Читать книгу The New Abelard (Vol. 1-3) - Robert Williams Buchanan - Страница 15

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Ay me, I sowed a seed in youth,

Nor knew that ’twas a dragon’s tooth,

Whereof has sprung to bring me shame

Legions of woe without a name.—Fausticulus.

The brougham passed rapidly up Wellington Street into Long Acre, thence into Oxford Street, passing westward till it came to Regent Circus, then it was driven up Portland Place to the gates of Regent’s Park. It entered, and the hansom followed about fifty yards behind. Passing to the left around the park, it reached Cranwell Terrace, and drew up before one of the large houses fronting the artificial water.

The hansom paused too, but Bradley kept his seat until he saw the lady and her companion alight, knock at the door, and enter in; while the brougham drove round to the stables at the rear. Then he sprang out, paid the man his sovereign, and prepared to follow.

For a moment he hesitated on the steps of the house, as if undecided whether to knock or fly; but recovering his determination he knocked loudly. The sound had scarcely died away when the door was opened by the same elderly woman he had noticed at the theatre.

‘Mrs. Montmorency?’ he said, for he had got the name by heart.

The woman looked at him in surprise, and answered with a strong French accent.

‘Madame has only just come in, and you cannot see her to-night.’

‘I must see her,’ returned the clergyman, entering the hall. ‘It is a matter of very important business.’

‘But it is so late. To-morrow, monsieur?’

‘To-morrow I am leaving London. I must see her at once.’

Seeing his persistence, and observing that he had the manners of a gentleman, the woman yielded.

‘If you will step this way, I will tell madame, but I am afraid she will not see you.’

So saying she led the way into a room on the ground floor, furnished splendidly as a kind of study, and communicating with a small dining room, which in its turn led to a large conservatory.

‘Your name, monsieur, if you please?’ said the woman.

‘My name is of no consequence—perhaps your mistress would not remember it. Tell her simply that a gentleman wishes to see her on very important business.’

With another look of wonder, the woman withdrew.

Still dreadfully pale and agitated, Bradley surveyed the apartment. It was furnished oddly, but with a perfect disregard of expense. A gorgeous Turkey carpet covered the floor; the curtains were of black-and-gold tapestry, the chairs of gold and crimson. In a recess, close to the window, was an elegant ormolu writing-desk, surmounted by a small marble statue, representing a young maid just emerging from the bath. Copies of well-known pictures covered the walls, but one picture was a genuine Etty, representing Diana and her virgins surprised by Actæon. Over the mantelpiece, which was strewn with golden and silver ornaments, and several photographs in frames, was a copy of Titian’s Venus, very admirably coloured.

To the inexperienced mind of the clergyman, ill acquainted with a certain phase of society, the pictures seemed sinister, almost diabolic. The room, moreover, was full of a certain sickly scent like patchouli, as if some perfumed creature had just passed through it leaving the scent behind.

He drew near the mantelpiece and looked at the photographs. Several of them he failed to recognise, though they represented women well known in the theatrical world; but in one he recognised the elderly gentleman with the eyeglass whom he had seen at the theatre, in another the little boy, and in two the mistress of the house herself. In one of the two last she was represented semi-nude, in the spangled trunks, flesh-coloured tights, and high-heeled boots of some fairy prince.

He was gazing at this photograph in horror, when he heard the rustle of a dress behind him. Turning quickly, he found himself face to face with the woman he sought.

The moment their eyes met, she uttered a sharp cry and went even more pale than usual, if that were possible. As she recoiled before him, he thought she did so in fear, but he was mistaken. All she did was to move to the door, peep out into the lobby, then, closing the door rapidly, she faced him again.

The expression of her face was curious to behold. It was a strange mixture of devilry and effrontery. She wore the dress she had worn in the theatre—her arms, neck, and bosom were still naked and covered with diamonds; and her eyes flashed with a beautiful but forbidding light.

‘So it is you!’ she said in a low voice. ‘At last!’

He stood before her like a man of marble, livid, ghastly, unable to speak, but surveying her with eyes of infinite despair. The sickly scent he had noticed in the room clung about her, and filled the air he was breathing.

There was a long silence. At last, unable any longer to bear his steadfast gaze, she laughed sharply, and, tripping across the room, threw herself in a chair.

‘Well?’ she said, looking up at him with a wicked smile.

His predominant thought then found a broken utterance.

‘It is true, then!—and I believed you dead!’

‘No doubt,’ she answered, showing her white teeth maliciously, ‘and you are doubtless very sorry to find yourself mistaken. No, I am very much alive, as you see. I would gladly have died to oblige you, but it was impossible, mon cher. But won’t you take a seat? We can talk as well sitting as standing, and I am very tired.’

Almost involuntarily, he obeyed her, and taking a chair sat down, still with his wild eyes fixed upon her face.

‘My God!’ he murmured. ‘And you are still the same, after all these years.’

She leant back in her chair, surveying him critically. It was obvious that her light manner concealed a certain dread of him; for her bare bosom rose and fell quickly, and her breath came in short sharp pants.

‘And you, my dear Ambrose, are not much changed—a little older, of course, for you were only a foolish boy then, but still very much the same. I suppose, by your clerical necktie, that you have gone into the Church? Have you got on well? I am sure I hope so, with all my heart; and I always said you were cut out for that kind of life.’

He listened to her like one listening to some evil spirit in a dream. It was difficult for him to believe the evidence of his own senses. He had been so certain that the woman was dead and buried past recall!

‘How did you find me out?’ she asked.

‘I saw you at the theatre, and followed you home.’

‘Eh bien!’ she exclaimed, with a very doubtful French pronunciation. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘Want with you?’ he repeated. ‘My God! Nothing!’

She laughed again, flashing her teeth and eyes. Then springing up, she approached a small table, and took up a large box of cigarettes. Her white hand trembled violently.

‘Can I offer you a cigarette?’ she said, glancing at him over her naked shoulder.

‘No, no!’

‘With your permission I will light one myself!’ she said, striking a wax match and suiting the action to the word. Then holding the cigarette daintily between her white teeth, she again sat down facing him. ‘Well, I am glad you have not come to make a scene. It is too late for that. We agreed to part long ago, and it was all for the best.’

‘You left me,’ he answered in a hollow voice.

‘Just so,’ she replied, watching the thin cloud of smoke as it wreathed from her lips. ‘I left you because I saw we could never get along together. It was a stupid thing of us to marry, but it would have been a still stupider thing to remain tied together like two galley-slaves. I was not the little innocent fool you supposed me, and you were not the swell I at first imagined; so we were both taken in. I went to India with young St. Clare, and after he left me I was very ill, and a report, which I did not contradict, got into the papers that I had died. I went on the stage out there under an assumed name, and some years ago returned to England.’

‘And now,’ he asked with more decision than he had yet shown, ‘how are you living?’

She smiled maliciously.

‘Why do you want to know?’

He rose and stood frowning over her, and despite her assumed sang-froid she looked a little alarmed.

‘Because, when all is said and done, I am your husband! Whatever you now call yourself, you are the same Mary Goodwin whom I married at Oxford ten years ago, and the tie which links us together has never been legally broken. Yet I find you here, living in luxury, and I suppose in infamy. Who pays for it all? Who is your present victim?’

With an impatient gesture and a flash of her white teeth she threw her cigarette into the fire, and rose up before him trembling, with fear, or anger.

‘So you have found your tongue at last!’ she said. ‘Do you think I am afraid of you? No, I defy you! This is my house, and if you are not civil I will have you turned out of it. Bah! it is like you to come threatening me, at the eleventh hour.’

Her petulant rage did not deceive him; it was only a mask hastily assumed to conceal her growing alarm.

‘Answer my question, Mary!—how are you living?’

‘Sit down quietly, and I will tell you.’

He obeyed her, covering his eyes with his hand. She watched him for a moment; then, reassured by his subdued manner, she proceeded.

‘I am not sure that I ought to tell you, but I dare say you would find out. Lord Ombermere——’

‘Lord Ombermere!’ echoed the clergyman. ‘Why, to my knowledge, he has a wife—and children.’

She shrugged her white shoulders, with a little grimace.

‘That is his affair, not mine,’ she said. ‘For the rest, I know the fact, and never trouble myself about it. He is very good to me, and awfully rich. I have all I want. He sent me to France and had me taught French and music; and he has settled a competence upon our boy. That is how the matter stands. I do pretty much as I like, but if Eustace knew I had a husband actually living he would make a scene, and perhaps we should have to part.’

‘Is it possible?—and—and are you happy?’

‘Perfectly,’ was the cool reply.

Bradley paced up and down the chamber in agitation.

‘Such a life is an infamy,’ he at last exclaimed. ‘It is an offence against man and God.’

‘I know all that cant, and I suppose you speak as a clergyman; but I do my duty by the man who keeps me, and never—like some I could name—have intrigues with other men. It wouldn’t be fair, and it wouldn’t pay. I hope,’ she added, as if struck suddenly by the thought, ‘you have not come here to-night imagining I shall return to you?’ He recoiled as if from a blow.

‘Return to me? God forbid!’

‘So say I, though you might put it a little more politely. By the way, I forgot to ask you—but perhaps you yourself have married again?’

The question came suddenly like a stab. Bradley started in fresh horror, holding his hand upon his heart. She exclaimed:—

‘You might have done so, you know, thinking me food for worms, and if such were the case you may be sure I should never have betrayed you. No; “live and let live” is my motto. I am not such a fool as to suppose you have never looked at another woman; and if you had consoled yourself, taking some nice, pretty, quiet, homely creature, fit to be a clergyman’s wife, to mend his stockings, and to visit the sick with rolls of flannel and bottles of beef-tea, I should have thought you had acted like a sensible man.’

It was too horrible. He felt stifled, asphyxiated. He had never before encountered such a woman, though their name is legion in all the Babylons, and he could not understand her. With a deep frown he rose to his feet.

‘Are you going?’ she cried. ‘Pray don’t, till we understand each other!’

He turned and fixed his eyes despairingly upon her, looking so worn, so miserable, that even her hard heart was touched.

‘Try to think I am really dead,’ she said, ‘and it will be all right. I have changed both my life and my name, and no one of my old friends knows me. I don’t act. Eustace wanted to take a theatre for me, but, after all, I prefer idleness to work, and I am not likely to reappear. I have no acquaintances out of theatrical circles, where I am known only as Mrs. Montmorency. So you see there is no danger, mon cher. Let me alone, and I shall let you alone. You can marry again whenever you like.’

Again she touched that cruel chord, and again he seemed like a man stabbed.

‘Marry?’ he echoed. ‘But I am not free! You are still my wife.’

‘I deny it,’ was the answer. ‘We are divorced; I divorced myself. It is just the same as if we had gone before the judge: a course you will surely never adopt, for it would disgrace you terribly and ruin me, perhaps.

Eustace is horribly proud, and if it should all come out about his keeping me, he would never forgive me. No, no, you’ll never be such a fool!’

Yet she watched him eagerly, as if anxious for some assurance that he would not draw her into the open daylight of a legal prosecution.

He answered her, as if following her own wild thoughts—

‘Why should I spare you? Why should I drag on my lifetime, tied by the law to a shameless woman? Why should I keep your secret and countenance your infamy? Do you take me for one of those men who have no souls, no consciences, no honour? Do you think that I will bear the horror of a guilty secret, now I know that you live, and that God has not been merciful enough to rid me of such a curse?’

It was the first time he had seemed really violent. In his pain he almost touched her with his clenched hand.

‘You had better not strike me!’ she said viciously.

At this moment the door opened, and a little boy (the same Bradley had seen at the theatre) ran eagerly in. He was dressed in a suit of black velvet, with bows of coloured ribbon, and, though he was pale and evidently delicate, he looked charmingly innocent and pretty.

‘Maman! maman!’ he cried in French.

She returned angrily, answering him in the same tongue—

‘Que cherchez-vous, Bébé? Allez-vous en!’

‘Maman, je viens vous souhaiter la bonne nuit!

‘Allez, allez,’ she replied impatiently, ‘je viendrai vous baiser quand vous serez couché.’

With a wondering look at the stranger the child ran from the room.

The interruption seemed to have calmed them both. There was a brief silence, during which Bradley gazed drearily at the door through which the child had vanished, and his companion seemed lost in thought.

The time has perhaps come to explain that, if this worldly and sin-stained woman had one redeeming virtue, it was love for her little boy. True, she showed it strangely, being subject to curious aberrations of mood. The child was secretly afraid of her. Sometimes she would turn upon him, for some trivial fault, with violent passion; the next moment she would cover him with kisses and load him with toys. In her heart she adored him; indeed, he was the only thing in the world that she felt to be her own. She knew how terribly his birth, when he grew up, would tell against his chances in life, and she had so managed matters that Lord Ombermere had settled a large sum of money unconditionally upon the child; which money was already invested for him, in his mother’s name, in substantial Government securities. Her own relation with Ombermere, I may remark in passing, was a curious one. Whenever he was in London, his lordship dropped in every afternoon at about four, as ‘Mr. Montmorency’; he took a cup of tea in company with mother and child; at a quarter to six precisely he looked at his watch and rose to go; and at seven he was dining in Bentinck Square, surrounded by his legal children, and faced by his lady. Personally, he was a mild, pale man, without intelligence or conversational powers of any kind, and ‘Mrs. Montmorency’ found his company exceedingly tedious and tame.

‘You see my position,’ said Mrs. Montmorency at last. ‘If you have no consideration for me, perhaps you will have some for my boy.’

The clergyman sighed, and looked at her as if dazed.

‘I must think it over,’ he said. ‘All this has come as a terrible shock upon me.’

‘Shall I see you again?’

‘God knows!’

‘If you should call, never do so between four and six; those are Eustace’s hours. I am generally in during the evening, unless I go to the theatre. Good night!’

And with the ghost of a smile she extended her hand. He took it vacantly, and held it limply for a moment. Then he dropped it with another sigh, and went to the door, which he opened. Turning on the threshold, he saw her standing in the centre of the room, pale, beautiful, and baleful. She smiled again, flashing her eyes and showing her white teeth. With a shudder that went through all his frame, he passed out into the silent street.

It was now very late, and the Park lay still and sleeping under the dim light of the moon. From time to time a carriage passed by, but the pavement was quite deserted. Full of what he had seen, with the eyes of his soul turned inward to the horrible reflection, he wandered slowly along, his footfalls sounding hollow and ominous on the footpath, as he went.

Instinctively, but almost unreflectingly, he took the direction of his hotel; passed out of the park and into Harley Street, thence across Cavendish Square to Regent Circus.

It seemed now to him as if his fate was sealed. God, in indignation at his revolt, meant to deal him full measure. Attacked on one side by the thunders of the Church, and tormented on the other by the ghost of his own youthful folly, where was he to find firm foothold for his feet? His one comfort in the strenuousness of his intellectual strife had been the sympathy and devotion of a woman who was now surely lost to him for ever; a woman who, compared to this frightful apparition of a dead past, was a very spirit of heaven. Yes, he loved an angel—an angel who would have redeemed him; and lo! in the very hour of his hope, his life was to be possessed by an incarnate devil.

His thoughts travelled back to the past.

He thought of the time when he had first known Mary Goodwin. He was a youth at Oxford, and she was the daughter of a small tradesman. She was very pretty and modest-looking in those days; though she knew the world well, and the worst side of it, she seemed to know it very little. His boy’s heart went out to her beauty, and he became entangled in an amour which he thought a seduction; she played her part prettily, with no lack of tears, so that, although he already knew that his first wild fancy was not love, he married her.

Afterwards his eyes were opened. The tender looking, mild-spoken, black-eyed little beauty showed that she had been only acting a part. As their marriage was a secret one, and they could not live together, she resided in the town, and was left a good deal to herself. Once or twice whispers came to his ears that he did not like, and he remonstrated with her; she answered violently, in such terms as opened his eyes still wider to her character. She was exorbitant in her demands for money, and she dressed gorgeously, in execrable taste. When his supplies fell short, as was inevitable, she was still well provided; and he accepted her statement that the supplementary sums came from her father. Once, coming upon her one evening unexpectedly, he found her hysterical and much the worse for liquor: empty champagne bottles and glasses were lying on the table, and the room was full of the scent of tobacco smoke. He discovered that two men of his own college had been calling upon her. A scene ensued, which was only one of many. I have no intention, however, of going into all the wretched details of what is a very common story; but it is sufficient to say that Bradley discovered himself tied miserably to a creature without honour, without education, without virtue, sometimes without decency. Nevertheless he did not cast her out or expose her, but during the Vacation took her with him to London, trying hard to reclaim her. It was while they were stopping there that she relieved him of all further suspense by walking off one day with all his ready cash, and joining an officer whose acquaintance she had made by accident in the open street. Bradley searched for her everywhere without success. It was not for many weeks afterwards that he received a line from her, addressed from Gibraltar, telling him that she was en route for India, and that she had no wish either to see him or to hear from him again.

So she disappeared from his life, and when the report of her death reached him he was touched, but secretly relieved. Few even of his own personal friends knew much of this chapter of his experience: he had been wise enough to keep his actual marriage to the woman as dark as possible. So he entered the Church a free man, and purer than most men in having only one unfortunate record, throughout which he had acted honourably, on his conscience.

And now, after all those years, she had arisen from the grave! At the very moment when he was most threatened with other perils, of body and of soul, and when his place in the world of work and duty was most insecure, she had appeared, to drive him to despair! He had been so certain that she had passed away, with all her sins, that she had become in time almost a sad sweet memory, of one more sinned against than sinning. And all the time she had been roaming up and down the earth, painted and dissolute, cruel and predatory—no longer a reckless girl, but a cold, calculating woman, with all the audacity of her experience.

But she was worse, he thought; she, in her splendour of wealth and mature beauty, was infinitely fouler. How calmly she wore her infamy! how lightly she trafficked with him for his silence, for his complicity! Unconscious of her own monstrosity, she dared to bargain with him—her husband—a priest of Christ!

Let those who sympathise with Bradley in his despair beware of sharing his revengeful thoughts. In simple fact, the woman was rising, not falling; her life, bad as it was from certain points of view, was still a certain advance upon what it once had been—was certainly a purer and an honester life than that of many men; than that, for example, of the honoured member of the aristocracy who paid her bills. She was faithful to this man, and her one dream was to secure comfort and security for her child. She had never loved Bradley, and had never pretended to love him. She did not wish to bring him any unhappiness. She had, as she expressed it, divorced herself, and, according to her conceptions of morality, she owed him no obligation.

But the more he thought of her and of the fatality of her resurrection, the more his whole soul arose in hate against her.

Of course there was one way which led to liberty, the one which she had implored him not to take. The law could doubtless at once grant him a formal divorce from the woman; but this could not be done without publicity, from which his soul shrank in horror. He pictured to himself how his adversaries would exult on seeing his name dragged through the mud! No; come what might, he would never think of that!

I cannot follow either his spiritual or his bodily wanderings any further at present. He walked the night away, not returning to his hotel until early dawn, when, pale, dishevelled, and wild, like a man after a night’s dissipation (as, indeed, he seemed to the waiter, whose experience of clergymen on town visits was not small), he called for his hand-bag, had a hasty wash, and crept away to take the morning train.