CHAPTER XV
An aunt, with whom she had lived during the brief interval between her return from India and her marriage, granted her a temporary asylum.
“If you will do with me until I can find some place of my own,” said Irene, “I shall be grateful.”
“My house is always open to dear Robert’s child,” said Miss Beechcroft.
She was an austere woman of primitive views, to whom Irene had ever been a puzzle. As the heroine of this amazing scandal, her niece was a dark and inscrutable enigma. Its transcendency bewildered her. Having no moral foot-rule capable of measuring it, she did not attempt the obviously futile. She waived explanatory details. Her dead brother’s only child craved shelter; she gave it willingly; her own companionship she withheld as much as possible, for a variety of reasons. Not the least was the gentlewoman’s respect for the dignity of suffering.
The freedom from misdirected sympathy was a boon to Irene. She needed solitude. Her universe had crashed about her ears. At first she was dazed, stunned, scarce knowing where to turn amid the shapeless wreckage. Few things could exemplify the cataclysm. Overwhelming proof coming to a Paul at the end of his life that there was no Christ, that his apostolate had been pure silliness, could not have brought him more face to face with chaos. It was too sudden for her to look within for contributing causes. Introspection comes later. At present she could only stare aghast at the ruins of her life, and proceed to shape for herself a temporary existence.
On the second day after the trial she found a measure of mental calmness. The past was irrevocable. Gerard’s self-revelation was final. There was no Gerard, such as she had conceived him; her worship had been a futility. She was conscious that love was dead, killed outright by lightning. Further she could not go. Neither could she forecast the consequences of the threatened divorce. Reconstruction for the present was essential. The effort braced her strength. Nature came to her aid, pride armed her with steadfastness, the fire of suffering steeled her will. She could humble herself no more to Gerard to sue for mercy. In everything henceforward the initiative would lie with him. She throned herself on snowcapped heights.
Yet from time to time her warm woman’s nature drooped earthward and sought for Hugh. But she shrank tremblingly from meeting him, wrote him a second vague postponement. Then regretted it an hour after. She must see him, and that soon; before he encountered Gerard. What would happen if the two men met—Gerard mad with jealous passion, Hugh blazing with indignation? The gentler elements within her took fright. A month before she would have scouted the idea of violence as preposterous. Bloodshed in private quarrel was a thing, in England, of the evil and romantic past. But she would have counted as equally unreal the story of the recent sensational incidents in their lives. Now nothing seemed too improbable for possibility. Calais sands stretched wet and bloodstained before her imagination. But still she shrank from meeting Hugh.
She lay awake long that night, in the primly furnished room where once she had dreamed so many girlish dreams of the man she was about to marry, and strove to disentangle the complexities of her emotions. She dreaded Hugh learning Gerard’s resolution. A cowardly impulse to send Hugh as mediator between Gerard and herself, was strangled at birth by a fierce grip of pride. If she alone could not convince her husband of her fidelity, what mattered his conviction at all? And then the realisation of that of which she stood self-accused lapped her woman’s chastity in fire from head to foot. At last she slept. The morning came, but with it no letter of repentance, as she had vaguely hoped, from Gerard. His decision had been final. In the afternoon she went to Sunnington and superintended the packing of her belongings. The maid Jane aided her, glancing every now and then with scared eyes at the set face of her mistress and dimly comprehending the anguish that lay behind. If Irene had gone through the rooms tearful and sobbing, the girl would have wept in sympathy; but there was that in Irene’s manner that held her silent.
Only once did Irene break down, and then she was alone in the upstairs room, that had been a nursery, and whose high fire-guards—fixtures which they had not disturbed when they took over the house—still suggested its former use. And a small child’s bed was there, occupied in her time by many little waifs. The associations the room had always evoked came back to her. She threw herself face downward on the bed.