People of Position

by Stanley Portal Hyatt

At first, on hearing of Joseph Fenton's legacy, he had thought of going abroad again, of seeking oblivion of the past few months in travel and excitement; but a chance remark of May's spoken at Joseph Fenton's funeral, the only occasion on which he had met any of the Griersons since the interview at Walter's office, had shown him that the family would welcome his departure, that it even regarded voluntary exile as the proper course for him to take under the circumstances, and, if only for that reason, he determined to stay. Probably he would have stayed in any case, for, though he had cut himself adrift from Lalage, had never seen her since she left London, and heard from her but seldom—brief, gentle little notes which invariably made him break his promise to her—all the old wild jealousy remained. It was torture whilst he was in England, but he felt it would mean madness if there were the ocean between them. His love for her was dead, or at least he told himself so, that part of love which comes from the joy of possession, which brings with it peace and courage, and a good comrade in the never-ending struggle against fate; but the other part, the fear and the hopelessness and the fever, remained with him always.

Once, and once only, he had had Lalage watched. He had lain awake night after night until his jealousy had culminated in his sending down a private detective. He had read the report—which was wholly in her favour, even the church working party of the village in which she was living being unable to rake up any charge against her—with an unutterable sense of shame and self-contempt, and then had thrust it hurriedly into the fire; but instead of bringing him peace it gave him another memory to brood over, and at times to try and drown.

Lalage's fears had only been too well founded. The locality was healthy enough, the doctor had said with almost brutal frankness the first time Jimmy had occasion to consult him; and then he had gone on to diagnose his patient's case without mincing his words.

"You don't show it outwardly, at least not to a layman, but any medical man would see what was the matter with you. What makes you drink?"

Jimmy had shrugged his shoulders, half-ashamed, half-irritated. "Habit, I suppose," he had answered, whereupon the other had growled.

"A confoundedly bad and stupid habit. The sooner you get some new ones the better. You write, don't you? How do you expect to make a success of it when you're sapping your brain power in this fool's way?"

He had added a few more things, pointed and true, but none the less they had parted good friends, and for a time Jimmy tried to fight his enemy, remembering his promise to Lalage; but it was always the same in the end. His black hour would come on him, and he would recall his great treason, and tell himself bitterly that she had been the first to set the example in the matter of broken faith.

Whatever fears May might have had on the point—and the matter certainly had worried her a good deal during the last twelve months—there had never been any question of Jimmy going back to Lalage. True, he had broken away from the Grierson tradition when he went to live at the flat, had thrown that tradition to the winds, but still he had never repudiated it openly, and in the end if he had not actually gone back to his own people, at least he had recognised that the standards of his own people were right. He was ashamed of himself, even more ashamed of Lalage. He saw his conduct—and hers—in its true light, its stupidity, and its immorality, and in the days following Joseph Fenton's death he had reached the nadir of contrition and misery, and would have made confession, and sought for absolution, had the family given him the chance. He was in the mood for it, being run-down and broken-hearted. But Joseph's death had altered the focus of things for the moment, making Jimmy's affairs a secondary consideration, and after the reading of the will, Joseph's legacy had effectually destroyed any hope of peace, at least as far as Ida was concerned. Fenton had left, it is true, nearly a hundred thousand to his wife, but the odd thousand to Jimmy almost neutralised the generosity of his other bequests, at least in Ida's sight, and Ida's personality dominated the whole family for the time being.

Curiously enough, no one knew of Jimmy's last meeting with Joseph. At first Jimmy had held his peace about it, not wishing in any way to add to Ida's troubles; then, when he found that his own misdeeds were supposed to have preyed on his brother-in-law's mind and hastened his death, he continued to keep silence, in a kind of savage contempt. He, at least, knew what Joseph's feelings had been, and all his sympathy and all his regrets were for the dead man, and not for the saint, who, after the manner of her kind, had understood nothing and forgiven nothing.

Yet, none the less, he would gladly have made peace with the family, just as May and Walter would have made peace with him, had Ida's bitterness not rendered that so hard as to be almost impossible. She was too good a woman to overlook his sin, or to allow anyone else to overlook it. She believed in the punishment of the sinner, not in his pardon, and she did not think that Jimmy had suffered enough; possibly she believed that he had not suffered at all, for had he not in the end received a thousand pounds which should, by rights, have gone to her own children? So, though he had repudiated Lalage to pacify his people, and—it must be admitted also—to satisfy his own conscience, his only reward had been a ghastly sense of isolation, both from his own world, where the Grierson tradition rules, and from that other world into which he had strayed for a few short never-to-be-forgotten months.