It was no easy duty to him to complete both stories by Thursday morning, and, confronted by the necessity for making Turquand a further excuse for retirement, he almost wished now that he were living alone. He was vastly relieved that the other accepted his allusions to "something that would keep him busy for a month or so" with no apparent perception of a mystery. After the first inevitable question was shirked, the journalist put no more, and behaved as if the explanation had been explicit. Neither Kent's friendship, nor his admiration for him, had ever been so warm, as while he decided that Turquand's experience must lead him to suspect something like the truth and enabled him to conceal the suspicion under his normal demeanour.
With Cynthia the ghost was less fortunate, though he barely divined it by her answer. He told her as much as he was free to tell: he wrote that he had work on hand at last, and that they would have ten guineas on Saturday, and a large sum in a couple of months. Where the stuff would appear, he could not say without a falsehood, and he trustee! she would not be curious on the point. The reservation that he regretted gave to his tone an aloofness that he did not design; Cynthia refrained from inquiring, but she was hurt. She felt that he might have imparted such intelligence a little more enthusiastically, at a little greater length. Did he suppose that her interest was limited to the payment? Was she only held sympathetic enough, to mind the baby when they were obliged to discharge the nurse? Now that he returned to work, her husband was going to treat her as a child again, just as he had done when he was engaged on his book! She did not perceive that, while he had been writing the book, she had occupied the position most natural to her; she did not detect that the attitude in which she recalled it was a new one. It was, however, the attitude of a woman. The hidden chagrin and urbanity of her reply was a woman's. These things were part of a development of which, while they had remained together, neither she nor the man who missed her had been acutely aware.
[CHAPTER XXII]
Mrs. Deane-Pitt paid Kent the ten guineas a few days after the Saturday on which she had expected to receive the Editor's cheque, and she made no secret of being delighted with the two tales. They were based upon rather original ideas, and after she had had them typewritten, and read them, she talked to him about them with the frankest appreciation possible. Kent almost lost sight of his regret that they weren't to appear under his own name, as the lady expressed her approval, and declared enthusiastically that to call them "excellent" was to say too little. He found it very stimulating to hear his work praised by Mrs. Deane-Pitt, especially as it was work done for her. Although she had professed to be careless of the quality, it was not to be supposed that she would not rather sign good stuff than bad, and the warmth and gaiety of her comments took the sting from the association and lent it a charm.
When he began her novel, it was with the discomfiting consciousness that the breakneck speed imposed on him would prevent the labourer being worthy of his hire. He was too hurried to be able to frame a scenario, and neither he nor the lady who was to figure as the author had more than a hazy idea of what the book was going to be about. He had mentally sworn to keep his critical faculty in check and to produce a chapter of two thousand words every day—if he did not bind himself to the accomplishment of a fixed instalment daily, the book would not be finished in double the time at his disposal! And he rose at seven, and worked till about midnight, on the day on which Chapter I. was done. He had corrected in a fashion as he composed, and he did not read it through when he put down his pen—that would be too disheartening. He remembered the opening chapter of The Eye of the Beholder, and, contrasted with the remembrance, these pages that he had perpetrated appeared to him puerile and painful. He folded them up, and posted them to Mrs. Deane-Pitt with a note before he slept.
"Whether you will want the novel after you have seen this, I don't know," he wrote; "I am sending it to you to ascertain. It is a specimen of the rubbish the thing will be if I have to turn it out at such a rate. I will call, on the chance of your being in, to-morrow afternoon."
He found her at home, and she welcomed him with a humorous smile.
"You have read it?" asked Kent, with misgiving.
"Yes; I've read it," she said. "Violet! Pray don't look so frightened of me!"