The old man who had been watching this scene, with a shrewd interest unusual in him, now broke in. He laid his hand on his son-in-law’s arm — ‘Show it to her, boy; show it to her,’ he said. ‘Never keep letters away from them. They don’t like it. It’s a bad beginning.’ And he sighed heavily, thinking of one of his own early quarrels with his dead Cecily.
Richard turned paler still. He found himself stammering some quite fantastic irrelevance, about its being a literary secret.
Nelly made a quick movement and snatched the letter from his pocket. ‘You make me curious,’ she said. ‘I must have just a tiny little peep.’ And she made as though she were about to open it.
When he recalled later every little detail of that scene it seemed to him as if a terrible eternity elapsed between that movement of hers and what he did next. During that eternity of seconds he seemed conscious of jet-black icebergs crashing together in a darkened sea.
Then, in a desperate inspiration, he acted.
He snatched the letter from her and tore it, unopened as it was, into four thick pieces. ‘There!’ he said in a husky voice. ‘Come here, Nell!’
She glanced at her father and raised her eyebrows a little.
The old man made a gesture as much as to say, ‘Go in with him, my dear, but it’s a bad job!’ And then she followed him into the house. ‘Here, Nell!’ he called and she followed him into the kitchen.
He lifted the round iron cover of the kitchen grate, with the implement appointed for that purpose, and thrust the four torn pieces into the fire. Then he replaced the iron lid.
Grace was quick to notice by both their faces that something was amiss. ‘Lord, Miss Nelly!’ she cried. ‘What be up to then? Burnin’ weddin’ scrips and holy promises? Lord! Mr Richard, sir — look to her now! Goodness save us! what fine cantraps and unlawful doin’s is this? Miss Nelly darlin’, now don’t ‘ee be takin’ on like that! Don’t ’ee, dearie!’
And she put her stalwart arms round her mistress who had suddenly turned a deadly white and was supporting herself against the table.
Grace almost lifted her on to a chair. ‘Don’t stand starin’ like as you a’ seed the Devil, Mr Richard. Get the dear darlin’ a drop o’ water!’
He put a glass hurriedly under the tap, obeying the wench ‘meek as any dazed sheep’ as Grace commented afterwards. ‘Gi’e it to I!’ she cried. ‘Bless the man! it’s the hot water tap ’ee’s a-turnin’. Here, gi’e it to I!’
But Nelly waved away the glass. ‘I’m all right now,’ she said, ‘thanks all the same Gracie dear!’
And certainly her colour began coming rapidly back.
Richard stood anxiously and wretchedly before her, twisting his fingers backwards and forwards and slowly nodding his head, as was his habit when utterly nonplussed.
She raised her eyes to his face and smiled a bitter, cruel little smile. It gratified and pleased her to see him look so entirely foolish.
Then she sprang to her feet. ‘All right now Gracie!’ she said. ‘It was the heat, I suppose.’
‘Hope ’tweren’t no wills nor testaments nor birth certifications you’ve a-throwed away like that and burned to cinders? I keeps this ‘ere stove as hot as Pharaoh’s Furnace, I do, else the darned thing don’t cook nothin’; but I ain’t a-heatin’ kitchen fires for to burn weddin’ dockiments and citations!’
‘That’s all right, Gracie. It was nothing. It was just a letter from a friend. It was nothing important.’
‘Well, it be ashes now, sure enough, whatever it were!’ Grace returned to her cooking with a philosophical wink.
The husband and wife went back to the front of the cottage. They found the old man anxiously awaiting them in the porch.
‘Nothing serious I hope,’ said he. He looked at Richard gravely. ‘Never keep letters from them. And never explain anything to them. Obey your own conscience. Go your own way. And if they want you to change your mind, just you hold your tongue and go on as you are. They’ll come round all right, sooner or later. But never argue with ‘em. Do what you have to do; never hide your letters, and never argue!’
‘There’s a lot in what you say, sir,’ said Richard very solemnly, propitiating the old man.
When the ex-priest had returned to his own room, the husband and wife moved by common consent into the garden. They both seemed conscious of a craving for air and sun. But the magnetism of their quarrel held them together and drew them towards each other.
‘So you still keep up with at least one of them?’ said Nelly, bending down, precisely as she had done half an hour ago, to smell the phloxes.
‘Yes, I keep up with one of them,’ answered Richard. ‘If to “keep up with” means to burn letters unopened.’
She lifted up her head at that, and her eyes flashed from her flushed face like two steel-blue blades. ‘Don’t lie, Richard! It’s not worth it. You know you’ve never burnt one of that woman’s letters before! And you wouldn’t have burnt that one, if you hadn’t been scared of my reading it. It’s no use lying. We may just as well face it. If you must keep these things going on, you must, I suppose. If you’re made like that, well! you are. But it’s rather a shock to me, my dear — just at first — you know.’
Richard had never felt so miserable, so uncomfortable, or so much of a complete fool as he did at that moment.
He did not know whether to be angry or relieved when the figure of Canyot, carrying a basket, appeared outside the gate.
Nelly gave him one quick glance — and then she waved to him and shouted: ‘Wait, Robert! Please wait! I’m coming with you.’
He waited just where he was without making a sign. He began picking the long grasses out of the hedge and sucking the sweetness from their stalks. He whistled as he did this and flicked away the flies from his forehead. He took no more notice of Richard than if the man had been one of the posts of the gate.
‘We’ve thought better of it, you see,’ said the writer, after a moment’s pause in which he gathered all his wits together to carry the thing through somehow.
Oh how he hated these tense undignified scenes! In France, he thought, misquoting Laurence Sterne with a miserable inward laugh, they do these things better.
‘I’m sailing on Saturday,’ was the only response he got from Canyot, who now began nibbling the little sticky leaves of a briar rose.
Richard turned and went into the house. He knocked at the door of the room he shared with Nelly.
‘I’m just coming,’ the girl called out. ‘May I come in?’ Richard pleaded, turning the handle of the door. The door was locked from the inside — for the first time!
He walked back into the garden feeling thoroughly miserable. He had hoped for one swift all-obliterating all-forgiving embrace. She had deliberately forestalled this intention. She intended to go off for the whole day with Canyot, leaving the rift between them raw and unhealed.
There was his rival, stolid and impassive, an ugly one-armed sentinel at the gate of their lost paradise. He had the end of a dockleaf in his mouth now. Would he eat up the whole hedge?
Nelly came flying past him with tripping steps. She pretended that the haste of that moment was extreme so as to avoid having to give him a farewell kiss.
She was out of the gate before he could open it for her, and instead of pausing then she ran past the young painter and up the hill-path crying as she ran, ‘Come on, Robert, we shall never get there if you’re so slow. Come on! I’ll race you to the top!’
Canyot picked up the picnic basket provided for him by Mrs Winsome and strode after her. About ten yards away he stopped and looked back, waving his stick at Richard. ‘Sailing on Saturday!’ he shouted and turned again to pursue the girl whose light mauve dress was still visible from the garden moving rapidly among the elder bushes and furze.