THE PITFALL
It was later evening. Gordon sat in the library, the diary in which he
had written those lines to Ada open before him.
Since the scene with Annabel whose dark aftermath had been the illness
of his old friend, a deeper sense of pain had oppressed him. His
marriage had sprung from an inarticulate divining of the infinite need
of his nature for such a spiritual influence as he had imagined she
possessed. It had ended in failure. A mood of hopelessness was upon him
now as he wrote:
“Man is a battle-ground between angel and devil. Tenderness and
roughness--sentiment, sensuality--soaring and grovelling, dirt and
deity--all mixed in one compound of inspired clay. Marriage is the
hostage he gives to his better nature. What if this hostage conspire
with his evil side to betray the citadel?
“Nature made me passionate of temper but with an innate tendency
to the love of good in my mainspring of mind. I am an atom jarring
between these great discords. Sympathy is the divine lifter--the
supreme harmonizer. And shall that evade me forever? Where shall I
find it? In the cheap intrigue that absorbs half the life of those
around me? Shall I turn to the fairest of those blandishments, and,
like the drunkard, forget my penury in the hiccough and happiness of
intoxication?”
The thought of the delicate coquetry of Jane Clermont and of the ripe
beauty of Lady Caroline Lamb flashed across the page, an insistent
vision. He saw the latter’s eyes, eager and inviting, as he had so
often seen them at Melbourne House, when he had turned from them to a
paler beauty. He thought of a past season when the whirlwind of her
infatuation had wound their two names in gossip that had never tired.
Love with her would have counted all sacrifice cheap, all obstacles
gossamer. Could such a passion yield him what he craved? Was he bound
to live pent within the palisade a priest’s ceremony had reared about
him? Of what virtue were honor and faith to a bond where love was not?
But this picture faded as he wrote across it the answer to its question:
“No! I will not. I will keep the bond. Yet I and the mother of my child
are far apart as the two poles! I am a toy of inborn unbeliefs, linked
to unemotional goodness, merciless virtue and ice-girdled piety. I am
asked to bow down to arcana which to me are bagatelles. As well believe
in Roberts the Prophet, or Breslau the Conjurer if he had lived in the
reign of Tiberius! The everlasting _why_ which stares me in the face
is an unforgivable thing. Yet to yield--to go the broad, easy way of
conventional belief and smug morality--to shackle the doubts I feel!
To anchor myself to the frozen molehills and write, like other men,
glozed comfortable lines on which friend and foe can batten alike, and
with which reviewer and reviewee, rhinoceros and elephant, mammoth and
megalonyx can lie quietly together!”
He threw down his pen, and leaned his forehead in his hands.
“Would to God I had nothing better in this soul of mine!” he exclaimed.
“The rest of the world can game and kiss and besot themselves in peace.
Only I--I--must writhe and struggle unsatisfied!”
“There is a carboy outside, your lordship, who wishes to see you.”
“A carboy!” Gordon raised his head. “What does he want?”
“He says he has a message for your lordship’s own hands. He’s a
likely-looking lad.”
“Very well, show him in. Hasn’t Rushton returned from Mr. Sheridan’s
yet?” he added.
“Yes, my lord. But Lady Noël sent him out again with a letter for Sir
Ralph to his club.”
Gordon heaved a sigh of relief. “Sherry must be better,” he thought. He
waited on the threshold till Fletcher ushered in a slim figure in the
round coat and buttons of a carman. His chin was muffled in a coarse
neckerchief, and a rumpled mass of brown hair showed beneath the edges
of the cloth cap whose visor was pulled over his eyes.
“Well, my lad?”
The boy stood still, twisting his fingers in his jacket till the
valet had retired. Then suddenly as the door closed, the cap was
snatched off, a mass of brown hair dropped curling about the boyish
shoulders--the silver-buttoned jacket fell open, revealing a softly
rounded throat and delicate slope of breast. Gordon uttered an
astonished and bewildered exclamation:
“Caro! What mad masquerade is this?”
She drew back under the pale intensity, the controlled agitation of
his face. “Forgive me! forgive me!” Tumult was looking from her eyes,
and her shoulders were heaving. “I could not help it! I have tried to
forget you during all this past year. I cannot bear to see you only at
Melbourne House and at parties and on the street. How pale you always
are!” she went on. “Like a statue of marble, and your dark hair such a
contrast. I never see you without wanting to cry. If any painter could
paint me your face as it is, I would give anything I possess!”
She had touched his hand, but he drew it away sharply, feeling a black
sense of entanglement in the touch.
“Lady Caroline! This is unthinkable! To come here in that dress--here,
to this house, is sheer madness! I did not imagine you capable of such
folly.”
“You think I am weak and selfish,” she pleaded. “You have always
thought I did not struggle to withstand my feelings. But indeed,
indeed, it is more than human nature can bear! I loved you before you
married Bella--loved you better than name, than religion, than any
prospects on earth! You must have loved me more if you had never seen
her! She has never cared for you as I do.”
He darted a glance at the door. His wife! A rebellious anger rose in
him at being thrust into such a predicament.
“You have taken a strange way to show that love.”
“Oh, I could show it other ways!” She was looking at him with tremulous
daring. “They used to say that once in the East, to prove to a Greek
girl that you loved her, you wounded yourself in the breast. Would such
a thing make you believe how I love you?”
At that moment both heard a voice in the hallway.
“Bella!” he said in a whisper.
“Oh, I thought she had gone to Seaham,” she breathed. “You must believe
I did not know she was here!” She buttoned the coat over her breast
with nervous fingers and put on the cloth cap. The sound had thrown her
into a paroxysm of dread.
“Quick, quick!” she urged.
“Not that way. Here, to the garden entrance!” He caught her hand, drew
her sharply toward the rear door and opened it.
The retreat was closed. Lady Noël, with sparkling eyes and spare figure
leaning on her cane, faced them at the threshold, her gaze leaping with
flickering triumph. At the same instant Annabel entered by the other
door.
The trap had sprung, the joints were working with precision. Gordon’s
first glance at his wife’s face told him there had been betrayal, for
the look he saw was not of surprise or wonder, though its indignant
lines set themselves deeper in presence of the visible fact. The jaws
of this trap had not been set by accident. How had Lady Noël and
Annabel guessed? The latter’s eyes were on the carboy’s costume, as
if she would convince herself doubly by every evidence of her senses.
The grim figure on the threshold pointed one thin forefinger at the
shrinking form in the boy’s dress.
“Take off that cap!”
Annabel took a quick step forward, as Lady Caroline snatched off
the covering to show a face flaming with defiance. “Caro!” she
exclaimed--“Caro!”
As she looked from one to the other, contempt rose in a frigid wave
over her features and she drew herself up to her full height and stood
stonily erect.
Lady Noël laughed with an echoing amusement, as Lady Caroline burst out
in a torrent:
“You can hate and despise me if you want to, Bella. It can make no
difference to me. Why did you come between us in the first place?
_You_ never loved him, at least. You had nothing to give him but that
horrible virtuous indifference of yours--nothing! nothing! You have
nothing to give him now. You have made his life wretched with your
perfectness and your conventions! Everybody knows that!”
Annabel’s look swept her with its sharp edge of scorn; then flashed on
Gordon, who stood composed, motionless, in a grip of repression.
“Is it not enough for you to have made me the butt of your daily
caprice, your shameless atheism?”--she drove the words at her
husband--“for all London to gossip of your social ‘conquests’ and your
dissolute affairs? Is _this_ not enough--that you offer me the final
dishonor of such planned meetings, under this roof?”
“It was not his fault!” cried Lady Caroline. “Bella! I will tell you
the truth!”
Gordon put out his hand with a gesture of protest as Lady Noël laughed
again, musically, maliciously.
A knock at the door silenced all voices. It heralded Fletcher, whose
eyes, habitually discreet, seemed to see no further than his master.
“Mr. Somers is outside, sir, with the Melbourne coach, to wait for Lady
Caroline Lamb.”
Lady Caroline’s blank, terror-struck eyes turned to Gordon, and she
began to tremble. She ran and pulled aside the portière from the
window. She shrank back with a gasping cry, for she recognized the
coach drawn up at the curb, whose lighted lanterns, reflected from
fawn-covered panels emblazoned with the Melbourne arms, lit plainly the
figure of William Lamb’s confidential factotum waiting by its step. Her
husband had known she was coming there! He had sent Somers instead of
the coachman--he even knew of the carboy’s dress!
A slow change passed over her face. Fear and dread had shown there an
instant pallidly--dread of the malignant fury she knew lay couched
beneath the cold exterior of her husband; now these were swallowed up
in a look more burning, more intense, more terrible--a look of sudden,
savage certainty. She turned this new countenance upon Gordon.
“So!” she said in a stifled voice. “You sent my letter to my husband!
You did not count on a scene with Bella--but for me who have bored you,
you took this cruel way to end it all! Well, you have succeeded. Now
I know Madame de Staël was right when she called you ‘demon.’ You are
without a heart. How I have loved you--and now I hate you. I _hate_
you!”
He made no reply. Her letter? As she spoke he had had a vision of Mrs.
Clermont’s noiseless movements and thin secret mouth, and suspicion
clogged his tongue.
Lady Caroline looked at him an instant with a shudder as she passed
out. “I shall always hate you,” she said with vengeful emphasis. They
heard the outer door close heavily behind her and the dulled sound of
wheels.
As Gordon turned again to meet his wife’s flinty gaze, the footman
appeared.
“Sir Ralph wished me to say he would answer at once, your ladyship,” he
said to Lady Noël.
“There was no change in Mr. Sheridan’s condition, Rushton?” asked
Gordon.
“Change, my lord?” the boy stammered. “Why, I--” He looked from him to
the others, his jaw dropped.
Lady Noël shifted her cane. “_I_ received Rushton’s report. I thought
it a pity anything should interfere with your lordship’s evening
engagement.”
“Mr. Sheridan was thought to be dying, my lord,” said the boy, “and had
asked for you.”