The Price of Love, Arnold Bennett [important of reading books .TXT] 📗

until that night, for Batchgrew had come into the new enterprise by the back door of a loan to its promoters, who were richer in ideas than in capital; and now, the harvest being ripe, he was arranging, by methods not unfamiliar to capitalists, to reap where he had not sown.

Shame and fear overcame Rachel. The crystal dream was shivered to dust. Awful apprehension, the expectancy of frightful events, succeeded to it. She perceived that since the very moment of quitting the house the dread of some disaster had been pursuing her; only she had refused to see it--she had found oblivion from it in the new and agitatingly sweet sensations which Louis Fores had procured for her. But now the real was definitely sifted out from the illusory. And nothing but her own daily existence, as she had always lived it, was real. The rest was a snare. There were no forests, no passionate love, no flying steeds, no splendid adorers--for her. She was Rachel Fleckring and none else.

Councillor Batchgrew turned to the left, and through a small hole in the painted wall Rachel saw a bright beam shooting out in the shape of a cone--forests, and the unreal denizens of forests shimmering across the entire auditorium to impinge on the screen! And she heard the steady rattle of a revolving machine. Then Batchgrew beckoned her into a very small, queerly shaped room furnished with a table and a chair and a single electric lamp that hung by a cord from a rough hook in the ceiling. A boy stood near the door holding three tin boxes one above another in his arms, and keeping the top one in position with his chin. These boxes were similar to that in which Louis' tickets had been dropped.

"Did you want your boxes, sir?" asked the boy.

"Put 'em down," Thomas Batchgrew growled.

The boy deposited them in haste on the table and hurried out.

"How is Mrs. Maldon?" demanded Mr. Batchgrew with curtness, after he had snorted and sniffed. He remained standing near to Rachel.

"Oh, she's very much better," said Rachel eagerly. "She was asleep when I left."

"Have ye left her by herself?" Mr. Batchgrew continued his inquiry. His voice was as offensive as thick dark glue.

"Of course not! Mrs. Tams is sitting up with her." Rachel meant her tone to be a dignified reproof to Thomas Batchgrew for daring to assume even the possibility of her having left Mrs. Maldon to solitude. But she did not succeed, because she could not manage her tone. She desired intensely to be the self-possessed, mature woman, sure of her position and of her sagacity; but she could be nothing save the absurd, guilty, stammering, blushing little girl, shifting her feet and looking everywhere except boldly into Thomas Batchgrew's horrid eyes.

"So it's Mrs. Tams as is sitting with her!"

Rachel could not help explaining--

"I had to come down town to do some shopping for Sunday. Somebody had to come. Mr. Fores had called in to ask after Mrs. Maldon, and so he walked down with me." Every word she said appeared intolerably foolish to her as she uttered it.

"And then he brought ye in here!" Batchgrew grimly completed the tale.

"We came in here for ten minutes or so, as I'd finished my shopping so quickly. Mr. Fores has just run across to the butcher's to get something that was forgotten."

Mr. Batchgrew coughed loosely and loudly. And beyond the cough, beyond the confines of the ugly little room which imprisoned her so close to old Batchgrew and his grotesque whiskers, Rachel could hear the harsh, quick laughter of the audience, and then faint music--far off.

"If young Fores was here," said Mr. Batchgrew brutally, "I should tell him straight as he might do better than to go gallivanting about the town until that there money's found."

He turned towards his boxes.

"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Batchgrew," said Rachel, tapping her foot and trying to be very dignified.

"And I'll tell ye another thing, young miss," Batchgrew went on. "Every minute as ye spend with young Fores ye'll regret. He's a bad lot, and ye may as well know it first as last. Ye ought to thank me for telling of ye, but ye won't."

"I really don't know what you mean, Mr. Batchgrew!" She could not invent another phrase.

"Ye know what I mean right enough, young miss!... If ye only came in for ten minutes yer time's up."

Rachel moved to leave.

"Hold on!" Batchgrew stopped her. There was a change in his voice.

"Look at me!" he commanded, but with the definite order was mingled some trace of cajolery.

She obeyed, quivering, her cheeks the colour of a tomato. In spite of all preoccupations, she distinctly noticed--and not without a curious tremor--that his features had taken on a boyish look. In the almost senile face she could see ambushed the face of the youth that Thomas Batchgrew had been perhaps half a century before.

"Ye're a fine wench," said he, with a note of careless but genuine admiration. "I'll not deny it. Don't ye go and throw yerself away. Keep out o' mischief."

Forgetting all but the last phrase, Rachel marched out of the room, unspeakably humiliated, wounded beyond any expression of her own. The cowardly, odious brute! The horrible ancient! What right had he?... What had she done that was wrong, that would not bear the fullest inquiry. The shopping was an absolute necessity. She was obliged to come out. Mrs. Maldon was better, and quietly sleeping. Mrs. Tarns was the most faithful and capable old person that was ever born. Hence she was justified in leaving the invalid. Louis Fores had offered to go with her. How could she refuse the offer? What reason could there be for refusing it? As for the cinema, who could object to the cinema? Certainly not Thomas Batchgrew! There was no hurry. And was she not an independent woman, earning her own living? Who on earth had the right to dictate to her? She was not a slave. Even a servant had an evening out once a week. She was sinless....

And yet while she was thus ardently defending herself she knew well that she had sinned against the supreme social law--the law of "the look of things." It was true that chance had worked against her. But common sense would have rendered chance powerless by giving it no opportunity to be malevolent. She was furious with Rachel Fleckring. That Rachel Fleckring, of all mortal girls, should have exposed herself to so dreadful, so unforgettable a humiliation was mortifying in the very highest degree. Her lips trembled. She was about to burst into a sob. But at this moment the rattle of the revolving machine behind the hole ceased, the theatre blazed from end to end with sudden light, the music resumed, and a number of variegated advertisements were weakly thrown on the screen. She set herself doggedly to walk back down the slope of the aisle, not daring to look ahead for Louis. She felt that every eye was fixed on her with base curiosity.... When, after the endless ordeal of the aisle, she reached her place, Louis was not there. And though she was glad, she took offence at his delay. Gathering up the reticule with a nervous sweep of the hand, she departed from the theatre, her eyes full of tears. And amid all the wild confusion in her brain one little thought flashed clear and was gone: the wastefulness of paying for a whole night's entertainment and then only getting ten minutes of it!


IV


She met Louis Fores high up Bycars Lane, about a hundred yards below Mrs. Maldon's house. She saw some one come out of the gate of the house, and heard the gate clang in the distance. For a moment she could not surely identify the figure, but as soon as Louis, approaching, and carrying his stick, grew unmistakable even in the darkness, all her agitation, which had been subsiding under the influence of physical exercise, rose again to its original fever.

"Ah!" said Louis, greeting her with a most deferential salute. "There you are. I was really beginning to wonder. I opened the front door, but there was no light and no sound, so I shut it again and came back. What happened to you?"

His ingenuous and delightful face, so confident, good-natured, and respectful, had exactly the same effect on her as before. At the sight of it Thomas Batchgrew's vague accusation against Louis was dismissed utterly as the rancorous malice of an evil old man. For the rest, she had never given it any real credit, having an immense trust in her own judgment. But she had no intention of letting Louis go free. As she had been put in the wrong, so must he be put in the wrong. This seemed to her only just. Besides, was he not wholly to blame? Also she remembered with strange clearness the admiration in the mien of the hated Batchgrew, and the memory gave her confidence.

She said, with an effort after chilly detachment--

"I couldn't wait in the cinema alone for ever."

He was perturbed.

"But I assure you," he said nicely, "I was as quick as ever I could be. Heath had put my stick in his back parlour to keep it safe for me, and it was quite a business finding it again. Why didn't you wait?... I say, I hope you weren't vexed at my leaving you."

"Of course I wasn't vexed," she answered, with heat. "Didn't I tell you I didn't mind? But if you want to know, old Batchgrew came along while you were gone and insulted me."

"Insulted you? How? What was he doing there?"

"How should I know what he was doing there? Better ask him questions like that! All I can tell you is that he came to me and called me into a room at the back--and--and--told me I'd no business to be there, nor you either, while Mrs. Maldon was ill in bed."

"Silly old fool! I hope you didn't take any notice of him."

"Yes, that's all very fine, that is! It's easy for you to talk like that. But--but--well, I suppose there's nothing more to be said!" She moved to one side; her anger was rising. She knew that it was rising. She was determined that it should rise. She did not care. She rather enjoyed the excitement. She smarted under her recent experience; she was deeply miserable; and yet, at the same time, standing there close to Louis in the rustling night, she was exultant as she certainly had never been exultant before.

She walked forward grimly. Louis turned and followed her.

"I'm most frightfully sorry," he said.

She replied fiercely--

"It isn't as if I didn't wait. I waited in the porch I don't know how long. Then of course I came home, as there was no sign of you."

"When I went back you weren't there; it must have been while you were with old Batch; so I naturally didn't stay. I just came straight up here. I was afraid you were vexed because I'd left you alone."

"Well, and if I was!" said Rachel, splendidly contradicting herself. "It's not a very nice thing for a girl to be left alone like that--_and all on account of a stick_!" There was a break in her voice.

Arrived at the gate, she pushed it open.

"Good-night," she snapped. "Please don't come in."

And within the