“That is what Mrs. Robinson says,” she said with a quivering lip, and I perceived that I was relegated to the same category in her mind as her mother-in-law.
She withdrew her thin hand and retreated once more behind the frail bastion of silence from which she had looked out at me for all these months; from which she had for one moment emerged, only to creep back to its forlorn shelter.
A few days later Mrs. Robinson was convalescent, sitting up in bed in a garish cap festooned with cherry-coloured ribbons, and a silk wadded jacket to match. I questioned her about her daughter-in-law, in whom for the first time I felt interested. It needed no acumen on my part to draw forth the whole of Blanche’s short history. One slight question was all that was necessary to turn on the cock of Mrs. Robinson’s confidences. The stream gushed forth at once, it overflowed, it could hardly be turned off again. I was drenched.
“How long has Blanche been married? Two years, Dr. Giles. She’s just nineteen. That’s her age—nineteen. Seventeen and three days when she married. Such a romance. She was seventeen and Arthur was twenty-two. Five years difference. Just right, and you never saw two young people so much in love with each other. And such a beautiful couple. It was a love match. Made in heaven. Just like his father and me over again. That is what I said to them. I said on their wedding day: ‘Well, I hope you will be as happy as your father and I were.’”
There was not much information to be retrieved from Mrs. Robinson’s gushings, but in the course of the next few days I hooked up out of a flood of extraneous matter a few facts which had apparently escaped her notice.
Blanche it seemed was the niece of a former Senior Curate of St. Botolph’s. “A splendid preacher, Dr. Giles, and a real churchman, high mass and confession, and incense, just the priest for St. Botolph’s, a dedicated celibate and vegetarian—such a saintly example to us all.”
It appeared obvious to me, though not to Mrs. Robinson, that the vegetarian celebate had been embarrassed as to what to do with his niece, when at the age of seventeen she had been suddenly left on his hands owing to the inconvenient death of her widowed mother. Evidently Blanche had not had a farthing.
“But he was such a wide-minded man. Of course he wanted dear Blanche to lead the highest life, and to dedicate herself as he had done, and to go into a sisterhood. But she cried all the time when he explained it to her, and said she could not paint in a sisterhood. And she didn’t seem to fancy illuminating missals, or church embroidery, just what he had thought she would like. He was always thinking what would make her happy. And then it turned out there was some question of expense as well which he had not foreseen, so he gave up the idea. And just at that time I had a lot of trouble with Arthur—with drink—between you and me. It was such a hot summer. I am convinced it was the heat that started it; too much whiskey in the soda water—and other things as well. Arthur was got hold of and led away. And Dr. Whittington advised me to find a nice young wife for him. And I told Mr. Copton—that was the priest’s name, all about it—I always told him everything, and he was most kind, and interested, and so understanding, and he agreed a good wife was just what Arthur wanted, and marriage was an honourable estate, those were his very words. And Arthur was fond of painting, and Blanche was fond of painting too, simply devoted to it, and they had lessons together in a private studio and—”
It went on and on for ever.
“And her uncle gave her away. He was quite distressed that he could not afford a trousseau, for he was Rector Designate of Saint Oressa’s at Liverpool, but I told him not to trouble about that. I gave her everything just as if she had been my own child. I spent hundreds on her trousseau, and she was married in my Brussels lace veil that I wore at my own wedding. I just took to her as my own child from the first. And would you believe it before he went away on his honeymoon, Arthur brought me the goldfish to keep me company. In a bowl it was. Such a quaint idea, wasn’t it, so like Arthur. They are my two pets, Blanche and Goldy.”