WHAT BECAME OF LADY LONGUEVILLE.
Sir Alexis took his wife abroad early in the summer. His former
intentions of spending the season in town, and producing his beautiful
new prize in the world for the envy of all beholders, had been of course
abandoned. To take her away, to keep her quiet, to abstract the too
well-known Lady Longueville from the observation of all spectators, was
his only policy now; and the pang with which Sir Alexis consented to
this necessity was all the more severe, that he was too proud to
disclose it to any one. Even to Innocent’s friends he said nothing of
the mortification and disappointment which had replaced all his hopes.
When the Eastwoods paid their visit at Longueville he was very kind,
very attentive to them, but their visit was paid to a lonely and silent
dwelling, which had already, in sentiment at least, abdicated its
supremacy. It was, it is true, more the show-house of the county than
ever, and visitors came eager to inquire into the habits and looks of
the Lady Longueville who had been tried for murder, but its stately calm
of sovereignty was over. No guests entered its doors that year. The
friends of Sir Alexis sent their cards to evidence their sympathy, but
they were in town, or they were going abroad, or they were afraid to
intrude upon his privacy at a moment of trouble; so that the great house
was solitary as an island in the middle of the sea.
“I don’t think we shall attempt any society this year,” Sir Alexis said
to Mrs. Eastwood, with a constrained smile. He was a gentleman, and he
showed no signs either to Innocent or her friends of the heavy burden
which he felt he had to bear. At least, he concealed it from Innocent
herself, and to some extent from Nelly; but Mrs. Eastwood read the proud
man’s mortification in every look and word. And he had no deep and true
love to fall back upon, only a faltering kindness and fondness for the
poor little girl who was no longer the crown of the connoisseur’s
collection, more delicate than his Dresden, more lovely than his best
picture, a living Leonardo, as he had hoped the whole world would
acknowledge her to be. Instead of remaining in that heaven of passive
art-perfection, Innocent had stepped unawares into the living world, and
had become the object of vulgar stares and curiosity, the heroine of a
_cause célèbre_. Poor Sir Alexis! he bore it with stoical fortitude, but
still the fact that he had much to bear became visible to instructed
eyes. He became--not cross, it is too harsh a word--rather consciously
forbearing and forgiving to his poor little wife. He made the best of
her, but he was worried secretly by the simplicities which a little
while before had been her crowning charm. He had to accept her as a
woman instead of glorying in her as the highest triumph of art; and when
he took her down from the pedestal he had himself erected, poor Innocent
was not qualified to enact the part of woman as he understood it. She
was a child, little more, perfect so long as you looked at her with the
eyes of a connoisseur, but not perfect when the eyes that were turned
upon her were those of a husband, very proud, and unwilling to fall
below the mark which became a Lady Longueville. Alas, Innocent had not
been trained to be Lady Longueville, the mistress of a great house, the
companion of a man of the world. She was only Innocent--no more.
He took her abroad; he took her to Pisa, where, poor child, her
recollections were sadly confused and uncertain, and where even
Niccolo--whom Sir Alexis, true to all that honour and kindness demanded
of him, did not fail to seek out, appeared to her through a mist, not
the same Niccolo she had known, though his features were unaltered, and
his delight at seeing her genuine. But Innocent had not lived at all
consciously in those old days, and it struck her with strange wonder to
find how little reality there was in her recollections of them, and how,
in the midst of them, her heart would return to home. Home meant The
Elms, however, to Innocent, not Longueville, nor her husband’s pretty
house in town, with all its treasures. But she went to Santa Maria della
Spina, and said her prayers, though even that visit was paid with little
comfort, for her husband was with her, not unindulgent of her prayers,
but a little disquieted and annoyed by her long pause after them. Why
should she sit there doing nothing? he wanted to know; especially as the
little church was soon filled by a party of English travellers, to whom
he felt some one was pointing out “the celebrated Lady Longueville--she
whose case was in all the papers, you know.” Sir Alexis could never get
rid of this fear. Whenever any one looked at his wife (and whosoever has
travelled in Italy knows the simple and honest admiration with which all
Italians, meaning no harm, regard beauty), Sir Alexis felt that they
were staring at the woman who had been tried, the heroine of the murder
case which had made so much noise in the papers. When any one in his
hotel took up the travellers’ book, he shuddered with the consciousness
that Lady Longueville’s name would be the first to be noticed. Thus he
fretted himself day by day. I do not suppose that Innocent had the least
idea of this in its full meaning and import, but she felt instinctively
the change of atmosphere round her, the absence of that genial warmth to
which her half-conscious soul had responded during the first days of
their marriage, and the coming in of something new, irritating and
painful. The sensation was very strange to her. It was the first time
she had ever been in an atmosphere of criticism--the first time she had
ever felt the effect of that constant, involuntary watch upon herself
and her actions with which a husband, no longer admiring, and not much
in love, so often regards his wife. She began to wake up, poor child, to
the necessity of considering her own words and ways, of thinking what
she should do and what she should say to please him. Even this was not
for a long time a conscious process in her mind, any more than Sir
Alexis was conscious that his fretted and troubled mental condition
betrayed itself sufficiently plainly to command her comprehension.
Neither was quite aware of what was going on between them, but yet life
was changing to both, new influences coming into being, old things
passing away.
The Longuevilles were gone for more than a year--they returned to
England only towards the close of the London season, Sir Alexis being
still anxious to avoid society, and afraid of the consequences of taking
his young wife anywhere. They saw few people, except Mrs. Barclay, who
did her best to be as kind and effusive as ever, but who was
disappointed bitterly by all the consequences of her brother’s marriage
with which she had been so much enchanted. There was now, however, an
expectation which made up for a great many drawbacks to this good woman,
and one about which she made herself very important and very busy.
“After all, the old Longuevilles are not to die out,” she said to all
his friends; and in the flutter of that delightful hope she forgot the
disadvantages which Innocent’s misfortune had brought about--the
banishment of her brother, and the fading of those glories which he had
worn for so short a time. “It is almost forgotten by this time; take my
word for it, that if next season is at all a good one, and if anything
out of the way turns up, nobody will remember that such a thing ever
happened,” she said, by way of consolation to her brother, who was not
in very good health, and who was in more fretful spirits than she had
ever seen him. “A change of Ministry, or a Japanese Embassy, or even
another scandal in high life, would make it all right for Innocent even
now. There are people, you know, who would make her a lion directly.”
“A pleasant thing for a man to have his wife made a lion, and for such a
cause,” said Sir Alexis, with a growl, which was half of pain and half
of irritation. Poor man! he was suffering from suppressed gout, I
believe, as well as many mental maladies, of which the pangs are still
more severe.
“Well, Alexis--but it is not so bad as it might have been,” said Mrs.
Barclay; “and before next season you will find it entirely forgotten,
and Lady Twyford will present Innocent, and what with the heir we hope
for, and all----”
Sir Alexis was mollified; but still he uttered another groan, not loud,
but deep. He had lost his beautiful manners; he was not the serene man
of the world, the urbane art collector and connoisseur, who had been
pronounced delightful on all sides. To be sure, his friends remarked,
marriage of itself often produces something of this effect; a man no
longer feels it necessary to please everybody when he has secured some
one to please him, and this rule tells more surely with your old
bachelor than with a young man. But yet there was more than this in the
churlishness and irritability which often veiled his once benign
countenance. Irritability and churlishness are hard words--too hard,
perhaps, to apply to a man who consciously restrained himself, and was
at all times a great deal sweeter and gentler than he might have been
had he indulged his temper as he often wished to do. But he was ill in
health, never having surmounted the excitement, horror, and anxiety of
the trial, and he was not young enough to possess the elasticity which
can throw off the effects of such a blow. And Innocent, who ought by all
rules to have felt it most, had thrown it off entirely; she had never
even been ill, which seemed to her husband (though he never said so) the
most extraordinary proof of her want of feeling; it had scarcely
affected her one way or another, though she was in reality the cause of
it all, and ought to have been the chief sufferer; but it had nearly
killed him. This gave him a second grievance, and subject of unexpressed
complaint against his wife; but yet, with all this sense of injury, and
with all his consciousness that Innocent, as a woman and a wife, and the
mistress of his house, was a failure, he was very good to her. He
changed nothing in his mode of treating her. Nothing was changed save
the atmosphere; but then the atmosphere was precisely the one thing
which moved Innocent, and in which she was capable of feeling the
change.
And various strange thoughts had been working in her also during this
year. She had learned to express herself in a different way, and she had
learned--what Innocent had never done before--to restrain and conceal
herself in some degree. Words would sometimes rise to her lips which she
did not utter--a curious symptom of mental advance--and she learned
unawares to step out of herself and shape her mind to her husband. She
did more for him a great deal than at first. She read to him, whereas he
had been used to read to her. “The Miller’s Daughter” had long slid back
into the past, but she read the newspapers to him, and books about art,
and tried hard to understand, and show at least a semblance of interest.
She was fond of pictures by nature, though to read about them was very
puzzling, but even the newspapers Innocent attempted, and there were
long tracts of reading which she got over with her lips, though her mind
escaped from them, and refused to have anything to do with those arid
pastures. All this she strained at to please her husband--by the action
of the profound, unexpressed, inarticulate conviction in her mind that
she had ceased to please him. She was a very good nurse, at least, never
weary, finding it possible to be quite still without occupation, without
movement, when her patient required rest--ready to read to him as long
as he pleased--to do whatever he pleased with a docility unbounded.
Shortly after their return to England Sir Alexis had occasion to put
this quality to the fullest test. He was taken ill with a complication
of disorders, and for a fortnight was in bed, nursed night and day by
his wife, who would not leave him, though her own condition required a
great deal more care than she gave it. Innocent, however, was impervious
to all representations of this kind. “Me! I am well. I am quite well; I
never was ill in my life,” she said, smiling upon the anxious matrons,
her aunt, and Mrs. Barclay, who regarded her proceedings with dismay.
Even the hopes which excited the Longuevilles so much did not excite
Innocent. Her passive mind did not awake to the future--her imagination
was not yet active enough to fix even upon the kind of hope which moves
women most. The present was all she knew, and in that she lived and had
her entire being.
Sir Alexis began to get well, and he was grateful, so far as he was
able, for the devotion she had shown him. But yet his gratitude was
tinctured by blame.
“It is very kind of you to nurse me; but when you think of the
circumstances, Innocent, it would be still kinder not to wear out and
tire yourself,” he said, in the half-weary tone of a man bound to give
thanks, yet more willing to find fault. Very gentle was his
fault-finding--but still it was fault-finding. He allowed her to sit by
him all day as he recovered, but with a servant in the next room to do
what he wanted, lest she should be fatigued. Even this consideration for
her had a certain tacit reproof in it--a reproof too subtle to wake
Innocent’s intellect, but which yet she felt eagerly as an evidence that
she had not quite succeeded in pleasing him. He was not angry--he did
not scold her; but yet he did not accept her service with that frank and
perfect satisfaction which makes service happy. One of these days,
however, Sir Alexis’s man, an old servant who had been long with him,
got tired in his turn, and was replaced in the ante-room by another not
so agreeable to the master. Innocent took her old offices upon her with
a furtive delight when she perceived this. She began again to administer
her husband’s medicine, to give him his drinks and tonics. In the
afternoon the patient became a little cross and restless. Something
disturbed his calm, I cannot tell what--some crease in his pillow, some
twist of the coverlet, or something, perhaps, in the news of the day
which Innocent had been reading. His mind took that evil turn which
makes a man ready to be irritated by every trifle, to think of
everything that is uncomfortable, and to say many things which are not
pleasant to hear. All of us, I suppose, take this ill turn sometimes in
the afternoon when the tide of being runs low, and every trifling
contradiction becomes a wrong and injury to us. Sir Alexis tried to
restrain himself, but he had not entirely succeeded. He even called for
his attendant, and consciously vented his ill-temper on the man, that he
might not be tempted further; but he had not quite exhausted the vein.
Some time after this outbreak Innocent rose softly and went to the
table.
“Why cannot you keep still, Innocent?” he said fretfully, “when you know
that you ought not to be constantly in motion! What is it now? You
disturb more than I can say----”
“It is the hour for your tonic,” she said. She was standing with her
face towards him, smiling at him, with the smile he had once thought so
strangely beautiful--with a Venice glass in one hand, milky white, and
of a graceful shape, the very cup for such a hand to hold. With the
other she took a bottle from the table, still looking at him. “You are
no wiser than me in this,” she said; “because it is bitter, you would
rather forget it; but you must not forget----”
He lay and looked at her strangely. She was to him at that moment as a
picture--a picture he had seen somewhere and half-forgotten. He paid
little attention as she approached him with the glass, but kept
following out the thread of thought this idea suggested. God knows--or
rather the devil knows, which is more appropriate--what evil spirit put
it into his head. He looked at her fixedly as she came up to the
bedside. He made no movement to take the glass when she held it out to
him.
“Habit goes a long way,” he said, more to himself than her. “Put it
down, Innocent; I don’t want my medicine from you; habit goes a long
way--_I wonder_--_will she ever do it again!_”
He looked from her to the glass as he said this, and waved it away from
him. I do not know by what magic Innocent understood instantly and
distinctly what he meant. He would never have permitted himself to say
it, had he not been confident in the slow and dim working of her mind,
which generally lost all allusions and understood only plain speaking.
But this time, for his punishment and for his fate, she saw in a moment
what he meant. She gave a low cry. She looked at him with such a
pathetic look as no human creature had ever turned on him before--like
that dumb mystery of reproach which sometimes comes to us from the eyes
of a speechless creature, an injured animal, without words in which to
form a complaint. Her hand shook, the little milk-white glass fell and
crashed in a hundred fragments; and without saying a word Innocent
turned away. With the sense of some spell upon him, which kept him
speechless, Sir Alexis watched her go softly, quietly out of the room.
He called her name before her dress had disappeared from the door, but
she did not come back. What had he done? He lay there for some minutes,
confounded, scarcely realizing what had happened, as wonder-stricken as
though a marble figure had shown signs of feeling. Then he called loudly
to the servant in the next room. “Ask Lady Longueville to come back, I
want her--instantly!” he said. A strange impatience flushed over him.
“Nonsense, nonsense!” he said to himself, “what _can_ happen? It is not
possible that she understood me--and if she did? Pooh! Is it Innocent I
am frightened for?” He laughed, all by himself, lying there in silence.
How strange that laugh sounded! not as if it came from him, but from
some mocking demon. He looked round, alarmed, to see who it was.
“Innocent! Innocent!” he cried aloud, in a terror he could not account
for. The servant did not come back. It seemed to him an age while he
waited, listening, not hearing a sound in the house. “Innocent!” He
sprang out of bed, feeble though he was, and clutched at his
dressing-gown, and hurried to the door. There he met the servant coming
back.
“Lady Longueville! Where is Lady Longueville?” he said.
“I beg your pardon, Sir Alexis, but my lady has just gone out. I might
have caught her at the door had I gone there first, but I went up-stairs
to call Mrs. Morton; she’s not in her room, Sir Alexis; and John tells
me as my lady is gone out.”
“Gone out!” cried Sir Alexis in dismay. “Gone out--alone! Where has she
gone? Go and ask which way she went. Go and ask if she said anything.
Good God! can’t you make haste! I mean--Lady Longueville, of course, has
gone to take the air. Why didn’t you or John, or some one, go with her?
a set of idiots! Why on earth is my wife to go out unattended with all
of you there?”
“I was here, Sir Alexis,” said the man in an injured tone, “and,
besides, my lady----”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Longueville in increasing agitation. “Let John go
after her at once, as he saw what direction she took, and tell her to
come to me directly. I have something to say--Go! go! go! don’t lose a
moment; and send for my sister,” cried Sir Alexis, distracted. His head
was throbbing, his limbs failing under him. He could send only his
servants after his wife, he could not go himself to bring her back; he
had to fling himself down on his bed exhausted, cursing himself and his
fate. What had he done? What had he said? What horrible temptation had
beguiled him? He said to himself that it could be but for a moment, that
she must come back--that his sweet, simple Innocent would soon and
surely forgive the evil words he never meant; but God help him! as he
fell back on the weary bed from which he could not rise, what a
miserable sinking, what a sense of some dreadful unknown calamity was in
his heart!
Innocent went out of her husband’s house, poor child, she knew not
how,--with that strange, helpless repetition of what she had done
before, which seems to be natural to the undeveloped mind when stung
with sudden pain. It was the only resource she had. What he had said to
her was not an offence to her,--to use such simple words; it was as if
he had cut her down suddenly, without mercy or warning,--cut her to the
very heart. It did not seem possible to her that she could live and go
on after it; it brought back to her all the misery of the past,--all her
own conviction of guilt,--all the bewildered, wretched sensation with
which she had fled from the house in Sterborne, in which Amanda lay
dead. Had she tried to do the same again? Her brain reeled when she
attempted to ask herself that question;--certainly that had not happened
again what had happened then. The glass had fallen out of her hand and
broken. Sir Alexis was living. He had not died. But what had put those
terrible words into his mouth? Had she tried to do it again? She
wandered forth in her horror and trouble, stricken to the heart,--ill in
body,--torn by sufferings she did not understand,--and still more ill in
soul, wondering was there not something that she, too, could take, and
die? When she fled from Sterborne, her way was clear to go home,--but
where could she go now? Not to The Elms, to bring more trouble upon
them,--to some hole or cover, anywhere, where she could lie down--only
lie down and die.
She wandered about through one narrow lane and another,--she did not
know nor care where she went;--and every moment it became more difficult
to keep erect--not to fall down and perish altogether. She would have
done so, and died probably in a dreary little suburban street, no one
knowing who she was, had not old Alice come out of one of the humble
houses where dwelt a sewing-woman to whom she had just taken work, as
the forlorn creature wandered by. Alice, divining evil with the instinct
which never fails a woman who knew so much of life as she had done,
rushed to the girl’s side, and clutched at her, as blind and sick with
pain she tottered by. “Miss Innocent! where are you going?--oh, what
ails you, what ails you?” cried Alice.
“Take me somewhere,” gasped poor Innocent, clasping her arms with a
sudden cry of anguish, round the old friend who came to her like an
angel out of heaven,--“take me somewhere, or I shall die----”
The poor needlewoman stood wondering at her door; and into her poor
little room Lady Longueville was taken,--half conscious only of all that
was happening to her. What a strange, sudden, miserable nightmare it
seemed, after the quiet and peace of the morning!--pain of body, pain of
heart, anguish which made her cry aloud, and a sick despair, which
quenched and silenced every hope and wish in her. There was no time to
ask questions, or to send for those who should have been by her in her
suffering. Alice was the only support, the only help she had in heaven
and earth. She clung to her, refusing to leave her hold.
“I want no one--no one but Alice,” she said, when they spoke to her of
her husband and of her friends. And in this poor little house it was
that the last hope of the Longuevilles perished and came to
nothing--that which had given Innocent new importance in the family, and
was to afford her a new beginning, as everybody hoped both in the family
and the world.
Meanwhile Sir Alexis’ servants went wandering far and near, seeking for
her. They went to The Elms first of all, and roused that peaceful house
into anxiety and wonder.
“This time my lady has gone clean off her head altogether, as I always
expected,” the messenger said to the servants of the house, who shook
their heads as he drank his beer, and agreed with him that they too had
always expected it. I cannot describe the tumult, the vain searching,
the runnings to and fro which ensued. It was late at night before any
one remarked that Alice had not come home, a discovery which, mysterious
as it was, gave a little comfort to the Eastwoods, at least. Nelly and
her mother consulted together, and set out immediately on foot to the
needlewoman’s whom Alice had gone to visit, hoping to hear some news of
her, some indications which they could follow out; and there they
lighted quite simply, unawares upon Innocent, lying like one dead,
speechless, colourless, the ghost of herself, with eyes which never
brightened at sight of them, which seemed as if they could make any
interchange of kindness ever more with other tender human eyes.
This new catastrophe fell upon them all like lightning from a cloudless
sky--like the storm which bursts without warning or sign of evil. Sir
Alexis, it is true, who lay at home in a state indescribable, took the
blame entirely on himself, and accused himself of cruelty and barbarous
folly, such as his attendants would have laughed to hear of, had they
not been so much frightened by the condition into which remorse and
excitement drove him, calling back his half-departed malady with a
hundred cruel aggravations. He moaned over his poor Innocent in all the
paroxysms of his disorder in a way that was pitiful to hear.
“Bring her back to me, and I will be better to her than I have ever
been. Bring her back, and all shall be well; if I live--if I live!” he
said, with a wail that was sometimes shrill with hope, and sometimes
bitter with despair.
This, however, was not to be. Innocent, paler than ever, blank and
passive as she had been years ago, was brought back to him as soon as
she could be removed, but only in time to see her husband in his last
lucid moments, to receive his blessing, and to bid him farewell.
“You have been a good child to me, poor Innocent. God bless you!” said
the dying man, putting his hand upon her head; and then he asked feebly
and anxiously, “You forgive me for what I said?”
“I did not do it,” said Innocent, looking at him very earnestly. “I did
not do it.” There was no anger in her eyes, only a firm, almost wild
denial, which yet she was anxious that he should believe.
“I know you did not,” he cried. “Oh, Innocent, my child, kiss me and
forgive me! you have been as good as an angel to me. It is I that have
been unkind, only I----”
She stooped down over him, her face melting a little, and kissed
him--then by a sudden impulse knelt down by his side. Innocent had but
one thing that it came into her head to do when she knelt down upon her
knees. She said “Our Father” reverently and slowly like a child by her
husband’s bedside: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that
have trespassed against us.” I have heard that there was not a dry eye
in the room; and when she rose up from her knees she kissed him again,
and held his hand till he died.