The Marriages

“Oh I daresay she’s all right,” he said as if he wanted to get on with his work.  He looked at the clock on the mantel-shelf; he would have to put in another hour.

“All right to come and take darling mamma’s place—to sit where she used to sit, to lay her horrible hands on her things?”  Adela was appalled—all the more that she hadn’t expected it—at her brother’s apparent acceptance of such a prospect.

He coloured; there was something in her passionate piety that scorched him.  She glared at him with tragic eyes—he might have profaned an altar.  “Oh I mean that nothing will come of it.”

“Not if we do our duty,” said Adela.  And then as he looked as if he hadn’t an idea of what that could be: “You must speak to him—tell him how we feel; that we shall never forgive him, that we can’t endure it.”

“He’ll think I’m cheeky,” her brother returned, looking down at his papers with his back to her and his hands in his pockets.

“Cheeky to plead for her memory?”

“He’ll say it’s none of my business.”

“Then you believe he’ll do it?” cried the girl.

“Not a bit.  Go to bed!”

“I’ll speak to him”—she had turned as pale as a young priestess.

“Don’t cry out till you’re hurt; wait till he speaks to you.”

“He won’t, he won’t!” she declared.  “He’ll do it without telling us.”

Her brother had faced round to her again; he started a little at this, and again, at one of the candles, lighted his cigarette, which had gone out.  She looked at him a moment; then he said something that surprised her.  “Is Mrs. Churchley very rich?”

“I haven’t the least idea.  What on earth has that to do with it?”

Godfrey puffed his cigarette.  “Does she live as if she were?”

“She has a lot of hideous showy things.”

“Well, we must keep our eyes open,” he concluded.  “And now you must let me get on.”  He kissed his visitor as if to make up for dismissing her, or for his failure to take fire; and she held him a moment, burying her head on his shoulder.

A wave of emotion surged through her, and again she quavered out: “Ah why did she leave us?  Why did she leave us?”

“Yes, why indeed?” the young man sighed, disengaging himself with a movement of oppression.

II

Adela was so far right as that by the end of the week, though she remained certain, her father had still not made the announcement she dreaded.  What convinced her was the sense of her changed relations with him—of there being between them something unexpressed, something she was aware of as she would have been of an open wound.  When she spoke of this to Godfrey he said the change was of her own making—also that she was cruelly unjust to the governor.  She suffered even more from her brother’s unexpected perversity; she had had so different a theory about him that her disappointment was almost an humiliation and she needed all her fortitude to pitch her faith lower.  She wondered what had happened to him and why he so failed her.  She would have trusted him to feel right about anything, above all about such a question.  Their worship of their mother’s memory, their recognition of her sacred place in their past, her exquisite influence in their father’s life, his fortune, his career, in the whole history of the family and welfare of the house—accomplished clever gentle good beautiful and capable as she had been, a woman whose quiet distinction was universally admired, so that on her death one of the Princesses, the most august of her friends, had written Adela such a note about her as princesses were understood very seldom to write: their hushed tenderness over all this was like a religion, and was also an attributive honour, to fall away from which was a form of treachery.  This wasn’t the way people usually felt in London, she knew; but strenuous ardent observant girl as she was, with secrecies of sentiment and dim originalities of attitude, she had already made up her mind that London was no treasure-house of delicacies.  Remembrance there was hammered thin—to be faithful was to make society gape.  The patient dead were sacrificed; they had no shrines, for people were literally ashamed of mourning.  When they had hustled all sensibility out of their lives they invented the fiction that they felt too much to utter.  Adela said nothing to her sisters; this reticence was part of the virtue it was her idea to practise for them.  She was to be their mother, a direct deputy and representative.  Before the vision of that other woman parading in such a character she felt capable of ingenuities, of deep diplomacies.  The essence of these indeed was just tremulously to watch her father.  Five days after they had dined together at Mrs. Churchley’s he asked her if she had been to see that lady.

“No indeed, why should I?” Adela knew that he knew she hadn’t been, since Mrs. Churchley would have told him.

“Don’t you call on people after you dine with them?” said Colonel Chart.

“Yes, in the course of time.  I don’t rush off within the week.”

Her father looked at her, and his eyes were colder than she had ever seen them, which was probably, she reflected, just the way hers appeared to himself.  “Then you’ll please rush off to-morrow.  She’s to dine with us on the 12th, and I shall expect your sisters to come down.”

Adela stared.  “To a dinner-party?”

“It’s not to be a dinner-party.  I want them to know Mrs. Churchley.”

“Is there to be nobody else?”

“Godfrey of course.  A family party,” he said with an assurance before which she turned cold.

The girl asked her brother that evening if that wasn’t tantamount to an announcement.  He looked at her queerly and then said: “I’ve been to see her.”

“What on earth did you do that for?”

“Father told me he wished it.”

“Then he has told you?”

“Told me what?” Godfrey asked while her heart sank with the sense of his making difficulties for her.

“That they’re engaged, of course.  What else can all this mean?”

“He didn’t tell me that, but I like her.”

“Like her!” the girl shrieked.

“She’s very kind, very good.”

“To thrust herself upon us when we hate her?  Is that what you call kind?  Is that what you call decent?”

“Oh I don’t hate her”—and he turned away as if she bored him.

She called the next day on Mrs. Churchley, designing to break out somehow, to plead, to appeal—“Oh spare us! have mercy on us! let him alone! go away!”  But that wasn’t easy when they were face to face.  Mrs. Churchley had every intention of getting, as she would have said—she was perpetually using the expression—into touch; but her good intentions were as depressing as a tailor’s misfits.  She could never understand that they had no place for her vulgar charity, that their life was filled with a fragrance of perfection for which she had no sense fine enough.  She was as undomestic as a shop-front and as out of tune as a parrot.  She would either make them live in the streets or bring the streets into their life—it was the same thing.  She had evidently never read a book, and she used intonations that Adela had never heard, as if she had been an Australian or an American.  She understood everything in a vulgar sense; speaking of Godfrey’s visit to her and praising him according to her idea, saying horrid things about him—that he was awfully good-looking, a perfect gentleman, the kind she liked.  How could her father, who was after all in everything else such a dear, listen to a woman, or endure her, who thought she pleased him when she called the son of his dead wife a perfect gentleman?  What would he have been, pray?  Much she knew about what any of them were! When she told Adela she wanted her to like her the girl thought for an instant her opportunity had come—the chance to plead with her and beg her off.  But she presented such an impenetrable surface that it would have been like giving a message to a varnished door.  She wasn’t a woman, said Adela; she was an address.

When she dined in Seymour Street the “children,” as the girl called the others, including Godfrey, liked her.  Beatrice and Muriel stared shyly and silently at the wonders of her apparel (she was brutally over-dressed) without of course guessing the danger that tainted the air.  They supposed her in their innocence to be amusing, and they didn’t know, any more than she did herself, how she patronised them.  When she was upstairs with them after dinner Adela could see her look round the room at the things she meant to alter—their mother’s things, not a bit like her own and not good enough for her.  After a quarter of an hour of this our young lady felt sure she was deciding that Seymour Street wouldn’t do at all, the dear old home that had done for their mother those twenty years.  Was she plotting to transport them all to her horrible Prince’s Gate?  Of one thing at any rate Adela was certain: her father, at that moment alone in the dining-room with Godfrey, pretending to drink another glass of wine to make time, was coming to the point, was telling the news.  When they reappeared they both, to her eyes, looked unnatural: the news had been told.

She had it from Godfrey before Mrs. Churchley left the house, when, after a brief interval, he followed her out of the drawing-room on her taking her sisters to bed.  She was waiting for him at the door of her room.  Her father was then alone with his fiancée—the word was grotesque to Adela; it was already as if the place were her home.

“What did you say to him?” our young woman asked when her brother had told her.

“I said nothing.”  Then he added, colouring—the expression of her face was such—“There was nothing to say.”

“Is that how it strikes you?”—and she stared at the lamp.

“He asked me to speak to her,” Godfrey went on.

“In what hideous sense?”

“To tell her I was glad.”

“And did you?” Adela panted.

“I don’t know.  I said something.  She kissed me.”

“Oh how could you?” shuddered the girl, who covered her face with her hands.

“He says she’s very rich,” her brother returned.

“Is that why you kissed her?”

“I didn’t kiss her.  Good-night.”  And the young man, turning his back, went out.

When he had gone Adela locked herself in as with the fear she should be overtaken or invaded, and during a sleepless feverish memorable night she took counsel of her uncompromising spirit.  She saw things as they were, in all the indignity of life.  The levity, the mockery, the infidelity, the ugliness, lay as plain as a map before her; it was a world of gross practical jokes, a world pour rire; but she cried about it all the same.  The morning dawned early, or rather it seemed to her there had been no night, nothing but a sickly creeping day.  But by the time she heard the house stirring again she had determined what to do.  When she came down to the breakfast-room her father was already in his place with newspapers and letters; and she expected the first words he would utter to be a rebuke to her for having disappeared the night before without taking leave of Mrs. Churchley.  Then she saw he wished to be intensely kind, to make every allowance, to conciliate and console her.  He knew she had heard from Godfrey, and he got up and kissed her.  He told her as quickly as possible, to have it over, stammering a little, with an “I’ve a piece of news for you that will probably shock you,” yet looking even exaggeratedly grave and rather pompous, to inspire the respect he didn’t deserve.  When he kissed her she melted, she burst into tears.  He held her against him, kissing her again and again, saying tenderly “Yes, yes, I know, I know.”  But he didn’t know else he couldn’t have done it.  Beatrice and Muriel came in, frightened when they saw her crying, and still more scared when she turned to them with words and an air that were terrible in their comfortable little lives: “Papa’s going to be married; he’s going to marry Mrs. Churchley!”  After staring a moment and seeing their father look as strange, on his side, as Adela, though in a different way, the children also began to cry, so that when the servants arrived with tea and boiled eggs these functionaries were greatly embarrassed with their burden, not knowing whether to come in or hang back.  They all scraped together a decorum, and as soon as the things had been put on table the Colonel banished the men with a glance.  Then he made a little affectionate speech to Beatrice and Muriel, in which he described Mrs. Churchley as the kindest, the most delightful of women, only wanting to make them happy, only wanting to make him happy, and convinced that he would be if they were and that they would be if he was.

“What do such words mean?” Adela asked herself.  She declared privately that they meant nothing, but she was silent, and every one was silent, on account of the advent of Miss Flynn the governess, before whom Colonel Chart preferred not to discuss the situation.  Adela recognised on the spot that if things were to go as he wished his children would practically never again be alone with him.  He would spend all his time with Mrs. Churchley till they were married, and then Mrs. Churchley would spend all her time with him.  Adela was ashamed of him, and that was horrible—all the more that every one else would be, all his other friends, every one who had known her mother.  But the public dishonour to that high memory shouldn’t be enacted; he shouldn’t do as he wished.