CHAPTER II
Adela was so far right as that by the end of the week, though she
remained certain, her father had still not made the announcement she
dreaded. What convinced her was the sense of her changed relations
with him--of there being between them something unexpressed,
something she was aware of as she would have been of an open wound.
When she spoke of this to Godfrey he said the change was of her own
making--also that she was cruelly unjust to the governor. She
suffered even more from her brother's unexpected perversity; she had
had so different a theory about him that her disappointment was
almost an humiliation and she needed all her fortitude to pitch her
faith lower. She wondered what had happened to him and why he so
failed her. She would have trusted him to feel right about anything,
above all about such a question. Their worship of their mother's
memory, their recognition of her sacred place in their past, her
exquisite influence in their father's life, his fortune, his career,
in the whole history of the family and welfare of the house--
accomplished clever gentle good beautiful and capable as she had
been, a woman whose quiet distinction was universally admired, so
that on her death one of the Princesses, the most august of her
friends, had written Adela such a note about her as princesses were
understood very seldom to write: their hushed tenderness over all
this was like a religion, and was also an attributive honour, to fall
away from which was a form of treachery. This wasn't the way people
usually felt in London, she knew; but strenuous ardent observant girl
as she was, with secrecies of sentiment and dim originalities of
attitude, she had already made up her mind that London was no
treasure-house of delicacies. Remembrance there was hammered thin--
to be faithful was to make society gape. The patient dead were
sacrificed; they had no shrines, for people were literally ashamed of
mourning. When they had hustled all sensibility out of their lives
they invented the fiction that they felt too much to utter. Adela
said nothing to her sisters; this reticence was part of the virtue it
was her idea to practise for them. SHE was to be their mother, a
direct deputy and representative. Before the vision of that other
woman parading in such a character she felt capable of ingenuities,
of deep diplomacies. The essence of these indeed was just
tremulously to watch her father. Five days after they had dined
together at Mrs. Churchley's he asked her if she had been to see that
lady.
"No indeed, why should I?" Adela knew that he knew she hadn't been,
since Mrs. Churchley would have told him.
"Don't you call on people after you dine with them?" said Colonel
Chart.
"Yes, in the course of time. I don't rush off within the week."
Her father looked at her, and his eyes were colder than she had ever
seen them, which was probably, she reflected, just the way hers
appeared to himself. "Then you'll please rush off to-morrow. She's
to dine with us on the 12th, and I shall expect your sisters to come
down."
Adela stared. "To a dinner-party?"
"It's not to be a dinner-party. I want them to know Mrs. Churchley."
"Is there to be nobody else?"
"Godfrey of course. A family party," he said with an assurance
before which she turned cold.
The girl asked her brother that evening if THAT wasn't tantamount to
an announcement. He looked at her queerly and then said: "I'VE been
to see her."
"What on earth did you do that for?"
"Father told me he wished it."
"Then he HAS told you?"
"Told me what?" Godfrey asked while her heart sank with the sense of
his making difficulties for her.
"That they're engaged, of course. What else can all this mean?"
"He didn't tell me that, but I like her."
"LIKE her!" the girl shrieked.
"She's very kind, very good."
"To thrust herself upon us when we hate her? Is that what you call
kind? Is that what you call decent?"
"Oh _I_ don't hate her"--and he turned away as if she bored him.
She called the next day on Mrs. Churchley, designing to break out
somehow, to plead, to appeal--"Oh spare us! have mercy on us! let him
alone! go away!" But that wasn't easy when they were face to face.
Mrs. Churchley had every intention of getting, as she would have
said--she was perpetually using the expression--into touch; but her
good intentions were as depressing as a tailor's misfits. She could
never understand that they had no place for her vulgar charity, that
their life was filled with a fragrance of perfection for which she
had no sense fine enough. She was as undomestic as a shop-front and
as out of tune as a parrot. She would either make them live in the
streets or bring the streets into their life--it was the same thing.
She had evidently never read a book, and she used intonations that
Adela had never heard, as if she had been an Australian or an
American. She understood everything in a vulgar sense; speaking of
Godfrey's visit to her and praising him according to her idea, saying
horrid things about him--that he was awfully good-looking, a perfect
gentleman, the kind she liked. How could her father, who was after
all in everything else such a dear, listen to a woman, or endure her,
who thought she pleased him when she called the son of his dead wife
a perfect gentleman? What would he have been, pray? Much she knew
about what any of them were! When she told Adela she wanted her to
like her the girl thought for an instant her opportunity had come--
the chance to plead with her and beg her off. But she presented such
an impenetrable surface that it would have been like giving a message
to a varnished door. She wasn't a woman, said Adela; she was an
address.
When she dined in Seymour Street the "children," as the girl called
the others, including Godfrey, liked her. Beatrice and Muriel stared
shyly and silently at the wonders of her apparel (she was brutally
over-dressed) without of course guessing the danger that tainted the
air. They supposed her in their innocence to be amusing, and they
didn't know, any more than she did herself, how she patronised them.
When she was upstairs with them after dinner Adela could see her look
round the room at the things she meant to alter--their mother's
things, not a bit like her own and not good enough for her. After a
quarter of an hour of this our young lady felt sure she was deciding
that Seymour Street wouldn't do at all, the dear old home that had
done for their mother those twenty years. Was she plotting to
transport them all to her horrible Prince's Gate? Of one thing at
any rate Adela was certain: her father, at that moment alone in the
dining-room with Godfrey, pretending to drink another glass of wine
to make time, was coming to the point, was telling the news. When
they reappeared they both, to her eyes, looked unnatural: the news
had been told.
She had it from Godfrey before Mrs. Churchley left the house, when,
after a brief interval, he followed her out of the drawing-room on
her taking her sisters to bed. She was waiting for him at the door
of her room. Her father was then alone with his fiancee--the word
was grotesque to Adela; it was already as if the place were her home.
"What did you say to him?" our young woman asked when her brother had
told her.
"I said nothing." Then he added, colouring--the expression of her
face was such--"There was nothing to say."
"Is that how it strikes you?"--and she stared at the lamp.
"He asked me to speak to her," Godfrey went on.
"In what hideous sense?"
"To tell her I was glad."
"And did you?" Adela panted.
"I don't know. I said something. She kissed me."
"Oh how COULD you?" shuddered the girl, who covered her face with her
hands.
"He says she's very rich," her brother returned.
"Is that why you kissed her?"
"I didn't kiss her. Good-night." And the young man, turning his
back, went out.
When he had gone Adela locked herself in as with the fear she should
be overtaken or invaded, and during a sleepless feverish memorable
night she took counsel of her uncompromising spirit. She saw things
as they were, in all the indignity of life. The levity, the mockery,
the infidelity, the ugliness, lay as plain as a map before her; it
was a world of gross practical jokes, a world pour rire; but she
cried about it all the same. The morning dawned early, or rather it
seemed to her there had been no night, nothing but a sickly creeping
day. But by the time she heard the house stirring again she had
determined what to do. When she came down to the breakfast-room her
father was already in his place with newspapers and letters; and she
expected the first words he would utter to be a rebuke to her for
having disappeared the night before without taking leave of Mrs.
Churchley. Then she saw he wished to be intensely kind, to make
every allowance, to conciliate and console her. He knew she had
heard from Godfrey, and he got up and kissed her. He told her as
quickly as possible, to have it over, stammering a little, with an
"I've a piece of news for you that will probably shock you," yet
looking even exaggeratedly grave and rather pompous, to inspire the
respect he didn't deserve. When he kissed her she melted, she burst
into tears. He held her against him, kissing her again and again,
saying tenderly "Yes, yes, I know, I know." But he didn't know else
he couldn't have done it. Beatrice and Muriel came in, frightened
when they saw her crying, and still more scared when she turned to
them with words and an air that were terrible in their comfortable
little lives: "Papa's going to be married; he's going to marry Mrs.
Churchley!" After staring a moment and seeing their father look as
strange, on his side, as Adela, though in a different way, the
children also began to cry, so that when the servants arrived with
tea and boiled eggs these functionaries were greatly embarrassed with
their burden, not knowing whether to come in or hang back. They all
scraped together a decorum, and as soon as the things had been put on
table the Colonel banished the men with a glance. Then he made a
little affectionate speech to Beatrice and Muriel, in which he
described Mrs. Churchley as the kindest, the most delightful of
women, only wanting to make them happy, only wanting to make HIM
happy, and convinced that he would be if they were and that they
would be if he was.
"What do such words mean?" Adela asked herself. She declared
privately that they meant nothing, but she was silent, and every one
was silent, on account of the advent of Miss Flynn the governess,
before whom Colonel Chart preferred not to discuss the situation.
Adela recognised on the spot that if things were to go as he wished
his children would practically never again be alone with him. He
would spend all his time with Mrs. Churchley till they were married,
and then Mrs. Churchley would spend all her time with him. Adela was
ashamed of him, and that was horrible--all the more that every one
else would be, all his other friends, every one who had known her
mother. But the public dishonour to that high memory shouldn't be
enacted; he shouldn't do as he wished.
After breakfast her father remarked to her that it would give him
pleasure if in a day or two she would take her sisters to see their
friend, and she replied that he should be obeyed. He held her hand a
moment, looking at her with an argument in his eyes which presently
hardened into sternness. He wanted to know that she forgave him, but
also wanted to assure her that he expected her to mind what she did,
to go straight. She turned away her eyes; she was indeed ashamed of
him.
She waited three days and then conveyed her sisters to the repaire,
as she would have been ready to term it, of the lioness. That queen
of beasts was surrounded with callers, as Adela knew she would be; it
was her "day" and the occasion the girl preferred. Before this she
had spent all her time with her companions, talking to them about
their mother, playing on their memory of her, making them cry and
making them laugh, reminding them of blest hours of their early
childhood, telling them anecdotes of her own. None the less she
confided to them that she believed there was no harm at all in Mrs.
Churchley, and that when the time should come she would probably take
them out immensely. She saw with smothered irritation that they
enjoyed their visit at Prince's Gate; they had never been at anything
so "grown-up," nor seen so many smart bonnets and brilliant
complexions. Moreover they were considered with interest, quite as
if, being minor elements, yet perceptible ones, of Mrs. Churchley's
new life, they had been described in advance and were the heroines of
the occasion. There were so many ladies present that this personage
didn't talk to them much; she only called them her "chicks" and asked
them to hand about tea-cups and bread and butter. All of which was
highly agreeable and indeed intensely exciting to Beatrice and
Muriel, who had little round red spots in THEIR cheeks when they came
away. Adela quivered with the sense that her mother's children were
now Mrs. Churchley's "chicks" and a part of the furniture of Mrs.
Churchley's dreadful consciousness.
It was one thing to have made up her mind, however; it was another
thing to make her attempt. It was when she learned from Godfrey that
the day was fixed, the 20th of July, only six weeks removed, that she
felt the importance of prompt action. She learned everything from
Godfrey now, having decided it would be hypocrisy to question her
father. Even her silence was hypocritical, but she couldn't weep and
wail. Her father showed extreme tact; taking no notice of her
detachment, treating it as a moment of bouderie he was bound to allow
her and that would pout itself away. She debated much as to whether
she should take Godfrey into her confidence; she would have done so
without hesitation if he hadn't disappointed her. He was so little
what she might have expected, and so perversely preoccupied that she
could explain it only by the high pressure at which he was living,
his anxiety about his "exam." He was in a fidget, in a fever,
putting on a spurt to come in first; sceptical moreover about his
success and cynical about everything else. He appeared to agree to
the general axiom that they didn't want a strange woman thrust into
their life, but he found Mrs. Churchley "very jolly as a person to
know." He had been to see her by himself--he had been to see her
three times. He in fact gave it out that he would make the most of
her now; he should probably be so little in Seymour Street after
these days. What Adela at last determined to give him was her
assurance that the marriage would never take place. When he asked
what she meant and who was to prevent it she replied that the
interesting couple would abandon the idea of themselves, or that Mrs.
Churchley at least would after a week or two back out of it.
"That will be really horrid then," Godfrey pronounced. "The only
respectable thing, at the point they've come to, is to put it
through. Charming for poor Dad to have the air of being 'chucked'!"
This made her hesitate two days more, but she found answers more
valid than any objections. The many-voiced answer to everything--it
was like the autumn wind round the house--was the affront that fell
back on her mother. Her mother was dead but it killed her again. So
one morning at eleven o'clock, when she knew her father was writing
letters, she went out quietly and, stopping the first hansom she met,
drove to Prince's Gate. Mrs. Churchley was at home, and she was
shown into the drawing-room with the request that she would wait five
minutes. She waited without the sense of breaking down at the last,
and the impulse to run away, which were what she had expected to
have. In the cab and at the door her heart had beat terribly, but
now suddenly, with the game really to play, she found herself lucid
and calm. It was a joy to her to feel later that this was the way
Mrs. Churchley found her: not confused, not stammering nor
prevaricating, only a little amazed at her own courage, conscious of
the immense responsibility of her step and wonderfully older than her
years. Her hostess sounded her at first with suspicious eyes, but
eventually, to Adela's surprise, burst into tears. At this the girl
herself cried, and with the secret happiness of believing they were
saved. Mrs. Churchley said she would think over what she had been
told, and she promised her young friend, freely enough and very
firmly, not to betray the secret of the latter's step to the Colonel.
They were saved--they were saved: the words sung themselves in the
girl's soul as she came downstairs. When the door opened for her she
saw her brother on the step, and they looked at each other in
surprise, each finding it on the part of the other an odd hour for
Prince's Gate. Godfrey remarked that Mrs. Churchley would have
enough of the family, and Adela answered that she would perhaps have
too much. None the less the young man went in while his sister took
her way home.
