Rachel's secretary in the little room on the ground-floor was interrupted by a tap at the door. Rachel came in laden with daffodils. Their splendor filled the gray room.
"Would you mind having them?" she said, smiling, and laying them down by her. "And would you kindly write a line to Jones telling him not to send me daffodils again. They are a flower I particularly dislike."
*
"Rachel?"
"Hugh!"
"Don't you think it would be better if we were married immediately?"
"Better than what?"
"Oh, I don't know; better than breaking it off."
"You can't break it off now. I'm not a person to be trifled with. You have gone too far."
"If you gave me half your attention, you would understand that I am only expressing a wish to go a little further, but you have become so frivolous since we have been engaged that I hardly recognize you."
"I suit myself to my company."
"Are you going to talk to me in that flippant manner when we are married. I sometimes fear, Rachel, you don't look upon me with sufficient awe. I foresee I shall have to be very firm when we are married. When may I begin to be firm?"
"Are these such evil days, Hugh?"
"I am like Oliver Twist," he said. "I want more."
*
They were sitting together one afternoon in the fire-light in silence. They often sat in silence together.
"A wise woman once advised me," said Rachel at last, "if I married, never to tell my husband of any previous attachment. She said, Let him always believe that he was the first
That ever burst
Into that silent sea.
I believe it was good advice, but it seems to me to have one drawback—to follow it may be to tell a lie. It would be in my case."
Silence.
"I know that a lie and an adroit appeal to the vanity of man are supposed to be a woman's recognized weapons. The same woman told me that I might find myself mistaken in many things in this world, but never in counting on the vanity of man. She said that was a reed which would never pierce my hand. I don't think you are vain, Hugh."
"Not vain! Why, I am so conceited at the fact that you are going to marry me that I look down on every one else. I only long to tell them so. When may I tell my mother, Rachel? She is coming to London this week."
"You have the pertinacity of a fly. You always come back to the same point. I am beginning to be rather bored with your marriage. You can't talk of anything else."
"I can't think about anything else."
He drew her cheek against his. He was an ingratiating creature.
"Neither can I," she whispered.
And that was all Rachel ever said of all she meant to say about Mr. Tristram.
*
A yellow fog. It made rings round the shaded electric lamp by which Rachel was reading. The fire burned tawny and blurred. Even her red gown looked dim. Hugh came in.
"What are you reading?" he said, sitting down by her.
He did not want to know, but if you are reading a book on another person's knee you cannot be a very long way off. He glanced with feigned interest at the open page, stooping a little, for he was short-sighted now and then—at least now.
Rachel took the opportunity to look at him. You can't really look at a person when he is looking at you. Hugh was very handsome, especially side face, and he knew it; but he was not sure whether Rachel thought so.
He read mechanically:
"Take back your vows.
Elsewhere you trimmed and taught these lamps to burn;
You bring them stale and dim to serve my turn.
You lit those candles in another shrine,
Guttered and cold you offer them on mine.
Take back your vows."
A shadow fell across Hugh's mind. Rachel saw it fall.
"You do not think that of me, Rachel," he said, pointing to the verse. It was the first time he had alluded to that halting confession which had remained branded on the minds of both.
He glanced up at her, and she suffered him for a moment to look through her clear eyes into her soul.
"I never thought that of you," she said, with difficulty. "I am so foolish that I believe the candles are lit now for the first time. I am so foolish that I believe you love me nearly as much as I love you."
"It is a dream," said Hugh, passionately, and he fell on his knees, and hid his white face against her knee. "It is a dream. I shall wake, and find you never cared for me."
She sat for a moment stunned by the violence of his emotion, which was shaking him from head to foot. Then she drew him into her trembling arms, and held his head against her breast.
She felt his tears through her gown.
"What is past will never come between us," she said, brokenly, at last. "I have cried over it too, Hugh; but I have put it from my mind. When you told me about it, knowing you risked losing me by telling me, I suddenly trusted you entirely. I had not quite up till then. I can't say why, except that perhaps I had grown suspicious because I was once deceived. But I do now, because you were open with me. I think, Hugh, you and I can dare to be truthful to each other. You have been so to me, and I will be so to you. I knew about that long before you told me. Lady Newhaven—poor thing!—confided in me last summer. She had to tell some one. I think you ought to know that I know. And oh, Hugh, I knew about the drawing of lots, too."
Hugh started violently, but he did not move.
Would she have recognized that ashen, convulsed face if he had raised it?
"Lady Newhaven listened at the door when you were drawing lots, and she told me. But we never knew which had drawn the short lighter till Lord Newhaven was killed on the line. Only she and I and you know that that was not an accident. I know what you must have gone through all the summer, feeling you had taken his life as well. But you must remember it was his own doing, and a perfectly even chance. You ran the same risk. His blood is on his own head. But oh, my darling, when I think it might have been you!"
Hugh thought afterwards that if her arms had not been round him, if he had been a little distance from her, he might have told her the truth. He owed it to her, this woman who was the very soul of truth. But if she had withdrawn from him, however gently, in the moment when her tenderness had, for the first time, vanquished her natural reserve, if she had taken herself away then, he could not have borne it. In deep repentance after Lord Newhaven's death, he had vowed that from that day forward he would never deviate again from the path of truth and honor, however difficult it might prove. But this frightful moment had come upon him unawares. He drew back instinctively, giddy and unnerved, as from a chasm yawning suddenly among the flowers, one step in front of him. He was too stunned to think. When he rallied they were standing together on the hearth-rug, and she was saying—he did not know what she was saying, for he was repeating over and over again to himself, "The moment is past. The moment is past."
At last her words conveyed some meaning to him.
"We will never speak of this again, my friend," she said; "but now that no harm can be done by it, it seemed right to tell you I knew."
"I ought never to have drawn," said Hugh, hoarsely.
"No," said Rachel. "He was in fault to demand such a thing. It was inhuman. But having once drawn he had to abide by it, as you would have done if you had drawn the short lighter."
She was looking earnestly at him, as at one given back from the grave.
"Yes," said Hugh, feeling she expected him to speak. "If I had drawn it I should have had to abide by it."
"I thank God continually that you did not draw it. You made him the dreadful reparation he asked. If it recoiled upon himself you were not to blame. You have done wrong, and you have repented. You have suffered, Hugh. I know it by your face. And perhaps I have suffered too, but that is past. We will shut up the past, and think of the future. Promise me that you will never speak of this again."
"I promise," said Hugh, mechanically.
/>
"The moment to speak is past," he said to himself.
Had it ever been present?
Chapter XLV
*
Dieu n'oublíe personne. Il visite tout le monde.—VINET.
Hugh did not sleep that night.
His escape had been too narrow. He shivered at the mere thought of it. It had never struck him as possible that Rachel and Lady Newhaven had known of the drawing of lots. Now that he found they knew, sundry small incidents, unnoticed at the time, came crowding back to his memory. That was why Lady Newhaven had written so continually those letters which he had burned unread. That was why she had made that desperate attempt to see him in the smoking-room at Wilderleigh after the boating accident. She wanted to know which had drawn the short lighter. That explained the mysterious tension which Hugh had noticed in Rachel during the last days in London before—before the time was up. He saw it all now. And, of course, they naturally supposed that Lord Newhaven had committed suicide. They could not think otherwise. They were waiting for one of the two men to do it.
"If Lord Newhaven had not turned giddy and stumbled on to the line, if he had not died by accident when he did," said Hugh to himself, "where should I be now?"
There was no answer to that question.
What was the use of asking it? He was dead. And, fortunately, the two women firmly believed he had died by his own hand. Hugh as firmly believed that the death was accidental.
But it could not be his duty to set them right, to rake up the whole hideous story again.
By an extraordinary, by a miraculous chance, he was saved, as it were, a second time. It could do no good to allude to the dreadful subject again. Besides, he had promised Rachel never to speak of it again.
He groaned, and hid his face in his hands.
"Oh, coward and wretch that I am," he said. "Cannot I even be honest with myself? I lied to her to-day. I never thought I could have told Rachel a lie, but I did. I can't live without her. I must have her. I would rather die than lose her now. And I should have lost her if I'd told her the truth. I felt that. I am not worthy. It was an ill day for her when she took my tarnished life into her white hands. She ought to have trodden me under foot. But she does love me, and I will never deceive her again. She does love me, and, God helping me, I will make her happy."
The strain of conflict was upon Hugh—the old, old conflict of the seed with the earth, of the soul with love. How many little fibres and roots the seed puts out, pushed by an unrecognized need within itself, not without pain, not without a gradual rending of its being, not without a death unto self into a higher life. Love was dealing with Hugh's soul as the earth deals with the seed, and—he suffered.
It was a man who did not look like an accepted lover who presented himself at Rachel's door the following afternoon.
But Rachel was not there. Her secretary handed Hugh a little note which she had left for him, telling him that Hester had suddenly fallen ill, and that she had been sent for to Southminster. The note ended: "These first quiet days are past. So now you may tell your mother, and put our engagement in the Morning Post."
Hugh was astonished at the despair which overwhelmed him at the bare thought that he should not see Rachel that day and not the next either. It was not to be borne. She had no right to make him suffer like this. Day by day, when a certain restless fever returned upon him, he had known, as an opium-eater knows, that at a certain hour he should become rested and calm and sane once more. To be in the same room with Rachel, to hear her voice, to let his eyes dwell upon her, to lean his forehead for a moment against her hand, was to enter, as we enter in dreams, a world of joy and comfort, and boundless, endless, all-pervading peace.
And now he was suddenly left shivering in a bleak world without her. With her he was himself, a released, freed self, growing daily further and further away from all he had once been. Without her he felt he was nothing but a fierce, wounded animal.
He tried to laugh at himself as he walked slowly away from Rachel's house. He told himself that he was absurd, that an absence of a few days was nothing. He turned his steps mechanically in the direction of his mother's lodgings. At any rate, he could tell her. He could talk about this cruel woman to her. The smart was momentarily soothed by his mother's painful joy. He wrenched himself somewhat out of himself as she wept the tears of jealous love, which all mothers must weep when the woman comes who takes their son away. "I am so glad," she kept repeating. "These are tears of joy, Hughie. I can forgive her for accepting you, but I should never have forgiven her if she had refused you—if she had made my boy miserable. And you have been miserable lately. I have seen it for a long time. I suppose it was all this coming on."
He said it was. The remembrance of other causes of irritation and moodiness had slipped entirely off his mind.
He stayed a long time with his mother, who pressed him to wait till his sister, who was shopping, returned. But his sister tarried long out-of-doors, and at last the pain of Rachel's absence returning on him, he left suddenly, promising to return in the evening.
He did not go back to his rooms. He wandered aimlessly through the darkening streets, impatient of the slow hours. At last he came out on the Embankment. The sun was setting redly, frostily, in a gray world of sky-mist and river-mist and spectral bridge and spire. A shaking path-way of pale flame came across the gray of the hidden river to meet him.
He stood a long time looking at it. The low sun touched and forsook, touched and forsook point by point the little crowded world which it was leaving.
"My poor mother," said Hugh to himself. "Poor, gentle, loving soul whom I so nearly brought down with sorrow to the grave. She will never know what an escape she has had. I might have been more to her. I might have made her happier, seeing her happiness is wrapped up in me. I will make up to her for it. I will be a better son to her in future. Rachel and I together will make her last years happy. Rachel and I together," said Hugh, over and over again.
And then he suddenly remembered that though Rachel had taken herself away he could write to her, and—he might look out the trains to Southminster. He leaped into a hansom and hurried back to his rooms.
The porter met him in a mysterious manner in the entrance. Lady waiting to see him. Lady said she was his sister. Had been waiting two hours. In his rooms now.
Hugh laughed, and ran up the wide, common staircase. His sister had heard the news from his mother and had rushed over at once.
As he stooped a little to fit the latch-key on his chain into the lock a man, who was coming down the stairs feeling in his pockets, stopped with a sudden exclamation. It was Captain Pratt, pallid, smiling, hair newly varnished, resplendent in a magnificent fur overcoat.
"What luck," he said. "Scarlett, I think. We met at Wilderleigh. Have you such a thing as a match about you?"
Hugh felt in his pockets. He had not one.
"Never mind," he said, opening the door. "I've plenty inside. Come in."
Hugh went in first, extricating his key. Captain Pratt followed, murmuring, "Nice little dens, these. A pal of mine lives just above—Streatham. You know Streatham, son of Lord—"
The remainder of the sentence was lost.
The door opened straight into the little sitting-room.
A woman in deep mourning rose suddenly out of a chair by the fire and came towards them.
"Hughie!" she said.
It was Lady Newhaven.
It is probable that none of the tableaux she had arranged were quite so dramatic as this one, in which she had not reckoned on that elaborate figure in the door-way.
Captain Pratt's opinion of Hugh, whom he had hitherto regarded as a pauper with an involved estate, leaped from temperate to summer heat—blood-heat. After the first instant he kept his eyes steadily fixed on Hugh.
"I—er—thank you, Scarlett. I have found my matches. A thousand thanks. Good-night."
He was disappearing, but Hugh, his eyes flashing in his gray face, held him forcibly by the arm.
>
"Lady Newhaven," he said, "the porter is inexcusable. These are my rooms which he has shown you into by mistake, not Mr. Streatham's, your nephew. He is just above. I think," turning to Captain Pratt, "Streatham is out of town."
"He is out of town," said Captain Pratt, looking with cold admiration at Hugh. "Admirable," he said to himself; "a born gentleman."
"This is not the first time Streatham's visitors have been shown in here," continued Hugh. "The porter shall be dismissed. I trust you will forgive me my share in the annoyance he has caused you. Is your carriage waiting?"
"No," said Lady Newhaven, faintly, quite thrown off the lines of her prepared scene by the sudden intrusion into it of a foreign body.
"My hansom is below," said Captain Pratt, deferentially, venturing, now that the situation was, so to speak, draped, to turn his discreet agate eyes towards Lady Newhaven. "If it could be of the least use, I myself should prefer to walk."
Now that he looked at her, he looked very hard at her. She was a beautiful woman.
Lady Newhaven's self-possession had returned sufficiently for her to take up her fur cloak.
"Thank you," she said, letting Captain Pratt help her on with it. "I shall be glad to make use of your hansom, if you are sure you can spare it. I am shocked at having taken possession of your rooms," turning to Hugh; "I will write to Georgie Streatham to-night. I am staying with my mother, and I came across to ask him to take my boys to the pantomime, as I cannot take them myself—so soon," with a glance at her crape. "Don't come down, Mr. Scarlett. I have given you enough trouble already."
Captain Pratt's arm was crooked. He conducted her in his best manner to the foot of the staircase and helped her into his hansom. His manner was not so unctuous as his father's, but it was slightly adhesive. Lady Newhaven shuddered involuntarily as she took his arm.
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