Elsie stared at her and did not weep.
“Ought I to tell him, ’m?”
“Oh, yes, you must tell him. There’s no sense in hiding them things—especially as he’s a little better. He’s got to know. And he’d be very angry, and quite rightly, if he wasn’t told, and at once.”
“I’ll go and tell him.”
“Would you like me to come with you?”
“You’re very kind, ’m,” said Elsie, cunning even in disaster. “I can manage. He’s very peculiar, but I know how to manage him. There won’t be nothing to be done till tomorrow, anyway.”
She had another and a far more perilous secret to keep, that of Joe. Therefore she dared not admit a stranger to the house. Of course, soon she would have to admit strangers—but not tonight, not tonight! She must postpone evil.
Mrs. Belrose lifted her immense bulk and kissed Elsie, and then Elsie cried. Saying not a word more, she turned, opened the door, and passed through the shop, rapt, totally ignoring the servers and the quarter of a pound of cheese.
“Tomorrow,” she said to herself, “I shall tell her” (Mrs. Belrose) “all about Joe. She’ll understand.” The mere thought of Mrs. Belrose was a refuge for her. “But missis can’t be dead. It was only yesterday morning—”
“Leave me alone. Leave me!” breathed Henry Earlforward in a dismaying murmur when she gave him the news. She obeyed.
IX
The Kiss
That night Elsie sat in the parlour (as she still to herself called the dining room) by the gas-fire which she had lighted on her own responsibility. An act and a situation which a few days earlier, two days earlier, would have been inconceivable to her! But Joe’s clothes had refused to dry in the kitchen; the gas-ring there was incapable of drawing the water out of them in the damp weather. Now they were dry; some of them were folded on a chair; upon these were laid the braces which she had given to him on his birthday, and which evidently he had worn ever since. To Elsie now these soiled and frayed braces had a magic vital quality. They seemed, far more than the clothes, to have derived from him some of his individuality, to be a detached part of him; she was sewing a button on the lifeless old trousers, and she had taken the button, and the thimble, needle, and thread from Mrs. Earlforward’s cardboard sewing-box in the left-hand drawer of the sideboard. She was working with the tools of a dead lady. At moments this irked and frightened her; at other moments she thought that what must be must be, and that, anyhow, the clothes ought to be put in order; and she could not go upstairs and disturb Joe by searching for her own apparatus—which certainly did not comprise trouser buttons. She tried to be natural and not to look ahead. She would not, for instance, dwell upon the apparently insoluble problem of arranging a proper funeral for Mrs. Earlforward. How could she, the servant, do anything towards that? She dared not leave her patients. She knew nothing about the organization of funerals. She had never even been to a funeral. She had no knowledge of possible relatives of the Earlforwards.
“Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Not till tomorrow—all that!” she said doggedly.
But she failed to push away everything. In the midst of her great grief for the death of Mrs. Earlforward (a perfect woman and a martyr) the selfish thought of her own future haunted her and would not be dismissed. Would Joe ever again wear those clothes which she was mending? He had taken some Bovril (Mr. Earlforward also), but she could not persuade herself that he was really better. She was terror-struck by the varied possibilities attending his death. A dead man secretly in her bed! What a plight for her! She determined afresh to confide the secret of Joe to Mrs. Belrose tomorrow morning. Not that the mere inconveniences of death deeply troubled her. No! In truth they were naught. Or rather, if he died they would have absolutely no importance to her compared with the death itself. Having found Joe, was she to lose him again? She could not face such a prospect. …
And then Mr. Earlforward. She was beginning to be convinced that the master really was better. He had taken the Bovril. He had opened one or two of his letters. The shock of the news about Mrs. Earlforward, instead of shattering him to pieces, had strengthened him, morally if not physically. He might recover—he was an amazing man! And, of course, she desired him to recover. Could she wish anyone’s death? She could not be so cruel, so wicked! And yet, and yet, if he lived, she was his slave forever; she was a captive with no hope of escape. A slave, either bowed down by sorrow for the death of Joe, or fatally desolated by the eternal reflection that Joe was alive and she could not have him because of her promise to Mr. Earlforward! She saw no hope; she made no reserves in the interpretation of her vow to the master. She could not see that circumstances inevitably, if slowly, alter cases.
She yawned heavily in extreme exhaustion.
Then her ear caught a faint, cautious tapping below. All trembling she crept downstairs. Jerry was at the shop-door. In the turmoil of distress she had forgotten that she had commanded him to call for orders. She was glad to have someone to talk to for a little while, and she brought him into the office. She saw in front of her, on the opposite side of the desk, a young lad who had most surprisingly and touchingly put on his best clothes for important events. Also he had washed himself. Also he was smoking a cigarette.
Jerry, who was thin and pinched in the face, saw in front of him an ample and splendid young woman—not very young to him, for his notion of youthfulness was rather narrow,
