and I should have had her safe. But it’s just like my luck. Do you know that this is the third time I’ve been engaged to be married?—no, by Jove, the fourth! And every time the girl has got out of it at the last moment. What an unlucky beast I am! A girl who was positively my ideal! I haven’t even a photograph of her to show you; but you’d be astonished at her face. Why, in the devil’s name, did I let her go to Birmingham?’
The visitors had risen. They felt uncomfortable, for it seemed as if Whelpdale might find vent for his distress in tears.
‘We had better leave you,’ suggested Biffen. ‘It’s very hard—it is indeed.’
‘Look here! Read the letter for yourselves! Do!’
They declined, and begged him not to insist.
‘But I want you to see what kind of girl she is. It isn’t a case of farcical deceiving—not a bit of it! She implores me to forgive her, and blames herself no end. Just my luck! The third— no, the fourth time, by Jove! Never was such an unlucky fellow with women. It’s because I’m so damnably poor; that’s it, of course!’
Reardon and his companion succeeded at length in getting away, though not till they had heard the virtues and beauty of the vanished girl described again and again in much detail. Both were in a state of depression as they left the house.
‘What think you of this story?’ asked Biffen. ‘Is this possible in a woman of any merit?’
‘Anything is possible in a woman,’ Reardon replied, harshly.
They walked in silence as far as Portland Road Station. There, with an assurance that he would come to a garret-supper before leaving London, Reardon parted from his friend and turned westward.
As soon as he had entered, Amy’s voice called to him:
‘Here’s a letter from Jedwood, Edwin!’
He stepped into the study.
‘It came just after you went out, and it has been all I could do to resist the temptation to open it.’
‘Why shouldn’t you have opened it?’ said her husband, carelessly.
He tried to do so himself, but his shaking hand thwarted him at first. Succeeding at length, he found a letter in the publisher’s own writing, and the first word that caught his attention was ‘regret.’ With an angry effort to command himself he ran through the communication, then held it out to Amy.
She read, and her countenance fell. Mr Jedwood regretted that the story offered to him did not seem likely to please that particular public to whom his series of one-volume novels made appeal. He hoped it would be understood that, in declining, he by no means expressed an adverse judgment on the story itself &c.
‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ said Reardon. ‘I believe he is quite right. The thing is too empty to please the better kind of readers, yet not vulgar enough to please the worse.’
‘But you’ll try someone else?’
‘I don’t think it’s much use.’
They sat opposite each other, and kept silence. Jedwood’s letter slipped from Amy’s lap to the ground.
‘So,’ said Reardon, presently, ‘I don’t see how our plan is to be carried out.’
‘Oh, it must be!’
‘But how?’
‘You’ll get seven or eight pounds from The Wayside. And—hadn’t we better sell the furniture, instead of—’
His look checked her.
‘It seems to me, Amy, that your one desire is to get away from me, on whatever terms.’
‘Don’t begin that over again!’ she exclaimed, fretfully. ‘If you don’t believe what I say—’
They were both in a state of intolerable nervous tension. Their voices quivered, and their eyes had an unnatural brightness.
‘If we sell the furniture,’ pursued Reardon, ‘that means you’ll never come back to me. You wish to save yourself and the child from the hard life that seems to be before us.’
‘Yes, I do; but not by deserting you. I want you to go and work for us all, so that we may live more happily before long. Oh, how wretched this is!’
She burst into hysterical weeping. But Reardon, instead of attempting to soothe her, went into the next room, where he sat for a long time in the dark. When he returned Amy was calm again; her face expressed a cold misery.
‘Where did you go this morning?’ he asked, as if wishing to talk of common things.
‘I told you. I went to buy those things for Willie.’
‘Oh yes.’
There was a silence.
‘Biffen passed you in Tottenham Court Road,’ he added.
‘I didn’t see him.’
‘No; he said you didn’t.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Amy, ‘it was just when I was speaking to Mr Milvain.’
