The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [44]
Mrs Maidan, however, was not a Powys married to an Ashburnham; she was a poor little O’Flaherty whose husband was a boy of country parsonage origin. So there was no mistaking the sob she let go as she went desolately away along the corridor. But Leonora was still going to play up. She opened the door of Ashburnham’s room quite ostentatiously, so that Florence should hear her address Edward in terms of intimacy and liking. ‘Edward,’ she called. But there was no Edward there.
You understand that there was no Edward there. It was then, for the only time of her career, that Leonora really compromised herself – She exclaimed…‘How frightful!… Poor little Maisie!…’
She caught herself up at that, but of course it was too late. It was a queer sort of affair…
I want to do Leonora every justice. I love her very dearly for one thing and in this matter, which was certainly the ruin of my small household cockle-shell, she certainly tripped up. I do not believe – and Leonora herself does not believe – that poor little Maisie Maidan was ever Edward’s mistress. Her heart was really so bad that she would have succumbed to anything like an impassioned embrace. That is the plain English of it, and I suppose plain English is best. She was really what the other two, for reasons of their own, just pretended to be. Queer, isn’t it? Like one of those sinister jokes that Providence plays upon one. Add to this that I do not suppose that Leonora would much have minded, at any other moment, if Mrs Maidan had been her husband’s mistress. It might have been a relief from Edward’s sentimental gurglings over the lady and from the lady’s submissive acceptance of those sounds. No, she would not have minded.
But, in boxing Mrs Maidan’s ears, Leonora was just striking the face of an intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a frightfully painful scene with Edward.
As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them when she chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward’s affairs were in such a frightful state and he lied so about them that she claimed the privilege of having his secrets at her disposal. There was not, indeed, any other way, for the poor fool was too ashamed of his lapses ever to make a clean breast of anything. She had to drag these things out of him.
It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that afternoon, Edward being on his bed for the hour and a half prescribed by the Kur authorities, she had opened a letter that she took to come from a Colonel Hervey. They were going to stay with him in Linlithgowshire78 for the month of September and she did not know whether the date fixed would be the eleventh or the eighteenth. The address on this letter was, in handwriting, as like Colonel Hervey’s as one blade of corn is like another. So she had at the moment no idea of spying on him.
But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward Ashburnham was paying a blackmailer of whom she had never heard something like three hundred pounds a year… It was a devil of a blow; it was like death; for she imagined that by that time she had really got to the bottom of her husband’s liabilities. You see, they were pretty heavy. What had really smashed them up had been a perfectly commonplace affair at Monte Carlo – an affair with a cosmopolitan harpy who passed for the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke. She exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl tiara from him as the price of her favours for a week or so. It would have pipped79 him a good deal to have found so much, and he was not in the ordinary way a gambler. He might, indeed, just have found the twenty thousand and the not slight charges of a week at an hotel with the fair creature. He must have been worth at that date five hundred thousand dollars and a little over.
Well, he must needs go to the tables and lose forty thousand pounds… Forty thousand solid pounds, borrowed from sharks! And even after that he must – it was an imperative passion – enjoy the favours of the lady. He got them, of course, when it was a matter of