The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife by Martin Armstrong Page B

miscalculated the effect of this statement on Mr. Darby. A look of consternation transformed his face; it wasas if he had seen a ghost; and next moment his cheeks and forehead were aflame.
    Sarah laughed. ‘It’s all right, Jim,’ she said, ‘I’m not blaming you.’
    But this did little to reassure Mr. Darby. He had received a very disagreeable shock. Had she actually, in some inexplicable way,
seen
him lunching at The Schooner? Had she seen him in conversation with Miss Sunningdale? With distressing vividness he had suddenly recalled the timid, ingratiating and fatuous little man whose face he had seen in the bar-room mirror. It was this that had brought the scarlet to his cheeks. He felt deeply ashamed and also horribly guilty. And it was not only the thought that Sarah had seen him that had so thoroughly upset him. It was also the uncomfortable feeling that, whether she saw him or not, she knew of his movements, that when he issued with that sense of eager joviality from the office at midday on Fridays, he was not really as free as he felt. His feeling of escape, of surreptitious holiday was a delusion. All the time, he was under observation.
    And all he could do in reply to Sarah’s good-humoured reassurance was to mutter incoherently about ‘quick … ah … lunch,’ and—’ ah … accumulation of work.’ Whether Sarah minded his visits to The Schooner or not, she had effectually ruined his enjoyment of them. Yes, he must certainly persevere in the scheme of the B Account.
    â€¢Â Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â Â â€¢
    Man proposes but God disposes. Did Providence interpose in order to save Mr. Darby from practising a deceit on his wife, or to punish him by transforming his intended falsehood into the terrible truth, or simply to test his mettle, as it once tested Job’s, by an even sterner ordeal? We cannot tell. But the fact remains that, for the first time in thirty-five years, Christmas brought no cheque from Uncle Tom Darby.
    For a whole fortnight before Christmas Day Mr. Darby had, by difficult and carefully prepared tactics, contrived to be the first to look over the letters that arrived by the earlypost (those that came by the later posts, he knew, were usually local letters only): but all in vain. He might as well have saved himself that daily expenditure of nerve-racking ingenuity. A horrible misgiving now took possession of him, a feeling that was positively physical and situated in the pit of his stomach; but he bore up bravely, reminding himself of the congestion and delays of the Christmas mails, and for another ten days he persevered in his secret inquisition. Then when the New Year was already three days old he gave up. He was convinced of sin, for he felt vaguely that this was a punishment visited on him for his unholy schemes. But the conviction of sin was as nothing beside the black disappointment and the black foreboding. For the fact that the cheque had not come this year must surely mean that it would never come again, that the fountain had at last dried up, as he had told himself so often that it eventually must, that Uncle Tom Darby was dead. Goodbye, then, to the B Account, the Adventure Fund, and to that pale and distant star which, since the moment of his conversion from romance to realism, had been the one illumination of his days.
    It was a very crestfallen little man now who travelled to and fro between Number Seven Moseley Terrace and Number Thirty Seven Ranger Street. The old alertness was gone from his step, he tottered rather than walked: the old bright birdlike pleasure in the world about him had withered; he studied only the ground a few feet in front of him, even the glasses of his spectacles looked dim and light-less. Steam trains might have coursed the Osbert Road cutting twenty times a minute: he would not