Innocent : her fancy and his fact Part 46

"Know him? He was my best friend!"

She shrugged her shoulders, and a slight weary smile parted her lips.

"Well, you never told me,--I have never heard you mention his name. But the world is a small place!--and when I was a girl he was beginning to be known by a good many people. Anyhow, he threw up everything in the way of his art and work, and ran away with me. I went quite willingly--I took a maid whom we bribed,--we pretended we were married, and we had a charming time together--a time of real romance, till he began to get tired and want change--all men are like that! Then he became a bore with a bad temper. He certainly behaved very well when he knew the child was coming, and offered to marry me in real earnest--but I refused."

"You refused!" Lord Blythe echoed the words in a kind of stupefied wonderment.

"Of course I did. He was quite poor--and I should have been miserable running about the world with a man who depended on art for a living.

Besides he was ceasing to be a lover--and as a husband he would have been insupportable. We managed everything very well--my own people were all in India--and my mother's friend, if she guessed my affair, said nothing about it,--wisely enough for her own sake!--so that when my time came I was able to go away on an easy pretext and get it all over secretly. Pierce came and stayed in a hotel close at hand--he was rather in a fright lest I should die!--it would have been such an awkward business for him!--however, all went well, and when I had quite recovered he took the child away from me, and left it at an old farmhouse he had once made a drawing of, saying he would call back for it--as if it were a parcel!" She laughed lightly. "He wrote and told me what he had done and gave me the address of the farm--then he went abroad, and I never heard of him again--"

"He died," interposed Lord Blythe, slowly--"He died--alone and very poor--"

"So I was told," she rejoined, indifferently--"Oh yes! I see you look at me as if you thought I had no heart! Perhaps I have not,--I used to have something like one,--your friend Armitage killed it in me. Anyhow, I knew the child had been adopted by the farm people as their own, and I took no further trouble. My parents came home from India to inherit an unexpected fortune, and they took me about with them a great deal--they were never told of my romantic escapade!--then I met you--and you married me."

A sigh broke from him, but he said nothing.

"You are sorry you did, I suppose!" she went on in a quick, reckless way--"Anyhow, I tried to do my duty. When I heard by chance that the old farmer who had taken care of the child was dead, I made up my mind to go and see what she was like. I found her, and offered to adopt her--but she wouldn't hear of it--so I let her be."

Lord Blythe moved a little from his statuesque att.i.tude of attention.

"You told her you were her mother?"

"I did."

"And offered to 'adopt' your own child?" She gave an airy gesture.

"It was the only thing to do! One cannot make a social scandal."

"And she refused?"

"She refused."

"I admire her for it," said Lord Blythe, calmly.

She shot an angry glance at him. He went on in cold, deliberate accents.

"You were unprepared for the strange compensation you have received?--the sudden fame of your deserted daughter?"

Her hands clasped and unclasped themselves nervously.

"I knew nothing of it! Armitage is not an uncommon name, and I did not connect it with her. She has no right to wear it."

"If her father were alive he would be proud that she wears it!--moreover he would give her the right to wear it, and would make it legal," said Lord Blythe sternly--"Out of old memory I can say that for him! You recognised each other at once, I suppose, when I presented her to you at the d.u.c.h.ess's reception?"

"Of course we did!" retorted his wife--"You yourself saw that I was rather taken aback,--it was difficult to conceal our mutual astonishment--"

"It must have been!" and a thin ironic smile hovered on his lips--"And you carried it off well! But--the poor child!--what an ordeal for her!

You can hardly have felt it so keenly, being seasoned to hypocrisy for so many years!" Her eyes flashed up at him indignantly. He raised his hand with a warning gesture.

"Permit me to speak, Maude! You can scarcely wonder that I am--well!--a little shaken and bewildered by the confession you have made,--the secret you have--after years of marriage--suddenly divulged. You suggested--at the beginning of this interview--that perhaps there was nothing in the social life of our day that would very much shock or surprise me--and I answered you that I was not easily surprised--but--I was thinking of others.--it did not occur to me that--that my own wife--" he paused, steadying his voice,--then continued--"that my own wife's honour was involved in the matter--" he paused again. "Sentiment is of course out of place--n.o.body is supposed to feel anything nowadays--or to suffer--or to break one's heart, as the phrase goes,--that would be considered abnormal, or bad form,--but I had the idea--a foolish one, no doubt!--that though you may not have married me for love on your own part, you did so because you recognised the love,--the truth--the admiration and respect--on mine. I was at any rate happy in believing you did!--I never dreamed you married me for the sake of convenience!--to kill the memory of a scandal, and establish a safe position--"

She moved restlessly and gathered her ermine cloak about her as though to rise and go.

"One moment!" he went on--"After what you have told me I hope you see clearly that it is impossible we can live together under the same roof again. If YOU could endure it, _I_ could not!"

She sprang up, pale and excited.

"What? You mean to make trouble? I, who have kept my own counsel all these years, am to be disgraced because I have at last confided in you?

You will scandalise society--you will separate from me--"

She stopped, half choked by a rising paroxysm of rage.

He looked at her as he might have looked at some small angry animal.

"I shall make no trouble," he answered, quietly--"and I shall not scandalise society. But I cannot live with you. I will go away at once on some convenient excuse--abroad--anywhere--and you can say whatever you please of my prolonged absence. If I could be of any use or protection to the girl I saw last night--the daughter of my friend Pierce Armitage--I would stay, but circ.u.mstances render any such service from me impossible. Besides, she needs no one to a.s.sist her--she has made a position for herself--a position more enviable than yours or mine. You have that to think about by way of--consolation?--or reproach?"

She stood drawn up to her full height, looking at him.

"You cannot forgive me, then?" she said.

He shuddered.

"Forgive you! Is there a man who could forgive twenty years of deliberate deception from the wife he thought the soul of honour?

Maude, Maude! We live in lax times truly, when men and women laugh at principle and good faith, and deal with each other less honestly than the beasts of the field,--but for me there is a limit!--a limit you have pa.s.sed! I think I could pardon your wrong to me more readily than I can pardon your callous desertion of the child you brought into the world--your lack of womanliness--motherliness!--your deliberate refusal to give Pierce Armitage the chance of righting the wrong he had committed in a headstrong, heart-strong rush of thoughtless pa.s.sion!--he WOULD have righted it, I know, and been a loyal husband to you, and a good father to his child. For whatever his faults were he was neither callous nor brutal. You prevented him from doing this,--you were tired of him--your so-called 'love' for him was a mere selfish caprice of the moment--and you preferred deceit and a rich marriage to the simple duty of a woman! Well!--you may find excuses for yourself,--I cannot find them for you! I could not remain by your side as a husband and run the risk of coming constantly in contact, as we did last night, with that innocent girl, placed as she is, in a situation of so much difficulty, by the sins of her parents--her mother, my wife!--her father, my dead friend! The position is, and would be untenable!"

Still she stood, looking at him.

"Have you done?" she asked.

He met her fixed gaze, coldly.

"I have. I have said all I wish to say. So far as I am concerned the incident is closed. I will only bid you good-night--and farewell!"

"Good-night--and farewell!" she repeated, with a mocking drawl,--then she suddenly burst into a fit of shrill laughter. "Oh dear, oh dear!"

she cried, between little screams of hysterical mirth--"You are so very funny, you know! Like--what's-his-name?--Marius in the ruins of Carthage!--or one of those antique cla.s.sical bores with their household G.o.ds broken around them! You--you ought to have lived in their days!--you are so terribly behind the times!" She laughed recklessly again. "We don't do the Marius and Carthage business now--life's too full and too short! Really, Richard, I'm afraid you're getting very old!--poor dear!--past sixty I know!--and you're quite prehistoric in some of your fancies!--'Good-night!'--er--'and farewell!' Sounds so stagey, doesn't it!" She wiped the spasmodic tears of mirth from her eyes, and still shaking with laughter gathered up her rich ermine wrap on one white, jewelled arm. "Womanliness--motherliness!--good Lord, deliver us!--I never thought you likely to preach at me--if I had I wouldn't have told you anything! I took you for a sensible man of the world--but you are only a stupid old-fashioned thing after all!

Good-night!--and farewell!"

She performed the taunting travesty of an elaborate Court curtsey and pa.s.sed him--a handsome, gleaming vision of satins, laces and glittering jewels--and opening the door with some noise and emphasis, she turned her head gracefully over her shoulder. Unkind laughter still lit up her face and hard, brilliant eyes.

"Good-night!--farewell!" she said again, and was gone.

For a moment he stood inert where she left him--then sinking into a chair he covered his face with his hands. So he remained for some time--silently wrestling with himself and his own emotions. He had to realise that at an age when he might naturally have looked for a tranquil home life--a life tended and soothed into its natural decline by the care and devotion of the wife he had undemonstratively but most tenderly loved, he was suddenly cast adrift like the hulk of an old battleship broken from its moorings, with nothing but solitude and darkness closing in upon his latter days. Then he thought of the girl,--his wife's child--the child too of his college chum and dearest friend,--he saw, impressed like a picture on the cells of his brain, her fair young face, pathetic eyes and sweet intelligence of expression,--he remembered how modestly she wore her sudden fame, as a child might wear a wild flower,--and, placed by her parentage in a difficulty for which she was not responsible, she must have suffered considerable pain and sorrow.

"I will go and see her to-morrow," he said to himself--"It will be better for her to know that I have heard all her sad little history--then--if she ever wants a friend she can come to me without fear. Ah!--if only she were MY daughter!"

He sighed,--his handsome old head drooped,--he had longed for children and the boon had been denied.

"If she were my daughter," he repeated, slowly--"I should be a proud man instead of a sorrowful one!"