The Happy Warrior Part 9

Roly also had his letter. "If you cause her one single moment's unhappiness--" and other wild words. He did not show it to Audrey.

Cause his darling unhappiness! He kissed away the tears her own letter had brought and laughingly cheered her with an amusing account of an incident in the hotel lobby. "We'll have to get out of this place, Audrey. There's a man staying here and his wife that I know well.

Great pals of Gran's. I near as a toucher ran bang into them."

It was the first glimpse of the Unforeseen.

III

The first glimpse of the Unforeseen! At the moment neither recognised it for such. At the moment it was merely "A d.i.c.kens of a squeak. I say, we'll have to look out for that kind of thing, old girl." Later, and that before very long, incidents of the kind began to be realised as the Unforeseen indeed. "That kind of thing" became, or seemed to become, extraordinarily and exasperatingly frequent. What had promised to be the fun of looking out for it became the strain of avoiding it.

There came a day--in Vienna, an original item of their programme but reached much earlier than intended owing to "That kind of thing's"

persistence--there came a day when signs of the strain were suddenly evidenced, when, like a disturbed snake, unsuspected and sharply alarming, the Unforeseen upstarted and hissed at them. Audrey had struck up a pleasant hotel acquaintance, the matter of an hour's chat, but related rather enthusiastically to Roly. At dinner that night she pointed out her friend. "Right at the far end--look! By that statue sort of thing. In pink, with that tall man; d'you see, dear?"

He saw; and with concern she saw him set down the gla.s.s he was raising to his lips and saw his face darken. He said: "d.a.m.nation! It's Lady Ashington. It's maddening, this kind of thing. By G.o.d, it is. I'm going. She'll spot me in a minute. I'm going."

His violent words hurt her and frightened her. He got to his feet and she made to rise also. That worsened the incident. "Stop where you are," he said angrily. "Both of us getting up--making people look! I can slip out behind here. d.a.m.n this business!"

When she followed him to their room, she found his temper no better that he had gone without his dinner. He had made arrangements, he told her, for them to leave early in the morning, and he named their destination. She tried to pretend not to notice his mood; but her voice trembled a little as she said, "I've never heard of the place, dear."

He grunted, a little ashamed of himself: "I don't suppose anybody has.

I hope not. We must get off the beaten track. Badgered about like this from pillar to post. It's getting on my nerves."

She faltered, "I'm so sorry, Roly."

Her tone p.r.i.c.ked him. But these men hate above all things to feel in the wrong when they are in the wrong. The effect of her humility was to make him explain: "I don't know what possessed you, Audrey, 'pon my soul I don't, to go palling up with that woman."

Again she blundered. His reproach was so absurd that she laughed quite naturally at it: "O Roly! how ridiculous! How was I to know you knew her?"

He turned on her, alarming her utterly. "You ought to have known!"

Foolish, exasperating tears in her eyes: "How could I? How could I?"

"I've told you--I've warned you; that's what I mean. I've told you that every dashed soul I ever knew seems to be all over the Continent.

I've warned you to be careful. Asked you not to get in with people.

You absolutely don't care, seems to me. Perhaps you think it funny dodging about like this--perhaps you enjoy it. Well, I don't. That's enough. Let's drop the subject."

IV

So and in this wise the miserable business jolted towards its climax; deeper blunders at every step and every blunder additional to the load that stumbled them into the next. Here was a young man that had taken to himself pleasures, and lo! they were chains, rattling whensoever he moved most grimly to remind him that now limits were imposed upon his movements; that he who, by virtue of his rank, of the blood in his veins, of his own high, careless, fearless air, that he who by virtue of these was wont to look every man in the face more boldly than the most of us, must now hide, dodge, shift, dissemble, or betray the secret that, as to his torment he found, every day and every covering deception made more impossible to discover to the world.

Of all mankind's infirmities nothing than deception so quickly, so deeply and so surely turns the quality of his behaviour; nothing so cruelly tears, so acidly pierces his nerves; nothing so saps his resolution, destroys his moral fibre. Honesty is sword and armour, bread and wine; deception a voracious canker in the vitals, a clutch out of h.e.l.l dragging through fog of fear, through slough of sin, into mire unspeakable. He was in its torments, he was writhing from them into deeper blunders; he began to shudder at the thought of proclaiming his marriage--yet.

She saw his plight and, all unschooled in life, she contributed to the disaster. Here was the gentlest creature, adoring and mated with an impetuous mate that now was as a free beast trapped, goaded by the sudden bars that caged him on every side, wildly seeking an outlet, panicked at finding none. She searched her miserable pamphlet of "I love," stained now with tears. It had nothing to give her. She read into it that in marrying her Roly she thought to have brought him nectar, and lo! it was a cup of poison she had given him, tormenting him utterly. She blamed herself. Through wakeful nights she watched him where he lay beside her--troubled often now in his sleep--and sought and sought, fumbling her pamphlet, to know what amends she could make him; and chid herself she was a burden to him; and would sit up in the darkness and wring her poor young hands in her distracted grief.

He noted the results that these distresses of her mind introduced to her appearance and her behaviour. They did not aid the difficulties with which he found himself beset. This was the beginning of the period of neglect of her; of silence in her presence for long periods; of brooding; of frowning at her where she sat or when she walked beside him; of leaving her in a storm, returning in remorse; of a.s.suring himself he did not love her less, nay, rather loved her more--_But!_

V

At the end of August came their return to England, and immediately his full realisation of the ghastly delusion of the idea that it were easy to tell Gran--easy and kind--when the thing was done. Monstrous delusion, ghastly folly! Why, the very fates were arrayed against it.

He returned to find Gran ailing, in bed. He went to the Mount Street house, bracing his warped resolution to the pitch of telling her, and it was to her bedroom he must go, and found her weak and stretching out her arms to him and overjoyed--O G.o.d! so overjoyed!--to have her Roly back. How tell her? Agony enough that she had no reproach for his neglect of her through the summer, nor any that he was come now with the news that he had run his leave to the last day and must at once rejoin the regiment at Canterbury. Agony enough that she nothing reproached, nothing questioned; unthinkable the agony of watching her while he said, "Gran--Gran, dear, I'm married. Audrey, Audrey Oxford, you know," and of hearing her poor lips falter, "Married? Married, Roly? Audrey Oxford? Married, Roly?"

Unthinkable! Impossible!

But it was another blunder committed, another step deeper into the coils, and he knew it for that when he left her, and ranged it with the similar torments that possessed him: the mad initial folly; the blunder of not proclaiming the marriage immediately he was married; the blunder of each hour delayed during the weeks on the Continent.

Now he was in the very jungle of the Unforeseen. Each step, every day, lost him deeper in its fastnesses; and like one so lost indeed, its dangers--encountered or suspected on every hand--preyed upon his mind, robbed his remaining courage, lost him his moral bearings that remained unwarped. His regimental duties kept him at Canterbury. He could not have Audrey there. He took a tiny furnished flat in the neighbourhood of Knightsbridge and there installed her, and there ran up to see her as often as might be. And the inevitable began. The inevitable--the chaff of his companions as to why he was forever "dodging up to town"; the meetings with his friends and their "Roly, where the devil do you get to these days?" the discovery that not only his men friends but his larger circle of acquaintances--Gran's friends--were beginning to gossip of his mysterious habits. The former put a man's interpretation on his conduct, baited him that they would track him down "to see what she was like." That thrice infuriated him: on Audrey's account; on the fear that they might do it and disclosure be forced, to relieve her from the horrible thing; and on the fact that what was implied was detestable to his nature. The larger circle of his friends were not more charitable, if more discreet. Gran, who was better again and had gone for her health to Burdon Old Manor, sent letters that failed to hide concern telling him of this, that and the other friend who had written saying he denied himself to everybody, was frequently in town, but never available and never to be found. Gran "hoped nothing was wrong, dear;" but erased her suspicion with her pen, but not so well that he could not read the words and picture the troubled thoughts that wrote them.

Ah! this was that grisly Unforeseen in shape new and most monstrous.

How meet it? How meet it? Just as he had shrunk from announcing his intention of marriage because of the clatter of tongues and the opposition that it would loose upon him, so now, but a thousand, thousand times more, he shrank from the clatter that divulgement of his secret would cause; from the resentment of his world at its befoolment by him (as they would feel it); from the sneers and laughter at his turpitude; from the apologies with which he must go round on his knees to those he had deceived; from the interminable explanations he must make. The Unforeseen in shape most monstrous! It rushed him as a host of savage beasts that had snarled, that had threatened, that had come at him singly and torn him but been whipped, but that now was on him in the pack. How meet it? How meet it? G.o.d! What a lightsome, harmless, innocent, mad, wanton, reckless thing he had done, and what a turmoil he had loosed!

Bitter days, these, in the Knightsbridge flat. That pamphlet of "I love" all connoted now, written in tears, with what "I love" demands, where leads and must be paid.

CHAPTER III

A LOVERS' LITANY

I

Bitter days--but suddenly breaking to dawn. There came to him, on the rack of this torment, a thought that tortured him anew, yet made for healing. Audrey? Even if, as in his extremity he debated, he dared all and defied all--s.n.a.t.c.hed himself out of this h.e.l.l by publishing his position and crying to all concerned, "Now do and say your worst!"--even if he so made an end of it, to what would he bring her?

How would she be received, suddenly proclaimed his wife when this ugly crop of suspicion and gossip was at its height? He knew, or through his distraught imagination he believed he knew; and he writhed to picture her--his gentle, unversed Audrey--thus introduced to the suspicious, uncharitable, malicious atmosphere that well he was aware his world could breathe. "Comes from a post-office somewhere, or a shop was it? Married at such and such a date--_so he says!_"

Thus the gate was slammed anew upon his resolution and locked and double-locked: the way must somehow be prepared for Audrey, the gossip by some means made to die, before he declared her. And with that there was unlocked and opened wide the gate that had barred up his love.

Imagining the world's treatment of her, he realised his own.

It was in the tumult of these discoveries that he presented himself at the Knightsbridge flat and greeted his Audrey with a fondness that made her cry a little for happiness; she frequently cried in these days, not often for happiness. His fondness continued at that dear level through the evening. It emboldened her to urge again the step that she believed the best of all the many plans she ceaselessly revolved for curing the trouble she told herself she had brought upon him. She urged him to tell Gran. "Do tell her, dear. It will end all your worry. You're so worried, Roly. I see it--oh, how I see it! And I only add to it because I'm not--because I don't--because I vex you in so many ways. I know I do. You used to be so happy. You will be again directly this is all over. Do tell her, Roly! Roly, _do!_"

She had been seated on the floor, her head resting against him where he sat in a great armchair. Now, in this appeal of hers, she was turned about and on her knees, her hands enfondling his, her face lifted towards him.

He made a little choking sound, all his love for her surging; all his treatment of her wounding him; the thought of what he would bring her to if he took the course she urged filling him with remorse and with pity for her. He said in a strangled voice: "I can't; I can't," and stooping, he raised her to him so that they lay together in the big chair, their faces close, his arms about her....

For a little s.p.a.ce, except that she was crying softly, they were silent--clasped thus, most dear to one another; and then proclaimed that dearness in sc.r.a.ps of murmured sentences, the gaps filled up by what their tones and their clasped arms instructed them....

Just murmurs, and dusky evening in the room--light, faint as their tones were faint, and in the shadows (how else seemed the air they breathed at every breath to thrill them?) spirits of true lovers that were winged down as, let us believe, lovers' spirits may when mortals love.

Just murmurs.

He said: "Audrey, Audrey, I've been so cruel--angry--thoughtless."

And she: "No ... no."

And she again: "Go to her, then, Roly. Don't tell, if you think not.... Just be with her for a little.... You'll be happy then....

Leave me alone a little, dear.... Not even write."

And he: "Audrey! ... Audrey!"