Footsteps of Fate Part 13

"I cannot leave the house yet. The old man will be going to bed in an hour or so, and then I can join you in the street."

"Then I will wait for you; opposite, by the Park railings. You will be sure to come? I will make it worth your while." The footman laughed, a loud, brazen laugh, which rang through the hall, filling Bertie with alarm.

"Then you are a gentleman now? And pretty flush, eh?"

"Yes," said Van Maeren hoa.r.s.ely. "Then you will come?"

"Yes, yes. In an hour or more, fully an hour. Wait for me. But if I am to do anything for you, you will have to fork out, you know; and fork out handsomely too!"

"All right, all right," said Bertie. "But I hope you will not fail me.

I count on your coming, mind."

The door was ruthlessly shut. He walked up and down for a very long time in the cold and damp. The chill pierced to his very marrow, while the twinkling gas lamps stared at him through the grey mist like watery eyes. He waited, pacing the pavement for an hour--an hour and a half--perishing of fatigue and cold, like a beggar without a shelter.

Still he waited, shivering as he walked, his hands in his pockets, his eyes dull with self-contempt, staring out of his white face at the dark square of the door, which still remained shut.

XV.

When, after a few days of anxious expectancy, Frank still had no answer from Eva, he wrote a second time; and although the first bloom of his revived hopes was already dying, he started whenever the bell rang, and would go to the letter-box in the front door; his thoughts were constantly busy with picturing the messenger who was walking up the road with his happiness--wrapped up in an envelope. And he would imagine what Eva's answer might be: just a few lines--somewhat cool, perhaps--in her large bold English hand, on the scented, ivory-laid paper she always used, with her initials crossed in pink and silver in one corner.

How long she took to write that answer! Was she angry? Or could she not make up her mind how to word her forgiveness; was she elaborating her letter as he had elaborated his? And the days went by while he waited for that note. When he was at home, he pictured the postman coming nearer and nearer, now only four--three--two doors away; now he would ring--and he listened; but the bell did not sound, or, if it did, it was not by reason of the letter. When he was out, he would be electrified by the thought that the letter must be lying at home and he hurried back to White-Rose Cottage, looked in the letter-box, and then in the sitting room. But he never found it, and the intolerable emptiness of the place where he looked for it made him swear and stamp with rage.

Twice had he written--two letters--and yet she gave no sign! And he could think of no cause in his ardent expectancy which made him regard it as the most natural thing that she should reply at once. Still he lived on this waiting. The reply must come; it could not be otherwise.

His brain held no other thought than: It is coming--it will come to day.

All life was void and flat, but it could be filled by just one letter.

Day followed day, and there was no change.

"I have had no answer yet from Eva," he said, in a subdued tone to Bertie, as feeling himself humiliated, disgraced by her determined silence, mocked at in his illusory hopes.

"Not yet?" said Bertie; and a mist of melancholy glistened in his black velvety eyes. A weight indeed lay on his mind; he sighed deeply and frequently. He really was unhappy. What he had done was so utterly base.

But it was all Frank's fault. Why, now that he was parted from Eva, could he not forget his pa.s.sion; why could he not find sufficient comfort in the sweets of friendship? How delightful it might have been to live on together, a happy pair of friends, under the calm blue sky of brotherhood, in the golden bliss of perfect sympathy, with no woman to disturb it. Thus he romanced, consciously working up his friendly, compa.s.sionate feeling towards Frank to a sort of frenzy, in the hope of comforting himself a little, of forgetting his foul deed, of convincing himself that he was magnanimous; nay, that in spite of that little deception, he now more than ever, since he was sunk in the mire really longed for a high ideal.--It was all Frank's fault. And yet, was Frank to blame because he could not forget Eva? No, no. That was all Fatality.

No one was to blame for that. That was the act of Fate.

"Yes, that is certain!" thought he. "But why have we brains to think with, and why do we feel pain, if we can do nothing to help ourselves?

Why are we not plants or stones? Why should this vast, useless universe exist at all? And why, why did nothingness cease to be? How peaceful, how delightfully peaceful, that would be!"

He stood, as it were, before the sealed portals of the great Enigma, suddenly amazed and horrified at himself. Good G.o.d! How had he come to this; how was it that nowadays he was always thinking of such things?

Had he ever had such notions in America, when he was toiling and tramping in his daily slavery? Had he not then regarded himself as a gross materialist, caring for nothing but plenty of good food and unbroken peace? And now, when he had long experience of such material comforts, now he felt as though his nerves had been spun finer and finer to mere silken threads, thrilling and quivering under one emotion after another, vibrating like the invisible aerial pulsations which are irresistibly transmitted, with a musical murmur, along the telephone wires overhead. How had he come by all this philosophy, the blossom of his idle hours? And in his bewilderment he tried to recall his youth, and remember whether he had then had this predisposition to thought, whether he had then had any books which had impressed him deeply; tried to picture his parents, and whether this might be hereditary. And he--he--had handed round coffee-cups in New York! Was he not after all happier in those days and freer from care? Or was it only that "distance lent enchantment to the view," the distance of so few years?

XVI.

When Frank, after a few days of death-in-life patience, had still received no answer, he wrote to Sir Archibald. Still the same silence.

He poured out his grief to Bertie in bitter complaint, no longer humble, but full of wrath like an enraged animal, and yet half woeful at the ill-feeling shown by Eva and her father. Was it not enough that he had three times craved forgiveness? Had Eva cared for him in fact so little, that when he grovelled at her feet she could find no word even to tell him that all was at an end?

"I cannot now remember all I said," he told Bertie, as he paced the room with long, equal, and determined steps. "But I must have been hard upon her. G.o.d help me, I can never govern my speech! And I seized her, I recollect, so, by the arms. And then I came away. I was too furious. I ought not to have done it; but I cannot keep cool, I cannot."

"Frank I wish you could get over it," said Bertie soothingly, from the depths of his armchair. "There is nothing now to be done. It is very sad that it should have happened so, but you must throw it off."

"Throw it off! Were you ever in love with a woman?"

"Certainly."

"Then you must know something of it.--But you could never love any one much; it is not in your nature. You love yourself too well."

"That may be; but at any rate I love you, and I cannot bear to see you thus, Frank. Get over it! They seem to have taken the whole business so ill that there is nothing more to be done. I wish you would only see that, and submit to the inevitable. Try to live for something else. Can there be no other woman in the world for you? Perhaps there is another.

A man does not perish so for love. You are not a girl--girls do so."

He gazed at Frank with such a magnetic light in his eyes that Westhove fancied there was a great truth in his words; and Bertie's last reproof reminded him of his vacillation, his miserable weakness, which lay beneath his manly and powerful exterior like an insecure foundation.

Still he clung to his pa.s.sionate longings, his vehement craving for the happiness he had lost.

"You cannot possibly judge of the matter," he retorted impatiently, trying to escape from Van Maeren's eye. "You never _did_ love a woman, though you may say so. Why should not everything come right again? What has happened after all? What have I done? I fell into a violent, vulgar rage. What then? Is that so unpardonable in the person you love?? But perhaps--I say, can I have addressed the letters wrongly?"

During a few seconds there was a weight of silence in the room, an atmosphere of lead. Then Van Maeren said--and his voice had a tender, coaxing tone:

"If you had written but once, I might think it possible; but three letters, to the same house--it is scarcely possible."

"I will go myself and call," said Westhove. "Yes, yes, I will go myself."

"What are you saying?" asked Bertie dreamily. He was still under the influence of that heavy moral atmosphere; he had not quite understood, not grasped the idea. "What was it you said?" he repeated.

"I shall go myself and call at the house," Frank reiterated.

"At what house? Where?"

"Why, at the Rhodes'--on Eva. Are you daft?"

But Bertie rose to his feet, and his eyes glittered in his pale face like black diamonds with a hundred facets.

"What to do there?" he said with a convulsive effort in his throat to keep his voice calm.

"To talk to her and set matters straight; I cannot bear it. It has gone on too long."

"You are a fool!" said Van Maeren shortly.

"Why am I a fool?"

"Why are you a fool? You have not a grain of self-respect. Do you really think of going there?"

"Yes, of course."

"I consider it absurd," said Bertie.