all that durant got out of polly was the privilege of driving her home, through mud and rain, at a melancholy trot. true, he was in no hurry to get back; so he let her take her own pace, in pity for her trembling limbs and straining heart. polly had done all she [pg 308] knew for her mistress in that frantic dash for freedom and the express; and, when he thought of what frida tancred's life had been, he guessed that the little animal was used to carrying her through worse storms than this.
the storm was over now; it had driven the clouds into the north, where they hung huddled and piled in a vast amphitheater; other clouds, charged with light now instead of darkness, were still rolling up from the south, east and west, their wings closed till the sky was shut in like whithorn-in-arden, ringed with its clouds as arden with its woods; above, beneath, there rose the same immense, impenetrable boundary, green on the earth and gray in heaven.
and frida tancred had escaped from these confines, would never come back to dwell in them again; she had said so, and he believed her. to be sure, she had shown weakness at the last, she had been driven to juggle with the conscience that would not let her go; had she not persuaded it that she was leaving the colonel for the colonel's good? but once gone, once there, away over the border and safe in the promised land, she would see clearly, she would realize her right to be happy in the glorious world.
not that these things could have happened without georgie chatterton. he had nothing but admiration for that young woman; there had been daring in her conquest of frida tancred, there were ingenuity and determination in the final elopement. was it possible that he was piqued at the insignificance of the part she had assigned to him? she had left him to settle up the sordid accounts while she ran away with the lady. he had got to say to colonel tancred, "colonel tancred, i am not your daughter's seducer and abductor; i am only a miserable accessory after the fact." in [pg 309] other words, miss chatterton had reminded him that he was too late.
too late indeed, it seemed. whether or not miss chatterton's faith in him had failed her at the last moment, but when he came down to dinner that evening he found that she had been beforehand with him; there was nothing left for him to do.
the colonel looked up smiling from a telegram. "news from st. pancras. miss chatterton is carrying my daughter off to the continent."
"i'm delighted to hear it. it will do her all the good in the world."
"yes, yes; i'm glad she should have the opportunity. i made a little tour on the continent myself when i was a young man, and i've felt a brighter fellow for it ever since."
"really?"
"yes. one's apt to get into a groove staying at home so much. there's nothing like rubbing brains with foreigners. it stretches you out, clears you of all your narrow insular prejudices, brings you in touch"—durant quivered; he knew it was coming—"in touch with fresh ideas. i don't know how you feel about it, but six months of it was enough to convince me that there's no place like england, and no people like english people, and no house like my own. as for frida, a very little goes a long way with frida; she'll be sick of it in six weeks, but she'll settle down all the better for the change."
"you think so?"
"i do. she may be a little unsettled at first. her poor mother was just the same—restless, restless. but she settled down."
the colonel made no further allusion to his daughter's absence. he was presently disturbed about another [pg 310] matter, bustling about the room, wondering, questioning, and exclaiming, "i have lost my little meteorological chronicle? has anybody seen my little meteorological chronicle? now, where did i have it last? i wonder if i could have left it with my other papers in frida's room?"
but frida's room, the room where she did all her father's writing, and her own reading and dreaming when she had time to read and dream, frida's room was locked, and nobody could find the key. the colonel, more than ever convinced that his meteorological chronicle was concealed in frida's room, ordered the door to be burst open. durant lent a shoulder to the work and entered somewhat precipitately, followed by the colonel.
the meteorological chronicle, the labor of years, was found where its author had left it, on his writing-table, together with his other papers, business letters, household accounts, primrose league programs, all carefully sorted, dated, and docketed. many of the letters had been answered; they lay, addressed in frida's handwriting, ready for the post. she had left her work in such perfect order that a new secretary could have been fitted into her place without a hitch. the fact was eloquent of finality and the winding up of affairs; but certain other details were more eloquent still.
order on the writing-table; in the rest of the room confusion and disarray, rifled bookcases and dismantled walls. fresh squares of wall-paper outlined in cobwebs marked the places where the great maps had hung. the soul of the room was gone from it with the portrait of the late mrs. tancred; the watercolor drawings, sad work of her restless fingers, were no longer there. the furniture had been pushed aside to make room for the deed of desecration; the floor was [pg 311] littered with newspapers and straw; an empty packing-case lay on its side, abandoned, in a corner.
the colonel opened round eyes of astonishment, but his mustache was still. he rang the bell and summoned the servants. under severe cross-examination, chaplin, the footman, gave evidence that three packing-cases had left coton manor for the station early in the morning before the bursting of the storm. frida, too, had discerned the face of the sky, and—admirable strategist!—had secured her transports. the colonel dismissed his witnesses, and appealed helplessly to durant; indeed, the comprehension in the young man's face gave him an appearance of guilty complicity.
"what does it mean, durant? what does it mean?"
durant smiled, not without compassion. when a young woman arranges her accounts, and makes off with three packing-cases, containing her library and her mother's portrait, the meaning obviously is that she is not coming back again in a hurry. he suggested that perhaps miss tancred proposed to make a lengthier stay on the continent than had been surmised.
"the whole thing," said the colonel, "is incomprehensible to me."
for the rest of the evening he remained visibly subdued by the presence of the incomprehensible; after coffee he pulled himself together and prepared to face it.
"there will be no whist this evening," he announced. "you will excuse me, durant; i have an immensity of work on hand. chaplin, put some whiskey and water in the study, and light the little lamp on my literary machine."
tuesday morning's post brought explanation. two letters lay on the breakfast table, both from a fresh [pg 312] hotel, the h?tel métropole, both addressed in frida tancred's handwriting, one to the colonel and the other to durant. durant's ran thus:
"dear mr. durant:—you will explain everything to my father, won't you? i have done my best, but he will never see it; it is the sort of thing he never could see—my reasons for going away and staying away. they are hard to understand, but, as far as i have made them out myself, it seems that i went away for his sake; but i believe, in fact i know, that i shall stay away for my own. you will understand it; we thrashed it all out that saturday afternoon—you remember?—and you understood then. and so i trust you.
"always sincerely yours,
"frida tancred.
"p.s.—write and tell me how he takes it. i can see it—so clearly!—from his point of view. i hope he will not be unhappy.
"p.p.s.—we sail to-morrow."
he was still knitting his brows over the opening sentences when the colonel flicked his own letter across the table.
"read this, durant, and tell me what you think of it."
durant read:
"my dear father:—you will see from georgie's telegram that we shall be leaving england to-morrow. i did not tell you this before because it would have meant so much explanation, and if we once began explaining things i don't think i should ever have [pg 313] gone at all. and i had to go. believe me, i was convinced that in going i was doing the best thing for you. i thought you had been making sacrifices for my sake, and that you would be happier without me, though you would not say so. whether i could have brought myself to leave you without the help of this conviction, and whether i have the conviction strongly still, i cannot say; it is hard to be perfectly honest, even with myself. but now that i have gone i simply can't come back again. not yet. perhaps never, till i have done the things i want to do.
"of course you will be angry—it is so unexpected. but only think—you would not be angry, would you, if i married? you would have considered that perfectly legitimate. yet it would have meant my leaving you for good. and what marriage and settling down in it is to other women, seeing the world and wandering about in it is to me—it's the thing i care for most. we do not talk about these things, so this is the first you have heard of it. think—if i had been very much in love with anyone i would have said nothing about it till i was all but engaged to him. it's the same thing. and it will make less difference to you than my marriage would have made."
here frida's pen had come to a stop; with a sudden flight from the abstract to the concrete, she had begun a fresh argument on a fresh page.
"i only mean to use a third of my income. the other two thousand will still go to keeping up the property. i have left everything so that my work could be taken up by anybody to-morrow."
the colonel's eyes had dogged durant's down to the bottom of the sheet, when he made a nervous [pg 314] attempt to recapture the letter. it was too late; the swing of frida's impassioned pleading had carried durant over the page, and one terse sentence had printed itself instantaneously on his brain. he handed back the letter without a word.
the colonel drew durant's arm in his and led him out through the window on to the gravel drive. up and down, up and down, they walked for the space of one hour, while the colonel poured out his soul. he went bareheaded, he lifted up his face to the heavens, touched to a deeper anguish by the beauty of the young day.
"lord, what a perfect morning! look at this place she's left; look at it! i've nursed the little property for her; it was as much hers as if i was in my grave, durant. she's lived in it for nearly thirty years, ever since she was no higher than that flower-pot, and she thinks nothing of leaving it. she thinks nothing of leaving me. and i've got more work to do than my brain's fit for; why i was in the very thick of my primrose league correspondence, up to the neck in all manner of accounts; and she knew it, and chose this time. i've got to give a lecture next week in whithorn parish-room, a lecture on 'imperialism,' and i've my little chronicle on hand, too; but it's nothing to her. the whole thing's a mystery to me. i can't think what can have made her do it. she never was a girl that cared for gadding about, and for society and that. as for trying to make me believe that i should be no worse off if she married, the question has never risen, durant. she hasn't married. she never even wanted to be married. she never would have been married."
"that makes it all the more natural that she should want to see something of the world instead."
"no, it's not natural. i could have understood her [pg 315] wanting to get married, that's natural enough; but what's a woman got to do with seeing the world? it's not as if she was my son, durant."
durant listened and wondered. as far as he could make out, the colonel's attitude to his daughter was twofold. on the one hand, he seemed to regard her as part of the little property, and as existing for the sake of the little property, from which point of view she had acquired a certain value in his eyes. on the other hand, he looked upon her as an inferior part of himself, and as existing for the sake of himself; it was a view old as the hills and the earth they were made of, being the paternal side of the simple primeval attitude of the man to the woman. and, seeing that the little property was a mere drop in the ocean of the colonel's egoism, this view might be said to include the other as the greater includes the less. on either theory frida tancred was not supposed to have any rights, or, indeed, any substantial existence of her own; she was an attribute, an adjunct.
"seeing the world—fiddlesticks! don't tell me there isn't something else at the bottom of it—it's an insult to my intelligence."
as everything the colonel did not understand was an insult to his intelligence, his intelligence must have had to put up with an extraordinary number of affronts.
he leaned heavily on the young man's arm. "it's shaken me. i shall never be the fellow i was. i can't understand it. nobody could have done more for any girl than i've done for frida; and she deserts me, durant, deserts me in my old age with my strength failing."
durant vainly tried to make himself worthy of frida tancred's trust, but he could add nothing to her [pg 316] reasoning, and she had kept her best argument to the last,—"it will make less difference to you than my marriage would have made."
"after all, sir, will it make so very much difference if—if your daughter does go away for a year or two?"
"i can't say. i can't tell you that till i've tried it, my boy. it's all too new to me, and i tell you i can't understand it."
he trailed off with a slow and stricken movement, like a lesser lear, and re?ntered the house by the window of frida's room. the sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his sense of her desertion.
"look at that. she was my right hand, maurice, and i can't realize that she's gone. it's the queerest sensation; i feel as if she was here and yet wasn't here."
durant said he had heard that people felt like that after the amputation of their right hands. as for the wound, he hoped that time would heal it.
"any soldier can tell you that old wounds will still bleed, durant. i think that was the luncheon bell."
lunch, over which the colonel lingered lovingly and long, somewhat obscured the freshness of the tragedy, and made it a thing of the remoter past. an hour later he was playing with his little rain-gauge on the lawn. at afternoon teatime he appeared immaculately attired in the height of the fashion; brown boots, the palest of pale gray summer suitings, a white piqué waistcoat, the least little luminous hint of green in his silk necktie, and he seemed the spirit of youth incarnate.
at this figure durant smiled with a pity that was only two-thirds contempt. he longed to ask him whether the old wound was bleeding badly. he was [pg 317] bound to believe that the colonel had a heart under his immaculate waistcoat, with pulses and arteries the same as other people's, his own unconquerable conviction being that if you pricked the gentlemannikin he would bleed sawdust.
the colonel had scarcely swallowed his tea when durant saw him trotting off in the direction of the cottage; there was that about him which, considering his recent bereavement, suggested an almost indecent haste. he returned and sat down to dinner, flushed but uncommunicative. he seemed aware that it was durant's last night, and it was after some weak attempts to give the meal a commemorative and farewell character, half-festal, half-funereal, that he sank into silence, and remained brooding over the ice pudding in his attitude of owl-like inscrutability. but during the privacy of dessert his mystic mood took flight; he hopped, as it were, onto a higher perch; he stretched the wing of victory and gazed at it admiringly; there was an effect as of the preening of young plumage, the fluttering of innumerable feathers.
and, with champagne running in his veins like the sap of spring, he proclaimed his engagement to that charming lady, mrs. fazakerly.
durant had no sooner congratulated him on the event than he remembered that he had left the postscript of miss tancred's letter unanswered. she had said, "write and tell me how he takes it"; she had hoped that he would not be unhappy. so he wrote: "he took it uncommonly well" (that was not strictly true, but durant was determined to set frida tancred's conscience at rest, even if he had to tamper a little with his own). "i should not say that he will be very unhappy. on the contrary, he has just assured [pg 318] me that he is the happiest man on earth. he is engaged to be married to mrs. fazakerly."
it was a masterly stroke on mrs. fazakerly's part, and it had followed so closely on the elopement (as closely, indeed, as consequence on cause) that durant had to admit that he had grossly underrated the powers of this remarkable woman. he had been lost in admiration of miss chatterton's elaborate intrigue and bold independent action; but now he came to think of it, though miss chatterton's style was more showy, mrs. fazakerly had played by far the better game of the two. durant, who had regarded himself as a trump card up mrs. fazakerly's sleeve, perceived with a pang that he had counted for nothing in the final move. mrs. fazakerly had not, as he idiotically supposed, been greatly concerned with frida tancred's attitude toward him. she had divined nothing, imagined nothing, she had been both simpler and subtler than he knew. she had desired the removal of frida tancred from her path, and at the right moment she had produced georgie chatterton. she had played her deliberately, staking everything on the move. georgie's independence had been purely illusory. she had appeared at mrs. fazakerly's bidding, she had behaved as mrs. fazakerly had foreseen, she had removed frida tancred, and durant had been nowhere. mrs. fazakerly's little gray eyes could read the characters of men and women at a glance, and as instantly inferred their fitness or unfitness for her purpose. she might be a poor hand at the game of whist, but at the game of matrimony she was magnificent and supreme.
frida had said, "we sail to-morrow"; therefore, durant walked all the way to whithorn-in-arden to post his letter, so that it might reach her before she left london. and as he came back across the dewy [pg 319] path in the dim light, and coton manor raised its forehead from the embrace of the woods and opened the long line of its dull windows, he realized all that it had done for frida. he understood the abnegation and the tragedy of her life. she had been sacrificed, not only to her father, but to her father's fetish, the property; coton manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been frida's, it had been her mother's. the place had crushed and consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material inheritance; it had made the living woman as the dead. he remembered how the house had been called her mother's monument, and how it had become her own grave. her soul had never lived there. and now that she was gone it was as empty as the tomb from which the soul has lifted the body at resurrection time.
and he, too, was set at liberty.
he left by the slow early train on wednesday without waiting for the afternoon express, his object being not so much to reach town as to get away from coton manor. the colonel accompanied him to the station; and, to his infinite surprise and embarrassment, he found mrs. fazakerly on the platform waiting to see him off.
he could think of nothing nice to say to her about her engagement, not even when she took possession of him with a hand on his arm, led him away to the far end of the platform, and gazed expectantly into his face.
"you don't congratulate me, mr. durant."
"on what?" he asked moodily.
"on having done a good deed."
"a good deed?"
"didn't i tell you there was nothing i wouldn't do for frida tancred?" [pg 320]
incomparable cunning! to set herself right in his eyes and her own, she was trying to persuade him that she had accepted the colonel for his daughter's sake. a good deed! well, whatever else she had done, and whatever her motives may have been, the deed remained; she had set frida tancred free. nevertheless, he could not be pleasant.
"self-sacrifice, no doubt, is a virtue," said he; "yet one draws the line——"
"does one?"
he felt a delicate pressure on his arm, the right touch, the light touch. "mr. durant, you are dense, and you are ungrateful."
"i don't see it."
"don't you see what i have done for you?" there was a strange light behind the pince-nez as she smiled up into his face. "i have cleared the way."
"for miss tancred, you mean," said durant; thereby proving that in her calculations as to his mean density mrs. fazakerly was not altogether wrong.
but durant was always an imaginative man. and as he sped on the same journey over the same rails, his imagination followed frida tancred in her flight toward freedom and the unknown.
