"Is that a good deal?"
Reggie frowned. He had been acting for this last week or so with such spontaneity, obeying so instantaneously his inclinations, that he found it hard to answer questions about these things. It is always harder to recall what we have done unthinkingly, than what has been the result of thought or conscious effort.
"I don't know," he said. "We talk about her now and then, but we talk about a thousand things. I don't know what you mean. Lady Hayes said the other day that she was sure Gerty would detest her."
"I think Lady Hayes is probably quite right."
"Then it would be very unreasonable of Gerty," said Reggie, frowning again, "and I don't know why you think so. Why should Gerty detest her?"
"Does she strike you as the sort of woman Gerty would like?"
"I don't think I ever thought about it till Lady Hayes mentioned it, and I disagreed with her."
"You told me the other day that you and Gerty agreed that you only liked good people. I don't think Gerty would think her good."
Reggie flushed angrily.
"I don't really see what you are driving at," he said rather vehemently, because he did see. "I think I won't talk about her any more if you don't mind, mummy. You see she's very kind and delightful to me, and that's all that I have any right to judge by, and I'm sure she'd be just as nice to Gerty."
He sauntered out of the room with rather exaggerated slowness, feeling a little uneasy. He was just conscious that this new element which had come into his life was a very absorbing one, and he wondered a little how absorbing it was in proportion to other things. Eva showed to him a different side to that she showed to the world; she was careful when he was there not to say quite what she was in the habit of saying, when she was with others. She regarded him as a child—a very charming, delightful child—and she knew that the greatest respect, as one of the most finished artists of human life has said, was due to children. In fact, according to his data, Reggie's glowing, adoring picture of her was faithful enough. Why Eva behaved like that to him is a question which concerned her alone, and of which the answer was even now working out in her mind. She had tried the world for two years, and had found it distinctly wanting.It amused her at times, but it bored her more frequently. The frantic interest which she had taken in men and women was beginning to pall a little; even the interest she had taken in herself was not so deep as it had been. It must be remembered that the world, as she knew it, was a certain section of society which, however much its units differ in individuality, is, to a certain extent, all dulled and choked in the limitations of its class, the inexorable need to be well dressed, to be successful, to be smart. Diversity of interest is the only thing that will make interest long lived; and diversity was exactly what was wanting. The gossip, the whispered scandals, the scheming, the jostling, were new to her at first, and she had drunk them down eagerly, but in her heart of hearts she knew that she was just a little tired of it all, and she was beginning to behave as others behaved, not because it was the most amusing thing that could be done, but because others behaved so. On this stale, gas-lit atmosphere Reggie had come like a whiff of fresh air. He had not the smallest interest in scandal or gossip, or any of those things in which her world found its entire interest settled. He was new, he was fresh, and he was young.
Just now that meant a good deal to Eva, for it was the type to her of all she had missed. He was, again, distinctly of her own class—he could not offend the most fastidious taste—Eva would neverhave cultivated a grocer's assistant, however fresh—and he was extremely handsome and attractive in appearance. Her feeling for him was made out of one large factor, and several small ones; for his pleasant manner, his frank good breeding, his beauty, she liked him; for his serene, stainless youth she had a sort of liking that was quite new to her.
That the conception he had formed of her was very far from representing her, she knew well. She had deliberately held the reckless, cynical, unprincipled part of her nature rigorously in check when she was with him. She was sympathetic, simple, divinely kind to him because she liked him so much and knew that he would detest the other half of her. But now a mixture of motives led her to determine to let him know all. It had come to this, that she felt that inevitable longing to throw her nature open to him, to drop this elaborate suppression, to let him see her as she was, and judge her. Our deeper emotions are thickly entwined with the fibres of honesty, which makes even those who are least honest, in ordinary life, scrupulously truthful and open when those deeper emotions are touched. To say that Eva was in love with Reggie would be both overstating it and understating it. He was the symbol to her of her lost ideals, which she found she had loved now she had lost them; and, humanly speaking, she found him very attractive as a substantial embodiment of these.
Eva was sitting in her room one morning, a few days after the talk Reggie had had with his mother, wondering how she had better carry her resolve out, when an idea struck her. She got up and wrote a short note to him:—
"I wonder if you would care to come to the opera to-night with me," she said. "Tannhäuser is being played, and I think I remember your saying you thought the overture very pretty. Do come. Dine here first."
"I wonder if you would care to come to the opera to-night with me," she said. "Tannhäuser is being played, and I think I remember your saying you thought the overture very pretty. Do come. Dine here first."
"Jim Armine shall come too," thought Eva. "He shall chaperone us. Besides, I can't be worldly all alone with Reggie. I must have some one to be worldly with. Decidedly that is the best plan."
The opera began at half-past eight, and Eva, in her note to Reggie, had mentioned "seven sharp" as the hour for dinner, because she wanted to hear the overture. Reggie had routed up an "arrangement" of the music that afternoon, and had got his mother to play it to him, but whether it was that Mrs. Davenport's musical education had been conducted in her youth on the same principles of æsthetics that used to instil intothe young idea the system of "touches" to indicate foliage, or that Reggie did not attend much—in any case, he pronounced it totally unintelligible, and, in his mind, reconsidered his previous verdict of it.
Reggie's "seven sharp" partook of the nature of "seven," but in a less degree of the nature of "sharp," and Jim Armine had already arrived and was talking to Eva. As he opened the door—he was already sufficiently at home to dispense with the formula of being shown up—Eva felt her resolve waver, but determined, if she could, to do what she had intended. She wheeled her chair a few inches further round, so as to be with her back to the door, and began talking in a hard, cold voice.
"Of course, there will be a tremendous scandal about it," she said to Jim, "but you know what the woman is like. Didn't you see her here a fortnight ago? Hayes thought her divine. Of course, men are always blind in such matters. If a woman is beautiful enough, they think she must be good. Now, women do just the opposite. If a woman is beautiful enough, they think she must be a villain. They are, probably, much more likely to be right than men. Ah! Reggie, you've come, have you? I know what your seven sharp is."
Reggie shook hands with her, and looked inquiring.
"Whom were you talking about?" he demanded.
"Oh! it would have been applicable to mostwomen," said Eva. "There has been, or will be, a tremendous scandal about most of us, and it seems to me that most women have been here during this last fortnight. We have been having a week of parties, and Hayes will have to sell one of his villas, I expect. The parties have all been very stupid, but so are the villas, for that matter. Come, let's go in to dinner. Which of you gentlemen will take me in? You're the nephew of a marquis, are you not, Jim? Then you shall go in first, and Reggie and I will follow."
"I've been making my mother play the overture to me," remarked Reggie, as they sat down, "and I can't understand a note of it."
"Oh! the overture is the epitome to the play," said Eva; "you have to know the plot, and then the overture is easy enough. Let's see, I'll give you a little sketch of it. Tannhäuser is a good young man, Reggie—something like you—and he goes to Venusberg. Well, Venusberg is not at all the place for a good young man. There is no propriety of any sort observed there, and they are very lax about etiquette and other things. Never go to Venusberg, Reggie, or, if you do, take Mrs. Reggie with you. If she won't come—and I don't expect she will—you had better not go at all. It is said to be very unsettling."
Jim Armine laughed. Lady Hayes was inclined to be talkative, and he always thought it worth whilelistening to her when she was talkative, because she always had something to say whenever she said anything. He wondered a little why she had taken it into her head to say this just now, but she always talked with a purpose, and he was content to assume the purpose. But Reggie was wofully puzzled. He had not known her like this, and he very much wanted explanations.
"I don't understand," he said. "You know I'm very stupid. Do tell me what you mean."
Eva cast one look at his anxious, frowning face, and trifled with her fish.
"I must do it," she said to herself; "I cannot let things continue as they have been."
"Oh! it gets easier further on," she continued, "as Humpty Dumpty said; and you'll understand it all when you hear the overture again, according to your new lights. Of course, the Venusberg is only an interlude in Tannhäuser's life, and everyone has interludes in their lives, or else they would not be human. Tannhäuser is a pilgrim, and the pilgrims march about to slow music all the time. Venus, of course, does not go about to slow music—quite the contrary, in fact; and, when you hear the two together, the contrast is very striking. Tannhäuser goes away from Venusberg, you know, before the end, and dies in the odour of sanctity."
Eva stopped for a moment, and Jim Armine laughed again.
"You are admirably lucid," he said. "You seldom explain yourself so well."
"Thanks for the compliment," said Eva. "And you, Reggie, do you find me lucid?"
Reggie was listening to her with a puzzled air.
"I expect I shall understand better when I've seen it," he said.
"Yes; you can't fail to understand it then," said Eva, "or, if you don't, you will be even more charming than I thought you. I wonder if you are capable of it. I am talking nonsense to-night; you must forget it to-morrow."
"As long as you remember it just during the opera," said Jim maliciously.
Eva's mind was thoroughly made up, and she choked the rising misgivings.
"He must know some time," she thought, "and it is best I should tell him."
"You are going to be Adam in the garden of Eden, possibly for the last time," she said with mock solemnity, which covered her own earnestness; "to-night the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will be offered you—"
"By the woman?" asked Jim, indicating Eva.
"On the contrary," said she, "by Augustus Harris. Every man since Adam has had it offered him sooner or later, Reggie, and the majority of them eat it. The apple, in this case, is Tannhäuser, accompanied by mycomments on it. It's a funny sort of apple. I'm giving you the core first, which is rather dry, probably, and the fruit comes afterwards, like dessert after savouries."
"The core is rather hard," remarked Reggie unceremoniously.
"Oh, it will taste quite different when you chew it up with the fruit."
"Give us some more of the core," asked Jim.
"Well, there's Venus, of course," said Eva, "about whom I haven't told you anything yet. She is just the opposite to the pilgrim's march; she regards things from an entirely different standpoint, you know. I'm always a little sorry for Venus. Tannhäuser goes away just when she has got very fond of him."
Eva stopped a moment and looked at Reggie.
"But, of course, you mustn't consider her at all. Tannhäuser is usually done on Saturdays, you know, and Venus would not go at all well with Sunday morning service. Poor dear, how the Litany would bore her! She stops in the porch, when you go into church, and when you come out she is gone. She hasn't gone, really, you know; she is only having a stroll, and she always comes back, very often before Monday. If she doesn't come back, most men go to look for her, and they usually find her again."
Reggie stifled a sudden sense of misgiving with staunch loyalty, and smiled at Eva.
"I told you I was stupid," he said, "the first time I saw you, and I confess to being absolutely stupid now. I don't understand you a bit."
Jim regarded Reggie as a successful interloper, and could not resist the temptation to be slightly malicious.
"After all, it is the most delightful thing in the world to be able to keep up our mysteries," he said. "Nothing intelligible is so charming as what is mysterious. When you understand anything, the charm is gone."
"Nonsense, Jim," said Eva; "don't pay any attention to what he says, Reggie. It is very easy to be unintelligible."
"Yes, it seems to be," said Reggie, rather absently, but resenting Jim's remark, which savoured of patronising.
Eva laughed.
"You won't get any change out of him, Jim," she said. "He has often assured me he is very stupid, which no stupid person is capable of doing. I must go and put on a cloak. There is just time for you to smoke a cigarette before the carriage comes."
Eva got up and left the room, and Reggie lit a cigarette, and strolled to the window. He had no particular liking for Jim Armine, and Eva's words had disturbed him. He was growing more conscious of the fact that his life was beginning to find a new centre, and a mystery which was quite new to it. His strong,genuine liking and admiration for Gertrude had not diminished a whit, but he did not conceal from himself that he thought with more excitement about Eva. But he felt himself able to retain both these interests without any sense of compromise. He was engaged to marry Gertrude, and he would have been genuinely puzzled if it had been suggested to him that such an engagement, to some minds, limited his liberty in becoming indefinitely interested in another woman. In fact, the extreme simplicity of his character appeared to be going to land him among some perilously complicated and unknown shoals. He was young, ardent and unreflective, and these divine gifts are capable of dealing back-handed blows in the most inopportune and unexpected ways.
But Eva's words this evening had startled and perplexed him, and his bewilderment was touched with distrust. He expected, as Eva had told him, to find the key to his perplexity in the opera to-night, and he half realised that the explanation might be appallingly significant. Years afterwards he remembered those few minutes, which he spent looking out of the window, with much greater clearness than he remembered what followed. A mental, like a physical shock, often produces a dimness in the memory. Men who have been in great peril of death will remember with great vividness the most insignificant circumstances just before that peril; how they were walking round the slipperycorner of rocks coated with ice, how a little purple gentian grew just above the crevice where they found a handhold, how at their feet was a trickle of water, where the sun had melted the snow. Then came the slip, and the activity of the mind seems suddenly quiescent. As they slid powerlessly down the icy stair, they noticed nothing, even the bitterness of death was passed—they were inanimate arrows from the bow of natural laws.
In the same way the little details of those few minutes when he waited for Eva to put on her opera cloak were engraved indelibly on Reggie's mind. Years afterwards the faint, acrid smell of red geraniums brought back the whole evening with a throb of sudden awakening. The window was open, and the flower-box outside was in full scent and colour. A canary creeper climbed the trellis-work at the sides of the windows, and twined its green, muscular stalks round the painted wooden squares. Between, a row of gaudy geraniums grew up from a groundwork of low mignonette, not yet in full flower, and in the front of the box a fringe of dark blue lobelias shivered on their hair-like stalks in the evening air. Beyond lay the grimy, dusty, square garden, and over the road, between the house and it, bowled silent, smooth-running carriages, within which he caught sight of the shimmering of silk and jewels, and over all brooded the hot, weary sky, exhausted with the long, sultry hours, but beginning togrow a little more serene, a little less stifled in the cool of the evening.
Reggie looked at these things not knowing he was noticing them, and forbearing to guess what Eva meant. He was surprised to hear the door in the room behind open, and to find that Eva was ready, and his cigarette was nearly smoked out. He had not thought that she had been gone more than a few seconds.
"Well, Reggie," she said, "have you been thinking it all over? Are you prepared for the great change. I think it is coming to-night, but, of course, there is nothing so easy as prophesying, and nothing so inconclusive. Well! we shall see. At present the carriage is waiting, and we must be off."
It was still early when they arrived at the opera house, and the orchestra were just beginning to tune up. The house was still comparatively empty, but it was beginning to fill rapidly, for all London had suddenly discovered that Wagner was worth listening to, and that an overture was not necessarily as dispensable as a preface.
But at last the tuning was over, the violins had caught their A's correctly, and had hit the "four perfect fifths," the drums had been screwed up to the necessary tension, and the wind instruments were in their places, pregnant with the miraculous birth of sound. For these five strings, these tubes of brasswere going not to interpret, but to present the actual mysteries which passed through the artist's brain. Music is, as it were, the speaker in the first person, whereas painting only deals with the vision secondhand. The painter represents a blaze of light by certain pigments—yellow, red, white—but these are only the symbols of what he wishes to tell us. He may not take liquid sunlight and place it on the canvas. His art is but a symbol, an algebra of tints to express certain other things. No colour he can use is in itself luminous, the resemblance it bears to light is only imagined by the spectator, in proportion as the artist presents us with contrasts, with sombre shadows or brooding clouds, and it is only by the aid of what he tries to represent that we can see his vision at all. But with the musician it is different—he deals with his materials direct; he takes sound pure, not a symbol of sound; his vision is woven of the waves of air which are eternal and original, not of chemical combinations of white lead, or the blood of cuttlefish. He mixes pure sound in his thought, and out of it "frames not a sound but a star." And Wagner, above all other musicians of all time, has taught an incredulous world what can be done with sound, his beautiful slave and master, just as Stevenson taught his faithless generation what could be done with steam. The emotions and passions of humanity are his harp, and this harp, touched by a master's finger, tells us what it knows.Thus in Tannhäuser he has presented us with the great problem of all time—the war between the lower, the bestial side of man, and something which mankind itself has declared to be higher—the pure, steadfast soul. He tears the hearts out of the breasts of Galahad and Messalina, bleeding and palpitating; he threads them together on his golden string, and then, the artist's work being over, he tosses them to us, and says "Choose." The materials for choice are all there, the whole of the data are before us, and as Tannhäuser chose once, so "chance" has ordained that each of us should choose, and the same thing called "chance" ordained that Reggie should choose that night.
There was a pause, a silence after the conductor had entered, and then the wooden instruments gave out half the problem. The slow, deep notes of the "Pilgrim's March" rose and fell, walking steadfastly on in perilous place, weary yet undismayed. Then followed the strange chromatic passage of transition, without which even Wagner did not dare to show us the other side of the picture, and then the great animal, which had lain as if asleep, began to stir; its heart beat with the life of its waking moments, and it started up. The violins shivered and smiled and laughed as Venusberg came in sight; they rose and fell, as the march before had done, but rising higher and laughing more triumphantly with each fall—careless, heedless, infinitely beautiful. But below them, not less steadfastthan before, moved the pilgrims. The riot was at its highest, the triumph of Venus and her train seemed complete, when suddenly Reggie started up. He stood at his full height a moment, watching the curtain rise on Venusberg.
"I see, I see," he cried.
Then he turned to Eva.
"You are a wicked woman," he said, and next moment the door of the box closed behind him.
Eva had been seated opposite him, and she had watched his face during the overture. Before he spoke, she knew what would happen, but she did not repent of her resolve. As he left the box, she made two hurried steps as if to follow him, and then stopped, turning round again towards the stage. The electric light fell full on her diamonds, on the gleam of her white dress, on her incomparable beauty. The fan that she had held had slipped down and lay at her feet, and her hands were clenched together.
"He is right," she said aloud. "Ah, my God! he is quite right."
Jim Armine looked up as Reggie left the box, but as his chair was towards the stage he saw nothing except that he had gone. But when Eva rose, he turned half round, and caught her words. It would not have required much penetration to see that something had happened, and it was not unnatural that he hesitated to ask Eva what was the matter. But the next momentshe had picked up her fan, and had seated herself in her old place. She opened her mouth to speak once, and Jim waited, but she said nothing.
"Where's Reggie gone?" asked he at length.
Eva summoned her wonderful power of self-control, and spoke in her natural voice.
"I think he has gone home," she said with a certain finality. "Isn't the scene charming? Really, they mount these things very well in England."
The evening passed on; men from other boxes came and paid their respects to Lady Hayes, and, as usual, she snubbed some, was a little amused by others, and appeared indifferent to all.
Towards the end of the third act, Lord Hayes made his appearance and made some true remarks on the state of the weather and the prevalent influenza. Eva listened to his remarks with somewhat unusual attention, and went so far as to inquire how his mother was, who, in spite of her fortified condition, was "down" with the epidemic. But when the curtain fell for the last time, and Tannhäuser had died in "the odour of sanctity," she turned to Jim.
"I wonder if that ending is really natural," she said. "Do you think any man leaves Venusberg so utterly behind after he has been ahabituéthere? I wish Reggie had stopped. He would have given us some very spontaneous criticisms on the subject."
"Do you think spontaneous criticisms are the most valuable?" he asked.
"Perhaps not; but they are very interesting. After all, experience may vitiate one's judgment as much as it matures it."
"What a very odd doctrine," laughed Jim. "But I don't suppose you really believe it yourself."
"Oh no, probably I don't," she replied, "but I don't know what I do believe, and what I don't. Will you give me my cloak? Do you want a lift? No? Good-night!"
When Eva got home she went straight up to her room, and her husband followed her and sat down on a chair opposite to her, as if waiting for her to speak. But Eva had quite as successful a power of silence as he, and sat saying nothing, till he found it unbearable and, in a fatal fit of fidgeting, went across to the mantelpiece, where Reggie's photograph was standing. Eva's eyes followed him slowly, with a still impatience.
He took up the photograph and looked at it for a moment.
"Ah! this is your young friend Reggie Davenport, is it not?"
Eva yawned slightly and nodded assent.
"I thought he was at the opera with you to-night?"
"He was."
"But surely he was not there when I came."
"No, he had gone away."
"Ah! I suppose he got tired of it. It is possible to get tired of Wagner."
Eva stood up suddenly. Her self-control was beginning to break down, and the knowledge of what had happened, the entire success of her own scheme of letting Reggie know the truth about her, was being supplanted in her own mind by a great sense of loss. She felt reckless, at revolt with the world, intolerably intolerant of her position. As she stood there, watching her husband leaning on the back of a chair with the photograph of Reggie in his hands, the desire to fling the truth of it at him became too strong to resist.
She made a quick, silent step to his side, and plucked the photograph out of his hands.
"I should not touch that again if I were you," she said, speaking in a low, rapid voice. "You had better leave it alone for the future. Oh! my meaning is clear enough. I am in love with Reggie Davenport. Yes—in love with him. He is not at all like a second Jim Armine, as you suggested the other day. No, this is quite a different thing. And he is in love with me, while he is engaged to that girl whose photograph stood next his there. It is a sweet position, is it not? Here am I married to you—in love with a young man who is engaged to someone else who is in love with him, while he is in love with me. Ah! Hayes, I lost a great deal when I married you, while you got what you wanted. You wanted to be my owner, did you not?You wished to be master of my beauty. I know how beautiful I am; there is not another woman in London who can touch me. You wanted someone who would give that stamp to your dinner parties and country house parties that I give it. You have had the best of it. And I married you because I wanted position, because I wanted to know the world. That I have got—I know it by heart. It is as dull as a week-old newspaper. Ah, God! how I know it. I did not know what it was to fall in love; I was inexperienced, ignorant. No, I don't blame you. I pity myself."
Eva stopped for a moment, and put Reggie's photograph down on the mantelpiece again, next Gertrude's. She looked at them for a single second, and then took the girl's photograph, and, with a sudden, ungovernable frenzy, tore it to bits, and threw the pieces in the grate. That wild-animal burst of jealousy would not be smothered. Then she went on, still speaking rapidly,—
"You need not be afraid of scandal, Hayes, or anything else of that sort. I have broken with Reggie for good. He thought me kind and good, and all that is womanly, and so I wished him to know the truth about me. Have you ever been in love? If so, you will understand it. I shocked him horribly by explaining to him about Tannhäuser, and at the end of the overture, he suddenly understood what I meant, and he got up and left the box, having told me that Iwas a wicked woman. It was very fine. I admired him immensely for it. But that sort of thing is rather trying. I managed to behave decently while the play lasted, but I have broken down. That is all there is to tell you. I don't really know why I told you at all."
Lord Hayes listened to his wife with much composure.
"Dear me, how very sensational!" he said, "and how very Quixotic of you. I should not have thought you were capable of Quixotism. You are a most remarkable woman. I think I shall go to bed. The new story by Paul Bourget which I am reading will seem quite flat after your little romance. Good-night!"
Eva felt a sudden sense that he was justified in his quiet scorn of her. How was it to be expected, she reasoned to herself, that he should behave to her, as far as in him lay, otherwise than she behaved to him? Her regret at all she had lost was not entirely resentment towards him. For the first time since she had known him, she was generous to him, showed a willingness to meet him half-way.
"Wait a moment," she said, "I have not quite done."
He paused in an uncompromising attitude with his hand on the handle of the door, ready for some fine return shot. But Eva's impulse was strong within her, and she spoke.
"I do not blame you," she said; "I assure you of that. I only blame myself. You were willing to be very kind to me, and I believe you are willing still. In fact, I am very sorry for you, just as I am very sorry for myself. I do not wish to make it worse for either of us. I want to make a bad job as good as it can be made. I did not tell you what I have told you, in order to disgust you or pain you. We are travellers in the same compartment in this very tiresome journey called life. We are inevitably shut in here until it is time for one of us to get out. Do not let us quarrel; it will only make the journey worse."
Lord Hayes came a step closer.
"Do you find this journey called life so tiresome?" he asked. "I should have thought you would have enjoyed it."
"I wish I was dead," said she, simply.
Then, quite suddenly, all her self-control gave way. She dropped her face in the sofa cushions and sobbed as if her heart would break. Lord Hayes was by no means a fool, and he saw very plainly what the reason for this sudden outburst was, and obviously it was not very complimentary to him, however complimentary it might be to another.
He closed the door quietly, and sat down in a chair a little way from her. He had no notion of being tender, and he lit a cigarette till she was herself again. The sobs grew quieter after a while, and in a few minutesEva sat up again. Lord Hayes chucked the end of his cigarette into the fireplace.
"My dear Eva," he said very calmly and quietly, "I know quite well, of course, what this all means. You are in love with that young fellow, and that quite accounts for your very—your very extraordinary behaviour. But I don't mind that at all, I assure you. You may be in love with him as much as ever you like. The only thing I should mind would be any scandal on the subject, and I feel quite sure that nothing of the sort will happen. You have been very candid to me—very candid indeed, and I will follow your lead. I know perfectly well that your position and title and wealth are much too dear to you to let you risk any possibility of losing them. You would lose everything by a scandal, and I do not believe you would gain anything. This young man is engaged to another girl, as you say, and he is obviously a very good young man, and will do nothing he should not. In any case, you would have to live at Boulogne or Dieppe, or some of those hideous little French towns, among a set of second-rate people. That is absurd on the face of it. No, I am sure this 'tedious journey called life,' to quote your own words again, would be much more tedious there. For the rest, I fail to see how I am to prevent our quarrelling. It never has been a wish of mine that we should. So once more, good-night!"
Eva was sitting up looking at her husband, with anintensity that was not pleasant to contemplate. He felt it perhaps, for once, when he met her eyes, he looked away again immediately and he faltered in his speech. The utter, entire absence of generosity, of anything like manly feeling in what he said, seemed to Eva to be a new revelation of meanness, the like of which she had never encountered. He turned and left the room at these last words, and Eva was left sitting there.
Mrs. Davenport had spent the evening alone. Her husband was away for the night, and Reggie, as we have seen, had gone to the opera.
Whatever Reggie was he was not secretive, and his obvious pleasure that afternoon at Lady Hayes's invitation did not savour of the sweetness of consciously forbidden fruit. But his very frankness, which, as has been mentioned before, was capable of dealing unpleasant back-hand blows, had also a dazzling power about it, which, like the rays from a noon-day sun, renders it impossible to tell what lies behind, though it would be very false to describe it as partaking of the nature of dissimulation. It seemed to say, "I am not responsible for the weakness of your eyesight; I show my mystery or my want of mystery to you with all myheart, and you are at fault if you cannot form any conclusion which it is." To continue the metaphor, Mrs. Davenport would have felt not ungrateful to some abatement in its brilliance partaking of the nature of an eclipsed frankness, a shadow cast on the disc by some external object, or, at any rate, she would have been glad to take the opinion of someone who was possessed of smoked glasses, or a natural tendency to observe correctly. Had she known it, Lord Hayes would have been exactly the individual required, but it was no discredit to her acuteness that the idea never entered her head, quite apart from the impracticability of putting it into execution.
She had just dined and was glancing through the pages of a novel from Mudie's, when the drawing-room door opened, and Reggie appeared. He paused a moment when he saw his mother, and then advanced into the room. His attempt to look unconcerned and contented was singularly unsuccessful.
Mrs. Davenport laid down her book, frightened.
"Ah! Reggie, what's the matter? What has happened?"
Reggie turned away from her, and fingered a small ornament on the mantelpiece.
"Nothing," he said hoarsely. "I came away from the opera. I—"
He turned round again, and knelt by his mother's chair.
"Don't ask me just now," he said. "There has been a scene, and I came away. Lady Hayes said things that disgusted me. I didn't think she was like that."
Mrs. Davenport offered a short mental thanksgiving. Until the relief had come, she had not known how much Reggie's intimacy with Lady Hayes had weighed on her. She waited for a moment to see if Reggie would say more. Then—
"Won't you tell me more, dear, or would you rather not?"
"Yes, I want to tell you," said he. "At dinner she told me all about Tannhäuser and Venusberg, and I didn't understand her. Then, when the overture was played, I suddenly understood it all. It was horrible; it was wicked. If anybody else had said that, I should simply have thought it was very bad form, but that she should!"
Mrs. Davenport had not quite realised before how serious it was, and Reggie's tone, even in his renunciation of Eva, was a shock to her.
"That she should say those things!" repeated Reggie. "But when I understood it, I couldn't stop there. I don't remember very clearly what happened. I told her she was a wicked woman, and then I came away."
The excessive baldness of his narrative struck Mrs. Davenport as convincing, and she felt a little reassured.But Reggie had not meant to reassure her, and he soon undeceived her.
"Why should she have said those things to me?" he went on, getting up, and walking about the room. "Why, if she was like that, couldn't she have kept it from me? I should have been content to know only half of her, and to have adored that."
"Ah!"
Mrs. Davenport winced as with a sudden spasm of pain; then pity for Gertrude bred in her anger for Reggie. "What do you mean?" she said sharply. "I do not understand you in the least. You adored her, then; why not say love?"
"I didn't know it before," said he, "until this thing came, or, of course, I should have gone away. I am not a villain. But I know it now; I adored her, and I loved her—and—"
"And you do still?"
"Yes."
There was a long silence, and the hum of the London streets came in at the open window. Mrs. Davenport found herself noticing tiny things, among others that Reggie had placed the ornament he had been fingering perilously near the edge of the mantelpiece. In a great crisis our large reflective and thinking powers get choked for a moment, and the ordinary surface perceptions, which are as instinctive and unnoticed as breathing, are left in command of our mind.The sight of that ornament there assumed an overwhelming importance to her, and she got up from her seat and put it back in a safer place. Then she turned to Reggie, who was standing still in the middle of the room, with his back towards her.
"Sit down here, Reggie," she said quietly. "I think we had better talk a little. Do you quite realise what that means?"
"Ah, don't talk to me like that," he burst out. "As if I was not in hell already, without being reminded of it. Mummy, I don't mean that. You are all that is good and loving. You know that I know it. You are very gentle with me. I won't be angry again."
Mrs. Davenport's anxiety for Gertrude made her very tender.
"Ah, my dear," she said, "I do not care for myself. It is very immaterial that you speak like that to me. I should be a very selfish woman if I thought of myself just now. There are others to think of, you and—and Gertrude."
"Yes, I know, I know. But what am I to do? Tell me that, and I will do it."
"Go to Aix," said his mother promptly, "and go at once."
"Go to Aix!" said he. "Why, that's just what I couldn't possibly do. God knows, I have done Gertrude injury enough, without insulting her!"
"Your waiting here in London is the worst insult you could do her. You must see that."
"I can't do it!" he cried. "You know I can't. How can I leave Eva—Lady Hayes—like this?"
Mrs. Davenport got up, and waited a moment till her voice was more under her control. But when she spoke, her anger vibrated through it so strongly, that even Reggie, in his almost impenetrable self-centred wretchedness, was startled.
"Has it ever occurred to you that there is another concerned in this besides yourself?" she said. "Are you aware that Gertrude loves you in a way that it honours any man to be loved? Do you mean to make no effort to repair the injury you have done her? Be a man, Reggie; you have been a boy too long. Dare you say you ever loved Gerty, if you treat her like this—now? You wish to behave like a fool, and, what is worse, like a coward. I never thought I should be ashamed of you, as I shall be now, if you stop in London after what has happened."
Once more there was a dead silence. Mrs. Davenport, as she knew, had played her ace of trumps; she had brought to bear the strongest motive that she could think of to influence Reggie. If he would not listen to her because she was his mother, if he cared nothing about the effect his action would have on her opinion of him, she knew that there was no more to be done by her.
Reggie flushed suddenly, as if he had been struck.
"But what good will it do if I go?" he cried; "and where am I to go to? I can't go to Gertrude now."
"Your place is with her," said Mrs. Davenport. "If it is all over between you, it is your business to tell her. I don't wish you to tell her at once, but go there and wait a week. Don't be a coward, and don't think that it will be any the better for putting it off. What do you propose to do in the interval—to wait here? She will write to you, and you will not answer, or will you pretend that you are hers, as she is yours? That would not be a very honourable position, would it? Don't disgrace yourself and bring dishonour on us all. Have you no pride, even?"
Reggie looked up in amazement.
"Disgrace myself—bring dishonour on you—"
"Has it never struck you that you are on the verge of doing that?" said Mrs. Davenport.
It evidently had not, and Reggie received the possibility of it with deep perplexity. But the outcome was that he said wearily,—
"Do as you like with me. Yes; I will go."
"Ah! but what is the use of going like that?" said his mother. "You must go, not because I wish you to, but because you realise it, and mean to act up to it. The fact of your going is only a symbol that you are not quite disloyal yet. You are to go as if your heartwas still whole; you are going to meet Gerty, to meet her to whom you promised so much. You told me Eva said things which disgusted you. Think of them; sting yourself into hating her. Oh! it will not be easy. I do not expect you will enjoy yourself."
Reggie sat still a moment; then he exclaimed inconsequently,—
"I am very tired. I shall go to bed. Yes, I want to see Gerty again very much."
Reggie, as he had said, had only that night realised how much Eva had entered into his life. It had not occurred to him before to put the case candidly to himself; not because he wished to shirk a conclusion, but because he regarded his feeling for Gertrude as sufficiently safe to warrant the assumption that things were all right. But when this sudden crash came—serious enough, at least, from his point of view, for he could not help regarding his words to Eva as a formal and complete rupture—he saw exactly where he stood. He was separated from Eva; but he was separated from Gertrude, not by any violent wrench, but by the gradual drift of the current, which he had not perceived till now. It had not occurred to him to be honest with himself before. Eva had been divinely kind to him, sympathetic, eager to share his confidence; it was no wonder that, in the blank which Gertrude's absence made, he had found pleasure in giving it her, and that the aforesaid blank became gradually filled with new interests.If the thought ever had occurred to him that the image of Eva was becoming a sort of palimpsest to that of Gertrude, he would have denied the imputation stoutly, perhaps the more stoutly because he was aware that he had not been at pains to find out.
Mrs. Davenport felt, when he had left her, that in a vague way she had expected all this. She had been quite aware that it is not possible for men to continue being boys indefinitely—that there is a time for everyone when they must ask themselves why they do a thing, or why they do not do it; and she knew that, for Reggie, that time had come. He was a boy no longer; that unconscious youth, which had moved Eva's interest, then her love, had gone; he had awoke from his long, happy dream to the grey, convincing morning of reason and of claims. That he would be the better man for it, she did not doubt; that he could not have been a man without, she knew; and yet she was full of regret, full of those aching thoughts "for days that are no more," which are even more poignant when we feel them for others than when we mourn over them for ourselves. Reggie had consented to go away—that was good; but was there not something left to be done? She knew from him that he had called Eva "a wicked woman," and had left the box. What, then, was Eva's feeling on the subject? If she was offended, so much the better; she might be induced to say so. If—worst chance of all—she cared for him, more than she cared for thehundred men who were dangling round her, was there still no possibility of making her say she was offended? All the mother's pride and protectiveness revolted against the notion, but it was worth trying. Mrs. Davenport had so clearly in her mind the best solution of the problem—namely, the disenchantment of Reggie, by any means, or, failing that, the prolonged absence from Eva—that she put her pride in her pocket. She remembered perfectly well her talk with Percy; how he had felt uneasy at this engagement, because it resembled too much Reggie's previous escapades: and surely, if he was right, Reggie's very curtailed entanglement with Eva came under the same head. Let him only get away, with obvious discouragement from Eva, and let Gertrude reassert her previous relation, unconscious of any interruption.
Lady Hayes had not passed a very good night. She was on the verge of doing a very difficult thing; that is to say, doing something directly opposed to her inclinations. In fact, she was, as she had told her husband, in love with Reggie Davenport, and such an experience was new to her. But this very simple and every-day phenomenon was curiously complicated in her case. She happened to be another man's wife, and the man with whom she was in love was about to be another girl's husband. She thought with some impatience of the hundred-and-one stories which are called realistic because they are improbable, in which the woman andman cast everything to the winds and say they obey the dictates of the divine mother of things, because that solution was very far from satisfying her. There is a book that says that love seeketh not its own, and, curiously enough, Eva found her thoughts straying to that short text, which has been abandoned as untrue by the apostles of evolution and modern life, who say that that particular gospel has served its time, that we now know a more excellent way. She had probably never devoted much thought as to whether she was modern or not, but she was surprised to find that so ancient a text seemed to represent her mood more clearly than less antique and hall-marked utterances.
She had had breakfast and was still sitting in the dining-room with her husband, when a footman came in bearing a card. Eva looked at it and pondered. Then,—
"Tell Mrs. Davenport I will see her; show her in here."
Eva got up from her place, and walked up and down the room. She was very pale, and she looked anxious and worn. But she stopped opposite the flower-stand in the corner, and put two orchids in the front of her dress.
Mrs. Davenport was announced, and remarked that it was a beautiful morning, and Lord Hayes assented. She had seldom seen him before, and he was dressed with extreme care, but appeared wholly insignificant.She remembered his enormous wealth, and it seemed to her to be a sort of label to prevent his getting quite lost in this large world. He reminded her of an undelivered parcel, waiting for its owner to turn up.
Lady Hayes sat silent for a few minutes, and then turned to her husband.
"Perhaps you would be so good as to go away," she said in a low, musical voice, "as I have things to talk over with my friend, or, if you like, we will go upstairs. Perhaps that would be better."
Lord Hayes got up with alacrity.
"The fact is," he said, "I was on the point of going. I have some business to do. I was wanting to talk to you some time later on, if it would be convenient."
"Certainly," said Eva. "I will see you about it later."
She dropped her eyes as he addressed her, and sat looking at the ground till he had left the room. Then she said to Mrs. Davenport,—
"What do you want with me?"
Her tone belied the curtness of her words, and she waited eagerly for the answer. These few moments after she had said she would see Mrs. Davenport, were spent in an agony to control herself. She was hungering for more news from Reggie, but in her hand she held a note, which had come from him by the early post, which made her decision doubly difficult. It wasa wild, absurd production, imploring pardon, entreating her to let him know that she had forgiven him—only half coherent—and Eva knew that he had really made his choice, or was willing to make his choice between her and Gertrude, if she would only say "Come." "I am going to Aix to-day," the note finished, "to see Gertrude. Cannot you send me one word, to say you forgive me? I behaved quite unpardonably."
Mrs. Davenport raised her eyes to Eva's face, and answered her bravely.
"I have come to talk to you about Reggie," she said.
Eva flushed, and unconsciously closed her hand on the note she held.
"What about him?"
"He is not very happy," said Mrs. Davenport, gently, "and I think perhaps you can help me."
"Ah! I think I probably can," said Eva. "I am glad you have come to see me. I am afraid I have made mischief, and I am sorry. It is odd for me to be sorry; I suppose it's a sign that I am growing old. You know for some time he has been seeing a good deal of me. That was my fault; I ought to have stopped it. And last night I gave him a sudden shock. He only knew one little bit of me, and I thought it was better—"
Eva stopped, for her voice was trembling, and Mrs. Davenport waited.
"It was better," she continued, after a moment, "that he should know the rest of me. Then, when he knew, he called me a wicked woman, and went away straight from the opera. It was splendid. I admired him immensely. But it appears he is sorry he did so. I have just got a note from him imploring forgiveness."
"Ah! the foolish boy," said Mrs. Davenport, half involuntarily.
"Yes, I quite agree with you. You see it puts me in a difficulty. I like him very much—so much that I should be sorry to do him an injury. I should do him an injury if I allowed him to fall in love with me again. On the other hand, I like him well enough to be very sorry not to see him again, and I have to choose."
Eva stopped again, and Mrs. Davenport laid a hand on hers.
"Yes, yes," she said eagerly.
Eva was gradually regaining her control over herself.
"I want him to be very happy," she said, "and his best chance of happiness, I am sure, is with that girl; I forget her name. I have never seen her, but Reggie has spoken of her to me. He ought to go to Herefordshire, or wherever it is, and live among the daisies with his beloved. He is not made for this sort of thing; he is too good. I don't at all wish to spoil his life or the girl's life."
Mrs. Davenport bent forward again in her chair.
"Ah! Eva, you will do it, won't you? I am sure you are right. He will be very happy with her. Do write to him, and say you are offended; make him angry, touch his pride, be as brutal as possible."
"But I don't feel brutal," said Eva. "It is rather hard on me. Oh! I can't, I can't," she exclaimed suddenly.
Mrs. Davenport saw how matters stood at once, and she paused. She had not expected this complication.
Eva started up as she made this self-betrayal, and stood with the colour rising in her cheeks, furiously angry with herself, and wondering how Mrs. Davenport would interpret it. She blamed herself for ever having seen her; she had passed a sleepless night and her nerves were disordered. But the other lady spoke again, almost at once. She saw that it made it harder for Eva, but she saw that the only thing to be done was to pretend to have noticed nothing. So, before the silence grew portentous, she went on, but with more tenderness in her voice,—
"Yes, of course it is hard for you," she said. "It is very hard to be unselfish in this weary world. But it is worth an effort, is it not? And that you are fond of Reggie ought to make it easier. You don't wish to spoil his life, as you say."
"How did he behave last night when he came home?" asked Eva, suddenly.
"He is changed," said Mrs. Davenport. "I think you would see it. Somehow, he is a boy no longer; he has become a man, and he finds it not pleasant."
"Ah! that is so, is it?" said Eva. "It was horribly stupid of me. But it makes it easier for me. He was so young, somehow—which I have never been. Are you sure you are right?"
"Yes, quite sure."
"That makes it easier for me, and perhaps for him. Does he take things hard?"
"I don't think Reggie has known anything before which he could take hard. He has been very happy."
"You mean he will be less happy now."
"For the time, yes," said Mrs. Davenport; "but I feel sure it will be for the best. He is one of those people who are made to be happy, and I am sure he will have less unhappiness this way than if you took any other course."
"I must think about it," said Eva, turning and walking up and down the room. But even as she spoke she tore Reggie's letter in half, and threw the pieces into the grate. "It is hard for me, is it not?" said she, stopping in front of Mrs. Davenport, "but it appears I am to be the victim."
"Reggie looked very like another victim last night," said the other.
Eva looked away.
"Did he—was he very unhappy about it?" she asked.
"Not too unhappy."
"What do you mean?"
"From what I know of him," said Mrs. Davenport, "especially since this sudden change has come, if you speak now, you may make the whole difference to him. Make him angry and sore, and then let him go off to Aix, and I think Gertrude will do the rest. I wonder if she will guess what has happened. I hope not."
"How she will hate me!" murmured Eva, "and so will Reggie. It is really hard to see what I am to gain by the arrangement."
"Ah! don't go back now," entreated Mrs. Davenport. "See, I have no pride left. I implore you to do what I ask. You are very powerful; I know your power too well, and so does Reggie, God help him!"
"I wonder if it is really better to be unselfish than selfish," mused Eva, more to herself than to Mrs. Davenport, "or to try to do good at all. We are so very short sighted that we may be doing the worst thing possible. Who were those very ingenious people who did harm when they wanted to, in order that good might follow? Anyhow, if I do this, I shall not have chosen the selfish course. I suppose there will be an imperishable reward for me somewhere. Even so, perhaps I am really doing the selfish thing by doing asyou ask me; it all depends, doesn't it, on how much I like him? whether I like him enough to be unselfish; whether the burden of being selfish wouldn't be harder to bear than the burden of being unselfish."
"I know how little I matter to you personally," said Mrs. Davenport, "but you will know at least that I think you have done a very noble thing, something of which not many are capable; something it was very hard for you to do."
"Ah! you don't understand me a bit," broke out Eva. "I assure you that no one's opinion has an atom of weight with me. I fear evil report as little as I covet good. Let me think for a few moments."
Mrs. Davenport was silent; she hardly heard Eva's last speech, for all her thoughts were on her possible decision. That she had not dismissed her at once, had not refused to see her, she felt was a favourable sign. Eva, she knew, was quite capable, in spite of a certain intimacy between them, of having sent a message that she saw no one in the morning. Mrs. Davenport feared her and her cold, hard power, as she feared nothing else in the world. She sat there pale, almost trembling, while Eva passed slowly up and down the room, for a few minutes. But at the end of one of these turns, when she was by the door, she passed out, and Mrs. Davenport heard her step ascending the stairs. She waited there while the minute hand crept round the dial of the great bronze clock on the mantelpiece,and it was half-an-hour before Eva appeared again, with a large, unsealed envelope in her hand. She looked very weary, but as faultlessly beautiful as ever.
"I have not sealed it," she said, "because I thought you might like to read it, and while I am about it I might as well do it handsomely. At the same time, I would sooner you did not read it, but I shall neither blame you nor try to dissuade you if you wish to. With it is Reggie's photo—the one he gave me. You need not take them. Will you read it? No? Then I will send a man with it at once, as you don't care to look at the letter. There is no reason why you should be turned into a penny post because your son has called me a wicked woman. He was quite right, by the way—perfectly right. I—"
Eva stopped suddenly, for there was that tremor in her voice which had been there once before at this interview.
"I will not betray myself," she determined, biting her lip, in a splendid effort to keep command over herself.
"There is just one thing that I should like to ask you," she went on almost at once; "send me a line now and then, to tell me about Reggie, and whether it is all right between him and the girl. I liked him very much, you know, and I shall never see him again, I suppose."
Mrs. Davenport was much moved. She had guessed, and guessed correctly, that Reggie would not be the only sufferer, and that Eva had behaved heroically, and tears partly of relief, but partly of gratitude and admiration, started to her eyes.
"God bless you for what you have done!" she whispered. "I can say no more than that."
The tension broke.
"Leave me quickly," cried Eva, as the large, painful sobs began to break from her throat. "Go at once!"
"Eva, Eva," cried Mrs. Davenport, stretching out her hands to her.
"Go—go at once!" cried the other.
She turned rapidly from her, and Mrs. Davenport, without another word, left the room. She just saw Eva sink in the arm-chair she had been occupying before, and bury her face in her hands. Mrs. Davenport closed the door quietly and went out.
She had left behind her, and she knew it, a sorrow greater and more desolate than Reggie's weaker nature would ever know. She remembered Percy's prediction, that some day Eva "would do something sublimely unselfish, and that would be when she fell in love."
It was still only about mid-day when she left the house, and she had purposely said "Good-bye" to Reggie before she went, for, presupposing the success of her expedition, of which Reggie knew nothing, herpresence was unnecessary and undesirable. If, on the other hand, she was unsuccessful, she had determined to go to the station and meet her husband, and acquaint him with the state of things. She drove about for an hour or so, and then changed her mind, and determined to make an effort to see Reggie before he set off.
She arrived home just as he was starting, and they met in the hall, and when she saw his face she drew a deep breath of satisfaction and relief. He was unmistakably angry.
"You are just off, are you, dear?" she said quietly. "Give Gertrude my love, and—and be very brave and make an effort, dear boy. It will not be easy. God bless you, my darling?"
"She wrote to me this morning," whispered Reggie hoarsely, as he kissed his mother. "I will never speak to her or think of her again. Ah! Mummy, good-bye! you have saved me."