The Golden Butterfly

CHAPTER XLII

"Then a babbled of green fields."

And then there was silence. Which of them was to speak! Not the woman who had wrought this mischief; not the man who knew of the wickedness but had not spoken; not the innocent girl who only perceived that something dreadful – something beyond the ordinary run of dreadful events – had happened, and that Victoria Cassilis looked out of her senses. Lawrence Colquhoun stood unmoved by her tears; his face was hardened; it bore a look beneath which the guilty woman cowered. Yet she looked at him and not at her husband.

Presently Colquhoun spoke. His voice was harsh, and his words were a command.

"Go home!" he said to Victoria. "There is no more mischief for you to do – go!"

She obeyed without a word. She threw the light wrapper which she carried on her arm round her slender neck, and walked away, restored, to outward seeming, to all her calm and stately coldness. The coachman and the footman noticed nothing. If any of her acquaintances passed her on the road, they saw no change in her. The woman was impassive and impenetrable.

Did she love Colquhoun? No one knows. She loved to feel that she had him in her power; she was driven to a mad jealousy when that power slipped quite away; and although she had broken the vows which both once swore to keep, she could not bear even to think that he should do the same. And she did despise her husband, the man of shares, companies, and stocks. But could she love Colquhoun? Such a woman may feel the passion of jealousy; she may rejoice in the admiration which gratifies her vanity; but she is far too cold and selfish for love. It is an artful fable of the ancients which makes Narcissus pine away and die for the loss of his own image, for thereby they teach the great lesson that he who loves himself destroys himself.

The carriage wheels crunched over the gravel, and Gabriel Cassilis raised a pale and trembling face – a face with so much desolation and horror, such a piteous gaze of questioning reproach at Colquhoun, that the man's heart melted within him. He seemed to have grown old suddenly; his hair looked whiter; he trembled as one who has the palsy; and his eyes mutely asked the question, "Is this thing true?"

Lawrence Colquhoun made answer. His voice was low and gentle; his eyes were filled with tears.

"It is true, Mr. Cassilis. God knows I would have spared you the knowledge. But it is true."

Gabriel Cassilis opened his lips as if to speak. But he refrained, stopping suddenly, because he recollected that he could no longer utter what he wished to say. Then he touched his mouth with his fingers like a dumb man. He was worse than a dumb man, who cannot speak at all, because his tongue, if he allowed it, uttered words which had no connection with his thoughts. Men that have been called possessed of the devil have knelt at altars, uttering blasphemous impieties when their souls were full of prayer.

"Do you understand me, Mr. Cassilis? Do you comprehend what I am saying?"

He nodded his head.

Colquhoun took a piece of notepaper from the writing-table, and laid it before him with a pencil. Mr. Cassilis grasped the pencil eagerly, and began to write. From his fingers, as from his tongue, came the sentence which he did not wish to write —

"A fine day, and seasonable weather for the time of year."

He looked at this result with sorrowful heart, and showed it to Colquhoun, shaking his head.

"Good heavens?" cried Colquhoun, "his mind is gone."

Gabriel Cassilis touched him on the arm and shook his head.

"He understands you, Lawrence," said Phillis; "but he cannot explain himself. Something has gone wrong with him which we do not know."

Gabriel Cassilis nodded gratefully to Phillis.

"Then Mr. Cassilis," Colquhoun began, "it is right that you should know all. Six years ago I followed Victoria Pengelley into Scotland. We were married privately at a registrar's office under assumed names. If you ever want to know where and by what names, you have only to ask me, and I will tell you. There were reasons, she said, – I never quite understood what they were, but she chose to be a fille romanesque at the time, – why the marriage should be kept secret. After the wedding ceremony – such as it was – she left the office with her maid, who was the only witness, and returned to the friends with whom she was staying. I met her every day; but always in that house and among other people. A few days passed. She would not, for some whim of her own, allow the marriage to be disclosed. We quarrelled for that, and other reasons – my fault, possibly. Good God! what a honeymoon! To meet the woman you love – your bride – in society; if for half an hour alone, then in the solitude of open observation; to quarrel like people who have been married for forty years – Well, perhaps it was my fault. On the fifth day we agreed to let things be as if they had never been. I left my bride, who was not my wife, in anger. We used bitter words – perhaps I the bitterest. And when we parted, I bade her go back to her old life as if nothing had been promised on either side. I said she should be free; that I would never claim the power and the rights given me by a form of words; that she might marry again; that, to leave her the more free, I would go away and never return till she was married, or till she gave me leave. I was away for four years; and then I saw the announcement of her marriage in the paper, and I returned. That is the bare history, Mr. Cassilis. Since my return, on my honour as a gentleman, you have had no cause for jealousy in my own behaviour towards – your wife, not mine. Remember, Mr. Cassilis, whatever else may be said, she never was my wife. And yet, in the eye of the law, I suppose she is my wife still. And with all my heart I pity you."

He stopped, and looked at the victim of the crime. Gabriel Cassilis was staring helplessly from him to Phillis. Did he understand? Not entirely, I think. Yet the words which he had heard fell upon his heart softly, and soothed him in his trouble. At last his eyes rested on Phillis, as if asking, as men do in times of trouble, for the quick comprehension of a woman.

"What can I do, Mr. Cassilis?" asked the girl. "If you cannot speak, will you make some sign? Any little sign that I can understand?"

She remembered that among her lesson-books was a dictionary. She put that into his hand, and asked him to show her in the dictionary what he wished to say.

He took the book in his trembling hands, turned over the leaves, and presently, finding the page he wanted, ran his fingers down the lines till they rested on a word.

Phillis read it, spelling it out in her pretty little school-girl fashion.

"S, I, si; L, E, N, C, E, lence – silence. Is that what you wish to say, Mr. Cassilis?"

He nodded.

"Silence," repeated Lawrence. "For all our sakes it is the best – the only thing. Phillis, tell no one what you have heard; not even Agatha; not even Jack Dunquerque. Or, if you tell Jack Dunquerque, send him to me directly afterwards. Do you promise, child?"

"I promise, Lawrence. I will tell no one but Jack; and I shall ask him first if he thinks I ought to tell him another person's secret."

"Thank you, Phillis. Mr. Cassilis, there are only we three and – and one more. You may trust Phillis when she promises a thing; you may trust me, for my own sake; you may, I hope, trust that other person. And as for me, it is my intention to leave England in a week. I deeply regret that I ever came back to this country."

A week was too far ahead for Mr. Cassilis to look forward to in his agitation. Clearly the one thing in his mind at the moment – the one possible thing – was concealment. He took the dictionary again, and found the word "Home."

"Will you let me take you home, sir?" Lawrence asked.

He nodded again. There was no resentment in his face, and none in his feeble confiding manner when he took Lawrence's arm and leaned upon it as he crawled out to the carriage.

Only one sign of feeling. He took Phillis by the hand and kissed her. When he had kissed her, he laid his finger on her lips. And she understood his wish that no one should learn this thing.

"Not even Agatha, Phillis," said Lawrence. "Forget, if you can. And if you cannot, keep silence."

They drove into town together, these men with a secret between them. Lawrence made no further explanations. What was there to explain? The one who suffered the most sat upright, looking straight before him in mute suffering.

It is a long drive from Twickenham to Kensington Palace Gardens. When they arrived, Mr. Cassilis was too weak to step out of the carriage. They helped him – Lawrence Colquhoun and a footman – into the hall. He was feeble with long fasting as much as from the effects of this dreadful shock.

They carried him to his study. Among the servants who looked on was Tomlinson, the middle-aged maid with the harsh face. She knew that her bolt had fallen at last; and she saw, too, that it had fallen upon the wrong person, for up-stairs sat her mistress, calm, cold and collected. She came home looking pale and a little worn; fatigued, perhaps, with the constant round of engagements, though the season was little more than half over. She dressed in gentle silence, which Tomlinson could not understand. She went down to dinner alone, and presently went to her drawing-room, where she sat in a window, and thought.

There Colquhoun found her.

"I have told him all," he said. "Your words told him only half, and yet too much. You were never my wife, as you know, and never will be, though the Law may make you take my name. Cruel and heartless woman! to gratify an insensate jealousy you have destroyed your husband."

"Is he – is he – dead?" she cried, almost as if she wished he were.

"No; he is not dead; he is struck with some fit. He cannot speak. Learn, now, that your jealousy was without foundation. Phillis will marry Dunquerque. As for me, I can never marry, as you know."

"He is not dead!" she echoed, taking no notice of the last words. Indeed, Phillis was quite out of her thoughts now. "Does he wish to see me?"

"No; you must not, at present, attempt to see him."

"What will they do to me, Lawrence?" she asked again. "What can they do? I did not mean him to hear. It was all to frighten you."

"To frighten me! What they can do, Mrs. Cassilis, is to put you in the prisoner's box and me in the witness box. What he wants to do, so far as we can yet understand, is to keep silence."

"What is the good of that? He will cry his wrongs all over the town, and Phillis will tell everybody."

"Phillis will tell no one, no one – not even Agatha. It was lucky that Agatha heard nothing; she was upstairs, lying down after her party. Will you keep silence?"

"Of course I shall. What else is there for me to do?"

"For the sake of your husband; for the sake of your boy – "

"It is for my own sake, Lawrence," she interrupted coldly.

"I beg your pardon. I ought to have known by this time that you would have acted for your own sake only. Victoria, it was an evil day for me when I met you; it was a worse day when I consented to a secret marriage, which was no marriage, when there was no reason for any secrecy; it was the worst day of all when I answered your letter, and came here to see you. Every day we have met has produced more recrimination. That would not have mattered, but for the mischief our meeting has wrought upon your husband. I pray that we may never in this world meet again."

He was gone, and Victoria Cassilis has not met him since, nor do I think now that she ever will meet him again.

The summer night closed in; the moonlight came up and shone upon the Park before her, laying silvery patches of light in ten of thousands upon the young leaves of the trees, and darkening the shadows a deeper black by way of contrast. They brought her tea and lights; then they came for orders. There were none; she would not go out that night. At eleven Tomlinson came.

"I want nothing, Tomlinson. You need not wait up; I shall not want you this evening."

"Yes, madam; no, madam. Mr. Cassilis is asleep, madam."

"Let some one sit up with him. See to that, Tomlinson; and don't let him be disturbed."

"I will sit up with him myself, madam." Tomlinson was anxious to get to the bottom of the thing. What mischief had been done, and how far was it her own doing? To persons who want revenge these are very important questions, when mischief has actually been perpetrated.

Then Victoria was left alone. In that great house, with its troop of servants and nurses, with her husband and child, there was no one who cared to know what she was doing. The master was not popular, because he simply regarded every servant as a machine; but at least he was just, and he paid well, and the house, from the point of view likely to be taken by Mr. Plush and Miss Hairpin, was a comfortable one. The mistress of the house was unpopular. Her temper at times was intolerable, her treatment of servants showed no consideration; and the women-folk regarded the neglect of her own child with the horror of such neglect in which the Englishwoman of all ranks is trained. So she was alone, and remained alone. The hands of the clock went round and round; the moon went down, and over the garden lay the soft sepia twilight of June; the lamp on the little table at her elbow went out; but she sat still, hands crossed in her lap, looking out of window, and thinking.

She saw, but she did not feel the wickedness of it, a cold and selfish girl ripening into a cold and selfish woman – one to whom the outer world was as a panorama of moving objects, meaning nothing, and having no connection with herself. Like one blind, deaf, and dumb, she moved among the mobs who danced and sang, or who grovelled and wept. She had no tears to help the sufferers, and no smiles to encourage the happy; she had never been able to sympathise with the acting of a theatre or the puppets of a novel; she was so cold that she was not even critical. It seems odd, but it is really true, that a critic may be actually too cold. She saw a mind that, like the Indian devotee, was occupied for ever in contemplating itself; she saw beauty which would have been irresistible had there been one gleam, just one gleam of womanly tenderness; she saw one man after the other first attracted and then repelled; and then she came to the one man who was not repelled. There was once an unfortunate creature who dared to make love to Diana. His fate is recorded in Lempriére's Dictionary; also in Dr. Smith's later and more expensive work. Lawrence Colquhoun resembled that swain, and his fate was not unlike the classical punishment. She went through the form of marriage with him, and then she drove him from her by the cold wind of her own intense selfishness – a very Mistral. When he was gone she began to regret a slave of such uncomplaining slavishness. Well, no one knew except Janet. Janet did not talk. It was rather a struggle, she remembered, to take Gabriel Cassilis – rather a struggle, because Lawrence Colquhoun might come home and tell the story, not because there was anything morally wrong. She was most anxious to see him when he did come home – out of curiosity, out of jealousy, out of a desire to know whether her old power was gone; out of fear, out of that reason which makes a criminal seek out from time to time the scene and accomplices of his crime, and for the thousand reasons which make up a selfish woman's code of conduct. It was three o'clock and daylight when she discovered that she had really thought the whole thing over from the beginning, and that there was nothing more to think about, except the future – a distasteful subject to all sinners.