It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"Judith!" This was sudden remonstrance, almost anger. But it softened as it had done before. "Well—well—perhaps it was only natural ... of course, I am forgetting...."

"Perhaps what was only natural?... Oh dear!—well, of course I know what you mean—my not being able to go into hysterics over this man's death. The circumstances are what I believe are called touching, no doubt, but...."

The Baronet was flushed, and quite angry at this. "The circumstances are what are rightly called touching," he said. "Poor Jim Coupland was coming out to meet him—so I understood the Rector—in the full expectation that he was bringing that dear little girl of his back to him. And he was only bringing the news of her death.... What did you say?..." For Judith had muttered sotto voce that then it didn't matter. But she did not repeat it, saying only, "I said nothing."

Her father did not believe this, and the end of his sentence hung fire, he looking doubtful. So Judith repeated his last words, to start him fresh. "'He was only bringing the news of the little girl's death' ... you were saying?..."

"Yes!—the news of her death. And then this damnable motor-car of yours comes tearing round the corner, with its damned hooting, and he's under the wheels in a moment! I shall tell Frank I won't have the thing in the house again, once he's taken it away. It's simply a horror and an abomination...." And so on. He was in want of a safety-valve, and here it was. The fact was that Judith's apathy about poor Jim had made him feel thoroughly uncomfortable; it was so unlike his measure and conception of what his family ought to be.

As for Judith, she may have felt that sort of alarm at this impetuous utterance that a child will remain susceptible of in later years, who would laugh at any like explosion of a non-parent. It is an inheritance from the nursery. Impressed by her father's denunciation of the motor-car, or possibly thinking to herself, "No more scenes, for Heaven's sake!" she relaxed so far as to say, formally, "I'm sorry for the little girl." But she spoiled whatever there was of graceful in a grudging concession by adding, "Perhaps that will satisfy you?"

The old gentleman said nothing, but looked at her, puzzled and hurt at what he shrank from thinking her heartlessness; trying to concoct excuses for it that would make her seem less ungracious. For he loved this daughter of his, so much so that even now he felt proud of her rich beauty, none the worse for all her stress and trouble. Indeed, as she stood there, caressing the great white bird that had shrieked—she had taken it as she spoke from its cage, and was kissing its terrifying beak with tenderness—her black mass of hair against its yellow crest; her ivory-white skin against the driven snow of its feathers, each made whiter in its own way by yet another white, the soft folds of a creamy summer dress most late Augusts would have condemned; her beautiful hand in the sun, with the bird's black claw upon its jewels—all these might have said a word in arrest of judgment to a parent readier to disbelieve in his daughter than Sir Murgatroyd. No doubt they influenced him to think that he had succeeded in glossing over what he would have condemned as callousness in one further away from him. But she—as other father's daughters are—was his little girl of twenty years ago grown up. She did not really mean this heartlessness, thought he; it was a sort of parti pris—a parade, an affectation!

Was he right, after all? Is the story wrong in its estimate of her? Has it laid too much stress on the hard side of this girl's character—its vanity and love of power? Some moralist has said that no mortal should be called heartless as long as he or she can fall in love. Judith Arkroyd must have been in love with Alfred Challis; for see what risks she was running to secure him! Why—yes!—to secure him; that was just it. She wanted him, and took the only road to possession that seemed open to her. Now if, when he lay insensible, that time when there was none to see, she had only stooped to kiss the inanimate hand, had even held it till the nurse returned! Should we not have felt more sorrow for her after that, when his returning speech showed how completely she had, for the moment, passed from his mind? No doubt she was in love with him, in one manner of loving. But there are so many!

This story is not going to break its heart about her—to chant dirges over the grave of her share of this grande passion. And its commiseration for her grows no mellower from dwelling on the fact it has to record: that exasperation against poor Jim Coupland, to whom she thought proper to ascribe the whole miscarriage of the scheme, was really a source of relief to her—a sort of counter-irritant. To her father, Jim's death and his child's filled the whole horizon—a black cloud. Challis's mishap he did not distress himself about; he would be all right presently—had he not spoken? As for his loss of memory, that meant nothing. Did he not himself, when he came round after his mishap, ask whether "the trout" had been taken, meaning the fox? Loss of memory was the rule, not the exception, in such cases. And as for the future of Challis and Judith, that was a difficulty there must be some legal way out of. It was incredible that Challis's wife should go on holding him at arm's length, and yet bar his union with another woman. Some solution of that problem could be found, Bill or no Bill! As for opposing his daughter's wishes, if they were really deep-rooted, that he would not do. All his opposition to Challis hitherto had been to him as Marianne's husband. If their marriage could be legally annulled or dissolved, he was not going to stand in the way of his daughter's happiness.

But this anger of hers against Jim showed her as a new Judith, whom he had never suspected the existence of. In her childhood she had been proud and domineering with her brothers and sisters—two elder brothers had died in the army, and a sister was married in India; none of them have crossed this story—but not, so far as her father knew, malignant or revengeful. It gave him a great discomfort at heart; set him wondering which of her ancestors on either side she had harked back to. Was it Josceline de Varennes, who, in one of those spirited middle ages, hid a knife under her bridal pillow and gave her first husband a warm reception to his couch, in order that she should marry Hugh Arkroyd? There was the knife, to prove it, in the glass cabinet with the green-dragon china service. But—as long ago as King Stephen! Oh no!—it was that old fiend of a great-grandmother of Therèse's. Every old family has an ancestral scapegoat, and a certain "Lady Sarah," of the days of the second George, was very popular in this one.