must clear out;" and he decided that at once, so soon as Westboro'
should be at home, he would take himself to ground still more neutral
than The Dials had proved to be. But Westboro' showed no intention of
coming immediately home. Instead, with a droll egoism, as if the fact
that he had made poor Bulstrode a party to his unhappiness gave him
thereafter a right to the other's time even in absence, he laid a firm
hold on Jimmy. Westboro' finally put pen to paper, and the scrappy
letter touched the deserted visitor; it proved to have been written at
a _bureau de poste_ in Paris:
"Don't, for God's sake, go off, old man. Keep up your end." (His
end!) "Stop on at Westboro'--Use the place as if it were all put up
for your amusement. Just live there so I may feel it's alive. Let me
find a human being at home when I turn up. I'll wire in a day or so."
"So he is in Paris, then." Bulstrode had supposed so, and did not
doubt that the Duke had gone there to find news of his wife, possibly
as well to see Madame de Bassevigne.
Poor fellow, if he were searching for the Duchess! Well, Bulstrode
would keep up his end, he had nothing else for the time being to do but
to mind other people's business. He put it so to himself. Indeed he
could not but believe it was fortunate for more than one person that
something could keep him from minding his own.
An undefined discretion kept him from going to the Moated Grange, as to
himself he styled the retreat the Duchess had made of The Dials. And,
in spite of the absolute freedom now given him to prowl about amongst
the books, in spite of his "evenings out" as he called them, Jimmy
found the time at Westboro' to drag lamentably. His own affairs, which
he so faithlessly denied, came to him in batches of letters whose
questions could not be solved by return mail. He became over his own
thoughts restless, and he sent a telegram to his host: "Better have a
look at things here yourself. Can't possibly stop on longer than...."
And he set a day.
"If Westboro', poor devil, has to look forward to a life of this
unaccompanied grandeur," he pitied him. The lines and files of
soft-footed, impersonal servants, the perfect stilted attention, the
silence, and the inhumanness of a man's lonely life, became intolerable
to Jimmy Bulstrode. Even though Frances, Duchess of Westboro', had
truly said that the castle was a delightful home, Bulstrode began to
wonder what that word comprised or meant: certainly nothing like his
occupation of another man's house or like any life that is lived alone.
At the end of the week that the American spent at Westboro' he had
condensed the castle, as he said to himself, as far as possible, to the
proportions of a Harlem flat, and he lived in it. In the almost small
breakfast room whose windows gave on the terrace, and where all the
December sun that was visible came to find him, he took his meals; each
of them but dinner, which was determinedly and imperially served by
five men in one of the dining-rooms, and at which function, as he
expressed it, he shut his eyes and just ate blindly through. He lived
out of doors all day, took his tea in his dressing-room, and read and
smoked until the august dinner hour called him down to dress and dine
alone. For a week he lived "without sight of a human being," so he
said, for the domestics were only machines. And, towards the end of
the week, he would have gone to see any one: an enemy would have been
too easy, and the only person within range was, of course, the Duchess
of Westboro'.
Westboro' had made a confidant of Bulstrode, and the woman had not.
Bulstrode liked it in her. To be sure, the cases were quite different:
there was no reason why the man deserted and bruised in his pride and
in his heart, should not have talked to his old friend. Westboro'
accused himself of weakness.
"I've blabbed like a woman," he acknowledged ruefully.
The Duchess had not spoken nor had she, on the other hand, with the
fine courage of the true woman, been in any eager haste to discover
what her husband had said of her, nor had she asked if he had spoken at
all. On the other hand, aided by an extreme patience and with still
greater delicacy, she had waited, understanding that her guest, whose
mettle and character she knew would not permit him to betray a trust,
might, however naively, disclose what he knew without being conscious
of it.
But if Bulstrode gave himself or his host away, the Duchess made no
sign that she had profited by indiscretions. The impersonality of
their conversations was indeed a relief to Bulstrode, and it made it
possible for him to feel himself less a traitor at the Duke's hearth.
But she talked very sweetly, too, of her children. She had the second
picture to the Duke's of the little boys, a picture like the one
Bulstrode had seen at the castle, and showed it to him as the father
had done.
"Westboro' has the companion to this," he had not minded telling her as
they sat together in the small room he had grown to know as well as the
larger rooms of the castle. And at the end of a few moments Bulstrode
quite blurted out: "Why, in Heaven's name do you women make men suffer
so?"
The Duchess, who had been working, dropped her bit of muslin and
looked, with her cherry lips parted and her great serious eyes, for all
the world like a lady in a gift book. Her face was eighteenth century
and child-like.
Bulstrode nodded. "Oh, yes, you've got so easily the upper hand, the
very least of you, you know, over the best of us. It's such an unfair
supremacy. You've got such a clever knowledge of little things, such a
sense of the scale of the feelings, and you certainly make the very
most of your power over us all. Can't you--" and his eyes, half
serious and half reproachful, seemed, as he looked at her, to question
all the womankind he knew--"Can't you ever love us well enough just
quite simply to make us happy?"
The Duchess had taken up her sewing again, and her eyes were upon it.
Bulstrode waited for a little, following her stitches through the
muslin and the flash of her thimble in the light.
"Can't you?" he softly repeated. "Isn't it, after all, a good sort of
way of spending one's life, this making another happy?"
"American women aren't taught so, you know," she said. "It isn't
taught us that the end and aim of our existence is to make a man happy."
Her companion didn't seem at all surprised.
"And so you see," she went on, "those of us that do learn that after
all there may be something in what you say--those of us that learn,
only find it out after a lot of hard experiences, and it is sometimes
too late!"
She seemed to think his direct question called for a distinct answer,
for she admitted: "Oh, yes, of course there are some of us who would
give a great deal to try. And you see, moreover," she went on with her
subject as she turned the corner of her square, "you put it well when
you said 'love enough.' You see that's the whole thing, Mr. Bulstrode,
to love enough. One can, of course, in that case, do nearly all there
is to do, can't one?"
"Nearly all," he had smiled, and added: "_And a great deal more_."
The household gods, whose dignity and harmony had not been disturbed
during the absence of the master of Westboro', were unable, however, to
give him very much comfort on his return. The Duke's motor cut quickly
up the long drive and severed--clove, as it were--a way through the
frosty air and let him into the park. The poor man had only a sense of
wretchedness on coming home--"coming back," he now put it. Huddled
down deep in his fur coat, its collar hunched round his ears, his face
was as gloomy as that of a man dispossessed of all his goods; doors
thrown open into the fragrant and agreeably warmed halls fetched him
further home. But the knowledge that the house had been lived in
during his absence was not ungrateful. He sniffed the odor of a
familiar brand of cigar, and before he had quite plumbed the melancholy
of the place to its depths, Jimmy Bulstrode had sunned out of one of
the inner rooms, and the grasp of the friendly hand and the sound of
the cheerful voice struck a chord in Westboro' that shook him.
"I've been like a fiend possessed," he said to Jimmy, in the evening
when they found themselves once more before the fire. "I've scarcely
known what I've been doing, or why; but I know one thing, and that is
that I'm the most wretched man alive."
Bulstrode nodded. "You _did_ go to Paris, then!"
"Yes," said the Duke, "and what I've found out there has driven me
insane."
Although ignorant of the variations of his friend's discovery,
Bulstrode was pretty certain of one that had not been made.
"You may, old chap," he said smoothly, "not have found out all the
truth, you know."
Westboro' raised his hand. "Come," he said, "no palliations; you can't
smooth over the facts. Frances is not in Paris. She has not been in
Paris for several months." He paused.
"In itself not a tragedy," murmured his friend. "Paris is considered
at times a place as well _not_ to be in."
But Bulstrode's remark did not distract his friend from his narrative.
"She has not been in Paris since I saw her twelve months ago, and she
has left no sign or trace of where she has gone. There is no address,
no way that I can find her. Not that a discovery is not of course
ultimately possible, but what, in the interval, if I should wish to
write to her? What if I should need to see her? What if I should die?"
"Would you, in any of those cases, send for her?"
"I don't know," the Duke admitted.
"But," Jimmy asked him, "did you go to Paris this time to see the
Duchess?"
"Since you ask me frankly," the Duke admitted, "I don't think that I
did."
"At all events," the other said, "you surely did not go to spy on her,
Westboro'?"
The Duke was silent, then answered quietly:
"I should never ask a question--not if it meant a certain discovery of
something that I feared or suspected. I don't think I should ever seek
to find out something she didn't want me to know."
Bulstrode, at the blindness of a man regarding his own intentions,
smiled behind his cigar. "Well?" he helped.
"I went over to France," said the Duke--"and I suppose you'll scarcely
believe a man who you say is not a lover to be capable of such
sentimentality--simply, if possible, to have a sight of my wife, to see
her go out of the door, or to see her go in, to see her possibly get
into a carriage; and how did I know that it would not be with another
man?"
"How did you find out that she had left?"
"I asked for her at her hotel."
"The first question, then," Jimmy smiled.
"A fair one?"
"Oh, perfectly."
"I was told that the Duchess had left Paris months before."
"And then?" the other man's voice was placid as he spoke for the Duke.
"Then you went to her bankers, her bakers and candlestick makers; in
short, you asked all over the place, didn't you?"
The Duke swore gently. "Well, what would you have a man do?"
"Why I would have him do that," nodded Jimmy, "by all means. Any man
would have done so."
In the half second of interval whilst the Duke was obliged to swallow
his friend's sarcasm, Bulstrode had time to think: "Here I am, once
more in the heart of an intrigue. Its fetters are all about me and I
am wretchedly bound by honor not to do the simple, natural thing."
Then he asked boldly: "Well, what do you think about it, Westboro'?"
"Think?" Westboro' repeated, "why, that she has deliberately escaped
from me, put herself out of any possible reach; she doesn't want a
reconciliation and she has gone away. She may have gone away alone and
she may not, that I don't know, and I don't believe I want to know."
"Oh, you'll find her." It was with the most delightful security and
contentment that his friend was able to tell the Duke this. But the
cheerful note struck the poor husband the disagreeablest of blows.
"Gad!" he laughed, "what a cold brand of creature a bachelor is! 'Find
her!' as one might speak of finding an umbrella that you've left by
mistake at your club. Of course she can be found. There are not many
mysteries that search can't solve in these days. And Duchesses don't
drop off the face of the earth. I could no doubt have found her in
twenty-four hours, but I didn't try to. I don't know that I want to
find her. It isn't the fact of where she's gone that counts--that she
wanted to go--that she has voluntarily made the separation final and
complete."
"Then," persisted the bachelor, "you don't really _want_ to find her?"
"Jove!" the Duke turned on him. "You don't know what it is to love a
woman! You've got some imagination--try to use it, can't you? Can't
you?"
He met the American's handsome eyes. A flush rose under Bulstrode's
cheek. Westboro' put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "I beg your
pardon, dear old chap."
"Oh, that's all right, old chap," Bulstrode assured cheerfully.
"My dear Duchess, it seems an unconscionable waste of time and life for
any one to ignore the inevitable! It's such a prodigal throwing out of
the window of riches!"
Bulstrode took her hands, both of them, in his as she stood in the
winter sunshine, the open house door behind her, the terrace and its
broken stairs of crumbling stone before her.
"Why, my dear lady, if I kept a diary of daily events I couldn't write
down one page of good reasons why you should be living here and
Westboro' up there, and I a comic go-between, in the secret of both and
the confidence of one."
"Oh," she interrupted, "then you're in the confidence...?"
"Of your husband, yes," Bulstrode found himself startled into betrayal.
She drew her hands from him and walked on a little in the sunshine, and
he followed by her side.
"I don't mind," she permitted, "you're such a perfect dear. I
shouldn't mind at all if I thought that the confidence were a good one."
Her tone was light and cool, but the gentleman never failed to notice
when the Duchess spoke of the Duke that there was a tremor under her
words, a warmth, an agitation, which she vainly tried to control.
"Confidences," she said, "are very rarely just, you know, and _les
absents ont toujours tort_."
"Oh, you don't mean...?" Jimmy emphasized.
"It was a confidence, wasn't it?"
"A real one," she was assured.
"Well then, you'll keep it, of course."
She drew the stole up round her long fair neck; her delicate head came
out of the soft fur like a flower. But before she could follow up her
words Bulstrode said:
"You, of course, then know how he loves you."
He felt more than knew that she trembled, and he saw an instinctive
gesture which he understood meant that he should be silent.
"You and I put it quite clearly, Mr. Bulstrode, the other day." Her
voice was serene again. "If only one cares enough--that's the
necessary thing for every question."
"Well?"
She half shrugged, made a little motion with her white hands, and this
answer said for her: "That is indeed the question, and I haven't solved
it."
They stopped at the terraced walk. The low stones, dark and black,
were filled in their interstices with fine lines of greenish moss. On
the sunny corner the dial's shadow fell across the noon. The Duchess
put her hand on the warmed stones.
"It's a heavenly day," she said, "I don't believe that the Riviera is
warmer. I never have seen such an English December."
Her eyes, which had been fixed on the woods below the garden, now
turned towards the house and rested on one of the upper windows where
the sun fell on the little panes. The Duchess remained looking up a
few seconds, then she came back to her guest.
"I started, you know, to tell you something," Bulstrode smiled at her.
"I once served on a jury in the West, and although the case was a
miserably sad one in every way, I suppose, I couldn't take it as
seriously as I should have done, for from the first the whole thing
seemed so unnecessary, and the crisis could so easily have been
avoided."
"I know," she interrupted him, "but you're rather wrong. Not from the
first."
He capitulated. "Well, grant it so if you like, only agree with me
when I say from my own--" he put his hand down on the dial's edge.
"From this lovely noon-time on, every hour you waste is clear loss.
The Duke loves you as women are rarely loved, and after all," he said
with something like passion in his agreeable voice "what _do_ you all
expect? Love doesn't hang on every tree for a woman to pluck at will,
and you have the great luck, my dear Duchess, to be loved by your own
husband. Why don't you go to him?"
"Go to him?" she echoed.
He curtly replied: "Why not?"
"My dear friend!"
"Why, didn't you forbid him to go to you?"
"Ah," she nodded, "the confidence, it was intimate indeed. But since
you have got it, won't you agree that any man, if he loved a woman,
would disobey her?"
"Westboro' would not."
The Duchess said coldly: "Pride is not love."
"You didn't mean him, then, to keep his vow?"
"Yes," she slowly thought out, "I did indeed, with all my heart."
"And now?"
She turned towards the house again, and as she walked back, said: "I
don't quite know."
And Bulstrode asked her: "That is why you are here, to find out?"
"Partly."
Her companion's face grew stern. The Duchess did not see it for her
eyes had again swept the upper window. At her side Bulstrode went on:
"You have taken ten years to discover that you did not love your
husband. You have taken one year to begin to wonder, to doubt, to
suspect, to half think that you do; it's an unstable state of heart,
Duchess, terribly unstable."
The woman stopped short at his side, and now as she lifted up her eyes
and saw him, was a little startled if not frightened at his expression.
"Unstable," she repeated, with a world of scorn in her voice. "How can
you use that word to me, knowing the facts of the case?"
"Oh, a man," said Bulstrode rather impatiently, "is a worthless,
wretched piece of mechanism altogether. I grant you that--utterly
unworthy the love and confidence of any good woman. He is capable of
all the vagaries and infidelities possible. We'll judge him so. But,"
he continued, "these wandering, vagrant derelicts have been known to
tie fast, to find port, to drop anchor. They have even brought great
riches and important treasure into harbor, fetched a world of good luck
home. There's only one thing in the universe that can keep a man,
Duchess, only one."
"Well?" she encouraged him.
"A woman's heart," he said deeply, "a woman's true tenderness; and it
needs all that heart, all its love, all its patience and sacrifice to
keep that man--all and forever."
He saw her bosom heave; she had thrown her fur off, as if its warmth
stifled her. Vivid color had come into her face. Her pallor for the
time was destroyed, and as she flashed a rebellious look at him, a look
of revolt and selfhood, he seemed to see again the American
girl--wilful, egotistical, spoiled--an imperious creature whose
caprices had been opposed to the Duke's Anglo-Saxon temperament and
national egoism.
At this moment, the window the Duchess looked towards opened part way:
it was under the eaves and there must have been a dovecote near, for
there came the soft sound of cooing like the call of a young bird.
Possibly the gentle note reached the woman's hearing as well, for her
face transcendently softened.
"I think," she said with evident effort to speak in a commonplace tone,
"it would be quite futile to urge Cecil to come."
"Oh, I shan't advise him so."
Bulstrode's quick answer made her look at him in so much surprise that
he went on to say: "I would not, in justice to him, in justice to the
great love I have been permitted to see, advise him to come."
The Duchess, during the months of analysis, suffering and experience,
had not admitted to herself that should her husband return she would
receive him, nor had she decided as to quite how obdurate she would be,
and she was curious at the attitude of this gentle friend. She naively
asked:
"Why would you not advise him so?"
Bulstrode said, still continuing his pleasant sententiousness, "The
woman's heart must be as stable as the man's is uncertain, and the man
who comes back after such a separation must not find a woman who does
not know her own mind. He must, on the contrary, find one who has no
mind or will or life but his."
As he looked at the person to whom he spoke he was somewhat struck by
the maternal look in her: he had never clearly discovered it before.
Her breast from which the fur had fallen, as it rose and fell under her
soft gown, was full, generous, and beautiful; even as he spoke in a
certain accusation against her, she seemed to have altered.
"Westboro'," he said a little confused, "must come back to a woman,
Duchess, to a woman--to a consoler. I wish I could express
myself--almost to a mother--as well as to a wife."
The ardent color dyed her face again; her lips moved. She put out her
hand towards him, and as he took it he understood that she wished him
to bid her good-by and to leave her alone. He heard what she struggled
to say:
"He must not come, he must not come."
"No," he accepted sadly for his friend, "No, he must not come."
Bulstrode had chosen those times for going to The Dials when his host
was least likely to take note of his absence; but it happened that more
than once the Duke missed him at just the wrong moment, and more than
once had been given the direction in which Bulstrode's footsteps had
turned.
One morning, during a talk with his agent, Westboro'--the map of the
district before him--enquired what had ever been done with the property
known as The Dials, and into whose hands the old place had fallen. It
seemed that it had been let for some months to a foreigner, a widow,
who lived there, and alone.
Westboro' considered the farms and forests, as they lay mapped out
before him, at the extreme foot of the castle's parks. It was a little
square of some fifty acres by itself; it had never interested him
before.
How long did the lease run on? Did the agent know? He believed for
another year.
The Duke gave instructions to have the property looked into, with a
view to purchase. And as the man put up his papers, he vouchsafed to
his employer:
"The present tenant is very exclusive; she sees nobody, has never, I
believe, even been to the Abbey. An old gardener who has been kept on
says the servants are all foreign."
The Duke gave only a tepid interest to the information which would have
passed entirely from his mind had it not been for his next meeting with
Jimmy Bulstrode.
As much to shake off the impression his last talk with the Duchess had
left on his mind, as to prolong his exercise, Jimmy had gone down out
of the garden and across the place on foot over the rough winter fields
with their rimy furrows and their barren floors. As he made his way
towards the bottom hedge, looking for a stile he knew would be there a
little farther on, cutting an entrance out through the thorn to the
road, he met Westboro', like himself, on foot, and with his hand upon
the stile. The presence of the Duke where Bulstrode knew he was least
thought to be, and where he was now sadly sure he was not opportune,
made Jimmy stop short, troubled, and, not for a moment thinking that
the fact of his being there _himself_ was singular, he made his way
determinedly through the stile. As he greeted his friend, his own
demeanor was decidedly one which said: "Don't go on in that direction,
follow rather out of the turnstile with _me_." And he led his friend
rather brusquely down the bank, hitching his arm in Westboro's, forced
him along with him into the road.
"I ran down here to look over these meadows," said Westboro.' "You
seem yourself, in a way, to be pacing the land off!"
"Oh, I _love_ cross-country walking," said Bulstrode warmly.
"You must," smiled the Duke, "to have cut off into those barren fields.
Were you lost?" Westboro' stopped and looked back. "You must have
come directly down through The Dials."
"_The Dials_?" the American helplessly repeated. "Do you mean the old
house and garden?"
Bulstrode's manner and speech were rarely curt and evasive, but he
seemed this time embarrassed and taken unawares. As the two men sat in
the motor which waited for the Duke down the road, Westboro' fixed his
glass in his eye and looked hard for a second at his friend.
Bulstrode's cheerful face was distinctly disturbed.
"I'm thinking something of buying The Dials," Westboro', after a
moment, said against the wind.
Poor Jimmy. If the house had not sufficiently up till now materialized
out of his fancy as a possession, it declared itself at once, without
doubt, as something he must look after. It was only a little bit of
England, luckily----
"Well," he exclaimed, "to be frank, old man, I've, too, been thinking I
should like to buy that property. You could surely spare me this
little corner of Glousceshire."
"Spare it!" cried Westboro', "my dear chap, fancy how ripping to have
you a landlord here! To catch and hold you so! We'll go over the
whole place together. My agent shall put the matter through for you."