“I confess I don’t understand——”
“Mr. Rivers would marry me,” she said, wistfully, “and then I should live in London!”
Egidia laughed—she could not help it! This, then, was the net result of her carefully arranged plan for indoctrinating her guest with the pleasures of respectability and the advantages of a defined social position.
“My dear woman, forgive me!” she exclaimed. “Have you the very remotest notion of what you are saying? You cannot have the most elementary knowledge of social laws if you imagine that a man having married a divorced woman—divorced on his account—could take her out, and expect his friends to call on her! On the contrary, you and he—God help you both—would have to forego all society. You would have to live abroad in some shady place, and be thankful for the company of blacklegs and second-rate women, or else make up your minds to live entirely apart from the world. He would not mind that; he is used to it; but you! What would you do without life, movement, and, above all, consideration? That is what I was asking myself when I looked down the table to-night, and saw you happy and gay——”
Mrs. Elles demurred.
“Well, pretending to be happy and gay—though I really and truly believe you were. As you have just been saying yourself, you were in your element. And I thought what a volcano it was that you were standing on, and how, if the worst came to pass, howdifferent a life yours would be from this you covet—and all the time you were thinking that the very fact of your divorce would entitle you to it all! Good Heavens! Instead of sitting there, gay and important, admired and attended to, with people taking the trouble to mesmerize you and analyze you and take your soul to pieces for you, you would be hidden away in some little foreign town—Boulogne, say?—cut, snubbed, and penned up for life with no other society but that of the man you have dragged down along with you, and involved in your ruin, and who would end by hating you in consequence.”
Mrs. Elles cried out, outraged. “You forget—you forget that he proposed to me—when he thought I was free!”
“I beg your pardon——” Egidia said, vaguely.
“No, don’t beg my pardon, you meant to be kind—but——” She stopped, and her whole manner altered as the humiliating suggestion took root in her mind. “Tell me—you must mean—tell me in so many words—you must mean to say that he never really cared for me? For God’s sake, speak out!”
“If you ask me to speak out honestly, then I don’t think he really did! He is not what is called a marrying man.... Now you will of course never be able to forgive me.... Let us both go to bed now at any rate—I am quite worn out!”
She turned aside wearily, and passed through the portière, letting her hand drag after her, as she went. Mrs. Elles’s vexation at her plain speaking diedbefore a more generous instinct of gratitude to the woman who had befriended her in her need. She caught hold of the fugitive hand——
“Oh, don’t leave me like this; indeed, you are my best friend. Thank you, thank you—for telling me the truth. I ought to know it.”
“It is only my opinion!” said the other, suffering herself, however, to be drawn into the room again, by the insistent tenderness of her rival, which touched her, and made her feel a brute.
“Yes,” Mrs. Elles went on sadly. “Only your opinion, but you have known him so very much longer than I have.” She would have been equal to the mental sacrifice of adding, “and so much more intimately,” but hardly dared, lest it was taken, not as a compliment but as an impertinence. “I only saw him for a month, and even in that time I could not help loving him—adoring him.... How could anyone help it? Could you?”
“No,” Egidia murmured under her breath, too much moved to resent the question.
“It is just those very silent men whom every one adores,” the other went on. “But he always preferred his art to me. I knew it at the time, only I was so blinded. Then when he realized that he was compromising me, he did the honourable thing, and proposed. Of course I don’t suppose he thought me quite impossible, he felt it would be just bearable to be married to me, if he had to be married, but he had never meant to be married, as you say. But youmust see, that if I come to think that, how very much more humiliating it makes it for me—how painful to have to think that one was only proposed to out of pity and a sense of duty!”
She turned her face away, sobbing.
Egidia put her arm round her. She could unfeignedly sympathise with the very real sorrows of wounded vanity. She felt she had spoken plainly—with full conviction and honest intent, it was true, but still plainly and perhaps brutally. She was conscious that her care had been all along for the man, and not the woman.
“My dear, my dear,” she said, drawing Mrs. Elles close to her, “there is another thing I see—that saves it a little—a good deal, I think!”
“What?” asked Phœbe Elles.
“You don’t really love him either!”
“What, not love him?”
“No, you think you do, you would die for him, of course, but you don’t love him. You happen to have chosen him for an emotional centre, every woman, if she is a woman, has to find an emotional centre, but she does not always choose well. Edmund, like all geniuses, is self-centred without being selfish; you understand me; he is to be regarded as exempt from the ordinary responsibilities of humanity, morally and otherwise. He is quite willing to be worshipped—what man is not? but he has no time to worship, or be aux petits soins with anybody. He could not, if he liked, make any woman happy, certainly not apassionate woman. She could never exist long in the rarefied spiritual atmosphere into which dear Edmund would want to lift her, where he lives—and flourishes. He can feel, of course, the big things, but he has, as it were, no small change of emotion at any one’s service. And he doesn’t, on his side, ask for anything. He is sufficient unto himself. Did you not observe, when you were with him, how he accepted your devotion, but made no demands on it!”
“He let me rub his colours for him!” Mrs. Elles said, laughing.
“Do you mean to say you did not feel the curious sense of aloofness, of want of sympathy with poor humanity, that the consciousness of a mission—even an art mission—seems to bring with it? Not for humanity’s woes; no one can be kinder than Edmund, if you are in real trouble, but he is the kind of man who would never notice if you had cut your finger, or had got a new frock on. Now woman wants more than that here below—at least I think so!”
She laughed, Mrs. Elles was wondering how she could talk like this about the man she cared for.
“I am being very didactic, I fear,” Egidia said suddenly. “And boring you.”
“No, no,” said the other vehemently. “I love discussing people. I have noticed all you say in Mr. Rivers, but still—— And do you know,” she went on eagerly, “all the men who speak of him seem very fond of him, so is it only women he snubs?”
“Oh, men like him and respect him, but they don’t slap him on the back, and confide their pleasant weaknesses to him! He is manly enough, but I don’t know how it is, he is quite out of it in the smoking-room.”
“He is very much at home in a woman’s boudoir, at all events!” said Mrs. Elles, a little bitterly.
“You mean mine,” the other replied with her usual directness. “Well, he is my cousin, and he knows I like to hear him discuss the only subject he cares to discuss—art. He tells me his ideas for new mediums and the experiments he is making. He laments the volatility of the prettiest colours, such as aureoline, and the impracticability of Nature as a model. We never talk of anything more personal than that, and all he condescends to look at here is a sunset over Westminster as we see it from my windows.”
“Do you like that sort of subject best yourself?” Mrs. Elles said wistfully, going out of herself for once, into the other woman’s mind, and realizing the bitterness of renunciation that informed the words so laughingly spoken.
“Oh, I—well, I am a woman, and no wiser than the rest. That is why I have been telling you all this, because if you once realize that I—have been there myself, in short—you will more readily let me help you and him. You see, though I am hopeless—absolutely hopeless”—Mrs. Elles stared; this strange woman might have been talking about cooks,for all the emotion she showed—“I am not even miserable about it. I know so well that if Edmund came to me and went down on his knees to me to marry him, I should refuse, he could not make me as happy as he makes me now. If I were a wife, I should not care to be second to anything, not even to Art, nor would you. I have realized the finality of it all, and so must you. But now, you must trust me, please, and not think, when I talk to you of your affairs and Edmund’s, that I am fighting for my own hand, and mean to secure him for myself, in the end, as soon as I have helped him to get clear of his entanglement with you. You see—I speak quite plainly.”
Mrs. Elles’s eager disclaimer of any such interpretation of Egidia’s behaviour was not so much the outcome of an emotional confidence in the woman who had so bravely, so wildly, so foolishly committed herself, as of the strong conviction which her words carried. She was secretly a little overcome and puzzled by the spectacle of so much single-mindedness and bonhomie in the unveiling of a soul’s tragedy, such as she conceived Egidia’s to be. She herself could not have been anything but tortuous in the telling of such a piece of secret history. The novelist’s methods were not hers. They went with the whole character of the woman, with the honest eyes, and shrewd, fine, but uncompromising mouth.
Egidia used her novelist’s privilege of supposed social emancipation sometimes, and braved conventionalities. She went once—or twice—to see her cousin in his studio. It was obviously impossible for her to receive him in her own house, while Mrs. Elles was an inmate of it.
Mrs. Elles had now been her guest for some months. She had written at the outset, in obedience to Egidia’s instructions, a letter to her husband, long and reasonable, announcing her present whereabouts, and laying the circumstances and facts of her stay in Yorkshire fully before him. His only reply to her had been a curt communication through his lawyers, informing her that he was determined to proceed with the case, and would even consent to defray the cost of her defence by a suitable firm of London solicitors, whose name and address he mentioned.
“He pays to get rid of me!” Mrs. Elles had commented bitterly. She had up to the last moment believed in the existence in Mortimer’s heart of a latent love for her. She was a woman before whom every man must necessarily bow the knee, even her husband. She was now a little disillusioned.
“Such a man should be glad to have such a wife asme, on any terms!” she observed to Egidia. “It is worse than quarrelling with one’s bread and butter; it is quarrelling with one’s culture, as well!”
But it was painfully obvious that Mortimer Elles did not now set so high a value on the Muse who had for ten years honoured his fireside.
These were the things that amused Egidia, and indemnified her for the trial of housing the delinquent, and being the recipient of her oft repeated confidences. She always thought, and spoke to Rivers, of Phœbe Elles as of a wayward foolish child, whose material interests they both had at heart, and of the impending divorce case as of a mere legal and technical difficulty into which the indiscretion and imprudence of this particular child had plunged herself, and her friends.
“Pooh!” she said to Rivers, in an off-hand manner that was half assumed. “You don’t know what Love is, either of you! She talks of it, and you don’t, but you are both alike!”
Rivers still used his old habit, the one Mrs. Elles had noticed, and suffered from, that of refusing to take up other persons’ speeches unless positively called upon to do so. He was working now against time, standing intent, mahl-stick and palette in hand, under the pale white globe of electric light, which dimly lit the whole vast studio, and concentrated itself upon his head, that was not so dark as it used to be.
“The little fiend! She has managed to turn hishair grey!” Egidia said to herself as she stood near him, but not near enough to interfere with the free play of his brush-arm, and talked softly, and in a way calculated to make no direct demand on his attention. Mrs. Elles had learned that art, too, in the glades of Brignal. Rivers never looked round at Egidia, but continued to lay on touch after touch with unerring precision and mastery. He now and then stepped back a few paces, and glanced at her, just enough to avoid jostling her in his backward walk, but that was all.
“Do you like Dr. André?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes, well enough why?”
“Because I think he admires Phœbe!”
“Does he?” was the indifferent reply.
“She is probably with him now—or at her lawyer’s.”
Egidia spoke tentatively, as if she were consulting him as to her own line in countenancing the intimacy between the two. Perhaps a desire to ascertain Rivers’ own personal feelings on the subject of the little flirtation unconsciously influenced her.
“There is no harm in André,” said Rivers decidedly. “And, poor little thing, it does her good to be taken out of herself!”
“Nothing ever really does that!” Egidia rejoined. Inwardly she said, “Oh, no, he can’t care for her.” And her face, unconsciously to herself, took on a joyous expression. She went on, with a manner of detached criticism:
“I never, in all my literary life, met any one who lived in herself so completely. Keats speaks of a woman who would have liked to have been engaged to a poem and married to a novel, but Phœbe goes one better, she is her own poem, her own novel. No spectacle, no literature in the world interests her as much. She is always pulling herself up by the roots, as it were, to account for her moral—or immoral—growth, and telling one all about it.”
“And does it bore you?” asked he.
“On the contrary, it interests me deeply. And to do her justice, she is a charming companion, so gay, so lively. No one would imagine what she is suffering. The Merry Martyr, I call her.” There was the very slightest touch of mockery in her tone.
He made no remark, and she continued:
“I gave her that drawing you gave me—the one that had a sketch of her in it. She did want it so badly, poor girl, and after all, she sat for it, and had a better right to it than I!”
“I will give you another!” said Rivers.
“Will you really, Edmund? That is nice of you.” She flushed with pleasure. “Now I must go back to my young woman of the sea!” She laughed.
“Be kind to her!” said Rivers, “but you are, I know. You are a good woman!”
“Am I? But I get very angry with the lady sometimes, when she talks as if this divorce of hers was a sort of smart tea-party she was going to in the immediate future.”
“But that is the right way to look at it,” said he, “and a tea party that won’t come off either!”
Egidia stared at him; she wondered if this was the flippancy of bitterness or indifference?
“They won’t be able to prove what is not true,” the artist went on, with some fire, but at the same time carefully laying and mixing burnt umber and madder brown on his palette. “There isn’t really the ghost of a case, as I told the old woman, her aunt, when she came and made me a scene. It will be all right. Elles will abandon the charge, or we will get it squared out of court. It isn’t worth thinking about.”
He applied the mixture he had made with a firm square touch.
“Oh, I see,” said Egidia, “that is why you are able to paint away so composedly! I was wondering—I had thought that in the face of such a possible horror you would have not been able to do anything. That is why I have distressed myself so much about it all. Are you sure you are not pretending—that you are not more disturbed than you care to own?”
“I don’t let it trouble me,” he said, adding with a certain intentional deliberation, “I am an artist before all!”
Egidia said she must go home. Rivers unyoked his palette from his thumb, and laid it down carefully. He led her out of the studio, downstairs, past walls covered with framed diplomas, and medals, and all kinds of memoranda of a life spent in the service andhonor of Art. His house in Bedford Square was pre-eminently a bachelor’s house; an indurated, deeply ingrained celibacy was suggested by the presence of many articles of furniture, and the absence of others. Rivers was of the orderly description of bachelor, of all kinds the most inveterate. Egidia, in her mind’s eye, could not see the little Elles throning it here, her trivial prettiness overwhelmed by the grandiose style of decoration appropriate to the mansions of Bloomsbury, her eyes resting on high wall spaces hung with old masters, her footsteps treading staircases whose angles were filled with yellow casts of heroic statues. There was never a bit of drapery, or a Tanagra figurine to reduce the scale a little. It was all the difference between the atmosphere of the British Museum, and a Louis Seize Boudoir. Egidia felt happier at the definition of this anomaly between the tastes of Rivers and Phœbe, and went away having absorbed some of the contagion of Rivers’ confidence in a renewed term of celibacy for himself.
Mrs. Elles had not yet returned when she got home, but came fluttering in presently, and touched her shoulder as she sat over the fire shivering with the chill depression of thoughts that would rise, in spite of the consoling visit she had just made.
“Cheer up!” said Mrs. Elles. “I have brought you a little present, nothing particular, only to show that I love you. A little gold lucky bean. Will you wear it to please me?”
She sank down on the hearthrug, and laid herhand, and for the moment her head, on Egidia’s knee. This was one of her “caressing little ways,” to which Egidia was ashamed of objecting.
“Where have you been?” she said coldly. “With the Doctor or the Lawyer?”
“Lawyer. Right away down to Holborn. Of course, I got there too soon. I generally do. I am so eager to hear what fresh news they have. A divorce case is so exciting. But then I have to wait, in the lobby, among all that barren brownness of cheap varnish, and trodden oilcloth and japanned tin deed boxes stacked up to the very horizon. There I am on one of an awful row of bulging leather chairs, where the crowd of witnesses sit—I mean the grimy people that keep coming in, wiping their cuffs across their mouths, and sit down apologetically. They are to be examined in this or that disgusting case, as Jane Anne will be in mine. I watch the commissionaire adding up figures inside his queer hutch of a desk, and read up all about Salmon-Fishery Laws on the walls and see the little bow-legged clerks hop off their stools, and run about with sheaves of papers. Why can’t they make lawyers’ offices prettier?”
“Divorce,” said Egidia, “would really become too attractive if it were run in connection with a restaurant or a manicure establishment.”
“And then,” Mrs. Elles went on, “when I do see Mr. Lawler, I cannot help thinking that he is laughing at me. He treats me like a child——”
“Instead of an erring woman!” said Egidia.“Well, you should not wear your hats so terribly on one side. The dignity of crime——”
“Yes, I must really get something plainer!” Mrs. Elles returned, taking her literally. “I nearly cried to-day, and it did not go with my hat at all.”
“Why did you cry?”
“Because—I can stand a good deal—but when he repeated all the awful things that woman was prepared to swear against me, I nearly gave way. The whole case, they say, stands on her evidence, and it is false, outrageously false. She always hated me, she cared for Mr. Rivers herself. It was notorious that she did.”
Egidia sneered a little, almost in spite of herself. “Who next?” she said.
“She was very nearly a lady,” Mrs. Elles said apologetically, “and he was kind to her, but he never flirted with her—of that I am convinced. But if the jury believe her, Mortimer will get his case, to a certainty!”
“Did they tell you the details—of what she was going to say?” asked Egidia, shyly and awkwardly.
Mrs. Elles told her, at some length, but without much hesitation.
“Oh, she can’t realize!” thought Egidia, brooding. “She can have no imagination!”
Her own conjured up so vividly the horrors of the scene in court—the scene that must come now, in spite of Rivers’ pathetically confident assertions.
“She can’t love him, or know or care one little bitwhat he suffers—or is it that she thinks that she will get him herself in the end? And so she will, for he is a man of honour. Ah, but she shall not, if I can prevent it. It will be the best plot I ever invented, if I can pull it through, and then I suppose I must take the veil, to show the purity of my intentions!... God forgive me, if he loves her! But he does not!... He is an artist before all. He said so himself, this very day. And no man loves disgrace, and such disgrace would kill love, if ever it existed!”
“What are you thinking of?” asked the other presently. “You look like the tragic muse, or Althea, before she put the burning brand back into the fire again. You have a very strong face, do you know? It is a pity Mr. Rivers isn’t a figure painter, then he could paint you.”
“I wish—somehow—you would not talk of Mr. Rivers.”
“Why not? I am always thinking of him.”
“That you are not.”
“You think me very frivolous?” Mrs. Elles sighed out. “But I only laugh that I may not weep—I go about trying to kill thought. If I did not, I should go mad with what is hanging over me! And the worst I have to bear almost is the thought that though I am thinking so constantly of him, he is not thinking of me—except as a disagreeable incident—a burr that has somehow got stuck to him, and that he cannot shake off!” She got up and walked about alittle, evidently a prey to real mental perturbation. Then she turned suddenly.
“Egidia, I want you and him if possible to know this, that I shall not marry him, even if I am divorced for him. I could not, after what you said.”
She spoke pettishly, like a child or a schoolgirl, but all the strength and sadness of renunciation was in her eyes. She evidently meant what she said. Egidia realised this, but the complication of her feelings about this little Helen kept her silent awhile. She took her hand, however, and held it, in sign of amity.
“I want, Phœbe,” she said presently, “to go out of town for two or three days. Do you think, if I did, that you could amuse yourself—and keep out of mischief?”
“You speak to me as if I was ten!” Mrs. Elles said. “I am not sure if I mind? What is mischief?”
“Oh, you know—things that might prejudice you—in your new position. I need not mention them—you know the kind of thing?”
“Can I go to see the Rembrandts with Dr. André?”
“The poor man’s in love with you—but there would be no harm in your going to the Rembrandts with him, I think,” Egidia answered easily.
By ten o’clock of the next day she was gone.
. . . . . . . .
Mrs. Elles felt a really irresistible impulse, to do what she did. “It was as if something called me!” she said afterwards. “I felt that I had to see him.”
So two days after the day on which her friend had left London, the dreary gas lamps of Bedford Square fluttered, and the black mud shone prismatically under the feet of a little woman, wandering without judgment or system, round and round the square, enquiring of nodding applewomen, of burly policemen, of scurrying street arabs, and honouring them all with the gracious smile of drawing rooms, the way to No. 99 in that region.
“Why, there, Missie, under yer nose,” said the last of the policemen, pointing to the number, written black and jagged over the fanlight of the house near whose very doorstep she was standing. He thought the young lady a little touched in the head; there was indeed a wild look in her eyes, born of the consciousness of her own audacity, and the wild joy of seeing Rivers again.
She rang the bell, and a grim, demure-looking Scotch servant—Rivers’ staid old housekeeper, of whom she had often heard—answered it.
“Can I see Mr. Rivers?” she asked.
“Mr. Rivers doesn’t paint figures, Miss,” said the woman kindly, and with the manner of one delivering an oft repeated statement. “But Mr. Brandard, over the other side of the Square, is always glad for us to send models over to him.”
“I am not a model,” said Mrs. Elles, vexed and ashamed. “Here is my card. Will you take it to Mr. Rivers, and ask if he will see me?”
The perfectly civil Scotchwoman took it, with ablank neutral face. She showed the visitor into a half vestibule, half room, on one side of the passage. It was perfectly ordered and arranged, there were no landscapes on its walls—it was, she knew, a fad of the painter’s not to hang his own pictures. There were other people’s pictures, etchings, engravings, with flattering inscriptions, “A mon ami—à mon confrère—hommages”—signed with some of the greatest names in the land. A sense of the worldly importance of this man whom she was going to drag through seas of disreputability grew in her mind, and affected her more deeply than Egidia’s hints and lectures had done. She was literally a burr hanging on this great name, and she ought to kill herself sooner than let herself be associated with it in men’s minds. It was then that the idea of suicide first came to her.
The servant came back.
“Mr. Rivers is very sorry indeed, Ma’am, but he is not able to see any one to-day.”
“He——” Her lips trembled; her whole body shock at the blow. She turned, lest the woman saw her face.
“Is there any message I can give, Madam?”
“No, thank you, no message,” she answered, with her face still averted, and drifting out into the street.
She leant against the palings of the Square, and sobbed. Was it love, or vanity—or shock?
“How brutal—how brutal!” she repeated to herself.
The policeman on his beat turned his bull’s eye on to her.
“Are you going to tell me to move on?” she asked him, plaintively.
“No, Madam,” he replied, and she was a little assuaged. At least he saw that she was a lady. She dried her eyes, and crossed back to the pavement, and down a side street. As she passed a little postern-like door in the wall—Rivers’ happened to be a corner house—it opened, and the artist came out. He still had her card in his hand.
They stood and faced each other.
“Oh, my God, how ill you look!” she exclaimed, “and it is all my fault. Won’t you even give me your hand?”
“Are you mad?” he said, contemporaneously with her speech. “Good God! was there ever a more idiotic thing for a woman in your position to do?”
He seized her arm, almost roughly, and led her away from the door.
“What are you going to do with me?”
“Put you in a cab, of course! You must not be seen here with me, on any account. I could hardly believe my eyes when your card was put into my hands.”
So saying, he tore it across with a rancour that pierced her heart.
“You are most unkind!” she complained, following him in his great angry strides down the street, “and unnecessary. It is quite dark, no one could seeme, or recognise me, and I do so want to talk to you. If you must take a hansom, choose one without a lamp. Egidia is away, for two days. I don’t know where she has gone. I felt I must see you, do you hear? It is a month since I have been in London—a month of agony.... Did you hail it?” she asked nervously, as a cab drew up along the kerbstone.
She put her hand appealingly on his arm.
“I won’t get in, unless you promise to come with me, so far. I must—I must talk to you.”
“You are behaving like a child.”
“I know I am,” she said, “only because you are behaving like a——”
What was she going to say? She did not know herself, only that a crushing sense of estrangement, of inevitableness, had come over her; the prop of an unacknowledged hope that had stayed her for so many weeks had been rudely withdrawn. The man she loved was a stranger; she had surely never lived at his side, day in, day out, through the summer that was past? A wave of despair overwhelmed her, black as the mud she looked down on, as she stood, her foot on the step, prepared to abandon her point, and go back alone.
But she had gained it.
“Anything sooner than a scene in the street!” she heard Rivers say wearily to himself, as he got in beside her.
“How cruel you are—how inconsiderate! SurelyI have the right to a few words with you! I will never perhaps speak to you again in this world!”
He sat, stiff in his closely-buttoned overcoat, like a statue beside her, and spoke no word.
She took his hand, as it lay on his knee.
“Forgive me—do forgive me! I am so sorry—so dreadfully sorry!”
“What for?” he said, gently.
“For bringing this on you—this—this disgrace. And you cannot forgive me, that is just it. I realised it when you refused to see me just now, and sent me a message by a servant.”
“I had to. Think, yourself! You must really not be so unreasonable!”
“I am reasonable—quite, quite reasonable; and saying good-bye to you, if you only would let me! Yes, you never cared for me much, and now the little ghost of love is laid forever. This threatened disgrace and exposure has killed it. But it was there—don’t take that from me—a little love, and the rest of it pity. Egidia says so, and I believe her.... Stop, stop, I am not asking you to say anything—I had rather you did not protest.... Oh, look at that great red Bovril sign flaring out! It looks as if the whole street was on fire. It must frighten the horses....”
Her voice broke into a sob of hysterical terror.
“Dear——” began Rivers, clasping her hand more tightly.
“How nice of you! It hardly sounds at all perfunctory! And yet I know it is. Don’t try any more. Let me tell you that I don’t mind this for myself, but only for you, and I mean to defend myself tooth and nail, only for your sake. I know what it means for you. If Mortimer and his paid accomplices can succeed in lying me away from him, then the world will expect you to marry me.”
“Yes,” he said, “and I will!”
“Ah, but it takes two!” she replied, in tragic accents. “You can’t marry me against my will. Supposing I am not there?”
He allowed the usual empty threat of suicide to pass unheeded.
“I shall ask you to, at any rate,” he said, doggedly.
“Oh, yes, you will ask me!” She was playing so well that she almost enjoyed it. “Oh, yes, you will ask me, because you are a man of honour—and I shall refuse, because I am a woman of honour. I will not be behind Egidia, whom you respect, in that. You are right. She is strong and good. And she loves you.”
“Please don’t.”
“Surely you and I have no need to mince words? She loves you, and if you marry any one, it ought to be Egidia. She is devoted, she is an angel, and she would rather see you dead at her feet, than married to me!”
She never looked round, or she would perhaps have realised the exquisite annoyance she was inflicting on her helpless victim, penned up as he was beside her,powerless to prevent or avoid the stream of tactless heroics she was pouring on him. His forehead was contracted, his hands were clenched together over the doors of the cab.
“We are coming to the more crowded streets now,” he said suddenly, “and it is really very dangerous for you to be seen with me. Had you not better let me get out, and leave you to go the rest of the way alone?”
She replied, with desperate and intentional incisiveness, “I permit you to leave me, since you wish it.”
He put up his arm, and raised the trap door. Mrs. Elles raised her hand to intercept his, but let it fall hopelessly down again, on a glance at his set face. The cab stopped and he got out, and standing half on the pavement, and half on the foot-board of the cab, held out his hand.
“Good-bye!” he said, “for the present!”
The reservation was kind in intention, but she would not accept it.
“Good-bye—forever!” was her answer, as her hand, gloveless, out of her muff, went forth to meet his.
“How cold you are!” he said, as he took it. “I am sorry. But it is better I should leave you now, isn’t it? Forgive me for being such a bear, but I have to think for both. I will write if I may?”
“You needn’t,” she whispered, retreating to the corner of the cab, like a wounded animal. “Tell him to go on!”
“Is there anywhere you can tell him to go—some shop—and then discharge him and take a new one? It would be safer!”
“Tell him to go to the New Gallery!” she said, defiantly, and Rivers accordingly did so, and left her.
Dr. André was waiting for her in the dim-lighted halls of the New Gallery, where large-eyed solemn-faced women, some of them so like Egidia, as she thought, looked down from the walls on Mrs. Elles in her somewhat elf-like prettiness, as of a picture by Tissot. All she had in common with them, was her large wide-open eyes, eyes without depth or mystery, and with unresting lids that had perhaps never drooped to hide an emotion worth the name, or a secret worth the keeping.
“I was afraid you were not coming after all!” the hypnotist said, in his soft, authoritative voice.
She sank on to a red leather causeuse, and blinked pathetically.
“Don’t speak to me for a moment!” she whispered, throwing back her head and turning her profile only towards him.
“You have a headache?” Dr. André asked sympathetically.
She shook her head, and in that nugatory shake strove to indicate the region of her heart, as the seat of her uneasiness. He had the tact to hold his tongue, and presently she remarked, with a little sigh, “What nice pictures!” as a hint that conversation might begin.
“You don’t care about pictures to-day,” he said, laughing. “You are terribly upset, I can see. Have you had bad news? Have you been fighting with wild beasts at Ephesus?”
She was pleased at his way of putting things. He was alluding to her interviews with lawyers: of the circumstances in which she found herself he was now quite au fait.
“Wild beasts!” she said. “Well, not quite that, but—people are very odd, and never behave exactly as one has a right to expect them to?” Her accent was slightly interrogative.
“Most men will bully a woman if they get a chance!” said he, looking at her keenly.
The butterfly did look a little crushed, a little subdued, as if she had only very recently been brought face to face with some of the crude realities of life of which she was always talking.
“But it is against all my theories,” he continued.
“I believe in people too much,” she went on. “And the consequence is, I give myself away, and make a fool of myself.”
“You don’t say so?” said Dr. André, politely, and tenderly.
He was not one who looked for wisdom in women; it was on charm that he insisted. He admired Mrs. Elles extremely. She reminded him of Heine’s famous definition of a latter-day Venus—“a cross between a dressmaker and a duchess.” The little touch of red on her cheek that was not rouge, butwhich gave her the faintly meretricious air beloved of décadents, pleased him; her large eyes, fuller at this moment of tears than of expression, were bent on him sadly and consciously appealing. By what art she avoided the vulgar catastrophe of falling tear-drops he did not know, but the brilliant result he could fully appreciate. He was a poseur himself, and her assumption of pose on his account flattered him.
“I wish I could help you,” he said, wondering if he would dare to take the little white hand stiff with rings that lay ungloved on the red-covered ottoman beside him. “Dare” was not the word—André was a determined flirt, and would dare most things,—but would it be advisable? He cared for her enough not to want to frighten her.
“You know I would do anything for you!” he confined himself to saying, and in spite of himself there was the strongest ring of sincerity in his voice.
“I know you would,” Mrs. Elles replied with pretty assurance. She knew that though he imagined he was only flirting, he was more nearly loving than he was himself aware. That was the way she liked it best; if he were to begin to think himself serious, he would begin to be tiresome, and she would have to discourage and snub him, and “see less” of him, as the phrase is. She did not want to lose him. Her intercourse with the distinguished hypnotist had acted as a derivative during this troublous period of her life. She hardly realized his uses, in that capacity, but Egidia did, and set no impediments inthe way of their frequent meetings. Phœbe was a fool, but Dr. André was a gentleman.
After having been scolded and bullied, as Mrs. Elles conceived herself to have been, by her ascetic and frigid lover for the last hour, it was sweet to be sympathized with, respectfully petted, and made of much account by Dr. André, who was willing to act as a souffre douleur. And though he was not nearly so handsome as Edmund Rivers, yet his face had a great deal more expression. Though his eyes were not deep like Rivers’, they were mesmeric. His soul was willing, nay anxious, to go forth to meet hers; it did not, like that of Rivers, obstinately remain hid in its fastnesses of reserve, to baffle and disappoint her, who was always on the look-out for the evidences of spiritual and intellectual communion.
She rose from the ottoman, giving herself a little shake. She tried to imagine herself in a world that knew not Rivers, or Egidia, or Mortimer. They were not here, what had they to do with her? Did they live? Her senses were not aware of them. Why then should she take them into account? What was this thing that was troubling her? Had she any present evidence of its existence? Did it exist, then?
Trying to solve this intense problem in metaphysics, she went round the Gallery with her accommodating cicerone, who kept up a running commentary of wise, witty, and educational remarks, without, however, in the least expecting her to takein or appreciate them. He knew exactly the kind of woman with whom he had to deal.
Suddenly they came on a representation of the Parcæ, three dreary, terrible old women sitting huddled up in a cowering circle, weaving, shaping and cutting the thread of the destinies of men. Mrs. Elles stopped and pondered deeply. There was a thread, yes, and many destinies were interwoven with the one. No man or woman stood alone. She had given a promise that had not been accepted, that day, but still she had made it; she had promised to cut the thread of her own life, so as to leave that of Rivers free. It was all very well: she stood there ostensibly her own mistress in that room, beside Dr. André, but the thread of her fate was hopelessly entangled with the fates of two other persons, her husband and her lover. The divorce hung imminent over their heads, the machinery of which they had set in motion, and which now could not be averted.
She turned to Dr. André, and looked mysterious.
“Shall I tell you what had always been one of my nightmares—a suicide manqué! If a person wishes to commit suicide, he should arrange to do it neatly and completely. Instead of that, he contrives to make it a hideous and ridiculous fiasco, and generally goes on humbly living after all!”
“Because intending suicides have as a rule got themselves worked up to such a state of nerves before they think of killing themselves, that having decided on it they are not fit to conduct such a ticklish enterprise. They are so agitated, so upset, they are in such a hurry to get out of the world, when once they have screwed themselves up to the point of resolution, that lest that resolution waver, they rush it, and so muff the whole thing!”
“Yes, but what I mean is that if I were perfectly calm and not in the least agitated, I should still ‘muff’ it, as you say, through not knowing how to set about it—the mere technique of the business would escape me!”
“I shall have to publish a little manual, at your service, ‘Suicide Made Easy!’”
“You must not make fun of me. I am serious.”
“I deeply regret to hear it!” he said, still laughing.
“No, but don’t you know—to a nervous woman like me, it would be an immense consolation to know that I could, at a given moment, get out of it—I mean life—decently and in order.”
“If you must go, why stand upon the order of your going?”
“But that’s just it. I should hate to do it clumsily, ungracefully, grotesquely. I believe certain poisons make you die—quite hideously!” She shivered.
“Nearly all!” he said, teasing her. “But I might mesmerise you—and never wake you up again!”
“You are just as unkind and unsympathetic as the others!” Mrs. Elles exclaimed, pettishly. “Let us go home.”
“Must we?” he said.
“Even if I didn’t want to,” she said, “they wantto be rid of us. Look, they are putting out some of the lights!”
“That is nothing. You want to punish me!”
“Oh, no, I am not cross with you. I only am disappointed in you,” she replied, wearily. “You can see me home if you like. I want to walk, it might drive my headache away.”
“I shall be delighted. Besides, as we live in the same house—or block—my way is yours, in a literal sense, at any rate.” He led the way to the door, and got her her umbrella. “I live so near,” he went on, as they turned down Regent Street, “that when the burden of life becomes really too hard to bear, you can send for me to come in and turn you off neatly.”
“I hate that word ‘neatly’!” was all she vouchsafed to reply. He spoke of other things and she answered absently and jerkily. As they drew near Westminster, she said, looking up at him:
“I do wish you would trust me!”
“Of course I do trust you, in what may I ask?”
“You might trust me not to use anything you might give me. I should just keep it by me, the means of Death, as a man keeps a sleeping draught by his bedside, and the knowledge that one can put an end to wakefulness at any moment makes it possible to stand it, don’t you see? I could bear my awful life better—oh, so much better—if I knew I could get out of it at any moment! But nobody understands me—no—not even you.”
The accent she contrived to throw on the lastwords touched him a little. He looked at her keenly but said nothing, and she continued defiantly:
“Well, if I am left to my own devices, there’s always the six chemists, and a fourpennyworth of laudanum at each! Oh, I know what one does. I’ve read novels.”
“Too many! They are such a perversion of real life. Well, I will see what I can do,” he said slowly.
She turned and caught hold of his hand.
“You can put it in an envelope, and seal it—with black sealing wax! It will be a bottle, won’t it? A tiny bottle?”
“I shall put it in one of those little Venetian tear bottles,” Dr. André said, smiling. “It will be what Browning calls ‘a delicate death.’ But”—his tone was as serious now as she could wish, “you must promise me faithfully not to use it ever! I should be your murderer, do you know? Do you want to hang me?”
She promised, smiling at his simplicity. She took his hand more than cordially in the lift that stopped, and deposited him, on a lower floor than hers.
“Is it possible that a magnetical rapport can be established between a man and a woman who loves another man?” she thought. “That would explain. At any rate he is kind to me—far, far kinder than Edmund.”
She dined alone and cried. Late that night a tiny little parcel was sent up to her from Dr. André. She shivered when she looked at it, and locked it up under two keys.
Egidia got out of the train at Barnard Castle, as Mrs. Elles had done, months before. She took a fly, and drove four miles to Greta Bridge.
She knew every inch of the ground from the description which Rivers and Phœbe had at different times given her of it.
She was full of purpose. Jane Anne Cawthorne was the worst enemy of the two that she had taken under her protection—Jane Anne Cawthorne was prepared to swear falsely—Jane Anne Cawthorne’s mouth must be stopped.
Egidia thought she could do it, fairly and squarely, and without this girl’s evidence, so she gathered from the lawyers, the case against Rivers and Phœbe would fall to the ground.
It was Jane Anne Cawthorne herself who came forward civilly when she alighted at the door of “Heather Bell,” and asked for rooms. Egidia was as urbane in manner as she could be towards the woman who cared for Rivers, and was yet prepared to testify falsely concerning him.
“A low type!” she thought to herself, “a potential villain, but still susceptible to moral influences. They have bribed her, but all the same, she is doingthis thing par dépit amoureux. Therefore an apt subject for diplomacy. How low I feel! But if I can only get him out of this, I don’t care what I do.”
She secured the very sitting-room that Rivers and Mrs. Elles had shared together, and derived a melancholy pleasure from the idea that it was so. There was the very rose-strewn table-cover, stained and splashed with the dabbling of the artist’s brush; there was the piano on which Mrs. Elles had played to him. But outside, in the wintry garden, the dark dank earth lay heavy upon all the flowers and verdure that had gladdened the eyes of the lovers. For in spite of Phœbe’s frivolity and Edmund’s asceticism, she could read through Phœbe’s admissions and falsifications, that for a brief space they had been lovers—the woman in her had been genuinely stirred, the man in him. It had not lasted, but it had been. But now it was winter, “the days dividing lover and lover, the light that loses, the night that wins,” the season when no man can paint, and loves that are ephemeral die down and are buried under the wrack of autumn. There was no frost as yet, the December air was mild and subdued, with only a prescience as it were of the snows and disasters of January.
Egidia made a sad little pilgrimage to the scenes of this romance that grieved her so. Brignal Banks under their winter aspect reminded her somehow of a young and pretty woman after a long and devastating illness. It was the same, and not the same, the warm tones had gone out of the green, the raggedboughs seemed blotted in upon the sky; the moist sides of the cliff, that no glow of sunset irradiated now, showed hard and chill behind the streaky lines of the leafless creepers that still hung on them. The water still bubbled and splashed over the stones, but with an empty merriment. So it seemed to the sad woman who stood by the river bank and looked at the bridge of stones made by human labour, that was no longer continuous. There had been a storm or two, and the rains had flushed the river bed, and the added flood had washed the stones away. She would never dare to confess it to Rivers and Phœbe, but she was at immense pains to gather up a heavy stone and try to drop it into a place between two remaining ones, and thus make the bridge passable. She would add her mite to Rivers’ bridge too. Phœbe Elles should not be the only woman who had helped him.
She came away from there a prey to terrible depression, and resolved to visit no more “mouldering lodges” of a past in which she had no share.
A fate seemed to be hanging over the whole world; to the sad Egidia, all the inanimate things that he had seen and touched seemed instinct with the foreboding of the particular disaster that threatened one man. And Jane Anne, too, who waited on her entirely now, at this dull season, when the personnel in the inn was necessarily diminished—was Jane Anne sad, or was it only the accustomed heaviness of the lonely, empty-lived, country girl?
Egidia had written her name, Miss Alice Giles,very clearly in the hotel book, and, in brackets, her nom de guerre, which had a world-wide reputation. She committed this solecism with a distinct purpose. Had her name as a novelist reached Jane Anne’s ears? That was the point she meant to work from.
Jane Anne certainly was full of the little civilities and attentions which that name generally evoked among the celebrity hunters of superior rank among whom Egidia’s ways were cast. Of taciturn habit though the landlady’s niece unmistakably was, she yet beamed on the authoress on every possible occasion, and lost no opportunity of insinuating herself into her good graces as far as was consistent with perfect deference and civility.
At the close of the second day she spoke and asked a question.
“If you please, ma’am,” she said, “might I venture to inquire if you are going to make a book about this place? So many do.”
“But tell me why you think I am likely to?” asked Egidia, with the elaborate indulgence of the conspirator.
“Because, ma’am, I happen to know that you are a writer. A gentleman that comes here sometimes, he gave me one of your books once, and oh, I do like it so! I got him to write my name in it, and who it was from! So I got his too. May I bring it out and show you?”
With the gracious permission of the authoress Jane Anne fetched the book. It was Egidia’s lastnovel but one, and on the flyleaf was Edmund Rivers’ signature. The book had the peculiar sodden appearance of a volume much and carefully read.
“The gentleman gave me lots of books,” Jane Anne went on. “And I have read them all over—hundreds of times. But I like none so much as this. I am so fond of novels! And if it was one written about here, why then I should like it all the better.”
“But this is such a very quiet place. I should not think that anything ever could happen here?”
“Oh, ma’am, don’t be too sure! Last summer now, something happened here, that if you was to put it into a book, no one would believe it! And I am in it too—leastways I shall be!”
“Tell me about it, if you have time,” said Egidia, “and then perhaps I could work it into something.”
“It is something very serious,” said Jane Anne, her heavy brows coming together. “It is a divorce case. I don’t know as I ought to tell it.”
“A divorce case is known eventually to all the world!” said Egidia sententiously. “Besides, you need not tell me the names!”
“Oh, no, I needn’t then,” said the girl, relieved, “but they are sure to slip out in the course of conversation. But then that won’t be my fault, will it?”
“No,” said the other, concealing her amusement at Jane Anne’s morality. “It will be mine—I hope. Come and sit down here, if you are not too busy, and tell me about it!”
Jane Anne was a little thrown off her majesticbalance by the distinguished authoress’s condescension. She sat down, awkward, handsome, interesting even, as a study, but——
“This creature presumes to love Edmund too!” Egidia thought, and hated the mission she had set herself to accomplish, which involved converse, and an assumption of intimacy with her.
“You see, ma’am, it is like this,” began Jane Anne, too humble and modestly conscious of the capacity in which this interview had been granted her, not to begin on it at once. “There is a gentleman, the gentleman who gave me that book, he comes here every year and paints—he always has done—he is not married, leastways we think not!—he is what they call the co-respondent.”
She said correspondent, but it was not her mispronunciation that made Egidia wince.
“Well, then,” Jane Anne went on, “last summer there comes a lady—leastwise a very funny lady, to be a lady—to call herself one, I mean—she was a foreigner, with painted cheeks, and something she did to her hair, and she nivver let our Mr. Rivers alone! He didn’t run after her, he really didn’t, but she had made up her mind to have him, and she did. She was married!”
“This is very interesting, and extraordinary!” ejaculated Egidia.
“But she nivver telled him so, nor none of us. She called herself Miss Frick, and first of all she wore a pair of blue spectacles, but trust her, she couldn’t stick to that long, because, you see, he couldn’t rightly see her face while she wore them, and so one fine day, she went and left them off! That’s why Mrs. Popham will have it that she was a spy! A spy! What for? She didn’t want to spy anything. She just wanted Mr. Rivers, and she got him! They used to go jaunting into the Park at all sorts of hours of the night, and loverish things like that!”
“Oh, then it is your opinion they were lovers?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do, and I am going for to say so. It is me that knows best, the lawyer says so.”
“Whose lawyer?”
“Mr. Mortimer Elles’s lawyer! He’s been down to see me times out of number. Aunt was dreadfully fashed; she said it put me out with my work!”
“And this man—the lover—is he a nice man?”
“Oh—ma’am!”
“Very nice?”
“The nicest gentleman I ever saw, or ever shall see. I would have done anything for him!”
“And she—is she nice?”
“Oh—ma’am!”
“You don’t like her so well, I see!”
“Ma’am, I should like to take and run this darning-needle into her. Brazened painted-up creature, so rude spoken, too—and great staring eyes, with black saucers round them——”
“Whatever she is, he will have to marry her now!” Egidia remarked carelessly.
“Ma’am!”
“Oh, yes, as a man of honour, he is bound to, if she is to be divorced on his account. Did not the lawyer tell you that? How very clever! Perhaps he did not realise how a man of honour would feel under the circumstances. The lover is a man of honour, is he not?”
“He’s a real gentleman, ma’am,” replied Jane Anne, translating Egidia’s description into her own language.
“Well, then, I am sorry for him!”
“But, ma’am, I don’t see why? She is a married woman; she carries on with him, her husband doesn’t like it—he can’t separate them, so he calls in the law to help him.”
“Very nicely reasoned, Jane Anne! But the law only helps the husband to get rid of the woman who has betrayed him, he has nothing to do with the other man, who is of course bound to the woman who has lost her position through him. If the man you speak of is a gentleman, he will do what is usual, you may be sure of that!”
The girl was quite speechless with emotion for a moment, then said, solemnly and sadly:
“Shall I be the one to force him to that, ma’am?”
“What do you mean? What have you to do with it?”
“Because the lawyer young gentleman says it is on my evidence they chiefly rely, to prove the case against him!”
“Oh, then, you may consider that you havemarried her to him, when the divorce is over! But what is your evidence?”
“I saw them,” stammered Jane Anne, “the lawyer says I must tell what I know, and not swear falsely.”
“Certainly you must tell what you know to be true.”
She looked insistently at the girl, but not too insistently, lest she roused her suspicions.
“But I should make as light of it as I could, if I were you, and wished the man well, as you say you do!”
“Then if nothing is proved against him, he won’t have to marry her?” inquired the girl eagerly.
“Obviously not. Her husband will have to take her back!”
“Oh,” said Jane Anne, “and Mr. Rivers be just where he was before?”
“Oh, is it Mr. Rivers? I know him slightly.”
“Do you? Do you? Ma’am, then if you know him, will you tell him that Jane Anne Cawthorne is his friend, and wishes him well. Why, I would like to die for him, I would indeed!”
“Then you had better lie for him a little!”
She looked keenly at the girl as she spoke, and with ever so slight an accent on the word whose first letter she had altered, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Jane Anne redden.
“Understate rather than overstate, you know!”
She now ventured to say this, seeing by the girl’s confusion that the latter course was the one she hadintended to take, or had perhaps even been suborned by a lawyer over-zealous in Mortimer Elles’s behalf to do.
“Nothing extenuate—but naught set down in malice!” she went on. “Don’t deny anything, or hold back anything, but make as light of what you did see as possible!”
“I think I hear my aunt calling me!” Jane Anne exclaimed suddenly. “I will just run and see what she wants, and be back in a moment.”
Miss Giles admired Jane Anne’s method of gaining time. Did she really go to attend on her aunt, or did she simply stand outside the door for a while? In five minutes she came back, looking somehow quite a different woman, and said simply:
“I want you to tell me how I can help him, ma’am?”
“Say simply what you know, and no more!”
“Then,” said Jane Anne, her eyes downcast, “I had better write to Mr. Perkins!”
“Who is he?”
“The lawyer gentleman who came here and saw me. He took down what I said on a piece of paper.”
“Perhaps in what you said then you—exaggerated a little—did not you?”
“Yes, ma’am, I did,” replied the girl, hiding her eyes in the apron she wore, and bursting into tears. “I was so angry with her and with him, because he would not even speak to me that last day, but shook my hand off his sleeve, that I said the worst I could.And truly I never saw no worse than him and her walking up the Broad Walk yonder hand in hand. It was the old lady saw him kissing her through the window, and standing by his bedroom door in the middle of the night. I didn’t see that, but I was there in the garden before,—it was I who took her to the window of his room, but I didn’t look, I couldn’t bear to. But I invented worse, and all I said, I told the lawyer I would swear to in Court.”
“How very awful!” said Egidia. “But if you write and say that you are not prepared to swear this then the chances are that the case will fall to the ground, and you will not have to appear in Court at all.”
“But then I shan’t even see him!” exclaimed Jane Anne.
“See him—no, not then, but if there isn’t any trial, you will have him back here painting as usual next spring, I should think.”
Jane Anne seized Egidia’s hand and kissed it.
“Oh, ma’am, ma’am, you know I never wanted nothing but that. I knew well enough he could never be anything to such as me, but I didn’t want him to marry anyone else.”
. . . . . . . .
“I did not expect him to marry me, but oh, I could not bear him to marry any one else!”
That phrase of the country girl’s was in Egidia’s ears all day as the train bore her southwards, her mission accomplished, and Phœbe Elles and Rivers for ever divided, by her means.
She had done it, and for what motive? Now that it was done, the spirit of self-analysis tormented the woman of letters skilled in the art of heart-searching. The happiness of Rivers was her object, and that she had been convinced lay in his continued celibacy. She herself had nothing to gain by it, wished to gain nothing by it. “I do not, I do not, if I have to go into a convent to prove it!” she said out aloud, in the solitude of the railway carriage. “I am glad we are cousins!” she added, mentally. “All women are dogs in the manger, when the man they love is concerned!” was her reflection with reference to Jane Anne’s pathetic speech. The devotion of the servant for the artist revolted while it touched her. “I wonder how many more there are of us?” she wondered bitterly. “And his method—indifference, and innate incapacity to make any woman really happy. Those are the men who are beloved.... Phœbe Elles is saved—but she won’t think so. So is Edmund—but he won’t admit it, perhaps. At any rate, I do not profit. If I did, I would kill myself!”