The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Given Case/Chapter 7
VII
'I only speak of the given case,' Philip Mackern said; 'that's the only thing I have to do with, and on what I've expressed to you of the situation it has made for me I don't yield an inch.'
Mrs. Gorton, to whom, in her own house, he had thus, in defence, addressed himself, was in a flood of tears which rolled, however, in their current not a few hard grains of asperity. 'You're always speaking of it, and it acts on my nerves, and I don't know what you mean by it, and I don't care, and I think you're horrible. The case is like any other case that can be mended if people will behave decently.'
Philip Mackern moved slowly about the room; impatience and suspense were in every step he took, but he evidently had himself well in hand and he met his hostess with studied indulgence. She had made her appearance, in advance, to prepare him for her sister, who had agreed by letter to see him, but who, through a detention on the line, which she had wired from Bath to explain, had been made late for the appointment she was on her way back to town to keep. Margaret Hamer had gone home precipitately—to Devonshire—five days before, the day after her last interview with Mrs. Despard; on which had ensued, with the young man, whom she had left London without seeing, a correspondence resulting in her present return. She had forbidden him, in spite of his insistence, either to come down to her at her mother's or to be at Paddington to meet her, and had finally, arriving from these places, but just alighted in Manchester Square, where, while he awaited her, Mackern's restless measurement of the empty drawing-room had much in common with the agitation to which, in a similar place, his friend Barton Reeve had already been condemned. Mrs. Gorton, emerging from a deeper retreat, had at last, though not out of compassion, conferred on him her company; she left him from the first instant in no doubt of the spirit in which she approached him. Margaret was at last almost indecently there, Margaret was upstairs, Margaret was coming down; but he would render the whole family an inestimable service by quietly taking up his hat and departing without further parley. Philip Mackern, whose interest in this young lady was in no degree whatever an interest in other persons connected with her, only transferred his hat from the piano to the window-seat and put it kindly to Mrs. Gorton that such a departure would be, if the girl had come to take leave of him, a brutality, and if she had come to do anything else an imbecility. His inward attitude was that his interlocutress was an insufferable busybody: he took his stand, he considered, upon admirable facts; Margaret Hamer's age and his own—twenty-six and thirty-two—her independence, her intelligence, his career, his prospects, his general and his particular situation, his income, his extraordinary merit, and perhaps even his personal appearance. He left his sentiments, in his private estimate, out of account—he was almost too proud to mention them even to himself. Yet he found, after the first moment, that he had to mention them to Mrs. Gorton.
'I don't know what you mean,' he said, 'by my "always" speaking of anything whatever that's between your sister and me; for I must remind you that this is the third time, at most, that we've had any talk of the matter. If I did, however, touch, to you, last month, on what I hold that a woman is, in certain circumstances—circumstances that, mind you, would never have existed without her encouragement, her surrender—bound in honour to do, it was because you yourself, though I dare say you didn't know with what realities you were dealing, called my attention precisely to the fact of the "given case." It isn't always, it isn't often, given, perhaps—but when it is one knows it. And it's given now if it ever was in the world,' Mackern still, with his suppression of violence, but with an emphasis the more distinct for its peculiar amenity, asserted as he resumed his pacing.
Mrs. Gorton watched him a moment through such traces of tears as still resisted the extreme freedom of her pocket-handkerchief. 'Admit then as much as you like that you've been a pair of fools and criminals'—the poor woman went far: 'what business in the world have you to put the whole responsibility on her?'
Mackern pulled up short; nothing could exceed the benevolence of his surprise. 'On "her"? Why, don't I absolutely take an equal share of it?'
'Equal? Not a bit! You're not engaged to any one else.'
'Oh, thank heaven, no!' said Philip Mackern with a laugh of questionable discretion and instant effect.
His companion's cheek assumed a deeper hue and her eyes a drier light. 'You cause her to be outrageously talked about, and then have the assurance to come and prate to us of "honour"!'
Mackern turned away again—again he measured his cage. 'What is there I'm not ready to make good?'—and he gave, as he passed, a hard, anxious smile.
Mrs. Gorton said nothing for a moment; then she spoke with an accumulation of dignity. 'I think you both—if you want to know—absolutely improper persons, and if I had had my wits about me I would have declined, in time, to lend my house again to any traffic that might take place between you. But you're hatefully here, to my shame, and the wretched creature, whom I myself got off, has come up, and the fat's cn the fire, and it's too late to prevent it. It's not too late, however, just to say this: that if you've come, and if you intend, to bully and browbeat her———'
'Well?' Philip Mackern asked.
She had faltered and paused, and the next moment he saw why. The door had opened without his hearing it—Margaret Hamer stood and looked at them. He made no movement; he only, after a minute, held her eyes long enough to fortify him, as it were, in his attempted intensity of stillness. He felt already as if some process, something complex and exquisite, were going on that a sound, that a gesture, might spoil. But his challenge to Mrs. Gorton was still in the air, and she apparently, on her vision of her sister, had seen something pass. She fixed the girl and she fixed Mackern; then, highly flushed and moving to the door, she answered him. 'Why, you're a brute and a coward!' With which she banged the door behind her.
The way the others met without speech or touch was extraordinary, and still more singular perhaps the things that, in their silence, Philip Mackern thought. There was no freedom of appeal for him—he instantly felt that; there was neither burden nor need. He wondered Margaret didn't notice in some way what Mrs. Gorton had said; there was a strangeness in her not, on one side or the other, taking that up. There was a strangeness as well, he was perfectly aware, in his finding himself surprised and even, for ten seconds, as it happened, mercilessly disappointed, at her not looking quite so 'badly' as her encounter with a grave crisis might have been entitled to present her. She looked beautiful, perversely beautiful: he couldn't indeed have said just how directly his presumption of visible ravage was to have treated her handsome head. Meanwhile, as she carried this handsome head—in a manner he had never quite seen her carry it before—to the window and stood looking blindly out, there deepened in him almost to quick anguish the fear even of breathing upon the hour they had reached. That she had come back to him, to whatever end, was somehow in itself so divine a thing that lips and hands were gross to deal with it. What, moreover, in the extremity of a man's want, had he not already said? They were simply shut up there with their moment, and he, at least, felt it throb and throb in the hush.
At last she turned round. 'He will never, never understand that I can have been so base.'
Mackern awkwardly demurred. 'Base?'
'Letting you, from the first, make, to me, such a difference.'
'I don't think you could help it.' He was still awkward.
'How can he believe that? How can he admit it?'
She asked it too wofully to expect a reply, but the young man thought a moment. 'You can't look to me to speak for him'—he said it as feeling his way and without a smile. 'He should have looked out for himself.'
'He trusted me. He trusted me,' she repeated.
'So did I—so did I.'
'Yes. Yes.' She looked straight at him, as if tasting all her bitterness. 'But I pity him so that it kills me!'
'And only him?'—and Philip Mackern came nearer. 'It's perfectly simple,' he went on. 'I'll abide by that measure. It shall be the one you pity most.'
She kept her eyes on him till she burst into tears. 'Pity me—pity me!'
He drew her to him and held her close and long, and even at that high moment it was perhaps the deepest thing in his gratitude that he did pity her.