by George Moore
Having satisfied herself that Lewis was not there, she was burning to get away, but her partner was so pressing that, fearing he would think it strange, she sat down, and he got her some jelly and a glass of champagne.
“I have won,” exclaimed Lord Senton, gladly, and he pocketed the five sovereigns.
“But surely you don’t believe it is true?” asked Sir John, who was just beginning to remember that his wife was the intimate friend of the lady upon whose virtue they were betting.
“My dear fellow!” replied Day, shrugging his shoulders.
“I am sure, I don’t know what you mean,” exclaimed Lord Senton, who began to think that, true or false, it was a great piece of impertinence of a man who was only a Scotch farmer to dare to pass judgment on a county family. However, Day eventually apologised, and the conversation then fell into a long discussion on the morality of women.
Mrs. Bentham drank a little champagne, and asked the young gentleman, who insisted upon explaining to her why he thought Swinburne a greater poet than Tennyson, to take her upstairs. On passing into the hall, they met Mr. Holt and Mr. Hilton, whose insatiable desire to talk of painting had brought them together again. Mr. Holt was enthusiastic on the subject of the ball. Never had he seen anything so artistically fashionable, and, forgetful of Mr. Hilton, he declared that the staircase would make a wonderful picture.
On both sides were huge majolica vases, filled with rare plants; two bronze Venuses upheld magnificent candelabras, set with five burners, whose bright light was softened by coloured globes, and the crowd, superb and smiling, descended into, and rose out of, the mirror, the women white and delicate, the men with quick looks, and the movements of lovers talking of love. Mrs. Bentham hated them, their smiles, their polite manners, their laughter; and in the bitterness of her despair, the whole scene appeared to her as something scarcely more serious than a toy, a marvellous toy, most ingeniously contrived, but only a toy after all.
Most of the dancers had now come up from supper; the ball was at its height. The band played a favourite quadrille, and all were dancing with the fumes of champagne in their heads.
The different couples rocked a little as they advanced up and down. The different costumes came and went in a confusion of bright stuffs; the rhythm, after having mixed and carried away the colours, suddenly brought back on certain notes the same rose satin skirt, the same blue velvet bodice, next the same black coats. Then, like a shower of fireworks, they all disappeared up the room, and so on hour after hour.
Leaving the dancers, Mrs. Bentham passed along the picture gallery, and searched the windows of the card-room, and then the boudoir at the back, but they were not there. She was now at the end of her patience, and her nervousness and agitation had turned into a sullen anger. Fortunately, the couples seated round the card-room were too occupied to notice her. Her lips and hands moved nervously, and she thought of telling Lady Marion that her niece had disappeared.
She had lost her head; was beside herself with mingled suspense and passion. After a pause she went hesitatingly out of the card-room, towards the gallery, encircling the head of the stairs. The upper parts were reached by two small staircases, one on each side of the stair gallery, and united overhead by a long passage; they were partially hidden by large hanging draperies.
Surely, she thought, they cannot be sitting up there alone, she would not be mad enough to do such a thing. Then, almost frantic with jealousy, she determined to see, and, bending under the curtain, went up the stairs. But they were not there; she stopped for a moment puzzled, then passed along the passage by her room, from whence came a faint odour of verveine, and prepared to descend to the ball-room by the other end.
Hearing the sound of voices, she stopped, and, descending a few steps, she looked over the bannisters, and saw Lewis sitting with Lady Helen.
After the waltz, with one accord, they had sought a quiet place where they could talk; they were both dying to be alone. Lord Senton had chased them from the balcony, they had tried the boudoir, the windows in the card-room, but couples as sentimentally inclined as themselves were already in possession of every available space. At last they had sat down in a far corner, but malicious Mr. Day, under the pretence of flirting with a little girl in pink, had taken the places behind them, and they had been obliged to talk of the weather, and the floor.
This was very annoying, and after a few minutes Lady Helen had proposed to go back to the dancing-room. But as they passed the staircase the temptation was irresistible; it looked so cool and cosy, with its deliciously soft carpet, that Lady Helen could not resist suggesting that they should sit there. She knew it was an imprudence, but she felt she could not waste her life thinking of proprieties. So they went up half-a-dozen steps and sat down. And what a relief it was to be out of the glare and the heat, to be able to talk of what interested them without fear of being overheard.
Each great passion is the fruit of many fruitless years, and to-day were we to meet, we should not love the persons for whom, later in life, it is destined that we shall sacrifice all things; for what indeed is an ideal if it be not the synthesis of our past lives. Lady Helen and Lewis were enchanted with each other, but, knowing nothing of the occult causes, were both a little surprised that it was so.
Then came the wearisome, yet charming fencing with words, the indirect questions and evasive replies, by which, under cover of a generality or an allegory, each tells the other of the passion burning in his or her heart, till at last, like moths fluttering round a light they fall into the flames of each other’s arms.
The staircase was full of a most delicious coolness, and they savoured slowly the idle tenderness which the scent of the flowers and mingling music bring to the souls of lovers. Already they murmured their speeches, more softly overcome by the sweet and insinuating emotion which drew them gently together.
Lady Helen wished to go, but she knew that Lewis was near her, and helplessly she leaned towards him; then, feeling his breath burning her she tried to withdraw, but her strength failed her, and she looked at him almost piteously. Their faces approached, and their souls were visible in their eyes; that moment seemed an eternity; then, with a movement like that of a swaying lily, she fell towards him, and their lips met in one long and passionate kiss, and removed the bar that had till now existed between them, and Lewis told her how much he had thought of her during the last five years; she, in return, reproached him with not having written to her; he defended himself with a hundred excuses. He did not know that she would have liked it; he scarcely knew her, he had not dared. At last the conversation turned on Mrs. Bentham.
Till now Lady Helen had made love to Lewis vaguely, but the kiss and the mention of Mrs. Bentham’s name suggested two ideas; one was a distinct wish to many him, the second an indefinite suspicion that Mrs. Bentham stood between her and the man she desired.
“But you — you love Mrs. Bentham, do you not?”
The words defined her ideas, and she felt that she already hated that woman, who, she was sure, loved, or had once loved, Lewis.
At this moment Mrs. Bentham leaned over the bannisters, and, hearing the question, she listened, as the criminal listens for the executioner’s step on the fatal morning.
In brief phrases Lewis admitted that Mrs. Bentham had been very kind to him; that she was a great friend of his; that, indeed, there was nothing he would not do for her. But Lady Helen continued to harass him with indirect taunts and indefinite questions, and she remained firm in her belief, that at one time or another he had made love to Mrs. Bentham.
Already, by a hundred equivocations and insinuations, he had striven to make her understand that Mrs. Bentham did not come up to his ideal of beauty; he had even gone so far as to say that she was a little passée, but he had hesitated from expressing himself more definitely. Lady Helen, on her side, was dying to ask him if he had ever kissed Mrs. Bentham, but, not daring, she continued to exasperate him with suggestions. Her persistent questioning irritated him. He fe
lt he could not leave her under the impression that he loved Mrs. Bentham. Momentarily, the feeling got the better of him, till at last he exclaimed, his heart sinking like a stone through the deep well of his cowardice:
“Good heavens! I wonder how you could think of such a thing; why, she is old enough to be my mother: you might as well accuse me of being in love with Mrs. Thorpe.”
Each dismal word had been to Mrs. Bentham like burning poison dropped into her brain. The intensity of her pain was so great that, while they were speaking, she was quiet as she was pale, but the silence fell too suddenly, and she uttered a little cry.
The lovers started to their feet and listened. Hearing nothing more, Lewis tried to persuade Lady Helen to sit down; but the charm was broken; she remembered she had been away from the ball too long; a waltz was playing, and she insisted on going off to dance.
Mrs. Bentham staggered; her head felt as if it were empty, everything looked as if it were sliding under her feet; but, by holding on to the wall, she managed to get to her room. She could go no further, and, utterly unable to resist the poignancy of her grief, threw herself on her bed, and sobbed amid the white sheets.
The room was in almost total darkness. The veilleuse, hanging in its silver censer, amid the light brown embroidered curtains of the narrow bed, revealed a white marble chimney-piece, where a Dresden clock ticked amid the unfading flowers; the tall wax candles glistened in the branching candelabra. An odour of damp scent and linen drifted through the door of the cabinet de toilette, which was open, and floated upwards towards the red flame of the nightlight.
After the first paroxysm of pain Mrs. Bentham lifted her face, and looking vacantly into space, listened to the waltz. Its long undulating rhythm glided up along the walls from the ballroom and died away on the carpet, amid the shadows of the curtains.
She listened to it for a few moments, and piteously longed for it to stop and leave her in peace. Then a sense of the reality came back to her, and she threw herself on the pillows trembling with grief.
Her face was contracted; her eyes were red, a feverish brown red, and, listening to the sensual waltz, with one hand she tore the lace of the pillow. Her face being turned away from the door, she did not see Mrs. Thorpe, who entered as one would into a sick-room, and sat down on the bed.
After a few moments, moaning piteously, Mrs. Bentham turned round. So great was her pain that she was not startled by the quiet little black figure that had so unexpectedly come and sat down by her bed.
“My poor child,” said Mrs. Thorpe, taking her cousin’s long white fingers in her brown and crooked hands, “I guessed the reason of your disappearance from the ball-room; I have come to comfort you.”
The words fell on Mrs. Bentham’s burning thoughts as softly as rain on a desert. She answered them by throwing herself on the old lady’s bosom, and for a short space the two women wept together.
“Oh, Sarah,” she said, “you don’t know what I suffer; if I could only die; I have nothing to live for now.”
“My dear,” replied the old woman, with tears in her voice, “I suffered as you; I also wished to die; I thought I could not survive the death of all I held dear; and yet I have done so these many years.”
“But it was death that took your husband from you; we cannot struggle with Death; there is no jealousy there.”
“True, we cannot struggle with Death,” returned Mrs. Thorpe, “any more than we can with Time; sooner or later, both surely overtake us.”
The two women clasped each other’s hands, and there seemed to be an indefinite allegory in the torn pink ball-dress, and the sombre, loose-hanging serge robe.
At first Mrs. Bentham did not answer; but when at last the meaning of Mrs. Thorpe’s words filtered its way through her grief-saddened mind, her lips grew pale, and her eyes turned with a violent contraction.
“You mean that I am an old woman,” she said, savagely; but seeing Mrs. Thorpe looking so pityingly at her, her anger melted and again she burst into tears.
The soft murmur of the waltz came up the staircase again, and its coiling voluptuousness seemed to mock her in a curious way.
“Oh, if it would stop!” she exclaimed, hiding her face in the pillow, her feet hanging over the edge of the bed. “It is driving me mad! It is driving me mad.”
“My dear Lucy,” said Mrs. Thorpe, “to obtain the privileges of one age we have to throw aside those of the last; and our lives are spent in making these transitions. Sometimes we pass gently from one to the other, sometimes violently; but in either case we have to go on; for, alas! there are no halting places on the highroad of Time. The girl in her teens has to part with her toys; the girl of five-and-twenty, with her innocence; a woman of forty, with her love. Perhaps the last may be the bitterest parting, but it is none the less necessary to make. Lucy, I have come to befriend you, to give you counsel. To-day, you can bid farewell to the past; to-morrow, Time will push you rudely aside. We both have loved him; you have contributed materially to his welfare. He owes everything to you; continue the good work you have begun; let him marry the girl he loves; be it for you to join their hands.”
“Then I must resign everything? So be it I am now alone in the world; a world of days without sun, of things that have no joy for me.”
There was both anguish and fear in her face, and she cast on Mrs. Thorpe a look of utter abandonment, one of those looks with which in terrible circumstances we strive to imprint our soul upon another’s.
Mrs. Thorpe trembled for her friend; she understood that the sacrifice of a lifetime was concentrated in those moments. The few words Mrs. Bentham had spoken were the agony of infinite passion, an infinite farewell kissed to all earthly things. Even poor little Mrs. Thorpe, who had so long outlived the life of hope and entered into that of prayer, was overcome by the majesty of human passion, and could scarcely find courage to implore her friend to surrender her love to another.
But it was to be, and, after a pause, she went on to explain to Mrs. Bentham what she must do, not only for her own, but for Lewis’s sake. Mrs. Bentham sat still on the edge of the bed; her friend’s voice sounded vague in her ears, like a murmur of distant waters. Her thoughts were not like waking thoughts, they were indefinite and diffused, penetrated with the sleepy unease of a nightmare, and the heavy grief of such obtuse sensations.
As she sat looking vacantly into space, unimportant details of her past life crowded on her memory, until at last, startled by some sudden recollection, she uttered a little cry like that of a hare when run into by the hounds.
“No, no,” she exclaimed, falling on her knees; “I cannot give him up. No, not yet. Oh, save me! Tell him what I have done for him, and he will — he must leave her!”
She stopped, and moaning piteously she held with her white hands on to Mrs. Thorpe’s black dress.
The cold dawn glided along the edges of the curtains, revealing the disorder of the room. A black satin dress, which Mrs. Bentham had rejected in favour of a pink, lay thrown across the pearl-grey sofa at the foot of the bed; the white toilette table was strewed with brushes, combs, and tresses of hair; two or three ivory files and nail polishers had fallen on the carpet, and a bottle of white rose perfume, left uncorked, sent its acrid odour upwards through the heavy air.
Mrs. Thorpe strove vainly to lift Mrs. Bentham, who was almost fainting, from the ground; she would have liked, but she dared not call for assistance.
“Air! air! I am suffocating!”
In a minute Mrs. Thorpe pulled the curtains aside and raised the window, letting in the pale light and chill breezes of the morning, and, white as the dead, Mrs. Bentham staggered to the window.
The sparrows were chirping in the two trees which grew in the deep garden; slate coloured clouds rolled upwards, uncovering a piece of yellow sky whose sides were turning to pink.
The two women shivered in the cold air, and the storm of Mrs. Bentham’s passion subsided. Her face was swollen with grief, her hair dishevelled, and her dress torn an
d tumbled. She appeared ten years older than two hours ago when she danced with Lewis.
The conversation between the women was very painful; it was impossible to speak of any but present things; and both heard with impatience the long sing-song of the waltz, and the tramp of passing feet.
At last Mrs. Bentham crossed the room; and pouring out some water, began to bathe her eyes.
“You had better go to bed, Lucy,” suggested Mrs. Thorpe; “I will tell them as they go that they must excuse you; that you had a bad attack of neuralgia, and had to go to your room.”
“No, no, not for worlds; I shall be all right in ten minutes. I will go through this trial to the end.”
“But your hair is in a frightful state; your dress is utterly spoiled; your face is swollen; you had really better not.”
“I have another dress just the same as this, and Marie will arrange my hair in a few minutes,” replied Mrs. Bentham, ringing the bell.
Even the French maid, whose first rule in life was to be surprised at nothing, could not help showing her astonishment at this second toilette, but she accepted the neuralgic excuse, and with a thousand little words of pity, arranged her mistress’s hair as well as she could in the time.
In a quarter of an hour she was dressed, and a little rouge and powder made her look almost as if nothing had happened. Quite calm, but trembling, she went down to the ball-room.
The yellow glare hurt her eyes, and feeling somewhat dazed, she went over to Lady Marion, who rose to meet her.
“I have been looking for you this ever so long, to say goodbye,” said Lady Marion. “I am afraid that Helen has been asking you to keep out of my way, she has been enjoying herself immensely.”
Mrs. Bentham with difficulty repressed a look of pain, but she saved herself by entering into a long explanation of how she had had a bad attack of neuralgia, and had been obliged to go to her room.
At that moment Lady Helen came up, on Lewis’s arm, looking radiant with pleasure.
