It had not occurred to Gertrude that she had a chance. To have
calculated chances would have seemed to her the last profanity, so
consecrated was her attitude to Brodrick and to all that was Brodrick's.
Her chance was, and it always had been, the chance of serving him. She
had it. What more, she said to herself, could a woman want?
The peace she had folded round Brodrick wrapped her too. In the quiet
hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock, nothing had happened to
disturb her beautiful serenity. It was by the cultivation of a beautiful
serenity that she had hoped to strengthen her appeal to Brodrick and her
position in his house. In the beginning that position had been so
fragile and infirm that she had had then no trust in its continuance.
Three years ago she had come to him, understanding that she was not to
stay. She was a far removed, impoverished cousin of Mrs. John
Brodrick's. Hence her claim. They had stretched the point of cousinship
to shelter the proprieties so sacred to every Brodrick. He had not
wanted her. He preferred a housekeeper who was not a lady, who would not
have to be, as he expressed it, all over the place. But he was sorry for
the impoverished lady and he had let her come. Then his sister Sophy had
urged him to keep her on until he married. Sophy meant until he married
the lady she intended him to marry. He had not married that lady nor any
other; he was not going to marry at all, he told them. But he had kept
Gertrude on.
He had said at the time that he didn't think she would do, but he would
try her. He regarded Gertrude with the suspicion a Brodrick invariably
entertained for any idea that was not conspicuously his own. But
Gertrude had managed, with considerable adroitness, to convince him that
she was, after all, his own idea. And when Sophy Levine triumphed, as a
Brodrick invariably did triumph, in the proved perfection of her scheme,
he said, Yes, Miss Collett was all right, now that he had trained her.
If he approved of Miss Collett it was because she was no longer
recognizable as the Miss Collett they had so preposterously thrust on
him. He could not have stood her if she had been.
Brodrick was right. Gertrude was not the same woman. She did not even
look the same. She had come to Moor Grange lean, scared, utterly
pathetic, with a mouth that drooped. So starved of all delight and of
all possession was Gertrude that she flushed with pleasure when she
heard that she was to have for her very own the little north room where
the telephone was now. There was such pathos in her meek withdrawal into
that little north room, that Brodrick hadn't the heart to keep her in
it. The drawing-room, he had intimated, also might be hers, when (it was
understood rather than stated) he wasn't there himself.
By that time he no longer objected to Gertrude's being all over the
place. Brodrick, though he did not know it and his sisters did, was the
sort of man who could not be happy without a woman to look after him.
Silently, almost furtively, Gertrude made herself indispensable to him.
She knew what he wanted before he knew it himself, and was on the spot
to supply it. Thus, watching the awful increase of Brodrick's
correspondence, as the editor grew great, she was prepared for the
coming of a secretary and had forestalled it.
She had kept herself prepared for the coming of a wife, a mistress of
Brodrick's house, and by making Brodrick supremely comfortable she had
managed to forestall that too. His secretary had become the companion
that his housekeeper could not hope to be. Hitherto he had kept Gertrude
Collett out of his library as far as possible. Now her intrusion had the
consecration of business, and it was even permissible for Gertrude to
spend long hours with him in the sanctuary. Brodrick invariably
breakfasted alone. This habit and his deadly and perpetual dining out,
had been a barrier to all intimacy. But now a large part of his work on
the "Monthly Review" could be done at home in the evenings, so that the
editor had less time for dining out. And latterly he had taken to
coming home early in the afternoons, when he rather liked to have
Gertrude in the drawing-room pouring out tea for him. She filled the
place of something that he missed, that he was as yet hardly aware of
missing. It seemed to him that he had got used to Gertrude.
He could not think what life would be like without Gertrude, any more
than he could think what it would be like with her in a closer and more
intimate relation. For none of them had ever suggested that he should
marry Gertrude. No Brodrick would have dreamed of marrying his
housekeeper. Gertrude would not have dreamed of it herself.
And yet she dreamed. But her dream was of continuance in the silent,
veiled adventure, the mystery and religion of her service. Service to
Brodrick, perpetual, unwearying service, constituted to her mind the
perfect tie. It was the purity of it that she counted as perfection. She
desired nothing further than her present surrender to the incorruptible,
inassailable passion of service. Whenever, in her dream, she touched the
perilous edges of devotion, Gertrude had pulled herself back. She had
told herself that she was there for nothing in the world but to save
Brodrick, to save him trouble, to save him worry, to save him expense;
to save and save and save. That was really what it came to when she
saved him from having to keep a secretary.
For Gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in Brodrick.
Thus she had laboured at her own destruction. So preoccupied was she
with the thought of Brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret
paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated
itself to him. He grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. If
Gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity,
Brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained
indefinitely quiescent. But he had become the centre of a hundred
influences, wandering spirits of Gertrude's brain. Irresistibly urging,
intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for
the dominion of Jane Holland. But Gertrude was not aware of this. Her
state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for
three years a secret to herself. She was before all things a
sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and
boundless capacity for illusion. She shuddered in the grip of mortal
renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were
fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of Brodrick. In her three
years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in
flesh and blood; and Brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. His
attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity.
It was with the coming of Jane Holland that disturbance had begun; a
trouble so mysterious and profound that, if her conscience probed it,
the seat of it remained hidden from the probe. She thought, in her
innocence, that she was going to have an illness; but it had not struck
her that her symptoms were aggravated by Miss Holland's presence and
became intense to excruciation in those hours when she knew that
Brodrick and Miss Holland were off together somewhere, and alone. She
sickened at the thought, and was unaware that she was sick. This
unconsciousness of hers was fostered by all the conventions of her
world, a world that veils itself decorously in the presence of the
unveiled; and she was further helped by her own anxiety to preserve the
perfect attitude, to do the perfect thing.
She was not even aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was
rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly
on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a
perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland.
Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's
coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where she was,
and what she was doing when she was not there.
It ended in wonder; for Brodrick was the only person who could have
informed her, and he had grown curiously reticent on the subject of Jane
Holland. He would say that she was coming, or that she was not coming,
on such or such a day. That was all. Her coming on some day or the other
was a thing that Gertrude had now to take for granted. She tried to
discuss it eagerly with Brodrick; she dwelt on it with almost
affectionate solicitude; you would have said that Brodrick could not
have desired it more than she did.
In the last two weeks Gertrude found something ominous in Brodrick's
silence and sulkiness. And on this Sunday, the day of Jane's departure,
she was no longer able to ignore their significance. Very soon he would
come to her and tell her that he did not want her; that she must go;
that she must make room for Miss Holland.
That night, after Brodrick had returned from taking Jane Holland home,
his secretary came to him in the library. She found him standing by the
writing-table, looking intently at something which he held in his hand,
something which, as Gertrude appeared to him, he thrust hastily into a
drawer.
"May I speak to you a moment?" she said.
"Certainly."
He turned, patient and polite, prepared to deal, as he had dealt before,
with some illusory embarrassment of Gertrude's.
"You are not pleased with me," she said, forcing the naked statement
through hard lips straight drawn.
"What makes you think so?"
"Your manner has been different."
"Then what you mean is that you are not pleased with my manner. My
manner is unfortunate."
He was almost oppressively patient and polite.
"Would it not be better," she said, "for me to go?"
"Certainly not. Unless you want to."
"I don't say that I want to. I say it might be better."
Still, with laborious, weary patience, he protested. He was entirely,
absolutely satisfied. He had never dreamed of her going. The idea was
preposterous, and it was her own idea, not his.
She looked at him steadily, with eyes prepared to draw truth from him by
torture.
"And there is no reason?" she said. "You can think of no reason why it
would be better for me to go?"
He hesitated a perceptible instant before he answered her.
"There is no reason," he said; and having said it, he left the room.
He had paused to gather patience in exasperation. Gertrude interpreted
the pause as the impressive stop before the final, irrevocable decision;
a decision favourable to her continuance.
She was not appeased by it. Her anxiety rather had taken shape,
resolving itself into a dreadful suspicion as to the relations between
Brodrick and Miss Holland.
He was not thinking of marrying Miss Holland. But there was something
between them, something which by no means necessitated her own
departure, which indeed rendered superfluous any change in the
arrangements she had made so perfect. It was not likely that Brodrick,
at his age, should desire to change them. He might be in love with Jane
Holland. He was wedded to order and tranquillity and peace. And she
never would be. There was wild, queer blood in her. Her writings proved
her lawless, defiant, contemptuous of propriety. She had, no doubt,
claimed the right of genius to make its own rules.
Gertrude's brain, which had been passive to the situation, now worked
with uncontrolled activity. She found herself arguing it out. If it were
so, whatever was, or had been, or would be between them, it was
transitory. It would run its course and period, and she would remain,
and he would return to her. She had only to wait and serve; to serve and
wait. It seemed to her then that her passion rose above theirs, white
with renunciation, a winged prayer, a bloodless, bodiless longing,
subtler than desire, sounding a poignant spiritual cry.
And all the time she knew that her suspicion was not justified. Jane
Holland was honest; and as for him, she was not even sure that he cared
for her.
Every instinct in her was now subdued to the craving to be sure, to know
how far the two were going or had gone. Whatever was between them, it
was something that Brodrick desired to conceal, to thrust out of her
sight, as he had thrust the thing he had held in his hand.
Up-stairs overhead, she heard the door of his room opening and
shutting. She saw the light from his windows lengthening on the gravel
path outside. He was not coming back.
She opened the drawer where she divined that it lurked hidden, the thing
that was the sign and symbol of their secret. She found lying there,
face downwards, a portrait of Jane Holland, a photograph of the painting
by Gisborne. She took it in her hand and looked at the queer,
half-plain, half-beautiful, wholly fascinating face; and it was as if
she looked for the first time on the face of her own passion, dully,
stupidly, not knowing it for the thing it was. She had a sudden vision
of their passion, Jane's and Brodrick's, as it would be; she saw the
transitory, incarnate thing, flushed in the splendour of its moment,
triumphant, exultant and alive.
She laid the portrait in its drawer again, face downwards, and turned
from it. And for a moment she stood there, clutching her breasts with
her hands, so that she hurt them, giving pain for intolerable pain.