This was the first reference that had been made to the visit. He wondered if she guessed what it had done for their friends.h.i.+p.
Old Mrs. Waterlow came in, wearing just such a delightful, flowing black satin cloak and deep black satin bonnet as he would have expected her to wear. And seeing him there with her daughter-in-law, she paused, as if arrested, on the threshold. Then, her eyes pa.s.sing from the tea-table and its intimacy of grouping with the two chairs they had risen from, and resting brightly on her daughter"s face, where she must read the reflection of his happiness, Owen saw that she cast off a scruple, came to a decision, and renewed the impulse that had brought her up the stairs, he now realised, at an uncharacteristic speed.
"My dear Cicely," she exclaimed, after she had greeted him, "you"ve lost your wager!"
Cicely Waterlow gazed at her for a moment and then she flushed deeply.
"Have I, mamma?" she said, busying herself with the kettle. "Well, that pleases you, and doesn"t displease me. You"ll want some tea, won"t you?"
"Yes, indeed, I want some tea. But you"ll not put me off with tea, my dear. I want to talk about my wager, too; and Mr. Stacpole will want to hear about it, for it was his wager as well. You did say that you felt convinced that I was safe in my haven, didn"t you, Mr. Stacpole? Well, I"ve lost it, and I"m not at all pleased to have lost it. I"m triumphant, if you will, but savage, too. You"ll forgive me, I know, Mr.
Stacpole, if I"m savage with your cousin when I tell you that she has been inspired with a black satin suite and mahogany furniture and bead-work since seeing Cicely"s new drawing-room in Chislebridge."
"Mamma!" Cicely protested. "Two people can perfectly well have the same idea at the same time! There"s no reason in the world why Gwendolen shouldn"t feel just my fancy for funny, old, ugly things."
"She didn"t show any fancy for them when she saw them a year ago, did she, dear?" said the intractable old lady, seating herself at the tea-table. "She was very guarded, very mute, though very observant. Yes; people may have the same idea, but they"ll hardly have the same black satin furniture and the same beaded footstools, will they?"
Seeing the deep embarra.s.sment in which his friend was plunged, Owen now interposed.
"Don"t try to defend Gwendolen on my account," he said. "She really can"t be defended. I know it, for I"ve seen her drawing-room."
"You have seen it? And what do you think of it?" asked old Mrs.
Waterlow.
"I thought, as I told her," said Owen, "that it lacked but one thing, and that was the travesty of a soul. It lacked the white paG.o.da."
"You told her that? It was what she told me. She told me that she could not forgive herself for having parted with the paG.o.da, for it was the travesty of a soul that her room still needed. "You mean," I said, "the paG.o.da placed as Cicely placed it on the centre-table in her new room?"
She gazed at me and laid her hand on my arm and asked: "But, dear Mrs.
Waterlow, how had Cicely placed the paG.o.da? I really don"t remember. I really don"t remember at all what Cicely"s new room was like, except that it was mid-Victorian, and had old water-colours on the walls.
Surely you don"t think that I"ve copied Cicely?"
""My dear Mrs. Conyers," I said to her, "I don"t think, but know, that you"ve done nothing else since you came to Chislebridge. But in this case you are farther from success than usual, for Cicely"s drawing-room is gay, and yours is _grand serieux_.""
Mrs. Waterlow"s bomb seemed to fill the air with a silvery explosion, and, as its echoes died, in the ensuing stillness, the eyes of Cicely and Owen met beneath the triumphant gaze of the merciless old lady. It was from his eyes that hers caught the infection. To remain grave now was to be _grand serieux_, and helpless gaiety was in the air. Owen broke into peals of laughter.
"Oh--but--" Cicely Waterlow protested, laughing, too, but still flushed and almost tearful--"it isn"t fair. It"s as if we had taken her in. She doesn"t know she does it, really she doesn"t; she is so well-meaning--so kind."
"She knows now," said old Mrs. Waterlow, who remained unsmiling, but with a placidity full of satisfaction; "and she"ll hardly be able to forget."
"I"m quite sure," said Cicely, "that she really believes that she cares for the new drawing-room. People can persuade themselves so easily of new tastes. And why shouldn"t they have them? I believe that Gwendolen does like it."
"Yes, she does indeed," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "She says so. She says she never cared for any room so much and that she intends to live and die with it. Her only refuge now is to go on faithfully loving it. So there she is, b.u.t.toned into her black satin for ever!"
Until now Mrs. Conyers has remained faithful, and her consistency is still made good to her; for none of her drawing-rooms has brought her such appreciation. Chislebridge has never dared to emulate it; Mr.
Chambers and his friends have often painted it, and Mrs. Waterlow"s original, like a gay jest, uttered and then gone for ever, is no longer in existence to vex and perplex her with its mocking smile. Moreover, her own drawing-room no longer lacks its travesty of a soul. Owen married Cicely Waterlow in the autumn, and Gwendolen, magnanimous, and burning her bridges behind her, sent them for their wedding-present her two lovely and unique red lacquer cabinets. One stands in the front, and one in the back drawing-room in the little house in St. Leonard"s Terrace, and Cicely said to Owen on the day they arrived that any wrong of the past, if wrong there had been, was now atoned for. And when they married and went round the world for their wedding-trip, they found in China a white paG.o.da, unflawed, larger, more sublimely elegant than the old one. This they brought back to Gwendolen, and with unfaltering courage she has placed it upon her mahogany centre table.
THE SUICIDE
A COMEDY
She took the bottle from its wrappings and looked at it--at its apparent insignificance and the huge significance of the glaring word "Poison"
printed across it. She looked resolutely, and as resolutely went with it to the other side of the room, and locked it away in the drawer of her dressing-table. She paused here, and her eyes met her mirrored eyes. The expression of her face arrested her attention. Did people who were going to die usually look so calm, so placid? Really, it was a sort of placidity that gazed back at her, so unlike the disfigured, tear-blinded reflection that had been there that morning--when she had read the paper. After the tempest of despair, the frozen decision, the nightmare securing of the means of death (if any one should guess! stop her!) it was indeed a sort of apathy that drenched her being, as if already the drug had gone through it. The face in the mirror was very young and very helpless and very charming. It was like the face of a little wind-blown ghost, with its tossed-back hair and wide, empty, gazing eyes. The sweetness of the wasted cheeks and soft, parted lips suddenly smote on the apathy, and tears came. She pressed her hands over her eyes, struggled, and mastered herself again. Her own pathos must not unnerve, and her unbearable sorrow must nerve, her.
She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Just three. She could give herself ample time for writing the letter; then she must go and post it.
Before five she would be back here--locked in her room. Before six--
She went to the writing-table, unlocked a drawer,--the key hung on a ribbon around her neck, under her bodice,--and took out a thick packet of closely written papers. Sitting there, hesitating a moment, she wondered if she would look back at those records of hope and suffering--more than a whole year of beautiful suffering, beautiful hope. The rising of tears again warned her that such a retrospect would make her more unfit for writing the last letter as it must be written--with full possession of her best and deepest meaning. She must be her most courageous self to write now. The writer of those past records seemed a little sister half playing with her grief, beside the self that sat here now, stricken and determined.
Drawing pen and paper to her, she wrote:
MY DEAREST--MY BEST BELOVED: This is the last of the letters. I am going to send them all to you now, so that you may know all.
I read this morning in the paper that you were to be married.
And now there is nothing left for me but to die. When you read this I shall be dead.
You must not blame me, or think me too cowardly. I am a fragile person, I know, and my life hung on you. Without hope it can"t go on; it"s too feeble to find anything else to live for. And you could never, never blame yourself. How could you have helped it? How could you have dreamed that I loved you? If you had you could have done nothing but be sorry--and irked. But it comforts me in dying to let you know how I have loved you; it is like a dying gift I make you,--do you see?--all the love that I have hidden. If I had lived I could never have made the gift. Had you guessed, or had I told you, it would have been a burden, a ludicrous burden. But as you read this, knowing that I am dead, my love must come to you as a blessing; you must feel it as something, in its little way beautiful, and care for it; for any love that only gives and makes no claim is beautiful, is it not? I think I find dying so much easier than living because in dying I can give you the gift.
All these letters, written from the first day I met you, almost a year and a half ago, will tell you step by step what I have felt. Don"t let the hopes that flickered up sometimes hurt you; the strength of my feeling made the flame, nothing that you ever said or did.
How I remember that first day, in the country, at the Ashwells", when mamma and I came on to the lawn where you were all sitting, and mamma laughed at me for stumbling over a chair--and you smiled at me. From the moment I saw you then, I loved you. You were like some dream come true. You never knew what joy it gave me (only joy; the pain was in not being with you) when we walked together and talked; the letters will tell you that. But to-day it all comes back, even the little things that I hardly knew I was seeing or hearing--the late white roses in the garden; and the robin sitting on the garden wall (we stopped to look at it, and it sat still, looking at us: I wonder if you remember the robin); and the distant song some labourers were singing in the fields far away.
And here in London, the dinners we met at, the teas you came to, the one or two books you gave me and that we wrote about--what I felt about it all, these meteors through my gray life, I have written it all down. Did I not act well? You could never have guessed, under my composure and cheerfulness, could you? I am a little proud of myself when I think of it.
And that this is no sudden rocking of my reason you will see, too, from the growing hopelessness, of emptiness in the last months, when I have not seen you. In the bottom of my heart I had always the little hope that some day I might give you these myself, that we might read them together, you and I, smiling over my past sorrow. And if I had died, and you had not loved me, you were to have had them, as I told you, for I wanted to give you my love; I could not bear that it should go out and that you should never know.
I wish that I could have died, and need not have killed myself; I am so afraid that that may give you pain, though it ought not to, if you think justly of it all.
Of course you will be sorry for me--I am afraid that I want you to be _sorry_; but don"t be too sad. I am so much happier in dying than I could have been in living; and in loving you I have felt so much, I have lived so much--more perhaps than many people in a whole lifetime.
See the gift you have given _me_, dearest one. Good-bye.
Good-bye.
ALLIDA.
It was over,--the last link with life, her last word spoken or written,--and the echo of it seemed to come to her already as across a great abyss that separated her from the world of the living.
With the signing of her name she had drawn the shroud over her face.
Only the mechanical things now remained to be done: dying was really over; she really was dead.
She wrapped this last letter around all the others, kissed it, and sealed it in a large envelope; then, putting on her hat and coat and holding the letter in her ulster pocket, she left her room and went down the stairs.
The house was a typically smart, flimsy London house, of the cheaper Mayfair sort--a narrow box set on end and fitted with chintz and gilt and white mouldings; a trap to Allida"s imagination--an imagination that no longer shrank from the contemplation of the facts of her life; for they, too, were seen from across that abyss.
In the drawing-room, among shaded lamps, cus.h.i.+ons, and swarming bric-a-brac, her mother had flirted and allured--unsuccessfully--for how many years? She had felt, since the time when, as a very little girl, she had gone by the room every day coming in from her walk at tea-time with her governess, and heard inside the high, smiling, artificial voice, with its odd appealing quality, its vague, waiting pauses, the shrinking from her mother and her mother"s aims. Later on the aims had been for her, too, and their determination had been partly, Allida felt, hardened by the fact of a grown-up daughter being such a deterrent--so in the way of a desperate, fading beauty who had never made the brilliant match she hoped for. That she had never, either, made even a moderate match for her, Allida, the girl felt, with a firmer closing of her hand on the letter, she perhaps owed to _him_. What might her weakness and her hatred of her home not have urged her into had not that ideal--that seen and recognized ideal--armed her? The vision of old Captain Defflin, his bruised-plum face and tight, pale eyes, rose before her, and the vacuous, unwholesome countenance of young Sir Alfred Cutts.