by Hugh Walpole
“I didn’t have a very good night either. That storm made me sleep badly.”
“Yes, wasn’t it a corker? It’s all right to-day though.”
She looked through the wide high windows and saw out over a country painted as in a delicate water-colour — The softest green and dark brown lay beneath a pale blue sky, very still, very gentle. Tiny white puffs of cloud were blown, like soap bubbles across the sun, so that bright gleams floated and passed and flashed again.
She drew a deep breath— “Nothing terrifying in such a day as this.”
“Yes, it’s beautiful — beautiful! I’m off for the day,” Roddy said, “ridin’ — —”
She helped herself to some breakfast and sat down.
Roddy said, “Well, no one would ever believe you’d had a bad night, Miss Rand.”— “You’re fresh as a pin.”
“Thank you,” she said, laughing. “But, all the same, I did sleep badly.”
“I’m not feeling princely myself,” he confessed, “that’s why I’m goin’ off for a ride, nothin’ like a ride to take you out of yourself. Don’t you ever feel, Miss Rand, that you want to get right away from yourself and be someone else?”
She looked at him. Roddy was in real trouble. His very physical strength showed the more clearly that he was unhappy. His fingers moved restlessly, his eyes were never still. She looked at her letters. There was one from Lady Adela.
“Oh! I’m sorry — I’m afraid I shall have to go back almost immediately — The Duchess is much less well — They’re worried about her.”
“The Duchess!” Roddy started up and then sat down again. “I’m sorry — I was thinking about her only yesterday. What’s the matter?”
“Lady Adela doesn’t say, but she asks about you — the Duchess, I mean. Got it into her head, Lady Adela says, that you’re not well or something.”
“I’ll write to her.” Roddy spoke slowly as though to himself— “I’ve not treated her very well lately and she’s always been such a brick to me.” He left his breakfast, walked backwards and forwards once or twice— “Always been such a brick to me, the old lady has,” he repeated.
Lady Adela really did want Lizzie to return. This horrid war was getting on her nerves, the house was all in disorder and nobody seemed either well or happy.
“Somebody really does want me,” thought Lizzie with a certain grim satisfaction.
But she was terribly restless that morning. She could settle down to nothing and ended by walking up and down the garden paths, watching the pale winter light cross the Downs in sweeping shadow, seeing the bare branches, all black and sharp against the blue distance.
How she loved life and how, at every turn, life was thrust from her! For that other woman, there inside the house, two men were ready, eager to die — for herself, in all the world, no one cared.
There came up to her again, borne as it were on the sharp winter air, a determination to drive down Rachel’s defences. The very sense that now, after Lady Adela’s letter, she must shortly return to London, hardened her resolution.
Before breakfast she had felt that she did not care, now, quite suddenly she was determined that she would confront Rachel and drag the truth from her. How much did Rachel care? Was Rachel already involved in a liaison with Breton?
And, at that thought, a pain so fierce clutched her heart that for a moment she could not see and the garden and the sky mingled like coloured smoke before her eyes.
Suddenly, coming to the end of the garden by the stone gate she saw that a strange thing had happened — one of the gryphons, perched there for many centuries, had tumbled to the ground and lay in the path, beyond the garden, broken into two pieces.
The storm of last night must have driven it down. But what had broken it?
She was sorry. She knew how deeply attached Roddy was to those gryphons; she remembered his pride when he had pointed them out to her.
The other gryphon looked very lonely.
“He will be distressed.” The dead leaves on the path were trembling over the broken pieces of stone and whistling, in little excited groups, above it— “Just as though they are glad,” she thought.
She and Rachel had a very amiable conversation at luncheon. Rachel confessed to a bad night.
Lizzie told her about Jacob.
“How tiresome of him to come and bother you — yes, I couldn’t sleep and he was very restless too, so I put him into the passage. It was after six — I meant him to go down to the servants’ hall. I’m so sorry, Miss Rand.”
“Oh, he didn’t worry me at all. I was awake.” That appeal was in Rachel’s eyes to-day more than ever. Lizzie saw it and steeled her heart. “I must know,” she thought. “I must know.”
“I’m afraid,” she said, “that I’ll have to go back to London to-morrow. I heard from Lady Adela this morning — The Duchess is not so well.”
“Oh!” Rachel caught her breath— “oh, Miss Rand, no, no, oh! I hope not! You must stay! I —— !” her colour came and went. “There’s the dance. I don’t know what I shall do without you.” And she went on more desperately, catching Lizzie’s eyes and evading them. “We are just beginning to be so happy here. My husband likes you so much. I do hope — —”
She stopped and the colour left her again; her hands were trembling on the white tablecloth.
The strangest impulse flooded Lizzie’s breast, an impulse to go to her and put her arms about her and kiss her and let her, there and then, unburden her heart —
Lizzie drove the impulse down, buried it. Her eyes were cold and her voice hard as she answered —
“I’m so sorry, but I think I must go. I can’t leave Lady Adela if things are really difficult. I’ll come this afternoon, shall I? and we might go over the dance — —”
Rachel had been thinking; she looked up sharply and stared at Lizzie, staring as though she had been some stranger whom she saw for the first time.
“Yes — Come to the Chinese room at four, will you? We’ll have tea up there.”
“Yes,” said Lizzie, “at four.”
They were both of them aware that something, now quite irrevocable, had been settled by these words.
There was a little old library up in one of the towers, and there Lizzie went. She had a desperate need of some place where, during the next hour, she might think and decide upon some plan. The room had little diamond-paned windows that looked down, on one side, over the courtyard, and on the other over the garden and the Downs. The shelves went from ceiling to floor and were filled with books that dimly shone with their old gold and were dusky in their rich, faded bindings.
It was very seldom that anyone came here; Lizzie was quite alone as, perched up in one of the deep-seated windows, she looked down at the garden, saw the stone gate with the solitary gryphon, watched the swiftly fading afternoon light fill the green lawn as a pot is filled with water.
Even now, early though it was, the little room was growing dark.
She strove now, resolutely, to discipline her mind. Although the very thought of Francis Breton now shamed her, it was for him that she must care. “Poor dear,” he was even now, in her heart. “Foolish, indiscreet — must plunge from one mess into another, needs someone — Oh, so dreadfully — to help him out.”
Her hostility to Rachel did not prevent her from feeling that here was someone very young, terribly inexperienced, most unhappily impulsive — the very last in the world to prevent Breton from having another catastrophe as bad as the early ones.
She must know absolutely what it was that he and Rachel were doing, and only Rachel could tell her that — And here her feeling about Rachel was compounded of the strangest mixture of anger and suspicion, of tenderness and compassion, of sympathy and hard callous indifference.
“Oh!” Lizzie thought, “why has all this come to me? Why wasn’t I allowed just to go on with my life as it was — My life that was so safe and sure and dull?” —
She was conscious, as she sat there, that she was li
stening for something. She felt, in an odd way, that the day had been a direct continuance of the dream that she had had in the night; all the morning she had been aware that her ears, in spite of herself, had been waiting for some sound, a message, or an arrival.
She sat now in the swiftly darkening room, as though she had been told that someone was coming at such and such an hour and she had heard the clock strike and was listening for the grating of the wheels on the cobbles of the courtyard.
The calm winter’s day passed now into a purple twilight — lights were coming in the windows —
She thought she heard a step in the passage and was startled as though someone had been suddenly, unexpectedly within the room.
She opened the window and listened— “Someone — several people — will come down that garden path in a minute — I know they will.”
But the air was very cold and she closed the window; even as she did so a clock struck four.
She got up and went to Rachel.
III
The Chinese room was so called because its walls were covered with a stiff golden Chinese paper. It had wide windows looking on to the garden; Rachel used it a great deal.
Lizzie fixed upon her mind, very deliberately, all the details of her surroundings. Rachel was dressed in black with red round her throat and her waist, and this brilliant colour made her face seem white and there were deep, heavy black marks under her eyes.
She looked up when Lizzie came in, seemed, with a violent effort, to compel control.
They sat there for some time and discussed the dance; the dusk filled the room, then tea was brought. There was a light in their corner; slowly the rest of the room grew dark.
They finished tea, it was taken away, and Lizzie, sitting quite close to Rachel, on a little sofa that had a window just behind it, was aware that again, in spite of herself, her ears were straining for some sound. The house and all the world were profoundly still.
When the servant had at last left them alone, Rachel said— “Miss Rand, you mustn’t go away to-morrow — Aunt Adela can manage for another week. After all, she did promise that you should stay for me over the ball.”
“Why did you ask me here, Lady Rachel?” Lizzie said. Her speech was a direct challenge and, instantly, when she had spoken she knew that they had entered upon those personal relations that they had, during all these weeks, feared.
“I asked you because I wanted you for a friend — I’ve no friend — no woman friend — whom I can trust. I knew that I could trust you — I hoped that you could help me — —”
“I’ve been here for some time now and you have told me nothing.”
“No — because you have held me off, have shown me so plainly that you disliked and distrusted me. You didn’t always dislike me — what have I done?”
“That’s only my way. As I told you this morning, Lady Seddon, I’m not an emotional person. But I feel more than I show. I would like to help you, if you will let me.”
Rachel leaned forward and caught first Lizzie’s arm, then her hand. Then she spoke, her voice quivering as though she were forcing upon herself the most intense control.
“Oh! you’re so strange, so odd I don’t know what you feel, whether you care, but these last months have been so hard for me that even though you hate me, despise me, it doesn’t matter — nothing matters if only I can get away from myself, you’re so different — so dry, so hard, but you are, you are! — just as hard — —” she stopped — Lizzie drew her hand away.
“Please — don’t tell me things if you feel about me like that. It hasn’t been my fault, has it, that we don’t get on? I didn’t ask to come here, to know you — let me go — let me go back. Don’t bother about me — leave me alone,” she at last brought out.
But Rachel said more urgently— “No, don’t go now. Even though you don’t care, even though you hate me, help me. I’ve no one else. If only you knew the things I’ve suffered these past weeks, how I’ve hated myself for my indecision, for my weakness and shame. I don’t know why I feel as though you were the only person to whom I could talk. I’m being driven, I suppose, by this long silence — and then you’re so absolutely to be trusted — even though you dislike me — you’re straight all through — I’ve always known that.”
At Lizzie’s heart again now that strange confusion of sensation, and with it a sure conviction that fate had this scene between them in hand, and that events now, whatever the hours might bring forth, were beyond her control.
“Yes, you may trust me,” she said drily— “I’m useful, at any rate for that.”
Lizzie watched her as, in the little pause that followed, Rachel struggled for concentration and for the point of view that would make the strongest appeal. That, Lizzie grimly knew, was the thing for which the girl was struggling and it yielded her the pleasanter irony because she was, herself, so surely aware of that one fact that all Rachel’s confessions contained —
For herself she had only confidently to sit and wait.... Then Rachel plunged —
“I’m unhappy,” she said, “in my married life, miserably unhappy, and entirely, utterly by my own fault. I’ve tried, or fancied that I’ve tried. I’ve done what I’ve thought was my best — Things have happened now, at last, that have made it impossible — I can’t go on any longer.”
She spoke as though she were, very urgently, endeavouring to deliver a fair honest statement. There was in her voice a note that showed that life had truly, of late, been very hard for her —
“I married, in the beginning, for a wrong reason. I knew then that I didn’t love my husband. I married because I wanted to escape. I had always hated my grandmother and she had always hated me — you knew that, Miss Rand; everyone who had anything to do with us knew it. She had done more than hate me, she had made me frightened — frightened of life and people. Someone came along who was kind and easy and comfortable, and everyone said it would be a good thing, and so I, not because I loved him, but because I wanted to escape from my grandmother, married him. Because I had to silence everything that was honest in me I’m paying now.”
“It was all quite natural,” Lizzie said. “Most women would have done the same.”
“It was horrible from the beginning; I found that I had not escaped from my grandmother at all. She had arranged the marriage and now was always, and in some curious way, influencing it.
“I soon saw what I had done — that I had been false to myself and therefore false to everything else. My husband was in love with me — He was very patient and good to me, but I found that everything that I did or thought or said in connection with my husband was false. What made it so hard was that I was, and I am, very fond of him. My training — the training of all our family had always been — to learn how to be sham, so that one’s real self never appeared all one’s life. It ought to have been easy enough — but I’ve never been like one of my family — I’d always been different.
“I had determined that this year I would do my duty to Roddy — But it’s harder than any determination can govern. It’s bad for Roddy, it’s deadly for me ... at last things have happened that have made it impossible for me — I’ve made up my mind this morning. I must leave Roddy, let him divorce me, give him a better chance with someone else.”
She spoke with the desperate immediate determination of youth, staring in front of her, her hands clenched. Like flame at Lizzie’s heart leapt this knowledge.
“She and Breton are going — only you can stop them — she and Breton.”
“Don’t you think,” said Lizzie, “a little of your husband?”
“I’m thinking of him all the time — It’s for his sake — that he should have a better chance with someone who cared — —”
“No, that isn’t true,” said Lizzie— “It’s because you love someone else — —”
Rachel, with her head down, whispered, “Yes — it’s because ... someone else.”
“Francis Breton.”
“Yes, Francis
Breton.”
That whisper of his name had in it confidence, worship, defiance ... all these things were torture to Lizzie sitting there, very composed, very stern, very quiet. She should have been able to say that name with just that precious intimacy, and she saw, in Rachel’s eyes, beyond her trouble the glad pride that the pronouncing of the name had given her.
“You know?” Rachel asked at length.
“Yes — —”
“You’ve known a long time.”
“Yes — a long time.”
“Oh! If you’d only spoken to me! — All this time I’ve been wanting you to — You must have known.”
“Yes — I knew.” Then Lizzie brought out slowly, letting her grave eyes wander over Rachel’s face —
“You yourself insisted on telling me. You have brought it upon yourself if I say what I must....”
Rachel caught the hostility.
“Yes?” she said sharply.
“I’m older than you — older in every way. You know so little yet, the harm that you can do.... You must leave Francis Breton alone, Lady Seddon.”
Rachel laughed— “Of course I knew that you — that it was the kind of way that you must look at it. But don’t you see, we’ve got past all that first stage — It isn’t, in the very least, any good looking at it from any general point of view. It’s simply the individual happiness of the three of us, my husband, Francis Breton, myself — It’s better for all of us that I should go.”
“No ... not better for Francis Breton.”
Rachel moved impatiently— “He — he and I — can judge that, Miss Rand — —”
“No — You can’t — you’re too young. You don’t know — I have a right to speak here, I know him — I have known him all this time — —”
Lizzie broke off. Rachel, suddenly looking up, gazed at her — Lizzie, fiercely, also proudly as though she were guarding something very precious that they were trying to take from her, returned her gaze.
“All this time,” Rachel said slowly. “You’ve known him — of course ... at Saxton Square....”
Then, as though the revelation had suddenly broken upon her, “Why you — you —— !”