“Perhaps Mr. Raymond is right, after all,” Gwendoline said, quietly. She was very quiet, but very pale, and looked her cousin as steadily in the eyes as if she had been fighting a small-sword duel with him. “The subject is one that will scarcely bear discussion here or elsewhere; but since you accuse me of feminine malice, I am bound to defend myself. I say that Mrs. Gilbert is a very bad wife and a very wicked woman. A person who is seen to attend a secret rendezvous with a stranger, not once, but several times, with all appearance of stealth and mystery, while her husband lies between life and death, must surely be one of the worst and vilest of women.”
Mr. Lansdell burst into a discordant laugh.
“What a place this Midlandshire is!” he cried; “and what a miraculous power of invention lies uncultivated amongst the inhabitants of our country towns! I withdraw any impertinent insinuations about your talent for scandal, my dear Gwendoline; for I see you are the merest novice in that subtle art. The smallest rudimentary knowledge would teach you to distinguish between the stories that are ben trovato and those that are not; their being true or false is not of the least consequence. Unfortunately, this Graybridge slander is one of the very lamest of canards. A newspaper correspondent sending it in to fill the bottom of a column would be dismissed for incompetency, on the strength of his blunder. Tell your maid to be a little more circumspect in future, Gwendoline.”
Lady Gwendoline did not condescend to discuss the truth or probability of her story. She saw that her cousin was ashy pale to the lips, and she knew that her shot had gone home to the very centre of the bull’s-eye. After this there was very little conversation. Lord Ruysdale started one or two of his favourite topics; but he understood dimly that there was something not quite pleasant at work amongst his companions. Roland sat frowning at his plate; and Charles Raymond watched him with an uneasy expression in his face; as a man who is afraid of lightning might watch the gathering of a storm-cloud. The dinner drew to a close amidst dense gloom and awful silence, dismally broken by the faint chinking of spoons and jingling of glass. Ah, what funeral-bell can fall more solemnly upon the ear than those common every-day sounds amidst the awful stillness that succeeds or precedes a domestic tempest! There is nothing very terrible in the twittering of birds; yet how ominous sound the voices of those innocent feathered warblers in the dread pauses of a storm!
Lady Gwendoline rose from the table when her father filled his second glass of Burgundy, and Mr. Raymond hurried to open the door for her. But Roland’s eyes were never lifted from his empty plate; he was waiting for something; now and then a little convulsive movement of his lower lip betrayed that he was agitated; but that was all.
Lord Ruysdale seemed relieved by his daughter’s departure. He had a vague idea that there had been some little passage-at-arms between Roland and Gwendoline, and fancied that serenity would be restored by the lady’s absence. He went twaddling on with his vapid discourse upon the state of the political atmosphere, placid as some babbling stream, until the dusky shadows began to gather in the corners of the low old-fashioned chamber. Then the Earl pulled out a fat ponderous old hunter, and exclaimed at the lateness of the hour.
“I’ve some letters to write that must go by to-night’s post,” he said. “Raymond, I know you’ll excuse me if I leave you for an hour or so. Roland, I expect you and Raymond to do justice to that Chambertin.”
Charles Raymond murmured some polite conventionality as the Earl left the room; but he never removed his eyes from Roland’s face. He had watched the brewing of the storm, and was prepared for a speedy thunder-clap. Nor was he mistaken in his calculations.
“Raymond, is this true?” Mr. Lansdell asked, as the door closed upon his uncle. He spoke as if there had been no break or change in the conversation since Mrs. Gilbert’s name had been mentioned.
“Is what true, Roland?”
“This dastardly slander against Isabel Gilbert. Is it true? Pshaw! I know that it is not. But I want to know if there is any shadow of an excuse for such a scandal. Don’t trifle with me, Raymond; I have kept no secrets from you; and I have a right to expect that you will be candid with me.”
“I do not think you have any right to question me upon the subject,” Mr. Raymond answered, very gravely: “when last it was mentioned between us, you rejected my advice, and protested against my further interference in your affairs. I thought we finished with the subject then, Roland, at your request; and I certainly do not care to renew it now.”
“But things have changed since then,” Mr. Lansdell said, eagerly. “It is only common justice to Mrs. Gilbert that I should tell you as much as that, Raymond. I was very confident, very presumptuous, I suppose, when I last discussed this business with you. It is only fair that you should know that the schemes I had formed, when I came back to England, have been entirely frustrated by Mrs. Gilbert herself.”
“I am very glad to hear it.”
There was very little real gladness in Mr. Raymond’s tone as he said this; and the uneasy expression with which he had watched Roland for the last hour was, if anything, intensified now.
“Yes; I miscalculated when I built all those grand schemes for a happy future. It is not so easy to persuade a good woman to run away from her husband, however intolerable may be the chain that binds her to him. These provincial wives accept the marriage-service in its sternest sense. Mrs. Gilbert is a good woman. You can imagine, therefore, how bitterly I felt Gwendoline’s imputations against her. I suppose these women really derive some kind of pleasure from one another’s destruction. And now set my mind quite at rest: there is not one particle of truth — not so much as can serve as the foundation for a lie — in this accusation, is there, Raymond?”
If the answer to this question had involved a sentence of death, or a reprieve from the gallows, Roland Lansdell could not have asked it more eagerly. He ought to have believed in Isabel so firmly as to be quite unmoved by any village slander; but he loved her too much to be reasonable; Jealousy the demon — closely united as a Siamese twin to Love the god — was already gnawing at his entrails. It could not be, it could not be, that she had deceived and deluded him; but if she had — ah, what baseness, what treachery!
“Is there any truth in it, Raymond?” he repeated, rising from his chair, and glowering across the table at his kinsman.
“I decline to answer that question. I have nothing to do with Mrs. Gilbert, or with any reports that may be circulated against her.”
“But I insist upon your telling me all you know; or, if you refuse to do so, I will go to Lady Gwendoline, and obtain the truth from her.”
Mr. Raymond shrugged his shoulders, as if he would have said, “All further argument is useless; this demented creature must go to perdition his own way.”
“You are a very obstinate young man, Roland,” he said aloud; “and I am very sorry you ever made the acquaintance of this Doctor’s Wife, than whom there are scores of prettier women to be met with in any summer-day’s walk; but I dare say there were prettier women than Helen, if it comes to that. However, as you insist upon hearing the whole of this village scandal — which may or may not be true — you must have your own way; and I hope, when you have heard it, you will be contented to turn your back for some time to come upon Midlandshire and Mrs. George Gilbert. I have heard something of the story Lady Gwendoline told you at dinner; and from a tolerably reliable source. I have heard — —”
“What? That she — that Isabel has been seen with some stranger?”
“Yes.”
“With whom? when? where?”
“There is a strange man staying at a little rustic tavern in Nessborough Hollow. You know what gossips these country people are; Heaven knows I have never put myself out of the way to learn other people’s business; but these things get bruited about in all manner of places.”
Roland chafed impatiently during this brief digression.
“Tell your story plainly, Raymond,” he said. “There is a strange man staying in Nessboro
ugh Hollow — well; what then?”
“He is rather a handsome-looking fellow; flashily dressed — a Londoner, evidently — and — —”
“But what has all this to do with Mrs. Gilbert?”
“Only this much, — she has been seen walking alone with this man, after dark, in Nessborough Hollow.”
“It must be a lie; a villanous invention! or if — if she has been seen to meet this man, he is some relation. Yes, I have reason to think that she has some relation staying in this neighbourhood.”
“But why, in that case, should she meet the man secretly, at such an hour, while her husband is lying ill?”
“There may be a hundred reasons.”
Mr. Raymond shrugged his shoulders. “Can you suggest one?” he asked.
Roland Lansdell’s head sank forward on his breast. No; he could think of no reason why Isabel Gilbert should meet this stranger secretly — unless there were some kind of guilt involved in their association. Secrecy and guilt go so perpetually together, that it is almost difficult for the mind to dissever them.
“But has she been seen to meet him?” cried Roland, suddenly. “No; I will not believe it. Some woman has been seen walking with some man; and the Graybridge vultures, eager to swoop down upon my poor innocent dove, must have it that the woman is Isabel Gilbert. No; I will not believe this story.”
“So be it, then,” answered Mr. Raymond. “In that case we can drop the subject.”
But Roland was not so easily to be satisfied. The poisoned arrow had entered far into his soul, and he must needs drag the cruel barb backwards and forwards in the wound.
“Not till you have given me the name of your authority,” he said.
“Pshaw! my dear Roland, have I not already told you that my authority is the common Graybridge gossip?”
“I’ll not believe that. You are the last man in the world to be influenced by paltry village scandal. You have better grounds for what you told me. Some one has seen Isabel and this man. Who was that person?”
“I protest against this cross-examination. I have been weak enough to sympathize with a dishonourable attachment, so far as to wish to spare you pain. You refuse to be spared, and must take the consequences of your own obstinacy. I was the person who saw Isabel Gilbert walking with a stranger — a showily-dressed disreputable-looking fellow — in Nessborough Hollow. I had been dining with Hardwick the lawyer at Graybridge, and rode home across country by the Briargate and Hurstonleigh Road, instead of going through Waverly. I heard the scandal about Mrs. Gilbert at Graybridge, — heard her name linked with that of some stranger staying at the Leicester Arms, Nessborough Hollow, who had been known to send letters to her and to meet her after dark. Heaven only knows how country people find out these things; but these things always are discovered somehow or other. I defended Isabel, — I know her head is a good one, though by no means so well balanced as it might be, — I defended Isabel throughout a long discussion with the lawyer’s wife; but riding home by the Briargate Road, I met Mrs. Gilbert walking arm-in-arm with a man who answered to the description I had heard at Graybridge.”
“When was this?”
“The night before last. It must have been some time between ten and eleven when I met them, for it was broad moonlight, and I saw Isabel’s face as plainly as I see yours.”
“And did she recognize you?”
“Yes; and turned abruptly away from the road into the waste grass between the highway and the tall hedgerow beyond.”
For some moments after this there was a dead silence, and Raymond saw the young man standing opposite him in the dusk, motionless as a stone figure — white as death. Then after that pause, which seemed so long, Roland stretched out his hand and groped among the decanters and glasses on the table for a water-jug; he filled a goblet with water; and Charles Raymond knew, by the clashing of the glass, that his kinsman’s hand was shaken by a convulsive trembling; After taking a long draught of water, Roland stretched his hand across the table.
“Shake hands, Raymond,” he said, in a dull, thick kind of voice; “I thank you heartily for having told me the truth; it was much better to be candid; it was better to let me know the truth. But, oh, if you could know how I loved her — if you could know! You think it was only the dishonourable passion of a profligate, who falls in love with a married woman, and pursues his fancy, heedless of the ruin he may entail on others. But it was not, Raymond; it was nothing like that. So help me Heaven, amidst all selfish sorrow for my own most bitter disappointment, I have sometimes felt a thrill of happiness in the thought that my poor girl’s name was still untarnished. I have felt this, in spite of my ruined life, the cruel destruction of every hope that had grown up out of my love for her; and to think that she, — that she who saw my truth and my despair, saw my weak heart laid bare in all its abject folly, — to think that she would dismiss me with school-girl speeches about duty and honour; and then, — then, when my grief was new, — while I still lingered here, too infatuated to leave the place in which I had so cruelly suffered, — to think that she should fall into some low intrigue, some base and secret association with —— . It is too bitter, Raymond; it is too bitter!”
The friendly dusk sheltered him as he dropped into a chair and buried his face upon the broad-cushioned elbow. The tears that gathered slowly in his eyes now were even more bitter than those that he had shed two months ago under Lord Thurston’s oak. If this sort of thing is involved in a man’s being in earnest, he had not need be in earnest about anything more than once in his life. Happily for us, the power to suffer, like every other power, becomes enfeebled and wears out at last by extravagant usage. If Othello had survived to marry a second time, he would not have dropped down in a fit when a new Iago began to whisper poisonous hints about the lady.
“I never loved any one but her,” murmured Roland Lansdell, “I have been a hard judge of other women; but I believed in her.”
“My poor boy, my poor impetuous Roland,” Mr. Raymond said, softly, “men have to suffer like this once in a lifetime. Fight it out, and have done with it. Look at the foul phantasm straight in the eyes, and it will melt into so much empty air; and then, ‘being gone,’ you are ‘a man again.’ My dear boy, before this year is out, you will be sipping absinthe — most abominable stuff! — after supper at the Maison Dorée, and entertaining your companions with a satirical history of your little caprice for the Doctor’s Wife.”
“And Heaven forgive me for talking like Major Pendennis, or any other wicked old worldling!” Mr. Raymond added, mentally.
Roland Lansdell got up by-and-by, and walked to the open French window. There was a silvery shimmer of moonlight upon the lawn, and the great clock in the stables was striking ten.
“Good night, Raymond,” said Mr. Lansdell, turning on the threshold of the window. “You can make some kind of apology for me to my uncle and Gwendoline. I won’t stop to say good night to them.”
“But where are you going?”
“To Nessborough Hollow.”
“Are you mad, Roland?”
“That’s a great deal too subtle a question to be answered just now. I am going to Nessborough Hollow to see Isabel Gilbert and her lover.”
* * *
CHAPTER XXXIII.
KEEPING A PROMISE.
The moon was slowly rising behind a black belt of dense foliage, — a noble screen of elm and beech that sheltered Lord Ruysdale’s domain from the common world without, — as Roland Lansdell crossed the lawn, and went in amongst the thickest depths of the park. At Lowlands there were no smooth glades, and romantic waterfalls, no wonderful effects of landscape-gardening, such as adorned Mordred Priory. The Earls of Ruysdale had been more or less behind the world for the last century and a half; and the land about the old red-brick mansion was only a tangled depth of forest, in which the deer browsed peacefully, undisturbed by the ruthless handiwork of trim modern improvement.
The lonely wildness of the place suited Roland Lansdell’s mood to-night
. At first he had walked very rapidly, even breaking into a run now and then; so feverishly and desperately did he desire to reach the spot where he might perhaps find that which would confirm his despair. But all at once, when he had gone some distance from the house, and the lights in Lady Gwendoline’s drawing-room were shut from him by half the width of the park, he stopped suddenly, leaning against a tree, faint and almost breathless. He stopped for the first time to think of what he had heard. The hot passion of anger, the fierce sense of outraged pride, had filled his breast so entirely as to sweep away every softer feeling, as flowers growing near a volcanic mountain may be scattered by the rolling lava-flood that passes over them. Now, for the first time, he lingered a little to reflect upon what he had heard. Could it be true? Could it be that this woman had deceived him, — this woman for whom he had been false to all the teaching of his life, — this woman, at whose feet he had offered up that comfortable philosophy which found an infallible armour against sorrow in supreme indifference to all things under heaven, — this woman, for whose sake he had consented to reassume the painful heritage of humanity, the faculty of suffering?
“And she is like the rest, after all,” he thought; “or only a little worse than the rest. And I had forgotten so much for her sake. I had blotted out the experience of a decade in order that I might believe in the witchery of her dark eyes. I, the man of half-a-dozen seasons in London and Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg, had sponged away every base record in the book of my memory, so that I might scrawl her name upon the blank pages; and now I am angry with her — with her, poor pitiful creature, who I suppose is only true to her nature when she is base and false. I am angry with her, when I have only my own folly to blame for the whole miserable business. I am angry with her, just as if she were a responsible being; as if she could be anything but what she is. And yet there have been good women in the world,” he thought, sadly. “My mother was a good woman. I used to fancy sometimes what might have happened if I had known her in my mother’s lifetime. I have even made a picture in my mind of the two women, happy together, and loving each other. Heaven forgive me! And after all her pretty talk about platonism and poetry, she betrays me for a low intrigue, and a rendezvous kept in an ale-house.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 270
