Sally Bishop Part 29

No--but can't you see, there's no need for you to be so miserable as you think. Men only make a sacrifice when they really love a woman.

He'll come back to you, like a duck to the water. You know he will.

Do you think if he'd cared for you at all, he'd have given tuppence whether he taught you what most men teach most women. The only woman a man thinks he has no real claim to, is the woman he loves; he believes he has a proprietary right to nearly every other blessed one he meets, and has only got to a.s.sert it."

"How do you know these things, Janet? What makes you say them?"

"You mean who's taught me them--eh? What man has ever taken a sufficient interest in me to show me so much of his s.e.x? Isn't that what you mean?"

"No!"

"Oh, I know I'm ugly enough. That gla.s.s has a habit of reminding me of it every morning. I could smash that gla.s.s sometimes with the back of a hair-brush, only it might break the hair-brush."

"Janet, you're cruel sometimes! Things like that never enter my dreams!" Sally exclaimed pa.s.sionately.

"Bless your heart," said Janet, "facts never do. You take facts as they come; you act on them instinctively, but you don't realize them.

I _am_ ugly. There's no doubt about it. You don't think I'm ugly, but you see I am. That prompts your question without knowing it. But men have made fools of themselves--even over me. There was one man at the school last year--took a fancy to me, I believe because I was so ugly. Just like James II. and the ugly maids-of-honour. I was going to live with him. Can you believe that? And one night at one of the dances, we were kicking up a row a bit--dancing about as if we were lunatics--and my hair fell down--there's not much for a pin to stick into at the best of times. I remember laughing and looking across the room at him. Well, I saw an expression in his eyes that settled it. He looked as if he could see me--just like I know I am--in the mornings when I first wake up--all frowsy and fuddled, with this little bit of a mat I've got, sticking out in tails, about as long as your hand, on the pillow. It takes a bit of courage for a man to even go and live with a woman after he's seen her like that. I a.s.sure you it didn't take me much courage to tell him I'd changed my mind."

Sally watched her and the pain that she felt as she listened furrowed her brow into frowns. She knew that there was more than this, more than the bare statement behind this little story. That was Janet's way of putting it, the way Janet made herself look on at life, the apparently heartless aspect in which she viewed everything. To sympathize would only sting her to still more bitter sarcasm. Sally said nothing, the pity was in her eyes.

"I've never told you that before, have I?" said Janet.

"No."

"And I suppose you're terribly shocked because I even ever thought of living with a man?"

"No, I'm not. If you loved him and--and he couldn't marry you."

Out of the corner of her eyes Janet watched her, rubbing her face vigorously with the towel to conceal her observation. In that moment then, she saw the end of Sally, drew the matter out in her mind, as, with hurried strokes, she might have sketched a pa.s.sing face upon the slip of paper.

"Well, you run on down to breakfast," she said. "You'll be late; it's five minutes to eight."

A whole week pa.s.sed by, and Sally heard no more of Traill. Every day, when she went out to lunch, or left the office after work was over, she looked up and down King Street in the hope, almost the expectation, of seeing him waiting for her to come. Then the expectation died away; the hope grew fainter and fainter, like a shadow that the sun casts upon the sundial until, at an hour before setting, it is scarcely discernible.

Another week sped its days through. It was as the unwinding of a reel of silk, each day a round, each round and the body of the reel grew thinner and thinner, and the coils of silk lay wasted--entangled on the floor.

Deep shadows settled under Sally's eyes. The disease of love-sickness has its common symptoms, the whole world knows them; the hungry self-interest that wears itself out into a hypochondriacal morbidity; the perverted power of vision, the hopeless want of philosophy; not to mention the hundred ailments of the body that beset every single one who suffers from the complaint.

Janet watched Sally closely through it all until, as the time pa.s.sed by, even she began to think that her calculations had been at fault.

At last, one morning, there lay on the breakfast-table in the kitchen, a little brown-paper parcel addressed to Sally. She picked it up eagerly and the flame flickered up into her cheeks as she laid it down again, unopened, in her lap. Janet smiled across at her, but said nothing. When breakfast was over, she let Sally go away by herself up to her bedroom, while she remained behind and talked to Mrs. Hewson. Ten minutes, she gave her; then she mounted the stairs as well. She did not knock. She walked straight into the bedroom and there she found Sally, seated near the window, the tears coursing down her cheeks, while she held out her wrist and stared at a woven gold bangle that bore on it her name in diamond letters. By the side of the empty box was a letter, well-folded, so that it could fit within, and on the floor lay the string and the brown paper, just as it had been torn off.

Janet stood in front of her, hands on hips, warmed with the sense of being a prophet in her own country.

"Are you satisfied now?" she asked.

Sally looked up; the pride of the woman in the bauble blent in her eyes with the disappointment of the woman in love.

"Isn't it lovely?" she said pathetically. "Oh, it is lovely. I've never had anything so beautiful before. But I can't keep it. How can I keep it?"

"Can't keep it!" exclaimed Janet. "What are you talking about? Do you think it was given to you to look at and then return? Why shouldn't you keep it? It's got your name on. He can't give it to anybody else, unless there's more than one Sally down his alley, which I should think is very doubtful. What do you mean--you can't keep it? You make me feel like Job's wife."

Sally unclasped the bangle and laid it back in the little velvet box with lingering fingers. Then she picked up the letter.

"Read that," she said.

Janet swept her eyes to it. To her, as she read, it seemed to be the condensation of more than one letter that had been written before.

A man, she argued, who gives such a present, is more than probably in love; and a man who is in love, cannot write so directly to the point in his first attempt.

This was the letter:--

"DEAR MISS BISHOP--"

(To call her "Sally" in diamonds and "Miss Bishop" in ink, was ridiculous. Ink was infinitely cheaper; and if he could afford the one, then why not the other?)

"I make it a habit to discharge debts. With this to you, I wipe out my debit sheet and stand clear. You remember my bet on the Hammersmith 'bus. I hope you were none the worse for my foolishness of our last evening. I have regretted my thoughtlessness many times since.

"Yours sincerely, "J. HEWITT TRAILL."

"What foolishness?" asked Janet, looking up quickly at the end. "What did he do?"

Of the fight and her fainting, Sally had told her nothing. She told her nothing now. The fear that Traill might be thought selfish--a thought which love had refused to give entrance to in her own mind--had led her to defend him with silence. Now she told the deliberate lie, unblus.h.i.+ngly, unfearingly.

"He did nothing," she replied; "that's only a joke of his. But you see, I can't keep the bangle," she went on quickly, covering the lie with words, as Eugene Aram hid the body of his victim with dead leaves.

"I must send it back to him. I never knew he really meant it when he made that bet. I never even thought he meant it when he reminded me of it that day after lunch."

"No more he did mean it," said Janet, sharply. "If he'd seen you again and again--he'd never have paid it--not as he's pretending to pay it now."

"Pretending?"

"Yes."

Sally took up the bangle in her fingers.

"You don't call this pretence, do you?" she asked. "Why, it's worth even much more than he said in his bet. He paid more than ten pounds for this."

"Exactly," said Janet, shrewdly; "doesn't that prove it? If he was only paying his bet, you can make pretty sure that he'd have sent the money and not a penny more than he owed."

"Yes; but do you think he'd do a thing like that?" said Sally, with pride. "He'd know I wouldn't accept it that way."

"Well, perhaps not," Janet agreed; "but then he wouldn't have bought a thing that cost a penny more than ten pounds, if so much. You don't know men when they're parting with money that they've had to whip some one else to get. You say he's not so very well off. At any rate, he wouldn't have given you a thing that cost fifteen or twenty pounds--those diamonds aren't so small--when he only owed you ten."

"But he didn't owe it to me!" Sally interrupted.

"Very well, he didn't. Then why do you think he's sent you this?"

"Because he thinks he does."

"Very well, again; then why does he send you something that's worth so much more?"

Janet folded her arms in a triumph of silence. For a long time Sally could frame no reply. It had seemed, only an hour before, that she would have been so willing to seize at any straw which the tide of affairs should bring her, and now that the solid branch had floated to her reach, she could not find the confidence to throw her whole weight upon it. It was the letter that thwarted her; the letter that warned her from too great a hope.