"Oh, she only meant to be friendly, I think. She seemed to admire baby."
"Deuced clever woman, Mrs. Reginald. I'll write about the pipe when I come in."
He was with Lady Joan for about two hours, and it was quite dark when he left her house. They had reached that stage in their intercourse when conversation is rather difficult, but companionship is a matter of course. They did not discuss the arts now, nor the ethics of Socialism, nor the position of woman. None of these things seemed to matter half so much to them as his prospects of getting fresh pupils, or her choice of a dining-room paper. And sometimes they did not speak at all, though their silence was never an embarrassed one. This afternoon there had been more than usual to talk about, for she had resolved to give up her visions of philanthropy and was thinking of going abroad, and he had been trying to dissuade her, purely in his character of adviser, without letting her see that he hoped she would remain in London. He was beginning to realize how much he liked coming to see her, and how great a relief it was to escape from the people who had claims upon him, and for whose bath-room pipes he was legally responsible, to some one who had no claim upon him, and whose bath-room pipes were in consequence so much pleasanter to superintend. And he walked down the doorsteps slowly, with a feeling that he had not persuaded her to remain, and that he was a fool not to have used the only methods of persuasion that he would like to have used, and that might have gained his point. There was a weary vista before him of endless letters to the plumber, of endless commonplace conversations with his wife, of endless unfulfilled ambitions, everything that chokes the energy of the artistic enthusiast who has been married long enough to lose his first illusions, and not long enough to learn to do without them. He was in the mood to be exasperated by a triviality, and he swore beneath his breath when a man with a beard stumbled against him in the portico.
"Digby!" shouted the man with the beard, in a voice that made the passers-by stop and look.
The musician recoiled, and stammered something. He said afterwards that the fateful truth flashed upon him in a second of time, but in reality he stood there for some moments while the existence of the man before him slowly worked its way to his brain. And with the realization of Jack's existence came the realization of something he had been trying for six months to hide from himself. Jack's return from the dead meant—good heavens! what did it not mean to him now?
And to Joan also?
"You—you must not go into her suddenly like this; it might kill her, the shock, don't you know," he found himself saying, in a kind of dream, when the first hurried and incoherent words of greeting had passed between them. Joan was all he was thinking of just then, Joan and the last six months of uninterrupted friendship. Yet Digby was not a bad man, nor a malicious one exactly; but his old affection for his brother, which had always depended more on habit than on natural affinity, had been rudely broken by his supposed death, and it was not easy to revive it again now, nor was it made easier by a concurrence of circumstances which seemed to demand that he should rather have stayed away altogether. Why had Jack chosen this moment to come back? A few years back the musician would have found an occasion for moralizing in the strange conflict of feelings within him.
"I—I feel quite queer myself," he said, making an effort to grasp his brother's hand more warmly; "why on earth didn't you let us know that the wrong man—that the other man was killed? You always did imagine that we knew all about you without your troubling to write to us, Jack. Never was so surprised in my life,—delighted, I should say. But what does it all mean?"
"Eh, what? Why, don't you see, I thought it was all bally rot to write and explain that they had cabled my name instead of Jack Rackstraw's, because I meant to come over that next mail. And then, when I got another berth offered me with an elegant screw, I reckoned I 'd take it and go on being dead for a space, rather a scheme, don't you twig? And besides, I thought if I lay low till next fall Joan might find out she cared for me a bit more than she calculated, eh? Hasn't it been hard work, though, just sitting tight and not hearing from her! Now, fire yourself, Digby, and let me freeze on to that bell."
"But look here, old man," urged the musician, desperately, "let me go in first and explain. You go round to Norah and wait till I come for you. These—these shocks are too much for women; they can't always stand them; women can't, you know. Surely you must see the folly of frightening her—"