The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford [best time to read books txt] 📗

The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora.

“I know it,” she said. “And I am dying for love of him.”

Leonora uttered an “Ah,” that, in spite of herself, was an “Ah” of horror and of grief.

“That is why,” the girl continued, “I am going to Glasgow⁠—to take my mother away from there.” She added, “To the ends of the earth,” for, if the last months had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases were still romantically those of a schoolgirl. It was as if she had grown up so quickly that there had not been time to put her hair up. But she added: “We’re no good⁠—my mother and I.”

Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:

“No. No. You’re not no good. It’s I that am no good. You can’t let that man go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him.”

The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, faraway smile⁠—as if she were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.

“I knew you would come to that,” she said, very slowly. “But we are not worth it⁠—Edward and I.”

Nancy had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made that comment over the giving of the horse to young Selmes. She had been thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for many days silent beside her aunt’s bed. (She had always thought of Leonora as her aunt.) And she had had to sit thinking during many silent meals with Edward. And then, at times, with his bloodshot eyes and creased, heavy mouth, he would smile at her. And gradually the knowledge had come to her that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Several things contributed to form and to harden this conviction.

She was allowed to read the papers in those days⁠—or, rather, since Leonora was always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out early, over the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day, in the papers, she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well. Beneath it she read the words: “The Hon. Mrs. Brand, plaintiff in the remarkable divorce case reported on p. 8.” Nancy hardly knew what a divorce case was. She had been so remarkably well brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practise divorce. I don’t know how Leonora had done it exactly. I suppose she had always impressed it on Nancy’s mind that nice women did not read these things, and that would have been enough to make Nancy skip those pages.

She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce case⁠—principally because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She imagined that Leonora, when her headache left her, would like to know what was happening to Mrs. Brand, who lived at Christchurch, and whom they both liked very well. The case occupied three days, and the report that Nancy first came upon was that of the third day. Edward, however, kept the papers of the week, after his methodical fashion, in a rack in his gun-room, and when she had finished her breakfast Nancy went to that quiet apartment and had what she would have called a good read. It seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not understand why one counsel should be so anxious to know all about the movements of Mr. Brand upon a certain day; she could not understand why a chart of the bedroom accommodation at Christchurch Old Hall should be produced in court. She did not even see why they should want to know that, upon a certain occasion, the drawing-room door was locked. It made her laugh; it appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy themselves with such matters. It struck her, nevertheless, as odd that one of the counsel should cross-question Mr. Brand so insistently and so impertinently as to his feelings for Miss Lupton. Nancy knew Miss Lupton of Ringwood very well⁠—a jolly girl, who rode a horse with two white fetlocks. Mr. Brand persisted that he did not love Miss Lupton.⁠ ⁠… Well, of course he did not love Miss Lupton; he was a married man. You might as well think of Uncle Edward loving⁠ ⁠… loving anybody but Leonora. When people were married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt, people who misbehaved⁠—but they were poor people⁠—or people not like those she knew.

So these matters presented themselves to Nancy’s mind.

But later on in the case she found that Mr. Brand had to confess to a “guilty intimacy” with someone or other. Nancy imagined that he must have been telling someone his wife’s secrets; she could not understand why that was a serious offence. Of course it was not very gentlemanly⁠—it lessened her opinion of Mrs. Brand. But since she found that Mrs. Brand had condoned that offence, she imagined that they could not have been very serious secrets that Mr. Brand had told. And then, suddenly, it was forced on her conviction that Mr. Brand⁠—the mild Mr. Brand that she had seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing “Blind Man’s Buff” with his children and kissing his wife when he caught her⁠—Mr. Brand and Mrs. Brand had been on the worst possible terms. That was incredible.

Yet there it was⁠—in black and white. Mr. Brand drank; Mr. Brand had struck Mrs. Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr. Brand was adjudged, in two or three abrupt words, at the end of columns and columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to Nancy⁠—nothing real, that is to say. She knew that one was commanded not to commit adultery⁠—but why, she thought, should one? It was probably something like catching salmon out of season⁠—a thing one did not do. She gathered it had something to do with kissing, or holding someone in your arms.⁠ ⁠…

And yet the