Le plus grand element des mauvaises actions secretes, des lachetes
inconnues, est peut-etre un honheur incomplet.
--BALZAC.
When Fay, in her panic-stricken widowhood, had fled back to her old home
in Hampshire, she found all very much as she had left it, except that
her father's hair was damply dyed, her sister Magdalen's frankly grey,
and the pigtail of Bessie, the youngest daughter, was now an imposing
bronze coil in the nape of her neck.
But if little else was radically changed in the old home except the hair
of the family, nevertheless, the whole place had somehow declined and
shrunk in Fay's eyes during the three years of her marriage. The dear
old gabled Tudor house, with its twisted chimneys, looked much the same
from the outside, but within, in spite of its wealth of old pictures and
cabinets and china, it had contracted the dim, melancholy aspect which
is the result of prolonged scarcity of money. Nothing had been spent on
the place for years. Magdalen seemed to have faded together with the
curtains, and the darned carpets, and the bleached chintzes.
Colonel Bellairs alone, a handsome man of sixty, had remained remarkably
young for his age. The balance, however, was made even by the fact that
those who lived with him grew old before their time. It had been so
with his wife. It was obviously so with his eldest daughter. Many men as
superficially affectionate as Colonel Bellairs, and at heart as callous,
as exacting and as inconsiderate, have made endurable husbands. But
Colonel Bellairs was not only irresolute and vacillating and incapable
of even the most necessary decisions, but he was an inveterate enemy of
all decision on the part of others, inimical to all suggested
arrangements or plans for household convenience. The words "spring
cleaning" could never be mentioned in his presence. The thing itself
could only be achieved by stealth. A month at the seaside for the sake
of the children was a subject that could not be approached. All small
feminine social arrangements, dependent for their accomplishment on the
use of the horses, were mown down like grass. Colonel Bellairs hated
what he called "living by clockwork."
You may read, if you care to do so, in the faces of many gentle-tempered
and apparently prosperous married women, an enormous fatigue. Wicked,
blood-curdling husbands do not bring this look into women's faces. It is
men like Colonel Bellairs who hold the recipe for calling it into
existence.
Mrs. Bellairs, a beautiful woman, with high spirits, but not
high-spirited, became more and more silent and apathetic year by year,
yielded more and more and more, yielded at last without expostulation
equally at every point, when she should have yielded and when she should
have stood firm, yielded at last even where her children's health and
well-being were concerned.
Apathy and health are seldom housemates for long together. Mrs. Bellairs
gradually declined from her chair to her sofa. She made no effort to
live after her youngest daughter was born. She could have done so if she
had wished it, but she seemed to have no wish on the subject, or on any
other subject. There is an Arabian proverb which seems to embody in it
all the melancholy of the desert, and Mrs. Bellairs exemplified it. "It
is better to sit than to stand. It is better to lie than to sit. It is
better to sleep than to lie. It is better to die than to sleep."
Fay had been glad enough, as we have seen, to escape from home by
marriage. No such way of escape had apparently presented itself for the
elder sister. As Magdalen and Fay sat together on the terrace in front
of the house, the contrast between the sisters was more marked than the
ten years' difference of age seemed to warrant.
Magdalen was a tall, thin woman of thirty-five, who looked older than
her age. She had evidently been extremely pretty once. Perhaps she might
even have been young once. But it must have been a long time ago. She
was a faded, distinguished-looking person, with a slight stoop, and a
worn, delicately-featured face, and humorous, tranquil eyes. Her thick
hair was grey. She looked as if she had borne for many years the brunt
of continued ill health, or the ill health of others, as if she had been
obliged to lift heavy weights too young. Perhaps she had. Everything
about her personality seemed fragile except her peace of mind. You could
not look at Magdalen without seeing that she was a happy creature.
But very few did look at her when Fay was beside her. Fay's beauty had
increased in some ways and diminished in others during the year of her
widowhood. She had become slightly thinner and paler, but not to the
extent when beauty suffers wrong. A very young face can bear a worn
look, and even have its charm enhanced thereby. The mark of suffering on
Fay's childlike face and in her deep violet eyes had brought with it an
expression which might easily be mistaken for spirituality, especially
by those--and they are very many--to whom a pallid and attenuated aspect
are the outward signs of spirituality.
That she was miserable was obvious. _But why was she so restless?_
Magdalen had often silently asked herself that question during the past
year. Even Bessie, the youngest sister, had noticed Fay's continual
restlessness and had commented on it, had advised her sister to embark
on a course of reading, and to endeavour to interest herself in work for
others.
She had also, with the untempered candour of eighteen, suggested to Fay
that she should cease to make a slave of Magdalen. It is hardly
necessary to add that Fay and Bessie did not materially increase the sum
of each other's happiness.
As Magdalen and Fay were sitting together in the sun the door into the
garden opened, and Bessie stalked slowly towards them across the grass,
in a short cycling skirt.
"It surely is not necessary to be quite so badly dressed as Bessie,"
said Fay with instant irritation. "If she must wear one of those hideous
short skirts, it might at any rate be well cut. I have told her so often
enough."
Since Bessie had been guilty of the enormity of suggesting a course of
reading, Fay had made many sarcastic comments on Bessie's direful
clothes.
"I must advise her to take dress more seriously," said Magdalen
absently. She was depressed by a faint misgiving about Bessie. Bessie
was to have lunched to-day with congenial archaeological friends,
intelligent owners of interesting fossils. Nevertheless, when
Wentworth's cob Conrad was seen courteously allowing himself to be
conducted to the stable she instantly decided to lunch at home, and to
visit her friends when they were not expecting her, in the afternoon.
_It could make no difference to them_, she had told Magdalen, who shook
her head over that well-known phrase, which Colonel Bellairs had long
since established as "a household word." Bessie was not to be moved by
Magdalen's disapproval, however. She retired to her chamber, donned a
certain enamel brooch which she only wore on Sundays, and appeared at
luncheon.
It was not a particularly cheerful meal. Wentworth was silent and
depressed. Colonel Bellairs did not for an instant cease to speak about
the right of way during the whole of luncheon, even when his back was
turned while he was bending over a ham on the sideboard. And the moment
luncheon was over he had marched Wentworth off to the scene of the
dispute.
Magdalen was vaguely uneasy at the tiny incident of Bessie's change of
plan, and was glad it had escaped Fay's notice. Most things about Bessie
did escape Fay's notice except her clothes. Bessie was not at eighteen
an ingratiating person. No one had ever called her the sunbeam of the
home. She had preserved throughout her solemn childhood and flinty
youth a sort of resentful protest against the attitude of her family at
her advent, namely, that she was not wanted. Her mother had died at her
birth, and for several years afterwards her father had studiously
ignored her presence in the house, not without a sense of melancholy
satisfaction at this proof of his devotion to her mother.
"No, no. It may be unreasonable. It may be foolish," he was wont to say
to friends who had not accused him of unreasonableness, "but don't ask
me to be fond of that child. I can't look at her without remembering
what her birth cost me."
Bessie was a fine, strong young woman, with a perfectly impassive
handsome face--no Bellairs could achieve plainness--and the manner of
one who moves among fellow creatures who do not come up to the standard
of conduct which she has selected as the lowest permissible to herself
and others. Bessie had not so far evinced a preference for anyone in her
own family circle, or outside it. Her affections consisted so far of a
distinct dislike of and contempt for her father. She had accorded to Fay
a solemn compassion when first the latter returned to Priesthope.
Indeed, the estrangement between the sisters, brought about by the
suggested course of reading, had been the unfortunate result of a
cogitating pity on Bessie's part for the lamentable want of regulation
of Fay's mind.
Bessie liked Magdalen, though she disapproved of her manner of life as
weak and illogical. You could not love Bessie any more than you could
love an ironclad. She bore the same resemblance to a woman that an iron
building does to a house. She was not in reality harder than tin or
granite or asphalt, or her father; but it would not be an over-statement
to suggest that she lacked softness.
She advanced with precision to the bench on which her sisters were
sitting.
"I am now going to cycle to the Carters'," she said to Magdalen. "I
forgot to mention till this moment that I met Aunt Mary this morning at
the Wind Farm, and that she gave me a letter for father, and said that
she and Aunt Aggie were lunching with the Copes."
"Poor Copes!" ejaculated Fay.
"And would both come on here afterwards to an early tea," continued
Bessie, taking no notice of the interruption. "Aunt Mary desired that
you would not have hot scones for tea, as Aunt Aggie is always depressed
after them. She said there was no objection to them cold, and buttered,
but not hot."
"I shall have tea in my own room then," once more broke in Fay. "I can't
stand Aunt Mary. She is always preaching at me."
"It is a pity that Fay is disinclined to share the undoubted burden of
entertaining our relatives," said Bessie, addressing herself exclusively
to Magdalen, "as I do not feel able to defer my visit to the Carters any
longer."
Magdalen struggled hard against a smile, and kept it under.
"Possibly the aunts are coming over to consult father about a private
matter," she said. "The letter beforehand to prepare his mind looks like
it. So it would be best if you and Fay were not there. The aunts'
affairs generally require the deepest secrecy."
"And then father lets it all out at dinner before the servants," said
Bessie over her shoulder as she departed.
When she was out of hearing Fay said with exasperation, "You are not
wise to give way so much to Bessie, Magdalen. She is selfishness itself.
Why did not you insist on her staying and helping with the aunts? She
never considers you."
Magdalen was silent.
"I hate sitting here with the house staring at me," said Fay. "I can't
think why you are so fond of this bench. Let us go into the beech
avenue."
For a long time past Magdalen had noticed that Fay always wanted to be
somewhere she was not.
They went in silence through the little wood that bounded the gardens,
and passed into the great, bare, grey aisle of the beech avenue.
In a past generation a wide drive had led through this avenue to the
house. It had been the south approach to Priesthope. But in these
impoverished days, the road, with its sweep of turf on either side, had
been neglected, and was now little more than a mossy cart-rut, with a
fallen tree across it.
The two sisters sat down on a crooked arm of the fallen tree.
It was a soft, tranquil afternoon, flooded with meek February sunshine.
Far away between the green-grey trunks of the trees, the sea glinted
like a silver ribbon. Everything was very still, with the stillness set
deep in peace of one who loves and awaits in awe love's next word. The
earth lay in the sunshine, and listened for the whisper of spring. Faint
birdnotes threaded the high windless spaces near the tree-tops.
"Look!" said Magdalen, "the first crocus."
What is there, what can there be in the first yellow crocus peering
against the brown earth, that can reach with instant healing, like a
child's "soft absolving touch," the inflamed, aching, unrest of the
spirit? It does not seek to comfort us. Then how does comfort reach
through with the crocus; as if the whole under-world were peace and joy,
and were breaking through the thin sod to enfold us?
Fay looked at the flame-pure, upturned face of the little forerunner,
absently at first, and then with growing absorption, until two large
tears slowly welled up into her eyes and blotted it out. She shivered,
and crept a little closer to her sister. She felt alienated from she
knew not what, dreadfully cold and alone in the sunshine, with her cheek
against her sister's shoulder. Though she did not realise it, something
long frost-bound in her mind was yielding, shifting, breaking up. The
first miserable shudder of the thaw was upon her.
She glanced up at Magdalen, who was looking into the heart of the
crocus, and a sudden anger seized her at the still rapture of her
sister's face. The contrast between her own gnawing misery and
Magdalen's serenity cut her like a knife. What right had Magdalen to be
so happy? Why should she have been exempted from all trouble? What had
she done that anguish could never reach her? Fay's love for Magdalen,
and at this time Magdalen was the only person for whom she had any
affection--had all the violent recoils, the mutinous anger, the sudden
desire to wound on the one side, all the tender patience and grieved
understanding on the other which are the outcome of a real attachment
between a bond woman and a free one.
The one craved, the other relinquished; the one was consumed with
unrest, the other had reached some inner stronghold of peace. The one
was imprisoned in self, the other was freed, released. The one made
demands, the other was willing to serve. It seems as if only the free
can serve.
"I am very miserable," said Fay suddenly. She was pushed once more by
the same blind impulse that had taken her to her husband's room the
night after Michael's arrest.
She used almost the same words. And as the duke had made no answer then,
so Magdalen made none now. She had not lived in the same house with Fay
for nearly a year for nothing.
Magdalen's silence acted as a goad.
"You think, and father thinks," continued Fay, her voice shaking, "you
are all blinder one than the other, that it's Andrea I'm grieving for.
It's not."
"I know that," said Magdalen. "You never cared much about him. I have
often wondered what it could be that was distressing you so deeply."
Fay winced. Magdalen had noticed something, after all.
"I have sometimes feared,"--continued Magdalen with the deliberation of
one who has long since made up her mind not to speak until the opening
comes, and not to be silent when it does come--"I have sometimes feared
that your heart was locked up in an Italian prison."
"My heart!" said Fay, and her visible astonishment at a not very
astonishing inference was not lost on Magdalen. "My heart!" she laughed
bitterly. "Do you really suppose after all I've suffered, all I've gone
through, that I'm so silly as to be in love with anyone in prison or out
of it? I suppose you mean poor dear Michael. I hate men, and their
selfish, stupid, blundering ways."
Fay had often alluded to the larger sex _en bloc_ as blunderers since
the night she had told Michael to stand behind the screen.
"There are two blunderers coming towards us now," said Magdalen, as the
distant figures of Colonel Bellairs and Wentworth appeared in the beech
avenue.
Both women experienced a distinct sense of relief.
Colonel Bellairs had many qualities as a parent which made him a kind of
forcing-house for the development of virtue in those of his own family.
He was as guano spread over the roots of the patience of others; as a
pruning hook to their selfishness. But he had one great compensating
quality as a father. He never for one moment thought that any man,
however young, visited the house except for the refreshment and solace
of his own society. He never encouraged anyone to come with a view to
becoming acquainted with his daughters. His own problematic re-marriage,
often discussed in all its pros and cons with Magdalen, was the only
possible alliance that ever occupied his thoughts. In this respect he
was an ideal parent in his daughters' eyes, an inhumanly selfish one
according to his two sisters, Lady Blore and Miss Bellairs, at this
moment stepping out towards Priesthope from the north lodge.
[Illustration: "'YOU ARE ALL BLINDER ONE THAN THE OTHER, THAT IT'S
ANDREA I'M GRIEVING FOR'"]
Wentworth had almost given up hope of a word with Fay until he saw her
sitting with Magdalen in the avenue. The world would be a much harder
place than it already is for women to live in if men concealed their
feelings. A reverent and assiduous study of the nobler sex leads the
student to believe that they imagine they conceal them. But it is women
who early in life are taught to acquire this art, at any rate when they
are bored. Half the happy married women of our acquaintance would be the
widows of determined suicides if women allowed it to appear when they
were bored as quickly as men do.
Wentworth had no idea that he was not an impassable barrier of reserve.
He often said of himself: "I am a very reserved man, I know. It is a
fault of character. I regret it, but I can't help it. I have not the art
of chatting about my deepest feelings at five o'clock tea as a man must
do who lays himself out to be popular with women. What I feel it is my
nature to conceal."
His reserve on this occasion was concentrated in his face, which
remained unmoved. But the lofty impassiveness on which he prided himself
did not reach down to his legs. Those members, which had been dragging
themselves in a sort of feeble semi-paralysis in the wake of the
ruthless Colonel Bellairs, now straightened themselves, and gave signs
of returning energy. Magdalen from a distance noted the change.
Wentworth for the first time was interested in what Colonel Bellairs
was saying. His own voice, which had become almost extinct, revived.
There was also a hint of spring in the air. Not being a person of much
self-knowledge, he mentioned that fact to Colonel Bellairs.
Colonel Bellairs looked at him with the suspicion which appears to be
the one light shadow that lies across the sunny life of the bore.
"I said so half an hour ago," he remarked severely, "when we were
inspecting my new manure tanks, and you said you did not notice it."
"You were right all the same," said the younger man.
What an interest would be added to life if it were possible to ascertain
how many thousands of times people like Colonel Bellairs are limply
assured that they are in the right! The mistake of statistics is that
they are always compiled on such dull subjects. Who cares to know how
many infants are born, and how many deaf mutes exist? But we should
devour statistics, we should read nothing else if only they dealt with
matters of real interest: if they recorded how often Mr. Simpson, the
decadent poet, had said he was "a child of nature," how often, if ever,
the Duchess of Inveraven and Mr. Brown, the junior curate at
Salvage-on-Sea, had owned they had been in the wrong; whether it was
true that an Archbishop had ever really said "I am sorry" without an
"if" after it, and, if so, on what occasion; and whether any novelist
exists who has not affirmed at least five hundred times that criticism
is a lost art.
"Is the right-of-way dispute progressing?" said Magdalen to her father
as the two men came up and stopped in front of them.
Colonel Bellairs implied that it would shortly be arranged, as his
intellect was being applied to the subject.
Wentworth said emphatically, for about the thirtieth time, that the
right of a footpath, or church path across the domain was well
established and could not be set aside; but that whether it was also a
bridle path was the moot point; and whether Colonel Bellairs was
justified in his recent erection of a five-barred stile.
(I may as well add here, for fear the subject should escape my mind
later on, that at the time of these pages going to press the dispute,
often on the verge of a settlement, had reached a further and acuter
stage, being complicated by Colonel Bellairs' sudden denial even of a
church path, to the legal existence of which he had previously agreed in
writing.)
Wentworth trod upon the crocus and said he must be going home.
"We will walk back to the house with you," said Magdalen, and she led
the way with her father.
"I wish you would tell your Aunt Mary," he said to Magdalen as they
walked on, "that I will not have her servants wandering in Lindley wood.
Jones tells me they were there again last Sunday with a dog, that
accursed little yapping wool mat of Aunt Aggie's! I simply won't stand
it. I would rather you told her. It would come better from you."
"I will tell her."
Colonel Bellairs was beginning late in life to lean on Magdalen. She
was fond of him in a way, and never yielded to him. _On ne peut
s'appuyer que contre ce qui resiste._ Though Colonel Bellairs did not
know it, he was always wanting to _s'appuyer_. He had found in his
daughter something solid to lean against, which he had never found in
his wife, who had not resisted him.
"Oh! and look here, Magdalen. I had a letter from your Aunt Mary this
morning, a long rigmarole. She says she is following her letter, and is
coming to have a serious talk with me. Hang it all! Can't a man have a
moment's peace?"
Colonel Bellairs tore out of an inner pocket a bulky letter in a bold,
upright hand, marked _Private_, at the top.
"I wish to the devil she would mind her own business, and let me manage
mine," he said pettishly, thrusting the letter at Magdalen.
"I don't like to read it, as it is marked 'Private.'"
"Read it. Read it," said Colonel Bellairs irritably.
Magdalen read the voluminous epistle tranquilly from beginning to end as
she and her father walked slowly back to the house.
It was an able production, built up on a solid foundation. It dealt with
Colonel Bellairs' "obvious duty" with regard to the man to whom Magdalen
had been momentarily engaged fifteen years before, and who, owing to two
deaths in the Boer war, had unexpectedly succeeded to an earldom.
"Well! well!" said Colonel Bellairs at intervals, more interested than
he wished to appear. "What do you think of it? We noticed in the papers
a week ago that he had succeeded his cousin."
"Wait a minute, father. I have only come to my lacerated affections."
"How slow you are! Your Aunt Mary does pound away. She has a touch as
light as a coal-sack. The wonder to me is how she ever captured poor old
Blore."
"Perhaps she did it by letter. She writes uncommonly well. 'Magdalen's
joyless homelife of incessant, unselfish service.' That is very well
put, isn't it? And so is this: 'It is your duty now to inform him that
you withdraw all opposition to the renewal of the engagement, and to
invite him to Priesthope.' Really, Aunt Mary sticks at nothing. I warn
you solemnly, father, this is only the thin end of the wedge. Unless you
stand firm now, she'll want to choose our new stair carpet for us next.
Really, I think at her age she might take a little holiday, and leave
the Almighty in charge."
"Is that all you've got to say?" said Colonel Bellairs, somewhat
surprised. "Do you wish me to ask him to the house or do you not? I
don't object to him. I never did, except as a son-in-law, when he had no
visible means of subsistence."
"And no intention of making any."
"Just so. But I always rather liked him, and, and--time slips by"--(it
had indeed), "and I can't make much provision for you, in fact, almost
none, and I may marry again; in fact, it is more than likely I shall
shortly marry again." Colonel Bellairs was for a moment plunged in
introspection. "So perhaps, on the whole, it would be more generous on
my part to ignore the past and ask him to the house."
"After forbidding him to come to it?"
Colonel Bellairs began to lose his temper.
"I shall ask whom I think fit if I choose to do so. I am master in this
house. If he does not care to come, he can stay away."
"Ask him, in that case."
"You agree that on the whole that would be best."
"Not at all. I think it extremely undignified on your part, and that it
is a pity that you should be so swayed by Aunt Mary as to go by her
judgment instead of your own. You never thought of asking him till she
tried to coerce you into it."
"I am not going to be coerced by any woman, much less by that man in
petticoats," said Colonel Bellairs wrathfully. "But she will be here
directly. H'm! What on earth am I to say to her if I _don't_ ask him?...
She will be here directly."
They had reached Colonel Bellairs' study by now, and he sat down heavily
in his old leather arm-chair. Magdalen was standing on the hearthrug
near him with the letter in her hand. She held it over the fire, he
nodded, and she dropped it in.
"Perhaps, Magdalen," said her father with dignity, "it would be just as
well if I kept clear of the whole affair. Women manage these little
things best among themselves. I would rather not be dragged in. Anything
on that subject, any discussion, or interchange of opinion would come
best from _you_, eh?"
"I think so, father."
Colonel Bellairs watched his sister's letter burn, with the fixed eye of
one about to drop off into an habitual nap.
The asphyxiating atmosphere of a man's room, where a window is never
opened except to let in a dog, or to shout at a gardener, and where
years of stale tobacco brood in every nook and curtain, enveloped its
occupant with a delicious sense of snug repose, and exerted its usual
soporific charm.
"Took Mary a long time to write," he said, with a sleepy chuckle, as the
last vestige disappeared of the laboriously constructed missive which
Lady Blore had sat up half the previous night, with gold-rimmed
pince-nez on Roman nose to copy out by her bedroom candle, and had sent
to pave the way before her strong destructive feet.
The footman came in.
"Lady Blore and Miss Bellairs are in the drawing-room."
"Just pull the blinds half-way down before you go," said Colonel
Bellairs to Magdalen, "and remember other people have got letters to
write as well as her, and I'm not to be disturbed on any account."