"Forgiven you!" George took her up. "I should like to know what he had to forgive."
"Well," she murmured timorously. "You understand what I mean."
He drummed his elegant feet on the striated deck. Out of the corner of his left eye he saw the mediaeval shape of the Tower rapidly disappearing. In front were the variegated funnels and masts of fleets gathered together in St. Katherine's Dock and London Dock. The steamer gained speed as she headed from Cherry Gardens Pier towards the middle of the river. She was a frail trifle compared with the big boats that lined the wharves; but in herself she had size and irresistible force, travelling quite smoothly over the short, riotous, sparkling waves which her cut-water divided and spurned away on either side. Only a tremor faintly vibrated throughout her being.
"Has he forgiven you for being engaged?" George demanded, with rough sarcasm.
She showed no resentment of his tone, but replied gently:
"I did try to mention it once, but it was no use--he wasn't in a condition. He made me quite afraid--not for me of course, but for him."
"Well, I give it up!" said George. "I simply give it up! It's past me. How soon's he going to _be_ in condition? He can't keep us walking about the streets for ever."
"No, of course not!" She smiled to placate him.
There was a pause, and then George, his eyes fixed on her hand, remarked:
"I suppose you don't wear it in the house, so that the sight of it shan't annoy him."
"Oh, George, dear!" Her glance asked for mercy, for magnanimity.
"Do you wear it when you're in the house, or don't you?"
"I daren't excite him. Truly, I daren't. It wouldn't do. It wouldn't be right."
She was admitting George's haphazard charge against her. He was astounded. But he merely flung back his head and raised his eyebrows. He thought:
"And yet she sticks to it he's nice to her! My God!"
He said nothing aloud. The Royal Hospital, Greenwich, showed itself in the distance like a domed island rising fabulously out of the blue-green water. Even far off, before he could decipher the main contours of the gigantic quadruple pile, the vision excited him. His mind, darkened by the most dreadful apprehensions concerning Marguerite, dwelt on it darkly, sardonically, and yet with pleasure. And he proudly compared his own disillusions with those of his greatest forerunners. His studies, and the example of Mr. Enwright, had inspired him with an extremely enthusiastic worship of Inigo Jones, whom he classed, not without reason, among the great creative artists of Europe. He snorted when he heard the Royal Hospital referred to as the largest and finest charitable institution in the world. For him it was the supreme English architectural work. He snorted at the thought of that pompous and absurd monarch James I ordering Inigo Jones to design him a palace surpassing all palaces and choosing a sublime site therefor, and then doing nothing. He snorted at the thought of that deluded monarch Charles I ordering Inigo Jones to design him a palace surpassing all palaces, and receiving from Inigo Jones the plans of a structure which would have equalled in beauty and eclipsed in grandeur any European structure of the Christian era--even Chambord, even the Escurial, even Versailles--and then accomplishing nothing beyond a tiny fragment of the sublime dream. He snorted at the thought that Inigo Jones had died at the age of nearly eighty ere the foundations of the Greenwich palace had begun to be dug, and without having seen more than the fragment of his unique Whitehall--after a youth spent in arranging masques for a stupid court, and an old age spent in disappointment. But then no English monarch had ever begun and finished a palace. George wished, rather venturesomely, that he had lived under Francis I!...