Today, when her girls were gone, she found herself very lonely.
Augustine was out riding and in her room she tried to occupy herself, fearing her own thoughts. It was past twelve when she heard the sound of his horse"s hoofs on the gravel before the door and, throwing a scarf over her hair, she ran down to meet him.
The hall door at Charlock House, under a heavy portico, looked out upon a circular gravel drive bordered by shrubberies and enclosed by high walls; beyond the walls and gates was the high-road. An interval of sunlight had broken into the chill Autumn day: Augustine had ridden bareheaded and his gold hair shone as the sun fell upon it. He looked, in his stately grace, like an equestrian youth on a Greek frieze. And, as was usual with his mother, her appreciation of Augustine"s n.o.bility and fineness pa.s.sed at once into a pang: so beautiful; so n.o.ble; and so shadowed. She stood, her black scarf about her face and shoulders, and smiled at him while he threw the reins to the old groom and dismounted.
"Nice to find you waiting for me," he said. "I"m late this morning. Too late for any work before lunch. Don"t you want a little walk? You look pale."
"I should like it very much. I may miss my afternoon walk--your father may have business to talk over."
They went through the broad stone hall-way that traversed the house and stepped out on the gravel walk at the back. This path, running below the drawing-room and dining-room windows, led down on one side to the woods, on the other to Lady Channice"s garden, and was a favourite place of theirs for quiet saunterings. Today the sunlight fell mildly on it. A rift of pale blue showed in the still grey sky.
"I met Marjory," said Augustine, "and we had a gallop over Pangley Common. She rides well, that child. We jumped the hedge and ditch at the foot of the common, you know--the high hedge--for practice. She goes over like a bird."
Amabel"s mind was dwelling on the thought of shadowed brightness and Marjory, fresh, young, deeply rooted in respectability, seemed suddenly more significant than she had ever been before. In no way Augustine"s equal, of course, except in that impersonal, yet so important matter of roots; Amabel had known a little irritation over Mrs. Grey"s open manoeuvreings; but on this morning of rudderless tossing, Marjory appeared in a new aspect. How sound; how safe. It was of Augustine"s insecurity rather than of Augustine himself that she was thinking as she said: "She is such a nice girl."
"Yes, she is," said Augustine.
"What did you talk about?"
"Oh, the things we saw; birds and trees and clouds.--I pour information upon her."
"She likes that, one can see it."
"Yes, she is so nice and guileless that she doesn"t resent my pedantry.
I love giving information, you know," Augustine smiled. He looked about him as he spoke, at birds and trees and clouds, happy, humorous, clasping his riding crop behind his back so that his mother heard it make a pleasant little click against his gaiter as he walked.
"It"s delightful for both of you, such a comradeship."
"Yes; a comradeship after a fashion; Marjory is just like a nice little boy."
"Ah, well, she is growing up; she is seventeen, you know. She is more than a little boy."
"Not much; she never will be much more."
"She will make a very nice woman."
Augustine continued to smile, partly at the thought of Marjory, and partly at another thought. "You mustn"t make plans, for me and Marjory, like Mrs. Grey," he said presently. "It"s mothers like Mrs. Grey who spoil comradeships. You know, I"ll never marry Marjory. She is a nice little boy, and we are friends; but she doesn"t interest me."
"She may grow more interesting: she is so young. I don"t make plans, dear,--yet I think that it might be a happy thing for you."
"She"ll never interest me," said Augustine.
"Must you have a very interesting wife?"
"Of course I must:--she must be as interesting as you are!" he turned his head to smile at her.
"You are not exacting, dear!"
"Yes, I am, though. She must be as interesting as you--and as good; else why should I leave you and go and live with someone else.--Though for that matter, I shouldn"t leave you. You"d have to live with us, you know, if I ever married."
"Ah, my dear boy," Lady Channice murmured. She managed a smile presently and added: "You might fall in love with someone not so interesting. You can"t be sure of your feelings and your mind going together."
"My feelings will have to submit themselves to my mind. I don"t know about "falling"; I rather dislike the expression: one might "fall" in love with lots of people one would never dream of marrying. It would have to be real love. I"d have to love a woman very deeply before I wanted her to share my life, to be a part of me; to be the mother of my children." He spoke with his cheerful gravity.
"You have an old head on very young shoulders, Augustine."
"I really believe I have!" he accepted her somewhat sadly humorous statement; "and that"s why I don"t believe I"ll ever make a mistake. I"d rather never marry than make a mistake. I know I sound priggish; but I"ve thought a good deal about it: I"ve had to." He paused for a moment, and then, in the tone of quiet, unconfused confidence that always filled her with a sense of mingled pride and humility, he added:--"I have strong pa.s.sions, and I"ve already seen what happens to people who allow feeling to govern them."
Amabel was suddenly afraid. "I know that you would always be--good Augustine; I can trust you for that." She spoke faintly.
They had now walked down to the little garden with its box borders and were wandering vaguely among the late roses. She paused to look at the roses, stooping to breathe in the fragrance of a tall white cl.u.s.ter: it was an instinctive impulse of hiding: she hoped in another moment to find an escape in some casual gardening remark. But Augustine, unsuspecting, was interested in their theme.
"Good? I don"t know," he said. "I don"t think it"s goodness, exactly.
It"s that I so loathe the other thing, so loathe the animal I know in myself, so loathe the idea of life at the mercy of emotion."
She had to leave the roses and walk on again beside him, steeling herself to bear whatever might be coming. And, feeling that unconscious accusation loomed, she tried, as unconsciously, to mollify and evade it.
"It isn"t always the animal, exactly, is it?--or emotion only? It is romance and blind love for a person that leads people astray."
"Isn"t that the animal?" Augustine inquired. "I don"t think the animal base, you know, or shameful, if he is properly harnessed and kept in his place. It"s only when I see him dominating that I hate and fear him so.
And," he went on after a little pause of reflection, "I especially hate him in that form;--romance and blind love: because what is that, really, but the animal at its craftiest and most dangerous? what is romance--I mean romance of the kind that jeopardizes "goodness"--what is it but the most subtle self-deception? You don"t love the person in the true sense of love; you don"t want their good; you don"t want to see them put in the right relation to their life as a whole:--what you want is sensation through them; what you want is yourself in them, and their absorption in you. I don"t think that wicked, you know--I"m not a monk or even a puritan--if it"s the mere result of the right sort of love, a happy glamour that accompanies, the right sort; it"s in its place, then, and can endanger nothing. But people are so extraordinarily blind about love; they don"t seem able to distinguish between the real and the false. People usually, though they don"t know it, mean only desire when they talk of love."
There was another pause in which she wondered that he did not hear the heavy throbbing of her heart. But now there was no retreat; she must go on; she must understand her son. "Desire must enter in," she said.
"In its place, yes; it"s all a question of that;" Augustine replied, smiling a little at her, aware of the dogmatic flavour of his own utterances, the humorous aspect of their announcement, to her, by him;--"You love a woman enough and respect her enough to wish her to be the mother of your children--a.s.suming, of course, that you consider yourself worthy to carry on the race; and to think of a woman in such a way is to feel a rightful emotion and a rightful desire; anything else makes emotion the end instead of the result and is corrupting, I"m sure of it."
"You have thought it all out, haven"t you"; Lady Channice steadied her voice to say. There was panic rising in her, and a strange anger made part of it.
"I"ve had to, as I said," he replied. "I"m anything but self-controlled by nature; already," and Augustine looked calmly at his mother, "I"d have let myself go and been very dissolute unless I"d had this ideal of my own honour to help me. I"m of anything but a saintly disposition."
"My dear Augustine!" His mother had coloured faintly. Absurd as it was, when the reality of her own life was there mocking her, the bald words were strange to her.
"Do I shock you?" he asked. "You know I always feel that you _are_ a saint, who can hear and understand everything."
She blushed deeply, painfully, now. "No, you don"t shock me;--I am only a little startled."
"To hear that I"m sensual? The whole human race is far too sensual in my opinion. They think a great deal too much about their s.e.xual appet.i.tes;--only they don"t think about them in those terms unfortunately; they think about them veiled and wreathed; that"s why we are sunk in such a bog of sentimentality and sin."
Lady Channice was silent for a long time. They had left the garden, and walked along the little path near the sunken wall at the foot of the lawn, and, skirting the wood of sycamores, had come back to the broad gravel terrace. A turmoil was in her mind; a longing to know and see; a terror of what he would show her.
"Do you call it sin, that blinded love? Do you think that the famous lovers of romance were sinners?" she asked at last; "Tristan and Iseult?--Abelard and Heloise?--Paolo and Francesca?"
"Of course they were sinners," said Augustine cheerfully. "What did they want?--a present joy: purely and simply that: they sacrificed everything to it--their own and other people"s futures: what"s that but sin? There is so much mawkish rubbish talked and written about such persons. They were pathetic, of course, most sinners are; that particular sin, of course, may be so a.s.sociated and bound up with beautiful things;--fidelity, and real love may make such a part of it, that people get confused about it."
"Fidelity and real love?" Lady Channice repeated: "you think that they atone--if they make part of an illicit pa.s.sion?"
"I don"t think that they atone; but they may redeem it, mayn"t they? Why do you ask me?" Augustine smiled;--"You know far more about these things than I do."
She could not look at him. His words in their beautiful unconsciousness appalled her. Yet she had to go on, to profit by her own trance-like strength. She was walking on the verge of a precipice but she knew that with steady footsteps she could go towards her appointed place. She must see just where Augustine put her, just how he judged her.