Mr. de Barral’s bitterness at his hemmed-in freedom is not the only thing that has been standing in the way of Flora’s marital happiness. She has been foolish. There are more secrets here for Marlow to learn and more suppositions for him to make.
He knows from the Fynes that Miss de Barral and Captain Anthony, Mrs. Fyne’s brother, met at their vacation home, that they didn’t talk much but quietly started walking together, and that Miss de Barral followed Captain Anthony to London, sending a letter to Mrs. Fyne shortly after. This letter is an important artifact. Mrs. Fyne receives it and doesn’t read it to her husband, but based on its contents she wants him to take steps. She enlists Marlow for help in convincing her husband, and also doesn’t read it to Marlow or let him read it. Marlow cuts the knot of the Fynes’ disagreement by telling the husband to go along with his wife’s idea to go to London and tell Captain Anthony not to marry Flora, because surely doing so will have no effect on a man in love anyway.
This seems like good advice, but Marlow hasn’t read the letter and can’t anticipate that what Fyne will say about it—without having seen it either, of course—and it does, against all odds*, strongly affect Captain Anthony. He doesn’t call off the marriage, but he does do something rash that changes his relationship with Flora and significantly diminishes their happiness in the first part of their marriage. This will change only through the climactic scene that also results in the death of Flora’s father.
When Marlow recounts that scene later, he says:
“I believe that just then the tension of the false situation was at its highest. Of all the forms offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realize it fully, which is the most imperative. Pairing off is the fate of mankind. And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist the necessity, fail in understanding and voluntarily stop short of the—the embrace, in the noblest meaning of the word, then they are committing a sin against life, the call of which is simple. Perhaps sacred. And the punishment of it is an invasion of complexity, a tormenting, forcibly tortuous involution of feelings, the deepest form of suffering from which indeed something significant may come at least, which may be criminal or heroic, may be madness or wisdom—or even a straight if despairing decision.”
Why did she do that, they will say of Flora, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart? And of Anthony they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully? Marlow finally finds out, right at the end of the novel, when he finds Mrs. Anthony again after many years and asks her what was in “that famous letter which so upset Mrs. Fyne.”
“‘It was simply crude,’ she said earnestly. ‘I was feeling reckless and I wrote recklessly. I knew she would disapprove and I wrote foolishly. It was the echo of her own stupid talk. I said that I did not love her brother but that I had no scruples whatever in marrying him.’
“She paused, hesitating, then with a shy half-laugh.
“‘I really believed I was selling myself, Mr. Marlow. And I was proud of it. What I suffered afterwards I couldn’t tell you; because I only discovered my love for my poor Roderick through agonies of rage and humiliation. …’
…
“Again she paused, then going back in her thoughts. ‘No! There was no harm in that letter. It was simply foolish. What did I know of life then? Nothing. But Mrs. Fyne ought to have known better.'”
Fortunately, what comes out of it is heroic, and a “fine adventure.”
*I’m trying, really trying, not to get into “chance” stuff, but it’s hard to completely avoid.
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