Читать книгу The Guarded Halo - Margaret Pedler - Страница 7

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“Bob, I’m to have four pounds a week—and ‘all found,’ as the servants say. Isn’t it simply too marvellous?”

It was a few days after Shirley’s first visit to Fremingham Place. There had been other visits since, which had only served to increase her liking for both the brother and sister, but on each occasion, by a sort of common consent, business matters had been shelved, and the question of the salary her engagement carried with it left in abeyance. And now the morning’s post had brought her a letter from Mrs. Harford, definitely fixing the amount, and she tossed the news excitedly across the breakfast table.

“It’s exactly like a fairy-tale come true,” she declared.

“Yes, it is, rather,” agreed Bob soberly. “Especially as the ‘all found’ part of it includes travelling about on the Continent.”

“Just what I’ve always longed to do!” sighed Shirley blissfully. Then, her face clouding over a little: “The only thing I wish is that you were coming too, old thing.”

“Luxury jobs of that kind aren’t likely to come my way,” he answered shortly. “I’d be grateful to Providence for merely a plain bread-and-butter one.”

“You’ll get it soon. I’m sure you will,” she averred.

His mouth tightened.

“I must,” he said, his voice hard. “I’ve been reckoning up, and when we’ve paid Mrs. Barnet’s bill this week we shall have exactly ten pounds left. Ten pounds doesn’t go very far in London for two people.”

“It won’t be for two people. Mrs. Harford wants to start next Monday, so I shall be off your hands.” Shirley got up and came round to his side. “More than that, I shall be able to help the family exchequer. I shan’t want half my salary—I’ve got heaps of clothes——”

Bob interrupted energetically.

“If you think I’m going to take any of the money you earn, you’re jolly well mistaken, kiddy. I won’t touch a penny of it.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” she answered, her eyes very soft. “Don’t be absurd, old dear. We’ve always pulled together, and we’re always going to. I shall just keep part of my screw for pocket-money and send you the remainder—until you’ve found a job.”

“No”—firmly.

“Yes”—with equal firmness. “Bob, you must agree to this. I should be miserable if you didn’t. And you don’t want to spoil all my pleasure in travelling, do you?” she went on beguilingly. “You know I shouldn’t enjoy a minute of it if I thought you were living on bread and scrape here in London. Besides, I don’t need the money, honestly, and with the ten pounds you’ll have left and what I can send you, you’ll rub along all right until you can get a job.”

But Bob’s expression remained uncompromising.

“No, you’ll keep your money,” he said curtly. “I won’t touch it.”

“That isn’t fair to you!” she objected. “We’ve always gone shares in everything. If you’d got a job and I hadn’t, you know you’d share what you made with me.”

“That’s different,” he returned stubbornly. “I’m a man and you’re a woman.”

Shirley resorted to extremes.

“Very well, then, if you won’t agree, I shan’t take the engagement at all—I’ll write and tell Mrs. Harford that I can’t come. And then”—triumphantly—“we shall both have to live on that ten pounds! So you see what your beastly pride will bring us to.”

In spite of himself, Bob smiled.

“Don’t be silly,” he said.

“It’s you who are being silly,” she maintained. “Look here”—she cast about in her mind for some way of persuading him—“will you take the money as a loan? You can pay me back when you’re earning yourself, if that will satisfy you.” She paused. “Do, please, Bob,” she pleaded, her voice not quite steady.

Perhaps it was that anxious little quiver in her voice which made Bob at last haul down his flag of masculine pride.

“Very well,” he agreed, slowly and reluctantly, “I’ll accept it—as a loan.”

“Then that’s settled.” And Shirley heaved a sigh of relief.

Her heart was lighter than it had been since the death of her uncle. Unconsciously to herself, the urgent need of finding work, and the anxiety of the last few weeks, had in a great measure helped to allay her first poignant sorrow at his loss, forcibly concentrating her thoughts on the imperative necessities of each day as it came. The search for work, the mending of her own and Bob’s clothes, and the housekeeping for their limited ménage had left her little time during the daylight hours to indulge in retrospect or nurse her grief, and at night she had usually been so tired that she had fallen asleep almost as soon as she laid her head on the pillow.

And this was all to the good. The first sharp edge of her loss had been inevitably dulled in a much shorter time than it might have taken had she been less fully occupied and less worried about actual ways and means. So that she was much better prepared now to make a fresh start in life than she would have been before her experience in Pagan Street. And the fact that, through her engagement with Mrs. Harford, she would be able to lighten Bob’s burden, give him a longer time in which to find a job himself—another three months’ searching must surely bring forth some kind of fruit in the shape of a suitable berth for him!—added enormously to her content.

Beyond that, there was a peculiar interest attaching to the job she herself had just obtained. She had been easily able to fill in the blanks in the brief outline which Simon Drake had given her of his sister’s affairs, and the whole tragic little story tugged at her sympathies. In spite of the satirical mockery with which Kit Harford cloaked her feelings, it was quite evident that she had been vitally hurt, that she had once cared tremendously for this man whose dealings with her had forced her to put him out of her existence. And Shirley felt that it was going to be up to her to help smooth the path for this other woman while she was in process of readjusting her life. Simon had implied as much, and in a way she was secretly rather proud of the fact that he had trusted her so far. She told him so one evening when he was seeing her home after she had dined at Fremingham Place. It was a warm, starlit night, and they had decided to walk back to Pagan Street in preference to taking a taxi.

“It wasn’t very difficult to trust you,” he said simply. “Don’t you think that there are some people one trusts on sight?”

“Yes. But one may be mistaken, all the same,” she returned. “For instance, Kit”—at Mrs. Harford’s suggestion she had dispensed with any more formal appellation—“Kit must have trusted the man she married.”

Under cover of the starlit dusk his face darkened.

“That’s true,” he agreed. “Most of us make a bad mistake over somebody one time or another in our lives.”

There was a queer note in his voice, a hardness which seemed foreign to it, and she glanced up quickly, trying vainly to read his face through the semi-darkness.

“You say that as though—you—had made a mistake once,” she said uncertainly, after a pause.

“I did”—briefly. “But a man is either a fool—or confoundedly unlucky—to make the same kind of mistake twice.” And then, with a deliberateness that warned her he did not mean to continue the conversation, he went on: “Actually, though, I don’t consider Kit made a mistake in trusting Nap Harford in the beginning. He’d have been all right if he’d been left alone. The trouble was that the other woman in the case wouldn’t let him alone. And Rita Conyers, the woman in question, was the type to whom most young men of Nap’s age would have fallen if she’d made up her mind they should.”

“You talk as though you yourself were a Methuselah,” she protested with a smile. “ ‘Young men of Nap’s age’! Why, he must have been at least twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-nine, as a matter of fact. I suppose”—he hesitated a moment—“I suppose that seems quite old enough to know better from the point of view of twenty—you said you were just twenty, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“Yes.”

“And I’m thirty-eight.” He spoke rather heavily. “There’s a big gap between us, isn’t there?”

Without quite realizing it, she was conscious of a certain wistfulness in the question and instinctively tried to meet it.

“I don’t think age makes much difference between friends. Do you?” she suggested sturdily.

He was silent for a moment.

“No,” he said at last. “Not between—friends.”

By this time they had reached No. 7, Pagan Street, and were standing together on the doorstep. She slipped her hand into his.

“I’m so glad. Because now you won’t let the ‘gap’ make any difference between us,” she said happily. Then she turned and fitted her latchkey into the lock, unconscious of the half-sad, half-quizzical gaze of the gray eyes which were following her movements.

A moment later she was mounting the ill-lit staircase to her room, while Simon Drake took his way slowly homeward, a curiously conflicting expression on his down-bent face.