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The Case of Richard Meynell

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> The Case of Richard Meynell




As though the maid's movement downstairs had been immediately perceived
by a listening ear overhead, there was a quick sound of footsteps. Miss
Puttenham ran downstairs, took the letters and the newspaper from the
hands of the girl, and closed the door behind her.

She opened the paper with eagerness, and read the account it gave of the
Coroner's inquiry held at the Cowroast a week before. The newspaper
dropped to the ground. She stood a moment, leaning against the
mantelpiece, every feature in her face expressing the concentration of
thought which held her; then she dropped into a chair, and raising her
two hands to her eyes, she pressed the shut lids close, lifting her face
as though to some unseen misery, while a little sound--infinitely
piteous--escaped her.

She saw a bedroom in a foreign inn--a vague form in the bed--a woman
moving about in nurse's dress, the same woman who had just died in John
Broad's cottage--and her sister Edith sitting by the fire. The door
leading to the passage is ajar, and she is watching.... Or is it the
figure in the bed that is watching?--a figure marred by illness and pain?
Through the door comes hastily a form--a man. With his entrance, movement
and life, like a rush of mountain air, come into the ugly shaded room. He
is tall, with a long face, refined and yet violent, instinct with the
character and the pride of an old hectoring race. He comes to the bed,
kneels down, and the figure there throws itself on his breast. There is a
sound of bitter sobbing, of low words--

Alice Puttenham's hands dropped from her face--and lay outstretched upon
her knee. She sat, staring before her, unconscious of the garden outside,
or of the passage of time. In some ways she was possessed of more beauty
at thirty-seven than she had been at twenty. And yet from childhood her
face had been a winning one--with its childish upper lip and its thin
oval, its delicate brunette colour, and the lovely clearness of its brown
eyes. In youth its timid sweetness had been constantly touched with
laughter. Now it shrank from you and appealed to you in one. But the
departure of youth had but emphasized a certain distinction, a certain
quality. Laughter was gone, but grace and character remained, imprinted
also on the fragile body, the beautiful arms and hands. The only marring
of the general impression came from an effect of restlessness and
constraint. To live with Alice Puttenham was to conceive her as a
creature subtly ill at ease, doing her best with a life which was, in
some hidden way, injured at the core.

* * * * *

She thought herself quite alone this quiet afternoon, and likely to
remain so. Hester, who had been lunching with her, had gone shopping into
Markborough with the schoolroom maid, and was afterward to meet Sarah and
Lulu at a garden party in the Cathedral Close. Lady Fox-Wilton had just
left her sister's house after a long, querulous, excited visit, the
latest of many during the past week. How could it be her--Alice's--fault,
that Judith Sabin had come home in this sudden, mysterious way? Yet the
event had reopened all the old wounds in Edith's mind, revived all the
old grievances and terrors. Strange that a woman should be capable of one
supreme act of help and devotion, and should then spend her whole after
life in resenting it!

"It was you and your story--that shocking thing we had to do for
you--that have spoilt my life--and my husband's. Tom never got over it--
and I never shall. And it will all come out--some day--and then what'll
be the good of all we've suffered!"

That was Edith's attitude--the attitude of a small, vindictive soul. It
never varied year by year; it showed itself both in trifles and on great
occasions; it hindered all sisterly affection; and it was the explanation
of her conduct toward Hester--it had indeed made Hester what she was.

Again the same low sound of helpless pain broke from Alice Puttenham's
lips. The sense of her unloved, solitary state, of all that she had borne
and must still bear, roused in her anew a flame of memory. Torch-like it
ran through the past, till she was shaken with anguish and revolt. She
had been loved once! It had brought her to what the world calls shame.
She only knew, at moments of strong reaction or self-assertion like the
present, that she had once had a man at her feet who had been the desired
and adored of his day; that she had breathed her heart out in the passion
of youth on his breast; that although he had wronged her, he had suffered
because of her, had broken his heart for her, and had probably died
because circumstances denied him the power to save and restore her, and
he was not of the kind that bears patiently either thwarting from without
or reproach from within.

For his selfish passion, his weakness and his suffering, and her own
woman's power to make him suffer; for his death, no less selfish indeed
than his passion, for it had taken from her the community of the same
air, and the same earth with him, the sense that somewhere in the world
his warm life beat with hers, though they might be separated in bodily
presence forever--for each and all of these things she had loved him. And
there were still times when, in spite of the years that had passed away,
and of other and perhaps profounder feelings that had supervened, she
felt within her again the wild call of her early love, responding to it
like an unhappy child, in vain appeal against her solitude, her sister's
unkindness, and the pressure of irrevocable and unforgotten facts.

Suddenly, she turned toward a tall and narrow chest of drawers that stood
at her left hand. She chose a key from her watch-chain, a small gold key
that in their childhood had been generally mistaken by her nieces and
nephews for one of the bunch of charms they were allowed to play with on
"Aunt Alsie's" lap. With it she unlocked a drawer within her reach. Her
hand slipped in; she threw a hasty look round her, at the window, the
garden. Not a sound of anything but the evening wind, which had just
risen, and was making a smart rustling among the shrubs just outside. Her
hand, a white, furtive thing, withdrew itself, and in it lay a packet,
wrapped in some faded, green velvet. Hurriedly--with yet more pauses to
listen and to look--the wrapping was undone; the case within fell open.

It contained a miniature portrait of a man--French work, by an excellent
pupil of Meissonier. The detail of it was marvellous; so, in Alice
Puttenham's view, was the likeness. She remembered when and how it had
been commissioned--the artist, and his bare studio in a street on the
island, near Notre Dame; the chestnuts in the Luxembourg garden as
they walked home; the dust of the falling blossoms, and the children
playing in the alleys. And through it all, what passionate, guilty
happiness--what dull sense of things irreparable!--what deliberate
shutting out of the future!

It was as good a likeness as the Abbey picture, only more literal, less
"arranged." The Abbey picture, also by a French artist of another school,
was younger, and had a fine, romantic, René-like charm. "René" had been
her laughing name for him--her handsome, melancholy, eloquent _poseur!_
Like many of his family, he was proud of his French culture, his French
accent, and his knowledge of French books. The tradition that came
originally from a French marriage had been kept up from father to son.
They were not a learned or an industrious race, but their tongue soon
caught the accent of the boulevards--of the Paris they loved and
frequented. Her hand lifted the miniature the better to catch the
slanting light.

As she did so she was freshly struck with a resemblance she had long
ceased to be conscious of. Familiarity with a living face, as so often
happens, had destroyed for her its likeness--likeness in difference--to a
face of the dead. But to-night she saw it--was indeed arrested by it.

"And yet Richard was never one tenth as good-looking!"

The portrait was set in pearls, and at the foot was an inscription in
blue enamel--

"_A ma mie!_"

But before she could see it she must with her cold, quick fingers remove
the fragment of stained paper that lay upon it like a veil. The half of a
page of Molière--turned down--like that famous page of Shelley's
"Sophocles"--and stained with sea water, as that was stained.

She raised the picture to her lips and kissed it--not with passion--but
clingingly, as though it represented her only wealth, amid so much
poverty. Then her hand, holding it, dropped to her knee again; the other
hand came to close over it; and her eyes shut. Tears came slowly through
the lashes.

Amazing!--that that woman should have come back--and died--within a few
hundred yards, and she, Alice, know nothing! In spite of all Richard's
persuasions she tortured herself anew with the thought of the interview
between Judith and Mr. Barron. What could they have talked about--so
long? Judith was always an excitable, hot-tempered creature. Her silence
had been heavily and efficiently bought for fifteen years. Then steps
had been taken--insisted upon--by Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton. His wife and his
sister-in-law had opposed him in vain. And Ralph had after all triumphed
in Judith's apparent acquiescence.

Supposing she had now come home, perhaps on a sudden impulse, with a view
to further blackmail, would not her wisest move be to risk some
indiscretion, some partial disclosure, so that her renewed silence
afterward might have the higher price? An hour's _tete-a-tete_ with
that shrewd, hard-souled man, Henry Barron! Alice Puttenham guessed that
her own long-established dislike of him as acquaintance and neighbour was
probably returned with interest; that he classed her now as one of
"Meynell's lot," and would be only too glad to find himself possessed of
any secret information that might, through her, annoy and harass Richard
Meynell, her friend and counsellor.

Was it conceivable that nothing should have been said in that lengthy
interview as to the causes for Judith's coming home?--or of the reasons
for her original departure? What else could have accounted for so
prolonged a conversation between two persons, so different in social
grade, and absolute strangers to each other?

Richard had told her, indeed, and she saw from the _Post_, that at the
inquest Barron had apparently accounted for the conversation. "She gave
me a curious history of her life in the States. I was interested by her
strange personality--and touched by her physical condition."

Richard was convinced that there was no reasonable cause for alarm. But
Richard was always the consoler--the optimist--where she was concerned.
Could she have lived at all--if it had not been so?

And then, for the second time, the rush of feeling rose, welling up, not
from the springs of the past, but from the deepest sources of the
present.

_Richard!_

That little villa on the Cap Martin--the steep pathway to it--and Richard
mounting it, with that pale look, those tattered, sea-stained leaves in
his hand--and the tragedy that had to be told, in his eyes, and on his
lips. Could any other human being have upheld her as he did through that
first year--through the years after? Was it not to him that she owed
everything that had been recovered from the wreck; the independence and
freedom of her daily life; protection from her hard brother-in-law, and
from her sister's reproaches; occupation--hope--the gradual healing of
intolerable wounds--the gradual awakening of a spiritual being?

Thus--after passion--she had known friendship; its tenderness, its
disinterested affection and care.

_Tenderness?_ Her hand dashed away some more impetuous tears, then locked
itself in the other, the tension of the muscles answering to the inward
effort for self-control. Thank God, she had never asked him for more; had
often seemed indeed to ask him for much less; had made herself
irresponsive, difficult, remote. At least she had never lost her dignity
in his eyes--(ah! in whose eyes but his had she ever possessed it?)--she
had never forfeited--never risked even--her sacred place in his life, as
the soul he had helped through dark places, true servant as he was of the
Master of Pity.

The alarms of the week died away, as this emotion gained upon her. She
bethought her of certain central and critical years, when, after long
dependence on him as comrade and friend, suddenly, she knew not how, her
own pulse had quickened, and the sharpest struggle of her life had come
upon her. It was the crisis of the mature woman, as compared with that of
the innocent and ignorant girl; and in the silent mastering of it she
seemed to have parted with her youth.

But she had never parted with self-control and self-respect. She had
never persuaded herself that the false was true. She had kept her
counsel, and her sanity, and the wage of it had not been denied her. She
had emerged more worthy of his friendship, more capable of rewarding it.

Yes, but with a clear and sad perception of the necessities laid upon
her--of the sacrifices involved.

He believed her--she knew it--indifferent to the great cause of religious
change and reform which he had at heart. In these matters, indeed, she
had quietly, unwaveringly held aloof. There are efforts and endurances
that can only be maintained--up to a point. Beyond that point resistance
breaks. The life that is fighting emotion must not run too many risks of
emotion. At the root of half the religious movements of the world lies
the appeal of the preacher and the prophet--to women. Because women are
the creatures and channels of feeling; and feeling is to religion as air
to life.

But _she_--must starve feeling--not feed and cherish it. Richard's voice
was too powerful with her already. To hear it dealing with the most
intimate and touching things of the soul would have tested the resistance
of her will too sorely. Courage and honour alike told her that she would
be defeated and undone did she attempt to meet and follow him--openly--in
the paths of religion. _Entbehren sollst du_--_sollst entbehren!_

So, long before this date, she had chosen her line of action. She took no
part in the movement, and she rarely set foot in the village church,
which was close to her gates. Meynell sadly believed her unshakeable--one
of the natural agnostics or pessimists of the world who cannot be
comforted through religion.

And meanwhile secretly, ardently, she tracked all the footsteps of his
thoughts, reading what he read, thinking as far as possible what he
thought, and revealing nothing.

Except that, lately, she had been indiscreet sometimes in talk with Mary
Elsmere. Mary had divined her--had expressed her astonishment that her
friend should declare herself and her sympathies so little; and Alice had
set up some sort of halting explanation.

But in this nascent friendship it was not Mary alone who had made
discoveries....

* * * * *

Alice Puttenham sat very still, in the quiet shadowy room, her eyes
closed, her hands crossed over the miniature, the Markborough paper lying
on the floor beside her. As the first activity of memory, stirred and
goaded by an untoward event, lost its poignancy; as she tried in
obedience to Meynell to put away her terrors, with regard to the past,
her thoughts converged ever more intensely on the present--on herself--
and Mary....

There was in the world, indeed, another personality rarely or never
absent from Alice Puttenham's consciousness. One face, one problem, more
or less acutely realized, haunted her life continuously. But this
afternoon they had, for the moment, receded into the background. Hester
had been, surely, more reasonable, more affectionate lately. Philip
Meryon had now left Sandford; a statement to that effect had appeared in
the _Post_; and Hester had even shown some kindness to poor Stephen. She
had at last declared her willingness to go to Paris, and the arrangements
were all made. The crisis in her of angry revolt, provoked apparently by
the refusal of her guardian to allow her engagement to Stephen, seemed to
be over.

So that for once Alice Puttenham was free to think and feel for her own
life and what concerned it. From the events connected with Judith Sabin's
death--through the long history of Meynell's goodness to her--the mind
of this lonely woman travelled on, to be filled and arrested by the
great new fact of the present. She had made a new friend. And at the
same moment she had found in her--at last--the rival with whom her
own knowledge of life had threatened her these many years. A rival so
sweet--so unwitting! Alice had read her. She had scarcely yet read
herself.

Alice opened her eyes--to the quiet room, and the windy sky
outside. She was very pale, but there were no tears. "It is not
renouncing"--she whispered to herself--"for I never possessed. It
is accepting--loving--giving--all one has to give."

And vaguely there ran through her mind immortal words--"_good
measure--pressed down, and running over_."

A smile trembled on her lip. She closed her eyes again, lost in one of
those spiritual passions accessible only to those who know the play and
heat of the spiritual war. The wind was blowing briskly outside, and from
the wood-shed in the back garden came a sound of sawing. Miss Puttenham
did not hear a footstep approaching on the grass outside.

* * * * *

Hester paused at the window--smiling. There was wildness--triumph--in her
look, as though for her this quiet afternoon had seen some undisclosed
adventure. Her cheek was hotly flushed, her loosened hair made a glory in
the evening sun. Youth, selfishly pitiless--youth, the supplanter and
destroyer--stood embodied in the beautiful creature looking down upon
Alice Puttenham, on the still intensity of the plaintive face, the closed
eyes, the hands holding the miniature.

Mischievously the girl came closer. She took the stillness before her for
sleep.

"Auntie! Aunt Alsie!"

With a start, Alice Puttenham sprang up. The miniature dropped from
her hands to the floor, opening as it fell. Hester looked at it
astonished--and her hand stooped for it before Miss Puttenham had
perceived her loss.

"Were you asleep, Aunt Alsie?" she asked, wondering. "I got tired of
that stupid party--and I--well, I just slipped away"--the clear high
voice had grown conscious--"and I looked in here, because I left a book
behind me--Auntie, who is it?" She bent eagerly over the miniature,
trying to see it in the dim light.

Miss Puttenham's face had faded to a gray-white.

"Give it to me, Hester!" She held out her hand imperiously.

"Mayn't I know even who it is?" asked Hester, as she unwillingly returned
it. In the act she caught the inscription and her face kindled.

Impetuously throwing herself down beside Miss Puttenham, the girl looked
up at her with an expression half mockery, half sweetness, while Alice,
with unsteady fingers, replaced the case and locked the drawer.

"What an awfully handsome fellow!" said Hester in a low voice, "though
you wouldn't let me see it properly. I say, Auntie, won't you tell me--?"

"Tell you what?"

"Who he was--and why I never saw it before? I thought I knew all your
things by heart--and now you've been keeping something from me!" The
girl's tone had changed to one of curious resentment. "You know how you
scold _me_ when you think I've got a secret."

"That is quite different, Hester."

Miss Puttenham tried to rise, but Hester, who was leaning against her
knee, prevented it.

"Why is it different?" she said, audaciously. "You always say
you--you--want to be everything to me--and then you hide things from
me--and I--"

She raised herself, sitting upright on the floor, her hands round her
knees, and spoke with extraordinary animation and sparkling eyes.

"Why, I should have loved you twice as much, Aunt Alice--and you know I
_do_ love you!--if you'd told me more about yourself. The people _I_ care
about are the people who _live_--and feel--and do things! There's verse
in one of your books"--she pointed to a little bookshelf of poets on a
table near--"I always think of it when mamma reads the 'Christian Year'
to us on Sunday evenings--

Out of dangers, dreams, disasters
_We_ arise, to be your masters!"

"_We_--the people who want to know, and feel, and _fight_! We who loathe
all the humdrum _bourgeois_ talk--'don't do this--don't do that!' Aunt
Alsie, there's a German line, too, you know it--' _Was uns alle bändigt,
das Gemeine'_--don't you hate it too--_das Gemeine?_" the word came
with vehemence through the white teeth. "And how can we escape it--we
women--except through freedom--through asserting ourselves--through love,
of course? It all comes to love!--love that mamma says one ought not to
talk about. I wouldn't talk about it, if it only meant what it means to
Sarah and Lulu--I'd scorn to!"

She stopped--and looked with her blazing and wonderful eyes at her
companion--her lips parted. Then she suddenly stooped and kissed the cold
hand trying to withdraw itself from hers.

"Who was he, dear?"--she laid the hand caressingly against her
cheek--"I'm good at secrets!"

Alice Puttenham wrenched herself free, and rose tottering to her feet.

"He is dead, Hester--and you mustn't speak of it to me--or any
one--again."

She leant against the mantelpiece trying to recover herself--but in vain.

"I'm rather faint," she said at last, putting out a groping hand. "No,
don't come!--I'm all right--I'll go upstairs and rest. I got overtired
this morning."

And she went feebly toward the door.

Hester looked after her, panting and wounded. Aunt Alsie repel--refuse
her!--Aunt Alsie!--who had always been her special possession and
chattel. It had been taken for granted in the family, year after year,
that if no one else was devoted to Hester, Aunt Alsie's devotion, at
least, never failed. Hester's clothes were Miss Puttenham's special care;
it was for Hester that she stitched and embroidered. Hester was to
inherit her jewels and her money. In all Hester's scrapes it was Aunt
Alice who stood by her, who had often carried her off bodily out of reach
of the family anger, to the Lakes, to the sea--once even, to Italy.

And from her childhood Hester had coolly taken it all for granted, had
never been specially grateful, or much more amenable to counsels from
Aunt Alice than from anybody else. The slender, graceful woman, so
gentle, plaintive and reserved, so easily tyrannized over, had never
seemed to mean much to her. Yet now, as she stood looking at the door
through which Miss Puttenham had disappeared, the girl was conscious of a
profound and passionate sense of grievance, and of something deeper,
beneath it. The sensation that held her was new and unbearable.

Then in a moment her temperament turned pain into anger. She ran to the
window and down the steps into the garden.

"If she had told me"--she said to herself, with the childish fury that
mingled in her with older and maturer things--"I might have told _her_.
Now--I fend for myself!"




CHAPTER X


Meanwhile, in the room upstairs, Alice Puttenham lying with her face
pressed against the back of the chair into which she had feebly dropped,
heard Hester run down the steps, tried to call, or rise, and could not.
Since the death of Judith Sabin she had had little or no sleep, and much
less food than usual, with--all the while--the pressure of a vague
corrosive terror on nerve and brain. The shock of that miniature in
Hester's hands had just turned the scale; endurance had given way.

The quick footsteps receded. Yet she could do nothing to arrest them. Her
mind floated in darkness.

Presently out of the darkness emerged a sound, a touch--a warm hand on
hers.

"Dear--dear Miss Puttenham!"

"Yes."

Her voice seemed to herself a sigh--the faintest--from a great distance.

"The servants said you were here. Ellen came up to knock, and you did not
hear. I was afraid you were ill--so I came in--you'll forgive me."

"Thank you."

Silence for a while. Mary brought cold water, chafed her friend's hands,
and rendered all the services that women in such straits know how to
lavish on a sufferer. Gradually Alice mastered herself, but more than a
broken word or two still seemed beyond her, and Mary waited in patience.
She was well aware that some trouble of a nature unknown to her had been
weighing on Miss Puttenham for a week or more; and she realized too,
instinctively, that she would get no light upon it.

Presently there was a knock at the door, and Mary went to open it. The
servant whispered, and she returned at once.

"Mr. Meynell is here," she said, hesitating. "You will let me send him
away?"

Alice Puttenham opened her eyes.

"I can't see him. But please--give him some tea. He'll have walked--from
Markborough."

Mary prepared to obey.

"I'll come back afterward."

Alice roused herself further.

"No--there is the meeting afterward. You said you were going."

"I'd rather come back to you."

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