Читать книгу The Complete Clayhanger Family Novels (Clayhanger + Hilda Lessways + These Twain + The Roll Call) - Arnold Bennett - Страница 175

“Married?”

“Yes. It is rather sudden, isn’t it?” Janet tried to smile, but she was exceedingly self-conscious. “To a Mr Cannon. She’s known him for a very long time, I think.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. I had a note this morning. It’s quite a secret yet. I haven’t told father and mother. But she asked me to tell you if I saw you.”

He thought her eyes were compassionate.

Mrs Orgreave came smiling into the room.

“Well, Mr Edwin, it seems we can only get you in here by main force.”

“Are you quite better, Mrs Orgreave?” he rose to greet her.

He had by some means or other to get out.

“I must just run in home a second,” he said, after a moment. “I’ll be back in three minutes.”

But he had no intention of coming back. He would have told any lie in order to be free.

In his bedroom, looking at himself in the glass, he could detect on his face no sign whatever of suffering or of agitation. It seemed just an ordinary mild, unmoved face.

And this, too, he had always felt and known would come to pass: that Hilda would not be his. All that romance was unreal; it was not true; it had never happened. Such a thing could not happen to such as he was... He could not reflect. When he tried to reflect, the top of his head seemed as though it would fly off... Cannon! She was with Cannon somewhere at that very instant... She had specially asked that he should be told. And indeed he had been told before even Mr and Mrs Orgreave... Cannon! She might at that very instant be in Cannon’s arms.

It could be said of Edwin that he fully lived that night. Fate had at any rate roused him from the coma which most men called existence.

Simple Maggie was upset because, from Edwin’s absence and her father’s demeanour at supper, she knew that her menfolk had had another terrible discussion. And since her father offered no remark as to it, she guessed that this one must be even more serious that the last.

There was one thing that Edwin could not fit into any of his theories of the disaster which had overtaken him, and that was his memory of Hilda’s divine gesture as she bent over Mr Shushions on the morning of the Centenary.