Mrs. Marble, reentering from the kitchen, saw her husband reach out greedily for the glass on the table at his side, and swallow its contents in violent gulps. Then she knew that dear Will would be unapproachable for the rest of the evening, and she would not be able to have that pleasant chat with him about what Jim had done for them that she had been looking forward to all day. Mrs. Marble was rather disappointed.
III
Yet for some weeks Mr. Marble hesitated about changing those five-pound notes. He was of mixed character. When he had been a rat in a corner he had fought like one, desperately, to the last risk, but now he had escaped he thought of nothing except flight and covering his tracks.
And he was paying heavily enough for those few Treasury notes. That heart of his which had thumped so heavily on that stormy evening thumped just as heavily at other times now. He could not keep his mind from working out possible occurrences in the future, and some new morbid thought of the arrival of the police, instigated by the officials of Medland’s hotel, or of some unexpected inquiry by the Bank as to whence had come the money which had so suddenly come into his possession, would set his heart pounding away until he could only lean back in his chair and gasp. He would wake sweating in the night too, with the fevered blood running hot under his skin, as some fantastic possibility developed in his sleeping mind. Then he would writhe and toss in his bed, muttering faintly to himself, tortured with fears of the known and of the unknown. And sometimes, when he had been sleeping very badly, one or two horrible memories returned to him: memories of a pair of staring eyes, and of a boyish face, the mouth smeared with foam. That was the worst of all.
He was not even happy sitting alone in the dining-room at Malcolm Road, with a full bottle of his only friend beside him, and calm in the knowledge that no one was poking about in the garden. The whisky only made him think the more at first. It took a long time before he could stop his mind from thinking about what might happen, and he soon found the worst moments of all were those at the beginning of the evening, when the whisky only bit and did not deaden. At times the prospect so frightened him that he flinched from his preliminary torture, and would go through the evening without drinking at all, although every fibre of his body seemed to be shrieking for it. These were the times when he craved for the company of his wife and children; when he would encourage Annie to long monologues about how she had spent her day. To Marble, sitting back in his chair, with Annie droning away beside him about her encounter with the baker’s boy, who now worked for the butcher instead, and how she went down Rye Lane to buy remnants at the sale, and what Mr. Brown, the insurance agent, had to say, it seemed incredible that anything unusual had happened. It must have all been a wild dream. If it were reality, how then could he be sitting at his fireside so peacefully? Brief monosyllables were sufficient to keep Annie talking and Mr. Marble had ample time to think of all this. It was too like a fantastic nightmare for anything really to have happened in this very room, this poky, stuffy, suburban dining-room, and for a terrible secret to be hidden away in the garden just outside. Drugged by Annie’s talk, or by John’s or Winnie’s chatter about school, Mr. Marble not infrequently succeeded in persuading himself that it was indeed a dream. And Annie was so pleasantly fluttered and flattered by his attention in listening to her like this! But when night came, Mr. Marble paid for his relaxation. Then, on the verge of sleep, he would realize that it was not a dream—and he would spend the night turning and tossing in fevered anxiety.
Security came back gradually. It was not a feeling of complete security; rather was it a feeling that anything would be welcome if only it would happen. No policeman came prying round 53 Malcolm Road; no official from the hotel came to ask as to the present whereabouts of one James Medland. Marble had paid his debts, every one of them, like a sensible man, and that had taken all the slender store of one-pound notes. But his personal expenses were much higher nowadays—they were bound to be while he spent half a sovereign a day on whisky—and nothing he could say to Annie had any effect in reducing household expenditure. The old rule became well established of spending a little more than his income. Under such circumstances it was inevitable that the five-pound notes should begin to melt away. He was very careful about it, as his bank clerk experience taught him to be. Not one of those rustling pieces of
