Somehow Good - William Frend De Morgan (the little red hen read aloud .TXT) 📗

cut with a smile, that was like that of the Indian brave under torture. A knife was through her heart. But it was well done, so she thought to herself. If she could be as intrepid as that, she could go on and live. She tried experiments of this sort when the watchful merry eyes of her daughter were not upon her, and even felt glad, this time, that the Major was having a doze underneath a "Daily Telegraph." Fenwick took it all as a matter of course, mere chaff....

Did he? If so, why, after a few words more of chat, did he press his hands on his eyes and shake a puzzled head; then, after an abrupt turn up and down the room, come back to where he stood at first and draw a long breath?

"Was that a recurrence, Mr. Fenwick?" she asked. They had come to speak of these mental discomforts as _recurrences_. They would afflict him, not seldom, without bringing to his mind any definite image. And this was the worst sort. When an image came, his mind felt eased.

"A sort of one."

"Can you tell when it came on?" All this was nettle-grasping. She was getting used to it. "Was it before or after I said that about your hair?"

"After. No, before. Perhaps just about then." Mrs. Nightingale decided that she would not tempt Providence any further. Self-discipline was good, but not carried to danger-point.

"Now sit down and be quiet," she said. "We won't talk any more about unpleasant things. Only the worst of it is," she added, smiling, "that one's topics--yours and mine, I mean--are so limited by the conditions. I should ask any other man who had been about the world, as you _must_ have done, all sorts of questions about all sorts of places--where he had been, whom he had seen. You can't answer questions, though I hope you will some day...."

She paused, and he saw the reason. "You see," said he, with a good-humoured laugh, "one gets back directly to the unpleasant subject, whether one will or no. But if I could remember all about my precious self, I might not court catechism about it...."

"_I_ should not about mine." This was said in a low tone, with a silent look on the unraised eyes that was almost an invitation not to hear, and her lips hardly moved to say it, either. He missed it for the moment, but finished his speech with the thought in his mind.

"Still, it's an ill-wind that blows nobody good. See what a clear conscience I have! But what was that _you_ said?"

She dropped the fire-screen and raised her eyes--fine eyes they were, which we might have likened to those of Juno had the eyes of oxen been blue--turning them full on him. "When?" said she.

"Just this minute. I ought to have apologized for interrupting you."

"I said I should not court catechism about myself. I should not." Fenwick felt he could not assign this speech its proper place in the dialogue without thinking. He thought gravely, looking to all seeming into the fire for enlightenment; then turned round and spoke.

"Surely that is true, in a sense, of all mankind--mankind and womankind. Nobody wants to be seen through. But one's past would need to be a very shaky one to make one wish for an oblivion like mine to extinguish it."

"I should not dislike it. I have now all that I wish to keep out of the past. I have Sally. There is nothing I could not afford to forget in the past, no one thing the loss of which could alter her in the least, that little monkey of a daughter of mine! And there are many, many things I should like to see the last of." From which speech Fenwick derived an impression that the little monkey, the vulgar child, had come back warm and living and welcome to the speaker's mind, and had driven away some mists of night, some uglinesses that hung about it. How he wished he could ask: "Was one of them her father?" That was not practicable. But it was something of that sort, clearly. His mind could not admit the idea of a haunting remorse, a guilty conscience of an action of her own, in the memory of the woman who spoke to him. He was too loyal to her for that. Besides, the wording of her speech made no such supposition necessary. Fenwick's answer to it fell back on abstractions--the consolation a daughter must be, and so forth.

"There she is!" said her mother; and then added, as perturbation without heralded Miss Sally's approach: "I will tell you what I meant some other time." For there she was, no doubt of it, wild with excitement to report the splendid success of the great sestet, the production of which had been the event of the musical gathering she had come from. And you know as well as we do how it is when youth and high spirits burst in upon the sober stay-at-homes, intoxicated with music and lights and supper and too many people talking at once. Sally's eyebrows and teeth alone would have been enough to set all the birds singing in the dullest coppices decorum ever planted, let alone the tales she had to tell of all the strange and wonderful things that had come to pass at the Erskine Peels', who were the givers of the party, and always did things on such a scale.

"And where do you think, mother, Mrs. Erskine Peel gets all those good-looking young men from that come to her parties? Why, from the Stores, of course. Just fancy!... How do I know? Why, because I talked to one of them for ever so long, and made him tell me all about it. I detected him, and told him so straight off. How did I recognise him? Why, of course, because he's that young man that came here about the letter. Oh, _you_ know, Mr. Fenwick! Gracious me, how slow you are! The young man that brought you the letter to translate. Rather tall, dark eyes."

"Oh yes, certainly. I remember him quite well. Well, I expect he made a very good young man for a small tea-party."

"Of course he did, and it's quite ridiculous." By which the vulgar child meant that class distinctions were ridiculous. She had this way of rushing subjects, eliding the obvious, and relying on her hearers. "He told me all about it. He'd been universally provided, he said; and I promised not to tell. Miss Erskine Peel--that's Orange, you know, the soprano--went to the manager and said her mother said they _must_ get more men, though it wasn't dancing, or the rooms looked so bad; only they mustn't be fools, and must be able to say Wagner and Liszt and things. And he hoped I didn't think he was a fool."

"What did you say?"

"Said I couldn't say--didn't know him well enough. He might be, to look at. Or not, accordingly. I didn't say _that_, you know, mamma."

"I didn't know, darling. You're very rude sometimes."

"Well, he said he could certainly say Wagner and Liszt, and even more, because--it was rather sad, you know, mamma dear----"

"Sally, you've told that young man he may call; you know you have!"

"Well, mamma dear, and if I have, I don't see that anybody's mare's dead. Because, do listen!" Fenwick interposed a parenthesis.

"I don't think you need to be apprehensive, Mrs. Nightingale. He was an educated young man enough. His not knowing a French phrase like that implies nothing. Not one in a hundred would." The way in which the Major, who, of course, had come out of his doze on the inrush of Miss Sally, looked across at Fenwick as he said this, implied an acquired faith in the judgment of the latter. Sally resumed.

"Just let me tell you. His name's Bradshaw. Only he's no relation to _the_ Bradshaw--in a yellow cover, you know. We-e-ell, I don't see anything in that!" Sally is defending her position against a smile her mother and Fenwick have exchanged. They concede that there is nothing in it, and Sally continues. "Where was I? Oh, Bradshaw; yes. He was an awfully promising violinist--awfully promising! And what do you think happened? Why, the nerves of his head gave way, and he couldn't stand the vibration! So it came to being Cattley's or nothing." Sally certainly had the faculty of cutting a long story short.

She thought the story, so cut, one that her mother and Mr. Fenwick might have shown a more active interest in, instead of saying it was time for all of us to be in bed. She did not, however, ascribe to them any external preoccupation--merely an abstract love of Truth; for was it not nearly one o'clock in the morning?

Nevertheless, a little incident of Mr. Fenwick's departure, not noticed at the moment, suddenly assumed vitality just as Sally was "going off," and woke her up. What was it she overheard her mother say to him, just as he was leaving the house, about something she had promised to tell him some time? However, reflection on it with waking faculties dissipated the importance it seemed to have half-way to dreamland, and Sally went contentedly to sleep again.

Fenwick, as he walked to his lodgings through the dull February night, did not regard this something, whatever it was, as a thing of slight importance at all. He may have been only "spooney," but it was in a sense that left him no pretence for thinking that anything connected with this beautiful young widow-lady could be unimportant to him. On the contrary, she was more and more filling all his waking thoughts, and becoming the pivot on which all things turned. It is true, he "dismissed from his mind"--whatever that means--every presumptuous suggestion that in some precious time to come she might be willing to throw in her lot with his own, and asked himself what sort of thing was he that he should allow such an idea to come even as far as contradiction-point? He, a poor inexplicable wreck! What was the Self he had to offer, and what else had he? But, indeed, the speculation rarely got even to this maturity, so promptly was it nipped in the bud. Only, there were so many buds to nip. He became aware that he was giving a good deal of attention to this sort of gardening.

Also, he had a consciousness that he was growing morbidly anxious for the maintenance of his own oblivion. That which was at first only a misgiving about what a return of memory might bring to light, was rapidly becoming a definite desire that nothing should come to light at all. How _could_ he look forward to that "hypothetical" wife whom he did not in the least believe in, but who might be somewhere, for all that! He knew perfectly well that his relations with Krakatoa Villa would _not_ remain the same, say what you might! Of course, he also knew that he had no relations there that _need_ change--most certainly not! At this point an effort would be made against the outcrop of his thoughts. Those confounded buds were always bursting. It was impossible to be even with them.

Perhaps it was on this evening, or rather early morning, as he walked home to his lodgings, that Fenwick began to recognise more fully than he had done before Mrs. Nightingale's share in what was, if not an absolute repugnance to a revival of the unknown past, at least a very ready acquiescence in his ignorance of it. But surely,