CHAPTER VI
There were attendant upon the expectation and the coming of Benji certain processes of mind that had not been with Huggo or with Doda. When it was in prospect she had vexation, sometimes a sense of injury, that again her work was to be interrupted. It would make no difference to Harry. It happened that the days of her trial were timed to fall on the date when a criminal prosecution of sensational public interest was due for hearing at the Old Bailey. Harry, for the defence, had added immensely to his brilliant reputation when seeing it through the preliminary stages before the magistrate. The Old Bailey proceedings were to be the greatest event, thus far, in his career. He had told her—how proud and delighted to hear it she had been!—that if he pulled it off (and he had set his heart on pulling it off) he would really begin to think about “taking silk.”
Well, but she also had her heart, in no single or sensational climax of her work, but in its every phase and every hour. It absorbed her. Two years earlier Mr. Simcox had begun disturbing signs of health that, begun, developed rapidly. His brisk activity went out of him. His walk had the odd suggestion of one carrying a load. His perky air went dull. His mind was like a flagging watch, run down. He could not concentrate, he suffered passages of aphasia, he began more and more to “give up the office,” more and more to leave things to her. The agency in both its branches, scholastic and insurance, developed well. She was its head and it absorbed her. She had a sense, that was like wine to her, of increasing swiftness of decision, of power, of judgment, of vision, of resource. She used to hurry to her office of a morning as an artist urgent with inspiration will hurry to his colours, or a poet to his pen,—avid to exercise that which was within her.
Well, it was to be stopped. Childbed. For a month at least, for two months more likely, all was to be set aside, to go into abeyance, to drift. Whereas Harry’s work.... Yes, vexatious! These laws that gave men the desirable place in life were not laws but conventions and she had proved them such; but with all proved there yet remained to the man privileges, to the woman restraints, that were ordinances fundamental and not to be escaped. Yes, injurious!
Thus in those weeks of the coming of him that was to be Benji, solely the boy of aspect mutinous and impetuous was in her face; and when within a month stood her appointed time came an event that stiffened there that aspect, turned it, indeed, actively upon the child within her waiting deliverance. This event in its momentous incidence on her career placed its occasion on parity with Harry’s anticipations of the Old Bailey trial. Mr. Simcox died.
There’s no use labouring why the emotions that at this loss should have been hers were not hers. That girl whose eyes had gathered tears at the picture of the little figure with flapping jacket peering through the curtains at the postman’s “rat-tat-flick” was not present in the woman whose first thought at the sudden news, brought to her seated in her office, was, “At such a time! Just when—Now what is to be done?” True for her that there followed gentle feelings, and gentler yet in her attendance on her patron’s obsequies, in the discovery that all of which he died possessed he’d left to her, but it is the duller surfaces that are slowest to give refraction, the least used springs that are least pliant. She was come a long road from her first signs of hardening. She was past, now, the stage where, when grieving for the little old man, she would have felt contrition that her first thought at his death had been, not of him, but of his death’s effect upon her work.
And there supervened, immediately, interests that caused the passing of Mr. Simcox merely—to have passed.
Mr. Sturgiss, of Field and Company, attending the funeral with her, said to her as he was taking his leave, “One would say this isn’t a moment to be talking of other things, business things, but after all—In a way it is the moment. You’ll be making new arrangements and rearrangements now. Before you start settling anything I want you to have in mind the old proposition. You’ve been loyal to poor Simcox to the end. This business is your own now. We want it. We want you. We want you in Lombard Street.”