Everything was dead. That had been Vera's answer when Claude asked
despairingly if love was dead. The words were in her mind now as she
stood alone in the room where her poets, and her actors, and her
philosophers, looked at her from the white walls, and where the sound
of the great hall door closing heavily as her husband shut it behind
him was still in her ears.
Had he gone for ever? Was it indeed the end? Could love that had begun
in ecstasy close in this grey calm? She felt neither sorrow nor anger.
Everything was dead. She stood among the ruins of her life, feeling
as a child might feel when the house she has built of cards shatters
suddenly and falls at her feet. Everything was over. She had no thought
of building another house; no desire to patch up a broken life and
begin again. Perhaps her husband loved her still, and it was the gloom
of this haunted house that had driven him to seek distraction in a
baser love. It was her fault, perhaps, and she ought to be sorry for
him. Poor Claude! She remembered his gaiety. The airy mockery that
had enchanted her, the quick wit that had struck fire and light out
of dull things. She remembered the joyous nature, the light laughter,
the inexhaustible energy which made difficult things--in the way of
sport--seem easy. Yes, they had been happy, utterly happy in the life
of the moment, shutting out every thought that was irksome, every
memory that hurt. And it was all over and dead, and she had nothing
left but the shadows in this room, the dead faces, the words of those
who were not. That scriptural phrase had always moved her. "He was not."
Her afternoons in Mr. Symeon's library had been all she had cared
for in the season that was ending. She had gone wherever her husband
asked her to go, and had given the entertainments he wanted her to
give; but through all that brilliant summer she had gone about like "a
corpse alive." That dreary simile had been in her mind sometimes when
she thought of herself, sitting in her victoria, dressed as only the
well-bred English woman with unlimited money can be dressed, lovely in
her fragile fairness, admired and talked about. She had gone about, and
held her own, in a quiet way, among crowds of clever men and women, and
her life had seemed to her like the end of a long dream. Her only vital
interest had been in the voices she heard in Francis Symeon's shadowy
room. Those voices were of living men and women; but the words were the
words of the dead.
She was not utterly unhappy. The past was past, and she had left off
grieving over it, for now she had a transcendent hope in the near
future--the hope of death. She would soon have passed the river that
they had passed, Giulia and her father. The gate through which they had
gone to a higher stage in the upward path of life would open for her;
and no matter by what slow ascent, no matter with what feeble steps,
she would climb the mountain up which they had gone, those emancipated
spirits.
She had known for a long time that she was marked for death. She had no
specific ailment, but in this last season she had felt her vanishing
life, felt the painless ebb of vitality, and had measured, by a flight
of stairs, by a pathway in the Park, where she walked sometimes in the
early morning, the waning strength of limbs and heart. The dreadful
sleeplessness of the first year of her widowhood had returned; and her
nights were almost entirely spent in thought and reading, her brain
never resting, her heart seldom quiet.
Although she looked forward to death as release, she could not escape
the boredom of medical treatment. Lady Okehampton, whose daughters
were all married, and wanted nothing from parental affection--except
to be allowed to go their own way, and not to be obliged to invite
Mummy to their choicest parties--devoted herself more and more to her
favourite niece, who wasn't actually her niece, but only a first cousin
once removed. Since, in those last days at Disbrowe, she had seen the
mark of death on Vera's pale forehead, Aunt Mildred, who was really
a warm-hearted woman, had interested herself keenly in the vanishing
life, and had made unremitting efforts to combat the enemy.
"She has simply wasted her life since her second marriage," she said.
"She has wasted her life as recklessly as Claude has wasted her money;
but she shan't die without my making an effort to save her, even if I
have to take every specialist in London to Portland Place."
"You'd better take her to the specialists," said his lordship. "It
would save your time and her money."
"As if money mattered!"
"You could telephone for appointments, and do the whole of Grosvenor
Street and Savile Row in a morning, with a good taxi."
"A taxi--when my niece has two superb Daimlers--no. By the by, the last
Claude showed me is an S.C.A.T."
"Poor Provana!" sighed Okehampton. "To think that nothing could induce
him to buy a motor car, although he was a man to whom moments are
money. It was one of his few eccentricities to worship his horses."
"He might have been here now if he had not been quite so fussy about
his horses," sighed her ladyship.
"What do you mean?"
"He might not have used the door between the house and the stables--the
door by which he and his murderer came into the house on that awful
night."
"True," assented her husband, "it was an infernally unlucky door, and I
suppose if poor little Vera dies they'll carry her out that way to be
cremated."
"Okehampton, you are too bad! Whoever said she was to be cremated?"
"Nobody. But it's the modern way, isn't it? And, of course, everything
would be up-to-date."
"How can you be so heartless, and how can you use that odious
expression 'up-to-date'?"
"Well, I hope the poor girl will be warned in time, and live to make
old bones; but she didn't look like it at her last party. You'd better
give her husband a good wigging. It will be more useful than calling in
the specialists."
"I am utterly disgusted with Claude. He is throwing her money out of
windows, and behaving atrociously into the bargain."
"I suppose you mean Mrs. Bellenden. Well, my dear, that was bound to
come. Vera has been too much in the clouds for the last year. From what
Susan Amphlett told me of her way of life in Rome, she was bound to
lose her husband. No man can stomach neglect from a wife; unless all
the other women neglect him. And Claude Rutherford is not a negligible
quantity."
Lady Okehampton had tried her hand upon her young kinsman before this
colloquy with her lord, and had found him hopeless. He turned the point
of her lectures with a jest. He was light as vanity. He protested that
his wife was alone to blame. He adored her, and thought no other woman
upon this planet her equal in charm and beauty; but since she had taken
up with Symeon and his spooks, she had surrounded herself with an
atmosphere of sadness that would send the most devoted husband to the
primrose path, in sheer revolt against the gloom of his home.
"We are poor creatures," he said, "and we have to be amused."
Once only in the course of numerous "wiggings" did Claude show anything
like strong feeling, and then emotion came in a tempest that scared his
mild kinswoman.
She had talked to him about his wife's health.
"Vera is absolutely wasting away," she said. "Something must be done,
or she will not live till the end of the year."
"No, no, no," he cried. "My God, what do you mean? Is that to be the
end? Is death to take her from me and leave me in this black world
alone? You have no right to say such a thing! By what authority? Who
has told you that she is in failing health? I see her every day. She
never complains."
"You must be blind if you don't see the change in her."
"I don't believe there is anything seriously wrong. She is as lovely as
ever. No, I don't believe it. You are cruel to come here and frighten
me. She is all I have in the world, all, all! Do you understand?" His
head drooped suddenly upon the table by which he was sitting, and she
heard his hoarse sobs tearing his throat and chest, and saw his long,
thin fingers writhing among his hair, the boyish auburn hair with a
glint of gold in it that foolish women had praised.
"There is no need for despair, Claude. I only wanted to awaken you to
the seriousness of the case. We shall save her, in spite of herself. I
see you are still fond of her, and yet----"
"And yet I have been a brute, a senseless, idiotic beast. But that's
all over, Lady Okehampton. Love her! I would lie outside her door,
like that dog of hers, all through the long night only to get a smile
and a touch of her hand in the morning. Love her! I loved her for
five patient years, loved her passionately, and kept myself in check,
and behaved like an elder brother. I, the man no woman could trust.
Love her! The picture of her childish prettiness at Disbrowe was in
my memory when I was going to the devil at Simla. You don't know what
men are made of. You only know the model English gentleman, like your
husband."
"Okehampton has never given me any trouble, except in his young days,
when he used to ride dangerous horses. I know I have been exceptionally
fortunate in my husband; and, of course, I know that modern husbands
and wives are utterly unlike us; but I must say that your behaviour at
your wife's last party was inexcusable. The dear Princess was sadly
huffed; and I doubt if Vera will ever get her to her house again."
"I don't think Vera will try."
"But she ought to try. The Princess Hermione has been perfectly sweet
about her."
"Vera doesn't care. That's her worst symptom, that I know of. She has
left off caring about things."
"And that is a very bad symptom," said Lady Okehampton. "When
Chagford's wife showed signs of it, I bundled her off to a nursing
home for six weeks, and she came out of it just in time for Ascot, and
as keen as mustard, as Chagford said in his vulgar way. She had been
dieted, and massaged, and not allowed to see anyone but her nurses; and
she was quite cured of not caring. She romped with her children, and
ate jam pudding like one of them."
"Ah, you see there were children," sighed Claude. "There was something
for her to come back to."
"Vera and you ought to have had a family. It is very disappointing,"
said Aunt Mildred, and the tone implied that when she said
"disappointing" she meant "reprehensible."
"Never mind," she went on presently, in a more hopeful tone, "don't be
down-hearted, Claude. If doctors can cure her, she shall be another
woman before the end of the year."
"You love doctors much better than I do," said Claude, grasping her
hands. "Find the man who can cure her and I will worship him."
* * * * *
After this Vera entered upon a wide acquaintance with the fashionable
specialists: the man who was invincible in treatment of lung trouble;
the only authority upon cardiac disorders; the man who knew more about
the nervous system than any other physician in Europe; the man who
had given his life to the study of the digestive organs; the hypnotic
doctor, and the mesmerist; and finally, as a condescension, the
all-round or common-sense man who might be consulted about anything,
and sometimes, as it were by rule of thumb, succeeded where the
specialists had failed.
These gentlemen came to Portland Place at irregular intervals through
the month of August, Vera resolutely refusing to leave London in that
impossible month, and Lady Okehampton again sacrificing her annual
cure to the care of her niece, as she had done in the year of Mario
Provana's unhappy death.
Lady Okehampton having made this sacrifice, almost the greatest which
a woman of her age and position could make, naturally allowed herself
some slight compensation in fussiness. She talked about her niece's
health to boring point with her familiar friends, with the result of
booking the name and address of some infallible specialist, hitherto
unknown to her; and this accounted for the spasmodic appearance of
a new consultant once or twice a week, in Vera's morning-room, all
through that impossible month, in which the doctors themselves were
panting for escape from London, to shoot grouse in Scotland, or do
their own cures in Bohemia, after a season of hard dining. Vera was
curiously submissive to these frequent ordeals. She answered any
questions that the great man asked her; but she never volunteered
information about herself, and she always made light of her ailments.
The admission of a little worrying cough that was at its worst at
night, a slight palpitation of the heart after going upstairs, was all
that could be obtained from her by the most subtle questionings; but
lungs and heart told their own story, without words.
She smiled when the nerve specialist asked her if she slept well, and
again when he suggested certain harmless opiates which would ensure
beneficent slumber. She had taken them all. She had exhausted Susan
Amphlett's pharmacopoeia, which contained all these specifics, and
others not so harmless.
When one physician after another--for on this they were all
agreed--told her that she ought not to be in London in this sultry,
depressing weather, while each advised his pet health resort, she
smiled sweetly, and said she meant to remain in London till November,
when she would go back to Rome.
"I am fond of this house," she said, "and the London air suits me."
"London air is very good air," answered Dr. Selwyn Tower, who
understood her better than the various new lights, "but not in August
and September. If you are to be in Rome in November, why not spend the
interval in Italy, at Varese, for instance, a charming spot, with every
advantage?"
No. Vera was not to be persuaded.
"I like the quiet of this home after the season. All I want is rest and
silence," she said, and Dr. Selwyn Tower shot a despairing glance at
Lady Okehampton.
"Your niece is absolutely charming; but as obstinate as a mule," he
told her, when they had their conference in one of the drawing-rooms.
All the doors and _portières_ were open, and the doctor looked at the
long vista of splendid emptiness with a faint shudder.
"It is a fine house, but a little depressing," he murmured.
"I call it positively uncanny; but that is all in my niece's line. She
is dreadfully morbid. I am glad there was no occultism or Christian
Science when I was young."
At these words Christian Science the famous consultant shuddered worse
than at sight of the empty rooms.
"If your sweet niece is _that_ way inclined we can do nothing for her,"
he said.
"No, thank Heaven, that is not one of her fads."
And then the fashionable physician gave his opinion of the case,
or just so much of his opinion as he thought it good to give to an
affectionate but not over wise aunt.
He found that the patient's strength was at a very low ebb. She had
been wasting her resources, living upon her capital, refusing herself
the rest that was essential for so fragile a form, so sensitive a
temperament, and so over-active a brain. Lady Okehampton had told
him of the gaieties, the rush from place to place, from amusement to
amusement, the everlasting entertaining and being entertained; and he
talked as if he had been there, watching and taking notes, all through
that wild career. He was not going to extinguish hope; so he kept up a
cheerful tone throughout the conference. There was nothing heroic in
the treatment required. Rest, and a soothing regimen. Not much walking,
but a great deal of fresh air, Drives in her open carriage to rural
suburbs, if she should insist on remaining in London; a little quiet
society; the utmost care as to diet, and constant medical supervision.
He would be glad to confer with Mrs. Rutherford's regular medical man
before he left London; and he hoped, on his return in three or four
weeks, to find a marked improvement.
This was all. When questioned as to lung trouble, he said that there
was trouble, but he saw no fatal indications. Yes, there was heart
weakness; but nothing that might not be modified by care.
Simple as she was, Lady Okehampton did not feel altogether assured by
all this bland talk, and the sound of the doctor's carriage wheels,
as they rolled away from the door, recalled the moaning of the winter
waves under the red cliffs at Disbrowe.
She repeated the specialist's diplomatic utterances to Claude, who did
not seem to attach much importance to medical opinion.
"All doctors talk alike," he said. "I don't think Vera's is a case for
the faculty. You remember what Macbeth said to his physician?"
Lady Okehampton did not remember; but she gave a sigh of assent that
answered as well.
"I'm afraid Vera's is a rooted sorrow, and, God help me! _I_ cannot
pluck it from her memory. We had better leave her alone. We can do
nothing more for her. We can't make her happy."
"Claude, this is too dreadful. Are we to let her die?" cried Aunt
Mildred, with something like an elderly shriek.
"Is death so great an evil? At least it means rest, and there are some
of us who can get rest no other way."
"Claude, it is positively dreadful to hear you talk like that, as if
you cared for nothing in this life."
"I don't."
And then Lady Okehampton took him in hand severely, and talked to
him as a good woman, but as a Philistine of the Philistines, would
naturally talk on such an occasion; and after remonstrating with him
for his want of religious feeling, and even proper affection, went
on to reproaching him for spending his wife's money, squandering her
magnificent fortune with a reckless wastefulness that might end in
reducing her to beggary.
"No fear of that, Aunt Mildred. No doubt I have thrown money out of
windows. Money has never been a serious consideration with Vera and
me. We should have been quite as happy when we started on our Venetian
honeymoon if we had had only just enough to pay for our tourists'
tickets and our gondola, just enough for the gondola and a cheap hotel.
Money could buy us nothing that we cared for. Later, when I knew what
her income was, I spent with a free hand; but there's a good deal of
spending in a hundred thousand a year----"
Lady Okehampton shivered, and stirred in her seat uneasily. That
colossal income, and nothing done for the needy members of her
husband's illustrious house!
"I wanted to amuse myself and to amuse my wife, and amusements are
costly nowadays; so the money has run out pretty fast, but there has
always been a handsome surplus. I see Mr. Zabulon, the banker, one
of my wife's trustees, two or three times a year, and he has never
complained. Vera's charities are immense; so there is really nothing
for you to moan about, Lady Okehampton."
"Nothing," cried Vera's aunt, with uplifted hands. "Was there ever
anyone so feather-headed, so feckless? Can you forget that when your
wife dies her fortune dies with her?"
"No. But when she dies, I shall have done with all that money can buy.
I shall be able to pension the old stable hands, and provide for my
dogs, out of my fifteen hundred a year; and I can give my trainer half
a dozen cracks that will make him comfortable for life."
"You are very considerate about your stable and kennels. I wonder if
you have ever considered Vera's obligations to those who come after
her."
"If you mean the Roman cater-cousins I certainly have not."
"Provana's heirs? Why, of course not! They will be inordinately rich
when that splendid fortune is chopped up among them. No, Claude, if
you had a proper family feeling, which to my mind is an essential
element in the Christian life, you would have thought of our herd of
poor relations. Nicholas Disbrowe, dying by inches in an East Anglian
Vicarage, and not daring to winter in the South, for want of means; or
poor Lady Rosalba, who is no better off than Vera's grandmother, and
doesn't make half as good a fight as poor Lady Felicia did; or Mary
Disbrowe Jones, who married so wretchedly, and is selling blouses in a
shabby street in Pimlico----"
"I think Vera has done a lot for all of 'em. I know she sent the
Reverend Nicholas a thousand pounds last winter, when his wife wrote
her a doleful letter; and she gave her blouse-making cousin two hundred
and fifty pounds last week, to save her from bankruptcy. Consider them,
forsooth! Do you suppose they don't ask to be considered? Every man
jack of them, down to the remotest connection by marriage. They are
as eloquent with the pen as professional begging-letter writers. They
blister their papers with tears. And Vera never refuses. She does not
know how."
"Oh, I know she is generous. A thousand to that worthy man in the
Fens was handsome; but that kind of casual help won't provide for the
future; and when our poor dear is gone there will be nothing. May that
sad day be long, long off; but in the meantime she ought to invest her
surplus income, and leave it to those who want it most and would use
it best. You may be sure I have no personal feeling; but the best of
us are not too well off, and if there should come the general election
that we are threatened with, I doubt if Chagford will be able to stand
for North Devon. The ballot has made bribery more audacious and more
expensive than ever. I am told three half crowns is the least the
wretches will take. They will ride a candidate's motor to death, and
then go and vote for his opponent."
"Let Chagford talk to my wife, if there's a dissolution," said Claude,
with a half-smothered yawn that expressed weariness and disgust.
"Vera is always kind," sighed Lady Okehampton dolefully; but she
refrained from suggesting that, when the dissolution came, Vera might
not be there.
This was Aunt Mildred's last attack upon Claude Rutherford. He took
matters into his own hands after this, and no longer depended upon
accounts of his wife's health at second hand. He took all information
upon that subject from Dr. Selwyn Tower, who had a great reputation at
that period, and whom he was inclined to trust.
The physician was more frank with the husband than he had been with the
aunt, though even yet he said nothing to extinguish hope. He told Mr.
Rutherford that it would have been better for his wife to winter in the
South, or by way of experiment to try a short winter in the Engadine,
coming down to Ragaz before the snow melted; but as the dear lady
seemed strangely bent upon staying in her own house, it would be safer
to indulge her fancy. Lungs and heart were only a question of weakness.
The mind was of serious consequence; and everything must be done to
check the tendency to melancholia.
"If we can make her happy, we shall be able to deal with the lung
trouble," said the physician. "Open air and good spirits might work a
miracle."
Dr. Tower naturally inquired as to parental history, and was somewhat
disheartened on hearing that the dear lady's father and mother had
died young, the former of galloping consumption, during an open-air
cure; yet even this did not induce him to pronounce sentence of death.
Nor did he allow Mrs. Rutherford to suppose herself a desperate case,
though he insisted on having a trained nurse, and of the best, in
attendance upon his patient, as well as the maid Louison.
The French girl might be all that Mrs. Rutherford could require, he
admitted, when Vera told him she wanted no one else.
"But you must allow me what I want," pleaded Dr. Tower with his most
ingratiating air. "My treatment is of the mildest--nothing heroic or
troublesome about it--but I must be sure that it is followed. I must
have someone about you who is responsible to _me_. My nurse shall not
be allowed to bore you. If she is intrusive or disagreeable to you, you
can telephone to me; and she shall be superseded within the hour."
Vera submitted. Her indifference to most things, even to those that
concerned herself, was one of her symptoms which made Dr. Tower uneasy.
"This woman will never help to cure herself," he thought, as he drove
away, with that far-off look in Vera's face impressed upon his mind.
"She does not want to get well. She is not absolutely unhappy--only
indifferent. Something must have gone wrong in her life. Yet her
husband does not seem a bad sort."
She was not unhappy. She had been allowed to take her own way, and to
live as she wished to live--in the silence and peace of the spacious
house, where the business of entertaining seemed to be at an end for
ever. Whatever had been amiss in the life that was ebbing away seemed
hardly to matter, now that she was drawing near the other life. Her
husband came and went, and spend a good deal of his time in her room,
talking with her, or reading to her, when she was too tired to talk.
There had been nothing said of his offence against her; no utterance
of that other woman's name. They were friends again, and could talk of
the things that they loved--literature, music, art; of Henry Irving's
Hamlet; of Millais and Browning, both of whom she had seen at Aunt
Mildred's house in her childhood, and whose faces she remembered; of
books new and old. They were as friendly and sympathetic as they had
been in Mario Provana's lifetime, before the dawn of love. It was as
if they were still at the same platonic stage. All that had come after
was like a lurid dream from which they had awakened. Tristram was again
the true knight. Iseult was sinless.
All that was best in Claude Rutherford was in the ascendant during
these long, slow weeks of silent sorrow, in which he knew that the
man with the scythe was at the door, that nothing money could buy or
love devise could save the woman he loved. He had broken finally with
that other woman: finally, for the fiery cup had lost its intoxicating
power, and the end had been a vulgar quarrel about money. Whatever was
to happen to him, he was safe from that siren's spells.
All his natural sweetness, his sympathy and charm, were for Vera, in
those quiet weeks of September and October, when there was nobody in
London, and the chariot wheels rolled no more in the broad roadway. He
was at his best in his wife's white morning-room, where the faces of
the immortals looked down upon him, and where he was kind even to the
dog she loved--the Irish terrier, brought home after his half-year's
quarantine--who stretched his strong limbs and rough, red-brown body
against her satin slippers, as she lay on her sofa, a fragile figure,
shadowy in her loose white gown.
All that was best in this man, the tenderness, the sympathy, was in
evidence now; a failure no doubt, trivial and shallow, incapable of
deep feeling, perhaps, but a sweet, lovable nature; a nature that had
made women love him whether he wanted their love or not.
"It is very good of you to give me so much of your time," Vera said one
day, slipping her thin little hand into his, which was almost as thin.
"Invalids are wretched company, and I don't want you to have too much
of this dull room."
"I do not find it dull--and it is no duller for me than for you."
"It is never dull for me. I have my faces. _They_ are always company."
"Your faces--You mean those portraits?"
"Byron, Scott, Browning. Yes, they are always company. I have looked
at them till they are alive. I have read Walter Scott's journals
and Byron's letters till I know them as well as if they had been my
intimate friends when they were alive. I know Browning's letters by
heart; those sweet letters to the sweet wife. Shakespeare is different.
It is so sad that there are no familiar records. One can only think of
him as the poet and the creator; genius that touches the supernatural."
"I don't think it matters how little you know of the man, his
deer-stalking or his tardy marriage, as long as you don't think there
was no Shakespeare, and that the noblest poetry this world ever saw was
written by the skunk who gave away his friend," said her husband.
"Bacon! Horrible!"
On one quiet evening, when Claude had been with her since his solitary
dinner, she said softly:
"I sometimes forget all the years, and think you are just the same
Cousin Claude who took pity on me at Disbrowe, when I was so shy that
other people's kindness only made me miserable. Till you came I used
to creep into any corner with a book, rather than mix with my Disbrowe
cousins, who were so dreadfully grand and clever."
"Precocious geniuses, Mrs. Somervilles in the bud, who matured into two
of the most commonplace women I know, and almost as ignorant as Susan
Amphlett," said Claude.
"But you must not give me so much of your time, Claude," she said
gently.
"I love to be with you; but I may slip away for the Cambridgeshire?" he
said, the trivial side of his character coming to the surface.
She did not even ask if he were personally interested in the race.
There had been a time when she knew every horse he owned, and made
most of them her friends, rejoicing in their beauty as creatures whom
she would have liked to keep for pets, rather than to expose them to
the ordeal of the turf; albeit she had followed their fortunes, and
speculated upon their chances, almost as keenly interested as her
husband. But now they had become things without shape or meaning, like
all the rest of the outside world.
"You need not be afraid of leaving me," she said. "I have this good
friend to keep me company," smoothing Boroo's rough coat with her soft
hand.
"I wish my mother were still in town. She would come to you every day."
"She is very good, but she and I have never been really friends. I know
she would be kind; but she would talk of painful things. I don't want
to remember. I want to look forward."
"Yes," he answered in a low voice, bending over her, and pressing his
lips on the pale brow. "There must be no looking back."
It was the first time he had kissed her since the night of the concert.
She looked up at him with a sad, sweet smile, and held his hand in hers
for a moment.
"Susan must come to you every day to keep you in good spirits," he said.
"No, Claude, Susie doesn't like sick people. She sits by my side and
chatters and chatters, telling me all the scandals she thinks will
interest me; but I can hear the effort she is making. Her tongue does
not run on as it used before I was ill; and once when she saw a spot
of blood on my handkerchief she nearly fainted. I don't want too much
of Susie. Mr. Symeon will come and talk to me sometimes; and his talk
always does me good."
"I wish I could think so. I hate leaving you in London. You ought to
have gone to Disbrowe, as your aunt wished. You would have done better
in that soft air."
"No. I should be better nowhere than in this silent house. If I cannot
be in Rome there is nowhere else where I should like to be. I want
space and silence, and no going and coming of people who mean to be
kind and who bore me to death. I want no fussing and talking about me.
I can put up with my nurse, because she is quiet and does her work like
a machine."
Rome? Yes, in the November afternoons when the world outside her
windows was hidden in grey fog, she longed for the beautiful city,
the place of life and light, the city of fountains, full of the sound
of rushing water. The dull greyness of London oppressed her, when she
thought of the long garden walks in their solemn stillness, the cypress
and ilex, the statues gleaming ghostly in the dusk against the dark
walls of laurel and arbutus, the broad terrace with its massive marble
balustrade, on which she had leant for hours in melancholy meditation,
thinking, thinking, thinking, as the multitude of church towers and the
great dome in the hollow below her changed from grey to purple, as the
golden light died in the west and the young moon rose above the fading
crimson of the afterglow.
It was sad to think that she would never see that divine city again,
and all that she had loved in Italy: Cadenabbia, where her honeymoon
had begun, to the sound of rippling water, as the boats crept by in the
darkness, to the music of guitars and Italian voices, singing in the
light of coloured lanterns, while the cosmopolitan crowd clustered in
the narrow space between the hotel and the lake.
* * * * *
Susan Amphlett came nearly every day, and insisted upon being admitted.
She had come to London for a week, just to buy frocks for a winter
round of visits.
"But much more to see you, my dearest," she said, and then she recited
the houses to which she was going, and her reason for going to them,
which seemed to be anything rather than any regard for the people she
was visiting. She talked of herself as if she had been a star actress.
"I am touring in the shires this winter," she said. "I did Hants and
Dorset last year, and was bored to extinction. Roger is happy in any
hole if he can be riding to hounds every day, and he had the Blackmoor
Vale and the North Hants within his reach most of the time; while I was
excruciated by a pack of women who talked of nothing but their good
works or their bridge, and they were such poor players that the good
works were less boring than the bridge talk. 'Dear Lady Sue, would you
call no trumps if?'--and would you do this and t'other? questions that
babies in the nursery might ask over their toy cards."
Then came a long account of the frocks that were being made for the
shires, and the scarlet top-coat to be worn with a grey habit, which
Roger hated.
"I think he would like me in an early-Victorian get up, with the edge
of my habit touching my horse's fetlocks, a large white muslin collar,
and a low beaver hat with a long feather. Those early-Victorian collars
cost two or three pounds apiece, my Grannie told me, and those poor
wretches who never changed their clothes till dinner, wore them all
day long; and yet they talk of _our_ extravagance; as if nobody paid
anything for clothes in those days."
And then, when the houses to which she was going, and the clothes she
was to wear, and her quarrels with her husband and her maid had been
discussed at length, Susan began to talk about her friend.
"Lady O. told me how ill you had been, _ma mie_, and of your curious
whim about this house. She says Selwyn Tower would have liked you to
go to the Transvaal, and told her that two or three months in that
delicious climate would make you a strong woman; but finding you set
upon stopping in your own house he gave way, as your illness is chiefly
a question of nerves. It is a comfort to know that, _n'est-ce pas, mein
Schatz?_"
"Yes, of course it is a comfort. I suppose, with nothing amiss but
one's nerves, one might live to be ninety."
"True, dearest, quite ninety," Susan answered, shuddering.
Susan Amphlett was out of her element in a sick room. The mere thought
that the friend she was talking to was marked for death seemed to
freeze her blood. Her own hand grew as cold as the cold hand she was
holding. She could not be bright and pleasant with Death in sight.
As she sat with Vera in the library that had been Provana's favourite
room she felt as if there were someone standing behind the door of that
inner room, a door that had been left ajar. There was someone waiting
there whose unseen presence made her dumb. Someone! Not Provana--but
another and more terrible shape.
"Vera," she burst out at last, "why do you sit in this horrid room
instead of in your sweet white den, with Byron and Browning and all
your dear people?"
"I like this room better, now that my thoughts have gone backward."
"What can you mean by thoughts going backward?"
"Now that I know time is measured for me, so much and no more; I like
to live over the days that are gone. It spins out my life to live the
dead years over again. This is the room Mario loved. His books are on
those shelves, the books that opened a new world for me: the Italian
historians, the Italian poets. In the first year of our life in this
house, before I was the fashion, we used to sit here of an evening,
long evenings, from nine till midnight, talking, talking, talking, or
Mario reading to me. He was a banker, and a dealer in money; but he
read poetry exquisitely."
"Vera!" Susan ejaculated suddenly, and sat staring.
"What's the matter?"
"I believe you loved Provana better than ever you have loved Claude."
"I don't know," Vera said dreamily.
She had been talking in a dreamy way, as if she were hardly conscious
that anyone was listening to her.
"Perhaps you never were really in love with your second husband?"
"Yes. I loved him too much--and," after a perceptible pause, "not
enough."
"Darling, I can't make you out."
"I am not worth making out."
"One thing I must tell you, Vera, even at the risk of agitating you. It
is all over with that woman."
"Which woman?"
"Which? Mrs. Bellenden. There has never been so much as a whisper about
any other since your marriage."
"Oh, it is all over? I thought so."
"Vera, what indifference! You might be talking of somebody in Mars.
Yes, dear, it is quite at an end. They had a desperate quarrel; quite
the worst of many frightful rows. There was furniture smashed, I
believe--Sèvres and things--and now she has consoled herself."
"Really?"
"A German Prince. One of the German attachés told me he would marry her
if he dared. Well, sweet, I must be trudging. I'm dining out, one of
those nice little winter dinners that I love. You must make haste and
get quite, quite well."
This was what Susie always said to a sick friend, even when the friend
was moribund. The "quite, quite" had such a cheering sound.
"By the by, Lady O. told me you have had the Princess Hermione?"
"Yes, she came to see me two or three times when she was passing
through town."
"That must have cheered you immensely. She is devoted to you, quite
raves about you, I hear, in the highest circles. Get well, dear, and
give a party for her when she is next in town."
Susie kissed her and patted her hair, and suppressed a shiver at the
cold brow that her lips touched. It felt like the brow of death.
Yet Vera's eyes were bright, and there was a rosy bloom on the thin
cheek. Susan was glad when she had got herself out of the house and
was walking fast through the cheerful streets. But she was sincerely
attached to her friend.
"I shall be fit for nothing this evening," she told herself sadly; but
she was at least fit for her part of Chorus, and entertained the little
dinner-party with a picturesque description of her fading friend, dying
slowly in that house of measureless wealth.
"Her income dies with her," she explained, "and though I suppose a
few pennies have been saved out of a hundred thousand a year, and my
cousin will get all that's left, he will be a pauper in a year or two,
I daresay."
On this the company speculated upon how much might be left; and all
were agreed that there was a good deal of spending in a hundred
thousand, while one of the middle-aged men went so far as to make
a rough calculation of the Rutherfords' expenditure in those five
years of expensive pleasures; but even after reckoning the dances
and dinner-giving, the yachts and balloons, the racing stable, and a
certain amount of losses on the turf and at cards, they did not bring
the annual outlay above eighty thousand, whereupon a dowager looked
round with a smile, and said:
"You haven't reckoned Mrs. Bellenden."
"True. Now you mention her, I take it there would be no surplus."
And then that remarkable lady and her German Prince were discussed
at full length--dissected rather than discussed; for when a woman is
remarkable for her beauty, and has spent three or four fortunes, and
is in a fair way of spending another, there is a great deal of amusing
talk to be got out of her.