CHAPTER XIV
Heartsick with longing for Gerard, she opened her front door. A maidservant met her in the hall. “Has your master come home?”
“He has been in and gone out again, ma’am. He told me to let you have this note when you arrived.” She handed her mistress the brass letter-tray where it was lying. Irene tore open the envelope with shaking fingers. It contained a hasty line scribbled in pencil.
“I am going away for the night. Will see you in the morning. G. M.”
She staggered as if he had struck her. What did it mean? It was difficult enough to grasp the fact; to pierce to the underlying motive was beyond her powers. A nameless fear assailed her. How could she live alone through all the hours until to-morrow morning? She stared at the words until they danced before her eyes. The fact was plain. In this hour of her most awful need of him, he had gone from her side. Her dismay was child-like in its piteousness.
“Did your master take any luggage with him?” she asked, steadying her voice.
“Just his dressing-bag,” replied the maid; then breaking through the restraint she had imposed upon herself: “And, oh, ma’am!—Mr. Colman——?”
“He is acquitted, Jane,” said Irene.
The maid burst into tears, after the manner of her class. Suspense had been great in the kitchen, where Hugh Colman had been invested with mythical excellences. The cook, upon whom he had never set eyes, had been weeping intermittently all day long. A fortiori, the naturalness of the emotions of the parlourmaid who had waited upon him at table and helped him on with his overcoat. It is odd how readily domestic servants receive the impression of a guest’s personality and how genuinely their sympathy or antipathy may be aroused. Perhaps, like silly women, they viewed Hugh in too heroic a light—but, nevertheless, the girl’s outburst was sincere. Irene, touched for the moment, forgot her anxiety. But it returned swiftly as soon as she was alone. She twisted the paper nervously in her hands, sat down upon one of the oak settles and tried to reason away the fear. Presently she rose and went upstairs to her room. She was desperately tired. She unpinned her veil, made a weary pretence of rolling it up, and then sank down helpless on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap.
In this relaxed moral condition a woman cries softly, if a sympathetic arm, man’s or woman’s, is put around her. When she is alone, however, crying seems futile and undignified; she arises soon afterwards, as Irene did, and mechanically changes her dress for a comfortable wrapper, freshens her face-with the trivial comfort of a powder-puff’s softness, tidies her hair, with dull, half-observant glances in her mirror, puts eau de cologne upon a clean handkerchief and wearily hangs up her discarded garments. The lighter feminine instincts float like straws upon the surface, beneath which other things have sunk for very heaviness.
After this she went downstairs to the smoking:-room, whither Jane brought her an egg beaten up in brandy. The girl hung about, eager for a word of detail concerning the trial. The expectation was pathetic, considering its impossibility of fulfillment. Irene dismissed her gently, and took the stimulant, of which she stood in great need. And then she thought, hard and anxiously.
A dreadful sense of loneliness crept over her, even more intense than that which she had once felt before, when she had gone on board the steamer at Bombay, journeying from one grave to another. It seemed impossible that Gerard should not be returning. She had never craved him so much as in this hour of crisis. Again she read the now crumpled sheet containing his curt message. Her blind faith in his acquiescence in the sacrifice was rudely shaken. He had gone from her in a passion of anger. There was no other solution. She felt sick with doubt and dread. Her eyes wandered round the room, trying to derive assurance of his return from the familiar, external signs of his occupancy. His fishing-rods stood in a corner in their neat canvas cases. His cartridge-belt hung festooned beneath a hunting-trophy on the wall, surmounted by a fox’s mask. Opposite, by the mantelpiece, stretched his overflowing pipe-rack. On a little table by the side of the great armchair, whose well-worn seat showed the impress of his huge limbs, still remained his pipe of the morning, with the ashes half fallen out. His slippers lay beneath the chair. Irene looked at them pathetically, and again felt the very miserable desire to cry. The trivial generally tends the flood-gates of tears. In the horrors of a siege women who have viewed, brave-eyed, men butchered before their faces, have been known to break down at the sight of a wrecked canary-cage.
Presently Jane came in with a letter. A commissionnaire had brought it and was waiting in the hall for an answer. Irene took it from the girl’s hand with a quick heart-throb. From Gerard, doubtless explanatory—perhaps utterly reassuring. But as soon as her eyes fell upon the envelope she recognised Hugh’s writing, and felt miserably disappointed. The letter was addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Merriam.” It ran:
“Dearest Ones—The terrible price you have paid for my life makes me shrink from crossing your threshold unbidden. For such a deed it is idle to talk of gratitude. Send for me and I shall come. But God knows what I can say to you both. Hugh.”
She sat for a few moments staring before her. Jane stood by respectful and dutiful, holding the brass salver by her side. Suddenly Irene rose, and, standing at her writing-table, dashed off a hasty line. They would have paid the price fifty times over for his sake. She would send for him soon, but to-night she was exhausted. He must be bright and happy. The bond between the three was only firmer and dearer. The maid took the note to the waiting messenger and Irene sank again into her chair by the fire.
She felt unspeakably grateful to Hugh for writing. How could she have received him? How explained Gerard’s absence? The thought of a meeting was a burning fire in cheeks and bosom. Fortunately it was avoided. She thanked the tact that always underlay and checked Hugh’s impulses. Another man, equally generous, would have rushed to throw himself at her feet.
The evening wore on. She sat down alone to the inevitable dinner and forced herself to eat. Once she caught Jane looking at her curiously. The details of the great trial’s sensational finish had reached Sunnington and were the theme of the servants’ hall. She read amused speculation and virtuous approbation, subtly mingled, in the girl’s glance. She flushed miserably, in spite of effort, and her throat contracted at the morsel she was about to swallow. Perhaps her servants would give her notice. The ironical pettiness of the thought faintly amused her and restored self-composure. The meal over, she returned to the smoking-room fire and nursed her heart-ache till bedtime.
Hugh’s letter, often re-read, awakened a desire for his companionship, vague and scarcely formulated as an idea. Yet she would have shrunk in strange terror at his approach. Womanlike, she longed for a tender word or gentle touch, and strove to materialise it out of Hugh’s letter. And she was conscious of a little disappointment, so little that she would not admit it to her reason, in the joint address. Her reason admired the delicacy with which Hugh had conveyed his appreciation of their combined purpose, but her woman’s instinct felt the individual lack. Ever so subtle an acknowledgment of her separate action would have been balm to the bruised spirit.
She slept fitfully, was up betimes, disregarding a racking headache. Gerard would come. She would have speech with him, learn the unimagined worst.
No letter from him. Her pile of correspondence, envelopes briefly surveyed, remained unopened. She had not the heart to read letters. All her throbbing thoughts were Gerard’s. He was deeply angered. She would humble herself. Yet human certainty had never been so radiantly absolute as hers had been in the oneness of their sacrifice, when she had offered up his honour and her virtue. She could come to no conclusion.
For an hour she stood at the dining-room window, which looked upon the little circular drive in front of the house, watching for her husband’s arrival. Her every fibre yearned and dreaded. At last he appeared, swung open the gate and strode in with a quick glance at the pale face behind the window. Irene’s hand flew to her heart. She stepped back, pierced by the glance, and waited. In another moment Gerard was in the room. He clapped his hat on the table and advanced a pace or two, fixing her with his shifty blue eyes.
“Now, let us have it out at once. What the devil have you got to say for yourself?”
The look, the tone, the insult dashed upon her like a douche of icy water upon an hysterical girl. She drew herself up, quivering, with a flash in her eyes.
“You are forgetting yourself, Gerard.”
Yet an instant afterwards she softened and humbled herself as a woman does towards the man she has been yearning for. She went to him with outstretched arms, pleading in her face.
“Forgive me, dear! Forgive me!”
He thrust her away, rather roughly.
“Don’t make a scene. I hate it. That’s why I stayed away, so as to put a cooling night in front of our interview. But I want an explanation, and I think I’m entitled to it.”
Irene looked at him helplessly. She was on the high seas, rudderless.
“I thought you would willingly have given your life for Hugh,” she said. “You were deeply moved—said there was nothing you would not give. The scheme flashed on me. I never doubted your assent—as God hears me, Gerard, I felt the certainty like an inspiration.”
“Damned funny inspiration to fancy that I would tamely agree to your infidelities with another man.”
“But didn’t you understand?” she gasped.
“Perfectly. But I’m not the sort of man to share my wife with anybody—even with my dearest friend.”
The world was rocking. Her senses swam. She lost heed of surroundings. Found herself saying in a silly way:
“But it was all a lie, Gerard. I thought you knew.”
He looked at her for a moment or two and then thumped his fist on the dining-table. The shock upset a little epergne of flowers and the water flooded the dark-red table-cover.
“And I say it wasn’t a lie. There!”
“Gerard!”
The voice, pitched high, rang through the house. A cry of terror, incredulity, reproach. They remained looking at each other he doggedly, unmoved, with slightly crossed eyes; she in blank anguish of amazement.
“I don’t beat about the bush. I come straight to the point. You and Colman carried on behind my back. Do you suppose I was fool enough not to see it? I was only biding my time. It came sooner than I expected. A coup de théâtre. I thought something was wrong by the unnecessary state of excitement you have been in the last few weeks. It must have been exciting, with a vengeance! All I can say is, that I admire your pluck. How long has this been going on? Tell me.”
“It was a mere invention—pure perjury—to save his life—your friend—my friend. What am I to say?
“Oh, my God, Gerard!” she burst out. “You are not in earnest—you are angry—saying this to try me, for some reason that I don’t understand.”
The thought of his belief in her sworn statement had never entered her mind during the most fear-racked moment. The fact dazed her. He shook his great shoulders impatiently.
“You had better give it up and answer my question.”
“I have answered it—my whole life with you has answered it.”
“It has,” he sneered. “And more fool I for not having taken the answer before. And I tell you, I was getting pretty sick of it—the eternal Hugh, Hugh—damn him!—in every sentence you uttered—the everlasting sight of him in the house——”
“But I thought he was as dear to you as I was!” broke in Irene, aghast.
“It suited your purpose to think so. I never told you so. I’m sick of it—utterly sick of it. Sick of your flim-flammeries of philosophy and the higher life and noble work in the world and all that rot. And now I’m heartily glad it’s over.”
“Over?” she echoed, falteringly.
“Yes, over. I’m not going to play the injured husband. I’m going to be free; to do what I like and live as I like, and you can go off with your lover and help him to write his measly poetry. It has been choking me for years. I’m going to get free of it all.”
Irene listened, stupefied. He seemed some unutterable stranger that had obtained access to her presence, she knew not how. He thrust his hands into his pockets and turned away. The gesture was familiar. Times out of number he had stood so, looming huge between herself and the light. It touched a tender chord, brought back the Gerard she had known and worshipped. Again she flew to him, caught him by the lapels of his coat and broke into a loud cry.
“But Gerard—my husband—am I a woman capable of such a thing?”
He unloosened her hands and drew apart from her.
“All women are the same—Madonas or Messalinas.”
“Then Hugh——”
“I tell you I hate him,” said Gerard, vindictively.
Then, suddenly, beneath his furious anger Irene saw the man as he was, and her idol lay shivered at her feet.
“Was that why you never told me of his having saved your life?”
Taken aback for the moment, he looked at her enquiringly.
“Because you hated him and were jealous of him all the time?”
“I told you my reasons. I haven’t come now to discuss them.”
He crossed the room and caught up his hat.
“I wish I had not come at all,” he said, with a drop in his tone to sullenness. “I should have sent my solicitor. Your brazening it out made me lose my temper.”
Irene interposed herself between him and the door.
“We can’t part like this,” she said in a queer voice. “Tell me what your wishes are and I’ll try to obey them.”
Gerard reflected for a moment, checking a spiteful outburst. He had said his say. Further display of anger was futile. Also he knew something of Irene, and was aware that plain words would fall coldest upon her intelligence.
“After what has passed,” he said, “I can’t live in this house while you are here.”
“I will leave it to-day,” said Irene.
“Take your time. I don’t want to inconvenience you more than I can help.”
“You are very kind, Gerard,” said Irene, in bitter irony.
“I will have everything that belongs to you despatched wherever you think fit,” he continued, unheeding.
“And then?”
He shrugged his shoulders, looked at her askance for a second.
“Then I get my divorce.”
Her mind, dazed by exhaustion and the pain and the successive cataclysms of this disastrous interview, had not travelled a second beyond the lurid present. The bald word was a new shock, the final sledgehammer blow that sent love reeling. She grew very white.
“You intend to—divorce—me?” she said, slowly.
“That is my intention,” he replied, somewhat abashed before her staring eyes.
Irene shrank away from the door, and turned gropingly towards a couch against the wall. Gerard lingered for a moment on the threshold. Then he left her. She sank upon the couch shuddering and faint, looking helplessly at the upset flowers and the soaking pool of water upon the table-cover.
CHAPTER XV
An aunt, with whom she had lived during the brief interval between her return from India and her marriage, granted her a temporary asylum.
“If you will do with me until I can find some place of my own,” said Irene, “I shall be grateful.”
“My house is always open to dear Robert’s child,” said Miss Beechcroft.
She was an austere woman of primitive views, to whom Irene had ever been a puzzle. As the heroine of this amazing scandal, her niece was a dark and inscrutable enigma. Its transcendency bewildered her. Having no moral foot-rule capable of measuring it, she did not attempt the obviously futile. She waived explanatory details. Her dead brother’s only child craved shelter; she gave it willingly; her own companionship she withheld as much as possible, for a variety of reasons. Not the least was the gentlewoman’s respect for the dignity of suffering.
The freedom from misdirected sympathy was a boon to Irene. She needed solitude. Her universe had crashed about her ears. At first she was dazed, stunned, scarce knowing where to turn amid the shapeless wreckage. Few things could exemplify the cataclysm. Overwhelming proof coming to a Paul at the end of his life that there was no Christ, that his apostolate had been pure silliness, could not have brought him more face to face with chaos. It was too sudden for her to look within for contributing causes. Introspection comes later. At present she could only stare aghast at the ruins of her life, and proceed to shape for herself a temporary existence.
On the second day after the trial she found a measure of mental calmness. The past was irrevocable. Gerard’s self-revelation was final. There was no Gerard, such as she had conceived him; her worship had been a futility. She was conscious that love was dead, killed outright by lightning. Further she could not go. Neither could she forecast the consequences of the threatened divorce. Reconstruction for the present was essential. The effort braced her strength. Nature came to her aid, pride armed her with steadfastness, the fire of suffering steeled her will. She could humble herself no more to Gerard to sue for mercy. In everything henceforward the initiative would lie with him. She throned herself on snowcapped heights.
Yet from time to time her warm woman’s nature drooped earthward and sought for Hugh. But she shrank tremblingly from meeting him, wrote him a second vague postponement. Then regretted it an hour after. She must see him, and that soon; before he encountered Gerard. What would happen if the two men met—Gerard mad with jealous passion, Hugh blazing with indignation? The gentler elements within her took fright. A month before she would have scouted the idea of violence as preposterous. Bloodshed in private quarrel was a thing, in England, of the evil and romantic past. But she would have counted as equally unreal the story of the recent sensational incidents in their lives. Now nothing seemed too improbable for possibility. Calais sands stretched wet and bloodstained before her imagination. But still she shrank from meeting Hugh.
She lay awake long that night, in the primly furnished room where once she had dreamed so many girlish dreams of the man she was about to marry, and strove to disentangle the complexities of her emotions. She dreaded Hugh learning Gerard’s resolution. A cowardly impulse to send Hugh as mediator between Gerard and herself, was strangled at birth by a fierce grip of pride. If she alone could not convince her husband of her fidelity, what mattered his conviction at all? And then the realisation of that of which she stood self-accused lapped her woman’s chastity in fire from head to foot. At last she slept. The morning came, but with it no letter of repentance, as she had vaguely hoped, from Gerard. His decision had been final. In the afternoon she went to Sunnington and superintended the packing of her belongings. The maid Jane aided her, glancing every now and then with scared eyes at the set face of her mistress and dimly comprehending the anguish that lay behind. If Irene had gone through the rooms tearful and sobbing, the girl would have wept in sympathy; but there was that in Irene’s manner that held her silent.
Only once did Irene break down, and then she was alone in the upstairs room, that had been a nursery, and whose high fire-guards—fixtures which they had not disturbed when they took over the house—still suggested its former use. And a small child’s bed was there, occupied in her time by many little waifs. The associations the room had always evoked came back to her. She threw herself face downward on the bed.
“Thank God, thank God,” she cried, “I haven’t got a child!”
Three days are sufficient for a sensation to become ancient history in London. This truth, like most others, is tame and unobtrusive and therefore apt to be disregarded by the still bloodshot vision of the hero of the sensation. The man in the street had forgotten Hugh, but Hugh overrated his memory and studiously kept out of his way. The West End knew him not. What time he did not remain restless in his flat, he walked or bicycled for miles into the country, filling his lungs with the free, sweet spring air and drowning anxieties in the intoxication of motion and freedom.
He had not yet recovered his mental balance, rudely upset by the extraordinary termination of the trial. He knew not whether to call himself arrant knave or blatant fool; a sorry Don Quixote, degraded at the instant of self-plumage; or a poor marionette, with limbs jerked ludicrously by destiny. He had faced death for a contemptuous sentiment of personal honour, in connection with a woman he despised; life had been purchased for him at the cost of the honour of the one woman in the world for whom he would have gladly died a thousand deaths. How did his honour stand? Grotesquely tragic, under any aspect.
An interview with Irene and Gerard would perhaps restore some kind of equilibrium. But hitherto that had been denied. Twice Irene had written a brief “not yet.” Delicacy commanded scrupulous obedience. But the truer and still untainted fountains of his heart welled out towards those two whose magnificent devotion transcended all power of gratitude. And an exquisite sadness of irony was superadded. Would the jury have convicted him, after Gardiner’s handling of the evidence? Cold reason returned an assured negative. But this, those two should never know. Meanwhile he hungered for the sight of Irene.
A friend visited him on the third morning after the trial; Cahusac, a rosy, gold-spectacled man who held a high position on one of the great dailies. Hugh was preparing to ride forth on his quest of the intoxication of budding lanes.
“I must get Holloway out of my blood,” he explained, welcoming his friend. “I think of nothing but God’s air and sunshine. But what brings you from your bed at this hour?”
“Selfishness. I come begging favours.”
“I am the last one to confer them.”
“What are your plans?” asked Cahusac, throwing himself into a seat.
Hugh made a helpless gesture. “I am a ruined man, Cahusac.”
“My dear fellow, half the world forgets and the rest forgives. I have been about much lately, sounding society. The heroic condones. Pardon my frankness.”
“And those two?”
“Who? The Merriams? Of course they are much discussed.”
“I know,” said Hugh. “Look—you asked me for my plans. This is one. I enter no house where I should be pardoned and the Merriams condemned.”
“You must excuse me, Colman,” said Cahusac, somewhat at fault; “I am aware of delicate ground—but why do you speak of them unitedly? Merriam has broken no conventions; naturally, he will be received everywhere, as usual.”
“He will claim equal privileges for his wife.”
“But they are not continuing to live together, as if nothing had happened?”
“Just as if nothing had happened.” replied Hugh, with the conviction of ignorance.
“And your relations remain unbroken?”
“Certainly,” said Hugh.
Cahusac, who had been ascending the scale of mystification, rose from his chair.
“You are three astounding people—the world won’t stand that, you know—it’s almost too much for me, and I’m not squeamish. No. Hang it all—The mari complaisant—and Merriam is the last man in the world—it beats me altogether. Look here, I’ll come back another time. I must digest this first!” The cleanly Briton in him was disgusted. Polyandry in Terra del Fuego is ethnologically interesting. In England it wears a different aspect.
Hugh broke into a half laugh, and, striding forward, seized Cahusac by the shoulder and swung him round.
“You silly fool,” he cried. “Do you suppose I’m the man to let you talk like this about my private affairs, if things were as you think? Has it never entered your head that the story was a lie from beginning to end? That Mrs. Merriam is the purest of women and the most spotless of wives? That it was the desperate stroke of two heroic friends to save a man’s life?”
The journalist’s rosy face expressed blank astonishment. He sank upon a chair and muttered incoherent wonder and apology.
“You are more astounding than ever!” he exclaimed at last. “Of course I was taken in, like the judge, jury, press, public, everybody—I’m heartily thankful.”
Suddenly he grew very grave.
“Are you aware that you have committed a blazing indiscretion?”
“In telling you?”
“Yes.”
“I know something of men,” said Hugh in his grand way.
“You can no more know a man in calm weather than you can know a ship. I myself am not aware what a villain I could be, if it were worth my while. I’ll try to keep straight. But don’t trust any one else with your secret. The blabbing tongue—the ears of the police—that heroic woman had up for perjury—I need say no more.”
Hugh walked about the room, agitated.
“You are right. Of course I knew it in a vague sort of way—but I have been driven half crazy—the strain of the last month—unimaginable—God knows how I pulled through. You are the first man I have spoken to. I couldn’t bear to let you think ill of her—and your kind, honest mug was so refreshing to me—I couldn’t help it. I never realised clearly before, that to save her from penal servitude I must consent to stand by and see the world throw mud at her. What a complicated wreck one’s life becomes as soon as it leaves the rails!”
“Don’t make yourself miserable with false analogies,” said Cahusac, philosophically. “I’m sick of the rails and I want to get off them. For that reason I asked what your plans were—I meant for the immediate future.”
“I shall give up the bar,” said Hugh, with a shudder, “at least criminal work. I said I was a ruined man. That’s why.”
“You persist in misunderstanding,” said the other with a smile. “You forget I came to ask a favour—I am thinking of going abroad for a holiday, taking it now instead of in the inevitable August. Wife doesn’t want to go. I am companionless. Will you take pity on me?”
Hugh’s impulsive nature responded to all the motives of the kindly act. He seized Cahusac’s hand.
“I won’t thank you. There are some deeds of friendship beyond thanks. I’ll come with you all the more gladly now that I have told you. But I should like to see the Merriams before we start.”
Cahusac lifted his eyebrows. “You haven’t seen them yet?”
Hugh received discomfort from his glance. He explained vaguely.
“Take your own time,” said Cahusac, again rising to go. “Things are slack just now. I can get away pretty easily.”
The Good Samaritan departed, and Hugh remained for some time speculative at the window, looking out into the sunshine. He had known Cahusac and his wife fairly intimately for several years. They were friends, too, of the Merriams. But hitherto he had shrouded his private life from them in his customary reserve. He wondered now at the indiscreet expansiveness of which he had been guilty. The secret was safe enough with Cahusac. But would he not have betrayed it, just the same, to a less scrupulous friend, who had come to him that morning with a sympathetic face? The thought gave qualms. The past year had loosened his character. The past month had played havoc with it; had weakened, too, his firm grasp of logical issues. Cahusac had enabled his mind to gain fresh hold. He faced the consequences of Irene’s action with the pain of a great dismay.
The physical longing for air and sun and forgetfulness in quick motion lured him out of doors. He rode hard through Sunnington and along the Heath Road until he reached the open country. He traversed many miles that day, going along lonely stretches of clear road at racing speed which brought the thrill into his veins and the lust of physical life that floods thought. He was in that condition of being which, in a more elemental age, would have carried him baresark into the joy of battle: modern civilisation substitutes the bicycle. Perhaps, after all, we are not more grotesque than our ancestors.
The dusk was falling when he returned by the Heath Road, dusty and thoroughly fatigued. He glanced wistfully at the Merriams’ house as he sped by. The lights were not yet lit. It bore a strange aspect of desertion. For a moment he felt the impulse to turn and seek admittance, get through the strange first interview, whose indefinite postponement was growing stranger still. Irene’s sensitiveness he could understand; besides, she had written twice. But Gerard’s silence was unaccountable. Was he waiting, despite Irene’s messages, for him to take the initiative? The temptation was strong; but obedience to Irene prevailed. He went on, letting his weary mind drift on trivial matters. He would have a meal, smoke, and sleep like a log. It would be the first sound, unstirring sleep for many weeks. The night before he had had a shivering dream of Minna, which had kept him awake till morning. Where was she? He wondered vaguely.
Suddenly a figure crossing the road in front of him caused him to ring his bell. The figure turned. He recognised Irene. In a second he had dismounted and was by her side. She extended her hand, looked at him frankly in the waning light.
“Fate has arranged it for us,” he said. “If you knew how I have been hungering for speech with you!”
“I couldn’t send for you,” she replied. “There were reasons——”
“I know. I have waited patiently. But you feel what I have to express somehow to you and Gerard.”
“You mustn’t see Gerard,” she said, with a little break in her voice. “I think it would be best if you did not see me, either. What is the good of words to thank me? We understand each other too well to need them. Couldn’t you go away for a holiday somewhere? It would be the best for all of us. You mustn’t be hurt—indeed, you mustn’t. But you will do what I ask you?”
“Anything in the wide world. In fact, I am going abroad with Cahusac. I was only waiting until I had seen you. But I don’t understand——”
He stopped, regarded her anxiously. In spite of the falling darkness, he could see that she looked thoroughly ill.
“I may as well tell you at once,” she said, with quiet abruptness, moving a step nearer to him and laying her fingers on the bicycle handle. “You are making the same mistake as I did—reckoning on Gerard’s acquiescence. He is unspeakably angry. We have quarrelled over it. That is why I didn’t send for you. If you could do anything, I should ask you. But it is a matter solely concerning the two of us. Time will set it right.”
She spoke so quietly that he never suspected the truth. On the other hand, he could well realise that, Gerard not consenting, the public sacrifice of his honour should arouse his furious indignation. His conception of the breach between Irene and Gerard was sufficient in itself to keep him speechless with pain and remorse.
“It wasn’t your fault, dear Hugh,” she said, at length, comfortingly. “And don’t think I regret what I did. Gerard will see it in the same light as myself some day.”
“But now—to cause this division between you—I wish I had pleaded guilty. It would have settled everything at once.”
The words fell somewhat incoherently. He writhed under a sense of impotence. How could he comfort or reassure her? His wits floundered. Suddenly they came into sharp contact with an idea. Why was she walking away from the house at this hour of the evening? He put the question.
“I am staying with my aunt, in Redcliffe Gardens,” she replied, calmly. “It was best to avoid the tension at home.”
“I cannot blame. Gerard,” said Hugh, in a low voice. “And yet, I thought——”
“Yes,” said Irene, looking him full in the face. “We both thought.”
Hitherto they had been standing still by the roadside. Now she turned and moved onwards, Hugh accompanying her, slowly wheeling his machine—an incongruous element.
“You can see now why I want you to go away for a little?”
“Only too clearly,” he said, bitterly.
Irene knew that he did not see at all, and cast up at him an instinctive feminine glance, half-grateful, half-pitying.
“When shall you start?”
“Practically at once—as soon as Cahusac can get away. Are you anxious that I should go quickly?”
“I should feel easier.”
“Can I come to see you before I leave?”
“Best not. It will make no difference between us. The old friendship remains.”
They had come to the end of the line of villa residences, to the cross-road that marked the beginning of Sunnington proper. Irene halted.
“You must ride on,” she said, extending her hand. He saw the social necessity. They were a marked couple, and several passers-by had already turned curious eyes upon them.
“I shall stay abroad until I have your permission to return,” he said.
She smiled sadly. It would not be her summons that would bring him back from exile. But she nodded an assent. He pressed her hand, murmured a “God bless you,” and rode off.
The interview that each had looked forward to, with such trepidation, was over. Irene felt somewhat faint from the strain. Deceit was alien to her nature which ever erred in over-frankness. Yet when he quickly disappeared from her following eyes into the gathering darkness, she gave a little sob of relief and hurried on at a brisk pace.
CHAPTER XVI
“T ELL me, Harroway,” said Gerard, “you who are the friend of us all, and would like to defend both my wife and Colman, does her story hold water?”
“I should let things alone for the present,” replied the lawyer, cautiously; “make investigations, give her for the while the benefit of the doubt.”
“But there can’t be any doubt. The whole thing hangs together. Colman was over head and ears in love with her before our marriage. He has been openly in love with her ever since. They have been associated in all her confounded schemes and philanthropies. He was always on her tongue and in her thoughts—always in the house when I wasn’t there. I remember he wanted to jump down my throat once because I suggested Irene had her faults like others. Look at those poems of his addressed to her. All the same story. This charge of murder is brought against him. His mouth is closed. For a time I didn’t believe the woman plea. However, we all agreed there was one. Who could it be? All of us floored. My wife half dead with anxiety—yet going through it day by day. We know what women can bear when it’s a question of concealment—a woman the other day was delivered of a child during a ball, and returned smiling to the ball-room—you saw the case. I don’t call Irene’s attitude any criterion of innocence. She keeps it up to the end. But when the rope is round his neck, her nerve gives way, and the whole thing comes out. Put upon oath, she gives it cut and dried—as cynically as you please—a woman all over. There’s no getting out of it. And I—I am the common mock of England.”
He spoke quietly, with an air of outraged dignity that won Harroway’s sympathy.
“It’s a miserable business altogether,” said the latter, biting the end of his quill-pen, as he sat in his leathern office-chair, pushed back slightly from the table.
“Then you agree with me that her explanation is preposterous?”
“The other thing bears the greater stamp of probability,” replied Harroway. And thus was Irene judged. Gerard felt relieved. Harroway’s opinion was of a certain value. It was sure to be the keynote of that of the Merriams’ social circle in which the old solicitor was an influential member, and Gerard was anxious to learn how society would take his divorce. For that purpose he had sought out Harroway in his office and plunged into the midst of things, with a frankness that was not altogether characteristic. He had gained his first point—a definite verdict against Irene. He himself believed her guilty. But a lurking, uncomfortable suspicion that proof of her innocence might not sing with his heart’s secret wishes made him distrustful of his own judgment. The contemplation of divorce was accompanied by sundry pricks of conscience. A vague fear assailed him that society might take Irene’s side. He sought the support of public opinion to bolster up a not too stout courage. He had a dim feeling that, in spite of his willingly jealous belief in her guilt, he was about to do Irene a great wrong by divorcing her.
“I am not a revengeful man, Harroway,” he said after a few moments’ silence. “I am only anxious to put an end to a tie the continuance of which would be a farce. It is not even as though I were putting her to public shame. She has done that herself already.”
“Then I would not be precipitate,” said Harroway. “You might feel disposed to forgive her. Such things have happened to men without loss of dignity.”
“I’m not going to forgive her. I don’t think she would desire it. The fact is our marriage has been a sham from the beginning. If I divorce her, she can marry Colman. I’m not likely—God forbid—to tie myself to a woman again. So it’s not for my sake. If I were seeking vengeance I should keep her legally tied. And I shan’t sue for damages.”
“The action would have to be undefended.”
“Precisely,” said Gerard, with a slight flush. Harroway rose and took two or three turns about the room, his hands behind his back.
“I see no other way out of it, Merriam,” he said. “I was hoping you could forgive her—take her back, sometime. I am fond of her. In fact, fond of the three of you, confound it! The whole business has upset me. First the murder affair—and now this. Yes. It’s best. Let somebody be happy, at any rate. You are acting generously—but I’d like you to give her a little grace—unless time is important.”
“It is important,” said Gerard. “I want to get away. I don’t see why I should go on slaving at the bar any longer. If it hadn’t been for my wife I should have chucked it long ago. I have about six hundred a year of my own. Why the deuce should I worry myself?”
“What are you thinking of doing?”
“South Africa. Big game shooting. One of the dreams of my life. I’m sick of this atmosphere. I want to breathe freely. I know Freewintle—the big man at that sort of thing, you know. He’s going out in two or three months. I don’t see why I should lose the chance of going with him. So I should like to set everything straight by then.”
Harroway nodded his head with mournful assent.
“I can quite understand.”
He walked across the room, then back again and halted before Gerard.
“But you know, Merriam, I would willingly give a thousand pounds to have your wife proved innocent.”
“I would give all I have to be able to believe her,” returned Gerard. But his tone sounded disingenuous in his own ears.
“I am not going to ask you to act for me, professionally,” he added.
“I suppose not,” replied Harroway, drily.
They shook hands and parted. Gerard took a long breath as soon as he reached the open air, and the look of dignified sorrow vanished from his face. He walked through Lincoln’s Inn Fields with a step that was almost jaunty—greatly pleased by his visit.
If there had been anything mean or cruel in his proposed action, Harroway would have protested bluntly, for flabbiness of expression was not one of his characteristics. Obviously it was the only thing to be done. The sooner the better. As he turned into Chancery Lane a child held up to him a basket of violets. He bought a bunch, stuck it in his buttonhole, a thing which he had not done for years, being a man neglectful of spruceness in attire. He felt exhilarated, in holiday mood, experiencing a sensation of freedom from chafing constraints.
Two weeks had passed since his furious interview with Irene. He had spent them at his friend Weston’s place, alone, for the owner was absent, where he fished, and, between the rises, meditated on his wrongs. He had spoken to Irene in violent indignation and hatred, brutally, as the coarse-grained man does when he feels himself to be injured. Instinct, that explosion of a long-laid train of a thousand tiny sensations, had directed his blow against her most vital spot—her idealisation of himself. He had left her in passionate anger. It was well that he did not encounter Hugh that day. In the calm of the country life his anger cooled down, but it had engendered a crop of sentiments which, when he examined them, turned out to be not altogether disagreeable. As he was not the man to have his senses long led captive by the same woman, the honeymoon fervour of his attachment to Irene had grown cold for some years. The glowing passion of love, therefore, had not been outraged. As a matter of fact, he was tired of her, like thousands of men at the present moment, whom habit and sloth and kind integrity keep dully affectionate to their wives. He was tired of her effusiveness, of her strenuousness, of the high plane of feeling on which she seemed to live, and of her unremitting efforts to drag him thither. He had never felt at ease with her, had been forced to practise a thousand deceptions; to live, in short, a life alien to his nature. In the daily unconscious struggle between two individualities, the stronger and more finely tempered wins. Gerard had yielded simply because he had been afraid to resist. The subconsciousness of this moral flabbiness had always been present. It acted now as a forcing-bed for the above-mentioned crop of sentiments.
The violets in his buttonhole typified their bursting into riotous bloom. He walked across the Strand and down westward along the embankment, his veins tingling. The fresh breeze blowing against the tide raised a myriad ripples that sparkled in the sunshine. A gull that had strayed up river was hovering snow-white against the blue sky. The steamers, with their illusory air of crowded merriment, shot swiftly by, and gave a queer sense of the rushing life of liberty. Every man has certain moments of sensitiveness to external surroundings. With Gerard they were rare; but this was one. Life was holding out her promise, the world was before him. He felt magnanimous towards Hugh; almost grateful to him for having given him this opportunity of re-starting his existence. He was young still, only five-and-thirty. A recent legacy had put him beyond the necessity of working at an irksome and unremunerative profession. He leaned over the parapet by Somerset House, and in the factories across the water saw the wide stretching veldt and the lumbering bullock-carts and all the joys of the longed-for hunter’s life. A lingering respectability no longer sought to disguise the fact; he was heartily glad to be freed from Irene.
And so it happened that, some days afterwards, while Cahusac was sitting with Hugh before their hotel at Avignon, and opening the letters which the swarthy waiter had just brought, he was astonished to see Hugh start to his feet, and, white and trembling with passion, stare at a communication which he dashed presently upon the table.
“The villain—the damned villain!”
Cahusac queried mutely through his gold spectacles. “He is bringing an action for divorce—for divorce against her—do you understand?”
“Don’t shout so, man, and sit down,” said Cahusac, quietly. Hugh obeyed mechanically, tore at his great moustache, and went on in a voice rendered hoarse by his effort to keep it within conversational tones:
“He believes that story. Is proceeding on the strength of it. A woman who idolised him, made him her god—-the veriest cur would have understood. My God! Cahusac, I’ll go back at once and shoot him on sight. He doesn’t deserve to live. To cast off a woman like that. By heaven, I’ll kill him.”
“Don’t talk like a madman,” said Cahusac.
“I can’t sit here. Come for a turn with me. I shall be better walking.”
Cahusac stuffed his correspondence into his pocket and accompanied him out of doors. They passed beneath the frowning mass of the old Palace of the Popes, with its innumerable towers and machicolated battlements, and reached the outer boulevards. The mid-day sun beat fiercely down. Below them lay the blue Rhone, winding through this garden of Southern France. The sun, the scene, and Cahusac’s quiet yet sympathetic common sense gradually calmed Hugh’s blazing anger.
“Had you no suspicion that it might come to this?” asked Cahusac, as they walked along under the trees.
“None whatever. Do you think if I had, I should have loitered about here? I knew he had quarrelled with her. She told me. I could see nothing unnatural in it. There are some sacrifices beyond the power of the average man. She thought he was equal to herself. I didn’t. At least for a day or two I did—just after the trial. Then came disillusion. You were right in what you said about knowledge of men. One can only test them by tempest. This one has been tested. He’s no better, no worse, than that fellow over there with the white umbrella and the rolls of fat at the back of his neck. In fact, I was obliged, after a time, to sympathise with him. What right had I to expect that a man would make such a sacrifice for me? I was powerless to reconcile them. It was her urgent wish that I should disappear for a few weeks—until things got settled. But I never, for one second, thought he doubted. We have been friends from childhood, he and I—intimates. He knows every syllable that has ever passed between his wife and myself. A thunderbolt out of this blue sky could not appall me more than this ghastly news.”
“To tell you a secret,” said Cahusac, “I saw the clay feet of the idol long ago. A good fellow in his way—the average sensual man.”
“The discovery must be killing her,” said Hugh. “I wonder why she did not tell you before you started.”
“I don’t pretend to know. She had her reasons. I am quite satisfied. I could never put her into the dull category of common women. And to think that that man—Cahusac, he can’t believe it of her. Some infernal villainy is at work.”
He broke forth again. Cahusac quietly listened out the torrent of indignation. It held elements of the rhapsodic that interested him.
They returned through the town. Hugh rushed into the telegraph office and despatched a message:—
“Are you mad? I am coming.”
“I hope you have done nothing rash,” said Cahusac, who had waited for him outside.
“I’ve told him that I am coming. I must go back straight, Cahusac. It is treating you miserably. But you see I can’t go on. I must see him—put a stop to this infamous business—drag him to his knees before his wife.”
“Take a sober man’s advice, Colman,” said the other, “and have it out with Mrs. Merriam first.”
Hugh’s eyes flashed and his lips curled in a smile beneath his moustache. Superfluous counsel! His heart hungered for her. There was a spice of irony in his thanks.
A few hours later Cahusac accompanied him to the railway station. The final adieux came.
“I owe you a great debt of gratitude, Cahusac,” said Hugh.
“I have enjoyed every minute of the holiday,” replied the other heartily.
“So have I. It has made a fresh man of me. I can face this now, thanks to you. If it had come on top of all the rest, I believe it would have floored me. A man is only capable of a certain amount of convulsion at a time.”
They parted, and the great P. L. M. train carried Hugh swiftly northwards. He had spoken truly. He was under a deep obligation to the quiet, kind-hearted man whose calm judgment and equable nature formed a complete sedative to the fever of his mind, whose companionship was a cool hand on a hot brow. A great need of expansion had been the reaction from the intense restraint of the month preceding his trial. His thoughts paid Cahusac grateful tribute.
A study of time-tables suddenly brought him to realisation of the date. It was the anniversary of his wedding day. The first. It was scarcely credible. The disastrous twelvemonth, viewed in retrospect, seemed a space of many years. The memory of the first wedded kiss of Minna’s young ripe lips came faintly as if from a far past, yet not without a spasm of revulsion; the memory of a succubus. Elemental sex feelings, determining hatred, bend a man’s judgment of a woman to elemental fierceness. For this reason often are women beaten. He tried to shake off the haunting sense of her caresses—to bury her existence in oblivion. But she was too essential a factor in this ruin of lives amongst which he was walking. What had become of her? He clenched his hands together, and wished that she was dead.
Yet what was she doing? The petty and incongruous question teased him.
A train whirred past. Was it a strange fatality, or an equally strange telepathic sub-consciousness? In that train was Minna, convalescent after a long illness, being carried on to Marseilles, where she was to catch the steamer to Smyrna. So husband and wife passed each other in the darkness, on the first anniversary of their wedding-day, and the soul of each was filled with passionate repudiation of the other. And in either case the starry woman, whom one worshipped and the other dreaded and envied, was the determining cause.