VII
Mr. Marble was, of course, deceiving himself when he imagined that his wife could deduce all that had happened from his halfhearted exclamations that night. He realized this as time passed. She could do nothing of the sort. The situation between them was still strained; they said as little to each other as they could help, but it was not because Annie knew her husband for a murderer. Mr. Marble gradually regained his peace of mind in that respect.
And other things were too exciting for him to brood over it just at present. As he had expected, Mr. Saunders had been unable to keep to himself the glorious fact that he had brought off a hundred to one success and had acquired the highly respectable sum of twenty-four thousand pounds. In two days the news was all over the City, and in three it had been brought to the official notice of the Bank. There had been a slight scene, in which Mr. Marble bore himself with the arrogance only to be expected of a man with a fortune at his back. The Bank suspected the worst; told him more in sorrow than in anger that they would not prosecute this time—they had had no case anyway, and furthermore they would not expose their office routine to comment in a court of law—and then accepted the resignation that he tendered with a sigh of relief.
Yet Mr. Marble did not become at once a gentleman of leisure. A distinguished firm of foreign exchange brokers heard Saunders’ story and decided that a man of Mr. Marble’s talents would be a desirable acquisition. The only man in all the City who had foreseen the rise of the franc, who had had the courage of his convictions to put all his savings into the speculation, and who, besides, had the force of character to inveigle Saunders into supporting him would be a man worth having. So they approached Mr. Marble, and made him a tentative offer which with little debate—he already had a vague idea that the more his thoughts were occupied the better—he accepted. The hours were easy; the junior partner was a little hesitant in mentioning the amount of the salary—five hundred a year. So Mr. Marble found himself in a comfortable position with no less an income than seventeen hundred pounds a year. He struggled hard to stop himself from thinking about the fact that all this splendour was entirely due to the fierce stimulus of being in danger of the gallows.
The freehold of 53 Malcolm Road was safely purchased. It was only a matter of three days’ negotiations, for the owners were overjoyed to find someone willing to pay seven hundred pounds for a house which cost twenty pounds a year in repairs and yet was not allowed by law to be rented at a greater sum than thirty-five pounds.
Mr. Marble could afford to live in a house three times as expensive. But he could not bring himself to leave the place. He could not bear the idea of taking his eyes from that garden. Besides, he had a vague apprehension that there might be legislation compelling all owners of unoccupied houses to let them, and then the state of affairs which his tortured imagination so constantly pictured would naturally develop. No, he could not bear to leave the place, and so Mr. Marble, with an income of seventeen hundred a year, continued to live in a shabby street, in a house with two tiny sitting-rooms, three tiny bedrooms, and a kitchen whose size Mrs. Marble deplored every time she entered it.
Poor Annie Marble! She could hardly realize all the changes that would take place. The first convincing proof that matters were radically different occurred in a week or two after that unpleasant evening in the drawing-room. Mr. Marble was leaving for town—he did not have to start until past nine o’clock nowadays—and as he said goodbye at the door he reached into his pocket and thrust something roughly into her hand.
“Here,” he said, “take this and go out this morning and spend it, every bit of it. Mind you spend it all. There, goodbye.”
He dashed off up the road. Mrs. Marble looked wonderingly at what he had given her. It was a roll of notes, crisp and fresh from the Bank. She passed them through her fingers. Some were five-pound notes, and some were one-pound notes. Altogether they amounted to an enormous sum—fifty pounds in all, actually—and it was more money than she had ever seen together at one time. Mr. Marble, in the bus on the way to the station, felt a good deal more comfortable than he had done for the last two weeks. It had been rotten, not daring to meet his wife’s eyes. She had a thin time, poor thing, and Mr. Marble knew from experience that one of the few slight pleasures in her life was being able to spend money. With fifty pounds in her purse she would be able to go down Rye Lane and have a high old time. Perhaps when he came back that evening she would be smiling again and all that beastly business when he had lost control of himself
