Part 13 (1/2)
”I shall not be satisfied if I may not send the rest. Miss Campion, I came to say----”
Again he stammered and broke down. Lettice, who thought that he had already delivered himself of his mental burden, was a little startled now, especially as he got up and stood by her chair at the window.
”What a lovely little garden!” he said. ”Why, you are quite in the country here. What delightful roses! I--I want to say something else, Miss Campion!”
”Yes,” said Lettice, faintly, and doing her best to feel indifferent.
”We have not known each other long, but it seems to me that we know each other well--at any rate that I know you well. Before I met you I had never made the acquaintance of a woman who at the same time commanded my respect, called my mind into full play, and aroused my sympathy. These last few months have been the happiest of my life, because I have been lifted above my old level, and have known for the first time what the world might yet be to me. There is something more I want to say to you.
I think you know that I have been married--that my wife is--is no more.
You may or may not have heard that miserable story, of my folly, and----”
”Oh, no!” cried Lettice, impulsively. ”It is true that Mrs. Hartley told me of the great trouble which fell upon you in the loss of which you speak.”
”The great trouble--yes! That is how Mrs. Hartley would put it. And the Grahams, have they told you nothing?”
”Nothing more.”
A look as of relief pa.s.sed across his face, followed by a spasm of pain; and he stood gazing wearily through the window.
”Perhaps they do not know, for I have never spoken of it to anyone. But I want to speak; I want to get rid of some of the wretched burden, and an irresistible impulse has brought me here to you. I am utterly selfish; it is like taking your money, or your ma.n.u.scripts, or your flowers, or anything that you value, to come in this way and almost insist on telling you my sordid story. It is altogether unjustifiable--it is a mad presumption which I cannot account for, except by saying that a blind instinct made me think that you alone, of all the people in this world, could help me if you would!”
Lettice was deeply moved by various conflicting emotions; but there was no hesitation in the sympathy which went out to meet this strange appeal. Even her reason would probably have justified him in his unconventional behavior; but it was sympathy, and not reason, which prompted her to welcome and encourage his confidence.
”If I can help you--if it helps you to tell me anything, please speak.”
”I knew I was not mistaken!” he said, with kindling eyes, as he sat down in a low chair opposite to her. ”I will not be long--I will not tell you all; that would be useless, and needlessly painful. I married in haste, after a week's acquaintance, the daughter of a French refugee, who came to London in 1870, and earned a living by teaching his language to the poorest cla.s.s of pupils. Don't ask me why I married her. No doubt I thought it was for love. She was handsome, and even charming in her way, and for some months I tried to think I was happy. Then, gradually, she let me wake from my fool's paradise. I found--you will despise me for a dupe!--that I was not the first man she had pretended to love. Nay, it was to me that she pretended--the other feeling was probably far more of a reality. Before the year was out she had renewed her intimacy with my rival--a compatriot of her own. You will suppose that we parted at once when things came to this pa.s.s; but for some time I had only suspicion to go upon. I knew that she was often away from home, and that she had even been to places of amus.e.m.e.nt in this man's company; but when I spoke to her she either lulled my uneasiness or pretended to be outraged by my jealousy. Soon there was no bond of respect left between us; but as a last chance, I resolved to break up our little home in England, and go abroad. I could no longer endure my life with her. She had ceased to be a wife in any worthy sense of the word, and was now my worst enemy, an object of loathing rather than of love. Still, I remember that I had a gleam of hope when I took her on the Continent, thinking it just possible that by removing her from her old a.s.sociations, I might win her back to a sense of duty. I would have borne her frivolity; I would have endured to be bound for life to a doll or a log, if only she could have been outwardly faithful.
”Well, to make a long story short, we had not been abroad more than six weeks when this man I have told you about made his appearance on the scene. She must have written to him and asked him to come, at the very moment when she was cheating me with a show of reviving affection; and I own that the meeting of these two one day in the hotel gardens at Aix-les-Bains drove me into a fit of temporary madness. We quarrelled; I sent him a challenge, and we fought. He was not much hurt, and I escaped untouched. The man disappeared, and I have never seen him from that day to this, but I have some reason to think that he is dead.”
He paused for a moment or two; and Lettice could not refrain from uttering the words, ”Your wife?” in a tone of painful interest.
”My wife?” he repeated slowly. ”Ah yes, my wife. Well, after a stormy scene with her, she became quiet and civil. She even seemed anxious to please me, and to set my mind at rest. But she was merely hatching her last plot against me, and I was as great a fool and dupe at this moment as I had ever been before.”
And then, with averted face, he told the story of his last interview with her on the hills beyond Culoz. ”I will not repeat anything she said,” he went on--it was his sole reservation--”although some of her sentences are burned into my brain for ever. I suppose because they were so true.”
”Oh, no!” Lettice murmured involuntarily, and looking at him with tear-dimmed eyes. She was intensely interested in his story, and Alan Walcott felt a.s.sured by her face that the sympathy he longed for was not withheld.
”My wound was soon healed,” he said when the details of that terrible scene were told; ”but I was not in a hurry to come back to England. When I did come back, I avoided as much as possible the few people who knew me; and I have never to this moment spoken of my deliverance, which I suppose they talk of as my loss.”
”They think,” said Lettice, slowly, for she was puzzled in her mind, and did not know what to say, ”that you are a widower?”
”And what am I?” he cried, walking up and down the room in a restless way. ”Am I not a widower? Has she not died completely out of my life? I shall never see her again--she is dead and buried, and I am free? Ah, do not look at me so doubtfully, do not take back the sympathy which you promised me! Are you going to turn me away, hungry and thirsty for kindness, because you imagine that my need is greater than you thought it five minutes ago? I will not believe you are so cruel!”
”We need not a.n.a.lyze my feelings, Mr. Walcott. I could not do that myself, until I have had time to think. But--is it right to leave other people under the conviction that your wife is actually dead, when you know that in all probability she is not?”
”I never said she was dead! I never suggested or acted a lie. May not a man keep silence about his own most sacred affairs?”
”Perhaps he may,” said Lettice. ”It is not for me to judge you--and at any rate, you have told me!”