Читать книгу Where Three Roads Meet - Ethel M. Dell - Страница 13

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The coming of winter—that last bitter winter of the War—was like the falling of a blight at Aubreystone Castle. Fuel was rationed, and the great rooms were sharply cold. Old Lady Aubreystone braved all hardship without a tremor, and her daughter, Caroline, laughed at it. But the new Lady Aubreystone shivered and sought the warmth of the little fire in the nursery where her baby boy played with more noise than concentration. He had never been difficult to amuse, and he had a humble servitor in the form of Rose, the village girl, who adored him. He no longer looked to his mother for the necessaries of life, but he worshipped her none the less. Though she sat huddled over the fire and took no active part in his jolly games, he loved to have her there. She was umpire and sole referee in all that he did. He was beginning to talk quite easily, and his name for her was “Molly.” It had developed out of his first effort at “Mother” and she had laughed and adapted it for him. It was easier to say, and he always chuckled over it as though he knew there were a joke somewhere. And that chuckle of his was so precious; it reminded her—oh, so vividly!—of someone who would have loved him as she did.

There was very little else in her life to remind her of that someone now. Married to Lord Aubreystone, living in an atmosphere to which she was alien, kept firmly under the authority of her redoubtable mother-in-law and Caroline, who, to give her her due, seldom noticed her, it was strange, she sometimes reflected, that she retained anything at all of her own personality. But for that corner where little Rollo laughed and played, she believed it would have faded away long since, so wholly different was this from the life to which she had been bred.

She was thankful that she was allowed to spend so much of her time in her merry boy’s company, and she suspected that this was by her husband’s especial contrivance. He wanted her to be happy, particularly now when her health greatly depended upon it. He wished her to have a cheery outlook and no repinings. Possibly the doctor who had informed him of the event that was to happen in the spring had warned him on this subject. She must be kept as free from care as possible, free from trouble of any sort. There must be nothing on her mind. Of course it was an anxious time for everyone, but she ought not to be allowed to dwell upon it. In the midst of all the suffering, she who had suffered so much must now be at peace.

She was fortunate—so her mother-in-law said—in having her husband in England, though he was in town most of the time and could spend only the week-ends with her—very limited week-ends at that, for he always left again on the Sunday night. But he never failed to run down and assure himself of her welfare. Perhaps he thought that his visits cheered her up. Molly bleakly wondered.

For nothing seemed to touch her in those days—save Rollo’s cheery prattle. She was far from well and immeasurably depressed. She looked forward to the birth of her second child with a dull foreboding, very different from the subdued eagerness with which she had anticipated the advent of Rollo. He had come as it were out of the depths of sorrow and bereavement, lighting a tiny torch to guide her up from her vale of misery. He had been her firstborn—Roy’s very own. But this newcomer was wholly different. She felt almost as if it did not belong to her, and she was morbidly aware that she did not want it. She only wanted Rollo.

This second marriage of hers was like a dark blot in her life, severing her from those clinging thoughts of Ronald which had been so unutterably dear to her, almost blurring the clear outline of his memory. It was as if she had desecrated the temple in which once she had loved to wander, and now the entrance to it was closed to her. She had indeed begun definitely to turn away from the hidden shrine, for the pain which any reminder of it caused her was so intolerable. She had hidden away the beloved miniature because she could no longer bear to look upon it. But still hungrily she marked in Rollo little ways and gestures which recalled the lover of her girlhood. She wanted him to be like his father—free and splendid and vital, made for greatness.

Often during that dreadful winter she would sit and watch the child with wistful eyes, wondering what the future held for him but thinking not at all of her own. He had been entered for one of the best public schools, and she felt that he would romp through everything practically without effort. He would be brilliant, full of fire, everybody’s favourite. He would have genius, and by the time it developed the world would be quiet again. Whither would it lead him? How often she wondered! And sometimes with a cold shiver she would ask herself if she would be there to see.

Her own vitality had sunk to a low ebb, and she had a horrible presentiment that she was going to be very ill. Perhaps she would not get over it. Perhaps—for marrying a man she did not love—her life was to be the forfeit. A sense of wrongdoing haunted her persistently, rendering her miserably unhappy, but she did not want to die because of Rollo. It would be so unfair to leave him in the hands of strangers who cared nothing for him, even though she knew that Ivor would keep his promise to the very last letter. She respected Ivor. He was honourable and just and unvaryingly kind to her. In his quiet, undemonstrative fashion he made much of her—too much at times. He was delighted at the prospect of an heir, and she felt that her value was greatly enhanced on that account. He gave her presents in which she dutifully professed to take pleasure, and he did his utmost to make life easy for her during the tedious months of waiting. He never expressed any anxiety about her, but he treated her with the most scrupulous care. She was never allowed to take any risks, and he always sought to encourage her and urge her to look forward to the happiness in store.

She tried to respond, though to have feigned any deep affection for him would have been beyond her power. It was as much as she could do to disguise the fact that his presence gave her not the faintest pleasure—that his departure gave her actual relief.

The slow passage of that winter with all its mental forebodings and physical miseries was like the gradual enactment of a curse. And then at last in the piercing cold of the early spring, unexpectedly and prematurely her trouble came upon her, and she was wrenched from her dim desert of sorrow and flung into an active inferno of suffering that awoke her very effectually to a wild and terrible struggle for life.

It seemed to go on indefinitely—that fearful battle—lengthening out through a delirium of days and nights of torture. It had not been so with her when Rollo had come into the world, but that had been before long-drawn-out sorrow and privation had worn her down. That had been a natural, almost an inevitable happening, and had brought her ultimate comfort; but this was a thing of terror—a thing from which her whole being shrank and strove instinctively to escape. And very often during those dreadful hours she cried out to Ronald in anguish of spirit, beseeching him to forgive her. But no answer ever came back out of the void. The gates were closed behind her.

She could but go forward on that agonizing adventure until at last a merciful darkness came upon her, and she entered a zone of strange forgetfulness in which her racked body found the peace of oblivion.

Out of this eventually she came, as one floating upwards out of a vast silence, and stared with a vague wonder at the cold daylight that surrounded her. The anguish had gone, but everything else seemed to have gone with it. She felt too numbed for exhaustion, almost non-existent.

Someone bent over her with a certain familiar stiffness of gesture which sent swift recognition to her brain. It was Ivor, patting the bedclothes and smiling at her. She frowned back at him in puzzled enquiry. It was as if she had returned from a long journey and were quite out of touch. Why was he smiling? So far as she could remember, he was not in the habit of smiling without reason. He actually seemed pleased with her, while she was conscious only of desperate weakness. Though he was touching her, he seemed to be a very great distance away, and there was a surging in her ears which prevented her hearing anything he said. She wished vaguely that he would go away.

And then, as her consciousness gradually spread and increased, she perceived another stiff figure at her bedside, and her trembling faculties awoke one by one to a full understanding.

Her mother-in-law’s hard voice came down to her. “Ah, that’s better. She’s come to herself. You needn’t be anxious. It’s all perfectly normal. My dear, I congratulate you upon the birth of your son.”

Her son! Molly’s weak lips moved. She tried to speak. Old Lady Aubreystone was smiling also—a smile of grim approval. She repeated her words, overbearing Molly’s quivering effort.

“Your son, my dear! Yes, you have succeeded at last, I am glad to say. You will soon be all right again. Nurse, bring the baby!”

There was a movement in the background, and the old woman stooped over Molly, holding a swathed bundle down to her.

“Just a peep—that’s all, and then you must be quiet. Dear me though! I never made all this fuss—but women are so soft nowadays. No grit whatever! There he is! Very small, but healthy! Once more—I congratulate you. May he be the first of many!”

Molly gazed with a kind of horrified realization. Her son! Hers and Ivor’s! She turned her eyes from the wrinkled object displayed for her gratification up to the somewhat hag-like features of Ivor’s mother, and, gasping, spoke:

“Oh, no—no—never again! I couldn’t—I couldn’t! Take it away! Let me have—my little Rollo!”

“Well—really!” declaimed Lady Aubreystone in outraged astonishment.

But that was the last that Molly heard for a very long time. For even as the words reached her she sank again into great depths of infinite darkness from which neither her new-born son nor even her precious Rollo could call her back. And in that outer darkness she lay for a long, long time.