"It is very dangerous."
Mrs. Agar"s sigh of relief was quite audible. It is thus that nature sometimes betrays human nature.
"Did _he_ say that? Did _he_ think that of it?"
Seymour Michael"s opinion still had value in her eyes.
"Yes," the reply came slowly; "he said that we might almost look upon Jem as a dead man."
Mother and son looked at each other and said nothing. Heredity is a strange thing, and one alternately aggrandised and slighted. Blood is a very powerful force, but the little lessons taught in childhood"s years bear a wondrous crop of good or evil fruit in later days.
Left alone, Arthur Agar"s natural tendency was towards good. Probably because he was timid, and goodness seems the safer course. There are many who have not the courage to forsake goodness, even for a moment. But under the influence of a stronger will--that is to say, under the influence of four out of every five persons crossing his path--Arthur was liable to be led in any direction. He would rather have sinned in company than have cultivated virtue in the solitude usually accorded to that state.
Somehow, in his mother"s presence it did not seem so very wrong to keep back the truth respecting Jem and to turn it to his own ends. It did not seem either mean or cowardly to take advantage of a rival"s absence and gain his object, by deception. So, perhaps, it was in the beginning, when the world was young. In those days also a mother and son helped each other in deception, and so since then have many thousands of mothers (incompetent or vicious) led their children to ruin.
"Of course," said Mrs. Agar, "if Jem goes and does things of that description he must take the consequences."
Arthur said nothing in reply to this. The thought had been his for some months, but he had never put it into shape.
"We are perfectly justified," she went on, "in acting as if Jem were dead until he deigns to advise us to the contrary."
This also was putting a long-cherished thought into form.
Arthur knew that he ought to have told his mother then and there that Jem had taken every step in his power to advise him as soon as possible of the falseness of the news transmitted to the newspapers. But something held him silent, some taint of hereditary untruthfulness.
"I do not see," she said, "that this news can, therefore, make much difference. There is no reason to alter any of our plans. To begin with, I am certain that he is dead. We must have heard by this time if he had been living."
Arthur gave a little nod of acquiescence.
"And also," pursued Mrs. Agar, with characteristic inconsistency, "he evidently does not care about us or our feelings."
Arthur knew what she meant, and he descended as low in the moral scale as ever he went during his life.
"But," he said, "there is, all the same, no time to lose."
He pa.s.sed his hand over his sleek, lifeless hair with a weary look.
"Well, dear," said his mother soothingly, "I will see Ellen Glynde to-morrow, and try to make her say something to Dora. A girl"s mother has always more influence than her father."
This idiotic axiom seemed to satisfy Arthur, probably because he knew no better, and he rose to take his bedroom candlestick.
Mrs. Agar was a person utterly incapable of harbouring two thoughts at the same moment. She never even got so far as to place two sides of a question upon an equal footing in her mind. All her questions had but one side. She was not thinking of Arthur when she went to her room. She was not thinking of him when she lay staring at the daylight, which had crept up into the sky before she closed her eyes.
She tossed and turned and moaned aloud with a childish impatience. Her mind could find no rest; it could not throw off the deadly knowledge that Seymour Michael had come back into her life. And somehow she was no longer Anna Agar, but Anna Hethbridge. She was no longer the fond mother whose whole world was filled by thoughts of her son--a miserable, thoughtless, haphazard world it was--but again she was the wronged woman, moved by the one great pa.s.sion that had stirred her sordid soul, a fearsome hatred for Seymour Michael.
She was not an a.n.a.lytical woman; she had never thought about her own thoughts; she was as superficial as human nature can well be. That is to say, she was little more than an animal with the gift of speech, added to one or two small items of knowledge which divide men from beasts. But she _knew_ that this was not the end. She never doubted for a moment that it was merely a beginning, that Seymour Michael was coming back into her life.
Like a child she tossed and tumbled in her bed, muttering half-consciously, "Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?"
CHAPTER XXIII
AND THE TIME Pa.s.sES SOMEHOW
His hand will be against every man, and every man"s hand against him.
For two days Mrs. Glynde had been going about the world with a bright red patch on either cheek; and it would seem that on the third day, namely, the Sunday, things came to a crisis in her disturbed mind. At morning service her fervour was something astonishing--the quaver in her voice was more noticeable in the hymns than ever, and the s.p.a.ce devoted to silent prayer after the blessing was so abnormally long that Stark, the s.e.xton, had to rattle the keys twice, with all due respect and for the sake of his Sunday dinner, before she rose from her knees; whereas once usually sufficed.
It was the devout practice that all the Rectory servants should go to evening service, while Mrs. Glynde, or Dora, or both, remained at home to take care of the house. On this particular evening Mrs. Glynde proposed that Dora should stay with her, and what her mother proposed Dora usually acceded to.
"Dear," said the elder lady, with a nervous little jerk of the head which was habitual or physical, "I have heard about Arthur."
They were sitting in the drawing-room, with windows open to the ground, and the fading light was insufficient to read by, although both had books.
"Yes, mother," answered the girl in rather a tired voice, quite forgetting to be cheerful. "I should like to know exactly what you heard."
"Well, Anna told me," and there was a whole world of distrust in the little phrase, "that Arthur had asked you to be his wife, and that you had refused without giving a reason."
"I gave him a reason," replied Dora; "the best one. I said that I did not love him."
There was a little pause. The two women looked out on to the quiet lawn.
They seemed singularly anxious to avoid looking at each other.
"But that might come, dear; I think it would come."
"I know it would not," replied Dora quietly. There was a dreaminess in her voice, as if she were repeating something she had heard or said before.
Suddenly Mrs. Glynde rose from her chair, and going towards her daughter, she knelt on the soft carpet, still afraid to look at her face. There was something suggestive and strange in the att.i.tude, for the elder woman was crouching at the feet of the younger.
"My darling," she whispered, "I know, I _know!_ I have known all along.
But mind, no one else knows, no one suspects! _It_ can never come to you again in this life. Women are like that, it never comes to them twice. To some it never comes at all; think of that, dear, it never comes to them at all! Surely that is worse?"
Dora took the nervous, eager hands in her own quiet grasp and held them still. But she said nothing.
"I have prayed night and morning," the elder woman went on in the same pleading whisper, "that strength might be given you, and I think my prayers were heard. For you have been strong, and no one has known except me, and I do not matter. The strength must have come from somewhere. I like to think that I had something to do with it, however little."
Again there was a silence. Across the quiet garden, from the church that was hidden among the trees, the sound of the evening hymn came rising and falling, the harshness of the rustic voices toned down by the whispering of the leaves.
"I know," Mrs. Glynde went on, speaking perhaps out of her own experience, "that now it must seem that there is nothing left. I know that It can never come to you, but something else may--a sort of alleviation; something that is a little stronger than resignation, and many people think that it is love. It is not love; never believe that!
But it is surely sent because so many women have--to go through life--without that--which makes life worth living."
"Hush, dear!" said Dora; and Mrs. Glynde paused as if to collect herself.
Perhaps her daughter stopped her just in time.
"There is," she went on in a calmer voice, "a sort of satisfaction in the duties that come and have to be performed. The duties towards one"s husband and the others--the others, darling--are the best. They are not the same, not the same as if--as they might have been, but sometimes it is a great alleviation. And the time pa.s.ses somehow."