The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  She stared—she cast about. “The purpose? What’s the matter? Why do you ask?”

  “They’ve put it off—they’ve put it off a month.”

  “Ah thank God!” said Adela.

  “Why the devil do you thank God?” Godfrey asked with a strange impatience.

  She gave a strained intense smile. “You know I think it all wrong.”

  He stood looking at her up and down. “What did you do there? How did you interfere?”

  “Who told you I interfered?” she returned with a deep flush.

  “You said something—you did something. I knew you had done it when I saw you come out.”

  “What I did was my own business.”

  “Damn your own business!” cried the young man.

  She had never in her life been so spoken to, and in advance, had she been given the choice, would have said that she’d rather die than be so handled by Godfrey. But her spirit was high, and for a moment she was as angry as if she had been cut with a whip. She escaped the blow but felt the insult. “And YOUR business then?” she asked. “I wondered what that was when I saw YOU.”

  He stood a moment longer scowling at her; then with the exclamation “You’ve made a pretty mess!” he turned away from her and sat down to his books.

  They had put it off, as he said; her father was dry and stiff and official about it. “I suppose I had better let you know we’ve thought it best to postpone our marriage till the end of the summer— Mrs. Churchley has so many arrangements to make”: he was not more expansive than that. She neither knew nor greatly cared whether she but vainly imagined or correctly observed him to watch her obliquely for some measure of her receipt of these words. She flattered herself that, thanks to Godfrey’s forewarning, cruel as the form of it had been, she was able to repress any crude sign of elation. She had a perfectly good conscience, for she could now judge what odious elements Mrs. Churchley, whom she had not seen since the morning in Prince’s Gate, had already introduced into their dealings. She gathered without difficulty that her father hadn’t concurred in the postponement, for he was more restless than before, more absent and distinctly irritable. There was naturally still the question of how much of this condition was to be attributed to his solicitude about Godfrey. That young man took occasion to say a horrible thing to his sister: “If I don’t pass it will be your fault.” These were dreadful days for the girl, and she asked herself how she could have borne them if the hovering spirit of her mother hadn’t been at her side. Fortunately she always felt it there, sustaining, commending, sanctifying. Suddenly her father announced to her that he wished her to go immediately, with her sisters, down to Brinton, where there was always part of a household and where for a few weeks they would manage well enough. The only explanation he gave of this desire was that he wanted them out of the way. Out of the way of what?” she queried, since there were to be for the time no preparations in Seymour Street. She was willing to take it for out of the way of his nerves.

  She never needed urging however to go to Brinton, the dearest old house in the world, where the happiest days of her young life had been spent and the silent nearness of her mother always seemed greatest. She was happy again, with Beatrice and Muriel and Miss Flynn, with the air of summer and the haunted rooms and her mother’s garden and the talking oaks and the nightingales. She wrote briefly to her father, giving him, as he had requested, an account of things; and he wrote back that since she was so contented—she didn’t recognise having told him that—she had better not return to town at all. The fag-end of the London season would be unimportant to her, and he was getting on very well. He mentioned that Godfrey had passed his tests, but, as she knew, there would be a tiresome wait before news of results. The poor chap was going abroad for a month with young Sherard—he had earned a little rest and a little fun. He went abroad without a word to Adela, but in his beautiful little hand he took a chaffing leave of Beatrice. The child showed her sister the letter, of which she was very proud and which contained no message for any one else. This was the worst bitterness of the whole crisis for that somebody—its placing in so strange a light the creature in the world whom, after her mother, she had loved best.

  Colonel Chart had said he would “run down” while his children were at Brinton, but they heard no more about it. He only wrote two or three times to Miss Flynn on matters in regard to which Adela was surprised he shouldn’t have communicated with herself. Muriel accomplished an upright little letter to Mrs. Churchley—her eldest sister neither fostered nor discouraged the performance—to which Mrs. Churchley replied, after a fortnight, in a meagre and, as Adela thought, illiterate fashion, making no allusion to the approach of any closer tie. Evidently the situation had changed; the question of the marriage was dropped, at any rate for the time. This idea gave our young woman a singular and almost intoxicating sense of power; she felt as if she were riding a great wave of confidence. She had decided and acted—the greatest could do no more than that. The grand thing was to see one’s results, and what else was she doing? These results were in big rich conspicuous lives; the stage was large on which she moved her figures. Such a vision was exciting, and as they had the use of a couple of ponies at Brinton she worked off her excitement by a long gallop. A day or two after this however came news of which the effect was to rekindle it. Godfrey had come back, the list had been published, he had passed first. These happy tidings proceeded from the young man himself; he announced them by a telegram to Beatrice, who had never in her life before received such a missive and was proportionately inflated. Adela reflected that she herself ought to have felt snubbed, but she was too happy. They were free again, they were themselves, the nightmare of the previous weeks was blown away, the unity and dignity of her father’s life restored, and, to round off her sense of success, Godfrey had achieved his first step toward high distinction. She wrote him the next day as frankly and affectionately as if there had been no estrangement between them, and besides telling him how she rejoiced in his triumph begged him in charity to let them know exactly how the case stood with regard to Mrs. Churchley.

  Late in the summer afternoon she walked through the park to the village with her letter, posted it and came back. Suddenly, at one of the turns of the avenue, half-way to the house, she saw a young man hover there as if awaiting her—a young man who proved to be Godfrey on his pedestrian progress over from the station. He had seen her as he took his short cut, and if he had come down to Brinton it wasn’t apparently to avoid her. There was nevertheless none of the joy of his triumph in his face as he came a very few steps to meet her; and although, stiffly enough, he let her kiss him and say “I’m so glad—I’m so glad!” she felt this tolerance as not quite the mere calm of the rising diplomatist. He turned toward the house with her and walked on a short distance while she uttered the hope that he had come to stay some days.

  “Only till to-morrow morning. They’re sending me straight to Madrid. I came down to say good-bye; there’s a fellow bringing my bags.”

  “To Madrid? How awfully nice! And it’s awfully nice of you to have come,” she said as she passed her hand into his arm.

  The movement made him stop, and, stopping, he turned on her in a flash a face of something more than, suspicion—of passionate reprobation. “What I really came for—you might as well know without more delay—is to ask you a question.”

  “A question?”—she echoed it with a beating heart.

  They stood there under the old trees in the lingering light, and, young and fine and fair as they both were, formed a complete superficial harmony with the peaceful English scene. A near view, however, would have shown that Godfrey Chart hadn’t taken so much trouble only to skim the surface. He looked deep into his sister’s eyes. “What was it you said that morning to Mrs. Churchley?”

  She fixed them on the ground a moment, but at last met his own again. “If she has told you, why do you ask?”

  “She has told me nothing. I’ve seen for myself.”

&nbs
p; “What have you seen?”

  “She has broken it off. Everything’s over. Father’s in the depths.”

  “In the depths?” the girl quavered.

  “Did you think it would make him jolly?” he went on.

  She had to choose what to say. “He’ll get over it. He’ll he glad.”

  “That remains to be seen. You interfered, you invented something, you got round her. I insist on knowing what you did.”

  Adela felt that if it was a question of obstinacy there was something within her she could count on; in spite of which, while she stood looking down again a moment, she said to herself “I could be dumb and dogged if I chose, but I scorn to be.” She wasn’t ashamed of what she had done, but she wanted to be clear. “Are you absolutely certain it’s broken off?”

  “He is, and she is; so that’s as good.”

  “What reason has she given?”

  “None at all—or half a dozen; it’s the same thing. She has changed her mind—she mistook her feelings—she can’t part with her independence. Moreover he has too many children.”

  “Did he tell you this?” the girl asked.

  “Mrs. Churchley told me. She has gone abroad for a year.”

  “And she didn’t tell you what I said to her?”

  Godfrey showed an impatience. “Why should I take this trouble if she had?”

  “You might have taken it to make me suffer,” said Adela. “That appears to be what you want to do.”

  “No, I leave that to you—it’s the good turn you’ve done me!” cried the young man with hot tears in his eyes.

  She stared, aghast with the perception that there was some dreadful thing she didn’t know; but he walked on, dropping the question angrily and turning his back to her as if he couldn’t trust himself. She read his disgust in his averted, face, in the way he squared his shoulders and smote the ground with his stick, and she hurried after him and presently overtook him. She kept by him for a moment in silence; then she broke out: “What do you mean? What in the world have I done to you?”

  “She would have helped me. She was all ready to help me,” Godfrey portentously said.

  “Helped you in what?” She wondered what he meant; if he had made debts that he was afraid to confess to his father and—of all horrible things—had been looking to Mrs. Churchley to pay. She turned red with the mere apprehension of this and, on the heels of her guess, exulted again at having perhaps averted such a shame.

  “Can’t you just see I’m in trouble? Where are your eyes, your senses, your sympathy, that you talk so much about? Haven’t you seen these six months that I’ve a curst worry in my life?”

  She seized his arm, made him stop, stood looking up at him like a frightened little girl. “What’s the matter, Godfrey?—what IS the matter?”

  “You’ve gone against me so—I could strangle you!” he growled. This image added nothing to her dread; her dread was that he had done some wrong, was stained with some guilt. She uttered it to him with clasped hands, begging him to tell her the worst; but, still more passionately, he cut her short with his own cry: “In God’s name, satisfy me! What infernal thing did you do?”

  “It wasn’t infernal—it was right. I told her mamma had been wretched,” said Adela.

  “Wretched? You told her such a lie?”

  “It was the only way, and she believed me.”

  “Wretched how?—wretched when?—wretched where?” the young man stammered.

  “I told her papa had made her so, and that SHE ought to know it. I told her the question troubled me unspeakably, but that I had made up my mind it was my duty to initiate her.” Adela paused, the light of bravado in her face, as if, though struck while the words came with the monstrosity of what she had done, she was incapable of abating a jot of it. “I notified her that he had faults and peculiarities that made mamma’s life a long worry—a martyrdom that she hid wonderfully from the world, but that we saw and that I had often pitied. I told her what they were, these faults and peculiarities; I put the dots on the i’s. I said it wasn’t fair to let another person marry him without a warning. I warned her; I satisfied my conscience. She could do as she liked. My responsibility was over.”

  Godfrey gazed at her; he listened with parted lips, incredulous and appalled. “You invented such a tissue of falsities and calumnies, and you talk about your conscience? You stand there in your senses and proclaim your crime?”

  “I’d have committed any crime that would have rescued us.”

  “You insult and blacken and ruin your own father?” Godfrey kept on.

  “He’ll never know it; she took a vow she wouldn’t tell him.”

  “Ah I’ll he damned if I won’t tell him!” he rang out.

  Adela felt sick at this, but she flamed up to resent the treachery, as it struck her, of such a menace. “I did right—I did right!” she vehemently declared “I went down on my knees to pray for guidance, and I saved mamma’s memory from outrage. But if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t”—she faltered an instant—”I’m not worse than you, and I’m not so bad, for you’ve done something that you’re ashamed to tell me.”

  He had taken out his watch; he looked at it with quick intensity, as if not hearing nor heeding her. Then, his calculating eyes raised, he fixed her long enough to exclaim with unsurpassable horror and contempt: “You raving maniac!” He turned away from her; he bounded down the avenue in the direction from which they had come, and, while she watched him, strode away, across the grass, toward the short cut to the station.

  CHAPTER IV

  His bags, by the time she got home, had been brought to the house, but Beatrice and Muriel, immediately informed of this, waited for their brother in vain. Their sister said nothing to them of her having seen him, and she accepted after a little, with a calmness that surprised herself, the idea that he had returned to town to denounce her. She believed this would make no difference now—she had done what she had done. She had somehow a stiff faith in Mrs. Churchley. Once that so considerable mass had received its impetus it wouldn’t, it couldn’t pull up. It represented a heavy-footed person, incapable of further agility. Adela recognised too how well it might have come over her that there were too many children. Lastly the girl fortified herself with the reflexion, grotesque in the conditions and conducing to prove her sense of humour not high, that her father was after all not a man to be played with. It seemed to her at any rate that if she HAD baffled his unholy purpose she could bear anything—bear imprisonment and bread and water, bear lashes and torture, bear even his lifelong reproach. What she could bear least was the wonder of the inconvenience she had inflicted on Godfrey. She had time to turn this over, very vainly, for a succession of days—days more numerous than she had expected, which passed without bringing her from London any summons to come up and take her punishment. She sounded the possible, she compared the degrees of the probable; feeling however that as a cloistered girl she was poorly equipped for speculation. She tried to imagine the calamitous things young men might do, and could only feel that such things would naturally be connected either with borrowed money or with bad women. She became conscious that after all she knew almost nothing about either of those interests. The worst woman she knew was Mrs. Churchley herself. Meanwhile there was no reverberation from Seymour Street—only a sultry silence.

  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 affected 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 ne
ver 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 exquisite things, where she would spend most of her old age on her knees with an apron and stout gloves, with a pair of shears 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 descend 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 surmise was wrong.

  “Is she big and dreadful?” the girl asked.

  Miss Flynn, who was circumspection 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 frustrated marriage; but everything to-day for Adela was part of that.