The Weavers, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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In his heart of hearts Eglington believed that she loved him, that her
interest in David was only part of her idealistic temperament--the
admiration of a woman for a man of altruistic aims; but his hatred of
David, of what David was, and of his irrefutable claims, reacted on her.
Perverseness and his unhealthy belief that he would master her in the
end, that she would one day break down and come to him, willing to take
his view in all things, and to be his slave--all this drove him farther
and farther on a fatal, ever-broadening path.
Success had spoiled him. He applied his gifts in politics, daringly
unscrupulous, superficially persuasive, intellectually insinuating, to
his wife; and she, who had been captured once by all these things, was
not to be captured again. She knew what alone could capture her; and, as
she sat and watched the singers on the stage now, the divine notes of
that searching melody still lingering in her heart, there came a sudden
wonder whether Eglington's heart could not be wakened. She knew that it
never had been, that he had never known love, the transfiguring and
reclaiming passion. No, no, surely it could not be too late--her marriage
with him had only come too soon! He had ridden over her without mercy; he
had robbed her of her rightful share of the beautiful and the good; he
had never loved her; but if love came to him, if he could but once
realise how much there was of what he had missed! If he did not save
himself--and her--what would be the end? She felt the cords drawing her
elsewhere; the lure of a voice she had heard in an Egyptian garden was in
her ears. One night at Hamley, in an abandonment of grief-life hurt her
so--she had remembered the prophecy she had once made that she would
speak to David, and that he would hear; and she had risen from her seat,
impelled by a strange new feeling, and had cried: "Speak! speak to me!"
As plainly as she had ever heard anything in her life, she had heard his
voice speak to her a message that sank into the innermost recesses of her
being, and she had been more patient afterwards. She had no doubt
whatever; she had spoken to him, and he had answered; but the answer was
one which all the world might have heard.
Down deep in her nature was an inalienable loyalty, was a simple,
old-fashioned feeling that "they two," she and Eglington, should cleave
unto each other till death should part. He had done much to shatter that
feeling; but now, as she listened to Mario's voice, centuries of
predisposition worked in her, and a great pity awoke in her heart. Could
she not save him, win him, wake him, cure him of the disease of Self?
The thought brought a light to her eyes which had not been there for many
a day. Out of the deeps of her soul this mist of a pure selflessness
rose, the spirit of that idealism which was the real chord of sympathy
between her and Egypt.
Yes, she would, this once again, try to win the heart of this man; and so
reach what was deeper than heart, and so also give him that without which
his life must be a failure in the end, as Sybil Eglington had said. How
often had those bitter anguished words of his mother rung in her
ears--"So brilliant and unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of
winning a great place in the world . . . so calculating and determined
and ambitious!" They came to her now, flashed between the eager
solicitous eyes of her mind and the scene of a perfect and everlasting
reconciliation which it conjured up--flashed and were gone; for her will
rose up and blurred them into mist; and other words of that true
palimpsest of Sybil Eglington's broken life came instead: "And though he
loves me little, as he loves you little too, yet he is my son, and for
what he is we are both responsible one way or another." As the mother, so
the wife. She said to herself now in sad paraphrase, "And though he loves
me little, yet he is my husband, and for what he is it may be that I am
in some sense responsible." Yet he is my husband! All that it was came to
her; the closed door, the drawn blinds; the intimacy which shut them away
from all the world; the things said which can only be said without
desecration between two honest souls who love each other; and that sweet
isolation which makes marriage a separate world, with its own sacred
revelation. This she had known; this had been; and though the image of
the sacred thing had been defaced, yet the shrine was not destroyed.
For she believed that each had kept the letter of the law; that, whatever
his faults, he had turned his face to no other woman. If she had not made
his heart captive and drawn him by an ever-shortening cord of attraction,
yet she was sure that none other had any influence over him, that, as he
had looked at her in those short-lived days of his first devotion, he
looked at no other. The way was clear yet. There was nothing
irretrievable, nothing irrevocable, which would for ever stain the memory
and tarnish the gold of life when the perfect love should be minted.
Whatever faults of mind or disposition or character were his--or
hers--there were no sins against the pledges they had made, nor the bond
into which they had entered. Life would need no sponge. Memory might
still live on without a wound or a cowl of shame.
It was all part of the music to which she listened, and she was almost
oblivious of the brilliant throng, the crowded boxes, or of the Duchess
of Snowdon sitting near her strangely still, now and again scanning the
beautiful face beside her with a reflective look. The Duchess loved the
girl--she was but a girl, after all--as she had never loved any of her
sex; it had come to be the last real interest of her life. To her eyes,
dimmed with much seeing, blurred by a garish kaleidoscope of fashionable
life, there had come a look which was like the ghost of a look she had,
how many decades ago.
Presently, as she saw Hylda's eyes withdraw from the stage, and look at
her with a strange, soft moisture and a new light in them, she laid her
fan confidently on her friend's knee, and said in her abrupt whimsical
voice: "You like it, my darling; your eyes are as big as saucers. You
look as if you'd been seeing things, not things on that silly stage, but
what Verdi felt when he wrote the piece, or something of more account
than that."
"Yes, I've been seeing things," Hylda answered with a smile which came
from a new-born purpose, the dream of an idealist. "I've been seeing
things that Verdi did not see, and of more account, too. . . . Do you
suppose the House is up yet?"
A strange look flashed into the Duchess's eyes, which had been watching
her with as much pity as interest. Hylda had not been near the House of
Commons this session, though she had read the reports with her usual
care. She had shunned the place.
"Why, did you expect Eglington?" the Duchess asked idly, yet she was
watchful too, alert for every movement in this life where the footsteps
of happiness were falling by the edge of a precipice, over which she
would not allow herself to look. She knew that Hylda did not expect
Eglington, for the decision to come to the opera was taken at the last
moment.
"Of course not--he doesn't know we are here. But if it wasn't too late, I
thought I'd go down and drive him home."
The Duchess veiled her look. Here was some new development in the history
which had been torturing her old eyes, which had given her and Lord
Windlehurst as many anxious moments as they had known in many a day, and
had formed them into a vigilance committee of two, who waited for the
critical hour when they should be needed.
"We'll go at once if you like," she replied. "The opera will be over
soon. We sent word to Windlehurst to join us, you remember, but he won't
come now; it's too late. So, we'll go, if you like."
She half rose, but the door of the box opened, and Lord Windlehurst
looked in quizzically. There was a smile on his face.
"I'm late, I know; but you'll forgive me--you'll forgive me, dear lady,"
he added to Hylda, "for I've been listening to your husband making a
smashing speech for a bad cause."
Hylda smiled. "Then I must go and congratulate him," she answered, and
withdrew her hand from that of Lord Windlehurst, who seemed to hold it
longer than usual, and pressed it in a fatherly way.
"I'm afraid the House is up," he rejoined, as Hylda turned for her
opera-cloak; "and I saw Eglington leave Palace Yard as I came away." He
gave a swift, ominous glance towards the Duchess, which Hylda caught, and
she looked at each keenly.
"It's seldom I sit in the Peers' Gallery," continued Windlehurst; "I
don't like going back to the old place much. It seems empty and hollow.
But I wouldn't have missed Eglington's fighting speech for a good deal."
"What was it about?" asked Hylda as they left the box. She had a sudden
throb of the heart. Was it the one great question, that which had been
like a gulf of fire between them?
"Oh, Turkey--the unpardonable Turk," answered Windlehurst. "As good a
defence of a bad case as I ever heard."
"Yes, Eglington would do that well," said the Duchess enigmatically,
drawing her cloak around her and adjusting her hair. Hylda looked at her
sharply, and Lord Windlehurst slyly, but the Duchess seemed oblivious of
having said anything out of the way, and added: "It's a gift seeing all
that can be said for a bad cause, and saying it, and so making the other
side make their case so strong that the verdict has to be just."
"Dear Duchess, it doesn't always work out that way," rejoined Windlehurst
with a dry laugh. "Sometimes the devil's advocate wins."
"You are not very complimentary to my husband," retorted Hylda, looking
him in the eyes, for she was not always sure when he was trying to baffle
her.
"I'm not so sure of that. He hasn't won his case yet. He has only staved
off the great attack. It's coming--soon."
"What is the great attack? What has the Government, or the Foreign
Office, done or left undone?"
"Well, my dear--" Suddenly Lord Windlehurst remembered himself, stopped,
put up his eyeglass, and with great interest seemed to watch a gay group
of people opposite; for the subject of attack was Egypt and the
Government's conduct in not helping David, in view not alone of his
present danger, but of the position of England in the country, on which
depended the security of her highway to the East. Windlehurst was a good
actor, and he had broken off his words as though the group he was now
watching had suddenly claimed his attention. "Well, well, Duchess," he
said reflectively, "I see a new nine days' wonder yonder." Then, in
response to a reminder from Hylda, he continued: "Ah, yes, the attack!
Oh, Persia--Persia, and our feeble diplomacy, my dear lady, though you
mustn't take that as my opinion, opponent as I am. That's the charge,
Persia--and her cats."
The Duchess breathed a sigh of relief; for she knew what Windlehurst had
been going to say, and she shrank from seeing what she felt she would
see, if Egypt and Claridge Pasha's name were mentioned. That night at
Harnley had burnt a thought into her mind which she did not like. Not
that she had any pity for Eglington; her thought was all for this girl
she loved. No happiness lay in the land of Egypt for her, whatever her
unhappiness here; and she knew that Hylda must be more unhappy still
before she was ever happy again, if that might be. There was that
concerning Eglington which Hylda did not know, yet which she must know
one day--and then! But why were Hylda's eyes so much brighter and softer
and deeper to-night? There was something expectant, hopeful, brooding in
them. They belonged not to the life moving round her, but were shining in
a land of their own, a land of promise. By an instinct in each of them
they stood listening for a moment to the last strains of the opera. The
light leaped higher in Hylda's eyes.
"Beautiful--oh, so beautiful!" she said, her hand touching the Duchess's
arm.
The Duchess gave the slim warm fingers a spasmodic little squeeze. "Yes,
darling, beautiful," she rejoined; and then the crowd began to pour out
behind them.
Their carriages were at the door. Lord Windlehurst put Hylda in. "The
House is up," he said. "You are going on somewhere?"
"No--home," she said, and smiled into his old, kind, questioning eyes.
"Home!"
"Home!" he murmured significantly as he turned towards the Duchess and
her carriage. "Home!" he repeated, and shook his head sadly.
"Shall I drive you to your house?" the Duchess asked.
"No, I'll go with you to your door, and walk back to my cell. Home!" he
growled to the footman, with a sardonic note in the voice.
As they drove away, the Duchess turned to him abruptly. "What did you
mean by your look when you said you had seen Eglington drive away from
the House?"
"Well, my dear Betty, she--the fly-away--drives him home now. It has come
to that."
"To her house--Windlehurst, oh, Windlehurst!"
She sank back in the cushions, and gave what was as near a sob as she had
given in many a day. Windlehurst took her hand. "No, not so bad as that
yet. She drove him to his club. Don't fret, my dear Betty."
Home! Hylda watched the shops, the houses, the squares, as she passed
westward, her mind dwelling almost happily on the new determination to
which she had come. It was not love that was moving her, not love for
him, but a deeper thing. He had brutally killed love--the full life of
it--those months ago; but there was a deep thing working in her which was
as near nobility as the human mind can feel. Not in a long time had she
neared her home with such expectation and longing. Often on the doorstep
she had shut her eyes to the light and warmth and elegance of it, because
of that which she did not see. Now, with a thrill of pleasure, she saw
its doors open. It was possible Eglington might have come home already.
Lord Windlehurst had said that he had left the House. She did not ask if
he was in--it had not been her custom for a long time--and servants were
curious people; but she looked at the hall-table. Yes, there was a hat
which had evidently just been placed there, and gloves, and a stick. He
was at home, then.
She hurried to her room, dropped her opera-cloak on a chair, looked at
herself in the glass, a little fluttered and critical, and then crossed
the hallway to Eglington's bedroom. She listened for a moment. There was
no sound. She turned the handle of the door softly, and opened it. A
light was burning low, but the room was empty. It was as she thought, he
was in his study, where he spent hours sometimes after he came home,
reading official papers. She went up the stairs, at first swiftly, then
more slowly, then with almost lagging feet. Why did she hesitate? Why
should a woman falter in going to her husband--to her own one man of all
the world? Was it not, should it not be, ever the open door between them?
Confidence--confidence--could she not have it, could she not get it now
at last? She had paused; but now she moved on with quicker step, purpose
in her face, her eyes softly lighted.
Suddenly she saw on the floor an opened letter. She picked it up, and, as
she did so, involuntarily observed the writing. Almost mechanically she
glanced at the contents. Her heart stood still. The first words scorched
her eyes.
"Eglington--Harry, dearest," it said, "you shall not go to sleep
to-night without a word from me. This will make you think of me
when . . . ."
Frozen, struck as by a mortal blow, Hylda looked at the signature. She
knew it--the cleverest, the most beautiful adventuress which the
aristocracy and society had produced. She trembled from head to foot, and
for a moment it seemed that she must fall. But she steadied herself and
walked firmly to Eglington's door. Turning the handle softly, she stepped
inside.
He did not hear her. He was leaning over a box of papers, and they
rustled loudly under his hand. He was humming to himself that song she
heard an hour ago in Il Trovatore, that song of passion and love and
tragedy. It sent a wave of fresh feeling over her. She could not go
on--could not face him, and say what she must say. She turned and passed
swiftly from the room, leaving the door open, and hurried down the
staircase. Eglington heard now, and wheeled round. He saw the open door,
listened to the rustle of her skirts, knew that she had been there. He
smiled, and said to himself:
"She came to me, as I said she would. I shall master her--the full
surrender, and then--life will be easy then."
Hylda hurried down the staircase to her room, saw Kate Heaver waiting,
beckoned to her, caught up her opera-cloak, and together they passed down
the staircase to the front door. Heaver rang a bell, a footman appeared,
and, at a word, called a cab. A minute later they were ready:
"Snowdon House," Hylda said; and they passed into the night.
CHAPTER XXXVI
"IS IT ALWAYS SO--IN LIFE?"
The Duchess and her brother, an ex-diplomatist, now deaf and patiently
amiable and garrulous, had met on the doorstep of Snowdon House, and
together they insisted on Lord Windlehurst coming in for a talk. The two
men had not met for a long time, and the retired official had been one of
Lord Windlehurst's own best appointments in other days. The Duchess had
the carriage wait in consequence.
The ex-official could hear little, but he had cultivated the habit of
talking constantly and well. There were some voices, however, which he
could hear more distinctly than others, and Lord Windlehurst's was one of
them--clear, well-modulated, and penetrating. Sipping brandy and water,
Lord Windlehurst gave his latest quip. They were all laughing heartily,
when the butler entered the room and said, "Lady Eglington is here, and
wishes to see your Grace."
As the butler left the room, the Duchess turned despairingly to
Windlehurst, who had risen, and was paler than the Duchess. "It has
come," she said, "oh, it has come! I can't face it."
"But it doesn't matter about you facing it," Lord Windlehurst rejoined.
"Go to her and help her, Betty. You know what to do--the one thing." He
took her hand and pressed it.
She dashed the tears from her eyes and drew herself together, while her
brother watched her benevolently.
He had not heard what was said. Betty had always been impulsive, he
thought to himself, and here was some one in trouble--they all came to
her, and kept her poor.
"Go to bed, Dick," the Duchess said to him, and hurried from the room.
She did not hesitate now. Windlehurst had put the matter in the right
way. Her pain was nothing, mere moral cowardice; but Hylda--!
She entered the other room as quickly as rheumatic limbs would permit.
Hylda stood waiting, erect, her eyes gazing blankly before her and rimmed
by dark circles, her face haggard and despairing.
Before the Duchess could reach her, she said in a hoarse whisper: "I have
left him--I have left him. I have come to you."
With a cry of pity the Duchess would have taken the stricken girl in her
arms, but Hylda held out a shaking hand with the letter in it which had
brought this new woe and this crisis foreseen by Lord Windlehurst.
"There--there it is. He goes from me to her--to that!" She thrust the
letter into the Duchess's fingers. "You knew--you knew! I saw the look
that passed between you and Windlehurst at the opera. I understand all
now. He left the House of Commons with her--and you knew, oh, you knew!
All the world knows--every one knew but me." She threw up her hands. "But
I've left him--I've left him, for ever."
Now the Duchess had her in her arms, and almost forcibly drew her to a
sofa. "Darling, my darling," she said, "you must not give way. It is not
so bad as you think. You must let me help to make you understand."
Hylda laughed hysterically. "Not so bad as I think! Read--read it," she
said, taking the letter from the Duchess's fingers and holding it before
her face. "I found it on the staircase. I could not help but read it."
She sat and clasped and unclasped her hands in utter misery. "Oh, the
shame of it, the bitter shame of it! Have I not been a good wife to him?
Have I not had reason to break my heart? But I waited, and I wanted to be
good and to do right. And to-night I was going to try once more--I felt
it in the opera. I was going to make one last effort for his sake. It was
for his sake I meant to make it, for I thought him only hard and selfish,
and that he had never loved; and if he only loved, I thought--"
She broke off, wringing her hands and staring into space, the ghost of
the beautiful figure that had left the Opera House with shining eyes.
The Duchess caught the cold hands. "Yes, yes, darling, I know. I
understand. So does Windlehurst. He loves you as much as I do. We know
there isn't much to be got out of life; but we always hoped you would get
more than anybody else."
Hylda shrank, then raised her head, and looked at the Duchess with an
infinite pathos. "Oh, is it always so--in life? Is no one true? Is every
one betrayed sometime? I would die--yes, a thousand times yes, I would
rather die than bear this. What do I care for life--it has cheated me! I
meant well, and I tried to do well, and I was true to him in word and
deed even when I suffered most, even when--"
The Duchess laid a cheek against the burning head. "I understand, my own
dear. I understand--altogether."
"But you cannot know," the broken girl replied; "but through everything I
was true; and I have been tempted too when my heart was aching so, when
the days were so empty, the nights so long, and my heart hurt--hurt me.
But now, it is over, everything is done. You will keep me here--ah, say
you will keep me here till everything can be settled, and I can go
away--far away--far--!"
She stopped with a gasping cry, and her eyes suddenly strained into the
distance, as though a vision of some mysterious thing hung before her.
The Duchess realised that that temptation, which has come to so many
disillusioned mortals, to end it all, to find quiet somehow, somewhere
out in the dark, was upon her. She became resourceful and persuasively
commanding.
"But no, my darling," she said, "you are going nowhere. Here in London is
your place now. And you must not stay here in my house. You must go back
to your home. Your place is there. For the present, at any rate, there
must be no scandal. Suspicion is nothing, talk is nothing, and the world
forgets--"
"Oh, I do not care for the world or its forgetting!" the wounded girl
replied. "What is the world to me! I wanted my own world, the world of my
four walls, quiet and happy, and free from scandal and shame. I wanted
love and peace there, and now . . . !"
"You must be guided by those who love you. You are too young to decide
what is best for yourself. You must let Windlehurst and me think for you;
and, oh, my darling, you cannot know how much I care for your best good!"
"I cannot, will not, bear the humiliation and the shame. This letter
here--you see!"
"It is the letter of a woman who has had more affaires than any man in
London. She is preternaturally clever, my dear--Windlehurst would tell
you so. The brilliant and unscrupulous, the beautiful and the bad, have a
great advantage in this world. Eglington was curious, that is all. It is
in the breed of the Eglingtons to go exploring, to experiment."
Hylda started. Words from the letter Sybil Lady Eglington had left behind
her rushed into her mind: "Experiment, subterfuge, secrecy. 'Reaping
where you had not sowed, and gathering where you had not strawed.' Always
experiment, experiment, experiment!"
"I have only been married three years," she moaned. "Yes, yes, my
darling; but much may happen after three days of married life, and love
may come after twenty years. The human heart is a strange thing."
"I was patient--I gave him every chance. He has been false and shameless.
I will not go on."
The Duchess pressed both hands hard, and made a last effort, looking into
the deep troubled eyes with her own grown almost beautiful with
feeling--the faded world-worn eyes.
"You will go back to-night-at once," she said firmly. "To-morrow you will
stay in bed till noon-at any rate, till I come. I promise you that you
shall not be treated with further indignity. Your friends will stand by
you, the world will be with you, if you do nothing rash, nothing that
forces it to babble and scold. But you must play its game, my dearest.
I'll swear that the worst has not happened. She drove him to his club,
and, after a man has had a triumph, a woman will not drive him to his
club if--my darling, you must trust me! If there must be the great smash,
let it be done in a way that will prevent you being smashed also in the
world's eyes. You can live, and you will live. Is there nothing for you
to do? Is there no one for whom you would do something, who would be
heart-broken if you--if you went mad now?"
Suddenly a great change passed over Hylda. "Is there no one for whom you
would do something?" Just as in the desert a question like this had
lifted a man out of a terrible and destroying apathy, so this searching
appeal roused in Hylda a memory and a pledge. "Is there no one for whom
you would do something?" Was life, then, all over? Was her own great
grief all? Was her bitter shame the end?