All that Durant got out of Polly was the privilege of driving her
home, through mud and rain, at a melancholy trot. True, he was in no
hurry to get back; so he let her take her own pace, in pity for her
trembling limbs and straining heart. Polly had done all she knew
for her mistress in that frantic dash for freedom and the express;
and, when he thought of what Frida Tancred's life had been, he
guessed that the little animal was used to carrying her through
worse storms than this.
The storm was over now; it had driven the clouds into the north,
where they hung huddled and piled in a vast amphitheater; other
clouds, charged with light now instead of darkness, were still
rolling up from the south, east and west, their wings closed till
the sky was shut in like Whithorn-in-Arden, ringed with its clouds
as Arden with its woods; above, beneath, there rose the same
immense, impenetrable boundary, green on the earth and gray in
heaven.
And Frida Tancred had escaped from these confines, would never come
back to dwell in them again; she had said so, and he believed her.
To be sure, she had shown weakness at the last, she had been driven
to juggle with the conscience that would not let her go; had she not
persuaded it that she was leaving the Colonel for the Colonel's
good? But once gone, once there, away over the border and safe in
the promised land, she would see clearly, she would realize her
right to be happy in the glorious world.
Not that these things could have happened without Georgie
Chatterton. He had nothing but admiration for that young woman;
there had been daring in her conquest of Frida Tancred, there were
ingenuity and determination in the final elopement. Was it possible
that he was piqued at the insignificance of the part she had
assigned to him? She had left him to settle up the sordid accounts
while she ran away with the lady. He had got to say to Colonel
Tancred, "Colonel Tancred, I am not your daughter's seducer and
abductor; I am only a miserable accessory after the fact." In other
words, Miss Chatterton had reminded him that he was too late.
Too late indeed, it seemed. Whether or not Miss Chatterton's faith
in him had failed her at the last moment, but when he came down to
dinner that evening he found that she had been beforehand with him;
there was nothing left for him to do.
The Colonel looked up smiling from a telegram. "News from St.
Pancras. Miss Chatterton is carrying my daughter off to the
Continent."
"I'm delighted to hear it. It will do her all the good in the
world."
"Yes, yes; I'm glad she should have the opportunity. I made a little
tour on the Continent myself when I was a young man, and I've felt a
brighter fellow for it ever since."
"Really?"
"Yes. One's apt to get into a groove staying at home so much.
There's nothing like rubbing brains with foreigners. It stretches
you out, clears you of all your narrow insular prejudices, brings
you in touch"--Durant quivered; he knew it was coming--"in touch
with fresh ideas. I don't know how you feel about it, but six months
of it was enough to convince me that there's no place like England,
and no people like English people, and no house like my own. As for
Frida, a very little goes a long way with Frida; she'll be sick of
it in six weeks, but she'll settle down all the better for the
change."
"You think so?"
"I do. She may be a little unsettled at first. Her poor mother was
just the same--restless, restless. But she settled down."
The Colonel made no further allusion to his daughter's absence. He
was presently disturbed about another matter, bustling about the
room, wondering, questioning, and exclaiming, "I have lost my little
meteorological chronicle? Has anybody seen my little meteorological
chronicle? Now, where did I have it last? I wonder if I could have
left it with my other papers in Frida's room?"
But Frida's room, the room where she did all her father's writing,
and her own reading and dreaming when she had time to read and
dream, Frida's room was locked, and nobody could find the key. The
Colonel, more than ever convinced that his meteorological chronicle
was concealed in Frida's room, ordered the door to be burst open.
Durant lent a shoulder to the work and entered somewhat
precipitately, followed by the Colonel.
The meteorological chronicle, the labor of years, was found where
its author had left it, on his writing-table, together with his
other papers, business letters, household accounts, Primrose League
programs, all carefully sorted, dated, and docketed. Many of the
letters had been answered; they lay, addressed in Frida's
handwriting, ready for the post. She had left her work in such
perfect order that a new secretary could have been fitted into her
place without a hitch. The fact was eloquent of finality and the
winding up of affairs; but certain other details were more eloquent
still.
Order on the writing-table; in the rest of the room confusion and
disarray, rifled bookcases and dismantled walls. Fresh squares of
wall-paper outlined in cobwebs marked the places where the great
maps had hung. The soul of the room was gone from it with the
portrait of the late Mrs. Tancred; the watercolor drawings, sad work
of her restless fingers, were no longer there. The furniture had
been pushed aside to make room for the deed of desecration; the
floor was littered with newspapers and straw; an empty packing-case
lay on its side, abandoned, in a corner.
The Colonel opened round eyes of astonishment, but his mustache was
still. He rang the bell and summoned the servants. Under severe
cross-examination, Chaplin, the footman, gave evidence that three
packing-cases had left Coton Manor for the station early in the
morning before the bursting of the storm. Frida, too, had discerned
the face of the sky, and--admirable strategist!--had secured her
transports. The Colonel dismissed his witnesses, and appealed
helplessly to Durant; indeed, the comprehension in the young man's
face gave him an appearance of guilty complicity.
"What does it mean, Durant? what does it mean?"
Durant smiled, not without compassion. When a young woman arranges
her accounts, and makes off with three packing-cases, containing her
library and her mother's portrait, the meaning obviously is that she
is not coming back again in a hurry. He suggested that perhaps Miss
Tancred proposed to make a lengthier stay on the Continent than had
been surmised.
"The whole thing," said the Colonel, "is incomprehensible to me."
For the rest of the evening he remained visibly subdued by the
presence of the incomprehensible; after coffee he pulled himself
together and prepared to face it.
"There will be no whist this evening," he announced. "You will
excuse me, Durant; I have an immensity of work on hand. Chaplin, put
some whiskey and water in the study, and light the little lamp on my
literary machine."
Tuesday morning's post brought explanation. Two letters lay on the
breakfast table, both from a fresh hotel, the _Hotel Metropole_,
both addressed in Frida Tancred's handwriting, one to the Colonel
and the other to Durant. Durant's ran thus:
"DEAR MR. DURANT:--You will explain everything to my father,
won't you? I have done my best, but he will never see it; it is
the sort of thing he never could see--my reasons for going away
and staying away. They are hard to understand, but, as far as I
have made them out myself, it seems that I went away for his
sake; but I believe, in fact I know, that I shall stay away for
my own. You will understand it; we thrashed it all out that
Saturday afternoon--you remember?--and you understood then. And
so I trust you.
"Always sincerely yours,
"FRIDA TANCRED.
"P.S.--Write and tell me how he takes it. I can see it--so
clearly!--from his point of view. I hope he will not be unhappy.
"P.P.S.--We sail to-morrow."
He was still knitting his brows over the opening sentences when the
Colonel flicked his own letter across the table.
"Read this, Durant, and tell me what you think of it."
Durant read:
"MY DEAR FATHER:--You will see from Georgie's telegram that we
shall be leaving England to-morrow. I did not tell you this
before because it would have meant so much explanation, and if
we once began explaining things I don't think I should ever
have gone at all. And I had to go. Believe me, I was convinced
that in going I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you
had been making sacrifices for my sake, and that you would be
happier without me, though you would not say so. Whether I could
have brought myself to leave you without the help of this
conviction, and whether I have the conviction strongly still, I
cannot say; it is hard to be perfectly honest, even with myself.
But now that I have gone I simply can't come back again. Not
yet. Perhaps never, till I have done the things I want to do.
"Of course you will be angry--it is so unexpected. But only
think--you would not be angry, would you, if I married? You
would have considered that perfectly legitimate. Yet it would
have meant my leaving you for good. And what marriage and
settling down in it is to other women, seeing the world and
wandering about in it is to me--it's the thing I care for most.
We do not talk about these things, so this is the first you have
heard of it. Think--if I had been very much in love with anyone
I would have said nothing about it till I was all but engaged to
him. It's the same thing. And it will make less difference to
you than my marriage would have made."
Here Frida's pen had come to a stop; with a sudden flight from the
abstract to the concrete, she had begun a fresh argument on a fresh
page.
"I only mean to use a third of my income. The other two thousand
will still go to keeping up the property. I have left everything
so that my work could be taken up by anybody to-morrow."
The Colonel's eyes had dogged Durant's down to the bottom of the
sheet, when he made a nervous attempt to recapture the letter. It
was too late; the swing of Frida's impassioned pleading had carried
Durant over the page, and one terse sentence had printed itself
instantaneously on his brain. He handed back the letter without a
word.
The Colonel drew Durant's arm in his and led him out through the
window on to the gravel drive. Up and down, up and down, they walked
for the space of one hour, while the Colonel poured out his soul. He
went bareheaded, he lifted up his face to the heavens, touched to a
deeper anguish by the beauty of the young day.
"Lord, what a perfect morning! Look at this place she's left; look
at it! I've nursed the little property for her; it was as much hers
as if I was in my grave, Durant. She's lived in it for nearly thirty
years, ever since she was no higher than that flower-pot, and she
thinks nothing of leaving it. She thinks nothing of leaving _me_.
And I've got more work to do than my brain's fit for; why I was in
the very thick of my Primrose League correspondence, up to the neck
in all manner of accounts; and she knew it, and chose this time.
I've got to give a lecture next week in Whithorn parish-room, a
lecture on 'Imperialism,' and I've my little chronicle on hand, too;
but it's nothing to her. The whole thing's a mystery to me. I can't
think what can have made her do it. She never was a girl that cared
for gadding about, and for society and that. As for trying to make
me believe that I should be no worse off if she married, the
question has never risen, Durant. She hasn't married. She never even
wanted to be married. She never would have been married."
"That makes it all the more natural that she should want to see
something of the world instead."
"No, it's not natural. I could have understood her wanting to get
married, that's natural enough; but what's a woman got to do with
seeing the world? It's not as if she was my son, Durant."
Durant listened and wondered. As far as he could make out, the
Colonel's attitude to his daughter was twofold. On the one hand, he
seemed to regard her as part of the little property, and as existing
for the sake of the little property, from which point of view she
had acquired a certain value in his eyes. On the other hand, he
looked upon her as an inferior part of Himself, and as existing for
the sake of Himself; it was a view old as the hills and the earth
they were made of, being the paternal side of the simple primeval
attitude of the man to the woman. And, seeing that the little
property was a mere drop in the ocean of the Colonel's egoism, this
view might be said to include the other as the greater includes the
less. On either theory Frida Tancred was not supposed to have any
rights, or, indeed, any substantial existence of her own; she was an
attribute, an adjunct.
"Seeing the world--fiddlesticks! Don't tell me there isn't something
else at the bottom of it--it's an insult to my intelligence."
As everything the Colonel did not understand was an insult to his
intelligence, his intelligence must have had to put up with an
extraordinary number of affronts.
He leaned heavily on the young man's arm. "It's shaken me. I shall
never be the fellow I was. I can't understand it. Nobody could have
done more for any girl than I've done for Frida; and she deserts me,
Durant, deserts me in my old age with my strength failing."
Durant vainly tried to make himself worthy of Frida Tancred's trust,
but he could add nothing to her reasoning, and she had kept her
best argument to the last,--"It will make less difference to you
than my marriage would have made."
"After all, sir, will it make so very much difference if--if your
daughter does go away for a year or two?"
"I can't say. I can't tell you that till I've tried it, my boy. It's
all too new to me, and I tell you I can't understand it."
He trailed off with a slow and stricken movement, like a lesser
Lear, and reentered the house by the window of Frida's room. The
sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his
sense of her desertion.
"Look at that. She was my right hand, Maurice, and I can't realize
that she's gone. It's the queerest sensation; I feel as if she was
here and yet wasn't here."
Durant said he had heard that people felt like that after the
amputation of their right hands. As for the wound, he hoped that
time would heal it.
"Any soldier can tell you that old wounds will still bleed, Durant.
I think that was the luncheon bell."
Lunch, over which the Colonel lingered lovingly and long, somewhat
obscured the freshness of the tragedy, and made it a thing of the
remoter past. An hour later he was playing with his little
rain-gauge on the lawn. At afternoon teatime he appeared
immaculately attired in the height of the fashion; brown boots, the
palest of pale gray summer suitings, a white pique waistcoat, the
least little luminous hint of green in his silk necktie, and he
seemed the spirit of youth incarnate.
At this figure Durant smiled with a pity that was only two-thirds
contempt. He longed to ask him whether the old wound was bleeding
badly. He was bound to believe that the Colonel had a heart under
his immaculate waistcoat, with pulses and arteries the same as other
people's, his own unconquerable conviction being that if you pricked
the gentlemannikin he would bleed sawdust.
The Colonel had scarcely swallowed his tea when Durant saw him
trotting off in the direction of the cottage; there was that about
him which, considering his recent bereavement, suggested an almost
indecent haste. He returned and sat down to dinner, flushed but
uncommunicative. He seemed aware that it was Durant's last night,
and it was after some weak attempts to give the meal a commemorative
and farewell character, half-festal, half-funereal, that he sank
into silence, and remained brooding over the ice pudding in his
attitude of owl-like inscrutability. But during the privacy of
dessert his mystic mood took flight; he hopped, as it were, onto a
higher perch; he stretched the wing of victory and gazed at it
admiringly; there was an effect as of the preening of young plumage,
the fluttering of innumerable feathers.
And, with champagne running in his veins like the sap of spring, he
proclaimed his engagement to that charming lady, Mrs. Fazakerly.
Durant had no sooner congratulated him on the event than he
remembered that he had left the postscript of Miss Tancred's letter
unanswered. She had said, "Write and tell me how he takes it"; she
had hoped that he would not be unhappy. So he wrote: "He took it
uncommonly well" (that was not strictly true, but Durant was
determined to set Frida Tancred's conscience at rest, even if he had
to tamper a little with his own). "I should not say that he will be
very unhappy. On the contrary, he has just assured me that he is
the happiest man on earth. He is engaged to be married to Mrs.
Fazakerly."
It was a masterly stroke on Mrs. Fazakerly's part, and it had
followed so closely on the elopement (as closely, indeed, as
consequence on cause) that Durant had to admit that he had grossly
underrated the powers of this remarkable woman. He had been lost in
admiration of Miss Chatterton's elaborate intrigue and bold
independent action; but now he came to think of it, though Miss
Chatterton's style was more showy, Mrs. Fazakerly had played by far
the better game of the two. Durant, who had regarded himself as a
trump card up Mrs. Fazakerly's sleeve, perceived with a pang that he
had counted for nothing in the final move. Mrs. Fazakerly had not,
as he idiotically supposed, been greatly concerned with Frida
Tancred's attitude toward him. She had divined nothing, imagined
nothing, she had been both simpler and subtler than he knew. She had
desired the removal of Frida Tancred from her path, and at the right
moment she had produced Georgie Chatterton. She had played her
deliberately, staking everything on the move. Georgie's independence
had been purely illusory. She had appeared at Mrs. Fazakerly's
bidding, she had behaved as Mrs. Fazakerly had foreseen, she had
removed Frida Tancred, and Durant had been nowhere. Mrs. Fazakerly's
little gray eyes could read the characters of men and women at a
glance, and as instantly inferred their fitness or unfitness for her
purpose. She might be a poor hand at the game of whist, but at the
game of matrimony she was magnificent and supreme.
Frida had said, "We sail to-morrow"; therefore, Durant walked all
the way to Whithorn-in-Arden to post his letter, so that it might
reach her before she left London. And as he came back across the
dewy path in the dim light, and Coton Manor raised its forehead
from the embrace of the woods and opened the long line of its dull
windows, he realized all that it had done for Frida. He understood
the abnegation and the tragedy of her life. She had been sacrificed,
not only to her father, but to her father's fetish, the property;
Coton Manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been
Frida's, it had been her mother's. The place had crushed and
consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material
inheritance; it had made the living woman as the dead. He remembered
how the house had been called her mother's monument, and how it had
become her own grave. Her soul had never lived there. And now that
she was gone it was as empty as the tomb from which the soul has
lifted the body at resurrection time.
And he, too, was set at liberty.
He left by the slow early train on Wednesday without waiting for the
afternoon express, his object being not so much to reach town as to
get away from Coton Manor. The Colonel accompanied him to the
station; and, to his infinite surprise and embarrassment, he found
Mrs. Fazakerly on the platform waiting to see him off.
He could think of nothing nice to say to her about her engagement,
not even when she took possession of him with a hand on his arm, led
him away to the far end of the platform, and gazed expectantly into
his face.
"You don't congratulate me, Mr. Durant."
"On what?" he asked moodily.
"On having done a good deed."
"A good deed?"
"Didn't I tell you there was nothing I wouldn't do for Frida
Tancred?"
Incomparable cunning! To set herself right in his eyes and her own,
she was trying to persuade him that she had accepted the Colonel for
his daughter's sake. A good deed! Well, whatever else she had done,
and whatever her motives may have been, the deed remained; she had
set Frida Tancred free. Nevertheless, he could not be pleasant.
"Self-sacrifice, no doubt, is a virtue," said he; "yet one draws the
line----"
"Does one?"
He felt a delicate pressure on his arm, the right touch, the light
touch. "Mr. Durant, you are dense, and you are ungrateful."
"I don't see it."
"Don't you see what I have done for you?" There was a strange light
behind the _pince-nez_ as she smiled up into his face. "I have
cleared the way."
"For Miss Tancred, you mean," said Durant; thereby proving that in
her calculations as to his mean density Mrs. Fazakerly was not
altogether wrong.
But Durant was always an imaginative man. And as he sped on the same
journey over the same rails, his imagination followed Frida Tancred
in her flight toward freedom and the unknown.