THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in
my life. They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever
gathered at any one moment--about myself. I don't think that
before that day I had ever wanted anything very much except
Florence. I have, of course, had appetites, impatiences . . . Why,
sometimes at a table d'hôte, when there would be, say, caviare
handed round, I have been absolutely full of impatience for fear
that when the dish came to me there should not be a satisfying
portion left over by the other guests. I have been exceedingly
impatient at missing trains. The Belgian State Railway has a trick
of letting the French trains miss their connections at Brussels.
That has always infuriated me. I have written about it letters to
The Times that The Times never printed; those that I wrote to the
Paris edition of the New York Herald were always printed, but
they never seemed to satisfy me when I saw them. Well, that was
a sort of frenzy with me.
It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize. I can understand it
intellectually. You see, in those days I was interested in people
with "hearts." There was Florence, there was Edward
Ashburnham--or, perhaps, it was Leonora that I was more
interested in. I don't mean in the way of love. But, you see, we
were both of the. same profession--at any rate as I saw it. And the
profession was that of keeping heart patients alive.
You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become.
Just as the blacksmith says: "By hammer and hand all Art doth
stand," just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves
around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general
believes that he alone is the preserver of society--and surely,
surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going--so did I
and, as I believed, Leonora, imagine that the whole world ought to
be arranged so as to ensure the keeping alive of heart patients.
You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may
become--how imbecile, in view of that engrossment, appear the
ways of princes, of republics, of municipalities. A rough bit of
road beneath the motor tyres, a couple of succeeding
"thank'ee-marms" with their quick jolts would be enough to set me
grumbling to Leonora against the Prince or the Grand Duke or the
Free City through whose territory we might be passing. I would
grumble like a stockbroker whose conversations over the
telephone are incommoded by the ringing of bells from a city
church. I would talk about medieval survivals, about the taxes
being surely high enough. The point, by the way, about the
missing of the connections of the Calais boat trains at Brussels was
that the shortest possible sea journey is frequently of great
importance to sufferers from the heart. Now, on the Continent,
there are two special heart cure places, Nauheim and Spa, and to
reach both of these baths from England if in order to ensure a
short sea passage, you come by Calais--you have to make the
connection at Brussels. And the Belgian train never waits by so
much the shade of a second for the one coming from Calais or
from Paris. And even if the French train, are just on time, you
have to run--imagine a heart patient running! --along the
unfamiliar ways of the Brussels station and to scramble up the
high steps of the moving train. Or, if you miss connection, you
have to wait five or six hours. . . . I used to keep awake whole
nights cursing that abuse. My wife used to run--she never, in
whatever else she may have misled me, tried to give me the
impression that she was not a gallant soul. But, once in the
German Express, she would lean back, with one hand to her side
and her eyes closed. Well, she was a good actress. And I would be
in hell. In hell, I tell you. For in Florence I had at once a wife and
an unattained mistress--that is what it comes to--and in the
retaining of her in this world I had my occupation, my career, my
ambition. It is not often that these things are united in one body.
Leonora was a good actress too. By Jove she was good! I tell you,
she would listen to me by the hour, evolving my plans for a
shock-proof world. It is true that, at times, I used to notice about
her an air of inattention as if she were listening, a mother, to the
child at her knee, or as if, precisely, I were myself the patient.
You understand that there was nothing the matter with Edward
Ashburnham's heart--that he had thrown up his commission and
had left India and come half the world over in order to follow a
woman who had really had a "heart" to Nauheim. That was the
sort of sentimental ass he was. For, you understand, too, that they
really needed to live in India, to economize, to let the house at
Branshaw Teleragh.
Of course, at that date, I had never heard of the Kilsyte case.
Ashburnham had, you know, kissed a servant girl in a railway
train, and it was only the grace of God, the prompt functioning of
the communication cord and the ready sympathy of what I believe
you call the Hampshire Bench, that kept the poor devil out of
Winchester Gaol for years and years. I never heard of that case
until the final stages of Leonora's revelations. . . .
But just think of that poor wretch. . . . I, who have surely the right,
beg you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a
luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable
destiny? For there is no other way to think of it. None. I have the
right to say it, since for years he was my wife's lover, since he
killed her, since he broke up all the pleasantnesses that there were
in my life. There is no priest that has the right to tell me that I
must not ask pity for him, from you, silent listener beyond the
hearth-stone, from the world, or from the God who created in him
those desires, those madnesses. . . .
Of course, I should not hear of the Kilsyte case. I knew none of
their friends; they were for me just good people--fortunate people
with broad and sunny acres in a southern county. Just good
people! By heavens, I sometimes think that it would have been
better for him, poor dear, if the case had been such a one that I
must needs have heard of it--such a one as maids and couriers and
other Kur guests whisper about for years after, until gradually it
dies away in the pity that there is knocking about here and there in
the world. Supposing he had spent his seven years in Winchester
Gaol or whatever it is that inscrutable and blind justice allots to
you for following your natural but ill-timed inclinations--there
would have arrived a stage when nodding gossips on the Kursaal
terrace would have said, "Poor fellow," thinking of his ruined
career. He would have been the fine soldier with his back now
bent. . . . Better for him, poor devil, if his back had been
prematurely bent.
Why, it would have been a thousand times better. . . . For, of
course, the Kilsyte case, which came at the very beginning of his
finding Leonora cold and unsympathetic, gave him a nasty jar. He
left servants alone after that.
It turned him, naturally, all the more loose amongst women of his
own class. Why, Leonora told me that Mrs Maidan--the woman he
followed from Burma to Nauheim--assured her he awakened her
attention by swearing that when he kissed the servant in the train
he was driven to it. I daresay he was driven to it, by the mad
passion to find an ultimately satisfying woman. I daresay he was
sincere enough. Heaven help me, I daresay he was sincere enough
in his love for Mrs Maidan. She was a nice little thing, a dear little
dark woman with long lashes, of whom Florence grew quite fond.
She had a lisp and a happy smile. We saw plenty of her for the
first month of our acquaintance, then she died, quite quietly--of
heart trouble.
But you know, poor little Mrs Maidan--she was so gentle, so
young. She cannot have been more than twenty-three and she had
a boy husband out in Chitral not more than twenty-four, I believe.
Such young things ought to have been left alone. Of course
Ashburnham could not leave her alone. I do not believe that he
could. Why, even I, at this distance of time am aware that I am a
little in love with her memory. I can't help smiling when I think
suddenly of her--as you might at the thought of something wrapped
carefully away in lavender, in some drawer, in some old house that
you have long left. She was so--so submissive. Why, even to me
she had the air of being submissive--to me that not the youngest
child will ever pay heed to. Yes, this is the saddest story . . .
No, I cannot help wishing that Florence had left her alone--with
her playing with adultery. I suppose it was; though she was such a
child that one has the impression that she would hardly have
known how to spell such a word. No, it was just
submissiveness--to the importunities, to the tempestuous forces
that pushed that miserable fellow on to ruin. And I do not suppose
that Florence really made much difference. If it had not been for
her that Ashburnham left his allegiance for Mrs Maidan, then it
would have been some other woman. But still, I do not know.
Perhaps the poor young thing would have died--she was bound to
die, anyhow, quite soon--but she would have died without having
to soak her noonday pillow with tears whilst Florence, below the
window, talked to Captain Ashburnham about the Constitution of
the United States. . . . Yes, it would have left a better taste in the
mouth if Florence had let her die in peace. . . .
Leonora behaved better in a sense. She just boxed Mrs Maidan's
ears--yes, she hit her, in an uncontrollable access of rage, a hard
blow on the side of the cheek, in the corridor of the hotel, outside
Edward's rooms. It was that, you know, that accounted for the
sudden, odd intimacy that sprang up between Florence and Mrs
Ashburnham. Because it was, of course, an odd intimacy. If you
look at it from the outside nothing could have been more unlikely
than that Leonora, who is the proudest creature on God's earth,
would have struck up an acquaintanceship with two casual
Yankees whom she could not really have regarded as being much
more than a carpet beneath her feet. You may ask what she had to
be proud of. Well, she was a Powys married to an Ashburnham--I
suppose that gave her the right to despise casual Americans as
long as she did it unostentatiously. I don't know what anyone has
to be proud of. She might have taken pride in her patience, in her
keeping her husband out of the bankruptcy court. Perhaps she did.
At any rate that was how Florence got to know her. She came
round a screen at the corner of the hotel corridor and found
Leonora with the gold key that hung from her wrist caught in Mrs
Maidan's hair just before dinner. There was not a single word
spoken. Little Mrs Maidan was very pale, with a red mark down
her left cheek, and the key would not come out of her black hair.
It was Florence who had to disentangle it, for Leonora was in such
a state that she could not have brought herself to touch Mrs
Maidan without growing sick.
And there was not a word spoken. You see, under those four
eyes--her own and Mrs Maidan's--Leonora could just let herself go
as far as to box Mrs Maidan's ears. But the moment a stranger
came along she pulled herself wonderfully up. She was at first
silent and then, the moment the key was disengaged by Florence
she was in a state to say: "So awkward of me . . . I was just trying
to put the comb straight in Mrs Maidan's hair. . . ."
Mrs Maidan, however, was not a Powys married to an
Ashburnham; she was a poor little O'Flaherty whose husband was
a boy of country parsonage origin. So there was no mistaking the
sob she let go as she went desolately away along the corridor. But
Leonora was still going to play up. She opened the door of
Ashburnham's room quite ostentatiously, so that Florence should
hear her address Edward in terms of intimacy and liking.
"Edward," she called. But there was no Edward there.
You understand that there was no Edward there. It was then, for
the only time of her career, that Leonora really compromised
herself--She exclaimed . . . "How frightful! . . . Poor little Maisie!
. . ."
She caught herself up at that, but of course it was too late. It was a
queer sort of affair. . . .
I want to do Leonora every justice. I love her very dearly for one
thing and in this matter, which was certainly the ruin of my small
household cockle-shell, she certainly tripped up. I do not
believe--and Leonora herself does not believe--that poor little
Maisie Maidan was ever Edward's mistress. Her heart was really
so bad that she would have succumbed to anything like an
impassioned embrace. That is the plain English of it, and I
suppose plain English is best. She was really what the other two,
for reasons of their own, just pretended to be. Queer, isn't it? Like
one of those sinister jokes that Providence plays upon one. Add to
this that I do not suppose that Leonora would much have minded,
at any other moment, if Mrs Maidan had been her husband's
mistress. It might have been a relief from Edward's sentimental
gurglings over the lady and from the lady's submissive acceptance
of those sounds. No, she would not have minded.
But, in boxing Mrs Maidan's ears, Leonora was just striking the
face of an intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a
frightfully painful scene with Edward.
As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them when
she chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward's
affairs were in such a frightful state and he lied so about them that
she claimed the privilege of having his secrets at her disposal.
There was not, indeed, any other way, for the poor fool was too
ashamed of his lapses ever to make a clean breast of anything. She
had to drag these things out of him.
It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that afternoon,
Edward being on his bed for the hour and a half prescribed by the
Kur authorities, she had opened a letter that she took to come
from a Colonel Hervey. They were going to stay with him in
Linlithgowshire for the month of September and she did not know
whether the date fixed would be the eleventh or the eighteenth.
The address on this letter was, in handwriting, as like Colonel
Hervey's as one blade of corn is like another. So she had at the
moment no idea of spying on him.
But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward
Ashburnham was paying a blackmailer of whom she had never
heard something like three hundred pounds a year . . . It was a
devil of a blow; it was like death; for she imagined that by that
time she had really got to the bottom of her husband's liabilities.
You see, they were pretty heavy. What had really smashed them
up had been a perfectly common-place affair at Monte Carlo--an
affair with a cosmopolitan harpy who passed for the mistress of a
Russian Grand Duke. She exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl
tiara from him as the price of her favours for a week or so. It
would have pipped him a good deal to have found so much, and
he was not in the ordinary way a gambler. He might, indeed, just
have found the twenty thousand and the not slight charges of a
week at an hotel with the fair creature. He must have been worth
at that date five hundred thousand dollars and a little over. Well,
he must needs go to the tables and lose forty thousand pounds. . . .
Forty thousand solid pounds, borrowed from sharks! And even
after that he must--it was an imperative passion--enjoy the favours
of the lady. He got them, of course, when it was a matter of solid
bargaining, for far less than twenty thousand, as he might, no
doubt, have done from the first. I daresay ten thousand dollars
covered the bill. Anyhow, there was a pretty solid hole in a
fortune of a hundred thousand pounds or so. And Leonora had to
fix things up; he would have run from money-lender to
money-lender. And that was quite in the early days of her
discovery of his infidelities--if you like to call them infidelities.
And she discovered that one from public sources. God knows
what would have happened if she had not discovered it from
public sources. I suppose he would have concealed it from her
until they were penniless. But she was able, by the grace of God,
to get hold of the actual lenders of the money, to learn the exact
sums that were needed. And she went off to England.
Yes, she went right off to England to her attorney and his while he
was still in the arms of his Circe--at Antibes, to which place they
had retired. He got sick of the lady quite quickly, but not before
Leonora had had such lessons in the art of business from her
attorney that she had her plan as clearly drawn up as was ever that
of General Trochu for keeping the Prussians out of Paris in 1870.
It was about as effectual at first, or it seemed so.
That would have been, you know, in 1895, about nine years before
the date of which I am talking--the date of Florence's getting her
hold over Leonora; for that was what it amounted to. . . . Well,
Mrs Ashburnham had simply forced Edward to settle all his
property upon her. She could force him to do anything; in his
clumsy, good-natured, inarticulate way he was as frightened of her
as of the devil. And he admired her enormously, and he was as
fond of her as any man could be of any woman. She took
advantage of it to treat him as if he had been a person whose
estates are being managed by the Court of Bankruptcy. I suppose
it was the best thing for him.
Anyhow, she had no end of a job for the first three years or so.
Unexpected liabilities kept on cropping up--and that afflicted fool
did not make it any easier. You see, along with the passion of the
chase went a frame of mind that made him be extraordinarily
ashamed of himself. You may not believe it, but he really had
such a sort of respect for the chastity of Leonora's imagination that
he hated--he was positively revolted at the thought that she should
know that the sort of thing that he did existed in the world. So he
would stick out in an agitated way against the accusation of ever
having done anything. He wanted to preserve the virginity of his
wife's thoughts. He told me that himself during the long walks we
had at the last--while the girl was on the way to Brindisi.
So, of course, for those three years or so, Leonora had many
agitations. And it was then that they really quarrelled.
Yes, they quarrelled bitterly. That seems rather extravagant. You
might have thought that Leonora would be just calmly loathing
and he lachrymosely contrite. But that was not it a bit . . . Along
with Edward's passions and his shame for them went the violent
conviction of the duties of his station--a conviction that was quite
unreasonably expensive. I trust I have not, in talking of his
liabilities, given the impression that poor Edward was a
promiscuous libertine. He was not; he was a sentimentalist. The
servant girl in the Kilsyte case had been pretty, but mournful of
appearance. I think that, when he had kissed her, he had desired
rather to comfort her. And, if she had succumbed to his
blandishments I daresay he would have set her up in a little house
in Portsmouth or Winchester and would have been faithful to her
for four or five years. He was quite capable of that.
No, the only two of his affairs of the heart that cost him money
were that of the Grand Duke's mistress and that which was the
subject of the blackmailing letter that Leonora opened. That had
been a quite passionate affair with quite a nice woman. It had
succeeded the one with the Grand Ducal lady. The lady was the
wife of a brother officer and Leonora had known all about the
passion, which had been quite a real passion and had lasted for
several years. You see, poor Edward's passions were quite logical
in their progression upwards. They began with a servant, went on
to a courtesan and then to a quite nice woman, very unsuitably
mated. For she had a quite nasty husband who, by means of letters
and things, went on blackmailing poor Edward to the tune of three
or four hundred a year--with threats of the Divorce Court. And
after this lady came Maisie Maidan, and after poor Maisie only
one more affair and then--the real passion of his life. His marriage
with Leonora had been arranged by his parents and, though he
always admired her immensely, he had hardly ever pretended to
be much more than tender to her, though he desperately needed
her moral support, too. . . .
But his really trying liabilities were mostly in the nature of
generosities proper to his station. He was, according to Leonora,
always remitting his tenants' rents and giving the tenants to
understand that the reduction would be permanent; he was always
redeeming drunkards who came before his magisterial bench; he
was always trying to put prostitutes into respectable places--and
he was a perfect maniac about children. I don't know how many
ill-used people he did not pick up and provide with
careers--Leonora has told me, but I daresay she exaggerated and
the figure seems so preposterous that I will not put it down. All
these things, and the continuance of them seemed to him to be his
duty--along with impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy
Scouts and to provide prizes at cattle shows and antivivisection
societies. . . .
Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not
continued. They could not possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at
that rate after the money had gone to the Grand Duke's mistress.
She put the rents back at their old figures; discharged the
drunkards from their homes, and sent all the societies notice that
they were to expect no more subscriptions. To the children, she
was more tender; nearly all of them she supported till the age of
apprenticeship or domestic service. You see, she was childless
herself.
She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to
blame. She had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family,
and they had forced upon her poor dear Edward without making
the stipulation that the children should be brought up as Catholics.
And that, of course, was spiritual death to Leonora. I have given
you a wrong impression if I have not made you see that Leonora
was a woman of a strong, cold conscience, like all English
Catholics. (I cannot, myself, help disliking this religion; there is
always, at the bottom of my mind, in spite of Leonora, the feeling
of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman, that filtered in upon me in
the tranquility of the little old Friends' Meeting House in Arch
Street, Philadelphia.) So I do set down a good deal of Leonora's
mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case to the peculiarly
English form of her religion. Because, of course, the only thing to
have done for Edward would have been to let him sink down until
he became a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe,
chance love affairs upon the highways. He would have done so
much less harm; he would have been much less agonized too. At
any rate, he would have had fewer chances of ruining and of
remorse. For Edward was great at remorse. But Leonora's English
Catholic conscience, her rigid principles, her coldness, even her
very patience, were, I cannot help thinking, all wrong in this
special case. She quite seriously and naïvely imagined that the
Church of Rome disapproves of divorce; she quite seriously and
naïvely believed that her church could be such a monstrous and
imbecile institution as to expect her to take on the impossible job
of making Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband. She had, as
the English would say, the Nonconformist temperament. In the
United States of North America we call it the New England
conscience. For, of course, that frame of mind has been driven in
on the English Catholics. The centuries that they have gone
through--centuries of blind and malignant oppression, of
ostracism from public employment, of being, as it were, a small
beleagured garrison in a hostile country, and therefore having to
act with great formality--all these things have combined to
perform that conjuring trick. And I suppose that Papists in England
are even technically Nonconformists.
Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew. But
that, at least, lets them be opportunists. They would have fixed
poor dear Edward up all right. (Forgive my writing of these
monstrous things in this frivolous manner. If I did not I should
break down and cry.) In Milan, say, or in Paris, Leonora would
have had her marriage dissolved in six months for two hundred
dollars paid in the right quarter. And Edward would have drifted
about until he became a tramp of the kind I have suggested. Or he
would have married a barmaid who would have made him such
frightful scenes in public places and would so have torn out his
moustache and left visible signs upon his face that he would have
been faithful to her for the rest of his days. That was what he
wanted to redeem him. . . .
For, along with his passions and his shames there went the dread
of scenes in public places, of outcry, of excited physical violence;
of publicity, in short. Yes, the barmaid would have cured him.
And it would have been all the better if she drank; he would have
been kept busy looking after her.
I know that I am right in this. I know it because of the Kilsyte case.
You see, the servant girl that he then kissed was nurse in the
family of the Nonconformist head of the county--whatever that
post may be called. And that gentleman was so determined to ruin
Edward, who was the chairman of the Tory caucus, or whatever it
is--that the poor dear sufferer had the very devil of a time. They
asked questions about it in the House of Commons; they tried to
get the Hampshire magistrates degraded; they suggested to the War
Ministry that Edward was not the proper person to hold the King's
commission. Yes, he got it hot and strong.
The result you have heard. He was completely cured of
philandering amongst the lower classes. And that seemed a real
blessing to Leonora. It did not revolt her so much to be
connected--it is a sort of connection--with people like Mrs
Maidan, instead of with a little kitchenmaid.
In a dim sort of way, Leonora was almost contented when she
arrived at Nauheim, that evening. . . .
She had got things nearly straight by the long years of scraping in
little stations in Chitral and Burma--stations where living is cheap
in comparison with the life of a county magnate, and where,
moreover, liaisons of one sort or another are normal and
inexpensive too. So that, when Mrs Maidan came along--and the
Maidan affair might have caused trouble out there because of the
youth of the husband--Leonora had just resigned herself to coming
home. With pushing and scraping and with letting Branshaw
Teleragh, and with selling a picture and a relic of Charles I or so.
had got--and, poor dear, she had never had a really decent dress to
her back in all those years and years--she had got, as she
imagined, her poor dear husband back into much the same
financial position as had been his before the mistress of the Grand
Duke had happened along. And, of course, Edward himself had
helped her a little on the financial side. He was a fellow that many
men liked. He was so presentable and quite ready to lend you his
cigar puncher--that sort of thing. So, every now and then some
financier whom he met about would give him a good, sound,
profitable tip. And Leonora was never afraid of a bit of a
gamble--English Papists seldom are, I do not know why.
So nearly all her investment turned up trumps, and Edward was
really in fit case to reopen Branshaw Manor and once more to
assume his position in the county. Thus Leonora had accepted
Maisie Maidan almost with resignation--almost with a sigh of
relief. She really liked the poor child--she had to like somebody.
And, at any rate, she felt she could trust Maisie--she could trust
her not to rook Edward for several thousands a week, for Maisie
had refused to accept so much as a trinket ring from him. It is true
that Edward gurgled and raved about the girl in a way that she had
never yet experienced. But that, too, was almost a relief. I think
she would really have welcomed it if he could have come across
the love of his life. It would have given her a rest.
And there could not have been anyone better than poor little Mrs
Maidan; she was so ill she could not want to be taken on
expensive jaunts. . . . It was Leonora herself who paid Maisie's
expenses to Nauheim. She handed over the money to the boy
husband, for Maisie would never have allowed it; but the husband
was in agonies of fear. Poor devil!
I fancy that, on the voyage from India, Leonora was as happy as
ever she had been in her life. Edward was wrapped up,
completely, in his girl--he was almost like a father with a child,
trotting about with rugs and physic and things, from deck to deck.
He behaved, however, with great circumspection, so that nothing
leaked through to the other passengers. And Leonora had almost
attained to the attitude of a mother towards Mrs Maidan. So it had
looked very well--the benevolent, wealthy couple of good people,
acting as saviours to the poor, dark-eyed, dying young thing. And
that attitude of Leonora's towards Mrs Maidan no doubt partly
accounted for the smack in the face. She was hitting a naughty
child who had been stealing chocolates at an inopportune
moment. It was certainly an inopportune moment. For, with the
opening of that blackmailing letter from that injured brother
officer, all the old terrors had redescended upon Leonora. Her
road had again seemed to stretch out endless; she imagined that
there might be hundreds and hundreds of such things that Edward
was concealing from her--that they might necessitate more
mortgagings, more pawnings of bracelets, more and always more
horrors. She had spent an excruciating afternoon. The matter was
one of a divorce case, of course, and she wanted to avoid publicity
as much as Edward did, so that she saw the necessity of
continuing the payments. And she did not so much mind that.
They could find three hundred a year. But it was the horror of
there being more such obligations.
She had had no conversation with Edward for many years--none
that went beyond the mere arrangements for taking trains or
engaging servants. But that afternoon she had to let him have it.
And he had been just the same as ever. It was like opening a book
after a decade to find the words the same. He had the same
motives. He had not wished to tell her about the case because he
had not wished her to sully her mind with the idea that there was
such a thing as a brother officer who could be a blackmailer--and
he had wanted to protect the credit of his old light of love. That
lady was certainly not concerned with her husband. And he swore,
and swore, and swore, that there was nothing else in the world
against him. She did not believe him.
He had done it once too often--and she was wrong for the first
time, so that he acted a rather creditable part in the matter. For he
went right straight out to the post-office and spent several hours in
coding a telegram to his solicitor, bidding that hard-headed man
to threaten to take out at once a warrant against the fellow who
was on his track. He said afterwards that it was a bit too thick on
poor old Leonora to be ballyragged any more. That was really the
last of his outstanding accounts, and he was ready to take his
personal chance of the Divorce Court if the blackmailer turned
nasty. He would face it out--the publicity, the papers, the whole
bally show. Those were his simple words. . . .
He had made, however, the mistake of not telling Leonora where
he was going, so that, having seen him go to his room to fetch the
code for the telegram, and seeing, two hours later, Maisie Maidan
come out of his room, Leonora imagined that the two hours she
had spent in silent agony Edward had spent with Maisie Maidan
in his arms. That seemed to her to be too much. As a matter of
fact, Maisie's being in Edward's room had been the result, partly
of poverty, partly of pride, partly of sheer innocence. She could
not, in the first place, afford a maid; she refrained as much as
possible from sending the hotel servants on errands, since every
penny was of importance to her, and she feared to have to pay
high tips at the end of her stay. Edward had lent her one of his
fascinating cases contaiing fifteen different sizes of scisssors, and,
having seen from her window, his departure for the post-office,
she had taken the opportunity of returning the case. She could not
see why she should not, though she felt a certain remorse at the
thought that she had kissed the pillows of his bed. That was the
way it took her.
But Leonora could see that, without the shadow of a doubt, the
incident gave Florence a hold over her. It let Florence into things
and Florence was the only created being who had any idea that the
Ashburnhams were not just good people with nothing to their
tails. She determined at once, not so much to give Florence the
privilege of her intimacy--which would have been the payment of
a kind of blackmail--as to keep Florence under observation until
she could have demonstrated to Florence that she was not in the
least jealous of poor Maisie. So that was why she had entered the
dining-room arm in arm with my wife, and why she had so
markedly planted herself at our table. She never left us, indeed,
for a minute that night, except just to run up to Mrs Maidan's
room to beg her pardon and to beg her also to let Edward take her
very markedly out into the gardens that night. She said herself,
when Mrs Maidan came rather wistfully down into the lounge
where we were all sitting: "Now, Edward, get up and take Maisie
to the Casino. I want Mrs Dowell to tell me all about the families
in Connecticut who came from Fordingbridge." For it had been
discovered that Florence came of a line that had actually owned
Branshaw Teleragh for two centuries before the Ashburnhams
came there. And there she sat with me in that hall, long after
Florence had gone to bed, so that I might witness her gay reception
of that pair. She could play up.
And that enables me to fix exactly the day of our going to the town
of M----. For it was the very day poor Mrs Maidan died. We found
her dead when we got back--pretty awful, that, when you come to
figure out what it all means. . . .
At any rate the measure of my relief when Leonora said that she
was an Irish Catholic gives you the measure of my affection for
that couple. It was an affection so intense that even to this day I
cannot think of Edward without sighing. I do not believe that I
could have gone on any more with them. I was getting too tired.
And I verily believe, too, if my suspicion that Leonora was jealous
of Florence had been the reason she gave for her outburst I should
have turned upon Florence with the maddest kind of rage.
Jealousy would have been incurable. But Florence's mere silly
jibes at the Irish and at the Catholics could be apologized out of
existence. And that I appeared to fix up in two minutes or so.
She looked at me for a long time rather fixedly and queerly while I
was doing it. And at last I worked myself up to saying:
"Do accept the situation. I confess that I do not like your religion.
But I like you so intensely. I don't mind saying that I have never
had anyone to be really fond of, and I do not believe that anyone
has ever been fond of me, as I believe you really to be."
"Oh, I'm fond enough of you," she said. "Fond enough to say that I
wish every man was like you. But there are others to be
considered." She was thinking, as a matter of fact, of poor Maisie.
She picked a little piece of pellitory out of the breast-high wall in
front of us. She chafed it for a long minute between her finger and
thumb, then she threw it over the coping.
"Oh, I accept the situation," she said at last, "if you can."
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