Chance by Joseph Conrad (free novel 24 .TXT) 📖

“Papa, it was in the country, on a road—”

He groaned, “On a road,” and closed his eyes.

“It’s too long to explain to you now.  We shall have lots of time.  There are things I could not tell you now.  But some day.  Some day.  For now nothing can part us.  Nothing.  We are safe as long as we live—nothing can ever come between us.”

“You are infatuated with the fellow,” he remarked, without opening his eyes.  And she said: “I believe in him,” in a low voice.  “You and I must believe in him.”

“Who the devil is he?”

“He’s the brother of the lady—you know Mrs. Fyne, she knew mother—who was so kind to me.  I was staying in the country, in a cottage, with Mr. and Mrs. Fyne.  It was there that we met.  He came on a visit.  He noticed me.  I—well—we are married now.”

She was thankful that his eyes were shut.  It made it easier to talk of the future she had arranged, which now was an unalterable thing.  She did not enter on the path of confidences.  That was impossible.  She felt he would not understand her.  She felt also that he suffered.  Now and then a great anxiety gripped her heart with a mysterious sense of guilt—as though she had betrayed him into the hands of an enemy.  With his eyes shut he had an air of weary and pious meditation.  She was a little afraid of it.  Next moment a great pity for him filled her heart.  And in the background there was remorse.  His face twitched now and then just perceptibly.  He managed to keep his eyelids down till he heard that the ‘husband’ was a sailor and that he, the father, was being taken straight on board ship ready to sail away from this abominable world of treacheries, and scorns and envies and lies, away, away over the blue sea, the sure, the inaccessible, the uncontaminated and spacious refuge for wounded souls.

Something like that.  Not the very words perhaps but such was the general sense of her overwhelming argument—the argument of refuge.

I don’t think she gave a thought to material conditions.  But as part of that argument set forth breathlessly, as if she were afraid that if she stopped for a moment she could never go on again, she mentioned that generosity of a stormy type, which had come to her from the sea, had caught her up on the brink of unmentionable failure, had whirled her away in its first ardent gust and could be trusted now, implicitly trusted, to carry them both, side by side, into absolute safety.

She believed it, she affirmed it.  He understood thoroughly at last, and at once the interior of that cab, of an aspect so pacific in the eyes of the people on the pavements, became the scene of a great agitation.  The generosity of Roderick Anthony—the son of the poet—affected the ex-financier de Barral in a manner which must have brought home to Flora de Barral the extreme arduousness of the business of being a woman.  Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.  This man—the man inside the cab—cast oft his stiff placidity and behaved like an animal.  I don’t mean it in an offensive sense.  What he did was to give way to an instinctive panic.  Like some wild creature scared by the first touch of a net falling on its back, old de Barral began to struggle, lank and angular, against the empty air—as much of it as there was in the cab—with staring eyes and gasping mouth from which his daughter shrank as far as she could in the confined space.

“Stop the cab.  Stop him I tell you.  Let me get out!” were the strangled exclamations she heard.  Why?  What for?  To do what?  He would hear nothing.  She cried to him “Papa!  Papa!  What do you want to do?”  And all she got from him was: “Stop.  I must get out.  I want to think.  I must get out to think.”

It was a mercy that he didn’t attempt to open the door at once.  He only stuck his head and shoulders out of the window crying to the cabman.  She saw the consequences, the cab stopping, a crowd collecting around a raving old gentleman . . . In this terrible business of being a woman so full of fine shades, of delicate perplexities (and very small rewards) you can never know what rough work you may have to do, at any moment.  Without hesitation Flora seized her father round the body and pulled back—being astonished at the ease with which she managed to make him drop into his seat again.  She kept him there resolutely with one hand pressed against his breast, and leaning across him, she, in her turn put her head and shoulders out of the window.  By then the cab had drawn up to the curbstone and was stopped.  “No!  I’ve changed my mind.  Go on please where you were told first.  To the docks.”

She wondered at the steadiness of her own voice.  She heard a grunt from the driver and the cab began to roll again.  Only then she sank into her place keeping a watchful eye on her companion.  He was hardly anything more by this time.  Except for her childhood’s impressions he was just—a man.  Almost a stranger.  How was one to deal with him?  And there was the other too.  Also almost a stranger.  The trade of being a woman was very difficult.  Too difficult.  Flora closed her eyes saying to herself: “If I think too much about it I shall go mad.”  And then opening them she asked her father if the prospect of living always with his daughter and being taken care of by her affection away from the world, which had no honour to give to his grey hairs, was such an awful prospect.

“Tell me, is it so bad as that?”

She put that question sadly, without bitterness.  The famous—or notorious—de Barral had lost his rigidity now.  He was bent.  Nothing more deplorably futile than a bent poker.  He said nothing.  She added gently, suppressing an uneasy remorseful sigh:

“And it might have been worse.  You might have found no one, no one in all this town, no one in all the world, not even me!  Poor papa!”

She made a conscience-stricken movement towards him thinking: “Oh!  I am horrible, I am horrible.”  And old de Barral, scared, tired, bewildered by the extraordinary shocks of his liberation, swayed over and actually leaned his head on her shoulder, as if sorrowing over his regained freedom.

The movement by itself was touching.  Flora supporting him lightly imagined that he was crying; and at the thought that had she smashed in a quarry that shoulder, together with some other of her bones, this grey and pitiful head would have had nowhere to rest, she too gave way to tears.  They flowed quietly, easing her overstrained nerves.  Suddenly he pushed her away from him so that her head struck the side of the cab, pushing himself away too from her as if something had stung him.

All the warmth went out of her emotion.  The very last tears turned cold on her cheek.  But their work was done.  She had found courage, resolution, as women do, in a good cry.  With his hand covering the upper part of his face whether to conceal his eyes or to shut out an unbearable sight, he was stiffening up in his corner to his usual poker-like consistency.  She regarded him in silence.  His thin obstinate lips moved.  He uttered the name of the cousin—the man, you remember, who did not approve of the Fynes, and whom rightly or wrongly little Fyne suspected of interested motives, in view of de Barral having possibly put away some plunder, somewhere before the smash.

I may just as well tell you at once that I don’t know anything more of him.  But de Barral was of the opinion, speaking in his low voice from under his hand, that this relation would have been only too glad to have secured his guidance.

“Of course I could not come forward in my own name, or person.  But the advice of a man of my experience is as good as a fortune to anybody wishing to venture into finance.  The same sort of thing can be done again.”

He shuffled his feet a little, let fall his hand; and turning carefully toward his daughter his puffy round cheeks, his round chin resting on his collar, he bent on her the faded, resentful gaze of his pale eyes, which were wet.

“The start is really only a matter of judicious advertising.  There’s no difficulty.  And here you go and . . . ”

He turned his face away.  “After all I am still de Barral, the de Barral.  Didn’t you remember that?”

“Papa,” said Flora; “listen.  It’s you who must remember that there is no longer a de Barral . . . ”  He looked at her sideways anxiously.  “There is Mr. Smith, whom no harm, no trouble, no wicked lies of evil people can ever touch.”

“Mr. Smith,” he breathed out slowly.  “Where does he belong to?  There’s not even a Miss Smith.”

“There is your Flora.”

“My Flora!  You went and . . . I can’t bear to think of it.  It’s horrible.”

“Yes.  It was horrible enough at times,” she said with feeling, because somehow, obscurely, what this man said appealed to her as if it were her own thought clothed in an enigmatic emotion.  “I think with shame sometimes how I . . . No not yet.  I shall not tell you.  At least not now.”

The cab turned into the gateway of the dock.  Flora handed the tall hat to her father.  “Here, papa.  And please be good.  I suppose you love me.  If you don’t, then I wonder who—”

He put the hat on, and stiffened hard in his corner, kept a sidelong glance on his girl.  “Try to be nice for my sake.  Think of the years I have been waiting for you.  I do indeed want support—and peace.  A little peace.”

She clasped his arm suddenly with both hands pressing with all her might as if to crush the resistance she felt in him.  “I could not have peace if I did not have you with me.  I won’t let you go.  Not after all I went through.  I won’t.”  The nervous force of her grip frightened him a little.  She laughed suddenly.  “It’s absurd.  It’s as if I were asking you for a sacrifice.  What am I afraid of?  Where could you go?  I mean now, to-day, to-night?  You can’t tell me.  Have you thought of it?  Well I have been thinking of it for the last year.  Longer.  I nearly went mad trying to find out.  I believe I was mad for a time or else I should never have thought . . . ”

* * * * *

“This was as near as she came to a confession,” remarked Marlow in a changed tone.  “The confession I mean of that walk to the top of the quarry which she reproached herself with so bitterly.  And he made of it what his fancy suggested.  It could not possibly be a just notion.  The cab stopped alongside the ship and they got out in the manner described by the sensitive Franklin.  I don’t know if they suspected each other’s sanity at the end of that drive.  But that is possible.  We all seem a little mad to each other; an excellent arrangement for the bulk of humanity which finds in it an easy motive of forgiveness.  Flora crossed the quarter-deck with a rapidity born of apprehension.  It had grown unbearable.  She wanted this business over.  She was thankful on looking back to see he was following her.  “If he bolts away,” she thought, “then I shall know that I am of no account indeed!  That no