Part 13

He had worked himself up to a great state of excitement, and Francis sat gaping at him like a child at a theatre. Old Lawrie went to the door and bawled:

"Tibby!"

The gaunt old Scotswoman came in, treading noiselessly, like a ghost, and stood (thought Francis) like a gaoleress waiting orders from the chieftain of a Border clan.

Old Lawrie sat at table and wrote a note on a very dirty piece of paper, folded it up into a cocked hat, and with great care wrote on it in a neat, impersonal copperplate hand, "Mrs. James Lawrie." He gave it to Tibby and commanded her to take it and Mr. Folyat to Mrs. Lawrie in the drawing-room. He shook Francis warmly by the hand, thanked him for listening to him so patiently and bowed with extraordinary dignity. Francis followed Tibby, feeling, as he said afterwards, like a captive in a strange land. It was very dark in the passage, and, like the night in Jorrocks, it smelled of cheese. At the drawing-room door Tibby whispered to him:

"Will you wait? She may be asleep."

She pushed the door open stealthily and two cats darted out, and, on seeing Francis, rushed away, one upstairs, the other to the end of the passage, and they both sat rumbling like a kettle on the boil. Tibby moved noiselessly into the room, then turned:

"She's no asleep. Ye may come in."

Francis followed her. Tibby planted herself in front of Mrs. Folyat, gave her the note with this:

"From the master."

(If it had been from the Emperor of Russia she could not have put more reverence into her voice.)

"From the master. This is the gentleman."

With that she materialised out of her ghostliness and stalked out of the room, and Francis, on whom the humour of the whole household was beginning to dawn, found himself inventing her report to the Master:

"The prisoner has been boiled in oil, but made no confession."

Mrs. James Lawrie was a large woman with a big face, surprisingly pink and young looking. She had her hair oiled and parted in the middle and surmounted with a tall lace cap adorned with pale-blue ribbons, and skewered on with white china-headed hat-pins that clearly passed through her head and came out on the other side. Her dress was very tight, and seemed to be stretched to breaking-point in the effort to hold in her flesh. From her attitude, certain details of her dress, and a portrait on the wall, it was clear that she prided herself on her resemblance to Queen Victoria, then alive and enjoying all the lustre and celebrity of her Jubilee.

There was another cat on the sofa by the fireplace. In the window was a wire stand full of palms and india-rubber plants and maiden-hair ferns. The windows were closed. The pictures were religious, or views of various seaside resorts and spas, and five pastel drawings of children, and everywhere, on tables, on the piano, on brackets, on the mantelpiece, was a profusion of knick-knacks, cheap china, china ladies, china babies, china shepherdesses, china stags, china birds, and, on a table near where Francis was standing, among various Eastern trivialities, a large elephant's tooth.

Mrs. Lawrie read her husband's letter without giving any sign that she was aware of her visitor. Then she said:

"Sit down."

She had a peculiar mouth that opened like a trap, the upper lip not moving at all, and the lower dropping and springing back as though she had not full control of it. It fascinated Francis so that he hardly heard what she said:

"You are a High Churchman, Mr. Folyat?"

"Yes."

"I was born a Baptist, Mr. Folyat. On my marriage I became a Low Churchwoman. My husband is a Presbyterian."

"Indeed."

"Yes."

Mrs. Lawrie's lip sprang back so violently that Francis began to think grotesquely that she would never be able to open her mouth again. She contrived it, however. She pressed her forefinger into the middle of her cheek--(exactly like the portrait of Queen Victoria)--and went on:

"Let me tell you, Mr. Folyat, that we are not rich. We are not rich, Mr. Folyat, but I have my pride. Mr. Lawrie's relations have begged me on their knees to allow them to educate my children. I have refused. My children are the children of a poor man, they must do what the children of the poor have to do. They must earn their living, and they must be made safe. I believe in safety. My two eldest sons are in the biggest and safest bank in the town, and, if they behave themselves, they will be there all their lives. My youngest is in a very good position in Messrs. Keith's warehouse, and he, too, if he behaves himself, will be there for the rest of his life. My youngest son is very foolish and volatile. I don't believe he knows his own mind. I doubt very much whether he has a mind to know. I think it best that he should stay where he is. I am glad to know that he has found friends in your house and circle, Mr. Folyat. I do not call, or I would call on Mrs. Folyat."

"Mrs. Folyat would, I am sure, be . . ." Francis dropped the remark as insincere. He added hastily, to cover it up:

"The boy seemed to think that his uncles would help."

"I do not allow Mr. Lawrie's brothers to interfere in my affairs in any way."

"Then . . ."

"That is all, Mr. Folyat."

Francis found himself forced to admiration of this woman. There was a sort of finality about her. He told himself that she was like a very large garden roller, a roller so heavy that no one man could move it. He had a trick of nicknaming people--(Minna had inherited it)--and he ticked her off in his mind as the garden-roller. When he had done that, he found that she was talking about the weather and Mr. Gladstone. When she had told him how she wept at the death of Charles Dickens, Francis thought it time to go. Mrs. Lawrie chatted amiably as she took him to the door, and she stood watching him as he walked down the asphalt path to the little rustic-gate. He turned down towards the bridge and took a long breath, and blew it out again. How good the sky was! How good the air upon one's face! . . . He remembered old Lawrie's verses:

_The distant tolling of the bell Told the great sun a man was dead. . . ._

What was dead? Old Lawrie? Hardly. The dead were surely not so mad as that. The woman? "Dead as a doornail," said Francis, and he thought with pity of Bennett Lawrie, young, ardent, groping for life, coming back at night, tired from his dull work in his dull office, to that house.

Almost unconsciously he found himself comparing it with his own house and wondering what that might be like for the young people in it--for Minna, for Annette for Frederic. Not so bad as that, surely not so bad as that. And yet . . . He would not admit to himself that all was not well in his own house.

"How strange," he thought. "How strange, to walk out of the street, an ordinary street, into lives like that! One would never have imagined it. . . . But the boy, Bennett; what's to become of the boy?"

XV

WALKING HOME

_He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends._ PROVERBS XVII.

YOU may walk out of a house and yet carry it with you, just as you may cross the Channel and yet always take England with you among your baggage.

Francis carried James Lawrie's house with him on his back like a snail's shell. He could not get the thought of Bennett out of his head, and the thought of Bennett made him sensitive as he had never been to the squalor through which he had to pass on the way home. Everything in him was disturbed. His comfortable good-nature rather than his religion had made him accept the world as good in essence, and he had always done what he could to alleviate poverty and to comfort distress when they had come knocking at his door, but moral distress such as he had found in old Lawrie and divined in old Lawrie's son he had never looked for and never seen. One thing only in his life had so disturbed him, the episode, years and years ago, of the murder in Potsham, but that he had not grasped so fully; it had been so easy to conventionalise it, to watch the man be swallowed up by the machinery of punishment and forget, to pass on to--what had he passed on to? He was dismayed to find himself thinking of his wooing. Even then he had not taken the trouble to understand what he was doing; and the result? Would it have been different if he had taken the trouble to understand? Old Lawrie seemed to take an immense amount of trouble to understand, and look at the pass to which he had brought himself.

He passed the end of a dismal trough of a street--there were hundreds like it in his parish--and the sight of it led him to the thought of poverty. Perhaps, he told himself, perhaps his disasters and old Lawrie's were due only to the fact that they were poor men, too poor for the responsibilities of wife and children they had taken upon themselves. . . . But that must be nonsense. There would soon be an end of everything if the great processes of the world were to be screwed down to the money standard, if . . . But that was too difficult. He must see old Lawrie again. Quite obviously he must think things out, but he was incapable of doing so alone, and admitted it to himself. He liked walking and resented this intrusion of thought upon his pleasure. He had been a fool and supposed that he must pay for his folly, and only hoped that the price asked would not be more than he could pay. He had a feeling that he was only at the beginning of some stupendous change, and on the whole he was excited by it, until he began to think, and then it all lay so far beyond his grasp that he was depressed. One thing relieved him--the knowledge that he had no regret for the fleshpots and the fat glebes of the two Cornish livings of his early manhood.

Then his thoughts took another turn. After all, what did it matter? He did his work conscientiously, and nothing else was greatly his concern. He was only interested in Bennett Lawrie in so far as he was going to be Gertrude's husband. He had promised to see what could be done towards making the young man a clergyman. He had fulfilled the promise, but apparently nothing could be done. The garden roller had passed over that aspiration and squeezed it out flat as a shadow. So be it. Gertrude's husband would continue in commerce, take an active though lay interest in Church matters, and probably be ten times more prosperous, probably also a more satisfactory husband and father, than if he were to take Orders. There was a great deal to be said for work which took a man away all day and every day from his home, a good deal from both sides. It needed a strong affection to withstand the strain of full community of existence and interest.

Finding himself beginning to think critically of marriage, Francis brought himself up with a start. There had been a time when he had given a great deal of thought to it, his thought had necessarily driven him to attempted discussion with his wife, but on the first hint of what was at the back of his mind she had cried scandal and shame upon him and so scared and wounded him that he had never returned to the subject. He had hoped to break down the wall that had grown up between them, but she put up two bricks for every one he removed. Did she know what she was doing? Did she suffer from it?--He did not know. He would never know. She amused him. He told himself that she was more like Mrs. Nickleby than he had conceived it possible for a woman in real life to be. At any rate she was not hard, armoured against even a joke, like Mrs. Lawrie.

That brought him back to Bennett, and he had a gust of anger against the young man--not a violent gust. Francis never could be violent in anything. His anger turned on himself and twinged his conscience with the realisation that he was giving more thought to Bennett and Bennett's affairs than he had to any of his children. The point of it all was the establishment of Bennett in a career superior to that which had been forced upon him, but then which of his children had been established in a career of any sort? Serge had gone his own way; Leedham had taken things into his own hands; Frederic had a profession, but he (Francis) had no notion how that profession was answering or what prospect it held out. Unfortunately Francis had never been able to take Frederic seriously, and the thought of him was enough to set his mind working in caricature. He thrust aside all that had been troubling him--with considerable relief--and the seed of irony planted in him by his conversation with old Lawrie grew like a magic beanstalk, and he saw himself in the absurd position of having obliged a world hungry for population--(Was it not? Did not everybody agree in saying so?)--with, for one man, a large supply of human beings, produced quite legitimately after due notice given, only to find that one after another the world rejected them, or at any rate refused to provide the males with worthy work or the females with husbands. He was walking along Miller Street as this new perception came to him, between fifty little houses on one side and fifty little houses on the other, and half-way down the street the door of a house opened and Frederic came out and stopped him. He had no hat on and he was a little nervous. He said:

"Have you had a letter?"

"Several. You don't write letters to me."

"No. It's from Mrs. Lipsett. She lives here. She said she'd written to you about me. You'd better come and see her. She lives here."

"Friends of yours?"

"Not exactly friends. I've only known her a fortnight. It's about her daughter."

"Oh!"

Francis turned and followed Frederic into the house, and down a narrow little passage into the kitchen at the back. This was a little dark room looking into a backyard. Both kitchen and yard were full of washing, for it was Monday. The remnants of a meal were on the table, walled in with piles of damp linen. From the cellar door just outside the kitchen came clouds of steam.

Mrs. Lipsett was a little, faded woman, very thin, very untidy. She was sitting in a hard Windsor chair gazing into the fire, as though she were hypnotised by it. She did not look up as the father and son entered. Frederic placed a chair for his father, introduced him to Mrs. Lipsett, and without worrying as to whether she heard him or not hurried away and shut the door. Mrs. Lipsett turned to Francis and said:

"My husband left me with five children and went off with a theatre woman. He takes young girls and trains them for the dancing. He's a rich man now, but I don't have a penny from him. It's hard work making a living with the lodgers, and you can't do it when there's illness."

"No, I suppose not. I'm very sorry," replied Francis uneasily. "If I can do anything. . ."

"_Do_ anything!" Mrs. Lipsett was scornful. "As if you could. I've worked my fingers to the bone. Two of the girls are in a shop. It wouldn't have been so bad if it had been them, though it would have been bad enough. But Annie's stayed at home helping me, and I don't see what's to be done. I don't see what's to be done. He's owned up to it. There's that much to be said for him. But that doesn't help much, does it?"

"Who? . . . I don't know. . . . I'm in the dark . . ."

"You've not had my letter . . . !"

"Letter?"

"Yes. That tells you."

"Tells me what?"

"What you ought to know."

"About whom? About what?"

"Him."

"Your husband?"

"No. Him and her."

Francis had learned patience in dealing with his parishioners, who were incapable of a direct statement. Mrs. Lipsett had no intention of being mysterious. It only showed that she could not bring herself to the point of open discussion of her affairs with a stranger. She had flung a certain amount of anger into her letter, all the anger she was capable of feeling, and she was not equal to the task of whipping it up again now that she was in the presence of the man to whom she had written in her first desire to injure Frederic. She made an effort and went on:

"I can't have it in the house. I can't lose my lodgers. It would frighten the lodgers."

"What would?"

Mrs. Lipsett looked desperate.

"Don't you know?"

"No, I don't," replied Francis, rather petulantly.

Mrs. Lipsett had risen to her feet. Now she sank back again into her chair and began to cry. Francis preferred that to her incoherence.

"My good woman," he said. "You seem to be in some trouble. If I can give you any consolation . . ."

"I am in trouble," moaned Mrs. Lipsett. "I'm always in trouble. I've never been out of trouble since I was born. Some people are like that you know."

These reflections cheered her up perceptibly, and she asked Francis if he would mind if she began to cook the first floor's tea.

Francis began to feel exasperated.

"My good woman," he said, "will you kindly explain what my son has to do with all this, and why he has brought me here?"

Mrs. Lipsett had moved to the table and taken up an armful of linen.

"Didn't he tell you?"

"No."

Mrs. Lipsett dropped her linen, ran to the door and screamed "Annie!"

A voice answered her.

"Come here!"

Mrs. Lipsett turned to Francis, folded her arms and with her lips tight pressed she worried out her words:

"Not told you, hasn't he? Leaving me to make a nice fool of myself! I've heard of you, Mr. Folyat! That innocent you are that you don't know you're born yet. . . ."

Annie came in and cut short anything else she might have to say.

"Yes, mother?"

"Isn't Mr. Folyat with you?"

"No. I thought he was here with you."

"Sloped, has he? Sloped!--This is Mr. Folyat's father."

"Good evening," said Annie.

An awkward silence came on the three of them, and all three thought of Frederic with varying degrees of wrath.

"My daughter . . ." began Mrs. Lipsett.

"Mother!"

"Tell him yourself then."

Annie blushed.

"I can't."

Mrs. Lipsett dropped into the vernacular.

"Eh! I am vexed!"

Francis took his hat and rose with some dignity.

"I am sorry," he said, "but as neither of you seem disposed to enlighten me . . ."

Annie stood between him and the door. She blurted out:

"It's Fred, Mr. Folyat. It wasn't fair of him to leave you alone with mother like that. We saw you going by and he said he'd go and tell you. I suppose he didn't. He's like that. He means well."

"Means well!" This from Mrs. Lipsett.

"Please, mother!" Annie went on. "Fred ought to have told you, Mr. Folyat. I'm as much to blame as he is. I suppose I'm very wicked, but there's some things you can't help. We didn't think, I suppose. But it's come to that, that we've got to think. I'm going to be a mother in three months, and Fred wants to help as much as he can."

Francis sat down again.

"Frederic!"

"Yes. The beauty! Ain't you proud of him?"

Frederic! Francis was not so much shocked as amazed. He was only too accustomed to irregularity, large and small, but he had always regarded the victims of it as creatures of another clay. Automatically by their offence they passed from one compartment of his mind to another. Where possible they were given benefit of clergy, but only as one finds a home for a stray dog. . . .

Mrs. Lipsett said:

"I say he ought to marry her."

Francis did not hear her. He was still trying to grasp the fact, but once more he found himself confronted with the difficulty that he could not take Frederic seriously. That Frederic should be, regularly or irregularly, on the point of becoming a father struck him as comic and grotesque, and yet (he said to himself) it was only to be expected that in course of time the fate that had overtaken himself should overtake his son also. But also a man was usually given time to get accustomed to the idea. In the ordinary course a man introduced a young woman to his father and mother--(with a pang he thought of Mrs. Folyat's reception of this event!)--they were engaged, married, and as bluntly as possible the Church service announced the probable consequences. Everything went smoothly and one hoped for the best. But Frederic, the buffoon, the play-actor, had dispensed with all this; had, by a sort of conjuring trick, inveigled him into a strange house, and left him with a very cool and collected young woman with a strong accent and an angry mother whose speech was of the broadest, and without a word of marriage, he was told--he was told--what was he told? With a start Francis realised that he was not in the least angry, as he ought to have been, as he had every right to be, and that he was thinking of the thing without the least reference to morality. He could not fit the formula he used for ordinary offenders to the case of his son, and, being honest, though slow and sluggish of mind, he admitted to himself that his one desire was to avoid having his wife know. He looked from the young woman to her mother and saw what a serious matter it was to them and gave up his unprofitable attempt to see the thing in connection with Frederic--(who threw it all out of perspective)--and, with a very real feeling for the two women, he said:

"I'm sorry. What do you want me to do?"

"You're not angry?"

Francis fell back with some relief on formula:

"I am deeply pained and grieved. . ." But then the new little conscience there was developing in him cried out on his insincerity and he was silent.

Mrs. Lipsett repeated:

"I say he ought to marry her. I say . . ."

"He doesn't want to marry me," said Annie. "He says he knows he couldn't make me happy."

"What's right is right," said Mrs. Lipsett. "Can he afford to marry her, Mr. Folyat? Can you make him marry her?"

"Can I?" thought Francis; and his mind flew to the idea of this young woman being presented to his wife as her first daughter-in-law. Then he said to himself:

"It is not I who am to be considered, but these two women. Frederic is least of all to be considered."

He did his best to think of Frederic as a husband, but it was quite hopeless. Frederic was more than ever elusive. It was impossible to conceive him in any responsible position. That made Francis see that it was quite useless to stay any longer. He could only go on repeating that he was sorry. He saw no method of coercing Frederic into marriage (or anything else). The most he could do was to be parentally angry, and he saw the futility of that. If necessary, in the cause of good morals, he could turn Frederic out of doors, but that would necessitate a scene and explanations, and from that he shrank. Only one thing was now clear--that there was nothing to be gained by further discussion with Mrs. Lipsett and her daughter. He rose to his feet again and said:

"I am sorry, very sorry, extremely sorry. I will see my son. I will do what I can. I promise you that everything that can be done will be done."

"Promises," said Mrs. Lipsett, "are like pie-crusts--made to be broken."

"Not mine," returned Francis, as he bowed himself out.

Annie took him to the door and said:

"I only want to get away, sir. I only want to get away."

Francis looked into her eager face. She was almost very pretty, and her eagerness was very touching. He was moved and a lump came into his throat, and tears filled his eyes, and he said:

"God bless you, my dear. You shall."

She bowed her head as he passed out, and as he heard the latch click he said to himself:

"Surely she has suffered enough."

And he felt a purely masculine anger against Frederic, anger which oozed and trickled away on the instant, for, as he turned up the street, he saw his son waiting for him at the corner. As he walked up the street he called Frederic poltroon, scoundrel, blackguard, lecher, debauchee, wastrel, but none of these words could revive his anger. As he came face to face with his son he found another word--play-actor, and if he had sympathy for Annie, the betrayed, he had pity for Frederic, her betrayer. She could suffer, had suffered. Frederic could feel nothing at all.

"After all," thought Francis, "he is my son. I have had my share in making him what he is."