Читаем A Dangerous Fortune (1994) полностью

Everything was different now. Nora was his legal wife but Maisie was the mother of his son. Nora could look after herself--and so could Maisie, for that matter --but a child needed a father. Suddenly the question of what he was to do with the rest of his life was open again.

No doubt a clergyman would say that nothing had changed and he should stay with Nora, the woman he had married in church; but clergymen did not know much. The strict Methodism of the Pilasters had passed Hugh by: he had never been able to believe that the answer to every modern moral dilemma could be found in the Bible. Nora had seduced and married him for cold-hearted gain--Maisie was right about that--and all there was between them was a piece of paper. That was very little, weighed against a child--the child of a love so strong that it had persisted for many years and through many trials.

Am I just making excuses, he wondered? Is all this no more than a specious justification for giving in to a desire I know to be wrong?

He felt torn in two.

He tried to consider the practicalities. He had no grounds for divorce, but he felt sure that Nora would be willing to divorce him, if she were offered enough money. However, the Pilasters would ask him to resign from the bank: the social stigma of divorce was too great to allow him to continue as a partner. He could get another job but no respectable people in London would entertain him and Maisie as a couple even after they married. They would almost certainly have to go abroad. But that prospect attracted him and he felt it would appeal to Maisie too. He could return to Boston or, better still, go to New York. He might never be a millionaire but what was that balanced against the joy of being with the woman he had always loved?

He found himself outside his own house. It was part of an elegant new red-brick terrace in Kensington, half a mile from his aunt Augusta's much more extravagant place at Kensington Gore. Nora would be in her overdecorated bedroom, dressing for lunch. What was to stop him walking in and announcing that he was leaving her?

That was what he wanted to do, he knew that now. But was it right?

It was the child that made the difference. It would be wrong to leave Nora for Maisie; but it was right to leave Nora for the sake of Bertie.