Hilda Lessways Part 24

"Me!" she answered, in a harsh tone which was the expression of her dismay.

The deed was done, irretrievably. In her bedroom she had said that she would try to speak with him, and lo! they were face to face, in the dark, in secret! Her terror was now, at any rate, desperately calm. She had plunged; she was falling into the deep sea; she was hopelessly cut off from the past.

"Oh!" came the uncertain voice weakly. "Did you want me? Did anyone want me?"

She heard the door being closed behind him.

She told him, with peculiar curtness, how she had seen him from her window, and how she wished to ask him an important question.

"I dare say you think it's very queer of me," she added.

"Not at all," he said, with an insincerity that annoyed her.

"Yes, you do!" she sharply insisted. "But I want to know"--what did she want to know?--"I want to know--did you mean it when you said--you know, at supper--that there's no virtue in believing?"

He stammered: "Did I say there was no virtue in believing?"

She cried out, irritated: "Of course you did! Do you mean to say you can say a thing like that and then forget about it? If it's true, it's one of the most wonderful things that were ever said. And that's why I wanted to know if you meant it, of whether you were only saying it because it sounded clever."

She stopped momentarily, wondering why she was thus implying an untruth; for the fact was that she had never doubted that he had been in earnest.

"That's what they're always doing in that house, you know--being clever!" she went on, in a tone apparently inimical to 'that house.'

"Yes," came the voice. "I meant it. Why?"

And the voice was so simple and so sincere that it pierced straight to her heart and changed her secret mood swiftly to the religious, so that she really was occupied by the thoughts with which, a moment previously, she had only pretended to be occupied; and the splendour of the revelation was renewed. Nevertheless, some impulse, perverse or defensive, compelled her to a.s.sume a doubt of his a.s.surance. She suspected that, had she not adopted this tactic, she might have melted before him in grat.i.tude.

"You did?" she murmured.

She thanked him, after that, rather coldly; and they talked a little about the mere worry of these religious questions. He protested that they never worried him, and reaffirmed his original proposition.

"I hope you are right," she said softly, in a thrilled voice. She was thinking that this was the most wonderful, miraculous experience that she had ever had.

V

Silence.

"Now," she thought, "I must go back." Inwardly she gave a delicious sigh.

But just as she was about to take her prim leave, the scarce-discerned figure of her companion stepped out into the garden.

"By Jove!" said Edwin Clayhanger. "It's beginning to rain, I do believe."

The wind blew, and she felt rain on her cheek. Clayhanger advised her to stand against the other wall of the porch for better protection. She obeyed. He re-entered the porch, but was still exposed to the rain. She called him to her side. Already he was so close that she could have touched his shoulder by outstretching her arm.

"Oh! I'm all right!" he said lightly, and did not move.

"You needn't be afraid of me!" She was hurt that he had refused her invitation to approach her. The next instant she would have given her tongue not to have uttered those words. But she was in such a tingling state of extreme sensitiveness as rendered it impossible for her to exercise a normal self-control.

Scarcely conscious of what she did, she asked him the time. He struck a match to look at his watch. The wind blew the match out, but she saw his wistful face, with his disordered hair under the hat. It had the quality of a vision.

He offered to get a light in the house, but abruptly she said good night.

Then they were shaking hands--she knew not how or why. She could not loose his hand. She thought: "Never have I held a hand so honest as this hand." At last she dropped it. They stood silent while a trap rattled up Trafalgar Road. It was as if she was bound to remain moveless until the sounds of the trap had died away.

She walked proudly out into the rain. He called to her: "I say, Miss Lessways!" But she did not stop.

In a minute she was back again in Lane End House.

"That you?" Tom's voice from the breakfast-room!

"Yes," she answered clearly. "I've put the chain on. Good night."

"Good night. Thanks."

She ascended the stairs, smiling to herself, with the raindrops fresh on her cheek. In her mind were no distinct thoughts, either concerning the non-virtue of belief, or the new epoch, or Edwin Clayhanger, or even the strangeness of her behaviour. But all her being vibrated to the mysterious and beautiful romance of existence.

CHAPTER VII THE NEXT MEETING

I

For several days the town of Bursley was to Hilda simply a place made perilous and redoubtable by the apprehension of meeting Edwin Clayhanger accidentally in the streets thereof. And the burden of her meditations was: "What can he have thought of me?" She had said nothing to anybody of the deliberately-sought adventure in the garden. And with the strangest ingenuous confidence she a.s.sumed that Edwin Clayhanger, too, would keep an absolute silence about it. She had therefore naught to fear, except in the privacy of his own mind. She did not blame herself--it never occurred to her to do so--but she rather wondered at herself, inimically, prophesying that one day her impulsiveness would throw her into some serious difficulty. The memory of the night beautifully coloured her whole daily existence. In spite of her avoidance of the town, due to her dread of seeing Clayhanger, she was constantly thinking: "But this cannot continue for ever. One day I am bound to meet him again." And she seemed to be waiting for that day.

It came with inevitable quickness. The last day but one of June was appointed throughout the country for the celebration of the Centenary of Sunday Schools. Neither Hilda nor any of the Orgreave children had ever seen the inside of a Sunday School; and the tendency up at Lane End House was to condescend towards the festival as towards a rejoicing of the proletariat. But in face of the magnitude of the affair, looming more enormous as it approached, this att.i.tude could not be maintained.

The preparations for the Centenary filled newspapers and changed the physiognomy of towns. And on the morning of the ceremonial service, gloriously flattered by the sun, there was candid excitement at the breakfast-table of the Orgreaves. Mr. Orgreave regretted that pressure of work would prevent him from seeing the fun. Tom was going to see the fun at Hanbridge. Jimmie and Johnnie were going to see the fun, but they would not say where. The servants were going to see the fun. Charlie had returned to London. Alicia wanted to go and see the fun, but as she was flushed and feverish, Mrs. Orgreave forbade and decided to remain at home with Alicia. Otherwise, even Mrs. Orgreave would have gone to see the fun. Hilda and Janet apparently hesitated about going, but Mr.

Orgreave, pointing out that there could not under the most favourable circ.u.mstance be another Centenary of Sunday Schools for at least a hundred years, sarcastically urged them to set forth. The fact was, as Janet teasingly told him while she hung on his neck, that he wished to accentuate as much as possible his own martyrdom to industry. Were not all the shops and offices of the Five Towns closed? Did not every member of his family, save those detained by illness, attend the historic spectacle of the Centenary? He alone had sacrificed pleasure to work.

Thus Janet's loving, ironic smiles foretold, would the father of the brood discourse during the next few days.

II

Hilda and Janet accordingly went down a be-flagged and sunlit Trafalgar Road together. Janet was wearing still another white dress, and Hilda, to her marked relief, had abandoned black for a slate-coloured frock made by a dressmaker in Bleakridge. It was Mrs. Orgreave herself who had first counselled Hilda, if she hated black, as she said she did, to abandon black. The entire family chorus had approved.

The risk of encountering Edwin Clayhanger on that day of mult.i.tudes was surely infinitesimal. Nevertheless, in six minutes the improbable had occurred. At the corner of Trafalgar Road and Duck Square Janet, attracted by the sight of banners in the distance, turned to the left along Wedgwood Street and past the front of Clayhanger's shop.

Theoretically shops were closed, but one shutter of Clayhanger's was down, and in its place stood Edwin Clayhanger. Hilda felt her features stiffening into a sort of wilful and insincere hostility as she shook hands. Within the darkness of the shop she saw the figure of two dowdy women--doubtless the sisters of whom Janet had told her; they disappeared before Janet and Hilda entered.

"It has happened! I have seen him again!" Hilda said to herself as she sat in the shop listening to Janet and to Edwin Clayhanger. It appeared likely that Edwin Clayhanger would join them in the enterprise of witnessing the historic spectacle.

A few minutes later everybody was startled by the gay apparition of Osmond Orgreave swinging his cane. Curiosity had been too much for industriousness, and Osmond Orgreave had yielded himself to the general interest.

"Oh! Father!" cried Janet. "What a deceitful thing you are!"

"Only a day or two ago," Hilda was thinking, "I had never even heard of him. And his shop seemed so strange and romantic to me. And now I am sitting in his shop like an old friend. And n.o.body suspects that he and I have had a secret meeting!" The shop itself seemed to be important and prosperous.