Innocent : her fancy and his fact Part 47

He turned off the lights in the library and went upstairs to his bedroom. Outside his wife's door he paused a moment, thinking he heard a sound,--but all was silent. Imagining that he probably would not sleep he placed a book near his bedside--but nature was kind to his age and temperament, and after about an hour of wakefulness and sad perplexity, all ruffling care was gradually smoothed away from his mind, and he fell into a deep and dreamless slumber.

Meanwhile Lady Blythe had been disrobed by a drowsy maid whom she sharply reproached for being sleepy when she ought to have been wide awake, though it was long past midnight,--and dismissing the girl at last, she sat alone before her mirror, thinking with some pettishness of the interview she had just had with her husband.

"Old fool!" she soliloquised--"He ought to know better than to play the tragic-sentimental with me at his time of life! I thought he would accept the situation reasonably and help me to tackle it. Of course it will be simply abominable if I am to meet that girl at every big society function--I don't know what I shall do about it! Why didn't she stay in her old farm-house!--who could ever have imagined her becoming famous! I shall go abroad, I think--that will be the best thing to do.

If Blythe leaves me as he threatens, I shall certainly not stay here by myself to face the music! Besides, who knows?--the girl herself may 'round' on me when her head gets a little more swelled with success.

Such a horrid bore!--I wish I had never seen Pierce Armitage!"

Even as she thought of him the vision came back to her of the handsome face and pa.s.sionate eyes of her former lover,--again she saw the romantic little village by the sea where they had dwelt together as in another Eden,--she remembered how he would hurry up from the sh.o.r.e bringing with him the sketch he had been working at, eager for her eyes to look at it, thrilling at her praise, and pouring out upon her such tender words and caresses such as she had never known since those wild and ardent days! A slight s.h.i.+ver ran through her--something like a pang of remorse stung her hardened spirit.

"And the child," she murmured--"The child--it clung to me and I kissed it!--it was a dear little thing!"

She glanced about her nervously--the room seemed full of wandering shadows.

"I must sleep!" she thought--"I am worried and out of sorts--I must sleep and forget--"

She took out of a drawer in her dressing-table a case of medicinal cachets marked "Veronal."

"One or two more or less will not hurt me," she said, with a pale, forced smile at herself in the mirror--"I am accustomed to it--and I must have a good long sleep!"

She had her way. Morning came,--and she was still sleeping. Noon--and nothing could waken her. Doctors, hastily summoned, did their best to rouse her to that life which with all its pains and possibilities still throbbed in the world around her--but their efforts were vain.

"Suicide?" whispered one.

"Oh no! Mere accident!--an overdose of veronal--some carelessness--quite a common occurrence. Nothing to be done!"

No!--nothing to be done! Her slumber had deepened into that strange stillness which we call death,--and her husband, a statuesque and rigid figure, gazed on her quiet body with tearless eyes.

"Good-night!" he whispered to the heavy silence--"Good-night! Farewell!"

CHAPTER VI

One of the advantages or disadvantages of the way in which we live in these modern days is that we are ceasing to feel. That is to say we do not permit ourselves to be affected by either death or misfortune, provided these natural calamities leave our own persons unscathed. We are beginning not to understand emotion except as a phase of bad manners, and we cultivate an apathetic, soulless indifference to events of great moment whether triumphant or tragic, whenever they do not involve our own well-being and creature comforts. Whole boatloads of fishermen may go forth to their doom in the teeth of a gale without moving us to pity so long as we have our well-fried sole or grilled cod for breakfast,--and even such appalling disasters as the wicked a.s.sa.s.sination of hapless monarchs, or the wrecks of palatial ocean-liners with more than a thousand human beings all whelmed at once in the pitiless depths of the sea, leave us cold, save for the uplifting of our eyes and shoulders during an hour or so,--an expression of slight shock, followed by forgetfulness. Air-men, recklessly braving the s.p.a.ces of the sky, fall headlong, and are smashed to mutilated atoms every month or so, without rousing us to more than a pa.s.sing comment, and a chorus of "How dreadful!" from simpering women,--and the greatest and best man alive cannot hope for long remembrance by the world at large when he dies. Shakespeare recognised this tendency in callous human nature when he made his Hamlet say--

"O heavens! Die two months ago and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year, but by 'r lady, he must build churches then, or else shall he suffer not thinking on."

Wives recover the loss of their husbands with amazing rapidity,--husbands "get over" the demise of their wives with the galloping ease of trained hunters leaping an accustomed fence--families forget their dead as resolutely as some debtors forget their bills,--and to express sorrow, pity, tenderness, affection, or any sort of "sentiment" whatever is to expose one's self to derision and contempt from the "normal" modernist who cultivates cynicism as a fine art. Many of us elect to live, each one, in a little back-yard garden of selfish interests--walled round carefully, and guarded against possible intrusion by uplifted spikes of conventionalism,--the door is kept jealously closed--and only now and then does some impulsive spirit bolder than the rest, venture to put up a ladder and peep over the wall. Shut in with various favourite forms of hypocrisy and cowardice, each little unit pa.s.ses its short life in mistrusting its neighbour unit, and death finds none of them wiser, better or nearer the utmost good than when they were first uselessly born.

Among such vain and unprofitable atoms of life Lady Maude Blythe had been one of the vainest and most unprofitable,--though of such "social"

importance as to be held in respectful awe by tuft-hunters and parasites, who feed on the rich as the green-fly feeds on the rose. The news of her sudden death briefly chronicled by the fas.h.i.+onable intelligence columns of the press with the usual--"We deeply regret"--created no very sorrowful sensation--a few vapid people idly remarked to one another--"Then her great ball won't come off!"--somewhat as if she had retired into the grave to avoid the trouble and expense of the function. Cards inscribed--"Sympathy and kind enquiries"--were left for Lord Blythe in the care of his dignified butler, who received them with the impa.s.siveness of a Buddhist idol and deposited them all on the orthodox salver in the hall--and a few messages of "Deeply shocked and grieved. Condolences"--by wires, not exceeding sixpence each, were despatched to the lonely widower,--but beyond these purely formal observances, the handsome brilliant society woman dropped out of thought and remembrance as swiftly as a dead leaf drops from a tree. She had never been loved, save by her two deluded dupes--Pierce Armitage and her husband,--no one in the whole wide range of her social acquaintance would have ever thought of feeling the slightest affection for her. The first announcement of her death appeared in an evening paper, stating the cause to be an accidental overdose of veronal taken to procure sleep, and Miss Leigh, seeing the paragraph by merest chance, gave a shocked exclamation--

"Innocent! My dear!--how dreadful! That poor Lady Blythe we saw the other night is dead!"

The girl was standing by the tea-table just pouring out a cup of tea for Miss Leigh--she started so nervously that the cup almost fell from her hand.

"Dead!" she repeated, in a low, stifled voice. "Lady Blythe? Dead?"

"Yes!--it is awful! That horrid veronal! Such a dangerous drug! It appears she was accustomed to take it for sleep--and unfortunately she took an over-dose. How terrible for Lord Blythe!"

Innocent sat down, trembling. Her gaze involuntarily wandered to the portrait of Pierce Armitage--the lover of the dead woman, and her father! The handsome face with its dreamy yet proud eyes appeared conscious of her intense regard--she looked and looked, and longed to speak--to tell Miss Leigh all--but something held her silent. She had her own secret now--and it restrained her from disclosing the secrets of others. Nor could she realise that it was her mother--actually her own mother--who had been taken so suddenly and tragically from the world. The news barely affected her--nor was this surprising, seeing that she had never entirely grasped the fact of her mother's personality or existence at all. She had felt no emotion concerning her, save of repulsion and dislike. Her unexpected figure had appeared on the scene like a strange vision, and now had vanished from it as strangely. Innocent was in very truth "motherless"--but so she had always been--for a mother who deserts her child is worse than a mother dead. Yet it was some few minutes before she could control herself sufficiently to speak or look calmly--and her eyes were downcast as Miss Leigh came up to the tea-table, newspaper in hand, to discuss the tragic incident.

"She was a very brilliant woman in society," said the gentle old lady, then--"You did not know her, of course, and you could not judge of her by seeing her just one evening. But I remember the time when she was much talked of as 'the beautiful Maude Osborne'--she was a very lively, wilful girl, and she had been rather neglected by her parents, who left her in England in charge of some friends while they were in India. I think she ran rather wild at that time. There was some talk of her having gone off secretly somewhere with a lover--but I never believed the story. It was a silly scandal--and of course it stopped directly she married Lord Blythe. He gave her a splendid position,--and he was devoted to her--poor man!"

"Yes?" murmured Innocent, mechanically. She did not know what to say.

"If she had been blessed with children--or even one child," went on Miss Leigh--"I think it would have been better for her. I am sure she would have been happier! He would, I feel certain!"

"No doubt!" the girl answered in the same quiet tone.

"My dear, you look very pale!" said Miss Leigh, with some anxiety--"Have you been working too hard?"

She smiled.

"That would be impossible!" she answered. "I could not work too hard--it is such happiness to work--one forgets!--yes--one forgets all that one does not wish to remember!"

The anxious expression still remained on Miss Lavinia's face,--but, true to the instincts of an old-fas.h.i.+oned gentlewoman, she did not press enquiries where she saw they might be embarra.s.sing or unwelcome.

And though she now loved Innocent as much as if she had been her own child, she never failed to remember that after all, the girl had earned her own almost wealthy independence, and was free to do as she liked without anybody's control or interference, and that though she was so young she was bound to be in all respects untrammelled in her life and actions. She went where she pleased--she had her own little hired motor-brougham--she also had many friends who invited her out without including Miss Leigh in the invitations, and she was still the "paying guest" at the little Kensington house,--a guest who was never tired of doing kindly and helpful deeds for the benefit of the sweet old woman who was her hostess. Once or twice Miss Leigh had made a faint half-hearted protest against her constant and lavish generosity.

"My dear," she had said--"With all the money you earn now you could live in a much larger house--you could indeed have a house of your own, with many more luxuries--why do you stay here, showering advantages on me, who am nothing but a prosy old body?--you could do much better!"

"Could I really?" And Innocent had laughed and kissed her. "Well!--I don't want to do any better--I'm quite happy as I am. One thing is--(and you seem to forget it!)--that I'm very fond of you!--and when I'm very fond of a person it's difficult to shake me off!"

So she stayed on--and lived her life with a nun-like simplicity and economy--spending her money on others rather than herself, and helping those in need,--and never even in her dress, which was always exquisite, running into vagaries of extravagance and follies of fas.h.i.+on. She had discovered a little French dressmaker, whose husband had deserted her, leaving her with two small children to feed and educate, and to this humble, un-famous plier of the needle she entrusted her wardrobe with entirely successful results. Worth, Paquin, Doucet and other loudly advertised personages were all quoted as "creators" of her gowns, whereat she was amused.

"A little personal taste and thought go so much further in dress than money," she was wont to say to some of her rather envious women friends. "I would rather copy the clothes in an old picture than the clothes in a fas.h.i.+on book."

Odd fancies about her dead mother came to her when she was alone in her own room--particularly at night when she said her prayers. Some mysterious force seemed compelling her to offer up a pet.i.tion for the peace of her mother's soul,--she knew from the old books written by the "Sieur Amadis" that to do this was a custom of his creed. She missed it out of the Church of England Prayer-book, though she dutifully followed the tenets of the faith in which Miss Leigh had had her baptised and confirmed--but in her heart of hearts she thought it good and right to pray for the peace of departed souls--

"For who can tell"--she would say to herself--"what strange confusion and sorrow they may be suffering!--away from all that they once knew and cared for! Even if prayers cannot help them it is kind to pray!"

And for her mother's soul she felt a dim and far-off sense of pity--almost a fear, lest that unsatisfied spirit might be lost and wandering in a chaos of dark experience without any clue to guide or any light to s.h.i.+ne upon its dreadful solitude. So may the dead come nearer to the living than when they also lived!

Some three or four weeks after Lady Blythe's sudden exit from a world too callous to care whether she stayed in it or went from it, Lord Blythe called at Miss Leigh's house and asked to see her. He was admitted at once, and the pretty old lady came down in a great flutter to the drawing-room to receive him. She found him standing in front of the harpsichord, looking at the portrait upon it. He turned quickly round as she entered and spoke with some abruptness.

"I must apologise for calling rather late in the afternoon," he said--"But I could not wait another day. I have something important to tell you--" He paused--then went on--"It's rather startling to me to find that portrait here!--I knew the man. Surely it is Pierce Armitage, the painter?"

"Yes"--and Miss Leigh's eyes opened in a little surprise and bewilderment--"He was a great friend of mine--and of yours?" "He was my college chum"--and he walked closer to the picture and looked at it steadfastly--"That must have been taken when he was quite a young man--before--" He paused again,--then said with a forced smile--"Talking of Armitage--is Miss Armitage in?"

"No, she is not"--and the old lady looked regretful--"She has gone out to tea--I'm sorry--"