Of course, all the chances were that de Barral should have fallen upon a
perfectly harmless, naive, usual, inefficient specimen of respectable
governess for his daughter; or on a commonplace silly adventuress who
would have tried, say, to marry him or work some other sort of common
mischief in a small way. Or again he might have chanced on a model of
all the virtues, or the repository of all knowledge, or anything equally
harmless, conventional, and middle class. All calculations were in his
favour; but, chance being incalculable, he fell upon an individuality
whom it is much easier to define by opprobrious names than to classify in
a calm and scientific spirit--but an individuality certainly, and a
temperament as well. Rare? No. There is a certain amount of what I
would politely call unscrupulousness in all of us. Think for instance of
the excellent Mrs. Fyne, who herself, and in the bosom of her family,
resembled a governess of a conventional type. Only, her mental excesses
were theoretical, hedged in by so much humane feeling and conventional
reserves, that they amounted to no more than mere libertinage of thought;
whereas the other woman, the governess of Flora de Barral, was, as you
may have noticed, severely practical--terribly practical. No! Hers was
not a rare temperament, except in its fierce resentment of repression; a
feeling which like genius or lunacy is apt to drive people into sudden
irrelevancy. Hers was feminine irrelevancy. A male genius, a male
ruffian, or even a male lunatic, would not have behaved exactly as she
did behave. There is a softness in masculine nature, even the most
brutal, which acts as a check.
While the girl slept those two, the woman of forty, an age in itself
terrible, and that hopeless young "wrong 'un" of twenty-three (also well
connected I believe) had some sort of subdued row in the cleared rooms:
wardrobes open, drawers half pulled out and empty, trunks locked and
strapped, furniture in idle disarray, and not so much as a single scrap
of paper left behind on the tables. The maid, whom the governess and the
pupil shared between them, after finishing with Flora, came to the door
as usual, but was not admitted. She heard the two voices in dispute
before she knocked, and then being sent away retreated at once--the only
person in the house convinced at that time that there was "something up."
Dark and, so to speak, inscrutable spaces being met with in life there
must be such places in any statement dealing with life. In what I am
telling you of now--an episode of one of my humdrum holidays in the green
country, recalled quite naturally after all the years by our meeting a
man who has been a blue-water sailor--this evening confabulation is a
dark, inscrutable spot. And we may conjecture what we like. I have no
difficulty in imagining that the woman--of forty, and the chief of the
enterprise--must have raged at large. And perhaps the other did not rage
enough. Youth feels deeply it is true, but it has not the same vivid
sense of lost opportunities. It believes in the absolute reality of
time. And then, in that abominable scamp with his youth already soiled,
withered like a plucked flower ready to be flung on some rotting heap of
rubbish, no very genuine feeling about anything could exist--not even
about the hazards of his own unclean existence. A sneering half-laugh
with some such remark as: "We are properly sold and no mistake" would
have been enough to make trouble in that way. 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 . . . "