Читать книгу Great Possessions - Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Страница 9

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Two months passed, and at last the War Office received a parcel for Lady Rose Bright. It had been sent to headquarters by the next officer in command under Sir David, who had met his own fate a few weeks later. Rose received the parcel at tea-time, brought to her by a mounted messenger from the War Office.

A great calm had settled in Rose's soul during these weeks. She had met her trouble alone and standing. At first, all had been utter darkness and bitter questioning. Then the questioning had ceased. Even the wish to have things clear to her mind and to know why she should have this particular trial was silenced, and in the completeness of submission she had come back to life and to peace. Nothing was solved, nothing made clear, but she was again in the daylight. But when she received the little parcel in its thick envelope she trembled excessively. It was addressed in a handwriting she had never seen before. She could not for some moments force herself to open it. When she did she drew out a faded photograph, a diamond ring, and a sheet of paper with writing in ink. The photograph was of Sir David as quite a young man—she had never seen it before; the ring had one very fine diamond, and that she had never seen before. On the paper was written in his own hand.—

"This will be brought to you if I die in battle. Forgive me, as you too hope to be forgiven. Justice had to be done. I have tried to make it as little painful as I could."

That was all. There was nothing else in the envelope. She took up the photograph, she took up the ring, and examined them in turn. It was so strange, this very remarkable diamond, which she had never seen before, sent to her as if it were a matter of course. He had never worn much jewellery, and he had left in her care the few seals and rings he possessed. Then the photograph of her husband as a young man, so much younger than when she had known him. Why send it to her now? What had she to do with this remote past? But the paper was the most astonishing of all. She had been standing when she undid the things; she left the ring and the photograph on the table, and she sank into a chair near the fire holding the bit of paper. The tone of it astonished and confused her. It was more the stern moralist asking to be forgiven for doing right than the guilty husband asking for mercy in her thoughts of him.

"Yes," thought Rose at length, "that is because she was his wife, and when he came to face death it was the great wrong of infidelity to her that haunted him. I must have seemed almost a partner in the wrong."

Again the confused sense of guilt seized her, the horrible possibility of having been a wife only in name. She did not weigh the matter calmly enough to feel quite as distinctly as she ought to have done that she could not be touched or denied in the faintest degree by a sin that was not her sin. Still she raised her head as she could not have done some weeks before; for the most acute phase of her trial had been faced and had been passed. Now in her moments of most bitter pain in the very depths of her soul was peace. As she became calmer she tried again to connect together those three parts of the message from the battle-field, the ring, the photograph, and the letter; but she could not do so. At last she put them away in the drawer of her bureau, and then wrote to tell her mother and the lawyer that Sir David had sent her a photograph, a ring, and a few private lines—that was all. There was no will.

Still everything had not been brought back. There had been portmanteaux sent down to Capetown, and there might yet be discovered a small despatch box, or a writing case, something or other that might hold a will. But the limit of time was reached at last; the portmanteaux and a despatch box were recovered, but they held no will.

The solicitor delayed to the last possible moment, and then the will was proved. It was published in the papers at a moment when a lull in the war gave leisure for private gossip, and the gossip accordingly raged hotly. All the sweetness, gentleness, and kindness that made Rose deservedly popular did not prevent there being two currents of opinion. There are wits so active that they cannot share the views of all right-minded people. While the majority sympathised deeply with Rose, there were a few who insinuated that she must be to some degree to blame for what had happened.

"Well, don't you know, I never could understand why she married a man so much older than herself. Of course she had not a penny and he was awfully rich, and people don't look too close into a man's character in such cases. It is rather convenient for some women to be very innocent."

Sir Edmund Grosse, to whom the remark was addressed at a small country house party, turned his back for a moment on the speaker in order to pick up a paper, and then said in a low, indifferent voice: "David Bright came into his cousin's fortune unexpectedly a year after he married Lady Rose."

The subject was dropped that time, but he met it again in somewhat the same terms in London. There seemed a sort of vague impression that Lady Rose had married for the sake of the wealth she had lost. Also at his club there was talk he did not like, not against Rose indeed, but dwelling on the other side of the story, and he hated to hear Rose's name connected with it. People forgot his relationship, and after all he was only a second cousin.

Edmund Grosse was at this time just over forty. He was a tall, loosely built man, with rather a colourless face, with an expression negative in repose, and faintly humorous when speaking. He was rich and supposed to be lazy; he knew his world and had lived it in and for it systematically. Some one had said that he took all the frivolous things of life seriously and all the serious things frivolously. He could advise on the choice of a hotel or a motor-car with intense earnestness, and he had healed more than one matrimonial breach that threatened to become tragic by appealing to the sense of humour in both parties. He never took for granted that anybody was very good or very bad. The best women possible liked him, and looked sorry and incredulous when they were informed by his enemies that he had no morals. He had never told any one that he was sad and bored. Nor had he ever thought it worth while to mention that he had indifferent health and knew what it was to suffer pain. If such personal points were ever approached by his friends they found that he did not dwell upon them. He had the air of not being much interested in himself.

For a long time he had felt no acute sensations of any kind; he had believed them to belong to youth and that was past. But that matter of David Bright's will had stirred him to the very depths. He spent solitary hours in cursing the departed hero, and people found him tiresome and taciturn in company.

At last he determined to meddle in Rose's concerns, and he went to see Mr. Murray, Junior, at his office. There ensued some pretty plain speaking as to the late hero between the two men. Edmund Grosse half drawled out far the worst comments of the two; he liked the lawyer and let himself speak freely. And although the visit was apparently wholly unproductive of other results, it was a decided relief to his feelings. Then he heard that Rose had come back to London, and he went to see her. It was about nine months since she had become a widow. She was alone in the big beautifully furnished drawing-room, which was just as of old. Except that a neat maid had opened the door, instead of a butler, he saw no change.

Rose looked a little nervous for a moment, and then frankly pleased to see him. Edmund always had a talent for seeming to be as natural in any house as if he were the husband or the brother or part of the furniture. Somehow, as Rose gave him tea and they settled into a chat, she felt as if he had been there very often lately, whereas in fact she had not seen him since David died, except at the memorial service. He began to tell her what visits he had paid, whom he had seen, the little gossip he expressed so well in his gentle, sleepy voice; and then he drew her on as to her own interests, her charities, her work for the soldiers' wives. He said nothing more that day, but he dropped in again soon, and then again.

At last one evening he observed quite quietly, in a pause in their talk: "So you live here on £800 a year?"

Rose did not feel annoyed, though she did not know why she was not angry.

"Yes, I can manage," she said simply.

"You can't tell yet; it's too soon." He got up out of his low chair near the fireplace, now filled with plants, and stood with his back against the chimney. "You know it's absurd," he said. Rose moved uneasily and was silent.

"It's absurd," he repeated, "there's another will somewhere. David would never have done that." He struck that note at the start, and cursed David all the deeper in the depths of his diplomatic soul. Rose looked at him gratefully, kindly.

"I think there is another will somewhere," she said, "but I am sure it will never be found. It's no use to think or talk of it, Edmund."

He fidgeted for a moment with the china on the chimney-piece.

"For 'auld lang syne,' Rose," he said in a very low voice, "and because you might possibly, just possibly, have made something of me if you had chosen, let me know a little more about it. I want to see what was in his last letter."

Rose flushed deeply. It was difficult to say why she yielded except that most people did yield to Grosse if he got them alone. She drew off the third finger of her left hand a very remarkable diamond ring and gave it to him. Then she took out of a drawer a faded photograph of a young, commonplace, open-faced officer, now framed in an exquisite stamped leather case, and handed that to him also. He saw that she hesitated.

"May I have the rest," he said very gently. Even her mother had never seen the piece of paper. No, she could not show that. Edmund did not insist further, and a moment later he seemed to have forgotten that she had not given him what he asked for.

"Did he often wear this ring?"

"Never. I never saw it till now, and I had never seen the photograph."

"It was taken in India," he commented, "and the ring has a date twenty years ago."

"I never noticed that," said Rose. She was feeling half consciously soothed and relieved as a child might feel comforted who had found a companion in a room that was haunted.

"Things from such a remote past," he murmured abstractedly. "Did he explain in writing why he sent those things?"

"No, he said nothing about them, he only——" she paused. Edmund did not move, and in a few moments she gave him the paper. He ground his teeth as he read it, he grew white about the lips, but he said nothing. He was horribly disappointed—the scoundrel asked for forgiveness. Then he had not made another will. Edmund did not look round at Rose, but she was acutely present to his consciousness—the woman's beauty, the child's innocence, the suffering and the strength in her face. "As you would be forgiven!" That was a further insult, it seemed to him. To talk of Rose wanting forgiveness. Then a strange kind of sarcasm took hold of him. So it was; she had not been able to believe in himself; he, Edmund, had not been ideal in any sense. Therefore she had passed him by, and then a hero had come whom she had worshipped, and this was the end of it. Every word in the paper burnt into him. "Justice"—how dared he? "Made it as little painful as he could"—it was insufferable, and the coward was beyond reach, had taken refuge whither human vengeance could not follow him.

He succeeded in leaving Rose's house without betraying his feelings, but he felt that no good had come of this attempt, so far at any rate. That night he slept badly, which he did pretty often, but he experienced an unusual sensation on waking. He felt as if he had been working hard and in vain all night at a problem, and he suddenly said to himself, "The ring, the photograph, and the paper were of course meant for the other woman, and she has got whatever was meant for Rose. Now if the thing that was meant for Rose was the will, Madame Danterre has got it now unless she has had the nerve to destroy it." He felt as if he had been an ass till this moment. Then he went to see Mr. Murray, Junior, who listened with profound attention until he had finished what he had to tell him.

"Lady Rose has allowed you to see the paper, then?" he said at last. "She has not even shown it to Lady Charlton. He asked her pardon," he mused, half to himself, "and said justice must be done. I am afraid, Sir Edmund, that that points in the same direction as our worst fears—that Madame Danterre was his wife."

"But he would not have written such a letter as that to Rose; it is impossible. 'Forgive as you too hope to be forgiven.' That sentence in connection with Lady Rose is positively grotesque, whereas it would be most fitting when addressed elsewhere."

Mr. Murray could not see the case in the same light as Edmund. He allowed the possibility of the scrap of paper and the ring having been sent to Rose by mistake, but he was not inclined to indulge in what seemed to him to be guesswork as to what conceivably had been intended to be sent to her in place of them.

"There is, too," he argued, "a quite possible interpretation of the words of that scrap of paper. It is possible that he was full of remorse for his treatment of Madame Danterre. Sometimes a man is haunted by wrong-doing in the past until it prevents his understanding the point of view of anybody but the victim of the old haunting sin. Remorse is very exclusive, Sir Edmund. In such a state of mind he would hardly think of Lady Rose enough to realise the bearing of his words. 'Forgive as you too hope to be forgiven' would be an appeal wrung out from him by sheer suffering. It is a possible cry from any human being to another. Then as to the ring and the photograph, we have no proof that he put them in the envelope. They may have been found on him and put into the envelope by the same hand that addressed it. I quite grant you that those few words are extraordinary, but they can be explained. But even if it were obvious that they were intended for somebody else, you cannot deduce from that, that another letter, intended for Lady Rose and containing a will, was sent elsewhere."

But Sir Edmund was obstinate. The piece of paper had been intended for Madame Danterre, together with the ring and the photograph—things belonging to Sir David's early life, to the days when he most probably loved this other woman; he even went so far as to maintain that the lady in Florence had given Sir David the ring.

"After all," said Mr. Murray, "what can you do? You could only raise hopes that won't be fulfilled."

"I think myself that my explanation would calm my cousin's mind; the possibility that she was not Sir David's wife is, I am convinced, the most painful part of the trial to her. I shall write it to her, but I shall also tell her that there is no hope whatever of proving what I believe to be the truth."

"None at all; do impress that upon her, Sir Edmund. We have nothing to begin upon. The officer who sent the paper to headquarters is dead; Sir David's own servant is dead; Sir David's will in favour of Madame Danterre has been published without even a protest."

"Lady Rose will not be inclined to raise the question."

"No, I believe that is true," said the lawyer; "Lady Rose Bright is a wise woman."

But Mr. Murray was annoyed to find that Edmund Grosse was far less wise, and that whatever he might promise to say to Rose he would not really be content to leave things alone. He intended to go to Florence and to get into touch with Madame Danterre. Such interference could do no good, and it might do harm.

"I won't alarm her," said Edmund, "believe me, she will have no reason to suppose that I am in Florence on her account. I am, in any case, going to the Italian lakes this autumn, and I have often been offered the loan of a flat overlooking the Arno. If the offer is still open I shall accept it. I have long wished to know that fascinating town a little better."

When Rose received the letter from Edmund it had the effect he had expected. It was simply calming, not exciting. Rose was even more anxious than the lawyer that nothing should be attempted in order to follow up her cousin's suggestion. But she could now let her imagination be comforted by Edmund's solution of the mystery, and let her fancy rest in the thought of a very different letter intended for herself. The words on that scrap of paper no longer burnt with such agony into her soul, and she no longer felt it a dreadful duty to wear the ring with its glorious stone so full of light, an object that was to her intensely repugnant. She would put it away, and with it all dark and morbid thoughts. She had a life to lead, thoughts to think, actions to do, and all that was in her own control must escape from the shadow of the past into a working daylight.