CHAPTER VIII.

A FINAL INTERVIEW.

MR. JERNINGHAM was prompt to comply with his wife’s request. On the second morning after the despatch of Emily’s letter, the master of Greenlands appeared at River Lawn; and this, allowing for time lost in the reposting of the letter, was as soon as it was possible for him to arrive there.

The change in his wife was painfully obvious to him, and shocked him deeply.

“I am sorry to see you looking so ill, Emily,” he said, concealing his surprise by an effort.

“Do you think I should have sent for you if I had not been very ill? It was very good of you to come so promptly. I have to thank you for much generosity, for much thoughtful kindness, during the years of our separation. Believe me, I have fully appreciated your kind feeling, your delicacy. But since my illness, there has come upon me the feeling that something more was due to me than kindness or delicacy; something more due from me to you than quiet submission to your wishes. Do not think that I have entrapped you into this visit in order to reproach you, or to exalt myself. Justification for my conduct there is none. I can never hope to rehabilitate myself in your eyes or in my own; all I desire is that you should know the whole truth. Will you kindly listen to me and believe me? I have kept silence for years; I speak now under the impression that I have but a few weeks to live; you cannot think that I shall speak falsely.”

“I am not capable of doubting your word, even under less solemn circumstances. But I trust you overrate your danger; convalescence is always a period of depression.”

“We will not talk of that; my own instinct and the sentence of my doctors alike condemn me. They talk about the restorative effect of a sea-voyage, and send me to Madeira for the autumn and winter; and that, for a woman of my age, is a sentence of death.”

“Let us hope it is only a precautionary measure.”

“I have no eager desire for life; I can afford to submit to Providence. And now let me speak of a subject which is of more importance to me than any question as to the time I have to live. Let me speak to you of my honour--as a woman and as a wife. When you decreed that all ties between us except the one legal bond should be severed, your decree was absolute. There was no room left for discussion. You sent me your solicitor, who told me, with much delicate circumlocution, that your home was no longer to be my home. There was to be neither scandal, nor disgrace, nor punishment for me, who had sinned against my duty as a wife. I was only to be banished. I was too much in the wrong to dispute the justice of this sentence, Harold; too proud to sue for mercy. I let judgment go by default. You banished your wife from the fortress of home; you deposed her from an unassailable position to a doubtful standing; and you did this upon the strength of a packet of letters, which a bolder offender would have received at her own address, and which a more experienced sinner would have burned. I want you to grant me one favour, Harold,--read those letters before I die.”

“I will read them when you please. Yes, I dare say I did wrong in cancelling our union upon such trifling evidence of error; but I acted from my own instinct. I have been a Sybarite in matters of sentiment; and to live with a woman whose heart and faith were not all my own, would have been unutterably hateful to me. I jumped at no conclusions. I did not suffer my thoughts to condemn you unheard. But you had been living under my roof in secret correspondence with a man who called himself my friend. What could I do? Could I come to you and say, ‘Please do not receive any more secret letters from Desmond; that is a kind of thing which I object to?’ You would of course have promised to oblige me, and Desmond would have addressed his letters to another office. Having deceived me once, you see, I could hardly hope you would not deceive me again. That sort of thing grows upon one. On the other hand, why should I make a foolish scandal, read Desmond’s letters,--which would have been an ungentlemanly thing to do,--subpœna your maid, your footman, make myself ridiculous, and humiliate you, for the profit of lawyers and the amusement of newspaper readers; and failing in convicting you of the last and worst of infamies, take you back to my home and heart a spotless wife? It seemed to me that there could be no course for us but a tranquil and polite separation.”

“If you had read the letters you might have thought differently.”

“My dear girl, with every wish to be indulgent, I can scarcely admit that. To my mind there are no degrees in these things. A woman is faithful or unfaithful. If the letter she receive contains but few lines about an opera-box, they should be lines which she can show her husband without a blush. There must be no lurking treason between the lines. She must not pose herself _en femme incomprise_, and call herself a faithful wife, because her infidelity does not come under the jurisdiction of the Divorce Court. You will say, perhaps, that this comes with a bad grace from me, whose life has been far from spotless. But, you see, spotlessness is not a man’s speciality; and however vile he may be himself, he has a natural belief in the purity of woman. She seems to him a living temple of the virtues, and he scarcely expects to find a pillar-post lurking in the shadow of the sacred portico.”

“I was very weak, very wicked,” murmured Emily; “but I have some excuses for my error which other women cannot claim. If I had thought that you loved me,--if I had seen reason for believing that our marriage had brightened your life in the smallest degree, or that my affection, howsoever freely given, could ever have been precious to you, it might have been otherwise with me. Oh, believe me, Mr. Jerningham, you might have made me a good wife, if you had cared to do so. Men have a power to mould us for which they rarely give themselves credit. It was not because of the twenty years’ difference between our ages that I grew weary of my home, and sighed for more congenial society, for sympathy I had never found there. _That_ was not the gulf between us. It was because you did not love me, and did not even care to pretend any love for me, that I welcomed the friendship of my father’s old friend, and forgot the danger involved in such sympathy. Your marriage was an act of generosity, a chivalrous protection of a helpless kinswoman, and I ought to have been grateful. I was grateful; but a woman’s heart has room for something more than gratitude. A man who marries as you married me is bound to complete his sacrifice. He must give his heart as well as his home and fortune. You gave me your cheque-book, but you let me see only too plainly that in the bargain which made us man and wife there was to be no exchange of hearts. What a union! How many times did we dine _tête-à-tête_ in the two years of our wedded life?--once--twice--well, perhaps half a dozen times; and I can recall your weary yawns, our little conventional speeches, on those rare occasions. For two years we lived under the same roof, and we never even quarrelled. You treated me with unalterable generosity, unchanging courtesy, and you held me at arm’s length; yet if you had wished to make yourself master of my heart, the conquest would have been an easy one. I was wounded by Mr. Desmond’s silence; I was melted by your kindness. It would not have been difficult for me to give you a wife’s devotion.”

“I dare say you are right, Emily,” Mr. Jerningham answered, with a little, languid sigh. His wife’s earnestness had taken him by surprise, and a new light had broken in upon his mind as she spoke.

It was possible that there was some truth in these earnest, passionate words. He admitted as much to himself. Something more might have been required of him than a gentlemanly toleration of the woman he had chosen to share his home, to bear his name. The higher, Christian idea of man’s accountableness for the soul of his weaker partner was quite out of the region of Mr. Jerningham’s ethics; but, on purely social grounds, he felt that he had done his cousin and his wife some wrong.

“I had exhausted my capacity for loving before I married,” he thought; “and I gave this poor creature a handful of ashes instead of a human heart.”

After a few minutes’ silence he addressed his wife with an unaccustomed tenderness of tone.

“Yes, my dear Emily, you have just ground for complaint against me. My error was greater than yours; and now we meet after a lapse of years--both of us older, possibly wiser--I can only say, forgive me.”

He held out the hand of friendship, which his wife accepted in all humility of spirit.

“No, no,” she exclaimed, “there can be no question of forgiveness on my part. You have been only too good to me, and my complaints are groundless and peevish. I suppose it is natural to a woman to try to excuse herself by accusing some one else. But, believe me, I have been no stranger to remorse. I could not die until I had thanked you for your indulgent kindness during the years of our separation, and asked you to forgive me. But before I ask for pardon, I beg you to read those letters.”

She took a little packet from her work-basket and handed it to her husband.

“I will do anything to oblige you,” said Mr. Jerningham, kindly; “but I assure you it is very unpleasant to me to read another man’s letters.”

He took the packet to a distant window, and there began his task. The letters were long--such clever, gossiping, semi-sentimental letters as a man writes to a lady with whom he is _aux petits soins_, without ulterior motive of any kind, for the mere pleasure involved in opening his mind and heart to a charming, sympathetic creature, whom he holds it better for himself “to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” Such letters are little more than the vehicles by which a man lets off the poetic gases of his brain, the herbals wherein he preserves the rarer flowers of his mind. Into such letters a man can pour all his caprices of fancy, all his audacities of thought; and as he writes, his mind is divided between tenderness for the dear recipient of his outpourings and a lurking consciousness that his letters will adorn his biography, and hold their place in polite literature, when the hand that runs along the paper to-day has mouldered in a coffin. In such letters every writer appears at his best. In the present he is writing for only one indulgent critic; in the future he fancies himself revealed to posterity with an audacious freedom forbidden by the natural reserve of the man who knows he will have to read a hundred and twenty reviews of his book.

Mr. Jerningham read Laurence Desmond’s letters very patiently. He smiled faintly now and then, in polite recognition of some little playful flight of the writer’s fancy; but he was far from being amused. More than one smothered but dismal yawn betrayed his weariness, and it was with a sigh of supreme relief that he at last returned them to his wife.

“They are really clever,” he said, “and hardly objectionable. They are the kind of thing that a Chateaubriand might have written to a Madame Récamier, and she was the very archetype of female virtue. I can only regret the one fact that they were not addressed to your own house.”

“My foolish cowardice was the sole cause of that error. I thought you would object to my receiving Mr. Desmond’s letters, and they were a great pleasure to me.”

“My poor child, if you had only examined my library in Park Lane, you would have found a hundred volumes of letters, from Pliny downwards, all of them better than Mr. Desmond’s effusions. But I suppose there is a charm in being the sole recipient of a man’s confidences. Every man writes that kind of thing once in his life; I have done it myself.”

“And can you forgive me freely?”

“Forgive you! Why, my dear child, you have been freely forgiven from the hour in which we parted. I thought it best and wisest to end a union which had been too lightly made. It is possible I was wrong. Unhappily, I had exhausted my fund of hope before I met you, and had acquired an unpleasant knack of expecting the worst in every situation of life. I did not take those letters as conclusive evidence of guilt; on the contrary, I was quite able to believe their existence was compatible with innocence. But I told myself that such letters must be the beginning of the end, and I took prompt steps to avert an impending catastrophe. I did not want to be a spectacle to men and angels as the husband of a runaway wife. ‘There shall be no running away,’ I said. ‘We will shake hands, and take our separate roads, without noise or scandal.’ I suppose it was a selfish policy; and again I am reduced to say, forgive me.”

After this Mr. Jerningham spoke no more of the past. He talked of his wife’s health, her future movements. He tried to inspire her with hope of amendment, in spite of her physician’s ominous looks, her own instincts; nothing could be kinder or more delicate than the manner in which he expressed himself both to Emily and to Mrs. Colton, who came in from the garden presently, and whom he thanked, with emphasis, for her devotion to his wife.

A quarter of an hour afterwards he was seated alone in a railway carriage, speeding London-wards by express train, and meditating profoundly upon the interview at River Lawn.

“Dying,” he said to himself; “of that there can be no doubt. Of all the hazards of fate, this was the last I should have expected. And I shall be free; free to marry again, if I could conceive so wild a folly; free to marry Helen de Bergerac; free to inflict the maximum of misery upon an innocent girl, in order to secure for myself the minimum of happiness. And yet, O God, what happiness there might be in such a union, if I could be loved again as I once was loved!”

He clasped his hands, and the day-dreamer’s ecstasy brightened his face for a moment. The setting sun shone red upon the river over which the train was speeding, and Harold Jerningham remembered such a rosy summer sunset five-and-twenty years ago, and a sweet girl-face looking up at him, transfigured by a girl’s pure love.