“Go on,” she said, forcing herself to speak quietly. “Tell me the rest.”
“The rest had the Tormarin temper for its corner-stone. Nesta was an utterly spoilt child, and a coquette to her very finger-tips. She tossed dignity to the winds, and there were everlasting scenes and quarrels. Then, one day, Blaise came in and found her entertaining a man whom he had forbidden the house. I don’t know what he said to her—but I can guess, poor child! He horsewhipped the man, and he must have frightened Nesta half out of her mind. That evening she ran away from Staple—Nick and I, of course, were living at the Dower House then—and after months of fruitless enquiry I had a letter from Margherita Valdi telling me that she had been found drowned. She had evidently made her way back to Italy, hoping to reach her sister, and then, in a fit of despair, committed suicide.”
“Oh, poor Blaise! How awful for him!” exclaimed Jean, horror-stricken. For the moment her own individual point of view was swept away in a flood of sympathy for Tormarin.
“Yes. It broke him up badly. Always, I think, he is brooding over the past. It colours his entire outlook on things. You see, he blamed himself—his ungovernable temper—for the whole tragedy.... If only he had been gentler with her, not terrified her into running away!... After all, she was a mere child—barely seventeen. But she was a heartless, conscienceless minx, nevertheless.... And Margherita Valdi did not let him down lightly. She wrote him a terrible letter, accusing him of her sister’s death. I opened it—he was abroad at the time—but, of course, he had to see it ultimately. Tied up in a little separate packet was Nesta’s wedding-ring, together with a newspaper report of the affair, and, to add a last stab of horror, she had folded the newspaper clipping and thrust it through the wedding-ring, labelling the packet ‘Cause and effect.’ It was a brutal thing to do.”
They were both silent for a space, Jean painfully envisaging the tragedy that lay behind that stern, habitual gravity of Tormarin’s, Lady Anne asking herself tremulously if she had been wise—if she had been wise in her disclosure? She wanted her son’s happiness so immeasurably! She believed she knew wherein it might lie, and she had raked over the burning embers of the past that she might help to give it him.
She knew that he himself was very unlikely to confide in Jean the story of his unhappy marriage, or that if he ever did so, it would be but to shoulder all the blame himself, exonerating Nesta entirely. Nor, unless Jean understood the fiery furnace through which he had passed—that ordeal of impetuous, mistaken love, of disillusion, and, finally, of the most bitter self-reproach—could she possibly interpret aright Blaise’s strange, churlish moods, his insistent efforts to stand always on one side, as though he were entitled to make no further claim on life, and, above all, the bitter quality which permeated his whole outlook.
All these things had been in Lady Anne’s mind when she had decided to enlighten Jean. She had seen, just as Judith had seen, whither Blaise was tending, fight against it as he might, and she was determined to remove from his path whatever of stumbling-block and hindrance she could. And, in this instance, she felt instinctively that Jean’s own attitude might constitute the greatest danger. Any woman, as sincere and positive as she, might easily be driven in upon herself, shrinkingly misunderstanding Blaise’s deliberate aloofness, and thus unconsciously assist in strengthening that barrier against love which he was striving to hold in place between them—and which Lady Anne so yearned to see thrown down.
It was to this end that she had reopened the shadowed pages of the past—so that no foolish obstacle, born of sheer misunderstanding, might imperil her son’s hope of happiness if the time should ever come—as she prayed it would come—when he would free himself from the shackles of a tragic memory and turn his face towards the light of a new dawn.