He sat there. One name was as good as another. What had they to do with him·
Mr. Lindley kept a special tone for him, kind, indulgent, but patronising. Durant took it all without criticism or offence, just submitting. But he did not want to eat—that troubled him, to have to eat in their presence. He knew he was out of place. But it was his duty to stay yet awhile. He answered precisely, in monosyllables.
When he left he winced with confusion. He was glad it was finished. He got away as quickly as possible. And he wanted still more intensely to go right away, to Canada.
Miss Louisa suffered in her soul, indignant with all of them, with him too, but quite unable to say why she was indignant.
ⅩⅢ
Two evenings after, Louisa tapped at the door of the Quarry Cottage, at half-past six. He had finished dinner; the woman had washed up and gone away, but still he sat in his pit-dirt. He was going later to the New Inn. He had begun to go there because he must go somewhere. The mere contact with other men was necessary to him, the noise, the warmth, the forgetful flight of the hours. But still he did not move. He sat alone in the empty house till it began to grow on him like something unnatural.
He was in his pit-dirt when he opened the door.
“I have been wanting to call—I thought I would,” she said, and she went to the sofa. He wondered why she wouldn’t use his mother’s round arm-chair. Yet something stirred in him, like anger, when the housekeeper placed herself in it.
“I ought to have been washed by now,” he said, glancing at the clock, which was adorned with butterflies and cherries, and the name of “T. Brooks, Mansfield”. He laid his black hands along his mottled dirty arms. Louisa looked at him. There was the reserve, and the simple neutrality towards her, which she dreaded in him. It made it impossible for her to approach him.
“I am afraid,” she said, “that I wasn’t kind in asking you to supper.”
“I’m not used to it,” he said, smiling with his mouth, showing the interspaced white teeth. His eyes, however, were steady and unseeing.
“It’s not that,” she said hastily. Her repose was exquisite and her dark grey eyes rich with understanding. He felt afraid of her as she sat there, as he began to grow conscious of her.
“How do you get on alone·” she asked.
He glanced away to the fire.
“Oh—” he answered, shifting uneasily, not finishing his answer.
Her face settled heavily.
“How close it is in this room. You have such immense fires. I will take off my coat,” she said.
He watched her take off her hat and coat. She wore a cream cashmir blouse embroidered with gold silks. It seemed to him a very fine garment, fitting her throat and wrists close. It gave him a feeling of pleasure and cleanness and relief from himself.
