A Mere Chance Volume III Part 9

It must be recorded, to Mr. Kingston's credit, that he behaved like a gentleman on this occasion. He was a little acid and supercilious, and not as composed as he a.s.sumed to be; but otherwise he conducted himself with propriety. "I took the carriage for half an hour," said he loudly.

"I hope I haven't kept you waiting, my dear. Ah, Mr. Dalrymple, how do you do? I did not know you were in town. I hope you are quite well.

Making a long stay?"

"A day or two only," said Roden, who stiffened in spite of himself, but spoke with studied courtesy. "I shall be starting back to Queensland to-night. I am glad to have had the opportunity of meeting Mrs.

Kingston, and to see her looking well."

"Oh, yes, she is very well, I hope. Travelling did her good--it does everybody good. I felt quite set up by it myself. Dear me, was that a drop of rain? I think you had better be getting home, Rachel. There is a heavy storm coming directly. Good day, Mr. Dalrymple, good day. We can't set you down anywhere, I suppose?"

Mr. Dalrymple declined a seat in the carriage with thanks, and he held out his hand to Rachel.

"Good-bye," he said quietly.

"Good-bye," she replied, with an ash-white face. They looked at one another for a second; and then, lifting his hat gravely, Mr. Dalrymple turned and walked away down the street, and Mr. Kingston gave his arm to his wife, and led her to her carriage. Poor Rachel! she did not ask herself what would happen next--she did not wonder nor care whether she was to be scolded or not. For a few bitter, lonely moments, she had no recognisable future.

Then she turned to her husband, who was fanning the fuel of his wrath in silence, laid her hand on his arm, and said softly, "Graham?"

"Well--what?" he inquired, roughly.

"Do not be angry. I am never going to see him again."

"It's to be hoped not," he snarled, "if you have any regard for your reputation. Standing up there with him, in that public way, for all Melbourne to see!"

"You would not have wished me to meet Mr. Dalrymple in any way that was _not_ public," she said, drawing herself up. "And I should be very sorry to do anything that all Melbourne might not see."

The rain began to sweep down heavily, and he turned to put up the window nearest him with an energy that threatened destruction to the gla.s.s.

And he said no more about Mr. Dalrymple.

Disturbed as he was, he was greatly relieved that the meeting he had always dreaded was over, and had taken place so quietly; and poor as was his estimation of the abstract woman, he had the most implicit faith in his wife's sincerity.

When she told him that she had bidden her old lover a final farewell, he believed her; and, though the sight and thought of the man made him ferocious, he was quite aware that difficulties were adjusting themselves more satisfactorily than he could have expected.

He did not feel that he had any excuse for upbraiding Rachel now, and he did not do it. But he had to put great restraint upon himself not to do it.

He got out of the carriage at his club, shutting the door with a bang behind him, and while his wife drove home by herself in a state of semi-consciousness, he went in to quarrel with some of his old friends who chanced to require his opinion upon the political situation.

Politics, he promptly gave them to understand, were beneath his notice, likewise the people who concerned themselves therein. He wouldn't touch one of them with a pair of tongs. It wasn't for gentlemen and clubmen to mix themselves up with a lot of rogues and vagabonds. Let them alone and be hanged to them. That was what respectable people did in America. If Americans didn't care what riff-raff represented them, why should they?

As for the colony, if it liked to be dragged in the dirt--if it preferred, of its own free will, to go to the devil--let it, for all to him.

And so he worked off his savage temper harmlessly, and appeared in his own drawing-room at seven o'clock, irreproachably spruce, and with a flower in his b.u.t.ton-hole, looking jaunty and amiable, as if nothing had happened.

Rachel, when he arrived, was sitting alone in the midst of her wealth and splendour, waiting for him.

She rose as he entered and went to meet him, looking lovely in her favourite black velvet, with red geraniums in her hair; and she laid her hand on his sleeve, and lifted a sad but peaceful face. "Kiss me, Graham," she said gently.

He put his arms round her at once.

"Dear little woman!" he responded. "I understand. I am not angry with you. It's all right. We won't say any more about it."

And he led her to the dining-room and placed her "at the head of the table," which was her social throne; and he plied her with dainty viands and rare wines with a fussy solicitude that was highly edifying to the servants who waited upon them, by way of showing her that he forgave her.

He was much impressed by his own large magnanimity; and what was more to the purpose, so in her unselfish heart, was she. They spent the evening together, _tete-a-tete_ by the fireside (for it was cold when the storm was over), in the most domestic manner, planning new schemes for the garden and for the arrangement of a pet cabinet of blue china; and when Rachel went to bed, lighting her way about the great corridors and staircases with a candle that her husband had lit for her, she felt that he was helping her to make a fair start upon the weary road which stretched, plain and straight--but, oh, so flat and bare!--before her.

And she was very grateful to him.

Mr. Dalrymple, meanwhile left town by an evening train, and travelled night and day until he reached his home in the Queensland wilderness, where, being human--and very much so, too--he unloosed his heart from the restraints that he had put upon it, and railed at ease over the injustices of fate in the very strongest language.

"Why should I have done it?" he demanded of his ancient friend and comrade as they lounged in restful att.i.tudes under the gra.s.s-thatched verandah of their humble little house, smoking the pipe of peace in the cool of the summer day. "Why should I have given her up to him? What right has he to keep her, while I am lonely for the rest of my days? He has not the shadow of a right. She doesn't belong to him, and she never will. There is no binding force in any other contract that is entered into by fraud and false pretences; why should there be in this which she has been dragged into, and which deprives her as well as me, of all the flower and sweetness of her life? It is a monstrous sacrifice--and as immoral as it is monstrous.

"It isn't as if we had no end of years, no end of lives to throw away.

Suppose, ages hence, if we should survive, with our human nature, and I, for one, don't want to survive without it--and we look back upon this precious bit of certain happiness that we _might_ have had, and see that we voluntarily gave up the whole of it merely because of a wretched little paper law--a miserable little conventional prejudice--what shall we think of ourselves then? We shall say that we did not deserve a gift that we did not know how to value."

"Rave away," said Mr. Gordon. "It will do you good. All the same, you know, as well as I do, that it would be impossible for you to do less or more than you have done."

Of course it was impossible. Few people are better than they profess to be, but he was one of those few. And if he had had the happiness of twenty lives to lose, he would have lost it all twice over rather than have kept it at any cost of peace or honour to the woman he loved. He allowed himself the right to love her still, which, as he justly remarked, couldn't hurt anybody.

He thought of her as he rode about his lonely plains, looking after black boys and cattle, and dreamt of her as he lay out in the starlight nights, with a saddle for his pillow, and the red light of the camp-fire flickering through the darkness upon his face; and always with a sense that, spiritually and morally, she belonged, before all the world to him.

But he never at heart regretted either that he had seen her that day at the Town-hall, or that he had elected to see her no more. He had done the only thing that it had been in him to do.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONSOLATION.

If it is true, as it is said, and as the observation of most of us seems to testify, that the ideal marriage is hardly ever realised, and then only when the rare and brief experience has been bought at untold cost of precious years, it is, perhaps, equally true that the majority of marriages wrongly and recklessly entered into, provided the contracting parties are honestly disposed, turn out surprisingly and undeservedly well.

Time, which solaces our disappointments and sanctifies our bereavements, remedies also in a great measure even these criminal mistakes.

As Rachel truly said, there are "whole worlds of things" besides love--_i.e._, "the love of man and woman when they love their best"--to knit husbands and wives together; and, independently of the ties that children create, and which, to the mother at least, are supremely and eternally sacred, the innumerable soft webs of habit and a.s.sociation that are woven in days and years of intimate companions.h.i.+p grow, like ivy over a fissure in a wall, so strong as eventually not only to hide the vacant place, but in some degree to supply artificially that element of stability and permanence to the structure which in its essential substance it lacked.

And so it was with Rachel. After a little time, when she had "settled down," changed and aged, and sobered as she was, she really was not unhappy.

She was always vastly conscious of her loss, but she was of too wholesome a disposition to be embittered by it; and her simple sense of duty and her characteristic unselfishness prompted her from the first to wear a cheerful face for her husband, and never by word or deed to reproach him, which course of conduct had the natural result of comforting herself quite as much as it gratified him.

He was not a bad man, and in his easy fas.h.i.+on, he loved her; and appreciating her gentle and dutiful behaviour, he put himself out of the way to be kind to her, though, with all his attentions, he never was what one would call a domestic husband.

Her demands upon him were not exorbitant. Indeed, she was true to her creed in not demanding anything; but for such evidences of his affection as he voluntarily bestowed upon her she showed herself always grateful in a meek, pleased way that was very charming to a man vain of his own importance, and she did not profess to be more so than, in her soft heart, she really was.

She had no vocation for independence, nor for making herself--still less for making others--miserable; and if she had married Bluebeard instead of a well-intentioned gentleman, she must have twined herself about him with her tender, deferential, delicately-caressing ways--which came as naturally to her as breathing--and have found support and rest in doing it.

When all signs of storm had cleared away, the apparently ill-matched husband and wife settled down to a life together that, if not rapturously delightful, was quite as placid and kindly and peaceful as the married life of most of us.

They did not see a great deal of each other, to be sure; but the hours that they spent together, being generally hours when Mr. Kingston was tired or unwell, and wanted to be nursed and cheered, and to have the papers read to him, had a homely sweetness and solace for Rachel not far removed from happiness.