IV
Mr. Pemberton looked after her very gratefully when she excused herself to take the child up-stairs. The door closed, he turned to Lord Burdon. "Nice—nice," he began in a stifled kind of voice, "to have a little son growing up—to watch. We watched young Lord Burdon—that poor boy—growing up—anxiously—so anxiously...."
He gave a nervous little laugh. "When I say 'we' you've no idea with what a terrible air of proprietorship the family is regarded by those, like myself, attached to it for generations, by those dependent on it. We looked so eagerly, so eagerly as the time drew on, to his coming of age. He was wanted so."
"Wanted?" Lord Burdon asked. "Wanted?" He pronounced the word heavily, as though he had an inkling of the answer and was apprehensive.
It started Mr. Pemberton on a recital that he spoke with seeming difficulty and yet as though he had prepared it. It occupied longer than either knew, and Lord Burdon, before it was finished, was sitting sunk low in his chair, as though what he heard oppressed him. The little old lawyer spoke of difficulties in connection with the estate; the diminished rent roll; the urgent necessity for comprehensive improvements essential to make the land pay its way; the long-urged necessity for the sale of Burdon House in Mount Street, heavily mortgaged and the interest an insupportable drain on the estate. It led him to why they had looked so anxiously for the coming of age. Everything that was essential was impossible, he showed, in the reign of gentle Jane Lady Burdon, who felt that she held in sacred trust for her grandson and would suffer no risks in raising of loans, nor depredation of her charge by sale of the town property. He had no eloquence, this devoted little lawyer, but he had earnestness that seemed to him who listened to fill the room, as it were, with living shapes of duties, demands, traditions of a great heritage that marshalled before him and looked to him to be carried forward, as soldiers to a leader.
A change in Mr. Pemberton's tone aroused him.
"He was wanted so," Mr. Pemberton said jerkily, and stopped.
No response, and in a funny little cracked voice, "Well, he's dead," Mr. Pemberton said.
Lord Burdon raised his eyes, contracted with the trouble that had given him that drooped, oppressed appearance while the other spoke, dim, clouded as with looking at something that menaced; and their eyes met—two very simple men.
Mr. Pemberton stretched out fumbling hands. He cried blunderingly and appealingly, his mouth twisting: "It has affected me—this death, this change. I am only an old man—a devoted old man. As we looked to him, so now we look to you."
"Look to me!" Lord Burdon said slowly. "Look to me! Good God, Pemberton, I funk it!" he cried. "I funk it and I hate it. I'm not the sort. I wish I'd been left alone. I wish to God I had!"
There followed his words a silence of the intense nature caused by speech that has been intense. In that silence, consciousness of some other personality in the room caused Mr. Pemberton to turn suddenly in his chair. He turned to see Lady Burdon standing in the doorway. She was not in the act of entering. She was standing there; and for the briefest space, while Mr. Pemberton looked at her and she at him, she just stood, erect, her head a trifle unduly high, with estimating eyes and with purposed mouth.
V
It had been an anxious Mr. Pemberton that came down to Miller's Field. It was a reassured Mr. Pemberton that stayed there, but a gravely disturbed Mr. Pemberton that went back to town. He knew Lady Burdon had been listening, the look he had seen on her face informed him of her displeasure with what she had heard, and he knew that in his first estimate of her he had misread her.
For he read her look aright. In her husband's cry—his weak, contemptible cry—in what she had heard of the little lawyer's statements and proposals—his tears and prayers of duties—she knew hostility to her plans, to her dreams, to her pleasures. Her estimating eyes that met Mr. Pemberton's inquired the strength of that hostility; her purposed mouth was the mirror of her determination against it.
MISCALCULATING A PEER
I
The little clock that is perched high over the vast fireplace in the library at Burdon House, Mount Street, marks a shade before ten of the evening. Its delicate ticking joins with the fluttering of the flames, and with the steady scratch of Mr. Librarian Amber's pen, to make the only sounds in this dignified apartment with its high-bred air, that has known many a Burdon and that shortly is to acknowledge another bearer of the title and serenely give farewell to the lady seated before the fire.
A gracious lady of many sorrows, as the Vicar of Little Letham parish, in a surprising flight, had named Jane Lady Burdon on the previous Sunday—and rightly named her. Sorrow has companioned Jane Lady Burdon before; now again is called whence it has lightly slumbered—walks hand in hand with the gentle lady, is her bedfellow, crouches on the hearth beside her as she sits, drooping slightly, in the high-backed chair, fingers enlocked on lap, eyes dimly upon the flames.
Lord Burdon, who has stepped into the dead boy's shoes—(Ah, Sorrow, walk here and here with me. Look, Sorrow, where he used to sport and run!)—has paid his visit that afternoon; sympathetic little Mr. Pemberton, with his papers and documents, has occupied a part of her morning. It has been a trying day for her. Her only desire now is to be left alone with her thoughts. (Come away, come away, Sorrow, Sorrow; and hold me close, and open me his prattling lips, his strong young lips.)
II
Mr. Librarian Amber—very conscious of Sorrow crouching there, but busy, busy—is writing at a table behind the drooping figure in the high-backed chair. The bald top of Mr. Amber's narrow head, nose hard after his pen like a diligent bloodhound on a slow scent, shines between the splendid yellow candles in their tall, silver holders that light his work. Neat little packets of papers, neatly arranged, dot the polished surface of the table, like islands set in a still, dark sea about the greater island that is Mr. Amber's manuscript. On a chair by Mr. Amber's side is a large, slim volume held by a gilt clasp and lettered on its cover of white vellum:
Percival Rollo Redpath LethamXIIth Baron Burdon
He is engaged, Mr. Librarian Amber, on that "Lives of the Barons Burdon" of which Lord Burdon had spoken to his wife, walking in the garden of Hillside.
Then that little clock perched over the mantelpiece tinkles the hour of ten.
"How do you progress, Mr. Amber?" Jane Lady Burdon inquires gently.
Mr. Amber—constitutionally nervous—starts, drops his pen, grabs at it as it rolls for the floor, misses it in the stress of a short-sighted fumble, makes a distressedTch-tch!as it rattles to the boards, clears his throat, starts on one reply and, in the manner of nervous persons suddenly interrogated, strangles it at birth and has a shot at fortune with another.
"I have almost got—I am just concluding the newspaper reports of the fight, my lady. Very nearly at the end." He recollects a resolve to be bright in order to cheer my lady, so he adds with a funny little pop: "Almost done!" and then with a brisk little puff blows imaginary dust from his manuscript. "Almost done!Hoof!"
"I will read it over to-morrow, Mr. Amber, immediately after breakfast. To-day is Friday. By Monday you should have finished, I think, and the book will be ready to go into its place at the Manor. You will come with me when I go down there next week, Mr. Amber, and we will put it in its place together. I shall be glad to see it in its place before I leave: all the Lives finished—our little hobby, Mr. Amber;" and her gracious ladyship of many sorrows puts into the words the smile that faintly touches her lips.
Mr. Amber, desperately agitated and pleased by this coupling of himself with his dear mistress, takes from the warmth of his happiness courage sufficient to introduce to her a matter that has been troubling him. He gets awkwardly to his feet, a spare, stooping figure, mild of face, little over fifty but looking more, frowns horribly at his chair for the noise it makes upon the polished floor as he pushes it back, and comes forward, twisting the fingers of his hands about one another.
"My lady—yes, I will surely finish by Monday. Your ladyship will forgive me—intruding myself—your ladyship speaks of leaving—I am—if I may venture—so attached—I scarcely—"
He is quite painfully agitated. His fingers, tightly locked now by their twistings, present a figure of his halting sentences come to a final tangle, an ultimate and hopeless knot.
Her gracious ladyship of many sorrows smiles in her kind way. "Dear Mr. Amber, you should know, of course. I have been thoughtless of you in my sorrow. I am going to my sister in York, Mr. Amber—Mrs. Eresby, you remember. Here nor the Manor is no longer my home, you understand. Indeed, how should I stay in houses of sad memories only?"
Mr. Amber murmurs "Ah—my lady!" and she continues: "I intend a last visit to the Manor—to take leave of our dear friends, Mr. Amber, and to collect a few—memories. I would go now, but I have first to meet Lady Burdon. Lord and Lady Burdon will very kindly come here for that purpose on Monday so that we may know one another for a few days."
She pauses and smiles inquiringly as though to ask Mr. Amber if he is now sufficiently informed. He blinks considerably, starts to work at his hands again, and suddenly says with a mouth all twisted: "It will be very—strange—to me to be parted from your ladyship."
She extends a gentle hand towards his that twist and twist, touching them softly: "Dear Mr. Amber. It has been the pleasantest friendship."
He says stupidly and brokenly, "What will I do?"
"You must go on living with the books," she tells him. "Why, what would they do without you, or you without them? I will speak to Lord Burdon. You must live on just the same in the Manor library where we have been together so often—all of us. I shall like to think of you there. It is my wish, Mr. Amber."
She says gently, "There!" as he clutches her hand to his lips. "I will go to bed now. I think I hear Colden coming for me," and as her maid enters, she rises.
Mr. Amber tries for words. That twisting mouth forbids them, and he turns to hold the door open.
"Thank you. Good night, Mr. Amber. Here is our kind Colden so thoughtful for my sleep. I am ready, Colden. Yes, I will take your arm. Good night, Mr. Amber." And as Mr. Amber stands watching, there comes to him faintly across the great hall: "We'll rest a moment here, Colden. A little trying, these stairs. Do you remember how he used to take me up? He never missed a night when he was home, did he? Do you remember how he made us laugh about this seat...?"
Then Mr. Amber returns to the library, closes the door and eases emotion by a trumpet blast upon his nose.
III
Mr. Amber took a seat before the fire. He was unsettled, he found, for further progress that night upon the work that had engaged him at the table. But his mind turned to it and from it to the eleven fine volumes into whose company it would go, completing the lives of the Barons Burdon that were the fruits of many years of loving labour—result of "our little hobby." In memory he trod again those happy days—saw himself installed librarian at Burdon Old Manor, a bookish youth, weak-backed, weak-eyed, son and despair of a tenant farmer; rehearsed again that youth's aimless, browsing years among the books, acquiring strange and various knowledge from the shelves, developing affections, habits, tastes that, as with tentacles, anchored him by heart and mind to the house of Burdon. Mr. Amber moved restlessly in his chair and came to the beginning of the great scheme, propounded by her gracious ladyship, that was to become "our little hobby," as immediately it became the purpose and enthusiasm of his life. Well, it was done—or almost done. The results of desperately exciting scratching about the library—among distressed old books, among family trees, among deeds, letters, parchments, rolls, records—were in eleven fine manuscript volumes—only the twelfth to finish.
A leisurely volume this twelfth, now lying on the table behind Mr. Amber's chair. Written up during its subject's short life—dear and most well-beloved to Mr. Amber every moment of it—the volume is as naturally detailed as some of the earlier volumes are naturally scrappy. Pettily detailed, perhaps. Mr. Amber starts with the precise hour and moment—6:15-½ A.M.—of the birth of the Hon. Rollo Percival Redpath Letham; notes his colouring—fair; his weight at successive infantile months—lusty beyond the average, it would appear; date of his first articulate speech; date of first stumbling run across the nursery floor—and suchlike small beer. His father's death is chronicled ("cf. vol. XI, pp. 196et seq.") and he is shown to be yet in his third year when he becomes twelfth Baron Burdon.... Date of measles.... Date of whooping cough.... First riding lesson.... Preparatory school.... First holidays.... First shooting lesson.... Puts a charge of shot into a keeper. It is all very closely detailed. It is detailed so closely that a gap towards the end is made conspicuous: and this is precisely that gap occupied by the "disappearance" of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken in the drawing-room at Hillside. The chronicle, that is to say, is brought very fully up to the May in which, as it shows, my lord suddenly went down to Burdon Old Manor from London, his grandmother being at Mount Street, and thence for a long holiday. It jumps to October and at once begins again to be remarkably detailed, "Our Own Correspondent's" account of the frontier engagement waiting on the table there to conclude it. But of this May to October period, covering the June to August of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken, Mr. Amber, like Mr. Pemberton, for the good reason that he knew nothing of how my lord occupied it, has nothing to say. Let it be said. My lord was in that June secretly married in London: a matter closely germane to this history, and now to be examined.
A BOOK OF THE SAME SIZE, ILLUSTRATINGTHE ELEMENT OF FOLLY
LOVE TRIMS WRECKERS' LAMPS
I
On a May morning, then, love in his heart, purpose in his eye, gathering in his careless hand the meshes that he is going to tug, shaking the unconsidered lives they bind—Rollo Percival Redpath Letham, twelfth Baron Burdon, "Roly" to his gay young comrades of the clubs and messes, was set down at Great Letham by the express from London.
Great Letham marks the nearest approach of the railway to the sequestered villages that touch their hats to the Burdon Old Manor folk. It stands at the head of a country that rolls away on either hand in down and valley. Roughly, Great Letham centres the high lands that bound this prospect on its nearer side, and from its outskirts there strikes away a great shoulder of down that thrusts like a massive viaduct straight and far to join the further hills. From a distance this natural viaduct admits to minds however stubbornly practical the similitude of a giant's arm. Rugged and brown and scarred it lies, not green in greenest summer; and the humped shoulder whence it springs, and the great mounds in which it swells along its path, present it as a mighty limb out-thrust to hold away the hills in which its fist is buried. Plowman's Ridge, they call it; and afoot upon it, it is kinder of aspect. Aloof, aloft, alone, the wayfarer stands here, and breathes or breasts the ceaseless wind that saunters or like a live thing thunders down its track; and has on either hand a spreading valley, whence curls the smoke of scattered hamlets, uprise the spires, come the faint sounds of creature life and gleam the fields, as spread upon a palette, coloured in obedience to this and that design of husbandry.
The railway skirts the eastward vale; along the tranquil westward slope the Burdon hamlets sleep. Viewed from the Ridge, they are ridiculously alike; ridiculously equidistant one from the next; ridiculously tethered, as it were, along the foot of the Ridge—like boats along a shore; ridiculously small to have separate names, but named in their order outwards from Great Letham: Market Roding and Abbess Roding and Nunford—linked by those names with the monastic ruins at Upabbot in the eastward vale; Shepwell and Burdon and Little Letham. They are tethered to the Ridge, and the Ridge is the most direct communication between them. Visitors from village to village, or from Great Letham to any, climb the slope and use the Ridge, rather than plod the winding roads that, as twelfth Baron Burdon has often declared, "take you about two miles from where you want to get before they let you loose to go there."
He struck out along the Ridge now.
Burdon village was his destination; and as he pressed his way towards it, putting up his face to snuff the familiar wind, speeding ahead his thoughts to what he came to seek, twelfth Baron Burdon showed himself a very personable young man. His tawny hair he wore closely cropped about his strong young head; beneath a straight nose he grew a little clump of fair moustache shaved bluntly away at the corners of a firm mouth. At a bold right-angle his jaw came cleanly from his throat; and his chin was thick and round, matching his open grey eyes to advertise purpose and command. A Burdon of Burdons Mr. Pemberton had named him. A high-spirited young man, vigorous, alert; very boyish in mind, very dominant of character. A Burdon of Burdons. Through a long line the bone of whose quality was their "I hold!" twelfth Baron Burdon inherited a spirit that, when crossed, was quick to be unsheathed as from their scabbards the eager swords of remote ancestors were quick,—dangerous as they. "Enormously high-spirited, difficult to handle," Mr. Pemberton had told new Lady Burdon. It was handling he could not brook. The lightest feel of the curb threw up his head as the fine-tempered colt's. Brow and lips would assume signs that spoke, even to one unacquainted with him, the imperious resolve of mastery.
He was in pursuit of mastery now.
II
As he came abreast of Burdon he edged down the Ridge, making towards a little copse that ran up from a garden behind the last cottage in the village street, the nearest to Little Letham. In the roadway this cottage displayed, suspended from its porch, the notice, painted in white letters on a black board:
POST OFFIC
(The painter had misjudged the space at his disposal but had added the missing E on the back of the board, "Case," as he explained, "unnybody be that dense as to turn her round to see what her do mean.")
The cottage served in those days for the reception and distribution of all the letters of the westward vale, a community little bothered with correspondence; and "Post Offic" was conducted by a slight little woman whom some called Postmum, some Miss Oxford. She was the daughter of a former vicar of Little Letham; to twelfth Baron Burdon she was Audrey's sister.
Deep in the trees, as he approached the copse, the sharp white of a skirt caught his eager eye. Taking a grassy path, he went noiselessly down and presently was separated from his Audrey by the dense thorn that hedged the tiny glade in which he found her. A basket of young fern roots was beside her and she was stooped, her back towards him, exploring in the undergrowth.
He thought to steal up to her, and tried. The dense thorn locked him, and she heard him and turned swiftly towards him.
She was flushed with her stooping. Now a deeper flush rose beneath her colour, sinking it in a warmer glow that stained her exquisitely from throat to brow. The dark violet's shade was in her eyes; when her colour abated, the pale rose's delicacy might have been shamed against the fairness of her skin. She wore no hat; her soft brown locks unruled the ribbon at her neck, and the breeze stirred her hair in little waves about her temples. Her arms were bare where she had thrust her sleeves beneath her elbows. She stood poised, as one might say, upon the feet of surprise; and her lips were slightly parted, her gentle bosom seeming to hold her breath as though she feared the smallest sigh would waft away the sudden gladness that had caught it.
She just whispered, "Roly!"
"I'm caught in this da—infernal bush," Roly cried, struggling.
"I wasn't to expect you for a week, you wrote."
He began to writhe and wrench. "You needn't. I shall stay here forever, I believe."
She gave the merriest laugh: "You're simply fixed!"
"Wait till I get at you!" He tried and was more firmly held. "I say, what thedickenshas happened to me?"
She put her hands together, enjoying his plight as a child that bends forward at a play. "You'll never get through there, Roly. You'll have to go back."
He wrenched and struggled: "Go back! There's a great spike or something sticking into me!"
His struggles broke a network of branches at his waist. A thorny bough sprang loose and whipped beneath his chin, forcing up his head.
"Good Lord! Look here, Audrey, I shall cut my throat and bleed to death; or this dashed spike will come slick through my back in a minute and impale me!"
"Roly! If you knew how funny you look!"
Her tone, the way in which (as it presented itself to him) she "squirmed" with childlike glee, caused him to laugh the jolliest laugh. No quality of hers attracted him as this fresh and innocent and childlike happiness that was her first characteristic; in none he found so great delight as in the fount of innocence through whose fresh stream came all her thoughts and words like young things at play.
He laughed the jolliest laugh: "Well, I've not come all the way from town just to look funny. I tell you, it's serious. I've never imagined such a fix. I'm dashed if I can move a finger now. Audrey, if you've got a woman's heart that feels, you'll help me out. This infernal thing under my chin—just move that and I'll show you how we fight in the dear old regiment—Damn!"
"Oh, it has cut you!" she cried, all concern as a moment before she had been all glee.
A step brought her face within a hand of his. She found place for her fingers between the thorns of the bramble beneath his chin. She drew the branch downwards, and the action caused her to bend towards him until their brows and eyes and lips were level. She looked directly into his eyes and he directly into hers; and each read there those dear and ardent mysteries that love far better images than ever love can voice.
He no more than breathed, "Kiss me, Audrey."
She waited for the smallest part of a moment. Entranced, enthralled, they only heard a lark that was a speck above them send down a tiny melody, and far upon the down a sheep-bell's distant note. Love's thralldom and Love's music to his thrall. The oldest play that mortals play; and never know befooled were often meeter than enthralled, nor better an ass to bray than some hymn seem to rise in benison. She kissed him tenderly upon the lips; gave the smallest sigh and breathed, "Dear Roly!"
Comic were the word for such a thing.
III
Comic, and comic that which followed when he, released, was with her in the glade and, seated by her, took her hands and bent her to his purpose.
"Now, listen to me, Audrey. Put both your hands in mine."
She responded as he bade her, performing surely the most beautiful action in the world as she gave her hands to his. All human life has no act more beautiful than the weaker hand confided to the stronger, nor any nearer Godhood than when strong hand takes the weak.
He enclosed her hands within his own. "Listen to me, Audrey," he repeated; and, as her hands had been her spirit, he possessed and drew her spirit on.
Yet comic is the word: for here—he planning, she agreeing—they made the plans they thought should make all bliss, all happiness their own; here, in fact, trimmed wreckers' lamps to shipwreck happy lives. He had determined upon secret marriage with her, and had determined it as the perfect solution of difficulties whose consideration was in some degree creditable to him. For as he told himself, and told his Audrey now, nothing prevented him from openly declaring his intention of contracting a marriage that would cause a breach between himself and his grandmother; nothing but the impossibility of enduring such a breach; that was unthinkable.
"Passionately devoted to his grandmother," Mr. Pemberton had told; "and she, for her part, making all the world of him." It was precisely this uncommon devotion between him and his dear "Gran" that drove him into torment of perplexity when first his heart informed him life without Audrey was insupportable. With utmost content he had surrendered himself into the object of Gran's adoring pride and, as such, into her control of her dear possession. As he grew older, that control had sometimes come to irk a little. "He sometimes chafed—chafed, if you follow me," Mr. Pemberton had said. But the quality of that chafing required better understanding than even Mr. Pemberton could give it. It was not at conflict of will between himself and Gran that Roly chafed; he knew his own determined character well enough to know that if he liked he could override her will as he overrode that of others who thought to oppose him. Where he chafed was where his devotion to her pricked him. He could not bear the thought of giving her distress; and he would sometimes chafe when—at this, at that, at some impulse or boyish fling of his—he thought her distress unreasonable; unreasonable because it shackled him unfairly; because either he would submit to it, or, taking his way, would suffer greatly, be robbed of his pleasure, at thought of having caused it.
But always, when the thing was over, be glad he had given way to her or most desperately grieved he had pained her. He knew that he was everything to her; how hurt her then?
With such the measure of his love for her, such the devotion between them, and such that devotion's price, what a situation was presented for his perplexity when Audrey came to occupy his heart! She had been his playmate in his childhood at Burdon Old Manor, she at the Vicarage. When her father died, Gran had expressed her fondness for his daughters by using her influence to procure the establishment of a post-office at Burdon and persuading the elder sister to conduct it, thus keeping them, as she had said, "near us." That was one thing; a head of the house of Burdon's marriage into so humble a degree—and that her Roly—he knew to be unthinkably another. She had great plans for great alliance for him—at some future date. At some future date! At her great age and at his extreme youth she could scarcely think of him as man—always as boy. It was one of the things that sometimes chafed him. But when, as had happened, the subject of marriage came up between them, and he would laugh at her immense ideas of his value, she would always end so pathetically: "But, Roly, how shall I bear any one to come between us?"
Rehearsing it all, "How—how in God's name?" he had desperately cried to himself, "can I tell her of Audrey?" She whom he could never bear to distress—how give her this vital hurt? She from whom—for the suffering it would cause her—he could never endure to be parted, how deliberately put her away? He would tell her his intention; how endure what she would say, or not say? He would carry out his purpose and she would leave him and must shortly die; and how endure her death in such circumstances? Or, haply, he would prevail on her to stay with him; and she, supplanted, jealous of Audrey and gentle Audrey fearing her. And how endure that?
No—to create such a breach insupportable, and insupportable life without Audrey. What then?
It came to him as complete solution, and as complete solution he pressed it now on Audrey, that he would marry Audrey first, then after a little while tell. The more he examined it, the more obvious, the less impossible of failure it seemed. "Gran, dear," he imagined himself saying, taking his opportunity in one of those frequent moments when, out driving with her or sitting alone with her in the evening, she loved just to sit silent, resting her hand on his,—"Gran, dear, I've something to tell you. I've done something and done it without telling you, so as to have you go on living with me like we've always lived together. Gran, I'm married—Audrey, Audrey Oxford; you remember, dear?"
Imagining it, he could imagine her arms about him. "Gran, I'm married"—easy and kind. "Gran, I'm going to marry, going to marry Audrey Oxford"—cruel, impossible!
The solution removed also an obstacle to their mating on Audrey's side—her sister. Their courtship had been carried on against her sister's disapproval. Maggie was twenty years older than Audrey, more mother to her than sister, and sharp-tongued in the matter of Roly's frequent visits, the more surely to avert the disaster in which she believed they must end.
"In time—it's only a question of time," she had once said to Audrey, "he will forget you, turn to his own position and responsibilities in life—leave you broken-hearted. How else can it end?"
And Audrey in tears: "What if I tell you he has asked me to marry him?"
"He has asked you that?"
"Maggie, he has."
"Has he told Lady Burdon?"
"Not yet, because—"
"Ah!"
And Audrey: "Oh, how can you say you love me?"
And Maggie: "Audrey! Audrey!"
And Audrey: "Maggie, I didn't mean that,"
And Maggie, steeling her heart: "But you think it: the first result of him. You are girl and boy; you don't understand. Why, I, who would die if you were to die, would rather see you dead than betrothed to him. If it ended in marriage, it would end in misery."
And later she had said to him: "If you break Audrey's heart, I will never forgive you. That's a poor threat. I would find a way perhaps—"
So there was Maggie stood in the way; and the solution found a way round Maggie. And there was lastly all the clatter of his friends, all the active disapproval of his elders; and the solution found an easy way around that. He could not hurt Gran; he could not conciliate Maggie; he could not face himself gossiped of, implored, advised, reproved; and the solution offered an easy way around it all. Easily winning Audrey to it,—her hands in his, his spirit possessing hers—he came to details. He had examined and arranged everything. He had made inquiries as to Registry Office marriages. They were both of age. There was a residence formality: well, she was coming on a visit to a girl friend in Kensington; he would take a room in a hotel in the district. They would meet at the Registry "one fine day." Long leave from his regiment was due. They would go on the continent—"all over the place, the most gorgeous time"—and afterwards—easy as all the rest was easy—Gran should be told.
He ended: "Audrey—married!"
And she: "Roly! ... Oh, Roly!"
Comic were the word for such a thing.
IV
Comic the word; but if, instead, you choose to judge them and to consider preposterous his arguments of the case between his Gran and his Audrey and preposterous his solution of it, beg you remember that life is going to be an impossible affair for us, a thing to drive us mad, if we are going to judge it by the standard of the correct and noble characters that you and I possess. By some means or another we must stoop down to the level of our neighbours and try to judge from there. Dowered with all the virtues, as you and I are, it is the easiest thing in the world to be impatient with another's folly, to despise him for it, to indicate how little moral courage will rid him of its effects; nay, to go further, and to declare it inconceivable that such blunders and follies and misbehaviours, as for example those upon which Roly and his Audrey were now embarked, can really have been committed. But that is a stage too far. We must not run our excusable intolerance of folly to the length of calling impossible even the most absurd actions, even the most incredible weakness of character. The whole history of mankind results precisely from these absurdities and these incredibilities. On the one hand, we should still and should all be in Eden if it were not so; on the other, there is the distinctly moving thought that you and I, faultless, are dependent for our entertainment on exactly these impossibilities of character in others: but for them we should never enjoy the delicious thrill of being shocked, never (the thing is unthinkable) be able to thank God we are not as others are.
No, we must accept these impossible follies on the part of our neighbours: but to understand them—nay, if we are too utterly high and they too utterly low for that, then merely to pay the poor devils for the entertainment they give us—let us try to see as they see, feel as they feel, become naked as they are naked to the bitter chill of cowardice, of temptation, of God knows what indeed that strikes them to the bone.
Let us try, and coming to these two, let it for Audrey at least be excused that she was the gentlest thing and all unschooled in any heavier book of life than the airy pamphlet that begins "I love;" with "I love" continues; with "I love" ends; and never asks, much less supplies, what "I love" means, or what demands, or whither leads, or how is paid.
LOVE LEADS AN EXPEDITION INTO THE UNFORESEEN
I
He married her—and wearied of her. Within two months of when he called her wife—and pressed her to him and kissed her for the fondness of that name, and chaffed her with "Wife" in place of Audrey at every lightest word—within two months of that tremendous day he was discovering himself checked and irritated by the vexations, the hindrances, the deceptions imposed by secret marriage upon his former free and buoyant way of life. Within three he was openly irked, not hiding from her that his temper was crossed when, stronger and more frequently, incidents arose to cross it. Within four months—and still their secret undeclared—he was often neglecting her, often silent in her presence for long periods; brooding; frowning at her where she sat or where she walked beside him; leaving her in a storm; returning to her in remorse; assuring himself he did not love her less, nay, rather loved her more—But...! Every way he turned and everything she did and all the things she did not do, brought him and bruised him against the bars of which thatButwas made.
All this most wretched and most pitiful, most excusable and most inexcusable business may best be examined in the incidents that stood out to mark its progress. Theirs was the oldest and most frequent of human errors. They had jumped into the delights of the foreseen, and behold! they found themselves in the swamp, in the jungle, in the desert, in the whirlpool of the unforeseen.
II
Audrey wrote and told Sister Maggie—a letter pledging her to secrecy, posted on the very moment of departure for the Continent ("at our wedding breakfast at the Charing Cross hotel, darling; and the train just going") and breathing ecstasy of happiness, and breathing love all atremble in its prayer for forgiveness. It informed Maggie that they were to be Mr. and Mrs. Redpath until everybody was told; and "O, darling Maggie, I shall not sleep until I get your letter—Poste restante, Paris, dear—telling me you forgive me and how glad you are."
Forgiveness was not to be discovered in the reply by the weeping eyes that read it. "You have made a most terrible mistake," Maggie wrote. "You say that you are happy, but you will find you can only be miserable while you are living in deception."
The wounding sentences were written in a firm, clear penmanship that in itself was cold and bitter reprimand. As they appeared, so Audrey read them. She did not know that they were written while the hand that made them could be steadied from its trembling desire to send a message only of devotion, only of prayer for Audrey's happiness, only of blessing. The letter brought to Audrey's eyes the tears that Maggie hoped to bring but ached to bring—forcing herself to be cruel in order to be kind; also it brought belief that Maggie was and wished to be estranged. It was never answered. Wisely intended, unwisely executed, misread, it added to the record of human perversity another of those immensely pitiful blunders that solely and alone are the cause of human unhappiness. When Heaven holds its reassembly, Heaven, as we seek out our loved, will surely ring with broken, loving greetings of: "I did not know! I did not understand!" No more will need be said. All tragedy, all sorrow is in those words; all tragedy, all sorrow removed by them.
Roly also had his letter. "If you cause her one single moment's unhappiness—" and other wild words. He did not show it to Audrey. Cause his darling unhappiness! He kissed away the tears her own letter had brought and laughingly cheered her with an amusing account of an incident in the hotel lobby. "We'll have to get out of this place, Audrey. There's a man staying here and his wife that I know well. Great pals of Gran's. I near as a toucher ran bang into them."
It was the first glimpse of the Unforeseen.
III
The first glimpse of the Unforeseen! At the moment neither recognised it for such. At the moment it was merely "A dickens of a squeak. I say, we'll have to look out for that kind of thing, old girl." Later, and that before very long, incidents of the kind began to be realised as the Unforeseen indeed. "That kind of thing" became, or seemed to become, extraordinarily and exasperatingly frequent. What had promised to be the fun of looking out for it became the strain of avoiding it.
There came a day—in Vienna, an original item of their programme but reached much earlier than intended owing to "That kind of thing's" persistence—there came a day when signs of the strain were suddenly evidenced, when, like a disturbed snake, unsuspected and sharply alarming, the Unforeseen upstarted and hissed at them. Audrey had struck up a pleasant hotel acquaintance, the matter of an hour's chat, but related rather enthusiastically to Roly. At dinner that night she pointed out her friend. "Right at the far end—look! By that statue sort of thing. In pink, with that tall man; d'you see, dear?"
He saw; and with concern she saw him set down the glass he was raising to his lips and saw his face darken. He said: "Damnation! It's Lady Ashington. It's maddening, this kind of thing. By God, it is. I'm going. She'll spot me in a minute. I'm going."
His violent words hurt her and frightened her. He got to his feet and she made to rise also. That worsened the incident. "Stop where you are," he said angrily. "Both of us getting up—making people look! I can slip out behind here. Damn this business!"
When she followed him to their room, she found his temper no better that he had gone without his dinner. He had made arrangements, he told her, for them to leave early in the morning, and he named their destination. She tried to pretend not to notice his mood; but her voice trembled a little as she said, "I've never heard of the place, dear."
He grunted, a little ashamed of himself: "I don't suppose anybody has. I hope not. We must get off the beaten track. Badgered about like this from pillar to post. It's getting on my nerves."
She faltered, "I'm so sorry, Roly."
Her tone pricked him. But these men hate above all things to feel in the wrong when they are in the wrong. The effect of her humility was to make him explain: "I don't know what possessed you, Audrey, 'pon my soul I don't, to go palling up with that woman."
Again she blundered. His reproach was so absurd that she laughed quite naturally at it: "O Roly! how ridiculous! How was I to know you knew her?"
He turned on her, alarming her utterly. "You ought to have known!"
Foolish, exasperating tears in her eyes: "How could I? How could I?"
"I've told you—I've warned you; that's what I mean. I've told you that every dashed soul I ever knew seems to be all over the Continent. I've warned you to be careful. Asked you not to get in with people. You absolutely don't care, seems to me. Perhaps you think it funny dodging about like this—perhaps you enjoy it. Well, I don't. That's enough. Let's drop the subject."
IV
So and in this wise the miserable business jolted towards its climax; deeper blunders at every step and every blunder additional to the load that stumbled them into the next. Here was a young man that had taken to himself pleasures, and lo! they were chains, rattling whensoever he moved most grimly to remind him that now limits were imposed upon his movements; that he who, by virtue of his rank, of the blood in his veins, of his own high, careless, fearless air, that he who by virtue of these was wont to look every man in the face more boldly than the most of us, must now hide, dodge, shift, dissemble, or betray the secret that, as to his torment he found, every day and every covering deception made more impossible to discover to the world.
Of all mankind's infirmities nothing than deception so quickly, so deeply and so surely turns the quality of his behaviour; nothing so cruelly tears, so acidly pierces his nerves; nothing so saps his resolution, destroys his moral fibre. Honesty is sword and armour, bread and wine; deception a voracious canker in the vitals, a clutch out of hell dragging through fog of fear, through slough of sin, into mire unspeakable. He was in its torments, he was writhing from them into deeper blunders; he began to shudder at the thought of proclaiming his marriage—yet.
She saw his plight and, all unschooled in life, she contributed to the disaster. Here was the gentlest creature, adoring and mated with an impetuous mate that now was as a free beast trapped, goaded by the sudden bars that caged him on every side, wildly seeking an outlet, panicked at finding none. She searched her miserable pamphlet of "I love," stained now with tears. It had nothing to give her. She read into it that in marrying her Roly she thought to have brought him nectar, and lo! it was a cup of poison she had given him, tormenting him utterly. She blamed herself. Through wakeful nights she watched him where he lay beside her—troubled often now in his sleep—and sought and sought, fumbling her pamphlet, to know what amends she could make him; and chid herself she was a burden to him; and would sit up in the darkness and wring her poor young hands in her distracted grief.
He noted the results that these distresses of her mind introduced to her appearance and her behaviour. They did not aid the difficulties with which he found himself beset. This was the beginning of the period of neglect of her; of silence in her presence for long periods; of brooding; of frowning at her where she sat or when she walked beside him; of leaving her in a storm, returning in remorse; of assuring himself he did not love her less, nay, rather loved her more—But!