The Sleeping Fury (15 page)

“Three-quarters of an hour is not very much, is it, my dearest, out of a whole lifetime?”

“Did you expect,” she asked, “that I would come to you here?”

He shook his head. “I got up and came out because I couldn't sleep. We didn't get to bed, you know, till half-past two, and I couldn't sleep then
for thinking of you. And did you expect to find me here?”

“No. And yet, when I found you, I wasn't surprised. It seemed the natural end of all that went before.”

“Yes. And I, as soon as I heard your step, knew that it must be you. How strange! Can it have been mere chance—just an accident?”

“No,” she said. The bare idea that she had been led to the most precious moment of her life by the mere stumbling of blind chance was such a cynical cheapening of him and her and all the meaning of life and love that her whole being rejected the brutal inhumanity of it. “No, my dear one, it was no accident; never believe it.”

And then, as if the realisation of the briefness of their love had cut once again across her enthralment, she asked: “When is it you go?

“I leave London on Friday morning. I shall stay to-night and to-morrow night at the Grosvenor Hotel. I have various things to settle in London before I go, and the Grosvenor, you see, is convenient for the train on Friday morning. I join my boat at Marseilles.”

“And you leave here this morning or this afternoon?

“I catch the twelve-thirty.”

“Then you start just before we do. We leave at twelve o'clock.”

Each sentence, in itself so commonplace, was charged, for them, with the tragedy of their imminent separation. Then once more they thrust the future from them and forgot all but one another.

When they thought of time again it was a quarter to nine.

“We must go, said Charlotte, and her heart withered in her breast.”

He folded her in his arms for the last time. “Goodbye, good-bye, my dearest, he said.”

“Good-bye, my only love.” Her voice had died to little more than a whisper. “I shall think of you always.”

The next three hours were, for Charlotte, like a long, troubled dream, though neither her hosts nor the other guests suspected that there was anything but calm under the calm surface which, as usual, she presented to them.”

At midday they were all assembled in the hall, Maurice Wainwright and the Mardales ready for departure. The Penningtons' car came first, to take Wainwright to the station, and he began to shake hands. Charlotte steeled herself to undergo the last terrible moment. Their farewell was over—they had separated already before breakfast in the yew-garden—but, though they had hardly spoken since, his visible presence had given her a deep and exquisite consolation. Now even that was to be taken from her. He had said good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Pennington, and was coming towards her with his hand stretched out. She half turned to meet him. The bright gold of his head shone for a moment, as when she had first set eyes on him yesterday, against the murrey-coloured curtain, and it seemed to her again that there was a vividness of life and colour in him that she had known in no one else. They shook hands in silence, and she realised afterwards that she had forgotten, in her distress, to take that last opportunity to print on her memory his face and eyes and the sense of his hand in hers; for
she did not look at him or return the pressure of his hand. She stood still and upright as a waxwork; her heart was a stone in her breast, and Alfred, glancing towards them to receive Wainwright's handshake, saw, in a fleeting glimpse, her eyes flash with tears behind her veil. The vision was so brief that he believed, the moment after, that it had been an illusion.”

A minute later Wainwright had driven away, and the Mardales were getting into their car.”

• • • • • • • •

For some miles they sat side by side in silence. It seemed to Charlotte that she had died, that with the departure of Wainwright life had left her. “But no,” she thought next moment, “I am not dead. The dead feel no pain. I am dying—slowly and painfully dying. Months hence the pain will grow less; years hence it will cease perhaps, and I shall be dead, and able once more to take life calmly and indifferently.” For a moment she longed for the years to come quickly and bring her peace; then, as she realised that she was longing for Maurice to be carried farther and farther from her, the wish died, for it seemed like treason against her love. No; short of longing to have him restored to her, she had nothing to wish for, nothing to hope for. There was nothing for her to do but to suffer.”

Alfred began to talk of casual things—the Penningtons and the Manor House, his engagements during the next day or two—and Charlotte found it a relief to listen and reply to him. Sitting beside her in the car, he could not see her face, but at luncheon he noticed how ill she was looking.”

“Did you sleep badly?” he asked. It was not unusual for him to wake in the morning and find her gone, and, when he did, he knew that she had wakened early and, being unable to sleep again, had got up.”

“Yes,” she said, I got up at a quarter to seven and went into the garden.

“We didn't get to bed till half-past two,” he said. “Old Pennington would have kept it up till half-past three if we hadn't struck.”

“Yes, Maurice told me so,” Charlotte thought to herself. Her senses, like a hollow tower long after the bell has ceased to strike, still resounded with him, and that casual phrase, re-echoed by Alfred, brought him back with enthralling vividness.”

Alfred rose from the table. “I must be off,” he said. “We have a Parish Council meeting at two-thirty. I don't suppose I shall be back before half-past six, Charlotte. I shall make various calls on the way home.”

Charlotte was glad to be alone. Telling Carson that she was not at home to callers, she took a book and went to a summer-house in a corner of the water-garden which had been laid out at the time of the building of the house. The summer-house was a little stone temple; the spaces between its pillars were closed with glass, and there was a glass door between the two central ones. Inside, there were deep wicker chairs with blue cushions and a stone table. There Charlotte knew she would be undisturbed.”

Alone for the first time since her parting from Maurice, she could at first do nothing but abandon herself to the tragic sweetness of her love. When at
last she was able to consider and reflect upon what had so suddenly and inexplicably happened to her, it seemed to her either that she was dreaming or that she had gone out of her mind. She tried to bring her reason to bear on it, to face and understand the thing; but the power which had always before enabled her to assert “I am I, and this is reality,” had deserted her. Something more than herself had invaded her, and all those familiar standards and classes—thought, feeling, sense, nonsense, good, evil, justice, duty, conscience—by which formerly she had governed her life and actions and judged of the world about her, had ceased to have their old distinct significance. Her sense of duty to Alfred and Haughton and the life she had deliberately adopted, her respect for the conventions of society, had no longer their incontrovertible authority. Her impulse now was to obey the divine power which had rapt her out of her old, dull self, for it seemed to her divine as nothing in life had been before. As for duty, her supreme duty, she felt, was to Maurice. He had given her what all her life she had craved for in vain. He loved her and longed for her, she knew, as she loved and longed for him, and yet he had asked nothing of her. It was for that very reason that she longed to devote her life to him. What was it then, she asked herself, which prevented her from going to him at once—packing a bag, ordering a car, and taking the next train to London? Considered practically like that, it appalled her. Her conventionality, her sanity, shuddered. But the divine madness in her thrilled at the contemplation of that release and self-abandonment. By a sudden instinct she
whispered a prayer: “O God, help me to know.” Then, for the first time in her life, she felt that such a prayer was absurd. The God to whom she had prayed in moments of difficulty and doubt seemed to her now a part of the cold, conventional world which in the last few hours had withered to insignificance before the fire of this new life which had blazed up in her. God, the urgent, irresistible God of reality, had already shown her the truth, and she dared not follow it. And all the while the brief, precious time was slipping away. In forty-eight hours Maurice would already have started; he would already be out of England. How agonising to think that he was still within her reach, and she not with him. A wild impulse seized her to go to him at once. Her heart rose fiercely against all the hindrances—not only her own doubts and weakness, but the physical and material barriers of time and space—which were holding her back from him. She struggled to rise from the long chair in which she was lying, and then, as if even that effort had been too much for her strength, she fell back, and, burying her face in her hands and turning her body to the wall, away from daylight and the world, burst into a paroxysm of dry, choking sobs. She did not try to check them; she resigned herself, lying on her side, her body curled up and shaken spasmodically. It was as if some hard, stubborn thing in her breast were melting.”

Soon her sobs became less violent, and then sank to long, shuddering sighs, like a storm that was dying down; and then, like the soft, quiet rain that follows the storm, her tears fell in silence.”

At last she sat up, dried her eyes, and blew her nose with the little ball of tear-soaked handkerchief. Then she rose to her feet, returned to the house, and, entering by a side-door to escape notice, went to her room and rang the bell.”

She told the maid that she might have to go away to-morrow. “Bring me my little black trunk, Mary,” she said.

In a few minutes the trunk was brought. “I shall not want you to pack,” she said to the maid. “I will do it myself.”

Then deliberately, but with no plan in mind, she packed the trunk and pushed it under the bed. When Alfred came home she would go to him in his study and tell him what had happened; and then she would tell him that she was going.”

Going? For how long? For ever? What did she expect to do after she had joined Maurice? Her mind gave her no answer to those questions. The only certain thing was that she must go to Maurice. She looked forward with weary despair to the talk with Alfred and the unutterable pain it would be for both of them. How would she find courage to inflict this monstrous cruelty on him? What would he do? If only he would be angry, and forbid her to go, it would make it easier. As she opened her bedroom door she heard the garden door shut. Could it be Alfred? She paused with her hand on the door-knob, listening. Yes, it was he; she recognised his step on the tiled floor of the passage below. Then there was silence. He would be crossing the hall, which was thickly carpeted. A moment later another door shut; he had gone into his study.”

She would go to him now. Feeling that her legs were going to sink under her, she hurried to the stairhead, down the stairs, and across the hall. When she opened his study door, he was standing at his desk putting some papers into a drawer.

“Are you busy, Alfred?” she said.

“No, my dear.” His pleasant, leisurely speech, so friendly and calm, filled her with sudden dismay.

He looked round and saw her face. “Charlotte!” His eyes and his voice were charged with anxiety. “Is something the matter?”

“I want to talk to you, Alfred.”

“Then sit down.” There was a fire in the grate, for the autumn evenings were cold. He drew up a chair for her, and she sat down.”

“I've always been honest with you, Alfred, haven't I?” she said.

“Always, my dear. I've never doubted it.”

“I want to be honest now.” Her voice failed for a moment. “I told you, when you asked me to marry you, that I was not in love with you, and had never been in love.”

He nodded his head. “Yes, Charlotte.”

“I hoped I should fall in love with you some day, Alfred; but … I didn't. And now”—her voice was no more than a whisper—“there's someone else.”

In a flash that brief vision of her tears that morning returned to him. “Maurice Wainwright,” he said. His face had gone suddenly very white and drawn, as if the flesh had shrunk back on to the bone.

“Yes,” she said. She did not ask, or even wonder, how he knew. “I had no warning, no choice. It came upon me like … like a whirlwind,” she said,
remembering Maurice's word, “the moment I met him.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes. When I got up and went out … early this morning, I went into the yew-garden to be alone, and … I found him there.”

“By … pre-arrangement?”

“No, Alfred. Up till then we had not spoken … confessed to one another. Neither of us knew we were to meet there.”

“And then you … spoke?”

“Yes. He took me in his arms, Alfred. We kissed. He asked me, when I told you, to assure you that he had not tried to attract me; that it had come to us both suddenly, like a whirlwind. You see, Alfred, he wanted you to know that he had not deliberately behaved dishonestly. It's true, Alfred.”

“I believe it.”

Charlotte bowed her head and wept. Then, controlling herself, she went on, in a thin, expressionless voice: “He starts the morning after next for Egypt.”

There was a silence. Alfred sat gazing in front of him, his face pale and drawn, his hands clasped, bending forward a little in his chair as if under the weight of his disaster.

“Alfred,” Charlotte broke out suddenly, her voice shaken by sobs, “I must go to him. I … I can't …”

Alfred went and knelt by her chair. He laid one arm round her shoulders. With his other hand he took one of hers. “There, Charlotte, my dear one, don't cry. I know you couldn't help yourself. It
was like you to come and tell me at once; I shall always remember that.”