A click of the latch--and Jane came into the room. She was pale, but her manner had regained its old quietude and gentleness.
As she came towards him and saw his ravaged face, a feeling of great concern, of pity so maternal in texture that it swept away every other feeling from her heart, almost broke down her new, unnatural composure.
She wished ardently--and Jane was full of hidden fire--to make everything easy for him. But oh! she could not bear him to look as he now looked.
It was not in order that Hew Lingard should look, should feel, as he was now looking and feeling that she had made the great renouncement--the renouncement which Wantele had implored her with such fierce, pa.s.sionate energy to refrain from making. Was it possible that Wantele had been right, and that she was doing an evil thing by the man she loved?--such was the agonised question which went through Jane Oglander"s mind as she advanced quietly towards him.
Only a few moments ago she had destroyed Athena"s note of wild joy, of grat.i.tude to herself. As she had watched the paper burn, as she had seen Athena"s delicate, graceful monogram vanish in the flame, Jane had felt as if her heart was shrivelling up with it.
She had been in the room but a very few moments, and already her presence was bringing peace to Lingard"s seared unhappy soul.
There was nothing on her face to show the conflicting emotions with which she was being shaken, and to him she breathed renunciation, serenity. How amazing to remember that only yesterday her nearness had brought him intolerable unease, as well as keen shame. Now he felt as if a touch from her hand would cure him of all his shameful ills.
Jane Oglander"s pity, and he knew that she was very pitiful, had the divine quality of raising, instead of debasing, as does so much of the pity lavished on others in this sad, strange world.
She held out her hand; he felt it fluttering for a moment in his strong grasp, but alas! it was her unease, her miserable misgiving that she now bestowed on him. There came over her eyes and brow a look of suffering, and Lingard dropped her hand quickly. No--he could not tell now, at once, what he had come to tell her.
"Will you come out with me, Jane?" he asked abruptly.
"Yes. Of course I will." It seemed a long, long time since he had asked her to do anything--with him.
They went out into the little hall. As he helped her on with her coat, she made a slight shrinking movement which cut him shrewdly; he reminded himself that she had the right to hate, as well as to despise, him.
With common consent they turned into the lonely country road, instead of under the beeches of Rede Place, and as they walked, each kept rather further from the other than do most people walking side by side. Jane respected his moody silence, and her memory went back to the first walk he and she had taken together on the day of his triumphant return home.
It had been a clear starry London night in autumn, and they had crossed from the shabby, quiet little street where she lived to that portion of the Embankment which lies between the river and St. Thomas"s Hospital,--a stone-flagged pavement open only to walkers.
There Lingard had linked his arm through hers, and the movement had given her a delicious thrill of joy, deepening in her that protective instinct which makes every woman long for the man she loves to cling to her.
As they had paced up and down, so happily alone in the peopled solitude London offers to her lovers, Jane"s tender heart could not forget what lay so near, and she had compared her blest lot with that meted out to the suffering and the forlorn, who lie in their serried ranks in the wards she so often visited.
How gladly now she would have changed places with the one among them who was nearest to death.
They were close to the Rectory gate, and Jane suddenly remembered that Lingard had promised to go in and see Mrs. Kaye this morning. She had forced herself to ask him to do so, and she remembered now that he had a.s.sented to her wish with almost painful eagerness. Perhaps he thought she meant him to go there with her. That would explain his coming to the Farm so early.
"Mr. Maule asked me to come to you," he said at last, breaking the long oppressive silence. "He thought--G.o.d knows why he thought it!--that a certain terrible thing which has happened--which happened last night--would reach you best from me."
"Something which happened last night?" Jane repeated in a low voice. "I know it already. Athena wrote to me."
She turned and faced him steadily.
"Don"t look like that, Hew. I--I can"t bear it. I know you couldn"t help what"s happened. I know you never loved me in the way a man ought to love a woman whom he is going to marry."
"I did," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "I swear to G.o.d I did!"
She shook her head.
"We both made a mistake," she answered steadily--"and it is fortunate that we discovered it in time. After all, engagements are often broken off, and we were engaged such a little--little while. I am glad Mr.
Maule has made up his mind to do what is right."
She flushed for the first time a deep red. The discussion was hateful to her.
"You are going to the Rectory to see Mrs. Kaye? I won"t go in with you, but I will wait here till you come out; and then we will walk together to Rede Place. I am going away to-day, back to London, and I can"t go away without saying good-bye to them. I promised Athena I would come for a few moments----"
The emotion she was restraining, the tears she kept from falling, stained her face with faint patches of red, and thickened her eyelids.
The measure of beauty which was hers, that beauty which owed so much to her ever-varying expression, was wholly obscured to-day.
Lingard felt intolerably moved. It was horrible to him to feel that he had bartered the right, the right he had owned for so short a time and had yielded so lightly, of taking Jane into his arms, and yet he felt he had never loved her as he loved her now, defenceless, before him. He could not wound and shock her by telling her of the terrible thing which had happened. Mr. Maule had asked too much of him.
His mind turned with relief to the task Jane had set him to do. In this matter of comforting the mother of a dead soldier son he would be able surely to bear himself in the old way.
He opened the Rectory gate and walked up, alone, the winding path which led to the front door.
Yes--Kaye was the name of the poor young fellow who had died at Aden.
What were his disagreeable a.s.sociations with the name of Bayworth Kaye?
He remembered.
For the first time since the doctor had told Lingard of what had happened the night before, it seemed as if Athena, her actual physical presence, was close to him again. He could almost hear the sound of her melodious voice as it had sounded when, thrilling with anger and scorn, she had told him of the gossip there had been about herself and this very man, this young Kaye, whose subsequent death seemed to arouse so much pity and concern in the neighbourhood.
Mrs. Kaye had been watching and waiting for General Lingard since ten o"clock. She had spent the hour in her shabby drawing-room going and coming from one window to the other, a tall, gaunt figure, clad in the deepest black.
When she saw him walking through the garden she retreated far back into the room, and there came into her face a look of fierce relief. She had so greatly feared that Mrs. Maule would prevent the fulfilment of his promise.
She was, as we know, a woman who made plans, and who carried out her plans to a successful issue. The rector, in his own way as bereaved, as heartbroken as was his wife, was in his study. She had told him curtly that he must stay there until she came and fetched him.
The cook had been sent into the market town four miles away, and the village girl, who was being trained with a kind of hard efficient care into a parlourmaid, had received her instructions.
General Lingard was to be shown straight into the drawing-room on his arrival; and then the girl was to start immediately on an errand to the village.
There was to be no eavesdropper at the interview Mrs. Kaye intended to have with the great soldier who was coming to offer his condolences on the death of her only son.
Strange rumours had reached the rectory, or rather Mrs. Kaye, for the rector had known nothing of them--rumours which she had drunk in with cruel avidity, rumours of General Lingard"s extraordinary absorption in his beautiful hostess, of the long walks and drives they took together, of the many hours they spent alone in her sitting-room.
As yet, however, not even village gossip had linked together the names of Lingard and Jane Oglander. That secret had been well kept, as are most innocent secrets.
At last the young servant announced, in a nervous, fluttered voice, "General Lingard, please, ma"am."
As Lingard walked in, as he saw the figure in deep mourning, his face relaxed and softened.
He himself came of clerical stock. His grandfather had been one of the Golden Canons of Durham, and as a child, as a youth, he had lived much in the more prosperous section of the Church of England. Often in the holidays he had accompanied relations on calls to rectories and vicarages which were as poverty-stricken, as full of self-respecting economy, as was this house. In those days all Lingard"s instinct had stood up in rebellion against the clerical atmosphere in which he was being bred. But with years there came across him a queer feeling of loyalty to the cloth, to what had been his father"s cloth.
Poor young Kaye! And yet most fortunate young Kaye. Such was Lingard"s involuntary thought as he glanced round the homely room--for the lad whose mother stood there mourning him had known that a devoted father and mother watched with solicitude, with pride, with anxiety, every step of his career.
How different from Lingard"s own case!--deprived of his parents in babyhood, and with none to care whether he did well in his profession or whether he went to the devil--as he had so very nearly gone to the devil some twenty years ago.