reality in the fact that everything had already become quite simple,
after all. The fine rooms looked so well ordered and decent in a stately
way. Melodramatic plotting ceased to exist as she looked at certain
dignified sofas and impressive candelabra. Such things became even more
impossible than they had become before the convincingness of the first
floor front bedroom in Mortimer Street, She began to give a good deal of
thought to the summer at Mallowe. There was an extraordinary luxury in
living again each day of it, the morning when she had taken the
third-class carriage which provided her with hot, labouring men in
corduroys as companions, that fleeting moment when the tall man with the
square face had passed the carriage and looked straight through her
without seeming to see her at all. She sat and smiled tenderly at the
mere reminiscent thought. And then the glimpse of him as he got into the
high phaeton at the station; and the moment when Lady Maria had
exclaimed "There's Walderhurst," and he had come swinging with his
leisurely step across the lawn. And he had scarcely seemed to see her
then, or notice her really when they met, until the morning he had
joined her as she gathered the roses and had talked to her about Lady
Agatha. But he had actually been noticing her a little even from the
first--he had been thinking about her a little all the time. And how far
she had been from guessing it when she had talked to Lady Agatha, how
pleased she had been the morning of the rose gathering when he had
seemed interested only in Agatha's self! She always liked to recall,
however, the way in which he had asked the few questions about her own
affairs. Her simplicity never wearied of the fascination of the way in
which he had looked at her, standing on the pathway, with that
delightful non-committal fixing of her with the monocle when she had
said:
"People _are_ kind. You see, I have nothing to give, and I always seem
to be receiving."
And he had gazed at her quite unmovedly and answered only:
"What luck!"
But since then he had mentioned this moment as one of those in which he
had felt that he might want to marry her, because she was so unconscious
of the fact that she gave much more to everybody than she received, that
she had so much to give and was totally unaware of the value of her
gifts.
"His thoughts of me are so _beautiful_ very often," was her favourite
reflection, "though he always has that composed way of saying things.
What he says seems more _valuable_, because he is like that."
In truth, his composed way of saying things it was which seemed to her
incomparable. Even when, without understanding its own longing for a
thing it lacked, her heart had felt itself a little unsustained she had
never ceased to feel the fascination of his entire freedom from any
shadow of interest in the mental attitude of others towards himself.
When he stood and gazed at people through the glass neatly screwed into
his eye, one felt that it was he whose opinion was of importance, not
the other person's. Through sheer chill imperviousness he seemed
entirely detached from the powers of criticism. What people said or
thought of his fixed opinion on a subject was not of the least
consequence, in fact did not exist; the entities of the persons who
cavilled at such opinions themselves ceased to exist, so far as he was
concerned. His was the immovable temperament. He did not snub people: he
cut the cord of mental communication with them and dropped them into
space. Emily thought this firmness and reserved dignity, and quailed
before the thought of erring in such a manner as would cause him to so
send her soul adrift. Her greatest terror during the past months had
been the fear of making him ridiculous, of putting him in some position
which might annoy him by objectionable publicity.
But now she had no further fears, and could wait in safety and dwell in
peace upon her memories and her hopes. She even began to gain a kind of
courage in her thoughts of him.
The atmosphere of the Berkeley Square mansion was good for her. She had
never felt so much its mistress before the staff of servants of whose
existence she was the centre, who so plainly served her with careful
pleasure, who considered her least wish or inclination as a royal
command, increased her realisation of her security and power. The
Warrens, who understood the dignity and meaning of mere worldly facts
her nature did not grasp, added subtly to her support. Gradually she
learned to reveal herself in simple talk to Mrs. Warren, who found her,
when so revealed, a case more extraordinary than she had been when
enshrouded in dubious mystery.
"She is absolutely delicious," Mrs. Warren said to her husband. "That an
adoration such as hers could exist in the nineteenth century is--"
"Almost degenerate," he laughed.
"Perhaps it is regenerate," reflecting. "Who knows! Nothing earthly, or
heavenly, would induce me to cast a doubt upon it. Seated opposite to a
portrait of her James, I hear her opinions of him, when she is not in
the least aware of what her simplest observation conveys. She does not
know that she is including him when she is talking of other things, that
one sees that while she is too shy to openly use his name much, the very
breath of her life is a reference to him. Her greatest bliss at present
is to go unobtrusively into his special rooms and sit there dwelling
upon his goodness to her."
In fact Emily spent many a quiet hour in the apartments she had visited
on the day of her farewell to her husband. She was very happy there. Her
soul was uplifted by her gratitude for the peace she had reached. The
reports of Lord Walderhurst's physician were never alarming and
generally of a reassuring nature. But she knew that he must exercise
great caution, and that time must elapse before he could confront his
return voyage. He would come back as soon as was quite safe. And in the
meantime her world held all that she could desire, lacking himself.
Her emotion expressed itself in her earnest performance of her reverent
daily devotions. She read many chapters of the Bible, and often sat
happily absorbed in the study of her Book of Common Prayer. She found
solace and happiness in such things, and spent her Sunday mornings,
after the ringing of the church bells, quite alone in Walderhurst's
study, following the Service and reading the Collects and Lessons. The
room used to seem so beautifully still, even Berkeley Square wearing its
church-hour aspect suggested devout aloofness from worldly things.
"I sit at the window and _think_," she explained to Mrs. Warren. "It is
so nice there."
She wrote her letters to India in this room. She did not know how far
the new courage in her thoughts of her husband expressed itself in these
letters. When Walderhurst read them, however, he felt a sense of change
in her. Women were sometimes spoken of as "coming out amazingly." He
began to feel that Emily was, in a measure at least, "coming out."
Perhaps her gradually increasing feeling of accustomedness to the change
in her life was doing it for her. She said more in her letters, and said
it in a more interesting way. It was perhaps rather suggestive of the
development of a girl who was on the verge of becoming a delightful sort
of woman.
Lying upon his back in bed, rendered, it may be, a trifle susceptible by
the weakness of slow convalescence, he found a certain habit growing
upon him--a habit of reading her letters several times, and of thinking
of her as it had not been his nature to think of women; also he slowly
awakened to an interest in the arrival of the English mails. The letters
actually raised his spirits and had an excellent physical effect. His
doctor always found him in good condition after he had heard from his
wife.
"Your letters, my dear Emily," Walderhurst once wrote, "are a great
pleasure to me. You are to-day exactly as you were at Mallowe,--the
creature of amiable good cheer. Your comfort stimulates me."
"How _dear_, how _dear_?" Emily cried to the silence of the study, and
kissed the letter with impassioned happiness.
[Illustration: Lady Maria Bayne]
The next epistle went even farther. It absolutely contained "things" and
referred to the past which it was her joy to pour libations before in
secret thought. When her eye caught the phrase "the days at Mallowe" in
the middle of a sheet, she was almost frightened at the rush of pleasure
which swept over her. Men who were less aloof from sentimental moods
used such phrases in letters, she had read and heard. It was almost as
if he had said "the dear old days at Mallowe" or "the happy days at
Mallowe," and the rapture of it was as much as she could bear.
"I cannot help remembering as I lie here," she read in actual letters as
she went on, "of the many thoughts which passed through my mind as I
drove over the heath to pick you up. I had been watching you for days. I
always liked particularly your clear, large eyes. I recall trying to
describe them to myself and finding it difficult. They seemed to me then
to resemble something between the eyes of a very nice boy and the eyes
of a delightful sheep-dog. This may not appear so romantic a comparison
as it really is."
Emily began most softly and sweetly to cry. Nothing more romantic could
she possibly have imagined.
"I thought of them in spite of myself as I drove across the moor, and I
could scarcely express to you how angry I was at Maria. It seemed to me
that she had brutally imposed on you only because she had known she
might impose on a woman with such a pair of eyes. I was angry and
sentimental at one and the same time. And to find you sitting by the
wayside, absolutely worn out with fatigue and in tears, moved me really
more than I had anticipated being moved. And when you mistook my meaning
and stood up, your nice eyes looking into mine in such ingenuous appeal
and fear and trouble, I have never forgotten it, my dear, and I never
shall."
His mood of sentiment did not sit easily upon him, but it meant a real
and interesting quite human thing.
Emily sat alone in the room and brooded over it as a mother might brood
over a new-born child. She was full of tremulous bliss, and, dwelling
with reverent awe upon the wonder of great things drawing nearer to her
every hour, wept for happiness as she sat.
* * * * *
The same afternoon Lady Maria Bayne arrived. She had been abroad taking,
in no dull fashion, various "cures," which involved drinking mineral
waters while promenading to the sounds of strains of outdoor music, and
comparing symptoms wittily with friends equal to amazing repartee in
connection with all subjects.
Dr. Warren was an old acquaintance, and as he was on the point of
leaving the house as she entered it she stopped to shake hands with him.
"It's rather unfortunate for a man when one can only be glad to see him
in the house of an enemy."
She greeted him with, "I must know what you are doing here. It's not
possible that Lady Walderhurst is fretting herself into fiddle-strings
because her husband chooses to have a fever in India."
"No, she is behaving beautifully in all respects. May I have a few
minutes' talk with you, Lady Maria, before you see her?"
"A few minutes' talk with me means something either amusing or
portentous. Let us walk into the morning-room."
She led the way with a rustle of silk petticoats and a suggestion of
lifted eyebrows. She was inclined to think that the thing sounded more
portentous than amusing. Thank Heaven! it was not possible for Emily to
have involved herself in annoying muddles. She was not that kind of
woman.
When she came out of the room some twenty minutes later she did not look
quite like herself. Her smart bonnet set less well upon her delicate
little old face, and she was agitated and cross and pleased.
"It was ridiculous of Walderhurst to leave her," she was saying. "It was
ridiculous of her not to order him home at once. It was exactly like
her,--dear and ridiculous."
In spite of her agitation she felt a little grotesque as she went
upstairs to see Emily,--grotesque, because she was obliged to admit to
herself that she had never felt so curiously excited in her life. She
felt as she supposed women did when they allowed themselves to shed
tears through excitement; not that she was shedding tears, but she was
"upset," that was what she called it.
As the door opened Emily rose from a chair near the fire and came slowly
towards her, with an awkward but lovely smile.
Lady Maria made a quick movement forward and caught hold of both her
hands.
"My good Emily," she broke forth and kissed her. "My excellent Emily,"
and kissed her again. "I am completely turned upside down. I never heard
such an insane story in my life. I have seen Dr. Warren. The creatures
were mad."
"It is all over," said Emily. "I scarcely believe it was true now."
Lady Maria being led to a sofa settled herself upon it, still wearing
her complex expression of crossness, agitation, and pleasure.
"I am going to stay here," she said, obstinately. "There shall be no
more folly. But I will tell you that they have gone back to India. The
child was a girl."
"It was a girl?"
"Yes, absurdly enough."
"Oh," sighed Emily, sorrowfully. "I'm _sure_ Hester was _afraid_ to
write to me."
"Rubbish!" said Lady Maria. "At any rate, as I remarked before, I am
going to stay here until Walderhurst comes back. The man will be quite
mad with gratified vanity."
Chapter Twenty three
It was a damp and depressing day on which Lord Walderhurst arrived in
London. As his carriage turned into Berkeley Square he sat in the corner
of it rather huddled in his travelling-wraps and looking pale and thin.
He was wishing that London had chosen to show a more exhilarating
countenance to him, but he himself was conscious of being possessed by
something more nearly approaching a mood of eagerness than he remembered
experiencing at any period of his previous existence. He had found the
voyage home long, and had been restless. He wanted to see his wife. How
agreeable it would be to meet, when he looked across the dinner-table,
the smile in her happy eyes. She would grow pink with pleasure, like a
girl, when he confessed that he had missed her. He was curious to see in
her the changes he had felt in her letters. Having time and
opportunities for development, she might become an absolutely delightful
companion. She had looked very handsome on the day of her presentation
at Court. Her height and carriage had made her even impressive. She was
a woman, after all, to be counted on in one's plans.
But he was most conscious that his affection for her had warmed. A
slight embarrassment was commingled with the knowledge, but that was the
natural result of his dislike to the sentimental. He had never felt a
shadow of sentiment for Audrey, who had been an extremely light, dry,
empty-headed person, and he had always felt she had been adroitly thrust
upon him by their united families. He had not liked her, and she had not
liked him. It had been very stupidly trying. And the child had not lived
an hour. He had liked Emily from the first, and now--It was an absolute
truth that he felt a slight movement in the cardiac region when the
carriage turned into Berkeley Square. The house would look very pleasant
when he entered it. Emily would in some subtle way have arranged that it
should wear a festal, greeting air. She had a number of nice, little
feminine emotions about bright fires and many flowers. He could picture
her childlike grown-up face as it would look when he stepped into the
room where they met.
Some one was ill in Berkeley Square, evidently very ill. Straw was laid
thick all along one side of it, depressing damp, fresh straw, over which
the carriage rolled with a dull drag of the wheels.
It lay before the door of his own house, he observed, as he stepped out.
It was very thickly scattered. The door swung open as the carriage
stopped. Crossing the threshold, he glanced at the face of the footman
nearest to him. The man looked like a mute at a funeral, and the
expression was so little in accord with his mood that he stopped with a
feeling of irritation. He had not time to speak, however, before a new
sensation arrested his attention,--a faint odour which filled the place.
"The house smells like a hospital," he exclaimed, in great annoyance.
"What does it mean?"
The man he addressed did not answer. He turned a perturbed awkward face
to his superior in rank, an older man, who was house steward.
In the house of mortal pain or death there is but one thing more full of
suggestion than the faint smell of antiseptics,--the gruesome, cleanly,
unpleasant odour,--that is, the unnatural sound of the whispering of
hushed voices. Lord Walderhurst turned cold, and felt it necessary to
stiffen his spine when he heard his servant's answer and the tone in
which it was made.
"Her ladyship, my lord--her ladyship is very low. The doctors do not
leave her."
"Her ladyship?"
The man stepped back deferentially. The door of the morning-room had
been opened, and old Lady Maria Bayne stood on the threshold. Her
worldly air of elderly gaiety had disappeared. She looked a hundred. She
was almost dilapidated. She had allowed to relax themselves the springs
which held her together and ordinarily supplied her with sprightly
movement.
"Come here!" she said.
When he entered the room, aghast, she shut the door.
"I suppose I ought to break it to you gently," she said shakily, "but I
shall do no such thing. It's too much to expect of any woman who has
gone through what I have during these last three days. The creature is
dying; she may be dead now."
She sank on the sofa and began to wipe away pouring tears. Her old
cheeks were pale and her handkerchief showed touches of rose-pink on its
dampness. She was aware of their presence, but was utterly indifferent.
Walderhurst stared at her haggard disorder and cleared his throat,
finding himself unable to speak without doing so.
"Will you have the goodness to tell me," he said with weird stiffness,
"what you are talking about?"
"About Emily Walderhurst," she answered. "The boy was born yesterday,
and she has been sinking ever since. She cannot possibly last much
longer."
"She!" he gasped, turning lead colour. "Cannot possibly last,--Emily?"
The wrench and shock were so unnatural that they reached that part of
his being where human feeling was buried under selfishness and inhuman
conventionality. He spoke, and actually thought, of Emily first.
Lady Maria continued to weep shamelessly.
"I am over seventy," she said, "and the last three days have punished me
quite enough for anything I may have done since I was born. I have been
in hell, too, James. And, when she could think at all, she has only
thought of you and your miserable child. I can't imagine what is the
matter with a woman when she can care for a man to such an extent. Now
she has what she wants,--she's dying for you."
"Why wasn't I told?" he asked, still with the weird and slow stiffness.
"Because she was a sentimental fool, and was afraid of disturbing you.
She ought to have ordered you home and kept you dancing attendance, and
treated you to hysterics."
No one would have resented such a course of action more derisively than
Lady Maria herself, but the last three days had reduced her to something
like hysteria, and she had entirely lost her head.
"She has been writing cheerfully to me--"
"She would have written cheerfully to you if she had been seated in a
cauldron of boiling oil, it is my impression," broke in her ladyship.
"She has been monstrously treated, people trying to murder her, and she
afraid to accuse them for fear that you would disapprove. You know you
have a nasty manner, James, when you think your dignity is interfered
with."
Lord Walderhurst stood clenching and unclenching his hands as they hung
by his sides. He did not like to believe that his fever had touched his
brain, but he doubted his senses hideously.
"My good Maria," he said, "I do not understand a word you say, but I
must go and see her."
"And kill her, if she has a breath left! You will not stir from here.
Thank Heaven! here is Dr. Warren."
The door had opened and Dr. Warren came in. He had just laid down upon
the coverlet of a bed upstairs what seemed to be the hand of a dying
woman, and no man like himself can do such a thing and enter a room
without a singular look on his face.
People in a house of death inevitably whisper, whatsoever their
remoteness from the sick-room. Lady Maria cried out in a whisper:
"Is she still alive?"
"Yes," was the response.
Walderhurst went to him.
"May I see her?"
"No, Lord Walderhurst. Not yet."
"Does that mean that it is not yet the last moment?"
"If that moment had obviously arrived, you would be called."
"What must I do?"
"There is absolutely nothing to be done but to wait. Brent, Forsythe,
and Blount are with her."
"I am in the position of knowing nothing. I must be told. Have you time
to tell me?"
They went to Walderhurst's study, the room which had been Emily's holy
of holies.
"Lady Walderhurst was very fond of sitting here alone," Dr. Warren
remarked.
Walderhurst saw that she must have written letters at his desk. Her own
pen and writing-tablet lay on it. She had probably had a fancy for
writing her letters to himself in his own chair. It would be like her to
have done it. It gave him a shock to see on a small table a thimble and
a pair of scissors.
"I ought to have been told," he said to Dr. Warren.
Dr. Warren sat down and explained why he had not been told.
As he spoke, interest was awakened in his mind by the fact that Lord
Walderhurst drew towards him the feminine writing-tablet and opened and
shut it mechanically.
"What I want to know," he said, "is, if I shall be able to speak to her.
I should like to speak to her."
"That is what one most wants," was Dr. Warren's non-committal answer,
"at such a time."
"You think I may not be able to make her understand?"
"I am very sorry. It is impossible to know."
"This," slowly, "is very hard on me."
"There is something I feel I must tell you, Lord Walderhurst." Dr.
Warren kept a keen eye on him, having, in fact, felt far from attracted
by the man in the past, and wondering how much he would be moved by
certain truths, or if he would be moved at all. "Before Lady
Walderhurst's illness, she was very explicit with me in her expression
of her one desire. She begged me to give her my word, which I could not
have done without your permission, that whatsoever the circumstances, if
life must be sacrificed, it should be hers."
A dusky red shot through Walderhurst's leaden pallor.
"She asked you that?" he said.
"Yes. And at the worst she did not forget. When she became delirious,
and we heard that she was praying, I gathered that she seemed to be
praying to me, as to a deity whom she implored to remember her fervent
pleading. When her brain was clear she was wonderful. She saved your son
by supernatural endurance."
"You mean to say that if she had cared more for herself and less for the
safety of the child she need not have been as she is now?"
Warren bent his head.
Lord Walderhurst's eyeglass had been dangling weakly from its cord. He
picked it up and stuck it in his eye to stare the doctor in the face.
The action was a singular, spasmodic, hard one. But his hands were
shaking.
"By God!" he cried out, "if I had been here it should not have been so!"
He got up and supported himself against the table with the shaking
hands.
"It is very plain," he said, "that she has been willing to be torn to
pieces upon the rack to give me the thing I wanted. And now, good God in
heaven, I feel that I would have strangled the boy with my own hands
rather than lose her."
In this manner, it seemed, did a rigid, self-encased, and conventional
elderly nobleman reach emotion. He looked uncanny. His stiff dignity
hung about him in rags and tatters. Cold sweat stood on his forehead and
his chin twitched.
"Just now," he poured forth, "I don't care whether there is a child or
not. I want her--I care for nothing else. I want to look at her, I want
to speak to her, whether she is alive or dead. But if there is a spark
of life in her, I believe she will hear me."
Dr. Warren sat and watched him, wondering. He knew curious things of the
human creature, things which most of his confrères did not know. He knew
that Life was a mysterious thing, and that even a dying flame of it
might sometimes be fanned to flickering anew by powers more subtle than
science usually regards as applicable influences. He knew the nature of
the half-dead woman lying on her bed upstairs, and he comprehended what
the soul of her life had been,--her divinely innocent passion for a
self-centred man. He had seen it in the tortured courage of her eyes in
hours of mortal agony.
"Don't forget," she had said. "Our Father which art in Heaven. Don't let
anyone forget. Hallowed be thy name."
The man, leaning upon his shaking hands before him, stood there, for
these moments at least, a harrowed thing. Not a single individual of his
acquaintance would have known him.
"I want to see her before the breath leaves her," he gave forth in a
harsh, broken whisper. "I want to speak. Let me see her."