However there was no time and no necessity for any one to do anything.
The situation itself vanished in the financial crash as a building
vanishes in an earthquake--here one moment and gone the next with only an
ill-omened, slight, preliminary rumble. Well, to say 'in a moment' is an
exaggeration perhaps; but that everything was over in just twenty-four
hours is an exact statement. Fyne was able to tell me all about it; and
the phrase that would depict the nature of the change best is: an instant
and complete destitution. I don't understand these matters very well,
but from Fyne's narrative it seemed as if the creditors or the
depositors, or the competent authorities, had got hold in the twinkling
of an eye of everything de Barral possessed in the world, down to his
watch and chain, the money in his trousers' pocket, his spare suits of
clothes, and I suppose the cameo pin out of his black satin cravat.
Everything! I believe he gave up the very wedding ring of his late wife.
The gloomy Priory with its damp park and a couple of farms had been made
over to Mrs. de Barral; but when she died (without making a will) it
reverted to him, I imagine. They got that of course; but it was a mere
crumb in a Sahara of starvation, a drop in the thirsty ocean. I dare say
that not a single soul in the world got the comfort of as much as a
recovered threepenny bit out of the estate. Then, less than crumbs, less
than drops, there were to be grabbed, the lease of the big Brighton
house, the furniture therein, the carriage and pair, the girl's riding
horse, her costly trinkets; down to the heavily gold-mounted collar of
her pedigree St. Bernard. The dog too went: the most noble-looking item
in the beggarly assets.
What however went first of all or rather vanished was nothing in the
nature of an asset. It was that plotting governess with the trick of a
"perfect lady" manner (severely conventional) and the soul of a
remorseless brigand. When a woman takes to any sort of unlawful
man-trade, there's nothing to beat her in the way of thoroughness. It's
true that you will find people who'll tell you that this terrific
virulence in breaking through all established things, is altogether the
fault of men. Such people will ask you with a clever air why the servile
wars were always the most fierce, desperate and atrocious of all wars.
And you may make such answer as you can--even the eminently feminine one,
if you choose, so typical of the women's literal mind "I don't see what
this has to do with it!" How many arguments have been knocked over (I
won't say knocked down) by these few words! For if we men try to put the
spaciousness of all experiences into our reasoning and would fain put the
Infinite itself into our love, it isn't, as some writer has remarked, "It
isn't women's doing." Oh no. They don't care for these things. That
sort of aspiration is not much in their way; and it shall be a funny
world, the world of their arranging, where the Irrelevant would
fantastically step in to take the place of the sober humdrum Imaginative
. . . "