He had not any doubt that the fact had reconciled him to his marriage with Marie Léonie. He had told his brother a year or so before that he would never marry her because she was a Papist, but he was aware that then he was only chipping at Spelden, the fellow that wrote Spelden on Sacrilege, a book that predicted all sorts of disaster for fellows who owned former Papist Church lands or who had displaced Papists. When he had told Christopher that he would never marry Charlotte—he had called her Charlotte for reasons of camouflage before the marriage—he had been quite aware that he was chipping at Spelden’s ghost—for Spelden must have been dead a hundred years or so. As it were, he had been saying grimly if pleasantly to that bogy:
“Eh, old un. You see. You may prophesy disaster to Groby because a Tietjens was given it over the head of one of your fellows in Dutch William’s time. But you can’t frighten me into making an honest woman—let alone a Lady of Groby—out of a Papist.”
And he hadn’t. He would swear that no idea of disaster to Groby had entered his head at the date of the marriage. Now, he would not say; but of what he felt then he was certain. He remembered thinking whilst the ceremony was going on of the words of Fraser of Lovat before they executed him in the Forty-Five. They had told him on the scaffold that if he would make some sort of submission to George II they would spare his body from being exhibited in quarters on the spikes of the buildings in Edinburgh. And Fraser had answered: “An the King will have my heid I care not what he may do with my ⸻,” naming a part of a gentleman that is not now mentioned in drawing-rooms. So, if a Papist was to inhabit Groby House, it mattered precious little if the first Lady Tietjens of Groby were Papist or Heathen.
A man as a rule does not marry his mistress whilst he has any kick in him. If he still aims at a career it might hinder him if she were known to have been his mistress, or, of course, a fellow who wants to make a career might want to help himself on by making a good marriage. Even if a man does not want to make a career he may think that a woman who has been his mistress as like as not may cuckold him after marriage, for, if she has gone wrong with him, she would be more apt to go wrong elsewhere as well. But if a fellow is practically finished those considerations disappear, and he remembers that you go to hell if you seduce virgins. It is as well at one time or another to make your peace with your Creator. Forever is a long word and God is said to disapprove of unconsecrated unions.
Besides, it would very likely please Marie Léonie, though she had never said a word about it, and it would certainly dish Sylvia, who was no doubt counting on being the first Lady Tietjens of Groby. And then, too, it would undoubtedly make Marie Léonie safer. In one way and another he had given his mistress quite a number of things that might well be desirable to that bitch, and neither his nor Christopher’s lives were worth much, whilst Chancery can be a very expensive affair if you get into it.
And he was aware that he had always had a soft spot in his heart for Marie Léonie, otherwise he would not have provided her with the name of Charlotte for public consumption. A man gives his mistress another name if there is any chance of his marrying her, so that it may look as if he were marrying someone else when he does it. Marie Léonie Riotor looks different from a casual Charlotte. It gives her a better chance in the world outside.
So it had been well enough. The world was changing and there was no particular reason why he should not change with it. … And he had not been able to conceal from himself that he was getting on the way. Time lengthened out. When he had come in drenched from one of the potty local meetings that they had had to fall back on during the war he had known that something was coming to him, because after Marie Léonie had tucked him up in bed he could not remember the strain of the winner of some handicap of no importance. Marie Léonie had given him a goodish tot of rum with butter in it and that might have made him hazy—but, all the same, that had never happened to him in his life before, rum or no rum. And by now he had forgotten even the name of the winner and the meeting. …
He could not conceal from himself that his memory was failing, though otherwise he considered himself to be as sound a man as he had ever been. But when it came to memory, ever since that day his brain had checked at times as a tired horse will at a fence. … A tired horse!
He could not bring himself to the computation of what three weeks back from the eleventh of November came to; his brain would not go at it. For the matter of that, he could remember precious little of the events of that three weeks in their due order. Christopher had certainly been about, relieving Marie Léonie at night and attending to him with a soft, goggle-eyed attentiveness that only a man with a saint for a mother could have put up. For hours and hours he would read aloud
