Part 13

“I’m going to tell you everything,” she began in a half-choked voice. “I’ve been so wicked, Miss Page, that I--I can’t believe it. Every now and then I think it’s a dream.” She shivered in Anne’s grasp, and sobbed a moment.

“It was my fault. I thought I was so bored. I thought I was tired of Harry--of Harry who has always been a thousand times too good for me. And so I--I flirted with him. Helen Didier says I threw myself at his head. She’s a hateful woman, and I loathe her, but that’s true, I did. He never cared for me. In my heart I knew he didn’t, even when I led him on to make love to me. It was nothing but my wretched wicked vanity. Just because I was bored. Just because----” Her voice sank, and for a moment Anne heard nothing but the painful catching of her breath in exhausted sobs.

“And the awful part was,” she stammered at last, “that _I_ didn’t care either. I never meant it to be more than a flirtation. At least I think I didn’t,” she added with a pitiful attempt at perfect honesty. “But----” She stopped short.

“But it became more than that. He was your lover?”

She nodded her head, and then suddenly clasped Anne with convulsive strength.

“And Harry’s coming to-morrow. And I’m a vile woman!”

She cried the words aloud in a panic of horror.

“Oh, Miss Page, what shall I do. What will become of me? what shall I say to Harry? I shall go mad!”

Anne laid her cheek on the head that rested against her shoulder, and was silent.

She understood what was passing in the soul of the weak, terror-struck little woman. The horror of outraged conventions, the nightmare conviction that she, the descendant of generations of respectable, honest women, she who had never heard of the sin she had committed, except in accents of disdain or horror, had become an abandoned creature, unfit for decent society, branded, defiled, eternally lost.

Anne’s heart went out to her in passionate pity.

“Oh help me! Tell me what to do,” Madge wailed. “You’re the only woman in the world I dared to tell, because----”

The abrupt pause, and a nervous gesture betrayed her, and Anne started a little, overcome by a sudden conviction.

“Yes. Why did you tell me, my dear?” she asked quietly.

“Because,” began Madge hurriedly, “you are so kind, so sweet, I felt----”

“That wasn’t the only reason.”

“No!” she cried with sudden recklessness. “It wasn’t. It’s because I heard that you--that you--Helen Didier found it out. She never rested. And then I asked--_him_, and he said I was never to mention your name to her. But she found out all about it, on the pretence that it was _you_ who had corrupted my mind, and made me what she calls fast. And so----”

“And so you thought you might confess to a fellow sinner?”

Anne’s cheek still rested on Madge’s hair, and over her head, her eyes smiled very quietly into the fire.

Madge was silent.

“I knew you wouldn’t utterly despise me,” she murmured at last, in a low voice.

“He has gone?” asked Anne after a moment. “You sent him away?”

“He came on Monday--two or three days ago. I’ve forgotten when.” She made a distracted gesture. “Until--until just lately, it was all right. We were not--not----”

“Not lovers,” said Anne, finishing the sentence for her in an even voice.

“Well, he came. And by that time I’d come to my senses, and to all this awful misery. He’s very kind,” she went on with a sort of surprise, as a child might speak of the unexpected clemency of some grown-up person. “He said he didn’t want to make me unhappy, and if I pleased it should all be at an end, and he would go away. So he went. But Harry’s coming to-morrow, and I daren’t meet him. I daren’t look at him. It’s awful--_awful_! I would kill myself,--but I daren’t do that either.”

She rose from her knees, and sank back in her chair, exhausted and shaking; her eyes fixed on Anne were the eyes of a little hunted animal.

All the terror of the gulf she had put between herself and respectable women, all the horror of feeling herself _déclassée_ outside the pale of moral virtue, filled her conventional little soul. It outweighed the sense of her personal disloyalty; it was greater than her sense of wanton treachery towards her husband. She was no longer a respectable woman, and in that fact lay the sting.

Anne leant towards her. “You haven’t told Harry?”

She shook her head.

“Then don’t.”

Madge stared at her incredulously. “But--but look at me!” she stammered. “He’ll see. He’d guess, even if I don’t tell him. I can’t stop crying. I can’t--help it.”

While she spoke the tears were running down her cheeks.

“Yes, you can. You can pull yourself together. He expects to find you ill, but you can meet him with a bright face--for his sake.”

“For his sake?” repeated Madge.

“Yes. Think of him a little, my dear, and forget yourself.”

“You mean he would never forgive me? Never take me back?”

“On the contrary, I know he would. He loves you. You would never hear a word of reproach from his lips. Your husband is a fine man, Madge, and a generous one--and a gentleman.”

“Yes, he is! He is!” she returned eagerly. “He _would_ forgive me, and I ought to tell him. I should never have a happy moment if I didn’t. My life would be spoilt.”

“And what about his?” asked Anne quietly.

Madge gazed at her. “You mean he--he wouldn’t forget it?”

Anne answered with a curious smile.

“You don’t understand much about men, my little Madge,” she said. “When they love, their instinct of possession is stronger than anything you can guess. It’s bound up with a thousand forces from primitive barbarous times. It may be unreasonable and savage, but it’s there. A generous man forgives, and even tries to understand. But the wound remains, and it rankles in spite of him. Have you the right to inflict such a wound? The wrong is yours. _You_ should be the only one to suffer.”

“But I _shall_ suffer,” broke in Madge. “And much more, if I feel I’m deceiving him.”

“Then accept the extra suffering, and bear it alone,” returned Anne quickly. “One pays for everything, Madge. Is it fair to call upon some one else to share the expenses?”

There was silence for a moment.

“If _you_ had married--afterwards, I mean,” said Madge hesitatingly, “wouldn’t you have told your husband?”

“There was no question of my marriage,” answered Anne rather painfully. “But if your circumstances were mine,” she added after a moment, “I should act as I advise you to act.”

Madge’s grasp on her hand tightened, but she did not speak.

“Go back and be a good wife to him,” Anne went on. “My dear,” she said sadly, “you don’t know your blessings. You have married a man with a faithful steadfast nature. His love will never fail you, and in that, thousands of women might envy you. All the material for happiness is within your reach. Happiness for the lack of which many women starve all their days. It never comes to them. It’s never offered. And if they can’t bear to be utterly without the joy of love, before the earth covers them, they have to take it at a great price.”

Her smile brought the tears again to Madge’s eyes.

“Such a price, my dear little Madge, as I’m glad you know nothing about.”

“Dear Miss Page!” she whispered. A moment’s half-awed revelation came to her of all that her friend’s words implied. In the light of it, her own fears and regrets, her whole mental attitude towards the past, later as well as immediate, seemed incredibly petty, mean, and trivial. She was ashamed with a nobler less selfish shame than she had ever experienced.

Her cheeks burnt, and her tears ceased to flow.

“Oh! I’ve been a beast!” she cried involuntarily. “I’ve always been so selfish and hateful to Harry. I’ve taken everything as my right. I’ve never thought of any one but myself. I’ve never thought of the lives of other women. You are right. It would only be one more selfishness to tell him. I won’t. I’ll love him instead.”

“Do that, my dear, and you’ll make him the happiest of men,” returned Anne simply. “And don’t refuse him children, Madge,” she added softly. “You owe him that. Besides, you’re refusing the greatest happiness for yourself. The blessing that women--women like me, can never have. That’s part of the price, you see. Not the least part of the price,” she added as though to herself.

She rose, and Madge stood up too, still holding her hand.

The firelight fell on Anne’s face, and the younger woman looked at her as though she had never seen her before,--with a tender surprised admiration.

“You are so beautiful!” she exclaimed suddenly.

The first smile Anne had seen came to her lips.

“I shall pray that my first baby may have eyes just like yours,” she said, almost gaily. “And hair like your lovely hair--when she’s a little older.”

Anne laughed. “It used to be brown. It went white very quickly--in three months.”

As she glanced into the mirror above the fireplace, she thought suddenly of François’s portrait with its mass of soft fair hair, _couleur de miel_; _couleur de poussière dorée_. She remembered the epithets of the painters.

“I must go now,” she said. “To-morrow Harry will be here to take care of you. Make yourself look pretty, Madge. Put on your nicest frock, and do your hair the way he likes, high up, you know, with little fluffy curls about. And make the room pretty, dear. I’ll order some flowers to be sent round to-night. Lots of them, so you’ll have plenty to do to arrange them. No more sitting by the fire and crying, mind! No looking back. Only look forward.”

Madge held her tight. “Oh! you’ve given me so much courage!” she exclaimed with a long sigh of relief. “You dearest of women. I’ll do everything you tell me.”

XX

Outside, in the lighted street, Anne called a cab, and gave the address of the nearest florist.

Her thoughts dwelt upon Madge, as the carriage rattled down the boulevard.

“I’m scarcely sorry,” was the outcome of her grave reflection. “It will make a woman of her. She needed a great shock, or a great sorrow to take her out of herself, and make her realize what it would mean to lose her husband.”

It was only while she was choosing flowers for her, that the part of Madge’s confession which concerned herself, came back confusedly to her mind. It gathered greater clearness as she drove towards her hotel, and by the time she reached it, and was sitting by her bedroom fire after dinner, she found herself wondering what would be the outcome of the matter.

That she might be sure of Madge Dakin, her instinct satisfied her. Yet the results of Madame Didier’s inquiries would in all probability, from other sources, reach Dymfield. What then?

Anne’s thoughts flitted from Mrs. Carfax to Mrs. Willcox, the solicitor’s wife, a lady who was interested in Church Missions, and Rescue Homes for Fallen Women. The memory of Miss Goldie, a maiden lady of substantial means, and views of life which even Dymfield considered rigid, came to her, and forced a smile. She saw her sitting in the front pew in church, her black bonnet with two purple pansies upon it, tied tightly under her chin. She saw her angular elbows, under the short mantle of black silk adorned with bugle trimming. She heard her rasping voice, which seldom softened even for Anne, who as a rule affected insensibly the voices of her neighbours.

She remembered Mr. Willcox, stiff, erect, lean-faced Mr. Willcox, loud in his denunciation of the present age, which he considered lax and immoral to the last degree.

She thought of the Vicar, with his blustering attempts at modernity, and his violently expressed scorn of everything but muscular Christianity and common sense.

Dymfield was the typical English village, with its types indigenous to the soil, firmly rooted, impervious to criticism, profoundly self-satisfied.

Dymfield for Anne would be impossible.

But Dymfield meant Fairholme Court, to which her heart was inextricably linked. The garden that she had planted, the garden that was full of fragrant memories of the blossoming time of her life. The bare idea of leaving it sent a pang of desolation to her heart.

She got up and began to walk restlessly about the room.

The absurdity of such an outcome of malicious gossip, struck her with a pathetic desire to laugh.

“After all these years! At my age,” she murmured.

She thought of her three years of happiness, the little space of time which had opened like a flower in her grey life, and wondered pitifully why any one should grudge it to her. But most of all, she shrank from the thought that people should talk about it. It had been for so many years her secret possession, the memory that had sweetened all her later days.

It would be insupportable to know that her acquaintances were gossiping about her. About her and René.

A painful flush rose to her face as she sat down again by the fire.

After her talk with Madge Dakin, her old life seemed too near. She thought of the parting with René in the morning--the morning he left her for his three days’ work at Fontainebleau.

The agony of making that parting a light one! She remembered that he turned at the door, and came back to kiss her again. The sun was on his hair, as he crossed the room.

Involuntarily to-night, twenty years after the words were spoken, Anne put her hands over her ears, that she might not hear his voice. But she knew what he had said. She remembered how, when he was gone, her resolution wavered.

Without question he loved her still. Wasn’t it too soon? Might she not stay a little longer? Just a little while longer? And then the _bonne_ had brought the letters of the second post, and among them there was one for René in a handwriting she knew. Within the past month they had been coming very often, these letters. Lately, every day.

She remembered how the sunshine had streamed upon the envelope at which she sat staring, till at last she moved to make her preparations.

Then the long train journey, and the agony which feared to betray itself in some insane fashion which might cause her to be stopped--forcibly prevented from reaching her destination.

She wanted to shriek aloud, to rave and cry, like the madwoman she half feared she might in fact have become.

Of the next few weeks she recalled nothing but a confused nightmare impression of unfamiliar rooms, strange faces, strange voices. Of people who for some mad reason were going about as usual, occupied with the ordinary business of life; talking, laughing, eating and drinking, unmoved, unconcerned.

One book on every hotel table drew her like a magnet. She would sit down anywhere with a _Bradshaw_ before her, and at once, mechanically plan her journey back to Paris.

Over and over again, she looked out trains, studied connections, pictured the moment of her arrival.

It would be tea-time. The lamps just lit. René sitting by the fire--René leaping to his feet to meet her.

Or it would be early morning. She would open his bedroom door softly....

And then the realization of her madness; more sleepless nights, fresh strange hotels, new cities up and down whose streets she wandered wondering why she should be there, why she should enter one building rather than another, why the day never passed, and when the night came, thinking would God that it were morning.

So terribly near seemed her past torture, that with all her strength Anne tried to stem the flood of reminiscence.

Thank God, little Madge Dakin had never known, would never know, misery such as hers! In the midst of her whirl of memories Anne gratefully considered this.

With an effort at diversion, she tried to recall the names of the cities in which she stayed, through which she had passed during the first few months of her exile.

In vain. She had only a confused impression of scorching streets, of palm trees against a hot blue sky; of seas hatefully, mockingly calm and blue.

She was in Athens when the news of his death reached her, and with it a packet of letters written during the first few weeks after her departure. They were letters from René, never sent, because she had left no address. Letters written in the frenzied hope that some day soon he must hear from her.

It was then that she tasted her first moment of peace.

She remembered sitting in a little walled garden somewhere within the city, and for the first time seeing that the blue sky overhead was beautiful.

She noticed the broad leaves of a fig-tree clambering upon the wall opposite, and listened to the dripping of a little stream which flowed from a stone trough into a well whose mouth was fringed delicately with ferns and wild flowers. And for the first time came to her a premonition of the calm and peace, and even happiness of her later years.

Her emotional life was over. No man as a lover would ever exist for her again. But she had experienced the love for which she had been willing to pay. She had paid, and some day she would be content.

René dead, had become hers once more--this time for ever.

Later in the year she met François at Antibes, and heard calmly, with scarcely a stab of pain, what she was prepared to hear. She had been right to go. But René had died before he ceased to love her.

Afterwards, her true wander years began. And then at last, the thought of the house and the garden at Dymfield became dear to her, and she went to them as a child goes home.

Anne let her mind dwell gratefully upon the quiet happy years she had spent at Dymfield.

She thought of her work among her flowers, and the paradise of beauty it had produced. She thought of the poorer village people whose lives she knew, whose children she loved, to whom for years she had been a friend. She remembered her little plans for their welfare, all the pleasant trifles which made up the sum of her daily existence.

And as she mused, came a wondering recognition of the healing of time, the passing of all violent emotion, whether of joy or of despair.

From some recess of her memory there sprang the words of an Eastern sage, who as a motto true alike in times of sorrow and times of delight, told his disciple to grave upon his signet ring, one sentence--_This too will pass_.

XXI

Anne started for London next morning, intending to spend the night in town, and devote the next day to her brother, and to Sylvia Carfax, to whom she had not found time to write.

Early on Thursday morning she drove to Carlisle House.

The page boy who took her up in the lift, indicated a door at the end of the corridor, and left her.

Anne knocked, and in response to a voice within, entered Sylvia’s bedroom.

It was littered with cardboard boxes, open trunks, dresses, hats, raiment of all sorts, and stumbling over the obstacles in her way, Sylvia rushed towards her with a cry of joy.

Even before she kissed her, Anne had time to notice the worried look on the girl’s face, which robbed it of its youthful prettiness.

“Oh!” she gasped. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come in time, and I didn’t know _what_ to do, or how to get out of it. Oh! I’m so thankful to see you, Miss Page. Sit down. Do sit down--if you can find a place,” she added, trying to laugh.

Anne chose the bed as the only available spot.

“My dear child, what’s the matter?” she exclaimed. “You’re packing, I suppose. Where are you going?”

“To--America,” returned Sylvia, with a gulp.

Anne looked at her, and drew her down beside her on the bed.

“Tell me all about it from the very beginning,” she said, with quiet insistence.

“_Don’t_ be angry with me,” implored Sylvia, her lips trembling. “I thought I’d been so clever to arrange it all myself, without saying a word about it. But--but now I’m frightened. And my contract’s signed, and I daren’t----”

“But what’s it all about? Tell me clearly, Sylvia.”

Sylvia made an effort to obey, and though lucidity was not the strong part of her story, by the end of half an hour’s questioning and explanation, Anne gathered that the girl had fallen into the hands of the manager of a third-rate theatrical company. The man had tempted her with the offer of a “star” part in a musical comedy, and she had signed a contract with him for America.

“He said he would make my fortune,” she declared. “He praised my voice so much, and told me I was wonderful, and that I should make a great hit. But he made me promise not to tell any one I was going. He said he wanted to have the credit of discovering me, and all that sort of thing. I knew mother and father would be horrified, but I thought it was too good a chance to lose, and that I’d risk their anger. Because, if I turned out a success, and made a lot of money, they would be very proud,” she added.

The instinctive knowledge of human nature shared by the pillars of the Church, caused Anne despite her anxiety, a secret smile.

“I thought he was so kind,” Sylvia went on pitifully, “and he seemed so nice at first, but lately he’s been different, and his manner has been so funny. He--he looked at me in a horrid way yesterday,” she confessed, “and held my hand tight, and when I tried to get away, he laughed. But my contract’s signed,” she declared with a wail of despair in her voice.

“Haven’t the principals of this place interfered?” Anne inquired. “The matron, or whoever it is who’s supposed to look after you?”

“They think I’m going home,” confessed Sylvia in an abashed voice. “I managed it so that they should think so.”

Anne rose, and with a terrified expression, the girl clung to her hand.

“Oh! Miss Page,” she gasped. “You’re not going? I’m to sail to-morrow night, and----”

“Don’t be frightened, you silly little thing. Of course you won’t sail to-morrow, nor any other night. Give me the address of this man.”

Sylvia falteringly repeated it.

Anne wrote it down, and stooped to kiss her.

“Unpack all those things, and put them tidy,” she said. “I haven’t time to scold you now, but I’ll come back and do it thoroughly this afternoon.”

The girl’s look of relief touched her, but she could scarcely repress a smile as she turned at the door, to see her standing like a penitent baby amongst all her finery.

“I wonder what I should have done with daughters?” she asked herself, half humorously, as she stepped into a cab, outside.

The question was answered by a smile and a sigh that were almost simultaneous.

Anne spent a busy morning. She went first to her solicitor, and after an hour’s colloquy with him on the case of Sylvia Carfax, she drove on to her brother’s house in Kensington. It stood in a highly respectable square, and was one of the hundreds of dull substantial edifices which came into existence during the mid-Victorian era.

Anne rang the bell, and stood waiting rather excitedly under the stucco canopy supported by pillars.

Her present meeting with Hugh was divided from the last, by a period of twenty years. It was odd to remember how little she knew of this brother, her only near relative in the world. He would be much changed, of course.

A sudden vivid recollection of the last time she had met him, swept through her mind, as she stood waiting admittance. How desolate she had been. How shy. How filled with the sense of being an outsider, a forgotten guest, unbidden to the banquet of life!

The door opened, and it was Hugh himself who drew her over the threshold, and welcomed her in the loud, kind voice she remembered.

“We’ve been waiting for you all the morning,” he declared, “and I rushed down when I heard the bell. Come in and let me look at you! It’s impossible to see anything in this wretched foggy atmosphere.”

With his arm still round her shoulder, he pushed open the door of a large room on the right of the hall.

“Here she is, Alice!” he exclaimed, as his wife rose from a sofa near the fire.

“Why Anne, what have you done to yourself?”

The words were uttered in amazement. Anne had slipped off her heavy cloak, and stood laughing tremulously as she held her brother by both hands, and noticed for the first time that his hair was white, and his good-natured bronzed face lined and wrinkled. She turned from him to greet her sister-in-law.