Chapter XX

Jim found Mrs. Bligh in her boudoir. She had just come in from the garden with a great bunch of Christmas roses in her arms.

A faint flush of colour shone in her cheeks from the whipping wind. She was dressed in white serge, and she had an ermine collar across her shoulders, and a tiny little ermine cap set deep on her fair hair.

Jim watched her hands move deftly over the Christmas roses on their tray. It seemed to him as if her delicate white fingers were made of the same frail, impalpable substance.

The two little girls hovered round her like butterflies, carrying two small blue vases which, they urged, they must fill for the nursery.

Mrs. Bligh stood there with her hands on the flowers and her head flung back; her eyes were full of tenderness and laughter. She was teasing them with the consenting, playful, teasing of happy love; then she looked up suddenly and saw Jim.

She stiffened instantly and stood quite still; Jim saw the laughter and the tenderness pass out of her face until she looked as if she were made of frost. Her eyes met his with a deadly calmness of recognition; then returned watchfully, to her children. She made a cruel little gesture as if she stood between them and danger.

They stopped their dancing and became as still as she; they, too, felt the sudden icy wind which had frozen the kindness out of her.

‘Go into the nursery,’ she said, in a toneless, gentle voice. ‘I will bring you some of the flowers soon.’

They obeyed without a protest. As they passed Jim they turned away their smooth fair heads punishingly, to accentuate his disgrace.

Mrs. Bligh began to arrange the flowers methodically in a wide, crystal bowl. Sometimes they fell forward loosely over her fingers, and she replaced them with a firm, quick touch without impatience.

‘I do not know why you have come here,’ she said. ‘It would have been better for you not to come. I have nothing at all to say to you.’

Jim fixed his eyes on her with a dumb insistence of longing. Surely she would lift hers to his with her tender intuition and restore his heart? She could not shut him out of the world of laughing tenderness she had for her children and all weak things. Even if he had sinned as Wivvle had sinned, would there not be for him still her pity and the mercy of her unstinted maternity; or was her motherhood only for her own—the narrow, sterile passion of an unpassionate heart?

It seemed as if it was. She would not look at Jim, nor draw from his dumb, expressive face any of the answers his heart held for her. She would never willingly hear anything that he had to say to her again.

Jim had given up the question of his guilt the moment he first met her eyes. He saw that she had judged him without hesitation or reprieve; but it was harder to give up his confidence in her mercy. Because to give up that was to believe her to be less than he had thought her, and it was far easier for Jim to accept condemnation than to give it. The incredulity in his eyes settled into protest.

‘Look here,’ he said roughly, ‘what kind of a game is it to play to call yourself a Christian and have no forgiveness?’

Her hands moved on unfalteringly among the loose, frail buds.

‘I forgive you as a sinner,’ she said coldly, ‘but I do not forgive your sin; nor do I wish to speak to you again. You have made it impossible. There are sins which cause gulfs between human beings; gulfs which are impassible—and yours is one of them.’

‘You oughtn’t to say that,’ Jim urged desperately. ‘If forgiveness means anything, it means wiping out any sin. I thought mothers were as merciful as God.’

‘I do not know what you have done to expect mercy,’ Mrs. Bligh observed, with an added edge to her voice.

She thought that the reference to her maternity was impertinent.

‘There is a plain way of repentance marked out for you—but you have not attempted to take it—and no religion bestows forgiveness without the fruits of repentance.’

‘Do you mean Emily ought to be married?’ Jim asked. ‘But she doesn’t want to marry me, nor I her. Wouldn’t it be as bad to marry—feeling like that—as anything that has happened?’

‘I don’t wish to discuss this subject with you,’ said Mrs. Bligh, lifting her cool, untroubled eyes to his face. ‘I believe my husband is waiting to see you in his study.’

‘But you’re my friend,’ Jim pleaded. ‘Surely you aren’t going to let me go out anyhow, believing this of me?’

‘I am not your friend,’ she answered steadily. ‘I was most willing to be of use to you as a human being, and as my husband’s charge. I saw that you needed help and assistance, and I tried to show you where you might find them. I had no personal feeling in the matter, and I have none now.’

Jim stared at her. Was she speaking the truth? Hadn’t she cared for all his homage and his eagerness—hadn’t she let him be her child’s companion, and her own?

Were all the summer hours they had spent together building up his new world of words and ideas, and all the silent hours of their prayers, nothing to her at all?

She had seen his worship in his eyes, and she had accepted it. She had not recognised any class distinction as a separation between them while he pleased her, but she was making him feel it now that he displeased her. She was making him feel everything that it was in her power to make him feel, because what he had wounded in her was her sense of power. She had believed she could do what she liked with Jim, and her supremacy had been threatened by a housemaid.

He had offended Mrs. Bligh’s pride and her taste at one blow. She might have forgiven him these two things if she had felt that he was wholly subservient to her. The depth of her interest in him before marked the depth of her distaste for him now; all his defects became insults. Jim did not know what had happened, but he had a sense that she was not speaking the truth. Her feelings were a closed door to him, and he struck against it with his bared heart, insistently and in vain.

‘Can’t you understand,’ he pleaded, ‘that a man may fail, and yet need help? That it’s not till he really stumbles that he does need it? You’re a married woman—you ought to know what men and women are like?

‘And if you can’t forgive me, you might have forgiven Emily. Oh, not what you call forgive—but you might have let her feel you cared, and were the same as she is. She’s harder hit than a man, and she’s got the world against her—but you needn’t have been against her. You might have made her feel there was something stronger than the world!’

Mrs. Bligh set her lips into a thin, hard line. She had no need of any further witness; this boy before her had spoken blasphemy. He had said she was the same as Emily.

‘I have just told you that I will not discuss this matter with you,’ she said. ‘You have presumed too far, first on my kindness, and now on my patience. As to what you say about the poor girl you have wronged, it is absurd, and you are the last person to say it. Whatever she has to suffer, you—and you alone—have inflicted it. I must ask you for the second time to leave me.’

‘Oh, I’ll go now,’ said Jim recklessly. ‘Nothing can matter any more now. I believed in what you taught me because I thought it made people better; I see now that it makes them worse.

‘It keeps them out of facing things. Why, my old skipper, without a clean word in his head, would have seen straighter into this thing than you!’

His words came back into his own heart, but they held no meaning for Mrs. Bligh.

As he had not gone at her bidding, she withdrew her attention from him as completely as if he were no longer there.

She was as remote and as fixed as the imperishable snows; and at last Jim dragged his reluctant heart away from her as if it were a beleagured traveller, dying of the cold.

Mrs. Bligh did not raise her eyes when he had gone, but she felt a vague sense of relief. Something had troubled her. She had been judged, and she was not used to being judged.

She told herself that this experiment, like all her husband’s experiments, had failed; and she gave a little, brave, self-pitying sigh, as she thought how often she had had to bear the disagreeable results of her husband’s failures.