For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources.Ihad, indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then Ibethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my supplemental typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on to her before the days of our breach."Of course!" said I, "Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and a long thin neck.He stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot indignation.I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air between them.I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora.He was quick and cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any man's kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were looked after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine.And Altiora, I've no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone one evening to get to the bottom of the matter.She got quite to the bottom of it,--it must have been a queer duologue.She read Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political breach.It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no public purpose of theirs to get rid of me.My downfall in any public sense was sheer waste,--the loss of a man.She knew she was behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved worse.She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her information was irresistible.And she set to work at it marvellously.Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency.I wrote a protest that was perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to stop her.She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has made up its mind to be hurtful.It wasn't only, I think, that she couldn't bear our political and social influence; she also--Irealised at that interview couldn't bear our loving.It seemed to her the sickliest thing,--a thing quite unendurable.While such things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
I've the vividest memory of that call of mine.She'd just come in and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit her and was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.
"Then part," she cried, "part.If you don't want a smashing up,--part! You two have got to be parted.You've got never to see each other ever, never to speak." There was a zest in her voice."We're not circulating stories," she denied."No! And Curmain never told us anything--Curmain is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite excellent young man.You misjudged him altogether."...
I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey.I caught the little wretch in the League Club, and he wriggled and lied.He wouldn't say where he had got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one.When Igave him the names of two men who had come to me astonished and incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told HIM.He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had just left England for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger.That struck me as mean, even for Bailey.I've still the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous ugly hands.
"I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can assure you we've done everything to shield you--everything."...
3
Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office.She made a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big window.I sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as Italked.
"The Baileys don't intend to let this drop," I said."They mean that every one in London is to know about it.""I know."
"Well!" I said.
"Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it's no good waiting for things to overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways.""What are we to do?"
"They won't let us go on."
"Damn them!"
"They are ORGANISING scandal."
"It's no good waiting for things to overtake us," I echoed; "they have overtaken us." I turned on her."What do you want to do?""Everything," she said."Keep you and have our work.Aren't we Mates?""We can't."
"And we can't!"
"I've got to tell Margaret," I said.
"Margaret!"
"I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it.
I've been wincing about Margaret secretly--""I know.You'll have to tell her--and make your peace with her."She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
"We've had some good times, Master;" she said, with a sigh in her voice.
And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
"We haven't much time left," she said.
"Shall we bolt?" I said.
"And leave all this?" she asked, with her eyes going round the room.
"And that?" And her head indicated Westminster."No!"I said no more of bolting.
"We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender," she said.
"Something."
"A lot."
"Master," she said, "it isn't all sex and stuff between us?""No!"
