Part 14 (1/2)

'I have remembered Miss Bretherton; you must go to her to-morrow, after--the funeral'

'I can't bear the thought of leaving you,' said Kendal, laying a brotherly hand on his shoulder, 'Let me write to-day.'

Paul shook his head. 'She has been ill. Any way it will be a great shock; but if you go it will be better.'

Kendal resisted a little more, but it seemed as if Marie's motherly carefulness over the bright creature who had charmed her had pa.s.sed into Paul. He was saying what Marie would have said, taking thought as she would have taken it for one she loved, and it was settled as he wished.

When his long pacing in the Champs Elysees was over Kendal went back to find Paul busy with his wife's letters and trinkets, turning them over With a look of s.h.i.+vering forlornness, as though the thought of the uncompanioned lifetime to come were already closing upon him like some deadly chill in the air. Beside him lay two miniature cases open; one of them was the case which Eustace had received from his sister's hand on the afternoon before her death, and both of them contained identical portraits of Marie in her first brilliant womanhood.

'Do you remember them?' Paul said in his husky Voice, pointing them out to him. 'They were done when you were at college and she was twenty-three. Your mother had two taken--one for herself and one for your old aunt Marion. Your mother left me hers when she died, and your aunt's copy of it came back to us last year. Tell Miss Bretherton its history.

She will prize it. It is the best picture still.'

Kendal made a sign of a.s.sent and took the case. Paul rose and stood beside him, mechanically spreading out his hands to the fire.

'To-morrow, as soon as you are gone, I shall go off to Italy. There are some little places in the south near Naples that she was very fond of. I shall stay about there for a while. As soon as I feel I can, I shall come back to the Senate and my work. It is the only thing left me,--she was so keen about it.' His voice sank into a whisper, and a long silence fell upon them. Women in moments of sorrow have the outlet of tears and caresses; men's great refuge is silence; but the silence may be charged with sympathy and the comfort of a shared grief. It was so in this case.

The afternoon light was fading, and Kendal was about to rise and make some necessary preparations for his journey, when Paul detained him, looking up at him with sunken eyes which seemed to carry in them all the history of the two nights just past. 'Will you ever ask her what Marie wished?' The tone was the even and pa.s.sionless tone of one who for the moment feels none of the ordinary embarra.s.sments of intercourse; Kendal met it with the same directness.

'Some day I shall ask her, or at least I shall let her know; but it will be no use.'

Paul shook his head, but whether in protest or agreement Kendal could hardly tell. Then he went back to his task of sorting the letters, and let the matter drop. It seemed as if he were scarcely capable of taking an interest in it for its own sake, but simply as a wish, a charge of Marie's.

Kendal parted from him in the evening with an aching heart, and was haunted for hours by the memory of the desolate figure returning slowly into the empty house, and by a sharp prevision of all the lonely nights and the uncomforted morrows which lay before the stricken man.

But, as Paris receded farther and farther behind him, and the sea drew nearer, and the sh.o.r.es of the country which held Isabel Bretherton, it was but natural that even the grip upon him of this terrible and startling calamity should relax a little, and that he should realise himself as a man seeking the adored woman, his veins still beating with the currents of youth, and the great unguessed future still before him.

He had left Marie in the grave, and his life would bear the scar of that loss for ever. But Isabel Bretherton was still among the living, the warm, the beautiful, and every mile brought him nearer to the electric joy of her presence. He took a sad strange pleasure in making the contrast between the one picture and the other as vivid as possible.

Death and silence on the one side--oh, how true and how irreparable! But on the other, he forced on his imagination till it drew for him an image of youth and beauty so glowing that it almost charmed the sting out of his grief. The English paper which he succeeded in getting at Calais contained the announcement: 'Miss Bretherton has, we are glad to say, completely recovered from the effects of the fainting fit which so much alarmed the audience at the _Calliope_ last week. She was able to play _Elvira_ as usual last night, and was greeted by a large and sympathetic house.' He read it, and turned the page hastily, as if what the paragraph suggested was wholly distasteful to him. He refused altogether to think of her as weak or suffering; he shrank from his own past misgivings, his own prophecies about her. The world would be a mere dark prison-house if her bright beauty were over-clouded! She was not made for death, and she should stand to him as the image of all that escapes and resists and defies that tyrant of our years, and pain, his instrument and herald.

He reached London in the midst of a rainy fog. The endless black streets stretched before him in the dreary December morning like so many roads into the nether regions; the gas-lamps scattered an unseasonable light through the rain and fog; it was the quintessence of murky, cheerless winter.

He reached his own rooms, and found his man up and waiting for him, and a meal ready. It was but three days since he had been last there, the open telegram was still lying on the table. One of his first acts was to put it hastily out of sight. Over his breakfast he planned his emba.s.sy to Miss Bretherton. The best time to find her alone, he imagined, would be about mid-day, and in the interval he would put his books and papers to rights. They lay scattered about--books, proofs, and ma.n.u.script. As his orderly hands went to work upon them, he was conscious that he had never been so remote from all that they represented. But his nature was faithful and tenacious, and under the outward sense of detachment there was an inward promise of return. 'I will come back to you,' seemed to be the cry of his thought. 'You shall be my only friends. But first I must see her, and all my heart is hers!'

The morning dragged away, and at half-past eleven he went out, carrying the little case with him. As he stood outside the Bayswater house, in which she had settled for the winter, he realised that he had never yet been under her roof, never yet seen her at home. It was his own fault.

She had asked him in her gracious way, on the first night of _Elvira_, to come and see her. But, instead of doing so, he had buried himself in his Surrey lodging, striving to bring the sober and austere influences of the country to bear upon the feverish indecision of his mood. Perhaps his disappearance and silence had wounded her; after all, he knew that he had some place in her thoughts.

The servant who opened the door demurred to his request to see Miss Bretherton. 'The doctor says, sir, that at home she must keep quiet; she has not seen any visitors just lately.' But Kendal persisted, and his card was taken in, while he waited the result. The servant hurried along the ground-floor pa.s.sage, knocked at the door at the farther end, went in for a moment, and came out beckoning to him. He obeyed with a beating heart, and she threw open the door for him.

Inside stood Isabel Bretherton, with eager surprise and pleasure in her whole att.i.tude. She had just risen from her chair, and was coming forward; a soft white cashmere shawl hung around her; her dress, of some dark rich stuff, fell with the flowing, stately lines peculiar to it; her face was slightly flushed, and the brilliancy of her colour, of her hair, of her white, outstretched hand, seemed to Kendal to take all the chill and gloom out of the winter air. She held some proof sheets of a new play in her hand, and the rest lay piled beside her on a little table.

'How kind of you, Mr. Kendal,' she said, advancing with her quick impulsive step towards him. 'I thought you had forgotten us, and I have been wanting your advice so badly! I have just been complaining of you a little in a letter to Madame de Chateauvieux! She--'

Then she suddenly stopped, checked and startled by his face. He was always colourless and thin, but the two nights he had just pa.s.sed through had given him an expression of haggard exhaustion. His black eyes seemed to have lost the keenness which was so remarkable in them, and his prematurely gray hair gave him almost a look of age in spite of the lightness and pliancy of the figure.

He came forward, and took her hand nervously and closely in his own.

'I have come to bring you sad news,' he said gently, and seeking anxiously word by word how he might soften what, after all, could not be softened. 'M. de Chateauvieux sent me to you at once, that you should not hear in any other way. But it must be a shock to you--for you loved her!'

'Oh!' she cried, interrupting him, speaking in short, gasping words, and answering not so much his words as his look. 'She is ill--she is in danger--something has happened?'