THE odd thing is that what sticks out in my recollection of the rest of
that evening was Leonora's saying:
"Of course you might marry her," and, when I asked whom, she answered:
"The girl."
Now that is to me a very amazing thing—amazing for the light of
possibilities that it casts into the human heart. For I had never had
the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the
slightest idea even of caring for her. I must have talked in an odd way,
as people do who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It is as if one had
a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other. I
had thought nothing; I had said such an extraordinary thing.
I don't know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to this
story. I should say that it didn't or, at any rate, that I had given
enough of it. But that odd remark of mine had a strong influence upon
what came after. I mean, that Leonora would probably never have spoken
to me at all about Florence's relations with Edward if I hadn't said,
two hours after my wife's death:
"Now I can marry the girl."
She had, then, taken it for granted that I had been suffering all that
she had been suffering, or, at least, that I had permitted all that she
had permitted. So that, a month ago, about a week after the funeral of
poor Edward, she could say to me in the most natural way in the world—I
had been talking about the duration of my stay at Branshaw—she said with
her clear, reflective intonation:
"Oh, stop here for ever and ever if you can." And then she added, "You
couldn't be more of a brother to me, or more of a counsellor, or more of
a support. You are all the consolation I have in the world. And isn't it
odd to think that if your wife hadn't been my husband's mistress, you
would probably never have been here at all?"
That was how I got the news—full in the face, like that. I didn't say
anything and I don't suppose I felt anything, unless maybe it was with
that mysterious and unconscious self that underlies most people. Perhaps
one day when I am unconscious or walking in my sleep I may go and spit
upon poor Edward's grave. It seems about the most unlikely thing I could
do; but there it is.
No, I remember no emotion of any sort, but just the clear feeling that
one has from time to time when one hears that some Mrs So-and-So is au
mieux with a certain gentleman. It made things plainer, suddenly, to my
curiosity. It was as if I thought, at that moment, of a windy November
evening, that, when I came to think it over afterwards, a dozen
unexplained things would fit themselves into place. But I wasn't
thinking things over then. I remember that distinctly. I was just
sitting back, rather stiffly, in a deep arm-chair. That is what I
remember. It was twilight.
Branshaw Manor lies in a little hollow with lawns across it and pine-
woods on the fringe of the dip. The immense wind, coming from across the
forest, roared overhead. But the view from the window was perfectly
quiet and grey. Not a thing stirred, except a couple of rabbits on the
extreme edge of the lawn. It was Leonora's own little study that we were
in and we were waiting for the tea to be brought. I, as I said, was
sitting in the deep chair, Leonora was standing in the window twirling
the wooden acorn at the end of the window-blind cord desultorily round
and round. She looked across the lawn and said, as far as I can
remember:
"Edward has been dead only ten days and yet there are rabbits on the
lawn."
I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass in
England. And then she turned round to me and said without any adornment
at all, for I remember her exact words:
"I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide."
I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of leisure that we two seemed
to have at that moment. It wasn't as if we were waiting for a train, it
wasn't as if we were waiting for a meal—it was just that there was
nothing to wait for. Nothing.
There was an extreme stillness with the remote and intermittent sound of
the wind. There was the grey light in that brown, small room. And there
appeared to be nothing else in the world.
I knew then that Leonora was about to let me into her full confidence.
It was as if—or no, it was the actual fact that—Leonora with an odd
English sense of decency had determined to wait until Edward had been in
his grave for a full week before she spoke. And with some vague motive
of giving her an idea of the extent to which she must permit herself to
make confidences, I said slowly—and these words too I remember with
exactitude—
"Did Florence commit suicide? I didn't know."
I was just, you understand, trying to let her know that, if she were
going to speak she would have to talk about a much wider range of things
than she had before thought necessary.
So that that was the first knowledge I had that Florence had committed
suicide. It had never entered my head. You may think that I had been
singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to have
been an imbecile. But consider the position.
In such circumstances of clamour, of outcry, of the crash of many people
running together, of the professional reticence of such people as hotel-
keepers, the traditional reticence of such "good people" as the
Ashburnhams—in such circumstances it is some little material object,
always, that catches the eye and that appeals to the imagination. I had
no possible guide to the idea of suicide and the sight of the little
flask of nitrate of amyl in Florence's hand suggested instantly to my
mind the idea of the failure of her heart. Nitrate of amyl, you
understand, is the drug that is given to relieve sufferers from angina
pectoris.
Seeing Florence, as I had seen her, running with a white face and with
one hand held over her heart, and seeing her, as I immediately
afterwards saw her, lying upon her bed with the so familiar little brown
flask clenched in her fingers, it was natural enough for my mind to
frame the idea. As happened now and again, I thought, she had gone out
without her remedy and, having felt an attack coming on whilst she was
in the gardens, she had run in to get the nitrate in order, as quickly
as possible, to obtain relief. And it was equally inevitable my mind
should frame the thought that her heart, unable to stand the strain of
the running, should have broken in her side. How could I have known
that, during all the years of our married life, that little brown flask
had contained, not nitrate of amyl, but prussic acid? It was
inconceivable.
Why, not even Edward Ashburnham, who was, after all more intimate with
her than I was, had an inkling of the truth. He just thought that she
had dropped dead of heart disease. Indeed, I fancy that the only people
who ever knew that Florence had committed suicide were Leonora, the
Grand Duke, the head of the police and the hotel-keeper. I mention these
last three because my recollection of that night is only the sort of
pinkish effulgence from the electric-lamps in the hotel lounge. There
seemed to bob into my consciousness, like floating globes, the faces of
those three. Now it would be the bearded, monarchical, benevolent head
of the Grand Duke; then the sharp-featured, brown, cavalry-moustached
feature of the chief of police; then the globular, polished and high-
collared vacuousness that represented Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor
of the hotel. At times one head would be there alone, at another the
spiked helmet of the official would be close to the healthy baldness of
the prince; then M. Schontz's oiled locks would push in between the two.
The sovereign's soft, exquisitely trained voice would say, "Ja, ja, ja!"
each word dropping out like so many soft pellets of suet; the subdued
rasp of the official would come: "Zum Befehl Durchlaucht," like five
revolver-shots; the voice of M. Schontz would go on and on under its
breath like that of an unclean priest reciting from his breviary in the
corner of a railway-carriage. That was how it presented itself to me.
They seemed to take no notice of me; I don't suppose that I was even
addressed by one of them. But, as long as one or the other, or all three
of them were there, they stood between me as if, I being the titular
possessor of the corpse, had a right to be present at their conferences.
Then they all went away and I was left alone for a long time.
And I thought nothing; absolutely nothing. I had no ideas; I had no
strength. I felt no sorrow, no desire for action, no inclination to go
upstairs and fall upon the body of my wife. I just saw the pink
effulgence, the cane tables, the palms, the globular match-holders, the
indented ash-trays. And then Leonora came to me and it appears that I
addressed to her that singular remark:
"Now I can marry the girl."
But I have given you absolutely the whole of my recollection of that
evening, as it is the whole of my recollection of the succeeding three
or four days. I was in a state just simply cataleptic. They put me to
bed and I stayed there; they brought me my clothes and I dressed; they
led me to an open grave and I stood beside it. If they had taken me to
the edge of a river, or if they had flung me beneath a railway train, I
should have been drowned or mangled in the same spirit. I was the
walking dead.
Well, those are my impressions.
What had actually happened had been this. I pieced it together
afterwards. You will remember I said that Edward Ashburnham and the girl
had gone off, that night, to a concert at the Casino and that Leonora
had asked Florence, almost immediately after their departure, to follow
them and to perform the office of chaperone. Florence, you may also
remember, was all in black, being the mourning that she wore for a
deceased cousin, Jean Hurlbird. It was a very black night and the girl
was dressed in cream-coloured muslin, that must have glimmered under the
tall trees of the dark park like a phosphorescent fish in a cupboard.
You couldn't have had a better beacon.
And it appears that Edward Ashburnham led the girl not up the straight
allée that leads to the Casino, but in under the dark trees of the park.
Edward Ashburnham told me all this in his final outburst. I have told
you that, upon that occasion, he became deucedly vocal. I didn't pump
him. I hadn't any motive. At that time I didn't in the least connect him
with my wife. But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist.—Or like a
very good novelist for the matter of that, if it's the business of a
novelist to make you see things clearly. And I tell you I see that thing
as clearly as if it were a dream that never left me. It appears that,
not very far from the Casino, he and the girl sat down in the darkness
upon a public bench. The lights from that place of entertainment must
have reached them through the tree-trunks, since, Edward said, he could
quite plainly see the girl's face—that beloved face with the high
forehead, the queer mouth, the tortured eyebrows, and the direct eyes.
And to Florence, creeping up behind them, they must have presented the
appearance of silhouettes. For I take it that Florence came creeping up
behind them over the short grass to a tree that, I quite well remember,
was immediately behind that public seat. It was not a very difficult
feat for a woman instinct with jealousy. The Casino orchestra was, as
Edward remembered to tell me, playing the Rakocsy march, and although it
was not loud enough, at that distance, to drown the voice of Edward
Ashburnham it was certainly sufficiently audible to efface, amongst the
noises of the night, the slight brushings and rustlings that might have
been made by the feet of Florence or by her gown in coming over the
short grass. And that miserable woman must have got it in the face, good
and strong. It must have been horrible for her. Horrible! Well, I
suppose she deserved all that she got.
Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms most
of them, towering and feathering away up into the black mistiness that
trees seem to gather about them at night; the silhouettes of those two
upon the seat; the beams of light coming from the Casino, the woman all
in black peeping with fear behind the tree-trunk. It is melodrama; but I
can't help it.
And then, it appears, something happened to Edward Ashburnham. He
assured me—and I see no reason for disbelieving him—that until that
moment he had had no idea whatever of caring for the girl. He said that
he had regarded her exactly as he would have regarded a daughter. He
certainly loved her, but with a very deep, very tender and very tranquil
love. He had missed her when she went away to her convent-school; he had
been glad when she had returned. But of more than that he had been
totally unconscious. Had he been conscious of it, he assured me, he
would have fled from it as from a thing accursed. He realized that it
was the last outrage upon Leonora. But the real point was his entire
unconsciousness. He had gone with her into that dark park with no
quickening of the pulse, with no desire for the intimacy of solitude. He
had gone, intending to talk about polo-ponies, and tennis-racquets;
about the temperament of the reverend Mother at the convent she had left
and about whether her frock for a party when they got home should be
white or blue. It hadn't come into his head that they would talk about a
single thing that they hadn't always talked about; it had not even come
into his head that the tabu which extended around her was not
inviolable. And then, suddenly, that—
He was very careful to assure me that at that time there was no physical
motive about his declaration. It did not appear to him to be a matter of
a dark night and a propinquity and so on. No, it was simply of her
effect on the moral side of his life that he appears to have talked. He
said that he never had the slightest notion to enfold her in his arms or
so much as to touch her hand. He swore that he did not touch her hand.
He said that they sat, she at one end of the bench, he at the other; he
leaning slightly towards her and she looking straight towards the light
of the Casino, her face illuminated by the lamps. The expression upon
her face he could only describe as "queer".
At another time, indeed, he made it appear that he thought she was glad.
It is easy to imagine that she was glad, since at that time she could
have had no idea of what was really happening. Frankly, she adored
Edward Ashburnham. He was for her, in everything that she said at that
time, the model of humanity, the hero, the athlete, the father of his
country, the law-giver. So that for her, to be suddenly, intimately and
overwhelmingly praised must have been a matter for mere gladness,
however overwhelming it were. It must have been as if a god had approved
her handiwork or a king her loyalty. She just sat still and listened,
smiling.
And it seemed to her that all the bitterness of her childhood, the
terrors of her tempestuous father, the bewailings of her cruel-tongued
mother were suddenly atoned for. She had her recompense at last.
Because, of course, if you come to figure it out, a sudden pouring forth
of passion by a man whom you regard as a cross between a pastor and a
father might, to a woman, have the aspect of mere praise for good
conduct. It wouldn't, I mean, appear at all in the light of an attempt
to gain possession. The girl, at least, regarded him as firmly anchored
to his Leonora. She had not the slightest inkling of any infidelities.
He had always spoken to her of his wife in terms of reverence and deep
affection. He had given her the idea that he regarded Leonora as
absolutely impeccable and as absolutely satisfying. Their union had
appeared to her to be one of those blessed things that are spoken of and
contemplated with reverence by her church.
So that, when he spoke of her as being the person he cared most for in
the world, she naturally thought that he meant to except Leonora and she
was just glad. It was like a father saying that he approved of a
marriageable daughter... And Edward, when he realized what he was doing,
curbed his tongue at once. She was just glad and she went on being just
glad.
I suppose that that was the most monstrously wicked thing that Edward
Ashburnham ever did in his life. And yet I am so near to all these
people that I cannot think any of them wicked. It is impossible of me to
think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright and
honourable. That, I mean, is, in spite of everything, my permanent view
of him. I try at times by dwelling on some of the things that he did to
push that image of him away, as you might try to push aside a large
pendulum. But it always comes back—the memory of his innumerable acts of
kindness, of his efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue. He was such a
fine fellow.
So I feel myself forced to attempt to excuse him in this as in so many
other things. It is, I have no doubt, a most monstrous thing to attempt
to corrupt a young girl just out of a convent. But I think Edward had no
idea at all of corrupting her. I believe that he simply loved her. He
said that that was the way of it and I, at least, believe him and I
believe too that she was the only woman he ever really loved. He said
that that was so; and he did enough to prove it. And Leonora said that
it was so and Leonora knew him to the bottom of his heart.
I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters; I mean that it
is impossible to believe in the permanence of man's or woman's love. Or,
at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the permanence of any early
passion. As I see it, at least, with regard to man, a love affair, a
love for any definite woman—is something in the nature of a widening of
the experience. With each new woman that a man is attracted to there
appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an
acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice,
a queer characteristic gesture—all these things, and it is these things
that cause to arise the passion of love—all these things are like so
many objects on the horizon of the landscape that tempt a man to walk
beyond the horizon, to explore. He wants to get, as it were, behind
those eyebrows with the peculiar turn, as if he desired to see the world
with the eyes that they overshadow. He wants to hear that voice applying
itself to every possible proposition, to every possible topic; he wants
to see those characteristic gestures against every possible background.
Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little and I do not
think that it counts for very much in a really great passion. It can be
aroused by such nothings—by an untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye
in passing—that I think it might be left out of the calculation. I don't
mean to say that any great passion can exist without a desire for
consummation. That seems to me to be a commonplace and to be therefore a
matter needing no comment at all. It is a thing, with all its accidents,
that must be taken for granted, as, in a novel, or a biography, you take
it for granted that the characters have their meals with some
regularity. But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a
passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving
for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the
same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same
ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For,
whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who
loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his
courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be
the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all
so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own
worthiness to exist.
So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get
what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the
relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But
these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass
across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will
become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned
too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.
And yet I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman—or
no, that is the wrong way of formulating it. For every man there comes
at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his
imagination has set her seal for good. He will travel over no more
horizons; he will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders; he
will retire from those scenes. He will have gone out of the business.
That at any rate was the case with Edward and the poor girl. It was
quite literally the case. It was quite literally the case that his
passions—for the mistress of the Grand Duke, for Mrs Basil, for little
Mrs Maidan, for Florence, for whom you will—these passions were merely
preliminary canters compared to his final race with death for her. I am
certain of that. I am not going to be so American as to say that all
true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn't. But I think that love will
be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted.
And, in the case of the other women, Edward just cut in and cut them out
as he did with the polo-ball from under the nose of Count Baron von
Lelöffel. I don't mean to say that he didn't wear himself as thin as a
lath in the endeavour to capture the other women; but over her he wore
himself to rags and tatters and death—in the effort to leave her alone.
And, in speaking to her on that night, he wasn't, I am convinced,
committing a baseness. It was as if his passion for her hadn't existed;
as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing that he spoke them,
created the passion as they went along. Before he spoke, there was
nothing; afterwards, it was the integral fact of his life. Well, I must
get back to my story.
And my story was concerning itself with Florence—with Florence, who
heard those words from behind the tree. That of course is only
conjecture, but I think the conjecture is pretty well justified. You
have the fact that those two went out, that she followed them almost
immediately afterwards through the darkness and, a little later, she
came running back to the hotel with that pallid face and the hand
clutching her dress over her heart. It can't have been only Bagshawe.
Her face was contorted with agony before ever her eyes fell upon me or
upon him beside me. But I dare say Bagshawe may have been the
determining influence in her suicide. Leonora says that she had that
flask, apparently of nitrate of amyl, but actually of prussic acid, for
many years and that she was determined to use it if ever I discovered
the nature of her relationship with that fellow Jimmy. You see, the
mainspring of her nature must have been vanity. There is no reason why
it shouldn't have been; I guess it is vanity that makes most of us keep
straight, if we do keep straight, in this world.
If it had been merely a matter of Edward's relations with the girl I
dare say Florence would have faced it out. She would no doubt have made
him scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to his sense of humour,
to his promises. But Mr Bagshawe and the fact that the date was the 4th
of August must have been too much for her superstitious mind. You see,
she had two things that she wanted. She wanted to be a great lady,
installed in Branshaw Teleragh. She wanted also to retain my respect.
She wanted, that is to say, to retain my respect for as long as she
lived with me. I suppose, if she had persuaded Edward Ashburnham to bolt
with her she would have let the whole thing go with a run. Or perhaps
she would have tried to exact from me a new respect for the greatness of
her passion on the lines of all for love and the world well lost. That
would be just like Florence.
In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant
factor—a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some
weak spot in one's character or in one's career. For it is intolerable
to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small
meannesses. It is really death to do so—that is why so many marriages
turn out unhappily.
I, for instance, am a rather greedy man; I have a taste for good cookery
and a watering tooth at the mere sound of the names of certain
comestibles. If Florence had discovered this secret of mine I should
have found her knowledge of it so unbearable that I never could have
supported all the other privations of the régime that she extracted from
me. I am bound to say that Florence never discovered this secret.
Certainly she never alluded to it; I dare say she never took sufficient
interest in me.
And the secret weakness of Florence—the weakness that she could not bear
to have me discover, was just that early escapade with the fellow called
Jimmy. Let me, as this is in all probability the last time I shall
mention Florence's name, dwell a little upon the change that had taken
place in her psychology. She would not, I mean, have minded if I had
discovered that she was the mistress of Edward Ashburnham. She would
rather have liked it. Indeed, the chief trouble of poor Leonora in those
days was to keep Florence from making, before me, theatrical displays,
on one line or another, of that very fact. She wanted, in one mood, to
come rushing to me, to cast herself on her knees at my feet and to
declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully emotional, outpouring as to
her passion. That was to show that she was like one of the great erotic
women of whom history tells us. In another mood she would desire to come
to me disdainfully and to tell me that I was considerably less than a
man and that what had happened was what must happen when a real male
came along. She wanted to say that in cool, balanced and sarcastic
sentences. That was when she wished to appear like the heroine of a
French comedy. Because of course she was always play acting.
But what she didn't want me to know was the fact of her first escapade
with the fellow called Jimmy. She had arrived at figuring out the sort
of low-down Bowery tough that that fellow was. Do you know what it is to
shudder, in later life, for some small, stupid action—usually for some
small, quite genuine piece of emotionalism—of your early life? Well, it
was that sort of shuddering that came over Florence at the thought that
she had surrendered to such a low fellow. I don't know that she need
have shuddered. It was her footling old uncle's work; he ought never to
have taken those two round the world together and shut himself up in his
cabin for the greater part of the time. Anyhow, I am convinced that the
sight of Mr Bagshawe and the thought that Mr Bagshawe—for she knew that
unpleasant and toadlike personality—the thought that Mr Bagshawe would
almost certainly reveal to me that he had caught her coming out of
Jimmy's bedroom at five o'clock in the morning on the 4th of August,
1900—that was the determining influence in her suicide. And no doubt the
effect of the date was too much for her superstitious personality. She
had been born on the 4th of August; she had started to go round the
world on the 4th of August; she had become a low fellow's mistress on
the 4th of August. On the same day of the year she had married me; on
that 4th she had lost Edward's love, and Bagshawe had appeared like a
sinister omen—like a grin on the face of Fate. It was the last straw.
She ran upstairs, arranged herself decoratively upon her bed—she was a
sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white cheeks, long hair, the
eyelashes falling like a tiny curtain on her cheeks. She drank the
little phial of prussic acid and there she lay.—O, extremely charming
and clear-cut—looking with a puzzled expression at the electric-light
bulb that hung from the ceiling, or perhaps through it, to the stars
above. Who knows? Anyhow, there was an end of Florence.
You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the end of
Florence. From that day to this I have never given her another thought;
I have not bestowed upon her so much as a sigh. Of course, when it has
been necessary to talk about her to Leonora, or when for the purpose of
these writings I have tried to figure her out, I have thought about her
as I might do about a problem in algebra. But it has always been as a
matter for study, not for remembrance. She just went completely out of
existence, like yesterday's paper.
I was so deadly tired. And I dare say that my week or ten days of
affaissement—of what was practically catalepsy—was just the repose that
my exhausted nature claimed after twelve years of the repression of my
instincts, after twelve years of playing the trained poodle. For that
was all that I had been. I suppose that it was the shock that did it—the
several shocks. But I am unwilling to attribute my feelings at that time
to anything so concrete as a shock. It was a feeling so tranquil. It was
as if an immensely heavy—an unbearably heavy knapsack, supported upon my
shoulders by straps, had fallen off and left my shoulders themselves
that the straps had cut into, numb and without sensation of life. I tell
you, I had no regret. What had I to regret? I suppose that my inner
soul—my dual personality—had realized long before that Florence was a
personality of paper—that she represented a real human being with a
heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-
note represents a certain quantity of gold. I know that sort of feeling
came to the surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe told me that he
had seen her coming out of that fellow's bedroom. I thought suddenly
that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of
drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that, if that
feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her room
and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I just
couldn't do it; it would have been like chasing a scrap of paper—an
occupation ignoble for a grown man.
And, as it began, so that matter has remained. I didn't care whether she
had come out of that bedroom or whether she hadn't. It simply didn't
interest me. Florence didn't matter.
I suppose you will retort that I was in love with Nancy Rufford and that
my indifference was therefore discreditable. Well, I am not seeking to
avoid discredit. I was in love with Nancy Rufford as I am in love with
the poor child's memory, quietly and quite tenderly in my American sort
of way. I had never thought about it until I heard Leonora state that I
might now marry her. But, from that moment until her worse than death, I
do not suppose that I much thought about anything else. I don't mean to
say that I sighed about her or groaned; I just wanted to marry her as
some people want to go to Carcassonne.
Do you understand the feeling—the sort of feeling that you must get
certain matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly negligible
complications before you can go to a place that has, during all your
life, been a sort of dream city? I didn't attach much importance to my
superior years. I was forty-five, and she, poor thing, was only just
rising twenty-two. But she was older than her years and quieter. She
seemed to have an odd quality of sainthood, as if she must inevitably
end in a convent with a white coif framing her face. But she had
frequently told me that she had no vocation; it just simply wasn't
there—the desire to become a nun. Well, I guess that I was a sort of
convent myself; it seemed fairly proper that she should make her vows to
me.
No, I didn't see any impediment on the score of age. I dare say no man
does and I was pretty confident that with a little preparation, I could
make a young girl happy. I could spoil her as few young girls have ever
been spoiled; and I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No
man can, or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him. But, as
soon as I came out of my catalepsy, I seemed to perceive that my
problem—that what I had to do to prepare myself for getting into contact
with her, was just to get back into contact with life. I had been kept
for twelve years in a rarefied atmosphere; what I then had to do was a
little fighting with real life, some wrestling with men of business,
some travelling amongst larger cities, something harsh, something
masculine. I didn't want to present myself to Nancy Rufford as a sort of
an old maid. That was why, just a fortnight after Florence's suicide, I
set off for the United States.
II
IMMEDIATELY after Florence's death Leonora began to put the leash upon
Nancy Rufford and Edward. She had guessed what had happened under the
trees near the Casino. They stayed at Nauheim some weeks after I went,
and Leonora has told me that that was the most deadly time of her
existence. It seemed like a long, silent duel with invisible weapons, so
she said. And it was rendered all the more difficult by the girl's
entire innocence. For Nancy was always trying to go off alone with
Edward—as she had been doing all her life, whenever she was home for
holidays. She just wanted him to say nice things to her again.
You see, the position was extremely complicated. It was as complicated
as it well could be, along delicate lines. There was the complication
caused by the fact that Edward and Leonora never spoke to each other
except when other people were present. Then, as I have said, their
demeanours were quite perfect. There was the complication caused by the
girl's entire innocence; there was the further complication that both
Edward and Leonora really regarded the girl as their daughter. Or it
might be more precise to say that they regarded her as being Leonora's
daughter. And Nancy was a queer girl; it is very difficult to describe
her to you.
She was tall and strikingly thin; she had a tortured mouth, agonized
eyes, and a quite extraordinary sense of fun. You might put it that at
times she was exceedingly grotesque and at times extraordinarily
beautiful. Why, she had the heaviest head of black hair that I have ever
come across; I used to wonder how she could bear the weight of it. She
was just over twenty-one and at times she seemed as old as the hills, at
times not much more than sixteen. At one moment she would be talking of
the lives of the saints and at the next she would be tumbling all over
the lawn with the St Bernard puppy. She could ride to hounds like a
Maenad and she could sit for hours perfectly still, steeping
handkerchief after handkerchief in vinegar when Leonora had one of her
headaches. She was, in short, a miracle of patience who could be almost
miraculously impatient. It was, no doubt, the convent training that
effected that. I remember that one of her letters to me, when she was
about sixteen, ran something like:
"On Corpus Christi"—or it may have been some other saint's day, I cannot
keep these things in my head—"our school played Roehampton at Hockey.
And, seeing that our side was losing, being three goals to one against
us at halftime, we retired into the chapel and prayed for victory. We
won by five goals to three." And I remember that she seemed to describe
afterwards a sort of saturnalia. Apparently, when the victorious fifteen
or eleven came into the refectory for supper, the whole school jumped
upon the tables and cheered and broke the chairs on the floor and
smashed the crockery—for a given time, until the Reverend Mother rang a
hand-bell. That is of course the Catholic tradition—saturnalia that can
end in a moment, like the crack of a whip. I don't, of course, like the
tradition, but I am bound to say that it gave Nancy—or at any rate Nancy
had—a sense of rectitude that I have never seen surpassed. It was a
thing like a knife that looked out of her eyes and that spoke with her
voice, just now and then. It positively frightened me. I suppose that I
was almost afraid to be in a world where there could be so fine a
standard. I remember when she was about fifteen or sixteen on going back
to the convent I once gave her a couple of English sovereigns as a tip.
She thanked me in a peculiarly heartfelt way, saying that it would come
in extremely handy. I asked her why and she explained. There was a rule
at the school that the pupils were not to speak when they walked through
the garden from the chapel to the refectory. And, since this rule
appeared to be idiotic and arbitrary, she broke it on purpose day after
day. In the evening the children were all asked if they had committed
any faults during the day, and every evening Nancy confessed that she
had broken this particular rule. It cost her sixpence a time, that being
the fine attached to the offence. Just for the information I asked her
why she always confessed, and she answered in these exact words:
"Oh, well, the girls of the Holy Child have always been noted for their
truthfulness. It's a beastly bore, but I've got to do it."
I dare say that the miserable nature of her childhood, coming before the
mixture of saturnalia and discipline that was her convent life, added
something to her queernesses. Her father was a violent madman of a
fellow, a major of one of what I believe are called the Highland
regiments. He didn't drink, but he had an ungovernable temper, and the
first thing that Nancy could remember was seeing her father strike her
mother with his clenched fist so that her mother fell over sideways from
the breakfast-table and lay motionless. The mother was no doubt an
irritating woman and the privates of that regiment appeared to have been
irritating, too, so that the house was a place of outcries and perpetual
disturbances. Mrs Rufford was Leonora's dearest friend and Leonora could
be cutting enough at times. But I fancy she was as nothing to Mrs
Rufford. The Major would come in to lunch harassed and already spitting
out oaths after an unsatisfactory morning's drilling of his stubborn men
beneath a hot sun. And then Mrs Rufford would make some cutting remark
and pandemonium would break loose. Once, when she had been about twelve,
Nancy had tried to intervene between the pair of them. Her father had
struck her full upon the forehead a blow so terrible that she had lain
unconscious for three days. Nevertheless, Nancy seemed to prefer her
father to her mother. She remembered rough kindnesses from him. Once or
twice when she had been quite small he had dressed her in a clumsy,
impatient, but very tender way. It was nearly always impossible to get a
servant to stay in the family and, for days at a time, apparently, Mrs
Rufford would be incapable. I fancy she drank. At any rate, she had so
cutting a tongue that even Nancy was afraid of her—she so made fun of
any tenderness, she so sneered at all emotional displays. Nancy must
have been a very emotional child.
Then one day, quite suddenly, on her return from a ride at Fort William,
Nancy had been sent, with her governess, who had a white face, right
down South to that convent school. She had been expecting to go there in
two months' time. Her mother disappeared from her life at that time. A
fortnight later Leonora came to the convent and told her that her mother
was dead. Perhaps she was. At any rate, I never heard until the very end
what became of Mrs Rufford. Leonora never spoke of her.
And then Major Rufford went to India, from which he returned very seldom
and only for very short visits; and Nancy lived herself gradually into
the life at Branshaw Teleragh. I think that, from that time onwards, she
led a very happy life, till the end. There were dogs and horses and old
servants and the Forest. And there were Edward and Leonora, who loved
her.
I had known her all the time—I mean, that she always came to the
Ashburnhams' at Nauheim for the last fortnight of their stay—and I
watched her gradually growing. She was very cheerful with me. She always
even kissed me, night and morning, until she was about eighteen. And she
would skip about and fetch me things and laugh at my tales of life in
Philadelphia. But, beneath her gaiety, I fancy that there lurked some
terrors. I remember one day, when she was just eighteen, during one of
her father's rare visits to Europe, we were sitting in the gardens, near
the iron-stained fountain. Leonora had one of her headaches and we were
waiting for Florence and Edward to come from their baths. You have no
idea how beautiful Nancy looked that morning.
We were talking about the desirability of taking tickets in lotteries—of
the moral side of it, I mean. She was all in white, and so tall and
fragile; and she had only just put her hair up, so that the carriage of
her neck had that charming touch of youth and of unfamiliarity. Over her
throat there played the reflection from a little pool of water, left by
a thunderstorm of the night before, and all the rest of her features
were in the diffused and luminous shade of her white parasol. Her dark
hair just showed beneath her broad, white hat of pierced, chip straw;
her throat was very long and leaned forward, and her eyebrows, arching a
little as she laughed at some old-fashionedness in my phraseology, had
abandoned their tense line. And there was a little colour in her cheeks
and light in her deep blue eyes. And to think that that vivid white
thing, that saintly and swanlike being—to think that... Why, she was
like the sail of a ship, so white and so definite in her movements. And
to think that she will never... Why, she will never do anything again. I
can't believe it...
Anyhow, we were chattering away about the morality of lotteries. And
then, suddenly, there came from the arcades behind us the overtones of
her father's unmistakable voice; it was as if a modified foghorn had
boomed with a reed inside it. I looked round to catch sight of him. A
tall, fair, stiffly upright man of fifty, he was walking away with an
Italian baron who had had much to do with the Belgian Congo. They must
have been talking about the proper treatment of natives, for I heard him
say:
"Oh, hang humanity!"
When I looked again at Nancy her eyes were closed and her face was more
pallid than her dress, which had at least some pinkish reflections from
the gravel. It was dreadful to see her with her eyes closed like that.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, and her hand that had appeared to be groping,
settled for a moment on my arm. "Never speak of it. Promise never to
tell my father of it. It brings back those dreadful dreams..." And, when
she opened her eyes she looked straight into mine. "The blessed saints,"
she said, "you would think they would spare you such things. I don't
believe all the sinning in the world could make one deserve them."
They say the poor thing was always allowed a light at night, even in her
bedroom.... And yet, no young girl could more archly and lovingly have
played with an adored father. She was always holding him by both coat
lapels; cross-questioning him as to how he spent his time; kissing the
top of his head. Ah, she was well-bred, if ever anyone was.
The poor, wretched man cringed before her—but she could not have done
more to put him at his ease. Perhaps she had had lessons in it at her
convent. It was only that peculiar note of his voice, used when he was
overbearing or dogmatic, that could unman her—and that was only visible
when it came unexpectedly. That was because the bad dreams that the
blessed saints allowed her to have for her sins always seemed to her to
herald themselves by the booming sound of her father's voice. It was
that sound that had always preceded his entrance for the terrible
lunches of her childhood... .
I have reported, earlier in this chapter, that Leonora said, during that
remainder of their stay at Nauheim, after I had left, it had seemed to
her that she was fighting a long duel with unseen weapons against silent
adversaries. Nancy, as I have also said, was always trying to go off
with Edward alone. That had been her habit for years. And Leonora found
it to be her duty to stop that. It was very difficult. Nancy was used to
having her own way, and for years she had been used to going off with
Edward, ratting, rabbiting, catching salmon down at Fordingbridge,
district-visiting of the sort that Edward indulged in, or calling on the
tenants. And at Nauheim she and Edward had always gone up to the Casino
alone in the evenings—at any rate, whenever Florence did not call for
his attendance. It shows the obviously innocent nature of the regard of
those two that even Florence had never had any idea of jealousy. Leonora
had cultivated the habit of going to bed at ten o'clock.
I don't know how she managed it, but, for all the time they were at
Nauheim, she contrived never to let those two be alone together, except
in broad daylight, in very crowded places. If a Protestant had done that
it would no doubt have awakened a self-consciousness in the girl. But
Catholics, who have always reservations and queer spots of secrecy, can
manage these things better. And I dare say that two things made this
easier—the death of Florence and the fact that Edward was obviously
sickening. He appeared, indeed, to be very ill; his shoulders began to
be bowed; there were pockets under his eyes; he had extraordinary
moments of inattention.
And Leonora describes herself as watching him as a fierce cat watches an
unconscious pigeon in a roadway. In that silent watching, again, I think
she was a Catholic—of a people that can think thoughts alien to ours and
keep them to themselves. And the thoughts passed through her mind; some
of them even got through to Edward with never a word spoken. At first
she thought that it might be remorse, or grief, for the death of
Florence that was oppressing him. But she watched and watched, and
uttered apparently random sentences about Florence before the girl, and
she perceived that he had no grief and no remorse. He had not any idea
that Florence could have committed suicide without writing at least a
tirade to him. The absence of that made him certain that it had been
heart disease. For Florence had never undeceived him on that point. She
thought it made her seem more romantic.
No, Edward had no remorse. He was able to say to himself that he had
treated Florence with gallant attentiveness of the kind that she desired
until two hours before her death. Leonora gathered that from the look in
his eyes, and from the way he straightened his shoulders over her as she
lay in her coffin—from that and a thousand other little things. She
would speak suddenly about Florence to the girl and he would not start
in the least; he would not even pay attention, but would sit with
bloodshot eyes gazing at the tablecloth. He drank a good deal, at that
time—a steady soaking of drink every evening till long after they had
gone to bed.
For Leonora made the girl go to bed at ten, unreasonable though that
seemed to Nancy. She would understand that, whilst they were in a sort
of half mourning for Florence, she ought not to be seen at public
places, like the Casino; but she could not see why she should not
accompany her uncle upon his evening strolls though the park. I don't
know what Leonora put up as an excuse—something, I fancy, in the nature
of a nightly orison that she made the girl and herself perform for the
soul of Florence. And then, one evening, about a fortnight later, when
the girl, growing restive at even devotional exercises, clamoured once
more to be allowed to go for a walk with Edward, and when Leonora was
really at her wits' end, Edward gave himself into her hands. He was just
standing up from dinner and had his face averted.
But he turned his heavy head and his bloodshot eyes upon his wife and
looked full at her.
"Doctor von Hauptmann," he said, "has ordered me to go to bed
immediately after dinner. My heart's much worse."
He continued to look at Leonora for a long minute—with a sort of heavy
contempt. And Leonora understood that, with his speech, he was giving
her the excuse that she needed for separating him from the girl, and
with his eyes he was reproaching her for thinking that he would try to
corrupt Nancy.
He went silently up to his room and sat there for a long time—until the
girl was well in bed—reading in the Anglican prayer-book. And about
half-past ten she heard his footsteps pass her door, going outwards. Two
and a half hours later they came back, stumbling heavily.
She remained, reflecting upon this position until the last night of
their stay at Nauheim. Then she suddenly acted. For, just in the same
way, suddenly after dinner, she looked at him and said:
"Teddy, don't you think you could take a night off from your doctor's
orders and go with Nancy to the Casino. The poor child has had her visit
so spoiled."
He looked at her in turn for a long, balancing minute.
"Why, yes," he said at last.
Nancy jumped out of her chair and kissed him. Those two words, Leonora
said, gave her the greatest relief of any two syllables she had ever
heard in her life. For she realized that Edward was breaking up, not
under the desire for possession, but from the dogged determination to
hold his hand. She could relax some of her vigilance.
Nevertheless, she sat in the darkness behind her half-closed jalousies,
looking over the street and the night and the trees until, very late,
she could hear Nancy's clear voice coming closer and saying:
"You did look an old guy with that false nose." There had been some sort
of celebration of a local holiday up in the Kursaal. And Edward replied
with his sort of sulky good nature:
"As for you, you looked like old Mother Sideacher."
The girl came swinging along, a silhouette beneath a gas-lamp; Edward,
another, slouched at her side. They were talking just as they had talked
any time since the girl had been seventeen; with the same tones, the
same joke about an old beggar woman who always amused them at Branshaw.
The girl, a little later, opened Leonora's door whilst she was still
kissing Edward on the forehead as she had done every night.
"We've had a most glorious time," she said. "He's ever so much better.
He raced me for twenty yards home. Why are you all in the dark?"
Leonora could hear Edward going about in his room, but, owing to the
girl's chatter, she could not tell whether he went out again or not. And
then, very much later, because she thought that if he were drinking
again something must be done to stop it, she opened for the first time,
and very softly, the never-opened door between their rooms. She wanted
to see if he had gone out again. Edward was kneeling beside his bed with
his head hidden in the counterpane. His arms, outstretched, held out
before him a little image of the Blessed Virgin—a tawdry, scarlet and
Prussian blue affair that the girl had given him on her first return
from the convent. His shoulders heaved convulsively three times, and
heavy sobs came from him before she could close the door. He was not a
Catholic; but that was the way it took him.
Leonora slept for the first time that night with a sleep from which she
never once started.
III
AND then Leonora completely broke down—on the day that they returned to
Branshaw Teleragh. It is the infliction of our miserable minds—it is the
scourge of atrocious but probably just destiny that no grief comes by
itself. No, any great grief, though the grief itself may have gone,
leaves in its place a train of horrors, of misery, and despair. For
Leonora was, in herself, relieved. She felt that she could trust Edward
with the girl and she knew that Nancy could be absolutely trusted. And
then, with the slackening of her vigilance, came the slackening of her
entire mind. This is perhaps the most miserable part of the entire
story. For it is miserable to see a clean intelligence waver; and
Leonora wavered.
You are to understand that Leonora loved Edward with a passion that was
yet like an agony of hatred. And she had lived with him for years and
years without addressing to him one word of tenderness. I don't know how
she could do it. At the beginning of that relationship she had been just
married off to him. She had been one of seven daughters in a bare,
untidy Irish manor-house to which she had returned from the convent I
have so often spoken of. She had left it just a year and she was just
nineteen. It is impossible to imagine such inexperience as was hers. You
might almost say that she had never spoken to a man except a priest.
Coming straight from the convent, she had gone in behind the high walls
of the manor-house that was almost more cloistral than any convent could
have been. There were the seven girls, there was the strained mother,
there was the worried father at whom, three times in the course of that
year, the tenants took pot-shots from behind a hedge. The women-folk,
upon the whole, the tenants respected. Once a week each of the girls,
since there were seven of them, took a drive with the mother in the old
basketwork chaise drawn by a very fat, very lumbering pony. They paid
occasionally a call, but even these were so rare that, Leonora has
assured me, only three times in the year that succeeded her coming home
from the convent did she enter another person's house. For the rest of
the time the seven sisters ran about in the neglected gardens between
the unpruned espaliers. Or they played lawn-tennis or fives in an angle
of a great wall that surrounded the garden—an angle from which the fruit
trees had long died away. They painted in water-colour; they
embroidered; they copied verses into albums. Once a week they went to
Mass; once a week to the confessional, accompanied by an old nurse. They
were happy since they had known no other life.
It appeared to them a singular extravagance when, one day, a
photographer was brought over from the county town and photographed them
standing, all seven, in the shadow of an old apple tree with the grey
lichen on the raddled trunk.
But it wasn't an extravagance.
Three weeks before Colonel Powys had written to Colonel Ashburnham:
"I say, Harry, couldn't your Edward marry one of my girls? It would be a
god-send to me, for I'm at the end of my tether and, once one girl
begins to go off, the rest of them will follow."
He went on to say that all his daughters were tall, upstanding, clean-
limbed and absolutely pure, and he reminded Colonel Ashburnham that,
they having been married on the same day, though in different churches,
since the one was a Catholic and the other an Anglican—they had said to
each other, the night before, that, when the time came, one of their
sons should marry one of their daughters. Mrs Ashburnham had been a
Powys and remained Mrs Powys' dearest friend. They had drifted about the
world as English soldiers do, seldom meeting, but their women always in
correspondence one with another. They wrote about minute things such as
the teething of Edward and of the earlier daughters or the best way to
repair a Jacob's ladder in a stocking. And, if they met seldom, yet it
was often enough to keep each other's personalities fresh in their
minds, gradually growing a little stiff in the joints, but always with
enough to talk about and with a store of reminiscences. Then, as his
girls began to come of age when they must leave the convent in which
they were regularly interned during his years of active service, Colonel
Powys retired from the army with the necessity of making a home for
them. It happened that the Ashburnhams had never seen any of the Powys
girls, though, whenever the four parents met in London, Edward
Ashburnham was always of the party. He was at that time twenty-two and,
I believe, almost as pure in mind as Leonora herself. It is odd how a
boy can have his virgin intelligence untouched in this world.
That was partly due to the careful handling of his mother, partly to the
fact that the house to which he went at Winchester had a particularly
pure tone and partly to Edward's own peculiar aversion from anything
like coarse language or gross stories. At Sandhurst he had just kept out
of the way of that sort of thing. He was keen on soldiering, keen on
mathematics, on land-surveying, on politics and, by a queer warp of his
mind, on literature. Even when he was twenty-two he would pass hours
reading one of Scott's novels or the Chronicles of Froissart.
Mrs Ashburnham considered that she was to be congratulated, and almost
every week she wrote to Mrs Powys, dilating upon her satisfaction.
Then, one day, taking a walk down Bond Street with her son, after having
been at Lord's, she noticed Edward suddenly turn his head round to take
a second look at a well-dressed girl who had passed them. She wrote
about that, too, to Mrs Powys, and expressed some alarm. It had been, on
Edward's part, the merest reflex action. He was so very abstracted at
that time owing to the pressure his crammer was putting upon him that he
certainly hadn't known what he was doing.
It was this letter of Mrs Ashburnham's to Mrs Powys that had caused the
letter from Colonel Powys to Colonel Ashburnham—a letter that was half-
humorous, half longing. Mrs Ashburnham caused her husband to reply, with
a letter a little more jocular—something to the effect that Colonel
Powys ought to give them some idea of the goods that he was marketing.
That was the cause of the photograph. I have seen it, the seven girls,
all in white dresses, all very much alike in feature—all, except
Leonora, a little heavy about the chins and a little stupid about the
eyes. I dare say it would have made Leonora, too, look a little heavy
and a little stupid, for it was not a good photograph. But the black
shadow from one of the branches of the apple tree cut right across her
face, which is all but invisible.
There followed an extremely harassing time for Colonel and Mrs Powys.
Mrs Ashburnham had written to say that, quite sincerely, nothing would
give greater ease to her maternal anxieties than to have her son marry
one of Mrs Powys' daughters if only he showed some inclination to do so.
For, she added, nothing but a love-match was to be thought of in her
Edward's case. But the poor Powys couple had to run things so very fine
that even the bringing together of the young people was a desperate
hazard.
The mere expenditure upon sending one of the girls over from Ireland to
Branshaw was terrifying to them; and whichever girl they selected might
not be the one to ring Edward's bell. On the other hand, the expenditure
upon mere food and extra sheets for a visit from the Ashburnhams to them
was terrifying, too. It would mean, mathematically, going short in so
many meals themselves, afterwards. Nevertheless, they chanced it, and
all the three Ashburnhams came on a visit to the lonely manor-house.
They could give Edward some rough shooting, some rough fishing and a
whirl of femininity; but I should say the girls made really more
impression upon Mrs Ashburnham than upon Edward himself. They appeared
to her to be so clean run and so safe. They were indeed so clean run
that, in a faint sort of way, Edward seems to have regarded them rather
as boys than as girls. And then, one evening, Mrs Ashburnham had with
her boy one of those conversations that English mothers have with
English sons. It seems to have been a criminal sort of proceeding,
though I don't know what took place at it. Anyhow, next morning Colonel
Ashburnham asked on behalf of his son for the hand of Leonora. This
caused some consternation to the Powys couple, since Leonora was the
third daughter and Edward ought to have married the eldest. Mrs Powys,
with her rigid sense of the proprieties, almost wished to reject the
proposal. But the Colonel, her husband, pointed out that the visit would
have cost them sixty pounds, what with the hire of an extra servant, of
a horse and car, and with the purchase of beds and bedding and extra
tablecloths. There was nothing else for it but the marriage. In that way
Edward and Leonora became man and wife.
I don't know that a very minute study of their progress towards complete
disunion is necessary. Perhaps it is. But there are many things that I
cannot well make out, about which I cannot well question Leonora, or
about which Edward did not tell me. I do not know that there was ever
any question of love from Edward to her. He regarded her, certainly, as
desirable amongst her sisters. He was obstinate to the extent of saying
that if he could not have her he would not have any of them. And, no
doubt, before the marriage, he made her pretty speeches out of books
that he had read. But, as far as he could describe his feelings at all,
later, it seems that, calmly and without any quickening of the pulse, he
just carried the girl off, there being no opposition. It had, however,
been all so long ago that it seemed to him, at the end of his poor life,
a dim and misty affair. He had the greatest admiration for Leonora.
He had the very greatest admiration. He admired her for her
truthfulness, for her cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of her
limbs, for her efficiency, for the fairness of her skin, for the gold of
her hair, for her religion, for her sense of duty. It was a satisfaction
to take her about with him.
But she had not for him a touch of magnetism. I suppose, really, he did
not love her because she was never mournful; what really made him feel
good in life was to comfort somebody who would be darkly and
mysteriously mournful. That he had never had to do for Leonora. Perhaps,
also, she was at first too obedient. I do not mean to say that she was
submissive—that she deferred, in her judgements, to his. She did not.
But she had been handed over to him, like some patient medieval virgin;
she had been taught all her life that the first duty of a woman is to
obey. And there she was.
In her, at least, admiration for his qualities very soon became love of
the deepest description. If his pulses never quickened she, so I have
been told, became what is called an altered being when he approached her
from the other side of a dancing-floor. Her eyes followed him about full
of trustfulness, of admiration, of gratitude, and of love. He was also,
in a great sense, her pastor and guide—and he guided her into what, for
a girl straight out of a convent, was almost heaven. I have not the
least idea of what an English officer's wife's existence may be like. At
any rate, there were feasts, and chatterings, and nice men who gave her
the right sort of admiration, and nice women who treated her as if she
had been a baby. And her confessor approved of her life, and Edward let
her give little treats to the girls of the convent she had left, and the
Reverend Mother approved of him. There could not have been a happier
girl for five or six years.
For it was only at the end of that time that clouds began, as the saying
is, to arise. She was then about twenty-three, and her purposeful
efficiency made her perhaps have a desire for mastery. She began to
perceive that Edward was extravagant in his largesses. His parents died
just about that time, and Edward, though they both decided that he
should continue his soldiering, gave a great deal of attention to the
management of Branshaw through a steward. Aldershot was not very far
away, and they spent all his leaves there.
And, suddenly, she seemed to begin to perceive that his generosities
were almost fantastic. He subscribed much too much to things connected
with his mess, he pensioned off his father's servants, old or new, much
too generously. They had a large income, but every now and then they
would find themselves hard up. He began to talk of mortgaging a farm or
two, though it never actually came to that.