Part 16 (1/2)

”I daresay, but that is not the point. The point is that I had no idea that iron traction engine wanted to marry my daughter or anybody's daughter. The tactless beast got up steam and proposed for her the day after I had offered him the living. He had never given so much as a preliminary screech on the subject, never blown a horn to show what his horrid intentions were--I only hope that if I had known I should still have had the moral courage to appoint him. The Archbishop a.s.sures me I should--but I doubt it. I was loudly accused of nepotism, of course.

Your uncle, who died soon afterwards, forgave me in the worst of taste on his deathbed. I had no means of justifying myself. The Archbishop and Grenfell and a few other old friends believed. _Why were you not among those old friends, Wentworth?_”

”I _was_ among them,” said Wentworth, meeting the Bishop's sombre eyes.

”You never answered it, so I suppose you never received it, but at the time I wrote you a long letter a.s.suring you that I for one had not joined in the cry against you, even though my uncle did. I frankly owned that, while I regarded the appointment as an ill-considered one, I took for granted that Mr. Rawlings was suited for the place. I said that I knew you far too well to suppose even for a moment that you would have given the post to a man, even if he were your son-in-law, unless he had been competent to fill it. You never answered the letter, so I suppose it failed to reach you.”

”I received it,” said the Bishop slowly. ”I felt it to be an illuminating doc.u.ment, but it did not seem to call for an answer. It was in itself a response to a tacit appeal.”

There was a pause, and then he continued cheerfully. ”Rawlings has proved himself dreadfully competent as you prophesied, and Lucy is very happy in her new home. I came on from there this morning. My son-in-law, with the admirable prompt.i.tude and economy of time which endeared him to me as my chaplain, had arranged that every moment of my visit should be utilised; that I should christen their first child, dedicate a thank-offering in the shape of a lectern, consecrate the new portion of the churchyard, open a reading-room, and say a few cordial words at a drawing-room meeting before I left at mid-day. I told him if he went on like this he would certainly come to grief and be made a bishop some day. But he only remarked that he was not solicitous of high preferment. I think you would like Rawlings if you knew him better. You and he have a certain amount in common. I must own that I am glad that it is Lucy who has to put up with him and not I. I should think even G.o.d Almighty must find him rather difficult to live with at times. And now, Wentworth, if I am to be up and away at c.o.c.k-crow, I must go to bed.”

But the Bishop did not go to bed at once when Wentworth had escorted him to his room.

”It was no use,” he said to himself. ”It was worth trying, but it was no use. He never saw that he had misjudged me. He met my eye. He has a straight, clean eye. He is sincere as far as he goes, but how far _does_ he go? He has never made that first step towards sincerity of doubting his own sincerity. He mistakes his moods for convictions. He has never suspected his own motives, or turned them inside out. He suspects those of others instead. He is like a crab. He moves sideways by nature, and he thinks that everyone else who moves otherwise is not straightforward, and that he must make allowances for them. According to his lights he has behaved generously by me. Has he! d.a.m.n him! G.o.d forgive me. Well, I must stick to him, for I believe I am almost the only friend he has left in the world.”

CHAPTER XII

Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?--D. G. ROSSETTI.

Fay did not sleep that night.

For a long time past, she seemed to have been gradually, inevitably approaching, dragging reluctant feet towards something horrible, unendurable. She could not look this veiled horror in the face. She never attempted to define it to herself. Her one object was to get away from it.

It had not sprung into life full grown. It had gradually taken form after Michael's imprisonment. At first it had been only an uneasy ghost that could be laid, a spectre across her path that could be avoided; but since she had come home it had slowly attained gigantic and terrifying proportions. It loomed before her now as a vague but insistent menace, from which she could no longer turn away.

A great change was coming over Fay, but she tacitly resisted it. She did not understand it, nor realise that the menace came from within her gates, was of the nature of an insurrection in the citadel of self. We do not always recognise the voice of the rebel soul when first it begins to speak hoa.r.s.ely, unintelligibly, urgently from the dark cell to which we have relegated it.

Some of us are so const.i.tuted that we can look back at our past and see it as a gradation of steps, a sort of sequence, and can thus gain a kind of inkling of the nature of the next step against which we are even now striking our feet.

But poor Fay saw her life only as shattered, meaningless fragments, confused, mutilated ma.s.ses without coherence. The ma.s.ses and the gaps between them were of the same substance in her eyes. She wandered into her past as a child might wander among the rubbish heaps of its old home in ruins. She was vaguely conscious that there had been a design once in those unsightly mounds, that she had once lived in them. On that remnant of crazy wall clung a strip of wall-paper which she recognised as the paper in her own nursery; here a vestige of a staircase that had led to her mother's room. And as a child will gather up a little frockful of sticks and fallen remnants, and then drop them when they prove heavy, so Fay picked up out of her past tiny disjointed odds and ends of ideas and disquieting recollections, only to cast them aside again as burdensome and useless.

The point to which she wandered back most frequently--to stare blankly at it without comprehension--was her husband's appeal to her on his deathbed. To-night she had gone back to it again as to a tottering wall.

She had worn a little pathway over heaps of miserable conjectures and twisted memories towards that particular place.

She saw again the duke's dying face, and the tender fixity of his eyes.

She could almost hear his difficult waning voice saying:

”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?”

_Since a year he does not see them._

It was two years now.

The shock to Fay at the moment those words were spoken had been that her husband had known all the time. That revelation blotted out all other thoughts for the time being. It even blotted out all considerations of her own conduct towards Michael, which it might conceivably have rendered acute. It made her mind incapable of receiving the impression that the duke had perhaps hoped his deliberate last words might make on it; that surely she would not, after his death, still keep Michael in his cell. Throughout the early weeks of her widowhood Fay remained as one stunned. Even Magdalen, who hurried out to her, supposed at first that she was stunned by grief.

”Then Andrea knew all the time.” That was the constant refrain of her bewildered, half-paralysed mind.

Gradually in the quiet monotonous life at Priesthope the question made itself felt. ”_How did he know?_”