THEY took Jimmie into the house, and Norma, looking neither to right
nor left, walked by the side of those carrying him, the front of her
embroidered dress smeared with blood. Every time her hands came in
contact with the delicate fabric, they left a fresh smear. Of this she
was unconscious. She was unconscious too, save in a dull way, of the
staring crowd; but she held her head high, and when Morland spoke to her
by the drawing-room window through which they passed, she listened to
what he had to say, bowed slightly, and went on.
“It is only a flesh wound. If it had been the lung, he would have spat
blood. I don't think it is serious.”
He spoke in a curiously apologetic tone, as if anxious to exculpate
himself from complicity in the attempted murder.. He was horribly
frightened. Two deaths laid in one day at a man's door are enough. The
possibility of a third was intolerable. The sense of the unheroic part
he had just played was beginning to creep over him like a chilling mist.
The consequences of confession, the only means whereby Jimmie could be
rehabilitated, loomed in front of him more and more disastrous. It would
be presenting himself to the world as a coward as well as a knave.
That prospect, too, frightened him. Lastly, there was Norma, white,
terror-stricken, metamorphosed in a second into a creature of primitive
emotions. Like the other shocks of that unhallowed day, her revelation
of unsuspected passions brought him face to face with the unfamiliar;
and to the average sensual man the unfamiliar brings with it an
atmosphere of the uncanny, the influence to be feared. His attitude,
therefore, when he addressed her was ludicrously humble.
She bowed and passed on. By this time she knew that Jimmie was not dead.
Morland's words even reassured her. Her breath came hard through
her delicate nostrils, and her bosom heaved up and down beneath the
open-work bodice with painful quickness. Only a few were allowed to stay
in the dining-room, Morland, Mr. Hardacre, Theodore Weever on behalf of
the duchess, and one or two others, while the Cosford doctor, who had
been invited to the garden-party, made his examination. Norma went
through into the hall. At the bottom of the stairs she met Connie in
piteous distress.
“Oh, my poor dear, my poor dear, we did n't know! I have just heard all
about it. It is terrible!”
Norma put up her hand beseechingly.
“Don't, Connie dear; don't talk of it. I can't bear it. I must be alone.
Send me up word what the doctor says.” She went to her room, sat there
and waited. Presently her maid entered with the message from Mrs.
Deering. The doctor's report was favourable--the wound not in any way
dangerous, the bullet easily extractable. They had carried the patient
to his bedroom, and Mrs. Deering had wired for Miss Marden to come down
by the first train. Norma dismissed the maid, and tried, in a miserable
wonder, to realise all that had happened.
A woman accustomed to many emotions can almost always hold herself in
check, if she be of strong will. Experience has taught her the
meaning and the danger of those swift rushes of the blood that lead to
unreasoning outburst. She is forewarned, forearmed, and can resist or
not as occasion demands. But even she is sometimes taken unawares.
How much the more likely to give way is the woman who has never felt
passionate emotion in her life before. The premonitory symptoms fail to
convey the sense of danger to her inexperienced mind. Before the
will has time to act she is swept on by a new force, bewildering,
irresistible. It becomes an ecstatic madness of joy or grief, and to the
otherwise rational being her actions are of no account. This curse
of quick responsiveness afflicts men to a less degree. If the first
chapters of Genesis could be brought up to date, woman would be endowed,
not with an extra rib, but with an extra nerve.
Now that she knew the shooting of Jimmie to be an affair of no great
seriousness, her heart sickened at the thought of her wild exhibition of
feeling. She heard the sniggering and ridicule in every carriage-load
of homeward-bound guests. From the wife of the scrubby curate to the
Princess of Herren-Rothbeck, her name was rolled like a delicate morsel
on the tongue of every woman in the county. And the inference they could
not fail to draw from her action was true--miserably true. But she had
only become poignantly aware of things at the moment when she saw the
lean haggard man in rusty black covering Jimmie with the revolver. Then
all the unrest of soul which she had striven to allay with her mockery,
all the disquieting visions of sweet places to which she had scornfully
blinded her eyes, all the burning words of passion whose clear echoing
had wrapped her body in hateful fever the night before, converged like
electric currents into one steady light radiant with significance. Two
minutes afterwards, when Jimmie fell, civilisation slipped from her like
a loose garment, and primitive woman threw herself by his side. But now,
reclothed, she shivered at the memory.
The door opened suddenly, and Mrs. Hardacre entered. There was battle
in every line of the hard face and in every movement of the thin, stiff
figure. Norma rose from the window where she had been sitting and faced
her mother defiantly.
“I know what you are going to say to me. Don't you think you might wait
a little? It will keep.”
“It won't. Sit down,” said Mrs. Hardacre between her teeth.
“I prefer to stand for the moment,” said Norma.
Mrs. Hardacre lost her self-control.
“Are we to send you to a madhouse? What do you mean by your blazing
folly? Before the whole county--before the duchess--before the princess!
Do you know what I have had to go through the last half-hour? Do you
know that we may never set foot in Chiltern Towers again? Do you know
we are the scandal and the laughing-stock of the county? As if one thing
was n't sufficient--for you to crown it by behaving like a hysterical
school-girl! Do you know what interpretation every scandal-mongering
tabby in the place is putting on your insane conduct?”
“Oh, yes,” said Norma, looking at her mother stonily; “and for once in
their spiteful lives they are quite right.”
“What do you mean?” gasped Mrs. Hardacre.
“I think my meaning is obvious.”
“That man--that painter man dressed like a secondhand
clothes-dealer--that--that beast?”
Mrs. Hardacre could scarcely trust her senses. The true solution of her
daughter's extraordinary behaviour had never crossed her most desperate
imaginings. But then she had not had much time for quiet speculatien.
The speeding of her hurriedly departing guests had usurped all the wits
of the poor lady.
“You have indeed given us a dramatic entertainment, dear Mrs. Hardacre,”
Lady FitzHubert had said with a sympathetic smile. “And poor Norma has
supplied the curtain. I hope she won't take it too much to heart.”
And Mrs. Hardacre, livid with rage, had had no weapon wherewith to
strike her adversary who thus took triumphant vengeance. It had been
a half-hour of grievous humiliation. The fount and origin thereof was
lying unconscious with a bullet through his shoulder. The subsidiary
stream, so to speak, was in her room safe and sound. Human nature,
for which she is not deserving of over-blame, had driven Mrs. Hardacre
thither. At least she could vent some of her pent-up fury upon her
outrageous daughter, who, from Mrs. Hardacre's point of view, indeed
owed an explanation of her action and deserved maternal censure. This
she was more than prepared to administer. But when she heard Norma
calmly say that Lady FitzHubert and the other delighted wreakers of
private revenges were entirely in the right, she gasped with amazement.
“That beast!” she repeated with a rising intonation. Norma gave her
habitual shrug of the shoulders. With her proud, erect bearing, it was a
gesture not ungraceful.
“Considering what I have just admitted, mother, perhaps it would be in
better taste not to use such language.”
“I don't understand your admitting it. I don't know what on earth you
mean,” said Mrs. Hardacre.
There was a short pause, during which she scanned her daughter's face
anxiously as if waiting to see a gleam of reason dawn on it. Norma
reflected for a moment. Should she speak or not? She decided to speak.
Brutal frankness had ever been her best weapon against her mother. It
would probably prevent future wrangling.
“I am sorry I have n't made my meaning clear,” she said, resuming
her seat by the window; “and I don't know whether I can make it much
clearer. Anyhow, I'll try, mother. I used to think that love was either
a school-girl sentimentality, a fiction of the poets, or else the sort
of thing that lands married women who don't know how to take care of
themselves in the divorce court. I find it is n't. That's all.”
Mrs. Hardacre ran up to the window and faced Norma. “And Morland?”
“It won't break his heart.”
“What won't?”
“The breaking off of our engagement.”
Mrs. Hardacre looked at her daughter in a paralysis of bewilderment.
“The madhouse is the only place for you.”
“Perhaps it is. Anyway I can't marry a man when I care for his intimate
friend--and when the intimate friend cares for me. Somehow it's not
quite decent. Even you, mother, can see that.”
“So you and the intimate friend have arranged it all between you?”
“Oh, no. He does n't know that I care, and he does n't know that I
know that he cares. I'll say that over again if you like. It is quite
accurately expressed. And you know I'm not in the habit of lying.”
“And you propose to marry----”
“I don't propose to do anything,” interrupted Norma, quickly. “I at
least can wait till he asks me. And now, mother, I've had rather a bad
time--don't you think we might stop?”
“It seems to me, my dear Norma, we are only just beginning,” said Mrs.
Hardacre.
Norma rose with nervous impatience.
“O heavens, mother,” she said, in the full deep notes of her voice,
which were only sounded at rare moments of feeling, “can't you see that
I'm in earnest? This man is like no one else I have ever met. I have
grown to need him. Do you know what that means? With him I am a changed
woman--as God made me, I suppose; natural, fresh, real--” Mrs. Hardacre
sat in Norma's vacated chair by the window and stared at her, as she
moved about the room. “I somehow feel that I am a woman, after all. I
have got something higher than myself that I can fall at the feet of,
and that's what every woman craves when she's decent. As for marrying
him--I'm not fit to marry him. There is n't any one living who is.
That's an end of it, mother. I can't say anything more.”
“And do you propose to go on seeing this person when he recovers?” asked
Mrs. Hardacre.
“Why not?”
“I really can't argue with you,” said her mother, mystified. “If you
had told me this rubbish yesterday, I should have thought you touched in
your wits. To-day it is midsummer madness.”
“Why to-day?” asked Norma.
“The man has shown himself to be such a horrible beast. Of course,
if you think confessing to having seduced a girl under infamous
circumstances and driven her by his brutality to child-murder and
suicide, and blazoning the whole thing out at a fashionable garden-party
and getting himself shot for his pains, are idyllic virtues, nothing
more can be said. It's a case, as I remarked, for a madhouse.” Norma
came and stood before her mother, her brows knitted in perplexity.
“Perhaps I am going crazy--I really don't understand what you are
talking about.”
Mrs. Hardacre leant forward in her chair and drew a long breath. A gleam
of intelligence came into her eyes as she looked at Norma.
“Do you mean to say you don't know what the row was about before the man
fired the shot?”
“No,” said Norma, blankly.
Her mother fell back in her chair and laughed. It was the first moment
of enjoyment she had experienced since Stone's black figure had
appeared on the terrace. Reaction from strain caused the laughter to
ring somewhat sharply. Norma regarded her with an anxious frown.
“Please tell me exactly what you mean.”
“My dear child--it's too funny. I thought you would have been too clever
to be taken in by a man like this. I see, you've been imagining him a
Galahad--a sort of spotless prophet--though what use you can have
for such persons I can't make out. Well, this is what happened.”
Embellishing the story here and there with little spiteful adornments,
she described with fair accuracy, however, the scene that had occurred.
Norma listened stonily.
“This is true?” she asked when her mother had finished.
“Ask any one who was there--your father--Morland.”
“I can't believe it. He is not that sort of man.”
“Is n't he? I knew he was the first time I set eyes on him. Perhaps
another time you'll allow me to have some sense--of course, if it is
immaterial to you whether a man is a brute--What are you ringing the
bell for?”
“I am going to ask Morland to come up here.”
The maid appeared, received Norma's message, and retired. Norma sat by
her little writing-table, with her head turned away from her mother, and
there was silence between them till the maid returned.
“Mr. King has just driven off to catch the train, miss. He left a note
for you.”
Mrs. Hardacre listened with contracted brow. When the maid retired, she
bent forward anxiously.
“What does he say?”
“You can read it, mother,” replied Norma, wearily. She held out the
note. Mrs. Hardacre came forward and took it from her hand and sat down
again.
It ran:
_“Dear Norma,--I think it best to run up to town on this afternoon's
business. I have only just time to catch the train at Cosford, so you
will forgive my not saying good-bye to you more ceremoniously. Take care
of poor Jimmie._
_“Yours affectionately,_
_“Morland.”_
“Poor Jimmie, indeed!” said Mrs. Hardacre, somewhat relieved at finding
the note contained no reference to the part played by Norma. “It's
very good of Morland, but I wish he would not mix himself up in this
scandal.”
“I can't see what less he could do than look after his friend's
interests,” said Norma.
“I wish the man had been shot or hanged before he came down here,” said
Mrs. Hardacre, vindictively. “That's the worst of associating with such
riff-raff. One never knows what they will do. It will teach you not
to pick people out of the gutter and set them in a drawing-room.” Mrs.
Hardacre rose. She did not often have the opportunity of triumphing over
her daughter. She crossed the room and paused for a moment by Norma,
who sat motionless with her chin in her hand, apparently too dismayed to
retort.
“I am glad to see symptoms of sanity,” she remarked.
Norma brought down her hand hard upon the table and leaped to her feet
and faced her mother.
“I tell you, it's impossible! Impossible! He is not that kind of man.
It is some horrible mistake. I will ask him myself. I will get the truth
from his own lips.”
“You shall certainly do nothing of the kind,” cried her mother; and in
order to have the last word she went out and slammed the door behind
her.
Norma sat by the window again. The red September sun was setting, and
bathed downs and trees in warm light, and glinted on the spire of a
little village church a mile away. Everything it touched was at peace,
save the bowed head of the girl, clasped with white fingers which still
retained the dull brown marks of blood. Could she believe the revolting
story? A woman so driven to desperation must have been cruelly handled.
Her sex rose up against the destroyer. Her social training had caused
her to regard with cynical indifference ordinary breaches of what
is popularly termed the moral law. In the fast, idle set which she
generally frequented it was as ordinary for a man to neigh after his
neighbour's wife as to try to win his friend's money; as unsurprising
for him to keep a mistress as a stud of race-horses; the crime was to
marry her. But it was not customary, even in smart society, to drive
women to murder their new-born babes and kill themselves. A callous
brutality suggested itself, and the contemplation of it touched
humanity, sex, essential things. Could she believe the story? She
shuddered.
The dressing-gong sounded through the house. Her maid entered, drew the
curtains, and lit the gas; then was dismissed. Norma would not go down
to dinner. A little food and drink in her own room would be all that she
could swallow.
Later, Connie Deering, who had changed her dress, tapped at the door
and was bidden to enter. A quantity of powder vainly strove to hide the
traces of recent tears on her pretty face. She was a swollen-featured,
piteous little butterfly.
“How is he?” asked Norma.
“Better, much better. They have taken out the bullet. There is no
danger, and he has recovered consciousness. I almost wish he hadn't. Oh,
Norma dear--”
She broke down and sat on the bed and sobbed. Norma came up and laid her
hand on her shoulder.
“Surely you don't believe this ghastly story?”
The fair head nodded above the handkerchief. A voice came from-below it.
“I must--it's horrible--Jimmie, of all men! I thought his life was so
sweet and clean--almost like a good woman's--I can't understand it. If
he is as bad as this, what must other men be like? I feel as if I shall
never be able to look a man in the face again.”
“But why should you take it for granted that he has done this?” asked
Norma, tonelessly.
Mrs. Deering raised her face and looked at her friend in blue-eyed
dismay.
“I did n't take it for granted. He told me so himself. Otherwise do you
think I should have believed it?”
“He told you so himself! When?”
“A short while ago. I went into his room. I could n't help it--I felt as
if I should have gone mad if I didn't know the truth. Parsons was there
with him. She said I could come in. He smiled at me in his old way, and
that smile is enough to make any woman fall in love with him. 'You've
been crying, Connie,' he said. 'That's very foolish of you.' So I began
to cry more. You would have cried if you had heard him. I asked him how
he was feeling. He said he had never felt so well in his life. Then
I blurted it out. I know I was a beast, but it was more than I could
stand. 'Tell me that this madman's story was all lies.' He looked at me
queerly, waited for a second or two, and then moved his head. 'It's
all true,' he said, 'all true.' 'But you must have some explanation!'
I cried. He shut his eyes as if he were tired and said I must take the
facts as they were. Then Parsons came up and said I mustn't excite him,
and sent me out of the room. But I did n't want to hear any more. I had
heard enough, had n't I?”
Norma, as she listened to the little lady's tale, felt her heart grow
cold and heavy. Doubt was no longer possible. The man himself had
spoken. He had not even pleaded extenuating circumstances; had merely
admitted the plain, brutal facts. He had gone under a feigned name,
seduced an honest girl, abandoned her, driven her to tragedy. It was all
too simple to need explanation.
“But what are we to do, dear?” cried Connie, as Norma made no remark,
but stood motionless and silent.
“I think we had better drop his acquaintance,” she replied with bitter
irony.
Connie flinched at the tone, being a tender-natured woman. She retorted
with some spirit:
“I don't believe you have any heart at all, Norma. And I thought you
cared for him.”
“You thought I cared for him?” Norma repeated slowly and cuttingly while
her eyes hardened. “What right had you to form such an opinion?”
“People can form any opinions they like, my dear,” said Connie. “That
was mine. And on the terrace this afternoon you know you cared. If ever
a woman gave herself away over a man, it was Norma Hardacre.”
“It was n't Norma Hardacre, I assure you. It was a despicable fool whom
I will ask you to forget. My mother was for putting it into a madhouse.
She was quite right. Anyhow it has ceased to exist and I am the real
Norma Hardacre again. Humanity is afflicted, it seems, periodically with
a peculiar disease. It turns men into beasts and women into idiots. I
have quite recovered, my dear Connie, and if you'll kindly go down
and ask them to keep dinner back for five minutes, I'll dress and come
down.”
She rang the bell for her maid. Connie rose from the bed. She longed to
make some appeal to the other's softer nature for her own sake, as she
had held Jimmie very dear and felt the need of sympathy in her trouble
and disillusion.
But knowing that from the rock of that cynical mood no water would gush
forth for any one's magic, she recognised the inefficacy of her own
guileless arts, and forbore to exercise them. She sighed for answer.
By chance her glance fell upon Norma's skirt. Human instinct, not
altogether feminine, seized upon the trivial.
“Why, whatever have you been doing to your dress?”
Norma looked down, and for the first time noticed the disfiguring smears
of blood.
“I must have spilt something,” she said, turning away quickly, and
beginning to unfasten the hooks and eyes of her neckband.
“I hope it will come out,” said Connie. “It's such a pretty frock.”
As soon as she was alone, Norma looked at the stains with unutterable
repulsion. She tore off the dress feverishly and threw it into a corner.
When her maid entered in response to her summons, she pointed to the
shapeless heap of crêpe and embroidery.
“Take that away and burn it,” she said.