The Sleeping Fury (16 page)

They remained for a while silent and motionless, he still kneeling by her chair and holding her hand. “Listen,” he said at last. “You stay here, and I'll go out for a while. You see, it has been rather unexpected for me, hasn't it?” He tried to smile, as though what he had said had something comical in it. “And I want to think for a little.”

He got on to his feet, stooped as if he were about to kiss her; then, as if remembering, checked himself and went slowly out of the room.”

Alfred went out into the garden. It was already twilight. The flat grey shapes of trees and shrubs stood like thin screens upon the grey desert of the lawn. Pools of pale green sky shone coldly behind the topmost branches of the highest trees, and the clear, cold depths of the zenith were beginning to crystallise into remote, faintly visible stars. He took a narrow path which wound among shrubs where he knew there was a garden seat, and when he reached the seat he dropped into it and remained for some time motionless in body and mind, withdrawn into the innermost chamber of his being which was the temple of his God. He did not pray in the sense that he uttered verbal requests; such prayer, for him, belonged only to the public worship of the church. Personal prayer, for Alfred, was to stand in the presence of God and absorb strength and health, like a tree in the sunlight. So he prayed, sitting in the twilight on the garden seat, until the cries of his suffering self grew quiet in the divine serenity. Only then did he dare to consider what had happened.”

When his thoughts turned again to Charlotte, he knew that his faith in her was unshaken. He believed what she had told him—that neither she nor Wain-wright had provoked the conflagration. Charlotte was not frivolous; she was serious-minded, self-controlled,
and generous. For this reason he realised, against his own hopes, that this sudden passion of hers was no mere feverish fancy, but a fact of deep significance. Alfred was one of those rare beings, a truly humble man. His humility originated, not in fear and self-depreciation, but in unselfishness and love of mankind. He had never ceased to be grateful to Charlotte for giving him all she could give. She had held nobly to her bargain through the years of their life together. He had hoped that she might at last come to love him as he loved her, but when he had realised that this hope was not to be fulfilled, he had not been embittered. He had never been one to reckon life in terms of his losses. For him life was a positive, not a negative, thing; he counted his gains and enjoyed them thankfully. Charlotte's affectionate friendship was very precious to him; it had brought him more happiness than love brought to many men, for he had a greater capacity than most men for happiness. It had become a part of him, and could never be taken from him, even if their life together were now at an end. To this day he loved Charlotte as he had always loved her, and at the thought that he might be on the point of losing her now his strength for the moment broke down under a great wave of despair that for a while held him engulfed. For a while he sat there, wholly given up to grief, and then again serenity returned to him. It never entered his mind to try to prevent her going, to remind her of her marriage-vow and her duty to him, to his position as Rector of Templeton and to his family honour. To hold her against her will would have seemed to him a sin so monstrously
inhuman that all else would have seemed insignificant beside it. The bonds of love were, for him, the only bonds permissible in all human affairs. And yet to imagine her with Wainwright, lavishing upon him all the love he himself had so longed for, was for him the most exquisite agony. Yes, he was jealous of Wainwright—he admitted that to himself. But it was not a personal jealousy; in no corner of his heart did he wish Wainwright harm. He had liked and admired him when he met him, and he liked and admired him still. But that she should be ready to leave him and rush to a stranger, that all their years of friendship should count for nothing—gone suddenly like the flame of a blown-out candle—cut him to the heart. But was it gone? Possibly, probably, he reflected, Charlotte's affection for him was as great as ever, in spite of her love for Wainwright. He had been assuming, he found, that her old feeling for him had died. The discovery of that mistake warmed his heart. Something, at least, remained to him. He stood up and stretched himself. It was useless to think any longer. His mind was clear now as to what he must do. The clock on the mantelpiece struck seven as he opened the study door. A small lamp was burning on the writing-table. He found Charlotte as he had left her, lying back in the chair beside the fire. She scanned his face anxiously as he came towards her. “Where did you go?” she asked. “Into the garden? I searched the house for you. There was so much I ought to have said before I let you go. Can you believe, Alfred, after what I have told you, that I still love you as much as ever I did, and that our life together
is as precious to me now as ever? And yet it's true; I assure you from the bottom of my heart that it's true. What a cruel, selfish wretch I must seem to you; and yet, if you could see into my heart, I know you would understand.”

“I do understand, my Charlotte; never fear. I understand, and I believe in you as much as ever I did. And remember this: whatever happens, whatever you choose to do, I shall never for one moment think unkindly of you. I owe you too much happiness for that to be possible. So if you feel you must go to him, Charlotte, you must go. When … when will it be? To-morrow?”

“Yes, to-morrow morning,” she said in a dry, toneless voice. “I must catch the ten-twenty. I will write to you immediately, Alfred—directly I have seen him. No one need know anything for the present, need they?”

He shook his head. “No. You have gone to London; that's all. Oh, Charlotte, if only we could have had children!”

She raised her tear-stained face and looked at him.”

“Yes. Then I couldn't have done this.”

He took her arm. “Come, my dear. We must go and get ready for dinner.”

He helped her to rise from her chair. Then, as they stood together, she grasped his arms and laid her face against his breast.”

“My poor dear,” she murmured. “How terrible it is. I never imagined such things could happen. It has almost seemed, when I've thought of it through these last twenty-four hours, that I must have gone mad. But I'm not mad, Alfred.”

“No, my dear.”

“I almost wish I were,” she added with a deep sigh.

Arm in arm they went upstairs together.

Lord Mardale, standing in his study, heard the sound of the departing motor and then the sound of Carson shutting the front door. Charlotte had said good-bye to him in the study, and he had not, as he generally did, gone to see her off at the front door, for he had not dared to trust himself in the presence of Carson and the chauffeur. Charlotte, raising her veil and displaying a deathlike face, had kissed him twice.

“Remember, my Charlotte,” he had said to her, “that if ever you wish to return, no matter when and no matter what has happened, I shall always be waiting for you.”

She had not been able to reply by more than a small inarticulate sound, and, lowering her veil, had hurried out without a word, shutting the door behind her. Now it was all over; she had gone. The heavy thud of the closing front door seemed to him to betray the immense emptiness of the house and of his own heart. There was nothing for him to do now but to bear up as well as he could and to occupy himself as much as possible with parish work and the business of the estate. As for the future, he had not yet begun to think of that. Had Charlotte left him for ever? He did not know. He had asked her no questions, and she had told him nothing except that she would write to him. Probably, he thought, she
had no plan in her mind beyond the resolve to rush to Wainwright. Ah, if only she would come back? The mere thought was balm to his heart. But it was foolish to tease himself by imagining what would never happen. She was gone. That final kiss was the last time he would ever touch her; the bloodless face over which she had lowered her veil had been his last sight of her.

With a heavy sigh he turned to his desk, and for brief intervals throughout the day he succeeded in concentrating his mind on his work. Then the shadow of his misery would loom up once more and the load descend upon him, and the weary struggle to thrust it from him would begin again. So the day passed, like a slow nightmare.

In the evening, tired out by the struggle, he sat idle before his study fire in the chair he had drawn up for her the night before. His feelings had grown numbed now; he could suffer no more; and his mind, freed from the load that clogged it, began to work feverishly, as if of its own accord. Details and side-issues involved in Charlotte's flight, to all of which his grief had blinded him at first, leapt up now and tormented him with their mad dance. If she did not return, her flight would become public knowledge. The servants, the parish, all his friends and acquaintances, would know. How would he be able to bear the disgrace? Those who knew him and liked him would pity him and blame her. His heart sank. That would be almost worse than if they blamed him, for she was a part of him, body and soul, and whatever touched her, touched him. And he would have to leave Haughton. To go on living
there alone would be unendurable; the place was too full of her. He would close the house, and go to live at Templeton Rectory with his curate. If only his mother were alive. … But next moment he thanked God for her sake that she was not. How terribly this would have hurt her! And Charlotte, too; her favourite! It was the first time that anything of the kind had happened in the Halnaker family. The Halnakers had always prided themselves on being irreproachable, and Alfred himself shared that pride. It was, for him, as it had been for all of them, their duty to be irreproachable, for it was the unique justification of an aristocracy that it should be nobler-hearted and nobler-minded than the rest. But was not Charlotte noble in heart and mind? Did he not still, in spite of what had happened, believe in her? Yes. He had told her so yesterday. How glad he was now that he had told her! His thoughts returned to his mother. If she could have seen into Charlotte's heart, she, certainly, would have understood. But the outside world cannot see into a human heart; friends, parishioners, servants, would never understand. What then? Are we to behave so as not to be misunderstood, or to act as our hearts and souls prompt us? It was the old dilemma between the letter and the spirit. Alfred gave up trying to think it out; he was too tired. He rose stiffly from his chair and went to his solitary bed.

• • • • • • • •

To Charlotte, driving to Templeton station that morning, it seemed that she had lost all sense of reality. “I am leaving Alfred, leaving Haughton,”
she told herself, but the thought meant nothing, or almost nothing, to her. She could not realise it. She stared at it dumbly, foolishly, and her heart lay like a lump of lead in her breast, without the least responsive pang. Coldly and calmly she bought her ticket. The train came in, and William, the footman, opened the door of her carriage. “Good-bye, William,” she said, feeling as she said it that she had said good-bye to the last link with Haughton.

“Good-bye, my lady.” He smiled up at her, touching his hat.

“How little he knows,” she thought, “of this unbelievable thing that is happening.”

The train started, and she leaned back in her corner. How wonderful Alfred had been with William that day three years ago when it had been discovered that he had stolen the silver. The comparison between herself and William came home to her with sudden and terrible distinctness. How infinitely worse was the thing she was doing to Alfred! William had taken a few spoons and forks; she was robbing him of his happiness, the unity of his home, and something of his good name. At that moment she seemed to herself a monster of cruelty.

Wrapped in these troubled thoughts, she sat regardless of her surroundings. She did not notice the stopping of the train at Annet Brook and Rimple. Then she looked out of the window, and the familiar mere at Lannock lay under her eyes, deep blue under the blue sky, enclosed, as if in a curling golden wall, by the tall, dense growths of autumnal flags and reeds which fringed its wandering margins. Pure white, like two great lilies, the two
swans floated motionless on the blue. How closely that scene, and all the scenes along the line to Wilmore, were woven into the texture of her life. They were part of her, part of her present, and part of all the past summers of her life, and of that one winter when she had gone to Haughton to stay with Lady Mardale after Lord Mardale's death. How she had loved them all at Haughton, and how they had loved her! Yet now she was betraying them. Yes, she was betraying even little Lady Mardale, whom she had worshipped more than anyone else in the world. For Lady Mardale, on her death-bed, had spoken to Charlotte of her happiness in leaving Alfred with her—“You, Charlotte,” she had said, “whom I would have chosen for him before any other woman.”

What would Lady Mardale have thought now? What, perhaps, was she thinking now, if the dead have any knowledge of the living? Tears ran down Charlotte's cheeks, and she raised her veil to dry them. Now her thoughts turned to her mother. She too would be bitterly wounded. She recalled her mother's delight when she had told her that Alfred had proposed to her. “This makes up for everything,” she had said. Now she was robbing her of this consolation. But to fail her mother was not, she felt, quite so terrible as to fail Lady Mardale, because Lady Mardale was so good, while Mamma, after all, though she loved Alfred and the Mardales, might have been consoled by any son-in-law with a peerage. Charlotte's greatest sin in deserting Alfred would be, in Lady Hadlow's eyes, the throwing away of her title; nothing could be more immoral than that.
Then Charlotte thought of Maurice, and immediately right and wrong, justice and injustice, were swallowed up in the burning certainty of her love. To have denied that love, to have been afraid to face these griefs and heart-searchings for the sake of that supreme call, would have seemed a greater sin that all the others. She longed to lay her head on his breast and lose at once all sense of the troubles which were tormenting her. What utter consolation it was to think of him and call up the vision of him—the gold of his hair and the blue of his eyes burning in the fresh colour of his face. He seemed to her the most beautiful creature she had ever seen, ever even imagined. Soon she would be with him—in two hours, perhaps—and then she would be safe from this exhausting conflict of thoughts and feelings. If only she could fall asleep till that moment arrived! She was tired, and it seemed to her that the effort that would be required to change trains at Wilmore and to cope with the arrival in London, the drive from Paddington to the Grosvenor Hotel, the enquiries to be made there, would be too much for her. What was she to do with her luggage? Should she take it to the Grosvenor with her or leave it in the cloak-room at Paddington? That question seemed to her, in her highly wrought state, of an insuperable complexity.