Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 340
He peeped again at the nun. She sat perfectly tranquil and self-possessed, and, when she moved a little in her seat, he obtained through the small windows a good view of her face. She had very red cheeks, as if she had been much in the open air, blue, rather hard eyes, and large teeth that appeared to impart to her face an air of rustic and rather hoydenish good health. She looked, to Mr. Sorrell’s eyes, like a prosperous market woman, and this disappointed Mr. Sorrell. He had expected, as long as he could not see her face, that she would appear pale and dark and ascetic, and with all the traces of suffering. His cigar drew well, and, propped between wall and wall of the corridor, he felt, upon the whole, comfortable. He had come out to think whether he had not made a fool of himself with Mrs. Lee-Egerton. But having the kind of brain which is able to cut off its thoughts into hermetically divided compartments, he was determined to leave the subject alone until he had come much more nearly to the end of his cigar. And suddenly it came into his head to think what a bully time he might have if with all his present faculties and knowledge he could be thrown right back into the Middle Ages. What would not he be able to do with those ignorant and superstitious people! He would invent for them the railway train, the electric telegraph, the flying machine, the motor-car, and the machine-gun. Above all, the machine-gun. He would be the mightiest man in the world: he would have power, absolute and enormous power. He could take anything: he could do anything. No king could withstand him. The walls of no castle and of no mint could keep him out. And he felt in his physical being a tingling, impatient sensation, an odd emotion of impatience as if just at his right hand there must be suspended an invisible curtain, which, could he but see it, he had only to draw back to enter into the region of impotent slaves over whom he could be lord of wealth as of life.
It was, of course, the sight of the nun that had aroused in him this train of thought. When he once more looked at her she was, with an expression of enjoyment, eating a sandwich out of a paper bag. And Mr. Sorrell laughed. It seemed to him as absurd that a nun should eat sandwiches as that she should travel in a Southampton-to-London express. He did not know how he ought to consider that they should subsist any more than how he should consider that they ought to travel. He rather imagined them consuming myrrh and hyssop, drinking the tears of affliction, and gliding in their stiff black skirts without touching it over the ground, quite close to it, as Mr. Sorrell was accustomed to do in a recurring dream that he had in common with most of the rest of humanity. The nun brushed the crumbs off the wide expanse of linen over her breast, and then, becoming aware of Mr. Sorrell’s eyes she frowned slightly at the thought that he must have seen her eating and moved over to the other corner of the vacant compartment. Mr. Sorrell did not see her again. And as if it were a signal to him to resume thinking upon whether he had made a fool of himself, Mr. Sorrell thrust his right hand into the deep pocket of his long grey ulster and drew out a leather jewel-case that had “L. E.” stamped upon its slightly domed top in gilt letters of a German-Gothic character.
CHAPTER II.
MR. SORRELL was accustomed to regard himself as a typical representative of the Homo-Sapiens-Europæus. He was rising forty; he was rather fair with fresh, brown hair; he had a drooping brown moustache and a pink, clear skin. His eyes were blue and slightly threatening, as if his condition in the world was that of militant assertion of his rights and rectitude. He had been nearly married several times, and he had had one or two affairs of the heart that he did not particularly care to think about, and in one case he had burned his fingers rather severely. His rival in the affections of an erratic married lady having persuaded her to give up to him Mr. Sorrell’s letters, which the rival afterwards, to save his own skin, handed over to a remarkably injured husband, it was only by the most extraordinary exertions that Mr. Sorrell had kept out of the Divorce Courts, and this had proved to him such a warning that, as he stood there reflecting, nothing in the world would have persuaded him, except on shipboard, to have had anything whatever to do with Mrs. Lee-Egerton. It was not that anybody knew anything against her: it was that there was always enveloping her such a perpetual and cloudy feeling of insecurity. Her husband was the sort of man who was always shooting in the Rockies. He was, indeed, shooting in the Rockies at that moment, which made it all the more remarkable that Mrs. Lee-Egerton should have appeared anywhere as near him as New York. Lee-Egerton was the son of a peer of so many descents that Mr. Sorrell would have been glad to know him. To know Mrs. Egerton was not, however, nearly so remarkable, since it was so extraordinarily easy to come across her, attended as it seemed always by a band of laughing cavaliers. On the other hand Lee-Egerton, whom few people ever saw, was said to be a happy, dangerous person, who might descend upon you at any time with a magazine rifle or worse. Nevertheless, with the idea of this rather thunderous personality at the back of his head, Mr. Sorrell had felt himself quite remarkably soothed by her frequent companionship. He had not, indeed, ever been soothed by anything or anybody quite so much for quite a long time. It was not that she was in her first youth, for she had a son, as Mr. Sorrell had remarkable reason at that moment to know, actually at Cambridge, where he had got himself into scrapes, all the more damnably complicated in that he was the heir-presumptive to the title, though his uncle could not be got to speak to any of his relatives. But Mrs. Egerton had a sort of haggard, pale, passionate repose. She was very dark and very tall and very aquiline, and her eyes appeared perpetually to be searching into mysteries. She was, moreover, exceedingly thin, and Mr. Sorrel imagined that he found her so infinitely restful because she was so exactly the opposite of himself. In the last five years, that is to say, he had been putting on flesh. As a mining engineer he had been rather thin and hardbitten, but five years of publishing, though he kept himself fit with Turkish baths and mechanical exercises, had contrived considerably to obscure the former outlines of his figure, and the face that looked out at him from the glass was much more heavy-jowled and deep and threatening-eyed than he at all cared to see. That middle age was descending upon him did not distress him so much, but he strongly objected to being fat.
And whereas Mr. Sorrell was distinctly bulky, Mrs. Lee-Egerton was exceedingly thin and graceful; whereas upon the whole he was exceedingly prosperous, she was oppressed by a very great grief. The great grief was her confounded son. And to him, feeling, as he did, large, fatherly, and protective, Mrs. Egerton had confided her almost unbearable sorrow. She had started for the United States, intending a campaign of social pleasures and triumphs that was to begin in New York, end in Washington, and culminate in a scandalous book of which, with immense success, she had already written two or three. But in New York itself, before she had had time to get her foot really planted, she had received a most lamentable letter from her son at Cambridge. This she had shown to Mr. Sorrell on the second night out, whilst after dinner they had reclined side by side in arm-chairs in a pleasant nook on the upper deck. Mr. Sorrell had taken it to a porthole to read, and he had gathered from it that young Egerton would be in the most damnable scrape in the world if he could not have two hundred and fifty pounds on the very moment that Mrs. Egerton landed at Southampton. Mr. Sorrell had returned to Mrs. Egerton in a frame of mind as grave as it was consolatory. He said that she might be quite sure it would be all right, though it was quite certain that the young Jack must be in as disgusting a hole as it was by any means possible for a young man to be in. And Mrs. Egerton, the enormous tears in her enormous eyes, plainly visible in the Atlantic moonlight, had declared to him that he could not by any possible means imagine what a mother’s feelings were like, or what a good boy her Jack really was. And at the thought that he might have to go to prison she shuddered all over her long and snake-like body. Mr. Sorrell said that of course it could not possibly come to that. Next evening, whilst they sat side by side at dinner in the à la carte restaurant of the upper deck, she suddenly thrust over his plate of hors-dœuvre, whilst the select band played, and the waiters appeared to skim through the air, a marconigram form bearing the words:
“Bulmer pressing. All up if necessary not here by eight to-morrow. God’s sake help. — Jack.”
“Oh well,” Mr. Sorrell had said cheerfully, “you must send your husband’s solicitors a message to wire the money to him.”
Mrs. Egerton stared at him with huge eyes. She swallowed an enormous something in her throat, and since she ate nothing else during that meal, Mr. Sorrell’s dinner was completely spoilt. She disappeared, indeed, before he had finished it, and Mr. Sorrell went to pace in solitude upon the comparatively deserted deck where, although they were only two days out and were not yet past the Banks, he had acquired the habit of expecting to find this charming lady. It was not, however, for at least an hour and a half, which in his impatience seemed an interminable agony, that, through the moonlight, she came to him and, exclaiming “I can’t do it!” burst into tears.
“You can’t do what?” Mr. Sorrell asked. And then there came out the whole lamentable story. Mr. Sorrell imagined that he must be the only man in London, or in the space between London and New York, who really understood what Mrs. Egerton was, just as he was the only one who would be really absolutely able from henceforth to champion her. But the immediately active part of her sad history was the fact that her husband allowed her the merest pittance — not twenty pounds a week — for her private needs; that his solicitors were instructed in the most peremptory manner never to advance her a penny of this pittance; that having come out expecting to exist upon the hospitality of the United States, she had upon her hardly more than her return ticket; that the real stones of her jewellery were all in pawn and replaced by imitations; and that she could not anyhow in the rest of the world, although she was surrounded by seeming friends, raise anything like the sum of a quarter of a thousand pounds. Her husband was fourteen days’ journey beyond the nearest telegraph station in the middle of a savage region.
“And oh,” she said, with a glance at the heaving bosom of the sea, “I couldn’t live if anything happened to Jack. I understand that they’d shave off the little ringlets that I used to twine round my fingers when he was an innocent boy saying his prayers at my knee.”
“Oh, of course, they wouldn’t do it at first,” Mr. Sorrell said. “Not while he was under remand. But it’s quite beastly enough that he should have committed — er — er — done the thing, without his being punished for it. In fact....” And after a good deal of hesitation and stammering Mr. Sorrell got out the offer to lend the lady the required sum.
She said, of course, she could not think of it; as her son had made his bed so he must lie; comparative strangers, however intimate their souls might feel, could not bring financial matters into their relationships; her husband would murder her if he came to hear of it, for Mr. Sorrell could have no conception of that gentleman’s ferocity. But the more she protested the more Mr. Sorrell thrust it upon her, and at last, in the midst of a burst of tears, Mrs. Lee-Egerton came to a pause. “There’s the Tamworth-Egerton crucifix,” she said.
Mr. Sorrell had never heard of the Tamworth-Egerton crucifix, and she explained to him that it was a gold beaten cross of unknown antiquity that had been in the hands of the family ever since the thirteenth century. It was considered to be of almost inestimable value and indeed the Jewellery Insurance Company had granted upon it a policy of £1,000. She had it actually upon the boat with her, for she had desired to impress certain choice members of American society by the sight of it now and then. If Mr. Sorrell would lend her the money, or still better, would wire it to her son, she would at once give the cross into his keeping until she could repay him.
Mr. Sorrell without more bargaining — for at the moment he did not want a cross or anything but this woman’s gratitude, had routed out the Marconi operator from his supper, and had telegraphed by private code to his bankers instructing them to pay £250 to Mr. Jack Lee-Egerton before noon on the morrow. And shortly afterwards in the public boudoir of the ship, Mrs. Egerton had handed over to him the Egerton cross in its leather case, in return for an acknowledgment from him, that he held it against the sum of £250 that day advanced.
In the corridor of the train Mr. Sorrell opened the leather case and looked at the battered, tarnished, light gold object. It was about the size of a dog biscuit and the thickness of a silver teaspoon, the cross being marked upon the flat surface with punched holes much indeed like those on the surface of a dog biscuit itself. And the feeling that had been lurking in the mind of Mr. Sorrell ever since, quitting the glamour of the ship, he had stepped upon the gangway at Southampton, put itself into the paralysing words: “Supposing I have been done!”
After all, he did not know anything about Mrs. Lee-Egerton, except that she was a Mrs. Lee-Egerton, and the other things that she had told him might or might not be true. This thing might just as well be a gilt fragment of a tin canister for all he knew. And upon the moment he snapped the case to and determined to return it to the lady. After all, if she were honest, she would pay him back the money in any case. If she was not the thing would not be worth keeping. And he swayed back into their compartment and sat down opposite her.
“I don’t at all like this speed,” she said. The train was shooting through round level stretches of heather. It seemed to sway now upon one set of wheels, now upon the other.
“That’s all right,” Mr. Sorrell said. “Nothing ever happens in these days. I’ve travelled I don’t know how many thousand miles in my life without coming across the shadow of an accident.” And he extended the jewel-case towards her. “Look here,” he said, “this thing’s too valuable for me to have in my possession. You take it. After all, you’re the best person to keep it.”
In the unromantic atmosphere of the railway carriage Mrs. Egerton appeared much older. She was dressed all in black and her face was very white and seamed, with dark patches of shadow like finger-prints beneath her eyes.
“No, you must keep it,” she said earnestly. “After all, it’s a thing to have had in one’s possession. Why, it was brought back from Palestine by Sir Stanley Egerton of Tamworth. Tamworth is quite close to here, and Sir Stanley, they say — that’s the touching old legend — died on landing on English soil, and the cross was carried to Tamworth by a converted Greek slave, who was dressed only in a linen shift and knew only two words of English — Egerton and Tamworth. Of course, Tamworth has been out of the family many centuries now, but the cross never has, never till this moment.”
And if Mrs. Egerton appeared to have grown older she appeared also to have grown more earnest. She leaned forward, and taking the cross out of the case she put it into Mr. Sorrell’s hands.
“Look at the funny, queer old thing,” she said. “And think of all it means, of loyalty and truth.”
“Well, I suppose it does if you say so,” Mr. Sorrell said. “You mean about the chap who carried it about in his nightshirt? I wonder how he travelled? I suppose they had stage coaches then, didn’t they?”
“Oh, good gracious no!” Mrs. Egerton answered. “He walked bare foot, and the country was beset with robbers all the way from Sandwich to here.”
“I don’t know that I should like to do that,” Mr. Sorrell said. “Though I suppose it would take off some flesh! But you don’t mean to say that they didn’t have any kind of public conveyance?”
“Dear me, no!” the lady answered. “It was in the year of the battle of Bannockburn. Sir Stanley set out with twenty knights and more than a hundred men-at-arms, and when he came back they were all dead and his only companion was this slave.”
“Well, that was a pretty heavy bill of mortality,” Mr. Sorrell said cheerfully. “The army doctors can’t have been worth very much in those days!”
“No, but don’t you see?” Mrs. Egerton said. “That’s why I should like you to keep the cross, if only for a little time. Since it was in the hands of that slave it hasn’t been out of the hands of an Egerton until now. But my son is the last of the family, and you’ve saved him from a dishonour worse than death quite as certainly as it is said that slave many times saved his master.”
“I guess,” Mr. Sorrell said, “that chap must have been a handy sort of fellow to have about one. You don’t get them like that now for thirty shillings a week. I’d just like to see one of my clerks walking from London to Brighton in his nightshirt carrying my gold stylo!”
“They say,” Mrs. Egerton went on, “he lived for some time at Tamworth and then he died. He’s said to have had weird gifts of prophecy and things. He prophesied steam-engines and people being able to speak to each other hundred of miles apart and their flying about in the air like birds. That’s recorded in the chronicle.”
