While Claude Rutherford's peril was a subject of troubled thought
for his mother and her friend and father confessor, Cyprian Hammond,
no friendly voice had breathed words of warning into Vera's ear; nor
had she any consciousness that warning was needed, or that danger
threatened.
Claude was a part of her life. From the day when she had met him
for the first time after her marriage, at a luncheon party at Lady
Okehampton's, and they two had sat talking in the embrasure of a
window, recalling delicious memories of her childhood's one happy
holiday--the ponies, the dogs, the gardens, the woods, the beach and
sea--all the joy his kindness had created for her in that verdant
paradise, upon that summer sea--from that happy hour when they had sat,
talking, talking, talking, while Lady Okehampton waited with growing
displeasure for an unpunctual dowager duchess, she had felt that this
kinsman of hers belonged to her, that to him she might look as the
guide, philosopher, and friend, indispensable to the happiness of every
woman whose husband is occupied with serious interests and has a mind
above trivialities.
There was nothing too trivial for Claude to understand and discuss with
interest. The merest nothing would command his serious thought, if it
were something that interested Vera; nor was any flight of her fancy
too wild or too high for him. From the colour of a frock or the shape
of a hat, to the most oracular utterance of Zarathustra, she could
command his attention and counsel. He came and went in her house like
the idle wind; and his entrances and exits were no more considered than
the wind. When her particular friends asked her whether she had seen
Mr. Rutherford lately, she would shrug her shoulders and smile.
"My cousin Claude? Yes, he was here yesterday. I see him almost every
day. If he has nothing better to do he comes in after his morning ride,
and sometimes stays for luncheon."
People were not unkind; but as years went on the situation was taken
for granted, and there were quiet smiles, gently significant, when
Madame Provana and her cousin were talked about. Their relations were
accepted as one of those open secrets, not to know which is not to be
in Society.
Lady Susan did her best to establish the scandal by telling people that
Vera and Claude had been brought up together, or almost, and that their
attachment was the most innocent and prettiest thing imaginable--"like
Paul and Virginia"--a classic which Lady Susan had never read. The
"almost" was necessary, as most people knew that Vera had been brought
up with Lady Felicia, in furnished lodgings, and had hardly had a
second frock to her back, to say nothing of being underfed, which early
privation was the cause of the pale slenderness that some people called
"ethereal."
Lady Susan's friends, furthermore, being well up in Burke, were
satirical about the link of kindred between third or fifth cousins.
Yet on the whole there was indulgence; and when Vera went on a
week-end visit to the seats of the mighty she generally found Mr.
Rutherford one of the party; which was hardly a cause for wonder, since
he was of the stuff of which week-end parties are made.
Vera was more than innocent. She was unconscious of anything particular
in her friendship for this friend of her childhood. What could be more
natural than that she should love to talk of that one blissful interval
in her dull existence--the solitary oasis in the desert of genteel
poverty? Only then had she known the beauty of woods and gardens; only
then had she known what summer could mean to the emancipated child: the
rapture of riding over dancing waves in a cockle-shell of a boat, with
the warm wind blowing her hair and the sea-gulls flashing their white
wings overhead, the adorable birds whose name was legion. To talk of
those young days, and to feel again as she had felt then, was a delight
which only Claude could give her; and the more hollow and unsatisfying
the things that money could buy became to her, the more she loved to
sit with her locked hands upon her knee and talk of that unforgotten
holiday.
"Do you remember that evening I asked you to row me out to the setting
sun, right into the great golden ball, and you said you would, and you
went too far, and we were out till after dark, and everybody was first
frightened and then angry?"
All their talk began with "Do you remember?" His memory was better than
hers, and he recalled adventures and moments that she had forgotten.
One day he brought her a little sketch on thick cardboard, roughly
painted in oils, one of his early bits of impressionism before he had
studied art, a little girl in a short white frock, with hair flying
about her head, cheeks like roses, and the blue of the sea in her eyes.
"What a funny child. You didn't mean that for me?"
"For no one else. I have dozens of such daubs. You remember how I
used to sit on a rock and paint while you were looking for shells or
worrying the jelly-fish."
"Poor things. I wanted to see them move. I hope they have no feelings.
Yes, you used to sit and paint; and I thought you disagreeable because
you would not play with me."
Beyond these pictures of the past they had inexhaustible subjects
for talk. There was a whole world of literature, the literature of
decadence, in which Vera had to be initiated, and Claude was a past
master in that particular phase of intellectual life. Baudelaire,
Verlaine, Nietzsche, the literature of pessimism, and the literature of
despair, that rebellion against law, human and divine, which Shelley
began, and which had been a dominant note among young poets since the
"Revolt of Islam" filled romantic minds with wonder and a vague delight.
Imperceptibly, naturally, and in no manner wrongfully, as it seemed
to Vera, Claude Rutherford's society had become essential to her
happiness. She accepted the fact as placidly, and with as complete
confidence in him and in herself, as if such a friendship between an
idle young man and an imaginative young woman had never been known
to end in shame and sorrow. She had lived in the world half a dozen
years, and had known of many social tragedies; but as these had not
touched any friend she valued, and as she was not a scandal-lover,
those dark stories of husbands betrayed and nurseries abandoned had
never deeply impressed her, and had been speedily forgotten. Nobody,
not even Lady Susie, who was a _mauvaise langue_, had ever hinted at
impropriety in her association with her cousin. Signor Provana saw him
come and go, and asked no questions. That stern and lofty nature was
of the kind that is not easily jealous. Had there been no Iago, Cassio
might have come and gone freely in the noble Moor's household, and no
shadow of fear would have darkened that great love. Vera's husband was
a disappointed man. His dream of a young and loving wife who would
make up to him for all that he had missed in boyhood and youth had
melted into thin air. He was sensitive and proud, and the memory of
his unloved childhood and of his first wife's indifference was never
absent from his mind when he considered his relations with his second
wife. He thought of his age, he saw his stern, rough features in the
glass, and a faint touch of coldness, the fretful weariness of an
over-indulged girl, was taken for aversion, and all his pride and all
his force of character rose up against the creature he loved too well
to judge wisely. It was he who built the wall that parted them; it was
his gloomy distrust of himself rather than of Vera that made the gulf
between them.
Let her be happy in her own way. He had sworn to make her happy: and
if it was her nature to delight in trivial things, if the aimless
existence of a rich man's sultana was her idea of bliss, she should
reign sole mistress of a harem which he would never enter while he
believed himself unwelcome there. Vera accepted this gradual drifting
apart as something inevitable, for which she was not to blame. The
strong man's impassioned love, which had appealed to the romantic side
of her character, had languished and died with the passing years.
She brooded on the change with sorrowful wonder before she became
accustomed to the idea that the lover who had taken her to his heart
with a cry of ineffable rapture had ceased to exist in the grave man
of business, whose preoccupied manner and absent gaze, as of one
looking at things far away, chilled her when she sat opposite him on
those rare occasions when they dined _tête-à-tête_--occasions when the
dinner-table was only a glittering spot in the dark spaciousness of the
room, a world of shadows, where the footmen moved like ghosts in the
area between the table and the far-off sideboard. They had been married
six years; but Vera thought sadly that her husband looked twenty years
older than the companion by whose side she had climbed the mule-paths,
through the lemon orchards and olive woods of San Marco, the man whose
conversation had always interested her, her first friend, her first
lover.
She accepted the change as inevitable, having been taught by the wives
of her acquaintance to believe that marriage was the death of love, and
as gradually as she learned to dispense with her husband's society,
so guiltlessly, because unconsciously, she came to depend upon Claude
Rutherford for sympathy and companionship.
She did not know that she loved him, though she knew that the day when
they did not meet seemed a long-drawn-out weariness, and that when the
evening shadows came, they brought a sense of desolation and a strange
lassitude, as of one weighed down by intolerable burdens.
All occupations and all amusements were burdens if Claude was not
sharing them--Society the heaviest of all. Far easier to endure the
dreary day in the solitude of her den, with the faces of her beloved
dead looking at her, than among empty-headed people, who could only
talk of what other empty-headed people were doing, or were going to
do, with that light spice of malice which makes other people's mistakes
and misfortunes so piquant and interesting.
Claude Rutherford had become a part of her life, and life was
meaningless without him: a fatal stage in the downhill path, but it
was a long time before her awakened conscience gave the first note of
warning.
Then--waking in the first faint flush of a summer dawn, after a night
of troubled sleep and feverish dreams--a night succeeding one of those
dismal days that she had been obliged to endure without the sight
of the familiar face, the glad, gay call of the familiar voice, the
sound of the light footstep on the stairs--she told herself for the
first time, with unutterable horror, that this man was dearer to her
than he ought to be--dearer than her husband, dearer than her peace
of mind, dearer than all this world held for her and all the next
world promised. Oh, the wickedness of it! the shame, the horror! To be
false to him--the man who had put his strong arms round her and lifted
her out of the dismal swamp of shabby gentility and taken her to his
generous heart; the man who trusted her with unquestioning faith, who
had never by word or look betrayed the faintest doubt of her truth and
purity.
No lovers' word had been spoken, no lovers' lips had met; yet as she
rose from that uneasy bed, and paced the spacious room in fever and
agitation, a ghostly figure, with bare feet and streaming hair, and
long white draperies, she felt as if she were steeped to the lips in
dishonour--a monster of ingratitude and treachery.
And then she began the struggle that most women make--even the weaker
souls--when they feel the downward path sloping under their feet, and
know that the pit of shame lies at the bottom of it, though they cannot
see it yet--the impotent struggle in which all the odds are against
them, their environment, every circumstance of their lives, their
friends, the nearest and dearest even, to whom they cannot cry aloud
and say: "Don't you see that I am fighting the tempter, don't you see
that I am half way down the hill and am trying to make a stand, that
I am over the edge of the cliff, and am hanging to the bushes with
bleeding, lacerated hands in the desperate endeavour to keep myself
from falling? Have you neither eyes nor understanding that you don't
try to help me?" Rarely is any friendly hand stretched out to help the
woman who sees her danger and tries to escape her doom. Acquaintances
look on and smile. These open secrets are accepted as a part of the
scheme of the universe, a particular phase of existence that doesn't
matter as long as the chief actors are happy. The wife, her familiar
friend, her complaisant or indifferent husband, are smiled upon by a
society of men and women who know their world and take it for what it
is worth. Only when the actors begin to play their parts badly, and
when the open secret becomes an open scandal, does Society cease to be
kind.
Vera did not think of Society in that tragic hour of an awakened
conscience. That which would have been the first thought with most
women had no place in her mind. It was of her sin that she thought--the
sin of inconstancy, of ingratitude, of faithlessness. Had she crossed
the border line, and qualified herself for the Divorce Court, she could
not have thought of herself with deeper contrition.
To love this other man better than she loved her husband; to long for
his coming; to be happy when he was with her, and miserable when he was
away; there was the sin.
But no word of love had been spoken. There was time for repentance.
He did not know that she loved him. Although, looking back, and
recalling words and tones of his, she could not doubt that he loved
her, she could hope that no word of hers had revealed the passion whose
development had been gradual and imperceptible as the growth of the
leaf buds in early spring, which no eye marks till they flash into life
in the first warmth of April.
Her friendship with this man, who was of her kindred, the companion
of the only happy days of her childhood, had seemed as natural as it
would have been to attach herself to a brother from whom she had long
been separated. She had welcomed him with a childish eagerness, she had
trusted him with a childish belief in the perfection of the creature
who is kind. She had admired him--comparing him with all the other
young men she knew, and finding him infinitely above them. His very
weakness had appealed to her. All that was wanting in his character
made him more likable, since compassion and regret mingled with her
liking. To be so clever, so gifted by nature, and to have done nothing
with nature's gifts--to be doomed to go down to death leaving his
name written in water--to die, having finished nothing but his _beaux
jours_: people who liked him best talked of him as a young man with a
_beau passé_. Shoulders were shrugged, and smiles were sad, when his
painter friends discussed him.
"We thought he was going to do great things in art, and he has done
nothing."
Soldiers who remembered him before he left the Army lamented the loss
of a man who was made for a soldier.
There had been trouble--trouble about a woman that had made him
exchange to a line regiment--and then the war being over, and the
chance of active service remote, disgust had come upon him, and he had
done with soldiering.
Vera had seen the shoulders shrugged, and had heard the deprecating
criticism of this kinsman of hers, and had been all the kinder to him
because Fate had been cruel.
She had tried to fire him with new hope; she had been ambitious for
him; had steeped herself in art books, and spent her mornings in
picture galleries, in order that she might be able to talk to him. She
had implored him to go back to his work, to paint better pictures than
he had painted when critics prophesied a future from his work.
"I am too old," he said.
"Nonsense. You have wasted a few years, but you will have to work
harder and buy back your lost time. Quentin Matsys did not begin to
paint till he was older than you."
"There were giants in those days. Compared with such men I am an
invertebrate pigmy."
"Oh, if you loved art you would not be content to live without the joy
of it."
"Yes, that's what people who look at pictures think--the joy of
painting a thing like that. The man who paints knows when the disgust
comes in and the joy goes out. He knows the sense of failure, the
disappointment, the longing to fling his half-finished picture on the
floor and perform the devil's dance upon it, as Müller used to do."
And then, one day, as they were going round a picture gallery together,
he said:
"Well, Vera, I have been meditating on your lecture; and I am going to
paint another picture--the last, perhaps."
"No, it won't be the last."
"I am going to paint your portrait. After all that sermonising you
can't refuse to sit to me."
"I won't refuse--unless Mario should object."
"How should he object? He will be in New York, or Madrid, or
Constantinople, most likely, while I am painting you. I am nothing if
not an impressionist, so it mustn't be a long business."
"I shall love sitting to you. To see you at work----"
"Yes, to see me earning my bread in the sweat of my brow, like the
day-labourer, will be a novelty. I shouldn't want to be paid for the
picture, but I dare say Provana would insist upon my taking a fee,
and as he counts in thousands, it would be a handsome one. No, Vera,
don't blush! I won't take money for my daub. You shall give it to the
Canine Defence League. It shall be a labour of love; a concession to a
sermonising cousin. I shall paint your portrait, just to convince you
that I can't paint, and that the life I am wasting is worth nothing."
Thus in light talk and laughter the plan was made that brought them
into a closer intimacy than they had known before, and although Claude
Rutherford was an impressionist, that portrait was three months upon
the easel which he had rigged up in Vera's morning-room.
"I want to paint you in the room where you live; not with a marble
pillar and a crimson curtain for a background."
The sittings went on at irregular intervals, in a style that was at
once sauntering and spasmodic, all through that season. Signor Provana
looked in now and then, stood watching the painter at work for five or
ten minutes, criticised, and made a sudden exit, driven away by Lady
Susan's shrill chatter.
But Lady Susan was not always there; and there were more tranquil
hours, when Vera sat in her half-reclining attitude on a low sofa
spread with a tiger skin, fanning herself with a great fan of peacock's
feathers, and gazing at the pictures on the wall with dreaming eyes:
hours in which the painter and his subject talked by fits and
starts--with silent pauses.
After all the pains that had been taken, the picture was a failure.
The painter hated it, Provana frankly disapproved; and in the haggard,
large-eyed siren smiling over the edge of the fan, Vera could not
recognise the face she saw in the glass.
"I have been much too long over the thing," Claude told Provana, with
slow and languid speech, half indifference, half disgust; "and it is a
dismal failure. But I shall do better next time, if Vera will let me
make a rapid sketch of her, when the daffodils are in bloom, and we
shall be week-ending at Marlow Chase. I could make a picture of her
on the hill above the house, in the yellow afternoon light, and among
the yellow flowers. I am an open-air painter if I am anything; but I
had almost forgotten how to set a palette. I shall work in a friend's
studio in the autumn, and I may do better next year."
Vera urged him to persevere in this good intention, and not to mind his
failure.
"I mind nothing," he said. "I have had three happy months. I mind
nothing while you are kind, and forgive me for having put you to a lot
of trouble, with this atrocious daub for the outcome of it all."
Privileged people only were allowed to see the daub; but those,
although supposed to be few, in the end proved to be many. Critics were
among them, and Mr. Rutherford was too shrewd not to discover that
every connoisseur had a little hole to pick in the portrait, and that
when all the little holes were put together there was nothing left.
And this picture, so poor a thing as it was, made the beginning of that
open secret, which everybody knew long before the awakening of Vera's
conscience, and while Mario Provana saw nothing to suspect or to fear
in his wife's intimacy with her cousin.
But now, with the awakening of conscience, began the fight against
Fate, the fight of the weak against the strong, the woman against
the man, innocent youth against an experienced lover. She was
single-hearted and pure in intention, counting happiness as thistledown
against gold, when weighed against her honour as a wife; but she
entered the lists without knowing the strength of her opponent, the
passive force of a weak man's selfishness. The main purpose of her
life was henceforward to release herself from the web that had been
woven so easily, so imperceptibly; first a careless association between
two people whose likings and ideas were in harmony; then friendship,
confidence, sympathy; and then unavowed love; love that made the days
desolate when the lovers were not together. He had been too frequent
and too dear a companion. He had become the master of her life, and it
was for her to release herself from that unholy bondage. She had to
learn to live without him.
It needed more than common cleverness and tact to bring about a change
in their manner of life, without making a direct appeal to Rutherford's
honour and telling him that their friendship had become a danger. To do
this would be to tell him that she loved him, to confess her weakness,
before he had passed the border line that divides the friend from the
lover. No, she could make no appeal to the man whose smouldering fires
she feared to kindle into flame. She knew that he loved her, and that
he had made her love him. She had to escape from the web that he had
woven round her; and she had, if possible, to set herself free without
his knowing the strength of her purpose, or the desperate nature of the
struggle.
All the chances were against her. She could not forbid him the house
without an open scandal. As he had come and gone in the last four
years, he must still be free to come and go. She could only avoid those
familiar hours--hours that had been so dear--by living in a perpetual
restlessness, always finding some engagement away from home.
It was weary work, but she persevered, and enlisted all the Disbrowes
in her cause, unconscious that they were being made use of. She
accepted every invitation, lent herself to everybody's fads,
philanthropic or otherwise; listened to the same fiddlers and singers
day after day, in drawing-rooms and among people that she knew by
heart; or stood with aching head under a ten-guinea hat, selling
programmes at amateur theatricals.
She contracted a closer alliance with Lady Susan Amphlett, and planned
excursions: a day at Windsor, a day at Dorking, at Guildford, to
rummage in furniture shops, at Greenwich to see the Nelson relics, to
Richmond and Hampton, even to Kew Gardens. Lady Susan was almost worn
out by these simple pleasures; but as she professed, and sincerely, an
absolute _culte_ for Vera Provana, she held out bravely.
These excursions were fairly successful, and as Vera took care that no
one should know where she and her friend were going--not even Susan
herself till they were on the road--it was not possible for Claude to
follow her. It was otherwise in the houses of her friends, where she
was always meeting him, and where it was essential that she should not
seem to avoid him, least of all to let him see that she was so doing.
She greeted him always with the old friendliness--a little more
cousinly than it had been of late; and she showed a matronly interest
in his health and occupations, as if she had been an aunt rather than a
cousin.
"It is quite delightful to meet you here this afternoon," he told her,
in a ducal house where guinea tickets for a charity concert seemed
cheap to the outside public. "You are to be met anywhere and everywhere
except in your own house. I have called so often that I have taken a
disgust for your knockers. When I am dead I believe those lions' heads
will be found engraven on my heart, like Queen Mary's Calais."
It was only natural that, with the awakening of conscience, there
should come the thought of those two first years of her married life,
when her husband's love had made an atmosphere of happiness around her,
when she had cared for no other companion, needed no other friend;
those blessed years before Claude Rutherford's pale, clear-cut face,
and low, seductive voice had become a part of her life, essential to
her peace. The change of feeling, the growing regard for this man,
had come about so gradually, with a growth so slow and imperceptible,
that she tried in vain to analyse her feelings in those four years
of careless intimacy, and to trace the process by which an innocent
friendship had changed to a guilty love. When had the fatal change
begun? She could not tell. It was only when she felt the misery of
one long day of parting that she knew her sin. The husband had become
a stranger, the friend had become the other half of her soul. He had
called her by that sweet name sometimes, but with so playful a tone
that the impassioned phrase had not scared her. It was one of many
lightly spoken phrases that she had heard as carelessly as they were
uttered.
And now, looking back at the last two years, she told herself that it
was her husband's fault that she had leant on Claude for sympathy,
her husband's fault that they had been too much together. For some
reason that she had never fathomed, Mario Provana had held himself
aloof from the old domestic intimacy. It was not only that his business
engagements necessitated his absence from home several times in the
course of the year, and on occasion for a considerable period. He had
business in Russia, and in Austria, and he had crossed the Atlantic
twice in the last year, the affairs of his New York house calling for
special attention in a disturbed state of American finance. These
frequent absences alone were sufficient to weaken the marriage bond;
but in the last year he had given his wife very little of his society
when they were under the same roof.
"You have hosts of friends," he said one day when she reproached him
for keeping aloof, "people who share your tastes and can be amused
by the things that amuse you. I bring back a tired brain after my
continental journeys, and am still more tired after New York. I should
make a wretched companion for a young wife, a beautiful butterfly who
was born to shine among all the other butterflies."
"I am nearly as tired as you are after your business journeys, Mario,"
she said. "I shall be very glad when we can go back to Rome."
"But you will have other butterflies there, and a good many of the same
that flutter about you here," he answered.
"We will shut our doors upon them and live quietly."
"Like Darby and Joan--old Darby and young Joan. No, Vera, we won't try
that. You weren't made for the part."
She had been too proud to say more. If he was tired of her--if he had
ceased to care for her, she would not ask him why.
But now, in her desperate need, sick to death of those aimless
excursions and unamusing amusements with Lady Susan, and of the dire
necessity of keeping away from her own house, to flutter from party to
party, almost sure of meeting Claude wherever she went, she turned in
her extremity to her natural protector, and tried to find shelter in
the love that ought to be her strong rock.
Her husband had been on the Continent, moving from city to city, for
the greater part of the June month in which she had been making her
poor little fight against Fate--trying to cure herself of Claude
Rutherford, as if he had been a bad habit, like drink or drugs. And
then one morning, when she was beginning the day dejectedly, tired of
yesterday, hopeless of to-morrow, a telegram from Paris told her to
expect her husband at seven o'clock that evening.
Her heart beat gladly, as at the coming of a deliverer.
She was not afraid of meeting him. She longed for his coming, as the
one friend who might save her from an influence that she feared.
The face she saw in the glass while her maid was dressing her hair
almost startled her. There were dark marks under the eyes, and the
cheeks were hollow and deadly pale. The black gauze dinner-gown she had
chosen would accentuate her pallor; but it was nearly seven o'clock,
and there was no time for any change in her toilet. She paced the great
empty rooms in sun and shadow, listening to every sound in the street,
and wondering if her husband would see the sickening change that
sickening thoughts had made in her face, and question her too closely.
She heard the hall door open, and then the familiar footstep, rapid,
strong, and yet light, very different from the footfall of obese middle
age; the step of a man whose active life and energetic temperament had
kept him young.
She met him on the threshold of the drawing-room.
"I am so glad you have come home," she said, holding up her face for
his kiss.
He kissed her, but without enthusiasm.
"I am glad you are glad," he said, "but can that mean that you have
missed me? From your letters I thought you and Lady Susan were having
rather a gay time."
"I was rushing about with her and going to parties, partly because I
missed you."
"Partly, and the other part of it was because you like parties and are
dull at home, I suppose, unless you have your house full."
"Oh, I am sick of it all, Mario," she said, with a sort of passionate
energy that made him believe her, "and I would live quite a different
life if you were not away so often, and if I were not thrown too much
on my own resources."
"My dear Vera, this is a new development," he said gravely, sitting
down beside her, and looking at her with eyes that troubled her, as if
they could see too much of the mind behind her face. "You are looking
thin and white. Has anything happened while I have been away, anything
to make you unhappy?"
"No!" she exclaimed with tremendous emphasis, for she felt as if he
were going to wrest her secret from her. "What could happen? But I
suppose there must come a time in every woman's life when she has had
enough of what the world calls pleasure, when the charm goes out of
amusements that repeat themselves year after year; and when one begins
to understand the emptiness of a life, occupied only with futilities,
when one begins to tire of running after every new thing, actors,
dancers, singers, and all the rest of them. I have had enough of that
life, Mario; and I want you to help me to do something better with the
liberty and the wealth you have given me."
"Do you want a mission?" he asked with a faint smile. "That is what
women seem to want nowadays."
"No, Mario. I want to be happy with you. Your business engagements take
you so much away from home, that our lives must be sometimes divided;
but not always--we need not be always living a divided life, as we have
been in the last three years."
A crimson flush swept across her face as she spoke, remembering that
these were the years in which Claude Rutherford's influence had grown
from a careless comradeship to an absorbing intimacy.
Her husband looked at her in silence for a few moments; and his grave
smile had now a touch of irony.
"Has it dawned upon you at last?" he asked. "Have you discovered that
we have been living apart; that we have been man and wife only in name?"
"It was not my fault, Mario. It was you who kept aloof."
"Not till I saw repulsion--not till I saw aversion."
"No, no--never, never, never! I have never forgotten your
goodness--never forgotten all I owe you."
They had been sitting side by side on the spacious Louis Quatorze sofa,
his hand upon her shoulder; but at her last words he started to his
feet with a cry of pain.
"Yes, that is it--you recognise an obligation. I have given you a fine
house, fine clothes, fine friends--and you think you ought to repay me
for them by pretending to love me. Vera, that is all over. There must
be no more pretending. I can bear a good deal, but I could not bear
that. I told you something of my past life before we were married; but
I doubt if I told you all its bitterness--all the blind egotism of my
marriage, the cruel awakening from a dream of mutual love--to discover
that my wife had married me because I could give her the things she
wanted, and that love was out of the question. I compared myself with
other men, and saw the difference; and as I had missed the love of a
mother, so I had to do without the love of a wife. I was not made to
win a woman's love--no, not even a mother's. This was why my affection
for my daughter was something more than the common love of fathers. She
was the first who loved me--and she will be the last."
"Mario, you are too cruel! Have I not loved you?"
"Yes--perhaps for a little while. You gave me a year of infinite
happiness--our honeymoon year. That ought to be enough. I have no right
to ask for more--but let there be no talk of gratitude--if I cannot
have love I will have nothing."
"You have been so cold, so silent and reserved, so changed. I thought
you were tired of me."
"Tired of you? Poor child! How should you know the measureless love in
the heart of a man of my life-history? When I took you in my arms in
the evening sunshine, I gave you all that was best and strongest in my
nature--boundless love and boundless trust. All my life-history went
for nothing in that hour. I did not ask myself if I was the kind of man
to win the heart of a girl. I did not think of my five-and-forty years
or my forbidding face. I gave myself up to that delicious dream. I had
found the girl who could love me, the divine girl, youth and innocence
incarnate. Think what it was after a year of happiness to be awakened
by a look, and to know that I had again been fooled, and that if in the
first surprise of my passionate love you had almost loved me, that love
was dead."
"No, no," she sobbed; and then she hid her streaming eyes upon his
breast, and wound her arms about his neck, clinging to the husband in
whom she found her only shelter.
Was it some curious instinct of the flesh, or some power of telepathy,
that told him not to take these tears and wild embrace for tokens of a
wife's love?
"My dearest girl," he said with infinite gentleness, as he loosened
the clinging arms and lifted the hidden face, "if this distress means
sorrow for having unwittingly deceived me, for having taken a man's
heart and not been able to give him love for love, there need be
no more tears. The fault was mine, the mistake was mine. You must
not suffer for it. To me you will always be unspeakably sweet and
dear--whether I think of you as a wife, or as the girl my daughter
loved--and whom I learned to love in those sad days when the shadow of
death went with us in the spring sunshine. Yes, Vera, you will always
be dear--my dearest on this earth. But there must be no pretending,
nothing false. Think of me as your friend and protector, the one friend
whom you can always trust, your rock of defence against all the dangers
and delusions of a wicked world. Trust me, dearest, and never keep a
secret from me. Be true to yourself, keep your honour stainless, your
purity of mind unclouded by evil associations. Let no breath of calumny
soil your name. Rise superior to the ruck of your friends, and have no
dealings with the lost women whose guilt Society chooses to ignore. I
ask no more than this, my beloved girl, in return for measureless love
and implicit faith."
He was holding both her hands, looking at her with searching eyes;
those clear grey eyes under a brow of power.
"Can you promise as much as this, Vera?
"Yes."
"With heart and mind?"
"With heart and mind."
"And you will never take the liberty I give you for a letter of
license?"
"No, no, no. But I don't ask for liberty. I want to belong to you, to
be sheltered by you."
"You shall have the shelter, if you need it; but be true to yourself,
and you will need no defender. A woman's safest armour is her own
purity. And again, my love," with a return of the slightly ironical
smile, "never was a woman better guarded than you are while you are
fringed round by Disbrowes, protected at every point by your mother's
clan, people at once well born and well bred, with no taint of
Bohemianism, unless indeed it may lurk in your _poco curante_ cousin,
the young painter who made such a lamentable failure of your portrait."
She felt as if every vestige of colour was fading out of her face, and
that even her lips must be deadly white. They were so parched that when
she tried to shape some trivial reply the power of speech seemed gone.
She felt the dry lips moving; but no sound came.
This was the end of her appeal to the husband whose love might have
saved her. Their relations were changed from that hour. He was not
again the lover-husband of their honeymoon years; but he was no longer
cold and reserved, he no longer held her at a distance. He was kind and
sympathetic.
He interested himself in her occupations and amusements, the books she
read and the people she saw. He was with her at the opera, where Claude
Rutherford sometimes came to them and sat through an act or two in the
darkness at the back of the box. He was infinitely kind and tender; but
it was the tenderness of a father, or a benevolent uncle, rather than
of a husband. He held rigidly to that which he had told her. There was
to be no make-believe in their relations.
If she was not happy, she was at peace for some time after her
husband's home-coming--a period in which they were more together than
they had ever been since those first years of their married life. She
tried to be happy, tried to forget the time in which Claude Rutherford
had been her daily companion, the time when she planned no pleasure
that he was not to share, and had no opinions about people or places,
or books or art, that she did not take from him: loving the things he
loved, hating the things he hated; as if they had been two bodies moved
by one mind. She tried not to feel an aching void for want of him; she
tried not to think him cruel for coming to her house so seldom, and
tried to be sorry that they met so often in the houses of her friends.
The time came when the awakened conscience was lulled to sleep, and
when her husband's society began to jar upon her strained nerves. She
had invoked him as a defence against the enemy; and now she longed for
the enemy, and had ceased to be grateful to the defender.
The rampart of defence was soon to fall. A financial crisis was
threatened, and Signor Provana was wanted at his office in New York.
He told his wife that he might be able to come back to London in a
fortnight, allowing ten days for the double passage, and four for his
business; but if things were troublesome in America he might be a good
deal longer.
"I shall try to be home in time to take you to Marienbad," he told her.
"But if I am not here, Lady Okehampton will take you, and you can get
Lady Susan to go with you and keep you in good spirits. I had a talk
with your aunt last night, and she promised to take you under her wing."
"I don't want to be under anybody's wing; and Aunt Mildred will bore me
to death if I see much of her at Marienbad."
"Oh, you will have your favourite Susie for amusement, and your aunt to
see that she doesn't lead you into mischief. Lady Susan is a shade too
adventurous for my taste."
This idea of Marienbad was a new thing. A certain nervous irritability
had been growing upon Vera of late, and her husband had been puzzled
and uneasy, and had called in a nerve specialist recommended by Lady
Okehampton, one of those new lights whom everybody believe in for a
few seasons. After a quiet talk with Vera, that grave authority had
suggested a rest cure, the living death of six weeks in a nursing home;
and on this being vehemently protested against by the patient, had
offered Marienbad as an alternative.
Provana had been startled by this sudden change in his wife's temper,
from extreme gentleness and an evident desire to please him, to a kind
of febrile impatience and irritability; and remembering her curious
agitation on the evening of his home-coming, her pallid cheeks and
passionate tears, he had an uneasy feeling that these strange moods had
a common source, and that there was something mysterious and unhappy
that it was his business to discover before he left her.
He came to her room early on the day of his departure, so early that
she had only just left her bedroom, and was still wearing the loose
white muslin gown in which she had breakfasted.
She was sitting on her low sofa in a listless attitude, looking at the
faces on the wall--Browning, Shelley, Byron--the faces of the inspired
dead who were more alive than the uninspired living; but at her
husband's entrance she started to her feet and went to meet him.
"You are not going yet," she exclaimed. "I thought the boat-train did
not leave till the afternoon."
"It does not; but I must give the interval to business. I have come to
bid you good-bye."
"I am very sorry you are obliged to go," she said.
"For God's sake do not lie to me. For pity's sake let there be no
pretending."
He took both her hands and drew her to him, looking at her with an
imploring earnestness.
"I have trusted you as men seldom trust their wives," he said. "I
thought I had done you a great wrong when I took you in the first bloom
of your young beauty and made you my own; cutting you off for ever
from the love of a young lover, and all the passion and romance of
youth. Considering this, I tried to make amends by giving you perfect
freedom, freedom to live your own life among your own friends, freedom
for everything that could make a woman happy, except that romantic love
which you renounced when you accepted me as your husband. I believed
in you, Vera, I believed in your truth and purity as I believe in God.
I could never have reconciled myself to the life we have led in this
house if it were not for my invincible faith in your truth. But within
this month that faith has been shaken. Your eyes have lost the old
look--the lovely look through which truth shone like a light. There is
something unhappy, something mysterious. There is a secret--and I must
know that secret before I leave you."
Her face changed to a look of stone as he watched her.
It was no time for tears. It was time for a superhuman effort at
repression, to hold every feeling in check, to make her nerves iron.
There was defiance in her tone when she spoke, after a silence that
seemed long.
"There is no secret."
"Then why are you unhappy?"
"I am not unhappy. I have a fit of low spirits now and then, a feeling
of physical depression, for which there is no reason; or perhaps my
idle, useless life, and the luxury in which I live, may be the reason."
"It is something more than low spirits. You are nervous and irritable
and you have a frightened look sometimes, a look that frightens me.
Oh, Vera, for God's sake be frank with me. Trust me half as much as
I have trusted you. Trust me as a daughter might trust her father,
knowing his measureless love, and knowing that with that love there
would be measureless pity. Trust me, my beloved girl, throw your burden
upon me, and you shall find the strength of a man's love, and the
self-abnegation that goes with it."
"I have no secret, no mystery; I mean to be worthy of your trust. I
mean to be true to myself. If you doubt me let me go to America with
you. Keep me with you."
His face lighted as she spoke, and then he looked thoughtfully at the
fragile form, the delicate features, the ethereal beauty that seemed to
have so frail a hold on life.
"No, you are not the stuff for sea voyages, and the storm and stress
of New York. If we went there together I should have to leave you too
much alone among strangers. I shall have an anxious time there; but it
shall not be a long time. If possible, I shall be here to take you to
Marienbad, and in the meantime you must live quietly, and do what your
doctor tells you. He is to see you next week, remember."
He held her to his heart, with stronger feeling than he had shown for
a long time, and gave her his good-bye kiss. She flung herself on her
knees as the door closed behind him.
"God help me to be true to him in heart and mind."
That was the prayer she breathed mutely, while her tears fell thick and
fast upon her clasped hands.
He was gone, the unloved husband, and she had to face the peril of
the undeclared lover. She felt helpless and forsaken, and she sat
for a long time in listless misery; and then, looking up at the
pictures on the wall, she tried to realise that silent companionship,
the souls of the illustrious dead--tried to believe that she was not
alone in her dejection, that in the silence of her lonely room there
was the sympathy and understanding of souls over whom death has no
more dominion, and whose pity was more profound than any earth-bound
creature could give her.
She thought of Francis Symeon, and of those meetings of which he
had told her. Nothing had come of her interview with him. Claude
Rutherford's light laughter had blown away her belief in the
high-priest of the spiritual world; and she had thought no more of the
creed that had appealed so strongly to her imagination.
Now, when life seemed a barren waste, her thoughts turned to the
philosophic visionary who had so gravely expounded his dream.
Everything in her material world harassed and distressed her, and she
turned to the spiritual life to escape from reality.
She wrote urgently to Mr. Symeon, telling him that she was unhappy, and
asking to be admitted to the society of which he had told her. She had
not to wait long for an answer. Symeon called upon her that afternoon,
and was with her for more than an hour, full of kindness and sympathy;
sympathy that scared her, for it seemed as if those strange eyes must
be reading the depths of her inner consciousness, and all the disgust
of life and vague longing that were interwoven with her thoughts of
Claude Rutherford.
It was to escape those thoughts--to dissever herself from that haunting
image, that she pleaded for admission to the shadow world.
"Bring me in communion with the great minds that are above earthly
passions," would be her prayer, could she have spoken freely; but she
sat in a thoughtful silence, soothed by the spiritualist's exposition
of that dream-world, which was to him more real than the solid earth
upon which he had to live--a reluctant participator in the life of the
vulgar herd.
"The mass of mankind, who have no joys that are not sensual, and
who live only in the present moment, have nothing but ridicule and
disbelief for the faith that makes even this sordid material world
beautiful for us, who see in earthly things the image of things
supernal," he said, with that accent of sincerity, that intense
conviction, which had made scoffers cease from scoffing under the
influence of his personality, however they might ridicule him in his
absence.
Everyone had to admit that, though the creed might be absurd, the man
was wonderful.
There was to be a meeting of "Us" at his chambers on the following
afternoon, and Symeon begged Vera to come.
"You may find only thought and silence," he said, "a company of friends
absorbed in meditation, but without any message from the other world;
or you may hear words that burn, the voices of disembodied genius. In
any case, while you are with us you will be away from the dust and
traffic of the material world."
Yes, she would go, she was only too glad to be allowed to be among his
disciples.
"I want to escape," she told him. "I am tired of my futile life--so
tired."
"I thought you would have joined us long ago," he said, as he took
leave, "but I think I know the influence that held you back."
The hot blood rushed into her face, the red fire of conscious guilt
that always came at the thought of Claude Rutherford. She had never
minimised her sin. It was sin to have made him essential to her
happiness, to have lost interest in all the rest of her life, to have
given him her heart and mind.
"I think the psychological moment has come," continued Symeon's slow,
grave voice, "and that you should now become one of us. You have
drained the cup of this trivial life, and have found its bitterness.
Our religion is our faith in the After-life. We have the faith that
looks through death. The orthodox Christian talks of the life beyond;
and we must give him credit for sometimes thinking of it--but does
he realise it? Is it near him? Does he look through death to the
Spirit-world beyond? Does he realise the After-life as Christ realised
it when He talked with His disciples?"