The Giant's Robe
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He was roused by sounds on the stairs outside, and presently he heard a light step in the farther room. 'I am not asleep,' he said, believing the nurse had returned.
'Vincent,' said a low tremulous voice, 'it is I – Mabel.' Then he looked up, and even in that half light he saw that the figure standing there in the open doorway was the one which had been chief in his thoughts.
Unprepared as he was for such a visitor, he felt no surprise – only a deep and solemn happiness as he saw her standing before him.
'You have come then,' he said; 'I am very glad. You must think less hardly of me – or you would not be here.'
She had only obtained leave to see him on her earnest entreaties and promises of self-restraint, but his first words sorely tried her fortitude; she came to his chair and sank down beside it, taking his hands in both hers. 'Vincent,' she cried, with a sob that would not be repressed, 'I cannot bear it if you talk so… I know all, all that you have suffered and given up … he has told me – at last!'
Vincent looked down with an infinite pity upon the sweet contrite face raised to his. 'You poor child,' he said, 'you know then? How could he tell you! Mabel, I tried so hard to spare you this – and now it has come! What can I say to you?'
'Say that you forgive me – if you ever can!' she said, 'when I remember all the hard things I said and thought of you, when all the time – oh, I was blind, or I must have seen the truth! And I can never, never make it up to you now!'
'Do you think,' he asked, 'that to see you here, and know that you understand me at last, would not make up for much harder treatment than I ever had from you, Mabel? If that were all – but he has told you, you said, told you the whole sad story. Mabel – what are you going to do?'
She put the question aside with a gesture of heart-sick pride: 'What does it matter about me? I can only think of you just now – let me forget all the rest while I may!'
'Dying men have their privileges,' he said, 'and I have not much more time. Mabel, I must ask you: What have you said to Mark?'
'Nothing,' she said, with a low moan, 'what was there to say? He must know that he has no wife now.'
'Mabel, you have not left him!' he cried.
'Not yet,' she said, turning away wearily; 'he brought me to this house – he is here now, I believe… You are torturing me with these questions, Vincent.'
'Answer me this once,' he persisted, 'do you mean to leave him?'
She rose to her feet. 'What else can I do,' she demanded, 'now that I know? The Mark I loved has gone for ever – he never even existed! I have no husband beyond the name. I have been in a dream all this time, and I wake to find myself alone! Only an hour ago and Mark was all the world to me – think what he must be to me from this time! No, I cannot live with him. I could not breathe the same air with him. I am ashamed that I could ever have loved him. He is all unworthy, and mean, and false, and I thought him noble and generous!'
'You are too hard,' said Vincent, 'he is not all bad, he was weak – not wicked; if I had not felt that, I should never have tried to keep his secret, and forced him, against his will, to keep it himself. And now he has confessed it all to you, when there was no fear of discovery to urge him, only because he could not endure the thought of my bearing your displeasure to the end. He did not know that that was so till this afternoon, and I told him without thinking it would have that effect on him – I did him an injustice there. He must have gone back and accused himself at once. Think, Mabel, was there nothing unselfish and brave in that? He knew what you would think of him, he knew that he was safe if he kept silence – and yet he spoke, because he preferred the worst for himself to allowing me to bear the penalty for his sins. Is a man who could act thus utterly lost?'
'Lost to me!' she said passionately, 'the confession came too late; and how could any confession atone for such a sin! No, he is too unworthy, I can never trust him, never forgive him!'
'I do not ask you to forgive him now,' he urged; 'he has done you a great wrong, your love and faith have received a cruel shock; and you cannot act and feel as if this had never been. I understand all that. Only do not close the door on forgiveness for ever, do not cut him off from all chance of winning back something of the confidence he has lost. The hope of that will give him strength and courage; without that hope to keep him up, without your influence he will surely lose heart and be lost for ever. His fate rests with you, have you thought of that?'
She was silent, but her face was still unconvinced.
'You think your love is dead,' he went on, 'and yet, Mabel, something tells me that love will not die easily with you. What if you find this is so at some future time, when the step you are bent upon has been taken, and you cannot retreat from it? What if, when you call him back, it is too late; and he will not, or cannot, return to you?'
'I shall never call him back,' she said.
'You will have no pity on him for his sake or your own,' Vincent pleaded, 'will you not for mine? Mabel, let me say something to you about myself. I have loved you for years – you are not angry with me for telling you so now, are you? I loved you well enough to put your happiness before all other things; it was for that I made any sacrifices I have made; it was for that I was willing even that you should think hardly of me.'
'For me!' she cried, 'was it for me you have done all this? How I have repaid you!'
'I was repaid by the belief that it secured your happiness,' he answered. 'I thought, rightly or wrongly, that I was justified in deceiving you for your own good. But now you are taking away all this from me, Mabel! I must die with the sense of having failed miserably, when I thought I was most successful, with the knowledge that by what I have done I have only increased the evil! Must I leave you with your happy home blighted past recovery, with nothing before you but a lonely, barren existence? Must I think of you living out your life, proud and unforgiving, and wretched to the end? I entreat you to give me some better comfort, some brighter prospect than that – you will punish me for my share in it all by refusing what I ask, but will you refuse?'
She came back to him. 'No,' she said brokenly, 'I have given you pain enough, I will refuse you nothing now, only it is so hard – tell me what I am to do!'
'Do not desert him, do not shame him before the world!' he said; 'bear with him still, give him the chance of winning back what he has lost. Peace may be long in coming to you – but it will come some day, and even if it never comes at all, Mabel, you will have done your duty, there will be a comfort in that. Will you promise this, for my sake?'
She raised her face, which she had hidden in her hands. 'I promise – for your sake,' she said, and at her words he sank back with a sigh of relief – his work was over, and the energy he had summoned up to accomplish it left him suddenly.
'Thank you!' he said faintly; 'you have made me happier, Mabel. I should like to see Mark, but I am tired. I shall sleep now.'
'I will come to-morrow,' she said, and bending over him, she kissed his forehead. She had not kissed him since the time when she was a child and he an undergraduate, devoted to her even then; and now that kiss and the touch of her hand lingered with him till he slept, and perhaps followed him some little way into the land of dreams.
Mark had been waiting in a little dark sitting-room on a lower floor; he had not dared to follow Mabel. At last, after long hours, as it seemed, of slow torment, he heard her descending slowly, and came to meet her; she was very pale and had been weeping, but her manner was composed now.
'Let us go home,' was all she said to him, and they drove back in silence as they had come. But when they had reached their home Mark could bear his uncertainty no longer.
'Mabel,' he said, and his voice shook, 'have you nothing to say to me, still?'
She met his appealing gaze with eyes that bore no reproach, only a fixed and hopeless sadness in their clear depths.
'Yes,' she said, 'let us never speak again of – of what you have told me to-night – you must make me forget it, if you can.'
The sudden relief almost took away his breath. 'You do not mean to leave me then!' he cried impulsively, as he came towards her and seemed about to take her hand. 'I thought I had lost you – but you will not do that, Mabel, you will stay with me?'
She shrank from him ever so slightly, with a little instinctive gesture of repugnance, which the wretched man noted with agony.
'I will not leave you,' she said, 'I did mean – but that is over, you owe it to him. I will stay with you, Mark – it may not be for much longer.'
Her last words chilled him with a deadly fear; his terrible confession had escaped him before he had had time to remember much that might well have excused him, even to himself, for keeping silence then.
'My God!' he cried in his agony when she had left him, 'is that to be my punishment? Oh, not that – any shame, any disgrace but that!'
And he lay awake long, struggling hard against a terror that was to grow nearer and more real with each succeeding day.
Vincent's sleep was sweet and sound that night, until, with the dawn, the moment came when it changed gently and painlessly into a sleep that was sounder still, and the plain common-place bedroom grew hushed and solemn, for Death had entered it.
CHAPTER XLII.
FROM THE GRAVE
THE days went by; Mark had followed Vincent to the grave, with a sorrow in which there was no feigning, and now the Angel of Death stood at his own door, and Love strove in vain to keep him back. For the fear which had haunted Mark of late had been brought near its fulfilment – Mabel lay dangerously ill, and it seemed that the son she had borne was never to know a mother's care.
Throughout one terrible week Mark never left the house on Campden Hill, while Mabel wavered between life and death; he was not allowed to see her; she had not expressed any wish as yet to see him, he learnt from Mrs. Langton, who had cast off all her languor before her daughter's peril, and was in almost constant attendance upon her. Mabel appeared in fact to have lost all interest in life, and the natural desire for recovery which might have come to her aid was altogether wanting, as her mother saw with a pained surprise, and commented upon to the conscience-stricken Mark.
Day after day he sat in the little morning-room, which looked as if she had but left it for an instant, even while he knew that she might never enter it again; sat there listening and waiting for the words which would tell him that all hope was at an end.
The doctors came and went, and there were anxious inquiries and whispered answers at the cautiously-opened front-door, while from time to time he heard on the stairs, or in the room above, hurried footsteps, each of which trod heavy upon his aching heart.
People came sometimes to sit with him. Trixie, for instance, who had married her artist, and was now comfortably established in a decorative little cottage at Bedford Park, came daily, and as she had the tact to abstain from any obviously unfounded assumption of hopefulness, her presence did him good, and perhaps saved him from breaking down under the prolonged strain.
Martha, too, even though she had never been able to feel warmly towards her sister-in-law, cast aside some of her prejudice and held aloof no longer.
Martha was inclined to take a serious view of things, having caught something of her mother's gloomy Puritanism, which her own unhappy disposition and contracted life had done nothing to sweeten, and not a little to embitter. She was not, perhaps, incapable of improving the occasion for her brother's benefit even then, by warnings against devotion to perishable idols, and hints of chastenings which were intended as salutary.
But somehow, when she saw his lined and colourless face, and the look of ghastly expectation that came and went upon it at the slightest unexpected sound without, she lost hold of the conviction that his bereavement would work for his spiritual benefit; her words in season died unspoken on her lips, and she gave way at parting to tears of pity and sympathy, in which the saint was completely forgotten in the sister and the woman.
And now it was evening, and he was alone once more, pretending to read, and thinking drearily of what was coming; for the doctor had just left, and his report had been less encouraging than ever – a change must come before long, he had said, and from his manner it was too clear what he thought that change would be.
Mark let his thoughts wander back to his brief married life, doomed to be cut short by the very fraud which had purchased it. They had been so happy, and it was all over – henceforth he would be alone.
She was leaving him after all, and he could not even feel that her love would abide with him when she had gone; oh, the unspeakable agony of knowing that she welcomed death as a release from him!
Never now could he hope to regain the heart he had lost, she despised him – and she was dying.
No, she must not die, he cried wildly in his extremity, how could he live without her? Oh, that she might be given back to him, even though he could never make the dead love live in her heart again! Had he not suffered enough – was not this a punishment beyond his sin?
And yet, as he looked back, he knew that he himself had brought about this punishment, that it was but the stern and logical sequence of his fraud.
There was a low tap at the door, and he started to his feet – the summons had come; no need to question the messenger who brought it, he heard the first words and passed her hastily.
He entered the room where Mabel was lying, and fell on his knees by her bedside, bowing his head upon the quilt in agonised despair, after one glance at her pale sweet face.
'My darling – my darling!' he cried, 'don't leave me … you promised – oh, remember … this is not – not good-bye!'
She laid a weak and slender hand on his dark hair in a caress that was more in pity than in love. 'They have not told you?' she said; 'I asked nurse to prepare you. I knew you would be so anxious. No, dear, it is not good-bye. I feel much better, I am quite sure now that I am going to get well. I wanted to tell you so myself. I must live for baby's sake – I can't die and leave him alone!'
And even in the ecstasy of relief which Mark felt at her words there was a spasm of sobering jealousy; she only cared to live for the child's sake – not for his.
CONCLUSION
THOSE who know Mark now are inclined to envy his good fortune. His literary mistakes are already beginning to be forgotten; the last breath of scandal was extinguished when it became known that Vincent Holroyd had dedicated his posthumous work to his college friend, to whom he also confided the duties of editor – duties which Mark accepted humbly, and discharged faithfully.
His name is becoming known in legal circles – not as a profound lawyer, which he will never be to the end of his career, but as a brilliant advocate, with a plausibility that is effective with the average juryman, and an acquaintance with legal principles which is not too close to prevent a British unconsciousness that a cause can ever be lost.
Society has, in a great measure, forgiven the affront he put upon it, and receives him to its bosom once more, while his home life can hardly fail to be happy; with his young and charming wife, and the only child, to whom she devotes herself.
If the story of his life were better known than it will ever be now he would certainly be thought to have escaped far more easily than he deserved.
And yet his punishment still endures, and it is not a light one. It is true that the world is prospering outwardly with him, true that the danger is over, that Harold Caffyn has not been heard of for some time, and that, whether alive or dead, he can never come between Mabel and her husband again, since she knows already the worst that there is to tell.
But there are penalties exacted in secret which are scarcely preferable to open humiliation. The love which Mark feels for his young wife, by its very intensity dooms him to a perpetual penance. For the barrier between them is not yet completely broken down; sometimes he fears that it never will be, though nothing in her manner to him gives him any real reason to despair. But he is always tormenting himself with the fancy that her gentleness is only forbearance, her tenderness pity, and her devotion comes from her sense of duty – morbid ideas, which even hard work and constant excitement can only banish for a time.
Whether he can ever fill the place he once held in his wife's heart is a question which only time can decide: 'Le dénigrement de ceux que nous aimons,' says the author of 'Madame Bovary,' 'toujours nous en détache quelque peu. Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles; la dorure en reste aux mains,' and in Mabel's case the idol had been more than tarnished, and had lost rather its divinity than its gilding.
But in spite of all she loves him still, though the character of her love may be changed; and loves him more than he dares to hope at present; while the blank that might have been in her life is filled by her infant son, her little Vincent, whom she will strive to arm against the temptations that proved too strong for his father.
Vincent Holroyd's second book was received with cordial admiration, though it did not arouse any extraordinary excitement.
It cannot be said to possess the vigour and freshness of 'Illusion,' and betrays in places the depression and flagging energy of the writer's condition, but it has certainly not lessened the reputation which he had won by the earlier work, to which it is even preferred by some who are considered to be judges.
And there is one at least who will never read it without a passion of remorseful pity, as its pages tell her more of a nature whose love was unselfish and chivalrous, and went unrewarded to the end.