professionally busy manner, “Let me make you comfortable down below at once, miss,” as though she were thinking of nothing else but her tip—was enough to dissipate the shades of death gathering round the mortal weariness of bewildered thinking which makes the idea of non-existence welcome so often to the young. Flora de Barral did lie down, and it may be presumed she slept. At any rate she survived the voyage across the North Sea and told Mrs Fyne all about it, concealing nothing and receiving no rebuke—for Mrs Fyne’s opinions had a large freedom in their pedantry. She held, I suppose, that a woman holds an absolute right—or possesses a perfect excuse—to escape in her own way from a man-mismanaged world.
What is to be noted is that even in London, having had time to take a reflective view, poor Flora was far from being certain as to the true inwardness of her violent dismissal. She felt the humiliation of it with an almost maddened resentment.
“And did you enlighten her on the point?” I ventured to ask.
Mrs Fyne moved her shoulders with a philosophical acceptance of all the necessities which ought not to be. Something had to be said, she murmured. She had told the girl enough to make her come to the right conclusion by herself.
“And she did?”
“Yes. Of course. She isn’t a goose,” retorted Mrs Fyne tartly.
“Then her education is completed,” I remarked with some bitterness. “Don’t you think she ought to be given a chance?”
Mrs Fyne understood my meaning.
“Not this one,” she snapped in a quite feminine way. “It’s all very well for you to plead, but I—”
“I do not plead. I simply asked. It seemed natural to ask what you thought.”
“It’s what I feel that matters. And I can’t help my feelings. You may guess,” she added in a softer tone, “that my feelings are mostly concerned with my brother. We were very fond of each other. The difference of our ages was not very great. I suppose you know he is a little younger than I am. He was a sensitive boy. He had the habit of brooding. It is no use concealing from you that neither of us was happy at home. You have heard, no doubt... Yes? Well, I was made still more unhappy and hurt—I don’t mind telling you that. He made his way to some distant relations of our mother’s people who I believe were not known to my father at all. I don’t wish to judge their action.”
I interrupted Mrs Fyne here. I had heard. Fyne was not very communicative in general, but he was proud of his father-in-law. “Carleon Anthony, the poet, you know.” Proud of his celebrity without approving of his character. It was on that account, I strongly suspect, that he seized with avidity upon the theory of poetical genius being allied to madness, which he got hold of in some idiotic book everybody was reading a few years ago. It struck him as being truth itself—illuminating like the sun. He adopted it devoutly. He bored me with it sometimes. Once, just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as so incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife and the dear girls? He transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me in his deep solemn voice to remember the “well-established fact” that genius was not transmissible.
I said only “Oh! Isn’t it?” and he thought he had silenced me by an unanswerable argument. But he continued to talk of his glorious father-in-law, and it was in the course of that conversation that he told me how, when the Liverpool relations of the poet’s late wife naturally addressed themselves to him in considerable concern, suggesting a friendly consultation as to the boy’s future, the incensed (but always refined) poet wrote in answer a letter of mere polished
“Oh! You do know,” said Mrs Fyne after a pause. “Well—I felt myself very much abandoned. Then his choice of life—so extraordinary, so unfortunate, I may say. I was very much grieved. I should have liked him to have been distinguished—or at any rate to remain in the social sphere where we could have had common interests, acquaintances, thoughts. Don’t think that I am estranged from him. But the precise truth is that I do not know him. I was most painfully affected when he was here by the difficulty of finding a single topic we could discuss together.”
While Mrs Fyne was talking of her brother I let my thoughts wander out of the room to little Fyne who by leaving me alone with his wife had, so to speak, entrusted his domestic peace to my honour.
“Well, then, Mrs Fyne, does it not strike you that it would be reasonable under the circumstances to let your brother take care of himself?”
“And suppose I have grounds to think that he can’t take care of himself in a given instance.” She hesitated in a funny, bashful manner which roused my interest. Then:
“Sailors I believe are very susceptible,” she added with forced assurance.
I burst into a laugh which only increased the coldness of her observing stare.
“They are. Immensely! Hopelessly! My dear Mrs Fyne, you had better give it up! It only makes your husband miserable.”
“And I am quite miserable too. It is really our first difference...”
“Regarding Miss de Barral?” I asked.
“Regarding everything. It’s really intolerable that this girl should be the occasion. I think he really ought to give way.”
She turned her chair round a little and picking up the book I had been reading in the morning began to turn the leaves absently.
Her eyes being off me, I felt I could allow myself to leave the room. Its atmosphere had become hopeless for little Fyne’s domestic peace. You may smile. But to the solemn all things are solemn. I had enough sagacity to understand that.
I slipped out into the porch. The dog was slumbering at Fyne’s feet. The muscular little man leaning on his elbow and gazing over the fields presented a forlorn figure. He turned his head quickly, but seeing I was alone, relapsed into his moody contemplation of the green landscape.
I said loudly and distinctly: “I’ve come out to smoke a cigarette,” and sat down near him on the little bench. Then lowering my voice: “Tolerance is an extremely difficult virtue,” I said. “More difficult for some than heroism.
