The French Lieutenant's Woman (53 page)

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 ..."