A FINAL INTERVIEW.
MR. JERNINGHAM was prompt to comply with his wife’s request. On the
second morning after the despatch of Emily’s letter, the master of
Greenlands appeared at River Lawn; and this, allowing for time lost in
the reposting of the letter, was as soon as it was possible for him to
arrive there.
The change in his wife was painfully obvious to him, and shocked him
deeply.
“I am sorry to see you looking so ill, Emily,” he said, concealing his
surprise by an effort.
“Do you think I should have sent for you if I had not been very ill?
It was very good of you to come so promptly. I have to thank you for
much generosity, for much thoughtful kindness, during the years of our
separation. Believe me, I have fully appreciated your kind feeling,
your delicacy. But since my illness, there has come upon me the feeling
that something more was due to me than kindness or delicacy; something
more due from me to you than quiet submission to your wishes. Do not
think that I have entrapped you into this visit in order to reproach
you, or to exalt myself. Justification for my conduct there is none. I
can never hope to rehabilitate myself in your eyes or in my own; all I
desire is that you should know the whole truth. Will you kindly listen
to me and believe me? I have kept silence for years; I speak now under
the impression that I have but a few weeks to live; you cannot think
that I shall speak falsely.”
“I am not capable of doubting your word, even under less solemn
circumstances. But I trust you overrate your danger; convalescence is
always a period of depression.”
“We will not talk of that; my own instinct and the sentence of my
doctors alike condemn me. They talk about the restorative effect of a
sea-voyage, and send me to Madeira for the autumn and winter; and that,
for a woman of my age, is a sentence of death.”
“Let us hope it is only a precautionary measure.”
“I have no eager desire for life; I can afford to submit to Providence.
And now let me speak of a subject which is of more importance to me
than any question as to the time I have to live. Let me speak to you
of my honour--as a woman and as a wife. When you decreed that all ties
between us except the one legal bond should be severed, your decree
was absolute. There was no room left for discussion. You sent me your
solicitor, who told me, with much delicate circumlocution, that your
home was no longer to be my home. There was to be neither scandal, nor
disgrace, nor punishment for me, who had sinned against my duty as a
wife. I was only to be banished. I was too much in the wrong to dispute
the justice of this sentence, Harold; too proud to sue for mercy. I
let judgment go by default. You banished your wife from the fortress
of home; you deposed her from an unassailable position to a doubtful
standing; and you did this upon the strength of a packet of letters,
which a bolder offender would have received at her own address, and
which a more experienced sinner would have burned. I want you to grant
me one favour, Harold,--read those letters before I die.”
“I will read them when you please. Yes, I dare say I did wrong in
cancelling our union upon such trifling evidence of error; but I acted
from my own instinct. I have been a Sybarite in matters of sentiment;
and to live with a woman whose heart and faith were not all my own,
would have been unutterably hateful to me. I jumped at no conclusions.
I did not suffer my thoughts to condemn you unheard. But you had been
living under my roof in secret correspondence with a man who called
himself my friend. What could I do? Could I come to you and say,
‘Please do not receive any more secret letters from Desmond; that is
a kind of thing which I object to?’ You would of course have promised
to oblige me, and Desmond would have addressed his letters to another
office. Having deceived me once, you see, I could hardly hope you
would not deceive me again. That sort of thing grows upon one. On
the other hand, why should I make a foolish scandal, read Desmond’s
letters,--which would have been an ungentlemanly thing to do,--subpœna
your maid, your footman, make myself ridiculous, and humiliate you,
for the profit of lawyers and the amusement of newspaper readers; and
failing in convicting you of the last and worst of infamies, take you
back to my home and heart a spotless wife? It seemed to me that there
could be no course for us but a tranquil and polite separation.”
“If you had read the letters you might have thought differently.”
“My dear girl, with every wish to be indulgent, I can scarcely admit
that. To my mind there are no degrees in these things. A woman is
faithful or unfaithful. If the letter she receive contains but few
lines about an opera-box, they should be lines which she can show her
husband without a blush. There must be no lurking treason between the
lines. She must not pose herself _en femme incomprise_, and call
herself a faithful wife, because her infidelity does not come under the
jurisdiction of the Divorce Court. You will say, perhaps, that this
comes with a bad grace from me, whose life has been far from spotless.
But, you see, spotlessness is not a man’s speciality; and however vile
he may be himself, he has a natural belief in the purity of woman. She
seems to him a living temple of the virtues, and he scarcely expects to
find a pillar-post lurking in the shadow of the sacred portico.”
“I was very weak, very wicked,” murmured Emily; “but I have some
excuses for my error which other women cannot claim. If I had thought
that you loved me,--if I had seen reason for believing that our
marriage had brightened your life in the smallest degree, or that
my affection, howsoever freely given, could ever have been precious
to you, it might have been otherwise with me. Oh, believe me, Mr.
Jerningham, you might have made me a good wife, if you had cared to do
so. Men have a power to mould us for which they rarely give themselves
credit. It was not because of the twenty years’ difference between
our ages that I grew weary of my home, and sighed for more congenial
society, for sympathy I had never found there. _That_ was not the
gulf between us. It was because you did not love me, and did not even
care to pretend any love for me, that I welcomed the friendship of my
father’s old friend, and forgot the danger involved in such sympathy.
Your marriage was an act of generosity, a chivalrous protection of a
helpless kinswoman, and I ought to have been grateful. I was grateful;
but a woman’s heart has room for something more than gratitude. A man
who marries as you married me is bound to complete his sacrifice. He
must give his heart as well as his home and fortune. You gave me your
cheque-book, but you let me see only too plainly that in the bargain
which made us man and wife there was to be no exchange of hearts. What
a union! How many times did we dine _tête-à-tête_ in the two years
of our wedded life?--once--twice--well, perhaps half a dozen times; and
I can recall your weary yawns, our little conventional speeches, on
those rare occasions. For two years we lived under the same roof, and
we never even quarrelled. You treated me with unalterable generosity,
unchanging courtesy, and you held me at arm’s length; yet if you had
wished to make yourself master of my heart, the conquest would have
been an easy one. I was wounded by Mr. Desmond’s silence; I was melted
by your kindness. It would not have been difficult for me to give you a
wife’s devotion.”
“I dare say you are right, Emily,” Mr. Jerningham answered, with
a little, languid sigh. His wife’s earnestness had taken him by
surprise, and a new light had broken in upon his mind as she spoke.
It was possible that there was some truth in these earnest, passionate
words. He admitted as much to himself. Something more might have been
required of him than a gentlemanly toleration of the woman he had
chosen to share his home, to bear his name. The higher, Christian idea
of man’s accountableness for the soul of his weaker partner was quite
out of the region of Mr. Jerningham’s ethics; but, on purely social
grounds, he felt that he had done his cousin and his wife some wrong.
“I had exhausted my capacity for loving before I married,” he thought;
“and I gave this poor creature a handful of ashes instead of a human
heart.”
After a few minutes’ silence he addressed his wife with an unaccustomed
tenderness of tone.
“Yes, my dear Emily, you have just ground for complaint against me.
My error was greater than yours; and now we meet after a lapse of
years--both of us older, possibly wiser--I can only say, forgive me.”
He held out the hand of friendship, which his wife accepted in all
humility of spirit.
“No, no,” she exclaimed, “there can be no question of forgiveness on
my part. You have been only too good to me, and my complaints are
groundless and peevish. I suppose it is natural to a woman to try to
excuse herself by accusing some one else. But, believe me, I have been
no stranger to remorse. I could not die until I had thanked you for
your indulgent kindness during the years of our separation, and asked
you to forgive me. But before I ask for pardon, I beg you to read those
letters.”
She took a little packet from her work-basket and handed it to her
husband.
“I will do anything to oblige you,” said Mr. Jerningham, kindly; “but I
assure you it is very unpleasant to me to read another man’s letters.”
He took the packet to a distant window, and there began his task. The
letters were long--such clever, gossiping, semi-sentimental letters
as a man writes to a lady with whom he is _aux petits soins_,
without ulterior motive of any kind, for the mere pleasure involved
in opening his mind and heart to a charming, sympathetic creature,
whom he holds it better for himself “to have loved and lost, than
never to have loved at all.” Such letters are little more than the
vehicles by which a man lets off the poetic gases of his brain, the
herbals wherein he preserves the rarer flowers of his mind. Into such
letters a man can pour all his caprices of fancy, all his audacities
of thought; and as he writes, his mind is divided between tenderness
for the dear recipient of his outpourings and a lurking consciousness
that his letters will adorn his biography, and hold their place in
polite literature, when the hand that runs along the paper to-day has
mouldered in a coffin. In such letters every writer appears at his
best. In the present he is writing for only one indulgent critic; in
the future he fancies himself revealed to posterity with an audacious
freedom forbidden by the natural reserve of the man who knows he will
have to read a hundred and twenty reviews of his book.
Mr. Jerningham read Laurence Desmond’s letters very patiently. He
smiled faintly now and then, in polite recognition of some little
playful flight of the writer’s fancy; but he was far from being amused.
More than one smothered but dismal yawn betrayed his weariness, and it
was with a sigh of supreme relief that he at last returned them to his
wife.
“They are really clever,” he said, “and hardly objectionable. They are
the kind of thing that a Chateaubriand might have written to a Madame
Récamier, and she was the very archetype of female virtue. I can only
regret the one fact that they were not addressed to your own house.”
“My foolish cowardice was the sole cause of that error. I thought you
would object to my receiving Mr. Desmond’s letters, and they were a
great pleasure to me.”
“My poor child, if you had only examined my library in Park Lane, you
would have found a hundred volumes of letters, from Pliny downwards,
all of them better than Mr. Desmond’s effusions. But I suppose there is
a charm in being the sole recipient of a man’s confidences. Every man
writes that kind of thing once in his life; I have done it myself.”
“And can you forgive me freely?”
“Forgive you! Why, my dear child, you have been freely forgiven from
the hour in which we parted. I thought it best and wisest to end a
union which had been too lightly made. It is possible I was wrong.
Unhappily, I had exhausted my fund of hope before I met you, and had
acquired an unpleasant knack of expecting the worst in every situation
of life. I did not take those letters as conclusive evidence of guilt;
on the contrary, I was quite able to believe their existence was
compatible with innocence. But I told myself that such letters must be
the beginning of the end, and I took prompt steps to avert an impending
catastrophe. I did not want to be a spectacle to men and angels as the
husband of a runaway wife. ‘There shall be no running away,’ I said.
‘We will shake hands, and take our separate roads, without noise or
scandal.’ I suppose it was a selfish policy; and again I am reduced to
say, forgive me.”
After this Mr. Jerningham spoke no more of the past. He talked of his
wife’s health, her future movements. He tried to inspire her with
hope of amendment, in spite of her physician’s ominous looks, her own
instincts; nothing could be kinder or more delicate than the manner in
which he expressed himself both to Emily and to Mrs. Colton, who came
in from the garden presently, and whom he thanked, with emphasis, for
her devotion to his wife.
A quarter of an hour afterwards he was seated alone in a railway
carriage, speeding London-wards by express train, and meditating
profoundly upon the interview at River Lawn.
“Dying,” he said to himself; “of that there can be no doubt. Of all
the hazards of fate, this was the last I should have expected. And
I shall be free; free to marry again, if I could conceive so wild a
folly; free to marry Helen de Bergerac; free to inflict the maximum of
misery upon an innocent girl, in order to secure for myself the minimum
of happiness. And yet, O God, what happiness there might be in such a
union, if I could be loved again as I once was loved!”
He clasped his hands, and the day-dreamer’s ecstasy brightened his face
for a moment. The setting sun shone red upon the river over which the
train was speeding, and Harold Jerningham remembered such a rosy summer
sunset five-and-twenty years ago, and a sweet girl-face looking up at
him, transfigured by a girl’s pure love.