I said:
“You want absolutely to interfere...?” Mrs Fyne nodded just perceptibly... “Well—for my part ... but I don’t really know how matters stand at the present time. You have had a letter from Miss de Barral. What does that letter say?”
“She asks for her valise to be sent to her town address,” Mrs Fyne uttered reluctantly and stopped. I waited a bit—then exploded.
“Well! What’s the matter? Where’s the difficulty? Does your husband object to that? You don’t mean to say that he wants you to appropriate the girl’s clothes?”
“Mr Marlow!”
“Well, but you talk of a painful difference of opinion with your husband, and then, when I ask for information on the point, you bring out a valise. And only a few moments ago you reproached me for not being serious. I wonder who is the serious person of us two now.”
She smiled faintly and in a friendly tone, from which I concluded at once that she did not mean to show me the girl’s letter, she said that undoubtedly the letter disclosed an understanding between Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral.
“What understanding?” I pressed her. “An engagement is an understanding.”
“There is no engagement—not yet,” she said decisively. “That letter, Mr Marlow, is couched in very vague terms. That is why—”
I interrupted her without ceremony.
“You still hope to interfere to some purpose. Isn’t it so? Yes? But how should you have liked it if anybody had tried to interfere between you and Mr Fyne at the time when
She had a genuine movement of astonished indignation. It is with the accent of perfect sincerity that she cried out at me:
“But it isn’t at all the same thing? How can you!”
Indeed how could I! The daughter of a poet and the daughter of a convict are not comparable in the consequences of their conduct if their necessity may wear at times a similar aspect. Amongst these consequences I could perceive undesirable cousins for these dear healthy girls, and such like, possible, causes of embarrassment in the future.
“No! You can’t be serious,” Mrs Fyne’s smouldering resentment broke out again. “You haven’t thought—”
“Oh yes, Mrs Fyne! I have thought. I am still thinking. I am even trying to think like you.”
“Mr Marlow,” she said earnestly. “Believe me that I really am thinking of my brother in all this...” I assured her that I quite believed she was. For there is no law of nature making it impossible to think of more than one person at a time. Then I said:
“She has told him all about herself of course.”
“All about her life,” assented Mrs Fyne with an air, however, of making some mental reservation which I did not pause to investigate. “Her life!” I repeated. “That girl must have had a mighty bad time of it.”
“Horrible,” Mrs Fyne admitted with a ready frankness very creditable under the circumstances, and a warmth of tone which made me look at her with a friendly eye. “Horrible! No! You can’t imagine the sort of vulgar people she became dependent on ... You know her father never attempted to see her while he was still at large. After his arrest he instructed that relative of his—the odious person who took her away from Brighton—not to let his daughter come to the court during the trial. He refused to hold any communication with her whatever.”
I remembered what Mrs Fyne had told me before of the view she had years ago of de Barral clinging to the child at the side of his wife’s grave and later on of these two walking hand in hand the observed of all eyes by the sea. Pictures from Dickens—pregnant with pathos.
Part 1—Chapter 6. Flora.
“A Very singular prohibition,” remarked Mrs Fyne after a short silence. “He seemed to love the child.”
She was puzzled. But I surmised that it might have been the sullenness of a man unconscious of guilt and standing at bay to fight his “persecutors,” as he called them; or else the fear of a softer emotion weakening his defiant attitude; perhaps, even, it was a self-denying ordinance, in order to spare the girl the sight of her father in the dock, accused of cheating, sentenced as a swindler—proving the possession of a certain moral delicacy.
Mrs Fyne didn’t know what to think. She supposed it might have been mere callousness. But the people amongst whom the girl had fallen had positively not a grain of moral delicacy. Of that she was certain. Mrs Fyne could not undertake to give me an idea of their abominable vulgarity. Flora used to tell her something of her life in that household, over there, down Limehouse way. It was incredible. It passed Mrs Fyne’s comprehension. It was a sort of moral savagery which she could not have thought possible.
I, on the contrary, thought it very possible. I could imagine easily how the poor girl must have been bewildered and hurt at her reception in that household—envied for her past while delivered defenceless to the tender mercies of people without any fineness either of feeling or mind, unable to understand her misery, grossly curious, mistaking her manner for disdain, her silent shrinking for pride. The wife of the “odious person” was witless and fatuously conceited. Of the two girls of the house one was pious and the other a romp; both were coarse-minded—if they may be credited with any mind at all. The rather numerous men of the family were dense and grumpy, or dense and jocose. None in that grubbing lot had enough humanity to leave her alone. At first she was made much of, in an offensively patronising manner. The connection with the great de Barral gratified their vanity even in the moment of the smash. They dragged her to their place of worship, whatever it might have been, where the congregation stared at her, and they gave parties to other beings like themselves at which they exhibited her with ignoble self- satisfaction. She did not know how to defend herself from their importunities, insolence and exigencies. She lived amongst them, a passive victim, quivering in every nerve, as if she were flayed. After the trial her position became still worse. On the least occasion and even on no occasions at all she was scolded, or else taunted with her dependence. The pious girl lectured her on her defects, the romping girl teased her with contemptuous references to her accomplishments, and was always trying to pick insensate quarrels with her about some “fellow” or other. The mother backed up her girls invariably, adding her own silly, wounding remarks. I must say they were probably not aware of the ugliness of their conduct. They were nasty amongst themselves as a matter of course; their
