CHAPTER III
There could be no chance of mistake. The photograph was a very good likeness.
For a while I sat quite still with the newspaper in my hands, living over the day in the shabby old garden. I felt like a mourner, bereaved of a loved one, for in a way—a schoolgirl way, perhaps—I had loved my prince of the arbour. And always since our day together, I'd compared other men with him, to their disadvantage. No one else ever captured my imagination as he captured it in those few hours.
For a moment that little bit of Long Ago pushed itself between me and Now. I was grieving for my dead romance, instead of for Brian's broken life: but quickly I woke up. Things were as bad as ever again, and even worse, because of their contrast with the past I'd conjured up. Grief for the death of Jimmy Beckett mingled with grief for Brian, and anxieties about money, in the dull, sickly way that unconnected troubles tangle themselves together in nightmare dreams.
I'm not telling you how I suffered, as an excuse for what I did, dear Padre. I'm only explaining how one thing led to another.
It was in thinking of Jim Wyndham, and what might have happened between us if he'd come back to me as he promised, that the awful idea developed in my head. The thought wasn't born full-grown and armoured, like Minerva when she sprang from the brain of Jupiter. It began like this:
"If I'd been engaged to him, I might have gone to his parents now. I should have comforted them by talking about their son, and they could have comforted me. Perhaps they would have adopted us as their children. We need never have been lonely and poor. Jim would have wished us to live with his father and mother, for all our sakes."
When the thought had gone as far as this, it suddenly leaped to an enormous height, as if a devil in me had been doing the mango trick.
I heard myself thinking, "Why don't you go to see Mr. and Mrs. Beckett, and tell them you were engaged to marry their only son? The paper said he left no fiancée or wife in America. You can easily make them believe your story. Nobody can prove that it isn't true, and out of evil good will come for everyone."