sweep of what he took to be park property, caught his eyes he once more
ventured to speak.
"I am not the cold-blooded traitor I seem, believe me," he tried to
plead, "and until we definitely passed the station at Redleigh Bucks I
was miserable to think I had, as it seems, betrayed your Majesty. But
when as we came up to the station I saw the King on the platform----"
She stopped short in front of him: "The King!" she exclaimed
incredulously.
Bulstrode nodded in a matter-of-fact way as if stray kings on
mid-country platforms were the common occurrence of his travelling
experiences.
"He had evidently followed you that far, and if the plan formed to
attach your carriage to the Dover express had been attempted, you would
have been stopped by your husband himself. As it is you are simply
going where you are expected to go--to Westboro' Castle."
This denouement, putting a summary end to her tragic anger, left her no
place for ecstatics. She sat down in front of Bulstrode and repeated,
dazed:--
"The _King_! The King had followed me! He had been warned then, but
by whom? You above all did not....?"
"Oh no!" He was glad to be honestly able to disclaim at least this
disloyalty. "I had nothing to do with it. The King had come on with
the man who had played your Majesty false all along, the man who is
indeed more the King's friend than he is Carmen-Magda's."
And sitting there, bewildered and appealing before him, she heard him
say: "I mean Lord Almouth Gresthaven."
She murmured some words in Poltavian, then besought: "Why, why do you
play with me?" The tears started to her eyes.
"Lord Gresthaven," Bulstrode hurried now to his confession--"has
plainly betrayed you. Either he failed to meet you as planned, or else
he came too late and thought better of his connivance against your
husband--at all events, both he and the King took the slow train."
"But _you_," she interrupted, staring at him--"You are not Lord
Gresthaven?"
"No," he said quietly, "no, I am an American, nothing more than a
friend and guest of the Duke of Westboro'. I tried over and over again
to tell you this, but you would not hear me and I finally accepted the
role you gave me with the firm intention of taking you with me to
Westboro' Castle. My name is James Thatcher Bulstrode, I am from
Boston, in the United States." Bulstrode thus tardily introduced
himself.
And Jimmy, not pretending ever to have counted greatly on the favor of
princes, was nevertheless taken aback. Not that he had any
preconceived notion of what Carmen-Magda would do--when she eventually
knew. He had been too absorbed in his mission, its entanglements, and
his climax. He may have been prepared for some exhibition of scorn,
but he more than likely looked for a social and commonplace ending to
their ride, but for what Carmen-Magda did he was entirely unprepared.
As if in his declaration of himself and his identity he had taken a
sponge and quite wiped himself off the slate, the Queen, after
speechlessly staring at him for a few moments, quietly removed her
attention from him altogether. She took from a little bag at her wrist
a rouge stick with which she carefully touched her lips; from a tiny
gold box she lightly dusted her cheeks with powder; she adjusted her
tulle bow and her veil and then sat serenely back waiting until the
train should arrive at her forced destination.
Although, one might say, unused to the manners of royalty, Jimmy was
dumbfounded; the beautiful woman in forest-brown clothes picked out
with hunting green had become as strange to him as in the first moment
when she attracted his attention some few miles beyond London. That
she should be angry at his interference he could admit, but that she
should not be grateful to be saved from her husband's wrath he did not
understand. Was he too plebeian for her to notice? He, of course, did
not speak to her again, nor did she break the singular silence, and for
some reason he did not even care to ask her forgiveness. Finally, he
decided that she was thinking solely of Gela, the man at the other end
of the route who would wait for her in vain, and when this sentimental
view of the case occurred to him, he would have felt _de trop_ had he
not seen how completely he was ignored.
They flashed past the last miles of wooded valley and hillside.
Westboro' was very soft in line and very mellow in the evening light.
The landscape, through a half-mist, was as brown and green as the dress
of the beautiful silent woman in the opposite corner of the travelling
carriage.
Bulstrode, looking at her rather timidly, felt as if he were in a dream.
At Westboro' Abbey the guard unlocked the compartment door and
Bulstrode, who got out first, helped the Queen of Poltavia to descend.
As she put foot to the ground she said, half leaning on the arm he
gave: "I thank you--very much indeed."
He caught the few words eagerly, and was fatuous enough to fancy that
she meant something more than the common courteous acknowledgment of a
man's help from a travelling carriage.
The station was deserted. The express having arrived some half hour
before without them, there had evidently been no preparation made to
meet this train.
Surrounded by her luggage, her brand new luggage, the Queen waited on
the side of the station that faced the open country, whilst Bulstrode
made inquiries about telephoning or getting word to the castle.
At this juncture, down the lane, between red thickets and golden
hedges, a smart dog-cart tooled along driven by a lady. She waved a
welcoming hand.
"Jimmy," she said as she drove up and leaned out and nodded to him, "I
knew you'd miss the express, you're so absent-minded about trains; and
who could be expected to distinguish between a 3.50 and a 3.53? So, as
you see, I drove down on the chance."
He had not greeted her in words. The long afternoon, the romantic
extravagant episode, of which he had been unwillingly a part, made this
woman seem so real. He felt as if from a burlesque extravaganza he had
come out into the fresh air; their eyes had met and Mrs. Falconer did
not miss any other greeting.
"That lady," he then said, "whom you see standing on the edge of the
platform surrounded by her luggage, like a shipwrecked being on a
desert island, is the Queen of Poltavia."
"Heavens!" exclaimed Mrs. Falconer.
"Yes," he said indifferently, "we came down from London together."
"Why, the whole castle is in a state about her. A coach and postillion
went to fetch her at the express. Telegrams are flying all over the
country. Why did she take a local--and with you--Jimmy?"
"Perhaps she is absent-minded about trains as well," he smiled, "at all
events here she certainly is and it will be charming of you to drive
her up."
"But I don't know her!"
"Oh," he shrugged, "one doesn't exactly _know_ queens, I don't know her
either, but that wouldn't prevent my doing her a service. I am sure
she'd rather be driven up to a cup of tea and a fire by an American
than stand here waiting for a postilion and four. It will be nice of
you to speak to her," he suggested, and stepped back.
Gathering up her reins, Mrs. Falconer whisked her horse about and drove
up to the lady's side. Bulstrode, from a little distance, watched her
graceful inclination and heard her lovely voice. He saw Carmen-Magda
lift her disguising veil, displaying her dark, foreign face. Slowly
going up to the dog-cart's side, together with the groom's help, he
bestowed the Queen's belongings in the trap.
"I will walk on slowly up the road," he suggested, "and most possibly
you will send back for me."
"Oh, I'll drive back myself." She was quite certain about it. As he
helped the Queen into the dog-cart, as she leaned on his supporting
hand, she said:
"Thank you, thank you very much indeed." And he was so vain as to
fancy that into tone and words Carmen-Magda put more warmth, more of
meaning, than a woman usually puts into the phrase of recognition of a
man's helping hand. He could not, moreover, have sworn that at the end
of the sentence was not murmured a word in a foreign tongue which might
in Poltavian mean "friend," but as he did not understand the language
of the country he could not be sure.
As he watched the trap up the hedged lanes out of sight, he rubbed his
eyes as if he were not certain whether or not he had not dozed and
dreamed in his compartment on the slow train from London.... But at
any rate he had the delightful heavenly certainty that this was
Westboro' of an Indian summer afternoon--and that of the two women who
had just driven up the lane out of sight, one at least was adorably
real.
THE SEVENTH ADVENTURE
VII
IN WHICH HE BECOMES THE POSSESSOR OF A CERTAIN PIECE OF PROPERTY
As Bulstrode stood in the window of his room at Westboro' Castle, his
face turned toward the country, it seemed to beckon him. It called him
from the park's end where suave and smooth the curving downs met the
preciser contour of the eastern field; from hedges holding snugly in
the roadways, the roads themselves running off on pleasant excursions
to townships whose names are suggestive of romance, whose gentle
beauties have mellowed with the ages which give them value and leave
them perfect.
With the sweetness of a bell, with the invitingness of a beckoning
hand, the English countryside summoned the gentleman to come out to it,
to explore and penetrate for himself. He gazed charmed and entranced
at the expanse of rippling meadow where, enclosed by the curtains of
soft old trees, the thatch of the eaves lifted their breast to the sun
and mist, and chimneys black with immemorial fires indicated the farms
of Westboro', rich, homely and respectable, as they left upon the
landscape harmonious color and history of thrift. To the east was the
dim suggestion of the little town, and some few miles in a hollow lay
the farmlands known as The Dials, and each second growing more
distinctly visible in the deepening light rose the towers of Penhaven
Abbey.
At the Duke's urging, Bulstrode had been led to stop on at Westboro'
Castle after the house party had dissolved at the end of their week's
sojourn; and there had since been many long tramps across country, with
the dogs at his heels and by his side the Duke, for the time diverted
from his semi-melancholy, semi-egotistical cynicism, and transformed
into an enthusiastic sport.
The Duke of Westboro' was a _desenchante_, more truly speaking a victim
of other peoples' temperaments. There were, however, not a few little
scores in the character of moral delinquencies which at least, so he
felt, he had been called upon quite fully to discharge.
The American man gave himself over to his host, and from the time
Westboro' put out a bait of "Oh, you're decidedly not turning in at
this hour, old man?" he flanked the Duke on the opposite side of the
fireplace in the East Library, there after coffee to wear away half the
night. During the following fortnight, Bulstrode found that he had
tallied up with his friend very closely the scores of the last few
miserable years.
Westboro's friendship with him dated back some ten years. Bulstrode
had first known the Englishman at Newport where, then not a young man,
he had come obviously and frankly in search of an American wife. The
search was unusual in that it was not for money, but, as Westboro' put
it, for type and race. His mother had been an American. He had adored
her, and wanted an American mother for his children. The woman
herself--and how Bulstrode saw it as he followed the deserted husband's
narrative--the woman had been a secondary thing. He recalled easily
the summary and conventional courtship and the vulgar brilliance of the
wedding. He had been one of Westboro's ushers, and his smaller part of
the affair left him with the distressing idea that he had assisted at a
sacrifice.
It would be euphemistic to say that Westboro' poured out his heart to
Bulstrode; Englishmen do not have such refreshments. Little by little,
rather in short curt phrases, a cynical word whose mocking fellow only
followed after some moments' silence--little by little, whilst the
smoky wreaths of the men's cigars veiled their confidences, the Duke
slowly told the story of ten years of married life. In this intimacy
he disclosed the history of the separation which formed at the moment
the subject of general public comment. Jimmy was relieved when the
moment came that the Duke thought opportune to say:
"There, old chap, you have the whole story! It's this cursed tradition
of marriage, and you're a lucky fellow to be free. I have never spoken
to any one before--you know it. I don't need to tell you so, but you
were in, as it were, at the start, and what do you think of the finish?"
Bulstrode reserved his opinion.
Westboro' Castle had been built in the sixteenth century by a lover of
the Virgin Queen. The stones were paved with memories. In the Picture
Hall the ardent gentleman three hundred years before had for one sole
hour entertained Elizabeth at a feast. She left him, obdurate and
unyielding, and he went crazy and followed the royal coach to the park
gate, weeping, his hands before his face; and there on the ground, his
fair curls torn, and the dust from the departing vehicles alone of the
glory that touched him, his people found him.
"How they prate of inequality, and of the crime of grafting the
American rose on these old stalks," Bulstrode mused. The beauty of
Frances, Duchess of Westboro', he had himself been one of the first to
concede; a portrait of her by Lehnbach did not to his eyes do her
justice. The fresh purity of her type had not been seized by the
German. She would be an ideal Duchess, he had said of her when the
mission of Westboro' to America had been bruited, and Westboro' had
thought: "She's a strong, fine woman, and will bear me beautiful
children."
She had borne him two. Bulstrode, in passing through the house, had
seen the low gates at the doors of two sunny rooms, the toys spread as
they had been lain. His own were the only apartments in that wing of
the castle, and the silence at the end of the hall was never broken.
When Westboro' had come to this part of his narrative, he had waited
quiet so long that his companion had naturally taken the evening to be
at its end. The Duke had thrown his cigar away, and lifting from the
table near him a leather case, opened it and handed over to Bulstrode
the photograph of two little bare-legged boys in sailor clothes. They
stood hand in hand, a pretty pair. Looking at it, and gently turning
it over on the other side, Bulstrode read:
"Frederick Cecil John Edward, Marquis of Wotherington, three years old.
Guy Perceval, Lord Feversham, aged two years."
Westboro's voice had a dull sound as he took the case from his friend's
hand.
"They are Westboro's I think, neck and crop. Scarlet fever--in three
days, Bulstrode--both in three days."
And that had been all.
Bulstrode had left the Duke and gone up-stairs. On the other side of
his cheerful rooms the empty nurseries in the ghostly moonlight held
their doors wide open as if to welcome at the low gates those bright
heads if they should come.
Jimmy, whose sentimentality consisted in his acting immediately when
anything was to be done, mixed a whiskey and soda from the array of
drinks that always exists at an Anglo-Saxon's elbow, and after a turn
or two in his dressing-room brought practically out:
"It's ridiculous! Sheer nonsense. There should be children here. The
woman is selfish and puritanical, and the man is no lover--_that's_
what's the matter! But Westboro' certainly loves her in his big, cold,
affectionate way." Jimmy smiled at his own fashion of putting it. And
how any woman, with a mind and common-sense, could help loving
Westboro' Castle and countryside, as well as Cecil, tenth Duke of the
line, the American visitor failed to see.
As the Duke of Westboro' thought of the members of his recent house
party--the women of it passed before his mental mirror. There were
several images of an American lady whose frocks and hats, whose wit and
grace, whose dark beauty had made her stay at Westboro' brilliant and
memorable. Possibly the remembrance of Mrs. Falconer, one night at
dinner, was what most persistently lingered in the Duke's mind. She
had sat on his left in a gown he remembered as becoming, and her jewels
had shone like fire on her bosom. He had particularly remarked them in
thinking of the idle jewels of his own house, left behind by the flight
of the Duchess. Mary Falconer had been more brilliant than her
ornaments, and Westboro' had thoroughly enjoyed his guest. He had
asked this woman especially because she charmed him; without forming
the reason he had a latent hope that she might do more than charm. He
wanted to forget and to be eased from the haunting memory that stung
and never soothed. From his first tete-a-tete with Mrs. Falconer he
had at once seen that there was nothing there for him.
Bulstrode had said that Westboro' was not a lover. Reserved as far as
all feeling was concerned, he had made no advances to the beautiful
American, but contented himself with watching her. She could not be in
love with her brutish husband who, out of the week spent at Westboro'
was visible only two days. Then Bulstrode had come. Pictures of the
two talking in the long twilights, riding together, walking on the
terrace side by side, came vividly to Westboro's recollection.
"That," he decided, "is a real flesh-and-blood woman, the kind of woman
I should have married. Bulstrode is a lucky devil."
"A chap," Westboro' said to Jimmy in a mild unpretentious mood of
philosophy, "is, of course, a husband; more naturally than people give
him credit for, a father; but first of all--and that's what so few
women take into consideration--_he is a man_."
The Duke had fallen into the habit of breaking through the silences
when each man, following his own thoughts, would forget the other. And
remarks such as these his companion knew, referred in sense and detail
to the long talks whose intenser personalities had ceased.
This day Westboro' brought out his little paragraph as, between the
hedges of a lowland lane, the two rode at a walk after a long hard
canter from Penhaven, some eight miles behind them on the hill. On
either side the top of the thorn was veiled with rime. Down the
hedge's thickness from his seat on his horse, Bulstrode could look into
the dark tangled interstices of the thicket and its delicious browns
and greens. Into the thorns here and there dried leaves had fallen,
and from the hedge as well as from the country, clouded and gray with
mist, came a sharpened sweetness; a blended smell of fields over which
early winter had passed; a smell of woods over which the fires cast
smoky veils. In the freshness and with the eager exercise, Bulstrode's
cheeks had reddened. He sat his horse well, and his enjoyment of life,
his ease with it, his charming spirit, shone in the face he turned to
the Duke. For some miles given over to the sympathetic task of
managing his horse, he had enjoyed like a boy, and during the ride had
thought of nothing but the physical delight of the open air and the
motion.
"Yes," he returned to his friend's remark, "as far as any point of
interest goes, we may grant you that we began as men. I mean to say
that monkeys aren't useful in one's deductions for emotional
hypotheses, at any rate. I'll grant you for our use that we were men
to begin with."
"Damn it all," said his host, "aren't we just as much so to-day, for
all our civilization?"
"Well, we don't primarily knock on the head a woman whose physique has
pleased us, and carry her off while she's unconscious."
"It might in some cases be a good thing if we did," Westboro' growled.
Bulstrode ran his hand along the silky neck of his horse, from whose
nostrils smoke came in little puffs that met the moisture of the air.
"Oh, we're not, you know, so awfully far away from our instincts in
anything, old man! There isn't any cast-iron rule about feelings.
They depend on the individual."
"Oh, you've never married," Westboro' tried frankly to irritate him,
"and you can't, you know----"
The sweet temper of the other accepted the Duke's scorn. "I'm not
married, or very theoretical about it, either. One can only, after
all, have his own point of view."
"We're not, I expect, fair to the women," the Duke generously
acknowledged. "We look for so much in them. We expect them to be so
much."
"A wife," Bulstrode completed for him, "a mother, a friend."
And Westboro' finished it. "For them and for other men. And a
mistress."
And here Bulstrode took him up for the first time with a note of
challenge in his voice.
"And what, my dear man, did you intend that the Duchess should take you
for? No, I mean to say, quite man to man, given that any woman could
or does contain all the qualities you so temperately ask?"
Westboro' smiled at the first curtness he had ever heard in his
friend's voice.
"Oh, you know, we men don't fuss about ourselves."
"You married her at eighteen," Bulstrode said. "You made her a
Duchess. You had already lived a life and she was a child beside you
in experience. You required motherhood of her, and in return...."
"Well," Westboro' turned about in his saddle and faced his earnest
friend. "What then, in your opinion, might I have been?"
"You might have been from the start," Bulstrode said it shortly, "a
lover. It's not a bad role. We Anglo-Saxons have no sentimental
education. Our puritanism makes us half the time timid at courtship
and love."
The gentlemen rode a little on with slackened rein. Westboro's
eyeglass cord was almost motionless as he stared out between his
horse's ears down the lane.
"Perhaps, after all," he fetched it out slowly, "there's something in
what you say."
Whether or not there was any truth in Bulstrode's commonplace remark,
it lingered in his host's mind all day. It gave him, for the first
time, a link to follow--an idea--and the Duke, entirely unused to
analysis, accustomed to act if not on impulse, certainly according to
his will and pleasure without concession, harked back in a groping,
touching fashion like an awkward boy looking for a lost treasure,
upsetting, as he went, old haunts, turning over things for years not
brought to the light of day. And it took him all the afternoon and a
good part of the evening to reach the place where he thought he had
lost originally his joy. Unlike the happier boy, he could not seize
his bliss once recovered, and stow it away; it was only remembrance
that brought him back, and with a tightening heart as he realized once
more the form and quality of his lost happiness--there he must leave it
and see it fade again into the past.
Jimmy gave his host a chance to follow his absorbed reflections. He
effaced himself, and behind a book whose lightness of touch made him
agreeably forget the heavier hand of current and daily events, he sat
in his dressing-room reading "The Vicar of Wakefield."
When Westboro' came in to him Jimmy looked up and quoted aloud: "When
lovely woman stoops to folly and finds at length that men betray...."
"Oh, they console themselves quickly," Westboro' finished. "Don't
fancy anything else, my dear fellow, they console themselves."
"They may pretend to do so."
"They succeed."
Westboro' took the little book from his friend's hand and shut it
firmly as if afraid that the rest of the verse might slip out and
refute him.
"Bulstrode, she consoles herself, she is perfectly happy."
"How are you then so sure?"
"Oh, I hear of her in Paris." The Duke's features contracted. "She's
contriving to pass her time--to pass her time."
Bulstrode leaned over towards his friend and, for Westboro' sat
opposite him, he put his hand on the Duke's knee.
"You must certainly go to her."
Westboro' stroked his moustache before he answered:
"Not if I never see her again."
"You should decidedly go to her."
The other shook his head. "Not if it meant twice the hell it is now."
"Why not?"
"I went to her once. I may say twice," he slowly said, "since we
separated." And as he stopped speaking Bulstrode could only imagine
what the result had been.
"I don't think I'm a Westboro' really, for I couldn't follow any
woman's carriage puling like a schoolboy as my ancestor did. There's a
great deal of my mother's blood in me, and it's a different blend."
Bulstrode's eyes were on the little book between the Duke's
aristocratic hands.