Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

I wrote to Isabel that I had changed my mind, and that I consented to have Frank at Restham for his convalescence: but I asked her to make it quite clear to him that I felt it as impossible now as I did two years ago to forgive him for having come between my wife and myself. I did not want to have him at the Manor on false pretences that everything was going to be smoothed over and made easy for him, as it had been always before: for even if such condoning of his fault had been possible on my part (which it was not), I knew him well enough to realise that it would be extremely bad for him.

The fiat had gone forth from the altar of Restham Church on the occasion of my marriage with Fay: "Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." Frank had done his best to put asunder two Divinely united persons, and had succeeded. Therefore I felt it was but meet that he should be punished as he deserved. To be allowed to sin with impunity is the most terrible curse that can fall on the head of any man: and I had no intention of becoming the instrument whereby this curse should be directed to the head of Frank Wildacre.

Isabel sent him down to Restham in her car, and it was on a gloomy autumn day that he arrived. I met him at the door, and at the first moment was struck afresh by his marvellous likeness to Fay: it seemed almost as if my dead darling had come back to me, and for a second I was well-nigh unmanned. But after Jeavons had helped him in and laid him down on the large Chesterfield by the hall fire, I saw that he was not as much like Fay as I had at first thought. Both the Wildacres had always been slight and slender, but it was the slightness and slenderness of perfect health: now Frank's thinness amounted to positive emaciation, and his face was pinched and peaked. Moreover, he had lost that appearance of essential and eternal youth which had been so marked a characteristic of him and of Fay, and without which he hardly seemed a Wildacre at all.

But in one thing he was unchanged, and that was in his perfect ease of manner and absolute unself-consciousness. Although I could see that it required all his self-control to enable him to respond naturally to my greeting, as indeed it required all my self-control to give it, nevertheless he succeeded: and I could not help admiring the pluck and courage of the boy when I remembered how much lay between his departure from the Manor and his return to it.

As I recalled what bright and beautiful beings Wildacre and his children had been at one time, and realised that this broken wreck of a boy was all that was left of the once brilliant trio, a wave of misery at the pity of it all swept over my soul. I thought of Wildacre as he used to be in the old boyish days, and then of Frank and Fay when they first came to the Rectory after their father's death: and I felt that I was face to face with the hopeless tragedy of what might have been but was not, because the folly and sin of man frustrated the Wisdom and Righteousness of God, as for some hidden reason it has been permitted to do ever since the forbidden tree was planted in the midst of the garden.

And that is how the last of the Wildacres came to Restham.

For some days I saw but little of Frank. Ponty took him into her tender keeping and set about nursing him back to health, only allowing him to come downstairs and lie on the Chesterfield couch by the hall fire for a few hours every day. It was astonishing to me to find Ponty so good to Frank. She had always resented his presence at Restham even before he had worked any mischief there: yet now she took him into her charge, and nursed him as devotedly as if she had been his mother.

I remarked upon this change of front one day. "I am surprised you are so kind to Mr. Wildacre, Ponty, considering how angry you were when first I asked him to come and live at the Manor. I was afraid you wouldn't like his coming back in this way."

"Well, you see, Master Reggie, when I was that set against his coming to the Manor, he was strong and well, and so could stand up to me, as you might say: but now he is too weak and ill to hurt a fly. There's lots of folks as you can't stand at any price when they are able to stick up for themselves: but when they are knocked down you'd do anything you could to help them to get up again."

"Women are made like that—thank God!" I said.