“Oh! Very well, very well,” said the doctor, frigid as usual, but not offended. Joe said no word, knowing that he must not meddle in such high matters of policy.
Scatterings, expostulations, reproofs on the stairs. Miss Raste entered, with the excited dog Jack. Her father had told her that if she saw no one familiar below she must mount two flights of stairs and knock at the door facing her at the top; but, in her eagerness, she had forgotten to knock. Miss Raste was growing in stature daily. Her legs were fabulously long, and it was said of her at home that in time she would be in a position to stoop and kiss the crown of her father’s head. To everyone’s surprise she impulsively rushed at Elsie with thin arms outstretched and kissed her. Elsie blushed, as well she might. Miss Raste had spoken to Elsie only once before, but out of the memory of Elsie’s face and that brief meeting she had constructed a lovely fairytale, and a chance word of her mother’s had set her turning it into reality. She had dreamed of having the adorable, fat, comfortable, kind Elsie for a servant in the house, and her parents were going to arrange the matter. For twenty-four hours she had been in a fever about it.
“Is she coming, papa?” the child demanded urgently.
“No, she can’t. She says she can’t cook, and so she won’t come.”
Miss Raste burst into tears. Her lank body shook with sobs. Everybody was grievously constrained. Nobody knew what to do, least of all the doctor. Jack stood still in front of the fire.
“Mummy would have taught you to cook,” Miss Raste spluttered, almost inarticulately. “Mummy’s awfully nice.”
Elsie’s sagacious scheme for her married life was dissipated in a moment. The scheme became absurd, impossible, inconceivable. Elsie was utterly defeated by the child’s affection, ardour, and sorrow. She felt nearly the same responsibility towards the child as towards Joe. She was the child’s forever. And she had kissed the child. Having kissed the child, could she be a Judas?
“Oh, then I’ll go and see Mrs. Raste,” said Elsie, half smiling and half crying.
This was indeed a very strange episode, upsetting as it did all optimistic theories about the reasonableness of human nature and the influence of logic over the springs of conduct. No one quite knew where he was. Dr. Raste was intensely delighted and proud, and yet felt that he ought to have a grievance. Joe was delighted, but egotistically. Elsie was both happy and sad, but rather more happy than sad. Miss Raste laughed with glee, while the tears still ran down her delicate cheeks. Jack barked once.
Not that Jack had that very mysterious intuitive comprehension of the moods of others which in the popular mind is usually attributed to dogs, children, and women. No! Jack had heard footsteps on the stairs. A tousled, white-sleeved man in a green apron entered.
“We’re ready for here now, miss,” he announced to Elsie.
And without waiting for permission he began rapidly to roll up the bedclothes in one vast bundle. Next he collected the crockery. The bedroom had ceased to be immune from the general sack.
“They didn’t have a lot of luck,” said Mr. Belrose to Elsie and Joe that night in the Steps at the locked door of T. T.’s. It was the decent, wizened little old fellow’s epitaph on Henry Earlforward and Violet. It was his apology for dropping the keys of T. T.’s into his pocket, and for the blaze of electricity from his old shop, and for the forlorn darkness of T. T.’s, and for the fact that he was prospering while others were dead. He did not attribute the fate of the Earlforwards to Henry’s formidable character. He could not think scientifically, and even had he been able to do so good nature would have prevented him. And even if he had attempted to do so he might have thought wrong. The affair, like all affairs of destiny, was excessively complex.
Elsie, for her part, laid much less stress than Mr. Belrose on luck. “With a gentleman like he was,” she thought, meaning Henry Earlforward, “something was bound to happen sooner or later.” She held Mr. Earlforward responsible for her mistress’s death, but her notions of the value of evidence were somewhat crude. And, similarly, she held herself responsible for her master’s death. She had noticed that he had never been the same since the orgy of her wedding-cake, and she had a terrible suspicion that immoderate wedding-cake caused cancer. Thus she added one more to the uncounted theories of the origin of cancer, and nobody yet knows enough of the subject to be able to disprove Elsie’s theory. However, that night Elsie, with the sensations of a homicide, the ruin of a home and family behind her,
