PART IV I

I HAVE, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it

may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a

sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a

country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the

wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes.

And, when one discusses an affair—a long, sad affair—one goes back, one

goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one

explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has

forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have

given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with

thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are

probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them.

They will then seem most real.

At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of Maisie

Maidan's death. I mean that I have explained everything that went before

it from the several points of view that were necessary—from Leonora's,

from Edward's and, to some extent, from my own. You have the facts for

the trouble of finding them; you have the points of view as far as I

could ascertain or put them. Let me imagine myself back, then, at the

day of Maisie's death—or rather at the moment of Florence's dissertation

on the Protest, up in the old Castle of the town of M——. Let us consider

Leonora's point of view with regard to Florence; Edward's, of course, I

cannot give you, for Edward naturally never spoke of his affair with my

wife. (I may, in what follows, be a little hard on Florence; but you

must remember that I have been writing away at this story now for six

months and reflecting longer and longer upon these affairs.)

And the longer I think about them the more certain I become that

Florence was a contaminating influence—she depressed and deteriorated

poor Edward; she deteriorated, hopelessly, the miserable Leonora. There

is no doubt that she caused Leonora's character to deteriorate. If there

was a fine point about Leonora it was that she was proud and that she

was silent. But that pride and that silence broke when she made that

extraordinary outburst, in the shadowy room that contained the Protest,

and in the little terrace looking over the river. I don't mean to say

that she was doing a wrong thing. She was certainly doing right in

trying to warn me that Florence was making eyes at her husband. But, if

she did the right thing, she was doing it in the wrong way. Perhaps she

should have reflected longer; she should have spoken, if she wanted to

speak, only after reflection. Or it would have been better if she had

acted—if, for instance, she had so chaperoned Florence that private

communication between her and Edward became impossible. She should have

gone eavesdropping; she should have watched outside bedroom doors. It is

odious; but that is the way the job is done. She should have taken

Edward away the moment Maisie was dead. No, she acted wrongly....

And yet, poor thing, is it for me to condemn her—and what did it matter

in the end? If it had not been Florence, it would have been some

other... Still, it might have been a better woman than my wife. For

Florence was vulgar; Florence was a common flirt who would not, at the

last, lacher prise; and Florence was an unstoppable talker. You could

not stop her; nothing would stop her. Edward and Leonora were at least

proud and reserved people. Pride and reserve are not the only things in

life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to

be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.

And Leonora let them go. She let them go before poor Edward did even.

Consider her position when she burst out over the Luther-Protest....

Consider her agonies....

You are to remember that the main passion of her life was to get Edward

back; she had never, till that moment, despaired of getting him back.

That may seem ignoble; but you have also to remember that her getting

him back represented to her not only a victory for herself. It would, as

it appeared to her, have been a victory for all wives and a victory for

her Church. That was how it presented itself to her. These things are a

little inscrutable. I don't know why the getting back of Edward should

have represented to her a victory for all wives, for Society and for her

Church. Or, maybe, I have a glimmering of it.

She saw life as a perpetual sex-battle between husbands who desire to be

unfaithful to their wives, and wives who desire to recapture their

husbands in the end. That was her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man,

for her, was a sort of brute who must have his divagations, his moments

of excess, his nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons. She had

read few novels, so that the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding

the sound of wedding bells had never been very much presented to her.

She went, numbed and terrified, to the Mother Superior of her

childhood's convent with the tale of Edward's infidelities with the

Spanish dancer, and all that the old nun, who appeared to her to be

infinitely wise, mystic and reverend, had done had been to shake her

head sadly and to say:

"Men are like that. By the blessing of God it will all come right in the

end."

That was what was put before her by her spiritual advisers as her

programme in life. Or, at any rate, that was how their teachings came

through to her—that was the lesson she told me she had learned of them.

I don't know exactly what they taught her. The lot of women was patience

and patience and again patience—ad majorem Dei gloriam—until upon the

appointed day, if God saw fit, she should have her reward. If then, in

the end, she should have succeeded in getting Edward back she would have

kept her man within the limits that are all that wifehood has to expect.

She was even taught that such excesses in men are natural, excusable—as

if they had been children.

And the great thing was that there should be no scandal before the

congregation. So she had clung to the idea of getting Edward back with a

fierce passion that was like an agony. She had looked the other way; she

had occupied herself solely with one idea. That was the idea of having

Edward appear, when she did get him back, wealthy, glorious as it were,

on account of his lands, and upright. She would show, in fact, that in

an unfaithful world one Catholic woman had succeeded in retaining the

fidelity of her husband. And she thought she had come near her desires.

Her plan with regard to Maisie had appeared to be working admirably.

Edward had seemed to be cooling off towards the girl. He did not hunger

to pass every minute of the time at Nauheim beside the child's recumbent

form; he went out to polo matches; he played auction bridge in the

evenings; he was cheerful and bright. She was certain that he was not

trying to seduce that poor child; she was beginning to think that he had

never tried to do so. He seemed in fact to be dropping back into what he

had been for Maisie in the beginning—a kind, attentive, superior officer

in the regiment, paying gallant attentions to a bride. They were as open

in their little flirtations as the dayspring from on high. And Maisie

had not appeared to fret when he went off on excursions with us; she had

to lie down for so many hours on her bed every afternoon, and she had

not appeared to crave for the attentions of Edward at those times.

And Edward was beginning to make little advances to Leonora. Once or

twice, in private—for he often did it before people—he had said: "How

nice you look!" or "What a pretty dress!" She had gone with Florence to

Frankfurt, where they dress as well as in Paris, and had got herself a

gown or two. She could afford it, and Florence was an excellent adviser

as to dress. She seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle.

Yes, Leonora seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle. She

imagined herself to have been in the wrong to some extent in the past.

She should not have kept Edward on such a tight rein with regard to

money. She thought she was on the right tack in letting him—as she had

done only with fear and irresolution—have again the control of his

income. He came even a step towards her and acknowledged, spontaneously,

that she had been right in husbanding, for all those years, their

resources. He said to her one day:

"You've done right, old girl. There's nothing I like so much as to have

a little to chuck away. And I can do it, thanks to you."

That was really, she said, the happiest moment of her life. And he,

seeming to realize it, had ventured to pat her on the shoulder. He had,

ostensibly, come in to borrow a safety-pin of her.

And the occasion of her boxing Maisie's ears, had, after it was over,

riveted in her mind the idea that there was no intrigue between Edward

and Mrs Maidan. She imagined that, from henceforward, all that she had

to do was to keep him well supplied with money and his mind amused with

pretty girls. She was convinced that he was coming back to her. For that

month she no longer repelled his timid advances that never went very

far. For he certainly made timid advances. He patted her on the

shoulder; he whispered into her ear little jokes about the odd figures

that they saw up at the Casino. It was not much to make a little

joke—but the whispering of it was a precious intimacy....

And then—smash—it all went. It went to pieces at the moment when

Florence laid her hand upon Edward's wrist, as it lay on the glass

sheltering the manuscript of the Protest, up in the high tower with the

shutters where the sunlight here and there streamed in. Or, rather, it

went when she noticed the look in Edward's eyes as he gazed back into

Florence's. She knew that look.

She had known—since the first moment of their meeting, since the moment

of our all sitting down to dinner together—that Florence was making eyes

at Edward. But she had seen so many women make eyes at Edward—hundreds

and hundreds of women, in railway trains, in hotels, aboard liners, at

street corners. And she had arrived at thinking that Edward took little

stock in women that made eyes at him. She had formed what was, at that

time, a fairly correct estimate of the methods of, the reasons for,

Edward's loves. She was certain that hitherto they had consisted of the

short passion for the Dolciquita, the real sort of love for Mrs Basil,

and what she deemed the pretty courtship of Maisie Maidan. Besides she

despised Florence so haughtily that she could not imagine Edward's being

attracted by her. And she and Maisie were a sort of bulwark round him.

She wanted, besides, to keep her eyes on Florence—for Florence knew that

she had boxed Maisie's ears. And Leonora desperately desired that her

union with Edward should appear to be flawless. But all that went....

With the answering gaze of Edward into Florence's blue and uplifted

eyes, she knew that it had all gone. She knew that that gaze meant that

those two had had long conversations of an intimate kind—about their

likes and dislikes, about their natures, about their views of marriage.

She knew what it meant that she, when we all four walked out together,

had always been with me ten yards ahead of Florence and Edward. She did

not imagine that it had gone further than talks about their likes and

dislikes, about their natures or about marriage as an institution. But,

having watched Edward all her life, she knew that that laying on of

hands, that answering of gaze with gaze, meant that the thing was

unavoidable. Edward was such a serious person.

She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two would be to

rivet on Edward an irrevocable passion; that, as I have before told you,

it was a trick of Edward's nature to believe that the seducing of a

woman gave her an irrevocable hold over him for life. And that touching

of hands, she knew, would give that woman an irrevocable claim—to be

seduced. And she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it

to be a parlour-maid. There are very decent parlour-maids.

And, suddenly, there came into her mind the conviction that Maisie

Maidan had a real passion for Edward; that this would break her

heart—and that she, Leonora, would be responsible for that. She went,

for the moment, mad. She clutched me by the wrist; she dragged me down

those stairs and across that whispering Rittersaal with the high painted

pillars, the high painted chimney-piece. I guess she did not go mad

enough.

She ought to have said:

"Your wife is a harlot who is going to be my husband's mistress.. ."

That might have done the trick. But, even in her madness, she was afraid

to go as far as that. She was afraid that, if she did, Edward and

Florence would make a bolt of it, and that, if they did that, she would

lose forever all chance of getting him back in the end. She acted very

badly to me.

Well, she was a tortured soul who put her Church before the interests of

a Philadelphia Quaker. That is all right—I daresay the Church of Rome is

the more important of the two.

A week after Maisie Maidan's death she was aware that Florence had

become Edward's mistress. She waited outside Florence's door and met

Edward as he came away. She said nothing and he only grunted. But I

guess he had a bad time.

Yes, the mental deterioration that Florence worked in Leonora was

extraordinary; it smashed up her whole life and all her chances. It made

her, in the first place, hopeless—for she could not see how, after that,

Edward could return to her—after a vulgar intrigue with a vulgar woman.

His affair with Mrs Basil, which was now all that she had to bring, in

her heart, against him, she could not find it in her to call an

intrigue. It was a love affair—a pure enough thing in its way. But this

seemed to her to be a horror—a wantonness, all the more detestable to

her, because she so detested Florence. And Florence talked....

That was what was terrible, because Florence forced Leonora herself to

abandon her high reserve—Florence and the situation. It appears that

Florence was in two minds whether to confess to me or to Leonora.

Confess she had to. And she pitched at last on Leonora, because if it

had been me she would have had to confess a great deal more. Or, at

least, I might have guessed a great deal more, about her "heart", and

about Jimmy. So she went to Leonora one day and began hinting and

hinting. And she enraged Leonora to such an extent that at last Leonora

said:

"You want to tell me that you are Edward's mistress. You can be. I have

no use for him."

That was really a calamity for Leonora, because, once started, there was

no stopping the talking. She tried to stop—but it was not to be done.

She found it necessary to send Edward messages through Florence; for she

would not speak to him. She had to give him, for instance, to understand

that if I ever came to know of his intrigue she would ruin him beyond

repair. And it complicated matters a good deal that Edward, at about

this time, was really a little in love with her. He thought that he had

treated her so badly; that she was so fine. She was so mournful that he

longed to comfort her, and he thought himself such a blackguard that

there was nothing he would not have done to make amends. And Florence

communicated these items of information to Leonora.

I don't in the least blame Leonora for her coarseness to Florence; it

must have done Florence a world of good. But I do blame her for giving

way to what was in the end a desire for communicativeness. You see that

business cut her off from her Church. She did not want to confess what

she was doing because she was afraid that her spiritual advisers would

blame her for deceiving me. I rather imagine that she would have

preferred damnation to breaking my heart. That is what it works out at.

She need not have troubled.

But, having no priests to talk to, she had to talk to someone, and as

Florence insisted on talking to her, she talked back, in short,

explosive sentences, like one of the damned. Precisely like one of the

damned. Well, if a pretty period in hell on this earth can spare her any

period of pain in Eternity—where there are not any periods—I guess

Leonora will escape hell fire.

Her conversations with Florence would be like this. Florence would

happen in on her, whilst she was doing her wonderful hair, with a

proposition from Edward, who seems about that time to have conceived the

naïve idea that he might become a polygamist. I daresay it was Florence

who put it into his head. Anyhow, I am not responsible for the oddities

of the human psychology. But it certainly appears that at about that

date Edward cared more for Leonora than he had ever done before—or, at

any rate, for a long time. And, if Leonora had been a person to play

cards and if she had played her cards well, and if she had had no sense

of shame and so on, she might then have shared Edward with Florence

until the time came for jerking that poor cuckoo out of the nest.

Well, Florence would come to Leonora with some such proposition. I do

not mean to say that she put it baldly, like that. She stood out that

she was not Edward's mistress until Leonora said that she had seen

Edward coming out of her room at an advanced hour of the night. That

checked Florence a bit; but she fell back upon her "heart" and stuck out

that she had merely been conversing with Edward in order to bring him to

a better frame of mind. Florence had, of course, to stick to that story;

for even Florence would not have had the face to implore Leonora to

grant her favours to Edward if she had admitted that she was Edward's

mistress. That could not be done. At the same time Florence had such a

pressing desire to talk about something. There would have been nothing

else to talk about but a rapprochement between that estranged pair. So

Florence would go on babbling and Leonora would go on brushing her hair.

And then Leonora would say suddenly something like:

"I should think myself defiled if Edward touched me now that he has

touched you."

That would discourage Florence a bit; but after a week or so, on another

morning she would have another try.

And even in other things Leonora deteriorated. She had promised Edward

to leave the spending of his own income in his own hands. And she had

fully meant to do that. I daresay she would have done it too; though, no

doubt, she would have spied upon his banking account in secret. She was

not a Roman Catholic for nothing. But she took so serious a view of

Edward's unfaithfulness to the memory of poor little Maisie that she

could not trust him any more at all.

So when she got back to Branshaw she started, after less than a month,

to worry him about the minutest items of his expenditure. She allowed

him to draw his own cheques, but there was hardly a cheque that she did

not scrutinize—except for a private account of about five hundred a year

which, tacitly, she allowed him to keep for expenditure on his mistress

or mistresses. He had to have his jaunts to Paris; he had to send

expensive cables in cipher to Florence about twice a week. But she

worried him about his expenditure on wines, on fruit trees, on harness,

on gates, on the account at his blacksmith's for work done to a new

patent Army stirrup that he was trying to invent. She could not see why

he should bother to invent a new Army stirrup, and she was really

enraged when, after the invention was mature, he made a present to the

War Office of the designs and the patent rights. It was a remarkably

good stirrup.

I have told you, I think, that Edward spent a great deal of time, and

about two hundred pounds for law fees on getting a poor girl, the

daughter of one of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge of murdering her

baby. That was positively the last act of Edward's life. It came at a

time when Nancy Rufford was on her way to India; when the most horrible

gloom was over the household; when Edward himself was in an agony and

behaving as prettily as he knew how. Yet even then Leonora made him a

terrible scene about this expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of

had the vague idea that what had passed with the girl and the rest of it

ought to have taught Edward a lesson—the lesson of economy. She

threatened to take his banking account away from him again. I guess that

made him cut his throat. He might have stuck it out otherwise—but the

thought that he had lost Nancy and that, in addition, there was nothing

left for him but a dreary, dreary succession of days in which he could

be of no public service... Well, it finished him.

It was during those years that Leonora tried to get up a love affair of

her own with a fellow called Bayham—a decent sort of fellow. A really

nice man. But the affair was no sort of success. I have told you about

it already... .

II

WELL, that about brings me up to the date of my receiving, in Waterbury,

the laconic cable from Edward to the effect that he wanted me to go to

Branshaw and have a chat. I was pretty busy at the time and I was half

minded to send him a reply cable to the effect that I would start in a

fortnight. But I was having a long interview with old Mr Hurlbird's

attorneys and immediately afterwards I had to have a long interview with

the Misses Hurlbird, so I delayed cabling.

I had expected to find the Misses Hurlbird excessively old—in the

nineties or thereabouts. The time had passed so slowly that I had the

impression that it must have been thirty years since I had been in the

United States. It was only twelve years. Actually Miss Hurlbird was just

sixty-one and Miss Florence Hurlbird fifty-nine, and they were both,

mentally and physically, as vigorous as could be desired. They were,

indeed, more vigorous, mentally, than suited my purpose, which was to

get away from the United States as quickly as I could. The Hurlbirds

were an exceedingly united family—exceedingly united except on one set

of points. Each of the three of them had a separate doctor, whom they

trusted implicitly—and each had a separate attorney. And each of them

distrusted the other's doctor and the other's attorney. And, naturally,

the doctors and the attorneys warned one all the time—against each

other. You cannot imagine how complicated it all became for me. Of

course I had an attorney of my own—recommended to me by young Carter, my

Philadelphia nephew.

I do not mean to say that there was any unpleasantness of a grasping

kind. The problem was quite another one—a moral dilemma. You see, old Mr

Hurlbird had left all his property to Florence with the mere request

that she would have erected to him in the city of Waterbury, Ill., a

memorial that should take the form of some sort of institution for the

relief of sufferers from the heart. Florence's money had all come to

me—and with it old Mr Hurlbird's. He had died just five days before

Florence.

Well, I was quite ready to spend a round million dollars on the relief

of sufferers from the heart. The old gentleman had left about a million

and a half; Florence had been worth about eight hundred thousand—and as

I figured it out, I should cut up at about a million myself. Anyhow,

there was ample money. But I naturally wanted to consult the wishes of

his surviving relatives and then the trouble really began. You see, it

had been discovered that Mr Hurlbird had had nothing whatever the matter

with his heart. His lungs had been a little affected all through his

life and he had died of bronchitis.

It struck Miss Florence Hurlbird that, since her brother had died of

lungs and not of heart, his money ought to go to lung patients. That,

she considered, was what her brother would have wished. On the other

hand, by a kink, that I could not at the time understand, Miss Hurlbird

insisted that I ought to keep the money all to myself. She said that she

did not wish for any monuments to the Hurlbird family.

At the time I thought that that was because of a New England dislike for

necrological ostentation. But I can figure out now, when I remember

certain insistent and continued questions that she put to me, about

Edward Ashburnham, that there was another idea in her mind. And Leonora

has told me that, on Florence's dressing-table, beside her dead body,

there had lain a letter to Miss Hurlbird—a letter which Leonora posted

without telling me. I don't know how Florence had time to write to her

aunt; but I can quite understand that she would not like to go out of

the world without making some comments. So I guess Florence had told

Miss Hurlbird a good bit about Edward Ashburnham in a few scrawled

words—and that that was why the old lady did not wish the name of

Hurlbird perpetuated. Perhaps also she thought that I had earned the

Hurlbird money.

It meant a pretty tidy lot of discussing, what with the doctors warning

each other about the bad effects of discussions on the health of the old

ladies, and warning me covertly against each other, and saying that old

Mr Hurlbird might have died of heart, after all, in spite of the

diagnosis of his doctor. And the solicitors all had separate methods of

arranging about how the money should be invested and entrusted and

bound.

Personally, I wanted to invest the money so that the interest could be

used for the relief of sufferers from the heart. If old Mr Hurlbird had

not died of any defects in that organ he had considered that it was

defective. Moreover, Florence had certainly died of her heart, as I saw

it. And when Miss Florence Hurlbird stood out that the money ought to go

to chest sufferers I was brought to thinking that there ought to be a

chest institution too, and I advanced the sum that I was ready to

provide to a million and a half of dollars. That would have given seven

hundred and fifty thousand to each class of invalid. I did not want

money at all badly. All I wanted it for was to be able to give Nancy

Rufford a good time. I did not know much about housekeeping expenses in

England where, I presumed, she would wish to live. I knew that her needs

at that time were limited to good chocolates, and a good horse or two,

and simple, pretty frocks. Probably she would want more than that later

on. But even if I gave a million and a half dollars to these

institutions I should still have the equivalent of about twenty thousand

a year English, and I considered that Nancy could have a pretty good

time on that or less.

Anyhow, we had a stiff set of arguments up at the Hurlbird mansion which

stands on a bluff over the town. It may strike you, silent listener, as

being funny if you happen to be European. But moral problems of that

description and the giving of millions to institutions are immensely

serious matters in my country. Indeed, they are the staple topics for

consideration amongst the wealthy classes. We haven't got peerage and

social climbing to occupy us much, and decent people do not take

interest in politics or elderly people in sport. So that there were real

tears shed by both Miss Hurlbird and Miss Florence before I left that

city. I left it quite abruptly. Four hours after Edward's telegram came

another from Leonora, saying: "Yes, do come. You could be so helpful." I

simply told my attorney that there was the million and a half; that he

could invest it as he liked, and that the purposes must be decided by

the Misses Hurlbird. I was, anyhow, pretty well worn out by all the

discussions. And, as I have never heard yet from the Misses Hurlbird, I

rather think that Miss Hurlbird, either by revelations or by moral

force, has persuaded Miss Florence that no memorial to their names shall

be erected in the city of Waterbury, Conn. Miss Hurlbird wept dreadfully

when she heard that I was going to stay with the Ashburnhams, but she

did not make any comments. I was aware, at that date, that her niece had

been seduced by that fellow Jimmy before I had married her—but I

contrived to produce on her the impression that I thought Florence had

been a model wife. Why, at that date I still believed that Florence had

been perfectly virtuous after her marriage to me. I had not figured it

out that she could have played it so low down as to continue her

intrigue with that fellow under my roof. Well, I was a fool. But I did

not think much about Florence at that date. My mind was occupied with

what was happening at Branshaw.

I had got it into my head that the telegrams had something to do with

Nancy. It struck me that she might have shown signs of forming an

attachment for some undesirable fellow and that Leonora wanted me to

come back and marry her out of harm's way. That was what was pretty

firmly in my mind. And it remained in my mind for nearly ten days after

my arrival at that beautiful old place. Neither Edward nor Leonora made

any motion to talk to me about anything other than the weather and the

crops. Yet, although there were several young fellows about, I could not

see that any one in particular was distinguished by the girl's

preference. She certainly appeared illish and nervous, except when she

woke up to talk gay nonsense to me. Oh, the pretty thing that she

was....

I imagined that what must have happened was that the undesirable young

man had been forbidden the place and that Nancy was fretting a little.

What had happened was just Hell. Leonora had spoken to Nancy; Nancy had

spoken to Edward; Edward had spoken to Leonora—and they had talked and

talked. And talked. You have to imagine horrible pictures of gloom and

half lights, and emotions running through silent nights—through whole

nights. You have to imagine my beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to

Edward, rising up at the foot of his bed, with her long hair falling,

like a split cone of shadow, in the glimmer of a night-light that burned

beside him. You have to imagine her, a silent, a no doubt agonized

figure, like a spectre, suddenly offering herself to him—to save his

reason! And you have to imagine his frantic refusal—and talk. And talk!

My God!

And yet, to me, living in the house, enveloped with the charm of the

quiet and ordered living, with the silent, skilled servants whose mere

laying out of my dress clothes was like a caress—to me who was hourly

with them they appeared like tender, ordered and devoted people,

smiling, absenting themselves at the proper intervals; driving me to

meets—just good people! How the devil—how the devil do they do it?

At dinner one evening Leonora said—she had just opened a telegram:

"Nancy will be going to India, tomorrow, to be with her father."

No one spoke. Nancy looked at her plate; Edward went on eating his

pheasant. I felt very bad; I imagined that it would be up to me to

propose to Nancy that evening. It appeared to me to be queer that they

had not given me any warning of Nancy's departure—But I thought that

that was only English manners—some sort of delicacy that I had not got

the hang of. You must remember that at that moment I trusted in Edward

and Leonora and in Nancy Rufford, and in the tranquility of ancient

haunts of peace, as I had trusted in my mother's love. And that evening

Edward spoke to me.

What in the interval had happened had been this:

Upon her return from Nauheim Leonora had completely broken down—because

she knew she could trust Edward. That seems odd but, if you know

anything about breakdowns, you will know that by the ingenious torments

that fate prepares for us, these things come as soon as, a strain having

relaxed, there is nothing more to be done. It is after a husband's long

illness and death that a widow goes to pieces; it is at the end of a

long rowing contest that a crew collapses and lies forward upon its

oars. And that was what happened to Leonora.

From certain tones in Edward's voice; from the long, steady stare that

he had given her from his bloodshot eyes on rising from the dinner table

in the Nauheim hotel, she knew that, in the affair of the poor girl,

this was a case in which Edward's moral scruples, or his social code, or

his idea that it would be playing it too low down, rendered Nancy

perfectly safe. The girl, she felt sure, was in no danger at all from

Edward. And in that she was perfectly right. The smash was to come from

herself.

She relaxed; she broke; she drifted, at first quickly, then with an

increasing momentum, down the stream of destiny. You may put it that,

having been cut off from the restraints of her religion, for the first

time in her life, she acted along the lines of her instinctive desires.

I do not know whether to think that, in that she was no longer herself;

or that, having let loose the bonds of her standards, her conventions

and her traditions, she was being, for the first time, her own natural

self. She was torn between her intense, maternal love for the girl and

an intense jealousy of the woman who realizes that the man she loves has

met what appears to be the final passion of his life. She was divided

between an intense disgust for Edward's weakness in conceiving this

passion, an intense pity for the miseries that he was enduring, and a

feeling equally intense, but one that she hid from herself—a feeling of

respect for Edward's determination to keep himself, in this particular

affair, unspotted.

And the human heart is a very mysterious thing. It is impossible to say

that Leonora, in acting as she then did, was not filled with a sort of

hatred of Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to despise him. He

was, she realized gone from her for good. Then let him suffer, let him

agonize; let him, if possible, break and go to that Hell that is the

abode of broken resolves. She might have taken a different line. It

would have been so easy to send the girl away to stay with some friends;

to have taken her away herself upon some pretext or other. That would

not have cured things but it would have been the decent line,... But, at

that date, poor Leonora was incapable of taking any line whatever.

She pitied Edward frightfully at one time—and then she acted along the

lines of pity; she loathed him at another and then she acted as her

loathing dictated. She gasped, as a person dying of tuberculosis gasps

for air. She craved madly for communication with some other human soul.

And the human soul that she selected was that of the girl.

Perhaps Nancy was the only person that she could have talked to. With

her necessity for reticences, with her coldness of manner, Leonora had

singularly few intimates. She had none at all, with the exception of the

Mrs Colonel Whelen, who had advised her about the affair with La

Dolciquita, and the one or two religious, who had guided her through

life. The Colonel's wife was at that time in Madeira; the religious she

now avoided. Her visitors' book had seven hundred names in it; there was

not a soul that she could speak to. She was Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw

Teleragh.

She was the great Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw and she lay all day upon

her bed in her marvellous, light, airy bedroom with the chintzes and the

Chippendale and the portraits of deceased Ashburnhams by Zoffany and

Zucchero. When there was a meet she would struggle up—supposing it were

within driving distance—and let Edward drive her and the girl to the

cross-roads or the country house. She would drive herself back alone;

Edward would ride off with the girl. Ride Leonora could not, that

season—her head was too bad. Each pace of her mare was an anguish.

But she drove with efficiency and precision; she smiled at the Gimmers

and Foulkes and the Hedley Seatons. She threw with exactitude pennies to

the boys who opened gates for her; she sat upright on the seat of the

high dog-cart; she waved her hands to Edward and Nancy as they rode off

with the hounds, and every one could hear her clear, high voice, in the

chilly weather, saying:

"Have a good time!"

Poor forlorn woman!...

There was, however, one spark of consolation. It came from the fact that

Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with his eyes. It had been

three years since she had tried her abortive love-affair with him. Yet

still, on the winter mornings he would ride up to her shafts and just

say: "Good day," and look at her with eyes that were not imploring, but

seemed to say: "You see, I am still, as the Germans say, A. D.—at

disposition."

It was a great consolation, not because she proposed ever to take him up

again, but because it showed her that there was in the world one

faithful soul in riding-breeches. And it showed her that she was not

losing her looks.

And, indeed, she was not losing her looks. She was forty, but she was as

clean run as on the day she had left the convent—as clear in outline, as

clear coloured in the hair, as dark blue in the eyes. She thought that

her looking-glass told her this; but there are always the doubts....

Rodney Bayham's eyes took them away.

It is very singular that Leonora should not have aged at all. I suppose

that there are some types of beauty and even of youth made for the

embellishments that come with enduring sorrow. That is too elaborately

put. I mean that Leonora, if everything had prospered, might have become

too hard and, maybe, overbearing. As it was she was tuned down to

appearing efficient—and yet sympathetic. That is the rarest of all

blends. And yet I swear that Leonora, in her restrained way, gave the

impression of being intensely sympathetic. When she listened to you she

appeared also to be listening to some sound that was going on in the

distance. But still, she listened to you and took in what you said,

which, since the record of humanity is a record of sorrows, was, as a

rule, something sad.

I think that she must have taken Nancy through many terrors of the night

and many bad places of the day. And that would account for the girl's

passionate love for the elder woman. For Nancy's love for Leonora was an

admiration that is awakened in Catholics by their feeling for the Virgin

Mary and for various of the saints. It is too little to say that the

girl would have laid her life at Leonora's feet. Well, she laid there

the offer of her virtue—and her reason. Those were sufficient

instalments of her life. It would today be much better for Nancy Rufford

if she were dead.

Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance; but they crowd on me. I

will try to tell the story.

You see—when she came back from Nauheim Leonora began to have her

headaches—headaches lasting through whole days, during which she could

speak no word and could bear to hear no sound. And, day after day, Nancy

would sit with her, silent and motionless for hours, steeping

handkerchiefs in vinegar and water, and thinking her own thoughts. It

must have been very bad for her—and her meals alone with Edward must

have been bad for her too—and beastly bad for Edward. Edward, of course,

wavered in his demeanour, What else could he do? At times he would sit

silent and dejected over his untouched food. He would utter nothing but

monosyllables when Nancy spoke to him. Then he was simply afraid of the

girl falling in love with him. At other times he would take a little

wine; pull himself together; attempt to chaff Nancy about a stake and

binder hedge that her mare had checked at, or talk about the habits of

the Chitralis. That was when he was thinking that it was rough on the

poor girl that he should have become a dull companion. He realized that

his talking to her in the park at Nauheim had done her no harm.

But all that was doing a great deal of harm to Nancy. It gradually

opened her eyes to the fact that Edward was a man with his ups and downs

and not an invariably gay uncle like a nice dog, a trustworthy horse or

a girl friend. She would find him in attitudes of frightful dejection,

sunk into his armchair in the study that was half a gun-room. She would

notice through the open door that his face was the face of an old, dead

man, when he had no one to talk to. Gradually it forced itself upon her

attention that there were profound differences between the pair that she

regarded as her uncle and her aunt. It was a conviction that came very

slowly.

It began with Edward's giving an oldish horse to a young fellow called

Selmes. Selmes' father had been ruined by a fraudulent solicitor and the

Selmes family had had to sell their hunters. It was a case that had

excited a good deal of sympathy in that part of the county. And Edward,

meeting the young man one day, unmounted, and seeing him to be very

unhappy, had offered to give him an old Irish cob upon which he was

riding. It was a silly sort of thing to do really. The horse was worth

from thirty to forty pounds and Edward might have known that the gift

would upset his wife. But Edward just had to comfort that unhappy young

man whose father he had known all his life. And what made it all the

worse was that young Selmes could not afford to keep the horse even.

Edward recollected this, immediately after he had made the offer, and

said quickly:

"Of course I mean that you should stable the horse at Branshaw until you

have time to turn round or want to sell him and get a better."

Nancy went straight home and told all this to Leonora who was lying

down. She regarded it as a splendid instance of Edward's quick

consideration for the feelings and the circumstances of the distressed.

She thought it would cheer Leonora up—because it ought to cheer any

woman up to know that she had such a splendid husband. That was the last

girlish thought she ever had. For Leonora, whose headache had left her

collected but miserably weak, turned upon her bed and uttered words that

were amazing to the girl:

"I wish to God," she said, "that he was your husband, and not mine. We

shall be ruined. We shall be ruined. Am I never to have a chance?" And

suddenly Leonora burst into a passion of tears. She pushed herself up

from the pillows with one elbow and sat there—crying, crying, crying,

with her face hidden in her hands and the tears falling through her

fingers.

The girl flushed, stammered and whimpered as if she had been personally

insulted.

"But if Uncle Edward..." she began.

"That man," said Leonora, with an extraordinary bitterness, "would give

the shirt off his back and off mine—and off yours to any..." She could

not finish the sentence.

At that moment she had been feeling an extraordinary hatred and contempt

for her husband. All the morning and all the afternoon she had been

lying there thinking that Edward and the girl were together—in the field

and hacking it home at dusk. She had been digging her sharp nails into

her palms.

The house had been very silent in the drooping winter weather. And then,

after an eternity of torture, there had invaded it the sound of opening

doors, of the girl's gay voice saying:

"Well, it was only under the mistletoe."... And there was Edward's gruff

undertone. Then Nancy had come in, with feet that had hastened up the

stairs and that tiptoed as they approached the open door of Leonora's

room. Branshaw had a great big hall with oak floors and tiger skins.

Round this hall there ran a gallery upon which Leonora's doorway gave.

And even when she had the worst of her headaches she liked to have her

door open—I suppose so that she might hear the approaching footsteps of

ruin and disaster. At any rate she hated to be in a room with a shut

door.

At that moment Leonora hated Edward with a hatred that was like hell,

and she would have liked to bring her riding-whip down across the girl's

face. What right had Nancy to be young and slender and dark, and gay at

times, at times mournful? What right had she to be exactly the woman to

make Leonora's husband happy? For Leonora knew that Nancy would have

made Edward happy.

Yes, Leonora wished to bring her riding-whip down on Nancy's young face.

She imagined the pleasure she would feel when the lash fell across those

queer features; the pleasure she would feel at drawing the handle at the

same moment toward her, so as to cut deep into the flesh and to leave a

lasting wheal.

Well, she left a lasting wheal, and her words cut deeply into the girl's

mind....

They neither of them spoke about that again. A fortnight went by—a

fortnight of deep rains, of heavy fields, of bad scent. Leonora's

headaches seemed to have gone for good. She hunted once or twice,

letting herself be piloted by Bayham, whilst Edward looked after the

girl. Then, one evening, when those three were dining alone, Edward

said, in the queer, deliberate, heavy tones that came out of him in

those days (he was looking at the table):

"I have been thinking that Nancy ought to do more for her father. He is

getting an old man. I have written to Colonel Rufford, suggesting that

she should go to him."

Leonora called out:

"How dare you? How dare you?"

The girl put her hand over her heart and cried out: "Oh, my sweet

Saviour, help me!" That was the queer way she thought within her mind,

and the words forced themselves to her lips. Edward said nothing.

And that night, by a merciless trick of the devil that pays attention to

this sweltering hell of ours, Nancy Rufford had a letter from her

mother. It came whilst Leonora was talking to Edward, or Leonora would

have intercepted it as she had intercepted others. It was an amazing and

a horrible letter.. ..

I don't know what it contained. I just average out from its effects on

Nancy that her mother, having eloped with some worthless sort of fellow,

had done what is called "sinking lower and lower". Whether she was

actually on the streets I do not know, but I rather think that she eked

out a small allowance that she had from her husband by that means of

livelihood. And I think that she stated as much in her letter to Nancy

and upbraided the girl with living in luxury whilst her mother starved.

And it must have been horrible in tone, for Mrs Rufford was a cruel sort

of woman at the best of times. It must have seemed to that poor girl,

opening her letter, for distraction from another grief, up in her

bedroom, like the laughter of a devil.

I just cannot bear to think of my poor dear girl at that moment....

And, at the same time, Leonora was lashing, like a cold fiend, into the

unfortunate Edward. Or, perhaps, he was not so unfortunate; because he

had done what he knew to be the right thing, he may be deemed happy. I

leave it to you. At any rate, he was sitting in his deep chair, and

Leonora came into his room—for the first time in nine years. She said:

"This is the most atrocious thing you have done in your atrocious life."

He never moved and he never looked at her. God knows what was in

Leonora's mind exactly.

I like to think that, uppermost in it was concern and horror at the

thought of the poor girl's going back to a father whose voice made her

shriek in the night. And, indeed, that motive was very strong with

Leonora. But I think there was also present the thought that she wanted

to go on torturing Edward with the girl's presence. She was, at that

time, capable of that.

Edward was sunk in his chair; there were in the room two candles, hidden

by green glass shades. The green shades were reflected in the glasses of

the book-cases that contained not books but guns with gleaming brown

barrels and fishing-rods in green baize over-covers. There was dimly to

be seen, above a mantelpiece encumbered with spurs, hooves and bronze

models of horses, a dark-brown picture of a white horse.

"If you think," Leonora said, "that I do not know that you are in love

with the girl..." She began spiritedly, but she could not find any

ending for the sentence. Edward did not stir; he never spoke. And then

Leonora said:

"If you want me to divorce you, I will. You can marry her then. She's in

love with you."

He groaned at that, a little, Leonora said. Then she went away.

Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly does not

herself know. She probably said a good deal more to Edward than I have

been able to report; but that is all that she has told me and I am not

going to make up speeches. To follow her psychological development of

that moment I think we must allow that she upbraided him for a great

deal of their past life, whilst Edward sat absolutely silent. And,

indeed, in speaking of it afterwards, she has said several times: "I

said a great deal more to him than I wanted to, just because he was so

silent." She talked, in fact, in the endeavour to sting him into speech.

She must have said so much that, with the expression of her grievance,

her mood changed. She went back to her own room in the gallery, and sat

there for a long time thinking. And she thought herself into a mood of

absolute unselfishness, of absolute self-contempt, too. She said to

herself that she was no good; that she had failed in all her efforts—in

her efforts to get Edward back as in her efforts to make him curb his

expenditure. She imagined herself to be exhausted; she imagined herself

to be done. Then a great fear came over her.

She thought that Edward, after what she had said to him, must have

committed suicide. She went out on to the gallery and listened; there

was no sound in all the house except the regular beat of the great clock

in the hall. But, even in her debased condition, she was not the person

to hang about. She acted. She went straight to Edward's room, opened the

door, and looked in.

He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It was an unusual thing for

him to do, at that time of night, in his evening clothes. It never

occurred to her, nevertheless, that he was going to shoot himself with

that implement. She knew that he was doing it just for occupation—to

keep himself from thinking. He looked up when she opened the door, his

face illuminated by the light cast upwards from the round orifices in

the green candle shades.

She said:

"I didn't imagine that I should find Nancy here." She thought that she

owed that to him. He answered then:

"I don't imagine that you did imagine it." Those were the only words he

spoke that night. She went, like a lame duck, back through the long

corridors; she stumbled over the familiar tiger skins in the dark hall.

She could hardly drag one limb after the other. In the gallery she

perceived that Nancy's door was half open and that there was a light in

the girl's room. A sudden madness possessed her, a desire for action, a

thirst for self-explanation.

Their rooms all gave on to the gallery; Leonora's to the east, the

girl's next, then Edward's. The sight of those three open doors, side by

side, gaping to receive whom the chances of the black night might bring,

made Leonora shudder all over her body. She went into Nancy's room.

The girl was sitting perfectly still in an armchair, very upright, as

she had been taught to sit at the convent. She appeared to be as calm as

a church; her hair fell, black and like a pall, down over both her

shoulders. The fire beside her was burning brightly; she must have just

put coals on. She was in a white silk kimono that covered her to the

feet. The clothes that she had taken off were exactly folded upon the

proper seats. Her long hands were one upon each arm of the chair that

had a pink and white chintz back.

Leonora told me these things. She seemed to think it extraordinary that

the girl could have done such orderly things as fold up the clothes she

had taken off upon such a night—when Edward had announced that he was

going to send her to her father, and when, from her mother, she had

received that letter. The letter, in its envelope, was in her right

hand.

Leonora did not at first perceive it. She said:

"What are you doing so late?"

The girl answered: "Just thinking."

They seemed to think in whispers and to speak below their breaths. Then

Leonora's eyes fell on the envelope, and she recognized Mrs Rufford's

handwriting.

It was one of those moments when thinking was impossible, Leonora said.

It was as if stones were being thrown at her from every direction and

she could only run. She heard herself exclaim:

"Edward's dying—because of you. He's dying. He's worth more than either

of us...."

The girl looked past her at the panels of the half-closed door.

"My poor father," she said, "my poor father."

"You must stay here," Leonora answered fiercely. "You must stay here. I

tell you you must stay here."

"I am going to Glasgow," Nancy answered. "I shall go to Glasgow tomorrow

morning. My mother is in Glasgow."

It appears that it was in Glasgow that Mrs Rufford pursued her

disorderly life. She had selected that city, not because it was more

profitable but because it was the natal home of her husband to whom she

desired to cause as much pain as possible.

"You must stay here," Leonora began, "to save Edward. He's dying for

love of you."

The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora.

"I know it," she said. "And I am dying for love of him."

Leonora uttered an "Ah," that, in spite of herself, was an "Ah" of

horror and of grief.

"That is why," the girl continued, "I am going to Glasgow—to take my

mother away from there." She added, "To the ends of the earth," for, if

the last months had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases were

still romantically those of a schoolgirl. It was as if she had grown up

so quickly that there had not been time to put her hair up. But she

added: "We're no good—my mother and I."

Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:

"No. No. You're not no good. It's I that am no good. You can't let that

man go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him."

The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, far-away smile—as if she

were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.

"I knew you would come to that," she said, very slowly. "But we are not

worth it—Edward and I."

III

NANCY had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made that

comment over the giving of the horse to young Selmes. She had been

thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for many days silent

beside her aunt's bed. (She had always thought of Leonora as her aunt.)

And she had had to sit thinking during many silent meals with Edward.

And then, at times, with his bloodshot eyes and creased, heavy mouth, he

would smile at her. And gradually the knowledge had come to her that

Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Several

things contributed to form and to harden this conviction.

She was allowed to read the papers in those days—or, rather, since

Leonora was always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out

early, over the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day, in

the papers, she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well. Beneath

it she read the words: "The Hon. Mrs Brand, plaintiff in the remarkable

divorce case reported on p. 8." Nancy hardly knew what a divorce case

was. She had been so remarkably well brought up, and Roman Catholics do

not practise divorce. I don't know how Leonora had done it exactly. I

suppose she had always impressed it on Nancy's mind that nice women did

not read these things, and that would have been enough to make Nancy

skip those pages.

She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce case—principally

because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She imagined that Leonora,

when her headache left her, would like to know what was happening to Mrs

Brand, who lived at Christchurch, and whom they both liked very well.

The case occupied three days, and the report that Nancy first came upon

was that of the third day. Edward, however, kept the papers of the week,

after his methodical fashion, in a rack in his gun-room, and when she

had finished her breakfast Nancy went to that quiet apartment and had

what she would have called a good read. It seemed to her to be a queer

affair. She could not understand why one counsel should be so anxious to

know all about the movements of Mr Brand upon a certain day; she could

not understand why a chart of the bedroom accommodation at Christchurch

Old Hall should be produced in court. She did not even see why they

should want to know that, upon a certain occasion, the drawing-room door

was locked. It made her laugh; it appeared to be all so senseless that

grown people should occupy themselves with such matters. It struck her,

nevertheless, as odd that one of the counsel should cross-question Mr

Brand so insistently and so impertinently as to his feelings for Miss

Lupton. Nancy knew Miss Lupton of Ringwood very well—a jolly girl, who

rode a horse with two white fetlocks. Mr Brand persisted that he did not

love Miss Lupton.... Well, of course he did not love Miss Lupton; he was

a married man. You might as well think of Uncle Edward loving... loving

anybody but Leonora. When people were married there was an end of

loving. There were, no doubt, people who misbehaved—but they were poor

people—or people not like those she knew.

So these matters presented themselves to Nancy's mind.

But later on in the case she found that Mr Brand had to confess to a

"guilty intimacy" with some one or other. Nancy imagined that he must

have been telling some one his wife's secrets; she could not understand

why that was a serious offence. Of course it was not very gentlemanly—it

lessened her opinion of Mrs Brand. But since she found that Mrs Brand

had condoned that offence, she imagined that they could not have been

very serious secrets that Mr Brand had told. And then, suddenly, it was

forced on her conviction that Mr Brand—the mild Mr Brand that she had

seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing "Blind

Man's Buff" with his children and kissing his wife when he caught her—Mr

Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst possible terms. That was

incredible.

Yet there it was—in black and white. Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand had struck

Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr Brand was adjudged, in two

or three abrupt words, at the end of columns and columns of paper, to

have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have committed adultery

with Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to Nancy—nothing real,

that is to say. She knew that one was commanded not to commit

adultery—but why, she thought, should one? It was probably something

like catching salmon out of season—a thing one did not do. She gathered

it had something to do with kissing, or holding some one in your arms..

..

And yet the whole effect of that reading upon Nancy was mysterious,

terrifying and evil. She felt a sickness—a sickness that grew as she

read. Her heart beat painfully; she began to cry. She asked God how He

could permit such things to be. And she was more certain that Edward did

not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Perhaps, then, Edward

loved some one else. It was unthinkable.

If he could love some one else than Leonora, her fierce unknown heart

suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself? And he did not

love her.... This had occurred about a month before she got the letter

from her mother. She let the matter rest until the sick feeling went

off; it did that in a day or two. Then, finding that Leonora's headaches

had gone, she suddenly told Leonora that Mrs Brand had divorced her

husband. She asked what, exactly, it all meant.

Leonora was lying on the sofa in the hall; she was feeling so weak that

she could hardly find the words. She answered just:

"It means that Mr Brand will be able to marry again."

Nancy said:

"But... but..." and then: "He will be able to marry Miss Lupton."

Leonora just moved a hand in assent. Her eyes were shut.

"Then..." Nancy began. Her blue eyes were full of horror: her brows were

tight above them; the lines of pain about her mouth were very distinct.

In her eyes the whole of that familiar, great hall had a changed aspect.

The andirons with the brass flowers at the ends appeared unreal; the

burning logs were just logs that were burning and not the comfortable

symbols of an indestructible mode of life. The flame fluttered before

the high fireback; the St Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the

winter rain fell and fell. And suddenly she thought that Edward might

marry some one else; and she nearly screamed.

Leonora opened her eyes, lying sideways, with her face upon the black

and gold pillow of the sofa that was drawn half across the great

fireplace.

"I thought," Nancy said, "I never imagined.... Aren't marriages

sacraments? Aren't they indissoluble? I thought you were married. ..

and..." She was sobbing. "I thought you were married or not married as

you are alive or dead."

"That," Leonora said, "is the law of the church. It is not the law of

the land...."

"Oh yes," Nancy said, "the Brands are Protestants."

She felt a sudden safeness descend upon her, and for an hour or so her

mind was at rest. It seemed to her idiotic not to have remembered Henry

VIII and the basis upon which Protestantism rests. She almost laughed at

herself.

The long afternoon wore on; the flames still fluttered when the maid

made up the fire; the St Bernard awoke and lolloped away towards the

kitchen. And then Leonora opened her eyes and said almost coldly:

"And you? Don't you think you will get married?"

It was so unlike Leonora that, for the moment, the girl was frightened

in the dusk. But then, again, it seemed a perfectly reasonable question.

"I don't know," she answered. "I don't know that anyone wants to marry

me."

"Several people want to marry you," Leonora said.

"But I don't want to marry," Nancy answered. "I should like to go on

living with you and Edward. I don't think I am in the way or that I am

really an expense. If I went you would have to have a companion. Or,

perhaps, I ought to earn my living...."

"I wasn't thinking of that," Leonora answered in the same dull tone.

"You will have money enough from your father. But most people want to be

married."

I believe that she then asked the girl if she would not like to marry

me, and that Nancy answered that she would marry me if she were told to;

but that she wanted to go on living there. She added:

"If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward."

She was frightened out of her life. Leonora writhed on her couch and

called out: "Oh, God!..."

Nancy ran for the maid; for tablets of aspirin; for wet handkerchiefs.

It never occurred to her that Leonora's expression of agony was for

anything else than physical pain.

You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went

into the girl's room at night. I have been casting back again; but I

cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I

tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who

has fallen behind. And then the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish

I could put it down in diary form. Thus: On the 1st of September they

returned from Nauheim. Leonora at once took to her bed. By the 1st of

October they were all going to meets together. Nancy had already

observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner. About the 6th

of that month Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had cause

to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle. On the 20th she read

the account of the divorce case, which is reported in the papers of the

18th and the two following days. On the 23rd she had the conversation

with her aunt in the hall—about marriage in general and about her own

possible marriage, her aunt's coming to her bedroom did not occur until

the 12th of November....

Thus she had three weeks for introspection—for introspection beneath

gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay

in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black shadows. It was not a

good situation for a girl. She began thinking about love, she who had

never before considered it as anything other than a rather humorous,

rather nonsensical matter. She remembered chance passages in chance

books—things that had not really affected her at all at the time. She

remembered someone's love for the Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered

to have heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the

vitals—though she did not know what the vitals were. She had a vague

recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes

hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who was said to have

taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers' existences were

said to be punctuated with heavy sighs. Once she went to the little

cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall and began to play. It

was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of that household had any turn

for music. Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found

herself playing. She had been sitting on the window seat, looking out on

the fading day. Leonora had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking

after some planting up in the new spinney. Thus she found herself

playing on the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing it.

A silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk—a tune in

which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into

minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high lights on dark waters melt

and waver and disappear into black depths. Well, it was a silly old

tune....

It goes with the words—they are about a willow tree, I think: Thou art

to all lost loves the best The only true plant found.

—That sort of thing. It is Herrick, I believe, and the music with the

reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick, And it was dusk;

the heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were like

mourning presences; the fire had sunk to nothing—a mere glow amongst

white ashes.... It was a sentimental sort of place and light and

hour....

And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying. She was crying quietly;

she went on to cry with long convulsive sobs. It seemed to her that

everything gay, everything charming, all light, all sweetness, had gone

out of life. Unhappiness; unhappiness; unhappiness was all around her.

She seemed to know no happy being and she herself was agonizing....

She remembered that Edward's eyes were hopeless; she was certain that he

was drinking too much; at times he sighed deeply. He appeared as a man

who was burning with inward flame; drying up in the soul with thirst;

withering up in the vitals. Then, the torturing conviction came to

her—the conviction that had visited her again and again—that Edward must

love some one other than Leonora. With her little, pedagogic

sectarianism she remembered that Catholics do not do this thing. But

Edward was a Protestant. Then Edward loved somebody....

And, after that thought, her eyes grew hopeless; she sighed as the old

St Bernard beside her did. At meals she would feel an intolerable desire

to drink a glass of wine, and then another and then a third. Then she

would find herself grow gay.... But in half an hour the gaiety went; she

felt like a person who is burning up with an inward flame; desiccating

at the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals. One evening she

went into Edward's gun-room—he had gone to a meeting of the National

Reserve Committee. On the table beside his chair was a decanter of

whisky. She poured out a wineglassful and drank it off.

Flame then really seemed to fill her body; her legs swelled; her face

grew feverish. She dragged her tall height up to her room and lay in the

dark. The bed reeled beneath her; she gave way to the thought that she

was in Edward's arms; that he was kissing her on her face that burned;

on her shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on fire.

She never touched alcohol again. Not once after that did she have such

thoughts. They died out of her mind; they left only a feeling of shame

so insupportable that her brain could not take it in and they vanished.

She imagined that her anguish at the thought of Edward's love for

another person was solely sympathy for Leonora; she determined that the

rest of her life must be spent in acting as Leonora's

handmaiden—sweeping, tending, embroidering, like some Deborah, some

medieval saint—I am not, unfortunately, up in the Catholic hagiology.

But I know that she pictured herself as some personage with a depressed,

earnest face and tightly closed lips, in a clear white room, watering

flowers or tending an embroidery frame. Or, she desired to go with

Edward to Africa and to throw herself in the path of a charging lion so

that Edward might be saved for Leonora at the cost of her life. Well,

along with her sad thoughts she had her childish ones.

She knew nothing—nothing of life, except that one must live sadly. That

she now knew. What happened to her on the night when she received at

once the blow that Edward wished her to go to her father in India and

the blow of the letter from her mother was this. She called first upon

her sweet Saviour—and she thought of Our Lord as her sweet Saviour!—that

He might make it impossible that she should go to India. Then she

realized from Edward's demeanour that he was determined that she should

go to India. It must then be right that she should go. Edward was always

right in his determinations. He was the Cid; he was Lohengrin; he was

the Chevalier Bayard.

Nevertheless her mind mutinied and revolted. She could not leave that

house. She imagined that he wished her gone that she might not witness

his amours with another girl. Well, she was prepared to tell him that

she was ready to witness his amours with another young girl. She would

stay there—to comfort Leonora.

Then came the desperate shock of the letter from her mother. Her mother

said, I believe, something like: "You have no right to go on living your

life of prosperity and respect. You ought to be on the streets with me.

How do you know that you are even Colonel Rufford's daughter?" She did

not know what these words meant. She thought of her mother as sleeping

beneath the arches whilst the snow fell. That was the impression

conveyed to her mind by the words "on the streets". A Platonic sense of

duty gave her the idea that she ought to go to comfort her mother—the

mother that bore her, though she hardly knew what the words meant. At

the same time she knew that her mother had left her father with another

man—therefore she pitied her father, and thought it terrible in herself

that she trembled at the sound of her father's voice. If her mother was

that sort of woman it was natural that her father should have had

accesses of madness in which he had struck herself to the ground. And

the voice of her conscience said to her that her first duty was to her

parents. It was in accord with this awakened sense of duty that she

undressed with great care and meticulously folded the clothes that she

took off. Sometimes, but not very often, she threw them helter-skelter

about the room.

And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood when Leonora, tall,

clean-run, golden-haired, all in black, appeared in her doorway, and

told her that Edward was dying of love for her. She knew then with her

conscious mind what she had known within herself for months—that Edward

was dying—actually and physically dying—of love for her. It seemed to

her that for one short moment her spirit could say: "Domine, nunc

dimittis,... Lord, now, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." She

imagined that she could cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her

fallen mother.

IV

AND it seemed to her to be in tune with the mood, with the hour, and

with the woman in front of her to say that she knew Edward was dying of

love for her and that she was dying of love for Edward. For that fact

had suddenly slipped into place and become real for her as the niched

marker on a whist tablet slips round with the pressure of your thumb.

That rubber at least was made.

And suddenly Leonora seemed to have become different and she seemed to

have become different in her attitude towards Leonora. It was as if she,

in her frail, white, silken kimono, sat beside her fire, but upon a

throne. It was as if Leonora, in her close dress of black lace, with the

gleaming white shoulders and the coiled yellow hair that the girl had

always considered the most beautiful thing in the world—it was as if

Leonora had become pinched, shrivelled, blue with cold, shivering,

suppliant. Yet Leonora was commanding her. It was no good commanding

her. She was going on the morrow to her mother who was in Glasgow.

Leonora went on saying that she must stay there to save Edward, who was

dying of love for her. And, proud and happy in the thought that Edward

loved her, and that she loved him, she did not even listen to what

Leonora said. It appeared to her that it was Leonora's business to save

her husband's body; she, Nancy, possessed his soul—a precious thing that

she would shield and bear away up in her arms—as if Leonora were a

hungry dog, trying to spring up at a lamb that she was carrying. Yes,

she felt as if Edward's love were a precious lamb that she were bearing

away from a cruel and predatory beast. For, at that time, Leonora

appeared to her as a cruel and predatory beast. Leonora, Leonora with

her hunger, with her cruelty had driven Edward to madness. He must be

sheltered by his love for her and by her love—her love from a great

distance and unspoken, enveloping him, surrounding him, upholding him;

by her voice speaking from Glasgow, saying that she loved, that she

adored, that she passed no moment without longing, loving, quivering at

the thought of him.

Leonora said loudly, insistently, with a bitterly imperative tone:

"You must stay here; you must belong to Edward. I will divorce him."

The girl answered:

"The Church does not allow of divorce. I cannot belong to your husband.

I am going to Glasgow to rescue my mother."

The half-opened door opened noiselessly to the full. Edward was there.

His devouring, doomed eyes were fixed on the girl's face; his shoulders

slouched forward; he was undoubtedly half drunk and he had the whisky

decanter in one hand, a slanting candlestick in the other. He said, with

a heavy ferocity, to Nancy:

"I forbid you to talk about these things. You are to stay here until I

hear from your father. Then you will go to your father."

The two women, looking at each other, like beasts about to spring,

hardly gave a glance to him. He leaned against the door-post. He said

again:

"Nancy, I forbid you to talk about these things. I am the master of this

house." And, at the sound of his voice, heavy, male, coming from a deep

chest, in the night with the blackness behind him, Nancy felt as if her

spirit bowed before him, with folded hands. She felt that she would go

to India, and that she desired never again to talk of these things.

Leonora said:

"You see that it is your duty to belong to him. He must not be allowed

to go on drinking."

Nancy did not answer. Edward was gone; they heard him slipping and

shambling on the polished oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed when there

came the sound of a heavy fall. Leonora said again:

"You see!"

The sounds went on from the hall below; the light of the candle Edward

held flickered up between the hand rails of the gallery. Then they heard

his voice:

"Give me Glasgow... Glasgow, in Scotland.. I want the number of a man

called White, of Simrock Park, Glasgow... Edward White, Simrock Park,

Glasgow... ten minutes... at this time of night..." His voice was quite

level, normal, and patient. Alcohol took him in the legs, not the

speech. "I can wait," his voice came again. "Yes, I know they have a

number. I have been in communication with them before."

"He is going to telephone to your mother," Leonora said. "He will make

it all right for her." She got up and closed the door. She came back to

the fire, and added bitterly: "He can always make it all right for

everybody, except me—excepting me!"

The girl said nothing. She sat there in a blissful dream. She seemed to

see her lover sitting as he always sat, in a round-backed chair, in the

dark hall—sitting low, with the receiver at his ear, talking in a

gentle, slow voice, that he reserved for the telephone—and saving the

world and her, in the black darkness. She moved her hand over the

bareness of the base of her throat, to have the warmth of flesh upon it

and upon her bosom.

She said nothing; Leonora went on talking....

God knows what Leonora said. She repeated that the girl must belong to

her husband. She said that she used that phrase because, though she

might have a divorce, or even a dissolution of the marriage by the

Church, it would still be adultery that the girl and Edward would be

committing. But she said that that was necessary; it was the price that

the girl must pay for the sin of having made Edward love her, for the

sin of loving her husband. She talked on and on, beside the fire. The

girl must become an adulteress; she had wronged Edward by being so

beautiful, so gracious, so good. It was sinful to be so good. She must

pay the price so as to save the man she had wronged.

In between her pauses the girl could hear the voice of Edward, droning

on, indistinguishably, with jerky pauses for replies. It made her glow

with pride; the man she loved was working for her. He at least was

resolved; was malely determined; knew the right thing. Leonora talked on

with her eyes boring into Nancy's. The girl hardly looked at her and

hardly heard her. After a long time Nancy said—after hours and hours:

"I shall go to India as soon as Edward hears from my father. I cannot

talk about these things, because Edward does not wish it."

At that Leonora screamed out and wavered swiftly towards the closed

door. And Nancy found that she was springing out of her chair with her

white arms stretched wide. She was clasping the other woman to her

breast; she was saying:

"Oh, my poor dear; oh, my poor dear." And they sat, crouching together

in each other's arms, and crying and crying; and they lay down in the

same bed, talking and talking, all through the night. And all through

the night Edward could hear their voices through the wall. That was how

it went....

Next morning they were all three as if nothing had happened. Towards

eleven Edward came to Nancy, who was arranging some Christmas roses in a

silver bowl. He put a telegram beside her on the table. "You can uncode

it for yourself," he said. Then, as he went out of the door, he said:

"You can tell your aunt I have cabled to Mr Dowell to come over. He will

make things easier till you leave." The telegram when it was uncoded,

read, as far as I can remember:

"Will take Mrs Rufford to Italy. Undertake to do this for certain. Am

devotedly attached to Mrs Rufford. Have no need of financial assistance.

Did not know there was a daughter, and am much obliged to you for

pointing out my duty.—White." It was something like that.

Then that household resumed its wonted course of days until my arrival.

V

IT is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all. For I ask

myself unceasingly, my mind going round and round in a weary, baffled

space of pain—what should these people have done? What, in the name of

God, should they have done?

The end was perfectly plain to each of them—it was perfectly manifest at

this stage that, if the girl did not, in Leonora's phrase, "belong to

Edward," Edward must die, the girl must lose her reason because Edward

died—and, that after a time, Leonora, who was the coldest and the

strongest of the three, would console herself by marrying Rodney Bayham

and have a quiet, comfortable, good time. That end, on that night,

whilst Leonora sat in the girl's bedroom and Edward telephoned down

below—that end was plainly manifest. The girl, plainly, was half-mad

already; Edward was half dead; only Leonora, active, persistent,

instinct with her cold passion of energy, was "doing things". What then,

should they have done? worked out in the extinction of two very splendid

personalities—for Edward and the girl were splendid personalities, in

order that a third personality, more normal, should have, after a long

period of trouble, a quiet, comfortable, good time.

I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the

words that end my last chapter. Since writing the words "until my

arrival", which I see end that paragraph, I have seen again for a

glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white tower,

Tarascon with the square castle, the great Rhone, the immense stretches

of the Crau. I have rushed through all Provence—and all Provence no

longer matters. It is no longer in the olive hills that I shall find my

Heaven; because there is only Hell... .

Edward is dead; the girl is gone—oh, utterly gone; Leonora is having a

good time with Rodney Bayham, and I sit alone in Branshaw Teleragh. I

have been through Provence; I have seen Africa; I have visited Asia to

see, in Ceylon, in a darkened room, my poor girl, sitting motionless,

with her wonderful hair about her, looking at me with eyes that did not

see me, and saying distinctly: "Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem....

Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem." Those are the only reasonable words

she uttered; those are the only words, it appears, that she ever will

utter. I suppose that they are reasonable words; it must be

extraordinarily reasonable for her, if she can say that she believes in

an Omnipotent Deity. Well, there it is. I am very tired of it all....

For, I daresay, all this may sound romantic, but it is tiring, tiring,

tiring to have been in the midst of it; to have taken the tickets; to

have caught the trains; to have chosen the cabins; to have consulted the

purser and the stewards as to diet for the quiescent patient who did

nothing but announce her belief in an Omnipotent Deity. That may sound

romantic—but it is just a record of fatigue.

I don't know why I should always be selected to be serviceable. I don't

resent it—but I have never been the least good. Florence selected me for

her own purposes, and I was no good to her; Edward called me to come and

have a chat with him, and I couldn't stop him cutting his throat.

And then, one day eighteen months ago, I was quietly writing in my room

at Branshaw when Leonora came to me with a letter. It was a very

pathetic letter from Colonel Rufford about Nancy. Colonel Rufford had

left the army and had taken up an appointment at a tea-planting estate

in Ceylon. His letter was pathetic because it was so brief, so

inarticulate, and so business-like. He had gone down to the boat to meet

his daughter, and had found his daughter quite mad. It appears that at

Aden Nancy had seen in a local paper the news of Edward's suicide. In

the Red Sea she had gone mad. She had remarked to Mrs Colonel Luton, who

was chaperoning her, that she believed in an Omnipotent Deity. She

hadn't made any fuss; her eyes were quite dry and glassy. Even when she

was mad Nancy could behave herself.

Colonel Rufford said the doctor did not anticipate that there was any

chance of his child's recovery. It was, nevertheless, possible that if

she could see someone from Branshaw it might soothe her and it might

have a good effect. And he just simply wrote to Leonora: "Please come

and see if you can do it."

I seem to have lost all sense of the pathetic; but still, that simple,

enormous request of the old colonel strikes me as pathetic. He was

cursed by his atrocious temper; he had been cursed by a half-mad wife,

who drank and went on the streets. His daughter was totally mad—and yet

he believed in the goodness of human nature. He believed that Leonora

would take the trouble to go all the way to Ceylon in order to soothe

his daughter. Leonora wouldn't. Leonora didn't ever want to see Nancy

again. I daresay that that, in the circumstances, was natural enough. At

the same time she agreed, as it were, on public grounds, that someone

soothing ought to go from Branshaw to Ceylon. She sent me and her old

nurse, who had looked after Nancy from the time when the girl, a child

of thirteen, had first come to Branshaw. So off I go, rushing through

Provence, to catch the steamer at Marseilles. And I wasn't the least

good when I got to Ceylon; and the nurse wasn't the least good. Nothing

has been the least good.

The doctors said, at Kandy, that if Nancy could be brought to England,

the sea air, the change of climate, the voyage, and all the usual sort

of things, might restore her reason. Of course, they haven't restored

her reason. She is, I am aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from

where I am now writing. I don't want to be in the least romantic about

it. She is very well dressed; she is quite quiet; she is very beautiful.

The old nurse looks after her very efficiently.

Of course you have the makings of a situation here, but it is all very

humdrum, as far as I am concerned.

I should marry Nancy if her reason were ever sufficiently restored to

let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. But it

is probable that her reason will never be sufficiently restored to let

her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. Therefore I

cannot marry her, according to the law of the land.

So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago. I am the

attendant, not the husband, of a beautiful girl, who pays no attention

to me. I am estranged from Leonora, who married Rodney Bayham in my

absence and went to live at Bayham. Leonora rather dislikes me, because

she has got it into her head that I disapprove of her marriage with

Rodney Bayham. Well, I disapprove of her marriage. Possibly I am

jealous.

Yes, no doubt I am jealous. In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive

myself following the lines of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I should

really like to be a polygamist; with Nancy, and with Leonora, and with

Maisie Maidan and possibly even with Florence. I am no doubt like every

other man; only, probably because of my American origin I am fainter. At

the same time I am able to assure you that I am a strictly respectable

person. I have never done anything that the most anxious mother of a

daughter or the most careful dean of a cathedral would object to. I have

only followed, faintly, and in my unconscious desires, Edward

Ashburnham. Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he really

wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney Bayham, a pleasant

enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is I who have

bought it from Leonora. I didn't really want it; what I wanted mostly

was to cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant.

Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is

a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The

things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong

thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.

Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the

olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like

and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's lives

like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of

the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, tumultuous, agonized, and

unromantic, lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by

deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?

For there was a great deal of imbecility about the closing scenes of the

Ashburnham tragedy. Neither of those two women knew what they wanted. It

was only Edward who took a perfectly clear line, and he was drunk most

of the time. But, drunk or sober, he stuck to what was demanded by

convention and by the traditions of his house. Nancy Rufford had to be

exported to India, and Nancy Rufford hadn't to hear a word of love from

him. She was exported to India and she never heard a word from Edward

Ashburnham.

It was the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of

Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of the

body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but

surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the extinction of

proud, resolute and unusual individuals.

Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the sentimentalist

about him; and society does not need too many sentimentalists. Nancy was

a splendid creature, but she had about her a touch of madness. Society

does not need individuals with touches of madness about them. So Edward

and Nancy found themselves steamrolled out and Leonora survives, the

perfectly normal type, married to a man who is rather like a rabbit. For

Rodney Bayham is rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is

expected to have a baby in three months' time.

So those splendid and tumultuous creatures with their magnetism and

their passions—those two that I really loved—have gone from this earth.

It is no doubt best for them. What would Nancy have made of Edward if

she had succeeded in living with him; what would Edward have made of

her? For there was about Nancy a touch of cruelty—a touch of definite

actual cruelty that made her desire to see people suffer. Yes, she

desired to see Edward suffer. And, by God, she gave him hell.

She gave him an unimaginable hell. Those two women pursued that poor

devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with whips. I

tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see him stand, naked to

the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and flesh hanging from him

in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration of what I feel. It was as if

Leonora and Nancy banded themselves together to do execution, for the

sake of humanity, upon the body of a man who was at their disposal. They

were like a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him

well tied to a stake. I tell you there was no end to the tortures they

inflicted upon him.

Night after night he would hear them talking; talking; maddened,

sweating, seeking oblivion in drink, he would lie there and hear the

voices going on and on. And day after day Leonora would come to him and

would announce the results of their deliberations.

They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a criminal; they

were like ghouls with an immobile corpse in a tomb beside them.

I don't think that Leonora was any more to blame than the girl—though

Leonora was the more active of the two. Leonora, as I have said, was the

perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her

desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired

children, decorum, an establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she

desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even

in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted

perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world

was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of

a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What

would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But, if you

put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If

you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that

with Leonora. She was made for normal circumstances—for Mr Rodney

Bayham, who will keep a separate establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth,

and make occasional trips to Paris and to Budapest.

In the case of Edward and the girl, Leonora broke and simply went all

over the place. She adopted unfamiliar and therefore extraordinary and

ungraceful attitudes of mind. At one moment she was all for revenge.

After haranguing the girl for hours through the night she harangued for

hours of the day the silent Edward. And Edward just once tripped up, and

that was his undoing. Perhaps he had had too much whisky that afternoon.

She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want? What did he

want? And all he ever answered was: "I have told you". He meant that he

wanted the girl to go to her father in India as soon as her father

should cable that he was ready to receive her. But just once he tripped

up. To Leonora's eternal question he answered that all he desired in

life was that—that he could pick himself together again and go on with

his daily occupations if—the girl, being five thousand miles away, would

continue to love him. He wanted nothing more, He prayed his God for

nothing more. Well, he was a sentimentalist.

And the moment that she heard that, Leonora determined that the girl

should not go five thousand miles away and that she should not continue

to love Edward. The way she worked it was this:

She continued to tell the girl that she must belong to Edward; she was

going to get a divorce; she was going to get a dissolution of marriage

from Rome. But she considered it to be her duty to warn the girl of the

sort of monster that Edward was. She told the girl of La Dolciquita, of

Mrs Basil, of Maisie Maidan, of Florence. She spoke of the agonies that

she had endured during her life with the man, who was violent,

overbearing, vain, drunken, arrogant, and monstrously a prey to his

sexual necessities. And, at hearing of the miseries her aunt had

suffered—for Leonora once more had the aspect of an aunt to the

girl—with the swift cruelty of youth and, with the swift solidarity that

attaches woman to woman, the girl made her resolves. Her aunt said

incessantly: "You must save Edward's life; you must save his life. All

that he needs is a little period of satisfaction from you. Then he will

tire of you as he has of the others. But you must save his life."

And, all the while, that wretched fellow knew—by a curious instinct that

runs between human beings living together—exactly what was going on. And

he remained dumb; he stretched out no finger to help himself. All that

he required to keep himself a decent member of society was, that the

girl, five thousand miles away, should continue to love him. They were

putting a stopper upon that.

I have told you that the girl came one night to his room. And that was

the real hell for him. That was the picture that never left his

imagination—the girl, in the dim light, rising up at the foot of his

bed. He said that it seemed to have a greenish sort of effect as if

there were a greenish tinge in the shadows of the tall bedposts that

framed her body. And she looked at him with her straight eyes of an

unflinching cruelty and she said: "I am ready to belong to you—to save

your life."

He answered: "I don't want it; I don't want it; I don't want it."

And he says that he didn't want it; that he would have hated himself;

that it was unthinkable. And all the while he had the immense temptation

to do the unthinkable thing, not from the physical desire but because of

a mental certitude. He was certain that if she had once submitted to him

she would remain his for ever. He knew that.

She was thinking that her aunt had said he had desired her to love him

from a distance of five thousand miles. She said: "I can never love you

now I know the kind of man you are. I will belong to you to save your

life. But I can never love you."

It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She didn't in the least know what

it meant—to belong to a man. But, at that Edward pulled himself

together. He spoke in his normal tones; gruff, husky, overbearing, as he

would have done to a servant or to a horse.

"Go back to your room," he said. "Go back to your room and go to sleep.

This is all nonsense."

They were baffled, those two women.

And then I came on the scene.

VI

MY coming on the scene certainly calmed things down—for the whole

fortnight that intervened between my arrival and the girl's departure. I

don't mean to say that the endless talking did not go on at night or

that Leonora did not send me out with the girl and, in the interval,

give Edward a hell of a time. Having discovered what he wanted—that the

girl should go five thousand miles away and love him steadfastly as

people do in sentimental novels, she was determined to smash that

aspiration. And she repeated to Edward in every possible tone that the

girl did not love him; that the girl detested him for his brutality, his

overbearingness, his drinking habits. She pointed out that Edward in the

girl's eyes, was already pledged three or four deep. He was pledged to

Leonora herself, to Mrs Basil, and to the memories of Maisie Maidan and

to Florence. Edward never said anything.

Did the girl love Edward, or didn't she? I don't know. At that time I

daresay she didn't though she certainly had done so before Leonora had

got to work upon his reputation. She certainly had loved him for what I

call the public side of his record—for his good soldiering, for his

saving lives at sea, for the excellent landlord that he was and the good

sportsman. But it is quite possible that all those things came to appear

as nothing in her eyes when she discovered that he wasn't a good

husband. For, though women, as I see them, have little or no feeling of

responsibility towards a county or a country or a career—although they

may be entirely lacking in any kind of communal solidarity—they have an

immense and automatically working instinct that attaches them to the

interest of womanhood. It is, of course, possible for any woman to cut

out and to carry off any other woman's husband or lover. But I rather

think that a woman will only do this if she has reason to believe that

the other woman has given her husband a bad time. I am certain that if

she thinks the man has been a brute to his wife she will, with her

instinctive feeling for suffering femininity, "put him back", as the

saying is. I don't attach any particular importance to these

generalizations of mine. They may be right, they may be wrong; I am only

an ageing American with very little knowledge of life. You may take my

generalizations or leave them. But I am pretty certain that I am right

in the case of Nancy Rufford—that she had loved Edward Ashburnham very

deeply and tenderly.

It is nothing to the point that she let him have it good and strong as

soon as she discovered that he had been unfaithful to Leonora and that

his public services had cost more than Leonora thought they ought to

have cost. Nancy would be bound to let him have it good and strong then.

She would owe that to feminine public opinion; she would be driven to it

by the instinct for self-preservation, since she might well imagine that

if Edward had been unfaithful to Leonora, to Mrs Basil and to the

memories of the other two, he might be unfaithful to herself. And, no

doubt, she had her share of the sex instinct that makes women be

intolerably cruel to the beloved person. Anyhow, I don't know whether,

at this point, Nancy Rufford loved Edward Ashburnham. I don't know

whether she even loved him when, on getting, at Aden, the news of his

suicide she went mad. Because that may just as well have been for the

sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it may have been for the

sake of both of them. I don't know. I know nothing. I am very tired.

Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the girl didn't love Edward.

She wanted desperately to believe that. It was a doctrine as necessary

to her existence as a belief in the personal immortality of the soul.

She said that it was impossible that Nancy could have loved Edward after

she had given the girl her view of Edward's career and character.

Edward, on the other hand, believed maunderingly that some essential

attractiveness in himself must have made the girl continue to go on

loving him—to go on loving him, as it were, in underneath her official

aspect of hatred. He thought she only pretended to hate him in order to

save her face and he thought that her quite atrocious telegram from

Brindisi was only another attempt to do that—to prove that she had

feelings creditable to a member of the feminine commonweal. I don't

know. I leave it to you.

There is another point that worries me a good deal in the aspects of

this sad affair. Leonora says that, in desiring that the girl should go

five thousand miles away and yet continue to love him, Edward was a

monster of selfishness. He was desiring the ruin of a young life. Edward

on the other hand put it to me that, supposing that the girl's love was

a necessity to his existence, and, if he did nothing by word or by

action to keep Nancy's love alive, he couldn't be called selfish.

Leonora replied that showed he had an abominably selfish nature even

though his actions might be perfectly correct. I can't make out which of

them was right. I leave it to you.

It is, at any rate, certain that Edward's actions were perfectly—were

monstrously, were cruelly—correct. He sat still and let Leonora take

away his character, and let Leonora damn him to deepest hell, without

stirring a finger. I daresay he was a fool; I don't see what object

there was in letting the girl think worse of him than was necessary.

Still there it is. And there it is also that all those three presented

to the world the spectacle of being the best of good people. I assure

you that during my stay for that fortnight in that fine old house, I

never so much as noticed a single thing that could have affected that

good opinion. And even when I look back, knowing the circumstances, I

can't remember a single thing any of them said that could have betrayed

them. I can't remember, right up to the dinner, when Leonora read out

that telegram—not the tremor of an eyelash, not the shaking of a hand.

It was just a pleasant country house-party.

And Leonora kept it up jolly well, for even longer than that—she kept it

up as far as I was concerned until eight days after Edward's funeral.

Immediately after that particular dinner—the dinner at which I received

the announcement that Nancy was going to leave for India on the

following day—I asked Leonora to let me have a word with her. She took

me into her little sitting-room and I then said—I spare you the record

of my emotions—that she was aware that I wished to marry Nancy; that she

had seemed to favour my suit and that it appeared to be rather a waste

of money upon tickets and rather a waste of time upon travel to let the

girl go to India if Leonora thought that there was any chance of her

marrying me.

And Leonora, I assure you, was the absolutely perfect British matron.

She said that she quite favoured my suit; that she could not desire for

the girl a better husband; but that she considered that the girl ought

to see a little more of life before taking such an important step. Yes,

Leonora used the words "taking such an important step". She was perfect.

Actually, I think she would have liked the girl to marry me enough but

my programme included the buying of the Kershaw's house about a mile

away upon the Fordingbridge road, and settling down there with the girl.

That didn't at all suit Leonora. She didn't want to have the girl within

a mile and a half of Edward for the rest of their lives. Still, I think

she might have managed to let me know, in some periphrasis or other,

that I might have the girl if I would take her to Philadelphia or

Timbuctoo. I loved Nancy very much—and Leonora knew it.

However, I left it at that. I left it with the understanding that Nancy

was going away to India on probation. It seemed to me a perfectly

reasonable arrangement and I am a reasonable sort of man. I simply said

that I should follow Nancy out to India after six months' time or so.

Or, perhaps, after a year. Well, you see, I did follow Nancy out to

India after a year....

I must confess to having felt a little angry with Leonora for not having

warned me earlier that the girl would be going. I took it as one of the

queer, not very straight methods that Roman Catholics seem to adopt in

dealing with matters of this world. I took it that Leonora had been

afraid I should propose to the girl or, at any rate, have made

considerably greater advances to her than I did, if I had known earlier

that she was going away so soon. Perhaps Leonora was right; perhaps

Roman Catholics, with their queer, shifty ways, are always right. They

are dealing with the queer, shifty thing that is human nature. For it is

quite possible that, if I had known Nancy was going away so soon, I

should have tried making love to her. And that would have produced

another complication. It may have been just as well.

It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do in order

to keep up their appearance of calm pococurantism. For Edward Ashburnham

and his wife called me half the world over in order to sit on the back

seat of a dog-cart whilst Edward drove the girl to the railway station

from which she was to take her departure to India. They wanted, I

suppose, to have a witness of the calmness of that function. The girl's

luggage had been already packed and sent off before. Her berth on the

steamer had been taken. They had timed it all so exactly that it went

like clockwork. They had known the date upon which Colonel Rufford would

get Edward's letter and they had known almost exactly the hour at which

they would receive his telegram asking his daughter to come to him. It

had all been quite beautifully and quite mercilessly arranged, by Edward

himself. They gave Colonel Rufford, as a reason for telegraphing, the

fact that Mrs Colonel Somebody or other would be travelling by that ship

and that she would serve as an efficient chaperon for the girl. It was a

most amazing business, and I think that it would have been better in the

eyes of God if they had all attempted to gouge out each other's eyes

with carving knives. But they were "good people".

After my interview with Leonora I went desultorily into Edward's gun-

room. I didn't know where the girl was and I thought I might find her

there. I suppose I had a vague idea of proposing to her in spite of

Leonora. So, I presume, I don't come of quite such good people as the

Ashburnhams. Edward was lounging in his chair smoking a cigar and he

said nothing for quite five minutes. The candles glowed in the green

shades; the reflections were green in the glasses of the book-cases that

held guns and fishing-rods. Over the mantelpiece was the brownish

picture of the white horse. Those were the quietest moments that I have

ever known. Then, suddenly, Edward looked me straight in the eyes and

said:

"Look here, old man, I wish you would drive with Nancy and me to the

station tomorrow."

I said that of course I would drive with him and Nancy to the station on

the morrow. He lay there for a long time, looking along the line of his

knees at the fluttering fire, and then suddenly, in a perfectly calm

voice, and without lifting his eyes, he said:

"I am so desperately in love with Nancy Rufford that I am dying of it."

Poor devil—he hadn't meant to speak of it. But I guess he just had to

speak to somebody and I appeared to be like a woman or a solicitor. He

talked all night.

Well, he carried out the programme to the last breath.

It was a very clear winter morning, with a good deal of frost in it. The

sun was quite bright, the winding road between the heather and the

bracken was very hard. I sat on the back-seat of the dog-cart; Nancy was

beside Edward. They talked about the way the cob went; Edward pointed

out with the whip a cluster of deer upon a coombe three-quarters of a

mile away. We passed the hounds in the level bit of road beside the high

trees going into Fordingbridge and Edward pulled up the dog-cart so that

Nancy might say good-bye to the huntsman and cap him a last sovereign.

She had ridden with those hounds ever since she had been thirteen.

The train was five minutes late and they imagined that that was because

it was market-day at Swindon or wherever the train came from. That was

the sort of thing they talked about. The train came in; Edward found her

a first-class carriage with an elderly woman in it. The girl entered the

carriage, Edward closed the door and then she put out her hand to shake

mine. There was upon those people's faces no expression of any kind

whatever. The signal for the train's departure was a very bright red;

that is about as passionate a statement as I can get into that scene.

She was not looking her best; she had on a cap of brown fur that did not

very well match her hair. She said:

"So long," to Edward.

Edward answered: "So long."

He swung round on his heel and, large, slouching, and walking with a

heavy deliberate pace, he went out of the station. I followed him and

got up beside him in the high dog-cart. It was the most horrible

performance I have ever seen.

And, after that, a holy peace, like the peace of God which passes all

understanding, descended upon Branshaw Teleragh. Leonora went about her

daily duties with a sort of triumphant smile—a very faint smile, but

quite triumphant. I guess she had so long since given up any idea of

getting her man back that it was enough for her to have got the girl out

of the house and well cured of her infatuation. Once, in the hall, when

Leonora was going out, Edward said, beneath his breath—but I just caught

the words:

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean." It was like his sentimentality

to quote Swinburne.

But he was perfectly quiet and he had given up drinking. The only thing

that he ever said to me after that drive to the station was:

"It's very odd. I think I ought to tell you, Dowell, that I haven't any

feelings at all about the girl now it's all over. Don't you worry about

me. I'm all right." A long time afterwards he said: "I guess it was only

a flash in the pan." He began to look after the estates again; he took

all that trouble over getting off the gardener's daughter who had

murdered her baby. He shook hands smilingly with every farmer in the

market-place. He addressed two political meetings; he hunted twice.

Leonora made him a frightful scene about spending the two hundred pounds

on getting the gardener's daughter acquitted. Everything went on as if

the girl had never existed. It was very still weather.

Well, that is the end of the story. And, when I come to look at it I see

that it is a happy ending with wedding bells and all. The villains—for

obviously Edward and the girl were villains—have been punished by

suicide and madness. The heroine—the perfectly normal, virtuous and

slightly deceitful heroine—has become the happy wife of a perfectly

normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful husband. She will shortly become

a mother of a perfectly normal, virtuous, slightly deceitful son or

daughter. A happy ending, that is what it works out at.

I cannot conceal from myself the fact that I now dislike Leonora.

Without doubt I am jealous of Rodney Bayham. But I don't know whether it

is merely a jealousy arising from the fact that I desired myself to

possess Leonora or whether it is because to her were sacrificed the only

two persons that I have ever really loved—Edward Ashburnham and Nancy

Rufford. In order to set her up in a modern mansion, replete with every

convenience and dominated by a quite respectable and eminently

economical master of the house, it was necessary that Edward and Nancy

Rufford should become, for me at least, no more than tragic shades.

I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining amidst darkness, upon

cold rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in Tartarus or

wherever it was.

And as for Nancy... Well, yesterday at lunch she said suddenly:

"Shuttlecocks!"

And she repeated the word "shuttlecocks" three times. I know what was

passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for Leonora has

told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock being

tossed backwards and forwards between the violent personalities of

Edward and his wife. Leonora, she said, was always trying to deliver her

over to Edward, and Edward tacitly and silently forced her back again.

And the odd thing was that Edward himself considered that those two

women used him like a shuttlecock. Or, rather, he said that they sent

him backwards and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't

want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and

Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant

moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not preaching

anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in

this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can

only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful

flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful

are condemned to suicide and to madness. But I guess that I myself, in

my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, of the

headstrong, and the too-truthful. For I can't conceal from myself the

fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham—and that I love him because he was

just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the

physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he

did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on

several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him

robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as much

of a sentimentalist as he was.. ..

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we

are here for. But then, I don't like society—much. I am that absurd

figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient

haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward's gun-room, all day and

all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I

visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. In

twenty minutes or so I shall walk down to the village, beneath my own

oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse, to get the American mail. My

tenants, the village boys and the tradesmen will touch their hats to me.

So life peters out. I shall return to dine and Nancy will sit opposite

me with the old nurse standing behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly

well-behaved as far as her knife and fork go, Nancy will stare in front

of her with the blue eyes that have over them strained, stretched brows.

Once, or perhaps twice, during the meal her knife and fork will be

suspended in mid-air as if she were trying to think of something that

she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an Omnipotent

Deity or she will utter the one word "shuttle-cocks", perhaps. It is

very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of health on her cheeks, to

see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the

neck, the grace of the white hands—and to think that it all means

nothing—that it is a picture without a meaning. Yes, it is queer.

But, at any rate, there is always Leonora to cheer you up; I don't want

to sadden you. Her husband is quite an economical person of so normal a

figure that he can get quite a large proportion of his clothes ready-

made. That is the great desideratum of life, and that is the end of my

story. The child is to be brought up as a Romanist.

It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward met his

death. You remember that peace had descended upon the house; that

Leonora was quietly triumphant and that Edward said his love for the

girl had been merely a passing phase. Well, one afternoon we were in the

stables together, looking at a new kind of flooring that Edward was

trying in a loose-box. Edward was talking with a good deal of animation

about the necessity of getting the numbers of the Hampshire territorials

up to the proper standard. He was quite sober, quite quiet, his skin was

clear-coloured; his hair was golden and perfectly brushed; the level

brick-dust red of his complexion went clean up to the rims of his

eyelids; his eyes were porcelain blue and they regarded me frankly and

directly. His face was perfectly expressionless; his voice was deep and

rough. He stood well back upon his legs and said:

"We ought to get them up to two thousand three hundred and fifty."

A stable-boy brought him a telegram and went away. He opened it

negligently, regarded it without emotion, and, in complete silence,

handed it to me. On the pinkish paper in a sprawled handwriting I read:

"Safe Brindisi. Having rattling good time. Nancy."

Well, Edward was the English gentleman; but he was also, to the last, a

sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent poems and

novels. He just looked up to the roof of the stable, as if he were

looking to Heaven, and whispered something that I did not catch.

Then he put two fingers into the waistcoat pocket of his grey, frieze

suit; they came out with a little neat pen-knife—quite a small pen-

knife. He said to me:

"You might just take that wire to Leonora." And he looked at me with a

direct, challenging, brow-beating glare. I guess he could see in my eyes

that I didn't intend to hinder him. Why should I hinder him?

I didn't think he was wanted in the world, let his confounded tenants,

his rifle-associations, his drunkards, reclaimed and unreclaimed, get on

as they liked. Not all the hundreds and hundreds of them deserved that

that poor devil should go on suffering for their sakes.

When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him his eyes became

soft and almost affectionate. He remarked:

"So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know."

I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, "God bless you", for I also

am a sentimentalist. But I thought that perhaps that would not be quite

English good form, so I trotted off with the telegram to Leonora. She

was quite pleased with it.