CHAPTER XXVIII

For many hours Margaret did nothing; then she controlled herself, and

wrote some letters. She was too bruised to speak to Henry; she could

pity him, and even determine to marry him, but as yet all lay too deep

in her heart for speech. On the surface the sense of his degradation was

too strong. She could not command voice or look, and the gentle words

that she forced out through her pen seemed to proceed from some other

person.

“My dearest boy,” she began, “this is not to part us. It is everything

or nothing, and I mean it to be nothing. It happened long before we ever

met, and even if it had happened since, I should be writing the same, I

hope. I do understand.”

But she crossed out “I do understand”; it struck a false note. Henry

could not bear to be understood. She also crossed out, “It is everything

or nothing.” Henry would resent so strong a grasp of the situation. She

must not comment; comment is unfeminine.

“I think that’ll about do,” she thought.

Then the sense of his degradation choked her. Was he worth all this

bother? To have yielded to a woman of that sort was everything, yes,

it was, and she could not be his wife. She tried to translate his

temptation into her own language, and her brain reeled. Men must be

different even to want to yield to such a temptation. Her belief in

comradeship was stifled, and she saw life as from that glass saloon on

the Great Western which sheltered male and female alike from the fresh

air. Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality, and

their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going? Strip

human intercourse of the proprieties, and is it reduced to this? Her

judgment told her no. She knew that out of Nature’s device we have built

a magic that will win us immortality. Far more mysterious than the call

of sex to sex is the tenderness that we throw into that call; far wider

is the gulf between us and the farmyard than between the farmyard and

the garbage that nourishes it. We are evolving, in ways that Science

cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate. “Men

did produce one jewel,” the gods will say, and, saying, will give us

immortality. Margaret knew all this, but for the moment she could not

feel it, and transformed the marriage of Evie and Mr. Cahill into a

carnival of fools, and her own marriage--too miserable to think of that,

she tore up the letter, and then wrote another:

“DEAR MR. BAST,

“I have spoken to Mr. Wilcox about you, as I promised, and am sorry to

say that he has no vacancy for you.

“Yours truly,

“M. J. SCHLEGEL.”

She enclosed this in a note to Helen, over which she took less trouble

than she might have done; but her head was aching, and she could not

stop to pick her words:

“DEAR HELEN,

“Give him this. The Basts are no good. Henry found the woman drunk on

the lawn. I am having a room got ready for you here, and will you please

come round at once on getting this? The Basts are not at all the type we

should trouble about. I may go round to them myself in the morning, and

do anything that is fair.

“M.”

In writing this, Margaret felt that she was being practical. Something

might be arranged for the Basts later on, but they must be silenced

for the moment. She hoped to avoid a conversation between the woman

and Helen. She rang the bell for a servant, but no one answered it;

Mr. Wilcox and the Warringtons were gone to bed, and the kitchen was

abandoned to Saturnalia. Consequently she went over to the George

herself. She did not enter the hotel, for discussion would have been

perilous, and, saying that the letter was important, she gave it to the

waitress. As she recrossed the square she saw Helen and Mr. Bast looking

out of the window of the coffee-room, and feared she was already too

late. Her task was not yet over; she ought to tell Henry what she had

done.

This came easily, for she saw him in the hall. The night wind had been

rattling the pictures against the wall, and the noise had disturbed him.

“Who’s there?” he called, quite the householder.

Margaret walked in and past him.

“I have asked Helen to sleep,” she said. “She is best here; so don’t

lock the front-door.”

“I thought some one had got in,” said Henry.

“At the same time I told the man that we could do nothing for him. I

don’t know about later, but now the Basts must clearly go.”

“Did you say that your sister is sleeping here, after all?”

“Probably.”

“Is she to be shown up to your room?”

“I have naturally nothing to say to her; I am going to bed. Will you

tell the servants about Helen? Could some one go to carry her bag?”

He tapped a little gong, which had been bought to summon the servants.

“You must make more noise than that if you want them to hear.”

Henry opened a door, and down the corridor came shouts of laughter. “Far

too much screaming there,” he said, and strode towards it. Margaret went

upstairs, uncertain whether to be glad that they had met, or sorry. They

had behaved as if nothing had happened, and her deepest instincts told

her that this was wrong. For his own sake, some explanation was due.

And yet--what could an explanation tell her? A date, a place, a few

details, which she could imagine all too clearly. Now that the first

shock was over, she saw that there was every reason to premise a Mrs.

Bast. Henry’s inner life had long laid open to her--his intellectual

confusion, his obtuseness to personal influence, his strong but furtive

passions. Should she refuse him because his outer life corresponded?

Perhaps. Perhaps, if the dishonour had been done to her, but it was done

long before her day. She struggled against the feeling. She told herself

that Mrs. Wilcox’s wrong was her own. But she was not a barren theorist.

As she undressed, her anger, her regard for the dead, her desire for a

scene, all grew weak. Henry must have it as he liked, for she loved him,

and some day she would use her love to make him a better man.

Pity was at the bottom of her actions all through this crisis. Pity, if

one may generalise, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is

for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not

be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness

stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.

Here was the core of the question. Henry must be forgiven, and made

better by love; nothing else mattered. Mrs. Wilcox, that unquiet yet

kindly ghost, must be left to her own wrong. To her everything was in

proportion now, and she, too, would pity the man who was blundering

up and down their lives. Had Mrs. Wilcox known of his trespass? An

interesting question, but Margaret fell asleep, tethered by affection,

and lulled by the murmurs of the river that descended all the night from

Wales. She felt herself at one with her future home, colouring it and

coloured by it, and awoke to see, for the second time, Oniton Castle

conquering the morning mists.