The Good Soldier (24 page)

And, indeed, she was not losing her looks. She was forty, but
she was as clean run as on the day she had left the convent—as
clear in outline, as clear coloured in the hair, as dark blue in
the eyes. She thought that her looking-glass told her this; but
there are always the doubts.... Rodney Bayham's eyes took them
away.

It is very singular that Leonora should not have aged at all. I
suppose that there are some types of beauty and even of youth made
for the embellishments that come with enduring sorrow. That is too
elaborately put. I mean that Leonora, if everything had prospered,
might have become too hard and, maybe, overbearing. As it was she
was tuned down to appearing efficient—and yet sympathetic. That is
the rarest of all blends. And yet I swear that Leonora, in her
restrained way, gave the impression of being intensely sympathetic.
When she listened to you she appeared also to be listening to some
sound that was going on in the distance. But still, she listened to
you and took in what you said, which, since the record of humanity
is a record of sorrows, was, as a rule, something sad.

I think that she must have taken Nancy through many terrors of
the night and many bad places of the day. And that would account
for the girl's passionate love for the elder woman. For Nancy's
love for Leonora was an admiration that is awakened in Catholics by
their feeling for the Virgin Mary and for various of the saints. It
is too little to say that the girl would have laid her life at
Leonora's feet. Well, she laid there the offer of her virtue—and
her reason. Those were sufficient instalments of her life. It would
today be much better for Nancy Rufford if she were dead.

Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance; but they crowd on
me. I will try to tell the story.

You see—when she came back from Nauheim Leonora began to have
her headaches—headaches lasting through whole days, during which
she could speak no word and could bear to hear no sound. And, day
after day, Nancy would sit with her, silent and motionless for
hours, steeping handkerchiefs in vinegar and water, and thinking
her own thoughts. It must have been very bad for her—and her meals
alone with Edward must have been bad for her too—and beastly bad
for Edward. Edward, of course, wavered in his demeanour, What else
could he do? At times he would sit silent and dejected over his
untouched food. He would utter nothing but monosyllables when Nancy
spoke to him. Then he was simply afraid of the girl falling in love
with him. At other times he would take a little wine; pull himself
together; attempt to chaff Nancy about a stake and binder hedge
that her mare had checked at, or talk about the habits of the
Chitralis. That was when he was thinking that it was rough on the
poor girl that he should have become a dull companion. He realized
that his talking to her in the park at Nauheim had done her no
harm.

But all that was doing a great deal of harm to Nancy. It
gradually opened her eyes to the fact that Edward was a man with
his ups and downs and not an invariably gay uncle like a nice dog,
a trustworthy horse or a girl friend. She would find him in
attitudes of frightful dejection, sunk into his armchair in the
study that was half a gun-room. She would notice through the open
door that his face was the face of an old, dead man, when he had no
one to talk to. Gradually it forced itself upon her attention that
there were profound differences between the pair that she regarded
a her uncle and her aunt. It was a conviction that came very
slowly.

It began with Edward's giving an oldish horse to a young fellow
called Selmes. Selmes' father had been ruined by fraudulent
solicitor and the Selmes family had had to sell their hunters. It
was a case that had excited a good deal of sympathy in that part of
the county. And Edward, meeting the young man one day, unmounted,
and seeing him to be very unhappy, had offered to give him an old
Irish cob upon which he was riding. It was a silly sort of thing to
do really. The horse was worth from thirty to forty pounds and
Edward might have known that the gift would upset his wife. But
Edward just had to comfort that unhappy young man whose father he
had known all his life. And what made it all the worse was that
young Selmes could not afford to keep the horse even. Edward
recollected this, immediately after he had made the offer, and said
quickly:

"Of course I mean that you should stable the horse at Branshaw
until you have time to turn round or want to sell him and get a
better."

Nancy went straight home and told all this to Leonora who was
lying down. She regarded it as a splendid instance of Edward's
quick consideration for the feelings and the circumstances of the
distressed. She thought it would cheer Leonora up—because it ought
to cheer any woman up to know that she had such a splendid husband.
That was the last girlish thought she ever had. For Leonora, whose
headache had left her collected but miserably weak, turned upon her
bed and uttered words that were amazing to the girl:

"I wish to God," she said, "that he was your husband, and not
mine. We shall be ruined. We shall be ruined. Am I never to have a
chance?" And suddenly Leonora burst into a passion of tears. She
pushed herself up from the pillows with one elbow and sat
there—crying, crying, crying, with her face hidden in her hands and
the tears falling through her fingers.

The girl flushed, stammered and whimpered as if she had been
personally insulted.

"But if Uncle Edward..." she began.

"That man," said Leonora, with an extraordinary bitterness,
"would give the shirt off his back and off mine—and off yours to
any..." She could not finish the sentence.

At that moment she had been feeling an extraordinary hatred and
contempt for her husband. All the morning and all the afternoon she
had been lying there thinking that Edward and the girl were
together—in the field and hacking it home at dusk. She had been
digging her sharp nails into her palms.

The house had been very silent in the drooping winter weather.
And then, after an eternity of torture, there had invaded it the
sound of opening doors, of the girl's gay voice saying:

"Well, it was only under the mistletoe."... And there was
Edward's gruff undertone. Then Nancy had come in, with feet that
had hastened up the stairs and that tiptoed as they approached the
open door of Leonora's room. Branshaw had a great big hall with oak
floors and tiger skins. Round this hall there ran a gallery upon
which Leonora's doorway gave. And even when she had the worst of
her headaches she liked to have her door open—I suppose so that she
might hear the approaching footsteps of ruin and disaster. At any
rate she hated to be in a room with a shut door.

At that moment Leonora hated Edward with a hatred that was like
hell, and she would have liked to bring her riding-whip down across
the girl's face. What right had Nancy to be young and slender and
dark, and gay at times, at times mournful? What right had she to be
exactly the woman to make Leonora's husband happy? For Leonora knew
that Nancy would have made Edward happy.

Yes, Leonora wished to bring her riding-whip down on Nancy's
young face. She imagined the pleasure she would feel when the lash
fell across those queer features; the plea sure she would feel at
drawing the handle at the same moment toward her, so as to cut deep
into the flesh and to leave a lasting wheal.

Well, she left a lasting wheal, and her words cut deeply into
the girl's mind....

They neither of them spoke about that again. A fortnight went
by—a fortnight of deep rains, of heavy fields, of bad scent.
Leonora's headaches seemed to have gone for good. She hunted once
or twice, letting herself be piloted by Bayham, whilst Edward
looked after the girl. Then, one evening, when those three were
dining alone, Edward said, in the queer, deliberate, heavy tones
that came out of him in those days (he was looking at the
table):

"I have been thinking that Nancy ought to do more for her
father. He is getting an old man. I have written to Colonel
Rufford, suggesting that she should go to him."

Leonora called out:

"How dare you? How dare you?"

The girl put her hand over her heart and cried out: "Oh, my
sweet Saviour, help mel" That was the queer way she thought within
her mind, and the words forced themselves to her lips. Edward said
nothing.

And that night, by a merciless trick of the devil that pays
attention to this sweltering hell of ours, Nancy Rufford had a
letter from her mother. It came whilst Leonora was talking to
Edward, or Leonora would have intercepted it as she had intercepted
others. It was an amazing and a horrible letter.. ..

I don't know what it contained. I just average out from its
effects on Nancy that her mother, having eloped with some worthless
sort of fellow, had done what is called "sinking lower and lower".
Whether she was actually on the streets I do not know, but I rather
think that she eked out a small allowance that she had from her
husband by that means of livelihood. And I think that she stated as
much in her letter to Nancy and upbraided the girl with living in
luxury whilst her mother starved. And it must have been horrible in
tone, for Mrs Rufford was a cruel sort of woman at the best of
times. It must have seemed to that poor girl, opening her letter,
for distraction from another grief, up in her bedroom, like the
laughter of a devil.

I just cannot bear to think of my poor dear girl at that
moment....

And, at the same time, Leonora was lashing, like a cold fiend,
into the unfortunate Edward. Or, perhaps, he was not so
unfortunate; because he had done what he knew to be the right
thing, he may be deemed happy. I leave it to you. At any rate, he
was sitting in his deep chair, and Leonora came into his room—for
the first time in nine years. She said:

"This is the most atrocious thing you have done in your
atrocious life." He never moved and he never looked at her. God
knows what was in Leonora's mind exactly.

I like to think that, uppermost in it was concern and horror at
the thought of the poor girl's going back to a father whose voice
made her shriek in the night. And, indeed, that motive was very
strong with Leonora. But I think there was also present the thought
that she wanted to go on torturing Edward with the girl's presence.
She was, at that time, capable of that.

Edward was sunk in his chair; there were in the room two
candles, hidden by green glass shades. The green shades were
reflected in the glasses of the book-cases that contained not books
but guns with gleaming brown barrels and fishing-rods in green
baize over-covers. There was dimly to be seen, above a mantelpiece
encumbered with spurs, hooves and bronze models of horses, a
dark-brown picture of a white horse.

"If you think," Leonora said, "that I do not know that you are
in love with the girl..." She began spiritedly, but she could not
find any ending for the sentence. Edward did not stir; he never
spoke. And then Leonora said:

"If you want me to divorce you, I will. You can marry her then.
She's in love with you."

He groaned at that, a little, Leonora said. Then she went
away.

Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly
does not herself know. She probably said a good deal more to Edward
than I have been able to report; but that is all that she has told
me and I am not going to make up speeches. To follow her
psychological development of that moment I think we must allow that
she upbraided him for a great deal of their past life, whilst
Edward sat absolutely silent. And, indeed, in speaking of it
afterwards, she has said several times: "I said a great deal more
to him than I wanted to, just because he was so silent." She
talked, in fact, in the endeavour to sting him into speech.

She must have said so much that, with the expression of her
grievance, her mood changed. She went back to her own room in the
gallery, and sat there for a long time thinking. And she thought
herself into a mood of absolute unselfishness, of absolute
self-contempt, too. She said to herself that she was no good; that
she had failed in all her efforts—in her efforts to get Edward back
as in her efforts to make him curb his expenditure. She imagined
herself to be exhausted; she imagined herself to be done. Then a
great fear came over her.

She thought that Edward, after what she had said to him, must
have committed suicide. She went out on to the gallery and
listened; there was no sound in all the house except the regular
beat of the great clock in the hall. But, even in her debased
condition, she was not the person to hang about. She acted. She
went straight to Edward's room, opened the door, and looked in.

He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It was an unusual
thing for him to do, at that time of night, in his evening clothes.
It never occurred to her, nevertheless, that he was going to shoot
himself with that implement. She knew that he was doing it just for
occupation—to keep himself from thinking. He looked up when she
opened the door, his face illuminated by the light cast upwards
from the round orifices in the green candle shades.

She said:

"I didn't imagine that I should find Nancy here." She thought
that she owed that to him. He answered then:

"I don't imagine that you did imagine it." Those were the only
words he spoke that night. She went, like a lame duck, back through
the long corridors; she stumbled over the familiar tiger skins in
the dark hall. She could hardly drag one limb after the other. In
the gallery she perceived that Nancy's door was half open and that
there was a light in the girl's room. A sudden madness possessed
her, a desire for action, a thirst for self-explanation.

Their rooms all gave on to the gallery; Leonora's to the east,
the girl's next, then Edward's. The sight of those three open
doors, side by side, gaping to receive whom the chances of the
black night might bring, made Leonora shudder all over her body.
She went into Nancy's room.