Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and tempered, who would understand.
9
So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate Mrs. Skelmersdale into a tender but for a long time an entirely painful memory. But mothers are not so easily disposed of, and more particularly a mother whose conduct is coloured deeply by an extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon Benham's outlook. His resolution to go round the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in him. It was constantly in his mind, like the suit of the importunate widow, that he ought to devote his life to the little lady's happiness and pride, and his reason told him that even if he wanted to make this sacrifice he couldn't; the mere act of making it would produce so entirely catastrophic a revulsion. He could as soon have become a croquet champion or the curate of Chexington church, lines of endeavour which for him would have led straightly and simply to sacrilegious scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.
There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that it was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the remorses of this period of Benham's life were too complicated and scattered for a cumulative effect. In the background of his mind and less subdued than its importance could seem to warrant was his promise to bring the Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady Marayne. They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite acutely the slight he was putting upon them by this delay. Lady Marayne's moods, however, had been so uncertain that he had found no occasion to broach this trifling matter, and when at last the occasion came he perceived in the same instant the fullest reasons for regretting it.
"Ah!" she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: "you told me you were alone!"...
Her mind leapt at once to the personification of these people as all that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from London. They were the enemy, they had got hold of him.
"When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry," she remembered with a flash. "You said, 'Do I tell lies?'"
"I WAS alone. Until— It was an accident. On my walk I was alone."
But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant, forefinger.
From the instant she heard of them she hated these South Harting people unrestrainedly. She made no attempt to conceal it. Her valiant bantam spirit caught at this quarrel as a refuge from the rare and uncongenial ache of his secession. "And who are they? What are they? What sort of people can they be to drag in a passing young man? I suppose this girl of theirs goes out every evening—Was she painted, Poff?"
She whipped him with her questions as though she was slashing his face. He became dead-white and grimly civil, answering every question as though it was the sanest, most justifiable inquiry.
"Of course I don't know who they are. How should I know? What need is there to know?"
"There are ways of finding out," she insisted. "If I am to go down and make myself pleasant to these people because of you."
"But I implore you not to."
"And five minutes ago you were imploring me to! Of course I shall."
"Oh well!—well!"
"One has to know SOMETHING of the people to whom one commits oneself, surely."
"They are decent people; they are well-behaved people."
"Oh!—I'll behave well. Don't think I'll disgrace your casual acquaintances. But who they are, what they are, I WILL know...."
On that point Lady Marayne was to score beyond her utmost expectations.
"Come round," she said over the telephone, two mornings later. "I've something to tell you."
She was so triumphant that she was sorry for him. When it came to telling him, she failed from her fierceness.
"Poff, my little son," she said, "I'm so sorry I hardly know how to tell you. Poff, I'm sorry. I have to tell you—and it's utterly beastly."
"But what?" he asked.
"These people are dreadful people."
"But how?"
"You've heard of the great Kent and Eastern Bank smash and the Marlborough Building Society frauds eight or nine years ago?"
"Vaguely. But what has that to do with them?"
"That man Morris."
She stopped short, and Benham nodded for her to go on.
"Her father," said Lady Marayne.
"But who was Morris? Really, mother, I don't remember."
"He was sentenced to seven years—ten years—I forget. He had done all sorts of dreadful things. He was a swindler. And when he went out of the dock into the waiting-room— He had a signet ring with prussic acid in it—..."
"I remember now," he said.
A silence fell between them.
Benham stood quite motionless on the hearthrug and stared very hard at the little volume of Henley's poetry that lay upon the table.
He cleared his throat presently.
"You can't go and see them then," he said. "After all—since I am going abroad so soon—... It doesn't so very much matter."
10
To Benham it did not seem to be of the slightest importance that Amanda's father was a convicted swindler who had committed suicide. Never was a resolved and conscious aristocrat so free from the hereditary delusion. Good parents, he was convinced, are only an advantage in so far as they have made you good stuff, and bad parents are no discredit to a son or daughter of good quality. Conceivably he had a bias against too close an examination of origins, and he held that the honour of the children should atone for the sins of the fathers and the questionable achievements of any intervening testator. Not half a dozen rich and established families in all England could stand even the most conventional inquiry into the foundations of their pride, and only a universal amnesty could prevent ridiculous distinctions. But he brought no accusation of inconsistency against his mother. She looked at things with a lighter logic and a kind of genius for the acceptance of superficial values. She was condoned and forgiven, a rescued lamb, re-established, notoriously bright and nice, and the Morrises were damned. That was their status, exclusion, damnation, as fixed as colour in Georgia or caste in Bengal. But if his mother's mind worked in that way there was no reason why his should. So far as he was concerned, he told himself, it did not matter whether Amanda was the daughter of a swindler or the daughter of a god. He had no doubt that she herself had the spirit and quality of divinity. He had seen it.
So there was nothing for it in the failure of his mother's civilities but to increase his own. He would go down to Harting and take his leave of these amiable outcasts himself. With a certain effusion. He would do this soon because he was now within sight of the beginning of his world tour. He had made his plans and prepared most of his equipment. Little remained to do but the release of Merkle, the wrappering and locking up of Finacue Street, which could await him indefinitely, and the buying of tickets. He decided to take the opportunity afforded by a visit of Sir Godfrey and Lady Marayne to the Blights, big iron people in the North of England of so austere a morality that even Benham was ignored by it. He announced his invasion in a little note to Mrs. Wilder. He parted from his mother on Friday afternoon; she was already, he perceived, a little reconciled to his project of going abroad; and contrived his arrival at South Harting for that sunset hour which was for his imagination the natural halo of Amanda.