Two, by Tricks: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

He went away without another word, and for a few seconds Lord Forestfield gazed vacantly at the door through which he had passed. A look of hatred then came into his evil face, still worn and rigid with the traces of wasting fever, and he muttered:

'D--n him! he's beaten at last, and I've got the Decree Absolute, after all!'

A minute later the nurse knocked at the library-door, having come to communicate the melancholy intelligence to his lordship, who received it with sullen propriety; and the dreary, dreadful bustle which precedes the awful stillness of a house wherein one lies dead, to last until the drearier and more dreadful bustle of the funeral, immediately commenced in that beautiful house in Seamore-place, where May's short life of joy, folly, guilt, repentance, and reparation had been lived.

When the night was some hours old, Sir Nugent Uffington, who had passed the interval in walking for miles straight ahead, he did not know where, returned to Seamore-place, and from the opposite side of the roadway looked up at the windows of the room where May Forestfield was lying. The house was invested with the conventional marks of mourning, and the useless tan was littered deep across the street. Lights were burning in the death-room, tall torches which threw their shadows on the blinds, and flickered in the air which passed in at that ominously open uppermost six inches of window-sash. Sir Nugent's imagination was busy with the scene which that room presented. He could see the sweet young face, set in its marble paleness, with the dark-veined eyelids, on which an expression of pain and weariness had sat for so long, sealed over the eyes which were never more to smile as they had smiled so rarely, or weep as they had wept so often, since he had seen them first, and, seeing them, been reminded of her mother's eyes, hidden in the dust. He could see the outline of the graceful wasted limbs, and the waxen hands laid upon the satin coverlet in the fulness of everlasting rest. It was well that she had died there, in her husband's house, with such protection as that formal circumstance might afford her name, that name which meant nothing now, save to the few who loved her, and would so soon be utterly forgotten by those who had been most eager to blacken it with scandal and cover it with reproach; but his heart was full of bitterness as he thought of why she had died. For that worse than worthless creature; for that sensual, cynical, selfish, brutal, dastardly fellow, whose sins against the marriage vow which she had broken had been countless and unblushing, as they were unrebuked and unpunished; who owed the life which had been a curse to her, to his wife's care, and who was set free by her death to carry out any scheme which might enter his base mind. Not yet could Uffington rejoice in her release; not yet could he realise the nothingness to her of what he could not but regard with bitterness and rage as Forestfield's triumph; and when he turned away at last from his contemplation of the silent house, and went home to write to Eleanor, it was with a heart full of hate towards Forestfield and De Tournefort, the two who had to answer for the fate just fulfilled within those walls.

Uffington's letter to Eleanor was hard work to write. The intelligence it had to convey must necessarily be a dreadful shock, as well as a profound grief, to the girl who had loved May so dearly, and who had so few besides to love. Eleanor was at Brighton with Mrs. Chadwick, and though she had been told of May's illness, she had not been told--because Uffington himself was ignorant of the truth--that a fatal termination was apprehended. The chill wintry morning had dawned before his task was completed; but as he wrote, in striving to console Eleanor consolation came to himself; in endeavouring to convince her that 'it was better so,' as May herself had said, he came to believe his own words, to realise that it was indeed well with May; that the life which she must have faced would have been too hard for her, and Death, which had taken her definitively out of the hands of man, was her best friend--a better friend than even he had been, or could be in the future; a closer friend, shielding her from scorn and unkindness, from vain regret and self-reproach from external temptation, and from herself. The memory of the woman whom Uffington had loved, and ruined, and recompensed for ruin in so far as a man can, was with him as he wrote to the pure and proud young girl whose love he had won, and won with a wondering secret exultation; a dead face looked up at him from beneath the waters of the Swiss lake, as he described that other dead face, with its fresh set seal of peace. During the hours of that night something passed into the soul of Nugent Uffington which was the soundest and safest of guarantees for Eleanor Irvine's happiness and security as his wife--a message of peace and self-knowledge sent to him from the dead.

* * * * * *

The heavy days went slowly by, and that on which the mortal remains of May Forestfield were to be laid in their last resting-place had come. Her death had been much talked of and the sentiments of 'society' on the subject were various. After the nine days' wonder of her restoration to her husband's house had died away, Lady Forestfield had been suffered to fall into general oblivion. That circumstance was, of course, much discussed, and many persons were of Mrs. Hamblin's way of thinking. Those persons were chiefly among the large numbers of the sinners who have not been found out. Sinners who have been found out are, as a rule, more charitable, and the divorcées who hover longingly on the confines of the world in which they once played a part, and who are perfectly cognisant of the peccadilloes of the women who, from their own vantage ground of deferred or escaped exposure, 'cut' them, while they eagerly devour every atom of gossip concerning the new 'milieu' in which their quondam but detected associates live, were unfeignedly glad of May Forestfield's 'luck.' They knew what detection and its penalties meant, and they would not wish any one such 'hard lines.' The undetected were scandalised. They even thought it very wrong that Lord Forestfield should have been permitted to sully his 'order' by such an act of misdirected clemency, and a lady who had been much and deservedly 'talked of' with poor May's husband was particularly denunciatory of the evil example and the dangerous precedent. She found consolation only in assuring herself and others that a restoration of that kind 'meant very little after all,' though of course Lady Forestfield would be 'kept out of mischief by being under her husband's roof;' she would be just as much 'out of society' as if she were not there. All this had concerned May not at all; indeed she hardly knew or even guessed how any one talked about her, and never turned her thoughts or her eyes back upon that 'world' which she had suspected to be a fool's paradise before she had forfeited it. Very much the same sort of comment was made upon her death; perhaps it was not in any instance so bitter as that which had attended her disgrace. Mrs. Hamblin regarded the event as a very good thing indeed for Lord Forestfield, quite a relief, and spoke of it in a tone which implied that she considered it the proper thing on the part of Providence to reward him for his unheard-of generosity by interposing to prevent his reaping its possibly unpleasant consequences. Mrs. Hamblin was also 'quite thankful' that the future Lady Uffington would not be exposed to the risks of association with 'such a person as Lady Forestfield,' and she added, while discussing the subject with a man newly lancé, who was en train to become the successor in her good graces of Spiridion Pratt--'resigned'--that of course those risks would have been doubled by the moral obtuseness of Sir Nugent Uffington, whose character everybody knew, and whose history had better not be inquired into. Poor Forestfield had behaved like an angel--angels are not expected to be worldly-wise--and it was the best possible thing for him. Mrs. Chadwick was genuinely sorry and pitiful; she loved life herself, she hated the mere idea of death, and kept it away from her by every means in her power. In health, wealth, strength, and the full enjoyment of life, she felt a sort of physical compassion for the young woman who had had to go down into the darkness and silence of the grave; and she had liked Lady Forestfield. But Mrs. Chadwick kept these sentiments to herself when she met Mrs. Hamblin, and her like; was ready to acknowledge that 'perhaps, after all, considering her hopeless loss of position,' &c.; and by the end of the week was impatient with Eleanor for her overwhelming grief; and inclined to resent its evidence in the girl's tears and seclusion as an injury to herself.

'What a singular fascination there is for some men in the mere fact of a woman having lost her character,' said Mrs. Hamblin to Frank Eardley one morning in the melancholy week. The two had met on the new pier at Brighton, and the gentleman had failed in an attempt to pass the lady without stopping to speak.

'I have just seen Mr. Pratt going into Mrs. Chadwick's house, and looking as melancholy as if he had lost his adoring and adored mamma, the "madre mia" of that charming sonnet you used to quiz so kindly. I suppose he's going to the Forestfield funeral.'

'He is, Mrs. Hamblin, and so am I. I must wish you good-morning.'