The Fallen Leaves Part 10

"Well?" she asked. "Will you promise now?"

Amelius gave her his promise.

"On your sacred word of honour?" she persisted.

Amelius repeated the formula. She reclined in her chair once more.

"I want to speak to you as if I was speaking to an old friend," she explained. "I suppose I may call you Amelius?"

"Certainly."

"Well, Amelius, I must tell you first that I committed a sin, many long years ago. I have suffered the punishment; I am suffering it still. Ever since I was a young woman, I have had a heavy burden of misery on my heart. I am not reconciled to it, I cannot submit to it, yet. I never shall be reconciled to it, I never shall submit to it, if I live to be a hundred. Do you wish me to enter into particulars? or will you have mercy on me, and be satisfied with what I have told you so far?"

It was not said entreatingly, or tenderly, or humbly: she spoke with a savage self-contained resignation in her manner and in her voice.

Amelius forgot his cigar again--and again she reminded him of it. He answered her as his own generous impulsive temperament urged him; he said, "Tell me nothing that causes you a moment's pain; tell me only how I can help you." She handed him the box of matches; she said, "Your cigar is out again."

He laid down his cigar. In his brief span of life he had seen no human misery that expressed itself in this way. "Excuse me," he answered; "I won't smoke just now."

She laid her cigar aside like Amelius, and crossed her arms over her bosom, and looked at him, with the first softening gleam of tenderness that he had seen in her face. "My friend," she said, "yours will be a sad life--I pity you. The world will wound that sensitive heart of yours; the world will trample on that generous nature. One of these days, perhaps, you will be a wretch like me. No more of that. Get up; I have something to show you."

Rising herself, she led the way to the large oaken press, and took her bunch of keys out of her pocket again.

"About this old sorrow of mine," she resumed. "Do me justice, Amelius, at the outset. I haven't treated it as some women treat their sorrows--I haven't nursed it and petted it and made the most of it to myself and to others. No! I have tried every means of relief, every possible pursuit that could occupy my mind. One example of what I say will do as well as a hundred. See it for yourself."

She put the key in the lock. It resisted her first efforts to open it.

With a contemptuous burst of impatience and a sudden exertion of her rare strength, she tore open the two doors of the press. Behind the door on the left appeared a row of open shelves. The opposite compartment, behind the door on the right, was filled by drawers with bra.s.s handles.

She shut the left door; angrily banging it to, as if the opening of it had disclosed something which she did not wish to be seen. By the merest chance, Amelius had looked that way first. In the one instant in which it was possible to see anything, he had noticed, carefully laid out on one of the shelves, a baby's long linen frock and cap, turned yellow by the lapse of time.

The half-told story of the past was more than half told now. The treasured relics of the infant threw their little glimmer of light on the motive which had chosen the subjects of the prints on the wall.

A child deserted and lost! A child who, by bare possibility, might be living still!

She turned towards Amelius suddenly, "There is nothing to interest you on _that_ side," she said. "Look at the drawers here; open them for yourself." She drew back as she spoke, and pointed to the uppermost of the row of drawers. A narrow slip of paper was pasted on it, bearing this inscription:--_"Dead Consolations."_

Amelius opened the drawer; it was full of books. "Look at them,"

she said. Amelius, obeying her, discovered dictionaries, grammars, exercises, poems, novels, and histories--all in the German language.

"A foreign language tried as a relief," said Mrs. Farnaby, speaking quietly behind him. "Month after month of hard study--all forgotten now.

The old sorrow came back in spite of it. A dead consolation! Open the next drawer."

The next drawer revealed water-colours and drawing materials huddled together in a corner, and a heap of poor little conventional landscapes filling up the rest of the s.p.a.ce. As works of art, they were wretched in the last degree; monuments of industry and application miserably and completely thrown away.

"I had no talent for that pursuit, as you see," said Mrs. Farnaby. "But I persevered with it, week after week, month after month. I thought to myself, 'I hate it so, it costs me such dreadful trouble, it so worries and persecutes and humiliates me, that _this_ surely must keep my mind occupied and my thoughts away from myself!' No; the old sorrow stared me in the face again on the paper that I was spoiling, through the colours that I couldn't learn to use. Another dead consolation! Shut it up."

She herself opened a third and a fourth drawer. In one there appeared a copy of Euclid, and a slate with the problems still traced on it; the other contained a microscope, and the treatises relating to its use.

"Always the same effort," she said, shutting the door of the press as she spoke; "and always the same result. You have had enough of it, and so have I." She turned, and pointed to the lathe in the corner, and to the clubs and dumb-bells over the mantelpiece. "I can look at _them_ patiently," she went on; "they give me bodily relief. I work at the lathe till my back aches; I swing the clubs till I'm ready to drop with fatigue. And then I lie down on the rug there, and sleep it off, and forget myself for an hour or two. Come back to the fire again. You have seen my dead consolations; you must hear about my living consolation next. In justice to Mr. Farnaby--ah, how I hate him!"

She spoke those last vehement words to herself, but with such intense bitterness of contempt that the tones were quite loud enough to be heard. Amelius looked furtively towards the door. Was there no hope that Regina and her friend might return and interrupt them? After what he had seen and heard, could _he_ hope to console Mrs. Farnaby? He could only wonder what object she could possibly have in view in taking him into her confidence. "Am I always to be in a mess with women?" he thought to himself. "First poor Mellicent, and now this one. What next?" He lit his cigar again. The brotherhood of smokers, and they alone, will understand what a refuge it was to him at that moment.

"Give me a light," said Mrs. Farnaby, recalled to the remembrance of her own cigar. "I want to know one thing before I go on. Amelius, I watched those bright eyes of yours at luncheon-time. Did they tell me the truth?

You're not in love with my niece, are you?"

Amelius took his cigar out of his mouth, and looked at her.

"Out with it boldly!" she said.

Amelius let it out, to a certain extent. "I admire her very much," he answered.

"Ah," Mrs. Farnaby remarked, "you don't know her as well as I do."

The disdainful indifference of her tone irritated Amelius. He was still young enough to believe in the existence of grat.i.tude; and Mrs. Farnaby had spoken ungratefully. Besides, he was fond enough of Regina already to feel offended when she was referred to slightingly.

"I am surprised to hear what you say of her," he burst out. "She is quite devoted to you."

"Oh yes," said Mrs. Farnaby, carelessly. "She is devoted to me, of course--she is the living consolation I told you of just now. That was Mr. Farnaby's notion in adopting her. Mr. Farnaby thought to himself, 'Here's a ready-made daughter for my wife--that's all this tiresome woman wants to comfort her: now we shall do.' Do you know what I call that? I call it reasoning like an idiot. A man may be very clever at his business--and may be a contemptible fool in other respects. Another woman's child a consolation to _me!_ Pah! it makes me sick to think of it. I have one merit, Amelius, I don't cant. It's my duty to take care of my sister's child; and I do my duty willingly. Regina's a good sort of creature--I don't dispute it. But she's like all those tall darkish women: there's no backbone in her, no dash; a kind, feeble, goody-goody, sugarish disposition; and a deal of quiet obstinacy at the bottom of it, I can tell you. Oh yes, I do her justice; I don't deny that she's devoted to me, as you say. But I am making a clean breast of it now.

And you ought to know, and you shall know, that Mr. Farnaby's living consolation is no more a consolation to me than the things you have seen in the drawers. There! now we've done with Regina. No: there's one thing more to be cleared up. When you say you admire her, what do you mean? Do you mean to marry her?"

For once in his life Amelius stood on his dignity. "I have too much respect for the young lady to answer your question," he said loftily.

"Because, if you do," Mrs. Farnaby proceeded, "I mean to put every possible obstacle in your way. In short, I mean to prevent it."

This plain declaration staggered Amelius. He confessed the truth by implication in one word.

"Why?" he asked sharply.

"Wait a little, and recover your temper," she answered.

There was a pause. They sat, on either side of the fireplace, and eyed each other attentively.

"Now are you ready?" Mrs. Farnaby resumed. "Here is my reason. If you marry Regina, or marry anybody, you will settle down somewhere, and lead a dull life."

"Well," said Amelius; "and why not, if I like it?"

"Because I want you to remain a roving bachelor; here today and gone tomorrow--travelling all over the world, and seeing everything and everybody."

"What good will that do to _you,_ Mrs. Farnaby?"

She rose from her own side of the fireplace, crossed to the side on which Amelius was sitting, and, standing before him, placed her hands heavily on his shoulders. Her eyes grew radiant with a sudden interest and animation as they looked down on him, riveted on his face.

"I am still waiting, my friend, for the living consolation that may yet come to me," she said. "And, hear this, Amelius! After all the years that have pa.s.sed, you may be the man who brings it to me."

In the momentary silence that followed, they heard a double knock at the house-door.

"Regina!" said Mrs. Farnaby.

As the name pa.s.sed her lips, she sprang to the door of the room, and turned the key in the lock.

CHAPTER 2