That was the sort of thing Helena put up with, partly out of weakness and partly strength.
One day after a long absence Georgina had arrived as of old with her rampant wounded rectitude. On this occasion she kicked the Manders’ cat just as Helena entered the room. Helena pretended not to notice but sat down as usual to hear her story.
‘Lady Manders,’ said Georgina, dabbing her eyes, ‘my son has gone.
Helena thought at first he must be dead.
‘Gone?’ she said.
‘Gone to live with his father,’ Mrs Hogg said. ‘Imagine the deception. That vile man has been seeing my boy in the hostel, behind my back. It’s been going on for months, a great evil, Lady Manders. The father has money you know, and my poor boy, a good Catholic—’
‘The father has taken him away?’
‘Yes. Andrew has gone to live with him.’
‘But surely Mr Hogg has no right. You can demand him back. What were the authorities thinking of? I shall look into this, Georgina.’
‘Andrew is of age. He went of his own free will. I wrote to him, begged him to explain or to see me. He won’t, he just won’t.’
‘Were you not informed by the authorities before Andrew was removed?’ Helena asked.
‘No. It was very sudden. All in an afternoon. They say they had no power to prevent it, and I was in Bristol at the time in that temporary post. It’s a shocking thing, a tragedy.’
Later Helena said to her husband, ‘Poor Mrs Hogg. She had reason to be distressed about it. I wish I could like the woman, but there’s something so unwholesome about her.’
‘Isn’t there!’ he said. ‘The children never cared for her, remember.’
‘I wonder if her son disliked her.’
‘Shouldn’t be surprised.’
‘Perhaps he’s better off with Mr Hogg.’
‘Shouldn’t be surprised.’
There was only one disastrous event which Georgina Hogg omitted to tell the Manders. That was the affair of Mervyn’s bigamous marriage under the assumed name ‘Hogarth’.
Mrs Hogg shifted from the window to turn up the gas fire. She said to Mervyn, ‘Making a criminal out of Andrew.’ ‘He likes the game.’
‘Bigamy,’ she said, ‘and now smuggling. You may get a surprise one day. I’m not going to sit by and watch you ruining Andrew.’
But he knew, she would never dissipate, in open scandal, the precious secret she held against him. He counted always and accurately on the moral blackmailer in Georgina, he had known in his childhood her predatory habits with other people’s seamy secrets. Most of all she cherished those offences which were punishable by law, and for this reason she would jealously keep her prey from the attention of the law. Knowledge of a crime was safe with her, it was the criminal himself she was after, his peace of mind if she could get it. And so Mervyn had exploited her nature without fear of her disclosing to anyone his bigamy (another ‘mistake’ of his), far less his smuggling activities. It was now three years since Mrs Hogg had made her prize discovery of the bigamy. She had simply received an anonymous letter. It informed her that her husband, under the name of Hogarth, had undergone a form of marriage in a register office with the woman who had since shared his home. Georgina thought this very probable — too probable for her even to confide in Helena who might have made investigations, caused a public fuss.
Instead, Georgina made her own investigations. The letter, to start with: on close examination, obviously written by Andrew. She rejoiced at this token of disloyalty as much as the contents agitated her with a form of triumph.
They were true. Georgina turned up at Ladle Sands, Sussex, where the couple were established, and made a scene with Eleanor.
‘You have been living with my husband for some years.’
‘Quite right,’ said Andrew who was present.
‘I must ask you to leave,’ Eleanor had kept repeating, very uncertain of her ground.
It was as banal as that.
Eleanor left Mervyn Hogg, now Hogarth, shortly after this revelation of his duplicity. She re-enacted the incident many times to the Baron. She made the most of it but her acting ability was inferior to her power of dramatic invention; what Eleanor added to the scene merely detracted from the sharp unambiguous quality of the original which lingered now only in the memories of Andrew and Georgina, exultant both, distinct though their satisfactions, and separated though they were. All the same, the Baron was impressed by Eleanor’s repeated assertion, ‘Mrs Hogg is a
Georgina wielded the bigamy in terrified triumph. Her terror lest Eleanor should take public action against the bigamist was partly mitigated by the fact that Eleanor had a reputation to keep free of scandal.
‘But my name would suffer more than hers. I’ve always been respectable whereas she’s a dancer,’ Georgina declared on one of her unwelcome visits to Ladle Sands. On the strength of the bigamy she had made free of Mervyn’s house.
‘Moreover,’ she declared, ‘the affair must be kept quiet for Andrew’s sake.’
‘I’m not fussy,’ Andrew said.
‘Imagine if my friends the Manders got to hear,’ Georgina said as she propped a post-card picture of the Little Flower on the mantelpiece.
