Instead of that, he proceeded to override her with a forgiveness that was no forgiveness; to secure himself against remorse and yet to keep his grudge intact and the hurt to his vanity unhealed.
He moved up to her side. ‘Come, Nelly, we two are just making fools of ourselves quarrelling like this. Are you going to ask me to lunch? I want to meet your father again so very much. It would never do to come as far as this and go back without seeing him. I didn’t see half his collections, you know — only the butterflies.’
She had to submit to this. There was no other way. And thus led, as it were, captive, harnessed helplessly to that elaborate social propriety which women are supposed to be responsible for, but which in reality is man’s protection from the passionate sub-civilized woman-soul, she meekly walked by his side, passive, quiet, subdued, unhappy, along the road by which she had come that morning hoping for unspeakable comfort.
‘I ought to tell you,’ she said as they went along, ‘what Mr Canyot has proposed for us; because Father is sure to talk about it and you’d wonder I’d said nothing. So you must let me bore you with just one or two more family details.’
‘Don’t be sarcastic, Nelly,’ he said gently. ‘How can I give you advice if I don’t know the situation? And you did ask me to help, you know!’
She flashed at him one quick look of bitter mockery; and then went on in quiet unemotional tones.
‘Robert suggested — he and Father talked about it without my knowledge — that when we were married, which he wanted to happen very soon, we should live in Hill Cottage — that’s a place you haven’t seen yet to the north of the village — and my father live there with us. Robert had nearly finished furnishing it when … when you came. It’s a pretty little house. It would really suit us very well as far as I’m concerned and Father would be happy there.’
She stopped speaking and they walked on for a second or two in silence. ‘Please go on,’ said Richard. ‘Please tell me everything. You don’t know what a magician I can be sometimes! Let me know every aspect of your difficulties.’
‘And then you came,’ the girl burst out; ‘and then his mother was killed. And now his poor head seems to have got the wildest notions into it. I can’t understand his letters!’
‘He told me at the hospital,’ threw in Richard, keeping that ‘threatening letter’ from approaching the tip of his tongue only by a resolute effort, ‘that it was about an exhibition in America that his mother came to see him. Has anything more come of that?’
Nelly looked round sharply. ‘I didn’t know you knew that,’ she said. ‘Well, I expect, as you say, if you’re to give me advice you must know everything. Yes. He talks now of going to America quite soon; in two or three weeks in fact. But what’s going to happen to Father while we’re gone, heaven knows!’
‘Then he wants to marry you at once and carry you over with him?’ Richard threw back at her, in a hard, firm, unemotional voice.
Nelly saw that she had been pushed into a corner. She had been tempted, she hardly knew why, to fling at him that assured ‘while we’re gone’. It was a sort of raft of refuge for her at the moment, that significant ‘we’, but she had no sooner uttered it than she felt as ashamed as if she had been caught in a palpable falsehood.
She wasn’t in any sense conscious of playing off one man against another. Whichever way she looked she saw perils and disasters. But it was intolerable to have to admit to Richard that Canyot had sent her a practical ultimatum, telling her she must choose between them and announcing that he would ‘come down soon to hear her decision’.
It was being left stranded like that, thrown out of her home without a moment’s notice, with her father on her hands, that created this misery, these wavering equivocations.
She, like Canyot himself, had no wish to be taken by anybody ‘out of pity’. Her painter, she knew, needed her, wanted her, loved her single-heartedly, loved her passionately — his wild jealousy proved that — and as long as she leant upon him her pride was quite unhurt. But the idea of having to confess to Richard the drastic nature of those letters she had been receiving, with their refrain of ‘choose’ — ‘choose’ — ‘choose’, was altogether unbearable. No girl could say to a man, ‘I must have one of you — now, which is it to be?’
The whole thing seemed to be a welter of bitterness and misery. And it had been so beautiful, so thrilling, that first encounter with Richard! This miserable problem of money, of necessity, of her father, put her into a completely false position. It spoilt all her happiness with Richard. It made her irritable; it made her say things to hurt him; it made her hate him.
She felt convinced that he didn’t believe that all was as well in her relations with Canyot as she had tried to make out. She had practically lied about it. Canyot had never suggested taking her to America. And she divined that Richard suspected her of lying. But what could she do? She had, at all costs, to protect both Richard and herself from the humiliation of her being driven into his arms by Robert and her father!
Life was certainly much more cruel to women than she had had any idea of before these last months. And it had been so lovely, so indescribably lovely, that first delicious vague consciousness that there was ‘something’ between herself and Richard different from anything else in the world!
And now this wretched money business, and the question of her father, had come in to spoil it all! And of course, poor darling Robert. But curiously enough it wasn’t, just now, her anxiety over any broken heart of Robert that filled her with gloom. She had a queer instinctive feeling that she could always ‘deal with’ Robert, whether she married him or not; ‘deal with’ him and quiet him and satisfy him and make him happy or at least content. It was as though she felt that merely for her to be alive on the earth at all was in a sense enough for Robert!
The case of Richard was completely different.
And what, when it came to that, had she appealed to Richard for in her desperation? He had come to her and they had quarrelled. He was so tiresomely touchy and vain. And was that to be the end?
What was it, when she had written that letter, that she had had in her mind? He was by her side now and she must protect him from herself, from pity for herself, by making it seem that all was well between her and the painter. Why must she do this? Because she was a woman; and women were not allowed to say straight out, from a clear unclouded sky, ‘I, Nelly Moreton, love you, Richard Storm.’
Instead of this they had to protect these impulsive susceptible creatures from their own emotions, from their emotions too! Why had they to do this? Why was the whole weight and burden of everything put upon them? Because they were women; and life had been arranged in that manner, by God, by nature, and by men!
‘Well,’ she said to her companion as they observed the figure of her father crossing the garden to meet them, ‘you must give me your magician’s advice very quickly; because I know Father intends to walk back with you to Selshurst after lunch. He has to make his final settlement today with the people there.’
She turned to him as she spoke and he noticed that though she lifted her eyebrows with a touch of quizzical humour her underlip was trembling.
‘The magician’s advice to the enchanted princess,’ said he, ‘had to be given in parables: It’s better to get drenched by the rain than to shelter where the lightning is attracted. But it’s best of all to wait under the nearest hedge till the rain is over.’