Honora made several attempts at an answer before she succeeded in saying, simply, that Hugh was too absorbed in his work of reconstruction of the estate for them to have house-parties this autumn. And even this was a concession hard for her pride to swallow. She would have preferred not to reply at all, and this slightest of references to his work—and hers—seemed to degrade it. Before she folded the sheet she looked again at that word “reconstruction” and thought of eliminating it. It was too obviously allied to “redemption”; and she felt that Mrs. Kame could not understand redemption, and would ridicule it. Honora went downstairs and dropped her reply guiltily into the mail-bag. It was for Hugh's sake she was sending it, and from his eyes she was hiding it.
And, while we are dealing with letters, one, or part of one, from Honora's aunt, may perhaps be inserted here. It was an answer to one that Honora had written a few days after her installation at Grenoble, the contents of which need not be gone into: we, who know her, would neither laugh nor weep at reading it, and its purport may be more or less accurately surmised from her aunt's reply.
“As I wrote you at the time, my dear,”—so it ran “the shock which
your sudden marriage with Mr. Chiltern caused us was great—so great
that I cannot express it in words. I realize that I am growing old,
and perhaps the world is changing faster than I imagine. And I
wrote you, too, that I would not be true to myself if I told you
that what you have done was right in my eyes. I have asked myself
whether my horror of divorce and remarriage may not in some degree
be due to the happiness of my life with your uncle. I am,
undoubtedly, an exceptionally fortunate woman; and as I look
backwards I see that the struggles and trials which we have shared
together were really blessings.
“Nevertheless, dear Honora, you are, as your uncle wrote you, our
child, and nothing can alter that fact in our hearts. We can only
pray with all our strength that you may find happiness and peace in
your new life. I try to imagine, as I think of you and what has
happened to you in the few years since you have left us—how long
they seem!—I try to imagine some of the temptations that have
assailed you in that world of which I know nothing. If I cannot, it
is because God made us different. I know what you have suffered,
and my heart aches for you.
“You say that experience has taught you much that you could not
have—learned in any other way. I do not doubt it. You tell me
that your new life, just begun, will be a dutiful one. Let me
repeat that it is my anxious prayer that you have not builded upon
sand, that regrets may not come. I cannot say more. I cannot
dissemble. Perhaps I have already said too much.
“Your loving
“AUNT MARY.”
An autumn wind was blowing, and Honora gazed out of the window at the steel-blue, ruffled waters of the lake. Unconsciously she repeated the words to herself:
“Builded upon sand!”
CHAPTER XIV. CONTAINING PHILOSOPHY FROM MR. GRAINGER
Swiftly came the autumn days, and swiftly went. A bewildering, ever changing, and glorious panorama presented itself, green hillsides struck first with flaming crimsons and yellows, and later mellowing into a wondrous blending of gentler, tenderer hues; lavender, and wine, and the faintest of rose colours where the bare beeches massed. Thus the slopes were spread as with priceless carpets for a festival. Sometimes Honora, watching, beheld from her window the russet dawn on the eastern ridge, and the white mists crouching in strange, ghostly shapes abode the lake and the rushing river: and she saw these same mists gather again, shivering, at nightfall. In the afternoon they threaded valleys, silent save for the talk between them and the stirring of the leaves under their horses' feet.
So the Indian summer passed—that breathless season when even happiness has its premonitions and its pangs. The umber fields, all ploughed and harrowed, lay patiently awaiting the coming again of the quickening spring. Then fell the rain, the first, cold winter rain that shrouded the valley and beat down upon the defenceless, dismantled garden and made pools in the hollows of the stone seat: that flung itself against Honora's window as though begrudging her the warmth and comfort within. Sometimes she listened to it in the night.
She was watching. How intent was that vigil, how alert and sharpened her senses, a woman who has watched alone may answer. Now, she felt, was the crisis at hand: the moment when her future, and his was to hang in the balance. The work on the farms, which had hitherto left Chiltern but little time for thought, had relaxed. In these wet days had he begun to brood a little? Did he show signs of a reversion to that other personality, the Chiltern she had not known, yet glimpses of whom she had had? She recalled the third time she had seen him, the morning at the Lilacs in Newport, that had left upon her the curious sense of having looked on a superimposed portrait. That Chiltern which she called her Viking, and which, with a woman's perversity, she had perhaps loved most of all, was but one expression of the other man of days gone by. The life of that man was a closed book she had never wished to open. Was he dead, or sleeping? And if sleeping, would he awake? How softly she tread!