by E. F. Benson
The paper slipped from Gertrude’s knees and fell crackling to the ground. So he was dead, and his wife a widow, like herself, she felt. She sat there for some time without stirring. So Lady Hayes, then, was free, and Reggie, as she had told him herself that afternoon, was free too. How very simple, after all, are the big problems of life, and how very cruel. Surely Eva could not help loving him. Anyone who knew him must love him; who could tell that half so well as herself, who loved him best? Was he not lovable? Surely, for she loved him. And what would Mrs. Rivière say? Her thoughts wandered blindly on, touching a hundred different points with accuracy, but without feeling, till they all centred round the main event.
Ah! the cruelty of it, the diabolical chance which placed these things on the devil’s chessboard, for the devil to move and manœuvre with. She was to be the victim, it seemed; she was to give up the object of her long tender love to another woman, more beautiful, less scrupulous than herself, and her jealousy sprang to birth, full armed, terrible. Did the irony of fate go so far as this, that that woman, for whom she had herself declared Reggie free, should be free also? Her rejection of him — that was nothing, a wile to bring him back more humbly to her feet. Ah, yes, they would be married in St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, probably, and Gertrude would go there, and sing “The Voice that breathed o’er Eden,” and eat their — his — wedding cake, and be introduced to the bride, and throw a slipper after them for luck. Yes that was all extremely likely, one might almost say imminent. At this point Gertrude began to perceive that she was getting hysterical, and with a violent effort of self-control, she got up and walked to the window. The sun was just setting, and over the lawn strolled a tall figure, preceded by a still taller shadow. Reggie’s eyes were bent to the ground, and he walked up close to the verandah without seeing her. The sight of that familiar, best-loved figure produced another mood in Gertrude; she watched it silently for a time, and then said to herself under her breath, —
“Pray, God, let her love him very much;” and then aloud, “Reggie.”
At the sound of his name he looked up and saw her.
“Come in here a minute,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”
Reggie nodded assent, and came along the verandah, until he reached the low, French window opening on to it.
“Come in,” said Gertrude, “it’s the Princess’s room, but she isn’t here. Sit down there.”
Gertrude paused.
“The paper has just come,” she said at length. “There is something I have read which I wish to tell you, Reggie. It affects you very deeply — I have just read it. Lord Hayes is dead.”
“Ah, God!—”
The exclamation burst from him involuntarily. He could have checked it no more than a man can help wincing at a sudden, unexpected blow, or starting at a sudden noise. But into those two words he had cast all the cargo of his soul — hope, longing, love. Gertrude had heard them, had comprehended them, had swallowed the bitter draught.
A moment afterwards he saw that he had told her all, more convincingly than he had done even this afternoon, for he saw she realized it to the full.
“Ah, Gerty, what can I do?” he said, when the silence had become unbearable. “You know how it is with me. How can I help it? I wish I were dead, though the gates of hell were yawning to receive me.”
“You did not wish you were dead two months ago,” she said with a flash of scorn, “not even though the gates of heaven were open to receive you. You are not so easily contented now.”
Reggie looked piteously at her.
“I know. I deserve all you could say of me. Much more than you ever would. I am a brute, a villain — I deserve to be shot. Yet you did not speak like that this afternoon; I am glad you have said it, though; I don’t feel less guilty, God knows! but I am not so bad as not to feel thankful for any punishment.”
“Let us say good-bye now,” said Gertrude. “We shall not meet again like this.”
She held out her hand to him, but volunteered no more intimate embrace. He grasped it, held it for a moment, and let it drop. Even the touch of hand had been something sacred before to him and her, he felt, but there was something dead between them; her hand was as another’s. But to Gertrude that rush of memories was too great. Her strength had been too severely taxed already.
“Ah, Reggie,” she cried, “do you leave me like this?”
“God help you!” he said, “and me too.”
“Reggie, my darling,” she cried suddenly, “shall that woman stand between you and me? Did you not promise me your love? Where are those promises? This is all a dream. Come to me again as you were once. You did not love anyone but me, you said — and once you told me you disliked wicked people. What has happened to those words of yours? Were they not true? It is a pity if they were not, for I have written them on my heart. Ah, my darling, my darling—” She threw her arms round him in a last embrace. “Reggie, dear,” she whispered, “this is good-bye. I did not mean what I said just now. I did not know what I was saying. That was the best of me that spoke this afternoon when I said you were free. You are quite free. I hope she will love you as much ... as much as I have done — as I do. That will be enough. And now go. Leave me by myself. Good-bye, dear; good-bye.”
She went with him on to the verandah, where the dusk was already falling, and as soon as he was outside the room, she turned quickly from him and went back, closing the glass door after her.
CHAPTER III.
Lord Hayes was buried with his fathers and forefathers in the little churchyard at Hayes, and after the funeral Eva came back again to her London house. Mrs. Grampound came to see her occasionally, was tearful and voluble, and could hardly conceal her satisfaction at the handsome settlements Lord Hayes had made on his widow.
“So thoughtful of him,” she would say, wiping her eyes, “to leave you the London house for life. He knew that you could not do without a few months in London every year; and the villa at Algiers, too, for the winter, in memory of the honeymoon. So unselfish!”
Mrs. Grampound seemed to think that his lordship’s disembodied spirit might have preferred to keep the villa at Algiers to itself, and that the fact that he had left it to his widow seemed to imply that he renounced all rights of visiting these particular glimpses of the moon. But Eva assented, with the ghost of a smile, as the impossible interpretation occurred to her.
Reggie’s letter to Mrs. Davenport, telling her that his engagement with Gertrude had been broken off, had arrived, and it was not very pleasant reading. He mentioned that this was prior to the news of Lord Hayes’s death, and that he was coming back to England; and with all his old frankness, he said that he had written to Eva a letter of sympathy on her husband’s death.
But if Reggie’s letter gave pain to Mrs. Davenport, not to mention that Gertrude was not altogether happy just now, surely there was the corresponding balance somewhere. Eva, for instance — things were taking a fresh turn, were they not, for her? Her husband was just dead — that was true; but though the loss of a husband is not, in the general way, a matter for congratulation, her case was a little exceptional. And this morning a letter had come for her from someone she was very fond of, saying a few words for the sake of decency, and a few other words which, for the sake of decency, had better have been left unsaid. Reggie had told Eva that all was over between himself and Gertrude, and that he was coming back to London. The letter ended almost imperiously, “I shall come to see you — you shall see me.”
Yet Eva was not the owner of the balance of happiness to make all square. How was that? But Eva was very conscious herself, as she sat with Reggie’s letter in her hand, why she was not happy. Reggie was coming to offer himself, body and soul, to her, and there was nothing in the world that she desired but to give herself, body and soul, to him. It seemed very simple. Unfortunately it was only more impossible.
She had decided only a week ago that he was happier, or would be happier with another than with her. She knew it, she knew it; sh
e was convinced of it by instinct and reasoning alike. It seemed to her that there was nothing she knew except that — that, and a certain dull remorse when she thought of that moment, when she had found the thing, which had been her husband, lying like a broken doll in the dark room. She wished she had made more of that bad job; he was so weak, so inadequate, surely it had not been worth while to spar with one so immeasurably her inferior. And he had been very kind to her, as kind as she would let him. He had been like a little dog, which had been purely amiable at first, but had got to snap instinctively when it was approached, from the certainty that it was going to be teased. She recalled that shrinking, hunted look that she had seen so often on his face when he had snapped at her and she had turned on him with a whip. To do her justice, the provocations, or, at any rate, the challenge had usually been on his side, but after all, would it not have been better so many times to have let it pass — not to have slashed so savagely? Ah, well, he was dead; Eva envied him now.
For the road to her happiness was as impassable as ever; her husband’s death had made no difference to that. She knew that Reggie’s best chance of happiness was not with her, but with another, and, unfortunately for Eva, she found that this fact could not be overlooked. And that necessity of securing his happiness came first; it was the most essential part of her love for him; the impossibility she had felt on that morning after they had seen Tannhäuser, or rather heard the overture together, of doing anything that was not for the best of his happiness, as far as in her and in her sober judgment lay, remained as impossible as ever. The existence of her husband, she felt then, was altogether a smaller matter. If she had felt it good that she and Reggie should love one another, she would have been content to go on living as they had lived before, seeing each other in ball-rooms, in crowded dining-rooms, in any publicity, just touching his hand, just reading that secret knowledge in his eyes, and she knew that he would have waited indefinitely as blissfully as herself. But her knowledge of herself and him rendered that impossible, and it was impossible still. Surely it was very hard; she did not ask for much, and that little was infinitely impossible.
Meanwhile, the hours were bringing Reggie closer to London, and closer to her. “I shall come and see you — you shall see me!” The words rang in her head, till it seemed the whole air held nothing but them. That imperious note, the first she had heard from him, was terribly dear to her, as it is to all men and women, when the one they love commands that which they long to do. He was changed, Mrs. Davenport had said; he had become a man. Eva felt in his words that the change had come — he spoke to her as a man to a woman. He pleaded no longer, he demanded, he announced his claims. She pictured him coming to her, bold in the assurance of his love. “You are mine,” he would say, “you are mine, and I am yours. Let us come away together. Ah! but you shall come; you dare not say ‘no.’”
Against the sight of him, the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand, Eva knew she would be powerless. The impossibilities on which she dwelt would sink, she well knew, into nothing by the side of that one great impossibility — that of resisting his claims when he came to seek and have her. Surely nothing on earth, not duty, nor unselfishness, nor wisdom, was so strong as Love, the soft, delicate-winged Love, which neither strove nor wept, but only smiled and smiled, until its claims, its claims in full, were willingly poured into its outstretched hand.
Eva rose from where she had been sitting, and walked upland down the room. Dressed in black from head to foot, she looked like an image of despair. She looked round the room, not hers, she felt, but his. That was the chair where he used to sit; the last day he had been there, he had pushed it back into the window and had sat in the sun, because he said he had a cold. He had been smoking a cigarette and had put it down on the window sill, where it had made the paint blister and burn. She had brought him a little Benares ware ash-tray, to put it in after that. Ah! there was the ash-tray, with the stump of a cigarette still in it. The servants ought to have cleared it away — and yet — well, perhaps it was too small to notice. In any case, she would not speak about it. No, on the whole she would speak about it, and she rang the bell. They should dust the room more carefully, she said to the man; that cigarette end had been there a week. After all, it did not matter, she added, as she took the ash-tray up. “No, leave it where it is; but let the room be dusted more carefully another time.” Poor, momentous little cigarette-end!
He will see her, will he? Ah! but he shall not. Eva, who had always felt herself so strong, was suddenly weak. If she knew that he was there, was waiting to know if he could see her, how could she say she would not see him, and if she saw him, how could she not yield? It was impossible, impossible. Meanwhile, she had a day and a night in which to decide what to do. He would not be in London till to-morrow morning. Many things may happen in a day or a night. She might go away, away somewhere where he would never know and could never follow her. And where in the world was that? Where would not she follow him? Perhaps nowhere in the world, out of the world somewhere — perhaps — perhaps....
There was a piece of green, unturned grass next the grave where her husband lay, in that peaceful churchyard where the trees sang low together in the wind. How would it do to go there, to be quite quiet at last? “Perchance to dream?” Yes; but surely if she dreamed at all, she would dream of Reggie. One might do worse, she thought, than dream of him.
How odd that she had not thought of this before! It was so very simple, so very satisfactory. She only cared for one thing in this world, and that she could not have. So why wait here?
But he must never know — that would spoil it all. He must never even suspect. Eva had an intense horror of anything like melodrama, and she wished everything to be as natural as possible. If only she could hire a madman from a lunatic asylum to shoot her — no, shooting would not do — it was noisy, messy, a hundred things it should not be. Surely doctors knew plenty of ways by which one could glide quietly out of the world without suspicion — they knew so many ingenious devices by which they can keep us in the world, that they must know some to let us out. Some clean, soothing drug which presented no traces at a post-mortem diagnosis — that was the word, was it not? Eva smiled when she pictured herself going to a doctor and asking for a drug of this description. A suspicious mind might perhaps attach undue importance to such a visit, if made a few hours before her death. What fools people were!
Eva pondered, till after a moment a sudden thought struck her. Was not suicide, of a kind, more misleading to those — to him to whom she wished it to be misleading, than death from apparently natural causes? Her husband had died four days before, and, nominally, she was a more or less broken-hearted widow; to Reggie, at least, broken-hearted enough, for it was part of the concealment which she had practised to him, to hide her relations with her husband, and when she decided to let him know the rest of her, that was a side issue which she had not shown him. Would not the self-sought death of a heart-broken widow be the most complete disguise to her action, far more complete than the clumsy death by pistols or overdoses? “It is always a good thing to add details,” thought Eva to herself. The worst of it was that such a death was somewhat melodramatic; but when the actor quits the boards for ever, it may be excusable that he makes one concession, in spite of his own distaste, to set the audience in a roar. Yes, she would have it so.
Lord Hayes used to dabble in chemistry in an amateur way, and Eva remembered his showing her, in his laboratory at Aston, a little bottle full of a harmless-looking liquid, the smell of which reminded her at first of soft cool peaches, but afterwards of the almond icing on the top of wedding cakes. He had told her that it was prussic acid, and that one drop of it on the tongue would kill a man. She remembered the incident clearly, because when she smelled it she had shuddered, and had thought of her own wedding cake. The bottle was sure to be there still — it stood on the second shelf to the right as you opened the door of the laboratory, and it had a large, red label on it. It was curious how accura
tely the whole thing came back to her.
The bottle was at Aston, and he was buried in the churchyard there. She regretted the necessity of melodrama, but she would not be alive to regret it afterwards. Eva had no fear, only a longing to get it over — to be quite sure that nothing would stop her carrying out her intention of putting herself out of the reach of him she loved. She would go down to Aston that afternoon; meanwhile, there were three or four hours to be spent in London. Well, there were very few preparations to make. When we take that longest journey of all, there is no packing to be done, no arrangements to be made, as when we go away for a three days’ visit. All arrangements are made for us; death provides us with an excellent courier who will forget nothing.
There were just two notes she wished to write — one to Mrs. Davenport, saying that she had heard from Reggie, to say he was coming back to London, and that he wished to see her; that she had given him his congé once for all and had no intention of seeing him, and that it would save her trouble if Mrs. Davenport would communicate this to him.
It was not a very easy note to write for many reasons, but the other was even harder; it was to Gertrude Carston, and ran as follows: —
“You will wonder what I, of all women in the world, can have to say to you. Do not resent my writing till you have read. I have done you a cruel wrong and I am sorry for it. I allowed Reggie Davenport to fall in love with me, when I might have stopped it. If I had cared for him it would have been different, for my husband is dead, and he would have married me. In that case I should not have been sorry as I am now. But I never cared for him at all; I did it thoughtlessly, and, as far as I had any motive at all, because it amused me. My husband was the only man I ever cared for; he is dead and I wish I were dead too. It is but poor amends that I can make, but this I promise you, that I will never see Reggie Davenport again. Be very patient with him; he will love you as well as you love him, and that I know is not a little. He will come back to you and you will not hate me then.