The New Abelard (Vol. 1-3). Robert Williams Buchanan
know all that cant, and I suppose you speak as a clergyman; but I do my duty by the man who keeps me, and never—like some I could name—have intrigues with other men. It wouldn’t be fair, and it wouldn’t pay. I hope,’ she added, as if struck suddenly by the thought, ‘you have not come here to-night imagining I shall return to you?’ He recoiled as if from a blow.
‘Return to me? God forbid!’
‘So say I, though you might put it a little more politely. By the way, I forgot to ask you—but perhaps you yourself have married again?’
The question came suddenly like a stab. Bradley started in fresh horror, holding his hand upon his heart. She exclaimed:—
‘You might have done so, you know, thinking me food for worms, and if such were the case you may be sure I should never have betrayed you. No; “live and let live” is my motto. I am not such a fool as to suppose you have never looked at another woman; and if you had consoled yourself, taking some nice, pretty, quiet, homely creature, fit to be a clergyman’s wife, to mend his stockings, and to visit the sick with rolls of flannel and bottles of beef-tea, I should have thought you had acted like a sensible man.’
It was too horrible. He felt stifled, asphyxiated. He had never before encountered such a woman, though their name is legion in all the Babylons, and he could not understand her. With a deep frown he rose to his feet.
‘Are you going?’ she cried. ‘Pray don’t, till we understand each other!’
He turned and fixed his eyes despairingly upon her, looking so worn, so miserable, that even her hard heart was touched.
‘Try to think I am really dead,’ she said, ‘and it will be all right. I have changed both my life and my name, and no one of my old friends knows me. I don’t act. Eustace wanted to take a theatre for me, but, after all, I prefer idleness to work, and I am not likely to reappear. I have no acquaintances out of theatrical circles, where I am known only as Mrs. Montmorency. So you see there is no danger, mon cher. Let me alone, and I shall let you alone. You can marry again whenever you like.’
Again she touched that cruel chord, and again he seemed like a man stabbed.
‘Marry?’ he echoed. ‘But I am not free! You are still my wife.’
‘I deny it,’ was the answer. ‘We are divorced; I divorced myself. It is just the same as if we had gone before the judge: a course you will surely never adopt, for it would disgrace you terribly and ruin me, perhaps.
Eustace is horribly proud, and if it should all come out about his keeping me, he would never forgive me. No, no, you’ll never be such a fool!’
Yet she watched him eagerly, as if anxious for some assurance that he would not draw her into the open daylight of a legal prosecution.
He answered her, as if following her own wild thoughts—
‘Why should I spare you? Why should I drag on my lifetime, tied by the law to a shameless woman? Why should I keep your secret and countenance your infamy? Do you take me for one of those men who have no souls, no consciences, no honour? Do you think that I will bear the horror of a guilty secret, now I know that you live, and that God has not been merciful enough to rid me of such a curse?’
It was the first time he had seemed really violent. In his pain he almost touched her with his clenched hand.
‘You had better not strike me!’ she said viciously.
At this moment the door opened, and a little boy (the same Bradley had seen at the theatre) ran eagerly in. He was dressed in a suit of black velvet, with bows of coloured ribbon, and, though he was pale and evidently delicate, he looked charmingly innocent and pretty.
‘Maman! maman!’ he cried in French.
She returned angrily, answering him in the same tongue—
‘Que cherchez-vous, Bébé? Allez-vous en!’
‘Maman, je viens vous souhaiter la bonne nuit!
‘Allez, allez,’ she replied impatiently, ‘je viendrai vous baiser quand vous serez couché.’
With a wondering look at the stranger the child ran from the room.
The interruption seemed to have calmed them both. There was a brief silence, during which Bradley gazed drearily at the door through which the child had vanished, and his companion seemed lost in thought.
The time has perhaps come to explain that, if this worldly and sin-stained woman had one redeeming virtue, it was love for her little boy. True, she showed it strangely, being subject to curious aberrations of mood. The child was secretly afraid of her. Sometimes she would turn upon him, for some trivial fault, with violent passion; the next moment she would cover him with kisses and load him with toys. In her heart she adored him; indeed, he was the only thing in the world that she felt to be her own. She knew how terribly his birth, when he grew up, would tell against his chances in life, and she had so managed matters that Lord Ombermere had settled a large sum of money unconditionally upon the child; which money was already invested for him, in his mother’s name, in substantial Government securities. Her own relation with Ombermere, I may remark in passing, was a curious one. Whenever he was in London, his lordship dropped in every afternoon at about four, as ‘Mr. Montmorency’; he took a cup of tea in company with mother and child; at a quarter to six precisely he looked at his watch and rose to go; and at seven he was dining in Bentinck Square, surrounded by his legal children, and faced by his lady. Personally, he was a mild, pale man, without intelligence or conversational powers of any kind, and ‘Mrs. Montmorency’ found his company exceedingly tedious and tame.
‘You see my position,’ said Mrs. Montmorency at last. ‘If you have no consideration for me, perhaps you will have some for my boy.’
The clergyman sighed, and looked at her as if dazed.
‘I must think it over,’ he said. ‘All this has come as a terrible shock upon me.’
‘Shall I see you again?’
‘God knows!’
‘If you should call, never do so between four and six; those are Eustace’s hours. I am generally in during the evening, unless I go to the theatre. Good night!’
And with the ghost of a smile she extended her hand. He took it vacantly, and held it limply for a moment. Then he dropped it with another sigh, and went to the door, which he opened. Turning on the threshold, he saw her standing in the centre of the room, pale, beautiful, and baleful. She smiled again, flashing her eyes and showing her white teeth. With a shudder that went through all his frame, he passed out into the silent street.
It was now very late, and the Park lay still and sleeping under the dim light of the moon. From time to time a carriage passed by, but the pavement was quite deserted. Full of what he had seen, with the eyes of his soul turned inward to the horrible reflection, he wandered slowly along, his footfalls sounding hollow and ominous on the footpath, as he went.
Instinctively, but almost unreflectingly, he took the direction of his hotel; passed out of the park and into Harley Street, thence across Cavendish Square to Regent Circus.
It seemed now to him as if his fate was sealed. God, in indignation at his revolt, meant to deal him full measure. Attacked on one side by the thunders of the Church, and tormented on the other by the ghost of his own youthful folly, where was he to find firm foothold for his feet? His one comfort in the strenuousness of his intellectual strife had been the sympathy and devotion of a woman who was now surely lost to him for ever; a woman who, compared to this frightful apparition of a dead past, was a very spirit of heaven. Yes, he loved an angel—an angel who would have redeemed him; and lo! in the very hour of his hope, his life was to be possessed by an incarnate devil.
His thoughts travelled back to the past.
He thought of the time when he had first known Mary Goodwin. He was a youth at Oxford, and she was the daughter of a small tradesman. She