Mrs. Davenport had spent the evening alone. Her husband was away for the
night, and Reggie, as we have seen, had gone to the opera.
Whatever Reggie was he was not secretive, and his obvious pleasure that
afternoon at Lady Hayes's invitation did not savour of the sweetness of
consciously forbidden fruit. But his very frankness, which, as has been
mentioned before, was capable of dealing unpleasant back-hand blows, had
also a dazzling power about it, which, like the rays from a noon-day
sun, renders it impossible to tell what lies behind, though it would be
very false to describe it as partaking of the nature of dissimulation.
It seemed to say, "I am not responsible for the weakness of your
eyesight; I show my mystery or my want of mystery to you with all my
heart, and you are at fault if you cannot form any conclusion which it
is." To continue the metaphor, Mrs. Davenport would have felt not
ungrateful to some abatement in its brilliance partaking of the nature
of an eclipsed frankness, a shadow cast on the disc by some external
object, or, at any rate, she would have been glad to take the opinion of
someone who was possessed of smoked glasses, or a natural tendency to
observe correctly. Had she known it, Lord Hayes would have been exactly
the individual required, but it was no discredit to her acuteness that
the idea never entered her head, quite apart from the impracticability
of putting it into execution.
She had just dined and was glancing through the pages of a novel from
Mudie's, when the drawing-room door opened, and Reggie appeared. He
paused a moment when he saw his mother, and then advanced into the room.
His attempt to look unconcerned and contented was singularly
unsuccessful.
Mrs. Davenport laid down her book, frightened.
"Ah! Reggie, what's the matter? What has happened?"
Reggie turned away from her, and fingered a small ornament on the
mantelpiece.
"Nothing," he said hoarsely. "I came away from the opera. I--"
He turned round again, and knelt by his mother's chair.
"Don't ask me just now," he said. "There has been a scene, and I came
away. Lady Hayes said things that disgusted me. I didn't think she was
like that."
Mrs. Davenport offered a short mental thanksgiving. Until the relief had
come, she had not known how much Reggie's intimacy with Lady Hayes had
weighed on her. She waited for a moment to see if Reggie would say more.
Then--
"Won't you tell me more, dear, or would you rather not?"
"Yes, I want to tell you," said he. "At dinner she told me all about
Tannhäuser and Venusberg, and I didn't understand her. Then, when the
overture was played, I suddenly understood it all. It was horrible; it
was wicked. If anybody else had said that, I should simply have thought
it was very bad form, but that she should!"
Mrs. Davenport had not quite realised before how serious it was, and
Reggie's tone, even in his renunciation of Eva, was a shock to her.
"That she should say those things!" repeated Reggie. "But when I
understood it, I couldn't stop there. I don't remember very clearly what
happened. I told her she was a wicked woman, and then I came away."
The excessive baldness of his narrative struck Mrs. Davenport as
convincing, and she felt a little reassured. But Reggie had not meant
to reassure her, and he soon undeceived her.
"Why should she have said those things to me?" he went on, getting up,
and walking about the room. "Why, if she was like that, couldn't she
have kept it from me? I should have been content to know only half of
her, and to have adored that."
"Ah!"
Mrs. Davenport winced as with a sudden spasm of pain; then pity for
Gertrude bred in her anger for Reggie. "What do you mean?" she said
sharply. "I do not understand you in the least. You adored her, then;
why not say love?"
"I didn't know it before," said he, "until this thing came, or, of
course, I should have gone away. I am not a villain. But I know it now;
I adored her, and I loved her--and--"
"And you do still?"
"Yes."
There was a long silence, and the hum of the London streets came in at
the open window. Mrs. Davenport found herself noticing tiny things,
among others that Reggie had placed the ornament he had been fingering
perilously near the edge of the mantelpiece. In a great crisis our large
reflective and thinking powers get choked for a moment, and the ordinary
surface perceptions, which are as instinctive and unnoticed as
breathing, are left in command of our mind. The sight of that ornament
there assumed an overwhelming importance to her, and she got up from her
seat and put it back in a safer place. Then she turned to Reggie, who
was standing still in the middle of the room, with his back towards her.
"Sit down here, Reggie," she said quietly. "I think we had better talk a
little. Do you quite realise what that means?"
"Ah, don't talk to me like that," he burst out. "As if I was not in hell
already, without being reminded of it. Mummy, I don't mean that. You are
all that is good and loving. You know that I know it. You are very
gentle with me. I won't be angry again."
Mrs. Davenport's anxiety for Gertrude made her very tender.
"Ah, my dear," she said, "I do not care for myself. It is very
immaterial that you speak like that to me. I should be a very selfish
woman if I thought of myself just now. There are others to think of, you
and--and Gertrude."
"Yes, I know, I know. But what am I to do? Tell me that, and I will do
it."
"Go to Aix," said his mother promptly, "and go at once."
"Go to Aix!" said he. "Why, that's just what I couldn't possibly do. God
knows, I have done Gertrude injury enough, without insulting her!"
"Your waiting here in London is the worst insult you could do her. You
must see that."
"I can't do it!" he cried. "You know I can't. How can I leave Eva--Lady
Hayes--like this?"
Mrs. Davenport got up, and waited a moment till her voice was more under
her control. But when she spoke, her anger vibrated through it so
strongly, that even Reggie, in his almost impenetrable self-centred
wretchedness, was startled.
"Has it ever occurred to you that there is another concerned in this
besides yourself?" she said. "Are you aware that Gertrude loves you in a
way that it honours any man to be loved? Do you mean to make no effort
to repair the injury you have done her? Be a man, Reggie; you have been
a boy too long. Dare you say you ever loved Gerty, if you treat her like
this--now? You wish to behave like a fool, and, what is worse, like a
coward. I never thought I should be ashamed of you, as I shall be now,
if you stop in London after what has happened."
Once more there was a dead silence. Mrs. Davenport, as she knew, had
played her ace of trumps; she had brought to bear the strongest motive
that she could think of to influence Reggie. If he would not listen to
her because she was his mother, if he cared nothing about the effect his
action would have on her opinion of him, she knew that there was no more
to be done by her.
Reggie flushed suddenly, as if he had been struck.
"But what good will it do if I go?" he cried; "and where am I to go to?
I can't go to Gertrude now."
"Your place is with her," said Mrs. Davenport. "If it is all over
between you, it is your business to tell her. I don't wish you to tell
her at once, but go there and wait a week. Don't be a coward, and don't
think that it will be any the better for putting it off. What do you
propose to do in the interval--to wait here? She will write to you, and
you will not answer, or will you pretend that you are hers, as she is
yours? That would not be a very honourable position, would it? Don't
disgrace yourself and bring dishonour on us all. Have you no pride,
even?"
Reggie looked up in amazement.
"Disgrace myself--bring dishonour on you--"
"Has it never struck you that you are on the verge of doing that?" said
Mrs. Davenport.
It evidently had not, and Reggie received the possibility of it with
deep perplexity. But the outcome was that he said wearily,--
"Do as you like with me. Yes; I will go."
"Ah! but what is the use of going like that?" said his mother. "You must
go, not because I wish you to, but because you realise it, and mean to
act up to it. The fact of your going is only a symbol that you are not
quite disloyal yet. You are to go as if your heart was still whole; you
are going to meet Gerty, to meet her to whom you promised so much. You
told me Eva said things which disgusted you. Think of them; sting
yourself into hating her. Oh! it will not be easy. I do not expect you
will enjoy yourself."
Reggie sat still a moment; then he exclaimed inconsequently,--
"I am very tired. I shall go to bed. Yes, I want to see Gerty again very
much."
Reggie, as he had said, had only that night realised how much Eva had
entered into his life. It had not occurred to him before to put the case
candidly to himself; not because he wished to shirk a conclusion, but
because he regarded his feeling for Gertrude as sufficiently safe to
warrant the assumption that things were all right. But when this sudden
crash came--serious enough, at least, from his point of view, for he
could not help regarding his words to Eva as a formal and complete
rupture--he saw exactly where he stood. He was separated from Eva; but
he was separated from Gertrude, not by any violent wrench, but by the
gradual drift of the current, which he had not perceived till now. It
had not occurred to him to be honest with himself before. Eva had been
divinely kind to him, sympathetic, eager to share his confidence; it was
no wonder that, in the blank which Gertrude's absence made, he had found
pleasure in giving it her, and that the aforesaid blank became gradually
filled with new interests. If the thought ever had occurred to him that
the image of Eva was becoming a sort of palimpsest to that of Gertrude,
he would have denied the imputation stoutly, perhaps the more stoutly
because he was aware that he had not been at pains to find out.
Mrs. Davenport felt, when he had left her, that in a vague way she had
expected all this. She had been quite aware that it is not possible for
men to continue being boys indefinitely--that there is a time for
everyone when they must ask themselves why they do a thing, or why they
do not do it; and she knew that, for Reggie, that time had come. He was
a boy no longer; that unconscious youth, which had moved Eva's interest,
then her love, had gone; he had awoke from his long, happy dream to the
grey, convincing morning of reason and of claims. That he would be the
better man for it, she did not doubt; that he could not have been a man
without, she knew; and yet she was full of regret, full of those aching
thoughts "for days that are no more," which are even more poignant when
we feel them for others than when we mourn over them for ourselves.
Reggie had consented to go away--that was good; but was there not
something left to be done? She knew from him that he had called Eva "a
wicked woman," and had left the box. What, then, was Eva's feeling on
the subject? If she was offended, so much the better; she might be
induced to say so. If--worst chance of all--she cared for him, more than
she cared for the hundred men who were dangling round her, was there
still no possibility of making her say she was offended? All the
mother's pride and protectiveness revolted against the notion, but it
was worth trying. Mrs. Davenport had so clearly in her mind the best
solution of the problem--namely, the disenchantment of Reggie, by any
means, or, failing that, the prolonged absence from Eva--that she put
her pride in her pocket. She remembered perfectly well her talk with
Percy; how he had felt uneasy at this engagement, because it resembled
too much Reggie's previous escapades: and surely, if he was right,
Reggie's very curtailed entanglement with Eva came under the same head.
Let him only get away, with obvious discouragement from Eva, and let
Gertrude reassert her previous relation, unconscious of any
interruption.
Lady Hayes had not passed a very good night. She was on the verge of
doing a very difficult thing; that is to say, doing something directly
opposed to her inclinations. In fact, she was, as she had told her
husband, in love with Reggie Davenport, and such an experience was new
to her. But this very simple and every-day phenomenon was curiously
complicated in her case. She happened to be another man's wife, and the
man with whom she was in love was about to be another girl's husband.
She thought with some impatience of the hundred-and-one stories which
are called realistic because they are improbable, in which the woman
and man cast everything to the winds and say they obey the dictates of
the divine mother of things, because that solution was very far from
satisfying her. There is a book that says that love seeketh not its own,
and, curiously enough, Eva found her thoughts straying to that short
text, which has been abandoned as untrue by the apostles of evolution
and modern life, who say that that particular gospel has served its
time, that we now know a more excellent way. She had probably never
devoted much thought as to whether she was modern or not, but she was
surprised to find that so ancient a text seemed to represent her mood
more clearly than less antique and hall-marked utterances.
She had had breakfast and was still sitting in the dining-room with her
husband, when a footman came in bearing a card. Eva looked at it and
pondered. Then,--
"Tell Mrs. Davenport I will see her; show her in here."
Eva got up from her place, and walked up and down the room. She was very
pale, and she looked anxious and worn. But she stopped opposite the
flower-stand in the corner, and put two orchids in the front of her
dress.
Mrs. Davenport was announced, and remarked that it was a beautiful
morning, and Lord Hayes assented. She had seldom seen him before, and he
was dressed with extreme care, but appeared wholly insignificant. She
remembered his enormous wealth, and it seemed to her to be a sort of
label to prevent his getting quite lost in this large world. He reminded
her of an undelivered parcel, waiting for its owner to turn up.
Lady Hayes sat silent for a few minutes, and then turned to her husband.
"Perhaps you would be so good as to go away," she said in a low, musical
voice, "as I have things to talk over with my friend, or, if you like,
we will go upstairs. Perhaps that would be better."
Lord Hayes got up with alacrity.
"The fact is," he said, "I was on the point of going. I have some
business to do. I was wanting to talk to you some time later on, if it
would be convenient."
"Certainly," said Eva. "I will see you about it later."
She dropped her eyes as he addressed her, and sat looking at the ground
till he had left the room. Then she said to Mrs. Davenport,--
"What do you want with me?"
Her tone belied the curtness of her words, and she waited eagerly for
the answer. These few moments after she had said she would see Mrs.
Davenport, were spent in an agony to control herself. She was hungering
for more news from Reggie, but in her hand she held a note, which had
come from him by the early post, which made her decision doubly
difficult. It was a wild, absurd production, imploring pardon,
entreating her to let him know that she had forgiven him--only half
coherent--and Eva knew that he had really made his choice, or was
willing to make his choice between her and Gertrude, if she would only
say "Come." "I am going to Aix to-day," the note finished, "to see
Gertrude. Cannot you send me one word, to say you forgive me? I behaved
quite unpardonably."
Mrs. Davenport raised her eyes to Eva's face, and answered her bravely.
"I have come to talk to you about Reggie," she said.
Eva flushed, and unconsciously closed her hand on the note she held.
"What about him?"
"He is not very happy," said Mrs. Davenport, gently, "and I think
perhaps you can help me."
"Ah! I think I probably can," said Eva. "I am glad you have come to see
me. I am afraid I have made mischief, and I am sorry. It is odd for me
to be sorry; I suppose it's a sign that I am growing old. You know for
some time he has been seeing a good deal of me. That was my fault; I
ought to have stopped it. And last night I gave him a sudden shock. He
only knew one little bit of me, and I thought it was better--"
Eva stopped, for her voice was trembling, and Mrs. Davenport waited.
"It was better," she continued, after a moment, "that he should know the
rest of me. Then, when he knew, he called me a wicked woman, and went
away straight from the opera. It was splendid. I admired him immensely.
But it appears he is sorry he did so. I have just got a note from him
imploring forgiveness."
"Ah! the foolish boy," said Mrs. Davenport, half involuntarily.
"Yes, I quite agree with you. You see it puts me in a difficulty. I like
him very much--so much that I should be sorry to do him an injury. I
should do him an injury if I allowed him to fall in love with me again.
On the other hand, I like him well enough to be very sorry not to see
him again, and I have to choose."
Eva stopped again, and Mrs. Davenport laid a hand on hers.
"Yes, yes," she said eagerly.
Eva was gradually regaining her control over herself.
"I want him to be very happy," she said, "and his best chance of
happiness, I am sure, is with that girl; I forget her name. I have never
seen her, but Reggie has spoken of her to me. He ought to go to
Herefordshire, or wherever it is, and live among the daisies with his
beloved. He is not made for this sort of thing; he is too good. I don't
at all wish to spoil his life or the girl's life."
Mrs. Davenport bent forward again in her chair.
"Ah! Eva, you will do it, won't you? I am sure you are right. He will be
very happy with her. Do write to him, and say you are offended; make him
angry, touch his pride, be as brutal as possible."
"But I don't feel brutal," said Eva. "It is rather hard on me. Oh! I
can't, I can't," she exclaimed suddenly.
Mrs. Davenport saw how matters stood at once, and she paused. She had
not expected this complication.
Eva started up as she made this self-betrayal, and stood with the colour
rising in her cheeks, furiously angry with herself, and wondering how
Mrs. Davenport would interpret it. She blamed herself for ever having
seen her; she had passed a sleepless night and her nerves were
disordered. But the other lady spoke again, almost at once. She saw that
it made it harder for Eva, but she saw that the only thing to be done
was to pretend to have noticed nothing. So, before the silence grew
portentous, she went on, but with more tenderness in her voice,--
"Yes, of course it is hard for you," she said. "It is very hard to be
unselfish in this weary world. But it is worth an effort, is it not? And
that you are fond of Reggie ought to make it easier. You don't wish to
spoil his life, as you say."
"How did he behave last night when he came home?" asked Eva, suddenly.
"He is changed," said Mrs. Davenport. "I think you would see it.
Somehow, he is a boy no longer; he has become a man, and he finds it not
pleasant."
"Ah! that is so, is it?" said Eva. "It was horribly stupid of me. But it
makes it easier for me. He was so young, somehow--which I have never
been. Are you sure you are right?"
"Yes, quite sure."
"That makes it easier for me, and perhaps for him. Does he take things
hard?"
"I don't think Reggie has known anything before which he could take
hard. He has been very happy."
"You mean he will be less happy now."
"For the time, yes," said Mrs. Davenport; "but I feel sure it will be
for the best. He is one of those people who are made to be happy, and I
am sure he will have less unhappiness this way than if you took any
other course."
"I must think about it," said Eva, turning and walking up and down the
room. But even as she spoke she tore Reggie's letter in half, and threw
the pieces into the grate. "It is hard for me, is it not?" said she,
stopping in front of Mrs. Davenport, "but it appears I am to be the
victim."
"Reggie looked very like another victim last night," said the other.
Eva looked away.
"Did he--was he very unhappy about it?" she asked.
"Not too unhappy."
"What do you mean?"
"From what I know of him," said Mrs. Davenport, "especially since this
sudden change has come, if you speak now, you may make the whole
difference to him. Make him angry and sore, and then let him go off to
Aix, and I think Gertrude will do the rest. I wonder if she will guess
what has happened. I hope not."
"How she will hate me!" murmured Eva, "and so will Reggie. It is really
hard to see what I am to gain by the arrangement."
"Ah! don't go back now," entreated Mrs. Davenport. "See, I have no pride
left. I implore you to do what I ask. You are very powerful; I know your
power too well, and so does Reggie, God help him!"
"I wonder if it is really better to be unselfish than selfish," mused
Eva, more to herself than to Mrs. Davenport, "or to try to do good at
all. We are so very short sighted that we may be doing the worst thing
possible. Who were those very ingenious people who did harm when they
wanted to, in order that good might follow? Anyhow, if I do this, I
shall not have chosen the selfish course. I suppose there will be an
imperishable reward for me somewhere. Even so, perhaps I am really doing
the selfish thing by doing as you ask me; it all depends, doesn't it,
on how much I like him? whether I like him enough to be unselfish;
whether the burden of being selfish wouldn't be harder to bear than the
burden of being unselfish."
"I know how little I matter to you personally," said Mrs. Davenport,
"but you will know at least that I think you have done a very noble
thing, something of which not many are capable; something it was very
hard for you to do."
"Ah! you don't understand me a bit," broke out Eva. "I assure you that
no one's opinion has an atom of weight with me. I fear evil report as
little as I covet good. Let me think for a few moments."
Mrs. Davenport was silent; she hardly heard Eva's last speech, for all
her thoughts were on her possible decision. That she had not dismissed
her at once, had not refused to see her, she felt was a favourable sign.
Eva, she knew, was quite capable, in spite of a certain intimacy between
them, of having sent a message that she saw no one in the morning. Mrs.
Davenport feared her and her cold, hard power, as she feared nothing
else in the world. She sat there pale, almost trembling, while Eva
passed slowly up and down the room, for a few minutes. But at the end of
one of these turns, when she was by the door, she passed out, and Mrs.
Davenport heard her step ascending the stairs. She waited there while
the minute hand crept round the dial of the great bronze clock on the
mantelpiece, and it was half-an-hour before Eva appeared again, with a
large, unsealed envelope in her hand. She looked very weary, but as
faultlessly beautiful as ever.
"I have not sealed it," she said, "because I thought you might like to
read it, and while I am about it I might as well do it handsomely. At
the same time, I would sooner you did not read it, but I shall neither
blame you nor try to dissuade you if you wish to. With it is Reggie's
photo--the one he gave me. You need not take them. Will you read it? No?
Then I will send a man with it at once, as you don't care to look at the
letter. There is no reason why you should be turned into a penny post
because your son has called me a wicked woman. He was quite right, by
the way--perfectly right. I--"
Eva stopped suddenly, for there was that tremor in her voice which had
been there once before at this interview.
"I will not betray myself," she determined, biting her lip, in a
splendid effort to keep command over herself.
"There is just one thing that I should like to ask you," she went on
almost at once; "send me a line now and then, to tell me about Reggie,
and whether it is all right between him and the girl. I liked him very
much, you know, and I shall never see him again, I suppose."
Mrs. Davenport was much moved. She had guessed, and guessed correctly,
that Reggie would not be the only sufferer, and that Eva had behaved
heroically, and tears partly of relief, but partly of gratitude and
admiration, started to her eyes.
"God bless you for what you have done!" she whispered. "I can say no
more than that."
The tension broke.
"Leave me quickly," cried Eva, as the large, painful sobs began to break
from her throat. "Go at once!"
"Eva, Eva," cried Mrs. Davenport, stretching out her hands to her.
"Go--go at once!" cried the other.
She turned rapidly from her, and Mrs. Davenport, without another word,
left the room. She just saw Eva sink in the arm-chair she had been
occupying before, and bury her face in her hands. Mrs. Davenport closed
the door quietly and went out.
She had left behind her, and she knew it, a sorrow greater and more
desolate than Reggie's weaker nature would ever know. She remembered
Percy's prediction, that some day Eva "would do something sublimely
unselfish, and that would be when she fell in love."
It was still only about mid-day when she left the house, and she had
purposely said "Good-bye" to Reggie before she went, for, presupposing
the success of her expedition, of which Reggie knew nothing, her
presence was unnecessary and undesirable. If, on the other hand, she was
unsuccessful, she had determined to go to the station and meet her
husband, and acquaint him with the state of things. She drove about for
an hour or so, and then changed her mind, and determined to make an
effort to see Reggie before he set off.
She arrived home just as he was starting, and they met in the hall, and
when she saw his face she drew a deep breath of satisfaction and relief.
He was unmistakably angry.
"You are just off, are you, dear?" she said quietly. "Give Gertrude my
love, and--and be very brave and make an effort, dear boy. It will not
be easy. God bless you, my darling?"
"She wrote to me this morning," whispered Reggie hoarsely, as he kissed
his mother. "I will never speak to her or think of her again. Ah! Mummy,
good-bye! you have saved me."