§
Not a word from Jocelyn all this time, not a sign. He might be dead, she thought; and it would have hurt her less if he had been. For dead he would have been for ever hers; nobody then could touch him, take him away. Crushed and bitter, she crept yet closer to Mr. Thorpe. He liked it. He liked being crept close to. He was thoroughly pleased with what in his business-like mind he referred to as his bargain.
She never mentioned Jocelyn to him, and he liked that too. ‘Young fool,’ he said, when he came round unexpectedly early one evening, and found her crying. ‘No use worrying about a fool.’
And Mrs. Luke, still further crushed by hearing Jocelyn called a fool, and therefore being forced to the deduction that she had produced one—yes, and it was true, too, in spite of his brains—could only hang on to Mr. Thorpe, and say nothing.
He liked that. He liked to be hung on to, and he had no objection to a certain amount of saying nothing in a woman. Her late husband, could he now have seen her who was once his wife, would have been surprised, for in his day she had never hung on, and had been particularly good at conversation. But there was that about Mr. Thorpe which quenched conversation. Even before her engagement, in the days of his preliminary assiduities after his wife’s death, she had found it difficult, when he came round, to keep what she understood was sometimes described as the ball rolling; and she was completely in command of herself then, in the full flood of her happiness and satisfaction. Conversation with him, the kind she and South Winch knew and practised, was out of the question. There was no exchange of opinions possible with Mr. Thorpe, because he never exchanged his, he merely emitted them and stuck to them. And they came out clothed in so very few words that they seemed to Mrs. Luke, watching him with quizzical, amused eyes—ah, those detached days, when one looked on and wasn’t involved!—almost indecently bare. Now she drooped. She bowed her head.
Mr. Thorpe liked that. He liked a woman to bow her head. Gentleness in a woman was what he liked: gentleness, and softness, and roundness. Margery was gentle all right, and soft enough in places—anyhow of speech; but she wasn’t round. Not yet. Later, of course, after the cook at Abergeldie—his house was called Abergeldie—had had a go at her, she wouldn’t know herself again. And meanwhile, to put an immediate stop to all this underfeeding, a stream of nourishment—oysters, lobsters, plovers’ eggs, his own pineapples, his own forced strawberries, his own butter and fresh eggs, and, once, a sucking pig—thickly flowed across the daisied meadow dividing Abergeldie from Almond Tree Cottage.
The little maid turned yellow, and began to get up at night and be sick. Mrs. Luke, feeling it was both wrong and grotesque to bury lobsters in the back garden, and unable either to stop the stream or deal with it herself, was forced to send most of the stuff round to her friends; and so South Winch became aware of what had happened, for nobody except Mr. Thorpe grew pineapples and bought plovers’ eggs, and nobody gave such quantities of them to a woman without being going to marry her afterwards.
Well, it was as good a way as any other of letting people know, thought Mrs. Luke, sitting in silence with Mr. Thorpe’s arm round her waist, while every now and then he furtively felt to see whether she wasn’t beginning anywhere to curve. Instead of sending round billets de faire part she sent lobsters. Rather original, she thought, with a slight return to her detached and amused earlier self. ‘Does he really think I can eat them all?’ she wondered.
And the little maid, in whose kitchen much, even so, remained, fell from one bilious paroxysm into another.