IV
And so Lola was free to go home again and spend the remainder of Sunday with her people, after all. But when, having tidied up and dressed herself, she ran downstairs into the servants’ sitting room on her way to the area steps, there sat Simpkins, a crestfallen and tragic figure, looking at a horizon which no longer contained the outline of his dream upon the banks of the Thames. He got up as Lola entered,—done for, but in the spirit of a protector, a Cromwellian spirit. “Where ’ad you bin last night?” he asked, “in them clothes?” He had not slept for thinking of it. His Lola, dressed like a lady, coming in with a tear-stained face, late at night, alone, from a devouring world. All his early chapel stuff had been revived at the sight. Disappointment had stirred it up.
Another cross-examination! Wasn’t the world large enough for so small a little figure to escape notice?
“Dear old Simpky,” she said, with that wide-eyed candor of hers, “I’m in such a hurry. With any luck I shall just be able to catch the bus that will take me home to lunch.”
But Simpkins put his back against the door. “No,” he said. “Not like that. Even if I’ve lost yer, I love yer, and it’s my job to see you don’t come to no ’arm. You’ve got to tell me what you’re doing.”
There was something in the man’s eyes and in the whiteness of his face that warned Lola immediately of the need to be careful. Her mother had said that Simpkins was a good man with something of ecstasy in his nature, and she guessed intuitively that the latter might take the form eventually, in his ignorance and his love, of a dangerous watchfulness. So she was very patient and quiet and commonplace, remembering a similar scene which had taken place with Treadwell outside Mrs. Rumbold’s battered house.
“I went to a concert with a married friend of mine. Lady Feo gave me the frock. It’s very kind of you to worry, Simpky. And now, please——”
And after a moment’s hesitation Simpkins opened the door and with a curious dignity gave the girl her freedom. He loved her and believed in her. She was Lola and she was good, and but for some catastrophic accident she might be engaged to be married to him.
But Lola didn’t go immediately. She turned round and put her hand on the valet’s arm. “What are you going to do?” she asked, affectionately concerned.
“There isn’t anything for me to do,” he said, “now.”
“Come home with me.”
But he shook his head. “I couldn’t,” he said. “Your father is a friend of mine and might slap me on the back and tell me to go on ’oping—and there isn’t any—is there?”
And she said, “No, Simpky dear. I’m sorry to say there isn’t. But you can’t sit here looking at the carpet with the sun shining and so much to see. Why not come on the bus as far as Queen’s Road and then go for a walk. It would do you good.”
And he said, “Nothing can do me good.”
And she could see that he had begun to revel in his pain, and nurse it, and elevate it to a great tragedy. And for the first time she recognized in this man a menace to her scheme. He loved her too well and she had made him a fanatic.
This scheme of hers, so like one of the Grimm’s fairy tales in which the woodcutter’s daughter dared to love the prince,—was it to get all over the town? Miss Breezy had a friend in Scotland Yard, a detective. Lady Feo was on the watch, and here was Simpkins turned into a protector. And all the while Prince Fallaray lived in the same house and did nothing more than just remember her name, thinking that she was a friend of the woman who called herself his wife.
Never mind; the sun was shining, tears had dried, courage had returned, frocks and shoes and stockings had come and the impossible was one of the things that nearly always happened.
An hour later the door of the watchmaker’s shop opened in answer to her knock. There stood the fat man with his beaming smile of welcome and surprise, and out of the little parlor came an enticing aroma of roast lamb and mint sauce.