All this happened on a Thursday, and on the following Wednesday Mrs.
Walbridge went out quietly, and sent a telegram to Oliver Wick's office,
asking him to come and see her that evening. She was to be alone--alone,
it seemed to her distracted mind, for the first time for weeks. For
every day and all day some one or other of her family had been with her,
trying to persuade her to do the thing her soul detested--to divorce her
husband.
Maud was very vehement. Her indignation with her father knew no bounds,
and Moreton Twiss agreed with his wife. He was a quick-witted man, with
a good gift of words, that he poured out unmercifully over the poor
little lady, until she felt literally beaten to death.
"It's perfectly disgusting of him," Maud interrupted once. "I should
think you would loathe the sight of him. I'm sure I do."
But Mrs. Walbridge did not loathe the sight of her husband. That is, she
did not loathe him appreciably more than she had done for years. They
might say what they liked. Billy Gaskell-Walker, too, to her amazement,
broke into the most hideous, strange language the moment the subject of
his father-in-law came up--called him all the names under the heavens.
But nothing made any difference. Paul might sneer and make his most
razorlike remarks about his father and the lady whom he wished to make
their stepmother; Grisel might cry and beg her mother for her sake to
put her father clean away.
"It's like a bad rat, or something," the girl said in her high
fastidiousness. "He makes the house unpleasant."
But rail, scorn, revile as they might, Mrs. Walbridge had her
standpoint, and stuck to it. She did not believe in divorce, and she
wasn't going to divorce her husband. What was more, after three days of
exasperated wrangling discussion, she surprised them all by bidding them
be quiet.
They were having tea, all of them, in the girls' room. The air was thick
with cigarette smoke, and the two sons-in-law and Paul were drinking
whisky and soda. Mrs. Walbridge, looking very small in the corner of the
big sofa, suddenly sat bolt upright and looked angrily round at them.
"Oh, hold your tongues, all of you," she cried in a voice of authority.
"You mustn't speak of him like that. I won't have it. He's my husband,
not yours. Poor fellow!"
They all stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses, which,
indeed, one or two of them privately believed she must have done.
"Oh, mother, how can you?" It was naturally Griselda, the baby, who
dared defy her. "You don't seem to realise what an utter beast he's
been, and how we all loathe him for treating you--yes, _you_--like
this."
"Poor fellow, indeed! Have a little pride, mother," suggested Paul, as
if he had said "have a little marmalade." But she didn't waver.
"Yes, poor fellow. I'm extremely sorry for him. You none of you seem to
realise what a pitiful thing it is for an old man, the father of a
family of grown-up children, to be making such a ridiculous spectacle of
himself."
Literally aghast, they stared, first at her, then at each other, and in
the silence she marched in triumph out of the room. Her misery was very
great, in spite of the queerness of her attitude, for she felt keenly
the pathos of her utter detachment of attitude, and her mind was thrown
back violently into the old days thirty years before, when she had loved
him, when she had believed in him, and defied and given up her whole
little world for his sake.
Poor Sir John Barclay still remembered her unhappiness and preoccupation
in the old days that summer at High Wycombe, but she had not told him
she had been suffering because she had been sent to the country by her
furious father to get her away from Ferdinand Walbridge. He did not know
how she had hoped against hope that Walbridge would, by some means, find
out where she was and get a letter to her, or manage to see her. She had
almost forgotten these things herself, until this business of Clara
Crichell had brought them back to her memory. It was a tragic,
heart-breaking thing, she felt, that an honest, romantic, deep love such
as hers had been for the beautiful young man her father had so detested,
could ever die so utterly as hers had.
It was dreadful to her, and seemed a shameful thing, that she could feel
no pang of jealousy or loneliness in the knowledge that her husband, her
companion for thirty years and the father of her five children, was
prepared to give up these children, his home life and her companionship
for another woman. Instead of what she believed would have been normal
emotions, she was conscious of a deep sorrow that he had been such a
fool as to fall in love with a woman of Mrs. Crichell's type, for she
knew with uncanny clearness exactly what Mrs. Crichell was. If only he
had fallen in love with someone who might possibly make him happy,
someone who was companionable and ambitious! But this woman, she knew,
was so like himself in her laziness, mental vacuity and self-centred
one-sidedness, that they were bound to destroy each other.
The whole family had assumed that her sole reason for refusing the
divorce was a semi-religious objection to that institution. It was true
that, although she was not a religious woman, her innate respect for the
forms of the church gave her the greatest possible horror of the divorce
court, but she knew, though none of the others seemed to suspect it,
that if Clara Crichell had been a different kind of woman, one with whom
she could, so to speak, trust her poor, faulty Ferdie, her objections
would have been bound to give way, in the course of time, to the
combined wishes of her family and friends. And she was afraid to utter
this instinctive fear of Mrs. Crichell because, although she knew little
of real life, she had an uncanny knowledge of the mental workings of the
men and women in books, who are, after all, more or less, like human
beings; and she felt that she could not bear to be misunderstood, as she
was certain to be if she uttered one word of personal objection to Mrs.
Crichell. They would all think she was jealous, and she would be unable
to persuade them that she was not.
Oliver found her pacing up and down her drawing-room in her afternoon
gown, which she had forgotten to fasten down the back, and which showed
a pathetic strip of merino petticoat.
"Something's wrong with your back here," he said. "Shall I hook it up? I
often fasten Jenny's new-fangled things, and they hook up to her neck.
Well, here I am, Mrs. Walbridge, _à la disposition di Usted_."
One of his useful little gifts was a way of keeping in mind, and
reproducing with impeccable inflection, little once-heard scraps of
foreign languages, and somehow it comforted the worried woman to hear
him talking so much in his usual manner; in spite of Grisel's
engagement, his world had not turned over.
"Have you--have you heard anything about us lately?" she began
nervously, as they sat down, and she nodded at his battered old
cigarette case, held interrogatively up to her.
"Yes," he answered abruptly, his manner changing. "I hear that Grisel
has a string of pearls, and is growing very fond of her aged suitor."
"He's not an aged suitor, and you mustn't call him one.
"Well, then, her gay young spark. It doesn't really matter, and she's
not really happy, and I know it, and so do you."
"Oh, Oliver, please don't make me unhappy about that. Things are bad
enough without Grisel's coming to grief."
He pricked his ears. "What do you mean--things are bad enough? What's
happened? I'm not going to worry you. I'm sorry----"
"It's about--it's about Mr. Walbridge. I don't quite know how to tell
you."
Oliver looked hastily round the room. "Oh, no, he's not here. He went
away yesterday morning."
"Gone away? Good heavens! Has he been losing money?"
"No; he has no money," she answered simply. "It's much worse than that.
It's--it's about a lady."
He gave a long whistle. "By golly! Is it, though? Then I'll bet it's
that over-ripe woman who sat next him at dinner--the painter's wife."
"Yes, it is. They have fallen in love with each other."
The young man threw his cigarette in the fire in his excitement.
"No! They can't have. Why, bless me, he's an old man--I beg your pardon.
But he isn't _young_, is he?"
"That doesn't matter. He's fallen in love with her and Mr. Crichell's
found out."
"My hat! The man with the nasty fingers."
"Yes. And they're all after me--not a soul stands up for me, Oliver. So
that's why I sent for you. I thought perhaps you would."
"Of course I will. You want someone to see you through divorcing him.
Well, I'm your boy. Have you got a solicitor? And--excuse me speaking so
plainly--have you got proofs?"
She laughed forlornly at his mistake. "Oh, my dear, you've got it all
wrong. It's the other way about. It's they that want me to divorce him
and I--I won't."
His face changed. He looked at her with surprise and commiseration in
his eyes.
"Oh, I see," he said quietly. "I didn't understand."
He felt that it would be indecorous for him to ask this old lady, as he
considered her, whether she really cared for the husband he had always
found so unpleasant, but he could in no way account for her refusing to
take the obvious course.
She saw his perplexity and went straight to the point. "You see," she
said, "I know what you are thinking, but I've known Mr. Walbridge for a
long time, and I know that he couldn't possibly be happy with a woman as
selfish and self-centred as Mrs. Crichell."
"Then you want him to be happy?" He spoke very gravely, his voice
sounding like that of a man very much older than himself.
She was grateful to him for not showing any surprise at her attitude.
"Oh, yes. I should like him to be happy. You're too young to understand,
Oliver. I hope you never will understand. But I'm not at all angry with
him, and I've always disliked Mrs. Crichell very much."
"So have I. Couldn't bear her, and neither could my mother. But why did
you send for me, Mrs. Walbridge? I'll do any mortal thing for you, but
the better I understand, the more useful I shall be."
"Oh, I just want you to stand up for me when they all attack me, and try
to make me divorce him."
"I see. I certainly think the choice ought to be yours. But," he added,
"I don't agree with you. I--I think you're making a mistake. By the way,
has the lady any money?"
"Oh, yes, she's quite well off."
There was a pause, at the end of which he said, "Well, I--it beats me.
Why do you suppose she wants him?" Then he added, feeling that he had
failed in tact, in thus speaking of the man who, after all, was his
companion's husband, and whom she wanted, in her queer way, to help.
"Well, it beats me."
"Mr. Walbridge has always been considered a very handsome man," she
said, in a voice of complete clarity and explanation. And then the door
opened and Griselda came suddenly in, wrapped in a big fur-collared
velvet cloak.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, on seeing Wick. "I didn't know anyone was here.
They all went on to the opera," she said, sitting down and letting her
cloak slip back, "and my head ached--I think I've a cold coming on--so I
got a taxi and came home. How are you, Oliver, and how is your mother? I
saw Jenny the other day, but I was in a taxi and she didn't see me."
"They're both well, thanks," he answered. "It's a long time since I saw
you, young lady."
"Yes, it is."
There was a pause, and Mrs. Walbridge glanced anxiously from one to the
other of the two painstakingly indifferent faces.
"No letters, mother?" the girl asked.
"Yes, there are two for you. One from Sir John."
"Good, I'll go and get them." She held out her hand to Oliver. "Then
I'll go on up to bed. I really do feel rather bad. Good-night."
He held her hand closely. "You're a nice young minx," he told her,
laughing. "I suppose you think I ought to congratulate you on your
engagement."
"It's a matter of complete indifference to me whether you do or not."
"Grisel, Grisel!" put in her mother.
Still he held her hand, his critical eyes looking her up and down.
"Good-night," she said again, trying to withdraw her hand.
"You're losing your looks," he declared. "You're too thin, and your eyes
are sunk into your head. It won't do, Grisel. You'll have to give in.
You used to be the prettiest thing alive, and unless you own up to your
old gentleman and confess to me that you can't live without me, you'll
soon have to join the sad army of the girls who aren't so pretty as they
feel."
She was furiously angry--so angry that she could not speak, and when he
suddenly let go her hand, she stumbled back and nearly fell. She left
the room without a word, and he sat down and hid his face for a moment
in his hands.
Mrs. Walbridge was indignant with him, but somehow she dared not speak,
and after a minute he rose.
"I'll go now," he said. "I'm done. Little brute!"
"I'm so sorry for you," she said, which was quite different from what
she had meant to say.
"I know you are, and I deserve it; I deserve everybody's pity. But damn
it all," he added, with sudden brightness, pushing back the strands of
straight dun-coloured hair that hung down over his damp forehead, "I'll
get her yet."
She went with him to the door, and they stood on the step in the bitter
cold of the still night.
"You'll stand by me then? You'll believe," she added earnestly, laying
her hand on his sleeve, "that I'm not just being a cat; that I really am
doing what I know will be best for him in the long run?"
"If you suddenly spat at me and scratched my eyes out and ran up the
wall there, and sat licking your fur, I shouldn't believe you were a
cat. But, mind you, Mrs. Walbridge, I think you are making a great
mistake. What on earth will you do with him about the house in this
frame of mind?"
"Oh, don't make it any harder for me. I know that I'm right."
They parted very kindly, and she went back into the house, knowing that
he would, as she expressed it, take sides with her. But something of the
virtue of her resolution seemed to have gone out of her, for, young as
he was, she respected his shrewdness and his instinct, and it depressed
her to know that he disapproved of her determination.
The next evening, Wick dined with the Gaskell-Walkers in Campden Hill.
He was the only guest, and Hermione told him at once that they had sent
for him in order to talk over this disgusting business of her father's.
When Gaskell-Walker had laid before him the combined reasons of the
whole tribe for wishing for the divorce, Wick sat down his glass and
looked at his host.
"I agree with every word you've said," he answered, without unnecessary
words. "It's a great mistake, but I know why she's doing it."
"That's more than any of _us_ knows," mourned Hermione. "I feel that I
never wish to look my father in the face again."
"Oh, that's going too far," the young man protested. "He's an awful old
scoundrel, of course, but still, there are plenty more like him."
Before they parted, Wick uttered a word of wisdom. "She won't give in to
you, or any of you, or to me," he said. "There's nothing so obstinate in
this world as a good woman fighting for a principle, and the fact that
the principle is perfectly idiotic has no bearing on the case. But your
mother's an old-fashioned woman, Mrs. Gaskell-Walker, and she's written
so many sentimental stories that her whole mind is coloured by them. If
you can get Mrs. Crichell to go to your mother and grovel and tear her
hair and cry, your mother would divorce your father." Then he went his
way.
"By Jove!" Gaskell-Walker said to his wife. "I believe he's right. Stout
fellow! I'll put your father up to this. I'll look him up at lunch at
Seeley's to-morrow."