"A very singular prohibition," remarked Mrs. Fyne after a short silence.
"He seemed to love the child."
She was puzzled. But I surmised that it might have been the sullenness
of a man unconscious of guilt and standing at bay to fight his
"persecutors," as he called them; or else the fear of a softer emotion
weakening his defiant attitude; perhaps, even, it was a self-denying
ordinance, in order to spare the girl the sight of her father in the
dock, accused of cheating, sentenced as a swindler--proving the
possession of a certain moral delicacy.
Mrs. Fyne didn't know what to think. She supposed it might have been
mere callousness. But the people amongst whom the girl had fallen had
positively not a grain of moral delicacy. Of that she was certain. Mrs.
Fyne could not undertake to give me an idea of their abominable
vulgarity. Flora used to tell her something of her life in that
household, over there, down Limehouse way. It was incredible. It passed
Mrs. Fyne's comprehension. It was a sort of moral savagery which she
could not have thought possible.
I, on the contrary, thought it very possible. I could imagine easily how
the poor girl must have been bewildered and hurt at her reception in that
household--envied for her past while delivered defenceless to the tender
mercies of people without any fineness either of feeling or mind, unable
to understand her misery, grossly curious, mistaking her manner for
disdain, her silent shrinking for pride. The wife of the "odious person"
was witless and fatuously conceited. Of the two girls of the house one
was pious and the other a romp; both were coarse-minded--if they may be
credited with any mind at all. The rather numerous men of the family
were dense and grumpy, or dense and jocose. None in that grubbing lot
had enough humanity to leave her alone. At first she was made much of,
in an offensively patronising manner. The connection with the great de
Barral gratified their vanity even in the moment of the smash. They
dragged her to their place of worship, whatever it might have been, where
the congregation stared at her, and they gave parties to other beings
like themselves at which they exhibited her with ignoble
self-satisfaction. She did not know how to defend herself from their
importunities, insolence and exigencies. She lived amongst them, a
passive victim, quivering in every nerve, as if she were flayed. After
the trial her position became still worse. On the least occasion and
even on no occasions at all she was scolded, or else taunted with her
dependence. The pious girl lectured her on her defects, the romping girl
teased her with contemptuous references to her accomplishments, and was
always trying to pick insensate quarrels with her about some "fellow" or
other. The mother backed up her girls invariably, adding her own silly,
wounding remarks. I must say they were probably not aware of the
ugliness of their conduct. They were nasty amongst themselves as a
matter of course; their disputes were nauseating in origin, in manner, in
the spirit of mean selfishness. These women, too, seemed to enjoy
greatly any sort of row and were always ready to combine together to make
awful scenes to the luckless girl on incredibly flimsy pretences. Thus
Flora on one occasion had been reduced to rage and despair, had her most
secret feelings lacerated, had obtained a view of the utmost baseness to
which common human nature can descend--I won't say a propos de bottes
as the French would excellently put it, but literally a propos of some
mislaid cheap lace trimmings for a nightgown the romping one was making
for herself. Yes, that was the origin of one of the grossest scenes
which, in their repetition, must have had a deplorable effect on the
unformed character of the most pitiful of de Barral's victims. I have it
from Mrs. Fyne. The girl turned up at the Fynes' house at half-past nine
on a cold, drizzly evening. She had walked bareheaded, I believe, just
as she ran out of the house, from somewhere in Poplar to the
neighbourhood of Sloane Square--without stopping, without drawing breath,
if only for a sob.