After throwing George Caresfoot into the bramble-bush, Arthur walked
steadily back to the inn, where he arrived, quite composed in manner,
at about half-past seven. Old Sam, the ostler, was in the yard, washing
a trap. He went up to him, and asked when the next train started for
London.
“There is one as leaves Roxham at nine o’clock, sir, and an uncommon
fast one, I’m told. But you bean’t a-going yet, be you, sir?”
“Yes, have the gig ready in time to catch the train.”
“Very good, sir. Been to the fire, I suppose sir?” he went on, dimly
perceiving that Arthur’s clothes were torn. “It wore a fine place, it
wore, and it did blaze right beautiful.”
“No; what fire?”
“Bless me, sir, didn’t you see it last night?—why, Isleworth Hall, to
be sure. It wore burnt right out, and all as was in it.”
“Oh! How did it come to get burnt?”
“Can’t say, sir, but I did hear say how as Lady Bellamy was a-dining
there last night along with the squire; the squire he went out
somewhere, my lady she goes home, and the footman he goes to put out
the lamp and finds the drawing-room a roaring fiery furnace, like as
parson tells us on. But I don’t know how that can be, for I heard how
as the squire was a-dying, so ‘taint likely that he was a-going out.
But, lord, sir, folk in these parts do lie that uncommon, ‘taint as it
be when I was a boy. As like as no, he’s no more dying than you are.
Anyhow, sir, it all burned like tinder, and the only thing, so I’m
told, as was saved was a naked stone statty of a girl with a chain
round her wrists, as Jim Blakes, our constable, being in liquor,
brought out in his arms, thinking how as it was alive, and tried to
rewive it with cold water.”
At that moment Sam’s story was interrupted by the arrival of a farmer’s
cart.
“How be you, Sam?”
“Well, I thank yer, for seventy-two, that is, not particular ill.”
“Have you a gentleman of the name of Heigham staying here?”
“I am he,” said Arthur, “do you want me?”
“No, sir, only the station-master at Roxham asked me to drop this here
as it was marked immediate,” and he handed Arthur a box.
Arthur thanked him, and, taking it, went up to his room, leaving old
Sam delighted to find a new listener to his story of the fire.
It was from the florist, and contained the bouquet he had meant to give
Angela on her wedding-day. It had cost him a good deal of thought that
bouquet, to say nothing of five guineas of the coin of the realm, and
he felt a certain curiosity to look at it, though to do so gave him
something of the same sensation that we experience in reading a letter
written by some loved hand which we know grew cold before the lines it
traced could reach us. He took the box to his room and opened it. The
bouquet was a lovely thing, and did credit even to Covent Garden, and
the masses of stephanotis and orange-bloom, relieved here and there by
rising sprays of lilies-of-the-valley, filled the whole room with
fragrance.
He drew it from the zinc-well in which it was packed in moss and
cotton-wool, and wondered what he should do with it. He could not leave
such a thing about, nor would he take it away. Suddenly an idea struck
him, and he repacked it in its case as carefully as he could in the
original moss and cotton-wool, and then looked about for the sheet of
tissue-paper that should complete the covering. He had destroyed it,
and had to search for a substitute. In so doing his eye fell upon a
long envelope on his dressing-table and he smiled. It contained his
marriage licence, and he bethought him that it was a very fair
substitute for tissue-paper, and quite as worthless. He extracted it,
and, placing it over the flowers, closed up the box. Then he carefully
directed it to “Mrs. George Caresfoot, Abbey House,” and, ringing the
bell, desired the boots to find a messenger to take it over.
When he had done all this, he sat down and wondered what could have
come to him that he could take pleasure in doing a cruel action only
worthy of a jealous woman.
Perhaps of all the bitter cups which are held to our lips in this sad
world there is none more bitter than that which it was his lot to drink
of now. To begin with, the blow fell in youth, when we love or hate, or
act, with an ardour and an entire devotion that we give to nothing in
after-life. It is then that the heart puts forth its most tender and
yet its most lusty shoots, and if they are crushed the whole plant
suffers, and sometimes bleeds to death. Arthur had, to an extent quite
unrealized by himself until he lost her, centred all his life in this
woman, and it was no exaggeration to say, as he had said to her, that
she had murdered his heart, and withered up all that was best in it.
She had done more, she had inflicted the most cruel injury upon him
that a woman can inflict upon a man. She had shaken his belief in her
sex at large.
He felt, sitting there in his desolation, that now he had lost Angela
he could never be the same man he would otherwise have been. Her cruel
desertion had shattered the tinted glass through which youth looks at
the world, and he now, before his day, saw it as it is, grim and hard,
and full of coarse realities, and did not yet know that time would
again soften down the sharpest of the rough outlines, and throw a
garment of its own over the nakedness of life. He was a generous-
hearted man and not a vain one, and had he thought that Angela had
ceased to care for him and loved this other man, he could have found it
in his heart to forgive her, and even to sympathize with her; but he
could not think this. Something told him that it was not so. She had
contracted herself into a shameful, loveless marriage, and, to gain
ends quite foreign to all love, had raised a barrier between them which
had no right to exist, and yet one that in this world could, he
thought, never be removed.
Misfortunes rain upon us from every quarter of the sky, but so long as
they come from the sky we can bear them, for they are beyond the
control of our own volition, and must be accepted, as we accept the
gale or the lightning. It is the troubles which spring from our own
folly and weakness, or from that of those with whom our lives are
intertwined, which really crush us. Now Arthur knew enough of the world
to be aware that there is no folly to equal that of a woman who, of her
own free will, truly loving one man whom she can marry if she wills it,
deliberately gives herself to another. It is not only a folly, it is a
crime, and, like most crimes, for this life, an irretrievable mistake.
Long before he got back to London, the first unwholesome exaltation of
mind that always follows a great misfortune, and which may perhaps be
compared with the excitement that for awhile covers the shameful sense
of defeat in an army, had evaporated, and he began to realize the
crushing awfulness of the blow which had fallen on him, and to fear
lest it should drive him mad. He looked round his little horizon for
some straw of comfort at which to catch, and could find none; nothing
but dreadful thoughts and sickening visions.
And then suddenly, just as he was sinking into the dulness of despair,
there came, like the first gleam of light in chaotic darkness, the
memory of Mildred Carr. Truly she had spoken prophetically. His idol
had been utterly cast down and crushed to powder by a hand stronger
than his own. He would go to her in his suffering; perhaps she could
find means to comfort him.
When he reached town he took a hansom and went to look for some rooms;
he would not return to those he had left on the previous afternoon, for
the sympathetic landlord had helped him to pack up the wedding clothes
and had admired the wedding gift. Arthur felt that he could not face
him again. He found some to suit him in Duke Street, St. James, and
left his things there. Thence he drove to Fenchurch Street and took a
passage to Madeira. The clerk, the same one who had given him his
ticket about a year before, remembered him perfectly, and asked him how
he got on with Mrs. Carr. But when his passage was taken he was
disgusted to find that the mail did not sail for another five days. He
looked at his watch, it was only half-past one o’clock. He could
scarcely believe what had happened had only occurred that morning, only
seven hours ago. It seemed to him that he had stood face to face with
Angela, not that morning, but years ago, and miles away, on some
desolate shore which lay on the other side of a dead ocean of pain. And
yet it was only seven hours! If the hours went with such heavy wings,
how would the days pass, and the months, and the years?
What should he do with himself? In his condition perpetual activity was
as necessary to him as air, he must do something to dull the sharp edge
of his suffering, or the sword of madness which hung over him by such a
slender thread would fall. Suddenly he bethought him of a man whom he
had known slightly up at Cambridge, a man of wealth and evil
reputation. This man would, he felt, be able to put him in a way of
getting through his time. He knew his address and thither he drove.
Four days later, a figure, shrunk, shaky, and looking prematurely old,
with the glaze of intoxication scarcely faded from his eye, walked into
Mr. Borley’s office. That respectable gentleman looked and looked
again.
“Good Heavens,” he said at length; “it isn’t Arthur Heigham.”
“Yes, it is, though,” said an unequal voice; “I’ve come for some money.
I’ve got none left and I am going to Madeira to-morrow.”
“My dear boy, what has happened to you? You look so very strange. I
have been expecting to see your marriage in the paper. Why, it’s only a
few days ago that you left to be married.”
“A few days, a few years, you mean. I’ve been jilted, that’s all,
nothing to speak of, you know, but I had rather not talk about it, if
you don’t mind. I’m like a nag with a flayed back, don’t like the sight
of the saddle at present,” and poor Arthur, mentally and physically
exhausted, put his head down on his arm and gulped.
The old lawyer took in the situation at a glance.
“Hard hit,” he said to himself; “and gone on to the burst,” and then
aloud, “well, well, that has happened to many a man, in fact, you
mightn’t believe it, but it once happened to me, and I don’t look much
the worse, do I? But we won’t talk about it. The less said of a bad
business the better, that’s my maxim. And so you are going abroad
again. Have you got any friends at Madeira?”
Arthur nodded.
“And you want some more money. Let me see, I sent you 200 pounds last
week.”
“That was for my wedding tour. I’ve spent it now. You can guess how I
have spent it. Pleasant contrast, isn’t it? Gives rise to moral
reflections.”
“Come, come, Heigham, you must not give way like that. These things
happen to most men in the course of their lives, and if they are wise
it teaches them that gingerbread isn’t all gilt, and to set down women
at their proper value, and appreciate a good one if it pleases
Providence to give them one in course of time. Don’t you go making a
fool of yourself over this girl’s pretty face. Handsome is as handsome
does. These things are hard to bear, I know, but you don’t make them
any better by pitching your own reputation after a girl’s want of
stability.”
“I know that you are quite right, and I am much obliged to you for your
kind advice, but we won’t say anything more about it. I suppose that
you can let me have some money?”
“Oh yes, if you want it, though I think we shall have to overdraw. What
do you want? Two hundred? Here is the cheque.”
“I am anxious about that young fellow,” said Mr. Borley to himself, in
the pause between Arthur’s departure and the entry of the next client.
“I hope his disappointment won’t send him to the dogs. He is not of the
sort who take it easy, like I did, for instance. Dear me, that is a
long while ago now. I wonder what the details of his little affair
were, and who the girl married. Captain Shuffle! yes, show him in.”