pg5247 [193]
She nodded. "Excuse me while I finish this door," she said.
He closed the front-door. "But you seem to be quite at home here!" he observed.
"I ought to be," said she.
He glanced again inquiringly up and down the corridor. "And you are really all alone now?" he asked, as though to be doubly sure.
She explained the circumstances.
"I owe you my most sincere excuses for bringing you here," he said confidentially.
"But why?" she replied, looking intently at her door. "They have been most kind to me. Nobody could have been kinder. And Madame Laurence being such a good nurse——"
"It is true," said he. "That was a reason. In effect they are both very good-natured little women…. You comprehend, as journalist it arrives to me to know all kinds of people …" He snapped his fingers … "And as we were opposite the house. In fine, I pray you to excuse me."
"Hold me this paper," she said. "It is necessary that every crack should be covered; also between the floor and the door."
"You English are wonderful," he murmured, as he took the paper. "Imagine you doing that! Then," he added, resuming the confidential tone, "I suppose you will leave the Foucault now, hein?"
"I suppose so," she said carelessly.
"You go to England?"
She turned to him, as she patted the creases out of a strip of paper with a duster, and shook her head.
"Not to England?"
"No."
"If it is not indiscreet, where are you going?"
"I don't know," she said candidly.
And she did not know. She was without a plan. Her brain told her that she ought to return to Bursley, or, at the least, write. But her pride would not hear of such a surrender. Her situation would have to be far more desperate than it was before she could confess her defeat to her family even in a letter. A thousand times no! That was a point which she had for ever decided. She would face any disaster, and any other shame, rather than the shame of her family's forgiving reception of her.
"And you?" she asked. "How does it go? This war?"
He told her, in a few words, a few leading facts about himself. "It must not be said," he added of the war, "but that will turn out ill! I—I know, you comprehend."
"Truly?" she answered with casualness.
"You have heard nothing of him?" Chirac asked.
"Who? Gerald?"
He gave a gesture.
"Nothing! Not a word! Nothing!"
"He will have gone back to England!"
"Never!" she said positively.
"But why not?"
"Because he prefers France. He really does like France. I think it is the only real passion he ever had."
"It is astonishing," reflected Chirac, "how France is loved! And yet…! But to live, what will he do? Must live!"
Sophia merely shrugged her shoulders.
"Then it is finished between you two?" he muttered awkwardly.
She nodded. She was on her knees, at the lower crack of the doors.
"There!" she said, rising. "It's well done, isn't it? That is all."
She smiled at him, facing him squarely, in the obscurity of the untidy and shabby corridor. Both felt that they had become very intimate. He was intensely flattered by her attitude, and she knew it.
"Now," she said, "I will take off my pinafore. Where can I niche you?
There is only my bedroom, and I want that. What are we to do?"
"Listen," he suggested diffidently. "Will you do me the honour to come for a drive? That will do you good. There is sunshine. And you are always very pale."
"With pleasure," she agreed cordially.
While dressing, she heard him walking up and down the corridor; occasionally they exchanged a few words. Before leaving, Sophia pulled off the paper from one of the key-holes of the sealed suite of rooms, and they peered through, one after the other, and saw the green glow of the sulphur, and were troubled by its uncanniness. And then Sophia refixed the paper.
In descending the stairs of the house she felt the infirmity of her knees; but in other respects, though she had been out only once before since her illness, she was conscious of a sufficient strength. A disinclination for any enterprise had prevented her from taking the air as she ought to have done,