The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford Page A

from
India." And that, indeed, is exactly how Leonora looked at it. It
is stated a little baldly, but Leonora was always a great one for
bald statements.
    What had happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of
M—— had been this:
    Leonora, who had been even then filled with pity and contrition
for the poor child, on returning to our hotel had gone straight to
Mrs Maidan's room. She had wanted just to pet her. And she had
perceived at first only, on the clear, round table covered with red
velvet, a letter addressed to her. It ran something like:
    "Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, how could you have done it? I trusted you
so. You never talked to me about me and Edward, but I trusted you.
How could you buy me from my husband? I have just heard how you
have—in the hall they were talking about it, Edward and the
American lady. You paid the money for me to come here. Oh, how
could you? How could you? I am going straight back to Bunny...."
Bunny was Mrs Maidan's husband.
    And Leonora said that, as she went on reading the letter, she
had, without looking round her, a sense that that hotel room was
cleared, that there were no papers on the table, that there were no
clothes on the hooks, and that there was a strained silence—a
silence, she said, as if there were something in the room that
drank up such sounds as there were. She had to fight against that
feeling, whilst she read the postscript of the letter.
    "I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress," the postscript
began. The poor child was hardly literate. "It was surely not right
of you and I never wanted to be one. And I heard Edward call me a
poor little rat to the American lady. He always called me a little
rat in private, and I did not mind. But, if he called me it to her,
I think he does not love me any more. Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you knew
the world and I knew nothing. I thought it would be all right if
you thought it could, and I thought you would not have brought me
if you did not, too. You should not have done it, and we out of the
same convent...."
    Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.
    And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she
began a search for Mrs Maidan herself—all over the hotel. The
manager said that Mrs Maidan had paid her bill, and had gone up to
the station to ask the Reiseverkehrsbureau to make her out a plan
for her immediate return to Chitral. He imagined that he had seen
her come back, but he was not quite certain. No one in the large
hotel had bothered his head about the child. And she, wandering
solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down beside a screen that
had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never heard then or
after what had passed between that precious couple. I fancy
Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor dear
Edward by addressing to him some words of friendly warning as to
the ravages he might be making in the girl's heart. That would be
the sort of way she would begin. And Edward would have
sentimentally assured her that there was nothing in it; that Maisie
was just a poor little rat whose passage to Nauheim his wife had
paid out of her own pocket. That would have been enough to do the
trick.
    For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic
growing and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every
one of the public rooms of the hotel—the dining-room, the lounge,
the schreibzimmer, the winter garden. God knows what they wanted
with a winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till
October. But there it was. And then Leonora ran—yes, she ran up the
stairs—to see if Maisie had not returned to her rooms. She had
determined to take that child right away from that hideous place.
It seemed to her to be all unspeakable. I do not mean to say that
she was not quite cool about it. Leonora was always Leonora. But
the cold justice of the thing demanded that she should play the
part of mother to this child who had come from the same convent.
She figured