After hesitating for ten minutes, and looking down with disgust on this paper, which looked so vulgar with its big type-written words, she decided with a reckless plunge into the unknown to sign it, and scrawled at the bottom of the lines the name which she wrote so seldom, Clare Otterbourne. With similar haste she thrust it into an envelope, sealed and sent it down to Massarene’s messenger.
She cried bitterly when it was irrevocably gone from her, but she felt that she could do no less than she had done; everybody took such dreadful advantage of poor Cocky’s death!
“I shall treat the beast worse than ever,” she thought, as her sobs ceased gradually. “Poignez vilain il vous oindra.”
She had always beaten her vilain, and he had always submitted and cowed before her. She believed that he would do so as long as he lived.
For this satirical, intelligent, and fin-de-siècle creature, so quick to see and ridicule the follies and frailties of other creatures, did not in the very faintest degree understand the stuff of which William Massarene was made.
Meantime, he was travelling toward Dover in the club train with the type-written paper safe in his inner breast-pocket. This errand pleased him.
CHAPTER XXV.
She had never known great anxiety before. She had had many worries, many troublesome moments, when she wanted money, but never such a weight of care as this. There had always been Cocky, on to whose shoulders she had been able to throw the blame of everything; and whose ingenuity had frequently (for a consideration) been of exceeding use to her. Now she was alone, without even the solace of having Harry to quarrel with and upbraid; and she had put herself and her secret and her signature into the hands of William Massarene. When she thought of it she felt as if a rush of ice-cold wind passed over her.
It was Sunday. She went to a fashionable church and took Boo with her, looking a picture of childish loveliness in the crape frock, and her big black hat and her little black silk legs displayed far above the knee.
“Mammy’s got a lot o’ bills to pay,” said Boo at the schoolroom dinner.