Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “There is not the slightest necessity,” replied his wife. “I can go alone, and you can go to bed.”

  “I tell you I am perfectly well!” he said with unconcealed annoyance. “Let me alone.”

  “Certainly. Nothing is easier.”

  The voice was full of that injured dignity which most surely irritated him, as Gloria knew. But the servant was in the room, and he said nothing, though it was a real effort to be silent. His tongue had been free that day, and it was hard to be bound again.

  They finished dinner almost in silence, and then went back to the drawing-room by force of habit. Gloria was still in her walking-dress, but there was no hurry, and she resumed her favourite seat by the fire for a time, before going to dress for the reception.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  THERE WAS SOMETHING exasperating in the renewal of the position exactly as it had been before dinner. To make up for having eaten nothing, Reanda drank two cups of coffee in silence.

  “You might at least speak to me,” observed Gloria, as he set down the second cup. “One would almost think that we had quarrelled!”

  The hard laugh that followed the words jarred upon him more painfully than anything that had gone before. He laughed, too, after a moment’s silence, half hysterically.

  “Yes,” he said; “one might almost think that we had quarrelled!” And he laughed again.

  “The idea seems to amuse you,” said Gloria, coldly.

  “As it does you,” he answered. “We both laughed. Indeed, it is very amusing.”

  “Donna Francesca has sent you home in a good humour. That is rare. I suppose I ought to be grateful.”

  “Yes. I am in a fine humour. It seems to me that we both are.” He bit his cigar, and blew out short puffs.

  “You need not include me. Please do not smoke into my face.”

  The smoke was not very near her, but she made a movement with her hands as though brushing it away.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said politely, and he moved to the other side of the fireplace.

  “How nervous you are!” she exclaimed. “Why can you not sit down?”

  “Because I wish to stand,” he answered, with returning impatience. “Because I am nervous, if you choose.”

  “You told me that you were perfectly well.”

  “So I am.”

  “If you were perfectly well, you would not be nervous,” she replied.

  He felt as though she were driving a sharp nail into his brain.

  “It does not make any difference to you whether I am nervous or not,” he said, and his eye began to lighten, as he sat down.

  “It certainly makes no difference to you whether you are rude or not.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, said nothing, and smoked in silence. One thin leg was crossed over the other and swung restlessly.

  “Is this sort of thing to last forever?” she inquired coldly, after a silence which had lasted a full minute.

  “I do not know what you mean,” said Reanda.

  “You know very well what I mean.”

  “This is insufferable!” he exclaimed, rising suddenly, with his cigar between his teeth.

  “You might take your cigar out of your mouth to say so,” retorted Gloria.

  He turned on her, and an exclamation of anger was on his lips, but he did not utter it. There was a remnant of self-control. Gloria leaned back in her chair, and took up a carved ivory fan from amongst the knick-knacks on the little table beside her. She opened it, shut it, and opened it again, and pretended to fan herself, though the room was cool.

  “I should really like to know,” she said presently, as he walked up and down with uneven steps.

  “What?” he asked sharply.

  “Whether this is to last for the rest of our lives.”

  “What?”

  “This peaceful existence,” she said scornfully. “I should really like to know whether it is to last. Could you not tell me?”

  “It will not last long, if you make it your principal business to torment me,” he said, stopping in his walk.

  “I?” she exclaimed, with an air of the utmost surprise. “When do I ever torment you?”

  “Whenever I am with you, and you know it.”

  “Really! You must be ill, or out of your mind, or both. That would be some excuse for saying such a thing.”

  “It needs none. It is true.” He was becoming exasperated at last. “You seem to spend your time in finding out how to make life intolerable. You are driving me mad. I cannot bear it much longer.”

  “If it comes to bearing, I think I have borne more than you,” said Gloria. “It is not little. You leave me to myself. You neglect me. You abuse the friends I am obliged to find rather than be alone. You neglect me in every way — and you say that I am driving you mad. Do you realize at all how you have changed in this last year? You may have really gone mad, for all I know, but it is I who have to suffer and bear the consequences. You neglect me brutally. How do I know how you pass your time?”

  Reanda stood still in the middle of the room, gazing at her. For a moment he was surprised by the outbreak. She did not give him time to answer.

  “You leave me in the morning,” she went on, working her coldness into anger. “You often go away before I am awake. You come back at midday, and sometimes you do not speak a word over your breakfast. If I speak, you either do not answer, or you find fault with what I say; and if I show the least enthusiasm for anything but your work, you preach me down with proverbs and maxims, as though I were a child. I am foolish, young, impatient, silly, not fit to take care of myself, you say! Have you taken care of me? Have you ever sacrificed one hour out of your long day to give me a little pleasure? Have you ever once, since we were married, stayed at home one morning and asked me what I would do — just to make one holiday for me? Never. Never once! You give me a fine house and enough money, and you think you have given me all that a woman wants.”

  “And what do you want?” asked Reanda, trying to speak calmly.

  “A little kindness, a little love — the least thing of all you promised me and of all I was so sure of having! Is it so much to ask? Have you lied to me all this time? Did you never love me? Did you marry me for my face, or for my voice? Was it all a mere empty sham from the beginning? Have you deceived me from the first? You said you loved me. Was none of it true?”

  “Yes. I loved you,” he answered, and suddenly there was a dulness in his voice.

  “You loved me—”

  She sighed, and in the stillness that followed the little ivory fan rattled as she opened and shut it. To his ear, the tone in which she had spoken had rung false. If only he could have heard her voice speaking as it had once sounded, he must have been touched.

  “Yes,” she continued. “You loved me, or at least you made me think you did. I was young and I believed you. You do not even say it now. Perhaps because you know how hard it would be to make me believe you.”

  “No. That is not the reason.”

  She waited a moment, for it was not the answer she had expected.

  “Angelo—” she began, and waited, but he said nothing, though he looked at her. “It is not true, it cannot be true!” she said, suddenly turning her face away, for there was a bitter humiliation in it.

  “It is much better to say it at once,” he said, with the supernaturally calm indifference which sometimes comes upon very sensitive people when they are irritated beyond endurance. “I did love you, or I should not have married you. But I do not love you any longer. I am sorry. I wish I did.”

  “And you dare to tell me so!” she cried, turning upon him suddenly.

  A moment later she was leaning forward, covering her face with her hands, and speaking through them.

  “You have the heart to tell me so, after all I have been to you — the devotion of years, the tenderness, the love no man ever had of any woman! Oh, God! It is too much!”

  “It is said now. It is of no use to go back to a lie,” obse
rved Reanda, with an indifference that would have seemed diabolical even to himself, had he believed her outbreak to be quite genuine. “Of what use would it be to pretend again?”

  “You admit that you have only pretended to love me?” She raised her flushed face and gleaming eyes.

  “Of late — if you call it a pretence—”

  “Oh, not that — not that! I have seen it — but at first. You did love me. Say that, at least.”

  “Certainly. Why should I have married you?”

  “Yes — why? In spite of her, too — it is not to be believed.”

  “In spite of her? Of whom? Are you out of your mind?”

  Gloria laughed in a despairing sort of way.

  “Do not tell me that Donna Francesca ever wished you to be married!” she said.

  “She brought us together. You know it. It is the only thing I could ever reproach her with.”

  “She made you marry me?”

  “Made me? No! You are quite mad.”

  He stamped his foot impatiently, and turned away to walk up and down again. His cigar had gone out, but he gnawed at it angrily. He was amazed at what he could still bear, but he was fast losing his head. The mad desire to strangle her tingled in his hands, and the light of the lamp danced when he looked at it.

  “She has made you do so many things!” said Gloria.

  Her tone had changed again, growing hard and scornful, when she spoke of Donna Francesca.

  “What has she made me do that you should speak of her in that way?” asked Reanda, angrily, re-crossing the room.

  “She has made you hate me — for one thing,” Gloria answered.

  “That is not true!” Reanda could hardly breathe, and he felt his voice growing thick.

  “Not true! Then, if not she, who else? You are with her there all day — she talks about me, she finds fault with me, and you come home and see the faults she finds for you—”

  “There is not a word of truth in what you say—”

  “Do not be so angry, then! If it were not true, why should you care? I have said it, and I will say it. She has robbed me of you. Oh, I will never forgive her! Never fear! One does not forget such things! She has got you, and she will keep you, I suppose. But you shall regret it! She shall pay me for it!”

  Her voice shook, for her jealousy was real, as was all her emotion while it lasted.

  “You shall not speak of her in that way,” said Reanda, fiercely. “I owe her and her family all that I am, all that I have in the world—”

  “Including me!” interrupted Gloria. “Pay her then — pay her with your love and yourself. You can satisfy your conscience in that way, and you can break my heart.”

  “There is not the slightest fear of that,” answered Reanda, cruelly.

  She rose suddenly to her feet and stood before him, blazing with anger.

  “If I could find yours — if you had any — I would break it,” she said. “You dare to say that I have no heart, when you can see that every word you say thrusts it through like a knife, when I have loved you as no woman ever loved man! I said it, and I repeat it — when I have given you everything, and would have given you the world if I had it! Indeed, you are utterly heartless and cruel and unkind—”

  “At least, I am honest. I do not play a part as you do. I say plainly that I do not love you and that I am sorry for it. Yes — really sorry.” His voice softened for an instant. “I would give a great deal to love you as I once did, and to believe that you loved me—”

  “You will tell me that I do not—”

  “Indeed, I will tell you so, and that you never did—”

  “Angelo — take care! You will go too far!”

  “I could never go far enough in telling you that truth. You never loved me. You may have thought you did. I do not care. You talk of devotion and tenderness and all the like! Of being left alone and neglected! Of going too far! What devotion have you ever shown to me, beyond extravagantly praising everything I painted, for a few months after we were married. Then you grew tired of my work. That is your affair. What is it to me whether you admire my pictures or Mendoza’s, or any other man’s? Do you think that is devotion? I know far better than you which are good and which are bad. But you call it devotion. And it was devotion that kept you away from me when I was working, when I was obliged to work — for it is my trade, after all — and when you might have been with me day after day! And it was devotion to meet me with your sour, severe look every day when I came home, as though I were a secret enemy, a conspirator, a creature to be guarded against like a thief — as though I had been staying away from you on purpose, and of my will — instead of working for you all day long. That was your way of showing your love. And to torment me with questions, everlastingly believing that I spend my time in talking against you to Donna Francesca—”

  “You do!” cried Gloria, who had not been able to interrupt his incoherent speech. “You love her as you never loved me — as you hate me — as you both hate me!”

  She grasped his sleeve in her anger, shaking his arm, and staring into his eyes.

  “You make me hate you!” he answered, trying to shake her off.

  “And you succeed, between you — You and your—”

  In his turn he grasped her arm with his long, thin fingers, with nervous roughness.

  “You shall not speak of her—”

  “Shall not? It is the only right I have left — that and the right to hate you — you and that infamous woman you love — yes — you and your mistress — your pretty Francesca!” Her laugh was almost a scream.

  His fury overflowed. After all, he was the son of a countryman, of the steward of Gerano. He snatched the ivory fan from her hand and struck her across the face with it. The fragile thing broke to shivers, and the fragments fell between them.

  Gloria turned deadly white, but there was a bright red bar across her cheek. She looked at him a moment, and into her face there came that fateful look that was like her dead mother’s.

  Then without a word she turned and left the room.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  THE DAUGHTER OF Angus Dalrymple and Maria Braccio was not the woman to bear a blow tamely, or to hesitate long as to the surest way of resenting it. Before she had reached the door she had determined to leave the house at once, and ten minutes had not passed before she found herself walking down the Corso, veiled and muffled in a cloak, and having all the money she could call her own, in her pocket, together with a few jewels of little value, given her by her father.

  Reanda had sunk into a chair when the door had closed behind her, half stunned by the explosion of his own anger. He looked at the bits of broken ivory on the carpet, and wondered vaguely what they meant. He felt as though he had been in a dream of which he could not remember the distorted incidents at all clearly. His breath came irregularly, his heart fluttered and stood still and fluttered again, and his hands twitched at the fringe on the arms of the chair. By and bye, the butler came in to take away the coffee cups and he saw that his master was ill. Under such circumstances nothing can equal the gentleness of an Italian servant. The man called some one to help him, and got Reanda to his dressing-room, and undressed him and laid him upon the long leathern sofa. Then they knocked at the bedroom door, but there was no answer.

  “Do not disturb the signora,” said Reanda, feebly. “She wishes to be alone. We shall not want the carriage.”

  Those were the only words he spoke that evening, and the servants understood well enough that something had happened between husband and wife, and that it was best to be silent and to obey. No one tried the door of the bedroom. If any one had turned the handle, it would have been found to be locked. The key lay on the table in the hall, amongst the visiting-cards. Dalrymple’s daughter had inherited some of his quick instinct and presence of mind. She had felt sure that if she locked the door of her room when she left the house, her husband would naturally suppose that she had shut herself in, not wishing to be disturbed, and would re
spect her desire to be alone. It would save trouble, and give her time to get away. He could sleep on the sofa in his dressing-room, as he actually did, in the illness of his anger, treated as Italians know how to treat such common cases, of which the consequences are sometimes fatal. Many an Italian has died from a fit of rage. A single blood-vessel, in the brain, a little weaker than the rest, and all is over in an apoplexy. But Reanda was not of an apoplectic constitution. The calming treatment acted very soon, he fell asleep, and did not wake till daylight, quite unaware that Gloria was not in the next room, sleeping off her anger as he had done.

  She had gone out in her first impulse to leave the house of the man who had so terribly insulted her. Under her veil the hot blood scorched her where the blow had left its red bar, and her rage and wounded pride chased one another from her heart to her head while with every beating of her pulse the longing for revenge grew wilder and stronger.

  She had left the house with one first idea — to find Paul Griggs and tell him what had happened. No other thought crossed her mind, and her steps turned mechanically down the Corso, for he still lived in his two rooms in the Via della Frezza.

  It was early still. People dined at six o’clock in those days, and it was not yet eight when Gloria found herself in the street. It was quiet, though there were many people moving about. During the hours between dinner and the theatre there were hardly any carriages out, and the sound of many footsteps and of many low voices filled the air. Gloria kept to the right and walked swiftly along, never turning her head. She had never been out in the streets alone at night in her life, and even in her anger she felt a sort of intoxication of freedom that was quite new to her, a beginning of satisfaction upon him who had injured her. There was Highland blood in her veins, as well as Italian passion.

  The southeast wind was blowing down the street behind her, that same strange and tragic wind, tragic and passionate, that had blown so gustily down upon Subiaco from the mountains, on that night long ago when Maria Addolorata had stood aside by the garden gate to let Dalrymple pass, bearing something in his arms. Gloria knew it by its sad whisper and by the faint taste of it and smell of it, through her close-drawn veil.