John Randall, in his shop. He had hardly entered his sister's room before he had calculated about how long it would be before the scandal spread through Wandsworth High Street. It wasn't as if he hadn't been well known. As a member of the Borough Council he stuck in the public eye where other men would have slipped through into obscurity. It was really worse for him than any of them.

All this was present in the back of John Randall's mind as he prepared to deal efficiently with the catastrophe. Having unbuttoned his coat and taken off his gloves with exasperating, slow, and measured movements, he fairly sat down to it at the table, preserving his very finest military air. The situation required before all things a policy. And the policy which most appealed to Mr. Randall, in which he showed himself most efficient, was the policy of a kindly hushing up. It was thus that for years he had dealt with his brother-in-laws' inebriety. Ranny's case, to be sure, was not quite so simple; still, on the essential point Mr. Randall had made up his mind—that, in the discussion that must follow, the idea of adultery should not once appear. If they were all of them as a family splashed more or less from head to foot with mud of a kind that was going to stick to them, why, there was nothing to be done but to cover it up as soon as possible.

It was in the spirit of this policy that he approached his nephew. It involved dealing with young Mrs. Ransome throughout as a good woman who had become, somehow, mysteriously unfortunate.

"I'm sorry to hear this about your wife, Randall. It's a sad business, a sad business for you, my boy."

From her seat on the sofa beside Ranny's mother, Aunt Randall murmured inarticulate corroboration of that view.

Ranny had remained standing. It gave him an advantage in defiance.

"I've never heard anything," his uncle continued, heavily, "that's shocked and grieved me more."

"I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, Uncle."

At that Mr. Randall fumed a little feebly, thereby losing some of the fineness of his military air. It was as if his nephew had disparaged his importance, ignored his stake in the family's reputation, and as good as told him it was no business of his.

"But I must worry about it. I can't take it like you do, as cool as if nothing had happened. Such a thing's never been known, never so much as been named in your mother's family, or your father's, either. It's—it's so unexpected."

"I didn't expect it any more than you did."

"You needn't take that tone, Randall, my boy. I'm sorry for you, but you're not the only one concerned. Still, I'm putting all that aside, and I'm here to help you."

"You can't help me. How can you?"

"I can help you to consider what's to be done."

"There isn't anything to be done that I can see."

"There are several things," said Mr. Randall, "that can be done." He said it as if he were counsel giving an opinion. "You can take her back; you can leave her alone; or you can divorce her. First of all I want to know one thing. Did you give her any provocation?"

"What do you mean by provocation?"

"Well—did you give her any cause for jealousy?"

Ranny's mother struck in. "He wouldn't, John." And his Aunt Randall murmured half-audible and shocked negation.

Ranny stared at his uncle as if he wondered where he was coming out next.

"Of course I didn't."

"Are—you—quite—sure about that?"

"You needn't ask him such a thing," said Ranny's mother; and Ranny fairly squared himself.

"Look here, Uncle, what d'you want to get at?"

"The facts, my boy."

"You've got all there are."

"How about that young woman up at your place?"

"What young woman?"

"That Miss—"

Ranny's mother supplied his loss. "Miss Dymond."

"What's she got to do with it?" said Ranny.

"I'm asking you. What has she?"

"Nothing. You can keep her out of it."

"That's what I should advise you to do, my boy."

Ranny dropped his defiance and sank his flushed forehead. "I have kept her out of it." His voice was grave and very low.

"Not if she's there. Taking everything upon her and looking after your children."

"What harm's she doing looking after them?"

"You'll soon know if you take it into a court of law."

"Who told you I was going to take it?"

"That's what I'm trying to get at. Are you?"

"Am I going to divorce her, you mean?"

That was what he had meant. It was also what he was afraid of, what he hoped to dissuade his nephew from. Above all things he dreaded the public scandal of divorce.

"Yes," he said. "Is it bad enough for that?"

"It's bad enough for anything. But I don't know what I'm going to do."

"Well, it won't do to have that young woman's name brought forward in the evidence."

"Who'd bring it?"

"Why, she might" (Randall's face was blank). "Your wife, if she defends the suit. That would be her game, you may be sure."

It would, Randall reflected. That was the very point suggested last night by his inner sanity, the use that might be made of Winny. Winny's innocent presence in his house might ruin his case if it were known. What was worse, far worse, it would ruin Winny. Whatever he did he must keep Winny out of it.

"I haven't said I was going to bring an action."

"Well—and I don't advise you to. Why have the scandal and the publicity when you can avoid it?"

"Why, Ranny," his mother cried, "it would kill your Father."

Ranny scowled. Her cry failed to touch him.

Mr. Randall went on. He felt that he was bringing his nephew round, that he was getting the case into his own hands, the hands that were most competent to deal with it. It was only to be expected that with his experience he could see farther than the young man, his nephew. What Mr. Randall saw beyond the scandal of the Divorce Court was a vision of young Mrs. Ransome, wanton with liberty and plunging deeper, splashing as she had not yet splashed, bespattering them all to the farthest limits of her range. The question for Mr. Randall was how to stop her, how to get her out of it, how to bring her to her sober senses before she had done more damage than she had.

He wondered, had it occurred to Randall that he might take her back?

"Have you any idea," he said, "what made her do it?"

"Good God, what a question!"

Mr. Randall made a measured, balancing movement of his body while he drummed with his fingers on the table.

"Well—" It was as if he took his question back, conceding its enormity. He leaned forward now in his balancing, and lowered his voice to the extreme of confidence.

"Have you any idea how far she's gone?" (It was as near as he could get to it.)

"She's gone as far as Paris," said Ranny, with a grin. "Is that far enough for you?"

Mr. Randall leaned back as with relief, and stopped balancing. "It might be worse," he said, "far worse."

"How d'you mean—worse? Seems to me about as bad as it can be."

"It's unfortunate—but not so serious as if—" He paused profoundly. He was visibly considering it from some private and personal point of view. "She might have stayed in London. She might have carried on at your own door or here in Wandsworth."

His nephew, Randall, was now regarding him with an attention the nature of which he entirely misconceived. It gave him courage to speak out—his whole mind and no mincing matters.

"If I were you, Randall, the first thing I should do is to get rid of that young woman—that Dymond girl—" He put up his hand to ward off the imminent explosion. "Yes, yes, I know all you've got to say, my boy, but it won't do. She's a young girl—"

"She's as good as they make them," said Ranny, glaring at him, "as good as my mother there."

"Yes, yes, yes. I know all about it. But you mustn't have her there."

"Have her where?"

"Where I know she's been—where your mother says she's been—in your house. Now, don't turn on your mother; she hasn't said a word against her. I'm not saying a word. But you mustn't—have—her—about, Randall. You mustn't have her about. There'd be talk and all, before you know where you are. It isn't right and it isn't proper."

"No, Ranny, it isn't proper," said his mother; and his aunt said, No, it wasn't, too.

Ranny laughed unpleasantly.

"You think it's as improper as the other thing, do you?"

He addressed his uncle.

"What other thing?" said Mr. Randall. It had made him wince even while he pretended not to see it. It had brought him so near.

"What my wife's done."

"Well, Randall, since you ask me, to all appearances—appearances, mind you—it is."

"Appearances?"

"Well, you must save appearances, and you must save 'em while you can."

"How am I to save them, I should like to know?"

"By actin' at once. By stoppin' it all before it gets about. You can't have your wife over there in Paris carryin' on. You must just start—soon as you can—to-morrow—and bring her back."

"Not much!"

"It's what you got to do, Randall. She's been unfortunate, I know; but she's young, and you don't know how she may have been led on. 'S likely's not you haven't looked after her enough. You don't know but what you may have been responsible. You got to take her back."

"What should I take her back for?" said Ranny, with false suavity.

"To save scandal. To save trouble and misery and disgrace all round. You got to think of your family."

"What do you mean by my family? Me and my children?"

"I mean the family name, my boy."

A frightful lucidity had come upon Ranny, born of the calamity itself. It was not for nothing that he had attained that sudden violent maturity of his. He saw things as they were.

"You mean yourself," he said. "Jolly lot you think of me and my children if you ask me to take her back. Not me! I'll be damned first."

"You married her, Randall, against the wishes of your family; and you're responsible to your family for the way she conducts herself."

"I should rather think I was responsible! If I wasn't—if I was a bletherin' idiot—I might take her back—"

"I don't say if she leaves you again you'll take her back a second time. But you got to give her a chance. After all, she's the mother of your children. You married her."

"Yes. That's where I went wrong. That's what made her do it, if you want to know. That's the provocation I gave her. It's what she always had against me—the children, and my marrying her. And she was right. She never ought to have had children. I never ought to have married her—against her will."

"Well, I can't think what you did it for—in such haste."

"I did it," said Ranny, in his maturity, his lucidity, "because it was the way I was brought up. I suppose, come to that, I did it for all you."

He saw everything now as it was.

"How d'you make that out? Did it for us!"

Then Ranny delivered his soul, and the escape, the outburst was tremendous, cataclysmic.

"For you and your rotten respectability! What you brought me up on. What you've rammed down my throat all along. What you're thinking of now. You're not thinking of me; you're thinking of yourself, and how respectable you are, and how I've dished you. You don't want me to take my wife back because you care a rap about me and my children. It's because you're afraid. That's what it is, you're afraid. You're afraid of the rotten scandal; you're afraid of what people'll say; you're afraid of not looking respectable any more. You know what my wife's done—you know what she is—"

"She's a woman, Randall, she's a woman."

"She's a—Well, she is, and you know it. You know what she is, and you want me to take her back so as you can lie about it and hush it all up and pretend it isn't there. Same as you've done with my father. He's a drunkard—"

"For shame, Randall," said his uncle.

"He is, and you know it, and he knows it, and my mother knows it. And yet you go on lying about him and pretending. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of hearing about how good he is, and his Headaches—Headaches!"

"Oh! Ranny, dear," his mother wailed, piteously.

"I'm not blaming him, Mother. Poor old Humming-bird, he can't help it. It's the way he's made. I'm not blaming Virelet. She can't help it, either. It's my fault. If I'd wanted her to stick to me I oughtn't to have married her."

"What ought you to have done then?" his uncle inquired, sternly.

"Anything but that. That's what started her. She couldn't stand it. She'll stick to Mercier all right, you'll see, because she isn't married to the swine; whereas if I took her back to-night she'd chuck me to-morrow. Can't you see that she's like that? She's done the best day's work she ever did for herself and me, too."

"Well, how you can speak about it so, Ranny," said his mother.

"There you're at it again, you know—pretendin'. You go on as if it was the most horrible thing that could happen to any one, her boltin', when you know the most horrible thing would be her comin' back again. To look at you and Uncle and Aunt there, any one would think that Virelet was the best wife and mother that ever lived, and that she'd only left me to go to heaven."

"Well, there's no good my saying any more, I can see," said Mr. Randall. And he rose, buttoning his coat with dignity that struggled in vain against his deep depression. He was profoundly troubled by his nephew's outburst. It was as if peace and honesty and honor, the solid, steadfast tradition by which he lived, had been first outraged, then destroyed in sheer brutality. He didn't know himself. He had been charged with untruthfulness and dishonesty; he, who had been held the soul of honesty and truth; who had always held himself at least sincere.

And he didn't know his nephew Randall. He had always supposed that Randall was refined and that he had a good heart. And to think that he could break out like this, and be coarse and cruel, and say things before ladies that were downright immoral—

"Well," he said, as he shook hands with him, "I can't understand you, my boy."

"Sorry, Uncle."

"There—leave it alone. I don't ask you to apologize to me. But there's your mother. You've done your best to hurt her. Good-by."

"He's upset, John," said Ranny's mother, "and no wonder. You should have let him be."

"I'm not upset," said Ranny, wearily. "What beats me is the rotten humbug of it all."

And no sooner did Mr. Randall find himself in the High Street with his wife than he took her by the arm in confidence.

"He was quite right about that wife of his. Only I thought—if he could have patched it up—"

"Ah, I dare say he knows more than we do. What I can't get over is the way he spoke about his poor father."

"Well—I wouldn't say it to Emma, but Fulleymore does drink. Like a fish he does."

(It was his sacrifice to honesty.)

"But Randall was wild. He didn't quite know what he was saying. Poor chap! It's hit him harder than he thinks."

* * * * *

Ranny, alone with his mother, put his arm round her neck and kissed her. (She had gone into her room and returned dressed, ready to go back with him to Southfields.)

"I'm sorry, Mother, if I hurt you."

"Never mind, Ranny, I know how hurt you must have been before you could do it. It was what you said about your Father, dear. But there—you've always been good to him no matter what he's been."

"Is he very bad, Mother?"

"He is. I don't know, I'm sure, how I'm going to leave him; unless he can manage with Mabel and Mr. Ponting. She's a good girl, Mabel. And he's got a kind heart, Ranny, that young man."

"D'you think I haven't?"

"I wasn't meaning you, my dear. Come, I'm ready now."

They went downstairs. Mrs. Ransome paused at the kitchen door to give some final directions to Mabel, the maid, and a message for Mr. Ponting, the assistant; and they went out.

As they were going down the High Street, her thoughts reverted to Ranny's awful outburst.

"Ranny, I wish you hadn't spoken to your uncle like you did."

"I know, Mother—but he set my back up. He was talkin' through his Sunday hat all the time, pretendin' to stick up for Virelet, knowin' perfectly well what she is, and cussin' and swearin' at her for it in his heart, and naggin' at me because there wasn't anybody else to go for."

"He was trying to help you, Ranny."

"If God can't help me, strikes me it's pretty fair cheek of Uncle to presume—" He meditated.

"But he wasn't tryin' to help me. He was thinkin' how he could help his own damned respectability all the blessed time. He knows what a bloomin' hell it's been for Virelet and me this last year—and he'd have forced us back into it—into all that misery—just to save his own silly skin."

"No, dear, it isn't that. He doesn't think Vi'let should be let go on living like she is if you can stop her. He thinks it isn't proper."

"Well, that's what I say. It's his old blinkin', bletherin' morality he's takin' care of, not me. Everybody's got to live like he thinks they ought to, no matter how they hate it. If two Kilkenny cats he knew was to get married and one of them was to bolt he'd fetch her back and tie 'em both up, heads together, so as she shouldn't do it again. And if they clawed each other's guts out he wouldn't care. He'd say they were livin' a nice, virtuous, respectable and moral life.

"What rot it all is!

"Stop her? As if any one could stop her! God knows she can't stop herself, poor girl. She's made like that. I'm not blamin' her."

For, with whatever wildness Ranny started, he always came back to that—He didn't blame her. He knew whereof she was made. It was proof of his sudden, forced maturity, that unfaltering acceptance of the fact.

"Talk of helpin'! Strikes me poor Vi's helpin' more than anybody, by clearin' out like she's done."

That was how, with a final incomparable serenity, he made it out.

But his mother took it all as so much wildness, the delirium, the madness, born of his calamity.

"He'd have been all right if I'd been ass enough to play into his hands and gone blowin' me nose and grizzlin', and whinin' about my misfortune, and let him go gassin' about the sadness of it and all that. But because I kept my end up he went for me.

"Sadness! He doesn't know what sadness is or misfortune.

"My God! If every poor beggar had the luck I've had—to be let off without having to pay for it!"

Up till then his mother had kept silence. She had let him rave. "Poor boy," she had said to herself, "he doesn't mean it. It'll do him good."

But when he talked about not having to pay for it, that reminded her that paying for it was just what he would have to do.

"How'll you manage," she said now, "about the children? I can take them for a week or two or more while you get settled."

"Would you?"

It was a way out for the present.

"I'd take them altogether—I'd love to, Ranny—if it wasn't for your Father bein' ill."

In spite of the cataclysm, she still by sheer force of habit kept it up.

"I don't want you to take them altogether," he said.

"I could do it—if you was to come with them—"

That, indeed, was what she wanted, the heavenly possibility she had sighted from the first. But she had hardly dared to suggest it. Even now, putting out her tremorous feeler, she shrank back from his refusal.

"If you could let Granville—and come and live with us."

His silence and his embarrassment pierced her to the heart.

"Won't you?" she ventured.

"Well—I've got to think of them. For them, in some ways, the poor old Humming-bird might, you see, be almost as bad as Virelet."

She knew. She had known it all the time. She had even got so far in knowledge as to see that Ranny's father was in a measure responsible for Ranny's marriage. If Ranny had had more life, more freedom, and more happiness around him in his home, he would not have been driven, as he was, to Violet.

"Well, dear, you just think it over. If you don't come you must get somebody."

Yes. He must get somebody. He had thought of that.

"It can't be Winny Dymond, dear."

"No," he assented. "It can't be Winny Dymond."

"And you'll have to come to me until I can find you some one."

They left it so. After all, it made things easier, the method that his mother had brought to such perfection, her way of skating rapidly over brittle surfaces, of circumnavigating all profound unpleasantness, and of plunging, when she did plunge, only into the vague, the void.

And through it all he was aware of the brittleness, the unpleasantness, the profundity of what was immediately before him, how to deal with poor Winny and her innocent enormity; the impropriety, as it had been presented to him, of her devotion.

But even this problem, so torturing to his nerves, was presently lost sight of in the simple, practical difficulty of detaching Winny from the children; or rather, of detaching the children from Winny, of tearing, as they had to tear, them from her, piecemeal, first Baby, then Dossie, with every circumstance of barbarous cruelty.

It was a spectacle, an operation of such naked agony that before it the most persistent, the most incorruptible sense of propriety broke down. It was too much altogether for Mrs. Ransome.

Dossie was the worst. She had strength in her little fingers, and she clung.

And the crying, the crying of the two, terrible to Ranny, terrible to Winny, the passionate screams, the strangled sobs, the long, irremediable wailing, the terrifying convulsive silences, the awful intermissions and shattering recoveries of anguish—it was as if their innocence had insight, had premonition of the monstrous, imminent separation, of the wrong that he and she were about to do to each other in the name of such sanctities as innocence knows nothing of. For outrage and wrong it was to the holy primal instincts, drawing them, as it had drawn them long ago, seeking to bind them again, body and soul, breaking all other bonds; insult and violence to honest love, to fatherhood and motherhood, to the one (one and threefold) perfection that they could stand for, he and she.

It ended by its sheer terror in Winny's staying just for that evening, to put the little things to sleep. For nobody else, not Ranny, and not his mother, was able to do that. The dark design of their torturers was to take these innocent ones by night, drugged with their sleep, and pack them in the pram, snugly blanketed, and thus convey them in secrecy to Wandsworth, where, it was hoped, they would wake up, poor lambs, to a morning without memory.

"Well—Winky," he said. But it was not yet well. He had to stand by and see Winky stoop over Baby's cot (it was her right) for the last look.

She knew it was her last look, in that room—in that way that had been the way of innocence.

"Well, I never!" said Ranny's mother, as he returned from seeing Winky home. (So much was permitted him. It was even imperative.)

"Did they ever cry like that for their Mammy?"

He smiled grimly. His illumination was more than he could bear.



CHAPTER XXVI

It was in the cruelty of it, in that sudden barbarous tearing of the children from Winny, of Winny from Ransome, and of Ransome from his home, in that hurried, surreptitious flight through the darkness, that he most felt the pressure and the malignant pinch of poverty. Owing to his straitened circumstances, with all his mother's forethought and good will, with all the combined resources of their ingenuity, they could do no better to meet his lamentable case than this. "This," indeed, was imperative, inevitable. He reflected bitterly that, if he had been a rich man, like the manager or the secretary of Woolridge's, instead of a ledger clerk (that was all that his last rise had made him) at a hundred and fifty a year, he would have been spared "this." It would have been neither inevitable nor imperative. It simply wouldn't have happened. He would have had a house with a staff of competent servants, a nurse for the children, a cook, and maybe a housemaid to manage for him, and so forth. Winny wouldn't have come into it. It would never have occurred to her to run the risks she had run for him. There would have been no need. She would have remained, serene, beautiful in sympathy, outside his calamity, untouched by its sordidness, its taint. All the machinery of his household would have gone on in spite of it, without any hitch or dislocation, working all the more smoothly in the absence of its mistress.

That was how rich people came out of this sort of thing, right side up, smiling, knowing as they did that there was nothing to spoil the peace of it for them, or make them apt to mistake it for anything but the blessing that it was. Thus they got, as you may say, the whole good out of it without any waste. At the worst, if they didn't like it, rich people, driven to flight, depart from the scene of their disaster with dignity, in cabs.

But Ranny's departure, with all its ignominy, was not by any means the worst. The worst, incomparably, was the going back on Monday evening to settle up. There was a man coming from Wandsworth with a handcart for the cots, the high chair and all the babies' furniture, and the kids' toys and the little clothes, their whole diminutive outfit, and for what he needed of his own. And when all the packing was done he would still have to go into things.

By the things he had to go into he meant the drawers and the cupboards in his wife's room.

And such things! It was as if the whole tale of her adultery, with all its secret infamy, its squalor, its utter callousness, was there in that room of the love-knots and the rosebuds.

In the locked wardrobe—the key was on the chimney piece where he could find it—he came on her old skirts, draggled and torn and stained as he had known them, on the muslin gown of last year, loathsome and limp, bent like a hanged corpse; and on her very nightgown of the other night, dreadfully familiar, shrinking, poor ghost of an abomination, in its corner. And under them, in a row, the shoes that her feet had gone in, misshapen, trodden down at heel, gaping to deliver up her shame.

These things Winny had collected and put away in order, and hidden out of his sight as best she could. Seeing, she too, the tale they told, she had hung a sheet in front of them and locked the door on them and laid the key aside, to break in some degree the shock of them. For they were things that had been good enough for him, but not good enough for Violet's lover. She had gone to him in all her bravery, leaving them behind, not caring who found them.

And there was more to be gone through before he had finished with it. There were the drawers, crammed with little things, the collars, the ribbons and the laces, and one or two trinkets that he had given her, cast off with the rest, all folded and tidied by Winny, smoothed and coaxed out of the memories they held, the creases that betrayed the slattern; and with them, tucked away by Winny, defiled beyond redemption, almost beyond recognition, the sachet, smelling of violets and with the word "Violet" sprawling all across it in embroidery.

All these things, the dresses, the shoes, and the rest of them, he gathered up in handfuls and flung into an old trunk which he locked and pushed under the bed.

Then he set his teeth and went on with his task. In the soiled linen basket, among his own handkerchiefs as he counted them, he found one queerly scented and of a strange, arresting pattern. It had the monogram "L. M." stitched into the corner. She must have borrowed it from the beast. Or else—the beast had been in the house and had left it there.

That finished him.

* * * * *

Finished as he was in every sense, thoroughly instructed, furnished with details that fitted out and rounded off all that was vague and incomplete in his vision of the thing, he was still unprepared for the question with which his mother met him.

"Have you told Mr. and Mrs. Usher?"

He hadn't.

He had forgotten Mr. and Mrs. Usher, forgotten that this prolongation of his ordeal would be necessary.

"Well, you'll have to."

"Of course I'll have to."

"Will you go and see him?"

"No. I—can't. I'll write."

He wrote in the afternoon of the next day at Woolridge's, in the luncheon hour when he had the ledger clerks' pen to himself. He was very brief.

He received his father-in-law's reply by return. Mr. Usher made no comment beyond an almost perfunctory expression of regret. But he said that he must see Randall. And, as the journey between Elstree and Wandsworth was somewhat long to be undertaken after office hours, he proposed the "Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware, as a convenient halfway house for them to meet at, and Wednesday, at seven or thereabouts, as the day and hour. Thus he allowed time for Randall to receive his letter and, if necessary, to answer it. No telegraphing for Mr. Usher, except in case of death, actual or imminent.

Ransome supposed that he would have to see him and get it over. Soon after seven on Wednesday, then, Mr. Usher having ridden over on his mare Polly and Ransome on his bicycle, they met in the parlor of the "Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware. Mr. Usher's friend the landlord had undertaken that they should not be disturbed.

It was impossible for Ransome not to notice something queer about his father-in-law, something utterly unlike the bluff and genial presence he had known. Mr. Usher seemed to have shrunk somehow and withered, so that you might have said the catastrophe had hit him hard, if that, his mere bodily shrinkage, had been all. What struck Ransome as specially queer about Mr. Usher was his manner and the expression of his face. You could almost have called it crafty. Guilty it was, too, consciously guilty, the furtive face of a man on the defensive, armed with all his little cunning against a possible attack, having entrenched himself in the parlor of the "Bald-Faced Stag" as on neutral territory.

"What say to a bit of supper, my boy, before we begin business?"

It was a false and feeble imitation of his old heartiness.

Over a supper of cold ham and cheese and beer they discussed Ransome's father's health and his mother's health, and Mrs. Usher's health, which was poor, and Mr. Usher's prospects, which were poorer, not to say bad. He leaned on this point and returned to it, as if it might have a possible bearing on the matter actually in hand, and with a certain disagreeable effect of craftiness and intention. It was as if he wished to rub it in that whatever else Randall forgot, he wasn't to forget that, that he had nothing to look to, nothing to hope for in his father-in-law's prospects; as if he, Mr. Usher, had arranged this meeting at the "Bald-Faced Stag" for the express purpose of making that clear, of forestalling all possible misunderstanding. He kept it before him, with the cheese and beer, on the brown oil-cloth of the table from which poor Randall found it increasingly difficult to lift his eyes.

It was almost a relief to him when Mr. Usher pushed his plate away with a groan of satiety, and began.

"Well, what's all this I hear about Virelet?"

Randall intimated that he had heard all there was.

"Yes, but what's the meaning of it? That's what I want to know."

Randall put it that its meaning was that it had simply happened, and suggested that his father-in-law was in every bit as good a position for understanding it as he.

"I dare say. But what I'm trying to get at is—did you do anything to make it happen?"

"What on earth do you suppose I did?"

"There might be faults on both sides, though I don't say as there were. But did you do anything to prevent it? Tell me that."

"What could I do? I didn't know it was going to happen."

"You should have known. You was warned fair enough."

"Was I? Who warned me, I should like to know?"

"Why, I did, and her mother did. Told you straight. Don't you go for to say that I let you marry the girl under false pretenses, or her mother either. I told you what sort Virelet was, straight as I could, without vilifying my own flesh and blood. Did you want me to tell you straighter? Did you want me to put a name to it?"

His little eyes shot sidelong at Randall, out of his fallen, shrunken fatness, more than ever crafty and intent.

He was pitiful. Randall could have been sorry for him but that he showed himself so mean. His little eyes gave him so villainously away. They disclosed the fullness of his knowledge; they said he had known things about Violet; he had known them all the time, things that he, Randall, never knew. And he hadn't let on, not he. Why should he? He had been too eager, poor man, to get Violet married. His eagerness, that had appeared as the hardy flower of his geniality, betrayed itself now as the sinister thing it was—when you thought of the name that he could have given her!

Randall did not blame him. He was past blaming anybody. He only said to himself that this explained what had seemed so inexplicable—the attitude, the incredible attitude of Mr. and Mrs. Usher; how they had leaped at him in all his glaring impossibility, an utter stranger, with no adequate income and no prospects; how they had hurried on the marriage past all prudence; how they had driven him on and fooled him and helped him to his folly.

But he was not going to let them fool him any more.

"Look here, Mr. Usher, I don't know what your game is and I don't care. I dare say you think you told me what you say you did. But you didn't. You didn't tell me anything—not one blessed thing. And if you had it wouldn't have done any good. I wouldn't have believed you. You needn't reproach yourself. I was mad on Virelet. I meant to marry her and I did marry her. That's all."

"Well," said Mr. Usher, partially abandoning his position, "so long as you don't hold me responsible—"

"Of course, I don't hold you responsible."

"I'm sure me and the Missis we've done what we could to make it easier for you."

He gazed before him, conjuring up between them a quiet vision of the long procession of hampers, a reminder to Randall of how deeply, as it was, he stood indebted.

"And we can't do no more. That's how it is. No more we can't do."

"I'm not asking you to do anything. What do you want?"

"I want to know what you're going to do, my boy."

"Do?"

"Yes, do."

"About what?"

"About Virelet. Talk of responsibility, you took it on yourself contrary to the warnings what you had, when you married her. And having taken it you ought to have looked after her. Knowing what she is you ought to have looked after her better than you've done."

"How could I have looked after her?"

"How? Why, as any other man would. You should have made her work, work with her 'ands, as I told you, 'stead of giving her her head, like you did, and lettin' her sit bone-idle in that gimcrack doll-house of yours from morning till night. Why, you should have taken a stick to her. There's many a man as would, before he'd 'a' let it come to that. Damn me if I know why you didn't."

"Well, really, Mr. Usher, I suppose I couldn't forget she was a woman."

"Woman? Woman? I'd 'a' womaned 'er! Look 'ere, my boy, it's a sad business, and there's no one sorrier for you than I am, but there's no good you and me broodin' mournful over what she's done. Course she'd do it, 's long's you let her. You hadn't ought to 'ave let 'er. And seein' as how you have, seems to me what you've got to do now is to take her back again."

"I can't take her back again."

"And why not?"

"Because of the children—for one thing."

That argument had its crushing effect on Mr. Usher. It made him pause a perceptible moment before he answered.

"Well—you needn't look to me and her mother to 'ave her—"

Randall rose, as much as to say that this was enough; it was too much; it was the end.

"We've done with her. You took her out of our 'ands what 'ad a hold on her, and you owe it to her mother and me to take her back."

"If that's all you've got to say, Mr. Usher—"

"It isn't all I've got to say. What I got to say is this. Before you was married, Randall, I don't mind telling you now, my girl was a bit too close about you for my fancy. I've never rightly understood how you two came together."

There, as they fixed him, his little eyes took on their craftiness again and his mouth a smile, a smile of sensual tolerance and understanding, as between one man of the world and another.

"I don't know, and I don't want to know. But however it was—I'm not askin', mind you—however it was"—He was all solemn now—"you made yourself responsible for that girl. And responsible you will be held."

It may have been that Mr. Usher drew a bow at a venture; it may have been that he really knew, that he had always known. Anyhow, that last stroke of his was, in its way, consummate. It made it impossible for Randall to hit back effectively; impossible for him to say now, if he had wished to say it, that he had not been warned (for it seemed to imply that if Mr. Usher's suspicions were correct, Randall had had an all-sufficient warning); impossible for him to maintain, as against a father whom he, upon the supposition, had profoundly injured, an attitude of superior injury. If Mr. Usher had deceived Randall, hadn't Randall, in the first instance, deceived Mr. Usher? In short, it left them quits. It closed Randall's mouth, and with it the discussion, and so that the balance as between them leaned if anything to Mr. Usher's side.

"Well, I'm sorry for you, Randall."

As if he could afford it now, Mr. Usher permitted himself a return to geniality. He paused in the doorway.

"If at any time you should want a hamper, you've only got to say so."

And Randall did not blame him. He said to himself: "Poor old thing. It's funk—pure funk. He's afraid he may have to take her back himself. And who could blame him?"

Funny that his father-in-law should have taken the same line as his Uncle Randall. Only, whereas his Uncle Randall had reckoned with the alternative of divorce, his father-in-law had not so much as hinted at the possibility.

* * * * *

It was almost as if Mr. Usher had had a glimpse of what was to come when he had been in such haste, haste that had seemed in the circumstances hardly decent, to saddle Ransome with the responsibility.

For, if Ransome had really thought that Violet was going to let him off without his paying for it, the weeks that followed brought him proof more than sufficient of his error. He had sown to the winds in the recklessness of his marriage and of his housekeeping, and he reaped the whirlwind in Violet's bills that autumn shot into the letter box at Granville.

He called there every other day for letters; for he was not yet prepared, definitely, to abandon Granville.

The bills, when he had gathered them all in, amounted in their awful total to twenty pounds odd, a sum that exceeded his worst dreams of Violet's possible expenditure. He had realized, in the late summer and autumn of last year, before the period of compulsory retirement had set in, that his wife was beginning to cost him more than she had ever done, more than any woman of his class, so far as he knew, would have dreamed of costing; and this summer, no sooner had she emerged triumphant than—with two children now to provide for—she had launched out upon a scale that fairly terrified him. But all her past extravagance did nothing to prepare him for the extent to which, as he expressed it, she could "go it," when she had, as you might say, an incentive.

The most astounding of the bills his whirlwind swept him was the bill from Starker's—from Oxford Street, if you please—and the bill (sent in with a cynical promptitude) from the chemist in Acacia Avenue at the corner. That, the chemist's, was in a way the worst. It was for scent, for toilette articles, strange yet familiar to him from their presence in his father's shop, for all manner of cosmetics, for things so outrageous, so unnecessary, that they witnessed chiefly to the shifts she had been put to, to her anxieties and hastes, to the feverish multiplication of pretexts and occasions. Still, they amounted but to a few pounds and an odd shilling or two. Starker's bill did the rest.

That, the high, resplendent "cheek" of it, showed what she was capable of; it gave him the measure of her father's "funk," for, of not one of the items, from the three-guinea costumes (there were several of them) down to the dozen of openwork Lisle-thread hose at two and eleven the pair, had Ransome so much as suspected the existence. The three-guinea costumes he could understand. It was the three nightgowns, trimmed lace, at thirteen, fifteen, and sixteen shillings apiece, that took his breath away, as with a vision of her purposes. Still, to him, her husband, Starker's statement of account represented directly, with the perfection of business precision, the cost of getting rid of her; it was so simply and openly the cost of her outfit, of all that she had trailed with her in her flight.

Yet, as he grasped it, he saw with that mature comprehension which was now his, that, awful as it was, that total of twenty pounds odd represented, perfectly, the price of peace. It was open to him to repudiate his wife's debts, in which case she would appear in the County Court, which, with its effect of publicity, with the things that would be certain to come out there, was almost as bad as the Divorce Court. Then the unfortunate tradespeople would not be paid, a result of her conduct which was intolerable to Ranny's decency. Besides, he wanted to be rather more than decent, to be handsome, in his squaring of accounts with the woman whom, after all, in the beginning he had wronged. He could even reflect with a humor surviving all calamity, that though twenty-odd pounds was a devil of a lot to pay, his deliverance was cheap, dirt cheap, at the money.

But that was not all. There was Granville.

He hated Granville. He could not believe how he ever could have loved it. The fact that he was gradually becoming his own landlord only made things worse. It gave Granville a malignant power over him, that power which he had once or twice suspected, the power to round on him and injure him and pay him back. He knew he was partly responsible for Granville's degradation. He had done nothing for this property of his. He had not given it a distinctive character; he had not covered it with creepers or painted it green or built a balcony. He had left it to itself.

He asked himself what it would look like in seventeen years' time when it would be his. In seventeen years' time he would be forty-two. What good would he be then? And what good would Granville be to him? What good was it now? In its malignancy it demanded large sums to keep it going and if it didn't get them it knew how to avenge itself. Slowly perishing, it would fall to dust in seventeen years' time when it came into his hands.

* * * * *

But he had not dreamed of the extent to which Granville could put on the screw.

He was enlightened by the agent of the Estate Company to which Granville owed its being. The agent, after a thorough inspection of the premises, broke it to Ransome that if he did not wish to lose Granville, he would have to undertake certain necessary repairs, the estimate for which soared to the gay tune of ten pounds eight shillings and eightpence. It was the state of the roof, of the southwest wall, and of the scullery drain that most shocked the agent. Of the scullery drain he could hardly bring himself to speak, remarking only that a little washing down from time to time with soda would have saved it all. The state of that drain was a fair disgrace; and it was not a thing of days; it dated from months back—years, he shouldn't be surprised. It was fit to breed a fever.

Of course, it wasn't quite as bad as the agent had made out. But Ranny, knowing Violet, believed him. It gave him a feeling of immense responsibility toward Granville, and the Estate Company, and the agent.

Finally, owing to Violet's reckless management, his debts to the grocer, the butcher, and the milkman had reached the considerable total of nine pounds eighteen shillings and eleven pence. It would take about forty pounds odd to clear his obligations.

The question was how on earth was he to raise the money? Out of a salary of twelve pounds a month?

He would have to borrow it. But from whom? Not from his father. To whatever height his mother kept it up, she could not conceal from him that his father was in difficulties. Wandsworth was going ahead, caught by the tide of progress. The new Drug Stores over the way were drawing all the business from Fulleymore Ransome's little shop. Even with the assistance of the young man, Mr. Ponting, Fulleymore Ransome was not in a state to hold his own. But John Randall, the draper, if you like, was prosperous. He might be willing, Ransome thought, to lend him the money, or a part of it, at a fair rate of interest.

And John Randall indeed lent him thirty pounds; but not willingly. His reluctance, however, was sufficiently explained by the fact that he had recently advanced more than that sum to Fulleymore. He was careful to point out to Randall that he was helping him to meet only those catastrophes which might be regarded as the act of God—Violet's bills and the deterioration of Granville. He was as anxious as Randall himself to prevent Violet's appearance in the County Court, and he certainly thought it was a pity that good house property should go out of his nephew's hands. But he refused flatly to advance the ten pounds for the weekly arrears, in order to teach Randall a lesson, to make him feel that he had some responsibility, and to show that there was a limit to what he, John Randall, was prepared to do.

For days Ransome went distracted. The ten pounds still owing was like a millstone round his neck. If he didn't look sharp and pay up he would be County-Courted too. He couldn't come down on his father-in-law. His father-in-law would tell him that he had already received the equivalent of ten pounds in hampers. There was nobody he could come down on. So he called at a place he had heard of in Shaftesbury Avenue, where there was a "josser" who arranged it for him quite simply by means of a bill of sale upon his furniture. After all, he did get some good out of that furniture.

And he got some good, too, out of Granville when he let it to Fred Booty for fifteen shillings a week.

He was now established definitely in his father's house. The young man Mr. Ponting had shown how kind his heart was by turning out of his nice room on the second floor into Ranny's old attic. The little back room, used for storage, served also as a day nursery for Ranny's children. Six days in the week a little girl came in to mind them. At night Ranny minded them where they lay in their cots by his bed.

It was all that could be done; and with the little girl's board and the children's and his own breakfast and supper and his Sunday dinner, it cost him thirty shillings a week. There was no way in which it could be done for less, since it was not in him to take advantage of his mother's offer to let him have the rooms rent free.

* * * * *

And underneath Ranny's rooms, between the bedroom at the back and the back parlor, between the parlor and the shop, between the shop and the dispensing-room, Fulleymore Ransome dragged himself to and fro, more than ever weedy, more than ever morose, more than ever sublime in his appearance of integrity; and with it all so irritable that Ranny's children had to be kept out of his way. He would snarl when he heard them overhead; he would scowl horribly when he came across the "pram," pushed by the little girl, in its necessary progress through the shop into the street and back again.

But at Ranny he neither snarled nor scowled, nor had he spoken any word to him on the subject of the great calamity. No reproach, no reminder of warnings given, none of that reiterated, "I told you so," in which, Ranny reflected, he might have taken it out of him. He also seemed to regard his son Randall as one smitten by God and afflicted, to whose high and sacred suffering silence was the appropriate tribute. His very moroseness provided the sanctuary of silence.

And all the time he drank; he drank worse than ever; furtively, continuously he drank. Nobody could stop him, for nobody ever saw him doing it. He did it, they could only suppose, behind Mr. Ponting's back in the dispensing-room.

They were free to suppose anything now; for, since Ranny's great delivering outburst, they could discuss it; and in discussion they found relief. Ranny's mother owned as much. She had suffered (that also she owned) from the strain of keeping it up. Ranny's outburst had saved her, vicariously. It was as if she had burst out herself.

There were, of course, lengths to which she would never go, admissions which she could not bring herself to make. There had to be some subterfuge, some poor last shelter for her pride. And so, of the depression in Fulleymore's business she would say before Mr. Ponting, "It's those Drug Stores that are ruining him," and Mr. Ponting would reply, gravely, "They'd ruin anybody."

Mr. Ponting was a fresh-colored young man and good-looking, with his blue eyes and his yellow hair sleeked backward like folded wings, so different from Mercier. Mr. Ponting had conceived an affection for Ranny and the children. He would find excuses to go up to the storeroom, where he would pretend to be looking for things while he was really playing with Dossie. He would sit on Ranny's bed while Ranny was undressing, and together they would consider, piously, the grave case of the Humming-bird, and how, between them, they could best "keep him off it."

"It's the dispensary spirits that he gets at," Mr. Ponting said. "That's the trouble."

(And it always had been.)

"The queer thing is," said Ranny, "that you never fairly see him tight. Not to speak of."

"That's the worst of it," said Mr. Ponting. "I wish I could see your father tight—tumbling about a bit, I mean, and being funny. The beastly stuff's going for him inside, all the time—undermining him. There isn't an organ," said Mr. Ponting, solemnly, "in your father's body that it hasn't gone for."

"How d'you know?"

"Why, by the medicines he takes. He's giving himself strophanthus now, for his heart."

"I say—d'you think my mother knows that?"

"It's impossible to say what your mother knows. More than she lets on, I shouldn't be surprised."

Mr. Ponting pondered.

"It's wonderful how he keeps it up. His dignity, I mean."

"It's rum, isn't it?" said Ranny. He was apparently absorbed in tying the strings of his sleeping-suit into loops of absolutely even length. "But he always was that mysterious kind of bird."

He began to step slowly backward as he buttoned up his jacket. Then, by way of throwing off the care that oppressed him, and lightening somewhat Mr. Ponting's burden, he ran forward and took a flying leap over the Baby's cot into his own bed.

Mr. Ponting looked, if anything, a little graver. "I wouldn't do that, if I were you," he said.

"Why not?" said Ranny over his blankets, snuggling comfortably.

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Ponting, vaguely.

In a day or two Ranny himself knew.

His arrangements had carried him well on into October. In the last week of that month, on a Tuesday evening, he appeared at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where he had not been seen since far back in the last year. It was not at the Gymnasium that he now presented himself, but at the door of that room where every Tuesday evening, from seven-thirty to eight-thirty, a qualified practitioner was in attendance.

It was the first time that Ransome had availed himself of this privilege conferred on him by the Poly.

He said he wouldn't keep the medical man a minute.

But the medical man kept Ranny many minutes, thumping, sounding, intimately and extensively overhauling him. For more minutes than Ranny at all liked, he played about him with a stethoscope. Then he fired off what Ranny supposed to be the usual questions.

"Had any shock, worry, or excitement lately?

"Been overdoing it in any way?

"Gone in much for athletics?"

Ranny replied with regret that it was more than three years since he had last run in the Wandsworth Hurdle Race.

He was then told that he must avoid all shock, worry, or excitement. He mustn't overdo it. He must drop his hurdle-racing. He mustn't bicycle uphill, or against the wind; he mustn't jump; he mustn't run—

"Not even to catch a train?"

"Not to catch anything."

And the doctor gave him a prescription that ran:

/P Sodae Bicarb., one dram. Tinct. Strophanthi, two drams— P/

He remembered. That was the stuff he'd measured for old Mr. Beasley's heart mixture. It was the stuff that Ponting said his father was taking now.

If any one had told him three years ago that his heart was rocky he'd have told them where to go to. It had been as sound as a bell when he entered for the Poly. Gym.

Well, he supposed that was about the finishing touch—if they wanted to do the thing in style.

He went slowly over Wandsworth Bridge and up the High Street, dejected, under the autumn moon that had once watched his glad sprinting.



CHAPTER XXVII

And in all this time he had not heard again from Violet, nor had he written to her.

Then—it was in the first week of November—Violet wrote.

She wrote imploring him to set her free. It was rooted in her, the fear that he would compel her to come back, that he had the power to make her. She wanted (he seemed to see it) to feel safe from him forever. Leonard had promised to marry her if she were free. She intimated that Leonard was everything that was generous and honorable. She wanted (she who had abused him so for having married her), she wanted to marry Mercier, to have a hold on him and be safe. Marriage was her idea of safety now.

She went on to say that if he would consent to divorce her, it would be made easy for him, she would not defend the suit.

That meant—he puzzled it out—that meant that it would lie between the two of them. Nobody else would be dragged into it. Winny's name would not by any possibility be dragged in. Violet would have no use for Winny, since she was not going to defend the suit. She might—at the worst—have to appear as witness, if the evidence of Violet's letters (her own admission) was not sufficient. It looked as if it would be simple enough. Why should he not release her? He had no business not to give her the chance to marry Mercier, to regulate the relation, if that was what she wanted.

It was his own chance, too, his one chance. He would be a fool not to take it.

And as it came over him in its fullness, all that it meant and would yet mean, Ranny felt his heart thumping and bounding, dangerously, in its weakened state.

On a Wednesday evening in November, he presented himself once more at the Regent Street Polytechnic and at the door of an office where, on Wednesday evenings, an experienced legal adviser held himself in readiness to give advice, that legal adviser who had been the jest of his adolescence, whose services he had not conceived it possible that he should require.

He had a curiously uplifting sense of the gravity and impressiveness of the business upon which at last, inconceivably, he came. But this odd elation was controlled and finally overpowered by disgust and shame, as one by one, under the kind but acute examination of the legal man, he brought out for his inspection the atrocious details. And he had to show Violet's letter of September, the document, supremely valuable, supremely infamous, supported by the further communication of November. The keen man asked him, as his uncle and his father-in-law had asked, if he had given any provocation, any cause for jealousy, misunderstanding, or the like? Had his own conduct been irreproachable? When all this part of it was over, settled to the keen man's satisfaction, Ranny was told that there was little doubt that he could get his divorce if—that was the question—he could afford to pay. Divorce was, yes, it was a costly matter, almost, you might say, the luxury of the rich. A matter, for him, probably of forty or fifty pounds—well, say, thirty, when you'd cut expenses down to the very lowest limit. Could he, the keen but kindly man inquired, afford thirty?

No, he couldn't. He couldn't afford twenty even. With all his existing debts upon him he couldn't now raise ten.

He asked whether he could get his divorce if he put it off a bit until he could afford it?

The legal man looked grave.

"Well—yes. If you can show poverty—"

Ranny thought he could undertake to show that all right.

At the legal man's suggestion he wrote a letter to his wife assuring her that it was impossible for her to desire a divorce more than he did; that he meant to bring an action at the very moment when he could afford it, pointing out to her that her debts which he had paid had not made this any easier for him; that in the meanwhile she need not be anxious; that he would not follow her or molest her in any way; and that in no circumstances would he take her back.

And now Ranny's soul and all his energy were set upon the one aim of raising money for his divorce. It was impossible to lay his hands upon that money all at once. He could not do it this year, nor yet the next, for his expenses and his debts together exceeded the amount of his income; but gradually, by pinching and scraping, it might be done perhaps in two or three years' time.

His chief trouble was that in all these weeks he had seen nothing of Winny. He had called twice at the side door of Johnson's, but they had told him that she was not in; and, hampered as he was with the children, he had not had time to call again. Besides, he knew he had to be careful, and Winny knew it too. That, of course, would always help him, her perception of the necessity for care. There were ways of managing these things, but they required his mother's or his friends' co-operation; and so far Mrs. Ransome had shown no disposition to co-operate. Winny was not likely to present herself at Wandsworth without encouragement, and she had apparently declined to lend herself to any scheme of Maudie's or of Fred Booty's. With Winny lying low there was nothing left for him but the way he shrank from, of persistent and unsolicited pursuit.

November passed and they were in December, and he had not seen her. After having recovered somewhat under the influence of the drug strophanthus, he now became depressed, listless, easily fatigued.

Up till now there had been something not altogether disagreeable to Mrs. Ransome in the misfortunes of her son. They had brought him back to her. But he had not wanted to come back; and now she wondered whether she had done well to make him come, whether (after all he had gone through) it was not too much for him, realizing as he did his father's awful state. It had gone so far, Mr. Ransome's state, that there was no way in which it could be taken lightly.

And she was depressed herself, perceiving it. Mr. Ransome's state made him unfit for business now, unfit to appear in the shop, above all unfit for the dispensary. Fit only to crawl from room to room and trouble them with the sad state of his peaked and peevish face. He required watching. He himself recognized that in his handling of tricky drugs there was a danger. The business was getting out of hand. It was small and growing smaller every month, yet it was too much for Mr. Ponting to cope with unassisted. They were living, all three of them, in a state of tension most fretting to the nerves.

The whole house fairly vibrated with it. It was as if the fearful instability of Mr. Ransome's nervous system communicated itself to everybody around him. At the cry or the sudden patter of Ranny's children overhead, Mr. Ransome would be set quivering and shaking, and this disturbance of his reverberated. Ranny set his teeth and sat tight and "stuck it"; but he felt the shattering effect of it all the same.

And the children felt it too, subtly, insidiously. Dossie became peevish, easily frightened; she was neither so good nor so happy with her Granny and the little girl as she had been with Winny. Baby cried oftener. Ranny sometimes would be up half the night with him.

All this Mrs. Ransome saw and grieved over and was powerless to help.

In Christmas week the state of Mr. Ransome became terrible, not to be borne. Ranny was working hard at the counting-house; he was worn out, and he looked it.

The sight of him, so changed, broke Mrs. Ransome down.

"Ranny," she said, "I wish you'd get away somewhere for Christmas. Me and Mabel'll look after the children. You go."

He said there wasn't anywhere he cared to go to.

"Well—is there anything you'd like to do?"

"To do?"

"For Christmas, dear. To make it not so sad like. Is there anybody," she said, "you'd like to ask?"

No, there wasn't. At any rate, if there was he wouldn't ask them. It wouldn't be exactly what you'd call fun for them, with the poor old Humming-bird making faces at them all the time.

His mother looked at him shrewdly and said nothing. But she sat down and wrote a letter to Winny Dymond, asking her to come and spend Christmas Day with them, if, said Mrs. Ransome, she hadn't anywhere better to go to and didn't mind a sad house.

And Winny came. She hadn't anywhere better to go to, and she didn't mind a sad house in the least.

They wondered, Ranny and his mother, how they were ever going to break it to the Humming-bird.

"Your Father won't like it, Ranny. He's not fit for it. He'll think us heartless, having strangers in the house when he's suffering so."

But Mr. Ransome, when asked if he was fit for it, replied astoundingly that he was fit enough if it would make Randall any happier.

It did. It made him so happy that his recovery dated from that moment. He had only one fear, that Dossie would have forgotten Winky.

But Dossie hadn't, though after two months of Wandsworth she had forgotten many things, and had cultivated reserve. When Ranny said, "Who's this, Dossie?" she tucked her head into her shoulder and smiled shyly and said, "Winty." But they had to pretend that Baby remembered, too. He hadn't really got what you would call a memory.

And, after all, it was Ranny (Winny said to herself) who remembered most. For he gave her for a Christmas present, not only a beautiful white satin "sashy," scented with lavender (lavender, not violets, this time), but a wonderful hot-water bag with a shaggy red coat that made you warm to look at it.

"Ranny! Fancy you remembering that I had cold feet!"

That night he went home with her to Johnson's side door, carrying the sachet and the hot-water bag and the things his mother had given her.

Upstairs, in the attic she shared with three other young ladies, the first thing Winny did was to turn to the Cookery Book she had bought a year ago and read the directions: "How to Preserve Hot-Water Bags"—to preserve them forever.



CHAPTER XXVIII

Thus nineteen-seven, that dreadful year, rolled over into nineteen-eight. By nineteen-ten, at the very latest, Ransome looked to get his divorce. He had no doubt that he could do it, for he found it far less expensive to live with his mother at Wandsworth than with Violet at Granville. He knew exactly where he was, he had not to allow so considerably for the unforeseen. His income had a margin out of which he saved. To make this margin wider he pinched, he scraped, he went as shabby as he dared, he left off smoking, he renounced his afternoon cup of tea and reduced the necessary dinner at his A B C shop to its very simplest terms.

The two years passed.

By January, nineteen-ten, he had only paid off what he already owed. He had not raised the thirty pounds required for his divorce. Indomitable, but somewhat desperate, he applied to his Uncle Randall for a second loan at the same interest. He did not conceal from him that divorce was his object. He put it to him that his mind was made up unalterably, and that since the thing had got to be, sooner or later, it was better for everybody's sake that it should be sooner.

But Mr. Randall was inexorable. He refused, flatly, to lend his money for a purpose that he persisted in regarding as iniquitous. Even if he had not advanced a further sum to young Randall's father, he was not going to help young Randall through the Divorce Court, stirring all that mud again. Not he.

"You should wash your dirty linen at home," he said.

"You mean keep it there and never wash it. That's what it comes to," said young Randall, furiously.

"It's been kept. And everybody's forgotten that it's there by this time. Why rake it up again?" said his Uncle Randall.

And there was no making him see why. There was no making any of them see. Mrs. Ransome wouldn't hear of the divorce. "It'll kill your Father, Ranny," she said, and stuck to it.

And Ranny set his mouth hard and said nothing. He calculated that if he put by twelve shillings a week for twenty-five weeks that would be fifteen pounds. He could borrow the other fifteen in Shaftesbury Avenue as he had done before, and in six months he would be filing his petition.