The sleeping fury, p.12
The Sleeping Fury, page 12
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.”
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.”
Chapter XVIII
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.
Chapter XIX
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.
