Amongst the handful of letters waiting for her in her dressing-room at the castle there had been a despatch from America. Even this, and a hasty look at her mail had not succeeded in holding her attention or even carrying it beyond the house. Her husband had expected to land in Liverpool at the end of the coming week; he was to take her home with him. And until he arrived she was breathing, as she always did in his absence, deeply.
There had been no one to greet them as Bulstrode and herself came into the castle, and she had hurried to her rooms to begin without loss of time her boasted rapid toilet. The dress, whose harmony had impressed her host, the Duke, on a former visit at the castle, had been laid out for her; its sumptuous color overspread the bed. But the lady chose instead a white gown whose art of holding to her, and holding her, in its simple lines and splendid sheen, made its beauty.
There was much of the true woman in this entirely lovely creature, as she stood before her glass and saw herself, the best example of the really beautiful American. Her naturalness gave her a freedom, a frankness, a grace, a certain imperial set of the head.
Bulstrode had once said to the Duchess of Westboro' that a woman should above all "console." Mary Falconer would have known what he meant. That sex she gloriously represented! The sweetness and dearness of her. Well, there were few women no doubt like her. Jimmy hoped so for the sake of the race, for the sake of the hearts of other men. She was the ideal fireside of home, and when, as she had twice done, she bade him, as that time she had said, "Build here," he knew what she meant and felt, and that she herself was exquisitely home.
Leaning over her dressing-table she scrutinized not her face, whose ardent beauty seemed to bloom upon the glass, but her hair as it fell and rippled and flowed round her brows. Along the edge of one of the lustrous waves was a touch as if her powder puff had brushed her hair. Mrs. Falconer put up her hand, smoothed the line, then let it lie as it grew. It so declared itself to be the first unmistakable white. A gardener's basket full of roses and camelias, gardenias and carnations had been sent up for her; but under the diamond at her breast she chose rather to fasten in a spray of mistletoe with its pale, grape-like berries. A long green scarf fell over her arm and against the whiteness of her dress like a branch of spring verdure, and permitted by the fashion of the day, there shook and trembled in her ears long, pear-shaped pearls which, like her thimble, had been her mother's.
As she left the security of her room and fire for the corridors and the publicity of the lower rooms, for the first time in her life she had a sudden feeling ofpruderieat the bare beauty of her neck and arms. She felt as if she were coming unclad into the street, and drew her scarf across her breast. But she found herself to be quite alone in the drawing-room, and before she had time to be bewildered at her long desertion, a letter was handed her with a few murmured words by a footman. It perhaps served her right, she reflected, for so blandly coming into a house during a state of domestic upheaval, that she should turn out to be not alone the only guest, but without host or friend! The letter told her, as gently as it could without the satisfaction of any explanation, that both Bulstrode and the Duke of Westboro' were unavoidably absent. She turned the letter over with keen disappointment. Her dress, her beauty which the drive from Penhaven and the afternoon's happiness had heightened to a point that she might be pardoned for seeing, was then all for nothing! On what extravagant bent could the two men have gone?
"Both of them," she soliloquized with a shrug, "off on a hunt, I dare say, after a fool of a woman who doesn't know enough to stop at home."
Before she could further lash at her absent hostess, she found herself a few seconds later taking the scarcely palpable arm of the rector, whom the Duke, in a moment of abstraction, had asked to the Christmas-tree and whom he had subsequently forgotten to put off. The rector alone, of all the expected, turned up, his smile vacuous and his appetite in order. At the table laid for four, and great enough for forty, the clergyman and the lady faced each other. Mrs. Falconer smiled kindly, for as her friend had told the Duchess on the same afternoon, she was kind; and if she resented the apology for a man her slendervis-à-vispresented, she did not show her scorn; she smiled kindly at him. His cloth and habit, and cut even, wore the air of disapproval. Her jewels, the bare splendor of her neck and arms, seemed out of place, and yet she could not but be perfectly sure that even the dull eyes of hervis-à-visnot alone reflected, but confirmed, how lovely she was.
The reverend gentleman was new to Glouceshire, but it turned out that he already knew its hearsays and itson ditsand he knew when she asked him, something of the country and The Dials. It may have been that the bright aspect of the lady, her light mockery—for as she would she could not help falling into them even with this half-human creature—wickedly drew him on, gave the man license as he thought, to descend to scandal; at all events, after dinner, over a cigar smoked in her presence, the empty glass of Benedictine at his elbow, in his cheeks a muddy red diffused from his wine, the gentleman leaned forward, and tried to adapt his speech and topic to the worldly vein which he imagined was the habitual tenor of a fashionable woman's life.
"Even this lovely shire," he drawled its beauty—"cannot, so it would seem, be free from scandal. And where a minister would naturally look for help, wretchedly enough for the most part he only finds examples and warnings."
The rector lifted his eyes to the fine old ceiling as if in its shields and blazons he was impressed by the blots of recent sins.
His hand touched the little liqueur glass. He picked it up and in a second of abstraction tried to drain its oily emptiness.
"Let me ring," said Mrs. Falconer, "and send for some more Benedictine, or better still, for somefine."
"No," he refused, and sedately put her right. "No more of anything, I think, unless it might be a bottle of soda. You spoke of lovely Glousceshire and then spoke of The Dials. Do you know the place?"
Only, she told him, by hearsay.
He solemnly supposed so; so he himself chiefly knew it, as indeed all the country side was growing to know it.
The eyes of the lady to whom the rector was retailing his little gossip were intently on him. But Mrs. Falconer in reality was not looking at him, neither did she at once find ready words to refute, to cast down, to blot out, his hideous suggestion that filled the room with it sooty blot.
Mrs. Falconer, who had good-humoredly been amused by his intense Britishness thus far, his pale lack of individuality, his perfect type, now looked sharply at her companion.
The rector had been more than right, Mrs. Falconer was used to the indifferent, rather brutal handling by society of human lives. Possibly as she adored people, no one of her set was more interested in the comedies and dramas of hercontemporains. But there are ways and channels: what runs clear in one runs muddy in another.
The rector, in his own way, told her that for several weeks a very beautiful lady had been living at The Dials. She had, it appeared, never been out of the garden gate, and the servants were foreign, all save a deaf old gardener. But the beautiful lady who sought such peculiar seclusion, had a very constant visitor. Of course the rector was not able or sufficiently daring to affirm; with a cleverness worthy a better story he left his hearer to guess, imagine, who the visitor might be.
"Don't you think," Mrs. Falconer breathed, after a very short lapse into silence, "that we might let such ghosts alone on Christmas Eve?"
She rose and stood before him in her soft, luminous dress; her eyes were intent on him, but in reality she was not looking at him.
He had grown so detestable that she could bear his presence no longer; she found herself, however, wanting to learn all his knowledge to its finest detail. She found that she despised herself for any interest she might take. She got rid of him at length, how, she never knew. But she saw him leave her presence with relief.
When the miserable man, as she called him, had taken his leave, the deserted guest looked about her rather defiantly, as if the objects with which the room was filled were hostile. Then, with a half-audible exclamation she sank down in a chair, her elbow on the left arm of it, and her chin in her hand.
Well, the imputation, the character of what she had just heard vulgarly said and to which, for a bewildered second, she had perhaps vulgarly listened—was highly dreadful, highly disordering to her fashion of thinking and believing about Jimmy Bulstrode! Oh, for a moment she had half believed what that creature said, and her eyes had winked fast at the game before them! In the swiftness of the revolutions it had seemed for a sole flash real; but now that the noise had stopped and the carousel as well, she saw howwoodenthe horses were and that they were as dead as doornails! If she had been disturbed, she came loyally back now, with a glow and a rush of tenderness as she instantly re-instated what could never lose caste.
Oh, The Dials! She couldn't conceive what Jimmy had in reality, rashly, delightfully done there; what he had planted or installed, if he had planted or installed anything. But whatever the truth was, it was sure to be essentially right, as far as ethics went—she knew that at least. But Jimmy's delicacy and his heart were all too fine for the crude wisdom of the world or for her common-sense, which would have told him no doubt, had he cared to ask, that he was rash and wild.
She was prepared to hear that he had made some Magdalen a home in this prudish country place. At this possibility Jimmy's kindness and charity stood out graciously in strong contrast to the prudish judgment.
There were several long mirrors set in the panels of the room like lakes between green shores of old brocade, and they reflected her as she leaned forwards in her chair and looked about her, taking in the brightness of the perfect little room. It had been cut off from the wider, grander spaces for more intimate passages in the social course of events, but there was nothing newly planned in its colors and tapestries, its hangings and furnishings; the effect was sombre rather, the objects had the air of use, of having participated in past existences, and like faithful servants, they seemed to wait to serve perfectly new events.
The especial brightness of the room came from the gay festooning that had found its way throughout the castle. The mirrors were dark with the velvet rounds of hemlock from which the miserable face of scandal, the sardonic face of divorce, under the conditions of the present domestic situation might well grin satyr-like from the Christmas wreaths. No doubt there were lots of ghosts about, ready to stride, to flutter, or to walk; the American woman put their histories and their legends impatiently by.
The facile way in which the Duchess of Westboro' had slipped out from the chafing of domestic harness, the egotisticalgestewith which she had so widely thrown over her responsibilities, fetched Mrs. Falconer up to her own life, from whose problems indeed her husband's absence alone set her free. Her affairs had lately rapidly progressed, flying, whirling. The circles the event of her marriage had originally created, touched at last the farthest limit; there was nothing left for them now but to scatter. The vortex had rapidly narrowed down, was narrowing down, and nothing remained but a sole object in the bed of the clear water; and as Mary Falconer looked at it she knew that the thing was a stone.
"We spend," she had once said to Bulstrode, "half our lives forging chains, and the other half trying to make ourselves free." Hadn't she wrenched with all her might to be rid of hers? materially she still wore her bonds and moved with a ball.
As she had driven away from Charing Cross Station, a month ago, after seeing her husband aboard the Dover and Calais special, she had breathed—breathed—breathed—stretched her arms and hands out to London, felt on her eye and brow a dew that meant the very dawning of liberty broke for her, and that she was for the time at least blessed by it, and free.
The Sorghams' London house had opened its refuge wide for her, and she had gone into it like a child, to sleep and rest, and there she had grown up again, to begin to think and to plan, project and puzzle as those who grow up must do. She had never thought to such practical purpose as she did in these days, and never come so nearly reaching an end.
Just before dressing for dinner on this night, at the sensation the touch of her husband's telegram gave her, she realized how near to a not unusual decision she was, and when she put the envelope by with the rest of her mail, the part of her mind which she would not let herself look into was in confusion and doubt.
More effectively than Falconer's coming could have done, his few telegraphed words brought him to his wife's consideration. And the fantastic story of The Dials helped her, ridiculous as it was, burlesque as it was, to think; in the very humor of it, a shock, and helped her more reasonably to consider what otherwise her feelings would have turned to tragedy.
Jimmy's ecstasies about the place recurred to her with renewed cordiality. He had spent an hour at least describing it, and when he had finished with "A woman must be there, it is made for a woman," Mary Falconer had only seen herself in the frame that the old place presented. She exclaimed aloud: "Oh, no, no," and continued to affirm to herself that it was too fantastically absurd—"Jimmy!"
"It's only some delightful bit of charity, and he's too afraid of my wretched conservatism and my ironies to have told me frankly about it."
Having in a very unfeminine way opened a crack for reason, its honest face peered through, and Mary Falconer glanced at it with a sigh and a half-amused recognition, as if she had not been face to face with anything so cool and eminent for a long time.
Jimmy had hinted to her of a secret, in London; there was something he said he wished to tell her about, would tell her in full later, something that involved much happiness to others, and could it have been this? Could it have been that he was really secretly married? That at last the step of which he had constantly spoken, for which indeed there had been times when together they had half-heartedly planned for it, could it be that the one safeguard for them both had actually been formed by him, and alone? But only a second would she permit this conception of The Dials to obtain hold. "Ridiculous!" she repeated, "ridiculous! Not that I believe a word or any innuendo of the shocking old wizard, but it only shows, it only shows the helplessness of a woman who is not bound to a man, and how entirely the man is free!"
Nothing a man does counts well for him with a woman but those things he does in accordance with her estimate of what his attitude towards her should be! And Bulstrode's high-minded control, the reserve—which since her marriage had been maintained, only counted now against him.
Wasn't she, in it all, rather counting without her host? Their bond was so tacit, so silent, so unworded. Indeed, he had made no bond, had asked her for no pledge. She was tied hand and foot, but he was free. And over that freedom what vague right had she? What dominion could she have? Isn't it, after all, in the life of a clever, delightful man, something not strictly a burden, the soul-absorbing entire devotion of a woman not too old and more or less not generally disliked? What did it—heavens, but she was analyzing—what did it cost him? Hadn't he always gone from her at a moment's warning, and stopped away for months and months? Imperious as by nature she was, she had always been wise enough to reserve a summons from her that, she had every reason to believe, would fetch him from any distance to her side. She never tested him, she scarcely ever wrote to him; she had been at the Sorghams', and alone for a month, and save for one perfectly delightful day he had not once turned up to keep her company.
As the woman's thoughts encompassed the subject they brought it up to this: that as far as things went, at all events, there was no blame: no matter how society had coupled their names, she had at least the conscience of her acts clear. Jimmy was to be thanked for it from beginning to end; as far as the conscience of her thoughts went, well, those were her own affair. Oh, she could recall skirmishes and narrow impasses! Her tactics had more than once been those only permitted by the codes of battle, and of another passion.
Her chair, which she had left, she passed and repassed as she walked up and down, trailing her soft dress across the floor. She stood before the fire, her foot held out to the fervent flame.
Her face softened as there came out clearly to her the real picture of Jimmy that always kept itself somewhere between her eyes and her brain. Ah, there were men of talent and fashion, who did not hesitate to make merry, who were more or less good, more or less anti-pathetic, and for whom society never had a word of reproach—but Jimmy! distinguished and charming, with every taste and means to gratify them, with—so to put it—the woman of his heart at his very doors—how did he live? Why, for everybody in the world but for himself. And through it all, in spite of the fact that he appeared blindly to shut his eyes against their mutual love, he lived for her. Oh, he was the best, the best!
She listened as she stood there for the hum of the motor which might tell her he was coming back. She wanted to ask him to tell her the truth about The Dials. She wanted, above all else, to see him again.
She remembered them, one by one, the happy occasions they had caught and made the most of, and each after the other they became lovely harbors where like ships her thoughts lay at anchor. Penhaven was certainly one of the best. She congratulated herself that she had conceived that day, and without any blame she acknowledged it to herself, that if Jimmy had only wished it they would have been there together now.
She had taken her chair again and sat back deeply in the great fauteuil. The brocade made a dark-hued background against which her head, frankly thrown back, defined its charming lines. Her bare arms folded across her breast, her foot swinging gently to and fro, she continued to muse and dream, and as she thought of Bulstrode, to love him.
Some one came in and piled up the fire and slipped out, but no message was brought her to tell her what had become of her host and her friend.
The long sympathetic silence beginning at the fireside flowed through the vast rooms and corridors, and out into the night, down the lanes and the road until its completeness and tonelessness were broken by the memory of the bells of Penhaven, as she and Jimmy had heard them whilst they rang the angelus in the close. And the discordant note of The Dials was drowned, confused and lost in her intense listening to the Penhaven bells. Some chord or other, or some fine spring touched as she so thought on, brought back to her the fact of the despatch upstairs, which if it had any, had an imperative importance. Falconer had sent it from Palm Beach where he had gone to get rid of a troublesome grippe. He did not, in the few lines which told he was seedy and had put off his sailing, suggest that she should go back. But he would not resent her return, she knew that, he would probably treat her decently for at least a fortnight.
"I don't know a creature," she praised herself, "who would have stayed on with Jack, and nothing but Jimmy has helped me to stick it out. If he really loved me would he have let me go on as I have gone on? I don't know. Unless he loved me could he have helped me at all? I think not."
Round the figure of her friend there began to group, as if for some special purpose, the kindnesses and charities she had seen him display. One by one she added up his gifts and benefits until the poor and outcast and forgotten and despised claimed all of them to be his friends; they gathered round him and in place of the categoric histories of self-love and indulgence, of passion that had in more or less degree characterized the men of her set, these things came till the dawn of them and the light of them made his figure shine. How, she thought, could he ever have been what he so wonderfully is, if he had lived for himself or been anything but the best? Upstairs, in her room, a few hours before, the mark of silver on her hair had been a whip to urge on her rebellion; to tell her to seize and make the most of the fleeting time, to warn her of the age which when her beauty and her youth were gone, was all that could remain for them both. But now there began to blow across her soul a freshness. She had indeed been drawing long breaths in her husband's absence, but free as they were they left her stifled and panting, as if to get the oxygen she had been obliged to climb too far. Now, on the contrary, she was lifted as by wings, and whilst they fluttered about her she breathed evenly yet fully, and the air on the heights was something better than wine.
There is an unspoiled enjoyment in the thing which has never given us pain. It may be a sensual and ecstatic prerogative of passion to make the object suffer, but there is a different sense of happiness in that which never does harm or hurt or wrong to the thing it loves. So she could think of Bulstrode, without pain, without regret, without reproach. And if the ardor and passion in her became suffused and slowly paled, there was a starry brightness, a beauty in her face and in her eyes such as Bulstrode, when he came in to find her waiting, had never seen before.
With every mile of the short run from The Dials back to the castle, Mrs. Falconer's friend had been preparing himself for his meeting with the woman he had left some few hours before. All his emotions culminated in a high, swinging excitement. The fact that he was going back alone to find Mary Falconer there, was the big motif, and as he thought of the dark, charming envelope the castle made, holding the treasure she was, keeping her there for him, his heart beat so high that he knew there was nothing more for him to feel. The ecstasy he had witnessed in the little house his chivalry had purchased, the meeting of the husband and wife, come together there after so much unhappiness, put it poignantly to him that sterile love is a very unsatisfactory thing indeed. And if the highest quality of gallantry is to consider a woman's honor before her love, it at least makes real happiness—so he felt then—impossible in the world.
One false swerve of the motor at the pace they were going, and there would not be any more problems to solve. If he died now he might justly say that he had not lived, he had not lived! Who would give him back what he had missed? The motto on the dials repeated itself to him:Utere dum licet.
He pushed into the castle on his arrival, hurried to dress, and went downstairs. It seemed to him as he put aside the portières, that these curtains were at last all there was between himself and her, that he was going home, coming home at last; that ways he had for years seen approaching, met at length to-night here. It was with the very clear realization of the culmination of the time that Bulstrode went in to find his friend.
He had stopped to make himself irreproachable, and expected to find her waiting and friendly and lovely. What, had he found her anything else? But as rising from her chair, the scarf slipping back from her bare shoulders, she put out her hand and greeted him, the dazzling sense that breaks on a man's consciousness when he finds himself alone with the woman he loves, proved for a second that he had need of all his control. He could not speak.
"Jimmy!" she exclaimed, "you're as white as a ghost! You look as though you'd been to a wake; and I don't believe you've had a mouthful of dinner."
He remembered that it might be polite to apologize to her for the entire desertion of the household.
"My poor friend, what in Heaven's name must you think of us all!"
"Of you all?" (True enough, there had been another!) She had thought volumes, comedies, tragedies, melodramas, but what she thought didn't so much matter as did the fact that he had not, whatever festivities he had honored, dined. Shouldn't they have something here together before the fire?
"I seem," she said, "to have a blighting effect upon my host."
"My friend Westboro' is the happiest man in Glousceshire."
"Which means that he has found his Duchess?"
"He has found his Duchess."
When her friend entered the room, by the light on his face like the brightness of the morning as he caught sight of her, Mary Falconer saw that for Jimmy Bulstrode she was still the one woman in the world. In the relief that this knowledge brought her she half attempted to play with what had been her suspicions, and to tease him, but this mood passed.
"That's a horrid old parson they chose to have me dine with," she said. "He told me dreadful scandals but I think now that I see through them all. The Duchess of Westboro' has been living incognita at The Dials, hasn't she, and her husband at last found her there?"
Bulstrode acknowledged that she had read the drama correctly. And Mary Falconer laughed.
"Yes, evidently the Duchess has a strong dramatic sense; she's very romantic, isn't she?"
And the man absently exclaimed: "Oh, I dare say, I dare say." Then turning to her with unusual vehemence: "Do, for Heaven's sake leave them and everybody. I want to forget them all."
He threw up his hand with a sort of supplication. He had seated himself on a tapestried stool close beside the chair she had taken again. Using her Christian name for one of the rare times in his life, he pleaded: "Can't we leave all other people, Mary, can't we?"
She looked at him startled and said that their host seemed pretty effectually to have leftthem, rising from her chair with the words, and crossing the room to one of the long windows, drew back the curtain.
The cold glass against which she pressed her cheek sent a shock through her, but she stayed for a second close to the pane as if she would implore the newer transport, the stiller transport, of the icy cold to transfuse her veins.
The changed temperature had chased away the fog, and the night spread its serene beauty over the park, where the moonlight lay along the terrace like snow. Far down the slope rose the outlines of the bare trees, and the wide landscape shone and shone until it finally was lost in the mists.
Bulstrode had followed over and stood by Mary Falconer's side, and the scene before him seemed full of joy, full of gifts, full of largesse. The ornament on the woman's bosom stirred with her breathing, shot a million fine sparkles, and below it the spray of mistletoe rose and fell, rose and fell.
He put his hand out and took the spray and fastened it in his buttonhole, saying that the mistletoe was above her head.
His voice, one she had never heard, made her unwisely turn to meet his eyes, to shake with the emotion of the adventurer trembling on the edge of the precipice; just to hang over which, and to shudder, he has climbed high. She put her hand out between them, holding him back.
"I've had a telegram from my husband. He's very ill. He's in Palm Beach and I'm going over to him next week."
"I've had a telegram from my husband""I've had a telegram from my husband"
"I've had a telegram from my husband""I've had a telegram from my husband"
Falconer's name was sovereign for breaking spells as far as Jimmy was concerned, but the wife's phrase this time gave him only a more violent revelation of his cruel hope. She went on:
"It's not alarming, but with a heart like Jack's, anything might happen. It's only when I'm with him that he keeps up any sort of shape."
The fact of his holding in his the hand that she had put out to keep him from her, did not serve to aid in a serene continuation of her plans, and the silence became a burden which if she did not herself lift would crush her.
She said hurriedly: "And you will help me to go."
And then Bulstrode spoke: "No," he said, "Oh, no."
For the briefest space she yielded to what he meant and was at last wicked enough and human enough to promise to do. But she had on this solemn evening—for it had so been—come too far, gone up too high to drag down all the way with him on a single word. In supremest happiness, however, at what he said and how he said it, she gave a little soft laugh, and although she was under the mistletoe, she felt that she looked down on him, loving him so much more that in adorable weakness he had suddenly grown small and dear.
"Oh, Jimmy," she whispered, "how heavenly of you, but you can't go back on ten years in one week. You can't, you know! You've thrown me like a giant sofar, I've gone right on up."
Still looking at her he shook his head as she repeated: "You'll help me, you'll help me! You can't go back!"
"Icango back," he said deeply, "on everything and everybody in the world."
At the frank simple words, and the sense of what they meant, at the sound of his new voice, it was as if all the dykes at last were down; and strong, bright, but most beautiful, the sea came rushing in. As she saw him coming toward her and knew that in a moment more she would be in his arms, and that at his first touch she would let everything go, she found one word to say and it proved only to be his name:
"Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!"
But there was in it an appeal. She could count the times she had wept in her life, very nearly, she had often said that a woman weeps only when she has nothing else to do, and there had always been so much, every minute in her life; and as if in logical affirmation there seemed now for her nothing to do but to cry. The tears which covered her face and fell into her palms and against the chair on which she leaned, comforted her in a measure and served to loosen the tension of her mind. She had succeeded in miraculously keeping away from him, just within touch of her, held back by a hand whose white gentleness was not so exquisitely strong but that he loved her too well to break the tender barrier. She never afterward knew what appeals she made or how she besought, but it must have been of great force to keep him so transfixed and pale.
"Oh, youhavetold me over and over again! Do you think I am deaf or blind, or that I have found you dumb? Such love, Jimmy, such high, sweet perfectness! Why, there isn't a woman in a million who has known it or even dreamed what such love could mean. Why, there hasn't been a day or an hour for ten years that you have not spoken it to me in the most adorable way, in the most beautiful way; and in every kind thing you have done, in every foolish, dear thing, I have been so vain as to think that I counted for something in it, that you did it a little for me. Other women have had their lovers, their scandals, their great passions. But I have had you without flaw, without a change, without regret. Hush!" she cried, wiping her tears away, "Hush. It's quite safe to let me go on. The only fear is thatyoumay speak."
The arm which she had held out to keep him from her had fallen upon his shoulder, lay about his neck as he knelt by her chair.
"It's been horrible!" she said, shaking her head, "Horrible—the days and the nights, the days and the nights! There have been times when I could have killed him and killed myself as well. But then you've come, and your presence has helped me, and that's the way I've pulled along; because by your silence you told me to pull along, because by the fact that you didn't speak I understood that you thought I should be brave, and I have been—thanks to you, and I shall be—thanks to you! Oh!" she cried passionately, "if you think because I am saying it all out that I want to go back, that I don't see what I am running away from, and what you mean, you're cruel, you're cruel!"
Her other hand had found its fellow and they both lay on his shoulders.
"I only think of you," he breathed, "and of how..."
She covered his lips. "Oh, hush, hush, you have told me, in the only way there was to tell. I'm too stupid to be able to combine a lover and a husband. The day and the hour you spoke I should never have seen my husband again. And that's where it stands; that's how it is, and you know it. You loved me because I was like that, and I love you because you are the bravest of the brave. There you are!" she cried, and drew away from him triumphantly, letting her arms fall. "There we both are!"
"Have you any vague conception of what this is for me?" Bulstrode asked.
"Oh, I dare say," she exclaimed, with a kind of petulance, "that I am only thinking of my own bewildering happiness. There," she exclaimed at his face, "I see you have a new weapon: pity. Oh, don't use that against me, and I warn you that everything in the world will crumble if you speak."
Her hands, which he was holding closely, she drew from him and laid them both on his breast and met his eyes full with her own. Her lips were slightly trembling, and she was as white as a winter day. In the moment of silence they passed like this, she seemed to him like some great precious pearl, some priceless rose fragrant, lustrous, made for him, gathered for him, and yet beyond his right. She seemed, above all, the woman, the mate; her glorious sex, her tenderness, her humanness, drew him and dazzled him; and, nevertheless, through his daze and over his desire, he heard with his finest her cry:
"Jimmy, Jimmy, don't speak, don't speak. Ah, if you really love me..."
He really loved her. Rising from where he knelt by her chair, Bulstrode went over, stood a second by the chimneypiece, and then took a few paces up and down the room, came back to her and said the thing the real man says to the woman he really loves:
"I want to make you happy, Mary. I will do whatever you wish me to do."
"Ah, then, go!"
Bulstrode looked wearily about as though of its own accord a door might unclose or a portière lift.
"Go where, pray, at this time of night, or morning?"
"Oh, to The Dials. Ring for a motor; they will take you in again; or go to the rector's."
The last of the fire had flared up. The flame went out.
Sinking back in her chair, she waited in a tranced stillness, her eyes on the ashes of the fire. She had said her say out, perhaps the man knew it, and as she leaned back in the cushions he saw how completely it all lay with him at the end. She thought he came back and waited a second at her side; she thought he bent a moment over her, but she did not stir until the cold wind from an opening door, till the clicking of a latch made her start, and then she turned to see that he had gone.
Bulstrode came back to the castle Christmas Day at nine o'clock. But the hour had the effect of being much earlier. The winter morning panoplied with festivity began its life slowly, and not all the day's brightness through which he had speeded his motor had yet come into the house. Bulstrode, drawn by it, went directly back to the room he had left several hours before, as though he expected still to find the woman he loved sitting before the extinguished fire.
Two parlor maids were whisking their skirts and dusters out of the opposite door, a footman at their heels. Touches of the inevitable order which reduces an agreeable disarray to the impersonal had already been put to the scene of Jimmy's tenderness, and the curtains drawn well away from the long windows let in the morning that entered broadly and fell across the hearth and the fresh-lit fire.
Clean logs replaced the cold ashes: the match had just finished with the kindlings, and Bulstrode went over to welcome the crackling of the young blaze. The absence of his host, the castle once more handed over to him for the time, gave him a feeling of proprietorship in the bright cordial room, but looking up at the portraits of Westboro's in puffs and velvets, Jimmy couldn't find an ancestor! Their amours and indulgences had written brilliant and amusing history; the gentlemen had gone mad at ladies' carriage wheels, they had carried off their scandals with the highest of hands, and still held their heads well. They had carved and raped and loved their way down to the present time, and were none the less a proud line of pure British blood. The American bachelor, about whose fine head nothing picturesque or worthy of history circled, looked up at the Dukes of Westboro' musingly, and there was not a peer or a noble better to look upon or who had been at heart a truer lover, although he did not know it.
During the lapse of time between leaving this same room and his present return, Bulstrode had not tossed on a sleepless bed; he had slept soundly, and during his rest the several dials had called out like bells, their voice,Utere dum licet; and finally a real bell had roused him to the fact that it was day, a new day, and that unless he was killed en route to the castle, nothing could keep him from the place and from her.
He had no consolation in the fact that the honor and decency of society were by him strengthened and retained, nor did he plan out the sane, wise project of not seeing her again. Nor did he weigh or balance his charge or responsibility. There had been a cessation of vibration of any kind, and only one supreme, sovereign reality took possession of the world and of himself, and the limitless beauty and the limitless delight he had breathed in ever since he left her and knew how she loved him. Nothing in life, he had so felt, could dull or tarnish the glory of her face; nothing, no matter what life held for them both, could efface the touch she had laid upon him, as her arms were about him. Through the interval his past life appeared to have been, on through the new and unlived interval to come, she would be as last night she had been, she would look at him as last night she had looked. "Heavens!" he meditated, in the faces of the self-indulgent, cynical Westboro's, "I am not going to be blasé through six paradises just because there happens to be a seventh!"
A new fire spun its lilac flames behind his back. The spicy breath of the wreaths of hemlock was deliciously sweet. Little by little the sun had made its eastern way and sparkled at the pane outside, and in the radiant clarity the terrace and its charming railing, the urns with the little cedars, stood out clearly; and more than all else, the truth cried itself to him, that whatever happened, she was still here, still in the house with him.
He had chosen a Christmas gift for her in London, and determined to send it up to her now with some roses, and in this way to announce the fact that he had come back from The Dials and was ready to use the day as she liked. He felt only how beautiful it would be to see her, that it did not for a second occur to him to wonder if she on her part would feel a certain embarrassment.
In answer to his ring, not a man servant, but the perfect housekeeper rustled in, her crisp silks, her cameos, and her "Christmas face," as one of the little Westboro' chaps had called her rosy countenance, on one of his few Christmas days.
"Where would Mr. Bulstrode please to have breakfast?"
"Why, wherever it best suited, went with the house, with the day. Where, indeed, and that was more to the point, would Mrs. Falconer have it?"
"Mrs. Falconer? Why, Mr. Bulstrode didn't know then that Mrs. Falconer had gone?"
She saw by his face that he knew nothing less in the world.
Why, directly the despatch had been fetched over from the Abbey station. There had been but twenty minutes between the getting of it and her starting away. A motor had been sent with her and the maid, and Mrs. Falconer had fortunately been able to make the train; the only one, it so happened, being Christmas Day, that connected with the Dover and Calais special.
The matter-of-fact bit of news came to Bulstrode so coldly and so ruthlessly that it took some seconds for the bitter thought that she had gone because she couldn't trust him, to penetrate. Then this gave place to an effulgent hope that it might beherselfshe couldn't trust! But the discovery that she had left him no message of any kind, and that she was above all irrevocably gone, struck him more cruelly than had any blow in his kindly life. He could not suffer in peace before the bland creature in silks and cameos. Crises and departures, battle, murder, and sudden death, he felt the housekeeper would accept serenely should any of them chance to occur at Westboro', and above all if they were part of the sacred family history. But Mrs. Falconer and he were not Westboro's, and he wanted to be rid of his companion and to find himself alone in order to consult time tables, to find out why it had been imperative to go to Calais, with what boat for America a Christmas-Day train could possibly connect, and to turn it all over in his mind. He at first believed that there had never been any telegram and that she had only employed a polite ruse in order to facilitate her flight.
Why, at all events, couldn't she have left him a line? She might, he ruefully complained, have strained a point and wished him a Merry Christmas! As he walked to and fro in the room now supremely deserted, he began slowly to approach a certain hypothesis which as soon as he granted, he as violently discarded. But the thought was imperious: something of its kind always haunted him like a bad ghost. It could usually be dismissed, but now it was persistent. A despatch from Falconer had certainly come the night before. Another might have followed on this morning, hard upon it? To have been sent over from the Abbey on a holiday must have been a very grave message indeed; "a matter," as the old term went, "of life and death." The phrase began to repeat itself and the conviction to grow, and as he was obliged to give it admittance and to face it, and to wonder what the shock would be to her, and what the news would be to him, how it would change things, and how they would both meet it—his promenade to and fro in the room brought him up before the centre table and he looked down upon it at length with a seeing eye. Why not? why not? he was wondering. We are all essentially mortal, and lightning never had struck yet,why not in this place? And since there had been neither shame nor blame, why couldn't he face the possibility of a perfectly natural mortality? Before him on the table lay Mrs. Falconer's green scarf, and as Bulstrode lifted the soft thing he saw that underneath it lay a despatch.
Then he knew instantly that Mary Falconer had left both scarf and telegram there, and that this was her message to him. He seemed, as the word he had not yet read met him in this form, to have been waiting all his life for just this news. The road, so long in winding home, had wound home at length, and now that he believed the crisis was really reached, there was something infinitely stilling in its solemnity.
Bulstrode could not at once draw the sheet from its envelope. He lit a cigar and sat down before the fire.
He knew, as though he saw it all before his eyes, how the despatch had found her this early Christmas Day, in her room—he knew how she had read it first and borne it well—for she was a brave, strong woman—he knew that his absence had been a relief to her. He knew how she had worn her long, dark cloak and thick veil, and had gone out to travel home alone. Oh, he knew her, and as he thought of the picture she had made, and how she would begin her sad and dreadful journey, he for the first time thought of himself—of themselves. He was too human not to know that there would be a future and that they would build anew. In the new house there would be no driftwood now; nor would they ever be haunted by the sound of a bell in the dark, for with the few brave souls who sail across the seas of life they had both of them stood by the sinking ship until it put into port.
Mrs. Shawles came in again presently and told him that she had laid his breakfast in the little room facing the gardens. Then she waited, and as Bulstrode looked up at her he forced himself to smile faintly and wished her a Merry Christmas.
She thanked him, gave him many, and said it was a happy morning for all of the Westboro's, and that the castle and the house would see new times and better things, and when he had stirred himself to the point of putting what he had for her into her hand, he was not sure whether he wanted her to go, or not, this time and leave him alone.
She still hesitated. It was a custom with them, she told him, with the Westboro's, to have hall prayers on holidays. When the Duke himself was there, he always read them; the servants and the children of the place had already come in. In the absence of the familywouldMr. Bulstrode...?
"Oh, no, on no account, on no account," he hurried. "Wasn't there some one else?"
"Well, to be sure, there was Portman."
The guest was sure that Portman would do it quite in the proper way, and as for himself, he would have his breakfast in a few moments, he thanked her.
And Mrs. Shawles, who had expected a more favorable answer, left open on the table the little Book which she had brought in with her.
Bulstrode took it up after she was gone.
In a few seconds he heard from the distance the sound of the children singing. Their voices ceased, to be followed by the subdued murmur of reading. As Bulstrode opened the Book he held, the leaves fell apart at the marriage rite. He hurriedly passed this over, and his eyes were arrested by the opening lines of a more solemn service. He paused to read the beautiful, pitiful words, and then, still with the open Book in his hands, he drew the telegram out of its cover....