"I think if I stay," said Rachel, "that you may say things you will regret later on when you are feeling stronger. You are evidently tired out now. Everything looks exaggerated when we are exhausted, as I see you are."
"I am worn out with misery," said Lady Newhaven. "I have not slept for a fortnight. I feel I must tell some one." And she burst into violent weeping.
Rachel sat down again, and waited patiently for the hysterical weeping to cease. Those in whom others confide early learn that their own engagements, their own pleasures and troubles, are liable to be set aside at any moment. Rachel was a punctual, exact person, but she missed many trains. Those who sought her seldom realized that her day was as full as, possibly fuller, than their own. Perhaps it was only a very small pleasure to which she had been on her way on this particular morning, and for which she had put on that ethereal gray gown for the first time. At any rate, she relinquished it without a second thought.
Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes and turned impulsively towards her.
The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to guess which would come uppermost. Sometimes fragments of both appeared on the surface together.
"I loved you from the first moment I saw you," she said. "I don"t take fancies to people, you know. I am not that kind of person. I am very difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns myself. I am _most_ reserved. I dare say you have noticed how reserved I am. I live in my sh.e.l.l. But directly I saw you I felt I could talk to you. I said to myself, "I will make a friend of that girl." Although I always feel a married woman is so differently placed from a girl. A girl only thinks of herself. I am not saying this the least unkindly, but, of course, it is so. Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all she says and does. How will it affect _them?_ That is what I so often say to myself, and then my lips are sealed. But, of course, being unmarried, you would not understand that feeling."
Rachel did not answer. She was inured to this time-honored conversational opening.
"And the temptations of married life," continued Lady Newhaven--"a girl cannot enter into them."
"Then do not tell me about them," said Rachel, smiling, wondering if she might still escape. But Lady Newhaven had no intention of letting her go. She only wished to indicate to her her true position. And gradually, not without renewed outbursts of tears, not without traversing many layers of prepared conventional feelings, in which a few thin streaks of genuine emotion wore embedded, she told her story--the story of a young, high-minded, and neglected wife, and of a husband callous, indifferent, a scorner of religion, unsoftened even by the advent of the children--"such sweet children, such little darlings"--and the gradual estrangement. Then came the persistent siege to the lonely heart of one not pretty, perhaps, but fatally attractive to men; the lonely heart"s unparalleled influence for good over the besieger.
"He would do anything," said Lady Newhaven, looking earnestly at Rachel.
"My influence over him is simply boundless. If I said, as I sometimes did at b.a.l.l.s, how sorry I was to see some plain girl standing out, he would go and dance with her. I have seen him do it."
"I suppose he did it to please you."
"That was just it, simply to please me."
Rachel was not so astonished as Lady Newhaven expected. She certainly was rather wooden, the latter reflected. The story went on. It became difficult to tell, and, according to the teller, more and more liable to misconstruction. Rachel"s heart ached as bit by bit the inevitable development was finally reached in floods of tears.
"And you remember that night you were at an evening party here," sobbed Lady Newhaven, casting away all her mental notes and speaking extempore.
"It is just a fortnight ago, and I have not slept since, and _he_ was here, looking so miserable"--(Rachel started slightly)--"he sometimes did, if he thought I was hard upon him. And afterwards, when every one had gone, Edward took him to his study and told him he had found us out, and they drew lots which should kill himself within five months--and I listened at the door."
Lady Newhaven"s voice rose half strangled, hardly human, in a shrill grotesque whimper above the sobs which were shaking her. There was no affectation about her now.
Rachel"s heart went out to her the moment she was natural. She knelt down and put her strong arms round her. The poor thing clung to her, and, leaning her elaborate head against her, wept tears of real anguish upon her breast.
"And which drew the short lighter?" said Rachel at last.
"I don"t know," almost shrieked Lady Newhaven. "It is that which is killing me. Sometimes I think it is Edward, and sometimes I think it is Hugh."
At the name of Hugh, Rachel winced. Lady Newhaven had mentioned no name in the earlier stages of her story while she had some vestige of self-command; but now at last the Christian name slipped out unawares.
Rachel strove to speak calmly. She told herself there were many Hughs in the world.
"Is Mr. Hugh Scarlett the man you mean?" she asked. If she had died for it, she must have asked that question.
"Yes," said Lady Newhaven.
A shadow fell on Rachel"s face, as on the face of one who suddenly discovers, not for the first time, an old enemy advancing upon him under the flag of a new ally.
"I shall always love him," gasped Lady Newhaven, recovering herself sufficiently to recall a phrase which she had made up the night before.
"I look upon it as a spiritual marriage."
CHAPTER VIII
A square-set man and honest.
--TENNYSON.
"d.i.c.k," said Lord Newhaven, laying hold of that gentleman as he was leaving Tattersall"s, "what mischief have you been up to for the last ten days?"
"I lay low till I got my clothes," said d.i.c.k, "and then I went to the Duke of ----. I"ve just been looking at a hack for him. He says he does not want one that takes a lot of sitting on. I met him the first night I landed. In fact, I stepped out of the train on to his royal toe travelling incog. I was just going to advise him to draw in his feelers a hit and give the Colonies a chance, when he turned round and I saw who it was. I knew him when I was A.D.C. at Melbourne before I took to the drink. He said he thought he"d know my foot anywhere, and asked me down for ---- races."
"And you enjoyed it?"
"Rather. I did not know what to call the family at first, so I asked him if he had any preference and what was the right thing, and he told me how I must hop up whenever he came in, and all that sort of child"s play. There was a large party and some uncommonly pretty women. And I won a tenner off his Royal Highness, and here I am."
"And what are you going to do now?"
"Go down to the city and see what Darneil"s cellars are like before I store my wine in them. It won"t take long. Er!--I say, Cack--Newhaven?"
"Well?"
"Ought I to--how about my calling on Miss--? I never caught her name."
"Miss West, the heiress?"
"Yes. Little attention on my part."
"Did she ask you to call?"
"No, but I think it was an oversight. I expect she would like it."
"Well, then, go and be--snubbed."
"I don"t want snubbing. A little thing like me wants encouragement."
"A good many other people are on the lookout for encouragement in that quarter."
"That settles it," said d.i.c.k; "I"ll go at once. I"ve got to call on Lady Susan Gresley, and I"ll take Miss--"
"West. West. West."
"Miss West on the way."
"My dear fellow, Miss West does not live on the way to Woking. Lady Susan Gresley died six months ago."
"Great Scot! I never heard of it. And what has become of Hester? She is a kind of cousin of mine."