To Sainty, sitting alone in his old room in the western pavilion, it
seemed that there was no bitterness left untasted. Far into the night he
sat, his elbows on the table, his head buried in his hands. At first all
seemed mere chaos and horror; he was stunned and could not think. But
for the haunting consciousness of misery, he could almost have fancied
that he had slept. Gradually, however, definite images began to emerge
from the bewildered trouble of his brain.
What was this thing that had come on him, through no fault of his own?
He had done no wrong, snatched no forbidden pleasure; it was those other
two who had sinned and enjoyed. Why must he be pilloried with them,
share the scandal and the punishment? He, with his morbid shrinking from
publicity, to have his private life turned inside out to the scorn and
laughter of the vulgar! He knew well enough how little sympathy he had
to expect; in all times and countries had not the betrayed husband been
a butt for mirth? He wondered why. It seemed hard to him that of the
three characters in the eternal drama of adultery, it should always be
the one innocent person that was selected for satire. Surely it was the
most elementary justice that punishment should fall on him who injures
his fellow, not upon the injured. Yet of they three, who would suffer
most? He, without a doubt, who had the greatest capacity for suffering.
He saw, as in a dream, the dingy scene of the divorce-court, the
headlines in the papers, his name dragged in the dirt. He pictured to
himself the long martyrdom of cross examination, the bar pathos, the bar
wit; he knew how he should flinch and writhe at the stake.
In his case, moreover, the situation was complicated by the coming
child. He had not only to proclaim his dishonour to the world, but must
lay bare to every grinning idiot the grotesque story of his married
life. If the husband whose rights had been invaded was absurd, what of
him who had not even been able to obtain those rights. And he must stand
up in open court and tell this thing of himself, he who felt the mere
idea of marriage too sacred for spoken words! The cruel irony of it all!
Was there no other issue but through that horrible sordid ordeal? What
did men do in his position? What was the _beau rôle_ for the injured
husband? He thought of Dumas’s ‘_Tue-la!_’ and wondered how it would
have advanced matters if he had murdered Cissy, supposing he had the
strength and courage to do it. It was only to shift the scene; another
court, an added horror, but the same publicity, the same scandal, the
same story to tell, the same agony to undergo.
He almost regretted the foolish old fantastic code of honour which would
have made it incumbent on him to challenge the seducer, and as likely as
not be killed by him. Death _might_ have been a solution, but there was
no such easy way out of the situation as that. The hand that had done
him so much wrong would not render him that supremest service.
Hitherto he had succeeded almost without conscious effort in keeping the
inevitable third in this grim trio almost an abstraction. Yet he
remembered how passionately he had refused to know, when his wife had
offered him the name of her lover. Now the figure was beginning to take
shape against his will; a tall figure with a false air of slenderness, a
figure that by the languid grace of its movements counteracted the
slight tendency to heaviness in the hips and shoulders. How well he knew
that back, the sinuous curves of the waist, the sidelong persuasive
droop of the head; he had seen it walking away beside Cissy on the
afternoon of their very first meeting. It had been pressed against the
glass door that held him an unwilling witness on the night of the ball
at Sunborough House. How clearly the impressions came back to him, the
dusky garden speckled leopard-wise with lanterns, the lithe, shimmering
blackness of the figure at his side trying to instil the doubts he would
not harbour, the swift swing back of the door, the words so clearly
overheard, that then had held no meaning for him. Still it was only a
back, he had not seen the face, the gentle, kindly, sly, mocking face.
He pressed his icy fingers tight against his hard straining eyeballs as
if he could shut it out, that face he would not see. Not _he_! not he of
all men! Had not his mother mentioned other men with whom her imprudence
was compromising Cissy? Oh! but that back was unmistakable. And then the
voice! low and soft, but so distinct; he could hear it, could hear the
words, counselling the horrible meanness of which he had so nearly been
the dupe. He understood _now_ the secret of her mysterious behaviour in
the library that night. Surely such baseness was unbelievable; even
Cissy had recoiled from carrying out the scheme.
For one brief moment he wished she could have done it--that he might
have been deceived. ‘I need never have known!’ he cried, and his voice
speaking aloud in the silence of the night startled him like the cry of
a creature that is being killed.
He raised his head and looked about him. The candle he had brought had
burnt almost to the socket; he rose and lighted two others from it, and
blew it out. The chill of the tireless summer night made him shiver, but
there was that which lay so cold about his heart that he welcomed the
physical discomfort as almost a relief. He moved about the room for a
little, but soon tiring, went and sat down again.
The same procession of black thoughts kept up their weary circle through
his head; round and round he followed them, yet came no nearer any
light, nor any decision of what it behoved him to do under the
circumstances. Was this the end of all his dreams, all his sacrifices,
all his endeavour for others, all he had hoped to accomplish? Was
everything to go down in this whirlpool of a disgrace greater even than
that which Arthur’s marriage had brought upon them? It was Arthur’s
marriage that had been the origin of all his troubles. Oh yes, he saw it
clearly enough now; however he had deceived himself at the time, he had
married, had taken on himself the most sacred obligations, for no object
but the mean one of excluding his brother. Perhaps this was his
punishment.
He saw what a puppet he had been in the hands of two strong-willed
women, an instrument to satisfy the vulgar ambitions of the one, the
angry revenge of the other. What a failure, what a dreary failure he had
been all through! For years he had had but one thought, one object in
life, to steer Arthur past the rocks and quicksands of youth, and anchor
him safe in the harbour of property and responsibility, and with what
result? What had come of all his plans, his careful tact, his delicate
manipulation of his mother and brother? Arthur’s marriage afforded a
comment of grimmest irony on his efforts in that direction. Since then,
as ardently as he had once longed to renounce his birthright in favour
of his brother, he had striven to preserve it from that contaminating
touch, to keep that brother’s wife from sitting in their mother’s place;
and, once more, with what result? To instal in the innermost shrine of
all he held most sacred a woman no less wanton than her sister-in-law,
only without her redeeming qualities and the excuses of her early
training, one who would make his home a wilderness, his name a by-word!
Shame, then, shame either way, and nothing accomplished!
It is not to be supposed that he thought these things out for himself,
coldly, sententiously, in order, as, for the sake of the reader, they
have to be written down. They were the residuum of all sorts of wild and
whirling fancies, flung up at him, as it were, out of a seething
cauldron of black wretchedness, which was rather sensation than thought.
Not once, moreover, but a thousand times, did each and all of them
appear and vanish in a kind of witches’ dance to his weary brain,
without perceptible sequence or connection. He seemed somehow to be
outside his own consciousness, to sit and watch these images, as, one by
one, some demon held them up for his tormenting, yet all the while every
nerve in him tingled with the apprehension of how intimately they were
part of himself.
As he sat gazing stonily at despair, there came a soft stirring of the
stillness, a murmur, a breath; then from without, a faint chirping.
’... as in dark summer dawns,’
he quoted mechanically, and was aware of a vague irritation that he
could not remember the beginning of the line.
‘The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square.’
He looked. The chintz curtains that veiled the windows were growing
ghostly and transparent. It was the dawn.
All through the night he had sat with his trouble, yet the morning found
him as helpless and undecided as ever.
‘To dying ears, when unto dying eyes,’ he repeated dully. ‘Ah! if it
were but that! Death! how easy to die! What a rest, what an escape!’ It
was life, not death, life with its hideous decisions and
responsibilities that he had got to face.
The candle flames became more spectral as the light slowly broadened,
the light of a new day, the day in which he would have to make up his
mind, to take a line, to _act_. There was no way out--none. Once more he
was confronted with the inevitable, the pitiless future coming every
moment nearer, with all it held of suffering and shame, the
fruitlessness of all his efforts, all in vain, in vain!
Then suddenly, as if some voice had spoken, came the question ‘Why?’ Why
need it be in vain? The solution, after all, lay ready to his hand. He
had only to hold his tongue. It was all so simple. ‘Their strength is to
sit still,’ he thought. Why, among all that had passed through his
wretched head, had this never struck him? He had wished for a child to
bar his brother and his brother’s sons from the succession. Well! here
was the child, his wife’s child, born in wedlock, legally, lawfully his.
Who could ever say it was not? No one but they two, and of their silence
he could be tolerably sure.
At first he put the idea from him with horror. It was a cheat, a fraud.
He, with his fastidiously high standard of conduct, to cozen his brother
out of his inheritance by a shabby trick. Impossible! The thing was
impossible.
He got up, and put back the curtain, and stood looking out into the
silence of the growing morning. Over opposite to him, the grey sky was
beginning to flush with palest rose, in which the last stars were
growing dim; but as yet the great quadrangle lay all in black shadow,
out of which the restored statues stood vaguely up like shapes of evil
menacing the eastern glory. No, no, no. Better the talk, the scandal,
the publicity of the divorce court, than to stand convicted before the
tribunal of his own conscience. Whatever else went down in the shipwreck
of his life, let him at least keep his self-respect. ‘What did it profit
a man to gain the world, and lose his own soul?’ Yet how often in the
old days, in his talk with Newby, had he inveighed against the
selfishness of the Puritan idea, which would make the saving of one’s
soul the object of conduct. Surely the only rational motive was the
consideration of how one’s acts affected others. In the present instance
who would be the worse for his silence? No one would be hurt or
disappointed. These people did not expect to succeed; they had given up
all hopes of it when he married. Had they not told him so themselves? On
the other hand, there was his mother, his mother who had done so much
for him. He remembered how he had found her, when she had first learned
the truth about Arthur, and terror mixed with his grief at the mere
conjecture of what she might say and do with the marriages of both her
sons thus ending in shame. Their talk that afternoon had shown him how
much her hopes were centred in the birth of an heir to Belchamber. The
mere prospect had blotted out the very recollection of her quarrel with
Cissy, and Lady Charmington was not a forgiving woman. His fear of her
had always gone hand in hand with his love of her, and both made him
wince at the thought of her disappointment. Had he the right to bring
this fresh blow upon her, who had suffered so much, merely to salve his
own conscience? After all, had he any self-respect to sacrifice? Was it
possible for him to have a meaner opinion of himself than he had always
entertained?
At that moment the sun topped the mass of the eastern wing, flooding
with light the broad spaces of grass and gravel at his feet, and casting
a long ray over the tall, stately _façade_ of the beautiful house. And
at the thought of all that was symbolised by that pomp of hewn and
fretted stone, the aristocrat that lurked so deep within him, so
overlaid with fine theories of brotherhood and equality that he was
unconscious of his very existence, stirred and claimed his own. ‘For the
credit of my house,’ he murmured uneasily, as he turned away from the
window.
He did not yield at once, or without a struggle, but he knew from the
first that it would come to that. From the moment the idea leaped
full-grown like Athene from his brain, it was fully armed to meet every
point that had distressed him. He feared scandal. There need be no
scandal. He shrank from the ignominy of a divorce case. There need be
none. Did the thought of unveiling to the public eye the bitter
humiliation of his married life revolt him? Here was a means not only of
secrecy, but actual disproof. Did it break his heart to think of
inflicting such a blow upon his mother? He had only to be silent to
crown her dearest wishes, and make her the happiest woman in England.
Had he married, enduring all that marriage had brought him, that he
might keep his sister-in-law and her children from the heritage of his
name and home? Here, too, was the one thing necessary for that end. And
to attain all these desired objects there was nothing to do, no word to
say, no lie to tell. He had only to let things take their course. It
was the line of least resistance, so easy, so fatally easy!
To a man of his character and disposition, what a temptation, what a
terrible temptation! He was weakened by his long vigil, the little stock
of vitality that he could ever call to his assistance, worn almost to a
thread with watching and misery. He knew he should give in. To all the
arguments in favour of it, what had he to oppose but one poor little
scruple of personal honour?
He wondered if his wife had known what he would do before he had thought
of it himself? Had she traded on her certainty of his cowardice? At such
a suspicion, he almost grew strong again; but no--she had seemed to
entertain no doubt that he would repudiate her. He fancied she had even
felt a certain relief at the prospect of being rid of the semblance of a
connection with himself, and the freedom to claim openly the protection
of the man whom, in her way, she loved. If so, here was another argument
in favour of silence. By it he could thwart and punish her.
He wandered into his brother’s old room, next his own. Here the drawn
blinds made still a glimmering twilight, and lent an unreality to the
familiar objects. He went and looked at the old school photographs.
There was one of Arthur in a group of the cricket eleven, which had
always been his special favourite. The figure stood squarely on its
legs, the brawny arms bare to the elbow and crossed upon the chest, a
boyish grin lighting the handsome face, from which the cap was pushed
back by the strong upward spring of the hair above the brow. It was the
image of youth, and life, and happiness. Long he stood motionless before
it, and then he bent forward and pressed his poor pale lips to the cold
glass. ‘Arthur,’ he whispered. ‘My little Arthur, you are dead, and so
is your miserable brother who loved you so. You are no more that brutal,
querulous egoist that I saw the other day, than he is the wretch who can
stoop to crime to rob you.’
Distant sounds showed him that the household was beginning to be astir.
Before his man came to wake him he must have removed the signs of his
long vigil. He returned hurriedly to his own room, once more drew the
curtain across the window, extinguished the lights, and, hastily
undressing himself, crept into bed. Already the sense of having
something to hide stung him with a terrible self-contempt. He had caught
sight of his drawn, haggard face as he passed the mirror. It was the
face of a coward.
He did not leave the pavilion all day. He sent word he was ill. That at
least was true enough, but late in the evening, as he was lying on the
sofa in his study, there came a knock at the door, and Cissy entered.
Though perhaps a shade paler than usual, nothing in her appearance
suggested a guilty wife come to hear her sentence.
‘I have come to return your visit of last night,’ she said, as she stood
looking down on him.
Sainty groaned and hid his face. At sight of her, the desire to brand
her as what she was almost conquered, where conscience and sense of
honour had failed--almost, but not quite.
Cissy kept her indifferent pose, playing with the ornaments she wore.
‘Well?’ she asked at last. ‘Have you made up your mind yet?’
‘Yes.’ His voice came muffled and strange.
Lady Belchamber started. ‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded, with
slightly quickened interest.
‘Nothing.’
There was a pause.
‘Do you mean to say,’ she asked at last, ‘that you are going to
acknowledge the child?’
‘Yes.’
She turned away from him with a half-stifled exclamation. Was it relief
or disappointment? he could not tell. After a time she flung a word over
her shoulder: ‘Why?’
‘Because it happens to suit me,’ he said doggedly.
The silence was broken by the little laugh he hated.
‘I suppose I ought to be very grateful to you,’ she sneered.
Sainty sprang from the couch. ‘I have ceased to expect gratitude or any
other kindly feeling from you,’ he blazed out at her; but his wrath fell
as quickly as it had flared.
Her puny disdain was powerless to hurt him, merged in the measureless
ocean of his self-contempt. There would be lies enough, acted, looked,
and lived, if not spoken. At least to her there need be no pretence of
an attitude; if not with an accomplice, with whom may one permit himself
the luxury of being honest?
‘After all, why should I scold at you?’ he said wearily. ‘You have
nothing to thank me for. Don’t suppose, if I stoop to this incomparable
baseness, that it is with any thought of pleasing _you_.’
Cissy stared at him, cowed by the dim apprehension of a tragedy she was
incapable of understanding; and it was not without a certain
satisfaction that he saw in her eyes the vague terror of the
incomprehensible beginning to permeate her habitual scorn of him.