“Yes, for a long time. It was years before we met again; but she wrote to me several times from Lausanne, during the first year of her banishment; doleful letters, complaining bitterly of her father’s cruelty in keeping her away from her beloved Cheriton, the horses and dogs, the life she loved. School she detested. She was clever, but she had no taste for intellectual pursuits. She soon wearied of the lake and the mountains, and the humdrum society of a small town. She wrote of herself as a galley-slave. Then came a sudden change, and she began to write about him. You don’t know the way a girl writes about him; the first him she has ever thought worthy to be written about. Her tone was light enough at the beginning. She had met a young Irishman at a little evening party, and they had laughed together at Lausanne society. He was an officer, on furlough, full of wit and fun. I need not go into details. I saw her danger, and warned her; I reminded her that her father would never allow her to marry a subaltern in a marching regiment, and that such a marriage would mean starvation. Her father could give her nothing; it was incumbent on her to marry well, and with her attractions she had only to wait for a good offer. It would inevitably come in due time.”
“She was handsome, I suppose? I know her face in the picture at Cheriton. My cousin bought all the old portraits.”
“She was much handsomer than the picture. That was painted when she was only fifteen, but at seventeen her beauty had developed, and she was one of the most brilliant blondes I ever saw. Well, I suppose you know how useless my advice was. She ran away with her Irish admirer, and I heard no more of her for nearly four years, when I met her one afternoon in the Strand, and she took me home to her lodging in Cecil Street, and gave me some tea. It was in October, and I stayed with her till dark, and then she insisted on seeing me off in the omnibus to Haverstock Hill, where I was then living in an artist’s family. The lodgings were shabby, and she was shabbily dressed. She was as handsome as ever, but she looked worried and unhappy. Her husband had sold out of the army, and had a position as secretary to a West End club.
“She told me that they would have been pretty well off but for his extravagance. He was getting four hundred a year, and they had no children. She complained that it was her fate to be allied with spendthrifts. Her father had squandered his fortune; and her husband’s improvident habits kept her in continual debt and difficulty. It grieved me to see the shabbiness of her surroundings—the squalid lodging-house parlour, without so much as a bunch of flowers or a stand of books to show that it was in the occupation of a lady. There was a cigarbox on the mantelpiece, and there was a heap of newspapers on the sofa, and a pair of shabby slippers inside the fender. It was a room to make one shudder. I asked her if she was reconciled to her father, and she said no; she had heard nothing of him since her marriage. I felt very unhappy about her after we parted at Hungerford Market. I saw her standing on the pavement as the omnibus drove away, a tall, slim figure, distinguished-looking in spite of her shabby mantle and rusty black silk gown. I had promised to go and see her again, though I was very seldom at liberty at that time, and I went to Cecil Street two or three times in the course of the winter, but she was always out, and there was something in the tone of her letters that made me think she did not wish to see me again, though I believe she was fond of me always, poor soul. I saw nothing more of her, and heard nothing until nearly four years afterwards, when I was spending an afternoon at Richmond with my pupils—two girls of fourteen and sixteen—and I came face to face with her in front of Thomson’s Seat. She was with a tall, handsome man, whom at first I took to be her husband: but there was something in the manner of both of them that impressed me uncomfortably, and I began to fear that this was not her husband. She looked much brighter than when I saw her in Cecil Street, and she was better dressed—very plainly, but in excellent taste. She took me aside a little way while her companion stood and talked to the two girls. She put her arm through mine in her old caressing way, and then she said, abruptly, ‘I almost wonder that you will speak to me. I thought you would cut me dead.’ I looked puzzled, no doubt; so she said, ‘Perhaps you don’t know what a lost creature I am. Perhaps you have not heard.’ I told her I had heard nothing about her since we parted at Hungerford Market, and then she gave a deep sigh, and said, ‘Well, I am not going to deceive you. That,’ with a jerk of her head towards the man who was standing with his back to us, ‘is not my husband, but he and I are bound together for the rest of our lives, and we are perfectly happy together. Society would scorn us and trample upon us no doubt if we gave it a chance; but we don’t. We live out of the world, and we live for one another. Now, aren’t you shocked with me? Don’t you want to run away?’ she asked, with a little laugh, which sounded as if she was very nearly crying. I told her that I was very sorry for her. I could say no more than that. ‘You would be sorrier still if you could picture to yourself the miserable life I led before I left my husband,’ she said. ‘I bore it for five years, years that seemed an eternity. He cared for me no more than for the flower-girls in the street. He left me to pine in my dingy lodging, left me to be dunned and worried all day long, left me out-at-elbows, ashamed of my own shabbiness, while he amused himself at his club; and then he considered himself cruelly used when he found out there was another man in the world who thought me worth caring for, and when I told him I loved that man with all my heart. My leaving him was the impulse of a moment. The moment came when his brutality turned the scale, and I ran out of the house in my despair, and jumped into the first cab I could hail, and drove away to him,’ pointing to the man in the distance, strolling beside my two gawky girls, ‘and to happiness. I am a wicked wretch, no doubt, to be happy under such circumstances, but I am, or, at any rate, as happy as anybody can hope to be in this world. There is always a thorn among the flowers,’ she sighed, as if the thorn was a big one, I thought. ‘I suppose I shall never see you again,’ she said. ‘When we say good-bye presently, it will be farewell for ever.’ I told her that was not inevitable. I was my own mistress, free to choose my friends. I told her that if ever she had need of a friend I would go to her. I felt that I was in some wise answerable for the bad turn her life had taken, for had I been a more judicious counsellor, I might have guided her better, might have prevented her coming into collision with her father. I asked her for her address, but she told me she had promised to tell nobody where she lived. ‘We are living out of the world,’ she said, ‘we have no visitors, no friends or acquaintance.’ She clasped my hands, kissed me, and hurried away to rejoin the man whose name I never learned. He lifted his hat to me and the girls, and they walked away together towards the Star and Garter, leaving us standing by Thomson’s Seat, staring idly at the landscape in the summer sunlight. I felt dazed as I stood there, looking down into that lovely valley. It had been a terrible shock to me to meet her again under such circumstances.”
CHAPTER XVI.
“Be useful where thou livest, that they may
Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still.
... All worldly joys go less
To the one joy of doing kindnesses.”
“What impression did the man make upon you in that brief meeting?” asked Theodore. “Did he strike you as a roué?”