Love and Mr. Lewisham. H. G. Wells
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keep his footing of reproof.
“I should have detected the writing, you know.”
“Of course you would. It was very wrong of me to persuade him. But I did—I assure you. He seemed in such trouble. And I thought—”
She made another break, and there was a faint deepening of colour in her cheeks. Suddenly, stupidly, his own adolescent cheeks began to glow. It became necessary to banish that sense of a duplicate topic forthwith.
“I can assure you,” he said, now very earnestly, “I never give a punishment, never, unless it is merited. I make that a rule. I—er—always make that a rule. I am very careful indeed.”
“I am really sorry,” she interrupted with frank contrition. “It was silly of me.”
Lewisham felt unaccountably sorry she should have to apologise, and he spoke at once with the idea of checking the reddening of his face. “I don’t think that,” he said with a sort of belated alacrity. “Really, it was kind of you, you know—very kind of you indeed. And I know that—I can quite understand that—er—your kindness. …”
“Ran away with me. And now poor little Teddy will get into worse trouble for letting me. …”
“Oh no,” said Mr. Lewisham, perceiving an opportunity and trying not to smile his appreciation of what he was saying. “I had no business to read this as I picked it up—absolutely no business. Consequently. …”
“You won’t take any notice of it? Really!”
“Certainly not,” said Mr. Lewisham.
Her face lit with a smile, and Mr. Lewisham’s relaxed in sympathy. “It is nothing—it’s the proper thing for me to do, you know.”
“But so many people won’t do it. Schoolmasters are not usually so—chivalrous.”
He was chivalrous! The phrase acted like a spur. He obeyed a foolish impulse.
“If you like—” he said.
“What?”
“He needn’t do this. The Impot., I mean. I’ll let him off.”
“Really?”
“I can.”
“It’s awfully kind of you.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s nothing much. If you really think …”
He was full of self-applause for this scandalous sacrifice of justice.
“It’s awfully kind of you,” she said.
“It’s nothing, really,” he explained, “nothing.”
“Most people wouldn’t—”
“I know.”
Pause.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Really.”
He would have given worlds for something more to say, something witty and original, but nothing came.
The pause lengthened. She glanced over her shoulder down the vacant avenue. This interview—this momentous series of things unsaid was coming to an end! She looked at him hesitatingly and smiled again. She held out her hand. No doubt that was the proper thing to do. He took it, searching a void, tumultuous mind in vain.
“It’s awfully kind of you,” she said again as she did so.
“It don’t matter a bit,” said Mr. Lewisham, and sought vainly for some other saying, some doorway remark into new topics. Her hand was cool and soft and firm, the most delightful thing to grasp, and this observation ousted all other things. He held it for a moment, but nothing would come.
They discovered themselves hand in hand. They both laughed and felt “silly.” They shook hands in the manner of quite intimate friends, and snatched their hands away awkwardly. She turned, glanced timidly at him over her shoulder, and hesitated. “Good-bye,” she said, and was suddenly walking from him.
He bowed to her receding back, made a seventeenth-century sweep with his college cap, and then some hitherto unexplored regions of his mind flashed into revolt.
Hardly had she gone six paces when he was at her side again.
“I say,” he said with a fearful sense of his temerity, and raising his mortar-board awkwardly as though he was passing a funeral. “But that sheet of paper …”
“Yes,” she said surprised—quite naturally.
“May I have it?”
“Why?”
He felt a breathless pleasure, like that of sliding down a slope of snow. “I would like to have it.”
She smiled and raised her eyebrows, but his excitement was now too great for smiling. “Look here!” she said, and displayed the sheet crumpled into a ball. She laughed—with a touch of effort.
“I don’t mind that,” said Mr. Lewisham, laughing too. He captured the paper by an insistent gesture and smoothed it out with fingers that trembled.
“You don’t mind?” he said.
“Mind what?”
“If I keep it?”
“Why should I?”
Pause. Their eyes met again. There was an odd constraint about both of them, a palpitating interval of silence.
“I really must be going,” she said suddenly, breaking the spell by an effort. She turned about and left him with the crumpled piece of paper in the fist that held the book, the other hand lifting the mortar board in a dignified salute again.
He watched her receding figure. His heart was beating with remarkable rapidity. How light, how living she seemed! Little round flakes of sunlight raced down her as she went. She walked fast, then slowly, looking sideways once or twice, but not back, until she reached the park gates. Then she looked towards him, a remote friendly little figure, made a gesture of farewell, and disappeared.
His face was flushed and his eyes bright. Curiously enough, he was out of breath. He stared for a long time at the vacant end of the avenue. Then he turned his eyes to his trophy gripped against the closed and forgotten Horace in his hand.
CHAPTER III. — THE WONDERFUL DISCOVERY.
On Sunday it was Lewisham’s duty to accompany the boarders twice to church. The boys sat in the gallery above the choirs facing the organ loft and at right angles to the general congregation. It was a prominent position, and made him feel painfully conspicuous, except in moods of exceptional vanity, when he used to imagine that all these people were thinking how his forehead and his certificates accorded. He thought a lot in those days of his certificates and forehead, but little of his honest, healthy face beneath it. (To tell the truth there was nothing very wonderful about his forehead.) He rarely looked down the church, as he fancied to do so would be to meet the collective eye of the congregation regarding him. So that in the morning he was not able to see that the Frobishers’ pew was empty until the litany.
But in the evening, on the way to church, the Frobishers and their guest crossed the market-square as his string of boys marched along the west side. And the guest was arrayed in a gay new dress, as if it was already Easter, and her face set in its dark hair came with a strange effect of mingled freshness and familiarity. She looked at him calmly! He felt very awkward, and was for cutting his new acquaintance. Then hesitated, and raised his hat with a jerk as if to Mrs. Frobisher. Neither lady acknowledged his salute, which may possibly have been