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 affected13 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 exquisite14 things, where she would spend most of her old age on her knees with an apron15 and stout16 gloves, with a pair of shears17 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 descend18 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 surmise19 was wrong.
“Is she big and dreadful?” the girl asked.
Miss Flynn, who was circumspection20 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 frustrated21 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 agitated22 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 brass24 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 apparition25. “I’ve come to ask you to intercede26.” 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 blur27 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 passionately28 even to herself that she had done anything so abject29 as to faint; but there was a lapse30 in her consciousness on the score of Miss Flynn’s intervention31. This intervention had evidently been active, for when they talked the matter over, later in the day, with bated breath and infinite dissimulation32 for the school-room quarter, the governess had more lurid33 truths, and still more, to impart than to receive. She was at any rate under the impression that she had athletically34 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 pervaded35 with agitations36 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 humiliation37 of her wound.
At first she declined to take it—having, as might appear, the much more attractive resource of regarding her visitant as a mere38 masquerading person, an impudent39 impostor. On the face of the matter moreover it wasn’t fair to believe till one heard; and to hear in such a case was to hear Godfrey himself. Whatever she had tried to imagine about him she hadn’t arrived at anything so belittling40 as an idiotic41 secret marriage with a dyed and painted hag. Adela repeated this last word as if it gave her comfort; and indeed where everything was so bad fifteen years of seniority made the case little worse. Miss Flynn was portentous42, for Miss Flynn had had it out with the wretch43. She had cross-questioned her and had not broken her down. This was the most uplifted hour of Miss Flynn’s life; for whereas she usually had to content herself with being humbly44 and gloomily in the right she could now be magnanimously and showily so. Her only perplexity was as to what she ought to do—write to Colonel Chart or go up to town to see him. She bloomed with alternatives—she resembled some dull garden-path which under a copious45 downpour has begun to flaunt46 with colour. Toward evening Adela was obliged to recognise that her brother’s worry, of which he had spoken to her, had appeared bad enough to consist even of a low wife, and to remember that, so far from its being inconceivable a young man in his position should clandestinely47 take one, she had been present, years before, during her mother’s lifetime, when Lady Molesley declared gaily48, over a cup of tea, that this was precisely49 what she expected of her eldest50 son. The next morning it was the worst possibilities that seemed clearest; the only thing left with a tatter of dusky comfort being the ambiguity51 of Godfrey’s charge that her own action had “done” for him. That was a matter by itself, and she racked her brains for a connecting link between Mrs. Churchley and Mrs. Godfrey. At last she made up her mind that they were related by blood; very likely, though differing in fortune, they were cousins or even sisters. But even then what did the wretched boy mean?
Arrested by the unnatural52 fascination53 of opportunity, Miss Flynn received before lunch a telegram from Colonel Chart—an order for dinner and a vehicle; he and Godfrey were to arrive at six o’clock. Adela had plenty of occupation for the interval54, since she was pitying her father when she wasn’t rejoicing that her mother had gone too soon to know. She flattered herself she made out the providential reason of that cruelty now. She found time however still to wonder for what purpose, given the situation, Godfrey was to be brought down. She wasn’t unconscious indeed that she had little general knowledge of what usually was done with young men in that predicament. One talked about the situation, but the situation was an abyss. She felt this still more when she found, on her father’s arrival, that nothing apparently55 was to happen as she had taken for granted it would. There was an inviolable hush56 over the whole affair, but no tragedy, no publicity57, nothing ugly. The tragedy had been in town—the faces of the two men spoke23 of it in spite of their other perfunctory aspects; and at present there was only a family dinner, with Beatrice and Muriel and the governess—with almost a company tone too, the result of the desire to avoid publicity. Adela admired her father; she knew what he was feeling if Mrs. Godfrey had been at him, and yet she saw him positively58 gallant59. He was mildly austere
Join or Log In!
You need to log in to continue reading