The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [101]
‘Edward’s dying – because of you. He’s dying. He’s worth more than either of us…’
The girl looked past her at the panels of the half-closed door.
‘My poor father,’ she said, ‘my poor father.’
‘You must stay here,’ Leonora answered fiercely. ‘You must stay here. I tell you you must stay here.’
‘I am going to Glasgow,’ Nancy answered. ‘I shall go to Glasgow tomorrow morning. My mother is in Glasgow.’
It appears that it was in Glasgow that Mrs Rufford pursued her disorderly life. She had selected that city, not because it was more profitable but because it was the natal home of her husband to whom she desired to cause as much pain as possible.
‘You must stay here,’ Leonora began, ‘to save Edward. He’s dying for love of you.’
The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora.
‘I know it,’ she said. ‘And I am dying for love of him.’
Leonora uttered an ‘Ah,’ that, in spite of herself, was an ‘Ah’ of horror and of grief.
‘That is why,’ the girl continued, ‘I am going to Glasgow – to take my mother away from there.’ She added, ‘To the ends of the earth,’ for, if the last months had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases were still romantically those of a schoolgirl. It was as if she had grown up so quickly that there had not been time to put her hair up. But she added: ‘We’re no good – my mother and I.’
Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:
‘No. No. You’re not no good. It’s I that am no good. You can’t let that man go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him.’
The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, far-away smile – as if she were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.
‘I knew you would come to that,’ she said, very slowly. ‘But we are not worth it – Edward and I.’
III
Nancy had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made that comment over the giving of the horse to young Selmes. She had been thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for many days silent beside her aunt’s bed. (She had always thought of Leonora as her aunt.) And she had had to sit thinking during many silent meals with Edward. And then, at times, with his bloodshot eyes and creased, heavy mouth, he would smile at her. And gradually the knowledge had come to her that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Several things contributed to form and to harden this conviction.
She was allowed to read the papers in those days – or, rather, since Leonora was always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out early, over the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day, in the papers, she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well. Beneath it she read the words: ‘The Hon. Mrs Brand, plaintiff in the remarkable divorce case reported on p. 8.’ Nancy hardly knew what a divorce case was. She had been so remarkably well brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practise divorce. I don’t know how Leonora had done it exactly. I suppose she had always impressed it on Nancy’s mind that nice women did not read these things, and that would have been enough to make Nancy skip those pages.
She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce case – principally because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She imagined that Leonora, when her headache left her, would like to know what was happening to Mrs Brand, who lived at Christchurch151 and whom they both liked very well. The case occupied three days, and the report that Nancy first came upon was that of the third day. Edward, however, kept the papers of the week, after his methodical fashion, in a rack in his gunroom, and when she had finished her breakfast Nancy went to that quiet apartment and had what she would have called a good read. It seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not understand why one counsel should be so anxious to know all about the movements of Mr Brand upon a certain day; she could not understand why a chart of the bedroom accommodation at Christchurch Old Hall should be produced in court. She did not