The Duchess of Wrexe Part 35

"No," said Roddy slowly, "no, we haven't and it's simply beastly. I'm a perfect swine. When I married you the one thing I meant to do was to be just as kind to you as I jolly well could be, and give you a perfectly rippin' time, and here I am hurtin' you like anything----"

She moved impatiently. "Never mind that, Roddy. You _have_ been very kind and I'm sure you'd have given anything for me not to have come into the garden just when I did, so as to have avoided hurting me. But what I do know is that you're not straight with me. You know I told you before we were married that the one thing that mattered was Truth--truth to oneself and truth to everyone else--Well, we haven't been straight with one another for a single instant. You've done any number of things that would be wrong to you if I knew about them, but wouldn't be in the least wrong if I didn't."

"Of course," said Roddy, "no feller tells his wife everything--that would be absurd. I think things are worse if people know about 'em whom it hurts to know--_much_ worse."

She was suddenly confronted now with a Roddy whose a.s.surance and confidence in his own personality startled her. Because he had never been gifted with words and liked to be in the company of dogs and horses she had fancied that he had no ideas about anything.

Rachel was a great deal younger than she knew and a great deal more contemptuous of the other half world than her experience of it justified. Strangely enough this confidence on Roddy's part angered her more than anything else could have done.

"The fact is that since our marriage we've never got to know each other in the least. We talk and go to places together and you give me things and I give you things--and that's all. I don't know you and now, after to-day, I can't trust you----"

He coloured a little at that, but said nothing.

She went on, rather fast and her breath coming between her words: "But I'm not going to be so silly as to make a scene because I saw you kissing Nita Raseley. She's simply not worth thinking about,--but you ought to be straighter to me all the way round. If you've wanted to be kind to me as you say, then you might have taken me more into your life----"

"Well," said Roddy slowly, "if you'd managed to love me a bit, Rachel, things might be different."

This answer was so utterly unexpected that it took her like a blow. That Roddy should attack _her_ when he had, only a few hours before, been discovered so abominably!

"What do you mean, Roddy?" she stammered angrily. "Love you? But----"

"Yes," he persisted doggedly, "I know when you accepted me you said you didn't and I know that I hadn't any right to expect it, but I believe if you hadn't thought me such a silly a.s.s and hadn't looked all the time as though you were just indulgin' my silly fancies until somethin' more sensible had come along, things might have been different. I'm the sort of feller," Roddy said, choosing his words carefully, "that you could have made anythin' out of, Rachel. I'm weak in some ways--most men are--and when a thing comes dancin' along lookin' ever so temptin', why, then I generally have to go after it. But you could have kept me, Rachel, more than anyone I've ever known----"

She was not touched nor moved, only angered that he, so obviously in the wrong, should attempt justification.

"Yes," she said hotly. "And I suppose in another moment you'll be telling me that it's silly of me to be angry at what I saw this afternoon?"

He thought it out a moment, then answered: "No, it was perfectly natural of course--only I don't think you ought to mind much. If you really cared, you wouldn't. It don't matter _really_ so much what I do if I still like you best. Moments don't count--it's what goes on all the time that matters. Why, I might kiss a hundred women and still you'd be the only woman who mattered to me. I've never cared for one so long before,"

he added simply.

Then as she said nothing he went on: "I've never been sort of educated--never cared enough for anyone to give things up. I would have given things up for you if you'd wanted me to, but you didn't really----"

"Aren't we a little off the point, Roddy?" she flung back. "The point is how are we going to get along all the years and years we've got in front of us? What are we going to do?"

"Everybody's just the same," said Roddy quietly. "It takes a lot of years before married people settle down. We can't expect to be any different----"

But although he spoke so quietly he watched her, hoping for some yielding on her part; in an instant, had she come to him, she would have seen a Roddy whom she had never seen before and from that moment onwards would have had a power over him that nothing could have shaken.

So delicately hung the balance between them. But she was filled with a sense of her own wrongs, her loneliness, the injustice of it all. At that moment all affection for Roddy had left her, she would only have been glad if she had known that she was never to see him again. His slow voice, his way of thinking out his sentences, his thick clumsy hands and his red face, everything came to her now as a continuation of the chains that she had worn all her days.

She got up and confronted him--

"Yes," she said fiercely, "that's exactly it. Life is to be like everyone else. We're to say the things, do the things that our neighbours say and do. Because your friends at Brooks's kiss their wives' friends, therefore you are to do so. Because the men you know never say what they mean and lie about everything they do, therefore you do the same. Oh! I know! Haven't I heard it all my life? Haven't my precious family lived on lies? You've caught it all from my delightful grandmother! I congratulate you!"

"What if I have?" he said. "She's a friend of mine, Rachel. She's been dashed good to me--You're not to say a word against her."

"I hate her," Rachel cried pa.s.sionately. "All my life she's been over me--for years she's been my enemy. If she stands for everything that you believe, then it isn't any wonder that we have nothing in common, that you should be proud of this afternoon, that--that----"

She was biting her lips to keep back the tears. Over his face had crept a sulky obstinate look that might have told her, had she seen it, that she was driving him very far.

"She's fine," he said. "She's made England what it is. You're all for ideas, Rachel, and for Truth and lots of things, but you're difficult to live with."

"Very well, Roddy. Thank you. Now we know how we stand. I at least owe Nita a debt for having cleared up the situation. If you find it difficult with me I can at least return the compliment--and I have at any rate this added advantage, that I speak the truth."

As he looked at her across the room he saw in her that same figure that he'd seen once just before proposing to her--someone foreign, unknown--He felt as though he were quarrelling with a stranger....

She turned and went.

For a long while he stood gazing into the fire, his hands in his pockets. How had it all happened? Why had they let it come to that kind of quarrel when they might so easily have prevented it?

And she, crying bitterly in her room, asked herself the same question.

CHAPTER IV

RACHEL--AND CHRISTOPHER AND RODDY

I

Christopher had s.n.a.t.c.hed his first holiday for two years and was abroad during the January of 1899 when the Seddons were in town.

February, March and April they spent at Seddon Court, and it was not therefore until early in May that Christopher saw Rachel.

She had dreaded with an almost fantastic alarm this meeting. No other human being knew her so honestly and accurately as did Christopher, and the change in her that he would at once discern would, when she caught the reflection of it in his eyes, mark definitely the sinister country into which these last months had carried her.

It had seemed as though some malign spirit had been determined to make the most of that quarrel that Nita Raseley had provoked.

Both Roddy and Rachel hated scenes--upon that, at least, they were agreed--and from their determination never to have another arose a deliberate avoidance of any plain speaking. Rachel, longing for honesty, found herself caught in a thousand deceits--Roddy, avoiding any kind of a.n.a.lysis, found that everything that he provided in conversation seemed to lead to danger.

He was now always ill at ease in Rachel's company; he had stood on that fatal evening, more strongly for the Beaminster interest than he had intended, but from his very determination to maintain his new independence, he produced the d.u.c.h.ess for Rachel's benefit at every turn of the road.

Roddy knew that the d.u.c.h.ess feared that Rachel would lead him from her side and that she received with rejoicing every sign on his part of irritation against Rachel. She had wanted him to marry her granddaughter because that bound him more closely to her, but she had not, perhaps, been prepared for the probable effect of Rachel's character upon him.

The d.u.c.h.ess therefore made, throughout these months, a third member of their company. Roddy, finding Rachel's society a growing embarra.s.sment, spent more and more of his time with his animals and his tenants and labourers. But all this time he was conscious, in a dumb way, of unhappiness and a puzzled dismay, so that his very affection for Rachel produced in him a growing irritation that it should be so needlessly thwarted. Things were all wrong and his resentment of his own failure to right them reacted, without his will, upon the very person whom he wished to propitiate.

For Rachel these months were baffling in their hideous discomfort. Her affection for Roddy was there, but it was swallowed by her desperate efforts to a.n.a.lyse a situation that was, in definite outline, no situation at all.

As Roddy withdrew, her loneliness wrapped her round, and in every day that added to her distance from Roddy she saw the active and malignant agency of her grandmother. She was intelligent enough to be aware that in this constant vision of the d.u.c.h.ess she was outstepping the probabilities; but her early years and the precipitation with which she had been shot out of them into an atmosphere that unexpectedly resembled their own earlier surroundings seemed to point to some diabolical agency.

"Oh! when I get free of this," had been her earlier cry, and now the foreboding that she was never to be free of it until she died terrified her with its possibility. Imagine her brought up in a stuffy house with windows tightly closed, in full vision of a high road, imagine her promised the freedom of the road at a future time; imagine her liberated, at last, rushing into the new life and finding that, after all, the walls of the house were still about her, and about her now for ever.

Her one reserve during the early months of the year at Seddon had been her letters to Francis Breton. His letters to her had been a series of self-revelation; he had restrained himself in so far as appealing to her simply on the score of their relationship and his enmity to the head of the house. She had replied revealing her sympathy, hinting at rebellion on her own side and feeling, after the writing of every letter, a hatred of her own deceit, a curiously heightened sense of affection for Roddy, above all a conviction that impulses were, of their own agency, working to some climax that she could not, or would not, control.

The foreign blood in her, the English blood in him, baffled their advances toward one another. Everything that Rachel did now seemed to Roddy so close to melodrama that it was best to use silence for his weapon. All Roddy's actions were to Rachel further ill.u.s.trations of Beaminster muddle and second-rate personality.

Had Roddy called out of Rachel the great depth of pa.s.sion and reality that she inherited from her mother her own love of him would have solved everything--but that he could not call from her, nor ever would.