The Duchess of Wrexe Part 59

"All this time," Rachel said slowly. "You've known him--of course ... at Saxton Square...."

Then, as though the revelation had suddenly broken upon her, "Why you--you----!"

"Yes," said Lizzie, now fiercely indeed, hurling back at the girl the _navete_ of her surprise. "Yes--it's odd, isn't it? I'm not the kind of woman, am I, ever to care for a man, or to have a man care for me?--To have any feeling or desire or affection. But it is not so strange as it may seem--I love him every bit as well as you do--I've cared more patiently perhaps, more unselfishly even. But there it is ... it gives me the right."

Nothing more surprising than that on this special circ.u.mstance Rachel had never reckoned. Feeling it now, blazing there before her, the way that she was to deal with it was beyond her experience. In an instant Lizzie Rand was, to her, a new creature. Always she had seen Lizzie patiently, with method, with discipline, putting things in order--that was her world and dominion. Lizzie had appeared, to Rachel, to stand for all the things that she herself was not. Rachel had often envied that absence of emotion, that security from impulse and pa.s.sion, and it was upon that very security that Rachel had wished to depend. It was that that had driven her to seek Lizzie's friendship. She herself so unsure, so caught and destroyed by powers too potent for her resistance, had looked with wonder and desire upon Lizzie's safety--

Now Lizzie Rand was no longer Lizzie Rand. She was of Rachel's number, she might, as easily as Rachel, be swept, whirled away,--after death and destruction.

But there was more than that. There was the realization that Lizzie must hate her, that Lizzie was the last person in the world to whom she should have given her confidence, that Lizzie would fight now to the last breath in her body to keep Francis Breton from her.

During a long silence they sat facing one another--the little room was now nearly dark and it was only by the faint pale shadow from the sky beyond the window that they could catch, each from each, their consciousness of their new relationship.

It was during that silence that Lizzie was again aware that her ears were straining to catch some sound....

"I didn't know," Rachel said at last very softly; "it must seem brutal to you now that I should have told you all this. I wouldn't of course have spoken."

"Ah! you needn't mind," Lizzie said grimly. "He's never seen anything of it. You must never give him any reason to suspect--I trust you for that.

No one in this world knows but you, and you should never have known if it had not been that I _had_ to prove my right to interfere. Perhaps even now, you don't see that I _have_ a right, but whether I have one or no, you've got to reckon with me now----"

"And _you've_ got to reckon," Rachel answered, with some of Lizzie's own fierceness, "with a power that's beyond your power or mine or anyone's.

Don't you imagine that we, all of us, haven't tried hard enough. Why!

all these last two years we've done nothing but try. Now it's simply stronger than we are. If Roddy," she went on, speaking now more slowly, "hadn't forced it.... If he'd not been impatient--but now--after what's just happened, it's right--it isn't fair to him, to myself, to any of us, that things should go on as they are----"

"I'm thinking," Lizzie answered quietly, "simply of Francis Breton."

"Well! isn't it fairer too for him? He's been living, as we have, all this time, a life that's denying all his own _real_ self. Anything's better than being false to that--life may be hard for us if we go away together, but at any rate it will be honest----"

"Ah! that just shows how young you are! Don't I know that pursuit of truth and honesty as well as you? Don't I know that when life's beginning for us, the one thing that seems to matter is exposing ourselves, showing ourselves to the world just as we are! At first it seems such an easy thing--Just round that corner the moment's coming when the real person in us is going to stand up and proclaim itself just as it is, fine and splendid? but always something just comes in the way and stops it--the years go on and we're further off from truth than ever.

"You think that if you go off with Francis Breton now, you'll, both of you, be leading, suddenly, honest brave lives before the world.

I tell you it isn't so. Things will be just as crooked, just as shadowed--issues just as confused--it will be worse than it was."

"But you don't know----"

"I know Francis Breton. Don't you know too the kind of man that he is?

Don't you know that he's as weak as a man can be, weaker than any woman ever _could_ be? He's the kind of man who must have society to bolster him up. If the men of his world are supporting him then he's as good as gold, as fine as you like. Let them leave him and down he goes. All his life the world's been down on him and that's why he's been down. Lately he's been quiet--he's been winning his place back. Soon, if he's patient, they'll all come round him again. But let him go off with you and he's done, finished--absolutely, utterly. 'Ah!' everyone will say, 'that's what we expected. That's what we always knew would happen.'

Don't you know what kind of effect _that_ will have upon him? Don't you know?... Of course you do. It will break him up. His old life abroad, creeping from place to place, will begin again, only now he'll have the additional knowledge that he's done for you as well as for himself. It will be the end, utterly the end of him. And I, who love him, will not let it be."

Lizzie's speech had roused in Rachel one of those old storms of anger.

She was exerting now her utmost self-control, but her heart seemed bound tight with some cord so slender that one movement, one impulse, would snap it--Then.... She saw in Lizzie now, only moved by a sense of jealous injury--"She sits there, knowing that I've taken him from her.

That's it.... That's what she's feeling--she's lost him. She can't forgive me for that."

But when she spoke her voice was quiet and controlled.

"That isn't so," Rachel said; "it won't, I think, be like that. There's so much more between us than you can understand. There's all our early life--not that we were together, but we seem to have it all in common, to have known it all together. We're unlike our family--all the Beaminsters--we're together in that--we are together in everything."

But Lizzie's voice went on, so coldly, with such a.s.surance that, with every word, the flame of Rachel's anger climbed a little higher, grew stronger and steadier.

"There's another thing too. I watched you, more than you know. No, no man--no man in the world--will ever keep you altogether--there's something--I can't tell you what it is--there's something in you that demands more than just a personal relationship like that--Perhaps it's maternity--it is, with many women,--perhaps it's a great cause, a movement of a country--

"But I know, with certainty, that you will never love Breton as you should love a man. Realization will never be the thing to you that antic.i.p.ation and retrospection are. I believe if you were to lose your husband now, you'd find that you loved him--All thoughts of Francis Breton, would go----"

At that, because at the very heart of her determination burnt the knowledge that Lizzie's words were true, Rachel's control was abandoned, her anger leapt: "You think you know--you think ... why ... why ... you don't know me at all!--you can't know me--we're strangers, Miss Rand--now--always....

"Nothing, _nothing_ can ever make us friends again--I'll never forgive you for what you've said--the poor creature that you take me for--no doubt you'd have done better had the chance been yours, but you go too far----"

"That was unfair of you," Lizzie said very low--"You may say to me what you please--That's of no importance to anybody. But Francis Breton's happiness, his success, that is more to me than anything or anyone.--You _shall_ not break his life into pieces for your own pleasure. There are more important things than your personal happiness, Lady Seddon----"

They were both standing, but they could not see one another, save, very faintly, their hands and faces--

"It's too late, Miss Rand," Rachel laughed. "I shall write to him to-morrow. I myself shall tell my husband--there is nothing that you can do----"

They stood there, conscious that a word, a movement on either side might produce an absurd, a tragic scene. Lizzie had never known such anger as the pa.s.sion that now held her. Rachel was taunting her with the thing that she had missed; she stood there, before the world, as the woman for whom no man cared--she stood there with the one human being who mattered to her on the edge of complete disaster--nothing that she could do could prevent it--and the woman at her side was the cause.

A sudden sweeping consciousness of the things that it would mean if Rachel were dead flowed over her. Her heart stopped--that way--at least--Francis Breton might be saved....

The room, dark as pitch before her, was filled now with a red glow--Her hands, clenched, were ice in a world that was all of an overpowering heat.

Lizzie never afterwards could remember what then exactly happened.

She was worked to a pitch of anger, she was thinking to herself, "What would be a way? ... anything to save him...."

"She shouldn't have taunted me with that"--when, suddenly, exactly as though someone had taken her brain and emptied it, she had forgotten Rachel, had forgotten her own personal injury, forgotten her anger, was only aware that, with every nerve in her body on edge, she was waiting for some sound--

Like an answer to an invocation, the sound, through the closed window, came--

IV

She must have made some startled noise, because she heard Rachel say, "What is it?"

She fled to the window and opened it. She could see nothing, but she could hear, as she had known all day that she would hear, steps, stumbling, falling heavily, upon the heavy gravel path.

She felt Rachel's hand upon her sleeve: "What is it?" Rachel said again--"Lizzie, what is it?"

Both women were seized and held by fear. Their feelings for one another were lost, sunk in the cold, shattering sense of disaster that had come, through the open window, into the room.

They could see lights now and figures--There were murmuring voices--

"Oh, Lizzie, what is it?" Rachel said for the third time, and then after a moment--"Roddy!"

Lizzie said--"Wait there. It may be nothing. I'll see--Don't you come for a moment."

She crossed the dark room, and opening the door saw Peters hurrying down the pa.s.sage towards her. His face was in complete disorder--the face of someone who, throughout his life, has had only one kind of face that has served most admirably for every kind of occasion--suddenly a situation has arisen for which that face will _not_ serve--

His body was shaking--

"Oh! Miss Rand, the master!"