CHAPTER XII
She was occasionally worried, however this might be, by the
impression that these sacrifices, great as they were, were nothing
to those that his own passion had imposed; if indeed it was not
rather the passion of his confederate, which had caught him up and
was whirling him round like a great steam-wheel. He was at any
rate in the strong grip of a dizzy splendid fate; the wild wind of
his life blew him straight before it. Didn't she catch in his face
at times, even through his smile and his happy habit, the gleam of
that pale glare with which a bewildered victim appeals, as he
passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps didn't even
himself know how scared he was; but SHE knew. They were in danger,
they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it beat
every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe
sentiment; she thought of herself and blushed even more for her
tepid response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to
feel that in another relation--a relation supplying that affinity
with her nature that Mr. Mudge, deluded creature, would never
supply--she should have been no more tepid than her ladyship. Her
deepest soundings were on two or three occasions of finding herself
almost sure that, if she dared, her ladyship's lover would have
gathered relief from "speaking" to her. She literally fancied once
or twice that, projected as he was toward his doom, her own eyes
struck him, while the air roared in his ears, as the one pitying
pair in the crowd. But how could he speak to her while she sat
sandwiched there between the counter-clerk and the sounder?
She had long ago, in her comings and goings made acquaintance with
Park Chambers and reflected as she looked up at their luxurious
front that they of course would supply the ideal setting for the
ideal speech. There was not an object in London that, before the
season was over, was more stamped upon her brain. She went
roundabout to pass it, for it was not on the short way; she passed
on the opposite side of the street and always looked up, though it
had taken her a long time to be sure of the particular set of
windows. She had made that out finally by an act of audacity that
at the time had almost stopped her heart-beats and that in
retrospect greatly quickened her blushes. One evening she had
lingered late and watched--watched for some moment when the porter,
who was in uniform and often on the steps, had gone in with a
visitor. Then she followed boldly, on the calculation that he
would have taken the visitor up and that the hall would be free.
The hall WAS free, and the electric light played over the gilded
and lettered board that showed the names and numbers of the
occupants of the different floors. What she wanted looked straight
at her--Captain Everard was on the third. It was as if, in the
immense intimacy of this, they were, for the instant and the first
time, face to face outside the cage. Alas! they were face to face
but a second or two: she was whirled out on the wings of a panic
fear that he might just then be entering or issuing. This fear was
indeed, in her shameless deflexions, never very far from her, and
was mixed in the oddest way with depressions and disappointments.
It was dreadful, as she trembled by, to run the risk of looking to
him as if she basely hung about; and yet it was dreadful to be
obliged to pass only at such moments as put an encounter out of the
question.
At the horrible hour of her first coming to Cocker's he was always-
-it was to be hoped--snug in bed; and at the hour of her final
departure he was of course--she had such things all on her
fingers'-ends--dressing for dinner. We may let it pass that if she
couldn't bring herself to hover till he was dressed, this was
simply because such a process for such a person could only be
terribly prolonged. When she went in the middle of the day to her
own dinner she had too little time to do anything but go straight,
though it must be added that for a real certainty she would
joyously have omitted the repast. She had made up her mind as to
there being on the whole no decent pretext to justify her flitting
casually past at three o'clock in the morning. That was the hour
at which, if the ha'penny novels were not all wrong, he probably
came home for the night. She was therefore reduced to the vainest
figuration of the miraculous meeting toward which a hundred
impossibilities would have to conspire. But if nothing was more
impossible than the fact, nothing was more intense than the vision.
What may not, we can only moralise, take place in the quickened
muffled perception of a young person with an ardent soul? All our
humble friend's native distinction, her refinement of personal
grain, of heredity, of pride, took refuge in this small throbbing
spot; for when she was most conscious of the objection of her
vanity and the pitifulness of her little flutters and manoeuvres,
then the consolation and the redemption were most sure to glow
before her in some just discernible sign. He did like her!
