Isabel Clarendon, Vol. II (of II)

Kingcote had often asked himself what was the purpose of his life—here it had declared itself at length. This was the fulfilment of his destiny—to suffer. He was born with the nerves of suffering developed as they are in few men. “Resist not, complain not!” Fate seemed whispering to him. “To this end was your frame cast. Your parents bequeathed you this nature, developing antecedents which were the preparation for it. Endure, endure, for the end is not yet.”

“I cannot endure! This anguish is more than humanity can bear.”

“Yes, you can and will endure it. Nature is cunning, and fits the fibre to the strain. Be proud of your finer sensibilities. Coarse men do not feel and suffer thus.”

“There is nothing high in my torment. It is of vanity and of the flesh. In agonising, I revile myself.”

“Do so. That also is the result of your compounding. Coarse natures never revile themselves.”

“And what will come of it, if I live?”

“That is of the future. Suffer!”....

He reached home when it was dark, he knew not at what time. Refusing the tea which Mary offered, he went to the solitude of his room. And there, in weariness, his frenzy passed. Wretchedness at what he had done took its place. He tried to remember all he wrote; a few phrases clung in his memory, and became his despair. How could he speak so to Isabel? And the letter would be delivered to-night.

He wrote another, explaining, imploring her forbearance, throwing himself at her feet. It was even now not nine o’clock, and she must not sleep with the other letter alone to think of. He went forth, took a hansom, and drove as far as Portman Square, then walked to the door of the house and rang the servant’s bell as he dropped his letter into the box.

He purposed to return on foot, but a very-short distance proved that his strength would not bear him half-way. By means of omnibuses he found himself at home again. This time he ate what his sister put for him, but scarcely spoke. Mary asked no questions, only looked at him with infinite sorrow and wonder. After eating he went to his bed and slept.

The postman brought him a letter in the morning.

“Bernard, Bernard, how can you be so foolish? Your first letter pained me dreadfully; your second makes all right again. Come and see me at eleven to-morrow morning; I promise you to be alone. I cannot write more now, as I must send my maid out to post this, and it is late. For ever yours, whether you believe it or not.”

It quieted him, but he said to himself that: it was cold, very cold; not one word of endearment. It would have pleased him better if she had resented his ill behaviour. She seemed to care little for those words of fire, to have already forgotten them.

He was with her at the hour named. Isabel met him with scarcely a sign of reproach, but he felt that her smile was not what he had once known. She had, too, a slight air of fatigue, and seated herself before she spoke to him.

“I shouldn’t have come,” he explained, referring to the previous afternoon, “but that it was so long since I had heard from you. Why didn’t you write?”

“I meant to, really; but all sorts of unexpected things have been taking up my time.”

“And it is a week since I saw you.”

“No; last Sunday.”

“Oh, that is not seeing you! It is mere misery to be in your presence with others. I avoid seeing your face, try not to hear you speaking.”

“But why? It is very hard to understand you, Bernard.”

“That is my fear. You don’t understand me. You can’t see what a difference there is for me between love and friendship. I cannot treat you as a friend. All the time that I am near you, I am shaken with passion; to play indifference is a sort of treachery. I must never again see you when others are by—I can’t bear it!”

She looked before her in a kind of perplexity, and did not move when he took her hand.

“You said very cruel things in your letter. I felt them more than you think.”

“Don’t speak of that, Isabel. I was mad when I wrote it. Try and bear with me, dear one; I am so wretchedly weak, but I love you more than you will ever know. Never tell me anything of what you do or whom you see; let me come to you when you have a spare halfhour, and that shall be enough. But write to me often. Give me constant assurance of your love. Promise that, for I suffer terribly!”

She was about to say something, but he went on.

“It is so hard that all these people can come and talk with you freely, and you can waste on them your smiles and your brightness, whilst I stand apart and am hungry for one little word. What is it that pleases you in their society? Are they better than I—those people who were about you yesterday? With a little trouble one might make a wax-work figure which would go through those forms every bit as well, even to the talking. Cannot you see how unworthy they are of you—you who are more beautiful than all women, whose heart can speak such true and tender and noble things! It is sacrilege that they should dare to touch your hands!”

Her lips trembled; as he came and knelt by her, she knew again an impulse of pure devotion.

“Bernard, do you wish me to go back again? Shall I go to Knightswell?”

“How can I say yes? It is your happiness to be here. You feel and enjoy your power.”

“Bid me leave London, and I will not remain another day.”

She feared his answer, yet longed to arouse in him the energy which should make her subject. A woman cannot be swayed against her instincts by mere entreaty, but she will bow beneath the hand that she loves. Had he adored her less completely, had the brute impulse of domination been stronger in him, his power and her constancy could have defied circumstances. But he would not lay upon her the yoke for which her neck was bowed in joyful trembling. He would not save her from herself by the exertion of a stronger selfishness. Neither his reverence nor his delicacy would allow him to constrain her. It is the difference between practice and theory; the latter is pure, abstract, ideal; the former must soil itself in the world’s conditions.

“I cannot make myself so selfish in your eyes,” he said. “If your love will not bear this test, how can it face those yet harder ones?”

“What have I done that you should doubt my love? Do you—do you doubt me?”

“Not when you look so into my eyes, bright angel!”

CHAPTER X

On Sunday the Meres dined early. It was very seldon that any one came to see them in the afternoon, which was generally much taken up with music. Mr. Meres had the habit of dozing over a book in his study. In theory he set apart Sunday for those great authors who are more talked about than read, for whom so little time is left amid the manifold demands of necessary labour and the literature of the day, yet for lack of whose sustaining companionship we are apt to fail so in the ways of plain living and high thinking. But between two and five o’clock the spell of drowsiness lay heavy upon our well-intentioned friend. On Sunday most people find it hard to exert themselves to much purpose. The atmosphere is soporific.

To-day there was expectation of Kingcote’s visit. Mr. Meres had made up his mind that if he just showed himself, and then left the young ladies to entertain their visitor, he would be exercising commendable discretion. After dinner he went to his study as usual; Ada and the two sisters remained in the sitting-room. There was no mention of the subject which occupied the minds of all; other things were talked of, but in an artificial way. Hilda presently began to play upon the piano. An hour passed, and there was a knock at the front door.

Kingcote had had a long letter from Isabel the evening before, and his mind was not ill-tuned for the visit. He was pleased with the aspect of the small house; here at all events there would be what he longed for, domestic peace and simplicity. He was conducted to the study, and found Mr. Meres with a Shakespeare open before him. He smiled, reminded of the rector of Winstoke.

“Which is your favourite play?” asked Mr. Meres by way of greeting, taking it for granted that Kingcote would know to what author he referred.

“Antony and Cleopatra,” was the unhesitating reply.

“Ha! I think my weakness is for the Winter s Tale. Perhaps it is because I grow old.”

They talked awhile. Kingcote listened to notes of music from an adjoining room. Mr. Meres presently proposed that they should invade what he called the gynæceum.

The little front room looked very bright and pleasant; its occupants were each one interesting, and in different ways. Kingcote’s eyes sought Ada first of all. It surprised him that she did not suffer so much by comparison with the other girls as he had anticipated. Perhaps it was familiarity with her face which enabled him to see it in a more favourable light than formerly. She was perfectly grave and, as usual, distant, but somehow she seemed more feminine than at Knightswell.

There was miscellaneous gossip, chiefly about the Academy. The old question of the artistic and the merely pleasing was rung upon in all its changes. Ada spoke very little, but Rhoda was unusually cheerful—perhaps she thought it became her to represent the hostess; perhaps also there were other reasons—and Hilda could not be other than charming. Only to look at her fresh, dainty youthfulness rested the eye like the hue of spring verdure. She was asked at length to sing.

“I have no sacred songs,” she remarked with a dubious glance.

“You have many that are not exactly profane,” returned her father, smiling.

Whilst she sang, Mr. Meres quietly left the room. There followed an hour or two of such pleasant animation as Kingcote had never known. Wholly at his ease, and forgetful of everything but the present, he surprised himself by the natural flow of his talk. The music stirred his faculties; the unwonted companionship soothed him. All he said was received with a certain deference anything but disagreeable; even Ada gave him respectful attention, and made not a single caustic remark. The girls’ conversation was of a very pleasing kind, remarkably intelligent, as different as possible from that of girls of corresponding age who are trained in the paces of society. In Rhoda and Hilda the influence of their father and of Ada Warren was evident; they appeared absolutely free from unreasoning kinds of prejudice, and were strong in the faith of the beautiful, which is woman’s salvation.

This visit Kingcote repeated twice before the end of July, not oftener, though he had invitations to do so. In the days through which he now began to live, it was seldom that he could regain the mood in which it was possible to mingle with society of any kind, even though the process might have relieved him. It was nothing less than an illness which fell upon him, an illness of the nerves and the imagination. There were intermissions of suffering, mostly the results of exhaustion; his torment rose to the point at which a mental catastrophe seemed imminent, then came a period of languor, in which he resumed strength to suffer again. Later, these three months became all but a blank in his memory, the details of the time, with the exception of one or two moments, forgotten.

He waited several days into the new week without hearing from Isabel, and at last had a very brief note from her, asking him to call before three o’clock. It was in his mind to write a refusal, saying that he was sure she had no time to give him, but this he could not carry out. He found her just leaving the dining-room; she had lunched alone. Her spirits were extravagant; he had never seen her so gay. The contrast with his own gloomy state did not tend to brighten him.

“What has happened to excite you so?” he asked.

“Happened? Nothing at all. Only I am well, and happy, and the sun shines; isn’t that enough to put one in good spirits?”

“Happy?” he repeated, rather bitterly.

“Did you wish me to be miserable?” she exclaimed merrily. “It is you who make my happiness; why don’t you keep some for yourself?”

“There you mistake. I have nothing whatever to do with it.”

“No, the mistake is yours, Bernard. I tell you the truth, but you will not, will not believe me. I can’t help it; I only know that you will believe me some day. Time will be on my side.”

He sat mute and downcast.

“Oh, why do you take life so hard?” she asked him. “It is full of good things to make the time pass, if you will only see them. Tell me now, what have you been doing since I saw you?”

“Nothing—waiting to hear from you.”

“Ah, that is not true! Who was it that went to Chelsea on Sunday, and made himself very agreeable indeed, charmingly agreeable, so that young ladies speak most flatteringly of him? I know, you see. Indeed I was just a little jealous, or should have been, if jealousy were not such a foolish thing.”

“That I don’t think you would ever feel.”

“Perhaps not. I certainly should not without cause, and, if I had cause, that would be a better reason still for resisting it.”

“Not if you–”

He interrupted himself, and turned away impatiently.

“You were going to say something very unkind, and you thought better of it. But you sadden me; it is dreadful to see you so low-spirited. Have you thought,” she asked, with a little hesitation, “of finding some occupation for your time?”

“Yes, I have thought constantly, but of course without result. You think I should not trouble you so often if my time were taken up?”

He could not help it. Almost everything she said converted itself in his seething mind to a bitter significance. This was the first reference she had made to the necessity under which he stood. It was natural enough that the subject should occupy her thoughts; he had several times wondered, indeed, that she kept silence about it. Now that she spoke, he attributed to her unkind motives.

They talked on in this fruitless way. He saw her look at the clock, and endeavoured to leave his seat; no doubt she was going somewhere, or expected visitors. Minute after minute he said to himself that he would go, yet still remained. The door opened, and Mr. Asquith was announced.

Robert had been long back from his yachting; at present he was entering with heartiness into the pleasures of the London season. His mode of life seemed to agree with him; there was ruddy health on his cheeks, and his whole appearance bespoke the man who found life one with enjoyment. Kingcote had heard his name in former times from the Vissians, but Isabel had never mentioned her cousin to him. He regarded him with involuntary dislike; the placid good-humour, the genial contentment of Asquith’s look and voice were enough to excite this feeling under the circumstances, and the frank kindness with which Isabel received him naturally increased it.

“Colonel Stratton,” Robert remarked, more suo, as he seated himself. “I met him at the top of Park Lane, and he was most anxious to discover my exact opinion of the atmospheric conditions of the day; seemed delighted when I agreed with him that there was moisture in the air.”

Isabel laughed heartily.

“Was that all that passed between you?” she inquired.

“Not quite. He wanted me to go with him to Barnet—was it Barnet? on a coach driven by a friend of his, a Captain Cullen—Hullen–”

“Captain Mullen,” Isabel corrected, much amused. “He is a first-rate whip. Why didn’t you go? It would have been delightful.”

“I’m afraid the company would have been rather too military for my tastes. Besides, I told him I was coming to see you. He begged me to–”

“To do what?”

“Nay, he himself paused at the ‘to’; the rest I was doubtless to understand. I presume from his manner that I was to present his respects to you.”

“Our friend Colonel Stratton,” Isabel explained to Kingcote, “is habitually at a loss for words. He really is the shyest man I ever knew. I tease him dreadfully, and I don’t think he minds it a bit.”

“Coach-driving,” remarked Robert. “Singular taste that. One is disposed to suggest hereditary influences.”

Kingcote rose.

“Must you go?” Isabel asked.

“I must,” was the brief reply.

“I don’t think you ever met Mr. Kingcote at Knightswell?” Isabel said, when the door had closed.

“I remember your speaking of him. Is he in London permanently?”

“I believe so.”

A purpose, which Isabel had had in mentioning him, passed, and she spoke of other things....

Kingcote was walking about the streets. He avoided home nowadays as much as possible; his madness seemed harder to bear in his own room, or with Mary watching him; it was always best to walk himself into fatigue, that there might be a chance of sleep in the night. Why had he not obeyed her hint, and left before visitors could arrive? And there again was the sting; she wished him to leave. Did she expect this cousin of hers, this prosperous, well-fed, easy-mannered gentleman? That mattered little; the one certainty was that her love grew less and less. She had not even the outward affectionateness which had once marked her when she spoke with him alone. Knowing perfectly the power of help and soothing that lay in her lightest loving word, she would not trouble to find one, not one. She was gay in the face of his misery. Love would be affected by subtle sympathies; yet she slept peacefully through those nights when he wrestled with anguish; when he called upon her, she was deaf to the voice she should have heard. So many other voices claimed her ear; those that murmured graceful things in bright drawing-rooms, those that flattered insidiously when she was enjoying her triumphs. It had been a mistake; to her an occasion, perhaps, for regrets and annoyances, to him a source of unutterable woe. Even if she really loved him at first, how could she continue to, now that every day brought something to lower him in her estimation? The worst of his suffering was in the thought that he himself was his own ruin. Could he from the first have borne himself like a man, have been affectionate without excess, have taken some firm, direct course in his difficulties, above all have seemed to be independent of her, then he might have held her his own. But that was requiring of him to be another than he was. Out of weakness strength could not come. His passion was that of a woman. Could he even now put on a consistent show of independence, it might not be too late. Why had he not taken her at her word when she offered to return to Knights well? Was it too late?

Too late; for in love that which is undone never can be made good. He was not worthy of her love; the consciousness was burnt in upon his brain. Had she met him now for the first time, and seen him as now he was, would she have loved him? Never; to think it was to rob her of woman’s excellence. He had no one but himself to blame. He must bear it; go lower in her sight day after day, see her impatience grow, feel friendship wholly supplanting love, and fatigued endurance take the place of friendship. It was his fate; he was himself, and could not become another....

Ah, he had indeed drunk too deeply of that magic water of the Knights Well, the spring at her gates! One draught, and it would have sent him on his way refreshed. But the water was so insidiously sweet....

He wrote her letters again, in which he spared neither reproach nor charge of cruelty. Isabel replied to him very shortly, but in pitying forbearance. At length she begged him earnestly to seek employment. He was undermining his health; it was imperative that he should apply his mind to some regular pursuit. Her he was making grievously unhappy; she would have to leave London. “Why, then, does she not?” he exclaimed angrily when he read this. “She knows it would be better for me.” Another cause of complaint had grown up in his thoughts; why had she never offered to come and see his sister? It would have been graceful, it would have been kind. But it would have been to commit herself too far, he reasoned. She was doing her best to show him in the gentlest way that the past must not be remembered too seriously. She never spoke now, never, of the day when she would become his wife. That was in any case at a year’s distance. Another year! He laughed scornfully. In a year it would be as if they had never met.

“Isabel,” he wrote to her one day, when memories had touched him, “I have given you all the love of which my soul is capable, and the soul of man never gave birth to more. I am weak and contemptible in your sight; it is because I faint for love of you. Oh, why have you stripped from my life every leaf and blossom, leaving only that red flower of passion which burns itself away? Every interest I once cherished has died in feeding this love. I cannot see the world around me; wherever I look there is your face, in thousandfold repetition, with every difference of expression I have ever beheld upon it. I see the first smile with which you greeted me—the first of all; I see the look in which your love dawned, the flush of rapture with which you listened to my earliest words of gratitude and devotion.

“I see you in your careless merriment, and in your pained coldness; I see you when you smile on others. I shall never know again that heaven of your unspoken tenderness, never, never! It was well that you made no vows to me; how well it is that you have seen my unworthiness before it was too lates of gratitude and devotion. I see you in your careless merriment, and in your pained coldness; I see you when you smile on others. I shall never know again that heaven of your unspoken tenderness, never, never! It was well that you made no vows to me; how well it is that you have seen my unworthiness before it was too late!”

She found that letter waiting for her when she reached home long after midnight, coming from a crowded scene, with laughter and music still ringing in her ears. Till her maid had left her she did not open it; it was with fear—as always of late—that she at length broke the envelope. She read, and tears filled her eyes. They came rushing, irresistible; she ceased from her endeavour to check them, and wept as she had not wept for long years. Through the dark hours she lay, with the letter in her hand, and only slept when morning was at her window.

She wrote, but did not ask him to come to her....

Two occasions marked themselves afterwards in his memory. To lose himself for an hour he went one night to the theatre. It was now early in July; Isabel was staying in town longer than she had purposed. He reached a seat in the pit, and sat through a farce which he in vain tried to follow. Then he watched the people who were beginning to fill the stalls. Two ladies came forward; he thought he knew the first, and remembered Mrs. Stratton; behind her was Isabel, then a gentleman—Colonel Stratton, he supposed. She was exquisitely beautiful, dressed as he had never seen her; the lights flashed upon her; her face had its own radiance. He forced his way out of the crowd, and into the street....

He called and asked for her, early one afternoon, and was told that she was not at home. Half-an-hour’s wandering brought him, scarcely with purpose, back into the same street. From a distance he saw that her carriage was waiting before the door, and immediately she came out and entered it. He turned away with blackness before his eyes....

He wrote and told her of that. “It is true, dear,” she answered, “and you must not blame me. I was obliged to leave home early, and I knew that if I saw you for a moment it would only cause you worse trouble than to believe I was away. You oblige me to do such things as this; I dare not be quite frank with you as I wish to be; you often frighten me. There is nothing that I wish to hide from you on my own account. What should there be?”

And so the time wore on to the end of July. Poor Mary’s existence had become one of ceaseless grief. Only two or three times had she ventured to entreat her brother to take her into his confidence, and let her share his trouble. He could not tell her the truth; it would have shamed him to open his heart even to her.

He put it all on the troubles which were in the future, the impossibility of marrying whilst he remained penniless.

“And I am the cause of that,” Mary said, in deep sorrow.

“You the cause? You misunderstand me entirely. It would have been precisely the same if the old state of things had remained unaltered. In any case I was penniless—from her point of view.”

Mary could gather from the last words a sense he did not consciously put into them. She had her own explanation of her brother’s dreadful state. Dreadful it was, no less. His face was wasted as if by consumption. He scarcely ate enough to support life. His sleeplessness had become a disease. He never smiled, and spoke for the most part in a weary, listless tone. Mary believed that there was death in his hands.

There came the day for leave-taking; he was to go to her—Isabel wrote—in the afternoon, and she would be at home to no one else.

“You are glad that I am going?” she said.

“Yes, I am glad. I had rather think of you among the fields.”

“Ada is going with me, to stay for a week or two. She proposed it herself; I was surprised.”

“But she had not left you finally?”

“I quite believed she had.”

They talked without any kind of emotion, but each avoided the other’s eyes. Kingcote had his usual look of illness and fatigue; Isabel was not without signs that the season had been a little too much for her strength.

“I am going to Scotland in a fortnight,” she mentioned. “Of course you shall have my address. Then in October you will come down some day and see me, will you not?”

“It is better that I should promise nothing. I can’t say where I may be in October.”

“Always distrusting the future! I dare not do that. The future is my best friend.”

“Doubtless!” he replied.

“And are not our futures one and the same, Bernard?”

“Let us say so, and think so if we can. But I know you have many things to occupy you. Let us say good-bye.”

“I don’t like that word. Au revoir is better.”

“Why not good-bye? It only means ‘God be with you.’”

“Does it? Then, good-bye!”

She offered her lips and he just touched them. Otherwise his self-torment would not have been complete.