‘Every family,’ she said, faltering, ‘has its little secrets, or at least something it keeps to itself. I don’t know that there is more with us than with other people——’ But her voice would not keep steady. ‘The only thing,’ she went on, sharply, feeling a resource in a little anger, ‘is that people generally—keep these things to themselves;—but John, it seems that John——’ And here she came to a dead stop and said no more.
Elly had grown graver and graver while Susie spoke. Her excitement and impatience to know, fell still, as a lively breeze will sometimes do in a moment. Her eyes, which Susie could not meet, seemed to read the very outline of the drooping figure, the bent head, the nervous stumbling hands so busy with work which they were incapable of doing. Elly’s face settled into something very serious. She flung her head back with the air of one taking a definite resolution.
‘In that case,’ she said, lingering a little over the words in case they might call forth an answer, ‘in that case, I think I had better go.’
Mr. Cattley, much perplexed, went with her to the door. He went up the street with her, his face very grave too, almost solemn.
‘Don’t do anything rash, Elly,’ he said. ‘We know Jack. I—I can’t think he is to blame.’
‘To blame!’ Elly said, with her head high, as if the suggestion were an insult. Then she added, after a moment, ‘Yes, he’s to blame, as everybody is that makes a mystery. Whatever it is, he might have known that he could trust me; that is the only way in which he can be to blame.’
Susie had thrown away her work in the ease of being alone. It was an ease to her, and the only solace possible. She put her arms on the table and her face upon them, and found the relief which women get in tears. It is but a poor relief; yet it gives a sort of refreshment. Her burning and scorched eyelids were softened—and the sense of scrutiny removed, and freedom to look and cry as she would, was good. But the thronging thoughts that had been kept in check by that need of keeping a steady front to the world, which is at once an appalling necessity and a support to women, came now with a wilder rush and took possession altogether of her being. How was it that he had appeared again, that spectre whom she had feared since she was a child, yet for whom by moments nature had cried out in her heart, Papa! She, like John, only knew the child’s name for him, only remembered him as smiling and kind; though she had learned, as John never had learned, that other aspect of him which appeared through her mother’s eyes. Susie knew something, embittered by the feeling of the woman who had gone through it all, of the long and hopeless struggle that had filled all her own childhood, and of which she had been vaguely conscious—the struggle between a woman of severe virtue, and an uprightness almost rigid, and a man who had no moral fibre, yet so many engaging qualities, so much good humour, ease of mind, and power of adapting himself, that most people liked him, though no one approved of him: the kind of father whom little children adore, but whom his sons and daughters, as they grow up, sometimes get to loathe in his incapacity for anything serious, for any self-restraint or self-respect.
His wife had been the last woman in the world to strive with such a nature, and perhaps the horror that had grown in her, and which she had instilled unconsciously into Susie’s mind, was embittered by this knowledge. Susie knew all the terrible story. How the woman had toiled to keep him right, to convince him of the necessity of keeping right, to persuade him that there was a difference between right and wrong: and she knew that this always hopeless struggle had ended in the misery and horror of the shame which her proud mother had to bear, yet would not bear. All this came back to her as she lay with her head bowed upon her arms in the abandonment of a misery which no stranger’s eye could spy upon. And he had come back? and how was mother to bear it? And how had John found it out? And why did he not hide in his own heart, as they had done, this dreadful, miserable secret? She, a girl, had known it and kept it a secret, even from her own thoughts, for fourteen years. Day and night she had prayed for the unfortunate in prison, but never by look or word betrayed the thing which had changed her life at twelve years old, and sundered her from others of her age, more or less completely ever since. It had separated her so completely that till now Susie had never lived in entirely natural easy relations with other girls, or with men of her own age. There had always been a great gulf fixed between her and youthful friendship, between her and love. This had been somehow bridged over here in this innocent place—and now! Oh, how would mother bear it? Oh, how had John found it out?
She was in the midst of these confused yet too distinct and certain trains of recollections and questions, when her solitude and ease of self-abandonment were suddenly disturbed. She had not heard any step, any token of another’s presence until she suddenly felt a light touch upon her bowed head, and on her arm. Susie had given herself up too completely to her own thoughts to be capable of considering the plight in which she was. She started and looked up, her face all wet with her weeping. She thought, she knew not what—that it was he perhaps, the terror of the family, though she remembered nothing of him but kindness; or John, it might be John, come to fetch her, to claim her help in these renewed and overwhelming troubles. She started up in haste, raising to the new-comer her tell-tale face. But it was not John, nor her father. It was Mr. Cattley who was standing close by her with his hand touching her arm. He had touched her head before, as she lay bowed down and overwhelmed. His eyes were fixed upon her, waiting till she should look at him, full of pity and tenderness.
‘Oh, Mr. Cattley!’ she cried, in the extremity of her surprise. He only replied by patting softly the arm on which his hand lay.