Marry! Not Lucille, while he had the sanity left to say “No”!
As for going to live at Monksmead with her and Auntie Yvette—it would be an even bigger crime. Was it for him to make Lucille a “problem” girl, a girl who was “talked about,” a by-word for those vile old women of both sexes whose favourite pastime is the invention and dissemination of lies where they dare, and of even more damaging head-shakes, lip-pursings, gasps and innuendoes where they do not?
Was it for him to get Lucille called “The Woman Who Did,” by those scum of the leisured classes, and “That peculiar young woman,” by the better sort of matron, dowager and chaperone,—make her the kind of person from whose company careful mothers keep their innocent daughters (that their market price may never be in danger of the faintest depreciation when they are for sale in the matrimonial market), the kind of woman for whom men have a slightly and subtly different manner at meet, hunt-ball, dinner or theatre-box? Get Lucille “talked about”?
No—setting aside the question of the possibility of living under the same roof with her and conquering the longing to marry.
No—he had some decency left, tainted as he doubtless was by his barrack-room life.
Tainted of course…. What was it he had heard the senior soldierly-looking man, whom the other addressed as “General,” say concerning some mutual acquaintance, at breakfast in the dining-car going up to Kot Ghazi?
“Yes, poor chap, was in the ranks—and no man can escape the barrack-room taint when he has once lived in it. Take me into any Officers’ Mess you like—say ‘There is a promoted gentleman-ranker here,’ and I’ll lay a thousand to one I spot him. Don’t care if he’s the son of a Dook—nor yet if he’s Royal, you can spot him alright….”
Pleasant hearing for the “landed proprietor,” whom a beautiful, wealthy and high-bred girl proposed to marry!
Tainted or not, in that way—he was mentally tainted, a fact beside which the other, if as true as Truth, paled into utterest insignificance.
No—he had taken the right line in replying to Lucille that he was getting worse mentally, that no doctor would dream of “vetting” him “sound,” that he was not scoundrel enough to come and cause scandal and “talk” at Monksmead, and that he was going to disappear completely from the ken of man, wrestle with himself, and come to her and beg her to marry him directly he was better—sufficiently better to “pass the doctor,” that is. If, meanwhile, she met and loved a man worthy of her, such a man as Ormonde Delorme, he implored her to marry him and to forget the wholly unworthy and undesirable person who had merely loomed large upon her horizon through the accident of propinquity …