"AND NOW I LIVE, AND NOW MY LIFE IS DONE!"
George Gilbert accepted his wife's explanation of her prolonged absence
on that March afternoon. She had carried her books to Thurston's Crag,
and had sat there reading, while the time slipped by unawares, and it
was too late to come back to dinner; and so she had bethought herself
that there was evening service at Hurstonleigh during Passion-week, and
she might hear Mr. Colborne preach. George Gilbert received this
explanation as he would have received any other statement from the lips
in whose truth he believed. But Mrs. Jeffson treated her young mistress
with a stately politeness that wounded Isabel to the quick. She endured
it very meekly, however; for she felt that she had been wicked, and that
all her sufferings were the fruit of her own sin. She stayed at home for
the rest of the week, except when she attended the Good-Friday's
services at Graybridge church with her husband; and on Sunday afternoon
she persuaded George to accompany her to Hurstonleigh. She was making
her feeble effort to be good; and if the enthusiasm awakened in her
breast by Mr. Colborne's preaching died out a little after she left the
church, there was at the worst something left which made her a better
woman than she had been before. But did she forget Roland Lansdell all
this time? No; with bitter anguish and regret she thought of the man who
had been as powerless to comprehend her as he was intellectually her
superior.
"He knows so much, and yet did not know that I was not a wicked woman,"
she thought, in simple wonder. She did not understand Roland's sceptical
manner of looking at everything, which could perceive no palpable
distinction between wrong and right. She could not comprehend that this
man had believed himself justified in what he had done.
But she thought of him incessantly. The image of his pale reproachful
face--so pale, so bitterly reproachful--never left her mental vision.
The sound of his voice bidding her leave him was perpetually in her
ears. He had loved her: yes; however deep his guilt, he had loved her,
and had wept because of her. There were times when the memory of his
tears, flashing back upon her suddenly, nearly swept away all her
natural purity, her earnest desire to be good; there were times when she
wanted to go to him and fall at his feet, crying out, "Oh, what am I,
that my life should be counted against your sorrow? How can it matter
what becomes of me, if you are happy?"
There were times when the thought of Roland Lansdell's sorrow overcame
every other thought in Isabel Gilbert's mind. Until the day when he had
thrown himself upon the ground in a sudden passion of grief, she had
never realized the possibility of his being unhappy because of her. For
him to love her in a patronizing far-off kind of manner was very much.
Was it not the condescension of a demigod, who smiles upon some earthly
creature? Was it not a reversal of the story of Diana and Endymion? It
was not the goddess, but the god, who came down to earth. But that he
should love her desperately and passionately, and be grief-stricken
because he could not win her for his own,--this was a stupendous fact,
almost beyond Isabel Gilbert's comprehension. Sometimes she thought he
was only the wicked squire who pretends to be very much in earnest in
the first act, and flings aside his victim with scorn and contumely in
the second. Sometimes the whole truth burst upon her, sudden as a
thunder-clap, and she felt that she had indeed done Roland Lansdell a
great and cruel wrong.
* * * * *
And where was he all this time--the man who had judged Isabel Gilbert by
a common standard, and had believed her quite ready to answer to his
summons whenever he chose to call her to his side? Who shall tell the
bitter sinful story of his grief and passion? Never once in all his
anger against Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey, when she jilted him for the sake
of young Lord Heatherland, had he felt so desperate a rage, so deep an
indignation, as that which now possessed him when he thought of Isabel
Gilbert. Wounded in his pride, his vanity; shaken in the self-confidence
peculiar to a man of the world; he could not all at once forgive this
woman who had so entirely duped and deceived him. He was mad with
mingled anger and disappointment when he thought of the story of the
last twelve-month. The bitterness of all his struggles with himself; his
heroic resolutions--young and fresh in the early morning, old and grey
and wasted before the brief day was done--came back to him; and he
laughed aloud to think how useless all those perplexities and
hesitations had been, when the obstacle, the real resistance, to his
sinful yearnings was _here_--here, in the shape of a simple woman's
will.
There may be some men who would not have thought the story finished with
that farewell under Lord Thurston's oak; but Roland Lansdell was not one
of those men. He had little force of mind or strength of purpose with
which to fight against temptation: but he had, on the other hand, few of
the qualifications which make a tempter. So long as he had been
uncertain of himself, and the strength of his love for Isabel, he had
indeed dissembled, so far as to make a poor show of indifference. So
long as he meant to go away from Midlandshire without "doing any harm,"
he had thought it a venial sin to affect some little friendship for the
husband of the woman he loved. But from the moment in which all
vacillation gave way before a settled purpose--from the hour of his
return to Midlandshire--he had made no secret of his feelings or
intentions. He had urged this girl to do a dishonourable act, but he had
used no dishonourable means. No words can tell how bitterly he felt his
disappointment. For the first time in his life this favourite of
bountiful nature, this spoiled child of fortune, found there was
something in the world he could not have, something that was denied to
his desire. It was such a very little time since he had bewailed the
extinction of all youthful hope and ardour in pretty cynical little
verses, all sparkling with scraps of French and Latin, and Spanish and
Italian, cunningly woven into the native pattern of the rhyme. It was
only a few months since he had amused himself by scribbling melodious
lamentations upon the emptiness of life in general, and that "mortal
coldness of the soul" to which a young man of seven-and-twenty, with a
great deal of money, and nothing particular to do, is especially
subject. Ah, how pitilessly he had laughed at other men's tenderest
sentiments! What cruel aphorisms from Scarron and Rochefoucauld, and
Swift and Voltaire, and Wilkes and Mirabeau, he had quoted upon the
subject of love and woman! How resolutely he had refused to believe in
the endurance of passion! how coldly he had sneered at the holy power of
affection! He had given himself cynical airs upon the strength of his
cousin's falsehood: and had declared there was no truth in woman,
because Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey had been true to the teaching of her
life, and had tried to make the best market of her Saxon face and her
long ringlets. And now he was utterly false to his own creed. He was in
love, passionately, earnestly in love, with a foolish sentimental little
woman, whose best charm was--what? That was the question which he tried
in vain to answer. He gnashed his teeth in an access of rage when he
sought to discover why he loved this woman. Other women more beautiful,
and how much more accomplished, had spread enchanted webs of delicious
flattery and tenderness about him; and he had broken through the
impalpable meshes, and had gone away unscathed from the flashing glances
of bright eyes, unmoved by the smiles for which other men were ready to
peril so much. Why was it that his heart yearned for this woman's
presence? She was in no way his intellectual equal: she was not a
companion for him, even at her best, when she murmured pretty little
feminine truisms about Shelley and Byron. In all his loiterings by Lord
Thurston's waterfall, he could recall no wise or witty saying that had
ever fallen from those childish lips. And yet, and yet--she was
something to him that no other woman had ever been, or, as he firmly
believed, ever could become. Oh, for one upward glance of those dark
eyes, so shyly tender, so pensively serene! Oh, for the deep delight of
standing by her side upon the border of a still Italian lake; for the
pure happiness of opening all the wild realms of wisdom and poetry
before those youthful feet! And then in after years, when she had risen
little by little to the standard which the world would deem befitting
his wife,--then, fate, or chance, the remote abstraction most men call
Providence, having favoured the truest and purest love upon this
earth,--then he might proclaim the ownership of the prize he had won for
himself; then he might exhibit before shallow, sceptical mankind, one
bright and grand example of a perfect union.
Mr. Lansdell's thoughts wandered very much after this fashion as he wore
out the long dreary days in his solitary home. He went nowhere; he
received no one. He gave the servants standing orders to say that he was
out, or engaged, to whomsoever came to Mordred. His portmanteaus were
packed, and had been packed ever since the night of his last meeting
with Isabel Gilbert. Every day he gave fresh orders respecting his
departure. He would have the carriage at such an hour, to catch a
certain train: but when the hour came, the groom was sent back to the
stables, and Mr. Lansdell lingered yet another day at Mordred Priory.
He could not go away. In vain, in vain he wrestled with himself: most
bitterly did he despise and hate himself for his unmanly weakness; but
he could not go away. She would repent: she would write to summon him to
another meeting beneath the bare old oak. With an imagination as ardent
as her own, he could picture that meeting; he could almost hear her
voice as he fancied the things she would say. "My love, my love!" she
would cry, clasping those slender hands about his arm; "I cannot live
without you: I cannot, I cannot!"
The weeks went slowly by, and Mr. Lansdell's body-servant had what that
individual was pleased to designate "a precious time of it." Never was
gentleman's gentleman so tormented by the whims and vagaries of his
master. One day "we" were off to Swisserland--Mr. Lansdell's valet
always called it Swisserland--and we were to go as fast as the railway
service could carry us, and not get a wink of sleep anywheres, except in
railway-carriages, until we got to Paw or Bas-el--the valet called it
Bas-el. Another day we were going to St. Petersburg, with our friend
Hawkwood, the Queen's messenger; and a pretty rate we were going at,
knocking the very lives out of us. Sometimes we were for tearing across
the Balkan range, on those blessed Turkish horses, that jolt a man's
life half out of him; or we were going on a yachting-cruise in the
Mediterranean; or fishing in the wildest regions of Norway. And all
about a trumpery minx at Graybridge! Mr. Lansdell's body-servant would
wind up, with unmitigated contempt: all about a young person who was not
fit to hold a candle to Sarah Jane the housemaid, or Eliza in the
laundry! Alas for Roland Lansdell, the servants who waited upon him knew
quite as well as he knew himself the nature of the fever which had made
him so restless! They knew that he was in love with a woman who could
never be his wife; and they despised him for his folly, and discussed
all the phases of his madness over their ponderous meat-suppers in the
servants' hall.
The weeks went slowly by. To Roland, the days were weary and the nights
intolerable. He went up to London several times, always leaving Mordred
alone and at abnormal hours, and every time intending to remain away.
But he could not: a sudden fever seized him as the distance grew wider
between him and Midlandshire. She would repent of her stern
determination: she would write to him, avowing that she could not live
without him. Ah, how long he had expected that letter! She would grow
suddenly unable to endure her life, perhaps, and would be rash and
desperate enough to go to Mordred in the hope of seeing him. This would
happen while he was away: the chance of happiness would be offered to
him, and he would not be there to seize it. She, his love, the sole joy
and treasure of his life, would be there, trembling on his threshold,
and he would not be near to welcome and receive her. The people at the
Clarendon thought that Mr. Lansdell had gone mad, so sudden were his
flights from their comfortable quarters.
And all this time he could hear nothing of the woman he loved. He could
not talk to his servants, and he had closed his doors against all
visitors. What was she doing? Was she at Graybridge still? Was she
leading the old quiet life, sitting in that shabby parlour, where he had
sat by her side? He remembered the pattern of the Kidderminster carpet,
the limp folds of the muslin-curtains, the faded crimson silk that
decorated the front of the piano upon which she had sometimes played to
him, oh, so indifferently. Day after day he haunted the bridge under
Lord Thurston's oak; day after day he threw tribute of cigar-ends into
the waterfall, while he waited in the faint hope that the Doctor's Wife
might wander thither. Oh, how cruel she was; how cruel! If she had ever
loved him, she too would have haunted that spot. She would have come to
the place associated with his memory: she would have come, as he came,
in the hope of another meeting.
Sometimes Mr. Lansdell ventured to ride along the little street at
Graybridge and through the dusty lane in which the doctor's house stood.
On horseback the master of Mordred Priory was almost on a level with the
bedroom windows of George Gilbert's habitation, and could look down into
the little parlour where Isabel was wont to sit. Once and once only he
saw her there, sitting before the table with some needlework in her
hands, so deeply absorbed, as it seemed, in her commonplace labour that
she did not see the cavalier who rode so slowly past her window. How
should he know how often she had run eagerly to that very window--her
face pale, her heart beating tempestuously--only to find that it was not
his horse whose hoof she had heard in the lane?
Perhaps the sight of George Gilbert's wife sitting at her needlework
gave Roland Lansdell a sharper pang than he would have felt had he seen
two mutes from Wareham keeping guard at the gate, and Mrs. Gilbert's
coffin being carried out at the door. She was not dead, then: she could
live and be happy, while he----! Well, he was not dead himself,
certainly; but he was the very next thing to being dead; and he felt
indignant at the sight of Isabel's apparent composure.
He walked to Lowlands in the course of a week or so after this, and
strolled into the drawing-rooms with some undefined intention of
flirting desperately with his cousin Gwendoline; of making her an offer
of marriage, perhaps. Why should he not marry? He could scarcely be more
miserable than he was; and a marriage with Gwendoline would be some kind
of revenge upon Isabel. He was inclined to do anything desperate and
foolish, if by so doing he could sting that cruel, obdurate heart. Was
this generous? Ah, no. But then, in spite of all that is said and sung
in its honour, love is not such a very generous passion. Roland found
his cousin alone, in the long low morning-room looking out into her
flower-garden. She was making wax flowers, and looked almost as tired of
her employment as if she had been some poor little artisan toiling for
scanty wages.
"I'm very glad you have interrupted me, Roland," she said, pushing away
all the paraphernalia of her work; "they are very tiresome; and, after
all, the roses are as stiff as camellias, and at the very best a vase of
wax-flowers only reminds one of an hotel at a watering-place. They
always have wax-flowers and Bohemian-glass candelabra at sea-side
hotels. And now tell me what you have been doing, Roland; and why you
have never come to us. We are so terribly dull."
"And do you think my presence would enliven you?" demanded Mr. Lansdell,
with a sardonic laugh. "No, Gwendoline; I have lived my life, and I am
only a dreary bore whom people tolerate in their drawing-rooms out of
deference to the West-end tailor who gets me up. I am only so much old
clothes, and I have to thank Mr. Poole for any position that I hold in
the world. What is the use of me, Gwendoline? what am I good for? Do I
ever say anything new, or think anything new, or do anything for which
any human creature has cause to say, Thank you? I have lived my life.
Does this kind of thing usually grow old, I wonder?" he asked, striking
himself lightly on the breast. "Does it wear well? Shall I live to write
gossiping old letters and collect china? Will Christie and Manson sell
my pictures when I am dead? and shall I win a posthumous reputation by
reason of the prices given for my wines, especially Tokay?--all
connoisseurs go in for Tokay. What is to become of me, Gwendoline? Will
any woman have pity upon me and marry me, and transform me into a family
man, with a mania for short-horned cattle and subsoil-drainage? Is there
any woman in all the world capable of caring a little for such a
worn-out wretch as I?"
It almost depended upon Gwendoline Pomphrey whether this speech should
constitute an offer of marriage. A pretty lackadaisical droop of the
head; a softly-murmured, "Oh, Roland, I cannot bear to hear you talk
like this; I cannot bear to think such qualities as yours can be so
utterly wasted;" any sentimental, womanly little speech, however
stereotyped; and the thing would have been done. But Lady Gwendoline was
a great deal too proud to practise any of those feminine arts affected
by manoeuvring mothers. She might jilt a commoner for the chance of
winning a marquis; but even that she would only do in a grand off-hand
way befitting a daughter of the house of Ruysdale. She looked at her
cousin now with something like contempt in the curve of her thin upper
lip. She loved this man perhaps as well as the Doctor's Wife loved him,
or it may be even with a deeper and more enduring love; but she was of
his world, and could see his faults and shortcomings as plainly as he
saw them himself.
"I am very sorry you have sunk so low as this, Roland," she said,
gravely. "I fancy it would be much better for you if you employed your
life half as well as other men, your inferiors in talent, employ their
lives. You were never meant to become a cynical dawdler in a country
house. If I were a man, a fortnight in the hunting season would exhaust
the pleasures of Midlandshire for me; I would be up and doing amongst my
compeers."
She looked, not at Roland, but across the flower-beds in the garden as
she spoke, with an eager yearning gaze in her blue eyes. Her beauty, a
little sharp of outline for a woman, would have well become a young
reformer, enthusiastic and untiring in a noble cause. There are these
mistakes sometimes--these _mesalliances_ of clay and spirit. A bright
ambitious young creature, with the soul of a Pitt, sits at home and
works sham roses in Berlin wool; while her booby brother is thrust out
into the world to fight the mighty battle.
The cousins sat together for some time, talking of all manner of things.
It was a kind of relief to Roland to talk to some one--to some one who
was not likely to lecture him, or to pry into the secrets of his heart.
He did not know how very plainly those secrets were read by Gwendoline
Pomphrey. He did not know that he had aroused a scornful kind of anger
in that proud heart by his love for Isabel Gilbert.
"Have you seen anything of your friends lately-that Graybridge surgeon
and his wife, whom we met one day last summer at Mordred?" Lady
Gwendoline asked by-and-by, with supreme carelessness. She had no
intention of letting Roland go away with his wound unprobed.
"No; I have seen very little of them," Mr. Lansdell answered. He was not
startled by Lady Gwendoline's question: he was perpetually thinking of
Isabel, and felt no surprise at any allusion made to her by other
people. "I have not seen Mr. Gilbert since I returned to England."
"Indeed! I thought he had inspired you with an actual friendship for
him: though I must confess, for my own part, I never met a more
commonplace person. My maid, who is an intolerable gossip, tells me that
Mrs. Gilbert has been suddenly seized with a religions mania, and
attends all the services at Hurstonleigh. The Midlandshire people seem
to have gone mad about that Mr. Colborne. I went to hear him last Sunday
myself, and was very much pleased. I saw Mr. Gilbert's wife sitting in a
pew near the pulpit, with her great unmeaning eyes fixed upon the
curate's face all through the sermon. She is just the sort of person to
fall in love with a popular preacher."
Mr. Lansdell's face flushed a vivid scarlet, and then grew pale. "With
her great unmeaning eyes fixed upon the curate's face." Those wondrous
eyes that had so often looked up at him, mutely eloquent, tenderly
pensive. Oh, had he been fooled by his own vanity? was this woman a
sentimental coquette, ready to fall in love with any man who came across
her path, learned in stereotyped schoolgirl phrases about platonic
affection? Lady Gwendoline's shaft went straight home to his heart. He
tried to talk about a few commonplace subjects with a miserable
assumption of carelessness; and then, looking suddenly up at the clock
on the chimney-piece, made a profuse apology for the length of his
visit, and hurried away. It was four o'clock when he left the gates of
Lowlands, and the next day was Sunday.
"I will see for myself," he muttered, as he walked along a narrow lane,
slashing the low hedge-rows with his stick as he went; "I will see for
myself to-morrow."