Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (163 page)

She said that she had not thought yet, and he answered, “Ah, no.”

She had been thinking about it all that day; it had flashed into her mind between all the misery over her father. She had had paroxysms of doubt; now she was very calm because she was certain he would take her away with him. Over her father’s body he had pledged himself not to desert her; and he loved her. He had said it before all this wretchedness had come.

She lay still. She was wearing her old blue dress, and the lamp on its pedestal blazed brilliantly down on her bright hair and her pure features. He was sitting on the window seat with his eyes upon the ground, and it was she who looked at him as one still evening he had held her motionless. An echo of those old agonies, of those old beneficent and torturing doubts, floated into her calm. He loved her.

He had not told her of his ruin because he loved her so much the words remained vivid in her memory through all these days of misery. It seemed years, a different world, since they had stood together. He had caught at her hand, and she seemed still to feel the pain of snatching it away, and still to feel the solace, the intense appeasement of the tears she had shed afterwards because he had said he loved her. He had not spoken for fear of shocking her, or because of her father. But her father was gone now, and she thought it would be easy. If he did not speak in the next day, she would tell him there was no room for misunderstandings now. She would give him two days.

He said suddenly:

“I shall be in France to-morrow.”

The new owner would be already in his house in the morning.

She trembled a little; they would have to speak to-night, then.

It occurred to him swiftly that he might say: “You must come with me,” but he did not, because it would have been too brusque. He wanted to find some finer way, something delicate.

He began talking slowly about life, about his own expectations, about how he was going to live in Italy. He was looking for an opening. He talked about happiness. He wanted her to be happy — to look at things in their entirety; not to expect too much of life, but assuredly not to expect too little. Once he said:

“I want you to be happy, because I am very fond of you.”

Her heart began to beat rapidly. It was coming now. No, no; it was too soon. He must not speak yet, she was not ready; it would spoil everything.

But he said: “About what we talked of last night. It is no good thinking over what is past. It would be wrong. We have ourselves to think of; that, too, is a duty. You remember there was a Roman who killed himself not so much for fear of his future as because he dreaded the recollection of his past.”

The image of poor Brede came to him: strong, vigorous in his tirades, crying out for sympathy, and indefatigable. That was how he would live in their hearts for as long as they lived. He was still alive; he was still there. George could hardly remember him as he was actually then.

Clara said: “No; you told me never to think of that. I will not.”

The simplicity of her utterance seemed to give the measure of his influence over her, of his love, and of her respect.

In the reaction from the thought of her father he wanted to say: “I love you; come with me.” But at that moment the words seemed shocking, as if they must wound her ears. The memory of her father would not leave him, and he repeated:

“Yes, I want you to be happy.”

But she must not expect that even “below the horizon” she would find pure rest.

She kept her eyes fixed on him; there was a great light in them, and her lips were parted. She was suddenly more than beautiful, and to him it was like a bliss of unconsciousness merely to sit looking at her. She said:

“Oh, I shall not expect too much, even there,” and he could not remember what they had been talking of, because he was so absorbed in looking at her.

He looked at the clock; it was very late, That did not matter now; nothing mattered any more. She lay back without stirring, and they were all alone. There was not in the whole village, in the whole black countryside, another watcher, another sigh, or another smile. They might wait like that until they started in the morning.

Suddenly he said: “I should like to take you to Rimini. There is a portico there that’s very lovely.” He got up abruptly, and she shrank a little and closed her eyes, “What I mean is, that it’s in looking at such things that we can forget ourselves. Some things are so beautiful that one can look at them for a long time, absorbed, unconscious, And, don’t you see, it’s then that one is happy, When you forget to think about your health, you are well; and, just in the same way, the moment you think, Now I am happy, you lose the finer spirit, you begin to question,”

She said: “Yes, yes,” eagerly, and she thought: “Now he has spoken. How tenderly he has done it.”

“Over there,” he was saying, “there are so many things. There’s something for you, and something for me when we differ, and at every turn there’s something for both of us together. It’s that. It’s that forgetfulness, it’s that getting outside ourselves into communion with a spirit that absorbs us — it’s that that is getting below the horizon.”

“Yes,” she said, “except at the supreme moments.”

He paced swiftly up and down, coming so close to her that her heart shrank painfully, and then receding. He said, hurriedly: “It’s only action that is a difficulty.”

He stepped towards her recumbent figure. It was as if already he held her in his arms; as if she had said, “Ah!” as if her head had fallen back. Suddenly it slipped into his mind, like an odd thought that he regarded contemptuously, “This is seduction.”

She wondered for one swift moment what it felt like to be dishonoured. Was it like a pain?

She had looked coldly at other women. He was coming: she shut her eyes.

Swift thoughts ran into her proud mind. What was ignominy? What did she care for contempt? She was going with him, and she felt proud and calm — Social codes, framed by men for the purposes of men, were nothing to her. She felt in herself no dishonour, but the glory of sacrificing herself to him —

But he was coming, and she shivered. Outside the darkness of her closed lids something paralysing, something terrible and blissful was coming towards her.

A profound thankfulness, like the spirit of a prayer, shed itself over her, and her arms lay as if powerless along the chair.

Suddenly she heard him say: “But it’s too—”

The black and tremendous figure of her father had risen before George’s eyes once more. The man was dead, the man was more than dead; but his memory remained. This thing would never vex his troubled spirit. But his memory was in their hands, and George seemed to hear men’s voices say, “Oh, Brede. He’s in a lunatic asylum, and his daughter ran away with a married man.” That contempt would fall on the memory of this man that they had both loved, and both impelled to his ruin. It would be a final and despicable stab at the fair fame of his friend’s house; it would be a final and despicable treachery.

He said: “No, I must go. It would be a calamity for us all.”

The spirit of self-sacrifice that was his seemed to envelope her too, now that she was his. She, too, must sacrifice herself to that tremendous ghost. The weariness that had so often come over him in face of Mr. Brede’s long troubles fell upon him once more, and seemed to make the invisible presence of her father the more actual and the more paralysing.

She gave a sudden and pitiful laugh of incredulity, a sharp, dry sound that expressed an utter disbelief. She could not believe that her attraction would not hold him.

He brought out: “I couldn’t make love to his daughter after ruining him.”

The horror of that long drive in the dark became appalling in his memory. He had been calm then, like a person stupefied. Now he saw it as something black and evil, a retribution for the ignoble course of events that had swept every obstacle away. It had given him her love, it had forced upon him the money that should make possible their life together, it had swept aside her father. But that memory and that past had risen up, a thing more dreadful than any disaster in the future.

She had been lying still, silent, as if she were very calm, but suddenly she was standing up before him, very pale, tall and rigid.

“You think it would be a calamity?” she asked slowly.

He did not speak.

“You told me — you told me — you forbade me to think about him.”

She, had thought, lying there, that with a word she could change him again. She had happiness in her hands; nothing could take it from her. But now she could not find any words. A cold anger, a cruel pride was rising uncontrollable in her.

“You told me it did not matter. You told me to forget him. I was ready, God help you.”
 
A violent passion against the universe overwhelmed her. If he were right, the right was a bitter wrong to her, and it was fated that all the world might think for others, and never one man for her. And she had tasted happiness.

She could not trust herself to speak to this man who had thrown her away.

She stood before him, pale and tall, a monastic figure in her coarse blue dress. Her fair and waving hair was brilliant in the light of the lamp; her features were rigid and pitiful, because the smile of the happiness she had tasted had not yet vanished from them. Her eyes were very wide open, as if she were walking in her sleep, and mechanically she brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.

“Self-sacrifice,” she said, slowly, “Doesn’t that ever end?”

Her hands dropped passionately apart. He was looking at the ground. Her dress rustled inaudibly, and when he glanced up again, she was no longer there.

THE END

First published in 1906, this is the first part of a trilogy of connected historical novels, followed by
Privy Seal
(1907) and
The Fifth Queen Crowned
(1908).
 
These three works present a greatly fictionalised account of Katharine Howard’s arrival at the Court of Henry VIII, her eventual marriage to the king and her subsequent death.

The trilogy features an omniscient narrator, who describes Katharine Howard in the first novel as a devout, though impoverished Roman Catholic, who is escorted by her fiery cousin Thomas Culpeper. Unintentionally, she comes to the attention of the king and is helped to a position as a lady in waiting for the Henry’s eldest daughter, by her old Latin tutor Nicholas Udal. In fact, Udal is a spy for Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal.

The trilogy is celebrated for its realistic depiction of life in a Tudor court and has been particularly admired by writers such as Graham Greene, Alan Judd and William Gass, who have remarked on its impressionistic qualities and effective use of atmosphere.

Catherine Howard (c. 1518–1542)