"No: you don't horrify me," Amabel replied. Her voice was gentle, almost
musing; she was absorbed in her contemplation.
"You see," said Lady Elliston, "you didn't play the game: you made a
mess of things and put the other players out. If you had stayed, and
kept your lover, you would have been, in my eyes, a less loveable but a
wiser woman. I believe in the game being kept up; I believe in the
social structure: I am one of its accredited upholders"; in the shadow
of her hand, Lady Elliston slightly smiled. "I believe in the family,
the group of shared interests, shared responsibilities, shared
opportunities it means: I don't care how many lovers a woman has if she
doesn't break up the family, if she plays the game. Marriage is a social
compact and it's the woman's part to keep the home together. If she
seeks love outside marriage she must play fair, she mustn't be an
embezzling partner; she mustn't give her husband another man's children
to support and so take away from his own children;--that's thieving. The
social structure, the family, are unharmed, if one is brave and wise.
Love and marriage can rarely be combined and to renounce love is to
cripple one's life, to miss the best thing it has to give. You, at all
events, Amabel, may be glad that you haven't missed it. What, after all,
does our life mean but just that,--the power and feeling that one gets
into it. Be glad that you've had something."
Amabel, answering nothing, contemplated her guest.
"So, as these are my views, imagine what I feel when I find you here,
like this"; Lady Elliston dropped her hand at last and looked about her,
not at Amabel: "when I find you, in prison, locked up for life, by
yourself, because you were lovably unwise. It's abominable, it's
shameful, your position, isolated here, and tolerated, looked askance at
by these nobodies.--Ah--I don't say that other women haven't paid even
more heavily than you've done; I own that, to a certain extent, you've
escaped the rigours that the game exacts from its victims. But there was
no reason why you should pay anything: it wasn't known, never really
known--your brother and Hugh saw to that;--you could have escaped
scot-free."
Amabel spoke at last: "How, scot-free?" she asked.
Lady Elliston looked hard at her: "Your husband would have taken you
back, had you insisted.--You shouldn't have fallen in with his plans."
"His plans? They were mine; my brother's."
"And his. Hugh was glad to be rid of the young wife he didn't love."
Again Amabel was trembling. "He might have been rid of her, altogether
rid of her, if he had cared more for power and freedom than for pity."
"Power? With not nearly enough money? He was glad to keep her money and
be rid of her. If you had pulled the purse-strings tight you might have
made your own conditions."
"I do not believe you," said Amabel; "What you say is not true. My
husband is noble."
Lady Elliston looked at her steadily and unflinchingly. "He is not
noble," she said.
"What have you meant by coming here today? You have meant something! I
will not listen to you! You are my husband's enemy;"--Amabel half
started from her chair, but Lady Elliston laid her hand on her arm,
looking at her so fixedly that she sank down again, panic-stricken.
"He is not noble," Lady Elliston repeated. "I will not have you waste
your love as you have wasted your life. I will not have this illusion of
his nobility come between you and your son. I will not have him come
near you with his love. He is not noble, he is not generous, he is not
beautiful. He could not have got rid of you. And he came to you with his
love yesterday because his last mistress has thrown him over--and he
must have a mistress. I know him: I know all about him: and you don't
know him at all. Your husband was my lover for over twenty years."
A long silence followed her words. It was again a strange picture of
arrested life in the dark room. The light fell quietly upon the two
faces, their stillness, their contemplation--it seemed hardly more
intent than contemplation, that drinking gaze of Amabel's; the draught
of wonder was too deep for pain or passion, and Lady Elliston's eyes
yielded, offered, held firm the cup the other drank. And the silence
grew so long that it was as if the twenty years flowed by while they
gazed upon each other.
It was Lady Elliston's face that first showed change. She might have
been the cup-bearer tossing aside the emptied cup, seeing in the slow
dilation of the victim's eyes, the constriction of lips and nostrils,
that it had held poison. All--all had been drunk to the last drop. Death
seemed to gaze from the dilated eyes.
"Oh--my poor Amabel--" Lady Elliston murmured; her face was stricken
with pity.
Amabel spoke in the cramped voice of mortal anguish.--"Before he married
me."
"Yes," Lady Elliston nodded, pitiful, but unflinching. "He married you
for your money, and because you were a sweet, good, simple child who
would not interfere."
"And he could not have divorced me, because of you."
"Because of me. You know the law; one guilty person can't divorce
another. No one knew: no one has ever known: he and Jack have remained
the best of friends:--but, of course, with all our care, it's been
suspected, whispered. If I'd been less powerful the whispers might have
blighted me: as it was, we thought that Bertram wasn't altogether
unsuspecting. Hugh knew that it would be fatal to bring the matter into
court;--I will say for Hugh that, in spite of the money, he wanted to.
He could have married money again. He has always been extremely
captivating. When he found that he would have to keep you, the money, of
course, did atone. I suppose he has had most of your money by now," said
Lady Elliston.
Amabel shut her eyes. "Wasn't he even sorry for me?" she asked.
Lady Elliston reflected and a glitter was in her eye; vengeance as well
as justice armed her. "He is not unkind," she conceded: "and he was
sorry after a fashion: 'Poor little girl,' I remember he said. Yes, he
was very tolerant. But he didn't think of you at all, unless he wanted
money. He is always graceful in his direct relations with people; he is
tactful and sympathetic and likes things to be pleasant. But he doesn't
mind breaking your heart if he doesn't have to see you while he is doing
it. He is kind, but he is as hard as steel," said Lady Elliston.
"Then you do not love him any longer," said Amabel. It was not a
question, only a farther acceptance.
And now, after only the slightest pause, Lady Elliston proved how deep,
how unflinching was her courage. She had guarded her illicit passion all
her life; she revealed it now. "I do love him," she said. "I have never
loved another man. It is he who doesn't love me."
From the black depths where she seemed to swoon and float, like a
drowsy, drowning thing, the hard note of misery struck on Amabel's ear.
She opened her eyes and looked at Lady Elliston. Power, freedom,
passion: it was not these that looked back at her from the bereft and
haggard eyes. "After twenty years he has grown tired," Lady Elliston
said; and her candour seemed as inevitable as Amabel's had been: each
must tell the other everything; a common bond of suffering was between
them and a common bond of love, though love so differing. "I knew, of
course, that he was often unfaithful to me; he is a libertine; but I was
the centre; he always came back to me.--I saw the end approaching about
five years ago. I fought--oh how warily--so that he shouldn't dream I
was afraid;--it is fatal for a woman to let a man know she is
afraid,--the brutes, the cruel brutes,"--said Lady Elliston;--"how we
love them for their fear and pleading; how our fear and pleading hardens
them against us." Her lips trembled and the tears ran down her cheeks.
"I never pleaded; I never showed that I saw the change. I kept him, for
years, by my skill. But the odds were too great at last. It was a year
ago that he told me he didn't care any more. He was troubled, a little
embarrassed, but quite determined that I shouldn't bother him. Since
then it has been another woman. I know her; I meet her everywhere; very
beautiful; very young; only married for three years; a heartless,
rapacious creature. Hugh has nearly ruined himself in paying her
jeweller's bills and her debts at bridge. And already she has thrown him
over. It happened only the other day. I knew it was happening when I saw
him here. I was glad, Amabel; I longed for him to suffer; and he will.
He is a libertine of most fastidious tastes and he will not find many
more young and beautiful women, of his world, to run risks for him. He,
too, is getting old. And he has gone through nearly all his own
money--and yours. Things will soon be over for him.--Oh--but--I love
him--I love him--and everything is over for me.--How can I bear it!"
She bent forward on her knees and convulsive sobs shook her.
Her words seemed to Amabel to come to her from a far distance; they
echoed in her, yet they were not the words she could have used. How dim
was her own love-dream beside this torment of dispossession.
What--who--had she loved for all these years? She could not touch or see
her own grief; but Lady Elliston's grief pierced through her. She leaned
towards her and softly touched her shoulder, her arm, her hand; she held
the hand in hers. The sight of this loss of strength and dignity was an
actual pain; her own pain was something elusive and unsubstantial; it
wandered like a ghost vainly seeking an embodiment.
"Oh, you angel--you poor angel!" moaned Lady Elliston. "There: that's
enough of crying; it can't bring back my youth.--What a fool I am. If
only I could learn to think of myself as free instead of maimed and left
by the wayside. It is hard to live without love if one has always had
it.--But I have freed you, Amabel. I am glad of that. It has been a
cruel, but a right thing to do. He shall not come to you with his
shameless love; he shall not come between you and your boy. You shan't
misplace your worship so. It is Augustine who is beautiful and noble; it
is Augustine who loves you. You aren't maimed and forsaken; thank heaven
for that, dear."
Lady Elliston had risen. Strong again, she faced her life, took up the
reins, not a trace of scruple or of shame about her. It did not enter
her mind to ask Amabel for forgiveness, to ask if she were despised or
shrunk from: it did not enter Amabel's mind to wonder at the omission.
She looked up at her guest and her lifted face seemed that of the
drowned creature floating to the surface of the water.
"Tell me, Amabel," Lady Elliston suddenly pleaded, "this is not going to
blacken things for you; you won't let it blacken things. You will live;
you will leave your prison and come out into the world, with your
splendid boy, and live."
Amabel slightly shook her head.
"Oh, why do you say that? Has it hurt so horribly?"
Amabel seemed to make the effort to think what it had done. She did not
know. The ghost wailed; but she could not see its form.
"Did you care--so tremendously--about him?"--Lady Elliston asked, and
her voice trembled. And, for answer, the drowned eyes looked up at her
through strange, cold tears.
"Oh, my dear, my dear," Lady Elliston murmured. Her hand was still in
Amabel's and she stood there beside her, her hand so held, for a long,
silent moment. They had looked away from each other.
And in the silence each knew that it was the end and that they would see
each other no more. They lived in different planets, under different
laws; they could understand, they could trust; but a deep, transparent
chasm, like that of the ether flowing between two divided worlds, made
them immeasurably apart.
Yet, when she at last gently released Amabel's hand, drawing her own
away. Lady Elliston said: "But,--won't you come out now?"
"Out? Where?" Amabel asked, in the voice of that far distance.
"Into the world, the great, splendid world."
"Splendid?"
"Splendid, if you choose to seize it and take what it has to give."