"I shall get him out of this town at once, and out of the country. Do as I say. As things are he doesn't know there is any George, and it's just as well he shouldn't. But if he stays anywhere about, he's bound to know."
All Hilda's demeanour admitted that George Cannon had never been allowed to know that he had a son; and the simple candour of the admission frightened Edwin by its very simplicity.
"Now! Off you go! George is in the engine-house."
Hilda moved reluctantly towards the outer-door, like a reproved and rebellious schoolgirl. Suddenly she burst into tears, sprang at Edwin, and, putting her arms round his neck, kissed him through the veil.
"Nobody but you would have helped him--in your place!" she murmured passionately, half admiring, half protesting. And with a backward look as she hurried off, her face stern and yet soft seemed to appeal: "Help him."
Edwin was at once deeply happy and impregnated with a sense of the frightful sadness that lurks in the hollows of the world. He stood alone with the flaring gas, overcome.
IV
He went back to the private room, self-conscious and rather tongue-tied, with a clear feeling of relief that Hilda was disposed of, removed from the equation--and not unsuccessfully. After the woman, to deal with the man, in the plain language of men, seemed simple and easy. He was astounded, equally, by the grudging tardiness of Mrs. Cannon's information to Hilda as to the release, and by the baffling, inflexible detraction of Hilda's words: "Well, I'm not surprised." And the flitting image of Auntie Hamps fighting for life still left him untouched. He looked at George Cannon, and George Cannon, with his unreliable eyes, looked at him. He almost expected Cannon to say: "Was that Hilda you were talking to out there?" But Cannon seemed to have no suspicion that, in either the inner or the outer room, he had been so close to her. No doubt, when he was waiting by the mantel-piece in the outer room, he had lifted the paper as soon as he heard the door unlatched, expressly in order to screen himself from observation. Probably he had not even guessed that the passer was a woman. Had Simpson been there, the polite young man would doubtless have said: "Good night, Mrs. Clayhanger," but Simpson had happened not to be there.
"Are you going to help me?" asked George Cannon, after a moment, and his heavy voice was so beseeching, so humble, so surprisingly sycophantic, so fearful, that Edwin could scarcely bear to hear it. He hated to hear that one man could be so slavishly dependent on another. Indeed, he much preferred Cannon's defiant, half-bullying tone.
"Yes," said he. "I shall do what I can. What do you want?"