"Very well, Roddy. Thank you. Now we know how we stand. I at least owe Nita a debt for having cleared up the situation. If you find it difficult with me I can at least return the compliment—and I have at any rate this added advantage, that I speak the truth."
As he looked at her across the room he saw in her that same figure that he'd seen once just before proposing to her—someone foreign, unknown—He felt as though he were quarrelling with a stranger....
She turned and went.
For a long while he stood gazing into the fire, his hands in his pockets. How had it all happened? Why had they let it come to that kind of quarrel when they might so easily have prevented it?
And she, crying bitterly in her room, asked herself the same question.
CHAPTER IV
RACHEL—AND CHRISTOPHER AND RODDY
I
Christopher had snatched his first holiday for two years and was abroad during the January of 1899 when the Seddons were in town.
February, March and April they spent at Seddon Court, and it was not therefore until early in May that Christopher saw Rachel.
She had dreaded with an almost fantastic alarm this meeting. No other human being knew her so honestly and accurately as did Christopher, and the change in her that he would at once discern would, when she caught the reflection of it in his eyes, mark definitely the sinister country into which these last months had carried her.
It had seemed as though some malign spirit had been determined to make the most of that quarrel that Nita Raseley had provoked.
Both Roddy and Rachel hated scenes—upon that, at least, they were agreed—and from their determination never to have another arose a deliberate avoidance of any plain speaking. Rachel, longing for honesty, found herself caught in a thousand deceits—Roddy, avoiding any kind of analysis, found that everything that he provided in conversation seemed to lead to danger.
He was now always ill at ease in Rachel's company; he had stood on that fatal evening, more strongly for the Beaminster interest than he had intended, but from his very determination to maintain his new independence, he produced the Duchess for Rachel's benefit at every turn of the road.
Roddy knew that the Duchess feared that Rachel would lead him from her side and that she received with rejoicing every sign on his part of irritation against Rachel. She had wanted him to marry her granddaughter because that bound him more closely to her, but she had not, perhaps, been prepared for the probable effect of Rachel's character upon him.
The Duchess therefore made, throughout these months, a third member of their company. Roddy, finding Rachel's society a growing embarrassment, spent more and more of his time with his animals and his tenants and labourers. But all this time he was conscious, in a dumb way, of unhappiness and a puzzled dismay, so that his very affection for Rachel produced in him a growing irritation that it should be so needlessly thwarted. Things were all wrong and his resentment of his own failure to right them reacted, without his will, upon the very person whom he wished to propitiate.
For Rachel these months were baffling in their hideous discomfort. Her affection for Roddy was there, but it was swallowed by her desperate efforts to analyse a situation that was, in definite outline, no situation at all.
As Roddy withdrew, her loneliness wrapped her round, and in every day that added to her distance from Roddy she saw the active and malignant agency of her grandmother. She was intelligent enough to be aware that in this constant vision of the Duchess she was outstepping the probabilities; but her early years and the precipitation with which she had been shot out of them into an atmosphere that unexpectedly resembled their own earlier surroundings seemed to point to some diabolical agency.
"Oh! when I get free of this," had been her earlier cry, and now the foreboding that she was never to be free of it until she died terrified her with its possibility. Imagine her brought up in a stuffy house with windows tightly closed, in full vision of a high road, imagine her promised the freedom of the road at a future time; imagine her liberated, at last, rushing into the new life and finding that, after all, the walls of the house were still about her, and about her now for ever.
Her one reserve during the early months of the year at Seddon had been her letters to Francis Breton. His letters to her had been a series of self-revelation; he had restrained himself in so far as appealing to her simply on the score of their relationship and his enmity to the head of the house. She had replied revealing her sympathy, hinting at rebellion on her own side and feeling, after the writing of every letter, a hatred of her own deceit, a curiously heightened sense of affection for Roddy, above all a conviction that impulses were, of their own agency, working to some climax that she could not, or would not, control.
The foreign blood in her, the English blood in him, baffled their advances toward one another. Everything that Rachel did now seemed to Roddy so close to melodrama that it was best to use silence for his weapon. All Roddy's actions were to Rachel further illustrations of Beaminster muddle and second-rate personality.
Had Roddy called out of Rachel the great depth of passion and reality that she inherited from her mother her own love of him would have solved everything—but that he could not call from her, nor ever would.
For Rachel, she saw in him now a possibility of perpetual infidelity, and at every suspicion of it her disgust both at herself and him grew because that possibility did not move her more.
They came up to London at the beginning of May and hid, very successfully from the world, the widening breach.
To Rachel, it was sheer terror to discover the thrill that the adjacence of Elliston Square to Saxton Square gave her. In this one self-revelation there was enough to present her with night after night of sleepless misery. She visited the Duchess and found that her presence was continually demanded. Every visit was a battle.
"Show me how you are treating him, whether he cares for you. Have you found him out? Tell me everything–"
"I will tell you nothing. I will come here day after day and you shall gather nothing from me. I have escaped you."
"Indeed you have not escaped me. My power over you is only now beginning–"
No word between them but the most civil. There was no trace in the old woman now of her earlier irony—no sign in Rachel of irritation or rebellion.
But the girl knew that war was declared, that her only ally was one in whose alliance lay, for her, the very heart of danger.
All these things she might hide from the world—from Christopher she knew that she could hide nothing.
II
It was on an early afternoon in May that Christopher had tea with Rachel. He had waited for his visit with very real anxiety; the letters that he had had from her had been unsatisfactory, not because they were actively expressive of unhappiness, but because there was an effort in every word of them—Rachel had never found it difficult to write to him before.
He was also uneasy because he had been against this marriage from the beginning. He did, as he said to the Duchess, know Rachel better than anyone else knew her; he knew her from his love for her, and also from that scientific study that he applied in his profession. And he had found, too, in her, as he had found in Breton, some strain of fierce helplessness, as of an animal caught in a trap, that especially moved his interest and affection—
Was Rachel's marriage a disaster? If so she had certainly managed to conceal it, for even the Duchess did not know—of that he was sure.
If Rachel were indeed unhappy would she come to him as she used to come to him?
What change had marriage wrought in her?
It was one of those May days when the weather is hot before London is ready. It was a day of tension; buildings, streets quivered beneath a sun in whose gaze there was no kindliness nor comfort. Christopher drove from Eaton Square, where, for some hours he had been engaged in preventing an old man from dying, when both the old man himself and all his friends and relations were convinced that death was the best thing for him—
Sloane Street ran like white steel before his eyes, not dimly veiled as he had so often seen it; Park Lane offered houses that stared with haughty faces upon a world that would, they knew, do anything for money—
Elliston Square itself was white and sterile; the town was, on this afternoon, irritated, sinister … feet ached upon its pavements and hearts were suddenly clutched with foreboding.
As he ascended in the lift to her flat he knew that, did he find that this marriage was, truly, a misadventure for Rachel, then, until his death, he would reproach himself for some weak inaction, some hesitation when first he had heard that it was to be.
He had protested, but now he felt that he should have done more.
Soon he had his answer to all his questions.
He saw at once that Rachel was no longer the impulsive, nervous girl whom he had always known. She was a girl no longer.
Her eyes greeted him now steadily, she seemed taller and her body was in perfect control—very tall and slim and dark, her cheeks pale but shadowed a little with the shadow deepening beneath her eyes. Her mouth, that had always been too large, had had before a delightful quality of uncertainty, so that smiles and frowns and alarms, distress and happiness all hovered near. It was now grave and composed.
Her limbs had always moved unsteadily and with the awkward lack of control of a child, now there was no kind of impulse, every movement was considered, and that was the first thing that Christopher saw, that nothing that Rachel now did or said was spontaneous.
There was less in her now to remind him of her foreign blood.
The flat was comfortable, but more commonplace than it would have been had it been Rachel's only.
He kissed her, as he had always done, and he fancied that she clung for a moment to him, as her hands went up to his coat.
He settled his big loose body and looked across at her.
Christopher was no subtle analyser of other people's emotions. His own feelings were never complicated and he expected life to run on plain and simple lines of likes and dislikes, sorrow, anger, love and hatred. If someone of whom he was fond made a direct appeal to him his simple remedies were often wonderfully useful—he was no fool and he had been brought, during a great number of years, into the most direct relations with men and women, but, if that direct appeal was not made, then he was frightened and baffled.
He was frightened of Rachel now; he knew instantly that instead of appealing she would defend herself from him.... Some mysterious conviction seemed to forebode that he would not be able to help her. He was, essentially, of those who, believing in goodness and virtue and the glorious Millennium, are contented, quite simply, with that belief and might, if they stated those simplicities, irritate the scoffers. But he was saved because he made statements on the rarest occasions and lived his life instead.
Here, however, was a crisis in his relations with Rachel that no platitudes could satisfy. Did he not touch her now he might never touch her again.
In a situation that was beyond him he was always hopelessly self-conscious. His love for Rachel was so tremendous a thing in him that a statement of it should surely have been the simplest thing in the world. But he saw in her eyes that to challenge her with—"My dear, you know how I love you. Tell me what's the matter," would frighten her to absolute silence. "I'm going to tell you nothing," she seemed to say to him, "unless you move me in spite of myself. But, if I don't tell you now I shall never tell you."
"Well, my dear," he said, smiling at her, "how are you after all this time?"
"I'm all right," she answered, smiling back at him. "It is good to see you again. Tell me all about your holiday."
"Tell me about yours first."
"Oh! There isn't very much to tell. I enjoyed it all enormously, of course."
"What did you enjoy most?"
"Oh! some of the smaller towns—Rapallo, for instance.—Oh! yes, and Bologna was fascinating."
"Not Rome and Florence?"
"In a way. But there were too many tourists. Rome one's got to stay in, I'm sure. That first view was disappointing."
"And how did Roddy—if I may call him Roddy—enjoy it?"
"Immensely, I think. He liked the country better than the towns though."
"You saw lots of pictures?"
"Heaps. Roddy enjoyed them enormously. I'd no idea he knew so much about them. Oh! it was all lovely, and such colours, such light—London seems like a cellar, even in June."
There followed then a pause that swelled and swelled between them until it resembled some dreadful monster, horribly stationed there to separate them.
Christopher looked at Rachel, but she refused to meet his eyes.
"I've lost her. I shall never see her again!" he thought with despair. Two years ago he would have gone to her, put his arms around her, kissed her and drawn from her at once her trouble.
He could not do that now.
"Your turn, Dr. Chris dear. Tell me about your holidays."
"Oh, mine don't count. I went to Brittany first, then up to St. Andrews with another man to play golf."
"You're looking splendidly well and you're thinner. What was Brittany like?"
"Delightful. Have you ever been there?"
"Never. I must get Roddy to take me. Just suit him, I should think."
To Christopher's intense relief tea was brought. He came to the table and then, for an instant, he did catch her eyes, saw tears in them, and behind the tears some appeal to him to help her. Her hand was shaking.
"How silly of me to spill your tea. I'm so sorry. Let me pour it back...."
"Rachel–" he began, but a servant entered with something and he waited. When they were alone again, standing over her as though he were afraid that she would escape him, he plunged.
"Rachel dear. We're talking as though we'd never met before. You've never been shy with me like this. If marriage is going to make a stranger of you, I shall break young Seddon's neck–"
"No," she said in a voice that was between laughter and tears. "Of course, Dr. Chris. Things are just the same between us, only, only—well, I'm married and—one thing and another, you know."
He caught both her hands.
"You're perfectly happy?"
She met his eyes.
"Perfectly."
"Happier than you've ever been in your life?"
She dropped her eyes.
"Happier than I've ever been in my life."
"And you'll come to me just the same if there's any kind of trouble?"
"Of course."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
They talked then, for a little time, of other things. But he was not satisfied. Rachel's soul, caught away in alarm, was still beyond his grasp.
At last, feeling that the moments were precious and that Roddy might at any instant appear, he sat down on the sofa beside her.
"Rachel dear. Something's worrying you. You won't tell me?"
"Nothing's worrying–"
"Ah, but I know—well, if you won't you won't—but if you knew how much I loved you you'd feel that you were cruel not to let me help you."
"Dear Dr. Chris—but there is nothing."
But her eyes were full of tears.
"Look here," he said. "Perhaps you'll feel later on you can talk to me. Just come straight away if you do feel that."
He went on. "Don't be frightened, my dear, if there are a whole heap of new emotions, new instincts, stirred in you by marriage. Just take them all as they come. It's all progress, you know. Don't be frightened of anything. Just take the animal by the head and look at it."
That led him to speak about Brun's Tiger. He explained it—the force in people, the way they either grappled with the creature, and at last trained it to help them with their work in the world, or ignored it, silenced it, allowed it at last to die, and so, cosy and lazily comfortable, passed to their day's end, but had, nevertheless, missed the whole purpose of life.
He enlarged on that and showed the connection of the individual Tiger with the welfare of the world, so that everyone who denied his Tiger added to his world's muddle and confusion, and at last there would come an inevitable crisis when war would spring up between those who had grappled with their Tiger and those who had not.
"One knows one's own Tiger—absolutely of oneself one knows it and has, of oneself, the choice whether to grapple or not—at least that's what I gathered he meant—I know it struck me at the time."
"Oh," she said, with a sigh that quivered through her whole body. "It's so easy to talk.... But it's true what he says. I know it."
At last Christopher got up to go. He did not know whether he had done any good; he felt that he was a miserable failure, and he had a foreboding that one day he would be ashamed indeed that he had not helped her.
"Do something," a voice seemed to tell him. "You'll regret … all your life you'll regret."
He turned and held again her hands in his.... "Rachel—dear—tell me–"
Her hands were chill and lifeless. Her voice caught. "Oh! Dr. Chris!…" Then she suddenly stepped back from him—
"It's all right.... I'm all right. Come again soon, Dr. Chris dear—come soon."
He left her and found his way into the hot, breathless street.
After he had gone Rachel sat, staring beyond the room out on to the white walls of the houses and the green branches of the trees in the square.
Roddy came in.
All the afternoon he had been thinking about her; at one moment he was furious with the discomfort that life was now becoming to him, at another moment he was imagining little plans that would sweep all the discomfort away.
All this spring they had been miserable together. Now was beginning a time that was always jolly in London and yet he could not enjoy a moment of it. Did she dislike him instead of liking him, or did he like her instead of loving her, it would all be so easy—just the same as any other couple.
Ever since that silly Nita incident there had been this restraint, and yet how could that be the cause?
Rachel had made nothing of it; it was because it had meant so little to her that he had chafed so at the remembrance of it.
She was fond of him—he knew that—she was miserably unhappy.
He loved her—and he was miserably unhappy.
Damn this weather.
He looked at her, wondered what would happen did he cross over and suddenly kiss her, knew that he would see her struggle to be kind, to give him what he wanted, knew that that would hurt most damnably, and that he would be in a bad temper for the rest of the evening and would wonder why—
So, with a muttered word he went out and up to his dressing-room, had a bath, and then lay reading with serious brows The Winning Post until his man told him that it was time to dress.
Slowly and with the absorbed care that he always gave to these preparations he made himself ready for the Beaminster dinner.
CHAPTER V
LIZZIE'S JOURNEY—I
"So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making;
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter
In sleep a king; but waking no such matter."
William Shakespeare.
I
During this year Lizzie Rand was glad that she had so much to do. As she had never until now given the romance in her an opportunity for freedom, so had she never before realized the amazing invasion upon life that that same romance might threaten.
Indeed by the early summer months of 1899 "threaten" was no longer an honest definition, for, now this same Romance had invaded, had conquered, had confronted the very citadels of Lizzie's heart, citadels never surveyed nor challenged at any time before.
Nevertheless, even now, Portland Place noticed no change in Miss Rand. Norris, Mrs. Newton, Dorchester would still, had they been challenged, have protested that Miss Rand had no conception of the softer, more sentimental side of life; she was there for discipline and order—Norris had been known to be led a fearful dance by young women "time and again"—Mrs. Newton had passionately adored the late Mr. Newton until a sudden chill had carried him to St. Agnes, Bare Street Cemetery, whither Mrs. Newton, every Sunday, did still make her stately pilgrimage—even Dorchester had once, it was said, paid grim attentions to a soldier who had, unhappily, found in some fluffy young woman a more hopeful comfort.
Here, above and below stairs, passion had marked its victims … Miss Rand only could have felt no touch of it.
She sometimes wondered at herself that she could so calmly and dispassionately separate the one life from the other. Never, within that neat stern room at Portland Place, was there a shudder or sudden invading thrill at some flashing recollection or imagination. To her work every nerve, every energy was given. Now, indeed, more than ever before in her experience of it did 104 Portland Place demand her presence. Increasingly throughout these months of 1899 was the solemn heavy air unsettled.
Lizzie, to whom all impression came with sharpening acuteness, had seen in the appearance, success and marriage of Rachel Beaminster the disturbing elements at work—"Things will never be the same here again"—she had said to herself.
It was, of course, through Lady Adela that Lizzie studied the house. The Duchess she never saw, but it was Lady Adela's attitude, before and after those interviews with her mother, that told their story. Lady Adela had never until now appeared an interesting figure to Lizzie, but now forth, from the dry sterile husk of her, a life, pathetic, struggling against heritages of dumb years, tried to come.
Lady Adela was unhappy; the very foundations of her existence threatened to dismay her, at any moment, by their insecurity. Within her the Beaminster tradition urged, before Lizzie Rand at any rate, the maintenance of dignity and indifference, but the novelty to her of all this disturbance brought with it a hapless inability to deal with it, and again and again little exclamations, little surprised wonders at what the world could be coming to, little confused clutchings at anything that offered stability, showed Lizzie that trouble was on every side of her. Then through the house rumour began to twist its way—Her Grace was not so well—"The Old Lady was breaking up" (this, in the close security of shuttered rooms below stairs).
No one could say whence these whispers gathered. Dorchester would admit nothing. Her own position in the servants' hall was that of a lofty uncompromising female Jove, and she knew well enough that her supremacy over Norris and Mrs. Newton depended on her mistress's supremacy over the world in general. Not for her then to admit ill health.
"Indeed no—Her Grace has been better of late than for years past."
But Norris and Mrs. Newton were not to be taken in. They were truly proud now of their alliance with the Beaminster family royal, but, supposing Her Grace were to leave this world to rule in a better one ("Here to-day, gone to-morrow 'igh or low," as Norris remarked), why, then "Le Roi est mort—Vive le Roi," and the Crown might, in the meanwhile, have passed elsewhere.
"You mark my words," Mrs. Newton said to Norris, "'er Grace will go, old Victorier will go, and where'll the Beaminster crowd be then, I ask you? Times are movin' too quick. I wouldn't give a toss for your Birth and Debrett and all in another twenty years."
To Lizzie also there came other signs of the times. She noticed that now the relations and friends of the family gathered more frequently together than ever before within her memory. The Duke, Lord Richard were continually in the house, and the adherents, Lady Carloes, Lord Crewner, the Massiters and all the others, called, dined, came to tea.
Throughout it all there was no expression of any change in the family policy. To Lizzie Lady Adela admitted nothing, only there were occasions when, almost against her will, she asked for advice, was uncertain a little, vague a little, even appealing a little.
Here Lizzie was exactly right, assisted and yet admitted no need for assistance. Her tact was perfect.
Lizzie had also Lady Seddon to besiege her attention.
To her considerable surprise Rachel had written to her three times during this year. On each occasion there had been some definite reason for writing, but behind the reason there had been some implied friendliness and Lizzie had, in her turn, sent answers that were more than businesslike replies.
Lizzie had seen Rachel several times in January and at each meeting her impression of Rachel's unhappiness had grown.
"There've been three of you," Lizzie said to herself. "There was the girl in the schoolroom, and a fierce awkward difficult creature she was. There was the girl in her first season, and a delightful, joyful, radiant creature she was. And now—well, there's a girl married, fierce again, suffering again—above all, afraid of herself."
In May Rachel asked Lizzie to go and see her, and Lizzie went. That meeting was in no way personal: Rachel seemed less friendly than she had been on that day, a year ago, when she had been to Lizzie's, but behind all that outward stiffness the appeal was there.
"She wants me to help her," thought Lizzie. "She's too proud now to ask me: the time will come though."
All this was connected, she knew, with the fortunes of the house. Through Lord John, Lord Richard, the Duke, Lady Adela, Dorchester, Norris, Mrs. Newton the spirit of uneasiness was abroad.
The Duchess, during these months, more than ever before, was present in every room and passage of the house—
The shadow of some coming event hovered.