LADY CONNIE.BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.Copyright, 1915, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, in the United States of America.
BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.
Copyright, 1915, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, in the United States of America.
Douglas Falloden was sitting alone in his father’s library surrounded by paper and documents. He had just concluded a long interview with the family lawyer; and a tray containing the remains of their hasty luncheon was on a side table. The room had a dusty, dishevelled air. Half of the house-servants had been already dismissed; the rest were disorganised. Lady Laura had left Flood the day before. To her son’s infinite relief she had consented to take the younger children and go on a long visit to some Scotch relations. It had been left vague whether she returned to Flood or not; but Douglas hoped that the parting was already over—without her knowing it; and that he should be able to persuade her, after Scotland, to go straight to the London house—which was her own property—for the winter.
Meanwhile he himself had been doing his best to wind up affairs. The elaborate will of twenty years earlier, with its many legacies and bequests, had been cancelled by Sir Arthur only six weeks before his death. A very short document had been substituted for it, making Douglas and a certain Marmaduke Falloden, his uncle and an eminent K.C., joint executors, and appointing Douglas and Lady Laura guardians of the younger children. Whatever property might remain ‘after the payment of my just debts’ was to be divided in certain proportions between Douglas and his brother and sister.
The estates, with the exception of the lands immediately surrounding the Castle, were to be sold to the tenants, and the dates of the auction were already fixed. For the Castle itself, negotiations had been opened with an enormously successful soap-boiler from the north, but the American proprietor of a dry-goods store in Chicago was also in the market, and the Falloden solicitors were skilfully playing the two big fish against each other. The sale of the pictures would come before the Court early in October. Meanwhile the beautiful Romney—the lady in black—still looked down upon her stripped and impoverished descendant; and Falloden,whose sole companion she often was through dreary hours, imagined her sometimes as tragic or reproachful, but more commonly as mocking him with a malicious Irish glee.
There would be some few thousand pounds left for himself when all was settled. He was determined to go into Parliament, and his present intention was to stand for a Merton Fellowship, and read for the Bar. If other men could make three or four thousand a year within three years or so of being called, why not he? His character had steeled under the pressure of disaster. He realised with a clearer intelligence, day by day, all that had gone from him—his father—his inheritance—the careless ease and self-assurance that goes with the chief places at the feast of life. But if he must now drop to the lower rooms, it would not be ‘with shame’ that he would do that, or anything else. He felt within himself a driving and boundless energy; an iron will to succeed. There was even a certain bitter satisfaction in measuring himself against the world without the props and privileges he had hitherto possessed. He was often sore and miserable to his heart’s depths; haunted by black regrets and compunction he could not get rid of. All the same it was his fixed resolve to waste no thoughts on mere happiness. His business was to make a place for himself as an able man among able men, to ask of ambition, intelligence, hard work, and the sharpening of brain on brain, the satisfaction he had once hoped to get out of marriage with Constance Bledlow, and the easy, though masterly, use of great wealth.
He turned to look at the clock.
She had asked him for five. He had ordered his horse accordingly, the only beast still left in the Flood stables, and his chief means of escape, during a dreary fortnight, from his peevish co-executor, who was of little or no service, and had allowed himself already to say unpardonable things about his dead brother, even to that brother’s son.
It was too soon to start, but he pushed his papers aside impatiently. The mere prospect of seeing Constance Bledlow provoked in him a dumb and troubled excitement. Under its impulse he left the library, and began to walk aimlessly through the dreary and deserted house, for the mere sake of movement. The pictures were still on the walls, for the sale of them had not yet been formally sanctioned by the Court; but all Lady Laura’s private and personal possessions had been removed to London, anddust-sheets covered the furniture. Some of it indeed had been already sold, and workmen were busy packing in the great hall, amid a dusty litter of paper and straw. The clocks had run down; the flowers had gone, and with them all the other signs of normal life which make the character of a house; what remained was only the débris of a once animated whole. Houses have their fate no less than books; and in the ears of its last Falloden possessor the whole of the great many-dated fabric, from its fourteenth-century foundations beneath the central tower to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt under the fourth George had disfigured the garden front, had often, since his father’s death, seemed to speak with an almost human voice of lamentation and distress.
But this afternoon Falloden took little notice of his surroundings. Why had she written to him?
Well, after all, death is death, and the merest strangers had written to him—letters that he was now wearily answering. But there had been nothing perfunctory in her letter. As he read it he had seemed to hear her very voice saying the soft touching things in it—things that women say so easily and men can’t hit upon; and to be looking into her changing face, and the eyes that could be so fierce, and then again so childishly sweet and sad—as he had seen them, at their last meeting on the moor, while she was giving him news of Radowitz. Yet there was not a word in the letter that might not have been read on the house-tops—not a trace in it of her old alluring, challenging self. Simplicity—deep feeling—sympathy—in halting words, and unfinished sentences:—and yet—something conspicuously absent and to all appearance so easily, unconsciously absent, that all the sweetness and the pity brought him more smart than soothing. Yes, she had done with him—for all her wish to be kind to him. He saw it plainly; and he turned back thirstily to those past hours in Lathom Woods, when he had felt himself, if only for a moment, triumphant master of her thoughts if not her heart; rebelled against, scolded, flouted, yet still tormentingly necessary and important. All that delicious friction, those disputes that are the fore-runner of passion, were gone—for ever. She was sorry for him—and very kind. His touchy pride recoiled, reading into her letter what she had never dreamt of putting into it, just because of the absence of that something—that old tremor—those old signs of his influence over her, which, of course, she would never let him see again.
All the same he had replied at once, asking if he might comeand say good-bye before she left Scarfedale. And she had sent him a telegram—‘Delighted—to-morrow—five o’clock.’
And he was going—out of a kind of recklessness—a kind of obstinate recoil against the sorrowful or depressing circumstance of life. He had given up all thoughts of trying to win her back—even if there were any chance of it. His pride would not let him sue as a pauper; and of course the Langmoors, to whom she was going—he understood—from Scarfedale, would take good care she did not throw herself away. Quite right too. Very likely the Tamworths would capture her; and Bletchley was quite a nice fellow.
When he did see her, what could they talk about? Radowitz?
He would like to send a message through her to Radowitz—to say something—
What could he say? He had seen Radowitz for a few minutes after the inquest—to thank him for his evidence—and for what he had done for Sir Arthur. Both had hurried through it. Falloden had seemed to himself stricken with aphasia. His mouth was dry, his tongue useless. And Radowitz had been all nerves, a flickering colour—good God, how deathly he looked!
Afterwards he had begun a letter to Radowitz, and had toiled at it, sometimes at dead of night, and in a feverish heat of brain. But he had never finished or sent it. What was the use? Nothing was changed. That black sling and the damaged hand in it stood for one of those hard facts that no wishing, and no sentimentalising, and no remorse could get over.
‘I wish to God I had let him alone!’
That now was the frequent and bitter cry of Falloden’s inmost being. Trouble and the sight of trouble—sorrow—and death—had been to him, as to other men, sobering and astonishing facts. The most decisive effect of them had been to make him vulnerable, to break through the hard defences of pride and custom, so that he realised what he had done. And this realisation was fast becoming a more acute and haunting thing than anything else. It constantly drove out the poignant recollection of his father’s death, or the dull sense of financial loss and catastrophe. Loss and catastrophe might be at some distant time made good. But what could ever give Radowitz back his art—his career—his natural object in life? The hatches of the present had just got to be closed over this ugly, irreparable thing. ‘I can’t undo it—nothing can ever be undone. But I can’t spend my life in repenting it; onemust just go forward, and not let that, or anything else, hamstring a man who has got his fight to fight, and can’t get out of it.’
Undo it? No. But were no, even partial, amends possible?—nothing that could be offered, or done, or said?—nothing that would give Constance Bledlow pleasure, or change her opinion?—efface that shrinking in her, of which he hated to think?
He cudgelled his brains, but could think of nothing.
Money, of course, was of no use, even if he still possessed it. Radowitz, in all matters connected with money, was hyper-sensitive and touchy. It was well known that he had private means; and it was certainly probable that he was now the richer man of the two.
No—there was nothing to be done. He had maimed for ever the vital energising impulse in another human being, and it could never be repaired. ‘His poor music!—murdered’—the words from Constance Bledlow’s horror-stricken letter were always in his mind. And the day after the inquest on Sir Arthur he had had some conversation on the medical points of his father’s case, and on the light thrown on them by Radowitz’s evidence, with the family doctor who was then attending Lady Laura, and had, it appeared, been several times called in by Sorell during the preceding weeks to see Radowitz and report on the progress of the hand. ‘A bad business!’ said the young man, who had intelligence and was fresh from hospital—‘and awful hard luck!—he might have hurt his hand in a score of ways and still have recovered the use of it, but this particular injury’—he shook his head—‘nothing to be done! And the worst of it is that a trouble like this, which cuts across a man’s career, goes so deep. The thing I should be most afraid of is his general health. You can see that he’s delicate—narrow-chested—a bundle of nerves. It might be phthisis—it might be’—he shrugged his shoulders—‘well, depression, bad neurasthenia. And the poor lad seems to have no family—no mother or sisters—to look after him. But he’ll want a lot of care if he’s to pull round again. An Oxford row, wasn’t it? Abominable!’
But here the sudden incursion of Lady Laura’s maid, to ask a question for her mistress, had diverted the doctor’s thoughts and spared Falloden reply.
A little later, he was riding slowly up the side of the moor towards Scarfedale, looking down on a landscape which since his childhood had been so intimate and familiar a part of himselfthat the thought of being wrenched away from it, immediately and for good, seemed merely absurd.
September was nearly gone; and the trees had long passed out of their August monotony, and were already prophetic of the October blaze. The level afternoon light was searching out the different planes of distance, giving to each hedgerow, elm or oak, a separate force and kingship: and the golden or bronze shades, which were day by day stealing through the woods, made gorgeous marriage with the evening purple. The Castle, as he gazed back upon it, had sunk into the shadows, a dim magnificent ghost, seen through mist, like the Rhine Maidens through the blue water.
And there it would stand, perhaps for generations yet, long after he and his kindred knew it no more. What did the plight of its last owner matter to it, or to the woods and hills? He tried to think of that valley a hundred years hence—a thousand!—and felt himself the merest insect crawling on the face of this old world, which is yet so young. But only for a moment. Rushing back, came the proud, resisting sense of personality—of man’s dominance over Nature—of the Nietzschean ‘will to power.’ To be strong, to be sufficient to oneself; not to yield, but to be for ever counter-attacking circumstance, so as to be the master of circumstance, whatever blows it might choose to strike—that seemed to be the best, the only creed left to him.
When he reached the Scarfedale house, and a gardener had taken his horse, the maid who opened the door told him he would find Lady Constance on the lawn. The old ladies were out driving.
Very decent of the old ladies, he thought, as he followed the path into the garden.
There she was!—her light form lost, almost, in a deep chair, under a lime tree. The garden was a tangle of roses and heliotrope; everything growing rank and fast, as though to get as much out of the soil and the sun as possible, before the first frost made execution. It was surrounded by old red walls that held the dropping sun, and it was full of droning bees, and wagtails stepping daintily over the lawns.
Connie rose and came towards him. She was in black, with pale pink roses in her hat. In spite of her height, she seemed to him the slightest, gracefullest thing, and as she neared him she lifted her deep brown eyes, and it was as though he had never seen before how beautiful they were.
‘It was kind of you to come!’ she said shyly.
He made no reply till she had placed him beside her under the lime. Then he looked round him, a smile twitching his lip.
‘Your aunts are not at home?’
‘No. They have gone for their drive. Did you wish to see them?’
‘I am in terror of your Aunt Winifred. She and I had many ructions when I was small. She thought our keepers used to shoot her cats.’
‘They probably did!’
‘Of course. But a keeper who told the truth about it would have no moral sense.’
They both laughed, looking into each other’s faces with a sudden sense of relief from tension. After all the tragedy and the pain, there they were, still young, still in the same world together. And the sun was still shining and the roses blooming. Yet, all the same, there was no thought of any renewal of their old relation on either side. Something unexpressed, yet apparently final, seemed to stand between them; differing very much in his mind from the something in hers, yet equally potent. She, who had gone through agonies of far too tender pity for him, felt now a touch of something chill and stern in the circumstance surrounding him, that seemed to put her aside. ‘This is not your business,’ it seemed to say; so that she saw herself as an inexperienced child playing with that incalculable thing—the male. Attempts at sympathy or advice died away—she rebelled—and submitted.
Still there are things—experiments—that even an inexperienced child, a child ‘of good will,’ may venture. All the time that she was talking to Falloden, a secret expectation, a secret excitement ran through her inner mind. There was a garden door to her left, across a lawn. Her eyes were often on it, and her ear listened for the click of the latch.
Meanwhile Falloden talked very frankly of the family circumstances and his own plans. How changed the tone was, since they had discussed the same things, riding through the Lathom Woods in June! There was little less self-confidence, perhaps; but the quality of it was not the same. Instead of alienating, it began to touch and thrill her. And her heart could not help its sudden tremor when he spoke of wintering ‘in or near Oxford.’ There was apparently a Merton prize Fellowship in December, on which his hopes were set, and the first part of his Bar examination to read for, whether he got a Fellowship or no.
‘And Parliament?’ she asked him.
‘Yes—that’s my aim,’ he said, quietly. ‘Of course it’s the fashion just now, especially in Oxford, to scoff at politics and the House of Commons. It’s like the art-for-arters in town. As if you could solve anything by words—or paints!’
‘Your father was in the House for some time?’
She bent towards him, as she mentioned his father, with a lovely unconscious gesture that sent a tremor through him. He seemed to perceive all that shaken feeling in her mind to which she found it so impossible to give expression; on which his own action had placed so strong a curb.
He replied that his father had been in Parliament for some twelve years, and had been a Tory Whip part of the time. Then he paused, his eyes on the grass, till he raised them to say abruptly:—
‘You heard about it all—from Radowitz?’
She nodded.
‘He came here that same night.’ And then suddenly, in the golden light, he saw her flush vividly. Had she realised that what she had said implied a good deal?—or might be thought to imply it? Why should Radowitz take the trouble—after his long and exhausting experience—to come round by the Scarfedale manor-house?
‘It was an awful time for him,’ he said, his eyes on hers. ‘It was very strange—that he should be there.’
And again he looked down—poking at the grass with his stick.
She hesitated. Her lips trembled.
‘He was very glad—to be there. Only he was sorry—for you.’
‘You mean he was sorry that I wasn’t there sooner—with my father?’
‘I think that was what he felt—that there was only—a stranger.’
‘I was just in time,’ said Falloden, slowly. ‘And I wonder—whether anything matters, to the dying?’
There was a pause, after which he added, with sudden energy—
I thought—at the inquest—he himself looked pretty bad.’
‘Otto Radowitz?’ Constance covered her eyes with her hands a moment—a gesture of pain. ‘Mr. Sorell doesn’t know what to do for him. He has been losing ground lately. The doctors say he ought to live in the open air. He and Mr. Sorell talk of a cottage near Oxford, where Mr. Sorell can go often and see him. But he can’t live alone.’
As she spoke Falloden’s attention was diverted. He had raisedhis head and was looking across the lawn, towards the garden entrance. There was the sound of a clicking latch. Constance turned, and saw Radowitz entering.
The young musician paused and wavered at the sight of the two under the lime. It seemed as though he would have taken to flight. But, instead, he came on with hesitating step. He had taken off his hat, as he often did when walking; and his red-gold hairen brossewas as conspicuous as ever. But otherwise what a change from the youth of three months before! Falloden, now that the immediate pressure of his own tragedy was relaxed, perceived the change even more sharply than he had done at the inquest; perceived it, at first with horror, and then with a wild sense of recoil and denial, as though some hovering Erinnys advanced with Radowitz over the leaf-strewn grass.
Radowitz grew paler still as he reached Connie. He gave Falloden a short, embarrassed greeting, and then subsided into the chair that Constance offered him. The thought crossed Falloden’s mind—‘Did she arrange this?’
Her face gave little clue—though she could not restrain one quick, hesitating glance at Falloden. She pressed tea on Radowitz, who accepted it to please her, and then, schooled as she was in all the minor social arts, she had soon succeeded in establishing a sort of small-talk between the three. Falloden, self-conscious and on the rack, could not imagine why he stayed. But this languid boy had ministered to his dying father! And to what, and to whom, were the languor, the tragic physical change, due? He stayed—in purgatory—looking out for any chance to escape.
‘Did you walk all the way?’
The note in Connie’s voice was softly reproachful.
‘Why, it’s only three miles!’ said Radowitz, as though defending himself, but he spoke with an accent of depression. And Connie remembered how, in the early days of his recovery from his injury, he had spent hours rambling over the moors, by himself or with Sorell. Her heart yearned to him. She would have liked to take his poor hands in hers, and talk to him, tenderly, like a sister. But there was that other dark face and those other eyes opposite—watching. And to them too her young sympathy went out—how differently!—how passionately! A kind of rending and widening process seemed to be going on within her own nature. Veils were falling between her and life; and feelings, deeper and stronger than any she had ever known, were fast developing the woman in the girl. Howto heal Radowitz!—how to comfort Falloden! Her mind ached under the feelings that filled it—feelings wholly disinterested and pure.
‘You really are taking the Boar’s Hill cottage?’ she asked, addressing Radowitz.
‘I think so. It is nearly settled. But I am trying to find some companion. Sorell can only come occasionally.’
As he spoke, a wild idea flashed into Falloden’s brain. It seemed to have entered without—or against—his will; as though suggested by some imperious agency outside himself. His intelligence laughed at it. Something else in him entertained it—breathlessly.
Radowitz stooped down to try and tempt Lady Marcia’s dachshund with a piece of cake.
‘I must anyhow have a dog,’ he said, as the pampered Max accepted the cake, and laid his head gratefully on the donor’s knee:—‘they’re always company.’
He looked wistfully into the dog’s large friendly eyes.
Connie rose.
‘Please don’t move!’ she said, flushing, ‘I shall be back directly. But I must put up a letter. I hear the postman!’ She ran across the grass, leaving the two men in acute discomfort. Falloden thought again, with rising excitement: ‘She planned it! She wants me to do something—to take some step⸺ But what?’
An awkward pause followed. Radowitz was still playing with the dog, caressing its beautiful head with his uninjured hand, and talking to it in a half whisper. As Constance departed, a bright and feverish red had rushed into his cheeks; but it had only made his aspect more ghostly, more unreal.
Again the absurd idea emerged in Falloden’s consciousness; and this time it seemed to find its own expression, and to be merely making use of his voice, which he heard as though it were someone else’s.
He bent over towards Radowitz.
‘Would you care to share the cottage with me?’ he said abruptly. ‘I want to find a place to read in—out of Oxford.’
Radowitz looked up, amazed—speechless! Falloden’s eyes met Otto’s steadily. The boy turned away. Suddenly he covered his face with his free hand.
‘Why did you hate me so?’ he said, breathing quick. ‘What had I done to you?’
‘I didn’t hate you,’ said Falloden, thickly. ‘I was mad.’
‘Because you were jealous? What a fool you were! She never cared a brass farthing for me—except as she does now. She would like to nurse me—and give me back my music. But she can’t—and you can’t.’
There was silence again. Otto’s chest heaved. As far as he could with his one hand, he hid the tears in his eyes from his companion. And at last he shook off emotion—with a laugh in which there was no mirth.
‘Well, at least, I shouldn’t make such a row now as I used to do—practising.’
Falloden understood his reference to the soda-water bottle fusillade, by which the ‘bloods,’ in their first attack upon him, had tried to silence his piano.
‘Can’t you play at all?’ he said, at last; choosing the easiest of several remarks that presented themselves.
‘I get about somehow on the keys. It’s better than nothing. And I’m writing something for my degree. It’s rather good. If I could only keep well!’ said the boy impatiently. ‘It’s this damned health that gets in the way.’
Then he threw himself back in his chair, all the melancholy of his face suddenly breaking up, the eyes sparkling.
‘Suppose I set up one of those automatic pianos they’re now talking about—could you stand that?’
‘I would have a room where I didn’t hear it. That would be all right.’
‘There’s a wonderful idea I heard of from Paris a week or two ago,’ said Otto excitedly—‘a marvellous electric invention a man’s at work on, where you only turn a handle, or press a button, and you get Rubinstein—or Madame Schumann or my countryman, Paderewski, who’s going to beat everybody. It isn’t finished yet. But it won’t be for the likes of me. It’ll cost at least a thousand pounds.’
‘They’ll get cheaper,’ said Falloden, his chin in his hands, elbows on knees—eyes fixed on his companion. It seemed to him he was talking in a dream, so strange was this thing he had proposed; which apparently was going to come to pass. At any rate Radowitz had not refused. He sat with the dachshund on his knees, alternately pulling out and folding its long ears. He seemed to be, all in a moment, in high spirits, and when he saw Connie coming back through the garden gate, with a shy, hesitatingstep, he sprang up eagerly to greet her. But there was another figure behind her. It was Sorell; and at sight of him ‘something sealed’ the boy’s lips. He looked round at Falloden, and dropped back into his chair.
Falloden rose from his seat abruptly. A formal and scarcely perceptible greeting passed between him and Sorell. All Falloden’s irritable self-consciousness rushed back upon him as he recognised the St. Cyprian’s tutor. He was not going to stay and cry peccavi any more, in the presence of a bloodless prig, for whom Oxford was the world. But it was bitter to him all the same to leave him in possession of the garden and Connie Bledlow’s company.
‘Thank you—I must go,’ he said brusquely, as Connie tried to detain him. ‘There is so much to do nowadays. I shall be leaving Flood next week. The agent will be in charge.’
‘Leaving—for good?’ she asked, in her appealing voice as they stood apart.
‘Probably—for good.’
‘I don’t know how to say—how sorry I am!’
‘Thank you. But I am glad it’s over. When you get back to Oxford—I shall venture to come and call.’
‘That’s a promise,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Where will you be?’
‘Ask Otto Radowitz! Good-bye.’
Her start of surprise pleased him. He approached Radowitz. ‘Shall I hear from you?’ he said stiffly.
‘Certainly!’ The boy looked up. ‘I will write to-morrow.’
The garden door had no sooner closed on Falloden than Radowitz threw himself back and went into a fit of laughter, curious, hollow laughter.
Sorell looked at him anxiously.
‘What’s the meaning of that, Otto?’
‘You’ll laugh, when you hear! Falloden and I are going to set up house together, in a cottage on Boar’s Hill—when we’ve found one. He’s going to read—and I’m to be allowed a piano, and a pianola. Queer, isn’t it?’
‘My dear Otto!’ cried Sorell, in dismay. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, he offered it—said he’d come and look after me. I don’t know what possessed him—nor me either. I didn’t exactly accept. But I shall accept. Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because Falloden’s the last person in the world to look after anybody—least of all, you!’ said Sorell with indignant energy. ‘But of course it’s a joke! You mean it for a joke. If he proposed it, it was like his audacity. Nobody would, who had a shred of delicacy. I suppose he wants to disarm public opinion!’
Radowitz looked oddly at Sorell, from under his finely-marked eyebrows.
‘I don’t believe he cares a hang for public opinion,’ he said slowly. ‘Nor do I. If you could come, Alexis, of course that would settle it. And if you won’t come to see me, supposing Falloden and I do share diggings, that settles it too. But you will come, old man—you will come!’
And he nodded, smiling, at his quasi-guardian. Neither of them noticed Connie. Yet she had hung absorbed on their conversation, the breath fluttering on her parted lips. And when their talk paused she bent forward, and laid her hand on Sorell’s arm.
‘Let him!’ she said pleadingly—‘let him do it!’
Sorell looked at her in troubled perplexity. ‘Let Douglas Falloden makesomeamends to his victim; if he can and will. Don’t be so unkind as to prevent it!’ That, he supposed, was what she meant. It seemed to him the mere sentimental unreason of the young girl, who will not believe that there is any irrevocableness in things at all, till life teaches her.
Radowitz too! What folly, what mistaken religiosity could make him dream of consenting to such a housemate through this winter which might very well be his last!
Monstrous! What kind of qualities had Falloden to fit him for such a task? All very well, indeed, that he should feel remorse! Sorell hoped he might feel it a good deal more sharply yet. But that he should ease his remorse at Otto’s expense, by offering what he could never fulfil, and by taking the place of someone on whom Otto could have really leaned: that seemed to Sorell all of a piece with the man’s egotism, his epicurean impatience of anything that permanently made him uncomfortable or unhappy. He put something of this into impetuous words as well as he could. But Otto listened in silence. So did Constance. And Sorell presently felt that there was a secret bond between them.
Before the aunts returned, the rectory pony-carriage came forRadowitz, who was not strong enough to walk both ways. Sorell and Constance were left alone.
Sorell, observing her, was struck anew by the signs of change and development in her. It was as though her mother and her mother’s soul showed through the girl’s slighter temperament. The old satiric aloofness in Connie’s brown eyes, an expression all her own, and not her mother’s, seemed to have slipped away; Sorell missed it. Ella Risborough’s sympathetic charm had replaced it, but with suggestions of hidden conflict and suffering, of which Lady Risborough’s bright sweetness had known nothing. It was borne in upon him that, since her arrival in Oxford, Constance had gone through a great deal, and gone through it alone. For after all what had his efforts amounted to? What can a man friend do for a young girl in these fermenting years of her youth? And when the man friend knows very well that, but for an iron force upon himself, he himself would be among her lovers? Sorell felt himself powerless—in all the greater matters—and was inclined to think that he deserved to be powerless. Yet he had done his best; and through his Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritual growth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his own youth. They had been reading Homer together—parts both of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’; and through ‘that ageless mouth of all the world,’ what splendid things had spoken to her!—Hector’s courage, and Andromache’s tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the bitter pity of Achilles, mother-love and wife-love, death and the scorn of death. He had felt her glow and tremble in the grip of that supreme poetry; for himself he had found her, especially of late, the dearest and most responsive of pupils.
But what use was anything, if after all, as Radowitz vowed, she was in love with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the men of Sorell’s type—disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden’s type—strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined—is perennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction for women of the other.
Sorell sat on impatiently in the darkening garden, hoping always that Connie would explain, would confess; for he was certain that she had somehow schemed for this preposterous reconciliation—if it was a reconciliation. She wanted, no doubt, to heal Falloden’s conscience, and so to comfort her own. And she would sacrificeOtto, if need be, in the process! He vowed to himself that he would prevent it, if he could.
Connie eyed him wistfully. Confidences seemed to be on her very lips, and then stopped there. In the end she neither explained nor confessed. But when he was gone she walked up and down the lawn under the evening sky, her hands behind her—passionately dreaming.
She had never thought of any such plan as had actually sprung to light. And she understood Sorell’s opposition.
All the same, her heart sang over it. When she had asked Radowitz and Douglas to meet, each unbeknown to the other, when she had sent away the kind old aunts and prepared it all, she had reckoned on powers of feeling in Falloden, in which apparently only she and Aunt Marcia believed; and she had counted on the mystical and religious fervour she had long since discovered in Radowitz. That night—after Sir Arthur’s death—she had looked trembling into the boy’s very soul, had perceived his wondering sense of a special message to him, through what had happened, from a God who suffered and forgives.
Yes, she had tried—to make peace.
And she guessed—the tears blinding her as she walked—at the true meaning of Falloden’s sudden impulse, and Otto’s consent. Falloden’s was an impulse of repentance; and Otto’s had been an impulse of pardon, in the Christian sense. ‘If I am to die, I will die at peace with him.’ Was that the thought—the tragic and touching thought, in the boy’s mind?
As to Falloden, could he do it?—could he rise to the height of what was offered him? She prayed he might; she believed he could.
Her whole being was aflame. Douglas was no longer in love with her; that was clear. What matter, if he made peace with his own soul? As for her, she loved him with her whole heart, and meant to go on loving him, whatever anyone might say. And that being so, she would of course never marry.
Could she ever make Nora understand the situation? By letter, it was certainly useless to try!
(To be continued.)