“I really must go.”
He rose and gave his hand. The next instant she was gone.
There was a deafening roar in his head. It was the complete destruction by earthquake of a city of dreams. A calamity which left nothing—even to be desired! A tremendous silence reigned after the event.
Five.
On the following evening, when from the windows of the London-to-Manchester express he saw in the gloom the high-leaping flames of the blast-furnaces that seem to guard eternally the southern frontier of the Five Towns, he felt that he had returned into daily reality out of an impossible world. Waiting for the loop-line train in the familiar tedium of Knype platform, staring at the bookstall, every item on which he knew by heart and despised, surrounded once more by local physiognomies, gestures, and accent, he thought to himself: “This is my lot. And if I get messing about, it only shows what a damned fool I am!” He called himself a damned fool because Hilda had proved to have a husband; because of that he condemned the whole expedition to Brighton as a piece of idiocy. His dejection was profound and bitter. At first, after Hilda had quitted him on the Sunday night, he had tried to be cheerful, had persuaded himself indeed that he was cheerful; but gradually his spirit had sunk, beaten and miserable. He had not called at Preston Street again. Pride forbade, and the terror of being misunderstood.
And when he sat at his own table, in his own dining-room, and watched the calm incurious Maggie dispensing to him his elaborate tea-supper with slightly more fuss and more devotion than usual, his thoughts, had they been somewhat less vague, might have been summed up thus: “The right sort of women don’t get landed as the wives of convicts. Can you imagine such a thing happening to Maggie, for instance? Or Janet?” (And yet Janet was in the secret! This disturbed the flow of his reflections.) Hilda was too mysterious. Now she had half disclosed yet another mystery. But what? “Why was her husband a convict? Under what circumstances? For what crime? Where? Since when?” He knew the answer to none of these questions. More deeply than ever was that woman embedded in enigmas.
“What’s this parcel on the sideboard?” Maggie inquired.
“Oh! I want you to send it in to Janet. It’s from her particular friend, Mrs Cannon—something for the kid, I believe. I ran across her in Brighton, and she asked me if I’d bring the parcel along.”
The innocence of his manner was perfectly acted. He wondered that he could do it so well. But really there was no danger. Nobody in Bursley, or in the world, had the least suspicion of his past relations with Hilda. The only conceivable danger would have been in hiding the fact that he had met her in Brighton.