Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize
the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of
sentiment?--EMERSON.
A fortnight had passed since the drawing of lots, and Lady Newhaven
remained in ignorance as to which of the two men had received his
death-warrant. Few have found suspense easy to bear; but for the
self-centred an intolerable element is added to it, which unselfish
natures escape. From her early youth Lady Newhaven had been in the habit
of viewing life in picturesque _tableaux vivants_ of which she
invariably formed the central figure. At her confirmation the Bishop,
the white-robed clergy, and the other candidates had served but as a
nebulous background against which her own white-clad, kneeling figure,
bowed in reverent devotion, stood out in high relief.
When she married Lord Newhaven he took so slight a part, though a
necessary one, in the wedding groups that their completeness had never
been marred by misgivings as to his exact position in them. When, six
years later, after one or two mild flirtations which only served as a
stimulus to her love of dress--when at last she met, as she would have
expressed it, "the one love of her life," her first fluctuations and
final deviation from the path of honor were the result of new
arrangements round the same centre.
The first groups in which Hugh took part had been prodigies of virtue.
The young mother with the Madonna face--Lady Newhaven firmly believed
that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows,
resembled that of a Madonna--with her children round her, Lord Newhaven
as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young,
handsome, devoted, heartbroken, and ennobled for life by the
contemplation of such impregnable virtue.
"You accuse me of coldness," she had imagined herself saying in a later
scene, when the children and the husband would have made too much of a
crowd, and were consequently omitted. "I wish to Heaven I were as cold
as I appear."
And she had really said it later on. Hugh never did accuse her of
coldness, but that was a detail. Those words, conned over many times,
had nevertheless actually proceeded out of her mouth. Few of us have the
power of saying anything we intend to say. But Lady Newhaven had that
power, and enjoyed also in consequence a profound belief in her
prophetic instincts; while others, Hugh not excepted, detected a
premeditated tone in her conversation, and a sense of incongruity
between her remarks and the occasion which called them forth.
From an early date in their married life Lord Newhaven had been in the
habit of discounting these remarks by making them in rapid rotation
himself before proceeding to the matter in hand.
"Having noticed that a mother--I mean a young mother--is never really
happy in the absence of her children, and that their affection makes up
for the carelessness of their father, may I ask, Violet, what day you
wish to return to Westhope?" he said one morning at breakfast.
"Any day," she replied. "I am as miserable in one place as in another."
"We will say Friday week, then," returned Lord Newhaven, ignoring, as he
invariably did, any allusions to their relative position, and because he
ignored them she made many. "The country," he added, hurriedly, "will be
very refreshing after the glare and dust and empty worldly society of
London."
She looked at him in anger. She did not understand the reason, but she
had long vaguely felt that all conversation seemed to dry up in his
presence. He mopped it all into his own sponge, so to speak, and left
every subject exhausted.
She rose in silent dignity, and went to her boudoir and lay down there.
The heat was very great, and another fire was burning within her,
withering her round cheek, and making her small, plump hand look shrunk
and thin. A fortnight had passed, and she had not heard from Hugh. She
had written to him many times, at first only imploring him to meet her,
but afterwards telling him she knew what had happened, and entreating
him to put her out of suspense, to send her one line that his life was
not endangered. She had received no answer to any of her letters. She
came to the conclusion that they had been intercepted by Lord Newhaven,
and that no doubt the same fate had befallen Hugh's letters to herself.
For some time past, before the drawing of lots, she had noticed that
Hugh's letters had become less frequent and shorter in length. She
understood the reason now. Half of them had been intercepted. How that
fact could account for the shortness of the remainder may not be
immediately apparent to the prosaic mind, but it was obvious to Lady
Newhaven. That Hugh had begun to weary of her could not force the narrow
entrance to her mind. Such a possibility had never been even considered
in the pictures of the future with which her imagination busied itself.
But what would the future be? The road along which she was walking
forked before her eyes, and her usual perspicacity was at fault. She
knew not in which of those two diverging paths the future would lie.
Would she in eighteen months' time--she should certainly refuse to marry
within the year--be standing at the altar in a "confection" of lilac and
white with Hugh; or would she be a miserable wife, moving ghostlike
about her house, in colored raiment, while a distant grave was always
white with flowers sent by a nameless friend of the dead? "How some one
must have loved him!" she imagined Hugh's aged mother saying. And once,
as that bereaved mother came in the dusk to weep beside the grave, did
she not see a shadowy figure start up, black-robed, from the
flower-laden sod, and, hastily drawing a thick veil over a beautiful,
despairing face, glide away among the trees? At this point Lady Newhaven
always began to cry. It was too heart-rending. And her mind in violent
recoil was caught once more, and broken on the same wheel. "Which?
_Which_?"
A servant entered.
"Would her ladyship see Miss West for a few minutes?"
"Yes," said Lady Newhaven, glad to be delivered from herself, if only by
the presence of an acquaintance.
"It is very charitable of you to see me," said Rachel. "Personally, I
think morning calls ought to be a penal offence. But I came at the
entreaty of a former servant of yours. I feel sure you will let me carry
some message of forgiveness to her, as she is dying. Her name is Morgan.
Do you remember her?"
"I once had a maid called Morgan," said Lady Newhaven. "She was drunken,
and I had to part with her in the end; but I kept her as long as I could
in spite of it. She had a genius for hair-dressing."
"She took your diamond heart pendant," continued Rachel. "She was never
found out. She can't return it, for, of course, she sold it and spent
the money. But now at last she feels she did wrong, and she says she
will die easier for your forgiveness."
"Oh! I forgive her," said Lady Newhaven, indifferently. "I often
wondered how I lost it. I never cared about it." She glanced at Rachel,
and added tremulously, "My husband gave it me."
A sudden impulse was urging her to confide in this grave, gentle-eyed
woman. The temptation was all the stronger because Rachel, who had only
lately appeared in society, was not connected with any portion of her
previous life. She was as much a chance acquaintance as a
fellow-passenger in a railway carriage.
Rachel rose and held out her hand.
"Don't go," whispered Lady Newhaven, taking her outstretched hand and
holding it.
"I think if I stay," said Rachel, "that you may say things you will
regret later on when you are feeling stronger. You are evidently tired
out now. Everything looks exaggerated when we are exhausted, as I see
you are."
"I am worn out with misery," said Lady Newhaven. "I have not slept for a
fortnight. I feel I must tell some one." And she burst into violent
weeping.
Rachel sat down again, and waited patiently for the hysterical weeping
to cease. Those in whom others confide early learn that their own
engagements, their own pleasures and troubles, are liable to be set
aside at any moment. Rachel was a punctual, exact person, but she missed
many trains. Those who sought her seldom realized that her day was as
full as, possibly fuller, than their own. Perhaps it was only a very
small pleasure to which she had been on her way on this particular
morning, and for which she had put on that ethereal gray gown for the
first time. At any rate, she relinquished it without a second thought.
Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes and turned impulsively towards
her.
The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so
mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to
guess which would come uppermost. Sometimes fragments of both appeared
on the surface together.
"I loved you from the first moment I saw you," she said. "I don't take
fancies to people, you know. I am not that kind of person. I am very
difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns myself. I am
_most_ reserved. I dare say you have noticed how reserved I am. I live
in my shell. But directly I saw you I felt I could talk to you. I said
to myself, 'I will make a friend of that girl.' Although I always feel a
married woman is so differently placed from a girl. A girl only thinks
of herself. I am not saying this the least unkindly, but, of course, it
is so. Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all
she says and does. How will it affect _them?_ That is what I so often
say to myself, and then my lips are sealed. But, of course, being
unmarried, you would not understand that feeling."
Rachel did not answer. She was inured to this time-honored
conversational opening.
"And the temptations of married life," continued Lady Newhaven--"a girl
cannot enter into them."
"Then do not tell me about them," said Rachel, smiling, wondering if she
might still escape. But Lady Newhaven had no intention of letting her
go. She only wished to indicate to her her true position. And gradually,
not without renewed outbursts of tears, not without traversing many
layers of prepared conventional feelings, in which a few thin streaks of
genuine emotion wore embedded, she told her story--the story of a young,
high-minded, and neglected wife, and of a husband callous, indifferent,
a scorner of religion, unsoftened even by the advent of the
children--"such sweet children, such little darlings"--and the gradual
estrangement. Then came the persistent siege to the lonely heart of one
not pretty, perhaps, but fatally attractive to men; the lonely heart's
unparalleled influence for good over the besieger.
"He would do anything," said Lady Newhaven, looking earnestly at Rachel.
"My influence over him is simply boundless. If I said, as I sometimes
did at balls, how sorry I was to see some plain girl standing out, he
would go and dance with her. I have seen him do it."
"I suppose he did it to please you."
"That was just it, simply to please me."
Rachel was not so astonished as Lady Newhaven expected. She certainly
was rather wooden, the latter reflected. The story went on. It became
difficult to tell, and, according to the teller, more and more liable to
misconstruction. Rachel's heart ached as bit by bit the inevitable
development was finally reached in floods of tears.
"And you remember that night you were at an evening party here," sobbed
Lady Newhaven, casting away all her mental notes and speaking extempore.
"It is just a fortnight ago, and I have not slept since, and _he_ was
here, looking so miserable"--(Rachel started slightly)--"he sometimes
did, if he thought I was hard upon him. And afterwards, when every one
had gone, Edward took him to his study and told him he had found us out,
and they drew lots which should kill himself within five months--and I
listened at the door."
Lady Newhaven's voice rose half strangled, hardly human, in a shrill
grotesque whimper above the sobs which were shaking her. There was no
affectation about her now.
Rachel's heart went out to her the moment she was natural. She knelt
down and put her strong arms round her. The poor thing clung to her,
and, leaning her elaborate head against her, wept tears of real anguish
upon her breast.
"And which drew the short lighter?" said Rachel at last.
"I don't know," almost shrieked Lady Newhaven. "It is that which is
killing me. Sometimes I think it is Edward, and sometimes I think it is
Hugh."
At the name of Hugh, Rachel winced. Lady Newhaven had mentioned no name
in the earlier stages of her story while she had some vestige of
self-command; but now at last the Christian name slipped out unawares.
Rachel strove to speak calmly. She told herself there were many Hughs in
the world.
"Is Mr. Hugh Scarlett the man you mean?" she asked. If she had died for
it, she must have asked that question.
"Yes," said Lady Newhaven.
A shadow fell on Rachel's face, as on the face of one who suddenly
discovers, not for the first time, an old enemy advancing upon him under
the flag of a new ally.
"I shall always love him," gasped Lady Newhaven, recovering herself
sufficiently to recall a phrase which she had made up the night before.
"I look upon it as a spiritual marriage."