It was not until the evening that Sylvester entered the library again. His father was still unconscious, likely to remain so for many hours. Matthew's ordinary medical adviser had consulted with Sylvester. A trained nurse telegraphed for from London had just arrived. At present nothing more could be done. Possibly the stricken man might recover. But the case was grave.
Sylvester had been puzzled all day. What could have induced the stroke? A moment or two before, his father had been in the best of spirits, talking with an enjoyment that had been very rare of late. Generally, when the heart is weak, it is some sudden shock that paralyses. But here the theory of sudden shock was untenable. Perhaps it was simply the reaction of the high spirits following depression.
Miss Lanyon and himself had dined together,—a cheerless meal. The gentle lady wept and conjectured feebly as to causation, implored Sylvester, as indeed she had done all day, to pronounce favourably on the patient's condition. They did not eat much. The cook had sent up tearful apologies for the spoiling of a dish, on the ground that she was too upset. But they would not have noticed. The parlour maid's eyes were red. She had been some years in the house, and the personal charm that endeared Matthew to all who came in contact with him had gained the girl's affection. Miss Lanyon used to say that Matthew spoiled the servants. Matthew replied that he hated perfection, and liked them spoiled; they were more human. At any rate, his sudden illness spread consternation and dismay through the household. The news had gone abroad, and anxious inquiries had been made at the door by all kinds and conditions of folk. Amongst them was Mr. Usher, who had shuffled up to hear news of his dear friend in affliction. Sylvester had sent him a curt reply by the servant. He disliked Mr. Usher cordially, and had rejoiced over the strained relations that had kept him away from the house. Dinner was over, and Sylvester went into the library to smoke. The room was more or less as he had left it that morning. Matthew's pass-book lay on the table, and three or four passed cheques lay upon the book. He filled and lit his pipe, and sat down in the writing-chair to think over the case. Suddenly, the room recalling associations, he remembered the cheque he had seen flutter from his father's fingers. Almost idly he looked down to see if it was still on the floor. His eye fell upon it underneath the armchair, whither it had probably been kicked during the bodily removal of his father from the room. He picked it up. But a glance was enough to make him start back with an oath. It was a passed cheque for £3,000 made payable to and indorsed by Roderick Usher, and signed “Matthew Lanyon.” At first he could not comprehend it. Why should his father have paid to Roderick so amazing a sum? And having paid it, why should he have received such a shock on seeing the cheque? He brought it nearer the lamp that stood on the table; and then, suddenly, a suspicion smote him, like a great blow. There were variations from his father's writing. His signature, so simple as to be roughly imitated with the greatest facility, had yet certain strong characteristics which were missing here. Sylvester looked at the numbers of the cheques on the table; they were consecutive. The three thousand pound cheque bore a number from a totally different series. The pink colour, too, was slightly faded. Where was the book from which the cheque had been torn? His glance fell upon his father's bunch of keys, depending from one in the lock of the writing-table drawer. An idea struck him. He remembered that his father, most methodical of men, kept the stubs of his cheque-books ranged along a shelf of an old press between the fireplace and the window. For a moment he hesitated. He had never looked at one of his father's papers in his life. His intention seemed almost criminal.
“I beg your pardon, my dear, but I must,” he said, half aloud, and then finding the key he opened the cupboard. A rapid examination showed him the stub he wanted. The dates on the counterfoils were of three years back. With trembling fingers he ran through the numbers. The counterfoil of Roderick's cheque was missing.
Mechanically he replaced the stub and locked the cupboard. And then he stood for a while, fierce-eyed, shivering with a horrible certainty. Roderick had forged the cheque, and the shock of discovery had nearly killed his father.
The whole man was white-hot with fury. In such accesses of anger, stern, reserved men have killed their enemies mercilessly. Instead of confusing their judgment, their anger burns it to crystal clearness. Every action is that of sublimated reason. Sylvester remained for a few moments motionless; then he picked up a railway time-card from the table, glanced at it, and consulted his watch. He turned down the lamp and left the room. In the hall he was met by Simmons, the doctor. The latter was by far the more outwardly perturbed of the two.
“Well, how are things?”
“As satisfactory as can be expected,” replied Sylvester. “Come and see.” They went together slowly up the stairs, discussing the symptoms, and entered the sick chamber. There was very little change. Unconsciousness would still last for many hours. That at least was certain. Meanwhile they could do nothing but await events. Before leaving the room, Sylvester bent down and kissed his father's face, that looked shrunken in the dim light, and never had he felt such yearning love for him. Downstairs, he drew Simmons into the library.
“I am going to London to-night,” said he.
Simmons stared at him. “To London?” he queried.
“And leave my father in this condition? Yes, I am summoned on a matter of life and death.”
The other was puzzled by the non-professional phrase. “An urgent case” would have been intelligible. But he made no comment. Neither of the Lanyons was a man to discuss his private concerns with his acquaintance. Sylvester continued,—
“I am more than satisfied to leave him in your hands, Simmons. You know that. But you would be doing me a good turn if you sent me two or three telegrams to-morrow. I hope to get back at night.”
“Willingly,” replied Simmons; and after a few more words, the two men shook hands and parted. Miss Lanyon, whose simple gospel it was that whatever Matthew or Sylvester did was right, demanded no explanations when Sylvester announced his intention of going to London; but when he was gone, she cried a bit to herself in a sympathetic feminine way. Men were unaccountable beings in her eyes. They represented mysterious forces which she had been brought up, in her young days, to regard with respectful awe. There was a trace of orientalism in the attitude of our grandmothers towards the male sex. It lingers still in old-fashioned, sequestered places.
It was late when Sylvester's cab stopped at his house in Weymouth Street. He attempted to open the door with his latch-key, but the chain was up, and he had to ring and wait in the drizzling rain until a shivering and tousled servant came down. At another time he would have felt a chill of desolation at entering the dark and fireless house, so cold in its unwelcome. But to-night he was strung to a high pitch; and the loneliness of his surroundings failed to touch the usually responsive chord. He went upstairs to his room, dominated by a fixed idea. He would stop the marriage, thus tardily doing his father's bidding, and have Roderick arrested on a charge of forgery. If his father died, his murder would thus, at least, be avenged.
Early the next morning he went to Roderick's chambers. The servant, who was setting the breakfast table, informed him that Mr. Usher had not yet been called.
“Wake him and say that Dr. Lanyon particularly wishes to see him,” said Sylvester.
The servant retired and returned a few moments afterwards with a request that he would wait for Mr. Usher in the studio. She conducted him thither and having put a match to the fire, departed. The room was bare, the hangings taken down, the knick-knacks packed in cases lying untidily about the floor, the pictures stacked against the walls,—all in preparation for the coming change in Roderick's way of living.
Presently a door opened, and Roderick appeared in dressing-gown and slippers. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes bloodshot. He looked like a man hag-ridden. He drew a quick, short breath at the first sight of Sylvester's threatening face. All his jauntiness had gone. He went a step or two towards his visitor and said curtly,—
“Well?”
“You have forged my father's name to a cheque for £3,000,” said Sylvester.
“Can I see it?”
Sylvester drew the cheque from his pocketbook and held it up for the other's inspection.
“I perceive the bankers have honoured it,” said Roderick. “Mr. Lanyon will not repudiate it.”
“He will not have the chance.Irepudiate it. He is lying unconscious,—perhaps at the point of death. By God! if he dies you will have killed him.”
“You are talking rank folly,” said Roderick, leaning against the jamb of the window, his hands in his dressing-gown pockets. “Mr. Lanyon as my solicitor sold out certain of my investments and sent me a cheque for the total amount.”
“A cheque to which there is no counterfoil, taken from a cheque-book in use three years ago?”
Sylvester laughed harshly and buttoned his overcoat, which he had opened so as to get at the cheque. Roderick grew white and passed his hand across his forehead. There was a moment's silence.
“As a matter of elementary justice,” said Sylvester, “I came here first for your explanation. As you can give none, I will now put the matter in the hands of the police, and in an hour or two there will be a warrant out for your arrest.”
He moved towards the door. Roderick staggered away from the window and drew his hand hard across his face in a gesture of utter weariness. The strain of the past week had been too much. Always thriftless and reckless in money matters, he had hitherto stopped short of unredeemed rascality. The burden of a crime had crushed his self-assurance.
“Stop a moment,” he said hoarsely. “There are other considerations.”
“I have them in view,” replied Sylvester, icily. He turned again. Roderick hurriedly interposed himself between him and the door.
“For God's sake, man, think of what you are doing! I don't deny it. There! I can't. It is more than I can bear. I have been in hell for the past week, devoured alive, with the flames licking my soul. I was driven to it, to save myself from disgrace. I was desperate. I would have replaced the money. By Heaven! I would. It was my only chance to avert sudden crash and to marry the woman I love.”
“You love!” sneered Sylvester.
“Yes, the woman I love and crave and worship, for whose sake I'd commit a thousand crimes. I was pushed hard, I tell you, with my back against the wall. I had to. Go back to Ayresford and tell your father I'll repay it,—every penny. I swear to God I will.”
“With Miss Defries's money. Rob Peter to pay Paul. Let me pass.”
“You are going to have me arrested?”
“Certainly.”
“But—Sylvester—good God!” cried Roderick, in incoherent agony. “Think of what it means—our old friendship—we were young together—we have grown old together—years ago, when you too were marrying a sweet woman, I stood by your side—”
“Your damned hand has been in every tragedy of my life,” exclaimed Sylvester, kindled into a sudden flame of anger. “And a damned woman's! If it had not been for a woman, you would not have killed my father.”
In the midst of his frantic anxiety, it was suddenly revealed to Roderick that in alluding to Sylvester's marriage he had touched the man's hidden wound. He hastened to repair his blunder.
“I am not pleading for myself alone,” he said, drawing himself up and speaking in a more dignified voice. “You can disgrace me, but my disgrace will fall on another—whom your father loves. If you arrest me, the marriage will be broken off by a miserable, horrible scandal,—one that will poison a woman's whole existence. It would be more than pain to your father if such hurt happened to Ella Defries.”
“You certainly don't propose that I should let this marriage take place to-morrow?” said Sylvester, recovering his cold scorn of manner. But he was somewhat checked in his purpose by Roderick's argument, and Roderick saw that he had gained a point.
“I happen to know,” said he, “that you would be carrying out your father's wish in preventing my marriage. I undertake to break it off. The day I marry her you can arrest me.”
Again Sylvester laughed harshly. “You know very well you would be safe then, as Ella Defries's husband.”
He turned and walked to the window and looked out in deep thought. He hated the man, clung fiercely to the revengeful joy of seeing him stamped out of decent existence. Compromise was wormwood, and yet compromise there must be. Roderick remained by the door straining haggard eyes at his judge, a strange figure, with his gorgeous dressing-gown and dishevelled hair, in the midst of the dismantled and rubbish-strewn room. Sylvester's last words had sent the thrill of a forlorn hope through his veins and he waited with throbbing heart for the other to speak.
At last Sylvester faced him again.
“I will give you a day's grace,” he said stonily. “You will leave Liverpool Street tonight at 8.30 for the Hook of Holland; one way of getting to the Continent is as good as another, and I happen to choose this one. You can take what steps you like to inform Miss Defries that you cannot marry her tomorrow or any other time. Those are my terms. I shall have a warrant ready. If you shuffle out of them, I shall put it in force and proceed against you without mercy.”
“Mercilessness is a dangerous game when a creature is driven to bay,” said Roderick.
“What could you do?” asked Sylvester, contemptuously.
Roderick drew his shoulders together and turned away. “Nothing,” he said in a low voice. “No, damn it! nothing.”
Somehow he could not utter the threat that rose to his lips. His soul revolted. It is one of the strangest facts in human psychology that there is no man so vile but that there is one thing he cannot and will not do: sometimes the thing is a hideous crime, sometimes only a comparatively trivial act of dishonour; but whatever may be its relative importance, there is always one virtuous principle to which the human soul must cling. Roderick had blackmailed the father,—for that is what his forgery came to,—but he could not blackmail the son. Nor could he drag his own father, hoary scoundrel though he knew him to be, down with him in his disgrace. So he kept silent as to the mysterious relations between the two old men, and—unutterable pathos of poor humanity—his silence was a salve to his conscience.
Sylvester turned the handle of the studio door.
“Do you accept my terms?”
“Yes,” said Roderick, suddenly.
“Good,” said Sylvester, and he closed the door behind him and went downstairs into the street. There he took a cab and drove to Scotland Yard.
He was not the man to utter idle threats. Before dictating conditions to Roderick, he had coldly calculated upon the power that he could wield. Like that of every London specialist, his practice was socially varied to a curious extent. Among his patients was a high official at Scotland Yard, who, he knew, without dereliction of duty, would courteously carry out the arrangements he intended to suggest. The official received him as he had anticipated. In order to avoid a painful scandal in society, it would be better to let the culprit fly the country. Of course there would be no talk of extradition. In the mean time, a warrant could be issued and put in force whenever Dr. Lanyon gave the word. Sylvester went home grimly satisfied with his morning's work. He found awaiting him a telegram from Simmons to the effect that his father's condition was unchanged.
Roderick went into his dining-room, as dismantled and cheerless as the studio, and drank a cup of coffee. He tried to eat, but the food choked him. He was crushed, beaten, ruined. Utter dejection was in his attitude as he sat in the straight-backed chair, staring helplessly in front of him. Even in his crimes he had failed. He had deferred paying in the forged cheque to the very last moment possible for the cheque he had written for Urquhart to be honoured by his own bankers. He had reckoned on clearing-house delay, on the half-day of Saturday, on the interveningdies nonof Sunday, in fact, on the cheque not coming under Matthew's notice until after the wedding. But the cheque had passed from bank to bank with diabolical expedition, and, like the curses in the Spanish proverb, it had come home to roost with a vengeance.
What was to become of him? He could scarcely realise his sentence. Exile from England meant a bitter struggle with poverty; and yet exile was his irremediable lot. In eight or nine hours he must start. There was no escape. He knew Sylvester of old, as hard as iron and as cold as ice, a man to carry out his purpose relentlessly. To-night—to leave this dear world of London behind him; tomorrow—to be in the aimless solitude of some foreign hotel, when, if fortune had been kind, he would have been standing at the altar with the woman whom he desired above all women that had ever entered his life. It was like the blank future of the man condemned to death.
Thoughts of his own misdoing, of his banishment, faded into a vague heaviness at the back of his brain, while the pang of a great hunger gripped him. He flung his arms on the table and buried his head and clutched his hair in both hands.
“My God, my God! I can't give her up!” he cried. Now that she was torn from him, he craved her with the awful passion of the man no longer young. A picture of her ripe lips and her fresh, eager face, so quick to flush, floated maddeningly before his closed eyes. Last night on parting he had held her close and kissed her. He felt the yielding softness of her bosom against his breast, could almost feel now the throb of her heart. He bit through his sleeve into his arm.
The paroxysm passed. He must think. The wedding must be postponed. Sylvester had intrusted him with that duty, out of regard for Ella. See her he could not; his soul shrank from it. A cowardly letter to reach her too late for questions to be asked, giving no reasons, simply stating that he was summoned away that night for an indefinite period? It must be written. He grovelled in his self-abasement.
Suddenly he raised his head and stared up, with panting breath and trembling body. A wild, mad idea had sprung from a recrudescence of the forlorn hope with which Sylvester's words had inspired him. He sprang to his feet with a quavering, hysterical laugh.
“By Christ! I'll carry it through,” he cried, and he walked about the room, swinging his arms in great gestures.
The room was in a state of bewitching confusion. Trunks, half filled, yawned open on the floor. On the bed were piles of white garments in the midst of which here and there a pink or blue ribbon peeped daintily. Cardboard boxes and tissue paper pervaded space. Hats small and hats immense lay about in unconsidered attitudes upon chintz-covered chairs and other resting-places. A pearl-coloured ball-dress, all gauze and chiffon and foamy nothingness, hung over the bed-rail. A thousand odds and ends—veils, hatpins, mysterious smooth wooden boxes, and cut-glass phials—were strewn on the tables. And the pale morning sunshine streamed in a friendly way into the room.
Ella was superintending her packing. Her maid having gone out for a moment, she sat on the edge of the bed (leaving, with feminine sureness of pose, the dainty piles of garments aforesaid unscathed), and gazed critically at a hat which she held on outstretched fingers thrust into the crown. In a dark silk blouse and a plain skirt, and with her auburn hair somewhat ruffled, she looked very simple and girlish. Lady Milmo, occupying the only vacant chair opposite, also regarded the hat with the eye of experience. The examination had, however, come to an end, for Ella, after flicking the great bows with the finger-tips of her disengaged hand, threw the confection lightly on the top of the pile, and putting her hands in her lap resignedly, turned to her aunt.
“I am sure Josephine will disappoint me with the blue dress.”
“Oh, no, my dear,” said Lady Milmo, “kingdoms may fall and empires may decay, but Josephine never fails. A woman of her word, my dear. Don't you know what she did for La Guira, the singer? La Guira ordered four dresses to take away with her to Patagonia or somewhere. It was impossible to finish them before the morning of departure. Josephine herself raced with them to Waterloo in a hansom just in time to see the train with La Guira in it steam out of the station; and that woman took a special there and then, and chased the train and got the dresses on board all right. Josephine is a marvellous woman.”
Ella laughed. She did not care very much. Her life at that moment was too full.
“It's quite sweet of the sun to come in and see me, isn't it?” she said.
“Provided he keeps up his good behaviour to-morrow,” said Lady Milmo.
“Oh, I sha'n't mind what he does tomorrow; I shall have too many things to think of.”
“But what about us poor unfortunates who are not going to be married?”
“You could be married now, fifty times over, auntie, if you chose,” said Ella, out of her lightness of heart.
“The Lord preserve me!” replied Lady Milmo, vivaciously. “When poor Howgate died I vowed that when we met in heaven, if there is one, no other man should stand between us.”
As the late Sir Howgate Milmo, Bart., had been a notoriously evil liver, Ella did not think there was much chance of her aunt escaping forsworn, even on her hypothesis.
“One can love heaps of times, you know,” she said, stretching out her limbs girlishly and looking at the tips of her shoes.
“Love your husband once and for all, my dear,” said her aunt, sententiously.
Ella rose to her feet and crossed over to her aunt's chair and sat on the arm, and kissed Lady Milmo. A spontaneous caress like that was rare with her, and the recipient looked up in pleased surprise. But Ella had grasped her fate in both hands and felt mistress thereof, and all seemed right with the world. She had compelled herself into entire happiness.
“Of course I do—or I shall,” she replied. “Do you think I could marry a man to whom I did not feel I could give all that is in me?”
“It is the fate of women to give,” said Lady Milmo, who was in a moralising mood.
“We must do something to justify our existence,” laughed Ella. “Women can't do much. I used to think differently when I was young. Men do all the real work in the world, but somehow they seem to want something from women. And it's a great thing to help on the big world by giving oneself body and soul to a man.”
“Cook his food and wash his clothes and see that there is a proper supply of Salutaris water when he comes home after a city dinner That was the whole duty of woman in your grandmother's time, child.”
“I think women are very much the same all through the ages,” said Ella. “At least,” she added reflectively, “that's the only way the riddle seems to be solved. A man does, wants, compels. A woman yields—otherwise—why, well—”
She rose, confused at' her half-confession, and re-examined the hat.
“Otherwise why should I be wanting to meet poor dear Howgate in heaven,” finished Lady Milmo, coming to her assistance with a humorous curl of the lip. “Anyhow,” she continued with some irrelevance, “I'm glad you're going to stay in a decent Christian country, where you can wear your pretty frocks.”
“So am I, auntie—now,” replied Ella. “But I didn't think I should be.”
Ella's maid came in, and the work of packing was resumed. Her mistress tried on the much-considered hat before the pier-glass, while Lady Milmo arranged the rumpled hair beneath, so that the hat should produce its due effect. Then one of the bridesmaids came, ostensibly to see if she could help; really to feast her innocent eyes upon the articles of attire everywhere displayed. The time slipped by pleasantly. At twelve o'clock the parlour-maid tapped at the door and entered with the announcement that Mr. Usher was downstairs and desired to see Miss Ella on most urgent business.
Lady Milmo threw up her hands. What could he want? Men were a positive nuisance at weddings! They ought to be chained up for days before and only let loose at the church door.
“I'm in such a mess,” cried Ella. But she sent down a message to Roderick that she would see him directly.
The servant smiled and departed. Ella gave herself those anxious feminine tidying touches before her glass, whose effect the eternal irony decrees shall never be noticed by man, and ran happily down the stairs to meet her lover. She turned the handle of the morning-room door and stood before him, in the heyday of her youth and her charm. All the anxieties of the past year had fallen from her. Her cheeks flushed a shy welcome. Her eyes, honest and clear, smiled upon him. She moved quickly forward, her lips already parted in happy speech, when suddenly she felt him come upon her and encircle her with strong, resistless arms and rain passionate kisses upon her mouth and cheeks.
“Oh, my God, I love you, I love you!” he murmured hoarsely. “I can't let you go. You are soul of my soul and blood of my blood. No, Ella, no,” he continued, as, confused and blushing, she strove to release herself; “I must keep you here. Heaven knows when I may hold you in my arms again. Listen, something terrible has happened,—a thing that may part our lives. Are you strong enough to bear it? Brave and strong and heroic, like the woman I think you?”
He relaxed his clasp and stood with hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at him. She met his passion-filled eyes fearlessly, but her colour had gone.
“Part our lives! I don't understand what you mean, Roderick.”
“Are you brave enough to face a terrible calamity?”
“I shall not faint, if you mean that,” she replied. “What is it?”
“I must leave England to-night,” he said in a quick voice. “How long I shall have to stay away, I do not know. It may be weeks, it may be months, it may be years.”
She looked at him with perplexed brows and a dawning fear in her eyes.
“But to-morrow—” she began.
“There will be no to-morrow—for me. Unless——”
“Unless what?”
He turned away and paced across the room and back again. He had thrown off the gold pince-nez, and now they swung by the cord over his waistcoat, and his small blue eyes, usually obscured by them, glowed strangely and the pupils were dilated. Where the actor, the inveterateposeur, ended and the man began, it were impossible to tell. He was playing a part, but playing it in desperate earnestness. The words, the gestures, were false; but the yearning folly of love that vibrated in his voice was as real a thing as had ever entered into the man's life.
“I must be plain with you, Ella. It's as much as my life, my honour, your fair happiness, is worth for me to stay in England over to-night. There can be no wedding to-morrow. I have done all that a man could do to avert things. The suspense has been a torturing agony above words. But the inevitable, the inexorable, has come. Oh, God, Ella, if you knew what living hell it is to me to tell you this!”
She put her hands before her face, feeling dazed and sick, and when she drew them away, her face was very white. Like every pure woman, her thoughts of late had been absorbed by the sweet vanities of the morrow's ceremony, with just a warm, tremulous sub-consciousness of the beyond. The sudden fall about her ears of this structure of vanities bewildered her. Her brain seemed to be an avalanche of telegrams and letters. Faces of bidden guests swam lurid before her. Roderick, a long way off, faded into infinite mist. A pang of disappointment, humiliation, she knew not what, ached in her breast. She scarcely heard or heeded what the man was saying. He stopped, seeing her so white, and looked at her, breathless. Then suddenly a cloud seemed to roll away before her, and she was conscious of him standing there with haggard eyes and features drawn in pain. Scorn of her first imaginings drove them into the limbo of all vain things; the thrill of a proud courage nerved her; she drew herself up and faced realities. And the first reality was a rush through her being of yearning pity for the man so stricken. With an impulse of consolation she went up to him, and again his arms closed swiftly round her. He murmured burning incoherences. He could not live without her love, the crown and joy of earthly things. Life would be a purgatorial flame. He loved her. He worshipped her, so brave, so loyal, so adorable. His voice was vibrant with elemental passion.
A woman, young and ardent, with rich blood running through her veins, is, above all things, a primitive human being. It were an ill day for the pride and vigour of the race if she were not. There are moments when the world's music surges like the roar of the sea in her ears, and the heart within her is lifted to her lips; when her limbs are as water, and her body is carried in the unfaltering arms of a god through illimitable space. She has yielded, is swept away by the man's passion, deliriously lost.
As in a dream, standing there in his embrace, she heard him whisper:—
“There is one way—to scoff at destiny—to rise triumphant above it—to be married tomorrow in spite of all things. Not here. In Holland where I am summoned—I have the license—we can explain the urgency of our flight—the English Consul or Chaplain at Amsterdam will marry us. Come with me tonight—Ella—for God's sake, Ella, say that you will.”
She smiled up at him without replying. The mad proposal seemed at the dreamy moment the sweetest of sanities. He continued in hurried intensity,—
“All will be so easy. You can say you are going to Ayresford—what more natural?—to stay here would be pain—there is a train for Ayresford about the time—half-past eight at Liverpool Street. I will meet you there with a ticket,—and then we shall be carried off to happiness—you and I—alone together—to conquer the world.... There—it must be.”
He took her hands, kissed them both, and released her. She stood for a while with downcast eyes and heaving bosom, recovering her mental balance.
“You have not yet told me,” she said presently, in a calmer voice, “why there should be this upheaval. I have said perhaps I might help you. Why do your life and honour and my happiness depend upon your leaving England to-night, Roderick?”
The supreme moment had come. He braced every nerve to meet the inevitable question. Summoning up an extraordinary dignity subtly tinged with sadness, he said with grave deliberation,—
“I cannot tell you.”
Ella recoiled involuntarily, staggered by the unexpectedness of the reply. She could only regard him in mute but anxious questioning.
“You must trust me, child,” he said. “It is another's secret.”
“So grave as to be withheld even from me?”
“Even so,” he replied. “I know,” he continued gravely, “I am asking you the ultimate thing a man can ask a woman,—blind trust. It is a thing that only the great soul, like you, can give. Put your hand in mine and trust in me!”
“Let me think,” she said in a low voice.
She sat down on a couch, baffled. If she looked up, she met the man's burning eyes fixed upon her, and the depths of her being were stirred. If she looked away, her life seemed fragmentary chaos, unrealisable, incomprehensible. She breathed fast from a heaving bosom. Roderick's mystery hovered between the grotesque and the tragic. To run away clandestinely with the man to whom she was to have been married with all the pomp of publicity on the morrow was an idea of comic opera. On the other hand, the blind trust required raised the proceeding to the heroic plane. Again, Nature within her shrank from mystery; she was a child appalled by the dark, and fear was upon her. But the sensitive gentlewoman felt the appeal to honour in every fibre of her pride. Generosity swelled against doubt. A strange physical coldness enwrapped her. To start to-night, with Roderick, surrendering herself utterly; the maiden in her piteously sought refuge from the thought. She glanced tremulously up at him, and her face flamed pink, and warmth entered her heart. She covered her cheeks with her hands and shrank into the corner of the couch.
“Oh, could I not join you afterwards?” she moaned. He fell at her feet and clasped her knees, broke into impassioned pleading. It was a matter of life or death. His unbalanced artistic temperament burst all restraints of conventional forms of speech. He raved of his consuming need. He was less a man than a shaking passion.
The eternal mystery to woman is man's desire of her. It transcends her thought, it looms immense, inscrutable, and irresistible before her. She is the everlasting Semele beneath the fiery glory of Zeus. It is decreed that when brought face to face with it (a chord within her being responsive, be it understood), she shall lose all sense of the proportion between it and the infinite passions of the universe. Life resolves itself into an amazement that she, with a whisper, a touch of her hand, can raise a man from hell to heaven. In the piteous, glorious, tragi-comedy of life, which has been played on millions of stages for millions of years, this elemental fact is so commonplace that it escapes our notice. We are apt to judge from externals, from the results of adherence to ethical systems, from social conventions; and when the actions of men and women are not provided for in artificial canons, we are baffled or are shocked by a sense of the immoral, the abnormal, or the preposterous. But men will desire and women will yield till the end of the human race.
And Ella yielded. She bound herself to meet him that evening and go with him into the darkness, whithersoever he should lead; and Roderick left the house, holding his head high, exultant in the sense of having conquered destiny.
But when he had gone, Ella threw herself face downwards on the couch in all the abandonment of exhaustion. For a while she could not think; she could only be conscious of the flow and ebb, and again the flow and ebb, and once more the flow of emotion, during the past hour. She had entered the room in light-hearted happiness; there had come the shock of an awful dismay. Then she had been lifted in the tide of the man's passion; there had followed the cold numbness of doubt; again passion had swept away reason. Now was reaction. She felt physically prostrated, and her body ached as if it had been beaten. Her eyelids burned. She would have liked to cry miserably, but she could not. She suffered the woman's torment of unshed tears. Suddenly she rose and drew herself together, despising her weakness. She had pledged herself to do a certain thing. It was to be done, and practical commonplaces had to be faced. First was the breaking of the news to Lady Milmo. The girl's heart was smitten with pity for the kindly lady who had entered so wholeheartedly into these wedding preparations. It would be a keen disappointment to countermand the feast, put off the guests, make lame excuses. And that would not be the end. There would be the scandal of her flight, of which Lady Milmo would have to bear the brunt. It was cruel to treat her so. She went to the window and looked out at the sunny houses on the other side of Pont Street; wondered whether they all were cages for women bound as she was in invisible chains. Her course had been marked out with scrupulous exactness; to deviate from it a hair's breadth would be not only breaking a solemn pledge, but perhaps endangering the life or honour, she knew not how, of the man she was to marry. Yet her frank soul rebelled against the deception. The hour of Roderick's departure was to be kept secret; her elopement with him not to be whispered of. She was to give out a journey to Ayresford, to escape from the painful associations of the house in Pont Street, filled with all the vain preparations for the morrow. She had never lied barefacedly in her life, and for a moment she hated Roderick for compelling her to falseness. But then the lingering echoes of his voice hummed in her ears, and the blood rushed back into her cheeks, and she felt strong for the sacrifice of her honour.
Did she love him? She answered the self-put question with a passionate affirmative. Else why was she doing this preposterous thing? Was not the blindness of her trust the very banner of her love? A phrase of Roderick's crossed her mind. “Life is merely the summation of moments of keen living.” She caught at it as a plank with the drowning man's thrill. She was living keenly; that alone was sufficient to justify everything. She was defying the set uses of the tame world. “Each man must batter down for himself the doors that hide life's inner glory” was another of his sayings. Was she not even now battering at the door? Her soul clutched at every supporting straw. Yet, in spite of these aphoristic comforts, it was with a strange, dull sense of fatality that she saw herself sitting by Roderick's side in the train that night, being carried away further and further into the inscrutable darkness.
The first part of her task was over. She had told Lady Milmo. It had been an interview of pain and self-reproach. Lady Milmo had gasped, wept, waxed indignant. All her kindly woman's motherliness had poured itself out upon the girl, whom she considered infamously treated. It was in vain for Ella to plead the matter of life and death that called Roderick away. Lady Milmo had her prejudices. She had cordially approved of Ella's immediate retirement to Ayresford. How could the poor child stay in the house where every surrounding would be a pain to her? She had sent Ella off to lie down in peace upon her own bed, away from the half-packed litter of finery in the girl's room; and while Ella lay there with a splitting headache, helplessly counting the slow hours, Lady Milmo sat heroically before her writing-table immersed in lists and telegraph forms.
The slow hours passed. A little difficulty arose. Lady Milmo had taken it for granted that Ella's maid would accompany her to Ayresford. Ella, alarmed, announced her intention of leaving her behind. She did not even wish her to come to the station to see after the luggage. She had to insist that solitude was essential. Lady Milmo yielded the point reluctantly. At last the time came. Ella's luggage had been placed on the fourwheeled cab. The door was open; the white-capped maid stood on the pavement. Ella turned with a sudden rush of emotion and kissed Lady Milmo, who had come with her to the hall.
“If I ever hurt you, dear, God knows it's because I cannot help it,” she said. But before the other could reply, a telegraph boy entered with a telegram. Name of Defries. Ella tore it open, with a spasm of anticipation, half fear, half hope, that it came from Roderick. But it ran:—
“Your coming a joy. Your uncle dangerously ill. Is cryingfor you. Agatha.”
Speechless she handed the paper to her aunt. Lady Milmo glanced at it.
“Doesn't it all work out for the best, dear?” she said gently. “Agatha Lanyon would not have wired if to-morrow's affair had not been broken off.”
“How did she know?” asked Ella, with white lips.
“Why, I sent them a message,” said Lady Milmo.
Ella bade her good-bye again. The parlour maid shut the cab-door and gave the word “Waterloo” to the driver. The cab drove off, and then Ella, spreading out the crumpled telegram, broke for the first time into a flood of passionate tears.
But some moments later she called to the driver,—
“I fancy the servant made a mistake. It is Liverpool Street I want to go to.”
And to Liverpool Street was she driven.