WAITING
Brummels,
Carchester, Sept. 26th, 19--.
MY DEAR EDWARD,
I have to thank you for your second letter, and for your cheque for
L7,000, which I cannot now refuse, but which, upon my soul, I don't
know what to do with. If I buy another necklace with it, I publish to
the world--or to such part of it as will see the pearls upon my wife's
neck--what I intend to keep even from the partner of my joys and
sorrows herself. If only a certain young woman had been able to bring
herself to consent to the proposal made to her, the difficulty might
have been got over by adding to _her_ stock of trinkets. But it is of
no use to cry over that, and my little friend Joan will assuredly have
considered herself justified in her refusal by the somewhat startling
suddenness with which the illustrious Robert consoled himself for her
loss. These affairs move too quickly for me in my old age. The young
woman whom I now have the honour to call daughter-in-law is all that
could be wished from the point of view of health and high spirits, and
I have nothing against her. But I do not feel impelled to hang an
extra seven thousand pounds' worth of pearls round her neck. If that
is a criticism on her, so be it. But she is not Joan. She is very far
from being Joan.
I have much news for you, my dear Edward, which only my inveterate
habit of procrastination has caused to be left till now.
The woman fastened upon Mary at Harrogate. This must have been after
she had given up all idea of getting anything out of you. No doubt she
followed her to that invigorating resort, and it is unfortunate that my
poor wife should not be able to drink her waters of bitterness without
being frightened out of her five wits by _that_ resurrection.
Fortunately I was within hail, and arrived on the scene in time to deal
with the situation. I gathered from her account of her interview with
you--my poor friend, what you must have gone through!--that you had
very loyally exonerated me from all possibility of blame or
misunderstanding, and I was pleased to be able in some sort to repay
that loyalty. I did not lie, Edward--at least not to her. What fine
adjustments of veracity one may have made later, in connubial intimacy,
let no man presume to sit in judgment upon. I had received your first
letter. I said neither yea nor nay, but rang the changes upon a
monotonous charge of her having tried to extort money from you. It was
the first line of defence, and I had no other. But she never got
behind it. There is a bland but dogged persistency in my nature which
ought to have carried me far. It carried me to the point of driving
her to uncontrollable rage, which is something of a triumph in itself.
To Mary I said before her, "This lady may not have stolen your
necklace. You have her word for it. I have the word of my friend,
Edward Clinton, that she asked him for money to stop her from spreading
the report that his daughter-in-law stole it. She is dead and cannot
defend herself. Also, Edward Clinton refused to give her any money.
These two facts are enough for me. I recognise this lady's existence
for the last time. I do not presume to dictate your actions, but if
you are wise I think you will do the same."
We got rid of her, and she left Harrogate the next morning. I let her
know, by the bye, that you held a letter from her admitting the fact
that she had made demands on you and that you had refused them; and you
may tell your son that she probably regrets having written that letter
as much as any she ever wrote. It is a master weapon.
Well, that is the attitude I shall take up--my wife too, although she
will talk a great deal, and be swayed by whatever opinion may be held
by whatever person she talks to. There is _bound_ to be talk, and a
great deal of talk. You cannot help that. But it will die down. Deny
nothing, admit nothing, except that you refused to pay her money. That
is my advice to you.
They say that Colne is going to marry her. Birds of a feather! He is,
at any rate, hot--spirituously so--in his defence of her, and in his
offence against you and yours. I met him passing through London; for
the sins of my youth I still belong to the Bit and Bridle Club, and I
went there for the first time for I should think twenty years, and fell
upon him imbibing. Rather, he fell upon me, and _I_ fell upon my
parrot-cry. "If you have any influence over that lady," I said to him,
"I should advise you to advise her to keep quiet. She _would_ have
kept quiet--for money. It is known that she asked for it, and the less
it has cause to be stated, the better for what reputation she has."
I left my lord in the maudlin stage, crying out upon the world's
iniquity, of which he has considerable first-hand knowledge; but when
he comes to what senses he still possesses he will, I hope, remember my
advice. Let him marry the lady, by all means. She will have what
protection she deserves, and there will be some who will accept her.
They will cross neither my path nor yours, for our orbits and those of
Colne do not intersect.
Finally, my old friend, set your teeth against what must come, and
never lose sight of the fact that it will pass. You have been
remarkably tried, and have escaped more pit-falls than could have been
expected of any fallible mortal. There are no more in front of you,
and all you have to do is to walk straight on with your usual stride.
Ever very sincerely yours,
SEDBERGH.
This letter gave the Squire some comfort. It contained almost the
first definite news he had had. He had been living in that
uncomfortable state in which the mind is wrought up to meet trouble
which is bound to come, and the trouble tarries. Every morning he had
arisen with the anticipation of the storm breaking; every night he had
lain down, having lived through such a day as he might have lived at
this season of the year for the last forty years. The storm had not
broken yet.
Was it too much to hope that it would, after all, pass over?
He looked up from the letter with that enquiry in his mind. But his
face soon clouded again. Though not in the full downpour, he was
already caught by it.
Poor little Joan! She knew. She was going about the house, trying
hard to be as bright as usual. Sometimes he heard her singing. That
was when she passed the door behind which he was sitting. She came in
to him much more freely than she had ever done, and sat and talked to
him. His daughters had never done that, nor his sons very frequently,
with the exception of Dick. It was an empty house now. He and Joan
and Mrs. Clinton were a good deal together. Joan had even persuaded
him to take her out cubbing. None of the Clinton girls had ever been
allowed to ride to hounds; but there were so many horses in the stable,
and so few people to ride them now, that he had given way. But he had
only been out cubbing twice himself this season. He was getting too
old, he said. He had never said that of himself before, about
anything, which was why Joan had pressed him to take her. But three
times it had happened that she had risen at dawn, and Mrs. Clinton had
come in to her and said that her father had not slept all night, but
was sleeping now, and had better be allowed to sleep on.
Joan had heard nothing from her young lover since the letter had been
written asking him to postpone his visit. She said nothing to anybody
about him, but went about the house as usual, singing sometimes.
There had been one day amongst the young birds, in which Sir Herbert
Birkett, Jim Graham, and Walter only had assisted from outside Kencote.
The Squire could not bring himself to ask his neighbours to shoot, nor
to shoot with them. The strain was too great. On his tall horse by
the covert-side, in those early meets of the hounds, he had always been
on the look-out for suspicion and avoidance, and fancied them when they
had not been there. But the news might come at any moment, filtering
through any one of a score of channels to this retired backwater of
meadow and wood and stream, and darkening it, to him whose whole life
had been spent in its pleasant ways, with shameful rumour.
It had been settled that life was to go on as usual at Kencote. But he
had lost the spring of his courage. Even if no one outside knew of his
dishonour, he knew of it himself. When the trouble came he would face
it with what courage he could. In the meantime he kept more and more
to the house, where he sat in his room, over the fire, reading the
papers, or doing nothing.
His half-brother, the Rector, came often to see him. He was some years
the younger of the two, but for years had looked the older, until now.
The Squire was ageing under his trial. He had lost his confident,
upright bearing, shambled just a very little when he walked, and
carried his head a trifle forward. His face was beginning to lose its
healthy ruddiness, and his beard was whiter, or seemed so.
The two men had always been good friends, but were as unlike in
character and pursuits as possible. The Rector was gentle and
retiring, a little bit of a scholar, a little bit of a naturalist,
gardener, musician, artist. He had no sporting tastes, but liked the
country and lived all the year round in his comfortable Rectory. He
was not a Clinton, but had been so long in their atmosphere that their
interests were largely his. He had been one of the first to be told of
the catastrophe. He had made no comments on it, but had shown his
sympathy by many kind but unobtrusive words and acts.
He came in as the Squire was sitting with Lord Sedbergh's letter in his
hand.
"Well, my dear Edward," he said, "it is such a lovely morning that I
was tempted out of my study. It is my sermon morning, and I shall have
a good one to preach to you on Sunday. I was in the vein. I shall go
back to it with renewed interest."
"I've had a letter that may interest you," said the Squire. "In a way
it seems to shed a gleam of light. But I don't know. Things are black
enough. It's this waiting for the blow to fall that is so wretched. I
had rather, almost, that everyone knew."
The Rector read through the letter carefully and handed it back.
"If nothing but the truth is to be told...!" he said.
"You mean that won't be so bad for us. It does look as if there might
be a chance of her not telling more than the truth, for her own sake.
If she is going to marry that creature! Colne! Bah! What mud we're
mixed up with! To think it rests with a man like that to keep her
quiet!"
"Is he so bad?" enquired the Rector.
"Bad! The sort of man that makes his order a by-word, for all the
world to spit upon. I should think even you must have some knowledge
of him. His first wife divorced him; his second died because he
ill-treated her."
"Is that known?"
"Yes. In the way these things _are_ known."
"He was Hubert Legrange, wasn't he? He was in my tutor's house at
Eton--after your time. He wasn't bad then--high-spirited, troublesome,
perhaps--that was all. But warm-hearted--merry. I liked him."
"Ah, my dear Tom! That's the sad thing, when you get to our age. To
see the men you've known as boys--how some of them turn out! I've
sometimes thought lately that I ought to have been more grateful to God
Almighty for keeping me free from a good many temptations I might have
had. I married young; I settled down here; it was what suited me. But
I see now that those tastes were given to me for my good. If it hadn't
been for that I might have gone wrong just as well as another. I had
money from the moment I came of age. I could have done what I liked.
Money's a great temptation to a young fellow."
The Rector hardly knew whether to be pleased or sorry at this vein of
moralising that had lately come over his brother. It showed his mind
working as he might have wished to see it work, towards humility and a
more lively faith; but it also showed him deeply affected by the waves
that were passing over his head; and the waves were black and heavy.
"What you say is very true," he said. "God keep us all faithful, as He
kept you, Edward. You were tempted, and you were upheld. You see that
now, I think."
"I thought," said the poor Squire after a pause, "that God was working
to avert this disgrace from me. Everything seemed to have been
ordered, in a way that was almost miraculous, to that end. It was just
when I was shaking off the last uncomfortable thoughts about it, when
everything seemed most bright for the future, that the blow fell.
Well, I suppose it was to be, and it will come right for us all in the
end; though I don't think I shall know a happy moment again as long as
I live. I was living in a fool's paradise. I don't quite understand
it, Tom."
The Rector thought he did. A fool's paradise is a paradise that the
fool makes for himself, and when he is driven out of it blames a higher
power. He was not inclined to think his brother the worse off, in all
that really mattered, for having been driven out of his paradise. But
it was a little difficult to tell him so.
The necessity was spared him for the moment. Dick came in, and was
shown the letter.
"I think that is the way things will work," he said. "She will be
repulsed by decent people, and she will come to see that whatever mud
she stirs up, more than half of it will stick to her. If she marries
Colne--or even if she only clings on to him as her champion--he'll come
to see, if he has any sense, that the less she talks the better."
"He would want to see her cleared," said the Rector.
"Yes, and that's our difficulty. Sedbergh is very good; but I don't
like it, all the same."
"Don't like what?" asked the Squire.
"I wish to God we could come out into the open." He spoke with strong
impatience. "She's in the wrong. Yes. Scandalously in the wrong--a
blackmailer, everything you like to say of her. But she's also in the
right, and that's just where she can hurt us--where she _is_ hurting
us."
"Has anything happened?" asked the Squire anxiously.
"Yes. It's reached us at last. It's creeping like a blight all over
the country--above ground, underground. It will crop up where you
never could have expected. And what satisfactory answer can we give,
without telling the truth, and the whole truth?"
"Tell us what has happened," said the Squire.
"I went into Bathgate, to Brooks, the saddler. I always have a talk
with the _old_ man, if he's in the shop; and he was there alone. He
hummed and ha'd a lot, and said there was a story going about that he
thought I ought to know of. And what do you think the story was?
Humphrey stole the necklace and gave it to Mrs. Amberley. Susan found
it out and it killed her. You gave Humphrey money on condition he
never showed his face in England again. That's the sort of thing we
are up against."
The Squire's face was a sight to see. The Rector relieved the tension
by laughing, but not very merrily.
"That story won't hurt us," he said.
"That's all very well, Tom," said Dick. "It wouldn't hurt us if there
was nothing behind. But what can you say? It's a lie. Yes. And you
say so. What do you look like, when you say it? Brooks didn't believe
it, of course. But he knew well enough there was _something_, or he
wouldn't have told me. How did it come? Who knows? He heard it in
the 'George.' They were talking of us. They'll be talking of us all
over Bathgate; then all over the country. Trace that story back, and
you'll get something nearer the truth. That will spread into another
story. There will be many different stories."
"They will contradict one another," said the Rector.
"Yes. And everyone who hears or tells us of them will want to know
exactly where the truth lies. It will all go on behind our backs; but
every now and then somebody, out of real consideration to us, as I
think old Brooks told me, or out of impudent curiosity, will bring it
to our notice. Then what are we to say? Oh, why can't we tell the
truth?"
"We can't," said the Squire, rousing himself. "We can only contradict
the lies. Well, now it has come, I am ready for it. I'll go to
Brooks. I'll talk to him. I'll go and sit on the Bench. I've been
sitting here doing nothing--shirking. I'm glad it has come at last."