Chapter XI

The telegram was brought in to Lady Mary as she sat alone in her little sitting room, in the hours between tea and the dressing bell,--hours which, so far as possible, especially during the last few months, she tried to keep to herself. It had been handed in at a branch office in the north of London and contained the news for which she had been waiting:

Elected majority two thousand heartiest thanks for good wishes.

CHRISTOPHER.

Her first impulse was one of genuine pleasure. She started to her feet, meaning to take it to her father, who was with Myrtile in the library. Then she stopped short and slowly resumed her seat. That little orange-coloured form might have meant so much more, so much food for her ambitions, her natural and proper ambitions for the man she loved. It might have been such a pledge for the interest of their life together, such a wonderful life, brimful of movement and colour in which she, too, might well hope to take a part. In her quiet way, she had for years looked upon her marriage with Christopher, sooner or later, as a certainty. Without the slightest desire in any way to mislead her, Christopher had subconsciously encouraged the idea. She knew perfectly well that, as soon as his position was a little more assured, he had intended to ask her to be his wife. It was one of those pleasant yet wonderful arrangements which seemed to develop automatically. Christopher was well-born, his friends were her friends, his disposition accorded with hers. She could never have married an idle man. Christopher had many a worthy ambition. She was precisely the wife to further them. Her money and her social influence would save him years of fruitless labour. He could leave the Bar whenever he liked, and turn his whole attention to politics.--And now the dream had crumbled. This slip of paper was nothing but a friendly message, telling her of the success of a friend with whose career she had no intimate concern. Her disposition was too kindly not to feel a certain amount of pleasure at his success, but that very pleasure brought its shadow of personal grief. She sat looking into the fire, twisting the little slip of paper in her hands. She knew very well that she was cursed with that one terrible and self-mortifying virtue, the unalterable fidelity of the woman who permits in her mind the thought of one man only and who can never replace him. The very thought of marriage with any one but Christopher was revolting. It seemed to her, as she sat there, that she was doomed to a career of lovelessness and inutility. She might labour in good works till her hair was streaked with grey and her face lined, and she knew very well the fruitlessness of all that she would accomplish. The best work of a woman, as she well knew, is the work done for the man she loves.

It was perhaps natural that her thoughts should turn to Myrtile. She wondered for a moment, slowly and painfully, at the instinct which had warned her of coming trouble when the two young men had told her of their adventure. She had felt it when first she had seen the frightened child, whose unspoken appeal for protection had met with so cold a response from her. She had been conscious of a cruelty wholly foreign to her nature, in those days at Monte Carlo, whenever the name of Myrtile was mentioned. She had puzzled Christopher and her brother alike by her lack of sympathy. Well, she was punished now. The child had justified all that she had felt. She had robbed her, unconsciously and unwillingly, of the greatest thing in life. As she sat there, the telegram crumpled up in her fingers, all that old hardness came back to her. It seemed to her a bitter thing that this unknown child should have been brought into the august household in which her own serene days had been spent, to rob her, the benefactress, of the crown of her life, to draw the sunshine from her days and send her down to a joyless grave. For a moment she was on the verge of a passion. She hated Myrtile, hated the sight of her gentle movements, the thought of her and all to do with her. She rose to her feet with an unaccustomed fire in her eyes and swung round--to find that the slight noise which had disturbed her meditations had been caused by the entrance of Myrtile herself.

There are moments when revelation is self-illuminative. This was one of them. Myrtile, gazing almost in terror into the face of her benefactress, knew that she was hated, and, with an extraordinary insight, she knew why. She saw the crumpled up telegraph form; she guessed at everything which had lain unspoken between them. She closed the door firmly behind her, came across to Lady Mary’s chair, fell on her knees and struggled with her sobs.

“I know! I know!” she cried. “I am very miserable!”

Mary looked at her coldly and critically. All the natural impulses of her heart seemed dried up. Even her pride refused to come to her aid. The truth lay naked between the two.

“I was a fool not to realise what bringing you here meant,” she said. “It is too late now. Here is the telegram. Christopher is elected.”

Myrtile brushed it away. It was a thing of no account.

“I care nothing for Christopher and you know it,” she declared passionately. “I do not care whether he is elected or not. Nothing about him makes any difference to me, or ever will.”

Myrtile was speaking the truth. To Mary it seemed amazing, but she knew that it was the truth.

“It is only a fancy which Christopher has for me,” Myrtile went on. “It will pass--oh, I am sure that it will pass! Deep down in his heart I know that there is another feeling.”

“There was,” Mary agreed. “But for your coming, he would have known it himself before now.”

Myrtile shook with the pain of it.

“But for my coming!” she repeated. “And I have prayed that I might bring a little happiness to you who have been so good to me!”

Her anguish was apparent. There was something almost unearthly in the sorrow which shone out of her eyes. Mary’s heart began to fail her. Her fingers rested on the top of the other girl’s head. A gleam of coming kindness shone mistily in her eyes.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.

“It is my fault that I am alive!” Myrtile moaned. “But listen, please. I have my plans. I am going away.”

“What good would that do?” Mary asked doubtfully.

“It would do great good,” Myrtile declared. “I shall remove myself altogether. Christopher’s fancy will pass. And besides--I must go.”

“My father would never spare you,” Mary said, ashamed of the joy with which the thought filled her.

“I have thought of everything,” Myrtile insisted. “Lord Hinterleys has been very kind to me, but he will forget. If he chooses to see me sometimes, it will be possible. Let me tell you, please. I have a plan. Only yesterday I heard from the curé. He is back again in the valley. He is at the church there now. He says, if I need ever to go back, I can teach at the school. All my people have gone away many, many miles. My stepfather has a larger farm. I shall go back. I should never have come away.”

Mary looked at her searchingly. All the suffering in the world seemed to be quivering in Myrtile’s sensitive face. She leaned a little forward towards the kneeling girl.

“Myrtile,” she whispered, “there is pain in your heart, too.”

“Oh, God knows it!” Myrtile sobbed. “There will be for ever and ever. It is for my own sake that I must leave. I thought that love was a toy, and I laughed to find it in my heart. And now I know that it is a torment. I want to go back along the road I have come and hide.”

“We have both been a little foolish,” Mary said kindly. “You looked out into life, expecting to find happiness, just as children go into the meadows to pick flowers. And I, too, forgot that happiness only comes when it is earned.--Now let us try and be sensible. I think that yours is a very good idea. We shall miss you very much here, but perhaps it will be best for you to go away for a little time.”

“I must go,” Myrtile insisted fervently.

“But teaching?”

“There is no need for me to teach,” Myrtile declared. “This letter that I have from the curé, it was written to tell me that my mother’s brother, who went to Geneva many years ago, has died and left me some money. An _avocat_ at Toulon has it for me. It is quite a great deal. I thought that I would buy a small farm and work in the fields there, work and work until I got brown and hard and grew like those other peasant girls there, lumps of the earth to which they stoop all the time. In a way I used to love the farm,” she went on, “when I was alone--those first few mornings when the fields began to show purple with the budding violets, and the still evenings when the cypress trees looked as though they had come out of a box of children’s toys--and the colours the sunset used to draw out of the mountains, the magentas and purples, and the pink glow coming in such unexpected places.”

“Why, you’re positively homesick!” Mary exclaimed.

“No, I am not homesick,” Myrtile assured her gravely, “but I am like an animal that has been hurt and wants to limp back to its home. A little time ago it was different. Every fibre of me longed for escape, to be where life was. Now I would like to go where I can forget it.”

Mary sighed.

“Fortunately,” she said, “you are very young. You will learn soon that there are many men of Gerald’s type, and that they are not to be taken too seriously. They have the trick of making you believe what they want you to believe, and they use it because they must. They are never quite honest. They are never quite bad. They certainly are not worth a broken heart.--Now we must take this message down to my father and send a reply. He does not altogether approve of Christopher’s politics, but he will be glad to know that he is elected. Afterwards, I will talk to him about you. I shall have to be very eloquent, for I know he will hate your going.”

“If it could be before Gerald comes back,” Myrtile pleaded.

Mary had even more trouble with her father than she had expected. At the first mention of Gerald’s name in connection with Myrtile’s desire to return to France, he stiffened.

“Mary,” he insisted, “I shall require you to tell me the exact truth as to this matter.”

“I will do so,” Mary promised.

“How much blame is to be attached to Gerald, and precisely what are his relations with Myrtile?” Lord Hinterleys asked sternly.

“Gerald is to blame only for thoughtlessness,” she assured him. “He is a born philanderer, just as Myrtile was born to be a ready victim. Myrtile loves him, and I am afraid she will never care for any one else. Other women have to bear their hurts, though, and I dare say she will get over it.”

“Gerald is a fool,” his father declared. “Marrying in one’s own class is well enough in an ordinary way, but--well, there isn’t another woman like Myrtile in the world. Gerald is an ass not to realise it instead of going to Russia, risking his life and liberty for the sake of this Russian girl. I don’t like Russians--never did. You are a person of common sense, Mary. If you say Myrtile must go, go she must, but I’d much rather Gerald came to his senses and married her.”

“Men are rather difficult in that way,” Mary rejoined, a little bitterly.