CHAPTER XV
Douglas Falloden was sitting alone in his father's library surrounded bypaper and documents. He had just concluded a long interview with thefamily lawyer; and a tray containing the remains of their hasty luncheonwas on a side-table. The room had a dusty, dishevelled air. Half of thehouse-servants had been already dismissed; the rest were disorganised.Lady Laura had left Flood the day before. To her son's infinite reliefshe had consented to take the younger children and go on a long visit tosome Scotch relations. It had been left vague whether she returned toFlood or not; but Douglas hoped that the parting was alreadyover--without her knowing it; and that he should be able to persuadeher, after Scotland, to go straight to the London house--which was herown property--for the winter.
Meanwhile he himself had been doing his best to wind up affairs. Theelaborate will of twenty years earlier, with its many legacies andbequests, had been cancelled by Sir Arthur only six weeks before hisdeath. A very short document had been substituted for it, making Douglasand a certain Marmaduke Falloden, his uncle and an eminent K.C., jointexecutors, and appointing Douglas and Lady Laura guardians of theyounger children. Whatever property might remain "after the payment ofmy just debts" was to be divided in certain proportions between Douglasand his brother and sisters.
The estates, with the exception of the lands immediately surroundingthe castle, were to be sold to the tenants, and the dates of the auctionwere already fixed. For the castle itself, negotiations had been openedwith an enormously successful soap-boiler from the north, but anAmerican was also in the market, and the Falloden solicitors wereskilfully playing the two big fish against each other. The sale of thepictures would come before the court early in October. Meanwhile thebeautiful Romney--the lady in black--still looked down upon her strippedand impoverished descendant; and Falloden, whose sole companion sheoften was through dreary hours, imagined her sometimes as tragic orreproachful, but more commonly as mocking him with a maliciousIrish glee.
There would be some few thousand pounds left for himself when all wassettled. He was determined to go into Parliament, and his presentintention was to stand for a Merton fellowship, and read for the bar. Ifother men could make three or four thousand a year within three years orso of being called, why not he? His character had steeled under thepressure of disaster. He realised with a clearer intelligence, day byday, all that had gone from him--his father--his inheritance--thecareless ease and self-assurance that goes with the chief places at thefeast of life. But if he must now drop to the lower rooms, it would notbe "with shame" that he would do that, or anything else. He felt withinhimself a driving and boundless energy, an iron will to succeed. Therewas even a certain bitter satisfaction in measuring himself against theworld without the props and privileges he had hitherto possessed. He wasoften sore and miserable to his heart's depths; haunted by blackregrets and compunction he could not get rid of. All the same it washis fixed resolve to waste no thoughts on mere happiness. His businesswas to make a place for himself as an able man among able men, to ask ofambition, intelligence, hard work, and the sharpening of brain on brain,the satisfaction he had once hoped to get out of marriage with ConstanceBledlow, and the easy, though masterly, use of great wealth.
He turned to look at the clock.
She had asked him for five. He had ordered his horse accordingly, theonly beast still left in the Flood stables, and his chief means ofescape during a dreary fortnight from his peevish co-executor, who wasof little or no service, and had allowed himself already to sayunpardonable things about his dead brother, even to that brother's son.
It was too soon to start, but he pushed his papers aside impatiently.The mere prospect of seeing Constance Bledlow provoked in him a dumb andtroubled excitement. Under its impulse he left the library, and began towalk aimlessly through the dreary and deserted house, for the mere sakeof movement. The pictures were still on the walls, for the sale of themhad not yet been formally sanctioned by the court; but all Lady Laura'sprivate and personal possessions had been removed to London, anddust-sheets covered the furniture. Some of it indeed had been alreadysold, and workmen were busy packing in the great hall, amid a dustylitter of paper and straw. All the signs of normal life, which make thecharacter of a house, had gone; what remained was only the debris of aonce animated whole. Houses have their fate no less than books; and inthe ears of its last Falloden possessor, the whole of the greatmany-dated fabric, from its fourteenth century foundations beneath thecentral tower, to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt had disfigured thegarden front, had often, since his father's death, seemed to speak withan almost human voice of lamentation and distress.
But this afternoon Falloden took little notice of his surroundings. Whyhad she written to him?
Well, after all, death is death, and the merest strangers had written tohim--letters that he was now wearily answering. But there had beennothing perfunctory in her letter. As he read it he had seemed to hearher very voice saying the soft, touching things in it--things that womensay so easily and men can't hit upon; and to be looking into herchanging face, and the eyes that could be so fierce, and then again sochildishly sweet and sad--as he had seen them, at their last meeting onthe moor, while she was giving him news of Radowitz. Yet there was not aword in the letter that might not have been read on the house-tops--nota trace in it of her old alluring, challenging self. Simplicity--deepfeeling--sympathy--in halting words, and unfinished sentences--and yetsomething conspicuously absent and to all appearance so easily,unconsciously absent, that all the sweetness and pity brought him moresmart than soothing. Yes, she had done with him--for all her wish to bekind to him. He saw it plainly; and he turned back thirstily to thosepast hours in Lathom Woods, when he had felt himself, if only for amoment, triumphant master of her thoughts, if not her heart; rebelledagainst, scolded, flouted, yet still tormentingly necessary andimportant. All that delicious friction, those disputes that are theforerunner of passion were gone--forever. She was sorry for him--andvery kind. His touchy pride recoiled, reading into her letter what shehad never dreamt of putting into it, just because of the absence of thatsomething--that old tremor--those old signs of his influence over her,which, of course, she would never let him see again.
All the same he had replied at once, asking if he might come and saygood-bye before she left Scarfedale. And she had sent him atelegram--"Delighted--to-morrow--five o'clock."
And he was going--out of a kind of recklessness--kind of obstinaterecoil against the sorrowful or depressing circumstance of life. He hadgiven up all thoughts of trying to win her back, even if there were anychance of it. His pride would not let him sue as a pauper; and of coursethe Langmoors to whom she was going--he understood--from Scarfedale,would take good care she did not throw herself away. Quite right too.Very likely the Tamworths would capture her; and Bletchley was quite anice fellow.
When he did see her, what could they talk about? Radowitz?
He would like to send a message through her to Radowitz--to saysomething--
What could he say? He had seen Radowitz for a few minutes after theinquest--to thank him for his evidence--and for what he had done for SirArthur. Both had hurried through it. Falloden had seemed to himselfstricken with aphasia. His mouth was dry, his tongue useless. AndRadowitz had been all nerves, a nickering colour--good God, how deathlyhe looked!
Afterwards he had begun a letter to Radowitz, and had toiled at it,sometimes at dead of night and in a feverish heat of brain. But he hadnever finished or sent it. What was the use? Nothing was changed. Thatblack sling and the damaged hand in it stood for one of those hard factsthat no wishing, and no sentimentalising, and no remorse could get over.
"I wish to God I had let him alone!"
That now was the frequent and bitter cry of Falloden's inmost being.Trouble and the sight of trouble--sorrow--and death--had been to him, asto other men, sobering and astonishing facts. The most decisive effectof them had been to make him vulnerable, to break through the harddefences of pride and custom, so that
he realised what he had done. Andthis realisation was fast becoming a more acute and haunting thing thananything else. It constantly drove out the poignant recollection of hisfather's death, or the dull sense of financial loss and catastrophe.Loss and catastrophe might be at some distant time made good. But whatcould ever give Radowitz back his art--his career--his natural object inlife? The hatches of the present had just got to be closed over thisugly, irreparable thing. "I can't undo it--nothing can ever be undone.But I can't spend my life in repenting it; one must just go forward, andnot let that, or anything else, hamstring a man who has got his fight tofight, and can't get out of it."
Undo it? No. But were no, even partial, amends possible?--nothing thatcould be offered, or done, or said?--nothing that would give ConstanceBledlow pleasure, or change her opinion?--efface that shrinking in her,of which he hated to think?
He cudgelled his brains, but could think of nothing.
Money, of course, was of no use, even if he still possessed it.Radowitz, in all matters connected with money, was hypersensitive andtouchy. It was well known that he had private means; and it wascertainly probable that he was now the richer man of the two.
No--there was nothing to be done. He had maimed forever the vital,energising impulse in another human being, and it could never berepaired. "His poor music!--_murdered_"--the words from ConstanceBledlow's horror-stricken letter were always in his mind. And the dayafter the inquest on Sir Arthur, he had had some conversation on themedical points of his father's case, and on the light thrown on them byRadowitz's evidence, with the doctor who was then attending Lady Laura,and had, it appeared, been several times called in by Sorell during thepreceding weeks to see Radowitz and report on the progress of the hand."A bad business!" said the young man, who had intelligence and was freshfrom hospital--"and awful hard luck!--he might have hurt his hand in ascore of ways and still have recovered the use of it, but with thisparticular injury"--he shook his head--"nothing to be done! And theworst of it is that a trouble like this, which cuts across a man'scareer, goes so deep. The thing I should be most afraid of is hisgeneral health. You can see that he's delicate--narrow-chested--a bundleof nerves. It might be phthisis--it might be"--he shrugged hisshoulders--"well, depression, bad neurasthenia. And the poor lad seemsto have no family--no mother or sisters--to look after him. But he'llwant a lot of care, if he's to pull round again. An Oxford row, wasn'tit? Abominable!"
But here the sudden incursion of Lady Laura's maid to ask a questionfor her mistress had diverted the doctor's thoughts and sparedFalloden reply.
* * * * *
A little later, he was riding slowly up the side of the moor towardsScarfedale, looking down on a landscape which since his childhood hadbeen so intimate and familiar a part of himself that the thought ofbeing wrenched away from it, immediately and for good, seemedmerely absurd.
September was nearly gone; and the trees had long passed out of theirAugust monotony, and were already prophetic of the October blaze. Thelevel afternoon light was searching out the different planes ofdistance, giving to each hedgerow, elm or oak, a separate force andkingship: and the golden or bronze shades, which were day by daystealing through the woods, made gorgeous marriage with the eveningpurple. The castle, as he gazed back upon it, had sunk into the shadows,a dim magnificent ghost, seen through mist, like the Rhine maidensthrough the blue water.
And there it would stand, perhaps for generations yet, long after he andhis kindred knew it no more. What did the plight of its last ownermatter to it, or to the woods and hills? He tried to think of thatvalley a hundred years hence--a thousand!--and felt himself the merestinsect crawling on the face of this old world, which is yet so young.But only for a moment. Rushing back, came the proud, resisting sense ofpersonality--of man's dominance over nature--of the Nietzschean "will topower." To be strong, to be sufficient to one's self; not to yield, butto be forever counterattacking circumstance, so as to be the master ofcircumstance, whatever blows it might choose to strike--that seemed tobe the best, the only creed left to him.
When he reached the Scarfedale house, and a gardener had taken hishorse, the maid who opened the door told him he would find LadyConstance on the lawn. The old ladies were out driving.
Very decent of the old ladies, he thought, as he followed the path intothe garden.
There she was!--her light form lost, almost, in a deep chair, under alime-tree. The garden was a tangle of late blooming flowers; everythinggrowing rank and fast, as though to get as much out of the soil and thesun as possible, before the first frost made execution. It wassurrounded by old red walls that held the dropping sun, and it was fullof droning bees, and wagtails stepping daintily over the lawns.
Connie rose and came towards him. She was in black with pale pink rosesin her hat. In spite of her height, she seemed to him the slightest,gracefullest thing, and as she neared him, she lifted her deep browneyes, and it was as though he had never seen before how beautifulthey were.
"It was kind of you to come!" she said shyly.
He made no reply, till she had placed him beside her under the lime.Then he looked round him, a smile twitching his lip.
"Your aunts are not at home?"
"No. They have gone for their drive. Did you wish to see them?"
"I am in terror of your Aunt Winifred. She and I had many ructions whenI was small. She thought our keepers used to shoot her cats."
"They probably did!"
"Of course. But a keeper who told the truth about it would have nomoral sense."
They both laughed, looking into each other's faces with a sudden senseof relief from tension. After all the tragedy and the pain, there theywere, still young, still in the same world together. And the sun wasstill shining and flowers blooming. Yet, all the same, there was nothought of any renewal of their old relation on either side. Somethingunexpressed, yet apparently final, seemed to stand between them;differing very much in his mind from the something in hers, yet equallypotent. She, who had gone through agonies of far too tender pity forhim, felt now a touch of something chill and stern in the circumstancesurrounding him that seemed to put her aside. "This is not yourbusiness," it seemed to say; so that she saw herself as an inexperiencedchild playing with that incalculable thing--the male. Attempts atsympathy or advice died away--she rebelled, and submitted.
Still there are things--experiments--that even an inexperienced child, achild "of good will" may venture. All the time that she was talking toFalloden, a secret expectation, a secret excitement ran through herinner mind. There was a garden door to her left, across a lawn. Her eyeswere often on it, and her ear listened for the click of the latch.
Meanwhile Falloden talked very frankly of the family circumstances andhis own plans. How changed the tone was since they had discussed thesame things, riding through the Lathom Woods in June! There was littleless self-confidence, perhaps; but the quality of it was not the same.Instead of alienating, it began to touch and thrill her. And her heartcould not help its sudden tremor when he spoke of wintering "in or nearOxford." There was apparently a Merton prize fellowship in December onwhich his hopes were set, and the first part of his bar examination toread for, whether he got a fellowship or no.
"And Parliament?" she asked him.
"Yes--that's my aim," he said quietly. "Of course it's the fashion justnow, especially in Oxford, to scoff at politics and the House ofCommons. It's like the 'art-for-arters' in town. As if you could solveanything by words--or paints!"
"Your father was in the House for some time?"
She bent towards him, as she mentioned his father, with a lovelyunconscious gesture that sent a tremor through him. He seemed toperceive all that shaken feeling in her mind to which she found it soimpossible to give expression; on which his own action had placed sostrong a curb.
He replied that his father had been in Parliament for some twelve years,and had been a Tory Whip part of the time. Then he paused, his eyes onthe grass, till he raised them to say abruptly: r />
"You heard about it all--from Radowitz?"
She nodded.
"He came here that same night." And then suddenly, in the golden light,he saw her flush vividly. Had she realised that what she had saidimplied a good deal?--or might be thought to imply it? Why shouldRadowitz take the trouble, after his long and exhausting experience, tocome round by the Scarfedale manor-house?
"It was an awful time for him," he said, his eyes on hers. "It was verystrange that he should be there."
She hesitated. Her lips trembled.
"He was very glad to be there. Only he was sorry--for you."
"You mean he was sorry that I wasn't there sooner--with my father?"
"I think that was what he felt--that there was only a stranger."
"I was just in time," said Falloden slowly. "And I wonder--whetheranything matters, to the dying?"
There was a pause, after which he added, with sudden energy--
"I thought--at the inquest--he himself looked pretty bad."
"Otto Radowitz?" Constance covered her eyes with her hands a moment--agesture of pain. "Mr. Sorell doesn't know what to do for him. He hasbeen losing ground lately. The doctors say he ought to live in theopen-air. He and Mr. Sorell talk of a cottage near Oxford, where Mr.Sorell can go often and see him. But he can't live alone."
As she spoke Falloden's attention was diverted. He had raised his headand was looking across the lawn towards the garden entrance. There wasthe sound of a clicking latch. Constance turned, and sawRadowitz entering.
The young musician paused and wavered, at the sight of the two under thelime. It seemed as though he would have taken to flight. But, instead,he came on with hesitating step. He had taken off his hat, as he oftendid when walking; and his red-gold hair _en brosse_ was as conspicuousas ever. But otherwise what a change from the youth of three monthsbefore! Falloden, now that the immediate pressure of his own tragedywas relaxed, perceived the change even more sharply than he had done atthe inquest; perceived it, at first with horror, and then with a wildsense of recoil and denial, as though some hovering Erinys advanced withRadowitz over the leaf-strewn grass.
Radowitz grew paler still as he reached Connie. He gave Falloden ashort, embarrassed greeting, and then subsided into the chair thatConstance offered him. The thought crossed Falloden's mind--"Did shearrange this?"
Her face gave little clue--though she could not restrain one quick,hesitating glance at Falloden. She pressed tea on Radowitz, who acceptedit to please her, and then, schooled as she was in all the minor socialarts, she had soon succeeded in establishing a sort of small talk amongthe three. Falloden, self-conscious, and on the rack, could not imaginewhy he stayed. But this languid boy had ministered to his dying father!And to what, and to whom, were the languor, the tragic physical changedue? He stayed--in purgatory--looking out for any chance to escape.
"Did you walk all the way?"
The note in Connie's voice was softly reproachful.
"Why, it's only three miles!" said Radowitz, as though defendinghimself, but he spoke with an accent of depression. And Connieremembered how, in the early days of his recovery from his injury, hehad spent hours rambling over the moors by himself, or with Sorell. Herheart yearned to him. She would have liked to take his poor hands inhers, and talk to him tenderly like a sister. But there was that otherdark face, and those other eyes opposite--watching. And to them too, heryoung sympathy went out--how differently!--how passionately! A kind ofrending and widening process seemed to be going on within her ownnature. Veils were falling between her and life; and feelings, deeperand stronger than any she had ever known, were fast developing the womanin the girl. How to heal Radowitz!--how to comfort Falloden! Her mindached under the feelings that filled it--feelings whollydisinterested and pure.
"You really are taking the Boar's Hill cottage?" she asked, addressingRadowitz.
"I think so. It is nearly settled. But I am trying to find somecompanion. Sorell can only come occasionally."
As he spoke, a wild idea flashed into Falloden's brain. It seemed tohave entered without--or against--his will; as though suggested by someimperious agency outside himself. His intelligence laughed at it.Something else in him entertained it--breathlessly.
Radowitz stooped down to try and tempt Lady Marcia's dachshund with apiece of cake.
"I must anyhow have a dog," he said, as the pampered Max accepted thecake, and laid his head gratefully on the donor's knee; "they'realways company."
He looked wistfully into the dog's large, friendly eyes.
Connie rose.
"Please don't move!" she said, flushing. "I shall be back directly. ButI must put up a letter. I hear the postman!" She ran over the grass,leaving the two men in acute discomfort. Falloden thought again, withrising excitement: "She planned it! She wants me to do something--totake some step--but what?"
An awkward pause followed. Radowitz was still playing with the dog,caressing its beautiful head with his uninjured hand, and talking to itin a half whisper. As Constance departed, a bright and feverish red hadrushed into his cheeks; but it had only made his aspect more ghostly,more unreal.
Again the absurd idea emerged in Falloden's consciousness; and this timeit seemed to find its own expression, and to be merely making use of hisvoice, which he heard as though it were some one else's.
He bent over towards Radowitz.
"Would you care to share the cottage with me?" he said abruptly. "I wantto find a place to read in--out of Oxford."
Radowitz looked up, amazed--speechless! Falloden's eyes met Otto'ssteadily. The boy turned away. Suddenly he covered his face with hisfree hand.
"Why did you hate me so?" he said, breathing quickly. "What had I doneto you?"
"I didn't hate you," said Falloden thickly. "I was mad."
"Because you were jealous? What a fool you were! She never cared a brassfarthing for me--except as she, does now. She would like to nurseme--and give me back my music. But she can't--and you can't."
There was silence again. Otto's chest heaved. As far as he could withhis one hand, he hid the tears in his eyes from his companion. And atlast he shook off emotion--with a laugh in which there was no mirth.
"Well, at least, I shouldn't make such a row now as I used todo--practising."
Falloden understood his reference to the soda-water bottle fusillade, bywhich the "bloods," in their first attack upon him, had tried to silencehis piano.
"Can't you play at all?" he said at last, choosing the easiest ofseveral remarks that presented themselves.
"I get about somehow on the keys. It's better than nothing. And I'mwriting something for my degree. It's rather good. If I could only keepwell!" said the boy impatiently. "It's this damned health that getsin the way."
Then he threw himself back in his chair, all the melancholy of his facesuddenly breaking up, the eyes sparkling.
"Suppose I set up one of those automatic pianos they're now talkingabout--could you stand that?"
"I would have a room where I didn't hear it. That would be all right."
"There's a wonderful idea I heard of from Paris a week or two ago," saidOtto excitedly--"a marvellous electric invention a man's at work on,where you only turn a handle, or press a button, and you getRubinstein--or Madame Schumann or my country-man, Paderewski, who'sgoing to beat everybody. It isn't finished yet. But it won't be for thelikes of me. It'll cost at least a thousand pounds."
"They'll get cheaper," said Falloden, his chin in his hands, elbows onknees, and eyes fixed on his companion. It seemed to him he was talkingin a dream, so strange was this thing he had proposed; which apparentlywas going to come to pass. At any rate Radowitz had not refused. He satwith the dachshund on his knees, alternately pulling out and folding itslong ears. He seemed to be, all in a moment, in high spirits, and whenhe saw Connie coming back through the garden gate, with a shy,hesitating step, he sprang up eagerly to greet her. But there wasanother figure behind her. It was Sorell; and at sight of him "somethingsealed" the boy's lips. H
e looked round at Falloden, and dropped backinto his chair.
Falloden rose from his seat abruptly. A formal and scarcely perceptiblegreeting passed between him and Sorell. All Falloden's irritableself-consciousness rushed back upon him as he recognised the St. Cypriantutor. He was not going to stay and cry _peccavi_ any more in thepresence of a bloodless prig, for whom Oxford was the world. But it wasbitter to him all the same to leave him in possession of the garden andConnie Bledlow's company.
"Thank you--I must go," he said brusquely, as Connie tried to detainhim. "There is so much to do nowadays. I shall be leaving Flood nextweek. The agent will be in charge."
"Leaving--for good?" she asked, in her appealing voice, as they stoodapart.
"Probably--for good."
"I don't know how to say--how sorry I am!"
"Thank you. But I am glad it's over. When you get back to Oxford--Ishall venture to come and call."
"That's a promise," she said, smiling at him. "Where will you be?"
"Ask Otto Radowitz! Good-bye!"
Her start of surprise pleased him. He approached Radowitz. "Shall I hearfrom you?" he said stiffly.
"Certainly!" The boy looked up. "I will write to-morrow."
* * * * *
The garden door had no sooner closed on Falloden than Radowitz threwhimself back, and went into a fit of laughter, curious, hollow laughter.
Sorell looked at him anxiously.
"What's the meaning of that, Otto?"
"You'll laugh, when you hear! Falloden and I are going to set up housetogether, in the cottage on Boar's Hill. He's going to read--and I'm tobe allowed a piano, and a piano-player. Queer, isn't it?"
"My dear Otto!" cried Sorell, in dismay. "What on earth do you mean?"
"Well, he offered it--said he'd come and look after me. I don't knowwhat possessed him--nor me either. I didn't exactly accept, but I shallaccept. Why shouldn't I?"
"Because Falloden's the last person in the world to look afteranybody--least of all, you!" said Sorell with indignant energy. "But ofcourse it's a joke! You mean it for a joke. If he proposed it, it waslike his audacity. Nobody would, who had a shred of delicacy. I supposehe wants to disarm public opinion!"
Radowitz looked oddly at Sorell from under his finely marked eyebrows.
"I don't believe he cares a hang for public opinion," he said slowly."Nor do I. If you could come, of course that would settle it. And if youwon't come to see me, supposing Falloden and I do share diggings, thatsettles it too. But you will come, old man--you will come!"
And he nodded, smiling, at hid quasi-guardian. Neither of them noticedConnie. Yet she had hung absorbed on their conversation, the breathfluttering on her parted lips. And when their talk paused, she bentforward, and laid her hand on Sorell's arm:
"Let him!" she said pleadingly--"let him do it!"
Sorell looked at her in troubled perplexity. "Let Douglas Falloden makesome amends to his victim; if he can, and will. Don't be so unkind as toprevent it!" That, he supposed, was what she meant. It seemed to him themere sentimental unreason of the young girl, who will not believe thatthere is any irrevocableness in things at all, till life teaches her.
Radowitz too! What folly, what mistaken religiosity could make him dreamof consenting to such a house-mate through this winter which mightbe his last!
Monstrous! What kind of qualities had Falloden to fit him for such atask? All very well, indeed, that he should feel remorse! Sorell hopedhe might feel it a good deal more sharply yet. But that he should easehis remorse at Otto's expense, by offering what he could never fulfil,and by taking the place of some one on whom Otto could have reallyleaned--that seemed to Sorell all of a piece with the man's egotism, hisepicurean impatience of anything that permanently made him uncomfortableor unhappy. He put something of this into impetuous words as well as hecould. But Otto listened in silence. So did Constance. And Sorellpresently felt that there was a secret bond between them.
* * * * *
Before the aunts returned, the rectory pony-carriage came for Radowitz,who was not strong enough to walk both ways. Sorell and Constance wereleft alone.
Sorell, observing her, was struck anew by the signs of change anddevelopment in her. It was as though her mother and her mother's soulshowed through the girl's slighter temperament. The old satiricaloofness in Connie's brown eyes, an expression all her own, and not hermother's, seemed to have slipped away; Sorell missed it. EllaRisborough's sympathetic charm had replaced it, but with suggestions ofhidden conflict and suffering, of which Lady Risborough's brightsweetness had known nothing. It was borne in upon him that, since herarrival in Oxford, Constance had gone through a great deal, and gonethrough it alone. For after all what had his efforts amounted to? Whatcan a man friend do for a young girl in the fermenting years of heryouth! And when the man friend knows very well that, but for an ironforce upon himself, he himself would be among her lovers? Sorell felthimself powerless--in all the greater matters--and was inclined to thinkthat he deserved to be powerless. Yet he had done his best; and throughhis Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritualgrowth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his ownyouth. They had been reading Homer together--parts both of the "Iliad"and the "Odyssey"; and through "that ageless mouth of all the world,"what splendid things had spoken to her!--Hector's courage, andAndromache's tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the pity ofAchilles, mother love and wife love, death and the scorn of death. Hehad felt her glow and tremble in the grip of that supreme poetry; forhimself he had found her the dearest and most responsive of pupils.
But what use was anything, if after all, as Radowitz vowed, she was inlove with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the man of Scroll'stype--disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in actionto the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden'stype--strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined--isperennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attractionfor women of the other.
Sorell sat on impatiently in the darkening garden, hoping always thatConnie would explain, would confess; for he was certain that she hadsomehow schemed for this preposterous reconciliation--if it was areconciliation. She wanted no doubt to heal Falloden's conscience, andso to comfort her own. And she would sacrifice Otto, if need be, in theprocess! He vowed to himself that he would prevent it, if he could.
Connie eyed him wistfully. Confidences seemed to be on her very lips;and then stopped there. In the end she neither explained nor confessed.But when he was gone, she walked up and down the lawn under the eveningsky, her hands behind her--passionately dreaming.
She had never thought of any such plan as had actually sprung to light.And she understood Sorell's opposition.
All the same, her heart sang over it. When she had asked Radowitz andDouglas to meet, each unbeknown to the other, when she had sent away thekind old aunts and prepared it all, she had reckoned on powers offeeling in Falloden, in which apparently only she and Aunt Marciabelieved; and she had counted on the mystical and religious fervour shehad long since discovered in Radowitz. That night--after Sir Arthur'sdeath--she had looked tremblingly into the boy's very soul, hadperceived his wondering sense of a special message to him through whathad happened, from a God who suffered and forgives.
Yes, she had tried to make peace.
And she guessed--the tears blinding her as she walked--at the truemeaning of Falloden's sudden impulse, and Otto's consent. Falloden's wasan impulse of repentance; and Otto's had been an impulse of pardon, inthe Christian sense. "If I am to die, I will die at peace with him." Wasthat the thought--the tragic and touching thought--in the boy's mind?
As to Falloden, could he do it?--could he rise to the height of what wasoffered him? She prayed he might; she believed he could.
Her whole being was aflame. Douglas was no longer in love with her; thatwas clear. What matter, if he made peace with his own soul? As for her,she loved him with he
r whole heart, and meant to go on loving him,whatever any one might say. And that being so, she would of coursenever marry.
Could she ever make Nora understand the situation? By letter, it wascertainly useless to try!
PART III