The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Papers/Chapter 4
IV
It was not till five days later that they again came together, and during these days many things had happened. Maud Blandy had, with high elation, for her own portion, a sharp sense of this; if it had at the time done nothing more intimate for her the Sunday of bitterness just spent with Howard Bight had started, all abruptly, a turn of the tide of her luck. This turn had not in the least been in the young man's having spoken to her of marriage—since she hadn't even, up to the late hour of their parting, so much as answered him straight: she dated the sense of difference much rather from the throb of a happy thought that had come to her while she cycled home to Kilburnia in the darkness. The throb had made her for the few minutes, tired as she was, put on speed, and it had been the cause of still further proceedings for her the first thing the next morning. The active step that was the essence of these proceedings had almost got itself taken before she went to bed; which indeed was what had happened to the extent of her writing, on the spot, a meditated letter. She sat down to it by the light of the guttering candle that awaited her on the dining-room table and in the stale air of family food that only had been—a residuum so at the mercy of mere ventilation that she didn't so much as peep into a cupboard; after which she had been on the point of nipping over, as she would have said, to drop it into that opposite pillar-box whose vivid maw, opening out through thick London nights, had received so many of her fruitless little ventures. But she had checked herself and waited, waited to be sure, with the morning, that her fancy wouldn't fade; posting her note in the end, however, with a confident jerk, as soon as she was up. She had, later on, had business, or at least had sought it, among the haunts that she had taught herself to regard as professional; but neither on the Monday nor on either of the days that directly followed had she encountered there the friend whom it would take a difference in more matters than could as yet be dealt with to enable her to regard, with proper assurance or with proper modesty, as a lover. Whatever he was, none the less, it couldn't otherwise have come to her that it was possible to feel lonely in the Strand. That showed, after all, how thick they must constantly have been—which was perhaps a thing to begin to think of in a new, in a steadier light. But it showed doubtless still more that her companion was probably up to something rather awful; it made her wonder, holding her breath a little, about Beadel-Muffet, made her certain that he and his affairs would partly account for Bight's whirl of absence.
Ever conscious of empty pockets, she had yet always a penny, or at least a ha'penny, for a paper, and those she now scanned, she quickly assured herself, were edited quite as usual. Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., had returned on Monday from Undertone, where Lord and Lady Wispers had, from the previous Friday, entertained a very select party; Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., was to attend on Tuesday the weekly meeting of the society of the Friends of Rest; Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., had kindly consented to preside on Wednesday, at Samaritan House, at the opening of the Sale of Work of the Middlesex Incurables. These familiar announcements, however, far from appeasing her curiosity, had an effect upon her nerves; she read into them mystic meanings that she had never read before. Her freedom of mind in this direction was indeed at the same time limited, for her own horizon was already, by the Monday night, bristling with new possibilities, and the Tuesday itself—well, what had the Tuesday itself become, with this eruption, from within, of interest amounting really to a revelation, what had the Tuesday itself become but the greatest day yet of her life? Such a description of it would have appeared to apply predominantly to the morning had she not, under the influence, precisely, of the morning's thrill, gone, towards evening, with her design, into the Charing Cross Station. There, at the bookstall, she bought them all, every rag that was hawked; and there, as she unfolded one at a venture, in the crowd and under the lamps, she felt her consciousness further, felt it for the moment quite impressively, enriched. "Personal Peeps—Number Ninety-Three: a Chat with the New Dramatist" needed neither the "H. B." as a terminal signature nor a text spangled, to the exclusion of almost everything else, with Mortimer Marshals that looked as tall as if lettered on posters, to help to account for her young man's use of his time. And yet, as she soon made out, it had been used with an economy that caused her both to wonder and to wince; the "peep" commemorated being none other than their tea with the artless creature the previous Saturday, and the meagre incidents and pale impressions of that occasion furnishing forth the picture.
Bight had solicited no new interview; he hadn't been such a fool—for she saw, soon enough, with all her intelligence, that this was what he would have been, and that a repetition of contact would have dished him. What he had done, she found herself perceiving—and perceiving with an emotion that caused her face to glow—was journalism of the intensest essence; a column concocted of nothing, an omelette made, as it were, without even the breakage of the egg or two that might have been expected to be the price. The poor gentleman's whereabouts at five o'clock was the only egg broken, and this light and delicate crash was the sound in the world that would be sweetest to him. What stuff it had to be, since the writer really knew nothing about him, yet how its being just such stuff made it perfectly serve its purpose! She might have marvelled afresh, with more leisure, at such purposes, but she was lost in the wonder of seeing how, without matter, without thought, without an excuse, without a fact and yet at the same time sufficiently without a fiction, he had managed to be as resonant as if he had beaten a drum on the platform of a booth. And he had not been too personal, not made anything awkward for her, had given nothing and nobody away, had tossed the Chippendale Club into the air with such a turn that it had fluttered down again, like a blown feather, miles from its site. The thirty-seven agencies would already be posting to their subscriber thirty-seven copies, and their subscriber, on his side, would be posting, to his acquaintance, many times thirty-seven, and thus at least getting something for his money; but this didn't tell her why her friend had taken the trouble—if it had been a trouble; why at all events he had taken the time, pressed as he apparently was for that commodity. These things she was indeed presently to learn, but they were meanwhile part of a suspense composed of more elements than any she had yet tasted. And the suspense was prolonged, though other affairs too, that were not part of it, almost equally crowded upon her; the week having almost waned when relief arrived in the form of a cryptic post-card. The post-card bore the H. B., like the precious "Peep," which had already had a wondrous sequel, and it appointed, for the tea-hour, a place of meeting familiar to Maud, with the simple addition of the significant word "Larks!"
When the time he had indicated came she waited for him, at their small table, swabbed like the deck of a steam-packet, nose to nose with a mustard-pot and a price-list, in the consciousness of perhaps after all having as much to tell him as to hear from him. It appeared indeed at first that this might well be the case, for the questions that came up between them when he had taken his place were overwhelmingly those he himself insisted on putting. "What has he done, what has he, and what will he?"—that inquiry, not loud but deep, had met him as he sat down; without however producing the least recognition. Then she as soon felt that his silence and his manner were enough for her, or that, if they hadn't been, his wonderful look, the straightest she had ever had from him, would instantly have made them so. He looked at her hard, hard, as if he had meant "I say, mind your eyes!" and it amounted really to a glimpse, rather fearful, of the subject. It was no joke, the subject, clearly, and her friend had fairly gained age, as he had certainly lost weight, in his recent dealings with it. It struck her even, with everything else, that this was positively the way she would have liked him to show if their union had taken the form they hadn't reached the point of discussing; wearily coming back to her from the thick of things, wanting to put on his slippers and have his tea, all prepared by her and in their place, and beautifully to be trusted to regale her in his turn. He was excited, disavowedly, and it took more disavowal still after she had opened her budget—which she did, in truth, by saying to him as her first alternative: "What did you do him for, poor Mortimer Marshal? It isn't that he's not in the seventh heaven———!"
"He is in the seventh heaven!" Bight quickly broke in. "He doesn't want my blood?"
"Did you do him," she asked, "that he should want it? It's splendid how you could—simply on that show."
"That show? Why," said Howard Bight, "that show was an immensity. That show was volumes, stacks, abysses."
He said it in such a tone that she was a little at a loss. "Oh, you don't want abysses."
"Not much, to knock off such twaddle. There isn't a breath in it of what I saw. What I saw is my own affair. I've got the abysses for myself. They're in my head—it's always something. But the monster," he demanded, "has written you?"
"How couldn't he—that night? I got it the next morning, telling me how much he wanted to thank me and asking me where he might see me. So I went," said Maud, "to see him."
"At his own place again?"
"At his own place again. What do I yearn for but to be received at people's own places?"
"Yes, for the stuff. But when you've had—as you had had from him—the stuff?"
"Well, sometimes, you see, I get more. He gives me all I can take." It was in her head to ask if by chance Bight were jealous, but she gave it another turn. "We had a big palaver, partly about you. He appreciates."
"Me?"
"Me—first of all, I think. All the more that I've had—fancy!—a proof of my stuff, the despised and rejected, as originally concocted, and that he has now seen it. I tried it on again with Brains, the night of your thing—sent it off with your thing enclosed as a rouser. They took it, by return, like a shot—you'll see on Wednesday. And if the dear man lives till then, for impatience, I'm to lunch with him that day."
"I see," said Bight. "Well, that was what I did it for. It shows how right I was."
They faced each other, across their thick crockery, with eyes that said more than their words, and that, above all, said, and asked, other things. So she went on in a moment: "I don't know what he doesn't expect. And he thinks I can keep it up."
"Lunch with him every Wednesday?"
"Oh, he'd give me my lunch, and more. It was last Sunday that you were right—about my sitting close," she pursued. "I'd have been a pretty fool to jump. Suddenly, I see, the music begins. I'm awfully obliged to you."
"You feel," he presently asked, "quite differently—so differently that I've missed my chance? I don't care for that serpent, but there's something else that you don't tell me." The young man, detached and a little spent, with his shoulder against the wall and a hand vaguely playing over the knives, forks and spoons, dropped his succession of sentences without an apparent direction. "Something else has come up, and you're as pleased as Punch. Or, rather, you're not quite entirely so, because you can't goad me to fury. You can't worry me as much as you'd like. Marry me first, old man, and then see if I mind. Why shouldn't you keep it up?—I mean lunching with him?" His questions came as in play that was a little pointless, without his waiting more than a moment for answers; though it was not indeed that she might not have answered even in the moment, had not the pointless play been more what she wanted. "Was it at the place," he went on, "that he took us to?"
"Dear no—at his flat, where I've been before. You'll see, in Brains, on Wednesday. I don't think I've muffed it—it's really rather there. But he showed me everything this time—the bathroom, the refrigerator, and the machines for stretching his trousers. He has nine, and in constant use."
"Nine?" said Bight gravely.
"Nine."
"Nine trousers?"
"Nine machines. I don't know how many trousers."
"Ah, my dear," he said, "that's a grave omission; the want of the information will be felt and resented. But does it all, at any rate," he asked, "sufficiently fetch you?" After which, as she didn't speak, he lapsed into helpless sincerity. "Is it really, you think, his dream to secure you?"
She replied, on this, as if his tone made it too amusing. "Quite. There's no mistaking it. He sees me as, most days in the year, pulling the wires and beating the drum somewhere; that is he sees me of course not exactly as writing about 'our home'—once I've got one myself, but as procuring others to do it through my being (as you've made him believe) in with the Organs of Public Opinion. He doesn't see, if I'm half decent, why there shouldn't be something about him every day in the week. He's all right, and he's all ready. And who, after all, can do him so well as the partner of his flat? It's like making, in one of those big domestic siphons, the luxury of the poor, your own soda-water. It comes cheaper, and it's always on the sideboard. 'Vichy chez soi.' The interviewer at home."
Her companion took it in. "Your place is on my sideboard—you're really a first-class fizz! He steps then, at any rate, into Beadel-Muffet's place."
"That," Maud assented, "is what he would like to do." And she knew more than ever there was something to wait for.
"It's a lovely opening," Bight returned. But he still said, for the moment, nothing else; as if, charged to the brim though he had originally been, she had rather led his thought away.
"What have you done with poor Beadel?" she consequently asked. "What is it, in the name of goodness, you're doing to him? It's worse than ever."
"Of course it's worse than ever."
"He capers," said Maud, "on every housetop—he jumps out of every bush." With which her anxiety really broke out. "Is it you that are doing it?"
"If you mean am I seeing him, I certainly am. I'm seeing nobody else. I assure you he's spread thick."
"But you're acting for him?"
Bight waited. "Five hundred people are acting for him; but the difficulty is that what he calls the 'terrific forces of publicity'—by which he means ten thousand other persons—are acting against him. We've all in fact been turned on—to turn everything off, and that's exactly the job that makes the biggest noise. It appears everywhere, in every kind of connection and every kind of type, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., desires to cease to appear anywhere; and then it appears that his desiring to cease to appear is observed to conduce directly to his more tremendously appearing, or certainly, and in the most striking manner, to his not in the least disappearing. The workshop of silence roars like the Zoo at dinner-time. He can't disappear; he hasn't weight enough to sink; the splash the diver makes, you know, tells where he is. If you ask me what I'm doing," Bight wound up, "I'm holding him under water. But we're in the middle of the pond, the banks are thronged with spectators, and I'm expecting from day to day to see stands erected and gate-money taken. There," he wearily smiled, "you have it. Besides," he then added with an odd change of tone, "I rather think you'll see to-morrow."
He had made her at last horribly nervous. "What shall I see?"
"It will all be out."
"Then why shouldn't you tell me?"
"Well," the young man said, "he has disappeared. There you are. I mean personally. He's not to be found. But nothing could make more, you see, for ubiquity. The country will ring with it. He vanished on Tuesday night—was then last seen at his club. Since then he has given no sign. How can a man disappear who does that sort of thing? It is, as you say, to caper on the housetops. But it will only be known to-night."
"Since when, then," Maud asked, "have you known it?"
"Since three o clock to-day. But I've kept it. I am—a while longer—keeping it."
She wondered; she was full of fears. "What do you expect to get for it?"
"Nothing—if you spoil my market. I seem to make out that you want to."
She gave this no heed; she had her thought. "Why then did you three days ago wire me a mystic word?"
"Mystic———?"
"What do you call 'Larks'?"
"Oh, I remember. Well, it was because I saw larks coming; because I saw, I mean, what has happened. I was sure it would have to happen."
"And what the mischief is it?"
Bight smiled. "Why, what I tell you. That he has gone."
"Gone where?"
"Simply bolted to parts unknown. 'Where' is what nobody who belongs to him is able in the least to say, or seems likely to be able."
"Any more than why?"
"Any more than why."
"Only you are able to say that?"
"Well," said Bight, "I can say what has so lately stared me in the face, what he has been thrusting at me in all its grotesqueness: his desire for a greater privacy worked through the Papers themselves. He came to me with it," the young man presently added. "I didn't go to him."
"And he trusted you," Maud replied.
"Well, you see what I have given him—the very flower of my genius. What more do you want? I'm spent, seedy, sore. I'm sick," Bight declared, "of his beastly funk."
Maud's eyes, in spite of it, were still a little hard. "Is he thoroughly sincere?"
"Good God, no! How can he be? Only trying it—as a cat, for a jump, tries too smooth a wall. He drops straight back."
"Then isn't his funk real?"
"As real as he himself is."
Maud wondered. "Isn't his flight———?"
"That's what we shall see!"
"Isn't," she continued, "his reason?"
"Ah," he laughed out, "there you are again!"
But she had another thought and was not discouraged. "Mayn't he be, honestly, mad?"
"Mad—oh yes. But not, I think, honestly. He's not honestly anything in the world but the Beadel-Muffet of our delight."
"Your delight," Maud observed after a moment, "revolts me." And then she said: "When did you last see him?"
"On Tuesday at six, love. I was one of the last."
"Decidedly, too, then, I judge, one of the worst." She gave him her idea. "You hounded him on."
"I reported," said Bight, "success. Told him how it was going."
"Oh, I can see you! So that if he's dead———"
"Well?" asked Bight blandly.
"His blood is on your hands."
He eyed his hands a moment. "They are dirty for him! But now, darling," he went on, "be so good as to show me yours."
"Tell me first," she objected, "what you believe. Is it suicide?"
"I think that's the thing for us to make it. Till somebody," he smiled, "makes it something else." And he showed how he warmed to the view. "There are weeks of it, dearest, yet."
He leaned more toward her, with his elbows on the table, and in this position, moved by her extreme gravity, he lightly flicked her chin with his finger. She threw herself, still grave, back from his touch, but they remained thus a while closely confronted. "Well," she at last remarked, "I sha'n't pity you."
"You make it, then, everyone except me?"
"I mean," she continued, "if you do have to loathe yourself."
"Oh, I sha'n't miss it." And then as if to show how little, "I did mean it, you know, at Richmond," he declared.
"I won't have you if you've killed him," she presently returned.
"You'll decide in that case for the nine?" And as the allusion, with its funny emphasis, left her blank: "You want to wear all the trousers?"
"You deserve," she said, when light came, "that I should take him." And she kept it up. "It's a lovely flat."
Well, he could do as much. "Nine, I suppose, appeals to you as the number of the muses?"
This short passage, remarkably, for all its irony, brought them together again, to the extent at least of leaving Maud's elbows on the table and of keeping her friend, now a little back in his chair, firm while he listened to her. So the girl came out. "I've seen Mrs. Chorner three times. I wrote that night, after our talk at Richmond, asking her to oblige. And I put on cheek as I had never, never put it. I said the public would be so glad to hear from her 'on the occasion of her engagement.'"
"Do you call that cheek?" Bight looked amused. "She at any rate rose straight."
"No, she rose crooked; but she rose. What you had told me there in the Park—well, immediately happened. She did consent to see me, and so far you had been right in keeping me up to it. But what do you think it was for?"
"To show you her flat, her tub, her petticoats?"
"She doesn't live in a flat; she lives in a house of her own, and a jolly good one, in Green Street, Park Lane; though I did, as happened, see her tub, which is a dream—all marble and silver, like a kind of a swagger sarcophagus, a thing for the Wallace Collection; and though her petticoats, as she first shows, seem all that, if you wear petticoats yourself, you can look at. There's no doubt of her money—given her place and her things, and given her appearance too, poor dear, which would take some doing."
"She squints?" Bight sympathetically asked.
"She's so ugly that she has to be rich—she couldn't afford it on less than five thousand a year. As it is, I could well see, she can afford anything—even such a nose. But she's funny and decent; sharp, but a really good sort. And they're not engaged."
"She told you so? Then there you are!"
"It all depends," Maud went on; "and you don't know where I am at all. I know what it depends on."
"Then there you are again! It's a mine of gold."
"Possibly, but not in your sense. She wouldn't give me the first word of an interview—it wasn't for that she received me. It was for something much better."
Well, Bight easily guessed. "For my job?"
"To see what can be done. She loathes his publicity."
The young man's face lighted. "She told you so?"
"She received me on purpose to tell me."
"Then why do you question my larks? What do you want more?"
"I want nothing—with what I have: nothing, I mean, but to help her. We made friends—I like her. And she likes me," said Maud Blandy.
"Like Mortimer Marshal, precisely."
"No, precisely not like Mortimer Marshal. I caught, on the spot, her idea—that was what took her. Her idea is that I can help her—help her to keep them quiet about Beadel: for which purpose I seem to have struck her as falling from the skies, just at the right moment, into her lap."
Howard Bight followed, yet lingered by the way. "To keep whom quiet———?"
"Why, the beastly Papers—what we've been talking about. She wants him straight out of them—straight."
"She too?" Bight wondered. "Then she's in terror?"
"No, not in terror—or it wasn't that when I last saw her. But in mortal disgust. She feels it has gone too far—which is what she wanted me, as an honest, decent, likely young woman, up to my neck in it, as she supposed, to understand from her. My relation with her is now that I do understand and that if an improvement takes place I sha'n't have been the worse for it. Therefore you see," Maud went on, "you simply cut my throat when you prevent improvement."
"Well, my dear," her friend returned, "I won't let you bleed to death." And he showed, with this, as confessedly struck. "She doesn't then, you think, know———?"
"Know what?"
"Why, what, about him, there may be to be known. Doesn't know of his flight."
"She didn't—certainly."
"Nor of anything to make it likely?"
"What you call his queer reason? No—she named it to me no more than you have; though she does mention, distinctly, that he himself hates, or pretends to hate, the exhibition daily made of him."
"She speaks of it," Bight asked, "as pretending———?"
Maud straightened it out. "She feels him—that she practically told me—as rather ridiculous. She honestly has her feeling; and, upon my word, it's what I like her for. Her stomach has turned and she has made it her condition. 'Muzzle your Press', she says; 'then we'll talk.' She gives him three months—she'll give him even six. And this, meanwhile—when he comes to you—is how you forward the muzzling."
"The Press, my child," Bight said, "is the watchdog of civilization, and the watchdog happens to be—it can't be helped—in a chronic state of rabies. Muzzling is easy talk; one can but keep the animal on the run. Mrs. Chorner, however," he added, "seems a figure of fable."
"It's what I told you she would have to be when, some time back, you threw out, as a pure hypothesis, to supply the man with a motive, your exact vision of her. Your motive has come true," Maud went on—"with the difference only, if I understand you, that this doesn't appear the whole of it. That doesn't matter"—she frankly paid him a tribute. "Your forecast was inspiration."
"A stroke of genius"—he had been the first to feel it. But there were matters less clear. "When did you see her last?"
"Four days ago. It was the third time."
"And even then she didn't imagine the truth about him?"
"I don't know, you see," said Maud, "what you call the truth."
"Well, that he quite by that time didn't know where the deuce to turn. That's truth enough."
Maud made sure. "I don't see how she can have known it and not have been upset. She wasn't," said the girl, "upset. She isn't upset. But she's original."
"Well, poor thing," Bight remarked, "she'll have to be?"
"Original?"
"Upset. Yes, and original too, if she doesn't give up the job." It had held him an instant but there were many things. "She sees the wild ass he is, and yet she's willing———?"
"'Willing' is just what I asked you three months ago," Maud returned, "how she could be."
He had lost it—he tried to remember. "What then did I say?"
"Well, practically, that women are idiots. Also, I believe, that he's a dazzling beauty."
"Ah yes, he is, poor wretch, though beauty to-day in distress."
"Then there you are," said Maud. They had got up, as at the end of their story, but they stood a moment while he waited for change. "If it comes out," the girl dropped, "that will save him. If he's dishonoured—as I see her—she'll have him, because then he won't be ridiculous. And I can understand it."
Bight looked at her in such appreciation that he forgot, as he pocketed it, to glance at his change. "Oh, you creatures———!"
"Idiots, aren't we?"
Bight let the question pass, but still with his eyes on her. "You ought to want him to be dishonoured."
"I can't want him, then—if he's to get the good of it—to be dead."
Still for a little he looked at her. "And if you're to get the good?" But she had turned away, and he went with her to the door, before which, when they had passed out, they had in the side-street, a backwater to the flood of the Strand, a further sharp colloquy. They were alone, the small street for a moment empty, and they felt at first that they had adjourned to a greater privacy, of which, for that matter, he took prompt advantage. "You're to lunch again with the man of the flat?"
"Wednesday, as I say; 1.45."
"Then oblige me by stopping away."
"You don't like it?" Maud asked.
"Oblige me, oblige me," he repeated.
"And disoblige him?"
"Chuck him. We've started him. It's enough."
Well, the girl but wanted to be fair. "It's you who started him; so I admit you're quits."
"That then started you—made Brains repent; so you see what you both owe me. I let the creature off, but I hold you to your debt. There's only one way for you to meet it." And then as she but looked into the roaring Strand: "With worship." It made her, after a minute, meet his eyes, but something just then occurred that stayed any word on the lips of either. A sound reached their ears, as yet unheeded, the sound of news boys in the great thoroughfare shouting "extra-specials" and mingling with the shout a catch that startled them. The expression in their eyes quickened as they heard, borne on the air, "Mysterious Disappearance———!" and then lost it in the hubbub. It was easy to complete the cry, and Bight himself gasped. "Beadel-Muffet? Confound them!"
"Already?" Maud had turned positively pale.
"They've got it first—be hanged to them!"
Bight gave a laugh—a tribute to their push—but her hand was on his arm for a sign to listen again. It was there, in the raucous throats; it was there, for a penny, under the lamps and in the thick of the stream that stared and passed and left it. They caught the whole thing—"Prominent Public Man!" And there was something brutal and sinister in the way it was given to the flaring night, to the other competing sounds, to the general hardness of hearing and sight which was yet, on London pavements, compatible with an interest sufficient for cynicism. He had been, poor Beadel, public and prominent, but he had never affected Maud Blandy at least as so marked with this character as while thus loudly committed to extinction. It was horrid—it was tragic; yet her lament for him was dry. "If he's gone I'm dished."
"Oh, he's gone—now," said Bight.
"I mean if he's dead."
"Well, perhaps he isn't. I see," Bight added, "what you do mean. If he's dead you can't kill him."
"Oh, she wants him alive," said Maud.
"Otherwise she can't chuck him?"
To which the girl, however, anxious and wondering, made no direct reply. "Good-bye to Mrs. Chorner. And I owe it to you."
"Ah, my love!" he vaguely appealed.
"Yes, it's you who have destroyed him, and it makes up for what you've done for me."
"I've done it, you mean, against you? I didn't know," he said, "you'd take it so hard."
Again, as he spoke, the cries sounded out: "Mysterious Disappearance of Prominent Public Man!" It seemed to swell as they listened; Maud started with impatience. "I hate it too much," she said, and quitted him to join the crowd.
He was quickly at her side, however, and before she reached the Strand he had brought her again to a pause. "Do you mean you hate it so much you won't have me?"
It had pulled her up short, and her answer was proportionately straight. "I won't have you if he's dead."
"Then will you if he's not?"
At this she looked at him hard. "Do you know, first?"
"No—blessed if I do."
"On your honour?"
"On my honour."
"Well," she said after an hesitation, "if she doesn't drop me———"
"It's an understood thing?" he pressed.
But again she hung fire. "Well, produce him first."
They stood there striking their bargain, and it was made, by the long look they exchanged, a question of good faith. "I'll produce him," said Howard Bight.