She was all contrition at sight of Camilla. She had left her too long alone; she would fetch smelling salts and the cordial Camilla found reviving. Dropping her roses on a small table, she hurried upstairs, to return almost at once with the medicaments and a light mohair shawl which she folded lovingly round Camilla. “There,” she said, “now you will be better, will you not, Camilla? But I wish you would let me fetch a doctor to you: I am sure Lavenham would wish it if he knew how often you were having these giddy spells.”
“What?” Camilla’s spirits were reviving. “And be dosed, as like as not, with crushed snails and viper’s broth? No, thank you, Chloe, I will wait to call a doctor till we are safe home, which I hope will be soon now.”
The light went out of Chloe’s face. “Very soon?”
“I hope so. But are you not glad? Chloe,” the question came out almost despite her, “have you been seeing him again?”
“Him?” All too obviously Chloe. was playing for time.
“The Frenchman ... M. Boutet ...” and with a final effort, “my brother. Is he not gone with the others? Chloe, tell true! I must know.” And she sat up on her couch with a look of such feverish anxiety that Chloe, alarmed in her turn, hurried to take her hand and offer the smelling salts once more. But Camilla waved them away. “No, no; I am well enough; if only you will tell me the truth. I must know, Chloe,” she said again, “or else I will send a messenger to Lavenham telling him the whole.”
Thus threatened, Chloe dissolved into one of her fits of easy tears. “Why are you so hard to me, Camilla? One would think you had never been in love in your life.” And then, drawing herself up proudly, “Yes, I am this minute come from Charles. He has stayed in Lisbon, at great risk to himself, merely in the hope of seeing me again. Camilla, I beg you will try to understand. We have so little time. Who knows when we shall meet again? I know Lee would not understand, but that you—Charles’s own sister—that you should be so hard, so unsympathetic: it is beyond bearing! Sometimes I think I shall go mad. And I thought you would be so pleased: I shall never understand you: to treat your own brother as if he was an enemy.”
“But he is one, Chloe. I fear I have done wrong in not telling Lavenham of this affair long since. But I tell you now that unless I have your solemn word that you will not see M. Boutet again, I shall send to Lavenham tonight.” And yet, she told herself, this too was cowardice. What was the use of extorting promises from Chloe, who would break them as lightly as the leaves she was stripping, as they talked, from one of her roses?
“Oh.” She had pricked herself and put her finger into her mouth to suck away the blood, then smiled reassuringly at Camilla. “No need to promise,” she said. “Charles leaves tonight: I do not know when I shall see him again.”
“For good?” Camilla could not conceal her relief.
“Oh no, but for more than a week.” Chloe made it sound an age. “You do not think we shall be gone before then, Camilla? If I did not see him once more, to say goodbye, I think my heart would break.” And Camilla, wryly amused, found herself, of all things, consoling her incorrigible sister- in-law for the absence of her untrustworthy love. And so the scene between them ended with nothing settled, though Camilla, thinking it over afterwards, told herself that next time Lavenham came he must be told, at whatever cost either to herself or to Chloe.
But when Lavenham did ride up to the house a few days later, he looked so distracted that Chloe and Camilla, after a quick exchange of glances, devoted themselves entirely to his comfort, without daring even to ask the questions that trembled on their lips. At last, setting down the glass of wine he had hardly tasted, he spoke. “You do not ask my news?”
“I fear it is bad,” Camilla said.
“Yes, the worst. It is but a matter of days before Dom John signs the decree confiscating British property. And the squadron we were promised, under Sir Sidney Smith, has not arrived. But there is worse than that.”
“Worse?”
“Yes. At least for me ... for us, I should say. Chloe, I beg you will leave us.”
Chloe protested, but her brother was firm. “No, this is no concern of yours, thank God. I must speak to my wife alone.”
With an anxious glance at Camilla, Chloe rose and left them. Closing the door behind her, Lavenham took another distracted turn about the room before he came back to stand over Camilla. “Do you remember my asking you, some time since, at Sintra, about a man I thought I saw you talking with in the garden here?”
“Yes?” Camilla’s voice shook on the word.
“And you denied having done so?”
“Yes,” she said again.
“God, I should have known.” He stood beside a tall vase of myrtle, systematically stripping the white blossoms from their stalks. “ ‘Trust the devil before you trust a woman,’ my father told me as he died. Why did I not listen? Now I am disgraced—a laughing-stock. I hope my grandmother will be pleased with what she has done to me. ‘No, no,’ you said, you had talked with no one. My poor mind, you hinted, must have been deceiving me again ... And so it was—when I took your word. I must have been mad. The Court has its spies, you must know, on all of us foreigners. I collect you did not think of that. And most particularly have there been agents about you, being the Frenchwoman, God forgive me, that you are. This morning, when I was urging Araujo to persuade Dom John to throw in his lot with ours and sail at once for the Brazils, he turned on me. ‘Is that the advice your wife wishes me to give?’ I did not understand what he meant. ‘My wife?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that French wife of yours. Or did you not know she has been constantly in touch with a notorious French spy? I have no doubt it would suit the French admirably to have us run away, bag and baggage, leaving our country for who will to snap up, but we’ll not do it, I tell you, and so you can tell that wife of yours you have kept so close—and no wonder, a spy and the accomplice of spies.’ ” Lavenham broke off and took another furious turn about the room, while she watched him, speechless. At last he returned to loom over her more threateningly than ever.
“And I—poor fool,” he went on, “I spoke up for you, refusing to believe what Araujo said—only to be faced with proofs, the reports of his men who have watched you.”
“Araujo’s men?” she asked, grasping at a straw. “But did you not say he was for the French?”
“What’s that to the purpose? No, no, do not shilly-shally with me like that. You have ruined me, and there’s an end of it. I trust you are satisfied with your work.”
Camilla had been thinking the rapid thoughts of despair. If they had indeed been spied on, surely the informer must know perfectly well that it was Chloe, not she, who had been receiving the Frenchman’s visits. His reports must have been deliberately falsified in order to give Araujo the strongest possible hold over Lavenham. Or could it be that Charles Boutet himself was the source of the information and had deliberately misinformed Araujo for some sinister purpose of his own? Groping among these possibilities, each one more desperate than the last, she sat tongue-tied under Lavenham’s furious stare. What could she say, what do? Useless to tell him that Boutet’s visits had been to Chloe: they remained just as damaging, and anyway she felt herself responsible in that she had let them continue. But there was one question she must ask. “And Strangford,” she said, “does he know?” Before the words were out of her mouth, she realised how he would take them.
“Ah,” it was something between a sigh and a groan. “So you admit it. As calmly as that. Is it nothing to you that you have destroyed everything I had hoped for in life? Do you know—it will make you laugh, I have no doubt—do you know that I had begun to think we might find happiness together, you and I. I had begun to believe a woman could be trusted—might even be safely loved. Yes, have your laugh, for you have earned it. I had begun to love you, poor fool that I was. And all the time, you were laughing at me with that French accomplice of yours. Tell me, accomplished wife, is he your lover, too? But I’ve not answered your question. No, Stran
gford does not know, nor will he, Araujo tells me, if I will but contradict everything I have ever said; change my advice to the Regent. Urge him to stay in Portugal, and my secret is safe. If I betray my country I may continue respected there; if not, I must be ruined. And this you have done to me. You, the girl I picked up in the gutter and gave my name—and almost my heart, too. But I have learned my lesson. Only tell me, mistress spy, what shall we do now? Do you propose to continue gracing my board—never my bed—or do you intend to join your Frenchman when he welcomes Bonaparte’s armies into Portugal—all too soon? I had best know, had I not, that I may guide my conduct accordingly.” His eyes glittered dangerously as he bent still more closely over her, but she was too angry now for fright.
“I thank you, my lord,” she said, “for your confidence in me. So I am to be tried, judged, and condemned, am I, on the word of Araujo, whom you have always proclaimed a French agent! You do not come to ask me if there is any truth in his accusations. Oh no, merely to tell me that I am false, and pour out your accumulated spleen against womankind on my innocent head. Yes, I said ‘innocent’ and it is true, though I can see you will never believe it. I have been foolish, I admit, and would ask your pardon, if you were in any state to listen to me. As for Araujo, go to him, tell him he has been misled by his agents, if that is the story they have told him, and see how he takes that. As for me: I have no French accomplice and never have had. Your board I have shared and your bed too, though you have paid me the compliment of forgetting the occasion—and carry the consequences with me now. It is a little late in the day to talk of banishing me from your bed when I am carrying your child. Oh, I grant, you were drunk—not yourself at the time—you would doubtless never have touched anything so loathsome as a woman else. Well, I too have learned my lesson. I have had my delusions too; my hopes of a happy marriage, but, believe me, my lord, they are at an end. Let us but get back to England and I promise you my child and I will never trouble you more.”
“Your child? What madness is this?”
“Yes, my child—and yours, though I can see you will never believe it. Well, so much the better for it, poor baby. Better no father than one as incapable of human feeling as you ... a man who will believe anyone rather than his own wife.”
He was silent for a moment, white-faced and shaking, then, as she succumbed to a passion of tears, he broke out again: “A likely story, madam, and told in a most happy hour. So I am to acknowledge some French spy’s bastard as my heir ... You say I believe Araujo before you: well, why should I not, when I have, to confirm his story, the evidence of my own eyes. Did I not—though, in my folly, I let you persuade me I was mistaken—did I not, myself, see you with your French paramour in the garden?”
He was interrupted by a voice from the doorway, where Chloe stood, white-faced and trembling. “Oh, Lavenham,” she said, “it was I.”
He looked at her, for a moment, in appalled silence, then, at a cry from her, turned back to catch Camilla as she fell.
CHAPTER 9
For Camilla there followed an interval of blessed unconsciousness. The doctors came, sighed, and shook their heads. It was brain fever, said one, and recommended shaving off her hair. It was merely the culmination of a nervous affliction, said another, and urged frequent bleeding. It was homesickness, said a third: Lavenham had best send her back to England without delay. In the same breath he warned that it would mean certain death to move her. None of them discovered her condition, and Lavenham, racked with an intolerable uncertainty, at once cursed and congratulated himself for his silence on this point. If she was false as he mostly believed—what better than that she should die, undisgraced, here in Portugal? But—suppose her story was true? Pacing the house, sleepless, night after night, he tortured himself with the doubt, and the vain attempt to remember. It was true enough, that when he had waked, the morning after he came home wounded, he had remembered nothing of what had happened the day before. Camilla had had to tell him. And how could she have told him this? And yet how easy for her to use his brief forgetfulness to mask her own guilty secret. True, Chloe had confessed the whole of her affair with Charles Boutet, though suppressing, from a delicacy of her own, the fact that he was Camilla’s brother. But there were other men ... Suspicious of women since childhood, Lavenham found it impossible to believe one now.
And yet, as Camilla lay there, day after day, so white, so silent, so nearly dead, it was impossible not to be moved by that strange feeling—could it be love?—that had crept upon him, almost unawares, since the first day when he had seen her in his carriage, drooping, exquisitely asleep—his wife. Sometimes, as he paced his room, those still, intolerable nights, he found himself praying for proof of her innocence, for another chance, for life ... But still she lay there silent, the doctors came, their advice conflicted on every point, and Lavenham and Chloe, united in an uneasy truce over the sick-bed, agreed tacitly to ignore it. As for the maid, Frances, she had fallen into such a state of panic since the first decree against the British that she was worse than useless and the main burden of the nursing fell inevitably on Chloe and Rosa, the plump, kind-hearted Portuguese girl who acted as her maid.
Despite his racking anxiety and tormenting doubt over Camilla, Lavenham still had to spend much of his time with the Prince Regent at Queluz. Things were moving rapidly to a crisis. It was only a matter of days, perhaps of hours, he told Chloe, before the Prince Regent signed the decree confiscating British property. And still the promised British squadron had not arrived—not that its coming would do them much good, as Chloe gloomily pointed out, since the one point on which all the doctors were agreed was that Camilla could not be moved without grave risk to both life and reason. Fortunately, when the decree was signed, it excluded the property of diplomats, and Dom Fernando, whose solicitude for Camilla’s health had been unfailing, and had added considerable fuel to Lavenham’s suspicions, arranged for a police agent to be stationed at their house to ensure that they were not molested. But it was uncomfortable enough, just the same, to hear of the forced sale of such British possessions as had not been already disposed of, and Chloe was not surprised when Frances’ nerve gave way entirely and she accepted an offer of a passage home with an Englishwoman who had contrived to bribe her way on board an American ship.
Chloe was glad enough to see her go. She had been more of a liability than an asset for some time, and, besides, it was a relief to have no English ears to hear the bitter scenes between her and her brother. For the discovery that it was Chloe who had been associating, all the time, with a known French spy had combined with Lavenham’s suspicions of Camilla to reawaken all the old bitterness against his mother, and through her, against women in general. Only the fact that most of their meetings took place over Camilla’s sickbed saved Chloe from the full tide of his wrath. Inevitably, he blamed her more than himself for Camilla’s illness and found her devoted nursing the smallest of amends. Conscience-stricken herself, she bore his reproaches for some time with the patience of guilt, but gradually her spirit reasserted herself and she turned on him roundly. Whose fault, after all, was it that she and Camilla were still here? “I do not blame you on my own account,” she went on, “since I begged to come and must take the consequences, but as Camilla’s husband I should have thought you would have taken more thought for her safety. The truth of the matter is you want a wife for your convenience but do not propose to yourself to take any responsibility for her. And besides,” she was well and truly roused now, “if you ask me, the main cause of Camilla’s illness has been your continued neglect of her. She has borne it like the angel she is, and therefore, I have no doubt, you have not even perceived that she felt it, but I have. It has never, I collect, since you are incapable of such a feeling yourself, occurred to you that she loved you and suffered from your treatment of her. If you could not feel towards her as a husband, you might at least have compelled yourself to behave like one. I only wish I knew what madness made you propose to her in the first place—or her acc
ept you, for the matter of that.”
Thus roundly attacked, Lavenham was silenced for once, and he left soon afterwards for Queluz with much to think about. It was a relief, both to him and to Chloe, when circumstances kept him there for several days. When he next came to Lisbon, it was to announce the imminent arrival of the British squadron and to bring bad news arising from it. Lord Strangford had felt compelled to ask for his passports and intended to go aboard Sir Sidney’s flagship as soon as he arrived to begin his blockade of Lisbon harbour. To make the gesture complete, it was essential that Lavenham should accompany the Minister Plenipotentiary. He came to ask Chloe whether she thought it safe to take Camilla. Once more the doctors came, and once more they shook their heads. There had been no change in Camilla’s condition, she still lay in the stupor into which she had fallen, accepting Chloe’s ministrations passively, like a child, or, more frightening, an imbecile, but otherwise entirely withdrawn into some shadow world of her own. The doctors looked grave, each one blaming her failure to recover on Lavenham’s refusal to take his original advice. As for moving her—and on board ship at that—they were unanimous in agreeing that it was out of the question. Death or madness were the alternative consequences. Then, gravely accepting their fees, they shook their heads a last time and took their leave.
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