§
Mrs. Luke also reacted to the Moulsfords in terms of meekness. Hers, however, lasted. She found them permanently dazzling. Besides, there was nothing to be done. Jocelyn had gone; she had lost him for ever; he would never come back, she very well knew, to the old life of dependence on her. And if he must go, if she must lose him, there really was no one in the world she would more willingly lose him to than the Duke of Goring. For certainly it was a splendid, an exalted losing.
When she had had time to think after that visit from Lord Charles—he had, she considered, a curious attractiveness—and was more herself again, when she had recovered a little from the extreme misery she had gone through and began not to feel quite so ill, she found it easy to forgive her mauvais quart d’heure. The Moulsfords were heaping benefits on her boy. They were settling all his difficulties. That morning when she was so unhappy, Lord Charles had been most delightfully kind and sympathetic, and had told her that the Duke, his father, intended to help the young couple,—‘You know my son won this year’s Rutherford Prize,’ she had said. ‘Indeed I do,’ he had answered in his charming, eager way, adding how much interested his father was in the careers of brilliant young men, especially at Cambridge, helping them in any way he could—and who would not, in such circumstances, forgive?
Mrs. Luke forgave.
The fact, however, remained that she was now alone, and she couldn’t think what her life was going to be without Jocelyn. For how, she wondered, did one live without an object, with no raison d’être of any sort? How did one live after one has left off being needed?
That year the spring was late and cold. The days dragged along, each one emptier than the last. There was nothing in them at all; no reason, hardly, why one should so much as get up every morning and dress for days like that,—pithless, coreless, dead days. She tried to comfort herself by remembering that at least she wasn’t any longer beaten down and humiliated, that she could lift her head and look South Winch in the face, and look it in the face more proudly than ever before; but even that seemed to have lost its savour. Still, she mustn’t grumble. This happened to all mothers sooner or later, this casting loose, this final separation, and to none, she was sure, had it ever happened more magnificently. She mustn’t grumble. She must be very thankful. She was very thankful. Like Toussaint l’Ouverture—Wordsworth, again—she had, she said to herself, sitting solitary through the chilly spring evenings by her fire after yet another empty day, great allies; only fortunately of a different kind from poor Toussaint’s, for however highly one might regard, theoretically, exultations and agonies and love and man’s unconquerable mind, she, for her part, preferred the Moulsfords.
But did she?
A bleak little doubt crept into her mind. As the weeks passed, the doubt grew bleaker. Invisible Moulsfords; Moulsfords delightful and most friendly when one met them, but whom one never did meet; Moulsfords full of almost intimacies; Moulsfords who said they were coming to see one again, and didn’t come; Moulsfords benignant, but somewhere else: were these in the long run, except as subjects of carefully modest conversation in South Winch—and South Winch, curiously, while it was plainly awe-struck by what had happened to Jocelyn yet was also definitely less friendly than it used to be—were these in the long run as life-giving, as satisfying, as fundamentally filling as Toussaint’s exultations and agonies?
Ah, one had to feel; feel positively, feel acutely. Anything, anything, any anger, any pain, any anxiety, any exasperation, anything at all that stabbed one alive, was better than this awful numbness, this empty, deadly, settled, stagnant, back-water calm....
And one evening, when it had been raining all day, after a period of standing at the drawing-room window looking out at the dripping front garden, where the almond-tree by the gate shivered in the grey twilight like a frail, half-naked ghost, she turned and went to her writing-table, and sat down and wrote a little note to Mr. Thorpe, and asked if he would not come in after his dinner, and chat, and show that they could still be good friends and neighbours; and when she had finished it, and signed herself Margery, with no Luke, she rang for the little maid, and bade her take it round to Abergeldie and bring back an answer.
‘For after all,’ she said to herself while she waited, standing by the fire and slowly smoothing one cold hand with the other, ‘he has sterling qualities.’
THE END
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Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber:
It it were a=> If it were a {pg 126}