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IMMEDIATELY after Florence's death Leonora began to put the
leash upon Nancy Rufford and Edward. She had guessed what had
happened under the trees near the Casino. They stayed at
Nauheim some weeks after I went, and Leonora has told me that
that was the most deadly time of her existence. It seemed like a
long, silent duel with invisible weapons, so she said. And it was
rendered all the more difficult by the girl's entire innocence. For
Nancy was always trying to go off alone with Edward--as she had
been doing all her life, whenever she was home for holidays. She
just wanted him to say nice things to her again.
You see, the position was extremely complicated. It was as
complicated as it well could be, along delicate lines. There was
the complication caused by the fact that Edward and Leonora
never spoke to each other except when other people were present.
Then, as I have said, their demeanours were quite perfect. There
was the complication caused by the girl's entire innocence; there
was the further complication that both Edward and Leonora really
regarded the girl as their daughter. Or it might be more precise to
say that they regarded her as being Leonora's daughter. And Nancy
was a queer girl; it is very difficult to describe her to you.
She was tall and strikingly thin; she had a tortured mouth,
agonized eyes, and a quite extraordinary sense of fun. You, might
put it that at times she was exceedingly grotesque and at times
extraordinarily beautiful. Why, she had the heaviest head of black
hair that I have ever come across; I used to wonder how she could
bear the weight of it. She was just over twenty-one and at times
she seemed as old as the hills, at times not much more than
sixteen. At one moment she would be talking of the lives of the
saints and at the next she would be tumbling all over the lawn
with the St Bernard puppy. She could ride to hounds like a
Maenad and she could sit for hours perfectly still, steeping
handkerchief after handkerchief in vinegar when Leonora had one
of her headaches. She was, in short, a miracle of patience who
could be almost miraculously impatient. It was, no doubt, the
convent training that effected that. I remember that one of her
letters to me, when she was about sixteen, ran something like:
"On Corpus Christi"--or it may have been some other saint's day, I
cannot keep these things in my head--"our school played
Roehampton at Hockey. And, seeing that our side was losing,
being three goals to one against us at halftime, we retired into the
chapel and prayed for victory. We won by five goals to three."
And I remember that she seemed to describe afterwards a sort of
saturnalia. Apparently, when the victorious fifteen or eleven came
into the refectory for supper, the whole school jumped upon the
tables and cheered and broke the chairs on the floor and smashed
the crockery--for a given time, until the Reverend Mother rang a
hand-bell. That is of course the Catholic tradition--saturnalia that
can end in a moment, like the crack of a whip. I don't, of course,
like the tradition, but I am bound to say that it gave Nancy--or at
any rate Nancy had--a sense of rectitude that I have never seen
surpassed. It was a thing like a knife that looked out of her eyes
and that spoke with her voice, just now and then. It positively
frightened me. I suppose that I was almost afraid to be in a world
where there could be so fine a standard. I remember when she was
about fifteen or sixteen on going back to the convent I once gave
her a couple of English sovereigns as a tip. She thanked me in a
peculiarly heartfelt way, saying that it would come in extremely
handy. I asked her why and she explained. There was a rule at the
school that the pupils were not to speak when they walked
through the garden from the chapel to the refectory. And, since this
rule appeared to be idiotic and arbitrary, she broke it on purpose
day after day. In the evening the children were all asked if they
had committed any faults during the day, and every evening
Nancy confessed that she had broken this particular rule. It cost
her sixpence a time, that being the fine attached to the offence.
Just for the information I asked her why she always confessed,
and she answered in these exact words:
"Oh, well, the girls of the Holy Child have always been noted for
their truthfulness. It's a beastly bore, but I've got to do it."
I dare say that the miserable nature of her childhood, coming
before the mixture of saturnalia and discipline that was her
convent life, added something to her queernesses. Her father was
a violent madman of a fellow, a major of one of what I believe are
called the Highland regiments. He didn't drink, but he had an
ungovernable temper, and the first thing that Nancy could
remember was seeing her father strike her mother with his
clenched fist so that her mother fell over sideways from the
breakfast-table and lay motionless. The mother was no doubt an
irritating woman and the privates of that regiment appeared to
have been irritating, too, so that the house was a place of outcries
and perpetual disturbances. Mrs Rufford was Leonora's dearest
friend and Leonora could be cutting enough at times. But I fancy
she was as nothing to Mrs Rufford. The Major would come in to
lunch harassed and already spitting out oaths after an
unsatisfactory morning's drilling of his stubborn men beneath a
hot sun. And then Mrs Rufford would make some cutting remark
and pandemonium would break loose. Once, when she had been
about twelve, Nancy had tried to intervene between the pair of
them. Her father had struck her full upon the forehead a blow so
terrible that she had lain unconscious for three days. Nevertheless,
Nancy seemed to prefer her father to her mother. She remembered
rough kindnesses from him. Once or twice when she had been
quite small he had dressed her in a clumsy, impatient, but very
tender way. It was nearly always impossible to get a servant to stay
in the family and, for days at a time, apparently, Mrs Rufford
would be incapable. I fancy she drank. At any rate, she had so
cutting a tongue that even Nancy was afraid of her--she so made
fun of any tenderness, she so sneered at all emotional displays.
Nancy must have been a very emotional child.
Then one day, quite suddenly, on her return from a ride at Fort
William, Nancy had been sent, with her governess, who had a
white face, right down South to that convent school. She had been
expecting to go there in two months' time. Her mother
disappeared from her life at that time. A fortnight later Leonora
came to the convent and told her that her mother was dead.
Perhaps she was. At any rate, I never heard until the very end what
became of Mrs Rufford. Leonora never spoke of her.
And then Major Rufford went to India, from which he returned
very seldom and only for very short visits; and Nancy lived herself
gradually into the life at Branshaw Teleragh. I think that, from
that time onwards, she led a very happy life, till the end. There
were dogs and horses and old servants and the Forest. And there
were Edward and Leonora, who loved her.
I had known her all the time--I mean, that she always came to the
Ashburnhams' at Nauheim for the last fortnight of their stay--and I
watched her gradually growing. She was very cheerful with me.
She always even kissed me, night and morning, until she was
about eighteen. And she would skip about and fetch me things and
laugh at my tales of life in Philadelphia. But, beneath her gaiety, I
fancy that there lurked some terrors. I remember one day, when
she was just eighteen, during one of her father's rare visits to
Europe, we were sitting in the gardens, near the iron-stained
fountain. Leonora had one of her headaches and we were waiting
for Florence and Edward to come from their baths. You have no
idea how beautiful Nancy looked that morning.
We were talking about the desirability of taking tickets in
lotteries--of the moral side of it, I mean. She was all in white, and
so tall and fragile; and she had only just put her hair up, so that
the carriage of her neck had that charming touch of youth and of
unfamiliarity. Over her throat there played the reflection from a
little pool of water, left by a thunderstorm of the night before, and
all the rest of her features were in the diffused and luminous
shade of her white parasol. Her dark hair just showed beneath her
broad, white hat of pierced, chip straw; her throat was very long
and leaned forward, and her eyebrows, arching a little as she
laughed at some old-fashionedness in my phraseology, had
abandoned their tense line. And there was a little colour in her
cheeks and light in her deep blue eyes. And to think that that vivid
white thing, that saintly and swanlike being--to think that. . . Why,
she was like the sail of a ship, so white and so definite in her
movements. And to think that she will never . . . Why, she will
never do anything again. I can't believe it . . .
Anyhow, we were chattering away about the morality of lotteries.
And then, suddenly, there came from the arcades behind us the
overtones of her father's unmistakable voice; it was as if a
modified foghorn had boomed with a reed inside it. I looked
round to catch sight of him. A tall, fair, stiffly upright man of
fifty, he was walking away with an Italian baron who had had
much to do with the Belgian Congo. They must have been talking
about the proper treatment of natives, for I heard him say:
"Oh, hang humanity!"
When I looked again at Nancy her eyes were closed and her face
was more pallid than her dress, which had at least some pinkish
reflections from the gravel. It was dreadful to see her with her
eyes closed like that.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, and her hand that had appeared to be
groping, settled for a moment on my arm. "Never speak of it.
Promise never to tell my father of it. It brings back those dreadful
dreams . . ." And, when she opened her eyes she looked straight
into mine. "The blessed saints," she said, "you would think they
would spare you such things. I don't believe all the sinning in the
world could make one deserve them."
They say the poor thing was always allowed a light at night, even
in her bedroom. . . . And yet, no young girl could more archly and
lovingly have played with an adored father. She was always
holding him by both coat lapels; cross-questioning him as to how
he spent his time; kissing the top of his head. Ah, she was
well-bred, if ever anyone was.
The poor, wretched man cringed before her--but she could not
have done more to put him at his ease. Perhaps she had had
lessons in it at her convent. It was only that peculiar note of his
voice, used when he was overbearing or dogmatic, that could
unman her--and that was only visible when it came unexpectedly.
That was because the bad dreams that the blessed saints allowed
her to have for her sins always seemed to her to herald themselves
by the booming sound of her father's voice. It was that sound that
had always preceded his entrance for the terrible lunches of her
childhood. . . .
I have reported, earlier in this chapter, that Leonora said, during
that remainder of their stay at Nauheim, after I had left, it had
seemed to her that she was fighting a long duel with unseen
weapons against silent adversaries. Nancy, as I have also said, was
always trying to go off with Edward alone. That had been her
habit for years. And Leonora found it to be her duty to stop that. It
was very difficult. Nancy was used to having her own way, and for
years she had been used to going off with Edward, ratting,
rabbiting, catching salmon down at Fordingbridge, district-visiting
of the sort that Edward indulged in, or calling on the tenants. And
at Nauheim she and Edward had always gone up to the Casino
alone in the evenings--at any rate, whenever Florence did not call
for his attendance. It shows the obviously innocent nature of the
regard of those two that even Florence had never had any idea of
jealousy. Leonora had cultivated the habit of going to bed at ten
o'clock.
I don't know how she managed it, but, for all the time they were at
Nauheim, she contrived never to let those two be alone together,
except in broad daylight, in very crowded places. If a Protestant
had done that it would no doubt have awakened a
self-consciousness in the girl. But Catholics, who have always
reservations and queer spots of secrecy, can manage these things
better. And I dare say that two things made this easier--the death of
Florence and the fact that Edward was obviously sickening. He
appeared, indeed, to be very ill; his shoulders began to be bowed;
there were pockets under his eyes; he had extraordinary moments
of inattention.
And Leonora describes herself as watching him as a fierce cat
watches an unconscious pigeon in a roadway. In that silent
watching, again, I think she was a Catholic--of a people that can
think thoughts alien to ours and keep them to themselves. And the
thoughts passed through her mind; some of them even got through
to Edward with never a word spoken. At first she thought that it
might be remorse, or grief, for the death of Florence that was
oppressing him. But she watched and watched, and uttered
apparently random sentences about Florence before the girl, and
she perceived that he had no grief and no remorse. He had not any
idea that Florence could have committed suicide without writing
at least a tirade to him. The absence of that made him certain that
it had been heart disease. For Florence had never undeceived him
on that point. She thought it made her seem more romantic.
No, Edward had no remorse. He was able to say to himself that he
had treated Florence with gallant attentiveness of the kind that she
desired until two hours before her death. Leonora gathered that
from the look in his eyes, and from the way he straightened his
shoulders over her as she lay in her coffin--from that and a
thousand other little things. She would speak suddenly about
Florence to the girl and he would not start in the least; he would
not even pay attention, but would sit with bloodshot eyes gazing at
the tablecloth. He drank a good deal, at that time--a steady soaking
of drink every evening till long after they had gone to bed.
For Leonora made the girl go to bed at ten, unreasonable though
that seemed to Nancy. She would understand that, whilst they
were in a sort of half mourning for Florence, she ought not to be
seen at public places, like the Casino; but she could not see why
she should not accompany her uncle upon his evening strolls
though the park. I don't know what Leonora put up as an
excuse--something, I fancy, in the nature of a nightly orison that
she made the girl and herself perform for the soul of Florence.
And then, one evening, about a fortnight later, when the girl,
growing restive at even devotional exercises, clamoured once
more to be allowed to go for a walk with Edward, and when
Leonora was really at her wits' end, Edward gave himself into her
hands. He was just standing up from dinner and had his face
averted.
But he turned his heavy head and his bloodshot eyes upon his wife
and looked full at her.
"Doctor von Hauptmann," he said, "has ordered me to go to bed
immediately after dinner. My heart's much worse."
He continued to look at Leonora for a long minute--with a sort of
heavy contempt. And Leonora understood that, with his speech, he
was giving her the excuse that she needed for separating him from
the girl, and with his eyes he was reproaching her for thinking that
he would try to corrupt Nancy.
He went silently up to his room and sat there for a long time--until
the girl was well in bed--reading in the Anglican prayer-book.
And about half-past ten she heard his footsteps pass her door,
going outwards. Two and a half hours later they came back,
stumbling heavily.
She remained, reflecting upon this position until the last night of
their stay at Nauheim. Then she suddenly acted. For, just in the
same way, suddenly after dinner, she looked at him and said:
"Teddy, don't you think you could take a night off from your
doctor's orders and go with Nancy to the Casino. The poor child
has had her visit so spoiled."
He looked at her in turn for a long, balancing minute.
"Why, yes," he said at last.
Nancy jumped out of her chair and kissed him. Those two words,
Leonora said, gave her the greatest relief of any two syllables she
had ever heard in her life. For she realized that Edward was
breaking up, not under the desire for possession, but from the
dogged determination to hold his hand. She could relax some of
her vigilance.
Nevertheless, she sat in the darkness behind her half-closed
jalousies, looking over the street and the night and the trees until,
very late, she could hear Nancy's clear voice coming closer and
saying:
"You did look an old guy with that false nose." There had been
some sort of celebration of a local holiday up in the Kursaal. And
Edward replied with his sort of sulky good nature:
"As for you, you looked like old Mother Sideacher."
The girl came swinging along, a silhouette beneath a gas-lamp;
Edward, another, slouched at her side. They were talking just as
they had talked any time since the girl had been seventeen; with
the same tones, the same joke about an old beggar woman who
always amused them at Branshaw. The girl, a little later, opened
Leonora's door whilst she was still kissing Edward on the forehead
as she had done every night.
"We've had a most glorious time," she said. "He's ever so much
better. He raced me for twenty yards home. Why are you all in the
dark?"
Leonora could hear Edward going about in his room, but, owing to
the girl's chatter, she could not tell whether he went out again or
not. And then, very much later, because she thought that if he
were drinking again something must be done to stop it, she
opened for the first time, and very softly, the never-opened door
between their rooms. She wanted to see if he had gone out again.
Edward was kneeling beside his bed with his head hidden in the
counterpane. His arms, outstretched, held out before him a little
image of the Blessed Virgin--a tawdry, scarlet and Prussian blue
affair that the girl had given him on her first return from the
convent. His shoulders heaved convulsively three times, and
heavy sobs came from him before she could close the door. He
was not a Catholic; but that was the way it took him.
Leonora slept for the first time that night with a sleep from which
she never once started.
Read next: PART III: CHAPTER III
Read previous: PART III: CHAPTER I
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