CHAPTER XVII"After a storm comes a calm."—It seemed as if a calm, the calm of a great despair had settled on Lauraine. All human love had passed out of her life; and that life itself looked grey, colourless as an autumn sky that has known no sunshine. But there was something in this dull stupor that kept the sharpness of pain in abeyance, that left her, to outward seeming, much the same as ever, and rejoiced Lady Etwynde's heart."After all," she thinks to herself, "she could not have loved him so very much."She does not attempt to allude to the confidence of that night, nor does Lauraine return to it. Just for two or three days she watches with anxious eyes the arrival of the post: she is half fearful of a letter from Keith, a letter that will be a sort of blaze of anger, and upbraiding, like his own last words. But there comes neither letter nor sign.After a week or two Lauraine begins to get restless."This is a place to sleep and dream in," she says to her friend; "I want to see some life again. Let us go to Baden or Monaco."Lady Etwynde is amazed."Will Sir Francis object?" she asks.Lauraine smiles with faint contempt. "He never troubles himself about what I do," she says. "We will go, and if he objects, we can leave again!"Lady Etwynde yields, and they go to Baden.Lauraine seems now to have as great a horror of solitude as before she has had of gaiety. She is always out, always restless. No one they know of the fashionable world is at Baden, it being yet too early in the season. It is crowded with Germans and Austrians, and adventurers of all nationalities, who throng the pretty Kursaal under the shadow of the pine-crowned hills.Lauraine makes numerous acquaintances, and is always inventing projects of amusements, such as picnics, excursions,jêtes, drives, and balls. She goes to concerts and theatres, she is one of the loungers in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal; she goes to supper-parties that to Lady Etwynde seem reckless andrisqué, and meets all her friend's feeble remonstrances with the unanswerable argument that her husband does not mind, and therefore no one else need trouble their head about it.She seems so horribly, unaccountably changed that it fills Lady Etwynde's mind with dread and pain.Better the morbid grief, the dreary apathy of the past, than this feverish and unnatural gaiety, this craving for excitement and pleasure. Just as suddenly as she has gone to Baden, so suddenly does she tire of it. "She will go down the Rhine," she declares, "and stop anywhere that is pretty and picturesque." The change of programme delights her friend, and they leave their circle of new acquaintances desolate at their sudden departure.The lovely scenery and the constant change seem for a while to quiet Lauraine's restlessness. She takes a fancy to Bingen, and stays there for a month; but it distresses Lady Etwynde to see how pale and thin she is getting, how weary and sleepless her eyes always look.A letter comes one day from Sir Francis. He is coming to Baden for the races; he is going to run a horse for the Prix de Dames. They had better remain abroad and meet him there. He will arrange for rooms at the Bairischer Hof, or D'Angleterre, as a lot of people are coming at the same time. Meanwhile he hopes Lauraine is tired of moping, and intends to be reasonable again.She reads the letter quietly through, and then hands it to Lady Etwynde."I can scarcely expect you to continue giving up your time to me as you have done," she says. "But this arrangement suits me very well. It is quiet and pleasant here, and I shall remain on till the time fixed for Baden. But you—there is your home, your own friends——""Unless you are tired of me," interrupts Lady Etwynde, "I am not going to run away. I do not think you are either in health or spirits to be left alone."They are at the Victoria Hof. Their rooms are very pleasant; their life has been more like what it was at Erlsbach, spent chiefly in the open air, in drives and rambles and excursions on the river, and visits to the beautiful old Rochus Capelle, which, for Lauraine, has endless interest, and of which she never seems to tire.This evening they are both sitting by the open window overlooking the Rhine. In these hot summer nights Lauraine has cast aside her heavy black dresses, and wears chiefly white, with knots of black ribbon here and there. Lady Etwynde thinks how lovely she looks, sitting there, with the sunrays touching her dusky hair, her soft snowy gown, her slender hands that are idly folded on her lap.Instinctively she comes forward and kneels by her side. "Am I to go, Lauraine?" she asks, softly.For all answer Lauraine clasps her round the neck, and bursts into tears. "No, no; a thousand times no!" she cries, weeping. "You are the only one left to me to love. Don't leave me quite desolate.""I will not," answers Lady Etwynde, softly. "I wish I could be of some use—of some help; but in these cases the tenderest sympathy seems to hurt. No one can help us.""You speak as if you too had 'loved and lost'?" says Lauraine, wiping the tears from her eyes, and looking at the beautiful, noble face beside her.A faint warmth of colour comes over it; the proud head, with its golden halo of hair, droops a little. "Yes," she says, "I have. Sometimes I think it was my own fault, after all I was too proud, too exacting. Shall I tell you the story? Would you care to hear?""Indeed, I would," said Lauraine, earnestly."He was a soldier," begins Lady Etwynde. "I was seventeen; romantic to my finger-tips. He, thirty years or more; bronzed, bold, stalwart, a king among men, I always thought. We met at my first season in London, loved, were engaged. He was of good family, but not rich. My parents objected strongly at first; but I was their only child, and they had never crossed whim or wish of mine. Of course I gained my point. Oh, how happy I was! It was like all the ecstasy of dreams, all the fancies of poets, all the purity and waking passion of first love steeping my life in golden glamour. I only lived, watched, thought for him, and he—all the time—he deceived me!"Her voice breaks. The bitterness and anguish of that time seems present over again. The colour fades from her cheeks as she kneels there in the radiant moonlight."No man comes to thirty years of age without a 'past' of some sort," she resumes. "But I, in my childish ignorance, imagined him another Bayard. He had been so brave, his name was crowned with so many laurels. He seemed the very soul of honour, of truth, and I—I loved him so. And one night, oh, shall I ever forget that night? We had gone down to Richmond to dinner. We had been out on the river afterwards. It was a warm June night, so fair, so still, so fragrant, and he rowed the boat himself and the rest of the party left us far behind. Suddenly another boat passed us; there were two men in it, and a woman. I remember noticing she had something scarlet wrapped about her and was very dark; foreign-looking I fancied. They were rowing fast, their boat shot by. I heard a cry, the sound of a name—hisname—and he was sitting before me, his face white as death, his eyes full of horror and doubt. 'Good God!' I heard him cry, 'and she isnotdead?'"My heart seemed to stand still. Then I grew very calm and cold. 'Who is that woman, Cyril?' He stared at me like one in a dream, and turned the boat back without a word and rowed me to the hotel. Then he led me up one of the quiet river walks, and standing there before me told me the whole sickening, miserable tale. There may have been extenuation in it. I saw none. I was young and ignorant of life and of men, and cruel, I suppose. He called me so. I could only cling to one fact—that she had been his wife. What mattered to me the folly, the caprice, the infatuation that had chained his hot youth and held him powerless now? What mattered to me anything, anything, save that he was lost to me, that my idol was shattered, my heart was broken. 'You told me you had loved no other woman as you loved me,' I said, scornfully; 'and all the time, all the time, you had given her the surest, truest proof of love a man can give. Pity! No, I have no pity! You made your choice, you must abide by it. If you were free this hour I would not marry you now. You have deceived me. Your love was a pretence; perhaps you call it also such names as you have called hers. Go to her, your wife; I never will voluntarily look upon your face again.' Oh, Lauraine, was I cruel, was I unjust; God knows. Oh, the bitterness, the agony, the shame of that night. I felt as if I hated him in the new sharp fever of jealousy that had come to my heart. I hated to think he had belonged to another, held her to his heart, kissed her, loved or seemed to love her. My whole nature seemed to change. I could only think he had deceived me, whether willingly, or mercifully did not matter. Love, youth, joy, hope, all seemed to die out of my heart. Nothing he said seemed to soften me. I would not listen, I would not yield, I would not pity. He left me, and I never saw him again. The next news I had was that he had gone abroad on foreign service. I had seen his name from time to time, but of his life, the life I once so fondly hoped to share, I know nothing!"Lauraine touches the trembling hands. "You were hard on him, I think," she says gently. "I suppose he thought her dead—that he was free.""He said so," answers Lady Etwynde. "Oh, yes, and doubtless he believed it. He could not have dared to offer such an insult to me, or my family. But what I resented was that he should have kept the story back, that he should have pretended that I was his first, his only love, and all the timeshehad been his wife. I could not forgive that!""But, my dear," says Lauraine, gently, "you may have had his firstreallove. The other was but a youthful folly, a hot-headed infatuation. Does any man come to us with his heart pure and free? Few, I think, if any. We cannot judge them by ourselves. That is how so many women wreck their lives. They expect too much. No man can ever be what a girl's dreams would make him. But it is so hard for her to believe that.""I know it now," answers Lady Etwynde. "I have learnt my lesson in bitterness and grief. But I think it has done me good. I have forgiven him long ago. I shall never see him again to tell him so, I suppose; perhaps he would not care even to hear it. But I am happier since I could pardon and pity his weakness, only—my Bayard he could never be again!""And of her? Do you know anything about her fate?" asks Lauraine, forgetful of her own sorrows in this new interest."I heard she was dead. She was a vile, cruel woman. He divorced her afterwards, but what was that to me? What can anything be to me now that concerns his name, his life?" There comes a long silence. The thoughts of both are busy with sad memories. As Lauraine looks at Lady Etwynde's face she sees it is full of pain, but her eyes have a dreamy look, as the eyes of one who sees some sweet vision afar off."I was wrong, I suppose," she says, slowly. "A woman who loves must forgetherselfin that love, and I, I thought too much of my wounded pride, my lost ideal. But I have never held a thought of love for any other man. The lips that he kissed were his first, they will be his for ever. I have never forgotten; and now I am thirty years old, and my parents, as you know, are dead, and I live alone, and am looked upon as a marvel of eccentricity, and have my school of apostles and fool them to the top of their bent. Sometimes life seems a horrible travesty of all that is dignified and pure, and sometimes a jest that one laughs at and forgets. But no one knows me as I really am, save you, Lauraine. To most people I suppose I hardly seem a woman. But my true self and my lost love live a life apart, a life of dreams, sad but yet beautiful. A life that feeds itself on memories, memories that are recalled by the colours of every changing sky, the scents of leaf and flower that touch one like a sound of music. Ah! those nights, those mornings, those scenes that are the same, yetnotthe same, how they make one's whole soul sick with longing, and mad with regret!""And you have borne all this so long?" says Lauraine, wonderingly."Yes," she answers; "it seems long, does it not? And I have not pined away much. I don't look like a love-lorn maiden, do I? I have not gone into a decline, or fallen away to a shadow, or grown grey with sorrow, or done anything I ought to have done according to romancers. I suppose no one I know ever suspects that I have had a love-story, much less that I cherish its memory.""Your nature must be a very constant one," says Lauraine. "You make me ashamed of myself. No wonder Keith reproaches me with unfaithfulness.""I think fidelity is an established instinct," says Lady Etwynde. "It is very much an accident of our own natures. To me, it seems an utter impossibility to even think of caring for another man. Cyril Carlisle was my first lover; I gave him all that was in me to give. It was all my life to me. I suppose—to him—it was but another experience.""Yours is a grand nature," says Lauraine, looking wonderingly at the calm, noble face. "You shame me for myself. If I had but kept true a little space——""One can never judge of another's case by one's own," answers Lady Etwynde. "No doubt you were tried, hurried into it. I know, oh! I know. You are not the first girl who has told me the same, nor will you be the last. The mothers of Society do it all for the best, doubtless. Love seems such a poor, contemptible thing in their eyes in comparison with—settlements. Oh, yes! that is so always. Perhaps they forget their own youth; one does, they say, when one outlives romance. And I suppose an 'Establishment' is better than poetry any day. They are wise, after all. Year after year the season has its martyrs. Girls are brought out and introduced with no higher aim or object set before them than a 'great marriage.' Fashion and Society expect it. I suppose it is what they were born for! Thank God! my parents were neither ambitious nor mercenary. Perhaps I too might have been over-persuaded. I don't think it likely. Still—-"She hesitates and looks compassionately at Lauraine's sad face. "You must try and be brave, dear, and bear your life as it is. Regrets, repining, sorrowing won't make it any better. You say you are weak, but I don't think you are so weak as all that. And there is one thing I have wanted to say to you of late. You will pardon me if it seems intrusive. But, do you know you are behaving very coldly, and, I think, unwisely, towards your husband? You leave him alone, to other temptations that your presence would restrain. All these months you have not seen him, you scarcely even write with more warmth or interest than you do to your steward; and, after all, he is your husband. Nothing can alter that; and he loved you very dearly, and no doubt he does still. Can you not see that your duty to him demands even more than the sacrifice you have already made? I know it is hard, terribly hard. You say there is no sympathy, no comprehension between you, and your heart is aching with this forbidden love, and he must seem in a way hateful; but you were not honest with him quite, if you promised to marry him, and yet held back your heart. You see what I mean?""Yes," Lauraine says faintly, "I see.""Duty demands much, but it also repays much,", continues Lady Etwynde gently. "Heaven knows I am not fit to preach to you; but in the world, as we know it, Lauraine, there are so many faithless wives, so many divided households. Oh, my dear, don't you add to the number! You have many enemies of whom you know nothing, and they would gladly seize your name, and smirch its purity with scandals, and whispers, and evil words. I want you to be brave, and face them all, and live out your life nobly and well. I know I am bidding you do a hard thing; but it is right, and I am sure you see it."Lauraine bends her head down wearily, and lays it on her friend's shoulder. She feels spent, tired, exhausted. The tears throng to her eyes, her heart aches with dull and ceaseless pain. "I do see it!" she half sobs. "I will try.""May Heaven give you strength!" murmurs Lady Etwynde, and she kisses her on the brow.
"After a storm comes a calm."—It seemed as if a calm, the calm of a great despair had settled on Lauraine. All human love had passed out of her life; and that life itself looked grey, colourless as an autumn sky that has known no sunshine. But there was something in this dull stupor that kept the sharpness of pain in abeyance, that left her, to outward seeming, much the same as ever, and rejoiced Lady Etwynde's heart.
"After all," she thinks to herself, "she could not have loved him so very much."
She does not attempt to allude to the confidence of that night, nor does Lauraine return to it. Just for two or three days she watches with anxious eyes the arrival of the post: she is half fearful of a letter from Keith, a letter that will be a sort of blaze of anger, and upbraiding, like his own last words. But there comes neither letter nor sign.
After a week or two Lauraine begins to get restless.
"This is a place to sleep and dream in," she says to her friend; "I want to see some life again. Let us go to Baden or Monaco."
Lady Etwynde is amazed.
"Will Sir Francis object?" she asks.
Lauraine smiles with faint contempt. "He never troubles himself about what I do," she says. "We will go, and if he objects, we can leave again!"
Lady Etwynde yields, and they go to Baden.
Lauraine seems now to have as great a horror of solitude as before she has had of gaiety. She is always out, always restless. No one they know of the fashionable world is at Baden, it being yet too early in the season. It is crowded with Germans and Austrians, and adventurers of all nationalities, who throng the pretty Kursaal under the shadow of the pine-crowned hills.
Lauraine makes numerous acquaintances, and is always inventing projects of amusements, such as picnics, excursions,jêtes, drives, and balls. She goes to concerts and theatres, she is one of the loungers in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal; she goes to supper-parties that to Lady Etwynde seem reckless andrisqué, and meets all her friend's feeble remonstrances with the unanswerable argument that her husband does not mind, and therefore no one else need trouble their head about it.
She seems so horribly, unaccountably changed that it fills Lady Etwynde's mind with dread and pain.
Better the morbid grief, the dreary apathy of the past, than this feverish and unnatural gaiety, this craving for excitement and pleasure. Just as suddenly as she has gone to Baden, so suddenly does she tire of it. "She will go down the Rhine," she declares, "and stop anywhere that is pretty and picturesque." The change of programme delights her friend, and they leave their circle of new acquaintances desolate at their sudden departure.
The lovely scenery and the constant change seem for a while to quiet Lauraine's restlessness. She takes a fancy to Bingen, and stays there for a month; but it distresses Lady Etwynde to see how pale and thin she is getting, how weary and sleepless her eyes always look.
A letter comes one day from Sir Francis. He is coming to Baden for the races; he is going to run a horse for the Prix de Dames. They had better remain abroad and meet him there. He will arrange for rooms at the Bairischer Hof, or D'Angleterre, as a lot of people are coming at the same time. Meanwhile he hopes Lauraine is tired of moping, and intends to be reasonable again.
She reads the letter quietly through, and then hands it to Lady Etwynde.
"I can scarcely expect you to continue giving up your time to me as you have done," she says. "But this arrangement suits me very well. It is quiet and pleasant here, and I shall remain on till the time fixed for Baden. But you—there is your home, your own friends——"
"Unless you are tired of me," interrupts Lady Etwynde, "I am not going to run away. I do not think you are either in health or spirits to be left alone."
They are at the Victoria Hof. Their rooms are very pleasant; their life has been more like what it was at Erlsbach, spent chiefly in the open air, in drives and rambles and excursions on the river, and visits to the beautiful old Rochus Capelle, which, for Lauraine, has endless interest, and of which she never seems to tire.
This evening they are both sitting by the open window overlooking the Rhine. In these hot summer nights Lauraine has cast aside her heavy black dresses, and wears chiefly white, with knots of black ribbon here and there. Lady Etwynde thinks how lovely she looks, sitting there, with the sunrays touching her dusky hair, her soft snowy gown, her slender hands that are idly folded on her lap.
Instinctively she comes forward and kneels by her side. "Am I to go, Lauraine?" she asks, softly.
For all answer Lauraine clasps her round the neck, and bursts into tears. "No, no; a thousand times no!" she cries, weeping. "You are the only one left to me to love. Don't leave me quite desolate."
"I will not," answers Lady Etwynde, softly. "I wish I could be of some use—of some help; but in these cases the tenderest sympathy seems to hurt. No one can help us."
"You speak as if you too had 'loved and lost'?" says Lauraine, wiping the tears from her eyes, and looking at the beautiful, noble face beside her.
A faint warmth of colour comes over it; the proud head, with its golden halo of hair, droops a little. "Yes," she says, "I have. Sometimes I think it was my own fault, after all I was too proud, too exacting. Shall I tell you the story? Would you care to hear?"
"Indeed, I would," said Lauraine, earnestly.
"He was a soldier," begins Lady Etwynde. "I was seventeen; romantic to my finger-tips. He, thirty years or more; bronzed, bold, stalwart, a king among men, I always thought. We met at my first season in London, loved, were engaged. He was of good family, but not rich. My parents objected strongly at first; but I was their only child, and they had never crossed whim or wish of mine. Of course I gained my point. Oh, how happy I was! It was like all the ecstasy of dreams, all the fancies of poets, all the purity and waking passion of first love steeping my life in golden glamour. I only lived, watched, thought for him, and he—all the time—he deceived me!"
Her voice breaks. The bitterness and anguish of that time seems present over again. The colour fades from her cheeks as she kneels there in the radiant moonlight.
"No man comes to thirty years of age without a 'past' of some sort," she resumes. "But I, in my childish ignorance, imagined him another Bayard. He had been so brave, his name was crowned with so many laurels. He seemed the very soul of honour, of truth, and I—I loved him so. And one night, oh, shall I ever forget that night? We had gone down to Richmond to dinner. We had been out on the river afterwards. It was a warm June night, so fair, so still, so fragrant, and he rowed the boat himself and the rest of the party left us far behind. Suddenly another boat passed us; there were two men in it, and a woman. I remember noticing she had something scarlet wrapped about her and was very dark; foreign-looking I fancied. They were rowing fast, their boat shot by. I heard a cry, the sound of a name—hisname—and he was sitting before me, his face white as death, his eyes full of horror and doubt. 'Good God!' I heard him cry, 'and she isnotdead?'
"My heart seemed to stand still. Then I grew very calm and cold. 'Who is that woman, Cyril?' He stared at me like one in a dream, and turned the boat back without a word and rowed me to the hotel. Then he led me up one of the quiet river walks, and standing there before me told me the whole sickening, miserable tale. There may have been extenuation in it. I saw none. I was young and ignorant of life and of men, and cruel, I suppose. He called me so. I could only cling to one fact—that she had been his wife. What mattered to me the folly, the caprice, the infatuation that had chained his hot youth and held him powerless now? What mattered to me anything, anything, save that he was lost to me, that my idol was shattered, my heart was broken. 'You told me you had loved no other woman as you loved me,' I said, scornfully; 'and all the time, all the time, you had given her the surest, truest proof of love a man can give. Pity! No, I have no pity! You made your choice, you must abide by it. If you were free this hour I would not marry you now. You have deceived me. Your love was a pretence; perhaps you call it also such names as you have called hers. Go to her, your wife; I never will voluntarily look upon your face again.' Oh, Lauraine, was I cruel, was I unjust; God knows. Oh, the bitterness, the agony, the shame of that night. I felt as if I hated him in the new sharp fever of jealousy that had come to my heart. I hated to think he had belonged to another, held her to his heart, kissed her, loved or seemed to love her. My whole nature seemed to change. I could only think he had deceived me, whether willingly, or mercifully did not matter. Love, youth, joy, hope, all seemed to die out of my heart. Nothing he said seemed to soften me. I would not listen, I would not yield, I would not pity. He left me, and I never saw him again. The next news I had was that he had gone abroad on foreign service. I had seen his name from time to time, but of his life, the life I once so fondly hoped to share, I know nothing!"
Lauraine touches the trembling hands. "You were hard on him, I think," she says gently. "I suppose he thought her dead—that he was free."
"He said so," answers Lady Etwynde. "Oh, yes, and doubtless he believed it. He could not have dared to offer such an insult to me, or my family. But what I resented was that he should have kept the story back, that he should have pretended that I was his first, his only love, and all the timeshehad been his wife. I could not forgive that!"
"But, my dear," says Lauraine, gently, "you may have had his firstreallove. The other was but a youthful folly, a hot-headed infatuation. Does any man come to us with his heart pure and free? Few, I think, if any. We cannot judge them by ourselves. That is how so many women wreck their lives. They expect too much. No man can ever be what a girl's dreams would make him. But it is so hard for her to believe that."
"I know it now," answers Lady Etwynde. "I have learnt my lesson in bitterness and grief. But I think it has done me good. I have forgiven him long ago. I shall never see him again to tell him so, I suppose; perhaps he would not care even to hear it. But I am happier since I could pardon and pity his weakness, only—my Bayard he could never be again!"
"And of her? Do you know anything about her fate?" asks Lauraine, forgetful of her own sorrows in this new interest.
"I heard she was dead. She was a vile, cruel woman. He divorced her afterwards, but what was that to me? What can anything be to me now that concerns his name, his life?" There comes a long silence. The thoughts of both are busy with sad memories. As Lauraine looks at Lady Etwynde's face she sees it is full of pain, but her eyes have a dreamy look, as the eyes of one who sees some sweet vision afar off.
"I was wrong, I suppose," she says, slowly. "A woman who loves must forgetherselfin that love, and I, I thought too much of my wounded pride, my lost ideal. But I have never held a thought of love for any other man. The lips that he kissed were his first, they will be his for ever. I have never forgotten; and now I am thirty years old, and my parents, as you know, are dead, and I live alone, and am looked upon as a marvel of eccentricity, and have my school of apostles and fool them to the top of their bent. Sometimes life seems a horrible travesty of all that is dignified and pure, and sometimes a jest that one laughs at and forgets. But no one knows me as I really am, save you, Lauraine. To most people I suppose I hardly seem a woman. But my true self and my lost love live a life apart, a life of dreams, sad but yet beautiful. A life that feeds itself on memories, memories that are recalled by the colours of every changing sky, the scents of leaf and flower that touch one like a sound of music. Ah! those nights, those mornings, those scenes that are the same, yetnotthe same, how they make one's whole soul sick with longing, and mad with regret!"
"And you have borne all this so long?" says Lauraine, wonderingly.
"Yes," she answers; "it seems long, does it not? And I have not pined away much. I don't look like a love-lorn maiden, do I? I have not gone into a decline, or fallen away to a shadow, or grown grey with sorrow, or done anything I ought to have done according to romancers. I suppose no one I know ever suspects that I have had a love-story, much less that I cherish its memory."
"Your nature must be a very constant one," says Lauraine. "You make me ashamed of myself. No wonder Keith reproaches me with unfaithfulness."
"I think fidelity is an established instinct," says Lady Etwynde. "It is very much an accident of our own natures. To me, it seems an utter impossibility to even think of caring for another man. Cyril Carlisle was my first lover; I gave him all that was in me to give. It was all my life to me. I suppose—to him—it was but another experience."
"Yours is a grand nature," says Lauraine, looking wonderingly at the calm, noble face. "You shame me for myself. If I had but kept true a little space——"
"One can never judge of another's case by one's own," answers Lady Etwynde. "No doubt you were tried, hurried into it. I know, oh! I know. You are not the first girl who has told me the same, nor will you be the last. The mothers of Society do it all for the best, doubtless. Love seems such a poor, contemptible thing in their eyes in comparison with—settlements. Oh, yes! that is so always. Perhaps they forget their own youth; one does, they say, when one outlives romance. And I suppose an 'Establishment' is better than poetry any day. They are wise, after all. Year after year the season has its martyrs. Girls are brought out and introduced with no higher aim or object set before them than a 'great marriage.' Fashion and Society expect it. I suppose it is what they were born for! Thank God! my parents were neither ambitious nor mercenary. Perhaps I too might have been over-persuaded. I don't think it likely. Still—-"
She hesitates and looks compassionately at Lauraine's sad face. "You must try and be brave, dear, and bear your life as it is. Regrets, repining, sorrowing won't make it any better. You say you are weak, but I don't think you are so weak as all that. And there is one thing I have wanted to say to you of late. You will pardon me if it seems intrusive. But, do you know you are behaving very coldly, and, I think, unwisely, towards your husband? You leave him alone, to other temptations that your presence would restrain. All these months you have not seen him, you scarcely even write with more warmth or interest than you do to your steward; and, after all, he is your husband. Nothing can alter that; and he loved you very dearly, and no doubt he does still. Can you not see that your duty to him demands even more than the sacrifice you have already made? I know it is hard, terribly hard. You say there is no sympathy, no comprehension between you, and your heart is aching with this forbidden love, and he must seem in a way hateful; but you were not honest with him quite, if you promised to marry him, and yet held back your heart. You see what I mean?"
"Yes," Lauraine says faintly, "I see."
"Duty demands much, but it also repays much,", continues Lady Etwynde gently. "Heaven knows I am not fit to preach to you; but in the world, as we know it, Lauraine, there are so many faithless wives, so many divided households. Oh, my dear, don't you add to the number! You have many enemies of whom you know nothing, and they would gladly seize your name, and smirch its purity with scandals, and whispers, and evil words. I want you to be brave, and face them all, and live out your life nobly and well. I know I am bidding you do a hard thing; but it is right, and I am sure you see it."
Lauraine bends her head down wearily, and lays it on her friend's shoulder. She feels spent, tired, exhausted. The tears throng to her eyes, her heart aches with dull and ceaseless pain. "I do see it!" she half sobs. "I will try."
"May Heaven give you strength!" murmurs Lady Etwynde, and she kisses her on the brow.