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A Modern Chronicle, a novel by Winston Churchill |
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Book 2 - Chapter 11. Containing Some Revelations |
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_ BOOK II CHAPTER XI. CONTAINING SOME REVELATIONS Honora, as she descended, caught a glimpse of the parlour maid picking up the scattered cards on the drawing-room floor. There were voices on the porch, where Howard was saying good-by to Mrs. Chandos and Trixton Brent. She joined them. "Oh, my dear!" cried Mrs. Chandos, interrupting Honora's apologies, "I'm sure I shan't sleep a wink--she gave me such a fright. You might have sent Trixy ahead to prepare us. When I first caught sight of her, I thought it was my own dear mother who had come all the way from Cleveland, and the cigarette burned my fingers. But I must say I think it was awfully clever of you to get hold of her and save Trixy's reputation. Good night, dear." And she got into her carriage. "Give my love to Mrs. Holt," said Brent, as he took Honora's hand, "and tell her I feel hurt that she neglected to say good night to me. I thought I had made an impression. Tell her I'll send her a cheque for her rescue work. She inspires me with confidence." Howard laughed. "I'll see you to-morrow, Brent," he called out as they drove away. Though always assertive, it seemed to Honora that her husband had an increased air of importance as he turned to her now with his hands in his pockets. He looked at her for a moment, and laughed again. He, too, had apparently seen the incident only in a humorous light. "Well, Honora," he remarked, "you have a sort of a P. T. Barnum way of doing things once in a while--haven't you? Is the old lady really tucked away for the night, or is she coming down to read us a sermon? And how the deuce did you happen to pick her up?" She had come downstairs with confession on her lips, and in the agitation of her mind had scarcely heeded Brent's words or Mrs. Chandos'. She had come down prepared for any attitude but the one in which she found him; for anger, reproaches, arraignments. Nay, she was surprised to find now that she had actually hoped for these. She deserved to be scolded: it was her right. If he had been all of a man, he would have called her to account. There must be--there was something lacking in his character. And it came to her suddenly, with all the shock of a great contrast, with what different eyes she had looked upon him five years before at Silverdale. He went into the house and started to enter the drawing-room, still in disorder and reeking with smoke. "No, not in there!" she cried sharply. He turned to her puzzled. Her breath was coming and going quickly. She crossed the hall and turned on the light in the little parlour there, and he followed her. "Don't you feel well?" he asked. "Howard," she said, "weren't you worried?" "Worried? No, why should I have been? Lula Chandos and May Barclay had seen you in the automobile in town, and I knew you were high and dry somewhere." "High and dry," she repeated. "What?" "Nothing. They said I had run off with Mr. Brent, didn't they?" He laughed. "Yes, there was some joking to that effect." "You didn't take it seriously?" "No--why should I?" She was appalled by his lack of knowledge of her. All these years she had lived with him, and he had not grasped even the elements of her nature. And this was marriage! Trixton Brent--short as their acquaintance had been--had some conception of her character and possibilities her husband none. Where was she to begin? How was she to tell him the episode in the automobile in order that he might perceive something of its sinister significance? Where was she to go to be saved from herself, if not to him? "I might have run away with him, if I had loved him," she said after a pause. "Would you have cared?" "You bet your life," said Howard, and put his arm around her. She looked up into his face. So intent had she been on what she had meant to tell him that she did not until now perceive he was preoccupied, and only half listening to what she was saying. "You bet your life," he said, patting her shoulder. "What would I have done, all alone, in the new house?" "In the new house?" she cried. "Oh, Howard--you haven't taken it!" "I haven't signed the lease," he replied importantly, smiling down at her, and thrusting his hands in his pockets. "I don't want it," said Honora; "I don't want it. I told you that I'd decided I didn't want it when we were there. Oh, Howard, why did you take it?" He whistled. He had the maddening air of one who derives amusement from the tantrums of a spoiled child. "Well," he remarked, "women are too many for me. If there's any way of pleasing 'em I haven't yet discovered it. The night before last you had to have the house. Nothing else would do. It was the greatest find in New York. For the first time in months you get up for breakfast--a pretty sure sign you hadn't changed your mind. You drag me to see it, and when you land me there, because I don't lose my head immediately, you say you don't want it. Of course I didn't take you seriously--I thought you'd set your heart on it, so I wired an offer to Shorter to-day, and he accepted it. And when I hand you this pleasant little surprise, you go right up in the air." He had no air of vexation, however, as he delivered this somewhat reproachful harangue in the picturesque language to which he commonly resorted. Quite the contrary. He was still smiling, as Santa Claus must smile when he knows he has another pack up the chimney. "Why this sudden change of mind?" he demanded. "It can't be because you want to spend the winter in Quicksands." She was indeed at a loss what to say. She could not bring herself to ask him whether he had been influenced by Trixton Brent. If he had, she told herself, she did not wish to know. He was her husband, after all, and it would be too humiliating. And then he had taken the house. "Have you hit on a palace you like better?" he inquired, with a clumsy attempt at banter. "They tell me the elder Maitlands are going abroad--perhaps we could get their house on the Park." "You said you couldn't afford Mrs. Rindge's house," she answered uneasily, "and I--I believed you." "I couldn't," he said mysteriously, and paused. It seemed to her, as she recalled the scene afterwards, that in this pause he gave the impression of physically swelling. She remembered staring at him with wide, frightened eyes and parted lips. "I couldn't," he repeated, with the same strange emphasis and a palpable attempt at complacency. "But--er--circumstances have changed since then." "What do you mean, Howard?" she whispered. The corners of his mouth twitched in the attempt to repress a smile. "I mean," he said, "that the president of a trust company can afford to live in a better house than the junior partner of Dallam and Spence." "The president of a trust company!" Honora scarcely recognized her own voice--so distant it sounded. The room rocked, and she clutched the arm of a chair and sat down. He came and stood over her. "I thought that would surprise you some," he said, obviously pleased by these symptoms. "The fact is, I hadn't meant to break it to you until morning. But I think I'll go in on the seven thirty-five." (He glanced significantly up at the ceiling, as though Mrs. Holt had something to do with this decision.) "President of the Orange Trust Company at forty isn't so bad, eh?" "The Orange Trust Company? Did you say the Orange Trust Company?" "Yes." He produced a cigarette. "Old James Wing and Brent practically control it. You see, if I do say it myself, I handled some things pretty well for Brent this summer, and he's seemed to appreciate it. He and Wing were buying in traction stocks out West. But you could have knocked me down with a paper-knife when he came to me--" "When did he come to you?" she asked breathlessly. "Yesterday. We went down town together, you remember, and he asked me to step into his office. Well, we talked it over, and I left on the one o'clock for Newport to see Mr. Wing. Wonderful old man! I sat up with him till midnight--it wasn't any picnic"... More than once during the night Honora awoke with a sense of oppression, and each time went painfully through the whole episode from the evening--some weeks past when Trixton Brent had first mentioned the subject of the trust company, to the occurrence in the automobile and Howard's triumphant announcement. She had but a vague notion of how that scene had finished; or of how, limply, she had got to bed. Round and round the circle she went in each waking period. To have implored him to relinquish the place had been waste of breath; and then--her reasons? These were the moments when the current was strongest, when she grew incandescent with humiliation and pain; when stray phrases in red letters of Brent's were illuminated. Merit! He had a contempt for her husband which he had not taken the trouble to hide. But not a business contempt. "As good as the next man," Brent had said--or words to that effect. "As good as the next man!" Then she had tacitly agreed to the bargain, and refused to honour the bill! No, she had not, she had not. Before God, she was innocent of that! When she reached this point it was always to James Wing that she clung--the financier, at least, had been impartial. And it was he who saved her. At length she opened her eyes to discover with bewilderment that the room was flooded with light, and then she sprang out of bed and went to the open window. To seaward hung an opal mist, struck here and there with crimson. She listened; some one was whistling an air she had heard before--Mrs. Barclay had been singing it last night! Wheels crunched the gravel--Howard was going off. She stood motionless until the horse's hoofs rang on the highroad, and then hurried into her dressing-gown and slippers and went downstairs to the telephone and called a number. "Is this Mr. Brent's? Will you say to Mr. Brent that Mrs. Spence would be greatly, obliged if he stopped a moment at her house before going to town? Thank you." She returned to her room and dressed with feverish haste, trying to gather her wits for an ordeal which she felt it would have killed her to delay. At ten minutes to eight she emerged again and glanced anxiously at Mrs. Holt's door; and scarcely had she reached the lower hall before he drove into the circle. She was struck more forcibly than ever by the physical freshness of the man, and he bestowed on her, as he took her hand, the peculiar smile she knew so well, that always seemed to have an enigma behind it. At sight and touch of him the memory of what she had prepared to say vanished. "Behold me, as ever, your obedient servant," he said, as he followed her into the screened-off portion of the porch. "You must think it strange that I sent for you, I know," she cried, as she turned to him. "But I couldn't wait. I--I did not know until last night. Howard only told me then. Oh, you didn't do it for me! Please say you didn't do it for me!" "My dear Honora," replied Trixton Brent, gravely, "we wanted your husband for his abilities and the valuable services he can render us." She stood looking into his eyes, striving to penetrate to the soul behind, ignorant or heedless that others before her had tried and failed. He met her gaze unflinchingly, and smiled. "I want the truth," she craved. "I never lie--to a woman," he said. "My life--my future depends upon it," she went on. "I'd rather scrub floors, I'd rather beg--than to have it so. You must believe me!" "I do believe you," he affirmed. And he said it with a gentleness and a sincerity that startled her. "Thank you," she answered simply. And speech became very difficult. "If--if I haven't been quite fair with you--Mr. Brent, I am sorry. I--I liked you, and I like you to-day better than ever before. And I can quite see now how I must have misled you into thinking--queer things about me. I didn't mean to. I have learned a lesson." She took a deep, involuntary breath. The touch of lightness in his reply served to emphasize the hitherto unsuspected fact that sportsmanship in Trixton Brent was not merely a code, but assumed something of the grandeur of a principle. "I, too, have learned a lesson," he replied. "I have learned the difference between nature and art. I am something of a connoisseur in art. I bow to nature, and pay my bets." "Your bets?" she asked, with a look. "My renunciations, forfeits, whatever you choose to call them. I have been fairly and squarely beaten--but by nature, not by art. That is my consolation." Laughter struck into her eyes like a shaft of sunlight into a well; her emotions were no longer to be distinguished. And in that moment she wondered what would have happened if she had loved this man, and why she had not. And when next he spoke, she started. "How is my elderly dove-coloured friend this morning?" he asked. "That dinner with her was one of the great events of my life. I didn't suppose such people existed any more." "Perhaps you'll stay to breakfast with her," suggested Honora, smiling. "I know she'd like to see you again." "No, thanks," he said, taking her hand, "I'm on my way to the train--I'd quite forgotten it. Au revoir!" He reached the end of the porch, turned, and called back, "As a 'dea ex machina', she has never been equalled." Honora stood for a while looking after him, until she heard a footstep behind her,--Mrs. Holt's. "Who was that, my dear?" she asked, "Howard?" "Howard has gone, Mrs. Holt," Honora replied, rousing herself. "I must make his apologies. It was Mr. Brent." "Mr. Brent!" the good lady repeated, with a slight upward lift of the faint eyebrows. "Does he often call this early?" Honora coloured a little, and laughed. "I asked him to breakfast with you, but he had to catch a train. He--wished to be remembered. He took such a fancy to you." "I am afraid," said Mrs. Holt, "that his fancy is a thing to be avoided. Are you coming to Silverdale with me, Honora?" "Yes, Mrs. Holt," she replied, slipping her arm through that of her friend, "for as long as you will let me stay." And she left a note for Howard to that effect. _ |
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