Chapter III (1)

Impelled by the sudden fruition of all that was morbid in his nature, Wald Ensor, towards the end of the year, married Mary Adelaide Frances, the widow of J. Dibben, Esq. It is a fact that until he bestirred himself to apply for the licence, he had not known the name of the father of Phillis. Adelaide never refused but seemed to prefer not to speak of him. Ensor supposed that Dibben, a healthy, ordinary man of no preponderating degree of intellect, had quickly managed to alienate and embitter a capricious, easily-bored woman like Adelaide. He was too modest to imagine that he himself amused her or interested her to any great extent, but at all events, he thought she considered him adequate. In his company, she appeared to find the nearest approach, for her, to a state of repose. She took possession of him, body and soul. He realized it faintly. She even seemed to have made some slight sacrifice of her individuality with a view to enslaving him completely. Though to every one else her manner was curt, unpleasant and at times unbearably arrogant, she stayed her savage tongue and curbed her domineering temper whenever it came in direct contact with her husband. And even had she allowed her natural acerbity full play, the fact that she was now about to become a mother for the second time, called forth all Ensor’s chivalry and tenderness.

He rejoiced greatly at his approaching paternity. The want that had been created deep in his heart by the premature death of his child out in California was about to be completely satisfied; the void that for lack of a better he had filled with Adelaide’s child, Phillis Dibben, he had adopted openly; while, secretly, Mary, her foster sister, as he in his heart called her, was far dearer to him. Phillis Dibben was unsympathetic, he did not think hers was altogether a nice nature, but still she was a child, and Ensor’s love of children was a real and true sentiment.

Though Adelaide and he had met first on the common ground of their philoprogenitive instinct, Ensor had come to suspect that his own was the truer development of it. Adelaide admired healthy, presentable specimens of the class only, and the beauty of Phillis as an undeniable guarantee of her own Eugenical perfection afforded the amount of toll to her vanity, the satisfaction of her pride that was needed to evoke the motherly in her. It was the only motive that swayed her, Ensor thought. Or else why did she so neglect the cook’s unhappy progeny, the child she had begun by petting, and more or less treating as her own? He could not forget that he had seen Mary, now degraded to a servant, on the day he had come across her in Beverley, sitting in the car with Adelaide’s own child. The turn was too sudden. It outraged his sense of decency.

Ensor, whose large heart was capable, where children were concerned, of embracing the halt and the maimed and the eugenically incorrect, could hardly endure to let the question stand over till Adelaide was more fit to deal with it. He constrained himself to do so, however, and contented himself with speaking kindly to the little girl whenever he met her on the stairs or in the corridors. She did not walk, she crawled; he had an idea she was slightly deformed? He realized that it was Mary he had stumbled over that first morning as she knelt by a side door into the garden, feebly scouring some stone steps. Her translation from the padded seat of the car to the hard stones she was washing had been so sudden that he could not easily conceive it to be she.

After a while he did speak to Adelaide. She made no mystery of it. She was a woman of her word, and Mary’s play days were over. Yes, it was true, she had until then been more or less brought up with Phillis, had shared her room and her meals and walks and games. It had pleased Phillis, but she could not sacrifice a child’s whole future even to please Phillis, so now that was over. With a sort of fiendish rationalism and want of consistency, she condemned a child brought up, through her caprice, in comparative ease and idleness, to do the rough work of the house, eat inferior food, worst of all, she subtracted her from all the softening educative influences to which she had been accustomed.

He listened, tapping his boot with his riding-whip. He said nothing. He thought it over. If only the child could hold on, it would of course be as well not to worry Adelaide just now, but wait till she had got safely over her forthcoming experience, always a severe mental trial to women of her temperament. Then, surely, milder counsels might prevail; he might get Mary reinstated, a kind of foster sister to Phillis, and that was what he would like best. Oh, very much best, for he had the greatest, the most absurd, tenderness for the ugly, sad unchildish child! But if that were impossible, if her mistress still refused to allow it, Mary might at least be taken out of this and sent away to some bright, well-managed school, or home of her own class, to be properly trained and educated. He did not like the notion of her being brought up to be a servant, she did not look as if she would ever be strong enough. But there were other professions. He would see----?

Meantime he did what he could for the child, and that was very little. She never appeared in the better part of the house that the red baize door shut off, and he sometimes fancied that Adelaide disliked to see him cross the threshold of it into the other. Yet the oldest and most interesting part of High Walls lay beyond, and Ensor was something of an antiquary, where architecture was concerned. He did not want to annoy his wife, however, and he was careful to conduct his architectural investigations from the back, where the historical portions of the house were situated. There Mary’s work lay, and he often spied her at her task of ablution on steps and hearth stones, armed with a pail and a piece of bath-brick, feebly scouring, swirling a wet rag about, ineffectually spreading long spiderlike arms in a radius of their length all round her and producing a dull wet surface, to be succeeded by a bright brown sanded one, where before all was dull, unvisited dust or dirt. She had terribly long arms for a child of her size and age, and she was moreover, he noticed, left-handed like himself. He would stand there for quite a long time looking down on her rusty red ribbon top-knot, knowing that the child was aware of him, but was far too well drilled to look up and crave his notice. How had they managed to transmogrify her so quickly, from a sort of foster sister to Phillis, sleeping with Phillis, driving about in the motor with Phillis and her mother, into the submissive drudge who never looked up till he spoke to her, and then with a sad cowed expression that went to his heart?

If she were actually carrying a heavy pail, too heavy for her or trailing a broom long enough for a person twice her height, he considered he was justified in taking the pail or the broom away from her at once and trying to learn from her the place where she wished it to be deposited. It was difficult to get her to speak at all, and she got shyer as the days went on. He felt, manlike, that he could scarcely offer to go down on his knees and scrub the stone floor in her stead, but he would have liked to do so, for he realized that it was not a child’s work. He fancied that the School Board, if they were aware that one of their prey was thus day by day removed from every form of school training, might have something to say about it, and dreaded some sort of exposure for Adelaide. Mary was given no tuition of any kind; he was sure of it. High Walls was five miles away from Market Weighton, and though in the nearest hamlet, consisting of a few cottages, there was a school that was half-a-mile distant, Mary never went beyond the garden, if indeed she got any fresh air at all.

The place was curiously self-contained, in its girdling walls. Adelaide did her own marketing in the motor, tradesmen never penetrated within their circumference. As it used to be said of the house in Portland Place that anything might go on there, so it might be said of High Walls. Adelaide had perhaps chosen to live here, perhaps through some affectionate analogy with the home of her birth and the house in which her mother had died. She had bought High Walls outright, so he learned, she made her own gas, she kept her own fowls and her own cows, and she ordered her clothes from Paris, fetching large wooden boxes that had crossed the seas, from the station herself, in the ever useful motor. In everything she did there was a _brusquerie_, a jerkiness, a suggestion of eccentricity.

There was no doubt that for one reason or another, from austerity, shyness and love of solitude, or simply from lack of social instinct, Adelaide had succeeded in creating a human vacuum all round her, an area sterilized of gossip. Since their marriage, before the registrar, three months ago, Mrs. Ensor, her husband felt pretty sure, had had no visitors. As a matter of fact, Ensor knew of three people who said they had driven or motored out to High Walls to pay their respects to the lady he had married, but even if they had done so, admittance was probably refused them. These were the wives of men that Ensor had met about in Market Weighton or Beverley, and who had enjoined their women folk to call on the queer, uncivilized woman whom this gentle, civilized man that they rather liked, had married. It was easy for Ensor to see that she was not popular. If people even realized her previous existence, they forbore to talk of her, and the call was only a tribute to his own charm and obvious pleasant gentlemanliness. For he was a man’s man, a man whom women are apt to find dull. But as Adelaide never went out, never returned a call, never expected to be asked to anything, it was easy enough to be civil to the husband, and make him free of what there was of Society in these sleepy little market towns. Before very long Wald Ensor belonged to the Conservative Club of Beverley, and was put on the Library Committee of that active little place, while in Weighton he played golf, and adjudged prizes. The wives’ drawing-rooms knew him not or hardly at all, he could not very well go about among the women without Adelaide, and he did not choose to do so.

He constrained himself to be more or less active in whatever was going, to fulfil his trivial duties as a citizen when they came his way, partly from a sense of duty, partly, he fancied, because the monotony of his existence at High Walls was slowly sapping his vitality, dulling his good temper and sense of good fellowship. The desire to travel again sometimes came over him in a great wave. If it had not been for Phillis and Adelaide, he said to himself: if it had not been for Mary, he did not say or even think to himself--he would, in certain irrepressible moods, have proposed it to his wife, to leave her for a time.

He could not, somehow, talk to Adelaide now; he thought it was because of her condition. He had come to think that everything, including questioning, plans and so on, must be deferred until Adelaide, in her own phrase, was “through.” She thought and talked of nothing else. It was an event of more than ordinary importance to her. Well, it would be over in a few months. Then he would ask her about her social ostracism. He would find out if it was self-incurred, a voluntary effort on her part? Or was it a case of sour grapes, and had she been clever enough to make a virtue out of necessity? She was clever enough for anything, of that he was convinced. Or had she from pique, temper or caprice, so obstinately refused herself at the beginning, when first she had come to settle in Yorkshire, that people had grown tired at last of making overtures of friendship; overtures that were continually repulsed by the sour chatelaine of the lonely house, in its belt of sombre trees and solid deterrent masonry.

He could not ask her this now, he could not ask her anything. He literally knew nothing about the woman he had married and taken to his breast, together with her child and her cook and her cook’s bastard, with the name that a man unknown had given her and which he had superseded so easily.

He did not know how long she had lived in Yorkshire, why she lived in Yorkshire, and why she had taken a mansion that was little better than a prison in which they two lived immured.

To do her justice, she did not seek to prison him there with her, she made no objection to his leaving her for hours. She would not seemingly have minded his leaving her for days, only he never did. He was held by her lazy, picturesque indifference, by the remembrance of the attraction of her bursts of passion in the days when she was not, as now, concentrating every force of her being on one single point, the bearing of a healthy child, a wonderful child, a child that should be even more eugenical than Phillis. He did not know that he was weak, but he knew that she was strong and that when he was not loving her, he was afraid of her. Yes, he, Wald Ensor, the man who had shot tigers and braved artillery and dug for gold under circumstances of almost impossible fortitude and endurance, was afraid of this hawk-nosed, straight-lipped woman, with the thin wrists, the small feet and the vanishing waist.

She was ruining him, she was breaking his spirit, making him a craven, as in another department Gertrude the cook, with her “good strong hands” that he shuddered to look at, was making of Mary. Mary, her child, the human being over whom she had power, even as Adelaide his wife, had power over him. He was sure of it. With her cruel, if necessary, training, Gertrude was killing her child by inches. In obedience to her mistress’s strange wild theory of economics, the warped little body of the cook’s child was being maimed and stunted, her mind dwarfed and annulled, her moral and physical growth contravened beyond recall. For Adelaide, with her strong will and sense of duty, was behind Gertrude, driving her to do what she thought was right and correct for the child of humble birth domiciled under her roof. She was right, economically right; it were indeed useless and extravagantly unpractical to bring up the cook’s child in luxury, beyond her station; the wrench of unfitness for her inevitable degradation and fall to her true station in life would be all the more severe later on. Only Adelaide’s want of imagination, however, could inure her to the thought of such a situation created by her own behest. Adelaide! fond of children! Never! Ensor smiled bitterly under his drooping moustache, and forced himself to remember that Adelaide had the defects of her qualities, and that philoprogenitiveness was not one of them. He had gauged her aright in the old days at Portland Place, or was it that that sly, all-seeing old father of hers had sown the doubt in his mind?

“_Adelaide, fond of children! She only thinks she is. Cruelty masked by philanthropy._”

And what was that about Mother’s vanity, and its non-negligibility as a factor? He remembered the old man’s pawky sneer as he said it.

“_Cases of baby-farming_,” he had argued. “_There’s sheer cruelty. If a woman ill-treats or even kills the child of another, no natural feeling except cruelty can possibly come into play, not even vanity.…_”

Vanity! Yes. There it was, a clear issue. The beautiful Phillis, her own… petted, cherished!… And on the other hand Mary, deformed, disgraced by Nature’s hand.… He used to hide his head in his hands as he contemplated the terrible antithesis.

Get her away!… He must… as soon as Adelaide had given birth to the wonderful child that was to be hers and his! That was settled. Meanwhile, he suffered, strange, unreasonable torments. Sometimes hanging about in the back of the house he would see the hem of Mary’s frock or the reach of her arm, as she scrubbed and lathered and polished. Then, with a groan, he would prevent himself from turning the corner of yard or out-house, lest he actually caught sight of the child at some one of her debilitating tasks. He would clench his hands, stuff a great cigar into his mouth, anything to keep him from rushing upon the poor waif, lifting her up, and boldly facing Gertrude, carry her off to America or the Antipodes.

One day, feeling he could bear it no longer, he got on to his bicycle and rode out to Weighton, on purpose to buy something; toys, sweatmeats, he did not know what, for Mary. Too handsome a present might bring down a beating, he sadly suspected; he had better get her something to eat, something nourishing, something that would disappear. He was about to invest in chocolate _fondants_, the best, when he suddenly realized that the cook’s child had been back in her proper station full three months, and would no longer appreciate the kind of eatables that would appeal to Phillis, who was a gourmet. He asked for and procured the wholesome candy, and rode home, tired and depressed. The impulse which had sent him out was a little spent. Poor Mary was the cook’s child after all, bred to servitude, doing only what her mother had done before her. He was a meddling busybody and would probably only succeed in getting the poor little creature a beating.…

He was thinking of Adelaide and Phillis now--of the rich sensuous beauty of Adelaide’s child, and the uncanny handsomeness of his wife. The devilish attraction of it swayed him, always more especially when he was tired and overwrought. It was her eyes.…

However, he had got the candy, a fat packet that ought to rejoice any normal child’s heart, and on arriving home he went boldly into the rear premises through the red baize door, and asked where Mary was?

Gertrude, coarse, homely, but on the whole well favoured, suspended her chopping operations at a board, and raising her chin, regarded him quizzically. With a kind of good-humoured malice, so it appeared to him, she slightly deferred her reply.… Then she said calmly--

“Mary is in the scullery.”

Raising her voice she called--

“Mary! You’re wanted.”

Quickly, obediently, a drooping, crestfallen figure of infancy appeared and stood in the sunlight that poured through the doorway, flung from a wide open window far back in the room she came from. It irradiated the ground she stood on and the filmy mass of cobwebs over her head; it could not light her up, any more than the bogey in the fields which flaps lank and dull in the full glare of noontide. And this was a living child, rendered by what means he knew not, unsusceptible, like any scarecrow, of light and joy. The depressed red bow on the top of her head looked as if it had not been untied for weeks. The hem of her skirt was partially torn off, it was far too long for her, and she had fastened, or some one had fastened it up for her, clumsily with a piece--two pieces of string. It showed a dirty pair of knickerbockers.

She stood, waiting patiently, blinking a little, hideous, shapeless, piteous. Gertrude said nothing but looked from one to the other, comparing them as it were, enjoying herself quietly, like a rough in the front row of the pit.

After a while, as if the play had lasted long enough, she said--

“Come here! I’ll put a pin in for you.”

Mary came shuffling up, not unwillingly. She did not seem to dislike her mother, that is all that could be said, and Ensor was glad to be able to think it possible that Gertrude was not always unkind to her. But such shocking neglect, even if there had been no excessive corporal punishment, was culpable. He stood, handling the packet of sweets dubiously, while the mother proceeded, with many a shake and pull, to modify her child’s disorder, which she had the sense to see injured her in the opinion of her master, if master he could be called who had no authority. At last summoning his courage, Ensor pulled out the packet and put it into Mary’s hand as she stood there, pending the adjustment of clothes that could hardly be called such, so ragged and insufficient were they.

The sweets fell to the ground, dropped with strange unchildish negligence from a nerveless hand. The child did not even look up. A spasm of agony transfixed the heart of Ensor.

Gertrude noticed the violent contraction of his features. She picked up the packet of bull’s eyes, and actually inserted one into Mary’s mouth. Ensor did not see if the child retained it, for he was groping on the ground for some of the sweets that had fallen out of the burst packet.

“Say thank you, you silly!” Gertrude adjured the child who stood astonished, bewildered, by such ordinary attentions as are the usual award of the protected and cherished young of any class. She was passive through fright, but if she had had the spirit, it was easy to see that her one idea was to hide, and that her eyes were looking for a corner to run into. But her mother had hold of her, ordering her attire, shaking her as if she had been a small frail apple-tree.

“That’s a very unsuitable length for a child’s dress, surely?” Ensor remarked, when Mary stood, hardly erect, sheepish but disengaged at last. The peccant undergarments were shoved into their proper place, more or less, and concealed, and her long loose frock was draped into paniers all round her.

“She’s skinny, that’s what it is!” conceded Gertrude. “Nothing won’t stay up round her! The dress too long, eh? No wonder! It’s one of Phillis’s that Miss Adelaide threw away because it was too bad for her beauty to wear. It had to do for my Mary, hadn’t it? We can’t afford to have clothes made on purpose for us, can we? Now run away, run away and play!”

She grinned. Mary stood stock still.

“You’re to grow into your clothes, I see,” said Ensor helplessly. “Well, make haste and grow, there’s a good girl!”

Mary smiled. Even if the gentleman’s words were absurd and irrelevant, she could not be deceived in the kindness of the speaker’s intention.

The smile, begun without spirit or brilliance, faded out like sunlight on a wall on a rainy day. Gertrude took up his speech, and answered it.

“Grow! Her! Never fear! Mary’s one of those stunted-from-birth ones Miss Adelaide’s always talking about. Just look at these thundering long arms!”

She extended to its full length the gnome-like, skinny limb to which she alluded. The owner suffered this liberty wearily. Her stupid glazed eyes were fixed on Ensor. They seemed to say, “Save me! Save me!”

He stammered out--

“Couldn’t she be sent to the sea for a month or so?… I would arrange it.… That is, if you could spare her?”

He waited on the cook’s answer agonizedly. She was in effect the child’s mother, with absolute power over it for life and death.…

“Spare her, Lord, yes!” answered the cook calmly. “The work she does isn’t worth speaking about. You’re nobbut a poor worker, aren’t you, Mary?” She turned to Ensor, away from the child, but she did not trouble to drop her voice at all--

“’Twould be no good, Sir. I’m thinking Miss Adelaide’s begun her grand training too late.”

“What d’you mean?” he asked.

“She’ll be training her into her grave, that’s what she’s doing.”

“Sh--h! for God’s sake, woman!” he muttered, and sought his wife. Something must be done.

* * * * * * *

He had no authority, except, strange to say, as far as Phillis was concerned. And though Phillis’s physical upbringing left nothing to be desired, he considered her mental education in some ways to be defective. Adelaide placed no obstacle whatever to his realization of certain views he had formulated and insisted on to the verge of tediousness with regard to the moral standards to be inculcated in a young growing girl.

She listened patiently, while he exposed these theories, and her thin lips wore something more nearly approaching to a smile at these times than any other, while her husband thus took a practical interest in the future of her daughter. He reasoned broadly, and generally; he could not lay his whole mind before the wife of Phillis’s father. For that father counted, and not, in Ensor’s idea, favourably. Phillis had certain strongly marked tendencies which he deplored, and which he conceived her to derive from the parent he did not know. She had undoubtedly a strain of the coarse and the callous; her father had probably had these characteristics more strongly developed. She had also some disagreeable qualities that he distinguished in and traced from Adelaide, and that careful training might cross and deny and finally eradicate. She was sly, she was morbid, she was headstrong and reckless of the claims of others.

So, acting with Adelaide’s authority, delegated to him, unquestioningly, he kept a strict watch and supervision on the books she read, and the conversations she heard or took part in. He did not countenance her frequent visits to the kitchen and her odd indecent familiarity with Gertrude the cook. He had asked his wife if he might not prohibit the child from entering the servants’ quarters altogether, and seal the red baize door that led to them against her use. He would like to forbid all entrance and egress by it, and force her to give her word of honour that she would observe the prohibition.

“She may give it, but she won’t keep it,” said Adelaide lazily. “You can’t wonder. She’s fond of Gertrude, because she gives her tit-bits, and Phillis is greedy, poor darling! And then”--she looked up in his face--“there’s your beloved Mary! She’s about, and you must remember the two were brought up together. They were like foster sisters before you came. You altered everything. And now I am going to have your child!”

He stooped and kissed her, full of premature paternal emotion. Adelaide was supposed to be not quite so well to-day. She was lying on the famous tiger-skin that he had given her, and which she had spread over a low wide couch in the hall. She chose to lie on it always, so that the brute’s savage head was close to her own. Loving and akin, the live Adelaide and the dead beast he had given her, both reeked of each other. There was all the hot suggestion of the jungle, of careless natural savagery in the juxtaposition of the tiger’s snarling teeth, Adelaide’s dusky eyes, and the spots and splashes of black that showed on each side of her spare form, like caked, dried blood upon the gold. It was his wife’s boast that her beautiful figure was hardly altered by her present condition, and the shocking cruelty to the unborn implied in this attainment of an unnatural shapeliness was lost on the simple fellow who was so soon to be a father.

“Our child,” he said, kissing her again passionately, “is the thing that matters.”

Then the recollection of that other child went through, pierced his heart like an arrow. He rose from his knees. All the blood in his body came into his face. He stood looking down on the woman, who had returned the passion of his caress with all the force of which she was at present capable. A large patch on the tiger-skin, a zebra mark bitten in, zig-zagging across the yellow fur, focussed his eyes.…

“Adelaide,” he prayed softly, “could we not take Mary back into the house again?”

“No,” Adelaide said. She spoke quite quietly too, but Ensor knew her; a storm was coming.

“Then,” he said pleadingly. “Could she not be sent away for a bit--or”--his immense struggle betrayed itself in his voice--“for good?”

“You cannot interfere with Gertrude’s business,” came plumb and sharp from Adelaide. “If Gertrude likes to leave me, she can of course take her child away with her. But I cannot do without Gertrude, and Gertrude will never leave me. Ask her.”

She turned away, and laid her cheek against the flat head of the tiger.

“And I was so happy!” she wailed, in bitter accents.

He knelt down again. Her breath came quick. He feared for her.

“It is no use,” she said. “You have spoilt it all. And all for the sake of a dirty misbegotten little wretch whose own mother can’t stand her and beats and neglects her. I don’t blame Gertrude. Don’t you understand, Wald, Mary is one of the wrecklings, one of Nature’s faults that ought to have been smothered at birth? I wish I had. I wish somebody had. My father would have put her away fast enough if I had asked him, only like a fool, I was kind to Gertrude, and saw her through with it. But I have come to hate the very sight of the child! And you--_you_ to come snivelling to me about her.… You!”

She laughed. Her passion was spent. She looked him, her husband, up and down, contemptuously.

He murmured: “Don’t, don’t excite yourself!”

“I won’t,” she said squarely, turning her face round to the wall. “I’m better now. I won’t let you hurt me. I’ll even discuss the unwholesome brat, if you like, that’ll show you I don’t care. Get on. Talk quietly and tell me what’s wrong about Mary’s upbringing.”

“You are very good,” Ensor murmured, “are you sure it won’t upset you?”

“No, I tell you.” She sat up and faced him. She pulled a basket of needle-work towards her and busied herself with it. Her hands did not shake. Ensor admired her. After all, she had no nerves, and he might as well say his say about the child, get better terms of existence for her, and be done with the subject. He made up his mind he would not say much; he would not descend to particulars of her ill treatment unless Adelaide asked for them. He began gently--

“I do think, don’t you? that when all’s said and done, Mary’s young, and even a servant’s child ought to have some joy of its life. Mary oughtn’t to be made to slave like a grown-up. Hang it all, a simple child should lightly draw its breath, not to the tune of housework and floorscrubbing. The sight of that poor kid carrying those heavy pails about makes me quite sick. I should like to tell you what I saw yesterday. Gertrude must be an unnatural mother----”

“Well, speak out, what did you see?” Adelaide asked sharply.

“You were out driving. Mary was standing by one of the high windows in the hall----”

“She’d no business to be there. Suppose a caller came?”

“No callers come. Why don’t they, by the way?”

“I hate people. I’ve snubbed them all, they daren’t show their noses here. Go on. What was your paragon doing in the hall?”

“She was eating something out of an enamel tin platter such as you feed dogs in, laid on the sill. The platter was not over clean, and I don’t know what the mess was, but it looked most unappetizing and she seemed to be--yes, actually picking something--something disgusting--something alive out of it.…!”

“Pah, you sicken me!” Adelaide screamed. Ensor went on relentlessly, now that he was wound up.…

“I put my hand on to her little scrubby head with that faded knot of red ribbon on the crown----”

“I wonder you can touch it. Don’t touch me.”

“And I told her not to eat the nasty stuff, and what was it? She said it was bits Gertrude cut off the toast before it went in the dining-room, the same as the dog had. It looked days old--quite mouldy. I shouldn’t like to give such a mess to my dog. I can only account for it as a morbid taste of the young growing child, and I bade her throw it away, and not eat between meals. It shows the shocking state of health she’s in, and she’s morbidly inventive, for then she said----”

“What did she say?”

“That it was her breakfast. Nonsense, I said. But she stuck to it. She seemed cowed, brutalized, but she stuck to it. I say, Adelaide--I know you aren’t very fit just now, but oughtn’t you to make some inquiries? Does Gertrude beat her or ill treat her? I hear sounds, of a morning sometimes--not so much lately since you’ve been seedy--but they freeze my blood, until I realize that it’s the dog getting a licking.… Oh, Adelaide, reassure me, don’t you see a man can’t stand the suspicion of such a thing in his house? A helpless child.…”

The drops of sweat stood on his forehead. Adelaide spoke, as it were a prepared speech, which it was now time to make.

“Your house!” she said. It was hers and the man winced.…

She continued, raising herself a little. “Look here! Mary’s a liar as well as a pig. You’ve owned it. Morbid--is that all? I say a filthy, beastly liar!… And, Wald, I’m going to bear _your_ child, and if you want to have a healthy one, born alive--you haven’t had much luck with children, so you say--you had better not worry me.… Let me have this chance. I’ll never try again. I shall kill myself if this one does not come off. Suppose you be wise in time, and leave off meddling in my domestic concerns, and go and attend to your own. You’ve a meeting of the Library Committee in Beverley at three. It’s full time.” She glanced composedly at the watch that lay on her breast, and lay down again as if it were a duty.…

He went about his business, trying to calm down in the quiet operation of the natural round, and the mild form of civic functions that filled his days. Adelaide was right, an important meeting of the Library Committee was on for to-day, at which he had announced his intention of speaking, for the subject interested him personally. It was a question of morals as applied to the feast of contemporary literature spread before the youth of Beverley and Weighton. Ensor’s contention was that as young girls formed the main contingent of the readers of books in all provincial towns it behoved far-seeing and right-minded city councillors to see that no works pernicious in quality or deleterious in tone should be delivered over to their private consumption. Their elders, with a taste for life, spiced and otherwise, should purchase outright the literature their souls loved, and leave the shelves of chance to works of limpid purity and unimpeachable if dreary moral tone.

The Library Committee was composed of enlightened men and women, for it had been founded by an exceedingly busy and fussy Mrs. Marrable, “a bit of a Socialist,” as she called herself. She was at any rate a person professedly open to all the new ideas. The Committee were a little afraid of her, and had come to look to Ensor, the shy silent embodiment of Conservative, almost retrograde feeling in their midst, to oppose her. He generally began his sentences: “I know I am a bit old-fashioned.” This was a capital counterblast to Mrs. Marrable and her “bit” of Socialism. They found him invaluable, a sort of slipper on the wheels of frenzied progress, and Mrs. Marrable was not easily gainsaid. She was a relation of the Bishop’s cousin, and had lived in Beverley for years in a big red house where she entertained Saturday to Monday parties from London. She had no daughters.

Another influential member, Canon St. Leger, unmarried, and living in the best house in the Close, was a friend of Ensor’s, though he had not asked him to come in so much lately.…

Indeed, looking round the green baize-covered table where all the Committee found themselves at last seated, it occurred to Ensor that he had not shaken hands with a single one of his confrères since the last meeting, and that was a month ago. For that reason, he supposed, they seemed strange to him, although they were all or nearly all, people with whom he had been desired to take pot luck on any occasion, lunch, or dinner, when he had ridden in from High Walls on his bicycle and found he had put it too late to get back. All except Mrs. Marrable, with whom for political and temperamental reasons he had always cared to have very little to do.

While the Committee dealt with some purely financial and business matters, which called for no more attention from the members of the Committee than was implied in passing a vote of confidence or holding up hands for a resolution, Ensor wrought himself up into a strange state of nervous apprehension. It might have been mere perverse fancy, but as a matter of fact not one of these people had spoken to him since they sat down, or recognized his presence except by a nod of salutation such as the barest courtesy demanded. The attitude of each several person could be accounted for separately. So-and-so had come in late, such a one had too many irons in the fire to be able to spare a word till the meeting was over, but still--there it was, the indefinable uneasiness, the disagreeable insinuating point that morbid imaginings could establish. No one had actually addressed a word to him!…

He brooded over this--he was tired, overwrought and annoyed, for the child Phillis had shown a sad racial cloven foot to-day. He was afraid she was not going to turn out so well as he could have wished. By and by other business being disposed of, the Committee were invited to deal with the question of detailed selection of books for the Library. It was a subject on which Ensor was keenly interested, and here he had so much to say that he forgot his preoccupation and did not allow his natural shyness to interfere with the expression of his opinion. He was strongly against the determination of Mrs. Marrable, to permit, nay, to encourage, the introduction of a certain novel, the work of one of her literary confrères, into the list of the Library. Ensor had had the book sent him from London, so as to acquaint himself with its supposed nature. He had carefully kept it out of the way of his womenkind, until having thoroughly digested it, he threw it into the fire. Yet this book was to be placed on the shelves of the Library to which Adelaide subscribed, and a copy of it would be sure to find its way to High Walls! He could not bear the idea of such a girl as Phillis, eager, sensuous, full of strong, exuberant, readily-awakened sex instincts, sucking in the unhealthy, unnecessary knowledge presented so cleverly by this book, and it seemed to his hypochondriacal imaginings that the tendency of the rest of the Committee was to override his objections _per se_. He grew tremendously excited, and the Committee wondered to see the usually still and discreet man, who had married the lady they called the terrible Mrs. Dibben, make such a violent exhibition of himself.

“I have a nearly grown-up daughter, as you all know,” so he ended his speech, and for the moment he felt every inch a father. “Well, let me tell you, that I had rather see her lying dead at my feet than realize that she was taking into her pure mind anything so poisonous, so pernicious, so destructive of all moral health as the work in question. I would rather see her starved, neglected, maimed even, than ruined mentally by such murderous nourishment.…”

He stopped, he felt that the sense of the meeting was not with him. The silence that swallowed up the last word was hard and disapproving. The Chairman, Canon St. Leger, drubbed on his desk with a pencil.… Mrs. Marrable, divesting herself of her feather boa with the air of one throwing down the gauntlet, and tilting forward her chair, rose.…

“Do I understand?” she said, speaking with privileged indistinctness, but Ensor heard her for all that. “Do I understand from Mr. Ensor’s eloquent speech, that he cares to throw his shield merely over a member of his own immediate family? What about the stranger within his gates? And I have yet to learn that spiritual injury and moral oppression are the only enemies worth combating? Talk of mental starvation, indeed!… Mental!… There are worse things than mental starvation. There are blows…!”

She appeared to become hysterical and quite incoherent.

“Such hypocrisy… such disgusting hypocrisy I never heard of. Let him look to his own house, I say--let him set his own house in order before we put the Society on to him!”

“Mrs. Marrable, I must beg you to observe! This language is impermissible here,” Canon St. Leger said, avoiding Ensor’s eye and the deprecating gestures he automatically made.… “I must call upon you to apologize!”

“To me,” Ensor said, white to his lips.

“Oh yes, I’ll apologize to the Committee,” said the lady, “and they’ll accept my apology. They all know what I mean. But in the interest of Humanity, it is time some steps were taken, and I’ll take them.…”

She folded her boa tightly round her neck and passed out. Canon St. Leger swiftly put the retention or refusal of the book in question to the vote and closed the meeting.

Ensor, dazed, his eyes blurred with unaccustomed passion, walked away like a condemned man, condemned for a crime of which he was unwitting.

He rode studiously home, meditating on these things to the point of falling off his bicycle. He was stunned with the impact of the undeserved disagreeable, and knew not what to think or whom to ask for an explanation. And when he got home he found real trouble awaiting him. Phillis, who had been ailing rather unaccountably for some time past, had shown definite symptoms of illness during his absence. The little local country doctor, (but quite “good,”) had been sent for and had been and gone. He had pronounced the child’s uneasiness to be due to a mild attack of typhoid fever, so Adelaide, afoot, her eyes alight with excitement, told the sluggish, depressed man who dismounted from his bicycle at the door where she came to meet him.

“Have something, Wald. You look pale. That meddling brute of a doctor has gone and ordered a nurse all off his own bat!” she fretfully informed him, leading the way into the drawing-room and closing the door. “I was so angry with him when I heard what he had done. Of course I should have nursed her myself. The woman is here now so we must make the best of it.”

Ensor was secretly of opinion that Dr. Hodgson was right, and that the state of Adelaide’s nerves would have made her an indifferent nurse; he, however, contented himself with remarking that neither himself nor Dr. Hodgson would approve of her sitting up at night.

“But I shall have to as it is. No nurse can do both. And, Wald, I do so detest strangers coming into the house! They go prying about, making up all sorts of absurd conclusions and telling the ass of a doctor everything.…”

An expression of indefinable apprehension crossed her peevish face, and her husband was touched, taking it, as he did, as indicating the state of nervous tension she was in. Phillis’s illness--her own condition----

He took her limp hand and kissed it.

“My poor Adelaide, what have you to fear? There’s nothing wrong for him to find out; I don’t quite approve of the status of Mary in the house, but after all that’s the cook’s affair, not ours.… By the way.…”

He was going to tell her something of Mrs. Marrable’s insinuations, but concluded he had better not mention the matter at this juncture.… He merely asked abruptly, “Where is Mary? I haven’t seen her about for the last few days.”

“Gertrude has sent her away to some friends at Cullercoats, I believe. She asked me if I could spare her!”

“And of course you did, kind girl,” said Ensor.

“Oh yes. The work she does isn’t worth thinking about. I told Gertrude we should never make a servant of her.… Good-bye. I must go to Phillis. I want to keep an eye on that nurse. I didn’t like her face. A mischief-maker if ever there was one.”

Adelaide was gone and Ensor fell a-thinking on the painful scene of to-day. He was obsessed, now that it was over, by the recollection of a fluid and retreating Committee. He saw black coats, and the grey mantelets of the country ladies melting away from him, fleeing from his contact. He could not account for the social ban under which he appeared to lie. This was the culminating incident; he remembered now other slighter acts of neglect and inattention in the past, which he had been too little self-conscious to observe or to piece together in a pattern of general avoidance and cold shouldering. The arraignment of the woman Marrable did not disturb him so much as the nervous acceptance of it by the Canon. Mrs. Marrable was a shrew, a local terror, a person of advanced views, and the author of the book in question was a friend of hers, probably?…

But Canon St. Leger, a decent, sober-minded man, a man of his own stamp!… He saw his thin hand toying with the suspended pencil, he heard again his meek milk-and-water reproof of Mrs. Marrable’s unparliamentary language.… He could not away with that.…

He wandered about the garden half the night with the puppy, now fully trained to be a perfect house-dog and companion. It followed him in an orderly manner from covert to covert under the high beetling wall with the thick beds of nettles growing luxuriantly at the base. Once, however, there was a skirmish; the dog grew quite excited at what must surely have been a not unusual sight for him, the yellow knob of a small boy’s head peering over the wall, supported presumably from behind by a human Japanese ladder of other small boys. It was a favourite game in this neighbourhood.

“He! He!” they crowed and chuckled. “Who lives ’ere? Old Mother Brownrigg and her girls. He! He! No one ever comes out here alive…!”

The dog barked and sprang. Fear of his ultimately reaching them at last dislodged the grotesque cohort. Ensor, his nerves a little shaken by this noisy onslaught of words only half heard, turned and made his way back to the house. It was absurd to mind. Children were always climbing up the other side of that wall; it was nice to climb, it had jutting courses of bricks half-way up, and the village curiosity was provoked and stimulated by the air of quasi-mystery which Adelaide chose to foster about High Walls, and that her rather witch-like appearance abroad, always heavily, mediævally cloaked and motor-veiled, abetted. She dressed like a toadstool in the day. And in the evening like a panther. She strode along, her step was confident, her eyes abstracted, her whole manner carelessly insulting. No wonder the children were afraid of her.

He went in, and saw the doctor coming out and questioned him about Phillis. His anxiety was easily allayed. The big girl was strong enough to resist a whole army of adverse microbes. He saw the new nurse, a tall, thin sprig of a woman with some indication of character. She was very cold and civil, especially when she spoke to Adelaide. He thought he saw plainly that she disliked the mistress of the house, already. Another! Poor Adelaide!

He knew he was right, as the days went on. The two women detested each other, skirmished every time they met, issued cross orders and confused the other servants. But the maid defeated the mistress. Dr. Hodgson, meek, little insignificant man that he was, resisted all Mrs Ensor’s hints and manœuvres, and finally, her most palpable efforts to get rid of Nurse Ferrier, who was, on her side, careful to give no positive offence, or commit any domestic crime which might lead to her dismissal on other grounds than medical ones. She was a capital nurse, even Adelaide admitted that, only Phillis no longer wanted one. Hodgson said she did. He further implied that a nurse stood between Mrs. Ensor and all fatigue or anxiety undesirable for a woman in her state, and that was the only argument Adelaide dared not, or did not care to, gainsay.

The distracted woman vented her annoyance at the doctor’s tactics on her husband, and to punish him would not let him see Phillis. As she spent most of her time in the girl’s room which opened out of her own, Ensor saw very little of her. He found himself not very much cast down by this arrangement; he was much out of sympathy with his wife, a little fretted by her irritability, and was glad to defer their meeting until the need for the nurse’s presence which so enraged her should have passed away.

He wondered, sometimes, when that would be, and thought he would like to ask the nurse. But she rather sternly, and with a sort of frigidity put on over and above her statutory nurse’s manner, passed him in the hall or on the stairs. He began to fancy that Adelaide, moved by her strange taste for regulating the movements and gestures of others, had bidden her enter as little as possible into conversation with the master of the house. Well! Well!…

He missed Mary, to whom, in the present upheaval, he could have paid a little more attention. Still, presumably she was well. Adelaide had apparently carried out his expressed wishes for once, and had insisted on Gertrude’s sending her child away for sea air. He missed the daily appeal of the dark eyes set in paleness, the weak gestures with her hands which Mary often used in lieu of speaking, as if mere movement made less stir, and drew down less attention on her from the cruel powers above. Though her face was pale it was always clean, he remembered. And a queer thing--he never remembered her sitting down. Did she ever sit down? He had seen her squat, he had seen her stand, but he had never seen her sit except that first day in the motor-car, when, the dark fur cap on her head, and the dark fur up to her chin had made her look almost a lady. She was dressed exactly like Phillis, then, he remembered! Strange monitory caprice of Adelaide’s--an instance of her sheer love of power--to raise, and then to degrade! No man could do such a thing except, perhaps, some savage Asiatic king, one in whom caprice remained the only lust left to satisfy.

He did not care to affront such scenes as he had gone through at Beverley any more, and he took his name off the Committee. He stayed at home and spent this dreary, uneventful time mostly in wandering about the house followed by the dog, who had grown attached to him. It generally lay at his feet in the hall while he sat on one of the yellow chairs, reading papers endlessly, smoking far more than was good for him. Thus he caught the doctor, on his way through the outer hall to see Phillis. The doctor generally nodded kindly, but did not stop, there was nothing to say about Phillis; she was going on well, and Adelaide did not expect to be confined for a couple of months or so. The nurse flitted by on her screw soles, going up and downstairs, and taking no notice of the solitary man. He never saw Gertrude at all.