Part 32

Roger delivered his blushing wife, rather overdressed (for he had insisted on a fashionable outfit), to her parents at Aldermaston; he shook hands heartily with his father-in-law to whom he took an immediate liking, kissed his mother-in-law (to her confusion) and his sisters-in-law, and then let his father-in-law drive him over to the nearest station from which he could get a train to Basingstoke (for Farleigh), promising to return in four days after he had seen his father, sister, and brothers, one of them at Portsmouth. When he did get back to Church Farm, Lucy was in bed, ill, and his father and mother-in-law were looking grave and preoccupied. They were also--as country people are--a little tiresomely reticent. What had happened? This, as he afterwards pieced it together.

When Mrs. Baines had received Ann Anderson's letter--written, as you will remember, about November 30, but not posted from Unguja till early in January--she had a knock-down blow. It is true the Mission on the receipt of a telegram from Callaway had warned her to expect serious news from Hangodi, but she had not paid much attention, so convinced was she that God must avert all harm from a son of hers. But the letter--from Ann, too, whom she would have welcomed as a daughter-in-law--was convincing, and for the first few hours after she had read it twice through, she locked herself into their joint bedroom to Mr. Baines's great discomfiture--he might wash and sleep where he liked. She had shouted at him through the keyhole, in a hoarse, strangled voice he hardly recognized as hers, that his son John was dead, killed by the "A-rabs," no doubt with that slut of a Lucy's full approval; and left to digest this dreadful news as best he might. Eliza, touched to great pity and a sympathetic sobbing over the fate of Master John, made him up a sort of a shakedown bedroom arrangement in the "libery," where he did his accounts....

Mrs. Baines did not emerge from her fastness for a day and a half. When she did come out she was composed, but with such an awful look in her eyes that no one dared offer sympathy or proffer advice. She gave her orders in as few words as possible. She set to work to confection the deepest mourning and pulled the blinds down, and down they had to remain a full week. During that week by the aid of candle-light she wrote a good many letters--for her. Eliza, who had to post them, for Mrs. Baines shrank from encountering friends or acquaintances till the week was up, noticed that some of them bore quite grand addresses: the member for Reading, the Marquis of Wiltshire, the Editor of the Review of Reviews....

How did Mrs. Baines know so soon that Lucy and Roger had returned to England and come down to see the Joslings at Church Farm? Why, because the miller of Aldermaston saw the Brenthams arrive at Aldermaston station and witnessed the greeting of Farmer Josling--such a fine upstanding man--and his son-in-law--just such another, only rather sallow-like and thin; and the miller told old Mrs. Bunsby of the general shop at Theale; and Mrs. Bunsby, wanting badly a supply of ginger beer, for the weather was getting warm and Oxford undergraduates sometimes pushed their walking tours as far as the Kennet Valley--Mrs. Bunsby walked over to John Baines & Co. that very afternoon to give an order for four dozen and mentioned the fact of "pore Master John's widow" having come back to her home "with a noo 'usband."

The assistant who registered the order for delivery in their next round, after Mrs. Bunsby left slipped into Mr. Baines's "libery," and half-whispered the news of Lucy's return. When, soon afterwards, Mrs. Baines came into the dining-room to preside over the tea table, he--(he looked very aged--my astral body floating over the scene felt a twinge of pity for him; in his own dull way he had been fond and proud of his only son and worked to provide him with a competency--some day)--he, with some preparatory clearing of the throat, said: "Er ... Hrhm.... Er ... Lucy's back, I hear...."

"Indeed?" replied his wife swiftly. "Where? Bridewell? That's where she ought to be...."

"I dare say, my dear, but she's at Church Farm, her parents', you know.... P'raps she could tell you something about John?..."

"P'raps she could. But I won't have her name mentioned in this house. Do you understand?"

Mr. Baines did, and took this intimation as final.

The next day was Sunday. Mrs. Baines spent much of the day (as she had decided she could not go to chapel) communing in prayer with her Maker in the bedroom fastness. Some of the prayers heard by the frightened Eliza through the keyhole sounded more like objurgations, and the Scripture readings were the minatory passage directed by the Minor Prophets against harlots and light women.

After two days of Aldermaston Lucy had quite recovered her spirits--she had felt rather depressed at Hankey's Mansions and not at all lightened at heart by her week of shopping under Aunt Pardew's furtive guidance and rather checked congratulations. On the Monday morning she was standing with her parents and Clara in front of the beautiful old farm house, inhaling the scents of May, revelling with the eye over the landscape beauty she had so often recalled to herself in Africa. Farmer Josling had repeatedly given expression to the pleasure he had derived from the looks, manner, and hand-grip of his son-in-law, and Mrs. Josling still blushed and laughed at the remembrance of his having kissed her cheek. They could not help the gratification of feeling that their daughter's second marriage was into a social stratum worthy of her looks, her superior education and their hopes for her....

Clara, walking away to glance at the bee-hives, called back to the group, "Here's Mrs. Baines coming up from the road."

Instinctively the parents withdrew into the porch of the house, leaving their daughter to meet Mrs. Baines for the first few minutes alone, with no other listeners to the sad story she had to tell. Lucy, like the bird fascinated by the snake, remained where she was, her fingers playing with a pansy she had just picked. Mrs. Baines, all in black, with black plumes to a large bonnet and black gloves, walked slowly and consideringly up to the spell-bound Lucy. When she was close to her she said: "What ... have ... you done ... with ... my ... son?..."

"Oh! I ... I ... haven't you heard?" stammered Lucy.

"I have heard ... and I've guessed much more than I've heard.... You ... you harlot--you adulteress--you--you strumpet!" roared Mrs. Baines, who had been cooking her vengeance and rehearsing this scene with a dictionary, during the last twenty-four hours. And forthwith before Lucy could reply or any one intervene she had dealt her two terrific boxes on the ears, first on one side and then on the other.

Lucy fell on to the pansy bed, temporarily stunned. Mr. Josling, scarcely able at first to believe ears and eyes, rushed out with a roar like a bull, picked up Mrs. Baines round her iron stays, as though she weighed no more than a wisp, ran round to the other side of the house where there was a great horse trough full of water, and soused in this the head and huge plumed bonnet of the angry woman. And again, giving her time to catch her breath, he plunged her head and bonnet beneath the water. Then, standing her on her feet, he said, "There! that'll cool your hot blood. That is some return for your half-killing my daughter--you blasted she-tiger, you ... Be off! Or I'll set the dogs on you.... I'll..."

"Father, dear," said Clara, crying for pity and rage over the hapless Lucy, yet careful of appearances: "Father dear, don't shout so! For goodness' sake, let the old witch go, and don't attract everybody's attention. What ever will the neighbours think! Here!" she said, thrusting on Mrs. Baines the umbrella she had brought and dropped on the garden path at the moment of the assault, "be off with you, you wicked old woman. It's a mercy father ain't killed you, he's that strong. And if you've done any real harm to my sister, we'll soon let you know and have you up before the courts, you wicked old snivelling psalm-singin' Methody!"

Mrs. Baines said nothing to this counter-attack. She drained the water from her plumes with her fingers, put her flopping bonnet as straight as was possible, pressed the water from her shoulders, and made some attempt to wipe her face with a handkerchief; and then, summoning all her strength and resolution (for in reality she was much shaken and near collapse), she walked firmly past them, uttering never a word, walked slowly down the garden path, turned to the right and contrived not to halt on her way back to the station till she was well out of their sight. They were a little over-awed by her dignity.

It was decided--and Lucy when she could speak implored them to adopt this negative course--not to write to Roger, and as far as possible not to talk of this painful scene to any neighbour. But to keep it from country gossip was an impossibility. This, that, or the other farm servant had seen it, from the rafters of a barn in repair, from the stables, from the dairy window; and so the treatment old Mrs. Baines had served out to her former daughter-in-law became noised abroad, penetrated from the kitchen and still-room of Engledene House to its mistress's dressing-room. A vague rumour of it even reached the African Department of the Foreign Office and Molyneux publicly shrugged his shoulders in Sir Mulberry Hawk's room. The Carnarvons at Highclere heard a perversion of it--rather a humorous one--from one of their farmer tenants, and reconsidered their idea of asking Brentham and Mrs. Brentham over to a week-end party to relate some of their extraordinary experiences. The Vicar of Farleigh Wallop realized that something of the kind had occurred to interrupt his musings on the arrangements of the streets in Calleva Atrebatum, and when he drove over with Maud to make the acquaintance of his daughter-in-law--now convalescent and thankful to find the drum of the worst smacked ear had not been split--he was merely coldly polite and expressed very little interest in missionary questions. Indeed he took no interest in Christian Missions after 700 A.D. Up to that time he reckoned--more or less--they had been spreading the ideas of Imperial Rome, of Roman civilization.

Roger, however, though he commented little on the episode of the assault, and felt in every way the least said, soonest mended, borrowed his father-in-law's riding-horse and rode early one morning over to Tilehurst. He entered the factory, of design, just as Mr. Baines was about to take his seat in the office and run his eyes over the day's orders. "Oh, don't be alarmed!" he said to Mr. Baines, who was instinctively about to withdraw, guessing his visitor's identity. "I'm not a violent heathen like your wife. Sit down and let us talk this over like sensible men."

He then put the matter very plainly before Mr. Baines.

Mrs. Baines, summoned by half-fearful, half-exultant Eliza, had "locked herself in her bedroom, she 'ave an' ast me to go for the police!"

"Then you, too," said Roger to the startled Eliza, "remain and hear what I have to say. Since your termagant of a mistress refuses to come, you shall repeat my words to her. You are, from what my wife tells me, an old and trusted servant of the family" (Eliza bridled and pleated the hem of her apron). "When she returns to sanity, you may get a chance of saying a word to your mistress in season, even if her husband has not the courage to do so. Tell her then, if she ever annoys or slanders or upsets my wife in any way I will leave no stone unturned to punish her. And if she appears at Church Farm or anywhere else again with the intention of assaulting my wife I will knock her on the head like the mad dog she is. Now you can leave us. But I trust also to you as an honourable woman and one who was sincerely fond of poor John Baines, who ought never to be connected with these hateful sayings and doings, not to chatter about this business outside this house."

And Eliza did not. She was much impressed by Brentham's appeal. The interview with John's father even ended in a kind of reconciliation. He heard from Brentham for the first time the whole story, so far as it was known, of the circumstances which led up to the attack on the station, John's death, and Lucy's journey to the coast; of how her baby had died and how ill she had been; of the Stotts, and of Ann Jamblin's obstinacy. Roger purposely prolonged the interview. It was doing the miserable father good, and was keeping Mrs. Baines a prisoner in her bedroom just when she wanted to be busy at house-work.

Maud on her return from visiting the Joslings tightened her lips and "went for" her father as he had never been truth-told before; so Mrs. Baines, if she did harm to Lucy's good name and gave her nervous system a nasty shock, also provoked good in other directions. A disturbance of the kind seldom fails to clear the air and create a fresher atmosphere. Maud reproached her father bitterly with his incivility to his eldest son's wife; with his general indifference to the well-being of his children, his selfish absorption in his archaeological work, his unfairness to them in lavishing on it funds which should have been their patrimony. She even issued a sort of ultimatum: the subsidies to the Silchester Excavation fund must cease; the curate at Farleigh must be given his conge and the Vicar--still able-bodied--carry out his own Church duties: or she would go away and earn her own living as a secretary or something or other. And she was at once, and on his authority, to ask Lucy to stay--with Roger, of course--for at least a month. He gave in. Maud had deeper plans hidden under this surface wrath. Roger was in difficulties with the Foreign Office, she guessed. He had resigned from the Indian Army. He might at any time have to forge a new career for himself and would want a little capital to start with. She reckoned that her father having originally been a well-to-do man and her mother having come to him with a substantial dowry, there ought to be a least twelve thousand pounds to be divided between the four of them. If that left her father almost entirely dependent on his income--about five hundred a year--from the twin benefices of Farleigh and Cliddesden, that would serve him right. He had no business to squander his children's money--as it really was--on a work of excavation which the County or the Nation should finance.

A little repentant and more than a little rheumatic--(besides, Roman Silchester was turning out so distressingly Christian and so little Pompeian and Pagan)--he agreed at any rate to look into the matter. The letter was sent to Lucy, and she came, now quite restored to health. She found in Maud the selfless friend and good adviser she had long needed. All she begged and prayed of Roger was that he might leave her at Farleigh for a time and not frighten her and upset her nerves by requiring of her the going out into smart Society, where she was ever on the twitter for fear of being questioned as to her birth and bringing-up and the circumstances of her life in Africa.

Roger rather ruefully consented. Maud would gradually cure her of her nerves and her rusticity. Meantime he would now tackle Sibyl. Sibyl had taken no notice of his card and call; but about three weeks afterwards had written to Maud, picturing herself as having now emerged from a swoon of grief and being ready to see Roger for a few minutes if he would promise to move gently and speak in a level voice, as the least thing upset her. Pressed to be more definite, she consented to see him--and him only--at Engledene on a certain Wednesday afternoon at three o'clock.

He found her in a little boudoir, which was draped with pleated lavender-mauve cashmere and shaded to a dim light. She was dressed in black, not having as yet the hardihood to discard widows' weeds, still less some diaphanous, filmy coiffe, some ghost of a widow's cap. Queen Victoria was still a great power in Society and kept Peeresses in order. If you were too daring you might be banned at Court and then where would your social and political influence be?