A Little Treachery

6

So they were to believe that all these crying evils had escaped Hungerford’s observation. For there had been not one word of warning.

But perhaps he had compounded with his conscience by using certain verbal devices, which they recalled and pondered later, too late for remedy, phrases like ‘for the price’ or ‘not to everyone’s taste, of course’, lightly spoken: hints which he must have noticed were not taken, which did not come anywhere near to conveying the truth to them. Quite unconscious, was he, of having given ignorant people the impression that they were getting very good value for their money?

This betrayal, so unexpected, so pointless, had cast over them a sort of bewildered doubt of themselves, as if their sanity had been questioned. They became quite sick with shock, and both felt physically ill.

What had the man meant by it? they asked each other again and again in pure astonishment. It could never have been due to incompetence, in a man so experienced. What motive had he? Why had he done it? A few words of warning would have been enough to avert from them this miserable disaster – and what would they have cost him? Had he been bribed? they asked each other wildly. Or, still more wildly, had he been fascinated by the pretty young wife of the couple from whom they had bought the house? It was recalled by them both as something which they had thought at the time a little odd and out of place, unseemly in the midst of business – of their own business, so momentous! – that he had twice broken off to speak of this young person with smiling admiration.

What must have been the young Ransoms’ astonishment and delight at getting rid of their little OLD-MAN-OF-THF-SEA at such a price and so easily?

A plot? But was it credible?

Indeed, such fancies were too absurd – Catherine, at least, thought so.

These reflections had already been made when Catherine stood facing her sister among the shoulder-high weeds, and was shocked, struck to the heart and enraged by Clem’s crushed silence. This it was which caused her to cry out passionately that they would have their garden, their lawns and borders, come weal, come woe; that one thing at least should be made to come right in that dreadful place.

From that time she pressed on, like one possessed, with her plans for the garden. Recklessly, with a foolish, desperate stubbornness, she proceeded to throw away her own trifle of capital on an attempt to produce the garden of their hopes out of that malignant wilderness. In that nightmare interval of six or seven months of loaded quietness which remained to them, the ground was cleared over a certain area, land-drains were put in and the surface roughly prepared for levelling and sowing with grass seed in the spring. The order had been given and she drove forward with it, while averting her eyes, stifling her apprehension before the spectacle of Clem’s strange, weak, eager acquiescence in this grandiose, totally impracticable plan, which was of a type to spring from Catherine’s brain only, as Catherine herself now uneasily recognized.

For they were so different.

Yet they had gone every step of the way together, and they shared a bad history.

Not many young people are called upon to bear intense, prolonged mental suffering. But they had been. Their father had died while they were children and all their affections had been fixed on their mother; but when they were still very young women, her mind had given way. A tragedy of fifteen years had followed, and if a literal torturing had been done before their eyes it would have been a moral scene compared with what those years forced them to witness: the spectacle of a feeling creature kept alive in terror, despair and hopeless degradation which everyone knew only death could end. They watched. Official persons, curious or indifferent, glanced in on the scene from time to time, preserving their precious ‘sense of proportion’ without much difficulty. Interesting! How much longer? Perhaps they betted on it. Oh, hearts of stone!

Looking back, Catherine marvelled as she saw that it was really only gradually that her whole soul had been lost in a tempest of rage and revolt.

But here she could speak only for herself. She had never known what Clem was thinking (a strange thing, but it was so), for their spirits had drawn far apart, even while they clung to each other; creatures too deeply wounded even to communicate with each other any longer, except at the surface, in a most oddly superficial way. And Clem’s surface had remained cheerful; a fact which, even at the time, had on occasion made Catherine pause in vague perplexity. Experience of trifling kinds, family record, had taught her that Clem was a type abnormally sensitive to pain and with little power to hide it. So in this case, when she might more reasonably have been in despair than in good spirits, considering her situation, could one suspect Clem of despairing interiorly and hiding it from other people? Only on one condition: that she had also succeeded in hiding it from herself. But thankful for this sunny air soothingly enfolding her, Catherine had never pondered much upon the enigma, never dreamed it was a grim one, though she felt its existence and had vaguely put it down to Clem’s having taken refuge in the rosy and endangering dream of reparation in heaven which religion admits. As for herself, she had continued to stare the facts in the face with obsessed fixity.

These were the thoughts and conditions of her girlhood, for the trial had dragged out all through their youth. It had slimed and poisoned all the years of hope. It was swollen, too, by a mass of subsidiary trouble, by money difficulties, by legal interference in their affairs, compulsion and duress. Those years when stirring things should have happened to them, things which would have established them in adult life, were spent in a waiting-room. A waiting-room where they sat with a thumping heart, with a distracted mind, with appetites grown morbidly faint, with young, keen faculties languishing, waiting interminably and waiting without hope. Waiting not really for a loved one’s death – no, hardly for that – but waiting for an end to it all, merely for an end! An end to all the sickening suffering. Waiting for the cries of torture to cease. But such cries never cease, go on ringing in your ears to your life’s end.

Perhaps Clem’s blood had even then passed into its state of diseased tension.

It was over at last, but all their youth was gone and they were locked together in a partnership which neither of them would ever be able to dissolve, because neither of them could ever bear to break this living ligament of nerves and heart formed by a shared, isolating anguish.

At the end of it all, they were women whose chance to construct and direct their lives was long past; they were both, though not yet forty, old in feeling, worn with passion, with the passions of grief and indignation, and the faulty beat of the heart, set up in that time, had become permanent. Yet the secret hope pulsed for a little while. To begin to live! Neither of them admitted the swift loss of this delusion – or its entertainment, even. But it did not take them long to divine that their highest bliss was to be freedom from pain.

For in some mysterious manner the new life, just as the old, seemed always to be tainted with anxiety. There hung over their heads – they felt its pressing weight – a dark cloud which had no cause, but was simply there for good. A most sinister cloud it was, for it had no reality, they could see that plainly; it was not to be accounted for by reason. They had not inherited madness, but they had been infected by it, by long, close proximity.

Everything had depended on what counter-forces each could bring against the infection, upon how the future treated them – whether well or ill, mercifully or unmercifully. They were indeed vulnerable; as vulnerable a pair of creatures as a thoughtless man in a hurry could have fallen in with, for his sins.