Buntingford walked rapidly across the park, astonishing the old
lodge-keeper who happened to see him pass through, and knew that his
lordship had a large Whitsuntide party at the house, who must at that
very moment be sitting down to dinner.
The Rectory lay at the further extremity of the village, which was long
and straggling. The village street, still bathed in sun, was full of
groups of holiday makers, idling and courting. To avoid them, Buntingford
stepped into one of his own plantations, in which there was a path
leading straight to the back of the Rectory.
He walked like one half-stunned, with very little conscious thought. As
to the blow which had now fallen, he had lived under the possibility of
it for fourteen years. Only since the end of the war had he begun to
feel some security, and in consequence to realize a new ferment in
himself. Well--now at least he would _know_. And the hunger to know
winged his feet.
He found a gate leading into the garden of the Rectory open, and went
through it towards the front of the house. A figure in grey flannels,
with a round collar, was pacing up and down the little grass-plot there,
waiting for him.
John Alcott came forward at sight of him. He took Buntingford's hand in
both his own, and looked into his face. "Is it true?" he said, gently.
"Probably," said Buntingford, after a moment.
"Will you come into my study? I think you ought to hear our story before
you see her."
He led the way into the tiny house, and into his low-roofed study, packed
with books from floor to ceiling, the books of a lonely man who had found
in them his chief friends. He shut the door with care, suggesting that
they should speak as quietly as possible, since the house was so small,
and sound travelled so easily through it.
"Where is she?" said Buntingford, abruptly, as he took the chair Alcott
pushed towards him.
"Just overhead. It is our only spare room."
Buntingford nodded, and the two heads, the black and the grey, bent
towards each other, while Alcott gave his murmured report.
"You know we have no servant. My sister does everything, with my help,
and a village woman once or twice a week. Lydia came down this morning
about seven o'clock and opened the front door. To her astonishment she
found a woman leaning against the front pillar of our little porch. My
sister spoke to her, and then saw she must be exhausted or ill. She told
her to come in, and managed to get her into the dining-room where there
is a sofa. She said a few incoherent things after lying down and then
fainted. My sister called me, and I went for our old doctor. He came back
with me, said it was collapse, and heart weakness--perhaps after
influenza--and that we must on no account move her except on to a bed in
the dining-room till he had watched her a little. She was quite unable to
give any account of herself, and while we were watching her she seemed to
go into a heavy sleep. She only recovered consciousness about five
o'clock this evening. Meanwhile I had been obliged to go to a diocesan
meeting at Dansworth and I left my sister and Dr. Ramsay in charge of
her, suggesting that as there was evidently something unusual in the case
nothing should be said to anybody outside the house till I came back and
she was able to talk to us. I hurried back, and found the doctor giving
injections of strychnine and brandy which seemed to be reviving her.
While we were all standing round her, she said quite clearly--'I want to
see Philip Buntingford.' Dr. Ramsay knelt down beside her, and asked her
to tell him, if she was strong enough, why she wanted to see you. She did
not open her eyes, but said again distinctly--'Because I am'--or was--I
am not quite sure which--'his wife.' And after a minute or two she said
twice over, very faintly--'Send for him--send for him.' So then I wrote
my note to you and sent it off. Since then the doctor and my sister have
succeeded in carrying her upstairs--and the doctor gives leave for you to
see her. He is coming back again presently. During her sleep, she talked
incoherently once or twice about a lake and a boat--and once she
said--'Oh, do stop that music!' and moved her head about as though it
hurt her. Since then I have heard some gossip from the village about a
strange lady who was seen in the park last night. Naturally one puts two
and two together--but we have said nothing yet to anyone. Nobody knows
that she--if the woman seen in the park, and the woman upstairs are the
same--is here."
He looked interrogatively at his companion. But Buntingford, who had
risen, stood dumb.
"May I go upstairs?" was all he said.
The rector led the way up a small cottage staircase. His sister, a
grey-haired woman of rather more than middle age, spectacled and prim,
but with the eyes of the pure in heart, heard them on the stairs and came
out to meet them.
"She is quite ready, and I am in the next room, if you want me. Please
knock on the wall."
Buntingford entered and shut the door. He stood at the foot of the bed.
The woman lying on it opened her eyes, and they looked at each other long
and silently. The face on the pillow had still the remains of beauty. The
powerful mouth and chin, the nose, which was long and delicate, the
deep-set eyes, and broad brow under strong waves of hair, were all fused
in a fine oval; and the modelling of the features was intensely and
passionately expressive. That indeed was at once the distinction and, so
to speak, the terror of the face,--its excessive, abnormal individualism,
its surplus of expression. A woman to fret herself and others to decay--a
woman, to burn up her own life, and that of her lover, her husband, her
child. Only physical weakness had at last set bounds to what had once
been a whirlwind force.
"Anna!" said Buntingford gently.
She made a feeble gesture which beckoned him to come nearer--to sit
down--and he came. All the time he was sharply, irrelevantly conscious of
the little room, the bed with its white dimity furniture, the texts on
the distempered walls, the head of the Leonardo Christ over the
mantelpiece, the white muslin dressing-table, the strips of carpet on the
bare boards, the cottage chairs:--the spotless cleanliness and the
poverty of it all. He saw as the artist, who cannot help but see, even at
moments of intense feeling.
"You thought--I was dead?" The woman in the bed moved her haggard eyes
towards him.
"Yes, lately I thought it. I didn't, for a long time."
"I put that notice in--so that--you might marry again," she said, slowly,
and with difficulty.
"I suspected that."
"But you--didn't marry."
"How could I?--when I had no real evidence?"
She closed her eyes, as though any attempt to argue, or explain was
beyond her, and he had to wait while she gathered strength again. After
what seemed a long time, and in a rather stronger voice she said:
"Did you ever find out--what I had done?"
"I discovered that you had gone away with Rocca--into Italy. I followed
you by motor, and got news of you as having gone over the Splugen. My car
had a bad accident on the pass, and I was ten weeks in hospital at Chur.
After that I lost all trace."
"I heard of the accident," she said, her eyes all the while searching out
the changed details of a face which had once been familiar to her. "But
Rocca wasn't with me then. I had only old Zélie--you remember?"
"The old _bonne_--we had at Melun?"
She made a sign of assent.--"I never lived with Rocca--till after the
child was born."
"The child! What do you mean?"
The words were a cry. He hung over her, shaken and amazed.
"You never knew!"--There was a faint, ghastly note of triumph in her
voice. "I wouldn't tell you--after that night we quarrelled--I concealed
it. But he is your son--sure enough."
"My son!--and he is alive?" Buntingford bent closer, trying to see her
face.
She turned to look at him, nodding silently.
"Where is he?"
"In London. It was about him--I came down here. I--I--want to get
rid of him."
A look of horror crossed his face, as though in her faint yet
violent words he caught the echoes of an intolerable past. But he
controlled himself.
"Tell me more--I want to help you."
"You--you won't get any joy of him!" she said, still staring at him.
"He's not like other children--he's afflicted. It was a bad doctor--when
I was confined--up in the hills near Lucca. The child was injured.
There's nothing wrong with him--but his brain."
A flickering light in Buntingford's face sank.
"And you want to get rid of him?"
"He's so much trouble," she said peevishly. "I did the best I could for
him. Now I can't afford to look after him. I thought of everything I
could do--before--"
"Before you thought of coming to me?"
She assented. A long pause followed, during which Miss Alcott came in,
administered stimulant, and whispered to Buntingford to let her rest a
little. He sat there beside her motionless, for half an hour or more,
unconscious of the passage of time, his thoughts searching the past, and
then again grappling dully with the extraordinary, the incredible
statement that he possessed a son--a living but, apparently, an idiot
son. The light began to fail, and Miss Alcott slipped in noiselessly
again to light a small lamp out of sight of the patient. "The doctor will
soon be here," she whispered to Buntingford.
The light of the lamp roused the woman. She made a sign to Miss Alcott to
lift her a little.
"Not much," said the Rector's sister in Buntingford's ear. "It's the
heart that's wrong."
Together they raised her just a little. Miss Alcott put a fan into
Buntingford's hands, and opened the windows wider.
"I'm all right," said the stranger irritably. "Let me alone. I've got a
lot to say." She turned her eyes on Buntingford. "Do you want to
know--about Rocca?"
"Yes."
"He died seven years ago. He was always good to me--awfully good to me
and to the boy. We lived in a horrible out-of-the-way place--up in the
mountains near Naples. I didn't want you to know about the boy. I wanted
revenge. Rocca changed his name to Melegrani. I called myself Francesca
Melegrani. I used to exhibit both at Naples and Rome. Nobody ever found
out who we were."
"What made you put that notice in the _Times_?"
She smiled faintly, and the smile recalled to him an old expression of
hers, half-cynical, half-defiant.
"I had a pious fit once--when Rocca was very ill. I confessed to an old
priest--in the Abruzzi. He told me to go back to you--and ask your
forgiveness. I was living in sin, he said--and would go to hell. A dear
old fool! But he had some influence with me. He made me feel some
remorse--about you--only I wouldn't give up the boy. So when Rocca got
well and was going to Lyons, I made him post the notice from there--to
the _Times_. I hoped you'd believe it." Then, unexpectedly, she slightly
raised her head, the better to see the man beside her.
"Do you mean to marry that girl I saw on the lake?"
"If you mean the girl that I was rowing, she is the daughter of a cousin
of mine. I am her guardian."
"She's handsome." Her unfriendly eyes showed her incredulity.
He drew himself stiffly together.
"Don't please waste your strength on foolish ideas. I am not going to
marry her, nor anybody."
"You couldn't--till you divorce me--or till I die," she said feebly, her
lids dropping again--"but I'm quite ready to see any lawyers--so that you
can get free."
"Don't think about that now, but tell me again--what you want me to do."
"I want--to go to--America. I've got friends there. I want you to pay my
passage--because I'm a pauper--and to take over the boy."
"I'll do all that. You shall have a nurse--when you are strong
enough--who will take you across. Now I must go. Can you just tell me
first where the boy is?"
Almost inaudibly she gave an address in Kentish Town. He saw that she
could bear no more, and he rose.
"Try and sleep," he said in a voice that wavered. "I'll see you again
to-morrow. You're all right here."
She made no reply, and seemed again either asleep or unconscious.
As he stood by the bed, looking down upon her, scenes and persons he had
forgotten for years rushed back into the inner light of memory:--that
first day in Lebas's atelier when he had seen her in her Holland overall,
her black hair loose on her neck, the provocative brilliance of her dark
eyes; their close comradeship in the contests, the quarrels, the
ambitions of the atelier; her patronage of him as her junior in art,
though her senior in age; her increasing influence over him, and the
excitement of intimacy with a creature so unrestrained, so gifted, so
consumed with jealousies, whether as an artist or a woman; his proposal
of marriage to her in one of the straight roads that cut the forest of
Compiegne; the ceremony at the Mairie, with only a few of their fellow
students for witnesses; the little apartment on the Rive Gauche, with its
bits of old furniture, and unframed sketches pinned up on the walls;
Anna's alternations of temper, now fascinating, now sulky, and that
steady emergence in her of coarse or vulgar traits, like rocks in an
ebbing sea; their early quarrels, and her old mother who hated him; their
poverty because of her extravagance; his growing reluctance to take her
to England, or to present her to persons of his own class and breeding in
Paris, and her frantic jealousy and resentment when she discovered it;
their scenes of an alternate violence and reconciliation and finally her
disappearance, in the company, as he had always supposed, of Sigismondo
Rocca, an Italian studying in Paris, whose pursuit of her had been
notorious for some time.
The door opened gently, and Miss Alcott's grey head appeared.
"The doctor!" she said, just audibly.
Buntingford followed her downstairs, and found himself presently in
Alcott's study, alone with a country doctor well known to him, a man who
had pulled out his own teeth in childhood, had attended his father and
grandfather before him, and carried in his loyal breast the secrets and
the woes of a whole countryside.
They grasped hands in silence.
"You know who she is?" said Buntingford quietly.
"I understand that she tells Mr. Alcott that she was Mrs. Philip Bliss,
that she left you fifteen years ago, and that you believed her dead?"
He saw Buntingford shrink.
"At times I did--yes, at times I did--but we won't go into that. Is she
ill--really ill?"
Ramsay spoke deliberately, after a minute's thought:
"Yes, she is probably very ill. The heart is certainly in a dangerous
state. I thought she would have slipped away this morning, when they
called me in--the collapse was so serious. She is not a strong woman, and
she had a bad attack of influenza last week. Then she was out all last
night, wandering about, evidently in a state of great excitement. It was
as bad a fainting fit as I have ever seen."
"It would be impossible to move her?"
"For a day or two certainly. She keeps worrying about a boy--apparently
her own boy?"
"I will see to that."
Ramsay hesitated a moment and then said--"What are we to call her? It
will not be possible, I imagine, to keep her presence here altogether a
secret. She called herself, in talking to Miss Alcott, Madame Melegrani."
"Why not? As to explaining her, I hardly know what to say."
Buntingford put his hand across his eyes; the look of weariness, of
perplexity, intensified ten-fold.
"An acquaintance of yours in Italy, come to ask you for help?"
suggested Ramsay.
Buntingford withdrew his hand.
"No!" he said with decision. "Better tell the truth! She was my wife. She
left me, as she has told the Alcotts, and took steps eleven years ago to
make me believe her dead. And up to seven years ago, she passed as the
wife of a man whom I knew by the name of Sigismondo Rocca. When the
announcement of her death appeared, I set enquiries on foot at once, with
no result. Latterly, I have thought it must be true; but I have never
been quite certain. She has reappeared now, it seems, partly because she
has no resources, and partly in order to restore to me my son."
"Your son!" said Ramsay, startled.
"She tells me that a boy was born after she left me, and that I am the
father. All that I must verify. No need to say anything whatever about
that yet. Her main purpose, no doubt, was to ask for pecuniary
assistance, in order to go to America. In return she will furnish my
lawyers with all the evidence necessary for my divorce from her."
Ramsay slowly shook his head.
"I doubt whether she will ever get to America. She has worn herself out."
There was a silence. Then Buntingford added:
"If these kind people would keep her, it would be the best solution.
I would make everything easy for them. To-morrow I go up to Town--to
the address she has given me. And--I should be glad if you would
come with me?"
The doctor looked surprised.
"Of course--if you want me--"
"The boy--his mother says--is abnormal--deficient. An injury at birth. If
you will accompany me I shall know better what to do."
A grasp of the hand, a look of sympathy answered; and they parted.
Buntingford emerged from the little Rectory to find Alcott again waiting
for him in the garden. The sun had set some time and the moon was peering
over the hills to the east. The mounting silver rim suddenly recalled to
Buntingford the fairy-like scene of the night before?--the searchlight on
the lake, the lights, the music, and the exquisite figure of Helena
dancing through it all. Into what Vale of the Shadow of Death had he
passed since then?--
Alcott and he turned into the plantation walk together. Various practical
arrangements were discussed between them. Alcott and his sister would
keep the sick woman in their house as long as might be necessary, and
Buntingford once more expressed his gratitude.
Then, under the darkness of the trees, and in reaction from the
experience he had just passed through, an unhappy man's hitherto
impenetrable reserve, to some extent, broke down. And the companion
walking beside him showed himself a true minister of Christ---humble,
tactful, delicate, yet with the courage of his message. What struck him
most, perhaps, was the revelation of what must have been Buntingford's
utter loneliness through long years; the spiritual isolation in which a
man of singularly responsive and confiding temper had passed perhaps a
quarter of his life, except for one blameless friendship with a woman now
dead. His utmost efforts had not been able to discover the wife who had
deserted him, or to throw any light upon her subsequent history. The law,
therefore, offered him no redress. He could not free himself; and he
could not marry again. Yet marriage and fatherhood were his natural
destiny, thwarted by the fatal mistake of his early youth. Nothing
remained but to draw a steady veil over the past, and to make what he
could of the other elements in life.
Alcott gathered clearly from the story that there had been no other woman
or women in the case, since his rupture with his wife. Was it that his
marriage, with all its repulsive episodes, had disgusted a fastidious
nature with the coarser aspects of the sex relation? The best was denied
him, and from the worse he himself turned away; though haunted all the
time by the natural hunger of the normal man.
As they walked on, Alcott gradually shaped some image for himself of
what had happened during the years of the marriage, piecing it
together from Buntingford's agitated talk. But he was not prepared for
a sudden statement made just as they were reaching the spot where
Alcott would naturally turn back towards the Rectory. It came with a
burst, after a silence.
"For God's sake, Alcott, don't suppose from what I have been telling you
that all the fault was on my wife's side, that I was a mere injured
innocent. Very soon after we married, I discovered that I had ceased to
love her, that there was hardly anything in common between us. And there
was a woman in Paris--a married woman, of my own world--cultivated, and
good, and refined--who was sorry for me, who made a kind of spiritual
home for me. We very nearly stepped over the edge--we should have
done--but for her religion. She was an ardent Catholic and her religion
saved her. She left Paris suddenly, begging me as the last thing she
would ever ask me, to be reconciled to Anna, and to forget her. For some
days I intended to shoot myself. But, at last, as the only thing I could
do for her, I did as she bade me. Anna and I, after a while, came
together again, and I hoped for a child. Then, by hideous ill luck, Anna,
about three months after our reconciliation, discovered a fragment of a
letter--believed the very worst--made a horrible scene with me, and went
off, as she has just told me,--not actually with Rocca as I believed, but
to join him in Italy. From that day I lost all trace of her. Her
concealment of the boy's birth was her vengeance upon me. She knew how
passionately I had always wanted a son. But instead she punished him--the
poor, poor babe!"
There was an anguish in the stifled voice which made sympathy
impertinent. Alcott asked some practical questions, and Buntingford
repeated his wife's report of the boy's condition, and her account of an
injury at birth, caused by the unskilful hands of an ignorant doctor.
"But I shall see him to-morrow. Ramsay and I go together. Perhaps, after
all, something can be done. I shall also make the first arrangements for
the divorce."
Alcott was silent a moment--hesitating in the dark.
"You will make those arrangements immediately?"
"Of course."
"If she dies? She may die."
"I would do nothing brutal--but--She came to make a bargain with me."
"Yes--but if she dies--might you not have been glad to say, 'I forgive'?"
The shy, clumsy man was shaken as he spoke, with the passion of his own
faith. The darkness concealed it, as it concealed its effect on
Buntingford. Buntingford made no direct reply, and presently they parted,
Alcott engaging to send a messenger over to Beechmark early, with a
report of the patient's condition, before Buntingford and Dr. Ramsay
started for London. Buntingford walked on. And presently in the dim
moonlight ahead he perceived Geoffrey French.
The young man approached him timidly, almost expecting to be denounced as
an intruder. Instead, Buntingford put an arm through his, and leaned upon
him, at first in a pathetic silence that Geoffrey did not dare to break.
Then gradually the story was told again, as much of it as was necessary,
as much as Philip could bear. Geoffrey made very little comment, till
through the trees they began to see the lights of Beechmark.
Then Geoffrey said in an unsteady voice:
"Philip!--there is one person you must tell--perhaps first of all. You
must tell Helena--yourself."
Buntingford stopped as though under a blow.
"Of course, I shall tell Helena--but why?--"
His voice spoke bewilderment and pain.
"Tell her _yourself_--that's all," said Geoffrey, resolutely--"and, if
you can, before she hears it from anybody else."