When she told Kitty that she was succeeding to Miss Levey's place Kitty had certain things to say about treachery and broken friendships. She said them at some length, and then remarked that after that of course Louie could hardly expect her to stay with her.
"You never liked her," she said, as if not to like Miss Levey was an offence in itself. "And I know you tried to keep me from seeing her. Oh, you think I don't notice things, but you never made a greater mistake; I could tell you things that would surprise you! You and James Jeffries have got some game on; don't tell me he didn't give her the push; Evie and Miriam both say so; oh, you're a deep one, Louie Causton! First you come between me and Miriam; and then that day your father came and I was asking him about black eyes and he told me you could have one without having one till you came to blow your nose—oh, I watched you! And then to go worming about till you got Miriam fired and then bag her job yourself! Thank goodness, some people have better ideas of friendship than that! I have, for one. Never mind the bit you owe me; you can pay Carter Paterson with it and we'll call it quits. Perhaps it wouldn't be troubling you too much to ask you if you knew where the luggage labels are?"
So Louie let her go. The tract she received by post on the following day: "God's Eye Everywhere, or No Sins Secret," she dropped into the fire. Even if Kitty really was groping blindfold on the track of that stale old private execution, Archie Merridew didn't matter now. The question had already entered the stage of blank fatality.
V
Louie did not succeed to Miss Levey's chair at once. Somebody else got that, who made room for somebody else, who made room for Louie. And her arrival at the Consolidation appeared to be the signal for Jim's almost immediate departure from it—that is to say, she saw him for three weeks, then missed him for some days, asked (in another week or so) a question, and was told that a fall of some sort, supervening on many weeks of concentrated work, had necessitated a trip to Egypt. She hinted that she would like to know what his fall had been, but nobody seemed able to tell her. As a matter of fact, she never knew. It was merely an act of spite on the part of the stars against herself.
The ordeal by absence began again.
This time she was able, somehow, to endure it. She always remembered him when she passed a shipping company's office, with a model of a liner in the window and pictures of palms and pyramids and a sphinx not altogether unlike himself looming up out of the tawny sand; but at other times she well-nigh forgot him for whole days together. She could hardly question her immediate superior, a Mr. Whitlock, about him, and probably Mr. Whitlock could not question Sir Julius Pepper—for Mr. Pepper was made a knight in the new year. Sir Julius had altogether too much nous and urbanity to be questioned; he asked, not answered, questions. Such an indiscretion would have stamped Mr. Whitlock himself as a man of a barbarous mind.
The place itself, its plate glass and marble, its gilded lifts and high galleries and lofty central dome, its floes of desks and counters and the tessellated floors over which rubber-tyred trollies ran to the strong-room every night—astonished Louie. What had been consolidated, who the men had been who had reconciled interests so great that the mere overcoming of their mass and inertia must have been accounted a wonder, she never really knew. Perhaps nobody really knew; perhaps not so much men as forces had accomplished that task. In some of its aspects the concern was a huge amalgamation of mercantile companies, mostly railway and shipping; in others it more nearly resembled a Government Department. But she knew that Jim knew all about it. Jim, Mr. Stonor (Mr. Whitlock's junior) told her, and Sir Julius, had planned the whole enterprise. Acting alone, Mr. Stonor said, Jim might have done the work and then have been shouldered out of the rewards by such bustling men as Robson, of the Board of Trade, George Hastie and Sir Peregrine Campbell, and others to whom Louie had lifted up her eyes when she had kept the appointment-books for the photographer in Bond Street; but Sir Julius had seen to that—trust Sir Julius! Sir Julius could cut a throat smiling with the best of them; if Jim was the genius, Sir Julius was the impresario of the enterprise. And by-and-by, from the frequency with which Sir Julius and other potentates said, when puzzled: "What d'you suppose Jeffries would do?" or "Why the deuce isn't Jeffries here?" Louie came to much the same conclusion.
At first she was set to work with twenty other girls who, each sitting under a porcelain-shaded incandescent that burned all day long, tapped typewriters in the back part of the building that looked down on the white-tiled well; and for some weeks it was a question whether she kept her job or not. For she was dreadfully inefficient, and daily expected a reduction to the level of the girls who, with rigid "dolly-caps" clamped round their heads, manipulated the rubber worms of the big telephone switchboard. But again her improved French served her turn. Miss Lingard, who sat in Miss Levey's chair behind a screen twenty yards away, was absent one day; Mr. Stonor haled Louie off to Sir Julius's room; and Louie, following Sir Julius and a Frenchman from one to another of the spring-roller maps with which the room was lined, took down in English short-hand a conversation in French about the boundaries of some concession or other. It was a badly botched job, but it was initialled and passed; and Sir Julius, who did not so much open doors and place chairs as allow it to be discovered that doors were opened and chairs placed exactly when they should have been, looked at Louie, thanked her, and presently sent for her again. One night she had to wait on him after dinner at an hotel, to make notes of certain conversations; and perhaps Sir Julius noted the little dipping of Louie's mouth when she was summoned from the ante-room where she had been kept waiting. She wondered whether he had expected she would turn up in a dolly-cap. A little after that he asked her out to dinner, without any business excuse at all. Presently she was wondering whether she would have to walk out of the Consolidation or else to tell Sir Julius Pepper not to be a fool.
It never came to that; exactly how near it was to doing so, Louie never knew. It was her Uncle Augustus of all people who saved the situation. His name came up; Louie could not restrain a sour little smile; and "Do you know Lord Moone?" Sir Julius asked. "Oh yes," Louie replied. That was all. Sir Julius's charming smile never varied. But the case was altered. Amanuenses of sorts are one thing, ladies with private information about the peerage another. Perhaps Sir Julius was a little of a snob. At any rate, he did not allow his little gallantries to interfere with business.