Lionel stared, and looked upward. Strange to say the heavens did not fall.
[ CHAPTER XXXIV]
Were a purblind generation convinced of the invaluable blessings of sorrow, trouble would be robbed of its sting. Ignorance and fear make the unenlightened bemoan their burdens, or shirk bearing them, as they should be borne, with the strength of hope. Chastening is the gift of the eternal love, and those happy few who know this submit with joy to the improving rod. But worrying is not submission, nor is grumbling a recognition of curative effects. To be manful, to be daring, to be so entirely wise from the learning of the lesson as to extract the sweet from the bitter, thus do we prove ourselves worthy of that suffering which God bestows in mercy and in pity. Troubles, if rightly understood, deepen the most shallow character, purify the most soiled soul. They begin in woe but they end in joy. When the lesson is learned, then comes the holiday--or more precisely, the holy-day--of peace and gladness.
Jim, in his simple way, understood that out of apparent evil great good had come to himself and Leah. Never before had they understood each other so well; never before had they forgathered with less friction. The Duke's reformation was as genuine as his embryonic soul was capable of making it. He felt desperately ashamed of himself at the communion table, and shame of self, provided the physical ego be not considered, is the beginning of repentance, which leads to hope, which brings pardon and solace to the uneasy, sinful heart. Jim did not become a saint by any manner of means, but he tried by fits and starts to be a better man, and so, with true though faltering zeal, advanced towards the light. And it was much gained that so once self-satisfied a man should acknowledge himself to be at all in need of improvement. The recalled code of schoolboy honour helped him to amend the less drastic rules of the society man. Could Jim have only gone still farther back, and remembered helpful nursery prayers and childish faith, he might have seen even more clearly how to utilise his mistakes. But he was yet a spirit in embryo, and his receptive powers were not great.
Leah did not keep pace with her husband on the upward path. When the danger was brought to naught, and her nerves became more normal, she forgot everything with the alacrity of a hardened heart. The wind of the Spirit had but troubled the surface of her nature; its depths remained undisturbed. Within a fortnight her dear devil of egotism returned, and she tore out of her book of life the disagreeable page, which she declined to read for the second time. Certainly she retained so much grace and memory as not to laugh at Jim's efforts to be good, and she was less ready than of yore to see and comment upon his obvious failings. But she secretly wondered that he should try to be pious, when there was no worldly advantage to be gained by such dullness. Besides, Jim, with the zeal of the newly converted, began to preach in a stammering, shamefaced way about the duties they owed to themselves in particular and to society at large. He even looked up Noblesse oblige at the tail-end of the dictionary, and quoted the platitude to Leah. On that occasion she had laughed consumedly; but, truth to say, Jim's sermons bored her immensely. She preferred those of Lionel, who, as a professional guide to glory, knew his business, whereas poor dear Jim was hopelessly muddled.
Therefore, while the Duke laboriously tried to be good, and succeeded but doubtfully, Leah was coquetting deliriously with the world, the flesh, and the many agreeable devils of her acquaintance. She improved her former extravagances into something worse, and revenged herself for being agreeable to Jim by letting both friends and enemies have the full benefit of her witty, cruel tongue. The few who did not come under its lash were in ecstasies at her sparkling conversation, and the many who did made themselves pronouncedly pleasant out of mortal fear. Leah danced and sang through the season with the insolent glee of a woman who knows her position to be unassailable. Jim wondered at her short memory, and tried to refresh it; but that she would not endure, and declined even to hear the name of Demetrius. Moreover, as M. Aksakoff had been translated to Copenhagen, there was no need to smooth matters over between him and the Duke. Everything was safe, everything was ripping, and she felt that her latest pas de seul was being executed on firm ground. She had skipped in the very nick of time from that dangerous old mount which had erupted so feebly.
And no one could say but what she did her best to be amiable. Late in the season she met and congratulated Mr. and Mrs. Askew; she told Lady Richardson how she admired her courage--underlined--in marrying that handsome pauper, Captain Lake; and forgivingly did she condole with Mrs. Penworthy, when the unexpected death of Freddy, from overwork, left that evergreen hack a widow whom no admirer wished to marry. Lady Canvey was most tenderly considered, and Wallace, the globe-trotting cynic, on Leah's introduction, amused the stay-at-home old lady by special command. The sedate Hengists thought even more of the Duchess than they had done of Lady Jim, and she was often asked to bore herself in their protective company. She gave Sir Billy Richardson a smiling time at one of the ducal seats, and invited Joan Kaimes to Curzon Street for a week of shopping and frivolity. Also bazaars and charity concerts, and meetings about the unemployed aristocracy, took up her attention. The fashionable congregation of an exclusive church beheld her regularly in its midst, and heard the audible admission that she was a miserable sinner--a most touching confession for a truly good Duchess to make. Then she befriended a bishop, who was not too straight-laced, and induced him to preach a scientific sermon in Lionel's church, of which Lionel, very nastily, did not approve. Oh, it was a merry time, when the grapes were ripe and the first-fruits of her ducal harvest were being gathered in. The Duchess of Pentland won golden opinions even from the censorious. Things could not have been better managed by the discarded fetish, and Leah admitted that in this respectable orgy the birthday of her life had come.
During this meteoric career it surprised every one that she should choose to retire suddenly. Fashion clamoured at her closed doors; society journals wondered and lamented; individual friends expressed themselves puzzled; and in print and conversation the freak of a Duchess who chose to disappear was freely discussed. It was as though the noonday sun should set unexpectedly. Leah's radiant orb had blazed triumphantly for a few months, paling the lesser stars of society, and then--had vanished. The Duke, when applied to for an explanation, stated that she had gone abroad, because her health was--hum--hum--hum. She crossed the Channel alone, too, which looked odd. People began to talk and to invent reasons to explain the inexplicable. But not even the most daring hinted at a connubial disagreement. Jim would have stopped any such rumour at once with high words. Not that it could arise, seeing that he thanked God publicly every Sunday for possessing a wife whose price was far above rubies. But whatever had happened, whatever might be the reason, it was indisputable that the beautiful and wealthy and clever and popular Duchess of Pentland had retired from the world in her heyday of social success.
Lionel was the first to hear of her when she returned unexpectedly to Firmingham, after a month's sojourn on the Continent. One day in the chilly grey autumn weather he received a note asking him to call at four o'clock, and went unthinkingly to pass through what he afterwards remembered as the most painful hour of his life. He fancied, when setting out, that Leah merely wished to see him about the Duke. It might be that Jim, with the Old Adam leaven still working within, had broken out again, and that Lionel was summoned to call the sinner a second time to repentance. But the Duke, as he gathered from old Colley, was vegetating at Hengist Castle. It was impossible that the Old Adam could emerge from his penitential cell in so respectable and moral a neighbourhood.
Leah received her cousin in the sitting-room of her Lady Jim days, where they had twice talked seriously. Later on it appeared that she had a special reason for selecting an apartment sanctified by the vicar's endeavour to improve her into a moderately presentable angel. It was a charming and tastefully decorated room, and the Duchess was as tastefully decorated and as charming as her surroundings. She sat in a deep chair by a brisk fire, dressed with that perfect choice of colour and material which always distinguished her. The delicate blue of her frock, and a selection of certain filigree silver ornaments, matched marvellously with her splendid red hair and sapphire eyes. Lionel noted an unusual pallor, but thought that he had never seen, her look more lovely. Apparently she had been reading, for she dropped her handkerchief over an open book on the small table at her elbow when she rose to shake hands. He mechanically wondered at the trivial action, and learned its significance later.