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 farm-yard
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 someone 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 someone
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 bargain 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 generalize, 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.
