The Good Soldier (23 page)

I do not mean to say that there was any unpleasantness of a
grasping kind. The problem was quite another one—a moral dilemma.
You see, old Mr Hurlbird had left all his property to Florence with
the mere request that she would have erected to him in the city of
Waterbury, Ill., a memorial that should take the form of some sort
of institution for the relief of sufferers from the heart.
Florence's money had all come to me—and with it old Mr Hurlbird's.
He had died just five days before Florence.

Well, I was quite ready to spend a round million dollars on the
relief of sufferers from the heart. The old gentleman had left
about a million and a half; Florence had been worth about eight
hundred thousand—and as I figured it out, I should cut up at about
a million myself. Anyhow, there was ample money. But I naturally
wanted to consult the wishes of his surviving relatives and then
the trouble really began. You see, it had been discovered that Mr
Hurlbird had had nothing whatever the matter with his heart. His
lungs had been a little affected all through his life and he had
died of bronchitis. It struck Miss Florence Hurlbird that, since
her brother had died of lungs and not of heart, his money ought to
go to lung patients. That, she considered, was what her brother
would have wished. On the other hand, by a kink, that I could not
at the time understand, Miss Hurlbird insisted that I ought to keep
the money all to myself. She said that she did not wish for any
monuments to the Hurlbird family. At the time I thought that that
was because of a New England dislike for necrological ostentation.
But I can figure out now, when I remember certain insistent and
continued questions that she put to me, about Edward Ashburnham,
that there was another idea in her mind. And Leonora has told me
that, on Florence's dressing-table, beside her dead body, there had
lain a letter to Miss Hurlbird—a letter which Leonora posted
without telling me. I don't know how Florence had time to write to
her aunt; but I can quite understand that she would not like to go
out of the world without making some comments. So I guess Florence
had told Miss Hurlbird a good bit about Edward Ashburnham in a few
scrawled words—and that that was why the old lady did not wish the
name of Hurlbird perpetuated. Perhaps also she thought that I had
earned the Hurlbird money. It meant a pretty tidy lot of
discussing, what with the doctors warning each other about the bad
effects of discussions on the health of the old ladies, and warning
me covertly against each other, and saying that old Mr Hurlbird
might have died of heart, after all, in spite of the diagnosis of
his doctor. And the solicitors all had separate methods of
arranging about how the money should be invested and entrusted and
bound. Personally, I wanted to invest the money so that the
interest could be used for the relief of sufferers from the heart.
If old Mr Hurlbird had not died of any defects in that organ he had
considered that it was defective. Moreover, Florence had certainly
died of her heart, as I saw it. And when Miss Florence Hurlbird
stood out that the money ought to go to chest sufferers I was
brought to thinking that there ought to be a chest institution too,
and I advanced the sum that I was ready to provide to a million and
a half of dollars. That would have given seven hundred and fifty
thousand to each class of invalid. I did not want money at all
badly. All I wanted it for was to be able to give Nancy Rufford a
good time. I did not know much about housekeeping expenses in
England where, I presumed, she would wish to live. I knew that her
needs at that time were limited to good chocolates, and a good
horse or two, and simple, pretty frocks. Probably she would want
more than that later on. But even if I gave a million and a half
dollars to these institutions I should still have the equivalent of
about twenty thousand a year English, and I considered that Nancy
could have a pretty good time on that or less. Anyhow, we had a
stiff set of arguments up at the Hurlbird mansion which stands on a
bluff over the town. It may strike you, silent listener, as being
funny if you happen to be European. But moral problems of that
description and the giving of millions to institutions are
immensely serious matters in my country. Indeed, they are the
staple topics for consideration amongst the wealthy classes. We
haven't got peerage and social climbing to occupy us much, and
decent people do not take interest in politics or elderly people in
sport. So that there were real tears shed by both Miss Hurlbird and
Miss Florence before I left that city. I left it quite abruptly.
Four hours after Edward's telegram came another from Leonora,
saying: "Yes, do come. You could be so helpful." I simply told my
attorney that there was the million and a half; that he could
invest it as he liked, and that the purposes must be decided by the
Misses Hurlbird. I was, anyhow, pretty well worn out by all the
discussions. And, as I have never heard yet from the Misses
Hurlbird, I rather think that Miss Hurlbird, either by revelations
or by moral force, has persuaded Miss Florence that no memorial to
their names shall be erected in the city of Waterbury, Conn. Miss
Hurlbird wept dreadfully when she heard that I was going to stay
with the Ashburnhams, but she did not make any comments. I was
aware, at that date, that her niece had been seduced by that fellow
Jimmy before I had married her—but I contrived to produce on her
the impression that I thought Florence had been a model wife. Why,
at that date I still believed that Florence had been perfectly
virtuous after her marriage to me. I had not figured it out that
she could have played it so low down as to continue her intrigue
with that fellow under my roof. Well, I was a fool. But I did not
think much about Florence at that date. My mind was occupied with
what was happening at Branshaw. I had got it into my head that the
telegrams had something to do with Nancy. It struck me that she
might have shown signs of forming an attachment for some
undesirable fellow and that Leonora wanted me to come back and
marry her out of harm's way. That was what was pretty firmly in my
mind. And it remained in my mind for nearly ten days after my
arrival at that beautiful old place. Neither Edward nor Leonora
made any motion to talk to me about anything other than the weather
and the crops. Yet, although there were several young fellows
about, I could not see that any one in particular was distinguished
by the girl's preference. She certainly appeared illish and
nervous, except when she woke up to talk gay nonsense to me. Oh,
the pretty thing that she was....

I imagined that what must have happened was that the undesirable
young man had been forbidden the place and that Nancy was fretting
a little. What had happened was just Hell. Leonora had spoken to
Nancy; Nancy had spoken to Edward; Edward had spoken to Leonora—and
they had talked and talked. And talked. You have to imagine
horrible pictures of gloom and half lights, and emotions running
through silent nights—through whole nights. You have to imagine my
beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to Edward, rising up at the foot
of his bed, with her long hair falling, like a split cone of
shadow, in the glimmer of a night-light that burned beside him. You
have to imagine her, a silent, a no doubt agonized figure, like a
spectre, suddenly offering herself to him—to save his reason! And
you have to imagine his frantic refusal—and talk. And talk! My
God!

And yet, to me, living in the house, enveloped with the charm of
the quiet and ordered living, with the silent, skilled servants
whose mere laying out of my dress clothes was like a caress—to me
who was hourly with them they appeared like tender, ordered and
devoted people, smiling, absenting themselves at the proper
intervals; driving me to meets—just good people! How the devil—how
the devil do they do it?

At dinner one evening Leonora said—she had just opened a
telegram:

"Nancy will be going to India, tomorrow, to be with her
father."

No one spoke. Nancy looked at her plate; Edward went on eating
his pheasant. I felt very bad; I imagined that it would be up to me
to propose to Nancy that evening. It appeared to me to be queer
that they had not given me any warning of Nancy's departure—But I
thought that that was only English manners—some sort of delicacy
that I had not got the hang of. You must remember that at that
moment I trusted in Edward and Leonora and in Nancy Rufford, and in
the tranquility of ancient haunts of peace, as I had trusted in my
mother's love. And that evening Edward spoke to me.

What in the interval had happened had been this:

Upon her return from Nauheim Leonora had completely broken
down—because she knew she could trust Edward. That seems odd but,
if you know anything about breakdowns, you will know that by the
ingenious torments that fate prepares for us, these things come as
soon as, a strain having relaxed, there is nothing more to be done.
It is after a husband's long illness and death that a widow goes to
pieces; it is at the end of a long rowing contest that a crew
collapses and lies forward upon its oars. And that was what
happened to Leonora.

From certain tones in Edward's voice; from the long, steady
stare that he had given her from his bloodshot eyes on rising from
the dinner table in the Nauheim hotel, she knew that, in the affair
of the poor girl, this was a case in which Edward's moral scruples,
or his social code, or his idea that it would be playing it too low
down, rendered Nancy perfectly safe. The girl, she felt sure, was
in no danger at all from Edward. And in that she was perfectly
right. The smash was to come from herself.

She relaxed; she broke; she drifted, at first quickly, then with
an increasing momentum, down the stream of destiny. You may put it
that, having been cut off from the restraints of her religion, for
the first time in her life, she acted along the lines of her
instinctive desires. I do not know whether to think that, in that
she was no longer herself; or that, having let loose the bonds of
her standards, her conventions and her traditions, she was being,
for the first time, her own natural self. She was torn between her
intense, maternal love for the girl and an intense jealousy of the
woman who realizes that the man she loves has met what appears to
be the final passion of his life. She was divided between an
intense disgust for Edward's weakness in conceiving this passion,
an intense pity for the miseries that he was enduring, and a
feeling equally intense, but one that she hid from herself—a
feeling of respect for Edward's determination to keep himself, in
this particular affair, unspotted.

And the human heart is a very mysterious thing. It is impossible
to say that Leonora, in acting as she then did, was not filled with
a sort of hatred of Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to
despise him. He was, she realized gone from her for good. Then let
him suffer, let him agonize; let him, if possible, break and go to
that Hell that is the abode of broken resolves. She might have
taken a different line. It would have been so easy to send the girl
away to stay with some friends; to have taken her away herself upon
some pretext or other. That would not have cured things but it
would have been the decent line,... But, at that date, poor Leonora
was incapable of taking any line whatever.

She pitied Edward frightfully at one time—and then she acted
along the lines of pity; she loathed him at another and then she
acted as her loathing dictated. She gasped, as a person dying of
tuberculosis gasps for air. She craved madly for communication with
some other human soul. And the human soul that she selected was
that of the girl.

Perhaps Nancy was the only person that she could have talked to.
With her necessity for reticences, with her coldness of manner,
Leonora had singularly few intimates. She had none at all, with the
exception of the Mrs Colonel Whelen, who had advised her about the
affair with La Dolciquita, and the one or two religious, who had
guided her through life. The Colonel's wife was at that time in
Madeira; the religious she now avoided. Her visitors' book had
seven hundred names in it; there was not a soul that she could
speak to. She was Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw Teleragh.

She was the great Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw and she lay all day
upon her bed in her marvellous, light, airy bedroom with the
chintzes and the Chippendale and the portraits of deceased
Ashburnhams by Zoffany and Zucchero. When there was a meet she
would struggle up—supposing it were within driving distance—and let
Edward drive her and the girl to the cross-roads or the country
house. She would drive herself back alone; Edward would ride off
with the girl. Ride Leonora could not, that season—her head was too
bad. Each pace of her mare was an anguish.

But she drove with efficiency and precision; she smiled at the
Gimmers and Ffoulkes and the Hedley Seatons. She threw with
exactitude pennies to the boys who opened gates for her; she sat
upright on the seat of the high dog-cart; she waved her hands to
Edward and Nancy as they rode off with the hounds, and every one
could hear her clear, high voice, in the chilly weather, saying:
"Have a good time!"

Poor forlorn woman!...

There was, however, one spark of consolation. It came from the
fact that Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with his
eyes. It had been three years since she had tried her abortive
love-affair with him. Yet still, on the winter mornings he would
ride up to her shafts and just say: "Good day," and look at her
with eyes that were not imploring, but seemed to say: "You see, I
am still, as the Germans say, A. D.—at disposition."

It was a great consolation, not because she proposed ever to
take him up again, but because it showed her that there was in the
world one faithful soul in riding-breeches. And it showed her that
she was not losing her looks.