The Weavers Part 41

"Have you?" Eglington flicked the ash from his cigar, speaking coolly.

Soolsby looked at him with his honest blue eyes aflame, and answered deliberately: "I was not for taking your place, my lord. 'Twas my duty to tell you, but the rest was between you and the Earl of Eglington."

"That was thoughtful of you, Soolsby. And Miss Claridge?"

"I told you that night, my lord, that only her father and myself knew; and what was then is now."

A look of relief stole across Eglington's face. "Of course--of course.

These things need a lot of thought, Soolsby. One must act with care--no haste, no flurry, no mistakes."

"I would not wait too long, my lord, or be too careful." There was menace in the tone.

"But if you go at things blind, you're likely to hurt where you don't mean to hurt. When you're mowing in a field by a school-house, you must look out for the children asleep in the gra.s.s. Sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home."

"Do you mean to do it or not, my lord? I've left it to you as a gentleman."

"It's going to upset more than you think, Soolsby. Suppose he, out there in Egypt"--he pointed again to the map--"doesn't thank me for the information. Suppose he says no, and--"

"Right's right. Give him the chance, my lord. How can you know, unless you tell him the truth?"

"Do you like living, Soolsby?"

"Do you want to kill me, my lord?"

There was a dark look in Eglington's face. "But answer me, do you want to live?"

"I want to live long enough to see the Earl of Eglington in his own house."

"Well, I've made that possible. The other night when you were telling me your little story, you were near sending yourself into eternity--as near as I am knocking this ash off my cigar." His little finger almost touched the ash. "Your hand was as near touching a wire charged with death. I saw it. It would have been better for me if you had gone; but I shut off the electricity. Suppose I hadn't, could I have been blamed?

It would have been an accident. Providence did not intervene; I did. You owe me something, Soolsby."

Soolsby stared at him almost blindly for a moment. A mist was before his eyes; but through the mist, though he saw nothing of this scene in which he now was, he saw the laboratory, and himself and Eglington, and Eglington's face as it peered at him, and, just before the voice called outside, Eglington's eyes fastened on his hand. It all flashed upon him now, and he saw himself starting back at the sound of the voice.

Slowly he got up now, went to the door, and opened it. "My lord, it is not true," he said. "You have not spoken like a gentleman. It was my lady's voice that saved me. This is my castle, my lord--you lodge yonder." He pointed down into the darkness where the lights of the village shone. "I owe you nothing. I pay my debts. Pay yours, my lord, to him that's beyond and away."

Eglington kept his countenance as he drew on his great-coat and slowly pa.s.sed from the house.

"I ought to have let you die, Soolsby. Y'ou'll think better of this soon. But it's quite right to leave the matter to me. It may take a little time, but everything will come right. Justice shall be done.

Well, good night, Soolsby. You live too much alone, and imagination is a bad thing for the lonely. Good night-good night."

Going down the hill quickly, he said to himself: "A sort of second sight he had about that wire. But time is on my side, time and the Soudan--and 'The heathen in his blindness....' I will keep what is mine. I will keep it!"

CHAPTER XXVII. THE AWAKENING

In her heart of hearts Hylda had not greatly welcomed the d.u.c.h.ess of Snowdon to Hamley. There was no one whose friendship she prized more; but she was pa.s.sing through a phase of her life when she felt that she was better apart, finding her own path by those intuitions and perceptions which belonged to her own personal experience. She vaguely felt, what all realise sooner or later, that we must live our dark hours alone.

Yet the frank downright nature of the once beautiful, now faded, d.u.c.h.ess, the humorous glimmer in the pale-blue eyes, the droll irony and dry truth of her speech, appealed to Hylda, made her smile a warm greeting when she would rather have been alone. For, a few days before, she had begun a quest which had absorbed her, fascinated her. The miner, finding his way across the gap of a reef to pick up the vein of quartz at some distant and uncertain point, could not have been more lost to the world than was the young wife searching for a family skeleton, indefinitely embodied in her imagination by the name, James Fetherdon.

Pile after pile of papers and letters of the late Earl and his Countess had pa.s.sed through her hands from chaos to order. As she had read, hour after hour, the diaries of the cold, blue-eyed woman, Sybil Eglington, who had lived without love of either husband or son, as they, in turn, lived without love of each other, she had been overwhelmed by the revelation of a human heart, whose powers of expression were smothered by a shy and awkward temperament. The late Countess's letters were the unclothing of a heart which had never expanded to the eyes of those whose love would have broken up a natural reserve, which became at last a proud coldness, and gave her a reputation for lack of feeling that she carried to her grave.

In the diaries which Hylda unearthed--the Countess had died suddenly--was the m.u.f.fled cry of a soul tortured through different degrees of misunderstanding; from the vague pain of suffered indifference, of being left out of her husband's calculations, to the blank neglect narrowing her life down to a tiny stream of duty, which was finally lost in the sands. She had died abroad, and alone, save for her faithful maid, who, knowing the chasm that lay between her mistress and her lord, had brought her letters and papers back to the Cloistered House, and locked them away with all the other papers and correspondence which the Countess had acc.u.mulated.

Among these papers was a letter to the late Lord Eglington written the day before she died. In the haste and confusion ensuing on her death, the maid had not seen it. It had never reached his hands, but lay in a pocket of the dead woman's writing-portfolio, which Hylda had explored without discovering. Only a few hours, however, before the d.u.c.h.ess of Snowdon came, Hylda had found again an empty envelope on which was written the name, James Fetherdon. The writing on the envelope was that of Sybil Lady Eglington.

When she discovered the envelope, a sense of mystery and premonition possessed her. What was the a.s.sociation between the Countess of Eglington and James Fetherdon, the father of David Claridge? In vain she searched among the voluminous letters and papers, for it would seem that the dead woman had saved every letter she received, and kept copies of numberless letters she had written. But she had searched without avail.

Even the diaries, curiously frank and without reserve, never mentioned the name, so far as she could find, though here and there were strange allusive references, hints of a trouble that weighed her down, phrases of exasperation and defiance. One phrase, or the idea in it, was, however, much repeated in the diaries during the course of years, and towards the last almost feverishly emphasised--"Why should I bear it for one who would bear nothing for me, for his sake, who would do nothing for my sake? Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?"

These words were haunting Hylda's brain when the telegram from the d.u.c.h.ess of Snowdon came. They followed her to Heddington, whither she went in the carriage to bring her visitor to Hamley, and kept repeating themselves at the back of her mind through the cheerful rallying of the d.u.c.h.ess, who spread out the wings of good-humour and motherly freedom over her.

After all, it was an agreeable thing to be taken possession of, and "put in her proper place," as the d.u.c.h.ess said; made to understand that her own affairs were not so important, after all; and that it was far more essential to hear the charming gossip about the new and most popular Princess of Wales, or the quarrel between d.i.c.kens and Thackeray. Yet, after dinner, in the little sitting-room, where the d.u.c.h.ess, in a white gown with great pink bows, fitter for a girl fresh from Confirmation, and her cheeks with their fixed colour, which changed only at the discretion of her maid, babbled of nothing that mattered, Hylda's mind kept turning to the book of life an unhappy woman had left behind her.

The sitting-room had been that of the late Countess also, and on the wall was an oil-painting of her, stately and distant and not very alluring, though the mouth had a sweetness which seemed unable to break into a smile.

"What was she really like--that wasn't her quite, was it?" asked Hylda, at last, leaning her chin on the hand which held the 'cello she had been playing.

"Oh, yes, it's Sybil Eglington, my dear, but done in wood; and she wasn't the graven image that makes her out to be. That's as most people saw her; as the fellow that painted her saw her; but she had another side to her. She disapproved of me rather, because I was squeezing the orange dry, and trying to find yesterday's roses in to-morrow's garden.

But she didn't shut her door in my face--it's hard to do that to a d.u.c.h.ess; which is one of the few advantages of living naked in the street, as it were, with only the strawberry leaves to clothe you. No, Sybil Eglington was a woman who never had her chance. Your husband's forbears were difficult, my dear. They didn't exactly draw you out.

She needed drawing out; and her husband drove her back into her corner, where she sulked rather till she died--died alone at Wiesbaden, with a German doctor, a stray curate, and a stuttering maid to wish her bon voyage. Yet I fancy she went glad enough, for she had no memories, not even an affaire to repent of, and to cherish. La, la! she wasn't so stupid, Sybil there, and she was an ornament to her own s.e.x and the despair of the other. His Serene Highness Heinrich of Saxe-Gunden fancied the task of breaking that ice, and he was an adept and an Apollo, but it broke his reputation instead.

"No doubt she is happy now. I shall probably never see!"

In spite of the poignant nature of the talk, Hylda could not but smile at the last words.

"Don't despair," she rejoined; "one star differeth from another star in glory, but that is no reason why they should not be on visiting terms."

"My dear, you may laugh--you may laugh, but I am sixty-five, and I am not laughing at the idea of what company I may be obliged to keep presently. In any case I'm sure I shall not be comfortable. If I'm where she is, I shall be dull; if I'm where her husband is, I'll have no reputation; and if there is one thing I want, it is a spotless reputation--sometime."

Hylda laughed--the manner and the voice were so droll--but her face saddened too, and her big eyes with the drooping lashes looked up pensively at the portrait of her husband's mother.

"Was it ever a happy family, or a lucky family?" she asked.

"It's lucky now, and it ought to be happy now," was the meaning reply.

Hylda made no answer, but caught the strings of the 'cello lightly, and shook her head reprovingly, with a smile meant to be playful. For a moment she played, humming to herself, and then the d.u.c.h.ess touched the hand that was drawing the bow softly across the strings. She had behind her garishness a gift for sympathy and a keen intuition, delicacy, and allusiveness. She knew what to say and what to leave unsaid, when her heart was moved.

"My darling," she said now, "you are not quite happy; but that is because you don't allow yourself to get well. You've never recovered from your attack last summer; and you won't, until you come out into the world again and see people. This autumn you ought to have been at Homburg or at Aix, where you'd take a little cure of waters and a great deal of cure of people. You were born to bask in friendship and the sun, and to draw from the world as much as you deserve, a little from many, for all you give in return. Because, dearest, you are a very agreeable person, with enough wit and humanity to make it worth the world's while to conspire to make you do what will give it most pleasure, and let yourself get most--and that's why I've come."

"What a person of importance I am!" answered Hylda, with a laugh that was far from mirthful, though she caught the plump, wrinkled little hand of the d.u.c.h.ess and pressed it. "But really I'm getting well here fast. I'm very strong again. It is so restful, and one's days go by so quietly."

"Yet, I'm not sure that it's rest you want. I don't think it is. You want tonics--men and women and things. Monte Carlo would do you a world of good--I'd go with you. Eglington gambles here"--she watched Hylda closely--"why shouldn't you gamble there?"

"Eglington gambles?" Hylda's face took on a frightened look, then it cleared again, and she smiled. "Oh, of course, with international affairs, you mean. Well, I must stay here and be the croupier."

"Nonsense! Eglington is his own croupier. Besides, he is so much in London, and you so much here. You sit with the distaff; he throws the dice."

Hylda's lips tightened a little. Her own inner life, what Eglington was to her or she to Eglington, was for the ears of no human being, however friendly. She had seen little of him of late, but in one sense that had been a relief, though she would have done anything to make that feeling impossible. His rather precise courtesy and consideration, when he was with her, emphasised the distance between "the first fine careless rapture" and this grey quiet. And, strange to say, though in the first five years after the Cairo days and deeds, Egypt seemed an infinite s.p.a.ce away, and David a distant, almost legendary figure, now Egypt seemed but beyond the door--as though, opening it, she would stand near him who represented the best of all that she might be capable of thinking. Yet all the time she longed for Eglington to come and say one word, which would be like touching the lever of the sluice-gates of her heart, to let loose the flood. As the s.p.a.ce grew between her and Eglington, her spirit trembled, she shrank back, because she saw that sea towards which she was drifting.