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[Illustration: "HER EYES TURNED TOWARDS IT MECHANICALLY BECAUSE IT
CONTAINED ... THE MAN OF WHOM SHE WAS THINKING"]
PRISONERS
FAST BOUND IN MISERY AND IRON
By
MARY CHOLMONDELEY
_Author of_
"Red Pottage"
"But for failing of love on our
part, therefore is all our travail."
--JULIAN OF NORWICH.
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMVI
Copyright, 1905, 1906, by
COLVER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Copyright, 1906, by
MARY CHOLMONDELEY
_Published, September, 1906_
To
My Brother
Reginald
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Her eyes turned towards it mechanically
because it contained ... the man of
whom she was thinking" _Frontispiece_
"A deathlike silence followed the _delegato's_
words" _Page_ 36
"'Is she worth it?' he said with sudden
passion" " 46
"'You are all blinder one than the other, that
it's Andrea I'm grieving for'" " 80
"If Fay had come in then he would have killed
her, done her to death with the chains he
had worn so patiently for her sake" " 146
"Fay noticed for the first time how lightly
Wentworth walked, how square his shoulders
were" " 184
CHAPTER I
Grim Fate was tender, contemplating you,
And fairies brought their offerings at your birth;
You take the rose-leaf pathway as your due,
Your rightful meed the choicest gifts of earth.
--ARTHUR C. LEGGE.
Fay stood on her balcony, and looked over the ilexes of her villa at
Frascati; out across the grey-green of the Campagna to the little
compressed city which goes by the great name of Rome.
How small it looked, what a huddled speck with a bubble dome, to be
represented by so stupendous a name!
She gazed at it without seeing it. Her eyes turned towards it
mechanically because it contained somewhere within its narrow precincts
the man of whom she was thinking, of whom she was always thinking.
It was easy to see that Fay--the Duchess of Colle Alto--was an
Englishwoman, in spite of her historic Italian name.
She had the look of perfect though not robust health, the reflection
over her whole being of a childhood spent much in the open air. She was
twenty-three, but her sweet fair face, with its delicate irregular
features, was immature, childish. It gave no impression of experience,
or thought, or of having met life. She was obviously not of those who
criticise or judge themselves. In how many faces we see the conflict, or
the remains of conflict with a dual nature. Fay, as she was called by
her family, seemed all of a piece with herself. Her unharassed
countenance showed it, especially when, as at this moment, she looked
harassed. Anxiety was evidently a foreign element. It sat ill upon her
smooth face, as if it might slide off at any moment. Fay's violet eyes
were her greatest charm. She looked at you with a deprecating, timid,
limpid gaze, in which no guile existed, any more than steadfastness, any
more than unselfishness, any more than courage.
Fay had come into the world anxious to please. She had never shown any
particular wish to give pleasure. If she had been missed out of her
somewhat oppressed and struggling home when she married, it is probable
that the sense of her absence was tinged by relief.
She had never intended to marry the Duke of Colle Alto. It is difficult
to say why that sedate distinguished personage married her.
Fay's face had a very sweet and endearing promise in it which drew men's
eyes after her. I don't know what it meant, and they did not know
either, but they instinctively lessened the distance between themselves
and it. A very thin string will tow a very heavy body if there is no
resistance, and the pace is slow. The duke looked at Fay, who was at
that moment being taken out for her first season by her grandmother,
Lady Bellairs. Fay tried to please him, as was her wont with all except
men with beards. She liked to have him in attendance. Her violet eyes
lighted up with genuine pleasure when he came to see her.
It is perhaps difficult for the legions of women who do not please
easily, and for the handful whose interests lie outside themselves, and
who are not desirous of pleasing indiscriminately, it is difficult for
either to realise the passionate desire to please which possesses and
saps the life of some of their sisters. Admiration with them is not a
luxury, any more than a hot-water bottle is a luxury to the aged, or a
foot rest to a gouty foot. It is a necessity of life. After a becoming
interval, the interstices of which had been filled with flowers, the
duke proposed to Lady Bellairs for Fay's hand. Fay did not wish to marry
him. He was not in the least her ideal. Neither did she wish to remain
unmarried, neither did she wish to part with her grave, distinguished
suitor who was an ornament to herself. And she was distinctly averse to
living any longer in the paternal home, lost in a remote crease in a
Hampshire down. Poor women have only too frequently to deal with these
complicated situations, with which blundering, egotistic male minds are
seldom in perfect sympathy.
Fay had never willingly relinquished any of the men who had cared for
her, and some had cared much. These last had as a rule torn themselves
away from her, leaving hearts, or other fragments of themselves, behind,
and were not to be cajoled back again, even by one of her little
gilt-edged notes. But the duke did not break away. He had selected her,
she pleased him, he desired to marry an Englishwoman. He had the
approval of Lady Bellairs.
The day came when Fay was suddenly and adroitly confronted with the fact
that she must marry him, or lose him.
Many confirmed bachelors who openly regret that they have never come
across a woman to whom they cared to tie themselves for life might be
in a position to descant on the inability of wives to enter into their
husbands' inmost feelings, if only they--the bachelors--had known on a
past occasion how to act with sudden promptitude on the top of patience.
The duke played the waiting game, and then hit hard. He had coolly
allowed himself to be trifled with, until the moment arrived when it did
not suit him to be trifled with any longer.
The marriage had not proved a marked success, nor an entire failure. The
duke was an irreproachable husband, but, like many men who marry when
they are no longer young, he aged suddenly after marriage. He quickly
became bald and stout. His tact except in these two particulars remained
flawless. He never allowed his deep chagrin to appear when, three years
after his marriage, he still remained without a son to continue his
historic name.
He was polite to his wife at all times, mildly sarcastic as to her
extravagance. Fay was not exorbitantly extravagant; but then the duke
was not exorbitantly rich. One of Fay's arts, as unconscious as that of
a kitten, was to imply past unhappiness, spoken of with a cheerful
resignation which greatly endeared her to others--and to herself. The
duke had understood that she had not had a very happy home, and he had
honestly endeavoured to make her new home happy. In the early days of
his marriage he made many small experiments in the hope of pleasing the
pretty creature who had thrown in her lot with his. Possibly also there
may have been other subtle, patient attempts to win somewhat from her of
another nature. Possibly there may have been veiled disappointments,
and noiseless retreats under cover of night.
However these things may have been, after the first year Fay made the
discovery that she was unhappily married. The duke was kind, in kindness
he never failed; but he was easily jealous--at least she thought so; and
he appeared quite unable to see in their true light her amicable little
flirtations with his delightful compatriots. After one or two annoying
incidents, in which the compatriots had shown several distinctly
un-English characteristics, the duke became, in his wife's eyes,
tiresome, strict, a burden. Perhaps, also, she felt the Englishwoman's
surprise at the inadequate belief in a woman's power of guarding her own
virtue, which remains in some nations an hereditary masculine instinct.
She felt that she could take care of herself, which was, in reality,
just what she could not do, as her imperturbable, watchful husband was
well aware.
But was he aware of the subject of her thoughts at this moment? It was
more than probable that he was. But Fay had not the faintest suspicion
that he had guessed anything.
One of her many charms was a certain youthful innocence of mind, which
imputed no evil to others, which never suspected that others would
impute it to her. Her husband was wearisome. He looked coldly on her if
she smiled on young men, and she had to smile at them when they smiled
at her. But, she reasoned, of course all the time he really knew that he
could trust her entirely. There was no harm in Fay's nature, no venom,
there were no dark places, no strong passions, with their awful
possibilities for good and evil. She had already given much pain in her
short life, but inadvertently. She was of that large class of whom it
may truly be said when evil comes, that they are more sinned against
than sinning. They always somehow gravitate into the places where people
_are_ sinned against, just as some people never attend a cricket-match
without receiving a ball on their persons.
And now trouble had come upon her. She had at last fallen in love. I
would not venture to assert that she had fallen in very deep, that the
"breakers of the boundless deep" had engulfed her. Some of us make
shipwreck in a teacup tempest, and when our serenity is restored--there
is nothing calmer than a teacup after its storm--our experience serves,
after a decent interval, as an agreeable fringe to our confidential
conversation.
Anyhow, Fay had fallen in love. I feel bound to add that for some time
before that event happened life had become intolerably dull. The advent
to Rome of her distant connection, Michael Carstairs, had been at this
juncture a source of delight to her. She had, before her marriage,
flirted with him a very little--not as much as she could have wished;
but Lady Bellairs, who was fond of him, had promptly intervened, and the
young man had disappeared into his examinations. That was four years
ago.
In reality Fay had half-forgotten him; but when she saw him suddenly,
pale, handsome, distinguished, across a ballroom in Rome, and, after a
moment's uncertainty, realised who he was, she felt the same pleasurable
surprise, soft as the fall of dew, which pervades the feminine heart
when, in looking into an unused drawer, it inadvertently haps upon a
length of new ribbon, bought, carefully put away, and forgotten.
Fay went gently up to Michael, conscious of her beauty and her wonderful
jewels, and held out her hand with a little deprecating smile.
"And so we meet again at last," she said.
He turned red and white.
"At last," he said with difficulty.
She looked more closely at him. The dreamy, poetic face had changed
during those four years. She became dimly aware that he had not only
grown from a youth into a man, but that some other transformation had
been painfully wrought in him.
Instinctively her beaming face became grave to match his. She was slow
to see what others were feeling, but quick to reflect their mood. She
sighed gently, vaguely stirred, in spite of herself, by something--she
knew not what--in her companion's face.
"It is four years since I saw you," she said.
And from her lowered voice it seemed as if her life were rooted in
memory alone.
"Four years," said Michael, who, promising young diplomat as he was,
appeared only able to repeat parrot-wise her last words after her.
A pause.
"Do you know my husband?"
"I do not."
"May I introduce him to you?"
Fay made a little sign, and the duke approached, superb, decorated,
dignified, with the polished pallor as if the skin were a little too
tight, which is the Charybdis of many who have avoided the Scylla of
wrinkles.
The elder Italian and the grave, fair, young Englishman bowed to each
other, were made known to each other.
That night as the duke drove home with his wife he said to her in his
admirable English:
"Your young cousin is an enthusiast, a dreamer, a sensitive, what your
Tennyson calls a Sir Galahad. In Italy we make of such men a priest, a
cardinal. He is not an _homme d'affaires_. It was not well to put him
into diplomacy. One may make a religion of art. One may even for a time
make a religion of a woman. But of the English diplomacy one does not
make a religion."
Fay lay awake that night. From a disused pigeon-hole in her mind she
drew out and unfolded to its short length that attractive remnant, that
half-forgotten episode of her teens. She remembered everything--I mean
everything she wished to remember. Michael's face had recalled it all,
those exquisite days which he had taken so much more seriously than she
had, the sudden ruthless intervention of Lady Bellairs, the end of the
daydream. Fay, whose attention had been adroitly diverted to other
channels, had never wondered how he took their separation at the time.
Now that she saw him again she was aware that he had taken it--to heart.
During that sleepless night Fay persuaded herself that Michael had not
been alone in his suffering. She also had felt the parting with equal
poignancy.
They met again a few days later by chance in an old cloistered, deserted
garden. How often she had walked in that garden as she was doing now
with English friends! His presence gave the place its true significance.
They met as those who have between them the bond of a common sorrow.
"And what have you been doing all these four years?" she asked him, as
they wandered somewhat apart.
"I have been working."
"You never came to say good-bye before you went to that place in Germany
to study."
"I was told I had better not come."
"I suppose grandmamma told you that."
"She did, most kindly and wisely."
A pause.
She was leaning in the still May sunshine against an old grey tomb of
carved stone. Two angels with spread wings upheld the defaced
inscription. Above it, over it, round it, like desire impotently defying
death, a flood of red roses clambered and clung. Were they trying to
wake some votary who slept below? A great twisted sentinel cypress kept
its own dark counsel. Against its shadow Fay's figure in her white
gossamer gown showed more ethereal and exquisite even than in memory.
She seemed at one with this wonderful, passionate southern spring, which
trembled between rapture and anguish. The red roses and the white irises
were everywhere. Even the unkept grass in which her light feet were set
was wild with white daisies.
"Do you remember our last walk on the down that day in spring?" she said
suddenly.
She had forgotten it until last night.
"I remember it."
"It was May then. It is May again now."
He did not answer. The roses left off calling to the dead, and suddenly
enfolded the two young grave creatures leaning against the tomb, in a
gust of hot perfume.
"Do you remember," Fay's voice was tremulous, "how you gave me a bit of
pink may?"
"I remember."
"I was looking at it yesterday. It is not very pink now."
It was true. In all shallow meanings, and when she had not had time to
get her mind into a tangle, Fay was perfectly truthful. She had
yesterday been turning over the contents of a little cedar box in which
she kept her childish possessions, and she had found in an envelope a
brown unsightly ghost of what had once been a may-blossom on a Hampshire
down. She had remembered the vivid sunshine, the wheeling seagull, the
soft south wind blowing in from the sea. Michael had kissed her under
the thin dappled shade of the flowering tree, and she had kissed him
back.
Michael's eyes turned for a long moment to the yellow weather-stained
arches of the cloister, and then he looked full at Fay with a certain
peculiar detached glance which had first made her endeavour to attract
him. There is a look in a man's face which women like Fay cannot endure,
because it means independence of them.
"I thought," he said, with the grave simplicity which apparently was
unchangeable in him whatever else might change, "that it was only I who
remembered. It has always been a comfort to me that any unhappiness
which my want of forethought, my--my culpable selfishness may have
caused, was borne by myself alone."
"I was unhappy too," she said, speaking as simply as he. She looked up
at him suddenly as she said it. There was a wet glint in her deep violet
eyes. She believed absolutely at that moment that she had been as
unhappy as he for four years. There was no suspicion in her mind that
she was not genuine. Only the sincere ever doubt their sincerity. Fay
never doubted hers. She felt what she said, and the sweet eyes turned on
Michael had the transparent fixity of a child's.
They walked unsteadily back to the others and spoke no more to each
other that day. Conscience pricked Fay that night.
"Leave him alone," it said. "You have both suffered. Let the dead past
bury its dead."
Fay's conscience was a wonderfully adaptable one with a tendency to
poetic quotation. It showed considerable tact in adopting her point of
view. Nevertheless from that generally fallacious standpoint it often
gave her quite respectable advice. "Leave him alone," said the
hoodwinked monitor. "You are married and Andrea is easily jealous.
Michael is sensitive, and has been deeply in love with you. Don't stir
him up to fall in love with you again. _Leave him alone._"
The young British matron waxed indignant. Was she, Fay, the kind of
woman to forget her duty to her husband? Was Michael the kind of man to
make love to a married woman? Such an idea was preposterous, unjust to
both of them. And people would begin to talk at once if she and her
cousin (Michael was only a distant connection) were studiously to avoid
each other, if they could not exchange a few words simply like old
friends. No one had suggested an attitude of rigid avoidance; but
throughout life Fay had always convinced herself of the advisability of
a certain wished-for course by conjuring up, only to discard it, the
extreme and most obviously senseless opposite of that course--as the
only alternative.
She imagined her husband saying: "Why won't you ask Mr. Carstairs to
dinner? He is your cousin and he is charming. What can the reason be
that you so earnestly refuse to meet him?" And then Andrea, who always
"got ideas into his head," would begin to suspect that there had been
"something" between them.
_No. No._ It would be far wiser to meet naturally now and then, and to
treat Michael like an old friend. Fay had a somewhat muffled conception
of what an old friend might be. After deep thought she came to the
conclusion that it was her duty to ask Michael frequently to the house.
When Fay once recognised a duty she performed it without delay.
She met with an unexpected obstacle in the way of its adequate
performance. The obstacle was Michael.
The young man came once, and then again after an interval of several
months, but apparently nothing would induce him to frequent the house.
Fay did not recognise her boyish eager lover in the grave sedate man,
old of his age, who had replaced him. His dignified and quite
unobtrusive resistance, which had not indifference at its core, added an
intense, a feverish, interest to Fay's life. She saw that he still cared
for her, and that he did not intend to wound himself a second time. He
had had enough. She put out all her little transparent arts during the
months that followed. The duke watched.
She had implied to her husband with a smile that she had not been very
happy at home. She implied to Michael with a smile that it was not the
duke's fault, but that she was not very happy in her married life, that
he did not care much about her, and that they had but few tastes in
common. Each lived their own life on amicable terms, but somewhat apart
from each other. She owned that she had hoped for something rather
different in marriage. She had, it seemed, started life with a very
exalted ideal of married life, which the duke's
coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb.
Michael remained outwardly obdurate, but inwardly he weakened. His
tender adoration and respect for Fay, wounded and mutilated though they
had been, had nevertheless survived what in many minds must have proved
their death-blow. He still believed implicitly all she said.
But to him her marriage was the impassable barrier, a barrier as
enfranchisable as the brown earth on a coffin lid.
After many months Fay at last vaguely realised his attitude towards her.
She told herself that she respected it, that it was just what she
wished, was in fact the result of her own tactfully expressed wishes.
She seemed to remember things she had said which would have led him to
behave just as he had done. And then she turned heaven and earth to
regain her personal ascendency over him. She never would have regained
it if an accident had not befallen her. She fell in love with him during
the process.
The day came, an evil day for Michael, when he could no longer doubt it,
when he was not permitted to remain in doubt. Who shall say what waves
of boundless devotion, what passionate impulses of protection, of
compassion, of intense longing to shield her from the fire which had
devastated his own youth, passed in succession over him as he looked at
the delicate little creature who was to him the only real woman in the
world--all the rest were counterfeits--and who now, as he believed,
loved him as he had long loved her.
Michael was one of the few men who bear through life the common
masculine burden of a profound ignorance of women, coupled with an
undeviating loyalty towards them. He supposed she was suffering as he
had suffered, that it was with her now beside the fountain, under the
ilexes of her Italian garden, as it had been with him during these five
intolerable years.
How Fay wept! What a passion of tears, till her small flower-like face
was bereft of all beauty, of everything except a hideous contraction of
grief!
He stood near her, not touching her, in anguish far deeper than hers. At
last he took her clenched hand in his.
"Do not grieve so," he said brokenly. "It is not our fault. It is
greater than either of us. It has come upon us against our wills. We
have both struggled. You don't know how I have struggled, Fay, day and
night since I came to Rome. But I have been in fault. I ought never to
have come, for I knew you were living near Rome. But I did not know it
had touched you, and for myself I had hoped--I thought--that it was
past--in as far as it could pass--that I was accustomed to it. Listen,
Fay, and do not cry so bitterly. I will leave Rome at once. I will not
see you again. My poor darling, we have come to a hard place in life,
but we can do the only thing left to us--our duty."
Fay's heart contracted, and she suddenly ceased sobbing. She had never
thought of this horrible possibility that he would leave her.
She drew the hand that clasped hers to her lips and held it tightly
against her breast.
"Don't leave me," she stammered, trembling from head to foot, from sheer
terror at the thought; "I will be good. I will do what is right. We are
not like other people. We can trust each other. But I can't live without
seeing you sometimes, I could not bear it."
He withdrew his hand. They looked wildly into each other's eyes. His
convulsed face paled and paled. Even as he stood before her she knew she
was losing him, that something was tearing him from her. It was as
certain that he was going from her as if she were standing by his
deathbed.
He kissed her suddenly.
"I shall not come back," he said. And the next moment he was gone.