When, then, he had kissed Frances Freeland, and watched her ascend the stairs, breathless because she WOULD breathe through her nose to the very last step, he turned into his study, lighted his pipe, and sat down to a couple of hours of a report upon the forces of constabulary available in the various counties, in the event of any further agricultural rioting, such as had recently taken place on a mild scale in one or two districts where there was still Danish blood. He worked at the numbers steadily, with just that engineer's touch of mechanical invention which had caused him to be so greatly valued in a department where the evolution of twelve policemen out of ten was constantly desired. His mastery of figures was highly prized, for, while it had not any of that flamboyance which has come from America and the game of poker, it possessed a kind of English optimism, only dangerous when, as rarely happened, it was put to the test. He worked two full pipes long, and looked at the clock. Twelve! No good knocking off just yet! He had no liking for bed this many a long year, having, from loyalty to memory and a drier sense of what became one in the Home Department, preserved his form against temptations of the flesh.
Yet, somehow, to-night he felt no spring, no inspiration, in his handling of county constabulary. A kind of English stolidity about them baffled him--ten of them remained ten. And leaning that forehead, whose height so troubled Frances Freeland, on his neat hand, he fell to brooding. Those young people with everything before them! Did he envy them? Or was he glad of his own age?
Fifty! Fifty already; a fogey! An official fogey! For all the world like an umbrella, that every day some one put into a stand and left there till it was time to take it out again. Neatly rolled, too, with an elastic and button! And this fancy, which had never come to him before, surprised him. One day he, too, would wear out, slit all up his seams, and they would leave him at home, or give him away to the butler.
He went to the window. A scent of--of May, or something! And nothing in sight save houses just like his own! He looked up at the strip of sky privileged to hang just there. He had got a bit rusty with his stars. There, however, certainly was Venus. And he thought of how he had stood by the ship's rail on that honeymoon trip of his twenty years ago, giving his young wife her first lesson in counting the stars. And something very deep down, very mossed and crusted over in John's heart, beat and stirred, and hurt him. Nedda--he had caught her looking at that young fellow just as Anne had once looked at him, John Freeland, now an official fogey, an umbrella in a stand. There was a policeman! How ridiculous the fellow looked, putting one foot before the other, flirting his lantern and trying the area gates! This confounded scent of hawthorn--could it be hawthorn?--got here into the heart of London!
The look in that girl's eyes! What was he about, to let them make him feel as though he could give his soul for a face looking up into his own, for a breast touching his, and the scent of a woman's hair. Hang it! He would smoke a cigarette and go to bed! He turned out the light and began to mount the stairs; they creaked abominably--the felt must be wearing out. A woman about the place would have kept them quiet. Reaching the landing of the second floor, he paused a moment from habit, to look down into the dark hall. A voice, thin, sweet, almost young, said:
"Is that you, darling?" John's heart stood still. What--was that?
Then he perceived that the door of the room that had been his wife's was open, and remembered that his mother was in there.
"What! Aren't you asleep, Mother?"
Frances Freeland's voice answered cheerfully :"Oh, no, dear; I'm never asleep before two. Come in."
John entered. Propped very high on her pillows, in perfect regularity, his mother lay. Her carved face was surmounted by a piece of fine lace, her thin, white fingers on the turnover of the sheet moved in continual interlocking, her lips smiled.
"There's something you must have," she said. "I left my door open on purpose. Give me that little bottle, darling."
John took from a small table by the bed a still smaller bottle.
Frances Freeland opened it, and out came three tiny white globules.
"Now," she said, "pop them in! You've no idea how they'll send you to sleep! They're the most splendid things; perfectly harmless.
Just let them rest on the tongue and swallow!"
John let them rest--they were sweetish--and swallowed.
"How is it, then," he said, "that you never go to sleep before two?"
Frances Freeland corked the little bottle, as if enclosing within it that awkward question.
"They don't happen to act with me, darling; but that's nothing.
It's the very thing for any one who has to sit up so late," and her eyes searched his face. Yes--they seemed to say--I know you pretend to have work; but if you only had a dear little wife!
"I shall leave you this bottle when I go. Kiss me."
John bent down, and received one of those kisses of hers that had such sudden vitality in the middle of them, as if her lips were trying to get inside his cheek. From the door he looked back. She was smiling, composed again to her stoic wakefulness.
"Shall I shut the door, Mother?"
"Please, darling."
With a little lump in his throat John closed the door.