Impelled by the sudden fruition of all that was morbid in his nature,
Wald Ensor, towards the end of the year, married Mary Adelaide
Frances, the widow of J. Dibben, Esq. It is a fact that until he
bestirred himself to apply for the licence, he had not known the name
of the father of Phillis. Adelaide never refused but seemed to prefer
not to speak of him. Ensor supposed that Dibben, a healthy, ordinary
man of no preponderating degree of intellect, had quickly managed to
alienate and embitter a capricious, easily-bored woman like Adelaide.
He was too modest to imagine that he himself amused her or interested
her to any great extent, but at all events, he thought she considered
him adequate. In his company, she appeared to find the nearest
approach, for her, to a state of repose. She took possession of him,
body and soul. He realized it faintly. She even seemed to have made
some slight sacrifice of her individuality with a view to enslaving
him completely. Though to every one else her manner was curt,
unpleasant and at times unbearably arrogant, she stayed her savage
tongue and curbed her domineering temper whenever it came in direct
contact with her husband. And even had she allowed her natural
acerbity full play, the fact that she was now about to become a mother
for the second time, called forth all Ensor’s chivalry and tenderness.
He rejoiced greatly at his approaching paternity. The want that had
been created deep in his heart by the premature death of his child out
in California was about to be completely satisfied; the void that for
lack of a better he had filled with Adelaide’s child, Phillis Dibben,
he had adopted openly; while, secretly, Mary, her foster sister, as he
in his heart called her, was far dearer to him. Phillis Dibben was
unsympathetic, he did not think hers was altogether a nice nature, but
still she was a child, and Ensor’s love of children was a real and
true sentiment.
Though Adelaide and he had met first on the common ground of their
philoprogenitive instinct, Ensor had come to suspect that his own was
the truer development of it. Adelaide admired healthy, presentable
specimens of the class only, and the beauty of Phillis as an
undeniable guarantee of her own Eugenical perfection afforded the
amount of toll to her vanity, the satisfaction of her pride that was
needed to evoke the motherly in her. It was the only motive that
swayed her, Ensor thought. Or else why did she so neglect the cook’s
unhappy progeny, the child she had begun by petting, and more or less
treating as her own? He could not forget that he had seen Mary, now
degraded to a servant, on the day he had come across her in Beverley,
sitting in the car with Adelaide’s own child. The turn was too sudden.
It outraged his sense of decency.
Ensor, whose large heart was capable, where children were concerned,
of embracing the halt and the maimed and the eugenically incorrect,
could hardly endure to let the question stand over till Adelaide was
more fit to deal with it. He constrained himself to do so, however,
and contented himself with speaking kindly to the little girl whenever
he met her on the stairs or in the corridors. She did not walk, she
crawled; he had an idea she was slightly deformed? He realized that it
was Mary he had stumbled over that first morning as she knelt by a
side door into the garden, feebly scouring some stone steps. Her
translation from the padded seat of the car to the hard stones she was
washing had been so sudden that he could not easily conceive it to be
she.
After a while he did speak to Adelaide. She made no mystery of it. She
was a woman of her word, and Mary’s play days were over. Yes, it was
true, she had until then been more or less brought up with Phillis,
had shared her room and her meals and walks and games. It had pleased
Phillis, but she could not sacrifice a child’s whole future even to
please Phillis, so now that was over. With a sort of fiendish
rationalism and want of consistency, she condemned a child brought up,
through her caprice, in comparative ease and idleness, to do the rough
work of the house, eat inferior food, worst of all, she subtracted her
from all the softening educative influences to which she had been
accustomed.
He listened, tapping his boot with his riding-whip. He said nothing.
He thought it over. If only the child could hold on, it would of
course be as well not to worry Adelaide just now, but wait till she
had got safely over her forthcoming experience, always a severe mental
trial to women of her temperament. Then, surely, milder counsels might
prevail; he might get Mary reinstated, a kind of foster sister to
Phillis, and that was what he would like best. Oh, very much best, for
he had the greatest, the most absurd, tenderness for the ugly, sad
unchildish child! But if that were impossible, if her mistress still
refused to allow it, Mary might at least be taken out of this and sent
away to some bright, well-managed school, or home of her own class, to
be properly trained and educated. He did not like the notion of her
being brought up to be a servant, she did not look as if she would
ever be strong enough. But there were other professions. He would
see----?
Meantime he did what he could for the child, and that was very little.
She never appeared in the better part of the house that the red baize
door shut off, and he sometimes fancied that Adelaide disliked to see
him cross the threshold of it into the other. Yet the oldest and most
interesting part of High Walls lay beyond, and Ensor was something of
an antiquary, where architecture was concerned. He did not want to
annoy his wife, however, and he was careful to conduct his
architectural investigations from the back, where the historical
portions of the house were situated. There Mary’s work lay, and he
often spied her at her task of ablution on steps and hearth stones,
armed with a pail and a piece of bath-brick, feebly scouring, swirling
a wet rag about, ineffectually spreading long spiderlike arms in a
radius of their length all round her and producing a dull wet surface,
to be succeeded by a bright brown sanded one, where before all was
dull, unvisited dust or dirt. She had terribly long arms for a child
of her size and age, and she was moreover, he noticed, left-handed
like himself. He would stand there for quite a long time looking down
on her rusty red ribbon top-knot, knowing that the child was aware of
him, but was far too well drilled to look up and crave his notice. How
had they managed to transmogrify her so quickly, from a sort of foster
sister to Phillis, sleeping with Phillis, driving about in the motor
with Phillis and her mother, into the submissive drudge who never
looked up till he spoke to her, and then with a sad cowed expression
that went to his heart?
If she were actually carrying a heavy pail, too heavy for her or
trailing a broom long enough for a person twice her height, he
considered he was justified in taking the pail or the broom away from
her at once and trying to learn from her the place where she wished it
to be deposited. It was difficult to get her to speak at all, and she
got shyer as the days went on. He felt, manlike, that he could
scarcely offer to go down on his knees and scrub the stone floor in
her stead, but he would have liked to do so, for he realized that it
was not a child’s work. He fancied that the School Board, if they were
aware that one of their prey was thus day by day removed from every
form of school training, might have something to say about it, and
dreaded some sort of exposure for Adelaide. Mary was given no tuition
of any kind; he was sure of it. High Walls was five miles away from
Market Weighton, and though in the nearest hamlet, consisting of a few
cottages, there was a school that was half-a-mile distant, Mary never
went beyond the garden, if indeed she got any fresh air at all.
The place was curiously self-contained, in its girdling walls.
Adelaide did her own marketing in the motor, tradesmen never
penetrated within their circumference. As it used to be said of the
house in Portland Place that anything might go on there, so it might
be said of High Walls. Adelaide had perhaps chosen to live here,
perhaps through some affectionate analogy with the home of her birth
and the house in which her mother had died. She had bought High Walls
outright, so he learned, she made her own gas, she kept her own fowls
and her own cows, and she ordered her clothes from Paris, fetching
large wooden boxes that had crossed the seas, from the station
herself, in the ever useful motor. In everything she did there was a
_brusquerie_, a jerkiness, a suggestion of eccentricity.
There was no doubt that for one reason or another, from austerity,
shyness and love of solitude, or simply from lack of social instinct,
Adelaide had succeeded in creating a human vacuum all round her, an
area sterilized of gossip. Since their marriage, before the registrar,
three months ago, Mrs. Ensor, her husband felt pretty sure, had had no
visitors. As a matter of fact, Ensor knew of three people who said
they had driven or motored out to High Walls to pay their respects to
the lady he had married, but even if they had done so, admittance was
probably refused them. These were the wives of men that Ensor had met
about in Market Weighton or Beverley, and who had enjoined their women
folk to call on the queer, uncivilized woman whom this gentle,
civilized man that they rather liked, had married. It was easy for
Ensor to see that she was not popular. If people even realized her
previous existence, they forbore to talk of her, and the call was only
a tribute to his own charm and obvious pleasant gentlemanliness. For
he was a man’s man, a man whom women are apt to find dull. But as
Adelaide never went out, never returned a call, never expected to be
asked to anything, it was easy enough to be civil to the husband, and
make him free of what there was of Society in these sleepy little
market towns. Before very long Wald Ensor belonged to the Conservative
Club of Beverley, and was put on the Library Committee of that active
little place, while in Weighton he played golf, and adjudged prizes.
The wives’ drawing-rooms knew him not or hardly at all, he could not
very well go about among the women without Adelaide, and he did not
choose to do so.
He constrained himself to be more or less active in whatever was
going, to fulfil his trivial duties as a citizen when they came his
way, partly from a sense of duty, partly, he fancied, because the
monotony of his existence at High Walls was slowly sapping his
vitality, dulling his good temper and sense of good fellowship. The
desire to travel again sometimes came over him in a great wave. If it
had not been for Phillis and Adelaide, he said to himself: if it had
not been for Mary, he did not say or even think to himself--he would,
in certain irrepressible moods, have proposed it to his wife, to leave
her for a time.
He could not, somehow, talk to Adelaide now; he thought it was because
of her condition. He had come to think that everything, including
questioning, plans and so on, must be deferred until Adelaide, in her
own phrase, was “through.” She thought and talked of nothing else. It
was an event of more than ordinary importance to her. Well, it would
be over in a few months. Then he would ask her about her social
ostracism. He would find out if it was self-incurred, a voluntary
effort on her part? Or was it a case of sour grapes, and had she been
clever enough to make a virtue out of necessity? She was clever enough
for anything, of that he was convinced. Or had she from pique, temper
or caprice, so obstinately refused herself at the beginning, when
first she had come to settle in Yorkshire, that people had grown tired
at last of making overtures of friendship; overtures that were
continually repulsed by the sour chatelaine of the lonely house, in
its belt of sombre trees and solid deterrent masonry.
He could not ask her this now, he could not ask her anything. He
literally knew nothing about the woman he had married and taken to his
breast, together with her child and her cook and her cook’s bastard,
with the name that a man unknown had given her and which he had
superseded so easily.
He did not know how long she had lived in Yorkshire, why she lived in
Yorkshire, and why she had taken a mansion that was little better than
a prison in which they two lived immured.
To do her justice, she did not seek to prison him there with her, she
made no objection to his leaving her for hours. She would not
seemingly have minded his leaving her for days, only he never did. He
was held by her lazy, picturesque indifference, by the remembrance of
the attraction of her bursts of passion in the days when she was not,
as now, concentrating every force of her being on one single point,
the bearing of a healthy child, a wonderful child, a child that should
be even more eugenical than Phillis. He did not know that he was weak,
but he knew that she was strong and that when he was not loving her,
he was afraid of her. Yes, he, Wald Ensor, the man who had shot tigers
and braved artillery and dug for gold under circumstances of almost
impossible fortitude and endurance, was afraid of this hawk-nosed,
straight-lipped woman, with the thin wrists, the small feet and the
vanishing waist.
She was ruining him, she was breaking his spirit, making him a craven,
as in another department Gertrude the cook, with her “good strong
hands” that he shuddered to look at, was making of Mary. Mary, her
child, the human being over whom she had power, even as Adelaide his
wife, had power over him. He was sure of it. With her cruel, if
necessary, training, Gertrude was killing her child by inches. In
obedience to her mistress’s strange wild theory of economics, the
warped little body of the cook’s child was being maimed and stunted,
her mind dwarfed and annulled, her moral and physical growth
contravened beyond recall. For Adelaide, with her strong will and
sense of duty, was behind Gertrude, driving her to do what she thought
was right and correct for the child of humble birth domiciled under
her roof. She was right, economically right; it were indeed useless
and extravagantly unpractical to bring up the cook’s child in luxury,
beyond her station; the wrench of unfitness for her inevitable
degradation and fall to her true station in life would be all the more
severe later on. Only Adelaide’s want of imagination, however, could
inure her to the thought of such a situation created by her own
behest. Adelaide! fond of children! Never! Ensor smiled bitterly under
his drooping moustache, and forced himself to remember that Adelaide
had the defects of her qualities, and that philoprogenitiveness was
not one of them. He had gauged her aright in the old days at Portland
Place, or was it that that sly, all-seeing old father of hers had sown
the doubt in his mind?
“_Adelaide, fond of children! She only thinks she is. Cruelty masked
by philanthropy._”
And what was that about Mother’s vanity, and its non-negligibility as
a factor? He remembered the old man’s pawky sneer as he said it.
“_Cases of baby-farming_,” he had argued. “_There’s sheer cruelty. If
a woman ill-treats or even kills the child of another, no natural
feeling except cruelty can possibly come into play, not even
vanity.…_”
Vanity! Yes. There it was, a clear issue. The beautiful Phillis, her
own… petted, cherished!… And on the other hand Mary, deformed,
disgraced by Nature’s hand.… He used to hide his head in his hands as
he contemplated the terrible antithesis.
Get her away!… He must… as soon as Adelaide had given birth to the
wonderful child that was to be hers and his! That was settled.
Meanwhile, he suffered, strange, unreasonable torments. Sometimes
hanging about in the back of the house he would see the hem of Mary’s
frock or the reach of her arm, as she scrubbed and lathered and
polished. Then, with a groan, he would prevent himself from turning
the corner of yard or out-house, lest he actually caught sight of the
child at some one of her debilitating tasks. He would clench his
hands, stuff a great cigar into his mouth, anything to keep him from
rushing upon the poor waif, lifting her up, and boldly facing
Gertrude, carry her off to America or the Antipodes.
One day, feeling he could bear it no longer, he got on to his bicycle
and rode out to Weighton, on purpose to buy something; toys,
sweatmeats, he did not know what, for Mary. Too handsome a present
might bring down a beating, he sadly suspected; he had better get her
something to eat, something nourishing, something that would
disappear. He was about to invest in chocolate _fondants_, the best,
when he suddenly realized that the cook’s child had been back in her
proper station full three months, and would no longer appreciate the
kind of eatables that would appeal to Phillis, who was a gourmet. He
asked for and procured the wholesome candy, and rode home, tired and
depressed. The impulse which had sent him out was a little spent. Poor
Mary was the cook’s child after all, bred to servitude, doing only
what her mother had done before her. He was a meddling busybody and
would probably only succeed in getting the poor little creature a
beating.…
He was thinking of Adelaide and Phillis now--of the rich sensuous
beauty of Adelaide’s child, and the uncanny handsomeness of his wife.
The devilish attraction of it swayed him, always more especially when
he was tired and overwrought. It was her eyes.…
However, he had got the candy, a fat packet that ought to rejoice any
normal child’s heart, and on arriving home he went boldly into the
rear premises through the red baize door, and asked where Mary was?
Gertrude, coarse, homely, but on the whole well favoured, suspended
her chopping operations at a board, and raising her chin, regarded him
quizzically. With a kind of good-humoured malice, so it appeared to
him, she slightly deferred her reply.… Then she said calmly--
“Mary is in the scullery.”