Warren Manor was not a house in which accidents often happened.
When the village children had measles all the little Blighs escaped it;
they did not fall out of trees; nor get into moral and physical
difficulties over summer fruit. Their sins were slight and infrequent,
and as far as possible confined to the involuntary lapses of human
nature.
The servants, too, lived a surface life of perfect smoothness and
propriety. Their manners were quiet and their aprons whiter than snow.
Mrs. Bligh gave them good wages and excellent food, and knew all about
their families. She was faultlessly kind and considerate to them; and
none of them had ever laughed, cried, or sneezed in her presence.
She didn’t know anything about their lovers; no young men were allowed
to visit them, and Mrs. Bligh never mentioned the subject—after this
point had once been made plain—any more than she would have mentioned
the tails of monkeys.
There was a certain amount of trouble in the household caused by Mr.
Bligh’s ardent temperament; but Mrs. Bligh managed to keep most of it to
herself, and as Mr. Bligh had a tender heart, and always told her
everything, she succeeded in steering him through the results of his
blunders without disaster.
She had married him for love, and called him in her youth the Don
Quixote of her dreams; but she was very careful to remove all the
windmills in his vicinity.
After ten years of happy married life Mr. Bligh’s ideals had become
reduced to picturesque theories. Perhaps his temperament would have
given his wife less trouble if she had allowed him a larger margin for
his enthusiasms, but, on the whole, she was more afraid of his
enthusiasms than of his temperament. Enthusiasms often reduced incomes;
whereas temperaments, when kept in play, will not reduce anything.
The boys were a responsibility, but they had never been a bother. They
were well-mannered and well-bred; and no being on earth can conceal more
than a well-mannered, well-bred English public schoolboy.
Sometimes you find out what he doesn’t know, but you can not find out
what he does. Nor did Mrs. Bligh wish to find out. She agreed with her
husband that the boys should be put on their honour and left alone. She
gave them all the moral influence she could spare from her family; as
she was not an emotional woman, this did them practically no harm. But
no policy of men nor of angels can keep human nature permanently secure,
and when an accident at length produced itself at Warren Manor, it
crashed through the polished surface of the house like an explosive
shell.
The cook was the first witness of the accident; her manner betrayed
extreme uneasiness over the morning’s orders, and she suggested making
beef-olives out of the remains of the mutton. Finally, she confessed
that she was ‘that upset’ she hardly knew where she was. Mrs. Bligh’s
eyes recalled her quickly to her exact position on the pale blue carpet
of the morning-room.
‘I think you had better tell me what is the matter?’ Mrs. Bligh
suggested coldly; for she did not like things that mattered, early in
the morning.
The cook took a hurried breath, and said she supposed it would all have
to come out sooner or later, but it gave her a turn to think of it.
She was a kind-hearted woman, and she urged her mistress to remember
that, of course, sometimes these things were to be looked upon as
accidents. Mrs. Bligh asked her what things? The cook said girls and
boys were that awkward when you came to think of it—and her mother had
once said that, after all, it was the marring of some and the making of
others. Emily had always seemed all right, and the cook had never
noticed anything to speak of—till this morning—when, as she was frying
the bacon and Emily came in with the tray, it had struck her all of a
heap.
Mrs. Bligh asked what had struck her; but it was a rhetorical question;
she knew by now what had struck the cook.
The cook turned the colour of boiled beetroot, and said perhaps the
mistress had better see Emily for herself.
‘I asked her right out who it was,’ the cook explained getting more and
more flustered under Mrs. Bligh’s cool and steady eyes. ‘And she did say
that young Barton—’is name come to the tip of ’er tongue, as it
were—though she never had a civil word for, or about him, before. I
will say that for her——’
‘Thank you, cook,’ said Mrs. Bligh incisively. ‘You need not tell me
anything more. Please send Emily to me.’
The cook hurried down the passage trembling and muttering. She told
Emily, to comfort her, that if she were in her place, she would a sight
rather meet an alligator than the mistress.
But this alternative did not present itself to Emily.
She went into the morning-room as a criminal goes to execution; and she
received what she went for.
Emily was, for the first time in her life, disturbed and inattentive.
Her face was distorted with tears, and her apron crumpled. She twisted
her hands in and out of its folds as if it could relieve the situation,
which she could not twist or wind herself out of.
Mrs. Bligh looked at her once and then looked away again. It was almost
more terrible when she looked away. It was so final.
There are some people who rush to help sinners because they see they are
in trouble; in their impulsive ardour they get into the trouble
themselves, but sometimes they help the sinner out of it. Perhaps they
are aware of a fellow-feeling. Mrs. Bligh was not one of this officious
and clumsy fellowship. She never touched pitch; so that she ran no risk
of getting defiled.
She sat there, a contented, married woman with three children, awful in
her purity; no iceberg could have looked colder, or more remote from the
experiences of the girl before her.
‘This is all _very, very_ distressing,’ Mrs. Bligh began after a pause.
It was very distressing for Emily, but not quite so distressing for Mrs.
Bligh. Besides, her uppermost feeling was disgust, not distress; and
Emily could feel that Mrs. Bligh’s real feeling was disgust.
She sobbed and threw her apron over her head.
‘Such a thing has never happened in my house before,’ Mrs. Bligh
continued, with the unconscious egotism of personal immunity, ‘and it
is, of course, a very great disgrace and sin on your part, Emily.
Indeed, I simply can not understand how it could have occurred.’
Emily choked with sobs. She might have told Mrs. Bligh that things occur
very easily when they are not understood, and she could have added that
even Mr. Bligh had kissed her once behind the scullery door.
But she didn’t dare; and besides, in that case nothing further had
happened. Mr. Bligh had only given her five shillings the next day and
looked rather silly.
‘I can not help blaming you,’ said Mrs. Bligh, ‘most women of your age
should have learned how to keep their self-respect and the respect of
others.’
Emily sobbed harder; then she saw a loophole for justification and took
it.
‘It’s very hard on me,’ she wailed, ‘having had any one like a young
gentleman—that wasn’t one—in the house, and going to early services
and all.’
It was a shrewd thrust; Emily, looking round the corner of her apron,
saw that it had taken effect. Mrs. Bligh winced as if she had trodden on
a slug.
‘If it is any comfort to you to know it,’ she observed after a moment’s
pause, ‘you will not be the only one to suffer. Of course you will leave
the house immediately, but so will the—the partner of your sin.’
It was a great comfort to Emily. Victorious spite is extremely pleasant,
and the memory of it lasts after other memories have faded. As a
momentary sensation it practically equals that joy in heaven over the
one sinner that repenteth.
Emily had her moment’s victory; but it should be forgiven her, for she
had a very bad time afterward.
‘Of course,’ Mrs. Bligh said, with frosty charity, ‘I shall not turn you
adrift. Will your parents consent to receive you?’
Emily couldn’t, and perhaps wouldn’t, go home to her parents. She
thought hurriedly for a moment, while she sobbed convulsively, and then
declared that they would turn her out of doors on the spot. She had
always been one to hold her head so high, and she had younger sisters.
The thought of going home drove her to the door of hysteria, but not
through it. Mrs. Bligh’s manner restrained her. Nobody had ever had
hysterics in her presence, and nobody ever would.
‘I think,’ Mrs. Bligh said decisively, ‘that, in that case, you had
better go to the Sisters of St. Mary’s Penitentiary. I will arrange for
cook to take you there this afternoon. You can remain there until the
birth of your child, and for a month afterward. If you do well, they
will try to find you a situation and take care of your child for you
if——’ Mrs. Bligh paused for a moment—‘it should be so unfortunate as
to live,’ she finished tranquilly.
Mrs. Bligh thought of her own two babies who had died, and it did not
make her tender toward the other woman’s child.
‘I think that is all,’ she added, rising to close the interview.
She looked at Emily again now, and said with formidable gentleness,—
‘I shall pray for you, Emily.’
Emily waited for a moment; perhaps she was expecting something more. She
knew that Mrs. Bligh was a very good woman, and she respected her, all
the more for being despised by her, but she thought that perhaps when
Mrs. Bligh had got over despising her she would help her.
However, it wasn’t any use Emily’s waiting. Mrs. Bligh thought that her
prayers would be quite enough, and she never got over despising Emily.