The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford Page B

origin. So there was no mistaking the sob she let go as
she went desolately away along the corridor. But Leonora was still
going to play up. She opened the door of Ashburnham's room quite
ostentatiously, so that Florence should hear her address Edward in
terms of intimacy and liking. "Edward," she called. But there was
no Edward there.
    You understand that there was no Edward there. It was then, for
the only time of her career, that Leonora really compromised
herself—She exclaimed.... "How frightful!... Poor little
Maisie!..."
    She caught herself up at that, but of course it was too late. It
was a queer sort of affair....
    I want to do Leonora every justice. I love her very dearly for
one thing and in this matter, which was certainly the ruin of my
small household cockle-shell, she certainly tripped up. I do not
believe—and Leonora herself does not believe—that poor little
Maisie Maidan was ever Edward's mistress. Her heart was really so
bad that she would have succumbed to anything like an impassioned
embrace. That is the plain English of it, and I suppose plain
English is best. She was really what the other two, for reasons of
their own, just pretended to be. Queer, isn't it? Like one of those
sinister jokes that Providence plays upon one. Add to this that I
do not suppose that Leonora would much have minded, at any other
moment, if Mrs Maidan had been her husband's mistress. It might
have been a relief from Edward's sentimental gurglings over the
lady and from the lady's submissive acceptance of those sounds. No,
she would not have minded.
    But, in boxing Mrs Maidan's ears, Leonora was just striking the
face of an intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a
frightfully painful scene with Edward.
    As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them
when she chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward's
affairs were in such a frightful state and he lied so about them
that she claimed the privilege of having his secrets at her
disposal. There was not, indeed, any other way, for the poor fool
was too ashamed of his lapses ever to make a clean breast of
anything. She had to drag these things out of him.
    It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that
afternoon, Edward being on his bed for the hour and a half
prescribed by the Kur authorities, she had opened a letter that she
took to come from a Colonel Hervey. They were going to stay with
him in Linlithgowshire for the month of September and she did not
know whether the date fixed would be the eleventh or the
eighteenth. The address on this letter was, in handwriting, as like
Colonel Hervey's as one blade of corn is like another. So she had
at the moment no idea of spying on him.
    But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward Ashburnham
was paying a blackmailer of whom she had never heard something like
three hundred pounds a year... It was a devil of a blow; it was
like death; for she imagined that by that time she had really got
to the bottom of her husband's liabilities. You see, they were
pretty heavy. What had really smashed them up had been a perfectly
common-place affair at Monte Carlo—an affair with a cosmopolitan
harpy who passed for the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke. She
exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl tiara from him as the price
of her favours for a week or so. It would have pipped him a good
deal to have found so much, and he was not in the ordinary way a
gambler. He might, indeed, just have found the twenty thousand and
the not slight charges of a week at an hotel with the fair
creature. He must have been worth at that date five hundred
thousand dollars and a little over. Well, he must needs go to the
tables and lose forty thousand pounds.... Forty thousand solid
pounds, borrowed from sharks! And even after that he must—it was an
imperative passion—enjoy the favours of the lady. He got them, of
course, when it was a matter of solid bargaining, for far less than
twenty thousand, as he might,