XXXII
Mr. Pembroke did not receive a clear account of what had happened when he returned for the interval. His sister—he told her frankly—was concealing something from him. She could make no reply. Had she gone mad, she wondered. Hitherto she had pretended to love her husband. Why choose such a moment for the truth?
“But I understand Rickie’s position,” he told her. “It is an unbalanced position, yet I understand it; I noted its approach while he was ill. He imagines himself his brother’s keeper. Therefore we must make concessions. We must negotiate.” The negotiations were still progressing in November, the month during which this story draws to its close.
“I understand his position,” he then told her. “It is both weak and defiant. He is still with those Ansells. Read this letter, which thanks me for his little stories. We sent them last month, you remember—such of them as we could find. It seems that he fills up his time by writing: he has already written a book.”
She only gave him half her attention, for a beautiful wreath had just arrived from the florist’s. She was taking it up to the cemetery: today her child had been dead a year.
“On the other hand, he has altered his will. Fortunately, he cannot alter much. But I fear that what is not settled on you, will go. Should I read what I wrote on this point, and also my minutes of the interview with old Mr. Ansell, and the copy of my correspondence with Stephen Wonham?”
But her fly was announced. While he put the wreath in for her, she ran for a moment upstairs. A few tears had come to her eyes. A scandalous divorce would have been more bearable than this withdrawal. People asked, “Why did her husband leave her?” and the answer came, “Oh, nothing particular; he only couldn’t stand her; she lied and taught him to lie; she kept him from the work that suited him, from his friends, from his brother,—in a word, she tried to run him, which a man won’t pardon.” A few tears; not many. To her, life never showed itself as a classic drama, in which, by trying to advance our fortunes, we shatter them. She had turned Stephen out of Wiltshire, and he fell like a thunderbolt on Sawston and on herself. In trying to gain Mrs. Failing’s money she had probably lost money which would have been her own. But irony is a subtle teacher, and she was not the woman to learn from such lessons as these. Her suffering was more direct. Three men had wronged her; therefore she hated them, and, if she could, would do them harm.
“These negotiations are quite useless,” she told Herbert when she came downstairs. “We had much better bide our time. Tell me just about Stephen Wonham, though.”
He drew her into the study again. “Wonham is or was in Scotland, learning to farm with connections of the Ansells: I believe the money is to go towards setting him up. Apparently he is a hard worker. He also drinks!”
She nodded and smiled. “More than he did?”