And without waiting for permission he began rapidly to roll up the bedclothes in one vast bundle. Next he collected the crockery. The bedroom had ceased to be immune from the general sack.
"They didn't have a lot of luck," said Mr. Belrose to Elsie and Joe that night in the Steps at the locked door of T. T.'s. It was the decent, wizened little old fellow's epitaph on Henry Earlforward and Violet. It was his apology for dropping the keys of T. T.'s into his pocket, and for the blaze of electricity from his old shop, and for the forlorn darkness of T. T.'s, and for the fact that he was prospering while others were dead. He did not attribute the fate of the Earlforwards to Henry's formidable character. He could not think scientifically, and even had he been able to do so good nature would have prevented him. And even if he had attempted to do so he might have thought wrong. The affair, like all affairs of destiny, was excessively complex.
Elsie, for her part, laid much less stress than Mr. Belrose on luck. "With a gentleman like he was," she thought, meaning Henry Earlforward, "something was bound to happen sooner or later." She held Mr. Earlforward responsible for her mistress's death, but her notions of the value of evidence were somewhat crude. And, similarly, she held herself responsible for her master's death. She had noticed that he had never been the same since the orgy of her wedding-cake, and she had a terrible suspicion that immoderate wedding-cake caused cancer. Thus she added one more to the uncounted theories of the origin of cancer, and nobody yet knows enough of the subject to be able to disprove Elsie's theory. However, that night Elsie, with the sensations of a homicide, the ruin of a home and family behind her, a jailbird on her left arm and his heavy grip-bag on her right, could still be happy as she went up the Steps into Riceyman Square, and called at her old home to make certain dispositions, and passed on in the chill darkness to Myddelton Square. She was apprehensive about future dangers and her own ability to cope with them; but she was always apprehensive.
Joe, belonging to the contemplative and passionate variety of mankind, was not at all apprehensive. He knew his soul as intimately as a pretty woman knows the externals of her body. He was conscious of joy in retreading with Elsie the old familiar streets. He had a perfect, worshipping faith in Elsie's affection and in her powers. His one affliction was to see Elsie lugging the heavy grip-bag; but even this was absurd, for he had not yet the strength to carry it, and he well knew that she would never have permitted him to try.
People saw a young, humble, mutually-absorbed couple strolling along and looking at one another. More correctly, people did not see a humble couple, any more than people at a Court ball see a fashionably dressed and self-sure couple. Elsie and Joe were characteristic of the district. They would have had to look much worse than they did in order to be classed as humble in Clerkenwell. Nor were people shocked at the spectacle of the woman lugging a heavy grip-bag while the man carried naught. Such dreadful things were often witnessed in Clerkenwell.
Printed by
Cassell & Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage,
London, E.C.4.
F 120.923
Transcriber's Note
Punctuation errors have been corrected.
The following suspected printer's error has been addressed.
Page 293. Joe changed to Jerry. (Jerry was extraordinarily uplifted)