“But I am dragging you to bed when you don’t want to go.”
“Not a bit, Paul, I assure you; it is quite all right. I am really quite sleepy myself. I should have liked to try the Patience, perhaps, but to-morrow will do just as well.”
He held the door open gravely for her, but there were several things she must attend to before leaving the room: the fire must be poked down so that no spark could be spat out on to the hearth-rug; the drawer of her writing-table must be locked so that the housemaid should not read her letters or examine her bills when dusting the room before breakfast on the following morning; and the book which she had been reading must be replaced in the bookcase. He endured all this ritual without betraying any irritation, watching even the final pats which she gave to the cushions of his chair.
“It’s quite all right, Paul, dear; of course one can’t help crumpling cushions when one sits on them, and what are they there for but to be sat on?”
She bustled out of the room, calling back to him as she mounted the stairs: “You won’t forget to lock up, will you?”
He had remembered to lock up now for twenty years. He went methodically about the business, looking behind curtains to see whether the shutters were closed, testing the chain on the front door. All that paraphernalia of security! He felt sometimes that the cold, the poor, and the hungry were welcome to the embers of his drawing-room fire, to the silver off his sideboard, and to the remains of the wine in his decanters. And as he stood for a moment at the garden door, looking up the gravel path of his trim little garden, and felt the biting cold beneath the slip of new moon, he wondered with a sort of anguish where she was, whether she was sheltered and cared for, or whether in her gay improvident way she had gone down and under, until on such a winter’s night as this there remained no comfort for her but such as she might find among the mirrors and garish lights of a bar, in such fortuitous company as she might charm with a vivacious manner and an affectation of laughter. She had from time to time been haunted by a premonition of such things, he remembered; a mocking wistfulness had come into her voice when she said, “You’ll always be all right, Paul, you were born prosperous; but as for me, I’ll end my days among the dregs of the world—I know it, so think of me sometimes when you sit over your Madeira and your cigar, won’t you? and wonder whether my nose isn’t pushed against your window in the hopes that the smell of your cooking might drift out to me,” and when she had said these things he had put his hand over her mouth to stop the words he couldn’t bear to hear, and she had laughed and had repeated, “Well, well, we’ll see.”
He shut the door carefully and shot the bolt into its socket. Very cold it was—silly of him to stand at the open door like that—hoped he hadn’t got a chill. Lighting his candle in the hall, he switched off all the electric lights and climbed the stairs to bed; a nice fire warmed his dressing-room, and his pyjamas were put out for him over the back of a chair in front of the fire; he undressed, thinking that he was glad he wasn’t a poor devil out in the cold. His wife was already in bed, and by the light of her reading-lamp he saw the curlers that framed her forehead, and the feather-stitching in white floss-silk round the collar of her flannel nightgown.
“What a long time you’ve been, Paul. I was just thinking, I shan’t be able to try that Patience to-morrow evening, because we’ve got the Howard-Ellises coming to dinner.”
“So we have. I’d quite forgotten. We must give them champagne,” he said mechanically; “they’ll expect it.”
He got into bed, turned out the lamp, and lay down beside his wife, staring into the dark.