Her lips parted. She panted lightly.
“You’ve heard me speak of Sybill Foster?”
Her voice came stammering, “N-no, Stephen. Did you?”
“Well, I didn’t mean to, till I knew it was all right. I only heard yesterday.”
“Heard what?”
“Why, that she’ll have me. Oh, Harriott—do you know what it’s like to be terribly happy?”
She knew. She had known just now, the moment before he told her. She sat there, stone-cold and stiff, listening to his raptures; listening to her own voice saying she was glad.
Ten years passed.
Harriott Leigh sat waiting in the drawing-room of a small house in Maida Vale. She had lived there ever since her father’s death two years before.
She was restless. She kept on looking at the clock to see if it was four, the hour that Oscar Wade had appointed. She was not sure that he would come, after she had sent him away yesterday.
She now asked herself, why, when she had sent him away yesterday, she had let him come to-day. Her motives were not altogether clear. If she really meant what she had said then, she oughtn’t to let him come to her again. Never again.
She had shown him plainly what she meant. She could see herself, sitting very straight in her chair, uplifted by a passionate integrity, while he stood before her, hanging his head, ashamed and beaten; she could feel again the throb in her voice as she kept on saying that she couldn’t, she couldn’t; he must see that she couldn’t; that no, nothing would make her change her mind; she couldn’t forget he had a wife; that he must think of Muriel.
To which he had answered savagely: “I needn’t. That’s all over. We only live together for the look of the thing.”
And she, serenely, with great dignity: “And for the look of the thing, Oscar, we must leave off seeing each other. Please go.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes. We must never see each other again.”
And he had gone then, ashamed and beaten.
She could see him, squaring his broad shoulders to meet the blow. And she was sorry for him. She told herself she had been unnecessarily hard. Why shouldn’t they see each other again, now he understood where they must draw the line? Until yesterday the line had never been very clearly drawn. To-day she meant to ask him to forget what he had said to her. Once it was forgotten, they could go on being friends as if nothing had happened.
It was four o’clock. Half-past. Five. She had finished tea and given him up when, between the half-hour and six o’clock, he came.
He came as he had come a dozen times, with his measured, deliberate, thoughtful tread, carrying himself well braced, with a sort of held-in arrogance, his great shoulders heaving. He was a man of about forty, broad and tall, lean-flanked and short-necked, his straight, handsome features showing small and even in the big square face and in the flush that swamped it. The close-clipped, reddish-brown moustache bristled forwards from the pushed-out upper lip. His small, flat eyes shone, reddish-brown, eager and animal.
She liked to think of him when he was not there, but always at the first sight of him she felt a slight shock. Physically, he was very far from her admired ideal. So different from George Waring and Stephen Philpotts.
He sat down, facing her.
There was an embarrassed silence, broken by Oscar Wade.
“Well, Harriott, you said I could come.” He seemed to be throwing the responsibility on her.
“So I suppose you’ve forgiven me,” he said.
“Oh, yes, Oscar, I’ve forgiven you.”
He said she’d better show it by coming to dine with him somewhere that evening.
She could give no reason to herself for going. She simply went.
He took her to a restaurant in Soho. Oscar Wade dined well, even extravagantly, giving each dish its importance. She liked his extravagance. He had none of the mean virtues.
It was over. His flushed, embarrassed silence told her what he was thinking. But when he had seen her home he left her at her garden gate. He had thought better of it.
She was not sure whether she were glad or sorry. She had had her moment of righteous exaltation and she had enjoyed it. But there was no joy in the weeks that followed it. She had given up Oscar Wade because she didn’t want him very much; and now she wanted him furiously, perversely, because she had given him up. Though he had no resemblance to her ideal, she couldn’t live without him.
She dined with him again and again, till she knew Schnebler’s Restaurant by heart, the white panelled walls picked out with gold; the white pillars, and the curling gold fronds of their capitals; the Turkey carpets, blue and crimson, soft under her feet; the thick crimson velvet cushions, that clung to her skirts; the glitter of silver and glass on the innumerable white circles of the tables. And the faces of the diners, red, white, pink, brown, grey and sallow, distorted and excited; the curled mouths that twisted as they ate; the convoluted electric bulbs pointing, pointing down at them, under the red, crinkled shades. All shimmering in a thick air that the red light stained as wine stains water.
And Oscar’s face, flushed with his dinner. Always, when he leaned back from the table and brooded in silence she knew what he was thinking. His heavy eyelids would lift; she would find his eyes fixed on hers, wondering, considering.
She knew now what the end would be. She thought of George Waring, and Stephen Philpotts, and of her life, cheated. She hadn’t chosen Oscar, she hadn’t really wanted him; but now he had forced himself on her she couldn’t afford to let him go. Since George died no man had loved her, no other man ever would. And she was sorry for him when she thought of him going from her, beaten and ashamed.
She was certain, before he was, of the end. Only she didn’t know when and where and how it would come. That was what Oscar knew.
It came at the close of one of their evenings when they had dined in a private sitting-room. He said he couldn’t stand the heat and noise of the public restaurant.
She went before him, up a steep, red-carpeted stair to a white door on the second landing.
From time to time they repeated the furtive, hidden adventure. Sometimes she met him in the room above Schnebler’s. Sometimes, when her maid was out, she received him at her house in Maida Vale. But that was dangerous, not to be risked too often.
Oscar declared himself unspeakably happy. Harriott was not quite sure. This was love, the thing she had never had, that she had dreamed of, hungered and thirsted for; but now she had it she was not satisfied. Always she looked for something just beyond it, some mystic, heavenly rapture, always beginning to come, that never came. There was something about Oscar that repelled her. But because she had taken him for her lover, she couldn’t bring herself to admit that it was a certain coarseness. She looked another way and pretended it wasn’t there. To justify herself, she fixed her mind on his good qualities, his generosity, his strength, the way he had built up his engineering business. She made him take her over his works and show her his great dynamos. She made him lend her the books he read. But always, when she tried to talk to him, he let her see that that wasn’t what she was there for.
“My dear girl, we haven’t time,” he said. “It’s waste of our priceless moments.”
She persisted. “There’s something wrong about it all if we can’t talk to each other.”
He was irritated. “Women never