BY “RITA.”
SO NEAR--SO FAR AWAY.
I never think but to regret
I know too much----
The hush and silence had fallen over the outer world beyond and about
the great hotel, and something of its hush and mystery brooded too in
the deserted corridors and vacated public rooms of the building itself.
Perhaps one or two of its inmates--so strangely thrown together--would
have given almost every earthly possession for the power to gaze
unknown--unseen--into one of those locked chambers; a room where a
woman sat alone, with all the light and laughter and mischief gone from
her face, and the shadows of suffering and regret resting like somber
memories in her veiled and sorrowful eyes.
This was not Lady Francis as the world knew her--as the men whom she
bewitched and tormented and flirted with in so audacious a fashion knew
her. No, this was a woman maddened by self-reproach and unavailing
regrets, fired with jealous hatred of a rival, and filled to the
heart’s core with the memories and the longings that one voice, one
face, alone in all the world had power to awaken, and had awakened
to-day.
She had thrown on a loose muslin wrapper, and the soft lace and pale
tinted ribbons seemed to cling lovingly around the lissom figure, the
snowy throat and arms. The long glass opposite reflected her as she
raised her drooping head with its wreath of unbound hair, and the
sorrowful eyes that met her own struck sharply on her senses as a
surprise--so unlike they were to the eyes she was used to see. “Oh,
what a fool I have been,” she cried, with an impatience and intolerance
of herself that was the more maddening by reason of its vain remorse.
“And yet I suppose I should do it again to-morrow under the same
circumstances; yet, O Frank, Frank, how I loved you once--how you
_seemed_ to love me!”
She looked down again at the table by which she was seated. On it lay
an open photograph case containing a photograph. The dark eyes smiled
at her--the handsome, gay, young face looked radiant in its happy youth
and supreme content with life.
Her own intent gaze seemed to drink in thirstily every line, every
feature, well as she knew them all. “He doesn’t look happy--now,” she
said, and a little sob broke from her.
Impatiently she closed the case, and began to pace up and down the room
in a stormy, impetuous fashion--dashing the tears from her wet lashes,
though they only thronged back fast and swift in very mockery of her
efforts to deny their weakness.
“How could I expect it to be different? Isn’t it always the
same--always, always?” she repeated passionately. “Love doesn’t last;
it can’t. And there were so many temptations; and then the excitement
of conquest, and the vanity of wishing to show him I could still charm
others, though he seemed to think I had no right to try. But it was all
so false, so--so foolish. If he had only trusted, if he had only spoken
gently, kindly--as he used to speak! And then that hateful woman, that
French serpent--fiend--adventuress. Heavens! how I hated her; how I
hate her still. If I thought he cared, _really_ cared--if I thought
he had ever held her to his heart--kissed her as he used to kiss
me--if--oh! I could _kill_ her!”
She broke off abruptly, pressing her hand to her heart, while the blood
rushed in a crimson torrent to her face. “Oh! he can’t!” she moaned,
throwing herself face downward on the cushions of the couch. “And yet
I believed it--once; and I’ve never even let any man’s lips touch
my hand; never, with all my whims and follies and vagaries, allowed
myself to forget that I am Frank’s wife. But he doesn’t care any
longer. How could I expect it? And yet if he had only spoken one word
to-day--one little word, I would have thrown myself at his feet and
said, ‘O Frank, I love you--I’ve never ceased loving you. Oh! take me
back and let us forget all this miserable mistake.’ Frank!” She raised
her head and shook back the rich, soft hair impatiently, and stretched
longing arms out to the empty silence. “Frank,” she whispered more
loudly, “why don’t you come to me? Why don’t you feel I want you as--as
surely--sometimes--you want me. Frank----”
She rose unsteadily, supporting herself by one hand that rested on the
back of the couch.
Her face had grown strangely white, her eyes had a look of intensity
that spoke of strained mental force. “If I dared go to him,” she said,
still in that strange whisper. “I’ve never said I was wrong--or--or
sorry, but I am, Frank--God knows I am. Don’t drive me desperate; I’m
too unhappy and too reckless to be always patient. But if you swear you
never loved any other woman, Frank, I--I will swear I never loved or
thought of any man save you. Never, dear heart--never.”
Still with that strained look, intense and far off as that of a
sleepwalker, still with face deathlike in its rigid whiteness, she
moved across the room. The loose shower of hair seemed to annoy her
by its weight. She paused an instant before the table and took up a
curious-looking silver dagger. Then, hastily twisting the hair into a
thick coil, she fastened it with the dagger and turned toward the door.
* * * * *
“Will she read it?” muttered Lord Francis to himself, as he looked at
the closely-covered pages of the letter in his hand. “Oh, if she would
only believe, if she would only let me know what she really feels. It
is maddening to be placed in such a position, to see her playing fast
and loose with reputation, to have no more right to kiss her lips or
touch her hand than the veriest stranger. To be here now, to-night, the
same roof covering us, not half a dozen walls dividing us, and yet not
dare----”
He broke off abruptly, his eyes grew dark with stormy passions. The
pain and fever of aroused memories throbbed wildly in his heart, and
thrilled his veins anew with love and longing, as once her light step
and sweet low laugh had thrilled him.
“Fenella! wife!” his heart cried. “O God! are our lives to be forever
wrecked and spoiled by this miserable folly? Child, surely you know I
love you, that all other women are but as shadows to me. Oh, how my
heart aches for you! Surely you feel it--you can’t have forgotten--you
_can’t_!”
He looked again at the letter, then placed it in an envelope and sealed
it hastily.
“I will go to her--I know her room. I can slip it under the door if--if
she is asleep; but, perhaps----”
He did not finish that thought audibly. Only opened the door and looked
down the dark and silent corridor beyond.
How still it was. He heard a clock striking, somewhere in the silence,
two hours after midnight. A strange chill--a feeling of half shame,
half uncertainty--held him there on the threshold. There seemed
something guilty and wrong about the simple action he intended.
“To think,” he muttered to himself, “that a man should actually feel
there was something improper in leaving a letter at his own wife’s
door. Yet, if I were seen, who would believe it?”
He drew the door after him. The whole corridor was in darkness. At the
further end stood a marble statue surrounded by tall palms. He had
noticed it already during the day. The room next to it was the one he
had seen Lady Francis enter.
He moved softly down the long passage. Suddenly he paused, and shrank
back into a doorway close at hand. That door beside the statue and the
palms was thrown open; a slender white figure stood revealed by the
light within the room. At the same moment another figure--the figure of
a man--advanced rapidly, and spoke in a low, hurried voice.
The watcher stood as if turned to stone. He saw the woman retreat
backward step by step into the room she had just quitted. He saw the
man attempt to follow her. The door shut; again all was darkness and
silence.
For one hateful, throbbing moment, that seemed to hold a lifetime of
agony in its passage, Lord Francis stood there, gazing at the closed
door. At last, with trembling limbs and face bloodless as the dead, he
staggered back to his own room, and sank down on the chair where he had
written that letter, with its pleading for love and reconciliation.
“Too late!” he cried. “O Heaven! to think my own eyes should be the
witness of my own eternal shame and--hers!”
His head fell on his arms. He was as one dazed and stunned by the
consciousness of misery undreamt of, despite those cold and silent
years.
Moment after moment passed. One hour and then another dropped into the
gulf of time that is no more. Still he never stirred. Consciousness of
anything besides his own misery--besides the living recognition of his
own shame--was dead within him; dead as youth was dead, and hope, and
truth, and all things fair and sweet in life--slain by a woman’s hand.
* * * * *
The dawn was brightening into daylight as at last Lord Francis roused
himself from his long stupor.
“What had happened?” he thought confusedly. “Had he been ill? Had he
done anything?”
A hideous dread seized and appalled him. In those brief hours he seemed
to have lived a lifetime.
“Why did I not kill him?” he muttered, lifting his haggard young face
up to the faint rose light that filtered through the curtains. “Kill
him! aye, and in her arms--kill him and her too! Heaven!” a strange,
hoarse laugh escaped him.
“I shall go mad if I stay here--under the same roof with them.”
He began to move about confusedly, putting things together, and tossing
his clothes into his portmanteau. He was possessed but by one idea--to
leave a place made hateful by this discovery, to get away from these
men and women, with their jeering tongues and malicious smiles, who all
guessed or knew of his disgrace. It had been so public, so shameless.
She had summoned this man to her side. She had flaunted her preference
for him before his very face, and now----
He cursed her in his heart, as still, with fevered haste and strange,
impetuous movements, he gathered together his few possessions. Then
he locked his box and wrote a hurried note to the manager of the
hotel, inclosing a check and stating that the portmanteau would be
sent for later on. A hurried glance around--a glance which passed
over the letter he had written but a few brief hours before. It lay
where it had fallen from his hand when he sank into the chair by his
writing-table--lay there so innocent, yet so fraught with power to work
remorse or retribution in days that were to come.
The gray light of the early dawn gleamed like a pale phosphorescence
over the shadowy corridor, and lit with spectral mystery the white
statue and the dusky palms. He shuddered as his eyes fell on them. How
significant they had become.
Then, with a smothered oath that breathed vengeance for the future, he
rushed down the staircase and past the sleeping porter in the entrance
hall, and in another moment was standing in the fresh, sweet atmosphere
of life and light that God and Nature have so freely given to the
thankless, sated eyes of men.
* * * * *
How that day passed Lord Francis never knew. It seemed to him, when his
senses grew clearer, that weeks and months must have gone by since that
awful moment that had brought to him the full and complete knowledge of
his wife’s perfidy. Yet there had been a strange and consistent purpose
in all his actions. He had walked for miles and miles before taking the
train. He had reached London, and driven straight to his chambers,
to the no small dismay and discomfiture of his man, who had been
inaugurating a brief spell of leisure not as wisely as he might have
done. He had given orders to this man to pack up clothes sufficient for
a long journey, paid his wages, arranged with his usual caretaker to
remain in the chambers, then departed for Charing Cross to catch the
tidal train _en route_ for Paris.
All this he remembered afterward. Remembered vaguely, impassively, as
if every action had been performed by someone apart and outside of
himself; as if he had been spectator instead of actor. Remembered,
even as he remembered the crowded station, the flashing lights, the
hoarse cries of the porters, the bustle and confusion on the platform,
and high above all the shrill voice of the newsvendors crying out the
news of the evening papers--“_Pall Mall!_” “_St. James Gazette!_” or
“_Star!_ Latest edition! Mysterious murder of a foreign count in a
hotel! Latest special!”
He threw himself back on the seat of his carriage. What mattered
murders or tragedies to him? In heart he knew himself a murderer by
desire and fierce hatred--in reality, his life had turned to tragedy
deep and bitter and terrible, with a hopelessness that the coming years
could never brighten, and the dawn of Hope would never bless.
The shrill whistle of the engine sounded above all the clamor. The
train moved slowly out of the station, and still clear and distinct
those words reached him like a meaningless echo: “Murder of a foreign
count! Mysterious occurrence! Special edition! Special edition!”