The Intrusions of Peggy
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With a sigh he rose and came out into the garden. Audrey sat there reading a novel, which she laid face downwards in her lap at his approach. He took a chair by her, and looked round on the domain that was to be his. Then he glanced at statuesque Audrey. Lady Blixworth viewed them from afar; an instinct told her that the letter had been written. The aunt hoped while the friend rejoiced.
'He must have proved that he needs quite a different wife from Trix, and where could he find one more different?' she mused.
'It's beautiful here in summer, isn't it?' he asked Audrey.
'It must be splendid always,' said she.
'I wish public life allowed me to enjoy more of it.' It is what public men generally say.
'Your work is so important, you see.'
He stretched out his legs and took off his hat.
'But you must rest sometimes,' she urged, with an imploring glance.
'So my mother's always telling me. Well, anyhow, since you like Barslett, I hope you'll stay a long time, Miss Pollington.'
It was not much, but Audrey carried it to Lady Blixworth – or, to put the matter with more propriety, she repeated his remark quite casually. It was not poor Audrey's fault if, in self-defence, she had to make the most of such remarks. Lady Blixworth kissed her niece thoughtfully.
'Another year of my life,' she remarked to the looking-glass that evening, in the course of a study of time's ravages – 'another year or thereabouts will probably see a successful termination to the affair.'
She smiled a little bitterly. Her life, as she understood the term, had few more years to run, and to give up one was a sacrifice. It was, however, no use trying to alter the Barmouth pace. She had done what she could – a good turn to Trix Trevalla, another little lift for Audrey.
'I'm becoming a regular Sarah Bonfill,' she concluded, as she went down to dinner.
The next Saturday Mrs. Bonfill herself came.
'How is Mortimer?' she whispered at the first opportunity.
'My dear Sarah, I doubt if you could have interfered with more tactfulness yourself.'
'And where's dear Audrey?'
'I hope and believe that she's sticking pins into a map to show where the Trans-Euphratic is to run. Kindly pat me on the back, Sarah.'
Mrs. Bonfill's smile was friendly pat enough, but it was all for Audrey; she asked nothing about Trix Trevalla.
Wide apart as the two were, Trix read the letter with something of the feeling under which Mervyn had written it. He was a good man, but not good for her – that seemed to sum up the matter. Perhaps her first smile of genuine mirth since her fall and flight was summoned to her lips by the familiar stiffness, the old careful balance of his sentences, the pain by which he held himself back from lecturing. A smile of another kind recognised his straightforwardness and his chivalry; he wrote like a gentleman, as Viola Blixworth knew he would. She was more in sympathy with him when he deplored the gulf between them than when he had told her it was but a ford which duty called on her to pass. 'How much have I escaped, and how much have I lost?' she asked; but the question came in sadness, not in doubt. It was not hers to taste the good; it would have been hers to drink the evil to the dregs. Reading his letter, she praised him and reviled herself; but she rejoiced that she had left him while yet there was time; she rejoiced honestly to see that she would remain in his memory as a thing that was unaccountable, that should not have been, that had come and gone, had given some pain but had done no permanent harm.
'I've got off cheaply,' she thought; her own sufferings were not in her mind, but his; she was glad that her burden of guilt was no heavier. For Mervyn was not as Beaufort Chance; he had done nothing to make her feel that they were quits and her wrong-doing obliterated by the revenge taken for it. She could blame herself less, since even Mervyn seemed to see that, if to begin had been criminal, to go on would have been worse. But bitterness was still in her; her folly seemed still so black, her ruin so humiliating, that she must cry, 'Unfit for him! No, it's for any man that I'm unfit!' Mervyn could but comfort her a little as to what concerned himself; her sin against herself remained unpardoned. And now in her mind that sin had taken on a darker colour; since she had looked in Airey Newton's eyes she could not believe herself the woman who had done such things. The man who, having found the pearl, went and sold all that he had and bought the field where it lay, doubtless did well and was well-pleased. What did the vendor feel who bartered his right for a small price because he had overlooked the pearl?
Mervyn showed her reply to Lady Blixworth – another proof that Aunt Viola was advancing in his confidence, and repressing natural emotions with a laudable devotion to duty. Upon this Lady Blixworth wrote to Peggy Ryle: —
'This letter is not,' she said, 'to praise myself, Peggy, nor to point out my many virtues, but to ask a question. I have indeed done much good. Mortimer is convinced that immutable laws were in fault – and I agree, since the dulness of Barslett and the family preachiness are absolutely immutable. Trix is convinced too – and again I agree, since Trix is naturally both headlong and sincere, an awful combination if one were married to Mortimer. So I praise myself for having made both of them resigned, and presently to be cheerful! Needless to say, I praise myself on another score, and am backing myself to mother young women against Sarah Bonfill herself (who, by the way, is here, and resettles the Cabinet twice a day – mere bravado, I believe, after her shocking blunders, but Sarah bravadoes with a noble solidity that makes the thing almost a British quality!). I wander! What I really ask – and I want to ask it in italics – is, Whom is she in love with? Trix, I mean, of course. I am not in telegraphic, telephonic, or telepathic communication with her, but she says in her letter to Mortimer, "I was not fit for you. Am I fit for any man?" My dear, believe your elders when you can, and listen in silence when you can't! In all my experience I never knew a woman ask that question unless she was in love. Heavens, do we want to be fit for or to please the Abstract Man? Not a bit of it, Peggy! The idea is even revolting, as a thousand good ladies would prove to you. "Am I fit for any man?" Who's "any man," Peggy? Let's have his name and the street where he resides. For my part, I believed there was a man at the back of it all the time – which was no great sagacity – and I said so to Lord Barmouth – which I felt to be audacity. Peggy, tell me his name. "Am I fit for any man?" Poor Trix is still rather upset and melodramatic! But we know what it means. And what are you doing? Do you want a husband? Here am I, started in trade as an honest broker! Come along!'
This letter, Peggy felt, was in a way consoling; she hoped that Trix was in love. But so far as it seemed to be intended to be amusing, Peggy really didn't see it. The fact is, Peggy was in a mood to perceive wit only of the clearest and most commanding quality. Things were very dark indeed, just these days, with Peggy. However, she replied to Lady Blixworth, said she had no notion what she meant, but told her that she was a good friend and a good aunt.
'The latter statements,' observed Lady Blixworth complacently, 'are at the present moment true. As for the former – oh, Peggy, Peggy!'
She was, in fact, rather hurt. A refusal to betray one friend is usually considered a reflection on the discretion of another.
CHAPTER XIX
'NO MORE THAN A GLIMMER'
Forty-eight hours had passed since Peggy Ryle fled from Danes Inn. How they had gone Airey Newton could scarcely tell; as he looked back, they seemed to hold little except the ever-reiterated cry, 'The shame of it – you're rich!' But still the contents of the safe were intact, and no entries had been cancelled in the red-leather book. A dozen times he had taken the book, looked through it, and thrown it from him again. A clash of passions filled him; the old life he had chosen, with its strange, strong, secret delight and its sense of hidden power, fought against the new suggestion. It was no longer of much moment to him that Peggy knew or that it was Peggy's voice which had cried out the bitter reproach. These things now seemed accidental. Peggy or another – it mattered little.
Yet he had sent for Tommy Trent, and reproached him; he was eager to reproach anybody besides himself.
'I told nobody,' protested Tommy, in indignant surprise. Then the thought flashed on him. 'Was it Peggy?' he asked incredulously. Airey's nod started all the story. His view was what Peggy had foreseen; he found no arguments to weigh against that breaking of her word which had made him seem a traitor in the eyes of his friend.
'A woman setting the world right is the most unscrupulous thing in the world,' he declared angrily. 'You believe I never meant to break faith, old fellow? I shall have it out with her, you may be sure.' He paused and then added, 'I can't believe she'll let it go any further, you know.'
To that also Airey seemed more than half-indifferent now; the old furtive solicitude for his secret, the old shame lest it should escape, seemed to be leaving him, or at least to be losing half their force, in face of some greater thing in his mind. He had himself to deal with now – what he was, not what was said or thought of him. But he did not intercede with Tommy's sternness against Peggy; he let it pass.
'I don't blame you. It's done now. You'd better leave me alone,' he said.
Tommy went and sought Peggy with wrath in his heart; but for all these two days she was obstinately invisible. She was not to be found in Harriet Street, and none of her circle had seen her. It may be surmised that she wandered desolately through fashionable gatherings and haunts of amusement, slinking home late at night. It is certain that she did not wish to meet Tommy Trent, that she would not for the world have encountered Airey Newton. There seemed to be gunpowder in the air of all familiar places; in the reaction of fear after her desperate venture Peggy withdrew herself to the safety of the unknown.
Airey sat waiting, his eyes constantly looking to the clock. Trix was coming to see him; she had written that she needed advice, and that he was the only friend she had to turn to in such a matter. 'Peggy is no use to me in the particular way I want help, and I have something to tell which I could tell to nobody but her or you.' He knew what she had to tell; the fact that she came to tell it to him was proof positive that she had heard nothing from Peggy. He had not forbidden her coming. Though it might be agony to him, yet he willed that she should come; beyond that point his will was paralysed.
In dainty and costly garb she came, still the vision of riches which had first struck his eyes when he saw her at the beginning of her campaign in London; yet though this was her outward seeming, her air and manner raised in him a remoter memory, bringing back to mind the pathetic figure at the Paris hotel. It was easy to see that she held no secret of his, and that he had no reproach to fear. Her burden lay in her own secret that she must tell, in the self-reproach against which she had no defence. Of neither part of Peggy's double treachery had she any suspicion.
'Long ago I told you I should come if I got into trouble. Here I am!' Her effort at gaiety was tremulous and ill-sustained.
'Yes, I know you've been in trouble.'
'Oh, I don't mean that. That's all over. It's something else. Will you listen? It's not easy to say.'
He gave her a chair and stood by the mantelpiece himself, leaning his elbow on it and his chin on his hand. For a minute or two he did not attend to her; his mind flew back to his own life, to his past work and its success, to those fruits of success which had come to usurp the place not merely of success but of the worthy work itself. She had been stammering out the first part of her story for some while before he turned to her and listened, with sombre eyes set on her nervous face. At that instant she seemed to him an enemy. She had come to rob him. Why should he be robbed because this woman had been a fool? So put, the argument sounded strong and sensible; it made short work of sentimentality. If he sent her away empty, what harm was done? Tommy Trent would think as he had always thought – no less, no worse. For the rest, it was only to take just offence with the girl who had put him to shame, and to see her no more. The old life, the old delight, held out alluring arms to him.
Trix Trevalla stumbled on, all unconscious of the great battle that she fought for another, anxious only to tell her story truthfully, and yet not so as to seem a creature too abject.
'That's the end of it,' she said at last with a woeful smile. 'After Glowing Stars and the other debts, I may have forty shillings a week or thereabouts. But I want to show you my investments, and I want you to tell me what I ought to sell and what few I might best try to keep. Every pound makes a difference, you know.' The intense conviction of a convert spoke in the concluding words.
'Why do you think I know about such things?'
'Oh, I daresay Mr. Trent would know better, but I couldn't make up my mind to tell him. And I've no right to bother him. I seem to have a right to bother you, somehow.' She smiled again for an instant, and raised her eyes to his. 'Because of what you said at Paris! You remember?'
'You hold me responsible still, I see.'
'Oh, that's our old joke,' she said, fearing to seem too serious in her fanciful claim. 'But still it does always seem to me that we've been in it together; all through it your words have kept coming back, and I've thought of you here. I think you were always in my mind. Well, that's foolish. Anyhow you'll tell me what you think?'
'At least I didn't tell you to trust Fricker.'
'Please don't,' she implored. 'That's the worst of all. That's the thing I can't bear to think of. I thought myself a match for him. And now – !' Her outspread hands accepted any scornful description.
She came to him and put into his hand a paper on which she had drawn up some sort of a statement of her ventures, of her debts, and of her position as she understood it. He took it and glanced through it.
'Heavens, how you spent money!' he exclaimed, in involuntary horror.
She blushed painfully: could she point out how little that had mattered when she was going to be Lady Mervyn?
'And the losses in speculation! You seem never to have been in anything sound!'
'They deceived me,' she faltered. 'Oh, I know all that! Must you say that again? Tell me – what will there be left? Will there be enough to – to exist upon? Or must I' – she broke into a smile of ridicule – 'or must I try to work?'
There was a pathetic absurdity about the suggestion. Airey's gruff laugh relieved the sternness of his indignation.
'Yes, I've shown such fine practical talents, haven't I?' she asked forlornly.
'You were very extravagant, but you'd have been in a tolerable position but for Fricker. Dramoffskys and Glowing Stars between them have done the mischief.'
'Yes. If I hadn't cheated him, and he hadn't cheated me in return, I should have been in a tolerable position. But I knew that before I came here, Mr. Newton.'
'Well, it's the truth,' he persisted, looking at her grimly over the top of the paper.
'You needn't repeat it,' she flashed out indignantly. Then her tone changed suddenly. 'Forgive me; it's so hard to hear the truth sometimes, to know it's true, to have nothing to answer.'
'Yes, it is hard sometimes,' Airey agreed.
'Oh, you don't know. You've not cheated and been cheated; you've had nothing to conceal, nothing to lie about, nothing that you dreaded being found out in.' She wrung her hands despairingly.
'I've warned you before now not to idealise me.'
'I can't help it. I believe even your Paris advice was all right, if I'd understood it rightly. You didn't mean that I was to think only of myself and nothing of anybody else, to do nothing for anyone, to share nothing with anyone. You meant I was to make other people happy too, didn't you?'
'I don't know what I meant,' he growled, as he laid her paper on the mantelpiece.
Trix wandered to the window and sat down in the chair generally appropriated to Peggy Ryle.
'I'm sick of myself,' she said.
'A self's not such an easy thing to get rid of, though.'
She glanced at him with some constraint. 'I'm afraid I'm bothering you? I really have no right to make you doleful over my follies. You've kept out of it all yourself; I needn't drag you into it.' She rose as if she would go. Airey Newton stood motionless. It seemed as though he would let her leave him without a word.
She had not in her heart believed that he would. She in her turn stood still for a moment. When he made no sign, she raised her head in proud resentment; her voice was cold and offended. 'I'm sorry I troubled you, Mr. Newton.' She began to walk towards the door, passing him on the way. Suddenly he sprang forward and caught her by the hands.
'Don't go!' he said in a peremptory yet half-stifled whisper.
Trix's eyes filled with tears. 'I thought you couldn't really mean to do that,' she murmured. 'Oh, think of what it is, think of it! What's left for me?'
He had loosed her hands as quickly as he had caught them, and she clasped them in entreaty.
'I'm neither bad enough nor good enough. I tried to marry for position and money. I was bad enough to do that. I wasn't bad enough to go on telling the lies. Oh, I began! Now I'm not good enough or brave enough to face what I've brought myself to. And yet it would kill me to be bad enough and degraded enough to take the only way out.'
'What way do you mean?'
'I can't tell you about that,' she said. 'I should be too ashamed. But some day you may hear I've done it. How am I to resist? Is it worth resisting? Am I worth saving at all?'
She had never seemed to him so much worth saving. And he knew that he could save her, if he would pay the price. He guessed, too, what she hinted at; there was only one thing that a woman like her could speak of as at once a refuge and a degradation, as a thing that killed her and yet a thing that she might come to do. Peggy Ryle had told him that he loved her, and he had not denied it then. Still less could he deny it now, with the woman herself before him in living presence.
She saw that he had guessed what was in her mind.
'Men can't understand women doing that sort of thing, I know,' she went on. 'I suppose it strikes them with horror. They don't understand what it is to be helpless.' Her voice shook. 'I've had a great deal of hardship, and I can't bear it any more. I'm a coward in the end, I suppose. My gleam of good days has made me a coward at the thought of bad ones again.' She added, after a pause, 'You'll look at the statement and let me know what you think, won't you? It might just make all the difference.' Again she paused. 'It seems funny to stand here and tell you that, if necessary, I shall probably sell myself; that's what it comes to. But you know so much about me already, and – and I know you'd like me if – if it was humanly possible to do anything except despise me. Wouldn't you? So do look carefully at the paper and go into the figures, please. Because I – even I – don't want to sell myself for money.'
What else was he doing with himself? The words hit home. If the body were sold, did not the soul pass too? If the soul were bartered, what value was it to keep the body? Peggy had begged him to save this woman pain; unconsciously she herself asked a greater rescue than that. And she offered him, still all unconsciously, a great salvation. Was it strange that she should talk of selling herself for money? Then was it not strange too that he had been doing that very thing for years, and had done it of deliberate choice, under the stress of no fear and of no necessity? The picture of himself that had been dim, that Tommy Trent had always refused to make clearer, that even Peggy Ryle's passionate reproach had left still but half-revealed, suddenly stood out before his eyes plain and sharp in every outline. He felt that it was a thing to be loathed.
She saw his face stern and contracted with the pain of his thoughts.
'Yes, I've told you all the truth about myself, and that's how you look!' she said.
He smiled bitterly at her mistake, and fixed his eyes on her as he asked: —
'Could you change a man, if you gave yourself to him? Could you drive out his devil, and make a new man of him? Could you give him a new life, a new heart, a new character?'
'I should have no such hopes. My eyes would be quite open.' Her thoughts were on Beaufort Chance.
'No, but couldn't you?' he urged, with a wistful persistence. 'If you knew the worst of him and would still look for something good – something you could love and could use to make the rest better? Couldn't you make him cease being what he hated being? Couldn't you have a power greater than the power of the enemy in him? If you loved him, I mean.'
'How could I love him?' she asked wonderingly.
'If he loved you?'
'What does such a man mean by love?' she murmured scornfully.
'I wonder if you could do anything like that,' he went on. 'Women have, I suppose. Could you?'
'Oh, don't talk about the thing. I hope I may have courage to throw it aside.'
He started a little. 'Ah, you mean – No, I was thinking of something else.'
'And how could such a woman as I am make any man better?' She smiled in a faint ridicule of the idea; but she ceased to think of leaving him, and sat down by the table. For the moment he seemed to pay little attention to where she was or what she did; he spoke to her indeed, but his air was absent and his eyes aloof.
'Because, if the woman couldn't, if it turned out that she couldn't, the last state would be worse than the first. Murder added to felo de se! There's that to consider.' Now he returned to her in an active consciousness of her presence. 'Suppose you loved a man who had one great – well, one great devil in him? Could you love a man with a devil in him?'
There was a touch of humour hardly won in his voice. Trix responded to it.
'With a thousand, if he was a man after all!'
'Ah, yes, I daresay. But with one – one immense fellow – a fellow who had sat on him and flattened him for years? Could you fight the fellow and beat him?'
Trix thought. 'I think I might have perhaps, before – before I got a devil too, you know.'
'Say he was a swindler – could you keep him straight? Say he was cruel – could you make him kind?' He paused an instant. 'Suppose he was a churl – could you open his heart?'
'All that would be very, very hard, even for a good woman,' said Trix Trevalla. 'And you know that in a case something like those I failed before.'
'Because, if you couldn't, it would be hell to you, and worse hell to him.'
'Yes,' murmured Trix. 'That would be it exactly.'
'But if you could – ' He walked to the window and looked out. 'It would be something like pulling down the other side of the Inn and giving the sun fair play,' said he.
'But could the man do anything for her?' asked Trix. 'Something I said started you on this. The man I thought of would do nothing but make the bad worse. If she were mean first, he'd make her meaner; if she lied before, she'd have to lie more; and he'd – he'd break down the last of her woman's pride.'
'I don't mean a man like that.'
'No, and you're not thinking of a woman like me.'
'She'd have to take the place of the thing that had mastered him; he'd have to find more delight in her than in it; she'd have to take its place as the centre of his life.' He was thinking out his problem before her.
At last Trix was stirred to curiosity. Did any man argue another's case like this? Was any man roused in this fashion by an abstract discussion? Or if he were dissuading her from the step she had hinted at, was not his method perversely roundabout? She looked at him with inquiring eyes. In answer he came across the room to her.
'Yet, if there were a man and a woman such as we've been speaking of, and there was half the shadow of a chance, oughtn't they to clutch at it? Oughtn't they to play the bold game? Ought they to give it up?'