The Duchess of Wrexe Part 30

As he spoke Rachel rose, beautifully, wonderfully, before him. There, as she had been on that first day when she had had tea there, bending forward, listening, her dark wondering eyes on his face.

Lizzie at the sound of the appeal in his voice had felt her heart expand, beat, so that her body seemed to hold, suddenly, some great possession that hurt her by its force and urgency.

But she answered almost sharply:

"Nonsense, Mr. Breton. Excuse me, but I've no patience with that kind of thing. People are meant to stand alone, not to go leaning about for other people's support. You're cursed with too much imagination, Mr.

Breton, and you remember too clearly everything that's happened before.

Begin now, as though you were born yesterday, and startle the family by your energy----"

"Now you're laughing at me," he said hotly. "I dare say I deserve it, but I don't feel as though I could stand--very much of it from anyone to-day----"

Then he was astonished by the sudden softness of her voice. "No, no, please," she said; "I understand so well. But indeed you have got friends who believe in you. Dr. Christopher, myself, if you'll count me, and lots more. You'll win everyone in time if you're not impatient and don't despair. Don't think of your grandmother too much. The mere fact of your not seeing her makes you imagine her as something portentous and dreadful, and she weighs you down, but she isn't really anything at all.

She can't stop one's energies if one's determined to let them go.

Please, please don't think I'm laughing. I only want to help----"

"I know you do," he answered warmly, "I owe you more than I can say. All these last weeks you and Christopher have been the two people who've held the world together for me. But there's more than you know, Miss Rand. There's----"

He bent towards her. She knew that the confidence was at last to be hers. It needed her strongest control to prevent the trembling of her hands. His eyes were alight, his whole body eloquent. At the thought of what he might be about to tell her the room turned before her.

Voices in the little hall. Then the door opened and in came Mrs. Rand and Daisy. They had been to the play--_Such_ nonsense. One of these new, serious plays with long, long conversations--Mrs. Rand wanted tea. Daisy wanted admiration.

Between Lizzie and Breton the precious cup had fallen, smashed to the tiniest atoms.

Meanwhile aimless conversation was more than he, in his present mood, could endure.

He made some excuse and, scarcely knowing what he did, found his hat and coat and went out into the square.

III

There had come to him one of those agonies of loneliness that no argument, no reasoning can destroy.

The absence of any letter from Rachel seemed to show that she had abandoned him. In all this vast thickly peopled world there was now no one to whom his presence or absence, his fortunes or disasters mattered.

The snowstorm gathered him into its folds; the snow fell against his mouth, his eyes, and before him, behind him, around him there was a world deserted of man, houses blind and without life.

The snow might fall now to the end of time. It would creep up and up, falling from the heavens, rising from the earth, swallowing all creation--the end of the world.

He pressed into the park and there under the trees stretching like gallows against the throttling sky temptation to give it all up, to go under and have done with it all, leapt, hot and fierce, upon him. Mrs.

Pont and the others were waiting for him. They would be good to him. The Upper World would not hear nor see nor think of his disasters, and slowly, with the others, life would recede, he would crumble and decay and cease to care, and death would come soon enough.

Then the wind smote his face and tore at his coat: the snow died away, beyond the black bare trees a very faint yellow bar threaded the thick grey--promise that the storm was at an end.

Suddenly with the cessation of the storm the long field of white seemed good and restful, and beyond the park the houses showed light in their windows.

The yellow spread through the sky, and stars, very slowly, came and the wind died away.

Courage filled him. Rachel might never come or write or care, but he would make the thought of her the one true thing in his heart, and with that he would do battle so long as he could.

Christopher and Miss Rand ... he thought of them as he trudged his way home--and when he saw the white silence of Saxton Square and the golden sky breaking above its peace and quiet he thought that, for a time longer, he would keep his place and hold his own.

CHAPTER II

A LITTLE HOUSE

"Each in the crypt would cry, 'But one freezes here! and why?

'When a heart, as chill, 'At my own would thrill Back to life, and its fires out-fly?

'Heart, shall we live or die?

The rest ... settle by-and-by!'"

ROBERT BROWNING.

I

Rachel at Seddon Court watched, from her window, that first fallen snow.

Seddon Court is about three miles from the town of Lewes and lies, tucked and cornered, under the very brow of the Downs. It is a grey little house, old and stalwart, with a courtyard and two towers. The towers are Norman; the rest of the house is Tudor.

Beyond the actual building there are gardens that run to the very foot of the Downs, with only a patch and an old stone wall intervening. Above the house, day and night, year after year, the Downs are bending; everything, beneath their steady solemn gaze, is small and restless; as the colours are flung by the sun across their green sprawling limbs the house, at their feet, catches their reflected smile and, when the sun is gone and the winds blow, cowers beneath their frown; everything in that house is conscious of their presence.

Rachel had been at Seddon Court for a month and now, at the window of her writing-room, looking across the garden, up into their dark shadows, she wondered at their indifference and monotony. Anyone who had known her before her marriage would be struck instantly, on seeing her now, by a change in her.

Her whole att.i.tude to the world, during her first season in London, had been an att.i.tude of wonder, of expectation, of the uncertainty that comes from expectation.

With that expectation were also alarm, distrust, and it was only when some sudden incident or person called happiness into her face that that distrust vanished.

Now she was older, that hesitation and awkwardness were gone, but with their departure had vanished, too, much of her honesty. Her dark eyes were as sincere as they had ever been, but to anyone who had known her before her att.i.tude now was a.s.sumed. Nothing might catch her unprepared, but what experiences were they that had taught her the need for armour?

Sitting in her room looking on to a lawn that would soon be white and to Downs obscured already by the thick tumbling snow, she knew that she was unhappy, disappointed, even alarmed. Suddenly to-day the uneasiness that had been gathering before her throughout the last weeks a.s.sumed, on this afternoon, the definite tangibility of a challenge.

"What's the matter--with me, with everything?... What's happened?"

Her room, dark green and white, had no pictures, but a long low book-case with grave handsome books, an edition of someone in red with white paper labels and another edition of someone else in dark blue and another in gold and brown, an old French gilt mirror, square, with a reflection of the garden and the foot of the Downs in it, an old Queen Anne rosewood writing-table, some Queen Anne chairs, a gate-legged table--a very cool, quiet room.

At her feet with his head resting on her shoe there lay a dog. This dog about a fortnight ago she had found in a field near the house with a kettle tied on to his tail, and his body a confused catastrophe of mud and blood.

She had carried him home; it had needed some courage to introduce him into the household, for Roddy possessed many dogs all of the finest breeds, and this was a mongrel who defied description. He was very short and s.h.a.ggy and stumpy. He was much too large for a Yorkshire terrier and yet that was undoubtedly his derivation. There was something of a sheep-dog in him and something of a Skye; his hair fell all over his face and, when you could see them, his eyes were brown. His nose was like a wet blackberry and his ears were long and full of emotion; when he ran his short tail, on which the hairs were arranged like branches on a Christmas tree, stuck up into the air and he resembled a rabbit.

In the confusion of the moment Rachel had called him Jacob, because she thought that Jacob was, in the Bible, the "hairy one".... After all, you _could_ not call a dog Esau.

Yes, to retain him had needed courage. Thinking of Roddy's att.i.tude to the dog brought so many other attendant thoughts in its train. Roddy in his devotion to animals (and oh! he _was_ devoted), had no room for those that were not of the aristocracy.

Concerning dogs who were mongrels he was kind but thought them much better dead. Unkind he would never be, but the way in which he ignored Jacob was worse than any unkindness.

Jacob, sensitive perhaps from early suffering, knew this and avoided Roddy, ran out of the room when he came into it, showed in every way that he must not expect to rank with the other dogs.