V
At Chickover there had been the most painful consultations between Stephen and Mrs. Colquhoun as to the best thing to do under the deplorable circumstances. Should they or should they not tell Virginia? Could they, indeed, help telling her? Not all, of course; she must never be told all. The night spent somewhere between Chickover and London—they both felt that the entire stretch of country between those two points was from henceforth polluted—the night that made the scandalous marriage a necessity, must be kept from Virginia for ever. But it became clear after a week that she must be told something, if only to account for her not hearing from her mother.
Stephen couldn’t bring himself to let her have the letters. They came at first, as he had expected, one after the other and all very thick. He wondered, turning them over in his hand, whether it wasn’t his duty to open them, but he resisted the strong leaning towards his duty that lifelong practice in doing it had induced in him, and took the more dignified course of sending them back unopened. Much more punitive too, he felt,—leaving the wretched woman completely in the dark as to what was happening at Chickover and what Virginia was feeling.
Then, when the letters at last left off coming, he watched for telegrams; he rather expected telegrams.
None came.
Then he was on the look-out for an unannounced arrival; he quite thought there would be one.
Nothing happened. Just silence.
At the end of the week Virginia said, ‘I can’t think why mother doesn’t write’—and began to look worried, and write letters herself.
Stephen took them out of the box in the hall and burnt them. ‘Painful, painful necessities,’ he said to Mrs. Colquhoun; for this letter business went against the grain—the gentleman grain, he told his mother, who hardly left him, comforting and advising him as best she could.
At the end of another week Virginia sent a telegram, or rather was going to send it but was stopped by Stephen. Clearly she must be told something. She had said, while writing it: ‘If I don’t get an answer to this I shall go up to London myself and see if anything is wrong.’
‘Poor child, poor child,’ murmured Mrs. Colquhoun, the moment for enlightenment having manifestly come. ‘Would you like me to be with you?’ she whispered in Stephen’s ear.
‘Better not, I think,’ he whispered back.
Alone with Virginia he took her on his knee. She was holding the telegram she had just written, and was in a hurry to go and send it off.
‘Yes, Stephen—what is it?’ she asked, fretted at being held back, and worried by this strange silence of her mother’s to the point of being unlike herself.
‘I am but a clumsy creature,’ he began, overwhelmed by the thought of the blow about to be delivered—and delivered by his hand, too, his own loving hand.
He laid his head on her breast, his arms round her, as she sat on his knee.
This beginning made Virginia still more uneasy; Stephen had never called himself a clumsy creature before. ‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, very anxious.
‘What is it not,’ groaned Stephen, holding her tight. To think it was he, he who so deeply loved her....
‘Oh, Stephen’—Virginia was thoroughly frightened—‘mother?’
‘Yes. Yes. Yours. And Virginia, my loved wife,’ he said, raising his head and looking at her, ‘believe me I had rather, to spare you, it were mine.’
Virginia sat like a stone. Her face was stiff and set. The worst had happened, then. Her little mother, her own sweet little mother, to whom she had been unkind, unloving, and who had never once failed in kindness and love to her, was dead.
‘She is dead,’ said Virginia, in a voice so toneless that it sounded indifferent.
‘How much better,’ thought Stephen, ‘for everybody as well as herself if she were.’
Aloud he said, his face buried in Virginia’s bosom. ‘No. She is not dead. Quite the contrary. She is remarrying.’
And as Virginia said nothing, for her breath was taken away by these blows and counter-blows, he went on: ‘Darling, I would have spared you if I could. I have tried to spare you. I have tried all these days to find some way of keeping it from you. Indeed, indeed I have tried——’
‘But, Stephen—why? Why shouldn’t mother marry again?’ asked Virginia, with the irritability natural to people who have been frightened without cause, but so unusual in her that Stephen could only account for it by her physical condition. ‘I think it very strange of her not to tell me, but why shouldn’t she remarry? Now there’ll be somebody to take care of her. I’m glad.’
‘Darling——’
He pressed his face still closer to her bosom. He wished he could hide it there for ever.
‘But I do think,’ said Virginia, reaction against her mother setting in now she knew she wasn’t dead, as it had set in the day she saw her trotting safe and sound up the avenue when she had been torn by fears of an accident, ‘I do think she might have told me. I do think that.’
Her voice had tears in it. She strangled them, and held herself up very straight, offering no real hospitality to Stephen’s head. She was deeply wounded.
‘Ah, but there are some things one doesn’t tell,’ said Stephen.
He was miserable. He would have given at least half Chickover to be able to spare her.
‘Remarrying isn’t one of them,’ she said; and for the first time he caught a glimpse of another Virginia, a Virginia who perhaps, ten years ahead, might argue.
He raised his head from her bosom and looked at her again.
‘I know what I am talking about, my child,’ he said. ‘This remarrying is. She is marrying the young man with whom she motored up to London. You saw him yourself. Perhaps you will now agree that there are some things one does not willingly tell one’s daughter.’
Virginia stared at him a moment, her eyes very wide open. Then, without speaking a word, she got up off his knee and walked over to a window and stood at it with her back to him.
How strange of her, he thought. What a strange way of meeting trouble—to go away from him like that, to turn from the love that longed to help her.
He didn’t know what to do or say next. He sat watching her in the utmost perplexity. His Virginia, getting up off his knee, withdrawing herself from his loving arms——
‘Yes,’ she said after a long silence. ‘I can imagine there may be such things. But I don’t think’—she turned and faced him—‘this is one of them.’
He got on to his feet and went towards her, his arms outstretched.
‘My darling, my wounded darling,’ he cried, all understanding and pitifulness, ‘you are generous and young——’
‘So is Mr. Monckton,’ was her unexpected answer.
Really it was like a blow in the face. It stopped him short. It must be her condition. But all that day the attitude continued, the strange, almost defiant attitude, and Stephen could only go into his study and pray that her heart might be softened, and her eyes opened to see things as they truly were.
Such a grave misfortune—she did not of course know how grave, how terrible it was—the first in their married life, and to take it this way, hardening her heart against the sympathy and understanding he and his mother offered her in such boundless measure, and persisting, with an obstinacy he wouldn’t have dreamed her capable of, in upholding what her mother had done! True she said very little, but that little was all obstinate. She was quite unlike her usual self to his mother, too, whose one thought was to comfort, and would not admit that there was anything to be comforted about. And when that night he got into bed, and drew her to his heart in the exquisite contact of the body that had always till then soothed every trouble of the spirit, and she came apparently willingly, and clung to him, and was his own dear wife as he thought, and, happily sure of this, he whispered that he hoped she had remembered to pray for her poor mother, it was a grievous shock to feel her shrink away from him and hear her say she hadn’t—not more than usual, not more than her childhood’s ‘God bless my mummy,’ and most grievous to have her ask him, just as if they weren’t in bed but downstairs conversing in their clothes, just as if they weren’t in the sacred place and at the sacred moment never yet profaned by talk of anything but love, why he really thought it so dreadful for her mother to marry again.
‘Do you not see it is terrible to marry some one young enough to be your son?’ he had asked sternly—he couldn’t have believed he would ever have to be stern with his own love in such a place, at such an hour.
And she had answered: ‘But is it any more terrible than marrying some one young enough to be your daughter?’
Virginia had answered that. His Virginia. In bed. In his very arms.