CHAPTER XVII
The train drew up slowly beside the platform at Victoria, three-quarters of an hour late. Hugh stood by the half-opened door, in a fume of impatience. He had telegraphed from Paris to Irene that he would be with her at eight. It was that hour now. He must go straightway, for he had resolved to have speech with her that night, and further delay would render his visit untimely. A porter from the Grosvenor Hotel came running up at his call, and took charge of his bag and hold-all. Relieved of responsibilities of luggage, he pushed his way through the hurrying stream of passengers on the platform, towards the cab-rank. But before he could engage a cab, he heard the light patter of hastening footsteps behind him, and his name uttered in a familiar voice. He turned in astonished delight.
“Irene!”
“Another minute and I should have missed you,” she said somewhat breathlessly.
“You have come to meet me? I never dreamed—”
“Of course not,” she said with a smile. “Your sex never does. Did you think I could receive you at Redcliffe Gardens? Your name is anathema there. I am only allowed on sufferance. I could not bear you to be denied the door. Besides, I wanted to see you. So I came.”
“And you have been waiting all this time? Men are brutes, Irene. I did not think of it. Forgive me.”
“For what? For your anxiety to serve me? You were coming straight to me after a twenty-four hours’ journey, without stopping to wash your hands or take food. That needs no forgiveness.”
They had been standing at the spot where they had met. He looked anxiously into her face. It was singularly calm and tender, though the eyes were a little weary, and the past month had brought lines about the corners of the delicate mouth. Wonder was mingled with his feelings of relief, for he had expected to find a woman broken down with trouble. Then his phrase about the dull category of common women crossed his mind, and he smiled.
“Where shall we talk, Irene?” he said, with a man’s helplessness.
“Are you going to Sunnington?”
“No. It is too far. I am putting up at the hotel.”
“Let us go there,” she said, turning, with prompt decision..
“Will it be wise?” said Hugh.
She laughed, ever so little scornfully.
“A sweep is not afraid of blacking his fingers when he handles coal. I am past such conventionalities.”
“You are mistaken. Quite the contrary.”
“I am not mistaken, Hugh,” she replied with quiet firmness. “Please let me have my own way in this.”
He bowed in assent, and they walked on together.
“A private sitting-room?”
“That would be more comfortable.”
There was a long silence on their way to the hotel. The reference to the subject of their interview was a touch of ice. Presently he asked:
“How did you guess that I should come to Victoria instead of Charing Cross?”
“You wired ‘arrive 7.10’ I looked in a Bradshaw. The Charing Cross train is timed to get in five minutes later. Men haven’t all the sense, you know.”
The flash of her old bantering manner cheered him. He laughed a little compliment to her sagacity.
“I chose Victoria because it was nearer to you,” he said.
They reached the hotel. Hugh explained his wants at the office. A waiter conducted them to a private sitting-room, switched on the light, drew down the Venetian blinds, and left them to the room’s rather stiff and imposing comforts.
“You must be very tired,” said Irene, womanlike. “Go and get something to eat—and then we’ll talk. Do. To please me.”
Her old solicitude and kindly intimacy. The upheaval had not altered her attitude towards him. Her steadfastness touched him deeply.
“You have a heart of gold, Irene,” he said.
But he disclaimed hunger or fatigue, and sat down in the saddle-bag chair opposite her, wondering at the peace of mind that these few moments of companionship could bring him, in defiance of the devastating emotions at work below the surface. She pushed up her veil and regarded him wistfully.
“You are looking much older. Your face has grown lined—and no wonder.”
“What I have gone through is small compared with the ruin I have brought on you.”
“If it is in any way your doing, Hugh, you have brought me to the truth,” she replied.
“The truth?”
“Yes. I was living in a Fool’s Paradise. I see now that disillusion was bound to have come sooner or later. Instead of the glamour disappearing bit by bit through unhappy years, it has all been torn off at once. Gerard did not love me. He is quite a different being from the man I loved. I prefer realities to shams. I have arrived at the truth, and so I am content.”
“But he shall arrive at the truth, too,” cried Hugh, starting to his feet. “He shall lick the dust before you—for the deadly wrong he wants to inflict on you. I had no idea before I left. If I had seen him yesterday when the news reached me, I should have—Perhaps it is well I didn’t see him. Why did you send me away? Did you know at the time?”
“Yes,” she replied, “I knew. But I wanted to see whether it was merely blind rage or whether time would bring a change. I felt it was better for you two not to meet in hot blood.”
“I could have stopped it, at once. Given you back your happiness.”
“Do you understand me so little?” she asked with an air of reproach.
“I could have convinced him, brought him to your feet. And I shall—to-morrow.”
“For God’s sake don’t,” she exclaimed quickly.
“I must. He shall not drag your name through the mud of the courts. I should be a hound to allow it.”
“What can you do?”
“Prove to him where I was that night. I was in a woman’s company—not in her arms, thank God. You are the first living soul to whom I have avowed it. Both of you shall know her name and the reason of my silence.”
“No, no, for God’s sake, no!” cried Irene again. He stopped short, checked in his outburst by her tone, and the intense earnestness of her face.
“Why not?”
“Do you think I could accept his—apologies?”
“He would make reparation.”
“I will not have any. If his knowledge of me—of the love that I bore him—was not sufficient to clear me in his eyes, do you think it would be other than humiliation to me that he should be convinced by outside proof?”
“I enter only too deeply into your feelings, Irene. But it will put a stop to this unholy action. Do you suppose I can rest, while it is hanging over you?”
“Listen, Hugh,” she said with a half smile. “Sit down and let us talk quietly. We have been on the emotional strain too long. I don’t want this action stopped. I blessed the instinct that made you come to me first—so that I could tell you. I have never seen any transcendental sacredness in marriage. You know that well enough. I regard it as the social sanction of a man and woman living together. I would not live with Gerard again for all the world. It would also be his last desire. This is a blessed chance of sundering our lives, legally, for ever. There are no children to be considered. What public dishonour the divorce court can bring upon a woman is mine already, I have nothing to lose, Hugh, and all to gain.”
“What have you to gain?”
“My liberty. My own life.”
“Remember that society awards less penalty to the forgiven wife than to the divorced one.”
“I want no patronage of society,” she flashed out spiritedly. “I am not a repentant Magdalene.” There was a long silence. Hugh lay back in his chair, his cheek supported by his hand, his brows knit in stern thought. She sat in more feminine attitude, slightly leaning forward, her eyes fixed on the simpering imitation Watteau group on the fire-screen. Suddenly she spoke, without diverting her glance.
“I was acting when I saw you last. It was an effort to be calm. Now I am genuine.”
Her serenity had been won inch by inch; a great nature defying woman’s weakness that clung in bleeding desperation to the shattered illusions, finally routing it, and planting its own standard on the abandoned citadel. The battle had been fought during the interval of utter solitude. Yet not won without cost. She emerged calm, but weary and wounded and aching of heart, with loss of ideals and purpose in life. The committee of her beloved Institution, to which she had given so much earnest enthusiasm, had written an ashamed and pained suggestion of her resignation. She answered almost within the minute of reading, paying bravely the penalty of her tarnished name. But the rapid dashes of the pen were like sword thrusts through her flesh. With Gerard standing by her side on the starry plane of sacrifice, she would have accepted such penalties happily, for the dear friend’s sake. But alone, with Gerard against her, she needed all her proud strength to bear the pain unfalteringly. She had conquered, however, and could face the present and the future undaunted. Love was dead and buried. It had been her life. She would find a truer meaning to the strange new life upon which she was entering. But first the old apparellings must be cast away, and she must go forth free. She longed for the legal dissolution of the tie that still bound her to Gerard.
With a man’s burning sense of wrong inflicted on the beloved woman, Hugh could not appreciate the intense earnestness of her desire. To divorce her was a deadly insult which made the barbaric man’s fingers tingle to be at the throat of the insulter. Barbaric vanity, too, compelled his thoughts to the pitiable figure he would cut, if he stood by silent, and allowed this outrage to be committed. He shifted his attitude impatiently and tugged at his moustache. The woman read him, and smiled.
“Whatever your secret is, Hugh, you must keep it to yourself,” she said gently. “A man doesn’t face death for a trifle. That woman’s honour is still in your keeping.”
Hugh felt the phrase like a barbed arrow. He snapped his fingers.
“That for her honour! It was not in question. My own, if you like. I seduced no man’s wife nor dishonoured his children. I wrote you the truth from the prison—I can’t tell you more without entering upon the story.”
“If you did, I should hold you false to your word,” said Irene. “And that you have never been. Let me know one true man, at any rate. I despise Fatima curiosities with all my soul. Tell me truly. You made a solemn promise of silence?”
“Certainly.”
“Then you must not break it. I couldn’t accept my rehabilitation with Gerard at that price, even if I desired it.”
“I accepted a far greater sacrifice from you, Irene,” he said in a low voice.
The tone brought the starting tears into her eyes. Impulsively she rose from her seat, and threw herself on her knees by his side, her hands clasping the arm of his chair.
“Yes, Hugh. It was a great thing that I did for you. But gladly, Hugh dear, gladly. God forbid I should regret it ever. You can repay me by granting me any request I make you in the name of what I did for you—you could not refuse.”
“You have me in your power, Renie. My life is at your disposal.”
“Then you will serve me in the truest and deepest way by keeping faithful to your word, and letting Gerard take this course undisturbed. Promise me.”
He rose, raised her to her feet, and kissed her hands, bending over them in the courtly way that recalled vividly to her mind a similar action, years ago, when he had first pledged himself to her service.
“I promise,” he said.
She smiled shyly, and flushed in slight embarrassment at the recollection.
“I am glad you have come back,” she said. “I shall feel much stronger. A woman must always have something outside herself to lean on. We are poor things.”
Hugh protested. She was apart from other women. What woman alive could have come out of such an ordeal with her faith in humanity unshaken, with her queenly tenderness unhardened? What woman had the crystalline intellect that could remain undimmed by the soul’s gloom and could pierce through it to the heart of things? The man’s pent-up passion squandered itself in hyperbole. He raised her to transcendental heights of greatness. She stood, with her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes following him as he paced the room passionately declaiming her excellencies, and felt an odd little thrill of something like happiness. Here at least was a man who believed in her; a genuine man, who had given startling proof of heroism. Her clear intelligence rejected the rhapsody with an indulgent smile, but her woman’s nature, thirsting for comfort, drank in the praise.
The chime of the black marble clock on the mantelpiece warned her of the hour. She announced her departure.
“You will see me through this, Hugh? You are the only one left that I can trust.”
“The only help I can give you is inaction. The hardest for an impatient man.”
“You can talk to me and advise me.”
“Where? I cannot visit you.”
“I have taken a flat. Am busy furnishing. In a few days I shall be installed there. Meanwhile you can help me to fix things straight, if you will. That will be material assistance. Things like that are hard for a woman alone.”
“It will make me almost happy and light-hearted again,” he replied.
They moved together towards the door. At the threshold he paused and regarded her earnestly.
“Will you tell me one thing, Irene, before we part to-night—frankly and honestly?”
“What is it?” she asked, with a sudden flutter of anxiety.
“Is it possible that all this ruin I have brought about you has not changed your feelings towards me—turned them, ever so little, to bitterness?”
His heart leapt at the quick radiance that came into her face.
“I have never felt till now, what our friendship really meant.”
He lay awake for some time that night, lost in a great wonder at the staunch steel of her nature. Here was one who had lost everything the world held dear, husband, home, good-repute, society, work, all through him, a once rejected lover, on whom she had bestowed her friendship for her husband’s sake, and a word of regret had never passed her lips—still less a word of reproach; her old loyal friendship had come bright through such a test as stains and fouls the fairest comradeship between man and woman. Did the earth elsewhere hold humanity so transcendent? The commoner needs of the bruised child of clay that might have suggested a solution, the man forgot in his adoration. Up till now she had been the great and hopeless love of his life, to which he had been ever loyal in thought and word. Henceforward she was to be the divinity of his impassioned worship.
The deified being, unconscious of her apotheosis, but only feeling a heart-broken, weary woman, cheered by a dear and loyal friend, reached her home and found two letters awaiting her. She took them to her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed to read them. The first, a large packet, contained a collection of tracts and religious leaflets. She was about to throw them aside, when her eye caught a flaring title: “The Woman who Sinned and was Saved.” The other pamphlets bore analogous inscriptions. She flushed hot with wrath at the outrage—then rose and tore the insulting papers across and across in a frenzy of indignation, and threw them into the grate. The request of the committee had been a social necessity, to which she had bowed her head in resignation. The insult of this anonymous evangelist scorched her. Forgetting the other letter, she proceeded to undress, anxious to get into the darkness, and lay her burning cheek upon the pillow. She thought fiercely of Hugh, of the savage joy it would be if he could find out and horsewhip the offender. But before she extinguished her light, the second envelope caught her attention. She broke it open, setting her teeth against fresh humiliation. She read the letter. Then sat down on the bed and began to cry, like a foolish woman. It was only a little note from Mrs. Cahusac, urging, with delicate tact, the claims of a friend.
Hugh did not seek out Gerard. Days passed. At last they met one morning at Sunnington station. Hugh marched up straight to him.
“You are a pretty blackguard, Gerard Merriam.”
Gerard drew up his big frame and returned his old friend’s keen gaze with a stare.
“And you?”.
“I am an honest man, and in your heart you know it.”
“Honesty is a relative term.”
“And you know that your wife is a pure woman.”
“Who meets you on your arrival in England, and spends hours with you in a private room of an hotel?”
“Have you been setting spies on her?” asked Hugh.
“I follow the usual course adopted by men in my position.”
The district train dashed into the station.
“Irene was right,” returned Hugh, turning contemptuously. “You are not worth trying to convince.”
They entered different compartments, left the train at different stations, and for some years did not meet again face to face.
CHAPTER XVIII
The months passed. The decree nisi was pronounced, in due course made absolute. It was a period for Irene of entire calm and repose. The strong soul braces itself to stand the storm of great events; in the dull after-time it yields to the beseech-ings of the exhausted flesh. Day after day Irene read and thought and rested, scarcely desirous of other pursuits. Her outlook over men and things was narrowed within the horizon of an invalid or a prisoner. The waves of life beat unheeded against the fortress of her seclusion. Her servant Jane—who had begged to be taken into her service when the Sunnington establishment was broken up, on Gerard’s going abroad—the Cahusacs, and Hugh were the population of her universe. During these months of reaction and physical and moral apathy, she desired no more from life than immunity from its stress. An ample income, her own heritage, kept her assured against material cares, and the need of work for its own sake was stifled by the much greater need of self-reconstruction. And even after the healing of torn fibres, she loved the soothing calm of her lethargy.
Then, suddenly, a slight shock from the outer world gave a necessary stimulus. Hugh came to her one afternoon, in great excitement, brandishing an evening paper.
“The mystery is cleared at last! They have found the murderers. As I said all along—a common, sordid burglary!”
The discovery of some burglar’s tools buried in the wood behind The Lindens, coupled with the fact that, at the time of the murder, two well-known ticket-of-leave men had failed to report themselves, had put the police on the track. The miscreants were captured.
Irene revived, devoured greedily, during the succeeding weeks, the newspaper reports of the case. The wretches confessed during their trial; were eventually hanged. In spite of her own public disproof of Hugh’s guilt, she had never been able to free herself from the horrible feeling that he still walked before the eyes of the world under the black shadow of suspicion. This was eternally dispelled.
“Did you never think it possible,” said Hugh one day, “that I might have done it—in a fit of anger?”
“You would have given yourself up and faced the consequences like a man,” replied Irene.
When he mused, a while later, on the saying, a queer feeling of pity wove itself into his thoughts of her. If she only could see mortality in those upon whom she bestowed her affection or her friendship!
The awakened spirit of the woman rose with a hunger for fresh interests. To one with a keen mind, a fervent heart, and a full purse, London offers no lack of occupation. Gradually she gathered round her a little array of charitable duties, which she performed in quiet, unostentatious fashion. Again, the years of happy labour had borne ripe fruit of knowledge. She showed Hugh one day an article which she had written on “Some Unrecorded Facts of Infant Mortality.” In his enthusiastic way he bore it off to an editor of his acquaintance, who took it for his journal. It was the beginning of a series of articles signed “Delta” that attracted considerable attention. Thus Irene found a vocation. But being a very human woman, she sighed occasionally for that which she had surrendered and for the comfort that came not.
One afternoon Harroway stood in the street comically perturbed, watching the retreating figure of Hugh, who had marched away in great wrath. He shrugged his shoulders and returned to his office; but the perturbation remained and accompanied him home. It was his usual experience of Hugh Colman. The man was like a cigar that smokes mildly and comfortably until, piff! paff! with awful unexpectedness, some maliciously secreted gunpowder sends the thing to smithereens. Thus Harroway summed him up to his wife, during that evening’s dressing hour, while he tied his white tie. The imitations of the explosion, interrupting the operation and endangering the cambric, brought down conjugal rebuke.
“Your usual tact, I suppose, my dear,” said his wife suavely.
Harroway waited until the two little pats announced that he was well and duly cravatted and then burst out. Tact! If he had to humour Mr. Hugh Colman, whom on earth was he to speak straight to? A man who owed his first brief to him. A man whom he had set his heart on making the most brilliant advocate of the day—who had egregiously disappointed him. A man for whom he was even now trying to build up a chancery practice—Tact, indeed!
“You’ve said that so often, my dear,” said his wife. “If only you would tell me why he exploded to-day I might more readily sympathise with you.” Harroway explained. He had been lunching with Chevasse the artist. Talk had fallen upon Hugh and Mrs. Merriam. Chevasse, very broad-minded and kindly disposed to them both, had been talking the matter over with the Cahusacs. Mrs. Cahusac, of course, was unconventional enough to keep in with Mrs. Merriam, but Mrs. Chevasse was like Harroway’s own Selina, and drew certain lines.
“Very rightly,” interrupted Mrs. Harroway. “Hard and fast. Marriage lines.”
“Precisely,” said Harroway. “That’s Mrs. Chevasse’s attitude also. I uphold you. I’m fond of them both. I help Hugh all I can. Would help her if I could, but I’m not going to visit a woman my wife doesn’t visit. And my wife doesn’t countenance irregular liaisons. I’m old-fashioned enough to agree with you fully. Let them get married decently and we’d stretch a point. So would the Chevasses. One or two others doubtless would be ready to meet them. I dare say Gardiner and his wife. Everybody is sorry for them. As sorry as they are for Merriam. Somehow the luridness of the tragedy disposes people to forgive them.”
“The man’s pluck was heroic. Almost an atonement in itself,” said Mrs. Harroway. “Almost. So was the woman’s. But there is the eternal law, you know. Hundreds of women would be glad to meet Colman. You would, Selina.”
“Yes,” she replied frankly, “I should be willing to receive him, but he won’t come.”
“That’s where I admire the man. He mixes with men. Of course he’s obliged to. But he won’t cross the threshold of a woman who doesn’t receive Irene Merriam. He’s a strong-willed devil, and he’ll stick to that all his life. Selina, I wish to goodness I could believe the story she told Merriam! But it’s beyond possibility, and the other is only too miserably human.”
“If you want to get to Mr. Colman’s explosion, before the people come to dinner, Algernon, you had better make haste,” said his wife, fan and gloves in hand, advancing with the calm of buxom years to the ottoman where he was sitting.
“It will take you half an hour to put on your new gloves, my dear,” he retorted. He emphasised the fact of their newness, because he had brought them home with him that afternoon.
“So like a man,” murmured Mrs. Harroway.
“Well, sit down and I’ll tell you,” he said, making room for her on the ottoman.
She sat and busied herself with the gloves, and Harroway relapsed into narrative. In the middle of the discussion with Chevasse, in walked Hugh. The restaurant was one of his usual haunts. Sat down at their table, and talked about things in general in the charmingest of moods. One would have thought him the mildest mannered man—like Lambro.
“Like who?” said Mrs. Harroway.
“Don’t interrupt, we haven’t time,” replied Harroway with a chuckle.
He resumed. Chevasse went away, leaving him alone with Hugh. They had coffee, liqueurs, and cigars. Things very comfortable. Harroway enquired after Mrs. Merriam. She was well, though of course feeling the quietness of her life. She was writing on social subjects, under a pseudonym, and was making a little reputation. But it was bitter for her. Here was the chance. What need of tact?
Why didn’t he marry her? Hugh twirled his moustache. Selina knew the way. Began to look dangerous. He supposed that was what everybody was asking. There was no question of marriage between them. Never had been. Never would be. He drank off his coffee, threw away his cigar, and put his hands in his pockets. He worshipped the ground she trod on, said he; would give up his life for her any day. But no idea of marriage.
“Why not?” asked Mrs. Harroway, wide-eyed.
“I don’t know. How should I? I said it was his duty. Replies that he knows where his duty lies. I suggest that society demands it. He damns society. I get him to listen to me. Tell him about Chevasse. He looks at me with those blue sword-blade eyes of his, just as he looked at Hanna at the trial. ‘It’s for her sake,’ I said. ‘Pardon an old friend’s bluntness.’ ‘Of course I pardon anything you choose to say, you know that well enough,’ he replied. So I went on; told him that every woman in her position was not offered such a chance of social recognition. He calls the waiter, tosses him some silver, waves him away with a lordly gesture as he fumbles for change, and gets up. I accompany him to the street. ‘It’s very good of your wife and Chevasse—tell them so,’ says he, ‘but I’m not going to do it.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s scarcely honourable, Hugh.’ Whereupon he grips me on the shoulder—the rheumatic one, my dear; I feel it now—and bawls out, ‘Damn it, man, if you think me an infernal blackguard say so at once.’ I was nettled—also in physical pain—so I did say it. And then he gave his shoulders a shrug and stalked away like a madman.”
Mrs. Harroway looked at him demurely. “I suppose you think you managed it all beautifully.” Then she laughed. But Harroway got up indignant.
“Hang it all, Selina!” he exclaimed, “I did expect a little sympathy from you.”
Whereupon she mollified him, so that he should eat his dinner with an unruffled mind, and thus avoid indigestion. A wife’s thoughtfulness is often very far-reaching.
Meanwhile Hugh had marched away in great wrath from his friend and benefactor. A man in a false position is apt to be unreasonable. Harroway should have taken it for granted he was acting honourably to Irene. Society generally ought to take it for granted. The irony of his friends’ kind suggestion was a red rag to his anger. Marry her! It was a palpitating vision of a paradise in this world for which he would cheerfully accept damnation in the next. Even were he not tied to Minna for life, and were free to ask Irene, sheer honour and loyalty forbade him to go to her with protestations of passion. She did not love him in the common way of women. Thus there was a double barrier to the fool wish of that composite fool society! And the maddening part of it was the impossibility of saying the words and bringing forward the proofs to convince it of its folly.
If he had loved her loyally through her married life, he loved her now with a new reverence. A new sacredness had arisen in his conception of his attitude toward her, such as had not hitherto invested his thoughts of women, and her influence had made itself felt in his work-a-day life. He had vowed he would never again plead in a criminal court, and had kept his vow. He was struggling to carve out a career in chancery practice. He had to supplement his income with irregular journalism. It was a hard battle; but he was not a beaten man. If he needed stimulus there were flashing goads in Irene’s eyes.
On this evening he had arranged to dine with her at seven. It had just struck the hour when he arrived at her flat in Kensington. Jane, who opened the door, greeted him with a smile, hung up his overcoat, and showed him into the drawing-room. Irene threw down her book beside her on the sofa, and rose in her quick, impulsive fashion.
“At last. You are two minutes late. They have been tedious.”
He looked at her, his eyes strangely blinded. The gradation from her customary laughing tenderness into something tenderer had been imperceptible. Perhaps to her as much as to him.
“A welcome like that is sweet after a day’s work,” he said. “And I haven’t seen you for forty-eight hours.”
“Very dull ones, I assure you. I have striven to improve them. A harder task than the busy insect’s.”
“Gathering honey out of blue-books?”
He indicated a couple of government publications lying open, face downwards, on an arm-chair.
“Horrid things!” cried Irene, pouncing on them and stowing them beneath a chiffonnier on the other side of the room. “I am tired of them. Let us be happy this evening, and forget their existence.”
A glance of surprised questioning met her. Usually she was eager to talk of her pursuits.
“I have a great need of happiness, you know, Hugh,” she continued, rather defiantly. “I could suck up an ocean of it, like an infinite sponge.”
Then she laughed, and turning away to her writing table swept the loose sheets of manuscript lying on it into a drawer.
“You see, I’m beginning to cultivate nerves.”
He watched her somewhat anxiously. She was looking pale this evening, and her grey eyes were more lustrous than usual. A faint pearl-coloured gown unrelieved by a spot of brighter colour accentuated the delicacy of her face.
“You are overworking yourself, Renie. Needlessly. You want a holiday—a change to sunshine and blue skies.”
“I want my dinner,” said Irene. “Here it is.”
Jane made formal announcement. They went into the little dining-room, where the table was daintily set with flowers, bright silver and glass.
“You are wrong,” she said quietly, as she helped the soup. “I am not overworking myself. I sleep like a top and haven’t an ache or pain in my body.”
“Still a change of air would do you no harm.”
She assented with idle interest. Where should she go? He suggested Spain. Zaraws, not far from St. Sebastian, on the Bay of Biscay; fairly secure from English; warm, picturesque, with the comforts of a civilised hotel. From personal acquaintance he launched forth into glowing description. The golden sands and the purple seas of the south. The olive gardens with their shivering silver and green. The dark-eyed Basques. The wealth of sun and colour. Irene leant her elbow on the table and her eyes dwelt softly on him.
“Does it please you?” he asked.
“The way you talk of it does. I would sooner have that. It does me more good. You always speak as if the subject of the moment were the one interest of your life. I wish you had a parliamentary career before you.”
He laughed. “That is dangerously near satire, Renie.”
“Women only use satire when they want to hurt, and to hurt deeply,” she said. “I want to—” She stopped, embarrassed.
“What?” he asked.
Her eyes fell before his. She made a pretence of eating. Jane entered with the next course. They discussed the weather, until she had retired.
“What could I do to make your life happier, Renie?” he asked. A futile question; yet men will continue to put it.
“What can I do to make yours happier? That is the all-important point to me.”
“Nothing,” he said in a low voice.
“This is the happiest time of my life.”
“There is nothing I could do—beyond asking you to dinner?”
“Nothing,” he repeated. “If there were, I should tell you.”
“You have only to ask,” said Irene.
Woman could say no more. There was a short silence. Hugh understood—yet did not divine. The inner man fell at her feet, blessing her for her sweet graciousness of surrender. He was fine enough to perceive that she was grateful to him for restraining expression of the love long known to her, and that her words were meant to relieve him of the obligation to which he had bound himself. But it was divine and tender charity. Nothing more. It was her way to reward royally out of proportion to services rendered.
“Life is a queer tangle,” he remarked after a while.
“The art of unravelling it is the art of living. But one must hold the master thread.”
“The master thread is work,” said Hugh, forcing his tone to lightness.
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
She did not answer. A little involuntary sigh fluttered her bosom.
“I wish I could put you back into your bright circle, Renie,” he said, putting his own interpretation upon her mood. With Harroway’s words fresh in his memory, his heart grew heavy.
“Yes, I miss my friends,” she replied absently.
The talk dropped a little. She stayed with him while he smoked his cigarette, and then they went into the drawing-room. Hugh drew her chair to the fire, set a footstool for her feet, and placed a cushion behind her head. She thanked him shyly, trying to keep back a rush of thoughts. Gerard had never done such a thing for her in his life. Suddenly tears came into her eyes. Hugh bent over her, in some concern.
“My poor Renie.”
She smiled as she wiped the tears away.
“The past sometimes hurts,” she said. “But the present is healing it.”
Again their talk languished, strangely lacking spontaneity. The breath of a new influence was hovering round them. At last Hugh rose to go.
“You look so tired that I won’t keep you up any longer. God bless you for what you have said this evening.”
She turned her head aside quickly and began to tremble a little. He could see the flush rising on the sweet contours of her temples, and losing itself in the shadow of her hair. “Then you did understand?” she murmured.
“Yes. But it was the angel and not the woman that spoke,” he said rather huskily. “Besides, I could never ask you for what I did not feel myself free to accept.”
She turned and faced him, looking him bravely in the eyes, while the flush flamed into scarlet.
“You will never think—as other men might think——?”
Her insinuation flashed for the first time through his mind—that she was urging him to marry her for social reasons.
“Good God, no!” he said. “Don’t speak of it.”
A moment afterwards they parted, and Hugh rushed down the stairs with his temples buzzing.
CHAPTER XIX
Her divine and selfless nature had made the offer. He had unequivocally refused it. The incident was therefore closed. Ostrich-wise he hid his head from its consequent influences in their relations, and regarded them as non-existent. That was the humorous aspect of his moral attitude. On the other hand he believed in himself and in his strength of will to withstand temptation. He knew that Irene was too strong and proud a woman to desire marriage with him as a social rehabilitation. In fact, the thought insulted her. He could not conceive that she loved him, wanted him for her own sake. As for himself, he could set his teeth and defy the heart-hunger. Should she speak again, he would disclose to her the fact of his marriage. He hoped that no necessity would arise.
Some weeks passed. They saw each other frequently, but there were many little flaws in the frankness of their intercourse to which he wilfully blinded himself. There were times when a chance sweetness of look or phrase set his heart beating madly; when, also, a chance wistfulness in her manner brought back vividly the full meaning of Harroway’s offer, and made him curse its futility. After a while she appeared to grow less cheerful. She would regard him with a little tender air of surprised reproach, which he attributed to the weariness of her lot. One Saturday night they walked from Bedford Square, where the Cahusacs lived, to Hyde Park Corner, before they took the omnibus for High Street, Kensington. In spite of the bright, evening they had just spent, the walk was singularly silent. Towards the end she leaned on his arm, feeling tired. Involuntarily he drew her closer to him, but the constraint grew greater. In the omnibus he asked her whether she felt down-hearted. She alleged a headache. His ready sympathy sprang to her. Why had she walked all that distance? To see whether exercise would remedy it, she replied.
“Life is weighing upon you, Renie,” he said, as he parted from her at her door.
“It is Hugh—a little,” she answered. And the stone-staircase was not too dimly lighted for him not to perceive once more the curious, reproachful surprise in her glance.
He went away full of passionate remorse for what he had brought upon her. Her life was crushing her. A desperate remedy flashed through his mind. A terrible temptation. Yet keenly sensitive to that within him which concerned Irene, he perceived an ugly leering selfishness beneath the surface, and he put the temptation from him.
Meanwhile the series of articles over the signature “Delta” had attracted attention. Her identity leaked out. A paragraph appearing in the literary notes of one journal, and copied by several others, revealed it to the general public. In these modern days a pseudonym is as effective a disguise as a jacket worn inside out. She was disturbed in mind, dreading publicity. “Delta” had become as soiled a name as “Irene Merriam.” Would not that lessen the influence of her work? Men would pass her articles by with a contemptuous shrug, and her appeals would be unheeded. To cry in the wilderness is task enough; to cry in a voice scorned by the few stragglers who hear, would have depressed the Baptist himself.
Then there came a day, shortly after her walk from Bedford Square with Hugh, when Jane brought her a gentleman’s card bearing a name with which she was unfamiliar and a pencilled legend—“Women’s Democratic League.” She decided to see the visitor. A red-haired man with dubious linen and persuasive manners was admitted. She motioned him to a chair. He put his hat on the ground and explained his mission. Her articles had been so appreciated by the League that he had been deputed to invite her to lecture on behalf of that body. Irene was gratified but alarmed. Writing was one thing, lecturing another.
“I am sorry to refuse,” she told the man, “but I have given up my little attempts at public life.”
“That is a great pity, Mrs. Merriam. So many would welcome you back again. Do think over it. We can promise you a most enthusiastic audience. In fact, we might scheme out a short tour—all expenses paid and a handsome percentage on the takings. Your name would draw.”
“You are mistaken,” said Irene frankly. “Besides——”
“Oh, no,” he interrupted quickly. “Your name is so well known—all over England. People would run to see you. Putting things on a commercial basis, so long as people come, their object doesn’t matter.”
Then Irene saw. For a moment, she gasped for breath. It was a calm proposal to make capital out of her notoriety. She rose and pressed the electric bell by her side, and turned upon him with flaming cheeks, and anger in her eyes.
“How dare you!” she cried.
The man took up his hat and broke into apologies. Jane appeared at the door.
“Show this person out,” said Irene.
The democratic delegate retired ignominiously. Irene walked about the room, mechanically rearranging perfectly orderly arranged trifles, in the feminine way, dazed with wrath and humiliation. A short while afterwards, she did not know whether to rage against the abandoned cynicism of the proposal, or to laugh cynically at her own touching simplicity in the matter of her former mental disquietude. In the midst of her anger arrived Elinor Cahusac on a flying call. Irene related the scene midway between tears and laughter. Mrs. Cahusac listened, sympathised, and, as soon as she reached her home, informed her husband of the insult that had been offered to Irene. And the next afternoon Cahusac, meeting Hugh by chance, in the Strand, repeated his wife’s story. An hour later Hugh was ringing furiously at Irene’s door.
He found her sitting before the fire, with her writing-board on her lap. She raised startled eyes as he entered, laid his hat and stick on a table, and came to her side. She rose instinctively, leaving the board on the broad arm of the chair.
“Is what Cahusac tells me true, Renie?” he cried impetuously—“about that scoundrel insulting you yesterday?”
“I told Elinor something.”
“And why did you not tell me last evening?”
“What use would there be in worrying you for nothing?” she replied evasively.
The light of the chandelier beneath which she was standing fell upon her averted face. The heaviness of her eyelids struck him; a crumpled ball of a handkerchief in her hand confirmed the betraying lids.
“And I come in unexpectedly and find you crying. You would not have told me the cause of that either.”
“I have no right to worry you,” she replied again.
“I wish to God I had the right to make you,” he cried passionately, goaded by the insult offered her and by the evidence of her unhappiness.
“I don’t think you do,” she said in a low voice.
“I?” he queried.
Taking her by the wrist, he impulsively led her to the sofa and seated her by his side.
“This state of things cannot go on,” he said harshly. “We are losing each other. I must explain. I will tell you about that woman, the one you know of.”
Irene started away from him, as though the word were a lash.
“Is she between us? I don’t want to hear a breath of her. I won’t listen. What is she to me? Let us continue in the old way.”
“We have come to the end of it,” said Hugh.
“Do you love her?” she asked, fiercely.
“I have every reason to hate and despise her,” said Hugh between his teeth. “You know very well that I love you with every fibre of my being.”
Irene held him with her eyes. The few seconds seemed an incalculable time.
“And you know that I love you with all my heart and soul. So why will you not take me?” she said slowly.
He sprang to his feet.
“You love me—like that?”
The great wonder of glory that suddenly held his soul in awe, shone from his eyes, dazzling and confusing the woman, whose own lowered tremulously.
“Like that?” he repeated. “Say it again.”
“I have told you too much already,” she murmured. And then the woman’s tears and tenderness all gushed forth, and she raised swimming eyes to him.’ “Oh, Hugh dear, why did you make me tell you?” In a moment she was sobbing in his arms, clinging to him, yielding herself to the ecstatic solace. Half shamed, she drooped her head and hid her face against his breast, and he held her tightly to him. Then there was a long great silence. The woman’s heart drank thirstily of the intoxicating flood of happiness. But the man’s burned white hot in the stress of agonising conflict. She could not see his drawn face. His short sharp breathing only told her of emotion too deep for words. Its pain did not pierce through her bliss. Her fair head rested contentedly against the molten furnace. Through such brief, fierce, soul-scorching fires come the tremendous decisions of life.
“Will you marry me, Irene?” he said at last.
She moved her head for a moment, like a child. Then she raised it, and drew herself gently from him.
“Do you know why I was crying—a woman is a fool, Hugh dear—when you came in?”
“Why?”
“I thought you did not want me. It was bitter. A turning of the tables.”
“Since when have you loved me?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Always, perhaps,” she replied, turning away. “It’s a question you must never ask me.”
How or when it had come she knew not. What woman does? Often she may point back to some spring morning of the heart, when love burst into blossom, and say: “Then I knew.” But she is aware that the petals had long lain delicately folded in the sheaths, and is dimly reminiscent of growth and expansion. To the how and when of that she can return no answer. But Irene looked back and found strange tendernesses working darkly through all the years. Could it have been possible——? Her womanhood shrank frightened from the suggestion—then tiptoed, with held breath, up to it again. The union of the two men in her affection had dated from the first day they had spoken to her on the P. & O. steamer, and it had existed continuously until one broke away, leaving the other untouched. Hugh’s loyal love for her had been one of the inner glories of her life. She had felt it to be the complement of Gerard’s. So much was clear. But was her own affection for Hugh complementary to her love for Gerard? Could her feelings towards Gerard have maintained their homogeneousness without the other influence? Was it, in brief, an inextricable dual love? She found no answers. All was a mystery—like the colour of an opal, with an elusive white of shame. Yet no thought of longing unsatisfied had ever tinged the purity of her wifely worship. There her soul was free from doubt. Yet again, on the other hand, Hugh had ever been inexpressibly dear to her. The cult of their idealised brotherhood had further fused these complex emotions together, thereby rendering the mystery more inscrutable.
“I can never tell you,” she repeated. “Never. Oh, Hugh dear, I have been so lost and lonely.”
His arm closed protectingly round her.
“Forgive me, dear,” she said. “I once thought you a weak man—perhaps that is why I did not love you at first. But now I know that you are strong—and I need your strength.”
That was the deep key-note of her happiness. Once she had compared the two men; rock and shifting sand. Idolatry had inverted her vision. It had been shifting sand and rock. She was safe on the rock now. Often, lately, had she looked back, in sickened wonder, upon that idolatry. The whole of her true life with Gerard had revealed itself: the dull taciturnity she had revered as strength, the ungracious compliances she had raised to tendernesses or noble actions, the hundred faults she had transfigured to virtues. In vain she looked for one sparkling deed, one act of unselfishness, one spontaneous loving caress that she had treasured, even one proof of more than common mental attainment. In the very work-a-day business of life he had deceived her; his practice at the bar was worth little or nothing. She was stupefied at her own delusion.
But now she was safe. Now she looked back upon Hugh’s life, and saw it filled with innumerable deeds of devotion and loyalty. His brilliance in the world was a matter not of blind faith but of direct testimony. His heroism had not been potential but actually displayed. Twice she had known him to face death. Once to save his friend’s life. Once to save a woman’s honour. Of the latter she was convinced. Convinced also of his impeccability as regards the woman. On the part this creature had played in his life she was too proud to speculate. He did not love her. That was certain. It sufficed the hungering woman. The strong soul refused to seek further. Yes, she was safe; the foundations of her life laid on the living rock. The overwhelming happiness of it!
She stood before him radiant. A black silk blouse, with frilled upstanding collar lightly caressing her throat, heightened the glow in her face. He had studied its infinite variety of expression, and knew it in all its phases, enthusiasm, anger, sorrow, gentleness. To-day it was a revelation. To only one man in her life can a woman reveal the full glory of her soul and sex. The last shreds of his compunction were swept away by a mighty wave of pride.
“I would have gone through hell-fire to win you,” he said.
She smiled, happily unconscious of his allusion, and replied in tender raillery.
“You have only had to go through the hollow form of asking me. Was it so hard?”
“I should never have asked you to marry me out of pity.”
“I knew that,” she replied. “And now—are you sure that you will be happy?”
“Happy?” he echoed.
He laughed, walked across the room, back again, and ran his fingers through his hair. The happiness began to intoxicate him. He stopped before her and took both her hands.
“Do you know what a man’s love is?” he cried.
He paced his room that night in a hot fever of joy, with pulses throbbing and nerves vibrating. Irene’s love was his at last, his for ever, to change life from an ill-weeded garden to glittering fields of an unimagined heaven beyond hyperbole of speech. To preserve the ineffable gift, he would take upon himself the burden of a hundred crimes. In this hour of rapture the burden of the one he had resolved to commit sat lightly on his shoulders. She ran no risk. The secret of the marriage was safe. It had lain buried in the Brighton Registrar’s office through all the lurid publicity of the trial. Minna would keep it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Anna Cassaba was bound body and soul to Minna. And then the crime was for the adored one’s greater happiness. It would lift from her the crushing weight of social loneliness. It would flood her life with the passion of a man’s worship. The vision of the full harmonious days to come rose up before him. He laughed aloud. There are times when a man feels strong enough to defy Fate.