MRS. BLENCARROW’S CONFESSION.
She had been there for some time when the sound of a footstep on the
gravel outside made her start. It was followed by a knock at the door,
which she herself opened almost before the summons. She came back to the
room, immediately followed by a tall man in clerical dress. The
suppressed excitement which had been in Mrs. Blencarrow’s aspect all the
day had risen now to an extraordinary height. She was very pale, with
one flaring spot on either cheek, and trembled so much that her teeth
were with difficulty kept from chattering against each other. She was
quite breathless when she took her seat again, once more supporting her
head in her hands.
The clergyman was embarrassed, too; he clasped and unclasped his hands
nervously, and remarked that the night was very cloudy and that it was
cold, as if, perhaps, it had been to give her information about the
weather that he came. Mr. Germaine giving her his views about the night,
and Mrs. Blencarrow listening with her face half hidden, made the most
curious picture, surrounded as it was by the bare framework of this
out-of-the-way room. She broke in abruptly at last upon the few broken
bits of information which he proceeded to give.
‘Do you guess why I sent for you, Mr. Germaine?’
The Vicar hesitated, and said, ‘I am by no means sure.’
‘Or why I receive you here in this strange place, and let you in myself,
and treat you as if you were a visitor whom I did not choose to have
seen?’
‘I have never thought of that last case.’
‘No--but it is true enough. It is not an ordinary visit I asked you to
pay me.’ She took her hands from her face and looked at him for a
moment. ‘You have heard what people are saying of me?’ she said.
‘Yes, but I did not believe a word. I felt sure that Kitty only meant to
curry favour at home.’
She gave him a strange, sudden look, then paused with a mechanical
laugh. ‘You think, then,’ she said, ‘that there are people in my own
county to whom that news would be something to conciliate;
something--something to make them forgive?’
‘There are people everywhere who would give much for such a story
against a neighbour, Mrs. Blencarrow.’
‘It is sad that such a thing should be.’ She stopped again, and looked
at him once more. ‘I am going to surprise you very much, Mr. Germaine.
You are not like them, so I think I am going to give you a great shock,’
she said.
She had turned her face towards him as she spoke; the two red spots on
her cheeks were like fire, yet her paleness was extreme; they only
seemed to make this the more remarkable.
In the momentary silence the door opened suddenly, and someone came in.
In the subdued light afforded by the shaded lamp it was difficult to see
more than that a dark figure had entered the room, and, crossing over to
the further side, sat down against the heavy curtains that covered the
window. Mrs. Blencarrow made the slightest movement of consciousness,
not of surprise, at this interruption, which, indeed, scarcely was an
interruption at all, being so instantaneous and so little remarked. She
went on:
‘You have known me a long time; you will form your own opinion of what I
am going to tell you; I will not excuse or explain.’
‘Mrs. Blencarrow, I am not sure whether you have perceived that we are
not alone.’
She cast a momentary glance at the new-comer, unnecessary, for she was
well aware of him, and of his attitude, and every line of the dark
shadow behind her. He sat bending forward, almost double, his elbows
upon his knees, and his head in his hands.
‘It makes no difference,’ she said, with a slight impatience--‘no
difference. Mr. Germaine, I sent for you to tell you--that it was true.’
‘What!’ he cried. He had scarcely been listening, all his attention
being directed with consternation, almost with stupefaction, on the
appearance of the man who had come in--who sat there--who made no
difference. The words did not strike him at all for the first moment,
and then he started and cried in his astonishment, ‘What!’ as if she had
struck him a blow.
Mrs. Blencarrow looked at him fixedly and spoke slowly, being, indeed,
forced to do so by a difficulty in enunciating the words. ‘The story you
have heard is--true.’
The Vicar rose from his chair in the sudden shock and horror; he looked
round him like a man stupefied, taking in slowly the whole scene--the
woman who was not looking at him, but was gazing straight before her,
with those spots of red excitement on her cheeks; the shadow of the man
in the background, with face hidden, unsurprised. Mr. Germaine slowly
received this astounding, inconceivable thought into his mind.
‘Good God!’ he cried.
‘I make no--explanations--no--excuses. The fact is enough,’ she said.
The fact was enough; his mind refused to receive it, yet grasped it with
the force of a catastrophe. He sat down helpless, without a word to
say, with a wave of his hands to express his impotence, his incapacity
even to think in face of a revelation so astounding and terrible; and
for a full minute there was complete silence; neither of the three moved
or spoke. The calm ticking of the clock took up the tale, as if the room
had been vacant--time going on indifferent to all the downfalls and
shame of humanity--with now and then a crackle from the glowing fire.
She said at last, being the first, as a woman usually is, to be moved to
impatience by the deadly silence, ‘It was not only to tell you--but to
ask, what am I to do?’
‘Mrs. Blencarrow--I have not a word--I--it is incredible.’
‘Yes,’ she said with a faint smile, ‘but very true.’ She repeated after
another pause, ‘What am I to do?’
Mr. Germaine had never in his life been called upon to face such a
question. His knowledge of moral problems concerned the more primitive
classes of humanity alone, where action is more obvious and the
difficulties less great. Nothing like this could occur in a village. He
sat and gazed at the woman, who was not a mere victim of passion--a
foolish woman who had taken a false step and now had to own to it--but a
lady of blameless honour and reputation, proud, full of dignity, the
head of a well-known family, the mother of children old enough to
understand her downfall and shame, with, so far as he knew, further
penalties involved of leaving them, and every habit of her life, and
following the man, whoever he was, into whatsoever wilderness he might
seek. The Vicar felt that all the ordinary advice which he would give in
such a case was stopped upon his lips. There was no parallel between
what was involved here and anything that could occur among the country
folk. He sat, feeling the problem beyond him, and without a word to say.
‘I must tell you more,’ said Mrs. Blencarrow. At her high strain of
excitement she was scarcely aware that he hesitated to reply, and not at
all that he was so much bewildered as to be beyond speech. She went on
as if she had not paused at all. ‘A thing has happened--which must often
happen; how can I tell you? It has been--not happy--for either. We
miscalculated--ourselves and all things. If I am wrong, I
am--subject--to contradiction,’ she said, suddenly stopping with a gasp
as if for breath.
The shades of the drama grew darker and darker. The spectator listened
with unspeakable excitement and curiosity; there was a silence which
seemed to throb with suspense and pain; but the figure in the background
neither moved nor spoke--a large motionless figure, doubled upon itself,
the shaggy head held between the hands, the face invisible, the elbows
on the knees.
‘You see?’ she said, with a faint movement of her hands, as though
calling his attention to that silence. There was a painful flicker of a
smile about her lips; perhaps her pride, perhaps her heart, desired even
at this moment a protest. She went on again: ‘It is--as I say; you will
see how this--complicates--all that one thinks of--as duty. What am I to
do?’
‘Mrs. Blencarrow,’ said the clergyman--then stopped with a painful sense
that even this name could be no longer hers, a perception which she
divined, and responded to with again a faint, miserable smile--‘what can
I say to you?’ he burst out. ‘I don’t know the circumstances; what you
tell me is so little. If you are married a second time----’
She made a movement of assent with her hand.
‘Then, of course--it is a commonplace; what else can I say?--your duty
to your husband must come first; it must come first. It is the most
primitive, the most fundamental law.’
‘What is that duty?’ she said, almost sharply, looking up; and again
there was a silence.
The clergyman laboured to speak, but what was he to say? The presence of
that motionless figure in the background, had there been nothing else,
would have made him dumb.
‘The first thing,’ he said, ‘in ordinary circumstances--Heaven knows I
speak in darkness--would be to own your position, at least, and set
everything in its right place. Nature itself teaches,’ he continued,
growing bolder, ‘that it is impossible to go on living in a false
position, acting, if not speaking, what can be nothing but a lie.’
‘It is commonplace, indeed,’ she cried bitterly, ‘all that: who should
know it like me? But will you tell me,’ she said, rising up and sitting
down in her excitement, ‘that it is my duty to leave my children who
want me, and all the work of my life which there is no one else to do,
for a useless existence, pleasing no one, needed by no one--a life
without an object, or with a hopeless object--a duty I can never fulfil?
To leave my trust,’ she went on, coming forward to the fire, leaning
upon the mantelpiece, and speaking with her face flushed and her voice
raised in unconscious eloquence, ‘the office I have held for so many
years--my children’s guardian, their steward, their caretaker--suppose
even that I had not been their mother, is a woman bidden to do all that,
to make herself useless, to sacrifice what she can do as well as what
she is?’
She stopped, words failing her, and stood before him, a wonderful noble
figure, eloquent in every movement and gesture, in the maturity and
dignity of her middle age; then suddenly broke down altogether, and,
hiding her face, cried out:
‘Who am I, to speak so? Not young to be excused, not a fool to be
forgiven; a woman ashamed--and for no end.’
‘If you are married,’ said the Vicar, ‘it is no shame to marry. It may
be inappropriate, unsuitable, it may be even regrettable; but it is not
wrong. Do not at least take a morbid view.’
She raised her drooping head, and turned round quickly upon him.
‘What am I to do?’ she said. ‘What am I to do?’
The Vicar’s eyes stole, in spite of himself, to the other side of the
room. The dark shadow there had not moved; the man still sat with his
head bent between his hands. He gave no evidence that he had heard a
word of the discussion; he put forth no claim except by his presence
there.
‘What can I say?’ said Mr. Germaine. ‘Nothing but commonplace, nothing
but what I have already said. Before everything it is your duty to put
things on a right foundation; you cannot go on like this. It must be
painful to do, but it is the only way.’
‘It is seldom,’ she said, ‘very seldom that you are so precise.’
‘Because,’ he said firmly, ‘there is no doubt on the subject. It is as
clear as noonday; there is but one thing to do.’
Mrs. Blencarrow said nothing; she stood with a still resistance in her
look--a woman whom nothing could overcome, broken down by
circumstances, by trouble, ready to grasp at any expedient; yet
unsubdued, and unconvinced that she could not struggle against Fate.
‘I can say nothing else,’ the Vicar repeated, ‘for there is nothing else
to say; and perhaps you would prefer that I should go. I can be of no
comfort to you, for there is nothing that can be done till this is
done--not from my point of view. I can only urge this upon you; I can
say nothing different.’
Again Mrs. Blencarrow made no reply. She stood so near him that he could
see the heaving of strong passion in all her frame, restrained by her
power of self-command, yet beyond that power to conceal. Perhaps she
could not speak more; at least, she did not. Mr. Germaine sat between
the two, both silent, absorbed in this all-engrossing question, till he
could bear it no longer. He rose abruptly to his feet.
‘May God give you the power to do right!’ he said; ‘I can say no more.’
Mrs. Blencarrow followed him to the door. She opened it for him, and
stood outside on the threshold in the moonlight to see him go.
‘At least,’ she said, ‘you will keep my secret; I may trust you with
that.’
‘I will say nothing,’ he replied, ‘except to yourself; but think of what
I have said.’
‘Think! If thinking would do any good!’
She gave him her hand, in all the veins of which the blood was coursing
like a strong stream, and then she closed the door behind him and locked
it. During all this time the man within had never stirred. Would he
move? Would he speak? Or could he speak and move? When she went
back----