Hilda Lessways. Arnold Bennett

Toms and Scoles's, I think it was. Then he left the district for a year or two--or it might be several. And then his lordship comes back all of a sudden, and sets up with Mr. Karkeek, just like that."

      "Can he talk French?"

      "Who? Mr. Cannon? He can talk English! My word, he can that! Eh, he's a 'customer,' he is--a regular' customer'!"

      Hilda, instead of being seated at the table, was away in far realms of romance.

      The startling thought occurred to her:

      "Of course, he'll expect me to go and see him! He's done what I asked him, and he'll expect me to go and see him and talk it over. And I suppose I shall have to pay him something. I'd forgotten that, and I ought not to have forgotten it."

CHAPTER VI

       VICTOR HUGO AND ISAAC PITMAN

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I

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      The next morning, Saturday, Hilda ran no risk in visiting Mr. Cannon. Her mother's cold, after a fictitious improvement, had assumed an aggravated form in order to prove that not with impunity may nature be flouted in unheated October drawing-rooms; and Hilda had been requested to go to market alone. She was free. And even supposing that the visit should be observed by the curious, nobody would attach any importance to it, because everybody would soon be aware that Mr. Cannon had assumed charge of the Calder Street property.

      Past the brass plates of Mr. Q. Karkeek, out of the straw-littered hubbub of the market-place, she climbed the long flight of stairs leading to the offices on the first floor. In one worsted-gloved hand she held a market-basket of multi-coloured wicker, which dangled a little below the frilled and flounced edge of her blue jacket. Secure in the pocket of her valanced brown skirt--for at that time and in that place it had not yet occurred to any woman that pockets were a superfluity--a private half-sovereign lay in the inmost compartment of her purse; this coin was destined to recompense Mr. Cannon. Her free hand went up to the heavy chignon that hung uncertainly beneath her bonnet--a gesture of coquetry which she told herself she despised.

      Her face was a prim and rather forbidding mask, assuredly a mysterious mask. She could not have explained her own feelings. She was still in the adventure, but the end of it was immediate. She had nothing to hope from the future. Her essential infelicity was as profound and as enigmatic as ever. She might have said with deliberate and vehement sincerity that she was not happy. Wise, experienced observers, studying her as she walked her ways in the streets, might have said of her with sympathetically sad conviction, "That girl is not happy! What a pity!" It was so. And yet, in her unhappiness she was blest. She savoured her unhappiness. She drank it down passionately, as though it were the very water of life--which it was. She lived to the utmost in every moment. The recondite romance of existence was not hidden from her. The sudden creation--her creation--of the link with Mr. Cannon seemed to her surpassingly strange and romantic; and in so regarding it she had no ulterior thought whatever: she looked on it with the single-mindedness of an artist looking on his work. And was it not indeed astounding that by a swift caprice and stroke of audacity she should have changed and tranquillized the ominous future for her unsuspecting mother and herself? Was it not absolutely disconcerting that she and this Mr. Cannon, whom she had never known before and in whom she had no other interest, should bear between them this singular secret, at once innocent and guilty, in the midst of the whole town so deaf and blind?

II

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      A somewhat shabby-genteel, youngish man appeared at the head of the stairs; he was wearing a silk hat and a too ample frock-coat. And immediately, from the hidden corridor at the top, she heard the voice of Mr. Cannon, imperious:

      "Karkeek!"

      The shabby-genteel man stopped. Hilda wanted to escape, but she could not, chiefly because her pride would not allow. She had to go on. She went on, frowning.

      The man vanished back into the corridor. She could hear that Mr. Cannon had joined him in conversation. She arrived at the corridor.

      "How-d'ye-do, Miss Lessways?" Mr. Cannon greeted her with calm politeness, turning from Mr. Karkeek, who raised his hat. "Will you come this way? One moment, Mr. Karkeek."

      Through a door marked "Private" Mr. Cannon introduced Hilda straight into his own room; then shut the door on her. He held in one hand a large calf-bound volume, from which evidently he was expounding something to Mr. Karkeek. The contrast between the expensive informality of Mr. Cannon's new suit and the battered ceremoniousness of Mr. Karkeek's struck her just as much as the contrast between their demeanours; and she felt, vaguely, the oddness of the fact that the name of the deferential Mr. Karkeek, and not the name of the commanding Mr. Cannon, should be upon the door-plates and the wire-blinds of the establishment. But of course she was not in a position to estimate the full significance of this remarkable phenomenon. Further, though she perfectly remembered her mother's observations upon Mr. Cannon's status, they did not in the slightest degree damage him in her eyes--when once those eyes had been set on him again. They seemed to her inessential. The essential, for her, was the incontestable natural authority and dignity of his bearing.

      She sat down, self-consciously, in the chair--opposite the owner's chair--which she had occupied at her first visit, and thus surveyed, across the large flat desk, all the ranged documents and bundles with the writing thereon upside down. There also was his blotting-pad, and his vast inkstand, and his pens, and his thick diary. The disposition of the things on the desk seemed to indicate, sharply and incontrovertibly, that orderliness, that inexorable efficiency, which more than aught else she admired in the external conduct of life. The spectacle satisfied her, soothed her, and seemed to explain the attractiveness of Mr. Cannon.

      Immediately to her left was an open bookcase almost filled with heavy volumes. The last of a uniform row of Law Reports was absent from its place--being at that moment in the corridor, in the hands of Mr. Cannon. The next book, a thin one, had toppled over sideways and was bridging the vacancy at an angle; several other similar thin books filled up the remainder of the shelf. She stared, with the factitious interest of one who is very nervously awaiting an encounter, at the titles, and presently deciphered the words, 'Victor Hugo,' on each of the thin volumes. Her interest instantly became real. Characteristically abrupt and unreflecting, she deposited her basket on the floor and, going to the bookcase, took out the slanting volume. Its title was Les Rayons et Les Ombres. She opened it by hazard at the following poem, which had no heading and which stood, a small triptych of print, rather solitary in the lower half of a large white page:

      Dieu qui sourit et qui donne

       Et qui vient vers qui l'attend

       Pourvu que vous soyez bonne,

       Sera content.

       Le monde où tout étincelle,

       Mais ou rien n'est enflammé,

       Pourvu que vous soyez belle,

       Sera charmé.

       Mon coeur, dans l'ombre amoureuse,

       Où l'énivrent deux beaux yeux,

       Pourvu que tu sois heureuse,

       Sera joyeux.

      That was all. But she shook as though a miracle had been enacted. Hilda, owing partly to the fondness of an otherwise stern grandfather and partly to the vanity of her unimportant father, had finally been sent to a school attended by girls who on the average were a little above herself in station--Chetwynd's, in the valley between Turnhill and Bursley. (It was still called Chetwynd's though it had changed hands.) Among the staff was a mistress who was known as Miss Miranda--she