Within half an hour after she had returned from shopping and before lunch was set upon the table, he knew the bath would be back in the darkroom, bright and pristine as when it was new, and nothing more would be said about it. Millie would be a little more ineffectually anxious to please at lunch, perhaps, but that was all.
Mr. Brownrigg passed behind the counter and flicked a speck of dust off the dummy cartons of face-cream. It was twelve twenty-five and a half. In four and a half minutes Phyllis Bell would leave her office further down the High Street, and in seven and a half minutes she would come in through that narrow, sunlit doorway to the cool, drug-scented shop.
On that patch of floor where the sunlight lay blue and yellow, since it had found its way in through the enormous glass vases in the window which were the emblem of his trade, she would stand and look at him, her blue eyes limpid and her small mouth pursed and adorable.
The chemist took up one of the ebony-backed hand mirrors exposed on the counter for sale and glanced at himself in it. He was not altogether a prepossessing person. Never a tall man at forty-two his wide, stocky figure showed a definite tendency to become fleshy, but there was strength and virility in his thick shoulders, while his clean-shaven face and broad neck were short and bull-like and his lips were full.
Phyllis liked his eyes. They held her, she said, and most of the other young women who bought their cosmetics at the corner shop and chatted with Mr. Brownrigg across the counter might have been inclined to agree with her.
Over-dark, round, hot eyes had Mr. Brownrigg; not at all the sort of eyes for a little, plump, middle-aged chemist with a placid wife like Millie.
But Mr. Brownrigg did not contemplate his own eyes. He smoothed his hair, wiped his lips, and then, realizing that Phyllis was almost due, he disappeared behind the dispensing desk. It was as well, he always thought, not to appear too eager.
He was watching the door, though, when she came in. He saw the flicker of her green skirt as she hesitated on the step and saw her half-eager, half-apprehensive expression as she glanced towards the counter.
He was glad she had not come in when a customer was there. Phyllis was different from any of the others whose little histories stretched back through the past fourteen years. When Phyllis was in the shop Mr. Brownrigg found he was liable to make mistakes, liable to drop things and fluff the change.
He came out from his obscurity eager in spite of himself, and drew the little golden-haired girl sharply towards him over that part of the counter which was lowest and which he purposely kept uncluttered.
He kissed her and the sudden hungry force of the movement betrayed him utterly. He heard her quick intake of breath before she released herself and stepped back.
“You... you shouldn’t,” she said, nervously tugging her hat back into position.
She was barely twenty, small and young-looking for her years, with yellow hair and a pleasant, quiet style. Her blue eyes were frightened and a little disgusted now, as though she found herself caught up in an emotion which her instincts considered not quite nice.
Henry Brownrigg recognized the expression. He had seen it before in other eyes, but whereas on past occasions he had been able to be tolerantly amused and therefore comforting and glibly reassuring, in Phyllis it irritated and almost frightened him.
“Why not?” he demanded sharply, too sharply he knew immediately, and the blood rushed into his face.
Phyllis took a deep breath.
“I came to tell you,” she said jerkily, like a child saying its piece, “I’ve been thinking things over. I can’t go on with all this. You’re married. I want to be married some day. I... I shan’t come in again.”
“You haven’t been talking to someone?” he demanded, suddenly cold.
“About you? Good heavens, no!”
Her vehemence was convincing, and because of that he shut his mind to its uncomplimentary inference and experienced only relief.
“You love me,” said Henry Brownrigg. “I love you and you love me. You know that.”
He spoke without intentional histrionics, but adopted a curious monotone which, some actors have discovered, is one of the most convincing methods of conveying deep sincerity.
Phyllis nodded miserably and then seemed oddly embarrassed. Wistfully her eyes wandered to the sunlit street and back again.
“Good-bye,” she said huskily and fled.
He saw her speeding past the window, almost running.
For some time Henry Brownrigg remained looking down at the patch of blue sunlight where she had stood. Finally he raised his eyes and smiled with conscious wryness. She would come back. Tomorrow, or in a week, or in ten days perhaps, she would come back. But the obstacle, the insurmountable obstacle would arise again, in time it would defeat him and he would lose her.
Phyllis was different from the others. He would lose her.
Unless that obstacle were removed.
Henry Brownrigg frowned.
There were other considerations too.
The old, mottled ledger told those only too clearly.
If the obstacle were removed it would automatically wipe away those difficulties also, for was there not the insurance and that small income Millie’s father had left so securely tied, as though the old man had divined his daughter would grow up to be such a fool?
Mr. Brownrigg’s eyes rested upon the little drawer under the counter marked: “Prescriptions: private.” It was locked and not even young Perry, his errand boy and general assistant, who poked his nose into most things, guessed that under the pile of slips within was a packet of letters scrawled in Phyllis’s childish hand.
He turned away abruptly. His breath was hard to draw and he was trembling.
The time had come.
Some months previously Henry Brownrigg had decided that he must become a widower before the end of the year, but the interview of the morning had convinced him that he must hurry.
At this moment Millie, her face still pink with shame at the recollection of the affair of the ill-washed bath, put her head round the inner door.
“Lunch is on the table, Henry,” she said, and added with that stupidity which had annoyed him ever since it had ceased to please him by making him feel superior: “Well, you do look serious. Oh, Henry, you haven’t made a mistake and given somebody a wrong bottle?”
“No, my dear Millie,” said her husband, surveying her coldly and speaking with heavy sarcasm. “That is the peculiar sort of idiot mistake I have yet to make. I haven’t reached my wife’s level yet.”
And as he followed her uncomplaining figure to the little room behind the shop a word echoed rhythmically in the back of his mind and kept time with the beating of his heart. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”
“Henry, dear,” said Millie Brownrigg, turning a troubled face towards her husband, “why Doctor Crupiner? He’s so expensive and so old.”
She was standing in front of the dressing table in the big front bedroom above the shop, brushing her brown, grey-streaked hair before she plaited it and coiled it round her head.
Henry Brownrigg, lying awake in his bed on the far side of the room, did not answer her.
Millie went on talking. She was used to Henry’s silence. Henry was so clever. Most of his time was spent in thought.
“I’ve heard all sorts of odd things about Doctor Crupiner,” she remarked. “They say he’s so old he forgets. Why shouldn’t we go to Mother’s man? She swears by him.”
“Unfortunately for your mother she has your intelligence, without a man to look after her, poor woman,” said Henry Brownrigg.