“Even thus two friends condemned
Embrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves,
Loather a hundred times to part than die;
Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee.”
They look at each other in a sort of terror, with a renewal and immense
increase of that fear of their own and each others’ possibilities of
frailty, which, looked back upon now, is seen to have been so
inadequately weak and so abundantly justified. Since there is no longer
any barrier of innocence between them, what is there to hinder them from
a repetition--a hundred repetitions--of that tasted, and therefore now
senselessly abstained-from, ecstasy? What more of guilt can there be in
ten or twenty score kisses than in that one which they have drunkenly
given and taken? They see the sophistry dawning in one another’s hungry
eyes; and once again their rebel arms half reach out reciprocally across
a dwindled interval; but this time, to balance her former misleading of
him, salvation--if that bitter abstinence can be called so--comes from
her that at first was weakest. She tears her eyes away from him, and
snatches a look round, as in preparation for flight.
“We must not stay here any longer!” she says with an accent of
ungovernable fear; and he as wildly acquiesces.
“No,” he says; “you are right. I do not know what has come to me; but
you are right not to trust me!”
“It is I, _I_, _I_!” she repeats in distraught self-accusation. “You do
not understand what a monster I am! I am to marry Rupert _next week_! I
have been engaged to him all my life! I am all they possess in the
world! Since I was a week old my uncle has overwhelmed me with his
generous love; every one has said that I was more to him than even the
boys. Now the one hope that is left for him lies----”
Her rapid flow of self-accusation breaks off abruptly, stemmed by the
awful obstacle placed by memory in its torrent course; and her face
turns ghastly under his miserable eyes, as once more for the thousandth
time, but with immeasurably deepened repulsion, she realizes the nature
of the hope which is her uncle’s one remaining tie to life, and by whom
to be fulfilled. It is by bearing children to Rupert that her
intolerably heavy debt to them both is to be paid. For one insane moment
her look flies to the pool. It must be under the little circles that the
dancing flies are making on its surface that she can best cut the knot
that is so far past untying. The broken voice of her fellow-sinner and
fellow-sufferer calls her back.
“And _I_! Do you forget that it was through me they lost poor Bill?”
Possibly it is a relief to each to pile the chief weight of their common
guilt on his and her own head respectively, in unconscious contrast to
the shabby recriminations of our first parents; but of even this little
alleviation they are soon robbed, all other consciousness merged in the
killing sense of instant and eternal parting.
“You had better stay here for a few minutes--till I am well away,” says
Lavinia, speaking very fast, but not incoherently. After a little
gasping pause, with a fresh rush of utter horror and woe, “Must I tell
Rupert?” Then, giving herself that answer of which her lover is quite
incapable, “No! I must not! if I did, it would be in the hope--the
certainty that he would cast me off. No, no; I must not--I must not tell
him, whatever happens: it would never do to tell him.” She rambles on,
half to herself, repeating the phrases, as of one whose hold on her own
intelligence is slipping away; then recovering it with a sudden snatch,
she says brusquely, “Well! it is done, and it can’t be undone, and there
is an end of it. Good-bye! I--I would say ‘God bless you’ if I had any
business to.”
Without giving him time for any answering benediction--as, indeed, why
should he bless her?--she breaks into a stumbling run, which carries her
blindly on, till at the curve which will finally hide him from her
sight, the curve whose distance from him guarantees her safety, the
dully raging passion within her arrests her feet, and turns her head to
see once more in crowning farewell torment the figure, in loosely
hanging clothes, of him whom she has ironically helped back to life only
to make him taste the sharpness of death.
* * * * *
“But I told you to say that I was not at home to any one?”
“I did say so, ’m.”
“It is not eleven o’clock yet?”
“No, ’m; it wants five minutes of eleven.”
“I am too busy: I have too much to do. It is impossible that I should
see any one this morning.”
“So I told Miss Prince, ’m; but she said she was sure that you would see
her.”
“Miss Prince always says that.”
“Yes, ’m.”
There is sympathy in the assent of the elderly unsmart butler, who has
reached the third stage in the usual progress of valuable servants to
their goal--that progress marked by the successive milestones of
“servant,” “treasure,” “tyrant,” “pensioner;” for Féodorovna is not
popular with his class.
“Will you go back and tell Miss Prince that I am very sorry, but I am
afraid I must ask her to put off her call till to-morrow, as Sir George
and Mr. Rupert are coming down by the 4.38 train, and I have a good many
arrangements to make before they arrive?”
The old butler regards her with a respectful pity for the weakness of
reasoning power that can imagine the visitor in question to be kept at
bay by the means proposed.
“Yes, ’m; but I do not think it will be any use, for Miss Prince said
she would like to take a turn in the garden until you were disengaged.
And I beg your pardon, ’m--your eyes are better than mine--isn’t that
Miss Prince opening the iron gate?”
Of course it _is_ Miss Prince--Miss Prince come to surprise Lavinia in
her utter dishevelment of soul, though the habit of a lifetime keeps her
unnerved body in its simple raiment neat and dainty--come to verify the
staring facts that sleep has mocked her; that hope has bid her an
eternal good-bye; that her despair is beyond the depth that any leaded
line can plumb; that she is wretched and guilty beyond the
sin-and-sorrow compass of any woful malefactor since the world began;
come to spy and comment, before she has begun to make up spirit and
flesh for that ghastly play-acting which is to last her life. These are
the thoughts--if such mental _orts_ and fragments can be called so--that
knock against each other in a vertigo of fear in Miss Carew’s brain, as
her visitor, with a graceful flitting gait that has yet sufficiently
proved the determination beneath it, floats up the kitchen-garden walk,
that had yesterday witnessed poor Mrs. Darcy’s discomfiture. Féodorovona
is dressed in a delicate Court mourning, and a certain elevation of
expression tells Lavinia that she has come to proclaim some action on
her own part that to most persons it would appear more judicious to
conceal.
“Gathering flowers?” she says, with a chastened smile, and with no
attempted apology for overriding her listener’s efforts to elude her.
“If I had only thought of it, I would have brought you any number from
our Houses.” There is a touch of the comfortable maternal brag in the
words, but it appears only to vanish as she adds with a quiet sigh, “As
you may imagine, I had other things to think of!”
“Had you?”
Lavinia has scarcely interrupted her flower-cutting, since it enables
her to present only a profile to her visitor’s observation, and the
reflection is passing through her mind with a foggy comfort that, since
she has not shed one tear, there can be no swollen eyelids to give her
away, and that, even if there were, Féodorovna’s panoply of perfect
egotism would protect her from the sight of them.
“_Had_ I?” repeats Miss Prince, the suavity of her high sorrow touched
by a ruffle of indignation. “Who can know that better than you?”
The shape of the question gives Lavinia an inward convulsion of new
terror. Is it possible that she can have heard, or learnt, or divined?
“Do you mean that Captain Binning is gone?” she asks, bending over a
long-stalked bronze tulip, which she snips off nearer the bulb than she
would have done in a more rational moment.
“Yes; he is gone!” After a moment of reverent ruminating, “It went off
quite quietly.”
“Did it?”
“Our real farewell was yesterday. We had a very important interview
yesterday morning. I asked for it.”
“Did you?”
“As you know, I have never been tied by the conventions. I have always
overridden them.”
“Yes.”
“In my case such unusual action is a necessary postulate of happiness.
_You_ are in the enviable position of knowing that you can never be
loved for anything but yourself; that no man can be accused of
mercenariness in approaching you, but in _my_ case there is always the
danger that the millions with which I am credited should keep away from
me any man of particularly delicate feeling and high honour.”
It seems incredible to Lavinia that at such a moment she herself should
be able to entertain so sordid a speculation; yet there is no doubt that
the wonder flashes through her mind as to whether the profits of the
Dropless Candle have really amounted to the figure so superbly indicated
by the daughter and goddaughter of that great invention?
“Such being the case,” continues Miss Prince, in a tone of modest pride
at the about-to-be-related exploit, “there was only one course open to
me, and as it was perfectly consonant with my views of life and ethics,
I took it without reluctance. I offered myself to him.”
“As you did to General ---- three months ago?”
The recalled action--recalled by the very white lips of the heroine’s
one hearer--would put most people out of countenance, and even Miss
Prince’s once more admirably white surface shows a pink stain.
“You speak as if you were convicting me of inconsistency--of infidelity
to my ideal,” she says, with a little haste of wronged modesty. “And
superficially it may appear to be so; but it is only in appearance; as
you know it has always been my creed that whenever and wherever I met
what I conceived to be the highest and noblest qualities of humanity
embodied in one man, I ought to offer myself unreservedly to him. If I
have failed, it is a failure more glorious than most successes.”
Lavinia has stopped her flower-cutting, and forgotten her misgivings as
to the tell-tale tragedy of her own face; she looks sullenly and with
what she knows to be a baseless rage of jealousy at her, the manner and
accompaniments of whose declaration of love she is in dull torment
trying to reconstruct, while memory adds its sting by recalling to her
the high, cool apartness of virginal indignation which had been her own
attitude of mind towards Féodorovna’s former achievement.
“Circumstances were against me,” pursues Féodorovna, presently, looking
away in a sort of dreamy protest towards the horizon. “That unlucky
illness! If I had had _your_ opportunities, the opportunities which were
wasted on you, he might have decided differently.”
It is lucky that Miss Prince is still upbraiding the skyline; for
Lavinia gives a sudden wince at the allusion to that safely preoccupied
heart of her own which has rendered her, as a matter of course,
danger-proof. To defend herself against that passionate repudiation of
her own immunity, which seems fighting its mad way to her lips, she
frames a needless question.
“He refused you?”
Féodorovna bends the chastened elegance of her black-and-white toque in
dignified acquiescence.
“Yes.”
A stinging curiosity goads the other on to a second question--
“And you--how did you take it?”
“I told him how greatly I admired his disinterestedness,” replies Miss
Prince, with perfectly regained equanimity, adding, with a touch of the
hereditarily commercial spirit, shrewd even in adversity. “It would, of
course, have been very advantageous for him from a material point of
view.”
“And--and that was all? It ended there?”
To only the sharpened eye of jealous suspicion would the tiny hesitation
that precedes the answer to this question be perceptible.
“Ye--es, it ended there.”
Past the power of even Féodorovna is it to confess to the precise method
in which she had closed the interview; and Lavinia knows that she will
never learn at what stage of the indubitably offered and as indubitably
refused embrace--whether at that of mere intention or ripe
accomplishment it had been arrested by its object. Féodorovna had given
her last response without looking her questioner quite in the face, and
her eye now rests on the church tower and the blossoming horse-chestnuts
with a real, if exasperating, sadness in it.
“I told him if ever he reconsidered his decision, that whatever might be
the lapse of time, whatever else changed, _I_ should not.”
The unassuming fidelity that voice and words claim is clearly felt by
their possessor to be so beautiful that Lavinia asks herself, in a
topsy-turvy whirl of confused wretchedness, whether it is not really
so? but the thought--if it deserves such a name--is chased a few moments
later, as with a whip of small cords, out of her soul by a far more
smarting suggestion.
“Well, good-bye. I am going away this afternoon to a quiet little
fishing village in Suffolk, to be quite alone with myself; so perhaps I
shall not see you again till the wedding. But, after all, that is only
six days off!”