She drew back to go up-stairs, and met her husband coming slowly out of the study. He looked steadily at her, as she clung trembling to the banisters. There was no alteration in his glance, and she suddenly perceived that what he knew now he had always known. She put her hand to her head.
"You look tired," he said, in the level voice to which she was accustomed. "You had better go to bed."
She stumbled swiftly up-stairs, catching at the banisters, and went into her own room.
Her maid was waiting for her by the dressing-table with its shaded electric lights. And she remembered that she had given a party, and that she had on her diamonds.
It would take a long time to unfasten them. She pulled at the diamond sun on her breast with a shaking hand. Her husband had given it to her when her eldest son was born. Her maid took the tiara gently out of her hair, and cut the threads that sewed the diamonds on her breast and shoulders. Would it never end? The lace of her gown, cautiously withdrawn through its hundred eyelet-holes, knotted itself.
"Cut it," she said, impatiently. "Cut it."
At last she was in her dressing-gown and alone. She flung herself face downwards on the sofa. Her attitude had the touch of artificiality which was natural to her.
The deluge had arrived, and unconsciously she met it, as she would have made a heroine meet it had she been a novelist, in a white dressing-gown and pink ribbons in a stereotyped attitude of despair on a divan.
Conscience is supposed to make cowards of us all, but it is a matter of common experience that the unimaginative are made cowards of only by being found out.
Had David qualms of conscience when Uriah fell before the besieged city? Surely if he had he would have winced at the obvious parallel of the prophet's story about the ewe lamb. But apparently he remained serenely obtuse till the indignant author's "Thou art the man" unexpectedly nailed him to the cross of his sin.
And so it was with Lady Newhaven. She had gone through the twenty-seven years of her life believing herself to be a religious and virtuous person. She was so accustomed to the idea that it had become a habit, and now the whole of her self-respect was in one wrench torn from her. The events of the last year had not worn it down to its last shred, had not even worn the nap off. It was dragged from her intact, and the shock left her faint and shuddering.
The thought that her husband knew, and had thought fit to conceal his knowledge, had never entered her mind, any more than the probability that she had been seen by some of the servants kneeling listening at a keyhole. The mistake which all unobservant people make is to assume that others are as unobservant as themselves.
By what frightful accident, she asked herself, had this catastrophe come about? She thought of all the obvious incidents which would have revealed the secret to herself—the dropped letter, the altered countenance, the badly arranged lie. No. She was convinced her secret had been guarded with minute, with scrupulous care. The only thing she had forgotten in her calculations was her husband's character, if, indeed, she could be said to have forgotten that which she had never known.
Lord Newhaven was in his wife's eyes a very quiet man of few words. That his few words did not represent the whole of him had never occurred to her. She had often told her friends that he walked through life with his eyes shut. He had a trick of half shutting his eyes which confirmed her in this opinion. When she came across persons who were after a time discovered to have affections and interests of which they had not spoken, she described them as "cunning." She had never thought Edward "cunning" till to-night. How had he, of all men, discovered this—this—? She, had no words ready to call her conduct by, though words would not have failed her had she been denouncing the same conduct in another wife and mother.
Gradually "the whole horror of her situation"—to borrow from her own vocabulary—forced itself upon her mind like damp through a gay wall-paper. What did it matter how the discovery had been made! It was made, and she was ruined. She repeated the words between little gasps for breath. Ruined! Her reputation lost! Hers—Violet Newhaven's. It was a sheer impossibility that such a thing could have happened to a woman like her. It was some vile slander which Edward must see to. He was good at that sort of thing. But no, Edward would not help her. She had committed—She flung out her hands, panic-stricken, as if to ward off a blow. The deed had brought with it no shame, but the word—the word wounded her like a sword.
Her feeble mind, momentarily stunned, pursued its groping way.
He would divorce her. It would be in the papers. But no. What was that he had said to Hugh—"No names to be mentioned; all scandal avoided."
She shivered and drew in her breath. It was to be settled some other way. Her mind became an entire blank. Another way! What way? She remembered now, and an inarticulate cry broke from her. They had drawn lots.
Which had drawn the short lighter?
Her husband had laughed. But then he laughed at everything. He was never really serious, always shallow and heartless. He would have laughed if he had drawn it himself. Perhaps he had. Yes, he certainly had drawn it. But Hugh? She saw again the white, set face as he passed her. No; it must be Hugh who had drawn it—Hugh, whom she loved. She wrung her hands and moaned, half aloud:
"Which? Which?"
There was a slight movement in the next room, the door was opened, and Lord Newhaven appeared in the door-way. He was still in evening dress.
"Did you call?" he said, quietly. "Are you ill?" He came and stood beside her.
"No," she said, hoarsely, and she sat up and gazed fixedly at him. Despair and suspense were in her eyes. There was no change in his, and she remembered that she had never seen him angry. Perhaps she had not known when he was angry.
He was turning away, but she stopped him. "Wait," she said, and he returned, his cold, attentive eye upon her. There was no contempt, no indignation in his bearing. If those feelings had shaken him, it must have been some time ago. If they had been met and vanquished in secret, that also must have been some time ago. He took up an Imitation of Christ, bound in the peculiar shade of lilac which at that moment prevailed, and turned it in his hand.
"You are overwrought," he said, after a moment's pause, "and I particularly dislike a scene."
She did not heed him.
"I listened at the door," she said, in a harsh, unnatural voice.
"I am perfectly aware of it."
A sort of horror seemed to have enveloped the familiar room. The very furniture looked like well-known words arranged suddenly in some new and dreadful meaning.
"You never loved me," she said.
He did not answer, but he looked gravely at her for a moment, and she was ashamed.
"Why don't you divorce me if you think me so wicked?"
"For the sake of the children," he said, with a slight change of voice.
Teddy, the eldest, had been born in this room. Did either remember that gray morning six years ago?
There was a silence that might be felt.
"Who drew the short lighter?" she whispered, before she knew that she had spoken.
"I am not here to answer questions," he replied. "And I have asked none. Neither, you will observe, have I blamed you. But I desire that you will never again allude to this subject, and that you will keep in mind that I do not intend to discuss it with you."
He laid down the Imitation and moved towards his own room.
With a sudden movement she flung herself upon her knees before him and caught his arm. The attitude suggested an amateur.
"Which drew the short lighter?" she gasped, her small upturned face white and convulsed.
"You will know in five months' time," he said. Then he extricated himself from her trembling clasp and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
Chapter IV
*
For the sin ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one!
—RUDYARD KIPLING.
When Hugh awoke the morning after Lady Newhaven's party the day was alread
y far advanced. A hot day had succeeded to a hot night. For a few seconds he lay like one emerging from the influence of morphia, who feels his racked body still painlessly afloat on a sea of rest, but is conscious that it is drifting back to the bitter shores of pain, and who stirs neither hand nor foot for fear of hastening the touch of the encircling, aching sands on which he is so soon to be cast in agony once more.
His mind cleared a little. Rachel's grave face stood out against a dark background—a background darker surely than that of the summer night. He remembered with self-contempt the extravagant emotion which she had aroused in him.
"Absurd," Hugh said to himself, with the distrust of all sudden springs of pure emotion which those who have misused them rarely escape. And then another remembrance, which only a sleeping-draught had kept at bay, darted upon him like a panther on its prey.
He had drawn the short lighter.
He started violently, and then fell back trembling.
"Oh, my God!" he said, involuntarily.
He lay still, telling himself that this dreadful nightmare would pass, would fade in the light of common day.
His servant came in noiselessly with a cup of coffee and a little sheaf of letters.
He pretended to be asleep; but when the man had gone he put out his shaking hand for the coffee and drank it.
The mist before his mind gradually lifted. Gradually, too, the horror on his face whitened to despair, as a twilight meadow whitens beneath the evening frost. He had drawn the short lighter. Nothing in heaven or earth could alter that fact.
He did not stop to wonder how Lord Newhaven had become aware of his own dishonor, or at the strange weapon with which he had avenged himself. He went over every detail of his encounter with him in the study. His hand had been forced. He had been thrust into a vile position. He ought to have refused to draw. He did not agree to draw. Nevertheless, he had drawn. And Hugh knew that, if it had to be done again, he should again have been compelled to draw by the iron will before which his was as straw. He could not have met the scorn of those terrible half-closed eyes if he had refused.
"There was no help for it," said Hugh, half aloud. And yet to die by his own hand within five months! It was incredible. It was preposterous.
"I never agreed to it," he said, passionately.
Nevertheless, he had drawn. The remembrance ever returned to lay its cold hand upon his heart, and with it came the grim conviction that if Lord Newhaven had drawn the short lighter he would have carried out the agreement to the letter. Whether it was extravagant, unchristian, whatever might have been truly said of that unholy compact, Lord Newhaven would have stood by it.
"I suppose I must stand by it, too," said Hugh to himself, the cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. "I suppose I am bound in honor to stand by it, too."
He suffered his mind to regard the alternative.
To wrong a man as deeply as he had wronged Lord Newhaven; to tacitly accept. That was where his mistake had been. Another man, that mahogany-faced fellow with the colonial accent, would have refused to draw, and would have knocked Lord Newhaven down and half killed him, or would have been knocked down and half killed by him. But to tacitly accept a means by which the injured man risked his life to avenge his honor, and then afterwards to shirk the fate which a perfectly even chance had thrown upon him instead of on his antagonist! It was too mean, too despicable. Hugh's pale cheek burned.
"I am bound," he said slowly to himself over and over again. There was no way of escape.
Yesterday evening, with some intuition of coming peril, he had said, "I will get out." The way of retreat had been open behind him. Now, by one slight movement, he was cut off from it forever.
"I can't get out," said the starling, the feathers on its breast worn away with beating against the bars.
"I can't get out," said Hugh, coming for the first time in contact with the bars which he was to know so well—the bars of the prison that he had made with his own hands.
He looked into the future with blank eyes. He had no future now. He stared vacantly in front of him like a man who looks through his window at the wide expanse of meadow and waving wood and distant hill which has met his eye every morning of his life and finds it—gone. It was incredible. He turned giddy. His reeling mind, shrinking back from the abyss, struck against a fixed point, and, clutching it, came violently to a stand-still.
His mother!
His mother was a widow and he was her only son. If he died by his own hand it would break her heart. Hugh groaned, and thrust the thought from him. It was too sharp. He could not suffer it.
His sin, not worse than that of many another man, had found him out. He had done wrong. He admitted it, but this monstrous judgment on him was out of all proportion to his offence. And, like some malignant infectious disease, retribution would fall, not on him alone, but on those nearest him, on his innocent mother and sister. It was unjust, unjust, unjust!
A very bitter look came into his face. Hugh had never so far hated any one, but now something very like hatred welled up in his heart against Lady Newhaven. She had lured him to his destruction. She had tempted him. This was undoubtedly true, though not probably the view which her guardian angel would take of the matter.
Among the letters which the servant had brought him he suddenly recognized that the topmost was in Lady Newhaven's handwriting. Anger and repulsion seized him. No doubt it was the first of a series. "Why was he so altered? What had she done to offend him?" etc., etc. He knew the contents beforehand, or thought he knew them. He got up deliberately, threw the unopened note into the empty fireplace, and put a match to it. He watched it burn.
It was his first overt act of rebellion against her yoke, the first step along the nearest of the many well-worn paths that a man takes at random to leave a woman. It did not occur to him that Lady Newhaven might have written to him about his encounter with her husband. He knew Lord Newhaven well enough to be absolutely certain that he would mention the subject to no living creature, least of all to his wife.
"Neither will I," he said to himself; "and as for her, I will break with her from this day forward."
The little pink notes with the dashing, twirly handwriting persisted for a week or two and then ceased.
*
Hugh was a man of many social engagements. His first impulse, when later in the day he remembered them, was to throw them all up and leave London. But Lord Newhaven would hear of his departure, and would smile. He decided to remain and to go on as if nothing had happened. When the evening came he dressed with his usual care, verified the hour of his engagement, and went out to dine with the Loftuses.
Chapter V
*
What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later.
—Maxim of the Bandar-log, RUDYARD KIPLING.
It was Sybell Loftus's first season in London since her second marriage with Mr. Doll Loftus. After a very brief sojourn in that city of frivolity she had the acumen to discover that London society was hopelessly worldly and mercenary; that people only met to eat and to abuse each other; that the law of cutlet for cutlet was universal; that young men, especially those in the Guards, were garrisoned by a full complement of devils; that London girls lived only for dress and the excitement of husband-hunting. In short, to use her own expression, she "turned London society inside out."
London bore the process with equanimity, and presently Sybell determined to raise the art of dinner-giving from the low estate to which she avowed it had fallen to a higher level. She was young, she was pretty, she was well-born, she was rich. All the social doors were open to her. But one discovery is often only the prelude to another. She soon made the further one that in order to raise the tone of social gatherings it is absolutely necessary to infuse into them a leaven of "clever people." Further light on this interesting subject showed her that most of the really "clever people" did not belong to her set. The discovery which all who love adulation quickly make—namely, that the truly apprecia
tive and sympathetic and gifted are for the greater part to be found in a class below their own—was duly made and registered by Sybell. She avowed that class differences were nothing to her with the enthusiasm of all those who since the world began have preferred to be first in the society which they gather round them.
Fortunately for Sybell she was not troubled by doubts respecting the clearness of her own judgment. Eccentricity was in her eyes originality; a wholesale contradiction of established facts was a new view. She had not the horrid perception of difference between the real and the imitation which spoils the lives of many. She was equally delighted with both, and remained in blissful ignorance of the fact that her "deep" conversation was felt to be exhaustingly superficial if by chance she came across the real artist or thinker instead of his counterfeit.
Consequently to her house came the raté in all his most virulent developments; the "new woman" with stupendous lopsided opinions on difficult Old Testament subjects; the "lady authoress" with a mission to show up the vices of a society which she knew only by hearsay. Hither came, unwittingly, simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell hoped, might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written a sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking it was an ordinary dinner-party, came Hugh, whom Sybell said she had discovered, and who was not aware that he was in need of discovery. And hither also on this particular evening came Rachel West, whom Sybell had pronounced to be very intelligent a few days before, and who was serenely unconscious that she was present on her probation, and that if she did not say something striking she would never be asked again.
Doll Loftus, Sybell's husband, was standing by Rachel when Hugh came in. He felt drawn towards her because she was not "clever," as far as her appearance went. At any rate, she had not the touzled, ill-groomed hair which he had learned to associate with female genius.
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