Chapter XXXIX

It was a relief to Viola when she got back to Warren Manor to find that Mrs. Bligh and Mabel had gone to tea at the Vicarage, and only Mr. Bligh was in the garden.

Viola had never noticed Mr. Bligh before, he had always seemed to her the rather voluble, boring member so often found in an attractive family, who has to be suppressed; and between whom, and the rest of the world the family acts as a shield.

Now she suddenly realised that he was old and tired, and kind—very particularly kind.

He fussed about getting her a comfortable chair, he wanted her to have tea, and cream and cushions, and behind his fussing, even tactfully behind it, was an unspoken sympathy with whatever had caused Viola’s absence. He pretended that what he minded was her having missed her lunch, but Viola knew that it was her not having wanted it which really upset him.

She drank her cup of tea in silence, and then she said suddenly, ‘Mr. Bligh, I want you to help me.’

Mr. Bligh dropped the sugar tongs on the grass. It was years since any one had wanted him to help them. Help was what, unless it was money, people usually didn’t want from Mr. Bligh, and there was nothing he liked giving nearly so much.

‘But, my dear child,’ he said, ‘of course I’ll help you—if I can, you know. I don’t say I’m Napoleon or Marlborough, or even the last of the Doges, but if I haven’t their power or their wisdom, I shall have just as much inclination, probably more; they weren’t as far as I remember, helpfully inclined.’

Viola leaned forward, her small, pale face was more alive than Mr. Bligh had ever seen it. She had seemed too passive to him before, like a creature submerged and still, in some foreign element. But she was not passive now. Her eyes woke and flashed at him, her lips trembled. The picture of her in white with a jade green scarf fluttering about her head and shoulders remained ineffaceably in Mr. Bligh’s mind; it was like young spring caught in a storm. Viola looked as if she wanted to shake off the fetters of the world of which she had been so still and unconscious a part; and as if, in order to do it, she wouldn’t be still any more.

She told her story simply and plainly. Mr. Bligh could follow it without any other difficulty than that of seeing for the first time that he had made a great mistake.

‘But Mr. Bligh,’ she finished, ‘your wife knew the truth. Emily had told her, and she let me think——’ her voice broke, she knew she oughtn’t to have told Mr. Bligh, this about his wife. She should have spared Mrs. Bligh, muffled her up in some way, but she couldn’t resist the temptation. Mrs. Bligh was too good to be muffled up—she challenged exposure.

But Mr. Bligh did not seem as shocked or surprised as Viola had expected. After all he had been married to Mrs. Bligh for twenty years. He was a devoted and loyal husband, and he believed his wife to be the most superior of women—but she was of that type of superiority which is liable to shuffle out of the rigour of unacceptable facts.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said tolerantly, ‘but I dare say she didn’t believe Emily, you know.’

Viola said relentlessly, ‘She could have found out. If you don’t take the trouble to find out whether a thing is true or not, you ought to believe it.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ agreed Mr. Bligh, ‘no doubt. Mind you, I don’t say it isn’t the more direct way, but very few people take it. They follow their prejudices, you know, and prejudices wriggle. I know that myself. I always try to take a perfectly unbiased line, but I’m not sure that I always know where to lay my hand on it, especially when my feelings come in. Feelings flurry me, you know. They’re the deuce, and a delicate, high-minded woman like my wife—well, you can’t be sure what she’ll lay her hand on in a crisis! She didn’t like it, you see, the whole business upset her very much; and Jim didn’t make any protest. I dare say he was being very noble and all that, you know, my dear; but nobility is apt to be misleading. I can’t blame Annette, but I blame myself, of course—I blame myself. I might have seen deeper. There are one or two points, now I come to look back on it, that never seemed very convincing. I’m afraid we all of us took the easiest way, except Jim, you know, except Jim. But what is it you want me to do about it now?’

‘First,’ said Viola, ‘I want you to go to the lawyer and satisfy yourself that what Emily says is true. I’m satisfied but I shall have to prove more than my own belief; this story will be used against me, you know, to prevent my seeing Jim Barton again, and I want to feel I can fight it.’

‘Fight it?’ asked Mr. Bligh deprecatingly, ‘but—I don’t believe in fighting stories, you know—I don’t really—stories accumulate so when you begin to fight them, and other people get dragged in, and it’s rather like stones thrown in a riot, you know—somebody bringing back a joint for dinner gets done in, while the leaders of the riot go home to tea. It’s all very rough and uncertain. I shouldn’t start fighting about Jim.’

‘I won’t if I can help it,’ said Viola, but if they attack me about him I must know what I’ve got to fight back with—and, Mr. Bligh, I want to see him! I can’t at home, and I couldn’t go to see him again at Poplar! But could you ask him down here for me? Say that I want particularly to see him—I think he would come.’

‘Sure to come,’ agreed Mr. Bligh reluctantly, ‘there’s no doubt of that whatever; but it isn’t all perfectly simple, you know, very few things are.

‘Young people always imagine that if you arrange for them to meet, nothing else matters.

‘But there are other things to be considered. I like Jim Barton, you know; I always did like him. I don’t say this story didn’t stick in my throat; still, I was prepared to make allowances all round. Emily was a very handsome strap—— I mean youth is youth, you know, and it makes mistakes, and then every one concerned has to come forward and pay for them. But I’ve followed his career, you know, and I’m very proud of him.

‘But all the same, my dear child, he’s a man, a man of the people, a hero of the people, if you like—but heroes—well—they aren’t heroic all the time, and they are men all the time, you have to consider that! I think you might make a mistake if you thought of him as a hero—rather a cruel one for him as well as for you.

‘If you ask him to come down here, what are you prepared to do with him?’

The colour came into Viola’s face, but she met Mr. Bligh’s eyes steadily.

‘I am prepared to marry him,’ she said gravely. ‘I think it is what he wants, and I think it is what I do.’

Mr. Bligh looked away from her. His eyes had a curious look in them as if they were reconsidering very distant dreams, looking at them, not as they were once to him, but as, with his riper knowledge, he knew them to have been. He shrank from interfering with the generosity of youth, but he was wondering how far the generosity could carry, and what would happen to Viola, and even more to Jim, if it dropped.

‘You are sure,’ he said quietly, ‘that you are not taking this step because you admired Jim and then misjudged him, and now have for him as well as your former admiration, all the pity and remorse you feel for having—even for a little while—deprived him of his due? Marriage is rather what I should call a readjustment, you know—a watering down here and a pulling together there, and it doesn’t do—at least I should hardly think it would do—to have anything extra to readjust.’

‘Ah!’ Viola said with a little distracted sigh, ‘how can I tell till I see him, what there is to readjust?’ Beneath her breath she murmured, ‘Love is a miracle, isn’t it? Love is a miracle.’

Viola wasn’t as hard as she wanted to be, she wasn’t as up to date, she clung with all the force of her strong, unpractised heart to a dream that can shake the world, but makes on the whole very little difference to most people. Mr. Bligh was not one of these to whom love had come lightly. The ardour and the bloom of it had never died for him, the image which had held it had become indifferent to his worship, but worship does not die because images are not responsive.

‘Very well, then,’ he said with unexpected decision. ‘You shall see him, my dear. I will do as you suggest I will go and see old Simmons and get him to tell me, as a privileged person, the facts of the case. I fear—I greatly fear—I have a suspicion who was at the bottom of it, and then I’ll write to Jim and ask him down here.’

He paused for a moment, and then said a little apologetically, ‘And I think, my dear, we will choose the day of the garden party at Downley.’ Mr. Bligh was going to take a very strong and independent line, but he thought the actual incident had better take place while his wife wasn’t there.

Viola leaned back in her chair and smiled at him gratefully. She wondered that she could ever have thought him insignificant and tiresome; but Mr. Bligh was still insignificant and tiresome, only Viola was too young to admit that it is very often insignificant and tiresome people who understand most perfectly their duty towards their neighbour.

He hovered in front of her for one more precaution.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we had better not mention the subject to my wife. She has such a high moral sense, you know. Of course she’d be relieved, very much relieved about Jim. There is no doubt of that whatever. But on the other hand, if it wasn’t Jim—I don’t want to press the point—but it must have been somebody, mustn’t it? And that might upset her more. Well, well, we needn’t go into who it was, of course—most unsuitable, but if she were to come to know of any definite arrangement, you know, to have Jim down here, she might think it her duty to tell your parents, and then there would be—wouldn’t there?—the deuce of a row. Not that I entirely take the modern view of parents, disagreeable excrescences eating up the life of their young. I don’t think—I really don’t think I eat up Denis’s life, or Dora’s, and certainly not Mabel’s; but then I have always allowed a margin, you know—quite a substantial margin. But in your case, I’m sure, I’ve got the highest respect for your father and mother, you know, but I fancy you’re a little pushed as to margin, aren’t you? And if Jim were to drop in unexpectedly for lunch or tea, while Annette and Mabel are over at Downley, I don’t quite see how anybody is going to be blamed for it. I always gave Jim a general invitation to look upon me as a friend.’

‘Dear Mr. Bligh,’ Viola murmured gratefully, ‘I think that will do beautifully.’ Her eyes wavered and laughed across the lawn at him. ‘I don’t want to get into a row any more than you do,’ she added, ‘but of course in the end I shall.’

Mr. Bligh shook his head and sighed sympathetically; she said she was afraid of rows, but she smiled while she said it; she was obviously less afraid of them than he was.

The end of Viola’s row would be an open future, but the end of Mr. Bligh’s row meant to look once again upon the closed door of the past.