Chance by Joseph Conrad (novels to read TXT) 📕

“Duplicity is a strong word, Mrs. Fyne—isn’t it?” I expostulated.  “And considering that Captain Anthony himself . . . ”

“Oh well—perhaps,” she interrupted me.  Her eyes which never strayed away from mine, her set features, her whole immovable figure, how well I knew those appearances of a person who has “made up her mind.”  A very hopeless condition that, specially in women.  I mistrusted her concession so easily, so stonily made.  She reflected a moment.  “Yes.  I ought to have said—ingratitude, perhaps.”

After having thus disengaged her brother and pushed the poor girl a little further off as it were—isn’t women’s cleverness perfectly diabolic when they are really put on their mettle?—after having done these things and also made me feel that I was no match for her, she went on scrupulously: “One doesn’t like to use that word either.  The claim is very small.  It’s so little one could do for her.  Still . . . ”

“I dare say,” I exclaimed, throwing diplomacy to the winds.  “But really, Mrs. Fyne, it’s impossible to dismiss your brother like this out of the business . . . ”

“She threw herself at his head,” Mrs. Fyne uttered firmly.

“He had no business to put his head in the way, then,” I retorted with an angry laugh.  I didn’t restrain myself because her fixed stare seemed to express the purpose to daunt me.  I was not afraid of her, but it occurred to me that I was within an ace of drifting into a downright quarrel with a lady and, besides, my guest.  There was the cold teapot, the emptied cups, emblems of hospitality.  It could not be.  I cut short my angry laugh while Mrs. Fyne murmured with a slight movement of her shoulders, “He!  Poor man!  Oh come . . . ”

By a great effort of will I found myself able to smile amiably, to speak with proper softness.

“My dear Mrs. Fyne, you forget that I don’t know him—not even by sight.  It’s difficult to imagine a victim as passive as all that; but granting you the (I very nearly said: imbecility, but checked myself in time) innocence of Captain Anthony, don’t you think now, frankly, that there is a little of your own fault in what has happened.  You bring them together, you leave your brother to himself!”

She sat up and leaning her elbow on the table sustained her head in her open palm casting down her eyes.  Compunction?  It was indeed a very off-hand way of treating a brother come to stay for the first time in fifteen years.  I suppose she discovered very soon that she had nothing in common with that sailor, that stranger, fashioned and marked by the sea of long voyages.  In her strong-minded way she had scorned pretences, had gone to her writing which interested her immensely.  A very praiseworthy thing your sincere conduct,—if it didn’t at times resemble brutality so much.  But I don’t think it was compunction.  That sentiment is rare in women . . . ”

“Is it?” I interrupted indignantly.

“You know more women than I do,” retorted the unabashed Marlow.  “You make it your business to know them—don’t you?  You go about a lot amongst all sorts of people.  You are a tolerably honest observer.  Well, just try to remember how many instances of compunction you have seen.  I am ready to take your bare word for it.  Compunction!  Have you ever seen as much as its shadow?  Have you ever?  Just a shadow—a passing shadow!  I tell you it is so rare that you may call it non-existent.  They are too passionate.  Too pedantic.  Too courageous with themselves—perhaps.  No I don’t think for a moment that Mrs. Fyne felt the slightest compunction at her treatment of her sea-going brother.  What he thought of it who can tell?  It is possible that he wondered why he had been so insistently urged to come.  It is possible that he wondered bitterly—or contemptuously—or humbly.  And it may be that he was only surprised and bored.  Had he been as sincere in his conduct as his only sister he would have probably taken himself off at the end of the second day.  But perhaps he was afraid of appearing brutal.  I am not far removed from the conviction that between the sincerities of his sister and of his dear nieces, Captain Anthony of the Ferndale must have had his loneliness brought home to his bosom for the first time of his life, at an age, thirty-five or thereabouts, when one is mature enough to feel the pang of such a discovery.  Angry or simply sad but certainly disillusioned he wanders about and meets the girl one afternoon and under the sway of a strong feeling forgets his shyness.  This is no supposition.  It is a fact.  There was such a meeting in which the shyness must have perished before we don’t know what encouragement, or in the community of mood made apparent by some casual word.  You remember that Mrs. Fyne saw them one afternoon coming back to the cottage together.  Don’t you think that I have hit on the psychology of the situation? . . . ”

“Doubtless . . . ”  I began to ponder.

“I was very certain of my conclusions at the time,” Marlow went on impatiently.  “But don’t think for a moment that Mrs. Fyne in her new attitude and toying thoughtfully with a teaspoon was about to surrender.  She murmured:

“It’s the last thing I should have thought could happen.”

“You didn’t suppose they were romantic enough,” I suggested dryly.

She let it pass and with great decision but as if speaking to herself,

“Roderick really must be warned.”

She didn’t give me the time to ask of what precisely.  She raised her head and addressed me.

“I am surprised and grieved more than I can tell you at Mr. Fyne’s resistance.  We have been always completely at one on every question.  And that we should differ now on a point touching my brother so closely is a most painful surprise to me.”  Her hand rattled the teaspoon brusquely by an involuntary movement.  “It is intolerable,” she added tempestuously—for Mrs. Fyne that is.  I suppose she had nerves of her own like any other woman.

Under the porch where Fyne had sought refuge with the dog there was silence.  I took it for a proof of deep sagacity.  I don’t mean on the part of the dog.  He was a confirmed fool.

I said:

“You want absolutely to interfere . . . ?”  Mrs. Fyne nodded just perceptibly . . . “Well—for my part . . . but I don’t really know how matters stand at the present time.  You have had a letter from Miss de Barral.  What does that letter say?”

“She asks for her valise to be sent to her town address,” Mrs. Fyne uttered reluctantly and stopped.  I waited a bit—then exploded.

“Well!  What’s the matter?  Where’s the difficulty?  Does your husband object to that?  You don’t mean to say that he wants you to appropriate the girl’s clothes?”

“Mr. Marlow!”

“Well, but you talk of a painful difference of opinion with your husband, and then, when I ask for information on the point, you bring out a valise.  And only a few moments ago you reproached me for not being serious.  I wonder who is the serious person of us two now.”

She smiled faintly and in a friendly tone, from which I concluded at once that she did not mean to show me the girl’s letter, she said that undoubtedly the letter disclosed an understanding between Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral.

“What understanding?” I pressed her.  “An engagement is an understanding.”

“There is no engagement—not yet,” she said decisively.  “That letter, Mr. Marlow, is couched in very vague terms.  That is why—”

I interrupted her without ceremony.

“You still hope to interfere to some purpose.  Isn’t it so?  Yes?  But how should you have liked it if anybody had tried to interfere between you and Mr. Fyne at the time when your understanding with each other could still have been described in vague terms?”

She had a genuine movement of astonished indignation.  It is with the accent of perfect sincerity that she cried out at me:

“But it isn’t at all the same thing!  How can you!”

Indeed how could I!  The daughter of a poet and the daughter of a convict are not comparable in the consequences of their conduct if their necessity may wear at times a similar aspect.  Amongst these consequences I could perceive undesirable cousins for these dear healthy girls, and such like, possible causes of embarrassment in the future.

“No!  You can’t be serious,” Mrs. Fyne’s smouldering resentment broke out again.  “You haven’t thought—”

“Oh yes, Mrs. Fyne!  I have thought.  I am still thinking.  I am even trying to think like you.”

“Mr. Marlow,” she said earnestly.  “Believe me that I really am thinking of my brother in all this . . . ”  I assured her that I quite believed she was.  For there is no law of nature making it impossible to think of more than one person at a time.  Then I said:

“She has told him all about herself of course.”

“All about her life,” assented Mrs. Fyne with an air, however, of making some mental reservation which I did not pause to investigate.  “Her life!” I repeated.  “That girl must have had a mighty bad time of it.”

“Horrible,” Mrs. Fyne admitted with a ready frankness very creditable under the circumstances, and a warmth of tone which made me look at her with a friendly eye.  “Horrible!  No!  You can’t imagine the sort of vulgar people she became dependent on . . . You know her father never attempted to see her while he was still at large.  After his arrest he instructed that relative of his—the odious person who took her away from Brighton—not to let his daughter come to the court during the trial.  He refused to hold any communication with her whatever.”

I remembered what Mrs. Fyne had told me before of the view she had years ago of de Barral clinging to the child at the side of his wife’s grave and later on of these two walking hand in hand the observed of all eyes by the sea.  Pictures from Dickens—pregnant with pathos.

“A very singular prohibition,” remarked Mrs. Fyne after a short silence.  “He seemed to love the child.”

She was puzzled.  But I surmised that it might have been the sullenness of a man unconscious of guilt and standing at bay to fight his “persecutors,” as he called them; or else the fear of a softer emotion weakening his defiant attitude; perhaps, even, it was a self-denying ordinance, in order to spare the girl the sight of her father in the dock, accused of cheating, sentenced as a swindler—proving the possession of a certain moral delicacy.

Mrs. Fyne didn’t know what to think.  She supposed it might have been mere callousness.  But the people amongst whom the girl had fallen had positively not a grain of moral delicacy.  Of that she was certain.  Mrs. Fyne could not undertake to give me an idea of their abominable vulgarity.  Flora used to tell her something of her life in that household, over there, down Limehouse way.  It was incredible.  It passed Mrs. Fyne’s comprehension.  It was a sort of moral savagery which she could not have thought possible.

I, on the contrary, thought it very possible.  I could imagine easily how the poor girl must have been bewildered and hurt at her reception in that household—envied for her past while delivered defenceless to the tender mercies of people without any fineness either of feeling or mind, unable to understand her misery, grossly curious, mistaking her manner for disdain, her silent shrinking for pride.  The wife of the “odious person” was witless and fatuously conceited.  Of the two girls of the house one was pious and the other a romp; both were coarse-minded—if