“When the German people confess their guilt with weeping and lamentation, the English will be first to forgive. Never till then.”
The presence of a German girl in the house seemed to act as a blight upon all domestic happiness. It was the cook who first “gave notice.” Elsa had never so much as set eyes upon that cross-eyed woman below-stairs who had prepared the family food since Wickham had sat in a high chair, with a bib round his neck. But Mary, in a private interview with Lady Brand, stormy in its character, as Elsa could hear through the folding-doors, vowed that she would not live in the same house with “one of those damned Germings.”
Lady Brand’s tearful protestations that Elsa was no longer German, being “Mr. Wickham’s wife,” and that she had repented sincerely of all the wrong done by the country in which she had unfortunately been born, did not weaken the resolution of Mary Grubb, whose patriotism had always been “above suspicion,” “which,” as she said, “I hope to remain so.” She went next morning, after a great noise of breathing and the descent of tin boxes, while Lady Brand and Ethel looked with reproachful eyes at Elsa as the cause of this irreparable blow.
The parlour-maid followed in a week’s time, on the advice of her young man, who had worked in a canteen of the Y. M. C. A. at Boulogne and knew all about German spies.
It was very awkward for Lady Brand, who assumed an expression of Christian martyrdom, and told Wickham that his rash act was bearing sad fruit, a mixed metaphor which increased his anger, as he told me, to a ridiculous degree.
He could see that Elsa was very miserable. Many times she wept when alone with him, and begged him to take her away to a little home of their own, even if it were only one room in the poorest neighbourhood. But Wickham was almost penniless, and begged her to be patient a little longer, until he had saved enough to fulfil their hope. There I think he was unwise. It would have been better for him to borrow money—he had good friends—rather than keep his wife in such a hostile atmosphere. She was weak and ill. He was alarmed at her increasing weakness. Once she fainted in his arms, and even to go upstairs to their rooms at the top of the house tired her so much that afterwards she would lie back in a chair, with her eyes closed, looking very white and worn. She tried to hide her ill-health from her husband, and when they were alone together she seemed gay and happy, and would have deceived him but for those fits of weeping at the unkindness of his mother and sister, and those sudden attacks of “tiredness” when all physical strength departed from her.
Her love for him seemed to grow with the weakness of her body. She could not bear him to leave her alone for any length of time, and while he was writing, sat near him, so that she might have her head against his shoulder, or touch his hand, or kiss it. It was not conducive to easy writing, or the invention of plots.
Something like a crisis happened, after a painful scene in the drawing-room downstairs, on a day when Brand had gone out to walk off a sense of deadly depression which prevented all literary effort.
Several ladies had come to tea with Lady Brand and Ethel, and they gazed at Elsa as though she were a strange and dangerous animal.
One of them, a thin and elderly schoolmistress, cross-questioned Elsa as to her nationality.