The Sleeping Fury (17 page)

As she approached London, the practical problems which her act would involve began for the first time to present themselves to her. Cold realities faced her. The reassuring glow of her passion flagged before them. What would happen to-morrow, and after to-morrow? To-morrow Maurice was starting for
Egypt. Would he postpone his departure? That would probably be out of the question. Would she, then, go with him, live with him in Egypt? That would probably be fatal to his position there. But if it were not, if they could manage to live together, would Alfred then divorce her? The very word divorce sent a chill to her heart. Would she ever be able to stand up against the disgrace of it? And, if divorce seemed horrible to her, how much more horrible it must seem to Alfred. No, Alfred would certainly never divorce her. She would have, then, to live permanently with Maurice as his mistress. Socially she would have no position, no existence. That seemed to her at present the least of all the evils involved. To be with Maurice she would willingly forgo all else. But whether she was divorced and married to Maurice, or whether she lived with him as his mistress, she would bring disgrace on Alfred—disgrace and the most cruel distress in return for years of unfailing love. And yet, when she left him this morning, after he must certainly have realised that these consequences would follow her desertion, he had told her that, whatever happened, she would always find him waiting for her if she wished to return. That was the last thing he had said to her. As she recalled it, she recalled also the spectacle of him standing there, a small, serious, forlorn man, his face grey and shrunk with pain, shorn, it seemed, of everything but his innocent and unassailable dignity. That memory of him cut her to the heart; it was more than she could bear. She turned her mind from it, and, rousing herself, glanced at the window. A continuous wall of sordid
houses was streaming past her; with a shock she recognised that in five minutes she would be in Paddington.

But, though she tried to free herself of that too poignant memory of Alfred, her mind returned to it as if in horrified fascination, and, as she contemplated it, pity and remorse rose in her heart. Why could she not have stayed with him, no matter at what cost to her? Justice, innocence, generosity, were all on his side. She had repaid him evil for good, cruelty for love; while he to the end had given her good for evil, love for her cruelty. She had vowed to love, honour, and obey him, but she had vowed nothing to Maurice. Vowed nothing; yet her heart, in spite of vows and duty, had given itself to him. It had never given itself to Alfred; there was no faithlessness there; she belonged to Maurice, not to Alfred.

She was roused again by a sudden darkening of the carriage and a flitting of obscure forms past the windows. She had arrived in Paddington. Her mind was in utter bewilderment. What was she to do? Where to go? If only some clear, incontrovertible voice would command and take from her the awful responsibility of choice. A porter opened the carriage door, and she told him that she would leave her luggage in the cloak-room.

The rest of that day survived in Charlotte's memory as a vague and troubled dream. She walked for what seemed a very long way from Paddington. She had confused impressions of a straight, broad road edged with trees, whose branches were almost bare, large buildings—hospitals, hotels, schools—of various shapes and colours, old-fashioned pallid houses, small and discreet, protected from the noisy street by strips of sad, faded garden.

• • • • • • • •

Later she found herself sitting on a park bench, watching grey squirrels run nimbly along the iron railings and three children assiduously collecting pebbles from the walk and arranging them in rows on the bench opposite hers, while two nurses with perambulators sat and talked and occasionally rocked a perambulator with an unconscious hand. Yes, if only she and Alfred had had children, she thought, as she watched them at their solemn game, how safely her love would have been anchored at Haughton. But the children she longed for were Maurice's children. She sighed as the thought of him swept her away again from Haughton and the road back to Haughton. How easily Alfred and Haughton and all her past and present life were reduced to ashes by the fire of her new passion!
Her heart cried out for Maurice, and yet it was her heart that wept at the memory of Alfred standing forlorn as she bade him good-bye. It was her heart, too, that urged her to forgo for Alfred's sake the supreme gift, so long desired, which life had at last offered to her. “He that loses his life for My sake,” she thought to herself, “the same shall save it.” How sad and bleak that promise seemed to her. How could she deliberately choose to wither on the very threshold of her long-expected spring? Life henceforward for her would be grey and autumnal, like the ruined park before her eyes. She rose from her bench heavy at heart. There were dead leaves everywhere. On the grass, under the trees, a man was brushing them into heaps, while another loaded them into a barrow. The children and the squirrels had gone; only the rows of pebbles remained on the empty bench.

• • • • • • • •

In the middle of the afternoon she sat alone in the lounge of the Langham Hotel with tea on a tray at her elbow. Feeling feeble and exhausted, she had remembered that she had had nothing to eat since—months ago it seemed—she had breakfasted with Alfred at Haughton. She had hailed the first taxi and driven to the Langham. What a relief it had been to sink into an easy chair in a corner of the lounge and sip the comforting tea unobserved. She gave herself up to the soothing idleness of the moment. Soon she must irrevocably make up her mind, order a taxi, and drive either to the Grosvenor or to Paddington. But at the moment life was
standing still, the devouring doubts and agonising alternatives were suspended, and she herself poised in a kind of apathetic peacefulness in which she seemed to hold her miseries at arm's length.

When she had sat so for nearly an hour, it occurred to her that, even if she resolved to return to Haughton, she might at least see Maurice once again. To see him just once again, and say to him all the things that before she had not been able to say—tell him that she had actually left home that morning to come to him—what an unutterable consolation that would be. By that she would give him the final assurance of her love. He would know then that it was not cowardice nor callousness that had held her from him, but the deliberate sacrifice of herself to duty. It seemed to be a very necessity of her heart that she should give him her love and that he should realise the gift. It was not enough for her now that she had given it already in the yew-garden at the Penningtons'. She must give it again now on the eve of his disappearance into that appalling distance where he would be so abysmally separated from her.

Then came the idea of ringing him up before she went to see him. She rose from her chair and enquired for the telephone, but when she had shut herself into the telephone-box a sudden access of fear took hold of her. With a desperate determination to forestall the coming weakness, she lifted the receiver and gave the number.

As she waited to be put through, she felt that she was going to faint. The receiver shuddered in her hand so that she could hardly hold it to her ear,
and it was only by a determined effort that she kept her senses and, when the call came through, asked for Mr. Maurice Wainwright.

She waited for an age, and then another age, her heart beating all the time so thickly that she was almost suffocated. At any moment the miracle would occur and she would hear his voice, and it seemed to her that when she did she would not have the strength to reply. There was someone there now—a few vague sounds, and then a voice. Ah, but it was not his. “Mr. Wainwright is not in, madam.”

It was almost a relief to her.

• • • • • • • •

Half an hour later she ordered a taxi. When she had taken her seat the hall-porter stood with his hand on the door:

“Where to, please, madam?”

For a moment she stared at him uncomprehendingly, then mechanically gave the order: “To the Grosvenor Hotel.”

As the taxi started, she leaned back and closed her eyes. It seemed to her that she had ceased to be a thinking and acting creature; she was no longer a woman, a complex human being. She had dissolved into a load of acutely sensitive tissue, a nucleus of tingling and shuddering sensation propped in a corner of the hurrying taxi. For a while she lay back inert, her eyes closed, her ears taking in the noise of the stream of traffic in which she flowed, her body passively responding to the swinging and jolting of the taxi.

After a long while she opened her eyes. The taxi
was turning out of Lower Regent Street into Pall Mall. She leaned forward and knocked on the window in front of her. Then she took up the speaking-tube.

“To Paddington,” she shouted. “I've changed my mind.”

She lay back again immediately and closed her eyes.

For three years Charlotte Mardale and Maurice Wainwright corresponded; then he ceased to write, and a few months later she heard, by chance, of his death. But already for three years he had been for her no more than a radiant memory, a memory that awoke at rare intervals to a sharper intensity with the arrival of each letter. When she added his last letter to the rest there were only six of them in all. Immediately after her return to Haughton the news had come that the Penningtons were leaving the Manor House. For Charlotte their departure closed yet another door on that brief, ecstatic moment of her life, and the birth of her only child, a girl, in the following summer reconciled her finally to the lot she had chosen.

It was twenty-one years before the Pennington family returned to their old home, and Charlotte Mardale was a woman of fifty when she revisited the scenes of her meeting with Maurice Wainwright. Old Mr. and Mrs. Pennington were both dead; it was Roger Pennington and his wife, and John, a grown-up son, who came back to the Manor House, and, when Charlotte and Alfred drove to the Penningtons' first garden-party, their daughter Sylvia, already a young woman of twenty, went with them.

That return to the Manor House brought Maurice Wainwright back to Charlotte more vividly than any of his letters had done, for he had been one of those who cannot put themselves into letters. It seemed to her that their brief, passionate meeting had happened, not twenty-one years, but twenty-one months ago. How could it be twenty-one years? What had she been doing in all the long time since? Nothing. Sylvia had been born, and had grown from babyhood to girlhood, from girlhood to young womanhood, but that seemed to have happened in the space of a very short time.

The memories of Maurice had been made even more vivid by the presence of young Eric Danver, John Pennington's friend, who, approaching her in the Manor House drawing-room with his golden
hair, fresh face, and blue eyes, when her mind was full of Maurice, had seemed to be a reincarnation of her dead lover. He had just that same open gaze, the same attractive seriousness of manner, and, talking to him during tea and watching him at various times in the afternoon, she had been charmed and touched by him. If she and Maurice had married, perhaps, she dreamed, their son would have been like this boy. She had met him again as they were leaving the Penningtons' and had asked him to come with them to the Haughton garden-party a week later. And, when he had come, she had felt a glow of happiness each time she had caught sight of him—playing tennis, crossing the hall, or standing in the drawing-room solemnly holding a cup of tea. To have him there at Haughton was for her a kind of reconciliation which she could not have explained nor defined, but which she deeply felt.

Old Lady Hadlow, who had just arrived on a visit to Haughton, picked him out as she sat, white-haired, upright, under her parasol, watching the tennis. She was always nowadays quietly but alertly on the look-out for eligible suitors for her granddaughter, and this good-looking young man struck her at once as, at least in appearance, highly eligible. But appearance was very far from being everything; there were, in fact, many much more important things to be taken into account before good looks could be considered at all.

“Who is the light-haired young man who is Sylvia's partner?” she asked, turning her birdlike face to John Pennington, who was lying on the grass near her chair.

“A friend of mine, Lady Hadlow,” said John.

“He is with us for a fortnight.”

“And what is his name?”

“Eric Danver.”

“Danver?” Lady Hadlow weighed the name carefully for a few seconds. It was not an impossible name; it was, indeed, rather a promising name. “One of the Leicestershire Danvers?” she asked. “We used to know old Sir John, father of the present Sir John.”

“I don't know, Lady Hadlow.”

How strange to know nothing of the family of a friend staying in the house! People were becoming dreadfully indifferent about such matters nowadays. But, of course, John's father and mother would know; she must ask them. And she took care to plant herself on a sofa next to Amy Pennington at tea, and ascertained from her that, according to the young man, the present Sir John Danver was the young man's uncle. He was not impossible, then; though it was to be hoped, of course, that Sylvia would marry into the peerage. Two plates appeared before her, one containing small, very tempting iced cakes, the other plain bread-and-butter. She fixed the cakes with bird-like attention; for a moment it seemed that she was going to peck at one; then regretfully she took some bread-and-butter, looking up, when she had done so, to see who had offered the plates.

“Bobby,” she said, smiling reproachfully, “you shouldn't tempt your poor old grandmother.”

Her eyes followed the tall man as he moved away. Really, Bobby was very presentable. He looked—
heaven alone knew why—a good deal better bred than many of the other men in the room. What a fortunate thing that Beatrix's husband—that odious, vulgar little man—had died, though by doing so he had left Beatrix and her boy little better than paupers. But Alfred, as usual, had been an angel, and nowadays Bobby was making more than his father had ever made. Her old eyes wandered round the room. Goodness gracious, what a frump Beatrix looked; but—yes, thank heaven—a distinguished frump. Though she looked as if she had been dragged round the garden by her hair, one saw at once that she was a lady. Wherever could she have got her lamentable disregard of her appearance from? Certainly not from her mother—the old lady straightened herself in her chair—and even poor Robert's family, she reflected, thinking of her long-dead husband, always dressed well; except Cousin Fanny, and she, of course, poor dear, was never able to afford to.