Chapter: NANCY had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made that
comment over the giving of the horse to young Selmes. She had been
thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for many days silent
beside her aunt's bed. (She had always thought of Leonora as her aunt.)
And she had had to sit thinking during many silent meals with Edward.
And then, at times, with his bloodshot eyes and creased, heavy mouth,
he would smile at her. And gradually the knowledge had come to her
that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Several
things contributed to form and to harden this conviction. She was
allowed to read the papers in those days--or, rather, since Leonora was
always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out early, over
the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day, in the papers,
she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well. Beneath it she read
the words: "The Hon. Mrs Brand, plaintiff in the remarkable divorce case
reported on p. 8." Nancy hardly knew what a divorce case was. She had
been so remarkably well brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practise
divorce. I don't know how Leonora had done it exactly. I suppose she had
always impressed it on Nancy's mind that nice women did not read these
things, and that would have been enough to make Nancy skip those pages.

She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce
case--principally because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She
imagined that Leonora, when her headache left her, would like to know
what was happening to Mrs Brand, who lived at Christchurch, and whom
they both liked very well. The case occupied three days, and the report
that Nancy first came upon was that of the third day. Edward, however,
kept the papers of the week, after his methodical fashion, in a rack in
his gun-room, and when she had finished her breakfast Nancy went to
that quiet apartment and had what she would have called a good read.
It seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not understand why one
counsel should be so anxious to know all about the movements of Mr Brand
upon a certain day; she could not understand why a chart of the bedroom
accommodation at Christchurch Old Hall should be produced in court.
She did not even see why they should want to know that, upon a certain
occasion, the drawing-room door was locked. It made her laugh; it
appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy
themselves with such matters. It struck her, nevertheless, as odd that
one of the counsel should cross-question Mr Brand so insistently and so
impertinently as to his feelings for Miss Lupton. Nancy knew Miss Lupton
of Ringwood very well--a jolly girl, who rode a horse with two white
fetlocks. Mr Brand persisted that he did not love Miss Lupton.... Well,
of course he did not love Miss Lupton; he was a married man. You might
as well think of Uncle Edward loving... loving anybody but Leonora. When
people were married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt,
people who misbehaved--but they were poor people--or people not like
those she knew. So these matters presented themselves to Nancy's mind.
But later on in the case she found that Mr Brand had to confess to a
"guilty intimacy" with some one or other. Nancy imagined that he must
have been telling some one his wife's secrets; she could not
understand why that was a serious offence. Of course it was not very
gentlemanly--it lessened her opinion of Mrs Brand. But since she found
that Mrs Brand had condoned that offence, she imagined that they could
not have been very serious secrets that Mr Brand had told. And then,
suddenly, it was forced on her conviction that Mr Brand--the mild
Mr Brand that she had seen a month or two before their departure to
Nauheim, playing "Blind Man's Buff" with his children and kissing his
wife when he caught her--Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst
possible terms. That was incredible.

Yet there it was--in black and white. Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand had
struck Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr Brand was adjudged,
in two or three abrupt words, at the end of columns and columns of
paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have
committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to
Nancy--nothing real, that is to say. She knew that one was commanded not
to commit adultery--but why, she thought, should one? It was probably
something like catching salmon out of season--a thing one did not do.
She gathered it had something to do with kissing, or holding some one in
your arms.. ..

And yet the whole effect of that reading upon Nancy was mysterious,
terrifying and evil. She felt a sickness--a sickness that grew as she
read. Her heart beat painfully; she began to cry. She asked God how He
could permit such things to be. And she was more certain that Edward did
not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Perhaps, then, Edward
loved some one else. It was unthinkable.

If he could love some one else than Leonora, her fierce unknown heart
suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself? And he did not
love her.... This had occurred about a month before she got the letter
from her mother. She let the matter rest until the sick feeling went
off; it did that in a day or two. Then, finding that Leonora's headaches
had gone, she suddenly told Leonora that Mrs Brand had divorced her
husband. She asked what, exactly, it all meant.

Leonora was lying on the sofa in the hall; she was feeling so weak that
she could hardly find the words. She answered just:

"It means that Mr Brand will be able to marry again."

Nancy said:

"But... but..." and then: "He will be able to marry Miss Lupton."
Leonora just moved a hand in assent. Her eyes were shut.

"Then..." Nancy began. Her blue eyes were full of horror: her brows were
tight above them; the lines of pain about her mouth were very distinct.
In her eyes the whole of that familiar, great hall had a changed aspect.
The andirons with the brass flowers at the ends appeared unreal; the
burning logs were just logs that were burning and not the comfortable
symbols of an indestructible mode of life. The flame fluttered before
the high fireback; the St Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the
winter rain fell and fell. And suddenly she thought that Edward might
marry some one else; and she nearly screamed.

Leonora opened her eyes, lying sideways, with her face upon the black
and gold pillow of the sofa that was drawn half across the great
fireplace.

"I thought," Nancy said, "I never imagined.... Aren't marriages
sacraments? Aren't they indissoluble? I thought you were married. ..
and..." She was sobbing. "I thought you were married or not married as
you are alive or dead." "That," Leonora said, "is the law of the church.
It is not the law of the land...."

"Oh yes," Nancy said, "the Brands are Protestants." She felt a sudden
safeness descend upon her, and for an hour or so her mind was at rest.
It seemed to her idiotic not to have remembered Henry VIII and the basis
upon which Protestantism rests. She almost laughed at herself.

The long afternoon wore on; the flames still fluttered when the maid
made up the fire; the St Bernard awoke and lolloped away towards the
kitchen. And then Leonora opened her eyes and said almost coldly:

"And you? Don't you think you will get married?"

It was so unlike Leonora that, for the moment, the girl was frightened
in the dusk. But then, again, it seemed a perfectly reasonable question.
"I don't know," she answered. "I don't know that anyone wants to marry
me."

"Several people want to marry you," Leonora said.

"But I don't want to marry," Nancy answered. "I should like to go on
living with you and Edward. I don't think I am in the way or that I am
really an expense. If I went you would have to have a companion. Or,
perhaps, I ought to earn my living...."

"I wasn't thinking of that," Leonora answered in the same dull tone.
"You will have money enough from your father. But most people want to be
married."

I believe that she then asked the girl if she would not like to marry
me, and that Nancy answered that she would marry me if she were told to;
but that she wanted to go on living there. She added:

"If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward."

She was frightened out of her life. Leonora writhed on her couch and
called out: "Oh, God!..."

Nancy ran for the maid; for tablets of aspirin; for wet handkerchiefs.
It never occurred to her that Leonora's expression of agony was for
anything else than physical pain.

You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went
into the girl's room at night. I have been casting back again; but I
cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I
tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who
has fallen behind. And then the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish
I could put it down in diary form. Thus: On the 1st of September they
returned from Nauheim. Leonora at once took to her bed. By the 1st
of October they were all going to meets together. Nancy had already
observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner. About the 6th
of that month Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had cause
to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle. On the 20th she read
the account of the divorce case, which is reported in the papers of the
18th and the two following days. On the 23rd she had the conversation
with her aunt in the hall--about marriage in general and about her own
possible marriage, her aunt's coming to her bedroom did not occur until
the 12th of November....

Thus she had three weeks for introspection--for introspection beneath
gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay
in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black shadows. It was not
a good situation for a girl. She began thinking about love, she who had
never before considered it as anything other than a rather humorous,
rather nonsensical matter. She remembered chance passages in chance
books--things that had not really affected her at all at the time. She
remembered someone's love for the Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered
to have heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the
vitals--though she did not know what the vitals were. She had a vague
recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes
hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who was said to have
taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers' existences
were said to be punctuated with heavy sighs. Once she went to the little
cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall and began to play. It
was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of that household had any turn
for music. Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found
herself playing. She had been sitting on the window seat, looking out on
the fading day. Leonora had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking
after some planting up in the new spinney. Thus she found herself
playing on the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing it.
A silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk--a tune
in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted
into minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high lights on dark waters
melt and waver and disappear into black depths. Well, it was a silly old
tune....

It goes with the words--they are about a willow tree, I think: Thou art
to all lost loves the best The only true plant found.

--That sort of thing. It is Herrick, I believe, and the music with the
reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick, And it was
dusk; the heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were like
mourning presences; the fire had sunk to nothing--a mere glow amongst
white ashes.... It was a sentimental sort of place and light and
hour....

And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying. She was crying quietly;
she went on to cry with long convulsive sobs. It seemed to her that
everything gay, everything charming, all light, all sweetness, had gone
out of life. Unhappiness; unhappiness; unhappiness was all around her.
She seemed to know no happy being and she herself was agonizing....

She remembered that Edward's eyes were hopeless; she was certain that he
was drinking too much; at times he sighed deeply. He appeared as a man
who was burning with inward flame; drying up in the soul with thirst;
withering up in the vitals. Then, the torturing conviction came to
her--the conviction that had visited her again and again--that Edward
must love some one other than Leonora. With her little, pedagogic
sectarianism she remembered that Catholics do not do this thing. But
Edward was a Protestant. Then Edward loved somebody....

And, after that thought, her eyes grew hopeless; she sighed as the old
St Bernard beside her did. At meals she would feel an intolerable desire
to drink a glass of wine, and then another and then a third. Then she
would find herself grow gay.... But in half an hour the gaiety went; she
felt like a person who is burning up with an inward flame; desiccating
at the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals. One evening she
went into Edward's gun-room--he had gone to a meeting of the National
Reserve Committee. On the table beside his chair was a decanter of
whisky. She poured out a wineglassful and drank it off. Flame then
really seemed to fill her body; her legs swelled; her face grew
feverish. She dragged her tall height up to her room and lay in the
dark. The bed reeled beneath her; she gave way to the thought that she
was in Edward's arms; that he was kissing her on her face that burned;
on her shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on fire.

She never touched alcohol again. Not once after that did she have such
thoughts. They died out of her mind; they left only a feeling of shame
so insupportable that her brain could not take it in and they vanished.
She imagined that her anguish at the thought of Edward's love for
another person was solely sympathy for Leonora; she determined that
the rest of her life must be spent in acting as Leonora's
handmaiden--sweeping, tending, embroidering, like some Deborah, some
medieval saint--I am not, unfortunately, up in the Catholic hagiology.
But I know that she pictured herself as some personage with a depressed,
earnest face and tightly closed lips, in a clear white room, watering
flowers or tending an embroidery frame. Or, she desired to go with
Edward to Africa and to throw herself in the path of a charging lion so
that Edward might be saved for Leonora at the cost of her life.
Well, along with her sad thoughts she had her childish ones. She knew
nothing--nothing of life, except that one must live sadly. That she now
knew. What happened to her on the night when she received at once the
blow that Edward wished her to go to her father in India and the blow
of the letter from her mother was this. She called first upon her sweet
Saviour--and she thought of Our Lord as her sweet Saviour!--that He
might make it impossible that she should go to India. Then she realized
from Edward's demeanour that he was determined that she should go to
India. It must then be right that she should go. Edward was always right
in his determinations. He was the Cid; he was Lohengrin; he was the
Chevalier Bayard.

Nevertheless her mind mutinied and revolted. She could not leave that
house. She imagined that he wished her gone that she might not witness
his amours with another girl. Well, she was prepared to tell him that
she was ready to witness his amours with another young girl. She would
stay there--to comfort Leonora.

Then came the desperate shock of the letter from her mother. Her mother
said, I believe, something like: "You have no right to go on living your
life of prosperity and respect. You ought to be on the streets with me.
How do you know that you are even Colonel Rufford's daughter?" She did
not know what these words meant. She thought of her mother as sleeping
beneath the arches whilst the snow fell. That was the impression
conveyed to her mind by the words "on the streets". A Platonic sense of
duty gave her the idea that she ought to go to comfort her mother--the
mother that bore her, though she hardly knew what the words meant. At
the same time she knew that her mother had left her father with another
man--therefore she pitied her father, and thought it terrible in herself
that she trembled at the sound of her father's voice. If her mother
was that sort of woman it was natural that her father should have had
accesses of madness in which he had struck herself to the ground. And
the voice of her conscience said to her that her first duty was to her
parents. It was in accord with this awakened sense of duty that she
undressed with great care and meticulously folded the clothes that she
took off. Sometimes, but not very often, she threw them helter-skelter
about the room.

And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood when Leonora, tall,
clean-run, golden-haired, all in black, appeared in her doorway, and
told her that Edward was dying of love for her. She knew then with her
conscious mind what she had known within herself for months--that Edward
was dying--actually and physically dying--of love for her. It seemed
to her that for one short moment her spirit could say: "Domine, nunc
dimittis,... Lord, now, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." She
imagined that she could cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her
fallen mother.

AND it seemed to her to be in tune with the mood, with the hour, and
with the woman in front of her to say that she knew Edward was dying of
love for her and that she was dying of love for Edward. For that fact
had suddenly slipped into place and become real for her as the niched
marker on a whist tablet slips round with the pressure of your thumb.
That rubber at least was made.

And suddenly Leonora seemed to have become different and she seemed to
have become different in her attitude towards Leonora. It was as if
she, in her frail, white, silken kimono, sat beside her fire, but upon a
throne. It was as if Leonora, in her close dress of black lace, with the
gleaming white shoulders and the coiled yellow hair that the girl had
always considered the most beautiful thing in the world--it was as
if Leonora had become pinched, shrivelled, blue with cold, shivering,
suppliant. Yet Leonora was commanding her. It was no good commanding
her. She was going on the morrow to her mother who was in Glasgow.

Leonora went on saying that she must stay there to save Edward, who was
dying of love for her. And, proud and happy in the thought that Edward
loved her, and that she loved him, she did not even listen to what
Leonora said. It appeared to her that it was Leonora's business to save
her husband's body; she, Nancy, possessed his soul--a precious thing
that she would shield and bear away up in her arms--as if Leonora were
a hungry dog, trying to spring up at a lamb that she was carrying. Yes,
she felt as if Edward's love were a precious lamb that she were bearing
away from a cruel and predatory beast. For, at that time, Leonora
appeared to her as a cruel and predatory beast. Leonora, Leonora with
her hunger, with her cruelty had driven Edward to madness. He must be
sheltered by his love for her and by her love--her love from a great
distance and unspoken, enveloping him, surrounding him, upholding him;
by her voice speaking from Glasgow, saying that she loved, that she
adored, that she passed no moment without longing, loving, quivering at
the thought of him.

Leonora said loudly, insistently, with a bitterly imperative tone:

"You must stay here; you must belong to Edward. I will divorce him."

The girl answered:

"The Church does not allow of divorce. I cannot belong to your husband.
I am going to Glasgow to rescue my mother."

The half-opened door opened noiselessly to the full. Edward was there.
His devouring, doomed eyes were fixed on the girl's face; his shoulders
slouched forward; he was undoubtedly half drunk and he had the whisky
decanter in one hand, a slanting candlestick in the other. He said, with
a heavy ferocity, to Nancy:

"I forbid you to talk about these things. You are to stay here until I
hear from your father. Then you will go to your father."

The two women, looking at each other, like beasts about to spring,
hardly gave a glance to him. He leaned against the door-post. He said
again:

"Nancy, I forbid you to talk about these things. I am the master of this
house." And, at the sound of his voice, heavy, male, coming from a deep
chest, in the night with the blackness behind him, Nancy felt as if her
spirit bowed before him, with folded hands. She felt that she would go
to India, and that she desired never again to talk of these things.

Leonora said:

"You see that it is your duty to belong to him. He must not be allowed
to go on drinking."

Nancy did not answer. Edward was gone; they heard him slipping and
shambling on the polished oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed when there
came the sound of a heavy fall. Leonora said again: "You see!"

The sounds went on from the hall below; the light of the candle Edward
held flickered up between the hand rails of the gallery. Then they heard
his voice:

"Give me Glasgow... Glasgow, in Scotland.. I want the number of a man
called White, of Simrock Park, Glasgow... Edward White, Simrock Park,
Glasgow... ten minutes... at this time of night..." His voice was
quite level, normal, and patient. Alcohol took him in the legs, not the
speech. "I can wait," his voice came again. "Yes, I know they have a
number. I have been in communication with them before."

"He is going to telephone to your mother," Leonora said. "He will make
it all right for her." She got up and closed the door. She came back
to the fire, and added bitterly: "He can always make it all right for
everybody, except me--excepting me!"

The girl said nothing. She sat there in a blissful dream. She seemed to
see her lover sitting as he always sat, in a round-backed chair, in
the dark hall--sitting low, with the receiver at his ear, talking in a
gentle, slow voice, that he reserved for the telephone--and saving
the world and her, in the black darkness. She moved her hand over the
bareness of the base of her throat, to have the warmth of flesh upon it
and upon her bosom.

She said nothing; Leonora went on talking....

God knows what Leonora said. She repeated that the girl must belong
to her husband. She said that she used that phrase because, though
she might have a divorce, or even a dissolution of the marriage by the
Church, it would still be adultery that the girl and Edward would be
committing. But she said that that was necessary; it was the price that
the girl must pay for the sin of having made Edward love her, for the
sin of loving her husband. She talked on and on, beside the fire. The
girl must become an adulteress; she had wronged Edward by being so
beautiful, so gracious, so good. It was sinful to be so good. She must
pay the price so as to save the man she had wronged.

In between her pauses the girl could hear the voice of Edward, droning
on, indistinguishably, with jerky pauses for replies. It made her glow
with pride; the man she loved was working for her. He at least was
resolved; was malely determined; knew the right thing. Leonora talked
on with her eyes boring into Nancy's. The girl hardly looked at her and
hardly heard her. After a long time Nancy said--after hours and hours:

"I shall go to India as soon as Edward hears from my father. I cannot
talk about these things, because Edward does not wish it."

At that Leonora screamed out and wavered swiftly towards the closed
door. And Nancy found that she was springing out of her chair with
her white arms stretched wide. She was clasping the other woman to her
breast; she was saying:

"Oh, my poor dear; oh, my poor dear." And they sat, crouching together
in each other's arms, and crying and crying; and they lay down in the
same bed, talking and talking, all through the night. And all through
the night Edward could hear their voices through the wall. That was how
it went.... Next morning they were all three as if nothing had happened.
Towards eleven Edward came to Nancy, who was arranging some Christmas
roses in a silver bowl. He put a telegram beside her on the table. "You
can uncode it for yourself," he said. Then, as he went out of the door,
he said: "You can tell your aunt I have cabled to Mr Dowell to come
over. He will make things easier till you leave." The telegram when it
was uncoded, read, as far as I can remember: "Will take Mrs Rufford to
Italy. Undertake to do this for certain. Am devotedly attached to Mrs
Rufford. Have no need of financial assistance. Did not know there was a
daughter, and am much obliged to you for pointing out my duty.--White."
It was something like that. Then the household resumed its wonted course
of days until my arrival.

 Part IV, Section III Until this point, Nancy had been brought up in a very sheltered, religious environment. She knew that some people committed adultery, but she assumed they were poor people whom she did not know. One morning, about a month before the evening when Leonora confessed in Nancy's room, Nancy decided to read the paper and her eyes came across a familiar name: Mrs. Brand. Mrs. Brand was a friend of the Ashburnhams, and as Nancy read the divorce court article, she realized what a terrible marriage Mr. and Mrs. Brand had. Mr. Brand drank too much, hit his wife, and carried on a long adulterous affair with another woman. The article shocked Nancy, not because she knew the Brands so well, but because it had never occurred to her that "good people" could do such things when they were married. It led her to think that Edward and Leonora could have the same problems. Nancy told Leonora about the Brands' divorce. Leonora asked Nancy if she ever wanted to marry; she responded that she didn't. She said that she would like to keep on living with her aunt and uncle. If she had to marry, she would want to marry someone like Edward. Leonora groaned in agony. The rest of this section describes Nancy's personal thoughts and reflections during the period between their return from Nauheim and Edward's death. After Nancy began to suspect that Edward loved another woman, she grew depressed. All happiness and joy seemed tainted. She consoled herself by believing that only protestants could love someone other than one's spouse. She began to drink, but doing so brought sexual thoughts about Edward into her head, so she gave it up immediately. Nancy wanted to be good and to do her duty. She wanted to care for Leonora for the rest of her life. After she received a letter from her own mother, who was living on the streets of Glasgow, Nancy determined that she should leave to take care of her mother, who had fallen so low. Just as she was packing, late that night, Leonora came in to tell her that Edward was literally dying of love for her. Part IV, Section IV Nancy now realized what she had felt all along: that Edward was dying of love for her, and that she was dying of love for Edward. She felt that Leonora possessed his body, but that Nancy possessed his soul. She wanted to shelter him and care for him spiritually. She determined to go to Glasgow to save her mother, and to write letters to Edward, loving him from afar. But Leonora would not hear of it; she wanted Nancy to go and physically "belong" to Edward. When Edward heard that Nancy desired to go to Glasgow, he forbade her from considering it. He said that she was to be sent to India to be with her father as soon as possible. Nancy consented to Edward's wishes. Leonora tries to convince Nancy to become an adulteress. She tells her that it is her duty to belong to Edward. Nancy must bear the burden of sin by commiting the initial wrong of "making Edward love her." Nancy was too beautiful, too good, and she had to pay the price by becoming an adulteress. Leonora and Nancy talked long into the night, and Edward heard their low voices through the wall.

