Kitabı oku: «Not Without Thorns», sayfa 28
“Gertrude,” he said, excitedly, as if he had not heard her words, “do you not know, or do you know about Eugenia? What has happened?”
“What has happened?” she repeated, looking a little startled; “nothing that I know of, except that she has gone to her friends at Wareborough – her sister, or aunt, or somebody – for a day or two. I suppose she often goes there, does she not? though I certainly thought she might have waited till my visit was over.”
“Is that all you know?” said Beauchamp, impatiently. “Do you not know with what intention she left this – that she went, never to return?”
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Mrs Eyrecourt, now for the first time taking alarm. “You don’t mean to say she has run away – run away with some one? How frightful! What a scandal! Oh, Beauchamp, how terribly you have been deceived!”
“Take care what you say, Gertrude,” said Captain Chancellor, sternly. “Run away with any one – my wife – Eugenia! What are you thinking of? Read that!”
He thrust into her hand the letter he had found on his mantelpiece, and while watching her read it, he almost laughed, not with standing his distress, at the utter incompatibility of his sister’s coarsely commonplace supposition with the perfect guilelessness, the transparency and innocence, he had often been half inclined to look upon as but a part of his wife’s childishness and inexperience.
Eugenia’s note to her husband was as follows: —
“I am going away because I am too hopeless and miserable to bear my life longer. Hitherto I have clung to hope and to you through all my suffering, believing that at least you had loved me. Now I know the whole bitter truth. I am going to my own friends. I will agree to any arrangements you like to make, but I do not want any money, except what I have of my own. I cannot think that you will in any way miss me, but I trust you will be happier without me than you have been with me.
“Eugenia.”
Mrs Eyrecourt did not speak when she had finished reading this. Beauchamp, observing her closely, fancied she looked pale and frightened.
“Can you explain any of this to me?” he asked, impatiently. “Has anything happened in my absence, to explain it? Or must I think she has gone out of her mind?”
Gertrude hesitated a little. “There was – we had a rather disagreeable conversation the day you left,” she began. “I don’t know who in the world could have put it in her head —truly I don’t, Beauchamp – but all of a sudden Eugenia challenged me with having been the cause of your not marrying Roma, and by some peculiar reasoning of her own, from that she went on to argue that I was the cause of your hasty proposal to her, which she seems to look upon as the misfortune of her life.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“What could I tell her but the truth? She seemed to have a very fair notion of it to begin with. I could not have deceived her. Certainly she is the most hot-headed exaggerated person I ever knew. She talked of having been deceived and all sorts of things. She must have been infatuated to think that you, with your prospects – and altogether – could have deliberately chosen her, or that your friends could have approved of your doing so, though of course both you and they were too honourable to try to draw back once the thing was actually done.”
Captain Chancellor laughed. There was a slight incredulousness in his laugh which made Gertrude very irate. “Then what you have told me is about the general substance of what you told her?” he said.
“I suppose so,” said Mrs Eyrecourt, sulkily. “I did not begin it. I do not consider myself in any way responsible for what she has done. She seemed all right again at luncheon, and as you must have seen, I never even associated this foolish fit of jealousy of hers with her sudden visit to her friends.”
But Beauchamp was not yet satisfied. For almost the first time in his life, he felt that he had his sister in his power, and he used it to the utmost. Little by little he extracted from her a full account of what had passed between her and his wife, including what she had told Eugenia of her really mistaken impression of the true relations that had existed between himself and Roma Eyrecourt, and when he had learnt all that she had to tell, he turned from her with a bitter “Thank you, Gertrude. You have certainly done your best to ruin any chances of happiness I had. I never before had a conception how spiteful a spiteful woman could be. You disliked Eugenia from the first, because she was my choice and not yours, and in the pleasure of making her miserable you have cared little what became of me.”
Mrs Eyrecourt was so offended that she first burst into tears, and then decided upon setting off to join Addie and her mother that very afternoon, leaving Floss behind her till she sent directions for her journey home. Captain Chancellor did not care. Before his sister had fixed her train, he was half-way to Wareborough, where, however, disappointment awaited him in the shape of the Thurstons’ complete ignorance of Eugenia’s whereabouts. The interview with his wife’s relations threatened at first to be a stormy one, for, in his increasing anxiety and perplexity, he was more than half inclined to blame them for this new complication. But they were patient and judicious; the sight of his unfeigned distress inclined Sydney to judge him more leniently than she had ever done, and new hopes began to spring in her heart, that if only Eugenia were with them again, all might yet be well. In the end, Beauchamp went home again to Halswood, by Frank’s advice, to wait there quietly till they heard from their sister.
“I am certain we shall have a letter from her to-morrow or Monday,” said Frank, “for even if she were ill, her maid Rachel, who, we were glad to find, is with her, would write. And it is better for you to go home, and look as if nothing were wrong. Your staying here would only make a talk, and I shall telegraph instantly we hear.”
So Beauchamp went home – home to the desolate house where Eugenia had felt so sure he would never miss her; and the loneliness and anxiety and wretchedness of the next two days brought him face to face with some truths hitherto but little recognised or considered in his pleasure-loving, self-regarding life.
And after all it was Roma’s letter, reaching him on Tuesday morning only, which first brought relief to the fears growing almost more than he could endure, for, by some mischance, Eugenia’s unlucky note to her sister, too late for Saturday’s post from Nunswell, was not received at its destination till this same Tuesday morning.
At first sight of Miss Eyrecourt’s letter, Captain Chancellor could hardly believe his eyes. “Roma with her,” he exclaimed; “Roma, of all people! How can I reconcile that with Gertrude’s story?”
Incomprehensible as it was, however, the news was marvellously welcome. Half-an-hour later came Frank Thurston’s promised telegram, and that very afternoon, hardly to her surprise, Rachel brought word privately to Miss Eyrecourt, that Captain Chancellor wished to know how he could see her.
“He does not want my mistress to be told of his arrival till he has seen you, ma’am,” said Rachel; adding discreetly, “of course with her not being very strong it might startle her, not expecting my master so soon.”
Volume Three – Chapter Eight.
O si sic Omnia!
“Und dennoch wohl ûns, wenn die Asche treû Der Fûnken hegt, wenn dan getäuschte Herz Nicht müde wird, von Neûem zû erglüh ’n!”
Uhland.
“Eugenia,” said Roma, when they were sitting together later in the day, “I have something to tell you.”
“What?” asked Eugenia.
“Some one is coming to see you – this evening or to-morrow morning, if you would like that better.”
“Who is it, Roma?” asked Eugenia, the colour rushing to her pale cheeks. “Not – not Beauchamp?”
“Yes, it is Beauchamp,” answered Roma. She had risen from her seat and now stood beside Eugenia, looking down at her with an expression of mingled anxiety and sympathy.
“Oh, Roma, you must have asked him to come, your letter must have brought him,” exclaimed Beauchamp’s wife in great distress. “I know you meant it well, dear Roma, but you should not have done it. I don’t want to see him just yet. I have been trying to make up my mind to do what I suppose must be right – to offer to go back to him, and do my duty as his wife. But you don’t know how difficult it will be. Oh, so difficult! He will never in the least understand the feelings that made me so miserable; he will think it was all bad temper; or low common jealousy of his having ever cared for you; oh, I see it all so plainly! Of course I will ask him to forgive me – ah, how gladly I would do so if I thought he could understand what he really has to forgive – it is not that I shrink from. But I see that during the rest of our life together I shall stand at such a hopeless disadvantage: he will not be able to believe in my real wish and determination to do my best; it is my own fault, I have brought it on myself, but that does not make it less bitter. This that I have done – this leaving him and my home, will be constantly rising up in judgment against me in his mind – it will never seem to him that anything was wanting on his side. I do mean to try, Roma, I do indeed, but all the spring has gone out of everything. Oh, how lonely it will be!”
Roma let her finish speaking without interrupting her. Then she said gently – “I think you see things at their very worst, Eugenia. I think there are feelings and motives in Beauchamp which will make your life easier than you now imagine. But I don’t think my saying so will do much good. About his coming, however, I must explain that it was entirely his own doing. My letter did not bring him. I did not say a word in it but what I told you. And even if I had not written, Beauchamp would have been here by now, for your brother-in-law had sent him your address.”
“He need not have interfered,” said Eugenia, haughtily.
Roma smiled. “He meant it for the best, I have no doubt,” she said. “You are sore and uneasy just now, Eugenia, and no wonder, but after awhile you will see things more brightly, I feel sure. But now, what about your seeing Beauchamp? He will be calling this evening to ask; he said he would. Would you rather wait till to-morrow morning?”
“I don’t know,” said Eugenia, irresolutely. Then, as a new thought struck her, “Have you seen him then, Roma?” she asked.
“Yes,” answered Miss Eyrecourt. “I have seen him, and had a very long talk with him – the longest talk, I think, I ever had with any gentleman! But I don’t think his wife will be jealous,” she added, with a bright smile, which, in spite of herself, extracted a faint, shadowy reflection of itself from Eugenia.
Just then there came a ring at the bell.
“There he is,” said Roma; “well, Eugenia?”
“I will see him now,” said Eugenia, suddenly. “It is better – my putting it off might only irritate him more.”
Roma kissed her without speaking, and left the room.
In the few minutes that passed before Captain Chancellor came upstairs how many painful anticipations had time to rush through Eugenia’s brain! She was determined to go through with what she had promised to Roma and to herself to attempt: she would humble herself to the utmost that she could truthfully do so; she would ask her husband’s forgiveness; she would own that she had taken up, with exaggeration and bitterness, Mrs Eyrecourt’s version of the past. All this she would say: she owed it to her own self-respect to do so, hopeless as she felt of any good effect it might have on her future, little as she anticipated that it would awaken any generous or tender feelings towards her in her husband’s heart. She pictured to herself the cold air of superiority with which he would receive her confession; she recalled the unsympathising contempt with which on several occasions her impulsive endeavours to draw nearer to him, to understand him better, had been thrown back on herself with a recoil of indignant mortification – and she said to herself that her fate was a very hard one.
There came a sort of tap at the door, and in answer to her tremulous “come in,” Captain Chancellor appeared. She was standing by the table, in the same attitude as that in which Roma left her. She looked up as Beauchamp closed the door, and came forward. To her surprise, she perceived at once that he was looking ill and careworn, and that his bearing was by no means free from agitation. She was so surprised that she forgot what she had meant to say first of all; she opened her lips mechanically, but no sound was heard: then a sort of giddiness came over her for a moment, and half unconsciously she closed her eyes. He was beside her in an instant. “Eugenia,” he exclaimed, “Eugenia, how ill you are looking! My poor darling, I may not have understood you – I have been a blind, selfish, careless husband, but oh, my dear, you should not have fancied I was so bad as not to care for your suffering! I did care – I do care. Your leaving me has half broken my heart. Will you not come back and try me again? Will you not believe in my love for you? Truly, it has always been there, though you doubted it.” Where were all Eugenia’s carefully considered words of confession? “Thus far have I done wrong, but no farther; to this extent have I been wanting in my wifely duty, but not beyond.” She threw her arms round her husband’s neck, and careless of possible repulse she burst into tears. “Beauchamp,” she said, simply, “I am very sorry for what I have done wrong. I will try to please you better in the future if you will forgive the past.”
“We will both try again,” he said, kindly, “Not that you did not please me, my dear child. Your only fault was – was – well, perhaps, as I have sometimes told you, you expected a little too much; your ideas were a little bit too romantic for every-day life. The best of husbands and wives knock against each other’s fancies now and then, you know, and it can’t be always like a honeymoon,” – Eugenia winced at this a little, a very little, – “but, all the same, I don’t see why our chances of being happy together are not quite as good as other people’s. You will gain experience, and I, I hope, will learn to understand you better. And I think that’s about all we can say. I am very thankful to have you again safe and well, and the next time you make yourself miserable about anything, come and ask me; don’t go to other people, who see nothing except through their own prejudices. Gertrude didn’t mean to make mischief; all the same she did so, as I told her. But Roma has put all that right?”
“Yes,” said Eugenia, “I —we– can never thank her enough for what she has done.”
“She says,” pursued Beauchamp, with unwonted humility, “I should have told you all about that old affair with her. I was very nearly doing so once, I remember, but – I don’t know how it was – I was bothered at that time, and I liked to keep you distinct from it all. I was bitter about Roma for a good while, and I disliked the subject. But, Eugenia, no suffering I have ever had to bear in my life has equalled that of the last few days.”
They were silent for a minute or two. “I must say,” Captain Chancellor went on, speaking more in his usual tone, “the Thurstons behaved very sensibly in not making any fuss. Nothing would have been so odious as any absurd story getting about.” But, happening to observe the pained expression of Eugenia’s face, he changed the subject, and went on to talk of some plans he had in his head of going abroad for a time, taking Eugenia to visit many places so far known to her but by name. “It would be the best way of making you strong again,” he said. “We might even spend next winter out of England, if we liked.” And, notwithstanding the unexpected encouragement she had met with in her new resolutions, it was a relief to Eugenia to be freed from the anticipation of an immediate recommencement of the life at Halswood, hitherto so lonely and uncongenial. She was touched, too, by the evident consideration for her happiness which prompted this new scheme, and Beauchamp, on his side, felt rewarded by her gratification for the amount of self-denial which the proposed plan entailed on him.
So when Roma rejoined them she quickly saw that her hopes had not been groundless; already the expression of Eugenia’s face had grown brighter and less despondent than she had seen it for long.
“Was I not a true prophet?” she said, to Eugenia, when they were by themselves again. “Are not things more hopeful than you expected?”
“Yes,” said Eugenia, thoughtfully, “they are; and it is you I have to thank for their being so, Roma.”
“No, don’t say that,” interrupted Roma, quickly. “I don’t like you to say so, because I want you to do Beauchamp justice. There is more to work upon in him than you were inclined to think, and you, as I told you before, have more power over him to draw out his best than any one else ever had or could have.”
“But still it is your doing,” persisted Eugenia, affectionately; “for who else but you could ever have opened my eyes to see this, or at least to look for it?”
A new feeling had wakened in her heart to her husband. From the ashes of the old unreasoning, wilfully blind, headstrong devotion had arisen a calmer, more tempered, more enduring sentiment. As yet she was hardly conscious of its existence; its component parts she could certainly not have defined. She only said to herself, “I don’t know how it is, but, somehow, what has passed to-day has made me feel sorry for Beauchamp. I don’t think hitherto any one has taken much pains to draw out what Roma calls ‘his best.’ And I am so weak and foolish and full of faults, how can I hope to do it? Yet, somehow, I think I do hope it.”
They all left Nunswell the next day, Roma travelling with them as far as Wareborough only, where she had promised a short visit to her cousins, the Dalrymples; Beauchamp and his wife returning to Halswood, there at once to commence preparations for their visit to foreign parts.
Eugenia trembled a little as they drew near the spot which, but so few days before, she had quitted with something very like despair in her heart. There was a mingling of almost superstitious apprehensiveness in her shrinking from “beginning again” – with new motives, new hopes, new patience – in the very place which had witnessed the woeful failure of her first essays, the cloudy ending to the too brilliant promise of the dawn of her married life. But these half-morbid feelings she was wise enough to keep to herself.
“I only hope,” she thought, “that Mrs Grier will not think herself bound to receive me in state after so short an absence. If she does I shall take it as a bad omen. She is a very good creature, but I shall never forget her first reception.”
So it was with some little apprehension that Mrs Chancellor looked out of the carriage as the front of the house came in sight. She knew Mrs Eyrecourt had gone; it had never occurred to her that poor little Floss had been temporarily left behind. Her surprise was great, her relief and pleasure extreme, when, almost before the carriage had stopped, she heard her own name shouted in the little girl’s peculiar pronunciation: “Aunty ’Genia, Aunty ’Genia, you have comed back! Kiss me quick! You never said good-bye when you wented away, and I cwied so! Please don’t never go away any more!”
The tears were not very far away from Eugenia’s own eyes, as she lifted the excited little mortal in her arms, and kissed the eager, flushed face.
“Dear little Floss,” she said, “I am so glad to come back to you;” and even Beauchamp was struck by the little scene.
“What an eccentric little creature it is,” he said to his wife, when, Floss’s rhapsodies having subsided, she said good-night and went off to bed “as good as gold.”
“Who would have thought that Gertrude’s child could have hugged away as vehemently at anyone as Floss did just now.”
And the child’s demonstrative affection put it into his head to make an unexpected proposal to Eugenia. “How would you like to take Floss with us?” he said. “I have no doubt Gertrude would be enchanted to let her come, and the child’s maid is French, which would be an advantage. You see we shall not be moving about at any uncomfortable speed; you are not strong enough for it, and that sort of thing is not my idea of travelling for pleasure. When there is no need for hurry, much better take it leisurely.”
Eugenia was delighted; she knew, though she never told it to anyone, the indirect influence for good which Floss’s innocent championship had had upon her life, and the idea of the child’s happiness was pleasant to her. Mrs Eyrecourt was delighted; so delighted that she wrote back accepting her brother’s offer, as if no shadow of anything disagreeable had ever disturbed the harmony of their intercourse. It suited her particularly well, to have Floss disposed of for the present, as she was anticipating a round of visits in which a child would have been rather an encumbrance, while yet, for the sake of appearances, she could not make up her mind to leave the little girl alone at Winsley for many weeks at a time. It looked well, too, to be able to tell her friends that her brother and his wife, “having no children of their own,” had taken such a fancy to her little daughter that they had begged leave to take her abroad with them for the winter; for Gertrude had sense enough to know that “family jars” are, of all things, the most undignified and “vulgar,” and she had endured some perturbation of spirit of late as to the probable nature of her future terms with her Halswood relatives.
“I am so glad you are going abroad,” she wrote; “it will be the very thing to set up Eugenia’s health and spirits. By-the-bye, I must not forget to send all sorts of kind messages from Addie and Victoria and their mother. The girls were sorry not to see you at Halswood as was arranged, but of course they quite understand my explanation about Eugenia’s not being well enough to receive them, and they hope to pay their visit some other time” etc, etc.
Some people – for of course in the neighbourhood of Halswood as elsewhere there were to be found human beings with superfluous energy to spare from the management of their own concerns, which they apparently conceived it to be their duty to bestow on those of others – some people thought it very odd and absurd of Captain and Mrs Chancellor to burden themselves with a child on their foreign tour. It was so odd as only to be explicable by the comprehensive assertion of Mrs Chancellor’s being, to say the least, “very odd altogether.” For notwithstanding all the care that had been taken to guard against outside remark, some amount of gossip had oozed out concerning Eugenia’s hasty flight from Halswood. Servants, the very best of them perhaps, will but be servants. It was not in Mrs Grier’s nature to refrain from lugubrious head-shakings and mysterious allusions when she found that her young mistress had actually left home without any explanation to herself, the vice-gerent of the establishment, of the reasons for this sudden step; it was not in the unexceptionable Blinkhorn’s nature to refrain, at the first table at least, from comment upon his master’s state of anxiety and dejection during the days of uncertainty and foreboding which succeeded his return home. And the natures of the various inferior functionaries in the Halswood household, being neither better nor worse than are ordinarily met with in their respective capacities, the rolling stone of gossip, contrary to the adage, grew and gathered as it went, till but few of the great houses in the neighbourhood, none certainly of the tea-tables in the little town of Chilworth or of the less pretentious Sunday afternoon entertainments in the farm houses on the estate, but had their own pet version of the Halswood scandal.
Of this, however, the principals in the little drama were, as is not unfrequently the case, in happy ignorance. As to the Chilworth edition of the story, as to the village chatter, they were of little consequence. They lived their appointed nine days, then died a natural death. But as to the more discreetly veiled, but nevertheless the far more insidious, whisper that went the round of “the county,” there is little saying where it would have stopped, how deep might not have been the social injury it would have caused to impulsive, reckless, innocent Eugenia, had it not suddenly received its death-blow from an unexpected but irresistible hand. It came to Lady Hereward’s ears, how or whence matters little, that the wife of the master of Halswood, “the girl with the beautiful face” which somehow had recalled the memory of the long years ago dead and buried little Alice, the young mother whose little baby had died, had somehow or other done something which threatened to get her “talked about.” And the good old woman rose to the occasion. “I think you are not aware, my dear Lady Vaughan,” she said, the first time the subject was publicly alluded to before her, “in fact, I am quite sure you cannot be aware that the young lady of whom you are speaking is a valued friend of mine, for I am certain you would not intentionally hurt my feelings or those of any one. Mrs Chancellor has passed through much sorrow, and she has my deepest sympathy. The report to which you allude is an exaggerated version of the simple fact that she was called away rather suddenly in her husband’s absence to some of her own friends. When she comes home again strong and well, as I hope she will, it will give me great pleasure to introduce her and any of my friends who have not yet met, to each other, for I hope she will be often at Marshlands.” Then she changed the subject; but this was the last that was heard, publicly at least, of “Mrs Chancellor’s elopement,” for Lady Hereward had queened it to some purpose during her forty years reign in the county.
It was in the latter part of July that Beauchamp and his wife left home. They stayed a little time in town, then proceeded by easy stages to Switzerland, intending there to spend the remainder of the summer and the early autumn, and when the colder weather drew near, to turn their steps to some one of the winter nests in the south of France. Their programme was carried out even more fully than they had intended. Winter came and went, though they learnt it only by the shortening and then lengthening again of the soft, sunny days; spring and summer, chasing travellers and swallows away once more to less sultry regions, followed; autumn returned, and Christmas, in the unfamiliar garb he wears by the shores of the blue Mediterranean, had passed by yet again, with his all-the-world-over greeting of “glad tidings and great joy,” before there was any talk of Halswood being again inhabited by its owners. Before that time came, Floss had learnt to chatter French like a magpie, Eugenia had come to doubt if she after all sufficiently appreciated the inestimable privilege of being “English bred and born,” and Beauchamp, on his part, was beginning to wonder if he would be equal to keeping his seat across country next season, after his long sojourning in the tents of Kedar, otherwise regions where “le sport” was alluded to with the uncomprehending bewilderment with which we used to discuss the fascination of the feast of Juggernaut – where a day with the Pau foxhounds furnished the only procurable pretence of a run.
At last the time for their return home was fixed. It had been in July they left England; it was not till the April “next but one” that they found themselves again within her shores, their party augmented by the presence of a French bonne, with a flapping white cap and a very satisfactory “worldly-looking” baby, a great boy of four months old, a most respectable son and heir to the hitherto ill-fated Chancellor estates. At first Eugenia’s disappointment that the little creature was not a daughter was great; but this feeling she expressed to no one, well aware that sympathy therein was hardly to be expected. She had learnt a good deal, she was learning every day more and more of the wisdom, the necessity of making the best of the materials with which she had to work; slowly, painfully was coming home to her the interpretation of the dream, the lesson of the great “life’s trial” in which so rashly, so ignorantly she had engaged. “Love” for her had not been “clear gain,” viewed by the light of the dim knowledge of to-day; but in the wiser afterwards “the sun will pierce;” the follies, the failures, the mistakes, the delusions will be lost in the beautiful whole, may indeed prove to have been essential to its perfection.
Not that Beauchamp Chancellor’s wife said or thought all this to herself; she speculated and theorised and philosophised much less than of old; she lived more in the present, taking life, as we all must take it sooner or later, if it is to be endurable at all, in a day-by-day fashion, leaving the “huge mounds of years,” the bewildering mazes of whys and wherefores, past and future, to be considered “by-and-by” – by-and-by, when surely we shall see things somewhat more clearly, more justly, more divinely, but a by-and-by which will never come to us if, dissatisfied with the fair promise of its far-off beauty, we seek to grasp its shadowy substance before the time.
So, in a sense – must it not always be but in a sense? – Eugenia was happy. Happier perhaps possibly, because she thought less about being happy than in the old days. She had seen before her in imagination a dreary road; to her surprise, ever and again as she walked along, fresh flowers began to spring by the wayside – little unobtrusive blossoms, hardly distinguishable till her foot had all but crushed out their tender life; tiny buds of brightness and sweetness, bringing many an unexpected spot of colour or breath of fragrance into her daily life.
She grew to be very thankful that her child was a boy; she learnt to be grateful for every link of sympathy between her husband and herself, she tried her utmost to strengthen and rivet each one of these; and though, apparently, at least, her efforts often failed, sometimes, on the other hand, she was rewarded by success surpassing her most sanguine hopes.
