Kitabı oku: «Not Without Thorns», sayfa 13
Volume Two – Chapter Three.
At Wareborough
“The certainty that struck hope dead.” – J. Ruskin.
These three weeks had passed drearily enough at Wareborough. Not with everybody, of course. Frank Thurston for one was in a far from unhappy state of mind – his marriage with Sydney Laurence was to take place in a few weeks; thanks to Gerald’s generosity no difficulties had come in its way, and the prospects of the young people were bright enough to satisfy all reasonable requirements. Sydney, in her calm way, was happy too. She belonged to the class of women who to some extent identify the husband with the home, and the selecting of this home, the discussion of the rival merits of the two or three little houses which happened at the time to be vacant in that part of Wareborough where they were to live, was deeply interesting to her. Still more delightful to her was the furnishing and adorning of the tiny habitation. Her taste was good, her common sense and discrimination wonderful, and she had the happy knack of never apparently opposing her lover, even when his ideas as to the drawing-room curtains, or china dinner-service, hardly accorded with what she considered suitable, or threatened to exceed the sums respectively appropriated to these purposes. Yet in the end and without the exercise of any conscious diplomacy, Sydney generally got her own way. Eugenia on these occasions wondered at, admired, often almost lost patience with her sister.
“You are really spoiling Frank, Sydney,” she would say. “I don’t believe he half appreciates you.”
But “Oh, yes, he does,” Sydney would answer with a quiet smile, for nothing that Eugenia could have said in those days would have had power to draw forth any but the gentlest reply from the sister whose whole soul was filled with an intensity of unexpressed, inexpressible sympathy in the suffering which Eugenia was doing her utmost to conceal.
Since the night when they had learnt the certainty of Captain Chancellor’s departure, his name had never been even indirectly alluded to by Eugenia. It was not that she was naturally reserved or too proud to confide in her sister, but just at the first shock she felt that her only strength lay in silence – once let the barriers of her reticence be broken down, she trembled for her already overtaxed powers of self-control. And besides she shrank from the not improbably adverse view which Sydney might take of Captain Chancellor’s behaviour.
“She does not know him as I do; she could not understand him,” thought Eugenia. “I could not, even by her, endure to hear him blamed or judged in the common conventional way, for whatever others might think of him, I believe him to be blameless. My faith in him is unshaken.”
And so she believed it to be, not discerning that in this morbid shrinking from any discussion of the subject even with Sydney, there lay concealed an unacknowledged misgiving as to the soundness of the foundations of her trust.
So she kept silence, and flattered herself that no one but Sydney could possibly suspect that anything was amiss. It was not difficult for her just at present to keep a little more than usual in the background, the young fiancée being naturally the nine days’ centre of observation. And even if Miss Laurence did look hardly in her ordinary spirits, people did not much wonder at it.
“It must be a trial to the two sisters, especially to Miss Laurence, poor girl, to think of being parted, even though Mrs Frank Thurston, that is to be, will only be a few streets off,” observed one kindly-hearted Wareborough matron to Mrs Dalrymple during a morning call when the Laurence family happened to come on the tapis; to which Mrs Dalrymple, who was feeling anything but happy about Eugenia’s altered looks, agreed with almost suspicious eagerness. For Mr Dalrymple, with true masculine magnanimity, had already given symptoms of having a stock of “I told you sos” in readiness for the first suitable opportunity, and had Eugenia been less preoccupied, her friend’s increasingly demonstrative affection and constant reiteration of “how very well she was looking,” could not but have roused the girl’s own suspicions.
Curiously enough, in these days Eugenia seemed to turn with satisfaction to Gerald Thurston.
“How very much Gerald has improved again of late,” she remarked one day naïvely to Sydney. “For some time after he came home, I thought India had spoilt him. He seemed rough and careless, as if he had got out of the way of women’s society, and was turning into a moody old bachelor. But now he has got back his nice, gentle, understanding way. He seems to know by instinct when, when – ” she stopped and hesitated – “when Frank and his chattering are almost more than I can bear,” had been in her thoughts, but she recollected herself in time to change it – “when one is tired and disinclined to talk or anything,” she said, wearily, and Sydney had hard work to force back the expression of sympathy which she felt would not at this stage be welcome.
“Yes,” she answered simply, “Gerald is very good and kind.”
She would not have been the least offended had Eugenia finished her sentence as had been on her tongue. How she pitied her no words could have told, and many a time Frank’s unconscious cheerfulness jarred even on Sydney herself, poor child, feeling almost as if the contrast of her own happy content was a crime against Eugenia’s shattered hopes.
She pitied Gerald too. It was worse for him now, she said to herself, than if all had been as she had expected. True, he might then have realised more acutely the sharpness of his disappointment, have suffered unselfishly from his misgivings as to the worthiness of her choice; “but still,” thought Sydney, in her sensible way, “it would have been over and certain – a thing that was to be, and he would have been beginning to get accustomed to it.”
But now though Eugenia in the body was still among them, the heart and soul – the very life it seemed just now, had gone out of her. All the freshness and brightness had been sacrificed – whatever possibilities the far-off future might yet conceal, the Eugenia of Gerald’s first love, the Eugenia of his absent dreams, was gone for ever, could never be his. She had never been his, it was true, but Sydney’s womanish faith in the “what would have been,” was indefensibly great. Correspondingly deep was her unspoken disappointment, her vehement, almost fierce indignation against the cause of all this trouble, the wanton destroyer of her sister’s youth and happiness. Had she come upon the subject with Frank, he would, she knew, have either refused to believe in Eugenia’s suffering, or have blamed her as herself the originator of it.
“But he doesn’t understand her, and that man threw dust in his eyes. Supposing even that Eugenia was easily deceived, allowing her to be, as Frank says, impressionable and extreme, does that excuse him; cold-hearted, unprincipled, selfish man of the world that he must be, to have robbed my darling of her happiness.”
But all these feelings, little suspected under her quiet exterior, Sydney kept to herself.
Late one afternoon, about six weeks after Captain Chancellor had left Wareborough, the sisters on their way home from a long and rather fatiguing shopping expedition, happened to pass Barnwood Terrace.
“Don’t you think we might go in and see Mrs Dalrymple for a few minutes?” suggested Sydney. “She has been twice to see us since we have called on her, and she is always so kind.”
“Very well; if you like I don’t care,” replied Eugenia, and Sydney hastened to ring the bell before she could change her mind. The girl was jealous for her sister that no occasion should be given for either kindly or spiteful gossip, and it was well for Eugenia that she had so discriminating a friend at hand; for in the preoccupation of her perplexity and trouble, it would never have occurred to her that any regard should be paid to the possible comments of the little outside Wareborough world.
Mrs Dalrymple was at home, and as cordially delighted as usual to see her two friends, yet Sydney was at once conscious of a slight underlying constraint in her manner, perceptible chiefly perhaps in the kind-hearted woman’s extra effusiveness and palpable endeavour to be quite as easy and cheerful as her wont.
“She has something on her mind,” thought Sydney, “something she is uncertain about telling us,” for the girl had no great opinion of Mrs Dalrymple’s power of reserve, and every time that their hostess introduced a new subject of conversation Sydney trembled, she hardly knew why, and glanced furtively in her sister’s direction. Eugenia sat quietly, unconscious of anything unusual in Mrs Dalrymple’s demeanour, now and then putting in a remark on one or other of the various topics touched upon. She was at that stage of very youthful suffering at which a sort of calm often falls upon the inexperienced subject of it; in reality a simple physical reaction, but which she told herself, with a childish yet morbid satisfaction, must be “the apathy of despair.” Her life, she told herself, was over; she had sounded the very depths of suffering, she had experienced the worst, the very worst; only one possible aggravation of what she had endured was conceivable to her; yet not so either, for her heart refused to listen to the faintest suggestion of so monstrous an idea as that of her having been deceived in her hero. Could it be possible that he had never been “in earnest,” that he did not really care for her, that the softly hinting words and looks more eloquent than words had meant nothing? Oh no, no, it could not be; though all the world should swear it to her, she would refuse to believe it.
“For if I ever came to think so, I should die,” she said to herself, with the innocent arrogance of youth which cannot believe that ever a human being’s sufferings equalled its own, or that the worst anguish is not that which kills, but that which is lived through. For in those natures which have the deepest capacity for suffering there is usually an appalling reserve of strength and endurance, and to such, dying is not so easy of achievement, as, fresh from their baptism of woe, they are apt to imagine. And Eugenia did not yet know either that there is a “living,” compared to which this ignorantly invoked “dying,” – a girl’s hazy, sentimental notion of it, that is to say – were but child’s play.
So Eugenia sat quietly beside Sydney in Mrs Dalrymple’s luxurious drawing-room – a room full of associations to her – calm in the belief that she had known the worst; that her unapproachable, unsurpassable sorrow had, as it were, set her apart from the rest of the world; that for the future the only life remaining for her was that of unselfish, self-devoting interest in the lives and interests of others. For this was the rôle that Eugenia, ever extreme, imaginative, and incapable of the sometimes so salutary resting on one’s oars, the taking one’s life and its lessons day by day soberly and trustingly, instead of insisting on unravelling the tangled thread oneself – had now already marked out for herself, and, true to her new ideal, she tried to listen with interest to Mrs Dalrymple’s commonplacisms, to answer brightly and smile cheerfully at the proper times. She imagined the shock to be over, the doomed limb already severed, and that she had known the acutest agony; when, alas, she woke from this dream to find that the worst was yet to come, that what she had endured was but the first shrinking of the tender flesh from the cold steel of the surgeon’s knife.
Her attention, in spite of her efforts, had flagged a little; she was recalling in fancy the many times Beauchamp Chancellor and she had been together in this room, from that first evening that now seemed so long ago, when he had found her standing alone at the door in the fog, and had asked her to dance without knowing her name. Suddenly something that Mrs Dalrymple was saying recalled her to the present. Their hostess had been asking Sydney, as her intimacy with the girls excused her in doing, some questions as to the proposed arrangements for her marriage.
“I do hope it will be fine weather at the time,” she had been saying. “Not merely on the day itself, of course, though one naturally likes some sunshine for a bride, but for the honeymoon. You will enjoy your tour so much more if it is fine.”
“Yes,” agreed Sydney. “But of that we must take our chance. April is never to be counted on.”
“No, and yet it is such a favourite month for marriages,” replied Mrs Dalrymple. “I hear of – let me see – three among my near friends, which are fixed for this April, – a niece of Henry’s, one of the Conroys. I forget if you have ever met them here? She is marrying a Mr Mildmay Jones, in the Civil Service, and going out to India. Then there is your marriage, Sydney, and another I only heard of yesterday. You remember my cousin Roma, Roma Eyrecourt,” (here it was that Eugenia’s attention was attracted), “of course you do – she was here last December, you know.”
She stopped, as if waiting for Sydney’s reply, for to her the question had been addressed. In reality, poor woman, she felt unable to screw up her courage to make the announcement which she yet knew it would be cruel and impossible to withhold.
Little shivers of cold began to creep over Sydney. She felt inclined to shake Mrs Dalrymple – why could she not either have held her tongue or said it out quickly without this unnecessary torture of suspense? For Eugenia was listening: there she sat, Sydney seemed to see without looking at her, in an unnatural tension of expectation, her eyes, which had somehow grown to look larger of late, fixed on the speaker.
“No,” said Sydney, in a weak, faint, almost querulous voice, quite unlike her own.
“No, I don’t know her. I didn’t see her when she was here.”
“Ah, no, by-the-bye you didn’t,” said Mrs Dalrymple, and something kept her from turning to Eugenia, the one who did know her cousin, as would have been natural, “I remember. But though you don’t know her, you know Captain Chancellor very well. I can’t tell you how surprised I was to hear of those two being really engaged. Of course it has often been spoken of, but I long ago made up my mind it would never be. I could get no satisfaction out of Roma when she was here, but I certainly didn’t think it looked like it. Beauchamp Chancellor never gave me the slightest reason to expect it – rather the other way indeed. Really I don’t think I ever was so surprised.”
“And the marriage is to take place very soon, I think you said,” inquired Sydney, with the same strange sensation she had had once before of being a mere machine asking questions at her sister’s bidding.
“Yes, very soon, I believe,” Mrs Dalrymple went on again in the same nervous, hurried manner. “Next month – about the same time as yours. I have not heard the whole particulars yet. My letter was not from Roma herself, but from Mrs Winter, a friend of mine who is staying near there just now. I must write and congratulate them both, I suppose, though – I hope they won’t ask us to the marriage, however; I certainly don’t want to go.”
There was silence for a few moments. Then both Mrs Dalrymple and Sydney were startled by the sound of Eugenia’s voice. She spoke in a quiet, rather dreamy tone, as if the sense of her words was hardly realised by her – but of the peculiarity of her manner only Sydney was aware.
“Will you kindly give our congratulations too, when you write, Mrs Dalrymple, please – mine especially. I saw Miss Eyrecourt several times, and we all know Captain Chancellor very well, you know.”
“Certainly I will, my dear Eugenia, with the greatest pleasure,” replied Mrs Dalrymple, with rather injudicious empressement. A very little encouragement would have drawn out the whole of her smouldering indignation against Beauchamp and womanly fellow-feeling with Eugenia’s wrongs, but without some hint from the sisters that the expression of her opinion would not be considered indelicate or intrusive, even Mrs Dalrymple felt that in this case, as in most others, the less said the better, and held her peace accordingly.
A minute or two passed, but no more allusion was made to the news which had so disturbed their hostess’s equilibrium. And before there was opportunity for the discussion of any other subject, the sisters, moved by a common instinct, discovered that it was getting late, and that they had already outstayed their time. Mrs Dalrymple could not resist kissing them both affectionately as they said good-bye, but this was the only expression of sympathy on which she ventured.
It was already twilight out of doors. Still not so dusk but that Sydney stole timid glances at her sister’s face in wistful anxiety as to what there might be there to read. But it seemed all blank: she might have stared at her with open inquiry, Eugenia would have been unconscious of it. She walked along quite quietly, replying mechanically to the little commonplace observations Sydney hazarded from time to time; but for the curious expression, or rather curious absence of expression in her usually changeful, speaking face, her sister would have suspected nothing but that Eugenia was in a more than usually silent mood this evening. As it was, Sydney felt bewildered and uncertain, vaguely apprehensive, yet not satisfied that there was new cause for any increase of her anxiety.
“Possibly,” thought Sydney, “this definite news may do her good. It may show her what a poor creature he is after all, and may rouse her to shake herself free of the remembrance of him altogether.”
She hardly understood that to Eugenia such a reaction, healthy and “sensible” though it might be, was impossible. Through all her despair and misery Eugenia clung with instinctive self-regard to her delusion; over and over again she repeated to herself in almost the same words, the poor little formula of faith in her lover which she told herself and really imagined she believed. It was her safeguard at this time, and well for her that she could hold to it; for what to some girls would have been merely a passing though sharp mortification, would to her have been a loss of self-respect extensive enough to have shaken the whole foundations of her character.
Very near their own house the sisters were overtaken by Frank Thurston. He walked beside them to the door, but seemed to hesitate about entering.
“Aren’t you coming in, Frank?” asked Sydney.
“It is hardly worth while,” he replied, eyeing regretfully his but half consumed cigar. “I have only five minutes to spare. Suppose you walk up and down with me, Sydney, instead of my coming in. It’s going to be a beautiful evening.”
Sydney glanced at Eugenia.
“Yes, do, Sydney,” said Eugenia.
Sydney fancied she could discern in this a longing on her sister’s part to be alone, if but for a quarter of an hour.
“Very well, then, I will stay out with you for a little, Frank,” she agreed, and Eugenia entered the house by herself.
When she got into the hall, for the first time she became conscious of feeling different from usual, strangely weak and giddy and very cold. Afraid of the servant’s observing anything amiss, she abandoned her intention of rushing upstairs at once to her own room, and went instead to the drawing-room, where she knew she would find no one. There was no light in the room but that of a large, brightly burning fire. Eugenia drew a low seat close to it, and in a minute or two when the warmth had penetrated a little through her thick dress, she seemed to feel better. Still, however, she was only half restored; she felt that going upstairs would be quite beyond her powers, so she sat still, vaguely relieved that Sydney did not appear with kindly but unendurable expressions of anxiety as to what was wrong.
How long she had sat there she did not know, when the door opened quietly and some one came in. Eugenia looked up. It was not Sydney. It was Gerald Thurston!
“Oh,” thought poor Eugenia, “oh, if only I were up in my own room! Oh, how can I sit and talk to Gerald!”
Then, however, there came a slight sensation of relief that it was Gerald and not Frank! She stood up to shake hands as usual when he crossed the room to where she was, but the giddy feeling returned, and she sat down again rather abruptly.
“I have been with your father in his study for the last hour,” explained Gerald. “He has asked me to stay to dinner and go with him to his lecture at Marny Mills to-night, so you must excuse my clothes.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Eugenia, smiling. “It wants more than half-an-hour to dinner-time still,” Gerald went on, speaking faster than usual – the truth being that this tête-à-tête with Eugenia, the first since the memorable evening of his return, was by no means to his taste – “don’t let me be in your way. I should not have come into the drawing-room, but your father had some letters to write, and I thought I was in his way. I met Sydney flying upstairs as I came across the hall, and she told me I should find a book and a fire in here.”
“There are some library books and new magazines over there on that side-table,” replied Eugenia, moving her head in the direction she meant. “But you are not in my way,” she went on indifferently. “I wasn’t doing anything.”
She shivered perceptibly as she spoke. Then she stooped to reach the poker, and began nervously stirring the fire.
Mr Thurston stopped on his way to the side-table. He came back to the fire-place and took the poker out of Eugenia’s hands. Even in the instant’s contact he felt their icy coldness.
“Let me do that for you,” he said gently. In her nervousness Eugenia had already done the very thing she would have wished not to do. She had stirred the glowing red into a vivid blaze, which fell full on her face. Something in it must have looked different from usual, for before she could turn away, Gerald spoke.
“Eugenia, what is the matter?” he exclaimed impulsively. “You are as cold as ice – you must be ill.”
She felt his eyes fixed upon her: extreme annoyance gave her momentary strength.
“Don’t, Gerald, please, don’t,” she said, half beseechingly, half petulantly. “There is nothing the matter. I may have got a chill, that is all. But please don’t look at me. I do so dislike it.”
She rose, resolved to put an end to his scrutiny. “I will get across the room,” she thought. She made two or three steps feebly but determinedly, wondering vaguely what had come to her feet, they felt so powerless and heavy; then, it seemed to her, she stepped suddenly down, down into unfathomable depths, into darkness compared to which midnight was as noon-day. “I am dying,” she thought to herself before her senses quite deserted her. “What will he think, how will he feel when he hears it?” And it seemed to her she called aloud with her last breath. “Beauchamp! oh, Beauchamp!”
In reality the words were a barely audible whisper, which would certainly have been unintelligible to ears less jealously sharp than those of her one hearer.
“My darling,” muttered Gerald, “so it is his doing, is it?”
The first two words made their way to Eugenia’s not yet quite unconscious brain. Afterwards she thought she must have dreamt that Beauchamp had answered her cry.
She had never fainted before. She could not at all understand the painful coming back to life; to finding herself after all – instead of awaking in the mysterious country across the river of which we know so little, so terribly little – in the old way again, lying on the drawing-room sofa, with a keen cold current of air blowing in her face.
“Where am I?” she said, as people always do say in such circumstances, glancing round her, apprehensively. But before Gerald had time to reply, her wits had sufficiently recovered themselves to take in the position.
It had not been much of a faint after all; her young life had not required much doctoring to regain its balance for the time. Mr Thurston had merely carried her to the window, and opened it to allow the fresh air to try what it could do. Then, laying her on the sofa, he was glad to see she was coming round again without his requiring to summon the assistance which he felt certain she would shrink from.
The room was bright with fire-light, and the cold air still blew in freshly. Eugenia lay still for a minute or two, gazing before her. Then she tried to rouse herself, and after a moment’s hesitation, seeing she could hardly manage it, Gerald put his arm round her, and helped her to sit up. He need not have been afraid of annoying her. She took his help with the most perfect simplicity, as if he had been her brother.
“Thank you, Gerald,” she said, softly, “you are so kind. You have always been kind to me, ever since I was quite little,” and half unconsciously she allowed her still throbbing head to lean for a moment on his shoulder. It was rather hard upon him – the perfect sisterliness of the little action made it all the more so. A sudden fear came over him that she would feel how fast his heart was beating, and would be startled into consciousness. So, very gently, under pretence of arranging the sofa cushion, he removed the arm that was round her. She did not seem to observe it.
“Are you better now, Eugenia?” he said, kindly. “I don’t know if I did right in opening the window, for I believe it must have been a chill that made you faint. But I am no doctor, and a good blow of fresh air was the only thing that occurred to me.”
“I am sure it was the best thing to do,” she answered; “I am not cold now. I don’t think it was real cold. It must have been the feeling of fainting coming on. I never fainted before, and I have always thought it so silly,” she added with a little smile. “I am all right now, I shall go upstairs in a minute, Gerald.” Appealingly, “You won’t tell anybody?”
“Not if you promise me to tell Sydney, and see the doctor if you have any return of it, or don’t feel quite well in any way.”
“Very well, I will promise that,” she replied, meekly enough. “It was very good of you not to call any one and make a fuss.” Then, after a moment’s hesitation, the hot colour rushing over her pale face, she added in a lower voice, “Gerald, didn’t I say something?”
There was no use parrying her inquiry. Sorely against his will, Gerald found himself obliged to accept the position of her confidant.
“Yes,” he said, simply; Eugenia did not perceive that it was sternly as well.
“Ah, I thought so,” she murmured. “I know I can trust you, though sometimes one prefers to trust no one. Don’t misunderstand me,” she added quickly, becoming alive to the grave expression of his face; “in one sense, I should not care if everybody knew what you suspect. No one need be ashamed of I can’t explain. I mean, I don’t want pity. I am not to be pitied, and no one is to be blamed. Only, people who only know half cannot understand, so I feel that my strength just now lies in silence.”
Mr Thurston looked at her very anxiously, the hard look melting out of his face.
“Take care you do not overrate your strength,” he said gently.
Eugenia smiled, but said nothing. Then she stood up, and was about to try if she could walk, when Gerald stopped her.
“Wait one instant,” he exclaimed, and before she had the least idea what he meant, he was back again with a glass of wine.
“Drink that, or at least half of it,” he said. “I found it on the sideboard. It must be getting near dinner-time.”
Eugenia did as he told her, and then he let her go.
“Good night; I don’t think I shall come down to dinner, and thank you again very, very much, and – and please remember,” were her last words.
Ten minutes later Sydney appeared, dressed for dinner, with a rather troubled face. She was anxious about Eugenia, she told Gerald; it looked as if she had caught a chill somehow – she had persuaded her not to come down again, but to go straight to bed.
“But talking of chills,” she went on, hastily, “this room is enough to freeze one. What can it be? Why, actually, the window is open. My dear Gerald, what can you be made of to have sat here without finding it out?”
Mr Dalrymple was dining with a bachelor friend that evening. It was pretty late when he got home to his wife, but he found her wide awake, and evidently in better spirits than she had been for the last day or two.
“Well, my dear Henry,” she began, “I am happy to tell you that for once your fears have been exaggerated. The Laurence girls were here to-day, and I told them – quite naturally, just in the course of conversation, you know – the piece of news I had heard. And I assure you, Eugenia took it beautifully; was not the least surprised or upset; begged me to send her congratulations, and so on. She cannot have been impressed by Beauchamp Chancellor as you thought, for she is a girl that shows all her feelings. It is quite a relief to me. I feel quite happy about her now.”
“Do you?” said Henry, with cruel satire. “I’m glad to hear it. Only I suspect your feelings are not at this moment shared by her family. Mr Le Neve was dining at Hill’s to-night, and a couple of hours ago he was sent for in a hurry to the Laurences. He said he would look in again, and so he did, and told us the patient was Miss Laurence – Eugenia, I mean. And I can tell you he is far from easy about her. My own idea is she’s in for brain fever. Be sure you send round first thing in the morning to inquire.”
Poor Mrs Dalrymple was crushed at once.
“Don’t you think Mr Le Neve is rather an alarmist?” she ventured, timidly.
But Henry was very unfeeling. “I can’t say I do,” he replied, leaving his wife to her own reflections, which considerably interfered with her night’s rest.
