In her heart of hearts Hylda had not greatly welcomed the Duchess of
Snowdon to Hamley. There was no one whose friendship she prized more;
but she was passing through a phase of her life when she felt that
she was better apart, finding her own path by those intuitions and
perceptions which belonged to her own personal experience. She vaguely
felt, what all realise sooner or later, that we must live our dark hours
alone.
Yet the frank downright nature of the once beautiful, now faded,
Duchess, the humorous glimmer in the pale-blue eyes, the droll irony
and dry truth of her speech, appealed to Hylda, made her smile a warm
greeting when she would rather have been alone. For, a few days before,
she had begun a quest which had absorbed her, fascinated her. The miner,
finding his way across the gap of a reef to pick up the vein of quartz
at some distant and uncertain point, could not have been more lost
to the world than was the young wife searching for a family skeleton,
indefinitely embodied in her imagination by the name, James Fetherdon.
Pile after pile of papers and letters of the late Earl and his Countess
had passed through her hands from chaos to order. As she had read, hour
after hour, the diaries of the cold, blue-eyed woman, Sybil Eglington,
who had lived without love of either husband or son, as they, in turn,
lived without love of each other, she had been overwhelmed by the
revelation of a human heart, whose powers of expression were smothered
by a shy and awkward temperament. The late Countess’s letters were the
unclothing of a heart which had never expanded to the eyes of those
whose love would have broken up a natural reserve, which became at last
a proud coldness, and gave her a reputation for lack of feeling that she
carried to her grave.
In the diaries which Hylda unearthed--the Countess had died
suddenly--was the muffled cry of a soul tortured through different
degrees of misunderstanding; from the vague pain of suffered
indifference, of being left out of her husband’s calculations, to the
blank neglect narrowing her life down to a tiny stream of duty, which
was finally lost in the sands. She had died abroad, and alone, save for
her faithful maid, who, knowing the chasm that lay between her mistress
and her lord, had brought her letters and papers back to the Cloistered
House, and locked them away with all the other papers and correspondence
which the Countess had accumulated.
Among these papers was a letter to the late Lord Eglington written the
day before she died. In the haste and confusion ensuing on her death,
the maid had not seen it. It had never reached his hands, but lay in a
pocket of the dead woman’s writing-portfolio, which Hylda had explored
without discovering. Only a few hours, however, before the Duchess
of Snowdon came, Hylda had found again an empty envelope on which was
written the name, James Fetherdon. The writing on the envelope was that
of Sybil Lady Eglington.
When she discovered the envelope, a sense of mystery and premonition
possessed her. What was the association between the Countess of
Eglington and James Fetherdon, the father of David Claridge? In vain she
searched among the voluminous letters and papers, for it would seem that
the dead woman had saved every letter she received, and kept copies of
numberless letters she had written. But she had searched without avail.
Even the diaries, curiously frank and without reserve, never mentioned
the name, so far as she could find, though here and there were strange
allusive references, hints of a trouble that weighed her down, phrases
of exasperation and defiance. One phrase, or the idea in it, was,
however, much repeated in the diaries during the course of years, and
towards the last almost feverishly emphasised--“Why should I bear it for
one who would bear nothing for me, for his sake, who would do nothing
for my sake? Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?”
These words were haunting Hylda’s brain when the telegram from the
Duchess of Snowdon came. They followed her to Heddington, whither she
went in the carriage to bring her visitor to Hamley, and kept repeating
themselves at the back of her mind through the cheerful rallying of the
Duchess, who spread out the wings of good-humour and motherly freedom
over her.
After all, it was an agreeable thing to be taken possession of, and “put
in her proper place,” as the Duchess said; made to understand that her
own affairs were not so important, after all; and that it was far more
essential to hear the charming gossip about the new and most popular
Princess of Wales, or the quarrel between Dickens and Thackeray. Yet,
after dinner, in the little sitting-room, where the Duchess, in a white
gown with great pink bows, fitter for a girl fresh from Confirmation,
and her cheeks with their fixed colour, which changed only at the
discretion of her maid, babbled of nothing that mattered, Hylda’s mind
kept turning to the book of life an unhappy woman had left behind her.
The sitting-room had been that of the late Countess also, and on the
wall was an oil-painting of her, stately and distant and not very
alluring, though the mouth had a sweetness which seemed unable to break
into a smile.
“What was she really like--that wasn’t her quite, was it?” asked Hylda,
at last, leaning her chin on the hand which held the ‘cello she had been
playing.
“Oh, yes, it’s Sybil Eglington, my dear, but done in wood; and she
wasn’t the graven image that makes her out to be. That’s as most people
saw her; as the fellow that painted her saw her; but she had another
side to her. She disapproved of me rather, because I was squeezing the
orange dry, and trying to find yesterday’s roses in to-morrow’s garden.
But she didn’t shut her door in my face--it’s hard to do that to a
Duchess; which is one of the few advantages of living naked in the
street, as it were, with only the strawberry leaves to clothe you. No,
Sybil Eglington was a woman who never had her chance. Your husband’s
forbears were difficult, my dear. They didn’t exactly draw you out.
She needed drawing out; and her husband drove her back into her corner,
where she sulked rather till she died--died alone at Wiesbaden, with
a German doctor, a stray curate, and a stuttering maid to wish her bon
voyage. Yet I fancy she went glad enough, for she had no memories, not
even an affaire to repent of, and to cherish. La, la! she wasn’t so
stupid, Sybil there, and she was an ornament to her own sex and the
despair of the other. His Serene Highness Heinrich of Saxe-Gunden
fancied the task of breaking that ice, and he was an adept and an
Apollo, but it broke his reputation instead.
“No doubt she is happy now. I shall probably never see!”
In spite of the poignant nature of the talk, Hylda could not but smile
at the last words.
“Don’t despair,” she rejoined; “one star differeth from another star in
glory, but that is no reason why they should not be on visiting terms.”
“My dear, you may laugh--you may laugh, but I am sixty-five, and I
am not laughing at the idea of what company I may be obliged to keep
presently. In any case I’m sure I shall not be comfortable. If I’m
where she is, I shall be dull; if I’m where her husband is, I’ll have
no reputation; and if there is one thing I want, it is a spotless
reputation--sometime.”
Hylda laughed--the manner and the voice were so droll--but her face
saddened too, and her big eyes with the drooping lashes looked up
pensively at the portrait of her husband’s mother.
“Was it ever a happy family, or a lucky family?” she asked.
“It’s lucky now, and it ought to be happy now,” was the meaning reply.
Hylda made no answer, but caught the strings of the ‘cello lightly,
and shook her head reprovingly, with a smile meant to be playful. For a
moment she played, humming to herself, and then the Duchess touched the
hand that was drawing the bow softly across the strings. She had behind
her garishness a gift for sympathy and a keen intuition, delicacy, and
allusiveness. She knew what to say and what to leave unsaid, when her
heart was moved.
“My darling,” she said now, “you are not quite happy; but that is
because you don’t allow yourself to get well. You’ve never recovered
from your attack last summer; and you won’t, until you come out into
the world again and see people. This autumn you ought to have been at
Homburg or at Aix, where you’d take a little cure of waters and a great
deal of cure of people. You were born to bask in friendship and the sun,
and to draw from the world as much as you deserve, a little from many,
for all you give in return. Because, dearest, you are a very agreeable
person, with enough wit and humanity to make it worth the world’s while
to conspire to make you do what will give it most pleasure, and let
yourself get most--and that’s why I’ve come.”
“What a person of importance I am!” answered Hylda, with a laugh that
was far from mirthful, though she caught the plump, wrinkled little hand
of the Duchess and pressed it. “But really I’m getting well here
fast. I’m very strong again. It is so restful, and one’s days go by so
quietly.”
“Yet, I’m not sure that it’s rest you want. I don’t think it is. You
want tonics--men and women and things. Monte Carlo would do you a world
of good--I’d go with you. Eglington gambles here”--she watched Hylda
closely--“why shouldn’t you gamble there?”
“Eglington gambles?” Hylda’s face took on a frightened look, then
it cleared again, and she smiled. “Oh, of course, with international
affairs, you mean. Well, I must stay here and be the croupier.”
“Nonsense! Eglington is his own croupier. Besides, he is so much in
London, and you so much here. You sit with the distaff; he throws the
dice.”
Hylda’s lips tightened a little. Her own inner life, what Eglington was
to her or she to Eglington, was for the ears of no human being, however
friendly. She had seen little of him of late, but in one sense that had
been a relief, though she would have done anything to make that feeling
impossible. His rather precise courtesy and consideration, when he
was with her, emphasised the distance between “the first fine careless
rapture” and this grey quiet. And, strange to say, though in the first
five years after the Cairo days and deeds, Egypt seemed an infinite
space away, and David a distant, almost legendary figure, now Egypt
seemed but beyond the door--as though, opening it, she would stand
near him who represented the best of all that she might be capable of
thinking. Yet all the time she longed for Eglington to come and say one
word, which would be like touching the lever of the sluice-gates of
her heart, to let loose the flood. As the space grew between her and
Eglington, her spirit trembled, she shrank back, because she saw that
sea towards which she was drifting.
As she did not answer the last words of the Duchess, the latter said
presently: “When do you expect Eglington?”
“Not till the week-end; it is a busy week with him,” Hylda answered;
then added hastily, though she had not thought of it till this moment:
“I shall probably go up to town with you to-morrow.”
She did not know that Eglington was already in the house, and had given
orders to the butler that she was not to be informed of his arrival for
the present.
“Well, if you get that far, will you come with me to the Riviera, or
to Florence, or Sicily--or Cairo?” the other asked, adjusting her
gold-brown wig with her babyish hands.
Cairo! Cairo! A light shot up into Hylda’s eyes. The Duchess had spoken
without thought, but, as she spoke, she watched the sudden change in
Hylda. What did it mean? Cairo--why should Cairo have waked her so?
Suddenly she recalled certain vague references of Lord Windlehurst, and,
for the first time, she associated Hylda with Claridge Pasha in a way
which might mean much, account for much, in this life she was leading.
“Perhaps! Perhaps!” answered Hylda abstractedly, after a moment.
The Duchess got to her feet. She had made progress. She would let her
medicine work.
“I’m going to bed, my dear. I’m sixty-five, and I take my sleep when I
can get it. Think it over, Sicily--Cairo!”
She left the room, saying to herself that Eglington was a fool, and
that danger was ahead. “But I hold a red light--poor darling!” she said
aloud, as she went up the staircase. She did not know that Eglington,
standing in a deep doorway, heard her, and seized upon the words eagerly
and suspiciously, and turned them over in his mind.
Below, at the desk where Eglington’s mother used to write, Hylda sat
with a bundle of letters before her. For some moments she opened,
glanced through them, and put them aside. Presently she sat back in her
chair, thinking--her mind was invaded by the last words of the Duchess;
and somehow they kept repeating themselves with the words in the late
Countess’s diary: “Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?”
Mechanically her hand moved over the portfolio of the late Countess, and
it involuntarily felt in one of its many pockets. Her hand came upon
a letter. This had remained when the others had been taken out. It was
addressed to the late Earl, and was open. She hesitated a moment, then,
with a strange premonition and a tightening of her heart-strings, she
spread it out and read it.
At first she could scarcely see because of the mist in her eyes; but
presently her sight cleared, and she read quickly, her cheeks burning
with excitement, her heart throbbing violently. The letter was the
last expression of a disappointed and barren life. The slow, stammering
tongue of an almost silent existence had found the fulness of speech.
The fountains of the deep had been broken up, and Sybil Eglington’s
repressed emotions, undeveloped passions, tortured by mortal sufferings,
and refined and vitalised by the atmosphere blown in upon her last hours
from the Hereafter, were set free, given voice and power at last.
The letter reviewed the life she had lived with her husband during
twenty-odd years, reproved herself for not speaking out and telling him
his faults at the beginning, and for drawing in upon herself, when she
might have compelled him to a truer understanding; and, when all
that was said, called him to such an account as only the dying might
make--the irrevocable, disillusionising truth which may not be altered,
the poignant record of failure and its causes.
“... I could not talk well, I never could, as a girl,” the
letter ran; “and you could talk like one inspired, and so
speciously, so overwhelmingly, that I felt I could say nothing in
disagreement, not anything but assent; while all the time I felt how
hollow was so much you said--a cloak of words to cover up the real
thought behind. Before I knew the truth, I felt the shadow of
secrecy in your life. When you talked most, I felt you most
secretive, and the feeling slowly closed the door upon all frankness
and sympathy and open speech between us. I was always shy and self-
conscious and self-centred, and thought little of myself; and I
needed deep love and confidence and encouragement to give out what
was in me. I gave nothing out, nothing to you that you wanted, or
sought for, or needed. You were complete, self-contained. Harry,
my beloved babe Harry, helped at first; but, as the years went on,
he too began to despise me for my little intellect and slow
intelligence, and he grew to be like you in all things--and
secretive also, though I tried so hard to be to him what a mother
should be. Oh, Bobby, Bobby--I used to call you that in the days
before we were married, and I will call you that now when all is
over and done--why did you not tell me all? Why did you not tell me
that my boy, my baby Harry, was not your only child, that there had
been another wife, and that your eldest son was alive?
“I know all. I have known all for years. The clergyman who married
you to Mercy Claridge was a distant relative of my mother’s, and
before he died he told me. When you married her, he knew you only
as James Fetherdon, but, years afterwards, he saw and recognised
you. He held his peace then, but at last he came to me. And I did
not speak. I was not strong enough, nor good enough, to face the
trouble of it all. I could not endure the scandal, to see my own
son take the second place--he is so brilliant and able and
unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of winning a great
place in the world, surer than yourself ever was, he is so
calculating and determined and ambitious! And though he loves me
little, as he loves you little, too, yet he is my son, and for what
he is we are both responsible, one way or another; and I had not the
courage to give him the second place, and the Quaker, David
Claridge, the first place. Why Luke Claridge, his grandfather,
chose the course he did, does not concern me, no more than why you
chose secrecy, and kept your own firstborn legitimate son, of whom
you might well be proud, a stranger to you and his rights all these
years. Ah, Eglington, you never knew what love was, you never had
a heart--experiment, subterfuge, secrecy, ‘reaping where you had
not sowed, and gathering where you had not strawed.’ Always,
experiment, experiment, experiment!
“I shall be gone in a few hours--I feel it, but before I go I must
try to do right, and to warn you. I have had such bad dreams about
you and Harry--they haunt me--that I am sure you will suffer
terribly, will have some awful tragedy, unless you undo what was
done long ago, and tell the truth to the world, and give your titles
and estates where they truly belong. Near to death, seeing how
little life is, and how much right is in the end, I am sure that I
was wrong in holding my peace; for Harry cannot prosper with this
black thing behind him, and you cannot die happy if you smother up
the truth. Night after night I have dreamed of you in your
laboratory, a vague, dark, terrifying dream of you in that
laboratory which I have hated so. It has always seemed to me the
place where some native evil and cruelty in your blood worked out
its will. I know I am an ignorant woman, with no brain, but God has
given me clear sight at the last, and the things I see are true
things, and I must warn you. Remember that....”
The letter ended there. She had been interrupted or seized with illness,
and had never finished it, and had died a few hours afterwards; and the
letter was now, for the first time, read by her whom it most concerned,
into whose heart and soul the words sank with an immitigable pain
and agonised amazement. A few moments with this death-document had
transformed Hylda’s life.
Her husband and--and David, were sons of the same father; and the
name she bore, the home in which she was living, the estates the title
carried, were not her husband’s, but another’s--David’s. She fell back
in her chair, white and faint, but, with a great effort, she conquered
the swimming weakness which blinded her. Sons of the same father! The
past flashed before her, the strange likeness she had observed, the
trick of the head, the laugh, the swift gesture, the something in the
voice. She shuddered as she had done in reading the letter. But they
were related only in name, in some distant, irreconcilable way--in a way
which did not warrant the sudden scarlet flush that flooded her face.
Presently she recovered herself. She--what did she suffer, compared
with her who wrote this revelation of a lifetime of pain, of bitter and
torturing knowledge! She looked up at the picture on the wall, at
the still, proud, emotionless face, the conventional, uninspired
personality, behind which no one had seen, which had agonised alone till
the last. With what tender yet pitiless hand had she laid bare the lives
of her husband and her son! How had the neglected mother told the bitter
truth of him to whom she had given birth! “So brilliant and able, and
unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, sure of winning a great place
in the world... so calculating and determined and ambitious.... That
laboratory which I have hated so. It has always seemed to me the
place where some native evil and cruelty in your blood worked out its
will....”
With a deep-drawn sigh Hylda said to herself: “If I were dying
to-morrow, would I say that? She loved them so--at first must have loved
them so; and yet this at the last! And I--oh, no, no, no!” She looked at
a portrait of Eglington on the table near, touched it caressingly, and
added, with a sob in her voice: “Oh, Harry, no, it is not true! It is
not native evil and cruelty in your blood. It has all been a mistake.
You will do right. We will do right, Harry. You will suffer, it will
hurt, the lesson will be hard--to give up what has meant so much to you;
but we will work it out together, you and I, my very dear. Oh, say that
we shall, that....” She suddenly grew silent. A tremor ran through her,
she became conscious of his presence near her, and turned, as though he
were behind her. There was nothing. Yet she felt him near, and, as she
did so, the soul-deep feeling with which she had spoken to the portrait
fled. Why was it that, so often, when absent from him, her imagination
helped her to make excuses for him, inspired her to press the real truth
out of sight, and to make believe that he was worthy of a love which,
but through some inner fault of her own, might be his altogether, and
all the love of which he was capable might be hers?
She felt him near her, and the feelings possessing her a moment before
slowly chilled and sank away. Instinctively her eyes glanced towards
the door. She saw the handle turn, and she slipped the letter inside the
portfolio again.
The door opened briskly now, and Eglington entered with what his enemies
in the newspaper press had called his “professional smile”--a criticism
which had angered his wife, chiefly because it was so near the truth.
He smiled. Smiling was part of his equipment, and was for any one at any
time that suited him.
Her eyes met his, and he noted in her something that he had never seen
before. Something had happened. The Duchess of Snowdon was in the house;
had it anything to do with her? Had she made trouble? There was trouble
enough without her. He came forward, took Hylda’s hand and kissed it,
then kissed her on the cheek. As he did so, she laid a hand on his arm
with a sudden impulse, and pressed it. Though his presence had chilled
the high emotions of a few moments before, yet she had to break to him
a truth which would hurt him, dismay him, rob his life of so much that
helped it; and a sudden protective, maternal sense was roused in her,
reached out to shelter him as he faced his loss and the call of duty.
“You have just come?” she said, in a voice that, to herself, seemed far
away.
“I have been here some hours,” he answered. Secrecy again--always
the thing that had chilled the dead woman, and laid a cold hand upon
herself--“I felt the shadow of secrecy in your life. When you talked
most I felt you most secretive, and the feeling slowly closed the door
upon all frankness and sympathy and open speech between us.”
“Why did you not see me--dine with me?” she asked. “What can
the servants think?” Even in such a crisis the little things had
place--habit struck its note in the presence of her tragedy.
“You had the Duchess of Snowdon, and we are not precisely congenial;
besides, I had much to do in the laboratory. I’m working for that new
explosive of which I told you. There’s fame and fortune in it, and I’m
on the way. I feel it coming”--his eyes sparkled a little. “I made it
right with the servants; so don’t be apprehensive.”
“I have not seen you for nearly a week. It doesn’t seem--friendly.”
“Politics and science are stern masters,” he answered gaily.
“They leave little time for your mistress,” she rejoined meaningly.
“Who is my mistress?”
“Well, I am not greatly your wife,” she replied. “I have the dregs of
your life. I help you--I am allowed to help you--so little, to share so
little in the things that matter to you.”
“Now, that’s imagination and misunderstanding,” he rejoined. “It has
helped immensely your being such a figure in society, and entertaining
so much, and being so popular, at any rate until very lately.”
“I do not misunderstand,” she answered gravely. “I do not share your
real life. I do not help you where your brain works, in the plans and
purposes and hopes that lie behind all that you do--oh, yes, I know your
ambitions and what positions you are aiming for; but there is something
more than that. There is the object of it all, the pulse of it, the
machinery down, down deep in your being that drives it all. Oh, I am not
a child! I have some intellect, and I want--I want that we should work
it out together.”
In spite of all that had come and gone, in spite of the dead mother’s
words and all her own convictions, seeing trouble coming upon him, she
wanted to make one last effort for what might save their lives--her
life--from shipwreck in the end. If she failed now, she foresaw a
bitter, cynical figure working out his life with a narrowing soul, a
hard spirit unrelieved by the softening influence of a great love--even
yet the woman in her had a far-off hope that, where the law had made
them one by book and scrip, the love which should consecrate such a
union, lift it above an almost offensive relation, might be theirs. She
did not know how much of her heart, of her being, was wandering over
the distant sands of Egypt, looking for its oasis. Eglington had never
needed or wanted more than she had given him--her fortune, her person,
her charm, her ability to play an express and definite part in his
career. It was this material use to which she was so largely assigned,
almost involuntarily but none the less truly, that had destroyed all of
the finer, dearer, more delicate intimacy invading his mind sometimes,
more or less vaguely, where Faith was concerned. So extreme was his
egotism that it had never occurred to him, as it had done to the Duchess
of Snowdon and Lord Windlehurst, that he might lose Hylda herself as
well as her fortune; that the day might come when her high spirit could
bear it no longer. As the Duchess of Snowdon had said: “It would all
depend upon the other man, whoever he might be.”
So he answered her with superficial cheerfulness now; he had not the
depth of soul to see that they were at a crisis, and that she could bear
no longer the old method of treating her as though she were a child, to
be humoured or to be dominated.
“Well, you see all there is,” he answered; “you are so imaginative,
crying for some moon there never was in any sky.”
In part he had spoken the truth. He had no high objects or ends or
purposes. He wanted only success somehow or another, and there was no
nobility of mind or aspiration behind it. In her heart of hearts she
knew it; but it was the last cry of her soul to him, seeking, though in
vain, for what she had never had, could never have.
“What have you been doing?” he added, looking at the desk where she
had sat, glancing round the room. “Has the Duchess left any rags on
the multitude of her acquaintances? I wonder that you can make yourself
contented here with nothing to do. You don’t look much stronger. I’m
sure you ought to have a change. My mother was never well here; though,
for the matter of that, she was never very well anywhere. I suppose it’s
the laboratory that attracts me here, as it did my father, playing with
the ancient forces of the world in these Arcadian surroundings--Arcady
without beauty or Arcadians.” He glanced up at his mother’s picture.
“No, she never liked it--a very silent woman, secretive almost.”
Suddenly her eyes flared up. Anger possessed her. She choked it down.
Secretive--the poor bruised soul who had gone to her grave with a broken
heart!
“She secretive? No, Eglington,” she rejoined gravely, “she was
congealed. She lived in too cold an air. She was not secretive, but yet
she kept a secret--another’s.”
Again Eglington had the feeling which possessed him when he entered the
room. She had changed. There was something in her tone, a meaning, he
had never heard before. He was startled. He recalled the words of the
Duchess as she went up the staircase.
What was it all about?
“Whose secrets did she keep?” he asked, calmly enough.
“Your father’s, yours, mine,” she replied, in a whisper almost.
“Secret? What secret? Good Lord, such mystery!” He laughed mirthlessly.
She came close to him. “I am sorry--sorry, Harry,” she said with
difficulty. “It will hurt you, shock you so. It will be a blow to you,
but you must bear it.”
She tried to speak further, but her heart was beating so violently that
she could not. She turned quickly to the portfolio on the desk, drew
forth the fatal letter, and, turning to the page which contained the
truth concerning David, handed it to him. “It is there,” she said.
He had great self-control. Before looking at the page to which she had
directed his attention, he turned the letter over slowly, fingering the
pages one by one. “My mother to my father,” he remarked.
Instinctively he knew what it contained. “You have been reading my
mother’s correspondence,” he added in cold reproof.
“Do you forget that you asked me to arrange her papers?” she retorted,
stung by his suggestion.
“Your imagination is vivid,” he exclaimed. Then he bethought himself
that, after all, he might sorely need all she could give, if things
went against him, and that she was the last person he could afford to
alienate; “but I do remember that I asked you that,” he added--“no doubt
foolishly.”
“Read what is there,” she broke in, “and you will see that it was not
foolish, that it was meant to be.” He felt a cold dead hand reaching
out from the past to strike him; but he nerved himself, and his eyes
searched the paper with assumed coolness-even with her he must still be
acting. The first words he saw were: “Why did you not tell me that my
boy, my baby Harry, was not your only child, and that your eldest son
was alive?”
So that was it, after all. Even his mother knew. Master of his nerves
as he was, it blinded him for a moment. Presently he read on--the whole
page--and lingered upon the words, that he might have time to think what
he must say to Hylda. Nothing of the tragedy of his mother touched him,
though he was faintly conscious of a revelation of a woman he had
never known, whose hungering caresses had made him, as a child, rather
peevish, when a fit of affection was not on him. Suddenly, as he read
the lines touching himself, “Brilliant and able and unscrupulous.... and
though he loves me little, as he loves you little too,” his eye lighted
up with anger, his face became pale--yet he had borne the same truths
from Faith without resentment, in the wood by the mill that other year.
For a moment he stood infuriated, then, going to the fireplace, he
dropped the letter on the coals, as Hylda, in horror, started forward to
arrest his hand.
“Oh, Eglington--but no--no! It is not honourable. It is proof of all!”
He turned upon her slowly, his face rigid, a strange, cold light in his
eyes. “If there is no more proof than that, you need not vex your mind,”
he said, commanding his voice to evenness.
A bitter anger was on him. His mother had read him through and
through--he had not deceived her even; and she had given evidence
against him to Hylda, who, he had ever thought, believed in him
completely. Now there was added to the miserable tale, that first
marriage, and the rights of David--David, the man who, he was convinced,
had captured her imagination. Hurt vanity played a disproportionate part
in this crisis.
The effect on him had been different from what Hylda had anticipated.
She had pictured him stricken and dumfounded by the blow. It had never
occurred to her, it did not now, that he had known the truth; for, of
course, to know the truth was to speak, to restore to David his own,
to step down into the second and unconsidered place. After all, to her
mind, there was no disgrace. The late Earl had married secretly, but he
had been duly married, and he did not marry again until Mercy Claridge
was dead. The only wrong was to David, whose grandfather had been even
more to blame than his own father. She had looked to help Eglington in
this moment, and now there seemed nothing for her to do. He was superior
to the situation, though it was apparent in his pale face and rigid
manner that he had been struck hard.
She came near to him, but there was no encouragement to her to play
that part which is a woman’s deepest right and joy and pain in one--to
comfort her man in trouble, sorrow, or evil. Always, always, he stood
alone, whatever the moment might be, leaving her nothing to do--“playing
his own game with his own weapons,” as he had once put it. Yet there was
strength in it too, and this came to her mind now, as though in excuse
for whatever else there was in the situation which, against her will,
repelled her.
“I am so sorry for you,” she said at last.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“To lose all that has been yours so long.”
This was their great moment. The response to this must be the touchstone
of their lives. A--half dozen words might alter all the future, might
be the watch word to the end of all things. Involuntarily her heart
fashioned the response he ought to give--“I shall have you left, Hylda.”
The air seemed to grow oppressive, and the instant’s silence a torture,
and, when he spoke, his words struck a chill to her heart--rough notes
of pain. “I have not lost yet,” were his words.
She shrank. “You will not hide it. You will do right by--by him,” she
said with difficulty.
“Let him establish his claim to the last item of fact,” he said with
savage hate.
“Luke Claridge knew. The proofs are but just across the way, no doubt,”
she answered, almost coldly, so had his words congealed her heart.
Their great moment had passed. It was as though a cord had snapped that
held her to him, and in the recoil she had been thrown far off from him.
Swift as his mind worked, it had not seen his opportunity to win her to
his cause, to asphyxiate her high senses, her quixotic justice, by that
old flood of eloquence and compelling persuasion of the emotions with
which he had swept her to the altar--an altar of sacrifice. He had
not even done what he had left London to do--make sure of her, by an
alluring flattery and devotion, no difficult duty with one so beautiful
and desirable; though neither love of beauty nor great desire was strong
enough in him to divert him from his course for an hour, save by his own
initiative. His mother’s letter had changed it all. A few hours before
he had had a struggle with Soolsby, and now another struggle on the
same theme was here. Fate had dealt illy with him, who had ever been its
spoiled child and favourite. He had not learned yet the arts of defence
against adversity.
“Luke Claridge is dead,” he answered sharply. “But you will tell--him,
you will write to Egypt and tell your brother?” she said, the conviction
slowly coming to her that he would not.
“It is not my duty to displace myself, to furnish evidence against
myself--”
“You have destroyed the evidence,” she intervened, a little scornfully.
“If there were no more than that--” He shrugged his shoulders
impatiently.
“Do you know there is more?” she asked searchingly. “In whose interests
are you speaking?” he rejoined, with a sneer. A sudden fury possessed
him. Claridge Pasha--she was thinking of him!
“In yours--your conscience, your honour.”
“There is over thirty years’ possession on my side,” he rejoined.
“It is not as if it were going from your family,” she argued.
“Family--what is he to me!”
“What is any one to you?” she returned bitterly.
“I am not going to unravel a mystery in order to facilitate the cutting
of my own throat.”
“It might be worth while to do something once for another’s sake than
your own--it would break the monotony,” she retorted, all her sense
tortured by his words, and even more so by his manner.
Long ago Faith had said in Soolsby’s but that he “blandished” all with
whom he came in contact; but Hylda realised with a lacerated heart that
he had ceased to blandish her. Possession had altered that. Yet how had
he vowed to her in those sweet tempestuous days of his courtship when
the wind of his passion blew so hard! Had one of the vows been kept?
Even as she looked at him now, words she had read some days before
flashed through her mind--they had burnt themselves into her brain:
“Broken faith is the crown of evils,
Broken vows are the knotted thongs
Set in the hands of laughing devils,
To scourge us for deep wrongs.
“Broken hearts, when all is ended,
Bear the better all after-stings;
Bruised once, the citadel mended,
Standeth through all things.”
Suddenly he turned upon her with aggrieved petulance. “Why are you so
eager for proof?”
“Oh, I have,” she said, with a sudden flood of tears in her voice,
though her eyes were dry--“I have the feeling your mother had, that
nothing will be well until you undo the wrong your father did. I know
it was not your fault. I feel for you--oh, believe me, I feel as I have
never felt, could never feel, for myself. It was brought on you by your
father, but you must be the more innocent because he was so guilty. You
have had much out of it, it has helped you on your way. It does not mean
so much now. By-and-by another--an English-peerage may be yours by your
own achievement. Let it go. There is so much left, Harry. It is a small
thing in a world of work. It means nothing to me.” Once again, even when
she had given up all hope, seeing what was the bent of his mind--once
again she made essay to win him out of his selfishness. If he would only
say, “I have you left,” how she would strive to shut all else out of her
life!
He was exasperated. His usual prescience and prudence forsook him. It
angered him that she should press him to an act of sacrifice for the
man who had so great an influence upon her. Perversity possessed him.
Lifelong egotism was too strong for wisdom, or discretion.
Suddenly he caught her hands in both of his and said hoarsely: “Do you
love me--answer me, do you love me with all your heart and soul? The
truth now, as though it were your last word on earth.”
Always self. She had asked, if not in so many words, for a little love,
something for herself to feed on in the darkening days for him, for her,
for both; and he was thinking only of himself.
She shrank, but her hands lay passive in his. “No, not with all my heart
and soul--but, oh--!”
He flung her hands from him. “No, not with all your heart and soul--I
know! You are willing to sacrifice me for him, and you think I do not
understand.”
She drew herself up, with burning cheeks and flashing eyes. “You
understand nothing--nothing. If you had ever understood me, or any human
being, or any human heart, you would not have ruined all that might
have given you an undying love, something that would have followed
you through fire and flood to the grave. You cannot love. You do not
understand love. Self--self, always self. Oh, you are mad, mad, to have
thrown it all away, all that might have given happiness! All that I
have, all that I am, has been at your service; everything has been bent
and tuned to your pleasure, for your good. All has been done for
you, with thought of you and your position and your advancement, and
now--now, when you have killed all that might have been yours, you cry
out in anger that it is dying, and you insinuate what you should kill
another for insinuating. Oh, the wicked, cruel folly of it all! You
suggest--you dare! I never heard a word from David Claridge that might
not be written on the hoardings. His honour is deeper than that which
might attach to the title of Earl of Eglington.”
She seemed to tower above him. For an instant she looked him in the eyes
with frigid dignity, but a great scorn in her face. Then she went to the
door--he hastened to open it for her.
“You will be very sorry for this,” he said stubbornly. He was too
dumfounded to be discreet, too suddenly embarrassed by the turn affairs
had taken. He realised too late that he had made a mistake, that he had
lost his hold upon her.
As she passed through, there suddenly flashed before her mind the scene
in the laboratory with the chairmaker. She felt the meaning of it now.
“You do not intend to tell him--perhaps Soolsby has done so,” she said
keenly, and moved on to the staircase.
He was thunderstruck at her intuition. “Why do you want to rob
yourself?” he asked after her vaguely. She turned back. “Think of your
mother’s letter that you destroyed,” she rejoined solemnly and quietly.
“Was it right?”
He shut the door, and threw himself into a chair. “I will put it
straight with her to-morrow,” he said helplessly.
He sat for a half-hour silent, planning his course.
At last there came a tap at the door, and the butler appeared.
“Some one from the Foreign Office, my lord,” he said. A moment
afterwards a young official, his subordinate, entered. “There’s the
deuce to pay in Egypt, sir; I’ve brought the despatch,” he said.