A fortnight pa.s.sed.

In the three days following the death he had not thought once about his own concerns. He simply hadn't time to think of them. Every minute he could spare was taken up with the arrangements for his father's funeral.

Sunday had been given over to mourning and remorse. It was Monday morning and the weeks following it that brought back the thought of his divorce. They brought it back, first, in all its urgency, as a thing vehemently and terribly desired, then as a thing, urgent indeed, but private and personal and, therefore, of secondary importance, a thing that must perforce stand over until the settlement of his father's affairs, till finally (emerging from the inextricable tangle in which it had become involved) it presented itself as it was, a thing hopeless and unattainable.

His father's affairs were worse than anything he had believed. For, except for that terror born of his own private superst.i.tion, he had not really looked forward to disaster on an overwhelming scale.... He had imagined his father's business as surviving him only for a little while, and his father's debts as entailing perhaps strict economy for years.

But for the actual figures he was not prepared.

And how his father, limited as he was in his resources and dest.i.tute, you would have thought, of all opportunity for wild expenditure, how he could have contrived to owe the amount he did owe pa.s.sed Ranny's understanding.

Into that pit of insolvency there went all that was fetched by the sale of the stock and the goodwill of the business and all that Mrs. Ransome had put into the business, including what she had saved out of her tiny income. As for Ranny's savings and the sum he had borrowed--the whole thirty pounds--they went to pay for the funeral and the grave and the monumental stone.

There could be no divorce. Divorce was not to be thought of for more than two years, when he would have got his rise.

He broke the news to Winny, sitting with her in their little halfway grove, the place consecrated to Ranny's confidences.

"I can't do different," he said, summing it all up.

"Of course, you can't. Never mind, dear. Let's go on as we are."

It was what Violet had said to him, but with how different a meaning!

"But Winky--it means waiting years. It'll be more than two before I can get a divorce--and we can't marry till six months after. That's three years. I can't bear to ask you to wait so long."

"Don't worry about me. I'm quite happy."

"You don't know how much happier you would be. Me too."

She pressed her face against his shoulder.

"I don't think I could be any happier than I am."

"You don't know," he repeated. "You don't know anything at all."

"I know I love you and you me, and that's enough."

"Oh--_is_ it?"

"It's the great thing."

"Winny, d'you know, that if poor Father hadn't died when he did--we missed it by a day. To think it could happen like that!"

He clinched it with, "This Combined Maze has been a bit too much for you and me."

CHAPTER x.x.x

Mrs. Ransome for the first time in her life was thinking. She called it thinking, although that was no word for it, for its richness, its amplitude, its peculiar secret certainty. You might say that for the first time in her life Mrs. Ransome was fully conscious; that, with an extraordinary vividness and clarity she saw things, not as she believed and desired them to be, but as they were.

She saw, for the first time since Mr. Ransome's death, that she was happy; or rather, that she had been happy for more than two years, that is to say, ever since Mr. Ransome's death. And this vision of her happiness, of her iniquitous and disgraceful satisfaction, was shocking to Mrs. Ransome. She would have preferred to think that ever since Mr.

Ransome's death she had been heartbroken.

But it was not so. Never in all her life had she been so at peace; never since her girlhood had she been so gay. This state of hers had lasted exactly two years and four months, thus clearly dating from her bereavement. For it was in May of nineteen-ten that he had died, and she was now in September nineteen-twelve.

She might not have been aware of it but that it, her happiness, had only six months more to run.

For two years and four months she had had her son Ranny to herself. She had been the mistress of his house, the little house that she loved, and the mother of his children whom (next to her son Ranny) she adored.

For two years and four months she had made him comfortable with a comfort he had never dreamed of, which most certainly he had never known. With tenderness and care and vigilance unabridged and unremitted, she had brought Granville and Stanley and Dossie to perfection. It had not been so hard. Stanley and Dossie she had found almost perfect from the first, more perfect than Ranny she had found them, because they were not so near to her own flesh, and not loved so pa.s.sionately as he.

And Granville, once far from perfect, had responded to treatment like a living thing. Maudie and Fred Booty had cherished it, they handed it on to Mrs. Ransome spotless and intact. Spotless and intact she had kept it. Spotless and intact no doubt it would be kept when, in six months'

time, she in turn would hand it over to Winny Dymond, to Ranny's second wife.

He had only just told her.

That was what hurt her most, that she had only just been told, when for more than two years he had been thinking of it. It was no use saying that he couldn't have told her before, because he wasn't free. He wasn't free now; not properly, like a widower.

That he would, after all, get rid of poor Violet, who hadn't, in all those years, troubled him or done him any harm, _that_ had been a blow to her. She hadn't believed it possible. She had thought the question of divorce had been settled once for all, five years ago, by his Uncle Randall. And John Randall in the meanwhile had justified his claim to be heard, and his right to settle things. He had canceled the debt that poor Fulleymore had owed him. To be sure, he could afford it. He was more prosperous and prominent than ever. He was, therefore, less than ever likely to approve of the divorce.

If the idea of divorce had been appalling five years ago, it was still more appalling now. Since, after all, poor Violet had removed herself so far and kept so quiet, the scandal of her original disappearance had somehow diminished with every year, while, proportionately, with every year, the scandal, the indecency, the horror of the Divorce Court had increased, until now it seemed to be a monstrous thing.

And that Ranny should have chosen this time of all times! When they'd paid off all the creditors and got clear, and stood respected and respectable again. As if his poor father's insolvency, which, after all, he couldn't help (since it was the Drug Stores that had ruined him), as if that wasn't enough disgrace for one family, he must needs go and rake up all that awful shame and trouble, after all these years, when everybody had forgotten that there _had_ been any trouble and any shame.

That was what Mrs. Ransome found so hard to bear. And that she had been deceived; that he should have let her go on thinking that it wasn't possible, up to the last minute (it was Sat.u.r.day and he was going to the lawyer on Monday), she who had the first right to be told.

All these years he had deceived her. All these years he had meant to do it the very minute he had got his rise.

For Ransome had attained the summit of his ambition. He was now a petty cas.h.i.+er with a pen all to himself at the top of the counting-house, and an income of two hundred a year. Short of making him a.s.sistant secretary (which was ridiculous) Woolridge's could do no more for him.

And Winny Dymond (Mrs. Ransome reflected bitterly), though he hadn't been free to speak to her, though he was practically (it didn't occur to Mrs. Ransome that what she meant was theoretically) a married man, Winny had known it all the time.

It was extraordinary, but Mrs. Ransome, who was really fond of Winny, felt toward her more acute and concentrated bitterness than she had felt toward Violet, whom she hated. She was able to think of Ranny's first wife as poor Violet, though Violet had made him miserable and destroyed his home and had left him and his children. And the thought of his marrying Winny Dymond was intolerable to Mrs. Ransome, though she had recognized her as the one woman Ranny ought to have married, the one woman worthy of him, and she would have continued to welcome her in that capacity as long as Ranny had refrained from marrying her.

For Ranny's mother knew that in Violet her motherhood had had no rival.

Violet's pa.s.sion for Ranny, Ranny's pa.s.sion for Violet, had not robbed her of her son. Violet, not having in her one atom of natural feeling, and caring only for her husband's manhood and his physical perfection, had left to Mrs. Ransome all that was most dear to her in Ranny. Married to Violet, he was still dependent on his mother. He clung to her, he deferred to her judgment, he came to her for comfort. If he had been ill it was she and not Violet who would have nursed him. Whereas Winny would take all that away from her. She would take--she could not help taking--Ranny utterly away; not from malice, not from selfishness, not because she wanted to take him, but because she could not help it. She was so made as to be all in all to him, so made as to draw him to her all in all. There would be absolutely nothing of Ranny left over for his mother, except the affection he had always felt for her, which, for a woman of Mrs. Ransome's temperament, was the least thing that she claimed. Her instinct had divined Winny infallibly, not only as a wife to Ranny, but as a mother. A mother Winny was and would be to him far more than if she had used her womanhood to bear him children.

So that, without the smallest preparation, she saw herself required at six months' notice to give up her son. And while she blamed him for not having told her, she overlooked the fact that if she had been told she could not have borne the knowledge. It would have poisoned for her every day of the eight hundred and forty-five days for which in her ignorance she had been so happy.

She did not attempt to deny that she had been happy. But what she had _said_ to Ranny when he told her was, "It's a mercy your poor father doesn't know."

And in that moment she thought of her happiness with a sharp pang as if it had been unfaithfulness to her dead husband.

It was at half past seven on a Sat.u.r.day evening in the last week of September, nineteen-twelve, that Mrs. Randall sat alone in the back sitting-room at Granville and meditated miserably on those things.

Upstairs in his bedroom overhead she could hear Ranny moving very softly, for fear of waking Stanley. She knew what he was doing. He was changing, making himself smart enough to take Winny Dymond to the Earl's Court Exhibition.