Jeannie Halton, going up to her bedroom that night, felt very keenly
that ineffable sense of coming home which makes all the hours spent in
alien places seem dim and unreal. She could hardly believe that it was
she who had been so long away from so many friends, still less that it
was she who, a year ago, tired and weary, had gone southwards in
search of that minimum of health and peace which makes existence
tolerable. Yet that time abroad could never have become dim to her,
since it was there, in the winter spent in Rome, that her old
friendship with Victor Braithwaite had ripened into intimacy and burst
into love. Rome would always be knit into her life.
It was not only in affairs of the mind and affections that her
perception was acute. Like most highly-organized people, her body, her
fine material senses, were vivid messengers to her soul; and as she went
upstairs she contrasted with a strong sense of content her purely
physical surroundings with those in which she had lived for the last
forty-eight hours. For two days and nights she had been hurried across
Europe, over the jolt and rattle of the racing wheels; by day the
blurred landscape, wreathed in engine-smoke, had streamed by her; by
night she had seen nothing but the dull, stuffed walls of her sleeping
compartment, and it was an exquisite physical pleasure to have the firm,
unshaken floor underfoot, to be surrounded by the appointments of a
beautiful house, to be able to move of one's own volition again, and not
to be taken like a parcel in a van from one end of Europe to the other.
And how delicious also it was to be clean, to have revelled in soap and
water, instead of being coated and pelted at by dust and coal-grime! On
the surface of life this was all pleasant; it all added to her sense of
security and well-being.
She had enjoyed a charming evening, which was not nearly over yet, since
Alice was coming to her room for a talk--no little talk, no few
good-night words, but a real long talk, which should wipe off the
arrears of a twelve months' abstinence. Alice had demurred at first,
saying she knew that journeys were fatiguing things, but Mrs. Halton had
truthfully said that she had never felt less tired. For when one is
happy there is no time to be fatigued; being happy engrosses the whole
attention. It was early yet also, scarcely after ten, for two or three
old friends only, a party of women, had dined, and these had gone away
early, with the fatigue of the traveller in their minds. Mrs. Halton had
let that pass; the fact was that to-night she wanted above all things to
talk to Lady Nottingham. There was one thing--a very big one--which she
meant to tell her, and there was also a great deal she wished to learn.
Lady Nottingham followed her after a minute or two; and a maid bearing a
tray with an enormous jug of hot water and a glass followed Lady
Nottingham, for she was one of those people who seem to keep permanently
young by always doing the latest thing. Just now there was a revival of
hot-water drinking, and with avidity (as if it tasted nice) Lady
Nottingham drank hot water.
"Excellent thing, Jeannie," she said. "Can't I persuade you to try?
You dear person, I don't know that I will even attempt to. It might
have some effect on you, and I don't want anything to have any effect
on you. I prefer you exactly as you are. Now I want to make myself
quite comfortable, in order that I may enjoy myself as much as
possible, and then you shall tell me all that has happened to you this
last year.--No, Hendon, you needn't wait up. Yes; plenty of hot
water. Go to bed."
"Let me pull the blinds up and open the windows," said Jeannie; "I want
to let London in. Ah! Clip-clop! Clip-clop! Girls and boys going to
dances, and falling in love with one another, and keeping the world
young. God bless them!"
She leant out into the soft warm night a moment, and then turned back
into the room again, her face so brimming with happiness and youth that
Alice for a moment was almost startled.
"They or something else seems to have kept you young, you dear!" she
said. "And now sit down and tell me all about yourself from the crown of
your head to the sole of your foot. You are so tall, too, Jeannie; it
will take a nice long time."
Jeannie sat down.
"So it is 'me next,' is it, as the children say?" she asked. "Very well,
me. Well, once upon a time, dear, a year ago, I was an old woman. I was
twenty-nine, if you care to know, but an old woman. For the measure of
years is a very bad standard to judge by; it tells you of years only
which have practically nothing to do with being old or young. Well, the
old woman of twenty-nine went away. And to-day she came back, a year
older in respect of years, since she is thirty now, but, oh! ever so
much younger, because---- Do you guess at all?"
Lady Nottingham put down her hot water.
"Ah! my dear," she said, "of course I guess. Or rather I don't guess; I
know. There is somebody. It is only Somebody who can interfere in our
age and our happiness. Who is it?"
"No; guess again," said Jeannie.
But again it was hardly a case of guessing. Lady Nottingham knew quite
well who it was, who in those years of Jeannie's married life had been
her constant and quiet support and stand-by, and who had found his
reward in the knowledge that he helped her to bear what had to be borne.
"Victor Braithwaite," she said, without pause. "Oh, Jeannie, is it so?
You are going to marry him? Oh, my darling, I am so glad. What a happy
man, and how well he deserves it!"
Lady Nottingham was stout and comfortable; but with extraordinary
alertness she surged out of her chair to kiss Jeannie, and upset the
table on which was her glass and her boiling water, breaking the one and
deluging the carpet with the other--a perfect Niagara of scalding fluid.
She paid not the least attention to the rising clouds of steam nor to
the glass which crashed on to the floor and was reduced to shards and
exploded fragments.
"My dear, how nice!" she said. "And he has been in love with you so
long! He will have told you that now, but I insist on the credit of
having seen it also. He behaved so splendidly, and was such a good
friend to you, without ever letting you see--for I will wager that you
did not--that he loved you."
"No, I never knew until he told me," said Jeannie, simply.
"Of course you didn't, because he is a nice man and you are a nice
woman. Oh, Jeannie, don't you hate those creatures who keep a man
dangling--wives, I mean--who like knowing that a man is eating his poor
silly heart out for them, who don't intend to lead--well, double lives,
and yet keep him tied to their apron-strings? Such vampires! They put
their dreadful noses in the air the moment he says something to them
that he shouldn't, and all the time they have been encouraging him to
say it! They are flirts, who will certainly find themselves in a very
uncomfortable round of the Inferno! I should torture them if I were
Providence! I am sure Providence would prefer---- Dear me, yes."
Alice kissed her again.
"Isn't it so?" she demanded, vehemently.
"About flirts? Why, of course. A flirt is a woman who leads a man on and
leads him on, and then suddenly says, 'What do you mean?' Surely we need
not discuss them."
Lady Nottingham went over to the window-seat.
"No, I know we need not," she said. "I was led away. Darling, Victor
Braithwaite is coming to Bray on Saturday. Did you ever hear of
anything more apt? Till this moment I was not sure that you would ever
marry him, though I longed for you to do so. You shall have a punt all
to yourselves--a private particular punt--and he shall--well, he shall
punt you about. Oh, Jeannie, I too love the youth of the world."
Jeannie drew her chair a little nearer to the window-seat, in which Lady
Nottingham had taken her place after the catastrophe of the hot water.
"I know. He told me he was coming to Bray to-day."
"Oh, he met you at Victoria?" she asked.
"No, dear; a little further down the line--at Dover, in fact. Yes,
Alice, his was the first face I saw as we came alongside. And how my
heart went out to him! What a good homecoming it has been, and how
absolutely unworthy I feel of it! You have no idea how I used to rebel
and complain in--in those past years, wondering what I had done to have
my life so spoilt. Spoilt! Yes, that was the word I used to myself, and
all the time this was coming nearer."
"Tell me more, dear."
"About him?" asked Jeannie.
"About him and you."
"Well, all the autumn I was on the Italian lakes. Oh, Alice, such
dreadful months, and all the more dreadful because of the maddening
beauty of the place. I looked at it. I knew it was all there, but I
never saw it; it never went inside me, or went to make part of me. I
was very sleepless all that time, and depressed with a blackness of
despair. And as I got stronger in physical health, the depression seemed
more unbearable, because, in all probability, so many years lay before
me, and nothing in life seemed the least worth while. I often thought of
you, and often--every day--of Daisy, longing, in a way, to see you both,
but knowing that it would be no use if I did, for you would have been to
me like the corpses, the husks of what I loved once. And I did not see
any possibility of getting better or of getting out of this tomb-like
darkness. It was like being buried alive, and getting more alive from
week to week, so that I grew more and more conscious of how black the
tomb was. Every now and then the pall used to lift a little, and that, I
think, was the worst of all."
Lady Nottingham laid her plump, comfortable hand on Jeannie's.
"You poor darling!" she said. "And you would not let either Daisy or me
come to you. Why did you not?"
"Because there are certain passages, I think, which the human soul has
to go through alone. Dear Alice, you don't know all that went to make up
the gloom of those dreadful months! There was one thing in particular
that cast a blacker shadow than all the rest. I hope you will never know
it. It concerns some one who is dead, but not my husband. It was that
which made the darkness so impenetrable. I know you will not ask me
about it. But, as I said, when the pall lifted a little, that was the
worst of all, because then, for a moment it might be, or for an hour or
two, I knew that life and youth and joy were just as dominant and as
triumphant as ever in the world, and that it was I who had got on the
wrong side of things, and saw them left-handed, and could be only
conscious of this hideous nightmare of suffering."
Jeannie paused again, pushing back the thick coils of black hair from
her forehead.
"Quite little things would make the pall lift," she said. "Once it was
the sudden light of the sun shining on one of those red sails; once it
was the sight of a little Italian contadina dancing with her shadow on
the white sunny road, all by herself, for sheer exuberance of heart;
once it was a man and a maid sitting close to each other in the dusk,
and quietly singing some little love-song, so--so dreadfully unconscious
of the sorrow of the world. Oh, that was bad--that was dreadful! Just
one little verse, and then in the darkness they kissed each other. I
knew they were darlings, and I thought they were devils. And once Victor
wrote to me, saying that he was passing through on his way to Venice and
Rome, and asking if he might come to see me. I did not answer him even;
I could not.
"But during all those weeks I suppose I was getting better, and when I
went south to Rome in November, though I still could not look forward
or contemplate the future at all, I knew better how to deal with the
present hour and the present day. There was no joy in them, but there
was a sort of acquiescence in me. If life--as seemed the only possible
thing--was to be joyless for me, I could at least behave decently. Also
a certain sort of pride, I think, came to my help. I felt that it was
bad manners to appear as I felt--just as when one has a headache one
makes an effort to appear more brilliantly well than usual. One doesn't
like people to know one has a headache, and in the same way I settled
that I didn't like them to know I had a heartache.
"Victor was in Rome. The manager of the branch of their banking business
there had died suddenly, and he had gone to take his place till some one
could be sent out from England. The new man arrived there some ten days
or so after I did; but he still stayed on, for one morning I saw him in
the Forum, and another day I passed him driving. All he knew was that I
had not answered the letter which he wrote to me when I was on Como, and
he made no further attempt to see me. But he did not leave Rome. And
then one day I wrote to him, as I was bound to do, saying that I had not
answered his letter because I believed then that I could not; but that
if he would forgive that, and come to see me----
"Oh, Alice, it is being such a long story. But there is little more. He
came, and I asked him if he was stopping long in Rome, and he said his
plans were uncertain. And then--so gradually that I scarcely knew it was
happening--he began to take care of me; and gradually, also, I began to
expect him to do so. He tells me I was not tiresome; I can't believe
him.
"And then--how does it happen? Nobody knows, though it has happened so
often. One day I saw him differently. I had always been friends with
him, and in those bad years I had always relied on him; but, as I say,
one day I saw him differently. I saw the man himself--not as he struck
me, but as he was. That is just it, dear Alice. 'How he struck me' was
left out, because I was left out. And then I knew I loved him. And--and
that is all, I think."
Lady Nottingham gave a long, appreciative sigh.
"I think it is _the_ nicest story," she said--"and it's all true.
Oh, Jeannie, I am such a match-maker, and it is so pleasant to be
forestalled. I asked him down to Bray simply in order to promote
this, and now I find it has been promoted already. But the punt
will be useful all the same."
Jeannie joined her friend in the window-seat.
"Yes, just the same," she said.