Chance - Joseph Conrad (ebook reader below 3000 .TXT) 📗

from the incomparably insolent manner of the governess.  Fyne stood by her side, as in those old-fashioned photographs of married couples where you see a husband with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair.  And they were about as efficient as an old photograph, and as still, till Mrs. Fyne started slightly.  The street door had swung open, and, bursting out, appeared the young man, his hat (Mrs. Fyne observed) tilted forward over his eyes.  After him the governess slipped through, turning round at once to shut the door behind her with care.  Meantime the man went down the white steps and strode along the pavement, his hands rammed deep into the pockets of his fawn overcoat.  The woman, that woman of composed movements, of deliberate superior manner, took a little run to catch up with him, and directly she had caught up with him tried to introduce her hand under his arm.  Mrs. Fyne saw the brusque half turn of the fellow’s body as one avoids an importunate contact, defeating her attempt rudely.  She did not try again but kept pace with his stride, and Mrs. Fyne watched them, walking independently, turn the corner of the street side by side, disappear for ever.

The Fynes looked at each other eloquently, doubtfully: What do you think of this?  Then with common accord turned their eyes back to the street door, closed, massive, dark; the great, clear-brass knocker shining in a quiet slant of sunshine cut by a diagonal line of heavy shade filling the further end of the street.  Could the girl be already gone?  Sent away to her father?  Had she any relations?  Nobody but de Barral himself ever came to see her, Mrs. Fyne remembered; and she had the instantaneous, profound, maternal perception of the child’s loneliness—and a girl too!  It was irresistible.  And, besides, the departure of the governess was not without its encouraging influence.  “I am going over at once to find out,” she declared resolutely but still staring across the street.  Her intention was arrested by the sight of that awful, sombrely glistening door, swinging back suddenly on the yawning darkness of the hall, out of which literally flew out, right out on the pavement, almost without touching the white steps, a little figure swathed in a holland pinafore up to the chin, its hair streaming back from its head, darting past a lamp-post, past the red pillar-box . . . “Here,” cried Mrs. Fyne; “she’s coming here!  Run, John!  Run!”

Fyne bounded out of the room.  This is his own word.  Bounded!  He assured me with intensified solemnity that he bounded; and the sight of the short and muscular Fyne bounding gravely about the circumscribed passages and staircases of a small, very high class, private hotel, would have been worth any amount of money to a man greedy of memorable impressions.  But as I looked at him, the desire of laughter at my very lips, I asked myself: how many men could be found ready to compromise their cherished gravity for the sake of the unimportant child of a ruined financier with an ugly, black cloud already wreathing his head.  I didn’t laugh at little Fyne.  I encouraged him: “You did!—very good . . . Well?”

His main thought was to save the child from some unpleasant interference.  There was a porter downstairs, page boys; some people going away with their trunks in the passage; a railway omnibus at the door, white-breasted waiters dodging about the entrance.

He was in time.  He was at the door before she reached it in her blind course.  She did not recognize him; perhaps she did not see him.  He caught her by the arm as she ran past and, very sensibly, without trying to check her, simply darted in with her and up the stairs, causing no end of consternation amongst the people in his way.  They scattered.  What might have been their thoughts at the spectacle of a shameless middle-aged man abducting headlong into the upper regions of a respectable hotel a terrified young girl obviously under age, I don’t know.  And Fyne (he told me so) did not care for what people might think.  All he wanted was to reach his wife before the girl collapsed.  For a time she ran with him but at the last flight of stairs he had to seize and half drag, half carry her to his wife.  Mrs. Fyne waited at the door with her quite unmoved physiognomy and her readiness to confront any sort of responsibility, which already characterized her, long before she became a ruthless theorist.  Relieved, his mission accomplished, Fyne closed hastily the door of the sitting-room.

But before long both Fynes became frightened.  After a period of immobility in the arms of Mrs. Fyne, the girl, who had not said a word, tore herself out from that slightly rigid embrace.  She struggled dumbly between them, they did not know why, soundless and ghastly, till she sank exhausted on a couch.  Luckily the children were out with the two nurses.  The hotel housemaid helped Mrs. Fyne to put Flora de Barral to bed.  She was as if gone speechless and insane.  She lay on her back, her face white like a piece of paper, her dark eyes staring at the ceiling, her awful immobility broken by sudden shivering fits with a loud chattering of teeth in the shadowy silence of the room, the blinds pulled down, Mrs. Fyne sitting by patiently, her arms folded, yet inwardly moved by the riddle of that distress of which she could not guess the word, and saying to herself: “That child is too emotional—much too emotional to be ever really sound!”  As if anyone not made of stone could be perfectly sound in this world.  And then how sound?  In what sense—to resist what?  Force or corruption?  And even in the best armour of steel there are joints a treacherous stroke can always find if chance gives the opportunity.

General considerations never had the power to trouble Mrs. Fyne much.  The girl not being in a state to be questioned she waited by the bedside.  Fyne had crossed over to the house, his scruples overcome by his anxiety to discover what really had happened.  He did not have to lift the knocker; the door stood open on the inside gloom of the hall; he walked into it and saw no one about, the servants having assembled for a fatuous consultation in the basement.  Fyne’s uplifted bass voice startled them down there, the butler coming up, staring and in his shirt sleeves, very suspicious at first, and then, on Fyne’s explanation that he was the husband of a lady who had called several times at the house—Miss de Barral’s mother’s friend—becoming humanely concerned and communicative, in a man to man tone, but preserving his trained high-class servant’s voice: “Oh bless you, sir, no!  She does not mean to come back.  She told me so herself”—he assured Fyne with a faint shade of contempt creeping into his tone.

As regards their young lady nobody downstairs had any idea that she had run out of the house.  He dared say they all would have been willing to do their very best for her, for the time being; but since she was now with her mother’s friends . . .

He fidgeted.  He murmured that all this was very unexpected.  He wanted to know what he had better do with letters or telegrams which might arrive in the course of the day.

“Letters addressed to Miss de Barral, you had better bring over to my hotel over there,” said Fyne beginning to feel extremely worried about the future.  The man said “Yes, sir,” adding, “and if a letter comes addressed to Mrs. . . . ”

Fyne stopped him by a gesture.  “I don’t know . . . Anything you like.”

“Very well, sir.”

The butler did not shut the street door after Fyne, but remained on the doorstep for a while, looking up and down the street in the spirit of independent expectation like a man who is again his own master.  Mrs. Fyne hearing her husband return came out of the room where the girl was lying in bed.  “No change,” she whispered; and Fyne could only make a hopeless sign of ignorance as to what all this meant and how it would end.

He feared future complications—naturally; a man of limited means, in a public position, his time not his own.  Yes.  He owned to me in the parlour of my farmhouse that he had been very much concerned then at the possible consequences.  But as he was making this artless confession I said to myself that, whatever consequences and complications he might have imagined, the complication from which he was suffering now could never, never have presented itself to his mind.  Slow but sure (for I conceive that the Book of Destiny has been written up from the beginning to the last page) it had been coming for something like six years—and now it had come.  The complication was there!  I looked at his unshaken solemnity with the amused pity we give the victim of a funny if somewhat ill-natured practical joke.

“Oh hang it,” he exclaimed—in no logical connection with what he had been relating to me.  Nevertheless the exclamation was intelligible enough.

However at first there were, he admitted, no untoward complications, no embarrassing consequences.  To a telegram in guarded terms dispatched to de Barral no answer was received for more than twenty-four hours.  This certainly caused the Fynes some anxiety.  When the answer arrived late on the evening of next day it was in the shape of an elderly man.  An unexpected sort of man.  Fyne explained to me with precision that he evidently belonged to what is most respectable in the lower middle classes.  He was calm and slow in his speech.  He was wearing a frock-coat, had grey whiskers meeting under his chin, and declared on entering that Mr. de Barral was his cousin.  He hastened to add that he had not seen his cousin for many years, while he looked upon Fyne (who received him alone) with so much distrust that Fyne felt hurt (the person actually refusing at first the chair offered to him) and retorted tartly that he, for his part, had never seen Mr. de Barral, in his life, and that, since the visitor did not want to sit down, he, Fyne, begged him to state his business as shortly as possible.  The man in black sat down then with a faint superior smile.

He had come for the girl.  His cousin had asked him in a note delivered by a messenger to go to Brighton at once and take “his girl” over from a gentleman named Fyne and give her house-room for a time in his family.  And there he was.  His business had not allowed him to come sooner.  His business was the manufacture on a large scale of cardboard boxes.  He had two grown-up girls of his own.  He had consulted his wife and so that was all right.  The girl would get a welcome in his home.  His home most likely was not what she had been used to but, etc. etc.

All the time Fyne felt subtly in that man’s manner a derisive disapproval of everything that was not lower middle class, a profound respect for money, a mean sort of contempt for speculators that fail, and a conceited satisfaction with his own respectable vulgarity.

With Mrs. Fyne the manner of the obscure cousin of de Barral was but little less offensive.  He looked at her rather slyly but her cold, decided demeanour impressed him.  Mrs. Fyne on her side was simply appalled by the personage, but did not show it outwardly.  Not even when the man remarked with false simplicity that Florrie—her name was Florrie wasn’t it? would probably miss at first all her grand friends.  And when he was informed that the girl was in bed, not feeling well at