And yet it was not that maimed hand, either, which stood between himself and Constance. It was rather the spiritual fact behind the visible—that instinct of fierce, tyrannical cruelty which he had felt as he laid his hands on Radowitz in the Oxford dawn a month ago. He shrank from it now as he thought of it. It blackened and degraded his own image of himself. He remembered something like it years before, when he had joined in the bullying of a small boy at school—a boy who yet afterwards had become his good friend. If there is such a thing as “possession,” devilish possession, he had pleaded it on both occasions. Would it, however, have seemed of any great importance to him now, but for Constance Bledlow’s horror-struck recoil? All men of strong and vehement temperament—so his own defence might have run—are liable to such gusts of violent, even murderous feeling; and women accept it. But Constance Bledlow, influenced, no doubt, by a pale-blooded sentimentalist like Sorell, had refused to accept it.
“I should be always afraid of you—of your pride and your violence—and love mustn’t be afraid. Good-bye!”
He tried to scoff, but the words had burnt into his heart.
CHAPTER XII
It was in the early morning, a few days after her arrival at Scarfedale Manor, the house of her two maiden aunts, that Connie, while all the Scarfedale household was still asleep, took pen and paper and began a letter to Nora Hooper.
On the evening before Connie left Oxford there had been a long and intimate scene between these two. Constance, motherless and sisterless, and with no woman friend to turn to more understanding than Annette, had been surprised in passionate weeping by Nora, the night after the Marmion catastrophe. The tact and devotion of the younger girl had been equal to the situation. She humbly admired Connie, and yet was directly conscious of a strength in herself, in which Connie was perhaps lacking, and which might be useful to her brilliant cousin. At any rate on this occasion she showed so much sweetness, such power, beyond her years, of comforting and understanding, that Connie told her everything, and thenceforward possessed a sister and a confidante. The letter ran as follows:—
“DEAREST NORA,—I have only been at Scarfedale Manor a week, and already I seem to have been living here for months. It is a dear old house, very like the houses one used to draw when one was four years old—a doorway in the middle, with a nice semicircular top, and three windows on either side; two stories above with seven windows each, and a pretty dormered roof, with twisted brick chimneys, and a rookery behind it; also a walled garden, and a green oval grass-plot between it and the road. It seems to me that everywhere you go in England you find these houses, and, I dare say, people like my aunts living in them.
“They are very nice to me, and as different as possible from each other. Aunt Marcia must have been quite good-looking, and since she gave up wearing a rational dress which she patented twenty-five years ago, she has always worn either black silk or black satin, a large black satin hat, rather like the old ‘pokes,’ with black feathers in winter and white feathers in summer, and a variety of lace scarves—real lace—which she seems to have collected all over the world. Aunt Winifred says that the Unipantaloonicoat’—the name of the patented thing—lost Aunt Marcia all her lovers. They were scared by so much strength of character, and could not make up their minds to tackle her. She gave it up in order to capture the last of them—a dear old general who had adored her—but he shook his head, went off to Malta to think it out, and there died of Malta fever. She considers herself his widow and his portrait adorns her sitting-room. She has a poor opinion of the lower orders, especially of domestic servants. But her own servants don’t seem to mind her much. The butler has been here twenty years, and does just what he pleases. The amusing thing is that she considers herself extremely intellectual, because she learnt Latin in her youth—she doesn’t remember a word of it now!—because she always read the reviews of papa’s books—and because she reads poetry every morning before breakfast. Just now she is wrestling with George Meredith; and she asks me to explain ‘Modern Love’ to her. I can’t make head or tail of it. Nor can she. But when people come to tea she begins to talk about Meredith, and asks them if they don’t think him very obscure. And as most people here who come to tea have never heard of him, it keeps up her dignity. All the same, she is a dear old thing—and she put a large case of chocolate in my room before I arrived!
“Aunt Winifred is quite different. Aunt Marcia calls her a ‘reactionary,’ because she is very high church and great friends with all the clergy. She is a very quiet little thing, short and fair, with a long thin nose and eyes that look you through. Her two great passions are—curates, especially consumptive curates—and animals. There is generally a consumptive curate living the open-air life in the garden. Mercifully the last patient has just left. As for animals, the house is full of stray dogs and tame rabbits and squirrels that run up you and look for nuts in your pocket. There is also a mongoose, who pulled the cloth off the tea-table yesterday and ran away with all the cakes. Aunt Marcia bears it philosophically, but the week before I came there was a crisis. Aunt Winifred met some sheep on the road between here and our little town. She asked where they were going to. And the man with them said he was taking them to the slaughter-house. She was horrified, and she bought them all—there and then! And half an hour later, she appeared here with the sheep, and Aunt Marcia was supposed to put them up in the garden. Well, that was too much, and the aunts had words. What happened to the sheep I don’t know. Probably Aunt Winifred has eaten them since without knowing it.