“Sir” cries Adams, “I assure you she is as innocent as myself.”         
          JOSEPH ANDREWS.

MRS. FOLYAT found the position of a grandmother entirely to her liking—the maximum of opportunity for beatific clucking with no responsibility. Annette had three children, Gertrude two, and Minna two, and Mrs. Folyat had already a large collection of their sayings for quotation in company, the most popular being an ode addressed by Annette’s second boy to Mr. Gladstone, who had visited our town several times when its allegiance to the Liberal cause began to waver.

Minna brought her two children to stay in Burdley Park. They came for a fortnight and stayed four months. They would have stayed longer but that Francis began to be anxious and, after a good deal of cogitation, shyly questioned Minna as to her husband’s doings.

“Basil is having a bad year,” said Minna. “We’re horribly poor sometimes. Rents in London are so dear.”

“Even so,” said Francis, “it seems hardly wise to leave him for so long.”

“We have rows.” Minna seemed to be quite cheerful about it. “Poor people always do have rows. They get so afraid, that they can’t enjoy anything else.”

“I was beginning to think that something serious might have happened.”

“Oh, no. I’m still Basil’s ‘darling wife’ when he writes to me, and he is my ‘devoted husband.’”

“Marriage,” said Francis, “is very difficult.”

“Of course it is, to anybody who isn’t an angel like you. . . . I’ll go back and try again.”

[Pg 310]

Francis sucked at his pipe thoughtfully.

“I oughtn’t to tell you this,” he said, “but Annette ran away once.”

“Did she?”

“Yes, after breakfast. She was back again in time to give Bennett his tea.”

 

Two days later Minna returned to London. The day after she had gone, Basil appeared with a drawn, miserable face. He asked Francis if he might speak to him, and Francis, quaking, led him into the study. Basil said he had been abroad. Minna had run away from him with the children.

“She came here,” said Francis. “For all we know, she was writing to you every day and hearing from you. She said she was hearing from you. . . . Only just before she went she spoke about your letters. She went back to London yesterday. You ought to be with her. . . . In my opinion you ought to have fetched her back months ago.”

Basil seemed to have a great deal to say, but he gulped it down and reached out for the railway guide.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose we must try again.”

“If you want money,” said Francis, “I would rather you came to me than were obliged to any one else.”

“It isn’t money. Thanks all the same.”

Francis felt his heart sink, but he let it pass. It seemed all the more imperative to him that Basil should hurry back to London. He bustled him out of the house and saw him to the station.

 

Three weeks passed during which no word came from Minna or Basil. Francis did not write to them, hoping that they were settling their differences—whatever they might be.

One morning when he was up early he took in the letters and found one from Minna addressed to Mary. He watched Mary read it at breakfast. Without looking up she thrust it back into its envelope, her hand trembling so that the paper rustled, and slipped it into her pocket.

[Pg 311]

“Who’s your letter from,” asked Mrs. Folyat. Francis held his breath.

“It’s from Fawcett’s, the music-publishers. They haven’t got the piece I wanted. Perhaps I didn’t give the name right.”

Francis breathed again.

Mary disappeared soon after breakfast. She went to Serge’s studio. He was out. She waited for him all day and had nothing to eat. She did not even light the gas but sat thinking, thinking on no thought. Serge found her in the dark.

“Why, Mary!” he said.

She held out Minna’s letter, and he sat and read it.

“Have you told anybody at home?”

“No. It’s too awful.”

“It isn’t awful at all. It’s very silly of them to be angry with each other.”

“But divorce. . . . It’s wicked.”

“Nonsense. It may be necessary. It often is. . . . She’ll want a good deal of sympathy.”

“She doesn’t deserve any.”

“How absurd you screwed-up people are! You don’t give sympathy because people deserve it, but because they need it.”

Mary pondered that for a moment or two. Then she asked:

“What did you say I was?”

“Screwed-up.”

Mary said nothing.

“We’d better burn this,” said Serge. “We shall have to be discreet. Letters nearly always convey wrong impressions.”

“Shall I write to Minna?”

“If you want to. Don’t give her your opinion. She won’t want it.”

“Who is to tell them at home?”

“I will, if you like.”

“That’s what I wanted you to do. . . . I felt that something was happening all the time Minna was here.”

“I’ll go home with you now.”

[Pg 312]

“I think the sooner the better. . . . Something awful might happen.”

 

Serge found his father in the greenhouse and went straight to the point. Francis was in his shirt-sleeves. He laid down his trowel and very slowly put on his coat.

“I knew something was happening, but I never thought it could be as bad as that.”

He sat down heavily and blinked through his spectacles.

“I seem,” he said, “I seem to have brought my children into the world to very little happiness. I suppose Minna ought never to have married a poor man. . . . It’s very queer, Serge, very queer. One reads of these things and the rights and wrongs of them appear to be very simple. They happen in one’s own family and the rights and wrongs don’t appear so simple. . . . If Minna were to come in now, I should be glad to see her. I should at least know that she was safe. . . .”

“The truth is,” said Serge, “that the rights and wrongs don’t matter. You either love people or you don’t. If you love them, you help them. If you don’t, some one else does.”

“I think,” said Francis, “I had better go to London. I always liked Basil. He always liked me. I might be able to make him see reason. . . . Minna says she is innocent. He ought to take her back.”

“My dear father, that isn’t reason. That is nonsense. . . . You’re thinking of what people will say. Public opinion doesn’t matter any more than my opinion or your opinion. If they have fallen so far apart as to wish to break the tie between them it will be quite impossible for them to live together without degradation——”

“You go so fast. I can’t follow you. I don’t see . . .”

“It is always degrading for a man and a woman to live together when they have no love for each other.”

“Dear me!” murmured Francis. “Dear me!” His face wore an expression of immense surprise. He went on muttering to himself in a puzzled way, and finally, with a sort of triumph, as though he had found the solution of his riddle:

[Pg 313]

“But if they are married?”

“My dear father, you must admit that love and marriage are two very different things. Love is divine, marriage is human.”

“But——”

“Marriage is not a divine ordinance. It is a respectable human institution contrived for the comfortable existence of society.”

“I am thinking of Minna’s children.”

“So am I.”

“She will lose them.”

“That is her affair. Anything is better for them than being brought up in a house with a man and a woman who hate each other.”

“I can’t admit that.”

“As a matter of principle, perhaps not; as a matter of practice, you will, just as you took over Frederic’s mess. . . .”

“How did that turn out?”

“Splendidly.”

Very slowly Francis turned that over in his mind and went back in memory to the day in Mrs. Entwistle’s cottage. It did not bring him any great elucidation, but it gave him a feeling of confidence in Serge, and, clinging to him, he said:

“What are we to do?”

“If you’ll agree to say nothing to my mother, to write nothing to Basil, and not to bother your head about the rights and wrongs of it, I’ll go to London and see Minna. If there’s a glimmer of hope I’ll do everything I can. If there isn’t, I’ll see Minna through. . . . I don’t think I shall come back. I can’t stay in this place much longer. It gobbles men up and doesn’t even have the decency to digest them properly. . . . It’s a machine and has no conscience about the past, no concern for the future. It darkens men’s minds so that they live hideously and their horrible sins are visited upon their children. No, I shan’t come back. I can’t. . . .”

“There is a great deal of wickedness in this place. It is God’s will,” said Francis.

[Pg 314]

“Men’s will. The will of men cheated and cozened by their own rapacity. . . . But that is neither here nor there. Will you agree to say nothing to my mother until you hear from me?”

“I’ll promise you that,” said Francis with a little compunction, for he saw how dark would be the days of waiting with such a secret tugging at his heart and his wife babbling of her children’s marriages. “How did you know? Did Mary tell you?”

“Yes, Mary told me. Mary has been rather a trump about it.”

“I shall be able to talk to Mary,” thought Francis, with a sigh of relief.

 

Serge spent the night packing and dismantling his studio. He destroyed a great many of his pictures, called up the porter and made him a present of his furniture and the clothes that were left after he had packed two bags.

In the morning he went to fetch Annie Lipsett. He found her just leaving, but made her go back with him to see the boy. Him he hugged and kissed, and then he gave Annie a cheque for fifty pounds for his education.

“And for God’s sake,” he said, “don’t make him a gentleman. Put him to a trade. If he’s any real good he’ll get out of it. If he’s only middling good he’ll stay there and marry and die respectable. If he’s bad—God help you; but he won’t be that.”

Annie said:

“You’re going.”

“Yes. I’m going.”

She was very plucky and fought back her tears. Serge took her shoulders in his hands and said:

“You and I have had a queer sort of love, an impersonal sort of meeting in Heaven here on earth. I never understood before what it must feel like to be a seraph—just a head and wings. We’ve been so busy fighting our way up out of a slimy pit that we haven’t had time to think much about each other—only the boy.”

Annie’s tears flowed freely and she clung to his hand and said:

[Pg 315]

“You don’t know what you’ve been to me, but I can tell you now. It was so much to have you for my friend in that time when I had no one. I loved you. . . .”

“I know, I know.”

“But all that sort of love went away afterwards when I had the boy. It has been a great thing for him too. . . .”

“I’ve learned a lot from him.”

“That’s so wonderful about you. You seem to be always learning. And now you’re going. I used to dread your going, but now it doesn’t hurt me at all. . . . You will always have me to think gladly of you.”

“And I of you. . . . We’ve made the world richer by a friendship.”

“I want to say thank you,” she said, “but I can’t, not enough.”

“Of course you can’t. . . . Come along.”

 

In a few hours Serge was in the express for London. He had a portfolio of pictures and drawings, two bags, and one hundred and twenty pounds in notes. As the train passed out of the dingy murk and his eyes lighted on the green, undefiled country, he drew in great breaths and found it hard not to shout for joy in the new zest for adventure that had come to him.

“That seraph notion,” he thought, “I wonder where it comes from? That curious hunger for the state of childhood, the pretence that it is superior to adult life. . . . Surely it all comes from their incompetence in managing their affairs as men and women. They seem to lose their simplicity. I wonder why? . . . Old Lawrie must be right. Mind, body, spirit. You can’t poison the spirit. That’s God, and He’s beyond contamination. Body and mind are the instruments of the spirit. Poison the mind and the body suffers. . . . That’s right. Yes: old Lawrie’s right. Fear of love and fear of death; the mind hemmed in and losing its bright power of reflection, so that it shows only a distorted image of life. . . . No wonder they hate life when it looks like th............