Part 116

By that time he no longer objected to Gertrude's being all over the place. Brodrick, though he did not know it and his sisters did, was the sort of man who could not be happy without a woman to look after him. Silently, almost furtively, Gertrude made herself indispensable to him. She knew what he wanted before he knew it himself, and was on the spot to supply it. Thus, watching the awful increase of Brodrick's correspondence, as the editor grew great, she was prepared for the coming of a secretary and had forestalled it.

She had kept herself prepared for the coming of a wife, a mistress of Brodrick's house, and by making Brodrick supremely comfortable she had managed to forestall that too. His secretary had become the companion that his housekeeper could not hope to be. Hitherto he had kept Gertrude Collett out of his library as far as possible. Now her intrusion had the consecration of business, and it was even permissible for Gertrude to spend long hours with him in the sanctuary. Brodrick invariably breakfasted alone. This habit and his deadly and perpetual dining out, had been a barrier to all intimacy. But now a large part of his work on the "Monthly Review" could be done at home in the evenings, so that the editor had less time for dining out. And latterly he had taken to coming home early in the afternoons, when he rather liked to have Gertrude in the drawing-room pouring out tea for him. She filled the place of something that he missed, that he was as yet hardly aware of missing. It seemed to him that he had got used to Gertrude.

He could not think what life would be like without Gertrude, any more than he could think what it would be like with her in a closer and more intimate relation. For none of them had ever suggested that he should marry Gertrude. No Brodrick would have dreamed of marrying his housekeeper. Gertrude would not have dreamed of it herself.

And yet she dreamed. But her dream was of continuance in the silent, veiled adventure, the mystery and religion of her service. Service to Brodrick, perpetual, unwearying service, constituted to her mind the perfect tie. It was the purity of it that she counted as perfection. She desired nothing further than her present surrender to the incorruptible, inassailable passion of service. Whenever, in her dream, she touched the perilous edges of devotion, Gertrude had pulled herself back. She had told herself that she was there for nothing in the world but to save Brodrick, to save him trouble, to save him worry, to save him expense; to save and save and save. That was really what it came to when she saved him from having to keep a secretary.

For Gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in Brodrick. Thus she had laboured at her own destruction. So preoccupied was she with the thought of Brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated itself to him. He grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. If Gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity, Brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained indefinitely quiescent. But he had become the centre of a hundred influences, wandering spirits of Gertrude's brain. Irresistibly urging, intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for the dominion of Jane Holland. But Gertrude was not aware of this. Her state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for three years a secret to herself. She was before all things a sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and boundless capacity for illusion. She shuddered in the grip of mortal renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of Brodrick. In her three years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in flesh and blood; and Brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. His attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity.

It was with the coming of Jane Holland that disturbance had begun; a trouble so mysterious and profound that, if her conscience probed it, the seat of it remained hidden from the probe. She thought, in her innocence, that she was going to have an illness; but it had not struck her that her symptoms were aggravated by Miss Holland's presence and became intense to excruciation in those hours when she knew that Brodrick and Miss Holland were off together somewhere, and alone. She sickened at the thought, and was unaware that she was sick. This unconsciousness of hers was fostered by all the conventions of her world, a world that veils itself decorously in the presence of the unveiled; and she was further helped by her own anxiety to preserve the perfect attitude, to do the perfect thing.

She was not even aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland. Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where she was, and what she was doing when she was not there.

It ended in wonder; for Brodrick was the only person who could have informed her, and he had grown curiously reticent on the subject of Jane Holland. He would say that she was coming, or that she was not coming, on such or such a day. That was all. Her coming on some day or the other was a thing that Gertrude had now to take for granted. She tried to discuss it eagerly with Brodrick; she dwelt on it with almost affectionate solicitude; you would have said that Brodrick could not have desired it more than she did.

In the last two weeks Gertrude found something ominous in Brodrick's silence and sulkiness. And on this Sunday, the day of Jane's departure, she was no longer able to ignore their significance. Very soon he would come to her and tell her that he did not want her; that she must go; that she must make room for Miss Holland.

That night, after Brodrick had returned from taking Jane Holland home, his secretary came to him in the library. She found him standing by the writing-table, looking intently at something which he held in his hand, something which, as Gertrude appeared to him, he thrust hastily into a drawer.

"May I speak to you a moment?" she said.

"Certainly."

He turned, patient and polite, prepared to deal, as he had dealt before, with some illusory embarrassment of Gertrude's.

"You are not pleased with me," she said, forcing the naked statement through hard lips straight drawn.

"What makes you think so?"

"Your manner has been different."

"Then what you mean is that you are not pleased with my manner. My manner is unfortunate."

He was almost oppressively patient and polite.

"Would it not be better," she said, "for me to go?"

"Certainly not. Unless you want to."

"I don't say that I want to. I say it might be better."

Still, with laborious, weary patience, he protested. He was entirely, absolutely satisfied. He had never dreamed of her going. The idea was preposterous, and it was her own idea, not his.

She looked at him steadily, with eyes prepared to draw truth from him by torture.

"And there is no reason?" she said. "You can think of no reason why it would be better for me to go?"

He hesitated a perceptible instant before he answered her.

"There is no reason," he said; and having said it, he left the room.

He had paused to gather patience in exasperation. Gertrude interpreted the pause as the impressive stop before the final, irrevocable decision; a decision favourable to her continuance.

She was not appeased by it. Her anxiety rather had taken shape, resolving itself into a dreadful suspicion as to the relations between Brodrick and Miss Holland.