“He must have loved her a lot. Poor chap! And she’s gone now, and left him alone. Hateful woman!”
The tears were even more imminent in her eyes now, as she stood by him, and there was a strange surge of emotion in her breast. Marble looked at her queerly. Both their hearts were throbbing tumultuously.
“You wouldn’t do a thing like that, would you?” said Marble, his hands playing with her sleeves.
Annie looked up at his face for a second—only a second.
“Oh, how could I? Oh, Will, Will, dear.”
There was no more need for words. But as Marble kissed her—her cheeks were wet, too, by now—he felt a queer, guilty sensation internally. And yet he meant that kiss, he really did. Perhaps Judas felt the same once.
XIV
And so, incredible as it might seem, sunshine had come again for a space to 53 Malcolm Road. The black pall of terror was lifted, and Annie Marble actually went singing in her high, cracked voice up and down the stairs as she did her housework. Not one word had passed between them concerning the shade of terrible danger that brooded over them, but now that each knew, and had shown that they could bear with the knowledge, the shade did not seem so black. It was a trouble shared, and a trouble shared voluntarily is a trouble robbed of half its weight.
Singing, Annie Marble went up and down the stairs. Marble, sitting downstairs, could hear her thin voice and her light step. For the present the voice did not call up a scowl to his brow; nor did the step seem too stealthy to be tolerated, as once it did. Whisky had lost its savour for the time being; there was no pressing need for it to dull his mind. Most of the time Marble’s mouth was twisted with a queer smile—and he had not smiled for months—as he thought of the difference his taking notice of his wife had made. He was glad of it, too, and now he could not think of his wife without that smile. He felt glad and comforted as he thought of her. Her present high spirits might be pathetic; they might even seem a trifle ridiculous, but they were, nevertheless, infectious. Within Mr. Marble’s bosom there was a fondness, almost a fatherly fondness, springing up for the woman who loved him so well.
And, estimating gains from the most sordid point of view it was a distinct advantage that he should have in the house a willing ally upon whom he could rely and who was possessed of sufficient knowledge of the facts of the case to help him should emergency arise.
Mr. Marble was even able occasionally to throw off his obsession completely and leave the house—and the garden—to his wife’s care, while he went forth through the dingy streets for exercise. The straggling rays of spring sunshine seemed to warm him, at a time when other people were hurrying along clasping their heavy coats to themselves in the bitter cold, and he blinked at the sunlight gratefully with house-blinded eyes.
As for Annie Marble, she was a changed woman. She could sing about the house; the housework seemed nothing to her nowadays, so comforting was the knowledge that darling Will was downstairs thinking about her; she routed out from some neglected kitchen shelf a stained copy of Mrs. Beeton—a wedding gift, unlooked at since she first had two children on her hands, sixteen years ago—and laboured joyously, though rarely successfully, compounding new delicacies for her beloved lord. For now there was no pinch for money, and Annie had found sixteen years ago that if one wanted to cook in the style of Mrs. Beeton there was a great need of money. And the will had to be there, too. So the evenings often found her sitting laboriously composing notes to the big stores ordering all sorts of strange things, things which she had never thought of ordering before, bottled oysters, asparagus, foie gras, queer lists for which Mr. Marble signed the cheques without a murmur. He felt that at last he was beginning to have some benefit from the money he had won at such risk during his slavery at the Bank. It was the first time.
And Mrs. Marble’s personal expenses, too, began to show a healthy increase. She did not venture up to Bond Street again, that was asking too much of her; she could not face the immense superiority of the young ladies in those shops; even High Street, Kensington, was a little above her head, but in Rye Lane she was exceedingly happy. The shops therein arrogantly called it “the Regent Street of South London” in their advertisements, and they did their level best to live up to the boast. Mrs. Marble’s frail little figure and her witless face, made almost pretty by reason of her happiness, became well known there. She would flit around the big shops, ordering here, trying on there, with in her manner a little trace of apology for troubling the assistants, for all her money. For her it was one of the very keenest of enjoyments, so keen that it almost hurt, to buy things, anything she liked, without having to think about the cost. But always she would stop in the middle of her shopping and hurry anxiously to catch a bus to get home in case her darling Will was growing anxious about her.
Yet this happiness, this moment of peace, was only a lull in the storm. They were both conscious of this, although they never admitted it even to themselves. And because they would not admit it they were still handicapped in their relations with each other. Annie found this one morning when she came home from Rye Lane and found Marble sitting spiritlessly in his chair in the sitting-room, in almost the same way as he had sat in the dark days gone by. There was a
