The Tragic Bride

by Francis Brett Young

By ordinary canons Mrs. Payne could not be considered an attractive woman. The only striking features in her plain, and rather expressionless face were her eyes, which were of a soft and extraordinarily beautiful grey. She had large hands and feet, no figure to speak of, and she dressed abominably. She possessed in fact, all the virtues and none of the graces, and was, in this respect at any rate, the diametrical opposite of her son. Her appearance suggested that life had given her a tremendous battering, a condition that would have been pitiful if it were not that she also gave the impression of having doggedly survived it; and for this reason one could not help admiring her.

Her husband had been a business man of exceptional brilliance, of a brilliance, indeed, that was almost pathological, and may have accounted in part for the curious mentality of Arthur. In a short, but incredibly active life, he had amassed a fortune that was considerable, even in the midlands where fortunes are made. I do not know what he manufactured, but his business was conducted in Gloucester, and the Overton estate, which he acquired shortly before his death, lay under the shadow of Cotswold, between its escarpment and the isolated hill of Bredon, within twenty miles of that city. Mr. Payne had died of acute pneumonia in a sharp struggle that was in keeping with his strenuous mode of life. Seven months after his death his only child, Arthur, was born.

In the care of her son, and the control of the fortune to which he would later succeed, Mrs. Payne, who was blessed with an equal vocation for motherhood and finance, became happily absorbed. Everything promised well. The business in Gloucester realised more than she could have expected, and she settled down in the placid surroundings of Overton with no care in the world but Arthur's future.

He was a singularly beautiful child, fair-haired, with a skin that even in manhood was dazzlingly white, and eyes that were as arresting as his mother's: a creature of immense vitality, who shook off the usual diseases of childhood without difficulty, and developed an early and almost abnormal physical perfection. He was not, it is true, particularly intelligent. He did not begin to talk until he was over three years old; but this slowness of development was only in keeping with his mother's physical type, and his early childhood was a period of sheer delight to her in which no shadow of the imminent trouble appeared.

By the time that he had reached his seventh year, Mrs. Payne was beginning to be worried about him. His bodily health was still magnificent, but there was a strain in his character that worried her. It appeared that it was impossible for him to tell the truth. Haphazard lying is no uncommon thing in children, proceeding, as it sometimes does, from an excess of imagination and an anxiety to appear startling; but imagination was scarcely Arthur's strong point, and his lies were not haphazard, but deliberately planned.

To a woman of Mrs. Payne's uncompromising truthfulness this habit appeared as a most serious failing. She could not leave it to chance, in a vague hope that Arthur would "grow out of it." She tackled it, heroically and directly, by earnest persuasion, and later, by punishments. By one method and another she determined to appeal to his moral sense, but after a couple of years of hopeless struggling she was driven to the conclusion that this, exactly, was what he lacked. It seemed that he had been born without one.

The thing was impossible to her, for his father had been a man of exceptional probity and, without self-flattery, she knew that she herself was the most transparently honest person on earth. As the boy grew older his opportunities for showing this fatal deficiency increased. Whatever she said or did, and however sweetly he accepted her persuasions and punishments, it became evident that she, at any rate, was incapable of keeping his hands from picking and stealing and his tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering. The condition was the more amazing in the face of his great natural charms. All her friends and visitors at Overton found the boy delightful; his physical beauty remained as wonderful as ever; on the surface he was a normal and exceptionally attractive child; but in her heart she realised bitterly that he was a completely a-moral being.

In nothing was this more apparent than in his behaviour towards animals. Overton, lying as it did in the midst of a green countryside, was a natural sanctuary for all wild creatures, in which Arthur, from his earliest years, had always shown a peculiar interest. As a child, he would spend many hours with the keeper, developing an instinct for wood-craft that seemed to be the strongest in his composition. He knew all the birds of the estate, their habits, their calls, their refuges. Once in the shadow of the woods, he himself was a wild animal, a creature of faunish activity and grace. Mrs. Payne always encouraged this passion of his as a natural and admirable thing, until, one day, the keeper, who was no more humane than the majority of keepers, came to her with a shocking story of Arthur's cruelty: an enormity that it would have taken the mind of a devil, rather than a man, to imagine. When she taxed the boy with it he only laughed. She thrashed the matter out; she pointed out to him that he had done a devilish thing; but in the end she had to give it up, for it became clear to her that he was trying as hard as he could to see her point of view but couldn't, simply because it wasn't in him. She began to realise slowly and reluctantly that it was no good for her to appeal to something that didn't exist. The boy had been born with a body a little above the normal, and a mind a little below the average, but nature had cruelly denied him the possession of a soul, and neither her prayers nor her devotion could give him what he congenitally lacked.

She wondered whether the isolation of his life at Overton had anything to do with it, whether contact with other children of his own age would reduce him to the normal. She took the risk, and sent him at the age of twelve, to a preparatory school in Cheltenham. Before the first term was half over they sent for her and asked her to remove him. The head master confessed that the case was beyond him. On the surface the boy was one of the most charming in the whole school, but his heart was an abyss of the most appalling blackness. Mrs. Payne entreated him to tell her the worst. He hedged, said that it wasn't just one thing that was wrong, but everything—everything. She asked him if he had ever known a case that resembled Arthur's. No, he thanked Heaven that he hadn't. Could he advise her what to do? Lamely he suggested a tutor, and then, as an afterthought, a mental specialist.

The word sent a chill into Mrs. Payne's heart. The idea that this bright, delightful child, the idol of her hopes, was the victim of some obscure form of moral insanity frightened her. But she was a woman of courage and determined to know the worst. She took him to a specialist in London.