The Country house
CHAPTER IX

MR. PARAMOR DISPOSES

Mrs. Pendyce, who, in accordance with her husband's wish, still occupied the same room as Mr. Pendyce, chose the ten minutes before he got up to break to him Gregory's decision. The moment was auspicious, for he was only half awake.

“Horace,” she said, and her face looked young and anxious, “Grig says that Helen Bellew ought not to go on in her present position. Of course, I told him that you'd be annoyed, but Grig says that she can't go on like this, that she simply must divorce Captain Bellew.”

Mr. Pendyce was lying on his back.

“What's that?” he said.

Mrs. Pendyce went on

“I knew it would worry you; but really”—she fixed her eyes on the ceiling—“I suppose we ought only to think of her.”

The Squire sat up.

“What was that,” he said, “about Bellew?”

Mrs. Pendyce went on in a languid voice and without moving her eyes:

“Don't be angrier than you can help, dear; it is so wearing. If Grig says she ought to divorce Captain Bellew, then I'm sure she ought.”

Horace Pendyce subsided on his pillow with a bounce, and he too lay with his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Divorce him!” he said—“I should think so! He ought to be hanged, a fellow like that. I told you last night he nearly drove over me. Living just as he likes, setting an example of devilry to the whole neighbourhood! If I hadn't kept my head he'd have bowled me over like a ninepin, and Bee into the bargain.”

Mrs. Pendyce sighed.

“It was a narrow escape,” she said.

“Divorce him!” resumed Mr. Pendyce—“I should think so! She ought to have divorced him long ago. It was the nearest thing in the world; another foot and I should have been knocked off my feet!”

Mrs. Pendyce withdrew her glance from the ceiling.

“At first,” she said, “I wondered whether it was quite—but I'm very glad you've taken it like this.”

“Taken it! I can tell you, Margery, that sort of thing makes one think. All the time Barter was preaching last night I was wondering what on earth would have happened to this estate if—if——” And he looked round with a frown. “Even as it is, I barely make the two ends of it meet. As to George, he's no more fit at present to manage it than you are; he'd make a loss of thousands.”

“I'm afraid George is too much in London. That's the reason I wondered whether— I'm afraid he sees too much of——”

Mrs. Pendyce stopped; a flush suffused her cheeks; she had pinched herself violently beneath the bedclothes.

“George,” said Mr. Pendyce, pursuing his own thoughts, “has no gumption. He'd never manage a man like Peacock—and you encourage him! He ought to marry and settle down.”

Mrs. Pendyce, the flush dying in her cheeks, said:

“George is very like poor Hubert.”

Horace Pendyce drew his watch from beneath his pillow.

“Ah!” But he refrained from adding, “Your people!” for Hubert Totteridge had not been dead a year. “Ten minutes to eight! You keep me talking here; it's time I was in my bath.”

Clad in pyjamas with a very wide blue stripe, grey-eyed, grey-moustached, slim and erect, he paused at the door.

“The girls haven't a scrap of imagination. What do you think Bee said? 'I hope he hasn't lost his train.' Lost his train! Good God! and I might have— I might have——” The Squire did not finish his sentence; no words but what seemed to him violent and extreme would have fulfilled his conception of the danger he had escaped, and it was against his nature and his training to exaggerate a physical risk.

At breakfast he was more cordial than usual to Gregory, who was going up by the first train, for as a rule Mr. Pendyce rather distrusted him, as one would a wife's cousin, especially if he had a sense of humour.

“A very good fellow,” he was wont to say of him, “but an out-and-out Radical.” It was the only label he could find for Gregory's peculiarities.

Gregory departed without further allusion to the object of his visit. He was driven to the station in a brougham by the first groom, and sat with his hat off and his head at the open window, as if trying to get something blown out of his brain. Indeed, throughout the whole of his journey up to town he looked out of the window, and expressions half humorous and half puzzled played on his face. Like a panorama slowly unrolled, country house after country house, church after church, appeared before his eyes in the autumn sunlight, among the hedgerows and the coverts that were all brown and gold; and far away on the rising uplands the slow ploughman drove, outlined against the sky:

He took a cab from the station to his solicitors' in Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was shown into a room bare of all legal accessories, except a series of Law Reports and a bunch of violets in a glass of fresh water. Edmund Paramor, the senior partner of Paramor and Herring, a clean-shaven man of sixty, with iron-grey hair brushed in a cockscomb off his forehead, greeted him with a smile.

“Ah, Vigil, how are you? Up from the country?”

“From Worsted Skeynes.”

“Horace Pendyce is a client of mine. Well, what can we do for you? Your Society up a tree?”

Gregory Vigil, in the padded leather chair that had held so many aspirants for comfort, sat a full minute without speaking; and Mr. Paramor, too, after one keen glance at his client that seemed to come from very far down in his soul, sat motionless and grave. There was at that moment something a little similar in the eyes of these two very different men, a look of kindred honesty and aspiration. Gregory spoke at last.

“It's a painful subject to me.”

Mr. Paramor drew a face on his blotting-paper.

“I have come,” went on Gregory, “about a divorce for my ward.”

“Mrs. Jaspar Bellew?”

“Yes; her position is intolerable.”

Mr. Paramor gave him a searching look.

“Let me see: I think she and her husband have been separated for some time.”

“Yes, for two years.”

“You're acting with her consent, of course?”

“I have spoken to her.”

“You know the law of divorce, I suppose?”

Gregory answered with a painful smile:

“I'm not very clear about it; I hardly ever look at those cases in the paper. I hate the whole idea.”

Mr. Paramor smiled again, became instantly grave, and said:

“We shall want evidence of certain things. Have you got any evidence?”

Gregory ran his hand through his hair.

“I don't think there'll be any difficulty,” he said. “Bellew agrees—they both agree!”

Mr. Paramor stared.

“What's that to do with it?”

Gregory caught him up.

“Surely, where both parties are anxious, and there's no opposition, it can't be difficult.”

“Good Lord!” said Mr. Paramor.

“But I've seen Bellew; I saw him yesterday. I'm sure I can get him to admit anything you want!”

Mr. Paramor drew his breath between his teeth.

“Did you ever,” he said drily, “hear of what's called collusion?”

Gregory got up and paced the room.

“I don't know that I've ever heard anything very exact about the thing at all,” he said. “The whole subject is hateful to me. I regard marriage as sacred, and when, which God forbid, it proves unsacred, it is horrible to think of these formalities. This is a Christian country; we are all flesh and blood. What is this slime, Paramor?”

With this outburst he sank again into the chair, and leaned his head on his hand. And oddly, instead of smiling, Mr. Paramor looked at him with haunting eyes.

“Two unhappy persons must not seem to agree to be parted,” he said. “One must be believed to desire to keep hold of the other, and must pose as an injured person. There must be evidence of misconduct, and in this case of cruelty or of desertion. The evidence must be impartial. This is the law.”

Gregory said without looking up:

“But why?”

Mr. Paramor took his violets out of the water, and put them to his nose.

“How do you mean—why?”

“I mean, why this underhand, roundabout way?”

Mr. Paramor's face changed with startling speed from its haunting look back to his smile.

“Well,” he said, “for the preservation of morality. What do you suppose?”

“Do you call it moral so to imprison people that you drive them to sin in order to free themselves?”

Mr. Paramor obliterated the face on his blotting-pad.

“Where's your sense of humour?” he said.

“I see no joke, Paramor.”

Mr. Paramor leaned forward.

“My dear friend,” he said earnestly, “I don't say for a minute that our system doesn't cause a great deal of quite unnecessary suffering; I don't say that it doesn't need reform. Most lawyers and almost any thinking man will tell you that it does. But that's a wide question which doesn't help us here. We'll manage your business for you, if it can be done. You've made a bad start, that's all. The first thing is for us to write to Mrs. Bellew, and ask her to come and see us. We shall have to get Bellew watched.”

Gregory said:

“That's detestable. Can't it be done without that?”

Mr. Paramor bit his forefinger.

“Not safe,” he said. “But don't bother; we'll see to all that.”

Gregory rose and went to the window. He said suddenly:

“I can't bear this underhand work.”

Mr. Paramor smiled.

“Every honest man,” he said, “feels as you do. But, you see, we must think of the law.”

Gregory burst out again:

“Can no one get a divorce, then, without making beasts or spies of themselves?”

Mr. Paramor said gravely

“It is difficult, perhaps impossible. You see, the law is based on certain principles.”

“Principles?”

A smile wreathed Mr. Paramor's mouth, but died instantly.

“Ecclesiastical principles, and according to these a person desiring a divorce 'ipso facto' loses caste. That they should have to make spies or beasts of themselves is not of grave importance.”

Gregory came back to the table, and again buried his head in his hands.

“Don't joke, please, Paramor,” he said; “it's all so painful to me.”

Mr. Paramor's eyes haunted his client's bowed head.

“I'm not joking,” he said. “God forbid! Do you read poetry?” And opening a drawer, he took out a book bound in red leather. “This is a man I'm fond of:

“That seems to me the sum of all philosophy.”

“Paramor,” said Gregory, “my ward is very dear to me; she is dearer to me than any woman I know. I am here in a most dreadful dilemma. On the one hand there is this horrible underhand business, with all its publicity; and on the other there is her position—a beautiful woman, fond of gaiety, living alone in this London, where every man's instincts and every woman's tongue look upon her as fair game. It has been brought home to me only too painfully of late. God forgive me! I have even advised her to go back to Bellew, but that seems out of the question. What am I to do?”

Mr. Paramor rose.

“I know,” he said—“I know. My dear friend, I know!” And for a full minute he remained motionless, a little turned from Gregory. “It will be better,” he said suddenly, “for her to get rid of him. I'll go and see her myself. We'll spare her all we can. I'll go this afternoon, and let you know the result.”

As though by mutual instinct, they put out their hands, which they shook with averted faces. Then Gregory, seizing his hat, strode out of the room.

He went straight to the rooms of his Society in Hanover Square. They were on the top floor, higher than the rooms of any other Society in the building—so high, in fact, that from their windows, which began five feet up, you could practically only see the sky.

A girl with sloping shoulders, red cheeks, and dark eyes, was working a typewriter in a corner, and sideways to the sky at a bureau littered with addressed envelopes, unanswered letters, and copies of the Society's publications, was seated a grey-haired lady with a long, thin, weatherbeaten face and glowing eyes, who was frowning at a page of manuscript.

“Oh, Mr. Vigil,” she said, “I'm so glad you've come. This paragraph mustn't go as it is. It will never do.”

Gregory took the manuscript and read the paragraph in question.

“This case of Eva Nevill is so horrible that we ask those of our women readers who live in the security, luxury perhaps, peace certainly, of their country homes, what they would have done, finding themselves suddenly in the position of this poor girl—in a great city, without friends, without money, almost without clothes, and exposed to all the craft of one of those fiends in human form who prey upon our womankind. Let each one ask herself: Should I have resisted where she fell?”

“It will never do to send that out,” said the lady again.

“What is the matter with it, Mrs. Shortman?”

“It's too personal. Think of Lady Malden, or most of our subscribers. You can't expect them to imagine themselves like poor Eva. I'm sure they won't like it.”

Gregory clutched at his hair.

“Is it possible they can't stand that?” he said.

“It's only because you've given such horrible details of poor Eva.”

Gregory got up and paced the room.

Mrs. Shortman went on

“You've not lived in the country for so long, Mr. Vigil, that you don't remember. You see, I know. People don't like to be harrowed. Besides, think how difficult it is for them to imagine themselves in such a position. It'll only shock them, and do our circulation harm.”

Gregory snatched up the page and handed it to the girl who sat at the typewriter in the corner.

“Read that, please, Miss Mallow.”

The girl read without raising her eyes.

“Well, is it what Mrs. Shortman says?”

The girl handed it back with a blush.

“It's perfect, of course, in itself, but I think Mrs. Shortman is right. It might offend some people.”

Gregory went quickly to the window, threw it up, and stood gazing at the sky. Both women looked at his back.

Mrs. Shortman said gently:

“I would only just alter it like this, from after 'country homes'. 'whether they do not pity and forgive this poor girl in a great city, without friends, without money, almost without clothes, and exposed to all the craft of one of those fiends in human form who prey upon our womankind,' and just stop there.”

Gregory returned to the table.

“Not 'forgive,'.rdquo; he said, “not 'forgive'.”

Mrs. Shortman raised her pen.

“You don't know,” she said, “what a strong feeling there is. Mind, it has to go to numbers of parsonages, Mr. Vigil. Our principle has always been to be very careful. And you have been plainer than usual in stating the case. It's not as if they really could put themselves in her position; that's impossible. Not one woman in a hundred could, especially among those who live in the country and have never seen life. I'm a squire's daughter myself.”

“And I a parson's,” said Gregory, with a smile.

Mrs. Shortman looked at him reproachfully.

“Joking apart, Mr. Vigil, it's touch and go with our paper as it is; we really can't afford it. I've had lots of letters lately complaining that we put the cases unnecessarily strongly. Here's one:

“'BOURNEFIELD RECTORY,

“'November 1.

“'DEAR MADAM,

“'While sympathising with your good work, I am afraid I cannot become a subscriber to your paper while it takes its present form, as I do not feel that it is always fit reading for my girls. I cannot think it either wise or right that they should become acquainted with such dreadful aspects of life, however true they may be.

“'I am, dear madam,

“'Respectfully yours,

“'WINIFRED TUDDENHAM.

“'P.S.— I could never feel sure, too, that my maids would not pick it up, and perhaps take harm.'.rdquo;

“I had that only this morning.”

Gregory buried his face in his hands, and sitting thus he looked so like a man praying that no one spoke. When he raised his face it was to say:

“Not 'forgive,' Mrs. Shortman, not 'forgive'.”

Mrs. Shortman ran her pen through the word.

“Very well, Mr. Vigil,” she said; “it's a risk.”

The sound of the typewriter, which had been hushed, began again from the corner.

“That case of drink, Mr. Vigil— Millicent Porter— I'm afraid there's very little hope there.”

Gregory asked:

“What now?”

“Relapsed again; it's the fifth time.”

Gregory turned his face to the window, and looked at the sky.

“I must go and see her. Just give me her address.”

Mrs. Shortman read from a green book:

“'Mrs. Porter, 2 Bilcock Buildings, Bloomsbury.' Mr. Vigil!”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Vigil, I do sometimes wish you would not persevere so long with those hopeless cases; they never seem to come to anything, and your time is so valuable.”

“How can I give them up, Mrs. Shortman? There's no choice.”

“But, Mr. Vigil, why is there no choice? You must draw the line somewhere. Do forgive me for saying that I think you sometimes waste your time.”

Gregory turned to the girl at the typewriter.

“Miss Mallow, is Mrs. Shortman right? do I waste my time?”

The girl at the typewriter blushed vividly, and, without looking round, said:

“How can I tell, Mr. Vigil? But it does worry one.”

A humorous and perplexed smile passed over Gregory's lips.

“Now I know I shall cure her,” he said. “2 Bilcock Buildings.” And he continued to look at the sky. “How's your neuralgia, Mrs. Shortman?”

Mrs. Shortman smiled.

“Awful!”

Gregory turned quickly.

“You feel that window, then; I'm so sorry.”

Mrs. Shortman shook her head.

“No, but perhaps Molly does.”

The girl at the typewriter said:

“Oh no; please, Mr. Vigil, don't shut it for me.”

“Truth and honour?”

“Truth and honour,” replied both women. And all three for a moment sat looking at the sky. Then Mrs. Shortman said:

“You see, you can't get to the root of the evil—that husband of hers.”

Gregory turned.

“Ah,” he said, “that man! If she could only get rid of him! That ought to have been done long ago, before he drove her to drink like this. Why didn't she, Mrs. Shortman, why didn't she?”

Mrs. Shortman raised her eyes, which had such a peculiar spiritual glow.

“I don't suppose she had the money,” she said; “and she must have been such a nice woman then. A nice woman doesn't like to divorce—”

Gregory looked at her.

“What, Mrs. Shortman, you too, you too among the Pharisees?”

Mrs. Shortman flushed.

“She wanted to save him,” she said; “she must have wanted to save him.”

“Then you and I——” But Gregory did not finish, and turned again to the window. Mrs. Shortman, too, biting her lips, looked anxiously at the sky.

Miss Mallow at the typewriter, with a scared face, plied her fingers faster than ever.

Gregory was the first to speak.

“You must please forgive me,” he said gently. “A personal matter; I forgot myself.”

Mrs. Shortman withdrew her gaze from the sky.

“Oh, Mr. Vigil, if I had known——”

Gregory Gregory smiled.

“Don't, don't!” he said; “we've quite frightened poor Miss Mallow!”

Miss Mallow looked round at him, he looked at her, and all three once more looked at the sky. It was the chief recreation of this little society.

Gregory worked till nearly three, and walked out to a bun-shop, where he lunched off a piece of cake and a cup of coffee. He took an omnibus, and getting on the top, was driven West with a smile on his face and his hat in his hand. He was thinking of Helen Bellew. It had become a habit with him to think of her, the best and most beautiful of her sex—a habit in which he was growing grey, and with which, therefore, he could not part. And those women who saw him with his uncovered head smiled, and thought:

'What a fine-looking man!'

But George Pendyce, who saw him from the window of the Stoics' Club, smiled a different smile; the sight of him was always a little unpleasant to George.

Nature, who had made Gregory Vigil a man, had long found that he had got out of her hands, and was living in celibacy, deprived of the comfort of woman, even of those poor creatures whom he befriended; and Nature, who cannot bear that man should escape her control, avenged herself through his nerves and a habit of blood to the head. Extravagance, she said, I cannot have, and when I made this man I made him quite extravagant enough. For his temperament (not uncommon in a misty climate) had been born seven feet high; and as a man cannot add a cubit to his stature, so neither can he take one off. Gregory could not bear that a yellow man must always remain a yellow man, but trusted by care and attention some day to see him white. There lives no mortal who has not a philosophy as distinct from every other mortal's as his face is different from their faces; but Gregory believed that philosophers unfortunately alien must gain in time a likeness to himself if he were careful to tell them often that they had been mistaken. Other men in this Great Britain had the same belief.

To Gregory's reforming instinct it was a constant grief that he had been born refined. A natural delicacy would interfere and mar his noblest efforts. Hence failures deplored by Mrs. Pendyce to Lady Malden the night they danced at Worsted Skeynes.

He left his bus near to the flat where Mrs. Bellow lived; with reverence he made the tour of the building and back again. He had long fixed a rule, which he never broke, of seeing her only once a fortnight; but to pass her windows he went out of his way most days and nights. And having made this tour, not conscious of having done anything ridiculous, still smiling, and with his hat on his knee, perhaps really happier because he had not seen her, was driven East, once more passing George Pendyce in the bow-window of the Stoics' Club, and once more raising on his face a jeering smile.

He had been back at his rooms in Buckingham Street half an hour when a club commissionaire arrived with Mr. Paramor's promised letter.

He opened it hastily.

“THE NELSON CLUB, “TRAFALGAR SQUARE.

“MY DEAR VIGIL,

“I've just come from seeing your ward. An embarrassing complexion is lent to affairs by what took place last night. It appears that after your visit to him yesterday afternoon her husband came up to town, and made his appearance at her flat about eleven o'clock. He was in a condition bordering on delirium tremens, and Mrs. Bellew was obliged to keep him for the night. 'I could not,' she said to me, 'have refused a dog in such a state.' The visit lasted until this afternoon—in fact, the man had only just gone when I arrived. It is a piece of irony, of which I must explain to you the importance. I think I told you that the law of divorce is based on certain principles. One of these excludes any forgiveness of offences by the party moving for a divorce. In technical language, any such forgiveness or overlooking is called condonation, and it is a complete bar to further action for the time being. The Court is very jealous of this principle of non-forgiveness, and will regard with grave suspicion any conduct on the part of the offended party which might be construed as amounting to condonation. I fear that what your ward tells me will make it altogether inadvisable to apply for a divorce on any evidence that may lie in the past. It is too dangerous. In other words, the Court would almost certainly consider that she has condoned offences so far. Any further offence, however, will in technical language 'revive' the past, and under these circumstances, though nothing can be done at present, there may be hope in the future. After seeing your ward, I quite appreciate your anxiety in the matter, though I am by no means sure that you are right in advising this divorce. If you remain in the same mind, however, I will give the matter my best personal attention, and my counsel to you is not to worry. This is no matter for a layman, especially not for one who, like you, judges of things rather as they ought to be than as they are.

“I am, my dear Vigil,

“Very sincerely yours,

“EDMUND PARAMOR. “GREGORY VIGIL, ESQ.

“If you want to see me, I shall be at my club all the evening.-E. P.”

When Gregory had read this note he walked to the window, and stood looking out over the lights on the river. His heart beat furiously, his temples were crimson. He went downstairs, and took a cab to the Nelson Club.

Mr. Paramor, who was about to dine, invited his visitor to join him.

Gregory shook his head.

“No, thanks,” he said; “I don't feel like dining. What is this, Paramor? Surely there's some mistake? Do you mean to tell me that because she acted like a Christian to that man she is to be punished for it in this way?”

Mr. Paramor bit his finger.

“Don't confuse yourself by dragging in Christianity. Christianity has nothing to do with law.”

“You talked of principles,” said Gregory—“ecclesiastical.”

“Yes, yes; I meant principles imported from the old ecclesiastical conception of marriage, which held man and wife to be undivorceable. That conception has been abandoned by the law, but the principles still haunt——”

“I don't understand.”

Mr. Paramor said slowly:

“I don't know that anyone does. It's our usual muddle. But I know this, Vigil—in such a case as your ward's we must tread very carefully. We must 'save face,' as the Chinese say. We must pretend we don't want to bring this divorce, but that we have been so injured that we are obliged to come forward. If Bellew says nothing, the Judge will have to take what's put before him. But there's always the Queen's Proctor. I don't know if you know anything about him?”

“No,” said Gregory, “I don't.”

“Well, if he can find out anything against our getting this divorce, he will. It is not my habit to go into Court with a case in which anybody can find out anything.”

“Do you mean to say—”

“I mean to say that she must not ask for a divorce merely because she is miserable, or placed in a position that no woman should be placed in, but only if she has been offended in certain technical ways; and if—by condonation, for instance—she has given the Court technical reason for refusing her a divorce, that divorce will be refused her. To get a divorce, Vigil, you must be as hard as nails and as wary as a cat. Now do you understand?”

Gregory did not answer.

Mr. Paramor looked searchingly and rather pityingly in his face.

“It won't do to go for it at present,” he said. “Are you still set on this divorce? I told you in my letter that I am not sure you are right.”

“How can you ask me, Paramor? After that man's conduct last night, I am more than ever set on it.”

“Then,” said Mr. Paramor, “we must keep a sharp eye on Bellew, and hope for the best.”

Gregory held out his hand.

“You spoke of morality,” he said. “I can't tell you how inexpressibly mean the whole thing seems to me. Goodnight.”

And, turning rather quickly, he went out.

His mind was confused and his heart torn. He thought of Helen Bellew as of the woman dearest to him in the coils of a great slimy serpent, and the knowledge that each man and woman unhappily married was, whether by his own, his partner's, or by no fault at all, in the same embrace, afforded him no comfort whatsoever. It was long before he left the windy streets to go to his home.

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