A Young Man's Year

CHAPTER XXIII

FACING THE SITUATION

The gods were laughing at him; so it seemed to Arthur Lisle. They chose to chastise his folly and his sin by ridicule. He whom the catastrophe – the intrigue and the flight – had broken was chosen to break the news of it. He must put on a composed consolatory face, preach fortitude, recommend patience under the inevitable. He was plumped back into his old position of useful cousin, the friend of both husband and wife. Judith was that too. Why should not she carry the tidings? "No, you'll be more sympathetic," she insisted, with the old touch of mockery governing her manner again. "I should tell him too much of the truth most likely." So he must do it. But this useful cousin seemed a very different sort of man from the stricken sufferer, the jealous lover, of overnight. Indeed it was pitiable for the forsaken jealous lover – denied even a departure from the scene of his woes, condemned to dwell in the house so full of her and yet so empty, the butt (so his sensitive fancy imagined) of half the gossip and half the giggles of which to his ears Hilsey Manor was already full. But the forsaken lover must sink himself in the sympathetic kinsman – if he could; must wear his face and speak in his tones. A monstrous hypocrisy! "Bernadette's run away, but, I'm sorry to say, not with me, Godfrey." No, no, that was all wrong – that was the truth. "Bernadette's left you for Oliver Wyse – unprincipled woman and artful villain!" Was that right? Well, 'artful villain' was right enough, surely? Perhaps 'deluded woman' would do for Bernadette. "Brave woman and happy man!" the rude laughter of the gods suggested. "If we'd either of us had half his grit, Godfrey!" All sorts of things impossible to say the gods invented in their high but disconcerting irony.

"Well, I'm in for it – here goes!" thought Arthur, as he requested Barber to find out from Mrs. Gates – who had been acting as nurse to her master as well as to his little girl – when Mr. Lisle could see him.

Gossip and giggles there may have been somewhere, probably there were, but not on the faces or in the demeanour of Barber and Mrs. Gates. Pomp, funereal pomp! They seemed sure that Bernadette was dead, and that her death was a suicide.

"I will ascertain immediately, sir," said Barber. He was really very human over it all – a mixture of shockedness and curiosity, condemnation and comprehension, outrage and excuse – for she certainly had a way with her, Mrs. Lisle had. But his sense of appropriateness overpowered them all – a result, no doubt, of the ceremonial nature of his vocation.

Mrs. Gates's humanity was more on the ample surface of her ample personality. She made no pretence of not understanding what had happened, and even went a little further than that.

"Lor, sir, well there!" she whispered to Arthur. "I've 'ad my fears. Yes, he can see you, poor gentleman! I've not said a word to 'im. And poor Miss Margaret!" She was bent on getting every ounce out of the situation. Arthur did not want to kill her – she was a good woman – but it would have relieved his feelings to jab a penknife into one of the wide margins around her vital parts. "Why is she so fat?" he groaned inwardly and with no superficial relevance. But his instinct was true; her corpulence did, in the most correct sense, aggravate the present qualities of her emotions and demeanour.

And so, in varying forms, the thing was running all through the house – and soon would run all through the village. Mrs. Lisle – Mrs. Lisle of Hilsey! Portentous, horrible – and most exciting! It would run to London soon. Mrs. Lisle of Hilsey was not such a personage there – but still pretty well known. A good many people had been at that party where the Potentates had met. One of them had abdicated now and gone – well, perhaps only as far as Elba!

All the air was full of her, all the voices speaking her name in unison. The sympathetic cousin had great difficulty in getting on the top of the defeated lover when Arthur entered Godfrey's room. And even anyhow – if one left out all the irony and all the complication – the errand was not an easy or a grateful one. If Godfrey had gone to bed sooner than witness a flirtation, what mightn't he do in face of an elopement?

The invalid was sitting up in bed, supported by several pillows, smoking a cigarette and reading yesterday's "Times." The improvement in his temper, manifest from the moment when he took to his bed, seemed to have been progressive. He made Arthur welcome.

"And I hope you've not come to say good-bye?" he added. Arthur had mentioned to him too the call to London and to work.

"No, I'm going to stay on a few days more, if you can put me up. I say, Godfrey – "

"Delighted to keep you – especially when I'm on my back. I hope to be up soon, though, very soon. Er – Wyse is staying on too, I suppose?"

"He left this morning, early, by motor."

"Did he? Really?" He smothered his relief, but it was unmistakable. "Rather sudden, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was sudden. The fact is – "

"Why did he go? Is he coming back?"

"I don't know – well, I mean, he didn't say anything to me. No, he won't be back."

"Oh, I suppose he told Bernadette about it. I thought I heard somebody moving about the house. I'm a light sleeper, you know, especially when I'm ill. About six o'clock, I think it was. I – I suppose Bernadette's disappointed at his not staying longer?" The assumed indifference of his question was contradicted by the eagerness of his furtive glance. Arthur felt it on him; he flushed as he sat down by the bedside, seeking so hard for a form of words, for an opening – something enlightening without being brutal. Godfrey's eyes, sharpened by his ill-will and suspicion, marked the flush and the hesitation; he guessed there was something to tell. "Well?" he added, peevish at getting no immediate answer.

"She – she's gone away too this morning, Godfrey – early – before we were up."

A lean hand shot out from the bed and grasped his wrist. "Arthur?"

"Yes, old chap, I'm sorry to say – it's a bad business."

"You do mean – ? Arthur, you do mean – ?"

"Yes, she's gone with him." He could not look at Godfrey; his speech was no more than a mutter. He felt the grasp on his wrist tighten, till it hurt him.

"The damned villain! I knew it! The infernal villain, Arthur!" Godfrey cried querulously.

Clearly an assent was required. Arthur's was inadequate. "Awfully bad business! Try to – to be calm, old fellow, while I tell you about it."

"Yes, yes, tell me!"

There was really nothing material left to tell, but Godfrey was greedy for details; such as there were to tell or conjecture he extracted by rapid questioning, even to the telegram which had come for Judith. Not till the end did he relax his hold on Arthur's wrist and lean back again on his pillows.

He lay silent like that for a long time, with Arthur silent beside him. His rage against Oliver seemed spent almost in the moment of its outburst; to his companion's relief he said nothing about Bernadette's conduct. He lay pathetically quiet, looking tired now, rather than angry or distressed. At last he gave a long sigh. "Well, we know where we are now!" he said.

That piece of knowledge had come to more than one inmate of the house in the last twelve hours.

"We must face the situation, Arthur. It's come to a crisis! I think I'm equal to getting up and – and facing the situation."

"Well, you know, there's no particular use in your – "

"My feelings are – well, you can imagine them." ("More or less!" threw in the gods, grimly chuckling.) "But I mustn't think of myself only. There's Margaret and – and all of it. Yes, I shall get up. I shall get up and sit in my chair, Arthur." He was silent again for a minute. "It makes a great difference. I – I shall have to consider my course – what's best in the interests of all of us. A terrible blow! It must be a blow even to you, Arthur? You and she were such good friends, weren't you? And she does this – she lets herself be seduced into doing this!"

"Yes, of course, it's – it's a blow; but it's you and Margaret we've got to think about."

"No, I don't forget you, I don't forget you!" ("If only he would!" groaned Arthur.) "Well, I must consider my course. Where did you say the telegram was sent from?"

"Winchester."

"I expect they stopped to breakfast there."

"Very likely." Arthur rose to his feet; he did not enjoy a "reconstruction" of the flight. The afflicted husband made no protest against his movement.

"Yes, leave me alone for a little while. I have to think – I must review the position. Tell Judith I should like to see her in about an hour's time, and – and go into matters."

Happy to escape, Arthur left him facing the situation, reviewing the position, considering his course, and determining to get up – to get, at any rate, into his arm-chair – the better to perform these important operations. The messenger of catastrophe came away with a strange impression of the effect of his tidings. After the first outburst – itself rather peevish than passionate – came that idle, almost morbid curiosity about details from which he himself instinctively averted his eyes; then this ineffectual fussiness, this vain self-assertion, which turned to facing the situation only when there was no longer anything or anybody to face, and to reviewing the position only when it was past mending. Of smitten love, even of pride wounded to the heart, there seemed little sign. All Arthur's feelings fought against the sacrilegious idea, but it would not be denied an entry into his mind – after the querulous anger, after the curiosity, mingling with the futile fussiness, there had been an undercurrent of relief – relief that nothing and nobody had to be faced really, that really nothing could be done, nothing expected from him, no call made now on courage or on energy – no, nor on a love or a sympathy already dead before Oliver Wyse struck them the final blow.

That morning's flight, then, was not the tragedy, but the end of it, not the culminating scene of terror and pity, but the fall of the curtain on a play played-out. Whatever of good or evil in life it might bring for Bernadette, for Godfrey it brought relief in its train. It was grievous, no doubt, in its external incidents – a society scandal, a family shame – but in itself, in its true significance to his mind, as it really and closely touched his heart, it came as an end – an end to the strain which he could not support, to the challenge which he dared not face, on which he had turned his back in sulks and malingering – an end to his long fruitless effort to be a satisfactory husband.

When Judith came down from her interview and joined Arthur in the garden before lunch, she had another aspect of the case to exhibit, a sidelight to throw on the deserted man's mind and its workings.

"How did you find him?" Arthur asked her.

"Oh, quite calm – and immersed in his account-books." She smiled. "Yes, he's up, in his chair, and a pile of them on the table at his elbow! He says that the first thing to do is to reduce his expenditure. He hopes now to be able to pay off his mortgage in four or five years. She was awfully extravagant, you know, and he hated mortgaging Hilsey."

"Do you think she knew he'd had to do it?"

"No, she didn't. He wouldn't let her know. He liked her to think him richer than he was, I think."

"Then he has no right to grumble at her extravagance."

"I never heard him do that – and he didn't do it this morning. All the same it worried him, and now he can save, oh, enormously, of course! The barouche and the pair of horses are to go, the first thing."

The barouche! It carried his mind back to the beginning, when its costly luxury framed for his eyes their earliest picture of Bernadette's dainty beauty.

"If he isn't going to keep it, he might send it after her. I would."

"Yes, you'd do a lot of foolish things if you were let. Luckily you're not!"

"Judith, I half believe he's glad!"

"Need we admit quite so much as that? Let's say he's facing the situation manfully!"

"Oh, he talked like that to you too, did he?" He jumped up, and took a few paces about the lawn, then came back and stood beside her. "By God, if he's glad, she was right to go, Judith!"

"I've never said anything to the contrary, have I? Have you seen Margaret this morning?"

"No, I haven't. What made you ask me that just now?"

"She came into my head. After all, she's a – a factor in the situation which, as Godfrey observes, has to be faced. I suppose I shall have to adopt her – more or less. Premature cares! Not so much Rome and Florence! It's as well to realise where one comes in oneself. When Godfrey talks of facing the situation, I don't think he proposes to do it alone, you know. You and I come into it."

"Yes." He added after a pause: "Well, we can't turn our backs on him, can we?"

"I've told her that her mother's gone on a visit – suddenly, to see a friend who's ill – and didn't like to wake her up to say good-bye. But that's a temporary solution, of course. She'll have to know more, and something'll have to be arranged about her and Bernadette. I don't suppose he'll object to Bernadette seeing her sometimes." She ended with a smile: "Perhaps you'll be asked to take her and be present at the interviews – and see that Sir Oliver's off the premises."

"I'll be hanged if I do anything of the sort! And, as you asked me to stay here, I don't think you need go on laughing at me."

Judith was impenitent. "It's a thing quite likely to happen," she insisted. "Bernadette would like it."

He turned away angrily and resumed his pacing. Yet in his heart he assented to the tenor of her argument. She might, in her malice, take an extravagant case – a case which, at all events, seemed to him just now cruelly extravagant – but she was right in her main contention. No more than she herself could he turn his back on Godfrey, or cut himself adrift from Hilsey. In last night's desperate hour Bernadette and he, between them, seemed to have cut all the bonds and severed all the ties; his only impulse had been to get away quickly. But it could not be so. Life was not like that – at least not to men who owned the sway of obligations and felt the appeal of loyalty and affection. He could not desert the ship.

Barber came out of the house and brought him a note. "From Mr. Beard, sir. Will you kindly send a verbal answer?"

He read it, and glanced towards Judith. He was minded to consult her. But, no, he would not consult Judith. He would decide for himself; something in the present position made him put a value on deciding for himself, even though he decided wrongly. "All right, say I will, Barber." He lit a cigarette and, walking back to Judith, sat down again beside her. But he said nothing; he waited for her to ask, if she were curious.

She was. "What did Barber want?"

"Only a note from Beard – about the match. We shall be one man short anyhow, and two if I don't turn up. So I told Barber to say I would."

"Good. Margaret and I will come and watch you. We've not gone into official mourning yet, I imagine."

"Hang 'em, they may think what they like! I'm going to play cricket."

So he played cricket, though that again would not have seemed possible over-night, and, notwithstanding that his eye might well have been out, he made five-and-twenty runs and brought off a catch of a most comforting order. Hilsey won the match by four wickets, and Judith, Margaret, and he strolled back home together in the cool of the evening, while the setting sun gilded the mellow and peaceful beauties of the old house.