The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Papers/Chapter 8
VIII
The first thing, on the part of our friends—after each interlocutor, producing a penny, had plunged into the unfolded "Latest"—was this very evidence of their dispensing with their companion's further attendance on their agitated state, and all the more that Bight was to have still, in spite of agitation, his function with him to accomplish: a result much assisted by the insufflation of wind into Mr. Marshal's sails constituted by the fact before them. With Beadel publicly dead this gentleman's opportunity, on the terms just arranged, opened out; it was quite as if they had seen him, then and there, step, with a kind of spiritual splash, into the empty seat of the boat so launched, scarcely even taking time to master the essentials before he gave himself to the breeze. The essentials indeed he was, by their understanding, to receive in full from Bight at their earliest leisure; but nothing could so vividly have marked his confidence in the young man as the promptness with which he appeared now ready to leave him to his inspiration. The news, moreover, as yet, was the rich, grim fact—a sharp flare from an Agency, lighting into blood-colour the locked room, finally, with the police present, forced open, of the first hotel at Frankfort-on-the-Oder; but there was enough of it, clearly, to bear scrutiny, the scrutiny represented in our young couple by the act of perusal prolonged, intensified, repeated, so repeated that it was exactly perhaps with this suggestion of doubt that poor Mr. Marshal had even also a little lost patience. He vanished, at any rate, while his supporters, still planted in the side-street into which they had lately issued, stood extinguished, as to any facial communion, behind the array of printed columns. It was only after he had gone that, whether aware or not, the others lowered, on either side, the absorbing page and knew that their eyes had met. A remarkable thing, for Maud Blandy, then happened, a thing quite as remarkable at least as poor Beadel's suicide, which we recall her having so considerably discounted.
Present as they thus were at the tragedy, present in far Frankfort just where they stood, by the door of their stale pothouse and in the thick of London air, the logic of her situation, she was sharply conscious, would have been an immediate rupture with Bight. He was scared at what he had done—he looked his scare so straight out at her that she might almost have seen in it the dismay of his question of how far his responsibility, given the facts, might, if pried into, be held—and not only at the judgment-seat of mere morals—to reach. The dismay was to that degree illuminating that she had had from him no such avowal of responsibility as this amounted to, and the limit to any laxity on her own side had therefore not been set for her with any such sharpness. It put her at last in the right, his scare—quite richly in the right; and as that was naturally but where she had waited to find herself everything that now silently passed between them had the merit, if it had none other, of simplifying. Their hour had struck, the hour after which she was definitely not to have forgiven him. Yet what occurred, as I say, was that, if, at the end of five minutes, she had moved much further, it proved to be, in spite of logic, not in the sense away from him, but in the sense nearer. He showed to her, at these strange moments, as blood-stained and literally hunted; the yell of the hawkers, repeated and echoing round them, was like a cry for his life; and there was in particular a minute during which, gazing down into the roused Strand, all equipped both with mob and with constables, she asked herself whether she had best get off with him through the crowd, where they would be least noticed, or get him away through quiet Covent Garden, empty at that hour, but with policemen to watch a furtive couple, and with the news, more bawled at their heels in the stillness, acquiring the sound of the very voice of justice. It was this last sudden terror that presently determined her, and determined with it an impulse of protection that had somehow to do with pity without having to do with tenderness. It settled, at all events, the question of leaving him; she couldn't leave him there and so; she must see at least what would have come of his own sense of the shock.
The way he took it, the shock, gave her afresh the measure of how perversely he had played with Marshal—of how he had tried so, on the very edge of his predicament, to cheat his fears and beguile his want of ease. He had insisted to his victim on the truth he had now to reckon with, but had insisted only because he didn't believe it. Beadel, by that attitude, was but lying low; so that he would have no promise really to redeem. At present he had one, indeed, and Maud could ask herself if the redemption of it, with the leading of their wretched friend a further fantastic dance, would be what he depended on to drug the pain of remorse. By the time she had covered as much ground as this, however, she had also, standing before him, taken his special out of his hand and, folding it up carefully with her own and smoothing it down, packed the two together into such a small tight ball as she might toss to a distance without the air, which she dreaded, of having, by any looser proceeding, disowned or evaded the news. Howard Bight, help-less and passive, putting on the matter no governed face, let her do with him as she liked, let her, for the first time in their acquaintance, draw his hand into her arm as if he were an invalid or as if she were a snare. She took with him, thus guided and sustained, their second plunge; led him, with decision, straight to where their shock was shared and amplified, pushed her way, guarding him, across the dense thoroughfare and through the great westward current which fairly seemed to meet and challenge them, and then, by reaching Waterloo Bridge with him and descending the granite steps, set him down at last on the Embankment. It was a fact, none the less, that she had in her eyes, all the while, and too strangely for speech, the vision of the scene in the little German city: the smashed door, the exposed horror, the wondering, in sensible group, the English gentleman, in the disordered room, driven to bay among the scattered personal objects that only too floridly announced and emblazoned him, and several of which the Papers were already naming—the poor English gentleman, hunted and hiding, done to death by the thing he yet, for so long, always would have, and stretched on the floor with his beautiful little revolver still in his hand and the effusion of his blood, from a wound taken, with rare resolution, full in the face, extraordinary and dreadful. She went on with her friend, eastward and beside the river, and it was as if they both, for that matter, had, in their silence, the dire material vision. Maud Blandy, however, presently stopped short—one of the connections of the picture so brought her to a stand. It had come over her, with a force she couldn't check, that the catastrophe itself would have been, with all the unfathomed that yet clung to it, just the thing for her companion's professional hand; so that, queerly but absolutely, while she looked at him again in reprobation and pity, it was as much as she could do not to feel it for him as something missed, not to wish he might have been there to snatch his chance, and not, above all, to betray to him this reflection. It had really risen to her lips—"Why aren't you, old man, on the spot?" and indeed the question, had it broken forth, might well have sounded as a provocation to him to start without delay. Such was the effect, in poor Maud, for the moment, of the habit, so confirmed in her, of seeing time marked only by the dial of the Papers. She had admired in Bight the true journalist that she herself was so clearly not—though it was also not what she had most admired in him; and she might have felt, at this instant, the charm of putting true journalism to the proof. She might have been on the point of saying: "Real business, you know, would be for you to start now, just as you are, before anyone else, sure as you can so easily be of having the pull"; and she might, after a moment, while they paused, have been looking back, through the river-mist, for a sign of the hour, at the blurred face of Big Ben. That she grazed this danger yet avoided it was partly the result in truth of her seeing for herself quickly enough that the last thing Bight could just then have thought of, even under provocation of the most positive order, was the chance thus failing him, or the train, the boat, the advantage, that the true journalist wouldn't have missed. He quite, under her eyes, while they stood together, ceased to be the true journalist; she saw him, as she felt, put off the character as definitely as she might have seen him remove his coat, his hat, or the contents of his pockets, in order to lay them on the parapet before jumping into the river. Wonderful was the difference that this transformation, marked by no word and supported by no sign, made in the man she had hitherto known. Nothing, again, could have so expressed for her his continued inward dismay. It was as if, for that matter, she couldn't have asked him a question without adding to it; and she didn't wish to add to it, since she was by this time more fully aware that she wished to be generous. When she at last uttered other words it was precisely so that she mightn't press him.
"I think of her—poor thing: that's what it makes me do. I think of her there at this moment—just out of the 'Line'—with this stuff shrieked at her windows." With which, having so at once contained and relieved herself, she caused him to walk on.
"Are you talking of Mrs. Chorner?" he after a moment asked. And then, when he had had her quick "Of course—of who else?" he said what she didn't expect. "Naturally one thinks of her. But she has herself to blame. I mean she drove him———" What he meant, however, Bight suddenly dropped, taken as he was with another idea, which had brought them the next minute to a halt. "Mightn't you, by the way, see her?"
"See her now———?"
"'Now' or never—for the good of it. Now's just your time."
"But how can it be hers, in the very midst———?"
"Because it's in the very midst. She'll tell you things to-night that she'll never tell again. To-night she'll be great."
Maud gaped almost wildly. "You want me, at such an hour, to call———?"
"And send up your card with the word—oh, of course the right one!—on it."
"What do you suggest," Maud asked, "as the right one?"
"Well, 'The world wants you'—that usually does. I've seldom known it, even in deeper distress than is, after all, here supposable, to fail. Try it, at any rate."
The girl, strangely touched, intensely wondered. "Demand of her, you mean, to let me explain for her?"
"There you are. You catch on. Write that—if you like—'Let me explain.' She'll want to explain."
Maud wondered at him more—he had somehow so turned the tables on her. "But she doesn't. It's exactly what she doesn't; she never has. And that he, poor wretch, was always wanting to———"
"Was precisely what made her hold off? I grant it." He had waked up. "But that was before she had killed him. Trust me, she'll chatter now."
This, for his companion, simply forced it out. "It wasn't she who killed him. That, my dear, you know."
"You mean it was I who did? Well then, my child, interview me." And, with his hands in his pockets and his idea apparently genuine, he smiled at her, by the grey river and under the high lamps, with an effect strange and suggestive. "That would be a go!"
"You mean"—she jumped at it—"you'll tell me what you know?"
"Yes, and even what I've done! But—if you'll take it so—for the Papers. Oh, for the Papers only!"
She stared. "You mean you want me to get it in———?"
"I don't 'want' you to do anything, but I'm ready to help you, ready to get it in for you, like a shot, myself, if it's a thing you yourself want."
"A thing I want—to give you away?"
"Oh," he laughed, "I'm just now worth giving! You'd really do it, you know. And, to help you, here I am. It would be for you—only judge!—a leg up."
It would indeed, she really saw; somehow, on the spot, she believed it. But his surrender made her tremble. It wasn't a joke—she could give him away; or rather she could sell him for money. Money, thus, was what he offered her, or the value of money, which was the same; it was what he wanted her to have. She was conscious already, however, that she could have it only as he offered it, and she said therefore, but halfheartedly, "I'll keep your secret."
He looked at her more gravely. "Ah, as a secret I can't give it." Then he hesitated. "I'll get you a hundred pounds for it."
"Why don't you," she asked, "get them for yourself?"
"Because I don't care for myself. I care only for you."
She waited again. "You mean for my taking you?" And then as he but looked at her: "How should I take you if I had dealt with you that way?"
"What do I lose by it," he said, "if, by our understanding of the other day, since things have so turned out, you're not to take me at all? So, at least, on my proposal, you get something else."
"And what," Maud returned, "do you get?"
"I don't 'get'; I lose. I have lost. So I don't matter." The eyes with which she covered him at this might have signified either that he didn't satisfy her or that his last word—as his word—rather imposed itself. Whether or no, at all events, she decided that he still did matter. She presently moved again, and they walked some minutes more. He had made her tremble, and she continued to tremble. So unlike anything that had ever come to her was, if seriously viewed, his proposal. The quality of it, while she walked, grew intenser with each step. It struck her as, when one came to look at it, unlike any offer any man could ever have made or any woman ever have received; and it began accordingly, on the instant, to affect her as almost inconceivably romantic, absolutely, in a manner, and quite out of the blue, dramatic; immeasurably more so, for example, than the sort of thing she had come out to hear in the afternoon—the sort of thing that was already so far away. If he was joking it was poor, but if he was serious it was, properly, sublime. And he wasn't joking. He was, however, after an interval, talking again, though, trembling still, she had not been attentive; so that she was unconscious of what he had said until she heard him once more sound Mrs. Chorner's name. "If you don't, you know, someone else will, and someone much worse. You told me she likes you." She had at first no answer for him, but it presently made her stop again. It was beautiful, if she would, but it was odd—this pressure for her to push at the very hour he himself had renounced pushing. A part of the whole sublimity of his attitude, so far as she was concerned, it clearly was; since, obviously, he was not now to profit by anything she might do. She seemed to see that, as the last service he could render, he wished to launch her and leave her. And that came out the more as he kept it up. "If she likes you, you know, she really wants you. Go to her as a friend."
"And bruit her abroad as one?" Maud Blandy asked.
"Oh, as a friend from the Papers—from them and for them, and with just your half-hour to give her before you rush back to them. Take it even—oh, you can safely"—the young man developed—"a little high with her. That's the way—the real way." And he spoke the next moment as if almost losing his patience. "You ought by this time, you know, to understand."
There was something in her mind that it still charmed—his mastery of the horrid art. He could see, always, the superior way, and it was as if, in spite of herself, she were getting the truth from him. Only she didn't want the truth—at least not that one. "And if she simply, for my impudence, chucks me out of window? A short way is easy for them, you know, when one doesn't scream or kick, or hang on to the furniture or the banisters. And I usually, you see"—she said it pensively—"don't. I've always, from the first, had my retreat prepared for any occasion, and flattered myself that, whatever hand I might, or mightn't, become at getting in, no one would ever be able so beautifully to get out. Like a flash, simply. And if she does, as I say, chuck me, it's you who fall to the ground."
He listened to her without expression, only saying "If you feel for her, as you insist, it's your duty." And then later, as if he had made an impression, "Your duty, I mean, to try. I admit, if you will, that there's a risk, though I don't, with my experience, feel it. Nothing venture, at any rate, nothing have; and it's all, isn't it? at the worst, in the day's work. There's but one thing you can go on, but it's enough. The greatest probability."
She resisted, but she was taking it in. "The probability that she will throw herself on my neck?"
"It will be either one thing or the other," he went on as if he had not heard her. "She'll not receive her, or she will. But if she does your fortune's made, and you'll be able to look higher than the mere common form of donkey." She recognised the reference to Marshal, but that was a thing she needn't mind now, and he had already continued. "She'll keep nothing back. And you mustn't either."
"Oh, won't I?" Maud murmured.
"Then you'll break faith with her."
And, as if to emphasise it, he went on, though without leaving her an infinite time to decide, for he looked at his watch as they proceeded, and when they came, in their spacious walk, abreast of another issue, where the breadth of the avenue, the expanses of stone, the stretch of the river, the dimness of the distance, seemed to isolate them, he appeared, by renewing their halt and looking up afresh toward the town, to desire to speed her on her way. Many things meanwhile had worked within her, but it was not till she had kept him on past the Temple Station of the Underground that she fairly faced her opportunity. Even then too there were still other things, under the assault of which she dropped, for the moment, Mrs. Chorner. "Did you really," she asked, "believe he'd turn up alive?"
With his hands in his pockets he continued to gloom at her. "Up there, just now, with Marshal—what did you take me as believing?"
"I gave you up. And I do give you. You're beyond me. Only," she added, "I seem to have made you out since then as really staggered. Though I don't say it," she ended, "to bear hard upon you."
"Don't bear hard," said Howard Bight very simply.
It moved her, for all she could have said; so that she had for a moment to wonder if it were bearing hard to mention some of features of the rest of her thought. If she was to have him, certainly, it couldn't be without knowing, as she said to herself, something—something she might perhaps mitigate a little the solitude of his penance by possessing. "There were moments when I even imagined that, up to a certain point, you were still in communication with him. Then I seemed to see that you lost touch—though you braved it out for me; that you had begun to be really uneasy and were giving him up. I seemed to see," she pursued after an hesitation, "that it was coming home to you that you had worked him up too high—that you were feeling, if I may say it, that you had better have stopped short. I mean short of this."
"You may say it," Bight answered. "I had better."
She had looked at him a moment. "There was more of him than you believed."
"There was more of him. And now," Bight added, looking across the river, "here's all of him."
"Which you feel you have on your heart?"
"I don't know where I have it." He turned his eyes to her. "I must wait."
"For more facts?"
"Well," he returned after a pause, "hardly perhaps for 'more' if—with what we have—this is all. But I've things to think out. I must wait to see how I feel. I did nothing but what he wanted. But we were behind a bolting horse—whom neither of us could have stopped."
"And he," said Maud, "is the one dashed to pieces."
He had his grave eyes on her. "Would you like it to have been me?"
"Of course not. But you enjoyed it—the bolt; everything up to the smash. Then, with that ahead, you were nervous."
"I'm nervous still," said Howard Bight.
Even in his unexpected softness there was something that escaped her, and it made in her, just a little, for irritation. "What I mean is that you enjoyed his terror. That was what led you on."
"No doubt—it was so grand a case. But do you call charging me with it," the young man asked, "not bearing hard———?"
"No"—she pulled herself up—"it is. I don't charge you. Only I feel how little—about what has been, all the while, behind—you tell me. Nothing explains."
"Explains what?"
"Why, his act."
He gave a sign of impatience. "Isn't the explanation what I offered a moment ago to give you?"
It came, in effect, back to her. "For use?"
"For use."
"Only?"
"Only." It was sharp.
They stood a little, on this, face to face; at the end of which she turned away. "I'll go to Mrs. Chorner." And she was off while he called after her to take a cab. It was quite as if she were to come upon him, in his strange insistence, for the fare.