Lady Elliston looked at her from across the chasm; it was not dark, it
held no precipices; it was made up only of distance. Lady Elliston saw;
but she was loyal to her own world. "Yes, it has," she said. "I've
lived; you have dreamed your life away. You haven't even a reality to
mourn the loss of."
"No," Amabel said; she closed her eyes and turned her head away against
the chair; "No; I have lived too. Don't pity me."
X
It was past five when Augustine came into the empty drawing-room. Tea
was standing waiting, and had been there, he saw, for some time. He rang
and asked the maid to tell Lady Channice. Lady Channice, he heard, was
lying down and wanted no tea. Lady Elliston had gone half an hour
before. After a moment or two of deliberation, Augustine sat down and
made tea for himself. That was soon over. He ate nothing, looking with a
vague gaze of repudiation at the plate of bread and butter and the
cooling scones.
When tea had been taken away he walked up and down the room quickly,
pausing now and then for further deliberation. But he decided that he
would not go up to his mother. He went on walking for a long time. Then
he took a book and read until the dressing-bell for dinner rang.
When he went upstairs to dress he paused outside his mother's door, as
she had paused outside his, and listened. He heard no sound. He stood
still there for some moments before lightly rapping on the door. "Who is
it?" came his mother's voice. "I; Augustine. How are you? You are coming
down?"
"Not tonight," she answered; "I have a very bad headache."
"But let me have something sent up." After a moment his mother's voice
said very sweetly; "Of course, dear." And she added "I shall be all
right tomorrow."
The voice sounded natural--yet not quite natural; too natural, perhaps,
Augustine reflected. Its tone remained with him as something disturbing
and prolonged itself in memory like a familiar note strung to a queer,
forced pitch, that vibrated on and on until it hurt.
After his solitary meal he took up his book again in the drawing-room.
He read with effort and concentration, his brows knotted; his young
face, thus controlled to stern attention, was at once vigilant for outer
impressions and absorbed in the inner interest. Once or twice he looked
up, as a coal fell with a soft crash from the fire, as a thin creeper
tapped sharply on the window pane. His mother's room was above the
drawing-room and while he read he was listening; but he heard no
footsteps.
Suddenly, dim, yet clear, came another sound, a sound familiar, though
so rare; wheels grinding on the gravel drive at the other side of the
house. Then, loud and startling at that unaccustomed hour, the old hall
bell clanged through the house.
Augustine found himself leaning forward, breathing quickly, his book
half-closed. At first he did not know what he was listening for or why
his body should be tingling with excitement and anger. He knew a moment
later. There was a step in the hall, a voice. All his life Augustine had
known them, had waited for them, had hated them. Sir Hugh was back
again.
Of course he was back again, soon,--as he had promised in the tone of
mastery. But his mother had told him not to come; she had told him not
to come, and in a tone that meant more than his. Did he not know?--Did
he not understand?
"No, dear Hugh, not soon.--I will write."--Augustine sprang to his feet
as he entered the room.
Sir Hugh had been told that he would not find his wife. His face wore
its usual look of good-temper, but it wore more than its usual look of
indifference for his wife's son. "Ah, tell Lady Channice, will you," he
said over his shoulder to the maid. "How d'ye do, Augustine:" and, as
usual, he strolled up to the fire.
Augustine watched him as he crossed the room and said nothing. The maid
had closed the door. From his wonted place Sir Hugh surveyed the young
man and Augustine surveyed him.
"You know, my dear fellow," said Sir Hugh presently, lifting the sole of
his boot to the fire, "you've got devilish bad manners. You are
devilishly impertinent, I may tell you."
Augustine received the reproof without comment.
"You seem to imagine," Sir Hugh went on, "that you have some particular
right to bad manners and impertinence here, in this house; but you're
mistaken; I belong here as well as you do; and you'll have to accept the
fact."
A convulsive trembling, like his mother's, passed over the young man's
face; but whereas only Amabel's hands and body trembled, it was the
muscles of Augustine's lips, nostrils and brows that were affected, and
to see the strength of his face so shaken was disconcerting, painful.
"You don't belong here while I'm here," he said, jerking the words out
suddenly. "This is my mother's home--and mine;--but as soon as you make
it insufferable for us we can leave it."
"_You_ can; that's quite true," Sir Hugh nodded.
Augustine stood clenching his hands on his book. Now, unconscious of
what he did, he grasped the leaves and wrenched them back and forth as
he stood silent, helpless, desperate, before the other's intimation. Sir
Hugh watched the unconscious violence with interest.
"Yes," he went on presently, and still with good temper; "if you make
yourself insufferable--to your mother and me--you can go. Not that I
want to turn you out. It rests with you. Only, you must see that you
behave. I won't have you making her wretched."
Augustine glanced dangerously at him.
"Your mother and I have come to an understanding--after a great many
years of misunderstanding," said Sir Hugh, putting up the other sole.
"I'm--very fond of your mother,--and she is,--very fond of me."
"She doesn't know you," said Augustine, who had become livid while the
other made his gracefully hesitant statement.
"Doesn't know me?" Sir Hugh lifted his brows in amused inquiry; "My dear
boy, what do you know about that, pray? You are not in all your mother's
secrets."
Augustine was again silent for a moment, and he strove for self-mastery.
"If I am not in my mother's secrets," he said, "she is not in yours. She
does not know you. She doesn't know what sort of a man you are. You have
deceived her. You have made her think that you are reformed and that the
things in your life that made her leave you won't come again. But
whether you are reformed or not a man like you has no right to come near
a woman like my mother. I know that you are an evil man," said
Augustine, his face trembling more and more uncontrollably; "And my
mother is a saint."
Sir Hugh stared at him. Then he burst into a shout of laughter. "You
young fool!" he said.
Augustine's eyes were lightnings in a storm-swept sky.
"You young fool," Sir Hugh repeated, not laughing, a heavier stress
weighting each repeated word.
"Can you deny," said Augustine, "that you have always led a dissolute
life? If you do deny it it won't help you. I know it: and I've not
needed the echoes to tell me. I've always felt it in you. I've always
known you were evil."
"What if I don't deny it?" Sir Hugh inquired.
Augustine was silent, biting his quivering lips.
"What if I don't deny it?" Sir Hugh repeated. His assumption of
good-humour was gone. He, too, was scowling now. "What have you to say
then?"
"By heaven,--I say that you shall not come near my mother."
"And what if it was not because of my dissolute life she left me? What
if you've built up a cock-and-bull romance that has no relation to
reality in your empty young head? What then? Ask your mother if she left
me because of my dissolute life," said Sir Hugh.
The book in Augustine's wrenching hands had come apart with a crack and
crash. He looked down at it stupidly.
"You really should learn to control yourself--in every direction, my
dear boy," Sir Hugh remarked. "Now, unless you would like to wreak your
temper on the furniture, I think you had better sit down and be still. I
should advise you to think over the fact that saints have been known
before now to forgive sinners. And sinners may not be so bad as your
innocence imagines. Goodbye. I am going up to see your mother. I am
going to spend the night here."
Augustine stood holding the shattered book. He gazed as stupidly at Sir
Hugh as he had gazed at it. He gazed while Sir Hugh, who kept a rather
wary eye fixed on him, left the fire and proceeded with a leisurely pace
to cross the room: the door was reached and the handle turned, before
the stupor broke. Sir Hugh, his eyes still fixed on his antagonist, saw
the blanched fury, the start, as if the dazed body were awakening to
some insufferable torture, saw the gathering together, the leap:--"You
fool--you young fool!" he ground between his teeth as, with a clash of
the half-opened door, Augustine pinned him upon it. "Let me go. Do you
hear. Let me go." His voice was the voice of the lion-tamer, hushed
before danger to a quelling depth of quiet.
And like the young lion, drawing long breaths through dilated-nostrils,
Augustine growled back:--"I will not--I will not.--You shall not go to
her. I would rather kill you."
"Kill me?" Sir Hugh smiled. "It would be a fight first, you know."
"Then let it be a fight. You shall not go to her."
"And what if she wants me to go to her.--Will you kill her first,
too--"--The words broke. Augustine's hand was on his throat. Sir Hugh
seized him. They writhed together against the door. "You mad-man!--You
damned mad-man!--Your mother is in love with me.--I'll put you out of
her life--"--Sir Hugh grated forth from the strangling clutch.
Suddenly, as they writhed, panting, glaring their hatred at each other,
the door they leaned on pushed against them. Someone outside was turning
the handle, was forcing it open. And, as if through the shocks and
flashes of a blinding, deafening tempest, Augustine heard his mother's
voice, very still, saying: "Let me come in."