_ Gerald Scales walked about the Strand, staring up at its high
narrow houses, crushed one against another as though they had been
packed, unsorted, by a packer who thought of nothing but economy
of space. Except by Somerset House, King's College, and one or two
theatres and banks, the monotony of mean shops, with several
storeys unevenly perched over them, was unbroken, Then Gerald
encountered Exeter Hall, and examined its prominent facade with a
provincial's eye; for despite his travels he was not very familiar
with London. Exeter Hall naturally took his mind back to his Uncle
Boldero, that great and ardent Nonconformist, and his own godly
youth. It was laughable to muse upon what his uncle would say and
think, did the old man know that his nephew had run away with a
girl, meaning to seduce her in Paris. It was enormously funny!
However, he had done with all that. He was well out of it. She had
told him to go, and he had gone. She had money to get home; she
had nothing to do but use the tongue in her head. The rest was her
affair. He would go to Paris alone, and find another amusement. It
was absurd to have supposed that Sophia would ever have suited
him. Not in such a family as the Baineses could one reasonably
expect to discover an ideal mistress. No! there had been a
mistake. The whole business was wrong. She had nearly made a fool
of him. But he was not the man to be made a fool of. He had kept
his dignity intact.
So he said to himself. Yet all the time his dignity, and his pride
also, were bleeding, dropping invisible blood along the length of
the Strand pavements.
He was at Salisbury Street again. He pictured her in the bedroom.
Damn her! He wanted her. He wanted her with an excessive desire.
He hated to think that he had been baulked. He hated to think that
she would remain immaculate. And he continued to picture her in
the exciting privacy of that cursed bedroom.
Now he was walking down Salisbury Street. He did not wish to be
walking down Salisbury Street; but there he was!
"Oh, hell!" he murmured. "I suppose I must go through with it."
He felt desperate. He was ready to pay any price in order to be
able to say to himself that he had accomplished what he had set
his heart on.
"My wife hasn't gone out, has she?" he asked of the hall-porter.
"I'm not sure, sir; I think not," said the hall-porter.
The fear that Sophia had already departed made him sick. When he
noticed her trunk still there, he took hope and ran upstairs.
He saw her, a dark crumpled, sinuous piece of humanity, half on
and half off the bed, silhouetted against the bluish-white
counterpane; her hat was on the floor, with the spotted veil
trailing away from it. This sight seemed to him to be the most
touching that he had ever seen, though her face was hidden. He
forgot everything except the deep and strange emotion which
affected him. He approached the bed. She did not stir.
Having heard the entry and knowing that it must be Gerald who had
entered, Sophia forced herself to remain still. A wild, splendid
hope shot up in her. Constrained by all the power of her will not
to move, she could not stifle a sob that had lain in ambush in her
throat.
The sound of the sob fetched tears to the eyes of Gerald.
"Sophia!" he appealed to her.
But she did not stir. Another sob shook her.
"Very well, then," said Gerald. "We'll stay in London till we can
be married. I'll arrange it. I'll find a nice boarding-house for
you, and I'll tell the people you're my cousin. I shall stay on at
this hotel, and I'll come and see you every day."
A silence.
"Thank you!" she blubbered. "Thank you!"
He saw that her little gloved hand was stretching out towards him,
like a feeler; and he seized it, and knelt down and took her
clumsily by the waist. Somehow he dared not kiss her yet.
An immense relief surged very slowly through them both.
"I--I--really--" She began to say something, but the articulation
was lost in her sobs.
"What? What do you say, dearest?" he questioned eagerly.
And she made another effort. "I really couldn't have gone to Paris
with you without being married," she succeeded at last. "I really
couldn't."
"No, no!" he soothed her. "Of course you couldn't. It was I who
was wrong. But you didn't know how I felt. ... Sophia, it's all
right now, isn't it?"
She sat up and kissed him fairly.
It was so wonderful and startling that he burst openly into tears.
She saw in the facile intensity of his emotion a guarantee of
their future happiness. And as he had soothed her, so now she
soothed him. They clung together, equally surprised at the sweet,
exquisite, blissful melancholy which drenched them through and
through. It was remorse for having quarrelled, for having lacked
faith in the supreme rightness of the high adventure. Everything
was right, and would be right; and they had been criminally
absurd. It was remorse; but it was pure bliss, and worth the
quarrel! Gerald resumed his perfection again in her eyes! He was
the soul of goodness and honour! And for him she was again the
ideal mistress, who would, however, be also a wife. As in his mind
he rapidly ran over the steps necessary to their marriage, he kept
saying to himself, far off in some remote cavern of the brain: "I
shall have her! I shall have her!" He did not reflect that this
fragile slip of the Baines stock, unconsciously drawing upon the
accumulated strength of generations of honest living, had put a
defeat upon him.
After tea, Gerald, utterly content with the universe, redeemed his
word and found an irreproachable boarding-house for Sophia in
Westminster, near the Abbey. She was astonished at the glibness of
his lies to the landlady about her, and about their circumstances
generally. He also found a church and a parson, close by, and in
half an hour the formalities preliminary to a marriage were begun.
He explained to her that as she was now resident in London, it
would be simpler to recommence the business entirely. She
sagaciously agreed. As she by no means wished to wound him again,
she made no inquiry about those other formalities which, owing to
red-tape, had so unexpectedly proved abortive! She knew she was
going to be married, and that sufficed. The next day she carried
out her filial idea of telegraphing to her mother. _