CHAPTER XIII. — LEWISHAM INSISTS.
Ethel Henderson sat at her machine before the window of Mr. Lagume’s study, and stared blankly at the greys and blues of the November twilight. Her face was white, her eyelids were red from recent weeping, and her hands lay motionless in her lap. The door had just slammed behind Lagune.
“Heigh-ho!” she said. “I wish I was dead. Oh! I wish I was out of it all.”
She became passive again. “I wonder what I have done,” she said, “that I should be punished like this.”
She certainly looked anything but a Fate-haunted soul, being indeed visibly and immediately a very pretty girl. Her head was shapely and covered with curly dark hair, and the eyebrows above her hazel eyes were clear and dark. Her lips were finely shaped, her mouth was not too small to be expressive, her chin small, and her neck white and full and pretty. There is no need to lay stress upon her nose—it sufficed. She was of a mediocre height, sturdy rather than slender, and her dress was of a pleasant, golden-brown material with the easy sleeves and graceful line of those aesthetic days. And she sat at her typewriter and wished she was dead and wondered what she had done.
The room was lined with bookshelves, and conspicuous therein were a long row of foolish pretentious volumes, the “works” of Lagune—the witless, meandering imitation of philosophy that occupied his life. Along the cornices were busts of Plato, Socrates, and Newton. Behind Ethel was the great man’s desk with its green-shaded electric light, and littered with proofs and copies of Hesperus, “A Paper for Doubters,” which, with her assistance, he edited, published, compiled, wrote, and (without her help) paid for and read. A pen, flung down forcibly, quivered erect with its one surviving nib in the blotting pad. Mr. Lagune had flung it down.
The collapse of the previous night had distressed him dreadfully, and ever and again before his retreat he had been breaking into passionate monologue. The ruin of a life-work, it was, no less. Surely she had known that Chaffery was a cheat. Had she not known? Silence. “After so many kindnesses—”
She interrupted him with a wailing, “Oh, I know—I know.”
But Lagune was remorseless and insisted she had betrayed him, worse—made him ridiculous! Look at the “work” he had undertaken at South Kensington—how could he go on with that now? How could he find the heart? When his own typewriter sacrificed him to her stepfather’s trickery? “Trickery!”
The gesticulating hands became active, the grey eyes dilated with indignation, the piping voice eloquent.