CHAPTER LI
Those who were left behind were not very careful of what Colonel Kingsward did. They were not thinking of his concerns; in the strain of personal feeling the most generous of human creatures is forced to think first of their own. Neither of the women who were left in the room had any time to consider the matter, but if they had they would have made sure without hesitation that nothing which could happen to Colonel Kingsward could be half so important as that crisis in which his daughter was involved.
Mrs. Leigh turned round upon the girl by her side and seized her hands. “Bee,” she cried, “now we are alone and we can speak freely. Tell me what it was, there is nobody here to frighten you, to take the words from your mouth. What was it, what was it that made you turn from Aubrey? At last, at last, it can be cleared up whatever it was.”
Bee turned away, trying to disengage her hands. “It is of no consequence,” she said, “Oh, don’t make me go back to those old, old things. What does it matter to Mr. Leigh? And as for me – ”
“It matters everything to Aubrey. He will be able to clear himself if you will give him the chance. How could he clear himself when he was never allowed to speak, when he did not know? Bee, in justice, in mere justice! What was it? You said your mother – ”
“Yes, I had her then. We heard it together, and she felt it like me. But we had no time to talk of it after, for she was ill. If you would please not ask me, Mrs. Leigh! I was very miserable – mother dying, and nowhere, nowhere in all the world anything to trust to. Don’t, oh! don’t make me go back upon it! I am not – so very – happy, even now!”
The girl would not let herself be drawn into Mrs. Leigh’s arms. She refused to rest her head upon the warm and ample bosom which was offered to her. She drew away her hands. It was difficult, very difficult, to keep from crying. It is always hard for a girl to keep from crying when her being is so moved. The only chance for her was to keep apart from all contact, to stand by herself and persuade herself that nobody cared and that she was alone in the world.
“Bee, I believe,” said Mrs. Leigh, solemnly, “that you have but to speak a word and you will be happy. You have not your mother now. You can’t turn to her and ask her what you should do. But I am sure that she would say, ‘speak!’ If she were here she would not let you break a man’s heart and spoil his life for a punctilio. I have always heard she was a good woman and kind – kind. Bee,” the elder lady laid her hand suddenly on the girl’s shoulder, making her start, “she would say ‘speak’ if she were here.”
“Oh, mamma, if you were here!” said Bee, through her tears.
She broke down altogether and became inarticulate, sobbing with her face buried in her hands. The ordeal of the last two days had been severe. Charlie and his concerns and the appearance of Miss Lance, and the conflict only half understood which had been going on round her, had excited and disturbed her beyond expression, as everybody could see and understand. But, indeed, these were but secondary elements in the storm which had overwhelmed Bee, which was chiefly brought back by that sudden plunge into the atmosphere of Aubrey. The sensation of being in his house, which she might in other circumstances have shared with him, of sitting at his table, in his seat, under the roof that habitually sheltered him – here, where her own life ought to have been passed, but where the first condition now was that there should be nothing of him visible. In Aubrey’s house, but not for Aubrey! Aubrey banished, lest perhaps her eyes might fall upon him by chance, or her ears be offended by the sound of his voice! Even his mother did not understand how much this had to do with the passion and trouble of the girl, from whose eyes the innocent name of her mother, sweetest though saddest of memories, had let forth the salt and boiling tears. If Mrs. Leigh had been anybody in the world save Aubrey’s mother, Bee would have clung to her, accepting the tender support and consolation of the elder women’s arms and her sympathy, but from Aubrey’s mother she felt herself compelled to keep apart.
It was not until her almost convulsive sobbing was over that this question could be re-opened, and in the meantime Betty having heard the sound of the closing door came rushing downstairs and burst into the room: perhaps she was not so much disturbed or excited as Mrs. Leigh was by Bee’s condition. She gave her sister a kiss as she lay on the sofa where Mrs. Leigh had placed her, and patted her on the shoulder.
“She will be better when she has had it out,” said Betty. “She has worked herself up into such a state about Miss Lance. And oh, please tell me what has happened. You are her enemy, too, Mrs. Leigh – oh, how can you misjudge her so! As if she had been the cause of any harm! I was sent away,” said Betty, “and, of course, Bee could not speak – but I could have told you. Yes, of course, I knew! How could I help knowing, being her sister? I can’t tell whether she told me, I knew without telling; and, of course, she must have told me. This is how it was – ”
Bee put forth her hand and caught her sister by the dress, but Betty was not so easily stopped. She turned round quickly, and took the detaining hand into her own and patted and caressed it.
“It is far better to speak out,” she said, “it must be told now, and though I am young and you call me little Betty, I cannot help hearing, can I, what people say? Mrs. Leigh, this was how it was. Whatever happened about dear Miss Lance – whom I shall stick to and believe in whatever you say,” cried Betty, by way of an interlude, with flashing eyes, “that had nothing, nothing to do with it. That was a story – like Charlie’s, I suppose, and Bee no more made a fuss about it than I should do. It was after, when Bee was standing by Aubrey, like – like Joan of Arc; yes, of course I shall call him Aubrey – I should like to have him for a brother, but that has got nothing to do with it. A lady came to call upon mamma, and she told a story about someone on the railway who had met Aubrey on the way home after that scene at Cologne, after he was engaged to Bee, and was miserable because of papa’s opposition.” Betty spoke so fast that her words tumbled over each other, so to speak, in the rush for utterance. “Well, he was seen,” she resumed, pausing for breath, “putting a young woman with children into one of the sleeping carriages – a poor young woman that had no money or right to be there. He put her in, and when they got to London he was seen talking to her, and giving her money, as if she belonged to him. I don’t see any harm in that, for he was always kind to poor people. But these ladies did, and I suppose so did mamma, and Bee blazed up. That is just like her. She takes fire, she never waits to ask questions, she stops her ears. She thought it was something dreadful, showing that he had never cared for her, that he had cared for other people even when he was pretending, I should have done quite different. I should have said, ‘Now, look here, Aubrey, what does it mean?’ – or, rather, I should never have thought anything but that he was kind. He was always kind – silly, indeed, about poor people, as so many are.”
Mrs. Leigh had followed Betty’s rapid narrative with as much attention as she could concentrate upon it, but the speed with which the words flew forth, the little interruptions, the expressions of Betty’s matured and wise opinions, bewildered her beyond measure.
“What does it all mean?” she asked, looking from one to another when the story was done. “A sleeping carriage on the railway – a woman with children – as if she belonged to him? How could a woman with children belong to him?” Then she paused and grew crimson with an old woman’s painful blush. “Is it vice, horrible vulgar vice, this child is attributing to my boy?”
The two girls stared, confused and troubled. Bee got up from the sofa and put her hands to her head, her eyes fixed upon Mrs. Leigh with an appalled and horrified look. She had not asked herself of what Aubrey had been accused. She had fled from him before the dreadful thought of relationships she did not understand, of something which was the last insult to her, whatever it might be in itself. “Vulgar vice!” The girls were cowed as if some guilt had been imputed to themselves.
“You are not like anything I have known, you girls of the period,” cried the angry mother. “You are acquainted with such things as I at my age had never heard of. You make accusations! But now – he shall answer for himself,” she said, flaming with righteous wrath. Mrs. Leigh went to the bell and rang it so violently that the sound echoed all over the house.
“Go and ask your master to come here at once, directly; I want him this moment,” she said, stamping her foot in her impatience. And then there was a pause. The man went off and was seen from the window to cross the street on his errand. Then Bee rose, her tears hastily dried up, pushing back from her forehead her disordered hair.
“I had better go. If you have sent for Mr. Leigh it will be better that I should go.”
Mrs. Leigh was almost incapable of speech. She took Bee by the shoulders and put her back almost violently on the sofa. “You shall stay there,” she said, in a choked and angry voice.
What a horrible pause it was! The girls were silent, looking at each other with wild alarm. Betty, who had blurted out the story, but to whom the idea of repeating it before Aubrey – before a man – was unspeakable horror, made a step towards the door. Then she said, “No, I will not run away,” with tremendous courage. “It is not our fault,” she added, after a pause. “Bee, if I have got to say it again, give me your hand.”
“It is I who ought to say it,” said Bee, pale with the horror of what was to come. “Vulgar vice!” And she to accuse him, and to stand up before the world and say that was why!
It seemed a long time, but it was really only a few minutes, before Aubrey appeared. He came in quickly, breathless with haste and suspense. He expected, from what his mother had told him, to find Miss Lance and Colonel Kingsward there. He came into the agitated room and found, of all people in the world, Bee and Betty, terrified, and his mother, walking about the room sounding, as it were, a metaphorical lash about their ears, in the frank passion of an elder woman who has the most just cause of offence and no reason to bate her breath. There was something humorous in the tragic situation, but to them it was wholly tragic, and Aubrey, seeing for the first time after so long an interval the girl he loved, and seeing her in such strange circumstances, was by no means disposed to see any humorous side.
“Here, Aubrey!” said his mother, “I have called upon you to hear what you are accused of. You thought it was Laura Lance, but she has nothing to do with it. You are accused of travelling from Germany, that time when you were sent off from Cologne – the time those Kingswards turned upon you” – (the girls both started, and recovered themselves a little at the shock of this contemptuous description), – “travelling in sleeping carriages and I know not what with a woman and children, who were believed to belong to you! What have you to say?”
“That was not what I said, Mrs. Leigh.”
“What have you to say?” cried Mrs. Leigh, waving her hand to silence Betty; “the accused has surely the right to speak first.”
“What have I to say? But to what, mother? What is it? Was I travelling with a woman and children? I suppose I was travelling – with all the women and children that were in the same train. But otherwise, of course you know I was with nobody. What does it mean?”
Bee got up from the sofa like a ghost, her blue eyes wild, her face pale. “Oh, let us go, let us go! Do not torment us,” she said. “I will acknowledge that it was not true. Now that I see him I am sure that it was not true. I was mad. I was so stung to think – Mrs. Leigh, do not kill me! I did him no harm; do not, do not go over it any more!”
“Go over what?” cried Aubrey. “Bee! She can’t stand, she doesn’t see where she is going. Mother, what on earth does it matter what was against me if it is all over? Mother! How dare you torture my poor girl – ?”
This was naturally all the thanks Mrs. Leigh got for her efforts to unravel the mystery, which the reader knows was the most innocent mystery, and which had never been cleared up or thought of since that day. It came clear of itself the moment that Aubrey, only to support her, took Bee into his arms.
CHAPTER LII
The Sorceress walked away very slowly down the street.
She had the sensation of having fallen from a great height, after the excitement of having fought bravely to keep her place there, and of having anticipated every step of a combat still more severe which yet had not come to pass after her previsions. It had been a fight lasting for hours, from the moment Betty, all unconscious, had told her of the house in which Charlie was. That was in the morning, and now it was late afternoon, and the work of the day, the common work of the day in which all the innocent common people about had been employed, was rounding towards its end. It seemed to her a long, long time that she had been involved, first in imagination, in severe thought, and then in actual conflict – in this struggle, fighting for her life. From the beginning she had made up her mind that she should fail. It was a consciously losing game that she had fought so gallantly, never giving in; and indeed she was not unaware, nor was she without a languid satisfaction in the fact that she had indeed carried off the honours of the field, that it would not be said that she had been beaten. But what did that matter? Argument she knew and felt had nothing to do with such affairs. She had known herself to have lost from the moment she saw Colonel Kingsward standing there against the mantelpiece in the dining-room. It had not been possible for her then to give in, to turn and go forth into the street flinging down her arms. On the contrary, it was her nature to fight to the last; and she had carried off an apparent victory. She had marched off with colours flying from the field of battle, leaving every enemy confounded. But she herself entertained no illusion in the matter. It was possible no doubt that her spell might yet be strong enough upon her middle-aged captive to make him ignore and pass over everything that told against her – but, after considering the situation with a keen and close survey of every likelihood, she dismissed that hope. No, her chance was lost – again; the battle was over – again. It had been so near being successful that the shock was greater perhaps than usual; but she had now been feeling the shock for hours; so that her actual fall was as much a relief as a pang, and her mind, full of resource, obstinately sanguine, was becoming ready to pass on to the next chance, and had already sprung up to think – What now?
I am sorry that in this story I have always been placed in natural opposition to this woman, who was certainly a creature full of interest, full of resource, and indomitable in her way. And she had a theory of existence, as, it is my opinion, we all must have, making out to ourselves the most plausible reasons and excuses for all we do. Her struggle – in which she would not have denied that she had sometimes been unscrupulous – had always been for a standing-ground on which, if once attained, she could have been good. She had always promised herself that she would be good when once she had attained – oh, excellent! kind, just, true! – a model woman. And what, after all, had been her methods? There had been little harm in them. Here and there somebody had been injured, as in the case of Aubrey Leigh, of Charlie Kingsward. To the first she had indeed done considerable harm, but then she had soothed the life of Amy, his little foolish wife, to whom she had been more kind than she had been unkind to him. She had not wanted to be the third person between that tiresome couple. She had stayed in his house from a kind of sense of duty, and had Aubrey Leigh indeed asked her to become his second wife she would, of course, have accepted him for the sake of the position, but with a grimace. She was not particularly sorry for having harmed him. It served him right for – well, for being Aubrey Leigh. And as for Bee Kingsward, she had triumphantly proved, much to her own surprise it must be said, that it was not she who had done Bee any harm. Then Charlie – poor Charlie, poor boy! He thought, of course, that he was very miserable and badly used. Great heavens! that a boy should have the folly to imagine that anything could make him miserable, at twenty-two – a man, and with all the world before him. Miss Lance at this moment was not in the least sorry for Charlie. It would do him good. A young fellow who had nothing in the world to complain of, who had everything in his favour – it was good for him to be unhappy a little, to be made to remember that he was only flesh and blood after all.
Thus she came to the conclusion, as she walked along, that really she had done no harm to other people. To herself, alas! she was always doing harm, and every failure made it more and more unlikely that she would ever succeed. She did not brood over her losses when she was thus defeated. She turned to the next thing that offered with what would have been in a better cause a splendid philosophy, but yet in moments like this she felt that it became every day more improbable that she would ever succeed.
Instead of the large and liberal sphere in which she always hoped to be able to fulfil all the duties of life in an imposing and remarkable way, she would have probably to drop into – what? A governess’s place, for which she would already be thought too old, some dreadful position about a school, some miserable place as housekeeper – she with all her schemes, her hopes of better things, her power over others. This prospect was always before her, and came back to her mind at moments when she was at the lowest ebb, for she had no money at all. She had always been dependent upon somebody. Even now her little campaign in George Street, Hanover Square, was at the expense of the friend with whom she had lived in Oxford, and who believed Laura was concerting measures to establish herself permanently in some remunerative occupation. These accounts would have to be settled somehow, and some other expedient be found by which to try again. Well, one thing done with, another to come on – was not that the course of life? And there was a certain relief in the thought that it was done with.
The suspense was over; there was no longer the conflict between hope and fear, which wears out the nerves and clouds the clearness of one’s mental vision. One down, another come on! She said this to herself with a forlorn laugh in the depths of her being, yet not so very forlorn. This woman had a kind of pleasure in the new start, even when she did not know what it was to be. There are a great many things in which I avow I have the greatest sympathy with her, and find her more interesting than a great many blameless people. Poetic justice is generally in books awarded to such persons. But that is, one is aware, not always the case in life.
While Miss Lance went on quietly along the long unlovely street, with those thoughts in her mind, walking more slowly than usual, a little languid and exhausted after her struggle, but as has been said frankly and without arrière pensée giving up the battle as lost, and accepting her defeat – she became suddenly aware of a quick firm footstep behind, sounding fast and continuous upon the pavement. A woman like this has all her wits very sharply about her, the ears and the sight of a savage, and an unslumbering habit of observation, or she could never carry on her career. She heard the step and instinctively noted it before her mind awoke to any sense of meaning and importance in it. Then, all at once, as it came just to that distance behind which made it apparent that this footstep was following someone who went before, it suddenly slackened without stopping, became slow when it had been fast. At this, her thoughts flew away like a mist and she became all ears, but she was too wise to turn round, to display any interest. Perhaps it might be that he was only going his own way, not intending to follow, and that he had slackened his pace unconsciously without ulterior motives when he saw her in front of him – though this Miss Lance scarcely believed.
Perhaps – I will not affirm it – she threw a little more of her real languor and weariness into her attitude and movements when she made this exciting discovery. She was, in reality, very tired. She had looked so when she left the house; perhaps she had forgotten her great fatigue a little in the course of her walk, but it now came back again with double force, which is not unusual in the most matter of fact circumstances. As her pace grew slower, the footstep behind became slower also, but always followed on. Miss Lance proceeded steadily, choosing the quietest streets, pausing now and then at a shop window to rest. The climax came when she reached a window which had a rail round it, upon which she leaned heavily, every line of her dress expressing, with a faculty which her garments specially possessed, an exhaustion which could scarcely go further. Then she raised her head to look what the place was. It was full of embroideries and needlework, a woman’s shop, where she was sure of sympathy. She went in blindly, as if her very sight were clouded with her fatigue.
“I am very tired,” she said; “I want some silk for embroidery; but that is not my chief object. May I sit down a little? I am so very tired.”
“Certainly, ma’am, certainly,” cried the mistress of the shop, rushing round from behind the counter to place a chair for her and offer a glass of water. She sat down so as to be visible from the door, but still with her back to it. The step had stopped, and there was a shadow across the window – the tall shadow of a man looking in. A smile came upon Miss Lance’s face – of gratitude and thanks to the kind people – also perhaps of some internal satisfaction. But she did not act as if she were conscious of anyone waiting for her. She took the glass of water with many acknowledgments; she leant back on the chair murmuring, “Thanks, thanks,” to the exhortations of the shop-woman not to hurry, to take a good rest. She did not hurry at all. Finally, she was so much better as to be able to buy her silks, and, declaring herself quite restored, to go out again into the open air.
She was met by the shadow that had been visible through the window, and which, as she knew very well, was Colonel Kingsward, stiff and embarrassed, yet with great anxiety in his face. “I feared you were ill,” he said, with a little jerk, the words coming in spite of him. “I feared you were fainting.”
“Oh, Colonel Kingsward, you!”
“Yes – I feared you were fainting. It is – nothing, I hope?”
“Nothing but exhaustion,” she said, with a faint smile. “I was very tired, but I have rested and I am a little better now.”
“Will you let me call a cab for you? You don’t seem fit to walk.”
“Oh, no cab, thanks! I would much rather walk – the air and the slow movement does one a little good.”
She was pale, and her voice was rather faint, and every line of her dress, as I have said, was tired – tired to death – and yet not ungracefully tired.
“I cannot let you go like this alone.” His voice softened every moment; they went on for a step or two together. “You had better – take my arm, at least,” he said.
She took it with a little cry and a sudden clasp. “I think you are not a mere man, but an archangel of kindness and goodness,” she said, with a faint laugh that broke down, and tears in her eyes.
And I think for that moment, in the extraordinary revulsion of feeling, Miss Lance almost believed what she said.