The Romance of His Life Part 31

Rest, warmth, silence, nourishment, these were all I could give her.

Instinctively I felt that the presence of the remorseful distressed Ted was unendurable to her, and I would not allow him to come into her room, or to sit up with her as he was anxious to do.

I took his place in an armchair at her bedside, having administered to her a sedative which I fortunately had with me, and was profoundly thankful when her even breathing shewed me that she was asleep.

I have known--who has not?--interminable nights, and nights when I dreaded the morning, but I think the worst of them was easier to bear than the night I kept watch beside Essie.

She was stricken. I could see no happiness for her in her future life, and I loved her. And I loved poor blundering Ted also. I grieved for them both. And I was sorry for the Duke too.

When the dawn was creeping ghostlike into the room and the night-light was tottering in its saucer, Essie stirred and woke. She lay a long time looking at me, an unfathomable trouble in her eyes.

"Beatrice," she said at last, "I could not find the way back."

"Where, dearest?"

"To the house. I tried and tried, but it was no use. It is lost, lost, lost. Everything is lost."

I did not answer. I tried to put my trust in Time, and in the thought that she would presently see her children in its rooms and playing in its gardens, and would realise that Kenstone was in a new sense her home, though not in the old one.

I brought her breakfast to her in her room, and then, in spite of my entreaties, she got up and dressed and came downstairs. But when a chastened and humble Ted timidly approached her to ask whether she would like to see the house once more before returning to London in a few hours time, she shook her head and averted her eyes. It was evident to me that she was determined never to set foot in it again.

He did not insist, and she was obviously relieved when he left the room.

He signed to me to follow him and then told me that he had just received a letter from the Duke asking him to accept the Vandyck in the octagonal room as a present, as on second thoughts he felt it belonged to the house and ought to remain there. The Duke had not started after all, as his s.h.i.+p had been delayed one day. He wrote from the house close at hand where he had been staying till his departure.

"It's worth thousands," said Ted. "Thousands. These bigwigs are queer customers. What an awful fool he is to part with it just out of sentiment. But of course I shall never sell it. It shall be an heirloom.

I've told him so," and Ted thrust the letter into his pocket and hurried away.

Our rooms were airless, and Essie allowed me to establish her in a wicker armchair under a chestnut tree in the old-fas.h.i.+oned inn garden still brave with Michaelmas daisies and purple asters. The gleaming autumn morning had a touch of frost in it. I wrapped her fur motor cloak round her, and put her little hat on her head. She remained pa.s.sive in my hands in a kind of stupor. Perhaps that might be the effect of the sedative I told myself. But I knew it was not so.

Essie was drinking her cup of anguish to the dregs. She did not rebel against it. She accepted her fate with dumb docility. She was not bearing it. She was not capable of an effort of any kind. She underwent it in silence.

I told her to try to sleep again, and she smiled wanly at me and obediently closed her eyes. As I went into the house to s.n.a.t.c.h an hour's rest and pack I turned and looked back at her motionless figure sunk down in her chair, her little grey face, pinched and thin like a squirrel's against the garish hotel cus.h.i.+on, her nerveless hands lying half open, palm upwards on her knee.

A faint breeze stirred, and from the yellow tree a few large fronded leaves of amber and crimson eddied slowly down, and settled, one on her breast and the others in the gra.s.s at her feet. She saw them not. She heeded them not. She heeded nothing. Her two worlds had clashed together, and the impact had broken both. They lay in ruins round her.

And so I looked for the last time on Essie.

Reader, I thought I could write this story to the end, but the pen shakes in my hand. The horror of it rushes back upon me. Ted's surprise at hearing that the Duke had gone to Essie in the garden, and that he had persuaded her to drive with him to London. Then his growing anxiety and continually reiterated conviction that we should find her in London, his uncomprehending fury when we reached London and--she was not there.

And then at last his tardy realisation and desolation.

I did what little I could to blunt the edge of his suffering when the first fever fit of rage was past.

"Dear Ted, she did not like the house. She told me she could not live in it."

"But she would have liked it when I had gutted it. I should have transformed it entirely. Electric light, bathrooms, central heating, radiators, dinner lift, luggage lift," Ted's voice broke down, and struggled on in a strangled whisper. "Inglenooks, cosy corners, speaking tubes, telephone, large French windows to the floor. She would not have known it again."

He hid his face in his hands.

I almost wished the paroxysms of anger back again.

"Oh! Beatrice, to leave me for another man when we were so happy together, because of a house; and an entire stranger, whom she did not want even to speak to, whom she was positively rude to. It could not have been our little tiff, could it? She must have been mad."

"You have hit on the truth," I said. "She was mad, quite mad. And mad people always turn against those whom they--love best."

It is all a long time ago. I married a year later, and a year later still Ted married again, a sensible good-humoured woman, and was just as happy as he had been with Essie, happier even. In time he forgot her, but I did not. She had sailed away across "perilous seas." She had pa.s.sed beyond my ken. I could only hold her memory dear. And at last she became to me, what for so many years she had been to her lover--a dream.

W. HEFFER & SONS LTD., CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND.