When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment.
His own beauty, such as it was, had certainly consumed away some time ago. Others of his contemporaries had done better, he reflected, as he looked across at his old friend and rival Humphrey Finch. Humphrey, for instance, had kept his hair. He stood now in a respectful attitude under his umbrella, his enviable head with its thick white mane soberly bowed, while his eyes rested thoughtfully upon Hugh's grandson. Humphrey was a quick man and Hugh was a slow man; and although Humphrey's career had come to an untimely end after an incident in Marrakesh which even the British Foreign Service, with its wide tolerance of eccentricity, could not overlook, Hugh still felt that Humphrey had been the more successful of the two. Hugh's own career in the Civil Service after he had decided, or rather discovered, that he was not a painter, had been if not exactly meteoric at least exemplary and such as could pass as distinguished. Flattering words in high quarters had attended his retirement. Yes, he could pass as a distinguished man; just as he could pass as a good husband, and few would ever know anything to the contrary. But the terror and the glory of life had passed him by.
Hugh shifted his gaze to the neighbouring umbrella under which he made out the unusually fashionable hat and unusually subdued face of Humphrey's wife, Mildred, who, although she had not been particularly fond of Fanny, had produced for the occasion a look of?heavy? reflective melancholy and even a few tears. She was leaning, not upon her husband's Ann, but upon that of her handsome younger brother, Colonel Felix Meecham, who held the umbrella high above her and contrived, even with both Anns thus occupied, somehow to stand at attention. 'Poor Mildred', as she was called by those of her acquaintance who knew, as indeed who did not know by now, the scandal of her husband's. sexual preferences. Yet Mildred was not a figure to pity.
Mildred, whom Hugh had kissed passionately once, he remembered, on a summer evening over twenty-five years ago, when they were both already sensible middle-aged married people. He wondered, as he watched her dab her eyes with a small handkerchief, whether she still recalled that curious incident.
The days of our age are three score years and ten.
Fanny had not lived out her appointed span. The cancer came sooner. And he himself had yet another three years to go. Well, Fanny had lived, she had married a distinguished man, she had borne children, she had loved her husband and her children and her grandchildren and her cats and dogs. She had been, he supposed, happy. She had not been altogether cheated. Hugh recalled the last funeral he had attended. When his eldest grandson Steve, Randall's boy, had died of polio Hugh had felt a frenzy of anger and misery which was quite unlike the resigned grief of today. Steve's death had been something gratuitous and wicked, and Hugh had raved at the universe in vain to find a place to pin that wickedness down.
Nothing had been right since Steve died. Randall had been reeling drunk at the funeral and said later that Ann had never forgiven him. It was rather perhaps that he had never forgiven Ann, upon whom by some insane and fantastic logic he had seemed to fix the blame of his bereavement. Drunk he had been at the funeral, and drunk he had been with increasing frequency ever since. Doubtless he had loved in Steve and lost in him his own immortality, his own more radiant self, for the boy had resembled him to a singular degree. Where had it come from, Hugh wondered, all that warmth? Not from Fanny certainly, and not from himself. He was a slow man and he had no warmth; it is a thing that one knows. What they all remembered now about Steve was his warmth and not that he had been, like his father, impossible. Yet those who, like Steve, like Randall, compel love, also for just that reason, Hugh reflected, merit the love they compel. While the worthy and deserving ones, such as Ann, are, by a terrible justice, unloved. Hugh had long ago ceased feeling guilty or even puzzled that he did not love Ann. He liked and respected and admired her, but there was no compulsion of warmth. Yet, when she was young and her hair was as red as Miranda's, Randall had loved her; and perhaps, it had been hinted in the village, Douglas Swann, though serenely married himself, loved her now in a way that was the tiniest bit more than pastoral.
By shifting his head slightly Hugh could see behind Ann the pious profile of Douglas Swann, and seemingly superimposed upon it, in his sidelong glimpse, as in a composite photograph, the handsome face of Clare Swann, her prominent eyes ablaze with curiosity and life. Since Fanny had been moved, two months ago, to the clinic in London, Douglas Swann had come up from Kent several times to see her, and today they had both come, which was very good of them, considering how busy they were, Hugh reflected with irritation. At least he was being spared the experience of having Swann conduct the burial service. Words of such terrible weight are best not profaned by those whom one has caught out being, if not positively frail, at least certainly absurd. With added annoyance Hugh recalled that he had promised to drive the Swanns back to Kent after the service was over. How much, how very much now, he did not want to go back to Grayhallock, to the big unspirited house and the acres of dreary roses. But there was such a lot still to be done there, so many tasks, so much sheer tidying up, now that poor Fanny was gone. Well, it would all be done, and then he would be free. He would be free. Ah, what did that mean?
Thou hast set our misdeeds before thee: and our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.
It was just as well he reflected that most of his own were, fortunately, secret. Yes, he had passed as a good husband. No one had known about Emma Sands. He had got past. Perhaps it was just this which should be, when his own time came, engraved upon his tombstone: he got away with it, he got past. His career had been successful, his marriage had been successful. No onehad known about Emma: that is no one had known much or anything for certain; and people notice so little and they forget. Fanny had known, of course; but Fanny had been so incredulous, so puzzled, so unable to cope in her thought with the irrational violence of that episode, that she had later made it, in a way, as if it had never happened. She had seemed to forget it utterly; and this too Hugh could hardly forgive her. Because he had spared her the details, she had never known how nearly she had lost him. Or had she, he wondered fruitlessly and for the thousandth time, so nearly lost him? He was, when all was said and done, a conventional man.
His mind had run this course many a time until he knew every turn and cranny of the reasoning by heart. Surely it was not for Fanny's sake or for the sake of the children that he had not then gone away. The children had been nearly grown up; and as for any real bond with Fanny, so great a fire would have frayed it in a second if he had let things rip. But he had not let things rip. Was it for pure convention that he had sacrificed that marvel? Perhaps. Was it because of the department? Was it because he had had no money of his own? Perhaps. Or was it for some demon of morality which, he knew, would have given him, later, no peace? Yet morality, as it subsequently seemed, was neither here nor there. No great store of spiritual energy had been liberated by his sacrifice; and his action, too high doubtless for any context which he could sustain for it, appeared to have had merely a destructive effect. He had passed years in a resentment against his wife which had gradually deadened his tenderness into pity and his pity into a dull resigned companionship. Their marriage had become a hollow frame. It was for that solid but echoing framework, its painted exterior so bravely held up to the world, that he had given up the peril of a great love.