VI
Stephen was completely crushed by this. It was like the things children say, unanswerable in its simple rightness, and yet, the grown-up world being what it is, all wrong.
Virginia was nearer the fount of truth than he was. Where he stood, thirty years further from it, its waters naturally were muddier; but there they were, and had to be dealt with including their mud, and not as if they remained for ever, as she so near the source supposed, crystal clear.
On the other hand he couldn’t do without his wife. He owed her everything, and above all he owed her his return to youth. She had come and released him from the darkening prison of deepening middle age. He worshipped her more than he knew. For instance, up to this he hadn’t known he was wax in her hands, he had imagined he led, guided, was in absolute authority; now suddenly he knew he was wax. When his mother-in-law had dared compare his marriage with hers, the thing had been the deadliest outrage. Virginia pointed her finger at it, and instead of being outraged he was crushed—crushed by the truth as she saw it, crushed by the knowledge that in her clear young eyes he hadn’t, in his condemnation of her mother’s action, a leg to stand on.
Yet how many legs did Stephen not know he really had to stand on. Everybody, except children like Virginia, inexperienced and new, would agree that the difference between the two cases was such that one was accepted as natural and the other with derision. But Virginia said there was no difference—he had an uneasy feeling that Christ might have said so too—and declared that if her mother’s marrying some one so much younger was terrible, then her marrying Stephen was terrible; more terrible, because there were actually eight years greater difference in their case.
All this she said that first tragic night in bed, and inquired, when she had finished, what was to be done about it.
He was wax. Not immediately; not for some black weeks of agonising separation, of days spent avoiding each other, of nights spent with their backs turned; but inevitably, before her stubbornness, he melted. She had too many of the necessities of his life in her hands. To be out of harmony with Virginia was worse, far worse—he shuddered as he admitted it, but there it was—than being out of harmony with God.
And Virginia, though she kept up her stout exterior and went doggedly through these painful days of April and May—the estrangement lasted all that time—was most wretchedly unhappy. What was she to make of all this? In her heart she was as much shocked as Stephen. But how could she not stand up for and defend her mother? How could she deny her own blood? Deeply she resented having to defend her mother; it shattered the foundations of the whole of her childhood’s faith. Was there ever anything more miserable, she thought, than to love some one and be horrified at them at the same time? She who ought to have been putting up her feet and resting more diligently than ever—‘The fifth month, dear child,’ Mrs. Colquhoun anxiously reminded her, ‘we are in the fifth month now, you know, and have to be most careful’—walked ceaselessly instead in the garden, up and down, up and down, in all those paths where she was least likely to be found by her mother-in-law, trying her hardest to see clear, to think right, groping round for some way to get back to Stephen while at the same time not deserting her mother, to get back to his arms, to his heart, to the unclouded love without which she felt she couldn’t live.
‘You know, Virginia dearest,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun at last, whose only wish was to console and be confided in, and who was much upset by this marked and morbid avoidance, ‘you have nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Has anybody?’ Virginia asked, stopping short in the middle of the path she had been waylaid in, and looking her mother-in-law squarely in the eyes.
‘That wretched, wretched mother of hers,’ groaned Mrs. Colquhoun to Stephen, describing this little scene to him and how uncomfortable and hurt she had been by the poor child’s want of frankness. ‘What misery she has brought on us all.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Stephen, looking up wearily from the sermon he was trying to write—his head, his heart, every part of him seemed to ache—‘we must countenance her.’
‘Countenance? Countenance her? Do you mean behave as if we approved of her?’
‘I do, mother. I have been thinking it over very seriously. Virginia’s health, and with her health her child’s health, is at stake. She——’ his voice faltered, for he was most miserable—‘she weeps at night. She—she weeps when she thinks I am asleep. If I try to console her it—it becomes heartbreaking.’
He turned his face away and bent over the manuscript. Tears had come out of his own eyes, and were wetting his face. Impossible for any one to conceive the torments of his nights in bed with his beloved one and estranged from her. That turning of backs, that cold space between their two unhappy bodies....
‘Wretched, wretched woman,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun again, more bitterly than ever, for she saw her son’s tears.
‘Yes. But we must think of Virginia.’
‘Has she been writing to her mother?’
‘I am sure she has not. She would do nothing without my knowledge.’
He dug the nib of his pen into the blotting-paper.
‘My wife is the soul of loyalty and straightness——’ he began, but his voice quivering uncontrollably at the mention of her dear qualities, he broke off.
‘Yes indeed, Stephen. Indeed I know it. She is the dearest child. Only at these times a woman isn’t quite herself, and Virginia, I can see, has got into a curious morbid state——’
‘I should leave her alone, mother,’ interrupted Stephen, his head bent so that she couldn’t see his face.
Mrs. Colquhoun was hurt. All her affection and sympathy being thrown back, as it were, at her,—told straight by her son, to whose welfare she had devoted the whole of her life, that she was taking the wrong line with Virginia. As though she didn’t know better than he could what was the right line to take with some one in Virginia’s condition!
‘I think I was wrong about those letters,’ he said, continuing to jab his pen into the blotting-paper. ‘I ought to have let her have them.’
‘I don’t at all agree with you. We did what we thought right, and more than that no mortal can be expected to do.’
‘No doubt. But we were mistaken, perhaps, as to what was right.’
‘Nonsense, Stephen. The child is only nineteen. She has to be protected from the influence of that woman. You caught the woman out yourself in the most scandalous, the most disgraceful immorality, and now you propose to countenance her and her—well, really there is only one word for him—her paramour.’
‘They are married. They have expiated their sin.’
‘Her late paramour, then.’
‘For Virginia’s sake they must be countenanced.’
‘How?’ asked Mrs. Colquhoun, greatly exasperated. Here was her son every bit as morbid as her daughter-in-law, and with no excuse of being in any particular month.
‘I am going to ask Virginia to write and invite them to pay us a visit.’
‘Here?’
‘Where else?’
‘I shall go away.’
‘As you please.’
‘Stephen——’
‘Yes, mother?’
But without waiting to hear what she was going to say he went on: ‘I have mismanaged this whole business. I have adopted a line with Virginia which cannot be continued, for it makes her unhappy and ill. Except for that night they spent together, which has now been expiated, what is there after all in their marriage different from Virginia’s and mine?’
‘Stephen!’
‘The sexes are reversed; the ages are the same—or rather the balance is on her side. She is eight years nearer his age than I am to Virginia’s.’
‘Stephen!’
‘It’s a mere prejudice, in any case.’
‘Stephen!’
‘My darling Virginia, so much closer to simple truth than I am,—so much closer, indeed, to God—sees no difference.’
‘She says so to you, does she? I wager she does see a difference in her heart, then. She is only standing up for that woman from some warped idea of duty—standing up for her against her own husband, against the father of her child.’
He made a gesture of weariness. He had suffered much. None but himself knew what his nights had been.
‘I love Virginia,’ he said, as if to himself.
Mrs. Colquhoun stood staring at him. He did not look at her, but sat at his table with bowed head. She had never before seen him like this, broken down, his standards gone, giving in, winking at sin, prepared, as he himself put it, to countenance it.
‘Stephen——’ she began.
He got up. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’ll go to Virginia now and put things straight.’
‘You really intend to have those shocking people here and whitewash them?’
He looked at her a moment in silence, bringing his attention back to what she was saying.
‘You talk as if they were outbuildings, mother,’ he said, with a faint, wretched smile.
‘Outbuildings! Sepulchres,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun. ‘Abodes of corruption. And nothing you can do in the way of whitening them will hide—will hide——’
She was becoming hysterical; in her life she had never been that. Words were failing her; in her life they had never done that. She must grip on to herself, she must shut her mouth tight. It frightened her, the behaviour of her hitherto absolutely reliable body.
Her son went out of the room and left her standing there.