Whilst he was out, Lalage hastily tidied up her little kitchen; then, taking a dustpan and brush, she swept up a few scraps of mud which had come off Jimmy's boots. In a drawer of the table she found his pen and a scrap of blotting paper he had used, and thrust them hurriedly into her dress. Then, during a final look round, she kissed in turn each article of furniture he had been wont to use, heedless of the tears that were dropping on them, coming last of all to his own chair, where she knelt down and buried her face in the seat. She was still there when she heard his step on the stairs; but she jumped up hastily and met him in the little hall, whither she had dragged the luggage.
"It is all ready now," she said, and went out without looking back.
When Jimmy got down to the club a couple of hours later, he found a telegram waiting for him in the rack, signed "Joseph Fenton."
It read: "Meet me any time to-night at the Grand Central Hotel. Shall be alone."
CHAPTER XXII
Jimmy heaved a sigh of relief as he read the telegram. In after years, he looked back on it as the one ray of brightness in the most ghastly day of his life. It did not alter the essential fact that everything had gone to pieces—nothing could alter that—but it made matters less complicated so far as Lalage's immediate future was concerned. He had intended asking his brother-in-law for a loan, and it was a load off his mind to find that Joseph was actually in town. A letter might, probably would, have fallen into Ida's hands, and this was one of those cases where an interview was better than many pages of explanations.
In reply to the telegram, Jimmy wired that he would be at the hotel at nine o'clock. He had given up all idea of going to the office that night, or, rather, of ever going there again. He must get away, at once, from everything which might remind him of the old life. He must cut himself adrift from it, immediately, altogether, if he wished to preserve his sanity. For himself, he cared nothing, at least at the moment; but, though he might never see her again once she had left London, he had to provide for Lalage. The Grierson strain in him had asserted itself in so far as it had made him determine to leave Lalage. He was able now to see her sin and his own, especially hers; but still he could not abandon her to her fate, as a true Grierson would have done, because he had been passionately in love, whilst the love of the true Grierson is always decorous, and truly tempered by financial considerations. The dowerless bride is regarded with coldness; the bride with a past is anathema; there is no road back, at least in the opinion of those who have sub-edited their religion in the interests of propriety.
Jimmy had no difficulty in finding a substitute to take on his work at the Record office, especially when he made it known that there was going to be a vacancy on the staff immediately.