HILDA LESSWAYS. Arnold Bennett
a conqueror who can recount a triumph with pride, but without conceit. She looked at him with naïve admiration. To admire him was agreeable to her; and she liked also to feel unimportant in his presence. But she fought, unsuccessfully, against the humiliating idea that his personal smartness convicted her of being shabby—of being even inefficient in one department of her existence; and she could have wished to be magnificently dressed.
“Mrs. Lessways is a very shrewd lady—very shrewd indeed!” said Mr. Cannon, with a smile, this time, to indicate humorously that Mrs. Lessways was not so easy to handle as might be imagined, and that even the cleverest must mind their p’s and q’s with such a lady.
“Oh yes, she is!” Hilda agreed, with an exaggerated emphasis that showed a lack of conviction. Indeed, she had never thought of her mother as a very shrewd lady.
Mr. Cannon continued to smile in silence upon the shrewdness of Mrs. Lessways, giving little appreciative movements of the diaphragm, drawing in his lips and by consequence pushing out his cheeks like a child’s; and his eyes were all the time saying lightly: “Still, I managed her!” And while this pleasant intimate silence persisted, the noises of the market-place made themselves prominent, quite agreeably—in particular the hard metallic stamping and slipping, on the bricked pavement under the window, of a team of cart-horses that were being turned in a space too small for their grand, free movements, and the good-humoured cracking of a whip. Again Hilda was impressed, mystically, by the strangeness of the secret relation between herself and this splendid effective man. There they were, safe within the room, almost on a footing of familiar friendship! The atmosphere was different from that of the first interview. And none knew! And she alone had brought it all about by a simple caprice!
“I was fine and startled when I saw you at our door, Mr. Cannon!” she said.
He might have said, “Were you? You didn’t show it.” She was half expecting him to say some such thing. But he became reflective, and began: “Well, you see—” and then hesitated.
“You didn’t tell me you thought of calling.”
“Well,” he proceeded at last—and she could not be sure whether he was replying to her or not—“I was pretty nearly ready to buy that Calder Street property. And I thought I’d talk that over with your mother first! It just happened to make a good beginning, you see.” He spoke with all the flattering charm of the confidential.
Hilda flushed. Under her mother’s suggestion, she had been misjudging him. He had not been guilty of mere scheming. She was profoundly glad. The act of apology to him, performed in her own mind, gave her a curious delight.
“I wish she would sell,” said Hilda, to whom the ownership of a slum was obnoxious.
“Very soon your consent would be necessary to any sale.”
“Really!” she exclaimed, agreeably flattered, but scarcely surprised by this information. “I should consent quick enough! I can’t bear to walk down the street!”
He laughed condescendingly. “Well, I don’t think your mother would care to sell, if you ask me.” He sat down.
Hilda frowned, regretting her confession and resenting his laughter.
“What will your charges be, please, Mr. Cannon?” she demanded abruptly, and yet girlishly timid. And at the same moment she drew forth her purse, which she had been holding ready in her hand.
For a second he thought she was referring to the price of rent-collecting, but the appearance of the purse explained her meaning. “Oh! There’s no charge!” he said, in a low voice, seizing a penholder.
“But I must pay you something! I can’t—”
“No, you mustn’t!”
Their glances met in conflict across the table. She had known that he would say exactly that. And she had been determined to insist on paying a fee—utterly determined! But she could not, now, withstand the force of his will. Her glance failed her. She was disconcerted by the sudden demonstration of her inferiority. She was distressed. And then a feeling of faintness, and the gathering of a mist in the air, positively frightened her. The mist cleared. His glance seemed to say, with kindness: “You see how much stronger I am than you! But you can trust me!” The sense of adventure grew even more acute in her. She marvelled at what life was, and hid the purse like a shame.
“It’s very kind of you,” she murmured.
“Not a bit!” he said. “I’ve got a job through this. Don’t forget that. We don’t collect rents for nothing, you know—especially Calder Street sort of rents!”
She picked up her basket and rose. He also rose.
“So you’ve been looking at my Victor Hugo,” he remarked, putting his right hand negligently into his pocket instead of holding it forth in adieu.
iv
So overset was she by the dramatic surprise of his challenging remark, and so enlightened by the sudden perception of it being perfectly characteristic of him, that her manner changed in an instant to a delicate, startled timidity. All the complex sensitiveness of her nature was expressed simultaneously in the changing tints of her face, the confusion of her eyes and her gestures, and the exquisite hesitations of her voice as she told him about the coincidence which had brought back to her in his office the poem of her schooldays.
He came to the bookcase and, taking out the volume, handled it carelessly.
“I only brought these things here because they’re nicely bound and fill up the shelf,” he said. “Not much use in a lawyer’s office, you know!” He glanced from the volume to her, and from her to the volume. “Ah! Miss Miranda! Yes! Well! It isn’t so wonderful as all that. My father used to give her lessons in French. This Hugo was his. He thought a great deal of it.” Mr. Cannon’s pose exhibited pride, but it was obvious that he did not share his father’s taste. His tone rather patronized his father, and Hugo too. As he let the pages of the book slip by under his thumb, he stopped, and with a very good French accent, quite different from Hilda’s memory of Miss Miranda’s, murmured in a sort of chanting—“Dieu qui sourit et qui donne.”
“That’s the very one!” cried Hilda.
“Ah! There you are then! You see—the bookmark was at that page.” Hilda had not noticed the thin ribbon almost concealed in the jointure of the pages. “I wouldn’t be a bit astonished if my father had lent her this very book! Curious, isn’t it?”
It was. Nevertheless, Hilda felt that his sense of the miraculousness of life was not so keen as her own; and she was disappointed.
“I suppose you’re very fond of reading?” he said.
“No, I’m not,” she replied. Her spirit lifted a little courageously, to meet his with defiance, like a ship lifting its prow above the threatening billow. Her eyes wavered, but did not fall before his.
“Really! Now, I should have said you were a great reader. What do you do with yourself?” He now spoke like a brother, confident of a trustful response.
“I just waste my time,” she answered coldly. She saw that he was puzzled, interested, and piqued, and that he was examining her quite afresh.
“Well,” he said shortly, after a pause, adopting the benevolent tone of an uncle or even a great-uncle, “you’ll be getting married one of these days.”
“I don’t want to get married,” she retorted obstinately, and with a harder glance.
“Then what do you want?”
“I don’t know.” She discovered great relief, even pleasure, in thus callously exposing her mind to a stranger.
Tapping his teeth with one thumb, he gazed at her, apparently in meditation upon her peculiar case. At last he said:
“I