The Judge

by Rebecca West

His voice was husky. She muttered, "I am sorry," and was annoyed to find that she really was.

"Why need you be?" he asked. "There's those that haven't that much to look back on. All I want from you, Miss Marion, is to let me help you. Or at least not to think ill of me for wanting to help you."

He sat still for a moment and continued to stroke his thigh.

"Marion," he began abruptly, and then paused as if to brace himself. "Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never wouldn't bother you for that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise with some chance of keeping it. And besides, there's more than that to it. How," he asked, lifting his head and speaking mincingly, "should I presume to go where Sir Harry's been? I would never ask you to be a wife to me. Just to accept the protection of my name, that's all I ask of you."

They sat for a while in the embrowned sunshine of the dusty room.

He rose and stood over her, drooping his sleek head benevolently. "Ah, well," he said, "I'd best leave you alone. God knows I never meant to intrude on you. Perhaps you would take a little doze now, and after tea I'll take you home." He looked on her moistly, tenderly. "Think kindly of me if you dream." Some emotion coagulated his voice to a thick, slow flow. "You'll be the only woman who ever has thought of me in her dreams if you do. I've never had anything to do with women all my life. You see, I know I've got an ugly mug. I wouldn't dare to make love to any woman in case I saw—what I've seen in your face—what I saw in your face that night I came out on you from the belvedere. Oh, I don't blame you, Miss Marion. You're young—you're beautiful. You've had a real gentleman for your sweetheart. But I don't see why I shouldn't help you. Still, if you don't see it so...." He sighed, and brought his hands together and bowed over them. His eyes passed deliberately over her matronly body, as if he knew his thoughts about her were so delicate that no suspicion of indelicacy could arise out of his contact with her. "Poor little Miss Marion," he murmured in an undertone, and wheeled about and padded to the door. He turned there and stood, his body neckless and sloping like a seal's, and said softly, "And don't think it was me who put Lady Teresa up to coming down to Yaverland's End to-morrow morning. It is her ladyship's own idea. I said to her, 'Leave the poor girl alone.' I have always said to her, 'Leave the poor girl alone.'" His voice faded. He moved vaporously out of the room.

One is too harsh to one's dead self. One regards it as the executor and residuary legatee of a complicated will dealing with a small estate regards the testator. Marion shook with rage at the weak girl of thirty years ago who lay on the sofa and stared at the grained panels of the closed door and let the walls of her will fall in. Then it was that her life had been given its bias towards her misery. Then it was there was conceived the tragedy which would come to a birth at which all present should die. "What tragedy? What tragedy?" she said derisively, sitting up in bed. There spoke in her the voice of her deepest self. "The tragedy," it answered composedly. "The tragedy. Did you not know almost as soon as Richard stirred in you that he would have eyes like black fire? Were you not perfectly acquainted long before his birth with all the modes in which his body and soul were to move, so that nothing he has done has ever surprised you? Even so, you have always known that the end of you and yours will be tragedy." "What could happen to my Richard?" she argued. "He is well, he is prosperous, he has this lovely Ellen who will be a watchdog to his happiness. Tragedy cannot touch him unless the gods send down fire from heaven, and there are no gods. There are no gods, but there are men, and fire that comes from the will." She groaned, and lay back and wrapped the sheets round her closely like cerements, as if by shamming dead she could cast off the hot thoughtfulness of life. But indeed she gained some comfort from this dialogue with that uncomfortable self, for she knew again how wise it was, and its predictions seemed irrational only because it had remembered all that her consciousness had determined to forget for fear it threw so strong a light on her fate that she would lose her courage to live.

Her reasoning self was a light, irreligious thing, and thought about what she should eat and what she should drink and where she should sleep, but this other self had never awakened save to speak of Harry or Richard. She trusted it, and she could recall quite definitely that on that afternoon thirty years before it had sanctioned her decision to abandon conflict and do what people wished to do. It knew, what her consciousness had forgotten, of how she herself had felt when she was within her mother's womb, and it was able to warn her that her unborn baby was seriously thinking of revising its decision to live. While she had staggered under the stones, the child had quailed in the midst of her terror like a naked man above whom breaks a thunderstorm; her nerves had played round him like a shaft of lightning, her loud heart-beat had been the thunder. Now her fear-poisoned blood gave it sickly nourishment, at which the foetal heart beat weakly, so that the embryo knew what the born know as faintness. The system of delicate mechanical adjustments by which it poises in the womb was for the moment dislocated, and at this violent warning of what life can be its will to live was overcast by doubt. If she could rest here now, and go home and have a long sleep, and sit all the next morning on the brow of the hill and watch the fishing-boats lie like black, fainting birds on the shining flats, the child would feel her like a peaceful fane around it and it would decide to live. But if Harry's mother came to see her next day it would forsake her.

She would come very early, for she was one of those people who suffer from a displaced day as others suffer from a displaced heart, and rose at six. Long before Marion had completed the long sleep that was necessary for the reassurance of her child she would be shaken, and look up into her grandmother's face, which she did not like, for though the expressions that passed over it were the same as they had always been, it was now overlaid with a patina of malice. She would smile now, as she dared to years ago, when she used to tell her little granddaughter that Lady Teresa had come to give her a present for reciting so nicely at the church school concert, but all her aspect would mean hatred of this girl who had been given the romantic love that she had been denied, and hope that its fruit might be destroyed. The room would be tidied; her drowsy head would be tormented by the banging of drawers and the rustling of paper. Out of consideration for Lady Teresa's feelings the photograph of Harry by her bed would be turned face downwards. That she would not really mind, for she would have liked to take it out of the frame and tear it to pieces; but she would have to pretend that she minded.

Then there would burst into her room the trailing and squawking personality of Lady Teresa. She would bring with her a quantity of warm black stuffs, for she was one of the most enthusiastic followers of Queen Victoria in the attempt to express the grief of widowhood by a profusion of dark dry goods, and she would sit close to the bed, so that Marion would lose nothing of the large face, with its beak nose and its bagging chin and its insulting expression of outraged common sense, or of the strangulated contralto in which she would urge that there was no reason why any sensible gel should not be proud to marry the butler at Torque House. By sheer noisiness she would make Marion cry. The child would doubt again.... Since these things would have happened she could not do other than she did. Her surrender was the price she had to pay for Richard's life.