“I make anyone call you – anything but what you are!” he cried. “Nobody would dare,” said the unfortunate fellow, “to do anything but revere you and admire you so long as I was there.”
“And then break out laughing the moment your back was turned,” she said. “ ‘What a hold the old hag has got upon him!’ is what they would say. And it would be quite true. Not that I am an old hag. No, I don’t think I am that, I am worse. I’m a very well preserved woman of my years. I’ve taken great care of myself to keep up what are called my personal advantages. I have never wished – I don’t wish now – to be thought older than I am, or ugly. I am just old enough – to be your mother, Charlie, if I had married young, as your mother did – ”
He drew his hands out of her cool and firm grasp, and once more covered his face with them. “Don’t torture me,” he cried.
“No, my dear boy, I don’t want to torture you, but you must not make me, nor yourself – whom I am proud of – ridiculous. I am going probably – for nothing is certain till it happens,” she said, with a mournful tone in her voice, slightly shaking her head, “and you may perhaps help to balk me – I am probably going to make a match with a reasonable person suited to my age.”
Poor Charlie started up, his hands fell from his face, his large miserable eyes were fixed upon hers. “And you come – you come – to tell me this!” he cried.
“It will be partly for you – to show how impossible your folly is – but most for myself, to secure my own happiness.” She said these words very slowly, one by one – “To secure my own happiness. Have I not the right to do that, because a young man, who should have been my son, has taken it into his foolish head to form other ideas of me? You would rather make me ridiculous and wretched than consider my dignity, my welfare, my happiness – and this is what you call love!” she said.
The girls listened to this conversation with feelings impossible to put into words, not knowing what to think. One of them loved the woman and the other hated her; they were equally overwhelmed in their young and simple ideas. She seemed to be speaking a language new to them, and to have risen into a region which they had never known.
CHAPTER L
She left Charlie’s room, having soothed him and reduced him to quiet in this inconceivable way, with a smile on her face and the look of one who was perfectly mistress of the situation. But when she had gone down half-a-dozen steps and reached the landing, she stood still and leaned against the wall, clasping her hands tight as if there was something in them to hold by. She had carried through this part of her ordeal with a high hand. She had made it look the kindest yet the most decisive interview in the world, crushing the foolish young heart, without remorse, yet tenderly, kindly, with such a force of sense and reason as could not be resisted – and all so naturally, with so much apparent ease, as if it cost her nothing. But she was after all, merely a woman, and she knew that only half, nay, not half, not the worst half of her trial was over. She lay back against the wall, having nothing else to rest upon, and closed her eyes for a moment. The two girls had followed her instinctively out of Charlie’s room, and stood on the stairs one above the other, gazing at her. The long lines of her figure seemed to relax, as if she might have fallen, and in their wonder and ignorance they might still have stood by and looked on letting her fall, without knowing what to do. But she did not do so. The corner of the walls supported her as if they had made a couch for her, and presently she opened her eyes with a vague smile at Betty, who was foremost. “I was tired,” she said, and then, “it isn’t easy” – drawing a long breath.
At this moment the trim figure of Mrs. Leigh’s maid appeared on the stairs below, so commonplace, so trim, so neat, the little apparition of ordinary life which glides through every tragedy, lifting its everyday voice in announcements of dinner, in inquiries about tea, in all the nothings of routine, in the midst of all tumults of misery and passion. “If you please, madam – my lady would be glad if you would step into the dining-room,” she said.
Miss Lance raised herself in a moment from that half-recumbent position against the wall. She recovered herself, got back her colour and the brightness of her eyes, and that look of being perfectly natural, at her ease, unstrained, spontaneous, which she had shown throughout the interview with Charlie. “Certainly,” she said. There did not seem to be time for the twinkling of an eyelid between the one mood and the other. She required no preparation or interval to pull herself together. She looked at the two sisters as if to call them to follow her, and then walked quietly downstairs to be tried for her life – like a martyr – oh, no, for she was not a martyr, but a criminal. She had no confidence of innocence about her. She knew what indictment was about to be brought against her, and she knew it was true. This knowledge, however, gives a certain strength. It gives courage such as the innocent who do not know what charge may be brought against them or how to meet it, do not possess. She had rehearsed the scene. She knew what she was going to be accused of, and had thought over, and set in order, all the pleas. She knew exactly what she had done and what she had not, which was a tower of strength to her, and she knew that on her power of fighting it out depended her life. It is difficult altogether to deny our sympathy to a brave creature fighting for bare life. However guilty he may be, human nature takes sides with him, hopes in the face of all justice that there may be a loophole of escape. Even Bee, coming slowly downstairs after her, already thrown into a curious tumult of feeling by that scene in Charlie’s room, began to feel her breath quicken with excitement even in the hostility of her heart.
There was one thing that Miss Lance had not foreseen, and that burst upon her at once when the maid opened the door – Colonel Kingsward, standing with his arm upon the mantel-piece and his countenance as if turned to stone. The shock which this sight gave her was very difficult to overcome or conceal, it struck her with a sudden dart as of despair; her impulse was to fling down her arms, to acknowledge herself vanquished, and to retreat, a defeated and ruined adventuress, but she was too brave and unalterably by nature too sanguine to do this. She gave him a nod and a smile, to which he scarcely responded, as she went towards Mrs. Leigh.
“How strange,” she said, “when I come to see a new friend to find so old a friend! I wondered if it could be Mr. Leigh’s house, but I was not sure – of the number.”
“I am afraid I cannot say I am glad to see you, Laura,” said Mrs. Leigh.
“No? Perhaps it would have been too much to expect. We were, so to speak, on different sides. Poor Amy, I know, was never satisfactory to you, and I don’t wonder. Of course you only thought of me as her friend.”
“If that were all!” Mrs. Leigh said.
“Was there more than that? May I sit down? I have had a long walk, and rather an exhaustive interview – and I did not expect to be put on my trial. But it is always best to know what one is accused of. I think it quite natural – quite natural that you should not like me, Mrs. Leigh. I was Amy’s friend and she was trying to you. She put me in a very false position which I ought never to have accepted. But yet – I understand your attitude, and I submit to it with respect – but, pardon me – sincerely, I don’t know what there was more.”
Miss Lance had taken a chair, a perfectly upright one, on which few people could have sat gracefully. She made it evident that it was mere fatigue which made her subside upon it momentarily, and lifted her fine head and limpid eyes with so candid and respectful an air towards Mrs. Leigh’s comfortable, unheroic face, that no contrast of the oppressed and oppressor could have been more marked. If anyone had suffered in the matter between these two ladies, it certainly was not the one with the rosy countenance and round, well-filled-out figure; or so, at least, any impartial observer certainly would have felt.
Mrs. Leigh, for her part, was almost speechless with excitement and anger. She had intended to keep perfectly calm, but the look, the tone, the appearance of this personage altogether, brought before her overpoweringly many past scenes – scenes in which, to tell the truth, Miss Lance had not been always in the wrong, in which the other figure, now altogether disappeared, of Aubrey’s wife was the foremost, an immovable gentle-mannered fool, with whom all reason and argument were unavailing, whom everybody had believed to be inspired by the companion to whom she clung. All Amy’s faults had been bound upon Laura’s shoulders, but this was not altogether deserved, and Miss Lance did not shrink from anything that could be said on that subject. It required more courage to say, “Was there anything more?”
“More!” cried Mrs. Leigh, choking with the remembrance. “More! My boy’s house was made unsafe for him, it was made miserable to him, he was involved in every kind of danger and scandal, and she asks me if there was more?”
“Poor Amy,” said Miss Lance, with a little pause on the name, shaking her head gently in compassion and regret. “Poor Amy put me in a very false position. I have already said so, I ought not to have accepted it, I ought not to have promised; but it was so difficult to refuse a promise to the dying. Let Colonel Kingsward judge. She was very unwise, but she had been my friend from infancy and clung to me more, much more than I wished. She exacted a promise from me on her death-bed that I would never leave her child – which was folly, and, perhaps more than folly, so far, at least, as I was concerned. You may imagine, Colonel Kingsward,” she added, steadfastly regarding him. He had kept his head turned away, not looking at her, but this gaze compelled him against his will to shift his position, to turn towards the appellant who made him the judge. He still kept his eyes away, but his head turned by an attraction which he could not withstand. “You may imagine, Colonel Kingsward – that I was the person who suffered most,” Miss Lance said after that pause, “compelled to stay in a house where I had never been welcome, except to poor Amy, who was dead; a sort of guardian, a sort of nurse, and yet with none of their rights, held fast by a promise which I had given against my will, and which I never ceased to regret. You are a man, Colonel Kingsward, but you have more understanding of a woman’s feelings than any I know. My position was a false one, it was cruel – but I was bound by my word.”
“No one ought to have given such a promise,” he said, coldly, with averted eyes.
“You are always right, I ought not to have done so; but she was dying, and I was fond of her, poor girl, though she was foolish – it is not always the wisest people one loves most – fond of her, very fond of her, and of her poor little child.”
The tears came to Miss Lance’s eyes. She shook her head a little as if to shake them from her eyelashes. “Why should I cry? They have been so long happy, happier far than we – ”
Mrs. Leigh, the prosecutor, the accuser, gave a gulp, a sob; the child was her grandchild, her only one – and besides anger in a woman is as prone to tears as sorrow. She gave a stifled cry, “I don’t deny you were good to the child; oh, Laura, I could have forgiven you everything! But not – not – ”
“What?” Miss Lance said.
Mrs. Leigh seized upon Bee by the arm and drew her forward – Aubrey’s mother wanted words, she wanted eloquence, her arguments had to be pointed by fact. She took Bee, who had been standing in proud yet excited spectatorship, and held her by her own side. “Aubrey,” she said, almost inarticulately, and stopped to recover her breath – “Aubrey – whom you had driven from his home – found at last this dear girl, this nice, good girl, who would have made him a new life. But you interfered, you wrote to her father, you went – I don’t know what you did – and said you had a claim, a prior claim. If you appeal to Colonel Kingsward, he is the best judge. You went to him – ”
“Not to me, I was not aware, I never even saw Miss Lance till long after; forgive me for interrupting you.”
Miss Lance turned towards him again with that full look of faith and confidence. “Always just!” she said. And this time for a tremulous moment their eyes met. He turned his away again hastily, but he had received that touch; an indefinable wavering came over his aspect of iron.
“Yes,” she said, “I do not deny it – it is quite true. Shall I now explain before every one who is here? I think,” she added, after a moment, “that my little Betty, who has nothing particular to do with it, may run away.”
“I!” said Betty, clinging to the back of a chair.
“Go,” said her father, impatiently, “go!”
“Yes, my dear, run away. Charlie must want some one. He will have got over me a little, and he will want some one. Dear little Betty, run away!”
Miss Lance rose from her seat – probably that too was a relief to her – and, with a smile and a kiss, turned Betty out of the room. She came back then and sat down again. It gained a little time, and she was at a crisis harder than she had ever faced before. She had gained a moment to think, but even now she was not sure what way there was out of this strait, the most momentous in which she had ever been. She looked round her at one after another with a look that seemed as secure and confident, as easy and natural, as before; but her brain was working at the most tremendous rate, looking for some clue, some indication. She looked round as with a pause of conscious power, and then her gaze fixed itself on Bee. Bee stood near Mrs. Leigh’s chair. She was standing firm but tremulous, a deeply concerned spectator, but there was on her face nothing of the eager attention with which a girl would listen to an explanation about her lover. She was not more interested than she had been before, not so much so as when Charlie was in question. When Mrs. Leigh, in her indictment, said, “You interfered,” Bee had made a faint, almost imperceptible movement of her head. The mind works very quickly when its fate hangs on the balance of a minute, and now, suddenly, the culprit arraigned before these terrible judges saw her way.
“I interfered,” Miss Lance said, slowly, “but not because of any prior claim;” – she paused again for a moment – “that would have been as absurd as in the case Colonel Kingsward knows of. I interfered – because I had other reasons for believing that Aubrey Leigh was not the man to marry a dear, good, nice girl.”
“You had – other reasons, Laura! Mind what you are saying – you will have to prove your words,” cried Mrs. Leigh, rising in her wrath, with an astonished and threatening face.
“I do not ask his mother to believe me. It is before Colonel Kingsward,” said Miss Lance, “that I stand or fall.”
“Colonel Kingsward, make her speak out! You know it was because she claimed my son – she, a woman twice his age; and now she pretends – Make her speak out! How dare you? You said he had promised to marry you – that he was bound to you. Colonel Kingsward, make her speak out!”
“That was what I understood,” he said, looking out of the window, his head turned half towards the other speakers, but not venturing to look at them. “I did not see Miss Lance, but that was what I understood.”
Laura sat firm, as if she were made of marble, but almost as pale. Her nerves were so highly strung that if she had for a moment relaxed their tension, she would have fallen to the ground. She sat like a rock, holding herself together with the strong grasp of her clasped hands.
“You hear, you hear! You are convicted out of your own mouth. Oh, you are cruel, you are wicked, Laura Lance! If you have anything to say speak out, speak out!”
“I will say nothing,” said Miss Lance. “I will leave another, a better witness, to say it for me. Colonel Kingsward, ask your daughter if it was because of my prior claim, as his mother calls it, that she broke off her engagement with Aubrey Leigh.”
Colonel Kingsward turned, surprised, to his daughter, who, roused by the sound of her own name, looked up quickly – first at the seemingly composed and serious woman opposite to her, then at her father. He spoke to her angrily, abruptly.
“Do you hear? Answer the question that is put to you. Was it because of this lady, or any claim of hers, that you – how shall I say it? – a girl like you had no right to decide one way or the other – that you broke off – that your mind was changed towards Mr. Aubrey Leigh?”
It appeared to Bee suddenly as if she had become the culprit, and all eyes were fixed on her. She trembled, looking at them all. What had she done? She was surely unhappy enough, wretched enough, a clandestine visitor, keeping Aubrey out of his own house, and what had she to do with Aubrey? Nothing, nothing! Nor he with her – that her heart should now be snatched out of her bosom publicly in respect to him.
“That is long past,” she said, faltering, “it is an old story. Mr. Aubrey Leigh is – a stranger to me; it is of no consequence – now!”
“Bee,” her father thundered at her, “answer the question! Was it because of – this lady that you changed your mind?”
Colonel Kingsward had always the art, somehow, of kindling the blaze of opposition in the blue eyes which were so like his own. She looked at him almost fiercely in reply, fully roused.
“No!” she said, “no! It was not because of – that lady. It was another – reason of my own.”
“What was your reason?” cried Mrs. Leigh. “Oh, Bee, speak! What was it, what was it? Tell me, tell me, my dear, what was your reason? that I may prove to you it was not true.”
“Had it anything to do with – this lady?” asked Colonel Kingsward once more.
“I never spoke to that lady but once,” cried Bee, almost violently. “I don’t know her; I don’t want to know her. She has nothing to do with it. It was because of something quite different, something that we heard – I – and mamma.”
Miss Lance looked at him with a smile on her face, loosing the grip of her hands, spreading them out in demonstration of her acquittal. She rose up slowly, her beautiful eyes filled with tears. She allowed it to be seen for the first time how she was shaken with emotion.
“You have heard,” she said, “a witness you trust more than me – if I put myself into the breach to secure a pause, it was only such a piece of folly as I have done before. I hope now that you will let me withdraw. I am dreadfully tired, I am not fit for any more.”
She looked with that appeal upon her face, first at one of her judges, then at the other. “If you are satisfied, let me go.” It seemed as if she could not say a word more. They made no response, but she did not wait for that. “I take it for granted,” she added, “that by that child’s mouth I am cleared,” and then she turned towards the door.
Colonel Kingsward, with a little start, came from his place by the mantel-piece and opened it for her, as he would have done for any woman. She let it appear that this movement was unexpected, and went to her heart; she paused a moment looking up at him – her eyes swimming in tears, her mouth quivering.
“How kind you are!” she said, “even though you don’t believe in me any more! but I have done all I can. I am very tired, scarcely able to walk.” He stood rigid, and made no sign, and she, looking at him, softly shook her head – “Let me see you at least once,” she said, very low, in a pleading tone, “this evening, some time?”
Still he gave no answer, standing like a man of iron, holding the door open. She gave him another look, and then walked quietly, but with a slight quiver and half stumble, away. They all stood watching until her tall figure was seen to pass the window, disappearing in the street, which is the outer world.
“Colonel Kingsward – ” said Mrs. Leigh.
He started at the sound of his name, as if he had but just awakened out of a dream, and began to smooth his hat, which all this time he had held in his hands.
“Excuse me,” he said, “excuse me, another time. I have some pressing business to see to now.”
And he, too, disappeared into that street which led both ways, into the monotony of London, which is the world.