Part 43

"Yes--you've forgotten the lady."

She smiled, and he took courage. "There it is. The lady, you see, isn't altogether a lady."

"Oh, Nicky----"

He did not look at her. He seemed to be a partaker in what he felt to be her suffering and Tanqueray's shame.

"Has he known her long?" she said.

"About two months."

She was right then. It had been since that night. It had been her own doing. She had driven him to her.

"Since he went to Hampstead then?"

"Yes."

"Who was she?"

"His landlady's daughter, I think, or a niece. She waited on him and--she nursed him when he was ill."

Jane drew in her breath with an almost audible sound. Nicky had sunk into his chair in his attitude of vicarious, shamefaced misery.

It made her rally. "Nicky," she said, "why do you look like that? I don't think it's nice of you to sit there, giving him away by making gloomy faces, in a chair. Why shouldn't he marry his landlady's daughter if he likes? You ought to stand up for him and say she's charming. She is. She must be; or he wouldn't have done it."

"He ought not to have done it."

"But he has. It had to happen. Nothing else could have happened."

"You think so? It seems to me the most unpredestined, the most horribly, fantastically fortuitous occurrence."

"It was what he wanted. Wouldn't you have given him what he wanted?"

"No," said Nicky, "not if it wasn't good for him."

"Oh, Nicky, how do you know what's good for him? You're not George Tanqueray."

"No. If I were I'd have----" He stopped. His passion, growing suddenly, recklessly, had brought him to the verge of the depth they were trying to avoid.

"If you were," said she, with amazing gaiety, "you'd have married this lady who isn't a lady. And then where would you have been?"

"Where indeed?" said Nicky bitterly.

Jane's face, so gay, became suddenly tragic. She looked away, staring steadily, dumbly, at something that she saw. Then he knew that he had raised a vision of the abyss, and of Tanqueray, their Tanqueray, sinking in it. He must keep her from contemplating that, or she would betray herself, she would break down.

He searched his heart for some consoling inspiration, and found none. It was his head which suggested that irrelevance was best.

"When," said he, by way of being irrelevant, "are you going to give us another big book?"

"I don't know," she said. "Never, I think."

He looked up. Her eyes shone perilously over trembling pools of tears. He had not been irrelevant at all.

"You don't think anything of the sort," he said, with a sharp tenderness.