Miss Bretherton

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Paul shook his head, but whether in protest or agreement Kendal could hardly tell. Then he went back to his task of sorting the letters, and let the matter drop. It seemed as if he were scarcely capable of taking an interest in it for its own sake, but simply as a wish, a charge of Marie's.

Kendal parted from him in the evening with an aching heart, and was haunted for hours by the memory of the desolate figure returning slowly into the empty house, and by a sharp prevision of all the lonely nights and the uncomforted morrows which lay before the stricken man.

But, as Paris receded farther and farther behind him, and the sea drew nearer, and the shores of the country which held Isabel Bretherton, it was but natural that even the grip upon him of this terrible and startling calamity should relax a little, and that he should realise himself as a man seeking the adored woman, his veins still beating with the currents of youth, and the great unguessed future still before him. He had left Marie in the grave, and his life would bear the scar of that loss for ever. But Isabel Bretherton was still among the living, the warm, the beautiful, and every mile brought him nearer to the electric joy of her presence. He took a sad strange pleasure in making the contrast between the one picture and the other as vivid as possible. Death and silence on the one side—oh, how true and how irreparable! But on the other, he forced on his imagination till it drew for him an image of youth and beauty so glowing that it almost charmed the sting out of his grief. The English paper which he succeeded in getting at Calais contained the announcement: 'Miss Bretherton has, we are glad to say, completely recovered from the effects of the fainting fit which so much alarmed the audience at the Calliope last week. She was able to play Elvira as usual last night, and was greeted by a large and sympathetic house.' He read it, and turned the page hastily, as if what the paragraph suggested was wholly distasteful to him. He refused altogether to think of her as weak or suffering; he shrank from his own past misgivings, his own prophecies about her. The world would be a mere dark prison-house if her bright beauty were over-clouded! She was not made for death, and she should stand to him as the image of all that escapes and resists and defies that tyrant of our years, and pain, his instrument and herald.

He reached London in the midst of a rainy fog. The endless black streets stretched before him in the dreary December morning like so many roads into the nether regions; the gas-lamps scattered an unseasonable light through the rain and fog; it was the quintessence of murky, cheerless winter.

He reached his own rooms, and found his man up and waiting for him, and a meal ready. It was but three days since he had been last there, the open telegram was still lying on the table. One of his first acts was to put it hastily out of sight. Over his breakfast he planned his embassy to Miss Bretherton. The best time to find her alone, he imagined, would be about mid-day, and in the interval he would put his books and papers to rights. They lay scattered about—books, proofs, and manuscript. As his orderly hands went to work upon them, he was conscious that he had never been so remote from all that they represented. But his nature was faithful and tenacious, and under the outward sense of detachment there was an inward promise of return. 'I will come back to you,' seemed to be the cry of his thought. 'You shall be my only friends. But first I must see her, and all my heart is hers!'

The morning dragged away, and at half-past eleven he went out, carrying the little case with him. As he stood outside the Bayswater house, in which she had settled for the winter, he realised that he had never yet been under her roof, never yet seen her at home. It was his own fault. She had asked him in her gracious way, on the first night of Elvira, to come and see her. But, instead of doing so, he had buried himself in his Surrey lodging, striving to bring the sober and austere influences of the country to bear upon the feverish indecision of his mood. Perhaps his disappearance and silence had wounded her; after all, he knew that he had some place in her thoughts.

The servant who opened the door demurred to his request to see Miss Bretherton. 'The doctor says, sir, that at home she must keep quiet; she has not seen any visitors just lately.' But Kendal persisted, and his card was taken in, while he waited the result. The servant hurried along the ground-floor passage, knocked at the door at the farther end, went in for a moment, and came out beckoning to him. He obeyed with a beating heart, and she threw open the door for him.

Inside stood Isabel Bretherton, with eager surprise and pleasure in her whole attitude. She had just risen from her chair, and was coming forward; a soft white cashmere shawl hung around her; her dress, of some dark rich stuff, fell with the flowing, stately lines peculiar to it; her face was slightly flushed, and the brilliancy of her colour, of her hair, of her white, outstretched hand, seemed to Kendal to take all the chill and gloom out of the winter air. She held some proof sheets of a new play in her hand, and the rest lay piled beside her on a little table.

'How kind of you, Mr. Kendal,' she said, advancing with her quick impulsive step towards him. 'I thought you had forgotten us, and I have been wanting your advice so badly! I have just been complaining of you a little in a letter to Madame de Châteauvieux! She—'

Then she suddenly stopped, checked and startled by his face. He was always colourless and thin, but the two nights he had just passed through had given him an expression of haggard exhaustion. His black eyes seemed to have lost the keenness which was so remarkable in them, and his prematurely gray hair gave him almost a look of age in spite of the lightness and pliancy of the figure.