Part 30 (2/2)
So she bore her secret knowledge alone, for their sakes feeling all the while like the scapegoat in the wilderness. But it was a happy wilderness for her, as time proved. Her husband's temper and disposition were well described by Sally, when she told Dr. Vereker in confidence one day that when he boiled he blew the lid off, but that he was a practical lamb, and was wax in her mother's hands. A good fizz did good, whatever people said. And the doctor agreed cordially. For he had a mother whose temper was notoriously sweetness itself, but was manipulated by its owner with a dexterity that secured all the effects of discomfort to its beneficiaries, without compromising her own claims to canonization.
Fenwick's temper--this expression always means want of temper, or absence of temper--was of the opposite sort. It occasioned no inconvenience to any one, and every one detected and cla.s.sed it after knowing him for twenty-four hours. The married couple had not existed for three months in that form before this trivial individuality was defined by Ann and Cook as ”only master.” Sally became so callous after a slight pa.s.sing alarm at one or two explosions that she would, for instance, address her stepfather, after hearing his volleys at some offender in the distance, with, ”Who did I hear you calling a confounded idiot, Jeremiah?” To which he would reply, softening into a genial smile: ”Lost my temper, I did, Sarah dear. Lost my temper with the Wash. The Wash sticks in pins and the heads are too small to get hold of”; or, ”People shouldn't lick their envelopes up to the hilt, and spoil one's ripping-corner, unless they want a fellow to swear”; or something similar belonging to the familiar trials of daily life.
But really safety-valve tempers are so common that Fenwick's would scarcely have called for notice if it had not been that, on one occasion, a remark of Sally's about a rather more vigorous _emeute_ than usual led her mother, accidentally thrown off her guard, to reply: ”Yes! But you have no idea how much better he is----” and then to stop suddenly, seeing the mistake she was making. She had no time to see a way out of the difficulty before Sally, puzzled, looked at her with: ”Better than when? I've known him longer than you have, mother.” For Sally always boasted of her earlier acquaintance.
”No _when_ at all, kitten! How much better he is when we are alone!
He never flares up then--that's what I meant.” But she knew quite well that her sentence, if finished, would have stood, ”how much better he is than he used to be!” She was too candid a witness in the court of her own conscience to make any pretence that this wasn't a lie. Of course it was; but if she never had to tell a worse one than that for Sally's sake, she would be fortunate indeed.
She was much more happy in the court of her conscience than she was in that of St. Satisfax--if we may ascribe a judicial status to him, to help us through with our a.n.a.lysis of her frame of mind. His was a court which, if not identical at all points with the a.n.a.logous exponents of things Divine in her youth, was fraught with the same jurisdiction; was vocal with resonances that proclaimed the same consequences to the unredeemed that the mumblings of a pastor of her early days, remembered with little grat.i.tude, had been inarticulate with. Her babyhood had received the idea that liars would be sent unequivocally to h.e.l.l, and her maturity could not get rid of it. Outside the precinct of the saint, the brief working morality that considers other folk first was enough for her; within it, the theologism of an offended deity still held a traditional sway. Outside, her whole soul recoiled from the idea of her child knowing a story that would eat into her heart like a cancer; within, a reserve-corner of that soul, inoculated when it was new and susceptible, shuddered at her unselfish adhesion to the only means by which that child could be kept in ignorance.
However, she was clear about one thing. She would apologize in prayer; but she would go to h.e.l.l rather than have Sally made miserable. Thus it came about that Mrs. Fenwick continued a very devout church-goer, and, as her husband never left her side when he had a choice, he, too, became a frequent guest of St. Satisfax, whom he seemed to regard as a harmless though fantastic person who lived in some century or other, only you always forgot which.
His familiarity with the usages of the reformed St. Satisfax, and his power of discriminating the lapses of that saint towards the vices of his early unregenerate days--he being all the while perfectly unconscious how he came to know anything of either--continued to perplex his wife, and was a source of lasting bewilderment to Sally.
A particular incident growing out of this was always a.s.sociated in Rosalind's mind with an epithet he then applied to Sally for the first time, but which afterwards grew to be habitual with him.
”Of course, it's the Communion-table,” he said in connexion with some discussion of church furniture. ”We have no altars in our church nowadays. You're a Papist, Sarah!”
”I thought Communion-tables were an Evangelical start,” said Sally irreverently. ”A Low Church turn-out. Our Mr. Prince is a Tractarian, and a Ritualist, and a Puseyite, and an Anglican. That's his game! The Bishop of London won't let him perform High Ma.s.s, and _I_ think it a shame! Don't you?... But I say, Jeremiah!” And Jeremiah refrained from expressing whatever indignation he felt with the Bishop of London, to find what Sally said. It was to the effect that it was incredible that he should know absolutely nothing about the original source of his information.
”I can only tell you, Sarah dear,” he said, with the ring of sadness in his voice that always came on this topic, ”that I _do_ remember nothing of the people who taught me, or the place I learned in. Yet I know about Tract No. 90, and Pusey and Newman, for all that. How I remember things that were information, and forget things that were things, is more than I can tell you. But can't you think of bits of history you know quite well, without ever recalling where you got them from?”
”Of course I can. At least, I could if I knew some history. Only I don't. Oh yes, I do. Perkin Warbeck and Anne of Cleves. I've forgotten about them now, only I know I knew them both. I've answered about them in examinations. They're history all right enough. As to who taught me about them, couldn't say!”
”Very well, Sarah. Now put a good deal of side into your stroke, and you'll arrive at me.”
But the revival of the old question had dug up discomfort his mind had done its best to inter; and he went silent and sat with a half-made cigarette in his fingers thinking gravely. Rosalind, at a writing-table behind him, moved her lips at Sally to convey an injunction. Sally, quickly apprehensive, understood it as ”Let him alone! Don't rake up the electrocution!” But Sally's native directness betrayed her, and before she had time to think, she had said, ”All right; I won't.” The consequence of which was that Fenwick--being, as Sally afterwards phrased it, ”too sharp by half”--looked up suddenly from his reverie, and said, as he finished rolling his cigarette, ”What won't our daughter?”
The pleasure that struck through his wife's heart was audible in her voice as she caught it up. ”Our daughter won't be a silly inquisitive little puss-cat, darling. It only worries you, and does no good.”
And he replied to her, as she came behind him and stood with an appreciative side-face against his, with a semi-apology for the phrase ”daughter,” and allowed the rest of what they were speaking of to lapse.
”I called her it for the pleasure of saying it,” said he. ”It sounded so nice!” And then he knew that her kiss was approval, but of course had no conception of its thoroughness. For her part, she hardly dared to think of the strangeness of the position; she could only rejoice at its outcome.
After that it became so natural to him to speak of Sally as ”our daughter” that often enough new acquaintances misconceived her relation to him, and had a shrewd insight that Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick must have been married very young. Once some visitors--a lady with one married daughter and two single ones--were so powerfully impressed with Sally's resemblance to her supposed parent that three-fourths of them went unconvinced away, in spite of the efforts of the whole household to remove the error. The odd fourth was supposed to have carried away corrective information. ”I got the flat one, with the elbows, in a quiet corner,” said Sally, ”and told her Jeremiah was only step.
Because they all shouted at once, so it was impossible to make them hear in a lump.”
Mistakes of this sort, occurring frequently, reacted on Mr. and Mrs.
Fenwick, who found in them a constant support and justification for the theory that Sally was really the daughter of both, while admitting intellectual rejection of it to be plausible to commonplace minds. They themselves got on a higher level, where _ex-post-facto_ parentages were possible. Causes might have miscarried, but results having turned out all right, it would never do to be too critical about antecedents.
Anyhow, Sally was _going to be_ our daughter, whether she _was_ or not.
Rosalind always found a curious consolation in the reflection that, however bewildering the position might be, she had it all to herself.
This was entirely apart from her desire to keep Fenwick in ignorance of his past; that was merely a necessity for his own sake and Sally's, while this related to the painfulness of standing face to face with an incredible conjunction of surroundings. She, if alone, could take refuge in wonder-struck silence. If her knowledge were shared with another, how could examination and a.n.a.lysis be avoided? And these would involve the resurrection of what she could keep underground as long as she was by herself; backed by a thought, if needed, of the merry eyebrows and pearly teeth, and sweet, soft youth, of its unconscious result. But to be obliged to review and speculate over what she desired to forget, and was helped to forget by grat.i.tude for its consequences, would have been a needless addition to the burden she had already to bear.
The only person she could get any consolation from talking with was the Major, who already knew, or nearly knew, the particulars of the nightmare of twenty years ago. But, then--we feel that we are repeating this _ad nauseam_--he was quite in the dark about Fenwick's ident.i.ty, and was to be kept there. Rosalind had decided it so, and she may have been right.
Would she have done better by forcing on her husband the knowledge of his own ident.i.ty, and risking the shock to her daughter of hearing the story of her outsider father's sin against her mother? Her decision against this course was always emphasized by--may even have been unconsciously due to--her prevision of the difficulty of the communication to Sally. How should she set about it? She pictured various forms of the attempt to herself, and found none she did not shudder at.
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