He did not turn, because he was afraid to let even a vacant mirror like Our Agnes reflect his face; and also for another reason. The fragrance of Harriet’s galloping soup reached him quickly across the room, waking him to the violent realisation that he had not tasted food for many hours. If he saw it, he might be driven to a fierce snatching which would send Our Agnes to join Helwise in her orgy of hysterics upstairs; so he stood fast, clasping the paper like a child in peril.
“Will you put it down—whatever it is?” The tray touched the table. “Thanks! And, while you’re here, do you mind lighting the fire? I couldn’t find any matches.”
He sat down in the desk-chair, struggling with his consuming hunger, and cursing himself for having kept her a moment longer than was necessary. She would take hours to light the fire—she always did—and he would have to sit in torture until she had finished. But he was very cold, chill with hunger as well as damp, and the mere consciousness of a woman’s presence had roused the weary man’s instinctive claim for help. Perhaps she would not find the matches, either, and while she went for others he could retreat in dignity with the food. But she did find them. He heard them rattle as she drew them out from behind the clock. Why on earth hadn’t he thought of looking there himself? It wasn’t like Our Agnes to be so quickwitted. Now he would have to sit through an eternity of craving while she fumbled with the wet sticks. He fixed his eyes furtively on the paper, and was back again sharply in his former atmosphere of longing and regret.
Dandy, on her knees, fighting the unwilling sticks, fought also the strangling tears and pitiful laughter in her own heart. Harriet’s jest was become fact; he had indeed taken her for Our Agnes! Her voice had sounded strange even in her own ears—she admitted that; but, if she had ever had a real place in his life, ever stirred, if only for an instant, his difficult heart, ever been to him even a fraction of more worth than the slattern in his kitchen, would he not have known that there was somebody quite other in the room? She looked at his tired back and roughened hair with a great rush of pity and pain and longing to help, but it did not reach him. His wet wristbands and soaked boots blurred before her misty eyes, but he did not guess or care. Love was round him, kissing his hand, begging at his knee, pressing his aching head to rest, but he could not feel it. She might have drawn his attention with a word, a touch, but she left the one unspoken, the other unperformed. There are rights belonging to unself-conscious friendship that shrinking, fastidious love will never claim.
How could he not know? Ah, but he ought to have known! If he had cared ever so little, he would have guessed at her presence; cared much—sprung to meet it; and, last of all, if he had loved her, he would have looked for her to come to him somehow from the very ends of the earth.
But he had done none of these things. There was no answer to her prayer. If he never guessed, never turned, she would know that she meant nothing to him at all.
The soup was getting cold. She fretted, battling with the fire. Harriet would be annoyed if their labour was wasted, and he seemed too deep in his reading to remember that she had brought him food. Nervously she pushed the basin up the table within reach of his hand, and went back to her task. When she looked round again, it was empty, and he had buried himself afresh in his paper. After the thrill of joy that she had at least given him some shred of comfort came the renewed certainty that he was quite unconscious of the giver. It was more than plain that she was outside his thoughts altogether.
The fire was crackling merrily now, and with a last strained hope that he might yet know her, she began to gather the papers into a corner, but before she had set the last on the pile, she saw him stir as if distressed and irritated through his absorption by her quiet movements. She stopped instantly, then, and moved to the door, yet slowly, and looking towards him, and all the way her heart was begging, begging for a sign. She knew that all these months her little taper of hope had burnt bravely, bending at times to the wind of disappointment, but always brightening and glowing. Now it was dying. By the time she reached the door it would be dead. Yet she would not call, nor speak aloud the words that the soul only could utter and its twin-soul only should hear. Even a commonplace he might possibly resent in this his trouble. He had said she did not understand. He might certainly say it now, if, in her ignorance of the real conditions, she tried to comfort him. She could only speak to him dumbly from her heart, and he did not hear. His home, his resting-place, were at hand, and he held his face from them. The little torch flickered low. The handle turned, and turned again. Outside the door Dandy stood, hugging her dead candle.
Hamer came in like an anxious bear in his large coat, and found her there.