The year slid like a corpse afloat.--D. G. ROSSETTI.
And how did it fare with Fay during the days that followed Michael's
arrest?
Much sympathy was felt for her. Lord John, wallowing in the delicious
novelty of finding eager listeners, went about extolling her courage and
unselfishness to the skies. Her conduct was considered perfectly natural
and womanly. No man condemned her for trying to shield her cousin from
the consequences of his crime. Women said they would have done the same,
and envied her her romantic situation.
And Fay, shut up in her darkened room in her romantic situation--she who
adored romantic situations--what were Fay's thoughts?
There is a travail of soul which toils with hard crying up the dark
valley of decision, and brings forth in anguish the life entrusted to
it. Perhaps it is the great renunciation. Perhaps it is only the loyal
inevitable deed which is struggling to come forth, to be allowed to live
for our healing and comfort.
But there is another travail of soul, barren, unavailing, which flings
itself down, and tosses in impotent misery from side to side, from mood
to mood, as in a sickly trance.
Such was Fay's.
Her decision not to speak had been made in the moment when she had let
Michael accuse himself, and she kept silence. But that she did not know.
She thought it was still to make.
"I must speak. I must speak," she said to herself all through the
endless day after Michael's arrest, all through the endless night, until
the dawn came up behind the ilexes, the tranquil dawn that knew all, and
found her shuddering and wild-eyed.
"I must speak. I cannot let Michael suffer for me, even to save my
reputation."
_Her reputation!_ How little she had cared for it twenty-four hours ago,
when passion clutched the reins!
But now---- The public shame of it--the divorce which in her eyes must
ensue--Andrea! Her courteous, sedate, inexorable husband, whose will she
could not bend, whom she could not cajole, whose mind was a closed book
to her; a book which had lain by her hand for three years, which she had
never had the curiosity to open!--Fay feared her husband, as we all fear
what we do not understand. He would divorce her--and then---- And
Magdalen at home--and----
A flood of suffocating emotion swept over her, full of ugly swimming and
crawling reptiles, and invertebrate horrors, the inevitable scavengers
of the sea of selfish passion.
Fay shrank back for very life. She could not pass through that flood and
live. Nevertheless she felt herself pushed towards it.
"But I have no choice. I _must_ speak. He is innocent. He is doing this
to shield me because he loves me. But I also love him, far, far more
than he loves me, and I will prove it."
Fay went in imagination through a fearful and melodramatic scene, in
which she revealed everything before a public tribunal. She saw her
husband's face darken against her, her lover's lighten as she saved him.
She saw her slender figure standing alone, bearing the whole shock,
serene, unshaken. The vision moved her to tears.
Was it a prophetic vision?
It was quite light now, and she crept to her husband's room. She had not
seen him during the previous day. He had been out the whole of it. She
felt drawn towards him by calamity, by the loneliness of her misery.
The duke was not asleep. He was lying in bed with his hands clasped
behind his head. His sallow face, worn by a sleepless night, and perhaps
by a wounding memory, was turned towards the light, and the new day
dealt harshly with it. There were heavy lines under the eyes. The eyes
looked steadily in front of him, plunged deep in a past which had
something of the irrevocable tenderness of the dawn in it, the holy
reflection of an inalienable love.
He did not stir as his wife came in. His eyes only moved, resting upon
her for a moment, focussing her with difficulty, as if withdrawn from
something at a great distance, and then they turned once more to the
window.
A pale primrose light had risen above the blue tangled mist of ilexes
and olives. The cypresses stood half-veiled in mist, half-sharply clear
against the stainless pallor of the upper sky.
"I am so miserable, Andrea."
He did not speak.
"I cannot sleep."
Still no answer.
"I am convinced that Michael is innocent."
"It goes without saying."
"Then they can't convict him, can they?"
"They will convict him," said the duke, and for a moment he bent his
eyes upon her. "Has he not accused himself?"
"They won't--hang him?"
The duke shrugged his shoulders. He did not think fit to enlighten his
wife's ignorance of the fact that in Italy there is no capital
punishment.
"But if he has not done it, and we know he has not," faltered Fay.
"He is perhaps shielding someone," said the duke, "the real murderer."
"I don't see how that could be."
"He may have his reasons. The real murderer is perhaps a friend--or
a--woman. Your cousin is a romantic. It is always better for a romantic
if he had not been born. But generally a female millstone is in
readiness to tie itself round him, and cast him into the sea. The world
is not fitted to him. It is to egotistic persons like you and me, my
Francesca, to whom the world is most admirably adapted."
"I don't see how the murderer could be a woman. Women don't murder men
on the high road."
"No, not on the high road. You are in the right. How dusty, how dirty is
the high road! But I have known, not once nor twice, women to murder men
very quietly. Oh! so gently and cleanly--to let them die. I am much
older than you, but you will perhaps also live to see a woman do this,
Francesca. And now retire to your room, and let me counsel you to take
some rest. Your beauty needs it."
She burst into tears.
"How little you care!" she said between her sobs, "how heartless you
are! I will never believe they will convict him. He is innocent, and his
innocence will come to light."
"I think the light will not be suffered to fall upon it," said the duke.
Afterwards, years afterwards, Fay remembered that conversation with
wonder that its significance had escaped her. But at the time she could
see nothing, feel nothing except her own anguish.
She left her husband's room. There was no help or sympathy in him. She
went back to her own room and flung herself face downwards on her bed.
Let no one think she did not suffer.
A faint ray of comfort presently came to her at the thought that
Michael's innocence might after all come to light. It might be proved in
spite of himself.
She would pray incessantly that the real murderer might give himself up,
or that suspicion should fall on him, and he should be dragged to
justice. And then, if--_after all_--Michael were convicted and his life
endangered, then she _must_ speak. But--not till then. Not now when all
might yet go well without her confession.... And it was not as if she
were guilty of unfaithfulness. She had not done anything wrong beyond
imprudence. Yes, she had certainly been imprudent; that she saw. But she
had done nothing _wrong_. It could not be right to confess to what in
public opinion amounted to unfaithfulness on her part, and dishonourable
conduct on his, when it was not so. They were both innocent. It would be
telling a lie to let anyone think either of them could be guilty of such
a sordid crime. It looked sordid now. Why should she drag down his name
with hers into the mud--unless it were absolutely necessary.... And she
must remember how distressed Michael would be if she said a word, if she
flung her good name from her, which he had risked all to save. Some
semblance of calm returned to her, as she thus reached the only
conclusion which the bias of her mind would permit. The stream ran
docilely in the little groove cut out for it.
During the days and weeks that followed Fay shut herself up, and prayed
incessantly for Michael.
She prayed all through the interminable interval before the trial.
"If it goes against him, I will speak," she said.
Yet all the time Michael who loved her knew that she would not speak.
Her husband who could have loved her, and who watched her struggle with
compassion, knew that she would not speak. Only Fay who did not know
herself believed that she would speak.
* * * * *
The day came when the duke gravely informed her that Michael was found
guilty of murder.
Fay's prayers it seemed had not availed. She prayed no more. There was
no help in God. Probably there was no God to pray to. Her sister
Magdalen seemed to think there was. But how could she tell? Besides,
Magdalen had such a calm temperament, and nothing had ever happened to
make her unhappy, or to shake her faith. It was different for Magdalen.
Evidently there was no justice anywhere, only a blind chance. "The truth
will out," Fay had said to herself over and over again. She had tried to
have faith. But the truth had not come out. She was being pushed, pushed
over the edge of the precipice. Oh, why had Michael fallen in love with
her when they were boy and girl! She remembered with horror and disgust
those early days, that exquisite dawn of young passion in the time of
primroses. It had brought her to _this_--to this horrible place of tears
and shame and shuddering--to these wretched days and hideous nights. Oh,
why, why, had he loved her! Why had she let herself love him!
Suddenly she said to herself, "They may reprieve him yet. If his
sentence is not commuted to imprisonment I will speak, so help me God I
will."
It could never be known whether she would have kept that oath, for the
next day she heard that Michael had been sentenced to fifteen years'
imprisonment. Why had Andrea been so cruel as to let her imagine for a
whole horrible night that Michael's would be a death sentence, when in
Italy it seemed there was no capital punishment as in England? It was
just like Andrea to torture her needlessly! When the sentence reached
her Fay drew breath. The horrible catastrophe had been averted. To a man
of Michael's temperament the living grave to which he was consigned was
infinitely worse than death. But what was Michael's temperament to Fay?
She shut her eyes to the cell of an Italian prison. Michael would live,
and in time the truth would come to light, and he would be released.
She impressed this conviction with tears on his half-brother Wentworth
Maine, the kind, silent elder brother, Michael's greatest friend, who
had come out to Italy to be near him, and who heard sentence given
against him with a set face, and an unshaken belief in his innocence.
Even to Wentworth Michael had said nothing, could be induced to say no
word. He confessed to the murder. That was all.
Wentworth, who had never seen Fay before, as she had married just before
he came to live at his uncle's place in Hampshire near Fay's home, saw
the marks of grief in her lovely face, and was unconsciously drawn
towards her. He was shy as only men can be; but he almost forgot it in
her sympathetic presence. She came into his isolated, secluded life at
the moment when the barriers of his instinctive timidity and apathy were
broken down by his first real trouble. And he was grateful to her for
having done her best to save Michael.
"I shall never forget that," he said, when he came to bid her good-bye.
"There are very few women who would have had the courage and
unselfishness to act as you did."
Fay winced and paled, and he took his leave, bearing away with him a
grave admiration for this delicate, sensitive creature, so full of
tender compassion for him and Michael.
He made no attempt to see her again when he returned to Italy some
months later to visit Michael in prison. To visit Fay on that occasion
would have taken him somewhat out of his way, and Wentworth never went
out of his way, not out of principle, but because such a course never
occurred to him. He would have liked to see her, in order to tell her
about Michael's condition, and also to deliver in person a message which
Michael had sent to Fay by him. But when he realised that a detour would
be necessary in order to accomplish this, he wrote to Fay to tell her
with deep regret that it was impossible for him to see her, gave her
Michael's message, and returned to England by the way he came.
Nevertheless, he often thought of her, for she was inextricably
associated with the unspeakable trouble of his life, his brother's
living death.
When all was over, and the last sod had--so to speak--been cast upon
that living grave, Fay tried to take up her life again. But she could
not. She had lost heart. She dared not be alone. She shunned society. At
her earnest request her sister Magdalen came out to her for a time, from
the home in England, into which she was wedged so tightly. But even
Magdalen's calm presence brought no calm with it, and the deepening
friendship between her sister and her husband only irritated Fay.
Everything irritated Fay. She was ill at ease, restless, feebly
sarcastic, impatient.
There is a peace which passes understanding, and there is an unpeace
which passes understanding also. Fay did not know, would not know, why
she was so troubled, so weary of life, so destitute of comfort.
Had she met the great opportunity of her life, the turning point, and
missed it? I do not think so. It was not for her.
* * * * *
A year later the duke died.
He made a dignified exit. An attack of vertigo to which he was liable
came on when he was on horseback. He was thrown and dragged, and only
survived a few days as by a miracle. His wife, who had seen little of
him during the last year, saw still less of him during the days of his
short illness. But when the end was close at hand he sent for her, and
asked her to remain in a distant recess of his room during the painful
hours.
"It will be a happier memory for you," he said gently to her between the
paroxysms of suffering, "to think that you were there."
And so propped high in a great carved bedstead in the octagonal room
where the Colle Altos were born, and where, when they could choose, they
died, the duke lay awaiting the end.
He had received extreme unction. The chanting choir had gone. The priest
had closed his pale fingers upon the crucifix, when he desired to be
left alone with his wife.
She drew near timidly and stood beside his bed.
He bent his tranquil, kindly eyes upon her.
"Good-bye, my Francesca," he said. "May God and his angels protect you,
and give you peace."
A belated compunction seized her.
"I wish I had been a better wife to you, Andrea," she said brokenly,
laying her hand on his.
He made the ghost of a courteous, deprecating gesture, and raised her
hand to his lips. The effort exhausted him. He closed his eyes and his
hand fell out of hers.
Through the open window came a sudden waft of hot carnations, a long
drawn breath of the rapturous Italian spring.
It reached the duke. He stirred slightly, and opened his eyes once more.
Once more they fell on Fay, and it seemed to her as if with the last
touch of his cold lips upon her hand their relation of husband and wife
had ceased. Even at that moment she realised with a sinking sense of
impotence how slight her hold on him from first to last had been.
Clearly he had already forgotten it, passed beyond it, would never
remember it again.
"It is spring," he said, looking full at her with tender fixity, and for
a moment she thought his mind was wandering. "Spring once more. The sun
shines. He does not see them, the spring and the sunshine. Since a year
he does not see them. Francesca, how much longer will you keep your
cousin Michael in prison?"
And thereupon the duke closed his eyes on this world, and went upon his
way.