Love
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 5
At Chickover there had been the most painful consultations between Stephen and Mrs. Colquhoun as to the best thing to do under the deplorable circumstances. Should they or should they not tell Virginia? Could they, indeed, help telling her? Not all, of course; she must never be told all. The night spent somewhere between Chickover and London—they both felt that the entire stretch of country between those two points was from henceforth polluted—the night that made the scandalous marriage a necessity, must be kept from Virginia for ever. But it became clear after a week that she must be told something, if only to account for her not hearing from her mother.
Stephen couldn’t bring himself to let her have the letters. They came at first, as he had expected, one after the other and all very thick. He wondered, turning them over in his hand, whether it wasn’t his duty to open them, but he resisted the strong leaning towards his duty that lifelong practice in doing it had induced in him, and took the more dignified course of sending them back unopened. Much more punitive too, he felt, —leaving the wretched woman completely in the dark as to what was happening at Chickover and what Virginia was feeling.
Then, when the letters at last left off coming, he watched for telegrams; he rather expected telegrams.
None came.
Then he was on the look-out for an unannounced arrival; he quite thought there would be one.
Nothing happened. Just silence.
At the end of the week Virginia said, ‘I can’t think why mother doesn’t write’—and began to look worried, and write letters herself.
Stephen took them out of the box in the hall and burnt them. ‘Painful, painful necessities,’ he said to Mrs. Colquhoun; for this letter business went against the grain—the gentleman grain, he told his mother, who hardly left him, comforting and advising him as best she could.
At the end of another week Virginia sent a telegram, or rather was going to send it but was stopped by Stephen. Clearly she must be told something. She had said, while writing it: ‘If I don’t get an answer to this I shall go up to London myself and see if anything is wrong.’
‘Poor child, poor child,’ murmured Mrs. Colquhoun, the moment for enlightenment having manifestly come. ‘Would you like me to be with you?’ she whispered in Stephen’s ear.
‘Better not, I think,’ he whispered back.
Alone with Virginia he took her on his knee. She was holding the telegram she had just written, and was in a hurry to go and send it off.
‘Yes, Stephen—what is it?’ she asked, fretted at being held back, and worried by this strange silence of her mother’s to the point of being unlike herself.
‘I am but a clumsy creature,’ he began, overwhelmed by the thought of the blow about to be delivered—and delivered by his hand, too, his own loving hand.
He laid his head on her breast, his arms round her, as she sat on his knee.
This beginning made Virginia still more uneasy; Stephen had never called himself a clumsy creature before. ‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, very anxious.
‘What is it not,’ groaned Stephen, holding her tight. To think it was he, he who so deeply loved her...
‘Oh, Stephen’—Virginia was thoroughly frightened—’mother?’
‘Yes. Yes. Yours. And Virginia, my loved wife,’ he said, raising his head and looking at her, ‘believe me I had rather, to spare you, it were mine.’
Virginia sat like a stone. Her face was stiff and set. The worst had happened, then. Her little mother, her own sweet little mother, to whom she had been unkind, unloving, and who had never once failed in kindness and love to her, was dead.
‘She is dead,’ said Virginia, in a voice so toneless that it sounded indifferent.
‘How much better,’ thought Stephen, ‘for everybody as well as herself if she were.’
Aloud he said, his face buried in Virginia’s bosom. ‘No. She is not dead. Quite the contrary. She is remarrying.’
And as Virginia said nothing, for her breath was taken away by these blows and counter-blows, he went on: ‘Darling, I would have spared you if I could. I have tried to spare you. I have tried all these days to find some way of keeping it from you. Indeed, indeed I have tried——’
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