The ladies were in town three weeks, which brought them from June into
July, when London began to grow hot and dusty, and the season to approach
its close. They were just about to leave town, though whether to
continue their dissipations by going to the seaside, or to return to
Highcombe and put their future residence in order, they had not as yet
made up their minds. Cavendish gave his vote for the seaside. "Of course
you mean to consult me, and give great weight to my opinion," he said.
"What I advise is the sea, and I will tell you why: I am obliged to go
to Portsmouth about some business. If you were at the Isle of Wight,
say, or Southsea----"
"That would be very pleasant: but we must not allow ourselves to be
tempted, not even by your company," said Mrs. Warrender, who began to
fear there might be enough of this. "We are going home to set our house
in order, and to see if, perhaps, Theo has need of us. And then the
Thynnes are coming home."
"Is it Miss Warrender who has developed into the Thynnes?"
"Indeed it is; that is how everybody inquires for her now. I have got
quite used to the name. That is one of the drawbacks of marrying one's
daughters, which I was telling you of. One's Minnie becomes in a moment
the Eustace Thynnes!"
They were not a smiling party that evening, and Mrs. Warrender's little
pleasantry fell flat. It flew, perhaps, across the mind of all, that
Chatty might be changed, in a similar way, into the Cavendishes. Dick
grew hot and cold when the suggestion flashed through him. Then it
was that he recollected how guilty he had been, and how little his
reflections had served him. He who had determined to call but once,
to go with them once to the play, had carried out his resolution so
far that the once had been always. And now the time of recompense was
coming. The fool's paradise was to be emptied of its tenants. He went
away very gloomy, asking himself many troubled questions. It was not
that he had been unaware, as time went on, what it was that went along
with it,--a whole little drama of simple pleasure, of days and evenings
spent together, of talks and expeditions. Innocent? Ah, more than
innocent, the best and sweetest thing in his life, if---- But that
little monosyllable makes all the difference. It was coming to an end
now, they were going away; and Dick had to let them go, without any
conclusion to this pretty play in which he had played his part so
successfully. Oh, he was not the first man who had done it! not the
first who had worn a lover's looks and used all a lover's assiduities,
and then--nothing more. Perhaps that was one of the worst features in
his behaviour to himself. To think that he should be classed with the
men who are said to have been amusing themselves! and Chatty placed
in the position of the victim, on whose behalf people were sorry or
indignant! When he thought that there were some who might presume to
pity her, and who would say of himself that he had behaved ill, the
shock came upon him with as much force as if he had never thought of it
before; although he had thought of it, and reflected upon how to draw
out of the intercourse which was so pleasant, before he gave himself up
to it, with an abandon which he could not account for, which seemed now
like desperation. Desperation was no excuse. He saw the guilt of it
fully, without self-deception, only when he had done all the harm
that was possible, had yielded to every temptation, and now found it
impossible to go any further. To repent in these circumstances is not
uncommon; there is nothing original in it. Thousands of men have done
it before him,--repented when they could sin no more. For a moment it
flashed across his mind to go and throw himself on Mrs. Warrender's
mercy and tell her all, and make what miserable excuse he could for
himself. Was it better to do that, to part for ever from Chatty, or to
let them think badly of him, to have it supposed that he had trifled or
amused himself, or whatever miserable words the gossips chose to use,
and yet leave a door open by which he might some time, perhaps, approach
her again? Some time! after she had forgotten him, after his unworthiness
had been proved to her, and some other fellow, some happier man who had
never been exposed to such a fate as had fallen upon him, some smug
Pharisee (this fling at the supposed rival of the future was very natural
and harmed nobody) had cut him out of all place in her heart! It was so
likely that Chatty would go on waiting for him, thinking of him, for
years perhaps, the coxcomb that he was!
"I said very suddenly that we must go home," said Mrs. Warrender, after
he had left them. "You did not think me hard, Chatty? It seemed to me
the best."
"Oh no, mamma," said Chatty, with a slight faltering.
"We have seen a great deal of Mr. Cavendish, and he has been very nice,
but I did not like the idea of going to the Isle of Wight."
"Oh no, mamma," Chatty repeated, with more firmness. "I did not wish it
at all."
"I am very glad you think with me, my dear. He has been very nice; he
has made us enjoy our time in town much more than we should have done.
But of course, that cannot last for ever, and I do really think now that
we should go home."
"I have always thought so," said Chatty. She was rather pale, and there
was a sort of new-born dignity about her, with which her mother felt
that she was unacquainted. "It has been very pleasant, but I am quite
ready. And then Minnie will be coming back as you said."
"Yes." Then Mrs. Warrender burst into a laugh which might as well have
been a fit of crying. "But you must prepare yourself to see not Minnie,
but the Eustace Thynnes," she said. And then the mother and daughter
kissed each other and retired to their respective rooms, where Chatty
was a long time going to bed. She sat and thought, with her pretty hair
about her shoulders, going over a great many things, recalling a great
many simple little scenes and words said,--which were but words after
all,--and then of a sudden the tears came, and she sat and cried very
quietly, even in her solitude making as little fuss as possible, with an
ache of wonder at the trouble that had come upon her, and a keen pang of
shame at the thought that she had expected more than was coming, more
perhaps than had ever been intended. A man is not ashamed of loving when
he is not loved, however angry he may be with himself or the woman who
has beguiled him; but the sharpest smart in a girl's heart is the shame
of having given what was not asked for, what was not wanted. When those
tears had relieved her heart, Chatty put up her hair very neatly for the
night, just as she always did, and after a while slept,--much better
than Dick.
He came next day, however, for a final visit, and the day after to see
them away, without any apparent breach in the confidence and friendship
with which they regarded each other. There might be, perhaps, a faint
almost imperceptible difference in Chatty, a little dignity like that
which her mother had discovered in her, something that was not altogether
the simple girl, younger than her years, whom Mrs. Warrender had brought
to town. On the very last morning of all, Dick had also a look which was
not very easy to be interpreted. While they were on their way to the
station he began suddenly to talk of Underwood and the Wilberforces, as
if he had forgotten them all this time, and now suddenly remembered that
there were such people in the world. "Did I ever tell you," he said,
"that one of the houses in the parish belongs to an uncle of mine, who
bought it merely as an investment, and let it?"
"We were talking of that," said Mrs. Warrender. "Mr. Wilberforce hoped
you had persuaded your uncle to leave the drainage alone in order to
make a nuisance and drive undesirable tenants away."
He laughed in a hurried, breathless way, then said quickly, "Is it true
that the people who were there are gone?"
"Quite true. They seem to have melted away without any one knowing, in a
single night They were not desirable people."
"So I heard: and gone without leaving any sign?"
"Have they not paid their rent?" said Mrs. Warrender.
"Oh, I don't mean to say that. I know nothing about that. My uncle----"
and here he stopped, with an embarrassment which, though Mrs. Warrender
was an unsuspicious woman, attracted her notice. "I mean," said Cavendish,
perceiving this, and putting force upon himself, "he will of course be
glad to get rid of people who apparently could do his property no good."
And after this his spirits seemed to rise a little. He told them that
he had some friends near Highcombe, who sometimes in the autumn offered
him a few days' shooting. If he got such an invitation this autumn
might he come? "It is quite a handy distance from London, just the
Saturday-to-Monday distance," he added, looking at Mrs. Warrender with
an expression which meant a great deal, which had in it a question, a
supplication. And she was so imprudent a woman! and no shadow of Minnie
at hand to restrain her. It was on her very lips to give the invitation
he asked. Some good angel of a class corresponding in the celestial
world to that of Minnie in this, only stopped her in time, and gave a
little obliqueness to the response.
"I hope we shall see you often," she said, which was pleasant but
discouraging, and then began to talk about the Eustace Thynnes, who were
at present of great use to her as a diversion to any more embarrassing
subject of conversation. Chatty scarcely spoke during this drive, which
seemed to her the last they should take together. The streets flying
behind them, the scenes of the brief drama falling back into distance,
the tranquillity of home before, and all this exciting episode of life
becoming as if it had never been, occupied her mind. She had settled all
that in her evening meditation. It was all over; this was what she said
to herself. She must not allow even to her own heart any thought of
renewal, any idea that the break was temporary. Chatty was aware that
she had received all his overtures, all his amiabilities (which was
what it seemed to come to) with great and unconcealed pleasure. To think
that he had nothing but civility in his mind all the time gave a blow to
her pride, which was mortal. She did not wear her pride upon her sleeve,
though she had worn her heart upon it. Her nature indeed was full of
the truest humility; but there was a latent pride which, when it was
reached, vibrated through all her being. No more, she was saying to
herself. Oh, never more. She had been deceived, though most likely he
had never wished to deceive her. It was she who had deceived herself;
but that was not possible, ever again.
"We have not thanked you half enough," said Mrs. Warrender, as he stood
at the door of the railway carriage. "I will tell Theo that you have
been everything to us. If you are as good to all the mothers and sisters
of all your old schoolfellows----"
"You do me a great wrong," he said, "as if I thought of you as the
mother of----" His eyes strayed to Chatty, who met them with a smile
which was quite steady. She was a little pale, but that was all. "Some
time," he added hastily, holding Mrs. Warrender's hand, "I may be able
to explain myself a little better than that."
"Shall I say if you are as kind to all forlorn ladies astray in London?"
Dick's face clouded over as if (she thought) he were about to cry. Men
don't cry in England, but there is a kind of mortification, humiliation,
a sense of being persistently misunderstood, and of having no possibility
of mending matters, which is so insupportable that the lip must quiver
under it, even when garnished with a moustache. "I hope you don't really
think that of me," he cried. "Don't! there is no time to tell you how
very different--But surely you know--something more than that----"
The train was in motion already and Chatty had shaken hands with
him before. She received the last look of his eyes, half indignant,
appealing, though in words it was to her mother he was speaking; but
made no sign. And it was only Mrs. Warrender who looked out of the
window and waved her hand to him, as he was left behind. Chatty--Chatty
who was so gentle, so little apt to take anything upon her, even to
judge for herself, was it possible that on this point she was less
soft-hearted than her mother? This thought went through him like an
arrow as he stood and saw the carriages glide away in a long curving
line. She was gone and he was left behind. She was gone, was it in
resentment, was it in disdain? thinking of him in his true aspect as
a false lover, believing him to have worn a false semblance, justly
despising him for an attempt to play upon her. Was this possible? He
thought (with that oblique sort of literary tendency of his) of Hamlet
with the recorder. Can you play upon this pipe?--and yet you think you
can play upon me! As a matter of fact there could nothing have been
found in heaven or earth less like Hamlet than Chatty Warrender; but
a lover has strange misperceptions. The steady soft glance, the faint
smile, not like the usual warm beaming of her simple face, seemed to
him to express a faculty of seeing through and through him which is not
always given to the greatest philosophers. And he stood there humiliated
to the very dust by this mild creature, whom he had loved in spite of
himself, to whom even in loving her he had attributed no higher gifts,
perhaps had even been tenderly disrespectful of as not clever. Was she
the one to see through him now?
If she only knew! but when Dick, feeling sadly injured and wounded, came
to this thought, it so stung him that he turned round on the moment, and,
neglecting all the seductions of waiting cabmen, walked quickly, furiously,
to Lincoln's Inn, which he had been sadly neglecting. If she knew
everything! it appeared to Dick that Chatty's clear dove's eyes (to
which he all at once had attributed an insight and perception altogether
above them) would slay him with the disdainful dart which pierces through
and through subterfuge and falsehood. That he should have ventured,
knowing what he knew, to approach her at all with the semblance of love:
that he should have dared,--oh, he knew, well he knew, how, once the
light of clear truth was let down upon it, his conduct would appear,--not
the mere trifler who had amused himself and meant no more, not the fool
of society, who made a woman think he loved her, and "behaved badly,"
and left her _plante la_. What were these contemptible images to the
truth! He shrank into himself as he pursued these thoughts and skulked
along. He felt like a man exposed and ashamed, a man whom true men would
avoid. "Put in every honest hand a whip,"--ah no, that was not wanted.
Chatty's eyes, dove's eyes, too gentle to wound, eyes that knew not how
to look unkindly, to conceal a sentiment, to veil a falsehood--one look
from Chatty's eyes would be enough.
Chatty knew nothing of the tragic terror which had come upon him at
the mere apprehension of this look of hers. She had no thought of any
tragedy, except that unknown to men which often becomes the central fact
in a life such as hers; the tragedy of an unfinished chapter in life,
the no-ending of an episode which had promised to be the drama in which
almost every human creature figures herself (or himself) as the chief
actor, one time or other. The drama indeed had existed, it had run
almost all its course, for the time it lasted it had been more absorbing
than anything else in the world. The greatest historical events beside
it had been but secondary. Big London, the greatest city in the world,
had served only as a little bosquet of evergreens in a village garden
might have done, as the background and scene for it. But it had no end;
the time of the action was accomplished, the curtain had fallen, and
the lights had been put out, but the comedy had come to no conclusion.
Comedy-tragedy; it does not matter much which words you use. The scenes
had all died away in incompleteness, and there had been no end. To many
a gentle life such as that of Chatty might be, this is all that ever
happens beyond the level of the ordinary and common. It was with a touch
of insight altogether beyond her usual intellectual capacity that she
realised this as she travelled very quietly with her mother from London
to Highcombe, not a very long way. Mrs. Warrender was very silent too.
She had meant the visit to town to be one of pleasure merely,--pleasure
for herself, change after the long monotony, and pleasure to her child
who had never known anything but that monotony. It was not, this little
epoch of time only three weeks long, to count for anything. It was
to be a holiday and no more. And lo! with that inexplicableness, that
unforeseenness which is so curious a quality of human life, it had
become a turning point of existence, the pivot perhaps upon which
Chatty's being might hang. Mrs. Warrender was not so decided as Chatty.
She saw nothing final in the parting. She was able to imagine that
secondary causes, something about money, some family arrangements that
would have to be made, had prevented any further step on Dick's part.
To her the drama indeed was not ended: the curtain had only fallen
legitimately upon the first act without prejudice to those which were to
follow. She did not talk, for Chatty's silence, her unusual dignity, her
retirement into herself, had produced a great effect upon her mother;
but her mind was not moved as Chatty's was, and she was able to think
with pleasure of the new home awaiting them, and of what they were to find
there. The Eustace Thynnes! she said to herself, with a laugh, thanking
Providence within herself that there had been no Minnie to inspect the
progress of the relations between Dick and Chatty, and probably to deliver
her opinion very freely on that subject and on her mother's responsibility.
Then there was the more serious chapter of Theo and his affairs which
must have progressed in the meantime. Mrs. Warrender caught herself up
with a little fright as she thought of the agitation and doubt which
wrapped the future of both her children. It was a wonderful relief to
turn to the only point from which there was any amusement to be had, the
visit of the Eustace Thynnes.