Chapter XXXII

Again Ambrosia stood before her large, dark dressing-table, and, with the keys in her hand, surveyed her mother’s _parure_ laid out precisely before her eyes.

The spring had come, but it was not the spring of her dreams; she wondered, without bitterness, if anyone ever had seen the spring-time of their dreams. It was a chill, light, still season, like a pause of exhaustion after the storms of winter. The first flowers had been slain by frost. Ambrosia had marked the blackened violets and withered daffodils rising from the iron-hard earth and the stunted grass of last year.

She still wore half-mourning for the Earl--purples and greys; but she would soon change that--and for her wedding-dress. In a month’s time she and Lucius were to be married, and they would go away from St. Nite’s together, exactly as she had planned; and yet so differently, from what she had planned.…

She had not been able to release Lucius; indeed, in every possible way she had bound him closer to her, appealing, she knew, to his compassion and chivalry; nor had he given the least sign of wishing to be released: but there was that between them--her feeling that she should have let him go. She defied this feeling. She declared to herself that she would not be intimidated by her own conscience; that she would be, if not happy, at least secure, despite them all; if not content, at least not thwarted. If she could never forget the Countess Fanny, at least she could ignore her; and the same with Lucius. She would never be able to probe the depth of his memories, but she knew that he would never speak of them. They might be to some extent, she dared to think, happy--as happiness was generally reckoned.

She put on her jewels slowly. There was no one to dispute them with her now; and she recalled the evening when she had refrained from wearing them because she had realised, with a start that was almost a pang, that they belonged to the Countess Fanny.

She hoped now, almost with a sense of panic, that she had not grudged them; there had been so little need to grudge Fanny anything, since she was so immediately to relinquish all.…

She sighed, staring at herself in the glass; not a beautiful woman, but graceful and comely enough, and one who could wear handsome clothes and stately jewellery. She would be a credit to the taste of Lucius if she could not crown or satisfy the passions of Lucius.

“It’s over now,” she said to herself, speaking aloud in the emphasis of her thoughts; “it’s gone, with the storms of winter; and I must not think of it any more. She came, and she went; and everything is as it was, even with Oliver. Yes, I dare to think that even with Oliver it is as it has been.”

He had fallen lately into a sullen quiet, and most of his life had been passed in a sullen quiet, so this was not remarkable. He seemed scarcely more morose and melancholic than he had ever been; even as a boy he had been sombre and gloomy, given to bursts of violence, and sulky, brooding.… Ambrosia, living with him in such close intimacy, might dare to say that she thought he had recovered from the shock of losing Fanny Caldini. He went about his duties with grim efficiency. Those who worked with him and those who served him found little change in him; he was as he had been when he had lived there with his brother and father, and as he had been later, when he returned home to inherit the estate. He seemed older, certainly, and the two fits or seizures he had had, had left a mark on his face; the right side was as if it had been clawed and dragged, faintly yet distinctly out of place. And with this defect his cold handsomeness was blemished. That slightly sinister appearance which had always repelled his fellows was accentuated. Yet, in everything else, one might say--thought Ambrosia, still lingering by her mirror--that Oliver had recovered; and she could, with a placid if not a pacified conscience, leave him.

“He’ll be alone,” Mr. Spragge had said, almost fearfully.

Ambrosia had said:

“Yes, but he does not wish for company; and who would care to offer themselves?”

The clergyman had asked if the Countess Fanny’s relations had been apprised of her death, and Ambrosia had said she supposed so. She had ventured once again on the subject to Oliver, and he had said that all those matters had been attended to; and with her own eyes she had seen the letters coming from London, with the lawyers’ seal on them; and letters from Italy, with the gaudy arms of the Caldini stamped in yellow wax on the back.

She went downstairs slowly and reluctantly, trying to capture the sensation of pure delight with which she had gone downstairs a few months ago to greet Lucius. There was to be one of her small dinner-parties to-night--just the vicar and his wife, the doctor and his sister, Oliver, Lucius, and herself.

She had ordered the lamps to be lit early, though it was still light without, for the spring twilight was bleak and drear, and the trees were bare that showed against the pallid sky almost as white as crystal. They had been robbed by the late severe frost of their early leaves, and showed stark as winter.

With an almost mechanical care, Ambrosia went round the table in her rustling silk, examining the silver, the glass, and the napery, exact and precise as usual. Always, through this most awful winter, she had maintained this gallant decorum of outward appearance. That had been in some measure her satisfaction and her triumph.

Oliver was already in the room. She disliked Oliver in his black evening clothes, with his black stock and his hair that looked now as if it had been thickly powdered. His face was tanned and coarsened by exposure to the fierce weather, and his lips were pallid. For all his massive air of strength, he seemed to his sister a sick man. But she would not touch on that--she would not in any way broach the tragedy between them. She wondered sometimes if he kept the little straw bonnet with the flattened wreaths of red flowers, and the torn cashmere shawl; and wondered also as to the fate of the two coral bracelets, one so oddly in the possession of Oliver, one so oddly in the possession of Lucius; but she never spoke of these things, and she tried to take her mind off them. And now, after her usual habit, she talked of commonplace affairs to Oliver, in formal tones which she strove to render affectionate.

“Why,” she reminded herself nervously, “there is nothing now left to make you think of the Countess Fanny; nothing whatever!”

The maid had gone, well paid and lamenting. She had been packed off to Italy, with all Fanny’s trunks and luggage, the harp, the trinkets, the pretty vases, and silk hangings, all that useless encumbrance of luxury which Fanny had insisted on bringing with her from Rome, and which had cost Oliver so much vexation on the journey; all gone now! Ambrosia had taken pains to be away from home the day that all these things were loaded on to the wagons and taken down to the ferry. And now the guest-chamber, which had once been her chamber, was exactly as it had been, with cool, glazed chintz with raspberry and blue flowers on them, the walls bare, save for pale water-colours of children and flowers, the hearth upon which no fire was ever lit, and a dressing-table with sprigged muslin over blue satin, on which no ornaments were ever laid.

Ambrosia wondered, “Will Oliver ever marry again? Will any other woman ever inhabit that room?”

Lucius came early, and brought with him a large bouquet of exotics from the glass-house at Lefton Park--fragile and delicate flowers, of fantastic shapes and delicately stained with colour, with long Latin names--aliens, which shed a faint, reluctant perfume in the warm room and seemed already to be shivering to their death in this foreign atmosphere.

But Ambrosia received them with gratitude, as she received any attention, however formal and stately, on the part of her lover, with gratitude. She knew so well, in the recesses of her soul, that the debt was all on her side. He could do very well without her, but she could not do without him; and her obligation was immense.

Lucius had changed, too, since that six weeks he had spent on the lighthouse during the tempest. No longer could she faintly despise him, think of him as too youthful, too dreamy, too irresolute. He had grown beyond her stature and beyond her judgment. If his essential sweetness was more than before apparent, so was his essential strength which, in a fashion, she had before missed. Fastidious and dilettante as she had thought him (always she had been slightly contemptuous of his passion for engineering, for the lighthouse), he had proved himself to be as resolute and as valiant as any of those ancestors of his who had fought on land or sea, or shown firmness and courage in the council chamber. She herself realised, and she had heard others remark, that not many men, inexperienced as he was, young as he was, could have done what he had done, and done it coolly, without any complaint or self-consciousness. She had imagination enough to understand what those six weeks must have meant to him, tormented by his passion for the lost woman, assaulted by the raging seas which had devoured her, alone, after the boy’s death, for so many days, isolated in the midst of the tempest.…

Her manner with Lucius now was different--timid, at times almost humble. She was thankful now for his mere kindness, where before she had rather haughtily demanded his full love.

They all sat down to the handsomely appointed table, reserved, amiable, stately. Ambrosia caught a sight of herself; looking up suddenly, she beheld herself in the round diminishing mirror, framed in the Empire style, that her mother had bought in Paris. She saw herself in the burnished silk and the heavy lace bertha, and _parure_ of jewels, and she thought vaguely: “That is I, sitting here at the head of this table, with Oliver opposite and Lucius near me, and those four other people who have known me all my life; and I am talking quite pleasantly, and eating and drinking, and nobody says anything at all about Fanny Caldini.…”

After dinner they went into the drawing-room, where daffodils and snowdrops and violets, disposed in the silver vases, gave out a chill fragrance of spring in the fire-warmed room.

Ambrosia sat down before the tall, rosewood piano, with the red satin quilted into an odd design underneath the lattice-work, and played and sang while Lucius turned over the music. But she avoided any Italian _aria_, though they were now so fashionable; nor did any of the company ask for them.

Oliver had said little during the meal, but this was not remarked, as he was usually so taciturn and even sullen in his demeanour.

While Ambrosia sang and played, he remained sunk in his chair, his chin dropped into his cravat as if he were lost in dangerous dreams. Then the doctor’s rather shabby little brougham drove up, and took him and his sister and the vicar and his wife away; and there were amiable, but rather formal, farewells, and some guarded talk of the marriage and the future.

Then the other three sat alone in the drawing-room, and heard the sound of the horses’ hoofs going off into the distance.

Oliver was drinking steadily, but as yet this appeared to have had no effect on him. He rose now, and abruptly left the room, neither speaking to nor glancing at Ambrosia nor Lucius.

“He still drinks too much,” murmured his sister, “and yet he seems something recovered, don’t you think, Lucius?”

She addressed him in that softer manner which she now used towards everyone. Ambrosia had of late lost much of her self-assurance and her hardness; she had been nearly overwhelmed by disaster and was humbled by the good fortune of her escape.

“Oliver seems to me much as he ever was,” said Lucius carefully. “But then, he is much shut away by himself. I am very sorry for Oliver,” he added. “And you will leave him here alone, Amy?”

She replied hastily, as if defending herself:

“What else can I do?” And she said, as she had said to the clergyman: “There is no one who would come and stay with Oliver; and Oliver will not leave St. Nite’s.”

“Well, to each his destiny,” sighed Lucius. Then he added in a more cheerful tone: “Perhaps as the years go by--that’s the great cure for everything, eh, Amy--time?”

He looked at Amy closely as he spoke, then rose impulsively, and came and stood by her chair.

“Amy, I wanted to ask you: has Oliver ever said anything to you about----”

She knew the name he wished to speak and could not say, and she helped him gently:

“Fanny? Do you mean about Fanny? No, he has never mentioned her since that illness of his, when you came off the lighthouse. A few days after that”--she laboured with her words, thinking of that conversation in the carriage, when Oliver had told her so violently that if she married Lucius, Fanny would be always between them--“he spoke of her death with great passion; but since, nothing!”

Lucius gazed at her earnestly, trying to perceive if she spoke the truth. As far as he knew, Oliver had never mentioned again that violent accusation which he had thrown in his face on the day of his father’s funeral; but it had often gnawed at his heart that he had, in secret, expressed it to Amy. But now he felt assured that this was not so. Amy was sad, but too tranquil to have been ever asked to consider such a thought as that.

“That is all, Amy,” he remarked; “I just wondered if he ever spoke of her.”

“There have been letters, as I think you know,” said Ambrosia, “from the lawyers and from Italy. He has never told anything of it to me, and I--well, why should I ask, Lucius?”

“Why, indeed?” smiled the young man. “It is over, is it not?”

Now was the moment when she might have bared her heart to him, and ask him what it had all meant to him, and told him of her sympathy and loyalty and gratitude. But she would not do this; she remained enclosed within herself, and merely repeated:

“Yes, it is over, Lucius.”

“And we must take up life,” added the young man, with a gallant smile, “and you must never think, Amy, that I was distracted from you--for more than a little while.”

She was startled at this. Was he, then, going to tear down those veils which she had so carefully arranged over this most dreadful subject?

“Of course, of course!” she agreed at once. “You would be distracted by such a tragedy as that. That was only natural, was it not, Lucius? You were the last to see her. I understood.”

Lucius looked at her very curiously, and smiled. She could not endure either the glance or the smile, and turned her eyes away. He could think her obtuse and foolish, vain and dull if he would, but he should not bring this thing out between them and force her to listen to his confession that he had loved the Countess Fanny… and she vowed then that she would be such a wife to him that she would make him forget that he ever had loved that strange, foreign girl, even for a few days loved her.… Oh, could love be confined to a space of time?

She waited, fearful that he would again try to speak--endeavour to open his heart and make some confession--but he had been checked in his attempt.

He remained long silent, staring into the fire, and she venturing to glance at his face, saw a secret expression there and knew that she would often behold it on those dear features.

When he did speak, it was to consult her about the choice of hotels where they might stay in Paris, and Ambrosia knew that the danger had passed--possibly for ever. It was not likely, she thought, that he would again try to tell her that he had loved Fanny Caldini. Yet, even in her relief, the woman thought that this, perhaps, was the worse alternative that she had chosen; she had turned back his confidence, and he would not offer it again. Were they not, then, though to all outward appearances so loving and intimate, yet further estranged? If she could have said “I know you love her; I know you love her still, and I’ll stand by and do what I can,” would not that have given her a better chance, brought them nearer? It was, anyhow, too late.

Soon he took his leave. He was going to walk home. There was a moon, and he liked that two miles along the cool road in the clear night.

Oliver was not to be found, so the young Earl left Sellar’s Mead without taking leave of his host. He carried no lantern, for the moon was almost full, and there were no clouds in the cold sky. He did not go directly to his home, but turned aside and took one of the lanes across the fields which led to the cliffs, and mounted the swelling ground until he reached a point where he could behold the sea, and the distant flash, red and white, of the light on St. Nite’s Head, that beacon which he had for six weeks kept alight with his own hands.

The sea was calm now, curling its sluggish foam among the rocks below; and the moon traced a path of silver on the water that seemed of polished metal.

The young Earl took a coral bracelet from his pocket, and looked at it by the light of the moon, and was so absorbed in contemplating this ornament that he did not hear any footfall behind him; only a shadow passed across his path, causing him to look round: Oliver Sellar was close behind him, hatless, in his evening clothes, and with the distortion in his face most noticeable.