Kitabı oku: «The Rubicon», sayfa 8

When she went upstairs half-an-hour later, she turned into her husband's room to get a book she wanted, and found him sitting by the window, as if expecting her. He rose as she entered, and stood like a servant waiting for orders. But Eva gave no orders, and, having found her book, only remarked that it was growing a little chilly. He did not reply, and she turned to look at him. There was something miserably shrunken about his appearance which was rather pitiful.

"You look tired," she said. "I should go to bed if I were you."

He did not meet her eyes, but continued to look out of the window.

"It has been a terrible night," he said.

Eva frowned.

"It has been nothing of the sort," she said. "Don't be absurd, Hayes. You made a very bad mistake; you did not treat me in the way I wish to be treated, and I was intensely angry with you. But I assure you I am angry no longer. It is quite over, as far as I am concerned. Don't let us quarrel more than is necessary. Just now, it is quite unnecessary to quarrel."

Lord Hayes had a certain potentiality for being malignant.

"It is not the quarrelling," he said; "it is the mutual position that I find we occupy to each other."

She grew a little impatient.

"Let that be enough," she said. "We only waste words."

She came a step nearer to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder, as if he had been a woman, or she a man.

"Come," she said, "be sensible. There is nothing more to say about it. You had better go to bed. Good-night!"

CHAPTER IV

The little grey ghost which visited Gertrude Carston in the early morning, soon became a habitué of her waking hours. He was a very importunate little ghost, and having once been given the entrée, he concluded that he was always welcome. But, though he was unpleasant enough at the time, he was slightly medicinal in character, or rather, not so much medicinal as health-giving. He did not exactly correct existing defects, but opened fresh springs within her. So far, however, he was medicinal, in that he was operative after the dose, which always continued bitter to the taste. But the bitterness was a good bitterness, and occasioned not discontent with Reggie, but discontent with herself, and it is always worth a good deal of bitterness to become wholesomely, not morbidly, discontented with oneself. She began to see in her nature unsuspected limitations, a thing quite as salutary, though not perhaps so pleasant, as the sight of unsuspected distances. A consciousness of unsuspected distance is liable to breed content, which is more injurious to the average mind – and she was quite average – than the discouraging discovery of a near horizon of unsuspected limitations, for the latter cause a revolt of something within us – which some call pride, and others spiritual aspiration – which refuses to acquiesce, and insists on those limitations becoming merely landmarks and milestones.

And, indeed, to see such a limitation is a long step towards correcting it. The young mind, to which growth is as natural as it is to the young body, if it has any of that irrepressible, unconscious elasticity, which is the main characteristic of its divine remoteness from age, will never acquiesce in a limitation it sees. It will, somehow or other, clamber over that horizon's rim, and though it may get many a fall, though it may be benighted and foot-sore and weary, that same divine youthfulness, which heals its physical fibres when they are bruised or cut, will repair its mental fibres. Its potentialities for recuperation are as strong as its refusal to be bounded. Youth may be crude, exaggerated, headstrong, but when the advocates of a temperate and bloodless senility have said all they can against it, they must confess that it is young.

What made this inward struggle so trying to Gertrude was, that she was unable, from the essential nature of it, to guess what was happening. All she knew was the sense of tangible limitations and dim tracts beyond, and an imperative necessity to flounder, as best she could, towards them. But she found much comfort in her love for Reggie, and in the knowledge of his love for her; she felt as if she was following some thin golden thread through a maze of bewildering twilight, but while that was secure in her hand, the maze and the twilight and the bewilderment were comparatively unimportant.

The Davenports had moved up to London in April, and Gertrude was with them again for a week before she went abroad to Aix with her mother in May. Mrs. Carston was a weak, fretful invalid, who always insisted on her daughter's cheerful and robust support while she went through a course of somewhat unnecessary baths and massages. The great city was just beginning to settle down to its great effort of amusing itself for three months, and the Morning Post recorded, morning by morning, some fresh additions to the big fair. The Davenports, in virtue of Mr. Davenport's modest contribution to the task of governing the nation, had been duly entered on the books for the year, and their blinds in Grosvenor Square testified to the accuracy of the announcement.

Reggie and Gertrude were sitting in the dining-room about half-past ten one morning. Reggie was apt to treat breakfast as a movable feast, and this morning he had been out riding till after ten, and had only just come back. It was a hot, bright day, and he had taken the liberty, which had broadened down from precedent to custom, to ride in a straw hat. This particular straw hat was new, and had a very smart I. Z. ribbon round it, and Gertrude was seeing how it would look on her. She was suffering from a slight cold, and had not gone out with him, but she found it pleasant enough to wait, after she had finished breakfast, and skim the daily papers till he returned.

She was deeply absorbed in the total disappearance of a French poodle when Reggie entered after dressing, and she laid down the paper to pour out tea for him.

"The Row was fuller this morning," said he, "and the Parliamentary train was in great force."

"What's the Parliamentary train?"

"Oh! the string of people who walk up and down very slowly, with a row of grooms behind; you know the sort."

"Any one there you knew?"

"Yes; several people. Gerty, give me another bit of sugar. Percy was there, looking for his sister. Apparently they've come back. Jim Armine was there too, also looking for Percy's sister."

"Lady Hayes?"

"Yes," said Reggie, eating steadily on. "I went and looked too. But we couldn't find her. By the way, Percy wants us to go there to lunch."

Gertrude had a sudden sense that all this had happened before, that she was going to act again in a rather distasteful scene. She had a sudden, instinctive desire not to go there, a quite irrational dislike to the idea.

"Oh! I can't," she said. "I've got a cold."

Reggie looked up innocently.

"Oh! I'm so sorry for not asking. Is it worse? Poor dear!"

Gertrude had a quite unusual dislike of white, excusable lies.

"No, it's not worse; it's rather better," she said.

"Let's go, then."

"Oh! I don't want to, Reggie," she said. "I want to go to the concert at St. James'. They're going to do the Tannhäuser overture."

"That's Wagner, isn't it?" said Reggie, doubtfully. "I think Wagner is ugly."

"Oh, you exceedingly foolish boy," said Gertrude. "You might as well call a storm at sea ugly."

"I don't care," said Reggie, "I think it is hideous. Besides, I want to go to the Hayes."

"Oh, well, then you just sha'n't," said Gertrude. "Really, I want to go awfully to this."

"But it'll be much worse for your cold than going out to lunch."

"Oh, I give up my cold," said she. "I haven't got one, really."

Reggie ate marmalade attentively.

"Do take me to the concert," said Gertrude. "I'm going away in two days. You can go and lunch with the Hayes then. It's a waste of time going out to lunch."

"You see, I promised to go to the Hayes," he said.

"Oh, nonsense! Send a note to say you have got to go to the concert. It's quite true; you have got to go."

"Of course, if I have got to – " said he slowly.

"That's right. It begins at three, doesn't it? No; don't say we can do both, because it is quite impossible. You're very good to me, Reggie."

Gertrude felt intensely relieved, but she could not have told why. There had been something in the conversation she had held with Reggie, six months before, on the subject of Eva, which remained in her mind, and gave her a sense, not of danger, but of distrust. A sensitive mind need not, usually is not, the most analytical, and for this reason, to apply analysis to her unwillingness to see Eva, would yield either no results, or false ones. There is an instinct in animals which enables them to discriminate between their friends and their foes, and the keener that instinct is, the more instantaneous it is in its working. The anatomist can tell us the action of the heart with almost absolute accuracy; he can say how the blood gets oxydised in the lungs, how it feeds the muscles and works the nerves – but the one thing he cannot tell us is, why it does so. And these instincts, like the action of the heart, can be noted and expressed, but the reason of their working we shall not know just yet. An action may be pulled to pieces like a flower, and divided into its component parts, and labelled with fifty crack-jaw names, but the life of the flower ceases not to be a delicate, insoluble mystery to us.

Reggie was very fond of music, but it was compatible, or rather essential, that his particular liking for it prompted him to say that Wagner seemed to him to be "awfully ugly." Nor was it such a far cry that he should assert, that same evening to Gertrude, that he had thought the "Overture to Tannhäuser" "awfully pretty."

Gertrude had been rather silent as they drove back. But something had prompted her to say to Reggie that evening, as they sat in the drawing-room before dinner:

"Ah! Reggie, I am so glad you are good."

Reggie's powers of analysis were easily baffled, and it is no wonder that he felt puzzled.

"I don't like bad people," he said.

"Nor do I, a bit," said Gertrude. "I am glad you don't either. I thought of that this afternoon at the concert."

"Oh! I listened to the music," said Reggie. "I liked it awfully."

"Yes, I know, but it suggested that to me. Half of the overture – all that rippling part seemed so wicked. I think Wagner must have been a bad man. He evidently meant it to be much more attractive than the other."

"I don't see how you can say some parts are wicked and some good. It's all done on the fiddles, you know."

Gertrude laughed.

"I hope you'll never understand, then," she said. "I prefer you as you are. After all, that matters a great deal."

The gong had sounded, and Mrs. Davenport, as she entered the room, heard the last words.

"What doesn't Reggie understand?" she asked.

"Gertrude said she thought some of the overture was wicked," said he, "and I said I didn't know what she meant. Is it very stupid of me?"

Mrs. Davenport looked up quickly at Gertrude.

"No, dear; I think it's very wise of you," she said.

Reggie jumped up.

"I didn't know I was ever wise," he said. "It's really a delightful discovery. Thank you, mummy. Gerty, you'll have to respect me for ever, now you know I'm wise. I shall invest in a sense of dignity."

"I never said you were wise," remarked Gertrude, "and I refuse to be responsible for any opinions but my own."

"Oh, I'll be responsible," murmured Mrs. Davenport.

Reggie looked from one to the other with the air of an intelligent dog.

"I daresay it's all right," he said, "but I don't know what it's all about."

"Oh! Reggie, you do understand," said Gertrude; "don't be ridiculous."

Reggie looked at her with the most genuine frankness.

"I don't understand a word, but I should like you to explain it very much."

Gertrude frowned and turned away to greet Jim Armine, who was dining with them. The vague pain which she had felt before was with her now. Somehow, she and Reggie seemed to have got on to different levels. It was his moral, not his intellectual, understanding which appeared to her every now and then as almost entirely wanting. What puzzled her was that she had been entirely unconscious of any such defect till a few months ago, and her present knowledge of it struck her somehow as not being the natural outcome of increased intimacy, but rather as if her own moral understanding, by which she judged Reggie, had been developed and showed the want of it in him. But here again the vague instinctiveness of the feeling in her mind precluded analysis. All she knew was that she viewed things rather differently from him, and that this difference had not always been there. But pity is akin to love, and love, when joined with pity, is not less love, but love joined to the most human protective instinct, which, if anything, adds tenderness to passion.

Jim Armine had been lunching with the Hayes, and brought a minatory message for Reggie. Why had he said he would come to lunch and bring Miss Carston, and then never turned up.

Reggie behaved in the most unchivalrous manner.

"It was all Gerty's fault," he said. "She made me go to hear music."

"But you wrote to say so, didn't you, Reggie?"

Reggie began to wish he had taken the blame on himself.

"Yes, I wrote," he said.

"And forgot to send it," interpolated Mrs. Davenport. "Reggie, you are simply abominable. You must go to call, and explain."

"Oh, you can write a note to say how sorry you are," said Gertrude, suddenly.

The remark was insignificant enough, but to Gertrude it was the outcome of a feeling not at all insignificant. She felt as if she had inadvertently said something she did not mean to say, without reflecting that, to the others, the words were capable of a much less momentous interpretation. She looked up quickly at Mrs. Davenport, fearing for a moment that her self-betrayal was patent. Mrs. Davenport also remembered at the moment a certain conversation which she and Gertrude had had one night some months ago, and their eyes met. That look puzzled the elder woman; she had not fathomed Gertrude's feeling on the subject of Lady Hayes, when she spoke to her about her, and the mystery remained still unsolved. The idea that Gertrude was in any way the prey of a jealous fear was too ridiculous to be entertained.

The Dowager Lady Hayes, who was staying with them, entered somewhat opportunely at this moment, followed by Mr. Davenport, and they all went in to dinner. That veteran lady appeared to be in a state of mind which, when it occurs in children, is called fractiousness.

She always took a homœopathic dose in globular form before dinner, which was placed in a little wooden box by her place, but to-night the dose had not been set out, and she disconcerted everybody horribly by saying, during the first moment of silence, inevitable, when English people meet to dine together, and in a voice of stentorian power, —

"My dinner pills."

A hurried consultation took place among the flunkies, and, after a few moments' search, the box was found, and handed to her on a salver. Old Lady Hayes held them up a moment and rattled them.

"Pepsine," she announced; "obtained from the gastric juices of pigs. An ostrich couldn't eat the food we eat, and at these hours, without suffering from indigestion. I would sooner eat a box of tin tacks than an ordinary English dinner at half-past eight, without my pepsine."

Mrs. Davenport cast a responsible eye over the menu, which, to the ordinary mind, appeared sufficiently innocent. She was always divided between the inclination to laugh and to be polite when dealing with Lady Hayes, which produced an inability to say anything.

Eva, as we have seen, adopted a different method; she neither laughed nor was she polite, but she was respectfully insolent, which is a very different matter. The utter indifference of her manner produced a sort of chemical affinity in those widely-sundered qualities, just as electricity produces a chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen, which turns them into pure water, though both gases seem sufficiently remote, to the unchemical mind, from their product.

"Soufflé," continued the dowager, glancing down the menu, "when composed of meat – that is, of nitrogenous substance – is utterly unsuitable to human food. It produces a distention – "

But Mrs. Davenport broke in, —

"Dear Lady Hayes, let me send for the wing of a chicken. I know you like chicken wing."

A sigh resembling relief went round the table. Mrs. Davenport had broken the charmed circle, who were waiting, like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, for the unaccountable brimstone to descend on them. Reggie began to talk very rapidly about the Ascot cup; Jim Armine engaged Mrs. Davenport on the Irish question; and Mr. Davenport, by way of transition, asked Lady Hayes whether gas was not very unhealthy.

But the subject of gas did not appear to interest the old lady. She wished to talk about something else, and when she wished to do anything, she did it.

"My daughter-in-law – " she began.

Reggie was still discussing, or rather enunciating, truths or untruths on the chances of Orme, and Lady Hayes's words did not reach him. But Lady Hayes was accustomed to demand a universal deference and attention for her remarks. So she glared at Reggie, who soon caught her eye – it was impossible not to catch her eye very soon when it meant business – and subsided.

"My daughter-in-law," repeated the dowager – "whom I saw this afternoon, driving a dogcart in the Park – it was quite unheard of for a young woman to drive a dogcart alone when I was young – asked me to tell you all to keep Monday week open. She is sending out cards for a dance on that day – or rather she has sent them out, and she forgot to send them to you. Therefore I am a penny postman. She would be glad to see you all. Personally, I think the dances that are given now are simply disgusting. They are very unhealthy, because everyone sits up at the time when the ordinary evening fever sets in; that is, from twelve to two. But I promised to give her message. I am responsible no further. And the cotillion is indecent."

Mr. Davenport made a bad matter worse.

"I am sure there will be none of that romping which you so rightly – ah! – dislike," he said. "I always think – "

But what Mr. Davenport always thought will never be known, for her ladyship interrupted him.

"It is based on immorality," she announced; "it is an exhibition that would disgrace any Christian country, and more especially England."

"Why especially England?" asked Jim, who was conscious of a challenge in her words.

"Because English people seem to pretend to a high morality more than any other nation."

"And are you cruel enough to include your daughter-in-law in that category?" asked Jim.

"Eva Hayes is very English," said the old lady.

"I am sure she never made any pretence of an exceptional morality," remarked Jim, eating his nitrogenous food, and getting angry.

"No one would accuse her of being exceptionally moral."

"I said she didn't make a pretence of it," said Jim.

Mrs. Davenport threw herself into the breach, and asked the dowager how digitalis was made.

Gertrude was sitting next Jim Armine, and wished to know more. Old Lady Hayes was well embarked on the structure of foxglove seeds, and she turned to Jim.

"You know Lady Hayes very well, don't you?" she asked.

"I was with them in Algiers last year."

"Do you like her very much?"

"That's a wrong word to use, somehow," he said. "I think she is the cleverest woman I ever saw, and, perhaps, the most interesting," he added, in a burst of veiled confidence.

"Ah!" – it was somewhat discouraging to hear that so many people took this as their main characteristic – "I don't know her at all. But I don't feel as if I should like her."

"I believe women dislike her very much, as a rule," remarked Jim, drily.

Something in his speech made Gertrude angry. It is always annoying, however modest an opinion we may have of ourselves, to be classed as a probable example to an universal rule. She waited a moment before she answered him.

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, there are very few people whom both women and men like much. Of course, I am not referring to the ordinary, stupid, good-natured people who are universal favourites – that is to say, whom no one dislikes – but to the people whom many men or women get excited about. She is one of those."

Mrs. Davenport was beginning to collect eyes – that is to say, she was looking at Gertrude, for no one could collect the dowager's eyes – and Gertrude rose in obedience.

"I think I know what you mean," she said.

Jim was left in excusable uncertainty as to what she meant, and the ladies left the room.

Mr. Davenport sat down again with an air of relief.

"I have always been considered a strong man," he said, "but, by the side of that old lady, I am a cripple and a baby. Get the cigarettes, Reggie."

"She told me that cigarettes were slow but certain death, yesterday," remarked Reggie, "but she cannot make me rude to her. It would be such a pity."

"Oh! she regards you as a possible convert," said Jim. "She hopes that you will go about with eight holes in your boots before long."

"How does she get on with Percy's sister?" asked Reggie, innocently.

Jim Armine laughed.

"Didn't you know you were her ark? She got routed in several pitched battles, and retired precipitately."

"That was when you were abroad last year, Reggie," said Mr. Davenport. "She came here one day with her boxes and medicines, and asked us to take her in. She gave no reason; but Lady Hayes told your mother."

"Was Lady Hayes so rude to her?"

Jim Armine laughed.

"She was so polite, on the contrary. Don't you know her?"

Gertrude went off next morning to meet Mrs. Carston at Tunbridge, and go with her to Aix. Reggie went with her to Victoria, and had parting words on the platform.

"I wish you were coming with me, Reggie," said Gertrude. "We're going to Lucerne in a month from now, when mother has had her course. That will be towards the end of June. Do come. It is an awfully nice place, and you can go up mountains – or row if you like. Will you?"

Reggie thought it a brilliant and feasible idea.

"I don't care a bit about London," he said, "and I do happen to care about you. It will be lovely. Write to me just before you go there, and tell me the hotel, and so on. Of course, I'll come. Ah! good-bye, Gerty."

The train moved slowly out of the station, and Reggie was left standing on the platform, waiting for it to curl away into the dark arch which soon swallowed it up. He had lost a great deal, and he went home somewhat silently.

That evening there was a great reception at one of the Foreign Embassies. Mrs. Davenport was the sister of the Ambassador's wife, and, after dinner, she asked whether anybody was going with her. Her husband eschewed such festivities; like a sensible man, he preferred, he said, to sit quietly at home, than to stand wedged in among a crowd of people who didn't care whether they saw him or not, and fight his way into a stuffy drawing-room. Reggie was sitting in the window, which he had thrown wide open, and was reading The Field. He had written a short note to Gertrude because he missed her, and as her bodily presence was not there, he felt it was something to communicate with her, but letter-writing was a difficulty to him, and the note had been very short.

An idea seemed to strike Mrs. Davenport when she saw him.

"Reggie, why don't you come?"

"I'll come if you like. Will it be amusing? Yes; I should like to come. Let me smoke in the carriage, mummy."

The two went downstairs together, and got into the carriage.

"Poor old boy," said Mrs. Davenport, laying her hand on his, "you will feel rather lonely to-night. I thought you'd like to come."

"It's an awful bore, Gerty having to go away," said Reggie, without any obvious discontent, "but it's only for a month, you know. I'm going to join her at Lucerne, if you don't want me. I hope there's something to do there. She said there were some mountains about. I shall climb."

Mrs. Davenport was conscious of a slight chill.

"Well, there'll be Gerty there," she said.

"Oh, yes; of course," said Reggie. "I shouldn't think of going if she wasn't there. You said I might smoke, didn't you?"

"I'm very happy about you and Gerty," said Mrs. Davenport, after a pause. "I should have chosen her of all others for a daughter-in-law."

"Oh! but I chose her first," said Reggie. "That's more important, isn't it? I wrote her a line this evening. I wish I didn't hate writing letters so. I can never think of anything to say. What do you say in letters, mother, you always write such good ones?"

"But you don't find it difficult to talk, Reggie. Why should you find it difficult to write?"

"Oh! but I do find it difficult to talk," said he. "It's dreadfully puzzling. I never talk to Gerty."

"Are you always quite silent, then?"

"No; but I don't talk. At least, I suppose I do talk, in a way. I babble, you know. She does most of the talking."

Mrs. Davenport laughed.

"Babble on paper, then," she said; "Gerty will like it just as well."

"Oh! but I can't. It's so silly if you put it down. Is this the Embassy? I hope I shall meet a lot of people I know."

Reggie's common sense was enormous. Gertrude had gone away, and she wouldn't come back for the wishing. He wished she had not gone very much, but here he was in England without her. Surely England without her was the same as England with her, except that she was not there. Her absence, from a practical point of view, did not take the taste out of everything else. How should it? She was a very charming person, the most charming person Reggie had ever met. But there were other charming people, on a distinctly lower level, no doubt, but they did not cease to be charming because Gertrude had gone to Aix. After all, Reggie agreed with the great materialistic philosophers of all time, though he had never read their works. Mrs. Davenport felt somewhat annoyed with this school of thought as she dismounted from the carriage.

The Embassy stood at the corner of a large square, and a broad, red carpet ran from the door across to the road, for royalty was expected. Inside the house the arrangements all corresponded with the magnificent promise of the red carpet. A row of gorgeous flunkies, a band in the hall beneath the stairs, several hundred pounds' worth of hot-house flowers banked up against the wall, a crowd of perfectly-dressed, bustling aristocrats, crowding up and staring, in the worst possible breeding, at a small space between two pillars, where three princesses were looking rather bored, and a similar number of princes were talking to the few who had managed, by dint of loyal shoves, to edge themselves into the august presences; the smiling host and hostess, the pleasant music of women's voices, crossing the somewhat sombre strains of the band below, all these things are the invariable concomitants of such festivities, and on the whole one crush is rather like another crush.

Mrs. Davenport and Reggie had moved slowly up the staircase, and Reggie certainly was finding it amusing. There were lots of people he knew, and he stood chatting on the stairs while Mrs. Davenport talked for a few moments to her sister.

Later on he was standing in a doorway between two of the big reception rooms, talking and laughing, and commanding, by reason of his height, a good deal of the room beyond, when he saw the crowd by the door opposite to him sway and move, as if a wind had passed over it; and through the room, plainly visible, for the crowd made way for her as she was walking with a prince, came a woman he had never seen before. She was tall, dressed in some pale, soft material; round her neck went a single row of diamonds, and above it rose a face for the like of which men have lived and died. Eva had a habit of looking over people's heads and noticing no one, but Reggie happened to be six foot three, and in his long, eager gaze was something that arrested Eva's attention. She looked at him fixedly and gravely, until the thing became absurd, and then she turned away with a laugh, and asked who that pretty boy was.

Reggie, when the spell of her look was broken, turned away too, and asked who the most beautiful woman in the world was.

"There, there," he cried, pointing at her, regardless of men or manners.

So the great loom clashed and crossed, and two more threads were woven, side by side, into the garment of God.