Two, by Tricks: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

'Nothing,' she replied in a flat tuneless tone, 'nothing.'

'I thought, my dear, from your looks, that a hawk might have dropped down into the dovecot; but you are very young and very sensitive, my poor child; in a few years you will learn to treat any little temporary storms with proper unconcern.' And then the carriages were signalled, and the ladies took their departure.

On reaching home, Lady Forestfield, with a passing glance into the dining-room, where the table was set out for supper, went straight to her room, and dismissing her maid as soon as possible, threw herself in her peignoir into a low chair near the window overlooking the Park, and gave herself up to thought.

'Forestfield knows all!' Those words were her social death-knell, ringing out farewell to friends, to position, to hope, almost to life; for what would life be to her without the surroundings in which she had revelled, and which were about to be ruthlessly cut away? Was there the remotest chance of escape? Could there be any possible motive by which her husband, cognisant of her crime, would consent to condone it? Of his own irregularities since their marriage, common and manifold as they were, she had long since been made aware, and had suffered them in silence. Might not he, in simplest justice to her, do likewise? He knew all; but none else, save the creatures in his employ, whose silence was as easily purchased as their espionage. He had been with her but five minutes before De Tournefort had told her the fatal news, and his manner, as ordinarily, was cold and cynically polite. She had seen him very different at times when she had unwittingly given him trivial cause for offence, when he had cursed and sworn, and once seized her arm and wrenched it round so violently that for weeks she had borne the blue impress of his fingers. Surely De Tournefort must have been misinformed. Surely, if Richard knew his disgrace, he would have avoided her in public; and when they met in private would have wreaked his wrath upon her, as he had done for far more venial matters.

From thinking of her husband she turned to thinking of herself, wondering how and why she had fallen; patiently, but in a vague dreamy kind of manner, analysing her feelings towards the man who had wrought her ruin, and for whose gratification she had imperilled her social status and her soul. For his gratification, not for hers! In her self-examination she did not find one grain of love for Gustave de Tournefort; she had not even had a caprice, a passion for him, and had only listened to his oft-urged suit when completely worn out with solitude, loneliness, and neglect. Love, passion--she had known them but once, in the early days of her marriage, when she thought that there had never lived on this earth a man comparable to her husband; none so handsome, none with such an easy bearing, such biting wit, such delicious insolence. She had sat down and worshipped him with all her soul and strength, heedless of her father's good-humoured raillery, heedless of her mother's tearful entreaties and solemn warnings; she had set up her idol and bowed down before it, only to find after a little time that it was a very ordinary kind of fetish indeed.

Those feelings were played out now, but at one time they had been all-powerful, and the mere recollection of them had a softening and humanising effect upon the wretched girl as she sat, her elbows resting on her knees, the lower part of her face buried in her hands, looking out across the road dotted with lamps and echoing the rattle of an occasional carriage, to the park beyond, where the big trees bent whisperingly to each other, and beckoned solemnly like dim gigantic spectres.

Suddenly a terror seized her. What Gustave had said must be true; he would never have dared to trifle with her on such a subject. They had been watched, and her husband knew all! Her husband would come home--he was on his way thither at that moment perhaps--and in his wild ungovernable fury he might murder her. Even if her life were spared it would be rendered desolate; she would be driven forth from her home, and left to fight her way in the world alone, without friends or resources.

Then there arose suddenly in her mind a scene which she had witnessed during the previous autumn, when she and Lord Forestfield were travelling in Germany. They were travelling from Ischl to Salzburg, and at the driver's request halted midway that he might bait his horses. A kermesse was being held in the little village, and amongst the numerous carts gathered together before the inn-door was a travelling-carriage, from which the horses had been removed. It was, however, still occupied, and nestled into one corner under the hood May Forestfield had made out the dim outline of a female form. The courier attached to this carriage, of course making friends and drinking with the Forestfields' courier, told him that the lady whom he was taking to Ischl was an Englishwoman, and very ill, so ill that the baths and waters of Ischl had been prescribed for her as a last resource. Lady Forestfield, hearing this from her maid, inquired the name of the lady, which in the courier's mouth was unintelligible; but May, learning that the invalid was alone, and all but unattended, acting under the kindly impulsive wish to be of some use, she scarcely knew how, made her way to the side of the carriage, and in her sweet tone spoke a few words of sympathy. The invalid, who had been lying huddled in the corner, turned quickly at the sound of the voice; and worn and ghastly as was her face, Lady Forestfield recognised her in an instant as Fanny Erle, an intimate acquaintance, who two years before had fled from her husband's roof, and had since been divorced. Some one else had recognised her at the same moment--Lord Forestfield, who, following his wife, had a look over her shoulder and instantly divined what had taken place. Mrs. Erle, on whose pale cheeks two bright red spots suddenly appeared, would have spoken; but Lord Forestfield, seizing his wife by the shoulder, hurried her away, and peremptorily insisted on her making no farther attempt to see the wretched woman again, speaking of her crime with the bitterest reprobation, and of the punishment which had fallen upon her with genuine contemptuous approbation.

Before Lady Forestfield's eyes, which were apparently fixed on the dim and distant park, rose this scene in all its minutest details: she heard the noisy laughter of the peasants; the jingle of the horses' bells and the rattle of their rope harness; the shouts and cries of the vendors in the kermesse; she saw the little square in which the inn stood, with the quaint gabled houses opposite, the loiterers round the carriage, the two couriers drinking beer on the steps of the inn; and above all, she saw the miserable look which Fanny Erle gave when Lord Forestfield hurried her away, and heard the moan of despair with which the wretched woman fell back into the corner of the carriage.

Was she to be like that, a leprous object, a pariah, from the contemplation of which people would turn in disgust? God forbid! And yet the sin of Fanny Erle was hers; why should she not incur the penalty?