CHAPTER XXI.
“FROM THE EVIL TO COME.”
Vansittart and his wife never went to the village in the mountains, where all things had been made ready for their coming. Eve spent that afternoon which should have been her last at Cannes in the burial-ground on the hill, now in its glory of May flowers, a paradise of roses and white marble, a place full of tenderest memorials to the early dead, a spot which seemed especially dedicated to those whom the gods love best, the holy ones and pure of spirit, removed from the evil to come for hard middle-life and selfish old age. Eve gave herself up to the luxury of grief on that last day, taking her fond farewell of that quiet bed where, under a coverlet of pale roses, the happy child slept the everlasting sleep. She lingered, and lingered, as the sun sloped towards the dark ridge of hills; lingered when the great flaming disc touched the rugged line, until there was only the afterglow to light her back to Californie. Vansittart had trusted her alone with the steady Benson, now promoted from Peggy’s nurse to be Eve’s own maid. He had cheques to write and final arrangements to make; and he thought that there would be greater tranquillity for Eve in solitude, with only an attendant. It was better there should be no one to whom she could expatiate on her grief, for her talk with him had always tended to hysteria. Thus convenience and prudence had both counselled his leaving her to herself; and it was only when the clock on the mantelpiece chimed the quarter before eight and the shadows deepened in the corners of the room that he felt he had been imprudent. He went hurriedly out to the terrace in front of the villa, and felt that creeping chillness in the air which follows quickly upon sundown on this southern shore. The carriage stopped at the gate as he went out,and Eve was in his arms, to be welcomed first and scolded afterwards.
“It is with you I am most angry, Benson,” he said to his wife’s attendant; “you ought to have been wiser.”
“I won’t have you scold Benson,” remonstrated Eve; “it is my fault. She teased me to come home ever so long ago, and I wouldn’t. I wanted to stay with Peggy till the last moment. It was like bidding her good-bye again. And now I have left her lying in her quiet grave, near the poor mother whom she hardly knew. I didn’t know how late it was till we were in the carriage coming home, and I began to feel rather chilly.”
“You are shivering now, Eve. You should have remembered what Dr. Bright said about sunset.”
“Ah, that was on Peggy’s account. It is different for me.”
“Well, I won’t try to frighten you into a cold. Run to your mistress’s-room, Benson, and make a good fire. I ordered tea to be ready.”
He almost carried Eve upstairs, and with his own hands manipulated the olive logs, and set the merry pine cones blazing and crackling, while she lay on the sofa in front of the fireplace and watched the flames; but the shivering continued in spite of the cheery wood fire, and eiderdown coverlet, and hot tea; so Dr. Bright was sent for hurriedly, and came to find his patient with a temperature that indicated grave disturbance. He came, and left only to come back again, with another English doctor, who did not leave his patient all night; and between midnight and morning the young wife’s existence trembled in the balance, and the husband, pacing to and fro and in and out on the lower floor, ground his teeth and beat his head in a passion of self-reproach, hating himself for having allowed that perilous visit to the cemetery, cursing himself for his folly in not having gone with her if she must needs go.
“There is a blight upon us and upon our love,” he told himself in his despair. “Nemesis will have her due.”
His fondest hope was blighted—the hope of a living link which should bind him closer to his wife and make severance impossible—a child, whose innocent eyes should turn from father to mother, and plead to the mother for the father’s sin—the child who, in direct contingency, was to be his champion and his saviour. He passed through an ordeal of such agony and apprehension on his wife’s account as to make him for the time being comparatively indifferent to the loss of his son, who came upon this mortal scene only to vanish from it for ever; but when at last, in mid-June, while Californie and her fir woods were baking under a tropical sun, his wife was restored to him, strong enough to travel to cooler regionsin the shadow of the great Alps, there fell upon him the sense of an irreparable loss.
They went by easy stages to Courmayeur, and established themselves there for the rest of the summer, in a reposeful solitude, keeping aloof from the climbers and explorers and the race of tourists generally. They had their own rooms, in a Dépendance of the hotel, rooms whose windows commanded valley and mountain. Here Eve first felt the tranquillizing influence of Alpine scenery, and her quiet rambles with Vansittart soon brought back the bloom of her girlish beauty, and restored something of the frank gladness of those younger years when she and her sisters used to ramble over the undulating ridge of Bexley Hill, and think it a mountain.
“Dear old Bexley,” sighed Eve, with her eyes dreamily contemplating Mont Chetif; “I hope I shall never begin to despise you, even though you are a hill to put in one’s pocket as compared with these white giants.”
The peaceful days, the perfect union between husband and wife, revived Eve’s spirits and did much to restore her health, sorely shaken by the ordeal through which she had passed. Fever had raged fiercely in the battle between life and death, and the long bright hair, which had made so fair a diadem in the days of her poverty, had been shorn from the burning head. She looked quaintly pretty now, with her boyish crop, framing the broad white forehead with crisp short curls. She laughed when Vansittart talked of next season, when his mother was to lend them the house in Charles Street.
“You can never appear in society with a cropped head for your companion,” she said. “People will say you have married a lady doctor, or some other learned monstrosity from Girton. I shall be tabooed in the smart world where ignorance isde rigueur, and to know anything about books is a sign of inferiority.”
“What care I if they think my sweet love a senior wrangler disguised as a fine lady? You are pretty enough to set the fashion of cropped heads.”
They moved slowly homeward in the late autumn, loitering beside the great Swiss lakes till the October mists began to make Pilatus invisible and to hang low over the steep gables of Lucerne. They lingered under Mr. Hauser’s hospitable roof so long that the great black St. Bernard lifted his head and howled an agonizing farewell when the carriage drove off to the station with Eve and her husband. That leonine beast was sagacious enough to know that the trunks and travelling-bags and bustle of departure meant something more than the daily drive, and that he was to see these kind friends no more, and eat no more sweet biscuits out of Eve’s soft white hands.
It was late in October when they found themselves among the pine woods and hillocks of Hampshire, and insignificant as the hills were there was pleasure in feeling one’s self at home. Eve’s mother-in-law was at Merewood to receive them, and to make much of her son’s wife, whom she found thinner and more fragile-looking than when she left for the Riviera, but with all the beauty and brightness which had captivated her lover. Mrs. Vansittart’s welcome had in it more of affection than she had ever given her son’s wife in the past.
“I think you are beginning to love me,” Eve said, too sensitive not to feel the change.
“My dear child, I always loved you.”
“Only a very little,” argued Eve. “You liked me pretty well in the abstract, I dare say, but you did not care for me as Mrs. John Vansittart. It was very natural. You had your own favourites, any one of whom you would have liked Jack to marry; dear, nice girls who always wear tidy frocks, play the ‘Lieder ohne Worte,’ and visit the poor. I was altogether a detrimental.”
“It was not you, Eve—only your people.”
“My people—meaning my father. Yes, he was a stumbling-block, no doubt—a man who had gone down in the world, and about whom malevolent people said cruel things. Well, he has not been obtrusive, has he? He has kept himself in the background.”
“My dear, he has been admirable, and your sisters, when I came to know them and understand them, proved altogether unobjectionable. We saw a good deal of each other while you were away.”
“Sophy told me how kind you had been. Yes, they are good girls. Their faults are all on the surface. But the flower of the flock is gone—the brightest and the most loving. She was all love.”
“Take comfort, dear; there is deep sorrow, but there can be no bitterness in the thought of a child’s death.”
“Ah, that is what you religious people say,” cried Eve, rebelliously, “but I have not faith enough to feel that. Why should she be taken? Life was all before her, full of happiness, of beautiful sights and sounds, and joys untasted. She was taken from the evil to come, you will say—but there might be no evil. There has been no evil in your life! See how peacefully it has glided by.”
“You forget, Eve, that I have had to sorrow for a beloved husband.”
“Oh, forgive me. Yes, you have felt the burden—the shadow has fallen upon you too—the shadow, and the burden of death. Why did the Creator make a beautiful world, and then spoil it?”
“Eve, this is blasphemy.”
“The heart must rebel sometimes; one must ask these questions. ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ Is it only thefool who says that? Is it not the bitter cry of all humanity at some time or other?”
“Eve, you are writhing under your first sorrow. Let it turn your heart to God, not away from Him. Do you think the unbeliever’s creed will give you any comfort?”
“Comfort? No. There is no comfort in religion, or in unbelief. Religion only means obedience, and public worship, and kindness to the poor, and a good orderly life. It doesn’t mean the certainty of getting back our dead—somewhere, somehow, and being happy again as we have been.”
“We can rest in the hope of that, Eve, knowing that we are immortal.”
“Knowing? But we don’t know. Nobody has ever come back to tell us. Oh, if but once, only once, for one moment in a year, our dead could come back and look at us, and speak to us, death would not be death.”
Mrs. Vansittart spoke no more of comfort. It was better perhaps to let the troubled heart tire itself out with grieving. Tranquillity would come afterwards.
“And our son, our son who breathed only to die. He did not live even long enough for baptism. He was dead when the Bishop came hurriedly from his house on the hill. You think perhaps—you who are a strict Anglican—that his soul is in limbo—that he will never see the throne of God. We were going to be so fond of him, Jack and I—and Peggy wanted to live long enough to see him—but she was gone before he came, and he didn’t care about living. If she had been well and happy all things would have been different. They would have been running about together in a year or two from now. And now she would have been carrying him about in her arms. He would have been beginning to notice people, and to laugh and coo like that cottager’s child we saw yesterday, just about as old as my baby would have been now.”
“My dearest, do you suppose I am not sorry for your loss and for your husband’s? But God never meant us to rebel, even in our grief. That must not be.”
“I know I am wicked,” said Eve, with a long-drawn sigh. “I have my fits of wickedness. In church yesterday, on my knees at the altar, I thought that I was resigned, I almost believed in the heaven where we shall see and know our friends again.”
The dark hour passed, and at sunset, when Vansittart came home from a long day in the plantations, his wife received him with her brightest smile. His coming back after a few hours’ absence meant the fulness of joy.
She had spent a day at Fernhurst, and the sight of her three sisters in their somewhat ostentatious mourning had renewed hergrief. She had sent them money for mourning, which largesse they had spent conscientiously, and so were swathed in crape and distinctly funereal of aspect.
There were Peggy’s sisters, whose very existence recalled her image too vividly; and there was Peggy’s room, the room which she had shared with Hetty; and the little bed where she had slept so peacefully, with her nose almost touching the sloping roof, before the cruel cough took hold of her, and disturbed those happy, childish slumbers, with their visions of fairyland, or of castles in the air which seemed solid and real to the dreamer. Everything in that cottage chamber suggested her who slept in a far lovelier spot.
The room remained just as the child had left it. Peggy’s things were sacred. There was her workbox, the substantial, old-fashioned rosewood box, inlaid with mother-o’-pearl, and lined with blue silk, the old, old blue, a colour such as modern taste holds up to scorn—for the box was nearly half a century old, and had belonged to Peggy’s grandmother first and to her mother afterwards. It had been given to Peggy because she was the youngest, and the little stock of trinkets was exhausted by the time her four sisters had each received a souvenir. The amethyst earrings, utterly unwearable, for Eve; the watch which had not gone for years, to Sophy; and a couple of poor little brooches for Jenny and Hetty. After these jewels had been dealt out there remained only the workbox for Peggy. It had been to her a source of infinite delight. What treasures of doll’s clothing, what varieties of fancy-work; kettle-holders, never to be polluted by a kettle; mats, never finished; Berlin-wool cuffs, and point-lace handkerchiefs. Peggy had seldom finished anything; but the rapture of beginning things had been intense, a fever of enjoyment.
There were her books upon a little carved Swiss shelf, by her bed. Her lesson-books, thumbed and dog’s-eared, everybody else’s lesson-books before they descended to her; that “Grammaire des Grammaires” over which the whole family had toiled, and the Primers which make learning easy and people the world with smatterers. There were gift-books, birthday presents from governess or sisters; the immortal Family Robinson, Grimm, Hans Andersen, Bluebeard, Cinderella. How many a summer dawn Peggy had lain upon that pillow, reading the old fairy-tales before a foot was stirring in the house. Her bed was there, with the prettiest ofBellagio rugs laid over it, sacred as a shrine. The little room would have been far more convenient for Hetty if that bed had been taken down and put away; but no one dreamed of removing it. There would have been unlovingness in the mere suggestion.
Well, they had all to do without Peggy henceforward. There was one link gone from the chain of love. Vansittart looked roundat his sisters-in-law’s faces with an agonized dread. Who would be the next? Which among that tainted flock would be the first to show the inherited poison, the first to feel the cold hand of the destroyer?
They all looked bright and healthy. They had all the fair complexion and fine roseate bloom which mark the typical English beauty, a loveliness of colour which can almost afford to dispense with perfection of form. They were slenderly made. In a doctor’s parlance, there was not much of them to fall back upon—not much in hand at the beginning of a long illness. They were tall and willowy, rather narrow-chested, Vansittart noted with a pang. Yes, assuredly Eve was the flower of the flock. Her chest was broader, her throat fuller and more firmly moulded than the chests and throats of her sisters. The poise of her head was more decided, her whole bearing argued a stronger constitution. She was the offspring of her mother’s youth, before any indication of disease had darkened the young life. She was the offspring of her father’s early manhood. The doctors had augured well for her on this account.
The winter was spent very quietly at Merewood. Vansittart hunted and shot, and he often went home earlier in the winter dusk than became him as a sportsman, in order to take tea with Eve beside the fire. His mother lingered at Merewood, so that Eve should not be alone, the link between the two women strengthening day by day. The sisters came over from Haslemere, and enjoyed all the luxuries of a well-appointed house. Eve and her husband went for two or three short visits to Redwold Towers, and Sir Hubert and Lady Hartley came to Merewood; he for the last of the pheasants—having pretty nearly cleared his own woods, extensive as they were—she for the pleasure of being with Eve, to whom she was sincerely attached.
And so the winter went by, a not unhappy winter. How could a young wife be unhappy, adoring and adored by her husband? Hymen’s torch glowed with gentlest light beside that hearth where the pine logs were heaped so liberally, pine logs from Vansittart’s paternal woods.
Eve was in high health at Easter, radiant, full of life and spirits, albeit in no wise forgetful of that grave on the hill where the Maréchal Niel roses were growing so luxuriantly, and which was being carefully tended by stranger hands. There are those at Cannes who take a loving pride in that Garden of Death, whose care it is that this place of rest should be for ever beautiful, a paradise of peace, the very memory whereof should be sweet in the thoughts of the bereaved. Eve could think now with resignation of that tranquil spot, and of the young life which had come to asudden pause on earth. Was it a full stop, or only a hyphen? Was it the end of the book, or only the bottom of the page, with the last word repeated over-leaf, to carry on the story without a break?
Mrs. Vansittart insisted that her children should have the free use of the house in Charles Street for the London season. She wanted Eve to enjoy the privileges of her position as the wife of a man of good family and good means. She had also a lingering hope that in the high pressure of London society her son might awaken to some worthy ambition—political or social, and might try to make his mark in the world. She had always been ambitious for him—had always wanted him to do something more than shoot his own pheasants, improve the cottages on his estate, and live within his means. For a young man of his social status, the political arena offered fair scope for ambition, and Mrs. Vansittart had the common idea that any man of good abilities can succeed in politics.