The first thing they noticed was that a proud-boy look was creeping over him—what Ruddy called an I-ate-the-canary look. For all his fatness he began to bustle. He began to make fusses if the meals weren’t punctual, to insist on his boots being properly blacked and to behave himself in general as though he were head of his household. He spoke vaguely of meetings in the city—meetings which it was vital that he should attend “punkchully.”
“If I’m not punkchull,” he said, “everything may go up the spout.” He didn’t explain what everything was; he was inviting his wife to ask a question.
She knew it—sensible woman. “Meetings in the city,” she thought to herself; “meetings in the city, indeed. Pooh! Men are all babies. If he thinks that he’s going to get me worked up——”
She had shared too many of his ups and downs to allow her excitement to show itself. She denied to herself that she was excited. These little flares of good fortune had deceived her faith too many times. So she treated her Alonzo like a big spoilt child, humoring his whims and feigning to be discreetly unobserving. She forbade the display of curiosity on the part of any of her family. “If you go asking questions,” she said, “you’ll drive him to it.”
She had seen him driven to it before—it was the moment when the dam of piled-up ambitions burst and they scrambled to save what they could from the whirlpool of collapsed speculations. The end of it had usually been a hasty retreat to a less expensive house.
Every day brought some new improvement in his dress. Within a fortnight he was looking exceedingly plump in a frock-coat and top-hat He hadn’t been so gorgeous in a dozen years—not since he had kept a carriage in Kensington. Each morning, shortly after nine, he left Orchid Lodge and marched down Eden Row, swinging his cane with a Mammon-like air of prosperity. When he came back in the evening, as frequently as not he had a flower blazing in his button-hole.
There were times when he strove to revive husbandly gallantries—little acts of forethought and gestures of tenderness. He had grown too fat and had been too long out of practice to do it graciously, and Mrs. Sheerug—she blinked at him with a happiness which tried in vain to conceal itself. They were Rip Van Winkles waking up to an altered world—a world in which a husband need no longer fear his wife, and in which there were more important occupations than talking Cockney to Mr. Ooze as an escape from dullness.
It took just three months for the suppressed expectations of Orchid Lodge to reach their climax. It was reached when Alonzo, of his own accord, without a helping hint or the least sign of necessity, offered his wife money. It happened one September evening, in the room with the French windows which opened into the garden. It was impossible for a natively inquisitive woman to refuse this bait to her curiosity.
“A hund—a hundred pounds! Why, Alonzo!”
Teddy and Ruddy were seated on the steps. At the sound of her gasping cry, they turned to gaze into the shabby comfort of the room. She stood tiptoeing against him, clinging to his hand and scanning his face with her faded eyes. Her gray hair straggled across her wrinkled forehead; her lips trembled. Her weary, worn-out, kindly appearance made her strangely pathetic in the presence of his plump self-assertiveness.