For many hours Margaret did nothing; then she controlled herself,
and wrote some letters. She was too bruised to speak to Henry;
she could pity him, and even determine to marry him, but as yet
all lay too deep in her heart for speech. On the surface the
sense of his degradation was too strong. She could not command
voice or look, and the gentle words that she forced out through
her pen seemed to proceed from some other person.
"My dearest boy," she began, "this is not to part us. It is
everything or nothing, and I mean it to be nothing. It happened
long before we ever met, and even if it had happened since, I
should be writing the same, I hope. I do understand."
But she crossed out "I do understand"; it struck a false note.
Henry could not bear to be understood. She also crossed out, "It
is everything or nothing." Henry would resent so strong a grasp
of the situation. She must not comment; comment is unfeminine.
"I think that'll about do," she thought.
Then the sense of his degradation choked her. Was he worth all
this bother? To have yielded to a woman of that sort was
everything, yes, it was, and she could not be his wife. She tried
to translate his temptation into her own language, and her brain
reeled. Men must be different even to want to yield to such a
temptation. Her belief in comradeship was stifled, and she saw
life as from that glass saloon on the Great Western which
sheltered male and female alike from the fresh air. Are the sexes
really races, each with its own code of morality, and their
mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going? Strip
human intercourse of the proprieties, and is it reduced to this?
Her judgment told her no. She knew that out of Nature's device we
have built a magic that will win us immortality. Far more
mysterious than the call of sex to sex is the tenderness that we
throw into that call; far wider is the gulf between us and the
farmyard than between the farmyard and the garbage that nourishes
it. We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends
that Theology dares not contemplate. "Men did produce one jewel,"
the gods will say, and, saying, will give us immortality.
Margaret knew all this, but for the moment she could not feel it,
and transformed the marriage of Evie and Mr. Cahill into a
carnival of fools, and her own marriage--too miserable to think
of that, she tore up the letter, and then wrote another:
DEAR MR. BAST,
"I have spoken to Mr. Wilcox about you, as I promised, and
am sorry to say that he has no vacancy for you.
Yours truly,
"M. J. SCHLEGEL."
She enclosed this in a note to Helen, over which she took less
trouble than she might have done; but her head was aching, and
she could not stop to pick her words:
"DEAR HELEN,
"Give him this. The Basts are no good. Henry found the
woman drunk on the lawn. I am having a room got ready for
you here, and will you please come round at once on getting
this? The Basts are not at all the type we should trouble
about. I may go round to them myself in the morning, and do
anything that is fair.
"M."
In writing this, Margaret felt that she was being practical.
Something might be arranged for the Basts later on, but they must
be silenced for the moment. She hoped to avoid a conversation
between the woman and Helen. She rang the bell for a servant, but
no one answered it; Mr. Wilcox and the Warringtons were gone to
bed, and the kitchen was abandoned to Saturnalia. Consequently
she went over to the George herself. She did not enter the hotel,
for discussion would have been perilous, and, saying that the
letter was important, she gave it to the waitress. As she
recrossed the square she saw Helen and Mr. Bast looking out of
the window of the coffee-room, and feared she was already too
late. Her task was not yet over; she ought to tell Henry what she
had done.
This came easily, for she saw him in the hall. The night wind had
been rattling the pictures against the wall, and the noise had
disturbed him.
"Who's there?" he called, quite the householder.
Margaret walked in and past him.
"I have asked Helen to sleep," she said. "She is best here; so
don't lock the front-door."
"I thought some one had got in," said Henry.
"At the same time I told the man that we could do nothing for
him. I don't know about later, but now the Basts must clearly
go."
"Did you say that your sister is sleeping here, after all?"
"Probably."
"Is she to be shown up to your room?"
"I have naturally nothing to say to her; I am going to bed. Will
you tell the servants about Helen? Could some one go to carry her
bag?"
He tapped a little gong, which had been bought to summon the
servants.
"You must make more noise than that if you want them to hear."
Henry opened a door, and down the corridor came shouts of
laughter. "Far too much screaming there," he said, and strode
towards it. Margaret went upstairs, uncertain whether to be glad
that they had met, or sorry. They had behaved as if nothing had
happened, and her deepest instincts told her that this was wrong.
For his own sake, some explanation was due.
And yet--what could an explanation tell her? A date, a place, a
few details, which she could imagine all too clearly. Now that
the first shock was over, she saw that there was every reason to
premise a Mrs. Bast. Henry's inner life had long laid open to
her--his intellectual confusion, his obtuseness to personal
influence, his strong but furtive passions. Should she refuse him
because his outer life corresponded? Perhaps. Perhaps, if the
dishonour had been done to her, but it was done long before her
day. She struggled against the feeling. She told herself that
Mrs. Wilcox's wrong was her own. But she was not a barren
theorist. As she undressed, her anger, her regard for the dead,
her desire for a scene, all grew weak. Henry must have it as he
liked, for she loved him, and some day she would use her love to
make him a better man.
Pity was at the bottom of her actions all through this crisis.
Pity, if one may generalise, is at the bottom of woman. When men
like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their
liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let
us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her
deeper nature, for good or for evil.
Here was the core of the question. Henry must be forgiven, and
made better by love; nothing else mattered. Mrs. Wilcox, that
unquiet yet kindly ghost, must be left to her own wrong. To her
everything was in proportion now, and she, too, would pity the
man who was blundering up and down their lives. Had Mrs. Wilcox
known of his trespass? An interesting question, but Margaret
fell asleep, tethered by affection, and lulled by the murmurs of
the river that descended all the night from Wales. She felt
herself at one with her future home, colouring it and coloured by
it, and awoke to see, for the second time, Oniton Castle
conquering the morning mists.
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