“I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!” said Mrs. Kingsward; and Bee heard that her mother had melted into tears.
“That is as good as saying you don’t believe me, who saw it with my own eyes,” said the visitor, getting up. “Indeed, I didn’t mean at all to distress you, for I thought that, as everything was broken off – I thought only if you had any doubts, as one has sometimes after one has settled a thing – that to know he was a man like that, with no respect for anything, who could leave his fiancée, and just plunge, plunge – there is no other word for it – ”
It was evident that Mrs. Kingsward, reduced to helplessness, here made no effort either to detain her visitor or to contradict her further, or indeed to make any remark. There was a step or two across the room, and then Mrs. Chichester said again – “Good-bye, dear. I am very sorry to have distressed you – but I couldn’t leave you in ignorance of such a thing for dear Bee’s sake; that is the one thing to be thankful for in the whole matter, that Bee doesn’t seem to mind a bit! She looks just as bright and just as nice as if nothing had happened. She can’t have cared for him! Only flattered, I suppose, and pleased to have a proposal – as those little things are, poor things. We should all thank heaven on our knees that there’s no question of a broken heart in Bee’s case – ”
She might not have been so sure of that had she seen the figure which came through the window the moment the door had closed upon her – Bee with her blue eyes blazing wildly out of her white face, and strange passion in every line both of features and form.
“What is the meaning of it?” she said, briefly, with dry lips.
“Oh, Bee, you have heard it all!”
“I have heard enough – what does it mean, mamma?”
Mrs. Kingsward roused herself, dried her eyes, and went forward to Bee with outstretched arms; but the girl turned away. “I don’t want to be petted. I want to know what – what it means,” she said.
“I don’t believe it,” cried Mrs. Kingsward.
“Give a reason; don’t say things to quiet me. Oh, keep your arms away, mamma! Don’t pet me as if I wanted that! Why don’t you believe it? And if you did believe it – what does it mean – what does it mean?”
CHAPTER XVI
Bee’s look of scared and horrified misery was something new in Mrs. Kingsward’s experience. The girl had not known any trouble. Her father’s rejection of her lover and the apparent break between them had been in reality only another feature in the romance. She had almost liked it better so. There had been no time to pine, to feel the pain of separation. It was all the more like a poem, like what every love story should be, that this breaking off should have come.
And now, all at once, without any warning! The worst of it was that Bee had only heard a part of the story, the recapitulation of it. Mrs. Chichester had given the accused more or less fair play. She had given an imperfect account of the explanation, the story the woman had told – as was almost inevitable to a third party, but she had given it to the best of her ability, not meaning to deceive, willing enough that he should have the benefit of the doubt, or perhaps that the judgment upon him should be all the more hard, because of his attempt to mingle deceit with his sin, and throw dust in the eyes of any possible spectators. This was the way in which it had appeared to herself, but she was not unfair. She told the story which had been told to the astonished lady upon whose solitude the little party had been obtruded in the middle of the night, and who had heard it perhaps even imperfectly at first hand mingled with the jolting and jarring of the train and the murmur of the children. And yet Mrs. Chichester had repeated it honestly.
But Bee had not heard that part of the tale. She had heard only the facts of the case which had presented to her inexperienced young mind the most wild and dreadful picture. Her lover, who had just left her, whom she had promised to stand by till death, suddenly appeared to her in the pale darkness of the midnight with a woman and children hanging on to him – belonging to him, as appeared. Where had he met them? How had he arranged to meet them? When her hand had been in his, when he had been asking from her that pledge till death, had he just been arranging all that – giving them that rendezvous – settling how they were to meet, and where? A horror and sickness came over poor Bee. It made her head swim and her limbs tremble. To leave her with her pledge in his ears, and to meet, perhaps at the very outset of his journey, the woman with the children – a common sort of woman, like a servant. As if that made any difference! If she had been a duchess it would have been all the same. He must have met her fresh from Bee’s presence, with his farewell to the girl whom he had pretended to love still on his lips. She could not think so clearly. Was this picture burnt in upon her mind? She seemed to see the dim, half-lighted carriage, and Aubrey at the door putting the party in. And then at Dover, in the daylight, shaking hands with his companion, bending over her as if he meant to kiss her! These two pictures took possession of Bee’s mind completely. And all this just when he had left Bee – between his farewell to her and his interview with her father! If she had heard of the story which the woman had told to the startled Miss Tatham in the dim sleeping carriage, from which, looking out, she had recognised Aubrey Leigh, it might have made a difference. But that story had not been told in Bee’s hearing. And Mrs. Kingsward did not know this, but supposed she had heard the whole from beginning to end.
Bee’s mother, to tell the truth, after the first shock, was glad of that unconscious eaves-dropping on Bee’s part; for how could she have told her? Indeed, the story was too gross, too flagrant to be believed by herself. She felt sure that there must be some explanation of it other than the vulgar one which was put upon it by these ladies; but she knew very well that the same interpretation would be put upon it by her husband, and many other people to whom Aubrey’s innocent interference in such a case would have seemed much less credible than guilt. Guilt is the thing that generally rises first as the explanation of everything, to the mind, both of the man and woman of the world. The impossibility of a man leaving a delicate flower of womanhood like Bee, whose first love he had won, in order to fall back at once into the bonds of a common intrigue, and provide for the comfort of his paramour, who had been waiting for him on the journey, would not prove so great to most people as the impossibility that he, as a stranger, would step out of his way to succour a poor little mother and children whom he had never seen before, and risk thereby a compromising situation.
The latter was the thing which would have seemed unutterably ridiculous and impossible to Colonel Kingsward. A first-class sleeping carriage secured for a mere waif upon his way, whom he had never seen before and never would see again! The fellow might be a fool, but he was not such a fool as that. Had the woman even been old and ugly the Colonel would have laughed and shrugged his shoulders at Aubrey’s bad taste; but the woman was pretty and young. A long-standing affair, no doubt; and, of course, it was quite possible, nay likely, that she was being sent, poor creature, to some retreat or other, where she would be out of the way with her children.
Mrs. Kingsward knew, as if she had heard him say these words, how her husband would speak. And who was she, with not half his experience of the world, to maintain a different opinion? Yet she did so. She thought it was like Aubrey to turn the poor woman’s lingering, melancholy journey into a quick and comfortable one, out of pure kindness, without thought of compromising himself any more than of having any recompense for what he did. But she did not know that Bee knew nothing of this explanation of the story. When she found that her child evidently thought nothing of that, but received at once the darker miserable tale into her mind, she was startled, but not perhaps astonished. Bee was young to think the worst of anybody, but at the same time it is by far the commonest way of thinking, and the offence was one against herself, which gives a sharper edge to everything. And then she knew what was going on in Bee’s mind chiefly by guesswork, for the girl said little. The colour went out of her face, her eyes sometimes gave a gleam of their old fire, but mostly had a strange set look, as if they were fixed on something not visible to the ordinary spectator. She sat all the evening through and never spoke. This was not so noticeable while the children were still about with their perpetual flow of observations and flood of questions; but when they went off in detachments to bed, and the two elder girls were left alone with their mother, Bee’s silence fell upon the others like a cloud. Betty, who knew nothing, after a few minutes rushed away upstairs to find refuge in the nursery, and then Mrs. Kingsward was left alone, face to face with this silent figure, so unlike Bee, which neither moved nor spoke. She had scarcely the courage to break the dreadful silence, but yet it had to be broken. Poor Mrs. Kingsward’s heart began to beat violently against her breast as it had not done since her return home.
“Bee!” she said. “Bee!”
Already the pumping of her heart had taken away her breath.
“Yes, mamma.”
“Oh! Bee, what – what are you going to do?”
“To do, mamma?”
“Oh! don’t repeat my words after me, but give me some sort of an answer. Betty may be back again in a moment. What are you going to do?”
“What can I do?” the girl said, in a low voice.
“I can’t suppose but that you have been thinking about it – what else could you be thinking of, poor child? For my part, I don’t believe it. Do you hear me, Bee?”
“Yes – I heard you say that before, mamma.”
“And that is all you think of what I say! My darling, you can’t remain like this. The first thing your father will ask will be, ‘What has happened?’ I cannot bear that you should give up – without a word.”
Mrs. Kingsward had disapproved of the correspondence, had felt that it would be incumbent upon her to tell her husband of it, but yet in this unforeseen emergency she forgot all that.
“Without a word! What words could I say? You don’t suppose I could discuss it with him – ask if it was true? If it’s true, there isn’t a word to say, is there? And if it isn’t true it would be an insult to ask him. And so one way or another it is all just done with and over. And I wish you would leave me quiet, mamma.”
“Done with and over! Without a word – on a mere story of something that took place on a journey!”
“Oh! leave me quiet, mamma. Do you think I need to be reminded of that journey? As if I did not see it, and the lamps burning, and hear the very wheels!”
“Bee, dear, how can I leave you quiet? Do you mean just to let it break off like that, without a word, without giving him the chance to explain?”
“I thought,” said Bee, with a faint satirical smile, for, indeed, her heart was capable of all bitterness, “that it was broken off completely by papa, and all that remained was only – what you called clandestine, mamma.”
“I did not call it clandestine. I knew you would do nothing that was dishonourable. And it is true that it was – broken off. But, Bee! Bee! you don’t seem to feel the dreadful thing this is. After all that has passed, to let it drop in a moment, without saying a word!”
“I thought it was what I ought to have done, as soon as papa’s will was made known.”
“Oh! Bee, you will drive me mad. And I have got no breath to speak. So you ought, perhaps – but you have not, when perhaps there was a reason. And now, for a mere chance story, and without giving him – an opportunity – to speak for himself.”
Bee raised her face, now crimson as it had before been pale.
“How could I put any questions on such a thing? How could it be discussed between him and me? To think of it is bad enough, but to speak of it – mamma! How do I know, even, what words to say?”
“In that case, every engagement would be at the mercy of any slanderer, if the girl never could bring herself to ask what it meant.”
“I am not any girl,” cried poor Bee, with a quiver of her lip. “I am just myself. I don’t think very much of myself any more than you do, but I can’t change myself. Oh, let me alone, let me alone, mamma!”
Mrs. Kingsward was very much excited. Her nostrils grew pinched and dilated in the struggle for breath; her lips were open and panting from the same cause. She was caught in that dreadful contradiction of sentiment and feeling which is worse than any unmingled catastrophe. She had been rent asunder before this by her desire to shield her daughter, yet the sense of her duty to her husband remained, and now it was the correspondence which she seemed to be called upon to defend almost at peril of her life; that actually clandestine, at least secret correspondence, of which she could not approve, which she was bound to cut short. And yet to cut it short like this was something which she could not bear. She threw aside the work with which she had been struggling and fixed her eyes on Bee, who did not look at her nor see how agitated her expression was.
“If you can do this, I can’t,” she said. “I will write to him. The other dreadful story may be true, for anything I know. And that, of course, is enough. But this one I don’t believe, if an angel from Heaven told it me. He shall at least have the chance of clearing himself!”
“I don’t know,” said Bee, “what the other dreadful story was. I thought it was only pretending to love – some other woman; and then – pretending to love me” – she broke off into a little hoarse laugh. The offence of it was more than Bee could bear. The insult – to suffer (she said to herself) was one thing – but to be insulted! She laughed to think what a fool she had been; how she had been taken in; how she had said – oh, like the veriest credulous fool – “Till death.”
“He was not pretending to love you. What went before I know not, but with you he was true.”
“One before – and one after,” said Bee, rising in an irrepressible rage of indignation. “Oh, mamma, how can we sit quietly and discuss it, as if – as if it were a thing that could be talked about? Am I to come in between – two others – two – I think it will make me mad,” the girl cried, stamping her foot. How does a man dare to do that – to insult a girl – who never sought him nor heard of him, wanted nothing of him – till he came and forced himself into her life!”
“Oh! Bee, my darling,” cried the mother, going up to her child with outstretched arms.
“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t pet me; I cannot bear it. Let me stand by myself. I am not a little thing like Lucy to be caught up and kissed till I forget. I don’t want to forget. There is nothing that can ever be done to me, if I were to live to an hundred, to put this out of my head.”
“Bee, be patient with me for a moment. I have lived longer than you have. What went before could be no offence to you, whatever it was. It might be bad, but it was no offence to you. And this – I don’t believe it – ”
Bee was far too much self-absorbed to see the labouring breath, the pink spot on each cheek, the panting which made her mother’s fine nostrils quiver and kept her lips apart, or that she caught at the back of a chair to support herself as she stood.
“I don’t know why – you shouldn’t believe it. I don’t believe it; I see it, I hear it,” cried Bee. “It’s like a story – and I thought these things were always stories, things made up to keep up the interest in a book – I’m the – deceived heroine, the one that’s disappointed, don’t you know, mamma? We’ve read all about her dozens of times. But she generally makes a fuss over it,” the girl said, with her suffocating laugh. “I shall make – no fuss – Mamma! What is the matter, mamma?”
Nothing more was the matter than the doctor could have told Mrs. Kingsward’s family long ago – a spasm of the heart. She stumbled backward to the sofa, and flung herself down before consciousness forsook her. Did consciousness forsake her at all? Bee rushing to the bell, making its violent sound peal through the house, then flinging herself at her mother’s feet, and calling to her in the helplessness of utter ignorance, “Mamma, mamma!” did not think that she was unconscious. Broken words fell from her in the midst of her gasps for breath, then there was a moment of dread stillness. By this time the room seemed to be full of people – Bee did not know who was there – and then there suddenly appeared out of the mist Moulsey with a glass and teaspoon in her hands.
“Go away, all of you,” cried Moulsey, “she’ll be better directly – open all the windows and take a fan and fan her, Miss Bee.”
The blast of the cold October night air came in like a flood, Bee seemed to come out of a horrible dream in the waft of air brought by the fan which she was herself waving to and fro – and in a little time, as Moulsey said, Mrs. Kingsward was better. The labouring breath which had come back after that awful moment of stillness gradually calmed down and became softer with an occasional long drawn sigh, and then she opened her eyes and said, with a faint smile, “What is it? What is it?” She looked round her for a moment puzzled – and then she said, “Ah! you are fanning me,” with a smile to Bee, but presently, “How cold it is! I don’t think I want to be fanned, Moulsey.”
“No, ma’am, not now. And White is just a-going to shut all the windows. The fire was a bit too hot, and you know you never can bear it when the room gets too hot.”
“No, I never can bear it,” Mrs. Kingsward said, in a docile tone. She followed the lead of any suggestion given to her. “I must have got faint – with the heat.”
“That was just it,” said Moulsey. “When you have a fire in the drawing-room so early it looks so cheerful you’re apt to pile it too high without thinking – for it ain’t really cold in October, not cold enough to have a fire like that. You want it for cheerfulness, ma’am, more than for heat. A big bit of wood that will make a nice blaze, and very little coal, as is too much for the season, is what your drawing-room fire should be.”
Mrs. Kingsward gradually came to herself during this long speech, which no doubt was what Moulsey intended. But she said she felt a little weak, and that she would keep on the sofa until it was time to go to bed. The agitation she had gone through seemed to have passed from her mind. “Read me a little of that story,” she said, pointing to a book on the table. “We left off last night at a most interesting part. Read me the next chapter, Bee.”
Bee sat down beside her mother’s sofa and opened the book. It was not a book of a very exciting kind it may be supposed, when it was thus read a chapter at a time, without any one of the party opening it from evening to evening to see how things went on. But as it happened at this point of the story, the heroine had found out that her lover was not so blameless as she thought, and was making up her mind to have nothing to do with him. Bee began to read with an indignation beyond words for both hero and heroine, who were so pale, so colourless, beside her own story. To waste one’s time reading stuff like this, while the tide of one’s own passion was ten times stronger! She did not think very much of her mother’s faint. It was, no doubt, the too large fire, as Moulsey said.