Part 6

Lady Elliston had gathered herself together though still, it was evident, bewildered. "I don't mean to blame Hugh so much. It was your fault, too, I suppose. You asked for the cloister, I know."

"No; I didn't ask for it. I asked to be allowed to go away and hide myself. The cloister, too, was a gift,--like my name, my undishonoured child."

"Dear, dear Amabel," said Lady Elliston, gazing at her, "how beautiful of you to be able to feel like that."

"It isn't I who am beautiful"; Amabel's lips trembled a little now and her eyes filled suddenly with tears. Tears and trembling seemed to bring hardness rather than softening to her face; they were like a chill breeze, like an icy veil, and the face, with its sorrow, was like a winter's landscape.

"He is so beautiful that he would never let anyone know or understand what I owe him: he would never know it himself: there is something simple and innocent about such men: they do beautiful things unconsciously. You know him well: you are far nearer him than I am: but you can't know what the beauty is, for you have never been helpless and disgraced and desperate nor needed anyone to lift you up. No one can know as I do the angel in my husband."

Lady Elliston sat silent. She received Amabel's statements steadily yet with a little wincing, as though they had been bullets whistling past her head; they would not pierce, if one did not move; yet an involuntary compression of the lips and flutter of the eyelids revealed a rather rigid self-mastery. Only after the silence had grown long did she slightly stir, move her hand, turn her head with a deep, careful breath, and then say, almost timidly; "Then, he has lifted you up, Amabel?--You are happy, really happy, in your strange life?"

Amabel looked down. The force of her vindicating ardour had passed from her. With the question the hunted, haunted present flooded in. Happy? Yesterday she might have answered "yes," so far away had the past seemed, so forgotten the fear in which she had learned to breathe. Today the past was with her and the fear pressed heavily upon her heart. She answered in a sombre voice: "With my past what woman could be happy. It blights everything."

"Oh--but Amabel--" Lady Elliston breathed forth. She leaned forward, then moved back, withdrawing the hand impulsively put out.--"Why?--Why?--" she gently urged. "It is all over: all passed: all forgotten. Don't--ah don't let it blight anything."

"Oh no," said Amabel, shaking her head. "It isn't over; it isn't forgotten; it never will be. Hugh cannot forget--though he has forgiven. And someday, I feel it, Augustine will know. Then I shall drink the cup of shame to the last drop."

"Oh!--" said Lady Elliston, as if with impatience. She checked herself. "What can I say?--if you will think of yourself in this preposterous way.--As for Augustine, he does not know and how should he ever know? How could he, when no one in the world knows but you and I and Hugh."

She paused at that, looking at Amabel's downcast face. "You notice what I say, Amabel?"

"Yes; that isn't it. He will guess."

"You are morbid, my poor child.--But do you notice nothing when I say that only we three know?"

Amabel looked up. Lady Elliston met her eyes. "I came today to tell you, Amabel. I felt sure you did not know. There is no reason at all, now, why you should dread coming out into the world--with Augustine. You need fear no meetings. You did not know that he was dead."

"He?"

"Yes. He. Paul Quentin."

Amabel, gazing at her, said nothing.

"He died in Italy, last week. He was married, you know, quite happily; an ordinary sort of person; she had money; he rather let his work go. But they were happy; a large family; a villa on a hill somewhere; pictures, bric-a-brac and bohemian intellectualism. You knew of his marriage?"

"Yes; I knew."

The tears had risen to Lady Elliston's eyes before that stricken, ashen face; she looked away, murmuring: "I wanted to tell you, when we were alone. It might have come as such an ugly shock, if you were unprepared. But, now, there is no danger anymore. And you will come out, Amabel?"

"No;--never.--It was never that."

"But what was it then?"

Amabel had risen and was looking around her blindly.

"It was.--I have no place but here.--Forgive me--I must go. I can't talk any more."

"Yes; go; do go and lie down." Lady Elliston, rising too, put an arm around her shoulders and took her hand. "I'll come again and see you. I am going up to town for a night or so on Tuesday, but I bring Peggy down here for the next week-end. I'll see you then.--Ah, here is Augustine, and tea. He will give me my tea and you must sleep off your headache. Your poor mother has a very bad headache, Augustine. I have tried her. Goodbye, dear, go and rest."

VI

An hour ago Augustine had found his mother in tears; now he found her beyond them. He gave her his arm, and, outside in the hall, prepared to mount the stairs with her; but, shaking her head, trying, with miserable unsuccess, to smile, she pointed him back to the drawing-room and to his duties of host.

"Ah, she is very tired. She does not look well," said Lady Elliston. "I am glad to see that you take good care of her."

"She is usually very well," said Augustine, standing over the tea-tray that had been put on the table between him and Lady Elliston. "Let's see: what do you have? Sugar? milk?"

"No sugar; milk, please. It's such a great pleasure to me to meet your mother again."

Augustine made no reply to this, handing her her cup and the plate of bread and butter.

"She was one of the loveliest girls I have ever seen," Lady Elliston went on, helping herself. "She looked like a Madonna--and a cowslip.--And she looks like that more than ever." She had paused for a moment as an uncomfortable recollection came to her. It was Paul Quentin who had said that: at her house.

"Yes," Augustine assented, pleased, "she does look like a cowslip; she is so pale and golden and tranquil. It's funny you should say so," he went on, "for I've often thought it; but with me it's an association of ideas, too. Those meadows over there, beyond our lawn, are full of cowslips in Spring and ever since I can remember we have picked them there together."

"How sweet"; Lady Elliston was still a little confused, by her blunder, and by his words. "What a happy life you and your mother must have had, cloistered here. I've been telling your mother that it's like a cloister. I've been scolding her a little for shutting herself up in it. And now that I have this chance of talking to you I do very much want to say that I hope you will bring her out a little more."

"Bring her out? Where?" Augustine inquired.

"Into the world--the world she is so fitted to adorn. It's ridiculous this--this fad of hers," said Lady Elliston.

"Is it a fad?" Augustine asked, but with at once a lightness and distance of manner.

"Of course. And it is bad for anyone to be immured."

"I don't think it has been bad for her. Perhaps this is more the world than you think."

"I only mean bad in the sense of sad."

"Isn't the world sad?"

"What a strange young man you are. Do you really mean to say that you like to see your mother--your beautiful, lovely mother--imprisoned in this gloomy place and meeting nobody from one year's end to the other?"

"I have said nothing at all about my likes," said Augustine, smiling.

Lady Elliston gazed at him. He startled her almost as much as his mother had done. What a strange young man, indeed; what strange echoes of his father and mother in him. But she had to grope for the resemblances to Paul Quentin; they were there; she felt them; but they were difficult to see; while it was easy to see the resemblances to Amabel. His father was like a force, a fierceness in him, controlled and guided by an influence that was his mother. And where had he found, at nineteen, that assurance, an assurance without his father's vanity or his mother's selflessness? Paul Quentin had been assured because he was so absolutely sure of his own value; Amabel was assured because, in her own eyes, she was valueless; this young man seemed to be without self-reference or self-effacement; but he was quite self-assured. Had he some mental talisman by which he accurately gauged all values, his own included? He seemed at once so oddly above yet of the world. She pulled herself together to remember that he was, only, nineteen, and that she had had motives in coming, and that if these motives had been good they were now better.

"You have said nothing; but I am going to ask you to say something"; she smiled back at him. "I am going to ask you to say that you will take me on trust. I am your friend and your mother's friend."

"Since when, my mother's?" Augustine asked. His amiability of aspect remained constant.

"Since twenty years."

"Twenty years in which you have not seen your friend."

"I know that that looks strange. But when one shuts oneself away into a cloister one shuts out friends."

"Does one?"

"You won't trust me?"

"I don't know anything about you, except that you have made my mother ill and that you want something of me."

"My dear young man I, at all events, know one thing about you very clearly, and that is that I trust you."

"I want nothing of you," said Augustine, but he still smiled, so that his words did not seem discourteous.

"Nothing? Really nothing? I am your mother's friend, and you want nothing of me? I have sought her out; I came today to see and understand; I have not made her ill; she was nearly crying when we came into the room, you and I, a little while ago. What I see and understand makes me sad and angry. And I believe that you, too, see and understand; I believe that you, too, are sad and angry. And I want to help you. I want you, when you come into the world, as you must, to bring your mother. I'll be waiting there for you both. I am a sort of fairy-godmother. I want to see justice done."

"I suppose you mean that you are angry with my father and want to see justice done on him," said Augustine after a pause.

Again Lady Elliston sat suddenly still, as if another, an unexpected bullet, had whizzed past her. "What makes you say that?" she asked after a moment.

"What you have said and what you have seen. He had been making her cry," said Augustine. He was still calm, but now, under the calm, she heard, like the thunder of the sea in caverns deep beneath a placid headland, the muffled sound of a hidden, a dark indignation.

"Yes," she said, looking into his eyes; "that made me angry; and that he should take all her money from her, as I am sure he does, and leave her to live like this."

Augustine's colour rose. He turned away his eyes and seemed to ponder.

"I do want something of you, after all; the answer to one question," he said at last. "Is it because of him that she is cloistered here?"

In a flash Lady Elliston had risen to her emergency, her opportunity. She was grave, she was ready, and she was very careful.

"It was her own choice," she said.

Augustine pondered again. He, too, was grave and careful She saw how, making use of her proffered help, he yet held her at a distance. "That does not answer my question," he said. "I will put it in another way. Is it because of some evil in his life that she is cloistered?"

Lady Elliston sat before him in one of the high-backed chairs; the light was behind her: the delicate oval of her face maintained its steady attitude: in the twilit room Augustine could see her eyes fixed very strangely upon him. She, too, was perhaps pondering. When at last she spoke, she rose in speaking, as if her answer must put an end to their encounter, as if he must feel, as well as she, that after her answer there could be no further question.

"Not altogether, for that," she said; "but, yes, in part it is because of what you would call an evil in his life that she is cloistered."

Augustine walked with her to the door and down the stone passage outside, where a strip of faded carpet hardly kept one's feet from the cold. He was nearer to her in this curious moment of their parting than he had been at all. He liked Lady Elliston in her last response; it was not the wish to see justice wreaked that had made it; it was mere truth.

When they had reached the hall door, he opened it for her and in the fading light he saw that she was very pale. The Grey's dog-cart was going slowly round and round the gravel drive. Lady Elliston did not look at him. She stood waiting for the groom to see her.

"What you asked me was asked in confidence," she said; "and what I have told you is told in confidence."

"It wasn't new to me; I had guessed it," said Augustine. "But your confirmation of what I guessed is in confidence."

"I have been your father's life-long friend," said Lady Elliston; "He is not an evil man."

"I understand. I don't misjudge him."

"I don't want to see justice done on him," said Lady Elliston. The groom had seen her and the dog-cart, with a brisk rattle of wheels, drew up to the door. "It isn't a question of that; I only want to see justice done _for_ her."

All through she had been steady; now she was sweet again. "I want to free her. I want you to free her. And--whenever you do--I shall be waiting to give her to the world again."

They looked at each other now and Augustine could answer, with another smile; "You are the world, I suppose."

"Yes; I am the world," she accepted. "The actual fairy-godmother, with a magic wand that can turn pumpkins into coaches and put Cinderellas into their proper places."

Augustine had handed her up to her seat beside the groom. He tucked her rug about her. If he had laid aside anything to meet her on her own ground, he, too, had regained it now.

"But does the world always know what _is_ the proper place?" was his final remark as she drove off.

She did not know that she could have found an answer to it.

VII

Amabel was sitting beside her window when her son came in and the face she turned on him was white and rigid.

"My dear mother," said Augustine, coming up to her, "how pale you are."

She had been sitting there for all that time, tearless, in a stupor of misery. Yes, she answered him, she was very tired.

Augustine stood over her looking out of the window. "A little walk wouldn't do you good?" he asked.

No, she answered, her head ached too badly.

She could find nothing to say to him: the truth that lay so icily upon her heart was all that she could have said: "I am your guilty mother. I robbed you of your father. And your father is dead, unmourned, unloved, almost forgotten by me." For that was the poison in her misery, to know that for Paul Quentin she felt almost nothing. To hear that he had died was to hear that a ghost had died.

What would Augustine say to her if the truth were spoken? It was now a looming horror between them. It shut her from him and it shut him away.

"Oh, do come out," said Augustine after a moment: "the evening's so fine: it will do you good; and there's still a bit of sunset to be seen."

She shook her head, looking away from him.

"Is it really so bad as that?"

"Yes; very bad."

"Can't I do anything? Get you anything?"

"No, thank you."

"I'm so sorry," said Augustine, and, suddenly, but gravely, deliberately, he stooped and kissed her.

"Oh--don't!--don't!" she gasped. She thrust him away, turning her face against the chair. "Don't: you must leave me.--I am so unhappy."

The words sprang forth: she could not repress them, nor the gush of miserable tears.

If Augustine was horrified he was silent. He stood leaning over her for a moment and then went out of the room.

She lay fallen in her chair, weeping convulsively. The past was with her; it had seized her and, in her panic-stricken words, it had thrust her child away. What would happen now? What would Augustine say? What would he ask? If he said nothing and asked nothing, what would he think?

She tried to gather her thoughts together, to pray for light and guidance; but, like a mob of blind men locked out from sanctuary, the poor, wild thoughts only fled about outside the church and fumbled at the church door. Her very soul seemed shut against her.

She roused herself at last, mechanically telling herself that she must go through with it; she must dress and go down to dinner and she must find something to say to Augustine, something that would make what had happened to them less sinister and inexplicable.

--Unless--it seemed like a mad cry raised by one of the blind men in the dark,--unless she told him all, confessed all; her guilt, her shame, the truths of her blighted life. She shuddered; she cowered as the cry came to her, covering her ears and shutting it out. It was mad, mad. She had not strength for such a task, and if that were weakness--oh, with a long breath she drew in the mitigation--if it were weakness, would it not be a cruel, a heartless strength that could blight her child's life too, in the name of truth. She must not listen to the cry. Yet strangely it had echoed in her, almost as if from within, not from without, the dark, deserted church; almost as if her soul, shut in there in the darkness, were crying out to her. She turned her mind from the sick fancy.

Augustine met her at dinner. He was pale but he seemed composed. They spoke little. He said, in answer to her questioning, that he had quite liked Lady Elliston; yes, they had had a nice talk; she seemed very friendly; he should go and see her when he next went up to London.

Amabel felt the crispness in his voice but, centered as she was in her own self-mastery, she could not guess at the degree of his.

After dinner they went into the drawing-room, where the old, ugly lamp added its light to the candles on the mantel-piece.

Augustine took his book and sat down at one side of the table. Amabel sat at the other. She, too, took a book and tried to read; a little time passed and then she found that her hands were trembling so much that she could not. She slid the book softly back upon the table, reaching out for her work-bag. She hoped Augustine had not seen, but, glancing up at him, she saw his eyes upon her.

Augustine's eyes looked strange tonight. The dark rims around the iris seemed to have expanded. Suddenly she felt horribly afraid of him.

They gazed at each other, and she forced herself to a trembling, meaningless smile. And when she smiled at him he sprang up and came to her. He leaned over her, and she shrank back into her chair, shutting her eyes.

"You must tell me the truth," said Augustine. "I can't bear this. _He_ has made you unhappy.--_He_ comes between us."

She lay back in the darkness, hearing the incredible words.

"He?--What do you mean?"

"He is a bad man. And he makes you miserable. And you love him."

She heard the nightmare: she could not look at it.

"My husband bad? He is good, more good than you can guess. What do you mean by speaking so?"

With closed eyes, shutting him out, she spoke, anger and terror in her voice.

Augustine lifted himself and stood with his hands clenched looking at her.

"You say that because you love him. You love him more than anything or anyone in the world."

"I do. I love him more than anyone or anything in the world. How have you dared--in silence--in secret--to nourish these thoughts against the man who has given you all you have."

"He hasn't given me all I have. You are everything in my life and he is nothing. He is selfish. He is sensual. He is stupid. He doesn't know what beauty or goodness is. I hate him," said Augustine.

Her eyes at last opened on him. She grasped her chair and raised herself. Whose hands were these, desecrating her holy of holies. Her son's? Was it her son who spoke these words? An enemy stood before her.

"Then you do not love me. If you hate him you do not love me,"--her anger had blotted out her fear, but she could find no other than these childish words and the tears ran down her face.

"And if you love him you cannot love me," Augustine answered. His self-mastery was gone. It was a fierce, wild anger that stared back at her. His young face was convulsed and livid.

"It is you who are bad to have such false, base thoughts!" his mother cried, and her eyes in their indignation, their horror, struck at him, accused him, thrust him forth. "You are cruel--and hard--and self-righteous.--You do not love me.--There is no tenderness in your heart!"--

Augustine burst into tears. "There is no room in your heart for me!--" he gasped. He turned from her and rushed out of the room.

* * * * *

A long time passed before she leaned forward in the chair where she had sat rigidly, rested her elbows on her knees, buried her face in her hands.

Her heart ached and her mind was empty: that was all she knew. It had been too much. This torpor of sudden weakness was merciful. Now she would go to bed and sleep.

It took her a long time to go upstairs; her head whirled, and if she had not clung to the baluster she would have fallen.

In the passage above she paused outside Augustine's door and listened. She heard him move inside, walking to his window, to lean out into the night, probably, as was his wont. That was well. He, too, would sleep presently.

In her room she said to her maid that she did not need her. It took her but a few minutes tonight to prepare for bed. She could not even braid her uncoiled hair. She tossed it, all loosened, above her head as she fell upon the pillow.