You have stores of patience, only now and then fits of desperation         
          DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS

FRANCIS received Mrs. Lawrie’s incoherent offensive letter, gulped down its unpalatable statement of fact, burned it, and rushed to his greenhouse to think it over and to master the anger that was rising in him. . . . He blamed himself for not having seen what was in the air and tried to remember incidents and conversations which should have given him the hint. He recollected several, quite enough to set him scourging himself for his blind neglect, until he began to ask himself what he could have done supposing he had seen and realised. Quite clearly he could not have forbidden Bennett the house. Interference was always dangerous where the emotions were concerned.

Most painful of all was the thought that Annette should not have had trust enough in him to seek his advice and comfort if she were in trouble. She must have suffered, he told himself, to make such a plunge into poverty and the responsibility of marriage. It must have been a tremendous flood of feeling that had swept her into it. . . . It was so pitiful: a mere child: children both of them.

In a second he found himself thinking the worst of it—a scrambled marriage of necessity. He put that from him. Of course not. Annette had been well and happy—except for her illness—extraordinarily happy, and so gentle and sympathetic and thoughtful, so blithe and busy. No wickedness there, no hypocritical covering up of dark gnawing secrets. Only the most absurd, pitiful [Pg 248]romantic folly, reckless defiance of all the laws of prudence.

If his thoughts of Annette were gentle and indulgent, he found it hard to extend his kindliness to Bennett. Young men would be young men, but they should leave young women alone. (Francis, still regarded young women as generically and fundamentally different from young men. To him young women who took any active part in the affairs of love were abnormal and unmaidenly. What exactly young men were to do with their ardour or where to present it, he did not know, and he was unconscious of any discrepancy in his thoughts.) The personal factor entered into his contemplation of this side of the pother. He told himself that Bennett had treated him very badly, had accepted his hospitality for years, received his indulgence in his affairs with Gertrude, his—to be sure, unsuccessful—assistance in the furtherance of his clerical ambitions, and then, secretly, with cunning and deceitfulness, he had played upon Annette’s young and innocent affections. There was an easy satisfaction in thus angrily vilifying Bennett, but it did not last long, for it led to a conception of Annette which did not sort with her nature as he knew it. She had always been curiously self-reliant and, quite clearly, fully cognisant of the facts of her existence and the purposes of her womanhood. Still he was reluctant to relinquish Bennett from the talons of his wrath. He was going to take Annette away, and could give no guarantee of his ability to provide for her and make her secure against the devastating influences of the hard struggle for daily bread. With his instinct for justice he asked himself what else they had to offer Annette, and, further, what they had given her from day to day ever since her return—drudgery, unending toil, a monotonous, trivial, and unrewarded activity. That brought him hotly near the heart of the mystery, but he turned his back on it, only to find himself most vividly remembering his visit to the house of the Lawries, and finding in that the explanation of Bennett’s share in the preposterous marriage. He had wondered then what would become of Bennett. [Pg 249]Now he was answered. . . . Presumably Mrs. Lawrie had not been misinformed. Obviously not. Her vituperation came from a fury of despair, a hopelessness in the face of a new turn of fate, which he felt to be so degrading that he desired to avoid it. Clearly there was nothing to be done. If it was salutary by a heavy use of the tongue to lacerate Annette and bring her to a sense of the seriousness of the thing she had done, he would—but he reflected that his wife would do all that and more than was necessary in that kind. For himself then there was nothing to be done and nothing to be said. If they found it impossible—as was more than likely—to live on Bennett’s income, something must be done to help them. Both families must contribute. . . For a moment he thought fantastically that the solution might be to ignore their marriage altogether, and keep Annette at home until Bennett could afford to keep her. He knew that for folly. If passion had so far blinded their reason that they had rushed into an insoluble compact, to thwart and repress it would be to invite unimagined disaster.

“It is beyond me,” he said. “Did these things happen when I was young? The world seems to be changing. I am too old to change with it.”

His last reflection was that, having swallowed Frederic’s disaster, he could not logically strain at Annette’s. He was wounded. Time would heal his wounds. Above all he must not be reduced to such an ignoble frenzy of bewilderment as Mrs. Lawrie. Then he felt sorry for the “garden-roller.”

“It must be,” he said, “very distressing to come on a hard stone in the middle of a soft lawn.”

That restored his humour. He took twelve little pots and began filling them with earth and fibre for his bulbs.

Annette came into the greenhouse. Francis suppressed a desire to run away. He did not look at her, but pretended to be absorbed in his work. Annette asked if she might help him.

“I think,” he said, “I think you had better close the door.”

[Pg 250]

Annette closed the door and stood with her back against it. Francis stole a glance at her. She was excited but there was no fear in her, only a sort of shy obstinacy. She said:

“How you love your greenhouse! You have been so much happier since we came here.”

“I have. And you?”

“I’m not altogether happy, because I want to go away.”

“My dear!”

“Yes. You can’t be quite happy when you’re going away from things and people you’ve loved and grown used to, can you?”

“I suppose not.”

“Father . . .” Francis trembled. His affections were touched. In his thoughts he had not realised the poignancy of his loss. It was going to be very painful; more painful almost than anything that had ever happened to him. He could not bear her hesitation, and he hastened the calamity.

“I know,” he said.

“You know?”

“Yes. I have had a letter from—his mother. She is very angry.”

“And you . . . Are you angry?”

“Oh! my dear, dear child . . .”

Then Annette was in his arms and they were crying together, and she was saying:

“Dear, dear father . . . I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t know it was going to be like this. I didn’t think, I didn’t think of anything but him. I haven’t thought of anything but him for a long time. . . .”

“But such a wedding . . . no cake, no presents, nobody to cry over you . . .”

“Only you, father.”

“I’m an old fool. I ought to be very angry with you. . . . But I’m not. I ought to be predicting the most horrible and miserable future for you. . . . But I can’t. . . . It’s much too serious. . . . I think you ought to tell your mother. It will hurt her less if it comes [Pg 251]from you than if it comes from me. I’ll tell the others. . . . There’s nothing to be said. I believe that you love each other. I will pray for your happiness. . . .”

“He’s ready for me,” said Annette. . . . “I wanted to go to him to-night, but I’ll wait until to-morrow if you like.”

Francis pondered that for a moment.

“No,” he said. “No, I think it would be best if you told your mother now and went away at once. It will save many tears. We shall have the night to get used to the idea. . . . It’s a new idea; rather a difficult one to digest—our little Annette a married woman.”

She told him then that Bennett was coming for her to the end of the street.

“And your belongings?” asked Francis.

“I was going to carry them.”

“Could you? I never thought they were so little. . . . Don’t brides usually have trousseaux?”

“I’m to have nothing that brides usually have. I don’t want anything.”

Francis filled the twelfth little pot, and very deliberately squeezed the mould down with his thumbs.

“I think,” he said, “I think that while you are talking to your mother I will walk along and see my—my son-in-law.”

“Yes. . . . Yes. Bennett will be glad to see you.”

“Will he?” said Francis dubiously.

They left the greenhouse. He watched Annette run upstairs, took his hat and stick and walked up the street. At the corner he saw a lean figure, standing under a lamp-post. It was Bennett. He was seized by a sudden fierce desire to hurt him and he gripped his stick more tightly and sawed with it up and down. He was walking rather faster than he knew and caught up with Bennett before the sudden mood had passed. His stick swung in the air, and Bennett was roused from his dreams of bliss by a sudden thwack across his loins. He was more startled than hurt, for he had not heard any approach.

“Ooh!” he cried, then recognised his assailant. “Mr. Folyat!”

[Pg 252]

Francis breathed heavily and raised his stick again. To feel Bennett’s flesh yielding under his blow had given him an intense and peculiar satisfaction, a pleasure so unwonted that his senses craved more of it. His mind however had shot ahead of his mood and he dropped his stick and said:

“I beg your pardon. . . . That was not what I intended. My intentions are frequently belied by my performances. . . . Did I hurt you?”

“You did.” Bennett rubbed his thigh ruefully, then stooped and restored his stick to Francis. They stared at each other by the light of the lamp-post and at length Francis said:

“Annette is telling her mother. She has just told me. I propose to stay with you until she comes. We should—a—we should know each other better.”

“I told my mother yesterday, I left her house last night.”

“It was foolish of you to quarrel.”

Francis laid his hand on Bennett’s arm and turned with him down the street. They passed up and down on the side opposite the house, Francis explaining as best he could how and why he had come to strike his son-in-law. He was very frank, and pointed out those elements of Bennett’s conduct of which, as a gentleman, he could not approve, but made it clear that they should not stand in the way of a friendly acceptance of the inevitable.

 

Upstairs in the drawing-room Annette had found her mother alone with Serge. Mrs. Folyat was knitting a never-ending woollen vest, and Serge was unwinding a skein for her round the back of a chair. Annette told her news. Serge went on winding the skein. Mrs. Folyat dropped her knitting, took off her spectacles, put them on again, pushed them up to her forehead and looked Annette up and down. Then very slowly, as though she was groping for her words, she said:

“I am thinking only of your father. This will bring his white hairs in sorrow to the grave.”

“I have told father,” said Annette

[Pg 253]

Mrs. Folyat was too far gone in sentimentality—forged sentiment—to feel anything. She had chosen what she thought the most appropriate and effective method of attack, only to find it parried. She clutched blindly at the first seemingly fit words that came to her mind, those which had already been used by Mrs. Lawrie:

“As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it.”

Serge rose and said:

“That is no reason why you should try to make it more uncomfortable, mother.”

Mrs. Folyat hardly heard him. She had begun to think (the specially ordained scourge of the sentimentalist) what people would say of her; not what they would say of Annette: she was incapable of seeing the affair from Annette’s point of view. One of her darling fictions, that of her perfect motherhood, was menaced. She was a she-lioness to protect it: her fictions were to her what her children m............