THAT autumn pressed heavily upon Mrs. Hardacre. Norma's engagement,
without being broken off, was indefinitely suspended, and Norma, by
going abroad with Mrs. Deering immediately on her return from Cornwall,
had placed herself beyond reach of maternal influence. It is true
that Mrs. Hardacre wrote many letters; but as Norma's replies mainly
consisted of a line or two on a picture post-card, it is to be doubted
whether she ever read them. Mrs. Hardacre began to feel helpless.
Morland could give her little assistance. He shrugged his shoulders at
her appeals. He was perfectly determined to marry Norma, but trusted to
time to restore her common-sense and lead her into the path of reason.
Nothing that he could do would be of any avail. Mrs. Hardacre urged him
to join the ladies on the Continent and bring matters to a crisis. He
replied that an election was crisis enough for one man in a year, and
furthermore the autumn session necessitated his attendance in the House.
He was quite satisfied, he told her stolidly, with things as they
were, and in the meantime was actually finding an interest in his new
political life. But Mrs. Hardacre shared neither his satisfaction nor
his interest, a mother's point of view being so different from that of a
lover.
As if the loss of ducal favour and filial obedience were not enough for
the distraught lady, her husband one morning threw a business letter
upon the table, and with petulant curses on the heads of outside
brokers, incoherently explained that he was ruined. They were liars and
knaves and thieves, he sputtered. He would drag them all into the police
court, he would write to the “Times,” he would go and horsewhip the
blackguards. Damme if he would n't!
“I wish the blackguards could horsewhip you,” remarked his wife, grimly.
“Have you sufficient brains to realise what an unutterable fool you have
been?”
If he did not realise it by the end of the week, it was not Mrs.
Hardacre's fault. She reduced the unhappy man to craven submission
and surreptitious nipping of old brandy in order to keep up the feeble
spirit that remained in him, and took the direction of affairs into her
own hands. They were not ruined, but a considerable sum of money had
been lost through semi-idiotic speculation, and for a time strict
economy was necessary. By Christmas the establishment in the country
was broken up, a tenant luckily found for Heddon Court, and a small
furnished house taken in Devonshire Place. These arrangements gave Mrs.
Hardacre much occupation, but they did not tend to soften her character.
When Norma came home, sympathetically inclined and honestly desirous to
smooth down asperities--for she appreciated the aggravating folly of her
father--she found her advances coldly repulsed.
“What is the good of saying you are sorry for me,” Mrs. Hardacre asked
snappishly, “when you refuse to do the one thing that can mend matters?”
Then followed the old, old story which Norma had heard so often in days
past, but now barbed with a new moral and adorned with new realism.
Norma listened wearily, surprised at her own lack of retort. When the
familiar homily came to an end, her reply was almost meek:
“Give me a little longer time to think over it.”
“You had better cut it as short as possible,” said Mrs. Hardacre, “or
you may find yourself too late. As it is, you are going off. What have
you been doing to yourself? You look thirty.”
“I feel fifty,” said Norma.
“You had better go and have your face massaged, or you'll soon not be
fit to be seen.”
“I think I want a course of soul massage,” answered Norma, with a hard
little laugh.
But when she was alone in her own room, she looked anxiously at her face
in the glass. Her mother had confirmed certain dismal imaginings. She
had grown thinner, older looking; tiny lines were just perceptible at
the corners of eyes and lips and across the forehead. The fresh bloom of
youth was fading from her skin. She was certainly going off. She had not
been a happy woman since her precipitate flight to Cornwall. The present
discovery added anxiety to depression.
A day or two afterwards Mrs. Hardacre returned to the unedifying attack.
Had Norma written to Morland to inform him of her arrival? Norma replied
that she had no inordinate longing to see Morland. Mrs. Hardacre
used language that only hardened and soured women of fashion who are
beginning to feel the pinch of poverty dare use nowadays. It is far more
virulent than a fishwife's, for every phrase touches a jangling nerve
and every gibe tears a delicate fibre, whereas Billingsgate merely
shocks and belabours. Norma bore it in silence for some time, and then
went away quivering from head to foot. A new and what seemed a horrible
gift had been bestowed upon her--the power to feel. Once a sarcastic
smile, a scornful glance, a withering retort would have carried her in
triumph from her mother's presence. Secure in her own callous serenity,
she would have given scarcely a further thought to the quarrel. Now
things had inexplicably changed. Her mother's stabs hurt. Some curious
living growth within her was wrung with pain. She could only grope
humbled and broken to her room and stare at nothing, wishing she could
cry like other women.
No wonder she looked old, when the spirit had left her and taken with
it the cold, proud setting of the features that had given her beauty
its peculiar stamp. Dimly she realised the disintegration. When a nature
which has taken a colossal vanity for strength and has relied thereon
unquestioningly for protection against a perilous world, once loses
grip of that sublime mainstay, it is impossible for it to take firm hold
again. It must content itself with lesser planks or flounder helplessly,
fearful of imminent shipwreck. Norma, during those autumn months, had
found her strength vanity. The fact in rude, symbolic form was brought
home to her a short time after her return.
It was a bright Sunday afternoon, when, on her way to pay a call in
Kensington, she had dismissed her cab at Lancaster Gate and was walking
through Kensington Gardens. Half-way a familiar figure met her eye. It
was her own maid sitting on a bench with a man by her side. The girl was
wearing a cheap long jacket over an elaborate dress, absurdly light
for the time of year. It caught Norma's attention, and then suddenly it
flashed upon her that it was the dress she had given to be burned months
ago. She walked on, aching with a sense of the futility of grandiose
determinations. She had consigned the garment stained with Jimmie's
blood contemptuously to the flames. It was incongruously whole in
Kensington Gardens. She had cast her love for Jimmie out of her heart in
the same spirit of comedic tragedy. Forlorn and bedraggled it was still
there, mockingly refusing to be reduced to its proper dust and ashes.
Her strength had not availed her to cast it out. Her strength was a vain
thing. Yet being forlorn and bedraggled the love was as hateful as
the unconsumed garment. It haunted her like an unpurged offence.
The newspaper details had made it reek disgustfully. At times Connie
Deering's half faith filled her with an extravagant hope that these
sordid horrors which had sullied the one pure and beautiful thing that
had come into her life were nothing but a ghastly mistake; that it was,
as Connie suggested, a dark mystery from which if Jimmie chose he could
emerge clean. But then her judgment, trained from childhood to look
below the surface of even smiling things and find them foul, rebelled.
The man had proclaimed himself, written himself down a villain. It was
in black and white. And not only a villain--that might be excusable--but
a hypocritical canting villain, which was the unforgivable sin. Every
woman has a Holy Ghost of sorts within her.
Norma did not write to Morland. She dreaded renewal of relations, and
yet she had not the courage to cut him finally adrift. The thought of
withered spinsterhood beneath her father's roof was a dismaying vision.
Marriage was as essential as ever to the scheme of her future. Why not
with Morland? Her mother's words, though spoken as with the tongues of
asps, were those of wisdom.
All that she could bring to a husband was her beauty, her superb
presence, her air of royalty. These gone, her chances were as illusory
as those of the pinched and faded gentlewomen who tittle-tattled at
Cosford tea-parties. Another year, and at the present rate of decay
her beauty would have vanished into the limbo of last year's snows. She
exaggerated; but what young woman of six-and-twenty placed as she has
not looked tremulously in her mirror and seen feet of crows and
heaven knows what imaginary fowls that prey upon female charms? At
six-and-thirty she smiles with wistful, longing regret at the remembered
image. Yet youth, happily, is not cognisant of youth's absurdities.
It takes itself tragically. Thus did Norma. Her dowry of beauty was
dwindling. She must marry within the year. Sometimes she wished that
Theodore Weever, who had not yet discovered his decorative wife and had
managed to find himself at various places which she had visited abroad,
would come like a Paladin and deliver her from her distress and carry
her off to his castle in Fifth Avenue. He would at least interest her as
a human being, which Morland, with all his solid British qualities,
had never succeeded in doing. But Theodore Weever had not spoken. He
retained the imperturbability of the bald marble bust of himself that
he had taken her to see in a Parisian sculptor's studio. There only
remained Morland. But for some reason, for which she could not account,
he seemed the last man on earth she desired to marry. When she had
written to him, soon after her flight to Cornwall, to beg for a
postponement of the wedding, giving him the very vaguest reasons for her
request, he had assented with a cheerfulness ill befitting an impatient
lover. It would be impertinence, he wrote, for him to enquire further
into her reasons. She was too much a woman of the world to act without
due consideration, and provided that he could look forward to the
very great happiness of one day calling her his wife, he was perfectly
satisfied with whatever she chose to arrange. The absence of becoming
fervour, in spite of her desire to postpone the dreaded day, produced
a feeling of irritated disappointment. None of us, least of all women,
invariably like to be taken at our word. If Morland lay so little value
upon her as that, he might just as well give her up altogether. She
replied impulsively, suggesting a rupture of the engagement. Morland,
longing for time to raise him from the abasement in which he grovelled,
had welcomed the proposal to defer the marriage; but as he smarted at
the same time under a sense of wrong--had he not been betrayed by
his own familiar friend and the woman he loved?--he now unequivocally
refused to accept her suggestion. He had made up his mind to marry her.
He had made all his arrangements for marrying her. The check he
had experienced had stimulated a desire which only through unhappy
circumstances had languished for a brief season. He persuaded himself
that he was more in love with her than ever. At all costs, in his
stupid, dogged way, he determined to marry her. He told her so bluntly.
He merely awaited her good pleasure. Norma accepted the situation and
thought, by going abroad, to leave it at home to take care of itself. It
might die of inanition. Something miraculous might happen to transform
it entirely. She returned and found it alive and quite undeveloped.
It grinned at her with a leer which she loathed from the depths of her
soul; and the more Mrs. Hardacre pointed at it the more it leered, and
the greater became the loathing.
At last Mrs. Hardacre took matters into her own hands and summoned
Morland to London. “Norma is in a green, depressed state,” she wrote,
“and I think your proper place is by her side. I imagine she regrets her
foolishness in postponing the marriage and is ashamed to confess it. A
few words with you face to face would bring her back to her old self.
Women have these idiotic ways, my dear Morland, and men being so much
stronger and saner must make generous allowances. I confidently expect
you.”
Morland's vanity, spurred by this letter, brought him in a couple of
days to London.
“My dear Morland, this is a surprise,” cried Mrs. Hardacre
dissemblingly, as he entered the drawing-room, “we were only just
talking of you. I'll ring for another cup.”
She moved to the bell by the side of the fireplace, and Norma and
Morland shook hands with the conventional words of greeting.
“I hope you've had a good time abroad?”
“Oh, yes. The usual thing, the usual places, the usual people, the usual
food. In fact, a highly successful pursuit of the usual. I've invented a
verb--'to usualise.' I suppose you've been usualising too?”
The sudden sight of him had braced her, and instinctively she had
adopted her old, cool manner as defensive armour. Her reply pleased
him. There was something pungent in her speech, irreconcilable in her
attitude, which other women did not possess. He was not physiognomist or
even perceptive enough to notice the subtle change in her expression. He
noted, as he remarked to her later, that she was “a bit off colour,” but
he attributed it to the muggy weather, and never dreamed of regarding
her otherwise than as radically the same woman who had engaged herself
to many him in the summer. To him she was still the beautiful shrew
whose taming appealed to masculine instincts. The brown hair sweeping
up in a wave from the forehead, the finely chiselled sensitive features,
the clear brown eyes, the mocking lips, the superb poise of the head,
the stately figure perfectly set off in the dark blue tailor-made dress,
all combined to impress him with a realisation of the queenliness of the
presence that had grown somewhat shadowy of late to his unimaginative
mental vision.
“And how do you like Parliament?” she asked casually, when the teacup
had been brought and handed to him filled.
“I find it remarkably interesting,” he replied sententiously. “It is
dull at times, of course, but no man can sit on those green benches and
not feel he is helping to shape the destinies of a colossal Empire.”
“Is that what you really feel--or is it what you say when you are
responding for the House of Commons at a public dinner?” asked Norma.
Morland hesitated for a moment between huffiness and indulgence. In
spite of his former gibes at the stale unprofitableness of parliamentary
life, he had always had the stolid Briton's reverence for our
Institutions, and now that he was actually a legislator, his traditions
led him to take himself seriously.
“I have become a very keen politician, I assure you,” he answered. “If
you saw the amount of work that falls on me, you would be astonished. If
it were n't for Manisty--that's my secretary, you know--I don't see how
I could get through it.”
“I always wonder,” said Mrs. Hardacre, “how members manage to find time
for anything. They work like galley-slaves for nothing at all. I regard
them as simply sacrificing themselves for the public good.”
“A member of Parliament is the noblest work of God. Don't, mother.
Please leave us our illusions.”
“What are they?” asked Morland.
“One is that there are a few decently selfish people left in an age of
altruists,” said Norma.
She talked for the sake of talking, careless of the stupid poverty of
her epigram. Morland, as the healthy country gentleman alternating
with the commonplace man about town, was a passable type enough, though
failing to excite exuberant admiration. But Morland, with his narrow
range of sympathies and pathetic ignorance of the thought of the day,
posing solemnly as a trustee of the British Empire, aroused a scorn
which she dare not express in words.
“I don't know that we are all altruists,” replied Morland,
good-temperedly. “If we are good little members of Parliament, we may
be rewarded with baronetcies and things. But one has to play the game
thoroughly. It's worth it, is n't it, even from your point of view,
Norma?”
“You're just the class of man the government does best in rewarding,”
remarked Mrs. Hardacre, with her wintry smile that was meant to be
conciliatory. “A man of birth and position upholds the dignity of a
title and is a credit to his party.”
Morland laughingly observed that it was early in the day to be thinking
of parliamentary honours. He had not even made his maiden speech. As
Norma remained silent, the conversation languished. Presently Mrs.
Hardacre rose.
“I have no doubt you two want to have a talk together. Won't you stay
and dine with us, Morland?”
He glanced at Norma, but failing to read an endorsement of the
invitation in her face, made an excuse for declining.
“Then I will say good-bye and leave you. I would n't stand any nonsense
if I were you,” she added in a whisper through the door which he held
open for her.
He sauntered up to the fireplace and stood on the hearth-rug, his hands
in his pockets. Norma, looking at him from her easy-chair, wondered at
a certain ignobility that she detected for the first time beneath his
bluff, prosperous air. In spite of birth and breeding he looked common.
“Well?” he said. “We had better have it out at once. What is it to be? I
must have an answer sooner or later.”
“Can't it be later?”
“If you insist upon it. I'm not going to hold a pistol to your head,
my dear girl. Only you must admit that I've treated you with every
consideration. I have n't worried you. You took it into your head to put
off our marriage. I felt you had your reasons and I raised no objection.
But we can't go on like this forever, you know.”
“Why not?” asked Norma.
“Human nature. I am in love with you, and want to marry you.”
“But supposing I am not in love with you, Morland. I've never pretended
to be, have I?”
“We need n't go over old ground. I accepted all that at the beginning.
The present state of affairs is that we are engaged; when are we going
to be married?”
“Oh, I don't know,” said Norma, desperately. “I have n't thought of it
seriously. I know I have behaved like a beast to you--you must forgive
me. At times it has seemed as though I was not the right sort to marry
and bring children into the world. I should loathe it!”
“Oh, I don't think so,” said Morland, in a tone he meant to be soothing.
“Besides--”
“I know what you are going to say--or at any rate what you would like
to say. It's scarcely decent to talk of such things. But I have n't been
brought up in a nunnery. I wish to God I had been. At all events, I am
frank. I would loathe it--all that side of it. Could n't we suppress
that side? Oh, yes, I am going to speak of it--it has been on my mind
for months,” she burst out, as Morland made a quick step towards her.
He did not allow her to continue. With his hand on the arm of her chair,
he bent down over her.
“You are talking wild nonsense,” he said; and she flushed red and did
not meet his eyes. “When a man marries, he marries in the proper sense
of the term, unless he is an outrageous imbecile. There is to be no
question of that sort of thing. I thought you knew your world better.
I want you--you yourself. Don't you understand that?”
Norma put out her hand to push him away. He seized it in his. She
snatched it from him.
“Let me get up,” she said, waving him off. She brushed past him, as she
rose.
“We can't go on talking. What I've said has made it impossible. Let us
change the subject. How long are you going to stay in town?”
“I'm not going to change the subject,” said Morland, rather brutally.
“I'm far too much interested in it. Hang it all, Norma, you do owe me
something.”
“What do I owe you? What?” she asked with a sudden flash in her eyes.
“You are a woman of common-sense. I leave you to guess. You admit you
have n't treated me properly. You have nothing to complain of as far as
I am concerned. Now, have you?”
“How do I know? No. I suppose not, as things go. Once I did try to--to
feel more like other women--and to make some amends. I told you that
perhaps we were making a mistake in excluding sentiment. If you had
chosen, you could have--I don't know--made me care for you, perhaps.
But you didn't choose. You treated me as if I were a fool. Very likely I
was.”
“When was that?” asked Morland, with a touch of sarcasm. “I certainly
don't remember.”
“It was the last night we had any talk together--in the billiard-room.
The night before--before the garden-party.” He turned away with an
involuntary exclamation of anger. He remembered now, tragic events
having put the incident out of his mind. He was caught in a trap.
“I did n't think you meant it,” he said, hurrying to the base excuse.
“Women sometimes consider it their duty to say such things--to act a
little comedy, out of kindness. Some fellows expect it. I thought it
would be more decent to let you see that I did n't.”
There was a short silence. Norma stood in the centre of the room, biting
her lip, her head moving slightly from side to side; she was seeking
to formulate her thoughts in conventional terms. Her cheek grew a shade
paler.
“Listen,” she said at length. “I am anything bad you like to call me.
But I'm not a woman who cajoles men. And I'm not a liar. I'm far too
cynical to lie. Truth is much more deadly. I hate lying. That's the main
reason why I broke with a man I cared for more than for any other man I
have ever met--because he lied. You know whom I mean.”
He faced her with a conscious effort. Even at this moment of strain and
anger, Norma was struck again with the lurking air of ignobility on his
face; but she only remembered it afterwards. He brazened it out.
“Jimmie Padgate, I suppose.”
“I can't forgive him for lying.”
“I don't see how he lied. He faced the music, at any rate, like a man,”
said Morland, compelled by a remnant of common decency to defend Jimmie.
“All his pose beforehand was a lie--unless the disclosures afterwards
were lies--”
“What do you mean?” asked Morland, sharply.
“Oh, never mind. We have not met to discuss the matter. I don't know why
I referred to it.”
She paused for a moment. She had begun her tirade at a white heat.
Suddenly she had cooled down, and felt lassitude in mind and limbs. An
effort brought her to a lame conclusion.
“You accused me of acting a comedy. I was n't acting. I was perfectly
sincere. I have been absolutely frank with you from the hour you
proposed to me.”
“Well, I'm sorry for having misunderstood you. I beg your pardon,” said
Morland. They took up the conversation from the starting-point, but
listlessly, dispiritedly. The reference to Jimmie had awakened the
ever-living remorse in Morland's not entirely callous soul. The man did
suffer, at times acutely. And now to act the conscious comedy in the
face of Norma's expressed abhorrence was a difficult and tiring task.
Unwittingly he grew gentler; and Norma, her anger spent, weakly yielded
to the change of tone.
“We have settled nothing, after all our talk,” he said at last, looking
at his watch. “Don't you think we had better fix it up now? Society
expects us to get married. What will people say? Come--what about
Easter?”
Norma passed her hand wearily over her eyes.
“I oughtn't to marry you at all. I should loathe it, as I said. I should
never get to care for you in that way. You see I am honest. Let us break
off the engagement.”
“Well, look here,” said Morland, not unkindly, “let us compromise. I'll
come back in three days' time. You'll either say it's off altogether or
we'll be married at Easter. Will that do?”
“Very well,” said Norma.
When Mrs. Hardacre came for news of the interview, Norma told her of the
arrangement.
“Which is it going to be?” she asked.
Norma set her teeth. “I can't marry him,” she said.
But the proud spirit of Norma Hardacre was broken. The three days'
Inferno that Mrs. Hardacre created in the house drove the girl to
desperation. Her father came to her one day with the tears running
down his puffy cheeks. Unknown to her mother he had borrowed money from
Morland, which he had lost on the Stock Exchange. Norma looked in her
mirror, and found herself old, ugly, hag-ridden. Anything was preferable
to the torture and degradation of her home. The next time that Morland
called he stayed to dinner, and the wedding was definitely fixed for
Easter.