Part 210

Sophy was speechless. Of all the attitudes that any Brodrick could take she had not expected this.

"We have made things too hard for her----" he said.

"We?"

"You and I--all of us. We've not seen what was in her."

Sophy repressed her opinion that they very probably would see now. As there was no use arguing with him in his present mood (she could see that), she left him.

Brodrick heard her motor hooting down Roehampton Lane. She was going to dine at Henry's. Presently all the family would be in possession of the situation, of Jane's conduct and his attitude. And there was Gertrude Collett. He understood now that she suspected.

Gertrude had come back into her place.

He picked up some papers and took them to the safe which stood in another corner of the room behind his writing-table. He wanted to get away from Gertrude, to be alone with his secret and concealed, without betraying his desire for solitude, for concealment. He knelt down by the safe and busied himself there quite a long time. He said to himself, "It couldn't happen. She was always honest with me. But if it did I couldn't wonder. The wonder is why she married me."

He rose to his feet, saying to himself again, "It couldn't happen."

With that slight readjusting movement the two men in him became one, so that when the reasoning man reached slowly his conclusion he formulated it thus: "It couldn't happen. If it did, it wouldn't happen this way. He" (even to himself he could not say "they") "would have managed better, or worse." At last his intellect, the lazy, powerful beast, was roused and dealt masterfully with the situation.

He had to pass the fireplace to get back to his seat, which Gertrude guarded. As he passed he caught sight of his own face in the glass over the chimney-piece, a face with inflamed eyes and a forehead frowning and overcast, and cheeks flushed with shame. Gertrude, looking up at him from the manuscript she brooded over, instinctively made way for him to pass.

It was she who spoke first. Her finger was on the pencil-marks again.

"Then that," said she, pointing, "that is not to stand?"

"Of course it isn't." He answered coldly. "It wasn't meant to. It's rubbed out."

He looked at her for the first time with dislike. He did not suspect her as the source of abominable suggestion. He was only thinking that if it hadn't been for her he wouldn't have seen any of these things.

She shrank before his look. "Does he think I wanted him to see it?" she said to herself.

Already she was clean in her own eyes. Already she had persuaded herself that she had not wanted that. And in the same breath of thought she asked herself, "What did he see?"

She smiled as she answered his cold answer.

"I thought it was rubbed out, but I couldn't be quite sure."

They were so absorbed that they did not hear the door open.

Jane stood in the doorway quietly regarding them.

LXV

There were people who knew for a fact that Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh Brodrick) had run away with George Tanqueray. The rumour ran through the literary circles shunned by Tanqueray and Jane. The theory of her guilt was embraced with excitement by the dreadful, clever little people. Not one of them would have confessed to a positive desire to catch her tripping. But now that the thing had happened it satisfied the craving for complete vision of the celebrated lady. It reduced considerably her baffling eminence, and dispersed once for all the impenetrable, irritating atmosphere of secrecy she had kept up.

There was George Tanqueray, too, who had kept it up even longer and more successfully. At last they had been caught, the two so insolent in their swift evasion of pursuit. Their fall, so to speak, enabled the hunter to come up with them. People who had complained that they could never meet them, who had wanted to meet them solely that they might talk about them afterwards, who had never been able to talk about them at all, had now abundant material for conversation.

The rumour, once it had fairly penetrated, spread over London in five days. It started in Kensington, ran thence all the way to Chelsea, skipped to Bloomsbury, and spread from these centres into Belgravia and Mayfair. In three weeks the tale of George Tanqueray and Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh Brodrick) had invaded Hampstead and the Southwestern suburbs. It was only confirmed by the contemptuous silence and curt denials of their friends, Arnott Nicholson, Caro Bickersteth, Nina Lempriere and the Protheros.

In Brodrick's family it sank down deep, below the level of permissible discussion. But it revealed itself presently in an awful external upheaval, utterly unforeseen, and in a still more unforeseen subsidence.

There was first of all a split between Mrs. Heron and the Doctor. The behaviour of Eddy and Winny, especially of Eddy, had got on the Doctor's nerves (he had confessed, in a moment of intense provocation, to having them). Eddy one evening had attacked violently the impermissible topic, defending Jin-Jin (in the presence of his younger sister) from the unspeakable charge current in their suburb, taxing his uncle with a monstrous credence of the impossible, and trying to prove to him that it was impossible.

For the sake of the peace so beloved by Brodricks it was settled that Frances and her children should live with poor dear John in the big house in Augustus Road.