The Rubicon

Lord Hayes used to dabble in chemistry in an amateur way, and Eva remembered his showing her, in his laboratory at Aston, a little bottle full of a harmless-looking liquid, the smell of which reminded her at first of soft cool peaches, but afterwards of the almond icing on the top of wedding cakes. He had told her that it was prussic acid, and that one drop of it on the tongue would kill a man. She remembered the incident clearly, because when she smelled it she had shuddered, and had thought of her own wedding cake. The bottle was sure to be there still – it stood on the second shelf to the right as you opened the door of the laboratory, and it had a large, red label on it. It was curious how accurately the whole thing came back to her.

The bottle was at Aston, and he was buried in the churchyard there. She regretted the necessity of melodrama, but she would not be alive to regret it afterwards. Eva had no fear, only a longing to get it over – to be quite sure that nothing would stop her carrying out her intention of putting herself out of the reach of him she loved. She would go down to Aston that afternoon; meanwhile, there were three or four hours to be spent in London. Well, there were very few preparations to make. When we take that longest journey of all, there is no packing to be done, no arrangements to be made, as when we go away for a three days' visit. All arrangements are made for us; death provides us with an excellent courier who will forget nothing.

There were just two notes she wished to write – one to Mrs. Davenport, saying that she had heard from Reggie, to say he was coming back to London, and that he wished to see her; that she had given him his congé once for all and had no intention of seeing him, and that it would save her trouble if Mrs. Davenport would communicate this to him.

It was not a very easy note to write for many reasons, but the other was even harder; it was to Gertrude Carston, and ran as follows: —

"You will wonder what I, of all women in the world, can have to say to you. Do not resent my writing till you have read. I have done you a cruel wrong and I am sorry for it. I allowed Reggie Davenport to fall in love with me, when I might have stopped it. If I had cared for him it would have been different, for my husband is dead, and he would have married me. In that case I should not have been sorry as I am now. But I never cared for him at all; I did it thoughtlessly, and, as far as I had any motive at all, because it amused me. My husband was the only man I ever cared for; he is dead and I wish I were dead too. It is but poor amends that I can make, but this I promise you, that I will never see Reggie Davenport again. Be very patient with him; he will love you as well as you love him, and that I know is not a little. He will come back to you and you will not hate me then.

"I wish I could have seen you to tell you these things. I think you would have believed me; and I must ask you to believe me now. You will have heard of my husband's death. May you never know what that means. If you like, show Mr. Davenport what I have written to you; it will be good that he should know that I never cared for him.

"I am not so bad as you think; I did my best to stop him caring for me when we saw Tannhäuser together; he went away to you, I know, next morning, and I hoped that that would have been the end. Perhaps, if you saw me, you would be sorry for me now. Above all, remember he will come back to you; it will be with you as if I had never come between you. The fault was mine, do not cast it up to him."

This letter took some time in the writing. It was not easy to write, but when it was done, Eva closed it for fear of drawing back, and sent both off at once to the post. She longed to finish some one of those things that lay before her to do, so that she could not go back from finishing them all. She was afraid of being weak, but not from fear of death. It was far easier to die than to live with that impassable barrier between her and happiness.

She arrived at Aston about four o'clock. She had sent a telegram to the house saying that she was coming for a few nights, and a carriage was at the station to meet her. She went first of all to the little laboratory opening off what had been her husband's study, and found that she had remembered the place where the bottle stood, with its red label. She uncorked it to make sure it was right. Yes, the almond on the top of wedding-cakes – her wedding-cake – it was exactly that smell. Then she drew her black veil over her face and went out again. There were certain grimly comic details which she had determined to go through, in order to lend probability to her act, and, with this purpose, she went into the hothouses, and the gardeners who were working saw her pick an armful of delicate orchids and white lilies. She tore the plants up like one possessed, and with her load of sweet-smelling whiteness, they saw her go down the path that led to the churchyard.

There were several loiterers there, among them the old sexton, who remembered afterwards that a lady, dressed in black, scattered a mass of flowers over Lord Hayes's grave, and then threw herself down on the fresh-turned earth, and lay there for half an hour or it might have been more. He knew her to be Lady Hayes, and when he went away, for the dusk was falling, he left her still there.

But when the sexton had gone, Eva got up. "One scene more of this weary farce," she said half aloud. "Ah, Reggie, Reggie, may you never know!"

In the gloaming she went back to the tall house, standing stately among its terraces and garden beds. The sun had sunk; only in the west was a great splash of crimson, the nightingales were singing in the elm trees, and white-winged moths fluttered about over the flower-beds. As she entered, she turned once more to look over the peaceful, unconscious earth. The river lay like a chain of crimson pools among the trees below the meadow; on the far bank was a brown-faced country lad fishing, and nearer, in the hayfields, were a few belated labourers returning from their work. Across the river she could see the red walls of her old home and the flower-beds gleaming in the light of the sunken sun. Then, for the first moment, a sudden spasm of regret, of longing, and of horror for what she was going to do came over her. It would have been better to have finished that last act at the grave itself, but an unaccountable repugnance to being found by the first passer-by had prevented her.

Next moment she had swept it away. Surely she was not going to turn coward now. She turned, and passed through the study, with step as firm as ever, and with all her indolent, unrivalled grace of movement, into the laboratory beyond.

THE END