The Sleeping Fury (21 page)

“Do you honestly imagine, Eric, that my mother would mind? If you do, you are paying her a very poor compliment. As for my father, he has a heart of gold, but he's a conventional old stick. It wouldn't alter his feelings for you one jot, but it would bother him at odd moments. He would have pricks from his conventional conscience when he introduced you to old Lady Rodmell, the Yankee muck-merchant's daughter. It would bring into action all the least honest sides of him, which it is so much kinder and healthier to allow to lie dormant. As for telling all your friends, my dear Eric, I never heard of such a piece of idiotic quixotry. Why, damn it, we are under no obligation to tell all our private history to our friends. People don't, when they become intimate with other people, at once start making a clean breast of it. Imagine it: ‘Look here, Mrs. Wilkins, I don't believe in God. Two years ago I got too much change at the Stores and never took it back. I committed fornication five—my memory is bad, it may be six—times last year, and my grandfather was a wholesale grocer.' Such confessions, though they would certainly enliven the boredoms of friendship, are not necessary, Eric. How much the less is yours, which has nothing whatever to do with you personally? There are, of course, particular
occasions when honesty compels one to speak, as in your own case when you felt, as I should have felt, that you must tell Lord Mardale. But to get on to the house-top and make a perfectly gratuitous announcement about it would be simply unmitigated folly. Not even the most scrupulous honesty calls for that. Believe me, Eric, it's merely that you're at present quite naturally over-sensitive about the thing.”

“You're a better tonic even than the sherry, John.”

“You notice my vinosity, old man? Well, suppose we go downstairs and have some dinner.”

After seeing Eric in London, Lord Mardale returned to Haughton by the last train. He found Charlotte alone in the morning-room. A tray containing a decanter and a plate of sandwiches stood on a table. Charlotte tried to smile a greeting, and that smile showed him how much she was suffering. “I ordered sandwiches for you,” she said. “Did you have dinner before you left London?”

“No,” he said, “I didn't feel I could face dinner; besides, there would hardly have been time in any case.”

“My dear Alfred, then you must have something more than this. I'll ring.”

“Don't, my dear. These sandwiches will be quite enough. But you're tired out,” he said, noticing the tired, sunken eyes and the sharp lines about her mouth. “You ought to be in bed.”

He sat down, and began abstractedly to eat a sandwich.

“Hadn't you better have a little wine?” she said, pouring him out a glass of port and handing it to him. He sipped a little of it, and then asked in a low voice:

“You've told her, then?”

“Yes, poor little thing.” She sighed bitterly, and turned away her head. “I felt,” she said, “as if I
had struck her in the face. Alfred, it is ghastly to have to treat innocent children so.”

“It is sometimes terribly difficult to do what one knows to be right, Charlotte. I felt as you felt when I talked to that poor boy this evening.”

“Did he … understand, Alfred?”

“Absolutely. He's a noble creature, Charlotte. That's what makes it so much harder. The very thing that has made it impossible for him to marry Sylvia has shown him as more than ever worthy of her.”

“Was he,” she asked anxiously, “very much upset?” She almost hoped to hear that he had not been, so unbearably painful to her was the thought of hurting him.

Alfred nodded with tightly closed lips. “But he was brave about it. We must help them both to be brave, Charlotte. They're both young; they'll get over it in time.”

Charlotte shook her head. “Never!” she said bitterly. “Life for them will never again be quite what it was before.”

“Let us hope it will become a deeper and more human thing for them. Doesn't suffering do that for us sometimes?”

She had leant forward to refill his glass, and she saw that his eyes, serene and loving, were fixed on her face. She understood the question that lay behind the spoken question. “Yes, my dear,” she said with conviction, patting him reassuringly on the shoulder.

She leaned back in her chair, and for a while they sat in silence. Then Charlotte spoke again. “You feel
quite sure, do you, Alfred, that it's impossible?”

“That they should marry?”

“Yes.”

“Don't you, Charlotte?” There was surprise in his question. “Eric's father and mother broke one of God's laws, didn't they? Eric was born in sin; we can't get over that. That is the most terrible thing about sin; its consequences involve the innocent. If we allowed Eric and Sylvia to marry, we should be condoning his parents' sin, shouldn't we?”

Alfred and Charlotte never spoke of the old incident of Maurice Wainwright, but each knew now that the other was thinking of it.

Charlotte raised her eyes to his. “Christ said, ‘Let him that is perfect cast the first stone at her.' I am no better than Eric's mother,” she said grimly.

“You didn't sin, Charlotte.”

“Yes, Alfred, I did.”

He glanced at her sharply; then his eyes softened again. “No, my dear; and, even if you had done, it would be no reason for committing another sin by countenancing your sin in others.”

“I remember,” said Charlotte, “something that old Mr. Winchmere—you remember him?—said to me when I was a girl younger than Sylvia. We were speaking of
Tess of the D' Urbervilles
and Mamma's disapproval of it as a book for Beatrix and me; and he told me that the older I grew, and the more involved in human sympathies and human troubles, the harder I should find it to distinguish between good and evil.”

“We should, if we were left to our own resources; but surely religion saves us from that? We have
Christ's example and Christ's very words, haven't we, to show us the way?”

“Yes, dear. But only the most human can rightly understand what Christ meant.”

“But Christ Himself will tell us what He means if we will give ourselves to Him. You believe that, Charlotte? You have experienced it, haven't you?”

Charlotte sighed. “I don't know, Alfred. Honestly, I can't say. I have often felt myself urged by what I knew to be best in me. Is that the prompting of Christ?”

“Yes, Charlotte.”

“But, if I obeyed the impulse of what is best in me now, I should let them marry. My reasons for wishing them not to marry are contemptible reasons. I have discovered that to-day.”

“Contemptible? What do you mean, Charlotte?”

“I am afraid of what the Duke and Duchess and the Rodmells and all our friends would think.”

“That's not contemptible, Charlotte. It means that you share with them a moral and social standard which you would be ashamed to fall below, just as you would be ashamed, and rightly ashamed, to be discovered stealing.”

“No, Alfred, it's not quite that. If I believed in their moral standards I should be justified; but I don't. If I listened to my own convictions, I should not hesitate for a moment in consenting to Sylvia and Eric marrying. But, though I am sure I should be right, I am too much of a snob and a coward to submit. I hate the thought of the whispers and the scandal; I'm frightened of them, even though in my heart of hearts I despise them. I imagine the old
Duchess remarking in her abrupt way: ‘Well, when it comes to our aristocrats marrying … marrying …' “Charlotte hesitated for a word.

“Bastards,” said Alfred. “That is the word she would probably use, and an ugly word too.”

“Yes, a dreadful word, Alfred; and yet it is nothing but our prejudice and our snobbishness that makes it dreadful for us.”

“No, dear; it is not snobbishness or prejudice or cowardice that makes you afraid of the talk and scandal, but religion and the authority of the ages. If we believe that man is something better than an animal, that he is a creature with a heart and mind and soul inspired by God, we must trust, mustn't we, to the accumulated wisdom of the ages rather than to our own unaided thoughts and emotions? What seems to you snobbishness and prejudice and cowardice in yourself is really your instinctive reverence for that wisdom. You instinctively hate the thought of Sylvia being married to an illegitimate husband, don't you?”

“Yes,” said Charlotte, “and I despise myself for doing so.”

Alfred did not reply. His face was contracted with trouble, and Charlotte could see that he was exhausted.

“Come,” she said, “let us go to bed. We're both tired out.”

• • • • • • • •

Next day was bright and frosty, and Alfred, having worked in his study all the morning, went out for a short walk in the grounds before luncheon. He crossed
the lawn, which was grey with frost and rang hard and hollow under his feet. The great beech-trees had blossomed into an exquisite frosty filigree, and the firs glittered as if wrought out of spun glass. Striking a winding path, he followed it through a shrubbery of laurels and rhododendrons, and, turning through a gateway of clipped yew, emerged into the water-garden. Here everything was as still and bare as a crystal. The fountains were silent; the drippings from their stone lips had frozen into clustered columns of glass. The water-lily plants had shrunk away from the surface of the ponds into the hidden depths of the water, invisible behind the pane of ice, black as polished flint, that covered each. There was a cold and beautiful serenity upon the place that soothed Alfred's heart as he paced round the stone-flagged path that enclosed it. He approached the little pillared temple, and suddenly it seemed to him that he had seen something move inside it. Could it be that a bird had got shut in? The blue reflection of the sky upon its windows prevented him from seeing clearly into it. He went up to the door and opened it. As he did so, someone rose from one of the chairs. It was Sylvia. She stood there, very pale, faintly and shamefacedly smiling at him.

“Sylvia!” he said. “I saw something move, and thought it must be a bird that was shut in. Why, you must be frozen, child.”

He took one of her cold little hands in his. “It's nearly half-past one, my dear. We ought to go in to luncheon. Will you come?”

They went out together, and he slipped his arm through hers. “My poor little girl,” he said, “I
wish I could do something to comfort you. But you must try to be brave, my dear. As time goes on you will be able to bear it better.”

She did not reply. She walked with her arm through his like a child at a funeral.

At last she asked: “How did he seem, Father? Very upset?”

“Eric? Yes, dear; naturally he was. I told him, Sylvia, that he might come and see you once again. After that, you had better not meet, had you, for some time? It will be easier to get over it if you don't meet.”

“If you mean, by ‘get over it,' cease to love him, Father, I shall never do that. We were meant for each other.”

“But you'll try, my darling, won't you?”

“No, Father. How can I try? It would be cruel to try, even if I knew how to. What harm has he done? He's perfectly innocent—as innocent as I am. Then why should I make things worse for him by ceasing to love him? No, I shall try and make up to him by loving him all my life.”

Alfred's heart sank. In his heart he agreed and sympathised so perfectly with what she said that he could not gainsay her. But he tried, gently and ineffectually, to make her see the sensible point of view.

“But if you can't marry, dearest, it will only make you both unhappy to persevere.”

She did not reply. Then she asked: “Why is it, Father, that we can't marry?”

“Mother told you why, Sylvia.”

“Yes, but what I mean is, that Eric himself has
broken no law and committed no sin, so why do you look upon him as wicked, or in some way … unclean?”

“I don't, my dear child. He's one of the best-hearted and most honourable fellows I ever knew, poor boy.”

Sylvia sighed wearily. “Then I don't understand, Father, why you forbid me to marry him.”

“Dearest, if we believe in our religion it is surely our duty to set our faces against the breaking of God's laws. People look to us to set them an example. If their priests and their law-makers wink at contempt of religion and law, what are they to think? Our family, as you know well enough, has given the country bishops and statesmen and soldiers, and it has prided itself on its virtue. That is an honest pride, don't you think so?”

“Indeed I do, Father.”

“Well, if you were to marry Eric, and it was known that he is an illegitimate child, people would be justified in thinking that I, a priest of the Church of England, thought lightly of the sanctity of marriage, and that you and I and Mother were not very creditable representatives of an old and noble family.”

“Only stupid and narrow people, Father.”

“But we must not be a cause of stumbling even for stupid and narrow people. Christ said: ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.'”

“But surely that doesn't mean that we must be cruel and unjust to the good and innocent for fear of being misunderstood by the stupid and narrow people?”

“No, dearest; and we are not being unjust to Eric. It was his mother and father who were unjust to him. My dear child, all I say sounds to you, I know, cold and pedantic. But you believe, don't you, dear, that I am only trying to choose what is right for us all to do, and that I would do anything in the world, short of what I know to be wrong, to bring you and Eric together? I'm very fond of Eric, Sylvia.”

“Dear, I know.” She squeezed his arm. “But” —and her voice trembled as she spoke—”but all I can feel or understand at present is that Eric is good and innocent, and I love him more than the whole world put together.”