There was in the world, indeed, another personality rarely or never absent from Alice Puttenham"s consciousness. One face, one problem, more or less acutely realized, haunted her life continuously. But this afternoon they had, for the moment, receded into the background. Hester had been, surely, more reasonable, more affectionate lately. Philip Meryon had now left Sandford; a statement to that effect had appeared in the _Post_; and Hester had even shown some kindness to poor Stephen. She had at last declared her willingness to go to Paris, and the arrangements were all made. The crisis in her of angry revolt, provoked apparently by the refusal of her guardian to allow her engagement to Stephen, seemed to be over.
So that for once Alice Puttenham was free to think and feel for her own life and what concerned it. From the events connected with Judith Sabin"s death--through the long history of Meynell"s goodness to her--the mind of this lonely woman travelled on, to be filled and arrested by the great new fact of the present. She had made a new friend. And at the same moment she had found in her--at last--the rival with whom her own knowledge of life had threatened her these many years. A rival so sweet--so unwitting! Alice had read her. She had scarcely yet read herself.
Alice opened her eyes--to the quiet room, and the windy sky outside. She was very pale, but there were no tears. "It is not renouncing"--she whispered to herself--"for I never possessed. It is accepting--loving--giving--all one has to give."
And vaguely there ran through her mind immortal words--"_good measure--pressed down, and running over_."
A smile trembled on her lip. She closed her eyes again, lost in one of those spiritual pa.s.sions accessible only to those who know the play and heat of the spiritual war. The wind was blowing briskly outside, and from the wood-shed in the back garden came a sound of sawing. Miss Puttenham did not hear a footstep approaching on the gra.s.s outside.
Hester paused at the window--smiling. There was wildness--triumph--in her look, as though for her this quiet afternoon had seen some undisclosed adventure. Her cheek was hotly flushed, her loosened hair made a glory in the evening sun. Youth, selfishly pitiless--youth, the supplanter and destroyer--stood embodied in the beautiful creature looking down upon Alice Puttenham, on the still intensity of the plaintive face, the closed eyes, the hands holding the miniature.
Mischievously the girl came closer. She took the stillness before her for sleep.
"Auntie! Aunt Alsie!"
With a start, Alice Puttenham sprang up. The miniature dropped from her hands to the floor, opening as it fell. Hester looked at it astonished--and her hand stooped for it before Miss Puttenham had perceived her loss.
"Were you asleep, Aunt Alsie?" she asked, wondering. "I got tired of that stupid party--and I--well, I just slipped away"--the clear high voice had grown conscious--"and I looked in here, because I left a book behind me--Auntie, who is it?" She bent eagerly over the miniature, trying to see it in the dim light.
Miss Puttenham"s face had faded to a gray-white.
"Give it to me, Hester!" She held out her hand imperiously.
"Mayn"t I know even who it is?" asked Hester, as she unwillingly returned it. In the act she caught the inscription and her face kindled.
Impetuously throwing herself down beside Miss Puttenham, the girl looked up at her with an expression half mockery, half sweetness, while Alice, with unsteady fingers, replaced the case and locked the drawer.
"What an awfully handsome fellow!" said Hester in a low voice, "though you wouldn"t let me see it properly. I say, Auntie, won"t you tell me--?"
"Tell you what?"
"Who he was--and why I never saw it before? I thought I knew all your things by heart--and now you"ve been keeping something from me!" The girl"s tone had changed to one of curious resentment. "You know how you scold _me_ when you think I"ve got a secret."
"That is quite different, Hester."
Miss Puttenham tried to rise, but Hester, who was leaning against her knee, prevented it.
"Why is it different?" she said, audaciously. "You always say you--you--want to be everything to me--and then you hide things from me--and I--"
She raised herself, sitting upright on the floor, her hands round her knees, and spoke with extraordinary animation and sparkling eyes.
"Why, I should have loved you twice as much, Aunt Alice--and you know I _do_ love you!--if you"d told me more about yourself. The people _I_ care about are the people who _live_--and feel--and do things! There"s verse in one of your books"--she pointed to a little bookshelf of poets on a table near--"I always think of it when mamma reads the "Christian Year"
to us on Sunday evenings--
Out of dangers, dreams, disasters _We_ arise, to be your masters!"
"_We_--the people who want to know, and feel, and _fight_! We who loathe all the humdrum _bourgeois_ talk--"don"t do this--don"t do that!" Aunt Alsie, there"s a German line, too, you know it--" _Was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine"_--don"t you hate it too--_das Gemeine?_" the word came with vehemence through the white teeth. "And how can we escape it--we women--except through freedom--through a.s.serting ourselves--through love, of course? It all comes to love!--love that mamma says one ought not to talk about. I wouldn"t talk about it, if it only meant what it means to Sarah and Lulu--I"d scorn to!"
She stopped--and looked with her blazing and wonderful eyes at her companion--her lips parted. Then she suddenly stooped and kissed the cold hand trying to withdraw itself from hers.
"Who was he, dear?"--she laid the hand caressingly against her cheek--"I"m good at secrets!"
Alice Puttenham wrenched herself free, and rose tottering to her feet.
"He is dead, Hester--and you mustn"t speak of it to me--or any one--again."
She leant against the mantelpiece trying to recover herself--but in vain.
"I"m rather faint," she said at last, putting out a groping hand. "No, don"t come!--I"m all right--I"ll go upstairs and rest. I got overtired this morning."
And she went feebly toward the door.
Hester looked after her, panting and wounded. Aunt Alsie repel--refuse her!--Aunt Alsie!--who had always been her special possession and chattel. It had been taken for granted in the family, year after year, that if no one else was devoted to Hester, Aunt Alsie"s devotion, at least, never failed. Hester"s clothes were Miss Puttenham"s special care; it was for Hester that she st.i.tched and embroidered. Hester was to inherit her jewels and her money. In all Hester"s sc.r.a.pes it was Aunt Alice who stood by her, who had often carried her off bodily out of reach of the family anger, to the Lakes, to the sea--once even, to Italy.
And from her childhood Hester had coolly taken it all for granted, had never been specially grateful, or much more amenable to counsels from Aunt Alice than from anybody else. The slender, graceful woman, so gentle, plaintive and reserved, so easily tyrannized over, had never seemed to mean much to her. Yet now, as she stood looking at the door through which Miss Puttenham had disappeared, the girl was conscious of a profound and pa.s.sionate sense of grievance, and of something deeper, beneath it. The sensation that held her was new and unbearable.
Then in a moment her temperament turned pain into anger. She ran to the window and down the steps into the garden.
"If she had told me"--she said to herself, with the childish fury that mingled in her with older and maturer things--"I might have told _her_.
Now--I fend for myself!"
CHAPTER X
Meanwhile, in the room upstairs, Alice Puttenham lying with her face pressed against the back of the chair into which she had feebly dropped, heard Hester run down the steps, tried to call, or rise, and could not.
Since the death of Judith Sabin she had had little or no sleep, and much less food than usual, with--all the while--the pressure of a vague corrosive terror on nerve and brain. The shock of that miniature in Hester"s hands had just turned the scale; endurance had given way.
The quick footsteps receded. Yet she could do nothing to arrest them. Her mind floated in darkness.
Presently out of the darkness emerged a sound, a touch--a warm hand on hers.
"Dear--dear Miss Puttenham!"
"Yes."
Her voice seemed to herself a sigh--the faintest--from a great distance.
"The servants said you were here. Ellen came up to knock, and you did not hear. I was afraid you were ill--so I came in--you"ll forgive me."
"Thank you."
Silence for a while. Mary brought cold water, chafed her friend"s hands, and rendered all the services that women in such straits know how to lavish on a sufferer. Gradually Alice mastered herself, but more than a broken word or two still seemed beyond her, and Mary waited in patience.
She was well aware that some trouble of a nature unknown to her had been weighing on Miss Puttenham for a week or more; and she realized too, instinctively, that she would get no light upon it.