CHAPTER XXII.

In spite of all the care bestowed upon him, and of his own unrelaxing efforts to fulfil his doctor’s promises that he should get well, Marchmont’s health did not improve. There was not, said the medical men, the least real danger to his life; the probability was that, as he grew more helpless, his hold on his life would grow stronger.

‘In fact,’ said Mr. Brownrigg to Fulvia, in a private interview after Marchmont had had a very bad night, ‘there is no reason why he should not live to be an old man. He will have every care and consideration; he has no worries; yes, he will settle down into a permanent invalid, but not one to whose life there is any imminent danger.’

‘Oh, yes, he will have every care and consideration,’ said Fulvia dreamily.

She smiled as Mr. Brownrigg rose to take his leave.

All the gaiety and visitors had been strictly forbidden. The guest-chambers were empty, the gardens and park untenanted. The house was more like the barrack of a regiment of dead soldiers than ever.

As the days went on Marchmont grew more dissatisfied and restless, more exacting and more difficult to manage. His brain was not in the least touched by his illness; only his natural suspiciousness seemed to grow ever keener and sharper, and his curiosity and determination to know everything, down to the minutest detail, of what went on in the household, more boundless and ungovernable. As August progressed, the lives of those at the great house did not grow happier. Marchmont’s nurse, though endowed with quite as much patience as the rest of her kind, grew restive, and told Fulvia one day that as a rule she could stand any kind of patient by simply taking no notice of his ‘tantrums,’ as she was pleased to call them; but that with Mr. Marchmont this was impossible, as he had a way with him more irritating and obnoxious than that of anyone whom she had ever nursed before.

His man also, a valuable servant, and one who knew that he had in some respects a very good place, became rebellious about the same time. Somehow or other the domestic phalanx had got wind of what Mr. Brownrigg had said--that the invalid was not in the least likely to die, only to grow more obnoxious--and somehow it then dawned upon them all that, whether they said so or not, this was a great and bitter blow--a terrible disappointment. They did not speak it out, no one spoke it out; but they showed it by short tempers, irritability, and a general air of disgust and tendency to mutiny. Morrison and the nurse chose the same day on which to utter their respective protests. Morrison said that his post would be a hard one at any wages, but that when he was told by his master that he was worth nothing, and that the wages of a stable-boy would more than pay for his services, he felt that it was not worth his while to remain.

Fulvia listened to them both, giving them their interviews one after the other. She heard with grave dignity what they had to say. She found their complaints perfectly rational, and told them so. She asked the nurse to remain as long as she could, and then she would be relieved in the order of things, according to the rules of her institution. To Morrison she simply explained the case, and said openly that it depended on his goodwill whether he endured it any longer.

‘If he ever gave one word of thanks, ma’am,’ said the man, ‘or ever spoke pleasant to me, I could do anything, for it must be awful to be laid on your back in that way, so helpless, and he’s younger than I am. But I have to wait on him hand and foot, and then be abused for it. It’s more than flesh and blood----’

‘He will never thank you,’ said Fulvia calmly. ‘You have been with us ever since he began to be ill, and you must know that. He will never thank you. There is only me to do that, and I can assure you I appreciate all you have done to lighten my anxiety in the matter. I am very much tied as it is. If it were not for you, I should be very badly off. I shall be extremely sorry if you go, and you may be sure that everything you do for your master you do in a sense for me. I cannot say any more. If you will go you will go. I cannot help it!’

‘Well, ma’am, to accommodate you, I’ll try again. You are a very good mistress, so just and so liberal--all say that in the servants’ hall, and we all feel it,’ said Morrison handsomely. ‘From Mrs. Perkins down to the scullery-maid, not one of us ever thinks that you want to do us a wrong.’

‘I am glad to hear it. You have guessed my feelings, at any rate, correctly. I wish all to be satisfied and happy as--possible.’ The words on her lips had been, ‘as I am sad and hopeless,’ but she stopped in time. Morrison retired, conquered, and Fulvia was left to realize that the words of praise given her by a domestic servant afforded her about as much pleasure as any she was likely to experience within the walls of her own house.

Left alone, she sat still for awhile, and then, lifting her arms, clasped her hands above her head, saying to herself, ‘How long will it go on? How long shall I be able to endure it?’

For ever, seemed to be the answer. Had she not asked that very question of Minna in the days before her marriage? ‘Do you think I can go on living in this way for three weeks longer? Don’t you think something is sure to happen?’ Yet nothing had happened. Everything had gone on to its bitter end. She had been married, and had not died. She had been carried about in the company of Marchmont, hating him more and more every day, but she had survived it. She had not wasted away in a consumption, nor grown silent and wretched and broken in spirit. On the contrary, she had grown more and more beautiful, as she knew. As a girl, immediately after her marriage, she had seen both men and women look at her with undisguised delight, as something most beautiful and most charming. The admiration, then, had been as much what one gives to a beautiful child as to a woman.

Now she never went anywhere without seeing that deeper flame come into men’s eyes as they beheld her, that sudden gravity settle over women’s faces as they scrutinized her, and saw in her as powerful a rival as they could possibly encounter. And while all this went on, there went on in her heart _pari passu_ the endless dreariness and barrenness and disgust to which she had never tried to put any stop or any limit, but which she had allowed in silence to eat away at her inmost soul. She allowed it almost unconsciously, but in her heart was the deep conviction that to do otherwise, to ‘make the best of things,’ as the happy-go-lucky saying has it, to attempt to reconcile herself to her lot and her husband, would have been moral degradation beyond words to describe. Her ennui, her scornful silent endurance, were not petulance--they were religion. Such a thing as had happened to her might happen to fifty women of weak or shallow or vain nature, and they might have come to accept the inevitable, and lived lives of almost contented respectability, the loss of their latent finer feelings compensated for by the possession of the money and place for which their bodies had been sold. She was not one of the fifty; she was the fifty-first, the exception, and the slow tragedy in which she lived was just as inevitable and as natural as that sunset succeeds sunrise, and sunrise sunset.

She did not acquiesce, she did not submit, she did not content herself. She endured, and resented. But that did not kill her, either. She told herself that she was as bad as the worst of them; she just lived on and slept when she was not prevented from doing so, and ate, and did not become melancholy; she read books and newspapers, and remembered what was in them, and was, when she came to think about it, very much surprised at herself for doing so.

‘How long can I endure it? For ever.’ Thus, so far, had run the question and answer. But to-day, when she asked the question, there was not cold, fastidious disgust in her mind, but raging rebellion, and the question, ‘How long can I?’ seemed to turn into, ‘Why should I?’

It was early in the forenoon when the unpleasant interviews with the nurse and Morrison had taken place. It was still considerably before twelve when she rose from her chair, went into the hall, took a broad straw hat from the hook on which it hung, and went out into the blazing August sunshine.

The grounds of Yewridge Hall were of considerable extent--they were varied by nature, and had been judiciously manipulated by a good landscape gardener. Fulvia took her way to that part of them most remote from her own house and Minna’s, to where a small lake, partly natural and partly artificial, made a cool retreat in the summer heat, and a most useful skating place in winter. There was a boat-house, with a little boat in it, and there was a kind of summer-house made of rough logs covered with bark, such as may be seen in many a park and garden in the country. To this part of the grounds Minna and her party never penetrated unless by invitation. Minna had a wholesome conviction as to the value of the adage, ‘Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour’s house, lest he grow weary of thee, and so hate thee.’ Moreover, Fulvia had once said to her that she found the solitude of the spot a great boon, and often went there to be alone.

She did not hurry this morning, but walked slowly towards the spot, clad in her cool-looking white morning gown, with its fresh simplicity and plainness. It took her ten minutes to reach the place she was going to. Though her face did not change, her eyes dilated as she came along between the trees towards the side of the pond, and saw Hans there, with his easel and other artist’s apparatus, though he had not apparently fixed upon the spot on which to plant the easel.

She had come along noiselessly. His eyes were cast down, and he seemed to be lost in reflection when she first saw him, but as she drew nearer, slowly and ever more slowly, he raised his eyes and bent them full upon her. Fulvia stopped. Hans laid down all the things that were in his hands, and went to meet her, removing his cap as he did so. He took both her hands into his own, and looked at her without speaking.

‘Have you been here long?’ she asked in a quiet, almost toneless voice.

‘Half an hour, perhaps. I don’t know.’

‘And you were not impatient?’

‘I was, and I was not. I thought I should never see you, and yet I was absolutely certain that something--probably something disagreeable--had prevented you from coming. What has happened?’

‘Oh!’ she said in a prolonged tone of weariness and exasperation, ‘that which is always happening. It is the same story over and over again. A miserable, sordid bother. I have been begging a servant man to try if he can’t stay with us a little longer, just to make life endurable to me. He has kindly consented to do so, and I am much in his debt.’

‘Mein Gott!’ exclaimed Hans, between his teeth. He had not let go of her hands. He drew them together, now, to his breast, and held them enfolded there, and looked down into her face with an expression of longing which seemed to say, ‘I will force you to smile, and to look different.’

‘This cannot go on,’ he said at last with low-voiced anger. ‘You are worse each time I see you--more sad, more hopeless and lifeless-looking. You will not look into my eyes now. You will not see how I love you, or you could not look so stern and immovable. If you would smile as you always have done before----’

Fulvia without a word raised her eyes and looked straight into his. There was not the shadow of a smile on her face; there was not the least sign of relaxation in what he had truly called her ‘stern’ expression.

‘No, you don’t smile! What is the meaning of it? The last time we met you told me you had lost that despair, that carelessness whether you lived or died. You looked quite glad, Fulvia mia. But to-day it is all there again, and I believe you will dare to tell me that I do not love you enough, could not make you happy.’

‘No, no, no; it is not that! I get depressed oftener than I used to do. I feel very miserable this morning. I can’t cast it off all in a moment. But I want to live,’ she whispered, in a passionate abandonment of eagerness--‘I want to live. To die now, after all the death I have lived through, with life just breaking, just holding out its hand to me--oh, by all the gods! it surely cannot happen--such a thing cannot happen!’

‘It shall not happen; I will not let it happen!’ said Hans, and had any keen observer been there--one who could have listened unmoved to the passionate utterances, and impartially weighed the meaning and value of both--that observer must have been struck with the thinness and impotence of the man’s utterances, as compared with those of the woman.

He it was who counselled hope and spoke of happiness, and would hear nought of despondency, nought of doubt or difficulties. She it was who was stern and sad, and, in the midst of her agonized debate with her love, contemplated the possibility of bitterness and dissatisfaction even in the fulfilment of it. The view which each took was sufficiently typical of their respective characters. Hans would have none of disaster, none of doubt or difficulty, because he could not or would not have fronted them, had they come. She spoke of them, discussed them, expected them, because she had within her the stuff with which to battle with them. Of course, the lighter, more sanguine strain sounded the stronger at that stage of the proceedings. It made more noise, and was set in a more effective key. It imposed upon even her.

‘To live merely as you have been living, and are living just now, is a simply intolerable idea,’ he said, with considerable passion in his tones. ‘For you, it is hideous to be in that house; for me, it is like hell, only to think of your being there.’

‘What am I to do?’ asked Fulvia faintly.

For the time being there was no more firmness nor decision left in her aspect. Her lips trembled, her eyes sank and wavered, her voice shook.

‘Leave it at once and come with me. I will take you away. Listen. That journey I was talking of--we will take it together, you and I. First we will go to Italy, very, very far South--to Sicily, to some place where no foreigners ever go. Think of it now, at this moment--the life, the sunshine, and the glory of it; then think of this bleak place and this bleak life; this cold air, that chill gray sea, those cold purple moors. We will hide nothing. In a very short time everything will be quite right. He’--he nodded in the direction of the Hall--‘will have applied to the law for redress of the wrong you have done him, which, as you are the sinner and he the saint, with all the good and pious world on his side, will be quickly accorded to him. Then you are free, and then you are my wife, who shall never know a grief or a pain or a harsh word or a humiliation again. That is what I want you to do.’

‘There is only one thing that prevents me from doing it,’ said Fulvia quietly, more quietly than he liked.

‘Loss of position and consideration, I suppose you mean--all the precious whited sepulchre business in which society deals. It is a mere prejudice, as you know. You are at present on the right side as regards that.... What pleasure has it ever brought you? What good has it done you?’

‘I don’t mean that at all. I have tried that, and I find that, though it has its value--there is more in it, Hans, than you will own--yet one may pay too high a price for it--when you are an exceptional case’--she spoke bitterly. ‘You see, caro mio, society is arranged to meet the needs of the many who don’t think, and who only want to have things made easy for them. The few, who have not been lucky enough to make themselves fit into it, must suffer the consequences of their stupidity.’

‘Don’t taunt me with abstract reasoning when I am dying to hear a word of kindness from you,’ he besought her. Indeed, abstract reasoning in any shape was distasteful to Hans.

‘Well, I will be very concrete, very prosaic, and very narrow,’ said she with a faint smile. ‘It is not the fear of losing my distinguished position in society, nor my spotless reputation, which really is a perfectly negative kind of good. I am thinking of what all of them down there would feel.’

She moved her hand towards Minna’s house.

‘What utter nonsense! They know; they are not children, they are not puritans. I believe Minna would rather see you happy than what people are fools enough to call blameless, any day.’

‘You do not know Minna, then. Her love is very dear to me. Sometimes, in my wretchedness, I think I am past caring for anything of the kind. But when I think of Minna heartbroken, I can’t bear it. And worse than that--Signor Oriole.’ She whispered his name.

Hans was not without the coarseness which comes, not of wilful malice, but of utter incompetency to distinguish between what may be said and what may not.

‘The last person in the world who could blame you,’ he said almost sharply.

‘Did I say he would blame me? Shall I break his heart because he would have no right to blame me for doing so?’

‘They cannot wish you to go on leading this hell upon earth existence any longer,’ said Hans savagely. ‘Sit down here, on this bench beside me, and let us see the thing fairly, from all sides.’

She shook her head.

‘My friend, why fatigue ourselves with anything of the kind? There is only one side from which to see it. Shall I leave my husband, whom I hate, with right and reason, and my friends whom I love, to go away with you, whom I adore, and of whom I know nothing?’

‘Know nothing of me!’ echoed Hans, forgetting his rapture in his surprise at her words. ‘Why, Fulvia, you have known me for six years--six whole years.’

‘I have known of you. I have not known you,’ she said, smiling.

‘Don’t leave me in this awful suspense,’ he besought her. ‘Tell me now when you will come. Tell me that you will come.’

‘I can’t now,’ said Fulvia simply. ‘I am quite decided about one thing. I will not make up my mind when I am vexed and angry, and jarred to my heart’s core, as----’

‘My darling!’ whispered Hans, a flush of triumph in his dark eyes.

‘As I have been this morning. What I do I will do deliberately. Then I shall be strong enough to go through with it.’

‘My darling!’ he whispered again. Fulvia’s eyes wavered at the words. ‘Promise me, then, when you will come. Tell me when you will tell me.’

‘You must give me three days. This is Friday. On Monday I will meet you here again. I promise you that I will have made up my mind.’

‘Three days!’ repeated Hans.

‘Yes,’ replied Fulvia. ‘It is a terribly short time in which to decide that one will----’

She paused. Hans did not press her farther. He made no complaint. He had marked her words. She did not say, ‘to decide whether one will,’ but ‘that one will.’ The victory was his.

‘Do not let us talk about that any more,’ said Fulvia; ‘it only brings back again all the horrors I have gone through. But do talk of something else.’

‘About anything that you like,’ replied Hans, who was sitting beside her on the bench, and, with one elbow on his knee and his cheek pressed upon his hand, was looking at her with, as it seemed to Fulvia, all his soul in his eyes. There was all of her soul, at least, in the full gaze which returned his.

It would have been very difficult to say in what way their friendship had begun; how the acquaintanceship of their youthful days had been renewed, and how it had grown and developed silently and almost imperceptibly through a thousand subtle delicate changes into the present stage, when all talk of ‘friendship’ and sympathy was discarded and the words ‘I love you’ had been many a time exchanged on both sides. Fulvia said the least, showed the least; with her it had gone too deep for words. The very fact that all these instincts of her nature had been so crushed, martyred, and repressed, ever since the day on which her mother had handed her over to Marchmont, gave them additional strength and energy now that they had been aroused. In the warmth of this love, which expressed itself in terms of the most delicate homage, all the warmth and passion of her own nature came to life, grew, expanded, developed into an overmastering love, which, however reticent on the outside, within knew no bounds. Almost had she grown to think it well that, if she and Hans were to be united, it would have to be at the cost of her outside glory.

No price seemed too great to pay for the experience of a natural love, a spontaneous, mutual delight, an exchange of soul. This was Fulvia’s inner conviction, and with all the strength of her nature she gloried in it; and in all the knowledge of the bitterness of that Dead Sea fruit upon which she had so long been trying to nourish herself, she could not have enough of the sweetness of this. She was reckless of the consequences; her whole emotional system was strung up, goaded to rebellion against her present situation; she often marvelled herself at the thin thread which held her back from responding to Hans with all the eagerness which he showed himself.

Yet, thin as that thread was--woven out of shadows and cobwebs, as it appeared to her, the memory of certain faces, the echo of certain voices--it did hold her back, and kept her grave and reticent where Hans was wild and impassioned. He spoke out his feelings, raged against her unhappiness, and the cause of it, kissed her hands and her feet: one day he had found her alone in the afternoon, resting on a couch, and, maddened by the oppressed silence with which she listened to what he had to say, had knelt down beside the sofa, and covered those little feet with adoring kisses. Hans it was who did all this, and gazed at her in a rapture of love, and spoke words to her whose adoration drowned the somewhat false ring which sometimes sounded through them. Fulvia it was who was calm and almost silent, receiving it with a passion of inner gratitude, but seldom speaking, seldom giving expression to her feelings. It was as if her daily life made such expressions almost trivial, so stern was the wretchedness she felt at home. Nevertheless, there were now and then, very rarely, moments in which she broke this austere gravity, and gave him a look or a word which repaid days or weeks of waiting and severity.

This morning, when they had been sitting for a long time almost silent, she turned to him, laid her hand for a moment upon his, and said:

‘Hans, it is since I knew you that I feel I have a right to live. I never have lived. I will live; I will not die without having lived.’

His heart sprang to his mouth. What was this but a promise? He lifted her hand to his lips, saying nothing audibly. He did not even wish to convey too much by a look, lest she should be startled, or begin to repent her of her decision. He asked no more, and did not even thank her--in words.

The sun grew hotter as mid-day was passed, and cast a warm glow into even this shady corner, and the lights and shadows played about and chequered the surface of the water, and danced on the footpath, and flitted over Fulvia’s face, under the shadow of her large hat. It was a brief dream of rest and repose, of ease from pain, and of hope for the future.

‘Someone is coming!’ exclaimed Hans suddenly, in a tone of startled annoyance, as he raised himself and looked in the direction of the footsteps which he heard.

‘Well,’ said Fulvia, with a superb, almost dreaming indifference, ‘let someone come.’

‘You do not mind this being interrupted: I do,’ said Hans angrily. ‘Confound him! whoever he may be.’

‘No--not him. I’m glad to see him,’ Fulvia retorted, looking quietly forwards towards the figure of Signor Giuseppe, who was advancing up the path.

He lifted his hat. Hans could not conceal his annoyance and vexation. Fulvia, on the contrary, rose and walked towards him with a gracious willingness to meet him.

Minna had often noticed this profound respect in the bearing of the young woman to the old man. It spoke volumes to her.

‘Good-morning!’ said she. ‘I am glad you have found your way here. Did you know I was here?’

‘No; I was strolling through the woods,’ said Signor Oriole, ‘and I came round this way--that is all.--Ah, Riemann,’ he added, with a glance more piercingly keen than he had ever bestowed upon that young man, ‘you are here, then! I thought I heard you telling Mrs. Hastings you were going to sketch by the river?’

‘I changed my mind. It was so blazingly hot by the river. Mrs. Marchmont once kindly told me I might come here when I liked, and I availed myself of her permission.’

‘What are you drawing?’ asked Signor Oriole dryly.

‘I have not yet decided. Would you have me turn my back upon Mrs. Marchmont, and sink myself in a sketch?’ asked Hans, in even a worse humour.

Fulvia had become very grave. Her natural spirit of truth and frankness liked not these evasions and subterfuges. Why need he have told anyone where he was going? He was a free agent. Then she felt sure that he had done it out of consideration for her. He did not know how perfectly indifferent she felt to all outsiders and what they thought. He wished to shield her. It was all right. It was his true and noble self.

‘I am going away now. I am wanted at home, and cannot stay longer,’ she said. ‘Good-morning, Mr. Riemann.--Will you come with me?’ she added, turning to Signor Oriole.

‘Willingly.--A rivederci, Riemann.’

They walked away towards the Hall.

Hans, left alone, looked dark and angry.

‘Women will be women to the end of the world,’ he told himself with the conviction of one who has made a discovery. ‘Worship them, and they insult you. Bully them, and they worship you. That has always been my experience.’

* * * * *

‘Where is Mrs. Hastings this morning?’ asked Fulvia.

‘She has just gone out with her brother and the _bambina_. I trust,’ said Signor Giuseppe, ‘that you were not as displeased with me as Riemann evidently was, for intruding upon you. I assure you it happened entirely by accident.’

Fulvia’s face flushed.

‘Do not speak to me like that!’ she exclaimed in a hurried voice. ‘I am always glad to see you--everywhere, and at any time. You have the right to come where I am.’

‘As for rights, we will say nothing,’ he said sadly. ‘I know you used to be glad to see me in the old days--when you used to penetrate into my little dark room, and sit upon my bed, cross-legged, like a tailor, seize upon one of my books, and ask questions. Do you remember?’

‘Do I remember?’

‘No matter what I was doing,’ he pursued with a smile, ‘your questions began. You would read aloud; you would know the meaning of everything; you----’

‘I must have been a dreadful little nuisance,’ said Fulvia, in a voice that was not quite steady.

‘Oh, indeed yes! I often showed you that I thought so, did I not?’

‘Ah, repeatedly!’ she exclaimed, suddenly seizing his arm in her hands, as she had so often done as a child, and smiling at him with a child’s delight. Then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling: ‘Don’t, don’t! Do not talk to me about those days, Beppo. I am miserable enough, without having my former happiness recalled to me.’

He came to a pause, took her hands in his, and looked into her face with an expression which, she told herself, was almost divine, in its immense love and tenderness, its sorrow, its yearning.

‘Carissima mia, I recall your former happiness because I would save you from future misery. Speak to me face to face! The man there, who was with you, is dear to you?’

‘Yes,’ said Fulvia, with dilated eyes, and in a whisper.

‘I say nothing about it. I have lived my life, and others will live their lives, and no experience of others can save them from walking straight up to their fate. That you should encounter some such experience was absolutely inevitable. Only listen to me. Suppose that characters could be taken in the hand like oranges, and weighed in a balance like any material thing; suppose I held the scales, and placed your character on the one side, and his on the other: do you know what would happen?’

She looked at him breathlessly.

‘Why, his would kick the beam,’ said Signor Oriole, with a scornful laugh. ‘My proud Fulvia in love with a thing of straw--at the mercy of a _farceur_.’

She grew rigid, and an angry light came into her eyes.

‘You are utterly mistaken,’ she said very coldly. ‘I know him; you do not. You have no right to speak of him in that way. As for future misery’--she laughed--‘no misery could be greater than that which I have endured, and which I am enduring at present. I am going back to it now at once. Good-bye.’

She snatched her hands out of the clasp of his, and, without giving him a look, sped on in the direction of the house.