Amabel Channice Part 7

Lady Elliston, at difficult moments, had always helped her, and this was one of the most difficult that she had ever known. Amabel forgot her tears, forgot her shame, in her intense desire that Augustine should guess nothing.

"My very dear Amabel," said Lady Elliston. She swept forward and took both Lady Channice's hands, holding them firmly, looking at her intently, intently smiling, as if, with her own mastery of the situation, to give her old friend strength. "My dear, dear Amabel," she repeated: "How good it is to see you again.--And how lovely you are."

She was silken, she was scarfed, she was soft and steady; as in the past, sweetness and strength breathed from her. She was competent to deal with most calamitous situations and to make them bearable, to make them even graceful. She could do what she would with situations: Amabel felt that of her now as she had felt it years ago.

Her eyes continued to gaze for a long moment into Amabel's eyes before, as softly and as steadily, they pa.s.sed to Sir Hugh who was again standing before the fire behind his wife. "How do you do," she then said with a little nod.

"How d'ye do," Sir Hugh replied. His voice was neither soft nor steady; the sharpness, the irritation was in it. "I didn't know you were down here," he said.

Over Amabel's shoulder, while she still held Amabel's hands, Lady Elliston looked at him, all sweetness. "Yes: I arrived this morning. I am staying with the Greys."

"The Greys? How in the d.i.c.kens did you run across them?" Sir Hugh asked with a slight laugh.

"I met them at Jack's cousin's--the nice old bishop, you know. They are tiresome people; but kind. And there is a Grey _fils_--the oldest--whom Peggy took rather a fancy to last winter,--they were hunting together in Yorkshire;--and I wanted to look at him--and at the place!--"--Lady Elliston's smile was all candour. "They are very solid; it's not a bad place. If the young people are really serious Jack and I might consider it; with three girls still to marry, one must be very wise and reasonable. But, of course, I came really to see you, Amabel."

She had released Amabel's hands at last with a final soft pressure, and, as Amabel took her accustomed chair near the table, she sat down near her and loosened her cloak and unwound her scarf, and threw back her laces.

"And I've been making friends with your boy," she went on, looking up at Augustine:--"he's been walking me about the garden, saying that you mustn't be disturbed. Why haven't I been able to make friends before?

Why hasn't he been to see me in London?"

"I'll bring him someday," said Sir Hugh. "He is only just grown up, you see."

"I see: do bring him soon. He is charming," said Lady Elliston, smiling at Augustine.

Amabel remembered her pretty, a.s.sured manner of saying any pleasantness--or unpleasantness for that matter--that she chose to say; but it struck her, from this remark, that the gift had grown a little mechanical. Augustine received it without embarra.s.sment. Augustine already seemed to know that this smiling guest was in the habit of saying that young men were charming before their faces when she wanted to be pleasant to them. Amabel seemed to see her son from across the wide chasm that had opened between them; but, looking at his figure, suddenly grown strange, she felt that Augustine's manners were 'nice.'

The fact of their niceness, of his competence--really it matched Lady Elliston's--made him the more mature; and this moment of motherly appreciation led her back to the stony wilderness where her son judged her, with a man's, not a boy's judgment. There was no uncertainty in Augustine; his theories might be young; his character was formed; his judgments would not change. She forced herself not to think; but to look and listen.

Lady Elliston continued to talk: indeed it was she and Augustine who did most of the talking. Sir Hugh only interjected a remark now and then from his place before the fire. Amabel was able to feel a further change in him; he was displeased today, and displeased in particular, now, with Lady Elliston. She thought that she could understand the vexation for him of this irruption of his real life into the sad little corner of kindness and duty that Charlock House and its occupants must represent to him. He had seldom spoken to her about Lady Elliston; he had seldom spoken to her about any of the life that she had abandoned in abandoning him: but she knew that Lord and Lady Elliston were near friends still, and with this knowledge she could imagine how on edge her husband must be when to the near friend of the real life he could allow an even sharper note to alter all his voice. Amabel heard it sadly, with a sense of confused values: nothing today was as she had expected it to be: and if she heard she was sure that Lady Elliston must hear it too, and perhaps the symptom of Lady Elliston's displeasure was that she talked rather pointedly to Augustine and talked hardly at all to Sir Hugh: her eyes, in speaking, pa.s.sed sometimes over his figure, rested sometimes, with a bland courtesy, on his face when he spoke; but Augustine was their object: on him they dwelt and smiled.

The years had wrought few changes in Lady Elliston. Silken, soft, smiling, these were, still, as in the past, the words that described her. She had triumphantly kept her lovely figure: the bright brown hair, too, had been kept, but at some little sacrifice of sincerity: Lady Elliston must be nearly fifty and her shining locks showed no sign of fading. Perhaps, in the perfection of her appearance and manner, there was a hint of some sacrifice everywhere. How much she has kept, was the first thought; but the second came:--How much she has given up. Yes; there was the only real change: Amabel, gazing at her, somewhat as a nun gazes from behind convent gratings at some bright denizen of the outer world, felt it more and more. She was sweet, but was she not too skilful? She was strong, but was not her strength unscrupulous? As she listened to her, Amabel remembered old wonders, old glimpses of motives that stole forth reconnoitring and then retreated at the hint of rebuff, graceful and unconfused.

There were motives now, behind that smile, that softness; motives behind the flattery of Augustine, the blandness towards Sir Hugh, the visit to herself. Some of the motives were, perhaps, all kindness: Lady Elliston had always been kind; she had always been a binder of wounds, a dispenser of punctual sunlight; she was one of the world's powerfully benignant great ladies; committees cl.u.s.tered round her; her words of a.s.sured wisdom sustained and guided ecclesiastical and political organisations; one must be benignant, in an altruistic modern world, if one wanted to rule. It was not a cynical nun who gazed; Lady Elliston was kind and Lady Elliston loved power; simply, without a sense of blame, Amabel drew her conclusions.

There were now lapses in Lady Elliston's fluency. Her eyes rested contemplatively on Amabel; it was evident that she wanted to see Amabel alone. This motive was so natural a one that, although Sir Hugh seemed determined, at the risk of losing his train, to stay till the last minute, he, too, felt, at last, its pressure.

His wife saw him go with a sense of closing mists. Augustine, now more considerate, followed him. She was left facing her guest.

Only Lady Elliston could have kept the moment from being openly painful and even Lady Elliston could not pretend to find it an easy one; but she did not err on the side of too much tact. It was so sweetly, so gravely that her eyes rested for a long moment of silence on her old friend, so quietly that they turned away from her rising flush, that Amabel felt old grat.i.tudes mingling with old distrusts.

"What a sad room this is," said Lady Elliston, looking about it. "Is it just as you found it, Amabel?"

"Yes, almost. I have taken away some things."

"I wish you would take them all away and put in new ones. It might be made into a very nice room; the panelling is good. What it needs is Jacobean furniture, fine old hangings, and some bits of gla.s.s and porcelain here and there."

"I suppose so." Amabel's eyes followed Lady Elliston's. "I never thought of changing anything."

Lady Elliston's eyes turned on hers again. "No: I suppose not," she said.

She seemed to find further meanings in the speech and took it up again with: "I suppose not. It's strange that we should never have met in all these years, isn't it."

"Is it strange?"

"I've often felt it so: if you haven't, that is just part of your acceptance. You have accepted everything. It has often made me indignant to think of it."

Amabel sat in her high-backed chair near the table. Her hands were tightly clasped together in her lap and her face, with the light from the windows falling upon it, was very pale. But she knew that she was calm; that she could meet Lady Elliston's kindness with an answering kindness; that she was ready, even, to hear Lady Elliston's questions.

This, however, was not a question, and she hesitated for a moment before saying: "I don't understand you."

"How well I remember that voice," Lady Elliston smiled a little sadly: "It's the girl's voice of twenty years ago--holding me away. Can't we be frank together, now, Amabel, when we are both middle-aged women?--at least I am middle-aged.--How it has kept you young, this strange life you've led."

"But, really, I do not understand," Amabel murmured, confused; "I didn't understand you then, sometimes."

"Then I may be frank?"

"Yes; be frank, of course."

"It is only that indignation that I want to express," said Lady Elliston, tentative no longer and firmly advancing. "Why are you here, in this dismal room, this dismal house? Why have you let yourself be cloistered like this? Why haven't you come out and claimed things?"

Amabel's grey eyes, even in their serenity always a little wild, widened with astonishment. "Claimed?" she repeated. "What do you mean? What could I have claimed? I have been given everything."

"My dear Amabel, you speak as if you had deserved this imprisonment."

There was another and a longer silence in which Amabel seemed slowly to find meanings incredible to her before. And her reception of them was expressed in the changed, the hardened voice with which she said: "You know everything. I've always been sure you knew. How can you say such things to me?"

"Do not be angry with me, dear Amabel. I do not mean to offend."

"You spoke as though you were sorry for me, as though I had been injured.--It touches him."

"But," Lady Elliston had flushed very slightly, "it does touch him. I blame Hugh for this. He ought not to have allowed it. He ought not to have accepted such misplaced penitence. You were a mere child, and Hugh neglected you shamefully."

"I was not a mere child," said Amabel. "I was a sinful woman."

Lady Elliston sat still, as if arrested and spell-bound by the unexpected words. She seemed to find no answer. And as the silence grew long, Amabel went on, slowly, with difficulty, yet determinedly opposing and exposing the folly of the implied accusation. "You don't seem to remember the facts. I betrayed my husband. He might have cast me off. He might have disgraced me and my child. And he lifted me up; he sheltered me; he gave his name to the child. He has given me everything I have.

You see--you must not speak of him like that to me."

Lady Elliston had gathered herself together though still, it was evident, bewildered. "I don't mean to blame Hugh so much. It was your fault, too, I suppose. You asked for the cloister, I know."

"No; I didn't ask for it. I asked to be allowed to go away and hide myself. The cloister, too, was a gift,--like my name, my undishonoured child."

"Dear, dear Amabel," said Lady Elliston, gazing at her, "how beautiful of you to be able to feel like that."

"It isn't I who am beautiful"; Amabel's lips trembled a little now and her eyes filled suddenly with tears. Tears and trembling seemed to bring hardness rather than softening to her face; they were like a chill breeze, like an icy veil, and the face, with its sorrow, was like a winter's landscape.

"He is so beautiful that he would never let anyone know or understand what I owe him: he would never know it himself: there is something simple and innocent about such men: they do beautiful things unconsciously. You know him well: you are far nearer him than I am: but you can't know what the beauty is, for you have never been helpless and disgraced and desperate nor needed anyone to lift you up. No one can know as I do the angel in my husband."

Lady Elliston sat silent. She received Amabel's statements steadily yet with a little wincing, as though they had been bullets whistling past her head; they would not pierce, if one did not move; yet an involuntary compression of the lips and flutter of the eyelids revealed a rather rigid self-mastery. Only after the silence had grown long did she slightly stir, move her hand, turn her head with a deep, careful breath, and then say, almost timidly; "Then, he has lifted you up, Amabel?--You are happy, really happy, in your strange life?"

Amabel looked down. The force of her vindicating ardour had pa.s.sed from her. With the question the hunted, haunted present flooded in. Happy?

Yesterday she might have answered "yes," so far away had the past seemed, so forgotten the fear in which she had learned to breathe. Today the past was with her and the fear pressed heavily upon her heart. She answered in a sombre voice: "With my past what woman could be happy. It blights everything."