"The duke adores you, madam."
"Poor duke! Do let him be--sleeping so woebegone with his mouth so, and that chin of a baby, like as if he dreamed of a penny whistle. He shouldn"t have let me come here. Talk of Mr. Beamish. How he will miss you, Chloe!"
"He will," Chloe said sadly.
"If you go, dear."
"I am going."
"Why should you leave him, Chloe?"
"I must."
"And there, the thought of it makes you miserable!"
"It does."
"You needn"t, I"m sure."
Chloe looked at her.
The d.u.c.h.ess turned her head. "Why can"t you be gay, as you were at the supper-table, Chloe? You"re out to him like a flower when the sun jumps over the hill; you"re up like a lark in the dews; as I used to be when I thought of nothing. Oh, the early morning; and I"m sleepy. What a beast I feel, with my grandeur, and the time in an hour or two for the birds to sing, and me ready to drop. I must go and undress."
She rushed on Chloe, kissed her hastily, declaring that she was quite dead of fatigue, and dismissed her. "I don"t want help, I can undress myself. As if Susan Barley couldn"t do that for herself! and you may shut your door, I sha"n"t have any frights to-night, I"m so tired out."
"Another kiss," Chloe said tenderly.
"Yes, take it"--the d.u.c.h.ess leaned her cheek--"but I"m so tired I don"t know what I"m doing."
"It will not be on your conscience," Chloe answered, kissing her warmly.
Will those words she withdrew, and the d.u.c.h.ess closed the door. She ran a bolt in it immediately.
"I"m too tired to know anything I"m doing," she said to herself, and stood with shut eyes to hug certain thoughts which set her bosom heaving.
There was the bed, there was the clock. She had the option of lying down and floating quietly into the day, all peril past. It seemed sweet for a minute. But it soon seemed an old, a worn, an end-of-autumn life, chill, without aim, like a something that was hungry and toothless. The bed proposing innocent sleep repelled her and drove her to the clock. The clock was awful: the hand at the hour, the finger following the minute, commanded her to stir actively, and drove her to gentle meditations on the bed. She lay down dressed, after setting her light beside the clock, that she might see it at will, and considering it necessary for the bed to appear to have been lain on. Considering also that she ought to be heard moving about in the process of undressing, she rose from the bed to make sure of her reading of the guilty clock. An hour and twenty minutes! she had no more time than that: and it was not enough for her various preparations, though it was true that her maid had packed and taken a box of the things chiefly needful; but the d.u.c.h.ess had to change her shoes and her dress, and run at bo-peep with the changes of her mind, a sedative preface to any fatal step among women of her complexion, for so they invite indecision to exhaust their scruples, and they let the blood have its way. Having so short a s.p.a.ce of time, she thought the matter decided, and with some relief she flung despairing on the bed, and lay down for good with her duke. In a little while her head was at work reviewing him sternly, estimating him not less accurately than the male moralist charitable to her s.e.x would do. She quitted the bed, with a spring to escape her imagined lord; and as if she had felt him to be there, she lay down no more. A quiet life like that was flatter to her idea than a handsomely bound big book without any print on the pages, and without a picture. Her contemplation of it, contrasted with the life waved to her view by the timepiece, set her whole system rageing; she burned to fly. Providently, nevertheless, she thumped a pillow, and threw the bedclothes into proper disorder, to inform the world that her limbs had warmed them, and that all had been impulse with her. She then proceeded to disrobe, murmuring to herself that she could stop now, and could stop now, at each stage of the advance to a fresh dressing of her person, and moralizing on her singular fate, in the mouth of an observer.
"She was shot up suddenly over everybody"s head, and suddenly down she went." Susan whispered to herself: "But it was for love!" Possessed by the rosiness of love, she finished her business, with an attention to everything needed that was equal to perfect serenity of mind. After which there was nothing to do, save to sit humped in a chair, cover her face and count the clock-tickings, that said, Yes--no; do--don"t; fly-- stay; fly--fly! It seemed to her she heard a moving. Well she might with that dreadful heart of hers!
Chloe was asleep, at peace by this time, she thought; and how she envied Chloe! She might be as happy, if she pleased. Why not? But what kind of happiness was it? She likened it to that of the corpse underground, and shrank distastefully.
Susan stood at her gla.s.s to have a look at the creature about whom there was all this disturbance, and she threw up her arms high for a languid, not unlovely yawn, that closed in blissful shuddering with the sensation of her lover"s arms having wormed round her waist and taken her while she was defenceless. For surely they would. She took a jewelled ring, his gift, from her purse, and kissed it, and drew it on and off her finger, leaving it on. Now she might wear it without fear of inquiries and virtuous eyebrows. O heavenly now--if only it were an hour hence; and going behind galloping horses!
The clock was at the terrible moment. She hesitated internally and hastened; once her feet stuck fast, and firmly she said, "No"; but the clock was her lord. The clock was her lover and her lord; and obeying it, she managed to get into the sitting-room, on the pretext that she merely wished to see through the front window whether daylight was coming.
How well she knew that half-light of the ebb of the wave of darkness.
Strange enough it was to see it showing houses regaining their solidity of the foregone day, instead of still fields, black hedges, familiar shapes of trees. The houses had no wakefulness, they were but seen to stand, and the light was a revelation of emptiness. Susan"s heart was cunning to reproach her duke for the difference of the scene she beheld from that of the innocent open-breasted land. Yes, it was dawn in a wicked place that she never should have been allowed to visit. But where was he whom she looked for? There! The cloaked figure of a man was at the corner of the street. It was he. Her heart froze; but her limbs were strung to throw off the house, and reach air, breathe, and (as her thoughts ran) swoon, well-protected. To her senses the house was a house on fire, and crying to her to escape.
Yet she stepped deliberately, to be sure-footed in a dusky room; she touched along the wall and came to the door, where a foot-stool nearly tripped her. Here her touch was at fault, for though she knew she must be close by the door, she was met by an obstruction unlike wood, and the door seemed neither shut nor open. She could not find the handle; something hung over it. Thinking coolly, she fancied the thing must be a gown or dressing-gown; it hung heavily. Her fingers were sensible of the touch of silk; she distinguished a depending bulk, and she felt at it very carefully and mechanically, saying within herself, in her anxiety to pa.s.s it without noise, "If I should awake poor Chloe, of all people!"
Her alarm was that the door might creak. Before any other alarm had struck her brain, the hand she felt with was in a palsy, her mouth gaped, her throat thickened, the dust-ball rose in her throat, and the effort to swallow it down and get breath kept her from acute speculation while she felt again, pinched, plucked at the thing, ready to laugh, ready to shriek. Above her head, all on one side, the thing had a round white top. Could it be a hand that her touch had slid across? An arm too!
this was an arm! She clutched it, imagining that it clung to her. She pulled it to release herself from it, desperately she pulled, and a lump descended, and a flash of all the torn nerves of her body told her that a dead human body was upon her.
At a quarter to four o"clock of a midsummer morning, as Mr. Beamish relates of his last share in the Tale of Chloe, a woman"s voice, in piercing notes of anguish, rang out three shrieks consecutively, which were heard by him at the instant of his quitting his front doorstep, in obedience to the summons of young Mr. Camwell, delivered ten minutes previously, with great urgency, by that gentleman"s lacquey. On his reaching the street of the house inhabited by d.u.c.h.ess Susan, he perceived many night-capped heads at windows, and one window of the house in question lifted but vacant. His first impression accused the pair of gentlemen, whom he saw bearing drawn swords in no friendly att.i.tude of an ugly brawl that had probably affrighted her Grace, or her personal attendant, a woman capable of screaming, for he was well a.s.sured that it could not have been Chloe, the least likely of her s.e.x to abandon herself to the use of their weapons either in terror or in jeopardy. The antagonists were Mr. Camwell and Count Caseldy. On his approaching them, Mr. Camwell sheathed his sword, saying that his work was done. Caseldy was convulsed with wrath, to such a degree as to make the part of an intermediary perilous. There had been pa.s.ses between them, and Caseldy cried aloud that he would have his enemy"s blood. The night-watch was nowhere. Soon, however, certain shopmen and their apprentices a.s.sisted Mr. Beamish to preserve the peace, despite the fury of Caseldy and the provocations--"not easy to withstand," says the chronicler--offered by him to young Camwell. The latter said to Mr. Beamish: "I knew I should be no match, so I sent for you," causing his friend astonishment, inasmuch as he was a.s.sured of the youth"s natural valour.
Mr. Beamish was about to deliver an allocution of reproof to them in equal shares, being entirely unsuspicious of any other reason for the alarum than this palpable outbreak of a rivalry that he would have inclined to attribute to the charms of Chloe, when the house-door swung wide for them to enter, and the landlady of the house, holding clasped hands at full stretch, implored them to run up to the poor lady: "Oh, she"s dead; she"s dead, dead!"
Caseldy rushed past her.
"How, dead! good woman?" Mr. Beamish questioned her most incredulously, half-smiling.
She answered among her moans: "Dead by the neck; off the door--Oh!"
Young Camwell pressed his forehead, with a call on his Maker"s name. As they reached the landing upstairs, Caseldy came out of the sitting-room.
"Which?" said Camwell to the speaking of his face.
"She !" said the other.
"The d.u.c.h.ess?" Mr. Beamish exclaimed.
But Camwell walked into the room. He had nothing to ask after that reply.
The figure stretched along the floor was covered with a sheet. The young man fell at his length beside it, and his face was downward.
Mr. Beamish relates: "To this day, when I write at an interval of fifteen years, I have the tragic ague of that hour in my blood, and I behold the shrouded form of the most admirable of women, whose heart was broken by a faithless man ere she devoted her wreck of life to arrest one weaker than herself on the descent to perdition. Therein it was beneficently granted her to be of the service she prayed to be through her death. She died to save. In a last letter, found upon her pincushion, addressed to me under seal of secrecy toward the parties princ.i.p.ally concerned, she antic.i.p.ates the whole confession of the unhappy d.u.c.h.ess. Nay, she prophesies: "The d.u.c.h.ess will tell you truly she has had enough of love!" Those actual words were reiterated to me by the poor lady daily until her lord arrived to head the funeral procession, and a.s.sist in nursing back the shattered health of his wife to a state that should fit her for travelling. To me, at least, she was constant in repeating, "No more of love!" By her behaviour to her duke, I can judge her to have been sincere. She spoke of feeling Chloe"s eyes go through her with every word of hers that she recollected. Nor was the end of Chloe less effective upon the traitor.
He was in the procession to her grave. He spoke to none. There is a line of the verse bearing the superscription, "My Reasons for Dying,"
that shows her to have been apprehensive to secure the safety of Mr.
Camwell:
I die because my heart is dead To warn a soul from sin I die: I die that blood may not be shed, etc.
She feared he would be somewhere on the road to mar the fugitives, and she knew him, as indeed he knew himself, no match for one trained in the foreign tricks of steel, ready though he was to dispute the traitor"s way. She remembers Mr. Camwell"s pet.i.tion for the knotted silken string in her request that it shall be cut from her throat and given to him."
Mr. Beamish indulges in verses above the grave of Chloe. They are of a character to cool emotion. But when we find a man, who is commonly of the quickest susceptibility to ridicule as well as to what is befitting, careless of exposure, we may reflect on the truthfulness of feeling by which he is drawn to pa.s.s his own guard and come forth in his nakedness; something of the poet"s tongue may breathe to us through his mortal stammering, even if we have to acknowledge that a quotation would scatter pathos.
ETEXT EDITOR"S BOOKMARKS:
All flattery is at somebody"s expense Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues But I leave it to you Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war Happiness in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance If I do not speak of payment Intellectual contempt of easy dupes Invite indecision to exhaust their scruples Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask for?
No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters Nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted Primitive appet.i.te for noise She might turn out good, if well guarded for a time The alternative is, a garter and the bedpost They miss their pleasure in pursuing it This mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure Wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land
[The End]