Deluge

BOOK IV. Helen and Claire

BOOK I heen$claire This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER I There are women who are incapable of tragedy. An invincible triviality protects them. Mary Wittels was of this order. Fortune, which had endowed her with a mysterious malady,variouslyreported as neuritis, rheumatism, or sciatica, but which she honestly believed to be peculiar to herself, had, with an almost equal kindliness, appointed her lodge-keeper to the Staffordshire1 mansion of the Earl of Hallowby.2 No one who knew the Earlwould be likely to suppose that she receivedany remuneration from that source, and it was therefore a natural development in the social disorder of which she was a by-product, that she should support herself by the retailing of gossip in return for the offerings which her neighbours gave her. She did this without malice, and became, in the course of years, somewhat expertin distinguishing between that which was authentic and that which would bring discredit upon her should she extend its publicity.With a generosity which is seldom duplicated, fortune befriended her again when it was spreading ruin over a continent . Unable to join the wild flight to northward (even had her common sense been insufficient to prevent such a folly), she owed her life to two further circumstances. First, the Earl of Hallowby was a gambler. Not being a bookmaker, and being too stupid even for successful dishonesty, he lost continually , as honest gamblers are apt to do. There is nothing here to regret. His money passed into other hands. They may have been better able to control it for the common good: that they were less so is not easily to be imagined. Being short of money, he fell among lawyers, who gave him good advice, and robbed him further with an air of detachment which gave their procedure an appearance as of the inevitability of natural law rather than of human ingenuity. He desired to cut down an avenue of trees which his ancestors had planted, and inquired of them whether the conditions on which he held the estate (which was entailed) would permit him to do so. They informed him that it was a doubtful point which the Courts must settle . The question depended upon the construction of a single unpunc151 tuated sentence in a document which had been drawn in their own office. In the course of two years the Courts had decided it as he desired , incidentally saving the life of Mary Wittels, for the avenue extended to the lodge gate and would surely have overwhelmed her. The timber was sold, a large part of the proceeds remaining in the hands of the legal gentlemen he had trusted. They signed a strip of coloured paper, and their bankers transferred a substantial sum from "Clients" to "Office" account when they received it. It was all most orderly.They robbed him strictly according to scale, and their intelligence was such that theywould have considered it dishonest to charge him more than the rate agreed by the trade union to which they belonged. The bureaucracy took its share of the plunder with a like urbanity. The Earl of Hallowby did not doubt that the propriety of felling trees could be affected by the appearance of red stamps on blue paper, and that those who had brought these colours into juxtaposition were entitled to a third of the proceeds of the avenueto which they related. In the end it made no real difference except to MaryWittels. The second point on which fortune had befriended her was that the lodge was very squat in shape, and was built of heavy stone blocks. Unlike most buildings of its kind, and possibly because it was built against a bank which rose steeply at the northern side of the lodge gates, its roof had a single slope to southward. It would be wrong to say that Mary was not affected by the storm. She was destined to remember it for many years as the night when her larder window was blown in with disastrous consequences to a pot of strawberry jam which Mrs. Swadkins had given her. The next day her leg was troublesome, and, supposing that callers would be few in such weather, she layin bed. When the storm fell, and the road became congested with a flying crowd, she remarked to herself (quite truly) that it was "wurs nor a bank 'oliday." Shegot up to close her...