Part 18

Though Adelaide and he had met first on the common ground of their philoprogenitive instinct, Ensor had come to suspect that his own was the truer development of it. Adelaide admired healthy, presentable specimens of the class only, and the beauty of Phillis as an undeniable guarantee of her own Eugenical perfection afforded the amount of toll to her vanity, the satisfaction of her pride that was needed to evoke the motherly in her. It was the only motive that swayed her, Ensor thought. Or else why did she so neglect the cook’s unhappy progeny, the child she had begun by petting, and more or less treating as her own? He could not forget that he had seen Mary, now degraded to a servant, on the day he had come across her in Beverley, sitting in the car with Adelaide’s own child. The turn was too sudden. It outraged his sense of decency.

Ensor, whose large heart was capable, where children were concerned, of embracing the halt and the maimed and the eugenically incorrect, could hardly endure to let the question stand over till Adelaide was more fit to deal with it. He constrained himself to do so, however, and contented himself with speaking kindly to the little girl whenever he met her on the stairs or in the corridors. She did not walk, she crawled; he had an idea she was slightly deformed? He realized that it was Mary he had stumbled over that first morning as she knelt by a side door into the garden, feebly scouring some stone steps. Her translation from the padded seat of the car to the hard stones she was washing had been so sudden that he could not easily conceive it to be she.

After a while he did speak to Adelaide. She made no mystery of it. She was a woman of her word, and Mary’s play days were over. Yes, it was true, she had until then been more or less brought up with Phillis, had shared her room and her meals and walks and games. It had pleased Phillis, but she could not sacrifice a child’s whole future even to please Phillis, so now that was over. With a sort of fiendish rationalism and want of consistency, she condemned a child brought up, through her caprice, in comparative ease and idleness, to do the rough work of the house, eat inferior food, worst of all, she subtracted her from all the softening educative influences to which she had been accustomed.

He listened, tapping his boot with his riding-whip. He said nothing. He thought it over. If only the child could hold on, it would of course be as well not to worry Adelaide just now, but wait till she had got safely over her forthcoming experience, always a severe mental trial to women of her temperament. Then, surely, milder counsels might prevail; he might get Mary reinstated, a kind of foster sister to Phillis, and that was what he would like best. Oh, very much best, for he had the greatest, the most absurd, tenderness for the ugly, sad unchildish child! But if that were impossible, if her mistress still refused to allow it, Mary might at least be taken out of this and sent away to some bright, well-managed school, or home of her own class, to be properly trained and educated. He did not like the notion of her being brought up to be a servant, she did not look as if she would ever be strong enough. But there were other professions. He would see----?

Meantime he did what he could for the child, and that was very little. She never appeared in the better part of the house that the red baize door shut off, and he sometimes fancied that Adelaide disliked to see him cross the threshold of it into the other. Yet the oldest and most interesting part of High Walls lay beyond, and Ensor was something of an antiquary, where architecture was concerned. He did not want to annoy his wife, however, and he was careful to conduct his architectural investigations from the back, where the historical portions of the house were situated. There Mary’s work lay, and he often spied her at her task of ablution on steps and hearth stones, armed with a pail and a piece of bath-brick, feebly scouring, swirling a wet rag about, ineffectually spreading long spiderlike arms in a radius of their length all round her and producing a dull wet surface, to be succeeded by a bright brown sanded one, where before all was dull, unvisited dust or dirt. She had terribly long arms for a child of her size and age, and she was moreover, he noticed, left-handed like himself. He would stand there for quite a long time looking down on her rusty red ribbon top-knot, knowing that the child was aware of him, but was far too well drilled to look up and crave his notice. How had they managed to transmogrify her so quickly, from a sort of foster sister to Phillis, sleeping with Phillis, driving about in the motor with Phillis and her mother, into the submissive drudge who never looked up till he spoke to her, and then with a sad cowed expression that went to his heart?

If she were actually carrying a heavy pail, too heavy for her or trailing a broom long enough for a person twice her height, he considered he was justified in taking the pail or the broom away from her at once and trying to learn from her the place where she wished it to be deposited. It was difficult to get her to speak at all, and she got shyer as the days went on. He felt, manlike, that he could scarcely offer to go down on his knees and scrub the stone floor in her stead, but he would have liked to do so, for he realized that it was not a child’s work. He fancied that the School Board, if they were aware that one of their prey was thus day by day removed from every form of school training, might have something to say about it, and dreaded some sort of exposure for Adelaide. Mary was given no tuition of any kind; he was sure of it. High Walls was five miles away from Market Weighton, and though in the nearest hamlet, consisting of a few cottages, there was a school that was half-a-mile distant, Mary never went beyond the garden, if indeed she got any fresh air at all.

The place was curiously self-contained, in its girdling walls. Adelaide did her own marketing in the motor, tradesmen never penetrated within their circumference. As it used to be said of the house in Portland Place that anything might go on there, so it might be said of High Walls. Adelaide had perhaps chosen to live here, perhaps through some affectionate analogy with the home of her birth and the house in which her mother had died. She had bought High Walls outright, so he learned, she made her own gas, she kept her own fowls and her own cows, and she ordered her clothes from Paris, fetching large wooden boxes that had crossed the seas, from the station herself, in the ever useful motor. In everything she did there was a _brusquerie_, a jerkiness, a suggestion of eccentricity.

There was no doubt that for one reason or another, from austerity, shyness and love of solitude, or simply from lack of social instinct, Adelaide had succeeded in creating a human vacuum all round her, an area sterilized of gossip. Since their marriage, before the registrar, three months ago, Mrs. Ensor, her husband felt pretty sure, had had no visitors. As a matter of fact, Ensor knew of three people who said they had driven or motored out to High Walls to pay their respects to the lady he had married, but even if they had done so, admittance was probably refused them. These were the wives of men that Ensor had met about in Market Weighton or Beverley, and who had enjoined their women folk to call on the queer, uncivilized woman whom this gentle, civilized man that they rather liked, had married. It was easy for Ensor to see that she was not popular. If people even realized her previous existence, they forbore to talk of her, and the call was only a tribute to his own charm and obvious pleasant gentlemanliness. For he was a man’s man, a man whom women are apt to find dull. But as Adelaide never went out, never returned a call, never expected to be asked to anything, it was easy enough to be civil to the husband, and make him free of what there was of Society in these sleepy little market towns. Before very long Wald Ensor belonged to the Conservative Club of Beverley, and was put on the Library Committee of that active little place, while in Weighton he played golf, and adjudged prizes. The wives’ drawing-rooms knew him not or hardly at all, he could not very well go about among the women without Adelaide, and he did not choose to do so.

He constrained himself to be more or less active in whatever was going, to fulfil his trivial duties as a citizen when they came his way, partly from a sense of duty, partly, he fancied, because the monotony of his existence at High Walls was slowly sapping his vitality, dulling his good temper and sense of good fellowship. The desire to travel again sometimes came over him in a great wave. If it had not been for Phillis and Adelaide, he said to himself: if it had not been for Mary, he did not say or even think to himself--he would, in certain irrepressible moods, have proposed it to his wife, to leave her for a time.

He could not, somehow, talk to Adelaide now; he thought it was because of her condition. He had come to think that everything, including questioning, plans and so on, must be deferred until Adelaide, in her own phrase, was “through.” She thought and talked of nothing else. It was an event of more than ordinary importance to her. Well, it would be over in a few months. Then he would ask her about her social ostracism. He would find out if it was self-incurred, a voluntary effort on her part? Or was it a case of sour grapes, and had she been clever enough to make a virtue out of necessity? She was clever enough for anything, of that he was convinced. Or had she from pique, temper or caprice, so obstinately refused herself at the beginning, when first she had come to settle in Yorkshire, that people had grown tired at last of making overtures of friendship; overtures that were continually repulsed by the sour chatelaine of the lonely house, in its belt of sombre trees and solid deterrent masonry.

He could not ask her this now, he could not ask her anything. He literally knew nothing about the woman he had married and taken to his breast, together with her child and her cook and her cook’s bastard, with the name that a man unknown had given her and which he had superseded so easily.

He did not know how long she had lived in Yorkshire, why she lived in Yorkshire, and why she had taken a mansion that was little better than a prison in which they two lived immured.

To do her justice, she did not seek to prison him there with her, she made no objection to his leaving her for hours. She would not seemingly have minded his leaving her for days, only he never did. He was held by her lazy, picturesque indifference, by the remembrance of the attraction of her bursts of passion in the days when she was not, as now, concentrating every force of her being on one single point, the bearing of a healthy child, a wonderful child, a child that should be even more eugenical than Phillis. He did not know that he was weak, but he knew that she was strong and that when he was not loving her, he was afraid of her. Yes, he, Wald Ensor, the man who had shot tigers and braved artillery and dug for gold under circumstances of almost impossible fortitude and endurance, was afraid of this hawk-nosed, straight-lipped woman, with the thin wrists, the small feet and the vanishing waist.

She was ruining him, she was breaking his spirit, making him a craven, as in another department Gertrude the cook, with her “good strong hands” that he shuddered to look at, was making of Mary. Mary, her child, the human being over whom she had power, even as Adelaide his wife, had power over him. He was sure of it. With her cruel, if necessary, training, Gertrude was killing her child by inches. In obedience to her mistress’s strange wild theory of economics, the warped little body of the cook’s child was being maimed and stunted, her mind dwarfed and annulled, her moral and physical growth contravened beyond recall. For Adelaide, with her strong will and sense of duty, was behind Gertrude, driving her to do what she thought was right and correct for the child of humble birth domiciled under her roof. She was right, economically right; it were indeed useless and extravagantly unpractical to bring up the cook’s child in luxury, beyond her station; the wrench of unfitness for her inevitable degradation and fall to her true station in life would be all the more severe later on. Only Adelaide’s want of imagination, however, could inure her to the thought of such a situation created by her own behest. Adelaide! fond of children! Never! Ensor smiled bitterly under his drooping moustache, and forced himself to remember that Adelaide had the defects of her qualities, and that philoprogenitiveness was not one of them. He had gauged her aright in the old days at Portland Place, or was it that that sly, all-seeing old father of hers had sown the doubt in his mind?

“_Adelaide, fond of children! She only thinks she is. Cruelty masked by philanthropy._”

And what was that about Mother’s vanity, and its non-negligibility as a factor? He remembered the old man’s pawky sneer as he said it.

“_Cases of baby-farming_,” he had argued. “_There’s sheer cruelty. If a woman ill-treats or even kills the child of another, no natural feeling except cruelty can possibly come into play, not even vanity.…_”

Vanity! Yes. There it was, a clear issue. The beautiful Phillis, her own… petted, cherished!… And on the other hand Mary, deformed, disgraced by Nature’s hand.… He used to hide his head in his hands as he contemplated the terrible antithesis.

Get her away!… He must… as soon as Adelaide had given birth to the wonderful child that was to be hers and his! That was settled. Meanwhile, he suffered, strange, unreasonable torments. Sometimes hanging about in the back of the house he would see the hem of Mary’s frock or the reach of her arm, as she scrubbed and lathered and polished. Then, with a groan, he would prevent himself from turning the corner of yard or out-house, lest he actually caught sight of the child at some one of her debilitating tasks. He would clench his hands, stuff a great cigar into his mouth, anything to keep him from rushing upon the poor waif, lifting her up, and boldly facing Gertrude, carry her off to America or the Antipodes.

One day, feeling he could bear it no longer, he got on to his bicycle and rode out to Weighton, on purpose to buy something; toys, sweatmeats, he did not know what, for Mary. Too handsome a present might bring down a beating, he sadly suspected; he had better get her something to eat, something nourishing, something that would disappear. He was about to invest in chocolate _fondants_, the best, when he suddenly realized that the cook’s child had been back in her proper station full three months, and would no longer appreciate the kind of eatables that would appeal to Phillis, who was a gourmet. He asked for and procured the wholesome candy, and rode home, tired and depressed. The impulse which had sent him out was a little spent. Poor Mary was the cook’s child after all, bred to servitude, doing only what her mother had done before her. He was a meddling busybody and would probably only succeed in getting the poor little creature a beating.…

He was thinking of Adelaide and Phillis now--of the rich sensuous beauty of Adelaide’s child, and the uncanny handsomeness of his wife. The devilish attraction of it swayed him, always more especially when he was tired and overwrought. It was her eyes.…

However, he had got the candy, a fat packet that ought to rejoice any normal child’s heart, and on arriving home he went boldly into the rear premises through the red baize door, and asked where Mary was?

Gertrude, coarse, homely, but on the whole well favoured, suspended her chopping operations at a board, and raising her chin, regarded him quizzically. With a kind of good-humoured malice, so it appeared to him, she slightly deferred her reply.… Then she said calmly--

“Mary is in the scullery.”

Raising her voice she called--

“Mary! You’re wanted.”

Quickly, obediently, a drooping, crestfallen figure of infancy appeared and stood in the sunlight that poured through the doorway, flung from a wide open window far back in the room she came from. It irradiated the ground she stood on and the filmy mass of cobwebs over her head; it could not light her up, any more than the bogey in the fields which flaps lank and dull in the full glare of noontide. And this was a living child, rendered by what means he knew not, unsusceptible, like any scarecrow, of light and joy. The depressed red bow on the top of her head looked as if it had not been untied for weeks. The hem of her skirt was partially torn off, it was far too long for her, and she had fastened, or some one had fastened it up for her, clumsily with a piece--two pieces of string. It showed a dirty pair of knickerbockers.

She stood, waiting patiently, blinking a little, hideous, shapeless, piteous. Gertrude said nothing but looked from one to the other, comparing them as it were, enjoying herself quietly, like a rough in the front row of the pit.

After a while, as if the play had lasted long enough, she said--

“Come here! I’ll put a pin in for you.”

Mary came shuffling up, not unwillingly. She did not seem to dislike her mother, that is all that could be said, and Ensor was glad to be able to think it possible that Gertrude was not always unkind to her. But such shocking neglect, even if there had been no excessive corporal punishment, was culpable. He stood, handling the packet of sweets dubiously, while the mother proceeded, with many a shake and pull, to modify her child’s disorder, which she had the sense to see injured her in the opinion of her master, if master he could be called who had no authority. At last summoning his courage, Ensor pulled out the packet and put it into Mary’s hand as she stood there, pending the adjustment of clothes that could hardly be called such, so ragged and insufficient were they.

The sweets fell to the ground, dropped with strange unchildish negligence from a nerveless hand. The child did not even look up. A spasm of agony transfixed the heart of Ensor.

Gertrude noticed the violent contraction of his features. She picked up the packet of bull’s eyes, and actually inserted one into Mary’s mouth. Ensor did not see if the child retained it, for he was groping on the ground for some of the sweets that had fallen out of the burst packet.

“Say thank you, you silly!” Gertrude adjured the child who stood astonished, bewildered, by such ordinary attentions as are the usual award of the protected and cherished young of any class. She was passive through fright, but if she had had the spirit, it was easy to see that her one idea was to hide, and that her eyes were looking for a corner to run into. But her mother had hold of her, ordering her attire, shaking her as if she had been a small frail apple-tree.

“That’s a very unsuitable length for a child’s dress, surely?” Ensor remarked, when Mary stood, hardly erect, sheepish but disengaged at last. The peccant undergarments were shoved into their proper place, more or less, and concealed, and her long loose frock was draped into paniers all round her.

“She’s skinny, that’s what it is!” conceded Gertrude. “Nothing won’t stay up round her! The dress too long, eh? No wonder! It’s one of Phillis’s that Miss Adelaide threw away because it was too bad for her beauty to wear. It had to do for my Mary, hadn’t it? We can’t afford to have clothes made on purpose for us, can we? Now run away, run away and play!”

She grinned. Mary stood stock still.

“You’re to grow into your clothes, I see,” said Ensor helplessly. “Well, make haste and grow, there’s a good girl!”

Mary smiled. Even if the gentleman’s words were absurd and irrelevant, she could not be deceived in the kindness of the speaker’s intention.

The smile, begun without spirit or brilliance, faded out like sunlight on a wall on a rainy day. Gertrude took up his speech, and answered it.

“Grow! Her! Never fear! Mary’s one of those stunted-from-birth ones Miss Adelaide’s always talking about. Just look at these thundering long arms!”

She extended to its full length the gnome-like, skinny limb to which she alluded. The owner suffered this liberty wearily. Her stupid glazed eyes were fixed on Ensor. They seemed to say, “Save me! Save me!”

He stammered out--

“Couldn’t she be sent to the sea for a month or so?… I would arrange it.… That is, if you could spare her?”

He waited on the cook’s answer agonizedly. She was in effect the child’s mother, with absolute power over it for life and death.…

“Spare her, Lord, yes!” answered the cook calmly. “The work she does isn’t worth speaking about. You’re nobbut a poor worker, aren’t you, Mary?” She turned to Ensor, away from the child, but she did not trouble to drop her voice at all--

“’Twould be no good, Sir. I’m thinking Miss Adelaide’s begun her grand training too late.”

“What d’you mean?” he asked.

“She’ll be training her into her grave, that’s what she’s doing.”

“Sh--h! for God’s sake, woman!” he muttered, and sought his wife. Something must be done.

* * * * * * *

He had no authority, except, strange to say, as far as Phillis was concerned. And though Phillis’s physical upbringing left nothing to be desired, he considered her mental education in some ways to be defective. Adelaide placed no obstacle whatever to his realization of certain views he had formulated and insisted on to the verge of tediousness with regard to the moral standards to be inculcated in a young growing girl.

She listened patiently, while he exposed these theories, and her thin lips wore something more nearly approaching to a smile at these times than any other, while her husband thus took a practical interest in the future of her daughter. He reasoned broadly, and generally; he could not lay his whole mind before the wife of Phillis’s father. For that father counted, and not, in Ensor’s idea, favourably. Phillis had certain strongly marked tendencies which he deplored, and which he conceived her to derive from the parent he did not know. She had undoubtedly a strain of the coarse and the callous; her father had probably had these characteristics more strongly developed. She had also some disagreeable qualities that he distinguished in and traced from Adelaide, and that careful training might cross and deny and finally eradicate. She was sly, she was morbid, she was headstrong and reckless of the claims of others.

So, acting with Adelaide’s authority, delegated to him, unquestioningly, he kept a strict watch and supervision on the books she read, and the conversations she heard or took part in. He did not countenance her frequent visits to the kitchen and her odd indecent familiarity with Gertrude the cook. He had asked his wife if he might not prohibit the child from entering the servants’ quarters altogether, and seal the red baize door that led to them against her use. He would like to forbid all entrance and egress by it, and force her to give her word of honour that she would observe the prohibition.

“She may give it, but she won’t keep it,” said Adelaide lazily. “You can’t wonder. She’s fond of Gertrude, because she gives her tit-bits, and Phillis is greedy, poor darling! And then”--she looked up in his face--“there’s your beloved Mary! She’s about, and you must remember the two were brought up together. They were like foster sisters before you came. You altered everything. And now I am going to have your child!”