The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
PART IV

Ford Maddox Ford PART I
PART II
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PART IV

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[5200]      PART IV
[5201]     
[5202]     I
[5203]     
[5204]     I HAVE, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that
[5205]     it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may
[5206]     be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of
[5207]     being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between
[5208]     the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the
[5209]     story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair--a long, sad
[5210]     affair--one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points
[5211]     that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely
[5212]     since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in
[5213]     their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting
[5214]     them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this
[5215]     is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best
[5216]     in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then
[5217]     seem most real.
[5218]     
[5219]     At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of
[5220]     Maisie Maidan's death. I mean that I have explained everything
[5221]     that went before it from the several points of view that were
[5222]     necessary--from Leonora's, from Edward's and, to some extent,
[5223]     from my own. You have the facts for the trouble of finding them;
[5224]     you have the points of view as far as I could ascertain or put them.
[5225]     Let me imagine myself back, then, at the day of Maisie's death--or
[5226]     rather at the moment of Florence's dissertation on the Protest, up
[5227]     in the old Castle of the town of M----. Let us consider Leonora's
[5228]     point of view with regard to Florence; Edward's, of course, I
[5229]     cannot give you, for Edward naturally never spoke of his affair
[5230]     with my wife. (I may, in what follows, be a little hard on Florence;
[5231]     but you must remember that I have been writing away at this story
[5232]     now for six months and reflecting longer and longer upon these
[5233]     affairs.) And the longer I think about them the more certain I
[5234]     become that Florence was a contaminating influence--she
[5235]     depressed and deteriorated poor Edward; she deteriorated,
[5236]     hopelessly, the miserable Leonora. There is no doubt that she
[5237]     caused Leonora's character to deteriorate. If there was a fine point
[5238]     about Leonora it was that she was proud and that she was silent.
[5239]     But that pride and that silence broke when she made that
[5240]     extraordinary outburst, in the shadowy room that contained the
[5241]     Protest, and in the little terrace looking over the river. I don't
[5242]     mean to say that she was doing a wrong thing. She was certainly
[5243]     doing right in trying to warn me that Florence was making eyes at
[5244]     her husband. But, if she did the right thing, she was doing it in the
[5245]     wrong way. Perhaps she should have reflected longer; she should
[5246]     have spoken, if she wanted to speak, only after reflection. Or it
[5247]     would have been better if she had acted--if, for instance, she had
[5248]     so chaperoned Florence that private communication between her
[5249]     and Edward became impossible. She should have gone
[5250]     eavesdropping; she should have watched outside bedroom doors.
[5251]     It is odious; but that is the way the job is done. She should have
[5252]     taken Edward away the moment Maisie was dead. No, she acted
[5253]     wrongly. . . . And yet, poor thing, is it for me to condemn her--and
[5254]     what did it matter in the end? If it had not been Florence, it would
[5255]     have been some other . . . Still, it might have been a better woman
[5256]     than my wife. For Florence was vulgar; Florence was a common
[5257]     flirt who would not, at the last, lacher prise; and Florence was an
[5258]     unstoppable talker. You could not stop her; nothing would stop
[5259]     her. Edward and Leonora were at least proud and reserved people.
[5260]     Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are
[5261]     not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular
[5262]     virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go. And Leonora let
[5263]     them. go. She let them go before poor Edward did even. Consider
[5264]     her position when she burst out over the Luther-Protest. . . .
[5265]     Consider her agonies. . . .
[5266]     
[5267]     You are to remember that the main passion of her life was to get
[5268]     Edward back; she had never, till that moment, despaired of getting
[5269]     him back. That may seem ignoble; but you have also to remember
[5270]     that her getting him back represented to her not only a victory for
[5271]     herself. It would, as it appeared to her, have been a victory for all
[5272]     wives and a victory for her Church. That was how it presented
[5273]     itself to her. These things are a little inscrutable. I don't know why
[5274]     the getting back of Edward should have represented to her a
[5275]     victory for all wives, for Society and for her Church. Or, maybe, I
[5276]     have a glimmering of it. She saw life as a perpetual sex-baffle
[5277]     between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their wives, and
[5278]     wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the end. That was
[5279]     her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man, for her, was a sort
[5280]     of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his
[5281]     nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons. She had read few novels,
[5282]     so that the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding the sound
[5283]     of wedding bells had never been very much presented to her. She
[5284]     went, numbed and terrified, to the Mother Superior of her
[5285]     childhood's convent with the tale of Edward's infidelities with the
[5286]     Spanish dancer, and all that the old nun, who appeared to her to
[5287]     be infinitely wise, mystic and reverend, had done had been to
[5288]     shake her head sadly and to say:
[5289]     
[5290]     "Men are like that. By the blessing of God it will all come right in
[5291]     the end."
[5292]     
[5293]     That was what was put before her by her spiritual advisers as her
[5294]     programme in life. Or, at any rate, that was how their teachings
[5295]     came through to her--that was the lesson she told me she had
[5296]     learned of them. I don't know exactly what they taught her. The lot
[5297]     of women was patience and patience and again patience--ad
[5298]     majorem Dei gloriam--until upon the appointed day, if God saw
[5299]     fit, she should have her reward. If then, in the end, she should have
[5300]     succeeded in getting Edward back she would have kept her man
[5301]     within the limits that are all that wifehood has to expect. She was
[5302]     even taught that such excesses in men are natural, excusable--as if
[5303]     they had been children.
[5304]     
[5305]     And the great thing was that there should be no scandal before the
[5306]     congregation. So she had clung to the idea of getting Edward back
[5307]     with a fierce passion that was like an agony. She had looked the
[5308]     other way; she had occupied herself solely with one idea. That
[5309]     was the idea of having Edward appear, when she did get him
[5310]     back, wealthy, glorious as it were, on account of his lands, and
[5311]     upright. She would show, in fact, that in an unfaithful world one
[5312]     Catholic woman had succeeded in retaining the fidelity of her
[5313]     husband. And she thought she had come near her desires.
[5314]     
[5315]     Her plan with regard to Maisie had appeared to be working
[5316]     admirably. Edward had seemed to be cooling off towards the girl.
[5317]     He did not hunger to pass every minute of the time at Nauheirn
[5318]     beside the child's recumbent form; he went out to polo matches;
[5319]     he played auction bridge in the evenings; he was cheerful and
[5320]     bright. She was certain that he was not trying to seduce that poor
[5321]     child; she was beginning to think that he had never tried to do so.
[5322]     He seemed in fact to be dropping back into what he had been for
[5323]     Maisie in the beginning--a kind, attentive, superior officer in the
[5324]     regiment, paying gallant attentions to a bride. They were as open
[5325]     in their little flirtations as the dayspring from on high. And Maisie
[5326]     had not appeared to fret when he went off on excursions with us;
[5327]     she had to lie down for so many hours on her bed every afternoon,
[5328]     and she had not appeared to crave for the attentions of Edward at
[5329]     those times. And Edward was beginning to make little advances to
[5330]     Leonora. Once or twice, in private--for he often did it before
[5331]     people--he had said: "How nice you look!" or "What a pretty
[5332]     dress!" She had gone with Florence to Frankfurt, where they dress
[5333]     as well as in Paris, and had got herself a gown or two. She could
[5334]     afford it, and Florence was an excellent adviser as to dress. She
[5335]     seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle.
[5336]     
[5337]     Yes, Leonora seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle. She
[5338]     imagined herself to have been in the wrong to some extent in the
[5339]     past. She should not have kept Edward on such a tight rein with
[5340]     regard to money. She thought she was on the right tack in letting
[5341]     him--as she had done only with fear and irresolution--have again
[5342]     the control of bis income. He came even a step towards her and
[5343]     acknowledged, spontaneously, that she had been right in
[5344]     husbanding, for all those years, their resources. He said to her one
[5345]     day:
[5346]     
[5347]     "You've done right, old girl. There's nothing I like so much as to
[5348]     have a little to chuck away. And I can do it, thanks to you."
[5349]     
[5350]     That was really, she said, the happiest moment of her life. And he,
[5351]     seeming to realize it, had ventured to pat her on the shoulder. He
[5352]     had, ostensibly, come in to borrow a safety-pin of her. And the
[5353]     occasion of her boxing Maisie's ears, had, after it was over,
[5354]     riveted in her mind the idea that there was no intrigue between
[5355]     Edward and Mrs Maidan. She imagined that, from henceforward,
[5356]     all that she had to do was to keep him well supplied with money
[5357]     and his mind amused with pretty girls. She was convinced that he
[5358]     was coming back to her. For that month she no longer repelled his
[5359]     timid advances that never went very far. For he certainly made
[5360]     timid advances. He patted her on the shoulder; he whispered into
[5361]     her ear little jokes about the odd figures that they saw up at the
[5362]     Casino. It was not much to make a little joke--but the whispering
[5363]     of it was a precious intimacy. . . .
[5364]     
[5365]     And then--smash--it all went. It went to pieces at the moment
[5366]     when Florence laid her hand upon Edward's wrist, as it lay on the
[5367]     glass sheltering the manuscript of the Protest, up in the high tower
[5368]     with the shutters where the sunlight here and there streamed in.
[5369]     Or, rather, it went when she noticed the look in Edward's eyes as
[5370]     he gazed back into Florence's. She knew that look.
[5371]     
[5372]     She had known--since the first moment of their meeting, since the
[5373]     moment of our all sitting down to dinner together--that Florence
[5374]     was making eyes at Edward. But she had seen so many women
[5375]     make eyes at Edward--hundreds and hundreds of women, in
[5376]     railway trains, in hotels, aboard liners, at street corners. And she
[5377]     had arrived at thinking that Edward took little stock in women
[5378]     that made eyes at him. She had formed what was, at that time, a
[5379]     fairly correct estimate of the methods of, the reasons for, Edward's
[5380]     loves. She was certain that hitherto they had consisted of the short
[5381]     passion for the Dolciquita, the real sort of love for Mrs Basil, and
[5382]     what she deemed the pretty courtship of Maisie Maidan. Besides
[5383]     she despised Florence so haughtily that she could not imagine
[5384]     Edward's being attracted by her. And she and Maisie were a sort
[5385]     of bulwark round him. She wanted, besides, to keep her eyes on
[5386]     Florence--for Florence knew that she had boxed Maisie's ears.
[5387]     And Leonora desperately desired that her union with Edward
[5388]     should appear to be flawless. But all that went. . . .
[5389]     
[5390]     With the answering gaze of Edward into Florence's blue and
[5391]     uplifted eyes, she knew that it had all gone. She knew that that
[5392]     gaze meant that those two had had long conversations of an
[5393]     intimate kind--about their likes and dislikes, about their natures,
[5394]     about their views of marriage. She knew what it meant that she,
[5395]     when we all four walked out together, had always been with me
[5396]     ten yards ahead of Florence and Edward. She did not imagine that
[5397]     it had gone further than talks about their likes and dislikes, about
[5398]     their natures or about marriage as an institution. But, having
[5399]     watched Edward all her life, she knew that that laying on of
[5400]     hands, that answering of gaze with gaze, meant that the thing was
[5401]     unavoidable. Edward was such a serious person.
[5402]     
[5403]     She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two would
[5404]     be to rivet on Edward an irrevocable passion; that, as I have
[5405]     before told you, it was a trick of Edward's nature to believe that
[5406]     the seducing of a woman gave her an irrevocable hold over him
[5407]     for life. And that touching of hands, she knew, would give that
[5408]     woman an irrevocable claim--to be seduced. And she so despised
[5409]     Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid.
[5410]     There are very decent parlour-maids.
[5411]     
[5412]     And, suddenly, there came into her mind the conviction that
[5413]     Maisie Maidan had a real passion for Edward; that this would
[5414]     break her heart--and that she, Leonora, would be responsible for
[5415]     that. She went, for the moment, mad. She clutched me by the
[5416]     wrist; she dragged me down those stairs and across that
[5417]     whispering Rittersaal with the high painted pillars, the high
[5418]     painted chimney-piece. I guess she did not go mad enough.
[5419]     
[5420]     She ought to have said:
[5421]     
[5422]     "Your wife is a harlot who is going to be my husband's mistress . .
[5423]     ." That might have done the trick. But, even in her madness, she
[5424]     was afraid to go as far as that. She was afraid that, if she did,
[5425]     Edward and Florence would make a bolt of it, and that, if they did
[5426]     that, she would lose forever all chance of getting him back in the
[5427]     end. She acted very badly to me.
[5428]     
[5429]     Well, she was a tortured soul who put her Church before the
[5430]     interests of a Philadelphia Quaker. That is all right--I daresay the
[5431]     Church of Rome is the more important of the two.
[5432]     
[5433]     A week after Maisie Maidan's death she was aware that Florence
[5434]     had become Edward's mistress. She waited outside Florence's door
[5435]     and met Edward as he came away. She said nothing and he only
[5436]     grunted. But I guess he had a bad time.
[5437]     
[5438]     Yes, the mental deterioration that Florence worked in Leonora was
[5439]     extraordinary; it smashed up her whole life and all her chances. It
[5440]     made her, in the first place, hopeless--for she could not see how,
[5441]     after that, Edward could return to her--after a vulgar intrigue with
[5442]     a vulgar woman. His affair with Mrs Basil, which was now all that
[5443]     she had to bring, in her heart, against him, she could not find it in
[5444]     her to call an intrigue. It was a love affair--a pure enough thing in
[5445]     its way. But this seemed to her to be a horror--a wantonness, all
[5446]     the more detestable to her, because she so detested Florence. And
[5447]     Florence talked. . . .
[5448]     
[5449]     That was what was terrible, because Florence forced Leonora
[5450]     herself to abandon her high reserve--Florence and the situation. It
[5451]     appears that Florence was in two minds whether to confess to me
[5452]     or to Leonora. Confess she had to. And she pitched at last on
[5453]     Leonora, because if it had been me she would have had to confess
[5454]     a great deal more. Or, at least, I might have guessed a great deal
[5455]     more, about her "heart", and about Jimmy. So she went to Leonora
[5456]     one day and began hinting and hinting. And she enraged Leonora
[5457]     to such an extent that at last Leonora said:
[5458]     
[5459]     "You want to tell me that you are Edward's mistress. You can be. I
[5460]     have no use for him." That was really a calamity for Leonora,
[5461]     because, once started, there was no stopping the talking. She tried
[5462]     to stop--but it was not to be done. She found it necessary to send
[5463]     Edward messages through Florence; for she would not speak to
[5464]     him. She had to give him, for instance, to understand that if I ever
[5465]     came to know of his intrigue she would ruin him beyond repair.
[5466]     And it complicated matters a good deal that Edward, at about this
[5467]     time, was really a little in love with her. He thought that he had
[5468]     treated her so badly; that she was so fine. She was so mournful
[5469]     that he longed to comfort her, and he thought himself such a
[5470]     blackguard that there was nothing he would not have done to
[5471]     make amends. And Florence communicated these items of
[5472]     information to Leonora.
[5473]     
[5474]     I don't in the least blame Leonora for her coarseness to Florence; it
[5475]     must have done Florence a world of good. But I do blame her for
[5476]     giving way to what was in the end a desire for
[5477]     communicativeness. You see that business cut her off from her
[5478]     Church. She did not want to confess what she was doing because
[5479]     she was afraid that her spiritual advisers would blame her for
[5480]     deceiving me. I rather imagine that she would have preferred
[5481]     damnation to breaking my heart. That is what it works out at. She
[5482]     need not have troubled.
[5483]     
[5484]     But, having no priests to talk to, she had to talk to someone, and as
[5485]     Florence insisted on talking to her, she talked back, in short,
[5486]     explosive sentences, like one of the damned. Precisely like one of
[5487]     the damned. Well, if a pretty period in hell on this earth can spare
[5488]     her any period of pain in Eternity--where there are not any
[5489]     periods--I guess Leonora will escape hell fire.
[5490]     
[5491]     Her conversations with Florence would be like this. Florence
[5492]     would happen in on her, whilst she was doing her wonderful hair,
[5493]     with a proposition from Edward, who seems about that time to
[5494]     have conceived the naïve idea that he might become a
[5495]     polygamist. I daresay it was Florence who put it into his head.
[5496]     Anyhow, I am not responsible for the oddities of the human
[5497]     psychology. But it certainly appears that at about that date Edward
[5498]     cared more for Leonora than he had ever done before--or, at any
[5499]     rate, for a long time. And, if Leonora had been a person to play
[5500]     cards and if she had played her cards well, and if she had had no
[5501]     sense of shame and so on, she might then have shared Edward
[5502]     with Florence until the time came for jerking that poor cuckoo out
[5503]     of the nest. Well, Florence would come to Leonora with some
[5504]     such proposition. I do not mean to say that she put it baldly, like
[5505]     that. She stood out that she was not Edward's mistress until
[5506]     Leonora said that she had seen Edward coming out of her room at
[5507]     an advanced hour of the night. That checked Florence a bit; but
[5508]     she fell back upon her "heart" and stuck out that she had merely
[5509]     been conversing with Edward in order to bring him to a better
[5510]     frame of mind. Florence had, of course, to stick to that story; for
[5511]     even Florence would not have had the face to implore Leonora to
[5512]     grant her favours to Edward if she had admitted that she was
[5513]     Edward's mistress. That could not be done. At the same time
[5514]     Florence had such a pressing desire to talk about something. There
[5515]     would have been nothing else to talk about but a rapprochement
[5516]     between that estranged pair. So Florence would go on babbling
[5517]     and Leonora would go on brushing her hair. And then Leonora
[5518]     would say suddenly something like:
[5519]     
[5520]     "I should think myself defiled if Edward touched me now that he
[5521]     has touched you."
[5522]     
[5523]     That would discourage Florence a bit; but after a week or so, on
[5524]     another morning she would have another try.
[5525]     
[5526]     And even in other things Leonora deteriorated. She had promised
[5527]     Edward to leave the spending of his own income in his own
[5528]     hands. And she had fully meant to do that. I daresay she would
[5529]     have done it too; though, no doubt, she would have spied upon his
[5530]     banking account in secret. She was not a Roman Catholic for
[5531]     nothing. But she took so serious a view of Edward's unfaithfulness
[5532]     to the memory of poor little Maisie that she could not trust him
[5533]     any more at all .
[5534]     
[5535]     So when she got back to Branshaw she started, after less than a
[5536]     month, to worry him about the minutest items of his expenditure.
[5537]     She allowed him to draw his own cheques, but there was hardly a
[5538]     cheque that she did not scrutinize--except for a private account of
[5539]     about five hundred a year which, tacitly, she allowed him to keep
[5540]     for expenditure on his mistress or mistresses. He had to have his
[5541]     jaunts to Paris; he had to send expensive cables in cipher to
[5542]     Florence about twice a week. But she worried him about his
[5543]     expenditure on wines, on fruit trees, on harness, on gates, on the
[5544]     account at his blacksmith's for work done to a new patent Army
[5545]     stirrup that he was trying to invent. She could not see why he
[5546]     should bother to invent a new Army stirrup, and she was really
[5547]     enraged when, after the invention was mature, he made a present
[5548]     to the War Office of the designs and the patent rights. It was a
[5549]     remarkably good stirrup.
[5550]     
[5551]     I have told you, I think, that Edward spent a great deal of time, and
[5552]     about two hundred pounds for law fees on getting a poor girl, the
[5553]     daughter of one of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge of
[5554]     murdering her baby. That was positively the last act of Edward's
[5555]     life. It came at a time when Nancy Rufford was on her way to
[5556]     India; when the most horrible gloom was over the household;
[5557]     when Edward himself was in an agony and behaving as prettily as
[5558]     he knew how. Yet even then Leonora made him a terrible scene
[5559]     about this expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of had the
[5560]     vague idea that what had passed with the girl and the rest of it
[5561]     ought to have taught Edward a lesson--the lesson of economy. She
[5562]     threatened to take his banking account away from him again. I
[5563]     guess that made him cut his throat. He might have stuck it out
[5564]     otherwise--but the thought that he had lost Nancy and that, in
[5565]     addition, there was nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary
[5566]     succession of days in which he could be of no public service . . .
[5567]     Well, it finished him.
[5568]     
[5569]     It was during those years that Leonora tried to get up a love affair
[5570]     of her own with a fellow called Bayham--a decent sort of fellow.
[5571]     A really nice man. But the affair was no sort of success. I have
[5572]     told you about it already. . . .
[5573]     
[5574]     II
[5575]     
[5576]     WELL, that about brings me up to the date of my receiving, in
[5577]     Waterbury, the laconic cable from Edward to the effect that he
[5578]     wanted me to go to Branshaw and have a chat. I was pretty busy at
[5579]     the time and I was half minded to send him a reply cable to the
[5580]     effect that I would start in a fortnight. But I was having a long
[5581]     interview with old Mr Hurlbird's attorneys and immediately
[5582]     afterwards I had to have a long interview with the Misses Hurlbird,
[5583]     so I delayed cabling.
[5584]     
[5585]     I had expected to find the Misses Hurlbird excessively old--in the
[5586]     nineties or thereabouts. The time had passed so slowly that I had
[5587]     the impression that it must have been thirty years since I had been
[5588]     in the United States. It was only twelve years. Actually Miss
[5589]     Hurlbird was just sixty-one and Miss Florence Hurlbird fifty-nine,
[5590]     and they were both, mentally and physically, as vigorous as could
[5591]     be desired. They were, indeed, more vigorous, mentally, than
[5592]     suited my purpose, which was to get away from the United States
[5593]     as quickly as I could. The Hurlbirds were an exceedingly united
[5594]     family--exceedingly united except on one set of points. Each of the
[5595]     three of them had a separate doctor, whom they trusted
[5596]     implicitly--and each had a separate attorney. And each of them
[5597]     distrusted the other's doctor and the other's attorney. And,
[5598]     naturally, the doctors and the attorneys warned one all the
[5599]     time--against each other. You cannot imagine how complicated it
[5600]     all became for me. Of course I had an attorney of my
[5601]     own--recommended to me by young Carter, my Philadelphia
[5602]     nephew.
[5603]     
[5604]     I do not mean to say that there was any unpleasantness of a
[5605]     grasping kind. The problem was quite another one--a moral
[5606]     dilemma. You see, old Mr Hurlbird had left all his property to
[5607]     Florence with the mere request that she would have erected to him
[5608]     in the city of Waterbury, Ill., a memorial that should take the form
[5609]     of some sort of institution for the relief of sufferers from the heart.
[5610]     Florence's money had all come to me-- and with it old Mr
[5611]     Hurlbird's. He had died just five days before Florence.
[5612]     
[5613]     Well, I was quite ready to spend a round million dollars on the
[5614]     relief of sufferers from the heart. The old gentleman had left
[5615]     about a million and a half; Florence had been worth about eight
[5616]     hundred thousand--and as I figured it out, I should cut up at about
[5617]     a million myself. Anyhow, there was ample money. But I
[5618]     naturally wanted to consult the wishes of his surviving relatives
[5619]     and then the trouble really began. You see, it had been discovered
[5620]     that Mr Hurlbird had had nothing whatever the matter with his
[5621]     heart. His lungs had been a little affected all through his life and
[5622]     he had died of bronchitis. It struck Miss Florence Hurlbird that,
[5623]     since her brother had died of lungs and not of heart, his money
[5624]     ought to go to lung patients. That, she considered, was what her
[5625]     brother would have wished. On the other hand, by a kink, that I
[5626]     could not at the time understand, Miss Hurlbird insisted that I
[5627]     ought to keep the money all to myself. She said that she did not
[5628]     wish for any monuments to the Hurlbird family. At the time I
[5629]     thought that that was because of a New England dislike for
[5630]     necrological ostentation. But I can figure out now, when I
[5631]     remember certain insistent and continued questions that she put to
[5632]     me, about Edward Ashburnham, that there was another idea in her
[5633]     mind. And Leonora has told me that, on Florence's dressing-table,
[5634]     beside her dead body, there had lain a letter to Miss Hurlbird--a
[5635]     letter which Leonora posted without telling me. I don't know how
[5636]     Florence had time to write to her aunt; but I can quite understand
[5637]     that she would not like to go out of the world without making
[5638]     some comments. So I guess Florence had told Miss Hurlbird a
[5639]     good bit about Edward Ashburnham in a few scrawled words--and
[5640]     that that was why the old lady did not wish the name of Hurlbird
[5641]     perpetuated. Perhaps also she thought that I had earned the
[5642]     Hurlbird money. It meant a pretty tidy lot of discussing, what with
[5643]     the doctors warning each other about the bad effects of
[5644]     discussions on the health of the old ladies, and warning me
[5645]     covertly against each other, and saying that old Mr Hurlbird might
[5646]     have died of heart, after all, in spite of the diagnosis of his doctor.
[5647]     And the solicitors all had separate methods of arranging about
[5648]     how the money should be invested and entrusted and bound.
[5649]     Personally, I wanted to invest the money so that the interest could
[5650]     be used for the relief of sufferers from the heart. If old Mr
[5651]     Hurlbird had not died of any defects in that organ he had
[5652]     considered that it was defective. Moreover, Florence had certainly
[5653]     died of her heart, as I saw it. And when Miss Florence Hurlbird
[5654]     stood out that the money ought to go to chest sufferers I was
[5655]     brought to thinking that there ought to be a chest institution too,
[5656]     and I advanced the sum that I was ready to provide to a million
[5657]     and a half of dollars. That would have given seven hundred and
[5658]     fifty thousand to each class of invalid. I did not want money at all
[5659]     badly. All I wanted it for was to be able to give Nancy Rufford a
[5660]     good time. I did not know much about housekeeping expenses in
[5661]     England where, I presumed, she would wish to live. I knew that
[5662]     her needs at that time were limited to good chocolates, and a good
[5663]     horse or two, and simple, pretty frocks. Probably she would want
[5664]     more than that later on. But even if I gave a million and a half
[5665]     dollars to these institutions I should still have the equivalent of
[5666]     about twenty thousand a year English, and I considered that Nancy
[5667]     could have a pretty good time on that or less. Anyhow, we had a
[5668]     stiff set of arguments up at the Hurlbird mansion which stands on
[5669]     a bluff over the town. It may strike you, silent listener, as being
[5670]     funny if you happen to be European. But moral problems of that
[5671]     description and the giving of millions to institutions are
[5672]     immensely serious matters in my country. Indeed, they are the
[5673]     staple topics for consideration amongst the wealthy classes. We
[5674]     haven't got peerage and social climbing to occupy us much, and
[5675]     decent people do not take interest in politics or elderly people in
[5676]     sport. So that there were real tears shed by both Miss Hurlbird and
[5677]     Miss Florence before I left that city. I left it quite abruptly. Four
[5678]     hours after Edward's telegram came another from Leonora, saying:
[5679]     "Yes, do come. You could be so helpful." I simply told my
[5680]     attorney that there was the million and a half; that he could invest
[5681]     it as he liked, and that the purposes must be decided by the Misses
[5682]     Hurlbird. I was, anyhow, pretty well worn out by all the
[5683]     discussions. And, as I have never heard yet from the Misses
[5684]     Hurlbird, I rather think that Miss Hurlbird, either by revelations or
[5685]     by moral force, has persuaded Miss Florence that no memorial to
[5686]     their names shall be erected in the city of Waterbury, Conn. Miss
[5687]     Hurlbird wept dreadfully when she heard that I was going to stay
[5688]     with the Ashburnhams, but she did not make any comments. I was
[5689]     aware, at that date, that her niece had been seduced by that fellow
[5690]     Jimmy before I had married her--but I contrived to produce on her
[5691]     the impression that I thought Florence had been a model wife.
[5692]     Why, at that date I still believed that Florence had been perfectly
[5693]     virtuous after her marriage to me. I had not figured it out that she
[5694]     could have played it so low down as to continue her intrigue with
[5695]     that fellow under my roof. Well, I was a fool. But I did not think
[5696]     much about Florence at that date. My mind was occupied with
[5697]     what was happening at Branshaw. I had got it into my head that
[5698]     the telegrams had something to do with Nancy. It struck me that
[5699]     she might have shown signs of forming an attachment for some
[5700]     undesirable fellow and that Leonora wanted me to come back and
[5701]     marry her out of harm's way. That was what was pretty firmly in
[5702]     my mind. And it remained in my mind for nearly ten days after my
[5703]     arrival at that beautiful old place. Neither Edward nor Leonora
[5704]     made any motion to talk to me about anything other than the
[5705]     weather and the crops. Yet, although there were several young
[5706]     fellows about, I could not see that any one in particular was
[5707]     distinguished by the girl's preference. She certainly appeared illish
[5708]     and nervous, except when she woke up to talk gay nonsense to
[5709]     me. Oh, the pretty thing that she was. . . .
[5710]     
[5711]     I imagined that what must have happened was that the undesirable
[5712]     young man had been forbidden the place and that Nancy was
[5713]     fretting a little. What had happened was just Hell. Leonora had
[5714]     spoken to Nancy; Nancy had spoken to Edward; Edward had
[5715]     spoken to Leonora--and they had talked and talked. And talked.
[5716]     You have to imagine horrible pictures of gloom and half lights,
[5717]     and emotions running through silent nights--through whole nights.
[5718]     You have to imagine my beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to
[5719]     Edward, rising up at the foot of his bed, with her long hair falling,
[5720]     like a split cone of shadow, in the glimmer of a night-light that
[5721]     burned beside him. You have to imagine her, a silent, a no doubt
[5722]     agonized figure, like a spectre, suddenly offering herself to
[5723]     him--to save his reason! And you have to imagine his frantic
[5724]     refusal--and talk. And talk! My God!
[5725]     
[5726]     And yet, to me, living in the house, enveloped with the charm of
[5727]     the quiet and ordered living, with the silent, skilled servants
[5728]     whose mere laying out of my dress clothes was like a caress--to
[5729]     me who was hourly with them they appeared like tender, ordered
[5730]     and devoted people, smiling, absenting themselves at the proper
[5731]     intervals; driving me to meets--just good people! How the
[5732]     devil--how the devil do they do it?
[5733]     
[5734]     At dinner one evening Leonora said--she had just opened a
[5735]     telegram:
[5736]     
[5737]     "Nancy will be going to India, tomorrow, to be with her father."
[5738]     
[5739]     No one spoke. Nancy looked at her plate; Edward went on eating
[5740]     his pheasant. I felt very bad; I imagined that it would be up to me
[5741]     to propose to Nancy that evening. It appeared to me to be queer
[5742]     that they had not given me any warning of Nancy's departure--But
[5743]     I thought that that was only English manners--some sort of
[5744]     delicacy that I had not got the hang of. You must remember that at
[5745]     that moment I trusted in Edward and Leonora and in Nancy
[5746]     Rufford, and in the tranquility of ancient haunts of peace, as I had
[5747]     trusted in my mother's love. And that evening Edward spoke to
[5748]     me.
[5749]     
[5750]      What in the interval had happened had been this:
[5751]     
[5752]     Upon her return from Nauheim Leonora had completely broken
[5753]     down--because she knew she could trust Edward. That seems odd
[5754]     but, if you know anything about breakdowns, you will know that
[5755]     by the ingenious torments that fate prepares for us, these things
[5756]     come as soon as, a strain having relaxed, there is nothing more to
[5757]     be done. It is after a husband's long illness and death that a widow
[5758]     goes to pieces; it is at the end of a long rowing contest that a crew
[5759]     collapses and lies forward upon its oars. And that was what
[5760]     happened to Leonora.
[5761]     
[5762]     From certain tones in Edward's voice; from the long, steady stare
[5763]     that he had given her from his bloodshot eyes on rising from the
[5764]     dinner table in the Nauheim hotel, she knew that, in the affair of
[5765]     the poor girl, this was a case in which Edward's moral scruples, or
[5766]     his social code, or his idea that it would be playing it too low
[5767]     down, rendered Nancy perfectly safe. The girl, she felt sure, was
[5768]     in no danger at all from Edward. And in that she was perfectly
[5769]     right. The smash was to come from herself.
[5770]     
[5771]     She relaxed; she broke; she drifted, at first quickly, then with an
[5772]     increasing momentum, down the stream of destiny. You may put it
[5773]     that, having been cut off from the restraints of her religion, for the
[5774]     first time in her life, she acted along the lines of her instinctive
[5775]     desires. I do not know whether to think that, in that she was no
[5776]     longer herself; or that, having let loose the bonds of her standards,
[5777]     her conventions and her traditions, she was being, for the first
[5778]     time, her own natural self. She was torn between her intense,
[5779]     maternal love for the girl and an intense jealousy of the woman
[5780]     who realizes that the man she loves has met what appears to be the
[5781]     final passion of his life. She was divided between an intense
[5782]     disgust for Edward's weakness in conceiving this passion, an
[5783]     intense pity for the miseries that he was enduring, and a feeling
[5784]     equally intense, but one that she hid from herself--a feeling of
[5785]     respect for Edward's determination to keep himself, in this
[5786]     particular affair, unspotted.
[5787]     
[5788]     And the human heart is a very mysterious thing. It is impossible to
[5789]     say that Leonora, in acting as she then did, was not filled with a
[5790]     sort of hatred of Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to
[5791]     despise him. He was, she realized gone from her for good. Then
[5792]     let him suffer, let him agonize; let him, if possible, break and go
[5793]     to that Hell that is the abode of broken resolves. She might have
[5794]     taken a different line. It would have been so easy to send the girl
[5795]     away to stay with some friends; to have taken her away herself
[5796]     upon some pretext or other. That would not have cured things but
[5797]     it would have been the decent line, . . . But, at that date, poor
[5798]     Leonora was incapable of taking any line whatever.
[5799]     
[5800]     She pitied Edward frightfully at one time--and then she acted
[5801]     along the lines of pity; she loathed him at another and then she
[5802]     acted as her loathing dictated. She gasped, as a person dying of
[5803]     tuberculosis gasps for air. She craved madly for communication
[5804]     with some other human soul. And the human soul that she
[5805]     selected was that of the girl.
[5806]     
[5807]     Perhaps Nancy was the only person that she could have talked to.
[5808]     With her necessity for reticences, with her coldness of manner,
[5809]     Leonora had singularly few intimates. She had none at all, with
[5810]     the exception of the Mrs Colonel Whelen, who had advised her
[5811]     about the affair with La Dolciquita, and the one or two religious,
[5812]     who had guided her through life. The Colonel's wife was at that
[5813]     time in Madeira; the religious she now avoided. Her visitors' book
[5814]     had seven hundred names in it; there was not a soul that she could
[5815]     speak to. She was Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw Teleragh.
[5816]     
[5817]     She was the great Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw and she lay all
[5818]     day upon her bed in her marvellous, light, airy bedroom with the
[5819]     chintzes and the Chippendale and the portraits of deceased
[5820]     Ashburnhams by Zoffany and Zucchero. When there was a meet
[5821]     she would struggle up--supposing it were within driving
[5822]     distance--and let Edward drive her and the girl to the cross-roads
[5823]     or the country house. She would drive herself back alone; Edward
[5824]     would ride off with the girl. Ride Leonora could not, that
[5825]     season--her head was too bad. Each pace of her mare was an
[5826]     anguish.
[5827]     
[5828]     But she drove with efficiency and precision; she smiled at the
[5829]     Gimmers and Ffoulkes and the Hedley Seatons. She threw with
[5830]     exactitude pennies to the boys who opened gates for her; she sat
[5831]     upright on the seat of the high dog-cart; she waved her hands to
[5832]     Edward and Nancy as they rode off with the hounds, and every
[5833]     one could hear her clear, high voice, in the chilly weather, saying:
[5834]     "Have a good time!"
[5835]     
[5836]     Poor forlorn woman! . . .
[5837]     
[5838]     There was, however, one spark of consolation. It came from the
[5839]     fact that Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with
[5840]     his eyes. It had been three years since she had tried her abortive
[5841]     love-affair with him. Yet still, on the winter mornings he would
[5842]     ride up to her shafts and just say: "Good day," and look at her with
[5843]     eyes that were not imploring, but seemed to say: "You see, I am
[5844]     still, as the Germans say, A. D.--at disposition."
[5845]     
[5846]     It was a great consolation, not because she proposed ever to take
[5847]     him up again, but because it showed her that there was in the
[5848]     world one faithful soul in riding-breeches. And it showed her that
[5849]     she was not losing her looks.
[5850]     
[5851]     And, indeed, she was not losing her looks. She was forty, but she
[5852]     was as clean run as on the day she had left the convent--as clear in
[5853]     outline, as clear coloured in the hair, as dark blue in the eyes. She
[5854]     thought that her looking-glass told her this; but there are always
[5855]     the doubts. . . . Rodney Bayham's eyes took them away.
[5856]     
[5857]     It is very singular that Leonora should not have aged at all. I
[5858]     suppose that there are some types of beauty and even of youth
[5859]     made for the embellishments that come with enduring sorrow.
[5860]     That is too elaborately put. I mean that Leonora, if everything had
[5861]     prospered, might have become too hard and, maybe, overbearing.
[5862]     As it was she was tuned down to appearing efficient--and yet
[5863]     sympathetic. That is the rarest of all blends. And yet I swear that
[5864]     Leonora, in her restrained way, gave the impression of being
[5865]     intensely sympathetic. When she listened to you she appeared also
[5866]     to be listening to some sound that was going on in the distance.
[5867]     But still, she listened to you and took in what you said, which,
[5868]     since the record of humanity is a record of sorrows, was, as a rule,
[5869]     something sad.
[5870]     
[5871]     I think that she must have taken Nancy through many terrors of the
[5872]     night and many bad places of the day. And that would account for
[5873]     the girl's passionate love for the elder woman. For Nancy's love
[5874]     for Leonora was an admiration that is awakened in Catholics by
[5875]     their feeling for the Virgin Mary and for various of the saints. It is
[5876]     too little to say that the girl would have laid her life at Leonora's
[5877]     feet. Well, she laid there the offer of her virtue--and her reason.
[5878]     Those were sufficient instalments of her life. It would today be
[5879]     much better for Nancy Rufford if she were dead.
[5880]     
[5881]     Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance; but they crowd on me.
[5882]     I will try to tell the story.
[5883]     
[5884]     You see--when she came back from Nauheim Leonora began to
[5885]     have her headaches--headaches lasting through whole days, during
[5886]     which she could speak no word and could bear to hear no sound.
[5887]     And, day after day, Nancy would sit with her, silent and
[5888]     motionless for hours, steeping handkerchiefs in vinegar and water,
[5889]     and thinking her own thoughts. It must have been very bad for
[5890]     her--and her meals alone with Edward must have been bad for her
[5891]     too--and beastly bad for Edward. Edward, of course, wavered in
[5892]     his demeanour, What else could he do? At times he would sit
[5893]     silent and dejected over his untouched food. He would utter
[5894]     nothing but monosyllables when Nancy spoke to him. Then he
[5895]     was simply afraid of the girl falling in love with him. At other
[5896]     times he would take a little wine; pull himself together; attempt to
[5897]     chaff Nancy about a stake and binder hedge that her mare had
[5898]     checked at, or talk about the habits of the Chitralis. That was when
[5899]     he was thinking that it was rough on the poor girl that he should
[5900]     have become a dull companion. He realized that his talking to her
[5901]     in the park at Nauheim had done her no harm.
[5902]     
[5903]     But all that was doing a great deal of harm to Nancy. It gradually
[5904]     opened her eyes to the fact that Edward was a man with his ups
[5905]     and downs and not an invariably gay uncle like a nice dog, a
[5906]     trustworthy horse or a girl friend. She would find him in attitudes
[5907]     of frightful dejection, sunk into his armchair in the study that was
[5908]     half a gun-room. She would notice through the open door that his
[5909]     face was the face of an old, dead man, when he had no one to talk
[5910]     to. Gradually it forced itself upon her attention that there were
[5911]     profound differences between the pair that she regarded a her
[5912]     uncle and her aunt. It was a conviction that came very slowly.
[5913]     
[5914]     It began with Edward's giving an oldish horse to a young fellow
[5915]     called Selmes. Selmes' father had been ruined by fraudulent
[5916]     solicitor and the Selmes family had had to sell their hunters. It
[5917]     was a case that had excited a good deal of sympathy in that part of
[5918]     the county. And Edward, meeting the young man one day,
[5919]     unmounted, and seeing him to be very unhappy, had offered to
[5920]     give him an old Irish cob upon which he was riding. It was a silly
[5921]     sort of thing to do really. The horse was worth from thirty to forty
[5922]     pounds and Edward might have known that the gift would upset
[5923]     his wife. But Edward just had to comfort that unhappy young man
[5924]     whose father he had known all his life. And what made it all the
[5925]     worse was that young Selmes could not afford to keep the horse
[5926]     even. Edward recollected this, immediately after he had made the
[5927]     offer, and said quickly:
[5928]     
[5929]     "Of course I mean that you should stable the horse at Branshaw
[5930]     until you have time to turn round or want to sell him and get a
[5931]     better."
[5932]     
[5933]     Nancy went straight home and told all this to Leonora who was
[5934]     lying down. She regarded it as a splendid instance of Edward's
[5935]     quick consideration for the feelings and the circumstances of the
[5936]     distressed. She thought it would cheer Leonora up--because it
[5937]     ought to cheer any woman up to know that she had such a
[5938]     splendid husband. That was the last girlish thought she ever had.
[5939]     For Leonora, whose headache had left her collected but miserably
[5940]     weak, turned upon her bed and uttered words that were amazing
[5941]     to the girl:
[5942]     
[5943]     "I wish to God," she said, "that he was your husband, and not mine.
[5944]     We shall be ruined. We shall be ruined. Am I never to have a
[5945]     chance?" And suddenly Leonora burst into a passion of tears. She
[5946]     pushed herself up from the pillows with one elbow and sat
[5947]     there--crying, crying, crying, with her face hidden in her hands
[5948]     and the tears falling through her fingers.
[5949]     
[5950]     The girl flushed, stammered and whimpered as if she had been
[5951]     personally insulted.
[5952]     
[5953]     "But if Uncle Edward . . ." she began.
[5954]     
[5955]     "That man," said Leonora, with an extraordinary bitterness, "would
[5956]     give the shirt off his back and off mine--and off yours to any . . ."
[5957]     She could not finish the sentence.
[5958]     
[5959]     At that moment she had been feeling an extraordinary hatred and
[5960]     contempt for her husband. All the morning and all the afternoon
[5961]     she had been lying there thinking that Edward and the girl were
[5962]     together--in the field and hacking it home at dusk. She had been
[5963]     digging her sharp nails into her palms.
[5964]     
[5965]     The house had been very silent in the drooping winter weather.
[5966]     And then, after an eternity of torture, there had invaded it the
[5967]     sound of opening doors, of the girl's gay voice saying:
[5968]     
[5969]     "Well, it was only under the mistletoe." . . . And there was
[5970]     Edward's gruff undertone. Then Nancy had come in, with feet that
[5971]     had hastened up the stairs and that tiptoed as they approached the
[5972]     open door of Leonora's room. Branshaw had a great big hall with
[5973]     oak floors and tiger skins. Round this hall there ran a gallery upon
[5974]     which Leonora's doorway gave. And even when she had the worst
[5975]     of her headaches she liked to have her door open--I suppose so
[5976]     that she might hear the approaching footsteps of ruin and disaster.
[5977]     At any rate she hated to be in a room with a shut door.
[5978]     
[5979]     At that moment Leonora hated Edward with a hatred that was like
[5980]     hell, and she would have liked to bring her riding-whip down
[5981]     across the girl's face. What right had Nancy to be young and
[5982]     slender and dark, and gay at times, at times mournful? What right
[5983]     had she to be exactly the woman to make Leonora's husband
[5984]     happy? For Leonora knew that Nancy would have made Edward
[5985]     happy.
[5986]     
[5987]     Yes, Leonora wished to bring her riding-whip down on Nancy's
[5988]     young face. She imagined the pleasure she would feel when the
[5989]     lash fell across those queer features; the plea sure she would feel
[5990]     at drawing the handle at the same moment toward her, so as to cut
[5991]     deep into the flesh and to leave a lasting wheal.
[5992]     
[5993]     Well, she left a lasting wheal, and her words cut deeply into the
[5994]     girl's mind. . . .
[5995]     
[5996]     They neither of them spoke about that again. A fortnight went
[5997]     by--a fortnight of deep rains, of heavy fields, of bad scent.
[5998]     Leonora's headaches seemed to have gone for good. She hunted
[5999]     once or twice, letting herself be piloted by Bayham, whilst
[6000]     Edward looked after the girl. Then, one evening, when those three
[6001]     were dining alone, Edward said, in the queer, deliberate, heavy
[6002]     tones that came out of him in those days (he was looking at the
[6003]     table):
[6004]     
[6005]     "I have been thinking that Nancy ought to do more for her father.
[6006]     He is getting an old man. I have written to Colonel Rufford,
[6007]     suggesting that she should go to him."
[6008]     
[6009]     Leonora called out:
[6010]     
[6011]     "How dare you? How dare you?"
[6012]     
[6013]     The girl put her hand over her heart and cried out: "Oh, my sweet
[6014]     Saviour, help mel" That was the queer way she thought within her
[6015]     mind, and the words forced themselves to her lips. Edward said
[6016]     nothing.
[6017]     
[6018]     And that night, by a merciless trick of the devil that pays attention
[6019]     to this sweltering hell of ours, Nancy Rufford had a letter from her
[6020]     mother. It came whilst Leonora was talking to Edward, or Leonora
[6021]     would have intercepted it as she had intercepted others. It was an
[6022]     amazing and a horrible letter. . . .
[6023]     
[6024]     I don't know what it contained. I just average out from its effects
[6025]     on Nancy that her mother, having eloped with some worthless sort
[6026]     of fellow, had done what is called "sinking lower and lower".
[6027]     Whether she was actually on the streets I do not know, but I rather
[6028]     think that she eked out a small allowance that she had from her
[6029]     husband by that means of livelihood. And I think that she stated as
[6030]     much in her letter to Nancy and upbraided the girl with living in
[6031]     luxury whilst her mother starved. And it must have been horrible
[6032]     in tone, for Mrs Rufford was a cruel sort of woman at the best of
[6033]     times. It must have seemed to that poor girl, opening her letter, for
[6034]     distraction from another grief, up in her bedroom, like the laughter
[6035]     of a devil.
[6036]     
[6037]     I just cannot bear to think of my poor dear girl at that moment. . . .
[6038]     
[6039]     And, at the same time, Leonora was lashing, like a cold fiend, into
[6040]     the unfortunate Edward. Or, perhaps, he was not so unfortunate;
[6041]     because he had done what he knew to be the right thing, he may
[6042]     be deemed happy. I leave it to you. At any rate, he was sitting in
[6043]     his deep chair, and Leonora came into his room--for the first time
[6044]     in nine years. She said:
[6045]     
[6046]     "This is the most atrocious thing you have done in your atrocious
[6047]     life." He never moved and he never looked at her. God knows
[6048]     what was in Leonora's mind exactly.
[6049]     
[6050]     I like to think that, uppermost in it was concern and horror at the
[6051]     thought of the poor girl's going back to a father whose voice made
[6052]     her shriek in the night. And, indeed, that motive was very strong
[6053]     with Leonora. But I think there was also present the thought that
[6054]     she wanted to go on torturing Edward with the girl's presence. She
[6055]     was, at that time, capable of that.
[6056]     
[6057]     Edward was sunk in his chair; there were in the room two candles,
[6058]     hidden by green glass shades. The green shades were reflected in
[6059]     the glasses of the book-cases that contained not books but guns
[6060]     with gleaming brown barrels and fishing-rods in green baize
[6061]     over-covers. There was dimly to be seen, above a mantelpiece
[6062]     encumbered with spurs, hooves and bronze models of horses, a
[6063]     dark-brown picture of a white horse.
[6064]     
[6065]     "If you think," Leonora said, "that I do not know that you are in
[6066]     love with the girl . . ." She began spiritedly, but she could not find
[6067]     any ending for the sentence. Edward did not stir; he never spoke.
[6068]     And then Leonora said:
[6069]     
[6070]     "If you want me to divorce you, I will. You can marry her then.
[6071]     She's in love with you."
[6072]     
[6073]     He groaned at that, a little, Leonora said. Then she went away.
[6074]     
[6075]     Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly
[6076]     does not herself know. She probably said a good deal more to
[6077]     Edward than I have been able to report; but that is all that she has
[6078]     told me and I am not going to make up speeches. To follow her
[6079]     psychological development of that moment I think we must allow
[6080]     that she upbraided him for a great deal of their past life, whilst
[6081]     Edward sat absolutely silent. And, indeed, in speaking of it
[6082]     afterwards, she has said several times: "I said a great deal more to
[6083]     him than I wanted to, just because he was so silent." She talked, in
[6084]     fact, in the endeavour to sting him into speech.
[6085]     
[6086]     She must have said so much that, with the expression of her
[6087]     grievance, her mood changed. She went back to her own room in
[6088]     the gallery, and sat there for a long time thinking. And she thought
[6089]     herself into a mood of absolute unselfishness, of absolute
[6090]     self-contempt, too. She said to herself that she was no good; that
[6091]     she had failed in all her efforts--in her efforts to get Edward back
[6092]     as in her efforts to make him curb his expenditure. She imagined
[6093]     herself to be exhausted; she imagined herself to be done. Then a
[6094]     great fear came over her.
[6095]     
[6096]     She thought that Edward, after what she had said to him, must
[6097]     have committed suicide. She went out on to the gallery and
[6098]     listened; there was no sound in all the house except the regular
[6099]     beat of the great clock in the hall. But, even in her debased
[6100]     condition, she was not the person to hang about. She acted. She
[6101]     went straight to Edward's room, opened the door, and looked in.
[6102]     
[6103]     He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It was an unusual thing
[6104]     for him to do, at that time of night, in his evening clothes. It never
[6105]     occurred to her, nevertheless, that he was going to shoot himself
[6106]     with that implement. She knew that he was doing it just for
[6107]     occupation--to keep himself from thinking. He looked up when
[6108]     she opened the door, his face illuminated by the light cast
[6109]     upwards from the round orifices in the green candle shades.
[6110]     
[6111]     She said:
[6112]     
[6113]     "I didn't imagine that I should find Nancy here." She thought that
[6114]     she owed that to him. He answered then:
[6115]     
[6116]     "I don't imagine that you did imagine it." Those were the only
[6117]     words he spoke that night. She went, like a lame duck, back
[6118]     through the long corridors; she stumbled over the familiar tiger
[6119]     skins in the dark hall. She could hardly drag one limb after the
[6120]     other. In the gallery she perceived that Nancy's door was half open
[6121]     and that there was a light in the girl's room. A sudden madness
[6122]     possessed her, a desire for action, a thirst for self-explanation.
[6123]     
[6124]     Their rooms all gave on to the gallery; Leonora's to the east, the
[6125]     girl's next, then Edward's. The sight of those three open doors,
[6126]     side by side, gaping to receive whom the chances of the black
[6127]     night might bring, made Leonora shudder all over her body. She
[6128]     went into Nancy's room.
[6129]     
[6130]     The girl was sitting perfectly still in an armchair, very upright, as
[6131]     she had been taught to sit at the convent. She appeared to be as
[6132]     calm as a church; her hair fell, black and like a pall, down over
[6133]     both her shoulders. The fire beside her was burning brightly; she
[6134]     must have just put coals on. She was in a white silk kimono that
[6135]     covered her to the feet. The clothes that she had taken off were
[6136]     exactly folded upon the proper seats. Her long hands were one
[6137]     upon each arm of the chair that had a pink and white chintz back.
[6138]     
[6139]     Leonora told me these things. She seemed to think it extraordinary
[6140]     that the girl could have done such orderly things as fold up the
[6141]     clothes she had taken off upon such a night--when Edward had
[6142]     announced that he was going to send her to her father, and when,
[6143]     from her mother, she had received that letter. The letter, in its
[6144]     envelope, was in her right hand.
[6145]     
[6146]     Leonora did not at first perceive it. She said:
[6147]     
[6148]     "What are you doing so late?"
[6149]     
[6150]     The girl answered: "Just thinking."
[6151]     
[6152]     They seemed to think in whispers and to speak below their breaths.
[6153]     Then Leonora's eyes fell on the envelope, and she recognized Mrs
[6154]     Rufford's handwriting.
[6155]     
[6156]     It was one of those moments when thinking was impossible,
[6157]     Leonora said. It was as if stones were being thrown at her from
[6158]     every direction and she could only run. She heard herself exclaim:
[6159]     "Edward's dying--because of you. He's dying. He's worth more than
[6160]     either of us. . . ."
[6161]     
[6162]     The girl looked past her at the panels of the half-closed door.
[6163]     
[6164]     "My poor father," she said, "my poor father." "You must stay
[6165]     here," Leonora answered fiercely. "You must stay here. I tell you
[6166]     you must stay here."
[6167]     
[6168]     "I am going to Glasgow," Nancy answered. "I shall go to Glasgow
[6169]     tomorrow morning. My mother is in Glasgow."
[6170]     
[6171]     It appears that it was in Glasgow that Mrs Rufford pursued her
[6172]     disorderly life. She had selected that city, not because it was more
[6173]     profitable but because it was the natal home of her husband to
[6174]     whom she desired to cause as much pain as possible.
[6175]     
[6176]     "You must stay here," Leonora began, "to save Edward. He's dying
[6177]     for love of you."
[6178]     
[6179]     The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora. "I know it," she said.
[6180]     "And I am dying for love of him."
[6181]     
[6182]     Leonora uttered an "Ah," that, in spite of herself, was an "Ah" of
[6183]     horror and of grief.
[6184]     
[6185]     "That is why," the girl continued, "I am going to Glasgow--to take
[6186]     my mother away from there." She added, "To the ends of the
[6187]     earth," for, if the last months had made her nature that of a
[6188]     woman, her phrases were still romantically those of a schoolgirl.
[6189]     It was as if she had grown up so quickly that there had not been
[6190]     time to put her hair up. But she added: "We're no good--my
[6191]     mother and I."
[6192]     
[6193]     Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:
[6194]     
[6195]     "No. No. You're not no good. It's I that am no good. You can't let
[6196]     that man go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him."
[6197]     
[6198]     The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, far-away smile--as if
[6199]     she were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.
[6200]     
[6201]     "I knew you would come to that,' she said, very slowly. "But we
[6202]     are not worth it--Edward and I."
[6203]     
[6204]     III
[6205]     
[6206]     NANCY had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made
[6207]     that comment over the giving of the horse to young Selmes. She
[6208]     had been thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for
[6209]     many days silent beside her aunt's bed. (She had always thought of
[6210]     Leonora as her aunt.) And she had had to sit thinking during many
[6211]     silent meals with Edward. And then, at times, with his bloodshot
[6212]     eyes and creased, heavy mouth, he would smile at her. And
[6213]     gradually the knowledge had come to her that Edward did not love
[6214]     Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Several things
[6215]     contributed to form and to harden this conviction. She was
[6216]     allowed to read the papers in those days--or, rather, since Leonora
[6217]     was always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out
[6218]     early, over the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day,
[6219]     in the papers, she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well.
[6220]     Beneath it she read the words: "The Hon. Mrs Brand, plaintiff in
[6221]     the remarkable divorce case reported on p. 8." Nancy hardly knew
[6222]     what a divorce case was. She had been so remarkably well
[6223]     brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practise divorce. I don't
[6224]     know how Leonora had done it exactly. I suppose she had always
[6225]     impressed it on Nancy's mind that nice women did not read these
[6226]     things, and that would have been enough to make Nancy skip
[6227]     those pages.
[6228]     
[6229]     She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce
[6230]     case--principally because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She
[6231]     imagined that Leonora, when her headache left her, would like to
[6232]     know what was happening to Mrs Brand, who lived at
[6233]     Christchurch, and whom they both liked very well. The case
[6234]     occupied three days, and the report that Nancy first came upon was
[6235]     that of the third day. Edward, however, kept the papers of the
[6236]     week, after his methodical fashion, in a rack in his gun-room, and
[6237]     when she had finished her breakfast Nancy went to that quiet
[6238]     apartment and had what she would have called a good read. It
[6239]     seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not understand why
[6240]     one counsel should be so anxious to know all about the
[6241]     movements of Mr Brand upon a certain day; she could not
[6242]     understand why a chart of the bedroom accommodation at
[6243]     Christchurch Old Hall should be produced in court. She did not
[6244]     even see why they should want to know that, upon a certain
[6245]     occasion, the drawing-room door was locked. It made her laugh; it
[6246]     appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy
[6247]     themselves with such matters. It struck her, nevertheless, as odd
[6248]     that one of the counsel should cross-question Mr Brand so
[6249]     insistently and so impertinently as to his feelings for Miss Lupton.
[6250]     Nancy knew Miss Lupton of Ringwood very well--a jolly girl, who
[6251]     rode a horse with two white fetlocks. Mr Brand persisted that he
[6252]     did not love Miss Lupton. . . . Well, of course he did not love Miss
[6253]     Lupton; he was a married man. You might as well think of Uncle
[6254]     Edward loving . . . loving anybody but Leonora. When people were
[6255]     married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt, people
[6256]     who misbehaved--but they were poor people--or people not like
[6257]     those she knew. So these matters presented themselves to Nancy's
[6258]     mind. But later on in the case she found that Mr Brand had to
[6259]     confess to a "guilty intimacy" with some one or other. Nancy
[6260]     imagined that he must have been telling some one his wife's
[6261]     secrets; she could not understand why that was a serious offence.
[6262]     Of course it was not very gentlemanly--it lessened her opinion of
[6263]     Mrs Brand. But since she found that Mrs Brand had condoned that
[6264]     offence, she imagined that they could not have been very serious
[6265]     secrets that Mr Brand had told. And then, suddenly, it was forced
[6266]     on her conviction that Mr Brand--the mild Mr Brand that she had
[6267]     seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing
[6268]     "Blind Man's Buff" with his children and kissing his wife when he
[6269]     caught her--Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst
[6270]     possible terms. That was incredible.
[6271]     
[6272]     Yet there it was--in black and white. Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand
[6273]     had struck Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr Brand
[6274]     was adjudged, in two or three abrupt words, at the end of columns
[6275]     and columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife
[6276]     and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words
[6277]     conveyed nothing to Nancy--nothing real, that is to say. She knew
[6278]     that one was commanded not to commit adultery--but why, she
[6279]     thought, should one? It was probably something like catching
[6280]     salmon out of season--a thing one did not do. She gathered it had
[6281]     something to do with kissing, or holding some one in your arms. .
[6282]     
[6283]     
[6284]     And yet the whole effect of that reading upon Nancy was
[6285]     mysterious, terrifying and evil. She felt a sickness--a sickness that
[6286]     grew as she read. Her heart beat painfully; she began to cry. She
[6287]     asked God how He could permit such things to be. And she was
[6288]     more certain that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora
[6289]     hated Edward. Perhaps, then, Edward loved some one else. It was
[6290]     unthinkable.
[6291]     
[6292]     If he could love some one else than Leonora, her fierce unknown
[6293]     heart suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself? And
[6294]     he did not love her. . . . This had occurred about a month before
[6295]     she got the letter from her mother. She let the matter rest until the
[6296]     sick feeling went off; it did that in a day or two. Then, finding that
[6297]     Leonora's headaches had gone, she suddenly told Leonora that
[6298]     Mrs Brand had divorced her husband. She asked what, exactly, it
[6299]     all meant.
[6300]     
[6301]     Leonora was lying on the sofa in the hall; she was feeling so weak
[6302]     that she could hardly find the words. She answered just:
[6303]     
[6304]     "It means that Mr Brand will be able to marry again."
[6305]     
[6306]     Nancy said:
[6307]     
[6308]     "But . . . but . . ." and then: "He will be able to marry Miss Lupton."
[6309]     Leonora just moved a hand in assent. Her eyes were shut.
[6310]     
[6311]     "Then . . ." Nancy began. Her blue eyes were full of horror: her
[6312]     brows were tight above them; the lines of pain about her mouth
[6313]     were very distinct. In her eyes the whole of that familiar, great
[6314]     hall had a changed aspect. The andirons with the brass flowers at
[6315]     the ends appeared unreal; the burning logs were just logs that
[6316]     were burning and not the comfortable symbols of an indestructible
[6317]     mode of life. The flame fluttered before the high fireback; the St
[6318]     Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the winter rain fell and fell.
[6319]     And suddenly she thought that Edward might marry some one else;
[6320]     and she nearly screamed.
[6321]     
[6322]     Leonora opened her eyes, lying sideways, with her face upon the
[6323]     black and gold pillow of the sofa that was drawn half across the
[6324]     great fireplace.
[6325]     
[6326]     "I thought," Nancy said, "I never imagined. . . . Aren't marriages
[6327]     sacraments? Aren't they indissoluble? I thought you were married .
[6328]     . . and . . ." She was sobbing. "I thought you were married or not
[6329]     married as you are alive or dead." "That," Leonora said, "is the
[6330]     law of the church. It is not the law of the land. . . ."
[6331]     
[6332]     "Oh yes," Nancy said, "the Brands are Protestants." She felt a
[6333]     sudden safeness descend upon her, and for an hour or so her mind
[6334]     was at rest. It seemed to her idiotic not to have remembered Henry
[6335]     VIII and the basis upon which Protestantism rests. She almost
[6336]     laughed at herself.
[6337]     
[6338]     The long afternoon wore on; the flames still fluttered when the
[6339]     maid made up the fire; the St Bernard awoke and lolloped away
[6340]     towards the kitchen. And then Leonora opened her eyes and said
[6341]     almost coldly:
[6342]     
[6343]     "And you? Don't you think you will get married?"
[6344]     
[6345]     It was so unlike Leonora that, for the moment, the girl was
[6346]     frightened in the dusk. But then, again, it seemed a perfectly
[6347]     reasonable question. "I don't know," she answered. "I don't know
[6348]     that anyone wants to marry me."
[6349]     
[6350]     "Several people want to marry you," Leonora said.
[6351]     
[6352]     "But I don't want to marry," Nancy answered. "I should like to go
[6353]     on living with you and Edward. I don't think I am in the way or
[6354]     that I am really an expense. If I went you would have to have a
[6355]     companion. Or, perhaps, I ought to earn my living. . . ."
[6356]     
[6357]     "I wasn't thinking of that," Leonora answered in the same dull tone.
[6358]     "You will have money enough from your father. But most people
[6359]     want to be married."
[6360]     
[6361]     I believe that she then asked the girl if she would not like to marry
[6362]     me, and that Nancy answered that she would marry me if she were
[6363]     told to; but that she wanted to go on living there. She added:
[6364]     
[6365]     "If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward."
[6366]     
[6367]     She was frightened out of her life. Leonora writhed on her couch
[6368]     and called out: "Oh, God! . . ."
[6369]     
[6370]     Nancy ran for the maid; for tablets of aspirin; for wet
[6371]     handkerchiefs. It never occurred to her that Leonora's expression
[6372]     of agony was for anything else than physical pain.
[6373]     
[6374]     You are to remember that all this happened a month before
[6375]     Leonora went into the girl's room at night. I have been casting
[6376]     back again; but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these
[6377]     people going. I tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date;
[6378]     then about Edward, who has fallen behind. And then the girl gets
[6379]     hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form.
[6380]     Thus: On the 1st of September they returned from Nauheim.
[6381]     Leonora at once took to her bed. By the 1st of October they were
[6382]     all going to meets together. Nancy had already observed very fully
[6383]     that Edward was strange in his manner. About the 6th of that
[6384]     month Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had
[6385]     cause to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle. On the 20th
[6386]     she read the account of the divorce case, which is reported in the
[6387]     papers of the 18th and the two following days. On the 23rd she
[6388]     had the conversation with her aunt in the hall--about marriage in
[6389]     general and about her own possible marriage, her aunt's coming to
[6390]     her bedroom did not occur until the 12th of November. . . .
[6391]     
[6392]     Thus she had three weeks for introspection--for introspection
[6393]     beneath gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the
[6394]     fact that it lay in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black
[6395]     shadows. It was not a good situation for a girl. She began thinking
[6396]     about love, she who had never before considered it as anything
[6397]     other than a rather humorous, rather nonsensical matter. She
[6398]     remembered chance passages in chance books--things that had not
[6399]     really affected her at all at the time. She remembered someone's
[6400]     love for the Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered to have heard
[6401]     that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the vitals--though
[6402]     she did not know what the vitals were. She had a vague
[6403]     recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes
[6404]     hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who was said to
[6405]     have taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers'
[6406]     existences were said to be punctuated with heavy sighs. Once she
[6407]     went to the little cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall
[6408]     and began to play. It was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of
[6409]     that household had any turn for music. Nancy herself could play a
[6410]     few simple songs, and she found herself playing. She had been
[6411]     sitting on the window seat, looking out on the fading day. Leonora
[6412]     had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking after some
[6413]     planting up in the new spinney. Thus she found herself playing on
[6414]     the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing it. A
[6415]     silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk--a tune
[6416]     in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and
[6417]     melted into minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high lights on
[6418]     dark waters melt and waver and disappear into black depths. Well,
[6419]     it was a silly old tune. . . .
[6420]     
[6421]     It goes with the words--they are about a willow tree, I think: Thou
[6422]     art to all lost loves the best The only true plant found.
[6423]     
[6424]     --That sort of thing. It is Herrick, I believe, and the music with the
[6425]     reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick, And it was
[6426]     dusk; the heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were
[6427]     like mourning presences; the fire had sunk to nothing--a mere
[6428]     glow amongst white ashes, . . . It was a sentimental sort of place
[6429]     and light and hour. . . .
[6430]     
[6431]     And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying. She was crying
[6432]     quietly; she went on to cry with long convulsive sobs. It seemed to
[6433]     her that everything gay, everything charming, all light, all
[6434]     sweetness, had gone out of life. Unhappiness; unhappiness;
[6435]     unhappiness was all around her. She seemed to know no happy
[6436]     being and she herself was agonizing. . . .
[6437]     
[6438]     She remembered that Edward's eyes were hopeless; she was
[6439]     certain that he was drinking too much; at times he sighed deeply.
[6440]     He appeared as a man who was burning with inward flame; drying
[6441]     up in the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals. Then, the
[6442]     torturing conviction came to her--the conviction that had visited
[6443]     her again and again--that Edward must love some one other than
[6444]     Leonora. With her little, pedagogic sectarianism she remembered
[6445]     that Catholics do not do this thing. But Edward was a Protestant.
[6446]     Then Edward loved somebody. . . .
[6447]     
[6448]     And, after that thought, her eyes grew hopeless; she sighed as the
[6449]     old St Bernard beside her did. At meals she would feel an
[6450]     intolerable desire to drink a glass of wine, and then another and
[6451]     then a third. Then she would find herself grow gay. . . . But in half
[6452]     an hour the gaiety went; she felt like a person who is burning up
[6453]     with an inward flame; desiccating at the soul with thirst;
[6454]     withering up in the vitals. One evening she went into Edward's
[6455]     gun-room--he had gone to a meeting of the National Reserve
[6456]     Committee. On the table beside his chair was a decanter of
[6457]     whisky. She poured out a wineglassful and drank it off. Flame
[6458]     then really seemed to fill her body; her legs swelled; her face grew
[6459]     feverish. She dragged her tall height up to her room and lay in the
[6460]     dark. The bed reeled beneath her; she gave way to the thought that
[6461]     she was in Edward's arms; that he was kissing her on her face that
[6462]     burned; on her shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on
[6463]     fire.
[6464]     
[6465]     She never touched alcohol again. Not once after that did she have
[6466]     such thoughts. They died out of her mind; they left only a feeling
[6467]     of shame so insupportable that her brain could not take it in and
[6468]     they vanished. She imagined that her anguish at the thought of
[6469]     Edward's love for another person was solely sympathy for
[6470]     Leonora; she determined that the rest of her life must be spent in
[6471]     acting as Leonora's handmaiden--sweeping, tending,
[6472]     embroidering, like some Deborah, some medieval saint--I am not,
[6473]     unfortunately, up in the Catholic hagiology. But I know that she
[6474]     pictured herself as some personage with a depressed, earnest face
[6475]     and tightly closed lips, in a clear white room, watering flowers or
[6476]     tending an embroidery frame. Or, she desired to go with Edward
[6477]     to Africa and to throw herself in the path of a charging lion so that
[6478]     Edward might be saved for Leonora at the cost of her life. Well,
[6479]     along with her sad thoughts she had her childish ones. She knew
[6480]     nothing--nothing of life, except that one must live sadly. That she
[6481]     now knew. What happened to her on the night when she received
[6482]     at once the blow that Edward wished her to go to her father in
[6483]     India and the blow of the letter from her mother was this. She
[6484]     called first upon her sweet Saviour--and she thought of Our Lord
[6485]     as her sweet Saviour!--that He might make it impossible that she
[6486]     should go to India. Then she realized from Edward's demeanour
[6487]     that he was determined that she should go to India. It must then be
[6488]     right that she should go. Edward was always right in his
[6489]     determinations. He was the Cid; he was Lohengrin; he was the
[6490]     Chevalier Bayard.
[6491]     
[6492]     Nevertheless her mind mutinied and revolted. She could not leave
[6493]     that house. She imagined that he wished her gone that she might
[6494]     not witness his amours with another girl. Well, she was prepared
[6495]     to tell him that she was ready to witness his amours with another
[6496]     young girl. She would stay there --to comfort Leonora.
[6497]     
[6498]     Then came the desperate shock of the letter from her mother. Her
[6499]     mother said, I believe, something like: "You have no right to go
[6500]     on living your life of prosperity and respect. You ought to be on
[6501]     the streets with me. How do you know that you are even Colonel
[6502]     Rufford's daughter?" She did not know what these words meant.
[6503]     She thought of her mother as sleeping beneath the arches whilst
[6504]     the snow fell. That was the impression conveyed to her mind by
[6505]     the words "on the streets". A Platonic sense of duty gave her the
[6506]     idea that she ought to go to comfort her mother--the mother that
[6507]     bore her, though she hardly knew what the words meant. At the
[6508]     same time she knew that her mother had left her father with
[6509]     another man--therefore she pitied her father, and thought it
[6510]     terrible in herself that she trembled at the sound of her father's
[6511]     voice. If her mother was that sort of woman it was natural that her
[6512]     father should have had accesses of madness in which he had struck
[6513]     herself to the ground. And the voice of her conscience said to her
[6514]     that her first duty was to her parents. It was in accord with this
[6515]     awakened sense of duty that she undressed with great care and
[6516]     meticulously folded the clothes that she took off. Sometimes, but
[6517]     not very often, she threw them helter-skelter about the room.
[6518]     
[6519]     And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood when Leonora,
[6520]     tall, clean-run, golden-haired, all in black, appeared in her
[6521]     doorway, and told her that Edward was dying of love for her. She
[6522]     knew then with her conscious mind what she had known within
[6523]     herself for months--that Edward was dying--actually and
[6524]     physically dying--of love for her. It seemed to her that for one
[6525]     short moment her spirit could say: "Domine, nunc dimittis, . . .
[6526]     Lord, now, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." She imagined
[6527]     that she could cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her
[6528]     fallen mother.
[6529]     
[6530]     IV
[6531]     
[6532]     AND it seemed to her to be in tune with the mood, with the hour,
[6533]     and with the woman in front of her to say that she knew Edward
[6534]     was dying of love for her and that she was dying of love for
[6535]     Edward. For that fact had suddenly slipped into place and become
[6536]     real for her as the niched marker on a whist tablet slips round with
[6537]     the pressure of your thumb. That rubber at least was made.
[6538]     
[6539]     And suddenly Leonora seemed to have become different and she
[6540]     seemed to have become different in her attitude towards Leonora.
[6541]     It was as if she, in her frail, white, silken kimono, sat beside her
[6542]     fire, but upon a throne. It was as if Leonora, in her close dress of
[6543]     black lace, with the gleaming white shoulders and the coiled
[6544]     yellow hair that the girl had always considered the most beautiful
[6545]     thing in the world--it was as if Leonora had become pinched,
[6546]     shrivelled, blue with cold, shivering, suppliant. Yet Leonora was
[6547]     commanding her. It was no good commanding her. She was going
[6548]     on the morrow to her mother who was in Glasgow.
[6549]     
[6550]     Leonora went on saying that she must stay there to save Edward,
[6551]     who was dying of love for her. And, proud and happy in the
[6552]     thought that Edward loved her, and that she loved him, she did not
[6553]     even listen to what Leonora said. It appeared to her that it was
[6554]     Leonora's business to save her husband's body; she, Nancy,
[6555]     possessed his soul--a precious thing that she would shield and
[6556]     bear away up in her arms--as if Leonora were a hungry dog, trying
[6557]     to spring up at a lamb that she was carrying. Yes, she felt as if
[6558]     Edward's love were a precious lamb that she were bearing away
[6559]     from a cruel and predatory beast. For, at that time, Leonora
[6560]     appeared to her as a cruel and predatory beast. Leonora, Leonora
[6561]     with her hunger, with her cruelty had driven Edward to madness.
[6562]     He must be sheltered by his love for her and by her love--her love
[6563]     from a great distance and unspoken, enveloping him, surrounding
[6564]     him, upholding him; by her voice speaking from Glasgow, saying
[6565]     that she loved, that she adored, that she passed no moment
[6566]     without longing, loving, quivering at the thought of him.
[6567]     
[6568]     Leonora said loudly, insistently, with a bitterly imperative tone:
[6569]     
[6570]     "You must stay here; you must belong to Edward. I will divorce
[6571]     him."
[6572]     
[6573]     The girl answered:
[6574]     
[6575]     "The Church does not allow of divorce. I cannot belong to your
[6576]     husband. I am going to Glasgow to rescue my mother."
[6577]     
[6578]     The half-opened door opened noiselessly to the full. Edward was
[6579]     there. His devouring, doomed eyes were fixed on the girl's face;
[6580]     his shoulders slouched forward; he was undoubtedly half drunk
[6581]     and he had the whisky decanter in one hand, a slanting candlestick
[6582]     in the other. He said, with a heavy ferocity, to Nancy:
[6583]     
[6584]     "I forbid you to talk about these things. You are to stay here until I
[6585]     hear from your father. Then you will go to your father."
[6586]     
[6587]     The two women, looking at each other, like beasts about to spring,
[6588]     hardly gave a glance to him. He leaned against the door-post. He
[6589]     said again:
[6590]     
[6591]     "Nancy, I forbid you to talk about these things. I am the master of
[6592]     this house." And, at the sound of his voice, heavy, male, coming
[6593]     from a deep chest, in the night with the blackness behind him,
[6594]     Nancy felt as if her spirit bowed before him, with folded hands.
[6595]     She felt that she would go to India, and that she desired never
[6596]     again to talk of these things.
[6597]     
[6598]     Leonora said:
[6599]     
[6600]     "You see that it is your duty to belong to him. He must not be
[6601]     allowed to go on drinking."
[6602]     
[6603]     Nancy did not answer. Edward was gone; they heard him slipping
[6604]     and shambling on the polished oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed
[6605]     when there came the sound of a heavy fall. Leonora said again:
[6606]     "You see!"
[6607]     
[6608]     The sounds went on from the hall below; the light of the candle
[6609]     Edward held flickered up between the hand rails of the gallery.
[6610]     Then they heard his voice:
[6611]     
[6612]     "Give me Glasgow . . . Glasgow, in Scotland . . I want the number
[6613]     of a man called White, of Simrock Park, Glasgow . . . Edward
[6614]     White, Simrock Park, Glasgow . . . ten minutes . . . at this time of
[6615]     night . . ." His voice was quite level, normal, and patient. Alcohol
[6616]     took him in the legs, not the speech. "I can wait," his voice came
[6617]     again. "Yes, I know they have a number. I have been in
[6618]     communication with them before."
[6619]     
[6620]     "He is going to telephone to your mother," Leonora said. "He will
[6621]     make it all right for her." She got up and closed the door. She
[6622]     came back to the fire, and added bitterly: "He can always make it
[6623]     all right for everybody, except me--excepting me!"
[6624]     
[6625]     The girl said nothing. She sat there in a blissful dream. She
[6626]     seemed to see her lover sitting as he always sat, in a round-backed
[6627]     chair, in the dark hall--sitting low, with the receiver at his ear,
[6628]     talking in a gentle, slow voice, that he reserved for the
[6629]     telephone--and saving the world and her, in the black darkness.
[6630]     She moved her hand over the bareness of the base of her throat, to
[6631]     have the warmth of flesh upon it and upon her bosom.
[6632]     
[6633]     She said nothing; Leonora went on talking. . . .
[6634]     
[6635]     God knows what Leonora said. She repeated that the girl must
[6636]     belong to her husband. She said that she used that phrase because,
[6637]     though she might have a divorce, or even a dissolution of the
[6638]     marriage by the Church, it would still be adultery that the girl and
[6639]     Edward would be committing. But she said that that was
[6640]     necessary; it was the price that the girl must pay for the sin of
[6641]     having made Edward love her, for the sin of loving her husband.
[6642]     She talked on and on, beside the fire. The girl must become an
[6643]     adulteress; she had wronged Edward by being so beautiful, so
[6644]     gracious, so good. It was sinful to be so good. She must pay the
[6645]     price so as to save the man she had wronged.
[6646]     
[6647]     In between her pauses the girl could hear the voice of Edward,
[6648]     droning on, indistinguishably, with jerky pauses for replies. It
[6649]     made her glow with pride; the man she loved was working for her.
[6650]     He at least was resolved; was malely determined; knew the right
[6651]     thing. Leonora talked on with her eyes boring into Nancy's. The
[6652]     girl hardly looked at her and hardly heard her. After a long time
[6653]     Nancy said--after hours and hours:
[6654]     
[6655]     "I shall go to India as soon as Edward hears from my father. I
[6656]     cannot talk about these things, because Edward does not wish it."
[6657]     
[6658]     At that Leonora screamed out and wavered swiftly towards the
[6659]     closed door. And Nancy found that she was springing out of her
[6660]     chair with her white arms stretched wide. She was clasping the
[6661]     other woman to her breast; she was saying:
[6662]     
[6663]     "Oh, my poor dear; oh, my poor dear." And they sat, crouching
[6664]     together in each other's arms, and crying and crying; and they lay
[6665]     down in the same bed, talking and talking, all through the night.
[6666]     And all through the night Edward could hear their voices through
[6667]     the wall. That was how it went. . . . Next morning they were all
[6668]     three as if nothing had happened. Towards eleven Edward came to
[6669]     Nancy, who was arranging some Christmas roses in a silver bowl.
[6670]     He put a telegram beside her on the table. "You can uncode it for
[6671]     yourself," he said. Then, as he went out of the door, he said: "You
[6672]     can tell your aunt I have cabled to Mr Dowell to come over. He
[6673]     will make things easier till you leave." The telegram when it was
[6674]     uncoded, read, as far as I can remember: "Will take Mrs Rufford
[6675]     to Italy. Undertake to do this for certain. Am devotedly attached to
[6676]     Mrs Rufford. Have no need of financial assistance. Did not know
[6677]     there was a daughter, and am much obliged to you for pointing out
[6678]     my duty.--White." It was something like that. Then the household
[6679]     resumed its wonted course of days until my arrival.
[6680]     
[6681]     V IT is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all. For I ask
[6682]     myself unceasingly, my mind going round and round in a weary,
[6683]     baffled space of pain--what should these people have done? What,
[6684]     in the name of God, should they have done?
[6685]     
[6686]     The end was perfectly plain to each of them--it was perfectly
[6687]     manifest at this stage that, if the girl did not, in Leonora's phrase,
[6688]     "belong to Edward," Edward must die, the girl must lose her
[6689]     reason because Edward died--and, that after a time, Leonora, who
[6690]     was the coldest and the strongest of the three, would console
[6691]     herself by marrying Rodney Bayham and have a quiet,
[6692]     comfortable, good time. That end, on that night, whilst Leonora sat
[6693]     in the girl's bedroom and Edward telephoned down below--that
[6694]     end was plainly manifest. The girl, plainly, was half-mad already;
[6695]     Edward was half dead; only Leonora, active, persistent, instinct
[6696]     with her cold passion of energy, was "doing things". What then,
[6697]     should they have done? worked out in the extinction of two very
[6698]     splendid personalities--for Edward and the girl were splendid
[6699]     personalities, in order that a third personality, more normal,
[6700]     should have, after a long period of trouble, a quiet, comfortable,
[6701]     good time.
[6702]     
[6703]     I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after
[6704]     the words that end my last chapter. Since writing the words "until
[6705]     my arrival", which I see end that paragraph, I have seen again for
[6706]     a glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white
[6707]     tower, Tarascon with the square castle, the great Rhone, the
[6708]     immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all
[6709]     Provence--and all Provence no longer matters. It is no longer in
[6710]     the olive hills that I shall find my Heaven; because there is only
[6711]     Hell. . . .
[6712]     
[6713]     Edward is dead; the girl is gone--oh, utterly gone; Leonora is
[6714]     having a good time with Rodney Bayham, and I sit alone in
[6715]     Branshaw Teleragh. I have been through Provence; I have seen
[6716]     Africa; I have visited Asia to see, in Ceylon, in a darkened room,
[6717]     my poor girl, sitting motionless, with her wonderful hair about
[6718]     her, looking at me with eyes that did not see me, and saying
[6719]     distinctly: "Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem. . . . Credo in
[6720]     unum Deum omnipotentem." Those are the only reasonable words
[6721]     she uttered; those are the only words, it appears, that she ever will
[6722]     utter. I suppose that they are reasonable words; it must be
[6723]     extraordinarily reasonable for her, if she can say that she believes
[6724]     in an Omnipotent Deity. Well, there it is. I am very tired of it. all.
[6725]     
[6726]     
[6727]     For, I daresay, all this may sound romantic, but it is tiring, tiring,
[6728]     tiring to have been in the midst of it; to have taken the tickets; to
[6729]     have caught the trains; to have chosen the cabins; to have
[6730]     consulted the purser and the stewards as to diet for the quiescent
[6731]     patient who did nothing but announce her belief in an Omnipotent
[6732]     Deity. That may sound romantic--but it is just a record of fatigue.
[6733]     
[6734]     I don't know why I should always be selected to be serviceable. I
[6735]     don't resent it--but I have never been the least good. Florence
[6736]     selected me for her own purposes, and I was no good to her;
[6737]     Edward called me to come and have a chat with him, and I
[6738]     couldn't stop him cutting his throat.
[6739]     
[6740]     And then, one day eighteen months ago, I was quietly writing in
[6741]     my room at Branshaw when Leonora came to me with a letter. It
[6742]     was a very pathetic letter from Colonel Rufford about Nancy.
[6743]     Colonel Rufford had left the army and had taken up an
[6744]     appointment at a tea-planting estate in Ceylon. His letter was
[6745]     pathetic because it was so brief, so inarticulate, and so
[6746]     business-like. He had gone down to the boat to meet his daughter,
[6747]     and had found his daughter quite mad. It appears that at Aden
[6748]     Nancy had seen in a local paper the news of Edward's suicide. In
[6749]     the Red Sea she had gone mad. She had remarked to Mrs Colonel
[6750]     Luton, who was chaperoning her, that she believed in an
[6751]     Omnipotent Deity. She hadn't made any fuss; her eyes were quite
[6752]     dry and glassy. Even when she was mad Nancy could behave
[6753]     herself.
[6754]     
[6755]     Colonel Rufford said the doctor did not anticipate that there was
[6756]     any chance of his child's recovery. It was, nevertheless, possible
[6757]     that if she could see someone from Branshaw it might soothe her
[6758]     and it might have a good effect. And he just simply wrote to
[6759]     Leonora: "Please come and see if you can do it."
[6760]     
[6761]     I seem to have lost all sense of the pathetic; but still, that simple,
[6762]     enormous request of the old colonel strikes me as pathetic. He was
[6763]     cursed by his atrocious temper; he had been cursed by a half-mad
[6764]     wife, who drank and went on the streets. His daughter was totally
[6765]     mad--and yet he believed in the goodness of human nature. He
[6766]     believed that Leonora would take the trouble to go all the way to
[6767]     Ceylon in order to soothe his daughter. Leonora wouldn't. Leonora
[6768]     didn't ever want to see Nancy again. I daresay that that, in the
[6769]     circumstances, was natural enough. At the same time she agreed,
[6770]     as it were, on public grounds, that someone soothing ought to go
[6771]     from Branshaw to Ceylon. She sent me and her old nurse, who
[6772]     had looked after Nancy from the time when the girl, a child of
[6773]     thirteen, had first come to Branshaw. So off I go, rushing through
[6774]     Provence, to catch the steamer at Marseilles. And I wasn't the
[6775]     least good when I got to Ceylon; and the nurse wasn't the least
[6776]     good. Nothing has been the least good. The doctors said, at
[6777]     Kandy, that if Nancy could be brought to England, the sea air, the
[6778]     change of climate, the voyage, and all the usual sort of things,
[6779]     might restore her reason. Of course, they haven't restored her
[6780]     reason. She is, I am aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from
[6781]     where I am now writing. I don't want to be in the least romantic
[6782]     about it. She is very well dressed; she is quite quiet; she is very
[6783]     beautiful. The old nurse looks after her very efficiently.
[6784]     
[6785]     Of course you have the makings of a situation here, but it is all
[6786]     very humdrum, as far as I am concerned. I should marry Nancy if
[6787]     her reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the
[6788]     meaning of the Anglican marriage service. But it is probable that
[6789]     her reason will never be sufficiently restored to let her appreciate
[6790]     the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. Therefore I cannot
[6791]     marry her, according to the law of the land.
[6792]     
[6793]     So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago. I am the
[6794]     attendant, not the husband, of a beautiful girl, who pays no
[6795]     attention to me. I am estranged from Leonora, who married
[6796]     Rodney Bayham in my absence and went to live at Bayham.
[6797]     Leonora rather dislikes me, because she has got it into her head
[6798]     that I disapprove of her marriage with Rodney Bayham. Well, I
[6799]     disapprove of her marriage. Possibly I am jealous. Yes, no doubt I
[6800]     am jealous. In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself
[6801]     following the lines of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I
[6802]     should really like to be a polygamist; with Nancy, and with
[6803]     Leonora, and with Maisie Maidan and possibly even with
[6804]     Florence. I am no doubt like every other man; only, probably
[6805]     because of my American origin I am fainter. At the same time I am
[6806]     able to assure you that I am a strictly respectable person. I have
[6807]     never done anything that the most anxious mother of a daughter or
[6808]     the most careful dean of a cathedral would object to. I have only
[6809]     followed, faintly, and in my unconscious desires, Edward
[6810]     Ashburnham. Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he
[6811]     really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney
[6812]     Bayham, a pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted
[6813]     Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn't
[6814]     really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a
[6815]     nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted
[6816]     Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer
[6817]     and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The
[6818]     things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the
[6819]     wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond
[6820]     me.
[6821]     
[6822]     Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the
[6823]     olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what
[6824]     they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are
[6825]     all men's lives like the lives of us good people--like the lives of
[6826]     the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords--broken,
[6827]     tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated
[6828]     by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil
[6829]     knows?
[6830]     
[6831]     For there was a great deal of imbecility about the closing scenes of
[6832]     the Ashburnham tragedy. Neither of those two women knew what
[6833]     they wanted. It was only Edward who took a perfectly clear line,
[6834]     and he was drunk most of the time. But, drunk or sober, he stuck
[6835]     to what was demanded by convention and by the traditions of his
[6836]     house. Nancy Rufford had to be exported to India, and Nancy
[6837]     Rufford hadn't to hear a word of love from him. She was exported
[6838]     to India and she never heard a word from Edward Ashburnham.
[6839]     
[6840]     It was the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of
[6841]     Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of
[6842]     the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work
[6843]     blindly but surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the
[6844]     extinction of proud, resolute and unusual individuals.
[6845]     
[6846]     Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the
[6847]     sentimentalist about him; and society does not need too many
[6848]     sentimentalists. Nancy was a splendid creature, but she had about
[6849]     her a touch of madness. Society does not need individuals with
[6850]     touches of madness about them. So Edward and Nancy found
[6851]     themselves steamrolled out and Leonora survives, the perfectly
[6852]     normal type, married to a man who is rather like a rabbit. For
[6853]     Rodney Bayham is rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is
[6854]     expected to have a baby in three months' time.
[6855]     
[6856]     So those splendid and tumultuous creatures with their magnetism
[6857]     and their passions--those two that I really loved--have gone from
[6858]     this earth. It is no doubt best for them. What would Nancy have
[6859]     made of Edward if she had succeeded in living with him; what
[6860]     would Edward have made of her? For there was about Nancy a
[6861]     touch of cruelty--a touch of definite actual cruelty that made her
[6862]     desire to see people suffer. Yes, she desired to see Edward suffer.
[6863]     And, by God, she gave him hell.
[6864]     
[6865]     She gave him an unimaginable hell. Those two women pursued
[6866]     that poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it
[6867]     with whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see
[6868]     him stand, naked to the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and
[6869]     flesh hanging from him in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration
[6870]     of what I feel. It was as if Leonora and Nancy banded themselves
[6871]     together to do execution, for the sake of humanity, upon the body
[6872]     of a man who was at their disposal. They were like a couple of
[6873]     Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a
[6874]     stake. I tell you there was no end to the tortures they inflicted
[6875]     upon him.
[6876]     
[6877]     Night after night he would hear them talking; talking; maddened,
[6878]     sweating, seeking oblivion in drink, he would lie there and hear
[6879]     the voices going on and on. And day after day Leonora would
[6880]     come to him and would announce the results of their
[6881]     deliberations.
[6882]     
[6883]     They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a criminal;
[6884]     they were like ghouls with an immobile corpse in a tomb beside
[6885]     them. I don't think that Leonora was any more to blame than the
[6886]     girl--though Leonora was the more active of the two. Leonora, as I
[6887]     have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in
[6888]     normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is
[6889]     needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an
[6890]     establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up
[6891]     appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her
[6892]     utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted
[6893]     perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the
[6894]     world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the
[6895]     complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the
[6896]     villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal,
[6897]     hard, polished substance. But, if you put it in a hot fire it will
[6898]     become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still
[6899]     more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. She was
[6900]     made for normal circumstances--for Mr Rodney Bayham, who
[6901]     will keep a separate establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth, and
[6902]     make occasional trips to Paris and to Budapest.
[6903]     
[6904]     In the case of Edward and the girl, Leonora broke and simply went
[6905]     all over the place. She adopted unfamiliar and therefore
[6906]     extraordinary and ungraceful attitudes of mind. At one moment
[6907]     she was all for revenge. After haranguing the girl for hours
[6908]     through the night she harangued for hours of the day the silent
[6909]     Edward. And Edward just once tripped up, and that was his
[6910]     undoing. Perhaps he had had too much whisky that afternoon.
[6911]     She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want?
[6912]     What did he want? And all he ever answered was: "I have told
[6913]     you". He meant that he wanted the girl to go to her father in India
[6914]     as soon as her father should cable that he was ready to receive her.
[6915]     But just once he tripped up. To Leonora's eternal question he
[6916]     answered that all he desired in life was that--that he could pick
[6917]     himself together again and go on with his daily occupations if--the
[6918]     girl, being five thousand miles away, would continue to love him.
[6919]     He wanted nothing more, He prayed his God for nothing more.
[6920]     Well, he was a sentimentalist.
[6921]     
[6922]     And the moment that she heard that, Leonora determined that the
[6923]     girl should not go five thousand miles away and that she should
[6924]     not continue to love Edward. The way she worked it was this:
[6925]     
[6926]     She continued to tell the girl that she must belong to Edward; she
[6927]     was going to get a divorce; she was going to get a dissolution of
[6928]     marriage from Rome. But she considered it to be her duty to warn
[6929]     the girl of the sort of monster that Edward was. She told the girl of
[6930]     La Dolciquita, of Mrs Basil, of Maisie Maidan, of Florence. She
[6931]     spoke of the agonies that she had endured during her life with the
[6932]     man, who was violent, overbearing, vain, drunken, arrogant, and
[6933]     monstrously a prey to his sexual necessities. And, at hearing of the
[6934]     miseries her aunt had suffered--for Leonora once more had the
[6935]     aspect of an aunt to the girl--with the swift cruelty of youth and,
[6936]     with the swift solidarity that attaches woman to woman, the girl
[6937]     made her resolves. Her aunt said incessantly: "You must save
[6938]     Edward's life; you must save his life. All that he needs is a little
[6939]     period of satisfaction from you. Then he will tire of you as he has
[6940]     of the others. But you must save his life."
[6941]     
[6942]     And, all the while, that wretched fellow knew--by a curious
[6943]     instinct that runs between human beings living together--exactly
[6944]     what was going on. And he remained dumb; he stretched out no
[6945]     finger to help himself. All that he required to keep himself a
[6946]     decent member of society was, that the girl, five thousand miles
[6947]     away, should continue to love him. They were putting a stopper
[6948]     upon that.
[6949]     
[6950]     I have told you that the girl came one night to his room. And that
[6951]     was the real hell for him. That was the picture that never left his
[6952]     imagination--the girl, in the dim light, rising up at the foot of his
[6953]     bed. He said that it seemed to have a greenish sort of effect as if
[6954]     there were a greenish tinge in the shadows of the tall bedposts that
[6955]     framed her body. And she looked at him with her straight eyes of
[6956]     an unflinching cruelty and she said: "I am ready to belong to
[6957]     you--to save your life."
[6958]     
[6959]     He answered: "I don't want it; I don't want it; I don't want it."
[6960]     
[6961]     And he says that he didn't want it; that he would have hated
[6962]     himself; that it was unthinkable. And all the while he had the
[6963]     immense temptation to do the unthinkable thing, not from the
[6964]     physical desire but because of a mental certitude. He was certain
[6965]     that if she had once submitted to him she would remain his for
[6966]     ever. He knew that.
[6967]     
[6968]     She was thinking that her aunt had said he had desired her to love
[6969]     him from a distance of five thousand miles. She said: "I can never
[6970]     love you now I know the kind of man you are. I will belong to you
[6971]     to save your life. But I can never love you."
[6972]     
[6973]     It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She didn't in the least know
[6974]     what it meant--to belong to a man. But, at that Edward pulled
[6975]     himself together. He spoke in his normal tones; gruff, husky,
[6976]     overbearing, as he would have done to a servant or to a horse.
[6977]     
[6978]     "Go back to your room," he said. "Go back to your room and go to
[6979]     sleep. This is all nonsense."
[6980]     
[6981]     They were baffled, those two women.
[6982]     
[6983]     And then I came on the scene.
[6984]     
[6985]     VI MY coming on the scene certainly calmed things down--for the
[6986]     whole fortnight that intervened between my arrival and the girl's
[6987]     departure. I don't mean to say that the endless talking did not go
[6988]     on at night or that Leonora did not send me out with the girl and,
[6989]     in the interval, give Edward a hell of a time. Having discovered
[6990]     what he wanted--that the girl should go five thousand miles away
[6991]     and love him steadfastly as people do in sentimental novels, she
[6992]     was determined to smash that aspiration. And she repeated to
[6993]     Edward in every possible tone that the girl did not love him; that
[6994]     the girl detested him for his brutality, his overbearingness, his
[6995]     drinking habits. She pointed out that Edward in the girl's eyes, was
[6996]     already pledged three or four deep. He was pledged to Leonora
[6997]     herself, to Mrs Basil, and to the memories of Maisie Maidan and
[6998]     to Florence. Edward never said anything.
[6999]     
[7000]     Did the girl love Edward, or didn't she? I don't know. At that time I
[7001]     daresay she didn't though she certainly had done so before Leonora
[7002]     had got to work upon his reputation. She certainly had loved him
[7003]     for what I call the public side of his record--for his good
[7004]     soldiering, for his saving lives at sea, for the excellent landlord
[7005]     that he was and the good sportsman. But it is quite possible that
[7006]     all those things came to appear as nothing in her eyes when she
[7007]     discovered that he wasn't a good husband. For, though women, as
[7008]     I see them, have little or no feeling of responsibility towards a
[7009]     county or a country or a career--although they may be entirely
[7010]     lacking in any kind of communal solidarity--they have an
[7011]     immense and automatically working instinct that attaches them to
[7012]     the interest of womanhood. It is, of course, possible for any
[7013]     woman to cut out and to carry off any other woman's husband or
[7014]     lover. But I rather think that a woman will only do this if she has
[7015]     reason to believe that the other woman has given her husband a
[7016]     bad time. I am certain that if she thinks the man has been a brute
[7017]     to his wife she will, with her instinctive feeling for suffering
[7018]     femininity, "put him back", as the saying is. I don't attach any
[7019]     particular importance to these generalizations of mine. They may
[7020]     be right, they may be wrong; I am only an ageing American with
[7021]     very little knowledge of life. You may take my generalizations or
[7022]     leave them. But I am pretty certain that I am right in the case of
[7023]     Nancy Rufford--that she had loved Edward Ashburnham very
[7024]     deeply and tenderly.
[7025]     
[7026]     It is nothing to the point that she let him have it good and strong as
[7027]     soon as she discovered that he had been unfaithful to Leonora and
[7028]     that his public services had cost more than Leonora thought they
[7029]     ought to have cost. Nancy would be bound to let him have it good
[7030]     and strong then. She would owe that to feminine public opinion;
[7031]     she would be driven to it by the instinct for self-preservation,
[7032]     since she might well imagine that if Edward had been unfaithful
[7033]     to Leonora, to Mrs Basil and to the memories of the other two, he
[7034]     might be unfaithful to herself. And, no doubt, she had her share of
[7035]     the sex instinct that makes women be intolerably cruel to the
[7036]     beloved person. Anyhow, I don't know whether, at this point,
[7037]     Nancy Rufford loved Edward Ashburnham. I don't know whether
[7038]     she even loved him when, on getting, at Aden, the news of his
[7039]     suicide she went mad. Because that may just as well have been for
[7040]     the sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it may have
[7041]     been for the sake of both of them. I don't know. I know nothing. I
[7042]     am very tired. Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the girl
[7043]     didn't love Edward. She wanted desperately to believe that. It was
[7044]     a doctrine as necessary to her existence as a belief in the personal
[7045]     immortality of the soul. She said that it was impossible that Nancy
[7046]     could have loved Edward after she had given the girl her view of
[7047]     Edward's career and character. Edward, on the other hand,
[7048]     believed maunderingly that some essential attractiveness in
[7049]     himself must have made the girl continue to go on loving him--to
[7050]     go on loving him, as it were, in underneath her official aspect of
[7051]     hatred. He thought she only pretended to hate him in order to save
[7052]     her face and he thought that her quite atrocious telegram from
[7053]     Brindisi was only another attempt to do that--to prove that she had
[7054]     feelings creditable to a member of the feminine commonweal. I
[7055]     don't know. I leave it to you. There is another point that worries
[7056]     me a good deal in the aspects of this sad affair. Leonora says that,
[7057]     in desiring that the girl should go five thousand miles away and
[7058]     yet continue to love him, Edward was a monster of selfishness. He
[7059]     was desiring the ruin of a young life. Edward on the other hand
[7060]     put it to me that, supposing that the girl's love was a necessity to
[7061]     his existence, and, if he did nothing by word or by action to keep
[7062]     Nancy's love alive, he couldn't be called selfish. Leonora replied
[7063]     that showed he had an abominably selfish nature even though his
[7064]     actions might be perfectly correct. I can't make out which of them
[7065]     was right. I leave it to you.
[7066]     
[7067]     it is, at any rate, certain that Edward's actions were perfectly--were
[7068]     monstrously, were cruelly--correct. He sat still and let Leonora
[7069]     take away his character, and let Leonora damn him to deepest
[7070]     hell, without stirring a finger. I daresay he was a fool; I don't see
[7071]     what object there was in letting the girl think worse of him than
[7072]     was necessary. Still there it is. And there it is also that all those
[7073]     three presented to the world the spectacle of being the best of
[7074]     good people. I assure you that during my stay for that fortnight in
[7075]     that fine old house, I never so much as noticed a single thing that
[7076]     could have affected that good opinion. And even when I look
[7077]     back, knowing the circumstances, I can't remember a single thing
[7078]     any of them said that could have betrayed them. I can't remember,
[7079]     right up to the dinner, when Leonora read out that telegram--not
[7080]     the tremor of an eyelash, not the shaking of a hand. It was just a
[7081]     pleasant country house-party.
[7082]     
[7083]     And Leonora kept it up jolly well, for even longer than that--she
[7084]     kept it up as far as I was concerned until eight days after Edward's
[7085]     funeral. Immediately after that particular dinner--the dinner at
[7086]     which I received the announcement that Nancy was going to leave
[7087]     for India on the following day--I asked Leonora to let me have a
[7088]     word with her. She took me into her little sitting-room and I then
[7089]     said--I spare you the record of my emotions--that she was aware
[7090]     that I wished to marry Nancy; that she had seemed to favour my
[7091]     suit and that it appeared to be rather a waste of money upon tickets
[7092]     and rather a waste of time upon travel to let the girl go to India if
[7093]     Leonora thought that there was any chance of her marrying me.
[7094]     
[7095]     And Leonora, I assure you, was the absolutely perfect British
[7096]     matron. She said that she quite favoured my suit; that she could
[7097]     not desire for the girl a better husband; but that she considered
[7098]     that the girl ought to see a little more of life before taking such an
[7099]     important step. Yes, Leonora used the words "taking such an
[7100]     important step". She was perfect. Actually, I think she would have
[7101]     liked the girl to marry me enough but my programme included the
[7102]     buying of the Kershaw's house about a mile away upon the
[7103]     Fordingbridge road, and settling down there with the girl. That
[7104]     didn't at all suit Leonora. She didn't want to have the girl within a
[7105]     mile and a half of Edward for the rest of their lives. Still, I think
[7106]     she might have managed to let me know, in some periphrasis or
[7107]     other, that I might have the girl if I would take her to Philadelphia
[7108]     or Timbuctoo. I loved Nancy very much--and Leonora knew it.
[7109]     However, I left it at that. I left it with the understanding that Nancy
[7110]     was going away to India on probation. It seemed to me a perfectly
[7111]     reasonable arrangement and I am a reasonable sort of man. I
[7112]     simply said that I should follow Nancy out to India after six
[7113]     months' time or so. Or, perhaps, after a year. Well, you see, I did
[7114]     follow Nancy out to India after a year. . . . I must confess to
[7115]     having felt a little angry with Leonora for not having warned me
[7116]     earlier that the girl would be going. I took it as one of the queer,
[7117]     not very straight methods that Roman Catholics seem to adopt in
[7118]     dealing with matters of this world. I took it that Leonora had been
[7119]     afraid I should propose to the girl or, at any rate, have made
[7120]     considerably greater advances to her than I did, if I had known
[7121]     earlier that she was going away so soon. Perhaps Leonora was
[7122]     right; perhaps Roman Catholics, with their queer, shifty ways, are
[7123]     always right. They are dealing with the queer, shifty thing that is
[7124]     human nature. For it is quite possible that, if I had known Nancy
[7125]     was going away so soon, I should have tried making love to her.
[7126]     And that would have produced another complication. It may have
[7127]     been just as well.
[7128]     
[7129]     It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do in
[7130]     order to keep up their appearance of calm pococurantism. For
[7131]     Edward Ashburnham and his wife called me half the world over
[7132]     in order to sit on the back seat of a dog-cart whilst Edward drove
[7133]     the girl to the railway station from which she was to take her
[7134]     departure to India. They wanted, I suppose, to have a witness of
[7135]     the calmness of that function. The girl's luggage had been already
[7136]     packed and sent off before. Her berth on the steamer had been
[7137]     taken. They had timed it all so exactly that it went like clockwork.
[7138]     They had known the date upon which Colonel Rufford would get
[7139]     Edward's letter and they had known almost exactly the hour at
[7140]     which they would receive his telegram asking his daughter to
[7141]     come to him. It had all been quite beautifully and quite
[7142]     mercilessly arranged, by Edward himself. They gave Colonel
[7143]     Rufford, as a reason for telegraphing, the fact that Mrs Colonel
[7144]     Somebody or other would be travelling by that ship and that she
[7145]     would serve as an efficient chaperon for the girl. It was a most
[7146]     amazing business, and I think that it would have been better in the
[7147]     eyes of God if they had all attempted to gouge out each other's
[7148]     eyes with carving knives. But they were "good people". After my
[7149]     interview with Leonora I went desultorily into Edward's gun-room.
[7150]     I didn't know where the girl was and I thought I mind find her
[7151]     there. I suppose I had a vague idea of proposing to her in spite of
[7152]     Leonora. So, I presume, I don't come of quite such good people as
[7153]     the Ashburnhams. Edward was lounging in his chair smoking a
[7154]     cigar and he said nothing for quite five minutes. The candles
[7155]     glowed in the green shades; the reflections were green in the
[7156]     glasses of the book-cases that held guns and fishing-rods. Over the
[7157]     mantelpiece was the brownish picture of the white horse. Those
[7158]     were the quietest moments that I have ever known. Then,
[7159]     suddenly, Edward looked me straight in the eyes and said:
[7160]     
[7161]     "Look here, old man, I wish you would drive with Nancy and me
[7162]     to the station tomorrow."
[7163]     
[7164]     I said that of course I would drive with him and Nancy to the
[7165]     station on the morrow. He lay there for a long time, looking along
[7166]     the line of his knees at the fluttering fire, and then suddenly, in a
[7167]     perfectly calm voice, and without lifting his eyes, he said:
[7168]     
[7169]     "I am so desperately in love with Nancy Rufford that I am dying of
[7170]     it."
[7171]     
[7172]     Poor devil--he hadn't meant to speak of it. But I guess he just had
[7173]     to speak to somebody and I appeared to be like a woman or a
[7174]     solicitor. He talked all night.
[7175]     
[7176]     Well, he carried out the programme to the last breath.
[7177]     
[7178]     It was a very clear winter morning, with a good deal of frost in it.
[7179]     The sun was quite bright, the winding road between the heather
[7180]     and the bracken was very hard. I sat on the back-seat of the
[7181]     dog-cart; Nancy was beside Edward. They talked about the way
[7182]     the cob went; Edward pointed out with the whip a cluster of deer
[7183]     upon a coombe three-quarters of a mile away. We passed the
[7184]     hounds in the level bit of road beside the high trees going into
[7185]     Fordingbridge and Edward pulled up the dog-cart so that Nancy
[7186]     might say good-bye to the huntsman and cap him a last sovereign.
[7187]     She had ridden with those hounds ever since she had been
[7188]     thirteen.
[7189]     
[7190]     The train was five minutes late and they imagined that that was
[7191]     because it was market-day at Swindon or wherever the train came
[7192]     from. That was the sort of thing they talked about. The train came
[7193]     in; Edward found her a first-class carriage with an elderly woman
[7194]     in it. The girl entered the carriage, Edward closed the door and
[7195]     then she put out her hand to shake mine. There was upon those
[7196]     people's faces no expression of any kind whatever. The signal for
[7197]     the train's departure was a very bright red; that is about as
[7198]     passionate a statement as I can get into that scene. She was not
[7199]     looking her best; she had on a cap of brown fur that did not very
[7200]     well match her hair. She said:
[7201]     
[7202]     "So long," to Edward.
[7203]     
[7204]     Edward answered: "So long."
[7205]     
[7206]     He swung round on his heel and, large, slouching, and walking
[7207]     with a heavy deliberate pace, he went out of the station. I
[7208]     followed him and got up beside him in the high dog-cart. It was
[7209]     the most horrible performance I have ever seen.
[7210]     
[7211]     And, after that, a holy peace, like the peace of God which passes
[7212]     all understanding, descended upon Branshaw Teleragh. Leonora
[7213]     went about her daily duties with a sort of triumphant smile--a very
[7214]     faint smile, but quite triumphant. I guess she had so long since
[7215]     given up any idea of getting her man back that it was enough for
[7216]     her to have got the girl out of the house and well cured of her
[7217]     infatuation. Once, in the hall, when Leonora was going out,
[7218]     Edward said, beneath his breath--but I just caught the words:
[7219]     
[7220]     "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean." It was like his
[7221]     sentimentality to quote Swinburne. But he was perfectly quiet and
[7222]     he had given up drinking. The only thing that he ever said to me
[7223]     after that drive to the station was:
[7224]     
[7225]     "It's very odd. I think I ought to tell you, Dowell, that I haven't any
[7226]     feelings at all about the girl now it's all over. Don't you worry
[7227]     about me. I'm all right." A long time afterwards he said: "I guess it
[7228]     was only a flash in the pan." He began to look after the estates
[7229]     again; he took all that trouble over getting off the gardener's
[7230]     daughter who had murdered her baby. He shook hands smilingly
[7231]     with every farmer in the market-place. He addressed two political
[7232]     meetings; he hunted twice. Leonora made him a frightful scene
[7233]     about spending the two hundred pounds on getting the gardener's
[7234]     daughter acquitted. Everything went on as if the girl had never
[7235]     existed. It was very still weather.
[7236]     
[7237]      Well, that is the end of the story. And, when I come to look at it I
[7238]     see that it is a happy ending with wedding bells and all. The
[7239]     villains--for obviously Edward and the girl were villains--have
[7240]     been punished by suicide and madness. The heroine--the perfectly
[7241]     normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful heroine--has become the
[7242]     happy wife of a perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful
[7243]     husband. She will shortly become a mother of a perfectly normal,
[7244]     virtuous slightly deceitful son or daughter. A happy ending, that is
[7245]     what it works out at.
[7246]     
[7247]     I cannot conceal from myself the fact that I now dislike Leonora.
[7248]     Without doubt I am jealous of Rodney Bayham. But I don't know
[7249]     whether it is merely a jealousy arising from the fact that I desired
[7250]     myself to possess Leonora or whether it is because to her were
[7251]     sacrificed the only two persons that I have ever really
[7252]     loved--Edward Ashburnham and Nancy Rufford. In order to set
[7253]     her up in a modern mansion, replete with every convenience and
[7254]     dominated by a quite respectable and eminently economical
[7255]     master of the house, it was necessary that Edward and Nancy
[7256]     Rufford should become, for me at least, no more than tragic
[7257]     shades.
[7258]     
[7259]     I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining amidst darkness,
[7260]     upon cold rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in
[7261]     Tartarus or wherever it was.
[7262]     
[7263]     And as for Nancy . . . Well, yesterday at lunch she said suddenly:
[7264]     
[7265]     "Shuttlecocks!"
[7266]     
[7267]     And she repeated the word "shuttlecocks" three times. I know what
[7268]     was passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for
[7269]     Leonora has told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a
[7270]     shuttlecock being tossed backwards and forwards between the
[7271]     violent personalities of Edward and his wife. Leonora, she said,
[7272]     was always trying to deliver her over to Edward, and Edward
[7273]     tacitly and silently forced her back again. And the odd thing was
[7274]     that Edward himself considered that those two women used him
[7275]     like a shuttlecock. Or, rather, he said that they sent him backwards
[7276]     and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to
[7277]     pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and
[7278]     Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely
[7279]     vagrant moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am
[7280]     not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not
[7281]     advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I
[7282]     suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous,
[7283]     and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the
[7284]     headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to
[7285]     madness. But I guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into
[7286]     the category of the passionate, of the headstrong, and the
[7287]     too-truthful. For I can't conceal from myself the fact that I loved
[7288]     Edward Ashburnham--and that I love him because he was just
[7289]     myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the
[7290]     physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done
[7291]     much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who
[7292]     took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things
[7293]     whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance.
[7294]     And, you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was. . . .
[7295]     
[7296]     Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what
[7297]     we are here for. But then, I don't like society--much. I am that
[7298]     absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the
[7299]     ancient haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward's gun-room,
[7300]     all day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits
[7301]     me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no
[7302]     interests. In twenty minutes or so I shall walk down to the village,
[7303]     beneath my own oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse, to get
[7304]     the American mail. My tenants, the village boys and the
[7305]     tradesmen will touch their hats to me. So life peters out. I shall
[7306]     return to dine and Nancy will sit opposite me with the old nurse
[7307]     standing behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly well-behaved as far
[7308]     as her knife and fork go, Nancy will stare in front of her with the
[7309]     blue eyes that have over them strained, stretched brows. Once, or
[7310]     perhaps twice, during the meal her knife and fork will be
[7311]     suspended in mid-air as if she were trying to think of something
[7312]     that she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an
[7313]     Omnipotent Deity or she will utter the one word "shuttle-cocks",
[7314]     perhaps. It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of health
[7315]     on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise
[7316]     of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white hands--and to
[7317]     think that it all means nothing--that it is a picture without a
[7318]     meaning. Yes, it is queer.
[7319]     
[7320]     But, at any rate, there is always Leonora to cheer you up; I don't
[7321]     want to sadden you. Her husband is quite an economical person of
[7322]     so normal a figure that he can get quite a large proportion of his
[7323]     clothes ready-made. That is the great desideratum of life, and that
[7324]     is the end of my story. The child is to be brought up as a
[7325]     Romanist.
[7326]     
[7327]     It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward
[7328]     met his death. You remember that peace had descended upon the
[7329]     house; that Leonora was quietly triumphant and that Edward said
[7330]     his love for the girl had been merely a passing phase. Well, one
[7331]     afternoon we were in the stables together, looking at a new kind
[7332]     of flooring that Edward was trying in a loose-box. Edward was
[7333]     talking with a good deal of animation about the necessity of
[7334]     getting the numbers of the Hampshire territorials up to the proper
[7335]     standard. He was quite sober, quite quiet, his skin was
[7336]     clear-coloured; his hair was golden and perfectly brushed; the
[7337]     level brick-dust red of his complexion went clean up to the rims
[7338]     of his eyelids; his eyes were porcelain blue and they regarded me
[7339]     frankly and directly. His face was perfectly expressionless; his
[7340]     voice was deep and rough. He stood well back upon his legs and
[7341]     said: .
[7342]     
[7343]     "We ought to get them up to two thousand three hundred and
[7344]     fifty." A stable-boy brought him a telegram and went away. He
[7345]     opened it negligently, regarded it without emotion, and, in
[7346]     complete silence, handed it to me. On the pinkish paper in a
[7347]     sprawled handwriting I read: "Safe Brindisi. Having rattling good
[7348]     time. Nancy."
[7349]     
[7350]     Well, Edward was the English gentleman; but he was also, to the
[7351]     last, a sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent
[7352]     poems and novels. He just looked up to the roof of the stable, as if
[7353]     he were looking to Heaven, and whispered something that I did
[7354]     not catch.
[7355]     
[7356]     Then he put two fingers into the waistcoat pocket of his grey,
[7357]     frieze suit; they came out with a little neat pen-knife--quite a
[7358]     small pen-knife. He said to me:
[7359]     
[7360]     "You might just take that wire to Leonora." And he looked at me
[7361]     with a direct, challenging, brow-beating glare. I guess he could
[7362]     see in my eyes that I didn't intend to hinder him. Why should I
[7363]     hinder him?
[7364]     
[7365]     I didn't think he was wanted in the world, let his confounded
[7366]     tenants, his rifle-associations, his drunkards, reclaimed and
[7367]     unreclaimed, get on as they liked. Not all the hundreds and
[7368]     hundreds of them deserved that that poor devil should go on
[7369]     suffering for their sakes.
[7370]     
[7371]     When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him his eyes
[7372]     became soft and almost affectionate. He remarked:
[7373]     
[7374]     "So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know."
[7375]     
[7376]     I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, "God bless you", for I
[7377]     also am a sentimentalist. But I thought that perhaps that would not
[7378]     be quite English good form, so I trotted off with the telegram to
[7379]     Leonora. She was quite pleased with it.