"There cannot be a pinch in death more sharp than this is."
The Bishop's sister, Miss Keane, whose life was a perpetual orgy of
mothers' meetings and G.F.S. gatherings, was holding a district
visitors' working party in the drawing-room at the Palace. The ladies
knitted and stitched, while one of their number heaped fuel on the flame
of their enthusiasm by reading aloud the "History of the Diocese of
Southminster."
Miss Keane took but little heed of the presence of Rachel and Hester in
her brother's house. Those who work mechanically on fixed lines seem, as
a rule, to miss the pith of life. She was kind when she remembered them,
but her heart was where her treasure was--namely, in her escritoire,
with her list of Bible-classes, and servants' choral unions, and the
long roll of contributors to the guild of work which she herself had
started.
When she had been up to Hester's room, invariably at hours when Hester
could not see her, and when she had entered Rachel's sledge-hammer
subscriptions in her various account-books, her attention left her
visitors. She considered them superficial, and wondered how it was that
her brother could find time to spend hours talking to both of them,
while he had rarely a moment in which to address her chosen band in the
drawing-room. She was one of those persons who find life a very prosaic
affair, quite unlike the fiction she occasionally read.
She often remarked that nothing except the commonplace happened.
Certainly she never observed anything else.
So Hester lay in the room above, halting feebly between two opinions,
whether to live or to die, and Rachel sat in the Bishop's study beneath,
waiting to make tea for him on his return from the confirmation.
If she did not make it, no one else did. Instead of ringing for it he
went without it.
Rachel watched the sun set--a red ball dropping down a frosty sky. It
was the last day of the year. The new year was bringing her everything.
"Good-bye, good-bye," she said, looking at the last rim of the sun as he
sank. And she remembered other years when she had watched the sun set on
the last day of December, when life had been difficult--how difficult!
"If Hester could only get better I should have nothing left to wish
for," she said, and she prayed the more fervently for her friend,
because she knew that even if Hester died, life would still remain
beautiful; the future without her would still be flooded with happiness.
"A year ago if Hester had died I should have had nothing left to live
for," she said to herself. "Now this newcomer, this man whom I have
known barely six months, fills my whole life. Are other women as narrow
as I am? Can they care only for one person at a time like me? Ah,
Hester! forgive me, I can't help it."
Hugh was coming in presently. He had been in that morning, and the
Bishop had met him, and had asked him to come in again to tea. Rachel
did not know what the Bishop thought of him, but he had managed to see a
good deal of Hugh.
Rachel waited as impatiently as most of us, when our happiness lingers
by us, loth to depart.
At last she heard the footman bringing some one across the hall.
Would Hugh's coming ever become a common thing? Would she ever be able
to greet him without this tumult of emotion, ever be able to take his
hand without turning giddy on the sheer verge of bliss?
The servant announced, "Lady Newhaven."
The two women stood looking at each other. Rachel saw the marks of
suffering on the white face, and her own became as white. Her eyes fell
guiltily before Lady Newhaven's.
"Forgive me," she said.
"Forgive you?" said Lady Newhaven, in a hoarse voice. "It is no use
asking me for forgiveness."
"You are right," said Rachel, recovering herself, and meeting Lady
Newhaven's eyes fully. "But what is the use of coming here to abuse me?
You might have spared yourself and me this at least. It will only
exhaust you and--wound me."
"You must give him up," said Lady Newhaven, her hands fumbling under her
crape cloak. "I've come to tell you that you must let him go."
The fact that Hugh had drawn the short lighter, and had not taken the
consequences, did not affect Lady Newhaven's feelings towards him in the
least, but she was vaguely aware that somehow it would affect Rachel's,
and now it would be Rachel's turn to suffer.
Rachel paused a moment, and then said, slowly:
"He does not wish to be let go."
"He is mine."
"He was yours once," said Rachel, her face turning from white to gray.
That wound was long in healing. "But he is mine now."
"Rachel, you cannot be bad all through." Lady Newhaven was putting the
constraint upon herself which that tightly clutched paper, that poisoned
weapon in reserve, enabled her to assume. For Hugh's sake she would only
use it if other means failed. "You must know that you ought to look upon
him as a married man. Don't you see"--wildly--"that we _must_ marry, to
put right what was wrong? He owes it to me. People always do."
"Yes, they generally do," said Rachel; "but I don't see how it makes the
wrong right."
"I look upon Hugh as my husband," said Lady Newhaven.
"So do I."
"Rachel, he loves me. He is only marrying you for your money."
"I will risk that."
"I implore you on my knees to give him back to me."
And Lady Newhaven knelt down with bare, white outstretched hands.
(Tableau number one. New Series.)
Rachel shrank back involuntarily.
"Listen, Violet," she said, "and get up. I will not speak until you get
up." Lady Newhaven obeyed. "If I gave back Hugh to you a hundred times
it would not make him love you any more, or make him marry you. I am not
keeping him from you. This marriage is his own doing. Oh! Violet, I'm
not young and pretty. I've no illusions about myself; but I believe he
really does love me, in spite of that, and I know I love him."
"I don't believe it," said Lady Newhaven. "I mean about him. Not about
you, of course."
"Here he is. Let him decide," said Rachel.
Hugh came in unannounced. Upon his grave face there was that
concentrated look of happiness which has settled in the very deep of the
heart and gleams up into the eyes.
His face changed painfully. He glanced from one woman to the other.
Rachel was sorry for him. She would fain have spared him, but she could
not.
"Hugh," she said, gently, her steadfast eyes resting on him, "Lady
Newhaven and I were talking of you. I think it would be best if she
heard from your own lips what she, naturally, will not believe from
mine."
"I will never believe," said Lady Newhaven, "that you will desert me
now, that all the past is nothing to you, and that you will cast me
aside for another woman."
Hugh looked at her steadily. Then he went up to Rachel, and taking her
hand, raised it to his lips. There was in his manner a boundless
reverent adoration that was to Lady Newhaven's jealousy as a match to
gunpowder.
Rachel kept his hand.
"Are you sure you want him, Rachel?" gasped Lady Newhaven, holding
convulsively to a chair for support. "He has cast me aside. He will cast
you aside next, for he is a coward and a traitor. Are you sure you want
to marry him? His hands are red with blood. He murdered my husband."
Rachel's hand tightened on Hugh's.
"It was an even chance," she said. "Those who draw lots must abide by
the drawing."
"It was an even chance," shrieked Lady Newhaven. "But who drew the short
lighter, tell me that? Who refused to fulfil his part when the time was
up? Tell me that."
"You are mad," said Rachel.
"I can prove it," said Lady Newhaven, holding out the letter in her
shaking hands. "You may read it, Rachel. I can trust you. Not him, he
would burn it. It is from Edward; look, you know his writing, written to
tell me that he," pointing at Hugh, "had drawn the short lighter, but
that, as he had not killed himself when the time came, he, Edward, did
so instead. That was why he was late. We always wondered, Rachel, why he
was two days late. Read it! Read it!"
"I will not read it," said Rachel, pushing away the paper. "I do not
believe a word of it."
"You shall believe it. Ask him to deny it, if he can."
"You need not trouble to deny it," said Rachel, looking full at Hugh.
The world held only her and him. And as Hugh looked into her eyes his
soul rose up and scaled the heights above it till it stood beside hers.
There is a sacred place where, if we follow close in Love's footsteps,
we see him lay aside his earthly quiver and his bitter arrows, and turn
to us as he is, with the light of God upon him, one with us as one with
God. In that pure light lies cease to be. We know them no more, neither
remember them, for love and truth are one.
Hugh strode across to Lady Newhaven, took the letter from her, and threw
it into the heart of the fire. Then he turned to Rachel.
"I drew the short lighter," he said. "I meant to take the consequences
at first, but when the time came--I did not. Partly I was afraid, and
partly I could not leave you."
If Lady Newhaven yearned for revenge she had it then. They had both
forgotten her. But she saw Rachel's eyes change as the eyes of a man at
the stake might change when the fire reached him. She shrank back from
the agony in them. Hugh's face became pinched and thin as a dead man's.
A moment ago he saw no consequences. He saw only that he could not lie
to her. His mind fell headlong from its momentary foothold. What mad
impulse had betrayed him to his ruin?
"You drew the short lighter, and you let me think all the time he had,"
said Rachel, her voice almost inaudible in its fierce passion. "You drew
it, and you let him die instead of you, as any one who knew him would
know he would. And when he was dead you came to me, and kept me in
ignorance even--that time--when I said I trusted you."
The remembrance of that meeting was too much.
Rachel turned her eyes on Lady Newhaven, who was watching her
terror-stricken.
"I said I would not give him up, but I will," she said, violently. "You
can take him if you want him. What was it you said to me, Hugh? That if
you had drawn the short lighter you would have had to abide by it. Yes,
that was it. Your whole intercourse with me has been one lie from first
to last. You were right, Violet, when you said he ought to marry you. It
will be another lie on the top of all the others."
"It was what Edward wished," faltered his widow. "He says so in the
letter that has just been burned."
"Lord Newhaven wished it," said Rachel, looking at the miserable man
between them. "Poor Lord Newhaven! First his honor. Then his life. You
have taken everything he had. But there are still his shoes."
"Rachel!" said Hugh, suddenly, and he fell on his knees before her,
clasping the hem of her gown.
She pushed him violently from her, tearing her gown in releasing it from
his frenzied grasp.
"Leave me," she whispered. Her voice was almost gone. "Coward and liar,
I will have nothing more to do with you."
He got upon his feet somehow. The two gray desperate faces spent with
passion faced each other. They were past speech.
He read his death-warrant in her merciless eyes. She looked at the
despair in his without flinching.
He stood a moment, and then feeling his way, like one half blind, left
the room, unconsciously pushing aside Lady Newhaven, whom both had
forgotten.
She gave one terrified glance at Rachel, and slipped out after him.