The Patrician

For that position he saw to be very serious. In the flush of full realization, there was for him no question of renunciation. She was his, he hers; that was determined. But what, then, was he to do? There was no chance of her getting free. In her husband’s view, it seemed, under no circumstances was marriage dissoluble. Nor, indeed, to Miltoun would divorce have made things easier, believing as he did that he and she were guilty, and that for the guilty there could be no marriage. She, it was true, asked nothing but just to be his in secret; and that was the course he knew most men would take, without further thought. There was no material reason in the world why he should not so act, and maintain unchanged every other current of his life. It would be easy, usual. And, with her faculty for self-effacement, he knew she would not be unhappy. But conscience, in Miltoun, was a terrible and fierce thing. In the delirium of his illness it had become that Great Face which had marched over him. And, though during the weeks of his recuperation, struggle of all kind had ceased, now that he had yielded to his passion, conscience, in a new and dismal shape, had crept up again to sit above his heart: He must and would let this man, her husband, know; but even if that caused no open scandal, could he go on deceiving those who, if they knew of an illicit love, would no longer allow him to be their representative? If it were known that she was his mistress, he could no longer maintain his position in public life – was he not therefore in honour bound; of his own accord, to resign it? Night and day he was haunted by the thought: How can I, living in defiance of authority, pretend to authority over my fellows? How can I remain in public life? But if he did not remain in public life, what was he to do? That way of life was in his blood; he had been bred and born into it; had thought of nothing else since he was a boy. There was no other occupation or interest that could hold him for a moment – he saw very plainly that he would be cast away on the waters of existence.

So the battle raged in his proud and twisted spirit, which took everything so hard – his nature imperatively commanding him to keep his work and his power for usefulness; his conscience telling him as urgently that if he sought to wield authority, he must obey it.

He entered the beech-grove at the height of this misery, flaming with rebellion against the dilemma which Fate had placed before him; visited by gusts of resentment against a passion, which forced him to pay the price, either of his career, or of his self-respect; gusts, followed by remorse that he could so for one moment regret his love for that tender creature. The face of Lucifer was not more dark, more tortured, than Miltoun’s face in the twilight of the grove, above those kingdoms of the world, for which his ambition and his conscience fought. He threw himself down among the trees; and stretching out his arms, by chance touched a beetle trying to crawl over the grassless soil. Some bird had maimed it. He took the little creature up. The beetle truly could no longer work, but it was spared the fate lying before himself. The beetle was not, as he would be, when his power of movement was destroyed, conscious of his own wasted life. The world would not roll away down there. He would still see himself cumbering the ground, when his powers were taken, from him. This thought was torture. Why had he been suffered to meet her, to love her, and to be loved by her? What had made him so certain from the first moment, if she were not meant for him? If he lived to be a hundred, he would never meet another. Why, because of his love, must he bury the will and force of a man? If there were no more coherence in God’s scheme than this, let him too be incoherent! Let him hold authority, and live outside authority! Why stifle his powers for the sake of a coherence which did not exist! That would indeed be madness greater than that of a mad world!

There was no answer to his thoughts in the stillness of the grove, unless it were the cooing of a dove, or the faint thudding of the sheep issuing again into sunlight. But slowly that stillness stole into Miltoun’s spirit. “Is it like this in the grave?” he thought. “Are the boughs of those trees the dark earth over me? And the sound in them the sound the dead hear when flowers are growing, and the wind passing through them? And is the feel of this earth how it feels to lie looking up for ever at nothing? Is life anything but a nightmare, a dream; and is not this the reality? And why my fury, my insignificant flame, blowing here and there, when there is really no wind, only a shroud of still air, and these flowers of sunlight that have been dropped on me! Why not let my spirit sleep, instead of eating itself away with rage; why not resign myself at once to wait for the substance, of which this is but the shadow!”

And he lay scarcely breathing, looking up at the unmoving branches setting with their darkness the pearls of the sky.

“Is not peace enough?” he thought. “Is not love enough? Can I not be reconciled, like a woman? Is not that salvation, and happiness? What is all the rest, but ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing?”

And as though afraid to lose his hold of that thought, he got up and hurried from the grove.

The whole wide landscape of field and wood, cut by the pale roads, was glimmering under the afternoon sun, Here was no wild, wind-swept land, gleaming red and purple, and guarded by the grey rocks; no home of the winds, and the wild gods. It was all serene and silver-golden. In place of the shrill wailing pipe of the hunting buzzard-hawks half lost up in the wind, invisible larks were letting fall hymns to tranquillity; and even the sea – no adventuring spirit sweeping the shore with its wing – seemed to lie resting by the side of the land.

CHAPTER XV

When on the afternoon of that same day Miltoun did not come, all the chilly doubts which his presence alone kept away, crowded thick and fast into the mind of one only too prone to distrust her own happiness. It could not last – how could it?

His nature and her own were so far apart! Even in that giving of herself which had been such happiness, she had yet doubted; for there was so much in him that was to her mysterious. All that he loved in poetry and nature, had in it something craggy and culminating. The soft and fiery, the subtle and harmonious, seemed to leave him cold. He had no particular love for all those simple natural things, birds, bees, animals, trees, and flowers, that seemed to her precious and divine.

Though it was not yet four o’clock she was already beginning to droop like a flower that wants water. But she sat down to her piano, resolutely, till tea came; playing on and on with a spirit only half present, the other half of her wandering in the Town, seeking for Miltoun. After tea she tried first to read, then to sew, and once more came back to her piano. The clock struck six; and as if its last stroke had broken the armour of her mind, she felt suddenly sick with anxiety. Why was he so long? But she kept on playing, turning the pages without taking in the notes, haunted by the idea that he might again have fallen ill. Should she telegraph? What good, when she could not tell in the least where he might be? And all the unreasoning terror of not knowing where the loved one is, beset her so that her hands, in sheer numbness, dropped from the keys. Unable to keep still, now, she wandered from window to door, out into the little hall, and back hastily to the window. Over her anxiety brooded a darkness, compounded of vague growing fears. What if it were the end? What if he had chosen this as the most merciful way of leaving her? But surely he would never be so cruel! Close on the heels of this too painful thought came reaction; and she told herself that she was a fool. He was at the House; something quite ordinary was keeping him. It was absurd to be anxious! She would have to get used to this now. To be a drag on him would be dreadful. Sooner than that she would rather – yes – rather he never came back! And she took up her book, determined to read quietly till he came. But the moment she sat down her fears returned with redoubled force-the cold sickly horrible feeling of uncertainty, of the knowledge that she could do nothing but wait till she was relieved by something over which she had no control. And in the superstition that to stay there in the window where she could see him come, was keeping him from her, she went into her bedroom. From there she could watch the sunset clouds wine-dark over the river. A little talking wind shivered along the houses; the dusk began creeping in. She would not turn on the light, unwilling to admit that it was really getting late, but began to change her dress, lingering desperately over every little detail of her toilette, deriving therefrom a faint, mysterious comfort, trying to make herself feel beautiful. From sheer dread of going back before he came, she let her hair fall, though it was quite smooth and tidy, and began brushing it. Suddenly she thought with horror of her efforts at adornment – by specially preparing for him, she must seem presumptuous to Fate. At any little sound she stopped and stood listening – save for her hair and eyes, as white from head to foot as a double narcissus flower in the dusk, bending towards some faint tune played to it somewhere oft in the fields. But all those little sounds ceased, one after another – they had meant nothing; and each time, her spirit returning – within the pale walls of the room, began once more to inhabit her lingering fingers. During that hour in her bedroom she lived through years. It was dark when she left it.

CHAPTER XVI

When Miltoun at last came it was past nine o’clock

Silent, but quivering all over; she clung to him in the hall; and this passion of emotion, without sound to give it substance, affected him profoundly. How terribly sensitive and tender she was! She seemed to have no armour. But though so stirred by her emotion, he was none the less exasperated. She incarnated at that moment the life to which he must now resign himself – a life of unending tenderness, consideration, and passivity.

For a long time he could not bring himself to speak of his decision. Every look of her eyes, every movement of her body, seemed pleading with him to keep silence. But in Miltoun’s character there was an element of rigidity, which never suffered him to diverge from an objective once determined.

When he had finished telling her, she only said:

“Why can’t we go on in secret?”

And he felt with a sort of horror that he must begin his struggle over again. He got up, and threw open the window. The sky was dark above the river; the wind had risen. That restless murmuration, and the width of the night with its scattered stars, seemed to come rushing at his face. He withdrew from it, and leaning on the sill looked down at her. What flower-like delicacy she had! There flashed across him the memory of a drooping blossom, which, in the Spring, he had seen her throw into the flames; with the words: “I can’t bear flowers to fade, I always want to burn them.” He could see again those waxen petals yield to the fierce clutch of the little red creeping sparks, and the slender stalk quivering, and glowing, and writhing to blackness like a live thing. And, distraught, he began:

“I can’t live a lie. What right have I to lead, if I can’t follow? I’m not like our friend Courtier who believes in Liberty. I never have, I never shall. Liberty? What is Liberty? But only those who conform to authority have the right to wield authority. A man is a churl who enforces laws, when he himself has not the strength to observe them. I will not be one of whom it can be said: ‘He can rule others, himself – !”

“No one will know.”

Miltoun turned away.

“I shall know,” he said; but he saw clearly that she did not understand him. Her face had a strange, brooding, shut-away look, as though he had frightened her. And the thought that she could not understand, angered him.

He said, stubbornly: “No, I can’t remain in public life.”

“But what has it to do with politics? It’s such a little thing.”

“If it had been a little thing to me, should I have left you at Monkland, and spent those five weeks in purgatory before my illness? A little thing!”

She exclaimed with sudden fire:

“Circumstances aye the little thing; it’s love that’s the great thing.”

Miltoun stared at her, for the first time understanding that she had a philosophy as deep and stubborn as his own. But he answered cruelly:

“Well! the great thing has conquered me!”

And then he saw her looking at him, as if, seeing into the recesses of his soul, she had made some ghastly discovery. The look was so mournful, so uncannily intent that he turned away from it.

“Perhaps it is a little thing,” he muttered; “I don’t know. I can’t see my way. I’ve lost my bearings; I must find them again before I can do anything.”

But as if she had not heard, or not taken in the sense of his words, she said again:

“Oh! don’t let us alter anything; I won’t ever want what you can’t give.”

And this stubbornness, when he was doing the very thing that would give him to her utterly, seemed to him unreasonable.

“I’ve had it out with myself,” he said. “Don’t let’s talk about it any more.”

Again, with a sort of dry anguish, she murmured:

“No, no! Let us go on as we are!”

Feeling that he had borne all he could, Miltoun put his hands on her shoulders, and said: “That’s enough!”

Then, in sudden remorse, he lifted her, and clasped her to him.

But she stood inert in his arms, her eyes closed, not returning his kisses.

CHAPTER XVII

On the last day before Parliament rose, Lord Valleys, with a light heart, mounted his horse for a gallop in the Row. Though she was a blood mare he rode her with a plain snaffle, having the horsemanship of one who has hunted from the age of seven, and been for twenty years a Colonel of Yeomanry. Greeting affably everyone he knew, he maintained a frank demeanour on all subjects, especially of Government policy, secretly enjoying the surmises and prognostications, so pleasantly wide of the mark, and the way questions and hints perished before his sphinx-like candour. He spoke cheerily too of Miltoun, who was ‘all right again,’ and ‘burning for the fray’ when the House met again in the autumn. And he chaffed Lord Malvezin about his wife. If anything – he said – could make Bertie take an interest in politics, it would be she. He had two capital gallops, being well known to the police: The day was bright, and he was sorry to turn home. Falling in with Harbinger, he asked him to come back to lunch. There had seemed something different lately, an almost morose look, about young Harbinger; and his wife’s disquieting words about Barbara came back to Lord Valleys with a shock. He had seen little of the child lately, and in the general clearing up of this time of year had forgotten all about the matter.

Agatha, who was still staying at Valleys House with little Ann, waiting to travel up to Scotland with her mother, was out, and there was no one at lunch except Lady Valleys and Barbara herself. Conversation flagged; for the young people were extremely silent, Lady Valleys was considering the draft of a report which had to be settled before she left, and Lord Valleys himself was rather carefully watching his daughter. The news that Lord Miltoun was in the study came as a surprise, and somewhat of a relief to all. To an exhortation to luring him in to lunch; the servant replied that Lord Miltoun had lunched, and would wait.

“Does he know there’s no one here?”

“Yes, my lady.”

Lady Valleys pushed back her plate, and rose:

“Oh, well!” she said, “I’ve finished.”

Lord Valleys also got up, and they went out together, leaving Barbara, who had risen, looking doubtfully at the door.

Lord Valleys had recently been told of the nursing episode, and had received the news with the dubious air of one hearing something about an eccentric person, which, heard about anyone else, could have had but one significance. If Eustace had been a normal young man his father would have shrugged his shoulder’s, and thought: “Oh, well! There it is!” As it was, he had literally not known what to think.

And now, crossing the saloon which intervened between the dining-room and the study, he said to his wife uneasily:

“Is it this woman again, Gertrude – or what?”

Lady Valleys answered with a shrug:

“Goodness knows, my dear.”

Miltoun was standing in the embrasure of a window above the terrace. He looked well, and his greeting was the same as usual.

“Well, my dear fellow,” said Lord Valleys, “you’re all right again evidently – what’s the news?”

“Only that I’ve decided to resign my seat.”

Lord Valleys stared.

“What on earth for?”

But Lady Valleys, with the greater quickness of women, divining already something of the reason, had flushed a deep pink.

“Nonsense, my dear,” she said; “it can’t possibly be necessary, even if – ” Recovering herself, she added dryly:

“Give us some reason.”

“The reason is simply that I’ve joined my life to Mrs. Noel’s, and I can’t go on as I am, living a lie. If it were known I should obviously have to resign at once.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Lord Valleys.

Lady Valleys made a rapid movement. In the face of what she felt to be a really serious crisis between these two utterly different creatures of the other sex, her husband and her son, she had dropped her mask and become a genuine woman. Unconsciously both men felt this change, and in speaking, turned towards her.

“I can’t argue it,” said Miltoun; “I consider myself bound in honour.”

“And then?” she asked.

Lord Valleys, with a note of real feeling, interjected:

“By Heaven! I did think you put your country above your private affairs.”

“Geoff!” said Lady Valleys.

But Lord Valleys went on:

“No, Eustace, I’m out of touch with your view of things altogether. I don’t even begin to understand it.”

“That is true,” said Miltoun.

“Listen to me, both of you!” said Lady Valleys: “You two are altogether different; and you must not quarrel. I won’t have that. Now, Eustace, you are our son, and you have got to be kind and considerate. Sit down, and let’s talk it over.”

And motioning her husband to a chair, she sat down in the embrasure of a window. Miltoun remained standing. Visited by a sudden dread, Lady Valleys said:

“Is it – you’ve not – there isn’t going to be a scandal?”

Miltoun smiled grimly.

“I shall tell this man, of course, but you may make your minds easy, I imagine; I understand that his view of marriage does not permit of divorce in any case whatever.”

Lady Valleys sighed with an utter and undisguised relief.

“Well, then, my dear boy,” she began, “even if you do feel you must tell him, there is surely no reason why it should not otherwise be kept secret.”

Lord Valleys interrupted her:

“I should be glad if you would point out the connection between your honour and the resignation of your seat,” he said stiffly.

Miltoun shook his head.

“If you don’t see already, it would be useless.”

“I do not see. The whole matter is – is unfortunate, but to give up your work, so long as there is no absolute necessity, seems to me far-fetched and absurd. How many men are, there into whose lives there has not entered some such relation at one time or another? This idea would disqualify half the nation.” His eyes seemed in that crisis both to consult and to avoid his wife’s, as though he were at once asking her endorsement of his point of view, and observing the proprieties. And for a moment in the midst of her anxiety, her sense of humour got the better of Lady Valleys. It was so funny that Geoff should have to give himself away; she could not for the life of her help fixing him with her eyes.

“My dear,” she murmured, “you underestimate three-quarters, at the very least!”

But Lord Valleys, confronted with danger, was growing steadier.

“It passes my comprehension;” he said, “why you should want to mix up sex and politics at all.”

Miltoun’s answer came very slowly, as if the confession were hurting his lips:

“There is – forgive me for using the word – such a thing as one’s religion. I don’t happen to regard life as divided into public and private departments. My vision is gone – broken – I can see no object before me now in public life – no goal – no certainty.”

Lady Valleys caught his hand:

“Oh! my dear,” she said, “that’s too dreadfully puritanical!” But at Miltoun’s queer smile, she added hastily: “Logical – I mean.”

“Consult your common sense, Eustace, for goodness’ sake,” broke in Lord Valleys. “Isn’t it your simple duty to put your scruples in your pocket, and do the best you can for your country with the powers that have been given you?”

“I have no common sense.”

“In that case, of course, it may be just as well that you should leave public life.”

Miltoun bowed.

“Nonsense!” cried Lady Valleys. “You don’t understand, Geoffrey. I ask you again, Eustace, what will you do afterwards?”

“I don’t know.”

“You will eat your heart out.”

“Quite possibly.”

“If you can’t come to a reasonable arrangement with your conscience,” again broke in Lord Valleys, “for Heaven’s sake give her up, like a man, and cut all these knots.”

“I beg your pardon, sir!” said Miltoun icily.

Lady Valleys laid her hand on his arm. “You must allow us a little logic too, my dear. You don’t seriously imagine that she would wish you to throw away your life for her? I’m not such a bad judge of character as that.”

She stopped before the expression on Miltoun’s face.

“You go too fast,” he said; “I may become a free spirit yet.”

To this saying, which seemed to her cryptic and sinister, Lady Valleys did not know what to answer.

“If you feel, as you say,” Lord Valleys began once more, “that the bottom has been knocked out of things for you by this – this affair, don’t, for goodness’ sake, do anything in a hurry. Wait! Go abroad! Get your balance back! You’ll find the thing settle itself in a few months. Don’t precipitate matters; you can make your health an excuse to miss the Autumn session.”

Lady Valleys chimed in eagerly

“You really are seeing the thing out of all proportion. What is a love-affair. My dear boy, do you suppose for a moment anyone would think the worse of you, even if they knew? And really not a soul need know.”

“It has not occurred to me to consider what they would think.”

“Then,” cried Lady Valleys, nettled, “it’s simply your own pride.”

“You have said.”

Lord Valleys, who had turned away, spoke in an almost tragic voice

“I did not think that on a point of honour I should differ from my son.”

Catching at the word honour, Lady Valleys cried suddenly:

“Eustace, promise me, before you do anything, to consult your Uncle Dennis.”

Miltoun smiled.

“This becomes comic,” he said.

At that word, which indeed seemed to them quite wanton, Lord and Lady Valleys turned on their son, and the three stood staring, perfectly silent. A little noise from the doorway interrupted them.

CHAPTER XVIII

Left by her father and mother to the further entertainment of Harbinger, Barbara had said:

“Let’s have coffee in here,” and passed into the withdrawing room.

Except for that one evening, when together by the sea wall they stood contemplating the populace, she had not been alone with him since he kissed her under the shelter of the box hedge. And now, after the first moment, she looked at him calmly, though in her breast there was a fluttering, as if an imprisoned bird were struggling ever so feebly against that soft and solid cage. Her last jangled talk with Courtier had left an ache in her heart. Besides, did she not know all that Harbinger could give her?

Like a nymph pursued by a faun who held dominion over the groves, she, fugitive, kept looking back. There was nothing in that fair wood of his with which she was not familiar, no thicket she had not travelled, no stream she had not crossed, no kiss she could not return. His was a discovered land, in which, as of right, she would reign. She had nothing to hope from him but power, and solid pleasure. Her eyes said: How am I to know whether I shall not want more than you; feel suffocated in your arms; be surfeited by all that you will bring me? Have I not already got all that?