SOUL OF PAUL
Nothing so horrible had ever happened to Paul before, nothing...
He felt as though he had committed a murder; it was as though he expected arrest and started at every knock on the door.Nothing so horrible...
It was, of course, in all the Skeaton papers.At the inquest it appeared that Mathew Cardinal had imitated the signature of a prosperous City friend; had he not chosen his own way out he would have discovered the arduous delights of hard labour.But he had chosen suicide and not "while of unsound mind." Yes, the uncle of the Rector's wife...Yes, The Rector's Wife's Uncle...Yes, The Rector's Wife's Uncle!
Sho discovered him, bumped right into him in the dark.What a queer story--like a novel.Oh, but she had always been queer--Trenchard had picked her up somewhere in a London slum; well, perhaps not a slum exactly but something very like it.Why did he marry her?
Perhaps he had to.Who knows? These clergymen are sly dogs.Always the worst if the truth were known...
So it went on.For nine whole days (and nights) it was the only topic in Skeaton.Paul caught the fringe of it.He had never known very much about his fellow-beings.He had always taken the things that they said to him as the true things, when they smiled he had thought that they meant their smiles.And why not?...since he always meant his.He had always been too lazy to dislike people, and his digestion had been too good and his ambition too slender to urge him towards spite and malice.He had believed that he was on excellent terms with all the world.
Now that was changed.He was watched, he knew, with curious, inquisitive, critical glances.Through no fault of his own he was soiled and smirched.That hearty confident laugh of his must be checked.He was afraid.Yes, he was afraid.He sat in his study and trembled at the thought of meeting his congregation.He had done nothing and yet his reputation was no longer clean.But he was afraid, also, of something else.He saw, desperately against his will, the central picture.He saw the body hanging in the dark room, Maggie tumbling against it, the cries, the lights, the crowd...
He saw it all, hour after hour.He was not an imaginative man, but it seemed to him that he had actually been present at this scene.He had to attend the inquest.That had been horrible.With all eyes upon him he stood up and answered their detestable questions.He had trembled before those eyes.Suddenly the self-confidence of all his life had left him.He had stammered in his replies, his hands had trembled and he had been forced to press them close to his sides.He had given his answers as though he were a guilty man.
He came then slowly, in the silence of his study, to the consideration of Grace and Maggie.This would kill Grace.She had altered, in a few days, amazingly; she would meet nobody, but shut herself into her bedroom.She would not see the servants.She looked at Paul as though she, like the rest of the world, blamed him.Paul loved Grace.He had not known before how much.They had been together all their lives and he had taken her protection and care of him too much for granted.How good she had been to him and for how many years! When they were happy it seemed natural that she should look after him, but now, in the middle of this scandal he saw that it should have been he who looked after her.He had not looked after her.Of course, now they would have to leave Skeaton and he knew what that departure would mean to Grace.She was suspicious of new places and new people.Strange to think now that almost the only person of whom she had not been suspicious was Maggie.
Maggie! His mind slowly wheeled round to her.He rose from his chair and began clumsily to parade the room.He walked up and down the study as though with closed eyes, his large body bumping against corners of tables and chairs.Maggie! He looked back, as of late he had often done, to those days in his cousin's house in London.What had happened to the Maggie whom he had known there?
He saw her again, so quiet, so ready to listen and learn, so modest, and yet with a humour and sense of appreciation that had promised well for the future.A child--an ignorant, charming, uneducated child, that is what she had seemed.He admitted now that his heart, always too soft and too gentle perhaps, had been touched beyond wisdom.She had seemed to need just the protection and advice that he had been fitted to give her.Then, as though in the darkness of the night, the change had been made; from the moment of entering into Skeaton there had been a new Maggie.He could not tell himself, because he was not a man clever at psychology, in what the change consisted.Had he been pressed he would have said perhaps that he had known the old Maggie intimately, that nothing that she could say or do astonished him, but that this new Maggie was altogether a stranger.Time had not altered that; with the passing months he had known her less and less.Why, at their first meeting long ago in Katherine's house he had known her better than he knew her now.He traced the steps of their history in Skeaton; she had eluded him always, never allowing him to hold her for more than a moment, vanishing and appearing again, fantastic, in some strange lighted distance, hurting him and disappointing him...He stopped in his walk, bewildered.He saw, with a sudden flash, that she had never appeared so fascinating to him as when she had been strangest.He saw it now at the moment when she seemed more darkly strange, more sinister and dangerous than ever before.