Part 20

Her hands came together gently in her lap. When she spoke, her emotional voice had a new tenderness. "Will you allow me to help you? We're not such strangers as we seem. For years I've been interested in you. I was always hearing of your adventures in Mexico, Korea, the Balkans and last of all at the Front. You've been quite a romantic figure in my life. You've always seemed so strong; and I admire strength immensely. I never dreamt that a time would ever come when I would be able to help you. You're in love and she's not in love with you. You're older than she is and it makes you unhappy. She has time to experiment, but for you it's different; your love is bound up with the last of your youth. Because you've been unhappy, you've been unwise. Your foolishness ended yesterday with the return of Reggie Pollock. I received the news of his return this morning. So you came down here to me, which was perfectly natural."

He shifted his gaze and stared out of the window, puzzled and troubled. "Unfortunately for me, Lady Dawn, a good deal of what you've said is true. But I don't see how it makes it natural that I should have come to you. I've been wanting to come for a very long time, but was given to understand that what I had to say might be distasteful."

"You must put that out of your mind." She said it comfortingly, as though to a little boy. "There's nothing distasteful in what you have to say. It may cause awkwardness with Sir Tobias; but if you can assure me that you're really in earnest over Terry, I'll be quite willing to risk that in order to become your ally."

He smiled towards her through the darkness. "There's nothing I should like better than to reckon you as my ally. And now I see why we've been talking at cross-purposes. You think that I've come to wheedle Terry's address out of you. Perhaps I have, since you've put the idea into my head. And with regard to my earnestness, nothing except Terry in the whole world matters. She's romance, self-fulfillment and, as you've said, the last dream of my youth. If I supposed that I were going to lose her, I would rather not have---- But I didn't come here to burden you with my troubles. I came to do something for you--something which I've tried to avoid doing. Something which has forced itself upon me and followed me until---- It's as though I'd been compelled by a personality outside myself. I may make you very unhappy----"

She leant forward, bringing her face so close that he could feel the fanning of her breath. The moon was newly risen; as it shone on the mist, low-lying in the meadows, it made the country-side luminous like a vast lake of milk which washed about the trees and submerged the hedges. In its reflected radiancy for the first time he saw her features clearly. They startled him, leaping together out of the white blur that they had been into something more lovely than he had imagined. He had never seen such calmness. And the calmness was not alone in her expression; the same sculptured quiet was in the white curve of her arms and the gentle swelling of her breast. He knew now why she was declared to be the most beautiful woman in England. But it was the wisdom of her far more than the beauty that enthralled him. There was no weakness that her sympathy could not encompass--nothing that he need be ashamed to tell her. Though she appeared to be about the same age as himself, by reason of her experience she made him feel younger. No woman who had attracted him before had been able to make him feel that. Already he was filled with a strange sense of gratitude.

Very simply she took his hand and folded it between her own.

"You, who have been a soldier, were a little afraid of me. Don't be afraid of me, Lord Taborley. Whatever it is that you've come to do for me, I shall try to be grateful. As for making me unhappy, no one--not even you--has the power to do that."

VIII

He looked at her wonderingly. "They say you never cry."

A slow smile flitted across her face and died out. "You want the truth? You yourself tell the truth---- When they say that I never cry, they mean that I never let them see me."

He laughed softly. "I thought it was that: you cry in secret like a man. Not to cry at all would be monstrous; it was that which made me afraid of you. A man doesn't like a woman to be stronger than himself. It was about a man who didn't like a woman to be stronger than himself that I came to talk to you."

She had guessed. Through her hands he could feel the commotion of her life struggle and die down till it grew almost silent. The stillness of the room seemed a backwater of the intenser stillness of the night without.

Her lips scarcely moved. "And the man?"

"Your husband."

"But he's dead."

"I know."

He waited for her to flame up at the indelicacy of his intrusion. He almost hoped she would. When she sat motionless as a statue, he continued apologetically. "I'm trespassing on things sacred. Because of that I've fought to avoid this meeting, knowing all the time that it was inevitable. I've tried to persuade myself that it would be kinder to leave you in ignorance----"

"Of what?" She strove to subdue her apprehension. Her profile showed pale and expressionless, as if chiseled in the solid wall of darkness.

"In ignorance of his grandeur."

He had said the thing most remote from what she had expected. He was aware of her relieved suspense--at the same time of her gentle skepticism. He felt irritated with himself at his choice of words. Grandeur did not express the meaning he had intended. When he made a new start, he stumbled his way gropingly, confused by his consciousness of her unuttered doubts.

"Why I have to tell you this I can hardly say. It's not for his sake. It's certainly not for mine. It's for yours, I fancy. Yes, I'm sure. By doing him justice I shall be able to help you, though I have no reason for supposing that you stand in need of help. It's to do him justice that he's been urging me. Yet why should he have selected me to be his spokesman? I wasn't his friend. I never met him till I reached the Front; out there I really never knew him. No one did. He was like a sleep-walker--a very silent man. You'll be wondering why, if this was the case, I should be so impertinent as to mention his name to you--to you of all persons, who can claim to have known him infinitely more intimately than any one else. And you'll be wondering why, after two months of procrastinating, I motored through the night from London to force my way into your privacy, without forewarning or introduction. If I'm going to be honest, I must run the risk of appearing absurd. I could resist him no longer. He coerced me with ill-luck. Ever since I entered your sister's house and discovered who you were, he's been urging----"

"Who I _was_!" Her head turned slowly. It was her first intense display of interest.

"I mean your relation to him--that it was you who were his wife. At the Front I didn't know that he was Lord Dawn; he'd blotted out his identity. He was merely gun-fodder like the rest of us--something to be sent over the top to be smashed and then to be left to sink into the mud or else hurried back to be patched up in hospital. He was a company-commander in my battalion. I knew nothing of his past. My acquaintance with him began and ended in the trenches. I don't know much now--only what Maisie's told me." He had been speaking with growing earnestness. Suddenly he flashed into indignant vehemence. "What Maisie's told me! It's false of the man as he was out there. He wants you to believe that. Out there he was different. He may have been paltry and base once; but he was reborn into a new nobility. He was white all through. He was overpoweringly heroic. From the humblest Tommy we all adored him--adored him for the example he set us. He was only cheerful when there was dying to be done--out at rest and in quiet sectors he was gloomy. The men loved him for that; it struck them as humorous. And yet he was utterly indifferent to their love. He'd got beyond caring for what anybody thought of him. He was too absorbed in establishing reasons for thinking well of himself. I learnt things about him--one does in the presence of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the gold from the dross. It was the dross that Maisie remembered. But we, who were his comrades in khaki, saw nothing but the gold--his untiring ability to share. You weren't there; nevertheless, that's what I've got to help you to understand. I've got to make you see the new Lord Dawn who was born out there. It was last night, after Pollock returned, that I saw my duty clearly. It came on me in a flash that, if a man who had been counted dead could come back, it was not impossible that this pleading from beyond the grave, which I'd tried to thwart and ridicule----"

He broke off abruptly. It was the wideness of her eyes that warned him. He was conscious that she, too, was feeling that invisible pressure. She was expecting to see something. He followed the direction of her eyes, glancing behind him into the hollow dimness of the room, where the solitary lamp was burning and the vanished lords of Dawn gazed stonily down from their canvases. In that moment he was aware that he had been stating facts as he had never owned them to himself. It was as though his lips had been used----

"Things that he didn't allow me to suspect!" She sighed shudderingly. "He allowed me to suspect so much. But tell me. What were these things? Since they're the reasons for your visit, they must be important."

"They're only part of the reasons."

"There are others?"

"The chief reason is yourself." He spoke cautiously, fearful lest he might lose her attention by rousing her incredulity. Even to himself it sounded preposterous that he, an outsider, should claim to bear so intimate a message from a husband who was dead. "You believed, Lady Dawn, that you had ceased to count in your husband's affections; yet wherever his battalion went, you were present with us. The men and officers knew you, without knowing who you were. You were with us in the mud of the Somme; you went over the top with us in our attacks. More than one young officer believed himself in love with you. Yours was the last woman's face that many a poor fellow looked upon before he went West. We were an emotional lot. Death made us natural as children. Women meant more to us than they ever had before and than they ever will again, perhaps. The nearness to eternity purged us of impurity. It fired us with a wistful kind of chivalry. The change is hard to express. I've known men, who hadn't a wife or sweetheart, cut strange women's portraits from the illustrated papers and treasure them. As we sit here it sounds a waste of sentiment; out there it seemed tragically pathetic. Every man wanted to believe, even though his believing was a conscious pretense, that there was one woman peculiarly his, who would miss----"

He interrupted himself to glance again across his shoulder, following her eyes where they probed the stealthy shadows. Then he brought his gaze back. "That was how I first learnt to know your face--from the portrait which your husband carried. Into whatever danger he was ordered, you went--you accompanied him in the most real sense: he carried you in his heart. From time to time I got glimpses of you. When he thought no one was looking, he would prop your portrait against the walls of dug-outs with a candle lighted before it, as if you were a saint whom he worshiped. You were the inspiration of his steadfastness to duty. What he did, he did for you. His courage was your courage; his kindness was your kindness. He was striving every minute to be worthy of you. I know of what I'm talking, for I did the same for Terry. Late at night one would stumble down greasy dug-out stairs, coming in from a patrol, to find him lost in thought and gazing at you. Or one would find him covering page after page of letters which he never sent. When he was dying, alone and far out in No Man's Land, he must have drawn out your portrait from next his heart. It was so tightly clasped in his hand when we found him, that we couldn't take it from him. I'd almost forgotten all this until two months ago, when I recognized Sargent's painting of you in your sister's house. Then for the first time I discovered your name and who he was. Since then he's given me no rest."

She had been leaning forward, her arm supported on her knee, her chin cushioned in her hand, the white light from the mist-covered meadows falling softly on her through the tall window, revealing the pulse beating in her throat and the trembling of her thin sweet mouth.

"What was it that he wanted you to do for me, Lord Taborley?"

He hesitated, clasping his forehead, like a man whose memory had suddenly gone blank. "I'm not sure. And yet I was sure before I started talking. Didn't you believe that he died hating you?"

She shook her head. "He left a child by me."

"Then, perhaps it wasn't that he hadn't hated you, but that he'd loved you in his last moments. Was it that which he wanted me to tell you?"

Again, with a gesture, she negatived his suggestion. "He'd never have doubted that I would know he had died loving me."

"Then why did he send me?"

Even while he asked it, he marveled at his certainty that she shared his conviction that he had been sent.

She turned her eyes full on his face and let them dwell there searchingly. As he returned her gaze, he noted that she was less young than he had supposed. She was older than her portrait. Her hair, which had looked night-black in the shadows, was prematurely frosted. The moonlight, strengthening, picked out remorselessly each silver thread. She was no longer capable of putting back the hands of time for any man.

She had read his thoughts. The pride went out of her voice. "Perhaps he sent you," she faltered, "that he might give me back a little of what he took."

"What did he take? Anything that I have----"

She leant back in her chair. Her face was again in shadow. "My youth. My happiness."

In the silence which followed he was aware that the third presence had departed.

IX

"Your youth! Your happiness!" He was astounded. "Strange that you should say that! I thought that I alone was searching."

"Let me talk," she begged. "I want to speak about myself. Not for my own sake, but for yours. To men like you who have lived at the Front, life has become a terribly earnest affair. You're like impatient children; what you want you want quickly. You seem to be afraid to postpone anything lest death should carry you off before your desire has been granted. But you're not really different from women like myself. Crises come to all of us, when life grows desperate--when to be alone becomes intolerable: when everything, even one's pleasures, becomes a burden, because they are unshared. Such a crisis would have come to you sooner or later in any event. It comes to every unmarried man and woman. The war only happened to be the means of bringing home to you your loneliness. When it broke, you didn't have time to choose; you seized on Terry, because she was young and pretty and susceptible. You were terrified by the calamity of being blotted out before you had known love. You forgot that there's a worse calamity--and that's being compelled to live forever with a person for whom you have ceased to care. A man like yourself can have any woman he likes, only any woman wouldn't suit. She would have to be unusual--of a high type like yourself. Such women are rare. The thought of Terry attracts you because a marriage with her would seem to halve your years. But why should you want to halve your years? To have lived ought to mean that you have gained experience, which is the most dearly purchased form of knowledge. Why should you be ashamed of it and so anxious to be rid of it? You purchased your experience with blood. It's the most valuable of all your possessions. And if you were to marry Terry, what could she contribute? A pretty face, an unbroken body and all the intolerance of her youth. A pretty face doesn't go far in matrimony. Husbands soon get used to mere prettiness and learn to look behind it for character. A wife, in order to be your friend, would have to be your equal in her understanding of suffering. How much suffering has a girl like Terry had?"

He wasn't angry. He wasn't even offended. What she had been saying had so clarified his thoughts that it had been as if he had been thinking aloud. Her voice was a dark mirror, glancing into which he had recognized himself. His self-knowledge carried him far beyond any arguments of hers. He sat perfectly still with a face of iron, gazing straight before him.

What he had mistaken for chivalry and romance had been nothing but foolishness. He had been enacting the unwisdom of an infatuated boy with the solemnity of a mature man. His clamor had been unprofitable, undignified, absurd--on a level with the amorous hysterics of Grand Opera, save that it had lacked the redeeming storm of contending music. The utter futility of so much wasted feeling bordered on tragedy; the need which it had expressed had been so primitive, so distressingly sincere. He was confronted with the necessity of confessing that his passion for Terry was at an end.

When had it died? Perhaps only since he had entered this quiet room, with its moonlit landscape, its lowered lights and its wise mistress, sitting so gravely alone with her patient beauty and her gently folded hands. But even before he had entered, it must have been dying. For weeks he had been flogging it, like an over-tired horse, into a feeble display of energy. More than anything, his conduct with Maisie proved that.

Maisie's excuse for the error of her many marriages recurred to him--that Gervis and Lockwood had hung up their hats in her hall. Frivolous, yes! But had he been less frivolous in his treatment of Terry? He had felt the compulsion to concentrate his craving to love and be loved on some special woman! Terry had been handiest, so he'd hung his idolatry on her.

But to acknowledge this implied a fickleness of temperament that was disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into a haggard runaway.

His pride leapt up in his defense. Turning to Lady Dawn, with grim despair he muttered, "But I want her. I can't do without her. I want no one else."

X

Her voice reached him out of the darkness. "To own that we've been mistaken takes more courage than to persist in the wrong direction. 'I want no one else!' We've all said that. It was through saying it that I brought about my shipwreck. But if you're sure that you want no one else, you must have her. If there's any way of getting her for you, I'll do my best to help."

She made an effort to rise. She stood before him swaying, a blinded look on her face, her eyes closed, her hands stretched out. He placed his arm about her. Her weight sagged against him.

"Not the servants," she whispered. "You and I. Give me air."

With his free hand he jerked the catch and pushed the window wide. The cool dampness of the night streamed in on her. He stood there with her clasped against him, her head stretched back, her body drooping. In the bowl of darkness at the foot of the turret, the rose-garden floated. Out of sight, in the green-scummed moat, a fish leapt with a sullen splash. A bird called. Wheels rumbled on a distant road. Again the silence was unbroken. The moonlight, falling on her face, gave to it an expression of childishness. Her breast and throat, gleaming white as marble, reminded him she was a woman.

She stirred. Her eyes opened. She gazed up at him wonderingly. "I'm better. Foolish of me!" Then, inconsequently, "How tall you are, Lord Taborley!"

He supported her till she could lean across the sill. They leant there together, their faces nearly touching. His arm was still about her; she did not seem to notice it. He was dumb with tremulous expectancy.

"It was about myself that I had to tell you," she whispered. "I was once like you. I wanted no one else. I knew, even while I wanted him, that he could never make me happy. Even when I was most in love with him, he had qualities which I distrusted. After marriage the distrusting grew. Yet all the while I was sorry for him. I would have given anything to undo---- His sins were mine. With another woman, less virtuous, he might have been good. In his yearning he tried to drag me down. I couldn't go, not even if going would have saved him. There was something in me, not exactly pride, that prevented. I have never spoken of this to anybody. I'm saying it to you because----"

She broke off. Why was she saying it? The perfume of June roses under moonlight, mingling with the fragrance of her hair, was intoxicating. His arm about her tightened. Was she only allowing him to hold her out of pity because of his confession?

"Because," she said, "I think before she knows of your visit it would be better that you should go."

He failed to grasp her logic. "But if I stay, she will never know."

She released herself gently and gazed at him reproachfully. "Never know! But you came in order that she might know."

He was more than ever puzzled. He had come to tell her of her husband. Did she not believe him? She seemed to be accusing him. He remembered how she had claimed, when he had entered, that she could guess what had brought him. "I came solely to see you," he said, speaking slowly. "I was compelled, as I've told you. I give you my word of honor that my visit wasn't even remotely related to----"