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JANE OGLANDER
by
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
"Something even more imperious than reason admonishes us that
life's inmost secret lies not in the slow adaptation of man to
circumstance, but in his costly victories and splendid defeats."
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1911
Copyright, 1911, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
Published April, 1911
JANE OGLANDER
PROLOGUE
"Elle fut née pour plaire aux nobles âmes,
Pour les consoler un peu d'un monde impur."
Jane Oglander was walking across Westminster Bridge on a late September
day.
It was a little after four o'clock--on the bridge perhaps the quietest
time of the working day--but a ceaseless stream of human beings ebbed to
and fro. She herself came from the Surrey side of the river, and now and
again she stayed her steps and looked over the parapet. It was plain--or
so thought one who was looking at her very attentively--that she was
more interested in the Surrey side, in the broken line of St. Thomas's
Hospital, in the grey-red walls of Lambeth Palace and the Lollards'
Tower, than in the mass of the Parliament buildings opposite.
But though Miss Oglander stopped three times in her progress over the
bridge, she did not stay at any one place for more than a few
moments--not long enough to please the man who had gradually come up
close to her.
Having first noticed her in front of the bridge entrance of St. Thomas's
Hospital, this man had made it his business to keep, if well behind,
then in step with her.
A human being--and especially a woman--may be described in many ways.
For our purpose it was fortunate that on this eventful afternoon of her
life Miss Oglander happened to attract the attention of an observer,
who, if then living in great penury and solitude, was yet destined to
become what a lover of literature has described as the greatest
interpreter of the human side of London life since Dickens.
When he was not writing, this man--whose name, by the way, was Ryecroft,
and whose misfortune it was to be temperamentally incapable of
sustained, wage-earning work--spent many hours walking about the London
streets studying the human side of London's traffic, and especially that
side which to a certain type of observer, of saunterer in the labyrinth,
is full of ever recurring mystery and charm. He wrote of the depths,
because the depths were all he knew, with an intimate and a terrible
knowledge. But he had your true romancer's craving for romance, and his
eager face with its curiously high, straight forehead crowned with a
shock of rather long auburn hair, was the face and head of the idealist,
of the humourist, and--now that he is dead, why not say so?--of the
lover, of the man that is to whom the most interesting thing in the
world remains, when all is said and done,--woman, and man's pursuit, not
necessarily conquest, of the elusive creature.
Ryecroft had been already on Westminster Bridge for some time before he
became aware that a feminine figure of more than common distinction and
interest, a young lady whose appearance and light buoyant step sharply
differentiated her from those about her, was walking toward him. As he
saw her his eyes lighted up with a rather pathetic pleasure, and in an
instant he had become sensitively aware of every detail of her dress.
She wore a plain grey coat and skirt, and a small hat of which the
Mercury wings, to the whimsical fellow watching her, evoked the Hellas
of his dreams. A black and white spotted veil, which, as was then the
fashion, left the wearer's delicately cut sensitive mouth bare, shadowed
her hazel eyes.
Ryecroft noticed--he always saw such things--that the young lady wore
odd gloves, the one on her right hand was light grey, that clothing her
left moleskin in colour. The trifling fact pleased him. It showed, or so
he argued with himself, that this sweet stranger had a soul above the
usual pernickety vanities of young womanhood.
For a moment their eyes met, and he admired the gentle, not unkind
indifference with which she received his eager, measuring glance.
In a sense, Jane Oglander never saw at all the man who was gazing at her
so intently, and he never saw her again, but for some moments--perhaps
for as long as half an hour--this singular and gifted being felt himself
to be in sensitive, even close, sympathy with her, and in his emotional
memory she henceforth occupied a niche labelled "The Lady of Westminster
Bridge."
Ryecroft allowed Miss Oglander to pass by him, and then quietly and very
unobtrusively he followed her; stopping when she stopped, following the
direction of her eyes, trying as far as might be to think her thoughts,
and meanwhile weaving in his mind a portrait of her having as little
relation to reality as has a woodland scene in tapestry to a real sun
and shadow-filled glade.
"Here," he said to himself, "is a girl who is assuredly not accustomed
to walking the more populous thoroughfares of London by herself. Were
she quite true to type she would be what they called 'chaperoned' by a
lady's maid, that is by a woman who would be certainly aware that I was
following them, and who would probably take my attention for herself. A
dozen men might follow this young lady and she would not be aware of
their proximity. There is something about her of Una, but Una so
completely protected by a quality in herself, and by her upbringing and
character, that she has no need of a lion.
"For me she holds a singular appeal, because she is unlike the only
woman I ever have the chance of meeting, and because we, that gentle,
austerely attractive creature and I, have much in common. Effortless
she has achieved all that I long for and that I know I shall never
obtain--intellectual distinction in those she frequents, the
satisfaction attendant on proper pride, and doubtless, in her daily
life, refined beauty of surroundings. She is very plainly dressed, but
that is because she has a delicate and elevated taste, and happily
belongs to that small, privileged class which is able to pay the highest
price, and so command the best type of gown, the prettiest shoes, the
best fitting gloves--even if she wears them odd--and the most becoming
hat.
"But what has Una been doing on the Surrey side of the Thames?"
Ryecroft smiled; he thought the answer to his question obvious.
"She has been"--he went on, talking to himself, and forming the words
with his lips, for he was a very lonely man--"to St. Thomas's Hospital,
either to see some friend who is in the paying ward, or to visit a poor
person in whom she is--to use the shibboleth of Mayfair--'interested.'
It is a more or less new experience, and though she is evidently in a
hurry, she cannot help lingering now and again, thinking over the
strange, dreadful things with which she has, doubtless for the first
time, now come in contact. She doesn't care for the Houses of
Parliament--they represent to her the thing she knows, for she often
takes part in that odd rite, 'Tea on the Terrace.' But she is
timorously attracted to the other side--to the dark, to the pregnant
side of life. And above all what fascinates her is the river--the river
itself, at once so like and so unlike the Thames she knows above
Richmond where she goes boating with her brothers' friends, with the
young men with whom she seems on such intimate terms and of whom she
knows so extraordinarily little, and who treat her, very properly, as
something fragile, to be cared for, respected...."
When she reached the end of the bridge, after looking to the right and
to the left, the young lady walked across the roadway with an assured
step, and Ryecroft's eager, sensitive face brightened. This was in the
picture, the picture he had drawn and coloured with his own pigments.
"For this kind of young Englishwoman the traffic stops instinctively of
itself," he said to himself; "and she has no fear of being run over"
(perhaps it should be added, that this little one-sided adventure of
Henry Ryecroft's took place before the advent of the trams). And still
he followed, keeping close behind her. Suddenly she turned toward the
Underground Railway, and this annoyed him; he had hoped that she (and
he) would walk down Great George Street, across the two parks, and so
into old Mayfair.
As an alternative he had promised himself the pleasure of seeing her get
into a hansom-cab. Were she to disappear into the ugly gulf of the
Underground it would disappoint him unreasonably. But stop! She had
turned her back on the cavernous entrance to the station and she was
gazing down at the posters of the evening papers.
The placards were all emblazoned with the same piece of news,
differently worded: "General Lingard in London," "Reception of Lingard
at Victoria," "Return of a Famous Soldier."
Ryecroft's lip curled. He had an intellectual contempt for the fighting
man as such, and a horror, nay a loathing, of war. He knew what even a
brief and successful war means to those among whom his own lot was cast,
the London woman whose son, whose brother, whose lover is so often
called Thomas Atkins.
And now, at last, he heard his lady's voice. She beckoned to the
smallest and most ragged of the lads selling newspapers:--
"I want all to-night's papers:" her voice fell with an agreeable cadence
on Ryecroft's ears. He was singularly susceptible to the cadences of the
human voice, and he thought he had never heard a sweeter. She took a
shilling out of her purse, and, rather to his surprise, he saw that her
purse was small, black and worn.
"How much?" she asked gently.
The boy hesitated, and then answered, "Five-pence halfpenny."
She handed him a shilling. "You can keep the change," she said, and a
very charming smile quivered across her face, "for yourself."
The man who was watching her felt touched--unreasonably moved. "Thank
God," he said to himself, "that, unlike many of her friends, she has
nothing to do with the C.O.S.!"
Then to Ryecroft's surprise, instead of going on as he expected her to
do--he had already made up his mind that she was taking the papers home
to an invalid father, or to a brother who had hurt himself in one of
those mad games in which, as the watcher knew well, the young English
oligarch delights to spend his spare time--the young lady turned, and
crossed over again on to the bridge, but this time she chose the other
side, the side which commands the more beautiful view of the London
river.
"Dear me," he said to himself, "the plot thickens!" and then he suddenly
told himself that of course she was going back to the hospital. The
person she was going to see had asked for an evening paper, and in her
generosity she had bought them all.
But on the bridge she stayed her steps, and, opening one of the papers,
spread it out against the parapet, and began eagerly reading it,
unheeding of the human stream flowing to and fro behind her.
Ryecroft gently approached closer and closer to her, and at last he was
able to see what it was she was bending over and reading with such
intentness: "_General Lingard's Home-coming._" "_Splendid Reception at
Victoria Station._" So was the column headed, and already her eyes had
travelled down to the last paragraph:
"To conclude: by his defeat of the great Mahomedan Emir of Bobo,
General Lingard has added to the British Crown another magnificent
jewel in the Sultanate of Amadawa."
Then came a cross-head--"Pen Portrait."
"Lingard is above all things a fighter. His eye is keen, alert,
passionless. He is a tall man, and he dominates those with whom he
stands. His life as a soldier has been from the beginning a wooing
of peril, and as a result he has commanded a victorious expedition
at an age when his seniors are hoping to command a regiment. He
does not talk as other men talk--he is no teller of 'good stories.'
He is a Man."
Jane Oglander looked up, and there came a glow--a look of proud, awed
gladness on her face.
Then, folding the paper, she walked steadily on. But though she crossed
over the bridge as if she were going to the hospital, to the side
entrance where visitors are admitted, she walked on past the mass of
buildings. Then she turned sharply to the left, Ryecroft still
following, till she came to a small row of houses, respectable, but poor
and mean in appearance, in a narrow street which was redeemed to a
certain extent by the fact that there was a Queen Anne church at one end
of it, and next to the church a substantial rectory or vicarage house.
To Ryecroft's measureless astonishment, she opened her purse, took out a
latch-key and let herself into the front-door of one of the small
houses....
Three weeks later Henry Ryecroft happened to be in that same
neighbourhood, and he suddenly remembered his Lady of Westminster
Bridge. Greatly daring--but he ever loved such daring--he rang at the
door of the house at which he had seen her go in.
A typical Londoner of the hard-working, self-respecting class answered
his ring. She stood for a moment looking at him, waiting for him to
speak.
"Is the lady in?" he asked, feeling suddenly ashamed and foolish. "I
mean the young lady who lives here."
"Miss Oglander?" said the woman. "No, she's away. But I'll give you her
address."
She handed him a piece of paper on which was written in what he thought
was a singularly pretty handwriting:--
MISS OGLANDER,
Rede Place,
Redyford,
Surrey.
He took the little piece of paper and walked away. When he found himself
on the bridge he dropped the paper into the river. "Oglander," he said
to himself, "a curious, charming name, rhyming with Leander,
philander----" he shook his head and smiled, "no, no, not philander," he
said, speaking the words aloud. "Lavender, that's what her name should
rhyme to,--Lavender...."
Henry Ryecroft, in his way a philosopher, would have been at first
gently amused, and then perhaps moved and interested, had he known both
how right and how wrong had been the kitcat portrait he had evolved out
of his inner consciousness.
He had been right as to the type. He had even been successful in
realizing something of Miss Oglander's inward mind and character from
her outward appearance, but he had been quite wrong as to the present
circumstances of her life.
It was true that she belonged to the privileged class who alone in the
seething world of London have the command of money, and also the
command, materially speaking, of the best. But if born and bred in the
west of London, she now belonged by deliberate choice to the south side
of the Thames. At a moment when she desired to hide herself from the
world, she had chosen that ugly, formless district of London which lies
between Westminster Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge because a distant
relation of her mother's had married a clergyman whose parish lay there,
and he had offered to find her in that parish plenty of hard work to
still her pain.
As a young girl, Jane Oglander had lived the life that Ryecroft imagined
her to be living now. While keeping house for a bachelor brother, she
had seen, from a pleasantly sheltered standpoint, all that was most
agreeable and amusing in the cultivated London world. Treated with the
gentle gallantry and respect Ryecroft had supposed by her brother's
friends, she was--as is so often the case with a young woman who has
been almost entirely educated by men and surrounded with masculine
influences--graver, less frivolous, more austerely refined than were
most of her contemporaries.
Her nature, the core of her, was happy, tender, sensitive, capable also
of a depth of feeling--and feeling always implies a certain
violence--unsuspected by those round her. Thanks to the circumstances of
her birth and upbringing Jane Oglander might conceivably have lived a
long beneficent life, and have finally slipped out of that life without
becoming aware that there were such tragic things as sin, shame, and
acute suffering in the world.
Humility was not lacking to one endowed with many of the other endearing
graces. Jane Oglander was very conscious of the lack in herself of those
practical qualities which make their fortunate possessors ever punctual
and unforgetful of the minor duties of life. She would forget to answer
unimportant letters, mistake the hour of unessential invitations,
arrive late for trains, and, as we have seen, tempt gifts her way by
putting on odd articles of clothing which her wiser friends always wore
in pairs.
But she was never found lacking in that beautiful quality which the
French call _la politesse du coeur_. Thus, her mental lapses were
never of a nature to hurt the feelings or the pride of those whose
feelings and whose pride are often regarded by people more fortunate in
a material sense than themselves as so unimportant as to be probably
non-existent.
First her father, and then her brother, had been instinctively careful
that she should only know the best of life. They had preserved her with
firm decision from any of those influences which might have injured,
thrown ever so small a speck or blemish, on her feminine delicacy. Her
father's death, occurring when she was eighteen, had meant that the
first year of her life as a grown-up girl had been spent in sincere
mourning.
Two very happy years had followed, and then on a certain thirteenth of
September--that is, almost exactly five years ago--there had befallen
Jane Oglander a thing which befalls daily, it might be said hourly, some
unfortunate human being.
There had cut right into and across her young, peaceful life a tragedy
full of ignoble horror, of that horror which attracts the eager interest
and attention of the morbid, the idle, and the vulgar.
Jane Oglander's kind brother, some years older than herself, whom she
had taken as completely on trust as all normal young women take those
who are near and dear to them, had left the club where he had been
dining, and hailing a cab, had driven to a distant quarter of the town,
a quarter of which the very name was unknown to his sister and to those
with whom she generally associated. There, in the space of a very few
moments, he had killed, not only a man who was regarded as in a special
sense his friend and as a peculiarly harmless individual, but also the
woman with whom he had found this man.
Certain circumstances of the affair, circumstances of quite an everyday
nature, though they had appeared to the amazed and agonised sister
incredible, had roused a good deal of public sympathy with Jack
Oglander. Though the fact that he had taken a pistol with him, as well
as some confidences he had made to yet another friend who had played a
minor part in the sordid drama, pointed to premeditation, the verdict
had been manslaughter.
Fortunately, as everyone except his poor sister thought, Jack Oglander
fell ill and died a normal death in the prison infirmary within two
months of his trial.
Friends had rallied--too many rather than too few--round the unfortunate
girl; but her best friends, those to whom she felt she owed the
greatest gratitude, were a certain Richard Maule, one of the trustees
of her small fortune, and Richard Maule's wife, Athena.
Mr. Maule, at the time of the tragedy already an invalid, had been able
to do nothing in an active sense, but his country house, Rede Place, had
immediately become, whenever she chose that it should be so, Miss
Oglander's home. In this matter the husband and wife were one in a sense
they had scarcely ever been, but in the happy, cloudless days which now
seemed to have belonged to a former existence, Jane Oglander had already
become as much as a young girl can be to a married woman some years
older than herself, Mrs. Maule's closest friend.
With these two dear friends was joined in the same wordless sense of
deep gratitude Dick Wantele, Richard Maule's cousin, and in this affair
his spokesman and representative.
It was this young man who, shaking himself free of a constitutional
lethargy, had become the indispensable adviser and friend of both
brother and sister; it was he who had persuaded Jack Oglander to plead
"not guilty"; it was he who had gone to great personal trouble in order
that Miss Oglander might be spared, as much as was possible, the
dreadful publicity into which each such tragic happening brings innocent
victims.
During the weeks which elapsed between the arrest and the trial, Miss
Oglander learnt to lean on Dick Wantele, to ask for, and defer to, his
advice, far more than she was at the time aware. Wantele's tact and good
feeling, and his intelligent withholding of the sympathy with which she
was at that time nauseated, were almost uncannily clever considering the
end he had in view.
An offer of marriage very seldom takes a woman by surprise, but twice
Jane Oglander was so surprised immediately after her brother's arrest.
The very next day a man much older than herself--whom she had regarded
with the kindly affection and indifference with which girls so often
regard one whom they unconsciously consider as a contemporary of their
parents rather than their own--had come and implored her to marry him
there and then. He was a member of the administration then in office,
and he had hinted that by doing this--that is, by marrying him--she
would almost certainly benefit her brother's cause. But though she was
touched, and touched to tears, by the strangely worded proposal, it
formed but an incident, to herself an unimportant incident, in days
crowded with such pain and amazing unhappiness.
Some weeks later, while driving back with Jane Oglander from her first
interview with her brother in prison, during that long--it appeared to
her that endless--drive from Holloway to Westminster, Dick Wantele also
asked her to marry him, and this offer she also refused. But Wantele
would not allow his disappointment to affect their apparently placid
friendship. He it was who brought her the news that her brother was ill,
and he was actually present at Jack Oglander's mournful deathbed in the
prison infirmary.
Rather ruefully aware that it was so, Dick Wantele now stood to Jane
Oglander much in the position her dead brother had once stood. She had
come to feel for him a deep unquestioning affection; it was to him she
would have turned in any new distress.
They met frequently, for though Miss Oglander had become absorbed in the
work among the London poor to which she henceforth dedicated her life,
her happiest, her only peaceful days--for she took keenly to heart the
material cares and sorrows of those with whom she was brought in
contact--were the weeks she spent each year at Rede Place.
When there, the thrice welcome guest of Richard and Athena Maule, and of
their kinsman and housemate Dick Wantele, Jane's content would have been
absolute had her host and hostess been on the terms of amity Miss
Oglander supposed all married people as noble as Richard and as good and
beautiful as was Athena should be. But she had in this matter, as one so
often has to do when dealing with a dual human relation, to compromise.
She gave, that is, her grateful love to both these people who, if
themselves on unhappy terms, were yet one in their affection for her.
It was to her an added perplexity and pain that her friend Dick sided
with his cousin Richard Maule rather than with Richard's wife Athena.
Nay, he went further--he took no pains to conceal his contemptuous
indifference to the beautiful woman who was perforce his housemate for
much of the year. Small wonder that Mrs. Richard Maule generally
absented herself from home when her friend Jane Oglander was there to
take the place only a woman can fill in a country house of which the
master is an invalid, his heir a bachelor.
So it was that the two women only saw much of one another when Mrs.
Maule was in London.
CHAPTER I
"A flag for those who go out to war,
A flag for those who return,
A flag for those who escape hell fire,
And a flag for those who burn."
In spite of many a proverb to the contrary, a plan or plot, when
carefully imagined and carried out by an intelligent human being, does
not often miscarry or go wrong.
The fact that Mrs. Kaye was now sitting staring through the window of
the little waiting-room of Selford Junction was the outcome of a
plan--what she knew well the one most concerned would have called a
plot--which had succeeded beyond her expectations. She had come there
secretly in order that she might see the last, the very last, of her son
now starting on his way to rejoin his regiment in India. She was here in
direct disobedience to his wish, aware that had he known she would be
there he would have found some way of eluding her vigilance.
The plan she had made had succeeded by its very simplicity.
After the quiet, measured "Good-bye and God bless you, Bayworth!"
uttered by the father to his only son at the gate of the
poverty-stricken garden of the vicarage; after the mother's more
emotional farewell, Mrs. Kaye, leaving her husband to go out into the
village, had hastened back to the house. There she had flung on her
shabby bonnet, and waiting a moment till the trap in which her boy was
driving to Selford Junction, some four miles off, had turned the corner,
she had gone quickly out of the garden. Walking at a rapid pace, for she
was still a vigorous woman, she had taken a short cut across the fields
to the small station where she knew she would be able to catch the slow
local train which was run in connection with the London express.
Once at Selford Junction, it had been a comparatively easy matter for
her to slip into the waiting-room and take up her station close to the
grimy window commanding the platform alongside of which the express had
already drawn up.
Mrs. Kaye had had two motives in doing what she had done. Her first and
very natural motive was that of seeing the last, the very last, of her
son. Her second, which she hid even from herself, was to discover why he
had refused, with a certain fierce decision, her company as far as
Selford Junction, where, ever since he was a little boy bound for his
first school, she--his mother--had always gone with him when there had
come the hard moment of saying good-bye.
To the tired labourer in the further corner of the waiting-room; to the
sickly-looking, weary working woman, accompanied by two children, who
had unwillingly made way for her, the sight of Mrs. Kaye was familiar,
and, in an apathetic way, unpleasing.
Each of them--even the children--had disagreeable associations with her
tall, spare figure, her severe looking weather-beaten face, crowned with
still abundant fair hair streaked with grey. They knew, with a long,
contemptuous knowledge, her short black serge skirt and the
old-fashioned beaded mantle, which formed her usual week-day, outdoor
costume in any but the very hottest weather.
The poor are better judges of character than the rich. Mrs. Kaye's hard
good sense and intelligent idea of justice, secured her the grudging
respect of her husband's parishioners, but her rigid closeness about
money--which they argued must mean either exceptional poverty or else
unusual meanness--alienated them. And yet the working woman, sitting
there, looked at Mrs. Kaye with a certain furtive sympathy. She well
knew that Bayworth Kaye--he had been christened Bayworth because it was
his mother's maiden name--was leaving for India that day.
Now Bayworth was in a sense part of the village. He had been born at the
Vicarage. His father's parishioners had followed him through each of the
stages of his successful young life, and they all liked him; partly
because the kind of success Bayworth Kaye had achieved is not the kind
which arouses dislike or envy, and even more because he was an
open-handed and good-natured young gentleman, very unlike--so the
villagers would have told you--either his gentle, unpractical father or
his hard mother.
Also, and this was very present to the woman now watching Mrs. Kaye,
"th' parson's son" had been, during the last few months, the hero of one
of those dramas which, because of certain elemental passions slumbering
in all men and in most women, whatever their rank or condition, always
arouse a certain uneasy, speculative interest and sympathy in the
onlooker. All unconsciously the village was grateful to young Kaye for
having provided them with something to talk about, something to laugh
about, something, above all, to relieve the uneventful dullness of their
lives.
This was why the man and woman whom Mrs. Kaye--if she was conscious of
their presence at all--regarded as merely of the earth, earthy, were
keenly aware of the last act of the tragi-comedy being played before
their eyes. They knew why their clergyman's wife was sitting here in the
waiting-room, instead of standing out on the platform saying a last word
to her son; and over each stolid face there came, when the eyes of these
same faces thoroughly realised at what the lady sitting by the window
was looking, an expression of cunning amusement, as well as of doubtful
sympathy.
Mrs. Kaye's eyes were fixed on a group composed of two people, a man and
a woman. The man--her son Bayworth Kaye--was standing inside one of the
first-class carriages of the London express; and below him on the
platform, her right hand resting on the sash of the open carriage
window, stood Mrs. Maule, the woman whom Mrs. Kaye had only half
expected to see there. In coming to Selford Junction to see the last of
Bayworth Kaye, Mrs. Maule was doing a very daring thing; those of her
neighbours and acquaintances whose opinion counted in the neighbourhood
would have said a very improper and shocking thing.
To Mrs. Kaye--such being her nature--there was a certain cruel
satisfaction in the knowledge that she had been right in her suspicion
as to why her son had told her that he would far prefer, this time, to
say good-bye at home. Given all that had gone before, it was not
surprising that Mrs. Kaye had guessed the reason why her boy had refused
her company at Selford Junction.
And yet, now that the reason stood before her, embodied in a slim,
gracefully posed figure which she and the two dumb spectators of the
little scene knew to be that of the squire's wife, she felt a dull pang
of resentful surprise.
She had hoped against hope that Bayworth would be here alone, and that
there might perhaps come her chance of a last word which would break
down the high, gateless barrier which had risen during the last few
months between herself and her son. Mrs. Kaye staring dumbly through the
waiting-room window knew that last word would never now be uttered.
Young Kaye's good-looking, fair face--the look of breeding derived from
his mother's forebears crossed with the more solid good looks which had
been his father's--was set in hard lines; yet he was making a gallant
effort to bear himself well, and he was smiling the painful smile which
is so far removed from mirth. The anguished pain of parting, the agony
he was feeling had found refuge only in the eyes which were fixed on his
companion's face.
Mrs. Kaye tried to see if that beautiful face, into which her son was
gazing with so strange and tragic a look of hungry pain, reflected any
of his feeling. But the delicately pure profile, the perfect curve of
cheek and neck, the tiny ear half concealed by carefully dressed masses
of dark hair, in their turn covered by a long grey veil becomingly wound
round the green deer-stalker hat, revealed nothing.
Now and again she could see Mrs. Maule's red lips--lips that told of
admirable physical fitness--move as if in answer to something the other
said.
Bayworth Kaye was leaning out, speaking earnestly. With a sudden gesture
his lean, brown fingers closed on the little gloved hand resting on the
window-sill. Mrs. Kaye could not hear what her son was saying, and she
would have given the world to know, but in the composed, steady glance
directed by her through the waiting-room window there was nothing to
show the bitter, helpless anger which oppressed her.
The excursion train for which the express had been waiting glided into
the station. Mrs. Kaye reminded herself with a strange mixture of
feelings that the time was growing very short; that not long would her
eyes be offended, as they were now being offended. In five minutes the
London train was due to start.
And then there came over the mother an overmastering desire which swept
everything before it. She must hear what it was her boy was saying; she
must see him clearly once more; she must run the risk of his becoming
aware that she had spied on him.
Mrs. Kaye rose from the hard wooden seat, and she made what was for her
a mighty effort to open the grimy waiting-room window; but it remained
fast.
Words were muttered behind her, words of which in her agitation she was
quite unconscious.
"Help the lady, can't ye!"
The big labourer in the corner rose to his feet; he lumbered across the
boarded floor, and laid his mighty shoulder against the sash; the flange
gave way, and as the window opened there seemed to rush in a loud,
confused wave of sound. A crowd of Saturday holiday-makers were
streaming over the platform, and as they swayed backwards and forwards
they completely hid for a moment the man and woman on whom Mrs. Kaye's
eyes had been fixed.
Then, as if the scene before her had been stage-managed by some master
of his craft, the crowd thinned, divided in two, seeking on either side
the few third-class carriages in the express, and Mrs. Kaye once more
saw her son and Athena Maule; saw, with a sharp pang, that the look of
strain and anguish had deepened on Bayworth Kaye's face, that his poor
pretence at a smile had gone.
The train groaned and moved a little forward, bringing the first-class
carriages quite close to the waiting-room window. Putting out her hand,
Mrs. Kaye could almost have touched Mrs. Maule on the shoulder; she
shrank back, but the two on whom her whole attention was fixed were so
far absorbed in each other as to be quite oblivious of everything round
them. And at last Mrs. Kaye heard the voice she loved best in the world,
nay the only voice she had ever really loved--asking the pitiful, futile
little question:
"Athena? Darling--say you're sorry I'm going!"
There was a pause, and then the woman to whom the question had been put
did in answer a very extraordinary thing. After having looked round, and
with furtive, deliberate scrutiny noted that the platform was now
practically deserted save for one man standing some way off, facing the
bookstall and with his back to the express--she moved for a moment up on
to the step of the railway carriage and turned her face, the lovely face
now flushed with something like tenderness and pity, up to the young
man.
"Of course I'm sorry you're going----"
Her clear, delicately modulated tones floated across the short space to
where Mrs. Kaye was sitting.
"Kiss me," breathed the beautiful lips; and then with a touch of
impatience, "You can kiss me good-bye. Don't you understand?"
His sudden response, the way his arm shot out and crushed her face, her
slender shoulders, was far more than she had bargained for. She stepped
back and shook herself like a bird whose plumage has been ruffled.
And then the train began to move.
Young Kaye leant out, dangerously far, but, in answer to a slight
movement of Mrs. Maule's hand, he sank back quite out of his mother's
sight. She heard his last hoarse cry of "good-bye," and for the moment
it had a strange effect on her heart. It seemed to set a seal on her
deep pain and wrath, to bring a certain fierce comfort in the knowledge
that her boy was gone, that he had left the shameful joy of the last
year, the tragic pain of the last few weeks, behind him. She even told
herself that, in the years that must elapse before he came home again,
he would have time to forget--as men do forget--the woman who had made
such a fool and worse, such a traitor, of him.
* * * * *
Mrs. Maule stood for a while looking after the train. Things had not
fallen out quite as she had expected them to do. She sometimes--not
often--acted on sheer impulse, but she seldom did so without very soon
repenting of it. She had been suddenly moved to do a daring thing,--one
of those things which give a sharp edge to a blurred emotion. But she
had not known how to allow, so she told herself, frowning, for the
existence in the subject of her experiment of an unreasonably primitive
violence of feeling.
She moved back and looked about her with an uncomfortable, rather
fearful, look in her eyes. As she did so, the man standing by the
bookstall also moved, and she became aware, with the quick instinct she
had for such things, that he had a striking, in fact, a very peculiar
face. She hoped he had seen nothing of that foolish little scene with
Bayworth Kaye.
As she looked at the stranger--he was still unconscious of her
presence--a wave of colour came over her face, or rather over as much of
her face as the veil swathed about her hat allowed to be seen of it.
With a curious, impulsive, un-English movement she pulled off one of her
gloves and put up her hand to her hot cheek. Then she turned abruptly
and began walking to the further end of the platform.
Mrs. Kaye, looking grimly after her, believed that Athena Maule had seen
her, and, having the grace to be ashamed, had blushed. But, in so
thinking, the clergyman's wife made one of her usual mistakes concerning
the men and women with whom her life brought her into unwilling contact.
Mrs. Maule had not seen her, and had she done so it may be doubted
whether she would have felt any more ashamed or annoyed than she did
now.
* * * * *
With a feeling of infinite lassitude, of physical as well as mental
fatigue, Mrs. Kaye turned her back on the window through which she had
seen a sight which was to remain with her for ever.
There were still some minutes to run before there would come into the
station the local train in which she could return to her now empty home,
and so drearily her mind went back, taking a rapid survey of the whole
of her son's short life and hitherto most prosperous career.
Mrs. Kaye came herself of a long line of distinguished soldiers, and
even before her child's birth she had been determined that he should
follow in the footsteps of her own people, not in those of his mild,
kindly father's. From his cradle the lad had been dedicated to the god
of battles, and only the mother herself knew what her intention had
cost her in the way of self-denial and of incessant effort.
Inadequate as had been their clerical income, supplemented by pitifully
small private means, she and her husband had grudged nothing to
Bayworth. Mrs. Kaye was a clever woman, cleverer than most; she had been
at some pains to find out the best way in which to put a boy through the
modern military mill, and everything had gone with almost fairy-like
smoothness from first to last.
From the preparatory school, where she had ascertained that he would
have among his mates the sons of the then Minister for War, down to the
day when he had won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, young Kaye had
been everything that even his exacting mother had desired. Nay more, he
had once or twice said a word--only a word, but still it had amply
repaid Mrs. Kaye for all she had gone through--implying that he
understood the sacrifices his father and mother had made for his sake.
When he had been specially chosen to take part in a dangerous frontier
expedition, it was his father who had appeared miserably anxious, but it
was with his mother, softened, carried out of herself, that the whole
neighbourhood had eagerly sympathised when there had come the glorious
news that Bayworth Kaye had been mentioned in despatches for an act of
reckless courage and gallantry, and recommended for the Victoria Cross.
Then had followed the lad's happy home-coming, and quite suddenly,
before--so it now seemed to his mother--Bayworth had been back a week,
Mrs. Maule had thrown over him the web of her fascinations. Not content
with having him constantly about her at Rede Place, she had procured for
him invitations to the houses where she stayed, and made him her slave
in a sense Mrs. Kaye had not known men could be enslaved.
Mother and son had had one painful discussion in which the mother had
been worsted. With terror she had plumbed for a moment the hidden depths
of her boy's heart. "You tell me there has been talk," he said very
quietly. "If you will give me the name of any man who has talked
unbecomingly of Mrs. Maule, I will deal with him----" "Deal with him,
Bayworth? What could you do?" "I could kill him." He had uttered the
words almost indifferently, and Mrs. Kaye looking into his set face had
said no more.
It was well that his father had known and suspected nothing.
The whole matter was to Mrs. Kaye the more amazing and iniquitous
because she had hitherto always defended Mrs. Maule when that lady's
conduct was discussed, as it constantly was discussed, in the
neighbourhood of Rede Place. At Redyford Vicarage such talk had never
been tolerated; and with a few stinging words of rebuke Mrs. Kaye had
ever put the gossips in their places.
It had suited her far better to have to deal with a brilliant,
beautiful, rather reckless woman, who was much away from home, and who
always treated her with the courtesy and indifferent good-humour due to
an equal, rather than with the type of great lady to whom she knew some
of the other clergy's wives were in subjection.