He had been incapable of thinking until now, the first moment (since it
had happened) that he had been left alone. Last night the thing had
stupefied him so that he could not think. If he had tried to describe
what had been before him last night, he would have said there was a lot
of cotton wool about. It had been all like wool, cotton wool, nothing
that the mind could bite on, nothing that it could grasp. Last night
Winny had been there, and that had stopped his thinking. It was absurd
to say that what had happened had disturbed his night's rest. What had
disturbed his night's rest had been his fear lest he should forget to
feed Baby. And in the morning there had been too many things to do,
there had been Dossie and Baby. And then Winny again.
And now they were all gone. There was silence and a clear space to think
in. His brain too was clear and clean. The clouds of cotton wool had
been dispersed in his movements to and fro.
As an aid to thinking he brought out of his breast pocket Violet's
letter. He spread it on the table in the back sitting-room and sat down
to it, seriously, as to a document that he would have to master, a thing
that would yield its secret only under the closest examination. He was
aware that he had not by any means taken it all in last night.
That she had gone off with Leonard Mercier, _that_ he had indeed
grasped, _that_ he knew. But beyond that the letter gave him no solid
practical information. It did not and it was not meant to give him any
clue. In going off Violet had disappeared and had meant to disappear. He
gathered from it that she had been possessed by one thought and by one
fear, that he would go after her and bring her back.
"What on earth," he said to himself, "should I go after her for?"
She made that clear to him as he read on. Her idea was that he would go
after her, not so much to bring her back as to do something to Mercier,
to inflict punishment on him, to hurt Mercier and hurt him badly. That
was what Violet was afraid of; that was why she tried to shield Mercier,
to excuse him, to take the whole blame on herself. And, evidently, that
was what Mercier was afraid of too. That was why he had bolted with her
to Paris. They must have had that in their minds, they must have planned
it months before. He must have been trying for the post he'd got there.
Ransome could see further, with a fierce shrewdness, that it was
Mercier's "funk" and not his loyalty that accounted for his "holding
off." "He held off because I was his friend, did he? He held off to save
his own skin, the swine!"
And now she drew him up. What was all this about Winny Dymond? He must
have missed it last night. "She was always fond of you. It was a lie
what I told you about her not being. I said it because I was mad on you.
I knew you'd have married her if I'd let you alone."
She was cool, the way she showed herself up. That's what she'd done,
had she? Lied, so that he might think Winny didn't care for him? Lied,
so that he mightn't marry her? Lied, so that she might get him for
herself? For her fancy, for no more than a low animal would feel. He
could see it now. He could see what she was. A woman who could fancy
Mercier must have been a low animal all through and all the time.
How he had ever cared for her he couldn't think. There must have been
some beastliness in him. Men _were_ beasts sometimes. But he was worse.
He was a fool to have believed her lie. Even her beastliness sank out of
sight beside that treachery.
Well--she'd been frank enough about it now. She must have had a face, to
own that she'd lied to him and trapped him! After that, what did it
matter if she _had_ left him? "I dare say you know who I've gone with."
What did it matter who she'd gone with? Good God! What did it matter
what she'd done?
He could smile at her fear and at the cause of it. Mercier must have
terrified her with his funk. The postscript said as much. "You can do
anything you like to me, so long as you don't hurt Leonard." He smiled
again at that. What did she imagine he'd like to do to her? As for
Mercier, what should he want to hurt the beast for? He wouldn't touch
him--now--with the end of a barge-pole.
Oh, well, yes, he supposed he'd have to leather him if he came across
him. But he wouldn't have any pleasure in it--now. Last year he would
have leathered him with joy; his feet had fairly ached to get at him, to
kick the swine out of the house before he did any harm in it. Now it was
as if he loathed him too much in his flabbiness to care for the contact
that personal violence involved.
Yet, through all the miserable workings of his mind the thought of
Mercier's flabbiness was sweet to him. It gave him a curious consolation
and support. True, it had been the chief agent in the process of
deception; it had blinded him to Mercier's dangerous quality; it had
given him a sense of false security; he could see, now, the fool he'd
been to imagine that it would act as any deterrent to a woman so
foredoomed as Violet. Thus it had in a measure brought about the whole
catastrophe. At the same time it had saved him from the peculiar
personal mortification such catastrophes entail. In comparison with
Mercier he sustained no injury to his pride and vanity of sex. And
Mercier's flabbiness did more for him than that. It took the sharpest
sting from Violet's infidelity. It removed it to the region of insane
perversities. It removed Violet herself from her place in memory, that
place of magic and of charm where if she had remained she would have had
power to hurt him.
When he considered her letter yet again in the calmness of that thought,
it struck him that Violet herself was offering him support and
consolation. "You shouldn't have married me. You should have married a
girl like Winny Dymond."--"I knew you'd marry her if I let you alone."
Why, after all these years, had she confessed her treachery? Why had she
confessed it now at the precise moment when she had left him? There was
no need. It couldn't help her. No, but it was just possible (for she was
quite intelligent) that she had seen how it might help him. It was
possible that some sort of contrition had visited her in that last
hour, and that she had meant to remind him that he was not utterly
abandoned, that there was something left.
That brought him to the lines, almost indecipherable, squeezed in her
last hurried moment into the margin of the letter. "You mustn't be
afraid of being fond of Baby. There was nothing between me and Leonard
before July of last year."
She had foreseen the supreme issue; she had provided for the worst
sting, the unspeakable suspicion, the intolerable terror. It was as if
she had calculated the precise point where her infidelity would touch
him.
Faced with that issue, Ranny's mind, like a young thing forced to sudden
tragic maturity by a mortal crisis, worked with an incredible clearness
and capacity. It developed an almost superhuman subtlety of
comprehension. He looked at the thing all round; he controlled his
passion so that he might look at it. It was of course open to him to
take it that she had lied. Passion indeed clamored at him, insisting
that she did lie, that lying came easier to her than the truth. But,
looking at it all round without passion, he was inclined to think that
Violet had not lied. She had not given herself time or space to lie for
lying's sake. If she had lied, then, she had lied for a purpose. A
purpose that he could very well conceive. But if she lied for _that_
purpose she would have given importance and prominence to her lie. She
wouldn't have hidden it away in an almost invisible scrawl on an
inadequate margin.
Of course, she might have lied to deceive him for another purpose, for
his own good. But there again conscious deception would have made for
legibility at the least.
Besides, she had put it in a way that left no room for doubt. "You
needn't be afraid of being fond of Baby." Even passion had to own that
the words had the ring of remorse, of insight, of certainty, and, above
all, of haste. Such haste as precluded all deliberation. Evidently it
was an afterthought. It had come to her, inopportunely, in the last
moment before flight, and she had given it the place and the importance
she would naturally give to a subject in which she herself was not in
any way concerned.
There remained the possibility that she might be mistaken. But the dates
upheld her. In the beginning he and she had, of necessity, gone very
carefully into the question of dates. He remembered that there had been
a whole body of evidence establishing the all-important point beyond a
doubt. All of his honor that he most cared for she had spared. She had
not profaned the ultimate sanctity, nor poisoned for him the very
sweetness of his life.
* * * * *
There were sounds in the front garden. Winny was bringing in the
children. He went out to meet them as they came up the flagged walk.
Dossie toddled, clinging to the skirts of Winny, who in all her
tenderness and absurdity, with her most earnest air of gravity and
absorption in the adventure, pushed the pram. In the pram, tilted
backward, with his little pink legs upturned, Baby fondled, deliciously,
his own toes. He was jerking himself up and down and making for the
benefit of all whom it might concern his very nicest noises.
Ranny stood in the doorway, silent, almost austere, like a man escaped
by a hair's breadth from great peril.
When he caught sight of the silent and austere young man in the doorway,
Baby let go his fascinating toes. He chuckled with delight. He jerked
himself more than ever up and down. He struggled to be free, to be
lifted up and embraced by the young man. Silence and austerity were no
deterrent to Baby, so assured was he of his position, of his welcome, of
the safe, warm, tingling place that would presently be his in the hollow
of the young man's arm. The desire of it made Baby's arms and his body
writhe, with a heartrending agitation, in his little knitted coat.
All this innocent ecstasy of Baby the young man met with silence and
austerity and somber eyes.
With Winny's eyes on him he indeed lifted Baby up, disclosing, first,
his pathetically bunched and bundled back, and then his face,
exquisitely contorted.
And Winny, who had _forgotten_ for a minute, laughed.
"He is funny, isn't he? He smiles just like you do, all up in the
corners like."
At that the young man's arms tightened, and he gripped Baby with passion
to his breast. He kissed him, looking down at him, passionately,
somberly.
Winny saw, and the impulse seized her to efface herself, to vanish.
"I must be going," she said, "or I shall be late for dinner. Can you
manage, Ranny? There's a beefsteak pie. I made it yesterday."
As she turned Dossie trotted after her; and as she vanished Dossie
cried, inconsolably.
He managed, beautifully, with the beefsteak pie.
His sense of bereavement which still weighed on him was no longer
attached in any way to Violet. He could not say precisely what it _was_
attached to. There it was. Only, when he thought of Violet it seemed to
him incomprehensible, not to say absurd, that he should feel it.