CHAPTER XII.
"THE GROUND-WHIRL OF THE PERISHED LEAVES OF HOPE."
MRS. READE lost no time in obeying her mother's summons. In two days she was back in Melbourne, and having given ten minutes to the inspection of her domestic affairs, and refreshed herself with tea and bread and butter, she went on to Toorak in the carriage that had brought her from the station, without even waiting to change her travelling-dress.
At Toorak she found things in a most discouraging and deplorable condition – as they never would have been, she told herself, had she remained in town.
Mrs. Hardy, who met her in the hall, and took her to her own room for elaborate explanations, was herself a most puzzling and unsatisfactory feature in the case, for she made it evident to her daughter's keen perception that something more had happened than was accounted for in her rather disconnected narrative, and that she did not intend to disclose what it was.
There was a touch of nervous recklessness and defiance in the way she spoke of Rachel's illness – as if the poor child had crowned a systematic series of misdemeanours by falling ill on purpose – and of her hearty regret that she had ever had anything to do with such a perverse and ungrateful girl, which conveyed to Mrs. Reade the impression that her cousin had in some way been persecuted, or had at any rate, been subjected to more heroic treatment than her own judgment and advice had sanctioned.
Under such circumstances it was, perhaps, natural that her mother should be somewhat reserved, since to be fully confidential would be to confess that she had made mistakes; but this sudden reversal of old habits, occurring at this important crisis in the family fortunes, was a serious aggravation of the already sufficient difficulties that the little woman had to deal with.
What complicated her task still further was the discovery that Mr. Kingston was again a frequent visitor at the house, and a strong suspicion that he was cognisant of those unauthorised measures – whatever they were – which she was not to hear of. The only thing she could hope for was that Rachel would make a clean breast of all her secrets.
"And if she trusts me, I will stand her friend against them all," declared the baffled conspirator to herself, as she sat and listened to her mother's tangled story.
It appeared that Rachel's first signs of illness had become apparent very soon after the Reades had left town. She began to fade in colour and to fail in appetite, and grew nervous, flighty, and restless; and, upon investigation, it was discovered that she had lost the habit of sleeping as a healthy girl should sleep at night.
The family doctor was called in, who, amongst other remedies prescribed a return to horse exercise, which, since the breaking-off of her engagement, had been abandoned; and Mr. Kingston thereupon begged so earnestly that she would ride Black Agnes again, that she reluctantly consented to do so to please him.
Mr. Kingston behaved most delicately, it was explained, and did not force himself upon her in her rides. She always went out with William. "Always," however, turned out to be only twice, and on both occasions the carriage had accompanied her with Mr. Kingston in it.
Just before Christmas she refused to ride any more, and she behaved in the most rude and ill-bred manner to Mr. Kingston. On Christmas Day she was very aggravating – in what way did not appear – and Mrs. Hardy had to "speak" to her; and the result was that she flew into a violent passion, and then had a fit of hysterics, and then fainted dead away, and did not come round for nearly five minutes.
"I don't recognise Rachel in any of those performances," remarked Mrs. Reade. "Why did you not send for me then, mother?"
"Because I thought it was nothing but a temporary attack. The weather was sultry – she was full of whims and fancies. What could you have done if you had come? And she was better again next day."
"Well?"
"Well, then, when I was doing all I could to nurse and take care of her, she went out of a warm room one night, and rambled about the garden or somewhere in a heavy dew, and got her feet wet. Wasn't it too bad? I could have shaken her when I saw her come in, with a face as white as ashes, and chilled to her very bones!"
"She caught cold, I suppose?"
"Of course she did. And then she had a touch of fever – what else was to be expected? Her pulse was very high, and she was excited, and inclined to be delirious – indeed, we had as much as we could do to manage her. It did not last long, and it was really nothing but the consequences of her imprudence, the doctor said – and there was a little low kind of fever going about just now – and he did not think her constitution was very strong. He says she will soon be all right, with care; and indeed, the fever is quite allayed since I wrote to you, and any little danger that there might have been is over. But she keeps low. She doesn't seem to gain strength – and no wonder, considering we can't get her to eat anything. I am glad you have come back; perhaps you will have more influence with her than I have."
"I suppose I may go up?" Mrs. Reade inquired, after a pause. Her mother gave her permission readily; it was a great surprise and relief to her to find herself spared the searching cross-examination which she had rather uneasily looked forward to.
"You had better put on your bonnet and have a drive," the young lady proceeded, pausing with her hand on the door. "It will do you good, after being in the house so much. I don't want the horses taken out, and they will only scratch holes in the gravel if they stand here doing nothing. I am not going away till dinner time."
"Thank you, my dear, I think I will," said Mrs. Hardy. Mrs. Reade went upstairs to Rachel's room, and without knocking, opened the door softly.
It was a bright January afternoon, but the heat of the day was over, and a sea breeze was springing up. The window was open, and the chintz curtains softly rustling to and fro. There was a magnificent bouquet on a table at the foot of the bed; the air was full of the perfume of roses; a few flies were buzzing over a plate of strawberries set on a chair at Rachel's side.
The invalid was lying on a sofa, in a white dressing-gown, in an attitude of extreme languor, asleep. One hand holding a fan had dropped beside her; the other was under her head. Her dark gold hair was loose and tumbled, and curling in damp rings on her temples; her face was flushed and thin; there were hollows and shadows under the tired closed eyes. She looked as if she had been ill for months.
Mrs. Reade, examining her attentively as she knelt by the sofa, was deeply shocked and concerned. Never would she have gone away to Adelonga if she could have foreseen this! And never should the poor little thing be harried and worried, as she had evidently been, again, if she had any power to prevent it – no, not though twenty Mr. Kingstons and all their twenty fortunes were at stake.
A mosquito settled upon the girl's white arm, and the light brush of the finger that removed it wakened her. She drew a deep breath, and opened her eyes languidly; then seeing her visitor, she stared at her for a second in a dazed and startled way; and then to Mrs. Reade's great embarrassment and distress, she suddenly flung herself into her arms, and broke into the wildest weeping.
"Now, Rachel! Now, my dearest child – "
But it would have been as hopeless to try and stop the Falls of Niagara as this tide of passion at the flood; seeing which, Mrs. Reade waited for the ebb in silence. By the time it came the girl was completely exhausted; she seemed to have the merest fragment of strength.
"Now," said Beatrice, when she had sponged her face and hands and otherwise taken steps to revive and soothe her, "now tell me what all this is about. I know you are in some great trouble, and I have come home on purpose to help you."
"No one can help me!" Rachel cried, despairingly, tears rushing afresh into her hot eyes.
"Oh, nonsense. Just tell me what is the matter, and see if I can't. Are they trying to make you marry Mr. Kingston? Because I can soon send him about his business."
"No; Mr. Kingston is very kind now. He sends me flowers every day. He does not worry me. He is very considerate and thoughtful. For I think he – knows."
"Well, and now I want to know. Is it about – someone else? Is it about Mr. Dalrymple?"
"Who told you?" the girl demanded, with sharp entreaty. "Oh, Beatrice, what have you heard? Did Mrs. Digby tell you anything about him? Is he in Queensland? Is he alive? What is he doing?"
Mrs. Reade replied that she had heard nothing of Mr. Dalrymple beyond the fact that he was believed to be in Queensland, and doing well.
"If he had not been, they must have known," said Rachel. "Oh, my love, if I could see you for myself just once."
She began to cry again, more bitterly than before, and to wring her hands. There was a fierce excitement in her grief and despair that for a moment stunned the little woman who had never known what it was to be in love.
And then Rachel told all the story of her clandestine engagement, as the reader already knows it, without any reservations. The dénouement was exactly what Mrs. Reade expected – "And he never came!"
"Poor little thing!" she ejaculated pitifully.
"I was as certain that he would come as that Christmas would come," said Rachel, reckless in her confessions now that she had begun to open her heart. "And there was a strange gentleman here, and he was shut up a long time with Aunt Elizabeth, and I thought it was he – "
"Are you sure it was not he?"
"Quite sure. When he was going away I ran out into the garden and watched for him; he was an ugly little man. And if it had been Roden, and he had wanted to see me, he would not have allowed himself to be sent away."
"That would have depended on mamma; wouldn't it?"
"Oh, no. He would never have let her send him away; and Aunt Elizabeth says, solemnly, that he never came."
"You told her about him then?" asked Mrs. Reade.
"Beatrice, I was nearly mad – I don't know what I said. She was very angry – she always hated him. But I did not care – I was too miserable to care. And I made her swear that he had never come; and now – it is nearly February – now I know he didn't. I don't want anybody to tell me."
Mrs. Reade put all these revelations into her mental crucible, and in a few seconds she had the product ready. On presenting it to Rachel, wrapped up in the gentlest language, it came to this simply – that "it was always the way with men of that kind."
"He is not like other men," said Rachel. "I do not blame him. I have thought of it, over and over and over, every night and every day, and I know why it was. I ran after him, Beatrice – I took him before he offered himself to me – I had only seen him once or twice when I showed him I loved him, and made him think I wanted him – he did not ask me to be his wife until I had given myself to him already! I did not think of it then, but I see it clearly now. I dragged him into it – I gave him no choice. And now he is away, and he thinks about it, and he knows I am not enough for him. How should I be enough —I for such a man as that? Oh, that happy woman, who died in his arms! Oh, how I wish I had been she!"
"Well," said Mrs. Reade, after a pause, trying to speak cheerfully, but feeling profoundly disheartened; "you ought not to have had anything to do with lovers and marriages at your time of life, and you must just give up thinking of such things until you are older and wiser."
"I shall never give him up," said Rachel quietly; "never, if I live to be a hundred. I have told Aunt Elizabeth – I told her to tell Mr. Kingston – that I shall never love any other man. It would be impossible, after loving him. When I am well I shall ask her to let me go out and be a governess, and earn my own living. I don't want to be rich, I want to be poor, like him. And some day, perhaps, I may see him again, and be able to do something for him – if it isn't till he is an old, old man, I don't care. If only God lets him live and lets me live, so that we are both in the world together – I'll take my chance of the rest. But – but," and she turned her head from side to side, and began to tremble and cry in a weak, hysterical abandonment of all self-command, "if I have to wait for years and years, without a sight of his face or a sound of his voice, how shall I be able to live? The longing for him will kill me!"
Mrs. Reade went away when her carriage returned, more humble-minded than she had been in her life. She wanted very much to stay and nurse her cousin until she was better, but she could not do that, because she could not trust Ned to keep house and keep sober by himself; so she set off to see the doctor to get a confidential report of the "case," meaning to intimate her suspicions that there was a touch of fever on the brain, and to gain his sanction to a scheme for removing the invalid to her own cheerful abode at South Yarra as soon as she became moderately convalescent.
CHAPTER XIII.
RACHEL ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE
PROBABLY no girl of nineteen – probably no man or woman of any age – ever died of a broken heart, unless when that complaint was complicated and aggravated by the presence of physical disease of some sort.
Rachel's constitution was sound, albeit her nervous organisation was extremely delicate, and she did not die, neither under this bitter first blow, nor later on, when she had still sharper provocations.
A little tender petting and coddling at the hands of her cousin Beatrice, who was now her devoted ally and friend, did more to restore her than all the doctor's medicines and all her aunt's jellies and broths.
The very talking of her troubles eased and soothed her, and gave her a sense of refreshment and rest, and though Beatrice offered her no encouragement on Mr. Dalrymple's behalf – and indeed hinted pretty broadly that the terrible thing which had happened was an inevitable sequel and corrective to a lapse of reason that partook of the character of temporary insanity, to say the least of it – she was heartily if not demonstratively sympathetic.
Within a fortnight of her cousin's return she reached that stage of convalescence which made the removal to South Yarra justifiable, and in the doctor's opinion expedient.
Mrs. Reade had great difficulty in carrying out this little enterprise. Her mother had never shown herself so impracticable.
She was determined not to let Rachel out of her sight, she said; and she stuck to that determination against many artful manœuvres so steadily that the powerful small woman, little accustomed to be thwarted, and still less to own to it, nearly made up her mind to confess herself beaten, and to break the disappointment to Rachel.
Mrs. Hardy, however, relented in a sudden and unexpected manner. She received a consignment of furniture and bric-à-brac from her travelling daughter, together with most interesting and bewildering advices.
Laura wrote to say that the Toorak House, if it had any respect for itself, must immediately get rid of its pierglasses, its whitewash, and its aniline colours; and poor Mrs. Hardy, who had ever walked with the complacent dignity of a priestess and oracle in the sacred regions of household art, was too much excited and disturbed by the humiliating discovery that she was old-fashioned and behind the times, and by her agonising desire to recover her proper position, to pay the customary attention even to Rachel's business.
While she was absorbed in beginning the mighty task of re-adjusting her ideas of taste and the details of her domestic environment, which, after a few years of painful struggle with the impracticabilities of Eastlake mediævalism, was to result in the existing combination of Chippendale and the Japanesque, she felt that it would be a relief to divest herself of superfluous cares.
So she laid her daughter under solemn obligations to protect Rachel's interests and the honour of the family, and allowed her to take the invalid away with her for a week or two, that so she might give her undivided attention to the choice of new coverings for the drawing-room furniture, and the question what should be done to the ceiling.
The two young women were very grateful for the chance which set them free to follow their own devices. Mrs. Reade brought her new brougham – a propitiatory offering from Ned after he had scandalously disgraced himself by going to a public dinner and coming home in a dishevelled condition at noon next day – and conveyed her charge to South Yarra in a nest of soft cushions, and laid her on a pillowy sofa in the brightest of homely boudoirs, where they discussed the situation and afternoon tea with much content and cheerfulness.
Rachel was strangely peaceful and amiable at this time. She puzzled her companion excessively. She had, indeed, a sort of exalted transcendentalism about her that was almost aggravating to that practical and most unsentimental person. Her way of moralising upon love and lovers, after such an experience as she had had, was very naïve and touching, but eminently preposterous, Mrs. Reade considered – and she did not at all mind saying so.
"A lover who is unfaithful does the deadliest dishonour that is possible to love, in my opinion," said she, with her customary air of decision. "To break any pledge is bad enough, but to break that pledge ought to disqualify a man from ever again calling himself a man."
"I do not think there should be any pledges in love, either given or asked for," said Rachel softly. "Love is not a thing to be tied and bound. Fancy a man feeling that he had to keep a promise if he did not wish to do it! And, oh! fancy a woman letting him – being deceived into letting him make a sacrifice for her! It would be an outrage and a degradation to both of them. I think Roden – Mr. Dalrymple – is above that, Beatrice."
From all she had heard, Mrs. Reade was decidedly disposed to think so too.
"He says that they are a curse upon people's lives – those engagements that are kept," continued Rachel, looking solemnly out of the window with her pensive eyes.
"Did he tell you that? Dear me, he must be a most extraordinary man."
"I understand it perfectly – I know what he means. When we love one another we are not responsible; something in us makes us do it. When we leave off loving – when we get dissatisfied – we can't help it either. It is nature that tells us to do the one as well as the other; and nature should be obeyed, Roden says."
Mrs. Reade made no comment upon this, but thought to herself that it was a remarkably wise provision of nature – under the circumstances – that her devotee was endowed with the courage of his convictions.
"It is very hard for me now, but it is the truest kindness and gentleness on his part," the girl went on, with a tremor in her quiet voice. "He knows we understand each other better than any one else can do. I think some day he will come and tell me all about it – when he thinks I can bear it; how he could not help it; that that other woman's memory was more to him than any new love a few days old could be, and how he was true to her and to himself, and to me, not to wrong any of us any further to gratify my foolishness. It will be something of that sort, I know; it will be nothing that is a disgrace to him. Ah, Beatrice, you think I am talking childish nonsense, I see it in your face."
"I certainly do, my dear. I think you are fully qualified for admission into the Yarra Bend, if you wish for the candid truth."
"No; you don't know him, and I do. I am puzzled, I don't deny that I am puzzled a little; but I trust him. He may do what he likes; I shall never think that he will do anything wrong. Some day it will be explained, and I shall see that he was right. I shall love him the more for not being afraid to break off with me when he felt it was a mistake. Under any circumstances I love him too well not to be thankful I am spared the misery of seeing him suffer from an irksome marriage that could not satisfy him. And love – as he and I understand love – would be degraded by vulgar efforts to keep it under lock and key."
"I don't know whether it occurs to you," remarked Beatrice, with her head on one side; "but it is a very dangerous doctrine that you and Mr. Dalrymple seem to believe in. Logically worked out, it leads – goodness knows where it doesn't lead to."
The blood flew over the girl's pale face. She was the most sensitively delicate, the most maidenly, of girls; and she scented a meaning in her cousin's words that shocked her terribly.
"I am sure that cannot be," she said, with a majestic gentleness that was full of severe reproach.
"You don't imply that husbands and wives, when they are tired of each other – or even when only one is tired – are at liberty to make fresh combinations?"
"You know I am not alluding to married people, Beatrice. They are like nuns who have taken the veil; they have nothing to do with – with – such things as we have been speaking of."
"Oh, indeed – haven't they?"
"They are in a sacred place. They are out of the common world – out of the arena, so to speak. They have taken their prizes, and gone to sit with the spectators. Even if they do marry wrongly, and do not love each other afterwards, in the fullest way, after such a dedication as they have made – with such ties and confidences, and intimacies between them, so sacred, and so close, and so delicate, and so – so – oh, Beatrice, don't look at me like that! You know what I mean."
"I am trying to follow you, dear."
"You are married yourself, and you know how it is – better than I do. Yet I know, too. If I were married – if I were Roden's wife – "
"You would lie down at his feet and let him clean his boots on you, if there did not happen to be a door-mat handy – oh, yes, I quite understand that."
"I would never make demands upon him that he should love me always," the girl proceeded, with a gentle solemnity that this kind of flippant witticism could not discompose. "I would never even ask him if he loved me. It would seem to me a coarse and insulting question, and it would tempt him to doubt whether he did. If he went away from me, I would never say to him, 'Write to me often – write me long letters.' It is so stupid of people to do that! Of course, if he wanted to, he would; and if he did it because he was asked, his letters would be valueless, and worse. He should never have to think of me as a mortgage on his life and his happiness – he should do as he liked – he should love me as he liked. And if ever he left off loving me, I should know he could not help it – I should not blame him – I should not ask him why. I should feel it in a moment – I am sure, long before he did – as one feels a chill in the air when the sun goes in, even if one's eyes are shut; but I should never say a word about it. And yet – "
"And yet it would never occur to him, you think, to provide himself with a more congenial companion?"
"Beatrice, I cannot talk to you, if you make those suggestions."
"I am only making your own suggestions, my dear. You said it was a degradation to love to keep it under lock and key."
"And I said I was not speaking of married people. You know there is something – whole worlds of things – besides love to be considered in their case."
"Married people are just as human as single people – and so, for the matter of that, are nuns who have taken the veil, I suppose. Vows, if I understand you rightly, are immoral; and the dictates of nature should be obeyed. Nature is uncommonly likely to dictate to man who is not in love with his wife that there might possibly exist a more desirable woman."
"I don't know how to explain myself," said Rachel, who felt herself in a distressing entanglement, and yet was conscious that her principles were being utterly misconstrued; "but I know that that– what you allude to – would be an impossibility."
"Well, I daresay it would," said Mrs. Reade, after a pause. She was suddenly struck with the impropriety of insisting upon strict logic in the discussion of these delicate matters, all things considered. Yet she was not quite content to leave off at this point.
"Put Mr. Dalrymple aside, Rachel. Suppose you were yourself married, not to him, but to someone you did not particularly care for?"
"That could never be," the girl replied quickly.
"Oh, I don't know. It was very nearly being, I may take leave to remind you. None of us can forsee what will happen, and 'never' is a ridiculous word for a child like you to use. You will not live an old maid for fifty or sixty years because you are disappointed in a lover whom you have known for a few days – don't you believe it."
"I will make no vows," said Rachel with a faint smile; "but I express to you my sincere conviction that I shall never marry anybody. If I do – and I can't say I wish to be an old maid – I shall tell the person, whoever he is, all about Roden, frankly."
"Of course you will. And very probably he will like you the better for that frankness, and be quite willing to take you on your own terms. But then, suppose after years of married life Mr. Dalrymple turned up again, and you found you felt towards him as you do now – what then?"
"What then?" repeated the girl, much disturbed and a little affronted; "I should not recognise that I felt so."
"But suppose – for the sake of argument – that you could not help yourself?"
"I hope I could help it, Beatrice. I should not allow him to remind me of the past."
"Would not the past suggest itself sufficiently? Ah, my dear, he is a very strong man! And you are as weak as – well, we needn't say anything about that. If he wanted your love back, and you had it in your heart – "
"If he did," interposed Rachel; "but I know he never would – I should love him no more."
"Would that be in accordance with the terms of your philosophy?"
"Yes, it would. For nature makes us with many capacities. Some of them counteract the others. Don't talk of these things any more, Beatrice – I don't like it."
"Very well, dear; I won't."
The little lady got up from her seat on the floor, opened a window, put the teacups on the table, and asked her cousin if she had seen the beautiful Persian tiles that Mr. Kingston had just had sent out to him for one of the dados in the new house.
Rachel responded absently, gazed for a little while in silence upon the sleepy garden full of flowers and humming bees, and as Mrs. Reade had expected, returned herself to the abandoned topic.
"At any rate," she said thoughtfully, "there is one thing I would always do. I would tell the truth. I would never have secrets. I would sooner do the wrongest thing, the wickedest crime, than hide it. If I feel things in my heart – well, my husband, if I have one, shall know all that I know. And I will never do anything that he – that the whole world – may not see."
"Does that seem to you so easy?" inquired Beatrice, settling a top-heavy rosebud in a slender Venetian vase. "Did you never have any secrets that you were afraid to tell?"
The girl was silent for several minutes. She was crimson to the throat, and her face was turned away from her companion.
"I will do what is sure to be right and – safe," she said at last, falteringly; "I will never marry anybody, if I do not marry Roden."