CHAPTER XVIII.
Annie left her husband’s room that night, after his most unexpected declaration of love and her own promise to try to return it, in a state of bewilderment in which thought was for a long time impossible. That his affection for her was anything more than a passing caprice, the result partly of jealousy of his brothers, and partly of pique at her own indifference, she did not for a moment believe. If her heart had been quite free, she might have been less skeptical, or more clearly touched by this acknowledgment of the strength of the influence she had gained over her rough and hitherto careless young husband. But she knew how deep lay the difference between his nature and her own, and since the first weeks of her marriage she had given up all hope of their ever harmonizing with each other except in the most superficial manner. Through his passionate words she had seemed, in spite of herself, to hear the ring of another voice, and she felt, with a thrill of shame, that no words of the man she had sworn to love could wake in her an emotion so strong as that she had felt at the few faltering words in which Aubrey Cooke had confessed that he loved her.
And Aubrey Cooke was out in the world working hard, as she felt, to win position and money, to make himself a name, to rise to the heights of the ambition she had encouraged; and perhaps even yet, in spite of her discouraging words to him, he was nursing the vain belief that she would some day be his, and longing for the time when they should wander out together again, and have more long talks, in which the words of each seemed but to express the unuttered thought of the other; while Harry, her husband, would remain an ignorant idler to the end of his life, ill-tempered, arrogant, unsympathetic to her, as if he had been an inhabitant of another world. And this man she had promised to try to love, with the honest, solemn intention of keeping her word to the best of her power! But she confessed to herself, with a shudder at the thought of the self-sacrifice she would have to make if his caprice were to last and she were to have to put off indefinitely her return to the stage, that she had an uphill task before her.
The next morning she met her husband in the expectation of finding him as ungracious as usual. But Harry had apparently been thinking out the position, and come to the conclusion that the effort must not be all on his wife’s side. At any rate, he was gentle and considerate, and asked her if she would drive him out, in a courteous tone which seemed to admit the possibility of a refusal.
It was the first day that he had been out of doors since his illness, and he was very good-tempered and happy, sitting wrapped up in rugs by his wife’s side in Lady Braithwaite’s pony-carriage; and, after that trial of it, the daily drive became an institution. Annie found that the explanation they had at the time of that little episode of the sporting-books had had the satisfactory result of making Harry more docile than ever; and when, in the country lanes through which they drove for miles each day over the frost-bound earth, she started him on some favorite topic of his, such as the training of race-horses or the advantages of a straight saddle, she found that she could continue her own train of thought almost undisturbed, by the help of a nod of approval every now and then; and she found him quite an endurable companion.
But unfortunately Harry was not so stupid as he was ignorant, and one day, when Annie had given a pleasant smile of approbation of what he was saying without having listened to it, he suddenly stopped short in the middle of a sentence, and, looking round at him in surprise, his wife found that he was sulking.
“Go on, Harry; that is very interesting,” said she innocently.
“No, it isn’t; you don’t know what I was talking about,” he returned sullenly.
“Yes, I do, Harry. You were talking about—horses,” said she, with what she thought a safe guess.
But her husband looked blacker than ever.
“I wasn’t talking about horses, as it happens. It shows how much you care what I say. I’m much obliged to you for letting me see that I bore you. Stop! I’ll get out;” and he tossed off his rugs.
“No, no, don’t, dear Harry! Let me drive you home. It is only a little way; but it is too far for you to walk yet. I’m very, very sorry I was so inattentive; but the fact is I—I have something on my mind that is troubling me; and so——”
“Have you, Annie?” he asked anxiously. “What is it?” Then, noticing the expression of his wife’s face, his manner changed, and he cried roughly, “It is a lie! It is an infernal excuse! Stop, I tell you, or I’ll jump out without your stopping! Now I’ll be hanged if I let you drive me out any more! You are just a little hypocrite, pretending to listen and be so sweet, when all the time you don’t care what I say if I talk myself hoarse. Go and talk your learned jargon with George, and William, and—the deuce, if you like! I’m going to Joe Green’s, the blacksmith.”
She had stopped, seeing it was of no use to try to argue with him in this mood, and that to disobey him would only be to see him break his neck before her eyes. And she drove home full of remorse, after watching him vault over a gate to take a short cut to the village, and making one more effort to stop him by a piteous cry of “Harry!” of which he took no notice.
To the blacksmith’s—where Susan Green lived! This, then, was the end of his revived affection for herself, that the very first walk he took led him straight back to the vulgar charms of the blacksmith’s daughter.
It was a bitter, unpleasant thought, even for a wife not sufficiently fond of her husband to be jealous. It was a humiliation which brought up in her mind the image of the one man who thought her charms superior to those of any other woman. She did not feel jealous, but insulted by the rude speech of her husband, who, after she had used every care, every charm at her command to fulfill her duty to him in sickness and in convalescence, rewarded her with a coarse taunt and an openly expressed intention of leaving her for the society of a girl of low birth and not unspotted name.
She drove home, and, as soon as she had taken off her hat and mantle, went into the library, where, in spite of Harry’s rough prohibition, she still continued to give William lessons in French. Dusk was coming on; but it was light enough for her to see the figure bending over a book in a low chair near the window. She crossed the room and put her hand on his shoulder.
“William, how wrong of you to try your eyes like that.”
He looked up. It was not William, but Harry.
“You, Harry?” murmured his wife, in astonishment.
“Yes, me—Harry. I may try my eyes as much as I like, mayn’t I?”
She took the book gently from his hand. It was “Sartor Resartus.”
“You have not been reading this?” she gasped.
“Yes, I have. I saw it lying on the table with your book-marker in it, so I took it up to see what it was like; and I’ve read six pages, but I’ll be hanged if I can make head or tail of it!”
“Nor can I,” said Annie.
“Well, what do you read it for then?”
She hesitated.
“It was written by a great man, a ‘mighty thinker,’ and I like to try to find out what he means.”
“Well, I think it is a very dull amusement. Thomas Carlyle”—looking at the title page. “Mighty thinker, you say. I’ve heard of a mighty hunter——”
“Oh, you are thinking of Nimrod! It’s not the same person,” said Annie.
“You are laughing at me! Very well!”
“Yes, I am,” said Annie, smiling, and putting her arms affectionately round his neck. “But I think, if I didn’t laugh, I should cry—I feel very much touched by finding you—finding you here trying to read my dull books when I was feeling very angry with you for running away from me as you did.”
Harry rubbed his curly head against her responsively without saying anything for a minute. Then he looked up searchingly into her face.
“Annie, I want to ask you something. Just now Ste—some one told me they had seen Colonel Richardson in Beckham several times during the last few days, and had seen you talking to him.”
“Well?”
“Well!”—sharply. “And why didn’t you say anything about it?”
“There was nothing to say. I met Colonel Richardson, I spoke to him, and that was all. What is there strange in that?”
“Oh, nothing, of course!” He paused for a moment and looked away from her. Then he burst out, but as if to himself: “It was Colonel Richardson who came dangling after you four years ago. You always liked him.”
“Harry, don’t be so absurd as to be jealous of Colonel Richardson! Indeed you have never had the slightest cause to be so.”
“How can I be sure of that?” said he, turning upon her suddenly. “One thing I am certain of—that is, that, during these four years that you have been away from me, you have met somebody you liked better than me. I don’t say it was unnatural—I don’t say I’m surprised; but I say that I know I’m right, and I’ll find out who it is, as sure as I’m your husband! You say I’ve no need to be jealous of any actor—and I don’t myself think you would lower yourself as far as that——”
“You forget that I’m an actress,” said Annie, composedly.
“Were an actress; but you’re not one now,” answered he, hastily. “Well, if you never cared for any actor, why not for Colonel Richardson? He is handsome, and knows how to talk to you about the things you like.”
“But I have told you already that I never cared for Colonel Richardson: and your persistent jealousy is an insult to me when I tell you it has no foundation. He belongs to a type of man which has no attraction for me.”
“What type’s that?”
“He is an idler; and I have worked too long and too hard myself not to despise idleness in a man.”
Harry gave a grunt of disapproval.
“I suppose you call me an idler.”
“Well, I don’t think you are much else,” said she, smiling.
“It seems to me, Annie, you expect a precious deal too much of a man,” he grumbled presently, in an injured tone. “To please you he must slave like a nigger, whether he has any need to work or not, and read himself blind over the dullest trash that ever was printed, and never talk about anything he himself likes, but chatter by the yard about things that haven’t the least interest, and beam all over with smiles when he is annoyed.”
Annie laughed.
“I don’t think I ever expected all that of anybody, and certainly not of you, Harry.”
And weary of this useless discussion, she left the room as Stephen entered it. The friendship between her and the cripple had never been great, and he was now rather jealous of her position in the household, which had become stronger than that of his adored Lilian, with whom, however, he had begun of late to have serious quarrels. Harry had let slip the fact that it was Stephen who had informed him of Colonel Richardson’s presence in Beckham, which had so needlessly excited his jealousy. Annie wondered what his object could have been.
When she left them together, Harry jumped up from his chair and faced his cousin.
“What do you come tormenting me for with your humbugging stories about Annie and Richardson? She doesn’t care a straw for the fellow!”
“Doesn’t she? Oh, that’s all right!” said Stephen, meaningly.
“No; she only spoke to him out of civility,” said Harry, raising his voice, but looking anxiously at the other. “Here—what do you mean with your confounded shrugs and squirms? Look me straight in the face, and say out what you mean?”
The cripple was trembling and his face paling, but not with fear of his companion. He hesitated for one moment, then said, in a hurried low voice, as if the words were wrenched from him against his will:
“Very well; don’t mind what I say. Of course I am warning you only for fun, for my own amusement. First go and tell her what nonsense I’ve been talking, and then—then let her meet Colonel Richardson at the lower gate at eleven to-night, and, take my word for it, you won’t be troubled with your wife any more.”
“Liar!” hissed out Harry.
“Oh, it is only my fun, of course,” sneered the cripple.
Harry stood for a moment leaning heavily on the table. His first instinct was to seize his cousin by the collar and confront him with Annie; but the next moment a terrible fear that this was the truth that he was hearing seized him, and a sudden desperate resolve stopped his hand and restored him to an appearance of calmness.
The hideous story seemed to him in his excited state only too likely. This would explain her anxiety to get away, her comparative coldness toward himself, and would justify the suspicions he had, not of her purity, but of her faith.
“I hate her, I hate her,” he said to himself, as he dashed away from Stephen, out of the library, and flung himself down upon a seat in the empty billiard-room, with his head in his hands. “I thought I did, and now I know it. The little, deceitful, heartless vixen! I’ll just take a leaf out of her own book, and see if I can’t be loving while I mean all the time to make her suffer. You despise me, do you, my lady? I’m a clod, am I? We’ll see to-night if we can’t turn the tables for once. You thought you could turn me round your little finger, I’ll warrant, and laughed at me, and thought me a boor and a silly fool to be fond of you. But you are mistaken, my fine lady! I hate you, I loathe you, and I’ll prove it to you to-night!”
But one thing in his programme it was beyond Harry’s strength to carry out. He could not act; and, when he met his wife just before dinner, and would fain have concealed, under soft words and caressing manners, the passionate indignation which was raging in him, he was obliged to turn away from her brusquely after the very first words. She noticed his agitation; but it was as impossible as it was unnecessary to fathom all her husband’s caprices, and her own manner then and at dinner was exactly the same as usual. Stephen watched him as he glared at his wife; and, when dinner was over, he fastened himself on to Annie to prevent a conversation between her husband and her. This was not difficult; for Harry, for the first time during his wife’s stay at the Grange, had disregarded all her entreating looks, and excited himself so much with wine that she kept carefully out of his way when the gentlemen came into the drawing-room.
Except for that incident and Harry’s consequent sullenness, the evening passed off as usual, until, at half-past ten, Annie and Lilian retired for the night. Then Harry, instead of joining his brothers in the billiard-room, sprung up from the corner where he had been sulking and watching for the last hour, snatched up a hat in the hall, and, without waiting to put on his overcoat, slipped out, without being seen by any one, into the garden. It was a snowy February night, and he shivered as, hot with wine and mad excitement, he first stepped into the keen air; but he strode down over the lawn toward the bottom of the garden, reckless as to the effects of the cold and wet on his not yet robust frame. He reached the lower gate; but, to his intense relief, there was no one there, no sound to be heard. He waited a few minutes, and a deep sense of joy, followed by the determination to transfer his revenge on to Stephen, who had played this trick upon him, had risen in his breast, when he heard the faint sound of wheels and hoofs over the soft snow, and saw through the falling flakes a close carriage coming slowly up from the direction of Beckham. It stopped at the gate. Harry held his breath; the carriage door opened, and a man in a thick great-coat stepped down into the snow. It was Colonel Richardson.
Harry, who, on the approach of the carriage, had crept in among the leafless snow-covered trees and the tall evergreens of the shrubbery, uttered no sound; but his right hand went swiftly to his coat-pocket and drew out a revolver, which he thrust into the breast of his coat without again relaxing his hold of it.
Colonel Richardson walked up and down in the snow in front of the gate, stopping after every few steps to listen, and to shake the thick flakes off his coat impatiently. He never came very near to the motionless figure among the trees, for there were a low wall and a thick growth of laurel and rhododendron bushes between them. And the spot Harry had chosen for his station was on the lower side of the gate, while any one coming from the house would come down to the upper side, so that Colonel Richardson, peering anxiously in impatient expectation through the branches, never once glanced in his direction.
When, in a low voice, he gave the coachman some direction, and the carriage went on a little way, and then turned slowly round, Harry recognized it as a hired carriage from a livery stable in Beckham. His hand still round his revolver, he was on the alert for the next movement; but the carriage, having turned so that the horses’ heads were toward Beckham, stopped again before the gate.
Time went slowly by for both men, the watcher and the watched; while the latter stamped the snow from his boots, strode up and down, and showed ever-increasing impatience, the former remained as still as ever at his post among the laurels. He did not feel the keen wind, or the falling snow, or the cold of the damp, white mass beneath his feet, which was striking into his frame and chilling him to the bone.
For almost the first time in his life thought had got hold of him, and was torturing him with sharp pangs which deadened the sense of bodily discomfort within him. His hatred of the man who stood there, unconscious of his presence, and the deadly errand which brought him, blazed as fiercely as ever; but his anger against his wife was dying away, and giving place to pity for the beautiful little creature who had so rashly given her happiness into his keeping four years and a half ago, to be punished for her rashness by his brutal neglect and indifference.
“Yet I meant to be kind to her. I did not want to be cruel. Am I such a brute that I can’t help it? I have tried to be gentle with her lately, and she likes me no better. She comes back to tantalize me into loving her as I never thought I could love any woman, and then runs away with this blackguard, who would just throw her over when——Good heavens! No! Even he couldn’t desert her!”
His lip quivered, and there came a choking feeling in his throat.
“Thank Heaven I’m in time to stop her! She’ll have to stay with me now; but she will find a way of making it more a punishment for me than for her, I expect. What an ass I am to care about her—I mean, to have cared about her! I’ll just show her the difference now. She shall see if it wasn’t better to have a churlish husband for a slave than for a master. She despised me, did she, and thought me a fool for letting her do what she liked with me? Yes, that is the way with women. Well, now it is her turn to do what I like; and I sha’n’t be so soft about it either. I’ll just——Confound her, I’ve a good mind to let her go off with him, and snap my fingers at her and be rid of her! Ay, and I would, too, only she is my wife, worse luck, and I must do for my honor what I wouldn’t do for her. No, that I wouldn’t! Oh, good Heaven, will she never love me? I’m not good enough for her; but I’m not such a cur as that fellow!”
As the minutes dragged on, a hope began to rise within him that she was not coming, after all, while he could see, to his joy, that the anxiety of the man he was watching had grown keener. Still they heard no sound, though they listened intently, the one in hope, the other in deadliest fear.
At last Harry saw Colonel Richardson turn his head quickly, as if his ear had caught some expected sound; then he laid his hand upon the latch of the gate. Still Harry heard nothing.
But a minute later, through the falling snow, he saw above him, swiftly approaching down the soft, white track of the pathway, a woman’s figure; and with a silent curse and a heart heavy within him, his eyes turned quickly to the man who was stealing his treasure. Colonel Richardson had raised the latch of the gate, opened it, and stood inside, waiting. Harry’s anger blazed up with fresh intensity.
“I’ll shoot him like a dog!” thought he.
And he stepped out from the shrubbery on to the pathway, drew out his revolver, and covered the other man with it as steadily as he had ever aimed at a partridge. Then he stood still, waiting for the other to turn and see him. But Colonel Richardson’s attention was fixed on the rapidly approaching figure. Harry would not look at her. It was not until the two had met that his eyes, in watching the man, fell upon the woman also.
“I could not get away before; the boys were all over the house,” she was whispering, deprecatingly.
His hand with the revolver dropped to his side as he sprung forward and in a few strides reached them and dragged her away.
“Lilian!”
At twenty minutes to twelve that night Annie was roused from sleep by knocking at her door.
“What is it?” she cried, sleepily.
But the answer startled her into wakefulness.
“Annie, Annie, open the door, for Heaven’s sake!”
It was her husband’s voice, but hoarse, feeble, and broken.
For one instant she paused. But there came another faltering knock, and Harry’s voice again, more feebly still, called:
“Annie, Annie, let me in; I am dying!”
She flew to the door, unlocked and opened it; and Harry, his coat wet with half-melted snow and covered with blood, staggered forward into her arms.