The Creators Part 124

She shrank before his look. "Does he think I wanted him to see it?" she said to herself.

Already she was clean in her own eyes. Already she had persuaded herself that she had not wanted that. And in the same breath of thought she asked herself, "What _did_ he see?"

She smiled as she answered his cold answer.

"I thought it was rubbed out, but I couldn't be quite sure."

They were so absorbed that they did not hear the door open.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Jane stood in the doorway, quietly regarding them]

Jane stood in the doorway quietly regarding them.

LXV

There were people who knew for a fact that Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh Brodrick) had run away with George Tanqueray. The rumour ran through the literary circles shunned by Tanqueray and Jane. The theory of her guilt was embraced with excitement by the dreadful, clever little people. Not one of them would have confessed to a positive desire to catch her tripping. But now that the thing had happened it satisfied the craving for complete vision of the celebrated lady. It reduced considerably her baffling eminence, and dispersed once for all the impenetrable, irritating atmosphere of secrecy she had kept up.

There was George Tanqueray, too, who had kept it up even longer and more successfully. At last they had been caught, the two so insolent in their swift evasion of pursuit. Their fall, so to speak, enabled the hunter to come up with them. People who had complained that they could never meet them, who had wanted to meet them solely that they might talk about them afterwards, who had never been able to talk about them at all, had now abundant material for conversation.

The rumour, once it had fairly penetrated, spread over London in five days. It started in Kensington, ran thence all the way to Chelsea, skipped to Bloomsbury, and spread from these centres into Belgravia and Mayfair. In three weeks the tale of George Tanqueray and Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh Brodrick) had invaded Hampstead and the Southwestern suburbs.

It was only confirmed by the contemptuous silence and curt denials of their friends, Arnott Nicholson, Caro Bickersteth, Nina Lempriere and the Protheros.

In Brodrick's family it sank down deep, below the level of permissible discussion. But it revealed itself presently in an awful external upheaval, utterly unforeseen, and in a still more unforeseen subsidence.

There was first of all a split between Mrs. Heron and the Doctor. The behaviour of Eddy and Winny, especially of Eddy, had got on the Doctor's nerves (he had confessed, in a moment of intense provocation, to having them). Eddy one evening had attacked violently the impermissible topic, defending Jin-Jin (in the presence of his younger sister) from the unspeakable charge current in their suburb, taxing his uncle with a monstrous credence of the impossible, and trying to prove to him that it _was_ impossible.

For the sake of the peace so beloved by Brodricks it was settled that Frances and her children should live with poor dear John in the big house in Augustus Road.

Brodrick then suggested that Gertrude Collett might with advantage keep house for Henry.

This arrangement covered the dreadful rupture, the intolerable situation at Moor Grange. Gertrude had contributed nothing to the support of the rumour beyond an intimation that the rupture (between her and the Brodricks) _was_ dreadful and the situation intolerable. The intimation, as conveyed by Gertrude, was delicate and subtle to a degree. All that she would admit in words was a certain lack of spiritual sympathy between her and Mrs. Brodrick.

It was felt in Brodrick's family that, concerning Jane and Tanqueray, Gertrude Collett knew considerably more than she cared to say.

And through it all Brodrick guarded his secret.

The rumour had not yet touched him whom it most affected. It never would touch him, so securely the secret he guarded guarded him. And though it had reached Hampstead the rumour had not reached Rose.

Rose had her hands full for once with the Protheros, helping Mrs.

Prothero to look after _him_. For Owen was ill, dreadfully and definitely ill, with an illness you could put a name to. Dr. Brodrick was attending him. Owen had consulted him casually the year before, and the Doctor had then discovered a bell-sound in his left lung. Now he came regularly once or twice a week all the way from Putney in his motor-car.

Rose had positively envied Laura, who had a husband who could be ill, who could be tucked up in bed and taken care of. It was Rose who helped Laura to make Prothero's big room look for all the world like the ward of a hospital.

Dr. Brodrick had wanted to take him away to a sanatorium, but Prothero had refused flatly to be taken anywhere. The traveller was tired of travelling. He loved with pa.s.sion this place where he had found peace, where his wandering genius had made its sanctuary and its home. His repugnance was so violent and invincible that the Doctor had agreed with Laura that it would do more harm than good to insist on his removal. She must do as best she could, with (he suggested) the a.s.sistance of a trained nurse.

Laura had very soon let him know what she could do. She had winced visibly when she heard of the trained nurse. It would be anguish to her to see another woman beside Owen's bed and her hands touching him; but she said she supposed she could bear even that if it would save him, if it were absolutely necessary. Was it? The Doctor had admitted that it was not so, if she insisted--absolutely--for the present; but it was advisable if she wished to save herself. Laura had smiled then, very quietly.

In twenty-four hours she showed him the great room, bare and clean as the ward of a hospital (Rose was on her knees on the floor, bees-waxing it). The long rows of bookcases were gone, so were the pictures. He couldn't put his finger on a single small unnecessary thing. Laura, cool and clean in a linen gown, defied him to find a c.h.i.n.k where a germ could lodge. Prothero inquired gaily, if they couldn't make a good fight there, where could they make it?

Henry, although used to these combats, was singularly affected as he looked upon the scene, stripped as it was for the last struggle. What moved him most was the sight of Laura's little bed, set under the north window, and separated from her husband's by the long empty s.p.a.ce between, through which the winds of heaven rushed freely. It showed him what the little thing was capable of, day and night, night and day, the undying, indomitable devotion. That was the stuff a man wanted in his wife. He thought of his brother Hugh. Why on earth, if he had to marry one of them, hadn't he married _her_? He was moved too and troubled by the presence there of Tanqueray's poor little wife. Whatever view truth compelled you to take of Jane's and Tanqueray's relations, Tanqueray's wife had, from first to last, been cruelly wronged by both of them.

Tanqueray's wife was so absorbed in the fight they were making as to be apparently indifferent to her wrongs, and they judged that the legend of Jane Holland and George Tanqueray had not reached her.

It had not. And yet she knew it, she had known it all the time--that they had been together. She had known it ever since, in the innocent days before the rumour, she had heard Dr. Brodrick telling Mrs. Prothero that his sister-in-law had gone down to Chagford for three months.

Chagford was where he was always staying. And in the days of innocence Addy Ranger had let out that it was Chagford where he was now. She had given Rose his address, Post Office, Chagford. He had been there all the time when Rose had supposed him to be in Wilts.h.i.+re and was sending all his letters there.

She did not hear of Mrs. Brodrick's return until a week or two after that event; for, in the days no longer of innocence, his sister-in-law was a sore subject with the Doctor. And when Rose did hear it finally from Laura, by that time she had heard that Tanqueray was coming back too. He had written to her to say so.

That was on a Sat.u.r.day. He was not coming until Tuesday. Rose had two days in which to consider what line she meant to take.

That she meant to take a line was already clear to Rose. Perfectly clear, although her decision was arrived at through nights of misery so profound that it made most things obscure. It was clear that they could not go on as they had been doing. _He_ might (nothing seemed to matter to him), but she couldn't; and she wouldn't, not (so she put it) if it was ever so. They had been miserable.

Not that it mattered so very much whether she was miserable or no. But that was it; she had ended by making him miserable too. It took some making; for he wasn't one to feel things much; he had always gone his own way as if nothing mattered. By his beginning to feel things (as she called it) now, she measured the effect she must have had on him.

It was all because she wasn't educated proper, because she wasn't a lady. He ought to have married a lady. He ought (she could see it now) to have married some one like Mrs. Brodrick, who could understand his talk, and enter into what he did.

There was Mr. and Mrs. Prothero now. They were happy. There wasn't a thing he could say or do or think but what she understood it. Why, she'd understand, time and again, without his saying anything. That came of being educated. It came (poor Rose was driven back to it at every turn) of being a lady.

She might have known how it would be. And in a way she had known it from the first. That was why she'd been against it, and why Uncle and Aunt and her master and mistress down at Fleet had been against it too. But there--she loved him. Lady or no lady, she loved him.

As for his going away with Mrs. Brodrick, she "looked at it sensible."

She understood. She saw the excuses that could be made for him. She couldn't understand _her_; she couldn't find one excuse for _her_ behaviour, a married woman, leaving her husband--such a good man, and her children--her little helpless children, and going off for weeks together with a married man, let him be who he might be. Still, if it hadn't been her, it might have been somebody else, somebody much worse.

It might have been that Miss Lempriere. If _she_'d had a hold on him, _she_'d not have let him go.

For deep-bedded in Rose's obscure misery was the conviction that Jane Brodrick had let him go. Her theory of Jane's guilt had not gone much farther than the charge of deserting her little helpless children. It was as if Rose's imagination could not conceive of guilt beyond that monstrous crime. And Jane had gone back to her husband and children, after all.

If it had been Miss Lempriere she would have been bound to have stuck, she having nothing, so to speak, to go back to.

The question was, what was George coming back to? If it was to her, Rose, he must know pretty well what. He must know, she kept repeating to herself; he must know. Her line, the sensible line that she had been so long considering, was somehow to surprise and defeat his miserable foreknowledge.

By Sunday morning she had decided on her line. Nothing would turn her.

She did not intend to ask anybody's advice, nor to take it were it offered. The line itself required the co-operation and, in a measure, the consent of Aunt and Uncle; and on the practical head they were consulted. She managed that on Sunday afternoon. Then she remembered that she would have to tell Mr. and Mrs. Prothero.

It was on Sunday evening that she told them.

She told them, very shortly and simply, that she had made up her mind to separate from Tanqueray and live with her uncle.

"Uncle'll be glad to 'ave me," she said.

She explained. "_He_'ll think more of me if he's not with me."

Prothero admitted that it might be likely.

"It's not," she said, "as if I was afraid of 'is taking up with another woman--serious."