XV
Before I opened my eyes next morning in my beautiful room a telegram came from Augustus—a long telegram written the night before, telling me that it was impossible to penetrate the fog that night, and I was to come up and join him at once in London, as he had just decided to go to the war with his Yeomanry. He could not keep out of it longer, as all his brother officers had volunteered, so he had felt obliged to do so, too. They were to start in less than three weeks.
"I shall go by the ten-o'clock train," I told McGreggor, as I scribbled my reply. "I must get up at once. Ask for my breakfast to be brought up here."
I was dressed by nine o'clock and sipping my chocolate.
The daintiness of the old Dresden china equipage pleased me, forced itself upon my notice in spite of the deep preoccupation of my mind.
An exquisite bunch of fresh roses lay on the tray, and a note from Antony—only a few words—hoping I had slept well and saying the brougham would be ready for me at half-past nine, and that he also was going to London.
McGreggor had left the room. Oh! am I very wicked? I kissed the writing before I threw the paper in the fire!
And so Augustus is going to the war, after all. It must have been some very strong influence which persuaded him to volunteer, he who hated the very thought.
I felt bitterly annoyed with myself that this news did not cause me any grief. I have been this man's wife for five months, and his going into danger in a far country leaves me cold. But I did, indeed, grieve for his mother. Her many good qualities came back to me. This will be a terrible blow to her.
I looked up at the little pastel by La Tour. The sprightly French
Marquise smiled back at me.
"Good-bye," I said. "You, pretty Marquise, would call me a fool because to-day Antony is not my lover. But I—oh, I am glad!"
He did not even kiss my finger-tips last night. We parted sadly after a storm of words neither he nor I had ever meant to speak.
"Il s'en faut bien que nous commissions tout ce que nos passions nous font faire!"
Once more La Rochefoucauld has spoken truth.
Why the situation is as it is I cannot tell. In my bringing up, the idea of taking a lover after marriage seemed a more or less natural thing, and not altogether a deadly sin, provided the affair was conducted sans fanfaronnade, without scandal. It was not that grandmamma and the Marquis actually discussed such matters in my hearing, but the general tone of their conversation gave that impression.
Marriage, as the Marquis said to me, was not a pleasure—it is a means to an end, a tax of society. The agréments of life came afterwards. I had always understood he had been grandmamma's lover.
Once I heard him express this sentiment when I was supposed to be reading my book: The marriage vows, he said, were the only ones a gentleman might break without great blemish to his honor. This was the atmosphere I had always lived in, and since my wedding the people of my own class that I have met do not seem to hold different views. Lord Tilchester is Babykins's lover. The Duke has passed on from several women, and, to come nearer home, there are my husband and Lady Grenellen. Only Lady Tilchester seems noble and above all these earthly things.
Why did I hesitate? I do not know. There is a something in my spirit which cried out against the meanness of it, the degradation, the sacrilege. I could not break my word to Augustus. Oh! I could not stoop to desecrate myself, and to act for all the future—hours of deceit.
And now after to-day I will never see Antony alone again. That we shall casually meet I cannot guard against. But never again shall I stay in his house. Never again awake in this beautiful room. Never again—
"The brougham is at the door, ma'am," said McGreggor, interrupting my thoughts, and I descended the stairs. The fog was still gray and raw, but had considerably lifted.
In the uncompromising daylight Antony's face looked haggard and drawn.
"Comtesse," he said, as we drove along, "I cannot forgive myself for causing you pain last night. Nothing was further from my thoughts than to harass and disturb you—here, in my own house—that I wanted you to look upon as your haven of rest. But I am not made of stone. The situation was exceptional—and I love you."
In spite of our imminent parting, joy rushed through me at his words.
Oh! could I ever get tired of hearing Antony say "I love you"?
"You did not cause me pain," I said. "We had drifted, neither knowing where. It was fate."
"Darling, do you remember our talk in your sitting-room, and of the coup de foudre? Well, it has struck us both. Oh! I could curse myself! Your dear little white face looks up at me pathetically without a reproach, and I have been a selfish brute to even tell you I love you. I meant to be your friend and comrade that you might feel you had at least some one that would stand by you forever. I wanted to make your life pleasanter, and now my mad folly has spoiled it all, and you decree that we must part. Oh! my little Comtesse, my loving you has only been to hurt you!"
"Oh no. It makes me glad to know it—only—only I cannot see you any more."
"I would promise never to say another word that could disturb you. Oh!
Why must we say good-bye?"
"Because I could not promise not to wish you to say things. You must surely know if we went on meeting it could only have one end."
"Well, I will do as you wish, my darling white rose. In my eyes you are above the angels."
Antony's voice when it is moved could wile a bird from off a tree.
Then I told him of my telegram, and I know he, too, felt glad that last night we had parted as we had.
"Ambrosine, listen to me," he said, "I will not try to see you, but if you want anything in the world done for you, promise to let me do it."
I promised.
"There is just one thing I want to know," I said. "That day before my wedding, when you sent me the knife and the note saying it was not too late to cut the Gordian knot, what did you mean? Did you care for me, then?"
"I do not know exactly what I meant. I was greatly attracted by you. That day we came over I very nearly said to you then, 'Come along away with me,' and then we never met again until your wedding. When I sent the knife I half wondered what you would say. I wrote the note half in joke, half in earnest. My principal feeling was that I could not bear you to marry Augustus. If we had chanced to meet then, really, I should have taken you off to Gretna Green."
"Alas!" I said.
The footman opened the door. We had arrived at the station.
We did not travel in the same carriage going to London. We had agreed it would be better not. And I do not think any one, seeing Antony calmly handing me into the hired brougham Augustus had sent to me, would have guessed that we were parting forever, and that, to me at least, all joy in the world had fled.
It is stupid to go on talking about one's feelings. Having cut off one's hand, I am sure grandmamma would say it would be drivelling and mawkish to meditate over each drop of blood.
I tried hard to think of other things. I counted the stupid pattern on the braid that ornamented the inside of the brougham. I counted the lamp-posts, with their murky lights, showing through the fog. I looked at McGreggor sitting stolidly opposite me. Could any emotions happen to that wooden mask? "Have you a lover that you have said good-bye to forever, I wonder? And is that why your face is carved out of stone?" I said to myself.
In spite of all grandmamma's stoical bringing-up, it was physical pain
I was suffering.
In Queen Victoria Street a hansom passed us and I caught a misty glimpse of Antony. He smiled mechanically as he raised his hat.
And so this is the end.
The fog is falling thickly again. Everything is damp and cold and black as night.
And I—Oh! I wish—
"Hallo, little woman! Glad to see you!" said Augustus, in a thick and tipsy voice, as I got out of the carriage. And he kissed me in front of all the people at the hotel door.
BOOK III
I
The ship sailed a week ago and Augustus has gone to the war. Oh, I hate to look back and think of those dreadful three weeks before he started!
A nightmare of hideous scenes. Alternate drunkenness and inordinate affection for me, or sullen silence and cringing fear. Oh, of all the frightful moments there are in life, there can be none so dark as those that some women have to suffer from the drunken passions and ways of men!
Augustus would have deserted at the last moment if an opportunity had offered. His mother made matters worse, as, instead of remembering her country as so many mothers have, and sending her son on his way with brave and glorious words, she wept and lamented from morning till night.
"I told you so, Gussie," she said, when she first met us in London. "I was always against your joining that Yeomanry. I told you it wasn't only the uniform, and it might get you into trouble some day. Oh, to think that an extra glass of champagne could have made you volunteer. And now you've got to go to the war and you have broken my heart."
Augustus's own terror was pitiable to see if it had not roused all my contempt.
Oh, that I should bear the name of a craven!
Lady Grenellen was also in London. When he was sober enough and not engaged with his military duties, Augustus went to see her, and if she happened to be unkind to him he vented his annoyance upon me on his return.
Had it not been that he was going to the war, I could not, for my own self-respect, have put up with the position any longer. But that thought, and the sight of his weeping mother, made me bear all things in silence. I could not add to her griefs.
She quite broke down one day.
"I always knew Gussie took too much. It began at Cambridge, long ago," she wept. "But after he first saw you and fell in love, he gave it up, I hoped, and now it has broken out again. I thought marrying you would have cured him. Oh, deary me! I feared some one would tell your grandma, and she would break off the match. I was glad when your wedding was over." And she sobbed and rocked herself to and fro. "I'm grateful to you, my dear, for what you have done for him. It's been ugly for you lately. But there—there, he's going to the war and I shall never see him again!"
"Do not take that gloomy view. The war is nearly over. There is no danger now," I said, to comfort her. "Augustus will only have riding about and a healthy out-door life, and it will probably cure him."
"I've lived in fear ever since the war began, and now it's come," she wailed, refusing to be comforted.
I said everything else I could, and eventually she cheered up for a few days after this, but at the end broke down again, and now, Amelia writes, lies prostrate in a darkened room. Amelia is having her time of trial. They left for Bournemouth yesterday.
Am I a cold and heartless woman because now that Augustus has gone I can only feel relief?
One of his last speeches was not calculated to leave an agreeable impression.
"You'd better look out how you behave while I am away," he said. "I'd kick up a row in a minute, only you're such a lump of ice no man would bother with you." Then, in a passion: "I wish to God they would, and take you off, so I could get some one of more use to me!" He was surprised that I did not wish him to kiss me ten minutes after this.
And now he has gone, and for six months, at any rate, I shall be free from his companionship.
When he returns things shall be started on a different footing.
I came down to Ledstone by myself yesterday. I have no plans. Perhaps I shall stay here until Christmas, when I am to go to Bournemouth to my mother-in-law.
The house seems more than ever big and hideously oppressive. I must find some interest. The old numbness has returned with double force. I take up a book and put it down again. I roam from one room to another. I am restless and rebellious—rebellious with fate.
I know grandmamma would be angry with me could she come back to me now. She would say I was behaving with the want of self-control of a common person, and not as one of our race. Well, perhaps she is right. I shall go to the cottage and see Hephzibah and give myself a shock. That may do me good.
I never willingly let myself think of Antony, but unconsciously my thoughts are always turning to the evening in the fog. I do not know where he is. He may be at Dane Mount, only these few miles off, and yet we must not meet.
I wonder if Ambrosine Eustasie de Calincourt had ever a lover.
Probably—and she would have listened to him, being of her time.
Oh, what is this quality in me that makes me as I am—a flabby thing, with strength enough to push away all I desire in life, to keep untarnished my idea of honor, and yet too weak to tear the matter from my mind once I have done so?
How grandmamma would despise me!
I think of the Princess's answer to the riddle of the nineteenth day in A Digit of the Moon. I am this middle thing, and it is only the very bad and very good that achieve peace and perfect happiness.
"Come, Roy, away with us! Let us run, as we used to do last year when we were young. Let us shake ourselves and laugh. No more of this unworthy repining! There are some in the world that have but one eye, and some but one leg, and they cannot see or run, and are worse off than we are, my friend. So think of that, and don't lift your lip at me, and tell me it is cold, and you want to stay by the fire."
All the blinds were down in the front of the cottage as I unlatched the garden gate—the gate I had passed through last following grandmamma's coffin to her grave. I ran round to the back door and soon found Hephzibah.
Her joy was great to see me there, her only regret being she had not known I was coming that she might have had the fires lit. They were all laid, and she soon put a match to them.
With what pride she showed me how she had kept everything! Then she left me alone, standing in the little drawing-room. It seemed so wonderfully small to me now. The pieces of brocade still hid the magenta "suite," but arranged with a prim stiffness they lacked in our day. Dear Hephzibah! She had been dusting them, and would not fold them up and put them away in case that I should ever come.
The china all stood as it used, and grandmamma's chair with her footstool, and the little table near it with her magnifying-glass and spectacle-case. There were her books, the old French classics, and the modern yellow backs, her paper-knife still in one, half-cut. I never realized how happy I had been here, in this little room, a year ago. How happy, and, oh, how ridiculously young! My work-box stood in its usual place, a bit of fine embroidery protruding from its lid.
For the first time in my life I sat down in grandmamma's chair. Oh, if something of her spirit could descend upon me! I tried to think of her maxims, her wonderful courage, her cheerfulness in all adversities, her wit, her gayety. I seemed a paltry, feeble creature daring to sit there, in her bergère, and sigh at fate. No, I would grumble no more. I, too, would be of the race.
How long I mused there I do not know. The fire was burning low.
I went up to my own old room, I must see everything, now I was here. It struck me with a freezing chill as I opened the door. The fire had not drawn here, and lay a mass of smouldering sticks and paper in the narrow grate.
There was my little white bed, cold and narrow. The dressing-table, with its muslin flounces and cheap, white-bordered mirror. Even the china tray was there, where, I remember, my jewels lay the night before my wedding, and close beside it, the red-morroco case Antony's present had come in—left behind, by mistake, I suppose, when the other gifts were packed away. The note he had written me with it was still in its lid.
The paper felt icy to touch. I pulled it out and read it to the end. Then I threw it in the fire. The sullen, charred sticks had not life enough to burn it. I lit a match and watched the bright flames curl up the chimney until all was destroyed. Then I fled. Here at least in the cottage I will never come again. The room is full of ghosts.
On the whole, however, my visit did me good. I returned to Ledstone with a firm determination to be more like grandmamma.
A telegram was awaiting me from Augustus, sent from his first stopping-place. He had caught the measles, it appeared. The measles! I thought only children got the measles.
Poor Augustus! He would make a bad patient. I was truly sorry, and sent the most affectionate and sympathetic answer I could think of to meet him at St. Helena.
I wrote to the war office, asking them please to send me any further news when they received it. But the measles! It almost made me laugh.