There were people who knew for a fact that Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh
Brodrick) had run away with George Tanqueray. The rumour ran through the
literary circles shunned by Tanqueray and Jane. The theory of her guilt
was embraced with excitement by the dreadful, clever little people. Not
one of them would have confessed to a positive desire to catch her
tripping. But now that the thing had happened it satisfied the craving
for complete vision of the celebrated lady. It reduced considerably her
baffling eminence, and dispersed once for all the impenetrable,
irritating atmosphere of secrecy she had kept up.
There was George Tanqueray, too, who had kept it up even longer and more
successfully. At last they had been caught, the two so insolent in their
swift evasion of pursuit. Their fall, so to speak, enabled the hunter to
come up with them. People who had complained that they could never meet
them, who had wanted to meet them solely that they might talk about them
afterwards, who had never been able to talk about them at all, had now
abundant material for conversation.
The rumour, once it had fairly penetrated, spread over London in five
days. It started in Kensington, ran thence all the way to Chelsea,
skipped to Bloomsbury, and spread from these centres into Belgravia and
Mayfair. In three weeks the tale of George Tanqueray and Jane Holland
(Mrs. Hugh Brodrick) had invaded Hampstead and the Southwestern suburbs.
It was only confirmed by the contemptuous silence and curt denials of
their friends, Arnott Nicholson, Caro Bickersteth, Nina Lempriere and
the Protheros.
In Brodrick's family it sank down deep, below the level of permissible
discussion. But it revealed itself presently in an awful external
upheaval, utterly unforeseen, and in a still more unforeseen
subsidence.
There was first of all a split between Mrs. Heron and the Doctor. The
behaviour of Eddy and Winny, especially of Eddy, had got on the Doctor's
nerves (he had confessed, in a moment of intense provocation, to having
them). Eddy one evening had attacked violently the impermissible topic,
defending Jin-Jin (in the presence of his younger sister) from the
unspeakable charge current in their suburb, taxing his uncle with a
monstrous credence of the impossible, and trying to prove to him that it
_was_ impossible.
For the sake of the peace so beloved by Brodricks it was settled that
Frances and her children should live with poor dear John in the big
house in Augustus Road.
Brodrick then suggested that Gertrude Collett might with advantage keep
house for Henry.
This arrangement covered the dreadful rupture, the intolerable situation
at Moor Grange. Gertrude had contributed nothing to the support of the
rumour beyond an intimation that the rupture (between her and the
Brodricks) _was_ dreadful and the situation intolerable. The intimation,
as conveyed by Gertrude, was delicate and subtle to a degree. All that
she would admit in words was a certain lack of spiritual sympathy
between her and Mrs. Brodrick.
It was felt in Brodrick's family that, concerning Jane and Tanqueray,
Gertrude Collett knew considerably more than she cared to say.
And through it all Brodrick guarded his secret.
The rumour had not yet touched him whom it most affected. It never would
touch him, so securely the secret he guarded guarded him. And though it
had reached Hampstead the rumour had not reached Rose.
Rose had her hands full for once with the Protheros, helping Mrs.
Prothero to look after _him_. For Owen was ill, dreadfully and
definitely ill, with an illness you could put a name to. Dr. Brodrick
was attending him. Owen had consulted him casually the year before, and
the Doctor had then discovered a bell-sound in his left lung. Now he
came regularly once or twice a week all the way from Putney in his
motor-car.
Rose had positively envied Laura, who had a husband who could be ill,
who could be tucked up in bed and taken care of. It was Rose who helped
Laura to make Prothero's big room look for all the world like the ward
of a hospital.
Dr. Brodrick had wanted to take him away to a sanatorium, but Prothero
had refused flatly to be taken anywhere. The traveller was tired of
travelling. He loved with passion this place where he had found peace,
where his wandering genius had made its sanctuary and its home. His
repugnance was so violent and invincible that the Doctor had agreed with
Laura that it would do more harm than good to insist on his removal. She
must do as best she could, with (he suggested) the assistance of a
trained nurse.
Laura had very soon let him know what she could do. She had winced
visibly when she heard of the trained nurse. It would be anguish to her
to see another woman beside Owen's bed and her hands touching him; but
she said she supposed she could bear even that if it would save him, if
it were absolutely necessary. Was it? The Doctor had admitted that it
was not so, if she insisted--absolutely--for the present; but it was
advisable if she wished to save herself. Laura had smiled then, very
quietly.
In twenty-four hours she showed him the great room, bare and clean as
the ward of a hospital (Rose was on her knees on the floor, bees-waxing
it). The long rows of bookcases were gone, so were the pictures. He
couldn't put his finger on a single small unnecessary thing. Laura, cool
and clean in a linen gown, defied him to find a chink where a germ could
lodge. Prothero inquired gaily, if they couldn't make a good fight
there, where could they make it?
Henry, although used to these combats, was singularly affected as he
looked upon the scene, stripped as it was for the last struggle. What
moved him most was the sight of Laura's little bed, set under the north
window, and separated from her husband's by the long empty space
between, through which the winds of heaven rushed freely. It showed him
what the little thing was capable of, day and night, night and day, the
undying, indomitable devotion. That was the stuff a man wanted in his
wife. He thought of his brother Hugh. Why on earth, if he had to marry
one of them, hadn't he married _her_? He was moved too and troubled by
the presence there of Tanqueray's poor little wife. Whatever view truth
compelled you to take of Jane's and Tanqueray's relations, Tanqueray's
wife had, from first to last, been cruelly wronged by both of them.
Tanqueray's wife was so absorbed in the fight they were making as to be
apparently indifferent to her wrongs, and they judged that the legend of
Jane Holland and George Tanqueray had not reached her.
It had not. And yet she knew it, she had known it all the time--that
they had been together. She had known it ever since, in the innocent
days before the rumour, she had heard Dr. Brodrick telling Mrs. Prothero
that his sister-in-law had gone down to Chagford for three months.
Chagford was where he was always staying. And in the days of innocence
Addy Ranger had let out that it was Chagford where he was now. She had
given Rose his address, Post Office, Chagford. He had been there all the
time when Rose had supposed him to be in Wiltshire and was sending all
his letters there.
She did not hear of Mrs. Brodrick's return until a week or two after
that event; for, in the days no longer of innocence, his sister-in-law
was a sore subject with the Doctor. And when Rose did hear it finally
from Laura, by that time she had heard that Tanqueray was coming back
too. He had written to her to say so.
That was on a Saturday. He was not coming until Tuesday. Rose had two
days in which to consider what line she meant to take.
That she meant to take a line was already clear to Rose. Perfectly
clear, although her decision was arrived at through nights of misery so
profound that it made most things obscure. It was clear that they could
not go on as they had been doing. _He_ might (nothing seemed to matter
to him), but she couldn't; and she wouldn't, not (so she put it) if it
was ever so. They had been miserable.
Not that it mattered so very much whether she was miserable or no. But
that was it; she had ended by making him miserable too. It took some
making; for he wasn't one to feel things much; he had always gone his
own way as if nothing mattered. By his beginning to feel things (as she
called it) now, she measured the effect she must have had on him.
It was all because she wasn't educated proper, because she wasn't a
lady. He ought to have married a lady. He ought (she could see it now)
to have married some one like Mrs. Brodrick, who could understand his
talk, and enter into what he did.
There was Mr. and Mrs. Prothero now. They were happy. There wasn't a
thing he could say or do or think but what she understood it. Why, she'd
understand, time and again, without his saying anything. That came of
being educated. It came (poor Rose was driven back to it at every turn)
of being a lady.
She might have known how it would be. And in a way she had known it from
the first. That was why she'd been against it, and why Uncle and Aunt
and her master and mistress down at Fleet had been against it too. But
there--she loved him. Lady or no lady, she loved him.
As for his going away with Mrs. Brodrick, she "looked at it sensible."
She understood. She saw the excuses that could be made for him. She
couldn't understand _her_; she couldn't find one excuse for _her_
behaviour, a married woman, leaving her husband--such a good man, and
her children--her little helpless children, and going off for weeks
together with a married man, let him be who he might be. Still, if it
hadn't been her, it might have been somebody else, somebody much worse.
It might have been that Miss Lempriere. If _she_'d had a hold on him,
_she_'d not have let him go.
For deep-bedded in Rose's obscure misery was the conviction that Jane
Brodrick had let him go. Her theory of Jane's guilt had not gone much
farther than the charge of deserting her little helpless children. It
was as if Rose's imagination could not conceive of guilt beyond that
monstrous crime. And Jane had gone back to her husband and children,
after all.
If it had been Miss Lempriere she would have been bound to have stuck,
she having nothing, so to speak, to go back to.
The question was, what was George coming back to? If it was to her,
Rose, he must know pretty well what. He must know, she kept repeating to
herself; he must know. Her line, the sensible line that she had been so
long considering, was somehow to surprise and defeat his miserable
foreknowledge.
By Sunday morning she had decided on her line. Nothing would turn her.
She did not intend to ask anybody's advice, nor to take it were it
offered. The line itself required the co-operation and, in a measure,
the consent of Aunt and Uncle; and on the practical head they were
consulted. She managed that on Sunday afternoon. Then she remembered
that she would have to tell Mr. and Mrs. Prothero.
It was on Sunday evening that she told them.
She told them, very shortly and simply, that she had made up her mind to
separate from Tanqueray and live with her uncle.
"Uncle'll be glad to 'ave me," she said.