XXVII
MELIA was frankly annoyed with herself for not having put up a better resistance. The sight of her father strutting down the street with the honors of war upon him was a little too much for her. He had been guilty of sixteen years of tyrannical cruelty and she was unable to forgive. In those sixteen years she had suffered bitterly and her stubborn nature had great powers of resentment.
Who was he that he should walk down Love Lane not merely as if he owned it—in sober truth he now owned half—but also the souls of the people who lived there? She could not help resenting that invincible flare, that overweening success, particularly when she compared it with the fecklessness of the man she had so imprudently married. After all, she was the first-born of this vain image and she knew his shortcomings better than he knew them himself. He had had more than his share of luck. No matter what the world might think of him, however fortune might treat him, he was not worthy of the position he had come to occupy.
As soon as the ponderous broadcloth back had turned the corner of Love Lane and was lost in that strong-moving stream, Mulcaster Road, she made up her mind that she would not go up to tea on Sunday afternoon. It was not that he really cared whether she went or not; had he done so he would have asked her sooner. Maybe his conscience was pricking him a bit, but he was not one to be much troubled in that way. In any case let it hurt him—so much the better if it did. This was a matter in which she would like him to be hurt as he had never been hurt before.
Here again, however, her father had an unfair advantage. If she stayed away on Sunday she might punish him a little—and even that was doubtful—but she would certainly punish her mother far more. And she had not the slightest wish to do that. She was sorry for her mother, whose sins of omission sprang from weakness of character. Nature had placed her in a very different category. She had fought this tyrant as hard as it was in her to fight any one, but she was one of nature’s underlings whose lot was always to be trampled on.
Alas, if Melia didn’t turn up on Sunday it was her mother who would suffer. And it was a matter in which she had suffered too much already. Melia had no particular affection now remaining for her mother; she even despised her for being so poor a creature, but at least her only crime was weakness and it was hardly fair that she should endure more than was necessary. Melia’s was rather a masculine nature in some ways; at any rate her father and she had one trait in common. They had a sense of justice. Hence she was now on the horns of a dilemma.
It was not until Sunday itself, after morning service at Saint George’s, that the decision was finally made. And then fortified by Mr. Bontine, a clergyman for whom Melia had a regard, she decided much against her inclination to go up to The Rise in the afternoon. It was a reluctant decision, made in soreness of heart; the only satisfaction to be got out of it would arise from the dubious process which the reverend gentleman described as “conquest of self.”
She set out rather later than she meant to, in a decidedly heavy mood. And it was not made lighter by the fact that the afternoon was sultry with the promise of thunder, and that the long and tedious climb to The Rise had to be made without the help of the tram on which she had counted. Long before the trams from the Market Place had reached the end of Love Lane they were full to overflowing, as she ought to have known they would be on a fine Sunday afternoon in the middle of the summer. In the process of painfully mounting the stuffy length of mean streets to achieve the space and grandeur of The Rise she grew vexed and hot. When at last she reached the famous eminence she was far indeed from the frame of mind proper to the paying of a call in its exclusive society. But it served her right. She should have stayed at home, or at least have allowed the motor to be sent for her.
As it was, it was nearly five o’clock when, limp and fagged, she came at last in view of the many-windowed, much-gabled elevation of Strathfieldsaye. In spite of herself the sight of it made her feel nervous. It was the home of her father and mother, but its note of grandeur gave her a cruel sense of her own inadequacy. At the brilliantly painted gate she lingered a moment. Courage was called for to walk up the broad gravel path as far as the porch with its fine oak door studded with brass nails.