He took her hand and shook it and then was gone, striding off, furiously, towards the trees.
She walked slowly back to Saxton Square.
CHAPTER II
THE DUCHESS MOVES
"Fear of the loss of power has more to do with disasters in the history of nations than any other motive."
James Anthony Froude.
I
Trouble invaded the strongholds of 104 Portland Place that winter: The Duchess was not so well … no evasions, whether above or below stairs, could conceal the harsh truth. The Duchess was not so well....
To the bewildered mind of Lady Adela the horrid succession of disasters that the winter had provided no other years could equal. It had all begun, she often fancied, from the day of Rachel's coming out, from the ball, or even, although for this she could not find a real excuse, from that visit to the Bond Street Picture Gallery. It was on that afternoon, Lady Adela well remembered, that there had first come to her those strange, treacherous thoughts about her mother that had, afterwards, as they had grown stronger and more formidable, changed life for her. Yes, it had seemed that, with Rachel's appearance before the world, disaster to the Beamister house had appeared also. Her mother's illness, the War, perpetual rumours of Rachel's unsatisfactory marriage, the uncomfortable presence of Frank Breton, the horrible disaster to poor Roddy—how they trooped before Lady Adela's eyes! Finally, more terrible than all of them, was the complete destruction of the old fiction, the old terror, the old submission. Lady Adela did not now dare to look into her mind because of the horrible things that she found there.
Roddy's accident had had the most terrible effect upon the Duchess. Only Christopher could really tell how Her Grace had taken it, but throughout the house, it was understood that the effect of it had been serious. "Wouldn't give her long now," said Mr. Norris. "What with this War and what not she was goin' as it was, and now Sir Roderick, as was always, as you might say, her pet, having this awful disaster—no, I don't give her long."
Adela of course saw nothing of her mother's feelings; she never had been allowed to see anything of them and she was not allowed now.
The old lady was outwardly as she had ever been, although she spoke less and, if you watched her, you could see sometimes that her hands were shaking. She used paint for her cheeks and she rouged her lips. Her love of fantastic things had grown very much, and, on the little table behind her chair, there was a row of strange china animals and some Indian dolls with wooden limbs that jangled when you touched them.
But Adela was no longer afraid of her mother. Stimulate it as she would, force upon herself her sensations of the days when she had been afraid, as she did, still the terror would not now confront her. There had been a dreadful scene when the Duchess had been told that her daughter was acting on the same committee as Mrs. Bronson, the dazzling American … a terrible scene … but Adela had come through it without a tremor—it had not affected her at all. "It isn't that I've changed much either. I'm just as nervous of other things—I'm just the same coward...."
Perhaps it was, a little, that the war had altered one's values—So many Beaminster necessities were not quite so necessary—
Certainly John felt the same, and the one consolation to Adela, through all this horrible time, was that she had grown nearer to John than she had ever been to anyone—John and she had been attacked by the Real World, both of them at the same moment, and they did find comfort, at this terrifying crisis, in being together.
But all Adela's energy was directed towards concealing from her mother that there was any change at all—"She must think that things are just the same, exactly the same. She mustn't ever know that … well, that …"
She could not put it into words. Her Grace's illness was never alluded to by any member of the household.
There came word, at the beginning of March, that Roddy had been moved up to London, that Rachel had taken a little house in York Terrace overlooking Regent's Park, that Roddy was wonderfully cheerful, suffered pain at times, but was, on the whole marvellous—
Two or three days after this news when Christopher arrived at 104 on his usual morning visit Lord John met him in the hall.
"I say, come in here a minute," he said, leading the way into his own little smoking-room—Lord John was fatter, scarcely now as rubicund, as shining as he had been—as neat and clean as ever, but there were lines on his forehead, and in his eye, that glance of surprise that had always been there had advanced into one of alarm—
"What the devil is life going to do, what horrible trick is it up to next?" he seemed to say—
"Look here, Christopher," he brought out, when the door was closed. "There's the devil and all to pay. My mother declares this morning that she's going to pay a visit to Roddy!"
"Well?" Christopher seemed amused.
"But … Good heavens!" John was aghast—"She hasn't stirred out of her room for thirty years! She … she … it'll kill her!"
"Oh! no, it won't—" Christopher answered, "not if she really means to do it. Of course she can't walk much—she won't have to—We can get her downstairs, and Roddy's room in York Terrace is on the ground floor—We'll have to see she doesn't catch cold—She'll have to choose a warm day."
"She says she's going this afternoon!" said Lord John, still overwhelmed by this amazing development.
"Well, to-day won't do any harm–"
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure. The danger with your mother has always been to stop her inclinations. Indulge 'em all the time if you can, let her say what she wishes, do what she wishes. If you were to carry her out of doors against her will, why it would do a great deal of harm indeed—but if she wants to go she'll see that she's up to it. It may be the best thing for her. She could have gone out heaps of times in the last thirty years if she'd wished to!"
Lord John rubbed his forehead—
"It's a great relief to hear you say that, Christopher. I didn't know how we were going to get out of it. She was so determined this morning–"
He broke off—"You're sure it won't do any harm?" he said again.
"I'm sure," said Christopher.
"There's something," Lord John went on again, "dreadfully on my mother's mind—She seems to feel that, in some way or other, she was responsible for his accident. I can't get at the bottom of it all and of course she won't tell me—she never tells me things. Perhaps you can get at it. I saw Rachel yesterday."
"Yes?"
"She's very fair about it all. Must be having a very hard time. She was glad to see me, I think, but—" he added a little wistfully—"I've never been anything to her since her marriage.
"She just seemed not to want me after that, and I'd been a good deal to her before. When one's getting old, Christopher, we old bachelors, we begin to notice that nobody wants us very much."
Christopher looked at him—Yes, John Beaminster had changed in the last year. Had he himself, he wondered, also changed?
"Yes," he said, smiling. "But I've been an old bachelor, Beaminster, for years and years and I see no likelihood of your ever being one. You get younger with every year, I believe."
"This accident to Roddy," John said slowly, as though he were thinking it all out, "has upset us all. It seems so terrible, happening to him … much worse for him … and then Rachel—But look here, I know you've got to go up to my mother, I won't keep you a minute—But there's a thing I've got to talk to you about—It's been on my conscience now for ages.... I've not known what to do … at last I've made up my mind."
John Beaminster had made up his mind to do something that he hated! To Christopher perhaps more than to anyone else in the world this was a revelation of the most vital, the most moving interest—He had known John for so long, seen him struggling behind screens and curtains, hugging to himself the happy knowledge that to the very end he would be able to keep life from getting at him, and now behold! Life had got at him, wag clutching him by the throat.
"It's about Frank"—at last he desperately brought out "I've made up my mind. I must go and see him—now, perhaps whilst mother is—is still suffering from the effects of Roddy's accident it wouldn't be wise perhaps to have him here actually in the house—But something must be done.... Adela agrees."
Adela agrees! Well, if the old woman upstairs.... Christopher was moved, as he had lately been often moved, by a swift stirring of pathos.
"You see, this War has upset us all so, has made one feel differently—And then he really does seem to have changed, been as quiet as anything all this time, and I hear that he's working at something sensible down in the City. I must go and see him–"
Then they hadn't heard, Christopher knew, of any rumours about Rachel and Francis.
Perhaps there were no rumours, perhaps only in the mind of the old lady.... But then let John say a word to her about this visit to Breton and out she would come with it all.
"Yes, Beaminster," Christopher said. "Of course I'm delighted. It's just what I hoped would happen, but perhaps, as your mother has been rather upset lately it would be just as well to say nothing to her...."
"Quite so...." John looked away, out of the window—Poor John!
Christopher held out his hand, and John took it and for a moment they stood there, then Christopher went upstairs.
II
Dorchester no longer asserted that her mistress was "better than she had ever been"—Since that terrible morning when Dr. Christopher had broken the news of Sir Roderick's accident Dorchester had made no pretence about anything. This was the time that must, she had always known, one day arrive, but what she had not known was that it would be quite like this.
She was a woman of some imagination; moreover, were there one person in the world who touched her heart, then was it her mistress; she had penetrated, she thought, some of the strange secrets and fantasies of that old woman's soul, and it seemed that now, in these later days, she was at last in touch with every motive and grim artifice that her mistress adopted—
But no—since that terrible day at the beginning of the year Dorchester had lost touch, was left, bewildered, at a loss, as though she were suddenly in the service of some stranger.
She had known that nothing more terrible could happen to her mistress than this—When she heard it she said to herself, "This will kill her—bound to—" She had known too that her mistress would not flinch, outwardly, and that to the ordinary observer there would be no sign, but the thing for which she had not been prepared was this silence, a silence so profound and yet so eloquent that one could obtain from it no clue, could discern no visible wound, but daily, almost hourly, as she sat there, change was at work … she was dying before their eyes—
What Dorchester did not know was that the Duchess had been aware, for a long time, that this was to occur, if not exactly this, why, then, something like it.
All through that autumn she had sat there waiting—the War, the rebellion of her children—it only needed that disaster should overtake Roddy and the circle was complete.
She did not doubt that it was because he had married Rachel that this had happened to him, and she might have prevented his marriage to Rachel had she wished.
The girl had now for her sitting there in her room the fatal inevitability of some hostile spirit. She saw all her past years as a duel with this girl, the one soul in rebellion against hers. Rachel had taken everything from her; she had first stirred Adela and John into rebellion, she had encouraged Francis Breton, she had destroyed Roddy … she rose, before the old woman's eyes, black, titanic, sweeping, with great dark wings, across the horizon.
The Duchess did not in so many words state that Rachel had flung her husband from his horse and then watched whilst his body was dragged along the stones, but, in some way, the girl had plotted it.
The old woman had indeed during these last months suffered from visions. There were days when her brain was as clear as it had ever been and on these days she thought more of Roddy than of Rachel, ached to be with him, longed to comfort him and make life bearable for him, cursed whatever fate it was that had ordained that upon him of all people such a burden should have fallen. Then there were other days when the old china dragons seemed more real than Dorchester, when shapes and sizes altered in an instant, when the cushion at her feet was swollen like a mountain, when she seemed floating through space, looking down upon houses, cities, mountains, when only like a jangling chain upon which everything hung, ran her hatred of her granddaughter.
On such a day if Rachel had come to her and she had been alone with her, she would have wished the dragons to devour her, would have urged the silver Indian snake on the little black table to have strangled her. On such a day she would sit hour after hour and wonder what she could do to her granddaughter....
It was upon one of her clear days that it flashed upon her that she would go and see Roddy. Beyond the actual excitement of visiting Roddy there was the determination to show the world what she still could do. Doubtless they were saying out there that she was bedridden now, ill, helpless, dying even … well, she would show them.
For thirty years she had not been outside her door—now, because she wished it, she would go.
She said nothing to Adela about this—she saw Adela now as seldom as possible. She told John on the morning of the day itself—on that same morning she told Christopher.
She told him sitting in her chair, with her cheeks painted and her white fingers covered with rings—
"I'm going to pay a visit—this afternoon, Christopher." She had expected opposition—she was a little disappointed when he said—
"Yes, so I've already heard this morning. I think it's an excellent thing—the day's warm. You'll have to be carried downstairs, you know–"
"You and Norris can do that. I won't have anyone else."
"Very well, I shall have to come with you–"
"Yes—You can talk to my granddaughter."
"It's thirty years...."
"Yes—The last time was Old Judy Bonnings's reception. They're all dead—all of 'em—D'you remember, Dorchester?"
"Yes—Your Grace—Very well."
Dorchester expressed no surprise—Anything was better than that silence of the last months. Moreover she had trusted Christopher. She had often been amazed at the knowledge that he showed of her mistress's temperament, would allow her temper, her imperious self-will indulgence one day and on another would control them absolutely. He knew what he was doing....
The picture that she presented, however, when helped downstairs by the pontifical Norris and Christopher! the house, with the decorous watchfulness of some large, solemn, and immensely authoritative policeman, surveying her descent, her own little bird-like face, showing nothing but a fine assumption of her splendid appearance before the public, after thirty years, she thus, once again, was saluted by Portland Place! Black furs of Lady Adela's surrounded, enfolded her, and from out of them her eyes haughtily but triumphantly surveyed a crossing-sweeper, two small children with their nurse, a messenger boy, and Roller the coachman. To Roller this must have been the dramatic moment of a somewhat undramatic career, but stout and imperial upon his box his body was held, rigid, motionless, and his large stupid eyes gazed in front of him at the trees and the light cloud-flecked March sky, and moved neither to the right nor to the left.
She was placed in the carriage—Christopher got in beside her and they moved off. He was interested to see the effect that this breaking into the world would have upon her. He felt himself a little in the position of showman and was glad that he had a spring afternoon of gleaming sunshine and a suggestion of budding trees and shrubs in the Portland Crescent garden to provide for her. They were held up by traffic as they crossed the Marylebone Road; drays, hansoms, bicycles passed—there was a stir of voices and wheels, somewhere in the park a band was playing.
He looked at her and saw that she paid no heed, but sat back in the dim shadow, her eyes, he thought, closed. She was, at that instant, more remote from him and all that he represented than she had ever been—Curiously he was moved, just then, by a consciousness of her personality that exceeded anything that he had ever felt in her before.
"Yes, she must have been tremendous," he thought. And then he wondered of what she was thinking, so quiet, and yet, from her very silence, sinister, and then—how could he have not considered this before? What was she going to say to Roddy?
At this, the dark carriage was suddenly, for him, as flashing with life and circumstance as though it had been the florid circle of some popular music-hall—What would she say to Roddy?
He knew her for the most selfish of all possible old women: unselfish only perhaps if Roddy were concerned, but there also, if some question of her power moved her, ruthless. He had traced the windings of her queer intertwisted brain with some accuracy—He knew also that the coloured unreal state that her closed, fantastic life (resembling, you might say, life inside a Chinese puzzle) had brought upon her led her now to see Rachel as arch-antagonist in every step and movement of her day.
She would not wish to make Roddy unhappy, she might persuade herself that to hint to him of Rachel's infidelity would be to put him on his guard—she might say that it was not fair that Rachel should not be pulled up....
Christopher himself could not tell how far this affair with Breton had gone....
During that short time it seemed to him that a crisis, that had been building up around him, here, there, for months, for years perhaps, had leapt upon him and that in some way he must deal with it.
Even whilst he struggled with the thoughts that were sweeping upon him now from every side, they were at the house—As he stepped out of the carriage he felt that he was before a locked door, that the safety of many persons depended upon his opening it, that he could not find the key.
"Lady Seddon was out. Sir Roderick was alone–" The Duchess was half assisted, half carried into the house.
III
The Duchess's feelings were indeed confused as she was helped into Roddy's room, placed in a large easy chair opposite to him and at last left alone with him.
Enough of itself to disturb her was the fact that now for the first time for thirty years she was able to examine some room different from her own—A large, high white-walled room with wide windows that displayed the park, sporting prints on the walls, antlers over the fireplace, a piano in one corner, a large bowl of primroses on the piano, some boxing-gloves and two old swords over the door, a wooden case with thin rosewood drawers and "Birds' Eggs" in gold letters upon it, a round table near the sofa upon which Roddy was lying and on the table a photograph of Rachel—
All these things her sharp old eyes noticed before she allowed them to settle upon Roddy—
His quiet, almost humorous "Well, Duchess," set, quite concisely, the note for this conversation. Not for either of them was it to betray any consciousness that this meeting of theirs was in any way out of the ordinary. Formerly it had been the ebullient, vigorous Roddy who had brought his vigour to renew her fierce old age; now that old age must be brought to him—
The Beaminsters did not show surprise at anything at all; had she come from her grave to visit him he would have greeted her with his quiet "Well, Duchess"—his life was broken in pieces, but she was not to offer any comment on that either.
She was exhausted even by that little drive, and that little passage from door to door, so she just lay back in her chair for a little while and looked at him.
His body was covered with a rug; his hands, still brown and large and clumsy, were folded on his lap; he was wonderfully tidy, brushed and cleaned, it seemed to her, as though he were always expecting a doctor or a visitor or were performed upon by some valet or other, simply, poor dear, that the time might be filled. His cheeks were paler of course and his face thinner, but it was in his eyes—his large, simple, singularly ungrown-up eyes she had always considered them—that the great change lay—
They smiled across at her with the same genial good temper that they had always presented to her. But indeed she could never call them "ungrown-up" again. Roddy Seddon had grown up indeed since she had seen him last; she knew now, as she faced the experience and, above all, the strength that those eyes now presented for her, that she had a new spirit to encounter.
Yes—he "had had a horrible time," but she was wise enough, at that instant, to realise that the "horrible time" had drawn character out of him that she, at least, had never, for an instant, suspected.
The old woman was moved so that she would have liked to have tottered to his sofa, to have caught his hands in her old dry ones, to have kissed him, to have smoothed his hair—but she sat quietly in her chair, recovered her breath and, grimly, almost saturninely, smiled at him.
"Well, Roddy," she said, "how are you?"
"I'm quite splendid. Play patience like a professor, can knit five mufflers in a week and am learning two foreign languages—But indeed how rippin' to see you here. I've spent a lot o' time on this old sofa wonderin' how you and I were goin' to see one another."
"Have you?" She was pleased at that—"Well, you see, I have managed it and quite easily too, not so bad after thirty years. My good Roddy, you of all people to tumble off a horse! What were you about?"
"Oh! it was simple enough." Roddy's eyes worked swiftly to the park and then back again. "I was worried, you see—my thoughts were wandering, and the old mare just tripped into a hole, pitched and flung me—I fell on a heap o' stones, they knocked the sense out of me, the horse was frightened and went dashin' along with me tangled up in her. All came of my thoughts wanderin'—But you know, Duchess, I've had heaps of accidents, heaps and heaps, every kind of thing has happened to me, but it's never been serious—always the most wonderful luck. Well, for once it left me."
"Poor old Roddy."
"Yes, it was 'poor old Roddy,' I can tell you, for the first six weeks—thought I simply couldn't stand it, had serious thoughts of kickin' out altogether, seemed to me everythin' had gone … it's wonderful, though, the way you pick up. And then everyone's been so tremendous, and as for Rachel!"
He heaved a great sigh—Her eyes half closed, then she looked very carefully at the photograph on the little round table. "That's a good photograph of her you've got."
"Yes—it's my favourite. But you, Duchess, tell me about yourself. You must be in magnificent form to have planned this great adventure."
She told him about herself—only a little, all very carefully chosen—She was fancying, as she sat there, that she was again playing the great diplomatist before the world.
This expedition had greatly excited her, it had fired her blood, and just now she felt that she was equal to taking up her old life of thirty years ago, playing once more a tremendous part, beating Mrs. Bronson and others of her kind straight off the field.
She had a great plan now of coming often to see Roddy and of gaining a very great influence over him; she did not say to herself in so many words that she could not bear to think of him lying there helpless and therefore completely in Rachel's power, but that is what in reality stirred her.
Roddy's helplessness—the sight and sound of it—drove higher that flame that had burnt now for so long before the altar at which Rachel was, one day, to be sacrificed. "She may come and go as she pleases. He lies here—He can do nothing. He can know nothing of her movements—He's in her hands—after what I know...."
What did she know? The acquaintanceship of Breton's man-servant and Dorchester had produced the fact of Rachel's visit, of letters—but wasn't that all? Amongst the strange mingled visions that now crossed and recrossed her brain it were hard to say what were real and what phantasmal. But granted that the two of them had come together at all, why then it was plain enough to anyone who knew them that only one result was possible—Poor Roddy … her poor Roddy!
But she did not know even now that she intended to tell him anything; her sense of the pain that that revelation would give to him held her, but as the minutes passed her delight at being back once more in this gay, bustling world (yes, she liked its new invigorating noises) the sense of power that she had, and youth, and strength, spun her brain to finest cobwebs of entanglements.
She was glad to be with her Roddy again, it was only fair that, helpless as he was, there should still be someone to guard and protect him … to protect him, yes!
Her eyes flashed at the photograph.
But for a long time they talked in precisely their old fashion. The War, friends and enemies, victories and defeats, marriages and deaths; Roddy seemed, for a time, the old Roddy.
And then gradually through it all there pushed towards her the consciousness that he was doing it now to please her; more than that, again and again she was aware that some bitter jest, some sharp distraction, some fierce criticism had been turned by him deftly aside—simply rejected with a deftness and a strength that the old Roddy could never have summoned.
Here again then—and it stabbed her there in the midst of her new pride and confidence—was a reminder that her power, her sovereignty had vanished! Was Roddy also to be beyond her influence, Roddy whom she had had at her feet since he was a boy of sixteen?
The photograph smiled across at her—She bent forward, her hand raised a little as though to lend emphasis to her words—"And then you know, Roddy, I'm still troubled with my abominable relation–"
"What! Breton? Why, how's he been behaving?" Roddy's voice was scornful.
"Oh! he's not done anything that I know of—But he's always there—so tiresome to have him so close, and John and Adela have grown so peculiar lately that there's no knowing—They may ask him in to tea one day–"
"Oh no, they won't," said Roddy. "He must be the most awful outsider."
"I wanted to speak about him to you because I thought you might give a word of warning to Rachel–"
"To Rachel?" Roddy's voice was amazed.
"Yes—She's become such a friend of his! Surely you know? That's what makes it so difficult for me—When one's own granddaughter–"
"Rachel! A friend of Breton's! But I didn't know she'd ever spoken to him—Look here, Duchess, you must explain–"
"I thought you must have known. I've often wished to speak to you about it, only Rachel is so difficult and I didn't want to worry you, and it seems especially hard just now–"
"But it doesn't worry me—not a bit. Only tell me—How do you mean that she's a friend of his?"
"Only that she goes to see him, writes to him–"
"Goes to see him–"
"Oh yes—is in complete sympathy–"
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely. You must ask her."
"I will of course–"
He lay back on his sofa. For a little time there was silence between them. She was filled now with wild regrets. She wished that she had said nothing. His face was hard and old—She wished … she scarcely knew what she wished; she only knew that suddenly she was tired and would like to go home.
A bell was rung and Christopher was sent for. She would like to have kissed Roddy, but only wagged her bony finger at him—
"Now be a good patient boy and I'll soon come again."