She cried a great deal--and she slept a little. She would have died
sooner than own it, but luckily for her newly developed sense of
veracity, there was no one to question her on this point. About eight
o’clock in the morning she rose and dressed, resolved to go downstairs
to breakfast as usual. She found it practically impossible not to see
Rivers again. If he wished to avoid her, he easily could do so.
So at the usual hour, she drifted into the little sitting-room, her face
composed to a certain extent, but her eyelids swelled, and her cheeks
bleached and seared by a sufficient percentage of the hours of the night
devoted to weeping.
The man of her thoughts was sitting at the breakfast table, bending
studiously over a Bradshaw. He hardly looked up, but he muttered
something civil. Mrs. Elles was woman of the world enough to be able to
murmur her conventional “Good morning” in return, for the benefit of
Dorothy, who was in attendance, and who watched them both so intently
as to justify Mrs. Elles’ peevish remark, “I do wish Dorothy would not
stare so.”
“Does she? I have not noticed,” he replied, listlessly. “Would you mind
pouring out the tea?”
This commonplace suggestion brought her back from the verge of
hysterics, as it was perhaps intended to do.
“Oh, I forgot,” she exclaimed, taking her hands out of her lap, and
becoming suddenly and inefficiently active. Rivers never got a worse cup
of tea in his life, probably, than the one Mrs. Elles gave him that
morning, and he took it without sugar, comment, or complaint.
They ate and drank in silence. Mrs. Elles could bear anything but that.
“Will you look out a train for me--a train home?” she asked, in tones as
nearly devoid of all emotion as she could compass.
“I will, if you will tell me where you live!” he replied, with equal
coldness.
“Newcastle,” she murmured, in a voice choked with incipient sobs.
He opened the Guide with cruelly assured hands. “There is a train at
12:45,” he said, looking up.
But the strain had been too much for her, she had flung down her napkin,
and had risen from the table, and hurrying across the room to the sofa,
had flung herself down there in a heap, with her face to the wall. He
caught the white gleam of a pocket handkerchief, which alone told him
she was weeping.
There was a silence. Rivers groaned--the nervous groan of a man who is
too well bred to swear at a woman.
She tried to refrain from sobbing aloud. She lay quite still. Her eyes,
half open in the dim penumbra of the sofa corner, saw only, as in a
nightmare, its rough horse-hair surface, like a dreary hill, studded
with briars of incommensurate proportions, and over which she somehow
imagined herself climbing. Her ears, preposterously sharpened by her
excitement, next heard the faint click of a teacup, hastily pushed
aside. A panic fear overcame her, lest this should be the signal of his
rising, and that the clash of the door closing behind him, as she had
heard it last night, and remembered it, would be the next sound that
would come to her ears. But as in some stages of the mesmeric trance,
she was powerless to stop him; she would not be able to raise a finger
even to save her life, and her life it would be that she would lose. He
would go out of the room--out of her world for ever! She listened ...
her ears were tingling ... it was positive pain....
He did rise--and she presently felt his hand on her shoulder, and heard
strange, unexpected words of tenderness from his lips.
“Dear--I love you--but what can I do? You are another man’s wife.”
She turned her whole body round, and caught his arm to her, and hid her
face on his sleeve.
“Yes, I know, but can you ever forgive me--for the lies I have told you?
That is what I want to know.”
“I have said that I loved you,” he said, simply. “I can’t say more than
that. Women are different, I suppose.”
She never remembered anything sadder than the sigh with which he said
this. She realized that in order to exonerate the woman he said he cared
for, and to condone her fault, he had been obliged to involve the whole
of her sex in her disgrace, and to set all womankind a few degrees
lower.
“What am I to do then?” she asked like a child, sitting up, and pushing
the disordered hair off her brows without regard to order or
becomingness.
“Obviously,” he said, and his tone was almost brutal, “go, unless you
will let me? Only, as you have a home and a husband to go to---- ”
“You might have spared me that!” she said, with a flash of her old
spirit, rising, and wandering deviously towards the door, like one in a
sad and hopeless dream. “Of course I must go!” she said meekly, fumbling
with the door handle. “Will you please open it? I have things to do ...
give up my room ... pay my bill....”
“Have you--are you sure you have enough money?”
“No, I daresay not,” she answered with dreary inconsequence. “But it
doesn’t matter!”
“What nonsense! Of course it matters. You must let me lend you some.”
She shuddered. “Oh, I couldn’t borrow of you.”
“Why not? You don’t know what you are saying, poor thing!”
At that word she began to cry.
“Look here---- ” His words were rough, but his voice was gentle. “For
Heaven’s sake, don’t go and expose yourself--expose us”--for she had
made a gesture expressive of entire disregard of all malign inferences
with regard to herself--“to the whole household! It is bad enough
already!”
He took her hand, and she ceased to weep, and looked up into the face of
her supreme arbiter with a dull submission.
“You must take these three notes that I am going to give you,” he said
authoritatively, “and go quietly up to your room and ring for the
servant and ask for your bill and pay it--I can’t do all this for you,
or I would--but I will order the trap to take you to the station in time
for the 12:45!”
“Drive to the station with me,” she murmured.
“No, I must not do that, but I will tell you what I will do. As soon as
you have made all your arrangements, we will take a little walk in the
Park, shall we?”
He spoke like an ascetic, dealing himself out many penances, and but one
indulgence. His tone throughout was businesslike and decided, he was no
longer the quiet indifferent dreamer of dreams, but the efficient man
of the world, the man of action; and the fanciful hysterical woman at
his side was completely dominated by his decision, and stilled for the
moment into something like acquiescence with her fate.
She carried out all his directions faithfully and accurately, and in
less than half an hour, joined him in the road outside the inn, veiled
and spectacled, and demure as a nun about to take the vow!
“I have told them,” he said, “to bring the trap round to the Park Gates
to meet you. So you will not need to go back to the inn at all. We have
just half an hour.”
“But you are wasting your whole morning’s work,” she said as they turned
in at the Park Gates. It was the first thing that occurred to her to
say.
“Oh, just for once!” he replied. “My work will have no cause to complain
of me--after to-day.”
She shuddered at the grimness of his accent--she apprehended his meaning
only too well. She seemed to see him in her mind’s eye, as he would be
henceforth, stooping, brooding, gloating over his work in the dell of
Brignal, alone, as he was before she came there, and mildly, dully happy
perhaps, as he may have been, before the Human Interest came to trouble
him.
And yet--“He does not want to let me see how he feels it,” was the
secret consolation that lay all the while at the back of her thought,
explaining his brusqueness, his taciturnity, his hardness, which her
surface mind could not help resenting and deprecating. Her soul’s life,
which was then at its lowest ebb, lived on that thought, and her body
took courage from it.
She walked into the Park almost briskly by his side, and when they had
travelled a certain distance along the broad path, he made a significant
movement of his hand towards her spectacles.
“Can you take those things off?” he asked her, imperiously.
She obediently doffed the symbol of her martyrdom and return to the
paths of virtue, and handed them to him. He folded the spectacles and
put them in his coat pocket.
“The bill was only thirteen pounds,” she next remarked, holding out the
notes he had lent her. “I had plenty of money of my own, so I return
these.”
The notes, too, he put into his pocket without comment. Then she said
reproachfully:--
“Don’t you want to know my name?”
He started. “Your name? That does not matter, does it?”
“But you surely must know my name to write to me by?”
“I am not going to write to you.”
“Why not?” There was a sharp note of prescient anguish in her voice.
“I am not good at writing letters.”
“Ah, no, it isn’t that,” she answered sadly. “You mean of course that
you want to go quite out of my life.”
“What can I do?”
“Do!” she repeated after him vaguely. Then--“Must you?”
“Yes--I must.”
“But it isn’t possible,--no, it isn’t possible!” she cried.
“Quite possible,” he answered her doggedly. “I did not know you a month
ago--I shall not know you a month hence, that’s all!”
She wailed out gently, like a child. “But what am I to do? What are you
going to do?”
“I am going to do my work,” he answered her severely and coldly. “My
work, that I have been letting go to the dogs lately. I shall paint and
paint--like the very devil--as I did before you came. You must do that
too. Work is the only thing, I find.”
“Work, work, honest work!” she repeated mechanically. “But will you tell
me what work I have to do? It is all very well for you--you speak as if
you quite looked forward to your life without me--but I shall eat my
heart out.”
“Oh, people say that, but there is a certain savage pleasure in
renunciation, as you will find.”
His tone was so extraordinarily bitter, that she cried out joyfully,
“Oh, then you do care a little? You speak of renunciation! Then I can
speak. I was afraid to. I was beginning to think--that you had
only--oh, how difficult it is to say these things!--that you had
only--proposed--to me, because I had compromised myself by staying here
with you so long. Out of pity, you know!”
They had left the Broad Walk, and were wandering down a track in the
undergrowth. He turned round to her, and his voice was quite different
from the one he had been hitherto using.
“You are quite wrong if you think that. On the contrary---- ” He
stopped, and seemed embarrassed for the first time. “It was what I
wanted--I said that I loved you--and I did. I do--only---- ”
“Then--then--if you can say that---- ” She seized his hand, raised it to
her lips, and kissed it. “Then let him--let my husband divorce me! I
must say it! I can’t let myself drown without a word! Mortimer will have
every excuse to divorce me, don’t you see? I have been living
practically alone with you for a whole month! It looks bad enough--even
old Mr. Popham saw it. I could not defend it--and I won’t! Mortimer will
have to divorce me, and we will marry each other and be happy.... Why do
you shake your head like that? No! But why not? You think my proposal
dreadful! So it is, but I would do anything--anything in the world to
come to you.”
“And so would I for you--you must not doubt that!” he replied, and his
slow deliberate tones in no wise expressed the emotion that, for her
comfort, she could see in his eyes. He gave her back her hands, as it
were.
“Anything,”--he repeated gravely, “but a dishonourable thing! No, not
even for you!... Look here! it is now half past eleven--you can only
just do it! The trap will be there already! You shall leave me here....
Please--don’t make difficulties, my dear. It has to be. We have decided
it, haven’t we? Good-bye ... good-bye!”
She did not cry. She stood still and leant her head against the trunk of
a huge beech tree, and felt her hair catch in its rough bark, and half
closed her eyes in anticipation of a parting that would be worse to bear
than a blow. Would he kiss her? He must, and yet she would not ask him.
He did; he took her in his arms, and gratified her great love with a
kiss more perfunctory than passionate, perhaps, and which yet awakened
the woman’s heart in her body once and for all. Then he turned sharply
on his heel and raised his hat--she smiled even in her misery at the
irony of it, but she understood him now--and left her.
She dared not watch him go, lest she fall into the crime of calling him
back to her. He might hate her for that. She looked up into the branches
of the tree overhead, till a sudden rush of tears mercifully blinded
her!
Ten minutes later, she made her way down the Broad Walk to the Gate,
turning a foolish unintelligent stare on the porter who opened it for
her as he had done for Rivers ten minutes before--she felt a wild desire
to ask him how her lover had looked as he passed through. Still in a
merciful dream she mounted the steps of the dog-cart that was waiting in
the road for her, and was whirled away in the direction of Barnard
Castle.
She was wrong in her supposition--Rivers had not left the Park, but had
turned down a little side path to the right. He stayed in the Park till
he heard the sound of the wheels of the dog-cart going past the high
boundary wall. Then he walked with his quick elastic step to the gate,
and back to the “Heather Bell.”
“I wonder if I shall ever paint another decent picture?” was the purely
technical remark that he made to himself. He was very pale, and he
lifted his hat off, once or twice, and breathed deeply as the cold
morning air met his forehead.
“A lady to see you, Mr. Rivers,” said Jane Anne to him, as he crossed
the porch.
“Where?”
“She asked to be shown into your sitting-room, Sir,” answered Jane Anne,
with great suavity of manner.
“You should not have done that!” the painter said wearily, and passed
in.
The first thing that caught his eyes on entering the little parlour that
he had shared with Mrs. Elles was her tear-stained handkerchief lying
like a white blot on the black horsehair sofa, and her long tan-coloured
gloves spread at length upon the table. If he had thought about it, he
would have recollected that the gloves had not lain there when he left
the room, or at any rate, were not in the same position. In the very
middle of the room stood a tall commanding presence, the “Bombazine
Mother”--as Mrs. Elles had insisted on calling her--the lady he had seen
talking to Jane Anne in the garden last night!
One bony hand was firmly planted on the table in the neighbourhood of
the gloves, the other flourished a letter in an aggressively judicial
manner. The artist bowed, and waited for her to speak.
“I daresay you know my name, Sir!” she said.
“I have not the pleasure,” he answered, curtly. Her voice had a most
painful effect on him.
“Poynder--Mrs. George Poynder--I am the aunt--by marriage--of the lady
who has been living with you here for one calendar month! Don’t attempt
to deny it, man---- ”
She spoke so preposterously fast that he had no opportunity of doing so.
Pointing to Jane Anne, who had slunk into the room during her speech,
she continued:
“This young lady will bear out what I have said, and the good people of
the inn. There are plenty of Phœbe’s things about; for instance, that
object on the sofa--you will hardly say it is yours, I presume? I saw
besides, with my own eyes last night, an unparallelled scene of---- ”
Here the painter interrupted her by almost roaring out:
“Please to leave the room, Jane Anne!”
The girl, cowed, crept out. The painter continued:
“If this lady is your niece, Madam, you will hardly wish to discuss her
reputation in public. Now, all I have to say to you is this, that this
is the parlour of the inn, common to all, and the only available
sitting-room. Your niece, Miss----,” he hesitated, he did not remember
to have ever called Mrs. Elles by any name--“has been good enough to
consent to share it with me during the time you name---- ”
“Nonsense! Now look here! it is no earthly use your beginning to tell me
a pack of cock-and-bull stories like that!” struck in the old woman, and
her overpowering emphasis actually silenced the man with the mere
physical oppression of volume of sound and harsh quality of tone. The
genius was no match for the virago.
“I have stayed here, in this very inn, from last night. I meant to see
for myself--and I have seen! The Vicar’s wife--if there is such a thing
as a vicar in this God-forgotten place!--who was scandalized by the
goings on here, wrote to me and apprised me that Mrs. Elles--my
niece--by marriage--perhaps you will have the brass to say that you did
not know that she was a married lady?”
“I certainly did not know”--began the artist, almost mildly--for the
sake of another woman, grown suddenly dearer to him than she had been,
he thought to exercise diplomacy in dealing with the coarse virago who
held that woman’s fate in her hands--but it was of no avail, since she
interrupted him again, stridently, volubly, overwhelmingly, so that his
forehead contracted, and he turned pale under the mere shock of the
impact of the words she flung at him.
“Yes, my niece Phœbe ran away from her husband--my nephew--and came
straight here to you, and has been living here with you for a clear
month under an assumed name. That looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? So bad
that Mortimer--my nephew--will have no difficulty in getting his
divorce?”
“Divorce!” muttered Rivers, taken by surprise, and foolishly allowing
her to see the shock her words had given him.
“Yes indeed, divorce, what else would you have? He will be perfectly
justified. The woman has always been a constant source of trouble and
disgrace to him. She has never known how to behave herself, and God
knows what might have happened, and I, for one, am rare and glad to be
shot of the little baggage! And now---- ”
Mrs. Poynder was not without a certain kind of penetration, and seeing
herself in imminent danger of being ordered out of the room, adroitly
concluded to be beforehand with the man whom she had goaded into fury.
“And now, Sir, I will wish you a very good day!” she said, quite
quietly, moving towards the door. “And since you are so very careful of
Phœbe’s reputation--there isn’t much of it--but the landlady here tells
me she was under the impression that you and she were courting. Well,
perhaps now that you have ruined her, you will be gentleman enough to
marry her. It is the very least you can do, when you have got her kicked
out of her husband’s house!”
“And by God, I will, if it comes to that!” Rivers said, with sudden and
determined emphasis. He strode to the door.
“Now, Madam, have the goodness to leave my room.”
He held the door open for her as she passed out. He was white with rage.
“I am sure I thought I heard you say it was the common parlour?” the
terrible woman remarked to him, over her shoulder.
* * * * *
A moment later, he seized his hat and went out. Jane Anne was waiting
for him in the passage, her comely face marred with tears. She caught
his hand and held it.
“Oh, Mr. Rivers, do please forgive me! Mrs. Topham wrote the letter, she
did indeed, and the other lady stayed here all night--and saw you---- ”
He shook her hand off his sleeve, and passed out into the road, without
even looking at her.
Jane Anne looked at her hand--the hand he had disdained--as if she would
like to cut it off. Her heavy brows contracted--met together in a dull
frown of rage and disappointment.
“Then I’ll just swear anything they like!” she muttered to herself.