The Sleeping Fury (27 page)

She sighed deeply and went towards her bedroom door. She was ready to go downstairs. On her way she went to Sylvia's room. She had not yet had her child to herself since she had left home a week ago. Sylvia was not yet dressed. Standing there in her white underclothes, bare-necked, bare-armed, and bare-legged, she looked like an exquisite little china figure which had suddenly been endowed with life.

“My darling,” said Charlotte, putting her arms round her, “I've hardly seen you yet.” She gazed anxiously into her daughter's eyes.

“Mother,” Sylvia whispered, her cheeks flushing for a moment to their old health, “I wrote to Eric and told him there was some hope for us. Was that very wrong of me?”

“No, darling; how could you help it?”

“There is still hope, isn't there, Mother?”

“Yes … yes, my dear; but don't be
too
hopeful. I haven't said a word to Father about it yet. I may have been …”

“You may have been wrong?”

“I may, darling, but I hope not.”

“And you think not?”

Charlotte hesitated. Then the sight of her daughter and the hungry enquiry in her eyes brought renewed strength to her resolve. “Yes, I think not.”

They smiled at each other, and Charlotte turned to the door and went out.

In the corridor she met Alfred, who had just emerged from his dressing-room. He took her arm, and as they walked towards the stair-head together he kissed her.

“How glad I am, Charlotte,” he said, “to have you home again.”

That unexpected impulse of his moved her so deeply that she could not reply.

• • • • • • • •

It was when Charlotte and Alfred were sitting alone after dinner, and Sylvia, tired out by her long day, had already gone to bed, that Alfred began to speak of what filled both their minds.

“I've been thinking a great deal since you went away, Charlotte. It was a good thing, I think, that you had to go away directly after … after what you told me. If you had been here, seeing you and speaking to you every day would have made things much more difficult for me—prevented me, I mean, from seeing my way clearly. Charlotte dear, I don't want to reproach you now; what is past is past. But I must tell you what my feelings have been, so as to make things clear to you as they have become to me.

“What I have felt most, Charlotte, is that you never told me the whole truth. You told me a little, and so made me believe that you had told me all.
Your frankness—what I believed was your frankness—touched me deeply. I felt that it was like you, that it was only another sign of what I had always loved so much in you—your beautiful honesty. And so you see, my dearest, that when you told me everything just before you went away last week, I couldn't help feeling that what had seemed your frankness had really been … yes, I must tell you exactly what I felt … I felt that your apparent frankness had been a clever piece of deceit. Oh, Charlotte, how much better to have told me nothing than to have told me the little you did! That was much more dishonest, wasn't it?”

He raised his eyes to hers. “Don't you think it was?”

Charlotte nodded her head; her lips were trembling.

“It was awful to me to think that all my life with you, all my happiness in you and Sylvia for the last twenty-one years, had been based on … on mere falsehood, concealment on your part and misunderstanding on mine. That was what was so terrible to me. It was worse, even, than to know that Sylvia, of whom I had been all these years so proud, was not my child at all. And yet that was terrible enough, for by that I felt cheated. There is something sacred in the feelings of men and women towards their children, Charlotte, and to rouse those feelings falsely to make them the subject of a delusion, of a horrible practical joke, seems to me a sacrilege. We should not play, in however grim earnest, with mysteries such as that. Did you never feel, Charlotte, in all these years, that you must speak out and undeceive me?
You see, dear, it is not merely that you deluded me once, one evening twenty-one years ago. Every day and every hour in the last twenty-one years you have been deluding me. And when at last you did undeceive me, it was not because you felt at last that you
must
restore honesty between us, but because you were determined to break my will. Charlotte, that was a terrible use to make of a terrible weapon. Don't you yourself feel …?”

He broke off, and, as if released for a moment from the stress of his emotion, he realised the effect that his words were having on Charlotte. Her face had become almost grey, and she sat with her lips parted, as though gasping for breath, one hand clutching the arm of her chair, the other grasping a handkerchief which it had crumpled into a ball. He got up and went to her chair and took one of her hands.

“Forgive me, my dearest,” he said. “I'm doing just what I meant not to do—pouring all these reproaches on you which have been whirling round and round in my mind during the last week. But isn't it best, after all, that you should know what I have been feeling and thinking? And won't it be easier for me, too, to put them out of my mind, now that I have told them to you, than it would have been if I had kept them to myself? But I'll say no more of that, now or ever; indeed, I've said all there is to say in the way of grievance. I have discovered other things during these last few days—more important things. I've discovered, Charlotte, that love is something more than right or wrong and kindness or unkindness. In spite of all you told me, I found that I didn't cease to love you. It's not a
matter of willing or not willing. You can't love or cease to love by taking thought. One has no choice in such things. When you met us this morning on Fording platform, I knew, Charlotte, that I loved you as much as ever. It was a blessing to discover that.”

With a sob Charlotte seized his hand in both her own and covered it with kisses. “Alfred,” she sobbed, “my dear Alfred!”

After a moment she looked up at him. “And Sylvia, Alfred?” she asked.

“And Sylvia too,” he said. “And I discovered then, Charlotte …” he went on. But Charlotte stopped him.

“Say no more, my dear, until I have told you something. As you said just now, Alfred, I told you … what I told you, to break your will. I was desperate, Alfred. I couldn't bear to see Sylvia suffer so terribly. I couldn't bear any longer that the lives of those two should be spoilt just when they had discovered the best thing life has to give them. At last, when nothing would move you, I decided to do what I did. I thought that if I told you that Sylvia was illegitimate, everything, when your mind had recovered from the shock, would be different for you—that you would look on Eric's illegitimacy in a new light, and, as I thought, a truer light, and that you would at last consent. But I never realised that what I told you would do away with the need of your consent. That had never occurred to me. I wanted your consent, and I determined that even that terrible and dangerous expedient was justified if I could get it, and so save the poor little things.”

“But, Charlotte … do you mean … was it …?” He was staring at her with a wild conjecture in his eyes.

“That it was untrue, Alfred; quite untrue, my dear. Can you believe it? I think you can. Didn't it seem almost unbelievable that I could have deluded you so cruelly all these years?”

He could not reply, but Charlotte knew already that he believed her. “When you told me, my dear,” she went on, “that you loved her and me in spite of everything, I couldn't keep it up any longer. It would have been too cruel and too wicked to force your consent. But don't you feel now, Alfred, that you can consent willingly? It almost seems now as if I had betrayed them at the last moment, because I've resigned all their hopes of happiness, and mine too, unconditionally into your hands, haven't I? And, Alfred, before I went to Fording last week I told Sylvia that there was just the least little hope. I couldn't bear to leave her here in that state of despair. And she, poor child, as she confessed to me this evening, wrote and told Eric. She wanted, you see, to give him a little consolation too.”

She raised her head and looked at him. “Tell me as soon as you can, Alfred,” she said.

“I can tell you now, dearest,” he said. “I give in, Charlotte, willingly and gladly. I have discovered in this last dreadful week that rules and regulations break down in the end. It is so difficult to remember the truth that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. You were right when you begged me to trust my heart; in the last resort there is nothing else we can trust.”

The remote silver chime of a clock in the hall fell across the stillness of the house like twelve crystal drops into a dark pool.

“You must tell her yourself to-morrow, Alfred,” said Charlotte.

“And we must let Eric know,” he replied.

Charlotte was silent for a while. Then she said: “Alfred, do you think I might go to London myself and bring Eric down? As to-morrow is Saturday, he will be free at one o'clock, I suppose. I should love to do that.”

He glanced at her, smiling. “Won't you be too tired, Charlotte, after the funeral and the journey to-day, and all the troubles of the week? We can wire to him to come and stay till Monday.”

“I'd rather go, Alfred. And I shan't be at all tired. Why, I'm already ten years younger than I was an hour ago.”

The End

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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Copyright © Martin Armstrong

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ISBN: 9781448205929
eISBN: 9781448205615

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