Robert Orange. John Oliver Hobbes
he has made us late for tea. What a stupid fellow!”
It was exactly five minutes past five when they reached St. James's Square. The sun, a globe, set in thin lines of yellow light, shone out above the trees, which were dull but not yet leafless. Grey and sulphurous and gold-edged clouds floated in masses on the blue sky. It had been a day of changes—yet it seemed to Sara, whose own moods had been as various, the ordinary passing away of time.
“Upon my word,” said his lordship, “it is too bad! They may say what they please about Reckage, but I call him a spooney. That horse was a noble horse—a most superior horse. He couldn't manage him. I wish he would sell him.”
“He would never do anything so much to his own advantage,” was the dry response. “Poor Reckage is a brilliant fool—he's selfish, and therefore he miscalculates.”
Sara was now talking mechanically—as she often did when she was with those whom she loved or liked, but from whom she was separated in every thought, interest, and emotion. The lassitude of which she had complained at the beginning of their drive returned upon her. Sighing heavily, she entered the house and mounted the long staircase to the drawing-room, where the tea-table was already spread, the flame quivering under the kettle, the deep pink china laid out on a silver tray. But the homeliness of the scene and its familiarity had no power to soothe that aching, distracted heart. Had she been a man, she thought, she might have sought her refuge in ceaseless work, in great ambitions, in achievements. This eternal tea-pouring and word-mincing, this business of forced laughter and garlanded conversation was more than she could endure. A low cry of impatience, too long and also too loosely imprisoned, escaped from her lips.
“What is the matter?” asked Lord Garrow, who was following close upon her heels.
“Life,” she said, “life! That is all that ever does matter.”
“Ain't you happy?”
“No, but I have it in me to be happy—an appalling capability. Let us say no more about it. I must join myself to eternity, and so find rest.”
“Well,” said her father, who now felt that he had a right to complain, “my poor uncle used to say, if women deserved happiness they would bear it better. Few of them bear it well—and this is a fact I have often brought before me.”
CHAPTER II
When Sara had prepared Lord Garrow's tea and cut the leaves of the Revue des Deux Mondes, which he invariably read until he dressed for dinner, she stole away to the further room, where she could play the piano, write letters, muse over novels, or indulge in reverie without fear of interruption. But as she entered it that afternoon its air of peace seemed the bleakness of desolation. A terrible and afflicting grief swept, like an icy breeze, through her heart, and, whether from actual physical pain or the excitement of the last few hours, tears started to her eyes, her cheeks flushed, and she fell to passionate weeping. The smiling Nymphs painted on the ceiling above her head and the rose leaves they were for ever scattering to the dancing Hours (a charming group, and considered very cheerful), could not relieve her woe. She cried long and bitterly, and was on the verge of hysterics when the door opened and her most intimate woman friend, the Viscountess Fitz Rewes, was announced. This bewitching creature—who was a widow, with two long flaxen curls, a sweet figure, and the smile of an angel—embraced her dear, dear Sara with genuine affection, and pretended not to see her swollen eyelids. Sara possessed for Pensée Fitz Rewes the fascination of a desperate nature for a meek one. The audacity, brilliancy, and recklessness of the younger woman at once stimulated and established the other's gentle piety.
They talked for fifteen minutes about the autumn visits they had paid, the visits they would have to pay, and the visits which nothing in the world would induce them to pay.
“I have been at home, at Catesby, most of the time,” said Pensée; “a very quiet, happyish time, on the whole. I had a few people down, but I saw a great deal of a particularly nice person. She is a foreigner—an archduchess really. Her father made a morganatic marriage. I am so glad they don't have morganatic marriages in England. I don't like to be uncharitable, but they seem, in a way, so improper. Madame de Parflete is all one could wish. Her husband was a dreadful man.”
“What did he do?” said Sara, who was a little absent.
“Oh, all kinds of things. He committed suicide in the end. And now—she is going to marry a friend of mine.”
“Who is he?”
“I never told you about him before,” said Pensée, “but I am so miserable to-day that you may as well know. He was a sort of brother, yet much more. One didn't meet him often in our set, because he didn't and doesn't care about it. Life, however, threw us together.”
She covered her wan face with her hands.
“How am I to give him up?” she asked. “How shall I bear it? I get so unhappy. I asked my little boy the other day what he did when I went away from home. He said—‘I gather chestnuts and feel lonely.’ And I asked my little girl what she did, and she said—‘I cry till you come back again.’ There's the difference between men and women. I am like my poor Lilian. You, Sara, if you could be wretched, would be more like the boy.”
“Do you think so?” said Sara.
“That wonderful passage in the New Testament—I often remember it! After all the agony and separation were over, Simon Peter said to the disciples, I go a fishing. He went back to the work he was doing when our Lord first called him. What courage!”
“Go on,” said Sara, “go on!”
“Of course, my heart has been taking an undue complacency in the creature, and this seldom fails to injure. I have a wish to be free from distress, and enjoy life. As if we were born to be happy! No, this world is a school to discipline souls and fit them for the other. I must forget my friend.”
“Nonsense!”
“It will be very hard. I took such an interest in his career. If I didn't mention him to you, or to other people, I mentioned him often to God. And now—it is somewhat awkward.”
“You little goose,” said Sara, “you have a heart of crystal. Nothing could be awkward for you.”
“My heart,” said Pensée, with a touch of resentment, “is just as dangerous and wicked as any other heart! You misunderstand me wilfully. I like prayer at all times, because it is a help and because it lifts one out of the world. Oh, when shall every thought be brought into captivity?”
“Listen!” said Sara, “listen! If there is an attractiveness in human beings so lovely that it could call your Almighty God Himself from heaven to dwell among them and to die most cruelly for their sakes, is it to be expected that they will not—and who will dare say that they should not?—as mortals themselves, discover qualities in each other which draw out the deepest affection? I have no patience with your religion—none.”
“You are most unkind, and I won't tell you any more,” replied Pensée, who looked, however, not ungrateful for Sara's view of the situation.
“Let me tell you something about me,” said her friend fiercely. “I never say my prayers, because I cannot say them, but I love somebody, too. Whenever I hear his name I could faint. When I see him I could sink into the ground. At the sight of his handwriting I grow cold from head to foot, I tremble, my heart aches so that it seems breaking in two. I long to be with him, yet when I am with him I have nothing to say. I have to escape and be miserable all alone. He is my thought all day: the last before I sleep, the first when I awake. I could cry and cry and cry. I try to read, and I remember not a word. I like playing best, for then I can almost imagine that he is listening. But when I stop playing and look round, I find myself in an empty room. It is awful. I call his name; no one answers. I whisper it; still no answer. I