XVIII
AMENDE HONORABLE
Meantime, with many jolts and halts, and to the accompaniment of a good deal of mercifully muffled blasphemy from the box, the cab drew out of the station yard and rolled heavily toward Suffolk Square. The blighting autumn rain drummed pitilessly on its roof and lashed the closed window-panes. So dark had the afternoon turned that Mrs. Barbour could only see her daughter's face as a white blur against the black velvet cushion, and was forced to guess at its expression. A good deal of new-born hope mingled with her own concern. I am a poor actor, and know now that after the first Mrs. Barbour had been undeceived by my message. She had suspected a "quarrel" on the last day at La Palèze, and though she had not been a witness to any further manifestations of it, did not believe, perhaps because she did not wish to believe, that it had even been made up. She had never approved her daughter's choice in her heart—had thought it but a poor fulfilment of so many fond imaginings. She had the relish for change often to be found in easy-going, hospitable natures. She was not callous nor indifferent to the girl's probable suffering, but she had lived through a good deal herself and had the robust scepticism of middle age in affairs of the heart. Beyond inevitable storms and fevers, beyond a few tearful days and sleepless nights, what rosy vistas might not be opening! With Ingram out of the way, she became seized again of all her old air-castles. It is a strange fact that the dark homeward drive, which was one long torture for the daughter, should have been invested for the being who loved her best with the subdued cheerfulness of an executor returning from a funeral.
A year ago she would have been profuse of tenderness and sympathy; but during that year her child's heart had grown away from her, exhausted by a passion it was too immature to bear, and shrank too perceptibly from the ministrations of any other love. For the present she judged an elaborate heedlessness to be at once the easiest and the safest course.
The promise of better days, of a clearer horizon, persisted in the clean, stately house that welcomed the wanderers home, in its high-ceiled rooms, so strangely wide and light after the dark, cramped little cottage in which she had been living under protest, and in the open kindly English faces of Druce and Kendal, who had not so much grown gray as they had toughened and flattened in faithful service. Her lodgers would not be back for a couple of weeks, and she could roam from room to room and indulge her sense of proprietorship undisturbed, finding everything brighter, fresher, better for her absence. One would have said that Number Eleven, too, had taken a trip to the seaside for change of air. She unpacked her trunk, found her knitting, and was humming a little brisk air when she returned to the sitting-room.
What she saw struck the song from her lips and the happiness from her heart. Fenella sat forward in an armchair over the cold, empty grate. Her poor face seemed tense, strangely unyouthful and set like a stone. She returned her mother's startled gaze with stricken, inexpressive eyes. Mrs. Barbour was on her knees at her side in a moment.
"Nelly, darling! Are you ill, child?"
The girl shook her head slowly, and looked away again at the black-leaded grate.
"Have you been sitting here ever since we came in? Oh, my pet! And I roaming over the house and never thinking." She drew the gloves off her daughter's limp hands. "Dear! your poor hands are like ice. Shall I have a fire lit while tea's making ready?"
Nelly shivered. "I'm chilled," she said, "and—and a little dizzy. It's the crossing, perhaps. And the house does seem cold and strange, doesn't it, mummy, after our littlechalêt?"
Mrs. Barbour rang for tea and ordered a fire to be lit. Her fingers trembled as she cut thin bread and butter.
"It's her eyes," she kept saying to herself, in that frightened soliloquy we use to temper a vague dread. "It's her eyes that frighten me. If I could only get them to look natural, I shouldn't mind so greatly. She knows something I don't. What did that devil say to her before he left?"
She wheeled the sofa before the fire—that was an inspiriting thing in itself on this rainy September evening—tucked a shawl over the child's shoulders and put furred slippers on the numbed, slender feet. Nelly sipped her tea, nibbled her toast with the docility of the broken in spirit. Later she pretended to read, but, happily ignorant how much of real sorrow may be entombed in the printed page, found no comfort there in time of present trouble. She was one of those for whom reading is a last resource, literature the thinnest of veils that can be interposed between them and the withering breath of reality. The book is yet to write that will not be laid down at a postman's knock or an infant's cry.
It was at a postman's knock now that the novel whose pages she had been listlessly turning slipped from her lap and fell, face downward, on the hearth-rug. She could not rise, so great was her agitation, and the fulness of time seemed to gather in every second thattick-tockedfrom the clock in the corner before her mother was in the room again. She was holding a letter before her spectacles, a letter with a deep black border, at whose superscription her brows were knitted. Back from failing limbs and reeling brain the blood flowed to Fenella's heart. But she did not faint. There is always enough life left us to learn the extent of our sorrow.
"The letter's for you, dear!"
"Read it, mummy," she said, simply. "I can't."
Mrs. Barbour ripped open the envelope. As she glanced over the unfamiliar writing, her faced glowed with pleased excitement.
"What is it? Oh!whatis it?" the puzzled and tortured girl asked her, seeing her lips move.
Mrs. Barbour looked up. "Darling, what's the matter? It's good news. I mean—God forgive me!—not very bad. Only your Aunt Hortense dead. You never knew her."
Fenella, as she took her suspense back into her breast, knew its name was Hope. Her eyes filled as from some inward sweat of anguish—some wound felt only when the sword is withdrawn.
"Why do they write to me?"
"It's from your cousin Leslie. Listen! Shall I read to you?" She did not wait for an answer, but read on breathlessly:
"Dear Cousin Fenella,"Do you remember—have you ever been told, of the girl who came to see you fifteen years ago, and whom you would not kiss? Fifteen years ago! and now she is bringing herself to your notice again. Do you feel it an insult after so long? You should not, dear cousin. For there are things that are so hard to write, but that sound so natural when they are spoken. And even though you resent it, be patient for the sake of the sad reason that occasions her writing now. Poor mother was buried on Friday. One can remain loyal and still admit that she was a woman hard to understand—impossible to divert from a prejudice once conceived. Even now, although I have thought of you unnumbered times, sought news of you, even kissed the picture we have of you as a child, that seemed to me to hold the promise of a sweet friendship to come in its baby face, I could not write to you as I am doing did I think that my impulse still crossed the will of the dead. You will not understand this until you have seen one you love die by inches under your eyes, while you stood by, powerless to save, and all but powerless to soothe. But toward the end of her illness mother spoke of you. Her heart was changed, and in what I am doing now I am carrying out the wishes of the dead no less than gratifying what has always been a secret desire."
"Dear Cousin Fenella,
"Do you remember—have you ever been told, of the girl who came to see you fifteen years ago, and whom you would not kiss? Fifteen years ago! and now she is bringing herself to your notice again. Do you feel it an insult after so long? You should not, dear cousin. For there are things that are so hard to write, but that sound so natural when they are spoken. And even though you resent it, be patient for the sake of the sad reason that occasions her writing now. Poor mother was buried on Friday. One can remain loyal and still admit that she was a woman hard to understand—impossible to divert from a prejudice once conceived. Even now, although I have thought of you unnumbered times, sought news of you, even kissed the picture we have of you as a child, that seemed to me to hold the promise of a sweet friendship to come in its baby face, I could not write to you as I am doing did I think that my impulse still crossed the will of the dead. You will not understand this until you have seen one you love die by inches under your eyes, while you stood by, powerless to save, and all but powerless to soothe. But toward the end of her illness mother spoke of you. Her heart was changed, and in what I am doing now I am carrying out the wishes of the dead no less than gratifying what has always been a secret desire."
Mrs. Barbour paused for breath. "Doesn't she write beautifully, dear?"
"I think it's gush," said Fenella. "Is there much more?"
"Oh! fie, dear. Listen!"
"Dear Cousin, we are to come to town for the autumn. May I call upon you—see you often—make amends for all the wasted years that might have made us friends? You are our kin, and, in trouble, blood calls to blood. We will return to Freres Lulford for Christmas, and we want you to spend it with us, among your own people. It will be a sad and quiet one for all, but by then I trust you will have grown so near to us that we need not grudge you a share in our grief. Write me when you get this. The earlier your answer reaches me the easier I shall forgive myself for what, by one cold word, you can turn to the deepest humiliation I have ever suffered. Think me impulsive, think me indiscreet, think me even impertinent; but, believe me, oh! so ready to write myself"Your loving cousin,"Leslie Barbour."
"Dear Cousin, we are to come to town for the autumn. May I call upon you—see you often—make amends for all the wasted years that might have made us friends? You are our kin, and, in trouble, blood calls to blood. We will return to Freres Lulford for Christmas, and we want you to spend it with us, among your own people. It will be a sad and quiet one for all, but by then I trust you will have grown so near to us that we need not grudge you a share in our grief. Write me when you get this. The earlier your answer reaches me the easier I shall forgive myself for what, by one cold word, you can turn to the deepest humiliation I have ever suffered. Think me impulsive, think me indiscreet, think me even impertinent; but, believe me, oh! so ready to write myself
"Your loving cousin,"Leslie Barbour."
Mrs. Barbour wiped her spectacles. They were so dim that she did not notice her daughter's vacant gaze.
"Mother, are people often taken ill so suddenly?"
"My dear, your cousin says it was a long illness."
Fenella gave the low moan of the misunderstood. "Mother! I don't mean—that. I mean Paul."
The woman could not check a movement of almost passionate impatience.
"Mr. Ingram? I don't believe he's ill at all. Men who write are always up or down. They're worse than women. It's the unhealthy life they lead."
"I wonder—I wonder!" said Nelly under her breath. She was realizing, with a sick dismay, that this was the last evening delivery and that to-morrow would be Sunday, a day during which, for those at least who live in London and wait upon the post for comfort, the operations of Providence are entirely suspended. Two nights and a day to be lived through—somehow!
Her mother took out the letter again, and fingered it caressingly.
"It's what I've been longing for all my life," she said. "When are you going to answer it, dear?"
"To-morrow, mummy, to-morrow," wailed poor Fenella, and fled from the room.
She climbed the stairs weakly, feeling the empty house's atmosphere no longer chill, but stifling and oppressive. By the time she had reached her room the impulse to fling herself upon her knees, to bury her face in the coverlet and weep and weep, had passed. Instead she lit both candles of her dressing-table and, sitting down, gazed long and earnestly at her reflection in the tilted mirror. To study herself thus was rather a habit of hers. The woman who has beauty and does not know it is a graceful conception, but lacks reality. All the world is a conspiracy, pleasant or otherwise, to convince her. Fenella was not vain, but, with all encountered comeliness compared to it, her body had not ceased to be a rapture to a curiously impersonal love of beauty, innate in her as in all sorts of people, but which, in her case, by a bounteous accident of nature, could be fed most delicately upon its own outward substance. Nor was she ignorant that, in the quarter to which she had devoted it, she was, to use the world's chosen language, and in a sense far beyond its choice meaning, "throwing her good looks away." She knew it—she gloried in it. No whisper that reached her from jealous or puzzled friends could add to her own conviction of it—no secret recess of her being but responded and thrilled to the call of self-sacrifice. At a certain height of passion woman becomes strangely sufficient to herself—is priestess and host in one, with an ecstasy in the immolation that men can only guess at. For all the lack of curiosity as to her lover's past life which was so unaccountable a thing to her mother, the girl guessed that it had been hard and sad, so sad and hard that the full strangeness of the destiny that brought him to lips and arms like hers could only be dimly comprehended by him. His blindness forced self-valuation upon her. She flung her beauty, the freshness of her youth, the tribute of other men's burning eyes and stammering tongues, into the scale against it. She asked only love. Let him but love, she would teach him appreciation in time. She had her own white conscience in such matters, too, even though the obtuseness of her lover's senses tempted her to lengths that innocence does not often venture. It was not three weeks ago since, sitting upon the dunes, at the end of an afternoon during which the grizzled head had been her plaything, she had asked Paul abruptly whether he did not in his heart sometimes think her a shameless woman. And the undisguised astonishment of the gray eyes at her question had been at once a reproach and the sweetest, completest assurance that it was possible to have. And then and there, drawing from his arms, and while the loose sand trickled through her fingers, she had made the poor little apologia of her love, haltingly and timidly, and told him that should it ever happen—inconceivable surely on this day of sunshine and sweet airs as that sky and sea should change places—that he should go one way in life, she another, she had such a store of shameful memories as would press her to the earth all the rest of her days.
Yet it was this possibility, scarce to be imagined a fortnight ago, which she was facing to-night; now, as she combed and plaited her black hair, so fine and loose that the comb ran through its length at a single stroke; now as, unfastening the corset that had chafed and rayed the tender flesh at her waist, she put on her long white robe and stood before the mirror, a trembling penitent, about to make amends through a whole racked night for the follies of her undisciplined heart. Buoyant and hopeful by nature, and really knowing nothing yet for certain, she was aghast at the urgency with which defeat claimed acceptance, and at the weakness and intermittence that her imagination, pressed into loyalty's service, showed in working toward her lover's justification. She felt herself sentenced, a culprit, a prey to the illogical anger of some power which she had failed to propitiate only because she had not known of its existence. The chill of abandonment was already at her heart. As for the letter which she had just heard read to her, she hardly gave it a thought, although a wish of her own heart, unavowed, but very intimate, was realized in it. To-night any comfort save the one for which her whole being ached was a traitor—an accomplice in the conspiracy of silence, of shrugged shoulders, of amused wonder that had surrounded her poor little love-story from the first. No one had meddled, she remembered; no one had interfered or seemed anxious. With smarting eyes as she laid her head on her pillow she paid her tribute to the wisdom of the world.
The morrow with its suspended bustle—its clanging church bells and the awkward voices of milkwomen and paper-boys ringing upon the silence of the streets and squares, was a torture not to be borne. As soon as her mother had gone to church she dressed herself and left the house. The morning was fine but close. In the park the moisture of a whole week's rain, sucked out of the stale earth by the sun, surcharged the air almost to the level of the tree-tops with a palm-house atmosphere that weighed alike upon flesh and spirit. Although it was September, the parks as she crossed them were full of smartly dressed people—mothers and young daughters—sturdy children with dawdling lawn-clad nurses—ivory-faced old ladies in ample creased robes of silk—an occasional earnest young man, professionally silk-hatted, striding along with a chattering girl at his side, who bravely but jerkily maintained the pace of his long legs. They all seemed to be coming in opposite directions. She was on one of those unhappy errands when we feel we are making head alone against a contrary current of joyous contentment.
The bell from the great Parliament tower was tolling twelve as she passed into Dean's Yard. The old gravelly square was deserted, except for a statuesque policeman and one little blue-coated messenger boy, with his round cap cocked over his ear, who from pure lightness of heart was waking its staid echoes with a shrill medley of popular airs. She had set out with no precise intention, drawn as by a magnet to the spot where the treasure of her heart was kept from her, but, though she did not reason, with every step her insensate impulse hardened. She would test the tottering fabric of her happiness now, though, at a touch, it should topple into ruins about her head.
Cowley Street was empty, and pigeons were feeding in the roadway. She was leaning against the railings—fighting, reasoning with a heart that the mere sight of his windows had driven into tumult, when the stillness was invaded by the blast of a motor-horn. The doves took flight above the sunlit roofs. A big touring car, coming from the river, swept into the street, and drew up, with a creaking of its brakes, outside the door that she was praying for strength to approach. A woman alighted, glanced at the number upon the red door, and plied the knocker briskly. Her hat was veiled and a light dust-cloak covered her dress, but one moment's application of that intuitive knowledge which women possess told the girl that she was probably handsome and undeniably rich. The whirr and clutter of the cylinders ceased unaccountably just as the door was opened. Cowley Street on Sunday is more than still. She heard his name clearly, the very accent in which it was uttered somehow confirming her first impression; then the door closed. With a single jaunty glance at the remaining feminine interest, the green-coated chauffeur swung himself out of his seat and busied himself with some recalcitrant machinery or other under the bonnet of the car.
Have you ever, on a railway journey, or in a packed public meeting, from which there was no escape without unwelcome comment, fought against deadly faintness? How the landscape crawled past the spinning, flashing, wheels! How the sermon, the address pelted on, a meaningless torrent of vocables, against the brain that was tense and taut for one thing only—that thing deliverance! In such a mood Fenella hurried through the streets and parks toward her home. She had forgotten her purse at setting out, and the cheapest, slowest amelioration of her journey was denied her. Another woman! Another woman! No defeat could have been more complete. Everything had been imaginable but this. Against every aspect that the annihilation of her suspense could have shown her she would have done battle—save only this. Women are taught by their whole life's training to seek concrete motives for action and, when found, to respect them. To principle they concede little, and they expect as little from it. If they fight selfishly, at least they fight bravely, naked and unambushed—warrior, weapon and reward in one. Auguring nothing from past treacheries, so the treachery be not to them, betrayal always finds them unprepared, as, once shattered, nothing really rebuilds their faith. Could it be otherwise? What value to them in a love or a devotion whose incentive lies outside of them and beyond them?
She reached home at last. Her mother had been watching for her from the window and ran to open the door. She had a letter in her hand. Where had the girl been? How ill she looked! There was news for her, brought by a boy messenger half an hour ago. The poor child could only shake her head and, taking her letter, seek refuge once more in her own room. During her absence her trunk had been unpacked; all the silver vanities were ranged, with snowy doylies beneath them, on the woman's altar of her dressing-table. The bed on which she had tossed and moaned all night was spread white and cool and smooth. A little breeze was rising, and fluttered the curtains at the open windows.
After what she had seen no letter could matter much; but she read it through dutifully, with a little sigh as each page fluttered from her hands to the floor. It was long and kind and tender; the letter of a man who would select his language at the very judgment seat of God; a fair copy, without blot or erasure, product of a night no less sleepless than her own. If the balance lay all at one side of the account, at least he had ruled the ledger straight. The old arguments were reiterated, the old impossibilities pressed home. The dilemma, evaded once before, had confronted Ingram again, harder, crueller for the delay, as is the manner of evaded dilemmas. He had had to choose again between wounding her pride or wounding her heart—to death this time—and with the anxiety such a man will always have to preserve a woman's good opinion at all costs, which is half fine feeling and half vanity, he had chosen the second. Wisely? Who shall say? At least his end was gained. He was loved at the last. She pressed the sheet which bore his signature madly, unrestrainedly against her mouth, blurring the ink with her moist lips. She would have kissed his hand so—holding the knife at her throat.
And with the kiss her childhood ended. Then and there the thorn-plaited crown of her womanhood was proffered her. She put it on bravely and unflinchingly. She did not despair of life nor of life's end. Flowers, laurels, she felt might crown her yet, but under blossom or bay leaf she would always know where to look for the old scars. And, finding them, she would bless them for his sake.
An hour later Mrs. Barbour, trembling a little at her own temerity, knocked at the door, and, getting no answer, opened it. Nelly was sitting on the bed, dry-eyed, sucking her thumb. The pages of her lover's last letter were littered over the quilt and on the floor.
The mother asked no question. She closed the sash softly, drew down the blind, and, going to her daughter without a word, held her close—held her for two long hours, while the Sabbath baked meats went to grease and the gong roared unheeded below; held her through a tempest so deep at life's sources that she trembled and prayed as the frail body shook against her breast. But the green tree bears the hurricane because it is green. The storm was passing away in sobs that grew fainter and fainter, the stained cheek was beginning to move restlessly upon her drenched shoulder, when she spoke:
"Was it bad news?—from him?" she asked, and compressed her lips.
"Mother," said the girl, with a fresh outburst of tears that was only the leaves shaking off the rain, "don't blame him! It's not quite his fault. He's so unhappy. We shall never see Paul again. And oh, mummy, I've been a bad, undutiful, careless child to you—but I'll be better now."
"You've been my dearest child, always," Mrs. Barbour answered. "It will be the old times over again for both of us. I ask nothing more."
Fenella was calm enough now to smile wanly at her mother's words. But even she could not guess how unlike any old times the new ones were to be.