For it was in dancing attendance on his harlot that he had learned these embellishments — dancing attendance on a harlot, a school how much more rigorous than a wife, his very improvement demonstrated. As in that
Ma fleur
, which for all she could do still rang in her head, Minna Lemuel’s voice resounded, in everything he had said or done he had borne witness to Minna, trailed her invisible presence through the house. Every alteration in him made up a portrait of her. What had the old Frederick cared for the liberation of Poland? What would those blinded mattress-pickers have been to him but two scarecrows, to be run away from in disgust and fear? But weak-minded and porous, he had yielded himself to his Minna, was saturated with her, and willy-nilly must exhale her, even in the house of his wife, even at the bedside of his child. It was as though she could smell Minna on him, as though he had brought bodily into the house the odour of his mistress.
But now he had rejoined her, and she was left alone in the leisure of the childless, to oversee her emptied house, methodically to destroy every remnant of her children, every toy and piece of childish apparel; for in her raging loss she could tolerate no sentiment of keepsakes, and in the burning of the bedding, the scouring of the sickroom, she saw a symbol of what her heart should do. Frederick was back with Minna, and she was done with them both. Telling herself this, in the next moment she would relapse, every consideration other than this a blind road that turned her back to the death of the children. If she remembered them, she must remember Frederick; and how remember Frederick without snuffing Minna? The children, Frederick, Minna. Through this order her thoughts ran, and at Minna stayed, ignobly fascinated, ignobly curious, until the next explosion of bitterness hurled her into a rage that could not think at all.
Presently she began to dream of her. Minna driving with Frederick in a painted circus chariot would appear on the horizon of the desert, where she stood talking with Job Saunders the bailiff about a sowing of scarcity-root. The chariot would sweep nearer, bouncing lightly as a bubble over the ridges of sand, pass, and vanish, and presently reappear, persistent as a gadfly. Or she would come on Minna alone, seated in her own morning-room, and suddenly know that she had been established there for weeks. Waking, she kept the sense of the dream’s vividity; the time of day, the position of a glove, every word spoken, remained. But there was always one blank. However she might interrogate her memory, or try by a stratagem of suddenness to surprise it of its secret, Minna’s visage still eluded her.
At last, rather than expose herself to such dreams, she abjured sleeping. For many successive nights she went to her bedroom only that her maid should undress her, and to rumple the bedclothes into a look of having been slept in. Then, after the house was silent, she would get up, dress herself, and creep downstairs, where, lighting one of her secret store of candles, she would read, or sort papers, or labour at one of those many unfinished pieces of needlework, or sometimes play a match of billiards with herself. Time went fast in these vigils, faster than it went by day, when a hundred insignificant duties nailed her down to this hour and that; and surprised that the night was over she would hear, beyond the curtained windows, the harsh bird-notes of autumn dawnings, and moving heavily with stiff cold limbs hid the traces of her vigil, and went back to her bed just before the household began to stir.
She had almost forgotten Mrs. Hervey. That strange interview on the night of the thunderstorm seemed as irrelevant as the incident of a fever dream, leaving nothing behind it that could supply any link between her and the young woman in the over-feathered bonnet whom she saw in church on Sundays. It needed the coming of quarter-day, and the arrival of Doctor Hervey’s bill, to revive its memory. Then, finding her thoughts running on the doctor’s wife, she gave them free rein, since it was better to be teased by Mrs. Hervey than by Minna. A visiting acquaintance between them was neither possible nor desirable; although they had walked hand in hand down the avenue, or rather because they had done so, a civil basket of dessert pears or a hothouse melon would be the properest acknowledgment of that evening visit and the misguided impulse which had prompted it.
Yet having chosen the melon Sophia went on from the hothouse to the stable, and left word there that the carriage was to be ready at midday to drive her to Mrs. Hervey’s.
The Herveys lived at Long Blandamer, a village with genteel pretensions enough to support half a dozen shops, a neat Wesleyan chapel, and sufficient trim-fronted stucco villas to provide a society of weekly card-parties. It represented the new world, as Blandamer Abbots, with its mud-walled cottages, tithe barn, and one great house, represented the old. Sophia had been brought up to feel at home in the one, and not in the other; and even now she felt a certain stiffening as the carriage, splashed with the mud of country lanes, moved over the smooth turnpike, overtaking groups of self-conscious young women or nursemaids towing beribboned children and fat pug-dogs. Doctor Hervey’s house had a green-painted trellis over its white front, a pocket-handkerchief lawn with a small conifer planted in its centre, an enormous brass door-knocker, and a cast of the Dying Gladiator turning his back on the road in what was obviously the parlour window.
The door was opened, the card and the melon received; and after a considerable pause Roger came back with the message that Mrs. Ingleby would be so delighted if Mrs. Willoughby would step in. The parlour was exactly as she had forecasted, but its occupant considerably more than she had bargained for.
My dear Mrs. Willoughby, dear madam, my daughter will be so delighted, such a superb melon, inexpressibly grieved, doctor’s orders, you know, her favourite fruit, condescension, necessity of a hot-bed, bereavement, this one more comfortable, a little refreshment ... The stout matron pranced about the room, assailing her with chairs and unfinished sentences, the flutter of her cap-ribbons seeming to fill the little room.
Waiting for the moment when breath must fail her, Sophia was at last able to enquire,
“I hope Mrs. Hervey is not ill.”
“Oh no, not in the least, only what is quite natural, you know, at such times. But she does not come down till the afternoons.”
Then, after glancing towards the Dying Gladiator as though to be assured of his inattention, the matron leant creaking forward, and whispered,
“My daughter is expecting, you know. In April.”
It might be April now, she thought, beholding the landscape of fields and hedgerows that with easy flow swept her away from the stucco of Long Blandamer. It was one of those autumn days which seem to have the innocence of spring. She was glad to wash her senses in it, they needed such a lustration. She had left the doctor’s house feeling as though she had escaped, and only just in time, from a dusty and airless closet. Yet in such a narrow den of gentility, and with such a mother, a young woman would bear a child. Yes, and another, and another; and grow middle-aged, and grow old, and die, and be buried under a neat headstone, describing her as a beloved wife. But what other lot, said her thoughts scratching nearer home, need any woman look for? What difference, save a larger den and a quieter mother, between Mrs. Hervey’s lot and the lot designed for her? With angry reasonings she tried to shake herself free from the sense of intolerable flatness and tedium which Mrs. Ingleby’s excited confidence had evoked. It was as though, after long days in a court-house, she had heard amid the buzzing of flies and the shuffling of feet a sentence of death pronounced, or of that worst death, a life-long imprisonment; and, suddenly stabbed awake from the indifference of scorn and sickness, had realised that the doom had been pronounced upon her.
“
I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house
... .”
Though her children were dead, she was not freed from that sentence.
The horses were checked, the carriage drew to one side. She looked out, and saw, advancing through the village, hounds with their tails flickering like shadows on running water, the bright colours of hunting coats and horse-flesh. Tall on their shining mounts between the low-thatched cottages of the hamlet, the riders looked like beings of another race, of an angelic stature and nourishment. Behind them came a following of stragglers — men out of work and long-legged girls; and from a cottage door a woman darted, swiftly tying on a clean apron and calling to her children to follow her.
“I will hunt again!” exclaimed Sophia. And in that determination it seemed as though all her cares might be shaken off, and Minna forgotten. She had not hunted since the birth of the children, never easy in leaving them for her own pleasure lest some harm should befall; and now, within three months of her bereavement, to ride to hounds would be an outrage. However, do it she would, and show openly to all that knew covertly how destiny and death had combined to make a free woman of her. The apostle had not included hunting in his programme for the younger women.
But she must wait for a new habit, she had grown too thin for the old. Three journeys to the county town to be fitted took off the edge from her anticipation, and when at last the morning came she was half-defeated before she set out. She looked with envy at Roger the groom. It was his first meet, that is to say the first to which he had gone mounted; and as they rode down the village street she glanced back and saw with amusement how he grinned from side to side, collecting the eyes of his former foot companions, draining their admiration like some tossed-off stirrup-cup.
His livery was the work of old Mr. Trimlett, and it fitted far better than her new habit. In every way Roger was to be envied. But Roger’s was a short-lived kingdom. In a couple of hours he was riding home behind her, crestfallen, blinking, and trying to pretend that it was the sharp wind only that made his eyes water. At the first covert they had drawn a blank; and while the hounds were snuffing and scrambling through Duke’s Gorse the wind-baffled bawls of a farmer, arriving belatedly across country, signalled to them too late that their fox had been lying out in the plough, and had sneaked away. Meanwhile the new habit was irking her more and more, too easy on the shoulders, too tight under the arms; and increasingly conscious of the singularity of her behaviour, and galled by the false heartiness of the welcomes proffered her by the other riders, Sophia discovered in herself a growing impression that she was out on false pretences, having in reality an assignation with the fox. If you’d hunt
me
, she thought, looking round scornfully, I’d give you a run for your money. And before she was aware she had signalled to Roger, and was riding home.
Of its fashion, it was a good enough right and left. By hunting at all she had estranged the goodies, and by deserting she must scandalise the nimrods. She was rather pleased with herself for the thoroughness of this blunder, and for the rest of the day a queer elation floated her along. But that night, having gone to bed whistling, she dreamed again of Minna, and woke next morning to a blacker despair than she had ever known.
Steadfast as a bodily pain it endured all day, an anguish and a tedium. At the day’s end she duly allowed herself to be undressed, and lay in her bed long enough to rumple it. Rising for her vigil she had no more feeling than on any other night that what she was doing was not perfectly prosaic and practical; and it was without any idea of a resorting to despair’s approved poetry that she did what she had never done before — drew back her curtains, and opened the window, and stared out into the hollow darkness of the night.
Though such a thought did not visit her, it was a night well mated to her mind’s night — a dead darkness, without wind or star. It was as though even the earth’s motion had come to a stop, a spring run down, and the vast toy for ever stayed from its twirling. A card-case lay on the windowsill, and with an idle whim she picked it up and dropped it into the well of darkness outside. It seemed an endless while before the ground beneath sighed back its confirmation of her act. “The force of gravity,” she remarked to the night; and suddenly the foolish words seemed to clinch her despair, shutting her up for ever in the residue of a life without joy, purpose or possible release; and wringing her dangled hands, she bowed herself over the sill, her mind circling downward like a plummet through a pit of misery, her body listening, as it were, to the pain of her breast crushed against the stone.
Opening her eyes at last, she found herself staring at a star; but a red, and angry and earthly one — the flare of the distant lime-kiln. Wrought by the day’s desperation to a fantastic clear-headedness, she put on her outdoor clothes, saying aloud as she moved about the room, “I will go to him, as those other women do. He robbed me of my children, he shall give me others.”
It seemed to her that she was in a perfectly rational frame of mind; and with detached self-approval she observed how methodically her wits were working, bidding her put on stout boots, visit the potting-shed for the old storm-lantern that hung there, and take the path across the park which would let her out by the wicket gate. Just as her lantern light made real to her only the patch of road on which her feet were set, her consciousness showed her only a moment’s world: a gate to be opened, a thistle skirted, a bramble’s clutch to be disentangled from her skirts.
The journey, so laggingly long on that July morning, was a short one now, and presently her lantern light showed her the glitter of water running shallow over stones, and that she had reached the bottom of the track which led to the lime-kiln. In the pale chalk mud she saw the large imprints of a man’s feet, and all the path as it led upward was speckled with fallen leaves from the bushes, trampled in so that they made a pattern as of black marble inlaid on white. All through her journey she had kept her eyes on the ground. There had been no need for sight to rekindle in her mind the red and angry star she had seen from the window. Now she was treading on the level turf, harsh with winter, and the star was before her, a fluctuating and sullen glare, and the smell of the kiln caught her throat and dried it as though with terror.