‘I’m sorry. But what have I done? Oh, what have I done! I might have known.’
‘Of course, if you’d known, this … regrettable precipitancy …’
‘Oh, hardly that! We’d been in love for ten years.’
‘And did quite well without each other. It’s a pity you couldn’t keep it up a little longer.’
‘Oh, Mother, don’t! Don’t be so cruel. Anyhow, it’s not that I’m thinking of. But I’ve been so unkind to him. Oh, perhaps it’s not true!’
‘I’m afraid it is, dear.’
Mrs Cocks put a few stitches into her rug. Agatha was walking distractedly about the room, delving into the past.
‘Poor John! Oh, I ought to have known! But why? Why didn’t he tell me? I don’t blame him, though. I know quite well why he didn’t. I was abominable to him and let him see I didn’t love him. Oh, but of course I wouldn’t have left him if I’d known. At least, not like that. But then, what would I have been worth even if I had stayed, if it was only for that? I don’t wonder he didn’t tell me. He would have, if I’d treated him better.’
‘I don’t know that it makes so very much difference to John,’ said Mrs Cocks dispassionately. ‘The injury which you’ve inflicted upon him would be the same, whether he were well or ill. I don’t expect he feels it any more bitterly on that score.’
‘I’m not thinking of that so much as the hateful way I baited him before I left him.’
‘And I’m not really thinking of John at all. And it’s rather sentimental in you, Agatha, to do so at this late hour. If you were going to consider his feelings you should have done so sooner. No! I’m thinking of the perfectly unnecessary way in which you have compromised yourself.’
‘I don’t see what else could have happened really,’ said Agatha dejectedly, as she sat down again. ‘Once it was a declared thing between me and Gerald, I suppose I must have gone to him. Only it would never have come to such a point, that time at Braxhall, if I’d known about John. How horrible it all is! However, it’s done now and can’t be undone. I must try to think what is best to do next.’
‘Quite so. And you have to remember that your reputation is still undamaged. The family will remain silent for John’s sake.’
‘But that can’t last for long.’
‘I hope you’ll see the sense, now, of coming to me here, at least until …’
‘But, my dear Mother, what’s the use of that? If I go to New York in six weeks’ time with Gerald, what’s the use? …’
‘I think you must wait here quietly until you can join him to be married.’
‘Oh, no! We couldn’t be separated like that.’
‘I think you owe it to John. I really do.’ Mrs Cocks was playing her last card and her face bore traces of anxiety. ‘So far you haven’t brought public disgrace on him. And that is what he minds, you know quite well it is. If you leave Gerald now and live here with me for a month or two you will save your husband’s name from dishonour. I think you’ve no right to refuse that to a dying man.’
‘I must see what Gerald thinks,’ said Agatha uncertainly. ‘He will know what is right. He has a finer conscience than I have.’
‘Has he, indeed?’ said Mrs Cocks.
‘I can see your point of view. I’ll put it to him.’
‘I’m sure he’ll think as I do. Let him go out to New York, and you can follow him when you are free. After a decent interval. Surely it would be better, from all points of view? We might both go out; it would look more respectable. And then you could marry him out there. I know it sounds callous to talk about the future in this cold-blooded way, but one must look ahead.’
‘It … it would be bound to be fairly soon, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes, quite. I gather there is, practically speaking, no doubt about that.’
Mrs Cocks longed to add: ‘You needn’t be afraid your husband will not die,’ but she checked herself in time and continued relentlessly:
‘For one thing, if it’s all decently and respectably done, and you don’t compromise yourselves by rushing off together before you can be properly married, it will be so much easier for you to return to England eventually. Supposing Gerald changed his mind about his work and wanted to come back and take up his London practice? You would infinitely prefer that in your heart of hearts, wouldn’t you? You don’t surely want to spend the rest of your life in New York?’
Agatha shivered.
‘Why invite a scandal when you can avoid it? I should have thought your affection for Gerald would have made you consider his position and career a little more.’
‘You see,’ exclained Agatha, ‘I rather think it is on my account that he has accepted this work in New York. I think he thought, poor dear, that it would be easier for me. And if that is so, I don’t think I ought to let him go without me.’
‘Well, at least, come here until you go. Don’t go on blatantly living with him as long as you are in London. I really think you should have more consideration for all our feelings than to do that. Besides, the Talisman is such a respectable place! It’s where all the head-mistresses go when they come up to attend conferences. I shouldn’t wonder if you got turned out when the management discover who you are. And they are bound to do that before long. How shall you like that?’
‘Oh, it is difficult! I’ll go off now and consult him,’ conceded Agatha.
‘Stay to lunch first. There is plenty of time.’
Mrs Cocks was unwilling to let Agatha go until she had forced her to a decision.
‘But I said I’d be back for lunch. He will wait for me.’
‘Ring him up and tell him you are staying here.’
‘I could do that.’
Agatha went to the telephone. As she waited for Gerald, she said reflectively:
‘It wouldn’t be a long separation. Only six weeks.’
‘What, child?’ Mrs Cocks looked up from her rug. ‘Oh! Oh, no! Not long. The most married people are sometimes parted for as long as that.’
Agatha addressed herself to the telephone:
‘Oh, Gerald, is that you? I’m speaking from South Kensington. I’m stopping to lunch, so don’t wait for me … Oh, not badly…. I’ll tell you when I get back…. I don’t quite know…. If I’m not back by tea-time, ring me up, will you? Good-bye, then.’
She hung up the receiver, and found that her mother was looking her over with approving eyes.
‘You’re in very good looks, my dear. You’ve quite got back your colour. I don’t know when I’ve seen you look better. Corsica has evidently built you up. Come down to lunch.’
The two women strolled downstairs. Agatha stifled a small pang of compunction at the thought of poor Gerald lunching in the hotel all by himself. As a matter of fact he had taken the opportunity to escape from the menu cards and the sweet-peas and maidenhair fern and all the flummery which so exasperated him at an hotel meal. He had sought an eating-house near Guy’s, a haunt of his bachelor days, where he was almost sure of picking up a friend to share his chops and beer.
4.
Hubert, borne as far as Cowper in his passion for the eighteenth century, had re-read the Winter Morning’s Walk. He became enchanted with it and insisted upon reading extracts to Lois in spite of her visible absorption in a volume of Marcel Proust. The next day was bitterly cold and he was very anxious that they should set forth upon a Winter Morning’s Walk of their own, but she would not be persuaded. In the afternoon, therefore, feeling every inch a country gentleman, he set off by himself. He strode through several farmyards and looked severely at some pigs. He thrashed with his stick at such poor weeds as the season had spared. His hope was that if he crossed a sufficient number of fields, and climbed a few score stiles, he might, permeated by the beauties of the wintry landscape, achieve that mood of philosophic reverie which gives distinction to the poets of Cowper’s age. If fields and hedges failed to produce the right effect he might try a country churchyard.
He had observed that the fellows us
ually begin by cataloguing the scenery, and he obediently scrutinized the view, moving the eye, as the poet directs, ‘from joy to joy.’ But, gaze as he would, he remained cold. Emphatically that, for a bleak, black wind swept from the steely sky and whistled over the stubble, nearly flaying him. His nose turned blue and his eyes began to water; it was the kind of day when no clothes seem thick enough.
‘It needs a frost, I suppose,’ he reflected, ‘and snow, and icicles hanging from the old barn roof, and what not. Something more like a Christmas card.’
He thought sadly of Madeira, where they had intended to spend the winter, and, as a fresh gale came down the hill, he wondered if Madeira would really be warm enough. The shortening afternoon gave him a good excuse for turning homewards.
Having reached his garden, however, he perceived Lois at the window of the living-room, and immediately underwent a recrudescence of the country gentleman. She beckoned to him but he ignored her and began a solemn tour of the estate, minutely examining each much-pruned rose-bush in the bed under the window. He hoped that he did not look too cold and miserable. Lois opened the long window and called to him to come in, but he hardly heard her in the frenzy of excitement with which he stooped over an extremely small bush. Then he straightened himself.
‘Lois!’ he called. ‘Just come and look here!’
‘What at?’ she called back, shivering in the window. ‘Do come in out of the cold. I’ve had a letter….’
‘I do believe …’ he said, in deep concern, ‘… I’m very much afraid it’s the blight!’
‘The what?’
‘The blight! … Er … rose blight.’
‘Is there such a thing?’
‘Of course there is.’
She came out and joined him.
‘I don’t see anything wrong,’ she said.
‘I don’t like that funny reddish colour at the end of that twig,’ he commented anxiously.
‘Aren’t they always like that at this time of year? And anyhow you can’t do anything about it, even if it is. You don’t know what to do.’
Hubert looked pained at such an accusation. He said, with becoming gravity:
‘I’ll have to consult with Saunders.’
‘Now do come in. I’ve something I want to talk to you about….’
He followed her into the genial warmth of the living-room and just managed to suppress a sigh of ecstasy as the window closed behind them.
‘I had a nice bracing walk,’ he told her. ‘Pity you wouldn’t come. Those pigs at the old farm are very fine. I had a look at them.’
But she was so intent upon a communication which she wished to make that she had no time to be a country gentleman’s wife. She did not even notice that he was aggrieved about it.
‘It’s the most extraordinary thing,’ she said, ‘and you will have to speak to James. He pays too little consideration, really, to poor Mother’s feelings, and it’s disgusting after all she’s done for him.’
‘How often have I told you,’ said Hubert furiously, his grievance taking shape, ‘how often have I told you that I will not speak to James about things? Why should I? He’s more trouble than he’s worth. If anything is to be done with him one of you women had better talk to his precious Dolly. That’s the only way to deal with him.’
‘Dolly is as bad as he is. She’s worse. They are both disgusting, but he has some excuse. He’s always been eccentric, and anyhow, men have different standards. But Dolly shouldn’t countenance it. At least, one expects people of her class to value respectability. One would think she would be more particular.’
‘What have they been doing now? I thought Dolly was too respectable, if anything. That was your mother’s view when last we discussed her.’
‘Mother writes that she really can’t go there any longer. She can’t countenance the way they receive Agatha. She says that Agatha is up at Hampstead so often that one can never be really quite sure of not meeting her.’
‘But Lois … I told you that at the Martins’ party the other week we all …’
‘That’s different. That’s in public. Of course, in a private family affair like this, one has to behave civilly in front of people. Dolly and James did quite right: I was glad to hear that they had that much savoir-faire. But it’s quite a different thing asking her to their house.’
‘It’s rather funny, when you think how very lately it was Agatha we all blamed for receiving them. But really, my dear, I think it’s entirely their business who they ask to their house.’
‘Have their family no claims? When you think of what we have all done for them! Where would they be if it wasn’t for us? You’d think James would have more feeling of loyalty to his brother. You’d think a respectable creature like Dolly would draw the line somewhere.’
‘I daresay she does.’
‘I tell you she doesn’t. If, knowing the facts, she can go on asking Agatha to her house, it shows that she doesn’t.’
‘I don’t see that follows,’ argued Hubert. ‘It merely shows that she wouldn’t draw the line where you do. Her conventions are not the same as yours.’
The word convention drew her fire, as he knew it would. She plunged after it, off the main track of her indignation.
‘Conventions? Who is talking of conventions? I don’t consider myself a very conventional person….’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No, I don’t. As people go I should say I was very tolerably broadminded. Anyhow, I’m much less conventional than you are.’
‘Very possibly,’ agreed Hubert in an irritating voice.
‘So you can’t talk.’
Hubert said nothing, but picked up the evening paper and settled himself in a comfortable chair by the fire. Lois, finding herself in a cul-de-sac, made one of those unexpectedly swift returns to the main issue which so often surprised him:
‘Anyhow this question of James and Dolly has nothing to do with convention.’
‘I should have thought it had.’
‘It’s … it’s simply a matter of decent feeling.’
‘Same thing …’ Hubert was heard to mumble.
‘It’s not. It isn’t at all the same thing.’
‘I think it is.’
‘I say it isn’t.’
‘What attitude,’ demanded Hubert, after a pause, ‘should decent feeling have prompted Dolly to adopt towards her sinning sister?’
‘Don’t be flippant, Hubert! I feel very strongly about this.’
‘I observe that you do. But I’m not joking, Lois. I want to know. How should Dolly behave to Agatha?’
‘She should make it quite clear … as soon as she has the opportunity to do it privately, I mean … she should make it obvious that she disapproves of her.’
‘But, I just put it to you, supposing she doesn’t disapprove?’
‘Well, then, she should.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, Hubert! How can you ask? And she pretends to be religious!’
‘But her kindness to Agatha may be on religious grounds, you know. Eating with publicans and sinners, even with scribes and pharisees, has been sanctioned by an unimpeachable precedent.’
‘Yes, perhaps. But it isn’t only religion. It’s the flagrant disregard of all social …’
Since convention was the only word which suggested itself to her, Lois left this sentence unfinished and went on to the third item in her charge.
‘They ought to remember what they owe to the family.’
‘But what do they owe?’
‘What does anyone owe? If I had treated you as Agatha treated John, would you like to see your relations welcoming me with open arms?’
Hubert was struck by this.
‘No, I can’t say I should,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘A little hurt, I should be.’
‘And for Dolly and James especially, when you think of everything that has been done for them. Mother, and John, and you and the Bragges. If you think how we’ve all helped in James’s career! You don�
��t remember, because you didn’t know us then, but I do, how Mother worried herself getting him good lessons and sending him to Paris and all. It’s really rather wonderful when you think she isn’t his real mother. And she had to stand no end of criticism from his own relations for not sending him away to school; that old Major Talbot and Mrs Gordon Clewer—all quite odious about it, and insinuating all sorts of things. They none of them could see that she was keeping him at home because she thought he would develop better there, and that a boy of his temperament couldn’t be treated like the average. And then think how John let him go on living at Lyndon, just letting him paint and go his own way without a word of criticism! Not many young artists have such obliging brothers. And then his marriage! I don’t see how he could possibly have married if the family hadn’t been so nice about it. He never considered, I suppose, when he was allowed to marry with so little trouble, what a blow it was to all of us. We all had to make sacrifices. And then think of the trouble you took to get him work! And Cynthia and Tom and the way he treated them. And the whole business of the Hampstead move. Mother was up there every day for a week, seeing about it. And you taking such trouble to introduce him to people; turning out on cold nights to take him to evening parties which bored you frightfully. Oh, I know it’s a privilege to have him in the family, but it’s a great burden too! And he’s not a scrap grateful!’
Hubert meditated on this catalogue in some awe and said:
‘He certainly has a good deal to thank us all for. But do I understand that your mother actually met Agatha at Hampstead?’
‘Yes. She went up to see Dolly about a servant or something. And James calmly took her into the sitting-room, where she found Agatha helping Dolly to make herself a blouse, if you please! You’d have thought they’d have the sense, under the circumstances, to show Mother into another room. It was most awkward.’
‘And what happened?’
‘I’ll read you what Mother writes.’
Lois picked up a letter and read:
‘Though I was very much taken aback, I was not, on the whole, sorry to have an opportunity of expressing my feelings. I was a little afraid lest my manner at Mrs Townshend’s might have been misunderstood….’
Ladies of Lyndon Page 28
