AtChickover there had been the most painful consultations between Stephen and Mrs. Colquhoun as to the best thing to do under the deplorable circumstances. Should they or should they not tell Virginia? Could they, indeed, help telling her? Not all, of course; she must never be told all. The night spent somewhere between Chickover and London—they both felt that the entire stretch of country between those two points was from henceforth polluted—the night that made the scandalous marriage a necessity, must be kept from Virginia for ever. But it became clear after a week that she must be told something, if only to account for her not hearing from her mother.
Stephen couldn’t bring himself to let her have the letters. They came at first, as he had expected, one after the other and all very thick. He wondered, turning them over in his hand, whether it wasn’t his duty to open them, but he resisted the strong leaning towards his duty that lifelong practice in doing it had induced in him, and took the more dignified course of sending them back unopened. Much more punitive too, he felt,—leaving the wretched woman completely in the dark as to what was happening at Chickover and what Virginia was feeling.
Then, when the letters at last left off coming, he watched for telegrams; he rather expected telegrams.
None came.
Then he was on the look-out for an unannounced arrival; he quite thought there would be one.
Nothing happened. Just silence.
At the end of the week Virginia said, ‘I can’t think why mother doesn’t write’—and began to look worried, and write letters herself.
Stephen took them out of the box in the hall and burnt them. ‘Painful, painful necessities,’ he said to Mrs. Colquhoun; for this letter business went against the grain—the gentleman grain, he told his mother, who hardly left him, comforting and advising him as best she could.
At the end of another week Virginia sent a telegram, or rather was going to send it but was stopped by Stephen. Clearly she must be told something. She had said, while writing it: ‘If I don’t get an answer to this I shall go up to London myself and see if anything is wrong.’
‘Poor child, poor child,’ murmured Mrs. Colquhoun, the moment for enlightenment having manifestly come. ‘Would you like me to be with you?’ she whispered in Stephen’s ear.
‘Better not, I think,’ he whispered back.
Alone with Virginia he took her on his knee. She was holding the telegram she had just written, and was in a hurry to go and send it off.
‘Yes, Stephen—what is it?’ she asked, fretted at being held back, and worried by this strange silence of her mother’s to the point of being unlike herself.
‘I am but a clumsy creature,’ he began, overwhelmedby the thought of the blow about to be delivered—and delivered by his hand, too, his own loving hand.
He laid his head on her breast, his arms round her, as she sat on his knee.
This beginning made Virginia still more uneasy; Stephen had never called himself a clumsy creature before. ‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, very anxious.
‘What is it not,’ groaned Stephen, holding her tight. To think it was he, he who so deeply loved her....
‘Oh, Stephen’—Virginia was thoroughly frightened—‘mother?’
‘Yes. Yes. Yours. And Virginia, my loved wife,’ he said, raising his head and looking at her, ‘believe me I had rather, to spare you, it were mine.’
Virginia sat like a stone. Her face was stiff and set. The worst had happened, then. Her little mother, her own sweet little mother, to whom she had been unkind, unloving, and who had never once failed in kindness and love to her, was dead.
‘She is dead,’ said Virginia, in a voice so toneless that it sounded indifferent.
‘How much better,’ thought Stephen, ‘for everybody as well as herself if she were.’
Aloud he said, his face buried in Virginia’s bosom. ‘No. She is not dead. Quite the contrary. She is remarrying.’
And as Virginia said nothing, for her breath was taken away by these blows and counter-blows, he went on: ‘Darling, I would have spared you if I could. I have tried to spare you. I have tried all these days to find some way of keeping it from you. Indeed, indeed I have tried——’
‘But, Stephen—why? Why shouldn’t mother marryagain?’ asked Virginia, with the irritability natural to people who have been frightened without cause, but so unusual in her that Stephen could only account for it by her physical condition. ‘I think it very strange of her not to tell me, but why shouldn’t she remarry? Now there’ll be somebody to take care of her. I’m glad.’
‘Darling——’
He pressed his face still closer to her bosom. He wished he could hide it there for ever.
‘But I do think,’ said Virginia, reaction against her mother setting in now she knew she wasn’t dead, as it had set in the day she saw her trotting safe and sound up the avenue when she had been torn by fears of an accident, ‘I do think she might have told me. I do think that.’
Her voice had tears in it. She strangled them, and held herself up very straight, offering no real hospitality to Stephen’s head. She was deeply wounded.
‘Ah, but there are some things one doesn’t tell,’ said Stephen.
He was miserable. He would have given at least half Chickover to be able to spare her.
‘Remarrying isn’t one of them,’ she said; and for the first time he caught a glimpse of another Virginia, a Virginia who perhaps, ten years ahead, might argue.
He raised his head from her bosom and looked at her again.
‘I know what I am talking about, my child,’ he said. ‘This remarrying is. She is marrying the young man with whom she motored up to London. You saw him yourself. Perhaps you will now agree that there are some things one does not willingly tell one’s daughter.’
Virginia stared at him a moment, her eyes very wideopen. Then, without speaking a word, she got up off his knee and walked over to a window and stood at it with her back to him.
How strange of her, he thought. What a strange way of meeting trouble—to go away from him like that, to turn from the love that longed to help her.
He didn’t know what to do or say next. He sat watching her in the utmost perplexity. His Virginia, getting up off his knee, withdrawing herself from his loving arms——
‘Yes,’ she said after a long silence. ‘I can imagine there may be such things. But I don’t think’—she turned and faced him—‘this is one of them.’
He got on to his feet and went towards her, his arms outstretched.
‘My darling, my wounded darling,’ he cried, all understanding and pitifulness, ‘you are generous and young——’
‘So is Mr. Monckton,’ was her unexpected answer.
Really it was like a blow in the face. It stopped him short. Itmustbe her condition. But all that day the attitude continued, the strange, almost defiant attitude, and Stephen could only go into his study and pray that her heart might be softened, and her eyes opened to see things as they truly were.
Such a grave misfortune—she did not of course know how grave, how terrible it was—the first in their married life, and to take it this way, hardening her heart against the sympathy and understanding he and his mother offered her in such boundless measure, and persisting, with an obstinacy he wouldn’t have dreamed her capable of, in upholding what her mother had done! True she said very little, but that little was all obstinate. She wasquite unlike her usual self to his mother, too, whose one thought was to comfort, and would not admit that there was anything to be comforted about. And when that night he got into bed, and drew her to his heart in the exquisite contact of the body that had always till then soothed every trouble of the spirit, and she came apparently willingly, and clung to him, and was his own dear wife as he thought, and, happily sure of this, he whispered that he hoped she had remembered to pray for her poor mother, it was a grievous shock to feel her shrink away from him and hear her say she hadn’t—not more than usual, not more than her childhood’s ‘God bless my mummy,’ and most grievous to have her ask him, just as if they weren’t in bed but downstairs conversing in their clothes, just as if they weren’t in the sacred place and at the sacred moment never yet profaned by talk of anything but love, why he really thought it so dreadful for her mother to marry again.
‘Do you not see it is terrible to marry some one young enough to be your son?’ he had asked sternly—he couldn’t have believed he would ever have to be stern with his own love in such a place, at such an hour.
And she had answered: ‘But is it any more terrible than marrying some one young enough to be your daughter?’
Virginia had answered that. His Virginia. In bed. In his very arms.
Stephenwas completely crushed by this. It was like the things children say, unanswerable in its simple rightness, and yet, the grown-up world being what it is, all wrong.
Virginia was nearer the fount of truth than he was. Where he stood, thirty years further from it, its waters naturally were muddier; but there they were, and had to be dealt with including their mud, and not as if they remained for ever, as she so near the source supposed, crystal clear.
On the other hand he couldn’t do without his wife. He owed her everything, and above all he owed her his return to youth. She had come and released him from the darkening prison of deepening middle age. He worshipped her more than he knew. For instance, up to this he hadn’t known he was wax in her hands, he had imagined he led, guided, was in absolute authority; now suddenly he knew he was wax. When his mother-in-law had dared compare his marriage with hers, the thing had been the deadliest outrage. Virginia pointed her finger at it, and instead of being outraged he was crushed—crushed by the truth as she saw it, crushed by the knowledge that in her clear young eyes he hadn’t, in his condemnation of her mother’s action, a leg to stand on.
Yet how many legs did Stephen not know he really hadto stand on. Everybody, except children like Virginia, inexperienced and new, would agree that the difference between the two cases was such that one was accepted as natural and the other with derision. But Virginia said there was no difference—he had an uneasy feeling that Christ might have said so too—and declared that if her mother’s marrying some one so much younger was terrible, then her marrying Stephen was terrible; more terrible, because there were actually eight years greater difference in their case.
All this she said that first tragic night in bed, and inquired, when she had finished, what was to be done about it.
He was wax. Not immediately; not for some black weeks of agonising separation, of days spent avoiding each other, of nights spent with their backs turned; but inevitably, before her stubbornness, he melted. She had too many of the necessities of his life in her hands. To be out of harmony with Virginia was worse, far worse—he shuddered as he admitted it, but there it was—than being out of harmony with God.
And Virginia, though she kept up her stout exterior and went doggedly through these painful days of April and May—the estrangement lasted all that time—was most wretchedly unhappy. What was she to make of all this? In her heart she was as much shocked as Stephen. But how could she not stand up for and defend her mother? How could she deny her own blood? Deeply she resented having to defend her mother; it shattered the foundations of the whole of her childhood’s faith. Was there ever anything more miserable, she thought, than to love some one and be horrified at them at the same time? She who oughtto have been putting up her feet and resting more diligently than ever—‘The fifth month, dear child,’ Mrs. Colquhoun anxiously reminded her, ‘we are in the fifth month now, you know, and have to be most careful’—walked ceaselessly instead in the garden, up and down, up and down, in all those paths where she was least likely to be found by her mother-in-law, trying her hardest to see clear, to think right, groping round for some way to get back to Stephen while at the same time not deserting her mother, to get back to his arms, to his heart, to the unclouded love without which she felt she couldn’t live.
‘You know, Virginia dearest,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun at last, whose only wish was to console and be confided in, and who was much upset by this marked and morbid avoidance, ‘youhave nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Has anybody?’ Virginia asked, stopping short in the middle of the path she had been waylaid in, and looking her mother-in-law squarely in the eyes.
‘That wretched, wretched mother of hers,’ groaned Mrs. Colquhoun to Stephen, describing this little scene to him and how uncomfortable and hurt she had been by the poor child’s want of frankness. ‘What misery she has brought on us all.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Stephen, looking up wearily from the sermon he was trying to write—his head, his heart, every part of him seemed to ache—‘we must countenance her.’
‘Countenance? Countenance her? Do you mean behave as if we approved of her?’
‘I do, mother. I have been thinking it over very seriously. Virginia’shealth, and with her health her child’s health, is at stake. She——’ his voice faltered, for he was most miserable—‘she weeps at night. She—she weeps when she thinks I am asleep. If I try to console her it—it becomes heartbreaking.’
He turned his face away and bent over the manuscript. Tears had come out of his own eyes, and were wetting his face. Impossible for any one to conceive the torments of his nights in bed with his beloved one and estranged from her. That turning of backs, that cold space between their two unhappy bodies....
‘Wretched, wretched woman,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun again, more bitterly than ever, for she saw her son’s tears.
‘Yes. But we must think of Virginia.’
‘Has she been writing to her mother?’
‘I am sure she has not. She would do nothing without my knowledge.’
He dug the nib of his pen into the blotting-paper.
‘My wife is the soul of loyalty and straightness——’ he began, but his voice quivering uncontrollably at the mention of her dear qualities, he broke off.
‘Yes indeed, Stephen. Indeed I know it. She is the dearest child. Only at these times a woman isn’t quite herself, and Virginia, I can see, has got into a curious morbid state——’
‘I should leave her alone, mother,’ interrupted Stephen, his head bent so that she couldn’t see his face.
Mrs. Colquhoun was hurt. All her affection and sympathy being thrown back, as it were, at her,—told straight by her son, to whose welfare she had devoted the whole of her life, that she was taking the wrong line with Virginia. As though she didn’t know better than he could what was the right line to take with some one in Virginia’s condition!
‘I think I was wrong about those letters,’ he said, continuing to jab his pen into the blotting-paper. ‘I ought to have let her have them.’
‘I don’t at all agree with you. We did what we thought right, and more than that no mortal can be expected to do.’
‘No doubt. But we were mistaken, perhaps, as to what was right.’
‘Nonsense, Stephen. The child is only nineteen. She has to be protected from the influence of that woman. You caught the woman out yourself in the most scandalous, the most disgraceful immorality, and now you propose to countenance her and her—well, really there is only one word for him—her paramour.’
‘They are married. They have expiated their sin.’
‘Her late paramour, then.’
‘For Virginia’s sake they must be countenanced.’
‘How?’ asked Mrs. Colquhoun, greatly exasperated. Here was her son every bit as morbid as her daughter-in-law, and with no excuse of being in any particular month.
‘I am going to ask Virginia to write and invite them to pay us a visit.’
‘Here?’
‘Where else?’
‘I shall go away.’
‘As you please.’
‘Stephen——’
‘Yes, mother?’
But without waiting to hear what she was going to say he went on: ‘I have mismanaged this whole business. I have adopted a line with Virginia which cannot be continued, for it makes her unhappy and ill.Except for that night they spent together, which has now been expiated, what is there after all in their marriage different from Virginia’s and mine?’
‘Stephen!’
‘The sexes are reversed; the ages are the same—or rather the balance is on her side. She is eight years nearer his age than I am to Virginia’s.’
‘Stephen!’
‘It’s a mere prejudice, in any case.’
‘Stephen!’
‘My darling Virginia, so much closer to simple truth than I am,—so much closer, indeed, to God—sees no difference.’
‘She says so to you, does she? I wager she does see a difference in her heart, then. She is only standing up for that woman from some warped idea of duty—standing up for her against her own husband, against the father of her child.’
He made a gesture of weariness. He had suffered much. None but himself knew what his nights had been.
‘I love Virginia,’ he said, as if to himself.
Mrs. Colquhoun stood staring at him. He did not look at her, but sat at his table with bowed head. She had never before seen him like this, broken down, his standards gone, giving in, winking at sin, prepared, as he himself put it, to countenance it.
‘Stephen——’ she began.
He got up. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’ll go to Virginia now and put things straight.’
‘You really intend to have those shocking people here and whitewash them?’
He looked at her a moment in silence, bringing his attention back to what she was saying.
‘You talk as if they were outbuildings, mother,’ he said, with a faint, wretched smile.
‘Outbuildings! Sepulchres,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun. ‘Abodes of corruption. And nothing you can do in the way of whitening them will hide—will hide——’
She was becoming hysterical; in her life she had never been that. Words were failing her; in her life they had never done that. She must grip on to herself, she must shut her mouth tight. It frightened her, the behaviour of her hitherto absolutely reliable body.
Her son went out of the room and left her standing there.
Itwas the very morning after this that Stephen was late for breakfast for the first time for years, and Virginia got down before him and found a postcard in her mother’s handwriting among the letters, with a picture on it of some place in the Isle of Wight and these words:You have helped me to happiness. Catherine Monckton.
She stared at it puzzled. She was still more puzzled when, turning it over again and looking at the address, she saw it was for Stephen, not for her.
Stephen had helped her mother to happiness? It would be just like him, of course—their reconciliation the night before had been utter and wonderful—but how? What had he had to do with it? He who only now, only yesterday, had come round to not disapproving any longer of the marriage?
She was still holding the postcard in her hand, vainly trying to make head or tail of it, when he came in.
‘It seems,’ she said, going to meet him with the quick steps and the radiant smile of love that is very proud, ‘that I still don’t know all your goodness, dear husband.’
‘What is it, my own wife?’ he asked, gazing at her upturned face with the glad content of the readmitted into paradise.
‘Why, look——’ And she gave him the postcard.
He turned a deep red. She took that for modesty,and laughed with pride in him. What he could have done and why he had done it she didn’t know, but she loved him with a positively burning faith.
Stephen, reading the words on the postcard, deduced that the marriage, which he had supposed had taken place a month or six weeks before, had in fact only just done so, for he believed no lasting happiness could be the lot of the ex-Mrs. Cumfrit, and gave her and her unfortunate victim two or three days of it at most before remorse and disillusionment set in. They were evidently at the very beginning of their two or three days when the card was written. He had had no wish at all, he knew, to help his mother-in-law to happiness. Expiation only was what he had had in mind. That expiation should be a happiness-giving process had not occurred to him as possible. And here was Virginia, praising and blessing him; here was this young unsullied spirit once more making him, by her belief and pride in his goodness, feel ashamed of himself. Also, how awkward it was. Why could not Mrs. Cumfrit have announced she was now Monckton in an ordinary manner, without dragging him into it?
‘Let us, my darling,’ he said, not knowing what to say and fervently wishing he really had done something to deserve the look of proud adoration on Virginia’s face, ‘have breakfast. Otherwise it will be cold. And I am as hungry as a——’ he was going to say hunter, but it sounded too unclerical, so he said rector instead; and they both laughed, being in the mood, that happy morning, when one laughs at anything.
She brought his coffee round to him, and stood behind his chair laying her cheek on his head. ‘You’ve got to confess, you know,’ she said, ‘however much you want tohide your light under a bushel. What did you do, Stephen darling, and why have we been so miserable all this time about mother’s marrying, when it was really you who——?’
‘I’ll confess to you, my love, that I did enjoin marriage.’
‘You did? Then why——?’
‘Virginia, love, you trust your husband?’
‘Oh, Stephen—soabsolutely!’ she cried, putting her arms round his neck.
‘Then if I ask you not to question me further on this matter?’ he said, stroking the hand round his neck and looking up at the face so near his own.
‘Oh Stephen—ask me something harder than that. I do so long to show what I would do for you. I do so long to be more like you——’
‘My darling, God forbid,’ said Stephen very earnestly.
‘Oh Stephen——’ was all Virginia could say to a modesty, a humility so profound. She had married not only a lover but a saint.
Her cup was full. To be asked by Stephen not to question him ... she went about as dumb as a mouse. To be asked by Stephen to believe in him ... she went about bursting with belief. And she was so happy, restored to her husband after the black separation, that she didn’t even any longer mind the idea of Christopher as a stepfather; and her happiness spilt over into the letter she wrote her mother asking them both to Chickover; and it was such a warm letter that Catherine, accustomed in her relations with Virginia to provide all the warmth, was as much puzzled as Virginia had been on reading the postcard to Stephen.
That Virginia, who rarely showed warmth, should show it now was really very puzzling. But, being at themoment in the first astonishment at the joy of falling in love, Catherine had no time for anything or any one but Christopher, and didn’t think about Virginia’s letter for long. She scribbled a little note—‘Thank you, darling, for your letter. We shall love to come some day’—and forgot her. Nor did she remember her again, or think of Chickover and Stephen and all that strange dim life, till the Fanshawes’ visit.
On that visit almost everything the Fanshawes said seemed to produce a climax. Their innocent questions were all, except one, very difficult to answer, and their comments could mostly only be met by silence. The one question that wasn’t difficult was, ‘Have you been to Chickover with him yet?’—for the warm, forgotten invitation came back to Catherine’s mind at these words; and though at the moment the Fanshawes hadn’t given her time to answer, afterwards, before they left, when all the naturalness and glow had gone out of their visit and everybody was elaborately making conversation, she announced that Virginia had written urging them to go down as soon as possible and stay a long while, and that they thought of soon going.
At this Christopher had made a face at her, indicative of his amazement, for it was the first he had heard of any such invitation or visit; and Mrs. Fanshawe asked, ‘Have Virginia and Mr. Monckton already met?’—a little timidly, for by this time she too felt that any question was likely to turn out to be a bombshell.
‘Oh yes,’ said Catherine, reddening again, a vision of that meeting flashing before her eyes—the Chickover drawing-room, herself coming in ready to start for London and finding three figures in it, figures stiff and silent as three hostile pokers.
Upon which the Fanshawes decided that there were things and people in life they couldn’t understand, and gave up trying to. But their bosoms were benevolent, and the only criticism they permitted themselves was that Virginia, whom they didn’t know, must be a little unusual.
Butwhat was to be done about Chickover?
When she saw herself in the glass in the mornings before dressing, Catherine felt she had better not go. The exclamations of the Fanshawes had confirmed her worst fears, and she knew for certain she was looking worn out. How could she go down there with Christopher, looking worn out? Virginia would notice it at once, and think she wasn’t happy and blame Christopher. Stephen would notice it too, and be sure she wasn’t happy, and triumph. While as for Mrs. Colquhoun——
She put Chickover out of her thoughts, and went and bought a lip-stick. The Fanshawes were giving a dance that night, and had invited them, and Christopher insisted on going. Useless for her to say she couldn’t dance; he said she wouldn’t be able to help herself with him. It appeared that he loved dancing, and only hadn’t danced much before his marriage because, as he explained, he couldn’t stick the fool-girls one met at dances. After all, it wasn’t possible to dance in absolutely stony silence, and what to say to these girls positively beat him. If one could have made love to them, now—Catherine winced—but one couldn’t even do that, because then one would have got tangled up and have to marry them. Marry them! Good God.
Now came this invitation, and he jumped at it, andall she could do was to make the best of herself. So, as a first step, she went out and bought a lip-stick; and such had been the innocence of her life in these matters that she blushed when she asked for one. But she wasn’t pleased with the effect, and, anxiously examining herself before Christopher came in to dinner, was inclined to think it only made her look older and certainly made her look less good.
He, however, noticed nothing, for by this time George’s electric lights had been heavily shaded, and he kissed her with his usual delight at getting back to her, and the stuff all came off, and she wondered what other women did to keep it on, or whether one either had a lip-stick or a lover, but never both.
She didn’t enjoy the dance. He couldn’t make her dance, however much he tried and she tried; and after struggling round the room with her and treading lamentably on each other’s toes, he gave up and let her sit down. But it wasn’t possible for him, hearing that throbbing music, not to dance, and Catherine, looking on at him going round with one girl after the other, all of whom seemed miracles of youth and prettiness, didn’t enjoy herself.
The girls appeared to languish at him. No wonder. He was far the most attractive young man there, she thought with an ache both of pride and pain. She didn’t enjoy herself at all.
The Fanshawes were very kind—almost too kind, as though they were eager to hide the facts of her own situation from her—and kept on bringing up elderly men who weren’t dancing and introducing them. But the elderly men thought the small lady with the wandering eyes and inattentive ears and reddened mouth rathertiresome, and soon melted away; besides, they preferred girls. So that whenever the Fanshawes looked her way they saw her, in spite of their efforts, sitting alone.
At last, after Ned Fanshawe had sat with her a long time, his mother came up with an elderly woman instead of an elderly man, and introduced her, and she did stick. Like Catherine, she appeared to know nobody there. They sat together the rest of the evening.
‘That’s my daughter,’ said the elderly woman, pointing out a very pretty girl dancing at that moment with Christopher. ‘Which is yours?’
No, Catherine didn’t enjoy herself.
For the life of her she couldn’t help being rather quiet in the taxi going home. Christopher had seemed to enjoy himself so much. All those girls....
‘I loved that,’ he said, lighting a cigarette, and then drawing her to him.
‘I thought you said you were bored by girls.’
‘Not if you’re there too. It makes all the difference.’
‘But I wasn’t much good to you.’
‘Why, just to know you were there, with me, in the room, made me happy.’
‘Do I make a good background?’ she asked, trying to sound amused.
He threw away his cigarette and took her in his arms. ‘Darling, were you horribly fed up, sitting there? I tell you what—we’ll get a gramophone, and I’ll teach you to dance. You’ll learn in no time, and then we’ll dance together at these shows every night.’
‘Wouldn’t I betired,’ said Catherine, making an effort to laugh; and, instead of laughing, crying.
Crying. The worst thing possible for her eyes. She would be a real, unmistakable hag in the morning.
‘Why, what is it, my precious little thing?’ exclaimed Christopher, feeling her face suddenly wet, and greatly surprised and distressed.
‘It’s nothing—I’m just tired,’ she said, hurriedly wiping her eyes and determined no more tears should screw themselves out.
‘I was a selfish idiot not to think how bored you must be,’ he said, anxiously kissing and loving her. ‘I saw you talking to Fanshawe, and thought you looked quite happy——’
‘Oh yes—so I was.’
‘Catherine—little thing——’
He kissed her again and again, and she kissed him back, and managed to laugh.
‘Darling Chris,’ she said, nestling close, ‘I don’t believe I’m any good at dances.’
‘You will be when I’ve taught you. You’ll dance like a little angel. We’ll get a gramophone to-morrow.’
‘Oh no—don’t get a gramophone. Please, Chris darling. I can’t learn to dance. I don’t want to. I’m sure I never could. You must go to dances without me.’
‘Without you! I like that. As though I’d ever go to anything, or budge an inch, without you.’
At this time they had been married five weeks.
There came another letter from Virginia; not quite so warm, because nobody can keep at the same temperature uninterruptedly for weeks, but still continuing to invite.
‘We hope you and Mr. Monckton are soon coming here, dearest mother,’ she wrote in her round, childish handwriting. ‘I have to lie up most of the time now, because I’ve begun the seventh month, and mother says that that is the one to be most careful in, so that if you were to come nowwe could have some nice quiet talks. Stephen is visiting in the parish, but I think if he were here he would ask me to give you his love.’
How far away it sounded. Another life, dim and misty. Stephen had evidently told her nothing of his monstrous suspicions. Virginia was prepared, dutifully as always, to accept her mother’s new husband. She had disliked him very obviously that day at Chickover, but now she was going to do her duty by him, just as she did her duty by everybody who had a claim on it.
Catherine sighed, holding the letter in her hand. It seemed like the splashing of cool water, a distant, quiet freshness, compared to her fevered, strange, rapturous—but was it really rapturous?—life now.
An ache of longing to see Virginia stole into her heart. One’s children and new husbands—how difficult they were to mix comfortably. Mothers, to be completely satisfactory, must be ready for sacrifice, and more sacrifice, and nothing but sacrifice. They mustn’t want any happiness but happiness through, by, and with their children. They must make no attempt to be individuals, to be separate human beings, but only mothers.
She sat staring at herself in the glass, thinking. When the letter arrived she was at her dressing-table, going through the now long and difficult process of doing her face. Mrs. Mitcham had brought the post in on tiptoe—she always now approached Catherine on tiptoe—laid it on the table, and stolen out again quickly, neither looking to the right hand nor the left, for by this time experience had taught her that if she did look what she saw was likely to be upsetting.
Catherine paused in what she was doing to open the letter, and then sat idly twisting it round her finger.She had been told of a woman in Sackville Street by Kitty Fanshawe who ‘did’ faces, and had gone at once and had hers done, and had been enchanted by the result. No more elementary lip-sticks and powder for her. In this elegant retreat, at the back of the building away from all noise, soothing to the nerves merely to go into, she had lain back in a deep delicious chair, and an exquisite young woman, whose own face was a convincing proof of the excellence of the treatment, did things with creams and oils and soft finger-tips; and when at the end—it was so soothing that Catherine went to sleep—a hand-glass was given her and she was told to look, she couldn’t help an exclamation of pleasure.
Well; this was a miracle. She not only looked ten, fifteen years younger and really, really pretty, but she looked so very fashionable. A little adventurous, perhaps, the last vestiges of the quiet country lady that still had survived the rubbings-off of Christopher all gone, but how—well, howpretty.
The only thing left to do was to go at once and buy a hat worthy of so distinguished a complexion. She went straight to Bond Street, and on the short walk discovered that people looked at her, saw her, instead of her being, as she had lately been, so completely uninteresting that it made her practically invisible.
Both the hat and the treatment were expensive,—the treatment more so, because it didn’t last, and the hat at least for a little while did. Impossible to have the treatment more often than very occasionally, as it cost so much, and she accordingly bought a box containing everything belonging to it except the young woman’s finger-tips, and tried to give it to herself at home.
The results were rather unfortunate. She didn’t look like anybody in the very least good. Mrs. Mitcham was secretly much worried. But she persisted, hoping by practice to become clever at it; and it was while she was in the middle of her daily struggles one morning, that Virginia’s second letter arrived.
What was to be done about Chickover? How could she go there with Christopher? Though he swore he would never go near the accursèd spot again, she knew he would if she asked him to. But how painful, how impossible it would be. Stephen was holding out olive-branches, for of course Virginia would never have invited them without his approval; but Stephen’s olive-branches were unpleasant things, she thought, remembering him as she had seen him last, on the day of his horrible accusations. To have met him last like that, and then find him on the doorstep being the pleasant host to Christopher! And Virginia, kept ignorant of everything except the fact of the marriage, bravely trying to do her duty all round, and Mrs. Colquhoun profoundly hostile and disapproving—why should her beloved Chris be exposed to such ordeals?
No, he shouldn’t be. But how could she go without him? Such were her feelings for Christopher that the thought of being separated from him even for the shortest possible visit was unbearable to her. Yet how not go? Enmeshed though she was in her obsession, the natural longing of her blood to see Virginia again yet tugged at her heart. If she could see Virginia without the others! But that, she knew, was impossible.
Presently, when she had finished dressing, she went into the drawing-room and looked up trains. Suppose she went on a Monday, and came back on the Wednesdayin time for dinner? No; she couldn’t endure being away so long from Christopher. One night would be quite enough for Chickover; there would be the whole afternoon and evening to talk in. No; she couldn’t endure that either. What mightn’t happen to him while she was away? The whole time her heart would be in her mouth. Why not do it in a day? Go the first thing, and come back the last thing?
She looked up trains again. Chickover was so very far away; it took hours to get there. But by leaving Waterloo soon after eight in the morning she could be there by twelve, and the last train from there at seven-twenty would get her back by midnight.
Yes; she would do that. No, she wouldn’t. There was another train at eleven something, getting down at three. It was most important she should look well and happy, and show those doubters and disapprovers what a success her marriage was. She who was so well and happy—surely there couldn’t be anybody in the worldmorewell and happy, except for sometimes being rather tired, which was nothing at all—must look it; and if she had lines and hollows in her face the three would at once jump to every sort of conclusion. The eleven o’clock train would give her time to go to Maria Rome, the Sackville Street lady, for face treatment first. There would still be four solid hours at Chickover. It made the whole thing very expensive, of course, but it was well worth it; for when they saw her so fresh and smooth they couldn’t but feel that it was merely silly to think her marriage had been a mistake, or to insist on measuring age and behaviour by years instead of by appearance. How intensely she wanted to prove her happiness, to triumph in Christopher!
She wrote to Virginia and told her she was coming down alone for the afternoon the following Monday, just to be with her a little by herself; Virginia wouldn’t want to see anybody she didn’t yet know very well in her present state, and she and Christopher—she wrote of him as Christopher, for all other ways of describing him were, she felt, absurd—would come down together later on, after the baby was born and Virginia was up and about again.
Then, at dinner, she told Christopher what she was going to do.
He didn’t like it. He hated the idea of her not being back till so late. She was far too precious and tiny to go racketing off alone. What mightn’t happen to her? He wouldn’t be able to do a stroke of work all Monday for thinking of her. In fact, he took the news exactly in the way Catherine would have wished him to, and she loved him, if possible, more than ever. Naturally at the same time he made some extremely disrespectful comments on Stephen’s personal appearance and general character, though, as the old boy had been the means of making Catherine marry him, he couldn’t help, he pointed out, liking him in spite of his various and glaring defects; and as for Virginia, his opinion of that girl was what it had always been, but he admitted that a mother might probably see something in her, and that if Catherine felt herself irresistibly impelled to go down and visit her, he supposed she had better go and get it over.
‘She’s going to have a——’ began Catherine, but stopped. Really, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. She would have to sometime, but why before it was absolutely necessary? Virginia’s baby would make hera grandmother. Christopher would be married to a grandmother. If he hadn’t up to now felt the difference in their ages this must inevitably wake him up to it. To think of it made her feel raw, as if her skin had been pulled off, and she left exposed, shrinking in an agonised apprehension and sensitiveness.... Love, love—if only she didn’t love him so much....
‘What is she going to have?’ he asked, as she stopped short, looking up from the strawberries he was eating.
‘A happy afternoon, I hope,’ said Catherine quickly, turning red and smiling nervously.
‘I should think so indeed—with you there,’ said Christopher. And added under his breath, so that Catherine couldn’t hear and have her darling little maternal affections hurt, ‘Young blighter.’
Onthe Monday, then, a pretty little lady of about thirty to thirty-five, whose prettiness was of the kind that is mostly disapproved of in country places, got out of the train at Chickover, and was met by an embarrassed clergyman.
The corners of her mouth were turned up in pleased smiles—it was so exciting and delightful to know one was looking really nice again—as she trotted along the platform to where he stood hesitating. She was, besides being very glad she looked nice, very glad to be going to see Virginia and very glad to be going back to Christopher that evening. Also, upheld by the knowledge of her attractiveness, the journey hadn’t tired her; on the contrary, it had been amusing, with an eagerly friendly strange man in the carriage, concerned in every way for her comfort. Added to which, the day being hot, she was flushed through the fainter flush bestowed on her by Sackville Street, and this was always becoming to her. And, finally, her eyes were bright with the gaiety that takes hold of a woman after even a small success. So that, altogether, it was natural she should smile.
Stephen had been prepared for anything rather than this. He had nerved himself to a quite different encounter,—certainly not to smiles. Bygones were to bebygones; his recent sacred experiences with Virginia had made him ardently determined to strive after the goodness she believed was his already, and his mother-in-law was to be received back with as much of the old respect for her as could possibly be scraped together. He would keep her before his mind as she used to be, and not dwell on that which she had since become. Besides, though she might have been happy when she wrote the postcard that had so unexpectedly intensified his own happiness, she couldn’t, he opined, be happy now. It was eight weeks ago that she wrote the card. Much, in marriage, may happen in eight weeks. Eight days was sometimes enough, so he understood, to open the eyes of the married. And here she was smiling.
‘How do you do,’ he said, grabbing at his soft hat with one hand and nervelessly shaking her hand with the other.
‘How very nice of you to come and meet me,’ she said gaily. Funny old Stephen. One couldn’t really be angry with him. And he was really very good. He looked extremely old, though, after having had Christopher before one’s eyes.
‘Not at all,’ said Stephen.
‘How is Virginia?’
‘Well.’
‘I’m so glad. I’m longing to see her. Oh, how do you do, Smithers. How are the children? I’m so glad——’
People were staring at her. It had not yet been his lot to be in the company of a lady people stared at. He hurried her into the car. He tried hard to respect her.
There wasn’t much time between the station and the house for respect, but he did try. He had thoughtto clear the ground for it by reassuring her during the brief drive as to Virginia’s ignorance of the reasons that had led to her marriage. ‘Led to’ was how he had intended to put it, rejecting the harsher and more exact word necessitated, for he was anxious to be as forgiving and delicate as possible, now that everybody concerned had turned the lamentable page. Besides, who was he to judge? Christ hadn’t judged the other woman taken in adultery.
Delicacy, however, was as difficult as respect. She herself seemed totally without it. Also it was difficult to feel she was his mother-in-law at all. She was curiously altered. He couldn’t make out in what the alteration consisted. Manifestly she was aping youth, but she was aping it, he admitted, so cleverly that if he hadn’t known her he might certainly, at a casual glance, have taken her for a daughter rather than a mother, though not the sort of daughter one would wish to have.
The moment they were seated in the car she herself threw delicacy to the winds. ‘You know, Stephen,’ she said taking his hand—he didn’t know whether to withdraw it or behave as if he hadn’t noticed—‘good does come in the strangest way out of evil.’
‘I am not prepared to admit that,’ Stephen felt bound to reply.
‘Oh do let’s be real friends, won’t we?’ she said, still smiling at him and looking like somebody’s slightly undesirable daughter. ‘Then we canreallytalk. I wanted to thank you for my great happiness——’
He tried to withdraw his hand. ‘I think perhaps——’ he began.
‘No, no—listen,’ she went on, holding it tighter. ‘If it hadn’t been for you I never would have marriedChristopher and never would have had an idea of what happiness is really like. So you see, your thinking those wicked things of us was what brought it all about. Just like roses, coming up and flowering divinely out of mud.’
He had made the most serious resolutions to let bygones be bygones, and he shut his mouth in a thin tight line lest he should be unable not to say something Virginia would be sorry for. That his mother-in-law, who was once so dovelike, so becoming of speech and discreet of behaviour, should suddenly slough the decencies and allude in highly distasteful images to occurrences he was doing his utmost to forget and forgive, that she should use, herself having been wicked, the word wicked in connection with any thoughts of his was surely outrageous.
Yet even while he locked his mouth he remembered that it was his mother-in-law’s postcard that had renewed and made more radiant his Virginia’s belief in him. The service this regrettable mother-in-law had done him was great and undeniable. She had in the past, and consciously, done him very great service, and he had been grateful. She had eight weeks ago done him another. Should he, because the last service had been accidental and unconscious, not repay her? Twice over now she had helped him to his wife. The side of him that judged, disapproved, suspected, that was his early training and all the long years before Virginia, made him not able to unlock his mouth; the side of him that didn’t and wasn’t, that longed to justify Virginia’s belief in him, made him try extraordinarily hard to unlock it. He did earnestly now desire to let mercy prevail over justice; but, when he looked at Catherine, how hard it was. This blooming gaiety—he used the adjective correctly, not as Christopher would have used it—upset his plans. He had not been prepared for it. She was not like the same person.
He sat silent, struggling within himself, and they arrived at the house holding each other’s hands for the simple reason that he couldn’t get his away.
There on the steps stood Virginia, as if she had never stood anywhere else since Catherine left her on them the day she departed in Christopher’s side-car on the momentous journey that had changed her life; only this time Mrs. Colquhoun wasn’t standing there with her, and Virginia had grown considerably rounder.
‘Sweet of you to come, mother,’ she said, shy and flushed, when Catherine had run up to her and was folding as much of her as she could in her arms.
It had not escaped Virginia that her mother and Stephen had arrived hand in hand. She gave him a look of deep and tender gratitude when he, too, came up the steps. He wiped his forehead. He seemed to be in a constant condition of rousing Virginia’s gratitude for things he hadn’t done. Really, he thought, following the two into the house, he was a worm; a worm decked, by his darling wife’s belief, in the bright adornments of a saint.
Virginia was much struck by her mother’s appearance. She didn’t remember her as so pretty. She felt oddly elderly, with her awkward heavy body, and certainly she felt completely plain beside her. Her mother looked a little fashionable perhaps, for quiet Chickover, yet why she should Virginia didn’t know, for she had on the same country clothes she was wearing on her last visit and the visit before that. Her complexion was beautiful. Virginia was quite glad Mrs. Colquhoun had hadto go away for the day on business and wouldn’t be there to see it. She felt—she didn’t know, for Mrs. Colquhoun had never mentioned such things, but she felt—that her mother-in-law thought women oughtn’t to have complexions once they were—well, older.
Lunch passed off well; the talk afterwards, which included Stephen who, anxious to be good and kind, remained with them and conversed to the very best of his ability, passed off well; tea passed off well; and after tea he purposely withdrew from the terrace, where they were sitting, so as to allow mother and daughter freedom to touch on matters of intimate feminine interest.
Then Virginia, after making her mother lie down on a long cane seat near hers, so as to rest before the journey home, screwed herself up to mentioning the marriage—it hadn’t yet been in any way alluded to—and said shyly, turning red as she spoke, ‘You know, mother, I’m really very glad about Mr.—Mr.——’
‘No, not Mr. anything, darling. Call him Christopher.’
‘Sweet of you, mother,’ said Virginia, looking so much relieved that Catherine said, ‘What is, dearest?’
Virginia turned yet redder. ‘I was afraid,’ she said, ‘you might want me to call him father.’
‘Ohno, darling,’ said Catherine, laughing nervously. ‘You couldn’t possibly.’
And taking Virginia’s hand and stroking it, looking down at it as she stroked, she said, ‘You don’t—you don’t think him too—too young, do you dearest?’
‘No,’ said Virginia stoutly.
‘Darling!’ exclaimed Catherine, raising the hand she was stroking and swiftly kissing it.
‘How can I, when Stephen and I——’
Dear, dear little Virginia. Catherine was so muchpleased and touched that she kissed Virginia’s hand over and over again. ‘My darling little daughter,’ she said, ‘my own darling little daughter——’ and added, and really at the moment believed it, forgetting how completely she had been absorbed only in Christopher, ‘I have missed you so.’
Virginia at once retreated into her shell. Instinctively she felt the lapse from truth. ‘Sweet of you, mother,’ she said in her usual awkward little way.
She drew her hand back. It was strange, and not quite right somehow, for her mother to be kissing it like that. It made her feel uncomfortable.
‘Wouldn’t you,’ she suggested, so as to turn the talk to practical matters, ‘like to wash your face, mother?’
‘Wash my face?’ echoed Catherine, startled and staring at her. ‘Why?’
‘I always find cold water such a help,’ said Virginia, ‘if one is rather tired.’
Catherine dropped back again on to her cushions. ‘Darling child,’ she murmured, closing her eyes a minute. Cold water—on the top of the delicate structure of Sackville Street——
No, she wouldn’t wash her face; she was quite comfortable, and not a bit tired, and was so very, very happy to be with her little Virginia.
Virginia got further into her shell. There was a something about her mother that she wasn’t accustomed to. She had always been a loving mother, but not quite—not exuberant like this. Something had gone. Was it—Virginia searched laboriously round in her scrupulous mind—dignity?
‘I mustn’t miss my train,’ said Catherine, when the church clock struck half-past six.
‘There’s half an hour still,’ said Virginia. ‘If you leave at seven it will be quite soon enough.’
‘It’s the last train,’ said Catherine. ‘Hadn’t the car better come round a little before seven?’
‘If you missed it, mother, it wouldn’t matter. I could lend you everything, and Stephen and I would be very glad.’
‘Darling,’ murmured Catherine again, concealing a shudder. She pictured herself after the unavoidable washing, coming down next morning to breakfast....
At a quarter to seven Stephen thought it proper to appear once more and converse during the few remaining moments of his mother-in-law’s visit. He had decided he would pick and offer her a bunch of roses to take home with her; if he wasn’t able to respond to hand-holding, if he wasn’t able, after all, to respect her, he could at least offer her roses. Virginia would be pleased, and his own conscience slightly soothed.
Catherine began putting on her gloves.
‘Plenty of time,’ said Stephen, seeing this. ‘It has occurred to me,’ he continued, ‘that you might like a few roses.’
‘How very nice of you, Stephen,’ said Catherine, who had planted every one of the roses with her own hands,—‘but isn’t it too late?’
‘Plenty of time. Smithers is most trustworthy about trains. I will gather them myself.’
And he went indoors to get a knife and a basket.
‘I’m sure I ought to go,’ said Catherine nervously to Virginia.
‘The car isn’t round yet, mother. Smithers is never late.’
‘I believe,’ said Stephen, coming out again, knifeand basket in hand, pausing on the terrace and considering the sky, ‘you will have a comparatively cool journey back. I rather fancy there has been a thunderstorm over towards Salisbury, and it will have cleared the air when you arrive there.’
He went down the steps on to the lawn, and began choosing roses with care and deliberation.
‘Virginia darling, oughtn’t I to go?’ Catherine asked, fidgeting.
‘It isn’t seven yet, mother,’ said Virginia patiently, a little hurt by this extreme anxiety not to be obliged to spend the night with them. Stephen on the lawn was carefully removing the thorns from the roses he had cut.
The church clock began to strike seven. Catherine started. ‘There,’ she exclaimed, getting up quickly, ‘Imustgo. Good-bye, darling. Never mind the roses, Stephen,’ she called.
‘You have at least another five minutes before you need leave,’ he called back in his sonorous, carrying voice, still going on selecting the biggest blooms.
Kate appeared and said the car was waiting.
Catherine hurriedly bent down and kissed Virginia. ‘Good-bye, darling—I’ll go at once. I’m sure I ought to. Don’t get up—you look so comfy. It has been such a joy seeing you again. Stephen, I’m going—I shall miss the train——’
‘Of course I’ll get up, mother, and see you off,’ said Virginia, disengaging herself with difficulty from the rugs and cushions everybody was always now burying her in. ‘Stephen,’ she called, ‘mother won’t wait.’
Stephen hastily cut one more rose, a particularly fine one, and hurried, infected by Catherine’s hurry,towards the terrace, stripping off the thorns as he came. His eyes being fixed on the thorns he was stripping off he didn’t see he had reached the steps of the terrace, and he stumbled and fell up them, scattering the roses at Virginia’s feet.
He wasn’t in the least hurt, and indeed was on his legs immediately again; but Virginia, who had stared at his prostrate form a moment in silence, her hand pressed to her heart, made a queer little sound and fainted.
Both Catherine and Stephen rushed to her. By the time help had been called, and they had lifted her and carried her indoors and laid her on a sofa, Catherine had missed her train.
Inthis way it happened that she stayed the night after all, and came down next morning looking quite different. She had breakfasted in her room, had lingered in it till the last moment, but finally was obliged to face her relations; and they were startled.
There was neither bloom nor gaiety now. The one had vanished with the other. Virginia thought her mother must have had far more of a shock the evening before than had been supposed. The fainting had been nothing,—when one was going to have a baby one did things like that, and they were of no consequence. She had soon recovered, and they had all three spent, Virginia thought, a very nice quiet evening afterwards, Stephen himself going to give the orders for her mother’s room to be got ready, and expressing the most hospitable satisfaction at her further stay. Her mother had been a little silent, that was all; and it hadn’t occurred to Virginia, who so soon was herself again, that she really had had a shock.
‘Why, mother——’ she exclaimed, when Catherine came down into the hall, ready to start.
‘I didn’t sleep,’ said Catherine, turning away her face and pretending to search for an umbrella she hadn’t brought.
They stared at her. What a difference. Virginia wasconcerned. Her poor little mother must really have been thoroughly frightened by her fainting.
‘But mother——’ she began, taking a step towards her, wanting to say something to reassure and comfort.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said Catherine, bending over the umbrella-stand.
She was a bundle of nerves and acute sensitiveness. She felt she couldn’t bear to be touched. And why didn’t they see that to stand there staring....
She pulled the umbrellas in the stand about with shaking fingers, putting off the moment of turning round to say good-bye.
It wasn’t only that she had had to wash off Maria Rome and hadn’t slept—and indeed she hadn’t slept a wink—it was also that in the watches of the night, of this her first night alone since her marriage, once more in that house of long calm memories, she had seen, as she stared into the darkness and thought of the inevitable next morning and its humiliations, that she was on the high road to becoming a fool. Yes, a fool; a silly fool; the sort of fool she had herself smiled at when she was younger, the worst sort of fool, the elderly fool.
But how could she stop? Sitting up in bed she asked herself this question. She must keep up somehow with Christopher’s youth. She couldn’t let herself crumble into age before his eyes. If only he hadn’t begun by admiring her physically so much! If only his love hadn’t been based on what, adoring her, he called her exquisiteness. How difficult it is, thought Catherine, wide awake hour after hour, to go on being exquisite when one doesn’t sleep enough, and is tormented by fear of one’s lover, on whom one’s entire happiness depends, suddenly seeing one isn’t exquisite at all, butold, old. It was like being forced to run a race that was quite beyond one’s strength, and from the beginning being out of breath. And next morning—she knew that separated from Sackville Street and out of reach of Maria Rome’s box she not only looked her age but much, much more now than her age, and Stephen and Virginia would be convinced the marriage was a bitter failure and punishment, and that Christopher was unkind to her. Christopher unkind to her! Christopher....
She spent an extremely unpleasant night. The house, its memories, the prospect of next morning, forced her to think. Oh, it was unfair, unfair and most cruel, that at last she should have been given love only when she was too old. She ought of course never to have listened to him, to have turned the sternest, deafest ear. But—one is vain; vanity had been the beginning of it, the irresistibleness of the delicious flattery of being mistaken for young, and before she knew what she was doing she had fallen in love,—fallen flop in love, like any idiot schoolgirl. And Christopher who didn’t realise, who hadn’t noticed yet, who loved her as if she were a girl, and by the very excess of his love burnt up what still had been left to her of youth.... Yes, she was a fool; but how stop, how stop? It was horrible to be ashamed, and yet to have to go on repeating the conduct that made one ashamed. Love—if only, only she didn’t love!
She spent an extremely unpleasant night. No wonder she came down looking different. It wasn’t just having had to wash away Maria Rome.
And then, while she was fumbling among the umbrellas, and Virginia was watching her in puzzled concern, and Stephen was endeavouring to identify the mother-in-lawwho had gone upstairs with the mother-in-law who had come down again, Mrs. Colquhoun came in through the drawing-room windows, arrived thus early across the park and garden to inquire how Virginia was after her mother’s visit of the day before, and to gather from Stephen what she could of his state of mind after so searching an experience.
The situation was as awkward as it was unexpected. Stephen and Virginia hadn’t thought she would come so early, or they would have sent round and warned. They could only look on and hope for the best. His mother, Stephen was aware, had decided that she, anyhow, was not obliged to continue to know the late Mrs. Cumfrit. If and when Mrs. Cumfrit came down to Chickover, his mother had informed him, she herself would always have urgent business somewhere else. Morals were, without any doubt whatever, morals, she had said, and if Stephen could reconcile his principles with leniency in regard to them, she herself neither could nor would.
It was therefore most unpleasant for every one that she should walk straight into Catherine’s presence. Virginia and Stephen held their breath. Mrs. Colquhoun gave a visible start when she saw the figure bending over the umbrella-stand, and made as if she would go back at once into the drawing-room from whence she had emerged. But when on Catherine’s turning round she saw her face, she was instantly placated. What a change. Judgment had indeed been swift. Here was nothing but a wreck. ‘He beats her,’ was Mrs. Colquhoun’s immediate mental comment. After all, she thought, one could leave these matters quite safely in the hands of God.
It had not been her intention ever to speak to Catherine again, but a wreck is different; one could not but feel benevolent towards a wreck. If only people would be and stay wrecks Mrs. Colquhoun would always have been benevolent. She put out her hand. She said quite politely, ‘How do you do.’ Stephen thought, ‘My mother is a good woman’; Virginia gave a sigh of relief; and all Catherine had to do was to reply with equal politeness, ‘How do you do.’
But she was in a highly abnormal condition. She was a mass of nerves and quivering intuitions. Caught, unprotected in the morning light, there she was standing exposed before these staring relations, unable to hide, obliged to show herself; and, with a feeling that nothing now mattered, she was overtaken by the reckless simplicity of the cornered. Through Mrs. Colquhoun’s greeting she felt the truth: Mrs. Colquhoun was being amiable because she thought Catherine was down and out, and Mrs. Colquhoun was what she was, hard, severe, critical, grudging of happiness, kind to failure so long as it remained failure, simply because there wasn’t a soul in the whole world who really loved her. A devoted husband would have done much to bring out her original goodness; a very devoted husband would have done everything.
And so, to her own astonishment, and to the frozen amazement of the others, instead of in her turn nicely murmuring, ‘How do you do,’ and smiling and going out to the car, she was impelled by what she saw in Mrs. Colquhoun’s eyes as she took her extended hand, to say, ‘You need love.’
What made her? It was the last thing she would really ever have said out loud to Mrs. Colquhounif she had been in her senses, so that she couldn’t have been in her senses. Nobody in the least knew what she meant. It sounded improper; it was most startling.
Mrs. Colquhoun withdrew the hand she ought never to have given, and Stephen said in a strained voice, ‘We all need that,’ and added with emphasis that it was high time to start unless the train was to be missed again.