"... that supreme disintegrant, the Tyranny of Love...."
The Small Farm had become dear to Jane during the long miserable days
she had lived through in the last fortnight. She had gone there whenever
she wanted to escape from the intolerable pain of seeing Lingard's
absorption in Athena Maule.
Each of the familiar rooms of Rede Place now held for her some bitter,
some humiliating association. She never took refuge in her own room
upstairs without remembering the long, intimate talk with Athena the
evening of her arrival when she had been compelled to reveal more of her
inner self than she had ever done in response to the other woman's
curiously insistent, eager questioning.
Yes, no doubt Athena was right. Hew Lingard probably regarded a suitable
marriage as a necessity of his career. She, Jane, had misunderstood him
from the very first, proving herself, so she told herself with shamed
anguish, a romantic fool.
In the region of the emotions there are certain secret ordeals which
must be faced in solitude. Hew Lingard had taught Jane Oglander what
love between a man and woman can come to mean. She had been ready not
only to give all--but to receive all. This being so, she could not
bring herself to endure the marriage of convenience she now believed to
be all he sought of her.
She would have given all the exquisite happiness of the last two
years--happiness the greater and the more intense because it was so
largely bred of her imagination--to blot out the week she and Lingard
had spent together in London. It was during those days she had learnt to
love him in the simple human way which now made the thought of parting
agony.
Unwittingly Lingard had done her a terrible mischief during those
enchanted days. She felt as if he had stolen her from herself, rifling
all the hidden chambers of her heart. She had given everything in
exchange for what she had believed to be the great, the sacred, treasure
of his love. And now he was scattering the treasure which she had
thought hers at the feet of another woman who, she believed, had not
sought it and to whom it was dross.
She had heard of such enthralments--a blunderer had so tried to excuse,
to explain to her, her brother Jack Oglander's crime. Yes, Jack had been
mad about that woman he had killed; that had been the word used--mad.
Mad? Jane Oglander, walking to the Small Farm, repeated the word--yes,
Lingard had been made mad by Athena in much the same way as Jack had
been made mad. When Lingard had implored her to marry him at once,
during that hour on The Hanger, he had really been beseeching her to
help him to escape. She saw that now--and perhaps, had she loved him
less, she would have yielded.
But there are moments when love, though the most dissembling of the
passions, cannot lie. Jane Oglander, when in her lover's arms, could not
accept as gold the baser metal he, perhaps unknowingly, pressed upon
her.
One thing remained to her. Nothing could take away from her the two
years which had gone before. She had not yet destroyed, she did not feel
that she need be called upon to destroy--until Lingard married some
other woman--the letters he had written to her in those two years. She
told herself that they had not been love letters, although to her simple
heart they had seemed strangely like it.
Any day during the past two years she might have opened a paper
containing the news of Lingard's death. But if that of which she had had
so sick a dread had happened, she would have had something dear,
something intimately secret and sacred, to bear about with her, locked
in the inner shrine of her heart, for the rest of her life.
The present and the immediate future must be considered, and, as she had
now told Athena of her decision, they must be considered to-day.
She remembered the many broken engagements of which she had heard--Jane
wondered if those other women had suffered as she was suffering now.
The one thing she felt she could not do would be to go back to that
little house in London, which to her would ever be filled with Hew
Lingard--not Lingard as he was now, gloomy, preoccupied, avoiding her
presence and yet painfully eager to obey her slightest wish--but Lingard
the happy, the masterful lover who yet had been so tender, so patient
with her.
What did other people do when they broke off an engagement or--or were
jilted?
Jane tried to remember what she had heard such people did. One girl had
been sent on a voyage round the world--another had refused to leave
home, she had stayed and "faced it out."
Fortunately she was not compelled to consider either of these
alternatives. She was mistress of her own life, and she had already
learnt the hard lesson that to deaden pain--heart pain--there is nothing
like incessant, unending work. She made up her mind to go to another
part of London, and start once more the salvage work which lay on the
edge of the great sea strewn with human wreckage.
But before Jane could do this, she must put an end to what had become,
certainly to herself, and probably to Lingard also, an intolerable
mockery.
* * * * *
Jane found Mabel Digby in bed; and the girl, though but little given to
caresses, drew her down and laid her head on the other's kind breast.
"Yes, it's true," she said, "I'm ill, and I don't know what's the
matter with me"--she lifted her face and pushed her hair back from her
forehead with a tired gesture. "No, I won't lie. I don't see why I
should pretend--with you! I'm ill, Jane, because Bayworth Kaye is dead.
I lie here thinking--thinking only of Bayworth. It's all so horrible--I
mean that he should have died when he was so unhappy. I burnt all his
letters the day he went away. You can't think how sorry I am now that I
did that, Jane. There was nothing in them, they weren't love letters--at
least I don't think so----"
Jane gave a muffled cry of pain.
"Jane, come nearer, and I'll tell you something which may make you think
a little less poorly of me. Bayworth did speak to me three years ago,
before he first went to India. I have never told anybody--not even his
mother, though she was always trying to find out. And when he came back
I was so happy--just for a few days--and then, almost at once, he fell
into Athena's clutches----"
And as she saw the other make a restless movement of recoil she added,
"I suppose you don't believe me, but it's true--horribly true. I saw it
all happening, but I could do nothing except feel miserable. I used to
think--poor fool that I was--that everything would come right at the
last. I thought she would get tired of him, and that I would get what
was left." She broke into hard sobs. "She did get tired of him--but too
late--too late for me!"
"I wonder, Mabel, whether you would like me to come and stay with you
for a few days."
Jane felt that the way was at last opening before her. The grief, the
angry pain, of the poor child now lying here before her soothed her sore
heart.
"Jane! What an unselfish angel you are!" Mabel did not see the other's
almost vehement gesture of denial. "Of course it would be the greatest
comfort to have you here!"
Then, as the girl was nervously afraid that Jane should imagine her
unwilling to speak of her engagement: "If you come here, I suppose
General Lingard will leave Rede Place?"
"Yes, I suppose he will."
Mabel looked up. It seemed to her as if her own suffering was reflected,
intensified, in Jane Oglander's sad eyes.
If only she could stay on here now to-day--and not see Lingard again!
Such was Jane Oglander's thought, but she lacked the cruel courage.
Richard Maule would be hurt and angered were she thus to disappear
suddenly. More, it might even make him suspect the truth--the truth as
to Lingard's infatuation--of which Jane thought him ignorant.
And so, when the dusk began to fall, she got up. Athena would be annoyed
if she were not back by tea-time. Athena disliked very much being alone
with her husband.
"Good-bye, Mabel. You'll see me some time to-morrow."
She hurried along the path through the trees and the bushes now stripped
of leaves. She was oppressed, haunted, by the thought of Bayworth Kaye.
Could Mabel Digby's story be true? Was Athena Maule a cruel, devouring
Circe, lacking mercy, honour, shame?
Jane could not think so. To believe what Mabel Digby had told her would
have required a readjustment of her whole view and conception of a
nature and character she had humbly admired and loved from early
girlhood. Jane had always unquestioningly accepted Athena's account of
the humiliations and the trials which befall beauty bereft of the care
and devotion of beauty's natural protector. Mrs. Maule, so Jane
believed, made an unwilling conquest of almost every man who came within
her magic ring, but till now Jane had never seen the spell working....
When more than halfway to the house, she heard the sound of wheels. Dick
Wantele and Hew Lingard were coming back an hour sooner than they were
expected.
She was glad it was so dark--but for that they must see her. She waited
till the dogcart flashed past within two or three yards of the path on
which she stood.
It looked as if Wantele was urging his eager horse, already within sight
of his stable, to go faster.
Jane drew further into the underwood. She saw, as if the scene were
actually before her, what would happen if she continued her way on into
the house.
Tea was now served in Athena's boudoir instead of in the Greek Room.
There the four of them, Jane, Athena, and the two men, came together
each afternoon. Dick never stayed long. After a few minutes he would go
to Richard, leaving the others--a strange unnatural trio,--till Jane
also escaped, sometimes to sit with her host, oftener to some place
where she could be alone.
This was what happened every day; and now she suddenly made up her mind
that it should never happen again. It was her heart, her mind, which was
sick and tired, not her body. It would do her good to go on walking till
the time came when she could creep quietly into the house and go up to
her room. Athena and Hew would think, if they thought of her at all,
that she had stayed on for tea with Mabel Digby....
All at once, out of the darkness, she heard a familiar voice: "Hullo,
Jane! You've managed to travel a good way in ten minutes. I don't think
it is ten minutes since we drove by. I thought I'd lost you!"
It was Dick Wantele, a little breathless, a little excited by the chase.
"Then you saw I was there?"
"I always see you, Jane."
He spoke quite lightly, but Jane Oglander felt touched--horribly
touched. The tears came into her eyes for the first time that day. Dick,
and Dick's friendship, was all that remained to her--now.
"Did it all go off quite right? Had you a good time?" she made a valiant
effort to control herself.
"A very good time! The duchess is most anxious General Lingard should go
on straight there after leaving here."
She felt the underlying, criticising dislike of Lingard in the tone in
which Wantele uttered the words, and she felt troubled.
Suddenly she stumbled, and her companion, putting out his thin hand,
grasped her arm.
"Jane," he said quickly, "wait a moment! It's not cold. I want to say
something to you, and I'd rather say it out here, where no one can
interrupt us, than indoors."
He took his hand from her arm. "I trust to your--your kindness not to
take offence."
"I shan't be offended, but--but must you speak to me, Dick? I've been so
grateful to you for not speaking."
"Yes, I must speak. It's been cowardly of me not to do it before. It's
about Lingard, Jane."
He waited a moment, but she made no movement.
"We are both agreed--at least, I suppose we are both agreed--that
Lingard is taking the sort of adulation, the--the rather ridiculous
homage, to which he is now being subjected, very well. But I don't think
you realise, my dear,----" he waited a moment; never had he called Jane
Oglander his dear before--"the effect on the real man--the
extraordinarily disturbing, upsetting effect such an experience as that
he is now going through is bound to have on any human being."
"I don't quite understand what you mean," her voice faltered; and yet
what he said brought vague comfort with it.
"Well, it isn't very easy to explain. But I can't help thinking that one
ought to be very merciful to a man who's being subjected to such an
ordeal. Athena hasn't made it easier," he tried, and failed, to make the
mention of his cousin's wife casual, easy. "Doubtless, without meaning
it, Athena intensifies everything--she never allows Lingard to forget
for a moment that he is a great man--a hero. You must remember that we
had ten days--ten days of incessant glorification of Lingard before you
arrived. He took it awfully well, but----"
"I do know what you mean," she said painfully. "Yet surely----" she
stopped abruptly. Not even with Wantele could she discuss--not even with
him could she admit Hew Lingard's attitude to Athena Maule.
"I want to tell you--perhaps I ought to have told you before,
Dick,--that I've made up my mind to end my engagement."
They walked on in silence for a few moments.
"I suppose you realise what the effect of your doing this now will be on
Lingard?" he said. "Mind you, Jane, I don't say that he doesn't deserve
it! But I do say that if you do this you will drive him straight to the
devil----" he waited a moment, but she made no answer to his words.
"Have you told Athena?" Wantele was ashamed of the question, but burning
curiosity and jealous pain impelled him to ask it.
"Yes, I told her this morning. But, Dick, I want to tell you, I think I
ought to tell you, that I don't----" she hesitated, hardly knowing how
to frame her sentence--"I don't blame Athena. I'm sure she couldn't help
what's happened."
"You press very hardly on Lingard, Jane."
He spoke with a terrible irony, but Jane did not understand.
"No, no!" she cried, distressed. "I press hard on nobody, least of all
on Hew."