(iii)
Flora followed Mrs. Carey’s maid upstairs, feeling as though the beating of her heart were causing each breath she drew to crowd thickly upon the next one.
Mrs. Carey’s house—she supposed it was Mrs. Carey’s house—was a very tiny one indeed, and looked tinier by reason of the number of pictures, draperies, and flowers that covered every available corner of the steep staircase and the small landing.
The drawing-room was small, too, and so dark that the maid turned on the rose-shaded electric lights as she ushered Flora into the empty room.
“Mrs. Carey isn’t down yet. I’ll tell her you’re here, m’m.”
“Mrs. Carey is expecting me. Please say that it is Miss Morchard.”
The maid went away.
“Unpunctual,” reflected Flora. “She said half-past ten.”
She gazed round the room, which confirmed the impression of Mrs. Carey’s personality that Flora had already received from her pale mauve notepaper, her methods of expressing herself in writing, and that which she knew of her relations with David Morchard.
Nearly everything in the room was rose-colour, except the walls, which were grey, and laden with sketches, brackets, and a shelf on which stood innumerable framed and unframed photographs, nearly all of them of men.
A minute writing-table, set corner ways, overflowed with papers, and more photographs, including one that Flora recognized instantly, although it had never been sent to St. Gwenllian.
The chair in front of the table supported a number of illustrated papers.
“Untidy,” was Flora’s next verdict.
She had resolutely closed the avenues of her mind to emotion and speculation alike. The habits of observation, which she mentioned in private spiritual consultation with her father as her own tendency towards a lack of charity, she knew subconsciously to possess a steadying effect.
A quantity of cigarette ash in a small receptacle, presumably placed there on the previous evening, and a general atmosphere of unopened windows, did not serve to modify Flora’s already unenthusiastic judgments.
Neither did Mrs. Carey’s delay in making her appearance.
When she at last came in, it was difficult to see what could possibly have delayed her, since she had apparently only stepped out of bed into a wadded silk kimono, a lace boudoir cap, and fur-bordered bedroom slippers.
She looked younger than Flora had expected her to be, and her little pallid face was pretty enough, with violet semi-circles under big, light blue eyes and a general air of fragility. Although nearly as tall as Flora herself, she was slight enough to produce an effect of daintiness, the adjective that Flora immediately felt certain would appeal to her most.
A short, thick plait of fair hair fell over her shoulders, and a certain babyish plaintiveness of utterance made Flora think of Olga Duffle.
“I’m sure you’re David’s sister,” said Mrs. Carey, to which proof of intuition her visitor offered no reply, thinking the fact sufficiently self-evident.
“Oh, do sit down. You must forgive me coming in like this, but I’m not strong, and I arrived worn out after an awful voyage—and then to get this news! Do you smoke?”
“No, thank you.”
“Do you mind if I do? I smoke too much, but my nerves are in an awful state. A doctor friend of mine—the dearest thing—made me promise faithfully never to inhale, but I’m afraid I do. It was the ship’s doctor, on the way home, as a matter of fact. There were one or two nice men on board, but the women were dreadful. Miss Morchard, I should think other women generally confide in you, don’t they, and like you most awfully. Now, I’m not enormously popular with other women. I don’t mean that I haven’t got women-friends, devoted ones, who’d do anything in the world for me—but most of my very best pals have been men. It’s funny, isn’t it? Your brother was one of my dearest friends.”
The blue eyes looked warily at Flora.
“That’s why I felt I had to see you, and oh! you are so like him! It’s hardly like talking to a stranger at all!”
It certainly was not, Flora reflected.
“I feel I’m so dreadfully in the dark—I know nothing. Only the awful, awful fact. When I got the cable—it was cabled to me, by a dear friend at Government House—when I read it, I simply didn’t believe it. I said, ‘It can’t be true.’ But it was.”
Flora did not feel it incumbent upon her to reply.
“When your father got my letter, I daresay he was astonished, but I’m frightfully impulsive, Miss Morchard, and I felt I must know more or I should go mad. That’s why I begged you to let me see you. I’m a thoroughly unconventional woman, as you may perhaps have guessed, and I always act on impulse.”
Flora looked at the frightened, furtive little face, and wondered what purpose and what concealment lay behind the flood of words.
“I’m going to be perfectly frank with you, because I feel I can trust you. May I call you Flora? My name is Maisie—a silly little name, isn’t it, but my friends all say it suits me. I don’t know why. Tell me, did David write to you about me? He said he was going to, but it was such a—such a short time before——”
Mrs. Carey’s tongue moistened her lips as though they were dry.
“I don’t know whether you’ve ever lived abroad, but if you haven’t, you don’t know what the East is like for people who have to live there. There’s a frightful amount of slander and gossip going on, and people put a wicked construction on all sorts of innocent things. It’s awful. It used to make me simply miserable. You see, live and let live has always been my motto. I like to go my own way, and have my own friends, and not do any harm to anybody, but simply be happy in my own little way. After all, it’s what God meant for all of us, isn’t it? But in India one can’t do that. My dear, you wouldn’t believe what it’s like. I went out when I was awfully young—I was married at twenty—and I know for a fact that the most beastly things have been said about me. You see, I feel I can tell you this quite frankly, Flora, because of your being David’s favourite sister. I know you’ll understand, and that I can trust you.”
Again that anxious, furtive glance was shot at her from under Mrs. Carey’s long lashes.
“I’ve had heaps of men friends, of course—especially in the Regiment. I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, and own up that one or two of them got rather silly, and fancied themselves in love with me. That wasn’t my fault, was it? I just wanted to be friends, you know. A nice woman can do such a lot for young men. I couldn’t help it—possibly—if they went and fancied themselves in love with me. Now could I? But would you believe it, people—it was mostly women, I must say, and some of them actually called themselves my friends—went and invented the most disgusting lies about me. Out of jealousy, you know. I was a good ten years younger than any of them, as it happened, and you’d have thought the Colonel’s wife, or anyone like that, might have wanted to mother me a little bit. (I lost my own mother when I was only fourteen, and had a rotten time at home.) But instead of that, my dear, instead of that, they simply spread these filthy stories about me and all my best friends. However, I don’t want to go into all that. It was soon after I first went out, and of course nobody who really knew me believed for an instant that there was anything in it. They heard something about it at Government House, you know, and the Governor was simply furious, I believe. My friend in the Secretariat told me about it. The Governor said that Mrs. Carey was the only real lady in the place, as well as being the prettiest woman in India. Of course, that may have been nonsense, because I happen to know that he did like me most awfully—personally, I mean—but I know I was most awfully touched at his taking up the cudgels for me like that. It showed what the people who really mattered thought of me, didn’t it, and after all, the Governor of a place does represent the King, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Flora.
It was the first appeal to which she had felt able to give any assent.
“You said that so like David!” cried Mrs. Carey clasping her hands together. “We were the greatest friends, and he used to come to me about everything. I used to tell him to marry....”
Another pause, and another look.
“I always want my young-men friends to marry. That just shows, doesn’t it, what nonsense it is for anyone to talk as though there were anything wrong about it? I don’t know whether your brother ever hinted anything to you, in his letters, about any horrid gossip. Between ourselves, he used to get angry, I know, at the things that were sometimes said, and of course he knew that I wasn’t—well, very happy. You’re not married, I know, so perhaps you won’t understand what it means to a woman, especially a very sensitive one, which I am, to have a husband who is jealous. I’m not blaming Fred, exactly, I suppose he can’t help it, and he was madly in love with me when we married. Of course, I was much too young and ignorant of life to marry, but I had an awfully unhappy home, and if it hadn’t been Fred, it would have been somebody else—men were always pestering me, somehow. Besides, people made mischief between us. How people can be wicked enough to come between husband and wife, I can’t think! I’ve been through hell once or twice in my life, I can tell you!”
Looking at the fear and the craftiness and the sensuality written on Maisie Carey’s small, ravaged face, Flora could believe it without difficulty.
“I don’t really know why I’m telling you all this, exactly. It’s not like me. I’m terribly reserved, really. But you’ve got such an awfully nice face, somehow, and you’re David’s sister. I can’t tell you how fond I was of David—we were just tremendous chums. It upset me awfully, that he should die in that sudden way.”
She began to cry in a convulsive, spasmodic way.
Flora still remained silent.
“I wish you’d tell me if he ever wrote anything to you about me,” sobbed Mrs. Carey.
In the midst of the tears which seemed to be really beyond her own control, Flora caught a glimpse as of a terrible anxiety. She suddenly knew that in the answer to that last, sobbed-out question lay, for Mrs. Carey, the crux of their interview.
“He did write,” said Flora. “But what he wrote is safe with me. It will never go any further.”
The figure in the gay silk kimono seemed to cower further back into the armchair, but there was no self-betraying exclamation.
“I suppose he told you about Fred and me?”
“And about himself too,” said Flora.
“Men are all alike! Why did he want to tell you?”
“So that I could tell my father and sister. David was afraid of Father.”
“Your father knows?” This time the note of alarm was undisguised.
“No. The letter was only found and posted after the ones that told us of David’s death. And I have told my father nothing.”
Mrs. Carey broke into vehement, hysterical speech.
“There’s nothing to tell! You people at home make such mountains out of molehills. I swear to you that there was nothing between us, that I never——”
Flora interrupted her.
“He told me everything,” she repeated. “He told me that the case would be undefended, and that he was coming home to marry you. So you see I know.”
“You! What can you, who’ve never married, never seen anything of life, know of things? You see evil where none exists—you’re like all these good and holy people ... intolerant....” Tears poured unchecked down her face, making streaks across the white powder. “You don’t even begin to know what I’ve gone through. My husband is a beast—a beast. You don’t know what that means.”
She flung herself backwards, almost prone, and wept hysterically.
“What are you going to do?” said Flora.
“Kill myself!”
The rhetorical answer came almost automatically.
Flora waited for a moment and then said very gently:
“As you say, I don’t know anything about these things, but perhaps you would tell me what you want. We might think of some way of making things better. And you can see for yourself that your secret—and David’s—is safe with me. I’ve deceived my father, sooner than let him guess. I don’t think he need ever know, now.”
“Why don’t you want him to know?” said Mrs. Carey with sudden curiosity that seemed to check her crying.
“It would make him very unhappy. He was proud of David and he thinks that David had a career before him. Perhaps you’ve read in books,” said Flora, speaking as though to a child, “about people thinking death is better than dishonour. Well, my father is like that.”
“He’s a parson, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Carey shrugged her shoulders.
“Where is your husband now?” Flora enquired. She felt that she could ask this woman questions without fear or rebuff, but she thought that it would be for her to disentangle the truth from the false in Mrs. Carey’s replies.
“Fred’s in Scotland. He’s staying with his mother. She’s a beastly old woman and I hate her. If she’d been a decent sort, you’d think she’d have used her influence to put things right between us, now wouldn’t you? But she’s never let Fred alone ever since we married. Always telling him tales about me, and saying I’m extravagant, and a flirt, and wanting to know why I’ve never had a baby. It’s not my fault if I’ve got rotten health, now is it? I’ve always been delicate. I’m sure I only wish I had got a child. It might have made Fred nicer to me, and I should have had something to care for.”
She began to cry again.
“I’m sure I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Perhaps you think I’m mad.”
“I’m dreadfully sorry for you,” said Flora truthfully.
“You’re a dear.” Mrs. Carey dropped the hostility out of her voice abruptly. “No one knows what I’ve gone through. And now about David—it’s simply awful!”
“Did you really mean to marry David, after your divorce?”
“I’d better tell you the whole story, I suppose,” said Mrs. Carey. She dried her eyes and her voice insensibly hardened from self-pity into tones of satisfaction.
“I suppose I’ve always been attractive to men. I can’t help it, after all. And I daresay I’ve played the fool, in my time—in fact I don’t deny it. But David and I were simply tremendous friends, to begin with. He was frightfully sorry for me, too. Everybody knew that Fred was simply hateful to me, and made a scene if I so much as went out riding with another man. He quite liked your brother, though, at first, I will say that for him. We used to have him to dinner pretty often, and one of the subalterns to make a fourth, and play Bridge. Well, I never guessed that your brother did more than just like me as a great friend, as heaps of men did—how could I? I used to advise him to marry, often and often. Some nice girl at home, who’d come out and look after him. Those boys all drink more than is good for them, out there, if they’ve no wife to look after them. And David used to talk nonsense about having no use for girls, and having met his ideal too late, but of course I never took it seriously. Heaps of men say things like that to one, now don’t they? We used to go out riding together a good deal, and of course I danced with him. (That’s another of the ways in which Fred is so frightfully selfish. He can’t dance himself ever since he was wounded in the war, so he hates me to.) Then people began to say the usual horrid things. The women out there are all cats, and besides, a good many of them wanted David for themselves. I didn’t take any notice. I think it’s so much more dignified not to, don’t you? As I said to the Colonel’s wife, when she had the impertinence to speak to me about it, I never have taken any notice of gossip, and I’m not going to begin now. I simply go my own way, and let people say what they choose. It doesn’t matter to me if they’ve got horrible minds. It’s themselves that are hurt by it, I always think, not me. But I think women are much braver and more unconventional than men, don’t you? David minded ever so much more than I did, when he found people were talking about us. Well, things were going from bad to worse between Fred and me, and one night he was so perfectly hateful to me that I got frightened. He was—not drunk, but not altogether sober. And I ran into the compound and down the road to David’s bungalow. He shared it with another man, but the other man was away shooting. You see, I was so frightened and upset that I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just felt I must go to someone who’d take care of me.”
Mrs. Carey swallowed, as though something in her throat were hurting her, and lit another cigarette with a hand that trembled.
“It was a frightfully imprudent thing to do, I suppose, but I’ve never pretended to be a particularly prudent woman. I daresay I should have been much happier if I’d been less impulsive, all my life, but after all, one can’t change one’s nature, can one? Besides, I was nearly out of my mind. Fred came to find me next morning. I was far too miserable and terrified to go back to him that night. We had scene after scene, after that, and he threatened me with divorce proceedings.”
She glanced at her motionless auditor.
“I may have been a careless fool, and I’ll go as far as to say that I’ve flirted with other men, but it was wicked of Fred to think of such a thing as divorce—to ruin my reputation, and spoil David’s career.”
“Why was the case to be undefended?” said Flora steadily.
“Why—why, don’t you see, when it all came to a crisis, I told David how utterly wretched my whole life was, and how I couldn’t bear it and should kill myself, and we had to talk things over, and see what could be done with Fred, who was like a madman. And then it all came out—I mean David said I was the only woman he could ever care for, and if I was free, wouldn’t I marry him, and let him try to make up to me for everything.”
“Why was the case to be undefended?”
“It would make less of a scandal if it was all done quietly. I—I didn’t feel I could face the other.”
In the truth of that last assertion, Flora could believe absolutely.
“I think I know the rest,” she said. “David was going to send in his papers, and come home to England as soon as possible after you and Major Carey, and you’d promised to marry him when the decree had been made absolute.”
“How do you know those legal terms?” said Mrs. Carey, pouting like a child that is trying to show displeasure.
Flora did not pursue the irrelevance. She was following a chain of thought in her own mind.
“David was in love with this woman. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written and asked me to do anything I could for her. As for leaving the case undefended—well, they probably hadn’t got a defence to put up. He meant to marry her—probably wanted to marry her. Besides he’d have felt that he owed it to her. And though he was afraid of Father, and very unhappy about sending in his papers, and though he may have had glimpses of what she really is—David wasn’t the sort to let her down. He didn’t kill himself.”
The certainty came to Flora with a rush of relief so profound that she could almost have thanked little Mrs. Carey for unwittingly bringing her to it.
It was characteristic of her that, instead, she glanced at her watch and said:
“I can only stay another twenty minutes, and we shall probably not meet again. Are you going to Scotland tonight?”
“Indeed I am. Fred is there now, at his mother’s, telling her all sorts of horrible things about me, I suppose. They’ve both written to me.”
“What is your husband going to do?”
“I don’t know.” She began to cry again. “His mother, for once in her life, wants to patch things up between us. She’s one of your religious people, and she thinks divorce is awful.”
“I don’t know whether a divorce is still possible, now that David——”
Mrs. Carey broke into a sort of howl that, in its reminiscence of a beaten animal, made Flora feel sick.
“That’s just it—Fred is a beast! He thinks there were other people—other men—as well.”
“Oh,” said Flora, and shuddered violently.
“You’ve been rather a dear, so I don’t mind telling you that your brother is out of it now, whatever happened. Oh, I don’t know what’ll happen. I never cared for anybody like I did for David—never. I was ready to go through anything for him, and we could have started fresh somewhere, and no one would have thought anything of it. People aren’t so narrow-minded as they used to be. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved!”
Flora felt no inclination to point out to the unhappy woman the inconsistency of her various statements.
She even found it easy enough to believe that Maisie Carey for the moment thought herself to be speaking the truth when she said that David was the only man she had ever loved.
“I’m sorry for you,” she said gently. “And I’m grateful to you, because you’ve taken a great weight off my mind. My brother asked me to do anything I could for you. Is there anything?”
“I don’t know what you could do, I’m sure. It isn’t even as though you were married. Not that you haven’t been sweet to me, listening like this. You do believe in me, don’t you? Even if you hear beastly stories about me, ever, you’ll know they aren’t true, won’t you?”
She put out a hand that still trembled, to Flora, but she went on speaking rapidly, as though not daring to wait for an assent that might not come.
“You’re awfully like David, in some ways, you know. It’s been a comfort to see you. Don’t tell your father about my troubles. Just say I was a friend of David’s, you know. I’m glad he didn’t come with you. I hate parsons, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, and I’m so frightfully nervous and upset that I might have said anything. I wish you could have seen Fred—he always says I haven’t got any decent women-friends. Perhaps you could have made him give me another chance.”
“Don’t you think he will?”
“How do I know? He’s written me a horrid letter, and pages and pages of cant from my mother-in-law. I believe if I promised to live at their hateful place, right away in Scotland, and keep within my allowance, and never have any fun at all, Fred would chuck the army and manage the estate for his mother. Can you see me in thick boots and a billycock hat, trudging up and down those hills to go and carry tracts to some wretched old woman in a cottage?”
She laughed melodramatically.
“No,” said Flora, “I can’t see you doing that. But I shouldn’t think you’d have to. Couldn’t you come here, for part of the year?”
“I suppose I could. I don’t know. Fred got this house to please me, when we were first married. He’d have done anything for me, then. I little knew what a life he was going to lead me later on!”
Flora rose.
“I’ve got to go. I will burn the letter that David wrote me, about you. Only one person knows what was in it, besides myself, and he will never repeat it.”
“Was that your father?”
“No, oh, no. My father mustn’t know, ever.”
Flora paused for a moment, then judged that it would be useless to make any appeal to Mrs. Carey’s discretion. For her own sake, she might keep silence as to her relationship with David Morchard, and a fresh emotional disturbance would eventually displace the episode—to her, it could be no more—from her mind.
Mrs. Carey looked at her curiously.
“Of course, I remember you told me that your father didn’t know. Then are you engaged?”
“No,” said Flora, colouring slightly.
“All men are beasts—you’re quite right to have nothing to do with them. I’ve had such a rotten time, what with Fred’s jealousy, and other men never letting me alone, that I sometimes wish I’d stayed an old maid, like you,” said Mrs. Carey.
Flora recognized the impulse that sought to inflict a scratch, where Mrs. Carey’s self-revelation had left her vanity disturbed with the instinctive fear that she had not been taken at her own valuation.
She said good-bye to her.
“I’ll let you know what happens,” Mrs. Carey promised. “I feel you really do care, you know. I shall think of you when I’m taking that horrid journey tonight all the way to Scotland. Perhaps I really will settle down there, if Fred is willing to make it up, and if he lets me have a decent allowance, and part of the year over here.”
She no longer looked desperate, and she bent over the banisters and waved to Flora with the little handkerchief that was still drenched by the tears she had been shedding.
Flora did not suppose that she should ever hear from her. Impressions made upon Mrs. Carey seemed to be transient affairs.
She was conscious of nothing so much as of extreme physical fatigue, and the intense relief of her new certainty that David had not, after all, sought the last desperate remedy. She could be certain of that, now.
“Perhaps Owen won’t understand why I’m so positive of that now,” she reflected. “But after all, I knew David. She counted on him, and he’d promised to marry her. David would never have failed her deliberately—it wasn’t in him. And he was taken away from committing a frightful sin. Besides, who knows how much he repented, poor boy?”
Within a few yards of the hotel, Flora met Quentillian.
He turned and accompanied her to the door.
“David didn’t take his own life, Owen. It was what they said—he must have been taken ill suddenly.”
“You know for certain?”
“For certain.”
He told her that he understood her relief, but his next words were:
“And do you still think you were right, about going alone to this woman?”
“Whether I was right or not, I’m thankful I did. She would have broken my father’s heart. She was a sort of—emotion-monger. She’d have spared him nothing.”
“She spared you nothing, then, Flora?”
“It’s different, for me. I would do anything in the world, for my father’s sake. That’s my only excuse, possibly, for deceiving him.”
“Do you want excuses?”
“No, I don’t. You’re right,” she said gravely. “I’ve planned it all deliberately, and I’ve got to see it through.”
“I think you’re wrong, all along the line, and I want to talk it over with you. It will be a bitter disappointment to the Canon to be told that he has missed seeing Mrs. Carey.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re going to leave it at that?”
“Yes, more than ever. Owen, when do you go to Stear?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Then could you travel down with us tomorrow? We go by the three o’clock train. I think it may do him good, to have you, and you see, he’ll be thinking that the whole expedition has been a failure. It will be easier for both of us, if you’re there.”
“Very well, I’ll come.”
They parted, and Flora went to seek her father. Except from a certain curiosity, it could not be said that Quentillian looked forward to an agreeable journey.
By the time that he joined Canon Morchard and his daughter at the railway station, he was beginning to feel as though the whole of the involved deception perpetrated with such a conviction of righteousness by Flora, must have been a figment of imagination. One glance at the Canon’s sombre and pallid face dispelled the illusion.
Flora looked pallid also, but her expression was one of rapt intensity, as though only her own strange vision, that Quentillian felt to be so singularly perverted, were before her. She had, undeniably, shielded her father from knowledge that must have appalled him, and in that security, remained calm.
The Canon, out of his lesser awareness, had not, however, remained calm at all.
“I have been angry, Owen,” he admitted, as they paced the platform together, at the Canon’s own invitation. “My disappointment has been very bitter. This lady, this Mrs. Carey, the friend of my dear boy David, left for Scotland last night. I went to her house this morning, only to find her gone. Flora, whom I trusted, had made a mistake of incredible carelessness. I could not have believed it, in a matter which must touch us all so nearly, which lay so close to my own heart. Poor child, she has been highly tried of late, and I have thought her looking ill. I should not have trusted to her accuracy. Lucilla, who has been my right hand, my secretary ever since her childhood, could never have failed me thus. I forgot that her sister was younger, unaccustomed to the task, less to be relied upon. But it has been a cruel disappointment, and I vented my first grief upon the culprit. Is there no stage of the journey, Owen, when one can see the undisciplined impulse driven underfoot, the hasty word bridled? I, who have striven all my life, I have again shown anger and violence—to my own child!”
The Canon’s peculiar predilection for making an amateur confessor of Quentillian, was by force of repetition ceasing to seem anything but natural.
Quentillian said: “Flora looks overwrought, sir,” and inwardly hoped that the train would arrive shortly.
“Aye, poor Flora! She was David’s especial favourite, his best correspondent. This stroke has fallen heavily upon Flora, Owen. And I, who should have made all allowance, I turned against her! In my sharp disappointment, I uttered those strong expressions that come back to one, when the moment’s passion has cooled, as they must have sounded to the unhappy sinner by whom they were provoked.”
It was the same piteous round of self-reproach, remorse and profound depression to which Owen had so frequently listened. He hoped that he might be of some assistance, however, incomprehensibly to himself, in listening yet once again.
“I have written to Mrs. Carey. She must indeed have thought my behaviour strange, ungrateful, unnatural even. That matters little enough, yet it adds its feather weight to the burden—its feather weight to the burden. That I should have appeared careless, indifferent, where news of David was concerned! I, who would have given my heart’s blood, for one hour’s intercourse with him since he left us for the last time! Ah, well, it does not bear dwelling upon.”
Nevertheless, the Canon dwelt upon it until it became necessary to rejoin Flora and enter the train.
During the journey he remained silent, with a profound and unhappy silence. His manner towards his daughter was peculiarly gentle and melancholy.
Presently he leant back in the corner, the sad lines of his face relaxing, and slept.
Flora spoke to Quentillian in a low voice.
“I’m so glad he’s asleep. Last night I heard him walking up and down his room for such a long while.”
“He is very much distressed,” said Quentillian severely.
“I know.” She acquiesced apathetically in the truth of the statement.
“Do you know that he has written to Mrs. Carey?”
“Yes.”
“How are you going to prevent her replying, and exposing the fact that you have seen her?”
Flora whitened perceptibly, but she answered him with sudden spirit.
“You have no right to question me, Owen, or to demand explanations from me in that tone.”
“I have this right, that you have made me a passive partner in your extraordinary schemes.”
Owen, too, was conscious of a rising anger.
“I feel like a traitor to your father, Flora. What are you going to do next?”
“I am going to see it through,” said Flora doggedly. “At least you will admit that to do a thing like this by halves, is a great deal worse than useless. I have saved my father from what must have broken his heart.”
“You have done evil that good may come,” he quoted grimly.
“If you like to put it so.” Flora was inexorable.
“He has suffered too much already.”
“You mock your own God,” said Quentillian, with sudden, low vehemence. “You profess to believe in Him, to trust Him, and yet you deceive and manoeuvre and plot, sooner than leave your father to his dealings. I have small belief in a personal God, Flora, but I can see no justification in endeavouring madly to stand between another soul, and life.”
She gazed at him piteously.
“Do you think I am not unhappy—that I have not been torn in two? He was angry, Owen, when he thought I had made a mistake about the appointment, and oh, the relief of it! I should have welcomed it if he had hit me—I deserved it all, and far more besides. If I am doing wrong, I am suffering for it.”
Quentillian, looking at her haggard, tragic face, felt sure that she spoke literal truth.
“When does Lucilla come home?” he suddenly asked.
“I don’t know. Soon, I hope.”
Quentillian hoped so too. It seemed to him that only Lucilla’s normality could adjust to any sort of balance the mental atmosphere of St. Gwenllian.
Flora gazed at her father.
“Think what it would have been to him to know, now, that David had sinned, even that he contemplated going through the form of marriage, with that poor thing! The world’s standards of honour are not those of my father.”
“Nor yours either,” Quentillian had almost said, but he checked the cheap retort as it rose.
An impulse made him say instead:
“Promise me at least, Flora, that if this becomes too much for you, if it all breaks down, you will let me share it with you. You owe it to me, I think, having let me be partly responsible. Will you promise?”
“You are very good,” said Flora, her mouth quivering for the first time. “But I don’t mean to fail.”
It was evident enough that her whole being was strung up to the accomplishment of her purpose, and that she was incapable of seeing beyond it.
Quentillian, at his own station, parted from Canon Morchard and his daughter with the direst forebodings. Insensibly, he, too, had almost come to feel that anxious preoccupation with the Canon’s peace of mind that exercised the Canon’s daughters.
Within a fortnight of his return he went over to St. Gwenllian and found there no trace of catastrophe such as he had half expected, but the usual atmosphere of calm melancholy.
He had no conversation with Flora, but she told him briefly that there would be no correspondence between her father and Mrs. Carey, and Quentillian was left to surmise by what peculiar methods Flora had achieved her ends.
On the whole, he preferred not to dwell upon the subject. He had a certain unwilling respect for Flora, even if none for her casuistries, and he had no wish to dwell either upon her astonishing machinations or his own complicity.