RECOGNITION.
With the unexpected return of George Dallas to London from Amsterdam,
an occurrence against which so much precaution had been taken, and
which had appeared to be so very improbable, a sense of discouragement
and alarm had stolen over Stewart Routh. In the coarse bold sense of
the term, he was a self-reliant man. He had no faith in anything
higher or holier than luck and pluck; but, in those mundane gods, his
faith was steadfast, and had been hitherto justified. On the whole,
for an outcast (as he had been for some time, that time, too, so
important in a man's life) he had not done badly; he had schemed
successfully, and cunning and crime had availed him. He was a callous
man by nature, of a base disposition; and, under any circumstances,
would have been cool-headed and dogged. In the circumstances in which
he found himself, his dogged cool-headedness was peculiarly useful and
valuable. He had relied upon them without any doubt or misgiving until
the day on which he was convinced by George Dallas's appearance on
the stage, which he believed him to have abandoned for an indefinite
time, that he had made a miscalculation. Then a slow cold fear
began to creep over him. Had his luck--what marvellous luck it had
been!--turned? Believers in such a creed as his are mostly
superstitious fanatics. He had felt some such dread; then, from the
moment when Harriet--Harriet, who should have seen that he had
blundered: confound the woman, was _she_ losing her head?--had told
him, in her smooth encouraging way, that this new difficulty should be
surmounted as the others had been. Not the smallest touch of
repentance, not the slightest shadow of remorse, fell upon him with
the stirring of this fact--only a hard, contemptuous anger against
himself and Harriet, and a bitter scornful hatred for the young man
who had been his tool for so long, and might now, in a moment, be
turned into the agent of his punishment. When George Dallas left
Harriet after the discussion which had terminated in his promise not
to move in the matter of the identification of Deane, Stewart Routh,
though he bore himself with calmness in his talk with his wife, had
invariably writhed and raged under the galling sense of the first
check he had received. If he could have done it safely, if the deed
would not have been more fatal than the conjuncture he feared, he
would have murdered Dallas readily; and he told himself so. He had
none of the poetry, none of the drama of crime about him. He was not a
man to kill one human being because it suited his purpose to do so,
and then to hesitate about killing another, if a still more powerful
preventive presented itself; he was incapable of the mixture of base
and cruel motives with the kind of sentimental heroics, with which the
popular imagination endows criminals of the educated classes. He had
all the cynicism of such individuals, cynicism which is their
strongest, characteristic; but he had nothing even mock heroic in his
composition. His hatred of George was mixed with the bitterest
contempt. When he found the young man amenable beyond his
expectations; when he found him unshaken in the convictions with which
Harriet had contrived to inspire him and hardly requiring to be
supported by his own arguments, his reassurance was inferior to his
scorn.
"The fool, the wretched, contemptible idiot!" Routh said, as he looked
round his dressing-room that night, and noted one by one the signs
which would have betokened to a practised eye preparations for an
abrupt departure, "it is hardly worth while to deceive him, and to
rule such a creature. He was full of suspicion of me before he went
away, and the first fruits of that pretty and affecting conversation
of his, under the influence of his mother and the territorial
decencies of Poynings, was what he flattered himself was a resolution
to pay me off, and be free of me. He yields to my letter without the
slightest difficulty, and comes here the moment he returns. He
believes in Harriet as implicitly as ever; and if he is not as fond of
me as he was, he is quite as obedient." The cynical nature of the man
showed itself in the impatient weariness with which he thought of his
success, and in the levity with which he dismissed, or at least tried
to dismiss, the subject from his mind. There was, however, one
insuperable obstacle to his getting rid of it--his wife.
Harriet had miscalculated her strength; not the strength of her
intellect, but that of her nerves, and the strain had told upon them.
She still loved her husband with a desperate kind of love; but all its
peace, all its strength, all its frankness--and even in the evil life
they had always led it had possessed these qualities--had vanished.
She loved him now with all the old intensity of passion, but with an
element of fierceness added to it, with a horrid craving and fear,
sometimes with a sudden repulsion, which she rebelled against as
physical cowardice, causing her to shrink from him in the darkness,
and to shut her ears from the sound of his breathing in his sleep.
And then she would upbraid herself fiercely, and ask herself if she,
who had given him all her life and being, who had renounced for
him--though she denied to herself that such renunciation was any
sacrifice, for did she not love him, as happy women, the caressed of
society, do not know how to love--home, name, kindred, and God, could
possibly shrink from him now? She had not played any pretty little
game of self-deception; she had not persuaded herself that he was
other than he really was; she did not care, she loved _him_, just as
he was, no better and no worse. She lived for him, she believed in,
she desired, she asked no other life; and if a terrible anguish had
come into that life latterly, that was her share of it, her fair
share. It was not easy, for she was a woman and weak; her nerves would
thrill sometimes, and phantoms swarm about her; sleeplessness would
wear her down, and a spell be set upon her lips, under which they
strove vainly to curve with their old smile, and to utter their old
words of endearment and protestation; for she scorned and hated
herself for such weakness, and could have torn her rebellious flesh
with rage, that sometimes it would creep and turn cold when he touched
her, or even when he only spoke. She fought this false and dastardly
weakness, as she called it, with steady bravery, and with the resolve
to conquer, which is always half a moral battle; but she did not
conquer it, she only quelled it for a little while. It returned on
occasions, and then it tortured and appalled her even more than when
the foe had been always in position.
All such conflicts of feeling had the effect of narrowing the sphere
of her life, of concentrating her whole attention on, and intensifying
her absorption in, her husband. A lassitude which her own good sense
told her was dangerous began to take possession of her. They were
better off now--she did not rightly know how, or how much, for she had
gradually lapsed from her previous customary active overseeing of
Routh's affairs, and had been content to take money as he gave it, and
expend it as he desired, skilfully and economically, but with an
entire indifference, very different from the cheerful, sunny household
thriftiness which had formerly been so marked a feature in their
Bohemian life, and had testified, perhaps more strongly than any other
of its characteristics, to the utter deadness of the woman's
conscience. His comforts were as scrupulously looked after as ever,
and far more liberally provided for; but the tasteful care for her
home, the indescribable something which had invested their life with
the charm of a refinement contrasting strangely with its real
degradation, had vanished. Harriet's manner was changed--changed to a
quietude unnatural to her, and peculiarly unpleasant to Routh, who had
had a scientific appreciation of the charm of steady, business-like,
calm judgment and decision brought to bear on business matters; but
discarded, at a moment's notice, for sparkling liveliness and a power
of enjoyment which never passed the bounds of refinement in its
demonstrativeness. "Eat, drink, and be merry" had been their rule of
life in time that seemed strangely old to them both; and if the woman
alone had sometimes remarked that the precept had a corollary, she did
not care much about it. "To-morrow ye die" was an assurance which
carried little terror to one absolutely without belief in a future
life, and who, in this, had realized her sole desire, and lived every
hour in the fulness of its realization. Stewart Routh had never had
the capacity, either of heart or of intellect, to comprehend his wife
thoroughly; but he had loved her as much as he was capable of loving
any one, in his own way, and the strength and duration of the feeling
had been much increased by their perfect comradeship. His best aid in
business, his shrewd, wise counsellor in difficulty, his good comrade
in pleasure, his sole confidant--it must be remembered that there was
no craving for respect on the one side, no possibility of rendering
it, no power of missing it, on the other--and the most cherished wife
of the most respectable and worthy member of society might have
compared her position with that of Harriet with considerable
disadvantage on many points.
Things were, however, changed of late, and Harriet had begun to feel,
with something of the awfully helpless, feeble foreboding with which
the victims of conscious madness foresee the approach of the foe, that
there was some power, whose origin she did not know, whose nature she
could not discern, undermining her, and conquering her unawares. Was
it bodily illness? She had always had unbroken health, and was slow to
detect any approach of disease. She did not think it could be that,
and conscience, remorse, the presence, the truth, of the supernatural
components of human life, she disbelieved in; therefore she refused to
take the possibility of their existence and their influence into
consideration. She was no longer young, and she had suffered--yes, she
had certainly suffered a very great deal; no one could love as she
loved and not suffer, that was all. Time would do everything for her;
things were going well; all risk was at an end, with the procuring of
George's promise and the quieting of George's scruples (how feeble a
nature his was, she thought, but without the acrid scorn a similar
reflection had aroused in her husband's mind); and every week of time
gained without the revival of any inquisition, was a century of
presumptive safety. Yes, now she was very weak, and certainly not
quite well; it was all owing to her sleeplessness. How could any one
be well who did not get oblivion in the darkness? This would pass, and
time would bring rest and peace. Wholly possessed by her love for her
husband, she was not conscious of the change in her manner towards
him. She did not know that the strange repulsion she sometimes felt,
and which she told herself was merely physical nervousness, had so
told upon her, that she was absent and distant with him for the most
part, and in the occasional spasmodic bursts of love which she yielded
to showed such haunting and harrowing grief as sometimes nearly
maddened him with anger, with disgust, with _ennui_--not with
repentance, not with compassion--maddened him, not for her sake, but
for his own.
The transition, effected by the aid of his intense selfishness, from
his former state of feeling towards Harriet, to one which required
only the intervention of any active cause to become hatred, was not a
difficult matter to a man like Routh. Having lost all her former
charm, and much of her previous usefulness, she soon became to him a
disagreeable reminder. Something more than that--the mental
superiority of the woman, which had never before incommoded him, now
became positively hateful to him. It carried with it, now that it was
no longer his mainstay, a power which was humiliating, because it was
fear-inspiring. Routh was afraid of his wife, and knew that he was
afraid of her, when he had ceased to love her, after he had begun to
dislike her; so much afraid of her that he kept up appearances to an
extent, and for a duration of time, inexpressibly irksome to a man so
callous, so egotistical, so entirely devoid of any sentiment or
capacity of gratitude.
Such was the position of affairs when George Dallas and Mr. Felton
left London to join Mr. and Mrs. Carruthers at Homburg. From the time
of his arrival, and even when he had yielded to the clever arguments
which had been adduced to urge him to silence, there was a sense of
insecurity, foreboding in Routh's mind; not a trace of the sentimental
superstitious terror with which imaginary criminals are invested after
the fact, but with the reasonable fear of a shrewd man, in a
tremendously dangerous and difficult position, who knows he has made a
false move, and looks, with moody perplexity, for the consequences
sooner or later.
"He must have come to England, at all events, Stewart," Harriet said
to her husband, when he cursed his own imprudence for the twentieth
time; "he must have come home to see his uncle. Mr. Felton would have
been directed here to us by the old woman at Poynings, and we must
have given his address. Remember, his uncle arrived in England the
same day he did."
"I should have sent him to George, not brought George to him," said
Routh. "And there's that uncle of his, Felton; he is no friend of
ours, Harriet; he does not like us."
"I am quite aware of that," she answered; "civil as he is, he is very
honest, and has never pretended to be our friend. If he is George's
friend, and George has told him anything about his life since he has
known us, I think we could hardly expect him to like us."
Her husband gave her one of his darkest looks, but she did not remark
it. Many things passed now without attracting her notice; even her
husband's looks, and sometimes his words, which were occasionally as
bitter as he dared to make them.
He was possessed with a notion that he must, for a time at least, keep
a watch upon George Dallas; not near, indeed, nor apparently close,
but constant, and as complete as the maintenance of Harriet's
influence with him made possible. For himself, he felt his own
influence was gone, and he was far too wise to attempt to catch at it,
as it vanished, or to ignore its absence. He acquiesced in the tacit
estrangement; he was never in the way, but he never lost sight of
George; he always knew what he was doing, and had early information of
his movements, and with tolerable accuracy, considering that the spy
whose services he employed was quite an amateur and novice.
This spy was Mr. James Swain, who took to the duties of his new line
of business with vigorous zeal, and who seemed to derive a grim kind
of amusement from their discharge. Stewart Routh had arrived with
certainty at the conclusion that the young man had adhered to the
promised silence up to the time of his leaving England with his uncle,
and he felt assured that Mr. Felton was in entire ignorance of the
circumstances which had had such terrible results for Mrs. Carruthers.
It was really important to him to have George Dallas watched, and, in
setting Jim Swain to watch him, he was inspired by darkly sinister
motives, in view of certain remote contingencies--motives which had
suggested themselves to him shortly after George's unhesitating
recognition of the boy who had taken Routh's note to Deane, on the
last day of the unhappy man's life, had solved the difficulty which
had long puzzled him. Only second in importance to his keeping George
Dallas in view was his not losing sight of the boy; and all this time
it never occurred to Routh, as among the remote possibilities of
things, that Mr. Jim Swain was quite as determined to keep an eye on
him.
Harriet had acquiesced in her husband's proposal that they should go
to Homburg readily. It happened that she was rather more cheerful than
usual on the day he made it, more like, though still terribly unlike,
her former self. She was in one of those intervals in which the
tortured prisoner stoops at the stake, during a temporary suspension
of the inventive industry of his executioner. The fire smouldered for
a little, the pincers cooled. She was in the hands of inflexible
tormentors, and who could tell what device of pain might attend the
rousing from the brief torpor? Nature must have its periods of rest
for the mind, be the agony ever so great; and hers was of the slow and
hopeless kind which has such intervals most surely, and with least
efficacy. One of them had come just then, and she was placid, drowsy,
and acquiescent. She went with Routh to Homburg; he managed to make
some hopeful, promising, and credulous acquaintances on the way, and
was besides accredited to some "business people," of perfectly
authentic character, at Frankfort, in the interest of the flourishing
Flinders.
The change, the novelty, the sight of gaiety in which she took no
share, but which she looked on at with a partial diversion of her
mind, did her good. It was something even to be out of England; not a
very rational or well-founded relief, but still a relief, explicable
and defensible too, on the theory to which she adhered, that all her
ills were merely physical. The torpid interval prolonged itself, and
the vital powers of the sufferer were recruited for the wakening.
This took place when Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge's pony-carriage passed
her as she sat by the side of the broad shaded road, and the woman's
splendid black eyes met hers. When her husband passed her without
seeing her, absorbed in passionate admiration, which any child must
have recognized as such, for the beautiful woman whose pony-carriage
was like a triumphal chariot, so royal and conquering of aspect was
she.
Keen were the tormentors, and full of avidity, and subtle was the new
device to tax the recruited strength and mock the brief repose. It was
raging, fierce, fiery, maddening jealousy.
It was late in the afternoon of the day on which Mrs. Ireton P.
Bembridge had sent her answer to Mr. Felton's note, and while George
Dallas was sitting with Mrs. Routh, that the beautiful widow and her
companion--this time exploring the forest glades in another direction,
in which they met but few of the visitors to the springs--once more
mentioned Mr. Felton and his son. The gray ponies were going slowly,
and the French groom in attendance was considering the probable
direction of the "affair" in which his mistress had so precipitately
engaged herself, and which, being conducted in the English tongue, was
interpreted to him by glances and tones only. The beauty of the face
on which Stewart Routh was gazing in an intensity of admiration, with
a certain desperation in it, in which a cleverer woman than this one
would have seen indications of character to warn and alarm her, but
which this one merely recognized as a tribute due to her, was
marvellously bright and soft, as the slanting rays of the sun came
through the tree stems, and touched it lingeringly, lovingly. Her
black eyes had wonderful gleams and reflections in them, and the
masses of her dark hair were daintily tinged and tipped with russet
tints. She was looking a little thoughtful, a little dreamy. Was she
tired, for the moment, of sparkling? Was she resting herself in an
array of the semblance of tenderness, more enchanting still?
"You knew him, then, in your husband's lifetime? He is not a new
acquaintance?"
"What a catechist you are!" she said, with just a momentary glance at
him, and the least flicker of a smile. "I did know him in my husband's
lifetime, who highly disapproved of him, if you care for _that_ piece
of information; we were great friends and he was rather inclined to
presume upon the fact afterwards."
She lingered upon the word, and gave it all the confirmatory
expression Routh had expected and feared.
"And yet you make an appointment with him to meet him _here_, in this
place, where every one is remarked and speculated upon; here, alone,
where you are without even a companion--" He paused, and with a light,
mocking laugh, inexpressibly provoking, she said:
"Why don't you say a 'sheep-dog'! We know the immortal Becky quite as
well as you do. In the first place, my appointment with Arthur Felton
means simply nothing. I am just as likely to break it as to keep it;
to go to London, or Vienna, or Timbuctoo, to-morrow, if the fancy
takes me; or to stay here, and have him told I'm not at home when he
calls, only that would please his father; and Mr. Felton is about the
only male creature of my acquaintance whom I don't want to please. In
the second place, I don't care one straw who remarks me, or what they
remark, and have no notion of allowing public opinion to take
precedence of my pleasure."
She laughed again, a saucy laugh which he did not like, gave him
another glance and another flicker of her eyelash, and said:
"Why, how extremely preposterous you are! You know well, if I cared
what people could, would, might, or should say, I would not allow you
to visit me every day, and I would not drive you out alone like this."
The perfect unconcern and freedom of the remark took Routh by
surprise, and disconcerted him as completely as its undeniable truth.
He kept silence; and Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge, amused at the blank
expression of his countenance, burst into a hearty fit of laughter
this time.
"I tell you I don't care about public opinion. All the men admire me,
no matter what I do; and all the women hate me, and would hate me all
the same, for my beauty--which I entirely appreciate, you know--if I
made my life as dull and decorous, as miserable, squalid, and canting,
as I make it pleasant, and joyous, and 'not the thing.' Neither men
nor women dare to insult me; and if they did, I should know how to
meet the emergency, I assure you, though I am not at all clever. I am
only courageous--'plucky,' your English ladies call it, I think, in
the last new style of stable and barrack-room talk. I am that; I don't
think that I could be afraid of anything or any one."
"Not of a man who really loved you with all the force and passion of
his heart?" said Routh, in a hoarse whisper, and bending a fierce dark
look upon her.
"Certainly not," she replied, lightly; but the colour rose in her
cheek, and her breath came a little quicker. "I don't believe in
people loving with passion and force, and all that sort of thing. It
is pretty to talk about on balconies, and it looks well on paper, in a
scrawly hand, running crookedly up into the corner, and with plenty of
dashes, and no date--" And here she laughed again, and touched up the
grays. Routh still kept silence, and still his dark look was bent upon
her.
"No, no," she went on, as the rapid trot of the ponies began again to
sound pleasantly on the level road, and she turned them out of the
forest boundaries towards the town, "I know nothing about all that,
except _pour rire_, as they say in Paris, about everything under the
sun, I do believe. To return to Arthur Felton; he is the last person
in the world with whom I could imagine any woman could get up anything
more serious than the flimsiest flirtation."
"You did 'get up' that, however, I imagine?" said Routh.
"Of course we did. We spouted very trite poetry, and he sent me
bouquets--very cheap ones they were, too, and generally came late in
the evening, when they may, being warranted not to keep, be had at
literally a dead bargain; and we even exchanged photographs--I don't
say portraits, you will observe. His is like enough; but that is
really nothing, even among the most prudish of the blonde misses. I
wonder the haberdashers don't send their likenesses with their bills,
and I shall certainly give mine to the postman here; I am always
grateful to the postman everywhere, and I like this one--he has nice
eyes, his name is Hermann, and he does not smoke."
"What a degenerate German!" said Routh. "And so Mr. Arthur Felton has
your likeness?"
"Had---had, you mean. How can I tell where it is now?--thrown in the
fire, probably, and that of the reigning sovereign of his affections
comfortably installed in the locket which contained it, which is
handsome, I confess: but he does not so much mind spending money on
himself, you see. It is exactly like this."
She placed her whip across the reins, and held all with the left hand,
whilst she fumbled with the right among the satin and lace in which
she was wrapped, and drew out a short gold chain, to which a
richly-chased golden ball, as large as an egg, was attached. Turning
slightly towards him, and gently checking her ponies, she touched a
spring, and the golden egg opened lengthways, and disclosed two small
finely-executed photographs.
One was a likeness of herself, and Routh made the usual remarks about
the insufficiency of the photographic art in certain cases. He was
bending closely over her hand, when she reversed the revolving plate,
and showed him the portrait on the other side.
"That is Arthur Felton," she said.
Then she closed the locket, and let it drop down by her side amid the
satin and the lace.
The French groom had in his charge a soft India shawl in readiness for
his mistress, in case of need. This shawl Stewart Routh took from the
servant, and wrapped very carefully round Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge as
they neared the town.
"The evening has turned very cold," he said; and, indeed, though she
did not seem to feel it, and rather laughed at his solicitude, Routh
shivered more than once before she set him down, near the Kursaal, and
then drove homewards, past the house where his wife was watching for
her, and waiting for him.
Routh ordered his dinner at the Kursaal, but, though he sat for a long
time at the table, he ate nothing which was served to him. But he
drank a great deal of wine, and he went home, to Harriet--drunk.
"How horribly provoking! It must have come undone while I was handling
it to-day," said Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge to her maid, when that
domestic was attiring her for dinner. "I had the locket, open, not an
hour ago."
"Yes, ma'am," answered the maid, examining the short gold chain; "it
is not broken, the swivel is open."
"And of all my lockets, I liked my golden egg best," lamented Mrs.
Ireton P. Bembridge.