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

of the undertow was guilty of a tremendous glare--the one the people who can't endure the seaside get neuralgia from--and Sally was going to come out of the second machine directly in the Turkey-twill knickers, and find her way through the selvage-wave and the dazzle, or get knocked down and have to try back. Surely Rosalind, instead of saying over and over again that she _must_ be ready to meet the coming evil, possibly close at hand, ought to make a serious effort to become so. She found herself, even at this early hour of the day, tired with the strain of a misgiving that an earthquake was approaching; and as those who have lived through earthquakes become unstrung at every slightest tremor of the earth's crust beneath them, so she felt that the tension begun with that recurrence of two days ago had grown and grown, and threatened to dominate her mind, to the exclusion of all else. Every little thing, such as the look on her husband's face half an hour ago, made her say to herself, as the earthquake-haunted man says at odd times all through the day and night, "Is this _it_? Has it come?" and she saw before her no haven of peace.

What was it now she really most feared? Simply the effect of the revelation on her husband's mind--an effect no human creature could make terms with. She was not the least afraid of anything he could say or do, delirium apart; but see what delirium had made of him--she was sure it was so--in that old evil hour when he had flung her from him and gone away in anger to try to get her sentence of banishment ratified. How could she guard against a repetition, in some form or other, of the disastrous errors of that unhappy time?

As we know, she was still in ignorance of all the revived memories he had told to Vereker; but she knew there had been something--disjointed, perhaps, and not to be relied on, as the doctor had said, but none the less to be feared on that account. She had seen the effect of his sleepless night before he went away with Vereker, and knew it to be connected with mental disturbance outside and beyond mere loss of rest; and she had an uneasy sense that something was being kept from her. She could not but believe Gerry's cheerfulness was partly assumed. Had he been quite at ease about his recollections, surely he would have told them to _her_. Then this had all come on the top of that Kreutzkammer one. The most upsetting thing of all, though, was the change that had come over him suddenly at breakfast, just after he had read aloud the name Herrick--a name he had seemed not free from memory of when her tongue was betrayed into speaking it--and the name Penderfield. If it was due to this last, so much the worse! It was the name of all others that was best for oblivion.

How hard it seemed that it must needs force itself to the fore in this way! Its present intrusion into her life and surroundings was utterly unconnected with anything in the past. Sally's friendship with Laetitia began in a music-class six years ago. The Sales Wilsons were people to all appearance as un-Indian as any folk need be. Why must Sally's friend, of all others, be the object of its owner's unwelcome admiration? To think, too, how near she had been to a precipice without knowing it! Suppose she had come face to face with that woman again! To be sure, her intercourse with Ladbroke Grove Road was limited to one stiff exchange of calls in "the season." Still, it might have happened ... but where was the use of begging and borrowing troubles?

Was it, or was it not, the fact, she asked herself, that now, after all these years, she thought of this woman as worse than her husband, the iniquity of the accomplice as more diabolical than that of the principal? She found she could not answer this in the negative off-hand. The paradox was also before her that that incorrigible amphibious treasure of hers, whose voice was even now shouting to her more timorous friend from beyond the selvage-wave she had just contemptuously dived through--that that Sally, inexchangeable for anything she could conceive or imagine, must needs have been something quite other than she was, had she come of any other technical paternity than the accursed one she had to own to. Was there some terrible law in Nature that slow forgiveness of the greatest wrong that can be wrought must perforce be granted to its inflictor, through the gracious survivor of a brutal indifference that would almost add to his crime, if that were possible? If, so, surely the Universe must be the work of an Almighty Fiend, a Demiurgus with a cruel heart, and this the masterstroke of all his cunning. But what, in Heaven's name, was the use of bruising her brains against the conundrums of the great unanswered metaphysical sphinx? Better be contented with the easy vernacular solution of the rhymester:


"Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
Evils from circumstances grow."


Because she felt she was getting no nearer the solution of her own problem, and was, if anything, wandering from the point.

Another way of looking at the matter was beginning to take form: had hung about her mind and forsaken it more than once. Might it not be better, after all, to dash at the position and capture it while her forces were well under control? To pursue the metaphor, the commissariat might not hold out. Better endure the ills we have--of course, Rosalind knew all that--than fly to others that we know not of. But suppose we have a chance of flying to others we can measure the length and breadth of, and staving off thereby an uncalculable unknown? She felt she almost knew the worst that could come of taking Gerry into her confidence, telling him boldly all about himself, provided she could choose her opportunity and make sure Sally was well out of the way. The concealment from Sally was the achievement whose failure involved the greatest risk. Her husband's mind would bear the knowledge of his story well or ill according to the way in which it reached him; but the necessity of keeping her girl in ignorance of it was a thing absolute. Any idea that Sally's origin could be concealed from her, and her stepfather's identity made known, Rosalind dismissed as simply fantastic.

A lady who had established herself below high-water mark with many more books than she could read, and plant capable of turning out much more work than she could do, at this point fled for safety from a rush of white foam. It went back for more, meaning to wet her through next time; but had to bear its disappointment. Mrs. Arkwright--for it was Gwendolen's mamma--being driven from the shadow of the breakwater, cast about her for a new lodgment, and perceived one beside Mrs. Fenwick, whom she thought very well for the seaside, but not to leave cards on. _Might_ she come up there, beside you? Rosalind didn't want her, but had to pretend she did, to encourage her advent. It left behind it a track of skeins and volumes, which had trickled from the fugitive, but were recovered by a domestic, and pronounced dry. Besides, they were only library books, and didn't matter.

"I haven't seen you since the other day on the pier, Mrs. Fenwick, or I wanted to have asked you more about that charming young couple, the Julian Attwoods. Oh dear! I knew I should get the name wrong.... _Bradshaw!_ Yes, of course." Her vivid perception of what the name really is, when apprised of it, almost amounts to a paroxysm. You see, on the pier that day, she made a bad blunder over those Bradshaw people, and though she had consoled her conscience by admitting to her husband that she had "_mis le pied dans le plat_," still, she thought, if she was actually going to plump down on Mrs. Fenwick's piece of beach, she ought to do a little more apology. By-the-bye, why is it that ladies of her sort always resort to snippets of French idiom, whenever they get involved in a quagmire of delicacy--or indelicacy, as may be? Will Gwendolen grow like her mother? However, that doesn't concern us now.

A little stiffness on Rosalind's part was really due to her wish to be by herself, but Mrs. Arkwright ascribed it to treasured resentment against her blunders of two days since. Now, she was a person who could never let anything drop--a tugging person. She proceeded to develop the subject.

"Really a most interesting story! I need hardly say that my informants had given me no particulars. Very old friends of my husband's. Quite possible they really knew nothing of this young gentleman's musical gifts. Simply told my husband the tale as I told it to you. Just that the daughter of an old friend of theirs, Professor Sales Wilson--_the_ Professor Sales Wilson--of course, quite a famous name in literature--scholarship--that sort of thing--had run away with a shopman! That was what my husband heard, you know. _I_ merely repeated it."

"Wasn't it, as things go, rather a malicious way of putting it--on their part?"

Mrs. Arkwright gave sagacious nods, indicative of comfortable "_we_-know-the-world-we-live-in-and-won't-pretend" relationships between herself and the speaker. They advertised perfect mutual understanding on a pinnacle of married experience. Fancy there being any need for anything else between _us_! they said. Their editor then supplied explanatory text: "Of course there may have been a _soupcon_ of personal feeling in the case--bias, pique, whatever one likes to call it. _You_ know, dear Mrs. Fenwick?" But Mrs. Fenwick waited for further illumination. "Well, you know ... I suppose it's rather a breach of confidence, only I know I shall be safe with _you_...."

"Don't tell me any secrets, Mrs. Arkwright. I'm not safe." But Mrs. Arkwright was not a person to be put off in this way. Not she! She meant elucidation, and nothing short of bayonets would stop her.

"Well, really, perhaps I'm making it of too much importance to talk of breaches of confidence. After all, it only amounts to a gentleman having been disappointed. Of course, his relations would ... don't you see?..."

"Was it some man that was after Tishy?" asked Rosalind, wondering how many more rejected suitors were wearing the willow about the haberdasher's bride. She had heard of one, only last night. She was not putting two and two together.

"I dare say everybody knows it, and it's only my nonsensical caution. But one does get _so_ timorous of saying anything. _You_ know, dear Mrs. Fenwick! However, it's better to say it out now--of course, quite between ourselves, you know. It was Mrs. Samuel Herrick's son, Sir Charles Penderfield. He's the present baronet, you know. Father was in the army--rather distinguished man, I fancy. Her second husband was a clergyman...." Here followed social analysis, some of which Rosalind could have corrected. The speaker floundered a little among county families, and then resumed the main theme. "Mrs. Herrick is a sort of connexion of my husband's (I don't exactly know what; but then, I never _do_ know--family is such a bore), and it was _she_ told _him_ all about this. I always forget these things when they're told _me_. But I can quite understand that the young man's mother, in speaking of it ... _you_ understand?..."

"Oh, of course, naturally. I think my daughter's coming out. I saw her machine-door move." Rosalind began collecting herself for departure.

"But, of course, you won't repeat any of this--but,