The chauffeur was in the garage, and Alethea was quickly driven to the station with her child. The train had already arrived and she had only time to buy a ticket and to jump in. Two hours later, she was in London.
Chapter Ten
IT WAS evening. Nicholas sat alone at Brokeyates. The house was painfully silent, and in the reaction after his violent fit of temper, he seemed to have no life left. He was only aware of a dull aching misery and an overwhelming sense of shame. He writhed as he remembered each episode in that horrible afternoon, each word which had been spoken by himself or by his mother.
When Alethea did not come back, Nicholas had left Mrs. Roxerby in the library and had gone in search of his wife, only to find that she and Hans had left the house. His anger was redoubled, for he guessed that his mother would realize that Alethea had tricked them both. He went back, and told her that the nurse could not get the child ready at once, but that he would be sent to London the next day; and he could not tell whether Mrs. Roxerby was deceived by this or not. At any rate she said nothing. The interval caused by his absence from the room seemed to have calmed them both. They were both weary and jaded, and they could quarrel no more.
‘I don’t see what you’ve got against me to put you into such a rage,’ Mrs. Roxerby said. ‘I’ve done nothing except coming here without letting you know I was coming. Of course, you didn’t want your wife to see me, and I expect I look worse than she expected, though I don’t suppose you ever described me as a beauty.’
‘God forbid!’ Nicholas interjected.
‘You haven’t got the right to forbid me to come to England,’ the woman went on. ‘ Someone had to come, to see about this steel contract, the one we were talking about when you were over in Melbourne; and I thought I might as well take the trip. I thought I should like to see the sort of place you have got over here. You can’t say anything against that, can you? After all, I am your mother.’
‘I don’t need reminding of that,’ said Nicholas bitterly.
‘Then I don’t see what right a son has to order his mother as to where she may go.’
‘You can go where you like for all I care, as long as you don’t come here. You have never cared for me nor I for you. There’s been no pretence about it, and don’t let us begin pretending now. All I ask from you is to be left alone.’
They were walking towards the door. He stopped before going out with her onto the steps.
‘Remember this,’ he said. ‘I meant what I said about the money. I am going to have no more of it. I give up my partnership from to-day. I no longer have a share in your business, and I shall draw no more money. You boast that it is all yours. Then let it be yours. I shall never touch another penny of it.’
‘And what do you gain by that?’ she asked. ‘You lose a good deal you know.’
‘I gain the untold advantage of cutting myself off from you and from all that can remind me of you,’ he answered bitterly.
‘If you don’t want to be reminded of me, you had better not have any more children. I won’t promise to take any more off your hands.’
And with that last shot she left him.
In the silence that succeeded her departure, her final words had echoed again and again. He could not go back to the library, for in it he knew that he would see nothing but the hated figure of his mother as she had stood there defying him. And now, when darkness had come, and he found himself alone after dinner, he sat in the dining-room and thought of his life, telling himself that he had been a doomed man from the first.
His mother and he had always felt for each other that unconquerable hatred which can only exist between two people linked together in the toils of an unescapable wrong. Mrs. Roxerby could not look at Nicholas without being reminded of the humiliations she had suffered from his father. At the time of her marriage, she had been passionately in love with her husband, and she then had had no idea that her person was unattractive. She had actually been vain of her appearance. It seemed to her quite natural that the handsome Englishman should have fallen in love with her. But once they were married, he had openly admitted that her money had been her one attraction, and he had not attempted to conceal the aversion which he felt for her person. She soon knew that he loathed her; and it was not long before she returned his loathing with a bitterness increased by wounded love and pride. She could not forgive him for being the first to show her what her appearance was really like.
And as Nicholas grew up, she recognized in him the same repulsion from her which his father had had, intensified in his case by the fact that he knew her blood was in his veins. He had been teased at school because he was the son of a dwarf, and he could not forgive his mother for having brought him into the world. As long as he remained in Australia, he never for a moment forgot the handicap with which he had started his life, and for which he blamed his mother. This permanently embittered him, making him suspicious of any offered friendship, and defiant when he was disliked.
England and Brokeyates had been his opportunity. Here the stigma of his birth was unknown, and he was the son of his father, not of his mother. He expanded in the spacious easy amateur life of an English county, where his Australian money and his Australian business training had given him an advantage. Brokeyates wanted him, and he had never been wanted before.
And then he had married Alethea. To have done this seemed to free him for ever from his sense of inferiority. This exquisite creature loved him as he loved her. She believed in his powers, in his achievements, in his future. Life in Australia became a half-forgotten dream.
Looking back, Nicholas saw that the blunder he had made had been that visit to Australia. How futile it seemed, now that he had cut himself off from the business which had demanded it. If he had broken away then, there would have been no need for his mother to come to see him when she came to England. And if he had stayed with Alethea through those months she would not have spent those fatal hours with the hideous little dwarf in the carpenter’s cottage. For Nicholas still assured himself that this was the cause of Hans’ deformity. He would not allow himself to think that such a thing could be hereditary, although he knew that the world would think so. Alethea herself must now have no doubt that it was so. He writhed as he thought of how his conduct must appear to her. She had always told him that he was unjust to the Warrens, as well as to herself and to Hans, and now she knew that he had all along had this frightful thing to hide. Yet, he still told himself that he had been honest throughout. He still believed what he had insisted upon all along. It was not possible that the puny body of his son could be an inheritance from himself. He repudiated the idea with every fibre of his magnificent physique.
As Nicholas thought things over he saw that Alethea had done well in going away. She had saved him from an act of mad cruelty. It would have been unpardonable to take her child from her, and to compel her to hand him over to the grotesque and inhuman little being whose existence had suddenly been revealed to her. Alethea had preserved him from this. She had been his better self.
Then there swept over him the realization that she was gone. Could it mean that she had left him altogether, horrified at what he had shown her of his true nature? He could not believe it, knowing her lovely generous spirit. She would save the child, but surely she would not leave her husband for ever! Yet, who would blame her if she did?
The next morning Nicholas tried to face his changed financial position. He would have no more money from Australia, and on this he had hitherto lived at Brokeyates, as his mother had pointed out. There remained the income from the estate, and although, thanks to his improvements, this was paying better than it had done when he succeeded, yet he knew that he was from henceforth a poor man. He realized this, but he did not realize all that it implied, for he had always been rich. He saw, at any rate, that he must dismiss most of the servants in the house.
If its walls had been conscious (as the walls of old houses may be, holding within them as they do the ‘ soul’ of which we are some
times aware) they would now have seen in Nicholas something of that same spirit of perverse satisfaction with which Sir Henry had waited for his house to fall about his ears. Nicholas felt a bitter joy in cutting down the comforts which had grown to be necessities. He planned a life which should be lived in two or three rooms, while the rest of the house was unused. With frenzy, he insisted, that very first day, on having the shutters shut in all the rooms which he meant to abandon, so that the darkened passages led to dark rooms—rooms cut off from life, left vacant for grey unhappy ghosts to haunt them. When he carried a light up the stairs, he saw his shadow move across these darkened corridors, and the movement made them emptier. When he heard his own footsteps in the hall, the silent house seemed the more silent.
Three days passed without a word from Alethea. Nicholas tried to stir himself to anger in order to quiet his anxiety; but the thought that she had gone for ever out of his life seemed to be killing him. And he knew he had done it himself. He could not blame her, try as he might.
On the third morning a letter in her handwriting was on the table. It came from Paris. Alethea wrote from a hotel, and her envelope contained only a scrap of paper. On it were written these words:
‘I have taken Hans away, as I see that it makes you so unhappy to have him in your house. I could not give him to a stranger. We are well, and if anything goes wrong with either of us, you shall hear. I leave here this evening. Alethea.’
That was all.
Chapter Eleven
AS a little girl, Alethea had been very fond of the German wife of one of her uncles; but when he died, Tante Helena went back to Bavaria, where she subsequently married one of her fellow-countrymen. Since then, she had never been in England, and though there had been many plans for Alethea to go and stay with her at Friedenbach, something had always interfered with them. It had become increasingly difficult for her to leave her grandfather, and after Nicholas had come into her life, Tante Helena had almost vanished from her memory. They had not written to each other for some years.
Then, during that frightful journey to London, when Alethea had left behind her everything in her life except the baby in her arms, the thought of the German aunt had suddenly come back into her mind, She would take the child to Friedenbach. Nicholas could never find her there, for he had never even heard Countess Friedenbach’s name. Such was her confidence in Tante Helena’s love, that Alethea quite naturally resolved, after a silence of five or six years, to telegraph to the Countess announcing her arrival with her baby. She did not even know whether Tante Helena had heard of her marriage.
So, after writing to Nicholas from Paris, Alethea set off on a long and weary journey to Bavaria. She was very unused to travelling, and she found everything difficult. She had forgotten most of her German, and it seemed impossible to make herself understood. She had hardly ever seen Hans cry, but to her despair he cried a great deal in the train. Alethea was panic-stricken, thinking that in her ignorance she was already doing some fatal harm to the child’s health, though really there was nothing wrong except that Hans was tired, and was missing the very regular routine to which his nurse had accustomed him.
The maddening rhythmic roar of the train set going in Alethea’s mind recurrent circles of unhappy thoughts. Round and round they came, always leading her back at last to their miserable starting-point. She could not get out of her mind the memory of Mrs. Roxerby. The picture of the hideous dwarf seemed photographed upon the retina of her eyes and she could not drive it away. As it stood before her, she hugged Hans closely to her, and hid his face against her, dreading the sight of him for fear that something in his face might resemble the inhuman little object who had suddenly declared herself to be his grandmother. And with the thought of that unexpected revelation, she felt again the shock with which she had learnt that Nicholas had all along kept this secret from her. She had no pity for him. She thought of his injustice towards her, and towards his workman, and she realized that when he was throwing all the responsibility for Hans’ misfortune onto her, he had known this about his own mother. She could not forgive him. And when she felt most bitter against him, the thought of Portia would recur. When she ran away with Hans, she had never given a thought to the other child. Now she remembered her, left to the mercy of a man who had shown himself utterly cruel and unprincipled. What would become of Portia now?
The train beat out no answer to these agonizing questions. It only hammered them in more and more insistently every hour, with no interruption except, from time to time, the fretful crying of Hans.
At last they reached the end of their journey. Alethea got out onto the platform of a little country station, and holding Hans in her arms, she watched the train go away. She felt as if she had escaped from a horde of demons, who, for as long as she could remember, had been dragging her bruised body over an unending road made of screeching pebbles, to the tune of a loud chorus of iron voices. In contrast with this, the station was unbelievably quiet, and the morning air a miracle of freshness. The light came over the mountains with a cool clarity.
She had stepped off the brink of the world she had known. She was standing alone with her baby in a completely strange land, and she felt no fear. Instead, there came to her an ineffable peace from the distant snow-covered mountains. As she looked up at them, they seemed transparent, not of this earth: they were spirit hills, made of pure morning light. It was like an awakening in Paradise. She found herself in no rapturous Heaven, ranked with singing angels or filled with the music of seraphic harmonies. No, this was a very quiet place, apart, it seemed, from saints and sinners alike. No one could follow her here. The valley was a crystal globe, holding in its clear serenity herself and her child.
Hans too, felt the spirit of the place. His fretfulness had gone, and he stared at the mountains with the deep wise gaze of a baby who has not learnt to speak. When once that art has been acquired, it is but too easy to splash about in the shallows of passing impressions, and to imagine all the while that one is in the ocean; but a baby watches the sky or the sea out of unplumbed deeps of wonder.
Alethea engaged a little carriage and started on the nine miles drive to Friedenbach. The way was by a wide valley, all flat green fields through which a little stream played its way. The month was April, and the snow had melted from the lower hills, while the early morning sun threw blue shadows from the remoter snow mountains across the meadow green. The little woods were breaking into thin leaves, and somewhere she heard a cuckoo. A sudden drift of crocuses across the grass took her breath. She thought at first that it was a belated patch of snow, but when she saw the pure white breaking now and again into the very palest mauve, she knew that she was looking at flowers. There were large pale cowslips too, like polyanthus, and she could not resist asking the driver to stop for a little time, while she lifted Hans out of the carriage and set him down among the soft golden flowers. The cowslips were exactly the same colour as his eyes.
‘How strange’, she thought, ‘to have eyes of greenish-gold! And how beautiful they are!’
Hans was very happy sitting on the grass. He grabbed at all the flowers he could reach, and he laughed and talked inarticulately to himself. Alethea wanted to make him a cowslip ball, but she had not with her that prosaic necessity, a reel of cotton; so she could only pick the separate blossoms and throw them at Hans, and he threw them back. The driver of their carriage was not at all disturbed by this dallying on the part of his fare. He evidently quite understood it, and he lit his pipe and threw himself flat on his back on the grass to smoke, enjoying the morning as much as Alethea and the child.
They played there for half an hour, but when they got back into the carriage, Alethea’s courage began to fail her. It suddenly came home to her that she was approaching a house, the owner of which she had never seen, while his wife had gone out of her life years ago. To these almost strangers she had dared to announce her visit by the mere sending of a telegram from Paris, and now she was arriving at their house without having wait
ed for an answer. Perhaps the Friedenbachs had long ago sold the house. In any case, they might be away on a visit. It might be even that Tante Helena had forgotten her. Alethea became very frightened. The place was Paradise no more, for the agitations of the world had broken in.
The drive took nearly two hours, and as time went on Alethea grew more and more alarmed at her own audacity. The road meandered along, taking as many curves as the stream which it followed. They crossed little stone bridges, skirted woods, passed roadside Calvarys, and now and again they drove through a little village. At every turn Alethea expected to find herself at Friedenbach, and each time she tried to prepare her arrival, and to rehearse her first words on seeing Tante Helena. But her trouble was that she didn’t even know if she would find the Friedenbachs at all, and if she did find them, she didn’t know what they would be like.
At last they turned off the main road, to follow a rough track which led right away into the mountains. They drove under an avenue of dark fir trees. The road grew chilly and Alethea shivered. Hans seemed frightened and he cuddled closer to her. She tried to stir up some courage in herself to pass on to him.
Then they emerged into a gay little inner valley, tucked away out of sight. It had its own streamlet, much tinier and noisier than the one they had hitherto followed; and there were no more stone bridges, for this absurd little stream was crossed by nothing more formal than fords or stepping-stones. The fields were filled with cows and calves, sheep and lambs; and, scattered over the grass, the cowslips, crocuses and anemones grew more thickly than ever. A friendly little house stood in a field. Its plastered walls were gay with bright coloured Rococo paintings. Two dogs lay asleep outside. The carriage stopped, and Alethea felt that her heart too had stopped beating.
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