CHAPTER X.
Careless of herself and her own secret, in the burning desire to be revenged upon Annie, Lilian sped back to the house, not knowing that George had seen her, and found Harry with the rest in the billiard-room, still quarreling hotly about the scene in the drawing-room, of which she had not yet heard. Stephen had been forbidden by her to leave the house that night, and he had been tortured with anxiety on her account ever since he saw Annie go into the conservatory, and then noticed a few minutes later that George had also disappeared.
Lilian beckoned Harry imperiously out of the room.
“I have something important to say to you.”
Her wide, glistening eyes, panting bosom, and resolutely subdued manner, checked his oaths at this interruption. He followed her into the hall.
“George and Colonel Richardson are in the garden, in the copse at the bottom, quarreling over your wife. I am sorry if I have startled you; but I thought you had better know.”
“She is the blight of my life,” hissed out Harry, with a bitter imprecation, trying to steady himself.
“Hadn’t you better do something more than stand here and abuse her?” asked Lilian, dryly.
She turned in disgust from the infuriated lad, and went into the drawing-room. He was on the point of following her, when Annie came into the hall from the garden by another door. There was not a trace of color in her face; she crept slowly, and it seemed to her drunken husband guiltily, toward the staircase.
“Stop!” growled Harry. “You have something to say to me now. Where have you been?”
“In the garden.”
“Whom were you with?”
“With George.”
“And Colonel Richardson?”
“Yes.”
She spoke wearily, all spirit seemed to have been taken out of her by the scenes she had gone through since Harry’s first bullying that afternoon.
“What were you doing there? Tell me at once.”
“I was doing nothing to be ashamed of; you know that perfectly well. I will tell you all about it to-morrow. It would be of no use to try to make you understand now,” said she, glancing up at his flushed face with an involuntary shudder of disgust.
“You will tell me now, whether I understand or not—that is my lookout,” returned he, doggedly. “I’ve had enough of your infernal airs of superiority, and I mean to show you I’m master. You go about with a long face, telling everybody you are too good for me, when all the while——”
“Take care what you say!” she broke in, with sudden spirit.
“What were you doing in the garden, then?” thundered he. “What was Colonel Richardson there for?”
She did not answer. It was not so much to shield Lilian as from fear of another and worse quarrel between the brothers that she was silent; and excitement, fatigue, and disgust were making her reckless.
“Do you intend to answer me or not?” asked Harry, laying a heavy hand on her shoulder.
His touch made her defiant.
“Not now.”
He raised his hand and struck her. It was not really a severe blow; but it was enough to throw the fragile little creature to the ground.
“You brute, you cruel, cowardly brute!” she cried, in a low, sobbing voice, looking up at him with passionate dark eyes full of hatred, from where she had fallen. “You may have killed your child!”—and her head fell back upon the floor at his feet, while he stood still in stupid, dumb bewilderment.
Only for a moment. The rough, drunken fellow was not heartless. When his dim, dazed eyes saw clearly the white, senseless face at his feet, and his dull ears began to admit a suggestion of her meaning, he flung himself down beside her and gathered the unconscious woman into his arms in a passion of loud, demonstrative remorse.
“I have killed her—I have killed her!” bemoaned to the group of frightened people from the drawing-room, billiard-room, and servants’-hall whom his cries brought quickly into the hall. “Heaven forgive me, she is dead! My poor, pretty little wife! Oh, I am a brute, a beast! Annie, Annie! She will never speak to me again!”—and the slight frame he held in his arms and pressed to his convulsed and swollen face shook with the violence of his sobs.
It was a genuine grief that prompted this outburst; but it was the grief, not of a man, but of a child who in a fit of thoughtless anger had taken the life of a pet dog or bird.
They took her from him with difficulty, assuring him that she had only fainted; and George and Wilfred led him away, while the women tried to restore her to consciousness. It was a long time before they succeeded; then Lady Braithwaite came into the billiard-room where the young men were.
“She must have a doctor. Somebody must ride to Beckham at once,” she said.
“I will!” cried Harry, jumping up.
“Nonsense; you are not sober enough,” said George curtly. He was bearing his share of remorse at the result of the day’s work.
But, before he had reached the door. Harry passed him with a rough push and an oath. The shock had sobered the lad for the time; but he had been drinking since to drown his remorse. However, he was so familiar with the stable as to be able almost by instinct to find what he wanted; he put saddle and bridle himself on to the fastest horse there, and, once in the saddle, he was all right, for, drunk or sober, Harry could ride.
He got back before the doctor, and ran, all breathless, heated, and splashed, up the stairs to the door of the room, into which Annie had been taken, knocked as softly as he could, and opened the door. She was lying on the bed, and his mother and the housekeeper were with her. They made gestures to him to go back; but he stood there, his face all quivering with wistful anxiety.
“Only let me just say one word to her,” pleaded he, hoarsely. He was panting still from the speed with which he had come.
Annie, who had been lying half-unconscious, opened her eyes and turned to Lady Braithwaite with a low cry:
“Don’t let him come near me!” she whispered.
But Harry heard; and he slunk out of the room, stunned as no physical blow could have stunned him.
Annie lay ill for weeks, and in all that time no messages, no entreaties would induce her to see her husband. The only glimpses he got of her were by stealth, when she was asleep. For the sweet hope of being a mother, which had made her secretly, silently happy under all his neglect, had now been taken from her, and she felt that it was his brutality which had snatched away the one joy her wretched marriage had brought her.
Lady Braithwaite tried to soothe her mind and induce her to forgive her husband. But the submissive daughter-in-law was strong in her weakness; and no persuasion on the part of the elder lady, who had now grown as kind as she had formerly been cold, could extract more than:
“Tell him I forgive him; but don’t let me see him.”
She was so obstinate in this decision that, even when she was well enough to be carried down-stairs, she refused to move from her room, and the women about her knew that it was the dread of meeting her husband which kept her a prisoner. So that Lady Braithwaite had to make her way to Harry’s room one night, and persuade him to go away for a time. It was a difficult task for a mother, for the lad’s passion broke out vehemently in alternate fits against his wife and of fondness for her. First he said he would go to the ends of the earth, if that would do her any good, and the next minute he swore she was a hard, ungrateful little vixen, and deserved to have her ears boxed.
However, at last Lady Braithwaite carried her point; and he agreed to go away for a fortnight to some relatives of hers in Leicestershire—no very great hardship, in truth, as the hunting-season was not yet over.
So one morning, before Annie was awake, he stole into her room with elaborately clumsy movements expressive of his intention not to make the least noise, all ready for his journey, except that he was without his boots—he had left them outside the door for fear of their creaking. He stood looking at her wistfully for a few minutes, and then crept close to the bed and softly kissed her. She did not move or wake. Then he took out of his pocket a letter, directed, rather quaintly, to “Mrs. Harold Braithwaite, Garstone Grange, Lancashire.” He had first written outside it simply, “Annie;” but then it had occurred to him that the dignity of the offended husband required the full title. This letter he tucked gently under her shoulder, as he did not want anybody else to see it. Then, with another kiss and the murmur, “She doesn’t deserve it—I’m blessed if she does!” he left the room.
When he got outside the door, he hesitated a moment.
“Wonder if it would hurt her to wake her? She might just say good-bye. Oh, well, it is only for a fortnight!” and he put on his boots and went down-stairs.
Only a fortnight—so he thought!
When Annie woke that morning, she found the letter. It was badly written, strangely spelled, not punctuated at all, an authentic uninspired document evidently:
“My dear Annie,—I ought not to have to write to you at all as a husband ought to see his wife whenever he likes and she ought to think it a compliment but you are ill though I believe you are nearly well now and I say no more. You don’t know how sorry I am about it all or you would be kinder for I can not ride or sleep or do anything hardly for thinking of you. Then all say I am silly to go on like this just for a woman and I dare say they are right in the abstrackt but they don’t know how much a man feels this sort of tretment until they are married themselves which I hope they won’t be till they are older than you and me for a man should not marry until five-and-twenty I am sure of that now. I do not say that to reproach you for it was not your fault, and it is nearly as bad for you as for me and it will all be different in a fortnight when I come back for I will be very gentle and kind to you and I want you to promise that you won’t say any more about it nor throw it in my face afterward when you are angry with me and that you won’t always be so dredfully quiet before people as if you were afraid of me. I know I am not good enough for you and everybody is always telling me so and it is not at all a pleasant thing for a fellow and I think if you were a little less good it would be better. I would as soon you gave me a slap in the face than obey me in the way you do like a statue or a martyr which you are not. Don’t think I want to say hard things to you for everybody will tell you how wretched I have been and I will say a lot more to you when I see you but now as the dog-cart is round and I have not had my breakfast I will say good-by and if you are not awake I will put it under your pillow. Your affectionate husband,“Harry.”
“My dear Annie,—I ought not to have to write to you at all as a husband ought to see his wife whenever he likes and she ought to think it a compliment but you are ill though I believe you are nearly well now and I say no more. You don’t know how sorry I am about it all or you would be kinder for I can not ride or sleep or do anything hardly for thinking of you. Then all say I am silly to go on like this just for a woman and I dare say they are right in the abstrackt but they don’t know how much a man feels this sort of tretment until they are married themselves which I hope they won’t be till they are older than you and me for a man should not marry until five-and-twenty I am sure of that now. I do not say that to reproach you for it was not your fault, and it is nearly as bad for you as for me and it will all be different in a fortnight when I come back for I will be very gentle and kind to you and I want you to promise that you won’t say any more about it nor throw it in my face afterward when you are angry with me and that you won’t always be so dredfully quiet before people as if you were afraid of me. I know I am not good enough for you and everybody is always telling me so and it is not at all a pleasant thing for a fellow and I think if you were a little less good it would be better. I would as soon you gave me a slap in the face than obey me in the way you do like a statue or a martyr which you are not. Don’t think I want to say hard things to you for everybody will tell you how wretched I have been and I will say a lot more to you when I see you but now as the dog-cart is round and I have not had my breakfast I will say good-by and if you are not awake I will put it under your pillow. Your affectionate husband,
“Harry.”
As Annie read this letter, it struck her for the first time that she had not appreciated the extreme youthfulness of her husband, who was much younger at twenty than she was on the eve of being nineteen. The letter, in its boyish simplicity, amused and touched her; however, it did not alter, but rather strengthened, a resolution which she had been busily forming and developing during those quiet weeks of illness.
On the day following Harry’s departure for Leicestershire she was led down-stairs, being strong enough to walk now, and enthroned in the drawing-room as a special pet and sovereign. She was rather shy with George at first; but he knew how to be so quietly kind as to put her at her ease. William danced wild hornpipes of joy round her, until they threatened to turn him out for being noisy, upon which he instantly subsided, and fell into the opposite extreme of speaking only in a thick whisper. All the rest were kind, Lilian rather ashamed of herself, but grateful to Annie for not having mentioned her name to indiscreet Harry on that eventful Christmas night.
George, after another stormy interview with his sister in the library, in which she had been in a position to give him back taunt for taunt, wisely agreed to bury all allusion to that night’s events, and merely used the power they gave him to insist on her marrying Mr. Falconer sooner than she wished. It had been a miserable business, that moonlit scene in the copse, requiring hushing up all round, but especially on Lilian’s account; so her eldest brother and Colonel Richardson had had to content themselves with an exchange of hard words, and the latter had returned to the station and the former to the house, each with an uneasy consciousness that he had never appeared to less advantage in his own eyes in his life.
By the time Annie came down-stairs for the first time, the preparations for Lilian’s wedding were already in progress; and, when Annie suggested to Lady Braithwaite that she thought she wanted change of air, the latter offered to take her away to the seaside as soon as Lilian was married, saying she could not leave home before. But Annie thanked her, and said she would be well enough to travel by herself in a day or two; and she wanted to go as soon as she could to her aunt’s, she thought.
When George heard of it, he begged his sister-in-law to wait until after the wedding, when he himself would take both her and his mother to Southport. She thanked him, but without accepting or declining the proposal.
On the very day before Harry’s expected return, however, George having left home early in the morning for a day’s hunting, Annie came into the morning-room—where Lady Braithwaite and her daughter were inspecting some newly arrived wedding presents—dressed for a journey.
“I knew the obstinate little thing would go off by herself, after all,” said Lilian, rather glad of her sister-in-law’s resolution.
The elder lady was completely taken by surprise.
“What about your luggage? You can’t go away without any,” she said.
“I packed it all last night, and ordered a cab from Beckham yesterday—at least, it was I who sent the order. The cab is at the door now.”
“But you can’t go off in that way; people would think it so strange! Wait until after dinner, and I will take you.”
“Thank you. William is going to drive me. The dog-cart will be round in a minute.”
This diverted Lady Braithwaite’s thoughts.
“That horrid dog-cart! You are going to let him take you in that! You will certainly be thrown out and killed!”
“I am not afraid,” said Annie, smiling; and, hearing William’s voice calling her from the hall, she bade them both good-bye and left the room, they following her to the front door.
Her manner was very quiet and composed; but Lilian was not easily deceived. She turned to her mother as the dog-cart disappeared down the drive.
“She does not mean to come back, mamma,” she said, in a low voice. And one of the servants standing at the back overheard and nodded to another, whispering:
“I told you so.”
William was in high spirits at driving his dear Annie again; but she was very silent, or talked without her usual brightness. He said nothing; but he thought to himself, “If she is so sorry to go away, she will be back all the sooner,” and, when, at the station, he had taken her ticket—first-class, in spite of her directions—and found her a comfortable carriage, he got in and flung his arms around her affectionately, and told her he should count the days till she came back. Then, to his sudden dismay, she burst into tears. The boy’s face fell.
“Annie, what is the matter?” Then, in a mysterious voice, “You haven’t cut away from Harry, have you?”
Annie nodded.
“Don’t tell any one at the Grange yet, William, there’s a dear, good old boy. I will write and explain. But I’m glad you know. I couldn’t bear it any longer. It was ruining both our lives; we never could have agreed, and we shall both be happier apart.”
“But where are you going? What are you going to do? You are not going to be a governess again, are you?”
“I don’t know. I am not sure of anything yet, only of this—that I shall be all right, and nobody need be anxious about me.”
“But I shall be. Oh, Annie, don’t go! Let me go with you and see you safely to your aunt’s. I have some money with me—George gave me my allowance only this morning. Do let me go!”
“No, no; you must not think of such a thing,” said Annie, almost laughing.
“And you were going to leave me just like the rest, without a word about your not coming back! Oh, Annie, when we’ve been such chums!”
The boy’s reproachful face overcame Annie.
“Look here—I’ll tell you what I haven’t told anybody else, and don’t mean to tell anybody else,” said she, affectionately; and she whispered something into his ear.
“Oh, Annie!”
“Mind you are not to tell any one—ever. I have not even made you promise, you see.”
“You needn’t be afraid. Your brother-in-law is a gentleman,” said William, gravely.
The express by which she was going stopped twenty minutes at Beckham; but now the guard was crying, “Take your seats!”—and William had to jump out. He got up on the step outside to see as much as he could of her at the very last, and said, in an important whisper:
“But I sha’n’t know where to write to you.”
“I will let you know. And mind, William, you are not to drink—at least, not like the others!”
“All right; I won’t. I may smoke, mayn’t I?”
“Oh, yes, you may smoke, and you may ride and fish and shoot as much as you like; only do try to read a little, and don’t swear quite so much as Wilfred or Harry.”
“All right. You don’t mind my saying a big, big D—— when I get a bad fall just before the finish?”
“N—o, I’ll pass that. Now get down; the train is going, and you will be hurt.”
William jumped off, but dashed down the platform beside the moving train a minute after, panting out, as he threw his purse into the carriage:
“You must take it; I’ve taken out all I want, and you may want it. You know I took first-class when you said second. Write.”
The last impression she carried away of her life at the Grange was the memory of the big, handsome boy standing looking at the disappearing train, with an expression on his face which threatened tears when he should be out of sight of the busy crowd around him.
When Annie’s own tears had stopped, she picked up the boy’s purse, which had fallen as he flung it, on to the opposite seat. It was a handsome purse and pocket-book, given him by his mother; but it had suffered from experiments made upon it with the various articles in his tool-chest. He had begun a diary in it when it was new, which had dwindled down to an occasional note of his transactions in rabbits. There were other boyish documents, a cutting from theField,et cetera, and there was more than five pounds in money, a broken scarf-pin, and two used foreign postage-stamps. She had no scruples about accepting the money, which was a welcome addition to her not very large store, and the pocket-book she put in her desk later as a cherishedsouvenirof the being she cared most about in the world. The boy’s high spirits and frank pleasure in hers had won her from the first, and the only things she regretted in her life at the Grange were the walks and drives and barbaric sports of ratting and mouse-bunting with him as a companion.
When she got to London, she went straight to a street she had been told of, north of Oxford Street, well known for cheap lodgings. She took a furnished bedroom at the top of a dingy house, and then next day she returned to Euston Station to fetch her luggage, which she had left at the parcels-office there, for fear of the extra expense of driving about in a cab with it, in case she should have any difficulty in finding a suitable lodging. She was on foot; and, as she entered the station, a hansom passed her with a young man in it who quite startled her by his likeness to Harry. The resemblance was so strong that she stopped, half inclined to turn back and walk about for a little while, in case it should be, indeed, her husband, so that he might have left the station before she got there. But then she reasoned with herself that Harry was in Leicestershire, and was expected at Garstone to-day, even if he were not already there; so that she decided to go boldly on. Another feeling impelled her forward—an unacknowledged hankering for a last sight of her husband, or even for a look at the man who so strongly resembled him.
Annie did not love her husband—she had never really loved him; and since Christmas she almost hated him. But, now that she had left him forever, and that too without any farewell, a natural inconsistency prompted her to try to steal a last look at the handsome lad who had been her lord and master.
So she went into the station, and, leaving her luggage for future consideration, looked about cautiously for the man she had seen in the hansom. He was not to be seen about the ticket offices, and, growing bolder, she slipped in and out among the groups of people on the platform. A train was about to start for the North. Still with caution, but attracted in spite of herself toward that train, which, as she knew, would stop at Beckham, Annie advanced until she was nearly opposite to the doors of the refreshment-room. They opened, and a young man came out. Annie stopped, with the color rushing to her face; for it was Harry. He looked so handsome in his light traveling-suit, with his overcoat hanging loosely over his arm, that she felt quite proud of him, and stood there with her eyes fixed upon him, half hoping that he would turn and see her.
But he did not, for he was gazing eagerly in the opposite direction—so eagerly that he risked being left behind, as the carriage doors were being closed. Annie’s eyes followed his, and found that the object of his evident admiration was a showily-dressed woman with bold eyes and impossibly yellow hair, who was tottering along the platform in boots which had long slender pegs instead of heels.
With a sigh of disgust, Annie turned away. It was years before she saw her husband again.