第33章 THE GOVERNESS(3)
And then another sneer, "Waste time enough over it too," followed perhaps by the bitter retort from the other party "You seemed to like it well enough though, playing the fool with that chit of a girl." Something of that sort. Don't you see it--eh . . . "Marlow looked at me with his dark penetrating glance. I was struck by the absolute verisimilitude of this suggestion. But we were always tilting at each other. I saw an opening and pushed my uncandid thrust.
"You have a ghastly imagination," I said with a cheerfully sceptical smile.
"Well, and if I have," he returned unabashed. "But let me remind you that this situation came to me unasked. I am like a puzzle-headed chief-mate we had once in the dear old Samarcand when I was a youngster. The fellow went gravely about trying to "account to himself"--his favourite expression--for a lot of things no one would care to bother one's head about. He was an old idiot but he was also an accomplished practical seaman. I was quite a boy and he impressed me. I must have caught the disposition from him.""Well--go on with your accounting then," I said, assuming an air of resignation.
"That's just it." Marlow fell into his stride at once. "That's just it. Mere disappointed cupidity cannot account for the proceedings of the next morning; proceedings which I shall not describe to you--but which I shall tell you of presently, not as a matter of conjecture but of actual fact. Meantime returning to that evening altercation in deadened tones within the private apartment of Miss de Barral's governess, what if I were to tell you that disappointment had most likely made them touchy with each other, but that perhaps the secret of his careless, railing behaviour, was in the thought, springing up within him with an emphatic oath of relief "Now there's nothing to prevent me from breaking away from that old woman." And that the secret of her envenomed rage, not against this miserable and attractive wretch, but against fate, accident and the whole course of human life, concentrating its venom on de Barral and including the innocent girl herself, was in the thought, in the fear crying within her "Now I have nothing to hold him with . . . "I couldn't refuse Marlow the tribute of a prolonged whistle "Phew!
So you suppose that . . . "
He waved his hand impatiently.
"I don't suppose. It was so. And anyhow why shouldn't you accept the supposition. Do you look upon governesses as creatures above suspicion or necessarily of moral perfection? I suppose their hearts would not stand looking into much better than other people's.
Why shouldn't a governess have passions, all the passions, even that of libertinage, and even ungovernable passions; yet suppressed by the very same means which keep the rest of us in order: early training--necessity--circumstances--fear of consequences; till there comes an age, a time when the restraint of years becomes intolerable--and infatuation irresistible . . . ""But if infatuation--quite possible I admit," I argued, "how do you account for the nature of the conspiracy.""You expect a cogency of conduct not usual in women," said Marlow.
"The subterfuges of a menaced passion are not to be fathomed. You think it is going on the way it looks, whereas it is capable, for its own ends, of walking backwards into a precipice.
When one once acknowledges that she was not a common woman, then all this is easily understood. She was abominable but she was not common. She had suffered in her life not from its constant inferiority but from constant self-repression. A common woman finding herself placed in a commanding position might have formed the design to become the second Mrs. de Barral. Which would have been impracticable. De Barral would not have known what to do with a wife. But even if by some impossible chance he had made advances, this governess would have repulsed him with scorn. She had treated him always as an inferior being with an assured, distant politeness.
In her composed, schooled manner she despised and disliked both father and daughter exceedingly. I have a notion that she had always disliked intensely all her charges including the two ducal (if they were ducal) little girls with whom she had dazzled de Barral. What an odious, ungratified existence it must have been for a woman as avid of all the sensuous emotions which life can give as most of her betters.
She had seen her youth vanish, her freshness disappear, her hopes die, and now she felt her flaming middle-age slipping away from her.