I REMEMBER laughing at the phrase, "accept the situation",
which she seemed to repeat with a gravity too intense. I said to her
something like:
"It's hardly as much as that. I mean, that I must claim the liberty of
a free American citizen to think what I please about your
co-religionists. And I suppose that Florence must have liberty to
think what she pleases and to say what politeness allows her to
say."
"She had better," Leonora answered, "not say one single word
against my people or my faith." It struck me at the time, that there
was an unusual, an almost threatening, hardness in her voice. It
was almost as if she were trying to convey to Florence, through
me, that she would seriously harm my wife if Florence went to
something that was an extreme. Yes, I remember thinking at the
time that it was almost as if Leonora were saying, through me to
Florence:
"You may outrage me as you will; you may take all that I
personally possess, but do not you care to say one single thing in
view of the situation that that will set up--against the faith that
makes me become the doormat for your feet."
But obviously, as I saw it, that could not be her meaning. Good
people, be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each
other. So that I read Leonora's words to mean just no more than:
"It would be better if Florence said nothing at all against my
co-religionists, because it is a point that I am touchy about."
That was the hint that, accordingly, I conveyed to Florence when,
shortly afterwards, she and Edward came down from the tower.
And I want you to understand that, from that moment until after
Edward and the girl and Florence were all dead together, I had
never the remotest glimpse, not the shadow of a suspicion, that
there was anything wrong, as the saying is. For five minutes, then,
I entertained the possibility that Leonora might be jealous; but
there was never another flicker in that flame-like personality. How
in the world should I get it?
For, all that time, I was just a male sick nurse. And what chance
had I against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in
league to conceal their hands from me? What earthly chance?
They were three to one--and they made me happy. Oh God, they
made me so happy that I doubt if even paradise, that shall smooth
out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like. And what
could they have done better, or what could they have done that
could have been worse? I don't know. . . .
I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and
that Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she
had to take up during her long Calvary of a life. . . .
You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do
not know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is
not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage.
What do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that.
They are dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I hope,
will open to them the springs of His compassion. It is not my
business to think about it. It is simply my business to say, as
Leonora's people say: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Do mine, et
lux perpetua luceat eis. In memoria aeterna erit. . . ." But what
were they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I think that the pair
of them were only poor wretches, creeping over this earth in the
shadow of an eternal wrath. It is very terrible. . . .
It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgement, as it appears
to me sometimes, at nights. It is probably the suggestion of some
picture that I have seen somewhere. But upon an immense plain,
suspended in mid-air, I seem to see three figures, two of them
clasped close in an intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary.
lt is in black and white, my picture of that judgement, an etching,
perhaps; only I cannot tell an etching from a photographic
reproduction. And the immense plain is the hand of God,
stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above it and
below it. And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence that
is alone. . . . And, do you know, at the thought of that intense
solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to rush forward and
comfort her. You cannot, you see, have acted as nurse to a person
for twelve years without wishing to go on nursing them, even
though you hate them with the hatred of the adder, and even in the
palm of God. But, in the nights, with that vision of judgement
before me, I know that I hold myself back. For I hate Florence. I
hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an
eternity of loneliness. She need not have done what she did. She
was an American, a New Englander. She had not the hot passions
of these Europeans. She cut out that poor imbecile of an
Edward--and I pray God that he is really at peace, clasped close in
the arms of that poor, poor girl! And, no doubt, Maisie Maidan
will find her young husband again, and Leonora will burn, clear
and serene, a northern light and one of the archangels of God. And
me. . . . Well, perhaps, they will find me an elevator to run. . . .
But Florence. . . .
She should not have done it. She should not have done it. It was
playing it too low down. She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer
vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer,
imbecile spirit of district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst
she was Edward's mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite
him to his wife? She would gabble on to Leonora about
forgiveness--treating the subject from the bright, American point
of view. And Leonora would treat her like the whore she was.
Once she said to Florence in the early morning:
"You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my
proper place. I know it, thank you."
But even that could not stop Florence. She went on saying that it
was her ambition to leave this world a little brighter by the
passage of her brief life, and how thankfully she would leave
Edward, whom she thought she had brought to a right frame of
mind, if Leonora would only give him a chance. He needed, she
said, tenderness beyond anything.
And Leonora would answer--for she put up with this outrage for
years--Leonora, as I understand, would answer something like:
"Yes, you would give him up. And you would go on writing to
each other in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I
know the pair of you, you know. No. I prefer the situation as it is."
Half the time Florence would ignore Leonora's remarks. She would
think they were not quite ladylike. The other half of the time she
would try to persuade Leonora that her love for Edward was quite
spiritual--on account of her heart. Once she said:
"If you can believe that of Maisie Maidan, as you say you do, why
cannot you believe it of me?" Leonora was, I understand, doing
her hair at that time in front of the mirror in her bedroom. And she
looked round at Florence, to whom she did not usually vouchsafe
a glance,--she looked round coolly and calmly, and said:
"Never do you dare to mention Mrs Maidan's name again. You
murdered her. You and I murdered her between us. I am as much
a scoundrel as you. I don't like to be reminded of it."
Florence went off at once into a babble of how could she have hurt
a person whom she hardly knew, a person whom with the best
intentions, in pursuance of her efforts to leave the world a little
brighter, she had tried to save from Edward. That was how she
figured it out to herself. She really thought that. . . . So Leonora
said patiently:
"Very well, just put it that I killed her and that it's a painful
subject. One does not like to think that one had killed someone.
Naturally not. I ought never to have brought her from India." And
that, indeed, is exactly how Leonora looked at it. It is stated a little
baldly, but Leonora was always a great one for bald statements.
What had happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of
M---- had been this:
Leonora, who had been even then filled with pity and contrition for
the poor child, on returning to our hotel had gone straight to Mrs
Maidan's room. She had wanted just to pet her. And she had
perceived at first only, on the clear, round table covered with red
velvet, a letter addressed to her. It ran something like:
"Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, how could you have done it? I trusted you
so. You never talked to me about me and Edward, but I trusted
you. How could you buy me from my husband? I have just heard
how you have--in the hall they were talking about it, Edward and
the American lady. You paid the money for me to come here. Oh,
how could you? How could you? I am going straight back to
Bunny. . . ." Bunny was Mrs Maidan's husband.
And Leonora said that, as she went on reading the letter, she had,
without looking round her, a sense that that hotel room was
cleared, that there were no papers on the table, that there were no
clothes on the hooks, and that there was a strained silence--a
silence, she said, as if there were something in the room that
drank up such sounds as there were. She had to fight against that
feeling, whilst she read the postscript of the letter.
"I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress," the postscript
began. The poor child was hardly literate. "It was surely not right
of you and I never wanted to be one. And I heard Edward call me
a poor little rat to the American lady. He always called me a little
rat in private, and I did not mind. But, if he called me it to her, I
think he does not love me any more. Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you
knew the world and I knew nothing. I thought it would be all right
if you thought it could, and I thought you would not have brought
me if you did not, too. You should not have done it, and we out of
the same convent. . . ."
Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.
And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she
began a search for Mrs Maidan herself--all over the hotel. The
manager said that Mrs Maidan had paid her bill, and had gone up
to the station to ask the Reiseverkehrsbureau to make her out a
plan for her immediate return to Chitral. He imagined that he had
seen her come back, but he was not quite certain. No one in the
large hotel had bothered his head about the child. And she,
wandering solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down beside a
screen that had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never
heard then or after what had passed between that precious couple.
I fancy Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor
dear Edward by addressing to him some words of friendly
warning as to the ravages he might be making in the girl's heart.
That would be the sort of way she would begin. And Edward
would have sentimentally assured her that there was nothing in it;
that Maisie was just a poor little rat whose passage to Nauheim
his wife had paid out of her own pocket. That would have been
enough to do the trick.
For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic
growing and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every
one of the public rooms of the hotel--the dining-room, the lounge,
the schreibzimmer, the winter garden. God knows what they
wanted with a winter garden in an hotel that is only open from
May till October. But there it was. And then Leonora ran--yes, she
ran up the stairs--to see if Maisie had not returned to her rooms.
She had determined to take that child right away from that hideous
place. It seemed to her to be all unspeakable. I do not mean to say
that she was not quite cool about it. Leonora was always Leonora.
But the cold justice of the thing demanded that she should play
the part of mother to this child who had come from the same
convent. She figured it out to amount to that. She would leave
Edward to Florence and to me--and she would devote all her time
to providing that child with an atmosphere of love until she could
be returned to her poor young husband. It was naturally too late.
She had not cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first. Now, as
soon as she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a
small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the
effort to strap up a great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely
that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had
closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic alligator. The key was
in her hand. Her dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come
down and covered her body and her face.
Leonora lifted her up--she was the merest featherweight--and laid
her on the bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she
had just scored a goal in a hockey match. You understand she had
not committed suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with
the long lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with
the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her
hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She
looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles that
were all about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at
her feet with their faces hidden might have been two swans that
were to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or wherever it is.
Leonora showed her to me. She would not let either of the others
see her. She wanted, you know, to spare poor dear Edward's
feelings. He never could bear the sight of a corpse. And, since she
never gave him an idea that Maisie had written to her, he
imagined that the death had been the most natural thing in the
world. He soon got over it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his
about which he never felt much remorse.
Read next: PART II#CHAPTER I
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