Chapter XVIII

Warren Manor was not a house in which accidents often happened.

When the village children had measles all the little Blighs escaped it; they did not fall out of trees; nor get into moral and physical difficulties over summer fruit. Their sins were slight and infrequent, and as far as possible confined to the involuntary lapses of human nature.

The servants, too, lived a surface life of perfect smoothness and propriety. Their manners were quiet and their aprons whiter than snow.

Mrs. Bligh gave them good wages and excellent food, and knew all about their families. She was faultlessly kind and considerate to them; and none of them had ever laughed, cried, or sneezed in her presence.

She didn’t know anything about their lovers; no young men were allowed to visit them, and Mrs. Bligh never mentioned the subject—after this point had once been made plain—any more than she would have mentioned the tails of monkeys.

There was a certain amount of trouble in the household caused by Mr. Bligh’s ardent temperament; but Mrs. Bligh managed to keep most of it to herself, and as Mr. Bligh had a tender heart, and always told her everything, she succeeded in steering him through the results of his blunders without disaster.

She had married him for love, and called him in her youth the Don Quixote of her dreams; but she was very careful to remove all the windmills in his vicinity.

After ten years of happy married life Mr. Bligh’s ideals had become reduced to picturesque theories. Perhaps his temperament would have given his wife less trouble if she had allowed him a larger margin for his enthusiasms, but, on the whole, she was more afraid of his enthusiasms than of his temperament. Enthusiasms often reduced incomes; whereas temperaments, when kept in play, will not reduce anything.

The boys were a responsibility, but they had never been a bother. They were well-mannered and well-bred; and no being on earth can conceal more than a well-mannered, well-bred English public schoolboy.

Sometimes you find out what he doesn’t know, but you can not find out what he does. Nor did Mrs. Bligh wish to find out. She agreed with her husband that the boys should be put on their honour and left alone. She gave them all the moral influence she could spare from her family; as she was not an emotional woman, this did them practically no harm. But no policy of men nor of angels can keep human nature permanently secure, and when an accident at length produced itself at Warren Manor, it crashed through the polished surface of the house like an explosive shell.

The cook was the first witness of the accident; her manner betrayed extreme uneasiness over the morning’s orders, and she suggested making beef-olives out of the remains of the mutton. Finally, she confessed that she was ‘that upset’ she hardly knew where she was. Mrs. Bligh’s eyes recalled her quickly to her exact position on the pale blue carpet of the morning-room.

‘I think you had better tell me what is the matter?’ Mrs. Bligh suggested coldly; for she did not like things that mattered, early in the morning.

The cook took a hurried breath, and said she supposed it would all have to come out sooner or later, but it gave her a turn to think of it.

She was a kind-hearted woman, and she urged her mistress to remember that, of course, sometimes these things were to be looked upon as accidents. Mrs. Bligh asked her what things? The cook said girls and boys were that awkward when you came to think of it—and her mother had once said that, after all, it was the marring of some and the making of others. Emily had always seemed all right, and the cook had never noticed anything to speak of—till this morning—when, as she was frying the bacon and Emily came in with the tray, it had struck her all of a heap.

Mrs. Bligh asked what had struck her; but it was a rhetorical question; she knew by now what had struck the cook.

The cook turned the colour of boiled beetroot, and said perhaps the mistress had better see Emily for herself.

‘I asked her right out who it was,’ the cook explained getting more and more flustered under Mrs. Bligh’s cool and steady eyes. ‘And she did say that young Barton—’is name come to the tip of ’er tongue, as it were—though she never had a civil word for, or about him, before. I will say that for her——’

‘Thank you, cook,’ said Mrs. Bligh incisively. ‘You need not tell me anything more. Please send Emily to me.’

The cook hurried down the passage trembling and muttering. She told Emily, to comfort her, that if she were in her place, she would a sight rather meet an alligator than the mistress.

But this alternative did not present itself to Emily.

She went into the morning-room as a criminal goes to execution; and she received what she went for.

Emily was, for the first time in her life, disturbed and inattentive. Her face was distorted with tears, and her apron crumpled. She twisted her hands in and out of its folds as if it could relieve the situation, which she could not twist or wind herself out of.

Mrs. Bligh looked at her once and then looked away again. It was almost more terrible when she looked away. It was so final.

There are some people who rush to help sinners because they see they are in trouble; in their impulsive ardour they get into the trouble themselves, but sometimes they help the sinner out of it. Perhaps they are aware of a fellow-feeling. Mrs. Bligh was not one of this officious and clumsy fellowship. She never touched pitch; so that she ran no risk of getting defiled.

She sat there, a contented, married woman with three children, awful in her purity; no iceberg could have looked colder, or more remote from the experiences of the girl before her.

‘This is all _very, very_ distressing,’ Mrs. Bligh began after a pause.

It was very distressing for Emily, but not quite so distressing for Mrs. Bligh. Besides, her uppermost feeling was disgust, not distress; and Emily could feel that Mrs. Bligh’s real feeling was disgust.

She sobbed and threw her apron over her head.

‘Such a thing has never happened in my house before,’ Mrs. Bligh continued, with the unconscious egotism of personal immunity, ‘and it is, of course, a very great disgrace and sin on your part, Emily. Indeed, I simply can not understand how it could have occurred.’

Emily choked with sobs. She might have told Mrs. Bligh that things occur very easily when they are not understood, and she could have added that even Mr. Bligh had kissed her once behind the scullery door.

But she didn’t dare; and besides, in that case nothing further had happened. Mr. Bligh had only given her five shillings the next day and looked rather silly.

‘I can not help blaming you,’ said Mrs. Bligh, ‘most women of your age should have learned how to keep their self-respect and the respect of others.’

Emily sobbed harder; then she saw a loophole for justification and took it.

‘It’s very hard on me,’ she wailed, ‘having had any one like a young gentleman—that wasn’t one—in the house, and going to early services and all.’

It was a shrewd thrust; Emily, looking round the corner of her apron, saw that it had taken effect. Mrs. Bligh winced as if she had trodden on a slug.

‘If it is any comfort to you to know it,’ she observed after a moment’s pause, ‘you will not be the only one to suffer. Of course you will leave the house immediately, but so will the—the partner of your sin.’

It was a great comfort to Emily. Victorious spite is extremely pleasant, and the memory of it lasts after other memories have faded. As a momentary sensation it practically equals that joy in heaven over the one sinner that repenteth.

Emily had her moment’s victory; but it should be forgiven her, for she had a very bad time afterward.

‘Of course,’ Mrs. Bligh said, with frosty charity, ‘I shall not turn you adrift. Will your parents consent to receive you?’

Emily couldn’t, and perhaps wouldn’t, go home to her parents. She thought hurriedly for a moment, while she sobbed convulsively, and then declared that they would turn her out of doors on the spot. She had always been one to hold her head so high, and she had younger sisters.

The thought of going home drove her to the door of hysteria, but not through it. Mrs. Bligh’s manner restrained her. Nobody had ever had hysterics in her presence, and nobody ever would.

‘I think,’ Mrs. Bligh said decisively, ‘that, in that case, you had better go to the Sisters of St. Mary’s Penitentiary. I will arrange for cook to take you there this afternoon. You can remain there until the birth of your child, and for a month afterward. If you do well, they will try to find you a situation and take care of your child for you if——’ Mrs. Bligh paused for a moment—‘it should be so unfortunate as to live,’ she finished tranquilly.

Mrs. Bligh thought of her own two babies who had died, and it did not make her tender toward the other woman’s child.

‘I think that is all,’ she added, rising to close the interview.

She looked at Emily again now, and said with formidable gentleness,—

‘I shall pray for you, Emily.’

Emily waited for a moment; perhaps she was expecting something more. She knew that Mrs. Bligh was a very good woman, and she respected her, all the more for being despised by her, but she thought that perhaps when Mrs. Bligh had got over despising her she would help her.

However, it wasn’t any use Emily’s waiting. Mrs. Bligh thought that her prayers would be quite enough, and she never got over despising Emily.