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THE death of Mrs Maidan occurred on the 4th of August, 1904.
And then nothing happened until the 4th of August, 1913. There is
the curious coincidence of dates, but I do not know whether that is
one of those sinister, as if half jocular and altogether merciless
proceedings on the part of a cruel Providence that we call a
coincidence. Because it may just as well have been the
superstitious mind of Florence that forced her to certain acts, as if
she had been hypnotized. It is, however, certain that the 4th of
August always proved a significant date for her. To begin with,
she was born on the 4th of August. Then, on that date, in the year
1899, she set out with her uncle for the tour round the world in
company with a young man called Jimmy. But that was not
merely a coincidence. Her kindly old uncle, with the supposedly
damaged heart, was in his delicate way, offering her, in this trip, a
birthday present to celebrate her coming of age. Then, on the 4th
of August, 1900, she yielded to an action that certainly coloured
her whole life--as well as mine. She had no luck. She was probably
offering herself a birthday present that morning. . . . On the 4th of
August, 1901, she married me, and set sail for Europe in a great
gale of wind--the gale that affected her heart. And no doubt there,
again, she was offering herself a birthday gift--the birthday gift of
my miserable life. It occurs to me that I have never told you
anything about my marriage. That was like this: I have told you, as
I think, that I first met Florence at the Stuyvesants', in Fourteenth
Street. And, from that moment, I determined with all the
obstinacy of a possibly weak nature, if not to make her mine, at
least to marry her. I had no occupation--I had no business affairs. I
simply camped down there in Stamford, in a vile hotel, and just
passed my days in the house, or on the verandah of the Misses
Hurlbird. The Misses Hurlbird, in an odd, obstinate way, did not
like my presence. But they were hampered by the national
manners of these occasions. Florence had her own sitting-room.
She could ask to it whom she liked, and I simply walked into that
apartment. I was as timid as you will, but in that matter I was like
a chicken that is determined to get across the road in front of an
automobile. I would walk into Florence's pretty, little,
old-fashioned room, take off my hat, and sit down.
Florence had, of course, several other fellows, too--strapping
young New Englanders, who worked during the day in New York
and spent only the evenings in the village of their birth. And, in
the evenings, they would march in on Florence with almost as
much determination as I myself showed. And I am bound to say
that they were received with as much disfavour as was my
portion--from the Misses Hurlbird. . . .
They were curious old creatures, those two. It was almost as if they
were members of an ancient family under some curse--they were
so gentlewomanly, so proper, and they sighed so. Sometimes I
would see tears in their eyes. I do not know that my courtship of
Florence made much progress at first. Perhaps that was because it
took place almost entirely during the daytime, on hot afternoons,
when the clouds of dust hung like fog, right up as high as the tops
of the thin-leaved elms. The night, I believe, is the proper season
for the gentle feats of love, not a Connecticut July afternoon, when
any sort of proximity is an almost appalling thought. But, if I never
so much as kissed Florence, she let me discover very easily, in the
course of a fortnight, her simple wants. And I could supply those
wants. . . .
She wanted to marry a gentleman of leisure; she wanted a
European establishment. She wanted her husband to have an
English accent, an income of fifty thousand dollars a year from
real estate and no ambitions to increase that income. And--she
faintly hinted--she did not want much physical passion in the
affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without
blinking.
She gave cut this information in floods of bright talk--she would
pop a little bit of it into comments over a view of the Rialto,
Venice, and, whilst she was brightly describing Balmoral Castle,
she would say that her ideal husband would he one who could get
her received at the British Court. She had spent, it seemed, two
months in Great Britain--seven weeks in touring from Stratford to
Strathpeffer, and one as paying guest in an old English family near
Ledbury, an impoverished, but still stately family, called
Bagshawe. They were to have spent two months more in that
tranquil bosom, but inopportune events, apparently in her uncle's
business, had caused their rather hurried return to Stamford. The
young man called Jimmy had remained in Europe to perfect his
knowledge of that continent. He certainly did: he was most useful
to us afterwards.
But the point that came out--that there was no mistaking--was that
Florence was coldly and calmly determined to take no look at any
man who could not give her a European settlement. Her glimpse
of English home life had effected this. She meant, on her
marriage, to have a year in Paris, and then to have her husband
buy some real estate in the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, from
which place the Hurlbirds had come in the year 1688. On the
strength of that she was going to take her place in the ranks of
English county society. That was fixed.
I used to feel mightily elevated when I considered these details, for
I could not figure out that amongst her acquaintances in Stamford
there was any fellow that would fill the bill. The most of them
were not as wealthy as I, and those that were were not the type to
give up the fascinations of Wall Street even for the protracted
companionship of Florence. But nothing really happened during
the month of July. On the 1st of August Florence apparently told
her aunts that she intended to marry me.
She had not told me so, but there was no doubt about the aunts,
for, on that afternoon, Miss Florence Hurlbird, Senior, stopped me
on my way to Florence's sitting-room and took me, agitatedly, into
the parlour. It was a singular interview, in that old-fashioned
colonial room, with the spindle-legged furniture, the silhouettes,
the miniatures, the portrait of General Braddock, and the smell of
lavender. You see, the two poor maiden ladies were in
agonies--and they could not say one single thing direct. They
would almost wring their hands and ask if I had considered such a
thing as different temperaments. I assure you they were almost
affectionate, concerned for me even, as if Florence were too
bright for my solid and serious virtues.
For they had discovered in me solid and serious virtues. That
might have been because I had once dropped the remark that I
preferred General Braddock to General Washington. For the
Hurlbirds had backed the losing side in the War of Independence,
and had been seriously impoverished and quite efficiently
oppressed for that reason. The Misses Hurlbird could never forget
it.
Nevertheless they shuddered at the thought of a European career
for myself and Florence. Each of them really wailed when they
heard that that was what I hoped to give their niece. That may
have been partly because they regarded Europe as a sink of
iniquity, where strange laxities prevailed. They thought the
Mother Country as Erastian as any other. And they carried their
protests to extraordinary lengths, for them. . . .
They even, almost, said that marriage was a sacrament; but neither
Miss Florence nor Miss Emily could quite bring herself to utter
the word. And they almost brought themselves to say that
Florence's early life had been characterized by
flirtations--something of that sort.
I know I ended the interview by saying:
"I don't care. If Florence has robbed a bank I am going to marry her
and take her to Europe." And at that Miss Emily wailed and
fainted. But Miss Florence, in spite of the state of her sister, threw
herself on my neck and cried out: "Don't do it, John. Don't do it.
You're a good young man," and she added, whilst I was getting out
of the room to send Florenc to her aunt's rescue:
"We ought to tell you more. But she's our dear sister's child."
Florence, I remember, received me with a chalk-pale face and the
exclamation:
"Have those old cats been saying anything against me?" But I
assured her that they had not and hurried her into the room of her
strangely afflicted relatives. I had really forgotten all about that
exclamation of Florence's until this moment. She treated me so
very well--with such tact--that, if I ever thought of it afterwards I
put it down to her deep affection for me.
And that evening, when I went to fetch her for a buggy-ride, she
had disappeared. I did not lose any time. I went into New York
and engaged berths on the "Pocahontas", that was to sail on the
evening of the fourth of the month, and then, returning to
Stamford, I tracked out, in the course of the day, that Florence had
been driven to Rye Station. And there I found that she had taken
the cars to Waterbury. She had, of course, gone to her uncle's. The
old man received me with a stony, husky face. I was not to see
Florence; she was ill; she was keeping her room. And, from
something that he let drop--an odd Biblical phrase that I have
forgotten --I gathered that all that family simply did not intend her
to marry ever in her life.
I procured at once the name of the nearest minister and a rope
ladder--you have no idea how primitively these matters were
arranged in those days in the United States. I daresay that may be
so still. And at one o'clock in the morning of the 4th of August I
was standing in Florence's bedroom. I was so one-minded in my
purpose that it never struck me there was anything improper in
being, at one o'clock in the morning, in Florence's bedroom. I just
wanted to wake her up. She was not, however, asleep. She
expected me, and her relatives had only just left her. She received
me with an embrace of a warmth. . . . Well, it was the first time I
had ever been embraced by a woman--and it was the last when a
woman's embrace has had in it any warmth for me. . . . I suppose
it was my own fault, what followed. At any rate, I was in such a
hurry to get the wedding over, and was so afraid of her relatives
finding me there, that I must have received her advances with a
certain amount of absence of mind. I was out of that room and
down the ladder in under half a minute. She kept me waiting at
the foot an unconscionable time--it was certainly three in the
morning before we knocked up that minister. And I think that that
wait was the only sign Florence ever showed of having a
conscience as far as I was concerned, unless her lying for some
moments in my arms was also a sign of conscience. I fancy that, if
I had shown warmth then, she would have acted the proper wife to
me, or would have put me back again. But, because I acted like a
Philadelphia gentleman, she made me, I suppose, go through with
the part of a male nurse. Perhaps she thought that I should not
mind.
After that, as I gather, she had not any more remorse. She was only
anxious to carry out her plans. For, just before she came down the
ladder, she called me to the top of that grotesque implement that I
went up and down like a tranquil jumping-jack. I was perfectly
collected. She said to me with a certain fierceness:
"It is determined that we sail at four this afternoon? You are not
lying about having taken berths?"
I understood that she would naturally be anxious to get away from
the neighbourhood of her apparently insane relatives, so that I
readily excused her for thinking that I should be capable of lying
about such a thing. I made it, therefore, plain to her that it was my
fixed determination to sail by the "Pocahontas". She said then--it
was a moonlit morning, and she was whispering in my ear whilst I
stood on the ladder. The hills that surround Waterbury showed,
extraordinarily tranquil, around the villa. She said, almost coldly:
"I wanted to know, so as to pack my trunks." And she added: "I
may be ill, you know. I guess my heart is a little like Uncle
Hurlbird's. It runs in families."
I whispered that the "Pocahontas" was an extraordinarily steady
boat. . . .
Now I wonder what had passed through Florence's mind during the
two hours that she had kept me waiting at the foot of the ladder. I
would give not a little to know. Till then, I fancy she had had no
settled plan in her mind. She certainly never mentioned her heart
till that time. Perhaps the renewed sight of her Uncle Hurlbird had
given her the idea. Certainly her Aunt Emily, who had come over
with her to Waterbury, would have rubbed into her, for hours and
hours, the idea that any accentuated discussions would kill the old
gentleman. That would recall to her mind all the safeguards
against excitement with which the poor silly old gentleman had
been hedged in during their trip round the world. That, perhaps,
put it into her head. Still, I believe there was some remorse on my
account, too. Leonora told me that Florence said there was--for
Leonora knew all about it, and once went so far as to ask her how
she could do a thing so infamous. She excused herself on the
score of an overmastering passion. Well, I always say that an
overmastering passion is a good excuse for feelings. You cannot
help them. And it is a good excuse for straight actions--she might
have bolted with the fellow, before or after she married me. And,
if they had not enough money to get along with, they might have
cut their throats, or sponged on her family, though, of course,
Florence wanted such a lot that it would have suited her very
badly to have for a husband a clerk in a dry-goods store, which was
what old Hurlbird would have made of that fellow. He hated him.
No, I do not think that there is much excuse for Florence.
God knows. She was a frightened fool, and she was fantastic, and I
suppose that, at that time, she really cared for that imbecile. He
certainly didn't care for her. Poor thing. . . . At any rate, after I had
assured her that the "Pocahontas" was a steady ship, she just said:
"You'll have to look after me in certain ways--like Uncle Hurlbird
is looked after. I will tell you how to do it." And then she stepped
over the sill, as if she were stepping on board a boat. I suppose she
had burnt hers!
I had, no doubt, eye-openers enough. When we re-entered the
Hurlbird mansion at eight o'clock the Hurlbirds were just
exhausted. Florence had a hard, triumphant air. We had got
married about four in the morning and had sat about in the woods
above the town till then, listening to a mocking-bird imitate an old
tom-cat. So I guess Florence had not found getting married to me
a very stimulating process. I had not found anything much more
inspiring to say than how glad I was, with variations. I think I was
too dazed. Well, the Hurlbirds were too dazed to say much. We
had breakfast together, and then Florence went to pack her grips
and things. Old Hurlbird took the opportunity to read me a
full-blooded lecture, in the style of an American oration, as to the
perils for young American girlhood lurking in the European
jungle. He said that Paris was full of snakes in the grass, of which
he had had bitter experience. He concluded, as they always do,
poor, dear old things, with the aspiration that all American women
should one day be sexless--though that is not the way they put it. .
. .
Well, we made the ship all right by one-thirty--an there was a
tempest blowing. That helped Florence a good deal. For we were
not ten minutes out from Sandy Hook before Florence went down
into her cabin and her heart took her. An agitated stewardess came
running up to me, and I went running down. I got my directions
how to behave to my wife. Most of them came from her, though it
was the ship doctor who discreetly suggested to me that I had
better refrain from manifestations of affection. I was ready
enough. I was, of course, full of remorse. It occurred to me that
her heart was the reason for the Hurlbirds' mysterious desire to
keep their youngest and dearest unmarried. Of course, they would
be too refined to put the motive into words. They were old stock
New Englanders. They would not want to have to suggest that a
husband must not kiss the back of his wife's neck. They would not
like to suggest that he might, for the matter of that. I wonder,
though, how Florence got the doctor to enter the conspiracy--the
several doctors.
Of course her heart squeaked a bit--she had the same configuration
of the lungs as her Uncle Hurlbird. And, in his company, she must
have heard a great deal of heart talk from specialists. Anyhow, she
and they tied me pretty well down--and Jimmy, of course, that
dreary boy--what in the world did she see in him? He was
lugubrious, silent, morose. He had no talent as a painter. He was
very sallow and dark, and he never shaved sufficiently. He met us
at Havre, and he proceeded to make himself useful for the next
two years, during which he lived in our flat in Paris, whether we
were there or not. He studied painting at Julien's, or some such
place. . . .
That fellow had his hands always in the pockets of his odious,
square-shouldered, broad-hipped, American coats, and his dark
eyes were always full of ominous appearances. He was, besides,
too fat. Why, I was much the better man. . . .
And I daresay Florence would have given me the better. She
showed signs of it. I think, perhaps, the enigmatic smile with
which she used to look back at me over her shoulder when she
went into the bathing place was a sort of invitation. I have
mentioned that. It was as if she were saying: "I am going in here. I
am going to stand so stripped and white and straight--and you are
a man. . . ." Perhaps it was that. . . .
No, she cannot have liked that fellow long. He looked like sallow
putty. I understand that he had been slim and dark and very
graceful at the time of her first disgrace. But, loafing about in
Paris, on her pocket-money and on the allowance that old
Hurlbird made him to keep out of the United States, had given
him a stomach like a man of forty, and dyspeptic irritation on top
of it. God, how they worked me! It was those two between them
who really elaborated the rules. I have told you something about
them--how I had to head conversations, for all those eleven years,
off such topics as love, poverty, crime, and so on. But, looking
over what I have written, I see that I have unintentionally misled
you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. Yet that
was the impression that I really had until just now. When I come
to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time.
You see, that fellow impressed upon me that what Florence needed
most of all were sleep and privacy. I must never enter her room
without knocking, or her poor little heart might flutter away to its
doom. He said these things with his lugubrious croak, and his
black eyes like a crow's, so that I seemed to see poor Florence die
ten times a day--a little, pale, frail corpse. Why, I would as soon
have thought of entering her room without her permission as of
burgling a church. I would sooner have committed that crime. I
would certainly have done it if I had thought the state of her heart
demanded the sacrilege. So at ten o'clock at night the door closed
upon Florence, who had gently, and, as if reluctantly, backed up
that fellow's recommendations; and she would wish me good
night as if she were a cinquecento Italian lady saying good-bye to
her lover. And at ten o'clock of the next morning there she would
come out the door of her room as fresh as Venus rising from any of
the couches that are mentioned in Greek legends.
Her room door was locked because she was nervous about thieves;
but an electric contrivance on a cord was understood to be
attached to her little wrist. She had only to press a bulb to raise
the house. And I was provided with an axe--an axe!--great gods,
with which to break down her door in case she ever failed to
answer my knock, after I knocked really loud several times. It was
pretty well thought out, you see.
What wasn't so well thought out were the ultimate
consequences--our being tied to Europe. For that young man
rubbed it so well into me that Florence would die if she crossed
the Channel--he impressed it so fully on my mind that, when later
Florence wanted to go to Fordingbridge, I cut the proposal
short--absolutely short, with a curt no. It fixed her and it frightened
her. I was even backed up by all the doctors. I seemed to have had
endless interviews with doctor after doctor, cool, quiet men, who
would ask, in reasonable tones, whether there was any reason for
our going to England--any special reason. And since I could not
see any special reason, they would give the verdict: "Better not,
then." I daresay they were honest enough, as things go. They
probably imagined that the mere associations of the steamer might
have effects on Florence's nerves. That would be enough, that and
a conscientious desire to keep our money on the Continent.
It must have rattled poor Florence pretty considerably, for you see,
the main idea--the only main idea of her heart, that was otherwise
cold--was to get to Fordingbridge and be a county lady in the
home of her ancestors. But Jimmy got her, there: he shut on her
the door of the Channel; even on the fairest day of blue sky, with
the cliffs of England shining like mother of pearl in full view of
Calais, I would not have let her cross the steamer gangway to save
her life. I tell you it fixed her.
It fixed her beautifully, because she could not announce herself as
cured, since that would have put an end to the locked bedroom
arrangements. And, by the time she was sick of Jimmy--which
happened in the year 1903 --she had taken on Edward
Ashburnham. Yes, it was a bad fix for her, because Edward could
have taken her to Fordingbridge, and, though he could not give her
Branshaw Manor, that home of her ancestors being settled on his
wife, she could at least have pretty considerably queened it there
or thereabouts, what with our money and the support of the
Ashburnhams. Her uncle, as soon as he considered that she had
really settled down with me-- and I sent him only the most
glowing accounts of her virtue and constancy --made over to her a
very considerable part of his fortune for which he had no use. I
suppose that we had, between us, fifteen thousand a year in
English money, though I never quite knew how much of hers went
to Jimmy. At any rate, we could have shone in Fordingbridge. I
never quite knew, either, how she and Edward got rid of Jimmy. I
fancy that fat and disreputable raven must have had his six golden
front teeth knocked down his throat by Edward one morning
whilst I had gone out to buy some flowers in the Rue de la Paix,
leaving Florence and the flat in charge of those two. And serve
him very right, is all that I can say. He was a bad sort of
blackmailer; I hope Florence does not have his company in the
next world.
As God is my Judge, I do not believe that I would have separated
those two if I had known that they really and passionately loved
each other. I do not know where the public morality of the case
comes in, and, of course, no man really knows what he would
have done in any given case. But I truly believe that I would have
united them, observing ways and means as decent as I could. I
believe that I should have given them money to live upon and that
I should have consoled myself somehow. At that date I might have
found some young thing, like Maisie Maidan, or the poor girl, and
I might have had some peace. For peace I never had with
Florence, and hardly believe that I cared for her in the way of love
after a year or two of it. She became for me a rare and fragile
object, something burdensome, but very frail. Why it was as if I
had been given a thin-shelled pullet's egg to carry on my palm
from Equatorial Africa to Hoboken. Yes, she became for me, as it
were, the subject of a bet--the trophy of an athlete's achievement,
a parsley crown that is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness,
his abstentions, and of his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value as a
wife, I think she had none at all for me. I fancy I was not even
proud of the way she dressed.
But her passion for Jimmy was not even a passion, and, mad as the
suggestion may appear, she was frightened for her life. Yes, she
was afraid of me. I will tell you how that happened. I had, in the
old days, a darky servant, called Julius, who valeted me, and
waited on me, and loved me, like the crown of his head. Now,
when we left Waterbury to go to the "Pocahontas", Florence
entrusted to me one very special and very precious leather grip.
She told me that her life might depend on that grip, which
contained her drugs against heart attacks. And, since I was never
much of a hand at carrying things, I entrusted this, in turn, to
Julius, who was a grey-haired chap of sixty or so, and very
picturesque at that. He made so much impression on Florence that
she regarded him as a sort of father, and absolutely refused to let
me take him to Paris. He would have inconvenienced her.
Well, Julius was so overcome with grief at being left behind that
he must needs go and drop the precious grip. I saw red, I saw
purple. I flew at Julius. On the ferry, it was, I filled up one of his
eyes; I threatened to strangle him. And, since an unresisting negro
can make a deplorable noise and a deplorable spectacle, and,
since that was Florence's first adventure in the married state, she
got a pretty idea of my character. It affirmed in her the desperate
resolve to conceal from me the fact that she was not what she
would have called "a pure woman". For that was really the
mainspring of her fantastic actions. She was afraid that I should
murder her. . . .
So she got up the heart attack, at the earliest possible opportunity,
on board the liner. Perhaps she was not so very much to be
blamed. You must remember that she was a New Englander, and
that New England had not yet come to loathe darkies as it does
now. Whereas, if she had come from even so little south as
Philadelphia, and had been an oldish family, she would have seen
that for me to kick Julius was not so outrageous an act as for her
cousin, Reggie Hurlbird, to say--as I have heard him say to his
English butler--that for two cents he would bat him on the pants.
Besides, the medicine-grip did not bulk as largely in her eyes as it
did in mine, where it was the symbol of the existence of an adored
wife of a day. To her it was just a useful lie. . . .
Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it--the
husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile
fears--for I was such a fool that I should never have known what
she was or was not--and the blackmailing lover. And then the
other lover came along. . . .
Well, Edward Ashburnham was worth having. Have I conveyed to
you the splendid fellow that he was--the fine soldier, the excellent
landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious
magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public
character? I suppose I have not conveyed it to you. The truth is,
that I never knew it until the poor girl came along--the poor girl
who was just as straight, as splendid and as upright as he. I swear
she was. I suppose I ought to have known. I suppose that was,
really, why I liked him so much--so infinitely much. Come to think
of it, I can remember a thousand little acts of kindliness, of
thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the Continent. Look here,
I know of two families of dirty, unpicturesque, Hessian paupers
that that fellow, with an infinite patience, rooted up, got their
police reports, set on their feet, or exported to my patient land.
And he would do it quite inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a
child crying in the street. He would wrestle with dictionaries, in
that unfamiliar tongue. . . . Well, he could not bear to see a child
cry. Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not give her
the comfort of his physical attractions. But, although I liked him
so intensely, I was rather apt to take these things for granted. They
made me feel comfortable with him, good towards him; they
made me trust him. But I guess I thought it was part of the
character of any English gentleman. Why, one day he got it into his
head that the head waiter at the Excelsior had been crying--the
fellow with the grey face and grey whiskers. And then he spent the
best part of a week, in correspondence and up at the British
consul's, in getting the fellow's wife to come back from London
and bring back his girl baby. She had bolted with a Swiss scullion.
If she had not come inside the week he would have gone to
London himself to fetch her. He was like that. Edward
Ashburnham was like that, and I thought it was only the duty of his
rank and station. Perhaps that was all that it was--but I pray God to
make me discharge mine as well. And, but for the poor girl, I
daresay that I should never have seen it, however much the feeling
might have been over me. She had for him such enthusiasm that,
although even now I do not understand the technicalities of
English life, I can gather enough. She was with them during the
whole of our last stay at Nauheim.
Nancy Rufford was her name; she was Leonora's only friend's only
child, and Leonora was her guardian, if that is the correct term.
She had lived with the Ashburnhams ever since she had been of
the age of thirteen, when her mother was said to have committed
suicide owing to the brutalities of her father. Yes, it is a cheerful
story. . . . Edward always called her "the girl", and it was very
pretty, the evident affection he had for her and she for him. And
Leonora's feet she would have kissed--those two were for her the
best man and the best woman on earth--and in heaven. I think that
she had not a thought of evil in her head--the poor girl. . . .
Well, anyhow, she chanted Edward's praises to me for the hour
together, but, as I have said, I could not make much of it. It
appeared that he had the D.S.O., and that his troop loved him
beyond the love of men. You never saw such a troop as his. And
he had the Royal Humane Society's medal with a clasp. That
meant, apparently, that he had twice jumped off the deck of a
troopship to rescue what the girl called "Tommies", who had fallen
overboard in the Red Sea and such places. He had been twice
recommended for the V.C., whatever that might mean, and,
although owing to some technicalities he had never received that
apparently coveted order, he had some special place about his
sovereign at the coronation. Or perhaps it was some post in the
Beefeaters'. She made him out like a cross between Lohengrin and
the Chevalier Bayard. Perhaps he was. . . . But he was too silent a
fellow to make that side of him really decorative. I remember
going to him at about that time and asking him what the D.S.O.
was, and he grunted out:
"It's a sort of a thing they give grocers who've honourably supplied
the troops with adulterated coffee in war-time"--something of that
sort. He did not quite carry conviction to me, so, in the end, I put
it directly to Leonora. I asked her fully and squarely--prefacing the
question with some remarks, such as those that I have already
given you, as to the difficulty one has in really getting to know
people when one's intimacy is conducted as an English
acquaintanceship--I asked her whether her husband was not really
a splendid fellow--along at least the lines of his public functions.
She looked at me with a slightly awakened air--with an air that
would have been almost startled if Leonora could ever have been
startled.
"Didn't you know?" she asked. "If I come to think of it there is not
a more splendid fellow in any three counties, pick them where you
will--along those lines." And she added, after she had looked at
me reflectively for what seemed a long time:
"To do my husband justice there could not be a better man on the
earth. There would not be room for it--along those lines."
"Well," I said, "then he must really be Lohengrin and the Cid in
one body. For there are not any other lines that count."
Again she looked at me for a long time.
"It's your opinion that there are no other lines that count?" she
asked slowly.
"Well," I answered gaily, "you're not going to accuse him of not
being a good husband, or of not being a good guardian to your
ward?"
She spoke then, slowly, like a person who is listening to the sounds
in a sea-shell held to her ear--and, would you believe it?--she told
me afterwards that, at that speech of mine, for the first time she
had a vague inkling of the tragedy that was to follow so
soon--although the girl had lived with them for eight years or so:
"Oh, I'm not thinking of saying that he is not the best of husbands,
or that he is not very fond of the girl."
And then I said something like:
"Well, Leonora, a man sees more of these things than even a wife.
And, let me tell you, that in all the years I've known Edward he
has never, in your absence, paid a moment's attention to any other
woman--not by the quivering of an eyelash. I should have noticed.
And he talks of you as if you were one of the angels of God."
"Oh," she came up to the scratch, as you could be sure Leonora
would always come up to the scratch, "I am perfectly sure that he
always speaks nicely of me."
I daresay she had practice in that sort of scene--people must have
been always complimenting her on her husband's fidelity and
adoration. For half the world--the whole of the world that knew
Edward and Leonora believed that his conviction in the Kilsyte
affair had been a miscarriage of justice--a conspiracy of false
evidence, got together by Nonconformist adversaries. But think of
the fool that I was. . . .
Read next: PART II: CHAPTER II
Read previous: PART I: CHAPTER VI
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