“For why should all this be done behind your back?” exclaimed the girl passionately. “What right have they to interfere, to discuss and plot, and settle what they think best to be done? As if, whatever happened, you could not stand alone, and judge for yourself! As if you needed a man!”
The letter fell to the floor as Sophia rose and leaned her arm upon the steady cold of the marble mantelshelf and shielded her face with her hand. There was something to be done, if she could but remember what, something practical, proper and immediate. She had been staring at a white china ornament, and now, as she shut her eyes, its small glittering point of light seemed to pierce through her eyelids, and to become the immutable focus upon which her thoughts must settle and determine. Slowly she composed herself, was presently all composure; and round her steadied mind she felt her flesh hanging cold and forlorn, as though in this conflict she had for ever abandoned it.
The girl had risen too. As Sophia turned to her she said,
“I see you want me to go. Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive. You have acted very well. It is a long time since any one has dealt by me with such honesty. I wish I could answer your generous impulse with equal truth. But I am too old, too wary of the world, to match you.”
She stooped for the letter, and put it back into the unresisting hands.
“This must go. And Doctor Hervey must never know that you brought it here.”
The girl sighed.
“Your guess was right, or your instinct. I do not want my husband to return. But whether he comes or no will make little real difference to me. Mine is a spoilt marriage. Yours is not, and I cannot let you endanger it.”
The rain had ceased, the storm was retreating. Though the air resounded with the noise of water, it was with the drips splashing from the roof-gutters, or the moisture fitfully cascading from branches when the dying wind wagged them.
“I will have the horses put in, and you shall be driven back.”
“Let me walk,” said the girl.
Common sense and civility yielded as Sophia looked at her guest. Unspeaking she picked up a shawl, and as though in some strange pre-ordered consent they left the house by the french window, and walked side by side down the avenue. Iced with the storm, the air was like the air of a new world, the darkness was like the virgin dusk of a new world emerging from chaos, slowly and blindly wheeling towards its first day. Far off the storm winked and muttered, but louder than its thunder was the sipping whistle, all around them, of the parched ground drinking the rain. Halfway down the avenue Sophia took the girl’s hand. It was ungloved now, cold and wet, and lay in her clasp like a leaf. So, grave and unspeaking, linked childishly together they went on under the trees, their footsteps scarcely audible among the sounds of the heavily dripping rain and the drinking earth.
She returned alone to the empty lighted drawing-room, to Mrs. Hervey’s chair pulled forward, and the decanter and the glass and the biscuits. They must be put away, she thought, all traces of this extraordinary visit; and as she carried the wine and the biscuits to the pantry she found herself stiffening with a curious implacability. No! However touching, such escapades were intolerable. One could not have such young women frisking round one, babbling as to whether or no one needed a husband, declaring on one’s behalf that one didn’t. From a woman of the village she could have heard such words without offence. Down there, in that lowest class, sexual decorum could be kilted out of the way like an impeding petticoat; and Mary Bugler, whose husband was in jail, and Carry Westmacott, whose husband should be, might declare without offence that a woman was as good as a man, and better. In her own heart, too, unreproved, could lodge the conviction that a Sophia might well discard a Frederick, and in her life she had been ready, calmly enough, to put this into effect. But into words, never! Such things could be done, but not said. And was it for the doctor’s wife, an immature little feather-pate, to pipe up in her treble voice, in her tones of provincial refinement, that Mrs. Willoughby did not need Mr. Willoughby?
Setting back the chair, glancing sharply about the room — last time she had left a glove — Sophia shook her head in condemnation. This visit had left no visible trace of Mrs. Hervey. But in this room, the serene demonstration of how a lady of the upper classes spends her leisure amid flowers and books and arts, words had been spoken such as those walls had never heard before. And to hear her own thought voiced she, the lady of the room, had had to await the coming of this interloper, this social minnikin, this Thomasina Thumb who, riding on a cat and waving a bodkin, had come to be her champion.
The next morning she sent off a letter to Frederick, coldly annoyed with herself for neglecting an essential formality — for with the putting of pen to paper it had become no more than that. Absent or present, he could not affect her now. The servants would make his bed, serve his food; she, trained better than they in her particular service of hostess-ship, would entertain him, a guest for the funeral. And then he would be gone again, back to his Minna, the only trace of his visit some additional entries in the household books. For there can be no middle way, she thought, where extremes have been attempted; and Frederick, failing to be my husband, must now be to me less than an acquaintance.
“As if you needed a man.” Mrs. Hervey’s words renewed themselves in her hearing, spoken with an indignant conviction blazing against the soberer colouring of Sophia’s own view of the case: that she could get on better without one. In some ways men were essential. One must have a coachman, a gardener, a doctor, a lawyer — even a clergyman. These served their purpose and withdrew — some less briskly than others, she reflected, seeing Mr. Harwood walking up the avenue. He had visited her daily, to enquire after the children and offer, she supposed, spiritual consolation. Apparently the presence of a clergyman of the Church of England in her morning-room was consolation enough, as though, like some moral vinaigrette he had but to be filled by a Bishop, introduced, unstoppered, and gently waved about the room, to diffuse a refreshing atmosphere. To visit widows in their affliction, she thought, moving the decanter towards him, was part of his duties. Possibly she was not sufficiently a widow to call out his most reviving gales. But indeed, beyond a pleasant civility and a rather tedious flow of chit-chat, no more was to be expected of him. He gave away very respectable soup, and preached sensible sermons, and his cucumber frames were undoubtedly the most successful in the village. What more to ask, except that he should soon go away? She had often congratulated herself that the parish was served by such a rational exponent of Christianity.
To-day, of course, they discussed the storm.
“This cooler air,” said he, “must certainly be of assistance to your little invalids. We may, indeed, consider the storm (since you tell me it did not alarm them) as providential. I understand, too, that nearly all the corn was already cut, so that the harvest will not be endangered.”
Tithes, thought Sophia.
God was a cloud, lightnings were round about his seat. But Mr. Harwood was unaware of this, and good manners forbade that she should hint it to him. Instead, she found herself thanking him warmly for his promise of balsam seed, well-ripened by the hot summer. If brought on under glass and transferred to a southern aspect, she should have a fine show of plants next summer.
For everything would go on, and she with it, broken on the wheeling year. Next summer would come, and she would walk in the silent garden, her black dress trailing, her empty heart stuffed up like an old rat-hole with insignificant cares, her ambition for seemliness and prosperity driving her on to oversee the pruning of trees, the trimming of hedges, the tillage of her lands, the increase of her stock. Urged and directed by her will, everything would go on, though to no end. The balsams would bloom, and she be proud of them.
If I were a man, she thought, I would plunge into dissipation.
What dissipation is to a man, religion is to a woman. Would it be possible to become a Roman Catholic and go into a convent? No, never for her! — of the two a
lternatives dissipation seemed the more feasible. For though she could not imagine how it might be contrived, since both to wine and the love of man she opposed an immovably good head, yet, could a suitable dissipation be devised, she might find in herself a will for it; but under no circumstances could she yield herself to devotion. There was gaming, she remembered; that was possible to women. And for a moment she paused to consider herself contracted into an anguished ecstasy that the croupier’s rake could thrust or gather. Gaming might do; yet in its very fever it was cold, and if she were to survive, she must be warmed — she so frigid to wine and the love of man. There was ambition. That should fit her, with her long-breathed resolution, her clear head and love of dominance. But how should a woman satisfy ambition unless acting upon and through a man? — and how control a man by resolution or reason, when any pretty face or leaning bosom could deflect him?
Far off stood the shade of Papa, speaking of philosophy and the calm joys of an elevated mind. True, Papa spoke also of the inconvenience of blue-stockings, pointing to his own mother as a model of all a daughter should be — Grandmamma, thick, dumpy, and perfumed, her creaking stomacher rising and falling under her gloved and folded hands, saying, “Come, little Sophia. You must not run about in the sun. Fetch your needlework, and sit by me.” Yet, avoiding blue-stockings, one might yet find some succour from Papa and intellectual pursuits — take up chemistry or archaeology, study languages, travel. A woman cannot travel alone, but two women may travel together; and Sophia for a moment beheld herself standing upon a bridge, a blue river beneath her, a romantic gabled golden town and purple mountains behind, and at her side, large-eyed and delighted and clutching a box of watercolour paints, Mrs. Hervey.
O foolish vision! Even were not Mrs. Hervey stoutly wedded to her apothecary, how could one long endure such a wavering mixture of impulse and impertinence, sensibility and false refinement?
It is because she was kind to me, she thought, that my mind turns to her. She is young, silly, and can do nothing, yet she came to me in kindness, offering to my aridity a refreshment not germane at all to what she really is, but a dew of being young and impulsive. Caspar is such another, if he were here I should cling to him, listen to his music, solace myself with his unconscious grace of being young, and malleable, and alive. Should I adopt him, bring him here in the stead of my children? A black heir to Blandamer? Impossible! Though I have will enough to enforce it, the resentment of those I force would hound him out, all but his actual black body. And indeed, could I long endure to have this pretty soft wagging black spaniel in the place of my children?
Most of the time it seemed to her inevitable that both children should die. Then, more irrational than the conviction of their doom, would come a conviction of their recovery. Hope would twitch her to her feet, set her running towards the night nursery where she should hear from Mrs. Kerridge indubitable symptoms of a turn for the better. And halfway there fear would stay her, bidding her sit down again, continue what occupation she had, taste, as long as it might linger, the hope so exactly fellowed to the previous hopes which enquiry had demolished.
Damian, Mrs. Kerridge and the doctor said, was making the better fight. Yet it was Damian who died first, collapsing suddenly, and dying with a little gasp like a breaking bubble. Two hours later Frederick entered the house. Sophia expected him, yet when the carriage came to the door she ran out by the long window, spying from behind a tree at the intruder, come so inopportunely upon her misery. Whoever it is, she thought, not recognising her own horses, I will not see him. I will hide.
A foreigner, her mind said, in the instant before recognition. He ran up the steps and stood talking to Johnson, who had opened the door. She advanced, slowly mounting the steps behind him, knowing herself unseen by him. She seemed to be stalking a prey, and on Johnson’s countenance she read with how much surmise and excitement her household awaited this meeting.
Why doesn’t he turn round, she thought. I cannot touch him, and I don’t want to speak, lest my voice should break, and deliver me over to him.
“Here is Mrs. Willoughby, sir.”
As though I were the coffee, she thought; and her lips were moving into a smile when he turned to her.
“Sophia!”
His voice had altered. There was a new note in it, he had lost his drawl. She said,
“Damian is dead. Do you know? I can’t remember if he died before the carriage started for you.”
He bowed his head.
“Johnson has told me.”
She saw that the horses were sweating. They must go to the stables, life must continue.
“You will be tired with your journey. Come in.”
Now which chair will you take, she thought — your old one?
But he remained on his feet, walking up and down the room, as though, again under that roof, the habit of his former listless pacing piped its old tune to him. To the window, and turning, to portrait of Grandpapa Aspen, and back to the window again, his advance and retreat surveyed by that quiet old gentleman, who, as Gainsborough had painted him, seemed with his gun and supple wet-nosed retriever to be watching through the endless bronze dusk of an autumnal evening, paused on the brink of his spinney and listening with contemplative pleasure to the footsteps of the poacher within. Benjamin Aspen Esq. J.P. stated the gold letters below. It had sometimes occurred to Sophia that it were as though Frederick, uneasily treading the Aspen estate, were the tribute of yet another poacher offered up to the implacable effigy. But now the poacher walked with a freer gait, a liberated air; and it was in this new manner, and in his subtly altered tone of voice, that Frederick halted by her chair and said,
“I will not make speeches, Sophia. But you must let me say how grateful I am to you for sending for me, how much I grieve that it is for this reason that you have had to break your resolution.”
The moment for a reconciliation, she thought, with the more bitterness and annoyance since her sense acknowledged that never before had Frederick’s demeanour expressed so patently, not merely an acceptance of their irreconcilability, but a will to it that might be equal to hers. She stared at his dusty boots, and said sourly,
“There wasn’t much hope, Frederick, nor is there for Augusta. They neither have much stamina. The Willoughby constitution, I suppose.”
To speak so was abominable, was the last thing she had wished to do. Nothing could retrieve the words, even had she not been too weary for an attempt. And feeling the blood labouring to her cheeks she sat unmoving, scorning to avert her shamed face, and fighting against a flood of self-pity.
“The devil of a disease.” He spoke as though thinking aloud, voicing a train of thought which her words had not pierced. “Vaccination or not, it will get you if it has a mind to. And if you creep through it, it may leave a life not worth living.” He went on to speak, as a traveller might, of the women in Paris who earned a livelihood as mattress-pickers, women whom smallpox had blinded. “They come from the Quinze-Vingts,” he said. “A child leads them to the door, and fetches them again at the end of the day. One morning, one spring morning, I came across two of these women sitting on the floor of an empty bedroom in my hotel. The door was open, and I watched them for a little, thinking how quickly they separated the tufts of wool, and wondering that they should work so silently, for as you know it’s queer to find two Parisians at work and not chattering. Their backs were towards me, but when I said good-day they turned. Then I saw their faces, so scarred that it would not have been possible to say if they were old women or girls of nineteen, and instead of eyes, hollow sockets and sores. Death is better than that, Sophia.”
How deeply changed he is, she thought. It is as though a stranger were speaking. That woman’s influence, I suppose. But, disciplined by the recollection of her last, abominable speech, she thrust down the thought of Minna Lemuel, and enquired as a hostess, speaking of food and refreshment.
“May I see Augusta?”
Of the two children Augusta had always been h
is favourite. More of an Aspen in character than the boy, it had been as though in her he wooed his last hope of her mother. An embarrassment of honour made Sophia turn away and talk to Mrs. Kerridge while Frederick stood by the sick child’s bed. He had entered the room, she noticed, with a little parcel in his hand; and now, glancing over her shoulder, she saw that he had unpacked from it a white rose, very delicately contrived from feathers, light as thistledown and sleek as spun glass. The small hand, so roughened and polluted, opened vaguely at the contact, clutched the toy and crumpled it, and let it fall.
“Speak to her, Frederick. She can’t see you, but she may recognise your voice.”
“Ma fleur,” he said. The small hand stirred on the coverlet, closed as though closing on the words, and presently fell open again.
After he had gone back to Paris and she was left alone with the leisure of the childless, those words, and the tone in which they were spoken, haunted her memory — according to her mood, an enigma, a nettle-sting, a caress. It was as though, at that moment, not Frederick but some one unknown to her had stood by the bed of her dying child and said, Ma fleur. That it was said with feeling, yes. Frederick had always been sincerely sentimental, had in the early days of their marriage melted his voice even to her. That it was said gravely, yes again. To have lost one child and know the other past keeping would darken any voice into gravity. But beyond this, and beyond anything her mind could unquarry, there remained a quality, part innocence, part a deep sophistication in sorrow, that must still fascinate and still elude her. The voice of one acquainted with grief. Not, as Frederick had been, suddenly swept into its shadow, but one long acknowledging it, a voice tuned for a lifetime, and for centuries of inherited lifetimes, to that particular note, falling since the beginning of the world in that melancholy acquiescent cadence, falling as wave after wave brings its sigh, long-swelled, and silently carried, and at last spoken and quenched on the shore.
Summer Will Show Page 8