A Mere Chance: A Novel. Vol. 3

CHAPTER VI.

MRS. READE MEETS HER MATCH

"WILL Mr. Roden Dalrymple do Mrs. Edward Reade the great favour to call upon her to-morrow (Thursday) morning, if convenient to him, between ten and twelve o'clock? She is particularly anxious to see him upon a matter of private business."

This note was despatched from South Yarra to Menzies on a certain night in the early part of December, a few weeks after the Town Hall ball. Mr. Dalrymple had just come to Melbourne, and Mrs. Reade, through the gossip of afternoon visitors, had heard of it.

She had heard of a great deal more besides – from Laura's husband chiefly; and the critical nature of the situation, and her anxious solicitude for Rachel's welfare in the midst of the perils and temptations to which, while a meeting with her old lover was possible, she would be exposed, made it seem absolutely necessary that the person who was most capable of doing so effectually should interfere once more.

The course she adopted in undertaking this delicate and difficult enterprise was worthy alike of her courage and her good sense. She had never met Mr. Dalrymple, and she had no definite knowledge of his character, only an impression that he was "wild" – a man of the world, with a touch of the libertine and the vagabond about him – and that he was also undoubtedly a gentleman, with some of the finer qualities that are the heritage of good blood.

Yet she determined that she would abjure all schemes and artifices, and see him herself before there was time for anything to happen, and appeal to his honour and generosity on behalf of the woman he loved – upon whose peace it seemed evident to her he had some selfish if not distinctly evil designs.

"He has come to town in consequence of Mr. Gordon's representations, of course, for no other purpose than to see her," the little woman said to herself the moment she heard of his arrival; "and if he does see her, nothing but trouble can possibly come of it."

So she determined to prevent trouble if possible, and this seemed to her the proper way.

She prepared herself for the interview on the Thursday morning, without any sense of having undertaken a difficult task.

When he arrived she was discussing dinner with her cook, and she walked from the larder to the drawing-room with a very grave and thoughtful face, but feeling perfectly serene and self-possessed.

He was standing in the middle of the room, facing the door, with his hat in his hand when she entered. He looked immensely tall, and stiff, and stately. There was an air of impracticable independence in his attitude, and in the distant dignity of his salutation that disconcerted her a little. He was wonderfully like his photograph she thought, and yet he was a much more imposing personage than she had bargained for.

"Oh, Mr. Dalrymple – it was so kind of you to come," she said, in her quick, easy way. "I must apologise for summoning you in such a very informal manner, but – a – won't you sit down?"

She dropped into one of her soft, low chairs; and her visitor seated himself at a little distance from her, not hesitatingly, but with just so much deliberation as indicated a protest against the prolongation of the interview.

"I understood from your note that you wished to see me upon some business," he suggested gravely.

"I did," she replied, feeling unaccountably flustered. "Perhaps you will think it rather impertinent of me – perhaps it is a liberty for me to take – but the fact is I have so deep an interest in my cousin's welfare – she is so very dear to me – I must plead that as my excuse – "

"You are speaking of Mrs. Kingston?" he interposed in the same cool and distant manner, "I hope she is quite well? I have not had the pleasure of seeing her since her marriage."

"She is quite well, thank you. I trust she will keep so, but I am afraid she is not very strong. Mr. Dalrymple, I ought perhaps to tell you that I – that Rachel told me – that I am aware of the relationship that has existed between you."

"We will not speak of that, if you please, Mrs. Reade."

"But I sent for you on purpose to speak of it."

"Then I must ask you to excuse me," he said, rising haughtily. "I cannot discuss those matters with strangers – still less with a member of Miss Fetherstonhaugh's family."

"But, Mr. Dalrymple, I am not to blame for anything that has happened – for any mistakes that have been made – I assure you I am not. I never knew of your accident – I never knew that Mr. Gordon came down – I never knew anything more than Rachel did, until it was too late. And I was her intimate friend all that time, and she made me her confidante. I served her interests as far as a friend who loved her could, to the best of my power."

"If that is so, I am very grateful to you," he said gently, "though I am afraid you failed to see what her interests were. May I ask if you are acting under her instructions now? Did she authorise you to make this appointment for the purpose of speaking of these things?"

"Of course she did not."

"Then we will not speak of them. There would be very grave impropriety in doing so. You must see, Mrs. Reade, that nothing you can say will in the least degree affect the case for anyone. I think we all know the truth of the story now. It is too late to take any action one way or the other. For Mrs. Kingston's sake, the fewer reminiscences we allow the better. Our business is to reconcile ourselves to circumstances, since they are irrevocable, and to let the past alone. If it was your intention to explain to me that you were guiltless of active participation in the crime which parted us, believe me, I appreciate the kind motive, and I thank you from my heart. But it is much better not to say any more about it."

He was still standing with his hat in his hand, and that peculiar distant look in his sad and haughty face. Mrs. Reade sat before him in her low chair silent, with her eyes cast down.

Not one of the numerous gentlemen in whose affairs she had condescended to take an interest had ever treated her like this, and she felt inexpressibly humiliated. Yet she had no sense of resentment, strange to say, against the individual who dominated her, and the position generally, in such an unexampled manner.

"Did I understand you to say that Mrs. Kingston was not strong?" he inquired after a short pause.

"I think she is very well," Mrs. Reade meekly responded. "Her constitution is quite sound; but her nervous system is delicate. She cannot stand worry, or shocks, or any great excitement or fatigue – any of those things upset her."

"I should imagine so. But it is always possible to keep her free of those things, is it not?"

Mrs. Reade replied, not so much to the letter as to the spirit of the question.

"Her husband takes good care of her," she said. "He is very thoughtful for her comfort. She does not run any risk of harm that he can spare her. If we are all as careful of her welfare as he is, Mr. Dalrymple – if we are as scrupulous to protect her peace now she is at peace – "

She broke off, and lifted her eyes wistfully.

Mr. Dalrymple looked down upon her with stately and impenetrable composure.

"I am deeply thankful to know that her marriage has so far been satisfactory," he said. "I suppose the house in Toorak is nearly finished, is it not?"

"It is quite finished. They went into it three weeks ago."

"It promised to be a very good house, though rather of the nouveaux riches order of architecture," he proceeded coolly; "and unfortunately it is impossible to manufacture trees, without which the best house looks bald and naked. But it stands well. It must be a very healthy situation; and that, after all, is the principal consideration."

"I hope she will be happy in it," said Mrs. Reade. Her soul rebelled against this mode of treating the question, and yet her efforts to divert the discussion into the channels that she had designed for it were absurdly feeble and futile.

"I hope so, indeed," he replied gravely. "I suppose you see a great deal of her, do you not?"

"Yes. I seldom miss a day without seeing her. Either I go to Toorak, or she comes here, or we meet somewhere about town. I do whatever is in my power to help to make her happy."

"It must be a happiness to you, too, to have her friendship and confidence in such a marked degree."

"It is," said Mrs. Reade.

"I – if you will excuse me – I will say good morning. Allow me to thank you very much for permitting me to call, and for your kind interest in my misfortunes – and in Mrs. Kingston's welfare. But the greatest service you can do her, Mrs. Reade, is to be silent yourself, and to discourage gossip in others, about anything that occurred either before or since her marriage in connection with me. I hope I do not seem discourteous in saying this – if so, pray forgive me. I speak to you frankly, because you are her friend. I am afraid she has not had many friends – there is the more reason that we who desire her welfare and happiness, should take every precaution against imperilling it by allowing any hint of these private matters to reach the ears of vulgar scandalmongers. A great crime has been done, for which if there is anything in the theory of retribution, some one will have to answer some day; but in the meantime our part is to take care that she is spared as much difficulty and suffering as possible."

"Yes, Mr. Dalrymple. That is what I think – that is what I was going to say."

"I am sure you think so. I am sure you see that that is all we can do for her now. Good morning. I am much obliged to you for your kindness. It looks rather as if we were going to have a storm, does it not? The air is close and sultry, and the glass is falling very fast."

He turned from looking out of the window and made a stately bow; she laid her hand upon the bell mechanically – she had no arts wherewith to keep him; and in another minute he had passed out of the house, and the door was shut upon him. The interview which was to have had such great results was over.

We have heard it said of a pioneer colonist, lessee of a Crown-land principality, that, after bearing the reverses of fortune which, with the advent of free selectors, overwhelmed him, the loss of land and stock and the accumulated treasure of toilsome and prosperous years, with the fortitude and equanimity of a gentleman, he was broken down at last by the unspeakable humiliation of the circumstance that he had "lived to hear himself called a boss-cocky."

Mrs. Reade had not only been defied and defeated, and made to feel small and ridiculous in her own drawing-room, where never man or woman – man, especially – had never dared dispute her supremacy; but she had lived to hear herself called, or at any rate to find herself considered, a gossip– a common tattler and busybody, who intrigued in other people's private affairs from the vulgar feminine love of meddling – and the blow was equally bitter.

She stood in the bow window of her drawing-room, and watched the tall figure leisurely striding through the garden as if South Yarra and the adjacent suburbs were but a small part of his possessions; taking in all the details of his strong majestic figure, his thin, dark, proud face, with its immense moustache, the perfection of his quiet dress, and the repose and dignity of his bearing generally, and of every distinct movement that he made – even when trying to open a gate with a mysterious fastening, at which most people fumbled and bungled awkwardly.

But she was not consumed with a passion of angry resentment against him for the indignities and humiliations that he had heaped upon her. No, she was filled with a vague but intense respect and admiration for him, a feeling that she had never before entertained for any individual of his sex.

She did not say it to herself in so many words, but the thought of her heart undoubtedly was that here was the man, who as a husband, would just have suited her.

CHAPTER VII.

GOOD-BYE

ON that same day, at a little after four o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Kingston might have been seen – she was seen, in fact – going into the Town Hall by herself, having left her carriage in the street below. She mounted the stone steps lightly, with the train of her dress held up in her hand, looking exquisitely fresh and dainty in the dusty sultriness that everywhere prevailed; and she glided through the vestibule as if time were precious, paid her sixpence, and entered the hall, where she took a solitary seat under the shadow of the gallery at the lower end.

The organist was interpreting Mozart to some hundreds of receptive citizens, making the great organ sing like a choir of angels in the "Gloria" of the Twelfth Mass, "et in terra pax, pax, pax hominibus; bonæ, bonæ voluntatis." All the spacious place was flooded with the impassioned harmonies of that inspired theme.

Rachel was not what is popularly called musical, but in the dulness of her empty life her soul slacked its thirst in this way, as a soul of a lower order, which had been denied its natural nourishment, might have found comfort in the emotional stimulus of champagne or brandy.

She could not play well herself, but she was like a fine instrument to be played upon; not one sweet phrase of melody passed from her listening ear to her sensitive heart without wakening an echo that had the very divine afflatus in it in response. And in this resonance of enthusiasms and aspirations, dumb and suffocated in the bondage of her artificial life – in the sense of breathing spiritual air, and freedom, though with a passion of enjoyment that filled her with far more pain than peace – she found the one true luxury of her much-envied lot.

Long ago – oh, so long ago! – the music of a violin had led her into enchantment, as the Pied Piper of Hamelin led away the children. To-day the music of the Town Hall organ, speaking now in Mozart's dramatic choruses, and again in Baptiste's Andante in G, was a similar but a sadder incantation.

She sat solitary in her far-away chair, with her feet on the rung of the one in front of her, her hands, gloved to perfection, folded in her lap, her delicate, neat dress daintily adjusted, much as she might have sat in the pew at church, a model of matronly grace and propriety.

But who could tell, from the expression of her quiet pose and her dreamy eyes, what ineffable raptures and fancies, what infinite longings and yearnings – nameless, even to her own consciousness, but all reminiscent of the blessed past – soared out of captivity on the wings of those alluring harmonies!

Who could see that in her heart she was crying – crying bitterly – for the poetry and the beauty that were lost out of her life!

There was an interval of silence, during which she sat quite still, looking at the great organ-pipes, and seeing nothing; and then there grew out of the hush the delicious rhythm of the "Faust" waltz, beating like a soft pulse through the summer air.

What spell is there in the "Faust" waltz, or in any waltz, for one whose heart is capable of receiving and responding to the inspired message of Mozart?

How can we tell? But this we know, that those whose hearts are warm and young – who understand how to love and how to dance, and have done the two things at the self-same moment – have seldom any more power than they have honest inclination to resist the subtle wiles of this simple measure.

There is a vox humana stop out in whatever organ plays it, magnetic to the human passions that memory and imagination keep. Rachel did not ask why it was, but she felt, as soon as the air began to unwind itself from a confusion of sweet sounds, and she heard the slow time throbbing softly in her ears, that she did not know how to bear it.

It filled her soul with a great wave of suffocating emotion – it ran like an electric current over all her sensitive nerves – it contracted her white throat with a choking pain that was like incipient hysteria – it set abnormal pulses bounding in her brain. She did not think of Adelonga, and the hour when she and her true love had their first and last waltz together.

No definite picture of the past arose at the magician's bidding, or if it did, she shut her eyes to it. But she could not help the forlorn rapture of longing for that nameless something that was the most precious of her woman's rights, which fate and fraud had taken from her, when the notes of this dreamy waltz measure, so charged with passionate and poetic associations, pulsed from the heart of the organ into her warm young blood.

"Oh, my love! my love!" – that was the burden of the music which was not set to words.

And she turned her face a little, and saw Roden Dalrymple standing in the doorway. He had come in quietly, and was waiting, with his hat in his hand, apparently for a pause in the performance, which he did not wish to interrupt, but really until he could find where some one whom he was looking for was sitting.

It was the first time she had seen him since that October night when they had parted in the moonlight under the walls of the house that was now her home; but she had been, unknown to herself, expecting him, and there was no shock in her surprise.

She knew that he was looking for her, when she saw his eyes travelling over the rows of occupied chairs in the upper division of the hall, and she longed to call out to him,

"Roden, Roden, here I am!"

But not a dozen seconds passed before he saw her far away from him in her shadowy corner; and when he saw her, with that solemn eagerness in her face, he knew – but he said to himself he had already known – that, though she had forsaken him, she had never done him wrong.

Of course before the day was over it was reported in various circles, more or less select, that pretty Mrs. Kingston, who had married an old fogey for his money, was in the habit of coming to the organ recitals alone and unbeknown to her husband, in order to enjoy clandestine flirtations with younger and more fascinating men.

It was also darkly whispered that the favoured individual was a person who made it his constant practice to run away with married women, and to murder their lawful spouses in sham duels afterwards if they ventured to make any objections.

But of all the human beings collected in the Town Hall that afternoon, perhaps no two were less capable of violating the spirit of the moral and social law whereof the letter is so sacred to the ubiquitous and lynx-eyed Mrs. Grundy, who persists in suspecting everyone of a desire to evade or infringe it, simply for the sake of doing so, whenever he or she is presented with an opportunity.

That they loved one another as much as it was possible for sympathetic hearts to love, and that they seized one brief half-hour out of a lifetime of separation in which to say farewell, might have been reprehensible from the conventional point of view; but then the conventional point of view does not embrace the universe, by a very long way.

He came down the hall, and round to her chair, and she drew her dress close that he might sit down beside her. She was too innately pure to make any mere outward and artificial demonstrations of modesty in such a moment as this; and she trusted him too well to be afraid of him.

She put out her hand, and he took it in a long, close clasp; and they looked at one another the while with loving, despairing eyes, which said, "Oh, Rachel, why did you?" and "Oh, Roden, forgive me!" and bridged the only gulf that could be bridged between them, without any help of words.

And then, though the organ began to fill the air with the sonorous crash and thunder of Bach's great pedal fugue in D, they heard nothing but the beating of their hearts, and the memories that called to them from their brief past, vibrating through the void and silence of a world in which they were alone together.

When the music ceased for an interval, Mr. Dalrymple rested his arm on the back of the chair which had served Rachel for a footstool, and looking into her face, said under his breath,

"Gordon gave me your message – I came down to thank you – and I thought we should get on better if we could see each other just once. Dear, we must try and comfort ourselves with knowing that neither of us played the other false."

"I did —I did," she whispered hurriedly. "I ought to have trusted you, Roden."

"Yes – that was a mistake. But you did not know any better, poor child. And they were too many for you, those people. Gordon ought to have insisted on seeing you, himself, or getting some message to you, and not have left you in their hands. But he did his best, he says. He was too anxious to get back to me to have much patience over it, and he didn't bargain for being told lies of that magnitude in cold blood. However, – however – "

He broke off and looked at her with a passion of love and grief in his eyes that he dared not trust to speech. And she looked back at him, with her simple soul laid bare – longing to make him know, if they were never to be together like this again, how absolutely in her heart she had been true to him. She would not tell him a lie, at any rate.

"Oh," he said in a sort of groaning whisper, drawing a long hard breath, "oh, my little one, isn't it hard lines!"

"Don't," she gasped, feeling that clutch on her throat tighten with a sudden spasm; "oh, Roden, don't!"

And he straightened himself quickly, and sat back in his chair. And the organ began to play again – a stately march of Schubert's, which acted like a tonic on her disordered nerves, and as a sedative to the hysterical excitement that for a moment had threatened to overmaster her.

The echoes of that march rang in her ears, when Roden was gone back to Queensland and this chapter of her life was finished, for many a long day.

And then at last the thunders of the National Anthem brought the performance to a close, and the audience trooped out, casting curious glances as they went at the distinguished-looking couple standing conspicuously apart – the tall stranger with the peculiar moustache, who had soldier and gentleman written on him from head to foot, and the graceful young lady with the lovely complexion and the irreproachable French dress, whom nobody "who was anybody" failed to recognise.

The two were left together amongst all the empty chairs, in a silence that was hardly broken by the organist's movements at the far end of the hall, closing the stops and keys of his enormous instrument.

"Well," said Mr. Dalrymple, looking down upon his companion, who lifted to his sombre eyes a pale but solemn face, "well – so this is all, I suppose!"

Her lips twitched a little; she could not answer him.

"You are not sorry that I came, are you, Rachel? It will not make it harder for you, will it?"

"Oh, no, Roden! But it is you on whom it is so hard – you will be so lonely without me! I can't bear to think what I have brought on you – and you had so many troubles already!"