Godfrey gazed at her; he listened with parted lips, incredulous and appalled. “You invented such a tissue of falsities and calumnies, and you talk about your conscience? You stand there in your senses and proclaim your crime?”
“I’d have committed any crime that would have rescued us.”
“You insult and blacken and ruin your own father?” Godfrey kept on.
“He’ll never know it; she took a vow she wouldn’t tell him.”
“Ah I’ll he damned if I won’t tell him!” he rang out.
Adela felt sick at this, but she flamed up to resent the treachery, as it struck her, of such a menace. “I did right—I did right!” she vehemently declared “I went down on my knees to pray for guidance, and I saved mamma’s memory from outrage. But if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t”—she faltered an instant—”I’m not worse than you, and I’m not so bad, for you’ve done something that you’re ashamed to tell me.”
He had taken out his watch; he looked at it with quick intensity, as if not hearing nor heeding her. Then, his calculating eyes raised, he fixed her long enough to exclaim with unsurpassable horror and contempt: “You raving maniac!” He turned away from her; he bounded down the avenue in the direction from which they had come, and, while she watched him, strode away, across the grass, toward the short cut to the station.
CHAPTER IV
His bags, by the time she got home, had been brought to the house, but Beatrice and Muriel, immediately informed of this, waited for their brother in vain. Their sister said nothing to them of her having seen him, and she accepted after a little, with a calmness that surprised herself, the idea that he had returned to town to denounce her. She believed this would make no difference now—she had done what she had done. She had somehow a stiff faith in Mrs. Churchley. Once that so considerable mass had received its impetus it wouldn’t, it couldn’t pull up. It represented a heavy-footed person, incapable of further agility. Adela recognised too how well it might have come over her that there were too many children. Lastly the girl fortified herself with the reflexion, grotesque in the conditions and conducing to prove her sense of humour not high, that her father was after all not a man to be played with. It seemed to her at any rate that if she HAD baffled his unholy purpose she could bear anything—bear imprisonment and bread and water, bear lashes and torture, bear even his lifelong reproach. What she could bear least was the wonder of the inconvenience she had inflicted on Godfrey. She had time to turn this over, very vainly, for a succession of days—days more numerous than she had expected, which passed without bringing her from London any summons to come up and take her punishment. She sounded the possible, she compared the degrees of the probable; feeling however that as a cloistered girl she was poorly equipped for speculation. She tried to imagine the calamitous things young men might do, and could only feel that such things would naturally be connected either with borrowed money or with bad women. She became conscious that after all she knew almost nothing about either of those interests. The worst woman she knew was Mrs. Churchley herself. Meanwhile there was no reverberation from Seymour Street—only a sultry silence.
At Brinton she spent hours in her mother’s garden, where she had grown up, where she considered that she was training for old age, since she meant not to depend on whist. She loved the place as, had she been a good Catholic, she would have loved the smell of her parish church; and indeed there was in her passion for flowers something of the respect of a religion. They seemed to her the only things in the world that really respected themselves, unless one made an exception for Nutkins, who had been in command all through her mother’s time, with whom she had had a real friendship and who had been affected by their pure example. He was the person left in the world with whom on the whole she could speak most intimately of the dead. They never had to name her together—they only said “she”; and Nutkins freely conceded that she had taught him everything he knew. When Beatrice and Muriel said “she” they referred to Mrs. Churchley. Adela had reason to believe she should never marry, and that some day she should have about a thousand a year. This made her see in the far future a little garden of her own, under a hill, full of rare and exquisite things, where she would spend most of her old age on her knees with an apron and stout gloves, with a pair of shears and a trowel, steeped in the comfort of being thought mad.
One morning ten days after her scene with Godfrey, on coming back into the house shortly before lunch, she was met by Miss Flynn with the notification that a lady in the drawing-room had been waiting for her for some minutes. “A lady” suggested immediately Mrs. Churchley. It came over Adela that the form in which her penalty was to descend would be a personal explanation with that misdirected woman. The lady had given no name, and Miss Flynn hadn’t seen Mrs. Churchley; nevertheless the governess was certain Adela’s surmise was wrong.
“Is she big and dreadful?” the girl asked.
Miss Flynn, who was circumspection itself, took her time. “She’s dreadful, but she’s not big.” She added that she wasn’t sure she ought to let Adela go in alone; but this young lady took herself throughout for a heroine, and it wasn’t in a heroine to shrink from any encounter. Wasn’t she every instant in transcendent contact with her mother? The visitor might have no connexion whatever with the drama of her father’s frustrated marriage; but everything to-day for Adela was part of that.
Miss Flynn’s description had prepared her for a considerable shock, but she wasn’t agitated by her first glimpse of the person who awaited her. A youngish well-dressed woman stood there, and silence was between them while they looked at each other. Before either had spoken however Adela began to see what Miss Flynn had intended. In the light of the drawing-room window the lady was five-and-thirty years of age and had vivid yellow hair. She also had a blue cloth suit with brass buttons, a stick-up collar like a gentleman’s, a necktie arranged in a sailor’s knot, a golden pin in the shape of a little lawn-tennis racket, and pearl-grey gloves with big black stitchings. Adela’s second impression was that she was an actress, and her third that no such person had ever before crossed that threshold.
“I’ll tell you what I’ve come for,” said the apparition. “I’ve come to ask you to intercede.” She wasn’t an actress; an actress would have had a nicer voice.
“To intercede?” Adela was too bewildered to ask her to sit down.
“With your father, you know. He doesn’t know, but he’ll have to.” Her “have” sounded like “‘ave.” She explained, with many more such sounds, that she was Mrs. Godfrey, that they had been married seven mortal months. If Godfrey was going abroad she must go with him, and the only way she could go with him would be for his father to do something. He was afraid of his father—that was clear; he was afraid even to tell him. What she had come down for was to see some other member of the family face to face—”fice to fice,” Mrs. Godfrey called it—and try if he couldn’t be approached by another side. If no one else would act then she would just have to act herself. The Colonel would have to do something—that was the only way out of it.
What really happened Adela never quite understood; what seemed to be happening was that the room went round and round. Through the blur of perception accompanying this effect the sharp stabs of her visitor’s revelation came to her like the words heard by a patient “going off” under ether. She afterwards denied passionately even to herself that she had done anything so abject as to faint; but there was a lapse in her consciousness on the score of Miss Flynn’s intervention. This intervention had evidently been active, for when they talked the matter over, later in the day, with bated breath and infinite dissimulation for the school-room quarter, the governess had more lurid truths, and still more, to impart than to receive. She was at any rate under the impression that she had athletically contended, in the drawing-room, with the yellow hair—this after removing Adela from the scene and before inducing Mrs. Godfrey to withdraw. Miss Flynn had never known a more thrilling day, for all the rest of it too was pervaded with agitations and conversations, precautions and alarms. It was given out to Beatrice and Muriel that their sister had been taken suddenly ill, and the governess ministered to her in her room. Indeed Adela had never found herself less at ease, for this time she had received a blow that she couldn’t return. There was nothing to do but to take it, to endure the humiliation of her wound.