"Any day," she replied. "I am as miserable in one place as in another."
"We will say Friday week, then," returned Lord Newhaven, ignoring, as he invariably did, any allusions to their relative position, and because he ignored them she made many. "The country," he added, hurriedly, "will be very refreshing after the glare and dust and empty worldly society of London."
She looked at him in anger. She did not understand the reason, but she had long vaguely felt that all conversation seemed to dry up in his presence. He mopped it all into his own sponge, so to speak, and left every subject exhausted.
She rose in silent dignity, and went to her boudoir and lay down there. The heat was very great, and another fire was burning within her, withering her round cheek, and making her small, plump hand look shrunk and thin. A fortnight had passed, and she had not heard from Hugh. She had written to him many times, at first only imploring him to meet her, but afterwards telling him she knew what had happened, and entreating him to put her out of suspense, to send her one line that his life was not endangered. She had received no answer to any of her letters. She came to the conclusion that they had been intercepted by Lord Newhaven, and that no doubt the same fate had befallen Hugh's letters to herself. For some time past, before the drawing of lots, she had noticed that Hugh's letters had become less frequent and shorter in length. She understood the reason now. Half of them had been intercepted. How that fact could account for the shortness of the remainder may not be immediately apparent to the prosaic mind, but it was obvious to Lady Newhaven. That Hugh had begun to weary of her could not force the narrow entrance to her mind. Such a possibility had never been even considered in the pictures of the future with which her imagination busied itself. But what would the future be? The road along which she was walking forked before her eyes, and her usual perspicacity was at fault. She knew not in which of those two diverging paths the future would lie.
Would she in eighteen months' time—she should certainly refuse to marry within the year—be standing at the altar in a "confection" of lilac and white with Hugh; or would she be a miserable wife, moving ghostlike about her house, in colored raiment, while a distant grave was always white with flowers sent by a nameless friend of the dead? "How some one must have loved him!" she imagined Hugh's aged mother saying. And once, as that bereaved mother came in the dusk to weep beside the grave, did she not see a shadowy figure start up, black-robed, from the flower-laden sod, and, hastily drawing a thick veil over a beautiful, despairing face, glide away among the trees? At this point Lady Newhaven always began to cry. It was too heart-rending. And her mind in violent recoil was caught once more, and broken on the same wheel. "Which? Which?"
A servant entered.
"Would her ladyship see Miss West for a few minutes?"
"Yes," said Lady Newhaven, glad to be delivered from herself, if only by the presence of an acquaintance.
"It is very charitable of you to see me," said Rachel. "Personally, I think morning calls ought to be a penal offence. But I came at the entreaty of a former servant of yours. I feel sure you will let me carry some message of forgiveness to her, as she is dying. Her name is Morgan. Do you remember her?"
"I once had a maid called Morgan," said Lady Newhaven. "She was drunken, and I had to part with her in the end; but I kept her as long as I could in spite of it. She had a genius for hair-dressing."
"She took your diamond heart pendant," continued Rachel. "She was never found out. She can't return it, for, of course, she sold it and spent the money. But now at last she feels she did wrong, and she says she will die easier for your forgiveness."
"Oh! I forgive her," said Lady Newhaven, indifferently. "I often wondered how I lost it. I never cared about it." She glanced at Rachel, and added tremulously, "My husband gave it me."
A sudden impulse was urging her to confide in this grave, gentle-eyed woman. The temptation was all the stronger because Rachel, who had only lately appeared in society, was not connected with any portion of her previous life. She was as much a chance acquaintance as a fellow-passenger in a railway carriage.
Rachel rose and held out her hand.
"Don't go," whispered Lady Newhaven, taking her outstretched hand and holding it.
"I think if I stay," said Rachel, "that you may say things you will regret later on when you are feeling stronger. You are evidently tired out now. Everything looks exaggerated when we are exhausted, as I see you are."
"I am worn out with misery," said Lady Newhaven. "I have not slept for a fortnight. I feel I must tell some one." And she burst into violent weeping.
Rachel sat down again, and waited patiently for the hysterical weeping to cease. Those in whom others confide early learn that their own engagements, their own pleasures and troubles, are liable to be set aside at any moment. Rachel was a punctual, exact person, but she missed many trains. Those who sought her seldom realized that her day was as full as, possibly fuller, than their own. Perhaps it was only a very small pleasure to which she had been on her way on this particular morning, and for which she had put on that ethereal gray gown for the first time. At any rate, she relinquished it without a second thought.
Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes and turned impulsively towards her.
The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to guess which would come uppermost. Sometimes fragments of both appeared on the surface together.
"I loved you from the first moment I saw you," she said. "I don't take fancies to people, you know. I am not that kind of person. I am very difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns myself. I am most reserved. I dare say you have noticed how reserved I am. I live in my shell. But directly I saw you I felt I could talk to you. I said to myself, 'I will make a friend of that girl.' Although I always feel a married woman is so differently placed from a girl. A girl only thinks of herself. I am not saying this the least unkindly, but, of course, it is so. Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all she says and does. How will it affect them? That is what I so often say to myself, and then my lips are sealed. But, of course, being unmarried, you would not understand that feeling."
Rachel did not answer. She was inured to this time-honored conversational opening.
"And the temptations of married life," continued Lady Newhaven—"a girl cannot enter into them."
"Then do not tell me about them," said Rachel, smiling, wondering if she might still escape. But Lady Newhaven had no intention of letting her go. She only wished to indicate to her her true position. And gradually, not without renewed outbursts of tears, not without traversing many layers of prepared conventional feelings, in which a few thin streaks of genuine emotion wore embedded, she told her story—the story of a young, high-minded, and neglected wife, and of a husband callous, indifferent, a scorner of religion, unsoftened even by the advent of the children—"such sweet children, such little darlings"—and the gradual estrangement. Then came the persistent siege to the lonely heart of one not pretty, perhaps, but fatally attractive to men; the lonely heart's unparalleled influence for good over the besieger.
"He would do anything," said Lady Newhaven, looking earnestly at Rachel. "My influence over him is simply boundless. If I said, as I sometimes did at balls, how sorry I was to see some plain girl standing out, he would go and dance with her. I have seen him do it."
"I suppose he did it to please you."
"That was just it, simply to please me."
Rachel was not so astonished as Lady Newhaven expected. She certainly was rather wooden, the latter reflected. The story went on. It became difficult to tell, and, according to the teller, more and more liable to misconstruction. Rachel's heart ached as bit by bit the inevitable development was finally reached in floods of tears.
"And you remember that night you were at an evening party here," sobbed Lady Newhaven, casting away all her mental notes and speaking extempore. "It is just a fo
rtnight ago, and I have not slept since, and he was here, looking so miserable"—(Rachel started slightly)—"he sometimes did, if he thought I was hard upon him. And afterwards, when every one had gone, Edward took him to his study and told him he had found us out, and they drew lots which should kill himself within five months—and I listened at the door."
Lady Newhaven's voice rose half strangled, hardly human, in a shrill grotesque whimper above the sobs which were shaking her. There was no affectation about her now.
Rachel's heart went out to her the moment she was natural. She knelt down and put her strong arms round her. The poor thing clung to her, and, leaning her elaborate head against her, wept tears of real anguish upon her breast.
"And which drew the short lighter?" said Rachel at last.
"I don't know," almost shrieked Lady Newhaven. "It is that which is killing me. Sometimes I think it is Edward, and sometimes I think it is Hugh."
At the name of Hugh, Rachel winced. Lady Newhaven had mentioned no name in the earlier stages of her story while she had some vestige of self-command; but now at last the Christian name slipped out unawares.
Rachel strove to speak calmly. She told herself there were many Hughs in the world.
"Is Mr. Hugh Scarlett the man you mean?" she asked. If she had died for it, she must have asked that question.
"Yes," said Lady Newhaven.
A shadow fell on Rachel's face, as on the face of one who suddenly discovers, not for the first time, an old enemy advancing upon him under the flag of a new ally.
"I shall always love him," gasped Lady Newhaven, recovering herself sufficiently to recall a phrase which she had made up the night before. "I look upon it as a spiritual marriage."
Chapter VIII
*
A square-set man and honest.
—TENNYSON.
"Dick," said Lord Newhaven, laying hold of that gentleman as he was leaving Tattersall's, "what mischief have you been up to for the last ten days?"
"I lay low till I got my clothes," said Dick, "and then I went to the Duke of —. I've just been looking at a hack for him. He says he does not want one that takes a lot of sitting on. I met him the first night I landed. In fact, I stepped out of the train on to his royal toe travelling incog. I was just going to advise him to draw in his feelers a hit and give the Colonies a chance, when he turned round and I saw who it was. I knew him when I was A.D.C. at Melbourne before I took to the drink. He said he thought he'd know my foot anywhere, and asked me down for — races."
"And you enjoyed it?"
"Rather. I did not know what to call the family at first, so I asked him if he had any preference and what was the right thing, and he told me how I must hop up whenever he came in, and all that sort of child's play. There was a large party and some uncommonly pretty women. And I won a tenner off his Royal Highness, and here I am."
"And what are you going to do now?"
"Go down to the city and see what Darneil's cellars are like before I store my wine in them. It won't take long. Er!—I say, Cack—Newhaven?"
"Well?"
"Ought I to—how about my calling on Miss—? I never caught her name."
"Miss West, the heiress?"
"Yes. Little attention on my part."
"Did she ask you to call?"
"No, but I think it was an oversight. I expect she would like it."
"Well, then, go and be—snubbed."
"I don't want snubbing. A little thing like me wants encouragement."
"A good many other people are on the lookout for encouragement in that quarter."
"That settles it," said Dick; "I'll go at once. I've got to call on Lady Susan Gresley, and I'll take Miss—"
"West. West. West."
"Miss West on the way."
"My dear fellow, Miss West does not live on the way to Woking. Lady Susan Gresley died six months ago."
"Great Scot! I never heard of it. And what has become of Hester? She is a kind of cousin of mine."
"Miss Gresley has gone to live in the country a few miles from us, with her clergyman brother."
"James Gresley. I remember him. He's a bad egg."
"Now, Dick, are you in earnest, or are you talking nonsense about Miss West?"
"I'm in earnest." He looked it.
"Then, for heaven's sake, don't put your foot in it by calling. My wife has taken a violent fancy to Miss West. I don't think it is returned, but that is a detail. If you want to give her a chance, leave it to me."
"I know what that means. You married men are mere sieves. You'll run straight home with your tongue out and tell Lady Newhaven that I want to marry Miss—I can't clinch her name—and then she'll tell her when they are combing their back hair. And then if I find, later on, I don't like her and step off the grass, I shall have behaved like a perfect brute, and all that sort of thing. A man I knew out in Melbourne told me that by the time he'd taken a little notice of a likely girl, he'd gone too far to go back, and he had to marry her."
"You need not be so coy. I don't intend to mention the subject to my wife. Besides, I don't suppose Miss West will look at you. You're a wretched match for her. With her money she might marry a brewery or a peerage."
"I'll put myself in focus anyhow," said Dick. "Hang it all! if you could get a woman to marry you, there is hope for everybody. I don't expect it will be as easy as falling off a log. But if she is what I take her to be I shall go for all I'm worth."
Some one else was going for all he was worth. Lord Newhaven rode early, and he had frequently seen Rachel and Hugh riding together at foot's pace. Possibly his offer to help Dick was partly prompted by an unconscious desire to put a spoke in Hugh's wheel.
Dick, whose worst enemy could not accuse him of diffidence, proved a solid spoke but for a few days only. Rachel suddenly broke all her engagements and left London.
Chapter IX
*
"Pour vivre tranquille il faut vivre loin des gens d'église."
There is a little stream which flows through Middleshire which seems to reflect the spirit of that quiet county, so slow is its course, so narrow is its width. Even the roads don't take the trouble to bridge it. They merely hump themselves slightly when they feel it tickling underneath them, and go on, vouchsafing no further notice of its existence. Yet the Drone is a local celebrity in Middleshire, and, like most local celebrities, is unknown elsewhere. The squire's sons have lost immense trout in the Drone as it saunters through their lands, and most of them have duly earned thereby the distinction (in Middleshire) of being the best trout-rod in England. Middleshire bristles with the "best shots in England" and the "best preachers in England" and the cleverest men in England. The apathetic mother-country knows, according to Middleshire, "but little of her greatest men." At present she associates her loyal county with a breed of small black pigs.
Through this favored locality the Drone winds, and turns and turns again, as if loath to leave the rich, low meadow-lands and clustering villages upon its way. After skirting the little town of Westhope and the gardens of Westhope Abbey, the Drone lays itself out in comfortable curves and twists innumerable through the length and breadth of the green country till it reaches Warpington, whose church is so near the stream that in time of flood the water hitches all kinds of things it has no further use for among the grave-stones of the little church-yard. On one occasion, after repeated prayers for rain, it even overflowed the lower part of the vicar's garden, and vindictively carried away his bee-hives. But that was before he built the little wall at the bottom of the garden.
Slightly raised above the church, on ground held together by old elms, the white vicarage of Warpington stands, blinking ever through its trees at the church like a fond wife at her husband. Indeed, so like had she become to him that she had even developed a tiny bell-tower near the kitchen chimney, with a single bell in it, feebly rung by a female servant on saints' days and G.F.S. gatherings.
About eight o'clock on this particular morning in July the Drone co
uld hear, if it wanted to hear, which apparently no one else did, the high, unmodulated voice in which Mr. Gresley was reading the morning service to Mrs. Gresley and to a young thrush, which was hurling its person, like an inexperienced bicyclist, now against Lazarus and his grave-clothes, now against the legs of John the Baptist, with one foot on a river's edge and the other firmly planted in a distant desert, and against all the other Scripture characters in turn which adorned the windows.
The service ended at last, and, after releasing his unwilling congregation by catching and carrying it, beak agape, into the open air, Mr. Gresley and his wife walked through the church-yard—with its one melancholy Scotch fir, embarrassed by its trouser of ivy—to the little gate which led into their garden.
They were a pleasing couple, seen at a little distance. He, at least, evidently belonged to a social status rather above that of the average clergyman, though his wife may not have done so. Mr. Gresley, with his long, thin nose and his short upper lip and tall, well-set-up figure, bore on his whole personality the stamp of that for which it is difficult to find the right name, so unmeaning has the right name become by dint of putting it to low uses—the maltreated, the travestied name of "gentleman."
None of those moral qualities, priggish or otherwise, are assumed for Mr. Gresley which, we are told, distinguish the true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank Heaven! the "gentleman born" frequently lacks. Whether he had them or not was a matter of opinion, but he had that which some who have it not strenuously affirm to be of no value—the right outside.
To any one who looked beyond the first impression of good-breeding and a well-cut coat, a second closer glance was discouraging. Mr. Gresley's suspicious eye and thin, compressed lips hinted that both fanatic and saint were fighting for predominance in the kingdom of that pinched brain, the narrowness of which the sloping forehead betokened with such cruel plainness. He looked as if he would fling himself as hard against a truth without perceiving it as a hunted hare against a stone-wall. He was unmistakably of those who only see side issues.
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