"Shall I," she said, uncertainly--"shall I--go first? Oh, I _oughtn"t_ to go! n.o.body ought to interfere--between husband and wife. But if you wish it--if I could do any good--"
Her eyes sought the answer of his.
Her face, framed in the folds of her black veil, shone in the candle-light; her voice was humble, yet brave.
The silence continued a moment. Then his lips moved.
"Be my messenger!" he said, just breathing it.
She made a sign of a.s.sent. And he, feebly lifting her hands, brought them to his lips. Close to them--unseen by her--for the moment unremembered by him--lay the revolver with which he had meant to take his life--and the letter in which he had bid her a last farewell.
CHAPTER XIII
Great Langdale was once more in spring. After the long quiet of the winter, during which these remoter valleys of the Lakes resume their primitive and self-dependent life, there were now a few early tourists in the two Dungeon Ghyll hotels, and the road traffic had begun to revive. Phoebe Fenwick, waiting and listening for the post in an upper room of Green Nab Cottage, ran hurriedly to the window several times in vain, drawn by the sound of wheels. The cart which clattered past was not that which bore Her Majesty"s mails.
At the third of these false alarms she lingered beside the open cas.e.m.e.nt window, looking out into the valley. It was a very weary woman who stood thus--motionless and drooping; a woman so tired, so conscious of wasted life and happiness, that although expectation held her in a grip of torture, there was in it little or nothing of hope.
Twelve years since she had last looked on those twin peaks, those bare fields and winding river! Twelve years! Time, the inexorable, had dealt with her, and not softly. All that rounded grace which Fenwick had once loved to draw had dropped from her, as the bloom drops from a wild cherry in the night. Phoebe was now thirty-five--close on thirty-six; and twelve years of hard work, joyless struggle, and pursuing remorse had left upon her indelible marks. She had grown excessively thin, and lines of restlessness, of furtive pain and suspicion, had graven themselves, delicately, irrevocably, about her eyes and mouth, on her broad brow and childish neck. There were hollows in the cheeks, the cutting of the face seemed to be ruder and the skin browner than of old. Nevertheless, the leanness of the face was that of energy, not that of emaciation. It pointed to life in the open air, a strenuous physical life; and, but for the look of fretting, of ceaseless and troubled longing with which it was a.s.sociated, it would rather have given beauty than taken it away.
Her eyes were more astonishing than ever; but there was a touch of wildness in them, and they were grown, in truth, too big and staring for the dwindled face. A pathetic face!--as of one in whom the impulse to weep is always present, yet for ever stifled. It had none of that n.o.ble intimacy with sorrow which so often dignifies a woman"s whole aspect; it spoke rather of the painful, struggling, desiring will, the will of pa.s.sion and regret, the will which fights equally with the past and with the future, and is, for Buddhist and Christian alike, the torment of existence.
Again a sound of wheels drew her eyes to the road. But it was only the Hawkshead butcher going his rounds. He stopped below the cottage, and Miss Anna"s servant went out to him. Phoebe sighed afresh in disappointment, her ears still strained the while to catch the first sound of that primitive horn, wherewith the postman in his cart, as he mounts the Langdale Valley, summons the dwellers in the scattered farms and cottages to come and take their letters.
But very likely there would be no letter at all. This was Thursday.
On Sat.u.r.day Miss Anna had met her and Carrie at Windermere, and had brought them to the old place. Sunday and Monday had been filled with agitated consultations. Then, on Tuesday, a neighbour living in Elterwater, and an old friend of Miss Anna"s, had gone up to London, bearing with her a parcel addressed to "John Fenwick, Constable House, East Road, Chelsea," which she had promised to deliver, either personally or through one of the servants of the boarding-house whither she was bound.
This lady must have delivered it on Wednesday--some time on Wednesday--she would not pledge herself. But probably not till the afternoon or evening. If so, there could be no letter. But if not a letter, a telegram; unless, indeed, John were determined not to take her back; unless her return were in his eyes a mere trouble and burden; unless they were to be finally and for ever separated. Then he would take his time--and write.
But--_Carrie_! Phoebe resumed her wandering from room to room and window to window, her mind deafened as it were by the rush of her own thoughts--unable to rest for a moment. He must want to see Carrie! And that seeing must and should carry with it at least one interview with his wife, at least the permission to tell her story, face to face.
Was it only a week since, under a sudden impulse, she had written to Miss Anna?--from the Surrey lodging, where for nearly two months she had hidden herself after their landing in England. Each day since then had been at once the longest and the shortest she had ever known.
Every emotion of which she was capable had been roused into fresh life, crowding the hours; while at the same time each day had flown on wings of flame, bringing the moment--so awful, yet so desired--when she should see John"s face again. After the slow years of self-inflicted exile; after the wavering weeks and months of repentance, doubt, and changing resolution, life had suddenly become breathless--a hurrying rush down some Avernian descent, towards crashing pain and tumult. For how could it end well? She was no silly girl to suppose that such things can be made right again with a few soft words and a kiss.
Idly her mind wandered through the past; through the years of dumb, helpless bitterness, when she would have given the world to undo what she had done, and could see no way, consistently with the beliefs which still held her; and through the first hours of sharp reaction, produced partly by events in her own history and partly by fresh and unexpected information. She had thought of John as hard, prosperous, and cruel; removed altogether out of her social ken, a rich and fashionable gentleman who might have and be what he would. The London letter of a Canadian weekly paper had given her the news of his election to the Academy. Then, from the same source, she had learnt of the quarrel, the scene with the Hanging Committee, the noisy resignation, and all the controversy surrounding it. She read and re-read every line of this scanty news, pondering and worrying over it. How like John, to ruin himself by these tempers! And yet, of course, he had been abominably treated!--any one could see that. From her anger and concern sprang new growths of feeling in a softened heart. If she had only been there!
Well!--what did it matter? The great lady who advised and patronised him no doubt had been there. If she had not been able to smooth out the tangle, what chance would his despised wife have had with him?
Then--last fall--there had come to the farm in the green Ontario country, a young artist, sent out on a commission from an English publishing firm who were producing a great ill.u.s.trated book on Canada.
The son of the house, who was at college in Montreal, had met him, and made friends with him; had brought him home to draw the farm, and the apple-orchards, heavy with fruit. And there, night after night, he had sat talking in the rich violet dusk; talking to this sad-faced Mrs.
Wilson, this Englishwoman, who understood his phrases and his ways, and had been in contact with artists in her youth.
John Fenwick! Why, of course, he knew all about John Fenwick!
Quarrelsome, clever chap! Had gone up like a rocket, and was now nowhere. What call had he to quarrel with the Academy? The Academy had treated him handsomely enough--much better than it had treated a lot of other fellows. The public wouldn"t stand his airs and his violence.
He wasn"t big enough. A Whistler might be insolent, and gain by it; but the smaller men must keep civil tongues in their heads. Oh, yes, talent of course--enormous talent!--but a poor early training, and a man wants all his time to get the better of _that_--instead of spouting and scribbling all over the place. No--John Fenwick would do nothing more of importance. Mrs. Wilson might take his word for that--sorry if he had said anything unpleasant of a friend of hers.
General report, besides, made him an unhappy, moody kind of fellow, living alone, with very few friends, taking n.o.body"s advice--and as obstinate as a pig about his work.
So said this young Daniel-come-to-judgement, between the whiffs of his pipe, in the Canadian farm-garden, while the darkness came down and hid the face of the silent woman beside him.
And so Remorse, and anguished Pity, sprang up beside her--grey and stern comrades--and she walked between them night and day. John, a lonely failure in England--poor and despised. And she, an exile here, with her child. And this dumb, irrevocable Time, on which she had stamped her will, so easily, so fatally, flowing on the while, year by year, towards Death and the End!--and these voices of "Too late!" in her ears!
But still the impulse of return grew--mysteriously it seemed--independently. And other facts and experiences came strangely to its aid. In the language of Evangelicalism which had been natural to her youth, Phoebe felt now, as she looked back, that she had been wonderfully "led." It was this sense, indeed, which had softened the humiliation and determined the actual steps of her homeward pilgrimage; she seemed to have been yielding to an actual external force in what she had done.
For it had not been easy, this second uprooting. Carrie, especially, had had her own reasons for making it difficult. And Phoebe had never yet had the courage to tell her the truth. She had spoken vaguely of "business" obliging them to take a journey to England--had asked the child to trust her--and taken refuge in tears and depression from Carrie"s objections. In consequence, she had seen the first shadow descend on Carrie"s youth; she had been conscious of the first breach between herself and her daughter.
In a sudden agony, she walked back to the window in her own room, looking this time, not towards Elterwater and the post, but towards Dungeon Ghyll and the wild upper valley.
Anna Mason had taken Carrie for a walk. At that moment, on Phoebe"s prayer, she was telling the child the story of her father and mother.
Phoebe"s eyes filled. She was, in truth, waiting for judgement--at the hands of her husband--and her daughter. Ever since their flight together, Carrie had been taught to regard her father as dead. As the years went on, "poor papa" was represented to her by a few fading memories, by the unframed picture which her mother kept jealously locked from sight, which she had been only once or twice allowed to see.
And now? Phoebe recalled the anguish of that night, when Carrie, returning to her mother in Surrey, from a day"s expedition to town, with a Canadian friend, described the queer, pa.s.sionate, grey-haired man--"Mr. Fenwick, they called him"--whom she had seen directing the rehearsal at the Falcon Theatre. Phoebe had a vision of herself leaning back in her chair, wrapped in shawls, feigning the exhaustion and blindness of nervous headache--while the child gave her laughing account of the scene, in the intervals of kissing and comforting "poor mummy."
And that drive from Windermere, beside Miss Anna, with Carrie opposite!--Carrie excitable, happy, talkative--her father"s child--now absorbed in a natural delight, exclaiming at the beauty of the mountains, the trees, the river, catching her mother"s hand, to make her smile too, and then in a sudden shyness and hardness, looking with her deep jealous eyes at the unknown friend opposite, wondering clearly what it all meant, resenting that she was told so little, and too proud to insist on more--or, perhaps, afraid to pierce what might turn out to be the unhappy or shameful secret of their life?
Yet Phoebe had tried to make it plausible. They were going to stay with an old friend, in a place which Carrie and her parents had lived in when she was a baby, near to the town where she was born. She knew already that her mother was from Westmoreland, from a place called Keswick; but she understood that her mother"s father was dead, and all her people scattered.
Until they came actually in sight of the cottage, the child had betrayed no memory of her own; though as they entered Langdale her chatter ceased, and her eyes sped nervously from side to side, considering the woods and fells and whitewashed farms. As they stopped, however, at the foot of the steep pitch leading to the little house, Carrie suddenly caught sight of it--the slate porch, the yew-tree to the right, the sycamore in front. She changed colour, and as she jumped down, she wavered and nearly fell.
And without waiting for the others she ran up the hill and through the gate. When she met them again at the house-door, her eyes were wet.
"I"ve been into the kitchen," she said, breathlessly--"and it"s so strange! I remember sitting there, and a man"--she drew her hand across her brow--"a man, feeding me. That--that was father?"
Phoebe could not remember how she had answered her; only some trembling words from Anna Mason, and an attempt to draw the child away--that her mother might enter the cottage alone and unwatched. And she had entered it alone--had walked into the little parlour.
The next thing she recollected--amid that pa.s.sion of desperate tears which had seemed to dissolve her, body and soul--were Carrie"s arms round her, Carrie"s face pressed against hers.
"Mother! mother! Oh! what is the matter? Why did we come here? You"ve been keeping things from me all these weeks--for years even. There is something I don"t know--I"m sure there is. Oh, it _is_ unkind. You think I"m not old enough--but I am. Oh! you ought to tell me, mother!"
How had she defended herself? staved off the inevitable once again?
All she knew was that Miss Anna had again come to the rescue, had taken the child away, whispering to her. And since then, in these last forty-eight hours--oh! Carrie had been good! So quiet, so useful--unpacking their clothes, helping Miss Anna"s maid with the supper, cooking, dusting, mending, as a Canadian girl knows how--only stopping sometimes to look round her, with that clouded, wondering look, as though the past invaded her.
Oh! she was a darling! John would see that--whatever he might feel towards her mother. "I stole her--but I"ve brought her back. I may be a bad wife--but there"s Carrie! I"ve not neglected her--I"ve done the best by her."
It was in incoherent, unspoken words like this that Phoebe was for ever pleading with her husband, even now.
Presently, in her walk about the room, she came to stand before the mantelpiece, where a photograph had been propped up against the wall by Carrie--of a white walled farm, with its out-buildings and orchards--and, gleaming beneath it, the wide waters of Lake Ontario.
Phoebe shuddered at the sight of it. Twelve years of her life had been wasted there.
Carrie, indeed, took a very different view.
Restlessly the mother left her room and wandered into Carrie"s. It was already--by half-past nine--spotlessly clean and neat; and Eliza, the girl from Hawkshead, had not been allowed to touch it. On the bed lay a fresh "waist," which Carrie had just made for herself, and on the dressing-table stood another photograph--not a place this time, but a person--a very evident and very good-looking young man!
Phoebe stood looking at it forlornly. Carrie"s young romance--and her own spoilt life--these two images held her. Carrie would go back, in time, across the sea--would marry, would forget her mother.
"And I"m not old, neither--I"m not old."