CHAPTER III.

MRS. WYLIE TAKES THE OFFENSIVE.

When Mrs. Wylie returned to the breakfast-room, she found that Brenda was preparing to write. A blank telegram-form lay on the blotting-pad in readiness.

'We must telegraph to Alice,' she said briskly, as she dipped a quill pen into the ink. 'What shall I say?'

Mrs. Wylie noticed the quill pen, and remembered that the girl never used anything but steel.

'Do not be in a hurry,' she urged rather coolly. 'Let us think what is best to be done. Let us have some breakfast.'

'I don't think I want any breakfast.'

'I am sure I do not, but I am going to eat some. Breakfast means _nerve_, Brenda, and we shall want all our nerve for the next few days.'

Reluctantly the girl took her place at the table. Her companion was relentless; moreover, she was aggravatingly placid, even to speculation.

'There are some lives,' she said, 'which seem to be allowed as a warning and lesson to the rest of us. No doubt it is very instructive to the onlookers; but I am sometimes a little sorry for the examples themselves.'

Brenda looked up, and presently resumed her pretence of eating.

'I am afraid,' she said, 'that his was not a very happy life. If he had the opportunity of living it over again ... I doubt ... whether he would accept it, I mean.'

'Oh,' returned the elder lady with remarkable conviction, 'none of us would do that!'

Brenda showed no disposition to stray off into generalities.

'Did you,' she asked quietly, 'really mean what you said just now about Alice? Is it your honest opinion that she loved Alfred Huston through it all?'

Mrs. Wylie sipped her tea meditatively.

'There are,' she answered after a pause, '... there are, I am afraid, some women who go through their lives without ever achieving the power of loving truly and wholly. It sometimes seems to me that Alice is one of them. They enjoy as others do, and they endure; but love is neither enjoyment nor endurance. It is a speciality, and the women who possess it (though they be called coquettes, flirts, wantons) are the salt of the earth. Alice came as near loving Alfred Huston as she will ever be to loving anyone beyond herself.'

'You think so?' in a curious monotone.

'Yes; I do.'

'I ... _don't_,' said Brenda.

'Ah! then you follow the majority, which, by the way, is composed of mere casual observers?'

'I do not know that I follow the majority; but I am of opinion that Alice has never loved Alfred Huston, because there was someone else.'

'That _is_ following the majority,' observed Mrs. Wylie complacently.

'And,' continued the girl in a hard voice, 'that other person is Theo Trist.'

'Majority,' murmured the widow sweetly.

'Even,' continued Brenda after a little pause, 'if things are as you say, it is horribly sad, and there is no alleviation. It is very hard that Alice should only realize now that she loved him. The rest of her life will be ... what _will_ it be?'

'I believe,' answered the older woman, with that practical philosophy which seems to be a growth of years only, 'that Alice loved him as much as lay in her nature. I am afraid, my dear, that your sister is incapable of a great and lasting passion, such as is usually considered desirable, although it invariably wrecks a life or two.'

'Very few people understand Alice.'

'And fewer still are ready to make her the slightest allowance. She began life with an initial mistake--namely, that a beautiful girl can marry any man she may choose. This error is very wide-spread; but, my dear, I have never watched the career of a beautiful girl without discovering, sooner or later, that in reality her choice is remarkably small. After weeding out impossibilities, setting aside improbabilities, and getting rid of ball-room hacks, there are seldom more than two men left. If a girl, in the confidence of her own loveliness as vouched for by elderly bachelors and doting relatives, is pleased to consider that she can have any man she likes, let her try. The best men, the ideal husbands, are not to be fished for. They come of their own accord, or they stay away altogether.'

'I suppose,' said Brenda reflectively, 'that she was spoilt by the circumstances attending her early life? Her popularity, I mean. But then people will say that a good nature is, or should be, beyond the reach of circumstances.'

'We cannot help,' replied the woman of the world, 'what people say. In the meantime we must just make the best of things as they stand. Alice is in an awkward position, and it is clearly our duty to get her out of it as creditably as we can.'

'Of course. I am ready to do all I can.'

Mrs. Wylie rose from the table with her characteristic cheeriness. For some moments she appeared to be thinking, then she spoke:

'The best way out of it is for me to go down to Cheltenham and bring her back. There is a train about eleven o'clock; Alice herself went by it. We can be back by to-night--about dinner-time, I should think, or a little later.'

To this suggestion Brenda acceded willingly enough. She was rather dazed by this sudden change in her sister's affairs, and her usually clear intellect seemed almost benumbed. Her manner was similar to that of a woman labouring under intense anxiety, or a suspense more terrible than the most abject fear.

Before leaving Mrs. Wylie telegraphed to Trist, the message being kept from Brenda's knowledge. She addressed it to his rooms in Jermyn Street, and without hesitation wrote the following words:

'_I am going to Cheltenham. Keep away from Brenda. Expect me in Jermyn Street eight o'clock to-night._'

'I think,' she reflected, as her plump white hand pressed the blotting-paper, 'that the time has really come when I must do something. These young people are verging on a terrible muddle ... unless ... unless Theo has some set plan of his own all along. I sometimes think he has. There _must_ be a motive somewhere.'

As the good lady was descending the stairs at half-past ten on her way to Paddington Station, a commissionaire came toiling up. He carried a letter in his hand, and Mrs. Wylie, perceiving it, stopped him. It was a full account of the accident, written at a club near at hand by Theodore Trist.

By three o'clock that afternoon Alice Huston learnt her husband's end. She received the news with a strange apathy. There were times in this woman's life when the permanence of sorrow was shut out from her mind. She was like a child in the way in which she took the punishment God thought fit to administer. It seemed part of her mental laziness. She had not even the energy to resist, however useless such a course may be.

There was no time to be lost, and Mrs. Wylie insisted upon an immediate departure for town. The excuses put forward by Alice were trivial, or would have been considered trivial in another woman. They caught the train, however, and reached London at half-past seven. A long, weary drive in a rattling cab (such a vehicle as could not be found in any other city) brought them to Suffolk Mansions.

Brenda was at the door to meet them. She kissed her sister silently, and then followed the two ladies into the drawing-room. There was a cheery fire burning briskly in the grate; a single lamp with a pink shade had a wonderful effect in adding comfort to the appearance of the room.

Alice lifted her veil and looked round as if expecting to find someone there. Mrs. Wylie, near the fire, and Brenda, who was closing the door, were both watching her.

'I think,' she said wearily, 'that Theo might have been here.'

Mrs. Wylie was hungry; perhaps she was also slightly irritated.

'Why?' she asked mercilessly.

Mrs. Huston unbuttoned her gloves speculatively, and, after a short pause, replied:

'Oh ... I don't know! I thought he would come, that was all.'

Mrs. Wylie made no pretence of concealing a somewhat impatient shrug of the shoulders.

'You are in your old room,' she said in a voice devoid of sympathy. 'If you take off your bonnet we will have dinner at once. It will warm us up.'

Brenda conducted her sister to the bedroom assigned to her. They had not spoken yet, but the girl's attitude was distinctly sympathetic in its bearing. Women have a silent way of telling us that their hearts are coming, as it were, towards us. I wonder, my brothers, what some of us would do without that voiceless sympathy--without the gentle glance that penetrates and consoles at one time--without the touch of certain fingers which, though light, is full of sweet heartfelt pleading to be allowed a share of the burden.

Brenda unpinned her sister's veil, and, hovering round, volunteered here and there a quick and deft assistance.

'I wonder,' said the beautiful woman at length, with that touch of helplessness in her tone which would have been better reserved for male ears, 'why I feel like a whipped child. I do not see that I am to blame because Alfred chose to be careless. Of _course_ it was an accident.'

Brenda did not answer at once. Indeed, they were leaving the room when she said in a reassuring tone:

'Undoubtedly it was an accident.'

There was no mistaking the tone. Whatever Mrs. Huston's faults may have been, she never sought undue credit; she never pretended to feel that which had no place in her heart. Her sins were those of omission rather than of commission. Despite Mrs. Wylie's assurance to the contrary, Brenda knew then, and never afterwards doubted, that her sister's love for her husband, if it had ever existed, was dead at the time of his sudden and untimely end.

As things go in these days, we can hardly blame this beautiful woman for having loved, and ceasing to love. It is only in novels of to-day and in records of ancient times that we meet with an enduring love. The fact is, we see too many of our fellow-creatures to be constant to a few. We drift together, and we drift apart again. We vow a little, perhaps, and protest that nothing shall divide; but presently the streams diverge. There is some little obstruction in the bed or pathway; the waters part, and never flow together again. We merrymakers dance here and we dance there; we run down into the country by an evening train; dine, dance, make love, and come to town at an early hour. The next night it is just as likely as not that we go off in some other direction with our dress-clothes in a bag and our hearts conspicuously on our sleeves 'for one night only.'

It was all very well for those inconsistent old knights (strange combinations of poetry and brutality) to be faithful to the young person remaining at home for industrial purposes; it was very easy for the young person in question to think of none other than the youth who wore her colours 'twixt armour and heart. These people never saw other youths and other maidens. If I went to the Holy Land, I am confident that I should think only of a certain small person left behind; and, moreover, it is within the bounds of probability that if she had no tennis parties, bachelors' balls, bazaars, and race-meetings, she would pine away her youth in thoughts of me, not to mention executing quite a quantity of unsightly needlework.

These reflections must, however, remain strictly between us. It would not do for the general public to get ear of them. Let us rather pound away at the good old doctrine of true love, following in the footsteps of romancers since the days of Solomon. Your hand, my brother! It is best to blind one's self at times.

Brenda was a daughter of the nineteenth century, and as such conceived it possible that love can bloom and flourish in the human heart only to die utterly after all. Some of us there are, perhaps, who, having once loved, carry a small wound with us until the end of the chapter; but the majority have no time to look back too steadily. Most assuredly Alice Huston was not one of the former. I believe honestly that she loved her husband; but I am also convinced that before his death she had ceased to do so--that the growth had died down utterly within her heart, leaving no trace, diffusing no odour, as it were, of better things.

The younger sister realized all this, but her blind affection for the woman whose existence had been so closely allied to her own made excuses and propounded explanatory theories as only a woman's love can. There was in her mind an indefinite feeling of antagonism against the events of the last few months, but in her own heart she blamed Alfred Huston. She would not give way to the ever-growing conviction that her sister was not quite free from the taint of faultiness in thought or action.