CHAPTER XXV
HE was sitting at his desk writing; and as he lifted his hand at her abrupt entrance and laid it on an object beside his papers she received no shock of surprise. She went forward and lifted his hand from the revolver.
“Must you?” she asked.
“Of course I must. Do you think I could live with myself another day?”
“Perhaps no one need ever know.”
“Everybody in England will know before a week is over. She gave me to understand that people guessed it already.”
“Thisseems such a terrible alternative to a woman—but——”
“But you have race in you. You understand perfectly. My honour has been sold, and my pride is dead: there is no place among men for what is left of me. And to face my son again! Good God!”
“Can nothing be done to keep it from Cecil?”
“Nothing. It is the only heritage I leave him and he’ll have to stand it as best he can. It won’t kill him, nor his courage; he’s made of stronger stuff than that. And if I’ve brought the family honour to the dust, he has it in him to raise it higher than it has ever been. Never let him forget that. You’veplayed your part well all along, but you’ve a great deal more to do yet. You’ll find that Fate didn’t steer you into this family to play the pretty rôle of countess——”
“I am equal to my part.”
“Yes: I think you are. Now—I have an hour’s work before me. I can’t let you go till I have finished. You are a strong creature—but you are a woman, all the same. You must stay here until I am ready to let you go.”
“I want to stay with you.”
“Thank you. Sit down.”
He handed her a chair, and returned to his writing.
Lee knew that if he had condemned her to the corridor under a vow of secrecy she should have paced up and down with increasing nervousness. But she felt calm enough beside him. He wrote deliberately, with a steady hand, and out of the respect he commanded she felt as profound a pity for him as she would feel when she stood beside him in the crypt. The soul had already gone out of him: it did not even strike her as eerie that the vigorous body beside her would demand its last rites in an hour.
Although taught to forgive her father, she had been brought up in a proper disapprobation of suicide. The impressions rooted in her plastic years rose and possessed her for a moment: but she wisely refused to consider what was none of her business. She did not even argue Lord Barnstaple’s case, nor remind herself that she understood him. It was exclusively his own affair, and to approve or condemn him was equally impertinent.
Her chair faced the window. The crystal moon hung low above the park. The woods looked old and dark: night gave them back their mystery. The lovely English landscape was steeped in the repose which the centuries had given it. The great forests and terrible mountains of California may have been born in earlier throes, but they still brooded upon the mysteries of the future. England was worn down to peace and calm by centuries of passing feet. She had the repose of a great mind in the autumn of its years.
Lee melted into sympathy with the country of her adoption. California loomed darkly in the background, majestic but remote, and folding itself in the mists of dreams. It had belonged to her, been a part of her, in some bygone phase of herself. She was proud to have come out of it and glad to have known it, but it would be silent to her hereafter. She was as significantly a Maundrell as if she had been born in her tower; for she was, and indivisibly, a part of her husband.
She was too sensible to waste time in upbraiding herself for her conduct of the past fortnight. It had been as inevitable as exhaustion after excitement, or mental rebellion after years of unremitting study; and the suffering it had caused could easily be transformed into gratitude. The important points were that her reaction had worn itself out, and that the tremendous climax on its heels had forced her prematurely into the consciousness that the three years’ effort to be something she had not developed in the previous twenty-one, had changed her character and her brain as indubitably as the constant action of waterchanges the face of a rock. One month of her old life would have bored her to extinction. Two months and she would have anathematised the continents of land and water between herself and her husband. A fortnight later she would have been in her tower. Solemn as the passing moments were, she could not ignore the prick of ironical relief that her future was to lack the determined effort of the past three years. Her new self would fit her with the ease of a garment long worn. Love had sustained her when she had desired nothing so much as happiness; but she knew that she had hardly known the inchoation of love until to-night. Cecil, in his terrible necessity, had taken her ego into his own breast.
Her thoughts went to him in their tower, writing, like his father, but with far less calm; for he grew nervous and impatient over his work. It seemed a strange and terrible thing that he should sit there unconscious of the double tragedy preparing for him, but she was glad to prolong his unconsciousness as long as she could. And she would be the one to tell him.
Lord Barnstaple laid down his pen and sealed his letters. He stood up and held out his hand.
“Good-bye,” he said.
They shook hands closely and in silence. Then she went out and he closed the door behind her. She stood still, waiting for the signal. She could not carry the news of his death to his son until he was gone beyond the shadow of a doubt. It was so long coming that she wondered if his courage had failed him, or if he were praying before the picture of his wife. It came at last.