Isabel Clarendon, Vol. II (of II)

This visit Kingcote repeated twice before the end of July, not oftener, though he had invitations to do so. In the days through which he now began to live, it was seldom that he could regain the mood in which it was possible to mingle with society of any kind, even though the process might have relieved him. It was nothing less than an illness which fell upon him, an illness of the nerves and the imagination. There were intermissions of suffering, mostly the results of exhaustion; his torment rose to the point at which a mental catastrophe seemed imminent, then came a period of languor, in which he resumed strength to suffer again. Later, these three months became all but a blank in his memory, the details of the time, with the exception of one or two moments, forgotten.

He waited several days into the new week without hearing from Isabel, and at last had a very brief note from her, asking him to call before three o’clock. It was in his mind to write a refusal, saying that he was sure she had no time to give him, but this he could not carry out. He found her just leaving the dining-room; she had lunched alone. Her spirits were extravagant; he had never seen her so gay. The contrast with his own gloomy state did not tend to brighten him.

“What has happened to excite you so?” he asked.

“Happened? Nothing at all. Only I am well, and happy, and the sun shines; isn’t that enough to put one in good spirits?”

“Happy?” he repeated, rather bitterly.

“Did you wish me to be miserable?” she exclaimed merrily. “It is you who make my happiness; why don’t you keep some for yourself?”

“There you mistake. I have nothing whatever to do with it.”

“No, the mistake is yours, Bernard. I tell you the truth, but you will not, will not believe me. I can’t help it; I only know that you will believe me some day. Time will be on my side.”

He sat mute and downcast.

“Oh, why do you take life so hard?” she asked him. “It is full of good things to make the time pass, if you will only see them. Tell me now, what have you been doing since I saw you?”

“Nothing—waiting to hear from you.”

“Ah, that is not true! Who was it that went to Chelsea on Sunday, and made himself very agreeable indeed, charmingly agreeable, so that young ladies speak most flatteringly of him? I know, you see. Indeed I was just a little jealous, or should have been, if jealousy were not such a foolish thing.”

“That I don’t think you would ever feel.”

“Perhaps not. I certainly should not without cause, and, if I had cause, that would be a better reason still for resisting it.”

“Not if you–”

He interrupted himself, and turned away impatiently.

“You were going to say something very unkind, and you thought better of it. But you sadden me; it is dreadful to see you so low-spirited. Have you thought,” she asked, with a little hesitation, “of finding some occupation for your time?”

“Yes, I have thought constantly, but of course without result. You think I should not trouble you so often if my time were taken up?”

He could not help it. Almost everything she said converted itself in his seething mind to a bitter significance. This was the first reference she had made to the necessity under which he stood. It was natural enough that the subject should occupy her thoughts; he had several times wondered, indeed, that she kept silence about it. Now that she spoke, he attributed to her unkind motives.

They talked on in this fruitless way. He saw her look at the clock, and endeavoured to leave his seat; no doubt she was going somewhere, or expected visitors. Minute after minute he said to himself that he would go, yet still remained. The door opened, and Mr. Asquith was announced.

Robert had been long back from his yachting; at present he was entering with heartiness into the pleasures of the London season. His mode of life seemed to agree with him; there was ruddy health on his cheeks, and his whole appearance bespoke the man who found life one with enjoyment. Kingcote had heard his name in former times from the Vissians, but Isabel had never mentioned her cousin to him. He regarded him with involuntary dislike; the placid good-humour, the genial contentment of Asquith’s look and voice were enough to excite this feeling under the circumstances, and the frank kindness with which Isabel received him naturally increased it.

“Colonel Stratton,” Robert remarked, more suo, as he seated himself. “I met him at the top of Park Lane, and he was most anxious to discover my exact opinion of the atmospheric conditions of the day; seemed delighted when I agreed with him that there was moisture in the air.”

Isabel laughed heartily.

“Was that all that passed between you?” she inquired.

“Not quite. He wanted me to go with him to Barnet—was it Barnet? on a coach driven by a friend of his, a Captain Cullen—Hullen–”

“Captain Mullen,” Isabel corrected, much amused. “He is a first-rate whip. Why didn’t you go? It would have been delightful.”

“I’m afraid the company would have been rather too military for my tastes. Besides, I told him I was coming to see you. He begged me to–”

“To do what?”

“Nay, he himself paused at the ‘to’; the rest I was doubtless to understand. I presume from his manner that I was to present his respects to you.”

“Our friend Colonel Stratton,” Isabel explained to Kingcote, “is habitually at a loss for words. He really is the shyest man I ever knew. I tease him dreadfully, and I don’t think he minds it a bit.”

“Coach-driving,” remarked Robert. “Singular taste that. One is disposed to suggest hereditary influences.”

Kingcote rose.

“Must you go?” Isabel asked.

“I must,” was the brief reply.

“I don’t think you ever met Mr. Kingcote at Knightswell?” Isabel said, when the door had closed.

“I remember your speaking of him. Is he in London permanently?”

“I believe so.”

A purpose, which Isabel had had in mentioning him, passed, and she spoke of other things....

Kingcote was walking about the streets. He avoided home nowadays as much as possible; his madness seemed harder to bear in his own room, or with Mary watching him; it was always best to walk himself into fatigue, that there might be a chance of sleep in the night. Why had he not obeyed her hint, and left before visitors could arrive? And there again was the sting; she wished him to leave. Did she expect this cousin of hers, this prosperous, well-fed, easy-mannered gentleman? That mattered little; the one certainty was that her love grew less and less. She had not even the outward affectionateness which had once marked her when she spoke with him alone. Knowing perfectly the power of help and soothing that lay in her lightest loving word, she would not trouble to find one, not one. She was gay in the face of his misery. Love would be affected by subtle sympathies; yet she slept peacefully through those nights when he wrestled with anguish; when he called upon her, she was deaf to the voice she should have heard. So many other voices claimed her ear; those that murmured graceful things in bright drawing-rooms, those that flattered insidiously when she was enjoying her triumphs. It had been a mistake; to her an occasion, perhaps, for regrets and annoyances, to him a source of unutterable woe. Even if she really loved him at first, how could she continue to, now that every day brought something to lower him in her estimation? The worst of his suffering was in the thought that he himself was his own ruin. Could he from the first have borne himself like a man, have been affectionate without excess, have taken some firm, direct course in his difficulties, above all have seemed to be independent of her, then he might have held her his own. But that was requiring of him to be another than he was. Out of weakness strength could not come. His passion was that of a woman. Could he even now put on a consistent show of independence, it might not be too late. Why had he not taken her at her word when she offered to return to Knights well? Was it too late?

Too late; for in love that which is undone never can be made good. He was not worthy of her love; the consciousness was burnt in upon his brain. Had she met him now for the first time, and seen him as now he was, would she have loved him? Never; to think it was to rob her of woman’s excellence. He had no one but himself to blame. He must bear it; go lower in her sight day after day, see her impatience grow, feel friendship wholly supplanting love, and fatigued endurance take the place of friendship. It was his fate; he was himself, and could not become another....

Ah, he had indeed drunk too deeply of that magic water of the Knights Well, the spring at her gates! One draught, and it would have sent him on his way refreshed. But the water was so insidiously sweet....

He wrote her letters again, in which he spared neither reproach nor charge of cruelty. Isabel replied to him very shortly, but in pitying forbearance. At length she begged him earnestly to seek employment. He was undermining his health; it was imperative that he should apply his mind to some regular pursuit. Her he was making grievously unhappy; she would have to leave London. “Why, then, does she not?” he exclaimed angrily when he read this. “She knows it would be better for me.” Another cause of complaint had grown up in his thoughts; why had she never offered to come and see his sister? It would have been graceful, it would have been kind. But it would have been to commit herself too far, he reasoned. She was doing her best to show him in the gentlest way that the past must not be remembered too seriously. She never spoke now, never, of the day when she would become his wife. That was in any case at a year’s distance. Another year! He laughed scornfully. In a year it would be as if they had never met.

“Isabel,” he wrote to her one day, when memories had touched him, “I have given you all the love of which my soul is capable, and the soul of man never gave birth to more. I am weak and contemptible in your sight; it is because I faint for love of you. Oh, why have you stripped from my life every leaf and blossom, leaving only that red flower of passion which burns itself away? Every interest I once cherished has died in feeding this love. I cannot see the world around me; wherever I look there is your face, in thousandfold repetition, with every difference of expression I have ever beheld upon it. I see the first smile with which you greeted me—the first of all; I see the look in which your love dawned, the flush of rapture with which you listened to my earliest words of gratitude and devotion.

“I see you in your careless merriment, and in your pained coldness; I see you when you smile on others. I shall never know again that heaven of your unspoken tenderness, never, never! It was well that you made no vows to me; how well it is that you have seen my unworthiness before it was too lates of gratitude and devotion. I see you in your careless merriment, and in your pained coldness; I see you when you smile on others. I shall never know again that heaven of your unspoken tenderness, never, never! It was well that you made no vows to me; how well it is that you have seen my unworthiness before it was too late!”

She found that letter waiting for her when she reached home long after midnight, coming from a crowded scene, with laughter and music still ringing in her ears. Till her maid had left her she did not open it; it was with fear—as always of late—that she at length broke the envelope. She read, and tears filled her eyes. They came rushing, irresistible; she ceased from her endeavour to check them, and wept as she had not wept for long years. Through the dark hours she lay, with the letter in her hand, and only slept when morning was at her window.

She wrote, but did not ask him to come to her....

Two occasions marked themselves afterwards in his memory. To lose himself for an hour he went one night to the theatre. It was now early in July; Isabel was staying in town longer than she had purposed. He reached a seat in the pit, and sat through a farce which he in vain tried to follow. Then he watched the people who were beginning to fill the stalls. Two ladies came forward; he thought he knew the first, and remembered Mrs. Stratton; behind her was Isabel, then a gentleman—Colonel Stratton, he supposed. She was exquisitely beautiful, dressed as he had never seen her; the lights flashed upon her; her face had its own radiance. He forced his way out of the crowd, and into the street....

He called and asked for her, early one afternoon, and was told that she was not at home. Half-an-hour’s wandering brought him, scarcely with purpose, back into the same street. From a distance he saw that her carriage was waiting before the door, and immediately she came out and entered it. He turned away with blackness before his eyes....

He wrote and told her of that. “It is true, dear,” she answered, “and you must not blame me. I was obliged to leave home early, and I knew that if I saw you for a moment it would only cause you worse trouble than to believe I was away. You oblige me to do such things as this; I dare not be quite frank with you as I wish to be; you often frighten me. There is nothing that I wish to hide from you on my own account. What should there be?”

And so the time wore on to the end of July. Poor Mary’s existence had become one of ceaseless grief. Only two or three times had she ventured to entreat her brother to take her into his confidence, and let her share his trouble. He could not tell her the truth; it would have shamed him to open his heart even to her.

He put it all on the troubles which were in the future, the impossibility of marrying whilst he remained penniless.

“And I am the cause of that,” Mary said, in deep sorrow.

“You the cause? You misunderstand me entirely. It would have been precisely the same if the old state of things had remained unaltered. In any case I was penniless—from her point of view.”

Mary could gather from the last words a sense he did not consciously put into them. She had her own explanation of her brother’s dreadful state. Dreadful it was, no less. His face was wasted as if by consumption. He scarcely ate enough to support life. His sleeplessness had become a disease. He never smiled, and spoke for the most part in a weary, listless tone. Mary believed that there was death in his hands.

There came the day for leave-taking; he was to go to her—Isabel wrote—in the afternoon, and she would be at home to no one else.

“You are glad that I am going?” she said.

“Yes, I am glad. I had rather think of you among the fields.”

“Ada is going with me, to stay for a week or two. She proposed it herself; I was surprised.”

“But she had not left you finally?”

“I quite believed she had.”

They talked without any kind of emotion, but each avoided the other’s eyes. Kingcote had his usual look of illness and fatigue; Isabel was not without signs that the season had been a little too much for her strength.

“I am going to Scotland in a fortnight,” she mentioned. “Of course you shall have my address. Then in October you will come down some day and see me, will you not?”

“It is better that I should promise nothing. I can’t say where I may be in October.”

“Always distrusting the future! I dare not do that. The future is my best friend.”

“Doubtless!” he replied.

“And are not our futures one and the same, Bernard?”

“Let us say so, and think so if we can. But I know you have many things to occupy you. Let us say good-bye.”

“I don’t like that word. Au revoir is better.”

“Why not good-bye? It only means ‘God be with you.’”

“Does it? Then, good-bye!”

She offered her lips and he just touched them. Otherwise his self-torment would not have been complete.