“Captain Hatton!” Evangeline called over the banisters, “are you coming riding before breakfast to-morrow?”
“If you wish me to,” he answered unsteadily and waited for a moment while Emma ran upstairs. But Evangeline only replied, “All right, eight o’clock then,” and disappeared, and he heard the girls’ laughter in the drawing-room. He let himself out and spent the evening and most of the night walking along the sea shore.
“That’s an unlucky hat of yours, Emma,” said Evangeline when she went back to the drawing-room. “I believe there’s a devil in it. We had one row about it before you came up.” She went off singing.
Teresa’s elusive desire had begun to show itself openly to her since she met Emma Gainsborough. She had been allowed at last behind the curtain where the faces that haunted her in the streets were no longer imaginary characters in a scene at which she looked on as a spectator. She began to know individual Tommys and Gordons and Gladyses and Victorias, Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Jason; to understand why Mr. Potter was out of work and what it meant to half-a-dozen lives when Mr. Jason brought home only a fraction of his earnings. She saw disease for the first time. She met pleasure and wit and obscenity and tragedy jostling familiarly together without prejudice or distinction, engendered by all possible unions of hunger, love, jealousy, optimism, sensuality, pride, gentleness, patience, brutality, callousness, kindness, ambition, hopelessness, fidelity, in all possible conditions of filth or heartrending strife with squalor; intelligence burning indomitably in fogs of prejudice and lies and stupidity. She had torn the veil which the faces in the street seemed to draw down between Mrs. Carpenter’s “duty to the city” and some vital secret that the city kept to itself. The passionate love of fellowship that had tormented her with its insistence and eluded her by its formlessness had taken shape in the places that Emma and her leaders were patiently trying to remake, and now she thought of little else.
CHAPTER VI
If Evangeline’s campaign against Evan Hatton’s prejudices had been a public war, the supporters of either side would have seen that the end was now drawing near. Optimists among the Evangelineites would have rubbed their hands and said that she had got the forces of his harsh morality fairly on the run; the pessimists would have prophesied (though admitting Evangeline’s strength) that the struggle would break out again as soon as peace was signed. The Evanites would either have declared that Morality was going to the dogs and was being sold by Self-interest and Pleasure, or they would have prepared to retreat, still fighting, to the height of “A Strong Man’s Influence,” and determined to reorganise for a new offensive when the enemy should be weakened by marriage.
An important battle took place during the ride that Evangeline had arranged, when Evan retreated after her flippancy on the subject of dead milliners. He called for her and brought her horse from the livery stable at eight the next morning, and they rode away in that state of silent tension which precedes an explanation when two people who care for each other have parted in offence. Evangeline tried hard to make him “start talking by himself,” as she had boasted to Teresa that he was now in the habit of doing. She tempted him with proof that she had absorbed his lecture on the magneto and was mistress of its difficulties. She threw him touching confidences about her plans in little everyday matters. But all in vain. At last her temper rose slightly.
“What is the matter with you?” she asked. “Are you angry with me?”
“I have no right to be angry with you,” he answered with emotion, “but I don’t understand you, and yet I know that you are good and could be great. Why do you pretend to be like the others and say things that are unworthy of you?”
Evangeline was overawed. “What things?” she asked timidly.