Part 20

It was for this reason, perhaps, that, although he sat there, a miserable failure, driven by the heartless might of the world to the last extremity, there was yet a light upon his brow, and about his weakly-parted lips a sweetness sometimes absent from brows and lips of more admirable men.

If he went, beneath scented lime-tree, past gay-flowered border, to peep through a certain wistaria-festooned window he should see his father with pipe and book in the accustomed chair, the mother would look up from her sewing. A recollection came to him of how once in those childish years which had been so much with him of late a sudden sense of overpowering loneliness had come upon him as he played. He had rushed to that window to comfort his little soul with the sight of the familiar faces, and had found the room empty. He recalled the terror that had fallen upon him, the horror of desolation. He would not risk the shock of disillusion. He saw them quite plainly, as his eyes seemed fixed on the broken boot, but he would not disturb them. No. When the time came and he entered the gate he would not go near the house, but would make his way through the shrubbery in which the lawn ended, and would seek that wilderness which had been his playground.

The wild hyacinths were blue about the roots of the tree on which his name was cut—how low down the sprawling letters were!—the pet name by which his mother had called him. If he fell asleep with his back against the trunk she might come and call him by it again.

It was because he had not slept all night that he was so tired. He had tossed and turned, tossed and turned upon his bed, seeking in his muddled, ineffectual brain for an escape from the disgrace of the broken boot. Quite suddenly there had presented itself to him the way of escape—the only way—the way he intended to take.

The feathery leaves of the shepherd's-parsley would wave above the broken boot. He would fall so blessedly asleep—so blessedly! The dog, he remembered, had not stirred.

The present master of the wistaria-covered house was driven past him, as he sat in the roadside chair, to turn in at the familiar gate; the afternoon sun, sinking towards evening, shone on the smart phaeton, the glossy-sided horse. Lesser men walked by him briskly to their humble dwellings, little children, belated from school or at play, rushed on. He grudged to no man his success, he looked on without bitterness at the joy of life—he blamed no one, envied no one. He had gone astray somehow, and was stranded and lost; but it was without rancour, or enmity, or spite that he, a lonely outsider, watched the "flowing, flowing, flowing, of the world."

So, at length, he rose from his place, pushed open the gate, laying a tender touch upon the latch that such dear hands had pressed in days gone by. So he made his way, going with unerring step, beneath the overbranching of copper-beech, lilac, and red may, to the flower-carpeted wilderness where, with bluebells about its roots and feathery foliage waving high around its trunk, stood that silver birch-tree upon whose smooth bark he had long ago carved his name.

WHEN DEEP SLEEP FALLETH

Ten days of honeymooning passed in a big hotel at Brighton. Ten days of feeling himself—he who, living, a man of wealth, in a small provincial town, was used to find himself talked about, looked up to, considered on every side—curiously unimportant and of no account. Then back with his bride to the imposing if somewhat gloomy-looking old house to which a dozen years ago he had brought home his first wife.

They had left Brighton early in the morning, and reached home as the winter's afternoon was closing in. In the drawing-room, where many a time she had seen his wife perform that office, the Bride poured out tea for him.

"At last," he said, and stood upon the rug before the fire, cup in hand, and smiled at her. "This is pleasant, isn't it?"

With a smile up at him, and a full glance of the dark melancholy eyes he so much admired, she let him know that indeed she thought it pleasant.

Her costly fur coat, one of his wedding-gifts to her, was tossed over the back of her chair; the firelight gleamed on heavy gold ornaments at wrists and throat. She had been a poor woman, clothing, not dressing, herself, till in her eight-and-thirtieth year all the fine things which money could buy were suddenly lavished upon her. So soon the feminine mind accustoms itself to that change! Every woman is born to fine raiment, meant to be softly swathed, richly decked, daintily tired. Cheated of her inheritance though she be, it is as natural to her as her own skin when at length she comes into it. The Bride felt a sense of well-being, but no strangeness.

The room in which she sat was perhaps a little overcrowded with beautiful things. In the days which were past, which she did not trouble too much to remember, she had sat here on Sunday afternoons—her one holiday, and always spent with the good-natured wife of the man she had married—and had told herself that the room bore too evident stamp of the wealth of the master of the house, and the too sumptuous tastes of the mistress. Yet, now that it was her own, so desirable in itself seemed each piece of furniture, so beautiful each ornament, it would be difficult, she felt, to decide what to banish.

The man's gaze followed hers, speculatively, roaming over the costly objects. He was by no means anxious to make a display of his wealth.

He dreaded above all things the charge of vulgarity, distrusting his first wife's taste, not being quite sure of his own. A compactly built, well-featured man of middle size and pale complexion; a man careful and correct in speech, manner and dress; in his gently reserved, modest bearing giving no sign that he had raised himself far above his origin, that his wealth was new.

"Do what you like here," he said to his wife, as if reading her thoughts. "Alter the disposition of the furniture—do away with it altogether. I am by no means wedded to things as they are."

He crossed as he spoke to a rosewood cabinet placed against the opposite wall. On its polished surface, above its innumerable little shelves and drawers, a Crown Derby tea and coffee service was set forth. Standing in the midst, propped between a basin and a cup, was the unframed photograph of a woman. This the man removed. Holding it loosely between his finger and thumb, still talking to his wife, he returned with it to his old position on the hearth.

"I have not set foot in this room since—for a year," he said. "I thought I would leave everything till you came. Do just as you like."

"You are so good to me—" she began, and then started forward in her chair. "Oh, don't, don't, love!" she cried. "Don't burn her picture!"

She was too late. For one instant the face of the first wife looked up at her, smiling, fat, fatuous, from the heart of the glowing coals, then, with a stab of the poker, wielded by a remorseless hand, vanished in the blaze.

"Oh, love!" she sighed, reproachfully, "Oh, love!"

"Why not?" he asked, with a smile which went no further than his close-set lips. He put down the poker on the hearth and rose up again. "She must have laid in a stock of hundreds of those photographs," he said. "The servants appear to have an inexhaustible supply. In spite of—discouragement—they kept my dressing-room and study-table garnished with them till I ordered them to desist."

The new wife looked away from him into the fire in a minute's silence. "It seems cruel," at last she said, with an obvious effort. "I wish you had not burnt it, love. At least, not to-night. In this big house there should be room for me and—her photographs."

When she found that their bedroom was to be the same which he and his former wife had occupied, she was uncomfortably surprised.

The servant who showed her to that apartment in time for her to change her dress for dinner was the middle-aged woman, calling herself parlour-maid, but who had acted as lady's-maid, factotum, confidante to the dead wife. She had made confidantes of all who would listen, poor woman, pouring out the secrets of her heart, and, as far as she knew them, of her husband's heart, into any stranger's ears.

"Can I be of any assistance to you, madam?" the maid had inquired; and madam, in order not to give offence, accepted for a time her services.

"I like to do my hair myself," she said, "but if you brush it for me I shall be glad."

She did not like this servant who had been on terms of close familiarity with the other woman; while, outwardly acquiescent, she allowed herself to be buttoned into a dressing-gown by the hard, bony fingers, in spirit she protested.

As the pins were taken out of the heavy dark hair, and the braids untwisted, the eyes of the new mistress and the eyes of the old servant met again and again in the glass. And the thought came to the bride: how often in that same glass those slanting eyes of the maid must have encountered other eyes! Eyes of shallow blue beneath a fringe of yellow-dyed, tousled locks.

The reflection was not a comforting one, and warm and cosy as was the brightly-lit room, she shivered. Hastily casting down her gaze it fell upon a photograph of her husband, taken ten years or so ago, shrined in its silver frame amid the silver accessories of the dressing-table. In order to break a silence which was getting on her nerves—

"Is that the picture which was always here?" she asked.

"Always," the servant replied. "It stood opposite one of my late mistress, taken at the same time, and framed in the same way. After my late mistress's death my master wished to have her photographs removed. He destroyed many of them. I think he destroyed the last to-day."

"Now, how in the world did she know that?" the Bride asked herself, guiltily conscious of the tell-tale face in the looking-glass, reddening before the servant's inquisitive eyes.

"After all, I will brush my hair myself," she said hastily. "I am used to doing it."

The servant, with no sign of either pleasure or displeasure on her shut-up, solemn face, withdrew.

"The silver-backed brushes on the table are those of my late mistress," she said from the door—"my master's last present to her. In the drawer beneath the looking-glass I think you will find your own brushes."

She found them there, and, lying beneath them, face upwards, a photograph of the dead wife.

The two women for years had called each other friend, but the Bride started back from the smiling presentment of the face now as if it had been some loathable thing. Started back, and shut the drawer.

Yet, in a minute had recovered herself, had taken out the picture, and laid it on the table before her, forcing herself to look long into the face that from among the medley of silver-topped bottles, pans and jars, smiled up at her.

As she looked, an inexplicable feeling of uneasiness and insecurity took possession of her. The fat, fatuous, and smiling face! It seemed to look with an air of contemptuous toleration upon her as an interloper; to say with its shallow gaze—"These are Mine. All this is Mine. It is I, you understand, who am mistress here."

Fascinated by this fancied new expression in the once expressionless eyes, the Bride looked and looked again—looked till the happy present slipped away from her and she was back in the unhappy past. The humble friend, her own poor toilette so soon made, sitting, by gracious permission, to watch the magnificent toilette of the other woman. In her bitter heart she felt again the scorn which her mind had always secretly held for this poor-witted, vulgar creature, who had not the brains to adapt herself to her husband's altered circumstances, who angered and shamed him beneath his still exterior, to his face, and gave him away to the first who would condescend to listen, behind his back. Who had sat before the dressing-table, watching in the glass the wide expanse of her bare bosom and white arms, and had boasted of her jewels and her dress. Babbled of things which should have been sacred between her husband and herself. How that woman sitting beside her, with the poor dress and the melancholy, dark eyes, hated her! With what an agony of pity she pitied the husband! Of what good were money, position, power to him with such a wife as this! She hated her. Hated her, as she sat before the glass, smiling at the reflection of her fair big arms and neck; hated her as, later at the dinner-table, she watched the husband's face, listening against his will to the woman gabbling forth some bit of information which the dullest-witted present knew she was expected to keep to herself.

Still lost to her surroundings in her reverie, the Bride heard again the outburst of foolish laughter with which the wife had once publicly declared her husband could keep nothing from her because of his habit of talking in his sleep. What she wished to know that in the daytime he would not tell her, she got from him at night by asking questions he never failed to answer while he slept.

She had hated her; and at last the poor creature, whose smiling face lay there beneath her fascinated gaze, had known it, and with the inferior force of her inferior nature had hated back. She had learnt—who knew how?—of the love between the woman who had been her friend and her own husband. The eyes had smiled no longer then.

The Bride lay back in her chair, motionless, while before her mind's eye rose the altered face of the woman who, deceived for long, was deceived no more—who knew! With her there had been no self-respecting reticence, no decency of secret tears. She had heaped insult upon the woman who had wronged her, she had led her husband a life of hell.

That time had been, mercifully, of short duration. A little illness of which no one took account, had ended all for the unhappy wife, had been the beginning of a joy beyond words for the other two. She had kept her bed for two days, suffering from a nervous attack, accompanied by excruciating neuralgia, and had died quite suddenly from the bursting of a vessel on the brain.

It had been, of course, in this room she had died. Upon the bed, there. And her husband, sleeping beside her, had not known that she was dead. Slowly the Bride, as if fearing what she might see, looked over her shoulder. The room, with a bright fire, and lit by electric light, was as cheerful as day. But as her eyes, slowly travelling back again, met their own reflection in the glass, she saw in them a haunted look which frightened her. She flew to her feet; snatching the portrait from the table, she hurriedly crossed the room and flung it to the flames.

"He is right. Why not?" she said. "To burn a picture is nothing—nothing! And it has given me horrible thoughts."

It was difficult to banish them.

When the newly-married pair were alone in the drawing-room after dinner, and she was seated at the piano, she asked him, through the chords she was softly touching, if there was not another room in the house they could take for their sleeping-chamber.

"Certainly," he said; "most certainly if she wished."

He, himself, had not slept there since the night of his first wife's death, he told her. Told her, too, that before leaving for their wedding-trip, he had given orders to have one of the other rooms prepared against their return. The reason this had not been done, the invaluable parlour-maid had informed him, was because the wardrobe he had particularly desired to be moved there had proved too big for the niche which was to have received it. Wardrobe or no wardrobe, however, since she wished it, they would migrate on the morrow.

"You do wish it?" he asked her.

She nodded, softly striking her chords.

"I wonder why? You are no more superstitious or fanciful than I."

She shook her head, bending forward to study the score of the music on the desk, one of Sullivan's operas they had heard together at Brighton. He, sitting close behind her, his chin touching her shoulder, had fixed his eyes on the music too, although he could not read a note of it. "Horrid thoughts came to me there," she said. "I don't think, love, I shall ever like to be alone in that room."

He named the invaluable maid. "Have her up to dress you," he advised.

The Bride shrugged her shoulders, and her fingers moved more quickly in a livelier movement. "We will change the room," she said.

Later, he had placed himself on the rug at her feet, and she, leaning forward in the armchair drawn over the fire, had her arm about his neck while he talked to her of himself, she questioning. Of his early life he talked, and what had been for and what against him; of his later success, and his old ambitions.

"All achieved now," he said, and turned to smile at her the curious, characteristic smile accomplished by a twist of a closed lip.

"I have not bored you?" he asked her with anxiety, when the evening was over. "Except to you, I have never in my life talked of myself. It is a luxury in which I must not too much indulge."

She reassured him with the zeal of the newly-wedded, much loved and loving wife. "Promise me that you will always tell me all, that you will never keep a secret from me," she said; and he promised, smiling upon her with his twisted lip.

"If you do," she cried, fondly threatening, "I shall know it, Sleep-talker! I shall ask you in your sleep and you will tell me all."

That, under those circumstances, he should probably tell her much that had no foundation in fact, and much that it would by no means please her to hear, he warned her.

She fancied by his tone that he was annoyed, and hastily asserted that she had been in fun, that not for a moment could she seriously entertain such an intention.

"What you do not wish to tell me, be sure I do not wish to hear," she told him.

He stood by the open drawing-room door and watched her as she ran lightly upstairs.

Conscious of his eyes following her, the knowledge of his love and admiration warm at her heart, she went into their brightly-lit bedroom. For years she had lived such an unloved life, watching her youth fade, fighting only for bread to keep herself alive in a world where none wanted her. Since, in this man's eyes she was still so young and fair, let her look at herself!

She crossed the room to the looking-glass with a quick, exultant step, but having reached the dressing-table, drew back with almost a cry. Standing on it in its old place, facing her husband in his silver frame, was the silver-framed portrait with the elaborately-dressed fair hair, the smiling, shallow eyes of the first wife.

The Bride stifled the little cry upon her lips, but with her heart beating thickly, fell back from the dressing-table, and leant against the foot of the bed.

A moment's thought reassured her. There was nothing, after all, disturbing in the reappearance of a photograph which had been displaced. The invaluable maid with her slanting eyes, with, perhaps, her stupid devotion to a memory, was responsible.

At the thought the Bride's nerves steadied themselves, but her anger arose. She moved to the bell—but stopped. Better not to create talk among the servants by the order she had meditated; rather let this portrait of the dead wife follow the rest.

But when she held it, frame and all, over the fire, she relented and drew it back. "It is not like me to be a superstitious fool. I will not," she said. "She is in her grave, and I am—here. In a way I did not wish, but could not help, I spoilt the last year of her life. She is dead, buried out of mind, shovelled away under the earth, that a joy undreamt of might come to me. This poor triumph at least she shall have, to keep her old place on the table. I will never dress in the morning without remembering I am in her place. When I prepare for my bed at night she shall not be forgotten."