PUNISHMENT
Anthony Clyne came to a stand before her, and lifted his hat.
“I understand,” he said, without letting his eyes meet hers—he was
stiffness itself, but perhaps he too had his emotions—“that you
preferred to see me here rather than indoors?”
“Yes,” Henrietta answered. And the girl thanked heaven that though the
beating of her heart had nearly choked her a moment before, her tone
was as hard and uncompromising as his. He could not guess, he never
should guess, what strain she put on nerve and will that she might not
quail before him; nor how often, with her quivering face hidden in the
pillow, she had told herself, before rising, that it was for once only,
once only, and that then she need never see again the man she had
wronged.
“I do not know,” he continued slowly, “whether you have anything to
say?”
“Nothing,” she answered. They were standing on the Ambleside road, a
short furlong from the inn. Leafless trees climbed the hill-side above
them; and a rough slope, unfenced and strewn with boulders and dying
bracken, ran down from their feet to the lake.
“Then,” he rejoined, with a scarcely perceptible hardening of the
mouth, “I had best say as briefly as possible what I am come to say.”
“If you please,” she said. Hitherto she had faced him regally. Now she
averted her eyes ever so slightly, and placed herself so that she
looked across the water that gleamed pale under the morning mist.
Yet, even with her eyes turned from him, he did not find it easy to say
what he must say. And for a few seconds he was silent. At last “I do
not wish to upbraid you,” he began in a voice somewhat lower in tone.
“You have done a very foolish and a very wicked, wicked thing, and one
which cannot be undone in the eyes of the world. That is for all to
see. You have left your home and your friends and your family under
circumstances——”
She turned her full face to him suddenly.
“Have they,” she said, “empowered you to speak to me?”
“Yes.”
“They do not wish to see me themselves?”
“No.”
“Nor perhaps—wish me to return to them?”
“No.”
She nodded as she looked away again; in sheer defiance, he supposed. He
did not guess that she did it to mask the irrepressible shiver which
the news caused her.
He thought her, on the contrary, utterly unrepentant, and it hardened
him to speak more austerely, to give his feelings freer vent.
“Had you done this thing with a gentleman,” he said, “there had been,
however heartless and foolish the act, some hope that the matter might
be set straight. And some excuse for yourself; since a man of our class
might have dazzled you by the possession of qualities which the person
you chose could not have. But an elopement with a needy adventurer,
without breeding, parts, or honesty—a criminal, and wedded already——”
“If he were not wedded already,” she said, “I had been with him now!”
His face grew a shade more severe, but otherwise he did not heed the
taunt.
“Such an—an act,” he said, “unfits you in your brother’s eyes to return
to his home.” He paused an instant. “Or to the family you have
disgraced. I am bound—I have no option, to tell you this.”
“You say it as from them?”
“I do. I have said indeed less than they bade me say. And not more, I
believe on my honour, than the occasion requires. A young gentlewoman,”
he continued bitterly, “brought up in the country with every care,
sheltered from every temptation, with friends, with home, with every
comfort and luxury, and about to be married to a gentleman in her own
rank in life, meets secretly, clandestinely, shamefully a man, the
lowest of the low, on a par in refinement with her own servants, but
less worthy! She deceives with him her friends, her family, her
relatives! If”—with some emotion—“I have overstated one of these
things, God forgive me!”
“Pray go on!” she said, with her face averted. And thinking that she
was utterly hardened, utterly without heart, thinking that her outward
calm spelled callousness, and that she felt nothing, he did continue.
“Can she,” he said, “who has been so deceitful herself, complain if the
man deceives her? She has chosen a worthless creature before her family
and her friends? Is she not richly served if he treats her after his
own nature and her example? If, after stooping to the lawless level of
such a poor thing, she finds herself involved in his penalties, and her
name a scandal and a shame to her family!”
“Is that all?” she asked. But not a quiver of the voice, not a tremour
of the shoulders, betrayed what she was feeling, what she suffered, how
fiercely the brand was burning into her soul.
“That is all they bade me say,” he replied in a calmer and more gentle
tone. “And that they would make arrangements—such arrangements as may
be possible for your future. But they would not take you back.”
“And now—what on your own account?” she asked, almost flippantly.
“Something, I suppose?”
“Yes,” he said, answering her slowly, and with a steady look of
condemnation. For in all honesty the girl’s attitude shocked and
astonished him. “I have something to say on my own account. Something.
But it is difficult to say it.”
She turned to him and raised her eyebrows.
“Really!” she said. “You seem to speak so easily.”
He did not remark how white, even against the pale shimmer of the lake,
was the face that mocked him; and her heartlessness seemed dreadful to
him.
“I wish,” he said, “to say only one thing on my own account.”
“There is only one thing you must not say,” she retorted, turning on
him without warning and speaking with concentrated passion. “I have
been, it may be, as foolish as you say. I am only nineteen. I may have
been, I don’t know about that, very wicked—as wicked as you say. And
what I have done in my folly and in my—you call it wickedness—may be a
disgrace to my family. But I have done nothing, nothing, sir,”—she
raised her head proudly—“to disgrace myself personally. Do you believe
that?”
And then he did notice how white she was.
“If you tell me that, I do believe it,” he said gravely.
“You must believe it,” she rejoined with sudden vehemence. “Or you
wrong me more cruelly than I have wronged you!”
“I do believe it,” he said, conquered for the time by a new emotion.
“Then now I will hear you,” she answered, her tone sinking again. “I
will hear what you wish to say. Not that it will bend me. I have
injured you. I own it, and am sorry for it on your account. On my own I
am unhappy, but I had been more unhappy had I married you. You have
been frank, let me be frank,” she continued, her eyes alight, her tone
almost imperious. “You sought not a wife, but a mother for your child!
A woman, a little better bred than a nurse, to whom you could entrust
the one being, the only being, you love, with less chance of its
contamination,” she laughed icily, “by the lower orders! If you had any
other motive in choosing me it was that I was your second cousin, of
your own respectable family, and you did not derogate. But you forgot
that I was young and a woman, as you were a man. You said no word of
love to me, you begged for no favour; when you entered a room, you
sought my eye no more than another’s, you had no more softness for me
than for another! If you courted me at all it was before others, and if
you talked to me at all it was from the height of wise dullness, and
about things I did not understand and things I hated! Until,” she
continued viciously, “at last I hated you! What could be more natural?
What did you expect?”
A little colour had stolen into his face under the lash of her
reproaches. He tried to seem indifferent, but he could not. His tone
was forced and constrained when he answered.
“You have strange ideas,” he said.
“And you have but two!” she riposted. “Politics and your boy! I cared,”
with concentrated bitterness, “for neither!”
That stung him to anger and retort.
“I can imagine it,” he said. “Your likings appear to be on a different
plane.”
“They are at least not confined to fifty families!” she rejoined. “I do
not think myself divine,” she continued with feverish irony, “and all
below me clay! I do not think because I and all about me are dull and
stupid that all the world is dull and stupid, talking eternally
about”—and she deliberately mocked his tone—“‘the licence of the
press!’ and ‘the imminence of anarchy!’ To talk,” with supreme scorn,
“of the licence of the press and the imminence of anarchy to a girl of
nineteen! It was at least to make the way very smooth for another!”
He looked at her in silence, frowning. Her frankness was an outrage on
his dignity—and he, of all men, loved his dignity. But it surprised him
at least as much as it shocked him. He remembered the girl sometimes
silly, sometimes demure, to whom he had cast the handkerchief; and he
had not been more astonished if a sheep had stood up and barked at him.
He was here, prepared to meet a frightened, weeping, shamefaced child,
imploring pardon, imploring mediation; and he found this! He was here
to upbraid, and she scolded him. She marked with unerring eye the
joints in his armour, and with her venomous woman’s tongue she planted
darts that he knew would rankle—rankle long after she was gone and he
was alone. And a faint glimpse of the truth broke on him. Was it
possible that he had misread the girl; whom he had deemed
characterless, when she was not shy? Was it possible that he had
under-valued her and slighted her? Was it possible that, while he had
been judging her and talking down to her, she had been judging him and
laughing in her sleeve?
The thought was not pleasant to a proud nature. And there was another
thing he had to weigh. If she were so different in fact from the
conception he had formed of her, the course which had occurred to him
as the best, and which he was going to propose for her, might not be
the best.
But he put that from him. A name for firmness at times compels a man to
obstinacy. It was so now. He set his jaw more stiffly, and—
“Will you hear me now?” he asked.
“If there is anything more to be said,” she replied. She spoke wearily
over her shoulder.
“I think there is,” he rejoined stubbornly, “one thing. It will not
keep you long. It refers to your future. There is a course which I
think may be taken and may be advantageous to you.”
“If,” she cried impetuously, “it is to take me back to those——”
“On the contrary,” he replied. He was not unwilling to wound one who
had shown herself so unexpectedly capable of offence. “That is quite
past,” he continued. “There is no longer any question of that. And even
the course I suggest is not without its disadvantages. It may not, at
first sight, be more acceptable to you than returning to your home. But
I trust you have learnt a lesson, and will now be guided.” After saying
which he coughed and hesitated, and at length, after twice pulling up
his cravat, “I think,” he said—“the matter is somewhat delicate—that I
had better write what I have in my mind.”
Under the dead weight of depression which had succeeded to passion,
curiosity stirred faintly in her. But—
“As you please,” she said.
“The more,” he continued stiffly, “as in the immediate present there is
nothing to be done. And therefore there is no haste. Until this”—he
made a wry face, the thing was so hateful to him—“this inquiry is at an
end, and you are free to leave, nothing but preliminaries can be dealt
with; those settled, however, I think there should be no delay. But you
shall hear from me within the week.”
“Very well.” And after a slight pause, “That is all?”
“That is all, I think.”
Yet he did not go. And she continued to stand with her shoulder turned
towards him. He was a man of strong prejudices, and the habit of
command had rendered him in some degree callous. But he was neither
unkind by nature, nor, in spite of the story Walterson had told of him,
inhuman in practice. To leave a young girl thus, to leave her without a
word of leave-taking or regret, seemed even to him, now it came to the
point, barbarous. The road stretched lonely on either side of them, the
woods were brown and sad and almost leafless, the lake below them
mirrored the unchanging grey above, or lost itself in dreary mist. And
he remembered her in surroundings so different! He remembered how she
had been reared, by whom encircled, amid what plenitude! And though he
did not guess that the slender figure standing thus mute and forlorn
would haunt him by night and by day for weeks to come, and harry and
torment him with dumb reproaches—he still had not the heart to go
without one gentler word.
And so “No, there is one thing,” he said, his voice shaking very
slightly, “I would like to add—I would like you to know. It is that
after next week I shall be at Rysby in Cartmel—Rysby Hall—for about a
month. It is not more than two miles from the foot of the lake, and if
you are still here and need advice——”
“Thank you.”
“——or help, I would like you to know that I am there.”
“That I may apply to you?” she said without turning her head.
He could not tell whether at last there were tears in her voice, or
whether she were merely drawing him on to flout him.
“I meant that,” he said coldly.
“Thank you.”
Certainly there was a queer sound in her voice.
He paused awkwardly.
“There is nothing more, I think?” he said.
“Nothing, thank you.”
“Very well,” he returned. “Then you will hear from me upon the matter I
mentioned—in a day or two. Good-bye.”
He went then—awkwardly, slowly. He felt himself, in spite of his
arguments, in spite of his anger, in spite of the wrong which she had
done him, and the disgrace which she brought on his name,—he felt
himself something of a cur. She was little more than a child, little
more than a child; and he had not understood her! Even now he had no
notion how often that plea would ring in his ears, and harass him and
keep him wakeful. And Henrietta? She had told herself before the
interview that with it the worst would be over. But as she heard his
firm tread pass slowly away, down the road, and grow fainter and
fainter, the pride that had supported her under his eyes sank low. A
sense of her loneliness, so cruel that it wrung her heart, so cruel
that she could have run after him and begged him to punish her, to
punish her as he pleased, if he would not leave her deserted, gripped
her throat and brought salt tears to her eyes. The excitement was over,
the flatness remained; the failure, and the grey skies and leaden water
and dying bracken. And she was alone; alone for always. She had defied
him, she had defied them all, she had told him that whatever happened
she would not go back, she would not be taken back. But she knew now
that she had lied. And she crossed the road, her step unsteady, and
stumbled blindly up the woodland path above the road, until she came to
a place where she knew that she was hidden. There she flung herself
down on her face and cried passionately, stifling her sobs in the green
damp moss. She had done wrong. She had done cruel wrong to him. But she
was only nineteen, and she was being punished! She was being punished!