“Are you sleepy, my love?” she asked.
“I am very tired, Anne; good-night”—and, taking up a candlestick, he went slowly upstairs while she stayed below, looking at the deadening fire, knowing that one night, suddenly, everything would be changed; but how and when it would be changed she could not guess. She did not dare look forward a single day or hour. She extinguished the lamp and shut the drawing-room door and locked it, remembering for a moment the unknown people, in the bygone years, who had gone out of the room never to enter it more.
Gradually the money in their possession was coming to a sure and certain end. She knew it, and her recklessness and extravagance vanished. She guarded every penny as if it were her heart’s blood, though she still did her spending with an air of willingness that concealed her reluctance. Hour after hour she racked her brains to think of some new source of help; but no suggestion presented itself, and he and she together faced, in silence, the bankruptcy that was overtaking them. He went less often towards the station now; he stayed discontentedly in the drawing-room, sitting uneasily by the fire on one of the easy-chairs with the peacock screen beside it. Sometimes, after he had brooded for a while in silence, he would get up and write a letter, but he always carefully gave it himself to the postman, and no letters at all ever arrived for him to Aunt Anne’s knowledge.
“Alfred,” she asked one day, “what has become of your work in town?—the work you used to go to your chambers to do?”
“I am resting now, and do not wish to be questioned about it. I require rest,” he said: and that was all.
Then a time came when he took to walking in the garden, and she knew that while he did so he kept a watch on the house, and especially on the window of the room in which she was sitting. When he thought she did not see him he disappeared down the dip behind and along the pathway between the fir-trees and larches towards the short cut to Hindhead. She remembered that the way to Hindhead was also the way to Liphook. It was, of course, too far to walk there, but perhaps there were some means of obviating that necessity. She said nothing, but she waited. It seemed to her as if Alfred Wimple waited too. For what? Was it for her to die? she sometimes asked herself, though she reproached herself for her suspicions. Then all her tenderness would come back, and she hovered round him lovingly, or stole away to commune with herself.
“I am sure he loves me,” she would think, as she sat vainly trying to comfort herself—“or why should he have married me? His love must be the meaning of mine for him, and the forgiveness of the past, after all the long years of waiting. It is different from what it was then; he is changed, and I am changed too. I am old with waiting, and he does not yet understand the reason of his own youth. I wonder which it is,” she said one day, almost in a dream, as she rocked to and fro over the fire—“is he disguised with youth of which he does not know the meaning; or am I disguised with years, so that he does not know that under them my youth is hidden?”
Closer and closer came the ills of poverty. The tradespeople trusted them to some extent, in spite of the warning they had received from the Hibberts, but at last they refused to do so any longer. The stores that Florence had sent in, too—Aunt Anne had said, “you must allow me to remain in your debt for them, my dear”—had gradually run out. Dinner became more and more of a difficulty, and at the scanty meal it was Alfred Wimple who ate, and Aunt Anne who looked on, pretending she liked the food she hardly dared to taste. He knew that she was starving herself for his sake, but he said nothing. It gave him a dull gratification to see her doing it. In his heart there was a resentment that death had not sooner achieved for his benefit that which from the first he had meant it to accomplish. Not that it was within his scheme to let Aunt Anne die yet; but when he married her he had not realized the awful shrinking that would daily grow upon him—the physical shrinking that youth sometimes feels from old age. In his nature there was no idealism, no sentiment. He could not give her the reverence that even mere age usually provokes, or the affection, as of a son, that some young men in his position might possibly have bestowed. He saw everything concerning her years with ghastly plainness—the little lines and the deep wrinkles on her face, the tremulous eyelids, the scanty hair brushed forward from places the cap covered. Even the soft folds of muslin round her withered throat made him shiver. He thought once, in one mad moment, how swiftly he could strangle the lingering life out of her. Her hands with the loose dry skin and the bloodless fingers and wrists that were always cold, as if the fire in them were going out, sent a thrill of horror through his frame when she touched him. The mere sound of her footstep, the touch of her black dress as she passed him by, insensibly made him draw back. He had played a daring game, but he had an awful punishment. He lived a brooding secret life, full of dread and alertness lest shame should overtake him, and his heart was not less miserable because it was incapable of generosity or goodness.
At last it became a matter of shillings.