“ casements opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
It seemed to me that poor Essie was indeed a captive in some “faery land forlorn,” and that invisible perilous seas were foaming round her casement windows.
She gave a slight shudder, and started up.
A man was walking slowly up and down the bowling green.
“It is he,” she said. “I’ve seen him walk there a hundred times.”
She watched the tall dignified figure pace up and down, and then turned her eyes from him to me. They were wide, and the pupils dilated.
“Beatrice,” she said solemnly,“I must not meet that man. He must not see me, for his sake, and for mine. All his life long he must go on thinking as he does now, that I am ... a dream.”
“The old woman says he starts for Spain to-day.”
Ted’s roundabout figure was suddenly seen trundling out across the grass towards the distant pacing figure.
“Who is that?” said Essie frowning.
“Who is that? Why, it’s Ted of course.”
“And who is Ted?”
“Who is Ted?” I echoed staring at her. “What on earth do you mean?”
She seemed to make a great mental effort.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. It is Ted.My husband.I forgot. You see I’ve never seen himherebefore.”
“You will soon grow accustomed to seeing him here,” I said cheerfully.
She shook her head.
The two men met, and moved together towards the house.
Essie looked round her in sudden panic.
“I can’t stay here,” she said. “It’s a trap. Where can I go?”
Her eyes searched the room. There was no other door in it. She looked at the narrow latticed windows. Her eyes came back to me with sheer terror in them, such as I have seen in a snared wild animal.
“Youmuststay here,” I said, “if you don’t want to meet him. They will reach the open door into the garden long before you could crossthe hall. Stay quietly where you are, and I will tell Ted you are unwell, and are resting.”
The two men were already in the hall. I went out to them, closing the door resolutely behind me.
Rupert Maria Wenceslao di Soto, Duke of Urrutia, was a tall grave young man of few words, with close cropped hair and a lean clean shaven face.
Ted introduced him to me, and then pressed him to have some luncheon. The long table down the banqueting hall shewed an array of which Fortnum and Mason might justly have been proud.
The Duke was all courtesy and thanks, but had already lunched. His car would be here in ten minutes to take him to London. If agreeable to Mr. Hopkins he would say one word on business. He had called to modify his agent’s letter about the mantelpieces. He was willing to sell them all as agreed at a valuation, except one.
“Which one?” asked Ted, instantly changing from the exuberant host into the cautious business man.
“The one in the south parlour,” said the Duke, waving his hand towards the door of the room in which was Essie. “I desire to make it clear, as my agent has not done so, that everything in that room I intend to take with me, so thatin my future home in the Pyrenees there may be one chamber exactly the same as my late mother’s room in my old home here.”
The explanation quite bowled over Ted. The business man gave way to the man of sentiment.
“Most creditable, I’m sure. Filial piety, most creditable. I don’t recall the mantlepiece in question, but of course as your Grace wishes to keep it, I agree at once. Between gentlemen, no difficulties, everything open to arrangement, amicable settlement.”
The old woman, dissolved in tears, interrupted Ted’s eloquence to tell “Mr. Rupert” that his car was at the door.
The Duke led her gently out of the hall, his hand on her shoulder, and then came back.
“I will detain you no longer from your luncheon,” he said. “With your permission I will spend a few moments in my mother’s chamber. It has many beautiful associations for me. I should like to see it once more before I leave for Spain.”
Ted hastened towards the door, but I barred the way.
“Dear Ted,” I said, “Essie is very ill. No one must go in.”
“No one go in!” said Ted flushing darkly. “I am astonished at you, Beatrice. The Duke wishes to see his mother’s room once more, on bidding farewell to his ancestral home, and you take upon yourself to forbid it.”
“My sister-in-law is ill,” I said, addressing the Duke, “it would distress her if a stranger were to go in suddenly.”
“I understand perfectly, Madam,” he said coldly, and made as if to take his leave.
“Stop,” said Ted, purple in the face. “My wifeisunwell. She is overtired, but she is the kindest, most tender-hearted woman in the world. It would cut her to the heart if she found out afterwards she had prevented your Grace’s seeing this room for the last time. Wait one moment, while I go in and explain it to her, and help her to walk a few steps to the settle here.”
And Ted, with a furious glance at me, pushed past me, and went into the room.
“It would be a great kindness to my sister, who is very nervous,” I said to the Duke, “if you would wait a moment in the garden.”
He instantly went towards the open door into the garden. Then I darted after Ted. Between us we would hurry Essie into one of the many other rooms that opened into the hall.
She was standing by the window frantically endeavouring to break the lattice of the central casement, which was a little larger than the others.
There was blood on her hand.
Ted was speaking, but she cut him short.
“Not in here,” she said passionately. “I won’t have it. He mustn’t come in here.”
“He must come in if I say so,” said Ted. The colour had left his face. I had seen him angry before now, but never so angry as this.
“No,” said Essie, “he must not.”
She came and stood before her husband.
“Haven’t I been a good wife to you these five years past,” she said. “Haven’t I done my best to make you happy? Haven’t I obeyed you in everything, everything, everything—till now?”
He stared at her open-mouthed. She had never opposed him before.
She fell on her knees before him, and clasped his feet with her bleeding hands.
“If you love me,” she said, “send him away. I refuse to see him.”
“You are hysterical,” said Ted, “or else you’re stark staring mad. I’ve spoilt you and given way to you till you think you can make any kind of fool of me. Get up at once, and cease this play acting, and come into the hall.”
“He’s in the garden,” I broke in. “You can pass through the hall, Essie.”
She rose to her feet, and her vehemence dropped from her. Her eyes were rivetted on Ted. She paid no heed to what I said. She had no attention to give to anything but her husband.
“I will not come out,” she said, and she sat down again on the divan.
“Then by—he shall come in,” said Ted, andbefore I could stop him he strode to the door, calling loudly to the Duke to enter.
There was a moment’s pause, in which we heard a step cross the hall. Then the Duke came in, and Ted introduced him to Essie. She bowed slightly, but he did not. He stared at her, transfixed, overwhelmed.
At that moment the discreet voice of Mr. Rodwell was heard in the doorway.
“Can I have one last word, Mr. Hopkins? A matter of some importance.”
“Yes, yes,” said Ted darting to the door, thankful to escape. As he left the room he said to me, “Take Essie at once into the hall. At once, do you hear?”
He might as well have said, “Take her to the moon.”
The Duke and Essie gazed at each other with awed intentness. There was sheer amazement on his face, blank despair on hers. They were entirely absorbed in each other. As I stood in the background I felt as if I were a ghost, that no word of mine could reach their world.
At last he spoke, stammering a little.
“Madam, on the night of my coming of age I left the dancers, and came in here, and behold! you were sitting on that divan, all in white.”
“Yes,” said Essie.
“We saw each other for the first time,” he said, trembling exceedingly.
“Yes.”
“And I knelt at your feet.”
“Yes.”
A suffocating compassion overcame me. It was unendurable to pry upon them, oblivious as they were of my presence. I left the room.
“He will go out of her life in five minutes,” I said to myself, “never to return. Poor souls. Poor souls. Let them have their say.”
I had never seen Romance before, much less such a fantastic romance as this, in a faery land as forlorn as this. My heart ached for them.
Presently I heard Ted’s voice in the distance shouting a last message to the departing Rodwell, and I went back to the octagonal room.
He was kneeling at her feet, her pale hands held in his, and his face bowed down upon them.
“You must go,” she said faintly.
He shuddered.
“You must go,” she repeated. “To me you can only be a picture. To you I am only a dream.”
“Yes, it is time to go,” I said suddenly in a hoarse voice. I obliged them to look at me, to listen to me.
Slowly he released her hands, and got upon his feet. He was like a man in a trance.
“Go! Go!” I said sharply. Something urgent in my voice seemed to reach his shrouded faculties.
He looked in bewildered despair at Essie.
“Go!” she repeated with agonised entreaty, paler than I had ever seen a living creature.
Still like a man in a trance he walked slowly from the room, passing Ted in the doorway without seeing him. In the silence that followed we heard his motor start and whirl away.
“He’s gone,” said Essie, and she fainted.
We had considerable difficulty in bringing her round, and, angry as I was with Ted, I could not help being sorry for him when for some long moments it seemed as if Essie had closed her eyes on this world for good.
But Ted, who always knew what to do in an emergency, tore her back by sheer force from the refuge to which she had fled, and presently her mournful eyes opened and recognised us once more. We took her back in the motor to the village inn, and I put her to bed.
Rest, warmth, silence, nourishment, these were all I could give her. Instinctively I felt that the presence of the remorseful distressed Ted was unendurable to her, and I would not allow him to come into her room, or to sit up with her as he was anxious to do.
I took his place in an armchair at her bedside, having administered to her a sedative which I fortunately had with me, and was profoundly thankful when her even breathing shewed me that she was asleep.
I have known—who has not?—interminable nights, and nights when I dreaded the morning, but I think the worst of them was easier to bear than the night I kept watch beside Essie.
She was stricken. I could see no happiness for her in her future life, and I loved her. And I loved poor blundering Ted also. I grieved for them both. And I was sorry for the Duke too.
When the dawn was creeping ghostlike into the room and the night-light was tottering in its saucer, Essie stirred and woke. She lay a long time looking at me, an unfathomable trouble in her eyes.
“Beatrice,” she said at last, “I could not find the way back.”
“Where, dearest?”
“To the house. I tried and tried, but it was no use. It is lost, lost, lost. Everything is lost.”
I did not answer. I tried to put my trust in Time, and in the thought that she would presently see her children in its rooms and playing in its gardens, and would realise that Kenstone was in a new sense her home, though not in the old one.
I brought her breakfast to her in her room, and then, in spite of my entreaties, she got up and dressed and came downstairs. But when a chastened and humble Ted timidly approached her to ask whether she would like to see the house once more before returning to London in a few hours time, she shook her head and averted hereyes. It was evident to me that she was determined never to set foot in it again.
He did not insist, and she was obviously relieved when he left the room. He signed to me to follow him and then told me that he had just received a letter from the Duke asking him to accept the Vandyck in the octagonal room as a present, as on second thoughts he felt it belonged to the house and ought to remain there. The Duke had not started after all, as his ship had been delayed one day. He wrote from the house close at hand where he had been staying till his departure.
“It’s worth thousands,” said Ted. “Thousands. These bigwigs are queer customers. What an awful fool he is to part with it just out of sentiment. But of course I shall never sell it. It shall be an heirloom. I’ve told him so,” and Ted thrust the letter into his pocket and hurried away.
Our rooms were airless, and Essie allowed me to establish her in a wicker armchair under a chestnut tree in the old-fashioned inn garden still brave with Michaelmas daisies and purple asters. The gleaming autumn morning had a touch of frost in it. I wrapped her fur motor cloak round her, and put her little hat on her head. She remained passive in my hands in a kind of stupor. Perhaps that might be the effect of the sedative I told myself. But I knew it was not so.
Essie was drinking her cup of anguish to thedregs. She did not rebel against it. She accepted her fate with dumb docility. She was not bearing it. She was not capable of an effort of any kind. She underwent it in silence.
I told her to try to sleep again, and she smiled wanly at me and obediently closed her eyes. As I went into the house to snatch an hour’s rest and pack I turned and looked back at her motionless figure sunk down in her chair, her little grey face, pinched and thin like a squirrel’s against the garish hotel cushion, her nerveless hands lying half open, palm upwards on her knee.
A faint breeze stirred, and from the yellow tree a few large fronded leaves of amber and crimson eddied slowly down, and settled, one on her breast and the others in the grass at her feet. She saw them not. She heeded them not. She heeded nothing. Her two worlds had clashed together, and the impact had broken both. They lay in ruins round her.
And so I looked for the last time on Essie.
Reader, I thought I could write this story to the end, but the pen shakes in my hand. The horror of it rushes back upon me. Ted’s surprise at hearing that the Duke had gone to Essie in the garden, and that he had persuaded her to drive with him to London. Then his growing anxiety and continually reiterated conviction that we should find her in London, his uncomprehendingfury when we reached London and—she was not there. And then at last his tardy realisation and desolation.
I did what little I could to blunt the edge of his suffering when the first fever fit of rage was past.
“Dear Ted, she did not like the house. She told me she could not live in it.”
“But she would have liked it when I had gutted it. I should have transformed it entirely. Electric light, bathrooms, central heating, radiators, dinner lift, luggage lift,” Ted’s voice broke down, and struggled on in a strangled whisper. “Inglenooks, cosy corners, speaking tubes, telephone, large French windows to the floor. She would not have known it again.”
He hid his face in his hands.
I almost wished the paroxysms of anger back again.
“Oh! Beatrice, to leave me for another man when we were so happy together, because of a house; and an entire stranger, whom she did not want even to speak to, whom she was positively rude to. It could not have been our little tiff, could it? She must have been mad.”
“You have hit on the truth,” I said. “She was mad, quite mad. And mad people always turn against those whom they—love best.”
It is all a long time ago. I married a year later, and a year later still Ted married again, asensible good-humoured woman, and was just as happy as he had been with Essie, happier even. In time he forgot her, but I did not. She had sailed away across “perilous seas.” She had passed beyond my ken. I could only hold her memory dear. And at last she became to me, what for so many years she had been to her lover—a dream.
Footnotes:
[1]Probably originally Morass Hold.
[1]Probably originally Morass Hold.
[2]I thought the recording angel funny at the time until Barrett told me afterwards that it was cribbed from Rhoda Broughton.
[2]I thought the recording angel funny at the time until Barrett told me afterwards that it was cribbed from Rhoda Broughton.
[3]First Published in 1909.
[3]First Published in 1909.
W. Heffer & Sons Ltd., Cambridge, England.
Transcriber’s NoteFootnotes have been renumbered and then moved from bottom of the relevant page to the end of the text.This text has been preserved as in the original, including archaic and inconsistent spelling, punctuation and grammar, except as noted below.Changes below have been made to the original text. Spelling changes are shown below within single quotes. Changes regarding punctuation are shown below in curly brackets, { }, for clarity.Page 16: ‘batallions’ changed to ‘battalions’.Page 21: ‘steping’ changed to ‘stepping’.Page 29: ‘call’ changed to ‘called’.Page 29: {‘conquering hero} changed to {“conquering hero}.Page 35: {“If you do not} changed to {‘If you do not}.Page 35: {these few lines.”} changed to {these few lines.’”}.Page 37: {when Barrett, had} changed to {when Barrett had}.Page 44: ‘obviously’ changed to ‘obvious’.Page 44: ‘seaching’ changed to ‘searching’.Page 45: {his own illusions. “He’s} changed to {his own illusions. He’s}.Page 57: {said gently.} changed to {said gently:}.Page 64: {solved a problem!} should perhaps read {solved a problem:}.Page 65: {She grieved} changed to {“She grieved}.Page 91: {“Do not be} changed to {‘Do not be}.Page 91: {all is well.”} changed to {all is well.’}.Page 92: {high road.’”} changed to {high road.’}.Page 92: {And we were} changed to {“And we were}.Page 92: {tower of Westminster.} changed to {tower of Westminster.”}.Page 95: {“How kind of you to call me in. There is not another house within miles.} changed to {‘How kind of you to call me in. There is not another house within miles.’}.Page 96: {The thunderstorm passed} changed to {“The thunderstorm passed}.Page 99: {and disappointment.”} changed to {and disappointment.’}.Page 104: {Could there have been an accident} changed to {Could there have been an accident?}.Page 106: {she was going.} changed to {she was going.’}.Page 106: {“And what was} changed to {“‘And what was}.Page 110: {didn’t I Blanche} changed to {didn’t I, Blanche}.Page 110: {Do we Blanche} changed to {Do we, Blanche}.Page 114: {Mrs. Robinson is an egregious} changed to {“Mrs. Robinson is an egregious}.Page 116: {good woman find} changed to {good woman, find}Page 121: ‘contrairy’ changed to ‘contrary’.Page 121: {see the goldfish?} changed to {see the goldfish?”}.Page 121: {give him his crumbs.} changed to {give him his crumbs?}.Page 121: {Dr. Giles, every one seems to} changed to {Dr. Giles, everyone seems to}.Page 121: {dreadful it is to be a prisoner.} changed to {dreadful it is to be a prisoner?}.Page 136: ‘decrepidness’ changed to ‘decrepitness’.Page 145: ‘portait’ changed to ‘portrait’.Page 152: {the sign of sickness.} changed to {the sign of sickness.”}.Page 156: {Joan has, never} changed to {Joan has never}.Page 159: {He has taken several prizes?} changed to {He has taken several prizes.}.Page 179: ‘ha’ changed to ‘had’.Page 203: {make any mistake I abhor} changed to {make any mistake. I abhor}.Page 209: ‘out’ changed to ‘our’.Page 212: {father’s estates} changed to {fathers’ estates}.Page 221: {“The ways of love} changed to {‘The ways of love}.Page 221: {thoroughfares of stones.”} changed to {thoroughfares of stones.’}.Page 223: {marrying me I told him} changed to {marrying me. I told him}.Page 225: {ground to listen.} changed to {ground to listen.”}.Page 229: {And as I looked} changed to {“And as I looked}.Page 229: {We neither of us spoke} changed to {“We neither of us spoke}.Page 240: {Who is Ted?” I echoed staring at her. ‘What on} changed to {“Who is Ted?” I echoed staring at her. “What on}.
Transcriber’s Note