“My life has been too terrible!” she thought. “I wish I was dead. I have been through too much. It is monstrous, and I cannot stand it. I do not want to die, but I wish I was dead.”
There was a discreet knock on the door.
“Come in,” she said, in a calm, resigned, cheerful voice. The sound had recalled her with the swiftness of a miracle to the unconquerable dignity of human pride.
Mr. Till Boldero entered.
“I should like you to come downstairs and drink a cup of tea,” he said. He was a marvel of tact and good nature. “My wife is unfortunately not here, and the house is rather at sixes and sevens; but I have sent out for some tea.”
She followed him downstairs into the parlour. He poured out a cup of tea.
“I was forgetting,” she said. “I am forbidden tea. I mustn’t drink it.”
She looked at the cup, tremendously tempted. She longed for tea. An occasional transgression could not harm her. But no! She would not drink it.
“Then what can I get you?”
“If I could have just milk and water,” she said meekly.
Mr. Boldero emptied the cup into the slop basin, and began to fill it again.
“Did he tell you anything?” she asked, after a considerable silence.
“Nothing,” said Mr. Boldero in his low, soothing tones. “Nothing except that he had come from Liverpool. Judging from his shoes I should say he must have walked a good bit of the way.”
“At his age!” murmured Sophia, touched.
“Yes,” sighed Mr. Boldero. “He must have been in great straits. You know, he could scarcely talk at all. By the way, here are his clothes. I have had them put aside.”
Sophia saw a small pile of clothes on a chair. She examined the suit, which was still damp, and its woeful shabbiness pained her. The linen collar was nearly black, its stud of bone. As for the boots, she had noticed such boots on the feet of tramps. She wept now. These were the clothes of him who had once been a dandy living at the rate of fifty pounds a week.
“No luggage or anything, of course?” she muttered.
“No,” said Mr. Boldero. “In the pockets there was nothing whatever but this.”
He went to the mantelpiece and picked up a cheap, cracked letter case, which Sophia opened. In it were a visiting card—“Señorita Clemenzia Borja”—and a bill-head of the Hotel of the Holy Spirit, Concepción del Uruguay, on the back of which a lot of figures had been scrawled.
“One would suppose,” said Mr. Boldero, “that he had come from South America.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing.”
Gerald’s soul had not been compelled to abandon much in the haste of its flight.
A servant announced that Mrs. Scales’s friends were waiting for her outside in the motorcar. Sophia glanced at Mr. Till Boldero with an exacerbated anxiety on her face.
“Surely they don’t expect me to go back with them tonight!” she said. “And look at all there is to be done!”
Mr. Till Boldero’s kindness was then redoubled. “You can do nothing for him now,” he said. “Tell me your wishes about the funeral. I will arrange everything. Go back to your sister tonight. She will be nervous about you. And return tomorrow or the day after. … No! It’s no trouble, I assure you!”
She yielded.
Thus towards eight o’clock, when Sophia had eaten a little under Mr. Boldero’s superintendence, and the pawnshop was shut up, the motorcar started again for Bursley, Lily Holl being beside her lover and Sophia alone in the body of the car. Sophia had told them nothing of the nature of her mission. She was incapable of talking to them. They saw that she was in a condition of serious mental disturbance. Under cover of the noise of the car, Lily said to Dick that she was sure Mrs. Scales was ill, and Dick, putting his lips together, replied that he meant to be in King Street at nine-thirty at the latest. From time to time Lily surreptitiously glanced at Sophia—a glance of apprehensive inspection, or smiled at her silently; and Sophia vaguely responded to the smile.
In half an hour they had escaped from the ring of Manchester and were on the county roads of Cheshire, polished, flat, sinuous. It was the season of the year when there is no night—only daylight and twilight; when the last silver of dusk remains obstinately visible for hours. And in the open country, under the melancholy arch of evening, the sadness of the earth seemed to possess Sophia anew. Only then did she realize the intensity of the ordeal through which she was passing.
To the south of Congleton one of the tyres softened, immediately after Dick had lighted his lamps. He stopped the car and got down again. They were two miles Astbury, the nearest village. He had just, with the resignation of experience, reached for the tool-bag, when Lily exclaimed: “Is she asleep, or what?” Sophia was not asleep, but she was apparently not conscious.
It was a difficult and a trying situation for two lovers. Their voices changed momentarily to the tone of alarm and consternation, and then grew firm again. Sophia showed life but not reason. Lily could feel the poor old lady’s heart.
“Well, there’s nothing for it!” said Dick, briefly, when all their efforts failed to rouse her.
“What—shall you do?”
“Go straight home as quick as I can on three tyres. We must get her over to this side, and you must hold her. Like that we shall keep the weight off the other side.”
He pitched back the tool-bag into its box. Lily admired his decision.
It was in this order, no longer under the spell of the changing beauty of nocturnal landscapes, that they finished the journey. Constance had opened the door before the car came to a stop
