There was a postscript appended to this letter which read as follows:
‘You’d better use my rooms at Mrs Winsome’s. I’ve paid in advance up to August. Board included.’
This singular epistle, and especially the postscript to it, gave Richard Storm an extremely uncomfortable day. He had well understood Nelly’s shyness about going up to Mrs Canyot’s funeral and was not surprised when in the end she had not gone. But since that decision of hers he had made few efforts to see her, and moreover when they had met, both of them had been so nervous and ill at ease that it had been impossible to talk with any kind of intimacy.
Richard took Canyot’s letter with him into the cathedral close and pondered long and wretchedly over it.
The situation was certainly an awkward one. What an extraordinary letter! No — he wasn’t conscious of ‘trifling’ with Nelly Moreton. What the devil was this ‘trifling’? But on the other hand he certainly did not feel committed, or as if he were involved with her in any irrevocable way. What a blundering, clumsy, roughshod fellow this Robert was! He felt a very decided anger against him. It was so childish — so ridiculous. Was the boy entirely ignorant of the ways of the world? Or was he, Richard, out of touch with the habits and manners of the middle classes in England?
He fumbled in his memory among his early impressions and ran over hurriedly the English novels he had read since. Did they do this kind of thing in this provincial island? Or had the war produced a new England with queer new customs? The boy wrote to him as if he were his superior officer warning him not to seduce some maiden of a conquered country! It seemed an incredible letter from one artist to another artist, from one nomadic Bohemian to another nomadic Bohemian.
Wasn’t one free to strike up a casual friendship with a charming girl without bringing down upon one the wrath of a furious fiancé?
Return her little gifts to her? Confound the fellow! If he were as touchy and jealous as all that, the child was indeed well rid of him.
But had they quarrelled? That was the point he wanted enlightenment upon. And if they had, had they quarrelled about him? But if they had quarrelled, because the girl had talked to him and seemed to like him, how did he know that she wished to have her engagement broken off on such ridiculous grounds?
She might be thoroughly in love with Canyot still and just hurt in her pride by his hot-headed silly violence. She might even be putting it all down to his upset nerves, to his grief for his mother. It looked as if she cared for him still — her reluctance to send back his ring. But it might also be a very natural refusal to be jostled and hurried and bullied at a moment’s notice.
Choose definitely between us! the fellow said. Never had such rough, boorish, crude, impolite usage been applied to a young woman! They would be lucky if she didn’t whistle them both down the wind!
The whole thing was particularly annoying. Little had he expected that before he had been in England a fortnight he would receive a threatening letter handing over into his keeping an unprotected female!
This letter of Canyot’s putting the matter so bluntly and grossly broke up like a bombshell the delicate sentimental dreamings he had begun to weave around the girl. It drove him to drastic issues and decisions; and he wasn’t at all ready for drastic issues and decisions. Nor was Miss Moreton ready for such things; he felt sure of that. The more he thought of it all the more angry he became with Canyot. Hot-headed conceited young prig! Because he had lost his mother did he think he could dictate their behaviour to half the world? It was extraordinarily annoying. It put both himself and Miss Moreton into such an absurd position. It made the girl look ridiculous and it made himself seem an ill-bred lunatic who had paid court to another man’s sweetheart before he had been two hours in her company.
For, after all, what had Canyot to go upon? Nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. He had not been alone with Nelly for a minute except those hours in the canon’s garden and the cathedral — except their encounter in the little church.
Was England so queer a place that one couldn’t talk to a girl for three-quarters of an hour without having her flung at one’s head?
She must have had an awful quarrel with the boy; there could be no mistake about that! But surely, surely, she couldn’t have told Canyot that she had ceased to care for him and had begun to care for him — a man she’d only just seen for the second time! It was unthinkable that she should have forgotten all modesty and decency to an extent as fantastic as that. The whole thing was Canyot’s damned hot-headed blundering jealousy. If he’d been a Frenchman he would no doubt have challenged him to a duel. The stupid ass! And then this postscript about the room at the farm … It was all so extremely laughable that it was difficult to take it seriously. That girl, who was a thoroughly sensible girl, showed clearly enough that she didn’t take it seriously by refusing to send him back his gifts.
She must be furiously angry with him though, if he had written to her in the style he had used to him!
Thus, with the surface of his mind, as if before a jury of people of the world, did Richard pour righteous oil upon his embarrassment.
In that deeper, subtler portion of his being, the part of him that did not condescend to use reason or logic, he was less sure, far less sure, of his position. Down in those depths, without any words, some honest cynical demon told him that Canyot was fatally near the truth. Of course there had been, directly he and Nelly met, and every second they were together, a thrilling vivid undercurrent of sympathy, of understanding. Canyot would have been a very insensitive lover if he hadn’t sensed that. He would have been a fool if he hadn’t seen it. No doubt he saw things in her expressions, in her tones, in her gestures, that made him know, with the breath of fate itself, that his hour was ended.
No doubt he had challenged her — and, poor innocent inexperienced thing as she was, she had not been able convincingly to meet his challenge. Without meaning to do so, teased and persecuted in his bullying, she had betrayed herself to him. This subtler voice, among Richard’s interior demons, was supported in its conclusions by his vanity.
It was as agreeable as it was touching: to think of a sweet young creature like this being driven into a corner till she admitted being more than a little interested in Mr Richard Storm!
Finally, as he rose from his seat under the lime trees, crushing Canyot’s letter into his pocket the better, more normal Richard in him decided that the young man had recognized more quickly than either Nelly or himself which way the wind was blowing, and apart from the least admission on her side and simply from devotion to her interests, had brought matters to a head in this erratic manner.
All that day and a good deal of the next was spent by Richard in meditating what he should do in this curious imbroglio. The end of it was that he decided to do nothing at all, except to leave Nelly Moreton alone for a while.
To leave the neighbourhood was out of the question. It would be like running away for the second time.
He replied in a friendly but quite non-committal manner to Canyot’s letter and said he would be very glad to see something more of him before he sailed for America. He avoided any mention of Miss Moreton’s name. His policy of remaining in retreat for the present and leaving the girl alone was made easier for him by a certain rush of energy in the sphere of his writing.