Minne-Adélaïde was gone, but her work remained. A week had passed, but
Gundred could never forget that dialogue. Still as far from her mind as
ever was any crude distrust of her husband. It was not in her nature
to have vulgar suspicions--to attribute to others that ugly baseness of
which she herself could never have been capable. But, none the less,
she grew vaguely fretted by Isabel’s presence, vaguely unhappy over
the interest that Kingston took in her cousin. The two were always
saying things that Gundred could not understand. Bit by bit she grew to
feel that even to be an efficient housekeeper and a nice, well-dressed
person is not always quite sufficient for a wife’s endowment. She made
spasmodic attempts to follow Isabel’s flights into the abstract, and
sometimes gave a book the preference over needlework. Her conversation
became ambitious, aiming at brilliancy, but only achieving flatulence.
She talked in capital letters, of high big words without definitions.
Her contributions to ethical debate were windy, wearisome, perpetually
circular and pointless. She saw that she could not attain to Isabel’s
fantastic lightness of touch; she tramped a heavy ring of argument,
and, being for ever unable to analyze her own meaning, was quite
incapable of conveying it to others. Never before had she found herself
inadequate. Now the conviction grew upon her that inadequate--at
least, in some directions--she certainly was. She took refuge in the
consciousness of her wedding-ring, and in the thought that impiety
would be involved in the sharing of much that her husband and Isabel
talked of. And for no possible consideration of earthly happiness would
Gundred have wished to share impiety.
Kingston and Isabel noticed Gundred’s efforts to keep pace with
their conversations. On Isabel they had no effect. Isabel admitted
no consideration of Gundred to any place in her life. She lived
alone with Kingston, in a world of their own creation, and Gundred
had for her little, if any, real existence. On Kingston Gundred’s
manœuvres impressed the full ill-luck of the situation. He saw how
she was trying to come near him, and her struggles to do so only
emphasized the fact that she was far away. Her attempt had come
too late. Understanding now, as he did, the relation in which his
whole soul stood to Isabel’s, it became piteous to watch Gundred’s
efforts, and understand their futility. He redoubled the warmth of
his demonstrations, and, after the habit of men, tried to make up for
denying her what she wanted by lavishing upon her everything she did
not. Outward signs no longer satisfied her; she had awaked to the fact
that true marriage involves the exchange of something more, and that
something more it was not now in Kingston’s power to give her. He
was delightfully attentive, delightfully demonstrative; he picked up
cushions, placed footstools and pillows, fetched and carried with eager
docility; he complimented, praised, gave lip-worship and kisses and
embraces; but these vigorous manifestations were all so many simulacra
of the love that was lacking. Gundred insensibly came to realize the
lack, and Kingston’s well-meant attempts to dissemble it only had the
effect of forcing it on her attention. He gave her no cause to feel
lonely, was always at her side, always included her in the talk, never
allowed himself to be alone with Isabel. Yet lonely Gundred still
felt herself--shut out from something. By whose fault? The fault was
undiscoverable.
Her husband’s attitude was negative and balanced. He threw all his
efforts into making good to Gundred the fraud that he had innocently
perpetrated. He had no need to look at Isabel, to talk to her, to
aggravate the trouble of Gundred’s position. To Kingston and Isabel
their secret glory was glory enough. He even shrank from the idea
of open friendship with the woman whom his heart loved. It was
enough--completely, triumphantly enough--that she should be there in
the same house with him, and that he should be for ever conscious of
her presence and her relationship to himself. That relationship might
have been profaned, spoiled, made common, had they allowed themselves
to indulge in talk, in rapture, in the perilous delights of intimacy.
As things were, it remained a lovely secret possession, a thing between
them both, silent and holy, not to be brought down to earth. The
earthly agonies had passed, or only recurred for fleeting moments. The
privilege of keeping sacred a feeling so absorbing was enough for the
glorification of the present. Morbid and perilous, the situation stood.
A month would probably have destroyed its frail balance. In the nature
of things it could not last. No sane lover could have contemplated its
lasting. But Kingston and Isabel had no plan. They lived from hour to
hour; they did not dare to look forward. Destiny would somehow loose
the knot of their relations. Silent love was enough for the moment.
Their emotions hung breathless on a delicate poise that would not
let them contemplate any to-morrow. Besides, such a transcendental
attitude, so dangerous, so unpractical, so deadly, left Kingston’s
nature free to pay consolatory court to Gundred. With all his external
nature he did homage to his wife, and concentrated his skill on paying
in full to Gundred the debt he owed. Exalted and fantastic, rather than
sensual and practical, his temperament made the task easier than it
might have been found by many better, more full-blooded men. To him it
became rather a fine martyrdom, in the successful achievement of which
lay not only purification, but even pleasure. In the mutilation of the
lower self for the sake of the higher he found a comfort so keen as to
be almost joy.
Thus, in eager self-mortification, he humbled himself before Gundred,
and believed that she had no suspicion of any defaultings on his
side. He felt that he was giving her good measure, pressed down and
running over--though only of the second-best. That she guessed it to
be the second-best her husband had no notion; so subtle an instinct
would always have been beyond the prosaic Gundred whom he had known
and married. Now he knew her no longer; life had developed them along
different roads. So he continued in the confident hope that he was
giving her the perfect satisfaction to which she had the right, while
she, for her part, secretly chafed at his obvious efforts, grieved
that effort should be necessary, and exerted herself more and more to
enter his life again. And as for the future, that might look after
itself. Sufficient to the day was the marital duty of it. Marriage,
however, is a dead thing by the time it becomes a duty. Kingston had no
suspicion of this, but Gundred, suddenly outstripping him in the race
of intuitions, understood in her heart of hearts, and felt a mortal
chill.
The habits of a lifetime, though, are not easily broken by emotional
gales; Gundred, for all her leaping excursions into the regions
frequented by Kingston and Isabel, retained her old, well-drilled
enthusiasm for domesticity. Hearts might break and sunder, but the
trained courage of Gundred saw no reason why soup, for that, should
grow tepid, or beds ill-aired. Whatever she might fear or suffer,
however much she might strain and agonize for real intimacy with her
husband, she could not have excused herself to herself for allowing
her attention to wander from his comfort or neglect his health. She
pursued the useful tenour of her way with a Spartan cheerfulness that
might have been even more splendid than it was had not long habit
so engrained in her the zeal of domestic services. She continued
overhauling the house, its resources, its supplies, its deficiencies.
Lady Adela having handed over to her the reins of government, she
assumed them with unfaltering grip. Soon she became the housekeeper’s
terror, and put to rout all the slack ease that had prevailed under
the ineffectual amiability of her mother-in-law’s rule. While one
side of her nature was battering for admittance into Kingston’s
life, the other, the older, larger side, was occupied in examining
store-cupboards, choosing wall-papers, pulling the house and its
appointments into shape once more. Many improvements must be made,
lighting remodelled, some of the worst horrors tactfully but decisively
obliterated.
And at this point, some ten days after Kingston’s understanding with
Isabel, her inquiries brought Gundred face to face with the revelation
that the drains of Ivescar were of an Early Victorian Tudor design
no less pronounced than the style of its architecture. The discovery
filled her with consternation. Her husband had confessed the day
before to a sore throat. Diphtheria at once painted itself grimly on
her imagination. Their stay at Ivescar must immediately end. With a
strenuous exertion of character she swept Kingston and Isabel into
harmony with her own determination, and the next morning they fled
from Yorkshire. There was only one place for them to go to while the
sanitary inspectors got to work. The London house was impossible--a
desolation of painters and builders. They must return to Brakelond.
Accordingly to Brakelond Gundred carried her acquiescent flock, and
they took up their residence once again in the little wooden wing
that jutted out over the sea. And so three more days passed, drifting
Kingston and Isabel insensibly nearer to the inevitable catastrophe. In
their fantastic ecstasy they were heedless of peril. But without some
intervention of fate their path led downwards towards disaster, though
they might ignore or angrily deny the fact even to themselves or each
other.
At Brakelond some of the old reflected strength came back to Gundred.
She became, once more, rather the châtelaine than the glorified
housekeeper. Her mind, less distracted by congenial cares, was able to
devote itself with all its might to what she called, to herself, the
recapture of her husband. She talked, claimed his attention, attempted
metaphysical flights. Her efforts aroused in him sad laughter,
irritation, and pity. They were tragically futile as ever--futile
in the very nature of the case, no less than in the limitations of
Gundred’s character. The situation drifted on and on. As for Isabel,
Gundred not only tried to copy her methods, but to monopolize her
company. She sat with her, took her for drives, kept her at her side as
much as possible, flattering herself all the time that her manœuvres
were imperceptible. Isabel, secure in her secret supremacy, allowed
herself to be captured, and, in the superficial victory of Gundred,
found an added joy in her own hidden amusement.
‘A little drive this afternoon--yes?’ said Gundred, after lunch.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice? You will come with me, Isabel?’
Isabel assented. ‘At what time?’ she asked.
‘Oh, four o’clock. I don’t want to go far. There is a woman I rather
wished to go and see. Dear Mary Restormel, Kingston, you have often
heard me speak of her. They have been friends of the family’s for I
couldn’t say how long.’
‘Shall I come with you?’ asked Kingston, not fancying the back seat of
the victoria, and hoping to be excused.
‘Oh no, dear. You had better sit in the garden and make yourself
comfortable. We shall not be away long. Restormel is only about two
miles off across the valley. And we’ll take the new horse too. So I
expect we shall be home again in next to no time.’
‘What does one talk to Mrs. Restormel about?’ asked Isabel.
‘Oh, I’ll do that,’ replied Gundred, not admitting, even to herself,
that her motive in taking Isabel was to prevent her from having
Kingston to herself that afternoon. ‘I really want to see her. She is
expecting a child in about a month, dear Mary Restormel. Such a mercy
if it is a son--not that it will make any difference, I am afraid, for
the place will certainly have to be sold as soon as poor Hugh Restormel
dies. Such a cruel pity--the sweetest little old place, Isabel. But the
Restormels are poorer than Church mice nowadays, and positively cannot
keep it going for another generation. You will simply love it, Isabel;
you will be able to wander in the garden and get lost.’
Expressing her joy at the prospect, Isabel made her escape to get ready.
Kingston and Gundred were left together.
‘You are quite sure you will not be lonely, Kingston,’ said Gundred,
after a pause. She spoke with a tinge of remorse in her voice,
reproaching herself with painful conscientiousness for her wish to
deprive him of amusing company.
‘Oh no,’ he answered, not discerning her veiled apology, nor caring
to. ‘I shall get along quite happily.’ He no longer answered her as he
might have done in his first innocent friendliness, before Isabel had
been revealed to him.
Gundred noticed the difference, with a subtlety for which he would not
have given her credit.
‘It is so nice having Isabel with us--yes?’ she said, apologizing both
to himself and her.
Her husband had long since ceased to criticize Isabel; now he warmed
honestly to her praise.
‘She is splendid company,’ he replied. ‘Always full of interesting
things to say. Don’t you think she is very amusing, Gundred?’
‘Oh yes,’ answered Gundred with pathetic insincerity. ‘So bright and
witty and facetious. I often wish I could say all the clever things she
does. I am afraid I am much slower than she is, though. My brain does
not run along so readily. I am fonder of serious things.’
Her voice was touched with a faint wistfulness. Kingston hardly noticed
it. He saw an opportunity for a show of that ardour which she found so
unsatisfactory, and which he believed that she found so satisfying.
‘She is one person, and you are another,’ he replied. ‘I would not have
you different, little lady, for anything in the world.’
This was pleasant and pretty. Gundred’s instincts found it blankly
empty and chilling. He meant to be so warm, but a month ago such an
advance as hers would have been very differently met. Then he had
thought her cold, had been for ever calling upon her to thaw. Now he
hardly appeared to notice whether she was warm or cold, despite his
manifestations of enthusiasm. Now it was he that was frozen, and she
might thaw, it seemed, in vain. Had her melting come too late?
‘Wouldn’t you?’ she answered slowly. ‘Are you really sure you wouldn’t?
Kingston,’ she went on in a low voice, ‘I do so want to do and say what
you like.’ She hesitated and broke off, seeking piteously for words
that should salve her pride in its downfall.
He could not understand that her seriousness demanded the tribute
of a serious answer in return. He gave her another of those easy
protestations which sounded so well, and yet, as she felt, meant so
little.
‘You always do,’ he replied, ‘always and always. You can’t tell how
much pleasure you give us, Gundred.’
Against this geniality, so smooth, so superficial, she felt horribly
powerless. There seemed no way, any longer, of piercing to her
husband’s notice, of spurring him up to sincerity. And that casual ‘us’
shut the door against her so finally.
‘Ah,’ she answered in a tired tone, her smile tinged with tragedy. ‘You
say such delightful things. But I do feel I am not clever enough for
you.’
‘It is not cleverness one wants,’ he said. ‘It is just you. You, and
only you. You are exactly perfect. One doesn’t criticize and say you
are not this and that. You are just You.’
She knew that he no longer criticized. But what he thought loyalty
she felt to be lack of interest. The ardour of his words awoke now
no answering ardour of conviction in her mind. As for Kingston, an
emotion of pure pity stirred him. This charming, dear little woman, how
awfully much, after all, he owed her. He believed that he could only
pay his debt to her by redoubling the formal warmth of his words. The
more pitiable he found her, the more he intensified the eagerness of
compliment that was his atonement at once to her and to himself, that
eagerness which she found so void and cold. ‘Dear pretty lady,’ he
said, ‘you should never have foolish little doubts. Don’t you realize
that nobody’s husband was ever so happy in the world before?’
She knew it. And she feared that she counted for nothing in that
happiness of his. Her hands dropped, her voice grew chilly in its
hopelessness. ‘Such a comfort--yes?’ she answered. ‘I am glad you are
so happy, Kingston. I hoped you would be.’
Isabel came back into the room, and in a moment an animated
conversation was going forward. Gundred took her part bravely, speaking
wherever speech was possible, always falling short or wide of the
point, always on the edge of giving up the attempt, and always being
picked up by her husband, and pushed back again into the dialogue. Then
the carriage was announced, and she set off with Isabel to visit the
Restormels.
Kingston sat in the garden, pondering the strange situation, hoping
that he was behaving fairly to all concerned, and believing that he
was. What could come of it all he had no idea. Poor Gundred, he admired
her, respected her, marvelled at her--did everything, in fact, but love
her. And that was now beyond his power. Love he could show, love no one
can force himself to feel. She no longer stirred any pulses of emotion
in him. She was a mere acquaintance--a pretty, charming, well-mannered
acquaintance, but nothing more. What could he do, except what he was
doing? To send Isabel away would be to find himself soon ceasing even
to tolerate his wife. Without Isabel his life would become vacant and
boring beyond conception. And it was not possible but that his boredom
would react unfavourably on his attitude towards Gundred. It was fairer
to all that Isabel should remain with them, easing off the tension
of the difficult situation. And in time everything would settle down
somehow, and the problem of existence would solve itself. He would not
look ahead. Ten days had passed in a dream of holy happiness. Why not
ten months, ten years, ten lustres?
Meanwhile the return of the two women was strangely delayed. Tea-time
came and went without a sign of them. And then the agitating news
arrived that the new horse had emphasized his novelty by bolting on
the homeward way, and upsetting the carriage at the foot of the hill
leading up to the Castle. Gundred was unhurt, and soon appeared, pale
and shaken, but intrepid. As for Isabel, her leg had been badly broken.
The next few hours passed in ceaseless bustle. Isabel, unconscious, was
carried up to the Castle. Doctors, nurses, medicaments were wired for.
Gundred’s courage came nobly to the fore. Despite the shock she herself
had sustained, she went calmly, self-denyingly, self-importantly about
her business. Kingston, who had seen nothing and suffered nothing of
the accident, was far less placid and level-headed than Gundred. The
sight of Isabel appalled him; Gundred firmly faced the responsibility,
had her brought to the oaken parlour at the end of the old wooden
wing, did all that could be done for her till the doctor arrived. When
Isabel returned to consciousness it was Gundred who watched over her,
comforted her, tried to mitigate her pain; Kingston could not bear to
contemplate the horror. Had the sufferer been a man, Kingston, perhaps,
might have confronted his groans more stolidly, though even so his
sympathetic, emotional temperament must always have been less fitted
than Gundred’s cool, unimaginative bravery, to cope with the manifold
uglinesses of physical suffering.
At last, however, the telegrams began to bear fruit. The doctor
arrived, and matters showed signs of settling down into a more regular
train. The bone was duly set, Isabel made comfortable, and hope held
out of a speedy and prosperous recovery. A nurse came, and proved a
very capable and decisive young person, whose only weakness was for
looking-glasses. She was established in the empty upper rooms of the
old wooden wing, and gave nightly scandal to the Castle servants
by lighting all the candles she could get together, the better to
contemplate her charms and curl her hair. Except for this trick of
collecting so lavish an illumination and leaving it to take care of
itself while she went about her other businesses, she turned out both
pleasant and useful. Her charge soon grew to like her, and, within a
day or two of the accident, life at Brakelond was subsiding once more
into calm and comfort. Helpless Isabel lay in state in the little oaken
parlour, where Kingston and Gundred kept her company, hardly leaving
her alone from morning to night. There was even, as her recovery
satisfactorily advanced, a certain quiet charm about this invalid life.
Isabel incapable of movement was rather a softer, more human person
than Isabel insolent in perfect vitality and health. Kingston and
Gundred enjoyed sitting with her and talking to her. They took it in
turns to read aloud, and did everything they could to make the victim’s
imprisonment as bearable as possible.
So the days went placidly by till, though she was as yet, of course,
unable to set foot to ground, the doctor promised that before long she
might expect to be getting about once more, without any ill-effects
from her accident. The nurse’s position, relieved by Gundred’s
assiduities, grew more and more formal, more and more of a sinecure.
She spent most of her time among the servants in the Castle, and her
own looking-glass saw less and less of her. There were her morning
duties and a few routine services to be discharged later, but in the
evening, when Isabel had dined, she could safely be left to the care
of Kingston and Gundred, while Nurse Molly, her fringe in perfection,
could go and delight the housekeeper’s room away in the Drum Tower.
The conversations between the three over Isabel’s bedside took many
a strange turn. Gundred was never encouraged by either Kingston or
Isabel to feel any of her inability to take an adequate part. They
chatted of everything that interested them, and Gundred was compelled
to believe herself interested also.
‘Now that the pain is over,’ said Isabel one night, ‘one wonders,
looking back, what it was all about--what it meant, what it really was.’
‘Oh, they always say a broken bone is dreadfully painful,’ replied
Gundred. ‘I have always heard so--yes? Dear Isabel, you bore it so
bravely.’
‘One has to worry through,’ rejoined Isabel. ‘But what I meant was, why
is the pain there? What makes a cracked bone produce all the unpleasant
effects it does on one’s consciousness. It sends all kinds of horrible
little burning, grinding, stabbing messages of spite to the brain. That
is what pain is. But what are all those little messages for? Why does
the beastly bone go on repeating itself so? If it only told the brain
once and for all that it was broken, that ought to be quite enough. I
hate a tautologous bone.’
‘Yes,’ said Kingston, ‘but it only goes on sending those messages when
your brain tries to disregard them. Your leg only hurt when you tried
to move it. Pain is simply the repeated warning of Nature.’
‘And the test of endurance--yes?’ put in Gundred. ‘Pain has the most
marvellously elevating effect.’
For a moment the conversation lapsed. They were sitting in the oaken
parlour after dinner. The hour was growing late, and soon Nurse Molly
might be expected to come and shut up Isabel for the night. However,
at present she was at the other end of the Castle, taking her pleasure
with the rest of the household, and the old wooden wing, with its
inhabitants, was left quite deserted.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Isabel. ‘Pain is absolutely horrible.
I am a coward about it. I loathe and dread it altogether. Pain and
death--dying, rather--are awful to me. I love being alive and warm in
the blessed world. Dissolution is ghastly. For nothing would I give up
the joy of living. Oh, agony is too horrible. It’s not a lesson so much
as a punishment. Oh yes, a punishment, even if it’s for something one
has done hundreds of years ago, before one was in this body at all.’
‘Oh, what a dreadful idea!’ cried Gundred, shocked--‘a terrible
unchristian idea!’
‘Not at all,’ contributed Kingston; ‘what about the blind man in the
Temple? They asked Christ, “Did this man sin, or his parents, that he
was born blind?” How could he have sinned, then, before he was born,
except in some other existence? And Christ passed the question. If He
had disbelieved the theory of reincarnation, He was quite capable of
saying so very definitely. But He did not. By His silence He implicitly
admitted its truth, instead of challenging it, and devoted Himself to
the healing of the blind man.’
‘So wonderfully hot it is in here to-night,’ said Gundred.
‘I always feel,’ went on Isabel, ‘whenever I have a bad time, I am
paying for having enjoyed a too good one once in a wrong way. I expect
this broken leg of mine is the result of some selfish enjoyment of mine
in bygone days that I have forgotten. I had prepared this penalty for
myself in some mysterious way. For these things come automatically.
Touch a button--commit the tiniest, wee-est action, good or bad--and
years and years later, long after one has thought the action dead and
forgotten, something happens that shows it has been alive and steadily
working from the first hour to the last. Every littlest thing that
happens, pleasant or painful, can always be traced back, I expect, to
some cause, infinitely small and infinitely remote in the past, far,
far away beyond one’s recollection.’
‘Don’t you wonder,’ said Kingston, ‘what your actions of yesterday
and to-day will produce, and how long it will be before their effects
come down upon us? We shall probably have forgotten all about to-day
by then, but everything that we have done must bear some sort of fruit
some day or other, as you say. Your accident, for instance, will have
some effect upon us, and Nurse Molly must make some change in our
lives, sooner or later. If one cannot introduce a fresh action without
effect into our lives, still less can one introduce a fresh person.
Nurse Molly, with her marvellous fringe, will certainly bring some new
element with her into our lives. Now, what will it be, Isabel?’
Gundred saw a chance of being apposite.
‘Talking of Nurse Molly,’ she said, ‘really, she must be terribly vain.
Morgan tells me she lights all the candles she can get together, and
then sits and looks at herself in the glass. The servants are perfectly
scandalized. And when she goes away from the room, she never dreams of
putting the candles out. She leaves them all burning quite happily, and
never thinks about them again. Such a sinful waste--yes? And she might
set these old wooden rooms on fire any day, by her carelessness.’
Isabel ignored her cousin’s intervention, and went back to the original
topic. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘I have atoned for my wickedness of the past
with this broken leg of mine. What I want to do is to lay up for myself
a great fat store of merit, so as to go on getting happier and happier
in all the later stages of my existence.’
‘Yes, but before one can attain the perfect happiness,’ replied
Kingston, ‘remember that one has to lose the desire for it. After
ages and ages of purification, one leaves the last trace of desire
behind--even the desire for good. Then one becomes the perfect
knowledge which is the perfect peace.’
‘So dreadfully chilly it sounds--yes?’ said Gundred.
‘Well, but the warmth of life is also the torment of life,’ replied
Kingston. ‘Desire may be as warm and pleasant as possible, but all
desire is sorrow. Without desire there is no disappointment, no
suffering, none of the horrible things in life that we all want to get
away from.’
‘Would one rather sacrifice desire for the sake of getting rid of
sorrow, or is desire so pleasant that one would put up with sorrow to
retain desire? I suppose desire is very painful and all the rest of it,
but it does make life wonderfully interesting, and one’s days would
be deadly lonely without it.... I don’t know that I want the perfect
peace, as yet, Kingston. Perhaps when my soul has grown a few centuries
older. At present all I want is to lay up for myself a supply of
happiness to go on with.’
‘You can only do that,’ he answered, ‘through
suffering--self-abnegations, martyrdoms, and all sorts of uncomfortable
strenuous virtues. By despising pain and bearing it for others, you may
attain to happiness. Not simply by sitting quiet and saying you want to
acquire merit. You must go through dreadful things cheerfully if you
hope to lay up merit.’
‘Nothing for nothing is the rule, evidently,’ said Isabel, ‘in morality
as well as in commerce. So tiresome, when everyone longs to get
bargains, and buy a pound’s worth for half a crown. But when happiness
comes to the hammer, it always fetches its full price, I suppose, in
whatever market you buy it.’
‘Well, Gundred, what do you think?’ asked Kingston.
‘Talking of hammers,’ replied Gundred, ‘there are the strangest
thumpings going on upstairs. Don’t you hear? Hammerings and bumpings
and knockings. Do you think Nurse Molly can be nailing up pictures?’
‘Running pins into the fringe, I should think,’ replied Kingston, with
a touch of petulance. Certainly Nurse Molly was making the oddest
noise in her room overhead. In the silence that followed Kingston’s
suggestions her unmethodical clatterings could be distinctly heard.
‘We must certainly ask her to be quiet--yes?’ said Gundred. Then she
rose and went to the window. ‘Why should it be so stifling in here?’
she went on. ‘There is quite a gale outside. Only listen.’ She paused,
and the roar of a great rushing wind was clearly evident.
‘The wind seems to get up very suddenly on these coasts,’ said Kingston.
‘Oh yes,’ answered Gundred; ‘all in a minute. Especially so late in
the year. That is what makes the heat so extraordinary.’ She peered
curiously out into the darkness. ‘Why, Kingston,’ she exclaimed,
‘it is actually snowing. How perfectly astonishing! Quite a number
of snowflakes are falling. And Nurse Molly’s illumination is really
too scandalous; I can see it glowing quite far out into the night,
throbbing and flickering.’ She pulled back the catch, and threw the
little window wide.
Instantly, from above, a long, keen shaft of pure flame curled swiftly
down into the room, licked round the casement like a dragon’s tongue,
and was gone again. Gundred had self-possession enough to close the
window, then she staggered back. The roaring sound overhead was louder
now than ever.
‘The Castle is on fire,’ she remarked at last, after a heavy pause.
Suddenly she felt elated by her sagacity. ‘The Castle is on fire,’ she
repeated slowly.
‘I think we had better get out of this,’ said Kingston. ‘It’s that
woman’s confounded candles upstairs. Ring the bell, Gundred, will you?’
He went to the door, and opened it. The passage, their one hope of
reaching the body of the Castle, was an impassable mass of flame at its
further end. Kingston came back into the room. Even now the full horror
of the situation had not struck him.
‘I’m afraid we can’t escape that way,’ he said quietly. ‘The corridor
is ablaze.’
Gundred, meanwhile, was vigorously pulling at the bell; in the silence
that followed Kingston’s announcement she continued methodically at her
task, and the knob could be heard slapping again and again into its
socket as she released it.
Kingston glanced from Gundred to Isabel.
Isabel had said nothing hitherto. He waited poignantly to hear what she
would suggest.
At last she spoke. Her voice was strained with agony and terror.
‘And I--I cannot move,’ she said. ‘I am tied by the leg.’
Kingston turned furiously upon Gundred, who, in an access of vain
frenzy, was rending and tearing the bell.
‘Leave off making that hideous row!’ he exclaimed. ‘What do you suppose
is the use of it? Do you imagine the servants will come through three
yards of fire to get us out?’
‘What are we to do?’ asked Gundred feebly.
‘I’m hanged if I know,’ replied her husband. ‘We must do something,
that’s certain, and pretty quickly. These old rooms will burn like
tinder. There must be some way along outside.’ He looked out of the
farther window. Now the clamour of the fire was growing every moment
more insistent. The night air was aglow, and burning fragments were
dropping like meteors towards the sea beneath.
‘Yes,’ said Kingston. ‘There is a little ledge of rock. One couldn’t
walk along it in the daytime, but we have no choice. Gundred, you will
have to do what you can. You will be able to get along quite safely,
if you go quickly and don’t think about it. And I must take charge of
Isabel. Isabel, I’m afraid it won’t be very good for your bad leg, but
I must carry you somehow. And there is no time to be lost.’
Then Gundred understood everything. In the midst of an orderly
comfortable life, it is not easy to understand that one is suddenly
hemmed in by inexorable death. But at last the facts of the situation
all burst in a shrieking pandemonium upon Gundred’s brain. She faced
round upon her husband, read his face, and knew suddenly what terrible
thing it was that he was thinking. In that awful moment of unveiled
sincerity she saw that she, his wife, came second in his consideration.
She was to get away as best she could. It was Isabel that mattered. The
slow secret fears of her life roared out into the open, swept down upon
her in a storm, and culminated. She clasped her hands for self-control,
as the world shook and tottered round her. Desperately she clutched
at her escaping senses; then, in a swirl, everything rushed together,
grew dark, vanished. She dropped her hands, gave a sharp, moaning cry,
and fainted. In the blank silence that followed her fall the voracious
bellowing of the fire drew closer and fiercer.
‘My God!’ said Kingston, in the low tone of absolute terror, ‘what are
we to do now?’ He looked at Isabel. Between the two helpless women
he must make his choice. He must make it instantly, too. He could
not by any possibility save both. He looked again from Isabel to
Gundred. Isabel’s face, in that supreme hour, was white and wet with
anguish, but she said nothing. She saw too well what Gundred’s collapse
involved. Kingston still stood glancing from one to the other. He knew
which of the two his whole soul cried aloud to save; he knew also which
of the two his duty called on him to save. Love and duty were at last
impossible to reconcile. On the razor’s edge of agony his mind poised
and quivered through a pause that seemed to fill whole delirious hours,
yet was come and gone in a flash. Insensibly he was waiting to hear
Isabel pronounce his sentence and her own. All her passionate love of
life shone in her straining eyes. They implored him, called upon him,
cried violently to him for safety. And then, in an instant, Isabel’s
eyes were opened, and her soul rose triumphant on its wings.
‘Your wife,’ she said, with dry lips, almost inaudibly. ‘Your wife. You
must save her. Go--go quickly--and then come back for me--if there is
time--oh God, come back for me quickly.’
All was over. He knew he must obey. Without a word, he turned and
gathered up the inanimate bundle that was Gundred. In feverish haste he
clambered with his burden through the window. Insatiably, terrifically,
the fire raged and ravened overhead. As he went he had a last glimpse
of Isabel, her face gleaming with fear, set in the strain of mortal
anxiety, her white hands clenched and writhing together on the quilt.
Then he was out in the darkness, with brands and lumps of burning
matter falling thick about his ears, drifting down into the night,
to sink at last, hissing, into the invisible sea below. Stumbling,
tottering, staggering, he dragged his load. How he ever reached safety
he could never have told. A hundred times it seemed as if he must fall.
But he struggled on vaguely, half-consciously, through a nightmare,
and found himself at last on sure ground, under the shelter of the old
Castle walls. Savagely he dropped his unconscious burden on a level
spot, then turned to rush back for Isabel. And, at that moment, before
his bloodshot eyes, the old wooden wing collapsed into a blazing hell
of fire--a vomiting pyramid of sparks and flame.