"They have most power to hurt us whom we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms."
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
A short avenue of chestnut trees, now in their scented glory of
rose-pink blossom, hid the square red-brick hunting lodge, still known
by its pre-Revolution name of Le Pavillon du Dauphin, from the broad
solitary roadway skirting the Forest of St. Germains. Under this avenue
James Berwick, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes bent on the
ground, was walking up and down the morning of the day he was expecting
Barbara to join him.
It was seven o'clock--not early, according to French hours, for now and
again the heavy wheels of a market cart, the jingling of the tiny bells
hung on to the blue worsted-covered harness, the neighing of the horses,
would break on his ear, and serve to remind him that he was in
France--in the land where, if long tradition speaks truly, the thing
that he was about to do would find many more honest apologists than in
his own; in France which had given, close to this very spot, so
magnificent a hospitality to his own Stuart ancestors. All about him lay
the deep, mysterious, unbroken calm of the great forest; every trace of
last summer's merrymakers--if, indeed, such people ever made their way
to this, the further edge of the wooded peninsula,--had been completely
obliterated. What more enchanting spot could be found in the wide world
to form the setting of what he believed would be a life-long romance?
Like most men, he had always seen something offensive, almost grotesque,
in the preliminaries now usual to conventional marriage. Heavens! what a
lack of imagination had the modern bride and bridegroom! Especially in
England--especially in his own class. Here the mating birds, amid
awakening spring, would sing his own and Barbara's epithalamium.
And yet Berwick was not happy, as he had thought to be, to-day. Again
and again during the long wakeful night he had just passed he had caught
himself wondering whether his uncle, at the beginning of his long
intimacy with Madame Sampiero, had felt such scruples as these which now
tormented him. If so, they had soon vanished; Lord Bosworth, during many
years, had been supremely content with life, and all that life brought
him.
Perhaps he, Berwick, was made of more scrupulous stuff. To-day he had to
face the fact that in his cup of honey there was a drop of exceeding
bitterness. The knowledge that Boringdon might be mistaken,--that
Barbara might, after all, never be free,--made the matter scarcely more
tolerable. Oliver had so spoken that at the time his words had carried
conviction. Berwick asked himself why he had not told her the whole
truth, and then let her be the judge as to what they should do. He had
always been aware that there were the two streaks in his character--the
two Stuart streaks--that of extreme nobility, and that which makes a man
capable of acts of inexplicable betrayal.
In vain he tried to persuade himself that now was too late to change.
Human nature has its limits; in a few hours Barbara would be here, and
with quickening pulses he tried to think only of the immediate future.
Later on, there would--there must--come inevitable pain and difficulty;
they would have to face the reproachful gaze of Madame Sampiero, the
undoubted disapproval of Lord Bosworth, and yet whose example were he
and Barbara now about to follow?
The present was his own, no one--no one, that is, but himself--could
deprive him of to-day's completed joy; and yet he would have given much
to hasten the march of the lagging hours, to sleep, to dream the time
away. Perhaps, when he was in the actual presence of the woman he loved
with a depth of feeling which, to a certain extent, purified and
rendered selfless his longing for her, he would find courage to tell her
the whole of what Boringdon had said--
This concession to his conscience lightened his heart, and he looked
with leisurely and pleased gaze at the finely proportioned building--a
miniature replica of what the central portion of the Palace of
Versailles must have looked like in the days of Louis XIII. No wonder
the curious, stately little pavilion had caught the fancy of his
father--that whimsical, unfortunate Charles Berwick, whose son thought
of him far oftener than he had ever done as a younger man. The Pavilion
du Dauphin, put up for sale in one of France's many political
convulsions, had only cost its English purchaser twenty thousand francs;
and now each year Berwick received an offer from the French Government
to buy the place back at five times that sum! He always refused this
offer, and yet he came there but seldom, sometimes in the autumn for a
few days, occasionally, perhaps once in two or three years, with
Arabella. Since the death of his own mother, no woman save James
Berwick's sister had enjoyed the rare charm of the old hunting lodge.
The building was not fitted for ordinary life. It consisted of two vast
central rooms,--that above the central hall being little more than a
loft,--out of which opened smaller apartments, each and all bearing
traces of the prodigal wealth and luxurious fancy of that fermier
général into whose acquisitive hands the place had drifted for a while
during the last half of the eighteenth century. It was he, doubtless,
who had added the painted ceilings, the panels which Berwick's father
believed had been painted by Nattier, and which, if this were so, would
have made the Pavilion du Dauphin a bargain even at the price which
Berwick yearly refused for it.
When Arabella was there, the brother and sister managed very well
without English servants, done for, and that most adequately, by an old
garde de chasse, Jean Lecerf, and his wife, whom Berwick paid generously
for looking after the property during the winter months of the year.
This old couple,--with the solitary exception of Lord Bosworth, who
rarely alluded to his younger brother,--were the only people who ever
spoke to Berwick and his sister of their parents. Those eccentric
parents, whose marriage had been in itself a wilful, innocent romance,
culminating in a runaway wedding, had spent five summers here, bringing
with them, after the first year, their baby daughter. The stories the
Lecerfs had to tell of that time lost nothing in the telling!
Mère Lecerf--a name generic of the soil in that part of Northern
France--knew very little of her present employer, saving the agreeable
fact that he must be very rich. She was quite unaware that he was a
widower, and she had accepted with apparent satisfaction, and quaintly
expressed felicitations, the story he had seen fit to tell her within an
hour of his arrival the day before--namely that he was now married, and
that his wife was coming to join him for a few days!
Berwick would have preferred to make no such explanation, but something
had to be said, and, after all, would not he henceforth regard Barbara
Rebell as in very truth his honoured, his cherished wife?
He walked from the outside air into the spacious room, into which the
morning sun was streaming through the one immense window which gave on
to a steep clearing, now carpeted with the vivid delicate green of
lily-of-the-valley leaves. One of the qualities which had most delighted
him in Barbara during the early days of their acquaintance had been her
perception of, and delight in, natural beauty. How charmed she would be
with this place! How the child which had awakened in her would revel in
the strangeness of a dwelling-place which so little resembled the
ordinary conventional house!
Groups of fair shepherdesses, each attended by her faithful swain,
smiled down from the pale grisaille walls, but close to the deep
chimney,--indeed, fixed inside, above the wooden seat--was a reminder of
an age more austere, more creative than that of Nattier. This was a
framed sheet of parchment--a contemporary copy of Plantin's curious
sonnet, "Le Bonheur de ce Monde," whose _naif_ philosophy of life has
found echoes in many worthy hearts since it was first composed by the
greatest of Flemish printers.
"Avoir une maison, commode, propre, et belle,
Un jardin tapissé d'espaliers odorans,
Des fruits, d'excellent vin, peu de train, peu d'enfants,
Posséder seul sans bruit une femme fidèle.
"N'avoir dettes, amour, ni procès, ni querelle,
Ni de partage à faire avecque ses parens,
Se contenter de peu, n'espérer rien des Grands,
Régler tous ses desseins sur un juste modèle.
"Vivre avecque franchise et sans ambition,
S'adonner sans scrupule à la dévotion,
Domter ses passions, les rendre obéissantes.
"Conserver l'esprit libre et le jugement fort,
Dire son Chapelet en cultivant ses entes,
C'est attendre chez soi bien doucement la mort."
With the exception, perhaps, of three or four lines, Berwick now found
himself in unexpected agreement with old Plantin's analysis of human
happiness.
And Barbara? Ah! she undoubtedly would agree with almost every word of
it; he caught himself wondering whether the position he had won, and
which he owed in a measure,--perhaps in a very great measure,--to his
wife's fortune, would be really forfeited, were he to become again a
comparatively poor man. Berwick had by no means forgotten what it was to
be straitened in means; and he realised that want of substantial wealth
had been a great bar even to Lord Bosworth. Still, oddly enough, the
thought of giving up his wealth for the sake of Barbara was beginning to
appeal to his imagination. He went so far as to tell himself that, had
he come across her as a girl, he would of course have married her, and
forfeited his large income without a regret.
So it was that, during the long solitary spring day, spent by him almost
wholly in the forest, Berwick experienced many phases of acute and
varying feeling, most of which tended to war with the course to which he
was being inexorably driven by his sense of honour rather than by his
conscience.
But for Boringdon's revelation as to Pedro Rebell's state, Berwick's
conscience would have been at ease. So much he had the honesty to admit.
Apart from that one point which so intimately involved his honour, he
was without scruple, and that although he loved Barbara the more for
being, as he well knew she was, scrupulous, and, as he thought,
conscience-ridden. Nothing, so he told himself again and again during
those hours of fierce battle, could alter the fact that she belonged to
him in that special sense which is, as concerns a man and a woman, the
outcome of certain emotional experiences only possible between two
natures which are drawn to one another by an over-mastering instinct.
In the days that followed the fire at Chancton Priory, there had arisen,
between Berwick and Barbara, a deep, wordless intimacy and communion,
which at the time had had the effect of making him divine what was in
her mind, with a clearness which had struck those about them as being
actually uncanny. And yet it was then, during those days, that Berwick
had sworn to himself that his love was pure and selfless in its essence.
As she had lain there, her hand quivering when it felt his touch, every
gross element of his nature had become fused and refined in the clear
flame of his passion. It had been during these exquisite, to him sacred
moments, that he had told himself that on these terms of spiritual
closeness and fusion he would be content to remain.
But alas! that mood had quickly changed; and the interview with
Boringdon had reawakened the violent primeval instinct which had
slumbered,--only slumbered,--during the illness of Barbara. The
knowledge that another man loved her, with an ordinary, natural love by
no means free from that element of physical attraction which Berwick
himself had been striving, not unsuccessfully, to control in his own
heart, had had a curious effect upon him. His soul, ay, and something
much less spiritual and more tangible than his soul, rushed down from
Heaven to earth, and he began to allow himself, when in the company of
the woman he loved, certain experiments, slight, almost gossamer in
texture, but which he would afterwards recall with a strange mingling of
shame and rapture, for they proved him master of that most delicate and
sensitive of human instruments, a pure and passionate heart.
The wide solitary glades carpeted with flowers, the chestnut groves,
skirting the great avenue of firs, which is one of the glories of the
Forest,--everything to-day seemed to minister to his passion, to bring
Barbara Rebell vividly before him. Coming on a bank from whose mossy
surface sprang high, delicately tinted windflowers, Berwick was suddenly
haunted by a physical memory--that of Barbara's movement of surrender
two days before. Again he felt her soft quivering mouth yielding itself
to his lips, and, still so feeling, he suddenly bent down and put these
lips, now sanctified, to the cool petals of a windflower. Was it a sure
instinct which warned him that Barbara's love for him, even if it
contained every element the natural man seeks to find in his mate, was
so far governed by conscience that she would never be really content and
unashamed so long as they were outside the law? More, if Boringdon were
right, if Pedro Rebell were indeed dying, and Barbara became in time
James Berwick's wife, would she ever forget, would she ever cease to
feel a pang of pain and remorse in, the fact of this episode, and of the
confession which would--which must--follow after? He had to ask himself
whether he was prepared to cast so dark a shadow over the picture of
these days, these hours, which her mind would carry into all the future
years of their lives.
* * * * *
More difficult, because far more subtle and unanswerable, was the
knowledge that Boringdon might after all have been wrong, and that
Barbara might never be free. In that case, so Berwick with fierce
determination told himself, he would be fool indeed to retard the
decisive step which would resolve what had already become, both to him
and to Barbara, if the truth were to be faced honestly, an intolerable
situation.
But in his heart Berwick knew well that Oliver Boringdon had spoken the
truth. Even now, to-day, release might have come, and Barbara might be a
free woman. Slowly, painfully, as he fought and debated the question
with himself, he became aware that only one course was compatible with
his own self-respect.
A secret misgiving, a hidden, unmentionable dread, which would have
troubled, perhaps with reason, many a man in Berwick's position, was
spared this man. He knew that he need have no fear that Barbara would
misunderstand, or question, even in her heart of hearts, his sacrifice.
It would not be now, but later, that she would suffer,--when they went
back to their old humiliating position at Chancton, as lovers
unacknowledged, separated, watched.
And so, at last, the outcome of the struggle which saw him go through so
many different moments of revolt and sharp temptation, was that Berwick
brought himself to envisage that immediate renunciation, which seemed so
much more difficult to face than did the further, if less poignant,
sacrifice which still lay in the distant future, when, to make Barbara
his wife, he would give up so much that had hitherto, or so he had
thought, made life worth living.
Slowly he made his way back to the Pavilion du Dauphin, there to set
himself grimly to do all that was possible to make his decision, if not
irrevocable, then most difficult of revocation. Mère Lecerf was abruptly
told that as her master must leave the hunting lodge that night she must
arrange to come and sleep there, in order that "Madame" should not be
alone in the solitary building. But that, as Berwick well knew, was by
no means enough, for Mère Lecerf would acquiesce in any change of plan
with joyful alacrity.
So it was that six o'clock saw him passing into the Pavilion Henri IV.,
the famous hostelry which terminates the long Terrace of St. Germains.
There he was well known, and could, in his present mood, have well
spared the delight with which his orders were received, as also the few
sentences in which the landlady's young daughter aired her English. "But
how so! Of course! The most beautiful of our rooms shall be ready for
Monsieur's occupation. Perhaps for three nights? La, la! What a short
sojourn! A carriage now, at once? Another one to be at the Pavilion du
Dauphin this evening? But yes, certainly!"
* * * * *
Barbara, stepping down from the high French railway carriage, looked
about her with a strange shrinking and fear in her dark eyes. From the
moment she had left the boat she had been reminded, and that
intolerably, of another journey taken, not alone,--on the day of her
marriage to Pedro Rebell. The last few months seemed obliterated, and
Berwick for the moment forgotten. She was haunted by two very different
presences,--that of her mother, and that of the West Indian planter,
whose physical nearness, which had ever, from their marriage day onward,
filled her with agonised revolt and terror, she seemed now to feel as
she had not felt it for years, for he had soon tired of his victim. Had
it not been that thoughts of Madame Sampiero, and of the duty she owed
to the paralysed woman, restrained her, she would have been tempted to
open the railway carriage door and step out into the rushing wind, and
so end, for ever, the conflict in her mind.
There are women, more women than men, who are born to follow the
straight way,--to whom crooked paths are full of unknown terrors. Such a
woman was Barbara Rebell. And yet the sight of Berwick,--Berwick, pale
indeed, but quiet, self-possessed and smiling, as they advanced towards
each other across the primitive little station,--brought comfort, and
even security, to her heart. It was so clearly impossible that he would
wish to work her any ill--
No other passenger had got out at Poissy, and the station-master, who
knew the owner of the Pavillon du Dauphin, looked with curiosity at the
man and woman now going towards one another. The information given to
Mère Lecerf had already reached him, "Cold types, these English!" but he
cheered up when he saw Berwick suddenly bend down and kiss each of the
traveller's pale cheeks, in French husbandly fashion. "Salut Monsieur!
Salut Madame!" the familiar accents fell sweetly on Barbara's ear as she
walked through to the town square, where a victoria was waiting to take
them to the Pavillon du Dauphin.
As she sat, silent by his side, Berwick took her hand in his. Again and
again he opened his lips to speak, to tell her of his decision. But
something seemed to hold him back from doing so now. Later, when they
were alone, would be time enough.
And Barbara? Still full of vague, unsubstantial fears, she yet felt
free--absolutely free--from the presence which had journeyed by her
side. Berwick now stood between herself and Pedro Rebell, but, during
the long silent drive up the steep road leading from the valley to the
forest plateau, Barbara's mother seemed to stand sentinel between
herself and Berwick.
* * * * *
At last they were alone,--alone in the shadow-filled hall where the
beams of the May moon, slanting in through the wide, curtainless window,
warred with the light thrown by the lamp still standing on the table
where they had sat at supper half an hour before.
As she heard the door shut behind Madame Lecerf, Barbara had risen and
gone over to the friendly glow of the fire. She was now sitting, rather
rigidly upright, on the wooden bench which formed a kind of inglenook
within the stone fireplace. Just above her head hung the faded gilt
frame containing Plantin's sonnet; her hands were clasped loosely over
her knees, and she was looking straight into the heart of the burning
peat.
Berwick, himself in shadow, watched her in tense silence; there was
something enigmatical, and to him rather fearful, in her stillness,--in
some ways he felt her more remote from himself than he had ever felt her
to be since the night they had first met.
When driving from Poissy, he had taken her hand, and she had let it rest
in his; but only for one brief moment, during the last two hours, had
the woman he loved shown any sign of emotion. This was when, as they sat
at table, the old French woman serving them had said, in answer to some
question: "Mais oui, Madame Berwick!" and Barbara's face had suddenly
become flooded with colour.
At last she looked round from the fire, and sought to see where her
companion was sitting. Berwick thought the gesture beckoned; he leapt up
and came forward with a certain eagerness, and, standing before her,
smiled down into her serious eyes.
Suddenly she put out her hand and touched his sleeve. "Won't you sit
down," she said, "here, by me?"
He obeyed, and she felt his arm slowly gathering her to him, while he,
on his side, became aware that she first shrank back, and then gradually
yielded to his embrace. Nay more, she suddenly laid her cheek against
his lips with a curious childish abandonment, but he knew there was
something wanting,--something which had been there during the moment
that their souls, as well as their bodies, had rushed together the
last,--the only time, till now,--that he had held her in his arms.
She made a slight, an ineffectual effort to disengage herself as she
asked in a low voice: "Why did your servant call me that? Call me, I
mean, by your name?"
"Because," he answered, rather huskily, "because I told her that you
were my wife. I hope that name is what all will call you some day."
Barbara's lips trembled. "No," she said very slowly, "I do not think
that will ever happen. God will not let me be so happy. I have not
deserved it." Yet even as she said the words, he felt, with quick,
overmastering emotion, that she was surrendering herself, in spirit as
well as in body, and that she came willingly.
He turned and caught her more closely to him.
"Listen," he said hoarsely, "listen while I say something to you that
perhaps I ought to have said before, earlier, to-night."
Then, rather suddenly, he withdrew his arms from about the slight
rounded figure enfolded in them. The utterance of what he had made up
his mind must now be said had become immeasurably more difficult during
the last few moments. He asked himself, with rough self-reproach and
self-contempt, why he had so delayed, why he had allowed her to come
here to be so wholly at his mercy, and he--yes, he--at hers? He got up
and walked slowly to the other side of the great room, and came back,
even more slowly, to where Barbara was sitting.
There he knelt down by her.
"Barbara," he said, "be kind to me! Help me! My pure angel, what does
your heart tell you would be to-night the greatest proof of my love--of
my adoration of you?"
And then the most amazing, and, to the man looking up at her with
burning eyes the most moving, change came over the face bent down to
his. Barbara had understood. But she said nothing,--only slipped down
and put her arms, a wholly voluntary movement of caress, round him, in a
strange speechless passion of gratitude and tenderness.
"Ah, Barbara," he said, "you have made me know you too well. You have
allowed me to see too clearly into your heart not to know that I was a
brute to ask you to do this thing,--to do that which I knew you believed
to be wrong." And, as she pressed more closely to him, her tears wetting
his face, he went on: "But I promise,--I swear,--I will never ask it of
you again. We will go on as we did,--as we found ourselves able to
do,--after the fire."
"But will not that make you unhappy?" Her lips scarcely moved as she
whispered the words, looking into his strained face with sad, beseeching
eyes.
"Yes," he said, rather shortly, "if I thought it impossible, or even
improbable, that you would become my wife, it would make me very
unhappy, but that, or so I believe, is not impossible, not even
improbable. Ah, Barbara, must I tell you,--do you wish me to tell
you,--everything?"
She looked up at him with a sudden fear and perplexity. What did he
mean, what was it he had heard and wished to keep from her? But she
would trust him, trust him to the end, and so, "No," she whispered,
"tell me nothing you would ever regret having told me. I am quite
content, nay, more than content, with your goodness to your poor
Barbara."
* * * * *
An hour later Berwick was driving away from the Pavillon du Dauphin, not
to the station as Mère Lecerf believed, but to St. Germains, within
easy, tantalising distance of the woman he had just left,--a very
tearful, a very radiant, a most adoring, and alas! a most adorable
Barbara.
Looking out with absent eyes across the great moonlit plain to his left,
Berwick thought over the strange little scene which had taken place. He
hardly knew what he had said,--in any case far less than he had meant.
Not a word, for instance, of what Boringdon had told him,--how could he
have spoilt, with the image of death, such an evening as had just been
theirs? Heavens! how strangely Barbara had altered, even before that
whispered assurance that he would never, never ask her to do that which
she thought wrong.
When he had first brought her into the Pavilion, there had been
something tragic, as well as touching, in her still submissiveness of
manner. But afterwards--ah, afterwards!--he had been privileged to see a
side of her nature--ardent, yet spiritual, passionate, yet pure,--which
he felt that he alone had the power to awaken, which had manifested
itself only for him. How happy each had been in the feeling of nearness
to the other, in the knowledge that they were at last free from
watching, even if kindly, eyes, and listening ears,--what happiness they
promised each other for the morrow! They would give themselves, so
Berwick told Barbara, three days in this sylvan fairy land, and then he
would take her to Paris, and go himself back to England.
* * * * *
Barbara Rebell never knew that those three days, of to her unalloyed
bliss, held dark hours for her companion--hours when he cursed himself
for a quixotic fool. But, even in the midst of that strange experience,
Berwick was able to write in all honesty to his sister, the only human
being to whom he confided the fact that he was in France,--might she not
already have learnt it from some less trustworthy source?--certain
cryptic words, to which she could then attach no meaning: "One word
more. I wish to remind you that appearances are deceitful, and also to
tell you that I have at last found that it is possible to be good, to be
happy, and also to have a good time."