Мэри Элизабет Брэддон
Wyllard's Weird
CHAPTER X.
"TOUCH LIPS AND PART WITH TEARS."
While Edward Heathcote was on the other side of the Channel trying to find a solution for the problem of Léonie Lemarque's death, which should also be a complete acquittal of Hilda's suitor, Bothwell himself was bent upon solving his own particular problem, that great perplexity of his social life, which had weighed upon him more or less heavily for the last three years. He had been to Plymouth twice since his decisive interview with Hilda; but on each occasion it had been impossible for him to obtain so much as five minutes' tête-à-tête with the lady he went to see; and that which he had to say to her could not be said in five minutes, or in five times five minutes. And now, while his champion was faithfully toiling in his interest, and while Hilda was giving him all her thoughts, and most of her prayers, Bothwell set out on his familiar Plymouth journey for the third time within ten days, and with a letter in his pocket which held out the hope of an opportunity for confidential talk.
"You looked miserable the last time you were here," wrote the lady, "and you looked as if you had something very serious to say to me. I am bored to death by the General's hangers-on – he is much too kind to the nobodies who besiege us here – and I hardly ever know what it is to be alone. But if you will come to-morrow, I will take care to keep other people out. I shall pretend a headache, and deny myself to everybody. You must walk boldly in by the garden, contrive not to meet any of the servants, and you will find me sitting in the colonnade. It will all seem accidental. When the General comes to his afternoon tea, he will find you there, and we shall tell him how you wandered in, and forced the consigne. You are such a favourite that he will smile at a liberty from you which he would be the first to resent in any one else."
Bothwell sat in his corner of the railway-carriage, meditating upon this letter in his breast-pocket. How hard and cruel and false and mean the whole tone of the lady's correspondence seemed to him, now that the glamour of a fatal infatuation had passed from his brain and his senses; now that he was able to estimate the enchantress at her real value; now that his newly-awakened conscience had shown him the true colour of his own conduct during the last three years!
Three years ago and a stroke of good fortune had happened to Bothwell Grahame one day in the hill-country, when he and his brother-officers had gone out after big game. It had been his chance to save the life of one of the most distinguished men in the service, General Harborough, a man who at that time occupied an important official position in the Bengal Presidency. Bothwell's presence of mind, courage, and rapid use of a revolver had saved the General from the jaws of a leopard, which had crept upon the party while they were resting at luncheon, after a long morning's bear-shooting. General Harborough was the last man to forget such a service. He took Bothwell Grahame under his protection from that hour, introduced him to his wife, Lord Carlavarock's daughter, and one of the most elegant women in the Presidency.
Favoured by such friends, Bothwell Grahame's life in India became a kind of triumph. He was good-looking, well-mannered, a first-rate shot, and an exceptional horseman. He could sing a part in a glee or duet, and he waltzed to perfection. He was supposed to have a genius for waltzing, and to become master of every new step as if by a kind of inspiration. "What is the last fashionable waltz in London?" people asked him; and he showed them the very latest glide, or swoop, or twist, as the case might be. His friends told him all about it in their letters, he said. He always knew what was going on in the dancing world.
Such a man, not too young nor yet too old – neither a stripling nor a fogey – chivalrous, amiable, full of verve and enjoyment of life, was eminently adapted to the holiday existence at Simla; and it was at Simla that Bothwell Grahame became in a manner the fashion, looked up to by all the young men of his acquaintance, petted by all the women. Nor did it appear strange in the eyes of society that Lady Valeria Harborough should be particularly kind to him, and should have him very often at her bungalow, which was the centre of all that was gay, and elegant, and spirituel in the district. All the Simla jokes originated at the Harborough bungalow. All the latest English fashions, the newest refinements in the service of a dinner-table or the arrangement of afternoon tea, came from the same source. Lady Valeria led the fashion, gave the note of taste throughout that particular section of Indian society.
No, there was nothing exceptional in her kindness to Captain Grahame. In the first place, he had saved her husband from being clawed and mangled to death by a wild beast, a service for which a good wife would be naturally grateful; and in the second place, Bothwell was only one of a court of young men who surrounded Lady Valeria wherever she happened to be living – but most of all up at the hills. She always spoke of them as "boys," and frankly admitted that she liked their admiration on account of its naïveté.
For some time she talked of Bothwell Grahame as a "nice boy," in spite of his six-and-twenty years. She herself owned pensively to seven-and-twenty. Tergiversation would have been vain, since the Peerage was open to all her friends, with its dryasdust record, "Valeria Hermione, born 1854."
She was twenty-seven years of age, strikingly elegant and interesting, if not actually handsome, and she had been two years married to a man who had lately celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday. She had accepted the General, and his splendid settlements, meekly enough. There had been no undue persuasion, no domestic tyranny. Her suitor was a thorough gentleman, wealthy, distinguished, and she was told that he could give her all good things which a woman need care to possess. She would spend two or three years with him in India, where he had an important official appointment; and then she would return to England, where he had two country seats – one a villa near Plymouth, the other a castle in Scotland – and a house in Grosvenor Square. As one of four sisters, it became her to accept the fortune that had fallen into her lap. She was, or she seemed to be, of a temperament that could be happy in an union with a man old enough to be her grandfather. She seemed one of those women born to shine and to rule rather than to love. No one who knew her intimately feared any evil consequences from her marriage with the elderly soldier.
"Valeria will make General Harborough an admirable wife," said the matrons and ancient maidens of the house of Carlavarock, "and she will be a splendid mistress for that fine old place in Perthshire."
Valeria had never known what passionate feeling meant till she gave her friendship to Bothwell Grahame. She had never thrilled at a man's voice, or listened for a man's footstep, till she began to start at his voice and listen for his tread. The fatal love came upon her like a fever, struck her down in the strength of her proud womanhood, made her oblivious of duty, blind to honour, mastered her like a demoniac possession, and from a spotless wife she became all at once a hypocrite and an intriguer.
O, those fatal days at Simla, the long idle afternoons! The music and singing – the dances late in the night when cool winds were blowing over the hills – the garden lit with lamps like glowworms – the billiards and laughter, the light jests, the heavy sighs. There came a time when Bothwell Grahame found himself bound by an iniquitous tie to the wife of his most generous friend.
Their love was to be guiltless always – that is to say, not the kind of love which would bring Lady Valeria Harborough within the jurisdiction of the Divorce Court: not the kind of love which would make her name a scandal and a hissing in the ears of all her English friends, a theme for scorn and scoffing throughout the length and breadth of Bengal. But, short of such guilt as this – short of stolen meetings and base allies, the connivance of servants, the venal blindness of hotel-keepers – short of actual dishonour – they were to be lovers. He was to be at her beck and call – to devote all the leisure of his days to her society – to give not one thought to any other woman – to wait patiently, were it ten or twenty years, for the good old man's death: and then, after her ceremonial year of widowhood, all deference to the world's opinion having been paid, he was to claim Lady Valeria for his wife. This was the scheme of existence to which Bothwell Grahame had pledged himself. For all the best years of his manhood he was to be a hypocrite and an ingrate – the slave of a woman whose ascendency he dared not acknowledge, waiting for a good man's death. That was the worst degradation of all to a man of warm heart and generous feeling. All that was best and noblest in Bothwell Grahame's nature revolted against the baseness of his position. To grasp General Harborough's hand, and to remember how deliberately he and Valeria had calculated the years which the good old man had yet to live, had speculated upon the end drawing near, coming suddenly perhaps; to know that all their hopes of happiness were based upon the husband's speedy death. There were times, even in the first red dawn of passion, while he was proudest of this woman's love, when he almost hated her for her disloyalty as a wife. Could there be happiness or peace in a bond so made? And then the woman's fascination, the absolute power of a passionate, resolute character over a weak and yielding one, vanquished all his scruples, stifled the voice of conscience and honour. Not Samson at the feet of Delilah was a more abject slave than Bothwell in that luxurious idleness of the Indian hills, when the only purpose life held seemed to be the desire to get the maximum of frivolous amusement out of every day. There was no pastime too childish for Lady Valeria and her admirers, no sport too inane. Yet the lady contrived to maintain her womanly dignity even in the most infantine amusements, and was honoured as a queen by all her little court of worshippers, from the bearded major, or the portly lawyer, to the callow subaltern.
Bothwell's conduct towards her, and the lady's manner to him, were irreproachable. If there were any difference, she was a shade colder and more reserved in her treatment of him than of her other slaves: but there were moments, briefest opportunities – a tête-à-tête of five minutes in a moonlit verandah, a little walk down to the fountain, a ride in which they two were ahead of the rest just for a few yards; moments when Valeria's impassioned soul poured forth its treasures of love at this man's feet, with the reckless unreserve of a woman who risks all upon one cast of the die. She, who had been deemed the coldest and proudest of women – Diana not more chaste, an iceberg not more cold – she, Valeria Harborough, had chosen to fall madly in love with a man who was her social inferior, and who had tried his uttermost to escape from the net she had spread for him. Weak as he was, he had not yielded willingly. He had fought the good fight, had tried his hardest to be loyal and true. And then, in one moment, the spell had been too strong for his manhood. One never-to-be-forgotten night, they two standing beside the fountain, steeped in the golden light of the southern stars, he had yielded himself up to the enchantment of the hour, to the witchery of luminous violet eyes, brighter for a veil of tears. He had drawn her suddenly to his heart, asked her passionately why she had made him adore her, in spite of himself, against reason and honour; and she, with tearful eyes looking up at him, had answered softly, "Because it was my fate to love you;" and then she told him, in short, disjointed sentences, broken by sobs, that she was not a wicked woman, that he must not scorn or loathe her, even if he could not give her love for love. Never, till she knew him, had she swerved by one hair's breadth from the line of strictest duty; never had she known a thought which she need wish to hide from her husband. And then, in an evil hour, he had become almost domesticated in her house, and his influence had gradually enfolded her, like a cloud spread by a magician, and she had awakened to a new life. She had learnt the meaning of that mystic word love.
From that night Bothwell was her slave. Touched, flattered, possessed by this fatal love – too glad weakly to echo the woman's favourite excuse, Fatality – he struggled no longer against this mutual madness, which was half bliss and half pain. He belonged henceforth to Lady Valeria – more completely enslaved than if she had been free to claim him before the world as her affianced husband. Her lightest word, her lightest look ruled him. He went where she told him, spent his days as she ordered. He had been one of the hardest working officers in India up to this time, and his branch of the service, the Engineers, was one which offered splendid chances of promotion.
General Harborough had promised to do all that his very considerable influence could do to push his young friend to the front; and it seemed to the men who knew him best that Bothwell Grahame's fortune was made.
"There are men whose heads are turned by the first stroke of luck, and who never do anything after," said a canny old Scotch major; "but Grahame is thorough, and is not afraid of hard work. Take my word for it, he'll get on just as young Robert Napier did forty years ago."
But, with the ball at his feet, Bothwell Grahame suddenly dropped out of the game. He left off working altogether. He was the slave of a woman who preferred her own pleasure in his society to his chances of distinction: who said, "Why should you work? There will be enough for both of us by and by."
By and by meant when the good old General should be lying in his grave. He was an old man: it was not possible to ignore that fact, though he was erect as a dart, active, full of dignity and intellect – a man of men. He was nearing the scriptural limit of threescore and ten, and the inevitable end that comes to us all must come to him before the world was many years older.
Nothing was further from Bothwell's thoughts than the idea of being maintained by a wife; but he let Lady Valeria tempt him away from his books or his laboratory, and suffered himself to become indifferent to his profession, to care for nothing but the life he led in her boudoir or her drawing-room.
And then there came new difficulties. Lady Valeria was at heart a gamester. The excitement of cards or betting had become a necessity to her in her Indian life. Soon after her arrival at Calcutta she had won a thousand pounds in the Umballa Sweep, and that one stroke of luck had been her ruin. She became a professional gambler, played high whenever there was a possibility of so doing, and had her book for every great English race. She awaited the telegrams that brought her the tidings of victory or defeat with feverish impatience. The natural result followed: she was often in money difficulties. Generous as her husband was, she feared to appeal to him on these occasions. She knew that, of all types of womanhood, he most hated a gambling woman. She had her pin-money, which was ample for all the ordinary requirements and even extravagances of a woman of fashion. She dared not ask her husband for more money. But she was not afraid to call upon her slave, Bothwell Grahame; and Bothwell had to help her somehow, this wife of the future, who, in the days to come, was to provide for him.
He helped her first by nominally lending – actually giving her – every sixpence of his own patrimony, disposing, bit by bit, of that little estate in Perthshire of which his ancestors had been so proud. When he had beggared himself thus, he began to borrow of the Jews – always for Lady Valeria – and finally found himself in such a mess, financially, that he had to leave the army.
General Harborough heard of his difficulties, and supposed they were all self-induced, but made the kindest excuses for the sinner. He offered to pay Bothwell's debts, and implored him not to throw up his career, with all its brilliant chances. The General was wounded to the quick when his offers were steadfastly refused.
"A gentleman knows how to accept a service as well as how to render one," he said. "You saved my life, and I have never felt burdened by the obligation."
Bothwell stood before him, grave, pale, silent, humiliated by his kindness.
"Forgive me, sir," he faltered at last. "Believe me, I am not ungrateful. There was a time when I would rather have accepted a favour from you than from any other man living. But I am tired of the army. I feel that I shall never get on. I have sent a statement of my affairs to my cousin's husband, who has a genius for finance. He will settle with my creditors, and I shall begin the world again, my own man."
Bothwell sighed involuntarily after those last words. What freedom, or manhood, or independence could there ever be for him, bound as he was bound?
He left India soon after this interview with the General, who was to return to England in the following year. Lady Valeria deeply resented her lover's conduct in leaving the East, while she was obliged to remain there. It was desertion, infidelity. He ought to have remained at any cost, at any loss of his own self-respect. She could never be brought to consider things from his standpoint. If he had loved her, she argued, he would have stayed. Love never counts the cost of anything. They parted in anger, and Bothwell went home with a sore heart, yet with a sense of relief in the idea of recovered freedom.
Then came a period of comparative liberty for Bothwell. He received an occasional letter from Lady Valeria, full of upbraidings and regrets. He answered as best he might – kindly, affectionately even; but he flattered himself that the fatal tie, the dishonourable engagement, was a folly of the past. He was all the more anxious to believe this, during that peaceful winter at Penmorval, on account of his growing esteem for another woman. O, what a different feeling it was, that winter love of his! Those happy half-hours amidst the rimy hedgerows, with the shrill north-easter swirling across the dark brown of the ploughed fields, the yellow light of a setting sun shining beneath a leaden sky. How curiously different was the girl's light happy talk in the English lane – talk which all the world might have heard – from those impassioned whispers beside the fountain, under the stars of Orient! At first it seemed to him that he was only soothed and cheered by his acquaintance with Hilda Heathcote. He affected to consider her a mere girl, hardly emerged from the nursery. He was surprised to find how rightly she thought upon the gravest subjects. Then all at once he awoke to the knowledge that he loved her: and while he was hesitating, doubting whether he were free to indulge this new and purer, sweeter, happier love, hardly daring to ask himself whether that old tie was or was not cancelled, he received a letter from Valeria, with the Paris postmark.
"We have just arrived here from Brindisi," she wrote. "We shall stay here for a few days while I order some gowns, and we shall be in London for a few weeks. After that we go to the General's place near Plymouth, where you must come and see me every day, just as you used at Simla. O Bothwell, I can hardly trust myself to write. I dare not tell you half the joy I feel in the idea of our meeting. If you cared for me you would come to London. It would be so easy to pretend business, and you would be warmly welcomed in Grosvenor Square. You might bring your portmanteau and stop with us. There is a barrack of empty rooms on the third floor. Ours is one of those huge corner houses, and the piggeries for the servants are over the offices at the back. I hope you will contrive to come. Your last letter seemed to me so cold and distant – as if you were beginning to forget, or as if you had not forgiven my anger at your desertion. Ah, Bothwell, you should have pitied me and sympathised with me in that cruel parting. You ought to have known that my anger was despair. But you thought only of your own dignity, your own self-respect – not of my sorrow. Men are so selfish."
Bothwell did not go to London. He excused himself upon various grounds, and remained quietly at Penmorval. But from that hour his manner to Hilda changed altogether. From an unavowed lover he became an indifferent acquaintance. He set a watch upon his tongue that it should say no words of pleasantness. He vowed that he would not again suffer himself to be enmeshed in Lady Valeria's net: but until he had calmly and deliberately broken with her he could not be the lover of any other woman. He made up his mind that so soon as the General and his wife were settled at Fox Hill there should be a rupture – temperate, gentle, firm, and irrevocable.
Lady Valeria came to Fox Hill, and summoned her slave. He went, and there was no rupture – only a renewal of the old bonds. The bird was in the fowler's net again. Bothwell was often at Fox Hill. He spent long afternoons there tête-à-tête with Lady Valeria. She was less careful than she had been in India.
"We are not surrounded with busybodies here," she said. "I feel that I can do as I like in my own house."
He went to London to borrow money for her when she was in difficulties about that horrible book of hers: and Lady Valeria's normal state now was financial difficulty. Almost everybody knew that she was a gambler, except her husband. He was so thoroughly respected and beloved that no one had the heart to make him unhappy by breathing a word to his wife's discredit. He thought her faultless.
She had hardened in that false wicked life of hers: but she was more fascinating than ever, Bothwell thought, albeit he was far less under her spell than he had been in the old days at Simla. The very fever of her mind intensified her charm. She seemed such an ethereal creature – all life, and light, and sparkle. She was, to other women, as the electric light is to gas.
And now, half buried in his corner of the railway-carriage, Bothwell smoked the pipe of meditation. He looked back upon that fatal past, and cursed himself for the weak folly that had put such a chain round his neck. He looked back, and recalled the old scenes, the old feelings, and he almost wondered if he could be the same man who had so felt and so acted.
He drove to Fox Hill as fast as a cab-horse would take him, alighted a little way from the chief gates, and dismissed his conveyance, meaning to walk back to Plymouth after his interview. Fox Hill was four miles from the station, but Bothwell could walk four miles in an hour with that free swinging stride of his. A four-mile walk and a pipe might just serve to quiet his nerves after the ordeal he had to undergo.
The General's Devonshire home was an Italian villa, built on the southern slope of an amphitheatre of hills, and commanding the town, the dockyards, the Hamoaze, and the Hoe in all their extent. Distance lent enchantment to the view. Plymouth, seen from this sunny hillside, looked as picturesque as Naples.
The villa had been planned by an architect of taste and culture, and built regardless of expense. The house was not large when measured by the number of its rooms; but all the rooms were spacious, lightsome, and lofty. The decorations were of the simplest. The glory of the place was its conservatories, which were so arranged as to introduce flowers and tropical foliage into every part of the dwelling. A long marble colonnade, enclosed by plate-glass shutters in winter or bad weather, surrounded the house, and here bloomed and flourished all that is rarest and loveliest in modern horticulture. The central hall had a glass roof, and was more a conservatory than a hall. The corridors between drawing-room and dining-room, between boudoir and study, were indoor gardens. Flowers pervaded the house, and harmonised admirably with the elegant simplicity of the furniture, the draperies of delicate chintz and soft India muslin.
The villa had been built sixty years ago, in the days of the Georges, a period when Italian colonnades, Corinthian porticoes, and Pompeian conservatories were the rage; but the house suited Lady Valeria just as a well-chosen frame suits a picture.
On this summery September morning Lady Valeria was seated in the colonnade, half reclining in one of those very low chairs which she always affected, being one of the few women who can rise gracefully from a seat about a foot from the ground. She was half hidden by the foliage of oleanders and magnolia, and it was only by a glimmer of white amongst the glossy green that Bothwell descried her in the distance as he crossed the lawn. There was a fountain on the lawn here, just as at Simla; but the fountain was a late improvement, insisted upon by Lady Valeria.
"It will recall Simla, where we were so happy," she told her husband.
"And yet you were so impatient to leave India, towards the last," he said, almost reproachfully.
"Yes, I was very tired of India at the last. There is an end of all things."
Bothwell had obeyed Lady Valeria's instructions to the letter. He had entered the grounds by a side gate, so as to escape challenge at the lodge: and now he made his way boldly to the colonnade in front of her boudoir. The boudoir was not a particularly sacred apartment, as it formed one in the suite of rooms and conservatories which communicated along the whole length of the house. Italian villas of the Georgian era were not planned for seclusion.
Lady Valeria was sitting in her low chair, with a low table at her side, scattered with books and newspapers. The books were mostly new memoirs and French novels of the most advanced school. The papers were chiefly sporting. She looked up languidly as Bothwell approached, and gave him her hand, like an empress, without stirring from her graceful repose amidst embroidered silken cushions. She was not beautiful. Her charm lay in an extreme refinement of feature and figure, a delicacy of tint which verged upon sickliness. It was the refinement of a vanishing race, and recalled the delicacy of an over-trained racehorse.
Her complexion was almost colourless in repose, but the lips were of the tint of pale-pink rose petals, and every emotion flushed the waxen cheek with loveliest bloom. Her nose was long and thin, too long for perfect beauty. Her chin was a thought too sharp, her brow too narrow. But her eyes were exquisite. Herein lay her one grand charm, and Lady Valeria well knew the power of those large violet eyes, fringed with darkest lashes, accentuated by pencilled brows – eyes which seemed to fill with tears at will – eyes which could plead more eloquently than lips ever spoke since the days of Eve, first tempted and then tempter.
"I hope you are not really ill," said Bothwell, seating himself in the chair opposite Lady Valeria.
"Only worried to death," she answered, with an irritated air. "I have troubles enough to send me into an early grave."
"Money troubles?"
"Money troubles. Yes. I have other troubles, too, but the money troubles are the most urgent. They gnaw the sharpest."
"You have been losing again?"
"Yes. I was so lucky with my Goodwood book that I grew bold – determined upon a great coup at York, put every farthing I could scrape together upon Crofter, the second favourite for the Great Ebor. I had been assured that it was the safest thing in the world. I might back him with my wedding-ring, Sir George Varney said. And York has generally been lucky to me, you know. It is my own county, and I love every inch of it. The Knavesmire was the first racecourse I ever saw, the place where I first learned to love horses, and to understand them. My father used to tell me everything about the races. I was the only one of us who was really interested in his talk."
"I thought the money from Davis, and the money you won at Goodwood, cleared all your difficulties."
"Yes, for the moment. But this York business has made things worse than they were before. However, you need not disturb yourself about it. Varney has offered to lend me the money."
She said this slowly, with drooping eyelids, and a thoughtful air; but she stole a little look at Bothwell from beneath the long dark lashes, to see how he took her speech.
"You must not take a sixpence of his money – not a sixpence," said Bothwell sternly.
"No? That is exactly my idea. It would be very bad form for a woman in my position to borrow from Varney – who is – well, a man of the world. But I must have the money somehow. The bookmakers won't wait. They only give credit in my case because they know I dare not cheat them."
"Surely the bookmen do not know that you are their creditor?"
"They are not supposed to know. The bets are made in my brother's name – Otho's – who has been in Australia for the last two years. But I don't believe these men would trust Otho, even if he were in London."
"It is dreadful!" exclaimed Bothwell, deeply distressed. "You ought not to have entangled yourself again. What makes you do this thing, Valeria? It is worse than chloral, or any other form of feminine madness."
"Yes, it is a kind of madness, I suppose. I should not do it if I were happy. I shall have no need to do it when I am happy – by and by."
Again she stole a look at him, a tender pathetic look, which would have melted him a year ago. But it left him unmoved now. He felt only anger at her folly, her obstinate persistence in wrong-doing.
"You must not take Varney's money," he repeated, "not for worlds. To think that you should have secret dealings with such a man – a hardened scamp and roué!"
"I am not going to accept Sir George's offer – which was at least good-natured, so you need not be uncivil about him," replied Valeria coolly; "but I must get the money somehow. I don't want Otho's name to be posted at Tattersall's. There are too many people who would guess that Otho stands for Valeria in this case."
