The Duchess of Wrexe Part 77

Once she said to him: "You think all this queer, don't you?" waving her hand at the bed, the chairs, the paper. "This colour and the odds and ends and the rest."

"It's part of you," he said; "I shouldn't know you without them."

"I love them," she breathed. "I _love_ them. Oh! if I'd had my way I'd have been born when one could have _piled_ up and splashed it about and had it everywhere--jewels, clothes, processions--Ah! that's why I hate this generation that's coming; the generation that you believe in so devoutly, it's so ugly. It wears ugly things, it likes ugly people, it believes in talking about ugly morals and making ugly laws...." Then she laughed--"It's funny, isn't it? I had to use the age I was born into, I cut my cloth to it, but what a figure I'd have made in any century before the nineteenth. All the old times were best. You could command and see that you were obeyed.... None of your Individualism then, Christopher."

She was silent for a time and he said nothing. He was thinking about Breton, wondering where he was, feeling that he should not have let him go. She said suddenly:

"Christopher, do you think there's a G.o.d?"

"I know there is."

"Well, I know there isn't--so there we are. One of us will find that we've made a mistake in a few years' time."

He said nothing. At last she began again:

"You're sure of it?"

"Quite sure."

"So like you--and you get a deal of comfort from it, no doubt. But what kind of a G.o.d, Christopher?"

"A just G.o.d--a loving G.o.d."

"How any doctor can say that truthfully! The pain, the crime you must have seen----"

"Exactly. I've known, I suppose, of as much misery, as much agony, much wickedness as most men in a lifetime. I've never had a case under my notice that hasn't shown the necessity for pain, the necessity for struggle, for defeat, for disaster. If this life were all, still I should have had proof enough that a loving G.o.d was moving in the world."

She lay back, smiling at him.

"You're a sentimentalist of course. I've heard you talk before. You're wrong, Christopher, badly wrong. I shall prove it before you will."

"Well," he said, smiling back at her, "we'll see."

"Oh, yes, you're a sentimentalist of the very worst--I don't know that I like you the less for it. I'm an old pagan and it's served me all my life. Ah! there's the thunder!"

She sat up in bed, her cap pushed back, her skinny arms stretched out in a kind of ecstasy. "There! That's it! That's the kind of thing I like!

There's your G.o.d for you, Christopher."

A flash of lightning flung the room into unreality.

"I'd hoped for one more good storm before I went. I've been waiting all day for this."

He never forgot the strange figure that she made; she displayed the excitement of a child presented with a sudden unexpected gift.

He himself had known many storms, but, perhaps because she now made so strange a central figure of this one, this always remained with him as the worst of his life. He had never heard such thunder and, as each crash fell upon them, he felt that she rose to it and exulted in it as though she were a swimmer meeting great ocean rollers.

There was at last a peal that broke upon them as though it had tumbled the whole house about their ears. Deafened by it he looked about him as though he had expected to find everything in the room shattered.

"_That_ was the best," she cried to him.

At last she lay back tired, and he bade her good night.

She held his hand for a moment. "I regret nothing," she said, "nothing at all. I've had a good time."

But, after he had left her, the sound of the rain had some personal fury about it that made her uneasy.

She called to Dorchester. "I think I'd like you to sleep here to-night, Dorchester. I may need you."

"Very well, Your Grace."

"After all," she thought as, the candles blown out, she lay and listened to the rain, "that dream may come back...."

CHAPTER VII

CHAMBER MUSIC--A TRIO

"A place may abound in its own sense, as the phrase is, without bristling in the least."--_The American Scene._

HENRY JAMES.

I

The storm savagely retreating left blue skies, spring, and the greenest gra.s.s the parks had ever displayed, behind it. Roddy, lying before his window, watched the pond, gleaming like blue gra.s.s but crisped by the breeze into a thousand ripples. Two babies ran, tumbled, screamed and shouted, and all the many-coloured ducks, the ducks with red bills, the ducks with draggled feathers, the ducks in grey and brown, chattered beneath the sun.

By midday a note had arrived from Breton saying that he would be with Roddy at half-past four; there was no word from the d.u.c.h.ess. He knew therefore that his plan had prospered. But, with those morning reflections that freeze so remorselessly the hot decisions of the night before, he was afraid of what he had done; he was afraid of Rachel.

He was afraid of Rachel because he recognized, now that he was on the brink of this plunge, how much deeper and more dangerous it might be for him than he had thought. During these last months he had been slowly capturing Rachel; that capture was the one ambition and desire of his life.

But in the very intensity and ardour of his desire he had learnt more surely than ever the strange contradictions that made her character. His accident had increased his own age and so emphasized her youth; she was ever so young, ever so impulsive; her seriousness was the seriousness of some very youthful spirit, who, guessing at the terrific difficulty of life, feels that the only way to surmount it is to close eyes blindly and leap over the whole of it at once. This was what he knew in his heart--although he would never have put it into words--as her adorable priggishness.

She had found her solution and everything must fit into it, but, since she had finally resolved it, nothing would fit into it at all--and there was the whole of Rachel's young history!

To Roddy one thing manifest was that a very tiny blunder might shatter the bond that was forming between them, and it was eloquent of a great deal that, whereas before in the Nita Raseley episode, it had been Rachel who feared the one false step, it was now Roddy. What it came to was that, in spite of everything, he was still unable to prophesy about her. She was still unrealized, almost untouched by him, that was partly why he loved her so.

Roddy's brain had been alive last night and ready to grapple with anything; to-day he felt stupid and confused. "We're in for a jolly good row," he thought, "far as I can see. There's no avoidin' it. Anyway, some clearin' up will come out of all of it."

So intent was he upon Rachel that he scarcely considered the d.u.c.h.ess. He had not very much imagination about people and made the English mistake of believing that everyone else saw life as he did. He had, for that very reason, never believed very seriously in the d.u.c.h.ess's pa.s.sion for himself; he liked her indeed for her hardness and resented any appearance of the gentler motions--"She'll like tellin' us all what she thinks of it"--placed _her_ in the afternoon's battle. He might have taken it all, had he chosen, as the most curious circ.u.mstance, that he should be "arranging things"--eloquent of the changed order of his life and of the new man that he was becoming.

He lay there all the morning, nervous and restless--Rachel had looked in for a moment and had told him that she was going to see Christopher, that she might not return to luncheon. He had fancied that, in those few moments, he had divined in her some especial thrill--"We're all going to be tuned up this afternoon."

If he found--and this was the question that he asked himself most urgently--that Rachel really had, in the competent interpretation of the term, "deserted" him for Breton, what would be his sensations? Being an Englishman he would, of course, horsewhip the fellow, divorce Rachel and lead a misanthropic but sensual existence for the rest of his days. But here the wild strain in Roddy counted. That is exactly what Roddy would not do. What was law for the man must be law also for the woman.

He had, on an earlier day, told her that were he to present her with a thousand infidelities, yet he would love her best and most truly, and therefore she must forgive him. Well, that should be true too for her.... Any episode with Breton seemed only an incident in the pursuit of her that Roddy had commenced on that day that he had married her.