a long time to Johnnie Orgreave? Oh! D’you mean at the front-door? Why, it wasn’t half a minute! He happened to mention a piece of land down at Shawport that I had a sort of a notion of buying.”
“Buying? What for?” Her tone hardened.
“Well, supposing I had to build a new works?”
“You never told me anything about it.”
“I’ve only just begun to think of it myself. You see, if I’m to go in for lithography as it ought to be gone in for, I can’t possibly stay at the shop. I must have more room, and a lot more. And it would be cheaper to build than to rent.”
She stood up.
“Why go in more for lithography?”
“You can’t stand still in business. Must either go forward or go back.”
“It seems to me it’s very risky. I wondered what you were hiding from me.”
“My dear girl, I was not hiding anything from you,” he protested.
“Whose land is it?”
“It belongs to Tobias Hall’s estate.”
“Yes, and I’ve no doubt the Halls would be very glad to get rid of it. Who told you about it?”
“Johnnie.”
“Of course it would be a fine thing for him too.”
“But I’d asked him if he knew of any land going cheap.”
She shrugged her shoulders, and shrugged away the disinterestedness of all Orgreaves.
“Anyone could get the better of you,” she said.
He resented this estimate of himself as a good-natured simpleton. He assuredly did not want to quarrel, but he was obliged to say:
“Oh! Could they?”
An acerbity scarcely intentional somehow entered into his tone. As soon as he heard it he recognised the tone as the forerunner of altercations.
“Of course!” she insisted, superiorly, and then went on: “We’re all right as we are. We spend too much money, but I daresay we’re all right. If you go in for a lot of new things you may lose all we’ve got, and then where shall we be?”
In his heart he said to her:
“What’s it got to do with you? You manage your home, and I’ll manage my business! You know nothing at all about business. You’re the very antithesis of business. Whatever business you’ve ever had to do with you’ve ruined. You’ve no right to judge and no grounds for judgment. It’s odious of you to asperse any of the Orgreaves. They were always your best friends. I should never have met you if it hadn’t been for them. And where would you be now without me? Trying to run some wretched boarding-house and probably starving. Why do you assume that I’m a d——d fool? You always do. Let me tell you that I’m one of the most common-sense men in this town, and everybody knows it except you. Anyhow I was clever enough to get you out of a mess.... You knew I was hiding something from you, did you? I wish you wouldn’t talk such infernal rot. And moreover I won’t have you interfering in my business. Other wives don’t, and you shan’t. So let that be clearly understood.” In his heart he was very ill-used and very savage.
But he only said:
“Well, we shall see.”
She retorted:
“Naturally if you’ve made up your mind, there’s no more to be said.”
He broke out viciously:
“I’ve not made up my mind. Don’t I tell you I’ve only just begun to think about it?”
He was angry. And now that he actually was angry, he took an almost sensual pleasure in being angry. He had been angry before, though on a smaller scale, with less provocation, and he had sworn that he would never be angry again. But now that he was angry again, he gloomily and fiercely revelled in it.
Hilda silently folded up the shawl, and, putting it into a drawer of the wardrobe, shut the drawer with an irritatingly gentle click.... Click! He could have killed her for that click.... She seized a dressing-gown.
“I must just go and look at George,” she murmured, with cool, clear calmness,—the virtuous, anxious mother; not a trace of coquetry anywhere in her.
“What bosh!” he thought. “She knows perfectly well George’s door is bolted.”
Marriage was a startling affair. Who could have foretold this finish to the evening? Nothing had occurred ... nothing ... and yet everything. His plans were all awry. He could see naught but trouble.
She was away some time. When she returned, he was in bed, with his face averted. He heard her moving about.
“Will she, or won’t she, come and kiss me?” he thought.
She came and kissed him, but it was a meaningless kiss.
“Good-night,” she said, aloofly.
“‘Night.”
She slept. But he could not sleep. He kept thinking the same thought: “She’s no right whatever.... I must say I never bargained for this....” etc.
Chapter VII
The Truce
i
Nearly a week passed. Hilda, in the leisure of a woman of fashion after dinner, was at the piano in the drawing-room. She had not urgent stockings to mend, nor jam to make, nor careless wenches to overlook, nor food to buy, nor accounts to keep, nor a new dress to scheme out of an old one, nor to perform her duty to her neighbour. She had nothing to do. Like Edwin, she could not play the piano, but she had picked up a note here and a note there in the course of her life, and with much labour and many slow hesitations she could puzzle out a chord or a melody from the printed page. She was now exasperatingly spelling with her finger a fragment of melody from one of Dvorak’s “Legends,”—a fragment that had inhabited her mind since she first heard it, and that seemed to gather up and state all the sweet heart-breaking intolerable melancholy implicit in the romantic existence of that city on the map, Prague. On the previous day she had been a quarter of an hour identifying the unforgetable, indismissible fragment amid the multitude of notes. Now she had recognisably pieced its phrases together, and as her stiff finger stumbled through it, her ears heard it, once more; and she could not repeat it often enough. What she heard was not what she was playing but something finer,—her souvenir of what Tertius Ingpen had played; and something finer than that, something finer than the greatest artist could possibly play—magic!
It was in the nature of a miracle to her that she had been able to reproduce the souvenir in physical sound. She was proud of herself as a miracle-worker, and somewhat surprised. And at the same time she was abject because she “could not play the piano.” She thought that she would be ready to sacrifice many happinesses in order to be able to play as well as even George played, that she would exchange all her own gifts multiplied by a hundred in order to be able to play as Janet Orgreave played, and that to be a world-renowned pianist dominating immense audiences in European capitals must mean the summit of rapture and glory. (She had never listened to a world-renowned pianist.) Meanwhile, without the ennui and slavery of practice, she was enchanting herself; and she savoured her idleness, and thought of her young pretty servants at work, and her boy loose and at large, and her husband keeping her, and of the intensity of beautiful sorrow palpitating behind the mediæval façades of Prague. Had Ingpen overheard her, he might have demanded: “Who is making that infernal noise on the piano?”
Edwin came