"Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing
of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite
and reasonable world."
R. L. S.
Love has been described, by one who had a singularly intuitive knowledge
of men's hearts, as a vital malady, and in one essential matter the
similitude holds good--namely, in the amazing suddenness with which the
divine fever will sometimes, nay often, seize upon its victim, driving
out for the time being all other and allied ills, leaving room only for
the one all-consuming passion.
James Berwick was one of those men--more rarely found perhaps in England
than on the Continent, and less often now than in the leisurely days of
the past--who can tell themselves that they are pastmasters in the art
of love. Two things in life were to him of absorbing interest--politics
and women, and he found, as have done so many of his fellows, that the
two were seldom in material conflict. His sister, Miss Berwick, did not
agree in this finding, but she kept her views and her occasional
misgivings to herself.
Women had always played a great part in James Berwick's life, and that,
as is generally true of the typical lover, in a very wide sense, as
often as not "en tout bien tout honneur." He thought no hour wasted
which was spent in feminine company: he was tender to the pruderies,
submissive to the caprices, and very grateful for the affection often
lavished on him by good and kindly women, to whom the thought of any
closer tie than that of friendship would have been an outrage.
More than once he had been very near, or so he had thought at the time,
to the finding of his secret ideal,--of that woman who should be at once
lover and friend. But some element, generally that of the selfless
tenderness for which his heart craved, was lacking in the unlawful loves
to which he considered himself compelled to confine his quest.
He based his ideal on the tie which had bound his uncle, Lord Bosworth,
to Madame Sampiero, and of which he had become aware at a moment when
his youth had made him peculiarly susceptible to what was fine and
moving in their strange, ardent romance.
To his ideal,--so he could still tell himself when on one of those
lamentable return journeys from some experimental excursion in that most
debatable land, le pays du tendre,--he could and would remain faithful,
however faithless he might become to the actual woman who, at the
moment, had fallen short of that same ideal.
Berwick constantly made the mistake of consciously seeking love, and so
of allowing nothing for that element of fantasy and surprise which has
always played so great a part in spontaneous affairs of the heart.
He asked too much, not so much of love, as of life--intellect, passion,
tenderness, fidelity, all these to be merged together in one who could
only hope to be linked with her beloved in unlawful, and therefore, so
whispered experience, in but temporary bonds.
During the last ten years--Berwick was now thirty-five, and, while his
brief married life lasted, he had been absolutely faithful to the poor
sickly woman whose love for him had fallen short of the noblest of
all--he had found some of the qualities he regarded as essential to a
great and steadfast passion, first in one, and then in another, but
never had he found them all united, as his uncle had done, in one woman.
Mrs. Marshall, of whom his sister was still so afraid had first
attracted him as a successful example of that type of woman to whom
beauty, and the brilliant exercise of her feminine instincts, stand in
lieu of mind and heart, and whose whole life is absorbed in the effort
to excite feelings which she is determined neither to share nor to
gratify. To vivify this lovely statue, to revenge, may-be, the wrongs of
many of his sex, had been for Berwick an amusing diversion, a game of
skill in which both combatants were to play with buttoned foils.
But Mrs. Marshall, caught up at last into the flames in which she
had seen so many burn--holocausts to her vanity and intense
egotism--suddenly began to love Berwick with that dry, speechless form
of passion which sears both the lover and the beloved, and which seems
to strip the woman of self-respect, the man of that tenderness which
should drape even spurious passion.
The death of the lady's husband had occurred most inopportunely, and had
been followed, after what had seemed to Berwick--now wholly
disillusioned--a shockingly short interval, by one of those scenes of
horror which sometimes occur in the lives of men and women and which
each participant would give much to blot out from memory. During the
interview he shuddered to remember, Berwick had been brought to say, "My
freedom is dearer to me, far more so, than life itself! If I had to
choose between marriage and death, I should choose death!"
Arabella need not have been afraid. Louise Marshall's very name had
become hateful to him, and the fact that she was still always trying to
throw herself across his path had been one reason why he had spent the
whole summer far from England.
* * * * *
It was in this mood, being at the moment out of love with love, that
Berwick had come back this autumn to Sussex and to Chancton Priory. It
was in this same mood that he had first met Barbara Rebell, and had
spent with her the evening of which he was afterwards to try and
reconstitute every moment, to recall every word uttered by either. He
had been interested, attracted, perhaps most of all relieved, to find a
woman so different from the type which had caused him so much distress,
shame, and--what was perhaps, to a man of his temperament,
worse--annoyance.
Then, after that short sojourn at the Priory, he had gone away, and
thought of Barbara not at all. Certain matters had caused him to come
back to Chillingworth before going on to Halnakeham Castle, and during
those days, with a suddenness which had left him defenceless, had come a
passion of deep feeling--none of those about them ventured to give that
feeling its true name--for the desolate-eyed, confiding creature, who,
if now thrown defenceless in his way as no woman had ever yet been, was
yet instinct with some quality which seemed to act as a shield between
himself and the tremulous, tender heart he knew was there, if only
because of the love Barbara lavished on Madame Sampiero.
During those early days, and for the first time in Berwick's experience,
humility walked hand in hand with love, and the lover for a while found
himself in that most happy state when passion seems intensified by
respect. James Berwick had hitherto been always able to analyse every
stage of his feeling in regard to the woman who at the moment occupied
his imagination, but with regard to Mrs. Rebell he shrank from such
introspection.
Yet another feeling, and one oddly new, assailed him during those long
hours which were spent in Barbara's company--now in the quiet stately
downstair rooms of the Priory, now out of doors, ay, and even by Madame
Sampiero's couch, for there Barbara, as if vaguely conscious of pursuit,
would often take refuge. Jealousy, actual and retrospective jealousy,
sharpened the edge of Berwick's feeling,--jealousy of Boringdon, of whom
he gathered Barbara had lately seen so much, and with whom, as he could
himself see, she must be on terms of pleasant comradeship--jealousy, far
more poignant and searching, of Pedro Rebell, and of that past which the
woman Berwick was beginning to regard as wholly his, had spent with him.
Mrs. Rebell never made the slightest allusion to her husband, and yet
for six long years--those formative years between nineteen and
five-and-twenty--Pedro Rebell must have been, and in a sense rarely
allowed to civilised man, the master of this delicate, sensitive woman,
and, when he so pleased, her lover. Who else save the half-Spanish West
Indian planter could have brought that shadow of fear into Barbara's
eyes, and have made her regard the passion of love, as Berwick had very
soon divined she did regard it, as something which shames rather than
exalts human nature?
From one and another, going even to Chancton Cottage, and questioning
Mrs. Boringdon in his desire to know what Barbara he knew well would
never tell him, Berwick had so far pieced together her past history as
to come somewhere near the truth of what her life had been. He could
picture Barbara's quiet childhood at St. Germains: could follow her
girlhood--spent partly in France, partly in Italy--to which, as she grew
to know him better, she often referred, and which had given her a kind
of mental cultivation which, to such a man as himself, was peculiarly
agreeable. Then, lastly, and most often, he would recall her long
sojourn in the lonely West Indian plantation. There, if Grace Johnstone
was to be believed, she had at times suffered actual physical
ill-treatment from the man whom she had married because he had come
across her path at a moment when she had been left utterly alone; and
also because--so Berwick, as he grew to understand her, truly
divined--Pedro Rebell bore her father's name, and shared the nationality
of which those English men and women who are condemned to exile are so
pathetically proud.
* * * * *
Mrs. Turke, Doctor McKirdy, and Madame Sampiero all watched with varying
feelings the little drama which was being enacted before their eyes.
Of the three, Mrs. Turke had the longest refused to believe the evidence
afforded by her very shrewd senses. The old housekeeper took a frankly
material view of life, and Doctor McKirdy had not been far wrong when he
had once offended her by observing, "I should describe you, woman, as a
grand old pagan!" There were few things she would not have done to
pleasure James Berwick; and that he should enjoy a passing flirtation
with Mrs. Rebell would have been quite within his old nurse's view of
what should be--nay more, Mrs. Turke would have visited with
condemnation any lady who had shown herself foolishly coy in accepting
the attentions of such a gentleman.
But when the old woman realised, as she soon came to do, that Berwick's
feeling for Madame Sampiero's kinswoman was of a very different quality
from that with which she had at first credited him, then Mrs. Turke felt
full of vague alarm, and she liked to remind herself that Mrs. Rebell
was a wife, and, from certain indications, a good and even a religious
woman in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
These stormy November days, so rough without, so peaceful within, each
big with the presage of coming winter, reminded Mrs. Turke of another
autumn at Chancton, and of other lovers who had found the atmosphere of
the Priory strangely conducive to such a state of feeling as that which
seemed to be brooding over James Berwick and Barbara Rebell.
True, Madame Sampiero and Lord Bosworth had been far more equally
matched in the duel which had ended in the defeat of both: but the
woman, in that conflict, had been troubled with fewer scruples. They
also had begun by playing at friendship--they also had thought it within
their power to absorb only the sweet, and to reject the bitter, of the
feast spread out before them. In those far away days Mrs. Turke had
been, to a certain limited extent, the confidante of her mistress, and
now she felt angered at the knowledge that her foster-son was becoming
impatiently aware of her watching eyes, and nervously afraid of any
word, even said by his old nurse in joke, concerning his growing
intimacy with Mrs. Rebell.
To Madame Sampiero, the present also brought back the past, and that,
ah! yes, most poignantly. As she lay in her beautiful room, her solitude
only broken by those two whom she had begun to watch so painfully, or by
Doctor McKirdy who gave her news of them, she felt like the wounded
warrior to whom heralds bring at intervals news of the conflict raging
without. A word had been said by Mrs. Turke soon after Berwick's return,
but the housekeeper had been rebuked by her paralysed mistress with
sharp decision.
The thought that the creature who was beginning not to take, so much as
to share, in her heart the place of her dead child, could be caught in
the net out of which she herself had not even yet cut herself free, was
intolerable--the more so that she had been amused, rather cynically
amused, at the effect her god-daughter had produced on the austere
Boringdon. To see them together, to see his growing infatuation, and
Barbara's utter unconsciousness of the feeling which, after the first
memorable interview, brought him daily to the Priory, had been to
Barbara's god-mother a delicious comedy. The woman in her delighted in
the easy triumph of this other woman, more particularly because at first
she had not credited Barbara Rebell with the possession of feminine
charm.
In this matter Boringdon showed Madame Sampiero how wrong she had been,
and not he only, but many others also had at once come under her spell.
And then, as is nearly always the way with those women who inspire
sudden passions, Mrs. Rebell's charm was not, in its essence, one of
sex. The grim, silent Scottish woman, Madame Sampiero's night attendant,
smiled when Barbara came into the room, and Léonie, the French maid, had
very early informed her mistress, "Je sens que je vais adorer cette
Madame Rebell!" while as for James Berwick, his attitude the more moved
and interested Madame Sampiero, because she had never seen him in any
relation save in that of her own kind, cool, and attentive guest.
Every nature betrays feeling in a manner peculiarly its own. Berwick
would have been surprised indeed had he realised his constant betrayal
of a passion so instinctive as to be as yet only partially revealed to
his innermost self. For the first time in his experience he loved
nobly--that is, with tenderness and abnegation. To be constantly with
Barbara, to talk to her with that entire intimacy made possible by the
solitary circumstances of her life, was all he asked as yet. Barbara
Rebell, during those same short weeks, was also happy, and wholly
content with the life she saw spread out before her--looking back to the
six years spent with Pedro Rebell as to a terrible ordeal lying safely
far behind her, so deep, so racial had been, after the first few weeks
of their married life, the antagonism between them.
Feeling her physical helplessness more than she had ever done, Madame
Sampiero asked herself, with a foreboding which deepened into pain,
whether certain passages in her own life were now about to be enacted
over again in that of her own cousin? Lying there, her mind alone free,
she told herself that while regretting nothing that had been, she yet
would do all in her power to prevent one she loved from going through
what she had endured--the more so that, to her mind, James Berwick was
not comparable to the man for whom she had herself sacrificed
everything. Lord Bosworth's only desire, and that over long years, had
been to make the woman he loved his wife. She knew well that the nephew
had a more ingenious and a less simple nature--that the two men looked
at life from a very different standpoint.
Madame Sampiero also realised to the full what Berwick's great wealth
had meant and did mean to him, and how different a man he would have
been without it. Had Barbara Rebell been free, so the paralysed woman
now told herself, James Berwick would have fled from the neighbourhood
of the Priory at the first dawn of his attraction.
Barbara's god-mother would have given much to know what neither her own
observation nor Doctor McKirdy's could tell her--namely, how Berwick's
undisguised passion was affecting the object of it. Every day the older
woman looked for some sign, for some conscious look, but Barbara
remained in this one matter an enigma to those about her. Madame
Sampiero knew--as every woman who has gone through certain experiences
is bound to know--the deep secrecy, the deeper self-repression, which
human beings, under certain conditions, can exercise when the question
involved is one of feeling, and so sometimes, but never when Mrs. Rebell
was actually with her, she wondered whether the attitude of Barbara to
Berwick hid responsive emotion, which, when the two were alone together,
knew how to show itself articulate.
One thing soon became clear. Barbara much preferred to see either
Boringdon or Berwick alone; she avoided their joint company; and that,
so the three who so closely observed her were inclined to think, might
be taken as a sign that she knew most surely how it was with them, if
still ignoring how it was with herself.
* * * * *
Concerning love--that mysterious passion which Plotinus so well
describes as part god part devil--Doctor McKirdy was an absolute
fatalist. He regarded the attraction of man to woman as inevitable in
its manifestations as are any of the other maleficent forces of nature,
and for this view--not to go further than his own case--he had good
reason. Till he was nearly thirty, he had himself experienced, not only
a distaste but a positive contempt for what those about him described as
love.
However much the fact was disguised by soft phrases, he, the young
Alexander McKirdy, knew full well that the passion was wholly base and
devilish--playing sometimes impish, more often terrible, tricks on those
it lured within its labyrinth; causing men to deviate almost
unconsciously from the paths lying straight before them; generally
injuring their careers, and invariably--and this, to such a nature as
his own, seemed the most tragic thing of all--making, while the spell
was upon the victims, utter fools of them. Above all had he condemned,
with deepest scorn and intolerance--this, doubtless, owing in a measure
to his early religious training--that man who allowed himself to feel
the slightest attraction for a married woman; indeed, for such a one, he
felt nothing but scathing contempt. The whole subject of man's relation
to woman was one on which the doctor had been, even as a very raw and
shy youth, always ready to hold forth, warning and admonishing those
about him, especially his own sentimental countrymen cast up on the
lonely and yet siren-haunted sea of London life.
Then, holding these views more than ever, though perhaps less eager to
discuss them, a chance had brought him to Chancton, there to fall
himself in the same snare which he believed in all good faith so easy to
avoid. After one determined effort to shake himself free, he had bowed
his neck to the yoke, gradually sacrificing all that he had once thought
made life alone worth living to a feeling which he had known to be
unrequited, and which for a time he had believed to be unsuspected by
the object of it.
Who was he, Alexander McKirdy, so he asked himself during those days
when he watched with very mingled feelings Berwick and Barbara--who was
he to jeer, to find fault, even to feel surprised at what had now
befallen James Berwick and Barbara Rebell? And yet, as was still apt to
be his wont, the old Scotchman blamed the woman far more than the
man--for even now, to his mind, man was the victim, woman the Circe
leading him astray. This view angered the mistress of the Priory, but
not even to please Madame Sampiero would the doctor pretend that he
thought otherwise than he did.
"Is this, think you, the first time she soweth destruction?" he once
asked rather sternly. "I tell ye, Madam, she cannot be so simple as ye
take her to be! I grant her Jamie"--falling back in the eagerness of the
discussion on what had been his name for Berwick as a child--"we all
know he's a charmer! But how about that poor stiff loon, Oliver
Boringdon? would you say that there she has not been to blame?"
But the answering murmur was very decided, "I am sure it is the first
time she has sowed destruction, as you call it."
"Well then, she has been lacking the opportunities God gives most women!
If she has not sowed, it has not been for lack of the seed: she has a
very persuasive manner--very persuasive indeed! That first night before
she stumbled into this house, I was only half minded that she should see
you, and she just wheedled me into allowing her to do so--oh! in a very
dignified way, that I will admit. Now as women sow so shall they reap."
"That," muttered Madame Sampiero, "is quite true;" and the doctor had
pursued, rather ruthlessly, his advantage. "Can you tell me in all
honesty," he asked, peering forward at her, meeting with softened gaze
the wide open blue eyes, "if you yourself sowed destruction
innocently-like, that is without knowing it? Was there ever a time when
you were not aware of what you were doing?"
For a moment the paralysed woman had made no answer, and then her face
quivered, and he knew that the sounds which issued from between her
trembling lips signified, "Yes, McKirdy, I always did know it! But
Barbara is a better woman than I ever was----"
"Ay, and not one half so beautiful as you ever were!" The doctor had
remained very loyal to his own especial Circe.
* * * * *
It now wanted but a week to Lord Pendragon's coming-of-age ball, and
Chancton Priory shared in the general excitement. Madame Sampiero was
well aware that this would be her god-daughter's real introduction to
the neighbourhood, and she was most anxious that the first impression
should be wholly favourable. As regarded what Barbara was to wear,
success could certainly be achieved; but in whose company she should
make her first appearance at Halnakeham Castle was more difficult to
arrange, for it had come to Doctor McKirdy's knowledge that James
Berwick intended that he and Mrs. Rebell should share the long drive
from Chancton to the Castle.
This the mistress of the Priory was determined to prevent, and that
without signifying her sense of its indecorum. The way out of the
difficulty seemed simple. Madame Sampiero intimated her wish that Doctor
McKirdy should be the third occupant of the Priory carriage, and that
with this strange-looking cavalier, Barbara should make her appearance
at the Castle: in that matter she thought she could trust to Berwick's
instinct of what was becoming, and further, she had little fear that he
would wish to attract the attention of the Duchess of Appleby and Kendal
to his friendship with Mrs. Rebell. But, to Madame Sampiero's
astonishment and chagrin, Doctor McKirdy refused to lend himself to the
plan.
"Nay," he said, "I've been thinking the matter over, and I cannot make
up my mind to oblige ye. Your wit will have to find out another way."
There had been a pause, and he added, with one of his curious twisted
smiles, "It's not such as I who would dare to intervene at 'the canny
hour at e'en'!"
"Then I must tell James it cannot be!" Madame Sampiero spoke the words
with the odd muffled distinctness which sometimes came over her
utterance. But Doctor McKirdy had been thinking carefully over the
situation: "Why not ask Mrs. Boringdon?" he growled out. "The woman does
little enough for the good living she gets here!"
Madame Sampiero looked at her faithful old friend with real gratitude.
How foolish she had been not to have thought of that most natural
solution! But to her, Oliver Boringdon's mother was the merest shadow,
scarcely a name.
And so it was that James Berwick's plan was defeated, while Barbara
Rebell, who had not as yet become as intimate with Grace Johnstone's
mother as she hoped to do, was made, somewhat against her will, to write
and invite Mrs. Boringdon and her son to share with her the Priory
carriage.