"Really? The Accuser of the Brethren in the pulpit with a vengeance!"
The Duke stared. "I don't know what you mean."
"I am quite sure you don't. Stop talking, please. I am too ill to be worried."
"Rats," said Jim, elegantly; "you look like a picture.*
"Then permit me the privilege of one, and do not ask for replies."
The Duke strolled to the window in a huff, and surveyed his property with sulky looks. Leah sat up on her sofa and pondered as to how much she should say and how much leave unsaid. Jim had always been under the impression that Demetrius had done his dirty work for money, and the truth would not probably strike him as amusing. Leah could easily have conceived and told a pretty fairy tale, as she was always resourceful in the way of fiction; but the sight of his pink, fatuous face filled her with rage. Why should he be a beast with women, and she a vestal with men? Was not sauce for the gander sauce for the goose also? She determined to tell him the whole brutal affair, with certain reservations concerning the betrayal of Demetrius. Jim had few moral scruples, but what he had would be averse to the betrayal of an accomplice, however dangerous. Yes; she would tell him enough to annoy him, and shake him out of his aggravating complacency. Also she wanted some one in whom to confide. But how to bring up the subject again without pandering to her husband's desire to be master?
He gave her the chance immediately. Like a bulldog, Jim never let go of anything he had once gripped. Into his thick head had crept some idea of a mystery, connected with Southend and with his wife's visit thereto. Therefore he stared out of the window until he thought she was more amenable to reason, and then came back to his seat with the old question.
"Why did you go to Southend?" he asked, doggedly.
Leah, not yet ready, fenced. "I told you why I went."
"No, you didn't. Aksakoff says----"
"Of course he does. Did you ever know a diplomatist who told the truth?"
"Huh! That comes well from you, considering."
"I never knew that white lies were political privileges. Besides, Aksakoff is too ashamed of Katinka to tell the truth."
"What's she been doin'?" asked the Duke, alertly. He had the soul of a knitter in the sun for gossip.
"Rescuing Demetrius," answered Leah, curtly.
"What!!!" Jim turned white and purple and red and green like a rainbow, and spluttered at the mouth. His wife, eyeing him coldly, did not think this exhibition of genuine fear a pretty sight. "He'll--why, he'll--tell," gasped Jim, gulping down an extremely serviceable word, which better fitted his feelings than surroundings.
"Of course."
"It's a question of money, I suppose."
"No, it isn't."
"But you told me----"
"What I chose to tell you. I always do."
Was there ever such a trying woman? Jim gulped down another out-of-place oath, and strode noisily up and down the room. He halted at intervals to tell his wife precisely what he thought of her. As the room was isolated, and there was no danger of eavesdropping servants, he indulged in a raised voice and a flow of language which revealed his very limited vocabulary. Leah, with her chin on her knuckles and a round elbow on the sofa cushion, listened unmoved, and looked as though she were having her photograph taken. Jim might have been executing his dance before a graven image for all the emotion she showed.
"I've had enough of this," shouted his Grace, maddened by a disdainful silence. "Just you explain, or I'll--why, hang it, I'll forget that I am a gentleman."
"It seems to me that you have forgotten."
"Oh! You would drive a saint mad."
"Lionel is perfectly sane, and he is the sole saint I have met."
"Ain't you afraid of my striking you?" demanded Jim's bulldog nature.
"Horribly afraid. Can't you see how I tremble?"
Poor Jim. He was quite at the end of his resources. Mrs. Penworthy always quailed, when he was in his tantrums; Lady Sandal fought fairly and squarely, slang for slang: but this calm, smiling she-fiend only sat like a dummy, waiting for him to do what she very well knew he would never dare to do.
"I wonder if you're a woman," groaned the Duke, returning beaten and baffled and completely exhausted to his chair.
"I wonder, too, seeing what you have made me put up with."
"Come, now, I've always treated you well."
"And other women better."
"What other women?" growled Jim, on his guard.
"You know very well."
"I don't. I know nothin', not even why you're bullyraggin' me. I swear," cried Jim, pathetically, to the ceiling, "that it's uncommonly hard for a cheery chap like me to be tied to a woman who--who--who----" Here words failed him, and he gasped.
"Go on. I admire your descriptions of my personality. They are so extraordinarily vivid and true."
"Who ain't what she ought to be."
Leah's opportunity to break the ice had come, and locking her hands together, she gazed pensively at the Duke, who wriggled uneasily on his seat. "How did you guess, Jim?"
"Guess what?" demanded the tormented man.
"That I am not what I ought to be."
The Duke stared aghast. "Then you ain't t" he shouted.
"Dr. Demetrius might say so."
"Leah!" He sprang up with clenched fists and his face took on a direfully black expression, which rejoiced her heart.
"Jim, I believe--really, I believe that you have some love for me after all."
"Oh, hang your fine talk. Demetrius?"
"I have kissed him."
"He dared to kiss you?"
"I dared to kiss him."
"You devil!" He suddenly raised his fist. Leah never winced, although he towered over her with his mouth working and his eyes animal in their unconsidering passion. It was impossible to strike, although his heart cried out that she ought to die. With an oath--it came out savagely this time--the fist dropped. "I'll have a divorce," muttered Jim, and plunged for the door.
"Because I kissed a man. Nonsense."
"Kissin' doesn't stop at kissin'."
"Not with you, perhaps."
"Leah!" he turned and reclosed the door, which his rage had wrenched open. "I know you've got a beastly tongue, and all that; but I could have sworn that you were as pure as my mother."
"Well, and so you can."
"What? After you confessin' that you kissed Demetrius?"
"Ugh!" Leah shuddered, as a picture after the style of Wiertz rose to her mind's eye. "I kissed a thing which was once Demetrius."
"Is he dead, then?"
"Better if he were. Ugh! That kiss was the most horrible thing I ever had to do in my life."
"Why did you do it, then?"
"I was forced to," she said faintly, and nausea made her place a handkerchief suddenly to her lips.
The Duke returned for the third time to his seat and looked into her changing face with round inquiring eyes. "There's somethin' in this I don't catch on to," he muttered; then, with gruff tenderness, and a timid caress from which Leah did not shrink, "What is it, old girl?"
The Duchess laughed. It was amusing to find her husband playing the spring bachelor. "I believe you love me," said she, recovering her colour.
"You know I do, only you keep me at arm's length."
"Have I not cause?"
"You wouldn't have, if you behaved as a fellow's wife should," said the Duke, bluntly. "Drop skirtin' round the bush and plunge in."
Leah admired and respected him in this peremptory mood, and for once showed no disposition to use her sharp tongue. Instinct told her that she had at length reached the end of Jim's tether, and that her easy-going bulldog was inclined to curl his lips. Therefore did she relate picturesquely and half-truthfully all her doings since the beginning of things in the gallery. For the time being her story broke off with the return of his Grace.
Jim listened with praiseworthy self-control. He certainly growled and scowled at the relation of that early loss, which had bound Demetrius to the service of the woman who betrayed him; but her artless confession robbed the butterfly caress of half its iniquity. Sometimes he grunted admiration of her pluck during the perils of his absence, and grinned when she detailed the melodramatic interview with Strange. Most of the time his eyes searched her face to make certain that she was telling the truth. He believed she was, although she kept back the precise way in which Demetrius had departed for Siberia. But she laid enough of this particular blame on Aksakoff's back to make Jim swear.
"The mean, dirty, foreign hound," cursed Jim, between his teeth. "I don't pretend to be an angel, but if I'd dropped to that----" he shook his fist with a scarlet face. "An' to think Aksakoff should dare to make use of your room--the rotten cur. I'll tell him what I think."
"Better not, Jim. Let sleeping dogs lie."
"Sleepin' mongrels," muttered the Duke. "All right; but don't you ever speak to him again. Do you hear?"
He blared out the order in a regimental manner, and Leah nodded.
"Yes, dear," she said meekly, "we must draw the line somewhere."
Jim nodded and gloomed, and rumbled something about Aksakoff that certainly was not a benediction. Then he harked back to his leading question, which had not yet been answered. "Why did you go to Southend?"
"Katinka, who had rescued Demetrius from Sakhalin Island, made me go to see him. I had to obey, else there might have been trouble. The man was ill on board Strange's steamer."
"Strange? Thought we paid the cad."
"We did." Leah frowned at the recollection of the sum. "But he had some liking for Demetrius, and helped him to escape, worse luck."
"Come now, don't say that. Siberia----" Jim shuddered. "Beastly place, Siberia."
"Nonsense. The climate is quite decent if you make up your mind. I don't believe those convict creatures suffer so much as they say."
She told the lie without sign of emotion, but all the same felt an inward qualm at the memory of the doctor's terrible narrative.
The Duke chewed his moustache meditatively. "An' you saw Demetrius?"
"Ugh!" Leah covered her face and rocked. "To live with that in my thoughts, and to think that I kissed It."
"Why did you?" demanded Jim, furiously.
"To get the cypher letters connected with the insurance plot," she replied, looking up; then detailed with necessary suppressions the greater and least repulsive part of her nauseous visit to the tramp steamer. The story sounded by no means pretty, and all her courage was necessary to enable her to arrive at finis.
When she did the Duke sprang up in a pelting rage. "My wife to be treated like that!"
"Oh, the treatment was not so bad," lied the Duchess, easily. "Of course, my mouth was sore with the fall on the stairs, but I managed to touch the lips of that--that---- Ugh! ugh!"
"I'll go to Southend to-morrow," announced the Duke, frowning. "I can't thrash Demetrius, poor devil, but I'll hammer the life out of that second-hand skipper."
"You won't find the boat there, Jim. I made inquiries, and learnt that it left, as Demetrius said it would, shortly after my visit. And we are quite safe. That kiss----"
"Leave the kissin' alone," cried Jim, turning on her fiercely. "Of course, I see you couldn't quite help it; but----"
"No 'but' at all," contradicted Leah, sharply. "If I hadn't bought back those cypher letters in that way the whole story might have come out. And then, Jim--well, you know."
"I do--I do." Jim groaned and dropped on the sofa beside her. "Oh, what fools we were to go into that insurance business!"
"It was my fault, dear. Don't worry. Demetrius will die soon, and Strange has his blackmail. We are entirely safe."
"Katinka?"
"Oh," said the Duchess, with a flippancy she was far from feeling, "I suppose shell sit by the grave of that man for the rest of her days."
"You're sure he's dyin'?"
"Yes!" She turned pale, and her voice quavered. "Such an object could not possibly live. It would be a--a--sin."
"What's his trouble?"
"I don't know--I can't say. I don't want to say. It's--it's too beastly for words. Ugh! He looked--looked--oh!" Leah's mouth worked like a rebuked child, and she burst into tears--into real womanly tears of shame and terror and outraged modesty. "That horrible kiss--oh, that horrible kiss!" she wailed, pinching his shoulder in her hysterical emotion.
"Poor old girl," said Jim, softly, and put his arm round her.
For once she appreciated marital sympathy, and learned that woman was not made to live alone. Leaning her cheek thankfully against the rough tweed of his coat, she sobbed vehemently, a frightened and crushed creature. Jim felt that he was a married man after all, and administered gruff consolation. It worried him to see this high-spirited woman break down so utterly. "There, there," said he, tenderly; "it's all right, old girl. You've got me."
"Thank God," murmured the beaten atheist.
Jim thought she must be going out of her mind. "What's that?" That she should thank a God she did not believe in, and for a husband whom hitherto she had always scorned, quite frightened him.
"What's that, Leah?" he asked again.
"Thank God for you," sobbed the Duchess, brokenly.
"Oh, my aunt," muttered the startled husband; then proceeded to fresh consolation: "Well, then, I'll break the head of any bounder who dares to say a word against you."
"Yes; but I'm afraid we're wicked, Jim."
"Other people are as bad," said the Duke, stoutly, "though I don't suppose we'd get a Sunday School prize. 'Course it ain't much good racin' in blinkers. We're a bad lot, the pair of us. I've behaved like a rotter, and worse, while you're like something I can't think of. Seems to me, Leah, we've been runnin' awf'ly crooked. Let's make a fresh start from scratch, and go straight for the future. Tandem, y' know," suggested Jim; "I'll be wheeler, as usual."
"We must make the best of things, I suppose," whimpered Leah, drying her eyes, and still too much unstrung to realise her regeneration.
"That's about it. We'll give sin a rest for a bit. I'll chuck that woman, and be your husband. I swear, Leah, I'll be a Methodist parson sort of husband."
"No, don't," said the Duchess, alarmed. "It's a mistake to overdo things."
Jim laughed, and she laughed.
"Well, I don't suppose I could keep on that game for long," said her husband; "but I mean that I'll be awf'ly square, an' footle after you round the town. It's th' sort of thing good husbands do, y' know. Give us a kiss, old girl, an' we'll begin our married life all over again."
Leah obeyed very contentedly, and nestled in Jim's strong arms like an innocent schoolgirl. She felt worn-out and tired, and drowsy from excess of emotion; felt also that here was a much-desired haven for a worried woman. "Dear old Jim!" she sighed, and Jim kissed her again.
The light was dying out of the sunset sky, and the room filled with pale warm shadows. The reconciled pair sat silently on the sofa in the gathering darkness, locked in a close embrace. The remorseful Jim felt that they were prisoners in the same dock, and anxiously paved a certain place with the very best intentions. Leah went to sleep, thanks to a less tender conscience.
To the world these two were the prosperous and happy Duke and Duchess of Pentland; to themselves, a misguided couple driven to do wrong by circumstances; but to God--what did they appear in God's sight? Remorse is not repentance, and remorse was the sole feeling of which they were capable. Leah's sleep was the slumber of the worn-out; Jim's self-promised reformation the result of shame. Shallow beings, miserable creatures, they could not plumb the depth of their wrong-doing. To them, sins were faults, and they were governed less by the Sermon on the Mount than by the laws of society. Indeed, it is questionable if either one of them was aware that such a sermon had been preached; but both knew to a hair how far they could go without being ostracised.
Jim was the better of the two, for the cold, brutal story told by his wife made him hot with the public-school shame of having done things which no fellow could do. The drastic codes of Eton and Harrow and Rugby and Winchester came to his mind, and he saw how he had sinned against the primitive laws of honour. Without oaths, he swore to lead a better and cleaner life with Leah to help him. He would be charitable and a good landlord, and take the chair at public dinners, and speak in the Lords, and chuck Lady Sandal--who was too expensive--and drop gambling to a certain extent, and not swear more than necessary, and--and--do what a man in his high position ought to do.
It will thus be seen that poor Jim's ideas of reformation were crude. He felt this himself, poor man, in his narrow brain; and like the child he really was, looked down to ask his clever wife's advice. He had no time to consider the irony of the thing, even if it had occurred to him, for discovering that Leah was sound asleep, he wondered hugely. From the placid expression of her face it was very plain that her crimes had not followed her into Dreamland. Jim whistled softly, marvelling that she could slumber so immediately after what she had told him. Laying her gently back on the sofa, he summoned her maid, and went about his own business. This was to begin reformation without loss of time.
"I must help Leah to be good," said the new broom.
But first he had to reform himself, and set about the first step, or what he conceived to be the first step, with the enthusiasm of the very bad person made uncomfortable by remorse. The vicar of Firmingham received a visit from his patron just as he was about to enjoy a well-earned dinner.
"Lionel," said the Duke, nervously, "I'm comin' to communion in a month. Could you get me whitewashed in that time?"
Lionel stared, and looked upward. Strange to say the heavens did not fall.
Were a purblind generation convinced of the invaluable blessings of sorrow, trouble would be robbed of its sting. Ignorance and fear make the unenlightened bemoan their burdens, or shirk bearing them, as they should be borne, with the strength of hope. Chastening is the gift of the eternal love, and those happy few who know this submit with joy to the improving rod. But worrying is not submission, nor is grumbling a recognition of curative effects. To be manful, to be daring, to be so entirely wise from the learning of the lesson as to extract the sweet from the bitter, thus do we prove ourselves worthy of that suffering which God bestows in mercy and in pity. Troubles, if rightly understood, deepen the most shallow character, purify the most soiled soul. They begin in woe but they end in joy. When the lesson is learned, then comes the holiday--or more precisely, the holy-day--of peace and gladness.
Jim, in his simple way, understood that out of apparent evil great good had come to himself and Leah. Never before had they understood each other so well; never before had they forgathered with less friction. The Duke's reformation was as genuine as his embryonic soul was capable of making it. He felt desperately ashamed of himself at the communion table, and shame of self, provided the physical ego be not considered, is the beginning of repentance, which leads to hope, which brings pardon and solace to the uneasy, sinful heart. Jim did not become a saint by any manner of means, but he tried by fits and starts to be a better man, and so, with true though faltering zeal, advanced towards the light. And it was much gained that so once self-satisfied a man should acknowledge himself to be at all in need of improvement. The recalled code of schoolboy honour helped him to amend the less drastic rules of the society man. Could Jim have only gone still farther back, and remembered helpful nursery prayers and childish faith, he might have seen even more clearly how to utilise his mistakes. But he was yet a spirit in embryo, and his receptive powers were not great.
Leah did not keep pace with her husband on the upward path. When the danger was brought to naught, and her nerves became more normal, she forgot everything with the alacrity of a hardened heart. The wind of the Spirit had but troubled the surface of her nature; its depths remained undisturbed. Within a fortnight her dear devil of egotism returned, and she tore out of her book of life the disagreeable page, which she declined to read for the second time. Certainly she retained so much grace and memory as not to laugh at Jim's efforts to be good, and she was less ready than of yore to see and comment upon his obvious failings. But she secretly wondered that he should try to be pious, when there was no worldly advantage to be gained by such dullness. Besides, Jim, with the zeal of the newly converted, began to preach in a stammering, shamefaced way about the duties they owed to themselves in particular and to society at large. He even looked upNoblesse obligeat the tail-end of the dictionary, and quoted the platitude to Leah. On that occasion she had laughed consumedly; but, truth to say, Jim's sermons bored her immensely. She preferred those of Lionel, who, as a professional guide to glory, knew his business, whereas poor dear Jim was hopelessly muddled.
Therefore, while the Duke laboriously tried to be good, and succeeded but doubtfully, Leah was coquetting deliriously with the world, the flesh, and the many agreeable devils of her acquaintance. She improved her former extravagances into something worse, and revenged herself for being agreeable to Jim by letting both friends and enemies have the full benefit of her witty, cruel tongue. The few who did not come under its lash were in ecstasies at her sparkling conversation, and the many who did made themselves pronouncedly pleasant out of mortal fear. Leah danced and sang through the season with the insolent glee of a woman who knows her position to be unassailable. Jim wondered at her short memory, and tried to refresh it; but that she would not endure, and declined even to hear the name of Demetrius. Moreover, as M. Aksakoff had been translated to Copenhagen, there was no need to smooth matters over between him and the Duke. Everything was safe, everything was ripping, and she felt that her latestpas de seulwas being executed on firm ground. She had skipped in the very nick of time from that dangerous old mount which had erupted so feebly.
And no one could say but what she did her best to be amiable. Late in the season she met and congratulated Mr. and Mrs. Askew; she told Lady Richardson how she admired her courage--underlined--in marrying that handsome pauper, Captain Lake; and forgivingly did she condole with Mrs. Penworthy, when the unexpected death of Freddy, from overwork, left that evergreen hack a widow whom no admirer wished to marry. Lady Canvey was most tenderly considered, and Wallace, the globe-trotting cynic, on Leah's introduction, amused the stay-at-home old lady by special command. The sedate Hengists thought even more of the Duchess than they had done of Lady Jim, and she was often asked to bore herself in their protective company. She gave Sir Billy Richardson a smiling time at one of the ducal seats, and invited Joan Kaimes to Curzon Street for a week of shopping and frivolity. Also bazaars and charity concerts, and meetings about the unemployed aristocracy, took up her attention. The fashionable congregation of an exclusive church beheld her regularly in its midst, and heard the audible admission that she was a miserable sinner--a most touching confession for a truly good Duchess to make. Then she befriended a bishop, who was not too straight-laced, and induced him to preach a scientific sermon in Lionel's church, of which Lionel, very nastily, did not approve. Oh, it was a merry time, when the grapes were ripe and the first-fruits of her ducal harvest were being gathered in. The Duchess of Pentland won golden opinions even from the censorious. Things could not have been better managed by the discarded fetish, and Leah admitted that in this respectable orgy the birthday of her life had come.
During this meteoric career it surprised every one that she should choose to retire suddenly. Fashion clamoured at her closed doors; society journals wondered and lamented; individual friends expressed themselves puzzled; and in print and conversation the freak of a Duchess who chose to disappear was freely discussed. It was as though the noonday sun should set unexpectedly. Leah's radiant orb had blazed triumphantly for a few months, paling the lesser stars of society, and then--had vanished. The Duke, when applied to for an explanation, stated that she had gone abroad, because her health was--hum--hum--hum. She crossed the Channel alone, too, which looked odd. People began to talk and to invent reasons to explain the inexplicable. But not even the most daring hinted at a connubial disagreement. Jim would have stopped any such rumour at once with high words. Not that it could arise, seeing that he thanked God publicly every Sunday for possessing a wife whose price was far above rubies. But whatever had happened, whatever might be the reason, it was indisputable that the beautiful and wealthy and clever and popular Duchess of Pentland had retired from the world in her heyday of social success.
Lionel was the first to hear of her when she returned unexpectedly to Firmingham, after a month's sojourn on the Continent. One day in the chilly grey autumn weather he received a note asking him to call at four o'clock, and went unthinkingly to pass through what he afterwards remembered as the most painful hour of his life. He fancied, when setting out, that Leah merely wished to see him about the Duke. It might be that Jim, with the Old Adam leaven still working within, had broken out again, and that Lionel was summoned to call the sinner a second time to repentance. But the Duke, as he gathered from old Colley, was vegetating at Hengist Castle. It was impossible that the Old Adam could emerge from his penitential cell in so respectable and moral a neighbourhood.