NORMA went down to dinner resolved to present a scornful front to
public opinion. She found the effort taxed her strength. During the
night her courage deserted her. The cold glitter of triumph in her
mother's eyes had been intolerable. Her father, generally regarded with
contemptuous indifference, had goaded her beyond endurance with his
futile upbraiding. Aline had arrived, white-faced and questioning,
and had established herself by Jimmie's bedside. Norma shrank from the
ordeal of the daily meeting with her and the explanation that would
inevitably come. She dreaded the return of Morland, uncertain of her own
intentions. As she tossed about on her pillow, she loathed the idea of
the marriage. Innermost sex had spoken for one passionate moment, and
its message still vibrated. She knew that time might dull the memory;
she knew that her will might one day triumph over such things as sex and
sentiment; but she must have a breathing space, a period of struggle, of
reflection, above all, of disassociation from present surroundings. If
she sold herself, it must be in the accustomed cold atmosphere of
brain and heart. Not now, when her head burned and flaming swords were
piercing her through and through. And last, and chief of all her dreads,
was the wounded man now sleeping beneath that roof. Father, mother,
Aline, Morland--these, torture though it were, she could still steel
her nerves to meet; but him, never. He had done what no other man in the
wide world had done. He had awakened the sleeping, sacredest inmost of
her, and he had dealt it a deadly wound. If she could have consumed him
and all the memories surrounding him with fire, as she had consumed the
garment stained with his blood, she would have done so in these hours of
misery. And fierce among the bewildering conflict of emotions that
raged through the long night was one that filled her with overwhelming
disgust--a horrible, almost grotesque jealousy of the dead girl.
In the morning, exhausted, she resolved on immediate flight. In the
little village of Penwyrn on the Cornish coast, her aunt Janet Hardacre
led a remote, Quakerish existence. The reply to a telegram before she
left her room assured Norma of a welcome. By eleven o'clock she had
left Heddon Court and was speeding westwards without a word to Jimmie or
Aline.
Morland returned in the afternoon, and after a whisky and soda to brace
his nerves, at once sought Jimmie, who roused himself with an effort to
greet his visitor.
“Getting on famously, I hear,” said Morland, with forced airiness. “So
glad. We'll have you on your feet in a day or two.”
“I hope to be able to travel back to London to-morrow.”
“To-morrow?”
“Yes,” said Jimmie, with a curious smile. “I fear I have outstayed my
welcome.”
“Not a bit of it,” said Morland, seating himself at the foot of the bed.
“We'll put all that right. But you will give one a little time, won't
you? You mustn't think you've been altogether left. I ran up to town
at once to see my solicitors--not my usual people, you know, but some
others, devilish smart fellows at this sort of thing. They'll see that
nothing gets into the beastly papers.”
“I don't see that it matters much,” said Jimmie.
“Why, of course it does. I'm not going to let you take the whole blame.
I could n't come forward yesterday, it was all so sudden. The scandal
would have rotted my election altogether. But you shall be cleared--at
any rate in the eyes of this household. I came down with the intention
of telling Norma, but she has bolted to Cornwall. Upset, I suppose.
However, as soon as she comes back--”
“Let things be as they are,” interrupted Jimmie, closing his eyes for a
moment wearily, for he had been suffering much bodily pain. “When I
said I was David Rendell, I meant it. I can go on acting the part. It's
pretty easy.”
“Impossible, my dear old chap,” said Morland, with an air of heartiness.
“You went into the affair with your eyes shut. You didn't know it was
such a horrible mess.”
“All the more reason for Norma to remain ignorant. It was for her sake
as well as yours.”
A peculiar tenderness in Jimmie's tone caused Morland, not usually
perceptive, to look at him sharply.
“You are very keen upon Norma,” he remarked.
Jimmie closed his eyes again, and smiled. He was very weak and tired.
The pain of his wound and a certain mental agitation had kept him awake
all night, and just before Morland entered he had been dropping off
to sleep for the first time. An unconquerable drowsiness induced
irresponsibility of speech.
“'The desire of the moth for the star,'” he murmured.
Morland slid from the bed to his feet, and with his hands in his pockets
gazed in astonishment at his friend.
An entirely novel state of affairs dawned upon him which required a
few moments to bring into focus. The ghastly tragedy for which he was
responsible, presenting itself luridly at every instant of the night and
day, had hidden from his reminiscent vision Norma's rush down the slope.
and her scared tending of the unconscious man. Jimmie's words
brought back the scene with unpleasant vividness and provided the
interpretation. When he saw this clearly, he was the most amazed man in
the three kingdoms. That Jimmie should have conceived and nourished
a silly, romantic passion for Norma, although he had never interested
himself sufficiently in Jimmie's private affairs to suspect it, was
humorously comprehensible. Ludicrously incomprehensible, however, was
a reciprocation of the sentiment on the part of Norma. In spite of
remorse, in spite of anxiety, in spite of the struggle between cowardice
and manhood, his uppermost sensation at that moment was one of lacerated
vanity. He had been hoodwinked, befooled, deceived. His own familiar
friend had betrayed him; the woman he was about to honour with his name
had set him at naught. He tingled with anger and sense of wrong.
The sick man opened his eyes drowsily, and seeing Morland's gaze full
upon him, started into wakefulness. He motioned him to come nearer.
“If you marry Norma--” he began.
“If I marry her!” cried Morland. “Of course I'm going to marry her. I'll
see any other man damned before he marries her! She's the only woman
in the world I've ever set my mind on, and no matter what happens, I'm
going to marry her. There are no damned if's about it.”
“Yes, there are,” Jimmie retorted weakly. “I was going to preach, but
I'm too tired. You'll have to be especially good to her--to make up.”
“For what?”
“For the wrong done to the other.”
Morland was silent. He went up to the window and stared out across the
lawns and tugged at his moustache. The reproach stung him, and he felt
that Jimmie was ungenerous. After all, he had only done what thousands
of other men had done with impunity. The consequences had been enough to
drive him mad, but they had been the hideous accident of a temperament
for which he had not been responsible.
“You surely don't believe all that mad fool said yesterday?” he muttered
without turning round.
“The promise of marriage?”
“It's a crazy invention. There never was any question of marriage. I
told you so months ago. I did everything in my power.”
“I'm glad,” said Jimmie.
Morland made no reply, but continued to stare out of the window and
meditate upon the many injuries that fate had done him. He arraigned
himself before the bar of his wounded vanity. He had broken the moral
law and deserved a certain penalty. The magnanimous verdict received
the applause of an admiring self. He was willing to undergo an adequate
punishment--the imposition of a fine and the hard labour of setting
devious things straight. But the alternative sentence to which he saw
himself condemned--on the one hand, the ruin of his political career,
his social position, and his marriage with Norma, to all of which he
clung with a newly found passion, and on the other, ignoble shelter
behind an innocent man who had done him a great wrong--he rebelled
against with all his average, sensual Briton's sense of justice. It was
grossly unfair. If there had been a spiritual “Times,” he would have
written to it.
The opening of the door caused him to turn round with a start. It was
Aline, anxious and pale from an all-night sitting by Jimmie's bedside,
but holding her slim body erect, and wearing the uncompromising air of
a mother who has found her child evilly entreated at the hands of
strangers. She glanced at the bed and at Morland; then she put her
finger to her lip, and pointed at Jimmie, who lay fast asleep. Morland
nodded and went on tiptoe out of the room. Aline looked round, and being
a sensitive young person, shivered. She threw open the window wide, as
if to rid the place of his influence. Jimmie stirred slightly. She bent
down and kissed his hair.
During the dark and troubled time that followed, Morland fell away from
Jimmie like the bosom friend of a mediaeval artist stricken with the
Black Death. At first, common decency impelled him to send the tainted
one affectionate messages, invitations to trust him awhile longer, and
enlarged, with the crudity of his mental habit, on the noble aspects of
Jimmie's sacrifice. But after Jimmie left the Hardacres' house, which
happened as soon as he could bear the journey, Morland shrank from
meeting him face to face; and when public exposure came, the messages
and the invitations and the protestations ceased, and Jimmie was left
in loneliness upon a pinnacle of infamy. Morland, in the futile hope
of the weak-willed man that he could, by some astonishing chance, sail a
middle course, did indeed give himself peculiar pains to keep the story
out of the newspapers, and his ill-success was due to other causes than
his own lack of effort. It was a tale too picturesque to be wasted
in these days of sensation-hunger. The fact of the dénouement of
the tragedy having taken place in the presence of royalty lent it a
theatrical glamour. A sardonic press filled an Athenian public with what
it lusted after. Indeed, who shall say with authority that the actual
dramas re-enacted before our courts and reported in our newspapers
have not their value in splashing with sudden colour the drab lives of
thousands? May it not be better for the dulled soul to be occasionally
arrested by the contemplation of furious passions than to feed
contentedly like a pig beside the slaughtered body of its fellow?
Be that as it may. The press paid no heed to Morland or the smart
fellows of solicitors whom he employed. It published as many details as
it could discover or invent. For the tragical business did not end with
the scene on the Hardacres' lawn. There was an inquest on the dead girl.
There was the trial of Daniel Stone for attempted murder. The full glare
of publicity shed itself upon the sordid history. In the one case the
jury gave a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity; in the other
the prisoner was found to be insane and was sent to an asylum. These
were matters of no great public interest. But letters to the dead girl
in a disguised handwriting were discovered, and Stone gave his crazy
evidence, and a story of heartless seduction under solemn promise of
marriage and of abandonment with cynical offer of money was established,
and the fashionable portrait-painter, who was supposed to be the hero
of the tale, awoke one morning and found himself infamous. The thing,
instead of remaining a mere police-court commonplace, became a society
scandal. Exaggeration was inevitable, not only of facts but of the
reprobation a virtuous community pronounces on the specially pilloried
wrongdoer. The scapegoat in its essential significance is by no means a
thing of legendary history. It exists still, and owes its existence to
an ineradicable instinct in human nature. The reprobation aforesaid is
due not entirely to hypocrisy, as the social satirist would have it,
but in a great measure to an unreasoning impulse towards expiation of
offences by horrified condemnation of some notorious other. Thus it
came to pass that upon Jimmie's head were put all the iniquities of the
people and all their transgressions in all their sins, and he was led
away into the social wilderness. After that, the world forgot him. He
had been obscure enough before he burst for a day into the blaze of
royal patronage; but now blackest darkness swallowed him up. Only Aline
remained by his side.
Morland wrote to Jimmie once after the exposure. As he had been the
cause, said he, of the probable ruin of Jimmie's professional prospects,
it was only right that he should endeavour to make some compensation. It
was, besides, a privilege of their life-long friendship. He enclosed a
cheque for two thousand pounds. Jimmie returned it.
“My dear Morland,” he wrote in answer, “loyalty can only be repaid by
loyalty, love by love. If I accepted money, it would dishonour both
yourself and me. It is true that I took upon me a greater burden than I
was aware of. The world, if it knew the facts, would, as you say, call
me a quixotic fool. But if I took your money it would have the right to
call me a mercenary knave. I have always suffered fools gladly,
myself the greatest. I can go on doing so. Meanwhile you can make full
compensation in the only way possible. Devote your life and energies
to the happiness of the woman you are about to marry.” This was a stern
letter for Jimmie to write. After he had posted it he reproached himself
for not having put in a kind word.