Lady Channice did not go and rest. She sat on in the shadowy room gazing
before her, her hands still clasped, her face wearing still its look of
fear. For twenty years she had not known what it was to be without fear.
It had become as much a part of her life as the air she breathed and any
peace or gladness had blossomed for her only in that air: sometimes she
was almost unconscious of it. This afternoon she had become conscious.
It was as if the air were heavy and oppressive and as if she breathed
with difficulty. And sitting there she asked herself if the time was
coming when she must tell Augustine.
What she might have to tell was a story that seemed strangely
disproportionate: it was the story of her life; but all of it that
mattered, all of it that made the story, was pressed into one year long
ago. Before that year was sunny, uneventful girlhood, after it grey,
uneventful womanhood; the incident, the drama, was all knotted into one
year, and it seemed to belong to herself no longer; she seemed a
spectator, looking back in wonder at the disaster of another woman's
life. A long flat road stretched out behind her; she had journeyed over
it for years; and on the far horizon she saw, if she looked back, the
smoke and flames of a burning city--miles and miles away.
Amabel Freer was the daughter of a rural Dean, a scholarly, sceptical
man. The forms of religion were his without its heart; its heart was her
mother's, who was saintly and whose orthodoxy was the vaguest symbolic
system. From her father Amabel had the scholar's love of beauty in
thought, from her mother the love of beauty in life; but her loves had
been dreamy: she had thought and lived little. Happy compliance, happy
confidence, a dawn-like sense of sweetness and purity, had filled her
girlhood.
When she was sixteen her father had died, and her mother in the
following year. Amabel and her brother Bertram were well dowered.
Bertram was in the Foreign Office, neither saintly nor scholarly, like
his parents, nor undeveloped like his young sister. He was a capable,
conventional man of the world, sure of himself and rather suspicious of
others. Amabel imagined him a model of all that was good and lovely. The
sudden bereavement of her youth bewildered and overwhelmed her; her
capacity for dependent, self-devoting love sought for an object and
lavished itself upon her brother. She went to live with an aunt, her
father's sister, and when she was eighteen her aunt brought her to
London, a tall, heavy and rather clumsy country girl, arrested rather
than developed by grief. Her aunt was a world-worn, harassed woman; she
had married off her four daughters with difficulty and felt the need of
a change of occupation; but she accepted as a matter of course the duty
of marrying off Amabel. That task accomplished she would go to bed every
night at half past ten and devote her days to collecting coins and
enamels. Her respite came far more quickly than she could have imagined
possible. Amabel had promise of great beauty, but two or three years
were needed to fulfill it; Mrs. Compton could but be surprised when Sir
Hugh Channice, an older colleague of Bertram's, a fashionable and
charming man, asked for the hand of her unformed young charge. Sir Hugh
was fourteen years Amabel's senior and her very guilelessness no doubt
attracted him; then there was the money; he was not well off and he
lived a life rather hazardously full. Still, Mrs. Compton could hardly
believe in her good-fortune. Amabel accepted her own very simply; her
compliance and confidence were even deeper than before. Sir Hugh was the
most graceful of lovers. His quizzical tenderness reminded her of her
father, his quasi-paternal courtship emphasized her instinctive trust in
the beauty and goodness of life.
So at eighteen she was married at St. George's Hanover Square and wore a
wonderful long satin train and her mothers lace veil and her mother's
pearls around her neck and hair. A bridesmaid had said that pearls were
unlucky, but Mrs. Compton tersely answered:--"Not if they are such good
ones as these." Amabel had bowed her head to the pearls, seeing them,
with the train, and the veil, and her own snowy figure, vaguely, still
in the dreamlike haze. Memories of her father and mother, and of the
dear deanery among its meadows, floating fragments of the poetry her
father had loved, of the prayers her mother had taught her in childhood,
hovered in her mind. She seemed to see the primrose woods where she had
wandered, and to hear the sound of brooks and birds in Spring. A vague
smile was on her lips. She thought of Sir Hugh as of a radiance lighting
all. She was the happiest of girls.
Shortly after her marriage, all the radiance, all the haze was gone. It
had been difficult then to know why. Now, as she looked back, she
thought that she could understand.
She had been curiously young, curiously inexperienced. She had expected
life to go on as dawn for ever. Everyday light had filled her with
bleakness and disillusion. She had had childish fancies; that her
husband did not really love her; that she counted for nothing in his
life. Yet Sir Hugh had never changed, except that he very seldom made
love to her and that she saw less of him than during their engagement.
Sir Hugh was still quizzically tender, still all grace, all deference,
when he was there. And what wonder that he was little there; he had a
wide life; he was a brilliant man; she was a stupid young girl; in
looking back, no longer young, no longer stupid, Lady Channice thought
that she could see it all quite clearly. She had seemed to him a sweet,
good girl, and he cared for her and wanted a wife. He had hoped that by
degrees she would grow into a wise and capable woman, fit to help and
ornament his life. But she had not been wise or capable. She had been
lonely and unhappy, and that wide life of his had wearied and confused
her; the silence, the watching attitude of the girl were inadequate to
her married state, and yet she had nothing else to meet it with. She had
never before felt her youth and inexperience as oppressive, but they
oppressed her now. She had nothing to ask of the world and nothing to
give to it. What she did ask of life was not given to her, what she had
to give was not wanted. She was very unhappy.
Yet people were kind. In especial Lady Elliston was kind, the loveliest,
most sheltering, most understanding of all her guests or hostesses. Lady
Elliston and her cheerful, jocose husband, were Sir Hugh's nearest
friends and they took her in and made much of her. And one day when, in
a fit of silly wretchedness, Lady Elliston found her crying, she had put
her arms around her and kissed her and begged to know her grief and to
comfort it. Even thus taken by surprise, and even to one so kind, Amabel
could not tell that grief: deep in her was a reticence, a sense of
values austere and immaculate: she could not discuss her husband, even
with the kindest of friends. And she had nothing to tell, really, but of
herself, her own helplessness and deficiency. Yet, without her telling,
for all her wish that no one should guess, Lady Elliston did guess. Her
comfort had such wise meaning in it. She was ten years older than
Amabel. She knew all about the world; she knew all about girls and their
husbands. Amabel was only a girl, and that was the trouble, she seemed
to say. When she grew older she would see that it would come right;
husbands were always so; the wider life reached by marriage would atone
in many ways. And Lady Elliston, all with sweetest discretion, had asked
gentle questions. Some of them Amabel had not understood; some she had.
She remembered now that her own silence or dull negation might have
seemed very rude and ungrateful; yet Lady Elliston had taken no offence.
All her memories of Lady Elliston were of this tact and sweetness, this
penetrating, tentative tact and sweetness that sought to understand and
help and that drew back, unflurried and unprotesting before rebuff,
ready to emerge again at any hint of need,--of these, and of her great
beauty, the light of her large clear eyes, the whiteness of her throat,
the glitter of diamonds about and above: for it was always in her most
festal aspect, at night, under chandeliers and in ball-rooms, that she
best remembered her. Amabel knew, with the deep, instinctive sense of
values which was part of her inheritance and hardly, at that time, part
of her thought, that her mother would not have liked Lady Elliston,
would have thought her worldly; yet, and this showed that Amabel was
developing, she had already learned that worldliness was compatible with
many things that her mother would have excluded from it; she could see
Lady Elliston with her own and with her mother's eyes, and it was
puzzling, part of the pain of growth, to feel that her own was already
the wider vision.
Soon after that the real story came. The city began to burn and smoke
and flames to blind and scorch her.
It was at Lady Elliston's country house that Amabel first met Paul
Quentin. He was a daring young novelist who was being made much of
during those years; for at that still somewhat guileless time to be
daring had been to be original. His books had power and beauty, and he
had power and beauty, fierce, dreaming eyes and an intuitive, sudden
smile. Under his aspect of careless artist, his head was a little turned
by his worldly success, by great country-houses and flattering great
ladies; he did not take the world as indifferently as he seemed to.
Success edged his self-confidence with a reckless assurance. He was an
ardent student of Nietzsche, at a time when that, too, was to be
original. Amabel met this young man constantly at the dances and country
parties of a season. And, suddenly, the world changed. It was not dawn
and it was not daylight; it was a wild and beautiful illumination like
torches at night. She knew herself loved and her own being became
precious and enchanting to her. The presence of the man who loved her
filled her with rapture and fear. Their recognition was swift. He told
her things about herself that she had never dreamed of and as he told
them she felt them to be true.
To other people Paul Quentin did not speak much of Lady Channice. He
early saw that he would need to be discreet. One day at Lady Elliston's
her beauty was in question and someone said that she was too pale and
too impassive; and at that Quentin, smiling a little fiercely, remarked
that she was as pale as a cowslip and as impassive as a young Madonna;
the words pictured her; her fresh Spring-like quality, and the peace, as
of some noble power not yet roused.
In looking back, it was strange and terrible to Lady Channice to see how
little she had really known this man. Their meetings, their talks
together, were like the torchlight that flashed and wavered and only
fitfully revealed. From the first she had listened, had assented, to
everything he said, hanging upon his words and his looks and living
afterward in the memory of them. And in memory their significance seemed
so to grow that when they next met they found themselves far nearer than
the words had left them.
All her young reserves and dignities had been penetrated and dissolved.
It was always themselves he talked of, but, from that centre, he waved
the torch about a transformed earth and showed her a world of thought
and of art that she had never seen before. No murmur of it had reached
the deanery; to her husband and the people he lived among it was a mere
spectacle; Quentin made that bright, ardent world real to her, and
serious. He gave her books to read; he took her to hear music; he showed
her the pictures, the statues, the gems and porcelains that she had
before accepted as part of the background of life hardly seeing them.
From being the background of life they became, in a sense, suddenly its
object. But not their object--not his and hers,--though they talked of
them, looked, listened and understood. To Quentin and Amabel this beauty
was still background, and in the centre, at the core of things, were
their two selves and the ecstasy of feeling that exalted and terrified.
All else in life became shackles. It was hardly shock, it was more like
some immense relief, when, in each other's arms, the words of love, so
long implied, were spoken. He said that she must come with him; that she
must leave it all and come. She fought against herself and against him
in refusing, grasping at pale memories of duty, honour, self-sacrifice;
he knew too well the inner treachery that denied her words. But, looking
back, trying not to flinch before the scorching memory, she did not know
how he had won her. The dreadful jostle of opportune circumstance; her
husband's absence, her brother's;--the chance pause in the empty London
house between country visits;--Paul Quentin following, finding her
there; the hot, dusty, enervating July day, all seemed to have pushed
her to the act of madness and made of it a willess yielding rather than
a decision. For she had yielded; she had left her husband's house and
gone with him.
They went abroad at once, to France, to the forest of Fontainebleau. How
she hated ever after the sound of the lovely syllables, hated the memory
of the rocks and woods, the green shadows and the golden lights where
she had walked with him and known horror and despair deepening in her
heart with every day. She judged herself, not him, in looking back; even
then it had been herself she had judged. Though unwilling, she had been
as much tempted by herself as by him; he had had to break down barriers,
but though they were the barriers of her very soul, her longing heart
had pressed, had beaten against them, crying out for deliverance. She
did not judge him, but, alone with him in the forest, alone with him in
the bland, sunny hotel, alone with him through the long nights when she
lay awake and wondered, in a stupor of despair, she saw that he was
different. So different; there was the horror. She was the sinner; not
he. He belonged to the bright, ardent life, the life without social bond
or scruple, the life of sunny, tolerant hotels and pagan forests; but
she did not belong to it. The things that had seemed external things,
barriers and shackles, were the realest things, were in fact the inner
things, were her very self. In yielding to her heart she had destroyed
herself, there was no life to be lived henceforth with this man, for
there was no self left to live it with. She saw that she had cut herself
off from her future as well as from her past. The sacred past judged her
and the future was dead. Years of experience concentrated themselves
into that lawless week. She saw that laws were not outside things; that
they were one's very self at its wisest. She saw that if laws were to be
broken it could only be by a self wiser than the self that had made the
law. And the self that had fled with Paul Quentin was only a passionate,
blinded fragment, a heart without a brain, a fragment judged and
rejected by the whole.
To both lovers the week was one of bitter disillusion, though for
Quentin no such despair was possible. For him it was an attempt at joy
and beauty that had failed. This dulled, drugged looking girl was not
the radiant woman he had hoped to find. Vain and sensitive as he was, he
felt, almost immediately, that he had lost his charm for her; that she
had ceased to love him. That was the ugly, the humiliating side of the
truth, the side that so filled Amabel Channice's soul with sickness as
she looked back at it. She had ceased to love him, almost at once.
And it was not guilt only, and fear, that had risen between them and
separated them; there were other, smaller, subtler reasons, little
snakes that hissed in her memory. He was different from her in other
ways.
She hardly saw that one of the ways was that of breeding; but she felt
that he jarred upon her constantly, in their intimacy, their helpless,
dreadful intimacy. In contrast, the thought of her husband had been with
her, burningly. She did not say to herself, for she did not know it, her
experience of life was too narrow to give her the knowledge,--that her
husband was a gentleman and her lover, a man of genius though he were,
was not; but she compared them, incessantly, when Quentin's words and
actions, his instinctive judgments of men and things, made her shrink
and flush. He was so clever, cleverer far than Hugh; but he did not
know, as Sir Hugh would have known, what the slight things were that
would make her shrink. He took little liberties when he should have been
reticent and he was humble when he should have been assured. For he was
often humble; he was, oddly, pathetically--and the pity for him added to
the sickness--afraid of her and then, because he was afraid, he grew
angry with her.
He was clever; but there are some things cleverness cannot reach. What
he failed to feel by instinct, he tried to scorn. It was not the
patrician scorn, stupid yet not ignoble, for something hardly seen,
hardly judged, merely felt as dull and insignificant; it was the
corroding plebeian scorn for a suspected superiority.
He quarrelled with her, and she sat silent, knowing that her silence,
her passivity, was an affront the more, but helpless, having no word to
say. What could she say?--I do love you: I am wretched: utterly wretched
and utterly destroyed.--That was all there was to say. So she sat, dully
listening, as if drugged. And she only winced when he so far forgot
himself as to cry out that it was her silly pride of blood, the
aristocratic illusion, that had infected her; she belonged to the caste
that could not think and that picked up the artist and thinker to amuse
and fill its vacancy.--"We may be lovers, or we may be performing
poodles, but we are never equals," he had cried. It was for him Amabel
had winced, knowing, without raising her eyes to see it, how his face
would burn with humiliation for having so betrayed his consciousness of
difference. Nothing that he could say could hurt her for herself.
But there was worse to bear: after the violence of his anger came the
violence of his love. She had borne at first, dully, like the slave she
felt herself; for she had sold herself to him, given herself over bound
hand and foot. But now it became intolerable. She could not
protest,--what was there to protest against, or to appeal to?--but she
could fly. The thought of flight rose in her after the torpor of despair
and, with its sense of wings, it felt almost like a joy. She could fly
back, back, to be scourged and purified, and then--oh far away she saw
it now--was something beyond despair; life once more; life hidden,
crippled, but life. A prayer rose like a sob with the thought.
So one night in London her brother Bertram, coming back late to his
rooms, found her sitting there.
Bertram was hard, but not unkind. The sight of her white, fixed face
touched him. He did not upbraid her, though for the past week he had
rehearsed the bitterest of upbraidings. He even spoke soothingly to her
when, speechless, she broke into wild sobs. "There, Amabel, there.--Yes,
it's a frightful mess you've made of things.--When I think of
mother!--Well, I'll say nothing now. You have come back; that is
something. You _have_ left him, Amabel?"
She nodded, her face hidden.
"The brute, the scoundrel," said Bertram, at which she moaned a
negation.--"You don't still care about him?--Well, I won't question you
now.--Perhaps it's not so desperate. Hugh has been very good about it;
he's helped me to keep the thing hushed up until we could make sure. I
hope we've succeeded; I hope so indeed. Hugh will see you soon, I know;
and it can be patched up, no doubt, after a fashion."
But at this Amabel cried:--"I can't.--I can't.--Oh--take me away.--Let
me hide until he divorces me. I can't see him."
"Divorces you?" Bertram's voice was sharp. "Have you disgraced
publicly--you and us? It's not you I'm thinking of so much as the family
name, father and mother. Hugh won't divorce you; he can't; he shan't.
After all you're a mere child and he didn't look after you." But this
was said rather in threat to Hugh than in leniency to Amabel.
She lay back in the chair, helpless, almost lifeless: let them do with
her what they would.
Bertram said that she should spend the night there and that he would see
Hugh in the morning. And:--"No; you needn't see him yet, if you feel you
can't. It may be arranged without that. Hugh will understand." And this
was the first ray of the light that was to grow and grow. Hugh would
understand.
She did not see him for two years.
All that had happened after her return to Bertram was a blur now. There
were hasty talks, Bertram defining for her her future position, one of
dignity it must be--he insisted on that; Hugh perfectly understood her
wish for the present, quite fell in with it; but, eventually, she must
take her place in her husband's home again. Even Bertram, intent as he
was on the family honour, could not force the unwilling wife upon the
merely magnanimous husband.
Her husband's magnanimity was the radiance that grew for Amabel during
these black days, the days of hasty talks and of her journey down to
Charlock House.
She had never seen Charlock House before; Sir Hugh had spoken of the
family seat as "a dismal hole," but, on that hot July evening of her
arrival, it looked peaceful to her, a dark haven of refuge, like the
promise of sleep after nightmare.
Mrs. Bray stood in the door, a grim but not a hostile warder: Amabel
felt anyone who was not hostile to be almost kind.
The house had been hastily prepared for her, dining-room and
drawing-room and the large bedroom upstairs, having the same outlook
over the lawn, the sycamores, the flat meadows. She could see herself
standing there now, looking about her at the bedroom where gaiety and
gauntness were oddly mingled in the faded carnations and birds of
paradise on the chintzes and in the vastness of the four-poster, the
towering wardrobes, the capacious, creaking chairs and sofas. Everything
was very clean and old; the dressing-table was stiffly skirted in darned
muslins and near the pin-cushion stood a small, tight nosegay, Mrs.
Bray's cautious welcome to this ambiguous mistress.
"A comfortable old place, isn't it," Bertram had said, looking about,
too; "You'll soon get well and strong here, Amabel." This, Amabel knew,
was said for the benefit of Mrs. Bray who stood, non-committal and
observant just inside the door. She knew, too, that Bertram was
depressed by the gauntness and gaiety of the bedroom and even more
depressed by the maroon leather furniture and the cases of stuffed birds
below, and that he was at once glad to get away from Charlock House and
sorry for her that she should have to be left there, alone with Mrs.
Bray. But to Amabel it was a dream after a nightmare. A strange,
desolate dream, all through those sultry summer days; but a dream shot
through with radiance in the thought of the magnanimity that had spared
and saved her.
And with the coming of the final horror, came the final revelation of
this radiance. She had been at Charlock House for many weeks, and it was
mid-Autumn, when that horror came. She knew that she was to have a child
and that it could not be her husband's child.
With the knowledge her mind seemed unmoored at last; it wavered and
swung in a nightmare blackness deeper than any she had known. In her
physical prostration and mental disarray the thought of suicide was with
her. How face Bertram now,--Bertram with his tenacious hopes? How face
her husband--ever--ever--in the far future? Her disgrace lived and she
was to see it. But, in the swinging chaos, it was that thought that kept
her from frenzy; the thought that it did live; that its life claimed
her; that to it she must atone. She did not love this child that was to
come; she dreaded it; yet the dread was sacred, a burden that she must
bear for its unhappy sake. What did she not owe to it--unfortunate
one--of atonement and devotion?
She gathered all her courage, armed her physical weakness, her wandering
mind, to summon Bertram and to tell him.
She told him in the long drawing-room on a sultry September day, leaning
her arms on the table by which she sat and covering her face.
Bertram said nothing for a long time. He was still boyish enough to feel
any such announcement as embarrassing; and that it should be told him
now, in such circumstances, by his sister, by Amabel, was nearly
incredible. How associate such savage natural facts, lawless and
unappeasable, with that young figure, dressed in its trousseau white
muslin and with its crown of innocent gold. It made her suddenly seem
older than himself and at once more piteous and more sinister. For a
moment, after the sheer stupor, he was horribly angry with her; then
came dismay at his own cruelty.
"This does change things, Amabel," he said at last.
"Yes," she answered from behind her hands.
"I don't know how Hugh will take it," said Bertram.
"He must divorce me now," she said. "It can be done very quietly, can't
it. And I have money. I can go away, somewhere, out of England--I've
thought of America--or New Zealand--some distant country where I shall
never be heard of; I can bring up the child there."
Bertram stared at her. She sat at the table, her hands before her face,
in the light, girlish dress that hung loosely about her. She was fragile
and wasted. Her voice seemed dead. And he wondered at the unhappy
creature's courage.
"Divorce!" he then said violently; "No; he can't do that;--and he had
forgiven already; I don't know how the law stands; but of course you
won't go away. What an idea; you might as well kill yourself outright.
It's only--. I don't know how the law stands. I don't know what Hugh
will say."
Bertram walked up and down biting his nails. He stopped presently before
a window, his back turned to his sister, and, flushing over the words,
he said: "You are sure--you are quite sure, Amabel, that it isn't Hugh's
child. You are such a girl. You can know nothing.--I mean--it may be a
mistake."
"I am quite sure," the unmoved voice answered him. "I do know."
Bertram again stood silent. "Well," he said at last, turning to her
though he did not look at her, "all I can do is to see how Hugh takes
it. You know, Amabel, that you can count on me. I'll see after you, and
after the child. Hugh may, of course, insist on your parting from it;
that will probably be the condition he'll make;--naturally. In that case
I'll take you abroad soon. It can be got through, I suppose, without
anybody knowing; assumed names; some Swiss or Italian village--" Bertram
muttered, rather to himself than to her. "Good God, what an odious
business!--But, as you say, we have money; that simplifies everything.
You mustn't worry about the child. I will see that it is put into safe
hands and I'll keep an eye on its future--." He stopped, for his
sister's hands had fallen. She was gazing at him, still dully--for it
seemed that nothing could strike any excitement from her--but with a
curious look, a look that again made him feel as if she were much older
than he.
"Never," she said.
"Never what?" Bertram asked. "You mean you won't part from the child?"
"Never; never," she repeated.
"But Amabel," with cold patience he urged; "if Hugh insists.--My poor
girl, you have made your bed and you must lie on it. You can't expect
your husband to give this child--this illegitimate child--his name. You
can't expect him to accept it as his child."
"No; I don't expect it," she said.
"Well, what then? What's your alternative?"
"I must go away with the child."
"I tell you, Amabel, it's impossible," Bertram in his painful anxiety
spoke with irritation. "You've got to consider our name--my name, my
position, and your husband's. Heaven knows I want to be kind to you--do
all I can for you; I've not once reproached you, have I? But you must be
reasonable. Some things you must accept as your punishment. Unless Hugh
is the most fantastically generous of men you'll have to part from the
child."
She sat silent.
"You do consent to that?" Bertram insisted.
She looked before her with that dull, that stupid look. "No," she
replied.
Bertram's patience gave way, "You are mad," he said. "Have you no
consideration for me--for us? You behave like this--incredibly, in my
mother's daughter--never a girl better brought up; you go off with
that--that bounder;--you stay with him for a week--good
heavens!--there'd have been more dignity if you'd stuck to him;--you
chuck him, in one week, and then you come back and expect us to do as
you think fit, to let you disappear and everyone know that you've
betrayed your husband and had a child by another man. It's mad, I tell
you, and it's impossible, and you've got to submit. Do you hear? Will
you answer me, I say? Will you promise that if Hugh won't consent to
fathering the child--won't consent to giving it his name--won't consent
to having it, as his heir, disinherit the lawful children he may have by
you--good heavens, I wonder if you realize what you are asking!--will
you promise, I say, if he doesn't consent, to part from the child?"
She did look rather mad, her brother thought, and he remembered, with
discomfort, that women, at such times, did sometimes lose their reason.
Her eyes with their dead gaze nearly frightened him, when, after all his
violence, his entreaty, his abuse of her, she only, in an unchanged
voice, said "No."
He felt then the uselessness of protestation or threat; she must be
treated as if she were mad; humored, cajoled. He was silent for a little
while, walking up and down. "Well, I'll say no more, then. Forgive me
for my harshness," he said. "You give me a great deal to bear, Amabel;
but I'll say nothing now. I have your word, at all events," he looked
sharply at her as the sudden suspicion crossed him, "I have your word
that you'll stay quietly here--until you hear from me what Hugh says?
You promise me that?"
"Yes," his sister answered. He gave a sigh for the sorry relief.
That night Amabel's mind wandered wildly. She heard herself, in the
lonely room where she lay, calling out meaningless things. She tried to
control the horror of fear that rose in her and peopled the room with
phantoms; but the fear ran curdling in her veins and flowed about her,
shaping itself in forms of misery and disaster. "No--no--poor
child.--Oh--don't--don't.--I will come to you. I am your mother.--They
can't take you from me."--this was the most frequent cry.
The poor child hovered, wailing, delivered over to vague, unseen sorrow,
and, though a tiny infant, it seemed to be Paul Quentin, too, in some
dreadful plight, appealing to her in the name of their dead love to save
him. She did not love him; she did not love the child; but her heart
seemed broken with impotent pity.
In the intervals of nightmare she could look, furtively, fixedly, about
the room. The moon was bright outside, and through the curtains a pallid
light showed the menacing forms of the two great wardrobes. The four
posts of her bed seemed like the pillars of some vast, alien temple, and
the canopy, far above her, floated like a threatening cloud. Opposite
her bed, above the chimney-piece, was a deeply glimmering mirror: if she
were to raise herself she would see her own white reflection, rising,
ghastly.--She hid her face on her pillows and sank again into the abyss.
Next morning she could not get up. Her pulses were beating at fever
speed; but, with the daylight, her mind was clearer. She could summon
her quiet look when Mrs. Bray came in to ask her mournfully how she was.
And a little later a telegram came, from Bertram.
Her trembling hands could hardly open it. She read the words. "All is
well." Mrs. Bray stood beside her bed. She meant to keep that quiet look
for Mrs. Bray; but she fainted. Mrs. Bray, while she lay tumbled among
the pillows, and before lifting her, read the message hastily.
From the night of torment and the shock of joy, Amabel brought an
extreme susceptibility to emotion that showed itself through all her
life in a trembling of her hands and frame when any stress of feeling
was laid upon her.
After that torment and that shock she saw Bertram once, and only once,
again;--ah, strange and sad in her memory that final meeting of their
lives, though this miraculous news was the theme of it. She was still in
bed when he came, the bed she did not leave for months, and, though so
weak and dizzy, she understood all that he told her, knew the one
supreme fact of her husband's goodness. He sent her word that she was to
be troubled about nothing; she was to take everything easily and
naturally. She should always have her child with her and it should bear
his name. He would see after it like a father; it should never know that
he was not its father. And, as soon as she would let him, he would come
and see her--and it. Amabel, lying on her pillows, gazed and gazed: her
eyes, in their shadowy hollows, were two dark wells of sacred wonder.
Even Bertram felt something of the wonder of them. In his new gladness
and relief, he was very kind to her. He came and kissed her. She seemed,
once more, a person whom one could kiss. "Poor dear," he said, "you have
had a lot to bear. You do look dreadfully ill. You must get well and
strong, now, Amabel, and not worry any more, about anything. Everything
is all right. We will call the child Augustine, if it's a boy, after
mother's father you know, and Katherine, if it's a girl, after her
mother: I feel, don't you, that we have no right to use their own names.
But the further away ones seem right, now. Hugh is a trump, isn't he?
And, I'm sure of it, Amabel, when time has passed a little, and you feel
you can, he'll have you back; I do really believe it may be managed.
This can all be explained. I'm saying that you are ill, a nervous
breakdown, and are having a complete rest."
She heard him dimly, feeling these words irrelevant. She knew that Hugh
must never have her back; that she could never go back to Hugh; that her
life henceforth was dedicated. And yet Bertram was kind, she felt that,
though dimly feeling, too, that her old image of him had grown
tarnished. But her mind was far from Bertram and the mitigations he
offered. She was fixed on that radiant figure, her husband, her knight,
who had stooped to her in her abasement, her agony, and had lifted her
from dust and darkness to the air where she could breathe,--and bless
him.
"Tell him--I bless him,"--she said to Bertram. She could say nothing
more. There were other memories of that day, too, but even more dim,
more irrelevant. Bertram had brought papers for her to sign, saying: "I
know you'll want to be very generous with Hugh now," and she had raised
herself on her elbow to trace with the fingers that trembled the words
he dictated to her.
There was sorrow, indeed, to look back on after that. Poor Bertram died
only a month later, struck down by an infectious illness. He was not to
see or supervise the rebuilding of his sister's shattered life, and the
anguish in her sorrow was the thought of all the pain that she had
brought to his last months of life: but this sorrow, after the phantoms,
the nightmares, was like the weeping of tears after a dreadful weeping
of blood. Her tears fell as she lay there, propped on her pillows--for
she was very ill--and looking out over the Autumn fields; she wept for
poor Bertram and all the pain; life was sad. But life was good and
beautiful. After the flames, the suffocation, it had brought her here,
and it showed her that radiant figure, that goodness and beauty embodied
in human form. And she had more to help her, for he wrote to her, a few
delicately chosen words, hardly touching on their own case, his and
hers, but about her brother's death and of how he felt for her in her
bereavement, and of what a friend dear Bertram had been to himself.
"Some day, dear Amabel, you must let me come and see you" it ended; and
"Your affectionate husband."
It was almost too wonderful to be borne. She had to close her eyes in
thinking of it and to lie very still, holding the blessed letter in her
hand and smiling faintly while she drew long soft breaths. He was always
in her thoughts, her husband; more, far more, than her coming child. It
was her husband who had made that coming a thing possible to look
forward to with resignation; it was no longer the nightmare of desolate
flights and hidings.
And even after the child was born, after she had seen its strange little
face, even then, though it was all her life, all her future, it held the
second place in her heart. It was her life, but it was from her husband
that the gift of life had come to her.
She was a gentle, a solicitous, a devoted mother. She never looked at
her baby without a sense of tears. Unfortunate one, was her thought, and
the pulse of her life was the yearning to atone.
She must be strong and wise for her child and out of her knowledge of
sin and weakness in herself must guide and guard it. But in her
yearning, in her brooding thought, was none of the mother's rapturous
folly and gladness. She never kissed her baby. Some dark association
made the thought of kisses an unholy thing and when, forgetting, she
leaned to it sometimes, thoughtless, and delighting in littleness and
sweetness, the dark memory of guilt would rise between its lips and
hers, so that she would grow pale and draw back.
When first she saw her husband, Augustine was over a year old. Sir Hugh
had written and asked if he might not come down one day and spend an
hour with her. "And let all the old fogies see that we are friends," he
said, in his remembered playful vein.
It was in the long dark drawing-room that she had seen him for the first
time since her flight into the wilderness.
He had come in, grave, yet with something blithe and unperturbed in his
bearing that, as she stood waiting for what he might say to her, seemed
the very nimbus of chivalry. He was splendid to look at, too, tall and
strong with clear kind eyes and clear kind smile.
She could not speak, not even when he came and took her hand, and said:
"Well Amabel." And then, seeing how white she was and how she trembled,
he had bent his head and kissed her hand. And at that she had broken
into tears; but they were tears of joy.
He stood beside her while she wept, her hands before her face, just
touching her shoulder with a paternal hand, and she heard him saying:
"Poor little Amabel: poor little girl."
She took her chair beside the table and for a long time she kept her
face hidden: "Thank you; thank you;" was all that she could say.
"My dear, what for?--There, don't cry.--You have stopped crying? There,
poor child. I've been awfully sorry for you."
He would not let her try to say how good he was, and this was a relief,
for she knew that she could not put it into words and that, without
words, he understood. He even laughed a little, with a graceful
embarrassment, at her speechless gratitude. And presently, when they
talked, she could put down her hand, could look round at him, while she
answered that, yes, she was very comfortable at Charlock House; yes, no
place could suit her more perfectly; yes, Mrs. Bray was very kind.
And he talked a little about business with her, explaining that
Bertram's death had left him with a great deal of management on his
hands; he must have her signature to papers, and all this was done with
the easiest tact so that naturalness and simplicity should grow between
them; so that, in finding pen and papers in her desk, in asking where
she was to sign, in obeying the pointing of his finger here and there,
she should recover something of her quiet, and be able to smile, even, a
little answering smile, when he said that he should make a business
woman of her. And--"Rather a shame that I should take your money like
this, Amabel, but, with all Bertram's money, you are quite a bloated
capitalist. I'm rather hard up, and you don't grudge it, I know."
She flushed all over at the idea, even said in jest:--"All that I have
is yours."
"Ah, well, not all," said Sir Hugh. "You must remember--other claims."
And he, too, flushed a little now in saying, gently, tentatively;--"May
I see the little boy?"
"I will bring him," said Amabel.
How she remembered, all her life long, that meeting of her husband and
her son. It was the late afternoon of a bright June day and the warm
smell of flowers floated in at the open windows of the drawing-room. She
did not let the nurse bring Augustine, she carried him down herself. He
was a large, robust baby with thick, corn-coloured hair and a solemn,
beautiful little face. Amabel came in with him and stood before her
husband holding him and looking down. Confusion was in her mind, a
mingling of pride and shame.
Sir Hugh and the baby eyed each other, with some intentness. And, as the
silence grew a little long, Sir Hugh touched the child's cheek with his
finger and said: "Nice little fellow: splendid little fellow. How old is
he, Amabel? Isn't he very big?"
"A year and two months. Yes, he is very big."
"He looks like you, doesn't he?"
"Does he?" she said faintly.
"Just your colour," Sir Hugh assured her. "As grave as a little king,
isn't he. How firmly he looks at me."
"He is grave, but he never cries; he is very cheerful, too, and well and
strong."
"He looks it. He does you credit. Well, my little man, shall we be
friends?" Sir Hugh held out his hand. Augustine continued to gaze at
him, unmoving. "He won't shake hands," said Sir Hugh.
Amabel took the child's hand and placed it in her husband's; her own
fingers shook. But Augustine drew back sharply, doubling his arm against
his breast, though not wavering in his gaze at the stranger.
Sir Hugh laughed at the decisive rejection. "Friendship's on one side,
till later," he said.
* * * * *
When her husband had gone Amabel went out into the sycamore wood. It was
a pale, cool evening. The sun had set and the sky beyond the sycamores
was golden. Above, in a sky of liquid green, the evening star shone
softly.
A joy, sweet, cold, pure, like the evening, was in her heart. She
stopped in the midst of the little wood among the trees, and stood
still, closing her eyes.
Something old was coming back to her; something new was being given. The
memory of her mother's eyes was in it, of the simple prayers taught her
by her mother in childhood, and the few words, rare and simple, of the
presence of God in the soul. But her girlish prayer, her girlish thought
of God, had been like a thread-like, singing brook. What came to her now
grew from the brook-like running of trust and innocence to a widening
river, to a sea that filled her, over-flowed her, encompassed her, in
whose power she was weak, through whose power her weakness was uplifted
and made strong.
It was as if a dark curtain of fear and pain lifted from her soul,
showing vastness, and deep upon deep of stars. Yet, though this that
came to her was so vast, it made itself small and tender, too, like the
flowers glimmering about her feet, the breeze fanning her hair and
garments, the birds asleep in the branches above her. She held out her
hands, for it seemed to fall like dew, and she smiled, her face
uplifted.
* * * * *
She did not often see her husband in the quiet years that followed. She
did not feel that she needed to see him. It was enough to know that he
was there, good and beautiful.
She knew that she idealised him, that in ordinary aspects he was a
happy, easy man-of-the-world; but that was not the essential; the
essential in him was the pity, the tenderness, the comprehension that
had responded to her great need. He was very unconscious of aims or
ideals; but when the time for greatness came he showed it as naturally
and simply as a flower expands to light. The thought of him henceforth
was bound up with the thought of her religion; nothing of rapture or
ecstasy was in it; it was quiet and grave, a revelation of holiness.
It was as if she had been kneeling to pray, alone, in a dark, devastated
church, trembling, and fearing the darkness, not daring to approach the
unseen altar; and that then her husband's hand had lighted all the high
tapers one by one, so that the church was filled with radiance and the
divine made manifest to her again.
Light and quietness were to go with her, but they were not to banish
fear. They could only help her to live with fear and to find life
beautiful in spite of it.
For if her husband stood for the joy of life, her child stood for its
sorrow. He was the dark past and the unknown future. What she should
find in him was unrevealed; and though she steadied her soul to the
acceptance of whatever the future might bring of pain for her, the sense
of trembling was with her always in the thought of what it might bring
of pain for Augustine.