The owner of the hand belonged, as ninety per cent. of the women in the place belonged, to François Villon's liberal sisterhood. Something in the pale square face and massive shoulders had attracted her vagrant fancy. She had quitted her companions—two gaily-dressed, be-rouged women and a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, moustached young German, whose stripy tweeds, vociferously-patterned linen, necktie of too obvious pattern, and high-crowned bowler hat, advertised the Berlin tailor and haberdasher and hatter at their customer's expense, as Saxham went by. Now she looked up into the strange, sorrowful eyes that were shaded by his tilted hat-brim, and twined her thin hands caressingly about his arm, asking:
"Why do you look so queer, dear? Is anything wrong?—excuse me asking—or is it the Funeral has given you the blue hump? It did me! I've not felt so bad since mother——" She broke off. Then as a shrill peal of laughter from one of her female companions followed a comment made by the other—"One of those ..."—she jerked her chin contemptuously, tossing an unprintable epithet in the direction of her lady friends—"says you're ugly. I don't think so. I like your face!" Her own was cruelly, terribly young, even under the white cream of zinc, the rouge, and the rice-powder. "Were you looking for a friend, dear?" she asked tightening the clasp of her thin, feverish hands.
"Yes," said Saxham, with a curious smile that made no illumination in his sombre face. "For Death! There is no better friend than Death, my child, either for you or me!"
Gently he unloosed the burning hands that clutched him, and turned and pushed his way out through the noisy, raving, chaffering, patchouli-scented crowd, and was gone, swallowed up in the roaring torrent of humanity that foamed down Piccadilly, leaving her frozen and stricken and staring.
LXII
Months went by. The slight overtures Lynette had made towards a more familiar friendship had ceased since that rebuff of Saxham's. She had never since set foot in his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme characters, attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic, frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, and flourished on the fireplace-tiles.
Only a few weeks more, he said to himself, and he would set her free. Before the natural craving for love, and life, and happiness should brim the cup of her fair sweet womanhood to overflowing; before her sex should rise in desperate revolt against himself her gaoler, Death should unlock her prison-doors and strike the fetters from those slender wrists, and point to Hope beckoning her to cross the threshold of a new life.
Soon, very soon now. The two-ounce vial that held the swift dismissing pang was in the locked drawer of the writing-table beside the whisky-flask. When he was alone and undisturbed—for Lynette seldom came to his consulting-room now—Saxham would take it out and dandle it, and hold it in his hands.
He would put the vial back presently, and lock the drawer, and, it being dark, perhaps would delay to light his lamp that he might torture himself with looking at that pitiless shadow-play, that humble comedy-drama of sweet, common, unattainable things that was every night renewed in those two rooms over the garage at the bottom of the yard.