He paused, — and Delicia spoke softly and with great gentleness, moved by the strength of her own grief to compassionate his, whatever it might be.
‘Indeed I would, Mr Valdis,’ she said earnestly. ‘I am quite sure you have a strong and steadfast nature, and that with you it would be a case of “once love, love always.”’
He met her eyes fully.
‘Thank you,’ he said in low accents; ‘I am glad you do me that justice. It moves me to make full confession, and to tell you what I thought would never be told. Others, I fear, have guessed my secret, but you — you have never seen it, never guessed it. You are not vain enough to realise your own charm; you live like an angel in a land of divine dreams, and so you have never known that I — I—’
But she suddenly started away from him, her eyes filling with tears, her hands thrust out to keep him back from her.
‘No, no,’ she cried, ‘you must not say it; you must not!’
‘Nay, I must and will,’ said Valdis, now losing a little of his hard self-control, for he sprang to her side and seized her two hands in his. ‘You have guessed it at last, then? That I love you, Delicia! Love you with all my soul, with every breath of my being, every beat of my heart! I have tried to hide it from you; I have battled against my own passion, and the fight has been hard; but when you say — oh, God! with what piteousness in your dear voice — that without love life is valueless, you break down my strength; you make me helpless in your hands, and you unman me! You need not be afraid of me, nor indignant, for I know all you would say. You will never love me; your whole heart was given to one man, your husband; he has flung away the precious gift as though it were naught, and it is broken, dear, quite broken! I know that even better than you do. Such a nature as yours can never love twice. And I know, too, that your proud, pure soul resents my love as an outrage because you are married, though your marriage itself has been one continual outrage. But you tempt me to speak; I cannot bear to hear the grief in your voice when you speak of life without love. I want you to know that there is one man on earth who worships you; who would come from the ends of the earth to serve you; who will consecrate his days to you, and who will die blessing your name! No, there shall be no time or space for reproaches, for, sweet woman as you are, I know the force of your indignation; I am going away at once, and you need never think of me again. See, I kiss your hands and ask your forgiveness for my roughness, my presumption. I have no right to speak as I have done, I know — but you will have pity—’
He stopped as she gently withdrew her hands from his clasp and gazed at him with sad, wet eyes. There was no anger in her face, only a profound despair.
‘Oh, yes, I will have pity,’ she murmured vaguely. ‘Who would not be pitiful for such a waste of love — of life! It is very cruel and confusing — one cannot be angry; I grieve for you, and I grieve for myself. You see, in my case, love is now a thing of the past. I have to look back upon it and say with the German poet, “I have lived and loved.” I love no more, and therefore I live no more. You, at any rate, have more vitality than I — you are still conscious of love—’
‘Bitterly conscious!’ said Valdis. ‘Hopelessly conscious!’
She was silent for a little; her face was turned away, and Valdis could not see the tears falling from her eyes. Presently she spoke very tranquilly, putting out her hand to meet his.
‘My dear friend,’ she said, ‘I am very sorry! I think you understand my nature, and you will therefore feel instinctively how sorry I am! I am quite an unfortunate mortal; I win love where I never sought it, and I have given love where it is not valued. Let us say no more about it. You are a brave man; you have your work, your art, and your career. You will, I hope, in time forget that Delicia Vaughan ever existed. A few days ago I should certainly have resented the very idea of your loving me as an insult and a slur upon my married life; but when I know that my marriage is a farce — a very devil’s mockery of holy union — why! I am not in a position to resent anything! Some women, without being as grief-stricken as I am, or in need of any consolation, hearing such a confession as yours to-night, would fling themselves into your arms and give you love for love; but I cannot do that. I have no love left; and if I had, I would not so forfeit my own self-respect, — or your reverence for me as a woman.’
‘Oh, my love, my saint! Forgive me!’ cried Valdis, moved by a sudden deep humiliation. ‘I should still have kept my secret; I ought never to have spoken!’
She looked at him candidly, the tears still in her eyes and a faint smile trembling on her mouth.
‘I am not sure about that,’ she said. ‘You see, when a woman is very sad and lonely, just as if she had grown suddenly too old and poor to have a friend in the world, there is a wonderful sweetness in the knowledge that someone still loves her, even though she may be quite unable to return that love. That is how I feel to-night; and so I cannot be quite as angry with you as I should like to be!’
She paused, then laid her hand on his arm.
‘It is growing dark, Mr Valdis; will you see me home? My rooms are quite close to the pier, so it will only be a few minutes’ walk.’
Silently he turned and walked beside her. Overhead, through slowly-flitting clouds, one or two stars twinkled out for a moment and vanished again, and the solemn measure of the sea around them sounded like the subdued chanting of a dirge.
‘Where are you staying?’ asked Delicia, presently.
‘Nowhere,’ he answered quickly. ‘I shall go back to town to-night.’
She said nothing further, and they walked slowly off the pier and up a little bit of sloping road, whither Spartan preceded them out of an intelligent desire to show his mistress that though he had only been at Broadstairs a few hours he already knew the house they were staying at. Arrived there, Delicia held out both her hands.
‘Good-bye, my dear friend!’ she said. ‘It is a long good-bye, you know — for it is better you should see as little of me as possible.’
‘Is it necessary to make me suffer?’ asked Valdis, unsteadily. ‘I will obey you in anything; but must you banish me utterly?’
‘I do not banish you,’ she answered gently. ‘I only say I shall honour you more deeply and think you a truer friend than ever, if you will spare yourself and me the pain of constant meeting.’
She looked steadfastly at him; her eyes were grave and sweet; her face pale and tranquil as that of some marble saint in the niche of a votive chapel. His heart beat; all the passion and tenderness of the man were roused. He would have given his life to spare her a moment’s grief, and yet this quiet desolation of hers, united to such a holy calm, awed him and kept him mute and helpless. Bending down, he took her hands and raised them reverently to his lips.
‘Then good-bye, Delicia!’ he said; ‘Good-bye, my love — for you will be my love always! God keep you! God bless you!’
Loosening her hands as quickly as he had grasped them, he raised his hat and stood bare-headed in the shadowy evening light, gazing at her as a man might gaze who was looking his last on life itself. Then he turned swiftly and was gone.
For a moment Delicia remained passively watching his retreating figure, her hand on the collar of Spartan, who manifested a wild desire to bound after him and bring him back. Then, shuddering a little, she went into the house and shut herself up alone in her bedroom for an hour. When she came out again her eyes were heavy with the shedding of tears; but such an expression was on her face as might be on the radiant features of an angel. And she was very quiet all that evening, sitting at her window and watching the clouds gradually clear, and the great stars shine out above the sea.
CHAPTER IX
The next day she received her husband’s letter, the letter in which he had excused himself altogether and started a complaint against her instead. She glanced over it with a weary sense of disgust, and smiled disdainfully as she thought what a mountain he was trying to make out of the mole-hill of the paragraph in Honesty.
‘As if an
y one of the lying tongues of journalism wagging against me could do me such wrong as his open infidelity,’ she mused. ‘God! How is it that men manage to argue away their own vices as if they were nothing, and yet take every small opportunity they can find for damaging an innocent woman’s reputation!’
She flung aside the letter and turned over the morning paper. There she found, under the heading of ‘Scene at a London Club,’ an account of Aubrey Grovelyn’s horse-whipping at the hands of Paul Valdis. The exposé of the so-called ‘poet,’ who, as Mr Brown, had been steadily booming himself, was cautiously hinted at in darkly ambiguous terms — no journal likes to admit that it has been cleverly fooled by one of its own staff. And great editors, who are anywhere and everywhere except where they should be, namely, in the editorial room, are naturally loth to make public the results of their own inattention to business. They do not like to confess that, in their love of pleasure and their devotion to race-meetings and shooting-parties, it often happens that the very porters guarding the doors of their offices know more about the staff than they do. The porter can tell exactly the hour that Mr B —— comes in to the office at night, the shortness of the time he stays there, and the precipitate hurry with which he goes home to bed. The porter knows that Mr B —— is paid five hundred a year for doing hard work at that office during a certain number of hours, and that Mr B —— seldom looks in for more than one hour, having other work on other papers, about which he says nothing. And that, therefore, Mr B —— is distinctly ‘doing’ his editor and proprietor. But as long as editors and proprietors prefer to caper about at the heels of ‘swagger’ society instead of attending strictly to their duties and to the grave responsibilities of journalism, so long will the British Press be corrupted by underlings, and ‘used’ for purposes which are neither honourable nor national, nor in any way exact, as reflecting the real current of public opinion. Delicia knew all this of old, hence her indifference to the press generally. She had always been entertained and surprised at the naïve delight with which certain society ‘belles’ had shown her descriptions of themselves in certain fashionable journals, where their personal attractions were enumerated and discussed as if they were nothing more than cattle in a market. She could never understand what pleasure there was in the vulgar compliments of the cheap paragraphist. And in the same way she never thought it worth while to attach importance to the scurrilities that appeared in similar quarters concerning all those women who stood aloof from self-advertisement and declined to ‘give themselves away’ by consenting to the maudlin puffery of the ‘ladies’ paper.’ So that the lofty tone of injury her husband assumed in his letter not only struck her as mean, but infinitely grotesque as well. She did not answer him, nor did he write again; and she passed a quiet fortnight at Broadstairs, finishing some literary work she had promised to her publishers at a certain date, and trying to think as little as possible of herself or her private griefs. When she was not engaged in creative composition, she turned to the study of books with almost as much ardour as had possessed her when, at the age of twelve, she had preferred to shut herself up alone and read Shakespeare to any other form of entertainment. And gradually, almost unconsciously to herself, the tone and temper of her mind changed and strengthened; she began to reconcile herself to the idea of the lonely lot which would henceforward be her portion. Turning the matter practically over in her mind, she decided that the best course to adopt would be that of a ‘judicial separation.’ She would make her husband a suitable ‘allowance’ (she smiled rather bitterly as she thought what a trouble he would make of it, and how he would fret and fume if he had to do without his four-in-hand and his tandem turn-out), and she herself would travel all over the world and gain fresh knowledge and experience for her literary labours. Or, if constant travel proved to be too fatiguing, she would take some place in the remote Highlands of Scotland, or the beautiful sequestered valleys of Ireland, and make a little hermitage among the hills, where she could devote herself to work and study for the remainder of her days.
‘I daresay I shall manage to be at least content, if I am not happy,’ she said to herself; ‘though, of course, society will reverse the position in its usual eminently false and disgusting way, and will whisper all sorts of lies about me, such as, “Oh, you know a literary woman is impossible to live with! It is always so; poor, dear Carlyon could not possibly stand her, she was so dreadful! Clever, but quite dreadful! Yes, and so they are separated. Such a good thing for Carlyon! He looks ten years younger since he got rid of her! And they say she’s living down in the country somewhere not too far from town; not so far but that Paul Valdis knows where to find her!” Oh, yes, I can hear them all at it, — croaking harpies!’ and her small hand clenched involuntarily. ‘The vultures of society can never understand anyone loving the sweet savour of truth; they only scent carrion. No man is true in their estimation, no woman pure; and chastity is so far from being pleasing to them that they will not even believe it exists!’
On the last afternoon of her stay at Broadstairs, she spent several hours strolling by the sea, listening to its solemn murmur and watching the sunlight fall in golden lines over its every billow and fleck of foam. With the gravity of her thoughts, her face had grown more serious during the last few days, though it had lost nothing in sweetness of expression; and as she paced along the sand, close to the very fringe of the waves, with Spartan bounding now and then into the water and back with joyous, deep barks of delight, a sudden, inexplicable sense of pain and regret surprised her into tears. Gazing far out beyond the last gleam of the ocean line with longing eyes, she murmured, —
‘How strange it is! I feel as if I should never look upon the sea again! I am growing morbid, I suppose, but to my fancy the waves are saying, “Good-bye, Delicia! Good-bye for ever, and still good-bye!” like Tosti’s old song!’
She stood silent for a little while, then turned and went homeward, resolutely battling with the curious foreboding that had suddenly oppressed her brain and heart. Spartan, shaking the wet spray from his shaggy coat, trotted by her side in the highest spirits; he was untroubled by any presentiments; he lived for the moment and enjoyed it thoroughly — a habit of mind common to all animals except man.
The next day she returned to London and entered her own house with her usual quiet and unruffled air. She looked well, even happy; and Robson, who opened the door for her admittance, began to think he was wrong after all, and that she ‘knew’ nothing.
‘Is Lord Carlyon in?’ she asked, with the civil coldness of a visitor rather than of a wife.
‘No, my lady.’ Here Robson hesitated, then finally spoke out. ‘His lordship has not been home for some days.’
Delicia looked at him steadily, and Robson stammered on, giving her more information.
‘Since the grand dinner his lordship gave here last week, he has only called in for his letters; he has been staying with friends.’
Delicia glanced around her at the picturesque hall with its heraldic emblems, stained-glass windows and rare old oak furniture, all of which she had collected herself and arranged with the taste of a perfect artist, and a faint chill crept over her as she thought that perhaps even her home — the home she had built and planned and made beautiful out of the work of her own brain — had been desecrated by the company of her husband’s ‘private friends.’
‘Was it a very grand dinner, Robson?’ she asked, forcing a smile, ‘Or did you all get into a muddle and do things badly?’
‘Well, my lady, we had very little to do with it,’ answered Robson, now gaining sufficient courage to pour out his suppressed complaints. ‘His lordship ordered all the dinner himself from Benoist, and sent cook and some of the other servants out for the day. They wasn’t best pleased about it, my lady. I stayed to help in the waiting. It was a very queer party indeed, but of course it isn’t my business to say anything—’
‘Go on,’ said Delicia, quietly. ‘What people dined here? Do I know any of them?’
�
��Not that I am aware of, my lady,’ said Robson, with an injured air. ‘I should say it wasn’t at all likely you knew any of them; they were very loud in their ways, very loud indeed. Two of the females — I beg pardon — ladies, stayed to sleep — one young one, and one old.’
Trembling from head to foot, Delicia managed still to restrain herself and to speak quietly, —
‘Did you know their names?’
‘Oh, yes, my lady — Madame de Gascon and her daughter, Miss de Gascon. Their names are French, but they spoke a sort of costermonger’s English.’
‘Did any of them go into my study?’
‘No, my lady,’ and honest Robson squared himself proudly. ‘I took the liberty of locking the door and putting the key in my pocket, and saying that you had left orders it was to be kept locked, my lady.’
‘Thank you!’ But as she spoke she quivered with rage and shame — her very servant pitied her; even he had had more decency and thought for her than the man she had wedded. Was it possible to drain much deeper the dregs of humiliation?
She went upstairs to her own bedroom and looked nervously about her. Had ‘Madame de Gascon and Miss de Gascon,’ whoever they were, slept there? She dared not ask; she feared lest she should lose the self control she had practised during her absence, and so be unable to meet her husband with that composure and dignity which her own self-respect taught her would be necessary to maintain. She loosened her cloak and took off her hat, glancing at all the familiar objects around her the while, as though she expected to see them changed. In the evening she would have to go to Lady Dexter’s ‘crush,’ which was being given in her special honour. She determined she would lie down and rest till it was time to dress. But just as she turned towards her bed a sharp pain ran through her body, as though a knife had been plunged into her heart, — a black cloud loomed before her eyes, and she fell forward in a dead swoon. Emily, the maid, who was fortunately in the adjoining dressing-room, heard her fall, and rushed at once to her assistance. With the aid of cold water and smelling-salts, she shudderingly revived and gazed about her in pitiful wonderment.
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 406