Si l’on vous a trahi, ce n’est pas la trahison qui importe; c’est le pardon qu’elle a fait na?tre dans votre ame. . . . Mais si la trahison n’a pas accru la simplicité, la confiance plus haute, l’étendue de l’amour, on vous aura trahi bien inutilement, et vous pouvez vous dire qu’il n’est rien arrivé.
— MAETERLINCK.
RACHEL and Hester were sitting in the shadow of the churchyard wall where Hester had so unfortunately fallen asleep on a previous occasion. It was the first of many clandestine meetings. Mr. and Mrs. Gresley did not realise that Hester and Rachel wished to “talk secrets,” as they would have expressed it, and Rachel’s arrival was felt by the Gresleys to be the appropriate moment to momentarily lay aside their daily avocations, and to join Hester and Rachel in the garden for social intercourse. The Gresleys liked Rachel. Listeners are generally liked. Perhaps also her gentle, unassuming manner was not an unpleasant change after the familiar nonchalance of the Pratts.
The two friends bore their fate for a time in inward impatience, and then, not without compunction, “practised to deceive.” Certain obtuse persons push others, naturally upright, into eluding and outwitting them, just as the really wicked people, who give viva voce invitations, goad us into crevasses of lies, for which, if there is any justice anywhere, they will have to answer at the last day. Mr. Gresley gave the last shove to Hester and Rachel by an exhaustive harangue on what he called socialism. Finding they were discussing some phase of it, he drew up a chair and informed them that he had “threshed out” the whole subject.
“Socialism,” he began, delighted with the polite resignation of his hearers, which throughout life he mistook for earnest attention. “Community of goods. People don’t see that if everything were divided up to-day, and everybody was given a shilling, by next week the thrifty man would have a sovereign, and the spendthrift would be penniless. Community of goods is impossible as long as human nature remains what it is. But I can’t knock that into people’s heads. I spoke of it once to Lord Newhaven, after his speech in the House of Lords. I thought he was more educated and a shade less thoughtless than the idle rich usually are, and that he would see it if it was put plainly before him. But he only said my arguments were incontrovertible, and slipped away.”
It was after this conversation, or rather, monologue, that Hester and Rachel arranged to meet by stealth.
They were sitting luxuriously in the short grass, with their backs against the churchyard wall, and their hats tilted over their eyes.
“I wish I had met this Mr. Dick five or six years ago,” said Rachel with a sigh.
Hester was the only person who knew about Rachel’s previous love disaster.
“Dick always gets what he wants in the long run,” said Hester. “I should offer to marry him at once if I were you. It will save a lot of trouble, and it will come to just the same in the end.”
Rachel laughed, but not light-heartedly. Hester had only put into words a latent conviction of her own which troubled her.
“Dick is the right kind of man to marry,” continued Hester, dispassionately. “What lights he has he lives up to. If that is not high praise I don’t know what is. He is good, but somehow his goodness does not offend one. One can condone it. And if you care for such things, he has a thorough-going respect for women, which he carries about with him in a little patent safe of his own.”
“I don’t want to marry a man for his qualities and mental furniture,” said Rachel, wearily. “If I did I would take Mr. Dick.”
There was a short silence.
“I am sure,” said Rachel at last, “that you do not realise how commonplace I am. You know those conventional heroines of second-rate novels who love tremendously once, and then, when things go wrong, promptly turn into marble statues, and go through life with hearts of stone. Well, my dear, I am just like that. I know it’s despicable. I have struggled against it. It is idiotic to generalise from one personal experience. I keep before my mind that other men are not like him. I know they aren’t, but yet — somehow I think they are. I am frightened.”
Hester turned her wide eyes towards her friend.
“Do you still consider after these four years that he did you an injury?”
Rachel looked out upon the mournful landscape. The weariness of midsummer was upon it. A heavy hand seemed laid upon the brow of the distant hills.
“I gave him everything I had,” she said slowly, “and he threw it away. I have nothing left for any one else. Perhaps it is because I am naturally economical,” she added, smiling faintly, “that it seems now, looking back, such a dreadful waste.”
“Only in appearance, not in reality,” said Hester. “It looks like a waste of life, that mowing down of our best years by a relentless passion which itself falls dead on the top of them. But it is not so. Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long run for having once in a lifetime ‘let out all the length of all the reins.’”
“You mean it did me good,” said Rachel, “and that he was a kind of benefactor in disguise. I dare say you are right, but you see I don’t take a burning interest in my own character. I don’t find my mental standpoint — isn’t that what Mrs. Loftus calls it? — very engrossing.”
“He was a benefactor all the same,” said Hester with decision. “I did not think so at the time, and if I could have driven over him in an omnibus I would have done so with pleasure. But I believe that the day will come when you will cover that grave with a handsome monument, erected out of gratitude to him for not marrying you. And now, Rachel, will you forgive me beforehand for what I am going to say?”
“Oh!” said Rachel ruefully. “When you say that I know it is the prelude to something frightful. You are getting out a dagger, and I shall be its sheath directly.”
“You are a true prophet, Rachel.”
“Yes, executioner.”
“My dear, dear friend, whom I love best in the world, when that happened my heart was wrung for you. I would have given everything I had, life itself — not that that is saying much — to have saved you from that hour.”
“I know it.”
“But I should have been the real enemy if I had had power to save you, which, thank God, I had not. That hour had to be. It was necessary. You may not care about your own character, but I do. There is something stubborn and inflexible in you — the seamy side of your courage and steadfastness — which cannot readily enter into the feelings of others or put itself in their place. I think it is want of imagination — I mean the power of seeing things as they are. You are the kind of woman who, if you had married comfortably some one you rather liked, might have become like Sybell Loftus, who never understands any feeling beyond her own microscopic ones, and who measures love by her own small preference for Doll. You would have had no more sympathy than she has. People, like Sybell, believe one can only sympathise with what one has experienced. That is why they are always saying ‘as a mother,’ or ‘as a wife.’ If that were true the world would have to get on without sympathy, for no two people have the same experience. Only a shallow nature believes that a resemblance in two cups means that they both contain the same wine. Sybell believes it, and you would have been very much the same, not from lack of perception, as in her case, but for want of using your powers of perception. If you had not undergone an agonised awakening all the great realities of life — love, hatred, temptation, enthusiasm — would have remained for you as they have remained for Sybell, merely pretty words to string on light conversation. That is why I can’t bear to hear her speak of them because every word she says proves she has not known them. But the sword that pierced your heart forced an entrance for angels, who had been knocking where there was no door — until then.”
Silence.
“Since when is it that people have turned to you for comfort and sympathy?”
No answer.
“Rachel, on your oath, did you ever really care for the London poor until you became poor yourself, and lived among them?”
“No.”
“But they were there all the time. You saw them in the streets. It was not as if you only heard of them. You saw them. Their agony, their vice, was written large on their faces. There was a slum almost at the back of that great house in Portman Square where you lived many years in luxury with your parents.”
“Don’t,” said Rachel, her lip trembling.
“I must. You did not care then. If a flagrant case came before you you gave something like other uncharitable people who hate feeling uncomfortable. But you care now. You seek out those who need you. Answer me. Were they cheaply bought or not, that compassion and love for the degraded and the suffering, which were the outcome of your years of poverty in Museum Buildings?”
“They were cheaply bought,” said Rachel with conviction, speaking with difficulty.
“Would you have learnt them if you had gone on living in Portman Square?”
“Oh, Hester! would anybody?”
“Yes, they would. But that is not the question. Would you?”
“N— no,” said Rachel.
There was a long silence.
Rachel’s mind took its staff and travelled slowly, humbly, a few more difficult steps up that steep path where “Experience is converted into thought as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin.”
At last she turned her grave eyes upon her friend.
“I see what you mean,” she said, “I have not reached the place yet, but I can believe that I shall come to it some day when I shall feel as thankful for that trouble as I do feel now for having known poverty. Yes, Hester, you are right. I was a hard woman without imagination. I have been taught in the only way I could learn — by experience. I have been very fortunate.”
Hester did not answer, but bent down and kissed Rachel’s hands. It was as if she had said, “Forgive me for finding fault with one so far above me.” And the action was so understood.
Rachel coloured, and they sat for a moment hand close in hand, heart very near to heart.
“How is it you are so sure of these things, Hester?” said Rachel in a whisper. “When you say them I see they are true, and I believe them, but how do you know them?”
A shadow, a very slight one, fell across Hester’s face. “‘Love knows the secret of grief.’ But can Love claim that knowledge if he is asked how he came by it by one who should have known?” The question crept in between the friends and moved them apart. Hester’s voice altered.
“Minna would say that I picked them up from the conversation of James. You know the Pratts are perfectly aware of what I have, of course, tried to conceal, namely, that the love scenes in the ‘Idyll’ were put together from scraps I had collected of James’ engagement to Minna. And all the humorous bits are claimed by a colony of cousins in Devonshire who say that any one ‘who had heard them talk’ could have written the ‘Idyll.’ And any one who had not heard them apparently. The so-called profane passages are all that are left to me as my own.”
“You are profane now,” said Rachel smiling, but secretly wounded by the flippancy which she had brought upon herself.
A distant whoop distracted their attention, and they saw Regie galloping towards them imitating a charger, while Fraülein and the two little girls followed.
Regie stopped short before Rachel, and looked suspiciously at her.
“Where is Uncle Dick?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Rachel, reddening in spite of herself, and her eyes falling guiltily before her questioner.
“Then he has not come with you?”
Regie’s mind was what his father called ‘sure and steady.’ Mr. Gresley often said he preferred a child of that kind to one that was quick-witted and flashy.
“No, he has not come with me.”
“Mary,” shrieked Regie, “he has not come.”
“I knew he had not,” said Mary. “When I saw he was not there I knew he was somewhere else.”
Dear little Mary was naturally the Gresleys’ favourite child. However thoroughly they might divest themselves of parental partiality, they could not but observe that she was as sensible as a grown-up person.
“I thought he might be somewhere near,” explained Regie, “in a tree or something,” looking up into the little yew. “You can’t tell with a conjurer like Uncle Dick, can you Auntie Hester, whatever Mary may say?”
“Mary is generally wrong,” said Hester, “but she is right or once.”
Mary, who was early acquiring the comfortable habit of hearing only the remarks that found an echo in her own breast, heard she was right, and said shrilly:
“I told Regie when we was still on the road that Uncle Dick wasn’t there. Mother doesn’t always go with father, but he said he’d run and see.”
“We shall be very late for luncheon,” said Fraülein hastily, blushing down to the onyx brooch at her turn-down collar, and drawing Mary away.
“Perhaps he left the halfpenny with you,” said Regie. “Fraülein would like to see it.”
“No, no,” said Fraülein, the tears in her eyes. “I do not vish at all. I cry half the night when I hear of it.”
“I only cry when baby beats me,” said Mary, balancing on one leg.
“I have not got the halfpenny,” said Rachel, the three elders studiously ignoring Mary’s personal reminiscences.
The children were borne away by Fraülein, and the friends kissed and parted.
“I am coming to Wilderleigh tomorrow,” said Rachel. “I shall be much nearer to you then.”
“It is no good contending against Dick and fate,” said Hester, shaking her finger at her. “You see it is all decided for you. Even the children have settled it.”
If a fool be associated with a wise man all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup.
— Buddist Dhaammapada.
“I CAN’T think what takes you to Wilderleigh,” said Lady Newhaven to Rachel. “I am always bored to death when I go there. Sybell is so self-centred.”
Perhaps one of the reasons why Lady Newhaven and Sybell Loftus did not “get on,” was owing to a certain superficial resemblance between them.
Both exacted attention, and if they were in the same room together it seldom contained enough attention to supply the needs of both. Both were conscious, like “Celia Chettam,” that since the birth of their first child their opinions respecting literature, politics, and art had acquired additional weight and solidity, and that a wife and mother could pronounce with decision on important subjects where a spinster would do well to hold her peace. Each was fond of saying, “As a married woman I think this or that”; yet each was conscious of dislike and irritation when she heard the other say it. And there is no doubt that Sybell had been too unwell to appear at Lady Newhaven’s garden party the previous summer, because Lady Newhaven had the week before advanced her cherished theory of “one life one love,” to the delight of Lord Newhaven, and the natural annoyance of Sybell, whose second husband was at that moment handing tea, and answering, “That depends,” when appealed to.
“As if,” as Sybell said afterwards to Hester, “a woman can help being the ideal of two men.”
“Sybell is such a bore now,” continued Lady Newhaven, “that I don’t know what she will be when she is older. I don’t know why you go to Wilderleigh of all places.”
“I go because I am asked,” said Rachel, “and partly because I shall be near Hester Gresley.”
“I don’t think Miss Gresley can be very anxious to see you, or she would have come here when I invited her. I told several people she was coming, and that Mr. Carstairs, who thinks so much of himself, came on purpose to meet her. It is very tiresome of her to behave like that, especially as she did not say she had any engagement. You make a mistake Rachel, in running after people who won’t take any trouble to come and see you. It is a thing I never do myself.”
“She is buried in her book at present.”
“I can’t think what she has to write about. But I suppose she picks up things from other people.”
“I think so. She is a close observer.”
“I think you are wrong, there, Rachel, for when she was here some years ago, she never looked about her at all. And I asked her how she judged of people, and she said, ‘By appearances.’ Now that was very silly, because as I explained to her, appearances were most deceptive, and I had often thought a person with a cold manner was cold-hearted, and afterwards found I was quite mistaken.”
Rachel did not answer. She wondered in what the gift consisted, which Lady Newhaven and Sybell both possessed, of bringing all conversation to a standstill.
“It seems curious,” said Lady Newhaven after a pause, “how the books are mostly written by the people who know least of life. Now the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese.’ People think so much of them. I was looking at them the other day. Why, they are nothing to what I have felt. I sometimes think if I wrote a book — I don’t mean that I have any special talent — but if I really sat down and wrote a book with all the deep side of life in it, and one’s own religious feelings, and described love and love’s tragedy as they really are, what a sensation it would make. It would take the world by storm.”
“Any book dealing sincerely with one of those subjects could not fail to be a great success.”
“Oh, yes. I am not afraid I should fail. I do wish you were not going, Rachel. We have so much in common. And it is such a comfort to be with some one who knows what one is going through. I believe you feel the suspense, too, for my sake.”
“I do feel it — deeply.”
“I sometimes think,” said Lady Newhaven, her face ageing suddenly under an emotion so disfiguring that Rachel’s eyes fell before it. “I am sometimes almost certain that Edward drew the short lighter. Oh! do you think if he did he will really act up to it when the time comes?”
“If he drew it he will certainly take the consequences.”
“Will he, do you think? I am almost sure he drew it. He is doing so many little things that look as if he knew he were not going to live. I heard Mr. Carstairs ask him to go to Norway with him next spring, and Edward laughed, and said he never looked more than a few months ahead.”
“I am afraid he may have said that intending you to hear it.”
“But he did not intend me to hear it. I overheard it.”
Rachel’s face fell.
“You did promise after you told me about the letter that you would never do that kind of thing again.”
“Well, Rachel, I have not. I have not even looked at his letters since. I could not help it that once, because I thought he might have told his brother in India. But don’t you think his saying that to Mr. Carstairs looks —”
Rachel shook her head.
“He is beyond me,” she said. “There may be something more behind which we don’t know about.”
“I have a feeling, it has come over me again and again lately, that I shall be released, and that Hugh and I shall be happy together yet.”
And Lady Newhaven turned her face against the high back of her carved oak chair, and sobbed hysterically.
“Could you be happy if you had brought about Lord Newhaven’s death?” said Rachel.
Her voice was full of tender pity, not for the crouching unhappiness before her, but for the poor atrophied soul. Could she reach it? She would have given everything she possessed at that moment for one second of Christ’s power to touch those blind eyes to sight.
“How can you say such things. I should not have brought it about. I did not even know of that dreadful drawing of lots till the thing was done. That was all his own doing.”
Rachel sighed. The passionate yearning towards her companion shrank back upon herself.
“The fault is in me,” she said to herself. “If I were purer, humbler, more loving, I might have been allowed to help her.”
Lady Newhaven rose, and held Rachel tightly in her arms.
“I count the days,” she said hoarsely, shaking from head to foot. “It is two months and three weeks to-day. November the twenty-ninth. You will promise faithfully to come to me and be with me then? You will not desert me? Whatever happens you will be sure — to come?”
“I will come. I promise,” said Rachel. And she stooped and kissed the closed eyes. She could at least do that.
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind.
— Song of the Bandar-log.
RACHEL arrived after tea at Wilderleigh, and went straight to her room on a plea of fatigue. It was a momentary cowardice that tempted her to yield to her fatigue. She felt convinced that she should meet Hugh Scarlett at Wilderleigh. She had no reason for the conviction beyond the very inadequate one that she had met him at Sybell’s London house. Nevertheless she felt sure that he would be among the guests, and she longed for a little breathing space after parting with Lady Newhaven before she met him. Presently Sybell flew in and embraced her with effusion.
“Oh! what you have missed!” she said breathlessly. “But you do look tired. You were quite right to lie down before dinner, only you aren’t lying down. We have had such a conversation downstairs. The others are all out boating with Doll but Mr. Harvey, the great Mr. Harvey, you know.”
“I am afraid I don’t know.”
“Oh yes, you do. The author of ‘Unashamed’.”
“I remember now.”
“Well, he is here, resting after his new book, ‘Rahab.’ And he has been reading us the opening chapters, just to Miss Barker and me. It is quite wonderful. So painful, you know. He does not spare the reader anything, he thinks it wrong to leave out anything, but so powerful.”
“Is it the same Miss Barker whom I met at your house in the season who denounced ‘The Idyll’?”
"Yes. How she did cut it up. You see she knows all about East London, and that sort of thing. I knew you would like to meet her again because you are philanthropic, too. She hardly thought she could spare the time to come, but she thought she would go back fresher if the wail were out of her ears for a week. The wail! Isn’t it dreadful. I feel we ought to do more than we do, don’t you?” “We ought, indeed.” “But, then, you see as a married woman — I can’t leave my husband and child, and bury myself in the East End, can I?” “Of course not. But surely it is an understood thing that marriage exempts women from all impersonal duties.” “Yes, that is just it. How well you put it. But others could. I often wonder why after writing ‘The Idyll’ Hester never goes near East London. I should have gone straight off, and have cast in my lot with them if I had been in her place.” “Do you ever find people do what you would have done if you had been in their place?” “No, never. They don’t seem to see it. It’s a thing I can’t understand, the way people don’t act up to their convictions. And I do know, though I would not tell Hester so for worlds, that the fact that she goes on living comfortably in the country after bringing out that book makes thoughtful people, not me, of course, but other earnest-minded people, think she is a humbug.” “It would — naturally,” said Rachel. “Well, now I am glad you agree with me, for I said something of the same kind to Mr. Scarlett last night, and he could not see it. He’s rather obtuse. I daresay you remember him?” “Perfectly.” “I don’t care about him, he is so superficial, and Miss Barker says he is very lethargic in conversation. I asked him because — don’t breathe a word of it — but because as a married woman one ought to help others, and — do you remember how he stood up for Hester that night in London?” “For her book, you mean.” “Well, it’s all one. Men are men, my dear. Let me tell you he would never have done that if he had not been in love with her.” “Do you mean that men never defend obvious truths unless they are in love!” “Now you are pretending to misunderstand me,” said Sybell joyously, making her little squirrel face into a becoming pout. “But it’s no use trying to take me in. And it’s coming right. He’s there at this moment!” “At the Vicarage?” “Where else! I asked him to go. I urged him. I said I felt sure she expected him. One must help on these things.” “But if he is obtuse and lethargic and superficial, is he likely to suit Hester?” “My dear, the happiest lot for a woman is marriage. And you and I are Hester’s friends. So we ought to do all we can for her happiness. That is why I just mentioned this.” The dressing-gong began to boom. “I must fly,” said Sybell, depositing a butterfly kiss on Rachel’s forehead. And she flew. “I wish I knew what I felt about him,” said Rachel to herself. “I don’t much like hearing him called obtuse and superficial, but I suppose I should like still less to hear Sybell praise him. I have never heard her praise anything but mediocrity yet.” If Rachel had been at all introspective she might have found a clue as to her feeling for Hugh in the unusual care with which she arranged her hair, and her decision at the last moment to discard the pale-green gown lying in state on the bed for a white satin one embroidered at long intervals with rose-coloured carnations. The gown was a masterpiece, designed especially for her by a great French milliner. Rachel often wondered whose eyesight had been strained over those marvellous carnations, but to-night she did not give them a thought. She looked with grave dissatisfaction at her pale nondescript face and nondescript hair and eyes. She did not know that only women with marriageable daughters saw her as she saw herself in the glass. As she left her room a door opened at the further end of the same wing, and a tall man came out. The middle-class element in her said, “Superfine.” His fastidious taste said, “A plain woman.” In another instant they recognised each other. “Superfine! What nonsense,” she thought, as she met his eager tremulous glance. “A plain woman. Rachel plain!” He had met the welcome in her eyes, and there was beauty in every movement, grace in every fold of her white gown. As they met the gong suddenly boomed out close beneath them, and they could only smile at each other as they shook hands. The butler, who was evidently an artist in his way, proved the gong to the uttermost; and they had descended the staircase together, and had crossed the hall before its dying tremors allowed them to speak. As he was about to do so he saw her wince suddenly. She was looking straight in front of her at the little crowd in the drawing-room. For an instant her face turned from white to grey, and she involuntarily put out her hand as if to ward off something. Then a lovely colour mounted to her cheek; she drew herself up and entered the room, while Hugh, behind her, looked fiercely at each man in succession. It is always the unexpected that happens. As Rachel’s half-absent eyes passed over the group in the brilliantly lighted drawing-room her heart reared without warning and fell back upon her. She had only just sufficient presence of mind to prevent her hand pressing itself against her heart. He was there, he was before her — the man whom she had loved with passion for four years, and who had tortured her. Mr. Harvey (the great Mr. Harvey) strode forward, and Rachel found her hand engulfed in a large soft hand which seemed to have a poached egg in the palm. “This is a pleasure to which I have long looked forward,” murmured the great man, all cuff and solitaire, bending in what he would have termed a “chivalrous manner” over Rachel’s hand; while Doll, standing near, wondered drearily “why these writing chaps were always such bounders.” Rachel passed on to greet Miss Barker, standing on the hearthrug, this time in magenta velveteen, but presumably still tired of the Bible, conversing with Rachel’s former lover, whose eyes were on the floor, and whose hand gripped the mantelpiece. He had seen her — recognised her. “May I introduce Mr. Tristram?” said Sybell to Rachel. “We have met before,” said Rachel gently, as he bowed without looking at her, and she put out her hand. He was obliged to touch it, obliged to meet for one moment the clear calm eyes that had once held boundless love for him, boundless trust in him; that had, as he well knew, wept themselves half blind for him. Mr. Tristram was one of the many who judge their actions in the light of after circumstances, and who towards middle age discover that the world is a treacherous world. He had not been “in a position to marry” when he had fallen in love with Rachel. But he had been as much in love with her as was consistent with a permanent prudential passion for himself and his future, that future which the true artist must ever preserve untrammelled. “High hopes faint on a warm hearthstone,” &c. He had felt keenly breaking with Rachel. Later on, when a tide of wealth flowed up to the fifth floor of Museum Buildings, he had recognised for the first time that he had made a great mistake in life. To the smart of baffled love had been added acute remorse, not so much for wealth missed as for having inflicted upon himself and upon her a frightful and unnecessary pain. But how could he have foreseen such a thing? How could he tell? he had asked himself in mute stupefaction when the news reached him. What a cheat life was! What a fickle jade was Fortune! Since the memorable day when Rachel had found means to lay the ghost that haunted her he had made no sign. “I hardly expected you would remember me,” he said, catching at his self-possession. “I have a good memory,” she said, aware that Miss Barker was listening, and that Hugh was bristling at her elbow. “And the little Spanish boy whom you were so kind to, and who lodged just below me in Museum Buildings, has not forgotten either. He still asks after the ‘Cavaliere’.” “Mr. Tristram is positively blushing at being confronted with his good deeds,” said Sybell, intervening on discovering that the attention of some of her guests had been distracted from herself. “Yes, darling”— to her husband —“you take in Lady Jane. Mr. Scarlett, will you take in Miss West?” “I have been calling on your friend, Miss Gresley,” said Hugh, after he had overcome his momentary irritation at finding Mr. Harvey was on Rachel’s other side. “I did not know until her brother dined here last night that she lived so near.” “Did not Mrs. Loftus tell you?” said Rachel, with a remembrance of Sybell’s remarks before dinner. “She told me after I had mentioned my wish to go and see her. She even implored me so repeatedly to go that I—” “Nearly did not go at all.” “Exactly. But in this case I persevered because I am, or hope I am, a friend of hers. But I was not rewarded.” “I thought you said you had seen her.” “Oh, yes, I saw her, and I saw that she looked very ill. But I found it impossible to have any conversation with her in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Gresley. Whenever I spoke to her Mr. Gresley answered, and sometimes Mrs. Gresley also. In fact, Mr. Gresley considered the call as paid to himself. Mrs. Loftus tells me he is much cleverer than his sister, but I did not gain that impression. And after I had given tongue to every platitude I could think of I had to take my leave.” “Hester ought to have come to the rescue.” “She did try. She offered to show me the short cut to Wilderleigh across the fields. But unluckily —” “I can guess what you are going to say.” “I am sure you can. Mr. Gresley accompanied us, and Miss Gresley turned back at the first gate.” “You have my sympathy.” “I hope I have, for I have had a severe time of it. Mr. Gresley was most cordial,” continued Hugh ruefully, “and said what a pleasure it was to him to meet any one who was interested in intellectual subjects. I suppose he was referring to my platitudes. He said living in the country cut him off almost entirely from the society of his mental equals, so much so that at times he had thoughts of moving to London, and making a little centre for intellectual society. According to him the whole neighbourhood was sunk in a state of hopeless apathy, with the exception of Mrs. Loftus. He said she was the only really clever cultivated person in Middleshire.” “Did he? How about the Bishop of Southminster?” “He did not mention him. My acquaintance with Mrs. Loftus is of the slightest,” added Hugh, interrogatively, looking at his graceful, animated hostess. “I imagined you knew her fairly well, as you are staying here.” “No. She asked me rather late in the day. I fancy I was a ‘fill up.’ I accepted in the hope, rather a vague one, that I might meet you here.” To Rachel’s surprise her heart actually paid Hugh the compliment of beating a shade faster than its wont. She looked straight in front of her, and her absent eyes fell on Mr. Tristram sitting opposite, talking somewhat sulkily to Miss Barker. Rachel looked steadily at him. Mr. Tristram had been handsome once, and four years had altered him but little in that respect. He had not yet grown stout, but it was evident that Nature had that injury in reserve for him. To grow stout is not necessarily to look common, but if there is an element of inherent commonness in man or woman, a very little additional surface will make it manifest, as an enlarged photograph magnifies its own defects. The “little more and how much it is” had come upon the unhappy Tristram, once the slimmest of the slim. Life had evidently not gone too well with him. Self-pity and the harassed look which comes of annoyance with trifles had set their mark upon him. His art had not taken possession of him. “High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone.” But they sometimes faint also in bachelor lodgings. The whole effect of the man was second rate, mentally, morally, socially. He seemed exactly on a par with the second-rate friends with whom Sybell loved to surround herself. Hugh and Dick were taking their revenge on the rival who blocked their way. Whatever their faults might be, they were gentlemen, and Mr. Tristram was only “a perfect gentleman.” Rachel had not known the difference when she was young. She saw it now. “I trust, Miss West,” said the deep voice of the Harvey, revolving himself and his solitaire slowly towards her, “that I have your sympathy in the great cause to which I have dedicated myself, the emancipation of woman.” “I thought the new woman had effected her own emancipation,” said Rachel. Mr. Harvey paid no more attention to her remark than any one with a theory to propound which must be delivered to the world as a whole. “I venture to think,” he continued, his heavy, lustreless eyes coming to a standstill upon her, “that though I accept in all reverence the position of woman as the equal of man, as promulgated in ‘The Princess,’ by our lion-hearted Laureate, nevertheless I advance beyond him in that respect. I hold,” in a voice calculated to impress the whole table, “that woman is man’s superior, and that she degrades herself when she endeavours to place herself on an equality with him.” There was a momentary silence, like that which travellers tell us succeeds the roar of the lion in his primeval forest, silencing even the twitter of the birds. “How true that is,” said Sybell, awed by the lurid splendour of Mr. Harvey’s genius. “Woman is man’s superior, not his equal. I have felt that all my life, but I never quite saw how until this moment. Don’t you think so, too, Miss Barker?” “I have never lost an opportunity of asserting it,” said the Apostle, her elbow on Mr. Tristram’s bread, looking at Mr. Harvey with some asperity, for poaching on her manor. “All sensible women have been agreed for years on that point.” Chapter XXIII With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish ’twere done! Not till the hours of light return, All we have built do we discern. — MATTHEW ARNOLD. IT was Sunday morning. The night was sinking out of the sky to lean faint unto death upon the bosom of the earth. The great forms of the trees, felt rather than seen, were darkness made visible. Among the night of high elms round Warpington a single yellow light burned in an upper window. It had been burning all night. And now, as the night waned, the little light waned with it. At last, it was suddenly blown out. Hester came to the window and looked out. There was light, but there was no dawn as yet. In the grey sky over the grey land the morning star, alone and splendid, kept watch in the east. She sat down and leaned her brow against the pane. She did not know that it was aching. She did not know that she was cold, exhausted, so exhausted that the morning star in the outer heaven and the morning star in her soul were to her the same. They stooped together, they merged into one great light, heralding a perfect day presently to be. The night was over, and that other long night of travail and patience and faith, and strong rowing in darkness against the stream, was over, too, at last — at last. The book was finished. The tears fell slowly from Hester’s eyes on to her clasped hands, those blessed tears which no human hand shall ever intervene to wipe away. To some of us Christ comes in the dawn of the spiritual life walking upon the troubled waves of art. And we recognise Him, and would fain go to meet Him. But our companions and our own fears dissuade us. They say it is only a spirit, and that Christ does not walk on water, that the land whither we are rowing is the place He has Himself appointed for us to meet Him. So our little faith keeps us in the boat, or fails us in the waves of that wind-swept sea. It seemed to Hester as if once, long ago, shrinking and shivering, she had stood in despair upon the shore of a great sea, and had heard a voice from the other side say, “Come over.” She had stopped her ears, she had tried not to go. She had shrunk back a hundred times from the cold touch of the water that each time she essayed let her trembling foot through it. And now, after an interminable interval, after she had trusted and doubted, had fallen and been sustained, had met the wind and the rain, after she had sunk in despair, and risen again, she knew not how, now at length a great wave — the last — had cast her up half-drowned upon the shore. A miracle had happened. She had reached the other side, and was lying in a great peace after the storm upon the solemn shore under a great white star. Hester sat motionless. The star paled and paled before the coming of a greater than he. Across the pause which God has set ‘twixt night and day came the first word of the robin. It reached Hester’s ear as from another world, a world that had been left behind. The fragmentary notes floated up to her from an immeasurable distance like scattered bubbles through deep water. The day was coming. God’s creatures of tree and field and hill took form. Man’s creature, the little stout church in their midst, thrust once more its plebeian outline against God’s sky. Dim shapes moved athwart the vacancy of the meadows. Voices called through the grey. Close against the eaves a secret was twittered, was passed from beak to beak. In the nursery below a little twitter of waking children broke the stillness of the house. But Hester did not hear it. She had fallen into a deep sleep in the low window-seat, with her pale forehead against the pane; a sleep so deep that even the alarum of the baby did not rouse her, nor the entrance of Emma with the hot water. “James,” said Mrs. Gresley, an hour later, as she and her husband returned through the white mist from early celebration, “Hester was not there. I thought she had promised to come.” “She had.” There was a moment’s silence. “Perhaps she is not well,” said Mr. Gresley, closing the churchyard gate into the garden. Mrs. Gresley’s heart swelled with a sense of injustice. She had often been unwell, often in feeble health before the birth of her children, but had she ever pleaded ill-health as an excuse for absenting herself from one of the many services which her husband held to be the mainspring of the religious life? “I do not think she can be very unwell. She is standing by the magnolia now,” she said, her lip quivering, and withdrawing her hand from her husband’s arm. She almost hated the slight graceful figure, which was not of her world, which was, as she thought, coming between her and her husband. “I will speak seriously to her,” said Mr. Gresley, dejectedly, who recollected that he had “spoken seriously” to Hester many times at his wife’s instigation without visible result. And as he went alone to meet his sister he prayed earnestly that he might be given the right word to say to her. A ray of sunlight, faint as an echo, stole through the lingering mist, parting it on either hand, and fell on Hester. Hester, standing in a white gown under the the veiled trees in a glade of silver and trembling opal, which surely mortal foot had never trod, seemed infinitely removed from him. Dimly he felt that she was at one with this mysterious morning world, and that he, the owner, was an alien and a trespasser in his own garden. But a glimpse of his cucumber frames in the background reassured him. He advanced with a firmer step, as one among allies. Hester did not hear him. She was gazing with an absorption that shut out all other sights and sounds at the solitary blossom on the magnolia tree. Yesterday it had been a bud. But to-day the great almond white petals which guarded it, overlapping each other so jealously, had opened wide, and the perfect flower, keeping nothing back, had laid bare all its pure white soul before its God. As Mr. Gresley stopped beside her, Hester turned her little pinched ravaged face towards him and smiled. Something of the passionate self-surrender of the flower was reflected in her eyes. “Dear Hester,” he said, seeing only the wan drawn face. “Are you ill?” “Yes. No. I don’t think so,” said Hester tremulously, recalled suddenly to herself. She looked hastily about her. The world of dew and silver had deserted her, had broken like an iridescent bubble at a touch. The magnolia withdrew itself. Hester found herself suddenly transplanted into the prose of life, emphasised by a long clerical coat, and a bed of Brussels sprouts. “I missed you,” said Mr. Gresley with emphasis. “Where? When?” Hester’s eyes had lost their fixed look, and stared vacantly at him. Mr. Gresley tried to subdue his rising annoyance. Hester was acting, pretending not to understand, and he saw through it. “At God’s altar,” he said gravely, the priest getting the upper hand of the man. “Have you not found me, there?” said Hester below her breath, but so low that fortunately her brother did not catch the words, and was spared their profanity. “I will appeal to her better feelings,” he said to himself. “They must be there if I can only touch them.” He did not know that in order to touch the better feelings of our fellow creatures we must be able to reach up to them, or by reason of our low stature we may succeed only in appealing to the lowest in them in spite of our tip-toe good intentions. Is that why such appeals too often meet with bitter sarcasm and indignation? But fortunately a robust belief in the assiduities of the devil as the cause of all failures, and a conviction that whoso opposed Mr. Gresley opposed the Deity, supported and blindfolded the young Vicar in emergencies of this kind. He spoke earnestly and at length to his sister. He waved aside her timid excuse that she had overslept herself after a sleepless night, and had finished dressing but the moment before he found her in the garden. He entreated her to put aside such insincerity as unworthy of her. He reminded her of the long months she had spent at Warpington with its peculiar spiritual opportunities; that he should be to blame if he did not press upon her the first importance of the religious life, the ever-present love of God, and the means of approaching Him through the sacraments. He entreated her to join her prayers with his that she might be saved from the worship of her own talent which had shut out the worship of God, from this dreadful indifference to holy things, and the impatience of all religious teaching which he grieved to see in her. He spoke well, the earnest blind would be leader endeavouring to guide her to the ditch from which he knew not how she had emerged, passionately distressed at the opposition he met with as he would have drawn her lovingly towards it. The tears were in Hester’s eyes, but the eyes themselves were as flint seen through water. She stifled many fierce and cruel impulses to speak as plainly as he did, to tell him that it was not religion that was abhorrent to her, but the form in which he presented it to her, and that the sin against the Holy Ghost was disbelief, like his in the religion of others. But when have such words availed anything? When have they been believed? Hester had a sharp tongue, and she was slowly learning to beware of it as her worst enemy. She laid down many weapons before she trusted herself to speak. “It is good of you to care what becomes of me,” she said gently, but her voice was cold. “I am sorry you regard me as you do. But from your point of view you were right to speak — as — as you have done. I value the affection that prompted it.” “She can’t meet me fairly,” said Mr. Gresley to himself, with sudden anger at the meanness of such tactics. “They say she is so clever, and she can’t refute a word I say. She appears to yield and then defies me. She always puts me off like that.” The sun had vanquished the mist, and in the brilliant light the two figures moved silently side by side back to the house, one with something very like rage in his heart, the rage that in bygone days found expression in stake and faggot. Perhaps the heaviest trouble which Hester was ever called upon to bear had its mysterious beginnings on that morning of opal and gossamer when the magnolia opened. Chapter XXIV Il le fit avec des arguments inconsistants et irréfutables, de ces arguments qui fondent devant la raison comme la neige au feu, et qu’on ne pent saisir, des arguments absurdes et triomphants de curé de campagne qui demontre Dieu. — GUY DE MAUPASSANT. SYBELL’S party broke up on Saturday, with the exception of Rachel and Mr. Tristram, who had been unable to finish by that date a sketch he was making of Sybell. When Doll discovered that his wife had asked that gentleman to stay over Sunday he entreated Hugh in moving terms to do the same. “I am not literary,” said Doll, who always thought it necessary to explain that he was not what no one thought he was. “I hate all that sort of thing. Utter rot I call it. For goodness’ sake, Scarlett, sit tight. I must be decent to the beast in my own house, and if you go I shall have to have him alone jawing at me till all hours of the night in the smoking-room.” Hugh was easily persuaded, and so it came about that the morning congregation at Warpington had the advantage of furtively watching Hugh and Mr. Tristram as they sat together in the carved Wilderleigh pew, with Sybell and Rachel at one end of it and Doll at the other. No one looked at Rachel. Her hat attracted a momentary attention, but her face none. The Miss Pratts, on the contrary, well caparisoned by their man milliner, well groomed, well curled, were a marked feature of the sparse congregation. The spectator of so many points, all made the most of, unconsciously felt with a sense of oppres- sion that everything that could be done had been done. No stone had been left unturned. Their brother, Captain Algernon Pratt, sitting behind them, looked critically at them, and owned that they were smart women. But he was not entirely satisfied with them as he had been in the old days, before he went into the Guards and began the real work of his life, raising himself in society. Captain Pratt was a tall, pale young man — assez beau gar?on — faultlessly dressed, with a quiet acquired manner. He was not ill-looking, the long, upper lip concealed by a perfectly kept moustache, but the haggard eye and the thin line in the cheek, which did not suggest thought and over-work as their cause, made his appearance vaguely repellant. Jesu, lover of my soul, sang the shrill voices of the choir boys, echoed by Regie and Mary, standing together, holding their joint hymn-book exactly equally between them, their two small thumbs touching. Fraülein, on Hester’s other side, was singing with her whole soul, accompanied by a pendulous movement of the body: Cover my defenceless ’ead, Wiz ze sadow of zy wing. Mr. Gresley, after baying like a bloodhound through the opening verses, ascended the pulpit and engaged in prayer. The congregation amen-ed and settled itself. Mary leaned her blonde head against her mother, Regie against Hester. The supreme moment of the week had come for Mr. Gresley. He gave out the text: “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” All of us who are Churchmen are aware that the sermon is a period admirably suited for quiet reflection. “A good woman loves but once,” said Mr. Tristram to himself in an attitude of attention, his fine eyes fixed decorously on a pillar in front of him. Some of us would be as helpless without a Bowdlerised generality or a platitude to sustain our minds as the invalid would be without his peptonised beef-tea. “Rachel is a good woman, a saint. Such a woman does not love in a hurry, but when she does she loves for ever.” What was that poem he and she had so often read together? Tennyson, wasn’t it? about love not altering “when it alteration finds,” but bears it out even to the crack of doom. Fine poet, Tennyson, he knew the human heart. She had certainly adored him four years ago, just in the devoted way in which he needed to be loved. And how he had worshipped her! Of course he had behaved badly. He saw that now. But if he had it was not from want of love. She had been unable to see that at the time. Good women were narrow, and they were hard, and they did not understand men. Those were their faults. Had she learnt better by now? Did she realise that she had far better marry a man who had loved her for herself, and who still loved her, rather than some fortune-hunter like that weedy fellow Scarlett. (Mr. Tristram called all slender men weedy.) He would frankly own his fault and ask for forgiveness. He glanced for a moment at the gentle familiar face beside him. “She will forgive me,” he said, reassuring himself in spite of an inward qualm of misgiving. “I am glad I arranged to stay on. I will speak to her this afternoon. She has become much softened, and we will bury the past, and make a fresh start together.” “I will walk up to Beaumere this afternoon,” said Doll, stretching a leg outside the open end of the pew. “I wish Gresley would not call the Dissenters worms. They are some of my best tenants, and they won’t like it when they hear of it. And I’ll go round the young pheasants. (Doll did this or something similar every Sunday afternoon of his life, but he always rehearsed it comfortably in thought on Sunday mornings.) And if Withers is about I’ll go out in the boat, the big one, the little one leaks, and set a trimmer or two for to-morrow. I’m not sure I’ll set one under the south bank, for there was the devil to pay last time when that beast of an eel got among the roots. I’ll ask Withers what he thinks. I wish Gresley would not call the Dissenters blind leaders of the blind. It’s such bad form, and I don’t suppose the text meant that to start with, and what’s the use of ill-feeling in a parish. And I’ll take Scarlett with me. We’ll slip off after luncheon, and leave that bounder to bound by himself. And poor old Crack shall come too. Uncle George always took him.” “James is simply surpassing himself,” said Mrs. Gresley to herself, her arm round her little daughter. “Worms! what a splendid comparison. The Churchman the full-grown man after the stature of Christ, and the Dissenter invertebrate (I think dear James means inebriate) like a worm cleaving to the earth. But possibly God in His mercy may let them slip in by a back door to heaven! How like him to say that, so generous, so wide-minded, taking the hopeful view of everything. How noble he looks. These are days in which we should stick to our colours. I wonder how he can think of such beautiful things. For my part I think the duty of the true priest is not to grovel to the crowd and call wrong right and right wrong for the sake of a fleeting popularity. How striking! What a lesson to the Bishop if he were only here. He is so lax about Dissent, as if right and wrong were mere matters of opinion. What a gift he has. I know he will eat nothing for luncheon. If only we were somewhere else where the best joints were a little cheaper, and his talents more appreciated.” And Mrs. Gresley closed her eyes and prayed earnestly, a tear sliding down her cheek on to Mary’s floss-silk mane, that she might become less unworthy to be the wife of one so far above her, that the children might all grow up like him, and that she might be given patience to bear with Hester even when she vexed him. Captain Pratt’s critical eye travelled over the congregation. It absolutely ignored Mrs. Gresley and Fraülein. It lingered momentarily on Hester. He knew what he called “breeding” when he saw it, and he was aware that Hester possessed it, though his sisters would have laughed at the idea. He had seen many well-bred women on social pinnacles look like that, whose houses were at present barred against him. The Pratt sisters were fixed into their smartness as some faces are fixed into a grin. It was not spontaneous, fugitive, evanescent as a smile, gracefully worn, or lightly laid aside as in Hester’s case. He had known Hester slightly in London for several years. He had seen her on terms of intimacy, such as she never showed to his sisters, with inaccessible men and women with whom he had achieved a bare acquaintance, but whom, in spite of many carefully concealed advances, he had found it imposs
"ible to know better. Captain Pratt had reached that stage in his profession of raising himself when he had become a social barometer. He was excessively careful whom he knew, what women he danced with, what houses he visited, and any of his acquaintances who cared to ascertain their own social status to a hairsbreadth had only to apply to it the touchstone of Captain Pratt’s manner towards them.
Hester, who grasped many facts of that kind, was always amused by the cold consideration with which he treated her on his rare visits to the parental Towers; and which his sisters could only construe as a sign that “Algy was gone on Hessie.”
“But he will never marry her,” they told each other. “Algy looks higher.”
It was true. If Hester had been Lady Hester, it is possible that the surname of Pratt, if frequently refused by stouter women, might eventually have been offered to her. But Captain Pratt was determined to marry rank, and nothing short of a Lady Something was of any use to him. An Honourable was better than nothing, but it did not count for much with him. It had a way of absenting itself when wanted. No one was announced as an Honourable. It did not even appear on cards. It might be overlooked. Rank, to be of any practical value, must be apparent, obvious. Lady Georgiana Pratt, Lady Evelina Pratt! Any name would do with that prefix. His eye travelled as far as Sybell and stopped again. She was “the right sort” herself, and she dressed in the right way. Why could not Ada and Selina imitate her? But he had never forgiven her the fact that he had met “a crew of cads” at her house, whom he had been obliged to cut afterwards in the Row. No, Sybell would not have done for him. She surrounded herself with vulgar people.
Captain Pratt was far too well mannered to be guilty of staring, except at pretty maidservants or shop girls, and his eye was moved on by the rigid police of etiquette which ruled his every movement. It paused momentarily on Rachel. He knew about her, as did every bachelor in London. A colossal heiress. She was neither plain nor handsome. She had a good figure, but not good enough to counterbalance her nondescript face. She had not the air of distinction which he was so quick to detect and appraise. She was a social nonentity. He did not care to look at her a second time. “I would not marry her with twice her fortune,” he said to himself.
Regie’s hand had stolen into Hester’s. His even breathing, felt rather than heard, as he dropped asleep against her shoulder, surrounded Hester with the atmosphere of peace and comfort which his father had broken earlier in the day. Regie often brought back to her what his father wrested from her.
She listened to the sermon as from a warm nest safely raised above the quaggy ground of personal feeling.
“Dear James! How good he is; how much in earnest. But worms don’t go in at back doors. Why are not clergymen taught a few elementary rules of composition before they are ordained? But perhaps no one will notice it except myself. James is certainly a saint. He has the courage of his opinions. I believe he loves God and the Church with his whole heart, and would go to the stake for them, or send me there if he thought it was for the good of my soul. Why has he no power? Why is he so much disliked in the parish and neighbourhood? I am sure it is not because he has small abilities and makes puns, and says cut-and-dried things. How many excellent clergymen who do the same are beloved? Is it because he deals with every one as he deals with me? What dreadful things he thinks of me. I don’t wonder he is anxious about me, What unworthy motives of wilful blindness and arrogance he is attributing to the Nonconformists! Oh, James! James! will you never see that it is disbelief in the sincerity of the religion of others, because it is not in the same narrow form as your own, which makes all your zeal and earnestness of none effect! You think the opposition you meet with everywhere is the opposition of evil to good, of indifference to piety. When will you learn that it is the good in your hearers which opposes you, the love of God in them which is offended by your representation of Him!”
Hugh’s eyes were fixed on the same pillar as Mr. Tristram’s, but if he had been aware of that fact he would have chosen another pillar. His thin handsome face was beginning to show the marks of mental strain. His eyes had the set impassive look of one who, hedged in on both sides, sees a sharp turn ahead of him on an unknown road.
“Rachel! Rachel! Rachel! Don’t you hear me calling to you? Don’t you hear me telling you that I can’t live without you? The hymn was right. ‘Other refuge have I none, Hangs my helpless soul on Thee,’ only it was written of you, not of that far, far away God who does not care. Only care for me. Only love me. Only give me those cool hands that I may lean my forehead against them. No help can come to me except through you. Stoop down to me and raise me up, for I love you.”
The sun went in suddenly, and a cold shadow fell on the pillar and on Hugh’s heart.
Love and marriage were not for him. That far-away God, that Judge in the black cap, had pronounced sentence against him, had doomed that he should die in his sins. When he had sat in his own village church only last Sunday between his mother and sister, he had seen the empty place on his chancel wall where the tablet to his memory would be put up. When he walked through the churchyard, his mother leaning on his arm, his step regulated by her feeble one, he had seen the vacant space by his father’s grave already filled by the mound of raw earth which would shortly cover him. His heart had ached for his mother, for the gentle feeble-minded sister who had transferred the interest in life, which keeps body and soul together, from her colourless existence to that of her brother. Hughie was the romance of her grey life: what Hughie said, what Hughie thought, Hughie’s wife — oh, jealous thought only to be met by prayer! But later on, joy of joys — Hughie’s children! He realised it, now and then, vaguely, momentarily, but never as fully as last Sunday. He shrank from the remembrance, and his mind wandered anew in the labyrinth of broken twisted thought, from which he could find no way out.
There must be some way out. He had stumbled callously through one day after another of these weeks in which he had not seen Rachel, towards his next meeting with her, as a half blind man stumbles towards the light. But the presence of Rachel afforded no clue to the labyrinth. What vain hope was this that he had cherished unconsciously that she could help him. There was no help for him. There was no way out. He was in a trap. He must die, and soon, by his own hand. Incredible, preposterous fate! He shuddered, and looked around him involuntarily.
His glance, reverent, full of timid longing fell on Rachel, and his heart cried aloud suddenly, “If she loves me, I shall not be able to leave her.”
Look in my face! my name is Might-have-been;
I am also caled No-more, Too-late, Farewell.
— DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
IT was Sunday afternoon. Mr. Tristram leaned on the stone balustrade that bounded the long terrace at Wilderleigh. He was watching two distant figures, followed by a black dot, stroll away across the park. One of them seemed to drag himself unwillingly. Mr. Tristram congratulated himself on the acumen which had led him to keep himself concealed until Doll and Hugh had started for Beaumere.
Sybell had announced at luncheon, in the tone of one who observes a religious rite, that she should rest till four o’clock, and would be ready to sit for the portrait of her upper lip at that hour.
It was only half-past two now. Mr. Tristram had planted himself exactly in front of Rachel’s windows, with his back to the house. “She will keep me waiting, but she will come out in time,” he said to himself, nervous and self-confident by turns, resting his head rather gracefully on his hand. His knowledge of womankind supported him like a life-belt, but it has been said that life-belts occasionally support their wearers upside down. Theories have been known to exhibit the same spiteful tendency towards those who place their trust in them.
“Of course, she has got to show me that she is offended with me,” he reflected, gazing steadily at the Welsh hills. “She would not have come out if I had asked her, but she will certainly come as I did not. I will give her half an hour.”
Rachel, meanwhile, was looking fixedly at Mr. Tristram from her bedroom window with that dispassionate scrutiny to avoid which the vainest would do well to take refuge in noisome caves.
“I wonder,” she said to herself, “whether Hester always saw him as I see him now. I believe she did.”
Rachel put on her hat and took up her gloves. “If this is really I, and that is really he, I had better go down and get it over,” she said to herself.
Mr. Tristram had given her half an hour. She appeared in the low stone doorway before the first five minutes of the allotted time had elapsed, and he gave a genuine start of surprise as he heard her step on the gravel. His respect for her fell somewhat at this alacrity.
“I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I am anxious to have a serious conversation with you.”
“Certainly,” she said.
They walked along the terrace, and presently found themselves in the little coppice adjoining it. They sat down together on a wooden seat round an old cedar, in the heart of the golden afternoon.
It was an afternoon the secret of which autumn and spring will never tell to winter and summer, when the wildest dreams of love might come true, when even the dead might come down and put warm lips to ours, and we should feel no surprise.
A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near at hand, fleeing from the still splendour of the sunfired woods where he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of grey stones and water, where he was a jewelled king.
When the kingfisher had left them tête-àtête Mr. Tristram found himself extremely awkwardly placed on the green bench. He felt that he had not sufficiently considered beforehand the peculiar difficulties which, in the language of the law, “had been imported into his case.”
Rachel sat beside him in silence. If it could be chronicled that sympathetic sorrow for her companion’s predicament was the principal feeling in her mind, she would have been an angel.
Mr. Tristram halted long between two opinions. At last he said brokenly:
“Can you forgive me?”
What woman, even in her white hair, even after a lifetime spent out of earshot, ever forgets the tone her lover’s voice takes when he is in trouble? Rachel softened instantly.
“I forgave you long ago,” she said gently.
Something indefinable in the clear full gaze that met his daunted him. He stared apprehensively at her. It seemed to him as if he were standing in cold and darkness, looking in through the windows of her untroubled eyes at the warm sunlit home which had once been his, when it had been exceeding well with him, but of which he had lost the key.
A single yellow leaf, crisped and hollowed to a fairy boat, came sailing on an imperceptible current of air to rest on Rachel’s knee.
“I was angry at first,” she said, her voice falling across the silence like another leaf. “And then after a time I forgave you. And later still, much later, I found out that you had never injured me — that I had nothing to forgive.”
He did not understand, and as he did not understand he explained volubly — for here he felt he was on sure ground — that, on the contrary, she had much to forgive, that he had acted like an infernal blackguard, that men were coarse brutes, not fit to kiss a good woman’s shoe latchet, &c. &c. He identified his conduct with that of the whole sex, without alluding to it as that of the individual Tristram. He made it clear that he did not claim to have behaved better than “most men.”
Rachel listened attentively. “And I actually loved him,” she said to herself.
“But the divine quality of woman is her power of forgiving. Her love raises a man, transfigures him, ennobles his whole life,” &c. &c.
“My love did not appear to have quite that effect upon you at the time,” said Rachel, regretting the words the moment they were spoken.
Mr. Tristram felt relieved. Here at last was the reproach he had been expecting.
He assured her she did well to be angry. He accused himself once more. He denounced the accursed morals of the day above which he ought to have risen, the morals, if she did but know it, of all unmarried men.
“That is a hit at Mr. Scarlett,” she said scornfully to herself, and then her cheek blanched as she remembered that Hugh was not exempt after all. She became suddenly tired, impatient, but she waited quietly for the inevitable proposal.
Mr. Tristram, who had the gift of emphatic and facile utterance, which the conventional consider to be the sign-manual of genius, had become so entangled in the morals of the age, that it took him some time to extricate himself from the subject before he could pass on to plead in an impassioned manner the cause of the man, unworthy though he might be, who had long loved her, loved her now, and would always love her, in this world and the next.
It was the longest proposal Rachel had ever had, and she had had many. But if the proposal was long the refusal was longer. Rachel, who had a good memory, led up to it by opining that the artistic life made great demands, that the true artist must live entirely for his art, that domestic life might prove a hindrance. She had read somewhere that high hopes fainted on warm hearthstones. Mr. Tristram demolished these objections as ruthlessly as ducks peck their own ducklings if they have not seen them for a day or two.
Even when she was forced to become more explicit it was at first impossible to Mr. Tristram to believe she would finally reject him. But the knowledge, deep-rooted as a forest oak, that she had loved him devotedly could not at last prevail against the odious conviction that she was determined not to marry him.
“Then, in that case you never loved me?”
“I do not love you now.”
“You are determined not to marry?”
“On the contrary, I hope to do so.”
Rachel’s words took her by surprise. She had no idea till that moment that she hoped anything of the kind.
“You prefer some one else. That is the real truth.”
“I prefer several others.”
Mr. Tristram looked suspiciously at her. Her answers did not tally with his previous knowledge of her. Perhaps he forgot that he had set his docile pupil rather a long holiday task to learn in his absence and she had learnt it.
“You think you would be happier with some fortune-hunter of an aristocrat than with a plain man of your own class, who, whatever his faults may be, loves you for yourself.”
Why is it that the word aristocrat as applied to a gentleman is as offensive as that of flunkey applied to a footman?
Rachel drew herself up imperceptibly.
“That depends upon the fortune-hunter,” she said with that touch of hauteur which, when the vulgar have at last drawn it upon themselves by the insolence which is the underside of their courtesy, always has the same effect on them as a red rag on a bull.
In their own language they invariably “stand up to it.” Mr. Tristram stood up physically and mentally. He also raised his voice, causing two rabbits to hurry back into their holes.
Women, he said, were incalculable. He would never believe in one again. His disbelief in woman rose even to the rookery in the high elms close at hand. That she, Rachel, whom he had always regarded as the first among women, should be dazzled by the empty glamour of rank, now that her fortune put such marriages within her reach, was incredible. He should have repudiated such an idea with scorn if he had not heard it from her own lips. Well, he would leave her to the life she had chosen. It only remained for him to thank her for stripping his last illusions from him, and to bid her good-bye.
“We shall never meet again,” he said, holding her hand, and looking very much the same without his illusions as he did when he had them on. He had read somewhere a little poem about “A Woman’s No,” which at the last moment meant “Yes.” And then there was another which chronicled how after several stanzas of upbraiding “we rushed into each other’s arms.” Both recurred to him now. He had often thought how true they were.
“I do not think we shall meet again,” said Rachel, who apparently had an unpoetic nature; “but I am glad for my own sake that we have met this once, and have had this conversation. I think we owed it to each other and to our — former attachment.”
“Well, good-bye.” He still held her hand. If she was not careful she would lose him.
“Good-bye.”
“You understand it is for always?”
“I do.”
He became suddenly livid. He loved her more than ever. Would she really let him go?
“I am not the kind of man to be whistled back,” he said fiercely. It was an appeal and a defiance, for he was just the kind of man, and they both knew it.
“Of course not.”
“That is your last word?”
“My last word.”
He dropped her hand, and half turned to go.
She made no sign.
Then he strode violently out of the wood without looking behind him. At the little gate he stopped a moment listening intently. No recalling voice reached him. Poets did not know what they were talking about. With a trembling hand he slammed the gate and departed.
Rachel remained a long time sitting on the wooden bench, so long that the stooping sun found out the solemn outstretched arms of the cedar, and touched them till they gleamed green as a beetle’s wing. Each little twig and twiglet was made manifest, raw gold against the twilight that lurked beneath the heavy boughs.
She sat so still that a squirrel came tip-toeing across the moss, and struck tail momentarily to observe her. He looked critically at her, first with one round eye, and then, turning his sleek head, with the other, and decided that she was harmless.
Presently a robin dropped down close to her, flashing up his grey underwing as he alighted, and then flew up into the cedar, and from its sun-stirred depths said his say.
The robin never forgets. In the autumn afternoons when the shadows are lengthening he sings sadness into your heart. If you are joyful shut your ears against him, for you may keep peace but never joy while he is singing. He knows all about it, “love’s labour lost,” the grey face of young Love dead, the hard-wrought grave in the live rock where he is buried. And he tells of it again, and again and again, as if Love’s sharp sword had indeed reddened his little breast, until the heart aches to hear him. But he tells also that consolation is folded not in forgetfulness, but in remembrance. That is why he sings in the silence of the autumn dawn, before memory closes her eyes, and again near sunset, when memory wakes.
Still Rachel sat motionless.
She had laboured with dumb unreasoning passion to forget, as a man works his hand to the bone night after night, week after week, month after month, to file through the bars of his prison. She found at last that forgetfulness came not of prayer and fasting: that it was not in her to forget. The past had seemed to stretch its cruel desecrating hand over all the future, cutting her off from the possibility of love and marriage, and from the children whom in dreams she held in her arms. As she had said to Hester, she thought she “had nothing left to give.”
But now the dead past had risen from its grave in her meeting with her former lover, and in a moment, in two short days and wakeful nights, the past relinquished its false claim upon her life. She saw that it was false, that she had been frightened where no fear was, that her deliverance lay in remembrance itself, not in the handcuffs with which until now she had bound her deliverer.
Mr. Tristram had come back into her life, and with his own hands had destroyed the overthrown image of himself, which lay like a barrier across her heart. He had replaced it by an accurate presentment of himself as he really was.
“Only that which is replaced is destroyed,” and it is often our real self in its native rags, and not as we jealously imagine another king in richer purple who has replaced us in the throne-room of the heart that loved us. To the end of life Rachel never forgot Mr. Tristram, any more than the amber forgets its fly. But she was vaguely conscious as he left her that he had set her free. She listened to his retreating step hardly daring to breathe. It was too good to be true. At last there was dead silence. No echo of a footfall. Quite gone. He had departed not only out of her presence but out of her life.
She breathed again. A tremor like that which shakes the first green leaf against the March sky stole across her crushed heart, empty at last, empty at last. She raised her hand timidly in the sunshine. She was free. She looked round dazzled, bewildered. The little world of sunshine and the turquoises of sky strewn among the golden network of the trees smiled at her, as one who brings good tidings.
A certain familiar hold on life and nature, so old that it was almost new, which she had forgotten, but which her former self used to feel, came back suddenly upon her like a lost friend from over seas. Scales seemed to fall from her eyes. The light was too much for her. She had forgotten how beautiful the world was. Everything was possible.
Some in the night of their desolation can take comfort when they see the morning star shuddering white in the east, and can say “Courage, the day is at hand.”
But others never realise that their night is over till the sun is up. Rachel had sat in a long stupor. The message writ large for her comfort in the stars that the night was surely waning had not reached her, bowed as she thought beneath God’s hand. And the sure return of the sun at last came upon her like a miracle.
’Tis not for every one to catch a salmon.
EVERY one who knows Middleshire knows that the little lake of Beaumere is bounded on the one side by the Westhope and on the other by the Wilderleigh property, the boundary being the ubiquitous Drone which traverses the mere in a desultory fashion, and with the assistance of several springs makes Beaumere what it is, namely (to quote from the local guidebook), “the noblest expanse of water surrounded by some of the most picturesque scenery in Middleshire.”
Thither Doll and Hugh took their way in the leisurely manner of men whose orthodoxy obliges them to regard Sunday as a day of rest.
Doll pointed out to Hugh the coppice which his predecessor Mr. George Loftus had planted. Hugh regarded it without excitement. Both agreed that it was coming on nicely. Hugh thought he ought to do a little planting at his own place. Doll said you could not do everything at once. A large new farm was the next object of interest. “Uncle George rebuilt Greenfields from the ground,” remarked Doll, as they crossed the high road and took to the harvesting fields where “the ricks stood grey to the sun.”
Hugh nodded. Doll thought he was a very decent chap, though rather low spirited. Hugh thought that if Mr. George Loftus had been alive he might have consulted him. In an amicable silence, broken occasionally by whistling for Crack, who hurried blear-eyed and asthmatic out of rabbit holes, the pair reached Beaumere; and, after following the path through the wood, came suddenly upon the little lake locked in the heart of the steeply climbing forest.
Doll stood still and pointed with his stick for fear Hugh might overlook it. “I come here every Sunday,” he remarked.
A sense of unreality and foreboding seized on Hugh, as the still face of the water looked up at him. Where had he seen it before, this sea of glass reflecting the yellow woods that stooped to its very edge? What had it to do with him?
“I’ve been here before,” he said, involuntarily.
“I daresay,” said Doll. “Newhaven marches with me here. The boundary is by that clump of silver birch. The Drone comes in there, but you can’t see it. The Newhavens are friends of yours, aren’t they?”
“Acquaintances,” said Hugh absently, looking hard at the water. He had never been here before. Memory groped blindly for a lost link, as one who momentarily recognises a face in a crowd, and tries to put a name to it and fails. As the face disappears, so the sudden impression passed from Hugh’s mind.
“I expect you have been here with them,” said Doll. “Good man, Newhaven.”
“I used to see a good deal of them at one time,” said Hugh, “but they seem to have forgotten me of late.”
“Oh! that’s her,” said Doll. “She is always oft and on with people. Takes a fancy one day and a dislike the next. But he’s not like that. You always know where to find him. Solid man, Newhaven. He doesn’t say much, but what he says he sticks to.”
“He gives one that impression,” said Hugh.
“I rather think he is there now,” said Doll, pointing to the further shore. “I see a figure moving, and two little specks. I should not wonder if it were him and the boys. They often come here on Sunday afternoons.”
“You have long sight,” said Hugh. He had met Lord Newhaven several times since the drawing of lots, and they had always greeted each other with cold civility. But Hugh avoided him when he could without drawing attention to the fact that he did so.
“Are you going over to his side?” he asked.
“Rather not,” said Doll. “I have never set a single trimmer or fired a shot beyond that clump of birch, or Uncle George before me.”
The two men picked their way down the hillside among the tall thin tree trunks. There was no one except the dogs at the keeper’s cottage in a clearing half-way down. Doll took the key of the boathouse from a little hole under the eaves.
“I think Withers must be out,” he remarked at last, after knocking and calling at the locked door and peering through the closed window. Hugh had been of that opinion for some time. “Gone out with his wife, I expect. Never mind, we can do without him.”
They went slipping over the dry beech-mast to the boathouse. Doll unlocked the door and climbed into one of the boats, Hugh and Crack followed. They got a perch rod off a long shelf, and half a dozen trimmers. Then they pulled out a little way and stopped near an archipelago of water-lily leaves.
Doll got out the perch rod and float and made a cast.
“It’s not fishing,” he said apologetically, half to his guest and half to his Maker. “But we are bound to get some baits.”
Hugh nodded and gazed down at the thin forest below. He could see the perch moving in little companies in the still water beyond the water trees. Presently a perch, a very small one, out alone for the first time, came up, all stiff head and shoulders and wagging tail, to the carelessly covered hook.
“Don’t, don’t, you young idiot,” said Hugh below his breath. But the perch knew that the time had come when a perch must judge for himself.
The float curtsied and went under, and in another second the little independent was in the boat.
“There are other fools in the world besides me, it seems,” said Hugh to himself.
“He’ll do, but I wish he was a dace,” said Doll, slipping the victim into a tin with holes in the top. “Half a dozen will be enough.”
They got half a dozen, baited and set the trimmers white side up, and were turning to row back, when Doll’s eye became suddenly fixed.
“By Jove, there’s something at it,” he said, pointing to a trimmer at some distance.
Both men looked intently at it. Crack felt that something was happening, and left off smelling the empty fish-can.
The trimmer began to nod, to tilt, and then turned suddenly upside down, and remained motionless.
“He’s running the line off it,” said Doll.
As he spoke the trimmer gave one jerk and went under. Then it reappeared, awkwardly bustling out into the open.
“Oh! hang it all, it’s Sunday,” said Doll with a groan. “We can’t be catching pike on a Sunday.” And he caught up the oars and rowed swiftly towards the trimmer.
As soon as they were within a boat’s length it disappeared again, came up again, and went pecking along the top of the water. Doll pursued warily and got hold of it.
“Gently now,” he said, as he shipped the oars. “He’ll go under the boat and break us if we don’t look out. I’ll play him, and you shove the net under him. Damn! — God forgive me! — We have come out without a landing-net. Good Lord, Scarlett, you can’t gaff him with a champagne-opener. There, you pull him in, and I’ll grab him somehow. I’ve done it before. Crack, lie down, you infernal fool. Scarlett, if you pull him like that you’ll lose him to a certainty. By George, he’s a big one.” Doll tore off his coat and pulled up his shirtsleeves. “He’s going under the boat. If you let him go under the boat, I tell you he’ll break us. I’m quite ready.” Doll was rubbing his waistcoat-buttons against the gunwale. “Bring him in gradually. For goodness’ sake, keep your feet off the line, or, if he makes a dash, he’ll break you. Give him line. Keep your elbows out. Keep your hands free. Don’t let him jerk you. If you don’t give him more line when he runs, you’ll lose him. He’s not half done yet. Confound you, Scarlett, hold on for all you’re worth. All right, old chap, all right. Don’t mind me. You’re doing it first-class. Right as rain. Now, now. By George, did you see him that time? He’s a nailer. Steady on him. Bring him in gently. Keep an even pull on him. Keep steady.”
Doll craned over the gunwale, his arms in the water. There was a swirl, a momentary glimpse of a stolid fish face, and heavy shoulders, and the boat righted itself.
“Missed him as I live!” gasped Doll. “Bring him in again.”
Hugh let out the slippery line and drew it in again slowly, hand over hand. Doll’s round head was over the side, his long legs spread adhesively in the bottom of the boat. Crack, beyond himself with excitement, got on the seat and barked without ceasing.
“He’s coming up again,” said Doll gutturally, sliding forward his left hand. “I must get him by the eyes, and then I doubt if I can lift him. He’s a big brute. He’s dragging the whole boat and everything. He’s about done now. Steady! Now!”
The great side of the pike lay heaving on the surface for a second, and Doll’s left forefinger and thumb were groping for its eyes. But the agonised pike made a last effort. Doll had him with his left hand, but could not raise him. “Pull him in now for all you’re worth,” he roared to Hugh, as he made a grab with his right hand. His legs began to lose their grip under the violent contortions of the pike. The boat tilted madly. Hugh reached forward to help him. There was a frantic effort, and it capsized.
“Bad luck,” said Doll, coming up sputtering, shaking his head like a spaniel. “But we shall get him yet. He’s bleeding like a pig. He’ll come up directly. Good Lord, the water’s like ice. We must be over one of the springs. I suppose you are all right, Scarlett.”
Hugh had come up, but in very different fashion.
“Yes,” he said faintly, clutching the upturned boat.
“I’m not sure,” said Doll, keeping going with one hand, “that we had not better get ashore, and fetch the other boat. The water’s enough to freeze one.”
“I can’t swim,” said Hugh, his teeth chattering.
He was a delicate man at the best of times, and the cold was laying hold of him.
Doll looked at his blue lips and shaking hands, and his face became grave. He measured the distance to the shore with his eye. It had receded in a treacherous manner.
“I’m not much of a performer myself,” he said, “since I broke my arm last winter, but I can get to the shore. The question is, can you hold on while I go back and bring the other boat, or shall we have a try at getting back together?”
“I can hold on all right,” said Hugh, instantly aware that Doll did not think he could tow him to land, but was politely ready to risk his existence in the attempt.
“Back directly,” said Doll, and without a second’s delay he was gone. Hugh put out his whole strength in the endeavour to raise himself somewhat out of the ice-cold water. But the upturned boat sidled away from him like a skittish horse, and after grappling with it he only slipped back again exhausted, and had to clutch it as best he could.
As he clung to the gunwale he heard a faint coughing and gasping close to his ear. Some one was drowning. Hugh realised that it must be Crack, under the boat. He called to him, he chirruped as if all were well. He stretched one hand as far as he could under the boat feeling for him. But he could not reach him. Presently the faint difficult sound ceased, began again, stopped, and was heard no more.
A great silence seemed to rush in on the extinction of that small sound. It stooped down and enveloped Hugh in it. Everything was very calm, very still. The boat kept turning slowly round and round, the only thing that moved. The sunlight quivered on the wet upturned keel. Already it was drying in patches. Hugh watched it. The cold was sapping his powers as if he were bleeding.
“I could have built a boat in the time Loftus takes to fetch one,” he said to himself, and he looked round him. No sign of Doll. He was alone in the world. The cold was gaining on him slowly, surely. Why had he on such heavy gloves which made him fumble so clumsily. He looked at his bare cut hands, and realised that their grip was leaving them. He felt that he was in measurable distance of losing his hold.
Suddenly a remembrance flashed across him of the sinister face of the water as it had first looked up at him through the trees. Now he understood. This was the appointed place for him to die. Hugh tightened his hold with his right hand, for his left was paralysed.
“I will not,” he said. “Nothing shall induce me. I will live and marry Rachel.”
The cold advanced suddenly on him as at the point of the bayonet.
“Why not die?” said another voice. “Will it be easier in three months’ time than it is now? Will it ever be so easy again? See how near death is to life, a wheel within a wheel, two rings linked together. A touch, and you pass from one to the other.”
Hugh looked wildly round him. The sun lay warm upon the tree tops. It could not be that he was going to die here and now; here in the living sunshine, with the quiet friendly faces of the hills all round him.
He strengthened his numb hold fiercely, all but lost it, regained it. Cramp long held at bay overcame him.
And the boat kept turning in the twilight. He reached the end of his strength and held on beyond it. He heard some one near at hand suffocating in long-drawn gasps. Not Crack this time, but himself.
The boat was always turning in the darkness.
The struggle was over. “It is better so,” said the other voice, through the roaring of a cataract near at hand. “Your mother will bear it better so. And all the long difficulties are over, and pain is past, and life is past, and sleep is best.”
“But Rachel?”
She was here in the warm swaying darkness. She was with him. She was Death. Death was only her arms round him in a great peace. Death was better than life. He let go the silly boat that kept him from her, and turned wholly to her, his closed eyes against her breast.
The main difference between people seems to be that one man can come under obligations on which you can rely — is obligable; and another is not. As he has not a law within him, there’s nothing to tie him to.
— EMERSON.
“FATHER,” said Teddy to Lord Newhaven, “Do, do be a horse, and I will ride you in the water.”
“Me, too,” said Pauly.
“I am not anxious to be a horse, Teddy. I’m quite content as I am.”
Lord Newhaven was stretched in an easy but undefensive attitude on the heathery bank, with his hands behind his head. His two sons rushed simultaneously at him and knelt on his chest.
“Promise,” they cried, punching him. “Two turns each.” There was a free fight, and Lord Newhaven promised.
“Honour bright. Two turns each, and really deep.”
“Honour bright,” said Lord Newhaven.
His two sons got off his chest, and Teddy climbed on his back in readiness as his father sat up and began to unlace his boots.
“Higher,” said Teddy over his shoulder, his arms tightly clasped round his father’s neck, as Lord Newhaven rolled up his trousers.
“You young slave-driver, they won’t go up any higher.”
“You did say ‘Honour Bright.’”
“Well, Shylock, I am ‘honour bright.’”
“You had them over your knees last time.”
“I had knickerbockers on, then.”
“Won’t these do the same?”
“They won’t come up another inch.”
“Then one, two, three — off!” shrieked Teddy, digging his heels into the parental back.
The horse displayed surprising agility. It curveted, it kicked, it jumped a little drain, it careered into the water, making a tremendous splashing.
The two boys screamed with delight.
But at last the horse sat down on the bank gasping, wiped its forehead, and, in spite of frenzied entreaties, proceeded to put on its socks and boots.
Lord Newhaven was not to be moved a second time. He lit a cigarette, and observed that the moment for sailing boats had arrived.
The boats were accordingly sailed. Lord Newhaven tilted his hat over his eyes and acted umpire.
“It is not usual to sail boats upside down,” he said, seeing Teddy deliberately upset his.
“They are doing it out there,” said Teddy, who had a reason for most things. And he continued to sail his boat upside down.
Lord Newhaven got up, and swept the water with his eye. His face became keen. Then his glance fell anxiously on the children.
“Teddy and Pauly,” he said, “promise me that you will both play on this one bit of sand, and not go in the water till I come back.”
They promised, staring bewildered at their father.
In another moment Lord Newhaven was tearing through the brushwood that fringed the water’s edge.
As he neared the boathouse he saw another figure trying to shove out the remaining boat.
It was Doll. Lord Newhaven pushed her off and jumped in.
Doll was almost speechless. His breath came in long gasps. The sweat hung on his forehead. He pointed to the black upturned boat.
“This one leaks,” said Lord Newhaven sharply.
“It’s got to go all the same, and sharp,” said Doll, hoarsely.
Lord Newhaven seized up a fishing-tin, and thrust it into Doll’s hands.
“You bale while I row,” he said, and he rowed as he had never rowed before.
“Who is it?” he said, as the boat shot out into the open.
Doll was baleing like a madman.
“Scarlett,” he said. “And he’s over one of the springs. He’ll get cramp.”
Lord Newhaven strained at his oars.
Consciousness was coming back, was slowly climbing upwards, upwards through immense intervals of time and space, to where at last with a wrench pain met it half-way. Hugh stirred feebly in the dark of a great forlornness and loneliness.
“Rachel,” he said, “Rachel.”
His head was gently raised, and a cup pressed to his lips. He swallowed something.
He groped in the darkness for a window, and then opened his eyes. Lord Newhaven withdrew a pace or two, and stood looking at him.
Their eyes met.
Neither spoke, but Hugh’s eyes, dark with the shadow of death, said plainly, “Hast thou found me, oh mine enemy?”
Then he turned them slowly, as an infant turns them, to the sky, the climbing woods, leaning over each other’s shoulders to look at him, to the warm earth on which he lay. At a little distance was stretched a small rough-haired form. Hugh’s eyes fixed on it. It lay very still.
“Crack,” he said suddenly, raising himself on his elbow.
There was neither speech nor language. Crack’s tail, that courteous member, made no sign.
“He was under the boat,” said Lord Newhaven, looking narrowly at the exhausted face of the man he had saved, and unable for the life of him to help a momentary fellow-feeling about the little dog.
Hugh remembered. It all came back, the boat, Crack’s dying gasps, the agonised struggle, the strait gate of death, the difficult passage through it, the calm beyond. He had almost got through, and had been dragged back.
“Why did you interfere?” he said, in sudden passion, his eyes flaming in his white face.
A dull colour rose to Lord Newhaven’s cheek.
“I thought it was an accident,” he said. “If it was not I beg your pardon.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“It was an accident,” said Hugh hoarsely, and he turned on his elbow and looked fixedly at the water, so that his companion might not see the working of his face.
Lord Newhaven walked slowly away in the direction of Doll, whose distant figure followed by another was hurrying towards them.
“And so there is a Rachel as well, is there?” he said to himself, vainly trying to steel himself against his adversary.
“How is he now?” said Doll, coming within earshot.
“He’s all right, but you’d better get him into dry clothes and yourself too.”
“Change on the bank,” said Doll, seizing a bundle from the keeper. “It’s as hot as an oven in the sun. Why Scarlett’s sitting up! I thought when we laid into him on the bank that he was too far gone, didn’t you? I suppose”— hesitating — Crack?”
Lord Newhaven shook his head.
“I must go back to my boys now,” he said, “or they will be getting into mischief.”
Doll nodded. He and Lord Newhaven had had a hard fight to get the leaking boat to land with Hugh at the bottom of it. It had filled ominously when Doll ceased baleing to help to drag in the heavy unconscious body.
There had been a moment when, inapprehensive as he was Doll had remembered with a qualm that Lord Newhaven could not swim.
“Every fellow ought to swim,” was the moral he drew from the incident and repeated to his wife, who, struck by the soundness of the remark, repeated it to the Gresleys.
Lord Newhaven retraced his steps slowly along the bank in his water-logged boots. He was tired and he did not hurry, for he could see in the distance two small figures sitting faithfully on a log where he had left them.
“Good little chaps,” he said half aloud.
In spite of himself his thoughts went back to Hugh. His feelings towards him had not changed, but they had been forced during the last half-hour out of their original intrenchments into the open, and were liable to attack from new directions.
It was not that he had virtually saved Hugh’s life, for Doll would never have got him into the leaking boat and kept it afloat single-handed. That first moment of enthusiasm when he had rubbed the senseless limbs and breathed into the cold lips, and had felt his heart leap when the life came halting back into them, that moment had passed and left him cold.
But Hugh’s melancholy eyes, as they opened once more on this world and met his unflinching, haunted him, and the sudden anger at his interference. It was the intrenchment of his contempt that Lord Newhaven missed.
A meaner nature would not have let him off so easily as Hugh had done.
“It was an accident,” he said to himself unwillingly. “He need not have admitted that, but I should have been on a gridiron if he had not. In different circumstances that man and I might have been friends. And if he had got into a scrape of this kind a little further afield I might have helped to get him out of it. He feels it. He has aged during the last two months. But as it is — Upon my word, if he were a boy I should have had to let him off. It would have been too bloodthirsty. But he is seven and twenty. He is old enough to know better. She made a fool of him, of course. She made a greater one of me once, for I— married her.
Lord Newhaven reviewed with a dispassionate eye his courtship and marriage.
“A wood anemone,” he said to himself; “I likened her to a wood anemone. Good Lord! And I was thirty years of age, while this poor devil is twenty-seven.”
Lord Newhaven stopped short with fixed eyes.
“I believe I should have to let him off,” he said half-aloud. “I believe I would let him off if I was not as certain as I stand here that he will never do it.”
The less wit a man has, the less he knows that he wants it.
HESTER always took charge of the three elder children and Fraülein of the baby during the six o’clock service, so that the nurse might go to church. On this particular Sunday afternoon Hester and the children were waiting in the little hall till the bell stopped, before which moment they were forbidden to leave the house. Mr. and Mrs. Gresley had just started for the church, Mr. Gresley looking worn and harassed, for since luncheon he had received what he called “a perfectly unaccountable letter” from one of his principal parishioners, a Dissenter, who had been present at the morning service, and who Mr. Gresley had confidently hoped might have been struck by the sermon. This hope had been justified, but not in the manner Mr. Gresley had expected. Mr. Walsh opined in a large round hand that as worms (twice underdashed) did not usually pay voluntary church and school rates he no longer felt himself under an obligation to do so, &c. &c. The letter was a great, an unexpected blow. Who could have foreseen such a result of the morning’s eloquence.
“The truth is,” said Mr. Gresley tremulously, “that they can’t and won’t hear reason. They can’t controvert what I say, so they take refuge in petty spite like this. I must own I am disappointed in Walsh. He is a man of some education, and liberal as regards money. I had thought he was better than most of them, and now he turns on me like this.”
“It’s a way worms have,” said Hester.
“Oh, don’t run a simile to death, Hester,” said Mr. Gresley impatiently. “If you had listened to what I tried to say this morning, you would have seen I only used the word worm figuratively. I never meant it literally, as any one could see who was not determined to misunderstand me. Worms pay school rates! Such folly is positively sickening if it were not malicious.”
Hester had remained silent. She had been deeply vexed for her brother at the incident.
As the church bell stopped the swing door opened and Boulou hurried in like a great personage, conscious that others have waited, and bearing with him an aroma of Irish stew and onions, which showed that he had been exchanging affabilities with the cook. For the truth must be owned. No spinster over forty could look unmoved on Boulou. Alas! for the Vicarage cook, who “had kept herself to herself” for nearly fifty years, only to fall the victim of a “grande passion” for Boulou.
The little Lovelace bounded in, and the expedition started. It was Regie’s turn to choose where they should go, and he decided on the “shrubbery,” a little wood through which ran the private path to Wilderleigh. Doll Loftus had given the Gresleys leave to take the children there.
“Oh, Regie, we always go there,” said Mary plaintively, who invariably chose the Pratts’ park, with its rustic bridges and chalets, which Mr. Pratt in a gracious moment had “thrown open” to, the Gresleys on Sundays, because, as he expressed it, “they must feel so cramped in their little garden.”
But Regie adhered to his determination, and to the “shrubberies” they went. Hester was too tired to play with them, too tired even to tell them a story; so she sat under a tree while they circled in the coppice near at hand.
As we grow older we realise that in the new gardens where life leads us we never learn the shrubs and trees by heart as we did as children in our old garden of Eden, round the little gabled house where we were born. We were so thorough as children. We knew the underneath of every laurel bush, the shape of its bunches of darkling branches, the green dust that our small restless bodies rubbed off from its under twigs. We see now as strangers those little hanging horsetails of pink which sad-faced elders call ribes, but once long ago when the world was young we knew them eye to eye, and the compact little black insects on them, and the quaint taste of them, and the clean clean smell of them. Everything had a taste in those days and was submitted to that test, just as until it had been licked the real colour of any object of interest was not ascertained. There was a certain scarlet berry, very red without and very white within, which we were warned was deadly poison. How well, after a quarter of a century, we remember the bitter taste of it, how much better than many other forbidden fruits duly essayed in later years. We ate those scarlet berries and lived though warned to the contrary.
Presently Boulou, who could do nothing simply, found a dead mouse, where any one else could have found it, in the middle of the path, and made it an occasion for a theatrical display of growlings and shakings. The children decided to bury it, and after a becoming silence their voices could be heard singing “Home, Sweet Home” as the body was being lowered into the grave previously dug by Boulou, who had to be forcibly restrained from going on digging it after the obsequies were over.
“He never knows when to stop,” said Regie, wearily, as Boulou, with a little plaister of earth on his nose, was carried coughing back to Hester.
As she took him Rachel and Sybell came slowly down the path towards them, and the latter greeted Hester with an effusion which suggested that when two is not company three may be.
“A most vexing thing has happened,” said Sybell in a gratified tone, sitting down under Hester’s tree. "I really don’t think I am to blame. You know Mr. Tristram, the charming artist who has been staying with us?”
“I know him,” said Hester.
“Well, he was set on making a sketch of me for one of his large pictures, and it was to have been finished to-day. I don’t see any harm myself in drawing on Sunday. I know the Gresleys do, and I love the Gresleys, he has such a powerful mind; but one must think for oneself, and it was only the upper lip, so I consented to sit to him at four o’clock. I noticed he seemed a little — well rather —”
“Just so,” said Hester.
“The last few days. But, of course, I took no notice of it. A married woman often has to deal with such things without making a fuss about them. Well, I overslept myself, and it was nearly half-past four before I awoke. And when I went into my sitting-room a servant brought me a note. It was from him, saying he had been obliged to leave Wilderleigh suddenly on urgent business, and asking that his baggage might be sent after him.”
Hester raised her eyes slightly as if words failed her. Sybell’s conversation always interested her.
“Perhaps the reason she is never told anything,” she said to herself, “is because the ground the confidence would cover is invariably built over already by a fiction of her own which it would not please her to see destroyed.”
“Who would have thought,” continued Sybell, “that he would have behaved in that way because I was one little half-hour late. And of course the pretext of urgent business is too transparent, because there is no Sunday post, and the telegraph boy had not been up. I asked that. And he was so anxious to finish the sketch. He almost asked to stay over Sunday on purpose.”
Rachel and Hester looked on the ground.
“Rachel said he was all right in the garden just before, didn’t you, Rachel?”
“I said I thought he was a little nervous.”
“And what did he talk to you about?”
“He spoke about the low tone of the morals of the day, and about marriage.”
“Ah! I don’t wonder he talked to you, Rachel, you are so sympathetic. I expect lots of people confide in you about their troubles and love affairs. Morals of the day! Marriage! Poor, poor Mr. Tristram! I shall tell Doll quietly this evening. On the whole, it is just as well he is gone.”
“Just as well,” said Rachel and Hester with surprising unanimity.
So fast does a little leaven spread within us — so incalculable is the effect of one personality on another.
— — GEORGE ELIOT.
HUGH was not ill after what Mr. Gresley called “his immersion,” but for some days he remained feeble and exhausted. Sybell quite forgot she had not liked him, insisted on his staying on indefinitely at Wilderleigh, and, undaunted by her distressing experience with Mr. Tristram, read poetry to Hugh in the afternoons and surrounded him with genuine warm-hearted care. Doll was steadily, quietly kind.
It was during these days that Hugh and Rachel saw much of each other, during these days that Rachel passed in spite of herself beyond the anxious impersonal interest which Hugh had awakened in her, on to that slippery much trodden ground of uncomfortable possibilities where the unmarried meet.
Hugh attracted and repelled her.
It was, alas! easy to say why she was repelled. But who shall say why she was attracted? Has the secret law ever been discovered which draws one man and woman together amid the crowd? Hugh was not among the best men who had wished to marry her, but nevertheless he was the only man since Mr. Tristram who had succeeded in making her think continually of him. And perhaps she half knew that though she had been loved by better men, Hugh loved her better than they had.
Which would prove the stronger, the attraction or the repulsion?
How can I? she said to herself over and over again. “When I remember Lady Newhaven, how can I? When I think of what his conduct was for a whole year, how can I? Can he have any sense of honour to have acted like that? Is he even really sorry? He is very charming, very refined, and he loves me. He looks good, but what do I know of him except evil. He looks as if he could be faithful, but how can I trust him?”
Hugh fell into a deep dejection after his narrow escape. Dr. Brown said it was nervous prostration, and Doll rode into Southminster and returned laden with comic papers. Who shall say whether the cause was physical or mental. Hugh had seen death very near for the first time, and the thought of death haunted him. He had not realised when he drew lots that he was risking the possibility of anything like that, such an entire going away, such an awful rending of his being as the short word death now conveyed to him. He had had no idea it would be like that. And he had got to do it again. There was the crux. He had got to do it again.
He leant back faint and shuddering in the deck chair in the rose garden where he was lying.
Presently Rachel appeared, coming towards him down the narrow grass walk between two high walls of hollyhocks. She had a cup of tea in her hand.
“I have brought you this,” she said, “with a warning that you had better not come in to tea. Mr. Gresley has been sighted walking up the drive. Mrs. Loftus thought you would like to see him, but I reminded her that Dr. Brown said you were to be kept very quiet.”
Mr. Gresley had called every day since the accident in order to cheer the sufferer to whom he had been greatly attracted. Hugh had seen him once, and afterwards had never felt strong enough to repeat the process.
“Must you go back?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Mrs. Loftus and he are great friends. I should be rather in the way.”
And she sat down by him.
“Are you feeling ill?” she said gently, noticing his careworn face.
“No,” he replied. “I was only thinking. I was thinking,” he went on after a pause, “that I would give everything I possess not to have done something which I have done.”
Rachel looked straight in front of her. The confession was coming at last. Her heart beat.
“I have done wrong,” he said slowly, “and I am suffering for it, and I shall suffer more before I’ve finished. But the worst is —”
She looked at him.
“The worst is that I can’t bear all the consequences myself. An innocent person will pay the penalty of my sin.”
Hugh’s voice faltered. He was thinking of his mother.
Rachel’s mind instantly flew to Lord Newhaven. “Then Lord Newhaven drew the short lighter,” she thought, and she coloured deeply.
There was a long silence.
“Do you think,” said Hugh, smiling faintly, “that people are ever given a second chance?”
“Always,” said Rachel. “If not here — afterwards.”
“If I were given another,” said Hugh. “If I might only be given another now in this life I should take it.”
He was thinking if only he might be let off this dreadful, self-inflicted death. She thought he meant that he repented of his sin, and would fain do better.
There was a sound of voices near at hand. Sybell and Mr. Gresley came down the grass walk towards them.
“London society,” Mr. Gresley was saying, “to live in a stuffy street away from the beauties of Nature, its birds and flowers, to spend half my days laying traps for invitations, and half my nights grinning like a fool in stifling drawing-rooms, listening to vapid talk. No, thanks! I know better than to care for London society. Hester does, I know, but then Hester does not mind making up to big people, and I do. In fact —”
“I have brought Mr. Gresley after all, in spite of Dr. Brown,” said Sybell, “because we were in the middle of such an interesting conversation on the snares of society that I knew you would like to hear it. You have had such a dull day with Doll away at his County Council.”
That night as Rachel sat in her room she went over that half-made, ruthlessly interrupted confidence.
“He does repent,” she said to herself, recalling the careworn face. “If he does, can I overlook the past? Can I help him to make a fresh start? If he had not done this one dishonourable action, I could have cared for him. Can I now?”
A fool’s mouth is his destruction.
THE superficial reader of these pages may possibly have forgotten, but the earnest one will undoubtedly remember that in an earlier chapter a sale of work was mentioned which was to take place in the Wilderleigh gardens at the end of August.
The end of August had now arrived, and with it two white tents, which sprang up suddenly one morning like giant mushrooms on one of Doll’s smooth-shaven lawns. He groaned in spirit as he watched their erection. They would ruin the turf.
“Might as well iron it with a hot iron,” he said disconsolately to Hugh. “But, of course, this sort of thing — Diocesan Fund, eh? In these days we must stand by our colours.” He repeated Mr. Gresley’s phrase. Doll seldom ventured on an opinion not sanctioned by the ages, or that he had not heard repeated till its novelty had been comfortably rubbed off by his wife or the Gresleys.
The two men watched the proceedings mournfully. They could not help, at least they were told they could not help the women busily engaged in draping and arranging the stalls. They were still at large, but Doll knew as well as a dog who is going to be washed, what was in store for him in the afternoon, and he was depressed beforehand.
“Don’t let yourself be run in,” he said generously to Hugh. “You’re not up to it. It takes a strong man to grapple with this sort of thing. Kills off the weakly ones like flies. You lie low in the smoking-room till it’s all over.”
“All I can say is,” remarked Mrs. Gresley, as she and Hester led the Vicarage donkey and cart up the drive, heavily laden with the work of many months, “that the Pratts have behaved exceedingly badly. Here they are, the richest people by far in the parish, and they would not even take a stall, they would not even furnish half of one, and they said they would be away, and they are at the Towers after all. No one likes the Pratts more than I do, or sees their good points as I do, but I can’t shut my eyes to the fact that they are the meanest of the mean.”
The Pratts had only contributed two “bed-spreads,” and a “sheet-sham,” and a set of antimacassars. If the reader wishes to know what “bed-spreads” and “sheet-shams” are, let him ask his intended, and let him see to it that he marries a woman who cannot tell him.
Mrs. Pratt had bought the antimacassars for the Towers, and secretly adored them until Ada pronounced them to be vulgar. The number of things which Ada discovered to be vulgar increased every day, and included the greater part of her mother’s wardrobe, much to the distress of that poor lady. Mrs. Pratt had reached the size when it is prudent to concentrate a love of bright colours in one’s parasol. On this particular afternoon she shed tears over the fact that Ada refused to accompany her if her mother wore a unique garment of orange satin covered with what appeared to be a plague of black worms.
Of course, the sale of work was combined with a garden party, and a little after three o’clock carriage after carriage began to arrive, and Sybell, with a mournful, handsome, irreproachably dressed husband, took up her position on the south front to receive her guests.
The whole neighbourhood had been invited, and it can generally be gauged with tolerable accuracy by a hostess of some experience who will respond to the call and who will stay away. Sybell and her husband were among those who were not to be found at these festivities, neither were the New- havens, save at their own, nor the Pontisburys, nor the Bishop of Southminster. Cards had, of course, been sent to each, but no one expected them to appear.
Presently, among the stream of arrivals, Sybell noticed the slender figure of Lady Newhaven, and — astonishing vision — Lord Newhaven beside her.
“Wonders will never cease,” said Doll, shaken for a moment out of the apathy of endurance.
Sybell raised her eyebrows, and advanced with the prettiest air of empressement to meet her unexpected guests. No, clearly it was impossible that the two women should like each other. They were the same age, about the same height and colouring, their social position was too similar, their historic houses too near each other. Lady Newhaven was by far the best looking, but that was not a difference which attracted Sybell towards her. On this occasion Sybell’s face assumed its most squirrel-like expression, for as ill-luck would have it they were dressed alike.
Lady Newhaven looked very ethereal as she came slowly across the grass in her diaphanous gown of rich white, covered with a flowing veil of thinnest transparent black. Her blue eyes looked restlessly bright, her lips wore a mechanical smile. Rachel watching her, experienced a sudden pang at her undeniable loveliness. It wounded her suddenly as it never had done before. “I am a common-looking square-built woman compared to her,” she said to herself. “No wonder he —”
She instinctively drew back as Lady Newhaven turned quickly towards her.
“You dear person,” said Lady Newhaven, her eyes moving restlessly over the crowd, “are you still here? Let us go and buy something together. How nice you look,” without looking at her. She drew Rachel apart in the direction of the tents.
“Where is he?” she said sharply. “I know he is here. I heard all about the accident, though Edward never told me. I don’t see him.”
“He is not in the gardens. He is not coming out. He is still rather knocked up.”
“I thought I should have died when I heard it. Ah, Rachel, never love any one. You don’t know what it’s like. But I must see him. I have come here on purpose.”
“So I supposed.”
“Edward would come, too. He appeared at the last moment when the carriage came round, though I have never known him to go to a garden-party in his life. But where is he, Rachel?”
“Somewhere in the house, I suppose.”
“I shan’t know where to find him. I can’t be wandering about that woman’s house by myself. We must slip away together, Rachel, and you must take me to him. I must see him alone for five minutes.”
Rachel shook her head.
Captain Pratt, tall, pale, cautious, immaculate, his cane held along his spinal column, appeared suddenly close at hand.
“Mrs. Loftus is fortunate in her day,” he remarked, addressing himself to Lady Newhaven, and observing her fixedly with cold admiration. “I seldom come to this sort of thing, but neighbours in the country must support each other. I see you are on your way to the tents. Pray allow me to carry your purchases for you.”
“Oh! don’t let me trouble you,” said Lady Newhaven, shrinking imperceptibly. But it was no trouble to Captain Pratt, and they walked on together.
Lord Newhaven, who could not have been far off, joined Rachel.
“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Pratt to Ada, “you might have let me wear my black and orange, after all, for you see Lady Newhaven has something very much the same, only hers is white underneath. And do you see she has got two diamond butterflies on, the little one at her throat and the big one holding her white carnations. And you would not let me put on a single thing. There now, Algy has joined her,” continued Mrs. Pratt, her attention quickly diverted from her own wrongs. “Now they are walking on together. How nice he looks in those beautiful clothes. Algy and Lord Newhaven and Mr. Loftus all have the same look, haven’t they? All friends together, as I often say, such a mercy among county people. You might walk a little with Lord Newhaven, Ada. It’s unaccountable how seldom we see him, but always so pleasant when we do. Ah! he’s speaking to Rachel West. They are going to the tents, after all. Well, whatever you may say, I do think we ought to go and buy something, too. Papa says he won’t put his hand in his pocket if the Loftuses are to get all the credit, and we ought to have had the choice of having the sale at the Towers, so he shan’t do anything; but I think it would be nice if we went and bought a little something. Just a five-pound note. You shall spend it, my dear, if you like.”
“This is sheer recklessness,” said Lord Newhaven, as Rachel bought an expensive tea-cosy from Fraülein. “In these days of death-duties you cannot possess four teapots, and you have already bought three teapot costumes.”
“That is what I am here for,” said Rachel, producing a cheque-book. “How much did you say, Fraülein?”
“Twenty-seven and seex,” said Fraülein.
“Now I see it in the full light, I have taken a fancy to it myself,” said Lord Newhaven. “I never saw anything the least like it. I don’t think I can allow you to appropriate it, Miss West. You are sweeping up all the best things.”
“I have a verr’ pretty thing for gentlemen,” said Fraülein. “Herr B-r-r-rown has just bought one.”
“Very elaborate indeed. Bible-markers, I presume? Oh! Braces! Never mind, they will be equally useful to me. I’ll have them. Now for the tea-cosy. It is under-priced. I consider that, with the chenille swallow, it is worth thirty shillings. I will give thirty for it.”
“Thirty-two and six,” said Rachel.
“The landed interest is not going to be brow-beaten by coal-mines. Thirty-three and twopence.”
“Forty shillings,” said Rachel.
“Forty-two,” said Lord Newhaven.
Every one in the tent had turned to watch the bidding.
“Forty-two and six,” said Rachel.
Fraülein blushed. She had worked the tea-cosy. It was to her a sonata in red plush.
“Three guineas,” said Captain Pratt, by an infallible instinct perceiving and placing himself within the focus of general interest.
The bidding ceased instantly. Lord Newhaven shrugged his shoulders and turned away. Fraülein, still shaking with conflicting emotions, handed the tea-cosy to Captain Pratt. He took it with an acid smile, secretly disgusted at the sudden cessation of interest, for which he had paid rather highly, and looked round for Lady Newhaven.
But she had disappeared.
“Fancy you and Algy bidding against each other like that,” said Ada Pratt archly to Lord Newhaven, for though Ada was haughty in general society she could be sportive, and even friskily ingratiating, towards those of her fellow creatures whom she termed “swells.” “Why half Middleshire will be saying that you have quarrelled next.”
“Only those who do not know how intimate Captain Pratt and I really are could think we have quarrelled,” said Lord Newhaven, his eye wandering over the crowd. “But I am blocking your way and Mrs. Pratt’s. How do you do, Mrs. Pratt. Miss West, your burden is greater than you can bear. You are dropping part of it. I don’t know what it is, but I can shut my eyes as I pick it up. I insist on carrying half back to the house. It will give a pleasing impression that I have bought largely. Weren’t you pleased at the money we wrung out of Captain Pratt? He never thought we should stop bidding. It’s about all the family will contribute, unless that good old Mama Pratt buys something. She is the only one of the family I can tolerate. Is Scarlett still here? I ought to have asked after him before.”
“He’s here, but he’s not well. He’s in hiding in the smoking-room.”
“He is lucky he is no worse. I should have had rheumatic fever if I had been in his place. How cool it is in here after the glare outside. Must you go out again? Well, I consider I have done my duty, and that I may fairly allow myself a cigarette in peace.”
“Really, Mr. Loftus, I’m quite shocked. This absurd faintness! The tent was very crowded, and there is not much air to-day, is there? I shall be all right if I may sit quietly in the hall a little. How deliciously cool in here after the glare outside. A glass of water? Thanks. Yes, only I hate to be so troublesome. And how are you after that dreadful accident in the boat?”
“Oh! I am all right,” said Doll, who by this time hated the subject. “It was Scarlett who was nearly frozen like New Zealand lamb.”
Doll had heard Mr. Gresley fire off the simile of the lamb, and considered it sound.
“How absurd you are. You always make me laugh. I suppose he has left now that he is unfrozen.”
“Oh! no. He is still here. We would not let him go till he was better. He is not up to much. Weak chap at the best of times I should think. He’s lying low in the smoking-room till the people are gone.”
“Mr. Scarlett is an old friend of ours,” said Lady Newhaven, sipping her glass of water, and spilling a little, “but I can’t quite forgive him, no, I really can’t, for the danger he caused to Edward. You know, or perhaps you don’t know, that Edward can’t swim, either. Even now I can’t bear to think what might have happened.”
She closed her eyes with evident emotion.
Doll’s stolid garden party face relaxed. “Good little woman,” he thought. “As fond of him as she can be.”
“All’s well that ends well,” he remarked aloud.
Doll did not know that he was quoting Shakespeare, but he did know by long experience that this sentence could be relied on as suitable to the occasion, or to any occasion that looked a little “doddery,” and finished up all right.
“And now, Mr. Loftus, positively I must insist on your leaving me quietly here. I am quite sure you are wanted outside, and I should blame myself if you wasted another minute on me. It was only the sun which affected me. Don’t mention it to Edward. He is always so fussy about me. I will rest quietly here for a quarter of an hour, and then rejoin you all again in the garden.”
“I hope I am not disturbing any one,” said Lord Newhaven, quietly entering the smoking-room. “Well, Scarlett, how are you getting on?”
Hugh, who was lying on a sofa with his arms raised and his hands behind his head, looked up and his expression changed.
“He was thinking of something uncommonly pleasant,” thought Lord Newhaven, “not of me or mine, I fancy. I have come to smoke a cigarette in peace,” he added aloud, “if you don’t object.”
“Of course not.”
Lord Newhaven lit his cigarette and puffed a moment in silence.
“Hot outside,” he said.
Hugh nodded. He wondered how soon he could make a pretext for getting up and leaving the room.
There was a faint silken rustle, and Lady Newhaven, pale, breathless, came swiftly in and closed the door. The instant afterwards she saw her husband and shrank back with a little cry. Lord Newhaven did not look at her. His eyes were fixed on Hugh.
Hugh’s face became suddenly ugly, livid. He rose slowly to his feet, and stood motionless.
“He hates her,” said Lord Newhaven to himself. And he removed his glance and came forward.
“You were looking for me, Violet?” he remarked. “I have no doubt you are wishing to return home. We will go at once.” He threw away his cigarette. “Well, good-bye, Scarlett, in case we don’t meet again. I daresay you will pay Westhope a visit later on. Ah, Captain Pratt! so you have fled, like us, from the madding crowd. I can recommend Loftus’s cigarettes. I have just had one myself. Good-bye. Did you leave your purchases in the hall, Violet? Yes? Then we will collect them on our way.”
The husband and wife were half-way down the grand staircase before Lord Newhaven said in his usual even voice:
“I must ask you once more to remember that I will not have any scandal attaching to your name. Did not you see that that white mongrel Pratt was on your track? If I had not been there when he came in he would have drawn his own vile conclusions, and for once they would have been correct.”
“He could not think worse of me than you do,” said the wife, half cowed, half defiant.
“No, but he could say so, which I don’t, or, what is more probable, he could use his knowledge to obtain a hold over you. He is a dangerous man. Don’t put yourself in his power.”
“I don’t want to, or in anybody’s.”
“Then avoid scandal instead of courting it, and don’t repeat the folly of this afternoon.”
Captain Pratt did not remain long in the smoking-room. He had only a slight acquaintance with Hugh, which did not appear capable of expansion. Captain Pratt made a few efforts, proved its inelastic properties, and presently lounged out again.
Hugh moved slowly to the window, and leaned his throbbing forehead against the stone mullion. He was still weak, and the encounter with Lady Newhaven had shaken him.
“What did he mean?” he said to himself, bewildered and suspicious. “‘Perhaps I should be staying at Westhope later on!’ But of course I shall never go there again. He knows that as well as I do. What did he mean?”
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter — and the Bird is on the wing.
— OMAR KHAYYáM.
IT was the third week of November. Winter, the destroyer, was late, but he had come at last. There was death in the air. A whisper of death stole across the empty fields and bare hill-side. The birds heard it and were silent. The November wind was hurrying round Westhope Abbey, shaking its bare trees.
Lord Newhaven stood looking fixedly out eastward across the level land to the low hills beyond. He stood so long that the day died, and twilight began to rub out first the hills and then the long white lines of flooded meadow and blurred pollard willows. Presently the river mist rose up to meet the coming darkness. In the east, low and lurid, a tawny moon crept up the livid sky. She made no moonlight on the grey earth.
Lord Newhaven moved away from the window, where he had become a shadow among the shadows, and sat down in the dark at his writing-table.
Presently he turned on the electric lamp at his elbow and took a letter out of his pocket. The circle of shaded light fell on his face as he read — the thin grave face, with the steady, inscrutable eyes.
He read the letter slowly, evidently not for the first time.
“If I had not been taken by surprise at the moment I should not have consented to the manner in which our differences were settled. Personally, I consider the old arrangement to which you regretfully alluded at the time”—(“pistols for two and coffee for four,” I remember perfectly)—“as preferable, and as you appeared to think so yourself, would it not be advisable to resort to it? Believing that the old arrangement will meet your wishes as fully as it does mine, I trust that you will entertain this suggestion, and that you will agree to a meeting with your own choice of weapons on any pretext you may choose to name within the next week.”
The letter ended there. It was unsigned.
“The time is certainly becoming short,” said Lord Newhaven. “He is right in saying there is only a week left. If it were not for the scandal for the boys, and if I thought he would really hold to the compact, I would meet him, but he won’t. He flinched when be drew lots. He won’t. He has courage enough to stand up in front of me for two minutes, and take his chance, but not to blow his own brains out. No. And if he knew what is in store for him if he does not, he would not have courage to face that either. Nor should I, if I were in his shoes, poor devil. The first six foot of earth would be good enough for me.”
He threw the letter with its envelope into the fire and watched it burn.
Then he took up the gold pen which his wife had given him, examined the nib, dipped it very slowly in the ink, and wrote with sudden swiftness.
“Allow me to remind you that you made no objection at the time to the manner of our encounter and my choice of weapons, by means of which publicity was avoided. The risk was equal. You now, at the last moment, propose that I should run it a second time, and in a manner to cause instant scandal. I must decline to do so, or to reopen the subject, which had received my careful consideration before I decided upon it. I have burnt your letter, and desire you will burn mine.”
“Poor devil!” said Lord Newhaven, putting the letter, not in the post-box at his elbow, but in his pocket. “Loftus and I did him an ill turn when we pulled him out of the water.”
The letter took its own time, for it had to avoid possible pitfalls. It shunned the company of the other Westhope letters, it avoided the village post-office, but after a day’s delay it was launched, and lay among a hundred others in a station pillar-box. And then it hurried, hurried, as fast as express train could take it, till it reached its London address, and, went softly upstairs, and laid itself with a few others on Hugh’s breakfast table.
For many weeks since his visit at Wilderleigh, Hugh had been like a man in a boat without oars, drifting slowly, imperceptibly on the placid current of a mighty river, who far away hears the fall of Niagara droning like a bumble bee in a lily cup.
Long ago, in the summer, he had recognised the sound, had realised the steep agony towards which the current was bearing him, and had struggled horribly, impotently, against the inevitable. But of late, though the sound was ever in his ears, welling up out of the blue distance, he had given up the useless struggle, and lay still in the sunshine watching the summer woods slide past, and the clouds sail away, always away and away, to the birthplace of the river, to that little fluttering pulse in the heart of the hills which a woman’s hand might cover, the infant pulse of the great river to be.
Hugh’s thoughts went back like the clouds towards that tiny spring of passion in his own life. He felt that he could have forgiven it — and himself — if he had been swept into the vortex of a headlong mountain torrent leaping down its own wild water-way, carrying all before it. Other men he had seen who had been wrested off their feet, swept out of their own keeping by such a torrent on the steep hillside of their youth. But it had not been so with him. He had walked more cautiously than they. As he walked he had stopped to look at the little thread of water which came bubbling up out of its white pebbles. It was so pretty, it was so feeble, it was so clear. Involuntarily he followed it, watched it grow, amused himself half contemptuously with it, helped its course by turning obstacles from its path. It never rushed. It never leaped. It was a toy. The day came when it spread itself safe and shallow on level land and he embarked upon it. But he was quickly tired of it. It was beginning to run muddily through a commonplace country, past squalid polluting towns and villages. The hills were long since gone. He turned to row to the shore. And behold his oars were gone! He had been trapped to his destruction.
Hugh had never regarded seriously his intrigue with Lady Newhaven. He had been attracted, excited, partially, half-willingly enslaved. He had thought at the time that he loved her, and that supposition had confirmed him in his cheap cynicism about woman. This, then, was her paltry little court, where man offered mock homage, and where she played at being queen. Hugh had made the discovery that love was a much overrated passion. He had always supposed so, but when he tired of Lady Newhaven he was sure of it. His experience was, after all, only the same as that which many men acquire by marriage, and hold unshaken through long and useful lives. But Hugh had not been able to keep the treasures of this early experience. It had been rendered worthless, perhaps rather contemptible by a later one, that of falling in love with Rachel, and the astonishing discovery that he was in love for the first time. He had sold his birthright for a mess of red pottage, as surely as any man or woman who marries for money or liking. He had not believed in his birthright, and holding it to be worthless, had given it to the first person who had offered him anything in exchange.
His whole soul had gradually hardened itself against Lady Newhaven. If he had loved her, he said to himself, he could have borne his fate. But the play had not been worth the candle. His position was damnable, but that he could have borne — at least so he thought if he had had his day. But he had not had it. That thought rankled. To be hounded out of life because he had mistaken paper-money for real was not only unfair, it was grotesque.
Gradually, however, Hugh forgot his smouldering hate of Lady Newhaven, his sense of injustice and anger against fate, he forgot everything in his love for Rachel. It became the only reality of his life.
He had remained in London throughout October and November, cancelling all his engagements because she was there. What her work was he vaguely apprehended: that she was spending herself and part of her colossal fortune in the East End, but he took no interest in it. He was incapable of taking more interests into his life at this time. He passed many quiet evenings with her in the house in Park Lane which she had lately bought. The little secretary who lived with her had always a faint smile and more writing to do than usual on the evenings when he dined with them.
A great peace was over all their intercourse. Perhaps it was the hush before the storm, the shadow of which was falling, falling, with each succeeding day across the minds of both. Once only a sudden gust of emotion stirred the quiet air, but it dropped again immediately. It came with the hour when Hugh confessed to her the blot upon his past. The past was taking upon itself ever an uglier and more repulsive aspect as he saw more of Rachel. It was hard to put into words, but he spoke of it. The spectre of love rose like a ghost between them as they looked earnestly at each other, each pale even in the ruddy firelight.
Hugh was truthful in intention. He was determined he would never lie to Rachel. He implied an intrigue with a married woman, a deviation not only from morality but from honour. More he did not say. But as he looked at her strained face it seemed to him that she expected something more. A dreadful silence fell between them when he had finished. Had she then no word for him. Her eyes, mute, imploring, dark with an agony of suspense, met his for a second and fell instantly. She did not speak. Her silence filled him with despair. He got up. “It’s getting late. I must go,” he stammered.
She rose mechanically and put out her hand.
“May I come again?” he said, holding it more tightly than he knew and looking intently at her. Was he going to be dismissed?
The pain he caused her hand recalled her to herself. A look of bewilderment crossed her face, and then she realised his suspense and said gravely, “You may come again.”
He kissed the hand he held, and as he did so he knew for the first time that she loved him. But he could not speak of love after what he had just told her. He looked back when he reached the door and saw her standing where he had left her. She had raised the hand he had kissed to her lips.
That was three days ago. Since then he had not dared to go and see her. He could not ask her to marry him when he was within a few days of the time when he was bound in so-called honour to give Lord Newhaven satisfaction. He certainly could not be in her presence again without asking her. The shadows of the last weeks had suddenly become ghastly realities once more. The roar of Niagara drowned all other sounds. What was he going to do? What was he going to do in the predicament towards which he had been drifting so long, which was now actually upon him? Who shall say what horror, what agony of mind, what frenzied searching for a way of escape, what anguish of baffled love crowded in on Hugh’s mind during those last days? At the last moment he caught at a straw, and wrote to Lord Newhaven offering to fight him. He did not ask himself what he should do if Lord Newhaven refused. But when Lord Newhaven did refuse, his determination, long unconsciously fostered, sprang full-grown into existence in a sudden access of passionate anger and blind rage.
“He won’t fight, won’t he! He thinks I will die like a rat in a trap with all my life before me. I will not. I offered him a fair chance of revenging himself — I would have fired into the air — and if he won’t take it it is his own look out, damn him. He can shoot me at sight if he likes. Let him.”