"Oh, mother, how can you?" It was naturally Griselda, the baby, who dared defy her. "You don't seem to realise what an utter beast he's been, and how we all loathe him for treating you—yes, you—like this."
"Poor fellow, indeed! Have a little pride, mother," suggested Paul, as if he had said "have a little marmalade." But she didn't waver.
"Yes, poor fellow. I'm extremely sorry for him. You none of you seem to realise what a pitiful thing it is for an old man, the father of a family of grown-up children, to be making such a ridiculous spectacle of himself."
Literally aghast, they stared, first at her, then at each other, and in the silence she marched in triumph out of the room. Her misery was very great, in spite of the queerness of her attitude, for she felt keenly the pathos of her utter detachment of attitude, and her mind was thrown back violently into the old days thirty years before, when she had loved him, when she had believed in him, and defied and given up her whole little world for his sake.
Poor Sir John Barclay still remembered her unhappiness and preoccupation in the old days that summer at High Wycombe, but she had not told him she had been suffering because she had been sent to the country by her furious father to get her away from Ferdinand Walbridge. He did not know how she had hoped against hope that Walbridge would, by some means, find out where she was and get a letter to her, or manage to see her. She had almost forgotten these things herself, until this business of Clara Crichell had brought them back to her memory. It was a tragic, heart-breaking thing, she felt, that an honest, romantic, deep love such as hers had been for the beautiful young man her father had so detested, could ever die so utterly as hers had.
It was dreadful to her, and seemed a shameful thing, that she could feel no pang of jealousy or loneliness in the knowledge that her husband, her companion for thirty years and the father of her five children, was prepared to give up these children, his home life and her companionship for another woman. Instead of what she believed would have been normal emotions, she was conscious of a deep sorrow that he had been such a fool as to fall in love with a woman of Mrs. Crichell's type, for she knew with uncanny clearness exactly what Mrs. Crichell was. If only he had fallen in love with someone who might possibly make him happy, someone who was companionable and ambitious! But this woman, she knew, was so like himself in her laziness, mental vacuity and self-centred one-sidedness, that they were bound to destroy each other.
The whole family had assumed that her sole reason for refusing the divorce was a semi-religious objection to that institution. It was true that, although she was not a religious woman, her innate respect for the forms of the church gave her the greatest possible horror of the divorce court, but she knew, though none of the others seemed to suspect it, that if Clara Crichell had been a different kind of woman, one with whom she could, so to speak, trust her poor, faulty Ferdie, her objections would have been bound to give way, in the course of time, to the combined wishes of her family and friends. And she was afraid to utter this instinctive fear of Mrs. Crichell because, although she knew little of real life, she had an uncanny knowledge of the mental workings of the men and women in books, who are, after all, more or less, like human beings; and she felt that she could not bear to be misunderstood, as she was certain to be if she uttered one word of personal objection to Mrs. Crichell. They would all think she was jealous, and she would be unable to persuade them that she was not.
Oliver found her pacing up and down her drawing-room in her afternoon gown, which she had forgotten to fasten down the back, and which showed a pathetic strip of merino petticoat.
"Something's wrong with your back here," he said. "Shall I hook it up? I often fasten Jenny's new-fangled things, and they hook up to her neck. Well, here I am, Mrs. Walbridge, à la disposition di Usted."
One of his useful little gifts was a way of keeping in mind, and reproducing with impeccable inflection, little once-heard scraps of foreign languages, and somehow it comforted the worried woman to hear him talking so much in his usual manner; in spite of Grisel's engagement, his world had not turned over.