PAGE 3
The Marriages
by
He was going to his room, and after a moment she heard his door close. Then she said to the servant “Shut up the house”–she tried to do everything her mother had done, to be a little of what she had been, conscious only of falling woefully short–and took her own way upstairs. After she had reached her room she waited, listening, shaken by the apprehension that she should hear her father come out again and go up to Godfrey. He would go up to tell him, to have it over without delay, precisely because it would be so difficult. She asked herself indeed why he should tell Godfrey when he hadn’t taken the occasion–their drive home being an occasion–to tell herself. However, she wanted no announcing, no telling; there was such a horrible clearness in her mind that what she now waited for was only to be sure her father wouldn’t proceed as she had imagined. At the end of the minutes she saw this particular danger was over, upon which she came out and made her own way to her brother. Exactly what she wanted to say to him first, if their parent counted on the boy’s greater indulgence, and before he could say anything, was: “Don’t forgive him; don’t, don’t!”
He was to go up for an examination, poor lad, and during these weeks his lamp burned till the small hours. It was for the Foreign Office, and there was to be some frightful number of competitors; but Adela had great hopes of him–she believed so in his talents and saw with pity how hard he worked. This would have made her spare him, not trouble his night, his scanty rest, if anything less dreadful had been at stake. It was a blessing however that one could count on his coolness, young as he was–his bright good-looking discretion, the thing that already made him half a man of the world. Moreover he was the one who would care most. If Basil was the eldest son–he had as a matter of course gone into the army and was in India, on the staff, by good luck, of a governor-general–it was exactly this that would make him comparatively indifferent. His life was elsewhere, and his father and he had been in a measure military comrades, so that he would be deterred by a certain delicacy from protesting; he wouldn’t have liked any such protest in an affair of HIS. Beatrice and Muriel would care, but they were too young to speak, and this was just why her own responsibility was so great.
Godfrey was in working-gear–shirt and trousers and slippers and a beautiful silk jacket. His room felt hot, though a window was open to the summer night; the lamp on the table shed its studious light over a formidable heap of text-books and papers, the bed moreover showing how he had flung himself down to think out a problem. As soon as she got in she began. “Father’s going to marry Mrs. Churchley, you know.”
She saw his poor pink face turn pale. “How do you know?”
“I’ve seen with my eyes. We’ve been dining there–we’ve just come home. He’s in love with her. She’s in love with HIM. They’ll arrange it.”
“Oh I say!” Godfrey exclaimed, incredulous.
“He will, he will, he will!” cried the girl; and with it she burst into tears.
Godfrey, who had a cigarette in his hand, lighted it at one of the candles on the mantelpiece as if he were embarrassed. As Adela, who had dropped into his armchair, continued to sob, he said after a moment: “He oughtn’t to–he oughtn’t to.”
“Oh think of mamma–think of mamma!” she wailed almost louder than was safe.
“Yes, he ought to think of mamma.” With which Godfrey looked at the tip of his cigarette.