IV

When accordingly at five she presented herself I naturally felt false

and base. My act had been a momentary madness, but I had at least to be

consistent. She remained an hour; he of course never came; and I could

only persist in my perfidy. I had thought it best to let her come;

singular as this now seems to me I thought it diminished my guilt. Yet

as she sat there so visibly white and weary, stricken with a sense

of everything her husband’s death had opened up, I felt an almost

intolerable pang of pity and remorse. If I didn’t tell her on the

spot what I had done it was because I was too ashamed. I feigned

astonishment--I feigned it to the end; I protested that if ever I had

had confidence I had had it that day. I blush as I tell my story--I take

it as my penance. There was nothing indignant I didn’t say about him; I

invented suppositions, attenuations; I admitted in stupefaction, as the

hands of the clock travelled, that their luck hadn’t turned. She smiled

at this vision of their “luck,” but she looked anxious--she looked

unusual: the only thing that kept me up was the fact that, oddly enough,

she wore mourning--no great depths of crape, but simple and scrupulous

black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried

a little muff of astrachan. This put me by the aid of some acute

reflection a little in the right. She had written to me that the

sudden event made no difference for her, but apparently it made as much

difference as that. If she was inclined to the usual forms why didn’t

she observe that of not going the first day or two out to tea? There

was some one she wanted so much to see that she couldn’t wait till her

husband was buried. Such a betrayal of eagerness made me hard and cruel

enough to practise my odious deceit, though at the same time, as the

hour waxed and waned, I suspected in her something deeper still than

disappointment and somewhat less successfully concealed. I mean a

strange underlying relief, the soft, low emission of the breath that

comes when a danger is past. What happened as she spent her barren hour

with me was that at last she gave him up. She let him go for ever. She

made the most graceful joke of it that I’ve ever seen made of anything;

but it was for all that a great date in her life. She spoke with her

mild gaiety of all the other vain times, the long game of hide-and-seek,

the unprecedented queerness of such a relation. For it was, or had been,

a relation, wasn’t it, hadn’t it? That was just the absurd part of it.

When she got up to go I said to her that it was more a relation than

ever, but that I hadn’t the face after what had occurred to propose

to her for the present another opportunity. It was plain that the only

valid opportunity would be my accomplished marriage. Of course she would

be at my wedding? It was even to be hoped that _he_ would.

“If _I_ am, he won’t be!” she declared with a laugh. I admitted there

might be something in that. The thing was therefore to get us safely

married first. “That won’t help us. Nothing will help us!” she said

as she kissed me farewell. “I shall never, never see him!” It was with

those words she left me.

I could bear her disappointment as I’ve called it; but when a couple of

hours later I received him at dinner I found that I couldn’t bear his.

The way my manoeuvre might have affected him had not been particularly

present to me; but the result of it was the first word of reproach that

had ever yet dropped from him. I say “reproach” because that expression

is scarcely too strong for the terms in which he conveyed to me his

surprise that under the extraordinary circumstances I should not have

found some means not to deprive him of such an occasion. I might really

have managed either not to be obliged to go out or to let their

meeting take place all the same. They would probably have got on in

my drawing-room without me. At this I quite broke down--I confessed my

iniquity and the miserable reason of it. I had not put her off and I had

not gone out; she had been there and after waiting for him an hour had

departed in the belief that he had been absent by his own fault.

“She must think me a precious brute!” he exclaimed. “Did she say of

me--what she had a right to say?”

“I assure you she said nothing that showed the least feeling. She looked

at your photograph, she even turned round the back of it, on which

your address happens to be inscribed. Yet it provoked her to no

demonstration. She doesn’t care so much as all that.”

“Then why are you afraid of her?”

“It was not of her I was afraid. It was of you.”

“Did you think I would fall in love with her? You never alluded to

such a possibility before,” he went on as I remained silent. “Admirable

person as you pronounced her, that wasn’t the light in which you showed

her to me.”

“Do you mean that if it _had_ been you would have managed by this time

to catch a glimpse of her? I didn’t fear things then,” I added. “I

hadn’t the same reason.”

He kissed me at this, and when I remembered that she had done so an hour

or two before I felt for an instant as if he were taking from my lips

the very pressure of hers. In spite of kisses the incident had shed a

certain chill, and I suffered horribly from the sense that he had seen

me guilty of a fraud. He had seen it only through my frank avowal, but

I was as unhappy as if I had a stain to efface. I couldn’t get over the

manner of his looking at me when I spoke of her apparent indifference to

his not having come.

For the first time since I had known him he seemed to have expressed

a doubt of my word. Before we parted I told him that I would undeceive

her, start the first thing in the morning for Richmond and there let

her know that he had been blameless. At this he kissed me again. I

would expiate my sin, I said; I would humble myself in the dust; I would

confess and ask to be forgiven. At this he kissed me once more.

V

In the train the next day this struck me as a good deal for him to have

consented to; but my purpose was firm enough to carry me on. I mounted

the long hill to where the view begins, and then I knocked at her door.

I was a trifle mystified by the fact that her blinds were still drawn,

reflecting that if in the stress of my compunction I had come early I

had certainly yet allowed people time to get up.

“At home, mum? She has left home for ever.”

I was extraordinarily startled by this announcement of the elderly

parlour-maid. “She has gone away?”

“She’s dead, mum, please.” Then as I gasped at the horrible word: “She

died last night.”

The loud cry that escaped me sounded even in my own ears like some harsh

violation of the hour. I felt for the moment as if I had killed her; I

turned faint and saw through a vagueness the woman hold out her arms to

me. Of what next happened I have no recollection, nor of anything but my

friend’s poor stupid cousin, in a darkened room, after an interval that

I suppose very brief, sobbing at me in a smothered accusatory way. I

can’t say how long it took me to understand, to believe and then to

press back with an immense effort that pang of responsibility which,

superstitiously, insanely had been at first almost all I was conscious

of. The doctor, after the fact, had been superlatively wise and clear:

he was satisfied of a long-latent weakness of the heart, determined

probably years before by the agitations and terrors to which her

marriage had introduced her. She had had in those days cruel scenes with

her husband, she had been in fear of her life. All emotion, everything

in the nature of anxiety and suspense had been after that to be strongly

deprecated, as in her marked cultivation of a quiet life she was

evidently well aware; but who could say that any one, especially a “real

lady,” could be successfully protected from every little rub? She had

had one a day or two before in the news of her husband’s death; for

there were shocks of all kinds, not only those of grief and surprise.

For that matter she had never dreamed of so near a release; it had

looked uncommonly as if he would live as long as herself. Then in the

evening, in town, she had manifestly had another: something must have

happened there which it would be indispensable to clear up. She had come

back very late--it was past eleven o’clock, and on being met in the hall

by her cousin, who was extremely anxious, had said that she was tired

and must rest a moment before mounting the stairs. They had passed

together into the dining-room, her companion proposing a glass of wine

and bustling to the sideboard to pour it out. This took but a moment,

and when my informant turned round our poor friend had not had time to

seat herself. Suddenly, with a little moan that was barely audible, she

dropped upon the sofa. She was dead. What unknown “little rub” had dealt

her the blow? What shock, in the name of wonder, _had_ she had in town?

I mentioned immediately the only one I could imagine--her having failed

to meet at my house, to which by invitation for the purpose she had

come at five o’clock, the gentleman I was to be married to, who had been

accidentally kept away and with whom she had no acquaintance whatever.

This obviously counted for little; but something else might easily

have occurred; nothing in the London streets was more possible than an

accident, especially an accident in those desperate cabs. What had she

done, where had she gone on leaving my house? I had taken for granted

she had gone straight home. We both presently remembered that in her

excursions to town she sometimes, for convenience, for refreshment,

spent an hour or two at the “Gentlewomen,” the quiet little ladies’

club, and I promised that it should be my first care to make at that

establishment thorough inquiry. Then we entered the dim and dreadful

chamber where she lay locked up in death and where, asking after a

little to be left alone with her, I remained for half an hour. Death had

made her, had kept her beautiful; but I felt above all, as I kneeled at

her bed, that it had made her, had kept her silent. It had turned the

key on something I was concerned to know.

On my return from Richmond and after another duty had been performed I

drove to his chambers. It was the first time, but I had often wanted to

see them. On the staircase, which, as the house contained twenty sets of

rooms, was unrestrictedly public, I met his servant, who went back with

me and ushered me in. At the sound of my entrance he appeared in the

doorway of a further room, and the instant we were alone I produced my

news: “She’s dead!”

“Dead?”

He was tremendously struck, and I observed that he had no need to ask

whom, in this abruptness, I meant.

“She died last evening--just after leaving me.”

He stared with the strangest expression, his eyes searching mine as

if they were looking for a trap. “Last evening--after leaving you?” He

repeated my words in stupefaction. Then he brought out so that it was in

stupefaction I heard: “Impossible! I saw her.”

“You ‘saw’ her?”

“On that spot--where you stand.”

This brought back to me after an instant, as if to help me to take it

in, the memory of the strange warning of his youth. “In the hour of

death--I understand: as you so beautifully saw your mother.”

“Ah! _not_ as I saw my mother--not that way, not that way!” He was

deeply moved by my news--far more moved, I perceived, than he would have

been the day before: it gave me a vivid sense that, as I had then said

to myself, there was indeed a relation between them and that he had

actually been face to face with her. Such an idea, by its reassertion

of his extraordinary privilege, would have suddenly presented him as

painfully abnormal had he not so vehemently insisted on the difference.

“I saw her living--I saw her to speak to her--I saw her as I see you

now!”

It is remarkable that for a moment, though only for a moment, I found

relief in the more personal, as it were, but also the more natural of

the two phenomena. The next, as I embraced this image of her having come

to him on leaving me and of just what it accounted for in the disposal

of her time, I demanded with a shade of harshness of which I was

aware--“What on earth did she come for?” He had now had a minute to

think--to recover himself and judge of effects, so that if it was still

with excited eyes he spoke he showed a conscious redness and made an

inconsequent attempt to smile away the gravity of his words.

“She came just to see me. She came--after what had passed at your

house--so that we _should_, after all, at last meet. The impulse seemed

to me exquisite, and that was the way I took it.”

I looked round the room where she had been--where she had been and I

never had been.

“And was the way you took it the way she expressed it?”

“She only expressed it by being here and by letting me look at her. That

was enough!” he exclaimed with a singular laugh.