This did not serve to mollify Gundred.
‘You should always do what mother wishes, without asking questions,’ she rejoined. ‘And what father may do is no concern of yours. Your father may be taken in like everybody else. But you ought to think it a privilege to obey your mother. Think of what you owe her—yes?’
Like many women, Gundred believed that, having engendered a child, entirely without regard for that problematical child’s wishes, must necessarily give her a lifelong claim on his gratitude. Like many women, she insisted on the debt, everywhere and always, until, by ceaseless demands, she had come near to exhausting the supply. Accordingly the conference continued for a while, unsatisfactorily. Jim for once had lost his grip on that lamentable diplomacy which an unwise mother’s exactions so early engrain into her children. He could no longer even acquiesce. He became warm in Ivor’s defence, and, with every word, Gundred felt more certainly that his disloyalty was the crime of the evil force that possessed him. That force must unquestionably be combated and dispossessed. And soon she found that she was incapable of coping with Jim. Worse, she could not even have recourse to the secular arm in the person of her husband, for her husband was equally under this incalculable diabolical sway. She grew more angry in her demands as the demands were refused. And Jim, flushed with opposition, verged on rudeness, would not be brought to promise the abandonment of his new friend, and treated his mother’s ultimatum with ominous cheerfulness.
‘You would not like to have to choose between Mr. Restormel and mother, would you—no?’ suggested Gundred with the supreme imprudence of excitement. And this weapon, too, had lost its efficacy with too frequent use. Jim had heard it too often now to retain any illusion as to its dramatic value.
He was very uncomfortable, though, as he answered: ‘Oh, rot, mother; you know that is impossible. I wish you would not say such things. You don’t want to make me out a beast to you, do you, just because I don’t want to be a beast to Ivor? It’s all rot finding fault with him, you know. He is a jolly good fellow, and father would not have got him here if he had not liked him too. So he must be all right, anyway.’
With a fatal lack of tact, Gundred went off on a side issue, and began protesting against the unnecessary crudeness of her son’s language—a crudeness which she made haste to attribute to Ivor’s degrading influence.
‘Well,’ replied Jim, ‘if there is nothing else to say against poor old Ivor than that! He isn’t the first person in the world who has said “rot,” and I don’t imagine he will be the last.’ And on that hit he rose and made his escape, despite his mother’s attempts to restrain him with loving arms, and exact, by kisses, a more satisfactory termination to the dialogue.
Gundred was left alone, feeling solitude as she had very rarely felt it in her life before. This intruder had destroyed the harmony of her home, had blighted her relations with her submissive subjects, had sapped loyalty, filial piety and honour in the hearts of all who owed her duty. This influence was altogether evil, and must be defeated without loss of another day. It was a blessed work this that Heaven had appointed her to do, and it must be done briskly, whole-heartedly, without any lookings-back from the plough, or weaknesses of any kind. Gundred began to revolve measures, and plans at last grew definite in her mind. She faced her course of action boldly. Ivor must be got rid of—somehow, anyhow. Qui veut la fin, veut les moyens.
And at this point she suddenly grew frightened. This road that she was treading, into what grim and stony places would it lead her? Gundred, for the first time in her life, began to feel afraid of herself. The intense fire of the righteous passion that consumed her, well, it was alarming, although it was so righteous. So righteous? A very faint flicker of hesitation dawned in Gundred’s mind. Was this passion of hers so righteous? It was carrying her, she felt, toward actions that sooner or later might be dark and dreadful; all the more important, then, to make sure beforehand that it was an inspiration of Heaven, not, by any chance, a temptation from Hell. Hitherto Gundred had never doubted that the Almighty had created her for a shining instance of the soul which is temptation-proof; now, however, she began to waver in her belief that she, alone of mortal beings, was set above the wiles of evil. After all, she was human; it was just barely imaginable that this uplifting ardour that she felt might proceed from the Powers of darkness rather than from those of light. That anger and hatred are often laudable she knew well, but this anger and hatred of hers were so devastating, so tyrannous that she could not, in all candour, feel herself absolutely certain of their celestial origin. She felt, as she pondered the matter, that she was indeed showing proper conscientiousness, an almost unworthy tenderness towards that Amalekite of an enemy; but the question was so important, so much hung on it, that no labour could be wasted in making sure as to the rights and wrongs of the case.
After all, though, would the Almighty have allowed her to entertain such passions if He had not meant her to indulge them? Yet even the greatest saints had been tempted by the devil. Indeed, the greater the saint the greater the temptation. The problem was nice, and required careful weighing. In any other case she would readily have conceded that such a passion might have been inspired without the connivance of the Almighty; in her own she was so perfectly, though so humbly, convinced that she lived and spoke as the mouthpiece of Heaven itself that she could hardly conceive it possible but that any feeling she nourished must, of necessity, be just and holy, through the very fact that it was she, the Lady Gundred Darnley, who had engendered and developed it. However, a pious doubt now besieged her, and she dutifully cast about in her mind for means to solve this riddle that her scrupulous sense of right had set before her. Until this was decided, she felt that it would be unfair to proceed to extremities even against Ivor Restormel. But how to decide it?