"Yes, Beaminster," Christopher said. "Of course I"m delighted. It"s just what I hoped would happen, but perhaps, as your mother has been rather upset lately it would be just as well to say nothing to her...."
"Quite so...." John looked away, out of the window--Poor John!
Christopher held out his hand, and John took it and for a moment they stood there, then Christopher went upstairs.
II
Dorchester no longer a.s.serted that her mistress was "better than she had ever been"--Since that terrible morning when Dr. Christopher had broken the news of Sir Roderick"s accident Dorchester had made no pretence about anything. This was the time that must, she had always known, one day arrive, but what she had not known was that it would be quite like this.
She was a woman of some imagination; moreover, were there one person in the world who touched her heart, then was it her mistress; she had penetrated, she thought, some of the strange secrets and fantasies of that old woman"s soul, and it seemed that now, in these later days, she was at last in touch with every motive and grim artifice that her mistress adopted--
But no--since that terrible day at the beginning of the year Dorchester had lost touch, was left, bewildered, at a loss, as though she were suddenly in the service of some stranger.
She had known that nothing more terrible could happen to her mistress than this--When she heard it she said to herself, "This will kill her--bound to--" She had known too that her mistress would not flinch, outwardly, and that to the ordinary observer there would be no sign, but the thing for which she had not been prepared was this silence, a silence so profound and yet so eloquent that one could obtain from it no clue, could discern no visible wound, but daily, almost hourly, as she sat there, change was at work ... she was dying before their eyes--
What Dorchester did not know was that the d.u.c.h.ess had been aware, for a long time, that this was to occur, if not exactly this, why, then, something like it.
All through that autumn she had sat there waiting--the War, the rebellion of her children--it only needed that disaster should overtake Roddy and the circle was complete.
She did not doubt that it was because he had married Rachel that this had happened to him, and she might have prevented his marriage to Rachel had she wished.
The girl had now for her sitting there in her room the fatal inevitability of some hostile spirit. She saw all her past years as a duel with this girl, the one soul in rebellion against hers. Rachel had taken everything from her; she had first stirred Adela and John into rebellion, she had encouraged Francis Breton, she had destroyed Roddy ... she rose, before the old woman"s eyes, black, t.i.tanic, sweeping, with great dark wings, across the horizon.
The d.u.c.h.ess did not in so many words state that Rachel had flung her husband from his horse and then watched whilst his body was dragged along the stones, but, in some way, the girl had plotted it.
The old woman had indeed during these last months suffered from visions.
There were days when her brain was as clear as it had ever been and on these days she thought more of Roddy than of Rachel, ached to be with him, longed to comfort him and make life bearable for him, cursed whatever fate it was that had ordained that upon him of all people such a burden should have fallen. Then there were other days when the old china dragons seemed more real than Dorchester, when shapes and sizes altered in an instant, when the cushion at her feet was swollen like a mountain, when she seemed floating through s.p.a.ce, looking down upon houses, cities, mountains, when only like a jangling chain upon which everything hung, ran her hatred of her granddaughter.
On such a day if Rachel had come to her and she had been alone with her, she would have wished the dragons to devour her, would have urged the silver Indian snake on the little black table to have strangled her. On such a day she would sit hour after hour and wonder what she could do to her granddaughter....
It was upon one of her clear days that it flashed upon her that she would go and see Roddy. Beyond the actual excitement of visiting Roddy there was the determination to show the world what she still could do.
Doubtless they were saying out there that she was bedridden now, ill, helpless, dying even ... well, she would show them.
For thirty years she had not been outside her door--now, because she wished it, she would go.
She said nothing to Adela about this--she saw Adela now as seldom as possible. She told John on the morning of the day itself--on that same morning she told Christopher.
She told him sitting in her chair, with her cheeks painted and her white fingers covered with rings--
"I"m going to pay a visit--this afternoon, Christopher." She had expected opposition--she was a little disappointed when he said--
"Yes, so I"ve already heard this morning. I think it"s an excellent thing--the day"s warm. You"ll have to be carried downstairs, you know----"
"You and Norris can do that. I won"t have anyone else."
"Very well, I shall have to come with you----"
"Yes--You can talk to my granddaughter."
"It"s thirty years...."
"Yes--The last time was Old Judy Bonnings"s reception. They"re all dead--all of "em--D"you remember, Dorchester?"
"Yes--Your Grace--Very well."
Dorchester expressed no surprise--Anything was better than that silence of the last months. Moreover she had trusted Christopher. She had often been amazed at the knowledge that he showed of her mistress"s temperament, would allow her temper, her imperious self-will indulgence one day and on another would control them absolutely. He knew what he was doing....
The picture that she presented, however, when helped downstairs by the pontifical Norris and Christopher! the house, with the decorous watchfulness of some large, solemn, and immensely authoritative policeman, surveying her descent, her own little bird-like face, showing nothing but a fine a.s.sumption of her splendid appearance before the public, after thirty years, she thus, once again, was saluted by Portland Place! Black furs of Lady Adela"s surrounded, enfolded her, and from out of them her eyes haughtily but triumphantly surveyed a crossing-sweeper, two small children with their nurse, a messenger boy, and Roller the coachman. To Roller this must have been _the_ dramatic moment of a somewhat undramatic career, but stout and imperial upon his box his body was held, rigid, motionless, and his large stupid eyes gazed in front of him at the trees and the light cloud-flecked March sky, and moved neither to the right nor to the left.
She was placed in the carriage--Christopher got in beside her and they moved off. He was interested to see the effect that this breaking into the world would have upon her. He felt himself a little in the position of showman and was glad that he had a spring afternoon of gleaming sunshine and a suggestion of budding trees and shrubs in the Portland Crescent garden to provide for her. They were held up by traffic as they crossed the Marylebone Road; drays, hansoms, bicycles pa.s.sed--there was a stir of voices and wheels, somewhere in the park a band was playing.
He looked at her and saw that she paid no heed, but sat back in the dim shadow, her eyes, he thought, closed. She was, at that instant, more remote from him and all that he represented than she had ever been--Curiously he was moved, just then, by a consciousness of her personality that exceeded anything that he had ever felt in her before.
"Yes, she must have been tremendous," he thought. And then he wondered of what she was thinking, so quiet, and yet, from her very silence, sinister, and then--how could he have not considered this before? What was she going to say to Roddy?
At this, the dark carriage was suddenly, for him, as flashing with life and circ.u.mstance as though it had been the florid circle of some popular music-hall--_What_ would she say to Roddy?
He knew her for the most selfish of all possible old women: unselfish only perhaps if Roddy were concerned, but there also, if some question of her power moved her, ruthless. He had traced the windings of her queer intertwisted brain with some accuracy--He knew also that the coloured unreal state that her closed, fantastic life (resembling, you might say, life inside a Chinese puzzle) had brought upon her led her now to see Rachel as arch-antagonist in every step and movement of her day.
She would not wish to make Roddy unhappy, she might persuade herself that to hint to him of Rachel"s infidelity would be to put him on his guard--she might say that it was not fair that Rachel should not be pulled up....
Christopher himself could not tell how far this affair with Breton had gone....
During that short time it seemed to him that a crisis, that had been building up around him, here, there, for months, for years perhaps, had leapt upon him and that in some way he must deal with it.
Even whilst he struggled with the thoughts that were sweeping upon him now from every side, they were at the house--As he stepped out of the carriage he felt that he was before a locked door, that the safety of many persons depended upon his opening it, that he could not find the key.
"Lady Seddon was out. Sir Roderick was alone----" The d.u.c.h.ess was half a.s.sisted, half carried into the house.
III
The d.u.c.h.ess"s feelings were indeed confused as she was helped into Roddy"s room, placed in a large easy chair opposite to him and at last left alone with him.
Enough of itself to disturb her was the fact that now for the first time for thirty years she was able to examine some room different from her own--A large, high white-walled room with wide windows that displayed the park, sporting prints on the walls, antlers over the fireplace, a piano in one corner, a large bowl of primroses on the piano, some boxing-gloves and two old swords over the door, a wooden case with thin rosewood drawers and "Birds" Eggs" in gold letters upon it, a round table near the sofa upon which Roddy was lying and on the table a photograph of Rachel--
All these things her sharp old eyes noticed before she allowed them to settle upon Roddy--
His quiet, almost humorous "Well, d.u.c.h.ess," set, quite concisely, the note for this conversation. Not for either of them was it to betray any consciousness that this meeting of theirs was in any way out of the ordinary. Formerly it had been the ebullient, vigorous Roddy who had brought his vigour to renew her fierce old age; now that old age must be brought to him--
The Beaminsters did not show surprise at anything at all; had she come from her grave to visit him he would have greeted her with his quiet "Well, d.u.c.h.ess"--his life was broken in pieces, but she was not to offer any comment on that either.
She was exhausted even by that little drive, and that little pa.s.sage from door to door, so she just lay back in her chair for a little while and looked at him.
His body was covered with a rug; his hands, still brown and large and clumsy, were folded on his lap; he was wonderfully tidy, brushed and cleaned, it seemed to her, as though he were always expecting a doctor or a visitor or were performed upon by some valet or other, simply, poor dear, that the time might be filled. His cheeks were paler of course and his face thinner, but it was in his eyes--his large, simple, singularly ungrown-up eyes she had always considered them--that the great change lay--
They smiled across at her with the same genial good temper that they had always presented to her. But indeed she could never call them "ungrown-up" again. Roddy Seddon had grown up indeed since she had seen him last; she knew now, as she faced the experience and, above all, the strength that those eyes now presented for her, that she had a new spirit to encounter.