‘A young ladah?’ he repeated with some surprise, taking off his pince-nez.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ said a familiar voice and Gladys pushed past the maid and advanced into the middle of the room.
At the sight of her, Mr. Quarles felt a sudden spasm of apprehension. He got up. ‘You can go,’ he said with dignity to the maid. She went. ‘My dyah child!’ He took Gladys’s hand; she disengaged it. ‘But what a surprise!’
‘Ow, a pleasant surprise!’ she answered sarcastically. Emotion always resuscitated the cockney in her. She sat down, planting herself with force and determination in the chair. ‘Here I am,’ that determined down-sitting seemed to imply, ‘and here I stay’—perhaps even, ‘here I bloody well stay.’
‘Pleasant indeed,’ said Mr. Quarles mellifluously, for the sake of saying something. This was terrible, he was thinking. What could she want? And how should he get her out of the house again? But if necessary, he could say he’d sent for her to do some specially urgent typing for him. ‘But very unexpected,’ he added.
‘Very.’ She shut her mouth firmly and looked at him—with eyes that Mr. Quarles didn’t at all like the expression of—as if in expectation. Of what?
‘I’m delighted to see you, of course,’ he went on.
‘Ow, are you?’ She laughed dangerously.
Mr. Quarles looked at her and was afraid. He really hated the girl. He began to wonder why he had ever desired her. ‘Very glad,’ he repeated, with dignified emphasis. The great thing was to remain dignified, firmly superior. ‘But…’
‘But,’ she echoed.
‘Well, ryahlly, I think it was rather rash to come here.’
‘He thinks it rather rash,’ said Gladys, as though passing on the information to an invisible third party.
‘Not to say unnecessarah.’
‘Well, I’m the judge of that.’
‘After all, you know quite well that if you’d wanted to see me, you’d only got to write and I’d have come at once. So why run the risk of coming hyah?’ He waited. But Gladys did not answer, only looked at him with those hard green eyes of hers and that close-lipped smile that seemed to shut in enigmatically heaven only knew what dangerous thoughts and feelings. ‘I’m ryahlly annoyed with you.’ The manner of Mr. Quarles’s rebuke was dignified and impressive, but kind—always kind. ‘Yes, ryahily annoyed.’
Gladys threw back her head and uttered a shrill, short, hyena-like laugh.
Mr. Quarles was disconcerted. But he preserved his dignity. ‘You may laugh,’ he said. ‘But I speak syahriously. You had no right to come. You knew quite well how important it is that nothing should be suspected. Especially hyah—hyah, in my own house. You knew it.’
‘Yes, I knew it,’ Gladys repeated, nodding her head truculently. ‘And that’s exactly why I came.’ She was silent for a moment. But the pressure of her feelings made silence no longer bearable. ‘Because I knew you were frightened,’ she went on, ‘frightened that people might find out what you were reelly like. You dirty old swine!’ And suddenly losing all control of her fury, she sprang to her feet and advanced on Mr. Quarles so menacingly, that he recoiled a step. But her attack was only verbal. ‘Giving yourself such airs, as though you was the Prince of Wales. And then taking a girl to dinner at the Corner House. And blaming everybody else, worse than a parson, when you’re no better than a dirty old pig yourself. Yes, a dirty old pig, that’s what you are. Saying you loved me, indeed! I know what that sort of love is. Why, a girl isn’t safe with you in a taxi. No, she isn’t. You filthy old beast! And then…’
‘Ryahlly, ryahily!’ Mr. Quarles had sufficiently recovered from his first shock of horrified surprise to be able to protest. This was terrible, unheard of. He felt himself being devastated, laid waste to, ravaged.
‘“Ryahlly, ryably,”’ she mimicked derisively. ‘And then not even taking a girl to a decent seat at the theatre. But w hen it was a question of your having a bit of fun in your way—oh, lord! Nasty fat old swine! And carrying on all the time like Rudolph Valentino, with your chatter about all the women that had been in love with you. With you! You just look at yourself in the glass. Like a red egg, that’s what you are.’
‘Too unseemlah!’
‘Talking about love with a face like that!’ she went on, more shrilly than ever. ‘An old swine like you! And then you only give a girl a rotten old watch and a pair of earrings, and the stones in them aren’t even good ones, because I asked a jeweller and he said they weren’t. And now, on top of everything I’m going to have a baby.’
‘A babah?’ repeated Mr. Quarles incredulously, but with a deeper and more dreadful sinking of apprehension. ‘Surely not a babah.’
‘Yes, a baby!’ Gladys shouted, stamping her foot. ‘Can’t you hear what I say, you old idiot? A baby. That’s what I’ve come here about. And I won’t go away till…’
It was at this moment that Mrs. Quarles walked in through the French window from the garden. She had been having a talk with Marjorie at the cottage and had come to tell Sidney that she had asked the two young people to dinner that evening.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, halting on the threshold.
There was a moment’s silence. Then, addressing herself this time to Mrs. Quarles, Gladys began again with uncontrollable fury. Five minutes later she was no less uncontrollably sobbing and Mrs. Quarles was trying to console her. Sidney took the opportunity to sneak out of the room. When the gong sounded for lunch, he sent down word to say that he was feeling very ill and would they please send up two lightly boiled eggs, some toast and butter, and a little stewed fruit.
Meanwhile in the study Mrs. Quarles had hung solicitously over Gladys’s chair. ‘It’s all right,’ she kept repeating, patting the girl’s shoulder, ‘It’s all right. You mustn’t cry.’ Poor girl! she was thinking. And what a dreadful scent! And how could Sidney? And again, poor girl, poor girl! ‘Don’t cry. Try to be brave. It’ll be all right.’
Gladys’s sobbing gradually subsided. Mrs. Quarles’s calm voice talked on consolingly. The girl listened. Then suddenly she jumped up. The face that confronted Mrs. Quarles was savagely derisive through the tear stains.
‘Ow, shut it!’ she said sarcastically, ‘shut it! What do you take me for? A baby? Talking like that! You think you can talk me quiet, do you? Talk me out of my rights. Talky talky; baby’s going to be good, isn’t she? But you’re mistaken, I tell you. You’re damned well mistaken. And you’ll know it soon enough, I can tell you.’
And with that she bounced out of the room into the garden and was gone.
CHAPTER XXXII
In the little house at the end of the mews Elinor was alone. Faint rumblings of far-away traffic caressed the warm silence. A bowl of her mother’s potpourri peopled the air for her with countless potential memories of childhood. She was arranging roses in a vase; huge white roses with petals of malleable porcelain, orange roses like whorls of congealed and perfumed flame. The chiming clock on the mantelpiece made a sudden and startling comment of eight notes and left the accorded vibrations to tingle mournfully away into nothingness, like music on a departing ship. Halfpast three. And at six she was expecting Everard. Expecting Everard for a cocktail, she was at pains to explain to herself, before he took her out to dinner and the play. Just an evening’s entertainment, like any other evening’s entertainment. She kept telling herself so, because she knew, underneath, she was prophetically certain, that the evening wouldn’t be in the least like other evenings, but cardinal, decisive. She would have to make up her mind, she would have to choose.
But she didn’t want to choose; that was why she tried to make herself believe that the evening was to be merely trivial and amusing. It was like covering a corpse with flowers. Mountains of flowers. But the corpse was always there, in spite of the concealing lilies. And a choice would have to be made, in spite of dinner at Kettner’s and the theatre. Sighing, she picked up the heavy vase in both hands and was just lifting it on to the mantelpiece, when there was a loud knock at the door. Elinor started so violently, that she almost dropped her burden. And the terror persisted, even when she had recovered from the first shock of surprise.
A knock at the door, when she was alone in the lonely house, always set her heart uncomfortably beating. The idea that there was somebody there, waiting, listening, a stranger, an enemy perhaps (for Elinor’s fancy was
