Emily met Wivvle as she crept sobbing across the hall. He would have
passed her with his head held stiffly away, but she clutched his arm
like a frightened animal. He stopped rigidly; every nerve in his being
resented this contact with Emily. All that ought to have kept him from
her in the first instance drove him from her now, when it was too late
to save her, and only not too late to save himself.
‘Let me go,’ he said in a low, fierce whisper. ‘Don’t you realise this
place is public?’
But Emily was beyond the consideration of outward things. She lifted her
sodden, tear-stained face to his as if the pain in it would touch him
when she could no longer attract him. This is perhaps the greatest
mistake that any woman can make.
‘I must speak to you,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all out. I’ve been with
her—oh, I didn’t know it was going to be like this!’
Wivvle had not known it either. The panic of the unimaginative,
overtaken by reality, seized them both; but Wivvle was the more
afraid—he was only afraid for himself.
‘It’s all right about you,’ she whispered eagerly; ‘I’ve laid it on to
that barge-boy—Jim Barton—it won’t matter about him.’
‘Good God! Why did you do that?’ Wivvle asked angrily. ‘Things are bad
enough already without your tangling me up in a tissue of lies!’
Emily gazed at him incredulously.
‘But,’ she said, ‘I thought it was what you wanted. You said last night
if it had only been him, with no family—— Of course I should never
have looked at him! I fair hate the sound of his voice! But I said it to
save you!’
‘Oh, hell!’ said Wivvle with uneasy exasperation—as if Emily could
possibly save him—as if she could do anything now, but bore him! ‘Never
mind—let go of my arm—here’s old Bligh coming along.’
Emily dropped his arm and scuttled behind the green baize door which led
to the servants’ quarters. She felt a strange sense of relief when she
was on the other side of the door. A week or two earlier she had felt as
if she didn’t belong there; she wanted to belong there now.
Mr. Bligh had not seen his wife, but he was aware that there was
uneasiness in the household. It set his nerves on edge and he spoke a
trifle sharply to Wivvle.
‘You ought to be at your work,’ he said. ‘What do you want with Emily at
this hour of the morning?’
Wivvle, who from the moment of Mr. Bligh’s approach had become
imperturbable and quiet as velvet, replied that he merely wanted to ask
her about his washing.
Mr. Bligh’s annoyance cleared instantly. He patted Wivvle on the
shoulder, and murmuring, ‘Perfect confidence of
course—breeding—reliable——’ turned off into his study.
Wivvle heard his words and flushed with genuine compunction. For a
moment he nearly did what he expected of himself. He nearly followed Mr.
Bligh into his study and told him the whole truth. He did not know that
if he did not do it then he would never do it; or that his conscience
would be unable twice to give him the same sharp lead. He was so little
used to sharpness; he felt sure he would find an easier opportunity of
speaking to Mr. Bligh a little later on.
When he had seen Pritchard and Ainley, for instance. It wouldn’t be
quite fair, after he had taken them both so completely into his
confidence, to act without asking their advice.
He was so sure of his own sense of fair play that he could easily
transfer it from what was essential to what was optional, and yet feel
convinced that when the moment of pressure came the _beau geste_ would
be given him.
He did not realise that, when a man has acted ignobly, a _beau geste_,
even if it occurs to him, does not remove the consequences of his act.
To his relief he found his confidants alone.
‘Look here, you fellows,’ he said impressively, ‘a most appalling thing
has happened. It’s out about Emily, and she’s told Mrs. Bligh it’s
Barton.’
Pritchard gave a long, low whistle. It was the whistle of a defeated
intellect. But Ainley was made of sterner stuff. He fixed his monocle
into his eye and laid his finger on the way of escape.
‘But why not?’ he asked composedly. ‘Why shouldn’t it be Jim Barton? It
won’t hurt him to speak of—he’s nearly finished his time here—he has
no people—and nobody knows him. Nothing could be more natural. Quite a
stroke on Emily’s part. And it lets you out, beautifully.’
‘Only you overlook one thing,’ said Wivvle, and try as he might he could
not keep the note of interrogation out of his voice. ‘Of course I can’t
do it—it would be a cad’s game.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ broke in Pritchard hurriedly. ‘I’m sure Ainley’s
right. It isn’t as if it had been one of us. You’ve been most
frightfully decent to the chap. If he has an atom of good feeling in him
he’ll be glad to help you. It isn’t mean if you _ask_ him—I grant you
it would be if you did it without asking.’
‘You can pay him for it, as far as that goes,’ urged Ainley. ‘He’s as
poor as a dog.’
‘Oh, that——’ said Wivvle handsomely.
He was beginning to feel handsome again; after all he might be able to
get out of it without feeling a cad.
He wouldn’t have accepted Ainley’s advice alone—Ainley had rather too
sharp a business code for Wivvle to follow—but Pritchard was all right.
Pritchard did not believe in a man’s acting to his own advantage except
when the temptation was overwhelming.
There was only one joint in Pritchard’s armour which Wivvle overlooked.
He would be unable to feel anything right which did not save Wivvle at
the expense of Barton.
‘Of course I would see that he didn’t suffer in any way,’ Wivvle said,
still looking defensively at his two advisers. ‘I might start him in
something later on. If I see he really doesn’t mind, you know. Only it
does seem rather a low-down thing to suggest.’
Ainley said,—
‘What about Emily? As she’s done it already you’d be rather putting her
in a hole if you deny it, won’t you? Quite a sport that girl, I must
say.’
‘That’s true,’ said Wivvle with relief.
Of course he wouldn’t put Emily into a hole—at least, not into a little
hole.
The man-of-the-world tone used by Ainley was a curious relief to Wivvle.
The sick distaste he felt for Emily—and even a little for himself—left
him. After all, such things happen every day. He had behaved generously
to Emily, and she would be perfectly all right, of course. She was a
handsome, superior girl—when she had not been crying—perhaps Jim would
like to marry her. It was rather a big concession for Wivvle to make;
but he felt that it was a moment for big concessions.
The whole question might resolve itself into a good thing for Jim.
Wivvle decided he would get his father to make Jim an under-bailiff in
Scotland. He could always go to Norway instead for salmon fishing. It
had hurt him too abominably to see himself as a gainer by Jim’s
generosity, but after all he needn’t look at it like that. Jim could be
the gainer, and Wivvle could still be generous.
‘Of course the whole thing depends on how he takes it,’ he observed in a
relieved voice. ‘I daresay I could make it rather a chance for him in
some way, if he’s for it. But I shan’t urge him in any way. I wonder if
his religion won’t rather stick in his throat?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ said Ainley; ‘that’s where you score. What about
bearing one another’s burdens! If he jibs at all, sling that at him.’
Wivvle winced. His idea was that Jim wasn’t exactly to bear a burden; he
was merely to receive a reward for removing an inconvenience. Emily by
now was nothing but inconvenience. The burden once off Wivvle’s
shoulders had grown miraculously small.
‘Well,’ he said nonchalantly, ‘I suppose I shall have to take the advice
you fellows have given me. You’ve been awfully decent about it—and I’ll
go and have it out now with old Barton. But I must say women are no end
of a nuisance.’
The other two looked at him admiringly, and his spirits rose under their
homage. They obviously thought the better of him for his complications.
Besides, they weren’t simply sick of Emily.
Jim laid his book aside the moment Wivvle came into the room.
He had noticed the traces of tears on Emily’s face the day before, and
his eyes, more accustomed to the changes of life, had guessed the reason
of her tears.
Wivvle had never spoken to him about Emily, but Jim saw now that he
meant to speak about her.
Wivvle moved a little uncertainly about the room. He had it on his
tongue’s tip, as he came upstairs, to begin the conversation by
saying,—
‘I’ve had rather a good idea about you, Barton, if you feel like falling
in with it.’
But as he met Jim’s eyes, friendly but searching, with that curious
directness of gaze which had first attracted him, he found himself
hurriedly saying instead,—
‘Look here, I’ve got into the deuce of a mess!’
Jim pointed to a chair opposite the table and drew out his pipe.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s hear what it is. I’ve been in the deuce of a
mess myself before now, and got out again.’
Wivvle sat down a trifle awkwardly for him and played with a cigarette
without lighting it.
‘Women are a dashed nuisance,’ he began fretfully. ‘I really ought to
have kept clear of them till I’d passed for Sandhurst. But what’s a man
to do when they won’t let you alone?’
The eyes opposite him hardened. Jim had not much sympathy for that plea
which has been the inspiration of all uncomfortable men since the garden
of Eden.
He made a quick descent from the agreeable abstract to the disagreeable
concrete.
‘Do you mean you’ve got Emily into trouble?’ he asked.
The question offended Wivvle deeply. He hesitated, and found himself on
the verge of a direct denial. It was only the remembrance that he had
got to play straight now to save himself in the end which prevented him
from a fresh evasion.
He put aside the tactlessness of Jim, and told his story as plainly as
he could.
He went on with more confidence when he had once started because he saw
that he wasn’t shocking Jim.
Jim thought the whole matter quite an everyday affair evidently, and he
was curiously free from reproach.
‘I thought somebody had turned the girl’s head the moment I saw her,’
was his only comment; but if he was not prepared to condemn Wivvle he
didn’t seem prepared to admire him either.
Apparently Jim did not think the turning of Emily’s head a very clever
thing to have done. Wivvle had to point out that, though he felt a cad
for doing it, after all he was barely nineteen and Emily twenty-four.
Jim agreed that she ought to have known better.
‘Still, she’ll have to pay for it,’ he added reflectively, and he didn’t
seem inclined to add anything else.
Wivvle resented this aspect of the subject and explained defensively
that he had been to a lawyer; and, while owing to the lawyer’s advice he
had denied his paternity, he had made a very handsome arrangement for
Emily—twenty pounds down and five shillings a week until the child was
sixteen. The lawyer said it was a most generous arrangement, and that
she was a lucky girl. But Jim still did not seem to be dazzled by
Emily’s good fortune. He merely remarked,—
‘It’ll take all of that to get her under way again. But I daresay when
it’s all over she’ll be able to earn enough to keep herself and the
child going.’
‘You see, I haven’t a very large allowance,’ Wivvle said a little
reproachfully.
‘She hasn’t got anything at all, and she’s lost her job,’ Jim reminded
him. ‘But you’ll have thought of that, of course.’
As a matter of fact, Wivvle hadn’t thought of it.
The whole thing was quite unexpectedly awkward, and twenty pounds down
and five shillings a week sounded princely for any one in Emily’s
position. He became suddenly dignified and vague.
‘Ah, I shall look after her, of course,’ he said, getting up and gazing
out of the window.
He had every intention of never seeing Emily again. In fact it was part
of the agreement that he had drawn up with the lawyer. The money was
contingent on there being no molestation on Emily’s part. Emily had
cried when she was told what ‘no molestation’ meant, but she had signed
the agreement.
‘It’ll be funny,’ said Jim unexpectedly, ‘having a child. I should like
it if it was me. I’ve always had a hankering for a kid of my own.’
Wivvle winced. He was shocked at Jim’s point of view.
Sins are seldom shocking to the conventional mind, but a plain statement
of their results can be extremely shocking.
Wivvle had felt that, once he had paid the twenty pounds, it would cease
to be his child. Evidently Jim lacked all sense of good breeding, and it
was peculiarly difficult to go on with so delicate a matter any further.
For a moment Wivvle almost wondered whether it wouldn’t be better—he
meant easier—to drop the whole thing.
But after all he couldn’t drop it. The only way to drop the subject was
to go on until he had got rid of it.
There was a bewildering absence of any agreeable alternative to this
particular situation.
Wivvle came back to the table and faced Jim’s steady quiet eyes with
their baffling candour.
‘Look here, old chap,’ he said desperately, ‘you don’t know what I’m up
against! This business fairly knocks me out. The Blighs will turn me
adrift to-morrow—oh, he wouldn’t—but she will—she’s as hard as iron
and ice. Oh, the dearest little woman in the world as long as you mind
your P’s and Q’s, I grant you; but, by Jove, she’s flint as far as
things of this kind are concerned. She’s the kind of woman to marry
really, once you’ve had your fling.
‘But it’ll do me out of my chance for the army, and that’d be bad
enough. Being a soldier is the only thing I ever wanted. I can’t see
myself doing anything else.
‘But that’s not the worst. What I mind most is my people.
‘This’ll break my mother’s heart. I’ve got to let her know because my
father always tells her everything—and she believes in me—she hasn’t
any sense about it—she believes I’ll come up to any scratch—and I hope
I would, of course, about most of ’em—but she’s particularly keen about
women—I don’t know why. But I know she thinks I’m as safe as houses.’
Jim wondered, if this were so, why it had failed to be remembered at the
only time when it could have been of any practical use. But he felt very
sorry for Wivvle. He knew from his own experience that there are things
which need all the grit a man has got to resist.
Now would be the moment his friendship had waited for and believed
in—he would see the flash of the sword of Wivvle’s honour. He still
believed Wivvle had got honour.
‘That’s bad,’ he said kindly. ‘I don’t know what it would be like, but I
can guess. You see, my mother’s dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Wivvle eagerly, ‘that’s just what I thought—if you were in
my place, if you _could_ be—you’d have nobody to mind. You leave here
in a month or so, anyhow, don’t you? And nobody really knows you. It
wouldn’t queer your pitch, I mean? You aren’t going to live here, and
anyhow it’ll all be hushed up—trust the Blighs for that. Nobody’ll know
anything outside the house. Mrs. Bligh’ll square the lot of them
somehow.
‘What I thought was, if you didn’t mind just taking my place. You see,
Emily lost her head this morning when she was accused of being in
trouble. She named you to shield me. Of course, it was an awful thing
for her to do. I told her at once I should deny it.’
Wivvle waited for a moment for the tribute of Jim’s thanks, but he got
no thanks. Jim took his pipe out of his mouth and said,—
‘She must have thought a lot of you to do that.’
Wivvle dismissed Emily’s affection with a wave of his hand. It seemed to
him irrelevant now that he no longer wanted it.
‘My idea was to go at once to old Bligh and deny it,’ he said firmly;
then his eyes wavered.
Jim’s, fixed steadily on him, probed to the root instinct of his
selfishness. Wivvle had not given his idea much of a chance.
‘Of course, I will in any case,’ Wivvle finished lamely, ‘if you decide
you’d rather not help me out?’
He didn’t offer Jim the under-bailiff ship. It was another of those
moments when it seemed better to wait for an easier opportunity.
Jim did not speak for quite a long time. He was so angry that he looked
down at the tablecloth to hide his emotion.
Wivvle did not dream of the fury that possessed Jim, because Wivvle did
not realise what he was asking. The whole predicament had become for him
a vague discomfort easily shifted. He did not see it as a monstrous debt
which he was asking Jim to pay.
Jim thought about Eliza and what he would have felt if Eliza had been
Emily and had to support a child without a name. He thought of himself,
too, and what would be thought of him for getting a respectable girl
into trouble and leaving her to it. He thought of his new-found
religion, and the comments on it that would instantly follow his
exposure.
Anger clutched him by the throat and shook him. From the bottom of his
soul he felt wronged, and he felt that Emily was wronged. He did well to
be angry. But still he did not speak. Something in Wivvle’s sudden
silence held him back. Wivvle had been so busy talking when he came
in—so fluent and so glibly self-preservative—that Jim had been
unconscious of the fear behind his words, and his essential ignorance.
Wivvle’s thoughts about himself had hidden his actions from Jim. He
simply wasn’t a hero after all. He looked like a hero—even now—with
his clear eyes and troubled brows; his curls thrown back and his fine
head erect. He looked every inch a hero. Unfortunately inches don’t make
heroes; perhaps it is not very just to expect them to.
Jim began to ask himself if it was fair to ask too much from Wivvle? The
sense of Wivvle’s weakness did not feed Jim’s anger. It softened it.
Wivvle was not one of those honest sinners who get into the rough and
tumble of their sins and fight for what they want; he let his
inclination force him into a situation which his spirit could neither
accept nor escape.
Jim looked up at him at last with tolerant, kind eyes. He had lost a
great illusion, but his heart ached for his friend.
Wivvle was sitting crouched forward against the table—he was sick with
a sudden fear that he wasn’t after all going to escape, and that this
slight inconvenience for Jim was once more to be turned into an
incredible menace for himself.
‘I don’t think I can lie about it for you,’ said Jim quietly, ‘but I can
stand to it. If I’m not asked I won’t deny it; I mean, if they believe
it I’ll let them believe it. I won’t give you away, and I’ll take the
punishment all right if they dismiss me.’
Wivvle gasped his relief; then he pulled himself together, and said with
an effort to revive his collapsed dignity,—
‘Of course I shouldn’t expect you to lie for me.’
It _was_ what he had expected, but what Jim suggested would do nearly as
well; no one would believe in Jim.
‘Mrs. Bligh knows it already,’ he explained. ‘She won’t ask you any
questions. She simply won’t speak to you again; and as for old Bligh,
you can easily bluff old Bligh. If you’ll really hold your tongue, it’s
a damned decent thing for you to do for me, Barton. I’ll never forget
it. Perhaps some day it’ll be my turn to do something for you, and I
rely on you to let me know if I ever can.’
Wivvle thought there was something curious about Jim’s face. He looked
suddenly as if he had been kicked blind, but he made no protest; he only
forgot to carry the thing off properly. It would have helped Wivvle to
get out of the room comfortably if Jim had agreed to his offer—or made
light of his own share in the transaction; but he let Wivvle go out of
the room without making light of anything.
After Wivvle had gone he put his hand up to his eyes, as if the sunshine
dazzled him.
He could not quite believe it.
His eyes wandered till they rested on a little silver crucifix Mrs.
Bligh had given him on Christmas day. She had said that she hoped it was
not superstitious to believe that it could keep a man from harm. Jim
stumbled forward and knelt before it; but he could not pray. Wivvle had
said that she believed he had done this thing—believed it without the
need for any further witness—and she would never speak to him again.
It was all a mistake—she could not believe it—he would see her and
look in her clear, gray eyes; and she, who knew what he had fought for,
prayed for, and gained out of all she had given him, would restore
something in him that seemed to be going to break. He tried to think
what there would be left of God if, after all, she didn’t believe in
him.