Chapter 8

"I didn't come for that. Sit down, Amabel. You are very tired, more tired than the other day. I have been looking at you for a long time.--I didn't come to tell you anything; but now, perhaps, I shall have something to tell. I must think."

She took a chair beside the table and leaned her head on her hand shading her eyes. Amabel had obeyed her and sat looking at her guest.

"Tell me," Lady Elliston said abruptly, and Amabel today, more than of sweetness and softness, was conscious of her strength, "have you been having a bad time since I saw you? Has anything happened? Has anything come between you and Augustine? I saw him this morning, and he's been suffering, too: I guessed it. You must be frank with me, Amabel; you must trust me: perhaps I am going to be franker with you, to trust you more, than you can dream."

She inspired the confidence her words laid claim to; for the first time in their lives Amabel trusted her unreservedly.

"I have had a very bad time," she said: "And Augustine has had a bad time. Yes; something has come between Augustine and me,--many things."

"He hates Hugh," said Lady Elliston.

"How can you know that?"

"I guessed it. He is a clever boy: he sees you absorbed; he sees your devotion robbing him; perhaps he sees even more, Amabel; I heard this morning, from Mrs. Grey, that Hugh had been with you, again, yesterday. Amabel, is it possible; has Hugh been making love to you?"

Amabel had become very pale. Looking down, she said in a hardly audible voice; "It is a mistake.--He will see that it is impossible."

Lady Elliston for a moment was silent: the confirming of her own suspicion seemed to have stupefied her. "Is it impossible?" she then asked.

"Quite, quite impossible."

"Does Hugh know that it is impossible?"

"He will.--Yesterday, Augustine came in while he was here;--I could not say any more."

"I see: I see"; said Lady Elliston. Her hand fell to the table now and she slightly tapped her finger-tips upon it. There was an ominous rhythm in the little raps. "And this adds to Augustine's hatred," she said.

"I am afraid it is true. I am afraid he does hate him, and how terrible that is," said Amabel, "for he believes him to be his father."

"By instinct he must feel the tie unreal."

"Yet he has had a father's kindness, almost, from Hugh."

"Almost. It isn't enough you know. He suspects nothing, you think?"

"It is that that is so terrible. He doesn't suspect me: he suspects him. He couldn't suspect evil of me. It is my guilt, and his ignorant hatred that is parting us." Amabel was trembling; she leaned forward and covered her face with her hands.

The very air about her seemed to tremble; so strange, so incredibly strange was it to hear her own words of helpless avowal; so strange to feel that she must tell Lady Elliston all she wished to know.

"Parting you? What do you mean? What folly!--what impossible folly! A mother and a son, loving each other as you and Augustine love, parted for that. Oh, no," said Lady Elliston, and her own voice shook a little: "that can't be. I won't have that."

"He would not love me, if he knew."

"Knew? What is there for him to know? And how should he know? You won't be so mad as to tell him?"

"It's my punishment not to dare to tell him--and to see my cowardice cast a shadow on Hugh."

"Punishment? haven't you been punished enough, good heavens! Cowardice? it is reason, maturity; the child has no right to your secret--it is yours and only yours, Amabel. And if he did know all, he could not judge you as you judge yourself."

"Ah, you don't understand," Amabel murmured: "I had forgotten to judge myself; I had forgotten my sin; it was Augustine who made me remember; I know now what he feels about people like me."

Again Lady Elliston controlled herself to a momentary silence and again her fingers sharply beat out her uncontrollable impatience. "I live in a world, Amabel," she said at last, "where people when they use the word 'sin,' in that connection, know that it's obsolete, a mere decorative symbol for unconventionality. In my world we don't have your cloistered black and white view of life nor see sin where only youth and trust and impulse were. If one takes risks, one may have to pay for them, of course; one plays the game, if one is in the ring, and, of course, you may be put out of the ring if you break the rules; but the rules are those of wisdom, not of morality, and the rule that heads the list is: Don't be found out. To imagine that the rules are anything more than matters of social convenience is to dignify the foolish game. It is a foolish game, Amabel, this of life: but one or two things in it are worth having; power to direct the game; freedom to break its rules; and love, passionate love, between a man and woman: and if one is strong enough one can have them all."

Lady Elliston had again put her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes and leaning her elbow on the table, and Amabel had raised her head and sat still, gazing at her.

"You weren't strong enough," Lady Elliston went on after a little pause: "You made frightful mistakes: the greatest, of course, was in running away with Paul Quentin: that was foolish, and it was, if you like to call foolishness by its obsolete name, a sin. You shouldn't have gone: you should have stayed: you should have kept your lover--as long as you wanted to."

Again she paused. "Do I horrify you?"

"No: you don't horrify me," Amabel replied. Her voice was gentle, almost musing; she was absorbed in her contemplation.

"You see," said Lady Elliston, "you didn't play the game: you made a mess of things and put the other players out. If you had stayed, and kept your lover, you would have been, in my eyes, a less loveable but a wiser woman. I believe in the game being kept up; I believe in the social structure: I am one of its accredited upholders"; in the shadow of her hand, Lady Elliston slightly smiled. "I believe in the family, the group of shared interests, shared responsibilities, shared opportunities it means: I don't care how many lovers a woman has if she doesn't break up the family, if she plays the game. Marriage is a social compact and it's the woman's part to keep the home together. If she seeks love outside marriage she must play fair, she mustn't be an embezzling partner; she mustn't give her husband another man's children to support and so take away from his own children;--that's thieving. The social structure, the family, are unharmed, if one is brave and wise. Love and marriage can rarely be combined and to renounce love is to cripple one's life, to miss the best thing it has to give. You, at all events, Amabel, may be glad that you haven't missed it. What, after all, does our life mean but just that,--the power and feeling that one gets into it. Be glad that you've had something."

Amabel, answering nothing, contemplated her guest.

"So, as these are my views, imagine what I feel when I find you here, like this"; Lady Elliston dropped her hand at last and looked about her, not at Amabel: "when I find you, in prison, locked up for life, by yourself, because you were lovably unwise. It's abominable, it's shameful, your position, isolated here, and tolerated, looked askance at by these nobodies.--Ah--I don't say that other women haven't paid even more heavily than you've done; I own that, to a certain extent, you've escaped the rigours that the game exacts from its victims. But there was no reason why you should pay anything: it wasn't known, never really known--your brother and Hugh saw to that;--you could have escaped scot-free."

Amabel spoke at last: "How, scot-free?" she asked.

Lady Elliston looked hard at her: "Your husband would have taken you back, had you insisted.--You shouldn't have fallen in with his plans."

"His plans? They were mine; my brother's."

"And his. Hugh was glad to be rid of the young wife he didn't love."

Again Amabel was trembling. "He might have been rid of her, altogether rid of her, if he had cared more for power and freedom than for pity."

"Power? With not nearly enough money? He was glad to keep her money and be rid of her. If you had pulled the purse-strings tight you might have made your own conditions."

"I do not believe you," said Amabel; "What you say is not true. My husband is noble."

Lady Elliston looked at her steadily and unflinchingly. "He is not noble," she said.

"What have you meant by coming here today? You have meant something! I will not listen to you! You are my husband's enemy;"--Amabel half started from her chair, but Lady Elliston laid her hand on her arm, looking at her so fixedly that she sank down again, panic-stricken.

"He is not noble," Lady Elliston repeated. "I will not have you waste your love as you have wasted your life. I will not have this illusion of his nobility come between you and your son. I will not have him come near you with his love. He is not noble, he is not generous, he is not beautiful. He could not have got rid of you. And he came to you with his love yesterday because his last mistress has thrown him over--and he must have a mistress. I know him: I know all about him: and you don't know him at all. Your husband was my lover for over twenty years."

A long silence followed her words. It was again a strange picture of arrested life in the dark room. The light fell quietly upon the two faces, their stillness, their contemplation--it seemed hardly more intent than contemplation, that drinking gaze of Amabel's; the draught of wonder was too deep for pain or passion, and Lady Elliston's eyes yielded, offered, held firm the cup the other drank. And the silence grew so long that it was as if the twenty years flowed by while they gazed upon each other.

It was Lady Elliston's face that first showed change. She might have been the cup-bearer tossing aside the emptied cup, seeing in the slow dilation of the victim's eyes, the constriction of lips and nostrils, that it had held poison. All--all had been drunk to the last drop. Death seemed to gaze from the dilated eyes.

"Oh--my poor Amabel--" Lady Elliston murmured; her face was stricken with pity.

Amabel spoke in the cramped voice of mortal anguish.--"Before he married me."

"Yes," Lady Elliston nodded, pitiful, but unflinching. "He married you for your money, and because you were a sweet, good, simple child who would not interfere."

"And he could not have divorced me, because of you."

"Because of me. You know the law; one guilty person can't divorce another. No one knew: no one has ever known: he and Jack have remained the best of friends:--but, of course, with all our care, it's been suspected, whispered. If I'd been less powerful the whispers might have blighted me: as it was, we thought that Bertram wasn't altogether unsuspecting. Hugh knew that it would be fatal to bring the matter into court;--I will say for Hugh that, in spite of the money, he wanted to. He could have married money again. He has always been extremely captivating. When he found that he would have to keep you, the money, of course, did atone. I suppose he has had most of your money by now," said Lady Elliston.

Amabel shut her eyes. "Wasn't he even sorry for me?" she asked.

Lady Elliston reflected and a glitter was in her eye; vengeance as well as justice armed her. "He is not unkind," she conceded: "and he was sorry after a fashion: 'Poor little girl,' I remember he said. Yes, he was very tolerant. But he didn't think of you at all, unless he wanted money. He is always graceful in his direct relations with people; he is tactful and sympathetic and likes things to be pleasant. But he doesn't mind breaking your heart if he doesn't have to see you while he is doing it. He is kind, but he is as hard as steel," said Lady Elliston.

"Then you do not love him any longer," said Amabel. It was not a question, only a farther acceptance.

And now, after only the slightest pause, Lady Elliston proved how deep, how unflinching was her courage. She had guarded her illicit passion all her life; she revealed it now. "I do love him," she said. "I have never loved another man. It is he who doesn't love me."

From the black depths where she seemed to swoon and float, like a drowsy, drowning thing, the hard note of misery struck on Amabel's ear. She opened her eyes and looked at Lady Elliston. Power, freedom, passion: it was not these that looked back at her from the bereft and haggard eyes. "After twenty years he has grown tired," Lady Elliston said; and her candour seemed as inevitable as Amabel's had been: each must tell the other everything; a common bond of suffering was between them and a common bond of love, though love so differing. "I knew, of course, that he was often unfaithful to me; he is a libertine; but I was the centre; he always came back to me.--I saw the end approaching about five years ago. I fought--oh how warily--so that he shouldn't dream I was afraid;--it is fatal for a woman to let a man know she is afraid,--the brutes, the cruel brutes,"--said Lady Elliston;--"how we love them for their fear and pleading; how our fear and pleading hardens them against us." Her lips trembled and the tears ran down her cheeks. "I never pleaded; I never showed that I saw the change. I kept him, for years, by my skill. But the odds were too great at last. It was a year ago that he told me he didn't care any more. He was troubled, a little embarrassed, but quite determined that I shouldn't bother him. Since then it has been another woman. I know her; I meet her everywhere; very beautiful; very young; only married for three years; a heartless, rapacious creature. Hugh has nearly ruined himself in paying her jeweller's bills and her debts at bridge. And already she has thrown him over. It happened only the other day. I knew it was happening when I saw him here. I was glad, Amabel; I longed for him to suffer; and he will. He is a libertine of most fastidious tastes and he will not find many more young and beautiful women, of his world, to run risks for him. He, too, is getting old. And he has gone through nearly all his own money--and yours. Things will soon be over for him.--Oh--but--I love him--I love him--and everything is over for me.--How can I bear it!"

She bent forward on her knees and convulsive sobs shook her.

Her words seemed to Amabel to come to her from a far distance; they echoed in her, yet they were not the words she could have used. How dim was her own love-dream beside this torment of dispossession. What--who--had she loved for all these years? She could not touch or see her own grief; but Lady Elliston's grief pierced through her. She leaned towards her and softly touched her shoulder, her arm, her hand; she held the hand in hers. The sight of this loss of strength and dignity was an actual pain; her own pain was something elusive and unsubstantial; it wandered like a ghost vainly seeking an embodiment.

"Oh, you angel--you poor angel!" moaned Lady Elliston. "There: that's enough of crying; it can't bring back my youth.--What a fool I am. If only I could learn to think of myself as free instead of maimed and left by the wayside. It is hard to live without love if one has always had it.--But I have freed you, Amabel. I am glad of that. It has been a cruel, but a right thing to do. He shall not come to you with his shameless love; he shall not come between you and your boy. You shan't misplace your worship so. It is Augustine who is beautiful and noble; it is Augustine who loves you. You aren't maimed and forsaken; thank heaven for that, dear."

Lady Elliston had risen. Strong again, she faced her life, took up the reins, not a trace of scruple or of shame about her. It did not enter her mind to ask Amabel for forgiveness, to ask if she were despised or shrunk from: it did not enter Amabel's mind to wonder at the omission. She looked up at her guest and her lifted face seemed that of the drowned creature floating to the surface of the water.

"Tell me, Amabel," Lady Elliston suddenly pleaded, "this is not going to blacken things for you; you won't let it blacken things. You will live; you will leave your prison and come out into the world, with your splendid boy, and live."

Amabel slightly shook her head.

"Oh, why do you say that? Has it hurt so horribly?"

Amabel seemed to make the effort to think what it had done. She did not know. The ghost wailed; but she could not see its form.

"Did you care--so tremendously--about him?"--Lady Elliston asked, and her voice trembled. And, for answer, the drowned eyes looked up at her through strange, cold tears.

"Oh, my dear, my dear," Lady Elliston murmured. Her hand was still in Amabel's and she stood there beside her, her hand so held, for a long, silent moment. They had looked away from each other.

And in the silence each knew that it was the end and that they would see each other no more. They lived in different planets, under different laws; they could understand, they could trust; but a deep, transparent chasm, like that of the ether flowing between two divided worlds, made them immeasurably apart.

Yet, when she at last gently released Amabel's hand, drawing her own away. Lady Elliston said: "But,--won't you come out now?"

"Out? Where?" Amabel asked, in the voice of that far distance.

"Into the world, the great, splendid world."

"Splendid?"

"Splendid, if you choose to seize it and take what it has to give."

After a moment Amabel asked: "Has it given you so much?"

Lady Elliston looked at her from across the chasm; it was not dark, it held no precipices; it was made up only of distance. Lady Elliston saw; but she was loyal to her own world. "Yes, it has," she said. "I've lived; you have dreamed your life away. You haven't even a reality to mourn the loss of."

"No," Amabel said; she closed her eyes and turned her head away against the chair; "No; I have lived too. Don't pity me."

X

It was past five when Augustine came into the empty drawing-room. Tea was standing waiting, and had been there, he saw, for some time. He rang and asked the maid to tell Lady Channice. Lady Channice, he heard, was lying down and wanted no tea. Lady Elliston had gone half an hour before. After a moment or two of deliberation, Augustine sat down and made tea for himself. That was soon over. He ate nothing, looking with a vague gaze of repudiation at the plate of bread and butter and the cooling scones.

When tea had been taken away he walked up and down the room quickly, pausing now and then for further deliberation. But he decided that he would not go up to his mother. He went on walking for a long time. Then he took a book and read until the dressing-bell for dinner rang.

When he went upstairs to dress he paused outside his mother's door, as she had paused outside his, and listened. He heard no sound. He stood still there for some moments before lightly rapping on the door. "Who is it?" came his mother's voice. "I; Augustine. How are you? You are coming down?"

"Not tonight," she answered; "I have a very bad headache."

"But let me have something sent up." After a moment his mother's voice said very sweetly; "Of course, dear." And she added "I shall be all right tomorrow."

The voice sounded natural--yet not quite natural; too natural, perhaps, Augustine reflected. Its tone remained with him as something disturbing and prolonged itself in memory like a familiar note strung to a queer, forced pitch, that vibrated on and on until it hurt.

After his solitary meal he took up his book again in the drawing-room. He read with effort and concentration, his brows knotted; his young face, thus controlled to stern attention, was at once vigilant for outer impressions and absorbed in the inner interest. Once or twice he looked up, as a coal fell with a soft crash from the fire, as a thin creeper tapped sharply on the window pane. His mother's room was above the drawing-room and while he read he was listening; but he heard no footsteps.

Suddenly, dim, yet clear, came another sound, a sound familiar, though so rare; wheels grinding on the gravel drive at the other side of the house. Then, loud and startling at that unaccustomed hour, the old hall bell clanged through the house.

Augustine found himself leaning forward, breathing quickly, his book half-closed. At first he did not know what he was listening for or why his body should be tingling with excitement and anger. He knew a moment later. There was a step in the hall, a voice. All his life Augustine had known them, had waited for them, had hated them. Sir Hugh was back again.

Of course he was back again, soon,--as he had promised in the tone of mastery. But his mother had told him not to come; she had told him not to come, and in a tone that meant more than his. Did he not know?--Did he not understand?

"No, dear Hugh, not soon.--I will write."--Augustine sprang to his feet as he entered the room.

Sir Hugh had been told that he would not find his wife. His face wore its usual look of good-temper, but it wore more than its usual look of indifference for his wife's son. "Ah, tell Lady Channice, will you," he said over his shoulder to the maid. "How d'ye do, Augustine:" and, as usual, he strolled up to the fire.

Augustine watched him as he crossed the room and said nothing. The maid had closed the door. From his wonted place Sir Hugh surveyed the young man and Augustine surveyed him.

"You know, my dear fellow," said Sir Hugh presently, lifting the sole of his boot to the fire, "you've got devilish bad manners. You are devilishly impertinent, I may tell you."

Augustine received the reproof without comment.

"You seem to imagine," Sir Hugh went on, "that you have some particular right to bad manners and impertinence here, in this house; but you're mistaken; I belong here as well as you do; and you'll have to accept the fact."

A convulsive trembling, like his mother's, passed over the young man's face; but whereas only Amabel's hands and body trembled, it was the muscles of Augustine's lips, nostrils and brows that were affected, and to see the strength of his face so shaken was disconcerting, painful.

"You don't belong here while I'm here," he said, jerking the words out suddenly. "This is my mother's home--and mine;--but as soon as you make it insufferable for us we can leave it."

"_You_ can; that's quite true," Sir Hugh nodded.

Augustine stood clenching his hands on his book. Now, unconscious of what he did, he grasped the leaves and wrenched them back and forth as he stood silent, helpless, desperate, before the other's intimation. Sir Hugh watched the unconscious violence with interest.

"Yes," he went on presently, and still with good temper; "if you make yourself insufferable--to your mother and me--you can go. Not that I want to turn you out. It rests with you. Only, you must see that you behave. I won't have you making her wretched."

Augustine glanced dangerously at him.

"Your mother and I have come to an understanding--after a great many years of misunderstanding," said Sir Hugh, putting up the other sole. "I'm--very fond of your mother,--and she is,--very fond of me."

"She doesn't know you," said Augustine, who had become livid while the other made his gracefully hesitant statement.

"Doesn't know me?" Sir Hugh lifted his brows in amused inquiry; "My dear boy, what do you know about that, pray? You are not in all your mother's secrets."

Augustine was again silent for a moment, and he strove for self-mastery. "If I am not in my mother's secrets," he said, "she is not in yours. She does not know you. She doesn't know what sort of a man you are. You have deceived her. You have made her think that you are reformed and that the things in your life that made her leave you won't come again. But whether you are reformed or not a man like you has no right to come near a woman like my mother. I know that you are an evil man," said Augustine, his face trembling more and more uncontrollably; "And my mother is a saint."