think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.
They had arrived in Lyme just before two. For a few minutes Charles took possession of the room he had reserved. Again he paced up and down, but now in a nervous agony, steeling himself for the interview ahead. The existentialist terror invaded him again; perhaps he had known it would and so burned his boats by sending that letter to Sarah. He rehearsed again the thousand phrases he had invented on the journey from Exeter; but they fled through his mind like October leaves. He took a deep breath, then his hat, and went out.
Mary, with a broad grin as soon as she saw him, opened the door. He practiced his gravity on her.
“Good afternoon. Is Miss Ernestina at home?” But before she could answer Ernestina herself appeared at the end of the hall. She had a little smile.
“No. My duenna is out to lunch. But you may come in.”
She disappeared back into the sitting room. Charles gave his hat to Mary, set his lapels, wished he were dead, then went down the hall and into his ordeal. Ernestina, in sunlight, by a window overlooking the garden, turned gaily.
“I received a letter from Papa this… Charles! Charles? Is something wrong?”
And she came towards him. He could not look at her, but stared at the carpet. She stopped. Her frightened and his grave, embarrassed eyes met.
“Charles?”
“I beg you to sit down.”
“But what has happened?”
“That is… why I have come.”
“But why do you look at me like that?”
“Because I do not know how to begin to say what I must.”
Still looking at him, she felt behind her and sat on a chair by the window. Still he was silent. She touched a letter on the table beside her.
“Papa…” but his quick look made her give up her sentence.
“He was kindness itself… but I did not tell him the truth.”
“The truth—what truth?”
“That I have, after many hours of the deepest, the most painful consideration, come to the conclusion that I am not worthy of you.”
Her face went white. He thought for a moment she would faint and stepped forward to catch her, but she slowly reached a hand to her left arm, as if to feel she was awake.
“Charles… you are joking.”
“To my eternal shame… I am not joking.”
“You are not worthy of me?”
“Totally unworthy.”
“And you… oh, but this is some nightmare.” She looked up at him with incredulous eyes, then smiled timidly. “You forget your telegram. You are joking.”
“How little you know me if you think I could ever joke on such a matter.”
“But… but… your telegram!”
“Was sent before my decision.”
Only then, as he lowered his eyes, did she begin to accept the truth. He had already foreseen that it must be the crucial moment. If she fainted, became hysterical… he did not know; but he abhorred pain and it would not be too late to recant, to tell all, to throw himself on her mercy. But though Ernestina’s eyes closed a long moment, and a kind of shiver seemed to pass through her, she did not faint. She was her father’s daughter; she may have wished she might faint; but such a gross betrayal of…
“Then kindly explain what you mean.”
A momentary relief came to him. She was hurt, but not mortally.
“That I cannot do in one sentence.”
She stared with a kind of bitter primness at her hands. “Then use several. I shall not interrupt.”
“I have always had, and I continue to have, the greatest respect and affection for you. I have never doubted for a moment that you would make an admirable wife to any man fortunate enough to gain your love. But I have also always been shamefully aware that a part of my regard for you was ignoble. I refer to the fortune that you bring—and the fact that you are an only child. Deep in myself, Ernestina, I have always felt that my life has been without purpose, without achievement. No, pray hear me out. When I realized last winter that an offer of marriage might be favorably entertained by you, I was tempted by Satan. I saw an opportunity, by a brilliant marriage, to reestablish my faith in myself. I beg you not to think that I proceeded only by a cold-blooded calculation. I liked you very much. I sincerely believed that that liking would grow into love.”
Slowly her head had risen. She stared at him, but seemed hardly to see him.
“I cannot believe it is you I hear speaking. It is some impostor, some cruel, some heartless…”
“I know this must come as a most grievous shock.”
“Shock!” Her expression was outraged. “When you can stand so cold and collected—and tell me you have never loved me!”
She had raised her voice and he went to one of the windows that was opened and closed it. Standing closer to her bowed head, he spoke as gently as he could without losing his distance.
“I am not seeking for excuses. I am seeking simply to explain that my crime was not a calculated one. If it were, how could I do what I am doing now? My one desire is to make you understand that I am not a deceiver of anyone but myself. Call me what else you will—weak, selfish… what you will—but not callous.”
She drew in a little shuddery breath.
“And what brought about this great discovery?”
“My realization, whose heinousness I cannot shirk, that I was disappointed when your father did not end our engagement for me.” She gave him a terrible look. “I am trying to be honest. He was not only most generous in the matter of my changed circumstances. He proposed that I should one day become his partner in business.”
Her face flashed up again. “I knew it, I knew it. It is because you are marrying into trade. Am I not right?”
He turned to the window. “I had fully accepted that. In any case—to feel ashamed of your father would be the grossest snobbery.”
“Saying things doesn’t make one any the less guilty of them.”
“If you think I viewed his new proposal with horror, you are quite right. But the horror was at my own ineligibility for what was intended—certainly not at the proposal itself. Now please let me finish my… explanation.”
“It is making my heart break.”
He turned away to the window.
“Let us try to cling to that respect we have always had for one another. You must not think I have considered only myself in all this. What haunts me is the injustice I should be doing you—and to your father—by marrying you without that love you deserve. If you and I were different people—but we are not, we know by a look, a word, whether our love is returned—”
She hissed. “We thought we knew.”
“My dear Ernestina, it is like faith in Christianity. One can pretend to have it. But the pretense will finally out. I am convinced, if you search your heart, that faint doubts must have already crossed it. No doubt you stifled them, you said, he is—”
She covered her ears, then slowly drew her fingers down over her face. There was a silence. Then she said, “May I speak now?”
“Of course.”
“I know to you I have never been anything more than a pretty little… article of drawing-room furniture. I know I am innocent. I know I am spoiled. I know I am not unusual. I am not a Helen of Troy or a Cleopatra. I know I say things that sometimes grate on your ears, I bore you about domestic arrangements, I hurt you when I make fun of your fossils. Perhaps I am just a child. But under your love and protection… and your education… I believed I should become better. I should learn to please you, I should learn to make you love me for what I had become. You may not know it, you cannot know it, but that is why I was first attracted to you. You do know that I had been… dangled before a hundred other men. They were not all fortune hunters and nonentities. I did not choose you because I was so innocent I could not make comparisons. But because you seemed more generous, wiser, more experienced. I remember—I will fetch down my diary if you do not believe me—that I wrote, soon after we became engaged, that you have little faith in yourself. I have felt that. You believe yourself a failure, you think yourself despised, I know not what… but that is what I wished to make my real bridal present to you. Faith in yourself.”
There was a long silence. She stayed with lowered head.
He spoke in a low voice. “You remind me of how much I lose. Alas, I know myself too well. One can’t resurrect what was never there.”
“And that is all what I say means to you?”
“It means a great, a very great deal to me.”
He was silent, though she plainly expected him to say more. He had not expected this containment. He was touched, and ashamed, by what she had said; and that he could not show either sentiment was what made him silent. Her voice was very soft and downward.
“In view of what I have said can you not at least…” but she could not find the words.
“Reconsider my decision?”
She must have heard something in his tone that he had not meant to be there, for she suddenly looked at him with a passionate appeal. Her eyes were wet with suppressed tears, her small face white and pitifully struggling to keep some semblance of calm. He felt it like a knife: how deeply he had wounded.
“Charles, I beg you, I beg you to wait a little. It is true, I am ignorant, I do not know what you want of me… if you would tell me where I have failed… how you would wish me to be… I will do anything, anything, because I would abandon anything to make you happy.”
“You must not speak like that.”
“I must—I can’t help it—only yesterday that telegram, I wept, I have kissed it a hundred times, you must not think that because I tease I do not have deeper feelings. I would…” but her voice trailed away, as an acrid intuition burst upon her. She threw him a fierce little look. “You are lying. Something has happened since you sent it.”
He moved to the fireplace, and stood with his back to her. She began to sob. And that he found unendurable. He at last looked round at her, expecting to see her with her head bowed; but she was weeping openly, with her eyes on him; and as she saw him look, she made a motion, like some terrified, lost child, with her hands towards him, half rose, took a single step, and then fell to her knees. There came to Charles then a sharp revulsion—not against her, but against the situation: his half-truths, his hiding of the essential. Perhaps the closest analogy is to what a surgeon sometimes feels before a particularly terrible battle or accident casualty; a savage determination—for what else can be done?—to get on with the operation. To tell the truth. He waited until a moment came without sobs.
“I wished to spare you. But yes—something has happened.”
Very slowly she got to her feet and raised her hands to her cheeks, never for a moment quitting him with her eyes.
“Who?”
“You do not know her. Her name is unimportant.”
“And she… you…”
He looked away.
“I have known her many years. I thought the attachment was broken. I discovered in London… that it is not.”
“You love her?”
“Love? I don’t know… whatever it is that makes it impossible to offer one’s heart freely to another.”
“Why did you not tell me this at the beginning?”
There was a long pause. He could not bear her eyes, which seemed to penetrate every lie he told.
He muttered, “I hoped to spare you the pain of it.”
“Or yourself the shame of it? You… you are a monster!”
She fell back into her chair, staring at him with dilated eyes. Then she flung her face into her hands. He let her weep, and stared fiercely at a china sheep on the mantelpiece; and never till the day he died saw a china sheep again without a hot flush of self-disgust. When at last she spoke, it was with such force that he flinched.
“If I do not kill myself, shame will!”
“I am not worth a moment’s regret. You will meet other men… not broken by life. Honorable men, who will…” he halted, then burst out, “By all you hold sacred, promise never to say that again!”
She stared fiercely at him. “Did you think I should pardon you?” He mutely shook his head. “My parents, my friends—what am I to tell them? That Mr. Charles Smithson has decided after all that his mistress is more important than his honor, his promise, his…”
There was the sound of torn paper. Without looking round he knew that she had vented her anger on her father’s letter.
“I believed her gone forever from my life. Extraordinary circumstances…”
A silence: as if she considered whether she could throw vitriol at him. Her voice was suddenly cold and venomous.
“You have broken your promise. There is a remedy for members of my sex.”
“You have every right to bring such an action. I could only plead guilty.”
“The world shall know you for what you are. That is all I care about.”
“The world will know, whatever happens.”
The enormity of what he had done flooded back through her. She kept shaking her head. He went and took a chair and sat facing her, too far to touch, but close enough to appeal to her better self.
“Can you suppose for one serious moment that I am unpunished? That this has not been the most terrible decision of my life? This hour the most dreaded? The one I shall remember with the deepest remorse till the day I die? I may be—very well, I am a deceiver. But you know I am not heartless. I should not be here now if I were. I should have written a letter, fled abroad—”
“I wish you had.”
He gave the crown of her head a long look, then stood. He caught sight of himself in a mirror; and the man in the mirror, Charles in another world, seemed the true self. The one in the room was what she said, an impostor; had always been, in his relations with Ernestina, an impostor, an observed other. He went at last into one of his prepared speeches.
“I cannot expect you to feel anything but anger and resentment. All I ask is that when these… natural feelings have diminished you will recall that no condemnation of my conduct can approach the severity of my own… and that my one excuse is my incapacity longer to deceive a person whom I have learned to respect and admire.”
It sounded false; it was false; and Charles was uncomfortably aware of her unpent contempt for him.
“I am trying to picture her. I suppose she is titled—has pretensions to birth. Oh… if I had only listened to my poor, dear father!”
“What does that mean?”
“He knows the nobility. He has a phrase for them—Fine manners and unpaid bills.”
“I am not a member of the nobility.”
“You are like your uncle. You behave as if your rank excuses you all concern with what we ordinary creatures of the world believe in. And so does she. What woman could be so vile as to make a man break his vows? I can guess.” She spat the guess out. “She is married.”
“I will not discuss this.”
“Where is she now? In London?”
He stared at Ernestine a moment, then turned on his heel and walked towards the door. She stood.
“My father will drag your name, both your names, through the mire. You will be spurned and detested by all who know you. You will be hounded out of England, you will be—”
He had halted at the door. Now he opened it. And that—or the impossibility of thinking of a sufficient infamy for him—made her stop. Her face was working, as if she wanted to say so much more, but could not. She swayed; and then some contradictory self in her said his name; as if it had been a nightmare, and now she wished to be told she was waking from it.
He did not move. She faltered and then abruptly slumped to the floor by her chair. His first instinctive move was to go to her. But something in the way she had fallen, the rather too careful way her knees had crumpled and her body slipped sideways onto the carpet, stopped him.
He stared a moment down at that collapsed figure, and recognized the catatonia of convention.
He said, “I shall write at once to your father.”
She made no sign, but lay with her eyes closed, her hand pathetically extended on the carpet. He strode to the bellrope beside the mantelpiece and pulled it sharply, then strode back to the open door. As soon as he heard Mary’s footsteps, he left the room. The maid came running up the stairs from the kitchen. Charles indicated the sitting room.
“She has had a shock. You must on no account leave her. I go to fetch Doctor Grogan.” Mary herself looked for a moment as if she might faint. She put her hand on the banister rail and stared at Charles with stricken eyes. “You understand. On no account leave her.” She nodded and bobbed, but did not move. “She has merely fainted. Loosen her dress.”
With one more terrified look at him, the maid went into the room. Charles waited a few seconds more. He heard a faint moan, then Mary’s voice.
“Oh miss, miss, ‘tis Mary. The doctor’s comin’, miss. ‘Tis all right, miss, I woan’ leave ee.”
And Charles for a brief moment stepped back into the room. He saw Mary on her knees, cradling Ernestina up. The mistress’s face was turned against the maid’s breast. Mary looked up at Charles: those vivid eyes seemed to forbid him to watch or remain. He accepted their candid judgment.