Mr. Wentworth read from them in a voice magnificently judicial.
"There's not much choice, is there?" she faltered, when he had finished.
He smiled.
"As places of residence--" he began, in an attempt to relieve the pathos.
"Oh, I didn't mean that," she cried. "Exile is--is exile." She flushed.
After a few moments of hesitation she named at random a state the laws of
which required a six months' residence. She contemplated him. "I hardly
dare to ask you to give me the name of some reputable lawyer out there."
He had looked for an instant into her eyes. Men of the law are not
invulnerable, particularly at Mr. Wentworth's age, and New England
consciences to the contrary notwithstanding. In spite of himself, her
eyes had made him a partisan: an accomplice, he told himself afterwards.
"Really, Mrs. Spence," he began, and caught another appealing look. He
remembered the husband now, and a lecture on finance in the Grenfell
smoking room which Howard Spence had delivered, and which had grated on
Boston sensibility. "It is only right to tell you that our firm does
not--does not--take divorce cases--as a rule. Not that we are taking this
one," he added hurriedly. "But as a friend--"
"Oh, thank you!" said Honora.
"Merely as a friend who would be glad to do you a service," he continued,
"I will, during the day, try to get you the name of--of as reputable a
lawyer as possible in that place."
And Mr. Wentworth paused, as red as though he had asked her to marry him.
"How good of you!" she cried. "I shall be at the Touraine until this
evening."
He escorted her through the corridor, bowed her into the elevator, and
her spirits had risen perceptibly as she got into her cab and returned to
the hotel. There, she studied railroad folders. One confidant was enough,
and she dared not even ask the head porter the way to a locality
where--it was well known--divorces were sold across a counter. And as she
worked over the intricacies of this problem the word her husband had
applied to her action recurred to her--precipitate. No doubt Mr.
Wentworth, too, had thought her precipitate. Nearly every important act
of her life had been precipitate. But she was conscious in this instance
of no regret. Delay, she felt, would have killed her. Let her exile begin
at once.
She had scarcely finished luncheon when Mr. Wentworth was announced. For
reasons best known to himself he had come in person; and he handed her,
written on a card, the name of the Honourable David Beckwith.
"I'll have to confess I don't know much about him, Mrs. Spence," he said,
"except that he has been in Congress, and is one of the prominent lawyers
of that state."
The gift of enlisting sympathy and assistance was peculiarly Honora's.
And if some one had predicted that morning to Mr. Wentworth that before
nightfall he would not only have put a lady in distress on the highroad
to obtaining a western divorce (which he had hitherto looked upon as
disgraceful), but that likewise he would miss his train for Pride's
Crossing, buy the lady's tickets, and see her off at the South Station
for Chicago, he would have regarded the prophet as a lunatic. But that is
precisely what Mr. Wentworth did. And when, as her train pulled out,
Honora bade him goodby, she felt the tug at her heartstrings which comes
at parting with an old friend.
"And anything I can do for you here in the East, while--while you are out
there, be sure to let me know," he said.
She promised and waved at him from the platform as he stood motionless,
staring after her. Romance had spent a whole day in Boston! And with Mr.
Alden Wentworth, of all people!
Fortunately for the sanity of the human race, the tension of grief is
variable. Honora, closed in her stateroom, eased herself that night by
writing a long, if somewhat undecipherable, letter to Chiltern; and was
able, the next day, to read the greater portion of a novel. It was only
when she arrived in Chicago, after nightfall, that loneliness again
assailed her. She was within nine hours--so the timetable said--of St.
Louis! Of all her trials, the homesickness which she experienced as she
drove through the deserted streets of the metropolis of the Middle West
was perhaps the worst. A great city on Sunday night! What traveller has
not felt the depressing effect of it? And, so far as the incoming
traveller is concerned, Chicago does not put her best foot forward. The
way from the station to the Auditorium Hotel was hacked and bruised--so
it seemed--by the cruel battle of trade. And she stared, in a kind of
fascination that increased the ache in her heart; at the ugliness and
cruelty of the twentieth century.
To have imagination is unquestionably to possess a great capacity for
suffering, and Honora was paying the penalty for hers. It ran riot now.
The huge buildings towered like formless monsters against the blackness
of the sky under the sickly blue of the electric lights, across the
dirty, foot-scarred pavements, strange black human figures seemed to
wander aimlessly: an elevated train thundered overhead. And presently she
found herself the tenant of two rooms in that vast refuge of the
homeless, the modern hotel, where she sat until the small hours looking
down upon the myriad lights of the shore front, and out beyond them on
the black waters of an inland sea.
.......................
From Newport to Salomon City, in a state not far from the Pacific tier,
is something of a transition in less than a week, though in modern life
we should be surprised at nothing. Limited trains are wonderful enough;
but what shall be said of the modern mind, that travels faster than
light? and much too fast for the pages of a chronicle. Martha Washington
and the good ladies of her acquaintance knew nothing about the upper
waters of the Missouri, and the words "for better, for worse, for richer,
for poorer" were not merely literature to them.
'Nous avons change tout cela', although there are yet certain crudities
to be eliminated. In these enlightened times, if in one week a lady is
not entirely at home with husband number one, in the next week she may
have travelled in comparative comfort some two-thirds across a continent,
and be on the highroad to husband number two. Why travel? Why have to put
up with all this useless expense and worry and waste of time? Why not
have one's divorce sent, C.O.D., to one's door, or establish a new branch
of the Post-office Department? American enterprise has surely lagged in
this.
Seated in a plush-covered rocking-chair that rocked on a track of its
own, and thus saved the yellow-and-red hotel carpet, the Honourable Dave
Beckwith patiently explained the vexatious process demanded by his
particular sovereign state before she should consent to cut the Gordian
knot of marriage. And his state--the Honourable Dave remarked--was in the
very forefront of enlightenment in this respect: practically all that she
demanded was that ladies in Mrs. Spence's predicament should become, pro
tempore, her citizens. Married misery did not exist in the Honourable
Dave's state, amongst her own bona fide citizens. And, by a wise
provision in the Constitution of our glorious American Union, no one
state could tie the nuptial knot so tight that another state could not
cut it at a blow.
Six months' residence, and a whole year before the divorce could be
granted! Honora looked at the plush rocking-chair, the yellow-and-red
carpet, the inevitable ice-water on the marble-topped table, and the
picture of a lady the shape of a liqueur bottle playing tennis in the
late eighties, and sighed. For one who is sensitive to surroundings, that
room was a torture chamber.
"But Mr. Beckwith," she exclaimed, "I never could spend a year here!
Isn't there a--house I could get that is a--a little--a little better
furnished? And then there is a certain publicity about staying at a
hotel."
The Honourable Dave might have been justly called the friend of ladies in
a temporary condition of loneliness. His mission in life was not merely
that of a liberator, but his natural goodness led him to perform a
hundred acts of kindness to make as comfortable as possible the purgatory
of the unfortunates under his charge. He was a man of a remarkable
appearance, and not to be lightly forgotten. His hair, above all,
fascinated Honora, and she found her eyes continually returning to it. So
incredibly short it was, and so incredibly stiff, that it reminded her of
the needle points on the cylinder of an old-fashioned music-box; and she
wondered, if it were properly inserted, what would be the resultant
melody.
The Honourable Dave's head was like a cannon-ball painted white. Across
the top of it (a blemish that would undoubtedly have spoiled the tune)
was a long scar,--a relic of one of the gentleman's many personal
difficulties. He who made the sear, Honora reflected, must have been a
strong man. The Honourable Dave, indeed, had fought his way upward
through life to the Congress of the United States; and many were the
harrowing tales of frontier life he told Honora in the long winter
evenings when the blizzards came down the river valley. They would fill a
book; unfortunately, not this book. The growing responsibilities of
taking care of the lonely ladies that came in increasing numbers to
Salomon City from the effeter portions of the continent had at length
compelled him to give up his congressional career. The Honourable Dave
was unmarried; and, he told Honora, not likely to become so. He was thus
at once human and invulnerable, a high priest dedicated to freedom.
It is needless to say that the plush rocking-chair and the picture of the
liqueur-bottle lady did not jar on his sensibilities. Like an eminent
physician who has never himself experienced neurosis, the Honourable Dave
firmly believed that he understood the trouble from which his client was
suffering. He had seen many cases of it in ladies from the Atlantic
coast: the first had surprised him, no doubt. Salomon City, though it
contained the great Boon, was not esthetic. Being a keen student of human
nature, he rightly supposed that she would not care to join the colony,
but he thought it his duty to mention that there was a colony.
Honora repeated the word.
"Out there," he said, waving his cigar to the westward, "some of the
ladies have ranches." Some of the gentlemen, too, he added, for it
appeared that exiles were not confined to one sex. "It's social--a little
too social, I guess," declared Mr. Beckwith, "for you." A delicate
compliment of differentiation that Honora accepted gravely. "They've got
a casino, and they burn a good deal of electricity first and last. They
don't bother Salomon City much. Once in a while, in the winter, they come
in a bunch to the theatre. Soon as I looked at you I knew you wouldn't
want to go there."
Her exclamation was sufficiently eloquent.
"I've got just the thing for you," he said. "It looks a little as if I
was reaching out into the sanitarium business. Are you acquainted by any
chance with Mrs. Boutwell, who married a fellow named Waterford?" he
asked, taking momentarily out of his mouth the cigar he was smoking by
permission.
Honora confessed, with no great enthusiasm, that she knew the present
Mrs. Waterford. Not the least of her tribulations had been to listen to a
partial recapitulation, by the Honourable Dave, of the ladies he had
assisted to a transfer of husbands. What, indeed, had these ladies to do
with her? She felt that the very mention of them tended to soil the pure
garments of her martyrdom.
"What I was going to say was this," the Honourable Dave continued. "Mrs.
Boutwell--that is to say Mrs. Waterford--couldn't stand this hotel any
more than you, and she felt like you do about the colony, so she rented a
little house up on Wylie Street and furnished it from the East. I took
the furniture off her hands: it's still in the house, by the way, which
hasn't been rented. For I figured it out that another lady would be
coming along with the same notions. Now you can look at the house any
time you like."
Although she had to overcome the distaste of its antecedents, the house,
or rather the furniture, was too much of a find in Salomon City to be
resisted. It had but six rooms, and was of wood, and painted grey, like
its twin beside it. But Mrs. Waterford had removed the stained-glass
window-lights in the front door, deftly hidden the highly ornamental
steam radiators, and made other eliminations and improvements, including
the white bookshelves that still contained the lady's winter reading
fifty or more yellow-and-green-backed French novels and plays. Honora's
first care, after taking possession, was to order her maid to remove
these from her sight: but it is to be feared that they found their way,
directly, to Mathilde's room. Honora would have liked to fumigate the
house; and yet, at the same time, she thanked her stars for it. Mr.
Beekwith obligingly found her a cook, and on Thursday evening she sat
down to supper in her tiny dining room. She had found a temporary haven,
at last.
Suddenly she remembered that it was an anniversary. One week ago that
day, in the old garden at Beaulieu, had occurred the momentous event that
had changed the current of her life!
CHAPTER IX
WYLIE STREET
There was a little spindle-supported porch before Honora's front door,
and had she chosen she might have followed the example of her neighbours
and sat there in the evenings. She preferred to watch the life about her
from the window-seat in the little parlour. The word exile suggests,
perhaps, to those who have never tried it, empty wastes, isolation,
loneliness. She had been prepared for these things, and Wylie Street was
a shock to her: in sending her there at this crisis in her life fate had
perpetrated nothing less than a huge practical joke. Next door, for
instance, in the twin house to hers, flaunted in the face of liberal
divorce laws, was a young couple with five children. Honora counted them,
from the eldest ones that ran over her little grass plot on their way to
and from the public school, to the youngest that spent much of his time
gazing skyward from a perambulator on the sidewalk. Six days of the week,
about six o'clock in the evening, there was a celebration in the family.
Father came home from work! He was a smooth-faced young man whom a
fortnight in the woods might have helped wonderfully--a clerk in the big
department store.
He radiated happiness. When opposite Honora's front door he would open
his arms--the signal for a race across her lawn. Sometimes it was the
little girl, with pigtails the colour of pulled molasses candy, who won
the prize of the first kiss: again it was her brother, a year her junior;
and when he was raised it was seen that the seat of his trousers was
obviously double. But each of the five received a reward, and the baby
was invariably lifted out of the perambulator. And finally there was a
conjugal kiss on the spindled porch.
The wife was a roly-poly little body. In the mornings, at the side
windows, Honora heard her singing as she worked, and sometimes the sun
struck with a blinding flash the pan she was in the act of shining. And
one day she looked up and nodded and smiled. Strange indeed was the
effect upon our heroine of that greeting! It amazed Honora herself. A
strange current ran through her and left her hot, and even as she smiled
and nodded back, unbidden tears rose scalding to her eyes. What was it?
Why was it?
She went downstairs to the little bookcase, filled now with volumes that
were not trash. For Hugh's sake, she would try to improve herself this
winter by reading serious things. But between her eyes and the book was
the little woman's smile. A month before, at Newport, how little she
would have valued it.
One morning, as Honora was starting out for her lonely walk--that usually
led her to the bare clay banks of the great river--she ran across her
neighbour on the sidewalk. The little woman was settling the baby for his
airing, and she gave Honora the same dazzling smile.
"Good morning, Mrs. Spence," she said.
"Good morning," replied Honora, and in her strange confusion she leaned
over the carriage. "Oh, what a beautiful baby!"
"Isn't he!" cried the little woman. "Of all of 'em, I think he's the
prize. His father says so. I guess," she added, "I guess it was because I
didn't know so much about 'em when they first began to come. You take my
word for it, the best way is to leave 'em alone. Don't dandle 'em. It's
hard to keep your hands off 'em, but it's right."
"I'm sure of it," said Honora, who was very red.
They made a strange contrast as they stood on that new street, with its
new vitrified brick paving and white stone curbs, and new little trees
set out in front of new little houses: Mrs. Mayo (for such, Honora's cook
had informed her, was her name) in a housekeeper's apron and a
shirtwaist, and Honora, almost a head taller, in a walking costume of
dark grey that would have done justice to Fifth Avenue. The admiration in
the little woman's eyes was undisguised.
"You're getting a bill, I hear," she said, after a moment.
"A bill?" repeated Honora.
"A bill of divorce," explained Mrs. Mayo.
Honora was conscious of conflicting emotions: astonishment, resentment,
and--most curiously--of relief that the little woman knew it.
"Yes," she answered.
But Mrs. Mayo did not appear to notice or resent her brevity.
"I took a fancy to you the minute I saw you," she said. "I can't say as
much for the other Easterner that was here last year. But I made up my
mind that it must be a mighty mean man who would treat you badly."
Honora stood as though rooted to the pavement. She found a reply
impossible.
"When I think of my luck," her neighbour continued, "I'm almost ashamed.
We were married on fifteen dollars a week. Of course there have been
trials, we must always expect that; and we've had to work hard, but--it
hasn't hurt us." She paused and looked up at Honora, and added
contritely: "There! I shouldn't have said anything. It's mean of me to
talk of my happiness. I'll drop in some afternoon--if you'll let me
--when I get through my work," said the little woman.
"I wish you would," replied Honora.
She had much to think of on her walk that morning, and new resolutions to
make. Here was happiness growing and thriving, so far as she could see,
without any of that rarer nourishment she had once thought so necessary.
And she had come two thousand miles to behold it.
She walked many miles, as a part of the regimen and discipline to which
she had set herself. Her haunting horror in this place, as she thought of
the colony of which Mr. Beckwith had spoken and of Mrs. Boutwell's row of
French novels, was degeneration. She was resolved to return to Chiltern a
better and a wiser and a truer woman, unstained by the ordeal. At the
outskirts of the town she halted by the river's bank, breathing deeply of
the pure air of the vast plains that surrounded her.
She was seated that afternoon at her desk in the sitting-room upstairs
when she heard the tinkle of the door-bell, and remembered her
neighbour's promise to call. With something of a pang she pushed back her
chair. Since the episode of the morning, the friendship of the little
woman had grown to have a definite value; for it was no small thing, in
Honora's situation, to feel the presence of a warm heart next door. All
day she had been thinking of Mrs. Mayo and her strange happiness, and
longing to talk with her again, and dreading it. And while she was
bracing herself for the trial Mathilde entered with a card.
"Tell Mrs. Mayo I shall be down in a minute," she said.
It was not a lady, Mathilde replied, but a monsieur.
Honora took the card. For a long time she sat staring at it, while
Mathilde waited. It read:
Mr. Peter Erwin.
"Madame will see monsieur?"
A great sculptor once said to the statesman who was to be his model:
"Wear your old coat. There is as much of a man in the back of his old
coat, I think, as there is in his face." As Honora halted on the
threshold, Peter was standing looking out of the five-foot plate-glass
window, and his back was to her.
She was suddenly stricken. Not since she had been a child, not even in
the weeks just passed, had she felt that pain. And as a child, self-pity
seized her--as a lost child, when darkness is setting in, and the will
fails and distance appalls. Scalding tears welled into her eyes as she
seized the frame of the door, but it must have been her breathing that he
heard. He turned and crossed the room to her as she had known he would,
and she clung to him as she had so often done in days gone by when, hurt
and bruised, he had rescued and soothed her. For the moment, the delusion
that his power was still limitless prevailed, and her faith whole again,
so many times had he mended a world all awry.
He led her to the window-seat and gently disengaged her hands from his
shoulders and took one of them and held it between his own. He did not
speak, for his was a rare intuition; and gradually her hand ceased to
tremble, and the uncontrollable sobs that shook her became less frequent.
"Why did you come? Why did you come?" she cried.
"To see you, Honora."
"But you might have--warned me."
"Yes," he said, "it's true, I might."
She drew her hand away, and gazed steadfastly at his face.
"Why aren't you angry?" she said. "You don't believe in what I have
done--you don't sympathize with it--you don't understand it."
"I have come here to try," he said.
She shook her head.
"You can't--you can't--you never could."
"Perhaps," he answered, "it may not be so difficult as you think."
Grown calmer, she considered this. What did he mean by it? to imply a
knowledge of herself?
"It will be useless," she said inconsequently.
"No," he said, "it will not be useless."
She considered this also, and took the broader meaning that such acts are
not wasted.
"What do you intend to try to do?" she asked.
He smiled a little.
"To listen to as much as you care to tell me, Honora."
She looked at him again, and an errant thought slipped in between her
larger anxieties. Wherever he went, how extraordinarily he seemed to
harmonize with his surroundings. At Silverdale, and in the drawing-room
of the New York house, and in the little parlour in this far western
town. What was it? His permanence? Was it his power? She felt that, but
it was a strange kind of power--not like other men's. She felt, as she
sat there beside him, that his was a power more difficult to combat. That
to defeat it was at once to make it stronger, and to grow weaker. She
summoned her pride, she summoned her wrongs: she summoned the ego which
had winged its triumphant flight far above his kindly, disapproving eye.
He had the ability to make her taste defeat in the very hour of victory.
And she knew that, when she fell, he would be there in his strength to
lift her up.
"Did--did they tell you to come?" she asked.
"There was no question of that, Honora. I was away when--when they
learned you were here. As soon as I returned, I came."
"Tell me how they feel," she said, in a low voice.
"They think only of you. And the thought that you are unhappy overshadows
all others. They believe that it is to them you should have come, if you
were in trouble instead of coming here."
"How could I?" she cried. "How can you ask? That is what makes it so
hard, that I cannot be with them now. But I should only have made them
still more unhappy, if I had gone. They would not have understood--they
cannot understand who have every reason to believe in marriage, why those
to whom it has been a mockery and a torture should be driven to divorce."
"Why divorce?" he said.
"Do you mean--do you mean that you wish me to give you the reasons why I
felt justified in leaving my husband?"
"Not unless you care to," he replied. "I have no right to demand them. I
only ask you to remember, Honora, that you have not explained these
reasons very clearly in your letters to your aunt and uncle. They do not
understand them. Your uncle was unable, on many accounts, to come here;
and he thought that--that as an old friend, you might be willing to talk
to me."
"I can't live with--with my husband," she cried. "I don't love him, and
he doesn't love me. He doesn't know what love is."
Peter Erwin glanced at her, but she was too absorbed then to see the
thing in his eyes. He made no comment.
"We haven't the same tastes, nor--nor the same way of looking at things
--the same views about making money--for instance. We became absolute
strangers. What more is there to say?" she added, a little defiantly.
"Your husband committed no--flagrant offence against you?" he inquired.
"That would have made him human, at least," she cried. "It would have
proved that he could feel--something. No, all he cares for in the world
is to make money, and he doesn't care how he makes it. No woman with an
atom of soul can live with a man like that."
If Peter Erwin deemed this statement a trifle revolutionary, he did not
say so.
"So you just--left him," he said.
"Yes," said Honora. "He didn't care. He was rather relieved than
otherwise. If I had lived with him till I died, I couldn't have made him
happy."
"You tried, and failed," said Peter.
She flushed.
"I couldn't have made him happier," she declared, correcting herself. "He
has no conception of what real happiness is. He thinks he is happy,-he
doesn't need me. He'll be much more--contented without me. I have nothing
against him. I was to blame for marrying him, I know. But I have only one
life to live, and I can't throw it away, Peter, I can't. And I can't
believe that a woman and a man were intended to live together without
love. It is too horrible. Surely that isn't your idea of marriage!"
"My idea of marriage isn't worth very much, I'm afraid," he said. "If I
talked about it, I should have to confine myself to theories and--and
dreams."
"The moment I saw your card, Peter, I knew why you had come here," she
said, trying to steady her voice. "It was to induce me to go back to my
husband. You don't know how it hurts me to give you pain. I love you--I
love you as I love Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary. You are a part of me. But oh,
you can't understand! I knew you could not. You have never made any
mistakes--you have never lived. It is useless. I won't go back to him. If
you stayed here for weeks you could not make me change my mind."
He was silent.
"You think that I could have prevented--this, if I had been less
selfish," she said.
"Where you are concerned, Honora, I have but one desire," he answered,
"and that is to see you happy--in the best sense of the term. If I could
induce you to go back and give your husband another trial, I should
return with a lighter heart. You ask me whether I think you have been
selfish. I answer frankly that I think you have. I don't pretend to say
your husband has not been selfish also. Neither of you have ever tried,
apparently, to make your marriage a success. It can't be done without an
honest effort. You have abandoned the most serious and sacred enterprise
in the world as lightly as though it had been a piece of embroidery. All
that I can gather from your remarks is that you have left your husband
because you have grown tired of him."
"Yes," said Honora, "and you can never realize how tired, unless you knew
him as I did. When love dies, it turns into hate."
He rose, and walked to the other end of the room, and turned.
"Could you be induced," he said, "for the sake of your aunt and uncle, if
not for your own, to consider a legal separation?"
For an instant she stared at him hopelessly, and then she buried her face
in her hands.
"No," she cried. "No, I couldn't. You don't know what you ask."
He went to her, and laid his hand lightly on her shoulder.
"I think I do," he said.
There was a moment's tense silence, and then she got to her feet and
looked at him proudly.
"Yes," she cried, "it is true. And I am not ashamed of it. I have
discovered what love is, and what life is, and I am going to take them
while I can."
She saw the blood slowly leave his face, and his hands tighten. It was
not until then that she guessed at the depth of his wound, and knew that
it was unhealed. For him had been reserved this supreme irony, that he
should come here to plead for her husband and learn from her own lips
that she loved another man. She was suddenly filled with awe, though he
turned away from her that she might not see his face: And she sought in
vain for words. She touched his hand, fearfully, and now it was he who
trembled.
"Peter," she exclaimed, "why do you bother with me? I--I am what I am. I
can't help it. I was made so. I cannot tell you that I am sorry for what
I have done--for what I am going to do. I will not lie to you--and you
forced me to speak. I know that you don't understand, and that I caused
you pain, and that I shall cause--them pain. It may be selfishness--I
don't know. God alone knows. Whatever it is, it is stronger than I. It is
what I am. Though I were to be thrown into eternal fire I would not
renounce it."
She looked at him again, and her breath caught. While she had been
speaking, he had changed. There was a fire in his eyes she had never seen
before, in all the years she had known him.
"Honora," he said quietly, "the man who has done this is a scoundrel."
She stared at him, doubting her senses, her pupils wide with terror.
"How dare you, Peter! How dare you!" she cried.
"I dare to speak the truth," he said, and crossed the room to where his
hat was lying and picked it up. She watched him as in a trance. Then he
came back to her.
"Some day, perhaps, you will forgive me for saying that, Honora. I hope
that day will come, although I shall never regret having said it. I have
caused you pain. Sometimes, it seems, pain is unavoidable. I hope you
will remember that, with the exception of your aunt and uncle, you have
no better friend than I. Nothing can alter that friendship, wherever you
go, whatever you do. Goodby."
He caught her hand, held it for a moment in his own, and the door had
closed before she realized that he had gone. For a few moments she stood
motionless where he had left her, and then she went slowly up the stairs
to her own room . . . .
CHAPTER X
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
Had he, Hugh Chiltern, been anathematized from all the high pulpits of
the world, Honora's belief in him could not have been shaken. Ivanhoe and
the Knights of the Round Table to the contrary, there is no chivalry so
exalted as that of a woman who loves, no courage higher, no endurance
greater. Her knowledge is complete; and hers the supreme faith that is
unmoved by calumny and unbelief. She alone knows. The old Chiltern did
not belong to her: hers was the new man sprung undefiled from the sacred
fire of their love; and in that fire she, too, had been born again.
Peter--even Peter had no power to share such a faith, though what he had
said of Chiltern had wounded her--wounded her because Peter, of all
others, should misjudge and condemn him. Sometimes she drew consolation
from the thought that Peter had never seen him. But she knew he could not
understand him, or her, or what they had passed through: that kind of
understanding comes alone through experience.
In the long days that followed she thought much about Peter, and failed
to comprehend her feelings towards him. She told herself that she ought
to hate him for what he had so cruelly said, and at times indeed her
resentment was akin to hatred: again, his face rose before her as she had
seen it when he had left her, and she was swept by an incomprehensible
wave of tenderness and reverence. And yet--paradox of paradoxes
--Chiltern possessed her!
On the days when his letters came it was as his emissary that the sun
shone to give her light in darkness, and she went about the house with a
song on her lips. They were filled, these letters, with an elixir of
which she drank thirstily to behold visions, and the weariness of her
exile fell away. The elixir of High Purpose. Never was love on such a
plane! He lifting her,--no marvel in this; and she--by a magic power of
levitation at which she never ceased to wonder--sustaining him. By her
aid he would make something of himself which would be worthy of her. At
last he had the incentive to enable him to take his place in the world.
He pictured their future life at Grenoble until her heart was strained
with yearning for it to begin. Here would be duty,--let him who would
gainsay it, duty and love combined with a wondrous happiness. He at a
man's labour, she at a woman's; labour not for themselves alone, but for
others. A paradise such as never was heard of--a God-fearing paradise,
and the reward of courage.
He told her he could not go to Grenoble now and begin the life without
her. Until that blessed time he would remain a wanderer, avoiding the
haunts of men. First he had cruised in the 'Folly, and then camped and
shot in Canada; and again, as winter drew on apace, had chartered another
yacht, a larger one, and sailed away for the West Indies, whence the
letters came, stamped in strange ports, and sometimes as many as five
together. He, too, was in exile until his regeneration should begin.
Well he might be at such a time. One bright day in early winter Honora,
returning from her walk across the bleak plains in the hope of letters,
found newspapers and periodicals instead, addressed in an unknown hand.
It matters not whose hand: Honora never sought to know. She had long
regarded as inevitable this acutest phase of her martyrdom, and the long
nights of tears when entire paragraphs of the loathed stuff she had
burned ran ceaselessly in her mind. Would she had burned it before
reading it! An insensate curiosity had seized her, and she had read and
read again until it was beyond the reach of fire.
Save for its effect upon Honora, it is immaterial to this chronicle. It
was merely the heaviest of her heavy payments for liberty. But what, she
asked herself shamefully, would be its effect upon Chiltern? Her face
burned that she should doubt his loyalty and love; and yet--the question
returned. There had been a sketch of Howard, dwelling upon the prominence
into which he had sprung through his connection with Mr. Wing. There had
been a sketch of her; and how she had taken what the writer was pleased
to call Society by storm: it had been intimated, with a cruelty known
only to writers of such paragraphs, that ambition to marry a Chiltern had
been her motive! There had been a sketch of Chiltern's career, in
carefully veiled but thoroughly comprehensible language, which might have
made a Bluebeard shudder. This, of course, she bore best of all; or, let
it be said rather, that it cost her the least suffering. Was it not she
who had changed and redeemed him?
What tortured her most was the intimation that Chiltern's family
connections were bringing pressure to bear upon him to save him from this
supremest of all his follies. And when she thought of this the strange
eyes and baffling expression of Mrs. Grainger rose before her. Was it
true? And if true, would Chiltern resist, even as she, Honora, had
resisted, loyally? Might this love for her not be another of his mad
caprices?
How Honora hated herself for the thought that thus insistently returned
at this period of snows and blasts! It was January. Had he seen the
newspapers? He had not, for he was cruising: he had, for of course they
had been sent him. And he must have received, from his relatives,
protesting letters. A fortnight passed, and her mail contained nothing
from him! Perhaps something had happened to his yacht! Visions of
shipwreck cause her to scan the newspapers for storms at sea,--but the
shipwreck that haunted her most was that of her happiness. How easy it is
to doubt in exile, with happiness so far away! One morning, when the wind
dashed the snow against her windows, she found it impossible to rise.
If the big doctor suspected the cause of her illness, Mathilde knew it.
The maid tended her day and night, and sought, with the tact of her
nation, to console and reassure her. The little woman next door came and
sat by her bedside. Cruel and infinitely happy little woman, filled with
compassion, who brought delicacies in the making of which she had spent
precious hours, and which Honora could not eat! The Lord, when he had
made Mrs. Mayo, had mercifully withheld the gift of imagination. One
topic filled her, she lived to one end: her Alpha and Omega were husband
and children, and she talked continually of their goodness and badness,
of their illnesses, of their health, of their likes and dislikes, of
their accomplishments and defects, until one day a surprising thing
happened. Surprising for Mrs. Mayo.
"Oh, don't!" cried Honora, suddenly. "Oh, don't! I can't bear it."
"What is it?" cried Mrs. Mayo, frightened out of her wits. "A turn? Shall
I telephone for the doctor?"
"No," relied Honora, "but--but I can't talk any more--to-day."
She apologized on the morrow, as she held Mrs. Mayo's hand. "It--it was
your happiness," she said; "I was unstrung. I couldn't listen to it.
Forgive me."
The little woman burst into tears, and kissed her as she sat in bed.
"Forgive you, deary!" she cried. "I never thought."
"It has been so easy for you," Honora faltered.
"Yes, it has. I ought to thank God, and I do--every night."
She looked long and earnestly, through her tears, at the young lady from
the far away East as she lay against the lace pillows, her paleness
enhanced by the pink gown, her dark hair in two great braids on her
shoulders.
"And to think how pretty you are!" she exclaimed.
It was thus she expressed her opinion of mankind in general, outside of
her own family circle. Once she had passionately desired beauty, the high
school and the story of Helen of Troy notwithstanding. Now she began to
look at it askance, as a fatal gift; and to pity, rather than envy, its
possessors.
As a by-industry, Mrs. Mayo raised geraniums and carnations in her front
cellar, near the furnace, and once in a while Peggy, with the
pulled-molasses hair, or chubby Abraham Lincoln, would come puffing up
Honora's stairs under the weight of a flower-pot and deposit it
triumphantly on the table at Honora's bedside. Abraham Lincoln did not
object to being kissed: he had, at least, grown to accept the process as
one of the unaccountable mysteries of life. But something happened to him
one afternoon, on the occasion of his giving proof of an intellect which
may eventually bring him, in the footsteps of his great namesake, to the
White House. Entering Honora's front door, he saw on the hall table a
number of letters which the cook (not gifted with his brains) had left
there. He seized them in one fat hand, while with the other he hugged the
flower-pot to his breast, mounted the steps, and arrived, breathless but
radiant, on the threshold of the beautiful lady's room, and there
calamity overtook him in the shape of one of the thousand articles which
are left on the floor purposely to trip up little boys.
Great was the disaster. Letters, geranium, pieces of flower-pot, a
quantity of black earth, and a howling Abraham Lincoln bestrewed the
floor. And similar episodes, in his brief experience with this world, had
not brought rewards. It was from sheer amazement that his tears ceased to
flow--amazement and lack of breath--for the beautiful lady sprang up and
seized him in her arms, and called Mathilde, who eventually brought a
white and gold box. And while Abraham sat consuming its contents in
ecstasy he suddenly realized that the beautiful lady had forgotten him.
She had picked up the letters, every one, and stood reading them with
parted lips and staring eyes.
It was Mathilde who saved him from a violent illness, closing the box and
leading him downstairs, and whispered something incomprehensible in his
ear as she pointed him homeward.
"Le vrai medecin--c'est toi, mon mignon."
There was a reason why Chiltern's letters had not arrived, and great were
Honora's self-reproach and penitence. With a party of Englishmen he had
gone up into the interior of a Central American country to visit some
famous ruins. He sent her photographs of them, and of the Englishmen, and
of himself. Yes, he had seen the newspapers. If she had not seen them,
she was not to read them if they came to her. And if she had, she was to
remember that their love was too sacred to be soiled, and too perfect to
be troubled. As for himself, as she knew, he was a changed man, who
thought of his former life with loathing. She had made him clean, and
filled him with a new strength.
The winter passed. The last snow melted on the little grass plot, which
changed by patches from brown to emerald green; and the children ran over
it again, and tracked it in the soft places, but Honora only smiled.
Warm, still days were interspersed between the windy ones, when the sky
was turquoise blue, when the very river banks were steeped in new
colours, when the distant, shadowy mountains became real. Liberty ran
riot within her. If he thought with loathing on his former life, so did
she. Only a year ago she had been penned up in a New York street in that
prison-house of her own making, hemmed in by surroundings which she had
now learned to detest from her soul.
A few more penalties remained to be paid, and the heaviest of these was
her letter to her aunt and uncle. Even as they had accepted other things
in life, so had they accepted the hardest of all to bear--Honora's
divorce. A memorable letter her Uncle Tom had written her after Peter's
return to tell them that remonstrances were useless! She was their
daughter in all but name, and they would not forsake her. When she should
have obtained her divorce, she should go back to them. Their house, which
had been her home, should always remain so. Honora wept and pondered long
over that letter. Should she write and tell them the truth, as she had
told Peter? It was not because she was ashamed of the truth that she had
kept it from them throughout the winter: it was because she wished to
spare them as long as possible. Cruellest circumstance of all, that a
love so divine as hers should not be understood by them, and should cause
them infinite pain!
The weeks and months slipped by. Their letters, after that first one,
were such as she had always received from them: accounts of the weather,
and of the doings of her friends at home. But now the time was at hand
when she must prepare them for her marriage with Chiltern; for they would
expect her in St. Louis, and she could not go there. And if she wrote
them, they might try to stop the marriage, or at least to delay it for
some years.
Was it possible that a lingering doubt remained in her mind that to
postpone her happiness would perhaps be to lose it? In her exile she had
learned enough to know that a divorced woman is like a rudderless ship at
sea, at the mercy of wind and wave and current. She could not go back to
her life in St. Louis: her situation there would be unbearable: her
friends would not be the same friends. No, she had crossed her Rubicon
and destroyed the bridge deep within her she felt that delay would be
fatal, both to her and Chiltern. Long enough had the banner of their love
been trailed in the dust.
Summer came again, with its anniversaries and its dragging, interminable
weeks: demoralizing summer, when Mrs. Mayo quite frankly appeared at her
side window in a dressing sacque, and Honora longed to do the same. But
time never stands absolutely still, and the day arrived when Mr. Beckwith
called in a carriage. Honora, with an audibly beating heart, got into it,
and they drove down town, past the department store where Mr. Mayo spent
his days, and new blocks of banks and business houses that flanked the
wide street, where the roaring and clanging of the ubiquitous trolley
cars resounded.
Honora could not define her sensations--excitement and shame and fear and
hope and joy were so commingled. The colours of the red and yellow brick
had never been so brilliant in the sunshine. They stopped before the new
court-house and climbed the granite steps. In her sensitive state, Honora
thought that some of the people paused to look after them, and that some
were smiling. One woman, she thought, looked compassionate. Within, they
crossed the marble pavement, the Honourable Dave handed her into an
elevator, and when it stopped she followed him as in a dream to an
oak-panelled door marked with a legend she did not read. Within was an
office, with leather chairs, a large oak desk, a spittoon, and portraits
of grave legal gentlemen on the wall.
"This is Judge Whitman's office," explained the Honourable Dave. "He'll
let you stay here until the case is called."
"Is he the judge--before whom--the case is to be tried?" asked Honora.
"He surely is," answered the Honourable Dave. "Whitman's a good friend of
mine. In fact, I may say, without exaggeration, I had something to do
with his election. Now you mustn't get flustered," he added. "It isn't
anything like as bad as goin' to the dentist. It don't amount to shucks,
as we used to say in Missouri."
With these cheerful words of encouragement he slipped out of a side door
into what was evidently the court room, for Honora heard a droning. After
a long interval he reappeared and beckoned her with a crooked finger. She
arose and followed him into the court room.
All was bustle and confusion there, and her counsel whispered that they
were breaking up for the day. The judge was stretching himself; several
men who must have been lawyers, and with whom Mr. Beckwith was exchanging
amenities behind the railing, were arranging their books and papers; some
of the people were leaving, and others talking in groups about the room.
The Honourable Dave whispered to the judge, a tall, lank, cadaverous
gentleman with iron-grey hair, who nodded. Honora was led forward. The
Honourable Dave, standing very close to the judge and some distance from
her, read in a low voice something that she could not catch--supposedly
the petition. It was all quite as vague to Honora as the trial of the
Jack of Hearts; the buzzing of the groups still continued around the
court room, and nobody appeared in the least interested. This was a
comfort, though it robbed the ceremony of all vestige of reality. It
seemed incredible that the majestic and awful Institution of the ages
could be dissolved with no smoke or fire, with such infinite
indifference, and so much spitting. What was the use of all the pomp and
circumstance and ceremony to tie the knot if it could be cut in the
routine of a day's business?
The solemn fact that she was being put under oath meant nothing to her.
This, too, was slurred and mumbled. She found herself, trembling,
answering questions now from her counsel, now from the judge; and it is
to be doubted to this day whether either heard her answers. Most
convenient and considerate questions they were. When and where she was
married, how long she had lived with her husband, what happened when they
ceased to live together, and had he failed ever since to contribute to
her support? Mercifully, Mr. Beckwith was in the habit of coaching his
words beforehand. A reputable citizen of Salomon City was produced to
prove her residence, and somebody cried out something, not loudly, in
which she heard the name of Spence mentioned twice. The judge said, "Take
your decree," and picked up a roll of papers and walked away. Her knees
became weak, she looked around her dizzily, and beheld the triumphant
professional smile of the Honourable Dave Beckwith.
"It didn't hurt much, did it?" he asked. "Allow me to congratulate you."
"Is it--is it all over?" she said, quite dazed.
"Just like that," he said. "You're free."
"Free!" The word rang in her ears as she drove back to the little house
that had been her home. The Honourable Dave lifted his felt hat as he
handed her out of the carriage, and said he would call again in the
evening to see if he could do anything further for her. Mathilde, who had
been watching from the window, opened the door, and led her mistress into
the parlour.
"It's--it's all over, Mathilde," she said.
"Mon dieu, madame," said Mathilde, "c'est simple comme bonjour!"
A MODERN CHRONICLE
By Winston Churchill
Volume 7.
CHAPTER XI
IN WHICH IT IS ALL DONE OVER AGAIN
All morning she had gazed on the shining reaches of the Hudson, their
colour deepening to blue as she neared the sea. A gold-bound volume of
Shelley, with his name on the fly-leaf, lay in her lap. And two lines she
repeated softly to herself--two lines that held a vision:
"He was as the sun in his fierce youth,
As terrible and lovely as a tempest;"
She summoned him out of the chaos of the past, and the past became the
present, and he stood before her as though in the flesh. Nay, she heard
his voice, his laugh, she even recognized again the smouldering flames in
his eyes as he glanced into hers, and his characteristic manners and
gestures. Honora wondered. In vain, during those long months of exile had
she tried to reconstruct him thus the vision in its entirety would not
come: rare, fleeting, partial, and tantalizing glimpses she had been
vouchsafed, it is true. The whole of him had been withheld until this
breathless hour before the dawn of her happiness.
Yet, though his own impatient spirit had fared forth to meet her with
this premature gift of his attributes, she had to fight the growing fear
within her. Now that the days of suffering were as they had not been,
insistent questions dinned in her ears: was she entitled to the joys to
come? What had she done to earn them? Had hers not been an attempt, on a
gigantic scale, to cheat the fates? Nor could she say whether this
feeling were a wholly natural failure to grasp a future too big, or the
old sense of the unreality of events that had followed her so
persistently.
The Hudson disappeared. Factories, bridges, beflagged week-end resorts,
ramshackle houses, and blocks of new buildings were scattered here and
there. The train was running on a causeway between miles of tenements
where women and children, overtaken by lassitude, hung out of the
windows: then the blackness of the tunnel, and Honora closed her eyes.
Four minutes, three minutes, two minutes . . . . The motion ceased. At
the steps of the car a uniformed station porter seized her bag; and she
started to walk down the long, narrow platform. Suddenly she halted.
"Drop anything, Miss?" inquired the porter.
"No," answered Honora, faintly. He looked at her in concern, and she
began to walk on again, more slowly.
It had suddenly come over her that the man she was going to meet she
scarcely knew! Shyness seized her, a shyness that bordered on panic. And
what was he really like, that she should put her whole trust in him? She
glanced behind her: that way was closed: she had a mad desire to get
away, to hide, to think. It must have been an obsession that had
possessed her all these months. The porter was looking again, and he
voiced her predicament.
"There's only one way out, Miss."
And then, amongst the figures massed behind the exit in the grill, she
saw him, his face red-bronze with the sea tan, his crisp, curly head
bared, his eyes alight with a terrifying welcome; and a tremor of a fear
akin to ecstasy ran through her: the fear of the women of days gone by
whose courage carried them to the postern or the strand, and fainted
there. She could have taken no step farther--and there was no need. New
strength flowed from the hand she held that was to carry her on and on.
He spoke her name. He led her passive, obedient, through the press to the
side street, and then he paused and looked into her burning face.
"I have you at last," he said. "Are you happy?"
"I don't know," she faltered. "Oh, Hugh, it all seems so strange! I don't
know what I have done."
"I know," he said exultantly; "but to save my soul I can't believe it."
She watched him, bewildered, while he put her maid into a cab, and by an
effort roused herself.
"Where are you going, Hugh?"
"To get married," he replied promptly.
She pulled down her veil.
"Please be sensible," she implored. "I've arranged to go to a hotel."
"What hotel?"
"The--the Barnstable," she said. The place had come to her memory on the
train. "It's very nice and--and quiet--so I've been told. And I've
telegraphed for my rooms."
"I'll humour you this once," he answered, and gave the order.
She got into the carriage. It had blue cushions with the familiar smell
of carriage upholstery, and the people in the street still hurried about
their business as though nothing in particular were happening. The horses
started, and some forgotten key in her brain was touched as Chiltern
raised her veil again.
"You'll tear it, Hugh," she said, and perforce lifted it herself. Her
eyes met his--and she awoke. Not to memories or regrets, but to the
future, for the recording angel had mercifully destroyed his book.
"Did you miss me?" she said.
"Miss you! My God, Honora, how can you ask? When I look back upon these
last months, I don't see how I ever passed through them. And you are
changed," he said. "I could not have believed it possible, but you are.
You are--you are finer."
He had chosen his word exquisitely. And then, as they trotted sedately
through Madison Avenue, he strained her in his arms and kissed her.
"Oh, Hugh!" she cried, scarlet, as she disengaged, herself, "you mustn't
--here!"
"You're free!" he exclaimed. "You're mine at last! I can't believe it!
Look at me, and tell me so."
She tried.
"Yes," she faltered.
"Yes--what?"
"Yes. I--I am yours."
She looked out of the window to avoid those eyes. Was this New York, or
Jerusalem? Were these the streets through which she had driven and trod
in her former life? Her whole soul cried out denial. No episode, no
accusing reminiscences stood out--not one: the very corners were changed.
Would it all change back again if he were to lessen the insistent
pressure on the hand in her lap.
"Honora?"
"Yes?" she answered, with a start.
"You missed me? Look at me and tell me the truth."
"The truth!" she faltered, and shuddered. The contrast was too great
--the horror of it too great for her to speak of. The pen of Dante had
not been adequate. "Don't ask me, Hugh," she begged, "I can't talk about
it--I never shall be able to talk about it. If I had not loved you, I
should have died."
How deeply he felt and understood and sympathized she knew by the
quivering pressure on her hand. Ah, if he had not! If he had failed to
grasp the meaning of her purgatory.
"You are wonderful, Honora," was what he said in a voice broken by
emotion.
She thanked him with one fleeting, tearful glance that was as a grant of
all her priceless possessions. The carriage stopped, but it was some
moments before they realized it.
"You may come up in a little while," she whispered, "and lunch with me
--if you like."
"If I like!" he repeated.
But she was on the sidewalk, following the bell boy into the cool,
marble-lined area of the hotel. A smiling clerk handed her a pen, and set
the new universe to rocking.
"Mrs. Leffingwell, I presume? We have your telegram."
Mrs. Leffingwell! Who was that person? For an instant she stood blankly
holding the pen, and then she wrote rapidly, if a trifle unsteadily:
"Mrs. Leffingwell and maid." A pause. Where was her home? Then she added
the words, "St. Louis."
Her rooms were above the narrow canon of the side street, looking over
the roofs of the inevitable brownstone fronts opposite. While Mathilde,
in the adjoining chamber, unpacked her bag, Honora stood gazing out of
the sitting-room windows, trying to collect her thoughts. Her spirits had
unaccountably fallen, the sense of homelessness that had pursued her all
these months overtaken her once more. Never, never, she told herself,
would she enter a hotel again alone; and when at last he came she clung
to him with a passion that thrilled him the more because he could not
understand it.
"Hugh--you will care for me?" she cried.
He kissed away her tears. He could not follow her; he only knew that what
he held to him was a woman such as he had never known before. Tender, and
again strangely and fiercely tender: an instrument of such miraculous
delicacy as to respond, quivering, to the lightest touch; an harmonious
and perfect blending of strength and weakness, of joy and sorrow,--of all
the warring elements in the world. What he felt was the supreme masculine
joy of possession.
At last they sat down on either side of the white cloth the waiter had
laid, for even the gods must eat. Not that our deified mortals ate much
on this occasion. Vesta presided once more, and after the feast was over
gently led them down the slopes until certain practical affairs began to
take shape in the mind of the man. Presently he looked at his watch, and
then at the woman, and made a suggestion.
"Marry you now--this of afternoon!" she cried, aghast. "Hugh, are you in
your right senses?"
"Yes," he said, "I'm reasonable for the first time in my life."
She laughed, and immediately became serious. But when she sought to
marshal her arguments, she found that they had fled.
"Oh, but I couldn't," she answered. "And besides, there are so many
things I ought to do. I--I haven't any clothes."
But this was a plea he could not be expected to recognize. He saw no
reason why she could not buy as many as she wanted after the ceremony.
"Is that all?" he demanded.
"No--that isn't all. Can't you see that--that we ought to wait, Hugh?"
"No," he exclaimed, "No I can't see it. I can only see that every moment
of waiting would be a misery for us both. I can only see that the
situation, as it is to-day, is an intolerable one for you."
She had not expected him to see this.
"There are others to be thought of," she said, after a moment's
hesitation.
"What others?"
The answer she should have made died on her lips.
"It seems so-indecorous, Hugh."
"Indecorous!" he cried, and pushed back his chair and rose. "What's
indecorous about it? To leave you here alone in a hotel in New York would
not only be indecorous, but senseless. How long would you put it off? a
week--a month--a year? Where would you go in the meantime, and what would
you do?"
"But your friends, Hugh--and mine?"
"Friends! What have they got to do with it?"
It was the woman, now, who for a moment turned practical--and for the
man's sake. She loved, and the fair fabric of the future which they were
to weave together, and the plans with which his letters had been filled
and of which she had dreamed in exile, had become to-day as the stuff of
which moonbeams are made. As she looked up at him, eternity itself did
not seem long enough for the fulfilment of that love. But he? Would the
time not come when he would demand something more? and suppose that
something were denied? She tried to rouse herself, to think, to consider
a situation in which her instinct had whispered just once--there must be
some hidden danger: but the electric touch of his hand destroyed the
process, and made her incapable of reason.
"What should we gain by a week's or a fortnight's delay," he was saying,
"except so much misery?"
She looked around the hotel sitting-room, and tried to imagine the
desolation of it, stripped of his presence. Why not? There was reason in
what he said. And yet, if she had known it, it was not to reason she
yielded, but to the touch of his hand.
"We will be married to-day," he decreed. "I have planned it all. I have
bought the 'Adhemar', the yacht which I chartered last winter. She is
here. We'll go off on her together, away from the world, for as long as
you like. And then," he ended triumphantly, "then we'll go back to
Grenoble and begin our life."
"And begin our life!" she repeated. But it was not to him that she spoke.
"Hugh, I positively have to have some clothes."
"Clothes!" His voice expressed his contempt for the mundane thought.
"Yes, clothes," she repeated resolutely.
He looked at his watch once more.
"Very well," he said, "we'll get 'em on the way."
"On the way?" she asked.
"We'll have to have a marriage license, I'm afraid," he explained
apologetically.
Honora grew crimson. A marriage license!
She yielded, of course. Who could resist him? Nor need the details of
that interminable journey down the crowded artery of Broadway to the
Centre of Things be entered into. An ignoble errand, Honora thought; and
she sat very still, with flushed cheeks, in the corner of the carriage.
Chiltern's finer feelings came to her rescue. He, too, resented this
senseless demand of civilization as an indignity to their Olympian loves.
And he was a man to chafe at all restraints. But at last the odious thing
was over, grim and implacable Law satisfied after he had compelled them
to stand in line for an interminable period before his grill, and mingle
with those whom he chose, in his ignorance, to call their peers. Honora
felt degraded as they emerged with the hateful paper, bought at such a
price. The City Hall Park, with its moving streams of people, etched
itself in her memory.
"Leave me, Hugh," she said; "I will take this carriage--you must get
another one."
For once, he accepted his dismissal with comparative meekness.
"When shall I come?" he asked.
"She smiled a little, in spite of herself.
"You may come for me at six o'clock," she replied.
"Six o'clock!" he exclaimed; but accepted with resignation and closed the
carriage door. Enigmatical sex!
Enigmatical sex indeed! Honora spent a feverish afternoon, rest and
reflection being things she feared. An afternoon in familiar places; and
(strangest of all facts to be recorded!) memories and regrets troubled
her not at all. Her old dressmakers, her old milliners, welcomed her as
one risen, radiant, from the grave; risen, in their estimation, to a
higher life. Honora knew this, and was indifferent to the wealth of
meaning that lay behind their discretion. Milliners and dressmakers read
the newspapers and periodicals--certain periodicals. Well they knew that
the lady they flattered was the future Mrs. Hugh Chiltern.
Nothing whatever of an indelicate nature happened. There was no mention
of where to send the bill, or of whom to send it to. Such things as she
bought on the spot were placed in her carriage. And happiest of all
omissions, she met no one she knew. The praise that Madame Barriere
lavished on Honora's figure was not flattery, because the Paris models
fitted her to perfection. A little after five she returned to her hotel,
to a Mathilde in a high state of suppressed excitement. And at six, the
appointed fateful hour, arrayed in a new street gown of dark green cloth,
she stood awaiting him.
He was no laggard. The bell on the church near by was still singing from
the last stroke when he knocked, flung open the door, and stood for a
moment staring at her. Not that she had been shabby when he had wished to
marry her at noon: no self-respecting woman is ever shabby; not that her
present costume had any of the elements of overdress; far from it. Being
a woman, she had her thrill of triumph at his exclamation. Diana had no
need, perhaps, of a French dressmaker, but it is an open question whether
she would have scorned them. Honora stood motionless, but her smile for
him was like the first quivering shaft of day. He opened a box, and with
a strange mixture of impetuosity and reverence came forward. And she saw
that he held in his hand a string of great, glistening pearls.
"They were my mother's," he said. "I have had them restrung--for you."
"Oh, Hugh!" she cried. She could find no words to express the tremor
within. And she stood passively, her eyes half closed, while he clasped
the string around the lace collar that pressed the slender column of her
neck and kissed her.
Even the humble beings who work in hotels are responsive to unusual
disturbances in the ether. At the Barnstable, a gala note prevailed: bell
boys, porters, clerk, and cashier, proud of their sudden wisdom, were
wreathed in smiles. A new automobile, in Chiltern's colours, with his
crest on the panel, was panting beside the curb.
"I meant to have had it this morning," he apologized as he handed her in,
"but it wasn't ready in time."
Honora heard him, and said something in reply. She tried in vain to rouse
herself from the lethargy into which she had fallen, to cast off the
spell. Up Fifth Avenue they sped, past meaningless houses, to the Park.
The crystal air of evening was suffused with the level evening light; and
as they wound in and out under the spreading trees she caught glimpses
across the shrubbery of the deepening blue of waters. Pools of mystery
were her eyes.
The upper West Side is a definite place on the map, and full,
undoubtedly, of palpitating human joys and sorrows. So far as Honora was
concerned, it might have been Bagdad. The automobile had stopped before a
residence, and she found herself mounting the steps at Chiltern's side. A
Swedish maid opened the door.
"Is Mr. White at home?" Chiltern asked.
It seemed that "the Reverend Mr. White" was. He appeared, a portly
gentleman with frock coat and lawn tie who resembled the man in the moon.
His head, like polished ivory, increased the beaming effect of his
welcome, and the hand that pressed Honora's was large and soft and warm.
But dreams are queer things, in which no events surprise us.
The reverend gentleman, as he greeted Chiltern, pronounced his name with
unction. His air of hospitality, of good-fellowship, of taking the world
as he found it, could not have been improved upon. He made it apparent at
once that nothing could surprise him. It was the most natural
circumstance in life that two people should arrive at his house in an
automobile at half-past six in the evening and wish to get married: if
they chose this method instead of the one involving awnings and policemen
and uncomfortably-arrayed relations and friends, it was none of Mr.
White's affair. He led them into the Gothic sanctum at the rear of the
house where the famous sermons were written that shook the sounding-board
of the temple where the gentleman preached,--the sermons that sometimes
got into the newspapers. Mr. White cleared his throat.
"I am--very familiar with your name, Mr. Chiltern," he said, "and it is a
pleasure to be able to serve you, and the lady who is so shortly to be
your wife. Your servant arrived with your note at four o'clock. Ten
minutes later, and I should have missed him."
And then Honora heard Chiltern saying somewhat coldly:--"In order to
save time, Mr. White, I wish to tell you that Mrs. Leffingwell has been
divorced--"
The Reverend Mr. White put up a hand before him, and looked down at the
carpet, as one who would not dwell upon painful things.
"Unfortunate--ahem--mistakes will occur in life, Mr. Chiltern--in the
best of lives," he replied. "Say no more about it. I am sure, looking at
you both--"
"Very well then," said Chiltern brusquely, "I knew you would have to
know. And here," he added, "is an essential paper."
A few minutes later, in continuation of the same strange dream, Honora
was standing at Chiltern's side and the Reverend Mr. White was addressing
them: What he said--apart of it at least--seemed curiously familiar.
Chiltern put a ring on a finger of her ungloved hand. It was a supreme
moment in her destiny--this she knew. Between her responses she repeated
it to herself, but the mighty fact refused to be registered. And then,
suddenly, rang out the words:
"Those whom God hath joined together let no man Put asunder."
Those whom God hath joined together! Mr. White was congratulating her.
Other people were in the room--the minister's son, his wife, his
brother-in-law. She was in the street again, in the automobile, without
knowing how she got there, and Chiltern close beside her in the
limousine.
"My wife!" he whispered.
Was she? Could it be true, be lasting, be binding for ever and ever? Her
hand pressed his convulsively.
"Oh, Hugh!" she cried, "care for me--stay by me forever. Will you
promise?"
"I promise, Honora," he repeated. "Henceforth we are one."
Honora would have prolonged forever that honeymoon on summer seas. In
those blissful days she was content to sit by the hour watching him as,
bareheaded in the damp salt breeze, he sailed the great schooner and gave
sharp orders to the crew. He was a man who would be obeyed, and even his
flashes of temper pleased her. He was her master, too, and she gloried in
the fact. By the aid of the precious light within her, she studied him.
He loved her mightily, fiercely, but withal tenderly. With her alone he
was infinitely tender, and it seemed that something in him cried out for
battle against the rest of the world. He had his way, in port and out of
it. He brooked no opposition, and delighted to carry, against his
captain's advice, more canvas than was wise when it blew heavily. But the
yacht, like a woman, seemed a creature of his will; to know no fear when
she felt his guiding hand, even though the green water ran in the
scuppers.
And every day anew she scanned his face, even as he scanned the face of
the waters. What was she searching for? To have so much is to become
miserly, to fear lest a grain of the precious store be lost. On the
second day they had anchored, for an hour or two, between the sandy
headlands of a small New England port, and she had stood on the deck
watching his receding figure under the flag of the gasoline launch as it
made its way towards the deserted wharves. Beyond the wharves was an
elm-arched village street, and above the verdure rose the white cupola of
the house of some prosperous sea-captain of bygone times. Honora had not
wished to go ashore. First he had begged, and then he had laughed as he
had leaped into the launch. She lay in a chaise longue, watching it
swinging idly at the dock.
The night before he had written letters and telegrams. Once he had looked
up at her as she sat with a book in her hand across the saloon, and
caught her eyes. She had been pretending not to watch him.
"Wedding announcements," he said.
And she had smiled back at him bravely. Such was the first acknowledgment
between them that the world existed.
"A little late," he observed, smiling in his turn as he changed his pen,
"but they'll have to make allowances for the exigencies of the situation.
And they've been after me to settle down for so many years that they
ought to be thankful to get them at all. I've told them that after a
decent period they may come to Grenoble--in the late autumn. We don't
want anybody before then, do we, Honora?"
"No," she said faintly; and added, "I shall always be satisfied with you
alone, Hugh."
He laughed happily, and presently she went up on deck and stood with her
face to the breeze. There were no sounds save the musical beat of the
water against the strakes, and the low hum of wind on the towering
vibrant sails. One moulten silver star stood out above all others. To the
northward, somewhere beyond the spot where sea and sky met in the hidden
kiss of night, was Newport,--were his relations and her friends. What did
they think? He, at least, had no anxieties about the world, why should
she? Their defiance of it had been no greater than that of an hundred
others on whom it had smiled benignly. But had not the others truckled
more to its conventions? Little she cared about it, indeed, and if he had
turned the prow of the 'Adhemar' towards the unpeopled places of the
earth, her joy would have been untroubled.
One after another the days glided by, while with the sharpened senses of
a great love she watched for a sign of the thing that slept in him--of
the thing that had driven him home from his wanderings to re-create his
life. When it awoke, she would have to share him; now he was hers alone.
Her feelings towards this thing did not assume the proportions of
jealousy or fear; they were merely alert, vaguely disquieting. The
sleeping thing was not a monster. No, but it might grow into one, if its
appetite were not satisfied, and blame her.
She told herself that, had he lacked ambition, she could not have loved
him, and did not stop to reflect upon the completeness of her
satisfaction with the Viking. He seemed, indeed, in these weeks, one whom
the sea has marked for its own, and her delight in watching him as he
moved about the boat never palled. His nose reminded her of the prow of a
ship of war, and his deep-set eyes were continually searching the horizon
for an enemy. Such were her fancies. In the early morning when he donned
his sleeveless bathing suit, she could never resist the temptation to
follow him on deck to see him plunge into the cold ocean: it gave her a
delightful little shiver--and he was made like one of the gods of
Valhalla.
She had discovered, too, in these intimate days, that he had the
Northman's temperament; she both loved and dreaded his moods. And
sometimes, when the yacht glided over smoother seas, it was his pleasure
to read to her, even poetry and the great epics. That he should be fond
of the cruel Scotch ballads she was not surprised; but his familiarity
with the book of Job, and his love for it, astonished her. It was a
singular library that he had put on board the 'Adhemar'.
One evening when the sails flapped idly and the blocks rattled, when they
had been watching in silence the flaming orange of the sunset above the
amethystine Camden hills, he spoke the words for which she had been
waiting.
"Honora, what do you say to going back to Grenoble?"
She succeeded in smiling at him.
"Whenever you like, Hugh," she said.
So the bowsprit of the 'Adhemar' was turned homewards; and with every
league of water they left behind them his excitement and impatience
seemed to grow.
"I can't wait to show it to you, Honora--to see you in it," he exclaimed.
"I have so long pictured you there, and our life as it will be."
CHAPTER XII
THE ENTRANCE INTO EDEN
They had travelled through the night, and in the early morning left the
express at a junction. Honora sat in the straight-backed seat of the
smaller train with parted lips and beating heart, gazing now and again at
the pearly mists rising from the little river valley they were climbing.
Chiltern was like a schoolboy.
"We'll soon be there," he cried, but it was nearly nine o'clock when they
reached the Gothic station that marked the end of the line. It was a
Chiltern line, he told her, and she was already within the feudal domain.
Time indeed that she awoke! She reached the platform to confront a group
of upturned, staring faces, and for the moment her courage failed her.
Somehow, with Chiltern's help, she made her way to a waiting omnibus
backed up against the boards. The footman touched his hat, the
grey-headed coachman saluted, and they got in. As the horses started off
at a quick trot, Honora saw that the group on the station platform had
with one consent swung about to stare after them.
They passed through the main street of the town, lined with plate-glass
windows and lively signs, and already bustling with the business of the
day, through humbler thoroughfares, and presently rumbled over a bridge
that spanned a rushing stream confined between the foundation walls of
mills. Hundreds of yards of mills stretched away on either side; mills
with windows wide open, and within them Honora heard the clicking and
roaring of machinery, and saw the men and women at their daily tasks.
Life was a strange thing that they should be doing this while she should
be going to live in luxury at a great country place. On one of the walls
she read the legend Chiltern and Company.
"They still keep our name," said Hugh, "although they are in the trust."
He pointed out to her, with an air of pride, every landmark by the
roadside. In future they were to have a new meaning--they were to be
shared with her. And he spoke of the times--as child and youth, home from
the seashore or college, he had driven over the same road. It wound to
the left, behind the mills, threaded a village of neat wooden houses
where the better class of operatives lived, reached the river again, and
turned at last through a brick gateway, past a lodge in the dense shade
of sheltering boughs, into a wooded drive that climbed, by gentle
degrees, a slope. Human care for generations had given to the place a
tradition. People had lived here and loved those trees--his people. And
could it be that she was to inherit all this, with him? Was her name
really Chiltern?
The beating of her heart became a pain when in the distance through the
spreading branches she caught a glimpse of the long, low outline of the
house, a vision at once familiar and unreal. How often in the months gone
by had she called up the memory of the photograph she had once seen, only
to doubt the more that she should ever behold that house and these trees
with him by her side! They drew up before the door, and a venerable,
ruddy-faced butler stood gravely on the steps to welcome them. Hugh
leaped out. He was still the schoolboy.
"Starling," he said, "this is Mrs. Chiltern."
Honora smiled tremulously.
"How do you do, Starling?" she said.
"Starling's an old friend, Honora. He's been here ever since I can
remember."
The blue eyes of the old servant were fixed on her with a strange,
searching expression. Was it compassion she read in them, on this that
should be the happiest of her days? In that instant, unaccountably, her
heart went out to the old man; and something of what he had seen, and
something of what was even now passing within him, came to her
intuitively. It was as though, unexpectedly, she had found a friend--and
a friend who had had no previous intentions of friendship.
"I'm sure I wish you happiness, madame,--and Mr. Hugh, he said in a voice
not altogether firm.
"Happiness!" cried Hugh. "I've never known what it was before now,
Starling."
The old man's eyes glistened.
"And you've come to stay, sir?"
"All my life, Starling," said Hugh.
They entered the hall. It was wide and cool, white panelled to the
ceiling, with a dark oak floor. At the back of it was an
eighteenth-century stairway, with a band of red carpet running up the
steps, and a wrought-iron guard with a velvet-covered rail. Halfway up,
the stairway divided at a landing, lighted by great triple windows of
small panes.
"You may have breakfast in half an hour, Starling," said Chiltern, and
led Honora up the stairs into the east wing, where he flung open one of
the high mahogany doors on the south side. "These are your rooms, Honora.
I have had Keller do them all over for you, and I hope you'll like them.
If you don't, we'll change them again."
Her answer was an exclamation of delight. There was a bedroom in pink,
with brocaded satin on the walls, and an oriel window thrust out over the
garden; a panelled boudoir at the corner of the house, with a marble
mantel before which one of Marie Antoinette's duchesses had warmed her
feet; and shelves lined with gold-lettered books. From its windows,
across the flowering shrubbery and through the trees, she saw the
gleaming waters of a lake, and the hills beyond. From this view she
turned, and caught her breath, and threw her arms about her husband's
neck. He was astonished to see that her eyes were filled with tears.
"Oh, Hugh," she cried, "it's too perfect! It almost makes me afraid."
"We will be very happy, dearest," he said, and as he kissed her he
laughed at the fates.
"I hope so--I pray so," she said, as she clung to him. "But--don't
laugh,--I can't bear it."
He patted her cheek.
"What a strange little girl you are!" he said. "I suppose I shouldn't be
mad about you if you weren't that way. Sometimes I wonder how many women
I have married."
She smiled at him through her tears.
"Isn't that polygamy, Hugh?" she asked.
It was all like a breathless tale out of one of the wonder books of
youth. So, at least, it seemed to Honora as she stood, refreshed with a
new white linen gown, hesitating on the threshold of her door before
descending. Some time the bell must ring, or the cock crow, or the fairy
beckon with a wand, and she would have to go back. Back where? She did
not know--she could not remember. Cinderella dreaming by the embers,
perhaps.
He was awaiting her in the little breakfast room, its glass casements
open to the garden with the wall and the round stone seat. The simmering
urn, the white cloth, the shining silver, the big green melons that the
hot summer sun had ripened for them alone, and Hugh's eyes as they rested
on her--such was her illusion. Nor was it quite dispelled when he lighted
a pipe and they started to explore their Eden, wandering through chambers
with, low ceilings in the old part of the house, and larger, higher
apartments in the portion that was called new. In the great darkened
library, side by side against the Spanish leather on the walls, hung the
portraits of his father and mother in heavy frames of gilt.
Her husband was pleased that she should remain so long before them. And
for a while, as she stood lost in contemplation, he did not speak. Once
she glanced at him, and then back at the stern face of the General,
--stern, yet kindly. The eyes, deep-set under bushy brows, like Hugh's,
were full of fire; and yet the artist had made them human, too. A dark,
reddish brown, close-trimmed mustache and beard hid the mouth and chin.
Hugh had inherited the nose, but the father's forehead was wider and
fuller. Hugh was at once a newer type, and an older. The face and figure
of the General were characteristic of the mid-century American of the
northern states, a mixture of boldness and caution and Puritanism, who
had won his battles in war and commerce by a certain native quality of
mind.
"I never appreciated him," said Hugh at length, "until after he died
--long after. Until now, in fact. At times we were good friends, and then
something he would say or do would infuriate me, and I would purposely
make him angry. He had a time and a rule for everything, and I could not
bear rules. Breakfast was on the minute, an hour in his study to attend
to affairs about the place, so many hours in his office at the mills, in
the president's room at the bank, vestry and charity meetings at regular
intervals. No movement in all this country round about was ever set on
foot without him. He was one to be finally reckoned with. And since his
death, many proofs have come to me of the things he did for people of
which the world was ignorant. I have found out at last that his way of
life was, in the main, the right way. But I know now, Honora," he added
soberly, slipping his hand within her arm, "I know now that without you I
never could do all I intend to do."
"Oh, don't say that!" she cried. "Don't say that!"
"Why not?" he asked, smiling at her vehemence. "It is not a confession of
weakness. I had the determination, it is true. I could--I should have
done something, but my deeds would have lacked the one thing needful to
lift them above the commonplace--at least for me. You are the
inspiration. With you here beside me, I feel that I can take up this work
with joy. Do you understand?"
She pressed his hand with her arm.
"Hugh," she said slowly, "I hope that I shall be a help, and not--not a
hindrance."
"A hindrance!" he exclaimed. "You don't know, you can't realize, what you
are to me."
She was silent, and when she lifted her eyes it was to rest them on the
portrait of his mother. And she seemed to read in the sweet, sad eyes a
question--a question not to be put into words. Chiltern, following her
gaze, did not speak: for a space they looked at the portrait together,
and in silence . . . .
From one end of the house to the other they went, Hugh reviving at the
sight of familiar objects a hundred memories of his childhood; and she
trying to imagine that childhood, so different from her own, passed in
this wonderful place. In the glass cases of the gun room, among the
shining, blue barrels which he had used in all parts of the world, was
the little shotgun his father had had made for him when he was twelve
years old. Hugh locked the door after them when they came out, and smiled
as he put the key in his pocket.
"My destroying days are over," he declared.
Honora put on a linen hat and they took the gravelled path to the
stables, where the horses, one by one, were brought out into the
courtyard for their inspection. In anticipation of this hour there was a
blood bay for Honora, which Chiltern had bought in New York. She gave a
little cry of delight when she saw the horse shining in the sunlight, his
nostrils in the air, his brown eyes clear, his tapering neck patterned
with veins. And then there was the dairy, with the fawn-coloured cows and
calves; and the hillside pastures that ran down to the river, and the
farm lands where the stubbled grain was yellowing. They came back by the
path that wound through the trees and shrubbery bordering the lake to the
walled garden, ablaze in the mellow sunlight with reds and purples,
salvias and zinnias, dahlias, gladioli, and asters.
Here he left her for a while, sitting dreamily on the stone bench. Mrs.
Hugh Chiltern, of Grenoble! Over and over she repeated that name to
herself, and it refused somehow to merge with her identity. Yet was she
mistress of this fair domain; of that house which had sheltered them race
for a century, and the lines of which her eye caressed with a loving
reverence; and the Chiltern pearls even then lay hidden around her
throat.
Her thoughts went back, at this, to the gentle lady to whom they had
belonged, and whose look began again to haunt her. Honora's superstition
startled her. What did it mean, that look? She tried to recall where she
had seen it before, and suddenly remembered that the eyes of the old
butler had held something not unlike it. Compassionate--this was the only
word that would describe it. No, it had not proclaimed her an intruder,
though it may have been ready to do so the moment before her appearance;
for there was a note of surprise in it--surprise and compassion.
This was the lady in whose footsteps she was to walk, whose charities and
household cares she was to assume! Tradition, order, observance,
responsibility, authority it was difficult to imagine these as a logical
part of the natural sequence of her life. She would begin to-day, if God
would only grant her these things she had once contemned, and that seemed
now so precious. Her life--her real life would begin to-day. Why not? How
hard she would strive to be worthy of this incomparable gift! It was
hers, hers! She listened, but the only answer was the humming of the bees
in the still September morning.
Chiltern's voice aroused her. He was standing in the breakfast room
talking to the old butler.
"You're sure there were no other letters, Starling, besides these bills?"
Honora became tense.
"No, sir," she heard the butler say, and she seemed to detect in his
deferential voice the note of anxiety suppressed in the other's. "I'm
most particular about letters, sir, as one who lived so many years with
your father would be. All that came were put in your study, Mr. Hugh."
"It doesn't matter," answered Chiltern, carelessly, and stepped out into
the garden. He caught sight of her, hesitated the fraction of a moment,
and as he came forward again the cloud in his eyes vanished. And yet she
was aware that he was regarding her curiously.
"What," he said gayly, "still here?"
"It is too beautiful!" she cried. "I could sit here forever."
She lifted her face trustfully, smilingly, to his, and he stooped down
and kissed it . . . .
To give the jealous fates not the least chance to take offence, the
higher life they were to lead began at once. And yet it seemed at times
to Honora as though this higher life were the gift the fates would most
begrudge: a gift reserved for others, the pretensions to which were a
kind of knavery. Merriment, forgetfulness, music, the dance; the cup of
pleasure and the feast of Babylon--these might more readily have been
vouchsafed; even deemed to have been bargained for. But to take that
which supposedly had been renounced--virtue, sobriety, security, respect
--would this be endured? She went about it breathlessly, like a thief.
Never was there a more exemplary household. They rose at half-past seven,
they breakfasted at a quarter after eight; at nine, young Mr. Manning,
the farm superintendent, was in waiting, and Hugh spent two or more hours
in his company, inspecting, correcting, planning; for two thousand acres
of the original Chiltern estate still remained. Two thousand acres which,
since the General's death, had been at sixes and sevens. The General's
study, which was Hugh's now, was piled high with new and bulky books on
cattle and cultivation of the soil. Government and state and private
experts came and made tests and went away again; new machinery arrived,
and Hugh passed hours in the sun, often with Honora by his side,
installing it. General Chiltern had been president and founder of the
Grenoble National Bank, and Hugh took up his duties as a director.
Honora sought, with an energy that had in it an element of desperation,
to keep pace with her husband. For she was determined that he should have
no interests in which she did not share. In those first days it was her
dread that he might grow away from her, and instinct told her that now or
never must the effort be made. She, too, studied farming; not from books,
but from him. In their afternoon ride along the shady river road, which
was the event of her day, she encouraged him to talk of his plans and
problems, that he might thus early form the habit of bringing them to
her. And the unsuspecting male in him responded, innocent of the simple
subterfuge. After an exhaustive discourse on the elements lacking in the
valley soil, to which she had listened in silent intensity, he would
exclaim:
"By George, Honora, you're a continual surprise to me. I had no idea a
woman would take an interest in these things, or grasp them the way you
do."
Lordly commendations these, and she would receive them with a flush of
gratitude.
Nor was it ever too hot, or she too busy with household cares, for her to
follow him to the scene of his operations, whatever these might be: she
would gladly stand for an hour listening to a consultation with the
veterinary about an ailing cow. Her fear was lest some matter of like
importance should escape her. She had private conversations with Mr.
Manning, that she might surprise her husband by an unsuspected knowledge.
Such were her ruses.
The housekeeper who had come up from New York was the subject of a
conjugal conversation.
"I am going to send her away, Hugh," Honora announced. "I don't believe
---your mother had one."
The housekeeper's departure was the beginning of Honora's real intimacy
with Starling. Complicity, perhaps, would be a better word for the
commencement of this relationship. First of all, there was an inspection
of the family treasures: the table-linen, the silver, and the china
--Sevres, Royal Worcester, and Minton, and the priceless dinner-set, of
Lowestoft which had belonged to Alexander Chiltern, reserved, for great
occasions only: occasions that Starling knew by heart; their dates, and
the guests the Lowestoft had honoured. His air was ceremonial as he laid,
reverently, the sample pieces on the table before her, but it seemed to
Honora that he spoke as one who recalls departed glories, who held a
conviction that the Lowestoft would never be used again.
Although by unalterable custom he submitted, at breakfast, the menus of
the day to Hugh, the old butler came afterwards to Honora's boudoir
during her struggle with the account books. Sometimes she would look up
and surprise his eyes fixed upon her, and one day she found at her elbow
a long list made out in a painstaking hand.
"What's this, Starling?" she asked.
"If you please, madame," he answered, "they're the current prices in the
markets--here."
She thanked him. Nor was his exquisite delicacy in laying stress upon the
locality lost upon her. That he realized the magnitude--for her--of the
task to which she had set herself; that he sympathized deeply with the
spirit which had undertaken it, she was as sure as though he had said so.
He helped her thus in a dozen unobtrusive ways, never once recognizing
her ignorance; but he made her feel the more that that ignorance was a
shameful thing not to be spoken of. Speculations upon him were
irresistible. She was continually forgetting the nature of his situation,
and he grew gradually to typify in her mind the Grenoble of the past. She
knew his principles as well as though he had spoken them--which he never
did. For him, the world had become awry; he abhorred divorce, and that
this modern abomination had touched the house of Chiltern was a calamity
that had shaken the very foundations of his soul. In spite of this, he
had remained. Why? Perhaps from habit, perhaps from love of the family
and Hugh,--perhaps to see!
And having stayed, fascination had laid hold of him,--of that she was
sure,--and his affections had incomprehensibly become involved. He was as
one assisting at a high tragedy not unworthy of him, the outcome of which
he never for an instant doubted. And he gave Honora the impression that
he alone, inscrutable, could have pulled aside the curtain and revealed
the end.
CHAPTER XIII
OF THE WORLD BEYOND THE GATES
Honora paused in her toilet, and contemplated for a moment the white
skirt that her maid presented.
"I think I'll wear the blue pongee to-day, Mathilde," she said.
The decision for the blue pongee was the culmination of a struggle begun
with the opening of her eyes that morning. It was Sunday, and the time
was at hand when she must face the world. Might it not be delayed a
little while--a week longer? For the remembrance of the staring eyes
which had greeted her on her arrival at the station at Grenoble troubled
her. It seemed to her a cruel thing that the house of God should hold
such terrors for her: to-day she had a longing for it that she had never
felt in her life before.
Chiltern was walking in the garden, waiting for her to breakfast with
him, and her pose must have had in it an element of the self-conscious
when she appeared, smilingly, at the door.
"Why, you're all dressed up," he said.
"It's Sunday, Hugh."
"So it is," he agreed, with what may have been a studied lightness--she
could not tell.
"I'm going to church," she said bravely.
"I can't say much for old Stopford," declared her husband. "His sermons
used to arouse all the original sin in me, when I had to listen to them."
She poured out his coffee.
"I suppose one has to take one's clergyman as one does the weather," she
said. "We go to church for something else besides the sermon--don't we?"
"I suppose so, if we go at all," he replied. "Old Stopford imposes a
pretty heavy penalty."
"Too heavy for you?" she asked, and smiled at him as she handed him the
cup.
"Too heavy for me," he said, returning her smile. "To tell you the truth,
Honora, I had an overdose of church in my youth, here and at school, and
I've been trying to even up ever since."
"You'd like me to go, wouldn't you, Hugh?" she ventured, after a silence.
"Indeed I should," he answered, and again she wondered to what extent his
cordiality was studied, or whether it were studied at all. "I'm very fond
of that church, in spite of the fact that--that I may be said to
dissemble my fondness." She laughed with him, and he became serious. "I
still contribute--the family's share toward its support. My father was
very proud of it, but it is really my mother's church. It was due to her
that it was built."
Thus was comedy played--and Honora by no the means sure that it was a
comedy. Even her alert instinct had not been able to detect the acting,
and the intervening hours were spent in speculating whether her fears had
not been overdone. Nevertheless, under the eyes of Starling, at twenty
minutes to eleven she stepped into the victoria with an outward courage,
and drove down the shady avenue towards the gates. Sweet-toned bells were
ringing as she reached the residence portion of the town, and subdued
pedestrians in groups and couples made their way along the sidewalks.
They stared at her; and she in turn, with heightened colour, stared at
her coachman's back. After all, this first Sunday would be the most
difficult.
The carriage turned into a street arched by old elms, and flanked by the
houses of the most prosperous townspeople. Some of these were of the
old-fashioned, classic type, and others new examples of a national
architecture seeking to find itself,--white and yellow colonial,
roughcast modifications of the Shakespearian period, and nondescript
mixtures of cobblestones and shingles. Each was surrounded by trim lawns
and shrubbery. The church itself was set back from the street. It was of
bluish stone, and half covered with Virginia creeper.
At this point, had the opportunity for a secret retreat presented itself,
Honora would have embraced it, for until now she had not realized the
full extent of the ordeal. Had her arrival been heralded by sounding
trumpets, the sensation it caused could not have been greater. In her
Eden, the world had been forgotten; the hum of gossip beyond the gates
had not reached her. But now, as the horses approached the curb, their
restive feet clattering on the hard pavement, in the darkened interior of
the church she saw faces turned, and entering worshippers pausing in the
doorway. Something of what the event meant for Grenoble dawned upon her:
something, not all; but all that she could bear.
If it be true that there is no courage equal to that which a great love
begets in a woman, Honora's at that moment was sublime. Her cheeks
tingled, and her knees weakened under her as she ran the gantlet to the
church door, where she was met by a gentleman on whose face she read
astonishment unalloyed: amazement, perhaps, is not too strong a word for
the sensation it conveyed to her, and it occurred to her afterwards that
there was an element in it of outrage. It was a countenance peculiarly
adapted to such an expression--yellow, smooth-shaven, heavy-jowled, with
one drooping eye; and she needed not to be told that she had encountered,
at the outset, the very pillar of pillars. The frock coat, the heavy
watch chain, the square-toed boots, all combined to make a Presence.
An instinctive sense of drama amongst the onlookers seemed to create a
hush, as though these had been the unwilling witnesses to an approaching
collision and were awaiting the crash. The gentleman stood planted in the
inner doorway, his drooping eye fixed on hers.
"I am Mrs. Chiltern," she faltered.
He hesitated the fraction of an instant, but he somehow managed to make
it plain that the information was superfluous. He turned without a word
and marched majestically up the aisle before her to the fourth pew from
the front on the right. There he faced about and laid a protesting hand
on the carved walnut, as though absolving himself in the sight of his God
and his fellow-citizens. Honora fell on her knees.
She strove to calm herself by prayer: but the glances of a congregation
focussed between her shoulder-blades seemed to burn her back, and the
thought of the concentration of so many minds upon her distracted her
own. She could think of no definite prayer. Was this God's tabernacle? or
the market-place, and she at the tail of a cart? And was she not Hugh
Chiltern's wife, entitled to his seat in the place of worship of his
fathers? She rose from her knees, and her eyes fell on the softly glowing
colours of a stained-glass window: In memoriam--Alicia Reyburn Chiltern.
Hugh's mother, the lady in whose seat she sat.
The organist, a sprightly young man, came in and began turning over his
music, and the choir took their-places, in the old-fashioned' manner.
Then came the clergyman. His beard was white, his face long and narrow
and shrivelled, his forehead protruding, his eyes of the cold blue of a
winter's sky. The service began, and Honora repeated the familiar prayers
which she had learned by heart in childhood--until her attention was
arrested by the words she spoke: "We have offended against Thy holy
laws." Had she? Would not God bless her marriage? It was not until then
that she began to pray with an intensity that blotted out the world that
He would not punish her if she had done wrong in His sight. Surely, if
she lived henceforth in fear of Him, He would let her keep this priceless
love which had come to her! And it was impossible that He should regard
it as an inordinate and sinful affection--since it had filled her life
with light. As the wife of Hugh Chiltern she sought a blessing. Would God
withhold it? He would not, she was sure, if they lived a sober and a
righteous life. He would take that into account, for He was just.
Then she grew calmer, and it was not until after the doctrinal sermon
which Hugh had predicted that her heart began to beat painfully once
more, when the gentleman who had conducted her to her seat passed her the
plate. He inspired her with an instinctive fear; and she tried to
imagine, in contrast, the erect and soldierly figure of General Chiltern
performing the same office. Would he have looked on her more kindly?
When the benediction was pronounced, she made her way out of the church
with downcast eyes. The people parted at the door to let her pass, and
she quickened her step, gained the carriage at last, and drove away
--seemingly leaving at her back a buzz of comment. Would she ever have
the courage to do it again?
The old butler, as he flung open the doors at her approach, seemed to be
scrutinizing her.
"Where's Mr. Chiltern, Starling?" she asked.
"He's gone for a ride, madame."
Hugh had gone for a ride!
She did not see him until lunch was announced, when he came to the table
in his riding clothes. It may have been that he began to talk a little
eagerly about the excursion he had made to an outlying farm and the
conversation he had had with the farmer who leased it.
"His lease is out in April," said Chiltern, "and when I told him I
thought I'd turn the land into the rest of the estate he tried to bribe
me into a renewal."
"Bribe you?"
Chiltern laughed.
"Only in joke, of course. The man's a character, and he's something of a
politician in these parts. He intimated that there would be a vacancy in
this congressional district next year, that Grierson was going to resign,
and that a man with a long purse who belonged to the soil might have a
chance. I suppose he thinks I would buy it."
"And--would you like to go to Congress, Hugh?"
"Well," he said, smiling, "a man never can tell when he may have to eat
his words. I don't say I shouldn't--in the distant future. It would have
pleased the General. But if I go," he added with characteristic vigour,
"it will be in spite of the politicians, not because of them. If I go I
shan't go bound, and I'll fight for it. I should enjoy that."
And she was able to accord him the smile of encouragement he expected.
"I am sure you would," she replied. "I think you might have waited until
this afternoon and taken me," she reproached him. "You know how I enjoy
going with you to those places."
It was not until later in the meal that he anticipated, in an admirably
accidental manner, the casual remark she had intended to make about
church.
"Your predictions were fulfilled," she answered; "the sermon wasn't
thrilling."
He glanced at her. And instead of avoiding his eyes, she smiled into
them.
"Did you see the First Citizen of Grenoble?" he inquired.
"I am sure of it," she laughed, "if he's yellow, with a drooping eye and
a presence; he was kind enough to conduct me to the pew."
"Yes," he exclaimed, "that's Israel Simpson--you couldn't miss him. How I
used to hate him when I was a boy! I haven't quite got over it yet. I
used to outdo myself to make things uncomfortable for him when he came up
here--I think it was because he always seemed to be truckling. He was
ridiculously servile and polite in those days. He's changed since," added
Hugh, dryly. "He must quite have forgotten by this time that the General
made him."
"Is--is he so much?" said Honora.
Her husband laughed.
"Is it possible that you have seen him and still ask that?" said he. "He
is Grenoble. Once the Chilterns were. He is the head of the honoured firm
of Israel Simpson and Sons, the president of the Grenoble National Bank,
the senior warden of the church, a director in the railway. Twice a year,
in the columns of the New York newspapers dedicated to the prominent
arrivals at the hotels, you may read the name of Israel Simpson of
Grenoble. Three times has he been abroad, respectably accompanied by
Maria, who invariably returns to read a paper on the cathedrals and art
before the Woman's Club."
Maria is his wife, I suppose."
"Yes. Didn't you run across Maria? She's quite as pronounced, in her way,
as Israel. A very tower of virtue."
"I didn't meet anybody, Hugh," said Honora. "I'll--I'll look for her next
Sunday. I hurried out. It was a little embarrassing the first time," she
added, "your family being so prominent in Grenoble."
Upon this framework, the prominence of his family, she built up during
the coning week a new structure of hope. It was strange she had never
thought before of this quite obvious explanation for the curiosity of
Grenoble. Perhaps--perhaps it was not prejudice, after all--or not all of
it. The wife of the Chiltern heir would naturally inspire a considerable
interest in any event, and Mrs. Hugh Chiltern in particular. And these
people would shortly understand, if they did not now understand, that
Hugh had come back voluntarily and from a sense of duty to assume the
burdens and responsibilities that so many of his generation and class had
shirked. This would tell in their favour, surely. At this point in her
meditations she consulted the mirror, to behold a modest, slim-waisted
young woman becomingly arrayed in white linen, whose cheeks were aglow
with health, whose eyes seemingly reflected the fire of a distant high
vision. Not a Poppaea, certainly, nor a Delila. No, it was unbelievable
that this, the very field itself of their future labours, should be
denied them. Her heart, at the mere conjecture, turned to stone.
During the cruise of the Adhemar she had often watched, in the gathering
darkness, those revolving lights on headland or shoal that spread now a
bright band across the sea, and again left the waters desolate in the
night. Thus, ceaselessly revolving from white hope to darker doubt, were
her thoughts, until sometimes she feared to be alone with them, and
surprised him by her presence in his busiest moments. For he was going
ahead on the path they had marked out with a faith in which she could
perceive no flaw. If faint and shadowy forms had already come between
them, he gave no evidence of having as yet discerned these. There was the
absence of news from his family, for instance,--the Graingers, the
Stranger, the Shorters, and the Pendletons, whom she had never seen; he
had never spoken to her of this, and he seemed to hold it as of no
account. Her instinct whispered that it had left its mark, a hidden mark.
And while she knew that consideration for her prompted him to hold his
peace, she told herself that she would have been happier had he spoken of
it.
Always she was brought back to Grenoble when she saw him thus, manlike,
with his gaze steadily fixed on the task. If New York itself withheld
recognition, could Grenoble--provincial and conservative Grenoble,
preserving still the ideas of the last century for which his family had
so unflinchingly stood--be expected to accord it? New York! New York was
many, many things, she knew. The great house could have been filled from
weekend to week-end from New York; but not with Graingers and Pendletons
and Stranger; not with those around the walls of whose fortresses the
currents of modernity still swept impotently; not with those who, while
not contemning pleasure, still acknowledged duty; not with those whose
assured future was that for which she might have sold her soul itself.
Social free lances, undoubtedly, and unattached men; those who lived in
the world of fashion but were not squeamish--Mrs. Kame, for example; and
ladies like Mrs. Eustace Rindge, who had tried a second throw for
happiness,--such votaries of excitement would undoubtedly have been more
than glad to avail themselves of the secluded hospitality of Grenoble for
that which they would have been pleased to designate as "a lively time."
Honora shuddered at the thought: And, as though the shudder had been
prophetic, one morning the mail contained a letter from Mrs. Kame
herself.
Mercifully Hugh had not noticed it. Honora did not recognize the
handwriting, but she slipped the envelope into her lap, fearful of what
it might contain, and, when she gained the privacy of her rooms, read it
with quickening breath. Mrs. Kame's touch was light and her imagination
sympathetic; she was the most adaptable of the feminine portion of her
nation, and since the demise of her husband she had lived, abroad and at
home, among men and women of a world that does not dot its i's or cross
its t's. Nevertheless, the letter filled Honora with a deep apprehension
and a deeper resentment. Plainly and clearly stamped between its
delicately worded lines was the claim of a comradeship born of Honora's
recent act. She tore the paper into strips and threw it into the flames
and opened the window to the cool air of the autumn morning. She had a
feeling of contamination that was intolerable.
Mrs. Kame had proposed herself--again the word "delicately" must be used
--for one of Honora's first house-parties. Only an acute perception could
have read in the lady's praise of Hugh a masterly avoidance of that part
of his career already registered on the social slate. Mrs. Kame had
thought about them and their wonderful happiness in these autumn days at
Grenoble; to intrude on that happiness yet awhile would be a sacrilege.
Later, perhaps, they would relent and see something of their friends, and
throw open again the gates of a beautiful place long closed to the world.
And--without the air of having picked the single instance, but of having
chosen from many--Mrs. Kame added that she had only lately seen Elsie
Shorter, whose admiration for Honora was greater than ever. A sentiment,
Honora reflected a little bitterly, that Mrs. Shorter herself had not
taken the pains to convey. Consistency was not Elsie's jewel.
It must perhaps be added for the sake of enlightenment that since going
to Newport Honora's view of the writer of this letter had changed. In
other words, enlarging ideals had dwarfed her somewhat; it was strictly
true that the lady was a boon companion of everybody. Her Catholicism had
two limitations only: that she must be amused, and that she must not--in
what she deemed the vulgar sense--be shocked.
Honora made several attempts at an answer before she succeeded in saying,
simply, that Hugh was too absorbed in his work of reconstruction of the
estate for them to have house-parties this autumn. And even this was a
concession hard for her pride to swallow. She would have preferred not to
reply at all, and this slightest of references to his work--and hers
--seemed to degrade it. Before she folded the sheet she looked again at
that word "reconstruction" and thought of eliminating it. It was too
obviously allied to "redemption"; and she felt that Mrs. Kame could not
understand redemption, and would ridicule it. Honora went downstairs and
dropped her reply guiltily into the mail-bag. It was for Hugh's sake she
was sending it, and from his eyes she was hiding it.
And, while we are dealing with letters, one, or part of one, from
Honora's aunt, may perhaps be inserted here. It was an answer to one that
Honora had written a few days after her installation at Grenoble, the
contents of which need not be gone into: we, who know her, would neither
laugh nor weep at reading it, and its purport may be more or less
accurately surmised from her aunt's reply.
"As I wrote you at the time, my dear,"--so it ran "the shock which
your sudden marriage with Mr. Chiltern caused us was great--so great
that I cannot express it in words. I realize that I am growing old,
and perhaps the world is changing faster than I imagine. And I
wrote you, too, that I would not be true to myself if I told you
that what you have done was right in my eyes. I have asked myself
whether my horror of divorce and remarriage may not in some degree
be due to the happiness of my life with your uncle. I am,
undoubtedly, an exceptionally fortunate woman; and as I look
backwards I see that the struggles and trials which we have shared
together were really blessings.
"Nevertheless, dear Honora, you are, as your uncle wrote you, our
child, and nothing can alter that fact in our hearts. We can only
pray with all our strength that you may find happiness and peace in
your new life. I try to imagine, as I think of you and what has
happened to you in the few years since you have left us--how long
they seem!--I try to imagine some of the temptations that have
assailed you in that world of which I know nothing. If I cannot, it
is because God made us different. I know what you have suffered,
and my heart aches for you.
"You say that experience has taught you much that you could not
have--learned in any other way. I do not doubt it. You tell me
that your new life, just begun, will be a dutiful one. Let me
repeat that it is my anxious prayer that you have not builded upon
sand, that regrets may not come. I cannot say more. I cannot
dissemble. Perhaps I have already said too much.
"Your loving
"AUNT MARY."
An autumn wind was blowing, and Honora gazed out of the window at the
steel-blue, ruffled waters of the lake. Unconsciously she repeated the
words to herself:
"Builded upon sand!"
CHAPTER XIV
CONTAINING PHILOSOPHY FROM MR. GRAINGER
Swiftly came the autumn days, and swiftly went. A bewildering, ever
changing, and glorious panorama presented itself, green hillsides struck
first with flaming crimsons and yellows, and later mellowing into a
wondrous blending of gentler, tenderer hues; lavender, and wine, and the
faintest of rose colours where the bare beeches massed. Thus the slopes
were spread as with priceless carpets for a festival. Sometimes Honora,
watching, beheld from her window the russet dawn on the eastern ridge,
and the white mists crouching in strange, ghostly shapes abode the lake
and the rushing river: and she saw these same mists gather again,
shivering, at nightfall. In the afternoon they threaded valleys, silent
save for the talk between them and the stirring of the leaves under their
horses' feet.
So the Indian summer passed--that breathless season when even happiness
has its premonitions and its pangs. The umber fields, all ploughed and
harrowed, lay patiently awaiting the coming again of the quickening
spring. Then fell the rain, the first, cold winter rain that shrouded the
valley and beat down upon the defenceless, dismantled garden and made
pools in the hollows of the stone seat: that flung itself against
Honora's window as though begrudging her the warmth and comfort within.
Sometimes she listened to it in the night.
She was watching. How intent was that vigil, how alert and sharpened her
senses, a woman who has watched alone may answer. Now, she felt, was the
crisis at hand: the moment when her future, and his was to hang in the
balance. The work on the farms, which had hitherto left Chiltern but
little time for thought, had relaxed. In these wet days had he begun to
brood a little? Did he show signs of a reversion to that other
personality, the Chiltern she had not known, yet glimpses of whom she had
had? She recalled the third time she had seen him, the morning at the
Lilacs in Newport, that had left upon her the curious sense of having
looked on a superimposed portrait. That Chiltern which she called her
Viking, and which, with a woman's perversity, she had perhaps loved most
of all, was but one expression of the other man of days gone by. The life
of that man was a closed book she had never wished to open. Was he dead,
or sleeping? And if sleeping, would he awake? How softly she tread!
And in these days, with what exquisite, yet tremulous skill and courage
did she bring up the subject of that other labour they were to undertake
together--the life and letters of his father. In the early dusk, when
they had returned from their long rides, she contrived to draw Chiltern
into his study. The cheerfulness, the hopefulness, the delight with which
she approached the task, the increasing enthusiasm she displayed for the
character of the General as she read and sorted the letters and
documents, and the traits of his she lovingly traced in Hugh, were not
without their effect. It was thus she fanned, ceaselessly and with a
smile, and with an art the rarest women possess, the drooping flame. And
the flame responded.
How feverishly she worked, unknown to him, he never guessed; so carefully
and unobtrusively planted her suggestions that they were born again in
glory as his inspiration. The mist had lifted a little, and she beheld
the next stage beyond. To reach that stage was to keep him intent on this
work--and--after that, to publish! Ah, if he would only have patience, or
if she could keep him distracted through this winter and their night, she
might save him. Love such as hers can even summon genius to its aid, and
she took fire herself at the thought of a book worthy of that love, of a
book--though signed by him that would redeem them, and bring a scoffing
world to its knees in praise. She spent hours in the big library
preparing for Chiltern's coming, with volumes in her lap and a note-book
by her side.
One night, as they sat by the blazing logs in his study, which had been
the General's, Chiltern arose impulsively, opened the big safe in the
corner, and took out a leather-bound book and laid it on her lap. Honora
stared at it: it was marked: Highlawns, Visitors' Book."
"It's curious I never thought of it before," he said, "but my father, had
a habit of jotting down notes in it on important occasions. It may be of
some use to us Honora."
She opened it at random and read: "July 5, 1893, Picnic at Psalter's
Falls. Temperature 71 at 9 A.M. Bar. 30. Weather clear. Charles left for
Washington, summons from President, in the midst of it. Agatha and Victor
again look at the Farrar property. Hugh has a ducking. P.S. At dinner
night Bessie announces her engagement to Cecil Grainger. Present Sarah
and George Grenfell, Agatha and Victor Strange, Gerald Shorter, Lord
Kylie--"
Honora looked up. Hugh was at her shoulder, with his eyes on the page.
"Psalter's Falls!" he exclaimed. "How well I remember that day! I was
just home from my junior year at Harvard."
"Who was 'Charles'?" inquired Honora.
"Senator Pendleton--Bessie's father. Just after I jumped into the
mill-pond the telegram came for him to go to Washington, and I drove him
home in my wet clothes. The old man had a terrible tongue, a whip-lash
kind of humour, and he scored me for being a fool. But he rather liked
me, on the whole. He told me if I'd only straighten out I could be
anything, in reason."
"What made you jump in the mill-pond?" Honora asked, laughing.
"Bessie Grainger. She had a devil in her, too, in those days, but she
always kept her head, and I didn't." He smiled. "I'm willing to admit
that I was madly in love with her, and she treated me outrageously. We
were standing on the bridge--I remember it as though it were yesterday
--and the water was about eight feet deep, with a clear sand bottom. She
took off a gold bracelet and bet me I wouldn't get it if she threw it in.
That night, right in the middle of dinner, when there was a pause in the
conversation, she told us she was engaged to Cecil Grainger. It turned
out, by the way, to have been his bracelet I rescued. I could have wrung
his neck, and I didn't speak to her for a month."
Honora repressed an impulse to comment on this incident. With his arm
over her shoulder, he turned the pages idly, and the long lists of guests
which bore witness to the former life and importance of Highlawns passed
before her eyes. Distinguished foreigners, peers of England, churchmen,
and men renowned in literature: famous American statesmen, scientists,
and names that represented more than one generation of wealth and
achievement--all were here. There were his school and college friends,
five and six at a time, and besides them those of young girls who were
now women, some of whom Honora had met and known in New York or Newport.
Presently he closed the book abruptly and returned it to the safe. To her
sharpened senses, the very act itself was significant. There were other
and blank pages in it for future years; and under different circumstances
he might have laid it in its time-honoured place, on the great table in
the library.
It was not until some weeks later that Honora was seated one afternoon in
the study waiting for him to come in, and sorting over some of the
letters that they had not yet examined, when she came across a new lot
thrust carelessly at the bottom of the older pile. She undid the elastic.
Tucked away in one of the envelopes she was surprised to find a letter of
recent date--October. She glanced at it, read involuntarily the first
lines, and then, with a little cry, turned it over. It was from Cecil
Grainger. She put it back into the envelope whence it came, and sat
still.
After a while, she could not tell how long, she heard Hugh stamping the
snow from his feet in the little entry beside the study. And in a few
moments he entered, rubbing his hands and holding them out to the blaze.
"Hello, Honora," he said; "are you still at it? What's the matter--a
hitch?"
She reached mechanically into the envelope, took out the letter, and
handed it to him.
"I found it just now, Hugh. I didn't read much of it--I didn't mean to
read any. It's from Mr. Grainger, and you must have overlooked it."
He took it.
"From Cecil?" he said, in an odd voice. "I wasn't aware that he had sent
me anything-recently."
As he read, she felt the anger rise within him, she saw it in his eyes
fixed upon the sheet, and the sense of fear, of irreparable loss, that
had come over her as she had sat alone awaiting him, deepened. And yet,
long expected verdicts are sometimes received in a spirit of
recklessness: He finished the letter, and flung it in her lap.
"Read it," he said.
"Oh, Hugh!" she protested tremulously. "Perhaps--perhaps I'd better not."
He laughed, and that frightened her the more. It was the laugh, she was
sure, of the other man she had not known.
"I've always suspected that Cecil was a fool--now I'm sure of it. Read
it!" he repeated, in a note of command that went oddly with his next
sentence; "You will find that it is only ridiculous."
This assurance of the comedy it contained, however, did not serve to
fortify her misgivings. It was written from a club.