Somehow Good by William Frend De Morgan (best short novels TXT) 📕

only worries you, and does no good." And he replied to her, as she came behind him and stood with an appreciative side-face against his, with a semi-apology for the phrase "daughter," and allowed the rest of what they were speaking of to lapse.

"I called her it for the pleasure of saying it," said he. "It sounded so nice!" And then he knew that her kiss was approval, but of course had no conception of its thoroughness. For her part, she hardly dared to think of the strangeness of the position; she could only rejoice at its outcome.

After that it became so natural to him to speak of Sally as "our daughter" that often enough new acquaintances misconceived her relation to him, and had a shrewd insight that Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick must have been married very young. Once some visitors--a lady with one married daughter and two single ones--were so powerfully impressed with Sally's resemblance to her supposed parent that three-fourths of them went unconvinced away, in spite of the efforts of the whole household to remove the error. The odd fourth was supposed to have carried away corrective information. "I got the flat one, with the elbows, in a quiet corner," said Sally, "and told her Jeremiah was only step. Because they all shouted at once, so it was impossible to make them hear in a lump."

Mistakes of this sort, occurring frequently, reacted on Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick, who found in them a constant support and justification for the theory that Sally was really the daughter of both, while admitting intellectual rejection of it to be plausible to commonplace minds. They themselves got on a higher level, where _ex-post-facto_ parentages were possible. Causes might have miscarried, but results having turned out all right, it would never do to be too critical about antecedents. Anyhow, Sally was _going to be_ our daughter, whether she _was_ or not.

Rosalind always found a curious consolation in the reflection that, however bewildering the position might be, she had it all to herself. This was entirely apart from her desire to keep Fenwick in ignorance of his past; that was merely a necessity for his own sake and Sally's, while this related to the painfulness of standing face to face with an incredible conjunction of surroundings. She, if alone, could take refuge in wonder-struck silence. If her knowledge were shared with another, how could examination and analysis be avoided? And these would involve the resurrection of what she could keep underground as long as she was by herself; backed by a thought, if needed, of the merry eyebrows and pearly teeth, and sweet, soft youth, of its unconscious result. But to be obliged to review and speculate over what she desired to forget, and was helped to forget by gratitude for its consequences, would have been a needless addition to the burden she had already to bear.

The only person she could get any consolation from talking with was the Major, who already knew, or nearly knew, the particulars of the nightmare of twenty years ago. But, then--we feel that we are repeating this _ad nauseam_--he was quite in the dark about Fenwick's identity, and was to be kept there. Rosalind had decided it so, and she may have been right.

Would she have done better by forcing on her husband the knowledge of his own identity, and risking the shock to her daughter of hearing the story of her outsider father's sin against her mother? Her decision against this course was always emphasized by--may even have been unconsciously due to--her prevision of the difficulty of the communication to Sally. How should she set about it? She pictured various forms of the attempt to herself, and found none she did not shudder at.

The knowledge that such things could be would spoil the whole world for the girl. She had to confess to herself that the customary paltering with the meaning of words that enables modern novels to be written about the damnedest things in the universe would either leave her mind uninformed, or call for a commentary--a rubric in the reddest of red letters. Even a resort to the brutal force of Oriental speech done into Jacobean English would be of little avail. For hypocrisy is at work all through juvenile reception of Holy Writ, and brings out as a result the idea that that writ is holy because it uses coarse language about things that hardly call for it. It Bowdlerises Potiphar's wife, and favours the impression that in Sodom and Gomorrah the inhabitants were dissipated and sat up late. This sort of thing wouldn't work with Sally. If the story were to be told at all, her thunderbolt directness would have it all out, down to the ground. Her mother went through the _pros_ and _cons_ again and again, and always came to the same conclusion--silence.

But for all that, Rosalind had a background belief that a time would come when a complete revelation would be possible. Her mind stipulated for a wider experience for Sally before then. It would be so infinitely easier to tell her tale to one who had herself arrived at the goal of motherhood, utterly unlike as (so she took for granted) was to be the way of her arrival, sunlit and soft to tread, from the black precipice and thorny wastes that had brought her to her own.

Any possible marriage of Sally's, however, was a vague abstraction of an indistinct future. Perhaps we should say _had been_, and admit that since her own marriage Mrs. Fenwick had begun to be more distinctly aware that her little daughter was now within a negligible period of the age when her own tree of happiness in life had been so curtly broken off short, and no new leafage suffered to sprout upon the broken stem. This identity of age could not but cause comparison of lots. "Suppose it had been Sally!" was the thought that would sometimes spring on her mother's mind; and then the girl would wonder what mamma was thinking of that she should make her arm that was round her tighten as though she feared to lose her, or bring her an irrelevant, unanticipated kiss.

This landmark-period bristled with suggested questions of what was to follow it. Sally would marry--that seemed inevitable; and her mother, now that she was herself married again, did not shrink from the idea as she had done, in spite of her protests against her own selfishness.

Miss Sally's attitude toward the tender passion did not at present give any grounds for supposing that she was secretly its victim, or ever would be. Intense amusement at the perturbation she occasioned to sensitive young gentlemen seemed to be the nearest approach to reciprocating their sentiments that she held out any hopes of. She admitted as a pure abstraction that it was possible to be in love, but regarded applicants as obstacles that stood in their own way.

"I'm sure his adoration does him great credit," she said to Laetitia one day about a new devotee--for there was no lack of them. "But it's his eyes, and his nose, and his mouth, and his chin, and his ears, and his hair, and his hands and his feet, and his altogether that----"

"That what?" asked her friend.

"That you can't expect a girl to then, if you insist upon it."

"Some girl will, you'll see, one of these days."

"What!--even that man with teeth!" This was some chance acquaintance, useful for illustration, but not in the story. Laetitia knew enough of him to give a testimonial.

"He's a very good fellow, whatever you may say!" said she.

"My dear Tishy! Goodness is the distinguishing feature of the opposite sex. I speak as a person of my own. Men's moral qualities are always high. If it wasn't for their appearance, and their manners, and their defective intelligences, they would make the most charming husbands."

"How very young you are!" Miss Wilson said, superior experience oozing out at every pore. Sally might have passed this by, but when it came to patting you on the cheek, she drew a line.

"Tishy dear, do you mean to go on like that, when I'm a hundred and you are a hundred and five?"

"Yes, dear. At least, I can't say. Anything may have happened by then."

"What sort of thing? Come, Tishy, don't be enigmatical. For instance?"

"You'll change your mind and be wiser--you'll see." Which might have been consecutive in another conversation. But it was insufferably patronizing in Laetitia to evade the centenarian forecast that should have come in naturally, and retreat into a vague abstraction, managing to make it appear (Sally couldn't say how or why) that her own general remarks about man, which meant nothing, were a formal proclamation of celibacy on her part. It is odd how little the mere wording of a conversation may convey, especially girl's conversation. What _is_ there in the above to warrant what came next from Sally?

"If you mean Dr. Vereker, that's ridiculous."

"I never mentioned his name, dear."

"Of course you didn't; you couldn't have, and wouldn't have. But anybody could tell what you meant, just the same, by leaving your mouth open when you'd done speaking." We confess freely that we should not have known, but what are we? Why _should_ Laetitia's having left her lips slightly ajar, instead of closing them, have "meant Dr. Vereker"?

But the fact is--to quote an expression of Sally's own--brain-waves were the rule and not the exception with her. And hypnotic suggestion raged as between her and Miss Laetitia Wilson, interrupting practice, and involving the performers in wide-ranging, irrelevant discussion. It was on a musical occasion at Ladbroke Grove Road that this conversation took place.

Laetitia wasn't going to deny Dr. Vereker, evidently, or else there really was something very engrossing about her G string. Sally went on, while she dog's-eared her music, which was new, to get good turning-over advantages when it came to playing.

"My medical adviser's not bad, taken as an aunt. I don't quite know what I should do without poor Prosy. But as for anything, of course that's absurd. Why, half the fun is that there _isn't_ anything!"

Laetitia knew as well as possible that her young friend, once started, would develop the subject on her own lines without further help from her. She furnished her face with a faint expression of amused waiting, not strong enough to be indictable, but operative, and said never a word.

"Foolery would spoil it all," pursued Sally; "in fact, I put my foot down at the first go-off. I pointed out that I stipulated to be considered a chap. Prosy showed tact--I must say that for Prosy--distinctly tact. You see, if I had had to say a single word to him on the subject, it would have been all up." Then possibly, in response to a threat of an inflexion in her friend's waiting countenance, "I should say, when I make use of the expression 'pointed out,' perhaps I ought to say 'conveyed to him.'" Sally gets the viola in place for a start, and asks is her friend ready? Waiting, it seems; so she merely adds, "Yes, I should say conveyed it to him." And off they go with the new piece of music in B flat, and are soon involved in terrifying complications which have to be done all over again. At the end, they are ungrateful to B flat, and say they don't care much for it; it will be better when they can play it, however. Then Laetitia schemes to wind Sally up a little.

"Doesn't the Goody goozle at you about him, though? You said she