by Grant Allen
In this matter, his pride itself fought hard with his pride. That is the wont of savages. Would it not be better, now Bertram Ingledew had fairly disappeared for ever from their sphere, to patch up a hollow truce for a time at least with Frida, and let all things be to the outer eye exactly as they had always been? The bewildering and brain-staggering occurrences of the last half-hour, indeed, had struck deep and far into his hard Scotch nature. The knowledge that the man who had stolen his wife from him (as he phrased it to himself in his curious belated mediaeval phraseology) was not a real live man of flesh and blood at all, but an evanescent phantom of the twenty-fifth century, made him all the more ready to patch up for the time-being a nominal reconciliation. His nerves — for even HE had nerves — were still trembling to the core with the mystic events of that wizard morning; but clearer and clearer still it dawned upon him each moment that if things were ever to be set right at all they must be set right then and there, before he returned to the inn, and before Frida once more went back to their children. To be sure, it was Frida’s place to ask forgiveness first, and make the first advances. But Frida made no move. So after sitting there long, salving his masculine vanity with the flattering thought that after all his rival was no mere man at all, but a spirit, an avatar, a thing of pure imagination, he raised his head at last and looked inquiringly towards Frida.
“Well?” he said slowly.
Frida raised her head from her hands and gazed across at him scornfully.
“I was thinking,” Monteith began, feeling his way with caution, but with a magnanimous air, “that perhaps — after all — for the children’s sake, Frida—”
With a terrible look, his wife rose up and fronted him. Her face was red as fire; her heart was burning. She spoke with fierce energy. “Robert Monteith,” she said firmly, not even deigning to treat him as one who had once been her husband, “for the children’s sake, or for my own sake, or for any power on earth, do you think, poor empty soul, after I’ve spent three days of my life with HIM, I’d ever spend three hours again with YOU? If you do, then this is all: murderer that you are, you mistake my nature.”
And turning on her heel, she moved slowly away towards the far edge of the moor with a queenly gesture.
Monteith followed her up a step or two. She turned and waved him back. He stood glued to the ground, that weird sense of the supernatural once more overcoming him. For some seconds he watched her without speaking a word. Then at last he broke out. “What are you going to do, Frida?” he asked, almost anxiously.
Frida turned and glanced back at him with scornful eyes. Her mien was resolute. The revolver with which he had shot Bertram Ingledew lay close by her feet, among the bracken on the heath, where Monteith had flung it. She picked it up with one hand, and once more waved him backward.
“I’m going to follow him,” she answered solemnly, in a very cold voice, “where YOU have sent him. But alone by myself: not here, before you.” And she brushed him away, as he tried to seize it, with regal dignity.
Monteith, abashed, turned back without one word, and made his way to the inn in the little village. But Frida walked on by herself, in the opposite direction, across the open moor and through the purple heath, towards black despair and the trout-ponds at Broughton.
THE END
A Splendid Sin
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER I.
THE BLACK EAGLE.
“IT’S a lovely view,” Mrs. Egremont said, with her eyes on the Himmelberg.
Sir Emilius Rawson looked up sharply and surveyed it in a critical mood through his glasses. He did not wish to commit himself. He gave the scene a searching glance, as if it were a doubtful patient, before he ventured upon his diagnosis. “Yes, it is a lovely view,” he admitted at last, after scanning it all over. He made the admission with an air of curious candor, begotten of the habit of seldom granting anything, lest he should afterwards be convicted of possible error. “It is a lovely view!” And he peered up and down, like one who expects to find some dangerous symptom lurking unobserved in some obscure corner.
Not that Sir Emilius was the least interested in the view; he had seen it before, and knew it thoroughly. But it was an instinct with him to look everything steadily in the face for a minute or two before plunging into even the most casual opinion. Use had made it in him a second nature. You had only to look, indeed, at Sir Emilius’s close-shaven face and preoccupied eyes in order to recognize at a glance the fact that he was a great London consulting physician. All big doctors acquire at last that preoccupied air; it grows out of their profession; they pretend to be listening to their patient’s recital of unimportant details, while they are really employed in looking behind his words and the mask of his face at such signs of constitution, disease, or temperament as his build and features may chance to indicate. Sir Emilius was bland, like all his class; without blandness of manner and a deferential smile, you cannot succeed in medicine. But even while he folded his scrupulously white hands in front of him, fingers touching and thumbs upright, with an external appearance of the profoundest interest in his patient’s life-history (from measles and scarlatina onward), he was inwardly engaged in observing to himself, “Strumous type; gouty diathesis: a large eater, a constant drinker of just a couple of glasses more wine than is good for him. General habit of body indicates the Carlsbad treatment. Prominent eyes — a loquacious talker; may as well make up my mind to half-an-hour of him. — Quite so; I follow you; it is one of the well-known sequelae of influenza. — Wish he’d come to the point. I can see beforehand it’s premonitory symptoms of Bright’s disease — and the fellow’ll waste twenty minutes of my precious time before he even arrives at it!”
For Sir Emilius was famous among men of his profession for his rapid and almost intuitive diagnosis; no doubt it was partly the promptitude with which he could read other men’s faces that gave his own that abiding look of preoccupied boredom. For it is hard, of course, to assume an air of interest in a story whose parallel you have heard ten thousand times before, and every detail of which you could supply by anticipation; yet, if you make a large income by pretending to listen to it, you must needs acquire a professional appearance of intelligent sympathy with every fresh narrator who unfolds his woes to you.
“When a lady of a certain age comes into my consulting-room, settles herself comfortably down, and begins by saying, ‘Doctor, I am the mother of fourteen children,’ Sir Emilius used often to remark in the privacy of family life, “I lean back in my armchair, fold my hands on my bosom, and close my eyes with a mechanical smile of gentle attention. For I know I shall have to listen to a full account of how all those fourteen children were, jointly and severally, brought into the world, as well as to everything that has happened to their mother in connection with each one of them.
I lose consciousness for a moment in a placid doze, from which I awake automatically the moment she says, ‘And now, doctor, I come to my fourteenth.’ Then I know I may, perhaps, at last begin to hear why she wants to consult me.”
So now, Sir Emilius gazed around him suspiciously at the pines and the mountains before he ventured at last on the non-committing remark, “It is a fine view, I admit, Julia.”
They were seated on an obtrusively rustic bench outside the Black Eagle Hotel in the Rothenthal. Sir Emilius was tall, broad-shouldered, a somewhat massive figure — one of those immaculate English gentlemen whose most salient feature appears
to be that they tub every morning. He had a close-shaven face clear-cut features, and an expression that summed up the College of Physicians. No man, indeed, was ever quite so wise as Sir Emilius Rawson looked. He had that studied air of preternatural sagacity which comes only from the assiduous employment of years in impressing your own superior knowledge and skill upon many thousand patients. When he put his hand to his chin, and drew it slowly downward, you felt that he was bringing a gigantic intellect to bear upon the elements of some most difficult problem; when he puckered his forehead and gazed hard at you through his eyeglasses, you realized that the Rontgen rays themselves could not spy out more than he did of your internal skeleton.
His half-sister, who sat beside him, was of different mold. Her air was shrinking. Sir Emilius, who was above everything physiological and modern, accounted for their unlikeness by the racial traits of their respective fathers. His own father, Dr. Rawson of Ipswich, was a burly East Anglian who had died when Emilius was a boy of twelve, leaving his widow not very well provided for. But Mrs. Egremont’s father, whom their mother had married in her second trial of matrimony, was a Devonshire squire, endowed with the soft and gentle Devonian nature; he had been completely overshadowed during his married life by the cleverness and energy of the woman he had chosen. It was from him, Sir Emilius thought, that Julia inherited her more delicate characteristics. And, indeed, Mrs. Egremont had a slender figure and sensitive face, deeply marked with the beauty of some great sorrow. She was still young, as women count youth nowadays — scarcely more than forty, and her features were daintily refined and sympathetic. She was one of those tall and graceful women who attract one at first sight by the moral qualities visible in their faces, and of whom one says at once, “There is a good woman!”
Mrs. Egremont raised her large eyes slowly towards the peak of the Rothspitze. “Hubert ought to be coming back,” she murmured anxiously. “He said it was only a six hours’ expedition, and he’s been gone over seven.”
Sir Emilius lighted a cigarette — he allowed himself the luxury of a cigarette in public at more than fifty miles from London. “Expeditions invariably take longer than one thinks,” he answered, in a somewhat unconcerned voice. “Add twenty per cent, to Baedeker’s estimate, and you get the fair average. Besides, Hubert took his camera with him, didn’t he?”
“He did,” Mrs. Egremont answered. “That, of course, would delay him. Still, I just hate this mountain climbing for him. I hope, when he marries, Fede will make him promise to give it up. It’s so horribly dangerous! I watched him through my field-glasses for an hour yesterday, clambering up that bare brown face of rock on the side of the Eselstein, and it made me giddy to look at him. I assure you, Mill, there wasn’t a foothold anywhere. He seemed to me to cling by his eyebrows.”
“These perpendicular cliffs are never quite so steep as they look from a distance,” Sir Emilius went on, calmly. “Never — or seldom.” It was his habit to hedge, lest he should too rashly have committed himself; for a doctor must always abstain from giving an absolute opinion; “never to prophesy unless you know,” is the wisdom of the profession. “When you get at close quarters with them, you find them diversified by little inequalities of surface which enable you to climb; here, a jutting ledge; there an inconspicuous crack; yonder again, a bush that springs from a cranny by whose aid you can prise yourself up. Hubert’s all right; he’s as safe a climber as any I ever saw. He has arms and legs exactly adapted for the work of mountaineering. If you notice the muscles of his thumbs and wrists, you’ll see at once—”
“Oh, what’s that speck on the wall of rock?” Mrs. Egremont cried, leaning forward, and lifting her field-glass hurriedly:
“A goat!” Sir Emilius answered, surveying it through his own. “A most unmitigated goat! — unless, indeed, it’s a chamois. And the chamois, I believe, is a mythical beast, like gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire — a mere playful figment of the Swiss imagination. He exists, if at all, in order that the Swiss may carve him in wood during the depths of winter, to sell at an extravagant price to Cockney tourists in the following season. That’s the worst, Julia, of you hens with one chicken. You can’t be philosophical. Boys will be boys; and Hubert is at the age when the desire to climb hereditarily manifest itself. ’Tis a survival from monkeydom. My old enemy, the mother of fourteen, now, has the advantage of you there.
She is calm and collected. Calmness, in fact, is her prevailing characteristic. She tends, as a rule, to be large and placid. She runs naturally to fat, just as she runs to infants a superabundance of the assimilative and accumulative tendencies. When I see her sailing under twenty yards of black silk into my room in Harley Street, I sum her up at once. ‘My dear madam,’ I say mentally, ‘you are a mother of fourteeen. You have buried three, and you have survived those shocks with matronly quietude. Your boys are abroad in the world — Matabeleland, Texas, Manitoba, Trinidad — and they give you no anxiety. You are aware that they break their heads; and that heads can be mended. You know they get into scrapes; and that scrapes are things which young fellows crawl out of as easily as they fall into them. You recognize the fact that they will marry horrid creatures; and that, by the end of six months, you and the horrid creature will be the best of friends, having mutually arrived at a modus vivendi, based upon the principle of an armed neutrality. You sleep o’ nights and you lay on fat still, no matter what happens to you.’ Whereas, you, Julia — you, if your boy has gone one hour longer than he says, you grow visibly thin to the naked eye under the stress of your terrors. Why, you have crows’ feet gathering round your eyes this very moment. Too anxious a temperament, my dear; too anxious a temperament! You can’t expect to keep a young man of twenty-two tied to your apron-string.”
“I don’t want to do that,” Mrs. Egremont answered, flushing. “I’m sure, Emilius, I’ve allowed him to go to Oxford, and to row and swim, and to take to anatomy, and everything of that sort; but this mountain climbing, you know, is so very different. And even in that I don’t oppose him; I try not to let him see how much it frightens me. I never once say to him, ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ for fear of seeming to interfere with his pleasures.”
“No, you don’t say it,” her brother answered, with a masculine smile. “But, by George, Julia, you look it.”
“I’m sorry if I do,” the mother went on, with her eyes fixed steadily on the distant peak. “I can’t bear to let Hubert see he’s giving me trouble. Dear boy, I only want to make him happy. And I know we women can’t quite understand what a boy wants to do. We would like, of course, to make girls and women of them.”
“Fortunately,” Sir Emilius interposed, “there’s not much danger of your succeeding in that aim with Hubert. He has a fine broad basis of solid manliness to work upon which it would be difficult to feminize. Though, of course, if you could, you would do your best to feminize it.”
“Oh, I hope not!” Mrs. Egremont cried. “My own dear boy! Why, I just love his manliness!”
“Yes, you just love his manliness. Every mother does; and never remembers that it can only be ensured by those very dangers she would like to guard him from. Without breaking of eggs, my dear, there is no omelet. You only want to make him happy. Yet you let him see you live for his happiness. Now, isn’t that the way to make him selfish?”
Mrs. Egremont shrank back, surprised. “What, Hubert selfish?” she cried. “My Hubert selfish? Why, Mill, you can’t mean it. Nothing on earth could make Hubert selfish!”
The doctor stroked his chin; professional habits survive even in private life. “Well, I admit,” he answered, “that Hubert, up to date, is one of the most affectionate and unselfish young fellows I ever came across. I allow he’s wrapped up in you. Never knew a boy think more of his mother — as, of course, he ought to do, for you’ve been a perfect angel to him. Still, it can’t be good for him to see that you are always thinking of him, and watching over him, and planning his happiness. He’s a good lad, I admit, and, as the stock phrase goes, he has neve
r given you one minute’s anxiety — though he’s never ceased for one minute to be an anxiety to you. He’s unselfish by nature, I grant. That he takes from you; for you’re about the most unselfish woman I ever came across, Julia; and I’ve known you for forty-four years, and am in a position to judge of you. Still, consider the other side. These things are hereditary. Every man is liable, sooner or later, to show some traits, at least, that recall his father.”
Mrs. Egremont’s cheek burned bright crimson. “His father!” she exclaimed, with a sudden fall in her voice. “His father! His father!” Then, after a moment, the glow dying away, she added, in a lower tone, “Ah, yes; I forgot; his father!”
“Walter was the most selfish pig I ever knew in my life,” Sir Emilius continued, with the frankness of family confidence.
