Time, unfortunately, seemed arrayed against him, for it was in April of
the same year that he met Miss Lilias Anstruther.
Their meeting summed up the possibilities of love at sight. He loved
her as she passed him on the stairs, and she him, as she afterwards
confided, while he was being led to her for introduction, an occasion
which has--for an Englishman, at any rate--small opportunities of
display.
But love at sight is such a miracle to the seer that he never imagines
its duplication. Terence saw nothing on Miss Anstruther's features but
the attention an intelligent woman might show to any man with a name in
the making.
She imagined, in the stern set of his, boredom at having to make
himself agreeable to a merely pretty girl.
There was, in his mind, no doubt, enough to complicate a glance of
admiration, since he saw between him and her the jealous presence of
another woman.
What that presence meant to him, now, he realized with despair.
He had endured in silence its unscrupulous intrigues; he had schooled
himself to meet the most preposterous of its requirements. But then he
stood alone; the worst that could be done him was the most that he need
fear. He could live secure since only he could suffer.
Now! He lost his breath as he thought of it.
He saw Lilias several times that month. He did not notice that it
seemed easy to see her. That she had a hand in that facility would
have been the last thing to strike him.
Love had come to him in the extravagant splendours it only wears for
those who find it late, with the eyes still unsoiled through which
youth sought it. For, to the boy, love is only a white angel, but the
man sees it iridescent with the colours of his accumulated years of
hope.
It was not surprising that Terence, who had never even imagined himself
in love before, and whose every instinct forbade a paltering with its
substitute, should have been overwhelmed by this putting forth of an
enchantment he had long ceased to expect.
He kept his head from early habit, which made the danger of losing it
in Miss Anstruther's presence almost a delight, and he banished the
acknowledgment of his happiness from every part of him but his eyes.
There, however, in the glow of an accustomed kindliness it could escape
recognition, and there too it was often absorbed in a stern anxiety
when he faced the risks of its discovery by the other woman.
From her he kept, with a man's timorous diplomacy, every echo of the
girl's name, until he learnt they were acquainted. Then he had to
endure an inquest on his concealment, and the woman's suspicions were
fertilized by his replies.
They found food for growth later on in what she was pleased, perhaps
rightly, to imagine a preoccupation in his manner.
She was, of course, aware of his effort to dilute what was emotional in
their intercourse, and to replace it with a tender and unashamed
fraternity.
Of that he made no secret; and she made very little of her resolve to
thwart it.
He had but small success but more than he expected. He declined
several invitations to Wallingford during the summer, where she had
again a house; and when he went in August, found her, thanks partly to
the persistence of some exacting and undesired guests, more malleable
than she had ever been before.
He had been so attentively kind to her during the season that she found
no excuse to upbraid him, yet she showed by a dozen disdainful poses
how fiercely she resented his determined friendliness.
Meanwhile he had seen little of Lilias. His devotion to her was too
sensitive and too entire to allow him even to offer her his company
while he had still, however occasionally, to bestow his kisses on
another woman. That woman too was still a moral charge upon him, and a
source beside of incalculable danger.
What she would not do was clearly not everywhere conterminous with what
she should not.
He had sufficiently realized that his happiness would never appeal to
her apart from hers, and that there would be a stormy finish where hers
ended. But he still trusted in time, and was satisfied with the slight
progress towards reasonableness in their relationship.
Her letters continued to upbraid him with his neglect; but they began
to hint at a reciprocal attitude.
She too, they threatened, could be indifferent; the time might come
when to his appeal there would be no response.
Terence prayed devoutly for that day to hasten, as the months went on;
and ran down in November, ostensibly for a week's hunting, to a house
in Leicestershire where Miss Anstruther was staying.
Knowing the country better than he, she offered to pilot him, and took
him under her charge with a delightful assurance, which allowed him no
voice nor choice of his own while out of doors.
She rode straight, but used her head, in cutting out a line, to nurse
her horse, and showed a most unfeminine appreciation of distances, save
when the hounds were running late away from home.
During the long easy amble homeward in the dusk, on such occasions
Terence might have been led to doubt that it was inadvertence which had
secured him so much of her company, had he not arrived at conclusions
of much greater moment.
To have found, at thirty-five when such discoveries are being despaired
of the woman for whom his life had waited for whom, unknown, it had
worn its innocence untainted, was sufficient of itself to monopolize
his thoughts.
In her presence he became young again; young in interests, in
expectancy, in purposeless energies. The whole desire of the man was
in focus for the first time in his life.
Lilias gave him her company but no other sign of liking; yet her
company was of itself sufficient to make him insanely content.
Still his fears made him cautious. The prize was too great, the
thought of failure too consuming, to admit of risk.
So he let the winter go without a word to her of what was eating out
his heart, using what chances offered for seeing her, but making none
that might attract comment, and all the while attenuating the link that
bound him to the other, and trying to accustom her to do without him.
He seemed in that to be making headway.
She wrote more and more rarely to him, and never in the expansive
fashion of the past, and if he kissed her on parting, as occasionally
she insisted, it added no warmth to his farewell. Yet he still
misdoubted her, and would not have put his fortune to the touch had
Fate not forced his hand with the announcement that Miss Anstruther was
leaving for India in the spring.
He looked in vain for ways to stop her, but shyly, and conscious of a
new distance in her manner, as though she thought his interest might be
more explicit.
On that he spoke. Her evasions, chilly with the disdain of every
honest woman for a philanderer, were intolerable. He saw the risk he
ran either way of losing her, but chose that which gave him, at any
rate, fighting chances, and told her of his love.
Three days followed in the blue of heaven; then he came back to earth,
and took up his trouble.
The other woman was at St. Raphael, so he had to write. He would have
vastly preferred to tell her face to face what he had done. He had no
courage for a fight in the dark; he wished to see the blow come back,
and meet it. But there were reasons insuperable against that.
He expected an intemperate reply, but nothing so wildly bereft of
reason as that which reached him. It was shrill with threats which
turned his blood to ice and then set it boiling with indignation;
threats which seemed to echo from some shrieking purlieu of the Mile
End Road.
Her soul revolted, she wrote, at what he had done. He had thrown her
away like stale water. His selfishness had made her life unbearable.
Her pride, her capacity for caring, her whole womanhood had been hurt
and crushed to death.
She went about feeling there was no meaning any more in anything. He
had hardened and embittered her nature to a terrible degree.
He had hurt her so unendurably that it didn't seem to matter how she
hurt others.
Love and truth and honour had become a farce, and loyalty was an
unnecessary scruple.
She ended by saying she did not know how long she could go on bearing
it in silence. The only fair thing seemed to be to tell Miss
Anstruther everything that had happened, and let her judge between them.
Despite the sense of his integrity, and a dreary memory of the months
devoted to her whims, Terence almost felt himself to be, as he read her
impeachment, the unspeakable brute that she described.
He even tried to excuse her horrid and unexpected forms of speech; the
clamour, the invective, the dismal absence of reserve. If she had
overleapt the bounds of decency he had given her the impetus, and to be
startled by such an exhibition only argued his inexperience.
Yet even his generosity could not acquit her. He remembered her
repeated wail, "Tell me I haven't spoilt your life!"--a cry which no
ardour of his assurance seemed able to satisfy. Well, now she had the
only proof that could appease her conscience, and this was the result.
He showed her that his life was still whole, and she itched to break it
beyond repair.
His resentment quickened. Surely it was more than should be asked of a
man's benevolence to sacrifice his life to no purpose for a woman's
mistake.
He wrote urgently, and as he thought in reason; but the letter read to
her as a wrathful menace. He had explained that in trying to hurt
others she might hurt herself the more, since to alienate Miss
Anstruther would be to make a lifelong enemy of himself.
She replied in such spiritless dejection that he had to try to comfort
her. She asked why he had been in such a hurry to supersede her; and
though his patience of many months seemed to him misnamed as hurry, he
explained the circumstance which made him speak.
Many letters passed between them: letters coloured on her part by a
childish irresponsibility and persistence, and on his by an attempt, a
fatal attempt, to treat her as a child, and to let her hug the little
salves to her vanity which she invented daily and submitted piteously
for his confirmation.
Terence discovered, when it was too late, that sooner than allow that
any one could supplant her in his affection, she had pictured his
proposal as a man's heroic sacrifice of himself to a girl's
forwardness, and his letters had unconsciously confirmed her fatuous
invention.
Consoled by it, she wrote to Lilias a letter of congratulation, and her
correspondence with Terence grew heavy with the odour of a shared and
precarious secret which she, at least, would make honourable pretences
to ignore.
Terence, at his wit's end for peace, capitulated to her self-complacent
theory, after a half-hearted attempt to take it from her.
To destroy her faith in it seemed needlessly unkind, seeing how much
her faith in everything else appeared to be bound up therein. And if
her comfort in it was false, false it had been all along, from the days
when for her sake he had fostered it. Now, at any rate, it brought
comfort to them both.
He was shown the letter Lilias had received from her, and thought his
danger at an end. Yet he went softly, not daring to own the intensity
of his happiness even to himself. He tried to keep the joy of it from
his mind, to walk humbly as a mortal should, lest the gods might grow
jealous of his exulting dreams.
Yet at times, despite his caution, at the higher tides of his delight,
he would laugh up in the face of heaven, not arrogantly, but with the
overrunning sense of his content.
A woman's lips had breathed their ephphatha upon his eyelids, and he
looked out upon a new world.
New, since her beauty, like a crystal spar, lent a rainbow border to
all things beyond it. His life seemed lifted by a spread of wings at
every touch of her fingers.
There was a magic in her influence, that fed from the soft reluctance
of her body the fuel that burned in his. A magic on which he lived
between their meetings, and for whose strange infusion he fainted while
they were apart.
He told her, laughing, that he was almost frightened to be such a
slave; and though she paid no heed to the assertion, it sank with
melting heat into her heart, and unknown to him the girl's breast
throbbed, behind its shy demurs, with a fierce exultation in the sense
that swayed him.
So two months passed, the two months when even the English earth seems
mad, mad with the surge of its triumphant greenness, and with the
singing flood of birds that fills it from the south.
From the south, too, came, in May, the other woman, giving Terence
notice of her return, and telling him that she only wished to see him
if he felt a meeting was not impossible.
He replied that nothing could make it impossible but his ignorance of
her address, which she had omitted to send him.
He called the day after it arrived. He had no avidity for the
interview; but, seeing that he would be certain some day to meet her,
thought the sooner the safer.
She received him with a curious prescribed coldness, warmed in the
strangest way by glances of reproachful pity. She spoke in a
compressed tone, and Terence expected that at any moment she would
scream and seize him. The prevision was so strong that, on leaving
her, he practically backed to the door, keeping his eye deterrently
fixed upon her, as though she were some savage creature that might
spring upon him if he turned his head.
She took the line throughout that, despite his perfidy, he was to be
regarded with a grieved compassion; and she met his profession of
attachment to the woman he was about to marry with the sad smile of a
lenient unbelief.
Once or twice the raging bitterness of a soul pent up behind it
threatened to engulf the passive monotony of her speech, and the dull
eyes glowed as though about to scorch him; but nothing deplorable
happened, and Terence breathed a deep relief as the door closed behind
him and shut off, as he trusted, from his future the only danger that
threatened it.
His confidence, however, did not live for long. Scarcely more than a
week later something serious in Miss Anstruther's face checked him as
he greeted her.
"Yes," she answered to his eyes, "there's something I want to ask you.
Is it true, as you told me, that you had never loved any one before you
met me?"
"Yes," he said.
"Did you never give any one cause to think you loved her?"
"Not with intention."
"But you might have without meaning to?"
"I did, without meaning to."
"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed.
"Yes," he said, "I know. May I ask how you do?"
"No," she replied; "I'd sooner not tell you that. I only wanted to be
told it wasn't true."
"But it is true!" he objected.
"Oh, not what matters," she breathed. "Did she care for you very, very
much?"
"She cared a good deal more than I deserved," he said gravely; "and
more unspeakably than I desired."
"But she didn't find that out?"
"No, she didn't find it out. Think what finding out would have meant
to her."
The girl was silent for a moment.
"Did you kiss her?" she asked, below her breath.
"I did many things I would have preferred not to," he said quietly;
"but what they were you could not wish, I think, to learn from me."
"On account of what I know?" she asked.
"I don't know what you know," he replied; "but I think that no man who
has shared, however unwillingly, a woman's secret, has any rights over
it but those of burial."
She gave him her lips with a smile, and made no further reference to
the subject before they parted. She was going into the country, and he
was not to see her for ten days.
He spent some part of them wondering idly whence her information had
come, but he was in no mood to make enquiry where it might have been
effective, and had put the question from his mind, when, at the end of
the week, he received from Lilias a feverish note saying that
everything between them depended on his reply to something that she
must ask him. Would he let her know the first moment he could come.
He named the next morning, but, when leaving his rooms on the way to
her the letter was delivered which changed the face of the world for
him, and hung the future on his choice of an alternative.
The letter was short, and passionately scornful. It admitted no
challenge, no reply. She had seen, it said, all he had written to the
other woman, and she despised him so utterly that she felt no pain in
parting from him for ever.
That was all. Yesterday he held for her all the beauty and the savour
of the world, to-day she loathed him as a leper. In an hour she had
repudiated the most sacred convictions of her soul.
She had learnt his fineness at every turn of his thoughts. Her spirit,
that had touched his at first so timidly, had come to seek with
passionate security its most intimate caress. There was nothing she
had not revealed to him, no shame so sweet nor so secret which she had
feared to let him know.
And now!
"If I had loved a devil unawares," reflected Terence sadly, "I hardly
think I would have cast her out like that. Love should not, for its
own dignity, degrade so easily what it has ennobled."
Yet not for a moment did he resent the ruthlessness of her letter. His
love had indeed exalted her above possibility of that.
He had lost her! It was of nothing less that he could think. For some
while he did not even wonder how the astounding change had come. Her
brief note said nothing; nothing of what had happened in that momentous
fortnight, nothing of the source of her enlightenment, nothing even to
excuse the feeding of her suspicions on letters of his which were not
addressed to her.
It left, indifferently, everything to his conjecture; but conjecture
was not difficult.
The tragic ending of his hopes was the outcome, he had little doubt, of
his last visit to the other woman. She saw him then as hers no longer;
saw in him too, perhaps, in spite of his concealments, a radiance which
her love had never wrought, and realized, with cruel clearness, how
entirely he was another's.
And so, inflamed with jealousy beyond endurance, she had determined
that no one should possess him if she might not, and had used her pain,
malignantly, to poison the other's pleasure.
That poison took no doubt at first the form of hints; a woman's pitying
innuendoes, which had roused the girl's suspicions and been the cause
of her demands. And when she repeated his disclaimer, further proofs,
he supposed, were mentioned, and finally the letters had been produced.
As the story of those two short weeks took shape in his mind--the
profitless destruction done to his life and to another's by a woman's
venomous malice--he could, in the fierceness of his despair, have made
an end to her with his naked hands.
At that, ashamed of himself, he smiled, remembering the frequent
vaunting of her pride and the affectations of her honour. This was
strange work for either of them. But then a woman's honour was so
detachable.
She had it if you had it; and if you hadn't it, neither had she. In
that way her morality never placed her at a disadvantage. She could
always be as noble or as mean as her opponent.
He smiled again, more grimly, to think that on him of all men such a
fate had fallen. That he who all his life had shrunk from women should
be execrated as a philanderer! Surely ironic comedy could go no
further?
And to consider, beside it, the kind of man, for whom London is too
small a harem, wedded gratefully, reverently, every day, by the kind of
woman who found him unworthy, the kind of man, alas! to whom all too
probably, to appease that terrible vanity of a trumpeted indifference,
she might fall: to the first brute who desired to possess her.
Her fineness would not save her! Had it ever saved a woman yet from
such a fate? By the blaze of his wrath he seemed to see the reason.
Woman had no fineness, no sensibility, no subtlety of discernment. Her
fastidiousness was an affectation, like the cut of her skirt: she wore
each because it was the fashion. It was made for her, not by her, and
was no part of her at all.
But his anger could only for an instant find fuel to feed it in the
woman he loved. It turned at once against the other, and his thoughts
turned with it to her letters, the only bond between them which
remained.
They formed the packet of many coloured papers which at last, blind
with scorn to their sanctity, he had drawn from its secret place.
He had kept them without defined intention; certainly with no
premonition of needing them in his defence; so far as he could
remember, only to remind himself how that strange disturbance of his
life had come about.
But now, as his anger burnt the better part of him, he saw another use
for them. They alone could justify, could extenuate what he had done.
No man who had endured an undesired love could read them and condemn.
But a woman? That was another matter. And a woman, too, who had
adored! How would she read their raving violence?
Would she believe that the woman who wrote so wildly of the surrender
of herself had never dreamed of giving him more by it than her lips.
He wondered. Women were so hopelessly ignorant of one another. So
unable to conceive as womanly any qualities but their own; so unable to
believe even in the existence of a compulsion which would not move
themselves.
Well, whether she believed or not, whether she would divine and
forgive, or be confirmed in her contempt, there remained no other way
to move, nor even to approach her.
It was horrible to have received such letters from a woman one did not
love, more horrible still to use them in one's defence. But she had
left him no alternative.
It was through her offence that he came to be fighting for what was
dearer than his life. Was any right left her to complain of his weapon?
Besides, as he assured himself, he would only be enlarging a story
which she had told: it was her tongue, not his, that had proclaimed it.
And whether happiness or despair came to him from the event, it could
at least bring her no change of fortune.
But with the very assertion of her security came apprehension from a
possibility he had not foreseen.
What if Lilias, finding that those letters in no way absolved him, but
proved the woman guilty of an unforgivable perfidy, should turn
vengefully against her the secrets which they held?
The fear swept clear his clouded honour. Here was he answering a
woman's baseness in the very fashion he had impeached as her habitual
use.
He was fighting her malicious treachery with a betrayal as infamous,
and which could be no whit excused by hers.
The sacredness of such letters could not be altered by circumstances;
love had written them for love's eye only, and they must be held
inviolable though love turned to hate.
And it was not only his personal honour that restrained him, but the
honour of love itself; the silence, the gravity which every great
service imposes upon those who have borne it; the duty of handing down
unsullied, unspoken of, the proud name the brave tradition to those
that come after.
It was because Love had indeed touched him with its sceptre that he
could shield in silence one who had worn its name unworthily even while
under it she had stabbed him to the heart.
He laid his hand upon the packet to return it to its place. Then, with
sudden hesitation and a rueful smile at the sense of his own weakness,
he rose and carried it across to the grate.
He laid it on the coals and lit a match beneath it; and, as he turned
away again towards the window, heard in the blaze his hope and his
despair together flame indifferently to the sky.