Leonora | Page 8

altered her will, too?'
'No. I'm all right in that quarter.'
'Then if your Aunt Hannah lives longest, you'll still come in for
everything, just as if your Uncle Meshach hadn't altered his will?'
'Yes. But Aunt Hannah won't live for ever. And Uncle Meshach will.
And where shall I be if she dies first?' He went on in a different tone.
'Of course one of 'em's bound to die soon. Uncle's sixty-four if he's a
day, and the old lady's a year older. And I want money.'
'Do you, Jack, really?' she said. Long ago she had suspected it, though
John never stinted her. Once more the solid house and their
comfortable existence seemed to shiver and be engulfed.
'By the way, Nora,' he burst out with sudden bright animation, 'I've
been so occupied to-day I forgot to wish you many happy returns. And
here's the usual. I hadn't got it on me this morning.'
He kissed her and gave her a ten-pound note.
'Oh! thanks, Jack!' she said, glancing at the note with a factitious
curiosity to hide her embarrassment.
'You're good-looking enough yet!' he exclaimed as he gazed at her.
'He wants something out of me. He wants something out of me,' she
thought as she gave him a smile for his compliment. And this idea that
he wanted something, that circumstances should have forced him into
the position of an applicant, distressed her. She grieved for him. She
saw all his good qualities--his energy, vitality, cleverness, facile
kindliness, his large masculinity. It seemed to her, as she gazed up at
him from the music-stool in the shaded solitude or the drawing-room,
that she was very intimate with him, and very dependent on him; and
she wished him to be always flamboyant, imposing, and successful.
'If you are at all hard up, Jack----' She made as if to reject the note.

'Oh! get out!' he laughed. 'It's not a tenner that I'm short of. I tell you
what you can do,' he went on quickly and lightly. 'I was thinking of
raising a bit temporarily on this house. Five hundred, say. You wouldn't
mind, would you?'
The house was her own property, inherited from an aunt. John's
suggestion came as a shock to her. To mortgage her house: this was
what he wanted!
'Oh yes, certainly, if you like,' she acquiesced quietly. 'But I thought--I
thought business was so good just now, and----'
'So it is,' he stopped her with a hint of annoyance. 'I'm short of capital.
Always have been.'
'I see,' she said, not seeing. 'Well, do what you like.'
'Right, my girl. Now--roost!' He extinguished the gas over the
mantelpiece.
The familiar vulgarity of some of his phrases always vexed her, and
'roost' was one of these phrases. In a flash he fell from a creature
engagingly masculine to the use-worn daily sharer of her monotonous
existence.
'Have you heard about Arthur Twemlow coming over?' she demanded,
half vindictively, as he was preparing to blow out the last candle on the
piano. He stopped.
'Who's Arthur Twemlow?'
'Mr. Twemlow's son, of course,' she said. 'From America.'
'Oh! Him! Coming over, did you say? I wonder what he looks like.
Who told you?'
'Uncle Meshach. And he said I was to say you were to look out for
yourself when Arthur Twemlow came. I don't know what he meant.
One of his jokes, I expect.' She tried to laugh.

John looked at her, and then looked away, and immediately blew out
the last candle. But she had seen him turn pale at what Uncle Meshach
had said. Or was that pallor merely the effect on his face of raising the
coloured candle-shade as he extinguished the candle? She could not be
sure.
'Uncle Meshach ought to be in the lunatic asylum, I think,' John's voice
came majestically out of the gloom as they groped towards the door.
'We shall have to be polite to Arthur Twemlow, when he comes, if he is
coming,' said John after they had gone upstairs. 'I understand he's quite
a reformed character.'
* * * * *
Because she fancied she had noticed that the window at the end of the
corridor was open, she came out of the bedroom a few minutes later,
and traversed the dark corridor to satisfy herself, and found the window
wide open. The night was cloudy and warm, and a breeze moved
among the foliage of the garden. In the mysterious diffused light she
could distinguish the forms of the poplar trees. Suddenly the bushes
immediately beneath her were disturbed as though by some animal.
'Good night, Ethel.'
'Good night, Fred.'
She shook with violent agitation as the amazing adieu from the garden
was answered from the direction of her daughter's window. But the
secondary effect