IN THE GARDEN
'Father's in a horrid temper. Did anything go wrong?' said Rose, when
Leonora reached Hillport.
'No,' Leonora replied. 'Where is he?'
'In the drawing-room. He says he won't have any tea.'
'You must remember, my dear, that your father has been through a great
deal this last day or two.'
'So have all of us, as far as that goes,' Rose stated ruthlessly.
'However----' She turned away, shrugging her shoulders.
Leonora wondered by means of what sad experience Rose would ultimately
discover that, whereas men have the right to cry out when they are hurt,
it is the whole business of a woman's life to suffer in cheerful
silence. She sat with the girls during tea, drinking a cup for the sake
of form, and giving them disconnected items of information about the
funeral, which at their own passionate request they had been excused
from attending. The talk was carried on in low tones, so that the rattle
of a spoon in a saucer sounded loud and distinct. And in the
drawing-room John steadily perused the 'Signal,' column by column, from
the announcement of 'Pink Dominoes' at the Hanbridge Theatre Royal on
the first page, to the bait of a sporting bookmaker in Holland at the
end of the last. The evening was desolating, but Leonora endured it with
philosophy, because she appreciated John's state of mind.
It was the disclosure of the legacy of two hundred and fifty pounds to
Fred Ryley, and of the recent conditional revocation of that legacy,
which had galled her husband's sensibilities by bringing home to him
what he had lost through Aunt Hannah's sudden death and through the
senile whim of Uncle Meshach to alter his will. He could well have
tolerated Meshach's refusal to distribute Aunt Hannah's savings
immediately (Leonora thought), had the old man's original testament
remained uncancelled. Once upon a time, Ryley, the despised poor
relation, the offspring of an outcast from the family, was to have been
put off with two hundred and fifty pounds, and the bulk of the Myatt
joint fortune was to have passed in any case to John. The withdrawal of
the paltry legacy, as shown in the codicil, was the outward and
irritating sign that Ryley had been lifted from his humble position to
the level of John himself. John, of course, had known months ago that he
and Ryley stood level in the hazard of gaining the inheritance, but the
history of the legacy, revealed after the funeral, aroused his disgusted
imagination, as it had not been roused before.
He was beaten; and, more important, he knew it now; he had the incensed,
futile, malevolent, devil-may-care feeling of being beaten. He bitterly
invited Fate not to stop at half-measures but to come on and do her
worst. And Fate, with that mysterious responsiveness which often
distinguishes her movements, came on. 'Of course! I might have expected
it!' John exclaimed savagely, two days later, when he received a
circular to the effect that a small and desperate minority of
shareholders were trying to put the famous brewery company into
liquidation under the supervision of the Court. The shares fell another
five in twenty-four hours. The Bursley Conservative Club knew positively
the same night that John had 'got out' at a ruinous loss, and this
episode seemed to give vigorous life to certain rumours, hitherto faint,
that John and his uncle had violently quarrelled at his aunt's funeral,
and that when Meshach died Fred Ryley would be found to be the heir.
Other rumours, that Ethel Stanway and Fred Ryley were about to be
secretly married, that Dain would have been the owner of Prince but for
the difference between guineas and pounds, and that the real object of
Arthur Twemlow's presence in the Five Towns was to buy up the concern of
Twemlow & Stanway, were received with reserve, though not entirely
discredited. The town, however, was more titillated than perturbed, for
every one said that old Meshach, for the sake of the family's good name,
would never under any circumstances permit a catastrophe to occur. The
town saw little of Meshach now--he had almost ceased to figure in the
streets; it knew, however, the Myatt pride in the Myatt respectability.
* * * * *
Leonora sympathised with John, but her sympathy, weakened by his
surliness, was also limited by her ignorance of his real plight, and by
the secret preoccupation of her own existence. From the evening of the
funeral the desire to see Arthur again, to study his features, to hear
his voice, definitely took the uppermost place in her mind. She thought
of him always, and she ceased to pretend to herself that this was not
so. She continually expected him to call, or to meet some one who had
met him, or to receive a letter from him. She forced her memory to
reconstitute in detail his last visit to Hillport, and all the
exacerbating scene of the funeral feast, in order that she might dwell
tenderly upon his gestures, his glances, his remarks, the inflections of
his voice. The eyes of her soul were ever beholding his form. Even at
breakfast, after the disappointment of the post, she would indulge in
ridiculous hopes that he might be abroad very early and would look in,
and not until bedtime did she cease to listen for his ring at the front
door. No chance of a meeting was too remote for her wild fancy. But she
dared not breathe his name, dared not even adumbrate an inquiry; and her
husband and daughters appeared to have entered into a compact not to
mention him. She did not take counsel with herself, examine herself,
demand from herself what was the significance of these symptoms; she
could not; she could only live from one moment to the next engrossed in
an eternal expectancy which instead of slackening became hourly more
intense and painful. Towards the close of the afternoon of the third
day, in the drawing-room, she whispered that something decisive must
happen soon, soon.... The bell rang; her ears caught the distant sound
for which they had so long waited. Shuddering, she thanked heaven that
she was alone. She could hear the opening and closing of the front door.
In three seconds Bessie would appear. She heard the knob of the
drawing-room door turn, and to hide her agitation she glanced aside at
the clock. It was a quarter to six. 'He will stay the evening,' she
thought.
'Mr. Dain,' Bessie proclaimed.
'Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Stanway? Stanway not come in yet, eh?' said the
stout lawyer, approaching her hurriedly with his fussy, awkward gait.
She could have laughed; but the visit was at any rate a distraction.
A few minutes later John arrived.
'Dain will stay for tea, Nora. Eh, Dain?' he said.
'Well--thanks,' was Dain's reply.
She asked herself, with sudden misgiving, what new thing was afoot.
After tea, the two men were left together at the table.
'Mother,' Ethel inquired eagerly, coming into the drawing-room, 'why are
father and Mr. Dain measuring the dining-room?'
'I don't know,' said Leonora. 'Are they?'
'Yes, Mr. Dain has got ever such a long tape.'
Leonora went into the kitchen and talked to the cook.
The next morning an idea occurred to her. Since the funeral, the girls
had been down to see Uncle Meshach each afternoon, and Leonora had
called at Church Street in the forenoon, so that the solitude of the old
man might be broken at least twice a day. When she had suggested the
arrangement to her husband, John had answered stiffly, with an
unimpeachable righteousness, that everything possible must be done for
his uncle. On this fourth day, Leonora sent Ethel and Milly in the
morning, with a message that she herself would come in the afternoon, by
way of change. The phrase that sang in her head was Arthur's promise to
Meshach: 'I shall call in a day or two.' She knew that he had not yet
called. 'Don't wait tea, if I should be late, dears,' she said smilingly
to the girls; 'I may stay with uncle a while.' And she nearly ran out of
the house.
* * * * *
When they had had tea, and when Leonora had performed the delicate feat
of arranging Uncle Meshach's domestic affairs without affronting his
servant, she sat down opposite to him before the fire in the parlour.
'You're for stopping a bit, eh?' he said, as if surprised.
'Well,' she laughed, 'wouldn't you like me to?'
'Oh, ay!' he admitted readily, 'I'st like it well enough. I don't know
but what you aren't all on ye very good--you and th' wenches, and Fred
as calls in of nights. But it's all one to me, I reckon. I take no
pleasure i' life. Nay,' he went on, 'it isn't because of _her_. I've
felt as I was done for for months past. I mun just drag on.'
'Don't talk like that, uncle.' She tried conventionally to cheer him.
'You must rouse yourself.'
'What for?'
She sought a good answer to this conundrum. 'For all of us,' she said
lamely, at length.
'Leonora, my lass,' he remarked drily, 'you're no better than the rest
of 'em.'
And as she sat there in the age-worn parlour, and thought of the distant
days of his energy, when with his own hands he had pulled down a wall
and replaced it by a glass partition, and of the night when he lay like
a corpse on Ethel's bed at the mercy of his nephew, and of Aunt Hannah
resting in the cold tomb just at the end of the street, her heart was
filled for a moment with an awful, ineffable, devastating sadness. It
seemed to her that every grief, anxiety, apprehension was joy itself
compared to this supreme tragedy of natural decay.
'Shall I light the gas?' she suggested. The room was always obscure, and
that evening happened to be a sombre one.
'Ay!'
'There!' she said brightly, when the gas flared, 'that's better, isn't
it? Aren't you going to smoke?'
'Ay!'
In reaching a second spill from the spill-jar on the mantelpiece she
noticed the clock. It was only a quarter past five. 'He may call yet,'
she dreamed, and then a more piquant thought: 'He may be at home when I
get back.'
There was a perfunctory knock at the house-door. She started.
'It's the "Signal" lad,' Meshach explained. 'He keeps on bringing it,
but I never look at it.'
She went into the lobby for the paper, and then read aloud to Uncle
Meshach the items of local news. The clock showed a quarter to six.
Suddenly it struck her that Arthur Twemlow might have called quite early
in the afternoon and that Meshach might have forgotten to tell her. If
he had perchance called, and perchance informed Meshach that he was
going on to Hillport, and if he had walked up by the road while she came
down by the fields! The idea was too dreadful.
'Has Mr. Twemlow been to see you yet?' she demanded, after a long
silence, pretending to be interested in the 'Signal.'
'No,' said Meshach; 'why dost ask?'
'I remembered he said he should.'
'He'll come, he'll come,' Meshach murmured confidently. 'Dain's been
in,' he added, 'wi' papers to sign, probate o' Hannah's will. Seemingly
John's not satisfied, from what Dain hints.'
'Not satisfied with what?' Flushing a little, she dropped the paper; but
she was still busily employed in expecting Arthur to arrive.
'Eh, I canna' tell you, lass.' Meshach gave a grim sigh. 'You know as I
altered my will?'
'Jack mentioned it.'
'Me and her, we thought it over. It was her as first said that Fred was
getting a nice young chap, and very respectable, and why should he be
left out in the cold? And so I says to her, I says, "Well, you can make
your will i' favour o' Fred, if you've a mind." "Nay, Meshach," her
says, "never ask me to cut out our John's name." "Well," I says to her,
"if you won't, I will. It'll give 'em both an even chance. Us'n die
pretty near together, me and you, Hannah, it'll be a toss-up," I says.
Wasn't that fair?' Leonora made no reply. 'Wasn't that fair?' he
repeated.
She could not be sure, even then, whether Uncle Meshach had devised in
perfect seriousness this extraordinary arrangement for dealing justly
between the surviving members of the Myatt family, or whether he had
always had a private humorous appreciation of the fantastic element in
it.
'I don't know,' she said.
'Well, lass,' he continued persuasively, sitting up in his chair, 'us
ignored young Fred for more till twenty year. And it wasna' right.
Hannah said it wasna' right as Fred should suffer for his mother and his
grandfeyther. And then us give Fred and your John an equal chance, and
John's lost, and now John isna' satisfied, by all accounts.' She gazed
at him with a gentle smile. 'Why dostna' speak, lass?'
'What am I to say, uncle?'
'Wouldst like me to make a new will, and halve it between John and Fred?
It wouldna' be fair to Fred, not rightly fair, because he's run his risk
for th' lot. But wouldst like it, lass?'
There was a trace of the old vitality in his shrivelled features, as he
laid this offering on the altar of her feminine charm.
'Oh, do, uncle!' she was about to say eagerly, but she thought in the
same instant of John standing over Meshach's body, with the ice-cold
cloth in his hand, and something, some dim instinct of a fundamental
propriety, prevented her from uttering those words. 'I would like you to
do whatever you think right,' she answered with calmness.
Meshach was evidently disappointed.
'I shall see,' he ejaculated. And after a pause, 'John's i' smooth water
again, isn't he? I meant to ask Dain.'
'I think so,' said Leonora.
She had become restive. Soon afterwards she bade him good-night and
departed. And all the way up to Hillport she speculated upon the chances
of finding Arthur in her drawing-room when she got home.
* * * * *
As she passed through the hall she knew at once that Arthur was not in
the house and had not been there; and the agitation of her heart
subsided suddenly into the melancholy stillness of defeated hope. She
sadly admitted that she no longer knew herself, and that the Leonora of
old had been supplanted by a creature of incalculable moods, a feeble
victim of strange crises of secret folly. Through the open door of the
drawing-room she could see Rose reading, and Millicent searching among
a pile of music on the piano. Bessie emerged from the dining-room with a
white cloth and the crumb-tray.
'Master's in there,' said Bessie; 'they didn't wait tea, ma'am.'
Leonora went into the dining-room, where John sat alone at the bare
mahogany, smoking. With her deep knowledge of him, she detected
instantly that he had been annoyed by her absence from tea. The
condition of the sharp end of his cigar showed that he was perturbed,
fretful, and perhaps in a state of suspense. 'Well,' she thought with
resignation, 'I may as well play the wife,' and she sat down in a chair
near him, put her purse on the table, and smiled generously. Then she
raised her veil, loosed the buttons of her new black coat, and began to
draw off her gloves.
'I've been waiting for you,' he said, and to her surprise his tone was
extremely pacific.
'Have you?' she answered, intensifying all her alluring grace. 'I
hurried home.'
'Yes, I wanted to ask you----' He stopped, ostensibly to put the cigar
into his meerschaum holder.
She perceived that the desire to ingratiate fought within him against
his vexation, and she wondered, with a touch of cynicism, what new
scheme had got possession of him, and how her assistance was necessary
to it.
'Would you like to go and live in the country, Nora?' He looked at her
audaciously for a moment and then his eyes shifted.
'For the summer, you mean?'
'Yes,' he said, 'for the summer and the winter too. Somewhere out Sneyd
way.'
'And leave here?'
'Exactly.'
'But what about the house, Jack?'
'Sell it, if you like,' said John lightly.
'Oh, no! I shouldn't like that at all,' she replied, nervously but
amiably. She wished to believe that his suggestion about selling the
house was merely an idle notion thrown out on the spur of the moment,
but she could not.
'You wouldn't?'
She shook her head. 'What has made you think of going to live in the
country?' she asked him, using a tone of gentle, mild curiosity. 'How
should you get to the works in the morning?'
'There's a very good train service from Sneyd to Knype,' he said. 'But
look here, Nora, why wouldn't you care to sell the house?'
It was perfectly clear to her that, having mortgaged her house, he had
now made up his mind to sell it. He must therefore still be in
financial difficulties, and she had unwittingly misled Uncle Meshach.
'I don't know,' she answered coldly. 'I can't explain to you why. But I
shouldn't.' And she privately resolved that nothing should induce her to
assent to this monstrous proposal. Her heart hardened to steel. She felt
prepared to suffer any unpleasantness, any indignity, rather than give
way.
'It isn't as if Hillport wasn't changing,' he went on, politely
argumentative. 'It is changing. In another ten years all the decent
estates will have been broken up, and we shall be left alone in the
middle of streets of villas rented at nineteen guineas to escape the
house duty. You know the sort of thing.... And I've had a very fair
offer for the place.'
'Whom from?'
'Well, Dain. I know he's wanted the house a long time. Of course, he's a
hard nut to crack, is Dain. But he went up to two thousand, and
yesterday I got him to make it guineas. That's a good price, Nora.'
'Is it?' she exclaimed absently.
'I should just imagine it was!' said John.
So it was expected of her that she should surrender her home, her
domain, her kingdom, the beautiful and mellow creation of her
intelligence; and that she should surrender it to David Dain, and to
the impossible Mrs. Dain, and to their impossible niece. She remembered
one of Milly's wicked tales about Mrs. Dain and the niece. Milly had met
Mrs. Dain in the street, and in response to an inquiry about the health
of the hypochondriacal niece, Mrs. Dain, gorgeously attired, had
replied: 'Her had but just rallied up off th' squab as I come out.'
These were the people who wanted to evict her from her house. And they
would cover its walls with new papers, and its floors with new carpets,
in their own appalling taste; and they would crowd the rooms with
furniture as fat, clumsy, and disgusting as themselves. And Mrs. Dain
would hold sewing meetings in the drawing-room, and would stand
chattering with tradesmen at the front door, and would drive out to
Sneyd to pay a call on Leonora and tell her how _pleased_ they all were
with the place!
'Do you absolutely need the money, John?' She came to the point with a
frank, blunt directness which angered him.
'I don't absolutely need anything,' he retorted, controlling himself.
'But Dain made the offer----'
'Because if you do,' she proceeded, 'I dare say Uncle Meshach----'
'Look here, my girl,' he interrupted in turn, 'I've had exactly as much
of Uncle Meshach as I can stand. I know all about Uncle Meshach, what I
wanted to know was whether you cared to sell the house.' And then he
added, after hesitating, and with a false graciousness, 'To oblige me.'
There was a marked pause.
'I really shouldn't like to sell the house, John,' she answered quietly.
'It was aunt's, and----'
'Enough said! enough said!' he cried. 'That finishes it. I suppose you
don't mind my having asked you!'
He walked out of the room in a rage.
Tears came into her eyes, the tears of a wounded and proud heart. Was it
conceivable that he expected her to be willing to sell her house?... He
must indeed be in serious straits. She would consult Uncle Meshach.
The front door banged. And then Rose entered the room.
Leonora drove back the tears.
'Your father has been suggesting that we sell this house, and go and
live at Sneyd,' she said to the girl in a trembling voice. 'Aren't you
surprised?' She seldom talked about John to her daughters, but at that
moment a desire for sympathy overwhelmed her.
'I should never be surprised at anything where father was concerned,'
said Rose coldly, with a slight hint of aloofness and of mental
superiority. 'Not at anything.'
Leonora got up, and, leaving the room, went into the garden through the
side door opposite the stable. She could hear Millicent practising the
Jewel Song from Gounod's _Faust_. As she passed down the sombre garden
the sound of the piano and of Milly's voice in the brilliant ecstatic
phrases of the song grew fainter. She shook violently, like a child who
is recovering from a fit of sobs, and without thinking she fastened her
coat. 'What a shame it is that he should want to sell my house! What a
shame!' she murmured, full of an aggrieved resentment. At the same time
she was surprised to find herself so suddenly and so deeply disturbed.
* * * * *
At the foot of the long garden was a low fence separating it from the
meadow, and in the fence a wicket from which ran a faint track to the
main field-path. She leaned against the fence, a few yards away from the
wicket, at a spot where a clump of bushes screened the house. No one
could possibly have seen her from the house, even had the bushes not
been there; but she wished to isolate herself completely, and to find
tranquillity in the isolation. The calm spring night, chill but not too
cold, cloudy but not too dark, favoured her intention. She gazed about
her at the obscure nocturnal forms of things, at the silent trees, and
the mysterious clouds gently rounded in their vast shape, and the sharp
slant of the meadow. Far below could be seen the red signal of the
railway, and, mapped in points of light on the opposite slope, the
streets of Bursley. To the right the eternal conflagration of the
Cauldon Bar furnaces illumined the sky with wavering amber. And on the
keen air came to her from the distance noises, soft but impressive, of
immense industrial activities.
She thought she could decipher a figure moving from the field-path
across the gloom of the meadow, and as she strained her eyes the figure
became an indubitable fact. Presently she knew that it was Arthur. 'At
last!' her heart passionately exclaimed, and she was swept and drenched
with happiness as a ship by the ocean. She forgot everything in the
tremendous shock of joy. She felt as though she could have waited no
more, and that now she might expire in a bliss intense and fatal, in a
sigh of supreme content. She could not stir nor speak, and he was
striding towards the wicket unconscious of her nearness! She coughed, a
delicate feminine cough, and then he turned aside from the direction of
the wicket and approached the fence, peering.
'Is that you?' he asked.
'Yes.'
Across the fence they clasped hands. And in spite of her great wish not
to do so she clutched his hand tightly in her long fingers, and held it
for a moment. And as she felt the returning pressure of his large,
powerful, protective grasp, she covered--but in imagination only--she
covered his face, which she could shadowily see, with brave and
abandoned kisses; and she whispered to him, but unheard: 'Admit that I
am made for love.' She feared, in those beautiful and shameless
instants, neither John, nor Ethel and Milly, nor even Rose. She knew
suddenly why men and women leave all--honour, duty, and affection--and
follow love. Then her arm dropped, and there was silence.
'What are you doing here?' She was unable to speak in an ordinary tone,
but she spoke. Her voice exquisitely trembled, and its vibrations said
everything that the words did not say.
'Why,' he answered, and his voice too bore strange messages, 'I called
at Church Street and Mr. Myatt said you had only been gone a few
minutes, and so I came right away. I guessed I should overtake you. I
don't know what he would think.' Arthur laughed nervously.
She smiled at him, satisfied. And how well she knew that her smiling
face, caught by him dimly in the obscurity of the night, troubled him
like an enchanting and enigmatic vision!
After they had looked at each other, speechless, for a while, the strong
influence of convention forced them again into unnecessary, irrelevant
talk.
'What's this about you selling this place?' he inquired in a low, mild
tone.
'Have you heard?'
'Yes,' he said, 'I did hear something.'
'Ah!' she murmured, wrinkling her forehead in a pretty make-believe of
woe--the question of the sale had ceased to be acute: 'I just came out
here to think about it.'
'But you aren't really going to----'
'No, of course not.'
She had no desire to discuss the tedious affair, because she was
infallibly certain of his entire sympathy. Explanations on her side, and
assurances on his, were equally superfluous.
'But won't you come into the house?' She invited him as a sort of
afterthought.
'Why?' he demanded bluntly.
She hesitated before replying: 'It will look so queer, us staying here
like this.' As soon as she had uttered the words she suspected that she
had said something decisive and irretrievable.
He put his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and walked several
times to and fro a few paces. Then he stopped in front of her.
'I guess we are bound to look queer, you and I, some day. So it may as
well be now,' he said.
It was in this exchange of sentences that their mutual passion became at
length articulate. A single discreet word spoken quickly, and she might
even yet perhaps have withdrawn from the situation. But she did not
speak; she could not speak; and soon she knew that her own silence had
bound her. She yielded herself with poignant and magnificent joy to the
profound drama which had been magically created by this apparently
commonplace dialogue. The climax had been achieved, and she was
conscious of being lifted into a sublime exultation, and of being cut
off from all else in the world save him. She looked at him intently with
a sadness that was the cloak of celestial rapture. 'How courageous you
are!' her soft eyes said. 'I should never have dared. What a _man_!' It
seemed to her that her heart would break under the strain of that
ecstasy. She had not imagined the possibility of such bliss.
'Listen!' he proceeded. 'I ought to be in New York--I oughtn't to be
here. I must tell you. Scarcely a fortnight ago, one afternoon while I
was working in my office in Fourteenth Street, I had a feeling I would
be bound to come over. I said to myself the idea was preposterous. But
the next thing I knew I was arranging to come. I couldn't believe I was
coming. Not even when I had booked my berth and boarded the steamer, not
even when the steamer was actually passing Sandy Hook, could I believe
that I was really coming. I said to myself I was mad. I said to myself
that no man in his senses could behave as I was behaving. And when I got
to Southampton I said I would go right back. And yet I couldn't help
getting into the special for London. And when I got to London I said I
would act sensible and go back. But I met young Burgess, and the next
thing I knew I was at Euston. And here I am pretending that it's my new
London branch that brings me over, and doing business I don't want to do
in Knype and Cauldon and Bursley. And I'm killing myself--yes, I am; I
tell you I couldn't stand much more--and I wouldn't be sure I wasn't
killing you. Some folks would say the whole thing was perfectly
dreadful, but I don't care so long as you--so long as you don't. I'm not
conceited really, but it looks like conceit--me talking like this and
assuming that you're ready to stand and listen. I assure you it isn't
conceit. I only know--that's all. It's difficult for you to say
anything--I can feel that--but I'd like you just to tell me you're glad
I came and glad I've spoken. I'd just like to hear that.'
She gazed fondly at him, at the male creature in whom she could find
only perfection, and she was filled with glorious pride that her image
should have drawn this strong, shrewd self-possessed man across the
Atlantic. It was incredible, but it was true. 'And,' said the secret
feminine in her, 'why not?'
He waited for her answer, facing her.
'Oh, yes!' she breathed. 'Oh, yes!... I'm glad--I'm so glad.'
'I wish,' he broke out, 'I wish I could explain to you what I think of
you, what I feel about you. You're so quiet and simple and direct and
yet--you don't know it, but you are. You're absolutely the most--Oh!
it's no use.'
She saw that he was growing very excited, and this, too, gave her deep
pleasure.
'We're in a hell of a fix!' he sighed.
Like many women, she took a fearful, almost thrilling joy in hearing a
man swear earnestly and religiously.
'That's it,' she said, 'there's nothing to be done?'
'Nothing to be done?' he demanded, imperiously. 'Nothing to be done?'
She examined his face, which was close to hers, with a meditative,
expectant smile. She loved to see him out of repose, eager, masterful,
and daring. 'What is there to be done?' she asked.
'I don't know yet,' he said firmly, 'I must think.' Then, in a delicious
surrender, she felt towards him as though they were on the brink of a
rushing river, and he was about to pick her up in his arms, like a
trifle, and carry her safely through the flood; and she had the illusion
of pressing her face, which she knew he adored, against his shoulder.
'Oh, you innocent angel!' he cried, seizing her hand (she let it lie
inert), 'do you suppose I'm the sort of man to sit down and cross my
legs and say that fate, or whatever you call it, hasn't done me right?
Do you suppose that two sensible persons like you and me are going to be
beaten by a mere set of circumstances? We aren't children, and we aren't
fools.'
'But----'
'You're not afraid, are you?' He drank in her charm.
'What of?'
'Anything.'
'It's when you aren't there,' she murmured tenderly. She really thought,
then, that by some marvellous plan he would perform the impossible feat
of reconciling the duty of fulfilling love with all the other duties.
'I shall reckon it up,' he said. 'Ah!'
Silence fell. And with the feel of the grass under her feet, and the
soft clouds overhead, and the patient trees, and the glare in the
southern smoke, and the lamps of Bursley, and the solitary red signal in
the valley, she breathed out her spirit like an aerial essence, and
merged into unity with him. And the strange far-off noises of nocturnal
industry wandered faintly across the void and seemed fraught with a
mysterious significance. Everything, in that unique hour, had the same
mysterious significance.
'Mother!' Millicent's distant voice, fresh and strong and pure in the
night, chanted the word startlingly to the first notes of a phrase from
the Jewel Song. 'Mother! Aren't you coming in?' The girl finished the
phrase with inviting gaiety, holding the final syllable. And the sound
faded, went out, like the flare of a rocket in the sky, and the dark
stillness was emphasised.
They did not move; they did not speak; but Leonora pressed his hand. The
passing thought of the orderly, multifarious existence of the house
behind her, of the warmed and lighted rooms, of the preoccupied lives,
only increased the felicity of her halcyon dream. And in the dreamy and
brooding silence all things retreated and gradually lapsed away, and the
pair were left sole amid the ineffable spaces of the universe to listen
to the irregular beatings of their own hearts. Time itself had paused.
'Mother!' Millicent sang again, nearer, more strongly and purely in the
night. 'We are waiting for you to come in!' She varied a little the
phrase from the Jewel Song. 'To come in!' The long sustained notes
seemed to become a beautiful warning, and then the sound expired.
Leonora withdrew her hand.
'I shall think it out, and write you to-morrow,' Arthur whispered, and
was gone.
* * * * *
The next day, after a futile morning of hesitations, Leonora decided in
the afternoon that she would go out for a walk and return in some
definite state of mind. She loosed Bran, and the dog, when he had
finished his elephantine gambades, followed her close at heel, with all
stateliness, to the wide marsh on the brow of the hill. Here she began
actively and seriously to cogitate.
John was sulking; and it was seldom that he sulked. He had not spoken to
her again, neither on the previous evening nor at breakfast; he had said
nothing whatever to any one, except to tell Bessie that he should not be
at home for dinner; on committee-meeting days, when he was engaged at
the Town Hall, John sometimes dined at the Tiger. His attitude produced
small effect on Leonora. She was far too completely absorbed in herself
to be perturbed by the offensive symptoms of her husband's wrath. She
had neglected even to call on Uncle Meshach; and as she strolled about
the marsh she thought vaguely and perfunctorily that she must see Uncle
Meshach soon and acquaint him with John's difficulties.
Pride as much as joy and alarm filled her heart. She was proud of her
perilous love; she would have liked proudly to confide it to some
friend, some mature and brilliant woman who knew the world and
understood things, and who would talk rationally; it seemed to her that
this secret idyll, at once tender and sincere and rather dashing, was
worthy of pride. She knew that many women, languishing in the greyness
of an impeccable and frigid domesticity, would be capable of envying
her; she remembered that, in reading the newspapers, she had sometimes
timidly envied the heroines of the matrimonial court who had bought
romance at the price of esteem and of peace. Then suddenly the whole
matter slipped into unreality, and she could not credit it. Was it
possible that she, a respectable matron, a known figure, the mother of
adult daughters, had fallen in love with a man not her husband, had had
a secret interview with her lover, and was anticipating, not a retreat,
but an advance? And she thought, as every honest woman has thought in
like case: 'This may happen to others; one hears of it, one reads about
it; but surely it cannot have happened to _me_!' And when she had
admitted that it had in fact happened to her, and had perceived with a
kind of shock that the heroines of the matrimonial court were real
persons, everyday creatures of flesh-and-blood, she thought, again like
the rest: 'Ah! But my affair is different from all the others. There is
something in it, something indefinable and precious, which makes it
different.'
She said: 'Can one help falling in love? Can one be blamed for that?'
For John she had little compassion, and the gay and feverish existence
of New York spread out invitingly before her in a vision full of piquant
contrasts with the death-in-life of the Five Towns! But her beloved
girls! They were an insuperable barrier. She could not leave them; she
could not forfeit the right to look them in the eyes without
embarrassment ... And then the next moment--somehow, she did not know
how--the difficulty of the girls was arranged. And she had departed. She
had left the Five Towns for ever. And she was in the train, in the
hotel, on the steamer; she saw every detail of the escape. Oh! The
rapture! The tremors! The long sigh! The surrender! The intense living!
Surely no price could be too great....
No! Common sense, the acquirement of forty years, supervened, and
informed her wild heart, with all the cold arrogance of sagacity, that
these imaginings were vain. She felt that she must write a brief and
firm letter to Arthur and tell him to desist. She saw with extraordinary
clearness that this course was inevitable. And lest her resolution might
slacken, she turned instantly towards home and began to hurry. The dog
glanced up questioningly, and hurried too.
'Why!' she reflected. 'People would say: "And her husband's aunt
scarcely cold in her grave!"' She laughed scornfully.
A carriage overtook her. It was Mrs. Dain's, coming from the direction
of Oldcastle.
'Good afternoon to you,' Mrs. Dain shouted, without stopping, and then,
when she caught sight of Bran: 'Bless us! The dog hasn't brukken his leg
after all!'
'Broken his leg!' Leonora repeated, astonished. The carriage was now in
front of her.
'Our Polly come in this morning and sat hersen down on a chair and told
us as your dog had brukken his leg. What tales one hears!' Mrs. Dain had
to twist her stout neck dangerously in order to finish the sentence.
'I should think so!' was Leonora's private comment, her gaze fixed on
the scarlet of Mrs. Dain's nodding bonnet.
In the little room off the dining-room Leonora dipped pen in ink to
write to Arthur. She wrote the date, and she wrote the word 'Dear.' And
she could not proceed. She knew that she could not compose a letter
which would be effective. She went to the window and looked out, biting
the pen. 'What am I to do?' she whispered, in terror. 'What am I to do?'
Then she saw Ethel running hard down the drive to the front door.
'Oh, mother!' The pale girl burst into the room. 'Father's done
something to himself. Fred's come up. They're bringing him.'
* * * * *
John Stanway had called at the chemist's in the Market Place and had
given a circumstantial description of an accident to Bran. It appeared
that while Carpenter was washing the waggonette, Bran being loose in the
stable-yard, the groom had suddenly slipped the lever of the
carriage-jack and the off hind wheel had caught Bran's hind leg and
snapped it like a piece of wood. The chemist had suggested prussic acid,
and John had laughingly answered that perhaps the chemist would be good
enough to come up and show them how to administer prussic acid to a dog
of Bran's size in great pain. John explained that the animal was now
fast by the collar, and he had demanded a large dose of morphia,
together with a hypodermic instrument. Having obtained these, and
precise instructions for their use, John had hurried away. It was not
till three hours had elapsed that a startling suspicion had disturbed
the chemist's easy mind. By that time, his preparations completed, John
had dropped unconscious from the arm-chair in his office at the works,
and Bursley was provided with one of those morbid sensations which more
than joy or triumph electrify the stagnant pulses of a provincial town.
Scores of persons followed the cab which conveyed Stanway from the works
to his house; and on the route most of the inhabitants seemed to know in
advance, by some strange intuition, that the vehicle was coming, and at
their windows or at their gates (according to social status) they stood
ready to watch it pass. And even after John had entered his home and had
been carried upstairs, and the cab and the policeman had gone, and the
doctor had gone, and Fred Ryley and Mr. Mayer, the works manager, had
gone, a crowd still remained on the footpath, staring at the gravelled
drive and at the front door, silent, patient, implacable.
The doctor had tried hot coffee, artificial respiration, and other
remedies, but without the least success, and he had reluctantly
departed, solemn for once, leaving four women to understand that there
was nothing to do save to wait for the final sigh. The inactivity was
dreadful for them. They could only look at each other and think, and
move to and fro aimlessly in the large bedroom, and light the gas at
dusk, and examine from moment to moment those contracted pupils and that
damp white brow, and listen for the faint occasional breaths. They did
not think the thoughts which, could they have foreseen the situation,
they might have expected to think. It did not occur to them to search
for the causes of the disaster, nor to speculate upon its results in
regard to themselves: they surrendered to the supreme fact. They were
all incapable of logical and ordered reflections, and in the hushed
torpor of their secret hearts there wandered, loosely, little
disconnected ideas and sensations; as that the Stanway family was at
length getting its full share of vicissitude and misfortune, that John
was after all more important and more truly dominant and more intimately
a part of their lives than they had imagined, that this affair was a
thousand miles removed from that of Uncle Meshach, that they were fully
supplied with mourning, and that suicide was mysteriously different from
their previous notion of it. The impressive thoughts, the obvious
thoughts--that if their creeds were sound, a soul was about to enter
into eternal torment, and that their lives would be violently changed,
and that they would be branded before the world as the wife and the
daughters of a defaulter and a self-murderer--did not by any means
absorb their minds in those first hours.
In the attitude of the girls towards Leonora there was a sort of
religious deference, as of priestesses to one soon to be sacrificed.
'She is the central figure of the tragedy,' they had the air of saying
to each other. 'We feel the affliction, but it cannot be demanded from
us that we should feel it as she feels it. We are only beginning to
live; we have the future; but she--she will have nothing. She will be
the widow.' And the significance of that terrible word--all that it
implied of social diminishment, of feeding on memory, and of mere
waiting for death--seemed to cling about Leonora as she stood restlessly
observant by the bed. And when Rose urged her to drink some tea, she
could not help drinking the tea humbly, from a sense of the duty of
doing what she was told. It was not Rose's fault that Rose was superior,
and that only twenty-four hours ago she had coldly informed her mother
that no act of her father's would surprise her. Leonora resigned herself
to humility.
'Mamma,' said Millicent, creeping into the room after an absence, 'Uncle
Meshach is here with Mr. Twemlow, and he says he's coming in. Must he?'
'Of course, darling,' Leonora answered, without turning her head.
Uncle Meshach appeared, leaning on his stick and on Arthur's arm. He
wore his overcoat and even his hat, and a white knitted muffler
encircled his shrivelled neck in loose folds. No one spoke as the old
and feeble man, with short uncertain steps, drew Arthur towards the bed
and gazed at his dying nephew. Meshach looked long, and sighed. Suddenly
he demanded of Leonora in a whisper:
'Is he unconscious?'
Leonora nodded.
Drawing a little nearer to the bed, Meshach signed to Millicent to
approach, and gave her his stick. Then he unbuttoned his overcoat, and
his coat, and the flap-pocket of his trousers, and after much searching
found a box of matches. He shook out a match clumsily, and struck it,
and came still nearer to the bed. All wondered apprehensively what the
old man was going to do, but none dared interfere or protest because he
was so old, and so precariously attached to life, and because he was the
head of the family. With his thin, veined, trembling hand, he passed the
lighted match close across John's eyeballs; not a muscle twitched. Then
he extinguished the match, put it in the box, returned the box to his
pocket, and buttoned the pocket and his coats.
'Ay!' he breathed. 'The lad's unconscious right enough. Let's be going.'
Taking his stick from Milly, he clutched Arthur's arm again, and very
slowly left the room.
After a moment's hesitation Leonora followed and overtook them at the
bottom of the stairs; it was the first time she had forsaken the
bedside. She was surprised to see Fred Ryley in the hall, self-conscious
but apparently determined to be quite at home. She remembered that he
said he should come up again as soon as he had arranged matters at the
works.
'Just take Mr. Myatt to the cab, will you?' said Twemlow quietly to
Fred. 'I'll follow.'
'Certainly,' Fred agreed, pulling his moustache nervously. 'Now, Mr.
Myatt, let me help you.'
'Ay!' said Meshach. 'Thou shalt help me if thou'n a mind.' As he was
feeling for the step with his stick he stopped and looked round at
Leonora. 'Lass!' he exclaimed, 'thou toldst me John was i' smooth
water.' Then he departed and they could hear his shuffling steps on the
gravel.
Twemlow glanced inquiringly at Leonora.
'Come in here,' she said briefly, pointing to the drawing-room. They
entered; it was dark.
'Your uncle made me drive up with him,' Arthur explained, as if in
apology.
She ignored the remark. 'You must go back to New York--at once,' she
told him, in a dry, curt voice.
'Yes,' he assented, 'I suppose I'd better.'
'And don't write to me--until after I have written.'
'Oh, but----' he began.
She thought wildly: 'This man, with his reason and his judgment, has not
the slightest notion how I feel, not the slightest!'
'I must write,' he said in a persuasive tone.
'No!' she cried passionately and vehemently. 'You aren't to write, and
you aren't to see me. You must promise, absolutely.'
'For how long?' he asked.
She shook her head. 'I don't know, I can't tell.'
'But isn't that rather----'
'Will you promise?' she cried once more, quite loudly and almost
fiercely. And her accents were so full of entreaty, of command, and of
despair, that Arthur feared a nervous crisis for her.
'If you wish it,' he said, forced to yield.
And even then she could not be content.
'You give me your word to do nothing at all until you hear from me?'
He paused, but he saw no alternative to submission. 'Yes.'
She thanked him, and without shaking hands or saying good-night she went
upstairs and resumed her place by the bedside. She could hear Uncle
Meshach's cab drive away.
'How came Mr. Twemlow to be here, mother?' Rose demanded quietly.
'I don't know,' Leonora replied. 'He must have been at uncle's.'
When the doctor had been again and gone, and various neighbours and the
'Signal' reporter had called to inquire for news, and the hour was
growing late, Ethel said to her mother, 'Fred thinks he had better stay
all night.'
'But why?' Leonora asked.
'Well, mother,' said Milly, 'it's just as well to have a man in the
house.'
'He can rest on the Chesterfield in the drawing-room,' Ethel added.
'Then if he's wanted----'
'Yes, yes,' Leonora agreed. 'And tell him he's very kind.'
At midnight, Fred was reading in the drawing-room, the man in the house,
the ultimate fount of security for seven women. Bessie, having refused
positively to go to bed, slept in a chair in the kitchen, her heels
touching the scrap of hearthrug which lay like a little island on the
red tiles in front of the range. Rose and Millicent had retired to bed
till three o'clock. Ethel, as the eldest, stayed with her mother. When
the hall-clock sounded one, meaning half past twelve, Leonora glanced
at her daughter, who reclined on the sofa at the foot of the beds; the
girl had fallen into a doze.
John's condition was unchanged; the doctor had said that he might
possibly survive for many hours. He lay on his back, with open eyes, and
damp face and hair; his arms rested inert on the sheet; and underneath
that thin covering his chest rose and fell from time to time, with a
scarcely perceptible movement. It seemed to Leonora that she could
realise now what had happened and what was to happen. In the nocturnal
solemnity of the house filled with sleeping and quiescent youth, she who
was so mature and so satiate had the sensation of being alone with her
mate. Images of Arthur Twemlow did not distract her. With the full
strength of her mind she had shut an iron door on the episode in the
garden; it was as though it had never existed. And she gazed at John
with calm and sad compassion. 'I would not sell my home,' she reflected,
'and here is the consequence of refusal.' She wished she had
yielded--and she could perceive how unimportant, comparatively,
bricks-and-mortar might be--but she did not blame herself for not having
yielded. She merely regretted her sensitive obstinacy as a misfortune
for both of them. She had a vision of humanity in a hurried procession,
driven along by some force unseen and ruthless, a procession in which
the grotesque and the pitiable were always occurring. She thought of
John standing over Meshach with the cold towel, and of Meshach passing
the flame across John's dying eyes, and these juxtapositions appeared to
her intolerably mournful in their ridiculous grimness.
Impelled by a physical curiosity, she lifted the sheet and scrutinised
John's breast, so pallid against the dark red of his neck, and bent down
to catch the last tired efforts of the heart within. And the idea of her
extraordinary intimacy with this man, of the incessant familiarity of
more than twenty years, struck her and overwhelmed her. She saw that
nothing is so subtly influential as constant uninterrupted familiarity,
nothing so binding, and perhaps nothing so sacred. It was a trifle that
they had not loved. They had lived. Ah! she knew him so profoundly that
words could not describe her knowledge. He kept his own secrets,
hundreds of them; and he had, in a way, astounded and shocked her by his
suicide. Yet, in another way, this miserable termination did not at all
surprise her; and his secrets were petty, factual things of no essential
import, which left her mystic omniscience of him unimpaired.
She looked at his eyes, and thought pitifully: 'These eyes cannot see
that I uncover him.' Then she looked again at his breast, which heaved
in shallow respirations. And at the moment he exhaled a sigh, so softly
delicate and gentle that it might have been the sigh of an infant
sinking to sleep. She put her ear quickly to the still breast, as to a
sea-shell, and listened intently, and caught no rumour of life there.
Startled, she glanced at the jaw, which had dropped, and then at Ethel
dozing on the sofa.
The room was filled for her with the majestic sound of trumpets, loud,
sustained, and thrilling, but heard only by the soul; a noble and
triumphant fanfare announcing the awful advent of those forces which are
beyond the earthly sense. John's body lay suddenly deserted and
residual; that deceitful brain, and that lying tongue, and that
murderous hand had already begun to decay; and the informing fragment of
eternal and universal energy was gone to its next manifestation and its
next task, unconscious, irresponsible, and unchanged. The ineptitude of
human judgments had been once more emphasised, and the great excellence
of charity.
'Ethel,' said Leonora timorously, waking with a touch the young and
beautiful girl whose flushed cheek was pressed against the cushion of
the sofa. 'He's gone.... Call Fred.'