It was in the cruelty of it, in that sudden barbarous tearing of the children from Winny, of Winny from Ransome, and of Ransome from his home, in that hurried, surreptitious flight through the darkness, that he most felt the pressure and the malignant pinch of poverty. Owing to his straitened circumstances, with all his mother's forethought and good will, with all the combined resources of their ingenuity, they could do no better to meet his lamentable case than this. "This," indeed, was imperative, inevitable. He reflected bitterly that, if he had been a rich man, like the manager or the secretary of Woolridge's, instead of a ledger clerk (that was all that his last rise had made him) at a hundred and fifty a year, he would have been spared "this." It would have been neither inevitable nor imperative. It simply wouldn't have happened. He would have had a house with a staff of competent servants, a nurse for the children, a cook, and maybe a housemaid to manage for him, and so forth. Winny wouldn't have come into it. It would never have occurred to her to run the risks she had run for him. There would have been no need. She would have remained, serene, beautiful in sympathy, outside his calamity, untouched by its sordidness, its taint. All the machinery of his household would have gone on in spite of it, without any hitch or dislocation, working all the more smoothly in the absence of its mistress.

That was how rich people came out of this sort of thing, right side up, smiling, knowing as they did that there was nothing to spoil the peace of it for them, or make them apt to mistake it for anything but the blessing that it was. Thus they got, as you may say, the whole good out of it without any waste. At the worst, if they didn't like it, rich people, driven to flight, depart from the scene of their disaster with dignity, in cabs.

But Ranny's departure, with all its ignominy, was not by any means the worst. The worst, incomparably, was the going back on Monday evening to settle up. There was a man coming from Wandsworth with a handcart for the cots, the high chair and all the babies' furniture, and the kids' toys and the little clothes, their whole diminutive outfit, and for what he needed of his own. And when all the packing was done he would still have to go into things.

By the things he had to go into he meant the drawers and the cupboards in his wife's room.

And such things! It was as if the whole tale of her adultery, with all its secret infamy, its squalor, its utter callousness, was there in that room of the love-knots and the rosebuds.

In the locked wardrobe—the key was on the chimney piece where he could find it—he came on her old skirts, draggled and torn and stained as he had known them, on the muslin gown of last year, loathsome and limp, bent like a hanged corpse; and on her very nightgown of the other night, dreadfully familiar, shrinking, poor ghost of an abomination, in its corner. And under them, in a row, the shoes that her feet had gone in, misshapen, trodden down at heel, gaping to deliver up her shame.

These things Winny had collected and put away in order, and hidden out of his sight as best she could. Seeing, she too, the tale they told, she had hung a sheet in front of them and locked the door on them and laid the key aside, to break in some degree the shock of them. For they were things that had been good enough for him, but not good enough for Violet's lover. She had gone to him in all her bravery, leaving them behind, not caring who found them.

And there was more to be gone through before he had finished with it. There were the drawers, crammed with little things, the collars, the ribbons and the laces, and one or two trinkets that he had given her, cast off with the rest, all folded and tidied by Winny, smoothed and coaxed out of the memories they held, the creases that betrayed the slattern; and with them, tucked away by Winny, defiled beyond redemption, almost beyond recognition, the sachet, smelling of violets and with the word "Violet" sprawling all across it in embroidery.

All these things, the dresses, the shoes, and the rest of them, he gathered up in handfuls and flung into an old trunk which he locked and pushed under the bed.

Then he set his teeth and went on with his task. In the soiled linen basket, among his own handkerchiefs as he counted them, he found one queerly scented and of a strange, arresting pattern. It had the monogram "L. M." stitched into the corner. She must have borrowed it from the beast. Or else—the beast had been in the house and had left it there.

That finished him.

Finished as he was in every sense, thoroughly instructed, furnished with details that fitted out and rounded off all that was vague and incomplete in his vision of the thing, he was still unprepared for the question with which his mother met him.

"Have you told Mr. and Mrs. Usher?"

He hadn't.

He had forgotten Mr. and Mrs. Usher, forgotten that this prolongation of his ordeal would be necessary.

"Well, you'll have to."

"Of course I'll have to."

"Will you go and see him?"

"No. I—can't. I'll write."

He wrote in the afternoon of the next day at Woolridge's, in the luncheon hour when he had the ledger clerks' pen to himself. He was very brief.

He received his father-in-law's reply by return. Mr. Usher made no comment beyond an almost perfunctory expression of regret. But he said that he must see Randall. And, as the journey between Elstree and Wandsworth was somewhat long to be undertaken after office hours, he proposed the "Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware, as a convenient halfway house for them to meet at, and Wednesday, at seven or thereabouts, as the day and hour. Thus he allowed time for Randall to receive his letter and, if necessary, to answer it. No telegraphing for Mr. Usher, except in case of death, actual or imminent.

Ransome supposed that he would have to see him and get it over. Soon after seven on Wednesday, then, Mr. Usher having ridden over on his mare Polly and Ransome on his bicycle, they met in the parlor of the "Bald-Faced Stag," Edgware. Mr. Usher's friend the landlord had undertaken that they should not be disturbed.

It was impossible for Ransome not to notice something queer about his father-in-law, something utterly unlike the bluff and genial presence he had known. Mr. Usher seemed to have shrunk somehow and withered, so that you might have said the catastrophe had hit him hard, if that, his mere bodily shrinkage, had been all. What struck Ransome as specially queer about Mr. Usher was his manner and the expression of his face. You could almost have called it crafty. Guilty it was, too, consciously guilty, the furtive face of a man on the defensive, armed with all his little cunning against a possible attack, having entrenched himself in the parlor of the "Bald-Faced Stag" as on neutral territory.

"What say to a bit of supper, my boy, before we begin business?"

It was a false and feeble imitation of his old heartiness.

Over a supper of cold ham and cheese and beer they discussed Ransome's father's health and his mother's health, and Mrs. Usher's health, which was poor, and Mr. Usher's prospects, which were poorer, not to say bad. He leaned on this point and returned to it, as if it might have a possible bearing on the matter actually in hand, and with a certain disagreeable effect of craftiness and intention. It was as if he wished to rub it in that whatever else Randall forgot, he wasn't to forget that, that he had nothing to look to, nothing to hope for in his father-in-law's prospects; as if he, Mr. Usher, had arranged this meeting at the "Bald-Faced Stag" for the express purpose of making that clear, of forestalling all possible misunderstanding. He kept it before him, with the cheese and beer, on the brown oil-cloth of the table from which poor Randall found it increasingly difficult to lift his eyes.

It was almost a relief to him when Mr. Usher pushed his plate away with a groan of satiety, and began.

"Well, what's all this I hear about Virelet?"

Randall intimated that he had heard all there was.

"Yes, but what's the meaning of it? That's what I want to know."

Randall put it that its meaning was that it had simply happened, and suggested that his father-in-law was in every bit as good a position for understanding it as he.

"I dare say. But what I'm trying to get at is—did you do anything to make it happen?"

"What on earth do you suppose I did?"

"There might be faults on both sides, though I don't say as there were. But did you do anything to prevent it? Tell me that."

"What could I do? I didn't know it was going to happen."

"You should have known. You was warned fair enough."

"Was I? Who warned me, I should like to know?"

"Why, I did, and her mother did. Told you straight. Don't you go for to say that I let you marry the girl under false pretenses, or her mother either. I told you what sort Virelet was, straight as I could, without vilifying my own flesh and blood. Did you want me to tell you straighter? Did you want me to put a name to it?"

His little eyes shot sidelong at Randall, out of his fallen, shrunken fatness, more than ever crafty and intent.

He was pitiful. Randall could have been sorry for him but that he showed himself so mean. His little eyes gave him so villainously away. They disclosed the fullness of his knowledge; they said he had known things about Violet; he had known them all the time, things that he, Randall, never knew. And he hadn't let on, not he. Why should he? He had been too eager, poor man, to get Violet married. His eagerness, that had appeared as the hardy flower of his geniality, betrayed itself now as the sinister thing it was—when you thought of the name that he could have given her!

Randall did not blame him. He was past blaming anybody. He only said to himself that this explained what had seemed so inexplicable—the attitude, the incredible attitude of Mr. and Mrs. Usher; how they had leaped at him in all his glaring impossibility, an utter stranger, with no adequate income and no prospects; how they had hurried on the marriage past all prudence; how they had driven him on and fooled him and helped him to his folly.

But he was not going to let them fool him any more.

"Look here, Mr. Usher, I don't know what your game is and I don't care. I dare say you think you told me what you say you did. But you didn't. You didn't tell me anything—not one blessed thing. And if you had it wouldn't have done any good. I wouldn't have believed you. You needn't reproach yourself. I was mad on Virelet. I meant to marry her and I did marry her. That's all."

"Well," said Mr. Usher, partially abandoning his position, "so long as you don't hold me responsible—"

"Of course, I don't hold you responsible."

"I'm sure me and the Missis we've done what we could to make it easier for you."

He gazed before him, conjuring up between them a quiet vision of the long procession of hampers, a reminder to Randall of how deeply, as it was, he stood indebted.

"And we can't do no more. That's how it is. No more we can't do."

"I'm not asking you to do anything. What do you want?"

"I want to know what you're going to do, my boy."

"Do?"

"Yes, do."

"About what?"

"About Virelet. Talk of responsibility, you took it on yourself contrary to the warnings what you had, when you married her. And having taken it you ought to have looked after her. Knowing what she is you ought to have looked after her better than you've done."

"How could I have looked after her?"

"How? Why, as any other man would. You should have made her work, work with her 'ands, as I told you, 'stead of giving her her head, like you did, and lettin' her sit bone-idle in that gimcrack doll-house of yours from morning till night. Why, you should have taken a stick to her. There's many a man as would, before he'd 'a' let it come to that. Damn me if I know why you didn't."

"Well, really, Mr. Usher, I suppose I couldn't forget she was a woman."

"Woman? Woman? I'd 'a' womaned 'er! Look 'ere, my boy, it's a sad business, and there's no one sorrier for you than I am, but there's no good you and me broodin' mournful over what she's done. Course she'd do it, 's long's you let her. You hadn't ought to 'ave let 'er. And seein' as how you have, seems to me what you've got to do now is to take her back again."

"I can't take her back again."

"And why not?"

"Because of the children—for one thing."

That argument had its crushing effect on Mr. Usher. It made him pause a perceptible moment before he answered.

"Well—you needn't look to me and her mother to 'ave her—"

Randall rose, as much as to say that this was enough; it was too much; it was the end.

"We've done with her. You took her out of our 'ands what 'ad a hold on her, and you owe it to her mother and me to take her back."

"If that's all you've got to say, Mr. Usher—"

"It isn't all I've got to say. What I got to say is this. Before you was married, Randall, I don't mind telling you now, my girl was a bit too close about you for my fancy. I've never rightly understood how you two came together."

There, as they fixed him, his little eyes took on their craftiness again and his mouth a smile, a smile of sensual tolerance and understanding, as between one man of the world and another.

"I don't know, and I don't want to know. But however it was—I'm not askin', mind you—however it was"—He was all solemn now—"you made yourself responsible for that girl. And responsible you will be held."

It may have been that Mr. Usher drew a bow at a venture; it may have been that he really knew, that he had always known. Anyhow, that last stroke of his was, in its way, consummate. It made it impossible for Randall to hit back effectively; impossible for him to say now, if he had wished to say it, that he had not been warned (for it seemed to imply that if Mr. Usher's suspicions were correct, Randall had had an all-sufficient warning); impossible for him to maintain, as against a father whom he, upon the supposition, had profoundly injured, an attitude of superior injury. If Mr. Usher had deceived Randall, hadn't Randall, in the first instance, deceived Mr. Usher? In short, it left them quits. It closed Randall's mouth, and with it the discussion, and so that the balance as between them leaned if anything to Mr. Usher's side.

"Well, I'm sorry for you, Randall."

As if he could afford it now, Mr. Usher permitted himself a return to geniality. He paused in the doorway.

"If at any time you should want a hamper, you've only got to say so."

And Randall did not blame him. He said to himself: "Poor old thing. It's funk—pure funk. He's afraid he may have to take her back himself. And who could blame him?"

Funny that his father-in-law should have taken the same line as his Uncle Randall. Only, whereas his Uncle Randall had reckoned with the alternative of divorce, his father-in-law had not so much as hinted at the possibility.

It was almost as if Mr. Usher had had a glimpse of what was to come when he had been in such haste, haste that had seemed in the circumstances hardly decent, to saddle Ransome with the responsibility.

For, if Ransome had really thought that Violet was going to let him off without his paying for it, the weeks that followed brought him proof more than sufficient of his error. He had sown to the winds in the recklessness of his marriage and of his housekeeping, and he reaped the whirlwind in Violet's bills that autumn shot into the letter box at Granville.

He called there every other day for letters; for he was not yet prepared, definitely, to abandon Granville.

The bills, when he had gathered them all in, amounted in their awful total to twenty pounds odd, a sum that exceeded his worst dreams of Violet's possible expenditure. He had realized, in the late summer and autumn of last year, before the period of compulsory retirement had set in, that his wife was beginning to cost him more than she had ever done, more than any woman of his class, so far as he knew, would have dreamed of costing; and this summer, no sooner had she emerged triumphant than—with two children now to provide for—she had launched out upon a scale that fairly terrified him. But all her past extravagance did nothing to prepare him for the extent to which, as he expressed it, she could "go it," when she had, as you might say, an incentive.

The most astounding of the bills his whirlwind swept him was the bill from Starker's—from Oxford Street, if you please—and the bill (sent in with a cynical promptitude) from the chemist in Acacia Avenue at the corner. That, the chemist's, was in a way the worst. It was for scent, for toilette articles, strange yet familiar to him from their presence in his father's shop, for all manner of cosmetics, for things so outrageous, so unnecessary, that they witnessed chiefly to the shifts she had been put to, to her anxieties and hastes, to the feverish multiplication of pretexts and occasions. Still, they amounted but to a few pounds and an odd shilling or two. Starker's bill did the rest.

That, the high, resplendent "cheek" of it, showed what she was capable of; it gave him the measure of her father's "funk," for, of not one of the items, from the three-guinea costumes (there were several of them) down to the dozen of openwork Lisle-thread hose at two and eleven the pair, had Ransome so much as suspected the existence. The three-guinea costumes he could understand. It was the three nightgowns, trimmed lace, at thirteen, fifteen, and sixteen shillings apiece, that took his breath away, as with a vision of her purposes. Still, to him, her husband, Starker's statement of account represented directly, with the perfection of business precision, the cost of getting rid of her; it was so simply and openly the cost of her outfit, of all that she had trailed with her in her flight.

Yet, as he grasped it, he saw with that mature comprehension which was now his, that, awful as it was, that total of twenty pounds odd represented, perfectly, the price of peace. It was open to him to repudiate his wife's debts, in which case she would appear in the County Court, which, with its effect of publicity, with the things that would be certain to come out there, was almost as bad as the Divorce Court. Then the unfortunate tradespeople would not be paid, a result of her conduct which was intolerable to Ranny's decency. Besides, he wanted to be rather more than decent, to be handsome, in his squaring of accounts with the woman whom, after all, in the beginning he had wronged. He could even reflect with a humor surviving all calamity, that though twenty-odd pounds was a devil of a lot to pay, his deliverance was cheap, dirt cheap, at the money.

But that was not all. There was Granville.

He hated Granville. He could not believe how he ever could have loved it. The fact that he was gradually becoming his own landlord only made things worse. It gave Granville a malignant power over him, that power which he had once or twice suspected, the power to round on him and injure him and pay him back. He knew he was partly responsible for Granville's degradation. He had done nothing for this property of his. He had not given it a distinctive character; he had not covered it with creepers or painted it green or built a balcony. He had left it to itself.

He asked himself what it would look like in seventeen years' time when it would be his. In seventeen years' time he would be forty-two. What good would he be then? And what good would Granville be to him? What good was it now? In its malignancy it demanded large sums to keep it going and if it didn't get them it knew how to avenge itself. Slowly perishing, it would fall to dust in seventeen years' time when it came into his hands.

But he had not dreamed of the extent to which Granville could put on the screw.

He was enlightened by the agent of the Estate Company to which Granville owed its being. The agent, after a thorough inspection of the premises, broke it to Ransome that if he did not wish to lose Granville, he would have to undertake certain necessary repairs, the estimate for which soared to the gay tune of ten pounds eight shillings and eightpence. It was the state of the roof, of the southwest wall, and of the scullery drain that most shocked the agent. Of the scullery drain he could hardly bring himself to speak, remarking only that a little washing down from time to time with soda would have saved it all. The state of that drain was a fair disgrace; and it was not a thing of days; it dated from months back—years, he shouldn't be surprised. It was fit to breed a fever.

Of course, it wasn't quite as bad as the agent had made out. But Ranny, knowing Violet, believed him. It gave him a feeling of immense responsibility toward Granville, and the Estate Company, and the agent.

Finally, owing to Violet's reckless management, his debts to the grocer, the butcher, and the milkman had reached the considerable total of nine pounds eighteen shillings and eleven pence. It would take about forty pounds odd to clear his obligations.

The question was how on earth was he to raise the money? Out of a salary of twelve pounds a month?

He would have to borrow it. But from whom? Not from his father. To whatever height his mother kept it up, she could not conceal from him that his father was in difficulties. Wandsworth was going ahead, caught by the tide of progress. The new Drug Stores over the way were drawing all the business from Fulleymore Ransome's little shop. Even with the assistance of the young man, Mr. Ponting, Fulleymore Ransome was not in a state to hold his own. But John Randall, the draper, if you like, was prosperous. He might be willing, Ransome thought, to lend him the money, or a part of it, at a fair rate of interest.

And John Randall indeed lent him thirty pounds; but not willingly. His reluctance, however, was sufficiently explained by the fact that he had recently advanced more than that sum to Fulleymore. He was careful to point out to Randall that he was helping him to meet only those catastrophes which might be regarded as the act of God—Violet's bills and the deterioration of Granville. He was as anxious as Randall himself to prevent Violet's appearance in the County Court, and he certainly thought it was a pity that good house property should go out of his nephew's hands. But he refused flatly to advance the ten pounds for the weekly arrears, in order to teach Randall a lesson, to make him feel that he had some responsibility, and to show that there was a limit to what he, John Randall, was prepared to do.

For days Ransome went distracted. The ten pounds still owing was like a millstone round his neck. If he didn't look sharp and pay up he would be County-Courted too. He couldn't come down on his father-in-law. His father-in-law would tell him that he had already received the equivalent of ten pounds in hampers. There was nobody he could come down on. So he called at a place he had heard of in Shaftesbury Avenue, where there was a "josser" who arranged it for him quite simply by means of a bill of sale upon his furniture. After all, he did get some good out of that furniture.

And he got some good, too, out of Granville when he let it to Fred Booty for fifteen shillings a week.

He was now established definitely in his father's house. The young man Mr. Ponting had shown how kind his heart was by turning out of his nice room on the second floor into Ranny's old attic. The little back room, used for storage, served also as a day nursery for Ranny's children. Six days in the week a little girl came in to mind them. At night Ranny minded them where they lay in their cots by his bed.

It was all that could be done; and with the little girl's board and the children's and his own breakfast and supper and his Sunday dinner, it cost him thirty shillings a week. There was no way in which it could be done for less, since it was not in him to take advantage of his mother's offer to let him have the rooms rent free.

And underneath Ranny's rooms, between the bedroom at the back and the back parlor, between the parlor and the shop, between the shop and the dispensing-room, Fulleymore Ransome dragged himself to and fro, more than ever weedy, more than ever morose, more than ever sublime in his appearance of integrity; and with it all so irritable that Ranny's children had to be kept out of his way. He would snarl when he heard them overhead; he would scowl horribly when he came across the "pram," pushed by the little girl, in its necessary progress through the shop into the street and back again.

But at Ranny he neither snarled nor scowled, nor had he spoken any word to him on the subject of the great calamity. No reproach, no reminder of warnings given, none of that reiterated, "I told you so," in which, Ranny reflected, he might have taken it out of him. He also seemed to regard his son Randall as one smitten by God and afflicted, to whose high and sacred suffering silence was the appropriate tribute. His very moroseness provided the sanctuary of silence.

And all the time he drank; he drank worse than ever; furtively, continuously he drank. Nobody could stop him, for nobody ever saw him doing it. He did it, they could only suppose, behind Mr. Ponting's back in the dispensing-room.

They were free to suppose anything now; for, since Ranny's great delivering outburst, they could discuss it; and in discussion they found relief. Ranny's mother owned as much. She had suffered (that also she owned) from the strain of keeping it up. Ranny's outburst had saved her, vicariously. It was as if she had burst out herself.

There were, of course, lengths to which she would never go, admissions which she could not bring herself to make. There had to be some subterfuge, some poor last shelter for her pride. And so, of the depression in Fulleymore's business she would say before Mr. Ponting, "It's those Drug Stores that are ruining him," and Mr. Ponting would reply, gravely, "They'd ruin anybody."

Mr. Ponting was a fresh-colored young man and good-looking, with his blue eyes and his yellow hair sleeked backward like folded wings, so different from Mercier. Mr. Ponting had conceived an affection for Ranny and the children. He would find excuses to go up to the storeroom, where he would pretend to be looking for things while he was really playing with Dossie. He would sit on Ranny's bed while Ranny was undressing, and together they would consider, piously, the grave case of the Humming-bird, and how, between them, they could best "keep him off it."

"It's the dispensary spirits that he gets at," Mr. Ponting said. "That's the trouble."

(And it always had been.)

"The queer thing is," said Ranny, "that you never fairly see him tight. Not to speak of."

"That's the worst of it," said Mr. Ponting. "I wish I could see your father tight—tumbling about a bit, I mean, and being funny. The beastly stuff's going for him inside, all the time—undermining him. There isn't an organ," said Mr. Ponting, solemnly, "in your father's body that it hasn't gone for."

"How d'you know?"

"Why, by the medicines he takes. He's giving himself strophanthus now, for his heart."

"I say—d'you think my mother knows that?"

"It's impossible to say what your mother knows. More than she lets on, I shouldn't be surprised."

Mr. Ponting pondered.

"It's wonderful how he keeps it up. His dignity, I mean."

"It's rum, isn't it?" said Ranny. He was apparently absorbed in tying the strings of his sleeping-suit into loops of absolutely even length. "But he always was that mysterious kind of bird."

He began to step slowly backward as he buttoned up his jacket. Then, by way of throwing off the care that oppressed him, and lightening somewhat Mr. Ponting's burden, he ran forward and took a flying leap over the Baby's cot into his own bed.

Mr. Ponting looked, if anything, a little graver. "I wouldn't do that, if I were you," he said.

"Why not?" said Ranny over his blankets, snuggling comfortably.

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Ponting, vaguely.

In a day or two Ranny himself knew.

His arrangements had carried him well on into October. In the last week of that month, on a Tuesday evening, he appeared at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where he had not been seen since far back in the last year. It was not at the Gymnasium that he now presented himself, but at the door of that room where every Tuesday evening, from seven-thirty to eight-thirty, a qualified practitioner was in attendance.

It was the first time that Ransome had availed himself of this privilege conferred on him by the Poly.

He said he wouldn't keep the medical man a minute.

But the medical man kept Ranny many minutes, thumping, sounding, intimately and extensively overhauling him. For more minutes than Ranny at all liked, he played about him with a stethoscope. Then he fired off what Ranny supposed to be the usual questions.

"Had any shock, worry, or excitement lately?

"Been overdoing it in any way?

"Gone in much for athletics?"

Ranny replied with regret that it was more than three years since he had last run in the Wandsworth Hurdle Race.

He was then told that he must avoid all shock, worry, or excitement. He mustn't overdo it. He must drop his hurdle-racing. He mustn't bicycle uphill, or against the wind; he mustn't jump; he mustn't run—

"Not even to catch a train?"

"Not to catch anything."

And the doctor gave him a prescription that ran:

He remembered. That was the stuff he'd measured for old Mr. Beasley's heart mixture. It was the stuff that Ponting said his father was taking now.

If any one had told him three years ago that his heart was rocky he'd have told them where to go to. It had been as sound as a bell when he entered for the Poly. Gym.

Well, he supposed that was about the finishing touch—if they wanted to do the thing in style.

He went slowly over Wandsworth Bridge and up the High Street, dejected, under the autumn moon that had once watched his glad sprinting.