Hugh put the boy’s photograph with mechanical precision in its
accustomed place, then turned away and threw himself into the nearest
chair and rested his head on his hand. Now, for the first time, his
heart seemed to fail him. It was stone-cold with fear, the horrible
fear, of which premonitions had haunted him, off and on, during the
three years of his great happiness, lest this crime which he had
committed should cause him to forfeit Irene’s love.
He had entered the house buoyant with hope. That morning he had
received the offer of an appointment which was generally held to be the
stepping-stone to the silk of the Queen’s Counsel. He had rushed up the
stairs as eager as a boy, to tell Irene his news, and to see the quick
flush of pleasure on her cheek. So impetuous had been his entrance that
Jane, who had been awaiting his arrival with a warning word, had only
reached the foot of the stairs when he opened the drawing-room door. And
then the thunderbolt had fallen. He was too dazed as yet to speculate on
the motives of Minna’s astonishing revelation to Gerard. The bare fact
was sufficient.
Irene knew the miserable secret. The anguish in her eyes struck the
whole passionate man faint and helpless.
Suddenly he roused himself with a start, walked with a firm fast stride
through the open door, up the stairs and into Irene’s bedroom. As he
expected, she was there, on the bed, her face hidden in the pillows.
Through the open window, behind the dressing-table, came the raw, damp
air. She struggled to her feet and held out a deprecating hand as he
advanced to her.
“Irene!” he said. His heart nearly broke over the word.
“Leave me alone a little, Hugh,” she said quietly. “I will speak with
you presently. I must think.”
“Hear my story first, Irene, and that will aid the judgment you will
pass upon me.”
“I can’t judge you,” she replied. “There are feelings independent of
intellectual judgment.”
“But hear me,” he pleaded.
“I can guess it all,” she said.
“I shall have to tell it soon. Why not now? You can’t guess all. Every
minute’s delay is widening the gulf between us, dear.”
“It seems to be infinitely wide already,” she answered. “Why did you
deceive me, Hugh? I trusted you so----”
“Because I loved you.”
“Love is perfect trust,” she said.
“It is also protection. You committed a crime punishable at law for my
sake. I did the same for yours.”
“Do you suppose I would have let anything stand in the way of our
union?” she said.
“I knew that you would not, dear. But I also knew that such unions are
hard for the woman. I wanted to lighten your lot, not make it heavier.”
She shook her head, despairingly unconvinced. A word of anger, a note
of passion, would have drawn from him passionate entreaties. Her
self-contained and hopeless calm threw him back, as it were, upon
himself.
“Well. Perhaps you had better tell me now. Not here. It is cold.”
She shivered, glanced at the window, and for the first time noticed that
it was open.
“My poor child!”
He lowered the sash quickly, and caught up a brown shawl that lay over
the back of a couch, and held it ready to slip round her shoulders. But
she refused it, saying that she would be warm downstairs.
“I have carried you in it before now, Renie,” he said. “The first
time--after the boy was born.”
“That was long ago--in a different state of existence. Oh, Hugh, how
could you live a lie like this?”
“Come and I will tell you,” he said.
They went downstairs to the library. Jane met them with enquiries as to
the lunch that had been awaiting Hugh’s return. Their eyes questioned
one another.
“You can clear it away, Jane,” he said.
Irene allowed him to perform his usual little courtesies of tenderness
in making her comfortable before the fire, and thanked him in the even
voice that smote him deeper than anger or fierce reproach. He stood
beside her, hands on hips, his customary attitude.
“Shall I begin from the beginning? Well, it is the usual thing. Adam set
the example, stereotyped the excuse. The woman tempted me. A man is a
threadbare creature when you hold him up to the light. Or to put things
another way: I loved a star--the better part of me; the lower part
plucked the first wayside flower to hand----”
He broke off, paced impatiently the verge of carpet adjoining the
polished strip of floor that ran from the doorway to the fireplace wall.
“I can’t talk of it to you. It is horrible. I loved you all the time,
remember. I behaved like a blackguard to her. I don’t want to justify
myself----”
He paused, as if expecting her to reply, but she looked steadfastly
at the fire and gave no sign of heeding. The lines had deepened in her
face, the youth had gone out of it. Her age was two and thirty. She
looked five years older.
“I am going into rhodomontades,” he said. “I will just tell you the
facts.”
He began at his first meeting with Minna, described their courtship,
marriage, quarrel, the whole miserable story of their lives. He sought
neither to spare himself nor to paint himself in Mephistophelian
colours. Too proud to plead extenuation, he forced himself to state
facts baldly. A note of pleading in his voice might have touched the
tenderer chords in Irene, but his tale left her cold, angered, her heart
unconvinced. When he had finished he sat down in the chair opposite her,
and there was a long silence.
“Do you still reproach me so bitterly for deceiving you?” he asked at
length.
She looked round at him wearily. She had not spoken a word since he had
begun his tale.
“I can’t reproach you for being different from what I thought you. You
acted well, my reason tells me, according to your lights, but--I thought
your lights were different. At first I could not conceive how you left
me in ignorance. I need not say that if you had told me the woman was
your wife, I should not have questioned you further.”
“The words were on my lips,” he said, leaning forward, with anxious,
earnest face. “You checked them--the evening that you told me of your
love. Do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember,” she said. Then, after a pause, resuming the
mid-thread of her last remark:
“But I can understand now from what you have told me of yourself. No, I
don’t reproach you.”
He threw himself, in an outburst of gratitude, on his knees beside her
chair, and seized her hand.
“God bless you, Renie. I still have your love.” She withdrew her hand
gently.
“That is what I don’t know, Hugh. Some you must have, for the boy’s
sake. Some because of your tenderness and devotion to me. But what I
gave you this morning when you kissed the boy and myself before you
started--seems to have gone out of me----”
“But, Irene, my beloved,” he urged, with the pathos of ineptitude, “I
did it for the best--for the sake of your name and happiness---for the
sake of the children that might be--the danger seemed utterly remote--it
seemed only taking upon myself the burden of a crime--I never breathed
to you a word of the love and longing that tortured me until you showed
me that you loved me. And then I took this step--the only dishonourable
thing I have done in my life that my conscience approved of. My motives
were pure. It was for your happiness.”
“I know,” she sighed. “I am not an irrational woman. It was not the
selfish motive of having me yours. My reason approves you. But something
has stopped in my heart--I don’t know what it is or why it is.”
“Time will set it on its old motion again,” he said.
“No, I think not. I had the trust in you that a more religious woman has
in God. Now it has gone.”
“But you tell me your reason approves,” insisted poor Hugh.
“Faith is on a different plane from reason. I am hurting you. It goes to
my heart to do it. But I can’t pretend.”
Hugh rose, and, stooping over her, kissed her forehead.
“I will leave you to yourself to-day, if you wish it.”
“You would be doing me a kindness, Hugh,” she replied.
He left her, and betook himself to the library of his club, where,
surrounding himself with books and sheets of manuscript, he made a
pretence of work a barrier against intrusive acquaintances.
Irene went upstairs to the nursery, and, dismissing the nursemaid, took
the boy on her lap, and drew her arms tightly round him. The tears
came from an overfull heart and trickled down upon the chubby cheek. He
disengaged himself and looked her in the face, and then, reminiscent of
a lugubrious story that Susan had been telling him:
“Is daddy dead?” he asked with cheerful sympathy.
“No, darling. He----”
She could not say more. A lump rose in her throat.
“Then why are you crying, mummy? Have you been naughty?”
She laughed, caught him to her breast again.
“We are all miserable sinners, Hughie, save you. And you are the dearest
mother’s angel that ever lived.”
She remained with him for the rest of the day, seeking material
distraction in his childish interests and needs, and finding the crushed
woman’s solace in his near and happy presence. Yet the beloved sight of
him brought pain. He was nameless, a child of Hagar. Already his future
years had been weighted with his mother’s public dishonour. Now, if
this thing were noised abroad, the burden of illegitimacy was added. The
maternal instinct rose, revolted, and raised up resentment against Hugh.
In the evening she put the boy to bed and sat by him as he slept. What
would be the outcome of it all? She rested her head upon the edge of the
pillow, and tried to think. In the first blank agony of that afternoon,
there had come into her head a wild idea of leaving Hugh, and living her
broken life in solitude. Perhaps the suggestion had been too fantastic
to be called an idea. She had been visited by obscured gleams of
visions, in which she had seen herself now flying on foot from the
house, now sitting at a window in a sea-coast cottage, with the boy at
her side.
Afterwards she recognised that these were but pictures of a brain
momentarily disordered. Even if her own heart did not bid her pity Hugh,
the boy was a sacred bond between them, not to be broken by any change
in their outer lives. Whatever happened, they would continue to live as
man and wife before the world, carrying on the lie. To her transparent
nature deceit was abhorrent. She had the blemish of her qualities.
And her love for Hugh? She strained her spiritual vision, saw things
distortedly, out of perspective. The woman of flesh and blood also
suffered. A certain grandeur of cold and cruel loveliness had invested
her conception of her of the ophidian eyes, and had stirred in her
bosom, not jealousy, but a feminine thrill of triumph. Far different
were her feelings with reference to Minna. How could the high-souled
gentleman have fallen a victim to the tawdry wiles of one so commonplace
and vulgar? The intrigue debased him in her eyes. It quenched in her
image of him that suffused radiance of idealism and spirituality which
had always existed. What she had said was true. The divinity in which
she had trusted had faded into nothingness. Her soul put forth its hands
for support, and found none; it was groping in darkness.
The boy stirred in his sleep. She slid one hand beneath the bed-clothes
and soothed him. The other touched the little crumpled hand, that
gradually closed round her finger. The action seemed symbolical. A
passionate tumult of maternal emotion swelled her heart. The tears
started again to her eyes. For a long time she sat, quite still,
absorbed as it were in the soul of the sleeping child.
Something strange had taken place. She felt the relief of returning
strength. She rose, kissed the breath of the parted, innocent lips, and
retired to her own room. When Hugh, an hour afterwards, came home, he
entered noiselessly and advanced a pace or two on tip-toe. Her placid,
regular breathing told him that she slept. He withdrew as gently as he
had entered, and went to bed.
The next day was Sunday. They met at breakfast. She approached him, and
offered her cheek to his kiss.
“Only that, Irene?” he asked, with his hand on her shoulder.
“I shall always give you all that is in me to give,” she replied. “You
must try to be content.”
He turned away sorrowfully, and sat down to table. Presently he told her
how he had entered her room last night, and found her sleeping. It had
made him happier.
“I was with Hughie all day,” she explained, with feminine suppression of
connective links.
“He is a comfort to you?”
“A new comfort,” she said.
The day passed tolerably enough, and the next and the next. Their outer
life remained unchanged. Yet it was the simulacrum of the old. She met
him with gentle kindness, uttering no word of reproach, and manifesting
a tender interest in his concerns and comforts. But the unassayable
essence of their union had gone. She had grown reserved, self-contained.
Hugh bowed his head beneath his punishment. He recognised the futility
of pleading. Once more she took her place among the cold stars,
hopelessly remote. The stamp of finality seemed impressed upon their
relations. And the hunger for that which could never be came into his
eyes.
They rarely spoke of the disintegrating cause. Once she asked him
whether he feared public exposure. He reassured her. The man would be a
devil if he blabbed such a secret abroad, considering the awful peril in
which he would place her. The other would keep silent for her own sake.
Why she had confided in Gerard was a mystery.
“You must seek the motive in love or hate,” said Irene.
“Hate, then.”
“I would not be too sure,” said Irene, who had tasted the bitter fruit
of knowledge. “A woman can have strange jealousies.”
“You need not fear,” he said.
But her words gave poignancy to gnawing misgivings. He had counted so
absolutely on Minna’s silence. Now, who could tell of what vindictive
folly she was capable?
“My mind is easy, Hugh,” she replied. “I have faith in my destiny.”
He looked enquiringly. “As the boy’s mother,” she explained.
So things went on until one evening, when, in consequence of a
long-standing invitation, the Harroways dined with them. Harroway took
Hugh into a corner before dinner. His face was beaming.
“I have seen Merriam. He has told me. I want to fling myself on my knees
before your wife. Believe me, I have all along had terrible doubts--ask
Selina. It makes me feel young again.”
“What did he tell you?” asked Hugh, anxiously.
“Simply that he had discovered his error. He thought I ought to know.
I’m glad I’m not in his shoes. I’d shoot myself--by George, I would,
sir!”
“He told you nothing about the source of his information?”
“No, my dear boy. Of course not. Oh, he’s straight enough, in his way,
is Gerard. He’s pretty miserable about it. He’s off to California next
week--to buy a ranch and settle down, he says. So your paths won’t cross
again. I was to give you that message.”
Hugh felt relieved. Gerard’s presence in London caused him an oppression
which he had not been able to shake off.
“I am glad we are clear in the eyes of you two, at last,” he said.
“You have always been clear in our hearts, my dear Hugh,” said the old
solicitor.
But in spite of Hugh’s relief, and that of Irene, who had been wept and
smiled over by Selina upstairs, the dinner had not the usual success
of their little reunions. Irene looked tired. Hugh’s efforts at
entertainment lacked spontaneity. Both exerted themselves, and were
conscious of exertion. After the guests had gone, they sat a while
together in the drawing-room.
“I suppose Mrs. Harroway told you?” said Hugh.
“Yes. It’s the best thing that can happen to us,” she answered. He
assented gloomily. She stole a wistful glance at him, and pitied him for
his downfall. She longed as yearningly as he for the dead day’s departed
grace. But it could never come back. Forgiveness implies raising or
lowering of respective planes. Where one forgives, one cannot worship.
Neither can one feel outside the limit imposed by temperament. It was
not given to her to love frail mortality with the sacred fire. Her
mother, father, the old eidolon of Gerard she had worshipped. Hugh she
had loved with a newly-awakened elemental passion, but had worshipped
him also. The whole devotion would never return. Her heart was moved by
the pity of it. And yet what could she do? In her heart she was grateful
to him for his tender courtesy, and his perception of her soul’s
workings. It made their common life tolerable, by giving her breathing
space, time to realise herself, and once more to reconstruct a new life
upon the ruins of an old one.
To cheer him, she gave him an account of her day’s doings, of the day’s
oddities and signs of progress in the boy. Demanded his news, touched
on the new appointment. For he had come home late, just in time to dress
for dinner, and they had not seen each other alone since the morning.
Then she rose and bade him good night.
“Good night. God bless you,” he said.
For some moments he sat in a brown study, meditating over the change
that a few days had wrought in his paradise. The haughtiness of spirit
that had enabled him all his life long to face his own misdeeds and
to scorn their consequences, was crushed. Irene had never been so
unutterably dear. He felt humbly grateful for her kindness.
He rose with a sigh, stretched himself, and after turning out the lights
in the drawing-room, went downstairs to the library, intending to do
an hour’s work before going to bed. He lit a cigarette, sat down,
and opened the brief-bag that he had brought home. With a handful
of documents, he drew out an unopened evening paper. He arrayed the
documents before him, then unfolded the newspaper, and leaning back in
his chair glanced idly up and down the columns. Suddenly his eye became
riveted to the page, his face grew white, and then he fell forward,
elbows on table, and sat staring in front of him, digging his nails into
his cheeks.
His back was to the door. He was not conscious that Irene, in
dressing-gown and with loose hair, had entered the room.
“Did I leave my book down here?” she asked, mentioning a new novel.
The sound of her voice startled him. He turned round, dazed. She came
towards him, caught sight of his face beneath the shaded gas-light,
and uttered a little cry of fear, for it was ghastly, and his eyes were
bloodshot. He beckoned her. She approached and read over his shoulder
the lines to which his finger pointed.
“A tragic sequel to the celebrated Sunnington murder is reported from
Nice. Miss Minna Hart, the daughter of the late Israel Hart, Esquire,
was found dead in her bed this morning. An empty bottle that had
contained chloral was found by her bedside. Whether death was the result
of an accident or not is not yet ascertained.”
But they knew. He turned in his chair, and they looked in silence at one
another. The dead girl seemed to rise up between them. For a moment they
were strangers.
“It was I that killed her,” he said.
“Yes, it was you.”
The words came mechanically from her lips. They crushed the man who lay
back in his chair, broken and helpless, with all the old pride gone.
“Then I had better follow her,” he said, staring moodily in front of
him.
There was a long, long silence. Irene looked at him, her hand to her
breast as if to suppress tumultuous workings. In the second and
greater crash of her illusions she had not felt the spasm of horror
and revulsion. She had only mourned the desecration of the sun in her
heaven. Her idol had been transmuted into clay, and she had seen herself
bereft of the god to whom she referred all the promptings of her soul.
Her chief sensation had been amazed self-pity, in which her broader
sympathies had no part. The moment of utter separation from him brought
a flash of insight, and she saw him as he was, a man confessed--erring,
high-minded, weak, patching up honour with dishonour, striving after
noble ends by base means, a contrast of opposites, a fusion of granite
and “a measure of shifting sand, from under the feet of the years.”
“I have made a ghastly failure of life,” he said, “but I can’t live
without your love.”
He raised his eyes. The great pain in them, unlike any anguish she had
dreamed of, smote her suddenly, and, like a magician’s staff, opened all
the fountains of her nature through which her woman’s tenderness
gushed forth. She rushed to him, knelt by his side, clinging to him
passionately, sobbing and weeping.
“Forgive me, dear, forgive me. All my life and love are yours to help
and comfort you.”
The tremendous revelation had come. She, the woman, was strong. He, the
man, was weak. It was for her to protect and guide him through life. She
felt a thrill with it as she strained him to her heart.
It was the vivid solution of her life’s problem, one diametrically
opposed to the processes she had blindly followed. In the pulsating
happiness of finding her warm human love for him coursing through her
veins, she accepted it with tearful gratitude. The god was lost in the
weak, proud man, to whom she represented the infallible and divine. It
was for her to lead, for him to follow.
They sat long together, side by side, on this night of shock and
reconciliation.
“God help us all who drift,” said Hugh.
“Love will guide, dear,” she answered.
“Who guided her?” he asked, motioning to the paper.
“We cannot judge her,” said Irene.
They were nearer in thought than they had ever been, as they held silent
communion over the pitiful tragedy that had shaken their lives. For each
felt that its cause lay not altogether in despair at having betrayed a
vital secret to a deadly enemy, who would use it to deprive her of her
fortune; that it lay deeper in the roots of a human soul. For a woman,
heart-poisoned by the cup of life that she drank, with its seething
ingredients of love, jealousy, bitterness, fear, despair, avarice,
self-contempt, hate, weariness, remorse, sense of wrong received and
dealt, the curse of race, the taint of wantonness, the flavours of
nobler things, late added--curdling sourly in the draught--a woman so
sickened to her death, is capable of many inconsistencies, and claims at
least the grave pity of the merciful.
“Will you forgive me for saying those cruel words?” asked Irene, at
last. “They came from me, I don’t know how.”
He took her in his arms.
“It is I that need the forgiveness.”
“There is only one thing I would not forgive you for.”
“And that?”
“Ceasing to love me,” she replied.
*****
And so they passed together out of the shadows, into the light of day.
But it was the day of April greys and sunlight that is Life, and not
the June glory that is Illusion. Irene’s eyes were opened; but if her
outlook was more sombre, the ground beneath her feet was more secure. A
sense, too, of aloneness came, but, womanlike, she hid it in her heart,
and the man walked with her unwitting, with regained buoyancy of step.
An erring, faulty woman, yet of stronger stuff than the impetuous man
she loved so deeply, she felt at times a pathetic longing for the old
blind worship. At such times she would look wistfully at her boy, asking
herself a foolish question; and her sweet human frailty sought to read
the answer in the child’s unfathomable eyes.
THE END.