The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett [163]
Preceded by the menial, he came into the room hurriedly, apologetically, with an air of acute anxiety. And as he saw her lying on her back, with flushed features, her hair disarranged, and only the grace of the silk ribbons of her matinee to mitigate the melancholy repulsiveness of her surroundings, that anxiety seemed to deepen.
"Dear madame," he stammered, "all my excuses!" He hastened to the bedside and kissed her hand—a little peek according to his custom. "You are ill?"
"I have my migraine," she said. "You want Gerald?"
"Yes," he said diffidently. "He had promised——"
"He has left me," Sophia interrupted him in her weak and fatigued voice. She closed her eyes as she uttered the words.
"Left you?" He glanced round to be sure that the waiter had retired.
"Quitted me! Abandoned me! Last night!"
"Not possible!" he breathed.
She nodded. She felt intimate with him. Like all secretive persons, she could be suddenly expansive at times.
"It is serious?" he questioned.
"All that is most serious," she replied.
"And you ill! Ah, the wretch! Ah, the wretch! That, for example!" He waved his hat about.
"What is it you want, Chirac?" she demanded, in a confidential tone.
"Eh, well," said Chirac. "You do not know where he has gone?"
"No. What do you want?" she insisted.
He was nervous. He fidgetted. She guessed that, though warm with sympathy for her plight, he was preoccupied by interests and apprehensions of his own. He did not refuse her request temporarily to leave the astonishing matter of her situation in order to discuss the matter of his visit.
"Eh, well! He came to me yesterday afternoon in the Rue Croissant to borrow some money."
She understood then the object of Gerald's stroll on the previous afternoon.
"I hope you didn't lend him any," she said.
"Eh, well! It was like this. He said he ought to have received five thousand francs yesterday morning, but that he had had a telegram that it would not arrive till to-day. And he had need of five hundred francs at once. I had not five hundred francs"—he smiled sadly, as if to insinuate that he did not handle such sums—"but I borrowed it from the cashbox of the journal. It is necessary, absolutely, that I should return it this morning." He spoke with increased seriousness. "Your husband said he would take a cab and bring me the money immediately on the arrival of the post this morning—about nine o'clock. Pardon me for deranging you with such a——"
He stopped. She could see that he really was grieved to 'derange' her, but that circumstances pressed.
"At my paper," he murmured, "it is not so easy as that to—in fine——!"
Gerald had genuinely been at his last francs. He had not lied when she thought he had lied. The nakedness of his character showed now. Instantly upon the final and definite cessation of the lawful supply of money, he had set his wits to obtain money unlawfully. He had, in fact, simply stolen it from Chirac, with the ornamental addition of endangering Chirac's reputation and situation—as a sort of reward to Chirac for the kindness! And, further, no sooner had he got hold of the money than it had intoxicated him, and he had yielded to the first fatuous temptation. He had no sense of responsibility, no scruple. And as for common prudence—had he not risked permanent disgrace and even prison for a paltry sum which he would certainly squander in two or three days? Yes, it was indubitable that he would stop at nothing, at nothing whatever.
"You did not know that he was coming to me?" asked Chirac, pulling his short, silky brown beard.
"No," Sophia answered.
"But he said that you had charged him with your friendlinesses to me!" He nodded his head once or twice, sadly but candidly accepting, in his quality of a Latin, the plain facts of human nature—reconciling himself to them at once.
Sophia revolted at this crowning detail of the structure of Gerald's rascality.
"It is fortunate that I can pay you," she said.
"But——" he tried to protest.
"I have quite enough money."
She did not say this to screen Gerald, but merely from amour-propre. She would not let Chirac think that she was the wife of a man bereft of all honour. And so she clothed Gerald with the rag of having, at any rate, not left her in destitution as well as in sickness. Her assertion seemed a strange one, in view of the fact that he had abandoned her on the previous evening