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At any rate, I never heard until the very end what became of Mrs Rufford. Leonora never spoke of her. And then Major Rufford went to India, from which he returned very seldom and only for very short visits; and Nancy lived herself gradually into the life at Branshaw Teleragh. I think that, from that time onwards, she led a very happy life, till the end.
Branshaw had a great big hall with oak floors and tiger skins. Round this hall there ran a gallery upon which Leonora's doorway gave. And even when she had the worst of her headaches she liked to have her door open I suppose so that she might hear the approaching footsteps of ruin and disaster. At any rate she hated to be in a room with a shut door.
I have rushed through all Provence and all Provence no longer matters. It is no longer in the olive hills that I shall find my Heaven; because there is only Hell... . Edward is dead; the girl is gone oh, utterly gone; Leonora is having a good time with Rodney Bayham, and I sit alone in Branshaw Teleragh.
And, after that, a holy peace, like the peace of God which passes all understanding, descended upon Branshaw Teleragh. Leonora went about her daily duties with a sort of triumphant smile a very faint smile, but quite triumphant. I guess she had so long since given up any idea of getting her man back that it was enough for her to have got the girl out of the house and well cured of her infatuation.
Just near Branshaw Teleragh it was and we descended on it from the high, clear, windswept waste of the New Forest. I tell you it was amazing to arrive there from Waterbury. And it came into my head for Teddy Ashburnham, you remember, had cabled to me to "come and have a talk" with him that it was unbelievable that anything essentially calamitous could happen to that place and those people.
And Edward replied with his sort of sulky good nature: "As for you, you looked like old Mother Sideacher." The girl came swinging along, a silhouette beneath a gas-lamp; Edward, another, slouched at her side. They were talking just as they had talked any time since the girl had been seventeen; with the same tones, the same joke about an old beggar woman who always amused them at Branshaw.
All these things, and the continuance of them seemed to him to be his duty along with impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy Scouts and to provide prizes at cattle shows and antivivisection societies.... Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not continued. They could not possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at that rate after the money had gone to the Grand Duke's mistress.
With pushing and scraping and with letting Branshaw Teleragh, and with selling a picture and a relic of Charles I or so, had got and, poor dear, she had never had a really decent dress to her back in all those years and years she had got, as she imagined, her poor dear husband back into much the same financial position as had been his before the mistress of the Grand Duke had happened along.
She would no doubt have made him scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to his sense of humour, to his promises. But Mr Bagshawe and the fact that the date was the 4th of August must have been too much for her superstitious mind. You see, she had two things that she wanted. She wanted to be a great lady, installed in Branshaw Teleragh. She wanted also to retain my respect.
She was not a Roman Catholic for nothing. But she took so serious a view of Edward's unfaithfulness to the memory of poor little Maisie that she could not trust him any more at all. So when she got back to Branshaw she started, after less than a month, to worry him about the minutest items of his expenditure.
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