It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"I remember Hallock," says Challis, reminiscent. "Man lost his hat over the cliff!... Oh yes—but I remember!—it was his house we dined at...."

"That was the occasion, sir.... The Baker desired me to say, sir, that he was sorry, but it should not occur again...."

"Never mind the Baker now, Mrs. Steptoe. Tell me about Mr. Hallock. I can't remember you, but I suppose you were there?"

"Not all along, but in and out of the room. I was divided with the kitchen. I remember the young lady very well." Mrs. Steptoe felt it would be safer to leave the young lady's name alone. The ground was shaky under her feet. In fact, she would rather the matter should never have come to Challis's knowledge.

His perception was growing of the oddity of Mrs. Steptoe knowing anything about it. "I can't understand," he said. "That youngster said you saw his mother. How came you to know the young lady was ... how came you to connect...." He hesitated over the description of Kate. To say "the lady whom I subsequently married" would have been making Mrs. Steptoe too much of a family confidante.

Now, that good woman had no objection to being of importance, but she wanted to keep safe, first and foremost. She had nothing to confess to personally; was, in fact, blameless. Why not simply tell all she knew? She took that course, telling all that happened about the photograph; but suggesting that the whole occurrence had been slight, trivial, colloquial—rather than otherwise hinting at surprise that Mr. Challis had known nothing about it. Why had she not told him? He made the inquiry, but interrupted her disclaimer of any locus standi in the matter, with an admission that he had asked a nonsensical question. Why should she have done anything but hold her tongue? She was quite an outsider. Well!—leave her outside. That was the obvious course.

"Thank you, Mrs. Steptoe," said Challis. "I fancy I remember that photograph.... Oh, the Baker!—yes! Tell him to be very careful that it doesn't occur again.... No, nothing else. That's all; good-morning!"

But his face, always grave now, was graver than ever as he hunted through the photograph albums he disinterred from the chiffonier Charlotte Eldridge had exploited so successfully, and got no success for himself. He found what he supposed to be the spaces these Ramsgate portraits had occupied, but nothing in them. They were two or three sudden blanks in a well-packed book. Marianne had taken them away.

For the first time since the rupture he felt undisguisedly angry with his wife. It was too bad!—what had he done that she should be so secretive and mistrustful? Why could she not frankly ask him for an explanation? After all, it was a subject he would have been so glad she should be in his confidence about, and one he had only kept back from her to spare her a needless disquiet. To get absolution for himself he resumed the whole story of his silence and its reasons. He failed to see how differently the thing had presented itself to her.

What would Kate have said to him—thought of him—if, when he first came to her mother's house, he had made a clean breast of the whole story to any of the family! As long as she kept silence, surely he was bound to do so? And then, when Kate was in her grave, or in Heaven, according to the immediate exigency of speech-without-thought among believers in God-knows-what—all this is Challis's language—when, anyhow, her demise had qualified her to be spoken of in a hushed voice, was he to intrude a revelation of a transaction that would have been at least out of keeping with the ideal Marianne's memory had made of a beloved and lamented elder sister? Then, as time went on, and no one seemed a penny the worse that the whole thing should be forgotten, the lock that shut the secret in got rusty, as such locks do, and Challis felt far from certain that he could turn the key at all, if he tried.