‘Then your marriage must be put off, of course?’ said Dora.
‘Well, I shouldn’t be surprised if that were found necessary,’ replied her brother caustically. He was able now to give vent to the feeling which in Marian’s presence was suppressed, partly out of consideration for her, and partly owing to her influence.
‘And shall we have to go back to our old lodgings again?’ inquired Maud.
Jasper gave no answer, but kicked a footstool savagely out of his way and paced the room.
‘Oh, do you think we need?’ said Dora, with unusual protest against economy.
‘Remember that it’s a matter for your own consideration,’ Jasper replied at length. ‘You are living on your own resources, you know.’
Maud glanced at her sister, but Dora was preoccupied.
‘Why do you prefer to stay here?’ Jasper asked abruptly of the younger girl.
‘It is so very much nicer,’ she replied with some embarrassment.
He bit the ends of his moustache, and his eyes glared at the impalpable thwarting force that to imagination seemed to fill the air about him.
‘A lesson against being over-hasty,’ he muttered, again kicking the footstool.
‘Did you make that considerate remark to Marian?’ asked Maud.
‘There would have been no harm if I had done. She knows that I shouldn’t have been such an ass as to talk of marriage without the prospect of something to live upon.’
‘I suppose she’s wretched?’ said Dora.
‘What else can you expect?’
‘And did you propose to release her from the burden of her engagement?’ Maud inquired.
‘It’s a confounded pity that you’re not rich, Maud,’ replied her brother with an involuntary laugh. ‘You would have a brilliant reputation for wit.’
He walked about and ejaculated splenetic phrases on the subject of his ill-luck.
‘We are here, and here we must stay,’ was the final expression of his mood. ‘I have only one superstition that I know of and that forbids me to take a step backward. If I went into poorer lodgings again I should feel it was inviting defeat. I shall stay as long as the position is tenable. Let us get on to Christmas, and then see how things look. Heavens! Suppose we had married, and after that lost the money!’
‘You would have been no worse off than plenty of literary men,’ said Dora.
‘Perhaps not. But as I have made up my mind to be considerably better off than most literary men that reflection wouldn’t console me much. Things are in statu quo, that’s all. I have to rely upon my own efforts. What’s the time? Half-past ten; I can get two hours’ work before going to bed.’
And nodding a good-night he left them.
When Marian entered the house and went upstairs, she was followed by her mother. On Mrs Yule’s countenance there was a new distress, she had been crying recently.
‘Have you seen him?’ the mother asked.
‘Yes. We have talked about it.’
‘What does he wish you to do, dear?’
‘There’s nothing to be done except wait.’
‘Father has been telling me something, Marian,’ said Mrs Yule after a long silence. ‘He says he is going to be blind. There’s something the matter with his eyes, and he went to see someone about it this afternoon. He’ll get worse and worse, until there has been an operation; and perhaps he’ll never be able to use his eyes properly again.’
The girl listened in an attitude of despair.
‘He has seen an oculist?—a really good doctor?’
‘He says he went to one of the best.’
‘And how did he speak to you?’
‘He doesn’t seem to care much what happens. He talked of going to the workhouse, and things like that. But it couldn’t ever come to that, could it, Marian? Wouldn’t somebody help him?’
‘There’s not much help to be expected in this world,’ answered the girl.
Physical weariness brought her a few hours of oblivion as soon as she had lain down, but her sleep came to an end in the early morning, when the pressure of evil dreams forced her back to consciousness of real sorrows and cares. A fog-veiled sky added its weight to crush her spirit; at the hour when she usually rose it was still all but as dark as midnight. Her mother’s voice at the door begged her to lie and rest until it grew lighter, and she willingly complied, feeling indeed scarcely capable of leaving her bed.
The thick black fog penetrated every corner of the house. It could be smelt and tasted. Such an atmosphere produces low-spirited languor even in the vigorous and hopeful; to those wasted by suffering it is the very reek of the bottomless pit, poisoning the soul. Her face colourless as the pillow, Marian lay neither sleeping nor awake, in blank extremity of woe; tears now and then ran down her cheeks, and at times her body was shaken with a throe such as might result from anguish of the torture chamber.
Midway in the morning, when it was still necessary to use artificial light, she went down to the sitting-room. The course of household life had been thrown into confusion by the disasters of the last day or two; Mrs Yule, who
