“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
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
