Chapter: I HAVE, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it
may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a
sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a
country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the
wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes.
And, when one discusses an affair--a long, sad affair--one goes back,
one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one
explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has
forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have
given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with
thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are
probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them.
They will then seem most real.

At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of Maisie
Maidan's death. I mean that I have explained everything that went before
it from the several points of view that were necessary--from Leonora's,
from Edward's and, to some extent, from my own. You have the facts for
the trouble of finding them; you have the points of view as far as I
could ascertain or put them. Let me imagine myself back, then, at
the day of Maisie's death--or rather at the moment of Florence's
dissertation on the Protest, up in the old Castle of the town of
M----. Let us consider Leonora's point of view with regard to Florence;
Edward's, of course, I cannot give you, for Edward naturally never spoke
of his affair with my wife. (I may, in what follows, be a little hard
on Florence; but you must remember that I have been writing away at this
story now for six months and reflecting longer and longer upon these
affairs.) And the longer I think about them the more certain I
become that Florence was a contaminating influence--she depressed and
deteriorated poor Edward; she deteriorated, hopelessly, the miserable
Leonora. There is no doubt that she caused Leonora's character to
deteriorate. If there was a fine point about Leonora it was that she
was proud and that she was silent. But that pride and that silence broke
when she made that extraordinary outburst, in the shadowy room that
contained the Protest, and in the little terrace looking over the river.
I don't mean to say that she was doing a wrong thing. She was certainly
doing right in trying to warn me that Florence was making eyes at her
husband. But, if she did the right thing, she was doing it in the wrong
way. Perhaps she should have reflected longer; she should have spoken,
if she wanted to speak, only after reflection. Or it would have been
better if she had acted--if, for instance, she had so chaperoned
Florence that private communication between her and Edward became
impossible. She should have gone eavesdropping; she should have watched
outside bedroom doors. It is odious; but that is the way the job is
done. She should have taken Edward away the moment Maisie was dead.
No, she acted wrongly.... And yet, poor thing, is it for me to condemn
her--and what did it matter in the end? If it had not been Florence, it
would have been some other... Still, it might have been a better woman
than my wife. For Florence was vulgar; Florence was a common flirt who
would not, at the last, lacher prise; and Florence was an unstoppable
talker. You could not stop her; nothing would stop her. Edward and
Leonora were at least proud and reserved people. Pride and reserve are
not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things.
But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to
pieces if you let them go. And Leonora let them go. She let them go
before poor Edward did even. Consider her position when she burst out
over the Luther-Protest.... Consider her agonies....

You are to remember that the main passion of her life was to get Edward
back; she had never, till that moment, despaired of getting him back.
That may seem ignoble; but you have also to remember that her getting
him back represented to her not only a victory for herself. It would, as
it appeared to her, have been a victory for all wives and a victory for
her Church. That was how it presented itself to her. These things are a
little inscrutable. I don't know why the getting back of Edward should
have represented to her a victory for all wives, for Society and for
her Church. Or, maybe, I have a glimmering of it. She saw life as a
perpetual sex-battle between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to
their wives, and wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the
end. That was her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man, for her, was a
sort of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his
nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons. She had read few novels,
so that the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding the sound of
wedding bells had never been very much presented to her. She went,
numbed and terrified, to the Mother Superior of her childhood's convent
with the tale of Edward's infidelities with the Spanish dancer, and all
that the old nun, who appeared to her to be infinitely wise, mystic and
reverend, had done had been to shake her head sadly and to say:

"Men are like that. By the blessing of God it will all come right in the
end."

That was what was put before her by her spiritual advisers as her
programme in life. Or, at any rate, that was how their teachings came
through to her--that was the lesson she told me she had learned of them.
I don't know exactly what they taught her. The lot of women was patience
and patience and again patience--ad majorem Dei gloriam--until upon the
appointed day, if God saw fit, she should have her reward. If then, in
the end, she should have succeeded in getting Edward back she would have
kept her man within the limits that are all that wifehood has to expect.
She was even taught that such excesses in men are natural, excusable--as
if they had been children.

And the great thing was that there should be no scandal before the
congregation. So she had clung to the idea of getting Edward back with a
fierce passion that was like an agony. She had looked the other way; she
had occupied herself solely with one idea. That was the idea of having
Edward appear, when she did get him back, wealthy, glorious as it were,
on account of his lands, and upright. She would show, in fact, that in
an unfaithful world one Catholic woman had succeeded in retaining the
fidelity of her husband. And she thought she had come near her desires.

Her plan with regard to Maisie had appeared to be working admirably.
Edward had seemed to be cooling off towards the girl. He did not
hunger to pass every minute of the time at Nauheirn beside the child's
recumbent form; he went out to polo matches; he played auction bridge
in the evenings; he was cheerful and bright. She was certain that he was
not trying to seduce that poor child; she was beginning to think that
he had never tried to do so. He seemed in fact to be dropping back
into what he had been for Maisie in the beginning--a kind, attentive,
superior officer in the regiment, paying gallant attentions to a bride.
They were as open in their little flirtations as the dayspring from on
high. And Maisie had not appeared to fret when he went off on excursions
with us; she had to lie down for so many hours on her bed every
afternoon, and she had not appeared to crave for the attentions of
Edward at those times. And Edward was beginning to make little advances
to Leonora. Once or twice, in private--for he often did it before
people--he had said: "How nice you look!" or "What a pretty dress!"
She had gone with Florence to Frankfurt, where they dress as well as
in Paris, and had got herself a gown or two. She could afford it, and
Florence was an excellent adviser as to dress. She seemed to have got
hold of the clue to the riddle.

Yes, Leonora seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle. She
imagined herself to have been in the wrong to some extent in the past.
She should not have kept Edward on such a tight rein with regard to
money. She thought she was on the right tack in letting him--as she
had done only with fear and irresolution--have again the control of his
income. He came even a step towards her and acknowledged, spontaneously,
that she had been right in husbanding, for all those years, their
resources. He said to her one day:

"You've done right, old girl. There's nothing I like so much as to have
a little to chuck away. And I can do it, thanks to you."

That was really, she said, the happiest moment of her life. And he,
seeming to realize it, had ventured to pat her on the shoulder. He had,
ostensibly, come in to borrow a safety-pin of her. And the occasion of
her boxing Maisie's ears, had, after it was over, riveted in her mind
the idea that there was no intrigue between Edward and Mrs Maidan. She
imagined that, from henceforward, all that she had to do was to keep him
well supplied with money and his mind amused with pretty girls. She was
convinced that he was coming back to her. For that month she no longer
repelled his timid advances that never went very far. For he certainly
made timid advances. He patted her on the shoulder; he whispered into
her ear little jokes about the odd figures that they saw up at the
Casino. It was not much to make a little joke--but the whispering of it
was a precious intimacy....

And then--smash--it all went. It went to pieces at the moment when
Florence laid her hand upon Edward's wrist, as it lay on the glass
sheltering the manuscript of the Protest, up in the high tower with the
shutters where the sunlight here and there streamed in. Or, rather, it
went when she noticed the look in Edward's eyes as he gazed back into
Florence's. She knew that look.

She had known--since the first moment of their meeting, since the moment
of our all sitting down to dinner together--that Florence was
making eyes at Edward. But she had seen so many women make eyes at
Edward--hundreds and hundreds of women, in railway trains, in hotels,
aboard liners, at street corners. And she had arrived at thinking that
Edward took little stock in women that made eyes at him. She had formed
what was, at that time, a fairly correct estimate of the methods of,
the reasons for, Edward's loves. She was certain that hitherto they had
consisted of the short passion for the Dolciquita, the real sort of
love for Mrs Basil, and what she deemed the pretty courtship of Maisie
Maidan. Besides she despised Florence so haughtily that she could not
imagine Edward's being attracted by her. And she and Maisie were a
sort of bulwark round him. She wanted, besides, to keep her eyes on
Florence--for Florence knew that she had boxed Maisie's ears. And
Leonora desperately desired that her union with Edward should appear to
be flawless. But all that went....

With the answering gaze of Edward into Florence's blue and uplifted
eyes, she knew that it had all gone. She knew that that gaze meant that
those two had had long conversations of an intimate kind--about their
likes and dislikes, about their natures, about their views of marriage.
She knew what it meant that she, when we all four walked out together,
had always been with me ten yards ahead of Florence and Edward. She did
not imagine that it had gone further than talks about their likes and
dislikes, about their natures or about marriage as an institution. But,
having watched Edward all her life, she knew that that laying on of
hands, that answering of gaze with gaze, meant that the thing was
unavoidable. Edward was such a serious person.

She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two would be to
rivet on Edward an irrevocable passion; that, as I have before told
you, it was a trick of Edward's nature to believe that the seducing of a
woman gave her an irrevocable hold over him for life. And that touching
of hands, she knew, would give that woman an irrevocable claim--to be
seduced. And she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it
to be a parlour-maid. There are very decent parlour-maids.

And, suddenly, there came into her mind the conviction that Maisie
Maidan had a real passion for Edward; that this would break her
heart--and that she, Leonora, would be responsible for that. She went,
for the moment, mad. She clutched me by the wrist; she dragged me down
those stairs and across that whispering Rittersaal with the high painted
pillars, the high painted chimney-piece. I guess she did not go mad
enough.

She ought to have said:

"Your wife is a harlot who is going to be my husband's mistress.. ."
That might have done the trick. But, even in her madness, she was
afraid to go as far as that. She was afraid that, if she did, Edward and
Florence would make a bolt of it, and that, if they did that, she would
lose forever all chance of getting him back in the end. She acted very
badly to me.

Well, she was a tortured soul who put her Church before the interests of
a Philadelphia Quaker. That is all right--I daresay the Church of Rome
is the more important of the two.

A week after Maisie Maidan's death she was aware that Florence had
become Edward's mistress. She waited outside Florence's door and met
Edward as he came away. She said nothing and he only grunted. But I
guess he had a bad time.

Yes, the mental deterioration that Florence worked in Leonora was
extraordinary; it smashed up her whole life and all her chances. It
made her, in the first place, hopeless--for she could not see how, after
that, Edward could return to her--after a vulgar intrigue with a vulgar
woman. His affair with Mrs Basil, which was now all that she had to
bring, in her heart, against him, she could not find it in her to call
an intrigue. It was a love affair--a pure enough thing in its way. But
this seemed to her to be a horror--a wantonness, all the more detestable
to her, because she so detested Florence. And Florence talked....

That was what was terrible, because Florence forced Leonora herself to
abandon her high reserve--Florence and the situation. It appears that
Florence was in two minds whether to confess to me or to Leonora.
Confess she had to. And she pitched at last on Leonora, because if it
had been me she would have had to confess a great deal more. Or, at
least, I might have guessed a great deal more, about her "heart",
and about Jimmy. So she went to Leonora one day and began hinting and
hinting. And she enraged Leonora to such an extent that at last Leonora
said:

"You want to tell me that you are Edward's mistress. You can be. I have
no use for him." That was really a calamity for Leonora, because, once
started, there was no stopping the talking. She tried to stop--but
it was not to be done. She found it necessary to send Edward messages
through Florence; for she would not speak to him. She had to give him,
for instance, to understand that if I ever came to know of his intrigue
she would ruin him beyond repair. And it complicated matters a good deal
that Edward, at about this time, was really a little in love with her.
He thought that he had treated her so badly; that she was so fine. She
was so mournful that he longed to comfort her, and he thought himself
such a blackguard that there was nothing he would not have done to make
amends. And Florence communicated these items of information to Leonora.

I don't in the least blame Leonora for her coarseness to Florence; it
must have done Florence a world of good. But I do blame her for giving
way to what was in the end a desire for communicativeness. You see that
business cut her off from her Church. She did not want to confess what
she was doing because she was afraid that her spiritual advisers
would blame her for deceiving me. I rather imagine that she would have
preferred damnation to breaking my heart. That is what it works out at.
She need not have troubled.

But, having no priests to talk to, she had to talk to someone, and
as Florence insisted on talking to her, she talked back, in short,
explosive sentences, like one of the damned. Precisely like one of the
damned. Well, if a pretty period in hell on this earth can spare her
any period of pain in Eternity--where there are not any periods--I guess
Leonora will escape hell fire.

Her conversations with Florence would be like this. Florence would
happen in on her, whilst she was doing her wonderful hair, with a
proposition from Edward, who seems about that time to have conceived the
naive idea that he might become a polygamist. I daresay it was Florence
who put it into his head. Anyhow, I am not responsible for the oddities
of the human psychology. But it certainly appears that at about that
date Edward cared more for Leonora than he had ever done before--or,
at any rate, for a long time. And, if Leonora had been a person to play
cards and if she had played her cards well, and if she had had no sense
of shame and so on, she might then have shared Edward with Florence
until the time came for jerking that poor cuckoo out of the nest. Well,
Florence would come to Leonora with some such proposition. I do not mean
to say that she put it baldly, like that. She stood out that she was not
Edward's mistress until Leonora said that she had seen Edward coming out
of her room at an advanced hour of the night. That checked Florence
a bit; but she fell back upon her "heart" and stuck out that she had
merely been conversing with Edward in order to bring him to a better
frame of mind. Florence had, of course, to stick to that story; for even
Florence would not have had the face to implore Leonora to grant her
favours to Edward if she had admitted that she was Edward's mistress.
That could not be done. At the same time Florence had such a pressing
desire to talk about something. There would have been nothing else to
talk about but a rapprochement between that estranged pair. So Florence
would go on babbling and Leonora would go on brushing her hair. And then
Leonora would say suddenly something like:

"I should think myself defiled if Edward touched me now that he has
touched you."

That would discourage Florence a bit; but after a week or so, on another
morning she would have another try.

And even in other things Leonora deteriorated. She had promised Edward
to leave the spending of his own income in his own hands. And she had
fully meant to do that. I daresay she would have done it too; though, no
doubt, she would have spied upon his banking account in secret. She
was not a Roman Catholic for nothing. But she took so serious a view
of Edward's unfaithfulness to the memory of poor little Maisie that she
could not trust him any more at all.

So when she got back to Branshaw she started, after less than a month,
to worry him about the minutest items of his expenditure. She allowed
him to draw his own cheques, but there was hardly a cheque that she did
not scrutinize--except for a private account of about five hundred a
year which, tacitly, she allowed him to keep for expenditure on his
mistress or mistresses. He had to have his jaunts to Paris; he had to
send expensive cables in cipher to Florence about twice a week. But she
worried him about his expenditure on wines, on fruit trees, on harness,
on gates, on the account at his blacksmith's for work done to a new
patent Army stirrup that he was trying to invent. She could not see
why he should bother to invent a new Army stirrup, and she was really
enraged when, after the invention was mature, he made a present to the
War Office of the designs and the patent rights. It was a remarkably
good stirrup.

I have told you, I think, that Edward spent a great deal of time,
and about two hundred pounds for law fees on getting a poor girl, the
daughter of one of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge of murdering her
baby. That was positively the last act of Edward's life. It came at a
time when Nancy Rufford was on her way to India; when the most horrible
gloom was over the household; when Edward himself was in an agony and
behaving as prettily as he knew how. Yet even then Leonora made him a
terrible scene about this expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of
had the vague idea that what had passed with the girl and the rest of
it ought to have taught Edward a lesson--the lesson of economy. She
threatened to take his banking account away from him again. I guess that
made him cut his throat. He might have stuck it out otherwise--but the
thought that he had lost Nancy and that, in addition, there was nothing
left for him but a dreary, dreary succession of days in which he could
be of no public service... Well, it finished him.

It was during those years that Leonora tried to get up a love affair of
her own with a fellow called Bayham--a decent sort of fellow. A really
nice man. But the affair was no sort of success. I have told you about
it already... .

WELL, that about brings me up to the date of my receiving, in Waterbury,
the laconic cable from Edward to the effect that he wanted me to go to
Branshaw and have a chat. I was pretty busy at the time and I was half
minded to send him a reply cable to the effect that I would start in
a fortnight. But I was having a long interview with old Mr Hurlbird's
attorneys and immediately afterwards I had to have a long interview with
the Misses Hurlbird, so I delayed cabling.

I had expected to find the Misses Hurlbird excessively old--in the
nineties or thereabouts. The time had passed so slowly that I had the
impression that it must have been thirty years since I had been in the
United States. It was only twelve years. Actually Miss Hurlbird was just
sixty-one and Miss Florence Hurlbird fifty-nine, and they were both,
mentally and physically, as vigorous as could be desired. They were,
indeed, more vigorous, mentally, than suited my purpose, which was to
get away from the United States as quickly as I could. The Hurlbirds
were an exceedingly united family--exceedingly united except on one set
of points. Each of the three of them had a separate doctor, whom they
trusted implicitly--and each had a separate attorney. And each of them
distrusted the other's doctor and the other's attorney. And, naturally,
the doctors and the attorneys warned one all the time--against each
other. You cannot imagine how complicated it all became for me. Of
course I had an attorney of my own--recommended to me by young Carter,
my Philadelphia nephew.

I do not mean to say that there was any unpleasantness of a grasping
kind. The problem was quite another one--a moral dilemma. You see, old
Mr Hurlbird had left all his property to Florence with the mere request
that she would have erected to him in the city of Waterbury, Ill., a
memorial that should take the form of some sort of institution for the
relief of sufferers from the heart. Florence's money had all come to
me--and with it old Mr Hurlbird's. He had died just five days before
Florence.

Well, I was quite ready to spend a round million dollars on the relief
of sufferers from the heart. The old gentleman had left about a million
and a half; Florence had been worth about eight hundred thousand--and
as I figured it out, I should cut up at about a million myself. Anyhow,
there was ample money. But I naturally wanted to consult the wishes of
his surviving relatives and then the trouble really began. You see, it
had been discovered that Mr Hurlbird had had nothing whatever the matter
with his heart. His lungs had been a little affected all through his
life and he had died of bronchitis. It struck Miss Florence Hurlbird
that, since her brother had died of lungs and not of heart, his money
ought to go to lung patients. That, she considered, was what her brother
would have wished. On the other hand, by a kink, that I could not at the
time understand, Miss Hurlbird insisted that I ought to keep the money
all to myself. She said that she did not wish for any monuments to the
Hurlbird family. At the time I thought that that was because of a New
England dislike for necrological ostentation. But I can figure out now,
when I remember certain insistent and continued questions that she put
to me, about Edward Ashburnham, that there was another idea in her mind.
And Leonora has told me that, on Florence's dressing-table, beside her
dead body, there had lain a letter to Miss Hurlbird--a letter which
Leonora posted without telling me. I don't know how Florence had time to
write to her aunt; but I can quite understand that she would not like
to go out of the world without making some comments. So I guess Florence
had told Miss Hurlbird a good bit about Edward Ashburnham in a few
scrawled words--and that that was why the old lady did not wish the name
of Hurlbird perpetuated. Perhaps also she thought that I had earned the
Hurlbird money. It meant a pretty tidy lot of discussing, what with the
doctors warning each other about the bad effects of discussions on the
health of the old ladies, and warning me covertly against each other,
and saying that old Mr Hurlbird might have died of heart, after all,
in spite of the diagnosis of his doctor. And the solicitors all had
separate methods of arranging about how the money should be invested and
entrusted and bound. Personally, I wanted to invest the money so that
the interest could be used for the relief of sufferers from the heart.
If old Mr Hurlbird had not died of any defects in that organ he had
considered that it was defective. Moreover, Florence had certainly died
of her heart, as I saw it. And when Miss Florence Hurlbird stood out
that the money ought to go to chest sufferers I was brought to thinking
that there ought to be a chest institution too, and I advanced the sum
that I was ready to provide to a million and a half of dollars. That
would have given seven hundred and fifty thousand to each class of
invalid. I did not want money at all badly. All I wanted it for was to
be able to give Nancy Rufford a good time. I did not know much about
housekeeping expenses in England where, I presumed, she would wish
to live. I knew that her needs at that time were limited to good
chocolates, and a good horse or two, and simple, pretty frocks. Probably
she would want more than that later on. But even if I gave a million and
a half dollars to these institutions I should still have the equivalent
of about twenty thousand a year English, and I considered that Nancy
could have a pretty good time on that or less. Anyhow, we had a stiff
set of arguments up at the Hurlbird mansion which stands on a bluff
over the town. It may strike you, silent listener, as being funny if you
happen to be European. But moral problems of that description and the
giving of millions to institutions are immensely serious matters in my
country. Indeed, they are the staple topics for consideration amongst
the wealthy classes. We haven't got peerage and social climbing to
occupy us much, and decent people do not take interest in politics or
elderly people in sport. So that there were real tears shed by both
Miss Hurlbird and Miss Florence before I left that city. I left it quite
abruptly. Four hours after Edward's telegram came another from Leonora,
saying: "Yes, do come. You could be so helpful." I simply told my
attorney that there was the million and a half; that he could invest
it as he liked, and that the purposes must be decided by the Misses
Hurlbird. I was, anyhow, pretty well worn out by all the discussions.
And, as I have never heard yet from the Misses Hurlbird, I rather
think that Miss Hurlbird, either by revelations or by moral force, has
persuaded Miss Florence that no memorial to their names shall be erected
in the city of Waterbury, Conn. Miss Hurlbird wept dreadfully when she
heard that I was going to stay with the Ashburnhams, but she did not
make any comments. I was aware, at that date, that her niece had been
seduced by that fellow Jimmy before I had married her--but I contrived
to produce on her the impression that I thought Florence had been a
model wife. Why, at that date I still believed that Florence had been
perfectly virtuous after her marriage to me. I had not figured it out
that she could have played it so low down as to continue her intrigue
with that fellow under my roof. Well, I was a fool. But I did not think
much about Florence at that date. My mind was occupied with what was
happening at Branshaw. I had got it into my head that the telegrams had
something to do with Nancy. It struck me that she might have shown signs
of forming an attachment for some undesirable fellow and that Leonora
wanted me to come back and marry her out of harm's way. That was what
was pretty firmly in my mind. And it remained in my mind for nearly ten
days after my arrival at that beautiful old place. Neither Edward nor
Leonora made any motion to talk to me about anything other than the
weather and the crops. Yet, although there were several young fellows
about, I could not see that any one in particular was distinguished by
the girl's preference. She certainly appeared illish and nervous, except
when she woke up to talk gay nonsense to me. Oh, the pretty thing that
she was....

I imagined that what must have happened was that the undesirable young
man had been forbidden the place and that Nancy was fretting a little.
What had happened was just Hell. Leonora had spoken to Nancy; Nancy had
spoken to Edward; Edward had spoken to Leonora--and they had talked and
talked. And talked. You have to imagine horrible pictures of gloom and
half lights, and emotions running through silent nights--through whole
nights. You have to imagine my beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to
Edward, rising up at the foot of his bed, with her long hair falling,
like a split cone of shadow, in the glimmer of a night-light that burned
beside him. You have to imagine her, a silent, a no doubt agonized
figure, like a spectre, suddenly offering herself to him--to save his
reason! And you have to imagine his frantic refusal--and talk. And talk!
My God!

And yet, to me, living in the house, enveloped with the charm of the
quiet and ordered living, with the silent, skilled servants whose mere
laying out of my dress clothes was like a caress--to me who was hourly
with them they appeared like tender, ordered and devoted people,
smiling, absenting themselves at the proper intervals; driving me to
meets--just good people! How the devil--how the devil do they do it?

At dinner one evening Leonora said--she had just opened a telegram:

"Nancy will be going to India, tomorrow, to be with her father."

No one spoke. Nancy looked at her plate; Edward went on eating his
pheasant. I felt very bad; I imagined that it would be up to me to
propose to Nancy that evening. It appeared to me to be queer that they
had not given me any warning of Nancy's departure--But I thought that
that was only English manners--some sort of delicacy that I had not got
the hang of. You must remember that at that moment I trusted in Edward
and Leonora and in Nancy Rufford, and in the tranquility of ancient
haunts of peace, as I had trusted in my mother's love. And that evening
Edward spoke to me.

What in the interval had happened had been this:

Upon her return from Nauheim Leonora had completely broken down--because
she knew she could trust Edward. That seems odd but, if you know
anything about breakdowns, you will know that by the ingenious torments
that fate prepares for us, these things come as soon as, a strain having
relaxed, there is nothing more to be done. It is after a husband's long
illness and death that a widow goes to pieces; it is at the end of a
long rowing contest that a crew collapses and lies forward upon its
oars. And that was what happened to Leonora.

From certain tones in Edward's voice; from the long, steady stare that
he had given her from his bloodshot eyes on rising from the dinner table
in the Nauheim hotel, she knew that, in the affair of the poor girl,
this was a case in which Edward's moral scruples, or his social code,
or his idea that it would be playing it too low down, rendered Nancy
perfectly safe. The girl, she felt sure, was in no danger at all from
Edward. And in that she was perfectly right. The smash was to come from
herself.

She relaxed; she broke; she drifted, at first quickly, then with an
increasing momentum, down the stream of destiny. You may put it that,
having been cut off from the restraints of her religion, for the first
time in her life, she acted along the lines of her instinctive desires.
I do not know whether to think that, in that she was no longer herself;
or that, having let loose the bonds of her standards, her conventions
and her traditions, she was being, for the first time, her own natural
self. She was torn between her intense, maternal love for the girl and
an intense jealousy of the woman who realizes that the man she loves has
met what appears to be the final passion of his life. She was divided
between an intense disgust for Edward's weakness in conceiving this
passion, an intense pity for the miseries that he was enduring, and a
feeling equally intense, but one that she hid from herself--a feeling of
respect for Edward's determination to keep himself, in this particular
affair, unspotted.

And the human heart is a very mysterious thing. It is impossible to say
that Leonora, in acting as she then did, was not filled with a sort of
hatred of Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to despise him. He
was, she realized gone from her for good. Then let him suffer, let him
agonize; let him, if possible, break and go to that Hell that is the
abode of broken resolves. She might have taken a different line. It
would have been so easy to send the girl away to stay with some friends;
to have taken her away herself upon some pretext or other. That would
not have cured things but it would have been the decent line,... But, at
that date, poor Leonora was incapable of taking any line whatever.

She pitied Edward frightfully at one time--and then she acted along
the lines of pity; she loathed him at another and then she acted as her
loathing dictated. She gasped, as a person dying of tuberculosis gasps
for air. She craved madly for communication with some other human soul.
And the human soul that she selected was that of the girl.

Perhaps Nancy was the only person that she could have talked to. With
her necessity for reticences, with her coldness of manner, Leonora had
singularly few intimates. She had none at all, with the exception of
the Mrs Colonel Whelen, who had advised her about the affair with La
Dolciquita, and the one or two religious, who had guided her through
life. The Colonel's wife was at that time in Madeira; the religious she
now avoided. Her visitors' book had seven hundred names in it; there was
not a soul that she could speak to. She was Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw
Teleragh.

She was the great Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw and she lay all day upon
her bed in her marvellous, light, airy bedroom with the chintzes and
the Chippendale and the portraits of deceased Ashburnhams by Zoffany and
Zucchero. When there was a meet she would struggle up--supposing it were
within driving distance--and let Edward drive her and the girl to the
cross-roads or the country house. She would drive herself back alone;
Edward would ride off with the girl. Ride Leonora could not, that
season--her head was too bad. Each pace of her mare was an anguish.

But she drove with efficiency and precision; she smiled at the Gimmers
and Ffoulkes and the Hedley Seatons. She threw with exactitude pennies
to the boys who opened gates for her; she sat upright on the seat of the
high dog-cart; she waved her hands to Edward and Nancy as they rode off
with the hounds, and every one could hear her clear, high voice, in the
chilly weather, saying: "Have a good time!"

Poor forlorn woman!...

There was, however, one spark of consolation. It came from the fact that
Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with his eyes. It had been
three years since she had tried her abortive love-affair with him. Yet
still, on the winter mornings he would ride up to her shafts and just
say: "Good day," and look at her with eyes that were not imploring,
but seemed to say: "You see, I am still, as the Germans say, A. D.--at
disposition."

It was a great consolation, not because she proposed ever to take him
up again, but because it showed her that there was in the world one
faithful soul in riding-breeches. And it showed her that she was not
losing her looks.

And, indeed, she was not losing her looks. She was forty, but she was as
clean run as on the day she had left the convent--as clear in outline,
as clear coloured in the hair, as dark blue in the eyes. She thought
that her looking-glass told her this; but there are always the
doubts.... Rodney Bayham's eyes took them away.

It is very singular that Leonora should not have aged at all. I suppose
that there are some types of beauty and even of youth made for the
embellishments that come with enduring sorrow. That is too elaborately
put. I mean that Leonora, if everything had prospered, might have
become too hard and, maybe, overbearing. As it was she was tuned down
to appearing efficient--and yet sympathetic. That is the rarest of all
blends. And yet I swear that Leonora, in her restrained way, gave the
impression of being intensely sympathetic. When she listened to you she
appeared also to be listening to some sound that was going on in the
distance. But still, she listened to you and took in what you said,
which, since the record of humanity is a record of sorrows, was, as a
rule, something sad.

I think that she must have taken Nancy through many terrors of the night
and many bad places of the day. And that would account for the girl's
passionate love for the elder woman. For Nancy's love for Leonora was an
admiration that is awakened in Catholics by their feeling for the Virgin
Mary and for various of the saints. It is too little to say that the
girl would have laid her life at Leonora's feet. Well, she laid
there the offer of her virtue--and her reason. Those were sufficient
instalments of her life. It would today be much better for Nancy Rufford
if she were dead.

Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance; but they crowd on me. I
will try to tell the story.

You see--when she came back from Nauheim Leonora began to have her
headaches--headaches lasting through whole days, during which she could
speak no word and could bear to hear no sound. And, day after day,
Nancy would sit with her, silent and motionless for hours, steeping
handkerchiefs in vinegar and water, and thinking her own thoughts. It
must have been very bad for her--and her meals alone with Edward must
have been bad for her too--and beastly bad for Edward. Edward, of
course, wavered in his demeanour, What else could he do? At times he
would sit silent and dejected over his untouched food. He would utter
nothing but monosyllables when Nancy spoke to him. Then he was simply
afraid of the girl falling in love with him. At other times he would
take a little wine; pull himself together; attempt to chaff Nancy about
a stake and binder hedge that her mare had checked at, or talk about the
habits of the Chitralis. That was when he was thinking that it was
rough on the poor girl that he should have become a dull companion. He
realized that his talking to her in the park at Nauheim had done her no
harm.

But all that was doing a great deal of harm to Nancy. It gradually
opened her eyes to the fact that Edward was a man with his ups and downs
and not an invariably gay uncle like a nice dog, a trustworthy horse or
a girl friend. She would find him in attitudes of frightful dejection,
sunk into his armchair in the study that was half a gun-room. She would
notice through the open door that his face was the face of an old, dead
man, when he had no one to talk to. Gradually it forced itself upon her
attention that there were profound differences between the pair that she
regarded as her uncle and her aunt. It was a conviction that came very
slowly.

It began with Edward's giving an oldish horse to a young fellow called
Selmes. Selmes' father had been ruined by a fraudulent solicitor and the
Selmes family had had to sell their hunters. It was a case that had
excited a good deal of sympathy in that part of the county. And Edward,
meeting the young man one day, unmounted, and seeing him to be very
unhappy, had offered to give him an old Irish cob upon which he was
riding. It was a silly sort of thing to do really. The horse was worth
from thirty to forty pounds and Edward might have known that the gift
would upset his wife. But Edward just had to comfort that unhappy young
man whose father he had known all his life. And what made it all the
worse was that young Selmes could not afford to keep the horse even.
Edward recollected this, immediately after he had made the offer, and
said quickly:

"Of course I mean that you should stable the horse at Branshaw until you
have time to turn round or want to sell him and get a better."

Nancy went straight home and told all this to Leonora who was lying
down. She regarded it as a splendid instance of Edward's quick
consideration for the feelings and the circumstances of the distressed.
She thought it would cheer Leonora up--because it ought to cheer any
woman up to know that she had such a splendid husband. That was the last
girlish thought she ever had. For Leonora, whose headache had left her
collected but miserably weak, turned upon her bed and uttered words that
were amazing to the girl:

"I wish to God," she said, "that he was your husband, and not mine. We
shall be ruined. We shall be ruined. Am I never to have a chance?" And
suddenly Leonora burst into a passion of tears. She pushed herself up
from the pillows with one elbow and sat there--crying, crying, crying,
with her face hidden in her hands and the tears falling through her
fingers.

The girl flushed, stammered and whimpered as if she had been personally
insulted.

"But if Uncle Edward..." she began.

"That man," said Leonora, with an extraordinary bitterness, "would give
the shirt off his back and off mine--and off yours to any..." She could
not finish the sentence.

At that moment she had been feeling an extraordinary hatred and contempt
for her husband. All the morning and all the afternoon she had been
lying there thinking that Edward and the girl were together--in the
field and hacking it home at dusk. She had been digging her sharp nails
into her palms.

The house had been very silent in the drooping winter weather. And then,
after an eternity of torture, there had invaded it the sound of opening
doors, of the girl's gay voice saying:

"Well, it was only under the mistletoe."... And there was Edward's gruff
undertone. Then Nancy had come in, with feet that had hastened up the
stairs and that tiptoed as they approached the open door of Leonora's
room. Branshaw had a great big hall with oak floors and tiger skins.
Round this hall there ran a gallery upon which Leonora's doorway gave.
And even when she had the worst of her headaches she liked to have her
door open--I suppose so that she might hear the approaching footsteps
of ruin and disaster. At any rate she hated to be in a room with a shut
door.

At that moment Leonora hated Edward with a hatred that was like hell,
and she would have liked to bring her riding-whip down across the girl's
face. What right had Nancy to be young and slender and dark, and gay at
times, at times mournful? What right had she to be exactly the woman
to make Leonora's husband happy? For Leonora knew that Nancy would have
made Edward happy.

Yes, Leonora wished to bring her riding-whip down on Nancy's young face.
She imagined the pleasure she would feel when the lash fell across those
queer features; the pleasure she would feel at drawing the handle at
the same moment toward her, so as to cut deep into the flesh and to
leave a lasting wheal.

Well, she left a lasting wheal, and her words cut deeply into the girl's
mind....

They neither of them spoke about that again. A fortnight went by--a
fortnight of deep rains, of heavy fields, of bad scent. Leonora's
headaches seemed to have gone for good. She hunted once or twice,
letting herself be piloted by Bayham, whilst Edward looked after the
girl. Then, one evening, when those three were dining alone, Edward
said, in the queer, deliberate, heavy tones that came out of him in
those days (he was looking at the table):

"I have been thinking that Nancy ought to do more for her father. He is
getting an old man. I have written to Colonel Rufford, suggesting that
she should go to him."

Leonora called out:

"How dare you? How dare you?"

The girl put her hand over her heart and cried out: "Oh, my sweet
Saviour, help me" That was the queer way she thought within her mind,
and the words forced themselves to her lips. Edward said nothing.

And that night, by a merciless trick of the devil that pays attention
to this sweltering hell of ours, Nancy Rufford had a letter from her
mother. It came whilst Leonora was talking to Edward, or Leonora would
have intercepted it as she had intercepted others. It was an amazing and
a horrible letter.. ..

I don't know what it contained. I just average out from its effects on
Nancy that her mother, having eloped with some worthless sort of fellow,
had done what is called "sinking lower and lower". Whether she was
actually on the streets I do not know, but I rather think that she eked
out a small allowance that she had from her husband by that means of
livelihood. And I think that she stated as much in her letter to Nancy
and upbraided the girl with living in luxury whilst her mother starved.
And it must have been horrible in tone, for Mrs Rufford was a cruel sort
of woman at the best of times. It must have seemed to that poor girl,
opening her letter, for distraction from another grief, up in her
bedroom, like the laughter of a devil.

I just cannot bear to think of my poor dear girl at that moment....

And, at the same time, Leonora was lashing, like a cold fiend, into the
unfortunate Edward. Or, perhaps, he was not so unfortunate; because he
had done what he knew to be the right thing, he may be deemed happy.
I leave it to you. At any rate, he was sitting in his deep chair, and
Leonora came into his room--for the first time in nine years. She said:

"This is the most atrocious thing you have done in your atrocious
life." He never moved and he never looked at her. God knows what was in
Leonora's mind exactly.

I like to think that, uppermost in it was concern and horror at the
thought of the poor girl's going back to a father whose voice made
her shriek in the night. And, indeed, that motive was very strong with
Leonora. But I think there was also present the thought that she wanted
to go on torturing Edward with the girl's presence. She was, at that
time, capable of that.

Edward was sunk in his chair; there were in the room two candles, hidden
by green glass shades. The green shades were reflected in the glasses
of the book-cases that contained not books but guns with gleaming brown
barrels and fishing-rods in green baize over-covers. There was dimly to
be seen, above a mantelpiece encumbered with spurs, hooves and bronze
models of horses, a dark-brown picture of a white horse.

"If you think," Leonora said, "that I do not know that you are in love
with the girl..." She began spiritedly, but she could not find any
ending for the sentence. Edward did not stir; he never spoke. And then
Leonora said:

"If you want me to divorce you, I will. You can marry her then. She's in
love with you."

He groaned at that, a little, Leonora said. Then she went away.

Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly does not
herself know. She probably said a good deal more to Edward than I have
been able to report; but that is all that she has told me and I am not
going to make up speeches. To follow her psychological development of
that moment I think we must allow that she upbraided him for a great
deal of their past life, whilst Edward sat absolutely silent. And,
indeed, in speaking of it afterwards, she has said several times: "I
said a great deal more to him than I wanted to, just because he was so
silent." She talked, in fact, in the endeavour to sting him into speech.

She must have said so much that, with the expression of her grievance,
her mood changed. She went back to her own room in the gallery, and sat
there for a long time thinking. And she thought herself into a mood
of absolute unselfishness, of absolute self-contempt, too. She said to
herself that she was no good; that she had failed in all her efforts--in
her efforts to get Edward back as in her efforts to make him curb his
expenditure. She imagined herself to be exhausted; she imagined herself
to be done. Then a great fear came over her.

She thought that Edward, after what she had said to him, must have
committed suicide. She went out on to the gallery and listened; there
was no sound in all the house except the regular beat of the great clock
in the hall. But, even in her debased condition, she was not the person
to hang about. She acted. She went straight to Edward's room, opened the
door, and looked in.

He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It was an unusual thing for
him to do, at that time of night, in his evening clothes. It never
occurred to her, nevertheless, that he was going to shoot himself with
that implement. She knew that he was doing it just for occupation--to
keep himself from thinking. He looked up when she opened the door, his
face illuminated by the light cast upwards from the round orifices in
the green candle shades.

She said:

"I didn't imagine that I should find Nancy here." She thought that she
owed that to him. He answered then:

"I don't imagine that you did imagine it." Those were the only words
he spoke that night. She went, like a lame duck, back through the long
corridors; she stumbled over the familiar tiger skins in the dark hall.
She could hardly drag one limb after the other. In the gallery she
perceived that Nancy's door was half open and that there was a light in
the girl's room. A sudden madness possessed her, a desire for action, a
thirst for self-explanation.

Their rooms all gave on to the gallery; Leonora's to the east, the
girl's next, then Edward's. The sight of those three open doors, side by
side, gaping to receive whom the chances of the black night might bring,
made Leonora shudder all over her body. She went into Nancy's room.

The girl was sitting perfectly still in an armchair, very upright, as
she had been taught to sit at the convent. She appeared to be as calm
as a church; her hair fell, black and like a pall, down over both her
shoulders. The fire beside her was burning brightly; she must have just
put coals on. She was in a white silk kimono that covered her to the
feet. The clothes that she had taken off were exactly folded upon the
proper seats. Her long hands were one upon each arm of the chair that
had a pink and white chintz back.

Leonora told me these things. She seemed to think it extraordinary that
the girl could have done such orderly things as fold up the clothes she
had taken off upon such a night--when Edward had announced that he was
going to send her to her father, and when, from her mother, she had
received that letter. The letter, in its envelope, was in her right
hand.

Leonora did not at first perceive it. She said:

"What are you doing so late?"

The girl answered: "Just thinking."

They seemed to think in whispers and to speak below their breaths. Then
Leonora's eyes fell on the envelope, and she recognized Mrs Rufford's
handwriting.

It was one of those moments when thinking was impossible, Leonora said.
It was as if stones were being thrown at her from every direction and
she could only run. She heard herself exclaim: "Edward's dying--because
of you. He's dying. He's worth more than either of us...."

The girl looked past her at the panels of the half-closed door.

"My poor father," she said, "my poor father." "You must stay here,"
Leonora answered fiercely. "You must stay here. I tell you you must stay
here."

"I am going to Glasgow," Nancy answered. "I shall go to Glasgow tomorrow
morning. My mother is in Glasgow."

It appears that it was in Glasgow that Mrs Rufford pursued her
disorderly life. She had selected that city, not because it was more
profitable but because it was the natal home of her husband to whom she
desired to cause as much pain as possible.

"You must stay here," Leonora began, "to save Edward. He's dying for
love of you."

The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora. "I know it," she said. "And
I am dying for love of him."

Leonora uttered an "Ah," that, in spite of herself, was an "Ah" of
horror and of grief.

"That is why," the girl continued, "I am going to Glasgow--to take my
mother away from there." She added, "To the ends of the earth," for, if
the last months had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases were
still romantically those of a schoolgirl. It was as if she had grown
up so quickly that there had not been time to put her hair up. But she
added: "We're no good--my mother and I."

Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:

"No. No. You're not no good. It's I that am no good. You can't let that
man go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him."

The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, far-away smile--as if
she were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.

"I knew you would come to that," she said, very slowly. "But we are not
worth it--Edward and I."

 Part IV, Section I Dowell admits that he has told this story in a very rambling way, going back and forward as he remembers important details. He justifies such a narration by claiming that it is more real; he says that it is the way a person telling a story would transmit it. As he reflects upon the story in its entirety, he places more blame on Florence than he did at the beginning of the novel. He charges her with depressing and deteriorating both Edward and Leonora, obliterating all opportunity for them to once again have a healthy marriage. He suggests that Leonora could have done more, perhaps, to prevent the affair once she realized it was a possibility. But he must admit that he should not condemn her for her inactivity. It was, after all Florence, with her vulgarity and her pride, who finally lured Edward away from his wife. Before their trip to M--, it appeared that Leonora's plan to win her husband back had been working. She excused his previous affairs as the uncontrollable nature of man, and she admitted that perhaps she had gone too far by so restricting Edward's money. He responded by making small advances to her, attempts to renew their intimacy. But this structure was smashed the moment that Florence laid her hand upon Edward's wrist. Leonora saw that Edward responded to Florence's advances, and she did not see how it could ever be possible for Edward to return to her "after such a vulgar intrigue with a vulgar woman." Leonora despised Florence, for not only did she thwart Leonora's strongest desire, she did so in a rude and showy manner, by constantly talking to Leonora of her affairs with Edward. When they returned to Branshaw Manor, Leonora once again clamped down on Edward's expenditures. She was enraged that he endeavored to spend money helping others through public service; she could not believe that Edward would donate to the War Office the rights to his stirrup, a potentially profitable invention. Dowell thinks that it was the prospect of being unable to help others which ultimately caused Edward to commit suicide. Part IV, Section II Dowell returns to Connecticut to visit the Misses Hurlbird and to settle the affairs of Uncle John Hurlbird. Because Hurlbird died only five days before Florence, Dowell is the inheritor of both of their fortunes. Uncle John asked that his money be used to found a center for the treatment of heart patients. After his death the doctors discovered that Uncle John never really had a heart problem; he had a lung problem. Dowell split the money to build a much larger center for the treatment of both the heart and the lungs. After donating the money, Dowell leaves to return to England as per the wishes of Edward and Leonora. Once at Branshaw Manor, Dowell learns that Nancy is leaving for India tomorrow in order to spend time with her father. He intends to propose to her before she leaves. But before he proposes, he has a long talk with Edward, who describes many of the events which have occurred in Dowell's absence. After they returned from Nauheim, Leonora had a breakdown. She had awful headaches and both she and Edward descended into depression. Nancy tried as best she could to care for her aunt and uncle, but she is unable to make the situation better. When Nancy returns home to tell Leonora of a good deed that Edward has done by giving a young man named Selmes his horse, Leonora responds with hatred rather than admiration. Leonora's hatred for Edward grows and she becomes increasingly bitter that Nancy is the person who can make Edward happy. In an effort to relieve his strain, Edward announces that he is sending Nancy to India to spend some time with her father. Leonora is livid that Edward could do something so selfish in sending a girl back to a man whom she fears. Leonora slips into Nancy's room later that night to talk to her. She tells her that Edward is dying for love of her. Nancy responds that she too is suffering because she is in love with Edward. Leonora is taken aback. Nancy says that she intends to go to Glasgow to care for her mother who has fallen on hard times. Leonora implores Nancy to stay, to belong to Edward so that he may be saved. Nancy smiles but answers that she and Edward are not worth that.

