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And while Charles was in South Winch, Laura was in Cambridge, dealing with Jocelyn. She, like Charles, had become conscious of the sufferings of the Lukes, and, like him, was obsessed by them and lost in astonishment that she hadn’t thought of them sooner; but for some obscure reason, or instinct, her compunctions and her sympathies were for Jocelyn rather than for his mother, and after a second sleepless night, during which she was haunted by the image of the unfortunate young husband and greatly tormented, she went down, much chastened, to Cambridge by the first possible train, with only one desire now, to put him out of his misery and beg his forgiveness.
So that Jocelyn, sitting doing nothing, his untouched breakfast still littering the table, sitting bent forward in the basket-chair common to the rooms of young men at Cambridge, his thin hands gripped so hard round his knees that the knuckles showed white, his ears strained for the slightest sound on the staircase, his eyes hollow from want of sleep, sitting as he had sat all the previous afternoon after getting Mr. Thorpe’s telegram and most of the night, sitting waiting, listening, and perhaps for the first time in his life, for his mother had not included religious exercises in his early education, doing something not unlike praying, did at last hear a woman’s step crossing Austen’s Court, hesitating at what he felt sure was his corner, then slowly coming up his staircase, and hesitating again at the first floor.
All the blood in his body seemed to rush to his head and throb there. His heart thumped so loud that he could hardly hear the steps any more. He struggled out of his low chair and stood listening, holding on to it to steady himself. Would they come up higher? Yes—they were coming up. Yes—it must be Sally. Sally—oh, oh, Sally!
He flew to the door, pulled it open, and saw—Laura.
‘It’s all right,’ she panted, for the stairs were steep and she was fat, ‘it is—about Sally—don’t look so——’ she stopped to get her breath—‘so dreadfully disappointed. She’s safe. If you’ll—oh, what stairs——’ she pressed her hand to her heaving bosom—‘come with me, I’ll—take you—to her——’
And having got to the top, she staggered past him into his room, and dropped into the basket-chair, and for a minute or two did nothing but gasp.
But how difficult she found him. Jocelyn, whose reactions were always violent, behaved very differently from the way his mother at that moment was behaving, placed in the same situation of being asked forgiveness by a Moulsford. Instead of forgiving, of being, as Laura had pictured, so much delighted at the prospect of soon having Sally restored to him that he didn’t mind anything, he appeared to mind very much, and quarrelled with her. She, accustomed to have everything she did that was perhaps a little wrong condoned and overlooked by all classes except her own, was astonished. Here she was, doing a thing she had never done before, begging a young man to forgive her, and he wouldn’t. On the contrary, he rated her. Rated her! Her, Laura Moulsford. She knew that much is forgiven those above by those below, and had frequently deplored the practice as one that has sometimes held up progress, but now that the opposite was being done to herself she didn’t like it at all.
‘Oh, what a nasty disposition you’ve got!’ she cried at last, when Jocelyn had been telling her for ten impassioned minutes, leaning against the chimney-piece and glowering down at her with eyes flashing with indignation, what he thought of her. ‘I’m glad now, instead of sorry, for what I did. At least Sally has had two days less of you.’
‘If you’re going to rag me as well——’ began Jocelyn, taking a quick step forward as if to seize and shake this fat little incredibly officious stranger,—so like him, his mother would have said, to waste time being furious instead of at once making her take him to Sally.
But Laura, unacquainted with his ways, was astonished.
Then he pulled himself up. ‘It’s not you I’m cursing really at all,’ he said. ‘It’s myself.’
‘Well, I don’t mind that,’ said Laura, smiling.
‘I’ve got the beastliest temper,’ said Jocelyn.
‘So I see,’ said Laura.
‘Do you think,’ he asked, for in spite of his anger he was all soft and bruised underneath after his two days of fear, and when the fat stranger smiled there was something very motherly about her, ‘I shall ever get over it?’
‘Perhaps if you try—try hard.’
‘But—look here, I don’t care what you say—what business had you to make away with my wife?’
‘Now you’re beginning all over again.’
‘Make away with my wife, smash up everything between me and my mother——’
‘Oh, oh——’ interrupted Laura, stopping up her ears, and bowing her head before the storm.