We find Agnes Barlow again walking in Summerfield; but this time she is
hurrying along the straight, unlovely cinder-strewn path which forms a
short cut from the back of The Haven to Summerfield station; and the
still, heavy calm of a late November afternoon broods over the rough
ground on either side of her.
It is nearly six months since Teresa Maldo's elopement and subsequent
suicide, and now no one ever speaks of poor Teresa, no one seems to
remember that she ever lived, excepting, perhaps, Father Ferguson....
As for Agnes herself, life had crowded far too many happenings into the
last few weeks for her to give more than a passing thought to Teresa;
indeed, the image of her dead friend rose before her only when she was
saying her prayers. And as Agnes, strange to say, had grown rather
careless as to her prayers, the memory of Teresa Maldo was now very
faint indeed.
An awful, and to her an incredible, thing had happened to Agnes Barlow.
The roof of her snug and happy House of Life had fallen in, and she lay,
blinded and maimed, beneath the fragments which had been hurled down on
her in one terrible moment.
Yes, it had all happened in a moment--so she now reminded herself, with
the dull ache which never left her.
It was just after she had come back from Westgate with little Francis.
The child had been ailing for the first time in his life, and she had
taken him to the seaside for six weeks.
There, in a day, it had turned from summer to winter, raining as it only
rains at the seaside; and suddenly Agnes had made up her mind to go back
to her own nice, comfortable home a whole week before Frank expected her
back.
Agnes sometimes acted like that--on a quick impulse; she did so to her
own undoing on that dull, rainy day.
When she reached Summerfield, it was to find her telegram to her husband
lying unopened on the hall table of The Haven. Frank, it seemed, had
slept in town the night before. Not that that mattered, so she told
herself gleefully, full of the pleasant joy of being again in her own
home; the surprise would be the greater and the more welcome when Frank
did come back.
Having nothing better to do that first afternoon, Agnes had gone
up to her husband's dressing-room in order to look over his summer
clothes before sending them to the cleaner. In her careful,
playing-at-housewifely fashion, she had turned out the pockets
of his cricketing coat. There, a little to her surprise, she had
found three letters, and idle curiosity as to Frank's invitations
during her long stay away--Frank was deservedly popular with the
ladies of Summerfield and, indeed, with all women--caused her to
take the three letters out of their envelopes.
In a moment--how terrible that it should take but a moment to shatter
the fabric of a human being's innocent House of Life!--Agnes had seen
what had happened to her--to him. For each of these letters, written in
the same sloping woman's hand, was a love letter signed "Janey"; and in
each the writer, in a plaintive, delicate, but insistent and reproachful
way, asked Frank for money.
Even now, though nearly seven weeks had gone by since then, Agnes could
recall with painful vividness the sick, cold feeling that had come over
her--a feeling of fear rather than anger, of fear and desperate
humiliation.
Locking the door of the dressing-room, she had searched eagerly--a
dishonourable thing to do, as she knew well. And soon she had found
other letters--letters and bills; bills of meals at restaurants, showing
that her husband and a companion had constantly dined and supped at the
Savoy, the Carlton, and Prince's. To those restaurants where he had
taken her, Agnes, two or three times a year, laughing and grumbling at
the expense, he had taken this--this _person_ again and again in the
short time his wife had been away.
As to the further letters, all they proved was that Frank had first met
"Janey Cartwright" over some law business of hers, connected--even Agnes
saw the irony of it--in some shameful way with another man; for, tied
together, were a few notes signed with the writer's full name, of which
the first began:
Dear Mr. Barlow:
Forgive me for writing to your private address
[etc., etc.].
The ten days that followed her discovery had seared Agnes's soul. Frank
had been so dreadfully affectionate. He had pretended--she felt sure it
was all pretence--to be so glad to see her again, though sometimes she
caught him looking at her with cowed, miserable eyes.
More than once he had asked her solicitously if she felt ill, and she
had said yes, she did feel ill, and the time at the seaside had not done
her any good.
And then, on the last of those terrible ten days, Gerald Ferrier had
come down to Summerfield, and both she and Frank had pressed him to stay
on to dinner. He had done so, though aware that something was wrong, and
he had been extraordinarily kind, sympathetic, unquestioning. But as he
was leaving he had said a word to his host: "I feel worried about Mrs.
Barlow"--Agnes had heard him through the window. "She doesn't look the
thing, somehow! How would it be if I asked her to go with me to a
private view? It might cheer her up, and perhaps she would lunch with me
afterwards?" Frank had eagerly assented.
Since then Agnes had gone up to London, if not every day, very nearly
every day, and Mr. Ferrier had done his best, without much success, to
"cheer her up."
Though they soon became more intimate than they had ever been, Agnes
never told Ferrier what it was that had turned her from a happy,
unquestioning child into a miserable woman; but, of course, he guessed.
And gradually Frank also had come to know that she knew, and, man-like,
he spent less and less time in his now uncomfortable home. He would go
away in the morning an hour earlier than usual, and then, under pretext
of business keeping him late at the office, he would come back after
having dined, doubtless with "Janey," in town.
Soon Agnes began to draw a terrible comparison between these two
men--between the husband who had all she had of heart, and the friend
whom she now acknowledged to herself--for hypocrisy had fallen away from
her--had lived only for her, and for the hours they were able to spend
together, during two long years, and yet who had never told her of his
love, or tried to disturb her trust in Frank.
Yes, Gerald Ferrier was all that was noble--Frank Barlow all that was
ignoble. So she told herself with trembling lip a dozen times a day,
taking fierce comfort in the knowledge that Ferrier was noble. But she
was destined even to lose that comfort; for one day, a week before the
day when we find her walking to Summerfield station, Ferrier's nobility,
or what poor Agnes took to be such, suddenly broke down.
They had been walking together in Battersea Park, and, after one of
those long silences which bespeak true intimacy between a man and a
woman, he had asked her if she would come back to his rooms--for tea.
She had shaken her head smilingly. And then he had turned on her with a
torrent of impetuous, burning words--words of ardent love, of anguished
longing, of eager pleading. And Agnes had been frightened, fascinated,
allured.
And that had not been all.
More quietly he had gone on to speak as if the code of morality in which
his friend had been bred, and which had hitherto so entirely satisfied
her, was, after all, nothing but a narrow counsel of perfection, suited
to those who were sheltered and happy, but wretchedly inadequate to meet
the needs of the greater number of human beings who are, as Agnes now
was, humiliated and miserable. His words had found an echo in her sore
heart, but she had not let him see how much they moved her. On the
contrary, she had rebuked him, and for the first time they had
quarrelled.
"If you ever speak to me like that again," she had said coldly, "I will
not come again."
And once more he had turned on her violently. "I think you had better
not come again! I am but a man after all!"
They parted enemies; but the same night Ferrier wrote Agnes a very
piteous letter asking pardon on his knees for having spoken as he had
done. And his letter moved her to the heart. Her own deep misery--never
for one moment did she forget Frank, and Frank's treachery--made her
understand the torment that Ferrier was going through.
For the first time she realized, what so few of her kind ever realize,
that it is a mean thing to take everything and give nothing in exchange.
And gradually, as her long, solitary hours wore themselves away, Agnes
came to believe that if she did what she now knew Ferrier desired her to
do,--if, casting the past behind her, she started a new life with
him--she would not only be doing a generous thing by the man who had
loved her silently and faithfully for so long, but she would also be
punishing Frank--hurting him in his honour, as he had hurt her in hers.
And then the stars that fight in their courses for those lovers who are
also poets fought for Ferrier.
The day after they had quarrelled and he had written her his piteous
letter of remorse, Gerald Ferrier fell ill. But he was not too ill to
write. And after he had been ill four days, and when Agnes was feeling
very, very miserable, he wrote and told her of a wonderful vision which
had been vouchsafed to him.
In this vision Ferrier had seen Agnes knocking at the narrow front door
of the lonely flat where he lived solitary; and through the door had
slipped in his angelic visitant, by her mere presence bringing him
peace, health, and the happiness he was schooling himself to believe
must never come to him through her.
The post which brought her the letter in which Ferrier told his vision
brought also to Agnes Barlow a little registered parcel containing a
pearl-and-diamond pendant from Frank.
For a few moments the two lay on her knee. Then she took up the jewel
and looked at it curiously. Was it with such a thing as this that her
husband thought to purchase her forgiveness?
If Ferrier's letter had never been written, if Frank's gift had never
been despatched, it may be doubted whether Agnes would have done what we
now find her doing--hastening, that is, on her way to make Ferrier's
dream come true.
* * * * *
At last she reached the little suburban station of Summerfield.
One of her father's many kindnesses to her each year was the gift of a
season ticket to town; but to-day some queer instinct made her buy a
ticket at the booking-office instead.
The booking-clerk peered out at her, surprised; then made up his mind
that pretty Mrs. Barlow--she wore to-day a curiously thick veil--had a
friend with her. But his long, ruminating stare made her shrink and
flush. Was it possible that what she was about to do was written on her
face?
She was glad indeed when the train steamed into the station. She got
into an empty carriage, for the rush that goes on each evening
Londonward from the suburbs had not yet begun.
And then, to her surprise, she found that it was the thought of her
husband, not of the man to whom she was going to give herself, that
filled her sad, embittered heart.
Old memories--memories connected with Frank, his love for her, her love
for him--became insistent. She lived again, while tears forced
themselves into her closed eyes, through the culminating moment of her
marriage day, the start for the honeymoon,--a start made amid a crowd of
laughing, cheering friends, from the little station she had just left.
She remembered the delicious tremor which had come over her when she
had found herself at last alone, really alone, with her three-hour-old
bridegroom.
How infinitely kind and tender Frank had been to her!
And then Agnes reminded herself, with tightening breath, that men like
Frank Barlow are always kind--too kind--to women.
Other journeys she and Frank had taken together came and mocked her, and
especially the journey which had followed a month after little Francis's
birth.
Frank had driven with her, the nurse, and the baby, to the station--but
only to see them off. He had had a very important case in the Courts
just then, and it was out of the question that he should go with his
wife to Littlehampton for the change of air, the few weeks by the sea,
that had been ordered by her good, careful doctor.
And then at the last moment Frank had suddenly jumped into the railway
carriage without a ticket, and had gone along with her part of the way!
She remembered the surprise of the monthly nurse, the woman's prim
remark, when he had at last got out at Horsham, that Mr. Barlow was
certainly the kindest husband she, the nurse, had ever seen.
But these memories, now so desecrated, did not make her give up her
purpose. Far from it, for in a queer way they made her think more
tenderly of Gerald Ferrier, whose life had been so lonely, and who had
known nothing of the simpler human sanctities and joys, and who had
never--so he had told her with a kind of bitter scorn of himself--been
loved by any woman whom he himself could love.
In her ears there sounded Ferrier's quick, hoarsely uttered words:
"D'you think I should ever have said a word to you of all this--if you
had gone on being happy? D'you think I'd ask you to come to me if I
thought you had any chance of being happy with him--now?"
And she knew in her soul that he had spoken truly. Ferrier would never
have tried to disturb her happiness with Frank; he had never so tried
during those two years when they had seen so much of each other, and
when Agnes had known, deep down in her heart, that he loved her, though
it had suited her conscience to pretend that his love was only
"friendship."