‘It was the only way, and she believed me.’
‘Wretched how – wretched when – wretched where?’ the young man stammered.
‘I told her papa had made her so, and that she ought to know it. I told her the question troubled me unspeakably, but that I had made up my mind it was my duty to initiate her.’ Adela paused, with the light of bravado in her face, as if, though struck while she phrased it, with the monstrosity of what she had done, she was incapable of abating a jot of it. ‘I notified her that he had faults and peculiarities that made mamma’s life a long worry – a martyrdom that she hid wonderfully from the world, but that we saw and that I had often pitied. I told her what they were, these faults and peculiarities; I put the dots on the i’s. I said it wasn’t fair to let another person marry him without a warning. I warned her; I satisfied my conscience. She could do as she liked. My responsibility was over.’
Godfrey gazed at her; he listened, with parted lips, incredulous and appalled. ‘You invented such a tissue of falsities and calumnies, and you talk about your conscience? You stand there in your senses and proclaim your crime?’
‘I would have committed any crime that would have rescued us.’
‘You insult and defame your own father?’ Godfrey continued.
‘He’ll never know it; she took a vow she wouldn’t tell him.’
‘I’ll be damned if I won’t tell him!’ Godfrey cried.
Adela felt sick at this, but she flamed up to resent the treachery, as it struck her, of such a menace. ‘I did right – I did right!’ she vehemently declared. ‘I went down on my knees to pray for guidance, and I saved mamma’s memory from outrage. But if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t’ – she faltered for an instant – ‘I’m not worse than you, and I’m not so bad, for you’ve done something that you’re ashamed to tell me.’
Godfrey had taken out his watch; he looked at it with quick intensity, as if he were not hearing nor heeding her. Then, glancing up with his calculating eye, he fixed her long enough to exclaim, with unsurpassable horror and contempt: ‘You raving maniac!’ He turned away from her; he bounded down the avenue in the direction from which they had come, and, while she watched him, strode away across the grass, toward the short cut to the station.
IV
GODFREY’S portmanteau, by the time Adela got home, had been brought to the house, but Beatrice and Muriel, who had been informed of this, waited for their brother in vain. Their sister said nothing to them about having seen him, and she accepted, after a little, with a calmness that surprised herself, the idea that he had returned to town to denounce her. She believed that would make no difference now – she had done what she had done. She had somehow a faith in Mrs Churchley. If Mrs Churchley had broken off she wouldn’t renew. She was a heavy-footed person, incapable of further agility. Adela recognised too that it might well have come over her that there were too many children. Lastly the girl fortified herself with the reflection, grotesque under the circumstances and tending to prove that her sense of humour was not high, that her father, after all, was not a man to be played with. It seemed to her, at any rate, that if she had prevented his marriage she could bear anything – bear imprisonment and bread and water, bear lashes and torture, bear even his lifelong reproach. What she could bear least was the wonder of the inconvenience she had inflicted on Godfrey. She had time to turn this over, very vainly, for a succession of days – days more numerous than she had expected, which passed without bringing her from London any summons to come up and take her punishment. She sounded the possible, she compared the degrees of the probable; feeling however that, as a cloistered girl she was poorly equipped for speculation. She tried to imagine the calamitous things young men might do, and could only feel that such things would naturally be connected either with money or with women. She became conscious that after all she knew almost nothing about either subject. Meanwhile there was no reverberation from Seymour Street – only a sultry silence.
At Overland she spent hours in her mother’s garden, where she had grown up, where she considered that she was training for old age, for she meant not to depend upon whist. She loved the place as, had she been a good Catholic, she would have loved the smell of her parish church; and indeed there was in her passion for flowers something of the respect of a religion. They seemed to her the only things in the world that really respected themselves, unless one made an exception for Nutkins, who had been in command all through her mother’s time, with whom she had had a real friendship, and who had been affected by their pure example. He was the person left in the world with whom, on the whole, she could talk most intimately about her mother. They never had to name her together – they only said ‘she’; and Nutkins freely conceded that she had taught him everything he knew. When Beatrice and Muriel said ‘she’ they referred to Mrs Churchley. Adela had reason to believe that she should never marry, and that some day she should have about a thousand a year. This made her see in the far future a little garden of her own, under a hill, full of rare and exquisite things, where she would spend most of her old age on her knees, with an apron and stout gloves, a pair of shears and a trowel, steeped in the comfort of being thought mad.
One morning, ten days after her scene with Godfrey, upon coming back into the house shortly before lunch, she was met by Miss Flynn with the notification that a lady in the drawing-room had been waiting for her for some minutes. ‘A lady’ suggested immediately Mrs Churchley. It came over Adela that the form in which her penalty was to descend would be a personal explanation with that misdirected woman. The lady had not given her name, and Miss Flynn had not seen Mrs Churchley; nevertheless the governess was certain that Adela’s surmise was wrong.
‘Is she big and dreadful?’ the girl asked.
Miss Flynn, who was circumspection itself, hesitated a moment. ‘She’s dreadful, but she’s not big.’ She added that she was not sure she ought to let Adela go in alone; but this young lady felt throughout like a heroine, and it was not for a heroine to shrink from any encounter. Was she not, every instant, in transcendent contact with her mother? The visitor might have no connection whatever with the drama of her father’s frustrated marriage; but everything, to-day, to Adela, was a part of that.
Miss Flynn’s description had prepared her for a considerable shock, but she was not agitated by her first glimpse of the person who awaited her. A youngish, well-dressed woman stood there, and silence was between them while they looked at each other. Before either of them had spoken, however, Adela began to see what Miss Flynn had intended. In the light of the drawing-room window the lady was five-and-thirty years of age and had vivid yellow hair. She also had a blue cloth suit with brass buttons, a stick-up collar like a gentleman’s, a necktie arranged in a sailor’s knot, with a golden pin in the shape of a little lawn-tennis racket, and pearl-grey gloves with big black stitchings. Adela’s second impression was that she was an actress; her third was that no such person had ever before crossed that threshold.
‘I’ll tell you what I’ve come for,’ said the apparition. ‘I’ve come to ask you to intercede.’ She was not an actress; an actress would have had a nicer voice.
‘To intercede?’ Adela was too bewildered to ask her to sit down.
‘With your father, you know. He doesn’t know, but he’ll have to.’ Her ‘have’ sounded like ‘’ave’. She explained, with many more such sounds, that she was Mrs Godfrey, that they had been married seven mortal months. If Godfrey was going abroad she must go with him, and the only way she could go with him would be for his father to do something. He was afraid of his father – that was clear; he was afraid even to tell him. What she had come down for was to see some other member of the family face to face (‘fice to fice’ Mrs Godfrey called it), and try if he couldn’t be approached by another side. If no one else would act, then she would just have to act herself. The Colonel would have to do something – that was the only way out of it.
What really happened Adela never quite understood; what seemed to be ha
ppening was that the room went round and round. Through the blur of perception accompanying this effect the sharp stabs of her visitor’s revelation came to her like the words heard by a patient ‘going off’ under either. She denied passionately, afterwards, even to herself, that she had done anything so abject as to faint; but there was a lapse in her consciousness in relation to Miss Flynn’s intervention. This intervention had evidently been active, for when they talked the matter over, later in the day, with bated breath and infinite dissimulation for the schoolroom quarter, the governess had more information, and still stranger, to impart than to receive. She was at any rate under the impression that she had athletically contended, in the drawing-room, with the yellow hair, after removing Adela from the scene and before inducing Mrs Godfrey to withdraw. Miss Flynn had never known a more thrilling day, for all the rest of it too was pervaded with agitations and conversations, precautions and alarms. It was given out to Beatrice and Muriel that their sister had been taken suddenly ill, and the governess ministered to her in her room. Indeed Adela had never found herself less at ease; for this time she had received a blow that she couldn’t return. There was nothing to do but to take it, to endure the humiliation of her wound.
At first she declined to take it; it was much easier to consider that her visitor was a monstrous masquerader. On the face of the matter, moreover, it was not fair to believe till one heard; and to hear in such a case was to hear Godfrey himself. Whatever his sister had tried to imagine about him she had not arrived at anything so belittling as an idiotic secret marriage with a dyed and painted hag. Adela repeated this last word as if it gave her some comfort; and indeed where everything was so bad fifteen years of seniority made the case little worse. Miss Flynn was portentous, for Miss Flynn had had it out with the wretch. She had cross-questioned her and had not broken her down. This was the most important hour of Miss Flynn’s life; for whereas she usually had to content herself with being humbly and gloomily in the right, she could now be magnanimously and showily so. Her only perplexity was as to what she ought to do – write to Colonel Chart or go up to town to see him. She bloomed with alternatives, never having known the like before. Toward evening Adela was obliged to recognise that Godfrey’s worry, of which he had spoken to her, had appeared bad enough to consist even of a low wife, and to remember that, so far from its being inconceivable that a young man in his position should clandestinely take one, she had been present, years before, during her mother’s lifetime, when Lady Molesley declared gaily, over a cup of tea, that this was precisely what she expected of her eldest son. The next morning it was the worst possibilities that seemed the clearest; the only thing left with a tatter of dusky comfort being the ambiguity of Godfrey’s charge that his sister’s action had ‘done’ for him. That was a matter by itself, and she racked her brains for a connecting link between Mrs Churchley and Mrs Godfrey. At last she made up her mind that they were related by blood; very likely, though differing in fortune, they were cousins or even sisters. But even then what did her brother mean?
Arrested by the unnatural fascination of opportunity, Miss Flynn received before lunch a telegram from Colonel Chart – an order for dinner and a vehicle; he and Godfrey were to arrive at six o’clock. Adela had plenty of occupation for the interval, for she was pitying her father when she was not rejoicing that her mother had gone too soon to know. She flattered herself she discerned the providential reason of that cruelty now. She found time however still to wonder for what purpose, under the circumstances, Godfrey was to be brought down. She was not unconscious, it is true, that she had little general knowledge of what usually was done with young men in that predicament. One talked about the circumstances, but the circumstances were an abyss. She felt this still more when she found, on her father’s arrival, that nothing, apparently, was to happen as she had taken for granted it would. There was a kind of inviolable hush over the whole affair, but no tragedy, no publicity, nothing ugly. The tragedy had been in town, and the faces of the two men spoke of it, in spite of themselves; so that at present there was only a family dinner, with Beatrice and Muriel and the governess, and almost a company tone, the result of the desire to avoid publicity. Adela admired her father; she knew what he was feeling, if Mrs Godfrey had been at him, and yet she saw him positively gallant. He was very gentle, he never looked at his son, and there were moments when he seemed almost sick with sadness. Godfrey was equally inscrutable and therefore wholly different from what he had been as he stood before her in the park. If he was to start on his career (with such a wife! – wouldn’t she utterly blight it?) he was already professional enough to know how to wear a mask.
Before they rose from table the girl was wholly bewildered, so little could she perceive the effects of such large causes. She had nerved herself for a great ordeal, but the air was as sweet as an anodyne. It was constantly plain to her that her father was deadly sad – as pathetic as a creature jilted. He was broken, but he showed no resentment; there was a weight on his heart, but he had lightened it by dressing as immaculately as usual for dinner. She asked herself what immensity of a row there could have been in town to have left his anger so spent. He went through everything, even to sitting with his son after dinner. When they came out together he invited Beatrice and Muriel to the billiard-room; and as Miss Flynn discreetly withdrew Adela was left alone with Godfrey, who was completely changed and not in a rage any more. He was broken, too, but he was not so pathetic as his father. He was only very correct and apologetic; he said to his sister, ‘I’m awfully sorry you were annoyed; it was something I never dreamed of.’
She couldn’t think immediately what he meant; then she grasped the reference to the yellow hair. She was uncertain, however, what tone to take; perhaps his father had arranged with him that they were to make the best of it. But she spoke her own despair in the way she murmured: ‘O Godfrey, Godfrey, is it true?’
‘I’ve been the most unutterable donkey – you can say what you like to me. You can’t say anything worse than I’ve said to myself.’
‘My brother, my brother!’ his words made her moan. He hushed her with a movement, and she asked, ‘What has father said?’
Godfrey looked over her head. ‘He’ll give her six hundred a year.’
‘Ah, the angel!’
‘On condition she never comes near me. She has solemnly promised; and she’ll probably leave me alone, to get the money. If she doesn’t – in diplomacy – I’m lost.’ The young man had been turning his eyes vaguely about, this way and that, to avoid meeting hers; but after another instant he gave up the effort, and she had the miserable confession of his glance. ‘I’ve been living in hell,’ he said.
‘My brother, my brother!’ she repeated.
‘I’m not an idiot; yet for her I’ve behaved like one. Don’t ask me – you mustn’t know. It was all done in a day, and since then, fancy my condition – fancy my work!’
‘Thank God you passed!’ cried Adela.
‘I would have shot myself if I hadn’t. I had an awful day yesterday with father; it was late at night before it was over. I leave England next week. He brought me down here for it to look well – so that the children sha’n’t know.’
‘He’s wonderful!’ she murmured.
‘He’s wonderful!’ said Godfrey.
‘Did she tell him?’ the girl asked.
‘She came straight to Seymour Street from here. She saw him alone first; then he called me in. That luxury lasted about an hour.’
Adela said, ‘Poor, poor father!’ to this; on which her brother remained silent. Then, after he had remarked that it had been the scene he had lived in terror of all through his cramming, and she had stammered her pity and admiration at such a mixture of anxieties and such a triumph of talent, she demanded: ‘Have you told him?’
‘Told him what?’
‘What you said you would – what I did.’
Godfrey turned away as if at present he had very little interest in that inferior tribulation. ‘I was angr
y with you, but I cooled off. I held my tongue.’
Adela clasped her hands. ‘You thought of mamma!’
‘Oh, don’t speak of mamma,’ said the young man tenderly.
It was indeed not a happy moment; and she murmured: ‘No; if you had thought of her –’
This made Godfrey turn back at her, with a little flare in his eyes. ‘Oh, then it didn’t prevent. I thought that woman was good. I believed in her.’
‘Is she very bad?’ his sister inquired.
‘I shall never mention her to you again,’ Godfrey answered, with dignity.
‘You may believe that I won’t speak of her. So father doesn’t know?’ she added.
‘Doesn’t know what?’
‘That I said that to Mrs Churchley.’
‘I don’t think so, but you must find out for yourself.’
‘I shall find out,’ said Adela. ‘But what had Mrs Churchley to do with it?’
‘With my misery? I told her. I had to tell some one.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Godfrey hesitated. ‘Oh, you take things so beastly hard – you make such rows.’ Adela covered her face with her hands, and he went on: ‘What I wanted was comfort – not to be lashed up. I thought I should go mad. I wanted Mrs Churchley to break it to father, to intercede for me and help him to meet it. She was awfully kind to me; she listened and she understood; she could fancy how it had happened. Without her I shouldn’t have pulled through. She liked me, you know,’ Godfrey dropped. ‘She said she would do what she could for me; she was full of sympathy and resource; I really leaned on her. But when you cut in, of course it spoiled everything. That’s why I was so angry with you. She couldn’t do anything then.’
Adela dropped her hands, staring; she felt that she had walked in darkness. ‘So that he had to meet it alone?’
‘Dame!’ said Godfrey, who had got up his French tremendously.
Muriel came to the door to say papa wished the two others to join them, and the next day Godfrey returned to town. His father remained at Overland, without an intermission, the rest of the summer and the whole of the autumn, and Adela had a chance to find out, as she had said, whether he knew that she had interfered. But in spite of her chance she never found out. He knew that Mrs Churchley had thrown him over and he knew that his daughter rejoiced in it, but he appeared not to have divined the relation between the two facts. It was strange that one of the matters he was clearest about – Adela’s secret triumph – should have been just the thing which, from this time on, justified less and less such a confidence. She was too sorry for him to be consistently glad. She watched his attempts to wind himself up on the subject of shorthorns and drainage, and she favoured to the utmost of her ability his intermittent disposition to make a figure in orchids. She wondered whether they mightn’t have a few people at Overland; but when she mentioned the idea her father asked what in the world there would be to attract them. It was a confoundedly stupid house, he remarked, with all respect to her cleverness. Beatrice and Muriel were mystified; the prospect of going out immensely had faded so utterly away. They were apparently not to go out at all. Colonel Chart was aimless and bored; he paced up and down and went back to smoking, which was bad for him, and looked drearily out of windows, as if on the bare chance that something might arrive. Did he expect Mrs Churchley to arrive, to relent? It was Adela’s belief that she gave no sign. But the girl thought it really remarkable of her not to have betrayed her ingenious young visitor. Adela’s judgement of human nature was perhaps harsh, but she believed that many women, under the circumstances, would not have been so forbearing. This lady’s conception of the point of honour presented her as rather a higher type than one might have supposed.