Читать книгу The Evil That Men Do - M.P. Shiel - Страница 10

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If we pass over twelve days from that night of Hartwell's coming home to Addison Road—twelve days which Hartwell spent in a state of the hardest mental strain in learning a thousand facts, in conversing with fifty people whom he had never before seen, in fighting his way to a more entrenched position in the kingdom which he had seized upon and generally, in getting to himself that almost "new sense" of sharp insight which the many calls upon his wits made needful to him—if we pass over these active twelve days, we find him on the thirteenth afternoon sitting in his private room in his Fenchurch Street office, looking through a number of documents relating to landed estate, as title deeds, conveyances, mortgages, liens, and so on, which he had not had the time to look into before.

From these he now found himself the owner of an important estate in Bucks, of another in Hampshire, and of a smaller one in Norfolk. This last was that Corton Estate where, as we know, "the wife" was. But Hartwell did not know that she was there and in vain, so far, had he tried to find out her whereabouts, though he was now fairly certain that he was really married, for he had found, under lock and key, a diary of Drayton's in which were more obscure references to "the wife." But who? where? this question greatly troubled Hartwell, when he found time, as during his unquiet nights, to think of it.

This Corton was a dilapidated old place, not yielding any rent, apparently given over to poachers, and unless Hartwell should some day think of turning it to some account, it was quite likely that he might not go down there for years.

Besides these three estates, there was a "Hobham House" in Surrey, not far from London, and on that twelfth evening, after examining the deeds, he determined to take a trip to this Hobham House at once, intending to decide that night as to whether it or Addison Road house would prove the more suitable for the laboratory which he was about to make. He therefore got the keys from the outer office, and took train for the small Surrey station of Lydney, where he asked his way, and thence walked to Hobham House. He found it to be a square brick building in a lonely situation at the end of an avenue of pines, and went through all the rooms, which were empty but for a few pieces of old furniture here and there.

He then set out to return to the station, but being absorbed in thought, he happened to take a wrong path where two paths met, and walking on and on without noticing his mistake, he was soon in the park of another estate, which adjoined the woods round Hobham House. It's name was Garlot Croft; it was the country-seat of Julia, Lady Methwold, which fact it was that had caused Drayton to acquire Hobham House lying near it, though he had hardly ever occupied Hobham House.

Hartwell was descending an avenue rather rough with ruts of hardened mud, when he saw before him a lady walking in the same direction as he, rolling a bicycle—saw, as it were, without seeing her, for he was looking on the ground. He had soon overtaken and passed her a little, absorbed in thought, when he heard a deep voice of mockery behind him say:

"A justly-offended James!"

He turned, and his eyes rested on a spirited image, a lady of twenty-two or twenty-three years, with a small head and face and a divinely tall length of body between her toes and her chin, and Hartwell said to himself:

"This can only be 'Julia,' whom I imagined to be still at Cannes."

Since she had formally given him up, he had not even been at the pains to answer her letter of dismissal. He had not, indeed, had the time to remember her existence. He put out his hand with a genial smile in his eyes, pleased with her frank beauty, the freedom of her carriage, and her profusion of soft-brown hair, which had become rather loose and dropped a little behind the neck, and he said:

"No, I was absorbed in thought, and looking on the ground. I am not offended, still less justly offended. For I am sure you never did a wiser thing, for yourself at least."

At once she looked at him with puzzled eyebrows—a little cynical surprise—and her first thought was:

"Well, but someone has been teaching my James to talk modestly, and to lift his hat with distinction."

They walked side by side under the over-arching branches of two rows of beech trees, she rolling her bicycle, and even as they talked, Hartwell's mind was inwardly busy with her, summing her up in a way that had become almost mechanical to him since he had entered the great world under false colours, and he thought to himself:

"She is a widow, young as she is, and she is as fated to second marriage as streams to flowing downward. The portrait in the locket is doubtless that of the already-forgotten Methwold—"

"You have been a long while considering your reply to my letter, James," she said, bridling, "or are you more correctly 'Mr Drayton' now?"

"Still 'James, let me hope," he answered with a patronising humor in his eyes, "though you, perhaps, should no longer be 'Julia,'" and he thought to himself, "she is an athlete, a horsewoman, no doubt—the back and neck. But I fancy that only fencing could give that liberation of her curves, that buoyant air. These are her grounds, that yonder is her house, she would not otherwise have troubled to alight from her bicycle on account of this little roughness of the ground."

While he was thinking this, Julia was saying:

"I have not the least objection to being still 'Julia,' if you like. I recognise, of course, that you have the right to be aggrieved, and I am quite disposed to be chums ever after."

"Then I call you the most charming of ladies," replied Hartwell, while he was thinking inwardly:

"She is certainly a fine specimen of the human mammal. Her most soft and womanly air is due, I fancy, to her hair, which is very fine, loose and light, and partly perhaps to the peachy coloring of her face, or something in the eyes, which are purple, like the violet or pansy, and are very soft in expression, though bright and spirited."

And while these thoughts of her were fluttering through his mind, Julia on her part was thinking with surprise of him: "But what is the matter? He is talking very much better than I always thought!"

And she said aloud:

"I was very sorry about the accident, James."

"'Very' is one of the strong words," he answered in a coldly playful way, smiling upon her with a patronising eye as a man of many cares and deep thought may watch something pretty play in his mood of relaxation, and still his thoughts kept running on her, dissecting her without any conscious effort, thinking: "She has a child, probably only one, a girl, under three years, for the doll on the handle-bar seems to be of cloth, it was bought en route—"

"But I was sincerely sorry," she said, in answer to his criticism of her 'very,' "you are not, please, to consider me a monster of heartlessness, for I do not think I am, then."

"You are not a monster at all," he answered, "but an excellent little human person, producing your allotted influence upon the history of life," and, as he said this, he was thinking inwardly.

She, meanwhile, was looking up at him with the most puzzled of eye-brows, for she could not believe her ears. He had called her "a little human person, producing her allotted influence—!" Was this then her rejected James? Drayton had called her "a clipper!" and she thought again with a pout, "His vulgarity must have been a pose! he is really quite nice when he chooses! I don't understand—"

"At any rate," she said aloud, "it seems pretty evident that I need not reproach myself with having broken anyone's heart."

"The wound on my head," he answered, "acted as a counter-irritant to that in my heart. The two thus tended to cure each other."

"Did, actually, cure each other, say."

"Pardon, only tended to!" he said with a sort of paternal gallantry. "The wound in the heart—remains."

"Dear me! It has lasted three eternal weeks, then."

"It can—never—be effaced."

"Is it my doing, really, that you are subdued and graver?" she asked seriously after a minute, with a side glance up at his face.

"I fear so," he answered, languidly toying with her, "the wound, you know, in the heart."

"Is it that accident?" she laughed, pleased, somehow at his pretence that her thunderbolt of dismissal had not fallen without hurting anyone, yet with a question, a doubt in her, whether her James could by any possibility be making fun of her.

"Yet, you see, I haunt your grounds," he said.

"You are only passing through to somewhere from Hobham House."

"No, I am here to be near you."

"Improbable fib. One would almost say that you were 'trying again,' James; but though the words are honeyed, the tone is bored, and the ears of widows are quick and accurate!"

"Then I must resign myself to being misunderstood."

They had come to a mansion with a Jacobean-Italian front and there they continued to talk a while on the steps of a terrace. It was suddenly so dark that he was to her only a cloaked pillar under a silk hat, and she to him something slim and dainty in a short skirt, with a ghost of white where some phlox lay on her bosom. Near Christmas, as it was, scents of Marechal Niel roses were to be detected in the air, some far-separated lights appeared in the mansion, accentuating its dreamy gloom, and the park lay silent, but for the noises made by three spaniels, which had come to meet her and were gambolling about them.

"Did you really know, then, that I had come back?" she asked.

"Let me be candid—no. I had been to Hobham House, where I am thinking of setting up a laboratory, and making the house my home."

"Did you say a laboratory?"

"Yes."

"What sort of a laboratory?"

"The laboratory of a biologist."

"For your own use, do you mean?"

"Yes."

"Then, I suppose I am dreaming, or are you Joking?"

"Is this so surprising, then?" he said: "I have always cherished an inclination for science, and finding myself at the age of thirty-eight no longer a stripling, and superfluously wealthy, I am now working hard to free myself from all business, in order to devote the remainder of my days to my inclination. I know of no heart in the world that loves me, unless it be one poor boy, to whom I have been a father, I have no ties, the rather coarse life which you have seen me live never really pleased me: so you will readily conceive why I decide to shut myself in with a mistress who will not write me a letter casting me into despair on the first rainy morning."

He could no longer see Julia's face, but there was now something more depicted there than mere astonishment. Some finger of pain and pity touched Julia's heart at this strange mixture of truth and falsehood pronounced by Hartwell, and her delicate bosom swelled a little at the birth of an instinct within her that if this man fell sick, she would like to nurse him, and if he were sad, then that would be sweet to a woman to lay her hand on his head.

"James," she said, with her eyes cast down a moment, "I am sorry, then, if I have seemed flippant."

"But I cannot permit you to be sorry," he answered. "I repeat seriously that never were your instincts so wise as when you cast me into despair, just as they were never so frivolous as when you engaged yourself to marry me. I was not half worthy of you."

"But by saying that, you make me doubt the truth of it, James. I did not, perhaps, quite know you. I'm afraid that, since I desired to disengage myself, I should have done it with rather more responsibility and—respect. I am cross with us both then. You should have made me like you better"—her dry little mouth pouted, as she said this.

"As for me, however you liked me, I like you well," said he. "You are charming, you are most beautiful, and you are also good."

And, bending to say this in a lower tone, there took place within Hartwell an event, an affection, an act of the soul, which he himself would have called "physiological," but really was no more so than a chord of music is. He somehow found her hand in his, and kissed it.

She laughed lightly, uneasily, murmuring in a soft low voice:

"No, James."

"What, have I transgressed?"

"Everybody knows that we are parted. It would be extremely absurd, really, if we are not. And we must not steal things, must we?"

"Then, I shall steal no more. Honesty is the best policy, as you say, but the hardest."

"Is it hard, really?"

"Yes."

"Frankly, it never once entered my head to take you seriously, James, to dream that you really cared, or that I did. It is very, very, very amusing! Did you really care, then?"

"No, no," he said in a new tone; "I must be serious, I see, with you and with myself. Forget my light words. I find you all too important a matter to trifle with—your dove's voice, your soft face, and all the pleasant fruit of your womanly being. Human creatures are among the paltriest of insects really, dear Lady Julia, if we consider it, but there are those of them, it seems, that have the biological property of giving out a music by merely living, as the dragon-fly's flight is accompanied by a musical sound. And such you seem to me at this moment, more admirable and important than all the crowd of suns visible to the eye on a moonless night, which delusion of mine proves to you, does it not, that my consciousness is not at this moment at its brightest. And now, moreover, I am only flirting with you, no doubt. Let not half that you hear me say be believed! This impression that I have of you is the merest passing delusion of my senses, you are no fairer and better than any other."

"Am I to be pleased, then, or vexed? Shall I laugh, or cry?" asked Julia, laughing. "I seem at last to have met a complex man! Or shall I simply remain silently astonished, with neither laughter nor tears? I assure you, that since the darkness has hidden your face I have quite the impression that you are not yourself, but another man. But come, Aunt Margaret is waiting: dinner."

"Thank you, I will, not," Hartwell said shortly. "Good-night."

He shook hands abruptly, turned, and had walked away some steps when she, after a few seconds of hesitation, called after him:

"James! I am going to fox-hunt and spend Christmas with the house party at Castle Moran—"

She said no more. He for his part, stood still, silent, tempted to be there with her, but undecided. He finally broke the silence by saying:

"I do not remember that I have an invitation."

"I will see to that. That is, if you like."

"I certainly like, but I do not think—Well, but you are very good. I must be there, then. Good-night."

Hartwell then walked on through the dark wood, making for the railway station, but going the wrong way, so that later on he had to traverse the park again. He fell at once, as he went, into the dark mood which regularly overcame him at every nightfall, and he thought within himself: "She is like a little flower on a tall stem—certainly very pleasant, very precious, very rare. The deluded arms open of themselves to embrace her—We, however, are 'married,' we have a 'wife'—Let us choose, if we can, to keep within the four corners of our British Law."

Julia, for her part, looked after him till he disappeared, amazed at herself and at him. She had liked Drayton, his rough way, his beard, his nonchalance, his frankly City-man point of view. He had once saved her life in the hunting-field, he had, moreover, appealed to her toleration, had amused and outraged her, and she had engaged herself to him mainly because that was outrageous and perverse. But there was some quality of weight, of eminence in him—he was admirable. She dropped her bicycle upon the lawn with rather a crash, and went into the house with a sigh.