Leurs amitiés et leurs amours.
—BOURGET.
Many sarcastic but true words have been said by man, and in no jealous spirit, concerning woman's friendship for woman. The passing judgment of the majority of men on such devotion might be summed up in the words, "Occupy till I come." It does occupy till they do come. And if they don't come the hastily improvised friendship may hold together for years, like an unseaworthy boat in a harbor, which looks like a boat but never goes out to sea.
But, nevertheless, here and there among its numberless counterfeits a friendship rises up between two women which sustains the life of both, which is still young when life is waning, which man's love and motherhood cannot displace nor death annihilate; a friendship which is not the solitary affection of an empty heart, nor the deepest affection of a full one, but which nevertheless lightens the burdens of this world and lays its pure hand upon the next.
Such a friendship, very deep, very tender, existed between Rachel West and Hester Gresley. It dated back from the nursery days, when Hester and Rachel solemnly eyed each other, and then made acquaintance in the dark gardens of Portman Square, into which Hester introduced a fortified castle with a captive princess in it, and a rescuing prince and a dragon, and several other ingredients of romance to the awed amazement of Rachel—stolid, solid, silent Rachel—who loved all two and four legged creatures, but who never made them talk to each other as Hester did. And Hester, in blue serge, told Rachel, in crimson velvet, as they walked hand in hand in front of their nursery-maids, what the London sparrows said to each other in the gutters, and how they considered the gravel path in the square was a deep river suitable to bathe in. And when the spring was coming, and the prince had rescued the princess so often from the dungeon in the laurel-bushes that Hester was tired of it, she told Rachel how the elms were always sighing because they were shut up in town, and how they went out every night with their roots into the green country to see their friends, and came back, oh! so early in the morning, before any one was awake to miss them. And Rachel's heart yearned after Hester, and she gave her her red horse and the tin duck and magnet, and Hester made stories about them all.
At last the day came when Rachel's mother, who had long viewed the intimacy with complacency, presented her compliments, in a note-sheet with two immense gilt crests on it, to Hester's aunt, and requested that her little niece might be allowed to come to tea with her little daughter. And Lady Susan Gresley, who had never met the rich iron-master's wife in this world, and would probably be equally exclusive in the next, was about to refuse, when Hester, who up to that moment had apparently taken no interest in the matter, suddenly cast herself on the floor in a paroxysm of despair and beat her head against the carpet. The tearful entreaties of her aunt gradually elicited the explanation, riddled by sobs, that Hester could never take an interest in life again, could never raise herself even to a sitting position, nor dry her eyes on her aunt's handkerchief, unless she were allowed to go to tea with Rachel and see her dormouse.
Lady Susan, much upset herself, and convinced that these outbursts were prejudicial to Hester's health, gave way at once, and a few days later Hester, pale, shy, in a white muffler, escorted by mademoiselle, went to tea in the magnificent house on the other side of the square, and saw Rachel's round head without a feathered hat on it, and both children were consumed by shyness until the two mademoiselles withdrew into another room, and Rachel showed Hester the dormouse which she had found in the woods in the country, and which ate out of her hand. And Hester made a little poem on it, beginning,
and so, with many breaks, the friendship attained a surer footing, and the intimacy grew with their growth, in spite of the fact that Lady Susan had felt unable (notwithstanding the marked advances of Mrs. West, possibly because of them) to enlarge her visiting-list, in spite of many other difficulties which were only in the end surmounted by the simplicity of character which Rachel had not inherited from her parents.
And then, after both girls had danced through one London season in different ball-rooms, Rachel's parents died, her mother first, and then—by accident—her father, leaving behind him an avalanche of unsuspected money difficulties, in which even his vast fortune was engulfed.
Hard years followed for Rachel. She ate the bread of carefulness in the houses of poor relations not of high degree, with whom her parents had quarrelled when they had made their money and began to entertain social ambitions. She learned what it was to be the person of least importance in families of no importance. She essayed to teach, and failed. She had no real education. She made desperate struggles for independence, and learned how others failed besides herself. She left her relations and their bitter bread and came to London, and struggled with those who struggled, and saw how Temptation spreads her net for bleeding feet. Because she loved Hester she accepted from her half her slender pin-money. Hester had said, "If I were poor, Rachel, how would you bear it if I would not let you help me?" And Rachel had wept slow, difficult tears, and had given Hester the comfort of helping her. The greater generosity was with Rachel, and Hester knew it.
And as Rachel's fortunes sank, Hester's rose. Lady Susan Gresley had one talent, and she did not lay it up in a napkin. She had the art of attracting people to her house, that house to which Mrs. West had never forced an entrance. Hester was thrown from the first into a society which her clergyman brother, who had never seen it, pronounced to be frivolous, worldly, profane, but which no one has called dull. There were many facets in Hester's character, and Lady Susan had managed to place her where they caught the light. Was she witty? Was she attractive? Who shall say? Man is wisely averse to "cleverness" in a woman, but if he possesses any armor wherewith to steel himself against wit it is certain that he seldom puts it on. She refused several offers, one so brilliant that no woman ever believed that it was really made.
Lady Susan saw that her niece, without a fortune, with little beauty save that of high breeding, with weak health, was becoming a personage. "What will she become?" people said. And in the meanwhile Hester did nothing beyond dressing extremely well. And everything she saw and every person she met added fuel to an unlit fire in her soul.
At last Rachel was able to earn a meagre living by type-writing, and for four years, happy by contrast with those when despair and failure had confronted her, she lived by the work of her hands among those poor as herself. Gradually she had lost sight of all her acquaintances. She had been out of the school-room for too short a time to make friends. And, alas! in the set in which she had been launched poverty was a crime; no, perhaps not quite that, but as much a bar to intercourse as in another class a want of the letter h is found to be.
It was while Rachel was still struggling for a livelihood that the event happened which changed the bias of her character, as a geranium transplanted from the garden changes its attitude in a cottage window.
On one of the early days of her despair she met on the dreary stairs of the great rabbit-warren in which she had a room, a man with whom she had been acquainted in the short year of her social life before the collapse of her fortunes. He had paid her considerable attention, and she had thought once or twice, with momentary bitterness, that, like the rest, he had not cared to find out what had become of her. She greeted him with shy but evident pleasure. She took for granted he had come to see her, and he allowed her to remain under that delusion. In reality he had been hunting up an old model whom he wanted for his next picture, and who had silently left Museum Buildings some months before without leaving his address. He had genuinely admired her, though he had forgotten her, and he was unaffectedly delighted to see her again.
That one chance meeting was the first of many. Flowers came to Rachel's little room, and romance came with them. Rachel's proud, tender heart struggled, and then gave way before this radiant first love blossoming in the midst of her loneliness. At last, on a March afternoon, when the low sun caught the daffodils he had brought her, he told her he loved her.
Days followed, exquisite days, which have none like them in later life whatever later life may bring. That year the spring came early, and they went often together into the country. And that year when all the world was white with blossom the snow came and laid upon earth's bridal veil a white shroud. Every cup of May blossom, every petal of hawthorn, bent beneath its burden of snow. And so it was in the full spring-tide of Rachel's heart. The snow came down upon it. She discovered at last that though he loved her he did not wish to marry her; that even from the time of that first meeting he had never intended to marry her. That discovery was a shroud. She wrapped her dead love in it, and would fain have buried it out of her sight.
But only after a year of conflict was she suffered to bury it—after a year during which the ghost of her dead ever came back, and came back to importune her vainly with its love. Rachel's poor neighbors grew accustomed to see the tall, handsome, waiting figure which always returned and returned, but which at last, after one dreadful day, was seen no more in Museum Buildings. Rachel had laid the ghost at last. But the conflict remained graven in her face.
On a certain cold winter morning Hester darted across the wet pavement from the brougham to the untidy entrance of Museum Buildings where Rachel still lived. It was a miserable day. The streets and bare trees looked as if they had been drawn in in ink, and the whole carelessly blotted before it was dry. All the outlines were confused, blurred. The cold penetrated to the very bones of the shivering city.
Rachel had just come in, wet and tired, bringing with her a roll of manuscript to be transcribed. A woman waiting for her on the endless stone stairs had cursed her for taking the bread out of her mouth.
"He always employed me till you came," she shrieked, shaking her fist at her, "and now he gives it all to you because you're younger and better-looking."
She gave the woman as much as she dared spare, the calculation did not take long, and went on climbing the stairs.
Something in the poor creature's words, something vague but repulsive in her remembrance of the man who paid her for the work by which she could barely live, fell like lead into Rachel's heart. She looked out dumbly over the wilderness of roofs. The suffering of the world was eating into her soul; the suffering of this vast travailing East London, where people trod each other down to live.
"If any one had told me," she said to herself, "when I was rich, that I lived on the flesh and blood of my fellow-creatures, that my virtue and ease and pleasure were bought by their degradation and toil and pain, I should not have believed it, and I should have been angry. If I had been told that the clothes I wore, the food I ate, the pen I wrote with, the ink I used, the paper I wrote on—all these, and everything I touched, from my soap to my match-box, especially my match-box, was the result of sweated labor, I should not have believed it, I should have laughed. But yet it is so. If I had not been rich once myself I should think as all these people do, that the rich are devils incarnate to let such things go on. They have the power to help us. We have none to help ourselves. But they never use it. The rich grind the poor for their luxuries with their eyes shut, and we grind each other for our daily bread with our eyes open. I have got that woman's work. I have struggled hard enough to get it, but, though I did not realize it, I might have known that I had only got on to the raft by pushing some one else off it."
Rachel looked out across the miles of roofs which lay below her garret window. The sound was in her ears of that great whirlpool wherein youth and beauty and innocence go down quick day by day. The wilderness of leaden roofs turned suddenly before her eyes into a sullen furrowed sea of shame and crime which, awaiting no future day of judgment, daily gave up its awful dead.
Presently Hester came in, panting a little after the long ascent of worn stairs, and dragging with her a large parcel. It was a fur-lined cloak. Hester spread it mutely before her friend, and looked beseechingly at her. Then she kissed her, and the two girls clung together for a moment in silence.
"Dearest," said Rachel, "don't give me new things. It isn't that—you know I did take it when I was in need. But, oh, Hester, I know you can't afford it. I should not mind if you were rich, at least, I would try not, but—if you would only give me some of your old clothes instead. I should like them all the better because you had worn them." And Rachel kissed the lapel of Hester's coat.
"I can't," whispered Hester into Rachel's hair. "The best is only just good enough."
"Wouldn't it be kinder to me?"
Hester trembled, and then burst into tears.
"I will wear it, I will wear it," said Rachel, hurriedly. "Look, Hester! I have got it on. How deliciously warm! and—do look!—it has two little pockets in the fur lining."
But Hester wept passionately, and Rachel sat down by her on the floor in the new cloak till the paroxysm was over.
How does a subtle affinity find a foothold between natures which present an obvious, a violent contrast to each other? Why do the obvious and the subtle forget their life-long feud at intervals and suddenly appear for a moment in each other's society?
Rachel was physically strong. Hester was weak. The one was calm, patient, practical, equable, the other imaginative, unbalanced, excitable.
Life had not spoiled Rachel. Lady Susan Gresley had done her best to spoil Hester. The one had lived the unprotected life, and showed it in her bearing. The other had lived the sheltered life, and bore its mark upon her pure forehead and youthful face.
"I cannot bear it," said Hester at last. "I think and think, and I can't think of anything. I would give my life for you, and you will hardly let me give you £3 10s. 6d. That is all it cost. It is only frieze, that common red frieze, and the lining is only rabbit." A last tear fell at the word rabbit. "I wanted to get you a velvet one, just the same as my new one, lined with chinchilla, but I knew it would only make you miserable. I wish," looking vindictively at the cloak—"I wish rabbits had never been born."
Rachel laughed. Hester was evidently recovering.
"Mr. Scarlett was saying last night that no one can help any one," continued Hester, turning her white, exhausted face to her friend. "He said that we are always so placed that we can only look on. And I told him that could not be true, but, oh, in my heart, Rachel, I have felt it was true all these long, long five years since you have lived here."
Rachel came and stood beside her at the little window. There was just room for them between the type-writer and the bed.
Far below, Hester's brougham was pacing up and down.
"Then are love and sympathy nothing?" she said. "Those are the real gifts. If I were rich to-morrow I should look to you just as I do now for the things which money can't buy. And those are the things"—Rachel's voice shook—"which you have always given me, and which I can't do without. You feel my poverty more than I do myself. It crushed me at first when I could not support myself. Now that I can—and in everything except money I am very rich—I am comparatively happy."
There was a long silence.
"Perhaps," said Rachel at last, with difficulty, "if I had remained an heiress Mr. Tristram might have married me. I feel nearly sure he would have married me. In that case I lost my money only just in time to prevent a much greater misfortune, and I am glad I am as I am."
Rachel remembered that conversation often in after-years with a sense of thankfulness that for once she, who was so reticent, had let Hester see how dear she was to her.
The two girls stood long together cheek against cheek.
And as Hester leaned against Rachel the yearning of her soul towards her suddenly lit up something which had long lain colossal, but inapprehended, in the depths of her mind. Her paroxysm of despair at her own powerlessness was followed by a lightning flash of self-revelation. She saw, as in a dream, terrible, beautiful, inaccessible, but distinct, where her power lay, of which restless bewildering hints had so often mocked her. She had but to touch the houses and they would fall down. She held her hands tightly together lest she should do it. The strength as of an infinite ocean swept in beneath her weakness, and bore it upon its surface like a leaf.
"You must go home," said Rachel gently, remembering Lady Susan's punctual habits.
Hester kissed her absently and went out into the new world which had been pressing upon her all her life, the gate of which Love had opened for her. For Love has many keys besides that of her own dwelling. Some who know her slightly affirm that she can only open her own cheap patent padlock with a secret word on it that everybody knows. But some who know her better hold that hers is the master-key which will one day turn all the locks in all the world.
A year later Hester's first book, An Idyll of East London, was reaping its harvest of astonished indignation and admiration, and her acquaintances—not her friends—were still wondering how she came to know so much of a life of which they decided she could know nothing, when suddenly Lady Susan Gresley died, and Hester went to live in the country with her clergyman brother.
A few months later still, and on a mild April day, when the poor London trees had black buds on them, Rachel brushed and folded away in the little painted chest of drawers her few threadbare clothes, and put the boots—which the cobbler, whose wife she had nursed, had patched for her—under the shelf which held her few cups and plates and the faithful tin kettle, which had always been a cheerful boiler. And she washed her seven coarse handkerchiefs, and put them in the washhandstand drawer. And then she raked out the fire and cleaned the grate, and set the room in order. It was quickly done. She took up her hat, which lay beside a bundle on the bed. Her hands trembled as she put it on. She looked wistfully round her, and her face worked. The little room which had looked so alien when she came to it six years ago had become a home. She went to the window and kissed the pane through which she had learned to see so much. Then she seized up the bundle and went quickly out, locking the door behind her, and taking the key with her.
"I am going away for a time, but I shall come back," she said to the cobbler's wife on the same landing.
"No one comes back as once goes," said the woman, without raising her eyes from the cheap blouse which she was finishing, which kept so well the grim secret of how it came into being that no one was afraid of buying it.
"I am keeping on the room."
The woman smiled incredulously, giving one sharp glance at the bundle. She had seen many flittings. She should buy the kettle when Rachel's "sticks" were sold by the landlord in default of the rent.
"Well, you was a good neighbor," she said. "There's a-many as 'ull miss you. Good-bye, and good luck to ye. I sha'n't say as you've left."
"I shall come back," said Rachel, hoarsely, and she slipped down-stairs like a thief. She felt like a thief. For she was rich. The man who had led her father into the speculations which had ruined him had died childless, and had bequeathed to her a colossal fortune.
CHAPTER VII
Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?—EMERSON.
A fortnight had passed since the drawing of lots, and Lady Newhaven remained in ignorance as to which of the two men had received his death-warrant. Few have found suspense easy to bear; but for the self-centred an intolerable element is added to it, which unselfish natures escape. From her early youth Lady Newhaven had been in the habit of viewing life in picturesque tableaux vivants of which she invariably formed the central figure. At her confirmation the Bishop, the white-robed clergy, and the other candidates had served but as a nebulous background against which her own white-clad, kneeling figure, bowed in reverent devotion, stood out in high relief.
When she married Lord Newhaven he took so slight a part, though a necessary one, in the wedding groups that their completeness had never been marred by misgivings as to his exact position in them. When, six years later, after one or two mild flirtations which only served as a stimulus to her love of dress—when at last she met, as she would have expressed it, "the one love of her life," her first fluctuations and final deviation from the path of honor were the result of new arrangements round the same centre.
The first groups in which Hugh took part had been prodigies of virtue. The young mother with the Madonna face—Lady Newhaven firmly believed that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows, resembled that of a Madonna—with her children round her, Lord Newhaven as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young, handsome, devoted, heartbroken, and ennobled for life by the contemplation of such impregnable virtue.
"You accuse me of coldness," she had imagined herself saying in a later scene, when the children and the husband would have made too much of a crowd, and were consequently omitted. "I wish to Heaven I were as cold as I appear."
And she had really said it later on. Hugh never did accuse her of coldness, but that was a detail. Those words, conned over many times, had nevertheless actually proceeded out of her mouth. Few of us have the power of saying anything we intend to say. But Lady Newhaven had that power, and enjoyed also in consequence a profound belief in her prophetic instincts; while others, Hugh not excepted, detected a premeditated tone in her conversation, and a sense of incongruity between her remarks and the occasion which called them forth.
From an early date in their married life Lord Newhaven had been in the habit of discounting these remarks by making them in rapid rotation himself before proceeding to the matter in hand.
"Having noticed that a mother—I mean a young mother—is never really happy in the absence of her children, and that their affection makes up for the carelessness of their father, may I ask, Violet, what day you wish to return to Westhope?" he said one morning at breakfast.
"Any day," she replied. "I am as miserable in one place as in another."
"We will say Friday week, then," returned Lord Newhaven, ignoring, as he invariably did, any allusions to their relative position, and because he ignored them she made many. "The country," he added, hurriedly, "will be very refreshing after the glare and dust and empty worldly society of London."
She looked at him in anger. She did not understand the reason, but she had long vaguely felt that all conversation seemed to dry up in his presence. He mopped it all into his own sponge, so to speak, and left every subject exhausted.
She rose in silent dignity, and went to her boudoir and lay down there. The heat was very great, and another fire was burning within her, withering her round cheek, and making her small, plump hand look shrunk and thin. A fortnight had passed, and she had not heard from Hugh. She had written to him many times, at first only imploring him to meet her, but afterwards telling him she knew what had happened, and entreating him to put her out of suspense, to send her one line that his life was not endangered. She had received no answer to any of her letters. She came to the conclusion that they had been intercepted by Lord Newhaven, and that no doubt the same fate had befallen Hugh's letters to herself. For some time past, before the drawing of lots, she had noticed that Hugh's letters had become less frequent and shorter in length. She understood the reason now. Half of them had been intercepted. How that fact could account for the shortness of the remainder may not be immediately apparent to the prosaic mind, but it was obvious to Lady Newhaven. That Hugh had begun to weary of her could not force the narrow entrance to her mind. Such a possibility had never been even considered in the pictures of the future with which her imagination busied itself. But what would the future be? The road along which she was walking forked before her eyes, and her usual perspicacity was at fault. She knew not in which of those two diverging paths the future would lie.
Would she in eighteen months' time—she should certainly refuse to marry within the year—be standing at the altar in a "confection" of lilac and white with Hugh; or would she be a miserable wife, moving ghostlike about her house, in colored raiment, while a distant grave was always white with flowers sent by a nameless friend of the dead? "How some one must have loved him!" she imagined Hugh's aged mother saying. And once, as that bereaved mother came in the dusk to weep beside the grave, did she not see a shadowy figure start up, black-robed, from the flower-laden sod, and, hastily drawing a thick veil over a beautiful, despairing face, glide away among the trees? At this point Lady Newhaven always began to cry. It was too heart-rending. And her mind in violent recoil was caught once more, and broken on the same wheel. "Which? Which?"
A servant entered.
"Would her ladyship see Miss West for a few minutes?"
"Yes," said Lady Newhaven, glad to be delivered from herself, if only by the presence of an acquaintance.
"It is very charitable of you to see me," said Rachel. "Personally, I think morning calls ought to be a penal offence. But I came at the entreaty of a former servant of yours. I feel sure you will let me carry some message of forgiveness to her, as she is dying. Her name is Morgan. Do you remember her?"
"I once had a maid called Morgan," said Lady Newhaven. "She was drunken, and I had to part with her in the end; but I kept her as long as I could in spite of it. She had a genius for hair-dressing."
"She took your diamond heart pendant," continued Rachel. "She was never found out. She can't return it, for, of course, she sold it and spent the money. But now at last she feels she did wrong, and she says she will die easier for your forgiveness."
"Oh! I forgive her," said Lady Newhaven, indifferently. "I often wondered how I lost it. I never cared about it." She glanced at Rachel, and added tremulously, "My husband gave it me."
A sudden impulse was urging her to confide in this grave, gentle-eyed woman. The temptation was all the stronger because Rachel, who had only lately appeared in society, was not connected with any portion of her previous life. She was as much a chance acquaintance as a fellow-passenger in a railway carriage.
Rachel rose and held out her hand.
"Don't go," whispered Lady Newhaven, taking her outstretched hand and holding it.
"I think if I stay," said Rachel, "that you may say things you will regret later on when you are feeling stronger. You are evidently tired out now. Everything looks exaggerated when we are exhausted, as I see you are."
"I am worn out with misery," said Lady Newhaven. "I have not slept for a fortnight. I feel I must tell some one." And she burst into violent weeping.
Rachel sat down again, and waited patiently for the hysterical weeping to cease. Those in whom others confide early learn that their own engagements, their own pleasures and troubles, are liable to be set aside at any moment. Rachel was a punctual, exact person, but she missed many trains. Those who sought her seldom realized that her day was as full as, possibly fuller, than their own. Perhaps it was only a very small pleasure to which she had been on her way on this particular morning, and for which she had put on that ethereal gray gown for the first time. At any rate, she relinquished it without a second thought.
Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes and turned impulsively towards her.
The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to guess which would come uppermost. Sometimes fragments of both appeared on the surface together.
"I loved you from the first moment I saw you," she said. "I don't take fancies to people, you know. I am not that kind of person. I am very difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns myself. I am most reserved. I dare say you have noticed how reserved I am. I live in my shell. But directly I saw you I felt I could talk to you. I said to myself, 'I will make a friend of that girl.' Although I always feel a married woman is so differently placed from a girl. A girl only thinks of herself. I am not saying this the least unkindly, but, of course, it is so. Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all she says and does. How will it affect them? That is what I so often say to myself, and then my lips are sealed. But, of course, being unmarried, you would not understand that feeling."
Rachel did not answer. She was inured to this time-honored conversational opening.
"And the temptations of married life," continued Lady Newhaven—"a girl cannot enter into them."
"Then do not tell me about them," said Rachel, smiling, wondering if she might still escape. But Lady Newhaven had no intention of letting her go. She only wished to indicate to her her true position. And gradually, not without renewed outbursts of tears, not without traversing many layers of prepared conventional feelings, in which a few thin streaks of genuine emotion wore embedded, she told her story—the story of a young, high-minded, and neglected wife, and of a husband callous, indifferent, a scorner of religion, unsoftened even by the advent of the children—"such sweet children, such little darlings"—and the gradual estrangement. Then came the persistent siege to the lonely heart of one not pretty, perhaps, but fatally attractive to men; the lonely heart's unparalleled influence for good over the besieger.
"He would do anything," said Lady Newhaven, looking earnestly at Rachel. "My influence over him is simply boundless. If I said, as I sometimes did at balls, how sorry I was to see some plain girl standing out, he would go and dance with her. I have seen him do it."
"I suppose he did it to please you."
"That was just it, simply to please me."
Rachel was not so astonished as Lady Newhaven expected. She certainly was rather wooden, the latter reflected. The story went on. It became difficult to tell, and, according to the teller, more and more liable to misconstruction. Rachel's heart ached as bit by bit the inevitable development was finally reached in floods of tears.
"And you remember that night you were at an evening party here," sobbed Lady Newhaven, casting away all her mental notes and speaking extempore. "It is just a fortnight ago, and I have not slept since, and he was here, looking so miserable"—(Rachel started slightly)—"he sometimes did, if he thought I was hard upon him. And afterwards, when every one had gone, Edward took him to his study and told him he had found us out, and they drew lots which should kill himself within five months—and I listened at the door."
Lady Newhaven's voice rose half strangled, hardly human, in a shrill grotesque whimper above the sobs which were shaking her. There was no affectation about her now.
Rachel's heart went out to her the moment she was natural. She knelt down and put her strong arms round her. The poor thing clung to her, and, leaning her elaborate head against her, wept tears of real anguish upon her breast.
"And which drew the short lighter?" said Rachel at last.
"I don't know," almost shrieked Lady Newhaven. "It is that which is killing me. Sometimes I think it is Edward, and sometimes I think it is Hugh."
At the name of Hugh, Rachel winced. Lady Newhaven had mentioned no name in the earlier stages of her story while she had some vestige of self-command; but now at last the Christian name slipped out unawares.
Rachel strove to speak calmly. She told herself there were many Hughs in the world.
"Is Mr. Hugh Scarlett the man you mean?" she asked. If she had died for it, she must have asked that question.
"Yes," said Lady Newhaven.
A shadow fell on Rachel's face, as on the face of one who suddenly discovers, not for the first time, an old enemy advancing upon him under the flag of a new ally.
"I shall always love him," gasped Lady Newhaven, recovering herself sufficiently to recall a phrase which she had made up the night before. "I look upon it as a spiritual marriage."
CHAPTER VIII
—TENNYSON.
"Dick," said Lord Newhaven, laying hold of that gentleman as he was leaving Tattersall's, "what mischief have you been up to for the last ten days?"
"I lay low till I got my clothes," said Dick, "and then I went to the Duke of ——. I've just been looking at a hack for him. He says he does not want one that takes a lot of sitting on. I met him the first night I landed. In fact, I stepped out of the train on to his royal toe travelling incog. I was just going to advise him to draw in his feelers a hit and give the Colonies a chance, when he turned round and I saw who it was. I knew him when I was A.D.C. at Melbourne before I took to the drink. He said he thought he'd know my foot anywhere, and asked me down for —— races."
"And you enjoyed it?"
"Rather. I did not know what to call the family at first, so I asked him if he had any preference and what was the right thing, and he told me how I must hop up whenever he came in, and all that sort of child's play. There was a large party and some uncommonly pretty women. And I won a tenner off his Royal Highness, and here I am."
"And what are you going to do now?"
"Go down to the city and see what Darneil's cellars are like before I store my wine in them. It won't take long. Er!—I say, Cack—Newhaven?"
"Well?"
"Ought I to—how about my calling on Miss—? I never caught her name."
"Miss West, the heiress?"
"Yes. Little attention on my part."
"Did she ask you to call?"
"No, but I think it was an oversight. I expect she would like it."
"Well, then, go and be—snubbed."
"I don't want snubbing. A little thing like me wants encouragement."
"A good many other people are on the lookout for encouragement in that quarter."
"That settles it," said Dick; "I'll go at once. I've got to call on Lady Susan Gresley, and I'll take Miss—"
"West. West. West."
"Miss West on the way."
"My dear fellow, Miss West does not live on the way to Woking. Lady Susan Gresley died six months ago."
"Great Scot! I never heard of it. And what has become of Hester? She is a kind of cousin of mine."
"Miss Gresley has gone to live in the country a few miles from us, with her clergyman brother."
"James Gresley. I remember him. He's a bad egg."
"Now, Dick, are you in earnest, or are you talking nonsense about Miss West?"
"I'm in earnest." He looked it.
"Then, for heaven's sake, don't put your foot in it by calling. My wife has taken a violent fancy to Miss West. I don't think it is returned, but that is a detail. If you want to give her a chance, leave it to me."
"I know what that means. You married men are mere sieves. You'll run straight home with your tongue out and tell Lady Newhaven that I want to marry Miss—I can't clinch her name—and then she'll tell her when they are combing their back hair. And then if I find, later on, I don't like her and step off the grass, I shall have behaved like a perfect brute, and all that sort of thing. A man I knew out in Melbourne told me that by the time he'd taken a little notice of a likely girl, he'd gone too far to go back, and he had to marry her."
"You need not be so coy. I don't intend to mention the subject to my wife. Besides, I don't suppose Miss West will look at you. You're a wretched match for her. With her money she might marry a brewery or a peerage."
"I'll put myself in focus anyhow," said Dick. "Hang it all! if you could get a woman to marry you, there is hope for everybody. I don't expect it will be as easy as falling off a log. But if she is what I take her to be I shall go for all I'm worth."
Some one else was going for all he was worth. Lord Newhaven rode early, and he had frequently seen Rachel and Hugh riding together at foot's pace. Possibly his offer to help Dick was partly prompted by an unconscious desire to put a spoke in Hugh's wheel.
Dick, whose worst enemy could not accuse him of diffidence, proved a solid spoke but for a few days only. Rachel suddenly broke all her engagements and left London.
CHAPTER IX
"Pour vivre tranquille il faut vivre loin des gens d'église."
There is a little stream which flows through Middleshire which seems to reflect the spirit of that quiet county, so slow is its course, so narrow is its width. Even the roads don't take the trouble to bridge it. They merely hump themselves slightly when they feel it tickling underneath them, and go on, vouchsafing no further notice of its existence. Yet the Drone is a local celebrity in Middleshire, and, like most local celebrities, is unknown elsewhere. The squire's sons have lost immense trout in the Drone as it saunters through their lands, and most of them have duly earned thereby the distinction (in Middleshire) of being the best trout-rod in England. Middleshire bristles with the "best shots in England" and the "best preachers in England" and the cleverest men in England. The apathetic mother-country knows, according to Middleshire, "but little of her greatest men." At present she associates her loyal county with a breed of small black pigs.
Through this favored locality the Drone winds, and turns and turns again, as if loath to leave the rich, low meadow-lands and clustering villages upon its way. After skirting the little town of Westhope and the gardens of Westhope Abbey, the Drone lays itself out in comfortable curves and twists innumerable through the length and breadth of the green country till it reaches Warpington, whose church is so near the stream that in time of flood the water hitches all kinds of things it has no further use for among the grave-stones of the little church-yard. On one occasion, after repeated prayers for rain, it even overflowed the lower part of the vicar's garden, and vindictively carried away his bee-hives. But that was before he built the little wall at the bottom of the garden.
Slightly raised above the church, on ground held together by old elms, the white vicarage of Warpington stands, blinking ever through its trees at the church like a fond wife at her husband. Indeed, so like had she become to him that she had even developed a tiny bell-tower near the kitchen chimney, with a single bell in it, feebly rung by a female servant on saints' days and G.F.S. gatherings.
About eight o'clock on this particular morning in July the Drone could hear, if it wanted to hear, which apparently no one else did, the high, unmodulated voice in which Mr. Gresley was reading the morning service to Mrs. Gresley and to a young thrush, which was hurling its person, like an inexperienced bicyclist, now against Lazarus and his grave-clothes, now against the legs of John the Baptist, with one foot on a river's edge and the other firmly planted in a distant desert, and against all the other Scripture characters in turn which adorned the windows.
The service ended at last, and, after releasing his unwilling congregation by catching and carrying it, beak agape, into the open air, Mr. Gresley and his wife walked through the church-yard—with its one melancholy Scotch fir, embarrassed by its trouser of ivy—to the little gate which led into their garden.
They were a pleasing couple, seen at a little distance. He, at least, evidently belonged to a social status rather above that of the average clergyman, though his wife may not have done so. Mr. Gresley, with his long, thin nose and his short upper lip and tall, well-set-up figure, bore on his whole personality the stamp of that for which it is difficult to find the right name, so unmeaning has the right name become by dint of putting it to low uses—the maltreated, the travestied name of "gentleman."
None of those moral qualities, priggish or otherwise, are assumed for Mr. Gresley which, we are told, distinguish the true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank Heaven! the "gentleman born" frequently lacks. Whether he had them or not was a matter of opinion, but he had that which some who have it not strenuously affirm to be of no value—the right outside.
To any one who looked beyond the first impression of good-breeding and a well-cut coat, a second closer glance was discouraging. Mr. Gresley's suspicious eye and thin, compressed lips hinted that both fanatic and saint were fighting for predominance in the kingdom of that pinched brain, the narrowness of which the sloping forehead betokened with such cruel plainness. He looked as if he would fling himself as hard against a truth without perceiving it as a hunted hare against a stone-wall. He was unmistakably of those who only see side issues.
Mrs. Gresley took her husband's arm as he closed the gate. She was still young and still pretty, in spite of the arduous duties of a clergyman's wife, and the depressing fact that she seemed always wearing out old finery. Perhaps her devotion to her husband had served to prolong her youth, for as the ivy is to the oak, and as the moon is to the sun, and as the river is to the sea, so was Mrs. Gresley to Mr. Gresley.
The fortunate couple were advancing through the garden, looking fondly at their own vicarage, with their own sponges hanging out of their upper windows, and their offspring waving to them from a third, when a small, slight figure appeared on the terrace.
"James," said Mrs. Gresley, with decision, "it is your duty to speak to Hester about attending early service. If she can go out in the garden she can come to church."
"I have spoken to her once," said Mr. Gresley, frowning, "and though I put it before her very plainly she showed great obstinacy. Fond as I am of Hester, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that she has an arrogant and callous nature. But we must remember, my love, that Aunt Susan was most lax in all her views, and we must make allowance for Hester, who lived with her till last year. It is only natural that Hester, bred up from childhood in that worldly circle—dinner-parties all through Lent, and Sunday luncheons—should have fallen through want of solid church teaching into freethinking and ideas of her own upon religion."
Mr. Gresley's voice was of that peculiar metallic note which carries farther than the owner is aware. It rose, if contradicted, into a sort of continuous trumpet-blast which drowned all other lesser voices. Hester's little garret was two stories above Mr. Gresley's study on the ground floor, but, nevertheless, she often heard confused, anxious parochial buzzings overwhelmed by that sustained high note which knew no cessation until objection or opposition ceased. As she came towards them, she heard with perfect distinctness what he was saying, but it did not trouble her. Hester was gifted with imagination, and imagination does not find it difficult to read by the shorthand of the expressions and habitual opinions and repressions of others what they occasionally say at full length, and to which they fondly believe they are giving utterance for the first time. Mr. Gresley had said all this many times already by his manner, and it had by its vain repetitions lost its novelty. Mr. Gresley was fortunately not aware of this, for unimaginative persons believe themselves to be sealed books, as hermetically sealed as the characters of others are to themselves.
Hester was very like her brother. She had the same nose, slightly too long for her small face, the same short upper lip and light hair, only her brother's was straight and hers was crimped, as wet sand is crimped by a placid outgoing sea. That she had an equally strong will was obvious. But there the likeness ended. Hester's figure was slight, and she stooped a little. Hester's eyes were very gentle, very appealing under their long, curled lashes. They were sad, too, as Mr. Gresley's never were, gay as his never were. An infinite patience looked out of them sometimes, that patience of enthusiasm which will cast away its very soul and all its best years for the sake of an ideal. Hester showed her age in her eyes. She was seven-and-twenty, and appeared many years younger until she looked at you.
Mrs. Gresley looked with veiled irritation at her sister-in-law in her clean holland gown, held in at the waist with a broad lilac ribbon, adroitly drawn in picturesque folds through a little silver buckle.
Mrs. Gresley, who had a waist which the Southminster dress-maker informed her had "to be kept down," made a mental note for the hundredth time that Hester "laced in."
Hester gave that impression of "finish" and sharpness of edge so rarely found among the blurred, vague outlines of English women. There was nothing vague about her. Lord Newhaven said she had been cut out body and mind with a sharp pair of scissors. Her irregular profile, her delicate, pointed speech and fingers, her manner of picking up her slender feet as she walked, her quick, alert movements—everything about her was neat, adjusted, perfect in its way, yet without more apparent effort than the succés fou in black and white of the water wagtail, which she so closely resembled.
"Good-morning," she said, turning back with them to the house. "Abel says it is going to be the hottest day we have had yet. And the letter-bag is so fat that I could hardly refrain from opening it. Really, James, you ought to hide the key, or I shall succumb to temptation."
Once in the days of her ignorance, when she first came to live at Warpington, Hester had actually turned the key in the lock of the sacred letter-bag when the Gresleys were both late, and had extracted her own letters. She never did it a second time. On the contrary, she begged pardon in real regret at having given such deep offence to her brother and his wife, and in astonishment that so simple an action could offend. She had made an equally distressing blunder in the early days of her life with the Gresleys by taking up the daily paper on its arrival in the afternoon.
"My dear Hester," Mrs. Gresley said, really scandalized, "I am sure you won't mind my saying so, but James has not seen his paper yet."
"I have noticed he never by any chance looks at it till the evening, and you always say you never read it," said Hester, deep in a political crisis.
"That is his rule, and a very good rule it is; but he naturally likes to be the first to look at it," said Mrs. Gresley, with a great exercise of patience. She had heard Hester was clever, but she found her very stupid. Everything had to be explained to her.
Her tone recalled Hester from the Indian tribal rising and the speech of the Prime Minister to the realities of life. It was fortunate for her that she was quick-witted. These two flagrant blunders were sufficient for her. She grasped the principle that those who have a great love of power and little scope for it must necessarily exercise it in trivial matters. She extended the principle of the newspaper and the letter-bag over her entire intercourse with the Gresleys and never offended in that manner again.
On this particular morning she waited decorously beside her brother as he opened the bag and dealt out the contents into three heaps. Hester pounced on hers and subsided into her chair at the breakfast-table.
"I wonder," said Mrs. Gresley, looking at Hester's pile of letters over the top of her share of the morning's correspondence—namely, a list of Pryce Jones—"that you care to write so many letters, Hester. I am sure I never did such a thing when I was a girl. I should have regarded it as a waste of time."
"Ha!" said Mr. Gresley, in a gratified tone, opening a little roll. "What have we here? Proofs! My paper upon 'Modern Dissent.' I told Edwards I would not allow him to put it in his next number of the Southminster Advertiser until I had glanced at it in print. I don't know when I shall find time to correct it. I shall be out all the afternoon at the chapter meeting."
He looked at Hester. She had laid down her letters and was taking a cup of coffee from Mrs. Gresley. She evidently had not heard her brother's remark.
"You and I must lay our heads together over this, Hester," he said, holding up with some pride a long slip of proof. "It will be just in your line. You might run it over after breakfast," he continued, in high good-humor, "and put in the stops and grammar and spelling—you're more up in that sort of thing than I am—and then we will go through it together."
Hester was quite accustomed, when her help was asked as to a composition, to receive as a reason for the request the extremely gratifying assurance that she was "good" at punctuation and spelling. It gave the would-be author a comfortable feeling that, after all, he was only asking advice on the crudest technical matters on which Hester's superiority could be admitted without a loss of masculine self-respect.
"I would rather not tamper with punctuation and spelling," said Hester, dryly. "I am so shaky on both myself. You had better ask the school-master. He knows all that sort of ABC better than I do."
Mr. Gresley frowned, and looked suspiciously at her. He wanted Hester's opinion, of which she was perfectly aware. But she intended that he should ask for it.
Mrs. Gresley, behind the coffee-pot, felt that she was overlooked. She had helped Mr. Gresley with his numerous literary efforts until Hester came.
"I saw you correcting some one's manuscript last week," he said. "You were at it all day in the hay-field."
"That was different. I was asked to criticise the style and composition."
"Oh, well," said Mr. Gresley, "don't let us split hairs. I don't want an argument about it. If you'll come into my study at ten o'clock I'll get it off my hands at once."
"With pleasure," said Hester, looking at him with rueful admiration. She had tried a hundred times to get the better of him in conversation, but she had not yet succeeded.
"I have a message for you," continued Mr. Gresley, in restored good-humor. "Mrs. Loftus writes that she is returning to Wilderleigh at the end of the week, and that the sale of work may take place in the Wilderleigh gardens at the end of August. And—let me see, I will read what she says:
"'I am not unmindful of our conversation on the duty of those who go annually to London to bring a spiritual influence to bear on society'—("I impressed that upon her before she went up.")—'We had a most interesting dinner-party last week, nearly all celebrated and gifted persons, and the conversation was really beyond anything I can describe to you. I thought my poor brain would turn. I was quite afraid to join in. But Mr. Harvey—the great Mr. Harvey—told me afterwards I was at my best. One lady, Miss Barker, who has done so much for the East End, is coming down to Wilderleigh shortly for a rest. I am anxious you should talk to her. She says she has doubts, and she is tired of the Bible. By the way, please tell Hester, with my love, that she and Mr. Harvey attacked The Idyll of East London, and showed it up entirely, and poor little me had to stand up for her against them all."
"She would never do that," said Hester, tranquilly. "She might perhaps have said, 'The writer is a friend of mine. I must stand up for her.' But she would never have gone beyond saying it to doing it."
"Hester," exclaimed Mrs. Gresley, feeling that she might just as well have remained a spinster if she was to be thus ignored in her own house, "I can't think how you can allow your jealousy of Sybell Loftus, for I can attribute it to nothing else, to carry you so far."
"Perhaps it had better carry me into the garden," said Hester, rising with the others. "You must forgive me if I spoke irritably. I have a racking headache."
"She looks ill," said her brother, following Hester's figure with affectionate solicitude, as she passed the window a moment later.
"And yet she does next to nothing," said the hard-worked little wife, intercepting the glance. "I always thought she wrote her stories in the morning. I know she is never about if the Pratt girls call to see her before luncheon. Yet when I ran up to her room yesterday morning to ask her to take Mary's music, as Fräulein had the headache"—(Mrs. Gresley always spoke of "the headache" and "the toothache")—"she was lying on her bed doing nothing at all."
"She is very unaccountable," said Mr. Gresley. "Still, I can make allowance for the artistic temperament. I share it to a certain degree. Poor Hester. She is a spoiled child."
"Indeed, James, she is. And she has an enormous opinion of herself. For my part, I think the Bishop is to blame for making so much of her. Have you never noticed how different she is when he is here, so gay and talkative, and when we are alone she hardly says a word for days together, except to the children?"
"She talked more when she first came," said Mr. Gresley. "But when she found I made it a rule to discourage argument"—(by argument Mr. Gresley meant difference of opinion)—"she seemed gradually to lose interest in conversation. Yet I have heard the Bishop speak of her as a brilliant talker. And Lord Newhaven asked me last spring how I liked having a celebrity for a sister. A celebrity! Why, half the people in Middleshire don't even know of Hester's existence." And the author of "Modern Dissent" frowned.
"That was a hit at you, my dear," said Mrs. Gresley. "It was just after your pamphlet on 'Schism' appeared. Lord Newhaven always says something disagreeable. Don't you remember, when you were thinking of exchanging Warpington for that Scotch living, he said he knew you would not do it because with your feeling towards Dissent you would never go to a country where you would be a Dissenter yourself?"
"How about the proofs?" said Hester, through the open window. "I am ready when you are, James."