‘Morland’s a deep ‘un,’ ejaculated Tommy. ‘Shouldn’t wonder if he was after one of the heiresses. Those girls’ll have a devil of a lot of money. The mater was always egging me on to be civil to ’em. Do you remember the World’s Bazaar, Cissy? Oh my!’
‘I wonder if he can be thinking of Gemma,’ said Lady Charmington thoughtfully. ‘Alice doesn’t say so, but——’
‘It’s not true,’ Cissy burst out; then, seeing awakened curiosity in several surrounding pairs of eyes, she added more indifferently, ‘I know Claude well enough to feel sure he would never be attracted by that black Jewess.’
‘He might be by her blond sovereigns,’ suggested Tommy.
Cissy became suddenly solicitous for the comfort of her guests. ‘I am sure you want to see your rooms,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like a bath after that dirty journey?’ and swept them into the house.
‘Cissy don’t seem to fancy the idea of Morland being sweet on the dark lady,’ Tommy giggled. ‘She used to flirt with him herself once. I remember mater——’
‘Tommy,’ said Sainty, ‘do, like a good soul, ask nurse to fetch baby.’
He felt sick and frightened. The contrast between the appearances of life and the ghastly things that were so thinly overlaid by them suddenly appalled his spirit. Almost unconsciously he picked up the baby, and clasped it closely to him. It was on that same spot, and on much such an afternoon, that he had first seen Cissy five years before. With the clearness of a picture thrown on a screen, he saw her standing as she had stood that day with Claude beside her, her girlish beauty bathed in soft golden light, and recalled the prophetic pang with which he had watched them turn away together under the baleful gaze of Aimée Winston. As he sat holding their child to his heart, the permanent dweller in his cupboard seemed to grin out at him with a more than usually fiendish malignity.
CHAPTER XXVI
One morning early in October, Thomas Eccleston appeared in his brother-in-law’s study with a shade of distress deepening the habitual ruddiness of his open countenance.
It has already been intimated that Sainty cherished a very real affection for this young man, holding a character so manly and direct to be little short of miraculous in a child of Lady Eccleston.
‘What’s the matter, Tommy?’ he asked. ‘You look perturbed. Have you and Danford been coming to blows?’
‘Oh no, Danny’s all right; it so happens I’m rather in his good books just now. But the fact is, I’ve had rather a queer letter, and I didn’t quite know what to do about it, so I thought the simplest thing was to bring it to you, though it’s not by any means what he intended me to do.’
‘Who’s “he”? Danford?’
‘No; I tell you it’s nothing to do with him,’
‘To begin with, then, who’s your correspondent?’
‘Well, if you want to know, it’s your brother.’
Sainty started. ‘Arthur? What can he want of you?’
‘I think the best way would be for you to read it,’ Tommy said, holding out the letter.
Sainty hesitated a moment, then took it and read:
‘Dear Eccleston—I expect you’ll be rather astonished at hearing from me, and still more at what it’s about. The fact of the matter is, I want you to do me a good turn. I was awfully glad to hear my brother had got you at Belchamber, and it suddenly occurred to me you would be just the chap to do what I want. To cut a long story short, I want to come to Belchamber. I suppose it’s very undignified of me, but I’m badly in want of a little amusement, and I thought if they were going to have a shoot, and it wasn’t a very big party, you might suggest to your sister to pop me in as one of the guns. You may think it funny that I don’t write straight to my brother, but I know he’d be infernally sniffy, and say I had no proper pride; and Cissy always seemed a good sort, and so did you, and I thought between you, you could work it for me. I know they won’t ask Lady Arthur, and I don’t ask it of ’em. At first I was afraid she mightn’t take it kindly, but she’s been all right about it; she says she don’t want to go where she isn’t wanted, but don’t mind my going without her. Do you think you can work it through your sister? Do, if you can, and oblige yours ever.—A. W. Chambers.’
‘Oh! how like Arthur!’ Sainty murmured, as he refolded this characteristic letter.
‘I thought,’ said Tommy, who had been watching him uneasily as he read, and fiddling with the things on the writing-table, ‘that it was better to come straight to you than to go to Cissy about it.’
‘So it is, and I’m very grateful to you, dear boy, for all your loyalty’; and Sainty laid a thin claw in Thomas’s large red hand. The sub-agent pressed it fervently.
‘What had I better say?’ he asked. ‘It puts me in such a deucedly awkward posish, don’t yer know.’
‘Of course he had no business to write to any one but me,’ Sainty said. ‘Well—you needn’t answer; I’ll write to him myself.’
Tommy looked much relieved. ‘Hope I didn’t do wrong,’ he said doubtfully.
‘On the contrary, you did more than right,’ Sainty said warmly.
‘Shall you ask him?’ Tommy ventured, after a pause.
‘I can’t say straight off; I must talk to Cissy about it, and’ (with an ill-concealed tremor) ‘to my mother,’
Cissy made no objections. Arthur was a pleasant, good-looking fellow, and a man you could ask without his wife was as good as a bachelor. Rather to Sainty’s surprise, Lady Charmington was not less willing. She hardly ever mentioned Arthur. Since the day when, livid and furious, she had solemnly cursed her younger son, Sainty could almost count on the fingers of one hand the times when she had spoken his name; but when, with some trepidation and much uncertainty, he approached her on the subject, he was met quite half-way.
‘Unto seventy times seven,’ she remarked, ‘the Scripture tells us we must forgive. That woman I will never receive, but as long as he is willing to come without her, I see no reason you shouldn’t have him at Belchamber; and—and—you may tell him I am willing to see him too, if he likes.’ And Sainty read in the sudden suffusion of the hard eyes, the tale of the poor woman’s long silent yearning for a sight of her favourite son.
So Arthur had his wish, and came once more to Belchamber. There was, no doubt, a certain awkwardness in the situation, and Sainty was surprised and touched to find that, though he certainly felt it much the most, Arthur was not without a perception of it, too. He was decidedly subdued during the first days of his visit, and Sainty’s ready sympathy went out, as usual, to any one who was ill at ease. Had Arthur been in his accustomed mood of complete self-satisfaction, he would have felt less tenderly towards him, but seeing him so humbled and brought low, on the footing, as it were, of a guest and poor relation in the home of their common childhood, was almost more than he could bear.
Perhaps Arthur intentionally rather accentuated this note, conscious of the effect it would have on his brother. He would pointedly ask leave to do the most obvious things. ‘There’s a spare gun in the gun-room,’ he would say; ‘the keeper says he doesn’t know whose it is. Should you mind if I took it, old chap? I’ve only one here, and it got so hot yesterday I could hardly shoot with it.’ Or it would be, ‘Tommy and I are going to practise a bit; may I use this old bat? I fancy it must once have been mine, but I’m not sure.’ Or, ‘Would it be convenient for me to have a horse this morning? I was thinking of riding over to see the mater.’ Formerly, whatever the house afforded was as freely his as Sainty’s. If he was not the owner, he was something more than an ordinary heir, and guns, bats, and horses were so emphatically his natural property, that it was unthinkable his asking permission to use them.
On the first morning of his visit, the brothers had wandered out together, and Arthur had commented on the new arrangement of the forecourt.
‘You’ve fetched all the old statues out of the shrubbery, I see,’ he said. ‘What did you do that for?’
Sainty explained, almost apologetically, that it was an attempt to return to Perrault’s original plan.
‘Is it so long since you were here?’ he said. ‘I had forgotten——’ Then, as the other remained silent, gloomily sucking at his pipe, ‘I’m afraid you don’t like it,’ he suggested meekly.
‘Oh! well, of course, it’s none of my business. I must say I think they looked better where they were, but I’m not much of a judge. Naturally, don’tcherknow, I liked ’em where I’ve always seen ’em. I can’t bear changes in the place.’
‘I’m sometimes half sorry I did it, myself,’ Sainty admitted. As he spoke he was aware that the moment had come which he had been dreading ever since his brother’s arrival, the first appearance on the scene of the baby, who was being taken out for his morning’s airing.
‘And so this is the son and heir, is it?’ said Arthur. ‘Hulloa! little ‘un, how do you do? I’m your uncle. You look very solemn, but it would be more natural if I did. You don’t know the difference your small existence makes to me and mine.’
The baby, as usual, at sight of Sainty, began making demonstrations of welcome, doubling himself forward over his restraining strap, and giving vent to a note like that of the nightingale, which is conventionally represented in print as ‘Jug-jug-jug,’ and a cry of ‘A-da, A-da-da, A-da,’ which was a sort of sound of all work with him for the expression of his varying emotions.
‘He wants his dada,’ said the nurse, eager to display her charge’s precocity, and, at the same time, gratify her master. ‘He says “Dada” quite plain, my lord, and it’s the first word he’s said.’
‘It’s a wise child that knows his own father,’ said Arthur jocosely.
Sainty could not restrain a hasty glance at him, but he was evidently innocent of any special or personal application of the often-quoted adage.
They walked on for a little beside the child, Sainty resting one hand lovingly on the edge of the little carriage, the baby squirming round and looking up into his face, wrinkling its nose and gurgling to attract his attention. When their ways divided, the parting was not effected without a burst of protest from the infant, which Sainty soothed and diverted as skilfully as the professional attendant.
‘The little beggar seems to like you,’ Arthur remarked. ‘I don’t remember either of mine ever yelling for me.’
‘You have probably never taken as much notice of them as I do of baby.’
‘You were always a kind of old granny; you’ll probably spoil that brat. Have you done anything to the stables since I was here?’
Once received, the prodigal brother came several times to Belchamber in the course of the winter. He liked the luxury, the magnificence, the good food, the gentlemanly licence of the conversation, the fine horses to ride (he soon ceased to ask if he might take one), better than the shabby gentility of the stucco rectory, the half-trained grooms, the half-lame hunters, the half-refined wife of his own home. It sometimes seemed to Sainty that he almost forgot he was a husband and father at all, and there were not wanting among the ladies of Cissy’s surrounding some who were quite willing to help him to this pleasing oblivion.
‘I like Lady Deans,’ he would say confidentially; ‘she’s rare sport, and there’s no nonsense about her; she don’t care what she says, and you haven’t got to think twice about what you say to her. Now if I were to say half the things to Topsy I do to her, she’d bridle and shy and look as sour as if she’d been brought up by a bishop. And when you think—oh my!’ and the sentence would end in a long puff of cigar smoke, or the burial of the speaker’s nose in a tall whisky and soda.
Arthur was a decided success with the members of the softer sex. The story of his romance cast quite a halo about him, and the very few mothers of grown-up girls who were tolerated in that gay company felt almost tenderly towards a detrimental who had put it out of his own power to marry their daughters.
As for Cissy, she and her brother-in-law got on capitally. She pressed him to come whenever he liked, partly, no doubt, because she divined that his presence was a constant unhappiness to her husband. The sight of him in juxtaposition with the baby kept a keen edge on all Sainty’s feelings of remorse; nor was Arthur likely to be restrained by a fastidious delicacy from all allusion to the change which the birth of an heir had made in his own position. His remarks on the subject were not always in the best possible taste; he affected jokes about the Babes in the Wood, referred to himself as the ‘wicked uncle,’ and ‘wondered Sainty was willing to trust him in the house with the precious infant.’ Such pleasantries, of a slightly sub-acid jocularity, went through and through Sainty in a way that the speaker could neither have guessed nor intended; he probably thought, on the contrary, that he was taking his blighted prospects with an easy amiability which did him infinite credit. He was not indeed without certain touches of kindliness towards his nephew. ‘When he gets a big boy, you must let his poor old uncle teach him to ride and shoot,’ he would say. ‘We must make a good sportsman of him, and you know you won’t do much in that line for him, old man.’ Sainty wondered if he wanted the boy to be a sportsman. His personal hatred of taking life extended itself to this nurseling of his affections. Must those tiny fingers be taught to curl round a trigger, that innocent heart learn to find its pleasure in slaughter and destruction? Yet he desired all forms of perfection for his darling; he hated to think of him at the same disadvantage among those with whom he would have to live as he himself had always been. He would have him strong and brave and daring, trained in all arts and exercises that became a gentleman; for instance, there could be no doubt that a certain proficiency in horsemanship was desirable for the ideal youth, but he recalled with horror his own early efforts to attain it, and shuddered to think how he should tremble, when, in course of time, the child came to an age to face these dangers.
He began to see how ill-fitted he was to be the trainer of a young man. Hitherto he had imagined himself only as a nurse of callow infancy, shielding the little one with his greater insight and sympathy from the misunderstandings that had made his own childhood unhappy. Somehow he had fancied the child would be like him, timid and shrinking, needing protection; but now it struck him that there was no reason why it should resemble him at all, and he recoiled with sudden terror from the thought of what unlovely qualities the offspring of two such parents might have inherited. How would he be able to bear seeing the treachery of the one, or the hard egotism of the other, reproducing itself in the being he loved best in the world? Had he the firmness needed for correcting such tendencies? Could he ever steel himself to the necessity of punishment?
On the other hand, it was hardly to be desired that the little boy should grow up on his pattern. He was not so conspicuous a success in his position that it was an object to educate a successor on the same lines. He began to understand the kind of problems his own bringing up had presented for solution to his mother and uncle; he remembered how futile had been the efforts of these two strong natures, with all the advantages of example, to instil into his feeble soul a more virile attitude towards life, and the sum in proportion of what difficulties he would have to encounter in a like endeavour was not a hard one to work out. If Lady Charmington, absolutely sure of what she wanted, and with her bull-dog tenacity of purpose, had failed so lamentably of her object, what kind of a creature would he turn out, assailed by a hundred doubts, fears, and indecisions, and desiring simultaneously quite irreconcilable ideals?
He recognised that the child had become the chief preoccupation of his life, its health, its food, its education—for he already tormented himself with questions that, by their very nature, could not have to be faced for years to come; and the more he troubled himself about the little thing, the more he loved it, the greater his love grew, the greater grew the desire to do his duty by his charge, the greater the anxiety as to what that duty might be.
So far, however, his troubles were only those common to all parents and guardians who took their responsibilities somewhat morbidly; his special self-torture began where theirs left off. When all was said and done, the thousand dangers that dog the steps of youth safely passed, the pitfalls on either hand successfully avoided, the boy trained to all perfection of manly virtue and delight—what then? To what purpose, and for what end, should he have fashioned this splendid creature? To be the means by which he was to rob his nearest kinsfolk of their birthright! If his remorse was constantly awakened by Arthur’s presence, and the things that he said, it yet addressed itself less to Arthur than to the child. It was not so much the injury to his brother and his brother’s children that was becoming an hourly torment to his conscience, as the injury to this innocent accomplice in making him the instrument of wrong. Was that, then, the best that he could do for the son of his heart, the being who was daily becoming more and more the centre of his existence, dearer than are the children of their loins to ordinary fathers, to use him as the unconscious weapon of his own fraud? There was no way out, no turning back; he could not now disavow him if he would. The crime was committed, irremediable, to go on breeding injustice, perpetuating wrong to the last chapters of the history of his race.
He saw in imagination the little boy passing from childhood to youth, from youth to manhood, growing tall and strong and beautiful, in his turn marrying, and begetting children to become links in the long chain of falsehood and carry on the consequences of his lie. And he would have to live and watch this happening, always alone, always in silence, with no one to whom he could unburthen his heart. There would only be two who shared his knowledge, and to neither of them could he say a word on the subject, though hideously, eternally aware that they knew, and were watching with himself. And then a new terror assailed him. When a secret was already the property of three people, could he be certain that no breath of it would ever reach the person principally concerned? He had plenty of experience of how recklessly Cissy could talk on occasion, what rash and terrible things the desire to wound could make her say, and he trembled lest in some fit of sudden anger with her son, some momentary loss of self-control, she might turn and crush him with the story of his birth. The word once spoken could never be recalled; he saw the poor boy coming, white and stern, to ask him if this thing were true, and felt by anticipation the agony of his own inability to deny it. A dozen times a day he lived through the misery of that confession, and watched the love and respect die out of those dear eyes, as his unwilling hand dealt the final blow. Perhaps it would be some fair growth of young romance, the prospect of an innocent, happy marriage with a good girl, that he would have to blast with that terrible avowal. He heard himself condemning the boy to sterile loneliness or the devious byways of illicit love, to make a tardy reparation, and restore the stolen heritage to its rightful owners.
These thoughts were with him day and night; they went to bed with him, and got up with him; they followed him about the place; they sat with him beside the sleeping baby, and looked at him out of its great solemn eyes when it woke. Truly ‘the Lord his God was a jealous God,’ that fastidiously high standard of conduct and personal honour, his one sin against which was to be ‘visited upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation.’
And then on a sudden the end came, and he learned the futility of his crime and his remorse alike. The poor little life that had been to him a source of such happiness and such self-torture came to an end as independently of any act of his as it had come to its beginning. It may have contained from the first the germs of some mortal disease, or perhaps the practices of its former nurse had left behind more fatal results than any one suspected. It is probable that too rapid teething had something to do with it. A baby’s life is at best but such a newly kindled flame, feeble and unsteady, that a puff of wind will make it flicker and go out. The whole thing did not take a week. The child was flushed, heavy, restless, as it had so often been before. ‘He is cutting another big tooth,’ the nurse said. ‘It’s no wonder he’s a little fractious, poor lamb! It’s the third in a fortnight.’ Lady Charmington was appealed to, and repeated, for the twentieth time, her comfortable assertions of how much more Sainty himself had suffered during the same anxious period; by constantly reassuring her son with them, she had finally almost persuaded herself that the baby was as strong as she wished it. She declared it was ridiculous to send for the doctor. ‘Have him, if you like,’ she said; ‘but I know just what he’ll say. Baby has been exactly like this so often, and each time you always think it is something dreadful. Nurse knows exactly what to do for him, don’t you, nurse?’
On the third day Sainty grew restive, and sent for him all the same. The doctor, if not as well satisfied as Lady Charmington, yet seemed to think there was no particular cause for anxiety. He detected a little sound in the bronchial pipes, and asked if the child could have got a chill in any way. ‘It might all very well come from the teeth,’ he said. ‘The little fellow is feverish; you had better keep him in for a day or two.’
He came once or twice more, a little uncertain, very non-committal; and then, one day, there was a swift unexplained rise of temperature, a convulsion or two, and, before even Sainty, with his genius for prophesying disaster, had fully realised the danger, all was over in this world as far as the baby was concerned.
CHAPTER XXVII
‘My little boy, my poor little boy! You were conceived in sin, and your birth was a lie. Your father never owned you, your mother never loved you. It was left to me, who should have hated you, to tend and cherish you. It was little enough that I could do for you, but God only knows what you have been to me. It was no fault of yours, my baby, but my misdoing, that would have made your innocent existence an injury to others. I might have known that you could do no harm, that you would go away before your life could wrong them.’
Sainty was murmuring broken phrases, his face bowed upon the face of the dead child. The tiny coffin, almost like a toy, was supported on two chairs facing each other, and on a third chair beside it he had sat almost continuously since the room had been put in order and the people turned out of it. His mother had said it was bad for him, but, with that single exception, there was luckily no one who cared enough to try and take him away, and so he had remained, hour after hour, steeped in the great quiet that surrounded that little figure.
The pale diffused daylight came sifted through the lowered blinds, giving an unreal look to common objects, turned suddenly useless, and ranged against the walls. Sainty himself had helped to order the room, and to deck it with flowers. He would allow no heavy fragrance of white funereal blossoms, but all the greenhouses of Belchamber had been ransacked for the unseasonable roses of winter, and to this day the smell of roses brings back to him the little white waxen face, barred with its black-fringed lids, at which he gazed so long in those sacred hours of communing with the dead.
It was his first experience of death. His father had died when he was a mere baby, and both his grandfathers in his early childhood; since he had been able to reflect or remember, he had never lost a friend. It struck him as strange that he, who had tasted so many sorrows, should have had no experience of this the supremest and commonest that man is called upon to bear. It was different from any other trouble he had ever known, deeper, more awful, more hopeless, yet somehow for that very reason more bearable too. There was no element of meanness in it, nothing petty or small. Such grief was large, calm, august, and above all very still; in presence of this perfect peace he could not strive nor cry. Shelley’s words about the Niobe came back to him as he sat there, and he kept repeating them to himself, ‘Her tender and serene despair.’ Despair, then, was ‘tender and serene’; how true it was! He was not even very unhappy. The consciousness of the aching void in his life would come later; but, for the moment, the bitterness of parting was lost in the relief of seeing his darling free from the suffering it had been torture to watch and know himself powerless to allay. He understood why David had arisen and washed his face and taken food, when they told him that his child was dead.
The baby hands were folded, and held a bunch of violets; and as he bent over them, laying his parched lips upon their marble coldness, the comforting promise seemed to steal down to the sources of his being, that at last, far off, after all the fever and the pain, this rest on which he looked was waiting for him, as for every one.
. . . . . . .
A discreet tap on the door jarred the silence like a drumbeat, and Sainty went across and opened it. A servant stood there wearing the decorous expression of those officially connected with mourning which is not a personal grief to them.
‘Her ladyship has been inquiring for you, m’lord,’ the man said, ‘and the post has come. I have put your lordship’s letters on your writing-table.’
Sainty came out into the passage, and locked the door behind him, slipping the key into his pocket. ‘You can tell her ladyship she will find me in my study,’ he said; ‘or if she prefers, and will let me know, I will come to her.’
He wondered what Cissy could have to say to him; he felt a sure foreboding that it would be nothing he should care to hear. What more was there for her to say to him henceforth, for ever?
He went to his study in the old western pavilion and sat down at his writing-table; it was heaped with a great pile of letters; the morning’s mail had been added to those which, yesterday, he had had no heart to open. They would have to be gone through some time, he supposed; it was a task he could not well leave to his secretary. Why not attack them at once while he was feeling calmed and strengthened? He drew a few towards him and nerved himself for the ordeal of reading them. He thought he knew so well what they would contain, yet in the very first that he took up he found matter quite unexpected, which even at that moment arrested his attention.
‘Dear old Sainty,’ he read: ‘I don’t at all like the idea of intruding my happiness on your grief; but I equally don’t want you to hear of it from any one but me, which you would be sure to do if I didn’t write at once. And first let me just stop and tell you how awfully sorry I am for you and Cissy losing your little boy. I can’t bear to think of you with your sensitive nature. The only thing to be said is that it was better than if he had been older, when you would have missed him so much more; you can’t personally have seen very much of him at that age. But to come back to myself. I hope I am the first to tell you (as you are almost the first that I have told) of my engagement to Gemma de Lissac. You who know my Gemma, and the admirable woman to whom she owes so much, will realise without any words of mine what a lucky fellow I am. I need not say I am tremendously in love, and absurdly happy. Mr. de Lissac has been most awfully good about it, and very generous. Of course, a wretched pauper like me could never have married a girl who hadn’t got something. For myself, as you know, my wants are few, but I couldn’t have asked Gemma, who has always had every luxury since she was a baby, to give up all she has been accustomed to, especially her thousand and one good deeds. Mr. de Lissac wants me to chuck my P. S.-ship and go in for parliament, and the duke has been very kind in promising his help. Forgive such a long letter about myself when you are in trouble, but happiness is always egotistical, and I can’t help hoping that mine won’t be indifferent to you. As I have written you such a yarn, and have so many letters to write, will you please tell Cissy, with my love, and ask her to forgive my not writing to her separately. I haven’t written to Aunt Sarah either, as I think Mrs. de Lissac is writing to her. Wish me joy, old man. There is no one whose good wishes I shall value more. Your affectionate cousin, Claude Morland.
‘P.S.—I don’t offer to come to the funeral. I know you’ll feel just as I should about it, and want to keep it all as quiet as possible.’
Sainty read the letter through twice. He had hardly finished his second perusal of it, when the door opened, and Cissy stood before him. She was dressed in hastily improvised mourning of incongruous showiness. The black clothes enhanced her fairness, and accentuated the slim girlishness of her figure, but her face had no youth in it, and her eyes glittered with an unnatural brightness.
‘You wanted to see me?’ Sainty asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have got something to say to you, and I may as well say it first as last.’ Then, as he stood waiting in silence to hear her, ‘You and I have got to have an explanation,’ she added.
‘Is it the moment, with the child lying dead in the house?’ Sainty asked, with a gesture of protest.
‘Yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘it is just that I wanted to speak about. As long as he lived, I have stayed for my child’s sake.’
Sainty gave a convulsive laugh. ‘You have done a great deal for the child’s sake!’ he said.
‘Now,’ she went on, ‘I have no reason for remaining. I have come to tell you that after the funeral I am going away. I can’t keep it up any longer. We hate each other, you know we do. Life together has become intolerable.’
‘Life together!’ Sainty repeated. ‘Do you call it life together? To me it seems that we could hardly be more apart. In Kamchatka I should not be further from you.’ And indeed she seemed so far away, that he felt as if his voice could hardly reach her; he wondered how she could ever have affected him for pain or pleasure. He looked at her across a chasm in which lay the dead child.
‘And where do you propose to go?’ he asked indifferently.
‘I shall go to the only man I have ever really loved,’ Cissy said dramatically.
‘I thought we were coming to that.’ It all seemed no business of his, not to affect him in any way; he even felt a little sorry for her under the blow he was going to deal her. He found himself casting about in his mind for the best way of telling her. How strange that that letter should just have come (or was it, perhaps, not wholly a coincidence?), that he should have selected that hour for opening it, that it should have been the first one that he had read! He still held it in his hand, and without saying anything he moved it so that the writing might attract her attention.
‘What have you got there?’ she cried, turning suddenly very white. ‘Let me see it. Is it from Claude?’ She sprang upon it, and snatched it from him before he could give it to her, and he heard the two sheets rattle against each other with the shaking of her hands.
‘There is a message for you in it,’ he said, as he turned away. He did not want to pry into her misery. He felt no exultation, only a sick contemptuous pity, pity in which there was no love.
Presently, hearing her give a sort of hoarse cry, he looked round. She had sunk into a chair, with one arm laid along the table, her other hand, clenched, rested on her knee. The letter had fallen on the floor. She sat looking straight in front of her, and her mouth moved as if she were speaking, but no sound came. She had evidently forgotten his presence altogether. She was frightening like this, her lips drawn back a little from her teeth, her face set in a grimace that made her almost monkey-like, ugly as strong emotion always is. After a time she began to beat on the edge of the table with her hand. ‘Blackguard! Blackguard!’ she kept repeating under her breath.
Sainty was longing for her to go and leave him alone with his grief. The presence of this other misery which, by the nature of the case, he could do nothing to soothe only aggravated his own; it seemed to bring him down to earth, to drag him back to the sordid and base, from the regions to which he had risen in the chamber of death. What had he to do with this woman’s fierce resentment, balked of her earthly passion, he who had been so near the borders of eternal peace?
He went over to her and spoke very gently. ‘I think we should be better apart,’ he said, ‘each with his own sorrow. We can do nothing to help each other.’
She seemed hardly to understand what he said, but she nodded dully and rose, and he held the door open for her to pass.
It was nothing to him, he reflected, whether she went or stayed, whether she played out the dreary farce of their married life to the end, or broke away to follow her own devices. The shame, which had seemed so unendurable that he had bartered his personal honour to avoid it, appeared to him now as a thing of no importance. He wondered how he had ever cared about it. Let her go, in heaven’s name, if she had a mind to! He almost wished that she would, but he knew in his heart that Claude’s letter had done its work; there would be no more talk of her going. He stooped and picked up the crumpled papers, smoothing them out and looking at the beautiful neat little handwriting, not an erasure, not a correction. Whatever the writer might say of haste and want of time and pressure of correspondence, that letter had not been written in a hurry.
‘It’s so complete,’ he said to himself; ‘the last touch. Nothing was wanting but this.’ He found himself almost admiring the absolute quality of his cousin’s villainy, so rounded and finished, with no loose ends.
In a few seconds his mind flew back over all the stages of his connection with Claude, the first coming to Belchamber of the large pale boy, with his dreamy eyes and curious fascination, the old Eton days, his baleful influence on Arthur, the story of his connection with Aimée Winston, the double treachery of his behaviour about Cynthia.... But when he came to the part Morland had played in his own married life, his imagination shuddered and winced, he could not, dare not, think of it. ‘And now, to crown all, this——’ And his hand struck the pages with their rippling conventional expressions of happiness and affection, their bland pretence of sympathy offered and demanded. For a moment the room swam round him, and he had to clutch the table for support. Could he let this thing be? Ought he to allow this girl to be sacrificed, and not make an effort to save her? But almost simultaneously he recognised the futility of any such attempt. He thought of Gemma, conceited, headstrong, self-confident, and at the same time superlatively sentimental, and imagined the reception he should meet with if he were to tell her the man into whose hands she had just surrendered her existence, was—what? The lover of his wife, the father of his child. How could he tell this thing, and that he had known it and accepted it in silence? No wonder Claude had dared to write as he did; he knew well enough that from Sainty at least he was safe from all attack.
Should he have to answer, to thank, to congratulate, to ‘hope they would be happy,’ to send gifts? At least he would not have to go to the wedding; his mourning would save him from that—his mourning for the child of the bridegroom! He felt a wild longing to get back to that upper chamber where all these mad thoughts were stilled. What had he to do? The letters. Why should these people steal the little time he had left to be with his lost darling? With a sigh of ineffable weariness he sat down once more, and hastily tore open two or three. The same little phrases recurred in all. ‘Sincere condolences,’ ‘heartfelt sympathy,’ ‘God’s will,’ ‘Consolation where alone it may be found.’ He remembered employing some of them himself on like occasions. Why make these attempts to plumb the unfathomable? As well smear ointment on a door behind which a man lay wounded.
As he turned over the heaps of still unbroken covers in search of a handwriting that promised at least the relief of tears, his eye was caught by one unfamiliar, yet not unknown. He took the letter from the rest and held it poised upon his palm, trying to fix the memory it recalled. The anonymous denunciations of his wife? Ah! no, that was impossible. Yet as he broke the seal he realised why his only other sight of this writing was associated with that time. It was from his sister-in-law.
‘Dear Lord Belchamber,—I know you have never liked me, and did not approve of your brother marrying me; but though it is little kindness or notice I’ve ever received from you or yours, I am a mother myself, and I know what it would be to me to lose either of my little darlings; and so I feel I must write a few lines of condolence with you and Lady Belchamber in your great sorrow, for I really do sympathise with you in the death of your dear little boy. I know you think me a common, grasping woman, but I don’t give a thought to any difference it may make to us, and, as Arthur says, what is to prevent your having others? I have a heart (indeed it was me made Arthur write and offer to come to Belchamber without me, and he’ll come to the funeral too). I’m not really a bad sort, and can feel for your loss. With sincere condolences to you and Lady Belchamber, I should like to sign, Your affectionate sister-in-law,
Cynthia Chambers.
‘P.S.—I have ventured to order a wreath sent, which please accept.’
THE END
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press