by Thomas Hardy
Miss Ambrose sighed nervously. “Yes,” she said.
“I don’t mean by you to-morrow! God forbid!”
“No.”
Miss Ambrose sighed again, and a silence followed, during which, while recalling unutterable things of the past, Rosalys gazed absently out of the window at the lake, that some men were dredging, the mud left bare by draining down the water being imprinted with hundreds of little footmarks of plovers feeding there. Eight or nine herons stood further away, one or two composedly fishing, their grey figures reflected with unblurred clearness in the mirror of the pool. Some little water-hens waddled with a fussy gait across the sodden ground in front of them, and a procession of wild geese came through the sky, and passed on till they faded away into a row of black dots.
Suddenly the plovers rose into the air, uttering their customary wails, and dispersing like a group of stars from a rocket; and the herons drew up their flail-like legs, and flapped themselves away. Something had disturbed them; a carriage, sweeping round to the other side of the house.
“There’s the door-bell!” Rosalys exclaimed, with a start. “That’s he, for certain! Is my hair untidy Jane? I’ve been rumpling it awfully, leaning back on the cushions. And do see if my gown is all right at the back — it never did fit well.”
The butler flung open the folding-doors and announced in the voice of a man who felt that it was quite time for this nonsense of calling to be put an end to by the more compact arrangement of the morrow:
“Lord Parkhurst!”
A man of middle size, with a fair and pleasant face, and a short beard, entered the room. His blue eyes smiled rather more than his lips as he took the little hand of his hostess in his own with the air of one verging on proprietorship of the same, and said: “Now, darling; about what we have to settle before the morning! I have come entirely on business, as you perceive!”
Rosalys tenderly smiled up at him. Miss Jennings left the room, and Rosalys’ sailor silently kissed and admired his betrothed, till he continued:
“Ah — my beautiful one! I have nothing to give you in return for the immeasurable gift you are about to bestow on me — excepting such love as no man ever felt before! I almost wish you were not quite so good and perfect and innocent as you are! And I wish you were a poorer woman — as poor as I — and had no lovely home such as this. To think you have kept yourself from all other men for such an unworthy fellow as me!”
Rosalys looked away from him along the green vistas of chestnut and beeches stretching far down outside the windows.
“Oswald — I know how much you care for me: and that is why I — hope you won’t be disappointed — after you have taken me to-morrow for good and all! I wonder if I shall hinder and hamper you in your profession. Perhaps you ought to marry a girl much younger than yourself — your nature is so young — not a maturing woman like me.”
For all answer he smiled at her with the confiding, fearless gaze that she loved.
Lord Parkhurst stayed on through a paradisical hour till Miss Jennings came to tell them that tea was in the library. Presently they were reminded by the same faithful relative and dependent that on that evening of all evenings they had promised to drive across to the house of Colonel Lacy, Lord Parkhurst’s uncle, and one of Rosalys, near neighbours, and dine there quietly with two or three intimate friends.
VI
When Rosalys entered Colonel Lacy’s drawing-room before dinner, the eyes of the few guests assembled there were naturally enough fixed upon her.
“By Jove, she’s better looking than ever — though she’s not more than a year or two under thirty!” whispered young Lacy to a man standing in the shadow behind a high lamp.
The person addressed started, and did not answer for a moment. Then he laughed and said forcedly,
“Yes, wonderful for her age, she certainly is.”
As he spoke his hostess, a fat and genial lady, came blandly towards him.
“Mr Durrant, I’m so sorry we’ve no lady for you to take in to-night. One or two people have thrown us over. I want to introduce you to Miss Ambrose. Isn’t she lovely? O, how stupid I am! Of course you grew up in this neighbourhood, and must have known all about her as a girl.”
Jim Durrant it was, in the flesh; once the soldier, now the “traveler and explorer” of the little known interiors of Asiatic countries; to use the words in which he described himself. His foreign-looking and sun-dried face was rather pale and set as he walked last into the dining-room with young Lacy. He had only arrived on that day at an hotel in the nearest town, where he had been accidentally met and recognized by that young man, and asked to dinner off-hand.
Smiling, and apparently unconscious, he sat down on the left side of his hostess, talking calmly to her and across the table to the one or two he knew. Rosalys heard his voice as the phantom of a dead sound mingling with the usual trivial words and light laughter of the rest, Lord Parkhurst’s conversation about Egyptian finance, and Mrs Lacy’s platitudes about the Home-Rule question, as if she were living through a curiously incoherent dream.
Suddenly during the progress of the dinner Mrs Lacy looked across with a glance of solicitude towards the other end of the table, and said in a low voice:
“I am afraid Miss Ambrose is rather overstrained — as she may naturally be? She looks so white and tired. Do you think, Parkhurst, that she finds this room too hot? I will have the window opened at the top.”
“She does look pale,” Lord Parkhurst murmured, and as he spoke glanced anxiously and tenderly towards his betrothed. “I think too, she has a little over-taxed herself — she don’t usually get so white as this.”
Rosalys felt his eyes upon her, looked across at him, and smiled strangely.
When dinner was ended Rosalys still seemed not quite herself, whereupon she was taken in hand by her good and fussy hostess; sal-volatile was brought, and she was given the most comfortable chair and the largest cushions the house afforded. It seemed to Rosalys as if hours had elapsed before the men joined the ladies and there came that general moving of places like the shuffling of a pack of cards. She heard Jim’s voice speaking close to her ear:
“I want to have a word with you.”
“I can’t!” she faltered,
“Did you get my letter?”
“No!” said she.
“I wonder how that was! Well — I’ll be at the door of Ambrose Towers while the stable-clock is striking twelve to-night. Be there to meet me. I’ll not detain you long. We must have an understanding.”
“For God’s sake how do you come here?”
“I saw in the newspapers that you were going to marry. What could I do otherwise than let you know I was alive?”
“O, you might have done it less cruelly!”
“Will you be at the door?”
“I must, I suppose! . . . Don’t tell him here — before these people! It will be such an agonising disturbance that — ”
“Of course I shan’t. Be there.”
This was all they could say. Lord Parkhurst came forward, and observing to Durrant, “They are wanting you for bezique,” sat down beside Rosalys.
She had intended to go home early: and went even earlier than she had planned. At half-past ten she found herself in her own hall, not knowing how she had got there, or when she had bidden adieu to Lord Parkhurst, or what she had said to him.
Jim’s letter was lying on the table awaiting her.
As soon as she had got upstairs and slipped into her dressing-gown, had dispatched her maid, and ascertained that all the household had retired, she read her husband’s note, which briefly informed her that he had led an adventurous life since they had parted, and had come back to see if she were living, when he suddenly heard that she was going to be married. Then Rosalys sat down at her writing-table to begin somehow a letter to Lord Parkhurst. To write that was an imperative duty before she slept. It need not be said that awful indeed to her was its object, the letting Lord Parkhurst know that she had a husb
and, and had seen him that day. But she could not shape a single line, and the visioned aspect that she would wear in his eyes as soon as he discovered this truth of her history, was so terrible to her that she burst into hysterical sobbing over the paper as she sat.
The clock crept on to twelve before Rosalys had written a word. The labour seemed Herculean — insuperable. Why had she not told him face to face?
Twelve o’clock it was; and nothing done; and controlling herself as women can, when they must, she went down to the door. Softly opening it a little way she saw against the iron gate immediately without it the form of her husband, Jim Durrant — upon the whole much the same form that she had known eight years ago.
“Here I am,” said he.
“Yes,” said she.
“Open this iron thing.”
A momentary feeling of aversion caused her to hesitate.
“Do you hear — do you mean to say — Rosalys!” he began.
“No — no. Of course I will!” She opened the grille and he came up and touched her hand lightly.
“Kissing not allowed, I suppose,” he observed, with mock solemnity, “in view of the fact that you are to be married to-morrow?”
“You know better!” she said. “Of course I’m not going to commit bigamy! The wedding is not to be.”
“Have you explained to him?”
“N-no — not yet. I was just writing it when — ”
“Ha — you haven’t! Good. Woman’s way. Shall I give him a friendly call to-morrow morning?”
“O no, no — let me do it!” she implored. “I love him so well, and it will break his poor heart if it is not done gently! O God — if I could only die to-night, while he still believes in me! You don’t know what affection I have felt for him!” she continued miserably, not caring what Jim thought. “He has been my whole world! And he — he believes me to be so good! He has all the old-fashioned ideas of marriage that people of your fast sets smile at! He knows nothing of any kind of former acquaintance between you and me. I ought not to have done it — kept him in the dark! I tried not to. But I was so fearfully lonely! And now I’ve lost him! . . . If I could only have got at that register in that City church, how I would have torn out the leaf.” she added vehemently.
“That’s a pleasant remark to make to a husband!”
“Well — that was my feeling; I may as well be honest! I didn’t know you were coming back any more; and you yourself suggested that I might be able to re-marry!”
“You’d better do it — I shan’t tell. And if anybody else did, the punishment is not heavy nowadays. The judges are beginning to discountenance informers on previous marriages, if the new-assorted parties themselves are satisfied to forget them.”
“Don’t insult me so. You’ve not forgotten how to do that in all these years!”
There was a silence, in which she regarded with passive gloom the familiar scene before her. The inquisitive jays, the pensive wood doves, that lodged at their ease thereabout, as if knowing that their proprietor was a gunless woman, all slept calmly; and not a creature was conscious of the presence of these two but a little squirrel they had disturbed in a beech near the shady wall. Durrant remained gazing at her; then he spoke, in a changed and richer voice:
“Rosalys!”
She looked vaguely at his face without answering.
“How pretty you look in this star-light — much as you did when we used to meet out here nine or ten years ago!”
“Ah! But — ”
The sentence was broken by his abrupt movement forward. He seized her firmly in his arms, and kissed her repeatedly before she was aware.
“Don’t — don’t!” she said, struggling.
“Why?”
“I don’t like you — I don’t like you!”
“What rot! Yes, you do! Come — damn you, dear — put up your face as you used to! Now, I’m not going off in a huff — I’m determined I won’t; nor shall you either! . . . Let me sit down in your hall, or somewhere, Rosalys! I’ve come a long way to-day, and I’m tired. And after eight years!”
“I don’t know what to say to it — there’s no light downstairs! The servants may hear us too — it is not so very late!”
“We can whisper. And suppose they do? They must know to-morrow!”
She gasped a sigh, and preceded him in through the door; and the squirrel saw nothing more.
VII
It was three-hours-and-half later when they re-appeared. The lawn was as silent as when they had left it, though the sleep of things had weakened to a certain precarious slightness; and round the corner of the house a low line of light showed the dawn.
“Now, good-bye, dear,” said her husband, lightly. “You’ll let him know at once?”
“Of course.”
“And send to me directly after?”
“Yes.”
“And now for my walk across the fields to the hotel. These boots are thin, but I know the old way well enough. By Jove, I wonder what Melanie — ”
“Who?”
“O — what Melanie will think, I was going to say. It slipped out — I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings at all.”
“Melanie — who is she?”
“Well — she’s a French lady. You know, of course, Rosalys, that I thought you were perhaps dead — and — so this lady passes as Mrs Durrant. “
Rosalys started.
“In fact I found her in the East, and took pity upon her — that’s all.”Though if it had happened that you had not been living now I have got back, I should of course, have married her at once.”
“Is — she, then, here with you at the hotel?”
“O no — I wouldn’t bring her on here till I knew how things were.”
“Then where is she?”
“I left her at my rooms in London. O, it will be all right — I shall see her safely back to Paris, and make a little provision for her. Nobody in England knows anything of her existence.”
“When — did you part from her?”
“Well, of course, at breakfast-time.”
Rosalys bowed herself against the doorway. “O — O — what have I done! What a fool — what a weak fool!” she moaned. “Go away from me — go away!”
Jim was almost distressed when he saw the distortion of her agonized face.
“Now why should you take on like this! There’s nothing in it. People do these things. Living in a prim society here you don’t know how the world goes on!”
“O, but to think it didn’t occur to me that the sort of man — ”
Jim, though anxious, seemed to awaken to something humorous in the situation, and vented a momentary chuckle. “Well, it is rather funny that I should have let it out. But still — ”
“Don’t make a deep wrong deeper by cruel levity! Go away!”
“You’ll be in a better mood to-morrow, mark me, and then I’ll tell you all my history. There — I’m gone! Au revoir!”
He disappeared under the trees. Rosalys, rousing herself, closed the gate and fastened the door, and sat down in one of the hall chairs, her teeth shut tight, and her little hands clenched. When she had passed this mood, and returned upstairs, she regarded the state of her room sadly, and bent again over her writing-table, murmuring “O, how weak, how weak was I!”
But in a few minutes she found herself nerved to an unexpected and passionate vigour of action; and began writing her letter to Lord Parkhurst with great rapidity. Sheet after sheet she filled, and, having read them over, she sealed up the letter and placed it on the mantelpiece to be given to a groom and dispatched by hand as soon as the morning was a little further advanced.
With cold feet and a burning head she flung herself upon the bed just as she was, and waited for the day without the power to sleep. When she had lain nearly two hours, and the morning had crept in, and she could hear from the direction of the stables that the men were astir, she rang for her maid, and taking the letter in her hand stood with it in an attitude of suspense as the wom
an entered. The latter looked full of intelligence.
“Are any of the men about?” asked Rosalys.
“O yes, ma’am. There’ve been such an accident in the meads this past night — about half-a-mile down the river — and Jones ran up from the lodge to call for help quite early; and Benton and Peters went as soon as they were dressed. A gentleman drowned — yes — it’s Mr James Durrant — the son of old Mr Durrant who died some years ago. He came home only yesterday, after having been heard nothing of for years and years. He left Mrs Durrant, who they say is a French lady, somewhere in London, but they have telegraphed and found her, and she’s coming. They say she’s quite distracted. The poor gentleman left the Three Lions last night and went out to dinner, saying he would walk home, as it was a fine night and not very far: and it is supposed he took the old short cut across the moor where there used to be a path when he was a lad at home, crossing the big river by a plank. There is only a rail now, and he must have tried to get across upon it, for it was broken in two, and his body found in the water-weeds just below.”
“Is he dead?”
“O yes. They had a great trouble to get him out. The men have just come in from carrying him to the hotel. It will be sad for his poor wife when she gets there!”
“His poor wife — yes.”
“Travelling all the way from London on such a call!”
Rosalys had allowed the hand in which she held the letter to Lord Parkhurst to drop to her side: she now put it in the pocket of her dressing-gown.
“I was wishing to send somewhere,” she said. “But I think I will wait till later.”
The house was astir betimes on account of the wedding, and Rosalys’ companion in particular, who was not sad because she was going to live on with the bride. When Miss Jennings saw her cousin’s agitation she said she looked ill, and insisted upon sending for the doctor. He, who was the local practitioner, arrived at breakfast time; very proud to attend such an important lady, who mostly got doctored in London. He said Rosalys certainly was not quite in her usual state of health; prescribed a tonic, and declared that she would be all right in an hour or two. He then informed her that he had been suddenly called up that morning to the case of which they had possibly heard — the drowning of Mr Durrant.
