The anodyne he tried was the worst conceivable. Charles had never led the life of pleasure, and had no relish for it; so now, when he attempted it, it was like brandy to a teetotaller. He belonged to Dillon’s, and took to frequenting that club, and playing cards for high stakes. Now, it is a dangerous thing to gamble if you have the mania for it in your blood, but it is more dangerous if your object is to blanket your mind. He won a good deal of money and lost a good deal, and he played with a cold intensity which rather scared his partners . . . Also he, who had always been abstemious, took to doing himself too well. I met him one night in St James’s Street, and got the impression that the sober Charles was rather drunk . . . Then there was hunting. He had not had time for years to do much of that, but now he kept horses at Birkham, and went out twice a week. He behaved as he had behaved in the Terra Nova rapids, and took wild risks because he believed that nothing could harm him. For a couple of months he rode so hard that he made himself a nuisance in the field . . . Then his confidence suddenly deserted him.
It occurred to him that any day he might have a smash, and linger bedridden till the following June. So he got rid of his hunters and fled from Birkham.
The result of all this was that before Christmas he had begun to get for himself a doubtful name. At first no one believed that this decorous young man could run amok, but nobody’s repute is iron-clad, and presently too many people were ready to surmise the worst. City men reported that he rarely showed up at his office, and was useless when he did. Hunting men had tales to tell of strange manners in the field and an insane foolhardiness. My nephew, who was one of his oldest friends, and belonged to Dillon’s, would say nothing at first when I asked him about the stories, but in the end he admitted reluctantly that they were true. “Charles has got mixed up with a poor lot,” he said. “Drunken swine like L——, and half-witted boys like little E—— and fine old-fashioned crooks like B——. He hardly recognizes me when we meet in the club, for he knows I don’t like his bunch. In the evening he’s apt to be tight after ten o’clock.
“God knows what’s done it!” said my nephew dismally. “Looks as if he weren’t able to take his corn. Too big a success too soon, you know. Well, he won’t be a success long . . . I put it down to a virtuous youth. If you don’t blow off steam under twenty-five, you’re apt to have a blow up later and scald yourself . . . No, I don’t think it is unrequited affection. I’ve heard that yarn, but I don’t believe it. I saw Lady Pam at a dinner last week, and she had a face like a death’s head. She’s going the pace a bit herself, but she’s not enjoying it. Whoever is behaving badly, it ain’t her. My notion is that Charles hasn’t given the girl a thought for months. Don’t ask me for an explanation. Something has snapped in him, the way a racehorse goes suddenly wrong.”
I confess that at the time I was more anxious about my goddaughter than about Charles. I knew him fairly well and liked him, but Pamela was very near my heart. I could not blame him, for it was she who had hitherto caused the trouble, but now it was very clear that things were not well with her . . . She had refused to pay her usual Scots visits, and had gone off with the Junipers to their place on the Riviera. The Juniper girl had only been an acquaintance, but she suddenly blossomed into a bosom friend. Now, the Junipers were not too well regarded by old-fashioned people. Tom and Mollie Nantley hated the business, but they had always made it a rule never to interfere with their daughters, and certainly up to now Pamela had deserved their confidence. It must have been gall and wormwood to them to see the papers full of pictures of the Juniper doings, with Pamela bathing and playing tennis and basking on the sands in the most raffish society . . . After that she went on a cruise to the Red Sea with some Americans called Baffin. The Nantleys knew very little about the Baffins, so they hoped for the best; but from what I learned afterwards the company on the yacht was pretty mixed—a journalistic peer, two or three financiers, and a selection of amorous and alcoholic youth.
Pamela returned to England before the end of November. The family always stayed on at Wirlesdon till well into the new year, but she insisted on taking up her quarters in London. She acted in several entertainments got up for charity, and became the darling of the illustrated press. I saw her once in December, at a dinner given for a ball, and was glad that Mollie Nantley was not present. The adorable child that I had known had not altogether gone, but it was overlaid with tragic affectations. She had ruined her perfect colouring with cosmetics, and her manner had acquired the shrill vulgarity which was then the fashion. She was as charming to me as ever, but in her air there was a curious defiance. Her face had been made up to look pert, but in repose it was tragic. I realized that it was all a desperate bravado to conceal suffering.
Chapter 3
Lamancha had a Christmas party at his house in Devonshire, and I went there on the twenty-seventh. After tea my hostess took me aside.
“We’ve made an awful gaffe,” she said. “Charles Ottery is here, and I find to my horror that Pamela Brune is coming tomorrow. I can’t very well put her off, but you know that things have not been going well with her and Charles, and their being together may be very painful for both of them.”
I asked if Charles knew that Pamela was coming.
“I told him this morning, but he didn’t seem interested. I hoped he would discover that he had an engagement elsewhere, but not a bit of it—he only looked blank and turned away. What on earth has happened to him, Ned? He is rather quarrelsome, when he isn’t simply deadly dull, and he has such queer moping moods. There is something on his mind, and I don’t believe that it’s Pamela.”
“Couldn’t you let her know he is here?” I asked.
“I wired to Mollie Nantley, but the only reply I got was about Pamela’s train. She is evidently coming with her eyes open.”
Pamela duly arrived during the following afternoon, when we were out shooting Lamancha’s hedgerow pheasants. I did not see her till dinner, and I had to go off at dawn next morning to London for an unexpected consultation. But that evening I had a very dear and most disquieting impression of her and Charles. Her manner was shrill and rather silly; she seemed to be acting a part which was utterly unsuited to her kind of beauty and to her character as I had known it. The house party was not exciting, only pleasant and friendly, and she succeeded in making us all uncomfortable. I did not see her first meeting with Charles, but that evening she never looked at him, nor he at her. He drank rather too much wine at dinner, and afterwards played bezique owlishly in the smoking room. I had tried to get a word with him, but he shunned me like the plague.
What happened after I left I learned from the diary. Behind the mask he had been deeply miserable, for the sight of the girl had brought back his old happier world. He realized that far down below all his anxieties lay his love for her—that indeed this love was subconsciously the cause of his frantic clutch on life. He had tried stoicism and had failed; he had tried drugging himself by excitement into forgetfulness and had failed not less dismally. Pamela’s presence seemed to recall him to his self-respect. He did not notice any change in her—his eyes had been too long looking inward to be very observant: he only knew that the woman who had once lit up his life was now for ever beyond him—worse still, that he had dropped to a level from which he could not look at her without shame. He fell into a mood of bitter abasement, which was far healthier than his previous desperation, for he was thinking now less of the death which was in store for him than of the code of honourable living to which he had been false.
That night he slept scarcely a wink, and next morning he did not show up at breakfast. He told the servant who called him that he was going for a long walk, and slipped out of the house before anybody was down. He felt that he had to be alone to wrestle with his soul.
The diary told something of his misery that day on the high Devon moors. The weather was quiet and tonic with a touch of frost, and he walked blindly over the uplands. Charles was too stiff-back
ed a fellow to indulge in self-pity, but his type is apt to be a prey to self-contempt. He can have seen nothing of the bright landscape, for he was enveloped in a great darkness—regrets, remorse, a world of wrath with the horror of a deeper shade looming before him. He struggled to regain the captaincy of his soul, but he had no longer the impulse to strive, since he seemed to himself to have already foresworn his standards. There was nothing before him but a dreadful, hopeless passivity, what the Bible calls an “awful looking-for of judgement.” The hours of spiritual torment and rapid movement wore down his strength, and in the afternoon he found that he was very weary. So he walked slowly homeward, having dulled his bodily and mental senses but won no comfort.
In the dusk, at the head of one of the grassy rides in the home woods, as the fates ordained it, he met Pamela. She, unhappy also, had fled from the house for a little air and solitude. Both were so full of their own thoughts that they might have passed without recognition had they not encountered each other at a gate. Charles opened it, and held it wide for the stranger to pass, and it was the speaking of his name that enlightened him as to the personality of the stranger.
“Good evening, Captain Ottery,” Pamela said.
He started and stared at her. Something in his appearance held her eyes, for a man does not go through hell without showing it. In those eyes there must have been wonder; there must have been pity too. He saw it, dulled though his senses were, and perhaps he saw also some trace of that suffering which I had noticed in London, for the girl was surprised and had no time to don her mask.
“Pamela!” he cried, and then his strength seemed to go from him, and he leaned heavily on the gate, so that his shoulder touched hers.
She drew back. “You are ill?”
He recovered himself. “No, not ill,” he said. He could say no more, for when a man has been wrestling all day with truth he cannot easily lie.
She put a hand on his arm. “But you look so ill and strange.”
And then some of the old tenderness must have come into her eyes and voice. “Oh, Charles,” she cried, “what has happened to us?”
It was the word “us” that broke him down, for it told him that she too was at odds with life. He had a sudden flash of illumination. He saw that what he had once longed for was true, that her heart was his, and the realization that not only life but love was lost to him was the last drop in his cup. He stood holding the gate, shaking like a reed, with eyes which, even in the half-light, seemed to be devoured with pain.
“You must have thought me a cad,” he stammered. “I love you—I loved you beyond the world, but I dared not come near you . . . I am a dying man . . . I will soon be dead.”
His strength came back to him. He had a purpose now. He had found the only mortal in whom he could confide—must confide.
As they walked down the ride in the winter gloaming, with the happy lights of the house in the valley beneath them, he told her all, and as he spoke it seemed to him that he was cleansing his soul. She made no comment—did not utter a single word.
At the gate of the terrace gardens he stopped. His manner was normal again, and his voice was quiet, almost matter-of-fact.
“Thank you for listening to me, Pamela,” he said. “It has been a great comfort to me to tell you this . . . It is the end for both of us. You see that, don’t you? . . . We must never meet again. Goodbye, my dear.”
He took her hand, and the touch of it shivered his enforced composure. “I love you . . . I love you,” he moaned . . .
She snatched her hand away.
“This is perfect nonsense,” she said. “I won’t . . .” and then fled down an alley, as she had once fled from me at Flambard.
Charles had some food in his room, and went to bed, where he slept for the first time for weeks. He had been through the extremes of hell, and nothing worse could await him. The thought gave him a miserable peace. He wrote a line to his hostess, and left for London by the early train.
Chapter 4
He was sitting next afternoon in his rooms in Mount Street when a lady was announced, and Pamela marched in on the heels of his servant. The room was in dusk, and it was her voice that revealed her to him.
“Turn on the light, Crocker,” she said briskly, “and bring tea for two. As quick as possible, please, for I’m famishing.”
I can picture her, for I know Pamela’s ways, plucking off her hat and tossing it on to a table, shaking up the cushions on the big sofa, and settling herself in a corner of it—Pamela no longer the affected miss of recent months, but the child of April and an April wind, with the freshness of a spring morning about her.
They had tea, for which the anxious Crocker provided muffins, rejoicing to see once again in the flat people feeding like Christians. Pamela chattered happily, chiefly gossip about Wirlesdon, while Charles pulled himself out of his lethargy and strove to rise to her mood. He even went to his bedroom, changed his collar and brushed his hair. When Crocker had cleared away the tea, she made him light his pipe. “You know you are never really happy with anything else,” she said; and he obeyed, not having smoked a pipe since Newfoundland.
“Now,” she said at last, when she had poked the fire into a blaze, “I want you to repeat very carefully all that rubbish you told me yesterday.”
He obeyed—told the story slowly and dispassionately, without the emotion of the previous day. She listened carefully, and wrote down from his dictation the exact words he had read in The Times. She knitted her brows over them. “Pretty accurate, aren’t they?” she asked. “Not much chance of mistaken identity.”
“None,” he said. “There are very few Otterys in the world, and every detail about me is correct.”
“And you believe in it?”
“I must.”
“I mean to say, you believe that you really saw that thing in The Times? You didn’t dream it afterwards?”
“I saw it as clearly as I am seeing you.”
“I wondered what tricks that old professor man was up to at Flambard, but I had no notion it was anything as serious as this. What do you suppose the others saw? Uncle Ned is sure to know— I’ll ask him.”
“He saw nothing himself—he told me so. Lady Flambard fainted, and he was looking after her.”
“She saw nothing either, then? I’m sorry, for I can’t ask any of the men. I don’t know Mr. Tavanger or Mr. Mayot or Sir Robert Goodeve, and Reggie Daker is too much of a donkey to count. It would be too delicate a subject to be inquisitive about with strangers . . . You really are convinced that the professor had got hold of some method of showing you the future?”
“Convinced beyond any possibility of doubt,” said Charles dismally.
“Good. That settles one thing . . . Now for the next point. The fact that you saw that stuff is no reason why it should happen. Supposing you had dreamed it, would you have allowed a dream, however vivid, to wreck your life?”
“But, Pamela dear, the case is quite different. Moe showed us what he called ‘objective reality.’ A dream would have been my own concern, but this came from outside, quite independent of any effort of mine. It was the result of a scientific experiment.”
“But the science may have been all cockeyed. Most science is—at any rate, it changes a good deal faster than Paris fashions.”
“You wouldn’t have said that if you had been under his influence. He didn’t want me to die—he didn’t make the Times paragraph take that form—he only lifted the curtain an inch so that I could see what had actually happened a year ahead. How can I disbelieve what science brought to me out of space, without any preparation or motive? The whole thing was as mathematical and impersonal as an eclipse of the moon in an almanac.”
“All right! Let’s leave it at that. Assume that The Times is going to print the paragraph. The answer is that The Times is going to be badly diddled. Somebody will make a bloomer.”
Charles shook his head. “I’ve tried to think that, but well—you know, that kind of mistake isn’t made.”
“Oh, isn’t it? The papers announced Dollie’s engagement to three different men—exact as you please—names and dates complete.”
“But why should it make a blunder in this one case out of millions? Isn’t it more reasonable to think that there is a moral certainty of its being right?”
Pamela was not succeeding with her arguments. They sounded thin to her own ears, in spite of her solid conviction at the back of them. She sat up, an alert, masterful figure, youth girt for command. She had another appeal than logic.
“Charles,” she said solemnly, “this is a horrible business for you, and you’ve got to pull yourself together. You must defy it. Make up your mind that you’re not going to give it another thought. Get back to your work, and resolve that you don’t care a lop-eared damn for Moe or science or anything else. Lose your temper with fate and frighten the blasted hussy.” Tom Nantley had a turn for robust speech in the hunting field, and his daughter remembered some of it.
Charles shook his head miserably.
“I’ve tried,” he said, “but I can’t. I simply haven’t the manhood . . . I know it’s the right way, but my mind is poisoned already. I’ve got a germ in it that fevers me . . . Besides, it isn’t sense. You can’t stop what is to be by saying that it won’t be.”
“Yes, you can,” said the girl firmly. “That’s the meaning of free will.”