Part 8
And now Rosamond's fingers hovered over the case of letters. Well did her heart forebode whose missives lay treasured there. Nevertheless, the sight of the handwriting struck her like a stab. Not yet could she summon strength to read those close-marked pages. Nay--were they even hers to read?
"Darling old Mammy--" this was not for her.
Yet she turned the sheets over and over, lingering upon them. Here was an envelope, endorsed in the same fair running hand as the book: "My beloved son's last letter." And here, on a card, was gummed a piece of white heather--memorial of God knows what pretty coquetry between the stalwart soldier and his "darling old Mammy."
What things must people live through--people who dare to love!
Rosamond had never loved. Had she not done well? When love offered itself to her she had been too young to know its face. And now.... She dropped the case from her hands as if it burnt her, and stood, poised for flight; then, as if driven by an invincible force, seized upon the closed frame, almost with anger. Fate held her, she could not escape.
Harry English, looking at her! Not the child, not the adolescent, but Harry the man as she, his wife, had known him. Even through the incomplete medium of a photograph, the strong black and white of his colouring, the bold line of his features, the concentrated purposeful expression, was reproduced with an effect of extraordinary vitality.
It seemed almost impossible to think of him as dead who could look at her so livingly from this little portrait.
* * * * *
Old Mary came in hurriedly.
"Here I am, ma'am, here I am! I heard you call."
Rosamond lifted dazed eyes. It took a perceptible space of time for the meaning of the words to filter to her brain. Then she said with vague impatience:
"I did not call."
"But you wanted me, surely," said the woman. Her glance wandered from the portrait in her new mistress's hand to the disorder on her old mistress's altar. "Surely you wanted me, ma'am."
She took a warm wrapper from the bed and folded it round Lady Gerardine. She supported her to an armchair and placed a cushion to her feet. The ministering hands were warm and strong; and Rosamond felt suddenly that in truth she was cold and weak, and that these attentions were grateful to her. She looked up again at the withered face, ethereally aged, at the blue eyes that seemed illumined from some source not of this world.
"Perhaps I did want you," she said.
A thin, self-absorbed, silent woman was old Mary. She regarded the world as with the gaze of the seer and moved within the small circlet of her duty wrapped in a mystic dignity of her own. Some held her in contempt, as madwoman; others in awe, as having "seen things."
If the manor-house had the reputation of being haunted, it was doubtless due to Mary's ways. No one from the neighbourhood would have consented to inhabit the ancient place with her. But fortunately Mary had a stout niece of her own, who averred that ghosts were indigestion, and who slept the sleep of the scrubber and the just, no matter what else might walk.
The housekeeper's strange eyes softened as she looked down into the fair pale face of her young master's widow.
"My dear lady that's gone," she said, "must be glad to know that there is another heart keeping watch here."
Her voice was soft and had a muffled sound as of one used to long silence. The tone seemed to harmonise with the singularity of the words. A small cold shiver ran over Rosamond; she stared without replying.
"The day the news came," proceeded the housekeeper, dreamily, "she set up that altar to him. And there she found peace."
As old Mary spoke, the habit of the trained servant was still strong upon her. She stooped to tuck in the fold of Rosamond's dressing-gown closer round her feet.
"There she prayed," she went on, as she straightened herself again, "and then, he came back to her in peace."
Rosamond closed the frame in her hands with a snap. She felt every impulse within her strike out against the mystic atmosphere that seemed to be closing round her.
"What are you saying?" she cried sharply. "In Heaven's name what do you mean? Who came back--the dead?"
Old Mary smiled again. She bent over the chair.
"Why, ma'am," she said, as if speaking to a frightened child, "you don't need to be told, a good lady like you: to those that have faith, there is no death."
"No death!" echoed Rosamond. "All life is death. Everything is full of death."
There was a strangling bitterness in her throat that broke forth in a harsh laugh. The placid room seemed to swim round with her; when she came to herself the servant was holding her hands once more. Her voice was falling into her ears with a measured soothing cadence:
"Not here. There is no death in this house. Don't you feel it, ma'am? It's not death that is here. Why, her that is gone, she passed from me there, in that bed, as the night passes into day. That is not death. Not an hour before the summons came for her she was wandering--as the doctor called it. I knew better. She saw him and was speaking to him. 'Ah, Harry,' she says, joyful, 'I knew you were not dead.' And then she turns to me. 'He is not dead, Mary,' she says, 'it was all a mistake.'"
Rosamond listened, her pale lips apart, her gaze dark and wondering.
"Why, ma'am," went on old Mary. "Haven't you felt it yourself, this night; didn't you feel his sweet company the minute you set foot in the house? I think it was my lady's great love that brought him back here. And now that she is gone, he's still here. And it's strange, he's here more than she is. She does not come as he does."
Her eyes became fixed on far-off things. Still clasping Rosamond's hand she seemed to transmit a glow, a warmth that reached to the heart. Rosamond's sick and cowering soul felt at rest as upon a strength greater than her own.
His company! Was that not what she had felt? Was it not that to which she had awakened? Ay, the old woman was right: it was sweet!
"There is no death," asserted old Mary, once again, "no death unless we make it. It's our fault if our dead do not live for us; it's our earthly bodies that won't acknowledge the spirit. It's we who make our dead dead, who bury them, who make corpses of them and coffins for them, to hide them away in the cold earth."
Rosamond wrenched her hands from the wrinkled grasp. She sprang to her feet, seized by a sudden anguish that was actual physical pain.
"Go, go!" she cried wildly. She was caught up as in a whirlwind of unimaginable terror. What had she done? Had she laid Harry English in the grave? Was he dead to her through her own deed, he that had lived on for his mother? Had she in her cowardice hammered him into his coffin, and would he always be a corpse to her because she had made him dead?
Through the inarticulate voices of her torment, she heard the door close and felt she was alone. And then she found herself upon her knees before the shrine, the photograph case still clenched between her fingers, praying blindly, madly, inarticulately--to what? she knew not. To the white Christ on the cross, who had risen from the dead? Or to the strong soldier whose image she held, and for whom there could be no rising again?
When the storm passed at length she was broken, chilled, and unconsoled. Old Mary's words came back to her: "She prayed there and she got peace." Well, the mother may have found peace in prayer. But for the wife, there was none! "He came back in peace"; he had not come back to her--to Rosamond, his wife!
A wave of revolt broke over her; against the God who had invented death for his creatures, or against stupid blind fate disposing of those human lives that have no God.
She rose slowly to her feet; her glance swept the homely room--the bed where the mother had died--to end once again upon the altar. What right had she, the old woman, to lay claim to Rosamond English's husband? The babe, the boy, may have been hers, let her have him! But the man--the man belonged to the wife. "And ye shall leave father and mother and cleave to one." "There is authority for it in your very scriptures," cried Rosamond, aloud. And, with fingers trembling with passionate eagerness she set to work to rob the frame of its treasure, the shrine of its chief relic.
Soon it lay in her hand, the clipped photograph. She carried it away, from the altar to the window, and stood a long, long while, devouring it with her gaze. So had he looked. No man had ever bolder, truer eyes. Ah, and no woman but Rosamond had seen them flame into passion--passion that yet then had had no meaning for her who saw! And those lips, folded into sternness, had any one known them to break into lines of tenderness as they were used for her? None at least, not even his mother, had heard them whisper what they had whispered to the wife--to the wife whose ears had been deaf, then, as a child's, because of her uncomprehending heart!
What was it old Mary had said? "It is we who make our dead dead." And had he lived on in this house because of the love of a withered heart, and should he not live again for her, his wife who was young and strong--and still virgin to love?
What she had buried she would dig out of the earth again, were it with bleeding fingers. That voice should speak once more, were each accent to stab her with its poignancy of loss. He should live, were it to be her death.
With dilated nostrils, panting for breath, her hair floating behind her, beautiful in her thrall of passion like some Valkyrie rising over blood and death, she rushed to the door and summoned Jani with ringing call. There is an exaltation of spirit to which pain is highest joy, and Rosamond ran now to her sorrow as the mystic to his cross.
"Jani!" she called. "Bring me Captain English's box."
*CHAPTER III*
The days dropped into the cup of time; measures of light and shade, of waxing and waning, ushered in with pale winter dawns, huddled away in rapid gloomy twilights, according to the precise yearly formula.
But to Rosamond these hours in the forgotten old manor-house on the moorlands, where the winds were the only visitors, brought so great a change that it was as if a gate had been shut upon her former road.
A common prate is that Time works the changes in us. And when we look from the child to the man, it would seem absurd even to raise the question. Yet it is not time that works the mightiest changes. Nay, in the world of the soul time but emphasises. The great upheavals that obliterate in our lives all familiar landmarks--that do alter everything down to our most intimate capacity of feeling, are sometimes but the work of one instant. It is not time that ravages, it is not time that draws the wrinkle seared into the heart; not to time do we owe the spread of the grey, instead of the gold that used to colour the web of existence. A man may carry the singing soul of his April to the death-bed of his old body. Yet again the heart may wither in a span so short as scarce to be measured.
And sometimes a change, so complete that even within our own soul we find ourselves suddenly on foreign ground, will come without any striking external event, without any apparent outside reason. In the life of the soul a crisis has occurred--and lo! the very world of God is different. Nay, God himself is another to us.
During these short wind-swept November days in the green and brown manor-house, there, amid the solitary downs, did such a change come to Rosamond. Had she tried, she could scarce have found her old self again. But she did not try; for this new self was at peace, was wrapped in dreams of great sweetness, and yet awake to a life hitherto not even guessed at.
* * * * *
In the attic room that had been Harry's own, she sat alone. A furious shower was pattering on the tiles close over her head, a drenched ivy spray was beating against the gable window like a frantic thing that wanted shelter, a pair of sparrows were answering each other with defiant chirrup. Far below in the house, Aspasia was lustily calling upon a recreant kitten. In the moorland silence these few trivial sounds became insistent, and yet seemed but to assert the silence itself.
She was seated at the wide battered old writing-table which schoolboy Harry English had scored with penknife and chisel, burned and inkstained. Before her a small writing-desk was spread open, and two or three letters lay loosely under her clasped hands. Her eyes were musingly fixed upon the rain-beaten pane with the knocking ivy branch; her lips were parted by a vaguely recurrent smile. And, as the smile came and went, a transient red glowed faintly upon her cheeks.... The world for her now was not upon the edge of winter: it was spring. She was not Rosamond Gerardine, out of touch with life, she was not Rosamond English, widow--she was Rosamond Tempest, maid once more, on the threshold of her life, at the April of the year. And Harry English was her lover. And yet she was a Rosamond Tempest such as he had never known--such a Rosamond Tempest as had never yet existed.
She took the letter that lay uppermost to her hand. It was dated Saltwoods. Written here--at this very desk, no doubt. Perhaps with this very ivory penholder, fluted, yellow, stained, while he sat in this same Windsor chair.... Unconsciously she caressed the worn wooden arms whereon his arms must have rested. Then again she set herself to read:--
"Saltwoods, 19th April."
On that April 19, all those years ago, he was thinking of her, writing to her! And she--so many miles away, shut in by the dreariest prison walls fate had ever built round a young impatient soul--had then not the faintest hint of her deliverer's approach.
DEAR MISS TEMPEST,--I dare say you have quite forgotten me. I was the youngest griffin, just before the old Colonel's death. I hope you will not think it a great impertinence in me to write like this to you; but my leave is up in a week or so, and I don't like to leave England without having seen your father's daughter again. I can never forget how kind he was to me--and your mother too. It made all the difference to me; such a young fool as I was, and so new to India and everything. I find I know some of the fellows at Fort Monkton, and I'm going to stop there a few days. May I call--and if so, when? Yours sincerely, HARRY ENGLISH. P.S.--I've only just found out where you are.
To Rosamond--most unwilling inmate in a household where, if she was not actually a burden, the smallness of her pittance rendered her certainly no material gain--this letter had brought a sort of vision of the past, a gleam of bygone light which made the present even more intolerable by contrast. It had been something to her to think that she should meet some one at last belonging to her old life, some one who had known her in those glamorous years of her happiness, some one straight from the magic shores that had held her in her happy years.
From eight to sixteen had Rosamond Tempest spent her life between the little hill station, the refuge of their hot season, and the historic old northern town where her father's duty lay--a sort of little Princess Royal, with a hundred devoted slaves and a score of gallant young courtiers, the imperious favourite of the whole station, native and white alike.... Oh the rides in the dawn! oh the picnics by moonlight! the many-coloured, vivid days that went with such swing, where every man almost was a hero, where the very air seemed full of the romance of frontier fights, of raids, and big game hunts, of "Tiger, tiger, burning bright" in jungle haunts! ... It had been surely the cruellest stroke of fate that had thrust the little spoilt girl, the beloved only child, from this pinnacle of bliss and importance!
Between one day and another Rosamond had become the penniless orphan, whom nobody wanted ... whom it was so kind of Major and Mrs. Carter to escort back to England, whom it was almost superhumanly good of Uncle and Aunt Baynes to admit into their family.
"A self-centered child," said Mrs. "General Baynes." "A cold-blooded little wretch," opined her cousins. Well, it was a fact that, during the four years that elapsed between her departure from India and the receipt of Captain English's letter, Rosamond had not given a human being one word, one look in confidence....
Late April on the Hampshire coast, with the gorse breaking into gorgeous yellow flame, honey-sweet in the sunshine; with the white clouds scurrying across a blue sky, chased by the merriest madcap wind that ever scampered; with the waves breaking from afar off, dashing up a thousand diamonds falling over and over each other in their race for the beach, roaring on the shingle in clamorous good-fellowship, the foam creaming in ever wider circles. And, across the leaping belt of waters, green and amber and white, the island, flashing too: the windows and roofs of the happy-looking town throwing back the sun glances, set in smooth slopes, mildly radiating green, like chrysoprase and peridot....
* * * * *
Rosamond had dropped the letter from her hand; again she was dreaming. Not the plaint of the November wind round the gable roof of Saltwoods in her ears, but the chant of this April chorus on Alverstoke beach. Not the monotonous ting of Aspasia's finger exercise from the room below, but the irregular boom and thud of gun practice far out at sea, brought in by the gust. And the voice that fell into silence so far away between the wild Indian hills was speaking to her again. And she heard, heard for the first time....
Rosamond Gerardine, virgin of heart through her two marriages, was being wooed! And the virgin in her was trembling and troubled, as womanhood awoke.... He held her hands and looked into her eyes. His cheeks were pale under their bronze, his lips trembled--"Could you trust me? Do you think me mad? I've only known you four days, but I've dreamt of you, all my life.... Rosamond!"
The sea wind was eddying round them, the grasses at Rosamond's feet were nodding like mad things in the gusts. Her hair was whipped against her face. So, on this English shore, with the taste of the salt in their mouths, with the wild salt moist winds all about them--this Englishman wooed this English girl, to come away and be his love in the burning East. Yes, she could trust him. Who could look into his true eyes and not trust him? But then it was the thought of the East, the East of her lost childhood's joy, that won her. Now, back in England's heart, from an East abhorred, to the loathing as of blood and cruelty, it was the lover, it was the love!
Again she felt the touch of his first kiss. He had sought her lips, but she had turned her cheek. Now--the blood rushed up into her face; her heart beat faster, almost a faintness crept over her. She dropped her head upon her outstretched arms, her burning cheek upon his letter ... again his strong arms held her.
* * * * *
Once more they parted at the gate of the house that was her prison. He was going back to India in ten days, and she would go with him, confidently, gladly!
She walked up the path between the straggling wallflowers, the pungent marigolds, into the mean narrow hall. Then her only thought had been of sailing away from that sordid genteel abode, back to fair India, the land of her dreams. Now--now, as across these years she re-lived that great day of her youth, her heart was swooning over the memory of his kiss; her brain was filled with a vision of his tender trembling lips; of the light in his eyes as he looked back at her, of the swing of his broad shoulders as he rounded the crescent towards the fort.
* * * * *
Miss Aspasia Cuningham was in a decidedly bad temper. To be home again, in England, to have unlimited opportunity of working out the Leschetizky method on a superfine Steinway piano, the most complete immunity from interfering uncles, from social duties, philistine secretaries and attaches, appeared a most delightful existence--in theory. But, in practice it was dull. Yes, dull was the word.
With four fingers pressing four consecutive notes while the remaining digit hammered away, vindictively, at the fifth; with pouting lip out-thrust, she had reached the point of telling herself that even India was better than this.
"Horrid place," ran Baby's angry cogitation, while the finger conscientiously drummed, "nothing but those stupid trees and that deadly moor, and the birds' chirp, chirp, and not a neighbour within miles; or if there were, with Aunt Rosamond not wanting to see a soul; not even the curate--and he's got eyes like marbles!"
Aspasia gave a little titter and changed the drumming finger from the third to the fourth. This was a less elastic member; and she grew pink with unconscious energy, while pursuing the inner monologue.
"I do think that disgusting Major Bethune might have given us some sign of life. People have no business to look into people's eyes like that, and press people's hands, and then go off and mean nothing at all. Not," said Baby, blowing out her nostrils with a fine breath of scorn, "that one ever thought of him in that way. But he--oh, he's just a horrid wretch like the rest! All the nice ones die, I think. At least, I've never met any."
She brought down the left hand in its turn, with a crash, on the five notes; and the fine discord seemed to have relieving effect. The reflections proceeded in a softer vein.
"Harry English--he must have been a dear." She turned her head to look for the inevitable portrait. There was scarce a room in Saltwoods that did not hold two or three presentments of him; sketches, most of them, by the faithful, forcible hand of the artist mother; photographs, too, in well-nigh every stage of the boy's development. Even Aspasia, positive, practical, unimaginative, could not but have fallen under the influence of the haunting presence. And in her actual mood of disillusion with Raymond Bethune, the ante-room of her girl's heart, that airy space open to all the winds, where so many come, pause, and go, was now, half in idleness, half in contradiction, consecrate to the image of gallant Harry English.
"How Aunt Rosamond could!" she thought, as she dreamily fixed her eyes upon that charcoal sketch which held one panel of the drawing-room, and which had been Mrs. English's last work. It was a much enlarged copy of the photograph on the shrine, and, whether by some unconscious transcription of her own sorrow, or whether her mother eyes had discovered in the little picture some stern premonition of his own approaching fate, the artist had given the strong bold face an expression that was almost bitter in its melancholy.
"How Aunt Rosamond could----" thought the girl, "when she had been loved by such a man, ever, ever have looked at any one else? Fancy--the Runkle!" Ah, if Aspasia had been loved by English, how nobly she would have borne her widowhood! Her heart, of course, would have been absolutely, completely broken; she would have gone about in deep, deep widow's weeds. And strangers, looking after her, noticing the sweet pale face amid the crape, would ask who she was and would be told in whispers: the widow of the hero of the Baroghil expedition. "Ah, it would have been sweet to have been loved by you, Harry English!"
Her hands fell from the piano; her soul was away upon a dream as vague and innocent as it was absorbing. Too often did the Leschetizky method end in this manner. The while Rosamond, high in her attic, dreamed that she was a girl once more, and that she had just been told that Harry English loved her.
*CHAPTER IV*