“You have hurt her, I will not have it; do you understand me, you—you?”
“Ah!” said Giles, and he looked very dangerous. Each man felt that all the old antagonism between them was being compressed into the few words they spoke.
Nielsen continued, tugging at his moustache, his face white with anger.
“What you have done you shall not again do; I will take care of it—I. You are not fit to speak to her, vous êtes un lâche, vous avez tué votr’ femme!” The last words seemed to explode in his mouth before they found vent—he had probably never intended to utter them.
Giles did not move, he only gritted his teeth together.
“Perhaps!” he said between them. At the word, so measured and so strange, Nielsen’s hands dropped inertly to his sides, his face expressed a sudden blank amazement, all his anger seemed to evaporate in surprise. A barrel organ was playing within a few feet of where they stood, the man, as he turned the dismal handle, grinned and kept holding a greasy hat towards them.
Giles, taking a step forward, spoke in a low voice—
“Look here, Mr. Nielsen,” he said, “I don’t take this sort of thing from you or any other man. Get out of my way, please, or by God, I’ll throw you.”
He stepped past Nielsen, who involuntarily moved to one side, and made no attempt to detain him. His face still expressed a blank astonishment, and he was endeavouring to fix his eyeglass into his eye as a short-sighted man does when he is puzzled. Giles strode along. The organ-grinder muttered: “Buon giorno, Signore,” thrusting his hat almost into his face, an intruding triviality which was quite acceptable to him.
He walked quickly eastwards. The incident with Nielsen had, for the moment, done him good; he thought grimly of the sudden change which had come over the Swede’s broad face. It served as a temporary distraction to his thoughts. But the next instant he was pursued again by a dull sense of utter unhappiness. Twice he actually turned round, and began to retrace his steps towards the Mansions, and each time his mind in the end was bent against it by the feeling, light and unsubstantial as a feather, that it would be ridiculous to go back now. He knew that it formed no part of the real balancing of his reasons, for or against, but there it was, a chance surface feeling just sufficient to turn the scale. He thought too of Nielsen, with a sensation of jealousy—which he knew all the time to be unreal. What was he doing there? What did his interference mean? He tried to bring the feeling to his own support, but it slipped away from him with the memory of the words Jocelyn had spoken. “I love you—I will be anything to you, anything but that——”