“Well, suppose I have?” she replied, defiantly. She added quickly, womanlike divining the reproach to Tommy, underlying Quixtus’s challenge: “He’s a child and I’m an old woman. I had the deuce’s own job to make him accept. I couldn’t go careering about France all by myself—I could, as a matter of practical fact—I could career all over Gehenna if I chose—but it wouldn’t have been gay. He sacrificed his pride to give me a holiday. What have you to say against it?”
A flush of shame mounted to Quixtus’s cheek. It was intolerable that one of his house—his sister’s son—should have been dependent for bread on a woman. He himself was to blame.
“Clementina,” said he, “this is a very delicate matter, and I hope you won’t misjudge me; but as your great generosity was based on a most unhappy misunderstanding——”
“Ephraim Quixtus,” she interrupted, seeing whither he was tending, “go on with your dinner and don’t be a fool!”
There was nothing for it but for Quixtus to go on with his dinner.
“I tell you what,” she said, after a pause, in spite of her weariness of Tommy as a topic of conversation; “when Tommy met you in Paris, he didn’t know what you’ve just told me. He thought you had unreasonably and heartlessly cut him adrift. And yet he greeted you as affectionately and frankly as if nothing had happened.”
“That’s true,” Quixtus admitted. “He did.”
“It proves to you what a sound-hearted fellow Tommy is.”
“That’s all,” said Clementina. “Or if it isn’t it ought to be.”
Quixtus made no reply. There was no reply possible, save the real explanation of his eccentric behaviour; and that he was not prepared to offer. But Clementina’s rough words sank deep in his mind. Judged by ordinary standards, his treatment of Tommy had been unqualifiable; Tommy’s behaviour all that was most meritorious. In Tommy’s case wherein lay the proof of the essential depravity of mankind? His gloomy faith received a shock which caused him exceeding discomfort. You see, if you take all the trouble of going mad for the sake of a gospel, you rather cling to it when you recover sanity. You are rather eager to justify to yourself the waste of time and energy. It is human nature.
After dinner she dismissed him. He must go out to a café and see the world. She had to look after the child’s slumbers, and write letters. Quixtus went out into the broad, busy streets. The Cannebière was crowded with gasping but contented citizens. On every side rose the murmur of mirth and cheerfulness. Solid burgesses strolled arm in arm with their solider wives. Youths and maidens laughed together. Swarthy workmen with open shirt-collars showing their hairy throats, bareheaded workgirls in giggling knots, little soldiers clinging amorously to sweethearts—all the crowd wore an air of gaiety, of love of their kind, of joy in comradeship. At the thronged cafés, too, men and women found comfort in the swelter of gregariousness. Night had fallen over the baking city, and the great thoroughfare blazed in light—from shop windows, cafés, street lamps, from the myriad whirling lamps of trams and motors. Above it all the full moon shone splendid from the intense sky of a summer night. Quixtus and the moon appeared to be the only lonely things in the Cannebière.