Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (53 page)

‘And you didn’t tell him, did you?’

‘Why — no, of course not. Why should I have, anyhow?’ said Julia, lying with the most cheerful glibness.

It may have been that there was something in her manner that belied her words, or perhaps it was simply that Edith’s temper was more than usually uncontrollable; be that as it may, she burst into a passion of tears.

‘Oh, Julia,’ she said, ‘you are a liar — you know you are, you told him — you wanted to turn him against me and get him for yourself. Oh, dear, I am very miserable.’

Julia flushed at first with anger, but repressing herself, held her tongue, and waited for the storm to pass over.

After a minute or so of this passionate sobbing Edith stopped suddenly and asked, —

‘No, but, Ju, dear, did you tell him or not — really?’

And Julia answered, —

‘Yes, I did — I had to.’

‘And what did he say?’ very eagerly.

‘Well, of course he cut up a little rough over it. You see it stung him up, because he did love you awfully, and it
did
look as if you had only cared for his money.’

‘It’s a shame of him, then,’ Edith said fiercely. ‘And I hate him for it. Why did he ever love me at all if he didn’t know me better than to think I cared for money? I s’pose he only cared for my face, and he’s got tired of that, or forgotten it. That’s what is. He’s found someone else to trifle with, and so he wants some excuse for throwing me over after I’ve tied myself to this old devil. It was all for Clem, and now he’s thrown me away, and will forget me. I
hate
him.’

‘Oh, well, then the hatred is pretty mutual between them, in words at least,’ thought Julia, keeping her thoughts, however, strictly to herself. ‘But I wonder what Mr Kasker-Ryves has been doing? It strikes me the saint’s become a devil with remarkable suddenness, anyhow. I s’pose that accounts for her cynicism. He must have found out why she married him, and been slanging her about it, poor girl.’

But the only thing she was able to get out of Edith was that Mr Kasker-Ryves was a frightful villain, and Edith almost shuddered at the mere mention of him.

What had occurred was simply this:

On the eventful day which changed the colour of the world for Edith, Mr Ryves, having duly and without mishap reached the station, was delayed some four hours awaiting the train which was bearing his son to him.

Delays of any kind were dangerous to Mr Kasker-Ryves, inasmuch as they forced his thoughts inwards, and he detested his thoughts.

Whilst his mind could occupy itself he was brilliant and unclouded, but no sooner was he left alone with the Past than his mind, by sheer revulsion, flew to the Future — the Future embodied by the word ‘Shadowland’ — and Mr Ryves’s shadows seemed begotten by substances vaguely loathsome and loathsomely vague. Moreover, his mind was occupied by the tie which he had discovered in the mind of his wife, and the mere suspecting of such a possibility caused a feeling of dislike to arise in his own mind, and with Mr Kasker-Ryves it was but one step from vague dislike to diabolical hatred and a wish for revenge.

From the very beginning it had always seemed to him improbable that Edith could love him, or rather it would have seemed so had he chosen to view the matter from a standard of probabilities; but he had chosen to shut his eyes, and discarding all the knowledge of human nature that he had gained during his long pilgrimage, he had elected to make believe that he believed she loved him — and now that, like a child, he was tired of making believe, he chose to say that she had made a fool of him, and since this damaged his vanity — his ruling passion — during the four hours of his waiting his hatred and wish for revenge grew almost to the size of a monomania.

True, four hours is not a long space of time for such a revolution to come about in a man’s mind, but then it had been pending for some time; moreover, when one comes to think of how infinitesimal an amount of time one generally devotes out of a day to psychological analysis, one will realise that four hours on stretch is almost sufficient not only for a revolution but for a reaction — and even a counter-reaction superadded.

The fact is Mr Kasker-Ryves was nothing but an utterly selfish, cold-hearted ruffian. Having spent the former part of his life in a state of reckless libertinism, he engaged himself latterly in justifying those excesses on philosophic grounds, which had one advantage that it kept his mind employed, or kept him out of mischief, so to speak. Moreover, he superadded to all this a power of subtle character reading and a faculty for intrigues that was well-nigh inconceivable in such a man.

And so he paced up and down the platform or in the waiting-room of the station so engrossed in his thoughts that he noticed nothing that went on outside him. He was planning out a delicate scheme of revenge on his wife for his having made a fool of himself, which is what it came to in the end. And the revenge was to be no mean one, so much he hated her, but it would only end in the grave — so he said to himself. At last a light began to dawn on him.

‘H’m,’ he said, ‘the first thing I must do is to make her hate me — not only that, but loathe me. That is a good idea — a very good one, because it will show her what a trap she let herself fall into when she married me. It always emphasises a torture if the executioner is hated by the victim, and it won’t be at all a difficult thing to do — not at all.’

And Mr Kasker-Ryves smiled, not his usual jovial company smile, but the quiet, happy smile of a man who is revelling in the thought of pleasure to come.

At that moment the train flew, shrieking, out of the fog into the glow of the station lamps, and in there burst into the solitariness a flood of passengers descending, and of railway porters rushing to meet them — a vision of touching of caps and hurrying feet, culminating and disappearing, as far as Mr Kasker-Ryves was concerned, at the sight of his son, muffled up to the eyes, swearing audibly and stamping his feet on the platform. With brightened eyes and hands outstretched he made towards his son.

‘How are you, Jemmy?’ he said, and Jemmy answered, —

‘Hullo, dad! you here? You don’t mean to say you’ve been waiting ever since one? You’ll be killing yourself if you don’t mind.’ Mr Kasker-Ryves laughed.

‘Oh, I don’t mind the cold,’ he said; ‘come on and have some lunch. Jackson’ll look after the luggage. What have you got? — Jackson, those two portmanteaus and the gun-cases, that’s all, and get the horses put in in about twenty minutes. Now, Jemmy, come along — why were you so late?’

‘Why, the cursed train ran off the line — in this beastly cold weather, too. I tried to do some writing, but my hands got so frozen I couldn’t. The only thing I could do was to stick my hands between the rug and my knees and swear — you should just have heard me. By-the-bye, how is Mrs Kasker-Ryves? I saw in the papers you’d got married,’ cos like an undutiful dad you never let me know anything about it.’

‘How could I?’ Mr Kasker-Ryves replied.

‘I didn’t know where on earth you’d hidden yourself.’

‘Well, that is to a certain extent a reason. I’ve been in Bavaria. Got regularly snowed up in a small village where I was stopping, and all that sort of thing you know.’

‘Lucky dog,’ said Mr Kasker-Ryves. ‘I’ve had a comparatively dull time of it. Mrs Ryves has got the influenza, and there’s only that Miss Tubbs in the house, though she’s gone to town on business to-day.’

The preternatural calmness with which the young man received the announcement certified Mr Ryves that his son had not by any means recovered from his hopeless attachment, and he changed to the subject of society scandal. For Mr Kasker-Ryves wished to give his entire thoughts to the more important theme of wife torture, and one can (at least Mr Kasker-Ryves could) blacken a very large number of characters in agreeable small talk whilst one’s mind is occupied with the more weighty matters of this life.

After mature consideration (whilst he and his son were discussing lunch) he arrived at the conclusion that it would be the safest in the end to make Edith hate him at once, for the torture would then be the more insupportable to her by reason of her knowledge of its inevitability. Arrived at this stage of his determination, it remained for him to resolve on a means of bringing about this desirable consummation to his hopes. But before he had made up his mind, Jackson appeared to say that the horses were put to. Now, by some accident, Mr Kasker-Ryves was never able to think whilst driving, and he therefore gave up his fascinating train of thoughts, and for the space of time needed in the journey home gave himself solely to the conversation.

‘I’ll just run up to my room and make myself presentable to my step-mamma,’ Jemmy said, and his father assented.

‘Come into the first library when you’ve finished. I shall be there. — By-the-bye, Parker,’ he said, turning to the servant who was taking off his coat, ‘where is Mrs Ryves?’

‘She’s in the second library, sir, I believe. She was asleep there in a lounge in front of the fire about an hour ago when I went in to put some coals on.’

‘Are the lights lit?’

‘Not in the second library, sir. I was afraid of waking Mrs Ryves, and so I only lit up the first library.’

Mr Ryves replied, —

‘Thanks, that’ll do,’ and went into the library.

Edith was still asleep, but he forbore to wake her.

‘She’ll wake up soon enough for my purposes — and just at present she may stop asleep,’ and he seated himself in front of the fire to await his son. During the interval, by dint of carefully considering the subject, he evolved from his labyrinthine brain a delicate scheme for the mental torture of his wife.

‘Of course she’s only a bit of a child yet, and has hardly sufficient mind to make a deep impression on, and that makes the matter the more difficult. I’ve always had a theory that the most unhappy age is the transition period that lies between boy and manhood, or girl and womanhood, as the case may be, and that the more rapidly the transition is made the rougher it is. So that, if I tear the veil from her eyes very suddenly, and show her the world as it really is, the operation will give her excessive pain. I’ll make the experiment in any case, and it seems to me that the most expeditious way of effecting it would be to show her what an out and out devil I am, that is to say, from her nursery morality point of view — I
will
try it anyhow. It is certain to make her hate me, whether the result conforms to the transition theory or not, and that is half the battle. Oh! and by Jove! there never was such an opportunity as the present. She’s asleep in the next room, but she sleeps very lightly, and is perfectly certain to wake up when we begin to talk — and I
know
very well no woman could resist the temptation of listening to our conversation. — Oh, here you are Jemmy. Shut the door after you. No — not the one into the second library. I like that left open; it equalises the temperature of the two rooms. I suppose you can wait for tea a little? Mrs Ryves is asleep at this moment, and I don’t want to wake her. She has only just recovered from the influenza.’

‘It’s rather too soon to ask you how you get on together, isn’t it?’ his son asked.

‘It is rather, you know, dear boy, especially as she’s been in bed half the time; but she has been everything I could wish hitherto.’

‘I met Lord Tatton yesterday at the club. He said he’d been down here a fortnight or so, and had seen a good deal of you, and that you and she were billing and cooing like a couple of turtle-doves.’

Mr Ryves laughed.

‘
À propos
of that,’ he said, ‘what was the name of her lover?’

His son looked at him curiously.

‘What do you want to know for — cut his throat? And which of’ em do you mean anyhow?’

‘Why, how many are there?’ Mr Ryves asked.

‘There was the fellow she was engaged to before she married you. She jilted him because his firm failed. The other’s Lord Tatton — he’s an after-marriage adherent.’

Mr Ryves raised his eyebrows.

‘What, have they begun on her already?’ he said. ‘Poor little Edith!’