The Duchess of Wrexe Part 31

Very characteristic this att.i.tude of Roddy, but very characteristic, too, the affection that Jacob was now receiving from his mistress. There was something that Jacob drew from Rachel that none of the fine, n.o.ble dogs of the house was able to secure.... Why?... What, again, was the matter? Why was Rachel unhappy?

Rachel was unhappy, and the answer came quite clearly to her as the room was darkened by the great storm of snow now falling over the Downs and the garden, because marriage with Roddy had not lessened in any way that uneasy disquiet that had stirred, without pause, beneath her life before her marriage; that uneasiness had, indeed, during the last three months, increased....

Was this her fault or Roddy's?

Attacked now by a scrutiny that refused dismissal she delivered herself up to the investigation of these months of her married life.

She knew that she had only once been happy since her marriage--that was on the first evening, when, the noise and clamour of the London wedding having died away, she had walked with Roddy in the peace of the Ma.s.siter garden (Lady Ma.s.siter had lent her house for the first weeks of the honeymoon), had felt his arm about her, had believed that there had really come to her that comfort and safety for which she longed.

After that there had followed a fortnight of great unreality--the strangest excitement, the most adventurous wonders, but a wonder and excitement that were from herself, the real Rachel Beaminster, most absolutely removed. It was as though she had watched closely but detached the experiences of some other girl. Roddy had, during those times, been a most ardent and pa.s.sionate lover; she had tried to respond and had hidden, as best she could, her failure.

Then, suddenly, with the time of their going abroad, pa.s.sion had left him; it had left him as swiftly as the pa.s.sing of wind over a hill. It was there--it was gone.

But he remained the perfect husband. His kindness, his charm, his simplicity, his affection for her--an affection that could never for an instant be doubted--these things had delighted her. He was now the friend, the strong reliant companion that she had wanted him to be.

During those first weeks in Italy and Greece happiness might have come to her had she not been stirred by her remembrance of the earlier weeks.

The pa.s.sion that had been in him, although it had not touched her, now in retrospect lit fires for her imagination. Instantly back to her had come the whole disquiet and unrest. The things that Roddy called from her now, she suddenly discovered with a great shrinking alarm, were all the Beaminster things. All the true emotions, qualities, traditions that made up her secret life were roused in her by their own inherent vitality, never by his evocation of them. _He_ was Beaminster--Roddy was Beaminster. With his kindness and courtesy his eyes saw the world with the eyes of his ancestors, his tongue spoke the language that had in it no sincerity, his heart wished for all the ceremonies and lies that the Beaminster had believed in since the beginning of time.

But her discovery did not lead her much further. She had, in her heart of hearts, always known that Roddy was a Beaminster. Why then had she married him? She had married him because she had been untrue to herself, because she had herself encouraged the Beaminster blood in her to blind her eyes, because she had desired deceit rather than truth, because she had wanted the comfort that the man could give her rather than the man himself, because she had m.u.f.fled and stifled and silenced that Power in her--the Power that made her restless and unquiet; the Power that was as hostile to the Beaminster faith as heaven is to h.e.l.l--

And yet this vehemence of explanation did not altogether explain Roddy.

Roddy was not _simply_ a Beaminster like Uncle John or Uncle Richard or Aunt Adela. There was an elemental direct emotion in Roddy that was exactly opposed to Beaminster conventionality.

These two elements in him puzzled and even frightened her. His att.i.tude during that first fortnight of their marriage she saw, again and again, in lesser degrees during their time abroad. She had seen him so primitive in his joy and excitement over places and people and moments--colour, food, storms, towns, pa.s.sers-by, anything--that she had been astounded by the force of it. Emotions swept over him and were gone, but, whilst they were there, she knew that she counted to him for nothing. Strangest of ironies that when he was least a Beaminster, then was she farthest from him--strangest of ironies that her link with him should be the Beaminster in him.

She was frightened of his primitive pa.s.sions. She had in her the instinct that one day they would touch his relations.h.i.+p to her and that that contact would rouse in her the full tide of the unhappiness of which she was now so conscious, and that then ... what might not happen?...

And yet behind it all she felt a strange, almost pathetic satisfaction because he, after all, had in him, just as she had, his two natures at war. There at least they found some common link; her eagerness to find some link was evidence enough of the affection she had for him.

After their return to England the wilder nature in him had extended and broadened. Everything to do with Seddon Court drew it out of him; his pa.s.sion for the place was wonderful to witness. Every stone of the little grey building was a jewel in his eyes; the servants, the cattle, the horses, the dogs, the flowers, the villagers, even the townspeople of Lewes drew sentiment from him.

"My old place," he would say, cuddling it to himself; he was never "sloppy" about it, but direct and simple and straightforward. It was obviously _the_ great emotion above all other emotions.

He was most anxious that Rachel should share this with him, and during her first weeks there she thought that she would do so. Then the disquiet in her spread to the place. The house spread itself out before her now as the lure that had from the beginning tempted her.

"It was for this place and quiet that you were false to yourself----"

Roddy felt that she did not share his enthusiasm, and their difficulty over this was exactly their difficulty over everything else; simply that Roddy was the least eloquent person in the world. He could explain nothing whatever of the vague unhappiness or dissatisfaction at his heart. Rachel _could_ have explained a great many things, but Roddy, she felt, would only look at her in his kind puzzled way and wonder why she couldn't take things as they were.

Perhaps during these last weeks he had himself felt that all was not well. Rachel thought that sometimes now through, all his kindness she detected a floating, wistful speculation on his part as to whether she were happy.

He _wanted_ her to be happy--most tremendously he wanted it--and did she explain to him that she was not happy because she was, now, for ever attended by a sense of her own disloyalty to all that was best in her, he would have suggested a doctor or have made her a present.

Had she been some stranger and had the case been presented to him he would have probably dismissed it by saying that "having made her bed she must lie on it." "After all, she married the feller--Well then, that's _her_ look-out."

So, perhaps, if this had been simply her trouble she would have done her bravest best to endeavour.

But there was more behind it all--far, far more.

She saw her marriage to Roddy, her struggling for self-respect, her present morbid introspection as a stage in what was now developing into a duel between herself and her grandmother.

Her grandmother had planned this marriage. Her grandmother was determined to destroy the honesty and truth in her and had chosen a Beaminster for her agent and now waited happy for the death of Rachel's soul.

But Rachel's soul should not so readily die! During all these weeks the thought of her grandmother had been continually with her. How she hated her, and with what fervour did Rachel return that hatred!

There was no melodrama in this hatred. When she had been a very little girl Rachel had somehow believed that her grandmother had been very cruel to her mother and father--She had hated her for that. Then she had seen that her grandmother disliked her and wished to tease her--so she had hated her for that also.

Her older amplification of this into principles and instincts had not altered the original vehemence of the pa.s.sion, it had only given it grown-up reasons for its existence.

And so, thinking of her grandmother, she thought also of Francis Breton.

Some weeks ago she had received a letter from him and that letter was now lying in the desk of her writing-table.

She had thought that her marriage would have snapped her interest in her cousin because it would have broken that hostility with her grandmother upon which her relations.h.i.+p with her cousin so largely depended. But now when she saw that marriage had only intensified her hostility to the d.u.c.h.ess, so therefore it had intensified her perception of Breton. His letter had aroused in her, just as contact with him aroused in her, everything in her that now, for her own peace of mind, she should keep at bay. His letter had amounted to this:

"You are a rebel as I am a rebel. We have said very little, but you have recognized in me the things that I have recognized in you. You have escaped through marriage, but for me there is no escape, and if you would, for the sake of those things that we have in common, keep me from going utterly under, then you must help me--as only you can."

He did not say this nor anything at all like this. He only, very quietly, congratulated her on her marriage, hoped that she would be very happy, said that London was a little desolate and difficult, hoped that she would not think more harshly of him than she could help, and, at the very end, told her that meeting her made him feel that he was not entirely abandoned by everybody.

It was the letter of a weak man and she knew it, but it was the letter of a man who was weak exactly in the places where she also failed. And this, more than anything else, moved her.

They two alone, it seemed, were struggling to keep their feet in a world that did not need them. It had been, through these months, Rachel's sharpest unhappiness, the consciousness that Roddy and indeed everything at Seddon Court could get on so very well without her.

n.o.body in London needed her--n.o.body here needed her. If you accepted the Beaminster doctrine, then no wife would demand more from a husband than Roddy gave Rachel--but was this not simply another proof that Rachel had made a Beaminster marriage?

Rachel had been flung straight from the schoolroom into marriage and the sensitive agonizing cry of a child to be loved by somebody--the cry that had always been so urgent in her--was urgent still.

It was exactly this comfortable sense of being a help that Roddy had not given her. Now this letter gave it to her.

But if this letter was an appeal, just as the mongrel Jacob, now at her feet, was an appeal, on the part of someone wounded and outcast, to her pity, so also was it an invitation to rebellion.

It was also a temptation to deceit and, did she answer the letter, she encouraged Breton to write again; she opened up not only a new relations.h.i.+p to him, but also a new relations.h.i.+p to all the forces that were most hostile to Roddy and her married happiness. May Eversley had once said to her: "Sit down and see, without any exaggeration or false colouring, what you've got. Take away, ruthlessly, anything that you imagine that you've got but haven't. Take away ruthlessly everything that you imagine that you would like to have but are not confident of securing--See what's happened to you in the past--Take away ruthlessly any sentimental repentances or sloppy regrets, but learn quite resolutely from your ugly mistakes."

Long ago she had written this down--now was the first necessity for applying it.

The doctrine of Truth--Truth to Oneself, the one thing that mattered.

She knew that the pursuit of Truth was to her, and to every rebel against the Beaminsters, the restive Tiger. In marrying Roddy she had been untrue to herself. In writing to Breton she would be true to herself but untrue to Roddy. She was fond of Roddy although she did not love him, nor did he, really, love her. The anxiety on both their parts to avoid hurting one another was proof enough of that, she thought.

There then was the whole situation. As she felt Jacob's warm head against her foot a great agitation of loneliness and dismay and helplessness swept over her.

Tears were in her throat and eyes--Then with a strong disdain she pushed it all from her. She was growing morbid, losing her sense of humour and proportion. Here in the house there was Nita Raseley staying; in the country there were people to be called upon, to be invited, to be interested in, there was Roddy, a perfect husband.

She strangled that other Rachel, there in her room. "Now you're dead,"

she felt, and seemed to fling a lifeless, crumpled figure out into the snow--

She looked at herself in the gla.s.s.

"You're not Rachel Beaminster now--you're Rachel Seddon. Act accordingly and don't whine--" She washed her face and brushed her hair, and combed Jacob's hair out of his eyes, and then, determined to be sensible and cheerful and civilized, went down to tea.