She went back to her mother’s room and deliberately proceeded to torture herself. She had been to blame throughout, and not a spark of anger or resentment came to comfort her. All these past months he had brought joy and purpose into her aimless life, and she had but bitten the hand that fed her, and even worse than that, had scolded its owner for his bounty. It was with a sense of incredulity that she recalled some of her awful phrases, her rude, snappish interruptions, and yet in the midst of her self-humiliation she knew that she felt thrills of excitement, both at what had happened and what was taking shape in her brain as to what was going to happen. She had just that pleasure in her agonies of self-reproach, as does the penitent who scourges himself. She liked it to hurt, she gloried in the castigation that was surely doing her good.
Tingling from her self-inflicted penance, she went to her mother’s writing table, for she had to complete her humiliation by writing to him without delay, and expressing fully and unreservedly all that had made this last half-hour so replete with the luxury of self-reproach. But the expression of it was not so easy as the perception of it had been, and she made half a dozen beginnings without satisfying herself. One began, ‘Oh, Mr Silverdale, how could I?’ but then she despaired of how to proceed. Another began, ‘I have honestly gone over every moment of this afternoon, and I find there is not a single point in which I am not entirely to blame,’ but that was too business-like and lacked emotion. But when she was almost in despair at these futile efforts, a brilliant idea came into her head. She would write in baby-language, which would surely touch his heart when he remembered how many serious things he and she had discussed together in this pretty jesting fashion.
‘Me vewy sorry,’ she wrote. ‘Me all messy with sorrowness. O poor parson, your Helper is vewy miserable. May things be as before? Will ‘oo forget and forgive, and let everything be nicey-nicey again? Fvom your wicked little Helper who hates herself.’
She could not improve on that either for silliness or pathetic sincerity, and unable to contemplate the delay which the post would entail, she gave it to the boy covered with buttons to carry it at once by hand to the Vicarage and wait for an answer. That would take half an hour: there were thirty delicious minutes of suspense, for though she did not doubt the purport of his answer, it was thrilling to have to wait for it.
The thrillingness was slightly shorn of its vibrations by the return of her mother, who had a great deal to say about the felicitous manner in which she had opened the bazaar. She had brought back with her a small plush monkey climbing a string, and a realistic representation of a spider’s web, with a woolly spider sitting in the middle of it. The rim of the web was fitted with hooks, so that you could hang it up anywhere. She selected the base of the pink clock as the most suitable site.
‘Is it not clever and quaint?’ she said. ‘I must really tell Jane that it is not a real one, or she will be dusting it away. And the monkey too, that is even quainter. You can bend its arms and legs into all sorts of attitudes. I made a little speech, dear, and there was Lady Inverbroom on one side of me, and Mrs Crawshaw on the other. It was quite a gathering of county people. Lady Inverbroom asked after you; no, I think I told her you had the influenza first, and then she asked after you. Yes, that was the way of it. She had a mantle on which I don’t think can have cost more than four guineas, but then I’m sure it’s not her fault if she has to economise. For my part, if I had all those pictures with that great house to keep up, I should get my husband to sell one or two, and treat myself to a bit of finery and a better dinner in the evening.’
‘Perhaps they are entailed,’ said Alice, thinking that by now her note would have arrived at the Vicarage.
‘Very likely, my dear,’ said her mother, ‘though it’s poor work entailing your pictures if you haven’t got anybody to leave them to. Indeed, I don’t see how they could be entailed unless you had somebody nearer than a second cousin to entail them for. I shouldn’t think the law would allow that for so distant a relation, though I’m sure I don’t know. Bless me, you’ve put on your new red dress. Whatever have you done that for? Just to sit quietly before the fire at home?’
Alice had the sense not to conceal a perfectly ordinary and innocent event, which if concealed and subsequently detected would make the concealment of it significant.
‘Oh, Mr Silverdale came to tea,’ she said. ‘He telephoned.’