It is always difficult to get rid of a woman at the end of a tragedy.
CHARLES LAMB.
THERE was no competition for the mantle of Annette. In the Burdley Park house the Folyats began to realise that they were increasingly uncomfortable. Annette’s powers of organisation had not been great, but she had acquired considerable skill in preventing the consequences of her mistakes and laches being generally felt. . . . When she left there was a sort of domestic collapse. No meals were ever punctual, nor were they tolerably cooked. Mrs. Folyat’s temper suffered, and she lashed her three remaining daughters with shrill sarcasm. . . . Mary had a sudden influx of new pupils and absented herself all day long. Gertrude arranged for a round of visits, and Minna became extremely zealous in church work, while Mrs. Folyat simmered in her indignation against the world in general, Annette in particular, and especially against love, that laughing enemy of public opinion. Not Annette’s duplicity, not her secrecy, not her defiance of parental authority so rankled in her mother’s mind as the black-and-white fact before all the vulgar, prying world that Bennett’s father was not respectable. The unlucky Bennett had inserted an advertisement of the marriage—he read it many times himself: Lawrie—Folyat. On the 28th Sept., Edward Bennett, youngest son of James Lawrie, to Annette, youngest daughter of the Rev. Francis Folyat; for it was the first time he had seen words of his own in print. Lower down on the same page was a short paragraph describing his father’s appearance in the police court, where, surely, the magistrate had seldom had such [Pg 267]an entertaining quarter of an hour. Old Lawrie pursued the argument begun overnight with the policeman (Serge had the third movement of it) and closed it with variations on an idea borrowed from Ruskin, that, Society being responsible for every crime and misdemeanour committed by its individual members, lots should be cast in each case as to which citizen of a certain district should bear the brunt of it. This, he said, would at any rate promote a feeling of responsibility towards one’s neighbour, and would in time lead each man to love his neighbour as himself. When that came about there would be neither crime nor misdemeanour.
“Till then,” said the magistrate, “I must administer the law as it stands. I am not a philosopher, but it seems to me that the condition you aspire to does obtain. Men do love their neighbours as themselves: that is, very little.” (Laughter.)
James Lawrie, cotton-broker and journalist, was fined ten shillings and costs.
The Lawrie family read the report and pretended that they had not done so. The Folyat family read it, and Mrs. Folyat, by continually explaining it away, forced it on the attention of many people who would otherwise never have heard of it. . . . She never forgave Annette. She declared that they, as a family, were utterly disgraced, would never hold up their heads again, that no one would ever call, that there was nothing to be done except for Francis to retire and them all to go and live in some place where no one had ever heard of them before. It was a splendid opportunity for her talent for inventing evils and calling monsters from the vasty deep, and she wasted no moment of it. With her own foolish tongue she set so many scandals going that, for a time, the clerical ladies were chary of calling. The scandals reached the bishop’s palace and were inquired into. The bishop’s wife, a kindly lady, laid them by calling, and, more, by sending, as she had not done for some years, an invitation to her garden-party. This so elated Mrs. Folyat that she forgot her gloom and tears and set Mary to work on her best black silk gown.
[Pg 268]
No member of the family, except Francis and Serge, visited Annette in her lodgings in the house of the German woman.
For the benefit of his mother and his fiancée, Frederic vowed that, when next he met Bennett Lawrie, he would horsewhip him.
“At least,” said Mrs. Folyat for Serge’s benefit, “I have one son who is a man.”
They might refuse to visit Annette, but they could not forget her. Now that she was gone, they realised her more nearly than they had ever done when the whole burden of their comfortable existence rested upon her shoulders. Mrs. Folyat grew more and more querulous as the household fell into worse and worse confusion. She demanded an extra servant; Francis said they could not afford it. She dismissed the hobgoblin, now a fully developed gnome, and, one after another, engaged a series of incompetent, untidy, and immoral females. At last, when one of them corrupted the washerwoman—the washing was done at home in those days on a Monday and Tuesday—and drew her into a wholesale conspiracy of theft, Mrs. Folyat, in despair, sent for Minna and implored her to take the burden of housekeeping off her hands. With a fair show of grace Minna set to, but it was not long before she went to see Annette. Annette was delighted. The days without Bennett were very long, and in their two rooms there was not enough work to occupy her hands for the morning; also, very frequently, she had no money at all and could not go out into the town. She thought, too, that Mina’s coming was a sign that her mother was on the point of relenting. Annette never doubted that she loved her mother, and her disapproval often weighed heavily on her spirit.
With a child’s pride in a new toy she displayed her two rooms and Bennett’s handiwork on the walls and wood and the bulrushes he had painted in oils on the bathroom window.
“What an awful street you live in,” said Minna.
“Is it?” Annette had never considered it ?sthetically. [Pg 269]It was the place she lived in, the scene of her honeymoon. She had filled it with romance and held it holy.
“Ma says,” remarked Minna, settling herself largely in Bennett’s wicker-chair so that she seemed to overflow it and fill the room,—“Ma says that she is quite sure Bennett will take to drink.”
“I don’t believe Ma could have said anything so odious.”
“Then you don’t know Ma.”
Minna took stock of the room, and she was divided between pity and contempt for her sister—pity that she should live in such a poor place, contempt that she should be satisfied and pleased with it, and she thought with a shudder of the day when the scales should fall from the lovers’ eyes and they should see themselves as they were, in that place, as it was. Minna had so often opened her heart to love only to expel it on finding it ridiculous that she could not conceive of any affection as permanently seated. She was like an inept gardener, who might plant spring flowers in his borders and deem it natural and inevitable that summer and autumn should be empty of all save weeds. She had cultivated a taste for falling in love, and always lost patience with it before she came to love.
She had come to ask Annette how she had contrived the more or less smooth-running of household affairs in Fern Square and Burdley Park, but found herself instead pondering marriage as here represented and also as applied to herself. She asked Annette what she did all day long. Annette told her: she sewed, mended, thought of Bennett, went out to buy his supper.
“A little different from home?” suggested Minna.
“Of course,” replied Annette, “I’d like more people. It’s hard to make it go all the day round when there’s only one. But then, I read. I usedn’t to be able to do that.”
“How did you manage at home? I can’t.”
“I don’t think I managed at all. Bennett says I’m an awfully bad manager. There were such a lot of things to do that they had to be done.”
[Pg 270]
“How did you make the servant work?”
“I didn’t. I did it all myself. If she did anything I generally had to do it all over again. She lit the fires in the morning and cleaned the boots and all the nasty work. I think in their own homes they leave all the rest undone.”
Minna rose from her seat and demanded to be shown the bedroom. This was very ugly. She made a wry face.
“Do you like it?—being married, I mean.”
Annette smiled. Musingly she said:
“What a silly question!”
Minna returned to Burdley Park little enlightened but uneasy and troubled. She went to the kitchen and worked, as she thought, very hard, and scolded the servant and lashed herself into a state of anger with things in general. By the evening she was entirely miserable. She sat down in her bedroom and wrote to Basil Haslam:
“I am miserable. Things are getting worse and worse. You have often scolded me for not taking things seriously enough. You little know me. Do men ever know women? Do they ever take women seriously? Don’t they always fall back on the woman’s instinct which they have invented as an excuse for their own silence and reticence? . . .
“I have been to see Annette. Poor child! It has upset me. I should like to see you—to-morrow, if possible. Can you come?
“Yours, M.”
She also wrote to Herbert Fry, on a sudden mischievous impulse which she did not take the trouble to understand, she enjoyed it so thoroughly:
“I am going to be married, and I hope to come to London. This place isn’t fit to live in, certainly not to be married in.”
Her pen scrawled triumphantly as she added:
“Kind regards to Mrs. Fry.
“Yours, M.”
[Pg 271]
She sent the letter to Mr. Fry’s office address in London Wall. She did not know where he lived.
Basil Haslam came next day bursting with sympathy and high hope. Minna received him, for the sake of effect, in the kitchen. Like Charlotte, she was cutting bread and butter. She had sent the servant out on an errand.
Basil came in very quietly, and made Minna think of a young inexperienced doctor cultivating a bedside manner. However, she repressed her desire to tease him and said:
“I have learned my lesson.”
“What lesson?”
“Something about a stalled ox.”
She scraped the butter very thin on the bread by way of heightening her own sensation of a chastening poverty.
“We shall be very poor,” she said.
“Oh, Minna! I will make you rich.”
“I suppose there is a lot of money in London.”
“Will you come to London with me?”
“Didn’t I say so in my letter?”
Basil was always literal. He took out her letter and read it again.
“Stupid,” said Minna. “I meant it if I didn’t say it.”
She laid down the knife and the loaf and submitted to her lover’s embraces.
Basil could not contain his delight:
“There’s my one-fifty a year. I can make three hundred the first year, five hundred the next, a thousand the next . . .”
“A thousand!”
“We’ll live in a studio first of all. Then we’ll live in a house and give dinner to the dealers and editors. And then we’ll live in a house with a studio and the dealers and editors shall give dinner to us.”
“That will be fun,” said Minna.
Together they carried the tea-tray upstairs and broke the news of their engagement to Mrs. Folyat. Frederic and Jessie Clibran-Bell were there. They had been conspiring with Mrs. Folyat to bring about a speedy wedding. [Pg 272]With the assistance of Mr. Clibran-Bell Frederic had been taking work on his own account and had made fifty pounds in a year. Herbert Fry had assisted him by letting him act as his agent—on condition that he had Frederic’s agency work in London—and now there was talk of his setting up in an office of his own, if his father could guarantee him one year’s expenses.
Mrs. Folyat set all this before Basil and Minna, and excitedly they planned a double wedding in two months’ time.
Mrs. Folyat saw in this project the chance of wiping out the stain of Annette’s offence.
Francis was approached that very night. He was for waiting. They could sell no more of their Potsham houses, or there would be no provision for their old age. (He had already begun to think dimly of retirement to the softer south and a garden.) Mrs. Folyat, however, had set her heart on the plan. She wheedled, cajoled, coaxed, scolded, suggested scheme after scheme, until Francis agreed to sell his life-insurance policy, but on condition that the proceeds were divided equally between his children with the exception of Leedham, who was married to a wealthy Portuguese widow, ten years his senior, in Rio . . . Mrs. Folyat pounced on that, and next morning saw to it that he began to take the necessary steps.
Twelve hundred pounds were raised by this means. Serge disapproved and disclaimed his share, so that the rest had two hundred and forty pounds each.
Frederic took an office near Serge’s studio, engaged two clerks, and was regarded as sufficiently established to enter into the state of matrimony.
There was an entertaining wedding. Bennett and Annette were invited and formally taken back into the fold. Basil and Minna Haslam went to London to spend their honeymoon in the studio they had taken in Chelsea. Frederic and Jessie Folyat took a house next door but one to James Lawrie’s. There were many tears shed over the brides, and after Mrs. Folyat had delivered herself of a sort of funeral oration à la Bossuet, Minna whispered to Serge:
[Pg 273]
“Ma always did love a theatrical performance.”
“‘Your son’s your son till he gets him a wife,’” said Mrs. Folyat to Frederic, and then to Minna she completed the tag, “‘Your daughter’s your daughter the rest of your life.’”
It was a very exciting and a very happy day in the Folyat household. Mrs. Folyat chattered all the evening. Mary and Gertrude said not a word and went silently off to bed, so that Francis was compelled to escort his wife to her room and perform the innumerable little services she required.
“Doesn’t the house feel empty?” she said.
Francis mumbled.
“I’m sure Annette is going to have a baby.”
“M-m-m-m.”
“I thought I was never going to be a grandmother.”
“You always were impatient,” said Francis in an unexpectedly loud voice.
That was criticism, which she could not abide. Francis rued his precipitancy. He was very unhappy about Frederic, but, he asked himself, what could he do? What could he do? There was no doubt that Jessie loved Frederic, but did not that, in itself, the more dangerously expose her to his folly and weak selfishness?
He hardly heard his wife’s words as she went maundering on. In the darkness he prayed that all might be, as he tried to believe, for the best.