“I feel sure you could do with a second cup of tea, Mr. Spong,” Agatha went on. “You will have to eat in the next few days by being taken unawares.” She paused at his side after taking him his cup. “I can feel so especially for you in your great loss. It is not so many years since I had to face the same myself.”
“Mrs. Calkin, I can only emulate your courage.”
“I cannot offer any courage as an example,” said Geraldine. “I can only remember writhing in darkness.”
“There is the loss that no one knows who has not suffered it,” said Agatha.
“All our troubles have been as nothing!” said Geraldine.
“No, no,” said Agatha, “indeed not that. But not the one loss of all losses.”
“It makes one more and more thankful one has not married,” said Geraldine. “I have not realised quite how much reason I had for gratitude.”
“Miss Dabis, it is not a reason for gratitude for someone else,” said Dominic.
“As we are talking of marriage, can’t we talk of the break-up of the Bellamys’ marriage?” said Kate. “We are supposed to behave in a natural way with people in trouble, and it is very unnatural not to be talking of it.”
“Miss Kate, do not let me prevent you,” said Dominic earnestly.
“That is putting it in a much safer way. Agatha and Geraldine, do not let Mr. Spong and me prevent you.”
“It is so strange to me,” said Agatha, embarking simply on her own treatment of the subject, “that people who have had the great experience of coming together, and sharing the first deep events of married life, can break it all up as if it were a trivial, passing relationship. I have nothing in me that helps me to understand it.”
“You can look at the things without you,” said Geraldine. “There are plenty of illuminating illustrations about.”
“Miss Dabis, I do not think there are plenty,” said Dominic in a grieved and dubious tone.
“I was only thinking casually of the instances that rose to my mind,” said Geraldine, her voice as casual as her thought.
“Was Lady Haslam upset by the news from the rectory?” said Agatha.
“I can hardly say,” said Dominic. “I was not present at the breaking of it to her. She can scarcely not have been aware of it, but we did not carry on conversation on that line. I rose to go very soon. With your permission, Mrs. Calkin, I will now take my leave of you, with thanks to you for the words we have exchanged. Miss Dabis, Miss Kate, you will allow me to make my adieux.” He seemed to find a fitness in the frivolous phrase. “I hope that when things are easier with me, I shall have the pleasure of welcoming you all under my roof, if you will tolerate my being, as I shall be, forced to dispense my hospitality myself.”
“Can we tolerate it?” said Kate. “By himself he will not allow gossip; and how can we cope with circumstances we have never met? Most people insist on it.”
“You will soon come up to Lady Hardisty, if you go on persevering in her line!” said Geraldine, with her eyebrows raised.
Kate looked kindly and uncomprehending, not ready to be drawn upon her emulation of Rachel, which had struck her as in its nature imperceptible.
“Poor man, he feels it very deeply,” said Agatha, coming back into the room.
“He thought I did not feel it enough,” said Kate.
“Well, anyhow he said so!” said Geraldine.
“We must not expect everyone to enter into everything,” said Agatha. “That would not be possible. If Mr. Spong expects it, he is wrong. We must get to know that, those of us whose lives hold the Chapter not common to all. It is the price we pay for fuller experience. We must be content to pay it.”
“We can be more content not to pay it,” said Geraldine.
“I shall never get over being thought to behave with a want of taste and feeling,” said Kate. “I shall harbour towards Mr. Spong the peculiar aversion we have towards those we have wronged.” She glanced at her sister as she ended.
“Well, we can talk about the Bellamys now,” said Geraldine, with a faint air of hardly finding her sister’s propensity worth considering. “I daresay Mr. Spong would have joined us, if we had persevered.”
“No!” said Agatha. “No! There are some things that some of us can only bear a certain touch upon.”
“I wonder how soon Mr. Spong will be looking about him for another partner,” said Geraldine, reaching for a book. “I thought he already tended to a wandering eye.”
“No. Not in this case. No!” said Agatha. “This is a case where devotion has gathered, risen to its height, and will hold to the end. He will go on his way alone. There are some of us for whom that path is laid out. Poor man! My thoughts will be with him to-night in his lonely home. They are with him now, as he goes his way towards it.”
Dominic was going his way in the Haslams’ carriage to the house of Sir Percy Hardisty.
“Ah, now, Spong, I take it as a kindness that you will try to feel at home with us to-night.”
“Sir Percy, I can only thank you.”
“You are saving us from feeling that our touch cannot be borne in trouble,” said Rachel. “That would strike at the very foundations of our union. Will you not have something to drink, Mr. Spong? It is half an hour before dinner.”
“It would strike, Lady Hardisty, at the foundation of our faith in many things,” said Dominic, stretching backwards to a table in compliance with the degree of his interest. “The touch of certain people is the only thing that can be borne.”
“Ah, now, forget it for the moment, Spong,” said Sir Percy. “Don’t be dwelling on it, my boy, to-night. I mean, dwell only on the bright side of it, on all of it; but don’t be feeling alone among old friends.”
“You may listen to Percy. He knows what can be done from experience,” said Rachel.
“Sir Percy, I cannot feel alone amid so much kindness. I will simply feel that she who has left me is with me in spirit.”
“Then you both will feel alike,” said Rachel.
“You will not misunderstand me, Lady Hardisty,” said Dominic, with a look of perplexity and a resonant utterance of the name, as if granting her full right to bear it, “when I say that to me any thought of a successor to my wife is sacrilege.”
“Well, now, Spong,” said Sir Percy, as if any subject were to bel preferred to the one that obtained, “how about this about the young Bellamys and Dufferin? Because we won’t try you now by going on to ground that is your own. But that is one sort of business.”
“Sir Percy, as family lawyer to all of them, I have been brought much into contact with the affair,” said Dominic with an air of grave distaste. “I have done my best to advise each party for his or her individual good, but the upshot is, they are to all intents and purposes of one mind.” He sank into dubious amusement.
“It is nice of them to agree under such a test,” said Rachel. “We should never know people in ordinary life. Of course the whole of my life is a test. It is quite the best moment in Mr. Spong’s life for us to have him with us, Percy.”
“I am sorry for that poor woman, Mrs. Christy,” said Dominic, with the dilation of his eyes that mention of a woman produced. “It is hard for her to have this trouble with her daughter. I have done all I can to show my sympathy towards her.”
“Percy, we must see about showing sympathy,” said Rachel, “if Mr. Spong doesn’t mind our copying him.”
“Lady Hardisty, indeed no,” said Dominic.
“But the girl will divorce Bellamy, of course,” said Sir Percy.
“No,” said Dominic in a judicial tone, “apparently not. The fault is entirely on her side, and Bellamy appears to be anxious to keep any slur off himself. It would go hard with him in his profession to take any other course. And another point seems to be that he may marry again. And no breath of scandal has ever touched him, Sir Percy.”