The Sleeping Fury (22 page)

Day followed day, and for Charlotte the sight of Sylvia's grief became daily a greater strain. The whole thing had been so horribly cruel. She kept recalling that vision of Sylvia in the mirror, smiling and blushing in her yellow silk dress on the night when, after their return from the Crofts' dance, she had told her that Eric had proposed, and she recalled, too, that other vision of her at tea on the following day, radiant with happiness in the presence of her lover. Never had she looked so lovely as in those brief hours of the blossoming of her first love, and Charlotte, remembering her own late springtime, had felt in her happiness for Sylvia's sake that life was once more becoming a rapturous thing. Those visions of Sylvia kept rising before her, and then, immediately after them, that other vision of her face in the morning-room when, after Alfred had gone to London to see Eric, she had told Sylvia that she and Eric could never marry. The sudden extinction of bloom and rapture from the young face that she loved more than anything else on earth was a thing that would haunt her till her dying day.

It haunted her now, and, as if that were not enough, there was the constant spectacle of Sylvia herself, with all her gaiety and happiness and fresh colour gone. How well Charlotte knew what the poor little thing was suffering! And that was not all.
There was Eric—Eric, who had appeared to her on her return to the Manor House as a living and breathing memory of Maurice, the boy who had brought her to a final reconciliation with life. The thought of him, broken too like Sylvia, cut her to the heart. Their tragedy was hers; they were, for her, all that was dearest and most beautiful in life, and their sufferings were suffered over again in her.

It was on a Saturday afternoon that Eric had come down to Haughton to bid good-bye to Sylvia. He had caught the one-fifteen from Paddington, and reached them at half-past three, and had returned to London by the last train the same evening. Alfred had been away on that occasion; Charlotte wished afterwards that he had been there. She had left the two forlorn young people alone together, and had seen Eric only at tea and dinner. How ill the poor boy had looked! His face was yet another tragic vision to haunt her days. As they rose from dinner, Carson had come to say that the car was at the door, and Eric had shaken hands with her. She longed to give him some proof of her affection and goodwill, to make him understand that it was her dearest wish that Sylvia and he should be happy. But what could she do or say? Nothing. And she shrank from empty assurances. She had turned away while he and Sylvia bade each other good-bye, but when their good-bye was over and he had reached the door, he had looked back, and she had seen the last glance they exchanged. There are some things, she thought to herself afterwards, recalling that dreadful moment, too painful to contemplate—looks and gestures which have in them an almost unendurable
pathos. It had been something in the forlornness with which he had turned away and gone out of the room, and something in Sylvia's eyes as they had followed him, that had stabbed Charlotte to the heart. She had sat down in the chair in which she had sat at dinner at the head of the table and burst into tears. Sylvia had come and knelt by her, and they had wept in each other's arms. Then they had gone to the morning-room and sat there in silence for a while, and then, though it was still early, Sylvia had kissed her mother and gone forlornly to bed.

It had been when sitting alone afterwards over the fire that Charlotte had at last seen her way clearly. Deeply unhappy as she was, she was able to consider their normal life at Haughton with a greater detachment than usual. For her, life centred in Sylvia. She loved and respected Alfred, but she adored Sylvia. Without Sylvia life would have little meaning and no happiness for her. Alfred, too, adored Sylvia, but Alfred, Charlotte felt, was secure. If all else failed him, his religion would remain a source of comfort and happiness of which nothing could deprive him. But for Charlotte herself there was no security. She was dependent, utterly dependent, on human love, both of loving and of being loved. Love was her religion, and, if it were taken from her, all would have been taken. All the love of her heart was given to Sylvia. Sylvia's happiness was hers; she asked no other happiness. Now, full of her jealous concern for Sylvia, she regarded the other aspects of her life. She liked society, and she enjoyed her own importance in society, and she enjoyed meeting friends and acquaintances. But
how small and unimportant now all these things seemed compared with this tragic separation of Sylvia and Eric. Those whisperings and scandals, the scornful surprise of her social superiors and equals which she had feared so much before, had shrunk to things of little significance. And as for Sylvia herself, of what importance in her life was the opinion of the outside world compared with the love of a man such as Eric? Having that, she would have everything, and to deny her that, as she and Alfred were doing, was to deny her the one thing life offered that was supremely worth having. How willingly, she remembered, she herself would have discarded all else, if she could have had Maurice. Her fears of social opinion for Alfred and Sylvia and herself had been the last struggle of the Ebernoe in her.

That made her think of her mother. How horrified her mother would be if she were to hear that Sylvia had married a man who was illegitimate. Well, it was possible, quite possible, that the old lady would never know, even if they did marry; and, realising that, Charlotte realised that the thing might never become widely known. If it had not been for poor Eric's honesty, they themselves might not have known. Certainly the Penningtons did not know, for Roger or Amy would hardly have failed to mention it to Alfred or her when they saw, as they must have seen, that Sylvia and Eric were mutually attracted. But, whether or not it was likely to be discovered, Charlotte was resolved now to persuade Alfred. She had sacrificed herself to Alfred, to his temporal and spiritual position, and even more to himself, because she could not bear to repay his
love with desertion. Now Sylvia was to be sacrificed. But there was no question, this time, of desertion. It was to convention that Sylvia was to be sacrificed —to society and the Church. Alfred had a great sense of responsibility—responsibility to the Church, to society, to his own noble family. How could he hear the promptings of his heart among all these rival claims? If he could obey his heart alone, Charlotte felt sure that he would yield. And he must yield. The excruciating memory of Sylvia's and Eric's good-bye an hour ago returned, and her heart bled for them once more. It was then that she formed the resolve that, come what might, they should marry.

• • • • • • • •

When Alfred returned home on the following Monday, Charlotte drove to the station to meet him, and, as it was a fine frosty afternoon, they decided, half way between Templeton station and Haughton, to walk the rest of the way home, and, stopping the car, got out.

As soon as they had started walking and the car had driven on, Alfred enquired about Eric's visit, and Charlotte, glad to ease her aching heart, told him all that had passed.

“Alfred,” she said, when she had finished, “we must stop torturing them. Saturday convinced me. If you had seen their faces when they said good-bye you too would have been convinced. I can't bear it any more, Alfred.”

“My dear, you and I too are being tortured, and we must not turn traitor under the torture. If we give in as soon as our beliefs are put to the test, then
our beliefs can't be worth much. Anyone can do right when all goes well; it is only when we are submitted to tests such as this that we can show our mettle.”

“But I don't believe we are right, Alfred. You speak of family pride and family virtue; are you sure the pride in this case is the right kind of pride, and that there is not too much of the letter and too little of the spirit in the virtue? Forgive me, Alfred dear. I don't believe for a moment that you are not trying to do what is best. I know you too well to doubt that. But it is so hard to unravel one's true motives at such a time as this. Are you quite sure that it is really that you are determined not to set a bad example, and not that your pride, like mine, shrinks at the thought of what the Duke and Duchess and the Rodmells and the Penningtons and the Crofts and all the rest of the county and country may think? You say it is hard to be good when trials come, but in this trial isn't it perhaps easier to forbid the marriage, and avoid its unpleasant consequences, than to have the courage to say that virtue is everything and accident of birth nothing —that the innocent shall not suffer for the sins they have not committed, and that you are proud to have a boy as good and honest as Eric for a son-in-law? If the Halnakers could achieve that, it seems to me that they would prove themselves as virtuous as they pride themselves on being.”

“My dear Charlotte, I fully admit that I am afraid of what everyone, from the Duke downwards, may think, but not for the reason you imagine. I am afraid for the perfectly legitimate and creditable reason that I am afraid of behaving unworthily.”

Charlotte looked him grimly in the face. “Alfred,” she said, “I'm sorry to say I doubt that.”

“You actually think I am deceiving you, Charlotte?”

“I think you are deceiving yourself. If you had been there on Saturday and seen them say good-bye” —she put her hand to her eyes as if to shut out an unbearable sight—” it would have convinced you.”

“Dear, you are allowing your feelings to get the better of your principles. How could that have altered the morality of the case?”

“Very easily and very completely, Alfred. You accuse me of allowing feelings to get the better of principles. Are you not doing something much worse? Are you not allowing principles to get the better of feelings? You are forgetting that the new commandment is that we love one another.”

Alfred made a gesture of despair. “Dearest, you know well enough that I love Sylvia better than life itself. This is torturing me as much as it is torturing you. Don't make it worse by depriving me of your help and sympathy.”

“I don't want to be unkind, Alfred; but it seems that, as things are, I must be unkind either to you or Sylvia. Oh, Alfred, no mere principles are worth obeying at the cost of so much suffering to those two.”

“Our duty to God, Charlotte, has to be obeyed at all costs.”

Charlotte sighed deeply. “But it can't be our duty to God to make them suffer. It's a contradiction, an absurdity. Love and innocence are sacred things; it is our duty to God to protect them, not to deny them.”

For the rest of the way they walked in silence.

Alfred stood in his study with his back to the fire and his hands in his trouser-pockets, staring in front of him. A paper half covered with writing lay on the writing-desk. He had been invited to preach one of the university sermons at Cambridge, and was now trying to compose it. But he was tired and depressed; the thoughts and words would not come. His heart was sore; to be at the same time formal, scholarly, and sincere was at the present time impossible to him. All his feelings at the moment were formless and acutely personal. He recalled suddenly how, twenty-one years ago, he had stood, heavy at heart as he was now, and heard the car drive away with Charlotte, and Carson shut the front door.

Once again he was alone. The daily sight of Sylvia's mutely protesting misery and Charlotte's growing hostility produced in him a bitter sense of isolation. He understood perfectly what was happening to Charlotte. Her moral sense, her sense of right and wrong, which was normally so keen in her, had broken down before the clamorous insistence of her motherhood. She had deserted him, left him to struggle alone; her one object now was to break down his resistance. She had ceased to think of right and wrong, honour or dishonour; she was thinking only of her child and her child's happiness.

But she had not, for all that, given up argument. She fought for her emotional prejudice with unwearying and often very skilful casuistry which sometimes drove him, exhausted as he was, almost to the brink of madness.

“Tell me this, Alfred,” she had said to him two days previously, when Sylvia had happened to leave them alone together in the drawing-room. “Suppose that nobody but you and I knew that Eric's parents were not married, and that it was certain that nobody would ever find out …”

He had sighed wearily. “But why must we bother ourselves, Charlotte, about hypothetical cases which could not possibly occur? Isn't it hard enough, as it is, to keep clear minds?”

“I asked you that, Alfred, because it seems to me we have been all the time assuming that everyone will know about Eric's birth. But, as it struck me for the first time this morning, the fact will more probably be that nobody, or hardly anybody, will know. Nobody seems to have known hitherto. And so there may be no question of your being misunderstood.”

“So long as we were not found out, Charlotte. And wouldn't the very fact that we were relying all the while on not being found out condemn us in our own eyes?”

“Not in mine, Alfred. I should have done nothing to be ashamed of, and my own clear conscience would enable me to answer the rebukes of stupid and bigoted people if they did find out and were scandalised.”

“I can't agree. In such a case as this we can't
be too scrupulous. The smallest taint of secrecy or subterfuge might involve us in the most appalling difficulties. We might at any moment find ourselves in a trap from which it would be impossible to escape without moral damage.”

Yesterday she had returned to the attack once again. She had been over to the Manor House to see Amy Pennington about the bazaar for the District Nurse Fund, and as soon as she got back she had gone to him in his study to give him an account of what had been arranged. As soon as she had finished doing so, she had once more resumed her indefatigable siege.

“I had a talk with John at the Manor House, Alfred,” she said. “I had thought that I noticed something hostile in him all through luncheon. It could only be, I guessed, because of Eric, and I wanted to know what John was thinking of us. So I got hold of him after luncheon and asked him if he had seen Eric lately. I saw his face cloud at the question. He said yes, that he had seen him in London last week. I asked how he had looked.