She would have lain awake anyhow, but she was greatly helped in this by Mr. Pope's restlessness. He was now turning over from left to right or from right to left at intervals of from four to seven minutes, and such remarks as "Damned scoundrel! Get out of this!" or "My daughter and degrade yourself in this way!" or "Never let me see your face again!" "Plight your troth to one man, and fling yourself shamelessly—I repeat it, Marjorie, shamelessly—into the arms of another!" kept Mrs. Pope closely in touch with the general trend of his thoughts.
She tried to get together her plans and perceptions rather as though she swept up dead leaves on a gusty day. She knew that the management of the whole situation rested finally on her, and that whatever she did or did not do, or whatever arose to thwart her arrangements, its entire tale of responsibility would ultimately fall upon her shoulders. She wondered what was to be done with Marjorie, with Mr. Magnet? Need he know? Could that situation be saved? Everything at present was raw in her mind. Except for her husband's informal communications she did not even know what had appeared, what Daffy had seen, what Magnet thought of Marjorie's failure to bid him good-night. For example, had Mr. Magnet noticed Mr. Pope's profound disturbance? She had to be ready to put a face on things before morning, and it seemed impossible she could do so. In times of crisis, as every woman knows, it is always necessary to misrepresent everything to everybody, but how she was to dovetail her misrepresentations, get the best effect from them, extract a working system of rights and wrongs from them, she could not imagine....
(Oh! she did so wish Mr. Pope would lie quiet.)
But he had no doubts of what became him. He had to maintain a splendid and irrational rage—at any cost—to anybody.
§ 2
A few yards away, a wakeful Marjorie confronted a joyless universe. She had a baffling realization that her life was in a hopeless mess, that she really had behaved disgracefully, and that she couldn't for a moment understand how it had happened. She had intended to make quite sure of Trafford—and then put things straight.
Only her father had spoilt everything.
She regarded her father that night with a want of natural affection terrible to record. Why had he come just when he had, just as he had? Why had he been so violent, so impossible?
Of course, she had no business to be there....
She examined her character with a new unprecedented detachment. Wasn't she, after all, rather a mean human being? It had never occurred to her before to ask such a question. Now she asked it with only too clear a sense of the answer. She tried to trace how these multiplying threads of meanness had first come into the fabric of a life she had supposed herself to be weaving in extremely bright, honourable, and adventurous colours. She ought, of course, never to have accepted Magnet....
She faced the disagreeable word; was she a liar?
At any rate, she told lies.
And she'd behaved with extraordinary meanness to Daphne. She realized that now. She had known, as precisely as if she had been told, how Daphne felt about Trafford, and she'd never given her an inkling of her own relations. She hadn't for a moment thought of Daphne. No wonder Daffy was sombre and bitter. Whatever she knew, she knew enough. She had heard Trafford's name in urgent whispers on the landing. "I suppose you couldn't leave him alone," Daffy had said, after a long hostile silence. That was all. Just a sentence without prelude or answer flung across the bedroom, revealing a perfect understanding—deeps of angry disillusionment. Marjorie had stared and gasped, and made no answer.
Would she ever see him again? After this horror of rowdy intervention? She didn't deserve to; she didn't deserve anything.... Oh, the tangle of it all! The tangle of it all! And those bills at Oxbridge! She was just dragging Trafford down into her own miserable morass of a life.
Her thoughts would take a new turn. "I love him," she whispered soundlessly. "I would die for him. I would like to lie under his feet—and him not know it."
Her mind hung on that for a long time. "Not know it until afterwards," she corrected.
She liked to be exact, even in despair....
And then in her memory he was struck again, and stood stiff and still. She wanted to kneel to him, imagined herself kneeling....
And so on, quite inconclusively, round and round through the interminable night hours.
§ 3
The young man in the village was, if possible, more perplexed, round-eyed and generally inconclusive than anyone else in this series of nocturnal disturbances. He spent long intervals sitting on his window-sill regarding a world that was scented with nightstock, and seemed to be woven of moonshine and gossamer. Being an inexpert and infrequent soliloquist, his only audible comment on his difficulties was the repetition in varying intonations of his fervent, unalterable conviction that he was damned. But behind this simple verbal mask was a great fury of mental activity.
He had something of Marjorie's amazement at the position of affairs.
He had never properly realized that it was possible for any one to regard Marjorie as a daughter, to order her about and resent the research for her society as criminal. It was a new light in his world. Some day he was to learn the meaning of fatherhood, but in these night watches he regarded it as a hideous survival of mediæval darknesses.
"Of course," he said, entirely ignoring the actual quality of their conversation, "she had to explain about the Magnet affair. Can't one—converse?"
He reflected through great intervals.
"I will see her! Why on earth shouldn't I see her?"
"I suppose they can't lock her up!"
For a time he contemplated a writ of Habeas Corpus. He saw reason to regret the gaps in his legal knowledge.
"Can any one get a writ of Habeas Corpus for any one—it doesn't matter whom"—more especially if you are a young man of six-and-twenty, anxious to exchange a few richly charged words with a girl of twenty who is engaged to someone else?
The night had no answer.
It was nearly dawn when he came to the entirely inadvisable conclusion—I use his own word's—to go and have it out with the old ruffian. He would sit down and ask him what he meant by it all—and reason with him. If he started flourishing that stick again, it would have to be taken away.
And having composed a peroration upon the institution of the family of a character which he fondly supposed to be extraordinarily tolerant, reasonable and convincing, but which was indeed calculated to madden Mr. Pope to frenzy, Mr. Trafford went very peacefully to sleep.
§ 4
Came dawn, with a noise of birds and afterwards a little sleep, and then day, and heavy eyes opened again, and the sound of frying and the smell of coffee recalled our actors to the stage. Mrs. Pope was past her worst despair; always the morning brings courage and a clearer grasp of things, and she could face the world with plans shaped subconsciously during those last healing moments of slumber.
Breakfast was difficult, but not impossible. Mr. Pope loomed like a thundercloud, but Marjorie pleaded a headache very wisely, and was taken a sympathetic cup of tea. The pseudo-twins scented trouble, but Theodore was heedless and over-full of an entertaining noise made by a moorhen as it dived in the ornamental water that morning. You could make it practically sotto voce, and it amused Syd. He seemed to think the Times opaque to such small sounds, and learnt better only to be dismissed underfed and ignominiously from the table to meditate upon the imperfections of his soul in the schoolroom. There for a time he was silent, and then presently became audible again, playing with a ball and, presumably, Marjorie's tennis racquet.