The Sleeping Fury (26 page)

Alfred had written to say that he and Sylvia would arrive on the morning of the funeral, having stayed the night in London on the way. The funeral was fixed for midday. That would enable the Mardales to catch the two-fifteen from Fording and reach home the same night.

Charlotte, her mind loosed from the suspense in which it had been held by her mother's illness, longed now to be with Sylvia and Alfred and at home again. She was full of anxieties, but not so much about Sylvia now as about Alfred. What had he been thinking during her absence? In what state of mind would she find him when they met again?
She looked forward hungrily to their arrival. At intervals a terrible misgiving overcame her. Ought she to have done what she had done? When she woke in the night and thought of it, it seemed to her that she had done a monstrous and unforgivable thing. The memory of his face when she had told him that Sylvia was not his child filled her with remorse and fear. But in the morning her courage returned. Anything was justified, even the sacrifice of Alfred's happiness, to save those two innocent young creatures. How would Sylvia be looking now? Would the hope that she had dared to rouse in her, as she had said good-bye when she left Haughton, have lifted her already out of her despair? Had something of the flower-like beauty of her face already returned? Her heart ached with love and solicitude. She longed desperately to have her child safe in her arms again.

When the day of the funeral came, she could no longer bear the suspense, and sent word to the chauffeur, who had orders to meet the train by which Alfred and Sylvia were arriving, that she would be going to the station to meet them.

When the car reached the station, there were still ten minutes before the train was due, and Charlotte, too agitated to sit still, got out and walked the platform. Her tall, handsome, imperturbable presence betrayed no hint of the tremulous eagerness which possessed her. Her legs felt weak; it was only by a conscious effort that she could walk straight; and, finding a station seat under a gas-lamp, she sat down to rest. Her mind kept rushing ahead, imagining the arrival of the train, the opening of carriage doors,
her anxiety of doubt when Alfred and Sylvia did not immediately appear, and then the longed-for forms and the release from agitation. She no longer looked beyond their arrival. The terrible problem that still obsessed them, the great question what Alfred's feelings to her and Sylvia would now be, had ceased for the time to trouble her. Once they were together again, it seemed to her, all would be well.

The signal was down now. She got up and resumed her pacing. Then began the sound of the train's approach, each variation engraved on her mind by years of familiarity—the roar as it crossed the iron bridge over the river, the muffled but more threatening rumble that followed, the shout of the porter—“Train for Twincombe, Appersley, and Bridge-croft”—and the storm of its arrival in the station.

She stood, a coldly impassive figure in black, scanning the carriage doors, her heart pulsing as if in response to the pulsing of the waiting engine. The porter opened a door, and Alfred, in a silk hat, got out and turned to help Sylvia. They were the only arrivals.

Charlotte rushed forward and seized Sylvia in her arms. “My darling, how are you?” She gazed hungrily into the small face under the black hat. It was changed; yes, blissfully changed; a tinge of the old colour had returned.

She turned eagerly to Alfred. His face struck her to the heart. It was still as she had seen it when she had confessed to him in his study—pale and drawn, as if the flesh had shrunk back on to the bone.

“Alfred, my dear, I had to come to meet you both. I couldn't wait.”

His eyes kindled as they met hers, and his face lit up with the old affectionate smile.

“You've not brought your luggage?” she asked.

“No, we left it at Victoria. You are coming back with us this afternoon, aren't you, Charlotte?”

“Yes, indeed, my dear. And how glad I shall be,” she said, her voice warm with emotion.

• • • • • • • •

It seemed to Charlotte, as she listened to the moving words of the burial service, that they were utterly inappropriate to her mother. The grim realism and the divine rapture were equally out of character with the proud, worldly, lovable, and strictly practical little lady. The sublime outburst of the opening, “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,” which stirred a secret ecstasy in Charlotte, soared, she felt, far beyond her mother's strict common sense. Such dreams and aspirations had had no part, as far as she knew, in her mother's life. It was true that she had always been an assiduous churchgoer, but she had always contrived, it had seemed, to keep religion and daily life rigorously apart. And then the grim commitment, when the coffin had been lowered into the grave and the handful of earth thrown upon it: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”; how coldly democratic and undiscriminating for such a convinced Ebernoe! Poor little thing, thought Charlotte; to think that all her eager self-importance should end so feebly in dust and ashes and corruption—that grim and horrible word. And the heavy black coffin and the dreary pomp of the four black-coated figures that lifted and carried it—it was all wrong, Charlotte
felt, all hopelessly false in its application to her mother. And it had been so sudden. A week—less than a week—ago she had been sitting up in bed, alert and aggressive, chatting with all her old vigour, and laughing to scorn her doctor's precautions. Then had come the second seizure, leaving a small, feeble old woman with aimlessly groping hands, and hard upon it the third, that quenched the last flicker of life. Charlotte recalled the slightly open mouth like the mouth of a goldfish and the glint between the eyelids. How merciless disease could be, like a man with a club killing a rat. One blow, and, when that was not enough, another; and then a third, the finishing one. How insignificant, in the presence of these awful realities, were questions of legitimacy and illegitimacy and the whims of public opinion. Yes, Alfred had been wrong to bow to such trifles, and, worse still, to sacrifice the happiness of Sylvia and Eric to them. How could she have stood by any longer and permitted that monstrous cruelty? What she had done was the only thing left for her to do to save them. He himself would surely be glad in the end.

But her heart ached for Alfred. She turned her head to glance at him, and at the sight of his face, so beautiful and sensitive and so painfully marked now by the tragedy which had fallen upon him, she felt, in a sudden access of remorse, that she had never loved him so much as now.

• • • • • • • •

Lady Hadlow and Alfred had always been great friends, and, sitting now in Fording church at her funeral, he dreamed of old times with her and
Charlotte and Beatrix and Haughton, and then recalled that day, during the time that Charlotte and her mother had stayed at Haughton just after Beatrix's elopement, when he and she, walking on the lawn under the beeches, had agreed that Lady Hadlow was too good an Ebernoe to be a good Christian. The memory of Charlotte as she then was sent a pang to his heart. What strange vicissitudes had been theirs since those early days— vicissitudes of which no one but he and she knew anything. What would his mother have thought if she had known all? She perhaps, with her wonderful goodness of heart, would have understood and forgiven all—all at least but the long, cruel deception. Perhaps, he reflected, even that. But, if the old woman there in the coffin had known all, she would neither have forgiven nor understood. And yet how admirable, in many ways, she was, with her warm heart, her energy and precision, and her delightful sense of humour which she so often turned upon herself. He remembered her so clearly, and, it seemed, such a short time ago, as a vigorous woman in the prime of life. Yet now she had died at a good old age. How short a thing life seemed nowadays. Twenty years ago Sylvia was born. That seemed a very short time ago, and yet in another twenty years he would be as old as Lady Hadlow, if, indeed, he were still alive. He felt old—very old already. The terrible trouble which poor Eric's discovery had brought upon them, and then, in the very middle of that, the blow of Charlotte's confession to him, had robbed life of all its old gusto and serenity.

He had followed the coffin out into the churchyard now, and abstractedly he watched them lower it into the grave. The words he had used so often himself struck across his thoughts. “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live.” It was true. Life was very short. He concentrated his thoughts on the service. Its spirit of resignation, rising at the end to a divine rapture, soothed his aching heart. He thought of the life after death— that state for which he devoutly hoped, of unimaginable bliss—and his ears drank in the words of the closing prayer: “Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.”

• • • • • • • •

Two hours later the Mardales were in the train on their way to London. The brief interlude of death was over; once more they were face to face with life, and the problem which life had thrust upon them. But even now, for Charlotte, the problem had lost its acuteness. The fact that Sylvia and Alfred were with her again, and that they were all going home, brought to her, for an undiscoverable reason, a great consolation. It was so great that it absorbed all her thoughts and feelings, and she sat with her mind loosed awhile from its tension, watching the familiar country wheel slowly past the windows, as if on a huge horizontal disc of which their carriage was the centre. Sometimes she would glance at Sylvia, who sat opposite her, and, when she did so, Sylvia's large blue eyes would meet hers with a look of expectant confidence. What if the hope she had so rashly aroused had to be extinguished
again? That thought passed across Charlotte's mind, but it did not trouble her. A confidence possessed her too, a confidence which she could not justify and did not attempt to justify. What need was there of justification when it was burning so steadily in her heart?

It became even stronger when they had crossed London and were on their way from Paddington to Templeton. That journey between her early and later homes was full of memories for Charlotte. It was bound up, it seemed, with all the crises of her life; she had made it in every variety of mood, from rapture to despair. It recalled the old delight of the visits to Haughton, when her mother and Beatrix and she set off each year full of the holiday feeling and armed with new dresses for the Haughton garden-party. Then there was that later journey when, as a girl of Sylvia's age, she had gone to be with Lady Mardale after old Lord Mardale's death, and the journey back to Fording during which she had pondered on Alfred's proposal made on the way to Templeton station; the tragic journey when, ten years later, she had abandoned Alfred and was rushing to Maurice, and the still more tragic journey home again when she had changed her mind. Thinking now of all those journeys, so momentous to her, she found it impossible to realise the great differences in herself which divided each one of them. It seemed to her now that she had been, all the time, the same Charlotte as she was now: the changes of age, mind, appearance, and dress did not exist in her memory. Her life, as epitomised for her in those few critical occasions, seemed to her
extraordinarily brief, and yet, when the length of time which covered them had passed again, she would have been in her grave for many years.

When they changed at Wilmore it was already dark. The night was clear, a moon was already high in the sky, and, as the little train drove deeper and deeper into the familiar country, Charlotte stared through the window, searching with hungry devotion through the grey and black and silver of darkness and moonlight for the well-known landmarks. It seemed to her that she had been very far, and for a very long time, away from these beloved scenes, and she took them back to her now with a feeling of deep consolation. The mere at Lannock lay in the surrounding dimness like a great dish of silver lustre; not a blur marred its pure perfection. The little water-mill at Rimple stood out above its invisible stream, a shape carved from jet and alabaster. At the sight of it Charlotte felt the tears smart in her eyes. How strange, she thought, that inanimate things can rouse such deep and passionate feelings. They were stopping now at Annet Brook; its dim oil lamps swam past the windows and then stood still. Templeton was the next station; in another twenty minutes they would be at home. Charlotte felt the same excitement—the same, but deeper and richer—that she had always felt at that moment of the journey as a girl, and when they got out on to Templeton platform, and passed through the gate in the white railings, she expected, for a moment, to hear the clinking of Kester fidgeting with his bit—Kester who for the last quarter of a century had been the mere buried skeleton of a horse.

As soon as they arrived at Haughton they went to their rooms to dress for dinner, and it was only when she was once more in her own room, and alone, that Charlotte's mood of confidence broke down. She felt now that it had been nothing more than an unconscious determination to keep her eyes turned away from the facts. The awful fact of her confession to Alfred, and its inevitable effect on him, loomed up in front of her once more in all its menacing reality. She stared at it, appalled. How could she have done such a thing? How could she have stooped to such a piece of diabolical diplomacy? But next minute, in self-defence, she recalled all her vain attempts to persuade him before she had resorted to that desperate expedient. She had resorted to it only when there was nothing else for her to do; and something—there was no question in her mind as to that—
had
to be done. She reminded herself, as to harden her resolution she had reminded herself so often, that her cruelty to Alfred had been perpetrated only for the sake of shielding Sylvia and Eric from an even greater cruelty. Of the two cruelties, his was the less justifiable; oh, unquestionably. Those two poor children! At the mere thought of their misery her heart bled. To put an end to that, nothing could be too drastic. No, she had been right. Alfred's terrible wrongness had made her right. How
strange it was to be convinced at the same time, as she now was, of his fundamental goodness and, in this instance, of his absolute wrongness. At the first sight of him on the platform at Fording this morning, at the first look of his eyes, she had realised once again his real nobility. Perhaps it was her rediscovery of this that awoke in her the inexplicable mood of confidence which had possessed her throughout the journey home. What a blessed relief it would be if everything righted itself in the end. But, short of a miracle, was such a thing possible?