Part 16

"I've only come down to solid earth," he explained. "And the earth's after all where we belong, Duchess. Stand firm, keep to your own part of it, and don't cloud-gaze, or somebody with a claim will knock you off your little foothold."

"Oh, _heavens_!" exclaimed his companion.

The gentleman, who appeared at length quite to have finished his material enjoyment of the tea, put his second empty cup down and looked at the lady.

"You should have married an American husband," he said to her, "a man who would have idolized you, not cared whether you developed or not. A duchess isn't far enough up. An American empress is higher."

The lady listening to him, shuddered a little.

"As it is," he went on regretfully, "you've been forced to develop, whether or not you wanted to, to grow finer and freer, to go farther on, to become more delightful. Here you are progressed and civilized, after years of education, experience and suffering, and, my poor child, here you are all alone."

She cried out, "Oh, Mr. Bulstrode," with a little gasp.

"Oh, no, no," he softly ejaculated, "it is not fair! You're terribly wasted, and you've been, as you too well know, terribly betrayed."

But here he felt her hand on his arm with a strong grasp. She shook the arm a little.

"Don't go on," she said deeply. "I tell you not to go on." After a few seconds, in which he heard the fire and the slow bubbling of the gently boiling water and the cooing of the doves without, under the eaves, the Duchess said: "Listen to me. I haven't talked at all to you, let me say something now."

Her companion reflected to himself: "Well, at all events, she's not going to malign the Duke; that's a foregone conclusion."

The Duchess clasped her hands round her knee and raised her face to him.

"Do you think," she asked, "that there's any egoist as nasty as a feminine one? Men are admitted to be generally selfish, but we specialize, and each one of us has the faculty of getting up some new and peculiar brand, I begin to believe. At any rate, when I married, I was an egoist, and I've stayed on being one until a very little time ago. I suppose I must in a way have more or less ornamented my position, as the papers say. I did have two children as well, and in that way fulfilled my duty as a Westboro'. But really and truly, I have never in the least been a wife, and very little of a mother. I was as silly and vain as could be, and I never for a moment valued my husband. I wasn't indifferent to my children, but I was absorbed by my worldly life, and when my little boys were taken ill and died, I was on a dahabeah on the Nile, and I don't think that Cecil ever forgave us for being so far away."

She remained quiet for a long time, looking down at her hands, and when she lifted her face Bulstrode saw that she had wept.

"That," she went on, "broke the ice round my heart, when I came home to those empty rooms."

He said soothingly, "There, there, my child."

"Oh, let me go on," she urged him, "let me speak. I shall probably never feel like doing so again. But at that time when I turned to find my husband, I discovered that I had no power over him, and I realized that for years I had not possessed his love. I suppose you'll tell me that it is unusual for a woman to see so clearly as this. Perhaps it is. At any rate, just because I did so clearly, I forgave him when he came to me last year, at Cannes."

"You were wonderful!" he repeated again, "perfectly noble, and, as I said before, Westboro' did not deserve you."

She did not here, as she had done before, catch him up; on the contrary, after a few moments, she asked him point-blank:

"What then do you advise us, knowing us both, to do?"

He was distinctly disappointed that she should have put the question to him, and gave her time to withdraw it as he asked tentatively: "You really feel that you must ask me, Duchess?"

"Tell me, at all events."

"You are quite sure that you could not go back to your husband?"

After a little pause, she lingeringly said:

"Yes, quite sure. You must know that he will not be the first to break the ice now." Then she pushed: "You would advise my filing my papers for divorce?"

Held in this way pitilessly for a direct challenge, he met her eyes with his own, asking her gently:

"Is there nothing that speaks for Westboro' more distinctly than anything I can say? And more appealingly than anything which you in all your pride feel?"

The Duchess assented that there was, with a movement of her lips; she put her hands over her face and so sat quietly for a few moments, and when she spoke again to her visitor, her words were irrelevant. When some few moments after she bade him good-by, she regretted his absence in London and begged him to come and see her as soon as he returned.

"Come," she said, "at least to see whether I am here or whether I have pitched my tent and gone away."

As Bulstrode stood in the doorway she asked him: "I understand there are a lot of people at the castle for Christmas, and among them will be Mrs. Falconer? Isn't it so? Is she really so very lovely?"

"It's a different type of loveliness from yours," Bulstrode returned. And the Duchess supposed: "A happier type?"

"Well, she's rather happy I think, take it all together," Jimmy said.

"Has she children?"

"None."

"Is she in love with her husband?"

And he was so long searching for a reply that the Duchess laughed quietly.

"Poor man," she said, "don't bother. But then since she's so happy, she must be in love with somebody else's husband."

But he put her right immediately.

"I don't think she in the least is. And why," he went on, "since happiness is so greatly the question of other people's state of mind, might we not let it go at the fact that she is herself very much loved?"

The Duchess looked at her guest rather absently. She was thinking of the happy beauty, the woman of a different type from her own, whose presence at Westboro' had been sought by her husband for the second time.

"Oh," she answered rather absently, giving Jimmy her hand, "she wouldn't, you know, be happy if the feeling were all on the other side."

When the Duke had casually asked his guest's plans for Christmas week, Bulstrode had come near to offending his host by declaring that he could not possibly be one of a second house party.

"Do you, then," Westboro' had asked, "_hate_ the holidays?"

The genial Bulstrode had assured him to the contrary.

"Nor do I," continued the Duke, "even though I'm a miserable man on the verge of a divorce. I expect there's too long a line of jolly Christmases back of the Westboro's for me to mope through the season. But I don't want to have Christmas coming to an empty house, my dear fellow"--He put it pathetically, "there's no one in this gloomy place but yourself and myself. We must have a Christmas party. The tenants will, of course, be noisy and cheerful, but I'm going to ask a lot of people down and make the list out now."

And Bulstrode had, however, firmly insisted that he could not really stop on--that he must go away. "There are," he wound up his arguments, "a thousand reasons why I should go."

But Westboro' had comprehendingly suggested that they might together bring "every reason" down to the country. "And," continued his Grace, "we'll narrow things into the most intimate circle possible. For I shall ask the Ravensworths of Surrey and their children, there are eight of them, ripping little things; they used to play with my boys. We'll turn them loose and have a tree, old man."

Jimmy watched his face with a keen pity, for there had not been one ray of light in it as he planned for his celebration.

"But you arrange to come back for Christmas Eve. There _must_ be some one in charge--I mean to say, some one so that if the whole thing is too much for me, why I'll bolt and you'll have to stand by."

He was, as he spoke, writing the names on a sheet of paper. Bulstrode felt the plan to be rather _triste_ and lifeless, and he knew that he could not and would not keep the Duchess' secret much longer, let its revelation cost him what it would.

"Westboro'," he said, "I shall have to be getting off to-morrow. You know I would stand by you if I could possibly see my way clear."

"I know perfectly well," the Duke acknowledged, "what a rotten bore I've been, and how sick of me you must be." He wrote on: "I shall ask Mrs. Falconer (her husband is in the States); she is quite alone in town at Lady Sorgham's." As he quoted this last name the Duke folded his list up. He nodded affectionately at Jimmy. "You'll arrange perhaps to come down with Mrs. Falconer on the Friday train?"

And Bulstrode capitulating weakly, murmured, "Oh, we'll fetch the toys and things for the tree," he offered.

"Ripping!" his Grace nodded.

Jimmy, on his way at last to London, stopped once more at The Dials, and was hurrying across the forest when the Duchess herself appeared to him at the big dial. She wore her furs, muff, and big enveloping stole, her hat with fur on it, and a veil. She was not in house or garden trim. The urban air of her toilet was a surprise to Bulstrode, and he took in her readiness for something he had not expected, something great, something decisive.

"It's good of you to come when you must be full of delightful ways of passing your time, Mr. Bulstrode," she said, "and I wanted so much to see you again."

"Again?"

"Of course," she replied nodding, "again and many times. But I mean I wanted to see you _here_." Bulstrode did not want her to tell him a piece of final news. He did not care to learn of an arbitrary departure, and he said, laughing: "Then you don't like my property? Any repairs you...?"

"Oh, I adore The Dials," she said gravely, "and I can't think why they ever let you buy it, or what you'll do with it after I'm gone." She smiled. ".... or with whom." Before he could speak she added: "Where is my husband to-day?"

"I left him wandering about the house like a lost spirit," Bulstrode replied. "Looking," he went on, "all about for something or other. I expect he himself didn't quite know what. For something to cheer up the empty rooms."

"Oh, don't," she murmured.

But he seemed pleased with the picture he drew. "I doubt if Westboro' stops in the house alone; he's probably gone out shooting."

"But he has a house full of people....?"

"No one has come, or is coming, after all."

"You don't mean to say that they've all refused!"

"Yes," Jimmy said, "every man of them, and all the women as well."

The Duchess put out her hand quickly, and said touchingly: "Oh, but you don't for a moment think----"

"That it's because of the scandal, dear lady?" he smiled. "Well, that would be a new phase. No, I think on the other hand they would revel, and the only reason in the world that they have not come down is that they were really asked too late. Christmas week, you know--

"And, of course, then, Mrs. Falconer," the Duchess's face brightened. "She----"

"Oh, _she_!" Bulstrode exclaimed, "she's as right as possible. She's sure to be along in good season."

"Oh!" accepted the Duchess, "and with whom does she come?"

Bulstrode waited. "Well, of course, the poor thing expects to find more or less some one to help her bear up her end. And I can't say how she will take the fact of only us two."

The Duchess interrupted cheerfully:

"Why, she, of course, will go directly back! You don't think for a second that she would stop on alone like that?"

"Alone?" Bulstrode gave her with a little malice. "But she'll have Westboro' and me so entirely to herself and one can always ask in the rector or curate or corral a neighbor."

But the Duchess shook her head as if she understood. "Oh, no, not at this time."

Bulstrode miscomprehended blithely: "Christmas time? You see, I know the visiting lady pretty well, and I believe she'll feel me to be more or less of a standby, and I know her spirit and her human kindness. I am inclined to think that she will feel it's up to her not to run off like a hare; to think that Westboro' may, in a way, need her; and that when she finds everybody's gone back on the poor man, and there's to be no tree after all, why, I'm tempted, by jove, to think----"

The Duchess helped him: "That she'll make a charity of it."

"Yes, if you like," he laughed. "Or be a sport," he preferred to put it. "Stay on, stand by. It will be perfectly ripping of her, you know."

But the Duchess had no sympathy for the other woman. Her eyes fixed themselves on the trees before her, and as a shot rang out in the distance she said abruptly: "Why, that might be Cecil, mightn't it? Does he shoot birds on your premises?"

Bulstrode wondered very much for what reason she was habited in street dress and furs, whether she had planned to leave The Dials or had intended going up to see her husband.

"Forgive me," he said, "if I seem to be shockingly in a hurry, but I must have a look at the time, for as it happens, even in this far-off place, I have an engagement."

Impulsively putting out her hand the Duchess exclaimed: "I can't ever, ever thank you."

"Oh, after your divorce----"

But she cried out so against his words that he hastened: "You want me to think then that you do not believe...."

"Believe!" she ardently repeated, "Oh, I don't know what I believe or think," and he saw that the poor thing spoke the truth. "It's I who am as unstable as the sea, I who am the derelict."

He contradicted her gently: "My dear, you're only trying to solve alone a problem which it takes two to answer. When you see Westboro' you will know."

She turned on him with the first sparkle of humor he had ever seen her display. "Why don't you marry Mrs. Falconer?"

He didn't start; indeed, the idea had such a familiar sound it would have been hard to frighten him with it from any corner.

"I thought you didn't believe in divorces?"

"Oh, but you'd make a wonderful husband!"

He laughed. "No one has ever thought so--_la preuve_....?"

With great frankness in her gesture and a great--he was quick to see it--a great affection--she put out her hand to him and said: "Oh, yes, you'd make a wonderful companion, and you've been a wonderful friend. If anything good comes to me now, I shall in great measure owe it to you."

He protested: "You owe me nothing, nothing."

There were tears in her eyes as she said: "But I want to, I like to, and I do. I don't know," she went on, "that I might not have been reconciled ultimately to my husband, but I feel quite sure it would only have been the basting up of the seam--it would have ripped away again. Did you ever--" she challenged him with still a little sparkle of humor, "hear of a thing called a change of heart?"

"Yes, at Methodist meetings."

She said gravely: "That's not what I mean. But whatever _has_ happened it's only been since you told me things."

Her face was so girlish, her eyes so sweet, her humility so sudden, that her companion found himself embarrassed and could hardly find words to say good-by to her. She went on to say, in a tone so low that he bent a little over the dial to hear her. "You told me you could not advise my husband to come to me."

Ah, had he! It was hard to remember that. _Had_ he said so?

"I think," she whispered, "you need not keep him away now, if he should want to come."

As her friend said nothing, she added in a voice more like a child than a great Duchess, "You may trust me. I _want_ him to come-- There, I've said it. I _hope_ he'll come. If he doesn't--

"Why, then, you'll go away," he finished. "You can't bear it."

The Duchess shook her head. "I'll go to him, on the contrary."

"You were going?"

"Yes, when you came."

He cried out: "Oh, I'm off then, I'm off for London, and I shan't be back for the Christmas holidays. You may count on me."

The Duchess smiled delightfully, and was in a second the elusive woman, intangible, and impossible to seize.

"No, no," she said, "please don't exile yourself either to-day or to-morrow. It isn't after all the moment, and I want to prove to you that I'm not jealous. I've decided to wait until that lovely woman has gone away."

The waste of his territory, its largesse to no purpose, its vastness through which only unbearable silences echoed; accumulated revenues and hereditary title, only added to the Duke's melancholy.

He had planned the Christmas house party too late as it proved, and refusals, one after another, came in during the week. The poor gentleman's mood led him to resent each fresh defection on the part of his guests as personal wounds inflicted by old friends at a time when charity would have been sweet. And it was with really tragic melancholy that he threw the last letter down exclaiming:

"And they all with one consent began to make excuse."

He quite waited for a line from Mrs. Falconer, which would tell him that she, too, had decided to abandon him: and the thought of what he believed to be Jimmy's complications at The Dials caused him half to regard the matter with a pity for her.

"If Jimmy _isn't_ married, he's the most whited of sepulchres!"

The satin shine of holly, the glimmer of pearly mistletoe, the odor of spruce and pine, and heavier scent of hemlock bewitched the castle throughout with their fragrance. Setting and decoration suggested a feast, and the Duke as he passed through the upper halls, and by the doors of his children's rooms, saw holly wreaths on the walls and that the little gates were twisted with green.

The day was dampish and the Duke, unable to bear the silence of the house, with his gun and his dogs and with a lack of resource and superfluity of ennui to urge him from the castle, started to tramp off his unrest. The afternoon was young, and the bare, naked sunlight fell over the bare nakedness of the land. The little low clumps of neutral-colored underbrush, the reddish-brown thickets between wood and field, would hide the birds well, and with his gun across his back, his hands in his pockets, his Grace covered many miles before he at length stopped to take in the length of the land or to listen for wings.

Coveys had flown up and away unseen by him, and their whirring unheard. His dogs had run off, and without being abruptly brought to heel, skulked back by themselves shamefaced and bewildered by the hunter's indifference. The holly reddened on the hedges, the scarlet berries bright among the glowing leaves; high in the poplars the parasite mistletoe with crystal balls, hung tiny white globules like fairy grapes; holiday in the air, and over the grey winter landscape the finest possible powder of snow lay pale under the furtive sun. As the forest edges closed about him and the Duke with still no idea of where he was going, continued to tramp, he unconsciously entered the property Bulstrode had lately acquired, and which he had begged his friend to avoid.

There was something in the country air, in its pungent sweetness, and in the season, that penetrated even Westboro's melancholy, and every now and then he lifted his head to breathe in deeply the fragrance of hemlock and the cold earthy aroma, the spice of bracken and the balm of a fragrant thicket that smelled like a rose. It was winter, however, and although a snow bird piped in it and the sun was out, there was a December quality that, in the mood he was in, overcame all the festivities of the time. He heard the bird who was persistent and sharp-voiced, and, for the first time thinking of the other game he had come out for, he paused. His dogs were gone, the beggars! He called them to no purpose, whistled and waited. They were a new brace and young. God knew where they had cut away to.

Before him, as he stood, the brown vistas of the winter forest opened out here and there into ochre circles and filled at this hour with brilliant sunlight, their round openings overflowing; the light filtered gently out and was swallowed up by the cold and closer wood. Under his feet there was only the faint ghost of the late snowfall on the turned-up, curled-up edges of the dry leaves. There beeches, red as copper, and iron-strong oaks struck their roots deep down into the mould. Westboro' did not know where he had wandered to, but here and there through the bare trees gleamed the white of a statue on its mossy base, and a little farther along, a broken pedestal held its slender column up amongst the tree trunks as mossy and veined as they, and right in the heart of the bowl, on a brick pedestal was a sundial, a round brass disc, cut into with the tooth of time, and all black and green. The sun at this moment shone full on it and its slight shadow fell along the noon. The Duke stooped down and through the glass read the inscription:

_Utere dum licet_.

"I'm a trespasser," he thought. "This is Bulstrode's property."

Through an opening just to the right he could see a brown path, and at the end of it a gate.

"What the deuce could Jimmy have so wanted this old place for? What was he hiding here?"

He turned back with the intention of taking as sudden leave of the place as he had made an entrance. He saw his dogs in front of him and called them. Before him lay the clean low fall of the meadow with the line of high hedge, and directly opposite him he could see the elms of his own park. He had not gone more than a couple of hundred feet away before he paused again and turned about to have one last look back at the enchanting place. As he stood thus, in Jimmy's property, he at first took it to be a trick of vision, for he stood perfectly rigid, peering back at the opening he had left not five minutes before. He leaned forwards, setting his eyeglass and staring at two figures who had come into the bowl and stood close by the big dial.

He set his gun on the ground and leaned upon it. There was a cordial meeting; he could hear the voices but he could not distinguish their words, and during all the interview, which must have consumed some fifteen minutes, the Duke never stirred. Finally, and curiously enough it seemed a short time to him, they took leave of each other, the man going out of the forest by a different path, the woman slowly turning down the neat walk that led to the brick arch, and to the old house. Whether or not the Duke had at this moment the vaguest suspicion of her, suspicion of his friend or of his wife that did them wrong, he never had time or clearness to reflect or to ask himself. A dense blindness took his senses away from him. He put his hands out to steady himself in vain, and staggered. His dogs were at his feet, he fell over them, struggled to get his balance back and like a stricken tree went down. In his heavy fall on his gun it discharged, filling his upper arm and shoulder with a quantity of bird shot. The scattering pain, instead of finishing his faint, roused him with a sharp, ugly sting, and the rush of the warm, wet blood. He half picked himself up, and then, aware of the pain tearing his muscles and flesh, he fell back like a dog on his haunches. Through his confusion he still contrived to remember a little path, and inch by inch he dragged himself towards it. He pulled along over the leaves and russet paths of ground. His bare hand finally struck the bricks of the little walk and he could still know that he was wonderfully in the road. There was a cloud before his swimming eyes and his troubled mind; his face, pale as death, was lifted towards the arch; leaving a bloody trail as he crawled along the ground, he contrived to reach the gate and fell across its threshold. His head lay on his arm, the string of his broken eyeglass wound pathetically about his wrist. The Duke proved to be a modern replica of the poor knight who fell, face downwards, on the grass when Elizabeth's carriage passed him by, some four hundred years before the present Duke.