Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?--D. G. ROSSETTI.
Fay did not sleep that night.
For a long time past, she seemed to have been gradually, inevitably
approaching, dragging reluctant feet towards something horrible,
unendurable. She could not look this veiled horror in the face. She
never attempted to define it to herself. Her one object was to get away
from it.
It had not sprung into life full grown. It had gradually taken form
after Michael's imprisonment. At first it had been only an uneasy ghost
that could be laid, a spectre across her path that could be avoided; but
since she had come home it had slowly attained gigantic and terrifying
proportions. It loomed before her now as a vague but insistent menace,
from which she could no longer turn away.
A great change was coming over Fay, but she tacitly resisted it. She did
not understand it, nor realise that the menace came from within her
gates, was of the nature of an insurrection in the citadel of self. We
do not always recognise the voice of the rebel soul when first it begins
to speak hoarsely, unintelligibly, urgently from the dark cell to which
we have relegated it.
Some of us are so constituted that we can look back at our past and see
it as a gradation of steps, a sort of sequence, and can thus gain a
kind of inkling of the nature of the next step against which we are even
now striking our feet.
But poor Fay saw her life only as shattered, meaningless fragments,
confused, mutilated masses without coherence. The masses and the gaps
between them were of the same substance in her eyes. She wandered into
her past as a child might wander among the rubbish heaps of its old home
in ruins. She was vaguely conscious that there had been a design once in
those unsightly mounds, that she had once lived in them. On that remnant
of crazy wall clung a strip of wall-paper which she recognised as the
paper in her own nursery; here a vestige of a staircase that had led to
her mother's room. And as a child will gather up a little frockful of
sticks and fallen remnants, and then drop them when they prove heavy, so
Fay picked up out of her past tiny disjointed odds and ends of ideas and
disquieting recollections, only to cast them aside again as burdensome
and useless.
The point to which she wandered back most frequently--to stare blankly
at it without comprehension--was her husband's appeal to her on his
deathbed. To-night she had gone back to it again as to a tottering wall.
She had worn a little pathway over heaps of miserable conjectures and
twisted memories towards that particular place.
She saw again the duke's dying face, and the tender fixity of his eyes.
She could almost hear his difficult waning voice saying:
"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?"
_Since a year he does not see them._
It was two years now.
The shock to Fay at the moment those words were spoken had been that her
husband had known all the time. That revelation blotted out all other
thoughts for the time being. It even blotted out all considerations of
her own conduct towards Michael, which it might conceivably have
rendered acute. It made her mind incapable of receiving the impression
that the duke had perhaps hoped his deliberate last words might make on
it; that surely she would not, after his death, still keep Michael in
his cell. Throughout the early weeks of her widowhood Fay remained as
one stunned. Even Magdalen, who hurried out to her, supposed at first
that she was stunned by grief.
"Then Andrea knew all the time." That was the constant refrain of her
bewildered, half-paralysed mind.
Gradually in the quiet monotonous life at Priesthope the question made
itself felt. "_How did he know?_"
That question was never answered by Fay, deeply though she pondered over
it. It remained a mystery to her all of her life. She recalled little
scraps of his conversation, tiny incidents which might have shown her
that he knew. But she had noticed nothing at the time. Her cheek burned
when she recalled his tranquil, sarcastic voice.
"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."
When first she remembered those words of her dead husband, a horrible
revulsion of feeling against him seized her. She had been vaguely
miserable and remorseful at his death until those words, so tranquilly
spoken in a primrose dawn, came back to her.
Then she was suddenly glad he was dead, gone for ever. She almost hated
him once more. It was dreadful to live with people whom she did not
understand, who knew things they kept secret, whose minds and thoughts
and motives were incomprehensible to her, who believed horrible untrue
things of her. It had been a fixed idea with Fay during her husband's
lifetime that he believed horrible untrue things about her. But what
they were she would have found it difficult to say.
Fay's was not a suspicious nature in its normal state, but most persons
of feeble judgment become suspicious when life becomes difficult. They
cannot judge, and consequently cannot trust. Fay had never learnt even
so much of her husband as that she might have trusted him entirely. Now
that he was gone without betraying her, the knowledge that he had known
her secret and had guarded it faithfully did not make her feel, with a
flood of humble contrition, how deeply she had misjudged him, how loyal
he had been from first to last; it only aroused in her a sense of fear
and anger. How secretive Andrea had been, how underhand! Perhaps part of
the doom of a petty, self-centred nature is that it does not know when
it has been generously and humanely dealt with.
When Fay had somewhat recovered from the shock of her husband's dying
speech she had turned with all her might to Magdalen, had cast herself
upon her, clung to her in a sort of desperation. Magdalen at any rate
believed in her.
For many months after she came to Priesthope, her mind remained in a
kind of stupor, and it seemed at first as if she were regaining a sort
of calm, caught as it were from Magdalen's presence.
But gradually miserable brooding memories returned, and it seemed at
last as if something in Magdalen's gentle serenity irritated instead of
soothing Fay as heretofore. Was Magdalen a sort of unconscious ally of
that fainting soul within Fay's fortress? Were chance words of
Magdalen's beginning to make the rebel stir in his cell? At any rate
something stirred. Something was making trouble. Fay began to shrink
from Magdalen, involuntarily at first, then purposely for long moody
intervals. Then she would be sarcastic and bitter with her, jibe at the
housekeeping, and criticise the household arrangements. A day later she
would be humbly and hysterically affectionate once more, asking to be
forgiven for her waywardness. She could not live without the comfort of
Magdalen's tenderness. And at times she could not live with it. Magdalen
preserved an unmoved front. She ignored her sister's petulance and
spasmodic fault-finding. She knew they were symptoms of some secret ill,
but what that ill was she did not know. She kept the way open for Fay's
sudden remorseful return to affectionate relations, and waited.
Those who, like Magdalen, do not put any value on themselves, are slow
to take offence. It was not that she did not perceive a slight, or a
rebuff, or a sneer at her expense, but she never, so to speak, picked up
the offence flung at her. She let it lie, by the same instinct that led
her to step aside in a narrow path rather than that her skirt should
touch a dead mole. No one could know Magdalen long without seeing that
she lived by a kind of spiritual instinct, as real to her as the natural
instincts of animals.
Fay became more and more haggard and irritable as the months at
Priesthope drew into a year. A new element of misery was added to her
life by the sight of Wentworth, and his visits were becoming frequent.
His mere presence made acute once more that other memory, partially
blurred, persistently pushed aside--the memory of Michael in prison. The
figure of the duke had temporarily displaced that other figure in its
cell.
But now the remembrance of Michael, continually stirred up by poor
Wentworth, with his set, bereaved face, was never suffered to sleep.
With every week of her life it seemed to Fay some new pain came.
Magdalen could not comfort her. Magdalen, who was so fond of Michael.
_If Magdalen knew!_
_Magdalen must never, never know._ She could not live without Magdalen.
Magdalen was not like Andrea in that. She at any rate was concealing
nothing, could know nothing. Now that Andrea was dead, only one living
person beside herself _knew_--Michael. Fay was unconsciously growing to
hate the thought of that one other person, to turn with horror from the
remembrance of Michael: his sufferings, his patient life in death
filled her with nausea, disgust. Her vehement selfish passion for him
had been smothered by the hideous debris which had been cast upon it.
She had never loved him, as the duke well knew, and now the shivering
remembrance of him, constantly renewed by Wentworth, had become like a
poignard in a wound that would not heal. Wentworth had to-day yet again
unconsciously turned the dagger in the wound, and her whole being
sickened and shuddered. Oh! if she could only tear out that sharp-bladed
remembrance and cast it from her, then in time the aching wound in her
life might heal, and she might become happy and well and at peace once
more;--at peace like Magdalen. An envious anger flared up in her mind
against Magdalen's calm and happy face.
Oh, if poor Michael could only die! He wanted to die. If only he could
die and release her. _Release her from what?_
From her duty to speak and set him free? Those were the words which she
never permitted the rebel voice within to say. Still, they were there,
silenced for the time, but always waiting to be said. Their gagged
whisper reached her in spite of herself.
Oh! if only Michael were dead and out of his suffering, then she would
never be tortured by them any more. Then, too, her husband's words would
lose their poisoned point, and she could thrust them forth from her mind
for ever.
"Francesca, how much longer will you keep your cousin Michael in
prison?"
Oh! Cruel, cruel Andrea, vindictive to the very gates of death.
Down the empty, whispering gallery of ghostly fears in which her life
crouched, Michael's voice spoke to her also. She could hear his grave,
low tones. "Think of me as in fairy-land."
That tender, compassionate message had a barbed point which pierced
deeper even than the duke's words.
Her lover and her husband seemed to have conspired together to revenge
themselves upon her.
Fay leaned her pretty head against the window-sill and sobbed
convulsively.
Poor little soul in prison, weeping behind the bars of her cell, that
only her own hands could open!
Were not Fay and Michael both prisoners, fast bound: she in misery, he
only in iron.
The door opened gently and Magdalen came in in a long white wrapper,
with a candle in her hand.
She put down the candle and came towards Fay. She did not speak. Her
face quivered a little. She bent over the huddled figure in the window
seat, and with a great tenderness drew it into her arms. For a moment
Fay yielded to the comfort of the close encircling arms, and leaned her
head against Magdalen's breast.
Then she wrenched herself free, and pushed her sister violently from
her.
"Why do you come creeping in like that?" she said fiercely. "You only
come to spy upon me."
Magdalen did not speak. She had withdrawn a pace, and stood looking at
her sister, her face as white as her night-gown.
Fay turned her tear-drenched face to the window and looked fixedly out.
There was a faint movement in the room. When she looked round Magdalen
was gone.
Fay, worn with two years of partially eluded suffering, restless with
pain, often sick at heart, was at last nearing the last ditch:--but she
had not reached it yet.
Many more useless tears, many more nights of anguish, many more days of
sullen despair still lay between her and that last refuge.