Chapter: THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in my
life. They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever gathered at
any one moment--about myself. I don't think that before that day I had
ever wanted anything very much except Florence. I have, of course, had
appetites, impatiences... Why, sometimes at a table d'hote, when there
would be, say, caviare handed round, I have been absolutely full of
impatience for fear that when the dish came to me there should not be
a satisfying portion left over by the other guests. I have been
exceedingly impatient at missing trains. The Belgian State Railway has
a trick of letting the French trains miss their connections at Brussels.
That has always infuriated me. I have written about it letters to The
Times that The Times never printed; those that I wrote to the Paris
edition of the New York Herald were always printed, but they never
seemed to satisfy me when I saw them. Well, that was a sort of frenzy
with me.

It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize. I can understand it
intellectually. You see, in those days I was interested in people with
"hearts." There was Florence, there was Edward Ashburnham--or, perhaps,
it was Leonora that I was more interested in. I don't mean in the way of
love. But, you see, we were both of the same profession--at any rate as
I saw it. And the profession was that of keeping heart patients alive.

You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become. Just as
the blacksmith says: "By hammer and hand all Art doth stand," just as
the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning
delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that he alone
is the preserver of society--and surely, surely, these delusions are
necessary to keep us going--so did I and, as I believed, Leonora,
imagine that the whole world ought to be arranged so as to ensure the
keeping alive of heart patients. You have no idea how engrossing such a
profession may become--how imbecile, in view of that engrossment, appear
the ways of princes, of republics, of municipalities. A rough bit of
road beneath the motor tyres, a couple of succeeding "thank'ee-marms"
with their quick jolts would be enough to set me grumbling to Leonora
against the Prince or the Grand Duke or the Free City through whose
territory we might be passing. I would grumble like a stockbroker whose
conversations over the telephone are incommoded by the ringing of bells
from a city church. I would talk about medieval survivals, about the
taxes being surely high enough. The point, by the way, about the missing
of the connections of the Calais boat trains at Brussels was that the
shortest possible sea journey is frequently of great importance to
sufferers from the heart. Now, on the Continent, there are two special
heart cure places, Nauheim and Spa, and to reach both of these baths
from England if in order to ensure a short sea passage, you come by
Calais--you have to make the connection at Brussels. And the Belgian
train never waits by so much the shade of a second for the one coming
from Calais or from Paris. And even if the French train, are just on
time, you have to run--imagine a heart patient running!--along the
unfamiliar ways of the Brussels station and to scramble up the high
steps of the moving train. Or, if you miss connection, you have to wait
five or six hours.... I used to keep awake whole nights cursing that
abuse. My wife used to run--she never, in whatever else she may have
misled me, tried to give me the impression that she was not a gallant
soul. But, once in the German Express, she would lean back, with one
hand to her side and her eyes closed. Well, she was a good actress. And
I would be in hell. In hell, I tell you. For in Florence I had at once
a wife and an unattained mistress--that is what it comes to--and in
the retaining of her in this world I had my occupation, my career, my
ambition. It is not often that these things are united in one body.
Leonora was a good actress too. By Jove she was good! I tell you, she
would listen to me by the hour, evolving my plans for a shock-proof
world. It is true that, at times, I used to notice about her an air
of inattention as if she were listening, a mother, to the child at her
knee, or as if, precisely, I were myself the patient.

You understand that there was nothing the matter with Edward
Ashburnham's heart--that he had thrown up his commission and had left
India and come half the world over in order to follow a woman who had
really had a "heart" to Nauheim. That was the sort of sentimental ass he
was. For, you understand, too, that they really needed to live in India,
to economize, to let the house at Branshaw Teleragh.

Of course, at that date, I had never heard of the Kilsyte case.
Ashburnham had, you know, kissed a servant girl in a railway train,
and it was only the grace of God, the prompt functioning of the
communication cord and the ready sympathy of what I believe you call
the Hampshire Bench, that kept the poor devil out of Winchester Gaol for
years and years. I never heard of that case until the final stages of
Leonora's revelations....

But just think of that poor wretch.... I, who have surely the right, beg
you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a luckless
devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny? For there
is no other way to think of it. None. I have the right to say it, since
for years he was my wife's lover, since he killed her, since he broke
up all the pleasantnesses that there were in my life. There is no priest
that has the right to tell me that I must not ask pity for him, from
you, silent listener beyond the hearth-stone, from the world, or from
the God who created in him those desires, those madnesses....

Of course, I should not hear of the Kilsyte case. I knew none of their
friends; they were for me just good people--fortunate people with broad
and sunny acres in a southern county. Just good people! By heavens, I
sometimes think that it would have been better for him, poor dear, if
the case had been such a one that I must needs have heard of it--such a
one as maids and couriers and other Kur guests whisper about for years
after, until gradually it dies away in the pity that there is knocking
about here and there in the world. Supposing he had spent his seven
years in Winchester Gaol or whatever it is that inscrutable and
blind justice allots to you for following your natural but ill-timed
inclinations--there would have arrived a stage when nodding gossips
on the Kursaal terrace would have said, "Poor fellow," thinking of his
ruined career. He would have been the fine soldier with his back now
bent.... Better for him, poor devil, if his back had been prematurely
bent.

Why, it would have been a thousand times better.... For, of course, the
Kilsyte case, which came at the very beginning of his finding Leonora
cold and unsympathetic, gave him a nasty jar. He left servants alone
after that.

It turned him, naturally, all the more loose amongst women of his own
class. Why, Leonora told me that Mrs Maidan--the woman he followed from
Burma to Nauheim--assured her he awakened her attention by swearing that
when he kissed the servant in the train he was driven to it. I daresay
he was driven to it, by the mad passion to find an ultimately satisfying
woman. I daresay he was sincere enough. Heaven help me, I daresay he was
sincere enough in his love for Mrs Maidan. She was a nice little thing,
a dear little dark woman with long lashes, of whom Florence grew quite
fond. She had a lisp and a happy smile. We saw plenty of her for the
first month of our acquaintance, then she died, quite quietly--of heart
trouble.

But you know, poor little Mrs Maidan--she was so gentle, so young. She
cannot have been more than twenty-three and she had a boy husband out in
Chitral not more than twenty-four, I believe. Such young things ought to
have been left alone. Of course Ashburnham could not leave her alone. I
do not believe that he could. Why, even I, at this distance of time am
aware that I am a little in love with her memory. I can't help smiling
when I think suddenly of her--as you might at the thought of something
wrapped carefully away in lavender, in some drawer, in some old house
that you have long left. She was so--so submissive. Why, even to me she
had the air of being submissive--to me that not the youngest child will
ever pay heed to. Yes, this is the saddest story...

No, I cannot help wishing that Florence had left her alone--with her
playing with adultery. I suppose it was; though she was such a child
that one has the impression that she would hardly have known how to
spell such a word. No, it was just submissiveness--to the importunities,
to the tempestuous forces that pushed that miserable fellow on to ruin.
And I do not suppose that Florence really made much difference. If it
had not been for her that Ashburnham left his allegiance for Mrs Maidan,
then it would have been some other woman. But still, I do not know.
Perhaps the poor young thing would have died--she was bound to die,
anyhow, quite soon--but she would have died without having to soak her
noonday pillow with tears whilst Florence, below the window, talked to
Captain Ashburnham about the Constitution of the United States.... Yes,
it would have left a better taste in the mouth if Florence had let her
die in peace....

Leonora behaved better in a sense. She just boxed Mrs Maidan's
ears--yes, she hit her, in an uncontrollable access of rage, a hard blow
on the side of the cheek, in the corridor of the hotel, outside Edward's
rooms. It was that, you know, that accounted for the sudden, odd
intimacy that sprang up between Florence and Mrs Ashburnham. Because
it was, of course, an odd intimacy. If you look at it from the outside
nothing could have been more unlikely than that Leonora, who is
the proudest creature on God's earth, would have struck up an
acquaintanceship with two casual Yankees whom she could not really have
regarded as being much more than a carpet beneath her feet. You may
ask what she had to be proud of. Well, she was a Powys married to
an Ashburnham--I suppose that gave her the right to despise casual
Americans as long as she did it unostentatiously. I don't know what
anyone has to be proud of. She might have taken pride in her patience,
in her keeping her husband out of the bankruptcy court. Perhaps she did.

At any rate that was how Florence got to know her. She came round a
screen at the corner of the hotel corridor and found Leonora with the
gold key that hung from her wrist caught in Mrs Maidan's hair just
before dinner. There was not a single word spoken. Little Mrs Maidan was
very pale, with a red mark down her left cheek, and the key would not
come out of her black hair. It was Florence who had to disentangle it,
for Leonora was in such a state that she could not have brought herself
to touch Mrs Maidan without growing sick.

And there was not a word spoken. You see, under those four eyes--her own
and Mrs Maidan's--Leonora could just let herself go as far as to box Mrs
Maidan's ears. But the moment a stranger came along she pulled herself
wonderfully up. She was at first silent and then, the moment the key was
disengaged by Florence she was in a state to say: "So awkward of me... I
was just trying to put the comb straight in Mrs Maidan's hair...."

Mrs Maidan, however, was not a Powys married to an Ashburnham; she was
a poor little O'Flaherty whose husband was a boy of country parsonage
origin. So there was no mistaking the sob she let go as she went
desolately away along the corridor. But Leonora was still going to play
up. She opened the door of Ashburnham's room quite ostentatiously, so
that Florence should hear her address Edward in terms of intimacy and
liking. "Edward," she called. But there was no Edward there.

You understand that there was no Edward there. It was then, for the
only time of her career, that Leonora really compromised herself--She
exclaimed.... "How frightful!... Poor little Maisie!..."

She caught herself up at that, but of course it was too late. It was a
queer sort of affair....

I want to do Leonora every justice. I love her very dearly for one thing
and in this matter, which was certainly the ruin of my small household
cockle-shell, she certainly tripped up. I do not believe--and Leonora
herself does not believe--that poor little Maisie Maidan was ever
Edward's mistress. Her heart was really so bad that she would have
succumbed to anything like an impassioned embrace. That is the plain
English of it, and I suppose plain English is best. She was really what
the other two, for reasons of their own, just pretended to be. Queer,
isn't it? Like one of those sinister jokes that Providence plays upon
one. Add to this that I do not suppose that Leonora would much have
minded, at any other moment, if Mrs Maidan had been her husband's
mistress. It might have been a relief from Edward's sentimental
gurglings over the lady and from the lady's submissive acceptance of
those sounds. No, she would not have minded.

But, in boxing Mrs Maidan's ears, Leonora was just striking the face of
an intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a frightfully
painful scene with Edward.

As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them when she
chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward's affairs were
in such a frightful state and he lied so about them that she claimed the
privilege of having his secrets at her disposal. There was not, indeed,
any other way, for the poor fool was too ashamed of his lapses ever to
make a clean breast of anything. She had to drag these things out of
him.

It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that afternoon,
Edward being on his bed for the hour and a half prescribed by the
Kur authorities, she had opened a letter that she took to come from a
Colonel Hervey. They were going to stay with him in Linlithgowshire for
the month of September and she did not know whether the date fixed would
be the eleventh or the eighteenth. The address on this letter was,
in handwriting, as like Colonel Hervey's as one blade of corn is like
another. So she had at the moment no idea of spying on him.

But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward Ashburnham was
paying a blackmailer of whom she had never heard something like three
hundred pounds a year... It was a devil of a blow; it was like death;
for she imagined that by that time she had really got to the bottom of
her husband's liabilities. You see, they were pretty heavy. What had
really smashed them up had been a perfectly common-place affair at Monte
Carlo--an affair with a cosmopolitan harpy who passed for the mistress
of a Russian Grand Duke. She exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl tiara
from him as the price of her favours for a week or so. It would have
pipped him a good deal to have found so much, and he was not in the
ordinary way a gambler. He might, indeed, just have found the twenty
thousand and the not slight charges of a week at an hotel with the fair
creature. He must have been worth at that date five hundred thousand
dollars and a little over. Well, he must needs go to the tables and lose
forty thousand pounds.... Forty thousand solid pounds, borrowed from
sharks! And even after that he must--it was an imperative passion--enjoy
the favours of the lady. He got them, of course, when it was a matter
of solid bargaining, for far less than twenty thousand, as he might, no
doubt, have done from the first. I daresay ten thousand dollars covered
the bill. Anyhow, there was a pretty solid hole in a fortune of a
hundred thousand pounds or so. And Leonora had to fix things up; he
would have run from money-lender to money-lender. And that was quite in
the early days of her discovery of his infidelities--if you like to call
them infidelities. And she discovered that one from public sources. God
knows what would have happened if she had not discovered it from public
sources. I suppose he would have concealed it from her until they were
penniless. But she was able, by the grace of God, to get hold of the
actual lenders of the money, to learn the exact sums that were needed.
And she went off to England.

Yes, she went right off to England to her attorney and his while he
was still in the arms of his Circe--at Antibes, to which place they had
retired. He got sick of the lady quite quickly, but not before Leonora
had had such lessons in the art of business from her attorney that she
had her plan as clearly drawn up as was ever that of General Trochu for
keeping the Prussians out of Paris in 1870. It was about as effectual at
first, or it seemed so.

That would have been, you know, in 1895, about nine years before the
date of which I am talking--the date of Florence's getting her hold over
Leonora; for that was what it amounted to.... Well, Mrs Ashburnham had
simply forced Edward to settle all his property upon her. She could
force him to do anything; in his clumsy, good-natured, inarticulate
way he was as frightened of her as of the devil. And he admired her
enormously, and he was as fond of her as any man could be of any woman.
She took advantage of it to treat him as if he had been a person whose
estates are being managed by the Court of Bankruptcy. I suppose it was
the best thing for him.

Anyhow, she had no end of a job for the first three years or so.
Unexpected liabilities kept on cropping up--and that afflicted fool did
not make it any easier. You see, along with the passion of the chase
went a frame of mind that made him be extraordinarily ashamed of
himself. You may not believe it, but he really had such a sort of
respect for the chastity of Leonora's imagination that he hated--he was
positively revolted at the thought that she should know that the sort
of thing that he did existed in the world. So he would stick out in an
agitated way against the accusation of ever having done anything. He
wanted to preserve the virginity of his wife's thoughts. He told me that
himself during the long walks we had at the last--while the girl was on
the way to Brindisi.

So, of course, for those three years or so, Leonora had many agitations.
And it was then that they really quarrelled.

Yes, they quarrelled bitterly. That seems rather extravagant. You
might have thought that Leonora would be just calmly loathing and he
lachrymosely contrite. But that was not it a bit... Along with Edward's
passions and his shame for them went the violent conviction of the
duties of his station--a conviction that was quite unreasonably
expensive. I trust I have not, in talking of his liabilities, given the
impression that poor Edward was a promiscuous libertine. He was not;
he was a sentimentalist. The servant girl in the Kilsyte case had been
pretty, but mournful of appearance. I think that, when he had kissed
her, he had desired rather to comfort her. And, if she had succumbed to
his blandishments I daresay he would have set her up in a little house
in Portsmouth or Winchester and would have been faithful to her for four
or five years. He was quite capable of that.

No, the only two of his affairs of the heart that cost him money were
that of the Grand Duke's mistress and that which was the subject of
the blackmailing letter that Leonora opened. That had been a quite
passionate affair with quite a nice woman. It had succeeded the one with
the Grand Ducal lady. The lady was the wife of a brother officer and
Leonora had known all about the passion, which had been quite a real
passion and had lasted for several years. You see, poor Edward's
passions were quite logical in their progression upwards. They began
with a servant, went on to a courtesan and then to a quite nice woman,
very unsuitably mated. For she had a quite nasty husband who, by means
of letters and things, went on blackmailing poor Edward to the tune of
three or four hundred a year--with threats of the Divorce Court. And
after this lady came Maisie Maidan, and after poor Maisie only one more
affair and then--the real passion of his life. His marriage with Leonora
had been arranged by his parents and, though he always admired her
immensely, he had hardly ever pretended to be much more than tender to
her, though he desperately needed her moral support, too....

But his really trying liabilities were mostly in the nature of
generosities proper to his station. He was, according to Leonora, always
remitting his tenants' rents and giving the tenants to understand that
the reduction would be permanent; he was always redeeming drunkards
who came before his magisterial bench; he was always trying to put
prostitutes into respectable places--and he was a perfect maniac about
children. I don't know how many ill-used people he did not pick up and
provide with careers--Leonora has told me, but I daresay she exaggerated
and the figure seems so preposterous that I will not put it down.
All these things, and the continuance of them seemed to him to be his
duty--along with impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy Scouts
and to provide prizes at cattle shows and antivivisection societies....

Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not continued.
They could not possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at that rate after the
money had gone to the Grand Duke's mistress. She put the rents back at
their old figures; discharged the drunkards from their homes, and sent
all the societies notice that they were to expect no more subscriptions.
To the children, she was more tender; nearly all of them she supported
till the age of apprenticeship or domestic service. You see, she was
childless herself.

She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to blame.
She had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family, and they had
forced upon her poor dear Edward without making the stipulation that
the children should be brought up as Catholics. And that, of course,
was spiritual death to Leonora. I have given you a wrong impression if
I have not made you see that Leonora was a woman of a strong, cold
conscience, like all English Catholics. (I cannot, myself, help
disliking this religion; there is always, at the bottom of my mind, in
spite of Leonora, the feeling of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman,
that filtered in upon me in the tranquility of the little old Friends'
Meeting House in Arch Street, Philadelphia.) So I do set down a good
deal of Leonora's mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case to the
peculiarly English form of her religion. Because, of course, the only
thing to have done for Edward would have been to let him sink down until
he became a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe, chance love
affairs upon the highways. He would have done so much less harm; he
would have been much less agonized too. At any rate, he would have
had fewer chances of ruining and of remorse. For Edward was great
at remorse. But Leonora's English Catholic conscience, her rigid
principles, her coldness, even her very patience, were, I cannot help
thinking, all wrong in this special case. She quite seriously and
naively imagined that the Church of Rome disapproves of divorce; she
quite seriously and naively believed that her church could be such
a monstrous and imbecile institution as to expect her to take on the
impossible job of making Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband. She had,
as the English would say, the Nonconformist temperament. In the United
States of North America we call it the New England conscience. For, of
course, that frame of mind has been driven in on the English Catholics.
The centuries that they have gone through--centuries of blind and
malignant oppression, of ostracism from public employment, of being, as
it were, a small beleagured garrison in a hostile country, and therefore
having to act with great formality--all these things have combined to
perform that conjuring trick. And I suppose that Papists in England are
even technically Nonconformists.

Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew. But that,
at least, lets them be opportunists. They would have fixed poor dear
Edward up all right. (Forgive my writing of these monstrous things in
this frivolous manner. If I did not I should break down and cry.) In
Milan, say, or in Paris, Leonora would have had her marriage dissolved
in six months for two hundred dollars paid in the right quarter. And
Edward would have drifted about until he became a tramp of the kind I
have suggested. Or he would have married a barmaid who would have made
him such frightful scenes in public places and would so have torn out
his moustache and left visible signs upon his face that he would have
been faithful to her for the rest of his days. That was what he wanted
to redeem him....

For, along with his passions and his shames there went the dread of
scenes in public places, of outcry, of excited physical violence; of
publicity, in short. Yes, the barmaid would have cured him. And it would
have been all the better if she drank; he would have been kept busy
looking after her.

I know that I am right in this. I know it because of the Kilsyte case.
You see, the servant girl that he then kissed was nurse in the family of
the Nonconformist head of the county--whatever that post may be called.
And that gentleman was so determined to ruin Edward, who was the
chairman of the Tory caucus, or whatever it is--that the poor dear
sufferer had the very devil of a time. They asked questions about it
in the House of Commons; they tried to get the Hampshire magistrates
degraded; they suggested to the War Ministry that Edward was not the
proper person to hold the King's commission. Yes, he got it hot and
strong.

The result you have heard. He was completely cured of philandering
amongst the lower classes. And that seemed a real blessing to Leonora.
It did not revolt her so much to be connected--it is a sort of
connection--with people like Mrs Maidan, instead of with a little
kitchenmaid.

In a dim sort of way, Leonora was almost contented when she arrived at
Nauheim, that evening....

She had got things nearly straight by the long years of scraping in
little stations in Chitral and Burma--stations where living is cheap
in comparison with the life of a county magnate, and where, moreover,
liaisons of one sort or another are normal and inexpensive too. So that,
when Mrs Maidan came along--and the Maidan affair might have caused
trouble out there because of the youth of the husband--Leonora had just
resigned herself to coming home. With pushing and scraping and with
letting Branshaw Teleragh, and with selling a picture and a relic of
Charles I or so, had got--and, poor dear, she had never had a really
decent dress to her back in all those years and years--she had got, as
she imagined, her poor dear husband back into much the same financial
position as had been his before the mistress of the Grand Duke had
happened along. And, of course, Edward himself had helped her a little
on the financial side. He was a fellow that many men liked. He was so
presentable and quite ready to lend you his cigar puncher--that sort
of thing. So, every now and then some financier whom he met about would
give him a good, sound, profitable tip. And Leonora was never afraid of
a bit of a gamble--English Papists seldom are, I do not know why.

So nearly all her investment turned up trumps, and Edward was really in
fit case to reopen Branshaw Manor and once more to assume his position
in the county. Thus Leonora had accepted Maisie Maidan almost with
resignation--almost with a sigh of relief. She really liked the poor
child--she had to like somebody. And, at any rate, she felt she could
trust Maisie--she could trust her not to rook Edward for several
thousands a week, for Maisie had refused to accept so much as a trinket
ring from him. It is true that Edward gurgled and raved about the girl
in a way that she had never yet experienced. But that, too, was almost a
relief. I think she would really have welcomed it if he could have come
across the love of his life. It would have given her a rest.

And there could not have been anyone better than poor little Mrs Maidan;
she was so ill she could not want to be taken on expensive jaunts....
It was Leonora herself who paid Maisie's expenses to Nauheim. She handed
over the money to the boy husband, for Maisie would never have allowed
it; but the husband was in agonies of fear. Poor devil!

I fancy that, on the voyage from India, Leonora was as happy as ever she
had been in her life. Edward was wrapped up, completely, in his girl--he
was almost like a father with a child, trotting about with rugs and
physic and things, from deck to deck. He behaved, however, with great
circumspection, so that nothing leaked through to the other passengers.
And Leonora had almost attained to the attitude of a mother towards Mrs
Maidan. So it had looked very well--the benevolent, wealthy couple of
good people, acting as saviours to the poor, dark-eyed, dying young
thing. And that attitude of Leonora's towards Mrs Maidan no doubt partly
accounted for the smack in the face. She was hitting a naughty child who
had been stealing chocolates at an inopportune moment. It was certainly
an inopportune moment. For, with the opening of that blackmailing letter
from that injured brother officer, all the old terrors had redescended
upon Leonora. Her road had again seemed to stretch out endless; she
imagined that there might be hundreds and hundreds of such things
that Edward was concealing from her--that they might necessitate more
mortgagings, more pawnings of bracelets, more and always more horrors.
She had spent an excruciating afternoon. The matter was one of a divorce
case, of course, and she wanted to avoid publicity as much as Edward
did, so that she saw the necessity of continuing the payments. And she
did not so much mind that. They could find three hundred a year. But it
was the horror of there being more such obligations.

She had had no conversation with Edward for many years--none that went
beyond the mere arrangements for taking trains or engaging servants. But
that afternoon she had to let him have it. And he had been just the same
as ever. It was like opening a book after a decade to find the words the
same. He had the same motives. He had not wished to tell her about the
case because he had not wished her to sully her mind with the idea
that there was such a thing as a brother officer who could be a
blackmailer--and he had wanted to protect the credit of his old light
of love. That lady was certainly not concerned with her husband. And he
swore, and swore, and swore, that there was nothing else in the world
against him. She did not believe him.

He had done it once too often--and she was wrong for the first time, so
that he acted a rather creditable part in the matter. For he went right
straight out to the post-office and spent several hours in coding a
telegram to his solicitor, bidding that hard-headed man to threaten to
take out at once a warrant against the fellow who was on his track. He
said afterwards that it was a bit too thick on poor old Leonora to
be ballyragged any more. That was really the last of his outstanding
accounts, and he was ready to take his personal chance of the Divorce
Court if the blackmailer turned nasty. He would face it out--the
publicity, the papers, the whole bally show. Those were his simple
words....

He had made, however, the mistake of not telling Leonora where he was
going, so that, having seen him go to his room to fetch the code for
the telegram, and seeing, two hours later, Maisie Maidan come out of his
room, Leonora imagined that the two hours she had spent in silent agony
Edward had spent with Maisie Maidan in his arms. That seemed to her to
be too much. As a matter of fact, Maisie's being in Edward's room had
been the result, partly of poverty, partly of pride, partly of sheer
innocence. She could not, in the first place, afford a maid; she
refrained as much as possible from sending the hotel servants on
errands, since every penny was of importance to her, and she feared to
have to pay high tips at the end of her stay. Edward had lent her one
of his fascinating cases containing fifteen different sizes of scissors,
and, having seen from her window, his departure for the post-office, she
had taken the opportunity of returning the case. She could not see why
she should not, though she felt a certain remorse at the thought that
she had kissed the pillows of his bed. That was the way it took her.

But Leonora could see that, without the shadow of a doubt, the incident
gave Florence a hold over her. It let Florence into things and Florence
was the only created being who had any idea that the Ashburnhams were
not just good people with nothing to their tails. She determined at
once, not so much to give Florence the privilege of her intimacy--which
would have been the payment of a kind of blackmail--as to keep Florence
under observation until she could have demonstrated to Florence that
she was not in the least jealous of poor Maisie. So that was why she
had entered the dining-room arm in arm with my wife, and why she had so
markedly planted herself at our table. She never left us, indeed, for a
minute that night, except just to run up to Mrs Maidan's room to beg her
pardon and to beg her also to let Edward take her very markedly out into
the gardens that night. She said herself, when Mrs Maidan came rather
wistfully down into the lounge where we were all sitting: "Now, Edward,
get up and take Maisie to the Casino. I want Mrs Dowell to tell me all
about the families in Connecticut who came from Fordingbridge." For it
had been discovered that Florence came of a line that had actually owned
Branshaw Teleragh for two centuries before the Ashburnhams came there.
And there she sat with me in that hall, long after Florence had gone to
bed, so that I might witness her gay reception of that pair. She could
play up.

And that enables me to fix exactly the day of our going to the town of
M----. For it was the very day poor Mrs Maidan died. We found her dead
when we got back--pretty awful, that, when you come to figure out what
it all means....

At any rate the measure of my relief when Leonora said that she was an
Irish Catholic gives you the measure of my affection for that couple.
It was an affection so intense that even to this day I cannot think of
Edward without sighing. I do not believe that I could have gone on any
more with them. I was getting too tired. And I verily believe, too, if
my suspicion that Leonora was jealous of Florence had been the reason
she gave for her outburst I should have turned upon Florence with the
maddest kind of rage. Jealousy would have been incurable. But Florence's
mere silly jibes at the Irish and at the Catholics could be apologized
out of existence. And that I appeared to fix up in two minutes or so.

She looked at me for a long time rather fixedly and queerly while I was
doing it. And at last I worked myself up to saying:

"Do accept the situation. I confess that I do not like your religion.
But I like you so intensely. I don't mind saying that I have never had
anyone to be really fond of, and I do not believe that anyone has ever
been fond of me, as I believe you really to be."

"Oh, I'm fond enough of you," she said. "Fond enough to say that I wish
every man was like you. But there are others to be considered." She was
thinking, as a matter of fact, of poor Maisie. She picked a little piece
of pellitory out of the breast-high wall in front of us. She chafed it
for a long minute between her finger and thumb, then she threw it over
the coping.

"Oh, I accept the situation," she said at last, "if you can."


I REMEMBER laughing at the phrase, "accept the situation", which she
seemed to repeat with a gravity too intense. I said to her something
like:

"It's hardly as much as that. I mean, that I must claim the liberty of a
free American citizen to think what I please about your co-religionists.
And I suppose that Florence must have liberty to think what she pleases
and to say what politeness allows her to say."

"She had better," Leonora answered, "not say one single word against
my people or my faith." It struck me at the time, that there was an
unusual, an almost threatening, hardness in her voice. It was almost
as if she were trying to convey to Florence, through me, that she
would seriously harm my wife if Florence went to something that was an
extreme. Yes, I remember thinking at the time that it was almost as if
Leonora were saying, through me to Florence:

"You may outrage me as you will; you may take all that I personally
possess, but do not you care to say one single thing in view of the
situation that that will set up--against the faith that makes me become
the doormat for your feet."

But obviously, as I saw it, that could not be her meaning. Good people,
be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each other. So that I
read Leonora's words to mean just no more than: "It would be better if
Florence said nothing at all against my co-religionists, because it is a
point that I am touchy about."

That was the hint that, accordingly, I conveyed to Florence when,
shortly afterwards, she and Edward came down from the tower. And I want
you to understand that, from that moment until after Edward and the girl
and Florence were all dead together, I had never the remotest glimpse,
not the shadow of a suspicion, that there was anything wrong, as the
saying is. For five minutes, then, I entertained the possibility that
Leonora might be jealous; but there was never another flicker in that
flame-like personality. How in the world should I get it?

For, all that time, I was just a male sick nurse. And what chance had I
against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal
their hands from me? What earthly chance? They were three to one--and
they made me happy. Oh God, they made me so happy that I doubt if even
paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me
the like. And what could they have done better, or what could they have
done that could have been worse? I don't know....

I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that
Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she had to take
up during her long Calvary of a life....

You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not
know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is not
necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What
do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are
dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I hope, will open to them
the springs of His compassion. It is not my business to think about
it. It is simply my business to say, as Leonora's people say: "Requiem
aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. In memoria
aeterna erit...." But what were they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I
think that the pair of them were only poor wretches, creeping over this
earth in the shadow of an eternal wrath. It is very terrible....

It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgement, as it appears
to me sometimes, at nights. It is probably the suggestion of some
picture that I have seen somewhere. But upon an immense plain, suspended
in mid-air, I seem to see three figures, two of them clasped close in an
intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary. It is in black and white,
my picture of that judgement, an etching, perhaps; only I cannot tell an
etching from a photographic reproduction. And the immense plain is the
hand of God, stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above
it and below it. And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence
that is alone.... And, do you know, at the thought of that intense
solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to rush forward and comfort her.
You cannot, you see, have acted as nurse to a person for twelve years
without wishing to go on nursing them, even though you hate them with
the hatred of the adder, and even in the palm of God. But, in the
nights, with that vision of judgement before me, I know that I hold
myself back. For I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred
that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness. She need not have
done what she did. She was an American, a New Englander. She had not the
hot passions of these Europeans. She cut out that poor imbecile of an
Edward--and I pray God that he is really at peace, clasped close in the
arms of that poor, poor girl! And, no doubt, Maisie Maidan will find her
young husband again, and Leonora will burn, clear and serene, a northern
light and one of the archangels of God. And me.... Well, perhaps, they
will find me an elevator to run.... But Florence... .

She should not have done it. She should not have done it. It was playing
it too low down. She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity;
she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of
district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was Edward's
mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his wife? She
would gabble on to Leonora about forgiveness--treating the subject from
the bright, American point of view. And Leonora would treat her like the
whore she was. Once she said to Florence in the early morning:

"You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my
proper place. I know it, thank you."

But even that could not stop Florence. She went on saying that it was
her ambition to leave this world a little brighter by the passage of her
brief life, and how thankfully she would leave Edward, whom she thought
she had brought to a right frame of mind, if Leonora would only give him
a chance. He needed, she said, tenderness beyond anything.

And Leonora would answer--for she put up with this outrage for
years--Leonora, as I understand, would answer something like:

"Yes, you would give him up. And you would go on writing to each other
in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I know the pair
of you, you know. No. I prefer the situation as it is." Half the time
Florence would ignore Leonora's remarks. She would think they were not
quite ladylike. The other half of the time she would try to persuade
Leonora that her love for Edward was quite spiritual--on account of her
heart. Once she said:

"If you can believe that of Maisie Maidan, as you say you do, why cannot
you believe it of me?" Leonora was, I understand, doing her hair at
that time in front of the mirror in her bedroom. And she looked round
at Florence, to whom she did not usually vouchsafe a glance,--she looked
round coolly and calmly, and said:

"Never do you dare to mention Mrs Maidan's name again. You murdered her.
You and I murdered her between us. I am as much a scoundrel as you. I
don't like to be reminded of it."

Florence went off at once into a babble of how could she have hurt a
person whom she hardly knew, a person whom with the best intentions, in
pursuance of her efforts to leave the world a little brighter, she had
tried to save from Edward. That was how she figured it out to herself.
She really thought that.... So Leonora said patiently:

"Very well, just put it that I killed her and that it's a painful
subject. One does not like to think that one had killed someone.
Naturally not. I ought never to have brought her from India." And that,
indeed, is exactly how Leonora looked at it. It is stated a little
baldly, but Leonora was always a great one for bald statements.

What had happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of M----
had been this:

Leonora, who had been even then filled with pity and contrition for the
poor child, on returning to our hotel had gone straight to Mrs Maidan's
room. She had wanted just to pet her. And she had perceived at first
only, on the clear, round table covered with red velvet, a letter
addressed to her. It ran something like:

"Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, how could you have done it? I trusted you so. You
never talked to me about me and Edward, but I trusted you. How could you
buy me from my husband? I have just heard how you have--in the hall they
were talking about it, Edward and the American lady. You paid the
money for me to come here. Oh, how could you? How could you? I am going
straight back to Bunny...." Bunny was Mrs Maidan's husband.

And Leonora said that, as she went on reading the letter, she had,
without looking round her, a sense that that hotel room was cleared,
that there were no papers on the table, that there were no clothes on
the hooks, and that there was a strained silence--a silence, she said,
as if there were something in the room that drank up such sounds as
there were. She had to fight against that feeling, whilst she read the
postscript of the letter.

"I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress," the postscript began.
The poor child was hardly literate. "It was surely not right of you and
I never wanted to be one. And I heard Edward call me a poor little rat
to the American lady. He always called me a little rat in private, and
I did not mind. But, if he called me it to her, I think he does not love
me any more. Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you knew the world and I knew nothing.
I thought it would be all right if you thought it could, and I thought
you would not have brought me if you did not, too. You should not have
done it, and we out of the same convent...."

Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.

And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she began a
search for Mrs Maidan herself--all over the hotel. The manager said that
Mrs Maidan had paid her bill, and had gone up to the station to ask the
Reiseverkehrsbureau to make her out a plan for her immediate return
to Chitral. He imagined that he had seen her come back, but he was not
quite certain. No one in the large hotel had bothered his head about the
child. And she, wandering solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down
beside a screen that had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never
heard then or after what had passed between that precious couple. I
fancy Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor dear
Edward by addressing to him some words of friendly warning as to the
ravages he might be making in the girl's heart. That would be the sort
of way she would begin. And Edward would have sentimentally assured her
that there was nothing in it; that Maisie was just a poor little rat
whose passage to Nauheim his wife had paid out of her own pocket. That
would have been enough to do the trick.

For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic growing
and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every one of
the public rooms of the hotel--the dining-room, the lounge, the
schreibzimmer, the winter garden. God knows what they wanted with a
winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till October. But
there it was. And then Leonora ran--yes, she ran up the stairs--to see
if Maisie had not returned to her rooms. She had determined to take that
child right away from that hideous place. It seemed to her to be all
unspeakable. I do not mean to say that she was not quite cool about it.
Leonora was always Leonora. But the cold justice of the thing demanded
that she should play the part of mother to this child who had come from
the same convent. She figured it out to amount to that. She would leave
Edward to Florence and to me--and she would devote all her time to
providing that child with an atmosphere of love until she could be
returned to her poor young husband. It was naturally too late.

She had not cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first. Now, as soon as
she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a small pair of
feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the effort to strap up a
great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely that her little body had
fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her, like the jaws
of a gigantic alligator. The key was in her hand. Her dark hair, like
the hair of a Japanese, had come down and covered her body and her face.

Leonora lifted her up--she was the merest featherweight--and laid her
on the bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she had just
scored a goal in a hockey match. You understand she had not committed
suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with the long lashes on
the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with the flowers all about
her. The stem of a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike of
flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like a bride in the sunlight
of the mortuary candles that were all about her, and the white coifs of
the two nuns that knelt at her feet with their faces hidden might have
been two swans that were to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or
wherever it is. Leonora showed her to me. She would not let either of
the others see her. She wanted, you know, to spare poor dear Edward's
feelings. He never could bear the sight of a corpse. And, since she
never gave him an idea that Maisie had written to her, he imagined that
the death had been the most natural thing in the world. He soon got over
it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his about which he never felt much
remorse.




PART II

 Part I, Section V Dowell says that his entire life's mission was to keep a heart patient alive. He constantly feared for Florence's safety and ease of travel. Dowell explains that in Florence he had both a wife and an unattained mistress; their marriage had never been consummated. He feels similar to Leonora, because he thinks it is her job, too, to care for a heart patient. But Dowell adds, he now realizes there was nothing at all wrong with Edward's heart, and he merely used it as an excuse to escape his army position and follow a young girl, Maisie Maidan, to Nauheim. Dowell describes the immediate history of Edward and Leonora. Several years before, Edward had been caught attempting to kiss a young servant girl in the back of a carriage car. Though he claimed his actions were innocent, Edward's political enemies brought it into the public eye, called it the Kilsyte case, and caused him extreme embarrassment. Afterward, Edward left servants alone, but became more interested in women of his own class. The next year, in Monte Carlo, Edward had an affair with a "harpy," La Dolciquita, who passed for the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke. He ran away with her for a week, bought her an extremely expensive tiara, and lost an enormous fortune at the gambling tables. Though he tried to hide these events from Leonora, she found out about it and went straight to England to take control of the money and pay off Edward's debts. Now in control of the Ashburnham finances, Leonora insisted that they go to India in order to save money. While in India, Edward started another affair with the wife of another army officer, Mrs. Basil. When Major Basil found out about the affair, he started to blackmail Edward. Edward's romantic attentions then moved to a young girl, Mrs. Maisie Maiden, a submissive woman whose young husband was away serving in the army. Leonora, who by now has become embittered about her husband's liaisons, decides that the best thing to do is to provide him a safe mistress with whom he is not likely to get into trouble. She agrees to humor Edward and they bring Mrs. Maidan with them to Nauheim. On the afternoon before the dinner when the Dowells and the Ashburnhams first met, Leonora had been opening Edward's mail when she found a blackmail letter from Major Basil. Leonora was horrified. She thought that finally she had gotten all of their financial affairs in order, but this letter led her to suspect that Edward was hiding an even greater number of debts. She and Edward had a terrible argument, and Edward was mortified that his wife should know so much of his indiscretions. Two hours later, Leonora saw Mrs. Maidan emerging from Edward's bedroom and it was too much for her; she suspected the worst. Leonora lost control and violently boxed Mrs. Maidan's ears, what Dowell describes as 'striking the face of an intolerable universe." Unfortunately for Leonora, Florence witnesses this scene. This gave Florence power over Leonora, because she now realized that the Ashburnhams were not merely "good people." Leonora attempts to befriend Florence in order to cover up the situation. Together, they meet Dowell and Captain Ashburnham for their first dinner together. Part I, Section VI Dowell reflects on his own position in this drama. He explains that he was merely a "male sick nurse" for all those years, and that, deceived, he was extraordinarily happy. He anticipates the question how does it "feel to be a deceived husband?" and he can only respond with the answer: "Heavens, I do not know. It just feels nothing at all." Dowell then reflects on Florence. He admits that sometimes he pities her and longs to comfort her in the afterlife, but then he remembers that he hates her so much that "he would not spare her an eternity of loneliness." Dowell concludes that Florence took advantage of people who were weaker than her. Dowell next recounts a story he has been told by Leonora of a conversation which took place between the two women. Florence had tried to convince Leonora to reconcile with Edward. Leonora will not hear of it; she knows that Florence and Edward will just continue their affair in private and in hotel rooms. When Florence brings up Maisie Maidan, Leonora gets very angry and coolly retorts that Florence is never to bring up Mrs. Maidan's name again, because the two of them are responsible for her death. Florence denies responsibility. Dowell then tells the story of Mrs. Maidan's death. On the day that the two couples traveled to M--, Leonora returned to Nauheim to find a letter from Mrs. Maidan. Mrs. Maidan had overheard a conversation between Florence and Edward and surmised that Leonora had brought her to Nauheim intending her to be Edward's mistress. Mrs. Maidan was horrified at the thought of this and intended to leave at once, but while packing her large trunk, she suffered from a heart attack and fell into it. When Leonora returned from their excursion, she found Maisie's letter and her poor dead body enveloped by the huge trunk. Although Edward feels little remorse, Leonora feels intensely guilty over Maisie's death.

