The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death

III

There had come to him one of those agonies of loneliness that no argument, no reasoning can destroy.

The absence of any letter from Rachel seemed to show that she had abandoned him. In all this vast thickly peopled world there was now no one to whom his presence or absence, his fortunes or disasters mattered. The snowstorm gathered him into its folds; the snow fell against his mouth, his eyes, and before him, behind him, around him there was a world deserted of man, houses blind and without life.

The snow might fall now to the end of time. It would creep up and up, falling from the heavens, rising from the earth, swallowing all creation—the end of the world.

He pressed into the park and there under the trees stretching like gallows against the throttling sky temptation to give it all up, to go under and have done with it all, leapt, hot and fierce, upon him. Mrs. Pont and the others were waiting for him. They would be good to him. The Upper World would not hear nor see nor think of his disasters, and slowly, with the others, life would recede, he would crumble and decay and cease to care, and death would come soon enough.

Then the wind smote his face and tore at his coat: the snow died away, beyond the black bare trees a very faint yellow bar threaded the thick grey—promise that the storm was at an end.

Suddenly with the cessation of the storm the long field of white seemed good and restful, and beyond the park the houses showed light in their windows.

The yellow spread through the sky, and stars, very slowly, came and the wind died away.

Courage filled him. Rachel might never come or write or care, but he would make the thought of her the one true thing in his heart, and with that he would do battle so long as he could.

Christopher and Miss Rand … he thought of them as he trudged his way home—and when he saw the white silence of Saxton Square and the golden sky breaking above its peace and quiet he thought that, for a time longer, he would keep his place and hold his own.

CHAPTER II
A LITTLE HOUSE

 
"Each in the crypt would cry,
'But one freezes here! and why?
'When a heart, as chill,
'At my own would thrill
Back to life, and its fires out-fly?
'Heart, shall we live or die?
The rest … settle by-and-by!'"
 

Robert Browning.

I

Rachel at Seddon Court watched, from her window, that first fallen snow.

Seddon Court is about three miles from the town of Lewes and lies, tucked and cornered, under the very brow of the Downs. It is a grey little house, old and stalwart, with a courtyard and two towers. The towers are Norman; the rest of the house is Tudor.

Beyond the actual building there are gardens that run to the very foot of the Downs, with only a patch and an old stone wall intervening. Above the house, day and night, year after year, the Downs are bending; everything, beneath their steady solemn gaze, is small and restless; as the colours are flung by the sun across their green sprawling limbs the house, at their feet, catches their reflected smile and, when the sun is gone and the winds blow, cowers beneath their frown; everything in that house is conscious of their presence.

Rachel had been at Seddon Court for a month and now, at the window of her writing-room, looking across the garden, up into their dark shadows, she wondered at their indifference and monotony. Anyone who had known her before her marriage would be struck instantly, on seeing her now, by a change in her.

Her whole attitude to the world, during her first season in London, had been an attitude of wonder, of expectation, of the uncertainty that comes from expectation.

With that expectation were also alarm, distrust, and it was only when some sudden incident or person called happiness into her face that that distrust vanished.

Now she was older, that hesitation and awkwardness were gone, but with their departure had vanished, too, much of her honesty. Her dark eyes were as sincere as they had ever been, but to anyone who had known her before her attitude now was assumed. Nothing might catch her unprepared, but what experiences were they that had taught her the need for armour?

Sitting in her room looking on to a lawn that would soon be white and to Downs obscured already by the thick tumbling snow, she knew that she was unhappy, disappointed, even alarmed. Suddenly to-day the uneasiness that had been gathering before her throughout the last weeks assumed, on this afternoon, the definite tangibility of a challenge.

"What's the matter—with me, with everything?… What's happened?"

Her room, dark green and white, had no pictures, but a long low book-case with grave handsome books, an edition of someone in red with white paper labels and another edition of someone else in dark blue and another in gold and brown, an old French gilt mirror, square, with a reflection of the garden and the foot of the Downs in it, an old Queen Anne rosewood writing-table, some Queen Anne chairs, a gate-legged table—a very cool, quiet room.

At her feet with his head resting on her shoe there lay a dog. This dog about a fortnight ago she had found in a field near the house with a kettle tied on to his tail, and his body a confused catastrophe of mud and blood.

She had carried him home; it had needed some courage to introduce him into the household, for Roddy possessed many dogs all of the finest breeds, and this was a mongrel who defied description. He was very short and shaggy and stumpy. He was much too large for a Yorkshire terrier and yet that was undoubtedly his derivation. There was something of a sheep-dog in him and something of a Skye; his hair fell all over his face and, when you could see them, his eyes were brown. His nose was like a wet blackberry and his ears were long and full of emotion; when he ran his short tail, on which the hairs were arranged like branches on a Christmas tree, stuck up into the air and he resembled a rabbit.

In the confusion of the moment Rachel had called him Jacob, because she thought that Jacob was, in the Bible, the "hairy one".... After all, you could not call a dog Esau.

Yes, to retain him had needed courage. Thinking of Roddy's attitude to the dog brought so many other attendant thoughts in its train. Roddy in his devotion to animals (and oh! he was devoted), had no room for those that were not of the aristocracy.

Concerning dogs who were mongrels he was kind but thought them much better dead. Unkind he would never be, but the way in which he ignored Jacob was worse than any unkindness.

Jacob, sensitive perhaps from early suffering, knew this and avoided Roddy, ran out of the room when he came into it, showed in every way that he must not expect to rank with the other dogs.

Very characteristic this attitude of Roddy, but very characteristic, too, the affection that Jacob was now receiving from his mistress. There was something that Jacob drew from Rachel that none of the fine, noble dogs of the house was able to secure.... Why?… What, again, was the matter? Why was Rachel unhappy?

Rachel was unhappy, and the answer came quite clearly to her as the room was darkened by the great storm of snow now falling over the Downs and the garden, because marriage with Roddy had not lessened in any way that uneasy disquiet that had stirred, without pause, beneath her life before her marriage; that uneasiness had, indeed, during the last three months, increased....

Was this her fault or Roddy's?

Attacked now by a scrutiny that refused dismissal she delivered herself up to the investigation of these months of her married life.

She knew that she had only once been happy since her marriage—that was on the first evening, when, the noise and clamour of the London wedding having died away, she had walked with Roddy in the peace of the Massiter garden (Lady Massiter had lent her house for the first weeks of the honeymoon), had felt his arm about her, had believed that there had really come to her that comfort and safety for which she longed.

After that there had followed a fortnight of great unreality—the strangest excitement, the most adventurous wonders, but a wonder and excitement that were from herself, the real Rachel Beaminster, most absolutely removed. It was as though she had watched closely but detached the experiences of some other girl. Roddy had, during those times, been a most ardent and passionate lover; she had tried to respond and had hidden, as best she could, her failure.

Then, suddenly, with the time of their going abroad, passion had left him; it had left him as swiftly as the passing of wind over a hill. It was there—it was gone.

But he remained the perfect husband. His kindness, his charm, his simplicity, his affection for her—an affection that could never for an instant be doubted—these things had delighted her. He was now the friend, the strong reliant companion that she had wanted him to be. During those first weeks in Italy and Greece happiness might have come to her had she not been stirred by her remembrance of the earlier weeks. The passion that had been in him, although it had not touched her, now in retrospect lit fires for her imagination. Instantly back to her had come the whole disquiet and unrest. The things that Roddy called from her now, she suddenly discovered with a great shrinking alarm, were all the Beaminster things. All the true emotions, qualities, traditions that made up her secret life were roused in her by their own inherent vitality, never by his evocation of them. He was Beaminster—Roddy was Beaminster. With his kindness and courtesy his eyes saw the world with the eyes of his ancestors, his tongue spoke the language that had in it no sincerity, his heart wished for all the ceremonies and lies that the Beaminster had believed in since the beginning of time.

But her discovery did not lead her much further. She had, in her heart of hearts, always known that Roddy was a Beaminster. Why then had she married him? She had married him because she had been untrue to herself, because she had herself encouraged the Beaminster blood in her to blind her eyes, because she had desired deceit rather than truth, because she had wanted the comfort that the man could give her rather than the man himself, because she had muffled and stifled and silenced that Power in her—the Power that made her restless and unquiet; the Power that was as hostile to the Beaminster faith as heaven is to hell—

And yet this vehemence of explanation did not altogether explain Roddy. Roddy was not simply a Beaminster like Uncle John or Uncle Richard or Aunt Adela. There was an elemental direct emotion in Roddy that was exactly opposed to Beaminster conventionality.

These two elements in him puzzled and even frightened her. His attitude during that first fortnight of their marriage she saw, again and again, in lesser degrees during their time abroad. She had seen him so primitive in his joy and excitement over places and people and moments—colour, food, storms, towns, passers-by, anything—that she had been astounded by the force of it. Emotions swept over him and were gone, but, whilst they were there, she knew that she counted to him for nothing. Strangest of ironies that when he was least a Beaminster, then was she farthest from him—strangest of ironies that her link with him should be the Beaminster in him.

She was frightened of his primitive passions. She had in her the instinct that one day they would touch his relationship to her and that that contact would rouse in her the full tide of the unhappiness of which she was now so conscious, and that then … what might not happen?…

And yet behind it all she felt a strange, almost pathetic satisfaction because he, after all, had in him, just as she had, his two natures at war. There at least they found some common link; her eagerness to find some link was evidence enough of the affection she had for him.

After their return to England the wilder nature in him had extended and broadened. Everything to do with Seddon Court drew it out of him; his passion for the place was wonderful to witness. Every stone of the little grey building was a jewel in his eyes; the servants, the cattle, the horses, the dogs, the flowers, the villagers, even the townspeople of Lewes drew sentiment from him.

"My old place," he would say, cuddling it to himself; he was never "sloppy" about it, but direct and simple and straightforward. It was obviously the great emotion above all other emotions.

He was most anxious that Rachel should share this with him, and during her first weeks there she thought that she would do so. Then the disquiet in her spread to the place. The house spread itself out before her now as the lure that had from the beginning tempted her.

"It was for this place and quiet that you were false to yourself–"

Roddy felt that she did not share his enthusiasm, and their difficulty over this was exactly their difficulty over everything else; simply that Roddy was the least eloquent person in the world. He could explain nothing whatever of the vague unhappiness or dissatisfaction at his heart. Rachel could have explained a great many things, but Roddy, she felt, would only look at her in his kind puzzled way and wonder why she couldn't take things as they were.

Perhaps during these last weeks he had himself felt that all was not well. Rachel thought that sometimes now through, all his kindness she detected a floating, wistful speculation on his part as to whether she were happy.

He wanted her to be happy—most tremendously he wanted it—and did she explain to him that she was not happy because she was, now, for ever attended by a sense of her own disloyalty to all that was best in her, he would have suggested a doctor or have made her a present.

Had she been some stranger and had the case been presented to him he would have probably dismissed it by saying that "having made her bed she must lie on it." "After all, she married the feller—Well then, that's her look-out."

So, perhaps, if this had been simply her trouble she would have done her bravest best to endeavour.

But there was more behind it all—far, far more.

She saw her marriage to Roddy, her struggling for self-respect, her present morbid introspection as a stage in what was now developing into a duel between herself and her grandmother.

Her grandmother had planned this marriage. Her grandmother was determined to destroy the honesty and truth in her and had chosen a Beaminster for her agent and now waited happy for the death of Rachel's soul.

But Rachel's soul should not so readily die! During all these weeks the thought of her grandmother had been continually with her. How she hated her, and with what fervour did Rachel return that hatred!

There was no melodrama in this hatred. When she had been a very little girl Rachel had somehow believed that her grandmother had been very cruel to her mother and father—She had hated her for that. Then she had seen that her grandmother disliked her and wished to tease her—so she had hated her for that also.

Her older amplification of this into principles and instincts had not altered the original vehemence of the passion, it had only given it grown-up reasons for its existence.

And so, thinking of her grandmother, she thought also of Francis Breton.

Some weeks ago she had received a letter from him and that letter was now lying in the desk of her writing-table.

She had thought that her marriage would have snapped her interest in her cousin because it would have broken that hostility with her grandmother upon which her relationship with her cousin so largely depended. But now when she saw that marriage had only intensified her hostility to the Duchess, so therefore it had intensified her perception of Breton. His letter had aroused in her, just as contact with him aroused in her, everything in her that now, for her own peace of mind, she should keep at bay. His letter had amounted to this:

"You are a rebel as I am a rebel. We have said very little, but you have recognized in me the things that I have recognized in you. You have escaped through marriage, but for me there is no escape, and if you would, for the sake of those things that we have in common, keep me from going utterly under, then you must help me—as only you can."

He did not say this nor anything at all like this. He only, very quietly, congratulated her on her marriage, hoped that she would be very happy, said that London was a little desolate and difficult, hoped that she would not think more harshly of him than she could help, and, at the very end, told her that meeting her made him feel that he was not entirely abandoned by everybody.

It was the letter of a weak man and she knew it, but it was the letter of a man who was weak exactly in the places where she also failed. And this, more than anything else, moved her.

They two alone, it seemed, were struggling to keep their feet in a world that did not need them. It had been, through these months, Rachel's sharpest unhappiness, the consciousness that Roddy and indeed everything at Seddon Court could get on so very well without her.

Nobody in London needed her—nobody here needed her. If you accepted the Beaminster doctrine, then no wife would demand more from a husband than Roddy gave Rachel—but was this not simply another proof that Rachel had made a Beaminster marriage?

Rachel had been flung straight from the schoolroom into marriage and the sensitive agonizing cry of a child to be loved by somebody—the cry that had always been so urgent in her—was urgent still.

It was exactly this comfortable sense of being a help that Roddy had not given her. Now this letter gave it to her.

But if this letter was an appeal, just as the mongrel Jacob, now at her feet, was an appeal, on the part of someone wounded and outcast, to her pity, so also was it an invitation to rebellion.

It was also a temptation to deceit and, did she answer the letter, she encouraged Breton to write again; she opened up not only a new relationship to him, but also a new relationship to all the forces that were most hostile to Roddy and her married happiness. May Eversley had once said to her: "Sit down and see, without any exaggeration or false colouring, what you've got. Take away, ruthlessly, anything that you imagine that you've got but haven't. Take away ruthlessly everything that you imagine that you would like to have but are not confident of securing—See what's happened to you in the past—Take away ruthlessly any sentimental repentances or sloppy regrets, but learn quite resolutely from your ugly mistakes."

Long ago she had written this down—now was the first necessity for applying it.

The doctrine of Truth—Truth to Oneself, the one thing that mattered. She knew that the pursuit of Truth was to her, and to every rebel against the Beaminsters, the restive Tiger. In marrying Roddy she had been untrue to herself. In writing to Breton she would be true to herself but untrue to Roddy. She was fond of Roddy although she did not love him, nor did he, really, love her. The anxiety on both their parts to avoid hurting one another was proof enough of that, she thought.

There then was the whole situation. As she felt Jacob's warm head against her foot a great agitation of loneliness and dismay and helplessness swept over her.

Tears were in her throat and eyes—Then with a strong disdain she pushed it all from her. She was growing morbid, losing her sense of humour and proportion. Here in the house there was Nita Raseley staying; in the country there were people to be called upon, to be invited, to be interested in, there was Roddy, a perfect husband.

She strangled that other Rachel, there in her room. "Now you're dead," she felt, and seemed to fling a lifeless, crumpled figure out into the snow—

She looked at herself in the glass.

"You're not Rachel Beaminster now—you're Rachel Seddon. Act accordingly and don't whine—" She washed her face and brushed her hair, and combed Jacob's hair out of his eyes, and then, determined to be sensible and cheerful and civilized, went down to tea.