Part 8 (2/2)
A year later the duke died.
He made a dignified exit. An attack of vertigo to which he was liable came on when he was on horseback. He was thrown and dragged, and only survived a few days as by a miracle. His wife, who had seen little of him during the last year, saw still less of him during the days of his short illness. But when the end was close at hand he sent for her, and asked her to remain in a distant recess of his room during the painful hours.
”It will be a happier memory for you,” he said gently to her between the paroxysms of suffering, ”to think that you were there.”
And so propped high in a great carved bedstead in the octagonal room where the Colle Altos were born, and where, when they could choose, they died, the duke lay awaiting the end.
He had received extreme unction. The chanting choir had gone. The priest had closed his pale fingers upon the crucifix, when he desired to be left alone with his wife.
She drew near timidly and stood beside his bed.
He bent his tranquil, kindly eyes upon her.
”Good-bye, my Francesca,” he said. ”May G.o.d and his angels protect you, and give you peace.”
A belated compunction seized her.
”I wish I had been a better wife to you, Andrea,” she said brokenly, laying her hand on his.
He made the ghost of a courteous, deprecating gesture, and raised her hand to his lips. The effort exhausted him. He closed his eyes and his hand fell out of hers.
Through the open window came a sudden waft of hot carnations, a long drawn breath of the rapturous Italian spring.
It reached the duke. He stirred slightly, and opened his eyes once more.
Once more they fell on Fay, and it seemed to her as if with the last touch of his cold lips upon her hand their relation of husband and wife had ceased. Even at that moment she realised with a sinking sense of impotence how slight her hold on him from first to last had been.
Clearly he had already forgotten it, pa.s.sed beyond it, would never remember it again.
”It is spring,” he said, looking full at her with tender fixity, and for a moment she thought his mind was wandering. ”Spring once more. The sun s.h.i.+nes. He does not see them, the spring and the suns.h.i.+ne. Since a year he does not see them. Francesca, how much longer will you keep your cousin Michael in prison?”
And thereupon the duke closed his eyes on this world, and went upon his way.
CHAPTER VII
A bachelor's an unfinished thing ... He wants somebody to listen to his talk.--EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
Reader, do you know Barford, in Hamps.h.i.+re? If you don't, I can tell you how to get to it. You take train from Victoria, and you get out at Saundersfoot. There is nothing at Saundersfoot, except a wilderness of lodgings and a tin station and a high wind. It need not detain an active mind beyond the necessary moment of enquiring by which road it may be most quickly left. I cannot tell you who Saunders was, nor why the watering-place was called after his foot. But if you walk steadily away from it for five miles inland, along the white chalky road between the downs, you will arrive at the little village of Barford.
There is only one road, so you cannot miss your way. Little twisty lanes fretted with sheep-tracks drop down into it now and then from the broad-shouldered downs on either side, but take no notice of them. If you persevere, you will in due course see the village of Barford lying in front of you, which, at a little distance, looks as if it had been carelessly swept into a crease between the downs, while a few cottages and houses on the hillside seem to have adhered to the ground, and remained stuck where they were when the sweeping took place.
After you have pa.s.sed the pond and the post office, and before you reach the school, you will see a lodge, and an old Italian iron gateway, flanked by a set of white wooden k.n.o.bs planted in the ground on either side, held together by chains. The white k.n.o.bs are apparently there in order to upset carriages as they drive in or out. But very few carriages have driven in or out during the last two years, except those of the owner of Barford Manor, Wentworth Maine. Wentworth, since he inherited the place from his uncle five years ago, had always led a somewhat secluded life. But during the last two years, ever since his half-brother, Michael, had been sentenced and imprisoned in Italy, Wentworth had withdrawn himself even more from the society of his neighbours. He continued to shoot and hunt, and to do his duties as a magistrate and as a supporter of the Conservative party, but his thin, refined face had a certain worn, pinched look, which spoke of long tracts of solitary unhappiness. And the habit of solitude was growing on him.
The old Manor House, standing in its high-walled gardens, its sunny low rooms looking out across the down, seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of ancient peace, which consorted as ill with the present impression of the place as does old Gobelin tapestry with a careful modern patch upon its surface. The patch, however, adroitly copied, is seen to be an innovation.
The old house, which had known so much, had sheltered so much, had kept counsel so long, seemed to resent the artificial peace that its present owner had somewhat laboriously constructed round himself, within its mellow, ivied walls.
There is a fict.i.tious tranquillity which is always on the verge of being broken, which depends largely on uninterrupted hours, on confidential, velvet-shod servants, on a brooding dove in a cedar, on the absence of the inharmonious or jarring elements which pervade daily life.
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