Is it well with the child?
“I AM not really anxious,” said Mr. Gresley, looking out across the Vicarage laurels to the white fields and hedges. All was blurred and vague and very still. The only thing that had a distinct outline was the garden railing, with a solitary rook on it.
“I am not really anxious,” he said again, sitting down at the breakfast table. But his face contradicted him. It was blue and pinched, for he had just returned from reading the morning service to himself in an ice-cold church, but there was a pucker in the brow that was not the result of cold. The Vicarage porch had fallen down in the night, but he was evidently not thinking of that. He drank a little coffee and then got up and walked to the window again.
“She is with the Pratts,” he said with decision. “I am glad I sent a note over early, if it will relieve your mind, but I am convinced she is with the Pratts.”
Mrs. Gresley murmured something. She looked scared. She made an attempt to eat something, but it was a mere pretence.
The swing door near the back staircase creaked. In the Vicarage you could hear everything.
Mr. and Mrs. Gresley looked eagerly at the door. The parlourmaid came in with a note between her finger and thumb.
“She is not there,” said Mr. Gresley in a shaking voice. “I wrote Mr. Pratt such a guarded letter saying Hester had imprudently run across to see them on her return home, and how grateful I was to Mrs. Pratt for not allowing her to return, as it had begun to snow. He says he and Mrs. Pratt have not seen her.”
“James,” said Mrs. Gresley, “where is she?”
A second step shuffled across the hall, and Fraülein stood in the doorway. Her pale face was drawn with anxiety. In both hands she clutched a trailing skirt plaistered with snow, hitched above a pair of large goloshed feet, into which the legs were grafted without ankles.
“She has not return?”
“No,” said Mr. Gresley, “and she is not with the Pratts.”
“I know always she is not wiz ze Pratts,” said Fraülein scornfully. “She never go to Pratt if she is in grief. I go out at half seven this morning to ze Br-r-rowns, but Miss Br-r-rown know nozing. I go to Wilderleigh, I see Mrs. Loftus still in bed, but she is not there. I go to Evannses, I go to Smeeth, I go last to Mistair Valsh, but she is not there.”
Mr. Gresley began to experience something of what Fraülein had been enduring all night.
“She would certainly not go from my house to a Dissenter’s,” he said stiffly. “You might have saved yourself the trouble of calling there, Fraülein.”
“She like Mr. and Mrs. Valsh. She give them her book,”
Fraülein’s voice drowned the muffled rumbling of a carriage, and a ring at the bell, the handle of which, uninjured amid the chaos, kept watch above the remains of the late porch.
The Bishop stood a moment in the little hall while the maid went into the dining-room to tell the Gresleys of his arrival. His eyes rested on the pile of letters on the table, on the dead flowers beside them. They had been so beautiful yesterday when he gave them to Hester. Hester herself had been so pretty yesterday.
The maid came back and asked him to “step” into the dining-room.
Mr. and Mrs. Gresley had risen from their chairs. Their eyes were fixed anxiously upon him. Fraülein gave a little shriek and rushed at him.
“She is viz you?” she gasped, shaking him by the arm.
“She is with me,” said the Bishop, looking only at Fraülein and taking her shaking hands in his.
“Thank God,” said Mr. Gresley, and Mrs. Gresley sat down and began to cry.
Some of the sternness melted out of the Bishop’s face as he looked at the young couple.
“I came as soon as I could,” he said. “I started soon after seven, but the roads are heavy.”
“This is a great relief,” said Mr. Gresley. He began on his deepest organ note, but it quavered quite away on the word relief for want of wind.
“How is Regie?” said the Bishop. It was his turn to be anxious.
“Regie is verr vell,” said Fraülein with decision. “Tell her he is so veil as he vas.”
“He is very much shaken,” said Mrs. Gresley, indignant mother-love flashing in her wet eyes. “He is a delicate child, and she, Hester — may God forgive her — struck him in one of her passions. She might have killed him. And the poor child fell and bruised his arm and shoulder. And he was bringing her a little present when she did it. The child had done nothing whatever to annoy her, had he, James?”
“Nothing,” said Mr. Gresley, and his conscience pricking him, he added, “I must own Hester had always seemed fond of Regie till last night.”
He felt that it would not be entirely fair to allow the Bishop to think that Hester was in the habit of maltreating the children.
“I have told him that his own mother will take care of him,” said Mrs. Gresley, “and that he need not be afraid, his aunt shall never come back again. When I saw his little arm I felt I could never trust Hester in the house again.” As Mrs. Gresley spoke she felt she was making certainty doubly sure that the woman of whom she was jealous would return no more.
“Regie cry till his ’ead ache because you say Miss Gresley no come back,” said Fraülein, looking at Mrs Gresley as if she would have bitten a piece out of her.
“I think, Fraülein, it is the children’s lesson-time,” said Mr. Gresley majestically.
Who could have imagined that unobtrusive, submissive Fraülein, gentlest and shyest of women, would put herself forward in this aggressive manner. The truth is, it is all very well to talk, you never can tell what people will do. They suddenly turn round and act exactly opposite to their whole previous character. Look at Fraülein!
That poor lady, recalled thus to a sense of duty, hurried from the room, and the Bishop, who had opened the door for her, closed it gently behind her.
“You must excuse her, my lord,” said Mr. Gresley; “the truth is, we are all somewhat upset this morning. Hester would have saved us much uneasiness, I may say anxiety, if she had mentioned to us yesterday evening that she was going back to you. No doubt she overtook your carriage, which put up at the inn for half an hour.”
“No,” said the Bishop, “she came on foot. She — walked all the way.”
Mr. Gresley smiled. “I am afraid, my lord, Hester has given you an inaccurate account. I assure you, she is incapable of walking five miles, much less ten.”
“She took about five hours to do it,” said the Bishop, who had hesitated an instant, as if swallowing something unpalatable. “In moments of great excitement nervous persons like your sister are capable of almost anything. The question is, whether she will survive the shock that drove her out of your house last night. Her hands are severely burnt. Dr. Brown, whom I left with her, fears brain fever.”
The Bishop paused, giving his words time to sink in. Then he went on slowly in a level voice, looking into the fire.
“She still thinks that she has killed Regie. She won’t believe the doctor and me when we assure her she has not. She turns against us for deceiving her.”
Mr. Gresley wrestled with a very bitter feeling towards his sister, overcame it, and said hoarsely:
“Tell her from me that Regie is not much the worse, and tell her that I— that his mother and I— forgive her.”
“Not me, James,” sobbed Mrs. Gresley. “It is too soon. I don’t. I can’t. If I said I did I should not feel it.”
“Hester is not in a condition to receive messages,” said the Bishop. “She would not believe them. Dr. Brown says the only thing we can do for her is to show Regie to her. If she sees him she may believe her own eyes, and this frightful excitement may be got under. I came to take him back with me now in the carriage.”
“I will not let him go,” said Mrs. Gresley, the mother in her overriding her awe of the Bishop. “I am sorry if Hester is ill. I will,” and Mrs. Gresley made a superhuman effort, “I will come and nurse her myself, but I won’t have Regie frightened a second time.”
“He shall not be frightened a second time. But it is very urgent. While we are wasting time talking, Hester’s life is ebbing away as surely as if she were bleeding to death. If she were actually bleeding in this room how quickly you two would run to her and bind up the wound. There would be nothing you would not do to relieve her suffering.”
“If I would let Regie go,” said Mrs. Gresley, “he would not be willing, and we could not have him taken away by force, could we, James?”
The door opened, and Regie appeared, gently pushed from behind by Fraülein’s thin hand. Boulou followed. The door was closed again immediately, almost on Boulou’s tail.
The Bishop and Regie looked hard at each other.
“I send my love to Auntie Hester,” said Regie in his catechism voice, “and I am quite well.”
“I should like to have some conversation with Regie alone,” said the Bishop.
Mrs. Gresley wavered, but the Bishop’s eye remained fixed on Mr. Gresley, and the latter led his wife away. The door was left ajar, but the Bishop closed it. Then he sat down by the fire and held out his hand.
Regie went up to him fearlessly, and stood between his knees. The two faces were exactly on the same level. Boulou sat down before the fire, his tail uncurling in the heat.
“Auntie Hester is very sorry,” said the Bishop. “She is so sorry that she can’t even cry.”
“Tell her not to mind,” said Regie.
“It’s no good telling her. Does your arm hurt much?”
“I don’t know. Mother says it does, and Fraülein says it doesn’t. But it isn’t that.”
“What is it, then?”
“It isn’t that, or the ‘tato being lost, it was only crumbs afterwards; but, Mr. Bishop, I hadn’t done nothing.”
Regie looked into the kind keen eyes, and his own little red ones filled again with tears.
“I had not done nothing,” he repeated. “And I’d kept my ‘tato for her. It’s that — that — I don’t mind about my arm. I’m Christian soldiers about my arm; but it’s that — that —”
“That hurts you in your heart,” said the Bishop, putting his arm round him.
“Yes,” said Regie, producing a tight little ball that had once been a handkerchief. “Auntie Hester and I were such friends. I told her all my secrets, and she told me hers. I knew long before, when she gave father the silver cream-jug, and about Fraülein’s muff. If it was a mistake, like father treading on my foot at the school feast, I should not mind, but she did it on purpose.”
The Bishop’s brow contracted. Time was ebbing away, ebbing away like a life. Yet Dr. Brown’s warning remained in his ears. “If the child is frightened of her, and screams when he sees her, I won’t answer for the consequences.”
“Is that your little dog?” he said, after a moment’s thought.
“Yes, that is Boulou.”
“Was he ever in a trap?” asked the Bishop with a vague recollection of the ways of clergymen’s dogs, those “little rifts within the lute” which so often break the harmony between a sporting squire and his clergyman.
“He was once. Mr. Pratt says he hunts, but father says not, that he could not catch anything if he tried.”
“I had a dog once,” said the Bishop, “called Jock. And he got in a trap like Boulou did. Now, Jock loved me. He cared for me more than anybody in the world. Yet, as I was letting him out of the trap, he bit me. Do you know why he did that?”
“Why?”
“Because the trap hurt him so dreadfully that he could not help biting something. He did not really mean it. He licked me afterwards. Now, Auntie Hester was like Jock. She was in dreadful, dreadful pain like a trap, and she hit you like Jock bit me. But Jock loved me best in the world all the time. And Auntie Hester loves you, and is your friend she tells secrets to, all the time.”
“Mother says she does not love me really. It was only pretence.” Regie’s voice shook. “Mother says she must never come back because it might be baby next. She said so to father.”
“Mother has made a mistake. I’m so old that I know better even than mother. Auntie Hester loves you, and can’t eat any breakfast till you tell her you don’t mind. Will you come with me and kiss her, and tell her so? And we’ll make up a new secret on the way.”
“Yes,” said Regie eagerly, his wan little face turning pink. “But mother?” he said, stopping short.
“Run and get your coat on. I will speak to mother. Quick, Regie.”
Regie rushed curveting out of the room. The Bishop followed more slowly, and went into the drawing-room where Mr. and Mrs. Gresley were sitting by the fireless hearth. The drawing-room fire was never lit till two o’clock.
“Regie goes with me of his own free will,” he said, “so that is settled. He will be quite safe with me, Mrs. Gresley.”
“My wife demurs at sending him,” said Mr. Gresley.
“No, no, she does not,” said the Bishop gently. “Hester saved Regie’s life, and it is only right that Regie should save hers. You will come over this afternoon to take him back,” he continued to Mr. Gresley. “I wish to have some conversation with you.”
Fraülein appeared breathless, dragging Regie with her.
“He has not got on his new overcoat,” said Mrs. Gresley. “Regie, run up and change at once.”
Fraülein actually said, “Bozzer ze new coat,” and she swept Regie into the carriage, the Bishop following, stumbling over the ruins of the porch.
“Have they had their hot mash?” he said to the coachman, who was tearing off the horses’ clothing.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Then drive all you know. Put them at the hills at a gallop.”
Fraülein pressed a packet of biscuits into the Bishop’s hand. “He eat no breakfast,” she said.
“Uncle Dick said the porch would sit down, and it has,” said Regie in an awestruck voice, as the carriage swayed from side to side of the road. “Father knows a great deal, but sometimes I think Uncle Dick knows most of all. First gates and flying half pennies, and now porches.”
“Uncle Dick is staying in Southminster. Perhaps we shall see him.”
“I should like to ask him about his finger, if it isn’t a secret.”
“I don’t think it is. Now, what secret shall we make up on the way?” The Bishop put his head out of the window. “Drive faster,” he said.
It was decided that the secret should be a Christmas present for “Auntie Hester,” to be bought in Southminster. The Bishop found that Regie’s entire capital was sixpence. But Regie explained that he could spend a shilling, because he was always given sixpence by his father when he pulled a tooth out. “And I’ve one loose now,” he said. “When I suck it it moves. It will be ready by Christmas.”
There was a short silence. The horses’ hoofs beat the muffled ground all together.
“Don’t you find, Mr. Bishop,” said Regie tentatively, “that this riding so quick in carriages, and talking secrets, does make people very hungry?”
The Bishop blushed. “It is quite true, my boy. I ought to have thought of that before. I am uncommonly hungry myself,” he said, looking in every pocket for the biscuits Fraülein had forced into his hand. When they were at last discovered in a somewhat dilapidated condition in the rug, the Bishop found they were a kind of biscuit that always made him cough, so he begged Regie, who was dividing them equally, as a personal favour to eat them all.
It was a crumb be-sprinkled Bishop who, half an hour later, hurried up the stairs of the Palace.
“What an age you have been,” snapped Dr. Brown from the landing.
“How is she?”
“The same, but weaker. Have you got Regie?”
“Yes, but it took time.”
“Is he frightened?”
“Not a bit.”
“Then bring him up.”
The doctor went back into the bedroom, leaving the door ajar.
A small shrunken figure with bandaged head and hands was sitting in an armchair. The eyes of the rigid, discoloured face were fixed.
Dr. Brown took the bandage off Hester’s head, and smoothed her hair.
“He is coming upstairs now,” he said, shaking her gently by the shoulders. “Regie is coming upstairs now to see you. Regie is quite well, and he is coming in now to see you.”
“Regie is dead, you old grey wolf,” said Hester in a monotonous voice. “I killed him in the backyard. The place is quite black and it smokes.”
“Look at the door,” repeated Dr. Brown, over and over again. “He is coming in at the door now.”
Hester trembled and looked at the door. The doctor noticed with a frown that she could hardly move her eyes.
Regie stood in the doorway, holding the Bishop’s hand. The cold snow light fell upon the gallant little figure and white face.
The doctor moved between Hester and the window. His shadow was upon her.
The hearts of the two men beat like hammers.
A change came over Hester’s face.
“My little Reg,” she said, holding out her bandaged hands.
Regie ran to her, and put his arms round her neck. They clasped each other tightly. The doctor winced to watch her hands.
“It’s all right, Auntie Hester,” said Regie. “I love you just the same, and you must not cry any more.”
For Hester’s tears were falling at last, quenching the wild fire in her eyes.
“My little treasure, my little mouse,” she said over and over again, kissing his face and hands and little brown overcoat.
Then all in a moment her face altered. Her agonised eyes turned to the doctor.
In an instant Dr. Brown’s hand was over Regie’s eyes, and he hurried him out of the room.
“Take him out of hearing,” he whispered to the Bishop, and darted back.
Hester was tearing the bandages off her hands.
“I don’t know what has happened,” she wailed, “but my hands hurt me so that I can’t bear it.”
“Thank God,” said the old doctor, blowing his nose.
The Devil has no stauncher ally than want of perception.
— PHILIP H. WICKSTEED.
It takes two to speak truth — one to speak and another to hear.
— THOREAU.
MRS. GRESLEY had passed an uncomfortable day. In the afternoon all the Pratts had called, and Mr. Gresley, who departed early in the afternoon for Southminster, had left his wife no directions as to how to act in this unforeseen occurrence, or how to parry the questions with which she was overwhelmed.
After long hesitation she at last owned that Hester had returned to Southminster in the Bishop’s carriage not more than half an hour after it had brought her back.
“I can’t explain Hester’s actions,” she would only repeat over and over again. “I don’t pretend to understand clever people. I’m not clever myself. I can only say Hester went back to Southminster directly she arrived here.”
Hardly had the Pratts taken their departure when Doll Loftus was ushered in. His wife had sent him to ask where Hester was, as Fraülein had alarmed her earlier in the day. Doll at least asked no questions. He had never asked but one in his life, and that had been of his wife, five seconds before he had become engaged to her.
He accepted with equanimity the information that Hester had returned to Southminster, and departed to impart the same to his exasperated wife.
“But why did she go back? She had only that moment arrived,” inquired Sybell. How should Doll know. She, Sybell, had said she could not rest till she knew where Hester was, and he, Doll, had walked to Warpington through the snow-drifts to find out for her. And he had found out, and now she wanted to know something else. There was no satisfying some women. And the injured husband retired to unlace his boots.
Yes, Mrs. Gresley had passed an uncomfortable day. She had ventured out for a few minutes, and had found Abel, with his arms akimbo, contemplating the little gate which led to the stables. It was lying on the ground. He had swept the snow off it.
“I locked it up the same as usual last night,” he said to Mrs. Gresley. “There’s been somebody about as has tampered it off its hinges. Yet nothing hasn’t been touched, the coal nor the stack. It don’t seem natural, twisting the gate off for nothing.”
Mrs. Gresley did not answer. She did not associate Hester with the gate. But she was too much perturbed to care about such small matters at the moment.
“His lordship’s coachman tell me as Miss Gresley was at the Palace,” continued Abel, “while I was a hotting up his mash for him, for William had gone in with a note, and onst he’s in the kitchen the hanimals might be stocks and stones for what he cares. He said his nevvy, the footman, heard the front door-bell ring just as he was getting into bed last night, and Miss Gresley come in without her hat, with the snow upon her. The coachman said as she must ha’ run afoot all the way.”
Abel looked anxiously at Mrs. Gresley.
“I was just thinking,” he said, “as perhaps the little lady wasn’t quite right in her ’ead. They do say as too much learning flies to the ’ead, the same as spirits to them as ain’t manured to ’em. And the little lady does work desperate hard.”
“Not as hard as Mr. Gresley,” said Mrs. Gresley.
“Maybe not, Mem, maybe not. But when I come up when red cow was sick at four in the morning, or may be earlier there was always a light in her winder, and the shadder of her face agin the blind. Yes, she do work precious hard.”
Mrs. Gresley retreated into the house, picking her way over the débris of the porch. At any other time its demise would have occupied the minds of the Vicarage household for days. But until this moment it had hardly claimed the tribute of a sigh. Mrs. Gresley did sigh as she crossed the threshold. That prostrate porch meant expense. She had understood from her husband that Dick had wantonly torn out the clamp that supported it, and that the whole thing had in consequence given way under the first snowfall. “He meant no harm,” Mr. Gresley had added, “But I suppose in the Colonies they mistake horseplay for wit.”
Mrs. Gresley went back to the drawing-room, and sat down to her needlework. She was an exquisite needlewoman, but all the activity of her untiring hands was hardly able to stem the tide of mending that was for ever flowing in upon her. When was she to find time to finish the darling little garments which the new baby required? Fraülein had been kind in helping, but Fraülein’s eyes were not very strong, or her stitches in consequence very small. Mrs. Gresley would have liked to sit in the schoolroom when lessons were over, but Fraülein had been so distant at luncheon about a rissole that she had not the courage to go in.
So she sat and stitched with a heavy heart awaiting her husband’s return. The fly was another expense. Southminster was ten miles from Warpington, eleven according to the Loftus Arms, from which it issued, the owner of which was not on happy terms with his “teetotal” vicar. Yet it had been absolutely necessary to have the fly, in order that Regie, who so easily caught cold, might return in safety.
The dusk was already falling, and more snow with it.
It was quite dark when Mrs. Gresley at last caught the sound of wheels and hurried to the door.
Mr. Gresley came in, bearing Regie, fast asleep in a fur rug, and laid him carefully on the sofa, and then went out to have an altercation with the driver, who demurred in forcible language to the arrangement, adhered to by Mr. Gresley, that the cost of the fly should be considered as part payment of certain arrears of tithe which in those days it was the unhappy duty of the clergyman to collect himself. Mr. Gresley’s methods of dealing with money matters generally brought in a high rate of interest in the way of friction, and it was a long time before the driver drove away, turning his horse deliberately on the little patch of lawn under the dining-room windows.
Regie in the meanwhile had waked up, and was having tea in the drawing-room as a great treat.
He had much to tell about his expedition; how the Bishop had given him half a crown, and Uncle Dick had taken him into the town to spend it, and how after dinner he had ridden on Uncle Dick’s back.
“And Auntie Hester. How was she?”
“She was very well, only she cried a little. I did not stay long because Mr. Bishop was wanting to give me the halfcrown, and he kept it downstairs. And when I went in again she was in bed, and she was so sleepy she hardly said anything at all.”
Mr. Gresley came in wearily, and dropped into a chair.
Mrs. Gresley gave him his tea, and presently took Regie upstairs. Then she came back and sat down in a low chair close to her husband. It was the first drop of comfort in Mr. Gresley’s cup to-day.
“How is Hester?”
“According to Dr. Brown she is very ill,” said Mr. Gresley in an extinguished voice. “But they would not let me see her.”
“Not see her own brother! My dear James, you should have insisted.”
“I did, but it was no use. You know how angry Dr. Brown gets at the least opposition. And the Bishop backed him up. They said it would excite her.”
“I never heard of such a thing. What is the matter with her?”
“Shock, Dr. Brown calls it. They have been afraid of collapse all day, but she is better this evening. They seemed to think a great deal of her knowing Regie.”
“Did the little lamb forgive her?”
“Oh yes, he kissed her and she knew him and cried. And it seems her hands are severely burnt. They have got a nurse, and they have telegraphed for Miss West. The Bishop was very good to Regie and gave him that fur rug.”
They looked at the splendid blue fox rug on the sofa.
“I am afraid,” said Mrs. Gresley after a pause, “that Hester did run all the way to Southminster as the Bishop said. Abel said the Bishop’s coachman told him that she came late last night to the Palace, and she was white with snow when the footman let her in.”
“My dear, I should have thought you were too sensible to listen to servant’s gossip,” said Mr. Gresley impatiently. “Your own common sense will tell you that Hester never performed that journey on foot. I told Dr. Brown the same, but he lost his temper at once. It’s curious how patient he is in a sick room, and how furious he can be out of it. He was very angry with me, too, because when he mentioned to the Bishop in my presence that Hester was under morphia, I said I strongly objected to her being drugged, and when I repeated that morphia was a most dangerous drug with effects worse than intoxication, in fact, that morphia was a form of intoxication, he positively before the Bishop shook his fist in my face, and said he was not going to be taught his business by me.
“The Bishop took me away into the study. Dick Vernon was sitting there, at least he was creeping about on all fours with Regie on his back. I think he must be in love with Hester, he asked so anxiously if there was any change. He would not speak to me, pretended not to know me. I suppose the Bishop had told him about the porch, and he was afraid I should come on him for repairs as he had tampered with it. The Bishop sent them away, and said he wanted to have a talk with me. The Bishop himself was the only person who was kind.”
There was a long pause. Mrs. Gresley laid her soft cheek against her husband’s, and put her small hand in a protecting manner over his large one. It was not surprising that on the following Sunday Mr. Gresley said such beautiful things about women being pillows against which weary masculine athletes could rest.
“He spoke very nicely of you,” went on Mr. Gresley at last. “He said he appreciated your goodness in letting Regie go after what had happened, and your offer to come and nurse Hester yourself. And then he spoke about me. And he said he knew well how devoted I was to my work, and how anything I did for the Church was a real labour of love, and that my heart was in my work.”
“It is quite true. So it is,” said Mrs. Gresley.
“I never thought he understood me so well. And he went on to say that he knew I must be dreadfully anxious about my sister, but that as far as money was concerned — I had offered to pay for a nurse — I was to put all anxiety off my mind. He would take all responsibility about the illness. He said he had a little fund laid by for emergencies of this kind, and that he could not spend it better than on Hester whom he loved like his own child. And then he went on to speak of Hester. I don’t remember all he said when he turned off about her, but he spoke of her as if she were a person quite out of the common.”
“He always did spoil her,” said Mrs. Gresley.
“He went off on a long rigmarole about her and her talent, and how vain he and I should be if leading articles appeared in the Spectator about us as they did about her. I did not know there had been anything of the kind, but he said every one else did. And then he went on more slowly that Hester was under a foolish hallucination, as groundless, no doubt, as that she had caused Regie’s death, that her book was destroyed. He said, ‘It is this idea which has got firm hold of her, but which has momentarily passed off her mind in her anxiety about Regie, which has caused her illness.’ And then he looked at me. He seemed really quite shaky. He held on to a chair. I think his health is breaking.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said the truth, that it was no hallucination but the fact, that much as I regretted to say so Hester had written a profane and immoral book, and that I had felt it my duty to burn it, and a very painful duty it had been. I said he would have done the same if he had read it.”
“I am glad you said that.”
“Well, the awkward part was that he said he had read it, every word, and that he considered it the finest book that had been written in his day. And then he began to walk up and down and to become rather excited, and to say that he could not understand how I could take upon myself such a responsibility, or on what grounds I considered myself a judge of literature. As if I ever did consider myself a judge! But I do know right from wrong. We had got on all right up till then, especially when he spoke so cordially of you and me, but directly he made a personal matter of Hester’s book, setting his opinion against mine, for he repeated over and over again it was a magnificent book, his manner seemed to change. He tried to speak kindly, but all the time I saw that my considering the book bad while he thought it good, gravelled him, and made him feel annoyed with me. The truth is, he can’t bear any one to think differently from himself.”
“He always was like that,” said the comforter.
“I said I supposed he thought it right to run down the clergy and hold them up to ridicule. He said ‘Certainly not, but he did not see how that applied to anything in Hester’s book.’ He said, ‘She has drawn us without bias towards us, exactly as we appear to three-quarters of the laity. It won’t do us any harm to see ourselves for once as others see us. There is in these days an increasing adverse criticism of us in many men’s minds, to which your sister’s mild rebukes are as nothing. We have drawn it upon ourselves, not so much by our conduct, which I believe to be uniformly above reproach, or by any lack of zeal, as by our ignorance of our calling; by our inability to “convert life into truth,” the capital secret of our profession, as I was once told as a divinity student. I for one believe that the Church will regain her prestige and her hold on the heart of the nation, but if she does, it will be mainly due to a new element in the minds of the clergy, a stronger realisation, not of our responsibilities — we have that — but of the education, the personal search for truth, the knowledge of human nature, which are necessary to enable us to meet them.’ He went on a long time about that. I think he grows very wordy. But I did not argue with him. I let him say what he liked. I knew that I must be obedient to my Bishop, just as I should expect my clergy to be to me, if I ever am a Bishop myself. Not that I expect I ever shall be”— Mr. Gresley was over tired —“but it seemed to me as he talked about the book, that all the time, though he put me down to the highest motives — he did me that justice — he was trying to make me own I had done wrong.”
“You didn’t say so?” said the little wife hotly.
“My dear, need you ask? But I did say at last that I had consulted with Archdeacon Thursby on the matter, and he had strongly advised me to do as I did. The Bishop seemed thunderstruck. And then — it really seemed providential — who should come in but Archdeacon Thursby himself. The Bishop went straight up to him, and said ‘You come at a fortunate moment, for I am greatly distressed at the burning of Miss Gresley’s book, and Gresley tells me that you advised it.’ And would you believe it,” said Mr. Gresley in a strangled voice, “the Archdeacon actually denied it then and there. He said he did not know Hester had written a book, and had never been consulted on the subject.”
The tears forced themselves out of Mr. Gresley’s eyes. He was exhausted and overwrought. He sobbed against his wife’s shoulder.
“Wicked liar!” whispered Mrs. Gresley into his parting. “Wicked, wicked man! Oh! James, I never thought the Archdeacon could have behaved like that!”
“Nor I,” gasped Mr. Gresley, “but he did. I suppose he did not want to offend the Bishop. And when I expostulated with him, and reminded him of what he had advised only the day before, he said that was about a letter, not a book, as if it mattered which it was. It was the principle that mattered. But they neither of them would listen to me. I said I had offered to help to re-write it, and the Bishop became quite fierce. He said I might as well try to re-write Regie if he were in his coffin. And then he mentioned casually, as if it were quite an afterthought, that Hester had sold it for a thousand pounds. All through, I knew he was really trying to hurt my feelings in spite of his manner, but when he said that he succeeded.”
Mr. Gresley groaned.
“A thousand pounds!” said Mrs. Gresley, turning white. “Oh! It isn’t possible.”
“He said he had seen the publisher’s letter offering it, and that Hester had accepted it by his advice. He seemed to know all about her affairs. When he said that, I was so distressed I could not help showing it, and he made rather light of it, saying the money loss was the least serious part of the whole affair, but of course it is the worst. Poor Hester, when I think that owing to me she has lost a thousand pounds! Seventy pounds a year, if I had invested it for her, and I know of several good investments, all perfectly safe, at seven per cent. — when I think of it it makes me absolutely miserable. We won’t talk of it any more. The Bishop sat with his head in his hands for a long time after the Archdeacon had gone, and afterwards he was quite kindly again, and said we looked at the subject from such different points of view that perhaps there was no use in discussing it. And we talked of the Church Congress until the fly came, only he seemed dreadfully tired, quite knocked up. And he promised to let us know first thing to-morrow morning how Hester was. He was cordial when we left. I think he meant well. But I can never feel the same to Archdeacon Thursby again. He was quite my greatest friend among the clergy round here. I suppose I shall learn in time not to have such a high ideal of people, but I certainly thought very highly of him until to-day.”
Mr. Gresley sat upright, and put away his handkerchief with decision.
“One thing this miserable day has taught us,” he said, “and that is that we must part with Fraülein. If she is to become impertinent the first moment we are in trouble, such a thing is not to be borne. We could not possibly keep her after her behaviour to-day.”
If two lives join, there is oft a scar.
— ROBERT BROWNING.
RACHEL left Westhope Abbey the day after Lord Newhaven’s funeral, and returned to London. And the day after that Hugh came to see her, and proposed, and was accepted.
He had gone over in his mind a hundred times all that he should say to her on that occasion. If he had said all that he was fully resolved to say it is hardly credible that any woman, however well disposed towards him, would have accepted so tedious a suitor. But what he really said, in a hoarse inaudible voice, was, “Rachel, will you marry me?” He was looking so intently into a little grove of Roman hyacinths that perhaps the hyacinths heard what he said; at any rate, she did not. But she supposed from long experience that he was proposing, and she said “Yes” immediately.
She had not intended to say so, at least not at first. She had made up her mind that it would be only right to inform him that she was fourteen months older than he (she had looked him out in Burke where she herself was not to be found); that she was “old enough to be his mother”; also that she was of a cold revengeful temper not calculated to make a home happy, and several other odious traits of character which she had never dreamed of confiding to any of the regiment of her previous lovers.
But the only word she had breath to say when the time came was “Yes.”
Rachel had shivered and hesitated on the brink of a new love long enough. Her anxiety about Hugh had unconsciously undermined her resistance. His confession had given her instantly the confidence in him which had been wanting. It is not perfection that we look for in our fellow creatures, but for what is apparently rarer, a little plain dealing.
How they rise before us! — the sweet reproachful faces of those whom we could have loved devotedly if they had been willing to be straightforward with us; whom we have lost, not by our own will, but by that paralysis of feeling which gradually invades the heart at the discovery of small insincerities. Sincerity seems our only security against losing those who love us, the only cup in which those who are worth keeping will care to pledge us when youth is past.
Rachel was not by nature de celles qui se jettent dan l’amour comme dans un précipice. But she shut her eyes, recommended her soul to God, and threw herself over. She had climbed down once — with assistance — and she was not going to do that again. That she found herself alive at the bottom was a surprise to her, but a surprise that was quickly forgotten in the constant wonder that Hugh could love her as devotedly as it was obvious he did.
Women would have shared that wonder, but not men. There was a home ready-made in Rachel’s faithful, dog-like eyes which at once appealed to the desire of expansion of empire in the heart of the free-born Briton.
Hugh had, until lately, considered woman as connected with the downward slope of life. He would have loudly disclaimed such an opinion if it had been attributed to him; but nevertheless it was the key-note of his behaviour towards them, his belief concerning them which was of a piece with his cheap cynicism and dilettante views of life. He now discovered that woman was made out of something more than man’s spare rib.
It is probable that if he had never been in love with Lady Newhaven Hugh would never have loved Rachel. He would have looked at her, as many men did, with a view to marriage, and would probably have dismissed her from his thoughts as commonplace. He knew better now. It was Lady Newhaven who was commonplace. His worldliness was dropping from him day by day as he learned to know Rachel better.
Where was his cynicism now that she loved him?
His love for her, humble, triumphant, diffident, passionate, impatient by turns, now exacting, now selfless, possessed him entirely. He remembered once with astonishment that he was making a magnificent match. He had never thought of it, as Rachel knew, as she knew well.
December came in bleak and dark. The snow did its poor best, laying day after day its white veil upon the dismal streets. But it was misunderstood. It was scraped into murky heaps. It melted and then froze, and then melted again. And London groaned and shivered on its daily round.
Every afternoon Hugh came, and every morning Rachel made her rooms bright with flowers for him. The flower shop at the corner sent her tiny trees of white lilac, and sweet little united families of hyacinths and tulips. The time of azalias was not yet. And once he sent her a bunch of daffodils. He knew best how he had obtained them.
Their wild sweet faces peered at Rachel, and she sat down faint and dizzy, holding them in her nerveless hands. If one daffodil knows anything, all daffodils know it to the third and fourth generation.
“Where is he?” they said, “that man whom you loved once? We were there when he spoke to you. We saw you stand together by the attic window. We never say, but we heard, we remember. And you cried for joy at right afterwards. We never say. But we heard. We remember.”
Rachel’s secretary in the little room on the ground floor was interrupted by a tap at the door. Rachel came in laden with daffodils. Their splendour filled the grey room.
“Would you mind having them?” she said smiling, and laying them down by her. "And would you kindly write a line to Jones telling him not to send me daffodils again. They are a flower I particularly dislike.”
“Rachel?”
“Hugh!”
“Don’t you think it would be better if we were married immediately?”
“Better than what?”
“Oh! I don’t know, better than breaking it off.”
“You can’t break it off now. I’m not a person to be trifled with. You have gone too far.”
“If you gave me half your attention, you would understand that I am only expressing a wish to go a little further, but you have become so frivolous since we have been engaged that I hardly recognise you.”
“I suit myself to my company.”
“Are you going to talk to me in that flippant manner when we are married. I sometimes fear, Rachel, you don’t look upon me with sufficient awe. I foresee I shall have to be very firm when we are married. When may I begin to be firm?”
“Are these such evil days, Hugh?”
“I am like Oliver Twist,” he said, “I want more.”
They were sitting together one afternoon in the firelight in silence. They often sat in silence together.
“A wise woman once advised me,” said Rachel at last, “if married, never to tell my husband of any previous attachment. She said, Let him always believe that he was the first
That ever burst
Into that silent sea.
I believe it was good advice, but it seems to me to have one drawback — to follow it may be to tell a lie. It would be in my case.”
Silence.
“I know that a lie and an adroit appeal to the vanity of man are supposed to be a woman’s recognised weapons. The same woman told me that I might find myself mistaken in many things in this world, but never in counting on the vanity of man. She said that was a reed which would never pierce my hand. I don’t think you are vain, Hugh.”
“Not vain! Why I am so conceited at the fact that you are going to marry me that I look down on every one else. I only long to tell them so. When may I tell my mother, Rachel? She is coming to London this week.”
“You have the pertinacity of a fly. You always come back to the same point. I am beginning to be rather bored with your marriage. You can’t talk of anything else.”
“I can’t think about anything else.”
He drew her cheek against his. He was an ingratiating creature.
“Neither can I,” she whispered.
And that was all Rachel ever said of all she meant to say about Mr. Tristram.
A yellow fog. It made rings round the shaded electric lamp by which Rachel was reading. The fire burned tawny and blurred. Even her red gown looked dim. Hugh came in.
“What are you reading?” he said, sitting down by her.
He did not want to know, but if you are reading a book on another person’s knee you cannot be a very long way off. He glanced with feigned interest at the open page, stooping a little for he was short-sighted now and then — at least now.
Rachel took the opportunity to look at him. You can’t really look at a person when he is looking at you. Hugh was very handsome, especially side face, and he knew it, but he was not sure whether Rachel thought so.
He read mechanically:
Take back your vows.
Elsewhere you trimmed and taught these lamps to burn;
You bring them stale and dim to serve my turn.
You lit those candles in another shrine,
Guttered and cold you offer them on mine.
Take back your vow.
A shadow fell across Hugh’s mind. Rachel saw it fall.
“You do not think that of me, Rachel,” he said, pointing to the verse. It was the first time he had alluded to that halting confession which had remained branded on the minds of both.
He glanced up at her, and she suffered him for a moment to look through her clear eyes into her soul.
“I never thought that of you,” she said with difficulty. “I am so foolish that I believe the candles are lit now for the first time. I am so foolish that I believe you love me nearly as much as I love you.”
“It is a dream,” said Hugh passionately, and he fell on his knees, and hid his white face against her knee. “It is a dream. I shall wake, and find you never cared for me.”
She sat for a moment stunned by the violence of his emotion, which was shaking him from head to foot. Then she drew him into her trembling arms, and held his head against her breast.
She felt his tears through her gown.
“What is past will never come between us,” she said brokenly at last. “I have cried over it, too, Hugh, but I have put it from my mind. When you told me about it, knowing you risked losing me by telling me, I suddenly trusted you entirely. I had not quite up till then. I can’t say why, except that perhaps I had grown suspicious because I was once deceived. But I do now because you were open with me. I think, Hugh, you and I can dare to be truthful to each other. You have been so to me, and I will be so to you. I knew about that long before you told me. Lady Newhaven, poor thing, confided in me last summer. She had to tell some one. I think you ought to know that I know. And oh, Hugh, I knew about the drawing of lots, too.”
Hugh started violently, but he did not move.
Would she have recognised that ashen convulsed face if he had raised it?
“Lady Newhaven listened at the door when you were drawing lots, and she told me. But we never knew which had drawn the short lighter till Lord Newhaven was killed on the line. Only she and I and you know that that was not an accident. I know what you must have gone through all the summer, feeling you had taken his life as well. But you must remember it was his own doing, and a perfectly even chance. You ran the same risk. His blood is on his own head. But oh, my darling, when I think it might have been you!”
Hugh thought afterwards that if her arms had not been round him, if he had been a little distance from her, he might have told her the truth. He owed it to her, this woman who was the very soul of truth. But if she had withdrawn from him, however gently, in the moment when her tenderness had for the first time vanquished her natural reserve, if she had taken herself away then, he could not have borne it. In deep repentance after Lord Newhaven’s death, he had vowed that from that day forward he would never deviate again from the path of truth and honour, however difficult it might prove. But this frightful moment had come upon him unawares. He drew back instinctively, giddy and unnerved, as from a chasm yawning suddenly among the flowers, one step in front of him. He was too stunned to think. When he rallied they were standing together on the hearthrug, and she was saying — he did not know what she was saying, for he was repeating over and over again to himself, “The moment is past. The moment is past.”
At last her words conveyed some meaning to him. “We will never speak of this again, my friend,” she said; “but now that no harm can be done by it, it seemed right to tell you I knew.”
“I ought never to have drawn,” said Hugh hoarsely.
“No,” said Rachel. “He was in fault to demand such a thing. It was inhuman. But having once drawn he had to abide by it, as you would have done if you had drawn the short lighter.”
She was looking earnestly at him, as at one given back from the grave.
“Yes,” said Hugh, feeling she expected him to speak. “If I had drawn it I should have had to abide by it.”
“I thank God continually that you did not draw it. You made him the dreadful reparation he asked. If it recoiled upon himself you were not to blame. You have done wrong, and you have repented. You have suffered, Hugh. I know it by your face. And perhaps I have suffered, too, but that is past. We will shut up the past, and think of the future. Promise me that you will never speak of this again.”
“I promise,” said Hugh mechanically.
“The moment to speak is past,” he said to himself.
Had it ever been present?
Dieu n’oublie personne. Il visite tout le monde.
— VINET.
HUGH did not sleep that night.
His escape had been too narrow. He shivered at the mere thought of it. It had never struck him as possible that Rachel and Lady Newhaven had known of the drawing of lots. Now that he found they knew, sundry small incidents, unnoticed at the time, came crowding back to his memory. That was why Lady Newhaven had written so continually those letters which he had burnt unread. That was why she had made that desperate attempt to see him in the smoking-room at Wilderleigh after the boating accident. She wanted to know which had drawn the short lighter. That explained the mysterious tension which Hugh had noticed in Rachel during the last days in London before — before the time was up. He saw it all now. And, of course, they naturally supposed that Lord Newhaven had committed suicide. They could not think otherwise. They were waiting for one of the two men to do it.
“If Lord Newhaven had not turned giddy and stumbled on to the line, if he had not died by accident when he did,” said Hugh to himself, “where should I be now?”
There was no answer to that question.
What was the use of asking it? He was dead. And, fortunately, the two women firmly believed he had died by his own hand. Hugh as firmly believed that the death was accidental.
But it could not be his duty to set them right, to rake up the whole hideous story again.
By an extraordinary, by a miraculous chance, he was saved, as it were, a second time. It could do no good to allude to the dreadful subject again. Besides, he had promised Rachel never to speak of it again.
He groaned, and hid his face in his hands.
“Oh, coward and wretch that I am,” he said. “Cannot I even be honest with myself? I lied to her to-day. I never thought I could have told Rachel a lie, but I did. I can’t live without her. I must have her. I would rather die than lose her now. And I should have lost her if I’d told her the truth. I felt that. I am not worthy. It was an ill day for her when she took my tarnished life into her white hands. She ought to have trodden me under foot. But she does love me, and I will never deceive her again. She does love me, and, God helping me, I will make her happy.”
The strain of conflict was upon Hugh — the old, old conflict of the seed with the earth, of the soul with love. How many little fibres and roots the seed puts out, pushed by an unrecognised need within itself, not without pain, not without a gradual rending of its being, not without a death unto self into a higher life. Love was dealing with Hugh’s soul as the earth deals with the seed, and — he suffered.
It was a man who did not look like an accepted lover who presented himself at Rachel’s door the following afternoon.
But Rachel was not there. Her secretary handed Hugh a little note which she had left for him, telling him that Hester had suddenly fallen ill, and that she had been sent for to Southminster. The note ended: “These first quiet days are past. So now you may tell your mother, and put our engagement in the Morning Post.”
Hugh was astonished at the despair which overwhelmed him at the bare thought that he should not see Rachel that day and not the next either. It was not to be borne. She had no right to make him suffer like this. Day by day, when a certain restless fever returned upon him, he had known, as an opium eater knows, that at a certain hour he should become rested and calm and sane once more. To be in the same room with Rachel, to hear her voice, to let his eyes dwell upon her, to lean his forehead for a moment against her hand, was to enter, as we enter in dreams, a world of joy and comfort, and boundless, endless, all-pervading peace.
And now he was suddenly left shivering in a bleak world without her. With her he was himself, a released, freed self, growing daily further and further away from all he had once been. Without her he felt he was nothing but a fierce wounded animal.
He tried to laugh at himself as he walked slowly away from Rachel’s house. He told himself that he was absurd, that an absence of a few days was nothing. He turned his steps mechanically in the direction of his mother’s lodgings. At any rate, he could tell her. He could talk about this cruel woman to her. The smart was momentarily soothed by his mother’s painful joy. He wrenched himself somewhat out of himself as she wept the tears of jealous love which all mothers must weep when the woman comes who takes their son away.
“I am so glad,” she kept repeating. “These are tears of joy, Hughie. I can forgive her for accepting you, but I should never have forgiven her if she had refused you — if she had made my boy miserable. And you have been miserable lately I have seen it for a long time. I suppose it was all this coming on.”
He said it was. The remembrance of other causes of irritation and moodiness had slipped entirely off his mind.
He stayed a long time with his mother, who pressed him to wait till his sister, who was shopping, returned. But his sister tarried long out of doors, and at last the pain of Rachel’s absence returning on him, he left suddenly, promising to return in the evening.
He did not go back to his rooms. He wandered aimlessly through the darkening streets, impatient of the slow hours. At last he came out on the Embankment. The sun was setting redly, frostily, in a grey world of sky-mist and river-mist and spectral bridge and spire. A shaking pathway of pale flame came across the grey of the hidden river to meet him.
He stood a long time looking at it. The low sun touched and forsook, touched and forsook point by point the little crowded world which it was leaving.
“My poor mother,” said Hugh to himself. “Poor, gentle, loving soul whom I so nearly brought down with sorrow to the grave. She will never know what an escape she has had. I might have been more to her. I might have made her happier, seeing her happiness is wrapped up in me. I will make up to her for it. I will be a better son to her in future. Rachel and I together will make her last years happy. Rachel and I together,” said Hugh over and over again.
And then he suddenly remembered that though Rachel had taken herself away he could write to her, and — he might look out the trains to Southminster. He leaped into a hansom and hurried back to his rooms.
The porter met him in a mysterious manner in the entrance. Lady waiting to see him. Lady said she was his sister. Had been waiting two hours. In his rooms now.
Hugh laughed and ran up the wide common staircase. His sister had heard the news from his mother and had rushed over at once.
As he stooped a little to fit the latch-key on his chain into the lock a man, who was coming down the stairs feeling in his pockets, stopped with a sudden exclamation. It was Captain Pratt, pallid, smiling, hair newly varnished, resplendent in a magnificent fur overcoat.
“What luck,” he said. “Scarlett, I think. We met at Wilderleigh. Have you such a thing as a match about you?”
Hugh felt in his pockets. He had not one.
“Never mind,” he said, opening the door. “I’ve plenty inside. Come in.”
Hugh went in first, extricating his key. Captain Pratt followed, murmuring "Nice little dens, these. A pal of mine lives just above — Streatham. You know Streatham, son of Lord —”
The remainder of the sentence was lost.
The door opened straight into the little sitting-room. A woman in deep mourning rose suddenly out of a chair by the fire and came towards them.
“Hughie!” she said.
It was Lady Newhaven.
It is probable that none of the tableaux she had arranged were quite so dramatic as this one, in which she had not reckoned on that elaborate figure in the doorway.
Captain Pratt’s opinion of Hugh, whom he had hitherto regarded as a pauper with an involved estate, leapt from temperate to summer heat — blood heat. After the first instant he kept his eyes steadily fixed on Hugh.
“I— er — thank you, Scarlett. I have found my matches. A thousand thanks. Good night.”
He was disappearing, but Hugh, his eyes flashing in his grey face, held him forcibly by the arm.
“Lady Newhaven,” he said. “The porter is inexcusable. These are my rooms which he has shown you into by mistake, not Mr. Streatham’s, your nephew. He is just above. I think,” turning to Captain Pratt, “Streatham is out of town.”
“He is out of town,” said Captain Pratt, looking with cold admiration at Hugh. “Admirable,” he said to himself; “a born gentleman.”
“This is not the first time Streatham’s visitors have been shown in here,” continued Hugh. “The porter shall be dismissed. I trust you will forgive me my share in the annoyance he has caused you. Is your carriage waiting?”
“No,” said Lady Newhaven faintly, quite thrown off the lines of her prepared scene by the sudden intrusion into it of a foreign body.
“My hansom is below,” said Captain Pratt deferentially, venturing, now that the situation was, so to speak, draped, to turn his discreet agate eyes towards Lady Newhaven. "If it could be of the least use, I myself should prefer to walk.”
Now that he looked at her he looked very hard at her. She was a beautiful woman.
Lady Newhaven’s self-possession had returned sufficiently for her to take up her fur cloak.
“Thank you,” she said, letting Captain Pratt help her on with it. “I shall be glad to make use of your hansom, if you are sure you can spare it. I am shocked at having taken possession of your rooms,” turning to Hugh; “I will write to Georgie Streatham to-night. I am staying with my mother, and I came across to ask him to take my boys to the pantomime, as I cannot take them myself — so soon,” with a glance at her crape. “Don’t come down, Mr. Scarlett. I have given you enough trouble already.”
Captain Pratt’s arm was crooked. He conducted her in his best manner to the foot of the staircase and helped her into his hansom. His manner was not so unctuous as his father’s, but it was slightly adhesive. Lady Newhaven shuddered involuntarily as she took his arm.
Hugh followed.
“I hope you will both come and see my mother,” she said, with an attempt at graciousness. “You know Lady Trentham, I think?"— to Captain Pratt.
“Very slightly. No. Delighted!” murmured Captain Pratt, closing the hansom doors in an intimate manner. “And if I could be of the least use at any time in taking your boys to the pantomime — er — only too glad. The glass down, Richards!”
The hansom with its splendid bay horse rattled off.
Captain Pratt nodded to Hugh, who was still standing on the steps, and turned away to buy a box of matches from a passing urchin. Then he turned up his fur collar, and proceeded leisurely on his way.
“Very stand-off both of them in the past,” he said to himself, "but they will have to be civil in future. I wonder if he will make her keep her title. Deuced awkward for them both though, only a month after Newhaven’s death. I wish that sort of contretemps would happen to me when I’m bringing in a lot of fellows suddenly. An opening like that is all I want to give me a start, and I should get on as well as anybody. The aristocracy all hang together, whatever Selina and Ada may say. Money don’t buy everything, as the governor thinks. But if you’re once in with ’em you’re in.”
Hugh went back to his room and locked himself in. He was a delicate man, highly strung, and he had not slept the night before. He collapsed into a chair and remained a long time, his head in his hands.
It was too horrible, this woman coming back upon him suddenly like the ghost of some one whom he had murdered. His momentary infatuation had been clean forgotten in his overwhelming love for Rachel. His intrigue with Lady Newhaven seemed so long ago that it had been relegated to the same mental shelf in his mind as the nibbling of a certain forbidden ginger-bread when he was home for his first holidays. He could not be held responsible for either offence after this immense interval of time. It was not he who had committed them, but that other embryo self, that envelope of flesh and sense which he was beginning to abhor, through which he had passed before he reached himself, Hugh, the real man, the man who loved Rachel, and whom Rachel loved.
He had not flinched when he came unexpectedly on Lady Newhaven. At the sight of her a sudden passion of anger shot up and enveloped him as in one flame from head to foot. His love for Rachel was a weapon, and he used it. He did not greatly care about his own good name, but the good name of the man whom Rachel loved was a thing to fight for. It was for her sake, not Lady Newhaven’s, that he had concocted the story of the mistaken rooms. He should not have had the presence of mind if Rachel had not been concerned.
He had not finished with Lady Newhaven. He should have trouble yet with her, hideous scenes, in which the corpse of his dead lust would be dragged up, a thing to shudder at, out of its nettly grave.
He could bear it. He must bear it. Nothing would induce him to marry Lady Newhaven, as she evidently expected. He set his teeth. “She will know the day after to-morrow,” he said to himself, “when she sees my engagement to Rachel in the papers. Then she will get at me somehow, and make my life a hell to me, while she can. And she will try and come between me and Rachel. I deserve it. I deserve anything I get. But Rachel knows and will stick to me. I will go down to her to-morrow. I can’t go on without seeing her. And she won’t mind, as the engagement will be given out next day.”
He became more composed at the thought of Rachel. But presently his lip quivered. It would be all right in the end. But, oh! not to have done it! Not to have done it! To have come to his marriage with a whiter past, not to need her forgiveness on the very threshold of their life together, not to have been unfaithful to her before he knew her.
What man who has disbelieved in his youth in the sanctity of Love, and then later has knelt in its Holy of Holies, has escaped that pang?
There’s neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee.
— SHAKESPEARE.
“MY mind misgives me, Dick!” said the Bishop, a day or two later, as Dick joined him and his sister and Rachel at luncheon at the Palace. “I am convinced that you have been up to some mischief.”
“I have just returned from Warpington, my lord. I understood it was your wish I should ride over and tell them Hester was better.”
“It certainly was my wish. I’m very much obliged to you. But I remembered after you had gone that you had refused to speak to Gresley when he was over here, and I was sorry I sent you.”
“I spoke to him all right,” said Dick grimly. “That was why I was so alacritous to go.”
The Bishop looked steadily at him.
“Until you are my suffragan I should prefer to manage my own business with my clergy.”
“Just so,” said Dick, helping himself to mustard. “But you see I’m his cousin, and I thought it just as well to let him know quietly and dispassionately what I thought of him. So I told him I was not particular about my acquaintances. I knew lots of bad eggs out in Australia, half of them hatched in England, chaps who’d been shaved and tubbed gratis by Government, in fact I’d a large visiting list, but that I drew the line at such a cad as him, and that he might remember I wasn’t going to preach for him at any more of his little cold water cures"— a smile hovered on Dick’s crooked mouth —“or ever take any notice of him in future. That was what he wanted, my lord. You were too soft with him, if you’ll excuse my saying so. But that sort of chap wants it giving him hot and strong. He doesn’t understand anything else. He gets quite beyond himself, fizzing about on his little pocket-handkerchief of a parish, thinking he is a sort of god, because no one makes it their business to keep him in his place, and rub it into him that he is an infernal fool. That is why some clergymen jaw so, because they never have it brought home to them what rot they talk. They’d be no sillier than other men if they were only treated properly. I was very calm, but I let him have it. I told him he was a mean sneak, and that either he was the biggest fool or the biggest rogue going, and that the mere fact of his cloth did not give him the right to do dishonest things with other people’s property, though it did save him from the pounding he richly deserved. He tried to interrupt, indeed he was tooting all the time like a fog-horn, but I did not take any notice, and I wound up by saying it was men like him who brought discredit on the Church and on the clergy, and who made the gorge rise of decent chaps like me.”
“Yes,” said Dick after a pause. “When I left him he understood, I don’t say entirely, but he had a distant glimmering. It isn’t often I go on these errands of mercy, but I felt that the least I could do was to back you up, my lord. Of course, it is in little matters like this that lay helpers come in, who are not so hampered about their language as I suppose the clergy are.”
The Bishop tried, he tried hard, to look severe, but his mouth twitched.
“Don’t thank me,” said Dick. “Nothing is a trouble where you are concerned. It was — ahem — pleasure.”
“That I can believe,” said the Bishop. “Well, Dick, Providence makes use of strange instruments — the jawbone of an ass has a certain Scriptural prestige. I daresay you reached poor Gresley where I failed. I certainly failed. But if it is not too much to ask, I should regard it as a favour another time if I might be informed beforehand what direction your diocesan aid was about to take.”
Dr. Brown, who often came to luncheon at the Palace, came in now. He took off his leathern driving gloves and held his hands to the fire.
“Cold,” he said. “They’re skating everywhere. How is Miss Gresley?”
“She knows us to-day,” said Rachel, “and she is quite cheerful.”
“Does the poor thing know her book is burnt?”
“No. She was speaking this morning of its coming out in the spring.”
The little doctor thrust out his underlip and changed the subject.
“I travelled from Pontesbury this morning,” he said, “with that man who was nearly drowned at Beaumere in the summer. I doctored him at Wilderleigh. Tall, thin, rather a fine gentleman. I forget his name.”
Dr. Brown always spoke of men above himself in the social scale as “fine gentlemen.”
“Mr. Redman,” said Miss Keane, the Bishop’s sister, a dignified person, who had been hampered throughout life by a predilection for the wrong name, and by making engagements in illegible handwriting by last year’s almanacs.
“Was it Mr. Scarlett?” said Rachel, feeling Dick’s lynx eye upon her. “I was at Wilderleigh when the accident happened.”
“That’s the man. He got out at Southminster, and asked me which was the best hotel. No, I won’t have any more, thanks. I’ll go up and see Miss Gresley at once.”
Rachel followed the Bishop into the library. They generally waited there together till the doctor came down.
“I don’t know many young men I like better than Dick,” said the Bishop. "I should marry him if I were a young woman. I admire the way he acts up to his principles. Very few of us do. Until he has a further light on the subject he is right to knock a man down who insults him. And from his point of view he was justified in speaking to Mr. Gresley as he did. I was sorely tempted to say something of that kind to him myself, but as one grows grey one realises that one can only speak in a spirit of love. A man of Dick’s stamp will always be respected because he does not assume virtues which belong to a higher grade than he is on at present. But when he reaches that higher grade he will act as thoroughly upon the convictions that accompany it as he does now on his present convictions.”
“He certainly would not turn the other cheek to the smiter.”
“I should not advise the smiter to reckon on it. And unless it is turned from that rare sense of spiritual brotherhood it would be unmanly to turn it. To imitate the outward appearance of certain virtues is like imitating the clothes of a certain class. It does not make us belong to the class to dress like it. The true foundation for the spiritual life, as far as I can see it, is in the full development of our human nature with all its simple trusts and aspirations. I admire Dick’s solid foundation. It will carry a building worthy of him some day. But my words of wisdom appear to be thrown away upon you. You are thinking of something else.”
“I was thinking that I ought to tell you that I am engaged to be married.”
The Bishop’s face lit up.
“I am engaged to Mr. Scarlett. That is why he has come down here.”
The Bishop’s face fell. Rachel had been three days at the Palace. Dick had not allowed the grass to grow under his feet. “That admirable promptitude,” the Bishop had remarked to himself, “deserves success.”
“Poor, dear Dick,” he said softly.
“That is what Hester says. I told her yesterday.”
“I really have a very high opinion of Dick,” said the Bishop.
“So have I. If I might have two I would certainly choose him second.”
“But this superfluous Mr. Scarlett comes first, eh?”
“I am afraid he does.”
“Well,” said the Bishop with a sigh, “if you are so ungrateful as to marry to please yourself instead of to please me there is nothing more to be said. I will have a look at your Mr. Scarlett when he comes to tea. I suppose he will come to tea. I notice the most farouche men do when they are engaged. It is the first step in the taming process. I shall of course bring an entirely unprejudiced mind to bear upon him, as I always make a point of doing, but I warn you beforehand I shan’t like him.”
“Because he is not Mr. Dick.”
“Well, yes, because he is not Dick. I suppose his name is Bertie.”
“Not Bertie,” said Rachel indignantly, “Hugh.”
“It’s a poor inefficient kind of name, only four letters, and a duplicate at each end. I don’t think, my dear, he is worthy of you.”
“Dick has only four letters.”
“I make it a rule never to argue with women. Well, Rachel, I’m glad you have decided to marry. Heaven bless you, and may you be happy with this man. Ah! Here comes Dr. Brown.”
“Well!” said the Bishop and Rachel simultaneously.
“She’s better,” said the little doctor angrily, he was always angry when he was anxious. “She’s round the first corner. But how to pull her round the next corner, that is what I’m thinking.”
“Defer the next corner.”
“We can’t now her mind is clear. She’s as sane as you or I are, and a good deal sharper. When she asks about her book she’ll have to be told.”
“A lie would be quite justifiable under the circumstances.”
“Of course, of course, but it would be useless. You might hoodwink her for a day or two, and then she would find out, first that the magnum opus is gone, and secondly, that you and Miss West, whom she does trust entirely at present, have deceived her. You know what she is when she thinks she is being deceived. She abused you well, my lord, until you reinstated yourself by producing Regie Gresley. But you can’t reinstate yourself a second time. You can’t produce the book.”
“No,” said the Bishop. “That is gone for ever.”
Rachel could not trust herself to speak. Perhaps she had realised more fully than even the Bishop had done what the loss of the book was to Hester, at least, what it would be when she knew it was gone.
“Tell her, and give her that if she becomes excitable,” said Dr. Brown, producing a minute bottle out of a voluminous pocket. “And if you want me I shall be at Canon Wylde’s at five o’clock. I’ll look in anyhow before I go home.”
Rachel and the Bishop stood a moment in silence after he was gone, and then Rachel took up the little bottle, read the directions carefully, and turned to go upstairs.
The Bishop looked after her but did not speak. He was sorry for her.
“You can go out till tea-time,” said Rachel to the nurse. “I will stay with Miss Gresley till then.”
Hester was lying on a couch by the fire in a rose-coloured wrapper. Her small face set in its ruffle of soft lace looked bright and eager. Her hair had been cut short, and she looked younger and more like Regie than ever.
Her thin hands lay contentedly in her lap. The principal bandages were gone. Only three fingers of the right hand were in a chrysalis state.
“I shall not be in too great a hurry to get well,” she said to Rachel. “If I do you will rush away to London and get married.”
“Shall I?” Rachel set down the little bottle on the mantelpiece.
“When is Mr. Scarlett coming down?”
“He came down to-day.”
“Then possibly he may call.”
“Such things do happen.”
“I should like to see him.”
“In a day or two, perhaps.”
“And I want to see dear Dick, too.”
“He sent you his love. Mr. Pratt was here at luncheon yesterday, and he asked me who the old chap was who put on his clothes with a shoe-horn.”
“How like him! Has he said anything more to the Bishop on the uses of swearing?”
“No. But the Bishop draws him on. He delights in him.”
“Rachel, are you sure you have chosen the best man?”
“Quite sure, I mean I never had any choice in the matter. You see I love Hugh, and I’m only fond of Mr. Dick.”
“I always liked Mr. Scarlett,” said Hester. “I’ve known him ever since I came out, and that wasn’t yesterday. He is so gentle and refined, and one need not be on one’s guard in talking to him. He understands what one says, and he is charming looking.”
“Of course, I think so.”
“And this is the genuine thing, Rachel? Do you remember our talk last summer?”
Rachel was silent a moment.
“All I can say is,” she said brokenly, “that I thank God day and night that Mr. Tristram did not marry me — that I’m free to marry Hugh.”
Hester’s uncrippled hand stole into Rachel’s.
“Everybody will think,” said Rachel, “when they see the engagement in to-morrow’s papers that I give him everything, because he is poor and his place involved, and of course I am horribly wealthy. But in reality it is I who am poor and he who is rich. He has given me a thousand times more than I could ever give him, because he has given me back the power of loving. It almost frightens me that I can care so much a second time. I should not have thought it possible. But I seem to have got the hang of it now, as Mr. Dick would say. I wish you were downstairs, Hester, as you will be in a day or two. You would be amused by the way he shocks Miss Keane. She asked if he had written anything on his travels, and he said he was on the point of bringing out a little book on ‘Cannibal Cookery,’ for the use of Colonials. He said some of the recipes were very simple. He began: ‘You take a hand and close it round a yam.’ But the Bishop stopped him.”
The moment Rachel had said, “He is on the point of bringing out a book,” her heart stood still. How could she have said such a thing? But apparently Hester took no notice.
“He must have been experimenting on my poor hand,” she said. “I’m sure I never burnt it like this myself.”
“It will soon be better now.”
“Oh! I don’t mind about it now that it doesn’t hurt all the time.”
“And your head does not ache to-day, does it?”
“Nothing to matter. But I feel as if I had fallen on it from the top of the cathedral. Dr. Brown says that is nonsense, but I think so all the same. When you believe a thing, and you’re told it’s nonsense, and you still believe it, that is an hallucination, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I have had a great many,” said Hester slowly. “I suppose I have been more ill than I knew. I thought I saw, I really did see, the spirits of the frost and the snow looking in at the window. And I talked to them a long time, and asked them what quarrel they had with me, their sister, that since I was a child they had always been going about to kill me. Aunt Susan always seemed to think they were enemies who gave me bronchitis. And I told them how I loved them and all their works. And they breathed on the pane and wrote beautiful things in frost-work, and I read them all. Now, Rachel, is that an hallucination about the frost-work, because it seems to me still, now that I am better, though I can’t explain it, that I do see the meaning of it at last, and that I shall never be afraid of them again.”
Rachel did not answer.
She had long since realised that Hester, when in her normal condition, saw things which she herself did not see. She had long since realised that Hester always accepted as final the limit of vision of the person she was with, but that that limit changed with every person she met. Rachel had seen her adjust it to persons more short-sighted than herself, with secret self-satisfaction, and then with sudden bewilderment had heard Hester accept as a commonplace from some one else what appeared to Rachel fantastic in the extreme. If Rachel had considered her own mind as the measure of the normal of all other minds, she could not have escaped the conclusion that Hester was a victim of manifold delusions. But, fortunately for herself, she saw that most ladders possessed more than the one rung on which she was standing.
“That is quite different, isn’t it?” said Hester, “from thinking Dr. Brown is a grey wolf.”
“Quite different. That was an hallucination of fever. You see that for yourself now that you have no fever.”
“I see that, of course, now that I have no fever,” repeated Hester, her eyes widening. “But one hallucination quite as foolish as that is always coming back, and I can’t shake it off. The wolf was gone directly, but this is just the same now I am better, only it gets worse and worse. I have never spoken of it to any one, because I know it is so silly. But, Rachel — I have no fever now — and yet — I know you’ll laugh at me — I laugh at my own foolish self — and yet all the time I have a horrible feeling that”— Hester’s eyes had in them a terror that was hardly human —“that my book is burnt.”
The soul of thy brother is a dark forest.
— Russian Proverb.
“A MARRIAGE has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between Hugh St. John Scarlett, of Kenstone Manor, Shropshire, only son of the late Lord Henry Scarlett, and Rachel, only child of the late Joshua Hopkins West, of Birmingham.”
This announcement appeared in the Morning Post a few days after Christmas, and aroused many different emotions in the breasts of those who read it.
“She has done it to spite me,” said Mr. Tristram to himself over his morning rasher, in the little eating-house near his studio. “I knew there was some one else in her mind when she refused me. I rather thought it was that weedy fellow with the high nose. Will he make her happy because he is a lord’s son? That is what I should like to ask her. Poor Rachel, if we had been able to marry five years ago we should never have heard of this society craze. Well, it’s all over now.” And Mr. Tristram henceforward took the position of a man suffering from an indelible attachment to a woman who had thrown him over for a title.
The Gresleys were astonished at the engagement. It was so extraordinary that they should know both persons. Now that they came to think of it, both of them had been to tea at the Vicarage only last summer.
“A good many people pop in and out of this house,” they agreed.
“I am as certain as that I stand here,” said Mr. Gresley, who was sitting down, “that that noisy boor, that underbred, foul-mouthed Dick Vernon wanted to marry her.”
“Don’t mention him,” said Mrs. Gresley. “When I think of what he dared to say —”
“My love,” said Mr. Gresley, “I have forgiven him. I have put from my mind all he said, for I am convinced he was under the influence of drink at the time. We must make allowance for those who live in hot climates. I bear him no grudge. But I am glad that a man of that stamp should not marry Miss West. Drunkenness makes a hell of married life. Mr. Scarlett, though he looked delicate, had at least the appearance of being abstemious.”
Fraülein heard the news as she was packing her boxes to leave Warpington Vicarage. She was greatly depressed. She could not be with her dear Miss Gresley in this mysterious illness which some secret sorrow had brought upon her; but at least Miss West could minister to her. And now it seemed Miss West was thinking of “Braütigams” more than of Hester.
Fraülein had been very uncomfortable at the Vicarage, but she wept at leaving. Mrs. Gresley had never attained to treating her with the consideration which she would have accorded to one whom she considered her equal. The servants were allowed to disregard with impunity her small polite requests. The nurse was consistently, ferociously jealous of her. But the children had made up for all, and now she was leaving them; and she did not own it to herself, for she was but five and thirty and the shyest of the shy; but she should see no more that noble-hearted, that musical Herr B-r-r-rown.
“Doll,” said Sybell Loftus to her husband at breakfast, “I’ve made another match. I thought at the time he liked her. You remember Rachel West, not pretty, but with a nice expression — and what does beauty matter? She is engaged to Mr. Scarlett.”
“Quiet, decent chap,” said Doll; “and I like her. No nonsense about her. Good thing he wasn’t drowned.”
“Mr. Harvey will feel it. He confided to me that she was his ideal. Now Rachel is everything that is sweet and good and dear, and she will make a most excellent wife, but I should never have thought, would you, that she could be anybody’s ideal?”
Doll opened his mouth to say, “That depends,” but remembered that his wife had taken an unaccountable dislike to that simple phrase, and remained silent.
Captain Pratt, who was spending Christmas with his family was the only person at Warpington Towers who read the papers. On this particular morning he came down to a late breakfast after the others had finished. His father, who was always down at eight, secretly admired his son’s aristocratic habits while he affected to laugh at them. “Shameful luxurious ways, these young men in the Guards. Fashionable society is rotten, sir, rotten to the core. Never get up till noon. My boy is as bad as any of them.”
Captain Pratt propped up the paper open before him while he sipped his coffee and glanced down the columns. His travelling eye reached Hugh’s engagement.
Captain Pratt rarely betrayed any feeling except ennui, but as he read, astonishment got the better of him.
“By George,” he said below his breath.
The bit of omelette on its way to his mouth was slowly lowered again, and remained sticking on the end of his fork.
What did it mean? He recalled that scene in Hugh’s rooms only last week. He had spoken of it to no one, for he intended to earn gratitude by his discretion. Of course, Scarlett was going to marry Lady Newhaven after a decent interval. She was a very beautiful woman, with a large jointure, and she was obviously in love with him. The question of her conduct was not considered. It never entered Captain Pratt’s head, any more than that of a ten-year-old child. He was aware that all the women of the upper classes were immoral, except newly come-out girls. That was an established fact. The only difference between the individuals, which caused a separation as of the sheep from the goats, was whether they were compromised or not. Lady Newhaven was not, unless he chose to compromise her. No breath of scandal had ever touched her.
But what was Scarlett about? Could they have quarrelled? What did it mean? And what would she do now?
“By George!” said Captain Pratt again, and the agate eyes narrowed down to two slits.
He sat a long time motionless, his untasted breakfast before him. His mind was working, weighing, applying now its scales, now its thermometer.
Rachel and Hugh were sitting together looking at a paragraph in the Morning Post.
“Does Miss Gresley take any interest?” said Hugh.
He was a little jealous of Hester. This illness, the cause of which had sincerely grieved him, had come at an inopportune moment. Hester was always taking Rachel from him.
“Yes,” said Rachel, “a little when she remembers. But she can only think of one thing.”
“That unhappy book.”
“Yes. I think the book was to Hester something of what you are to me. Her whole heart was wrapped up in it — and she has lost it. Hugh, whatever happens, you must not be lost now. It is too late. I could not bear it.”
“I can only be lost if you throw me away,” said Hugh.
There was a long silence.
“Lady Newhaven will know to-day,” said Rachel at last. “I tried to break it to her, but she did not believe me.”
“Rachel,” said Hugh, stammering, “I meant to tell you the other day, only we were interrupted, that she came to my rooms the evening before I came down here. I should not have minded quite so much, but Captain Pratt came in with me and — found her there.”
“Oh Hugh, that dreadful man! Poor woman!”
“Poor woman!” said Hugh, his eyes flashing. “It was poor you I thought of. Poor Rachel! to be marrying a man who —”
There was another silence.
“I have one great compensation,” said Rachel, laying her cool, strong hand on his. “You are open with me. You keep nothing back. You need not have mentioned this unlucky meeting, but you did. It was like you. I trust you entirely, Hugh. I bless and thank you for loving me. If my love can make you happy, oh Hughie, you will be happy.”
Hugh shrank from her. The faltered words were as a two-edged sword.
She looked at the sensitive, paling face with tender comprehension. The mother-look crept into her eyes.
“If there is anything else that you wish to tell me, tell me now.”
A wild overwhelming impulse to fling himself over the precipice out of the reach of those stabbing words! A horrible nauseating recoil that seemed to rend his whole being.
Somebody said hoarsely:
“There is nothing else.”
It was his own voice, but not his will, that spoke. Had any one ever made him suffer like this woman who loved him?
Lady Newhaven had returned to Westhope ill with suspense and anxiety. She had felt sure she should successfully waylay Hugh in his rooms, convinced that if they could but meet the clouds between them (to borrow from her vocabulary) would instantly roll away. They had met, and the clouds had not rolled away. She vainly endeavoured to attribute Hugh’s evident anger at the sight of her to her want of prudence, to the accident of Captain Pratt’s presence. She would not admit the thought that Hugh had ceased to care for her, but it needed a good deal of forcible thrusting away. She could hear the knock of the unwelcome guest upon her door, and though always refused admittance he withdrew only to return. She had been grievously frightened, too, at having been seen in equivocal circumstances by such a man as Captain Pratt. The very remembrance made her shiver.
“How angry Edward would have been,” she said to herself. “I wonder whether he would have advised me to write a little note to Captain Pratt, explaining how I came there, and asking him not to mention it. But, of course, he won’t repeat it. He won’t want to make an enemy of me and Hugh. The Pratts think so much of me. And when I marry Hugh”—(knock at the mental door)—”if ever I marry Hugh, we will be civil to him and have him to stay. Edward never would, but I don’t think so much of good family, and all that, as Edward did. We will certainly ask him.”
It was not till after luncheon that Lady Newhaven, after scanning the Ladies’ Pictorial, languidly opened the Morning Post.
Suddenly the paper fell from her hands on to the floor. She seized it up and read again the paragraph which had caught her eye.
“No. No,” she gasped; “it is not true. It is not possible.” And she read it a third time.
The paper fell from her nerveless hands again, and this time it remained on the floor.
It is doubtful whether until this moment Lady Newhaven had known what suffering was. She had talked freely of it to others. She had sung, as if it were her own composition, “Cleansing Fires.” She often said it might have been written for her.
In the cruel fire of sorrow,
soft pedal.
Cast thy heart, do not faint or wail,
both pedals down, quicker.
Let thy hand be firm and steady,
loud, and hold on to last syllable.
Do not let thy spi-rit quail,
bang! B natural. With resolution.
Bu-ut . . .
hurricane of false notes, &c. &c.
But now, poor thing, the fire had reached her, and her spirit quailed immediately. Perhaps it was only natural that as her courage failed something else should take its place; an implacable burning resentment against her two betrayers, her lover and her friend. She rocked herself to and fro. Lover and friend. “Oh! never, never trust in man’s love or woman’s friendship henceforth for ever.” So learned Lady Newhaven the lesson of suffering.
“Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me,” she sobbed, “and mine acquaintance out of my sight.”
A ring at the door-bell proved that the latter part of the text at any rate was not true in her case.
A footman entered.
“Not at home. Not at home,” she said impatiently.
“I said not at home, but the gentleman said I was to take up his card,” said the man, presenting a card.
When Captain Pratt tipped he tipped heavily.
Lady Newhaven read it.
“No. Yes. I will see him,” she said. It flashed across her mind that she must be civil to him, and that her eyes were not red. She had not shed tears.
The man picked the newspaper from the floor, put it on a side table, and withdrew.
Captain Pratt came in, bland, deferential, orchid in buttonhole.
It was not until he was actually in the room, his cold appraising eyes upon her, that the poor woman realised that her position towards him had changed. She could not summon up the nonchalant distant civility which, according to her ideas, was sufficient for her country neighbours in general, and the Pratts in particular.
Captain Pratt opined that the weather, though cold, was seasonable.
Lady Newhaven agreed.
Captain Pratt regretted the hard frost on account of the hunting. Four hunters eating their heads off, &c.
Lady Newhaven thought the thaw might come any day.
Captain Pratt had been skating yesterday on the parental flooded meadow. Flooded with fire engine. Men out of work. Glad of employment, &c.
How kind of Captain Pratt to employ them.
Not at all. It was his father. Duties of the landed gentry, &c. He believed if the frost continued they would skate on Beaumere.
No, no one was allowed to skate on Beaumere. The springs rendered the ice treacherous.
Silence.
Captain Pratt turned the gold knob of his stick slowly in his thick white fingers. He looked carefully at Lady Newhaven, as a connoisseur with intent to buy looks at a piece of valuable china. She was accustomed to being looked at, but there was something in Captain Pratt’s prolonged scrutiny which filled her with vague alarm. She writhed under it. He observed her uneasiness, but he did not remove his eyes.
Were the boys well?
They were quite well, thanks. She was cowed.
Were they fond of skating?
Very fond.
Might he suggest that they should come over and skate at Warpington Towers to-morrow. He himself would be there, and would take charge of them.
He rose slowly as one who has made up his mind. Lady Newhaven feared it would be troubling Captain Pratt too much.
It would be no trouble to Captain Pratt; on the contrary, a pleasure.
His hand was now extended. Lady Newhaven had to put hers into it.
Perhaps next week if the frost held. She tried to withdraw her hand. Oh, well, then, to-morrow; certainly, to-morrow.
“You may rely on me to take care of them,” said Captain Pratt, still holding her hand. He obliged her to look at him. His hard eyes met her frightened blue ones. “You may rely on my discretion entirely — in all matters,” he said meaningly.
Lady Newhaven winced, and her hand trembled violently in his.
He pressed the shrinking little hand, let it go, and went away.
Le temps apporte, emporte, mais ne rapporte pas.
“MAY I come in?” said the Bishop, tapping at Hester’s door.
“Do come in.”
Hester was lying propped up by many cushions on a sofa in the little sitting-room leading out of her bedroom. She looked a mere shadow in the firelight.
She smiled at him mechanically, but her face relapsed at once into the apathetic expression which sat so ill upon it. Her lustreless eyes fixed themselves again on the fire.
“And what are you going to do this afternoon?” she said politely. It was obvious she did not care what he did.
“I am going to Westhope on business,” he said, looking narrowly at her. It was all very well for Dr. Brown to say she must be roused; but how were his instructions to be carried out?
“I am a great deal of trouble to you,” said Hester. “Could not I be sent to a home, or a place where you go through a cure, where I should be out of the way till I’m well.”
“Have I deserved that, Hester?”
“No; but you know I always try to wound my best friends.”
“You don’t succeed, my child, because they know you are in heavy trouble.”
“We will not speak of that,” said Hester quickly.
“Yes, the time has come to speak of it. Why do you shut us out of this sorrow? Don’t you see that you make our burdens heavier by refusing to let us share yours?”
“You can’t share it,” said Hester, “no one can.”
“Do you think I have not grieved over it?”
“I know you have, but it was waste of time. It’s no good — no good. Please don’t cheer me, and tell me I shall write better books yet, and that this trial is for my good. Dear Bishop, don’t try and comfort me. I can’t bear it.”
“My poor child, I firmly believe you will write better books than the one which is lost, and I firmly believe that you will one day look back upon this time as a step in your spiritual life, but I had not intended to say so. The thought was in my mind, but it was you who put the words into my mouth.”
“I was so afraid that —”
“That I was going to improve the occasion?”
“Yes. Dr. Brown and the nurse are so dreadfully cheerful now, and always talking about the future, and how celebrated I shall be some day. If you and Rachel follow suit I shall — I think I shall go out of my mind.”
The Bishop did not answer.
“Dr. Brown may be right,” Hester went on. “I may live to seventy, and I may become — what does he call it — a distinguished author. I don’t know and I don’t care. But whatever happens in the future, nothing will bring back the book which was burnt.”
The Bishop did not speak. He dared not.
“If I had a child,” Hester continued in the exhausted voice with which he was becoming familiar, “and it died, I might have ten more, beautiful and clever and affectionate, but they would not replace the one I had lost. Only if it were a child,” a little tremor broke the dead level of the passionless voice, “I should meet it again in heaven. There is the resurrection of the body for the children of the body, but there is no resurrection that I ever heard of for the children of the brain.”
Hester held her thin right hand with its disfigured first finger to the fire.
“A great writer who had married and had children whom she worshipped, once told me that the pang of motherhood is that even your children don’t seem your very own. They are often more like some one else than their parents, perhaps the spinster sister-in-law, whom every one dislikes, or some entire alien. Look at Regie. He is just like me, which must be a great trial to Minna. And they grow up bewildering their parents at every turn by characteristics they don’t understand. But she said the spiritual children, the books, are really ours.”
“If you were other than you are,” said Hester, after a long pause, “you would reprove me for worshipping my own work. I suppose love is worship. I loved it for itself, not for anything it was to bring me. That is what people like Dr. Brown don’t understand. It was part of myself. But it was the better part. The side of me which loves success, and which he is always appealing to, had no hand in it. My one prayer was that I might be worthy to write it, that it might not suffer by contact with me. I spent myself upon it.” Hester’s voice sank. “I knew what I was doing. I joyfully spent my health, my eyesight, my very life upon it. I was impelled to do it by what you perhaps will call a blind instinct, what I, poor simpleton and dupe, believed at the time to be nothing less than the will of God.”
“You will think so again,” said the Bishop, “when you realise that the book has left its mark and influence upon your character. It has taught you a great deal. The mere fact of writing it has strengthened you. The outward and visible form is dead, but its spirit lives on in you. You will realise this presently.
“Shall I? On the contrary, the only thing I realise is that it is not God who is mocked, but His foolish children who try to do His bidding. It seems He is not above putting a lying spirit in the mouth of his prophets. Do you think I still blame poor James for his bonfire, or his jealous little wife who wanted to get rid of me? Why should I? They acted up to their lights as your beloved Jock did when he squeezed the life out of that rabbit in Westhope Park. In all those days when I did not say anything, it was because I felt I had been deceived. I had done my part. God had not done His. He should have seen to it that the book was not destroyed. You prayed by me once when you thought I was unconscious. I heard all right. I should have laughed if I could, but it was too much trouble.”
“These thoughts will pass away with your illness,” said the Bishop. “You are like a man who has had a blow, who staggers about giddy and dazed, and sees the pavement rising up to strike him. The pavement is firm under his feet all the time.”
“Half of me knows in a dim blind way that God is the same always,” said Hester, “while the other half says ‘Curse God and die.’”
“That is the giddiness, the vertigo after the shock.”
“Is it? I dare say you are right. But I don’t care either way.”
“Why trouble your mind about it, or about anything?”
“Because I have a feeling, indeed it would be extraordinary if I had not, for Dr. Brown is always rubbing it in, that I ought to meet my trouble bravely, and not sink down under it, as he thinks I am doing now. He says others have suffered more than I have. I know that, for I have been with them. It seems,” said Hester, with the ghost of a smile, “that there is an etiquette about these things, just as the blinds are drawn up after a funeral. The moment has come for me, but I have not drawn up my blinds.”
“You will draw them up presently.”
“I would draw them up now,” said Hester, looking at him steadily, “if I could. I owe it to you and Rachel to try, and I have tried, but I can’t.”
The Bishop’s cheek paled a little.
“Take your own time,” he said, but his heart sank.
He saw a little boat with torn sail and broken rudder, drifting on to a lee shore.
“I seem to have been living at a great strain for the last year,” said Hester. “I don’t know one word from another now, but I think I mean concentration. That means holding your mind to one place, doesn’t it? Well, now, something seems to have broken, and I can’t fix it to anything any more. I can talk to you and Rachel for a few minutes if I hold my mind tight, but I can’t really attend, and directly I am alone or you leave off speaking, my mind gets loose from my body and wanders away to an immense distance, to long dreary desert places. And then if you come in I make a great effort to bring it back, and to open my eyes, because if I don’t you think I’m ill. You don’t mind if I shut them now, do you, because I’ve explained about them, and holding them open does tire me so. I wish they could be propped open. And — my mind gets further and further away every day. I hope you and Rachel won’t think I am giving way if — sometime — I really can’t bring it back any longer.”
“Dear Hester, no.”
“I will not talk any more then. If you and Rachel understand, that is all that matters. I used to think so many things mattered, but I don’t now. And don’t think I’m grieving about the book while I’m lying still. I have grieved, but it is over. I’m too tired to be glad or sorry about anything any more.”
Hester lay back spent and grey among her pillows.
The Bishop roused her to take the stimulant put ready near hand, and then sat a long time watching her. She seemed conscious of his presence. At last the nurse came in, and went out silently, and returned to his study. Rachel was waiting there to hear the result of the interview.
“I can do nothing,” he said. “I have no power to help her. After forty years ministry I have not a word to say to her. She is beyond human aid, at least she is beyond mine.”
“You think she will die?”
“I do not see what is going to happen to prevent it, but I am certain it might be prevented.”
“You could not rouse her?”
“No, she discounted anything I could have said, by asking not to say it. That is the worst of Hester. The partition between her mind and that of other people is so thin that she sees what they are thinking about. Thank God, Rachel, that you are not cursed with the artistic temperament! That is why she has never married. She sees too much. I am not a matchmaker, but if I had had to take the responsibility, I should have married her at seventeen to Lord Newhaven.”
“You know he asked her?”
“No, I did not know it.”
“It was a long time ago, when first she came out. Lady Susan was anxious for it, and pressed her. I sometimes think if she had been given time, and if her aunt had let her alone — but he married within the year. But what are we to do about Hester? Dr. Brown says something must be done, or she will sink in a decline. I would give my life for her, but I can do nothing. I have tried.”
“So have I,” said the Bishop. “But it has come to this. We have got to trust the one person whom we always show we tacitly distrust by trying to take matters out of His hands. We must trust God. So far we have strained ourselves to keep Hester alive, but she is past our help now. She is in none the worse case for that. We are her two best friends save one. We must leave her to the best Friend of all. God has her in His hand. For the moment the greater love holds her away from the less, like the mother who takes her sick child into her arms, apart from the other children who are playing round her. Hester is in God’s keeping, and that is enough for us. And now take a turn in the garden, Rachel. You are too much indoors. I am going out on business.”
When Rachel had left him the Bishop opened his despatch box, and took out a letter.
It was directed to Lady Newhaven.
“I promised to give it into her own hand a month after his death, whenever that might happen to be,” he said to himself. “There was some trouble between them. I hope she won’t confide it to me. Anyhow, I must go and get it over. I wish I did not dislike her so much. I shall advise her not to read it till I am gone.”
The mouse fell from the ceiling, and the cat cried “Allah!”
— Syrian Proverb.
THAT help should come through such a recognised channel as a Bishop could surprise no one, least of all Lady Newhaven, who had had the greatest faith in the clergy all her life, but, nevertheless, so overwhelmed was she by despair and its physical sensations, that she very nearly refused to see the Bishop when he called. Her faith even in lawn sleeves momentarily tottered. Who would show her any good? Poor Lady Newhaven was crushed into a state of prostration so frightful that we must not blame her if she felt that even an Archbishop would have been powerless to help her.
She had thought, after the engagement was announced, of rushing up to London and insisting on seeing Hugh; but always, after she had looked out the trains, her courage had shrunk back at the last moment. There had been a look on Hugh’s face during that last momentary meeting which she could not nerve herself to see again. She had been to London already once to see him without success.
She knew Rachel was at the Palace at Southminster nursing Hester, and twice she had ordered the carriage to drive over to her, and make a desperate appeal to her to give up Hugh. But she knew that she should fail. And Rachel would triumph over her. Women always did over a defeated rival. Lady Newhaven had not gone.
The frightful injustice of it all wrung Lady Newhaven’s heart to the point of agony. To see her own property deliberately stolen from her in the light of day, as it were in the very market place, before everybody, without being able to raise a finger to regain him! It was intolerable. For she loved Hugh as far as she was capable of loving anything. And her mind had grown round the idea that he was hers as entirely as a tree will grow round a nail fastened into it.
And now he was to marry Rachel, and soon.
Let no one think they know pain until they know jealousy.
But when the Bishop sent up a second time, asking to see her on business, she consented.
It was too soon to see callers, of course. But a Bishop was different. And how could she refuse to admit him when she had admitted that odious Captain Pratt only four days before. She hoped no one would become aware of that fact. It was as well for her that she could not hear the remarks of Selina and Ada Pratt, as they skated on the frozen meadows with half, not the better-half, of Middleshire.
“Poor Vi Newhaven. Yes, she won’t see a creature. She saw Algy for a few minutes last week, but then he is an old friend, and does not count. He said she was quite heartbroken. He was quite upset himself. He was so fond of Ted Newhaven.”
The Bishop would not even sit down. He said he was on the way to a confirmation, and added that he had been entrusted with a letter for her, and held it towards her.
“It is my husband’s handwriting,” she said, drawing back with instinctive fear.
“It is from your husband,” said the Bishop gently, softening somewhat at the sight of the ravages which despair had made in the lovely face since he had last seen it. “He asked me to give it into your own hand a month after his death.”
“Then he told you that —”
“He told me nothing, and I wish to hear nothing.”
“I should like to confess all to you, to feel myself absolved,” said Lady Newhaven in a low voice, the letter in her trembling hand.
He looked at her, and he saw that she would not say all. She would arrange details to suit herself, and would omit the main point altogether, whatever it might be, if, as was more than probable it told against herself. He would at least save her from the hypocrisy of a half-confession.
“If in a month’s time you wish to make a full confession to me,” he said, “I will hear it. But I solemnly charge you in the meanwhile to speak to no one of this difficulty between you and your husband. Whatever it may have been, it is past. If he sinned against you, he is dead, and the least you can do is to keep silence. If you wronged him”— Lady Newhaven shook her head vehemently —“If you wronged him,” repeated the Bishop, his face hardening, “be silent for the sake of the children. It is the only miserable reparation you can make him.”
“You don’t understand,” she said feebly.
“I know that he was a kindly, gentle-natured man, and that he died a hard and bitter one,” said the Bishop. “God knows what is in that letter, but your husband said it would be of the greatest comfort and assistance to you in a difficulty which he foresaw for you. I will leave you to read it.”
And he left the room.
The early December twilight was creeping over everything. Lady Newhaven took the letter to the window, and after several futile attempts succeeded in opening it.
It ran as follows:
“It is irreligious to mourn too long for the dead. ‘I shall to him, but he shall not return to me,’ II. Sam. xii. 23. In the meanwhile, until you rejoin me, I trust you will remember that it is my especial wish that you should allow one who is in every way worthy of you to console you for my loss, who will make you as happy as you both deserve to be. That I died by my own hand you and your so-called friend Miss West of course aware. That ‘the one love of your life’ drew short lighter you are perhaps not aware. I waited two days to see if he would fulfil the compact, and as he did not — I never thought he would — I retired in his place. I present to you this small piece of information as a wedding-present, which, if adroitly handled, may add to the harmony of domestic life. And if by any chance he should have conceived the dastardly, the immoral idea of deserting you in favour of some mercenary marriage — of which I rather suspect him — you will find this piece of information invaluable in restoring his allegiance at once. He is yours by every sacred tie, and no treacherous female friend must wrest him from you.
“Your late husband, “NEWHAVEN.”
Lady Newhaven put the letter in her pocket, and then fainted away, with her fair head on the window-ledge.
There cannot be a pinch in death more sharp than this is.
THE Bishop’s sister, Miss Keane, whose life was a perpetual orgy of mothers’ meetings and G.F.S. gatherings, was holding a district visitors’ working party in the drawing-room at the Palace. The ladies knitted and stitched, while one of their number heaped fuel on the flame of their enthusiasm by reading aloud the “History of the Diocese of Southminster.”
Miss Keane took but little heed of the presence of Rachel and Hester in her brother’s house. Those who work mechanically on fixed lines seem as a rule to miss the pith of life. She was kind when she remembered them, but her heart was where her treasure was — namely, in her escritoire, with her list of Bible classes, and servants’ choral unions, and the long roll of contributors to the guild of work which she herself had started.
When she had been up to Hester’s room, invariably at hours when Hester could not see her, and when she had entered Rachel’s sledge-hammer subscriptions in her various account-books, her attention left her visitors. She considered them superficial, and wondered how it was that her brother could find time to spend hours talking to both of them, while he had rarely a moment in which to address her chosen band in the drawing-room. She was one of those persons who find life a very prosaic affair, quite unlike the fiction she occasionally read.
She often remarked that nothing except the commonplace happened. Certainly she never observed anything else.
So Hester lay in the room above halting feebly between two opinions, whether to live or to die, and Rachel sat in the Bishop’s study beneath, waiting to make tea for him on his return from the confirmation.
If she did not make it, no one else did. Instead of ringing for it he went without it.
Rachel watched the sun set — a red ball dropping down a frosty sky. It was the last day of the year. The new year was bringing her everything.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” she said, looking at the last rim of the sun as he sank. And she remembered other years when she had watched the sun set on the last day of December, when life had been difficult — how difficult!
“If Hester could only get better I should have nothing left to wish for,” she said, and she prayed the more fervently for her friend, because she knew that even if Hester died, life would still remain beautiful; the future without her would still be flooded with happiness.
“A year ago if Hester had died I should have had nothing left to live for,” she said to herself. “Now this newcomer, this man whom I have known barely six months, fills my whole life. Are other women as narrow as I am? Can they care only for one person at a time like me? Ah, Hester! forgive me, I can’t help it.”
Hugh was coming in presently. He had been in that morning, and the Bishop had met him, and had asked him to come in again to tea. Rachel did not know what the Bishop thought of him, but he had managed to see a good deal of Hugh.
Rachel waited as impatiently as most of us, when our happiness lingers by us, loth to depart.
At last she heard the footman bringing some one across the hall.
Would Hugh’s coming ever become a common thing? Would she ever be able to greet him without this tumult of emotion, ever be able to take his hand without turning giddy on the sheer verge of bliss.
The servant announced, “Lady Newhaven.”
The two women stood looking at each other. Rachel saw the marks of suffering on the white face, and her own became as white. Her eyes fell guiltily before Lady Newhaven’s.
“Forgive me,” she said.
“Forgive you?” said Lady Newhaven in a hoarse voice. “It is no use asking me for forgiveness.”
“You are right,” said Rachel, recovering herself, and meeting Lady Newhaven’s eyes fully. “But what is the use of coming here to abuse me? You might have spared yourself and me this at least. It will only exhaust you and — wound me.”
“You must give him up,” said Lady Newhaven, her hands fumbling under her crape cloak. “I’ve come to tell you that you must let him go.”
The fact that Hugh had drawn the short lighter, and had not taken the consequences, did not affect Lady Newhaven’s feelings towards him in the least, but she was vaguely aware that somehow it would affect Rachel’s, and now it would be Rachel’s turn to suffer.
Rachel paused a moment, and then said slowly:
“He does not wish to be let go.”
“He is mine.”
“He was yours once,” said Rachel, her face turning from white to grey. That wound was long in healing. “But he is mine now.”
“Rachel, you cannot be bad all through.” Lady Newhaven was putting the constraint upon herself which that tightly clutched paper, that poisoned weapon in reserve, enabled her to assume. For Hugh’s sake she would only use it if other means failed. “You must know that you ought to look upon him as a married man. Don’t you see?"— wildly —“that we must marry, to put right what was wrong. He owes it to me. People always do.”
“Yes, they generally do,” said Rachel; “but I don’t see how it makes the wrong right.”
“I look upon Hugh as my husband,” said Lady Newhaven.
“So do I.”
“Rachel, he loves me. He is only marrying you for your money.”
“I will risk that.”
“I implore you on my knees to give him back to me.”
And Lady Newhaven knelt down with bare white outstretched hands. (Tableau number one. New Series.)
Rachel shrank back involuntarily.
“Listen, Violet,” she said, “and get up. I will not speak until you get up.” Lady Newhaven obeyed. “If I gave back Hugh to you a hundred times it would not make him love you any more, or make him marry you. I am not keeping him from you. This marriage is his own doing. Oh! Violet, I’m not young and pretty. I’ve no illusions about myself; but I believe he really does love me, in spite of that, and I know I love him.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Lady Newhaven. “I mean about him. Not about you, of course.”
“Here he is. Let him decide,” said Rachel.
Hugh came in unannounced. Upon his grave face there was that concentrated look of happiness which has settled in the very deep of the heart, and gleams up into the eyes.
His face changed painfully. He glanced from one woman to the other. Rachel was sorry for him. She would fain have spared him, but she could not.
“Hugh,” she said gently, her steadfast eyes resting on him, “Lady Newhaven and I were talking of you. I think it would be best if she heard from your own lips what she naturally will not believe from mine.”
“I will never believe,” said Lady Newhaven, “that you will desert me now, that all the past is nothing to you, and that you will cast me aside for another woman.”
Hugh looked at her steadily. Then he went up to Rachel, and taking her hand, raised it to his lips. There was in his manner a boundless reverent adoration that was to Lady New. haven’s jealousy as a match to gunpowder.
Rachel kept his hand.
“Are you sure you want him, Rachel?” gasped Lady Newhaven, holding convulsively to a chair for support. “He has cast me aside. He will cast you aside next, for he is a coward and a traitor. Are you sure you want to marry him? His hands are red with blood. He murdered my husband.”
Rachel’s hand tightened on Hugh’s.
“It was an even chance,” she said. “Those who draw lots must abide by the drawing.”
“It was an even chance,” shrieked Lady Newhaven. “But who drew the short lighter, tell me that? Who refused to fulfil his part when the time was up? Tell me that.”
“You are mad,” said Rachel.
“I can prove it,” said Lady Newhaven, holding out the letter in her shaking hands. “You may read it, Rachel. I can trust you. Not him, he would burn it. It is from Edward; look, you know his writing, written to tell me that he,” pointing at Hugh, “had drawn the short lighter, but that, as he had not killed himself when the time came, he, Edward, did so instead. That was why he was late. We always wondered, Rachel, why he was two days late. Read it. Read it.”
“I will not read it,” said Rachel, pushing away the paper. “I do not believe a word of it.”
“You shall believe it. Ask him to deny it, if he can.”
“You need not trouble to deny it,” said Rachel, looking full at Hugh.
The world held only her and him. And as Hugh looked into her eyes his soul rose up and scaled the heights above it till it stood beside hers.
There is a sacred place where, if we follow close in love’s footsteps, we see him lay aside his earthly quiver and his bitter arrows, and turn to us as he is, with the light of God upon him, one with us as one with God. In that pure light lies cease to be. We know them no more, neither remember them, for love and truth are one.
Hugh strode across to Lady Newhaven, took the letter from her, and threw it into the heart of the fire. Then he turned to Rachel.
“I drew the short lighter,” he said. “I meant to take the consequences at first, but when the time came — I did not. Partly I was afraid, and partly I could not leave you.”
If Lady Newhaven yearned for revenge she had it then. They had both forgotten her. But she saw Rachel’s eyes change as the eyes of a man at the stake might change when the fire reached him. She shrank back from the agony in them. Hugh’s face became pinched and thin as a dead man’s. A moment ago he saw no consequences. He saw only that he could not lie to her. His mind fell headlong from its momentary foothold. What mad impulse had betrayed him to his ruin?
“You drew the short lighter, and you let me think all the time that he had,” said Rachel, her voice almost inaudible in its fierce passion. “You drew it, and you let him die instead of you, as any one who knew him would know he would. And when he was dead you came to me, and kept me in ignorance even — that time — when I said I trusted you.”
The remembrance of that meeting was too much.
Rachel turned her eyes on Lady Newhaven who was watching her terror-stricken.
“I said I would not give him up, but I will,” she said violently. “You can take him if you want him. What was it you said to me, Hugh? That if you had drawn the short lighter you would have had to abide by it. Yes, that was it. Your whole intercourse with me has been one lie from first to last. You were right, Violet, when you said he ought to marry you. It will be another lie on the top of all the others.”
“It was what Edward wished,” faltered his widow. “He says so in the letter that has just been burnt.”
“Lord Newhaven wished it,” said Rachel, looking at the miserable man between them. “Poor Lord Newhaven! First his honour. Then his life. You have taken everything he had. But there are still his shoes.”
“Rachel!” said Hugh suddenly, and he fell on his knees before her, clasping the hem of her gown.
She pushed him violently from her, tearing her gown in releasing it from his frenzied grasp.
“Leave me,” she whispered. Her voice was almost gone. “Coward and liar, I will have nothing more to do with you.”
He got upon his feet somehow. The two grey desperate faces spent with passion faced each other. They were past speech.
He read his death warrant in her merciless eyes. She looked at the despair in his without flinching.
He stood a moment, and then feeling his way, like one half blind, left the room, unconsciously pushing aside Lady Newhaven whom both had forgotten.
She gave one terrified glance at Rachel, and slipped out after him.
I thought, “Now, if I had been a woman, such
As God made women, to save men by love —
By just my love I might have saved this man.”
— ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
“HAS Lady Newhaven been here?” said the Bishop, coming into the study, his hands full of papers. “I thought I saw her carriage driving away as I came up.”
“She has been here.”
The Bishop looked up suddenly, his attention arrested by Rachel’s voice. There is a white heat of anger that mimics the pallor of a fainting fit. The Bishop thought she was about to swoon, until he saw her eyes. Those gentle faithful eyes were burning. He shrank as one who sees the glare of fire raging inside familiar windows.
“My poor child,” he said, and he sat down heavily in his leather armchair.
Rachel still stood. She looked at him, and her lips moved, but no sound came forth.
The Bishop looked intently at her.
“Where is Scarlett?” he said.
“Hugh is gone,” she said stammering. “I have broken off my engagement with him. He will never come back.”
And she fell suddenly on her knees, and hid her convulsed face against the arm of a chair.
The Bishop did not move. He waited for this paroxysm of anger to subside. He had never seen Rachel angry before in all the years he had known her, but he watched her without surprise. Only stupid people think that coal cannot burn as fiercely as tow.
She remained a long time on her knees, her face hidden. The Bishop did not hurry her. At last she began to sob silently, shuddering from head to foot.
Then he came and sat down near her, and took the cold clenched hands in his.
“Rachel, tell me,” he said gently.
She tried to pull her hands away; but he held them firmly. He obliged her to look up at him. She raised her fierce disfigured face for a moment, and then let it fall on his hands and hers.
“I am a wicked woman,” she said. “Don’t trouble about me. I’m not worth it. I thought I would have kept all suffering from him, but now — if I could make him suffer — I would.”
“I have no doubt he is suffering.”
“Not enough. Not like me. And I loved him and trusted him. And he is false, too, like that other man I loved, like you, only I have not found you out yet, like Hester, like all the rest. I will never trust any one again. I will never be deceived again. This is — the — second time.”
And Rachel broke into a passion of tears.
The Bishop released her hands, and felt for his own handkerchief.
Then he waited, praying silently. The clock had made a long circuit before she raised herself.
“I am very selfish,” she said looking with compunction at the kind tried face. “I ought to have gone to my room instead of breaking down here. Dear Bishop, forgive me. It is past now. I shall not give way again.”
“Will you make me some tea?” he said.
She made the tea with shaking hands, and awkward half-blind movements. It was close on dinner time, but she did not notice it. He obliged her to drink some, and then he settled himself in his leather armchair. He went over his engagements for the evening. In half an hour he ought to be dining with Canon Glynn to meet an old college friend. At eleven he had arranged to see a young clergyman whose conscience was harrying him. He wrote a note on his knee without moving saying he could not come, and touched the bell at his elbow. When the servant had taken the note, he relapsed into the depths of his armchair, and sipped his tea.
“I think, Rachel,” he said at last, “that I ought to tell you that I partly guess at your reason for breaking off your engagement. I have known for some time that there was trouble between the Newhavens. From what Lady Newhaven said to me to-day, and from the fact that she has been here, and that immediately after seeing her you broke your engagement with Scarlett, I must come to the conclusion that Scarlett had been the cause of this trouble.”
Rachel had regained her composure. Her face was white and hard.
“You are right,” she said. “He was at one time — her lover.”
“And you consider, in consequence, that he is unfit to become your husband?”
“No. He told me about it before he asked me to marry him. I accepted him, knowing it.”
“Then he was trying to retrieve himself. He acted towards you, at any rate, like an honourable man.”
Rachel laughed. “So I thought at the time.”
“If you accepted him, knowing about his past, I don’t see why you should have thrown him over. One dishonourable action sincerely repented does not make a dishonourable man.”
“I did not know all,” said Rachel. “I do now.”
The Bishop looked into the fire.
Her next words surprised him.
“You really cared for Lord Newhaven, did you not?”
“I did.”
"Then as you know the one thing he risked his life to conceal for the sake of his children, namely, his wife’s misconduct, I think I had better tell you the rest.” So Rachel told him in harsh bald language the story of the drawing of lots, and how she and Lady Newhaven had remained ignorant as to which had drawn the short lighter. How Hugh had drawn it; how when the time came he had failed to fulfil the agreement; how two days later Lord Newhaven had killed himself; and how she and Lady Newhaven had both, of course, concluded that Lord Newhaven must have drawn the short lighter. Rachel went on, her hard voice shaking a little. “Hugh had told me that he had had an entanglement with a married woman. I knew it long before he spoke of it, but just because he risked losing me by owning it I loved and trusted him all the more. I thought he was, at any rate, an upright man. After Lord Newhaven’s death he asked me to marry him, and I accepted him. And when we were talking quietly one day”— Rachel’s face became, if possible, whiter than before —“I told him that I knew of the drawing of lots. (He thought no one knew of it except the dead man and himself.) And I told him that he must not blame himself for Lord Newhaven’s death. He had brought it on himself. I said to him”— Rachel’s voice trembled more and more —‘It was an even chance. You might have drawn the short lighter yourself.’ and — he — said that if he had, he should have had to abide by it.”
"The Bishop shaded his eyes with his hand. It seemed cruel to look at Rachel, as it is cruel to watch a man drown.
“And how do you know he did draw it?” he said.
“It seems Lord Newhaven left his wife a letter, which she as only just received, telling her so. She brought it here to-day to show me.”
“Ah! A letter! And you read it?”
“No,” said Rachel, scornfully, “I did not read it. I did not believe a word she said about it. Hugh was there, and I told him I trusted him; and he took the letter from her, and put it in the fire.”
“And did he not contradict it?”
“No. He said it was true. He has lied to me over and over again, but I saw he was speaking the truth for once.”
There was a long silence.
“I don’t know how other people regard those things,” said Rachel at last, less harshly — she was gradually recovering herself —“but I know to me it was much worse that he could deceive me than that he should have been Lady Newhaven’s lover. I did feel that dreadfully. I had to choke down my jealousy when he kissed me. He had kissed her first. He had made that side of his love common and profane; but the other side remained. I clung to that. I believed he really loved me, and that supported me and enabled me to forgive him, though men don’t know what that forgiveness costs us. Only the walls of our rooms know that. But it seems to me much worse to have failed me on that other side as well — to have deceived me — to have told me a lie — just when — just when we were talking intimately.”
“It was infinitely worse,” said the Bishop.
“And it was the action of a coward to draw lots in the first instance if he did not mean to abide by the drawing, and the action of a traitor, once they were drawn, not to abide by them. But yet, if he had told me — if he had only told me the whole truth — I loved him so entirely that I would have forgiven — even that. But whenever I alluded to it, he lied.”
“He was afraid of losing you.”
“He has lost me by his deceit. He would not have lost me if he had told me the truth. I think — I know — that I could have got over anything, forgiven anything, even his cowardice, if he had only admitted it and been straightforward with me. A little plain dealing was all I asked, but — I did not get it.”
The Bishop looked sadly at her. Straightforwardness is so seldom the first requirement a woman makes of the man she loves. Women, as a rule, regard men and their conduct only from the point of view of their relation to women — as sons, as husbands, as fathers. Yet Rachel, it seemed, could forgive Hugh’s sin against her as a woman, but not his further sin against her as a friend.
“Yet it seems he did speak the truth at last,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And after he had destroyed the letter, which was the only proof against him.”
“Yes.”
Another silence.
“I am glad you have thrown him over,” said the Bishop slowly, “for you never loved him.”
“I deceived myself in that case,” said Rachel bitterly. “My only fear was that I loved him too much.”
The Bishop’s face had become fixed and stern.
“Listen to me, Rachel,” he said. “You fell desperately in love with an inferior man. He is charming, refined, well-bred, and with a picturesque mind, but that is all. He is inferior. He is by nature shallow and hard (the two generally go together), without moral backbone, the kind of man who never faces a difficulty, who always flinches when it comes to the point, the stuff out of which liars and cowards are made. His one redeeming quality is his love for you. I have seen men in love before. I have never seen a man care more for a woman than he cares for you. His love for you has taken entire possession of him, and by it he will sink or swim.”
The Bishop paused. Rachel’s face worked.
“He deceived you,” said the Bishop, “not because he wished to deceive you, but because he was in a horrible position, and because his first impulse of love was to keep you at any price. But his love for you was raising him even while he deceived you. Did he spend sleepless nights because for months he vilely deceived Lord Newhaven? No. Rectitude was not in him. His conscience was not awake. But I tell you, Rachel, he has suffered like a man on the rack from deceiving you. I knew by his face as soon as I him that he was undergoing some great mental strain. I did not understand it, but I do now.”
Rachel’s mind, always slow, moved, stumbled to its bleeding feet.
“It was remorse,” she said, turning her face away.
“It was not remorse. It was repentance. Remorse is bitter. Repentance is humble. His love for you has led him to it. Not your love for him, Rachel, which breaks down at the critical moment; his love for you which has brought him for the first time to the perception of the higher life, to the need of God’s forgiveness, which I know from things he has said, has made him long to lead a better life, one worthier of you.”
“Don’t,” said Rachel. “I can’t bear it.”
The Bishop rose, and stood facing her.
“And at last,” he went on, “at last, in a moment, when you showed your full trust and confidence in him, he shook off for an instant the clogs of the nature which he brought into the world, and rose to what he had never been before — your equal. And his love transcended the lies that love itself on its lower plane had prompted. He reached the place where he could no longer lie to you. And then, though his whole future happiness depended on one more lie, he spoke the truth.”
Rachel put out her hand as if to ward off what was coming.
“And how did you meet him the first time he spoke the truth to you?” continued the Bishop inexorably. “You say you loved him, and yet — you spurned him from you, you thrust him down into hell. You stooped to him in the beginning. He was nothing until your fancied love fell upon him. And then you break him. It is women like you who do more harm in the world than the bad ones. The harm that poor fool Lady Newhaven did him is as nothing compared to the harm you have done him. You were his god, and you have deserted him. And you say you loved him. May God preserve men from the love of women if that is all that a good woman’s love is capable of.”
“I can do nothing,” said Rachel hoarsely.
Do nothing! said the Bishop fiercely. "You can do nothing when you are responsible for a man’s soul! God will require his soul at your hands. Scarlett gave it into your keeping, and you took it. You had no business to take it if you meant to throw it away. And now you say you can do nothing!”
“What can I do?” said Rachel faintly.
“Forgive him.”
“Forgiveness won’t help him. The only forgiveness he would care for is to marry me.”
“Of course. It is the only way you can forgive him.”
Rachel turned away. Her stubborn quivering face showed a frightful conflict.
The Bishop watched her.
“My child,” he said gently, “we all say we follow Christ, but most of us only follow Him and His cross — part of the way. When we are told that our Lord bore our sins, and was wounded for our transgressions, I suppose that meant that He felt as if they were His own in His great love for us. But when you shrink from bearing your fellow creature’s transgressions, it shows that your love is small.”
Rachel was silent.
“If you really love him you will forgive him.”
Rachel clenched and unclenched her bands.
“You are appealing to a nobility and goodness which are not in me,” she said stubbornly.
“I appeal to nothing but your love. If you really love him you will forgive him.”
“He has broken my heart.”
“I thought that was it. It is yourself you are thinking of. But what is he suffering at this moment? You do not know or care. Where is he now, that poor man who loves you? Rachel, if you had ever known despair, you would not thrust a fellow creature down into it.”
“I have known it,” said Rachel hoarsely.
“Were not you deserted once? You were deserted to very little purpose, if after that you can desert another. Go back in your mind, and — remember. Where you stood once he stands now. You and his sin have put him there. You and his sin have tied him to his stake. Will you range yourself for ever on the side of his sin? Will you stand by and see him perish?”
Silence; like the silence round a death-bed.
“He is in a great strait. Only love can save him.”
Rachel flung out her arms with an inarticulate cry.
“I will forgive him,” she said. “I will forgive him.”