Every Sunday Mrs. Findon went with her two stepdaughters to the
cemetery and put flowers on the grave. Every Sunday since her husband's
death she had done so--every Sunday for four years, excepting during
the month of August, which was passed in the unattractive village where
his widowed sister lived. When the melancholy walk was over and they
had returned to the house, the Misses Findon used to sit on either
side of the fireplace, moist-eyed, and slightly pink about the noses,
speaking at long intervals in subdued tones; and their young stepmother
would gaze from the window, wondering whether the pretence of mourning
a husband she had not loved was to be her lot for life.
When she was twenty her father had said to her, "Belle, Mr. Findon
wants to marry you. Don't look like that. He is much older than you
are, of course, and it isn't the ideal, but what have you got to look
forward to? I'm a pauper, and we both know I can't last much longer,
and when I've gone you'll be all alone. How are you to live? You'll be
left with about fifty pounds, and waste some of that on crape. It's a
ghastly thing for me to lie here and know you'll soon be destitute.
He's decent enough in a dull way, and if you were to marry him I should
feel I had a right to die."
So she had married him; and Mr. Findon had endeavoured to mould her
disposition to his requirements. He moulded so much that it seemed to
her he must lament that she wasn't an entirely different person, and
she wondered why he had asked her to be his wife. The provincial town
to which he took her was depressing, and the furniture and ornaments of
his house made her want to shriek, and the people who paid her visits
never mentioned any subject that had any interest for her.
More dejecting than the visitors were her step-children. To the two
colourless schoolgirls--Amy, fourteen years of age, Mildred nearly
sixteen--she had turned eagerly; turned achingly, because no child
of her own came to lighten the gloom; and for long she had striven to
believe that the slowness of their minds was due to their environment.
"They need waking up," she would think, and exhausted herself in
efforts to make them fluent. But she found that nothing that was done
could make them fluent. And as they grew older, she found that nothing
that was said could make them laugh. They laughed only when the wind
blew somebody's hat off.
They were sandy, undemonstrative girls, and they had manifested no
great affection for their father till he died suddenly five years
after the marriage. Then, however, the words "dear father" were for
ever on their lips, and a strain of unsuspected sentiment in their
nature had opposed itself morbidly to the slightest departure from any
domestic arrangement that he had desired. She still remembered Amy's
pained stare, and Mildred's startled "I don't think dear father would
have liked that!" when she had diffidently proposed to transfer a
huge photograph of his mother from the drawing-room wall to the spare
bedroom. She still reproached herself for her compliant "Oh, I won't,
then, of course." It was among the first of the concessions that had
made the house seem to her a sepulchre. By her stepdaughters' wish,
nothing had been altered in his study--not the position of an armchair,
or of the footstool. Even to the pipes on the table, and a gum-bottle
on the mantelpiece, the room, which was never used now, remained as he
had left it last. And every morning for four years she had accompanied
Mildred and Amy solemnly to the threshold, and regarded the armchair
and the pipes with an air of reverence; and afterwards sat down to
breakfast, thinking that the girls looked as if they had been to the
funeral over again. At the beginning, if she had not shrunk from
wounding them, she might have hinted that that piece of hypocrisy was
horrible to her. Now she could do so no more than she could hint that
she did not want to feign bereavement in the cemetery every Sunday,
or to take an annual change that was made doleful by the triteness
of Aunt Harriet, and the presence of her invalid son. At the age of
five-and-twenty, the gentleness and weakness of the woman had committed
her to act a lie. At the age of twenty-nine, the woman reflected
miserably that, unless her stepdaughters married, she would have to act
the lie for life.
The oppressive thought was no new one--and she had asked stupid people
to dinner, and accepted invitations to wearisome households. She
had urged Mildred and Amy to join the golf and tennis clubs, though
they were apathetic about golf and tennis, and she usually took them
to London to buy their frocks, instead of to the local High Street.
But girls less becomingly dressed had got married, and no young man
had paid any attentions to Mildred or Amy. Though Mildred was but
twenty-five, and Amy only twenty-three, both had already the air of
girls destined for spinsterhood. Sometimes, as she regarded their
premature primness, she found it impossible to suppose that proposals
would ever come to them, impossible to picture either of the staid,
angular figures in a man's arms. Timidly, once, when her dread of a
lifetime spent in Beckenhampton had grown unbearable, she had nerved
herself to suggesting a removal. "Don't you think we should find it
brighter to live somewhere else?" she had pleaded. "In London we should
have concerts, and pictures and things."
"London?" Amy had faltered, with dismay. "Oh, no, I shouldn't like that
at all."
"Well, it needn't be London, then; but there are nicer towns than
this. What do _you_ think, Mildred?"
"I'm sure we could, none of us, be as happy as we are at home," said
Mildred in a shocked voice. "It would seem dreadful to leave the home
where dear father used to be with us."
And the little stepmother, her hope extinguished, had found herself
murmuring, "Yes, of course, there _is_ that, I know." The terms of
their father's will had made the house more theirs than hers; it seemed
to her that she lacked the right to persist, even if she could have
felt sanguine of persistence prevailing. But what she lacked most of
all, of course, was courage. She was good-natured, she was charming,
she had some beautiful qualities, but she was without the force of mind
to oppose anybody. She was a tender, lovable, and exasperating coward.
That is to say, she would have been exasperating if there had been
anyone to regret her cowardice, anyone to care much whether she was
miserable or not.
And then, one summer, after Mildred had influenza, the doctor
recommended Harrogate, instead of the dismal village--and the
possibility of Harrogate yielding husbands to the girls quickened the
woman's heart. In the season there, among so many men--mightn't there
be two to find Mildred and Amy congenial?
It was she, not they, who pondered so carefully and paid so much for
the morning, afternoon, and evening dresses in which they lagged about
a fashionable hydro a fortnight later. It was she, not they, who knew
a throb of hope when either of them danced twice, monosyllabically,
with the same partner, and who welcomed their opportunity to play in an
amateur performance, with its attraction of daily rehearsals.
"I don't think we care much for acting," Amy demurred. "I think we
would rather look on, like you."
"Dr. Roberts said that Mildred needed to be taken out of herself; if
_you_ don't go in for it, _she_ won't. Oh, I should say yes. It is sure
to be a lot of fun, you know."
"I don't think that Mildred and I care much for fun," demurred Amy.
However, the Misses Findon attended the rehearsals--with the dramatic
instinct possessed by pasteboard figures on a toy stage. And blankly
their stepmother noted that, though young men were ambitious of
"polishing their scenes" in alcoves, at various hours, with other
girls, no young man's histrionic fervour urged him to any spontaneous
polishing with Mildred or Amy.
The thing that did happen at Harrogate was unlooked-for: a man
displayed considerable interest in Mrs. Findon herself.
They had spoken first in the hall, where he was sitting when she came
out of the breakfast-room with the girls one morning; and on subsequent
mornings they had all loitered for ten minutes in the hall; and then,
when the rehearsals prevented Mildred and Amy from loitering, she had
paused awhile without them. One day, when the rehearsal took place
after luncheon, she was surprised to find that she had sat talking to
him the whole afternoon. But though their tone had long since grown
informal and they talked spontaneously, though he had told her he
was in the last fortnight of his leave from India and spoken of his
prospects of a judgeship there, she did not realise how far their
acquaintance had progressed until he said to her, "You don't look like
a happy woman, and yet it doesn't sound to me as if your husband had
been all the world to you. If it isn't the loss of your husband that's
weighing on you, what's the matter?"
She gazed at him, startled. And still stranger to her than the boldness
of his question, was the intimacy of her reply, after she had made it.
"Mr. Murray, I'm _not_ a happy woman."
From that moment they were not acquaintances--they were friends.
Piecemeal he learnt her story, and perceived the weakness of her
character. And their confidences were more frequent and prolonged
after a hurried letter from Aunt Harriet, saying that "her dear boy
had passed away, and that it would help her to bear her cross if dear
Mildred and Amy would go to her for two or three days." A week slid by,
and they were with her still. And meanwhile Mr. Murray and Mrs. Findon
fell in love with each other.
It was her first breath of romance. A father's ailments, encompassing
her girlhood, had excluded sentimental episodes. To marriage she had
been moved by nothing but docility. She would soon be thirty--and for
the first time she found a strange pulsating promise in the birds'
twittering when she woke; lingered at a looking-glass, and turned back
to it, that a man might approve. She eyed intently time's touches on
her face, noting with new sensitiveness that it showed her age. She
knew, for the first time, restlessness if one man was absent; and if he
was present, knew impatience of all others who were present too. And
she sparkled at her own blitheness; and but for the recurring thought
that it would all be over soon, she lived in Eden for a week.
* * * * *
They had been speaking of her stepdaughters, and he had said, "The
first time I saw you with them I wondered what the relationship was.
You can't have much in common with them? You must have hoped to see
them marry, haven't you?"
"Do you think they will?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't know. It doesn't follow, because one finds no charm in
a girl oneself, that nobody else will find any. I've known men crazy
about women that I wouldn't have turned my head to look at--and men
that were by no means fools. Isn't there anybody in Beckenhampton?"
"There aren't many chances for a girl in Beckenhampton. Besides, they
don't care for young men's society--that's one of the reasons why men
don't find much to say to them, I think. I hoped something might come
of their staying here, but----"
"But a man has wanted to talk to _you_, instead."