And the best of it was that the danger was all over already. There was
no danger any more. The supposed nephew’s appearance had a purpose. He
had come, full, full to trembling—with the bigness of his news. There
must have been rumours already as to the shaky position of the de
Barral’s concerns; but only amongst those in the very inmost know. No
rumour or echo of rumour had reached the profane in the West-End—let
alone in the guileless marine suburb of Hove. The Fynes had no
suspicion; the governess, playing with cold, distinguished exclusiveness
the part of mother to the fabulously wealthy Miss de Barral, had no
suspicion; the masters of music, of drawing, of dancing to Miss de
Barral, had no idea; the minds of her medical man, of her dentist, of
the servants in the house, of the tradesmen proud of having the name of
de Barral on their books, were in a state of absolute serenity. Thus,
that fellow, who had unexpectedly received a most alarming straight tip
from somebody in the City arrived in Brighton, at about lunch-time, with
something very much in the nature of a deadly bomb in his possession.
But he knew better than to throw it on the public pavement. He ate his
lunch impenetrably, sitting opposite Flora de Barral, and then, on some
excuse, closeted himself with the woman whom little Fyne’s charity
described (with a slight hesitation of speech however) as his “Aunt.”
What they said to each other in private we can imagine. She came out of
her own sitting-room with red spots on her cheek-bones, which having
provoked a question from her “beloved” charge, were accounted for by a
curt “I have a headache coming on.” But we may be certain that the talk
being over she must have said to that young blackguard: “You had better
take her out for a ride as usual.” We have proof positive of this in
Fyne and Mrs Fyne observing them mount at the door and pass under the
windows of their sitting-room, talking together, and the poor girl all
smiles; because she enjoyed in all innocence the company of Charley.
She made no secret of it whatever to Mrs Fyne; in fact, she had
confided to her, long before, that she liked him very much: a confidence
which had filled Mrs Fyne with desolation and that sense of powerless
anguish which is experienced in certain kinds of nightmare. For how
could she warn the girl? She did venture to tell her once that she
didn’t like Mr Charley. Miss de Barral heard her with astonishment.
How was it possible not to like Charley? Afterwards with naïve loyalty
she told Mrs Fyne that, immensely as she was fond of her she could not
hear a word against Charley—the wonderful Charley.
The daughter of de Barral probably enjoyed her jolly ride with the jolly
Charley (infinitely more jolly than going out with a stupid old
riding-master), very much indeed, because the Fynes saw them coming back
at a later hour than usual. In fact it was getting nearly dark. On
dismounting, helped off by the delightful Charley, she patted the neck
of her horse and went up the steps. Her last ride. She was then within
a few days of her sixteenth birthday, a slight figure in a riding habit,
rather shorter than the average height for her age, in a black bowler
hat from under which her fine rippling dark hair cut square at the ends
was hanging well down her back. The delightful Charley mounted again to
take the two horses round to the mews. Mrs Fyne remaining at the
window saw the house door close on Miss de Barral returning from her
last ride.
And meantime what had the governess (out of a nobleman’s family) so
judiciously selected (a lady, and connected with well-known county
people as she said) to direct the studies, guard the health, form the
mind, polish the manners, and generally play the perfect mother to that
luckless child—what had she been doing? Well, having got rid of her
charge by the most natural device possible, which proved her practical
sense, she started packing her belongings, an act which showed her clear
view of the situation. She had worked methodically, rapidly, and well,
emptying the drawers, clearing the tables in her special apartment of
that big house, with something silently passionate in her thoroughness;
taking everything belonging to her and some things of less
unquestionable ownership, a jewelled penholder, an ivory and gold paper
knife (the house was full of common, costly objects), some chased silver
boxes presented by de Barral and other trifles; but the photograph of
Flora de Barral, with the loving inscription, which stood on her
writing-desk, of the most modern and expensive style, in a silver-gilt
frame, she neglected to take. Having accidentally, in the course of the
operations, knocked it off on the floor she let it lie there after a
downward glance. Thus it, or the frame at least, became, I suppose,
part of the assets in the de Barral bankruptcy.
At dinner that evening the child found her company dull and brusque. It
was uncommonly slow. She could get nothing from her governess but
monosyllables, and the jolly Charley actually snubbed the various cheery
openings of his “little chum”—as he used to call her at times,—but not
at that time. No doubt the couple were nervous and preoccupied. For
all this we have evidence, and for the fact that Flora being offended
with the delightful nephew of her profoundly respected governess sulked
through the rest of the evening and was glad to retire early. Mrs—
Mrs—I’ve really forgotten her name—the governess, invited her nephew
to her sitting-room, mentioning aloud that it was to talk over some
family matters. This was meant for Flora to hear, and she heard it—
without the slightest interest. In fact there was nothing sufficiently
unusual in such an invitation to arouse in her mind even a passing
wonder. She went bored to bed and being tired with her long ride slept
soundly all night. Her last sleep, I won’t say of innocence—that word
would not render my exact meaning, because it has a special meaning of
its own—but I will say: of that ignorance, or better still, of that
unconsciousness of the world’s ways, the unconsciousness of danger, of
pain, of humiliation, of bitterness, of falsehood. An unconsciousness
which in the case of other beings like herself is removed by a gradual
process of experience and information, often only partial at that, with
saving reserves, softening doubts, veiling theories. Her
unconsciousness of the evil which lives in the secret thoughts and
therefore in the open acts of mankind, whenever it happens that evil
thought meets evil courage; her unconsciousness was to be broken into
with profane violence with desecrating circumstances, like a temple
violated by a mad, vengeful impiety. Yes, that very young girl, almost
no more than a child—this was what was going to happen to her. And if
you ask me, how, wherefore, for what reason? I will answer you: Why, by
chance! By the merest chance, as things do happen, lucky and unlucky,
terrible or tender, important or unimportant; and even things which are
neither, things so completely neutral in character that you would wonder
why they do happen at all if you didn’t know that they, too, carry in
their insignificance the seeds of further incalculable chances.
Of course, all the chances were that de Barral should have fallen upon a
perfectly harmless, naïve, usual, inefficient specimen of respectable
governess for his daughter; or on a commonplace silly adventuress who
would have tried, say, to marry him or work some other sort of common
mischief in a small way. Or again he might have chanced on a model of
all the virtues, or the repository of all knowledge, or anything equally
harmless, conventional, and middle class. All calculations were in his
favour; but, chance being incalculable, he fell upon an individuality
whom it is much easier to define by opprobrious names than to classify
in a calm and scientific spirit—but an individuality certainly, and a
temperament as well. Rare? No. There is a certain amount of what I
would politely call unscrupulousness in all of us. Think for instance
of the excellent Mrs Fyne, who herself, and in the bosom of her family,
resembled a governess of a conventional type. Only, her mental excesses
were theoretical, hedged in by so much humane feeling and conventional
reserves, that they amounted to no more than mere libertinage of
thought; whereas the other woman, the governess of Flora de Barral, was,
as you may have noticed, severely practical—terribly practical. No!
Hers was not a rare temperament, except in its fierce resentment of
repression; a feeling which like genius or lunacy is apt to drive people
into sudden irrelevancy. Hers was feminine irrelevancy. A male genius,
a male ruffian, or even a male lunatic, would not have behaved exactly
as she did behave. There is a softness in masculine nature, even the
most brutal, which acts as a check.
While the girl slept those two, the woman of forty, an age in itself
terrible, and that hopeless young “wrong ’un” of twenty-three (also well
connected I believe) had some sort of subdued row in the cleared rooms:
wardrobes open, drawers half pulled out and empty, trunks locked and
strapped, furniture in idle disarray, and not so much as a single scrap
of paper left behind on the tables. The maid, whom the governess and
the pupil shared between them, after finishing with Flora, came to the
door as usual, but was not admitted. She heard the two voices in
dispute before she knocked, and then being sent away retreated at once—
the only person in the house convinced at that time that there was
“something up.”
“Dark and, so to speak, inscrutable spaces being met with in life there
must be such places in any statement dealing with life. In what I am
telling you of now—an episode of one of my humdrum holidays in the
green country, recalled quite naturally after all the years by our
meeting a man who has been a blue-water sailor—this evening
confabulation is a dark, inscrutable spot. And we may conjecture what
we like. I have no difficulty in imagining that the woman—of forty,
and the chief of the enterprise—must have raged at large. And perhaps
the other did not rage enough. Youth feels deeply it is true, but it
has not the same vivid sense of lost opportunities. It believes in the
absolute reality of time. And then, in that abominable scamp with his
youth already soiled, withered like a plucked flower ready to be flung
on some rotting heap of rubbish, no very genuine feeling about anything
could exist—not even about the hazards of his own unclean existence. A
sneering half-laugh with some such remark as: ‘We are properly sold and
no mistake’ would have been enough to make trouble in that way. And
then another sneer, ‘Waste time enough over it too,’ followed perhaps by
the bitter retort from the other party, ‘You seemed to like it well
enough though, playing the fool with that chit of a girl.’ Something of
that sort. Don’t you see it—eh....”
Marlow looked at me with his dark penetrating glance. I was struck by
the absolute verisimilitude of this suggestion. But we were always
tilting at each other. I saw an opening and pushed my uncandid thrust.
“You have a ghastly imagination,” I said with a cheerfully sceptical
smile.
“Well, and if I have,” he returned unabashed. “But let me remind you
that this situation came to me unasked. I am like a puzzle-headed chief
mate we had once in the dear old _Samarcand_ when I was a youngster.
The fellow went gravely about trying to ‘account to himself’—his
favourite expression—for a lot of things no one would care to bother
one’s head about. He was an old idiot but he was also an accomplished
practical seaman. I was quite a boy and he impressed me. I must have
caught the disposition from him.”
“Well—go on with your accounting then,” I said, assuming an air of
resignation.
“That’s just it.” Marlow fell into his stride at once. “That’s just
it. Mere disappointed cupidity cannot account for the proceedings of
the next morning; proceedings which I shall not describe to you—but
which I shall tell you of presently, not as a matter of conjecture but
of actual fact. Meantime returning to that evening altercation in
deadened tones within the private apartment of Miss de Barral’s
governess, what if I were to tell you that disappointment had most
likely made them touchy with each other, but that perhaps the secret of
his careless, railing behaviour, was in the thought, springing up within
him with an emphatic oath of relief. ‘Now there’s nothing to prevent me
from breaking away from that old woman.’ And that the secret of her
envenomed rage, not against this miserable and attractive wretch, but
against fate, accident and the whole course of human life, concentrating
its venom on de Barral and including the innocent girl herself, was in
the thought, in the fear crying within her, ‘Now I have nothing to hold
him with...’”
I couldn’t refuse Marlow the tribute of a prolonged whistle “Phew! So
you suppose that....”
He waved his hand impatiently.
“I don’t suppose. It was so. And anyhow why shouldn’t you accept the
supposition. Do you look upon governesses as creatures above suspicion
or necessarily of moral perfection? I suppose their hearts would not
stand looking into much better than other people’s. Why shouldn’t a
governess have passions, all the passions, even that of libertinage, and
even ungovernable passions; yet suppressed by the very same means which
keep the rest of us in order: early training—necessity—circumstances—
fear of consequences; till there comes an age, a time when the restraint
of years becomes intolerable—and infatuation irresistible....”
“But if infatuation—quite possible I admit,” I argued, “how do you
account for the nature of the conspiracy.”
“You expect a cogency of conduct not usual in women,” said Marlow. “The
subterfuges of a menaced passion are not to be fathomed. You think it
is going on the way it looks, whereas it is capable, for its own ends,
of walking backwards into a precipice.”
When one once acknowledges that she was not a common woman, then all
this is easily understood. She was abominable but she was not common.
She had suffered in her life not from its constant inferiority but from
constant self-repression. A common woman finding herself placed in a
commanding position might have formed the design to become the second
Mrs de Barral. Which would have been impracticable. De Barral would
not have known what to do with a wife. But even if by some impossible
chance he had made advances, this governess would have repulsed him with
scorn. She had treated him always as an inferior being with an assured,
distant politeness. In her composed, schooled manner she despised and
disliked both father and daughter exceedingly. I have a notion that she
had always disliked intensely all her charges including the two ducal
(if they were ducal) little girls with whom she had dazzled de Barral.
What an odious, ungratified existence it must have been for a woman as
avid of all the sensuous emotions which life can give as most of her
betters.
She had seen her youth vanish, her freshness disappear, her hopes die,
and now she felt her flaming middle-age slipping away from her. No
wonder that with her admirably dressed, abundant hair, thickly sprinkled
with white threads and adding to her elegant aspect the piquant
distinction of a powdered coiffure—no wonder, I say, that she clung
desperately to her last infatuation for that graceless young scamp, even
to the extent of hatching for him that amazing plot. He was not so far
gone in degradation as to make him utterly hopeless for such an attempt.
She hoped to keep him straight with that enormous bribe. She was
clearly a woman uncommon enough to live without illusions—which, of
course, does not mean that she was reasonable. She had said to herself,
perhaps with a fury of self-contempt. “In a few years I shall be too
old for anybody. Meantime I shall have him—and I shall hold him by
throwing to him the money of that ordinary, silly, little girl of no
account.” Well, it was a desperate expedient—but she thought it worth
while. And besides there is hardly a woman in the world, no matter how
hard, depraved or frantic, in whom something of the maternal instinct
does not survive, unconsumed like a salamander, in the fires of the most
abandoned passion. Yes there might have been that sentiment for him
too. There _was_ no doubt. So I say again: No wonder! No wonder that
she raged at everything—and perhaps even at him, with contradictory
reproaches: for regretting the girl, a little fool who would never in
her life be worth anybody’s attention, and for taking the disaster
itself with a cynical levity in which she perceived a flavour of revolt.
And so the altercation in the night went on, over the irremediable. He
arguing, “What’s the hurry? Why clear out like this?” perhaps a little
sorry for the girl and as usual without a penny in his pocket,
appreciating the comfortable quarters, wishing to linger on as long as
possible in the shameless enjoyment of this already doomed luxury.
There was really no hurry for a few days. Always time enough to vanish.
And, with that, a touch of masculine softness, a sort of regard for
appearances surviving his degradation: “You might behave decently at the
last, Eliza.” But there was no softness in the sallow face under the
gala effect of powdered hair, its formal calmness gone, the dark-ringed
eyes glaring at him with a sort of hunger. “No! No! If it is as you
say then not a day, not an hour, not a moment.” She stuck to it, very
determined that there should be no more of that boy and girl
philandering since the object of it was gone; angry with herself for
having suffered from it so much in the past, furious at its having been
all in vain.
But she was reasonable enough not to quarrel with him finally. What was
the good? She found means to placate him. The only means. As long as
there was some money to be got she had hold of him. “Now go away. We
shall do no good by any more of this sort of talk. I want to be alone
for a bit.” He went away, sulkily acquiescent. There was a room always
kept ready for him on the same floor, at the further end of a short
thickly carpeted passage.
How she passed the night, this woman with no illusions to help her
through the hours which must have been sleepless I shouldn’t like to
say. It ended at last; and this strange victim of the de Barral
failure, whose name would never be known to the Official Receiver, came
down to breakfast, impenetrable in her everyday perfection. From the
very first, somehow, she had accepted the fatal news for true. All her
life she had never believed in her luck, with that pessimism of the
passionate who at bottom feel themselves to be the outcasts of a morally
restrained universe. But this did not make it any easier, on opening
the morning paper feverishly, to see the thing confirmed. Oh yes! It
was there. The Orb had suspended payment—the first growl of the storm
faint as yet, but to the initiated the forerunner of a deluge. As an
item of news it was not indecently displayed. It was not displayed at
all in a sense. The serious paper, the only one of the great dailies
which had always maintained an attitude of reserve towards the de Barral
group of banks, had its “manner.” Yes! a modest item of news! But
there was also, on another page, a special financial article in a
hostile tone beginning with the words “We have always feared” and a
guarded, half-column leader, opening with the phrase: “It is a
deplorable sign of the times” what was, in effect, an austere, general
rebuke to the absurd infatuations of the investing public. She glanced
through these articles, a line here and a line there—no more was
necessary to catch beyond doubt the murmur of the oncoming flood.
Several slighting references by name to de Barral revived her animosity
against the man, suddenly, as by the effect of unforeseen moral support.
The miserable wretch!...
“You understand,” Marlow interrupted the current of his narrative, “that
in order to be consecutive in my relation of this affair I am telling
you at once the details which I heard from Mrs Fyne later in the day,
as well as what little Fyne imparted to me with his usual solemnity
during that morning call. As you may easily guess the Fynes, in their
apartments, had read the news at the same time, and, as a matter of
fact, in the same august and highly moral newspaper, as the governess in
the luxurious mansion a few doors down on the opposite side of the
street. But they read them with different feelings. They were
thunderstruck. Fyne had to explain the full purport of the intelligence
to Mrs Fyne whose first cry was that of relief. Then that poor child
would be safe from these designing, horrid people. Mrs Fyne did not
know what it might mean to be suddenly reduced from riches to absolute
penury. Fyne with his masculine imagination was less inclined to
rejoice extravagantly at the girl’s escape from the moral dangers which
had been menacing her defenceless existence. It was a confoundedly big
price to pay. What an unfortunate little thing she was! ‘We might be
able to do something to comfort that poor child at any rate for the time
she is here,’ said Mrs Fyne. She felt under a sort of moral obligation
not to be indifferent. But no comfort for anyone could be got by
rushing out into the street at this early hour; and so, following the
advice of Fyne not to act nastily, they both sat down at the window and
stared feelingly at the great house, awful to their eyes in its stolid,
prosperous, expensive respectability with ruin absolutely standing at
the door.”
By that time, or very soon after, all Brighton had the information and
formed a more or less just appreciation of its gravity. The butler in
Miss de Barral’s big house had seen the news, perhaps earlier than
anybody within a mile of the Parade, in the course of his morning duties
of which one was to dry the freshly delivered paper before the fire—an
occasion to glance at it which no intelligent man could have neglected.
He communicated to the rest of the household his vaguely forcible
impression that something had gone damnably wrong with the affairs of
“her father in London.”
This brought an atmosphere of constraint through the house, which Flora
de Barral coming down somewhat later than usual could not help noticing
in her own way. Everybody seemed to stare so stupidly somehow; she
feared a dull day.
In the dining-room the governess in her place, a newspaper
half-concealed under the cloth on her lap, after a few words exchanged
with lips that seemed hardly to move, remaining motionless, her eyes
fixed before her in an enduring silence; and presently Charley coming in
to whom she did not even give a glance. He hardly said good morning,
though he had a half-hearted try to smile at the girl, and sitting
opposite her with his eyes on his plate and slight quivers passing along
the line of his clean-shaven jaw, he too had nothing to say. It was
dull, horribly dull to begin one’s day like this; but she knew what it
was. These never-ending family affairs! It was not for the first time
that she had suffered from their depressing after-effects on these two.
It was a shame that the delightful Charley should be made dull by these
stupid talks, and it was perfectly stupid of him to let himself be upset
like this by his aunt.
When after a period of still, as if calculating, immobility her
governess got up abruptly and went out with the paper in her hand,
almost immediately afterwards followed by Charley who left his breakfast
half eaten, the girl was positively relieved. They would have it out
that morning whatever it was, and be themselves again in the afternoon.
At least Charley would be. To the moods of her governess she did not
attach so much importance.
For the first time that morning the Fynes saw the front door of the
awful house open and the objectionable young man issue forth, his
rascality visible to their prejudiced eyes in his very bowler hat and in
the smart cut of his short fawn overcoat. He walked away rapidly like a
man hurrying to catch a train, glancing from side to side as though he
were carrying something off. Could he be departing for good?
Undoubtedly, undoubtedly! But Mrs Fyne’s fervent “thank goodness”
turned out to be a bit, as the Americans—some Americans—say
“previous.” In a very short time the odious fellow appeared again,
strolling, absolutely strolling back, his hat now tilted a little on one
side, with an air of leisure and satisfaction. Mrs Fyne groaned not
only in the spirit, at this sight, but in the flesh, audibly; and asked
her husband what it might mean. Fyne naturally couldn’t say. Mrs Fyne
believed that there was something horrid in progress and meantime the
object of her detestation had gone up the steps and had knocked at the
door which at once opened to admit him.
He had been only as far as the bank.
His reason for leaving his breakfast unfinished to run after Miss de
Barral’s governess, was to speak to her in reference to that very errand
possessing the utmost possible importance in his eyes. He shrugged his
shoulders at the nervousness of her eyes and hands, at the
half-strangled whisper “I had to go out. I could hardly contain
myself.” That was her affair. He was, with a young man’s
squeamishness, rather sick of her ferocity. He did not understand it.
Men do not accumulate hate against each other in tiny amounts,
treasuring every pinch carefully till it grows at last into a monstrous
and explosive hoard. He had run out after her to remind her of the
balance at the bank. What about lifting that money without wasting any
more time? She had promised him to leave nothing behind.
An account opened in her name for the expenses of the establishment in
Brighton, had been fed by de Barral with deferential lavishness. The
governess crossed the wide hall into a little room at the side where she
sat down to write the cheque, which he hastened out to go and cash as if
it were stolen or a forgery. As observed by the Fynes, his uneasy
appearance on leaving the house arose from the fact that his first
trouble having been caused by a cheque of doubtful authenticity, the
possession of a document of the sort made him unreasonably uncomfortable
till this one was safely cashed. And after all, you know it was
stealing of an indirect sort; for the money was de Barral’s money if the
account was in the name of the accomplished lady. At any rate the
cheque was cashed. On getting hold of the notes and gold he recovered
his jaunty bearing, it being well-known that with certain natures the
presence of money (even stolen) in the pocket, acts as a tonic, or at
least as a stimulant. He cocked his hat a little on one side as though
he had had a drink or two—which indeed he might have had in reality, to
celebrate the occasion.
The governess had been waiting for his return in the hall, disregarding
the side-glances of the butler as he went in and out of the dining-room
clearing away the breakfast things. It was she, herself, who had opened
the door so promptly. “It’s all right,” he said touching his
breast-pocket; and she did not dare, the miserable wretch without
illusions, she did not dare ask him to hand it over. They looked at
each other in silence. He nodded significantly: “Where is she now?” and
she whispered, “Gone into the drawing-room. Want to see her again?”
with an archly black look which he acknowledged by a muttered, surly: “I
am damned if I do. Well, as you want to bolt like this, why don’t we go
now?”
She set her lips with cruel obstinacy and shook her head. She had her
idea, her completed plan. At that moment the Fynes, still at the window
and watching like a pair of private detectives, saw a man with a long
grey beard and a jovial face go up the steps helping himself with a
thick stick, and knock at the door. Who could he be?
He was one of Miss de Barral’s masters. She had lately taken up
painting in water-colours, having read in a high-class woman’s weekly
paper that a great many princesses of the European royal houses were
cultivating that art. This was the water-colour morning; and the
teacher, a veteran of many exhibitions, of a venerable and jovial
aspect, had turned up with his usual punctuality. He was no great
reader of morning papers, and even had he seen the news it is very
likely he would not have understood its real purport. At any rate he
turned up, as the governess expected him to do, and the Fynes saw him
pass through the fateful door.
He bowed cordially to the lady in charge of Miss de Barral’s education,
whom he saw in the hall engaged in conversation with a very good-looking
but somewhat raffish young gentleman. She turned to him graciously:
“Flora is already waiting for you in the drawing-room.”
The cultivation of the art said to be patronised by princesses was
pursued in the drawing-room from considerations of the right kind of
light. The governess preceded the master up the stairs and into the
room where Miss de Barral was found arrayed in a holland pinafore (also
of the right kind for the pursuit of the art) and smilingly expectant.
The water-colour lesson enlivened by the jocular conversation of the
kindly, humorous, old man was always great fun; and she felt she would
be compensated for the tiresome beginning of the day.
Her governess generally was present at the lesson; but on this occasion
she only sat down till the master and pupil had gone to work in earnest,
and then as though she had suddenly remembered some order to give, rose
quietly and went out of the room.
Once outside, the servants summoned by the passing maid without a bell
being rung, and quick, quick, let all this luggage be taken down into
the hall, and let one of you call a cab. She stood outside the
drawing-room door on the landing, looking at each piece, trunk, leather
cases, portmanteaus, being carried past her, her brows knitted and her
aspect so sombre and absorbed that it took some little time for the
butler to muster courage enough to speak to her. But he reflected that
he was a free-born Briton and had his rights. He spoke straight to the
point but in the usual respectful manner.
“Beg you pardon, ma’am—but are you going away for good?”
He was startled by her tone. Its unexpected, unladylike harshness fell
on his trained ear with the disagreeable effect of a false note. “Yes.
I am going away. And the best thing for all of you is to go away too,
as soon as you like. You can go now, to-day, this moment. You had your
wages paid you only last week. The longer you stay the greater your
loss. But I have nothing to do with it now. You are the servants of
Mr de Barral—you know.”
The butler was astounded by the manner of this advice, and as his eyes
wandered to the drawing-room door the governess extended her arm as if
to bar the way. “Nobody goes in there.” And that was said still in
another tone, such a tone that all trace of the trained respectfulness
vanished from the butler’s bearing. He stared at her with a frank
wondering gaze. “Not till I am gone,” she added, and there was such an
expression on her face that the man was daunted by the mystery of it.
He shrugged his shoulders slightly and without another word went down
the stairs on his way to the basement, brushing in the hall past Mr
Charles who hat on head and both hands rammed deep into his overcoat
pockets paced up and down as though on sentry duty there.
The ladies’ maid was the only servant upstairs, hovering in the passage
on the first floor, curious and as if fascinated by the woman who stood
there guarding the door. Being beckoned closer imperiously and asked by
the governess to bring out of the now empty rooms the hat and veil, the
only objects besides the furniture still to be found there, she did so
in silence but inwardly fluttered. And while waiting uneasily, with the
veil, before that woman who, without moving a step away from the
drawing-room door was pinning with careless haste her hat on her head,
she heard within a sudden burst of laughter from Miss de Barral enjoying
the fun of the water-colour lesson given her for the last time by the
cheery old man.
Mr and Mrs Fyne ambushed at their window—a most incredible occupation
for people of their kind—saw with renewed anxiety a cab come to the
door, and watched some luggage being carried out and put on its roof.
The butler appeared for a moment, then went in again. What did it mean?
Was Flora going to be taken to her father; or were these people, that
woman and her horrible nephew, about to carry her off somewhere? Fyne
couldn’t tell. He doubted the last, Flora having now, he judged, no
value, either positive or speculative. Though no great reader of
character he did not credit the governess with humane intentions. He
confessed to me naïvely that he was excited as if watching some action
on the stage. Then the thought struck him that the girl might have had
some money settled on her, be possessed of some means, of some little
fortune of her own and therefore—
He imparted this theory to his wife who shared fully his consternation.
“I can’t believe the child will go away without running in to say
good-bye to us,” she murmured. “We must find out! I shall ask her.”
But at that very moment the cab rolled away, empty inside, and the door
of the house which had been standing slightly ajar till then was pushed
to.
They remained silent staring at it till Mrs Fyne whispered doubtfully
“I really think I must go over.” Fyne didn’t answer for a while (his is
a reflective mind, you know), and then as if Mrs Fyne’s whispers had an
occult power over that door it opened wide again and the white-bearded
man issued, astonishingly active in his movements, using his stick
almost like a leaping-pole to get down the steps; and hobbled away
briskly along the pavement. Naturally the Fynes were too far off to
make out the expression of his face. But it would not have helped them
very much to a guess at the conditions inside the house. The expression
was humorously puzzled—nothing more.
For, at the end of his lesson, seizing his trusty stick and coming out
with his habitual vivacity, he very nearly cannoned just outside the
drawing-room door into the back of Miss de Barral’s governess. He
stopped himself in time and she turned round swiftly. It was
embarrassing; he apologised; but her face was not startled; it was not
aware of him; it wore a singular expression of resolution. A very
singular expression which, as it were, detained him for a moment. In
order to cover his embarrassment, he made some inane remark on the
weather, upon which, instead of returning another inane remark according
to the tacit rules of the game, she only gave him a smile of
unfathomable meaning. Nothing could have been more singular. The
good-looking young gentleman of questionable appearance took not the
slightest notice of him in the hall. No servant was to be seen. He let
himself out pulling the door to behind him with a crash as, in a manner,
he was forced to do to get it shut at all.
When the echo of it had died away the woman on the landing leaned over
the banister and called out bitterly to the man below “Don’t you want to
come up and say good-bye.” He had an impatient movement of the
shoulders and went on pacing to and fro as though he had not heard. But
suddenly he checked himself, stood still for a moment, then with a
gloomy face and without taking his hands out of his pockets ran smartly
up the stairs. Already facing the door she turned her head for a
whispered taunt: “Come! Confess you were dying to see her stupid little
face once more,”—to which he disdained to answer.
Flora de Barral, still seated before the table at which she had been
working on her sketch, raised her head at the noise of the opening door.
The invading manner of their entrance gave her the sense of something
she had never seen before. She knew them well. She knew the woman
better than she knew her father. There had been between them an
intimacy of relation as great as it can possibly be without the final
closeness of affection. The delightful Charley walked in, with his eyes
fixed on the back of her governess whose raised veil hid her forehead
like a brown band above the black line of the eyebrows. The girl was
astounded and alarmed by the altogether unknown expression in the
woman’s face. The stress of passion often discloses an aspect of the
personality completely ignored till then by its closest intimates.
There was something like an emanation of evil from her eyes and from the
face of the other, who, exactly behind her and overtopping her by half a
head, kept his eyelids lowered in a sinister fashion—which in the poor
girl, reached, stirred, set free that faculty of unreasoning explosive
terror lying locked up at the bottom of all human hearts and of the
hearts of animals as well. With suddenly enlarged pupils and a movement
as instinctive almost as the bounding of a startled fawn, she jumped up
and found herself in the middle of the big room, exclaiming at those
amazing and familiar strangers.
“What do you want?”
You will note that she cried: What do you want? Not: What has happened?
She told Mrs Fyne that she had received suddenly the feeling of being
personally attacked. And that must have been very terrifying. The
woman before her had been the wisdom, the authority, the protection of
life, security embodied and visible and undisputed.
You may imagine then the force of the shock in the intuitive perception
not merely of danger, for she did not know what was alarming her, but in
the sense of the security being gone. And not only security. I don’t
know how to explain it clearly. Look! Even a small child lives, plays
and suffers in terms of its conception of its own existence. Imagine,
if you can, a fact coming in suddenly with a force capable of shattering
that very conception itself. It was only because of the girl being
still so much of a child that she escaped mental destruction; that, in
other words she got over it. Could one conceive of her more mature,
while still as ignorant as she was, one must conclude that she would
have become an idiot on the spot—long before the end of that
experience. Luckily, people, whether mature or not mature (and who
really is ever mature?) are for the most part quite incapable of
understanding what is happening to them: a merciful provision of nature
to preserve an average amount of sanity for working purposes in this
world....
“But we, my dear Marlow, have the inestimable advantage of understanding
what is happening to others,” I struck in. “Or at least some of us seem
to. Is that too a provision of nature? And what is it for? Is it that
we may amuse ourselves gossiping about each other’s affairs? You for
instance seem—”
“I don’t know what I seem,” Marlow silenced me, “and surely life must be
amused somehow. It would be still a very respectable provision if it
were only for that end. But from that same provision of understanding,
there springs in us compassion, charity, indignation, the sense of
solidarity; and in minds of any largeness an inclination to that
indulgence which is next door to affection. I don’t mean to say that I
am inclined to an indulgent view of the precious couple which broke in
upon an unsuspecting girl. They came marching in (it’s the very
expression she used later on to Mrs Fyne) but at her cry they stopped.
It must have been startling enough to them. It was like having the mask
torn off when you don’t expect it. The man stopped, for good; he didn’t
offer to move a step further. But, though the governess had come in
there for the very purpose of taking the mask off for the first time in
her life, she seemed to look upon the frightened cry as a fresh
provocation. ‘What are you screaming for, you little fool?’ she said
advancing alone close to the girl who was affected exactly as if she had
seen Medusa’s head with serpentine locks set mysteriously on the
shoulders of that familiar person, in that brown dress, under that hat
she knew so well. It made her lose all her hold on reality. She told
Mrs Fyne: ‘I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t even know that I was
frightened. If she had told me it was a joke I would have laughed. If
she had told me to put on my hat and go out with her I would have gone
to put on my hat and gone out with her and never said a single word; I
should have been convinced I had been mad for a minute or so, and I
would have worried myself to death rather than breathe a hint of it to
her or anyone. But the wretch put her face close to mine and I could
not move. Directly I had looked into her eyes I felt grown on to the
carpet.’”
It was years afterwards that she used to talk like this to Mrs Fyne—
and to Mrs Fyne alone. Nobody else ever heard the story from her lips.
But it was never forgotten. It was always felt; it remained like a
mark on her soul, a sort of mystic wound, to be contemplated, to be
meditated over. And she said further to Mrs Fyne, in the course of
many confidences provoked by that contemplation, that, as long as that
woman called her names, it was almost soothing, it was in a manner
reassuring. Her imagination had, like her body, gone off in a wild
bound to meet the unknown; and then to hear after all something which
more in its tone than in its substance was mere venomous abuse, had
steadied the inward flutter of all her being.
“She called me a little fool more times than I can remember. I! A
fool! Why, Mrs Fyne! I do assure you I had never yet thought at all;
never of anything in the world, till then. I just went on living. And
one can’t be a fool without one has at least tried to think. But what
had I ever to think about?”
“And no doubt,” commented Marlow, “her life had been a mere life of
sensations—the response to which can neither be foolish nor wise. It
can only be temperamental; and I believe that she was of a generally
happy disposition, a child of the average kind. Even when she was asked
violently whether she imagined that there was anything in her, apart
from her money, to induce any intelligent person to take any sort of
interest in her existence, she only caught her breath in one dry sob and
said nothing, made no other sound, made no movement. When she was
viciously assured that she was in heart, mind, manner and appearance, an
utterly common and insipid creature, she remained still, without
indignation, without anger. She stood, a frail and passive vessel into
which the other went on pouring all the accumulated dislike for all her
pupils, her scorn of all her employers (the ducal one included), the
accumulated resentment, the infinite hatred of all these unrelieved
years of—I won’t say hypocrisy. The practice of perfect hypocrisy is a
relief in itself, a secret triumph of the vilest sort, no doubt, but
still a way of getting even with the common morality from which some of
us appear to suffer so much. No! I will say the years, the passionate,
bitter years, of restraint, the iron, admirably mannered restraint at
every moment, in a never-failing perfect correctness of speech, glances,
movements, smiles, gestures, establishing for her a high reputation, an
impressive record of success in her sphere. It had been like living
half-strangled for years.”
And all this torture for nothing, in the end! What looked at last like
a possible prize (oh, without illusions! but still a prize) broken in
her hands, fallen in the dust, the bitter dust, of disappointment, she
revelled in the miserable revenge—pretty safe too—only regretting the
unworthiness of the girlish figure which stood for so much she had
longed to be able to spit venom at, if only once, in perfect liberty.
The presence of the young man at her back increased both her
satisfaction and her rage. But the very violence of the attack seemed
to defeat its end by rendering the representative victim as it were
insensible. The cause of this outrage naturally escaping the girl’s
imagination her attitude was in effect that of dense, hopeless
stupidity. And it is a fact that the worst shocks of life are often
received without outcries, without gestures, without a flow of tears and
the convulsions of sobbing. The insatiable governess missed these signs
exceedingly. This pitiful stolidity was only a fresh provocation. Yet
the poor girl was deadly pale.
“I was cold,” she used to explain to Mrs Fyne. “I had had time to get
terrified. She had pushed her face so near mine and her teeth looked as
though she wanted to bite me. Her eyes seemed to have become quite dry,
hard and small in a lot of horrible wrinkles. I was too afraid of her
to shudder, too afraid of her to put my fingers to my ears. I didn’t
know what I expected her to call me next, but when she told me I was no
better than a beggar—that there would be no more masters, no more
servants, no more horses for me—I said to myself: Is that all? I
should have laughed if I hadn’t been too afraid of her to make the least
little sound.”
It seemed that poor Flora had to know all the possible phases of that
sort of anguish, beginning with instinctive panic, through the
bewildered stage, the frozen stage and the stage of blanched
apprehension, down to the instinctive prudence of extreme terror—the
stillness of the mouse. But when she heard herself called the child of
a cheat and a swindler, the very monstrous unexpectedness of this caused
in her a revulsion towards letting herself go. She screamed out all at
once “You mustn’t speak like this of Papa!”
The effort of it uprooted her from that spot where her little feet
seemed dug deep into the thick luxurious carpet, and she retreated
backwards to a distant part of the room, hearing herself repeat, “You
mustn’t, you mustn’t,” as if it were somebody else screaming. She came
to a chair and flung herself into it. Thereupon the somebody else
ceased screaming and she lolled, exhausted, sightless, in a silent room,
as if indifferent to everything and without a single thought in her
head.
The next few seconds seemed to last for ever so long; a black abyss of
time separating what was past and gone from the reappearance of the
governess and the reawakening of fear. And that woman was forcing the
words through her set teeth:
“You say I mustn’t, I mustn’t. All the world will be speaking of him
like this to-morrow. They will say it, and they’ll print it. You shall
hear it and you shall read it—and then you shall know whose daughter
you are.”
Her face lighted up with an atrocious satisfaction. “He’s nothing but a
thief,” she cried, “this father of yours. As to you I have never been
deceived in you for a moment. I have been growing more and more sick of
you for years. You are a vulgar, silly nonentity, and you shall go back
to where you belong, whatever low place you have sprung from, and beg
your bread—that is if anybody’s charity will have anything to do with
you, which I doubt—”
She would have gone on regardless of the enormous eyes, of the open
mouth of the girl who sat up suddenly with the wild staring expression
of being choked by invisible fingers on her throat, and yet horribly
pale. The effect on her constitution was so profound, Mrs Fyne told
me, that she who as a child had a rather pretty delicate colouring,
showed a white bloodless face for a couple of years afterwards, and
remained always liable at the slightest emotion to an extraordinary
ghost-like whiteness. The end came in the abomination of desolation of
the poor child’s miserable cry for help: “Charley! Charley!” coming
from her throat in hidden gasping efforts. Her enlarged eyes had
discovered him where he stood motionless and dumb.
He started from his immobility, a hand withdrawn brusquely from the
pocket of his overcoat, strode up to the woman, seized her by the arm
from behind, saying in a rough commanding tone: “Come away, Eliza.” In
an instant the child saw them close together and remote, near the door,
gone through the door, which she neither heard nor saw being opened or
shut. But it was shut. Oh yes, it was shut. Her slow unseeing glance
wandered all over the room. For some time longer she remained leaning
forward, collecting her strength doubting if she would be able to stand.
She stood up at last. Everything about her spun round in an oppressive
silence. She remembered perfectly—as she told Mrs Fyne—that clinging
to the arm of the chair she called out twice “Papa! Papa!” At the
thought that he was far away in London everything about her became quite
still. Then, frightened suddenly by the solitude of that empty room,
she rushed out of it blindly.
With that fatal diffidence in well doing, inherent in the present
condition of humanity, the Fynes continued to watch at their window.
“It’s always so difficult to know what to do for the best,” Fyne assured
me. It is. Good intentions stand in their own way so much. Whereas if
you want to do harm to anyone you needn’t hesitate. You have only to go
on. No one will reproach you with your mistakes or call you a
confounded, clumsy meddler. The Fynes watched the door, the closed
street door inimical somehow to their benevolent thoughts, the face of
the house cruelly impenetrable. It was just as on any other day. The
unchanged daily aspect of inanimate things is so impressive that Fyne
went back into the room for a moment, picked up the paper again, and ran
his eyes over the item of news. No doubt of it. It looked very bad.
He came back to the window and Mrs Fyne. Tired out as she was she sat
there resolute and ready for responsibility. But she had no suggestion
to offer. People do fear a rebuff wonderfully, and all her audacity was
in her thoughts. She shrank from the incomparably insolent manner of
the governess. Fyne stood by her side, as in those old-fashioned
photographs of married couples where you see a husband with his hand on
the back of his wife’s chair. And they were about as efficient as an
old photograph, and as still, till Mrs Fyne started slightly. The
street door had swung open, and, bursting out, appeared the young man,
his hat (Mrs Fyne observed) tilted forward over his eyes. After him
the governess slipped through, turning round at once to shut the door
behind her with care. Meantime the man went down the white steps and
strode along the pavement, his hands rammed deep into the pockets of his
fawn overcoat. The woman, that woman of composed movements, of
deliberate superior manner, took a little run to catch up with him, and
directly she had caught up with him tried to introduce her hand under
his arm. Mrs Fyne saw the brusque half turn of the fellow’s body as
one avoids an importunate contact, defeating her attempt rudely. She
did not try again but kept pace with his stride, and Mrs Fyne watched
them, walking independently, turn the corner of the street side by side,
disappear for ever.
The Fynes looked at each other eloquently, doubtfully: What do you think
of this? Then with common accord turned their eyes back to the street
door, closed, massive, dark; the great, clear-brass knocker shining in a
quiet slant of sunshine cut by a diagonal line of heavy shade filling
the further end of the street. Could the girl be already gone? Sent
away to her father? Had she any relations? Nobody but de Barral
himself ever came to see her, Mrs Fyne remembered; and she had the
instantaneous, profound, maternal perception of the child’s loneliness—
and a girl too! It was irresistible. And, besides, the departure of
the governess was not without its encouraging influence. “I am going
over at once to find out,” she declared resolutely but still staring
across the street. Her intention was arrested by the sight of that
awful, sombrely glistening door, swinging back suddenly on the yawning
darkness of the hall, out of which literally flew out, right out on the
pavement, almost without touching the white steps, a little figure
swathed in a holland pinafore up to the chin, its hair streaming back
from its head, darting past a lamp-post, past the red pillar-box....
“Here,” cried Mrs Fyne; “she’s coming here! Run, John! Run!”
Fyne bounded out of the room. This is his own word. Bounded! He
assured me with intensified solemnity that he bounded; and the sight of
the short and muscular Fyne bounding gravely about the circumscribed
passages and staircases of a small, very high-class, private hotel,
would have been worth any amount of money to a man greedy of memorable
impressions. But as I looked at him, the desire of laughter at my very
lips, I asked myself: how many men could be found ready to compromise
their cherished gravity for the sake of the unimportant child of a
ruined financier with an ugly, black cloud already wreathing his head.
I didn’t laugh at little Fyne. I encouraged him: “You did!—very
good.... Well?”
His main thought was to save the child from some unpleasant
interference. There was a porter downstairs, page boys; some people
going away with their trunks in the passage; a railway omnibus at the
door, white-breasted waiters dodging about the entrance.
He was in time. He was at the door before she reached it in her blind
course. She did not recognise him; perhaps she did not see him. He
caught her by the arm as she ran past and, very sensibly, without trying
to check her, simply darted in with her and up the stairs, causing no
end of consternation amongst the people in his way. They scattered.
What might have been their thoughts at the spectacle of a shameless
middle-aged man abducting headlong into the upper regions of a
respectable hotel a terrified young girl obviously under age, I don’t
know. And Fyne (he told me so) did not care for what people might
think. All he wanted was to reach his wife before the girl collapsed.
For a time she ran with him but at the last flight of stairs he had to
seize and half drag, half carry her to his wife. Mrs Fyne waited at
the door with her quite unmoved physiognomy and her readiness to
confront any sort of responsibility, which already characterised her,
long before she became a ruthless theorist. Relieved, his mission
accomplished, Fyne closed hastily the door of the sitting-room.
But before long both Fynes became frightened. After a period of
immobility in the arms of Mrs Fyne, the girl, who had not said a word,
tore herself out from that slightly rigid embrace. She struggled dumbly
between them, they did not know why, soundless and ghastly, till she
sank exhausted on a couch. Luckily the children were out with the two
nurses. The hotel housemaid helped Mrs Fyne to put Flora de Barral to
bed. She was as if gone speechless and insane. She lay on her back,
her face white like a piece of paper, her dark eyes staring at the
ceiling, her awful immobility broken by sudden shivering fits with a
loud chattering of teeth in the shadowy silence of the room, the blinds
pulled down, Mrs Fyne sitting by patiently, her arms folded, yet
inwardly moved by the riddle of that distress of which she could not
guess the word, and saying to herself: “That child is too emotional—
much too emotional to be ever really sound!” As if anyone not made of
stone could be perfectly sound in this world. And then how sound? In
what sense—to resist what? Force or corruption? And even in the best
armour of steel there are joints a treacherous stroke can always find if
chance gives the opportunity.
General considerations never had the power to trouble Mrs Fyne much.
The girl not being in a state to be questioned she waited by the
bedside. Fyne had crossed over to the house, his scruples overcome by
his anxiety to discover what really had happened. He did not have to
lift the knocker; the door stood open on the inside gloom of the hall;
he walked into it and saw no one about, the servants having assembled
for a fatuous consultation in the basement. Fyne’s uplifted bass voice
startled them down there, the butler coming up, staring and in his shirt
sleeves, very suspicious at first, and then, on Fyne’s explanation that
he was the husband of a lady who had called several times at the house—
Miss de Barral’s mother’s friend—becoming humanely concerned and
communicative, in a man to man tone, but preserving his trained
high-class servant’s voice: “Oh bless you, sir, no! She does not mean
to come back. She told me so herself”—he assured Fyne with a faint
shade of contempt creeping into his tone.
As regards their young lady nobody downstairs had any idea that she had
run out of the house. He dared say they all would have been willing to
do their very best for her, for the time being; but since she was now
with her mother’s friends....
He fidgeted. He murmured that all this was very unexpected. He wanted
to know what he had better do with letters or telegrams which might
arrive in the course of the day.
“Letters addressed to Miss de Barral, you had better bring over to my
hotel over there,” said Fyne beginning to feel extremely worried about
the future. The man said “Yes, sir,” adding, “and if a letter comes
addressed to Mrs.”
Fyne stopped him by a gesture. “I don’t know.... Anything you like.”
“Very well, sir.”
The butler did not shut the street door after Fyne, but remained on the
doorstep for a while, looking up and down the street in the spirit of
independent expectation like a man who is again his own master. Mrs
Fyne hearing her husband return came out of the room where the girl was
lying in bed. “No change,” she whispered; and Fyne could only make a
hopeless sign of ignorance as to what all this meant and how it would
end.
He feared future complications—naturally; a man of limited means, in a
public position, his time not his own. Yes. He owned to me in the
parlour of my farmhouse that he had been very much concerned then at the
possible consequences. But as he was making this artless confession I
said to myself that, whatever consequences and complications he might
have imagined, the complication from which he was suffering now could
never, never have presented itself to his mind. Slow but sure (for I
conceive that the Book of Destiny has been written up from the beginning
to the last page) it had been coming for something like six years—and
now it had come. The complication was there! I looked at his unshaken
solemnity with the amused pity we give the victim of a funny if somewhat
ill-natured practical joke.
“Oh hang it,” he exclaimed—in no logical connection with what he had
been relating to me. Nevertheless the exclamation was intelligible
enough.
However at first there were, he admitted, no untoward complications, no
embarrassing consequences. To a telegram in guarded terms dispatched to
de Barral no answer was received for more than twenty-four hours. This
certainly caused the Fynes some anxiety. When the answer arrived late
on the evening of next day it was in the shape of an elderly man. An
unexpected sort of man. Fyne explained to me with precision that he
evidently belonged to what is most respectable in the lower middle
classes. He was calm and slow in his speech. He was wearing a
frock-coat, had grey whiskers meeting under his chin, and declared on
entering that Mr de Barral was his cousin. He hastened to add that he
had not seen his cousin for many years, while he looked upon Fyne (who
received him alone) with so much distrust that Fyne felt hurt (the
person actually refusing at first the chair offered to him) and retorted
tartly that he, for his part, had _never_ seen Mr de Barral, in his
life, and that, since the visitor did not want to sit down, he, Fyne,
begged him to state his business as shortly as possible. The man in
black sat down then with a faint superior smile.
He had come for the girl. His cousin had asked him in a note delivered
by a messenger to go to Brighton at once and take “his girl” over from a
gentleman named Fyne and give her house-room for a time in his family.
And there he was. His business had not allowed him to some sooner. His
business was the manufacture on a large scale of cardboard boxes. He
had two grown-up girls of his own. He had consulted his wife and so
that was all right. The girl would get a welcome in his home. His home
most likely was not what she had been used to but, etcetera, etcetera.
All the time Fyne felt subtly in that man’s manner a derisive
disapproval of everything that was not lower middle class, a profound
respect for money, a mean sort of contempt for speculators that fail,
and a conceited satisfaction with his own respectable vulgarity.
With Mrs Fyne the manner of the obscure cousin of de Barral was but
little less offensive. He looked at her rather slyly but her cold,
decided demeanour impressed him. Mrs Fyne on her side was simply
appalled by the personage, but did not show it outwardly. Not even when
the man remarked with false simplicity that Florrie—her name was
Florrie wasn’t it? would probably miss at first all her grand friends.
And when he was informed that the girl was in bed, not feeling well at
all he showed an unsympathetic alarm. She wasn’t an invalid was she?
No. What was the matter with her then?
An extreme distaste for that respectable member of society was depicted
in Fyne’s face even as he was telling me of him after all these years.
He was a specimen of precisely the class of which people like the Fynes
have the least experience; and I imagine he jarred on them painfully.
He possessed all the civic virtues in their very meanest form, and the
finishing touch was given by a low sort of consciousness he manifested
of possessing them. His industry was exemplary. He wished to catch the
earliest possible train next morning. It seems that for seven and
twenty years he had never missed being seated on his office-stool at the
factory punctually at ten o’clock every day. He listened to Mrs Fyne’s
objections with undisguised impatience. Why couldn’t Florrie get up and
have her breakfast at eight like other people? In his house the
breakfast was at eight sharp. Mrs Fyne’s polite stoicism overcame him
at last. He had come down at a very great personal inconvenience, he
assured her with displeasure, but he gave up the early train.
The good Fynes didn’t dare to look at each other before this unforeseen
but perfectly authorised guardian, the same thought springing up in
their minds: Poor girl! Poor girl! If the women of the family were
like this too!... And of course they would be. Poor girl! But what
could they have done even if they had been prepared to raise objections.
The person in the frock-coat had the father’s note; he had shown it to
Fyne. Just a request to take care of the girl—as her nearest
relative—without any explanation or a single allusion to the financial
catastrophe, its tone strangely detached and in its very silence on the
point giving occasion to think that the writer was not uneasy as to the
child’s future. Probably it was that very idea which had set the cousin
so readily in motion. Men had come before out of commercial crashes
with estates in the country and a comfortable income, if not for
themselves then for their wives. And if a wife could be made
comfortable by a little dexterous management then why not a daughter?
Yes. This possibility might have been discussed in the person’s
household and judged worth acting upon.—
The man actually hinted broadly that such was his belief and in face of
Fyne’s guarded replies gave him to understand that he was not the dupe
of such reticences. Obviously he looked upon the Fynes as being
disappointed because the girl was taken away from them. They, by a
diplomatic sacrifice in the interests of poor Flora, had asked the man
to dinner. He accepted ungraciously, remarking that he was not used to
late hours. He had generally a bit of supper about half-past eight or
nine. However....
He gazed contemptuously round the prettily decorated dining-room. He
wrinkled his nose in a puzzled way at the dishes offered to him by the
waiter but refused none, devouring the food with a great appetite and
drinking (“swilling” Fyne called it) gallons of ginger beer, which was
procured for him (in stone bottles) at his request. The difficulty of
keeping up a conversation with that being exhausted Mrs Fyne herself,
who had come to the table armed with adamantine resolution. The only
memorable thing he said was when, in a pause of gorging himself “with
these French dishes” he deliberately let his eyes roam over the little
tables occupied by parties of diners, and remarked that his wife did for
a moment think of coming down with him, but that he was glad she didn’t
do so. “She wouldn’t have been at all happy seeing all this alcohol
about. Not at all happy,” he declared weightily.
“You must have had a charming evening,” I said to Fyne, “if I may judge
from the way you have kept the memory green.”
“Delightful,” he growled with, positively, a flash of anger at the
recollection, but lapsed back into his solemnity at once. After we had
been silent for a while I asked whether the man took away the girl next
day.
Fyne said that he did; in the afternoon, in a fly, with a few clothes
the maid had got together and brought across from the big house. He
only saw Flora again ten minutes before they left for the railway
station, in the Fynes’ sitting-room at the hotel. It was a most painful
ten minutes for the Fynes. The respectable citizen addressed Miss de
Barral as “Florrie” and “my dear,” remarking to her that she was not
very big “there’s not much of you my dear,” in a familiarly disparaging
tone. Then turning to Mrs Fyne, and quite loud, “She’s very white in
the face. Why’s that?” To this Mrs Fyne made no reply. She had put
the girl’s hair up that morning with her own hands. It changed her very
much, observed Fyne. He, naturally, played a subordinate, merely
approving part. All he could do for Miss de Barral personally was to go
downstairs and put her into the fly himself, while Miss de Barral’s
nearest relation, having been shouldered out of the way, stood by, with
an umbrella and a little black bag, watching this proceeding with grim
amusement, as it seemed. It was difficult to guess what the girl
thought or what she felt. She no longer looked a child. She whispered
to Fyne a faint “Thank you,” from the fly, and he said to her in very
distinct tones and while still holding her hand: “Pray don’t forget to
write fully to my wife in a day or two, Miss de Barral.” Then Fyne
stepped back and the cousin climbed into the fly muttering quite
audibly: “I don’t think you’ll be troubled much with her in the future;”
without however looking at Fyne on whom he did not even bestow a nod.
The fly drove away.