"He's written once or twice on business. I send him a line two or three times a week to say how Sonia's getting on, and I'm going down there for the week-end pretty soon. You can't tell much from a dictated letter—or from him, if it comes to that," he added with a sigh.
It must have been two or three days after this night that Lady Loring came to me with a worried expression and the announcement that Sonia would have to keep her bed until after her confinement; against this sentence the doctor allowed no appeal. Thereafter I found myself spending a considerable portion of the day in the sick-room. Sonia had overcome her earlier antagonism and after her first unburdening of spirit was prepared to discuss herself and her history with a frankness that amazed me until George told me that it was one of her most unchanging characteristics and one that was not solely stamped upon her by a desire to talk about herself. At the end of a week I had received a full and most unflattering account of her girlhood.
"I was frightfully attractive, of course, but I must have been odious," she began engagingly. "Every other woman hated me, and I used to take it as a great compliment, but I don't think I should now. I want to be liked, I always did; but I never took any trouble, I went out of my way to exasperate men. I don't know why people stood me—people like George, I mean, who didn't pretend to be in love with me. I must either have been a first-class flirt, or I must have been a genius, or else I must really have had qualities that I didn't recognise."
I had a full history of her engagement to Loring, over whom her facile triumph had exasperated her, so that she picked quarrels day by day until the engagement was broken off and she made, if not the match, at least the most widely discussed scandal, of the year.
There was another man called Claypole or Crabtree (as she always alluded to him as Tony I never entirely discovered his surname) to whom she had been engaged before Loring came on the scene. I had his history, too, sandwiched between accounts of the men whom she had not married for one reason or another, and the rich Jews like Sir Adolphus Erskine, whom she had fascinated and bled; throughout she talked like an artless child describing her first ball. On some subjects she was inexorably reticent; I never heard why she had fallen in love with O'Rane and married him, and in all the hours that I sat with her she never alluded a second time to the stages of her estrangement from her husband. An hour daily for a fortnight told me little, perhaps, about Sonia, but it shed a searching light on girls of the class to which she belonged.
2
As the days went by I found myself allowed to spend less and less time with Sonia. She had hypnotised herself into believing, as a matter of duty and necessity, that she was ill, tired and suffering at a time when half the amount of persuasion would have made her feel that she had never been more comfortable in her life. It was hardly cowardice, for George had told me anecdotes of her endurance in the hunting-field which shewed that she was capable of supporting pain; but the obsession made her a difficult patient.
"Only three weeks more," I used to be told; "only a fortnight more."
Then she began to count in days, and I saw her face lengthen and her eyes dilate, as though the Wild Ass's Skin were shrinking in her hand. She was morbidly curious to find out from Lady Loring how much unavoidable pain she would have to feel; the doctor was questioned again and again until he warned her that she was preparing the gravest consequences for her child and herself. And it was after he had gone that she whispered a terrible prayer that the baby might be born dead.
When the conversation was reported to me, I felt that drastic steps would have to be taken, if she was to be kept from going mad herself and giving birth to an imbecile. I took George into my confidence and sent him for his week-end at Melton with a string of rhetorical questions and a bulletin which brought O'Rane the same night to London, where he stayed until Sunday evening, while his neglected guest billeted himself on the Headmaster and accepted the hospitality of the Common Room. I was by myself, dozing over a book, when the library door was flung open, a gigantic Saint Bernard ambled in and a drenched and breathless figure demanded if anyone was there.