A CRISIS.
As nature makes us, so to a great extent, the most of us remain, when
education has done its very best, or its very worst, to modify the great
mother's handiwork. Her patterns, of which no one ever saw the original
designs, and that have been unknown centuries a-weaving, cannot be
sensibly altered in the infinitesimal fragment that one human lifetime
represents, though every thread of circumstance, in its right or wrong
adjustment, must have its value in the ultimate product, whatever that
unimaginable thing may be.
Still, in the individual man or woman, here and there, the type that he
or she belongs to is temporarily obscured by accidental causes; the
lines of character, laid down by many forefathers, are twisted or
straightened by violent wrenchings of irresponsible fate--as in less
important branches of nature's business her processes are interrupted by
lightning and earthquakes, and other rebellious forces.
Rachel, from the hour when she discovered how it was that she and Roden
Dalrymple had been defrauded of their "rights," was apparently quite
changed (though--as she is still a very young woman--we are not
prepared to suppose that she will never be her old weak and timid and
clinging self again). She was turned, from a soft and shrinking girl,
into a hard and fearless, if not a defiant, woman.
The immense strength of her love--always an incalculable "unknown
quantity" in the elements of human character and the factors of human
destiny--had already given force and point, and meaning and dignity, to
her whole personality and her relations with life; but now the magnitude
of her wrongs and misfortunes, and still more of _his_, seemed to dwarf
and crush every feeble trait and sentiment in her.
She went back to the ball-room, very white and silent, on Mr. Gordon's
arm; and the first person of her own party whom she met there was Mr.
Reade, under whose protection she placed herself, dismissing her late
escort with a quiet "good-night."
She asked to be taken to Beatrice; and Ned, who never knew from whom he
had received her, piloted her through the crowd until he found his small
wife, whose bright eyes no sooner rested on Rachel's face than they
recognised a new calamity.
"Has she heard anything, I wonder?" she asked herself in dismay. "Are
you ill?" she inquired aloud.
"I want to go home," said Rachel.
The little woman did not waste time asking useless questions. She took
her cousin to the cloak-room, sent Ned for a cab, and in a few minutes
the three were driving to the Kingstons' hotel.
When they reached Rachel's drawing-room, and Ned had been sent
downstairs to see if her maid was on the premises, Mrs. Reade put her
arms round her tenderly, and begged to know what was the matter with
her.
But Rachel, singularly unresponsive to the rare caress, would not
tell--would not talk at all. She would not betray the mother's crime to
the daughter, and she would not mention the name of her beloved, even to
her dearest friend, in these married days.
"I am not well," she said, gently but with an odd harshness in her face
and voice. "I could not dance--I could not stay in that place. I shall
be better here. Go back, Beatrice, and make excuses for me. Say I was
not well."
"I shall do no such thing," said Beatrice bluntly. "I shall not leave
you until Graham comes home."
Rachel begged and protested with a sharp peremptoriness that was very
unusual to her. Beatrice, full of anxiety and consternation, was
obdurate.
In the midst of their discussion, they heard Mr. Kingston coming
upstairs, bustling along in great haste. He flung open the door, with an
air of angry irritation.
"Oh, here you are!" he exclaimed loudly. "What on earth are you doing?
Everybody is inquiring for you, Rachel. Aren't you well? Why didn't you
tell me, and let me bring you home, if you wanted to come? You have set
all the room talking and gossiping, slinking off before midnight in this
way--as if you were a mere nobody, who would not be missed--and not
letting me know. What's the matter, eh?"
Rachel, without changing her position by a hair's breadth, lifted her
eyes steadily and looked at him, but she did not speak.
Mrs. Reade saw the look, and she needed no words to tell her that some
crisis in the conjugal relations of this pair had come, which no
outsider had any business to see or meddle with; and she guessed
correctly what it was.
"I will go back, and make what explanations are necessary," said she;
"and I will come round in the morning, Rachel."
And she went out quickly, and closed the door behind her. On the stairs
she met Rachel's maid going up, and told her her mistress would ring
when she wanted her; and in the lobby of the hotel she replied to her
husband's anxious inquiries by declaring irrelevantly that she wished
Mr. Kingston, and his house and his money, were all at the bottom of the
sea.
That gentleman, meanwhile, after following her out upon the landing, and
looking over the stairs to see that her natural protector was in
attendance, returned to his wife with a vague presentiment of
unpleasantness in some shape or other.
He, too, had been struck with the peculiar expression of Rachel's face,
and a guilty conscience intimated at once that she had "found out
something," though it did not suggest any catastrophe in particular.
There were so many things that, by unlucky accident, she might find out.
"However, I am not going to be called to account by her," he said to
himself, in that spirit of swagger which she had herself nursed and
nourished by her excess of wifely meekness. "_I_ am not Ned Reade, to
submit to be dictated to and sat upon by my own wife--so she needn't
begin it."
And he walked into the drawing-room in a lordly manner.
The reception that he met with staggered him considerably.
"Graham," said Rachel, in a very quiet voice, "did you send word to Mr.
Roden Dalrymple that I was engaged to you that Christmas--you know when
I mean--two years ago, when I was ill? Did you tell that lie to Mr.
Gordon deliberately, when you knew how things were with us?"
He was silent--intensely silent--for a few minutes, amazed, ashamed,
embarrassed, and savage. He did not know how to answer her. Then he gave
a little short surly laugh.
"What about it? Who has been talking to you of those things? What is Mr.
Dalrymple to you _now_, I should like to know?"
"Did you?" she persisted.
"And what if I did?" he retorted roughly, but still making a ghastly
attempt at badinage. "All's fair in love and war, you know, my dear; and
it was that aunt of yours who told the lie, as you elegantly term it--if
it was a lie--not I; I merely did not contradict her."
She looked at him steadily, with that implacable hardness in her once
soft eyes.
"I will never forgive you," she said; "I will never, never forgive you."
"I am sure I am very sorry to hear it; but I suppose I can manage to get
on without your forgiveness," he began. And then he gave up trying to
make a joke of it, and turned upon her savagely. "Have you been seeing
that fellow, Rachel? Tell me this instant; I insist upon knowing."
"I have seen his friend," she said, quietly.
"And did he send his friend to make those explanations to you--to
_you_?"
"No; he did not send him. It was by accident that I met Mr. Gordon
to-night!"
"And what business had you to talk to Mr. Gordon--to talk to
anybody--about your old love affairs? Do you forget that you are a
married woman--that you are my wife? It was bad enough when you were
single to be mixing yourself up with a disreputable scoundrel like
that----"
"He is not a disreputable scoundrel," she interposed sternly. "He is
the most upright gentleman--he is the most noble man--in the wide world.
I might have known," she added, drawing herself up proudly, "that he
would never have forsaken me! I might have been sure that he would never
break his word; that whoever was to blame for what happened to me that
time, _he_ was not! But I let myself be twisted round anybody's fingers
rather than trust in him. It serves me right, it serves me right! I was
not worthy of him."
"Well--upon my word!"
"You need not look at me so, Graham. I have never deceived _you_. I told
you before I married you exactly how it was with me. I have never had
any secrets from you, and I never will have any. You _know_ as well as I
do that I loved him--ah! I did not love him enough, that is what has
ruined us!--and so I shall while I live, if I live to be a hundred."
"You mean to say you can sit there and tell me that to my face?"
"I can only tell the truth," she replied, with the same hard
deliberation. "I could no more help loving him, especially now I
understand how things have been with us--no one will know it, but it
will be in my heart--than I could help breathing. When I leave off
breathing, then I shall forget him perhaps, not before."
Mr. Kingston was beside himself with passion--as, indeed, so was she.
"Forewarned is forearmed," he said, with a sort of sardonic snarl; "I
shall know now what steps to take to protect my honour."
"You know perfectly well that your honour--what _you_ call your
honour--is safe," she replied proudly. "If I am not to be trusted, _he_
is. Do not insult us any more. We have had enough cruelty; we shall have
quite enough to bear--he and I."
And so they went on with these bitter and defiant recriminations--Mr.
Kingston, of course, insisting upon giving due prominence to his own
wrongs, which were very real ones in their way, and both of them making
reckless proposals with respect to their domestic arrangements--until
suddenly, without any apparent warning, Rachel went off into wild
hysterics, and the doctor had to be sent for.
Perhaps it was the best thing that could have happened under all the
circumstances. She was very ill for several hours; and in the morning,
when passion was spent, and she was lying in her bed still and quiet,
with her head swathed in wet bandages, her husband knelt down beside her
and asked her to forgive him.
"It was for love of you that I did it," he said; "and _I_ am punished,
too. We can't undo it now, Rachel, if we would, and there's no good in
making a public talk and scandal. Let bygones be bygones, won't you,
dear?"
She lifted her heavy eyes to his face. They were cold and hard no
longer, but unutterably dull and sad.
"Yes," she said wearily; "we have both been wrong; we have injured one
another. We must try to make the best of it; it is the only thing we can
do now."
He kissed her and stroked her face, and adjusted the wet bandages.
"There, there," he said soothingly, "we both forgot ourselves a little.
We said a great deal more than we meant, I daresay. People do when they
are out of temper."
And he bade her go to sleep, told her he would take her for a drive in
the afternoon if she felt well enough, and went forth with the sense
that he was treating her magnanimously to receive and reply to inquiries
after her health in person.
By noon, "all Melbourne," according to Mrs. Hardy's calculation, was
aware that Mr. and Mrs. Kingston had had a quarrel (though there was
every variety of conjecture as to the cause of it, and a division of
opinion as to which was the most to blame); but it was not Mr.
Kingston's fault if all Melbourne was not satisfied by nightfall that
the quarrel had been made up.