chains, and the other half trying to make ourselves free." Hadn't she
wrenched with all her might to be rid of hers? materially she still
wore her bonds and moved with a ball.
As she had driven away from Charing Cross Station, a month ago, after
seeing her husband aboard the Dover and Calais special, she had
breathed--breathed--breathed--stretched her arms and hands out to
London, felt on her eye and brow a dew that meant the very dawning of
liberty broke for her, and that she was for the time at least blessed
by it, and free.
The Sorghams' London house had opened its refuge wide for her, and she
had gone into it like a child, to sleep and rest, and there she had
grown up again, to begin to think and to plan, project and puzzle as
those who grow up must do. She had never thought to such practical
purpose as she did in these days, and never come so nearly reaching an
end.
Just before dressing for dinner on this night, at the sensation the
touch of her husband's telegram gave her, she realized how near to a
not unusual decision she was, and when she put the envelope by with the
rest of her mail, the part of her mind which she would not let herself
look into was in confusion and doubt.
More effectively than Falconer's coming could have done, his few
telegraphed words brought him to his wife's consideration. And the
fantastic story of The Dials helped her, ridiculous as it was,
burlesque as it was, to think; in the very humor of it, a shock, and
helped her more reasonably to consider what otherwise her feelings
would have turned to tragedy.
Jimmy's ecstasies about the place recurred to her with renewed
cordiality. He had spent an hour at least describing it, and when he
had finished with "A woman must be there, it is made for a woman," Mary
Falconer had only seen herself in the frame that the old place
presented. She exclaimed aloud: "Oh, no, no," and continued to affirm
to herself that it was too fantastically absurd--"Jimmy!"
"It's only some delightful bit of charity, and he's too afraid of my
wretched conservatism and my ironies to have told me frankly about it."
Having in a very unfeminine way opened a crack for reason, its honest
face peered through, and Mary Falconer glanced at it with a sigh and a
half-amused recognition, as if she had not been face to face with
anything so cool and eminent for a long time.
Jimmy had hinted to her of a secret, in London; there was something he
said he wished to tell her about, would tell her in full later,
something that involved much happiness to others, and could it have
been this? Could it have been that he was really secretly married?
That at last the step of which he had constantly spoken, for which
indeed there had been times when together they had half-heartedly
planned for it, could it be that the one safeguard for them both had
actually been formed by him, and alone? But only a second would she
permit this conception of The Dials to obtain hold. "Ridiculous!" she
repeated, "ridiculous! Not that I believe a word or any innuendo of
the shocking old wizard, but it only shows, it only shows the
helplessness of a woman who is not bound to a man, and how entirely the
man is free!"
Nothing a man does counts well for him with a woman but those things he
does in accordance with her estimate of what his attitude towards her
should be! And Bulstrode's high-minded control, the reserve--which
since her marriage had been maintained, only counted now against him.
Wasn't she, in it all, rather counting without her host? Their bond
was so tacit, so silent, so unworded. Indeed, he had made no bond, had
asked her for no pledge. She was tied hand and foot, but he was free.
And over that freedom what vague right had she? What dominion could
she have? Isn't it, after all, in the life of a clever, delightful
man, something not strictly a burden, the soul-absorbing entire
devotion of a woman not too old and more or less not generally
disliked? What did it--heavens, but she was analyzing--what did it
cost him? Hadn't he always gone from her at a moment's warning, and
stopped away for months and months? Imperious as by nature she was,
she had always been wise enough to reserve a summons from her that, she
had every reason to believe, would fetch him from any distance to her
side. She never tested him, she scarcely ever wrote to him; she had
been at the Sorghams', and alone for a month, and save for one
perfectly delightful day he had not once turned up to keep her company.
As the woman's thoughts encompassed the subject they brought it up to
this: that as far as things went, at all events, there was no blame: no
matter how society had coupled their names, she had at least the
conscience of her acts clear. Jimmy was to be thanked for it from
beginning to end; as far as the conscience of her thoughts went, well,
those were her own affair. Oh, she could recall skirmishes and narrow
impasses! Her tactics had more than once been those only permitted by
the codes of battle, and of another passion.
Her chair, which she had left, she passed and repassed as she walked up
and down, trailing her soft dress across the floor. She stood before
the fire, her foot held out to the fervent flame.
Her face softened as there came out clearly to her the real picture of
Jimmy that always kept itself somewhere between her eyes and her brain.
Ah, there were men of talent and fashion, who did not hesitate to make
merry, who were more or less good, more or less anti-pathetic, and for
whom society never had a word of reproach--but Jimmy! distinguished and
charming, with every taste and means to gratify them, with--so to put
it--the woman of his heart at his very doors--how did he live? Why,
for everybody in the world but for himself. And through it all, in
spite of the fact that he appeared blindly to shut his eyes against
their mutual love, he lived for her. Oh, he was the best, the best!
She listened as she stood there for the hum of the motor which might
tell her he was coming back. She wanted to ask him to tell her the
truth about The Dials. She wanted, above all else, to see him again.
She remembered them, one by one, the happy occasions they had caught
and made the most of, and each after the other they became lovely
harbors where like ships her thoughts lay at anchor. Penhaven was
certainly one of the best. She congratulated herself that she had
conceived that day, and without any blame she acknowledged it to
herself, that if Jimmy had only wished it they would have been there
together now.
She had taken her chair again and sat back deeply in the great
fauteuil. The brocade made a dark-hued background against which her
head, frankly thrown back, defined its charming lines. Her bare arms
folded across her breast, her foot swinging gently to and fro, she
continued to muse and dream, and as she thought of Bulstrode, to love
him.
Some one came in and piled up the fire and slipped out, but no message
was brought her to tell her what had become of her host and her friend.
The long sympathetic silence beginning at the fireside flowed through
the vast rooms and corridors, and out into the night, down the lanes
and the road until its completeness and tonelessness were broken by the
memory of the bells of Penhaven, as she and Jimmy had heard them whilst
they rang the angelus in the close. And the discordant note of The
Dials was drowned, confused and lost in her intense listening to the
Penhaven bells. Some chord or other, or some fine spring touched as
she so thought on, brought back to her the fact of the despatch
upstairs, which if it had any, had an imperative importance. Falconer
had sent it from Palm Beach where he had gone to get rid of a
troublesome grippe. He did not, in the few lines which told he was
seedy and had put off his sailing, suggest that she should go back.
But he would not resent her return, she knew that, he would probably
treat her decently for at least a fortnight.
"I don't know a creature," she praised herself, "who would have stayed
on with Jack, and nothing but Jimmy has helped me to stick it out. If
he really loved me would he have let me go on as I have gone on? I
don't know. Unless he loved me could he have helped me at all? I
think not."
Round the figure of her friend there began to group, as if for some
special purpose, the kindnesses and charities she had seen him display.
One by one she added up his gifts and benefits until the poor and
outcast and forgotten and despised claimed all of them to be his
friends; they gathered round him and in place of the categoric
histories of self-love and indulgence, of passion that had in more or
less degree characterized the men of her set, these things came till
the dawn of them and the light of them made his figure shine. How, she
thought, could he ever have been what he so wonderfully is, if he had
lived for himself or been anything but the best? Upstairs, in her
room, a few hours before, the mark of silver on her hair had been a
whip to urge on her rebellion; to tell her to seize and make the most
of the fleeting time, to warn her of the age which when her beauty and
her youth were gone, was all that could remain for them both. But now
there began to blow across her soul a freshness. She had indeed been
drawing long breaths in her husband's absence, but free as they were
they left her stifled and panting, as if to get the oxygen she had been
obliged to climb too far. Now, on the contrary, she was lifted as by
wings, and whilst they fluttered about her she breathed evenly yet
fully, and the air on the heights was something better than wine.
There is an unspoiled enjoyment in the thing which has never given us
pain. It may be a sensual and ecstatic prerogative of passion to make
the object suffer, but there is a different sense of happiness in that
which never does harm or hurt or wrong to the thing it loves. So she
could think of Bulstrode, without pain, without regret, without
reproach. And if the ardor and passion in her became suffused and
slowly paled, there was a starry brightness, a beauty in her face and
in her eyes such as Bulstrode, when he came in to find her waiting, had
never seen before.
With every mile of the short run from The Dials back to the castle,
Mrs. Falconer's friend had been preparing himself for his meeting with
the woman he had left some few hours before. All his emotions
culminated in a high, swinging excitement. The fact that he was going
back alone to find Mary Falconer there, was the big motif, and as he
thought of the dark, charming envelope the castle made, holding the
treasure she was, keeping her there for him, his heart beat so high
that he knew there was nothing more for him to feel. The ecstasy he
had witnessed in the little house his chivalry had purchased, the
meeting of the husband and wife, come together there after so much
unhappiness, put it poignantly to him that sterile love is a very
unsatisfactory thing indeed. And if the highest quality of gallantry
is to consider a woman's honor before her love, it at least makes real
happiness--so he felt then--impossible in the world.
One false swerve of the motor at the pace they were going, and there
would not be any more problems to solve. If he died now he might
justly say that he had not lived, he had not lived! Who would give him
back what he had missed? The motto on the dials repeated itself to
him: _Utere dum licet_.
He pushed into the castle on his arrival, hurried to dress, and went
downstairs. It seemed to him as he put aside the portieres, that these
curtains were at last all there was between himself and her, that he
was going home, coming home at last; that ways he had for years seen
approaching, met at length to-night here. It was with the very clear
realization of the culmination of the time that Bulstrode went in to
find his friend.
He had stopped to make himself irreproachable, and expected to find her
waiting and friendly and lovely. What, had he found her anything else?
But as rising from her chair, the scarf slipping back from her bare
shoulders, she put out her hand and greeted him, the dazzling sense
that breaks on a man's consciousness when he finds himself alone with
the woman he loves, proved for a second that he had need of all his
control. He could not speak.
"Jimmy!" she exclaimed, "you're as white as a ghost! You look as
though you'd been to a wake; and I don't believe you've had a mouthful
of dinner."
He remembered that it might be polite to apologize to her for the
entire desertion of the household.
"My poor friend, what in Heaven's name must you think of us all!"
"Of you all?" (True enough, there had been another!) She had thought
volumes, comedies, tragedies, melodramas, but what she thought didn't
so much matter as did the fact that he had not, whatever festivities he
had honored, dined. Shouldn't they have something here together before
the fire?
"I seem," she said, "to have a blighting effect upon my host."
"My friend Westboro' is the happiest man in Glousceshire."
"Which means that he has found his Duchess?"
"He has found his Duchess."
When her friend entered the room, by the light on his face like the
brightness of the morning as he caught sight of her, Mary Falconer saw
that for Jimmy Bulstrode she was still the one woman in the world. In
the relief that this knowledge brought her she half attempted to play
with what had been her suspicions, and to tease him, but this mood
passed.
"That's a horrid old parson they chose to have me dine with," she said.
"He told me dreadful scandals but I think now that I see through them
all. The Duchess of Westboro' has been living incognita at The Dials,
hasn't she, and her husband at last found her there?"
Bulstrode acknowledged that she had read the drama correctly. And Mary
Falconer laughed.
"Yes, evidently the Duchess has a strong dramatic sense; she's very
romantic, isn't she?"
And the man absently exclaimed: "Oh, I dare say, I dare say." Then
turning to her with unusual vehemence: "Do, for Heaven's sake leave
them and everybody. I want to forget them all."
He threw up his hand with a sort of supplication. He had seated
himself on a tapestried stool close beside the chair she had taken
again. Using her Christian name for one of the rare times in his life,
he pleaded: "Can't we leave all other people, Mary, can't we?"
She looked at him startled and said that their host seemed pretty
effectually to have left _them_, rising from her chair with the words,
and crossing the room to one of the long windows, drew back the curtain.
The cold glass against which she pressed her cheek sent a shock through
her, but she stayed for a second close to the pane as if she would
implore the newer transport, the stiller transport, of the icy cold to
transfuse her veins.
The changed temperature had chased away the fog, and the night spread
its serene beauty over the park, where the moonlight lay along the
terrace like snow. Far down the slope rose the outlines of the bare
trees, and the wide landscape shone and shone until it finally was lost
in the mists.
Bulstrode had followed over and stood by Mary Falconer's side, and the
scene before him seemed full of joy, full of gifts, full of largesse.
The ornament on the woman's bosom stirred with her breathing, shot a
million fine sparkles, and below it the spray of mistletoe rose and
fell, rose and fell.
He put his hand out and took the spray and fastened it in his
buttonhole, saying that the mistletoe was above her head.
His voice, one she had never heard, made her unwisely turn to meet his
eyes, to shake with the emotion of the adventurer trembling on the edge
of the precipice; just to hang over which, and to shudder, he has
climbed high. She put her hand out between them, holding him back.
"I've had a telegram from my husband. He's very ill. He's in Palm
Beach and I'm going over to him next week."
[Illustration: "I've had a telegram from my husband"]
Falconer's name was sovereign for breaking spells as far as Jimmy was
concerned, but the wife's phrase this time gave him only a more violent
revelation of his cruel hope. She went on:
"It's not alarming, but with a heart like Jack's, anything might
happen. It's only when I'm with him that he keeps up any sort of
shape."
The fact of his holding in his the hand that she had put out to keep
him from her, did not serve to aid in a serene continuation of her
plans, and the silence became a burden which if she did not herself
lift would crush her.
She said hurriedly: "And you will help me to go."
And then Bulstrode spoke: "No," he said, "Oh, no."
For the briefest space she yielded to what he meant and was at last
wicked enough and human enough to promise to do. But she had on this
solemn evening--for it had so been--come too far, gone up too high to
drag down all the way with him on a single word. In supremest
happiness, however, at what he said and how he said it, she gave a
little soft laugh, and although she was under the mistletoe, she felt
that she looked down on him, loving him so much more that in adorable
weakness he had suddenly grown small and dear.
"Oh, Jimmy," she whispered, "how heavenly of you, but you can't go back
on ten years in one week. You can't, you know! You've thrown me like
a giant so _far_, I've gone right on up."
Still looking at her he shook his head as she repeated: "You'll help
me, you'll help me! You can't go back!"
"I _can_ go back," he said deeply, "_on everything and everybody in the
world_."
At the frank simple words, and the sense of what they meant, at the
sound of his new voice, it was as if all the dykes at last were down;
and strong, bright, but most beautiful, the sea came rushing in. As
she saw him coming toward her and knew that in a moment more she would
be in his arms, and that at his first touch she would let everything
go, she found one word to say and it proved only to be his name:
"Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!"
But there was in it an appeal. She could count the times she had wept
in her life, very nearly, she had often said that a woman weeps only
when she has nothing else to do, and there had always been so much,
every minute in her life; and as if in logical affirmation there seemed
now for her nothing to do but to cry. The tears which covered her face
and fell into her palms and against the chair on which she leaned,
comforted her in a measure and served to loosen the tension of her
mind. She had succeeded in miraculously keeping away from him, just
within touch of her, held back by a hand whose white gentleness was not
so exquisitely strong but that he loved her too well to break the
tender barrier. She never afterward knew what appeals she made or how
she besought, but it must have been of great force to keep him so
transfixed and pale.
"Oh, you _have_ told me over and over again! Do you think I am deaf or
blind, or that I have found you dumb? Such love, Jimmy, such high,
sweet perfectness! Why, there isn't a woman in a million who has known
it or even dreamed what such love could mean. Why, there hasn't been a
day or an hour for ten years that you have not spoken it to me in the
most adorable way, in the most beautiful way; and in every kind thing
you have done, in every foolish, dear thing, I have been so vain as to
think that I counted for something in it, that you did it a little for
me. Other women have had their lovers, their scandals, their great
passions. But I have had you without flaw, without a change, without
regret. Hush!" she cried, wiping her tears away, "Hush. It's quite
safe to let me go on. The only fear is that _you_ may speak."
The arm which she had held out to keep him from her had fallen upon his
shoulder, lay about his neck as he knelt by her chair.
"It's been horrible!" she said, shaking her head, "Horrible--the days
and the nights, the days and the nights! There have been times when I
could have killed him and killed myself as well. But then you've come,
and your presence has helped me, and that's the way I've pulled along;
because by your silence you told me to pull along, because by the fact
that you didn't speak I understood that you thought I should be brave,
and I have been--thanks to you, and I shall be--thanks to you! Oh!"
she cried passionately, "if you think because I am saying it all out
that I want to go back, that I don't see what I am running away from,
and what you mean, you're cruel, you're cruel!"
Her other hand had found its fellow and they both lay on his shoulders.
"I only think of you," he breathed, "and of how..."
She covered his lips. "Oh, hush, hush, you have told me, in the only
way there was to tell. I'm too stupid to be able to combine a lover
and a husband. The day and the hour you spoke I should never have seen
my husband again. And that's where it stands; that's how it is, and
you know it. You loved me because I was like that, and I love you
because you are the bravest of the brave. There you are!" she cried,
and drew away from him triumphantly, letting her arms fall. "There we
both are!"
"Have you any vague conception of what this is for me?" Bulstrode asked.
"Oh, I dare say," she exclaimed, with a kind of petulance, "that I am
only thinking of my own bewildering happiness. There," she exclaimed
at his face, "I see you have a new weapon: pity. Oh, don't use that
against me, and I warn you that everything in the world will crumble if
you speak."
Her hands, which he was holding closely, she drew from him and laid
them both on his breast and met his eyes full with her own. Her lips
were slightly trembling, and she was as white as a winter day. In the
moment of silence they passed like this, she seemed to him like some
great precious pearl, some priceless rose fragrant, lustrous, made for
him, gathered for him, and yet beyond his right. She seemed, above
all, the woman, the mate; her glorious sex, her tenderness, her
humanness, drew him and dazzled him; and, nevertheless, through his
daze and over his desire, he heard with his finest her cry:
"Jimmy, Jimmy, don't speak, don't speak. Ah, if you really love me..."
He really loved her. Rising from where he knelt by her chair,
Bulstrode went over, stood a second by the chimneypiece, and then took
a few paces up and down the room, came back to her and said the thing
the real man says to the woman he really loves:
"I want to make you happy, Mary. I will do whatever you wish me to do."
"Ah, then, go!"
Bulstrode looked wearily about as though of its own accord a door might
unclose or a portiere lift.
"Go where, pray, at this time of night, or morning?"
"Oh, to The Dials. Ring for a motor; they will take you in again; or
go to the rector's."
The last of the fire had flared up. The flame went out.
Sinking back in her chair, she waited in a tranced stillness, her eyes
on the ashes of the fire. She had said her say out, perhaps the man
knew it, and as she leaned back in the cushions he saw how completely
it all lay with him at the end. She thought he came back and waited a
second at her side; she thought he bent a moment over her, but she did
not stir until the cold wind from an opening door, till the clicking of
a latch made her start, and then she turned to see that he had gone.
Bulstrode came back to the castle Christmas Day at nine o'clock. But
the hour had the effect of being much earlier. The winter morning
panoplied with festivity began its life slowly, and not all the day's
brightness through which he had speeded his motor had yet come into the
house. Bulstrode, drawn by it, went directly back to the room he had
left several hours before, as though he expected still to find the
woman he loved sitting before the extinguished fire.
Two parlor maids were whisking their skirts and dusters out of the
opposite door, a footman at their heels. Touches of the inevitable
order which reduces an agreeable disarray to the impersonal had already
been put to the scene of Jimmy's tenderness, and the curtains drawn
well away from the long windows let in the morning that entered broadly
and fell across the hearth and the fresh-lit fire.