Part 9

"He is not noble," Lady Elliston repeated. "I will not have you waste your love as you have wasted your life. I will not have this illusion of his nobility come between you and your son. I will not have him come near you with his love. He is not noble, he is not generous, he is not beautiful. He could not have got rid of you. And he came to you with his love yesterday because his last mistress has thrown him over--and he must have a mistress. I know him: I know all about him: and you don't know him at all. Your husband was my lover for over twenty years."

A long silence followed her words. It was again a strange picture of arrested life in the dark room. The light fell quietly upon the two faces, their stillness, their contemplation--it seemed hardly more intent than contemplation, that drinking gaze of Amabel's; the draught of wonder was too deep for pain or passion, and Lady Elliston's eyes yielded, offered, held firm the cup the other drank. And the silence grew so long that it was as if the twenty years flowed by while they gazed upon each other.

It was Lady Elliston's face that first showed change. She might have been the cup-bearer tossing aside the emptied cup, seeing in the slow dilation of the victim's eyes, the constriction of lips and nostrils, that it had held poison. All--all had been drunk to the last drop. Death seemed to gaze from the dilated eyes.

"Oh--my poor Amabel--" Lady Elliston murmured; her face was stricken with pity.

Amabel spoke in the cramped voice of mortal anguish.--"Before he married me."

"Yes," Lady Elliston nodded, pitiful, but unflinching. "He married you for your money, and because you were a sweet, good, simple child who would not interfere."

"And he could not have divorced me, because of you."

"Because of me. You know the law; one guilty person can't divorce another. No one knew: no one has ever known: he and Jack have remained the best of friends:--but, of course, with all our care, it's been suspected, whispered. If I'd been less powerful the whispers might have blighted me: as it was, we thought that Bertram wasn't altogether unsuspecting. Hugh knew that it would be fatal to bring the matter into court;--I will say for Hugh that, in spite of the money, he wanted to. He could have married money again. He has always been extremely captivating. When he found that he would have to keep you, the money, of course, did atone. I suppose he has had most of your money by now," said Lady Elliston.

Amabel shut her eyes. "Wasn't he even sorry for me?" she asked.

Lady Elliston reflected and a glitter was in her eye; vengeance as well as justice armed her. "He is not unkind," she conceded: "and he was sorry after a fashion: 'Poor little girl,' I remember he said. Yes, he was very tolerant. But he didn't think of you at all, unless he wanted money. He is always graceful in his direct relations with people; he is tactful and sympathetic and likes things to be pleasant. But he doesn't mind breaking your heart if he doesn't have to see you while he is doing it. He is kind, but he is as hard as steel," said Lady Elliston.

"Then you do not love him any longer," said Amabel. It was not a question, only a farther acceptance.

And now, after only the slightest pause, Lady Elliston proved how deep, how unflinching was her courage. She had guarded her illicit passion all her life; she revealed it now. "I do love him," she said. "I have never loved another man. It is he who doesn't love me."

From the black depths where she seemed to swoon and float, like a drowsy, drowning thing, the hard note of misery struck on Amabel's ear. She opened her eyes and looked at Lady Elliston. Power, freedom, passion: it was not these that looked back at her from the bereft and haggard eyes. "After twenty years he has grown tired," Lady Elliston said; and her candour seemed as inevitable as Amabel's had been: each must tell the other everything; a common bond of suffering was between them and a common bond of love, though love so differing. "I knew, of course, that he was often unfaithful to me; he is a libertine; but I was the centre; he always came back to me.--I saw the end approaching about five years ago. I fought--oh how warily--so that he shouldn't dream I was afraid;--it is fatal for a woman to let a man know she is afraid,--the brutes, the cruel brutes,"--said Lady Elliston;--"how we love them for their fear and pleading; how our fear and pleading hardens them against us." Her lips trembled and the tears ran down her cheeks. "I never pleaded; I never showed that I saw the change. I kept him, for years, by my skill. But the odds were too great at last. It was a year ago that he told me he didn't care any more. He was troubled, a little embarrassed, but quite determined that I shouldn't bother him. Since then it has been another woman. I know her; I meet her everywhere; very beautiful; very young; only married for three years; a heartless, rapacious creature. Hugh has nearly ruined himself in paying her jeweller's bills and her debts at bridge. And already she has thrown him over. It happened only the other day. I knew it was happening when I saw him here. I was glad, Amabel; I longed for him to suffer; and he will. He is a libertine of most fastidious tastes and he will not find many more young and beautiful women, of his world, to run risks for him. He, too, is getting old. And he has gone through nearly all his own money--and yours. Things will soon be over for him.--Oh--but--I love him--I love him--and everything is over for me.--How can I bear it!"

She bent forward on her knees and convulsive sobs shook her.

Her words seemed to Amabel to come to her from a far distance; they echoed in her, yet they were not the words she could have used. How dim was her own love-dream beside this torment of dispossession. What--who--had she loved for all these years? She could not touch or see her own grief; but Lady Elliston's grief pierced through her. She leaned towards her and softly touched her shoulder, her arm, her hand; she held the hand in hers. The sight of this loss of strength and dignity was an actual pain; her own pain was something elusive and unsubstantial; it wandered like a ghost vainly seeking an embodiment.

"Oh, you angel--you poor angel!" moaned Lady Elliston. "There: that's enough of crying; it can't bring back my youth.--What a fool I am. If only I could learn to think of myself as free instead of maimed and left by the wayside. It is hard to live without love if one has always had it.--But I have freed you, Amabel. I am glad of that. It has been a cruel, but a right thing to do. He shall not come to you with his shameless love; he shall not come between you and your boy. You shan't misplace your worship so. It is Augustine who is beautiful and noble; it is Augustine who loves you. You aren't maimed and forsaken; thank heaven for that, dear."

Lady Elliston had risen. Strong again, she faced her life, took up the reins, not a trace of scruple or of shame about her. It did not enter her mind to ask Amabel for forgiveness, to ask if she were despised or shrunk from: it did not enter Amabel's mind to wonder at the omission. She looked up at her guest and her lifted face seemed that of the drowned creature floating to the surface of the water.

"Tell me, Amabel," Lady Elliston suddenly pleaded, "this is not going to blacken things for you; you won't let it blacken things. You will live; you will leave your prison and come out into the world, with your splendid boy, and live."

Amabel slightly shook her head.

"Oh, why do you say that? Has it hurt so horribly?"

Amabel seemed to make the effort to think what it had done. She did not know. The ghost wailed; but she could not see its form.

"Did you care--so tremendously--about him?"--Lady Elliston asked, and her voice trembled. And, for answer, the drowned eyes looked up at her through strange, cold tears.

"Oh, my dear, my dear," Lady Elliston murmured. Her hand was still in Amabel's and she stood there beside her, her hand so held, for a long, silent moment. They had looked away from each other.

And in the silence each knew that it was the end and that they would see each other no more. They lived in different planets, under different laws; they could understand, they could trust; but a deep, transparent chasm, like that of the ether flowing between two divided worlds, made them immeasurably apart.

Yet, when she at last gently released Amabel's hand, drawing her own away. Lady Elliston said: "But,--won't you come out now?"

"Out? Where?" Amabel asked, in the voice of that far distance.

"Into the world, the great, splendid world."

"Splendid?"

"Splendid, if you choose to seize it and take what it has to give."

After a moment Amabel asked: "Has it given you so much?"

Lady Elliston looked at her from across the chasm; it was not dark, it held no precipices; it was made up only of distance. Lady Elliston saw; but she was loyal to her own world. "Yes, it has," she said. "I've lived; you have dreamed your life away. You haven't even a reality to mourn the loss of."

"No," Amabel said; she closed her eyes and turned her head away against the chair; "No; I have lived too. Don't pity me."

X

It was past five when Augustine came into the empty drawing-room. Tea was standing waiting, and had been there, he saw, for some time. He rang and asked the maid to tell Lady Channice. Lady Channice, he heard, was lying down and wanted no tea. Lady Elliston had gone half an hour before. After a moment or two of deliberation, Augustine sat down and made tea for himself. That was soon over. He ate nothing, looking with a vague gaze of repudiation at the plate of bread and butter and the cooling scones.

When tea had been taken away he walked up and down the room quickly, pausing now and then for further deliberation. But he decided that he would not go up to his mother. He went on walking for a long time. Then he took a book and read until the dressing-bell for dinner rang.

When he went upstairs to dress he paused outside his mother's door, as she had paused outside his, and listened. He heard no sound. He stood still there for some moments before lightly rapping on the door. "Who is it?" came his mother's voice. "I; Augustine. How are you? You are coming down?"

"Not tonight," she answered; "I have a very bad headache."

"But let me have something sent up." After a moment his mother's voice said very sweetly; "Of course, dear." And she added "I shall be all right tomorrow."

The voice sounded natural--yet not quite natural; too natural, perhaps, Augustine reflected. Its tone remained with him as something disturbing and prolonged itself in memory like a familiar note strung to a queer, forced pitch, that vibrated on and on until it hurt.

After his solitary meal he took up his book again in the drawing-room. He read with effort and concentration, his brows knotted; his young face, thus controlled to stern attention, was at once vigilant for outer impressions and absorbed in the inner interest. Once or twice he looked up, as a coal fell with a soft crash from the fire, as a thin creeper tapped sharply on the window pane. His mother's room was above the drawing-room and while he read he was listening; but he heard no footsteps.

Suddenly, dim, yet clear, came another sound, a sound familiar, though so rare; wheels grinding on the gravel drive at the other side of the house. Then, loud and startling at that unaccustomed hour, the old hall bell clanged through the house.

Augustine found himself leaning forward, breathing quickly, his book half-closed. At first he did not know what he was listening for or why his body should be tingling with excitement and anger. He knew a moment later. There was a step in the hall, a voice. All his life Augustine had known them, had waited for them, had hated them. Sir Hugh was back again.

Of course he was back again, soon,--as he had promised in the tone of mastery. But his mother had told him not to come; she had told him not to come, and in a tone that meant more than his. Did he not know?--Did he not understand?

"No, dear Hugh, not soon.--I will write."--Augustine sprang to his feet as he entered the room.

Sir Hugh had been told that he would not find his wife. His face wore its usual look of good-temper, but it wore more than its usual look of indifference for his wife's son. "Ah, tell Lady Channice, will you," he said over his shoulder to the maid. "How d'ye do, Augustine:" and, as usual, he strolled up to the fire.

Augustine watched him as he crossed the room and said nothing. The maid had closed the door. From his wonted place Sir Hugh surveyed the young man and Augustine surveyed him.

"You know, my dear fellow," said Sir Hugh presently, lifting the sole of his boot to the fire, "you've got devilish bad manners. You are devilishly impertinent, I may tell you."

Augustine received the reproof without comment.

"You seem to imagine," Sir Hugh went on, "that you have some particular right to bad manners and impertinence here, in this house; but you're mistaken; I belong here as well as you do; and you'll have to accept the fact."

A convulsive trembling, like his mother's, passed over the young man's face; but whereas only Amabel's hands and body trembled, it was the muscles of Augustine's lips, nostrils and brows that were affected, and to see the strength of his face so shaken was disconcerting, painful.

"You don't belong here while I'm here," he said, jerking the words out suddenly. "This is my mother's home--and mine;--but as soon as you make it insufferable for us we can leave it."

"_You_ can; that's quite true," Sir Hugh nodded.

Augustine stood clenching his hands on his book. Now, unconscious of what he did, he grasped the leaves and wrenched them back and forth as he stood silent, helpless, desperate, before the other's intimation. Sir Hugh watched the unconscious violence with interest.

"Yes," he went on presently, and still with good temper; "if you make yourself insufferable--to your mother and me--you can go. Not that I want to turn you out. It rests with you. Only, you must see that you behave. I won't have you making her wretched."

Augustine glanced dangerously at him.

"Your mother and I have come to an understanding--after a great many years of misunderstanding," said Sir Hugh, putting up the other sole. "I'm--very fond of your mother,--and she is,--very fond of me."

"She doesn't know you," said Augustine, who had become livid while the other made his gracefully hesitant statement.

"Doesn't know me?" Sir Hugh lifted his brows in amused inquiry; "My dear boy, what do you know about that, pray? You are not in all your mother's secrets."

Augustine was again silent for a moment, and he strove for self-mastery. "If I am not in my mother's secrets," he said, "she is not in yours. She does not know you. She doesn't know what sort of a man you are. You have deceived her. You have made her think that you are reformed and that the things in your life that made her leave you won't come again. But whether you are reformed or not a man like you has no right to come near a woman like my mother. I know that you are an evil man," said Augustine, his face trembling more and more uncontrollably; "And my mother is a saint."

Sir Hugh stared at him. Then he burst into a shout of laughter. "You young fool!" he said.

Augustine's eyes were lightnings in a storm-swept sky.

"You young fool," Sir Hugh repeated, not laughing, a heavier stress weighting each repeated word.

"Can you deny," said Augustine, "that you have always led a dissolute life? If you do deny it it won't help you. I know it: and I've not needed the echoes to tell me. I've always felt it in you. I've always known you were evil."

"What if I don't deny it?" Sir Hugh inquired.

Augustine was silent, biting his quivering lips.

"What if I don't deny it?" Sir Hugh repeated. His assumption of good-humour was gone. He, too, was scowling now. "What have you to say then?"

"By heaven,--I say that you shall not come near my mother."

"And what if it was not because of my dissolute life she left me? What if you've built up a cock-and-bull romance that has no relation to reality in your empty young head? What then? Ask your mother if she left me because of my dissolute life," said Sir Hugh.

The book in Augustine's wrenching hands had come apart with a crack and crash. He looked down at it stupidly.

"You really should learn to control yourself--in every direction, my dear boy," Sir Hugh remarked. "Now, unless you would like to wreak your temper on the furniture, I think you had better sit down and be still. I should advise you to think over the fact that saints have been known before now to forgive sinners. And sinners may not be so bad as your innocence imagines. Goodbye. I am going up to see your mother. I am going to spend the night here."

Augustine stood holding the shattered book. He gazed as stupidly at Sir Hugh as he had gazed at it. He gazed while Sir Hugh, who kept a rather wary eye fixed on him, left the fire and proceeded with a leisurely pace to cross the room: the door was reached and the handle turned, before the stupor broke. Sir Hugh, his eyes still fixed on his antagonist, saw the blanched fury, the start, as if the dazed body were awakening to some insufferable torture, saw the gathering together, the leap:--"You fool--you young fool!" he ground between his teeth as, with a clash of the half-opened door, Augustine pinned him upon it. "Let me go. Do you hear. Let me go." His voice was the voice of the lion-tamer, hushed before danger to a quelling depth of quiet.

And like the young lion, drawing long breaths through dilated-nostrils, Augustine growled back:--"I will not--I will not.--You shall not go to her. I would rather kill you."

"Kill me?" Sir Hugh smiled. "It would be a fight first, you know."

"Then let it be a fight. You shall not go to her."

"And what if she wants me to go to her.--Will you kill her first, too--"--The words broke. Augustine's hand was on his throat. Sir Hugh seized him. They writhed together against the door. "You mad-man!--You damned mad-man!--Your mother is in love with me.--I'll put you out of her life--"--Sir Hugh grated forth from the strangling clutch.

Suddenly, as they writhed, panting, glaring their hatred at each other, the door they leaned on pushed against them. Someone outside was turning the handle, was forcing it open. And, as if through the shocks and flashes of a blinding, deafening tempest, Augustine heard his mother's voice, very still, saying: "Let me come in."

XI

They fell apart and moved back into the room. Amabel entered. She wore a long white dressing-gown that, to her son's eyes, made her more than ever look her sainted self; she had dressed hastily, and, on hearing the crash below, she had wrapped a white scarf about her head and shoulders, covering her unbound hair. So framed and narrowed her face was that of a shrouded corpse: the same strange patience stamped it; her eyes, only, seemed to live, and they, too, were patient and ready for any doom.

Quietly she had closed the door, and standing near it now she looked at them; her eyes fell for a moment upon Sir Hugh; then they rested on Augustine and did not leave him.

Sir Hugh spoke first. He laughed a little, adjusting his collar and tie.

"My dear,--you've saved my life. Augustine was going to batter my brains out on the door, I fancy."

She did not look at him, but at Augustine.

"He's really dangerous, your son, you know. Please don't leave me alone with him again," Sir Hugh smiled and pleaded; it was with almost his own lightness, but his face still twitched with anger.

"What have you said to him?" Amabel asked.

Augustine's eyes were drawing her down into their torment.--Unfortunate one.--That presage of her maternity echoed in her now. His stern young face seemed to have been framed, destined from the first for this foreseen misery.

Sir Hugh had pulled himself together. He looked at the mother and son. And he understood her fear.

He went to her, leaned over her, a hand above her shoulder on the door. He reassured and protected her; and, truly, in all their story, it had never been with such sincerity and grace.

"Dearest, it's nothing. I've merely had to defend my rights. Will you assure this young firebrand that my misdemeanours didn't force you to leave me. That there were misdemeanours I don't deny; and of course you are too good for the likes of me; but your coming away wasn't my fault, was it.--That's what I've said.--And that saints forgive sinners, sometimes.--That's all I want you to tell him."

Amabel still gazed into her son's eyes. It seemed to her, now that she must shut herself out from it for ever, that for the first time in all her life she saw his love.

It broke over her; it threatened and commanded her; it implored and supplicated--ah the supplication beyond words or tears!--Selflessness made it stern. It was for her it threatened; for her it prayed.

All these years the true treasure had been there beside her, while she worshipped at the spurious shrine. Only her sorrow, her solicitude had gone out to her son; the answering love that should have cherished and encompassed him flowed towards its true goal only when it was too late. He could not love her when he knew.

And he was to know. That had come to her clearly and unalterably while she had leaned, half fallen, half kneeling, against her bed, dying, it seemed to her, to all that she had known of life or hope.

But all was not death within her. In the long, the deadly stupor, her power to love still lived. It had been thrown back from its deep channel and, wave upon wave, it seemed heaped upon itself in some narrow abyss, tormented and shuddering; and at last by its own strength, rather than by thought or prayer of hers, it had forced an outlet.

It was then as if she found herself once more within the church. Darkness, utter darkness was about her; but she was prostrated before the unseen altar. She knew herself once more, and with herself she knew her power to love.