VII
A DRESS REHEARSAL
Her own interests? Not many days had passed before she had a chance to value them anew. The evening of the dance came and went. She was a little surprised at the size of the gathering it called together. There must have been eighty people in the hall, neighbors mostly, jovial, temperately enthusiastic, in after-dinner mood, and with the additional prospect of a first meet to hounds next day after the long frost. She noticed, however, that Bryan seemed to be introducing a good many strangers. She had danced amid a buzz of whispers, exclamations, and frequently a loud "Bravo!" taken up and echoed wherever a white shirt-front glimmered in the darkened hall. None of them knew how well it was done, but every one could appreciate a graceful child in a white satin Watteau dress with a great pointed frill, black sausage curls falling upon her shoulders under a quaint glazed hat, whose bones seemed to be of whalebone, whose feet never were still, and whose face, through all her changing gestures of appeal, hesitancy, curiosity, disdain, cunning, and weariness never altered from the grave set expression with which she faced the first round of applause. Or an odalisque, in a long striped tunic of the thinnest, softest silk and baggy Turkish trousers that sagged in great wide folds over her bare slippered feet, who swayed in time to sleepytraumereimusic almost like a top—rousing every now and then with a braying jar of the little cymbals that were fastened on her hands, to straighten and poise and twirl herself anew—sinking on the floor with the last faint chords, a soft limp heap of silk and dishevelled black hair.
Already, as she sat by her bedroom fire in night-dress and wrapper, her hair plaited on each side of her head, and cuddling her knee, she was paying for her brief hour of triumph. She had the indefinable feeling of having "gone too far" that makes one dread the coming day like the face of an enemy. She thought people had looked strangely at her when she returned dressed, collected, and a little paler, to the hall. It was not because here and there she had caught a false note in the tempest of congratulation that overwhelmed her. It seemed set altogether in a key that was strange and new; she could judge, for, after all, it was not the first time she had danced in public. Even the impulse which had made her at the end of her second dance run forward and kiss Lady Warrener (at the piano) seemed to be misunderstood. The gentle peeress, so kind before, had shrunk from her palpably. And yet it was so natural; for she had never danced to music played like that before. How she longed for her public, her real public, obtuse and leather-lunged if you will, but whom a smile can conquer and whose loyalty, once gained, is gained forever!
Then she had her own private motives for misgiving. Her cousin's manner had been strange for days. Leslie avoided her plainly, but followed her with her eyes. When forced to speak she seemed, not harsh, but confused, shocked, and anxious for escape. Jack had gone back to his regiment in Ireland the day after the dinner, grumbling, and feeling the iron of disinheritance in his soul as only the younger son of a great house can. He would have told her everything. But she must have an explanation from Leslie to-morrow. On no other prospect could she face the night.
The fire was burning low. The little Sheraton clock on the mantelpiece shrilledtwo. She threw off her slippers and wrapper, opened the window, and, drawing a screen across the sinking fire, crept between the smooth linen sheets. But, once in bed, her excitement returned on her. Three o'clock—four o'clock—struck, and she was awake, the pulse of the music still in her relaxed body, listening to the fire shifting in the grate, watching the red dusk turn slowly to black.
Suddenly she heard the handle of the door move, very gently and very steadily. The bed-curtains hid it from view; but she remembered that she had forgotten to lock it, and when it closed again as gently she knew that some one was in the room. But there was something else she had not forgotten. She felt under her pillow and closed her hand upon it. The very day she saw him last her lover had given her a little steel repeating pistol. She remembered his words: "I've never had occasion to use it, Nelly, but I should be giving you a false impression of the world, as I know it, if I didn't tell you there's ten times as much chance you'll have to defend your honor some day as there is I'll ever have to defend my property."
She lay still, her heart beating to suffocation, but she did not quite close her eyes, and the next moment a fear that was never to be named went out of her heart. It was only her cousin Leslie. She recognized her plainly—long and emaciated, with tawny, lifeless hair about her shoulders. She was carrying a night-light in a cone-shaped glass.
Now that fear was gone she had time to be puzzled. Up to a week ago a visit from her cousin at the hour of "combing and confidences" had been a regular affair, but one of the changes noticeable in her attitude had been the abandonment of the nightly habit. It was a great opportunity for the clear understanding on which she meant to insist, but it was very late, she was tired, and, as often happens, felt a sudden disinclination to put her resolution to the test. She decided to simulate sleep. She breathed a little heavier and closed her eyes.
Leslie set down her lamp—she heard it distinctly on the little marble-topped table beside the bed—and bent over her. She felt her cousin's breath on her cheek. The thin, weak hand began to stroke her forehead and hair. Nelly was proof against a good many things, but not against tickling. She laughed and opened her eyes.
Next moment, with a leap as lithe as a panther's, she had jumped out of bed and, gripping her cousin's wrists, bore her backward on to the floor. She was strong as well as active, and upon the thick carpet the struggle was as brief as it was noiseless. Something fell from the older woman's hand. She tossed it back on the bed and, switching on the electric current, flooded the room with light. Leslie picked herself up, crawled to the wall and crouched there, her knees drawn up to her chin, looking at her cousin through her tawny mane, with eyes wide and distraught in her white, quivering face.
Fenella gave one look at the little stiletto on the bed, and covered her face with her hands in a reaction of terror.
"Oh, Leslie! Wicked—wicked woman! What had I done to you? Oh, what a horror! And under your own roof! Oh, you must be mad!"
"Go on!" said Leslie, thickly. "Ring the bell—wake the house! Have me put in a mad-house. Father wouldn't care, nor any one else. He's cursed me and called me a wet blanket heaps of times before people. I'm in every one's way now mother's gone."
Fenella still looked at her incredulously. She was expecting every moment to wake from her nightmare. A thing like this couldn't be real—couldn't be life! Suddenly the wretched woman flung herself at her feet, weeping and kissing them.
"Oh! my darling, don't look at me like that, as though I were some poisonous reptile. Oh, my God! what have I done? Do you think I really meant to harm you? Do you think I'm jealous? But if I am, it's only for your own good name. It's their fault. Of course you're nothing to them; they didn't know you when you were a little baby girl. I only wanted to be sure. And then something said to me that if—that if—Why do you shrink that way? Do you loathe to have me touch you?"
Fenella bent forward and laid her hand across the hysterical woman's mouth.
"Leslie, be quiet this instant, or I won't answer for what I'll do. And throw this over you or you'll get a chill. Now, are you quieter? I'm not going to make a fuss, or even tell a living soul what's happened to-night. But it's on a condition."
"I know what you mean."
"Yes. You must tell me what's being said about me?"
"They say that he—that you——"
"Yes. Go on!"
"That you were Bryan Lumsden's mistress in France, and that he's spending money on bringing you out and paying for your dresses and lessons, and that he——" She hesitated.
"What? Is there more?"
"Yes. That—oh! that he wasn't the first. That when he—found you, you were posing as a model to some French artist."
"What a picturesque past I've got! And have you believed it all?"
Leslie made a despondent and penitent gesture.
"Not now I've seen you. Not now I've told you to your face. But you can't live in a house like Lulford all your life and not hear—things. Well, are you going to loathe me forever?"
Fenella seemed thoughtful. "I don't loathe you," she said, "not more than any one else. Go back to bed now. I'm tired after last night."
"You won't refer to this to-morrow, will you? I shall be hunting all day, but you won't throw it in my face when we meet at night."
"No. Here, take this thing back to where you got it. No, I'm not afraid to let you have it. Yes, I'll kiss you good-night. Oh, Leslie,go!" She stamped her bare foot desperately.
As soon as her cousin was out of the room she locked the door and began to pack her trunks, turning keys and opening drawers as stealthily as a thief in the night. Her teeth chattered and her heart was filled with the wild panic instinct of flight. She only cried once, as she folded the clothes in which she had danced. "They said—his money!" How well she remembered the day they had been made, the whirring and bumping of the machine, her mother's perplexed face over the paper patterns, the very smell of Paul's pipe. "Theatricals," she had told him, and he had not asked a single question. The poor wounded heart ached for home. When her trunks were packed she lay down and watched for the dawn.
The house was astir early. There was shouting from room to room, running hither and thither of ladies' maids and gentlemen's gentlemen, brushing of habits and knocking out of wooden boot-trees. She breakfasted in her room, and sent down word that she was getting up late—that she was over-tired. She had to endure cheerful proposals to come in and pull her out, cries of "Tally-ho!" and "Gone to earth!"—even try to answer them in kind. When they had all ridden away, she got up and dressed herself to her hat and coat and furs, her hands numb and clumsy from haste and agitation. There was a Bradshaw in the library, through whose mazes she ran with a finger in which she could feel the very beat of her disordered pulse, but she could make little or nothing of it. The house seemed to be empty of men-servants, but in the stable yard she ran across one of the helpers. He eyed her strangely and rasped a stubbly chin with a broken finger nail at her question.
"Lunnon train? Noa, miss, baint no Lunnon train through Lulford 'fore two-twenty, an' that doant stop fur to take up nor fur to set down, 'cept ye tellygraff down the line. There's a slow to Wolv'r'ampton at three-thritty, but ye'll have to wait forty minutes f'r yewr connexshuns. Two trunks, ye say, miss? Now, let me think——"
Fenella slid ten shillings in silver into a hand that seemed to be in the way.
"Thank'ee kindly, miss. 'Tis a bad marnen, miss, ye see: bein' a huntin' marnen all oor men be haff th' place. Come twelve o'clock, I'm taken 'nother harse to Wrogwarden Wood m'self, but if ye don't mind the bit of a walk to stash'n, I can harness Marvine to th' bailiff's cart, and tak' yewr trunks to stashun now in a casulty way like, and bid 'em wait till ye come. Thank'ee, miss."
After a wretched pretence of eating a cold lunch, served in the solitude of the morning-room by maid-servants who whispered together outside and even peeped through the crack of the door, Fenella took her muff and dressing-case and set off to walk to the station. Snow lay still in recesses and hollows of the trees beneath the drive, and there were dirty lumps and patches on the slope of the hill where the slide had been made. She breathed freer when a corner of the drive hid the gray walls and turrets of the old priory, and more freely still when she had passed the round white lodge with its one smoking chimney and was out on the public road. Often, upon her summer holidays, passing such a lodge with its escutcheoned pillars and long dove-haunted avenue curving away into a dim and baffling perspective, she had wondered what sort of life was led beyond its swinging gates. Her lip curled at the thought that now she knew.
The road she was walking along was sheltered and lonely, but sunken between high banks. The thawing uplands on either side had drained into it, and she was forced to pick her way very carefully, her heavy skirts held up with one hand and the baize-covered dressing-case, which seemed to grow heavier and which she hated more each moment (it had been one of mummy's ridiculous ideas), knocking against her knees on the other side. She had only gone some few hundred yards when, beyond a turn in the narrow road, she heard the splash of a hard-ridden horse, and clambered up the clayey bank to be out of its way. At sight of her the rider pulled up so hard as almost to bring his steed upon its haunches. She had not time to pull her veil down.
"You of all the world!" exclaimed Lumsden. "What's up, Flash? Playing lady bountiful on the sly?"
"I'm going home."
Bryan whistled softly. He was wearing a black coat with wide skirts, a low-crowned silk hat and the palest of pale blue stocks. His white breeches and boots were covered with mud and his horse's miry flanks heaved like a bellows.
"Going home?" he repeated, in open-mouthed surprise. "What on earth has happened?"
"Please let me go on! I've had bad news from home this morning, that's all."
"That's a fib, Flash. You've been awake again all night. The second time. Oh, fie!"
No remark from Fenella.
"Any one been rude to you?"
The girl shook her head.
"You won't tell me, eh?"
"Sir Bryan, I can't. I've promised——Oh, you'veno right!"
Lumsden swung himself out of the saddle.
"At any rate, you're not going to walk any further in those thin shoes and sit four hours in a train with wet feet. Come! up you get. The lane gets worse the farther you go."
With sudden docility she put her dressing-case down on the wet grass.
"That's right! Put your foot here. Steady—Greaser! Don't be afraid. He's quite blown; going's far too heavy to-day. Now take the bag in your lap. What's in it, Flash? Diamonds?"
He looked at her quizzically as he laid the reins over his shoulder.
"For two two's I'd come up with you to London. Oh, don't look so frightened. It's only an impulse. I've been fighting impulses every day for the last fortnight. I don't want to worry you," he went on, as the horse began to pick his way downhill with stiff, tired legs; "but you'll have to give some reason for all this. Did you leave any message behind?"
She shook her head.
"Then we'll have to fake a telegram. You simply can't leave like this, and that's all there is about it. Hullo! who's this?"
A small boy in corduroys and with a red badge on his arm was drifting up the lane toward them, examining the hedge-rows first on one side, then on another, in search of diversion. At Lumsden's call he started and adopted a more official gait.
"Come here, boy! Can you take a telegram?"
"Ahve got one," said the leaden-footed herald unfastening his satchel. "Miss Fen—Fen——"
Bryan snatched it from his hand.
"Open it, please," said Fenella in the ghost of a voice.
"By George!" said the baronet, looking up, "this is Providence. This lets us all out."
"Read it, please."
"Lady Anne very ill. Asks for you. Think you had better come. Wire."
"I don't think that's good news at all."
"Well, it suits us, doesn't it?" with a quick look at the troubled, indignant face. "You mustn't feel things too much, you know. Fancy Anne Caslon dying in her bed at last! 'Tattering Annie' they used to call her in the West Meath. Fate! fate! there's nothing else. Here, boy," he said, putting his hand in his breeches pocket, "take this, and cut away to the station and tell 'em to stop the two-twenty. Shocked at me, ain't you?" he said, as the boy trotted off after a backward gape at the strange couple.
"I think it's horrid to talk about fate as if it was meant to do our little odd lying jobs for us. I'm very much upset at the news."
"No, but isn't it true—I mean my meeting you this way? Confess, now. You were on your way back to town wounded and indignant, with a firm resolve never to see any one you'd met at Lulford again, weren't you?"
"Yes, I think so."
"But you're not now?"
"I don't know. I must have time to think."
He seemed quite satisfied with the answer, being used possibly to oblique affirmations from women.
A culvert and signal-box appeared suddenly above the hedge to their right.
"You'd better get down here. There's a foot-path at the side of the main road." He flushed deeply as he held her in his arms. Another checked impulse, no doubt.
In the waiting-room they sat, one on each side of a sullen fire in a black stove. He smoked a cigar, and steam rose from the drenched skirts of his coat.
"I'm going to Biarritz almost immediately," he said; "but Dollfus knows what to do. Call on him as soon as you possibly can. I don't see myself there's much more training wanted, but you must be fitted in somewhere, and that takes time."
He might have added that it takes money too—some one's money—but it was not the moment to enlarge on this. Fenella listened to his advice respectfully and gave him her address when he asked for it. She liked him no better, but, at the point they had reached, she felt it necessary, for her own satisfaction, that she should take the least complicated view of his helpfulness that was possible. To take a great deal and to give a little is a prerogative that the nicest of women think it no shame to use. She bought her own ticket, but let him order foot-warmers and even literature—The Tattler,Photo Bits, and a novel by Charles Garvice, to be brought her at Wolverhampton. He was back at her side as the train, chafing fussily at the check to its course, began to move out of the little country station.
"Don't worry over whatever's happened you down there," he said at the last, jerking back his head at the hospitable mansion she had just left. "They're a dull crowd. We'll meet a very different lot later on. Good-bye! Keep fit and don't grizzle. I'll wire your mother that you're on your way."
He stood gazing after the tail of the train as the gray distance sucked it in to a point.
"You were a pretty wench, Bill," he heard a voice say behind him in the porters' room. The homely comment jarred him, but it also readjusted a view that had been inclining dangerously toward the romantic. Is there, I often wonder, some inbred memory of old disaster that makes Englishmen afraid of romance? Bryan, as he plodded homeward on his stiff hunter, almost laughed to remember that he had suddenly sickened of the chase, sickened of everything, and ridden back eight muddy miles on a beaten horse to see this girl, and—who knows?—perhaps to ask her to be his wife—if she had insisted upon it.
Shawled and pillowed at Wolverhampton by the guard's care, and quite tired out, Fenella slept, as warm as a dormouse under the snow, nearly all the way to Euston. A new ring from the clanging permanent way, more metallic, more menacing, as the train, sighting its goal afar off, made up its schedule time, roused her from a dream—ah! how deadly sweet of sun-steeped dunes, of outspread skies and seas, her poor little "land of lost content." The carriage pitched and rocked, lights twinkled together behind the bare trees, suburban pavements, and broadways blazing in blue-white light flashed past the windows. She put out her head against the cold, gritty rush of wind, and looked toward a red glare in the sky. Somewhere in that man-made wilderness of stone and brick, from whose smouldering discontents reddened smoke seemed to be ascending to heaven, he lived and moved and had his being who but now, in the lilied meadows of her dream, had held her against his breast and kissed away the desolate ache at her heart. Back to him, and he could not hinder—straight, straight as a homing-bird she was flying. With every moment that passed the distance that sundered them was being annihilated. Intense unreasoning joys! triumph almost lyrical of spirit over matter! God's crowning mercy in affliction!—manna from Heaven, and portion of the outcast!