She stood with clasped hands, looking skyward in the moonlight; sublime in her simple faith, even to the unbeliever.
“Hester, do you think that God cares about marriage lines? He has made His creatures to love as we love. Our love cannot be unholy in His sight — any more than the unwedded love of Adam and Eve in the Garden.”
“He never made us for dishonour,” she answered firmly. “Good night, Mr. Hillersdon — good night and good-bye.”
She turned and walked quickly, with steady steps, towards Rosamond Road. A minute ago he had held her clasped close in his enfolding arms, had felt the tumult of her heart mixing with the tumult of his own — had counted her all his own, pledged to him for ever by those passionate kisses, those tears which mingled with his tears, tears of joy and triumph, the hysterical fervour of exultant love. And now she called him “Mr. Hillersdon,” and turned her back upon him as coolly as upon any importunate adventurer — invincible in her purity, although she loved him.
Angry, despairing, his thoughts took a sudden turn — worthy of Lovelace. He told himself that he would diplomatise — reculer pour mieux sauter.
“Let me walk with you to your door at least,” he said, “if it is to be good-bye.”
She made no answer, and he walked by her side, watching her profile in the dim light. She had wiped away her tears, her hot blushes had faded to marble pallor, her lips were firmly set, as if the face were verily marble, delicately chiselled by some old-world sculptor.
“Hester, you are very cruel to me.”
“It is you who are cruel. Most of all when you tried to trade upon my weakness, to frighten me by saying you have not long to live. That was the cruellest of all.”
“But it is true, Hester — as true as that you and I are walking here side by side. When I first came into my fortune, knowing myself far from strong, I went to a dear old doctor who saved my life from a sharp attack of lung disease when I was a little boy. I saw him more than a year ago, and he was not particularly hopeful about me even then. He warned me that I must live carefully, that all strong emotions would tend to shorten my days. I saw him again yesterday, for I was bent on knowing the worst. He was all kindness and all truth. He told me that I had changed for the worse within the year that was gone, and that only by extreme carefulness could I prolong my life for a few years. And then he bade me go and be happy, as if that were such an easy thing to do.”
“It must be easy for you to be happy. You have all the world to choose from,” she said falteringly.
“A futile privilege if there is only one thing in the world that I want. Deny me that and you reduce me to misery.”
“Did your doctor really say that you have but a few years to live? “she asked, and he knew by her voice that she was crying, though her face was averted. “Don’t try to make me unhappy. I’m sure it is not true that he said so. Doctors don’t say such things.”
“Sometimes, Hester. Even a physician will tell the truth when he is hard pressed. My doctor spoke very plainly. It is only in a life of calm — which means a life of happiness — that I can hope to prolong my existence a few years — just the years that are best and brightest, when love lights them. If I am worried and unhappy my life will be a question of months instead of years. But if you do not care for me that makes no difference to you.”
“You know that I care for you. Should I be speaking to you now — anxious about your health — after what you have said to me, if I did not care for you? If love were not stronger than pride, I should never have spoken to you again. But I am speaking to you to-night for the last time. Our friendship is at an end for ever.”
“Our friendship never began, Hester. From the first I had but one feeling about you, and that was passionate love, which takes no heed of difficulties, does not forecast the future. I was wrong, perhaps, hampered as I am, to pursue you; but I followed where my heart led; I could not count the cost for you or for me. You are right — you are wise. We must part. Good night, dear love, and good-bye.”
His tone was firm and deliberate. She believed him — believed that he was convinced, and that trial and temptation were over. She turned to him with a choking sob, put her hand in his, and whispered good-bye. Those two hands clasped each other passionately, but with briefest pressure. She hurried from him to the little iron gate, let herself in at the unguarded door — what need of locks and bolts when there was so little to tempt the thief? — and vanished from his sight.
He went back to the river side, and sat there for an hour or more watching the tide flow by, and thinking, thinking, thinking of the woman he loved and the brief span he had for love or for life.
“And she can believe that I renounce her — knowing that she loves me — having held her in my arms and felt her sweet lips trembling against my own in love’s first kiss. How simple women are!”
It was eleven o’clock before he remembered that he had asked Jermyn to sup with him at midnight. He walked home, for his heated brain and throbbing pulses needed active movement. He walked faster than he had walked three or four years ago, when he was a strong man. He thought of many things upon his way through streets that were still full of traffic and busy life, and once or twice as he caught the expression of a passing face he saw a kind of wondering horror in strange eyes that looked at him.
“I must be looking miserably ill to-night,” he thought, after one of those casual glances. “Perhaps I am even worse than Dr. South seemed to think me. He questioned me about my family history, and I rather shirked the subject — paltered with the truth — told him my father and mother are alive and well. But the history is bad all the same. Bad, decidedly bad. Two lovely young sisters of my mother faded off this earth before they saw a twentieth birthday, and an uncle I can just remember died at three and thirty. My family history won’t justify a hopeful view of a bad case.”
He supped with Jermyn, and sat late into the night, and drank deeper than his wont, and he told Jermyn the story of his love. Of his free will he would not have chosen Justin Jermyn for a confidant, and yet he poured out all his hopes and dreams, the whole history of his passion in all its weakness and all its strength to this man whose mocking cynicism continually revolted him. Yet it may be that the cynic’s companionship was the only society he could have endured at this stormy period. The voice of conscience must be stifled somehow; and how could it be so easily drowned as by this spirit of evil which denied the existence of good, which laughed at the idea of virtue and honour in man or woman?
“If the first man who put a fence round a bit of land and called it his was an enemy to his fellow-men,” said Justin Jermyn, “what of the first man who set up a narrow standard of conduct, a hard and fast rule of morality, and said by this standard and by this line and rule of mine shall men act and live for evermore, whether they be happy or miserable? Along this stony road, hedged in with scruples and prejudices, shall men tramp painfully to their dull and dreary end; yes, even while, in the fair open country on either side those thorny fences, joy and love and gladness beckon to gardens of roses and valleys fairer than Eden. Why torment yourself because you have given a foolish old man the means of indulging freely in his favourite vice — an innocent vice, since it hurts none but himself — whereby you have perhaps provided for him the happiest days of his life?”
“I have given him the means of breaking his daughter’s heart,” said Gerard, remorsefully.
“Skittles! No woman’s heart was ever yet broken by a drunken father. It needs a nearer and dearer love than the filial to break hearts. All that Hester Davenport wants in this life is to be happy with the man she loves. The drunken father might prove a stupendous difficulty if you wanted to parade your divinity through the electric glare of the great world as Mrs. Gerard Hillersdon — but if you want her for your goddess, your Egeria, hidden from the glare and the din, the existence of her father, drunk or sober, is of little moment.”
CHAPTER XVIII. “LOST, LOST! ONE MOMENT KNELLED THE WOE OF YEARS.”
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GERARD let three whole days go by without making any attempt to see Hester. Lovelace himself could hardly have been more diplomatic. He was completely miserable in the interval, counted the hours, and wondered perpetually whether the woman he loved was hungering for his presence as he hungered for hers. He spent the greater part of the time with Jermyn; driving to Richmond one day to dine at the Star and Garter and sit late into the night, watching the mists rising in the valley, and the stars shining on the river; driving to Maidenhead on another day and loitering long upon the shadowy river, and sitting in a riverside garden smoking and talking half through the sultry summer night; and in this long tête-à-tête, he sounded the uttermost depths of Justin Jermyn’s godlessness and cheerful egotism.
“The one thing that I am certain of in this Rhadamanthine universe,” said this philosophical worldling, “is that I, Justin Jermyn, exist; and this being my one certainty, I hold that my one duty — the duty I owe to myself — is to be happy, and to make the best of the brief span which I am to enjoy on this earth. Reason tells me that to be happy and to live long I must abjure passion — reason tells me that serenity of mind means health and prolonged life; and to this end I have learnt to treat life lightly, as a farce rather than a tragedy, and to give my affection neither to man nor woman — to be slave neither of friendship nor of love. A selfish philosophy, I grant you; but self is my only certainty.”
“An admirable philosophy, if it were as easy to practise as to preach. And have you never loved?”
“Never, in the fashion that you call love. I have never been unhappy for a woman’s sake.”
“And the domestic affections — father, mother, family?”
“I never knew them. I was flung as a waif upon the world, reared upon charity, the architect of my own fortune — such as it is. I am like Hester Summerson in ‘Bleak House.’ My mother was my disgrace, and I was hers. I am at least so far a follower of St. Paul, that I owe no man anything. I sink the second part of the precept.”
Gerard meditated upon Jermyn’s character as he drove home, towards daybreak, the man himself slumbering by his side. It was perhaps only natural that a man cut off from all family ties, cheated of mother’s love and father’s friendship, a stranger to every bond of blood relationship, should have grown up to manhood heartless and passionless, should have trained himself to the settled calm of a philosophical egotism, attaining in the morning of life that immunity from all the pains and penalties of the affections which the average egotist only achieves in old age.
Gerard looked at the sleeper wonderingly, almost with envy. The fair pale face was unmarked by a line that told of anxious thought or deep feeling. The sleeper’s lips were parted in a faint smile, as if even in sleeping he felt the sensuous pleasure of life on a fair summer morning — the perfume of flowers from a hundred gardens, the soft breath of the wind creeping up from the west, warm with the glow of last night’s sunset. The joy of living! Yes, this man who loved no one enjoyed life in all its fullness; and he, Gerard, with two millions to spend, and, it might be, less than two years to spend them in, was miserable — miserable because of the cowardly incertitude which made him unable to take the straight and honourable road to happiness while the sinuous and evil way lay open to him.
He went to Chelsea at dusk on the third evening after Hester’s tearful farewell. She came quickly to the door in answer to his knock, and he was startled at the change which three days had made in her. The first words she spoke told him that it was not love of him which had so altered her, but poignant anxiety about her father.
“He has never been home since that night,” she said. “I have been in search of him at every place that I could think of as possible for him to have gone to, but I can hear nothing of him since Tuesday night — the night you were here. He was at the Swan Tavern that night, sitting in the coffee-room drinking brandy and water till the house closed. He was talking a good deal, and he was very excited in his manner when he left, but the people would not tell me if he had drunk much. They pretended not to know how much brandy had been served to him. I have been to the police office, and the river has been dragged along by the Embankment, where he and I used always to walk. They were very good to me at the police station, and they have promised to do all they can to find him, living or dead. But, oh” — with a burst of uncontrollable weeping—” I fear they will never find him alive. He could have had only a little money, and he must have spent it all on brandy, and then when he was mad with drink — ah, you don’t know how drink maddens him — he may have walked into the river, or thrown himself in, miserable and despairing. He was at the Swan at eleven o’clock, only a few minutes’ walk from the river, and I can find no one who saw him after that hour. I think he must have meant to come home — I don’t think he would wilfully desert me — but some accident, some fit of madness—”
She could not speak for sobbing. Gerard led her into the parlour, where the old man’s empty chair reminded him of that last interview, and of the snare he had set for a weak sinner’s feet. Looked at in the light of Hester’s grief to-night, and the awful possibilities she suggested, the thing which he had done seemed little short of murder.
“I will go to Scotland Yard, Hester,” he said, eager to comfort her. “I will set the cleverest detectives in London at work, and it shall go hard if they don’t find your father. My dearest, don’t give way to these morbid imaginings. Be sure he is safe somewhere — only hiding because he feels he has disgraced himself in your eyes. He has been afraid to come home, knowing how grieved you would be at his backsliding. Be comforted, dear love.” His arms were round her, and he drew the pale pinched face to his own, and again their lips met, but this time Hester’s kiss was the kiss of despair. She clung to her lover in her grief and fear. She forgot the peril of such consolations.
What comfort could he give her about her father, except the assurance that all that money could do to find him should be done, and that once being found every possible means should be taken to ensure his welfare in the future. He told her that there were doctors who had made such cases their chief study, homes where her father could be surrounded with every luxury, and yet secured from the possibility of indulgence in his fatal vice. He showed her how happy and free from care her future might be if she would only trust her own fate and her father’s to him. And then came words of love, burning words that have been spoken again and again upon this earth with good or evil import — words that may be true when the lips speak them, yet false within the year in which they are spoken — words that promise an eternity of love, and may be uttered in all good faith, and yet prove lighter than the thistledown wafted across summer pastures.
Three days ago she had been strong to resist the tempter, strong in womanly pride and maiden modesty. To-night she was broken down by grief, worn and fevered by sleepless nights, almost reckless in her aching misery. To-night she listened to those vows of love. What had she on this earth but his love, if the father for whom she had toiled was indeed lying at the bottom of the river, her purpose in life gone for ever? Who could be more lonely and ‘friendless than she was to-night?
So she listened to his pleading, heard him while he urged her to consider how poor a thing that legal tie was which he entreated her to forego; how often, how lightly cancelled by the disgraceful revelations of the divorce court.
“Time was when marriage meant till death,” he said, “but that is an exploded fashion. Marriage nowadays means the convenience of a settlement which will enable a man either to found a family or to cheat his creditors. Marriage means till husband and wife are tired of each other, and till the lady has grown callous enough to face the divorce court.”
And then he reminded her how the most romantic passions, the loves that have become history are not those alliances upon which parish priest and family lawyer have smiled. He reminded her of Abelard and Heloise, of Henri’s passion for Gabrielle, and Nelson’s deathless love for Emma Hamilton. He urged that society itself had pa
rdoned these fair offenders, for love’s sweet sake.
Her intellect was too clear to be deceived by such shallow reasoning.
On the very brink of the abyss she recoiled. Loving him with all her heart, knowing that life without him meant a colourless and hopeless existence — a hand-to-hand struggle with adversity, knowing by too bitter experience that to be well born and poor means lifelong humiliation, she yet had the strength to resist his pleading.
“Your wife or nothing,” she said. “I never meant to hear your voice again after that night. I prayed to God that we might never meet again. And now for my father’s sake I humiliate myself so far as to ask your help. If you will bring him back to me I will thank and bless you — and will try to forget your degrading propositions.”
“Degrading, Hester!” he cried reproachfully, trying to take her hand again, the hand that had lain softly in his a few moments ago.
“Yes, degrading! What could you say to any wretched lost woman in London worse than you have said to me? You talk to me of love — and you offer me shame for my portion.”
“Hester, that is a woman’s narrow way of looking at life. As if the priest and the ring made all the difference.”
“If yon cared for me you would make me your wife.”
“I am not free to marry, Hester. I am bound by a tie which I cannot break yet awhile. The tie may be loosened in years to come, and then you shall be my wife. So soon as I am free we will have the priest and the ring, the whole ecclesiastical formula — although that formula will not make me one whit more your slave than I am this night.”
“I don’t want a slave,” she said resolutely. “I want a husband whom I can love and honour. And now I am going back to the police station to ask if there is any news.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 914
