The Intrusions of Peggy

'Has she got the money?'

'Yes – and perhaps enough more to pay her debts, and just to live. But it's not so much the money; it's the humiliation and the shame. Oh, don't you understand? Mr. Fricker will spare her that if – if he's bribed with a thousand pounds.'

He looked at her eager eyes and flushed cheeks; she pushed back her hair from her brow.

'He asks four thousand pounds,' she said, and added, pointing to the little bag, 'There's five hundred there.'

As she spoke she turned her eyes away from him towards the window. It did not seem to her fair to look at him; and her gaze would tell too much perhaps. She had given him the facts now; what would he make of them? She had broken her word to Trix Trevalla. Her pledge to Tommy Trent was still inviolate. Tommy had trusted her implicitly when she had surprised from him his friend's secret that his carelessness let slip. He had taken her word as he would have accepted the promise of an honourable man, a man honourable in business, or a friend of years. Her knowledge had counted as ignorance for him because she had engaged to be silent. The engagement was not broken yet. She waited fearfully. Airey could save her still. What would he do?

The seconds wore on, seeming very long. They told her of his struggle. She understood it with a rare sympathy, the sympathy we have for the single scar or stain on the heart of one we love; towards such a thing she could not be bitter. But she hoped passionately that he himself would conquer, would spare both himself and her. If he did, it would be the finest thing in the world, she thought.

She heard him move across to the safe and lock it. She heard him shut the red-leather book with a bang. Would he never speak? She would not look till he did, but she could have cried to him for a single word.

'And that was what you wanted your five hundred for?' he asked at last.

'My five hundred's no good alone.'

'It's all you've got in the world – well, except your pittance.'

She did not resent the word; he spoke it in compassion. She turned to him now and found his eyes on her.

'Oh, it's nothing to me. I never pay any attention to money, you know.' She managed a smile, trying to plead with him to think any such sacrifice a small matter, whether in another or in himself.

'Well, I see your plan, and it's very kind. A little Quixotic perhaps, Peggy – '

'Quixotic! If it saves her pain?' Peggy flashed out in real indignation.

'Anyhow what's the use of talking about it? Five hundred isn't four thousand, and Fricker won't come down, you know.'

It was pathetic to her to listen to the studied carelessness of his voice, to hear the easy reasonable words come from the twitching lips, to see the forced smile under the troubled brow. His agony was revealed to her; he was asked to throw all his dearest overboard. She stretched out her hands towards him.

'I might get help from friends, Airey.'

'Three thousand five hundred pounds?'

With sad bitterness she heard him. He was almost lying now; his manner and tone were a very lie.

'Friends who – who love her, Airey.'

He was silent for long again, moodily looking at her.

'Who would think anything well done, anything well spent, if they could save her pain!'

With an abrupt movement he turned away from her and threw himself into a chair. He could no longer bear the appeal of her eyes. At last it seemed strange as well as moving to him. But he could have no suspicion; he trusted Tommy Trent and conceived his secret to be all his own. His old great shame that Peggy should know joined forces with the hidden passion which was its parent; both fought to keep him silent, both enticed him to delude her still. Yet when she spoke of friends who loved Trix Trevalla, whom could she touch, whom could she move, as she touched and moved him? The appeal went to his heart, trying to storm it against the enemies entrenched there.

Suddenly Peggy hid her face in her hands, and gave one short sob. He looked up startled, clutching the arm of his chair with a fierce grip. He sat like that, his eyes set on her. But when he spoke, it was lamely and almost coldly.

'Of course we should all like to save her pain; we would all do what we could. But think of the money wanted! It's out of the question.'

She sprang to her feet and faced him. For the moment she forgot her tenderness for him; her understanding of his struggle was swept away in indignation.

'You love her!' she cried in defiant challenge. 'You of all people should help her. You of all people should throw all you have at her feet. You love her!'

He made no denial; he rose slowly from his chair and faced her.

'Oh, what is love if it's not that?' she demanded. 'Why, even friendship ought to be that. And love – !' Again her hands were outstretched to him in a last appeal. For still there was time – time to save his honour and her own, time to spare him and her the last shame. 'It would be riches to you, riches for ever,' she said. 'Yes, just because it's so hard, Airey!'

'What?' The word shot from his lips full of startled fear. Why did she call it hard? The word was strange. She should have said 'impossible.' Had he not put it before her as impossible? But she said 'hard,' and looked in his eyes as she spoke the word.

'Love can't make money where it isn't,' he went on in a dull, dogged, obstinate voice.

'No, but it can give it where it is!' She was carried away. 'And it's here!' she cried in accusing tones.

'Here?' He seemed almost to spring at her with the word.

'Yes, here, in this room – in that safe – everywhere!'

They stood facing one another for a moment.

'You love her – and she's ruined!'

She challenged denial. Airey Newton had no word to say. She raised her hand in the air and seemed to denounce him.

'You love her, she's ruined, and – you're rich! Oh, the shame of it – you're rich, you're rich!'

He sank back into his chair and hid his face from her.

She stood for a moment, looking at him, breathing fast and hard. Then she moved quickly to him, bent on her knee, and kissed his hand passionately. He made no movement, and she slipped quietly and swiftly from the room.

CHAPTER XVIII

AN AUNT – AND A FRIEND

Barslett: July 11.

My dear Sarah, – How I wish you were here! You would enjoy yourself, and I should like to see you doing it – indeed I should be amused. I never dare tell you face to face that you amuse me – you'd swell visibly, like the person in Pickwick – but I can write it quite safely. We are a family party – or at any rate we look forward to being one some day, and even now escape none of the characteristics of such gatherings. We all think that the Proper Thing will happen some day, and we tell one another so. Not for a long while, of course! First – and officially – because Mortimer feels things so deeply (this is a reference to the Improper Thing which so nearly happened – are you wincing, Sarah?); secondly – and entirely unofficially – because of a bad chaperon and a heavy pupil. You are a genius; you ought to have had seventeen daughters, all twins and all out together, and five eldest sons all immensely eligible! Nature is so limited. But me! I'm always there when I'm not wanted, and I do hate leaving a comfortable chair. But I try. Do I give you any clear idea when I say that a certain young person wants a deal of hoisting – and is very ponderous to hoist? And I'm not her mother, or I really wouldn't complain. But sometimes I could shake her, as they say. No, I couldn't shake her, but I should like to get some hydraulic machinery that could. However – it moves all the same! What's-his-name detected that in the world, which is certainly slow enough, and we all detect it in this interesting case – or say we do. And I've great faith in repeating things. It spreads confidence, whence comes, dear Sarah, action.

Mortimer is here a lot, but is somewhat fretful. The Trans-Euphratic, it seems, is fractious, or teething, or something, and Beaufort Chance has been nasty in the House – notably nasty and rather able. (Do you trace any private history?) However, I daresay you hear enough about the Trans-Euphratic at home. It buzzes about here, mingling soothingly with the approaching flower show and a calamity that has happened to a pedigree cow. Never mind details of any of them! Sir Stapleton was indiscreet to me, but it stops there, if you please. How sweet the country is in a real English home!

But sometimes we talk of the Past – and the P is large. There is a thank-heavenly atmosphere of pronounced density about Lady B. – quite sincere, I believe; she has realised that flightiness almost effected an entry into the family! Mortimer says little – deep feelings again. In my opinion it has done him some little good – which we and Audrey hope speedily to destroy. (Oh, that child! The perfection of English girlhood, Sarah; no less, believe me!) My lord is more communicative – to me. I believe he likes to talk about it. In fact Trix made some impression there; possibly there is a regret hidden somewhere in his circumference. He took me round the place yesterday, and showed me the scene of the flight. I should think going to Waterloo must give one something of the same feeling – if one could be conducted by a wounded hero of the fight. This was the conversation that passed – or something like it: —

Lord B.: She looked almost like a ghost.

Myself: Heavens, Lord B.!

Lord B. (inserting spud in ground): This was the very spot – the SPOT!

Myself: You surprise me!

Lord B.: I felt certain that something unusual was occurring.

Myself: Did that strike you at once?

Lord B.: Almost, Viola – I say, almost – at once. She came up. I remonstrated. My words do not remain in my memory.

Myself: Moments of excitement —

Lord B.: But I remonstrated, Viola.

Myself: And she pushed you away?

Lord B.: She did – and ran along the path here – following this path to that gate —

Myself (incredulously, however one's supposed to show that): That very gate, Lord B.?

Lord B.: It's been painted since, but that is the gate, Viola.

Myself: Fancy! (There isn't any other gate, you know; so, unless Trix had taken the fence in a flying leap, one doesn't see what she could have done.)

Lord B.: Yes, that gate. She ran through it and along that road —

Myself (distrustfully): That road, Lord B.?

Lord B. (firmly): That road, Viola. She twisted her veil about her face, caught up her skirts —

Myself:! !!! !

Lord B.: And ran away (impressively) towards the station, Viola!

Myself: Did you watch her?

Lord B.: Till she was out of sight – of sight, Viola!

Myself: I never realised it so clearly before, Lord B.

Lord B.: It is an experience I shall never forget.

Myself: I should think not, Lord B.

Then the excellent old dear said that he trusted he had no unchristian feelings towards Trix; he had been inclined to like her, and so on. But he failed to perceive how they could have treated her differently in any single particular. 'You could not depend on her word, Viola.' I remembered, Sarah, that in early youth, and under circumstances needless to specify exactly, you could not depend on mine – unless the evidence against me was hopelessly clear. I suppose that was Trix's mistake. She fibbed when she was bound to be found out, and saw it herself a minute later. Have you any personal objection to my dropping a tear?

I don't pretend to say I should go on writing if there was anything else to do, but it will open your mind to give you one more scrap.

Myself: What, Audrey dear, come in already? (It is 9.30 p.m. – evening fine – moon full.)

Audrey: Yes, it was rather chilly, Auntie, and there's a heavy dew.

Myself (sweetly): I thought it such a charming evening for a stroll.

Audrey: I was afraid of my new frock, Auntie.

Myself (very sweetly): You're so thoughtful, dear. Has Mortimer come in too?

Audrey: I knew he was busy, so I told him he mustn't leave his work for me. He went in directly then, Auntie.

Myself (most sweetly): How thoughtful of you, darling!

Audrey: He did suggest I should stay a little while, but the dew —

Myself (breaking down): Good gracious, Audrey, what in the world &c., &c., &c.

Audrey (pathetically): I'm so sorry, Auntie dear!

Now what would you do in such a case, Herr Professor Sarah?

No doubt things will turn out for the best in the end, and I suppose I shall be grateful to poor Trix. But for the moment I wish to goodness she'd never run away! Anyhow she has achieved immortality. Barmouths of future ages will hush their sons and daughters into good marriages by threatening them with Trix Trevalla. She stands for ever the Monument of Lawlessness – with locks bedraggled, and skirts high above the ankle! She has made this aristocratic family safe for a hundred years. She has not lived in vain. And tell me any news of her. Have you had the Frickers to dinner since my eye was off you? There, I must have my little joke. Forgive me, Sarah!

Affectionately,V. B.

'Tut!' said Mrs. Bonfill, laying down the letter, extracts from which she had been reading to her friend Lord Glentorly.

'She's about right as to Chance, anyhow,' he remarked. 'I was in the House, and you couldn't mistake his venom.'

'He doesn't count any longer.' Mrs. Bonfill pronounced the sentence ruthlessly.

'No, not politically. And in every other way he's no more than a tool of Fricker's. Fricker must have him in the hollow of his hand. He knows how he stands; that's the meaning of his bitterness. But he can make poor Mortimer feel, all the same. Still, as you say, there's an end of him!'

'And of her too! She was an extraordinary young woman, George.'

'Uncommonly attractive – no ballast,' summed up Glentorly. 'You never see her now, I suppose?'

'Nobody does,' said Mrs. Bonfill, using 'nobody' in its accepted sense. She sighed gently. 'You can't help people who won't be helped.'

'So Viola Blixworth implies,' he reminded her with a laugh.

'Oh, Viola's hopelessly flippant; but she'll manage it in the end, I expect.' She sighed again and went on, 'I don't know that, after all, one does much good by meddling with other people's affairs.'

'Come, come, this is only a moment of despondency, Sarah.'

'I suppose so,' she agreed, with returning hope. To consider that her present mood represented a right and ultimate conclusion would have been to pronounce a ban on all her activities. 'I've half a mind to propose myself for a visit to Barslett.'

'You couldn't do better,' Lord Glentorly cordially agreed. 'Everything will soon be over here, you see.'

She looked at him a little suspiciously. Did he suggest that she should retreat for a while and let the talk of her failures blow over? He was an old friend, and it was conceivable that he should seek to convey such a hint delicately.

'I had one letter from Trix,' she continued. 'A confused rigmarole – explanations, and defence, and apologies, and all the rest of it.'

'What did you write to her?'

'I didn't write at all. I put it in the fire.'

Glentorly glanced at his friend as she made this decisive reply. Her handsome, rather massive features were set in a calm repose; no scruples or doubts as to the rectitude of her action assailed her. Trix had chosen to jump over the pale; outside the pale she must abide. But that night, when a lady at dinner argued that she ought to have a vote, he exclaimed with an unmistakable shudder, 'By Jove, you'd be wanting to be judges next!' What turned his thoughts to that direful possibility?

But of course he did not let Mrs. Bonfill perceive any dissent from her judgment or her sentence. He contented himself with saying, 'Well, she's made a pretty mess of it!'

'There's nothing left for her – absolutely nothing,' Mrs. Bonfill concluded. Her tone would have excused, if not justified, Trix's making an end of herself in the river.

Lady Glentorly was equally emphatic on another aspect of the case.

'It's a lesson to all of us,' she told her husband. 'I don't acquit myself, much less can I acquit Sarah Bonfill. This taking up of people merely because they're good-looking and agreeable has gone far enough. You men are mainly responsible for it.'

'My dear!' murmured Glentorly weakly.

'It's well enough to send them a card now and then, but anything more than that – we must put our foot down. The Barmouths of all people! I declare it serves them right!'

'The affair seems to have resulted in serving everybody right,' he reflected. 'So I suppose it's all for the best.'

'Marriage is the point on which we must make a stand. After a short pause she added an inevitable qualification: 'Unless there are overwhelming reasons the other way. And this woman was never even supposed to be more than decently off.'

'The Barmouths are very much the old style. It was bad luck that she should happen on them.'

'Bad luck, George? It was Sarah Bonfill!'

'Bad luck for Mrs. Trevalla, I mean.'

'You take extraordinary views sometimes, George. Now I call it a Providence.'

In face of a difference so irreconcilable Glentorly abandoned the argument. There were a few like him who harboured a shame-faced sympathy for Trix. They were awed into silence, and the sentence of condemnation passed unopposed.

Yet there were regrets and longings in Mervyn's heart. Veiled under his dignified manner, censured by his cool judgment, hustled into the background by his resolute devotion to the Trans-Euphratic railway and other affairs of state, made to seem shameful by his determination to find a new ideal in a girl of Audrey Pollington's irreproachable stamp, they maintained an obstinate vitality, and, by a perverse turn of feeling, drew their strength from the very features in Trix and in Trix's behaviour which had incurred his severest censure while she was still his and with him.

Remembering her recklessness and her gaiety, recalling her hardly-suppressed rebellion against the life he asked her to lead and the air he gave her to breathe, rehearsing even the offences which had, directly or indirectly, driven her to flight and entailed exile on her, he found in her the embodiment of something that he condemned and yet desired, of something that could not be contained in his life, and thereby seemed in some sort to accuse that life of narrowness. She had shown him a country which he could not and would not enter; at moments the thought of her derisively beckoned him whither he could not go. At last, under the influence of these ideas, which grew and grew as the first shock of amazed resentment wore off, he came to put questions to himself as to the part that he had played, to realise a little how it had all seemed to her. This was not to blame himself or his part; he and it were still to him right and inevitable. But it was a step towards perceiving something deeper than the casual perversity or dishonesty of one woman. He had inklings of an ultimate incompatibility of lives, of ways, of training, of thought, of outlook on the world. Both she and he had disregarded the existence of such a thing. The immediate causes of her flight – her dishonesty and her fear of discovery – became, in this view, merely the occasion of it. In the end he asked whether she had not shown a kind of desperate courage, perhaps even a wild inspiration of wisdom, in what she had done. Gradually his anger against her died away, and there came in its place a sorrow, not that the thing she fled from was not to be, but that it never could have been in any true or adequate sense. Perhaps she herself had seen that – seen it in some flashing vision of despair which drove her headlong from the house by night. Feelings that Trix could not analyse for herself he thought out for her with his slow, narrow, but patient and thorough-going mind. The task was hard, for wounded pride still cried out in loud protest against it; but he made way with it. If he could traverse the path of it to the end, there stood comprehension, yes, and acquiescence; then it would appear that Trix Trevalla had refused to pile error on error; in her blind way she would have done right.

That things we have desired did not come to pass may be sad; that they never could have is sadder, by so much as the law we understand seems a more cruel force than the chance that hits us once, we know not whence, and may never strike again. The chance seems only a perverse accident falling on us from outside; the law abides, a limitation of ourselves. Towards such a consciousness as this Mervyn struggled.

At last he hinted something of what was in his mind to Viola Blixworth. He talked in abstract terms, with an air of studying human nature, not of discussing any concrete case; he was still a little pompous over it, and still entirely engrossed in his own feelings. His preoccupation was to prove that he deserved no ridicule, since fate, and not merely folly, had made him its unwilling plaything. She heard him with unusual seriousness, in an instant divining the direction of his thoughts; and she fastened on the mood, turning it to what she wanted.

'That should make you tolerant towards Mrs. Trevalla,' she suggested, as they walked together by the fountains.

'I suppose so, yes. It leaves us both slaves of something too strong for us.'

She passed by the affected humility that defaced his smile; she never expected too much, and was finding in him more than she had hoped.

'If you've any allowance for her, any gentleness towards her – '

'I feel very little anger now.'

'Then tell her so, Mortimer. Oh, I don't mean go to her. On all accounts you'd better not do that.' (Her smile was not altogether for Mervyn here; she spared some of it for her duties and position as an aunt.) 'But write to her.'

'What should I say?' The idea was plainly new to him. 'Do you mean that I'm to forgive her?'

'I wouldn't put it quite like that, Mortimer. That would be all right if you were proposing to – renew the arrangement. But I suppose you're not?'

He shook his head decisively. As a woman Lady Blixworth was rather sorry to see so much decision; it was her duty as an aunt to rejoice.

'Couldn't you manage to convey that it was nobody's fault in particular? Or something like that?'

He weighed the suggestion. 'I couldn't go quite so far,' he concluded, with a judicial air.

'Well, then, that the mistake was in trying it at all? Or in being in a hurry? Or – or that perhaps your manner – ?'

'No, I don't think there was anything wrong with my manner.'

'Could you say you understood her feelings – or, at any rate, allowed for them?'

'Perhaps I might say that.'

'At any rate you could say something comforting.' She put her arm through his. 'She's miserable about you, I know. You can say something?'

'I'll try to say something.'

'I know you'll say it nicely. You're a gentleman, Mortimer.'

She could not have used a better appeal, simple as it sounded. All through the affair – all through his life, it might be said – he had been a gentleman; he had never been consciously unkind, although he had often been to Trix unconsciously unbearable. Viola Blixworth put him on his honour by the name he reverenced.

'You'll feel better after you've done it – and more like settling down again,' said she. Friendship and auntship mingled. It would comfort Trix to hear that he had no bitterness; it would certainly assist Audrey if he could cease from studying his precise feelings, of any nature whatsoever, about another woman. Lady Blixworth was so accustomed to finding her motives mixed that a moderate degree of adulteration in them had ceased to impair her satisfaction with a useful deed. Besides, is not auntship also praiseworthy? Society said yes, and she never differed from it when its verdicts were convenient.

The letter was written; it was a hard morning's work, for he penned it as carefully as though it were to go into some archives of state. He would say no more than the truth as he had at last reached it; he said no less with equal conscientiousness. The result was stiff with all his stiffness, but there was kindness in it too. It was not forgiveness; it was acquiescence and a measure of understanding. And he convinced himself more and more as he wrote; in the end he did come very near to saying that there had been mistakes on both sides; he even set it down as a possible hypothesis that the initial error had been his. He had a born respect for written documents, and of written documents not the least of his respect was for his own. He had never felt so sure that there was an end of Trix Trevalla, so far as he was concerned, as when he had put the fact on record over his own signature.