Swiftly came the autumn days, and swiftly went. A bewildering, ever
changing, and glorious panorama presented itself, green hillsides struck
first with flaming crimsons and yellows, and later mellowing into a
wondrous blending of gentler, tenderer hues; lavender, and wine, and the
faintest of rose colours where the bare beeches massed. Thus the slopes
were spread as with priceless carpets for a festival. Sometimes Honora,
watching, beheld from her window the russet dawn on the eastern ridge,
and the white mists crouching in strange, ghostly shapes abode the
lake and the rushing river: and she saw these same mists gather again,
shivering, at nightfall. In the afternoon they threaded valleys, silent
save for the talk between them and the stirring of the leaves under
their horses' feet.
So the Indian summer passed--that breathless season when even happiness
has its premonitions and its pangs. The umber fields, all ploughed and
harrowed, lay patiently awaiting the coming again of the quickening
spring. Then fell the rain, the first, cold winter rain that shrouded
the valley and beat down upon the defenceless, dismantled garden and
made pools in the hollows of the stone seat: that flung itself against
Honora's window as though begrudging her the warmth and comfort within.
Sometimes she listened to it in the night.
She was watching. How intent was that vigil, how alert and sharpened her
senses, a woman who has watched alone may answer. Now, she felt, was the
crisis at hand: the moment when her future, and his was to hang in the
balance. The work on the farms, which had hitherto left Chiltern but
little time for thought, had relaxed. In these wet days had he begun
to brood a little? Did he show signs of a reversion to that other
personality, the Chiltern she had not known, yet glimpses of whom she
had had? She recalled the third time she had seen him, the morning
at the Lilacs in Newport, that had left upon her the curious sense of
having looked on a superimposed portrait. That Chiltern which she called
her Viking, and which, with a woman's perversity, she had perhaps loved
most of all, was but one expression of the other man of days gone by.
The life of that man was a closed book she had never wished to open. Was
he dead, or sleeping? And if sleeping, would he awake? How softly she
tread!
And in these days, with what exquisite, yet tremulous skill and courage
did she bring up the subject of that other labour they were to undertake
together--the life and letters of his father. In the early dusk, when
they had returned from their long rides, she contrived to draw Chiltern
into his study. The cheerfulness, the hopefulness, the delight with
which she approached the task, the increasing enthusiasm she displayed
for the character of the General as she read and sorted the letters and
documents, and the traits of his she lovingly traced in Hugh, were not
without their effect. It was thus she fanned, ceaselessly and with a
smile, and with an art the rarest women possess, the drooping flame. And
the flame responded.
How feverishly she worked, unknown to him, he never guessed; so
carefully and unobtrusively planted her suggestions that they were born
again in glory as his inspiration. The mist had lifted a little, and she
beheld the next stage beyond. To reach that stage was to keep him intent
on this work--and--after that, to publish! Ah, if he would only have
patience, or if she could keep him distracted through this winter and
their night, she might save him. Love such as hers can even summon
genius to its aid, and she took fire herself at the thought of a book
worthy of that love, of a book--though signed by him that would redeem
them, and bring a scoffing world to its knees in praise. She spent hours
in the big library preparing for Chiltern's coming, with volumes in her
lap and a note-book by her side.
One night, as they sat by the blazing logs in his study, which had been
the General's, Chiltern arose impulsively, opened the big safe in the
corner, and took out a leather-bound book and laid it on her lap. Honora
stared at it: it was marked: “Highlawns, Visitors' Book.”
“It's curious I never thought of it before,” he said, “but my father,
had a habit of jotting down notes in it on important occasions. It may
be of some use to us Honora.”
She opened it at random and read: “July 5, 1893, Picnic at Psalter's
Falls. Temperature 71 at 9 A.M. Bar. 30. Weather clear. Charles left
for Washington, summons from President, in the midst of it. Agatha and
Victor again look at the Farrar property. Hugh has a ducking. P.S. At
dinner night Bessie announces her engagement to Cecil Grainger. Present
Sarah and George Grenfell, Agatha and Victor Strange, Gerald Shorter,
Lord Kylie--”
Honora looked up. Hugh was at her shoulder, with his eyes on the page.
“Psalter's Falls!” he exclaimed. “How well I remember that day! I was
just home from my junior year at Harvard.”
“Who was 'Charles'?” inquired Honora.
“Senator Pendleton--Bessie's father. Just after I jumped into the
mill-pond the telegram came for him to go to Washington, and I drove him
home in my wet clothes. The old man had a terrible tongue, a whip-lash
kind of humour, and he scored me for being a fool. But he rather liked
me, on the whole. He told me if I'd only straighten out I could be
anything, in reason.”
“What made you jump in the mill-pond?” Honora asked, laughing.
“Bessie Grainger. She had a devil in her, too, in those days, but she
always kept her head, and I didn't.” He smiled. “I'm willing to admit
that I was madly in love with her, and she treated me outrageously.
We were standing on the bridge--I remember it as though it were
yesterday--and the water was about eight feet deep, with a clear sand
bottom. She took off a gold bracelet and bet me I wouldn't get it if she
threw it in. That night, right in the middle of dinner, when there was
a pause in the conversation, she told us she was engaged to Cecil
Grainger. It turned out, by the way, to have been his bracelet I
rescued. I could have wrung his neck, and I didn't speak to her for a
month.”
Honora repressed an impulse to comment on this incident. With his arm
over her shoulder, he turned the pages idly, and the long lists of
guests which bore witness to the former life and importance of Highlawns
passed before her eyes. Distinguished foreigners, peers of England,
churchmen, and men renowned in literature: famous American statesmen,
scientists, and names that represented more than one generation of
wealth and achievement--all were here. There were his school and college
friends, five and six at a time, and besides them those of young girls
who were now women, some of whom Honora had met and known in New York or
Newport.
Presently he closed the book abruptly and returned it to the safe. To
her sharpened senses, the very act itself was significant. There were
other and blank pages in it for future years; and under different
circumstances he might have laid it in its time-honoured place, on the
great table in the library.
It was not until some weeks later that Honora was seated one afternoon
in the study waiting for him to come in, and sorting over some of the
letters that they had not yet examined, when she came across a new
lot thrust carelessly at the bottom of the older pile. She undid the
elastic. Tucked away in one of the envelopes she was surprised to find
a letter of recent date--October. She glanced at it, read involuntarily
the first lines, and then, with a little cry, turned it over. It was
from Cecil Grainger. She put it back into the envelope whence it came,
and sat still.
After a while, she could not tell how long, she heard Hugh stamping the
snow from his feet in the little entry beside the study. And in a few
moments he entered, rubbing his hands and holding them out to the blaze.
“Hello, Honora,” he said; “are you still at it? What's the matter--a
hitch?”
She reached mechanically into the envelope, took out the letter, and
handed it to him.
“I found it just now, Hugh. I didn't read much of it--I didn't mean to
read any. It's from Mr. Grainger, and you must have overlooked it.”
He took it.
“From Cecil?” he said, in an odd voice. “I wasn't aware that he had sent
me anything-recently.”
As he read, she felt the anger rise within him, she saw it in his eyes
fixed upon the sheet, and the sense of fear, of irreparable loss, that
had come over her as she had sat alone awaiting him, deepened. And
yet, long expected verdicts are sometimes received in a spirit of
recklessness: He finished the letter, and flung it in her lap.
“Read it,” he said.
“Oh, Hugh!” she protested tremulously. “Perhaps--perhaps I'd better
not.” He laughed, and that frightened her the more. It was the laugh,
she was sure, of the other man she had not known.
“I've always suspected that Cecil was a fool--now I'm sure of it. Read
it!” he repeated, in a note of command that went oddly with his next
sentence; “You will find that it is only ridiculous.”
This assurance of the comedy it contained, however, did not serve to
fortify her misgivings. It was written from a club.
“DEAR HUGH: Herewith a few letters for the magnum opus which I have
extracted from Aunt Agatha, Judge Gaines, and others, and to send
you my humble congratulations. By George, my boy, you have dashed
off with a prize, and no mistake. I've never made any secret, you
know, of my admiration for Honora--I hope I may call her so now.
And I just thought I'd tell you you could count on me for a friend
at court. Not that I'm any use now, old boy. I'll have to be frank
with you--I always was. Discreet silence, and all that sort of
thing: as much as my head is worth to open my mouth. But I had an
idea it would be an act of friendship to let you know how things
stand. Let time and works speak, and Cecil will give the thing
a push at the proper moment. I understand from one of the
intellectual journals I read that you have gone in for simple life
and scientific farming. A deuced canny move. And for the love of
heaven, old man, keep it up for a while, anyhow. I know it's
difficult, but keep it up. I speak as a friend.
“They received your letters all right, announcing your marriage.
You always enjoyed a row--I wish you could have been on hand to see
and hear this one. It was no place for a man of peace, and I spent
two nights at the club. I've never made any secret, you know, of
the fact that I think the Pendleton connection hide-bound. And you
understand Bessie--there's no good of my explaining her. You'd have
thought divorce a brand-new invention of the devil, instead of a
comparatively old institution. And if you don't mind my saying so,
my boy, you took this fence a bit on the run, the way you do
everything.
“The fact is, divorce is going out of fashion. Maybe it's because
the Pendleton-Grenfell element have always set their patrician faces
against it; maybe its been a bit overdone. Most people who have
tried it have discovered that the fire is no better than the frying-
pan--both hot as soon as they warm up. Of course, old boy, there's
nothing personal in this. Sit tight, and stick to the simple life--
that's your game as I see it. No news--I've never known things to
be so quiet. Jerry won over two thousand night before last--he made
it no trumps in his own hand four times running.
“Yours,
“CECIL.”
Honora returned this somewhat unique epistle to her husband, and he
crushed it. There was an ill-repressed, terrifying savagery in the act,
and her heart was torn between fear and pity for this lone message
of good-will. Whatever its wording, such it was. A dark red flush had
mounted his forehead to the roots of his short curly hair.
“Well?” he said.
She was fighting for her presence of mind. Flashes of his temper she had
known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing--his anger. Not
his anger, but the anger of the destroyer that she beheld waking now
after its long sleep, and taking possession of him, and transforming him
before her very eyes. She had been able to cope with the new man, but
she felt numb and powerless before the resuscitated demon of the old.
“What do you expect me to say, Hugh?” she faltered, with a queer feeling
that she was not addressing him.
“Anything you like,” he replied.
“Defend Cecil.”
“Why should I defend him?” she said dully.
“Because you have no pride.”
A few seconds elapsed before the full import and brutality of this
insult reached her intelligence, and she cried out his name in a voice
shrill with anguish. But he seemed to delight in the pain he had caused.
“You couldn't be expected, I suppose, to see that this letter is a d--d
impertinence, filled with an outrageous flippancy, a deliberate affront,
an implication that our marriage does not exist.”
She sat stunned, knowing that the real pain would come later. That
which slowly awoke in her now, as he paced the room, was a high sense
of danger, and a persistent inability to regard the man who had insulted
her as her husband. He was rather an enemy to them both, and he would
overturn, if he could, the frail craft of their happiness in the storm.
She cried out to Hugh as across the waters.
“No,--I have no pride, Hugh,--it is gone. I have thought of you only.
The fear that I might separate you from your family, from your friends,
and ruin your future has killed my pride. He--Mr. Grainger meant to be
kind. He is always like that--it's his way of saying things. He wishes
to show that he is friendly to you--to me--”
“In spite of my relations,” cried Chiltern, stopping in the middle of
the room. “They cease to be my relations from this day. I disown them. I
say it deliberately. So long as I live, not one of them shall come into
this house. All my life they have begged me to settle down, to come up
here and live the life my father did. Very well, now I've done it. And
I wrote to them and told them that I intended to live henceforth like a
gentleman and a decent citizen--more than some of them do. No, I wash
my hands of them. If they were to crawl up here from the gate on their
knees, I'd turn them out.”
Although he could not hear her, she continued to plead.
“Hugh, try to think of how--how our marriage must have appeared to them.
Not that I blame you for being angry. We only thought of one thing--our
love--” her voice broke at the word, “and our own happiness. We did not
consider others. It is that which sometimes has made me afraid, that we
believed ourselves above the law. And now that we have--begun so well,
don't spoil it, Hugh! Give them time, let them see by our works that we
are in earnest, that we intend to live useful lives.
“I don't mean to beg them,” she cried, at sight of his eyes. “Oh, I
don't mean that. I don't mean to entreat them, or even to communicate
with them. But they are your flesh and blood--you must remember that.
Let us prove that we are--not--like the others,” she said, lifting her
head, “and then it cannot matter to us what any one thinks. We shall
have justified our act to ourselves.”
But he was striding up and down the room again. It was as she
feared--her plea--had fallen on unheeding ears. A sudden convulsive
leaping of the inner fires sent him to his desk, and he seized some
note-paper from the rack. Honora rose to her feet, and took a step
towards him.
“Hugh--what are you going to do?”
“Do!” he cried, swinging in his chair and facing her, “I'm going to
do what any man with an ounce of self-respect would do under the
circumstances. I'm going to do what I was a fool not to have done three
months ago--what I should have done if it hadn't been for you. If in
their contemptible, pharisaical notions of morality they choose to
forget what my mother and father were to them, they cease to exist for
me. If it's the last act of my life I'm going to tell them so.”
She stood gazing at him, but she was as one of whom he took no account.
He turned to the desk and began to write with a deliberation all the
more terrible to her because of the white anger he felt. And still she
stood. He pressed the button on his desk, and Starling responded.
“I want a man from the stable to be ready to take some letters to town
in half an hour,” he said.
It was not until then that she turned and slowly left the room. A mortal
sickness seemed to invade her vitals, and she went to her own chamber
and flung herself, face downward, on the lace covering of the bed: and
the sobs that shook her were the totterings of the foundations of her
universe. For a while, in the intensity of her anguish, all thought was
excluded. Presently, however, when the body was spent, the mind began
to practise its subtle and intolerable torture, and she was invaded by a
sense of loneliness colder than the space between the worlds.
Where was she to go, whither flee, now that his wrath was turned
against her? On the strength of his love alone she had pinned her faith,
discarded and scorned all other help. And at the first contact with that
greater power which he had taught her so confidently to despise, that
strength had broken!
Slowly, she gazed back over the path she had trod; where roses once had
held up smiling heads. It was choked now by brambles that scratched her
nakedness at every step. Ah, how easily she had been persuaded to enter
it! “We have the right to happiness,” he had said, and she had
looked into his eyes and believed him. What was this strange, elusive
happiness, that she had so pantingly pursued and never overtaken? that
essence pure and unalloyed with baser things? Ecstasy, perhaps, she had
found--for was it delirium? Fear was the boon companion of these; or
better, the pestilence that stalked behind them, ever ready to strike.
Then, as though some one had turned on a light--a sickening, yet
penetrating blue light--she looked at Hugh Chiltern. She did not wish to
look, but that which had turned on the light and bade her was stronger
than she. She beheld, as it were, the elements of his being, the very
sources of the ceaseless, restless energy that was driving him on. And
scan as she would, no traces of the vaunted illimitable power that
is called love could she discern. Love he possessed; that she had not
doubted, and did not doubt, even now. But it had been given her to see
that these springs had existed before love had come, and would flow,
perchance, after it had departed. Now she understood his anger; it was
like the anger of a fiercely rushing river striving to break a dam and
invade the lands below with devastating floods. All these months the
waters had been mounting....
Turning at length from the consideration of this figure, she asked
herself whether, if with her present knowledge she had her choice to
make over again, she would have chosen differently. The answer was a
startling negative. She loved him. Incomprehensible, unreasonable, and
un reasoning sentiment! That she had received a wound, she knew; whether
it were mortal, or whether it would heal and leave a scar, she could not
say. One salient, awful fact she began gradually to realize, that if she
sank back upon the pillows she was lost. Little it would profit her to
save her body. She had no choice between her present precarious foothold
and the abyss, and wounded as she was she would have to fight. There was
no retreat:
She sat up, and presently got to her feet and went to the window and
stared through the panes until she distinguished the blue whiteness of
the fallen snow on her little balcony. The night, despite the clouds,
had a certain luminous quality. Then she drew the curtains, searched for
the switch, and flooded the room with a soft glow--that beautiful
room in which he had so proudly installed her four months before. She
smoothed the bed, and walking to the mirror gazed intently at her
face, and then she bathed it. Afterwards she opened her window again,
admitting a flurry of snow, and stood for some minutes breathing in the
sharp air.
Three quarters of an hour later she was dressed and descending the
stairs, and as she entered the library dinner was announced. Let us
spare Honora the account of that repast or rather a recital of the
conversation that accompanied it. What she found to say under the eyes
of the servants is of little value, although the fact itself deserves to
be commended as a high accomplishment; and while she talked, she studied
the brooding mystery that he presented, and could make nothing of it.
His mood was new. It was not sullenness, nor repressed rage; and his
answers were brief, but he was not taciturn. It struck her that in spite
of a concentration such as she had never in her life bestowed on any
other subject, her knowledge of him of the Chiltern she had married--was
still wofully incomplete, and that in proportion to the lack of
perfection of that knowledge her danger was great. Perhaps the Chiltern
she had married was as yet in a formative state. Be this as it may,
what she saw depicted on his face to-night corresponded to no former
experience.
They went back to the library. Coffee was brought and carried off, and
Honora was standing before the fire. Suddenly he rose from his chair,
crossed the room, and before she could draw away seized and crushed her
in his arms without a word. She lay there, inert, bewildered as in the
grip of an unknown force, until presently she was aware of the beating
of his heart, and a glimmering of what he felt came to her. Nor was it
an understandable thing, except to the woman who loved him. And yet and
yet she feared it even in that instant of glory.
When at last she dared to look up, he kissed away the tears from her
cheeks.
“I love you,” he said. “You must never doubt it--do you understand?”
“Yes, Hugh.”
“You must never doubt it,” he repeated roughly.
His contrition was a strange thing--if it were contrition. And
love--woman's love--is sometimes the counsellor of wisdom. Her sole
reproach was to return his kiss.
Presently she chose a book, and he read to her.