GWEN'S PESSIMISM. IT WAS ALL OUR FAULT! HOW SHE KNEW THAT ADRIAN
TORRENS WAS FIANCE, AND HOW HER MOTHER TOOK KINDLY TO THE IDEA.
PEOPLE ONLY KNOW WHAT THE WILL OF GOD IS, NOT WHAT IT ISN'T. BUT
ADRIAN TORRENS DID _NOT_ COME TO TABLE. LONELINESS, AND NIGHT--ALL
BUT SLEEPLESS. WANT OF COMMON SENSE. THE FATE OF A FEATHER.
COUNTING A THOUSAND. LOOKING MATTERS CALMLY IN THE FACE. A GREAT
DECISION, AND WHAT GWEN SAW IN A MIRROR
Lady Ancester, not sorry to get away from a position which involved the
consideration that she was unreasonable in feeling reluctance to remain
in it, endeavoured on arriving in her own room to congratulate herself
on her own share in an embarrassing interview.
She had got through it very well certainly, but not so well as she had
been led to expect by her meeting with his father three weeks since. She
had had her misgivings before that interview, and had been pleasantly
surprised to find how thoroughly the inexorable present had ridden
rough-shod over the half-forgotten past. Their old identities had
vanished, and it was possible to be civil and courteous, and that sort
of thing; even to send messages of sympathy, quite in earnest, to the
lady who up till now had been little more than the Miss Abercrombie
Hamilton Torrens married. Being thus set at ease about what seemed rocks
of embarrassment ahead, in the father's case, Lady Ancester had looked
forward with perfect equanimity to making the acquaintance of the
son--had, in fact, only connected him in her mind with this deplorable
accident, which, however, she quite understood to be going to be a thing
of the past. All in good time. Her equanimity had, however, been
disturbed by the young man's inherited manner, which his father had so
completely lost; above all things by his rapid nonsense, one of his
father's leading characteristics in youth. She condemned it as more
nonsensical, which probably only meant that she herself was older. But
the manner--the manner of it! How it brought back Clarges Street and her
mother, and the family earthquake over her resolution to marry a young
Dragoon, with three good lives between him and his inheritance! She was
taken aback to find herself still so sensitive about that old story.
She had not succeeded in ridding herself of her disquieting memories
when her daughter followed her, choking back tense excitement until she
had fairly closed the door behind her. Then her words came with a rush,
for all that she kept her voice in check to say them.
"He cannot _see_, mamma--he cannot see _at all_! He is dead
stone-blind--for life--for life! And _we_ have done it--_we_ have done
it!" Then she broke down utterly, throwing herself on a sofa to hide in
its cushions the torrent of tears she could no longer keep back. "_We_
have done it--_we_ have done it!" she kept on crying. "_We_ have ruined
his life, and the guilt is ours--ours--_all_!"
The Countess, good woman, tried to mix consolation with protest against
such outrageous pessimism. She pointed out that there was no medical
authority for such an extreme view as Gwen's. On the contrary, Sir
Coupland had spoken most hopefully. And, after all, if Mr. Torrens could
see Arthur's Bridge he could not be absolutely blind.
"He could not see Arthur's Bridge _at all_," said Gwen, sitting up and
wiping her tears, self-possessed again for the moment from the stimulus
of contradiction, always a great help. "I stood facing him for five
minutes holding out my hand for him to shake, and he never--_never_--saw
it!"
"Perhaps he doesn't like shaking hands," said her mother weakly. "Some
people don't."
"They do mine," said Gwen. "Besides, he did in the end, and...."
"And what?"
"And nothing." At which point Gwen broke down again, crying out as
before that he was blind, and she knew it. The doctors were only talking
against hope, and _they_ knew it. "Oh, mother, mother," she cried out,
addressing her mother as she would often do when in trouble or excited,
"how shall we bear it, years from now, to know that he can see
nothing--_nothing!_--and to know that the guilt of his darkness lies
with us--is ours--is yours and mine? Have we ever either of us said a
word of protest against that wicked dog-shooting order? It was in the
attempt to commit a crime that we sanctioned, that old Stephen tried to
shoot that darling Achilles. Oh, I know it was no fault of old
Stephen's!" She became a little calmer from indulgence of speech that
had fought for hearing. "Oh no, mother dear, it's no use talking. If Mr.
Torrens never recovers his eyesight he has only us to thank for it." She
paused a moment, and then added:--"And how I shall look that girl in the
face I don't know!"
"What girl?"
"Oh, didn't you see? The girl he's got that engaged ring on his finger
about. You didn't see? You never _do_ see, mamma dear!"
"I didn't notice any particular ring, dear." Her ladyship may have felt
a relief about something, to judge by her manner. "Has Irene said
anything to you?" she asked.
Gwen considered a little. "Irene talks a good deal about a Miss Gertrude
Abercrombie, a cousin. But she has never _said_ anything."
"Oh!--it's Miss Gertrude Abercrombie?..."
"_I_ know nothing about it. I was only guessing. She may be Miss
Gertrude Anybody. Whoever she is, it's the same thing. _Think_ what
she's lost!"
"She has, indeed, my dear," says the elder lady, who is not going to
give up this acceptable Miss Gertrude Anybody, even at the risk of
talking some nonsense about her. "And we must all feel for the cruelty
of her position. But if she is--as I have no doubt she is--truly
attached to Mr. Torrens, she will find her consolation in the thought
that it is given to her to ... to...." But the Countess was not
rhetorician enough to know that choice words should be kept for
perorations. She had quite taken the edge off her best arrow-head. She
could not wind up "to be a consolation to her husband" with any
convincingness. So when Gwen interrupted her with:--"I see what you
mean, but it's nonsense," she fell back upon the strong entrenchment of
seniors, who know the Will of God. They really do, don't you know? "At
least," she said, "this Miss Abercrombie must admit that no blame can
fairly be laid at our door for what was so manifestly ordained by the
Almighty. Sir Hamilton Torrens himself was the first to exonerate your
father. His own keeper is instructed to shoot all dogs except poodles."
"It was not the Will of God at all...."
"My dear!--how _can_ you know that?"
"Well--not more than everything else is! It was old Stephen's not
hitting his mark. And he would have killed Achilles, then. Oh dear, how
I do sometimes wish God could be kept out of it!... No, mamma, it's no
use looking shocked. Whatever makes out that it was not our fault is
wrong, and Sir Hamilton Torrens didn't mean that when he said it."
"My dear, it is his own son."
"Very well, then, all the more! Oh, you know what I mean.... No, mamma,"
said she as she left the room, "it isn't any use. I am utterly miserable
about it."
And she was, though she herself scarcely knew yet how miserable. So long
as she had someone else to speak to, the whole deadly truth lingered on
the threshold of her mind and would not enter. She ascribed weight to
opinions she would have disregarded had she had no stake on the chance
of their correctness.
She caught at the narration of her maid Lutwyche, prolonging her
hair-combing for talk's sake. Lutwyche had the peculiarity of always
accommodating her pronunciation to the class she was speaking with,
elaborating it for the benefit of those socially above her. So her
inquiry how the gentleman was getting on was accounted for by her having
seen him from the guardian. Speaking with an equal, she would have said
garden. She had seen him therefrom, and been struck by his appearance of
recovered vigour, especially by his visible enjoyment of the land
escape. She would have said landscape to Cook. Pronounced anyhow, her
words were a comfort to her young mistress, defending her a very little
against the black thoughts that assailed her. Similarly, Miss Lutwyche's
understanding that Mr. Torrens would come to table this evening was a
flattering unction to her distressed soul, and she never questioned her
omniscient handmaid's accuracy. On the contrary, she utilised a memory
of some chance words of her mother to Irene, suggesting that her brother
might be "up to coming down" that evening, as a warrant for
replying:--"I believe so."
Nevertheless, she had no hope of seeing him make his appearance in the
brilliantly illuminated Early Jacobean drawing-room, where at least two
of the upstairs servants had to light wax tapers for quite ten minutes
at dusk, to be even with a weakness of the Earl's for wax-candlelight
and no other. And when Irene appeared without him, her "Oh dear!--your
brother wasn't up to coming down, then?" was spiritless and perfunctory.
Nor did she believe her friend's "No--we thought it best to be on the
safe side." For she knew now why it was that this absence from the
evening banquet--"family dinner-table" is too modest a phrase--had been
so strenuously insisted on. There was no earthly reason why Irene's
brother should not have dressed and sat at table. Were there no sofas in
the Early Jacobean drawing-room? There was no reason against his
presence at all except that his absolute blindness must needs have been
manifest to every observer. She could see it all now.
"You know, dear," said Irene, "if Adrian were a reasonable being, there
would be no harm in his dining down, as Lutwyche calls it. He could sit
up to dinner perfectly, but no earthly persuasion would get him up to
bed till midnight. And as for lying down on sofas in the drawing-room
after dinner, you could as soon get a mad bull to lie down on a sofa as
Adrian, if there was what Lutwyche calls company."
So that evening the beauty of the Earl's daughter--whose name among the
countryfolk, by-the-by, was "Gwen o' the Towers"--was less destructive
than usual to the one or two new bachelors who helped the variation of
the party. For monumental beauty kills only poets and dreamers, and
these young gentlemen were Squires. The verdict of one of them about her
tells its tale:--"A stunner to look at, but too standoffish for my
money!" She was nothing of the sort; and would gladly, to oblige, have
shot a smile or an eye-flash at either of them if her heart had not been
so heavy. But she wanted terribly to be alone and cry all the evening,
and was of no use as a beauty. Perhaps it was as well that it was so,
for these unattached males.
When the time came for the loneliness of night she was frightened of it,
and let Irene go at her own door with reluctance. In answer to whom she
said at parting:--"No--no, dear! I'm perfectly well, and nothing's the
matter." Irene spoke back after leaving her:--"You know _I'm_ not the
least afraid about him. It will be all right." Then Gwen mustered a poor
laugh, and with "Of course it will, dear!" vanished into her bedroom.
She got to sleep and slept awhile; then awoke to the worst solitude a
vexed soul knows--those terrible "small hours" of the morning. Then,
every mere insect of evil omen that daylight has kept in bounds grows
to the size of an elephant, and what was the whirring of his wings
becomes discordant thunder. Then palliatives lose their market-value,
and every clever self-deception that stands between us and acknowledged
ill bursts, bubblewise, and leaves the soul naked and unarmed against
despair.
Gwen waked without provocation at about three in the morning; waked
Heaven knew why!--for there was all the raw material of a good night's
rest; the candidate for the sleepership; a prodigiously comfortable bed;
dead silence, not so much as an owl in the still night she looked out
into during an excursion warranted to promote sleep--but never sleep
itself! She had been dragged reluctantly from a dreamless Nirvana into
the presence of a waking nightmare--two great beautiful eyes that looked
at her and saw nothing; and this coercion, she somehow felt, was really
due to an unaccountable absence of mind on her part. Surely she could
have kept asleep with a little more common sense. She would go back from
that excursion reinforced, and bid defiance to that nightmare. Sleep
would come to her, she knew, if she could find a _modus vivendi_ with a
loose flood of golden hair, and could just get hold of a feather-quill
that was impatient of imprisonment and wanted to see the world. She
searched for it with the tenderest of finger-tips because she knew--as
all the feather-bed world knows--that if one is too rough with it, it
goes in, and comes out again just when one is dropping off....
There!--it was caught and pulled out. She would not burn it. It would
smell horribly and make her think of Lutwyche's remedy for fainting
fits, burned feathers held to the nostrils. No!--she would put it
through the casement into the night-air, and it would float away and
think of its days on the breast of an Imbergoose, and believe them back
again. Oh, the difference between the great seas and winds, and the
inside of that stuffy ticking! Poor little breast-feather of a foolish
bird! Yes--now she could go to sleep! She knew it quite well--she had
only to contrive a particular attitude.... There, that was right! Now
she had only to put worrying thoughts out of her head and count a
thousand ... and then--oblivion!
Alas, no such thing! In five minutes the particular attitude was a thing
of the past, and the worrying thoughts were back upon her with a
vengeance. Or, rather, the worrying thought; for her plural number was
hypocrisy. She was in for a deadly wakeful night, a night of growing
fever, with those sightless eyes expelling every other image from her
brain. She was left alone with the darkness and a question she dared not
try to answer. Suppose that when those eyes looked upon her that
evening at Arthur's Bridge for the first time--suppose it was also the
last? What then? How could she know it, and know how the thing came
about, and whom she held answerable for it, and go on living?...
No--her life would end with that. Nothing would again be as it had been
for her. Her childhood had ended when she first saw Death; when her
brother's corpse was carried home dripping from within a stone's throw
of this new tragedy. But was not that what bills of lading call the "Act
of God"--fair play, as it were, on the part of Fate? What was this?...
Come--this would never do, with a pulse like that!
No one should ever feel his pulse, or hers, at night. Gwen was none the
better for doing it. Nor did she benefit by an operation which her mind
called looking matters calmly in the face. It consisted in imaginary
forecasts of a _status quo_ that was to come about. She had to skip some
years as too horrible even to dream of; years needed to live down the
worst raw sense of guilt, and become hardened to inevitable life. Then
she filled in her _scenario_ with Sir Adrian Torrens, the blind Squire
of Pensham Steynes, and his beautiful and accomplished wife, a dummy
with no great vitality, constructed entirely out of a ring on Mr.
Torrens's finger and an allusion of Irene's to the Miss Gertrude
Abercrombie, whose skill in needlework surpassed Arachne's. Gwen did not
supply this lady with a sufficiently well-marked human heart. Perhaps
the temptation to make her clever and shrewd but not sympathetic, not
quite up to her husband's deserts, was irresistible. It allowed of an
unprejudiced consciousness of what she, Gwen, would have been in this
dummy's situation. It allowed latitude to a fancy that portrayed Lady
Gwendolen Whatever-she-had-become--because, of course, _she_ would have
to marry some fool--as the staunch and constant friend of the family at
Pensham. Her devotion to the dummy when in trouble--and, indeed, she
piled up calamities for the unhappy lady--was monumental; an example to
her sex. And when, to the bitter grief of her devoted husband, the dummy
died--all parties being then, at a rough estimate, forty--and she
herself, his dearest friend, stood by the dummy's grave with him, and,
generally speaking, sustained him in his tribulation, a disposition to
get the fool out of the way grew strong enough to make its victim doubt
her own vouchers for her own absolute disinterestedness. She turned
angrily upon her fancies, tore them to tatters, flung them to the winds.
One does this, and then the pieces join themselves together and reappear
intact.
She was no nearer sleep after looking matters calmly in the face, that
way, for a full hour. Similar trials to dramatize a probable future all
ended on the same lines, and each time Gwen was indignant with herself
for her own folly. What was this man to her, whom she had seen twice?
Little enough!--she pledged herself to it in the Court of Conscience!
What was she to him, who had spoken with her twice certainly; but _seen_
her--oh, how little! Why, _she_ had seen _him_ more, of the two, if one
came to close quarters with Time. See how long he was stooping over that
unfortunate dog-chain!
Sitting up in bed in the dim July dawn, wild-eyed in an unshepherded
flock of golden locks, this young lady was certainly surpassingly
beautiful. She was revolving in her poor, aching head a contingency she
had not fully allowed for. Suppose--merely to look other things in the
face, you see!--suppose there were _no_ dummy! What chance would the
poor fellow have then of winning the love of any woman, with those blind
eyes in his head? Gwen got up restlessly and went to the casement,
meeting a stream of level sunlight that the swallows outside in the ivy
were making the subject of comment, and stood looking out over the
leagues of the ancient domain of her forefathers. "Gwen o' the
Towers"--that was her name. It seemed to join chorus with her own answer
to the last question, to her satisfaction.
To offer the consolation of her love, to give all she had to give, to
this man as compensation for the great curse that had fallen on him
through the fault of her belongings, seemed to her in her excited state
easy and nowise strange--mere difficulty of the negotiation apart. She
elected to shut her eyes to a fact we and the story can guess--we are so
shrewd, you see!--and to make a parade in her own eyes of a
self-renunciation approaching that of Marcus Curtius. If only the gulf
would open to receive her she would fling herself in. She ignored the
dissimilarities of detail in the two cases, especially the conceivable
promised land at the bottom of _her_ gulf. The Roman Eques had nothing
but death and darkness to look forward to.
The difficulties of the scheme shot across her fevered conception of it.
How if, though he was not affianced to the dummy, or any other lay
figure she might provide, his was a widowed heart left barren by the
hand of Death? How if some other disappointment had marred his
life?--some passion for a woman who had rashly accepted somebody else
before meeting him? This happens we know; so did Gwen, and was sorry.
How if some minx--Lutwyche's expression--had bewitched him and slighted
him? He might nurse a false ideal of her till Doomsday. Men did
sometimes, _coeteris paribus_. But how could she--how _could_ she?...
Anyhow, Gwen might have seen her way through that difficulty with a fair
chance. But--to be invisible!
The morning sun had been at variance with some flames, hard to believe
clouds, and had just dispersed them so successfully that their place in
the heavens knew them no more. His rays, unveiled, bore hard upon the
blue eyes, sore with watching, of the girl a hundred million miles off,
and drove her from her casement. Gwen of the Towers fell back into the
room, all the flowing lawn of the most luxurious _robe-de-nuit_ France
could provide turned to gold by the touch of Phoebus. She paused a
moment before a mirror, to glance at her pallor in it, and to wonder at
the sunlight in the wealth of its setting of ungroomed, uncontrollable
locks. It was not vanity exactly that provoked the despairing
thought:--"But he will never see me--never!" A girl would have been a
hypocrite indeed who could shut her eyes to what Gwen saw in that
looking-glass. She knew all about it--had done so from babyhood.
Some relaxation of the mind gave Morpheus an opportunity, and he took
such advantage of a willing victim that Lutwyche, coming three hours
later, scarcely knew how to deal with the case, and might have been
uneasy at such an intensive cultivation of sleep if she had been a
nervous person. But she was prosaic and phlegmatic, and held to the
general opinion that nothing unusual ever happened. So she was content
to make a little extra noise; and, when nothing came of it, to go away
till rung for. That was how Gwen came to be so late at breakfast that
morning.