The Reflections of Ambrosine Part 39

And now you've got to go to the war and you have broken my heart."

Augustus's own terror was pitiable to see if it had not roused all my contempt.

Oh, that I should bear the name of a craven!

Lady Grenellen was also in London. When he was sober enough and not engaged with his military duties, Augustus went to see her, and if she happened to be unkind to him he vented his annoyance upon me on his return.

Had it not been that he was going to the war, I could not, for my own self-respect, have put up with the position any longer. But that thought, and the sight of his weeping mother, made me bear all things in silence. I could not add to her griefs.

She quite broke down one day.

"I always knew Gussie took too much. It began at Cambridge, long ago,"

she wept. "But after he first saw you and fell in love, he gave it up, I hoped, and now it has broken out again. I thought marrying you would have cured him. Oh, deary me! I feared some one would tell your grandma, and she would break off the match. I was glad when your wedding was over." And she sobbed and rocked herself to and fro. "I'm grateful to you, my dear, for what you have done for him. It's been ugly for you lately. But there--there, he's going to the war and I shall never see him again!"

"Do not take that gloomy view. The war is nearly over. There is no danger now," I said, to comfort her. "Augustus will only have riding about and a healthy out-door life, and it will probably cure him."

"I've lived in fear ever since the war began, and now it's come," she wailed, refusing to be comforted.

I said everything else I could, and eventually she cheered up for a few days after this, but at the end broke down again, and now, Amelia writes, lies prostrate in a darkened room. Amelia is having her time of trial. They left for Bournemouth yesterday.

Am I a cold and heartless woman because now that Augustus has gone I can only feel relief?

One of his last speeches was not calculated to leave an agreeable impression.

"You'd better look out how you behave while I am away," he said. "I'd kick up a row in a minute, only you're such a lump of ice no man would bother with you." Then, in a pa.s.sion: "I wish to G.o.d they would, and take you off, so I could get some one of more use to me!" He was surprised that I did not wish him to kiss me ten minutes after this.

And now he has gone, and for six months, at any rate, I shall be free from his companionship.

When he returns things shall be started on a different footing.

I came down to Ledstone by myself yesterday. I have no plans. Perhaps I shall stay here until Christmas, when I am to go to Bournemouth to my mother-in-law.

The house seems more than ever big and hideously oppressive. I must find some interest. The old numbness has returned with double force. I take up a book and put it down again. I roam from one room to another.

I am restless and rebellious--rebellious with fate.

I know grandmamma would be angry with me could she come back to me now. She would say I was behaving with the want of self-control of a common person, and not as one of our race. Well, perhaps she is right.

I shall go to the cottage and see Hephzibah and give myself a shock.

That may do me good.

I never willingly let myself think of Antony, but unconsciously my thoughts are always turning to the evening in the fog. I do not know where he is. He may be at Dane Mount, only these few miles off, and yet we must not meet.

I wonder if Ambrosine Eustasie de Calincourt had ever a lover.

Probably--and she would have listened to him, being of her time.

Oh, what is this quality in me that makes me as I am--a flabby thing, with strength enough to push away all I desire in life, to keep untarnished my idea of honor, and yet too weak to tear the matter from my mind once I have done so?

How grandmamma would despise me!

I think of the Princess's answer to the riddle of the nineteenth day in _A Digit of the Moon_. I am this middle thing, and it is only the very bad and very good that achieve peace and perfect happiness.

"Come, Roy, away with us! Let us run, as we used to do last year when we were young. Let us shake ourselves and laugh. No more of this unworthy repining! There are some in the world that have but one eye, and some but one leg, and they cannot see or run, and are worse off than we are, my friend. So think of that, and don't lift your lip at me, and tell me it is cold, and you want to stay by the fire."

All the blinds were down in the front of the cottage as I unlatched the garden gate--the gate I had pa.s.sed through last following grandmamma's coffin to her grave. I ran round to the back door and soon found Hephzibah.

Her joy was great to see me there, her only regret being she had not known I was coming that she might have had the fires lit. They were all laid, and she soon put a match to them.

With what pride she showed me how she had kept everything! Then she left me alone, standing in the little drawing-room. It seemed so wonderfully small to me now. The pieces of brocade still hid the magenta "suite," but arranged with a prim stiffness they lacked in our day. Dear Hephzibah! She had been dusting them, and would not fold them up and put them away in case that I should ever come.

The china all stood as it used, and grandmamma's chair with her footstool, and the little table near it with her magnifying-gla.s.s and spectacle-case. There were her books, the old French cla.s.sics, and the modern yellow backs, her paper-knife still in one, half-cut. I never realized how happy I had been here, in this little room, a year ago.

How happy, and, oh, how ridiculously young! My work-box stood in its usual place, a bit of fine embroidery protruding from its lid.

For the first time in my life I sat down in grandmamma's chair. Oh, if something of her spirit could descend upon me! I tried to think of her maxims, her wonderful courage, her cheerfulness in all adversities, her wit, her gayety. I seemed a paltry, feeble creature daring to sit there, in her _bergere_, and sigh at fate. No, I would grumble no more. I, too, would be of the race.

How long I mused there I do not know. The fire was burning low.

I went up to my own old room, I must see everything, now I was here.

It struck me with a freezing chill as I opened the door. The fire had not drawn here, and lay a ma.s.s of smouldering sticks and paper in the narrow grate.

There was my little white bed, cold and narrow. The dressing-table, with its muslin flounces and cheap, white-bordered mirror. Even the china tray was there, where, I remember, my jewels lay the night before my wedding, and close beside it, the red-morroco case Antony's present had come in--left behind, by mistake, I suppose, when the other gifts were packed away. The note he had written me with it was still in its lid.

The paper felt icy to touch. I pulled it out and read it to the end.

Then I threw it in the fire. The sullen, charred sticks had not life enough to burn it. I lit a match and watched the bright flames curl up the chimney until all was destroyed. Then I fled. Here at least in the cottage I will never come again. The room is full of ghosts.

On the whole, however, my visit did me good. I returned to Ledstone with a firm determination to be more like grandmamma.

A telegram was awaiting me from Augustus, sent from his first stopping-place. He had caught the measles, it appeared. The measles!

I thought only children got the measles.

Poor Augustus! He would make a bad patient. I was truly sorry, and sent the most affectionate and sympathetic answer I could think of to meet him at St. Helena.

I wrote to the war office, asking them please to send me any further news when they received it. But the measles! It almost made me laugh.

II

Next day Lady Tilchester wrote and asked me to go to Harley. She had heard I was alone, and would be so delighted to have me for a week, she said.

I started two days afterwards. To see her would give me pleasure.

"How very white and thin you are looking, dear!" she said, as we sat together in her sitting-room the first afternoon I arrived. "You are not the same person as the very young girl who danced at the Yeomanry ball in May. How old are you, Ambrosine?"

"I was twenty in October."

"Twenty years old! Only twenty years old, and with that sad face!

Nothing in life ought to make one sad at twenty. You look like a piteous child. I could imagine Muriel, with a dead bird, or a set of kittens to be drowned, looking as pathetic as you do."