Part 9

Mr. Thorpe was clean and healthy; for that she was thankful. Still, she suffered a good deal that first day. Then, imperceptibly, she got used to him. Surprising how soon one gets used to a man, she thought, on whom this one’s substantial shape had made a distinctly disagreeable impression the first week she found herself up against it. By the end of a week she no longer noticed the curious springy solidity of Mr. Thorpe’s figure, which had seemed to her when he first embraced her, used as she was to the lean fragility of her late husband, so unpleasantly much. And besides, the flood of his riches began to flow over her immediately, and it was a warm flood. She hadn’t known how agreeable such a flood could be. She hadn’t had an idea of the way it could bring comfort into one’s every corner--yes, even into one’s mind when one’s mind was sore and unhappy. Riches, she had always held, were vulgar; but she now obscurely recognised that they were only vulgar if they were somebody else’s. One’s own--why, to what noble ends could not riches be directed in the hands of those who refused to use them vulgarly? Married to Mr. Thorpe, she would make of them as beautiful and graceful a thing as she had made of her poverty. And it did soothe Mrs. Luke, it did help her a great deal during these days of wreckage, that her life, which had been so spare and bony, was now becoming hourly, in every sort of pleasant way, more and more padded, more and more soft and luscious with fat.

For, if no longer precious to Jocelyn, she was precious to Mr. Thorpe, and it was his pride to pad out the meagreness of her surroundings; and though she cried herself to sleep each night because of Jocelyn, she awoke each morning comforted because of Mr. Thorpe. After twelve hours of not seeing Mr. Thorpe she could clearly perceive, what was less evident at the end of a long evening with him, her immense good fortune in having got him. A decent, honourable man. Not every woman in the forties finds at the precise right moment a decent, honourable man, who is also rich. Where would she have been now without Mr. Thorpe? He was her rock, her refuge; he was the plaster to her wounded pride, the restorer of her self-respect.

‘I can _rely_ on him,’ she said to herself while she sat in front of her glass in the morning, brushing her thick, black hair--in the evening when she brushed it she didn’t say anything. ‘I can entirely _trust_ him. What, after all, is education? What has education done for Jocelyn? The one thing that matters is character.’

And she would come down to find her breakfast-table strewn with fresh evidences of Mr. Thorpe’s hot-houses and love.

§

Not a word from Jocelyn all this time, not a sign. He might be dead, she thought; and it would have hurt her less if he had been. For dead he would have been for ever hers; nobody then could touch him, take him away. Crushed and bitter, she crept yet closer to Mr. Thorpe. He liked it. He liked being crept close to. He was thoroughly pleased with what in his business-like mind he referred to as his bargain.

She never mentioned Jocelyn to him, and he liked that too. ‘Young fool,’ he said, when he came round unexpectedly early one evening, and found her crying. ‘No use worrying about a fool.’

And Mrs. Luke, still further crushed by hearing Jocelyn called a fool, and therefore being forced to the deduction that she had produced one--yes, and it was true, too, in spite of his brains--could only hang on to Mr. Thorpe, and say nothing.

He liked that. He liked to be hung on to, and he had no objection to a certain amount of saying nothing in a woman. Her late husband, could he now have seen her who was once his wife, would have been surprised, for in his day she had never hung on, and had been particularly good at conversation. But there was that about Mr. Thorpe which quenched conversation. Even before her engagement, in the days of his preliminary assiduities after his wife’s death, she had found it difficult, when he came round, to keep what she understood was sometimes described as the ball rolling; and she was completely in command of herself then, in the full flood of her happiness and satisfaction. Conversation with him, the kind she and South Winch knew and practised, was out of the question. There was no exchange of opinions possible with Mr. Thorpe, because he never exchanged his, he merely emitted them and stuck to them. And they came out clothed in so very few words that they seemed to Mrs. Luke, watching him with quizzical, amused eyes--ah, those detached days, when one looked on and wasn’t involved!--almost indecently bare. Now she drooped. She bowed her head.

Mr. Thorpe liked that. He liked a woman to bow her head. Gentleness in a woman was what he liked: gentleness, and softness, and roundness. Margery was gentle all right, and soft enough in places--anyhow of speech; but she wasn’t round. Not yet. Later, of course, after the cook at Abergeldie--his house was called Abergeldie--had had a go at her, she wouldn’t know herself again. And meanwhile, to put an immediate stop to all this underfeeding, a stream of nourishment--oysters, lobsters, plovers’ eggs, his own pineapples, his own forced strawberries, his own butter and fresh eggs, and, once, a sucking pig--thickly flowed across the daisied meadow dividing Abergeldie from Almond Tree Cottage.

The little maid turned yellow, and began to get up at night and be sick. Mrs. Luke, feeling it was both wrong and grotesque to bury lobsters in the back garden, and unable either to stop the stream or deal with it herself, was forced to send most of the stuff round to her friends; and so South Winch became aware of what had happened, for nobody except Mr. Thorpe grew pineapples and bought plovers’ eggs, and nobody gave such quantities of them to a woman without being going to marry her afterwards.

Well, it was as good a way as any other of letting people know, thought Mrs. Luke, sitting in silence with Mr. Thorpe’s arm round her waist, while every now and then he furtively felt to see whether she wasn’t beginning anywhere to curve. Instead of sending round _billets de faire part_ she sent lobsters. Rather original, she thought, with a slight return to her detached and amused earlier self. ‘Does he really think I can eat them all?’ she wondered.

And the little maid, in whose kitchen much, even so, remained, fell from one bilious paroxysm into another.

§

She was warmly congratulated. It soothed her afresh, this new importance with which she was instantly clothed. Money--she sighed, but faced it--money, even in that place where people really did try to keep their eyes well turned to the light, was a great, perhaps the greatest, power. She sighed. It oughtn’t to be so; but if it was so? And who would not be grateful, really deeply grateful, to Edgar, and put up with all his little ways, when he was so generous, so kind, and so completely devoted? Besides, his little ways would, she was sure, later on become much modified. A wife could do so much. A well-bred, intelligent wife--it was simply silly not to admit plain facts--could do everything. When she was married....

And then she found herself shrinking from the thought of when she was married. She could restrain his affection now; it was her privilege. But when she was married, it would be his privilege not to be able to be restrained. And there appeared to be no age limit to a man’s affectionateness. Here was Edgar, well over sixty and still affectionate. Really, really, thought Mrs. Luke, who even in her most ardent days had loved only with her mind.

And then one evening, nearly three weeks after the arrival of that letter of Jocelyn’s that had brought all this about, Mr. Thorpe said, ‘When’s it going to be?’

‘When is what going to be?’ she asked, starting.

To this he only replied, ‘Coy, eh?’ and sat staring at her proudly and affectionately, a hand on each knee.

Pierced by the word, Mrs. Luke hastened to say in her most level voice, ‘You mean our marriage? Surely there’s plenty of time.’

‘Time, eh? You bet there isn’t. Not for you and me. We’re no chickens, either of us.’

Mrs. Luke winced. She had never at any time tried, or wished, or pretended to be a chicken, yet to be told she wasn’t one was strangely ruffling. If it were a question of chickens, compared with Edgar she certainly was one. These things were relative. But what a way of....

And then, as before, the little maid came in with a letter, and Mr. Thorpe, vexed as before by the interruption (why that servant--well, one could hardly call a thing that size a servant; that aproned spot, then--couldn’t leave letters outside till they were wanted ...), said, curbing himself, ‘Letter, eh?’

‘From Jocelyn,’ said Mrs. Luke, who had flushed a bright flame-colour, and whose hands, as they held the letter, were shaking.

‘Thought so,’ said Mr. Thorpe in disgust.

§

He learned with profound disapproval that Jocelyn was bringing his bride to Almond Tree Cottage. He didn’t want brides about--none, that is, except his own; and he feared this precious son of hers, who had behaved to her about as badly as a son could behave, would distract Margery’s attention from her own affairs, and make her even more coy about fixing the date of her wedding than she already was.

‘Going to sponge on you,’ was his comment.

She shrank from the word.

‘Jocelyn isn’t like that,’ she said quickly.

‘Pooh,’ said Mr. Thorpe.

She shrank from this word too. Edgar was, as she well knew and quite accepted, a plain man and a rough diamond, but a man shouldn’t be too plain, a diamond shouldn’t be too rough. Besides, surely the expression was obsolete.

‘My dear Edgar,’ she protested gently.

Mr. Thorpe persisted. ‘It’s pooh all right,’ he said. ‘Young men with wives in their shifts’--he remembered every word of that first letter--‘and only five hundred a year to keep them on, always sponge. Or try to,’ he said, instinctively closing his hands over his pockets. ‘Got to live, you know. Must stay somewhere.’

‘He is going to live in London,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘You remember he said so in his first letter. Live there and do--do literary work.’

‘Bunkum,’ said Mr. Thorpe.

And this word seemed to her even more obsolete, if possible, than pooh.

But there was no time to worry about words. What was she going to do? Where was she going to put Jocelyn and his wife? How was she going to receive them? Had she better pretend to South Winch that she had known nothing about it till they had appeared on her doorstep and overwhelmed her with the news? Had she better pretend that Jocelyn had given up Cambridge because he had been offered a position in London too good to refuse? Or had she better hide them indoors till they had found rooms in London, and could be got away again without having been seen, and meanwhile go on behaving as if nothing had happened?

She lost her head. Standing there, with the letter in her shaking hands and Mr. Thorpe, who wouldn’t go away, squarely in front of her, she lost her practical, cool head, and simply couldn’t think what to do. One thing alone was clear--she was going to suffer. And presently another thing emerged into clearness, an absurd thing, but curiously difficult and unpleasant,--she had no spare-room, and in Jocelyn’s room was only the little camp bed it had pleased him (and her too, who liked to think of him as Spartan), to sleep in. This was no house for more than just herself and Jocelyn. Oh, why hadn’t she married Mr. Thorpe at once? Then she would have been established at Abergeldie by now, and able to let the pair have Almond Tree Cottage to themselves.

Abergeldie. The word brought light into her confusion. Of course. That was where they must go. Abergeldie, majestic in the size and number of its unused spare-rooms, magnificent in its conveniences, its baths, its staff of servants. She had been taken over it, as was fitting; had waded across the thickness of its carpets, admired its carved wardrobes, marble-topped washstands and immense beds, gazed from its numerous windows at its many views, wilted through its hot-houses, ached along its lawns, and knew all about it. The very place. And, given courage by the knowledge of the impossibility of housing more than one person beside herself in her own house, urged on by the picture in her mind of that tiny room upstairs and its narrow bed, she made her suggestion to Mr. Thorpe.

Nervously she made it, fearing that the reason for it, fearing that the merest most passing mention of such a thing as a bed, would bring out the side of him which she was forced to recognise as ribald. And it did. He said all the things she was so sorry to have been obliged to expect he would. But he was good-natured; he liked to feel he was helping Margery out of a fix. Also, the young fool would be away from his mother then, and perhaps some sense could be got into his head, and at the same time as sense was got in nonsense would be got out,--the nonsense, for instance, of no doubt supposing that he, Edgar Thorpe, was the sort of man who could be sponged upon beyond, say, a couple of days. Besides, he was proud of Abergeldie, and hardly anybody, what with first Annie’s being alive and then with her not being alive, had ever seen it.

So it was settled, and he went away earlier than usual to give his orders to the housekeeper; and Mrs. Luke, creeping into bed with a splitting headache, lay for hours staring at nothing, and trying to forget Mr. Thorpe’s last words.

For, after he had most affectionately embraced her, so affectionately that she was sure one of her tendons had snapped, he had said: ‘No good his trying to milk _me_, you know.’

Milk him?

She lay staring into the dark. Was character, after all, better than education?

§

The Canon said it was, and so did his wife. In fact at tea next day in Mrs. Luke’s little garden, on that bit of lawn round the cedar, near the low fence across which grazed Mr. Thorpe’s Jersey cows, they all three were unanimous that it was. Wonderful how daylight, ordinary things, meals, tea-cups, callers, dispelled doubts.

‘Better to have both, of course,’ said the Canon, eating Mr. Thorpe’s forced strawberries after covering them with the cream that had been, twenty-four hours earlier, inside those very cows, ‘but if that’s not possible, give me character. It’s what _tells_. It’s the only thing that in the long run _tells_.’

‘Oh, well--one isn’t seriously disputing it,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘Only these theories, if one presses them----’

She paused, and poured out more tea for Mrs. Walker.

‘For instance,’ she went on, ‘suppose a man had a cook of a completely admirable nature. If he married her, could he be happy? I mean, an educated man. Let us say a very _well_ educated man.’

‘Certainly, if she cooked nicely,’ said the Canon, who thought he scented rather than saw the form of Mr. Thorpe lurking somewhere at the back of his delightful parishioner’s remarks, and wasn’t going to be caught.

He knew the importance of turning away seriousness, when it cropped up at the wrong moment, with a laugh. A man as valuably rich as Mr. Thorpe shouldn’t be taken too seriously, shouldn’t be examined and pulled about. His texture simply wouldn’t stand it. He should be said grace over, thought the Canon, who fully realised what a precious addition Mr. Thorpe’s wealth in Mrs. Luke’s hands was going to be to South Winch, and gobbled up thankfully. Gobbled up; not turned over first on the plate.

Mrs. Luke hadn’t invited the Walkers to tea. On the contrary, when first they appeared at the back door, ushered through it by the little maid who each time she saw the Canon’s gaiters was thrown by them into a fresh convulsion of respectfulness, she had been annoyed. Because all day long she had been vainly trying to collect and arrange her thoughts, soothe her nerves, prepare her mind for the evening, when Jocelyn had said he would arrive--to supper, he wrote, somewhere round eight o’clock,--and define what her attitude was going to be both to him and to the girl with the utterly ridiculous Christian name; and not having one bit succeeded, and impelled by some vague hope that out of doors she might find quiet, that in Nature she might find tranquillity and composure, had said she would have tea in the garden.

_Nature never did betray the heart that loved her...._

Some idea like that, though she wasn’t at all a Wordsworthian and regarded him at best with indulgence, drove her out to what her corner of South Winch held of Nature,--the bit of lawn, the cedar, the Kerria japonica against the wall by the kitchen window, the meadow across the railing, full of daisies and cows, and, on that fine spring afternoon of swift shadows and sunshine, the wind, fresh and sweet with the scent of young leaves.

But once the Walkers were there she found they did her good. They distracted her. And they liked her so much. It was always pleasant and restoring to be with people who liked one. The Canon made her feel she was good-looking and important, and his wife made her feel she was important. Also, they helped with the strawberries, from which, after a fortnight of them at every meal, she had for some time turned away her eyes. Later on, when she was alone again, there would still be at least a couple of hours to decide in what sort of a way she would meet Jocelyn; quite long enough, seeing how she couldn’t, whenever she thought of the meeting, stop herself from trembling.

Oh, he had behaved outrageously to her--to her, his mother, who had given up her life to him. There had been men in past years she might have married, men of her own age and class, by whom she might have had other children and with whom she might have been happy all this time; and she had turned them down, dismissed them ruthlessly because of Jocelyn, because only Jocelyn, and his gifts and career, were to have her love and devotion. Wasn’t it a shame, wasn’t it a shame to treat her so? To behave to her as though she were his enemy, the kill-joy who mustn’t be told and mustn’t be consulted, who must be kept in the dark, shut out? And why, because he had gone mad about a girl, must he go still more mad, and ruin himself by throwing up Cambridge?

A wave of fresh misery swept over her. ‘Go on talking--_please_,’ she said quickly, when the Walkers, replete, fell momentarily silent.

They looked up surprised; and they were still more surprised when they saw that her face, usually delicately pale, was quite red, and her eyes full of tears.

The Canon was affectionately concerned, and his wife was concerned.

‘Are you not well, dear Mrs. Luke?’ she inquired.

‘My _dear_ friend,’ said the Canon, setting down his cup, tidying his mouth, and taking her hand. ‘My dear, _dear_ friend--what is it?’

Then, impulsively, she told them. ‘It’s Jocelyn,’ she said. ‘He’s married, and given up Cambridge.’

And all her mortification and bitter unhappiness engulfed her, and she began helplessly to cry.

‘Dear, dear. Dear me. Dear, dear me,’ said the Canon.

‘Dear Mrs. Luke----’ said his wife.

They sat impotently looking on. Such excessive weeping from the poised, the unemotional, the serene Mrs. Luke, was most disconcerting. One shouldn’t expose oneself like that, however unhappy one was, thought the Canon’s wife, feeling terribly uncomfortable; and even the Canon had a sensation he didn’t like, as of fig-leaves being wrenched off and flung aside.

Well, having behaved like this--really her nerves had completely gone--there was nothing left but to explain further, and after a few painful moments of trying to gulp herself quiet she told them all about it.

They were horrified. Jocelyn’s behaviour, to the Walkers who had ripening sons of their own, seemed to the last degree disgraceful. That the girl was some one to be ashamed of was very plain, or why should he have come down voluntarily from Cambridge? Marriage by itself didn’t stop a student from continuing there. He was ruined. He would never be anything now. And as representing South Winch, which had not yet in its history produced a distinguished man, the Canon felt this blighting of its hopes that some day it would be celebrated as the early home of Sir Jocelyn Luke, perhaps of Lord Luke--why not? hadn’t there been Kelvin?--very keenly.

Poor mother. Poor, poor mother.

The Canon took her hand, and, raising it reverently to his lips, kissed it. His wife didn’t mind this, because in sorrow, as in sickness, there is no sex. Nobody enjoys kissing the hand of the sick. She minded nothing the Canon did so long as he didn’t enjoy it.

‘Yes--and he’s bringing her here to-night,’ gasped Mrs. Luke, struggling to keep down a fresh outburst.

‘Here? Bringing her here? Without first asking your permission and forgiveness?’ cried the Canon. ‘Disgraceful. Outrageous. Unpardonable.’

‘Oh, _isn’t_ it, _isn’t_ it----’ wept Mrs. Luke into her handkerchief.

Never, never could she forgive Jocelyn. No, she never, never would. Let him manage for himself now. Let him lie as best he could on the miserable bed he had made. She would tell him so plainly, and though she couldn’t help his coming there that night she would insist that he should go away again next morning and never, never come back....

And then, over the top of her handkerchief, she saw him standing there, standing in the back-door looking at her: Jocelyn; the light of her eyes; the only thing really in her life.

‘Jocelyn--oh, _Jocelyn_!’

She gave a kind of sobbing sigh; she struggled to her feet; she stood, swaying a moment, holding on to the table; and then simply ran to him.

§

‘Mother----’

‘Oh--_Jocelyn_!’

He hugged her tighter than he had ever hugged her. He was raised quite outside his ordinary self, in this joy of getting back to her. And that she should run into his arms--she who never ran, who never showed emotion!

‘You’re not angry, Mother?’ he asked, looking down at her upturned face, still wet and red from her recent weeping.

‘Dreadfully,’ she said, smiling up at him, the strangest transfigured, watery smile.

‘Oh, Mother--I knew you wouldn’t fail me!’ he cried, infinitely relieved, infinitely melted and grateful.

‘Fail you?’

‘Oh, Mother----’

And they hugged again. His mother’s love was a miracle. Her voice was an enchantment. Just to hear the words, the precious right words, said in the precious right voice....

At the tea-table the Canon and his wife, who carefully didn’t look but yet saw, were much shocked. This surely amounted to having duped them as to her real feelings, to having got their sympathy and concern on false pretences.

‘Hadn’t we better go home, John?’ Mrs. Walker inquired of her husband.

‘Much better,’ said the Canon, who didn’t see how to do it.

He looked about for a way of escape.

There wasn’t one, except by climbing over to the cows, and that would involve them in trespass. Besides, retreat should be dignified.

‘But where----?’ Mrs. Luke was whispering, her cheek against Jocelyn’s, while with one hand she still clung hold of his neck. ‘Salvatia----?’

‘In the sitting-room,’ whispered Jocelyn. ‘I put her there. I wanted to see you first alone. Why on earth those Walkers are here to-day of all days----’

He glanced at the scene on the lawn, where the Canon and his wife, marooned at the untidy tea-table, were trying to seem absorbed in something that wasn’t happening up above their heads in the branches of the cedar.

‘You said supper-time----’

‘But I scorched to get to you quickly----’

‘Then you wanted me?’

‘Oh, Mother!’

And he hugged her again, and the Walkers looked about again for a way of escape, and again found none.