The Sleeping Fury (23 page)

“‘Not very well, I'm afraid, Lady Mardale,' he said. ‘He is, of course, terribly depressed.'

“I asked him if Eric had told him everything, and he said that he had. ‘It's horribly painful for us all,' I said to him, ‘but you understand how it is?'

“He did not reply. He stood with his head down, looking at the ground. Then he raised his eyes, and, seeing that I was expecting an answer to my question, he replied.

“ ‘Understand, Lady Mardale? ‘he said. ‘Well, to be quite truthful, I don't.'

“ ‘You don't feel, then,' I said, ‘that it is impossible for a man in my husband's position to consent? Do you think that if he could he wouldn't? ‘

“ ‘I'm afraid,' he said, ‘my view is so very different from yours.'

“ ‘Let me hear it, John,' I said.

“ ‘You see, my own belief,' he said, ‘is that the only nobility and the only virtue nowadays are personal, whatever they may have been in earlier times. They lie in the man himself—nowhere else.'

“I told him that I agreed with him absolutely, and that I thought, too, that Eric was a boy of unusually fine character. ‘But for all that,' I said, ‘my husband feels, you see, that we must not appear to condone his parents' irregularity.'

“John raised his head and looked me in the face. ‘May I ask you a straight question, Lady Mardale?' he said.

“I said, ‘Of course, by all means.' I wanted to know, Alfred, what the boy thought.

“‘If one of the Duke's sons,' he said, ‘proposed to Sylvia, and she wished to accept him, would Lord Mardale consent?'”

Suddenly Charlotte had abandoned her narrative and asked him point blank:

“Would you consent, Alfred?”

“Certainly,” he had replied wearily.

“So I said to John,” said Charlotte. “I said I thought you would certainly consent.”

“‘And yet,' he said, looking me full in the eyes, ‘an ancestor of the Duke's, as we all know, was an
illegitimate daughter of Charles the Second. I can't see, Lady Mardale, where the difference comes in between Eric and the Duke's sons. In a matter of principle like this, time and rank are mere accidents, aren't they?' he said. ‘They can't be allowed to count.'

“Alfred, I had nothing whatever to say. Have you, I wonder? It is worth thinking over.”

Without waiting for him to reply, she had left the room.

• • • • • • • •

In a sense, Alfred was right about Charlotte. She had ceased to concern herself with abstract principles of right and wrong, but that was only because she was perfectly convinced of the rightness of her feelings. Love and her sense of justice dictated one thing and one thing only, and she pursued it, careless of the consequences. The happiness of Sylvia and Eric was the most important thing in her life. Friends, if they disapproved, could go; she could do without them. Still more insignificant were the opinions of mere acquaintances. As for religion, if religion was something that could be detached from love, and set in opposition to it, as with Alfred it now seemed to be, such religion was not for her. Alfred was wrong; she was quite sure of that now; and she was sure that if only he could cut himself free of this tangle of laws and principles, and listen to the promptings of his heart, he himself would know that he was wrong. How differently he was behaving now from when he had dealt with William the footman's theft of the silver. There were no
scruples then about condoning sin; and yet, according to the conventional view which Lady Hadlow had voiced so loudly, he was certainly condoning theft. But the issue was simple then, for he himself was not deeply involved; his goodness of heart had had free play. Now, he was too deeply ensnared to see his way out. His duty to Sylvia, his duty to his Church and his parish, to his family integrity, as precious to him as life, to his social position; his sense of justice and his horror of the least taint of moral obliquity—all these, and more, struggled in him, one against the other, for the upper hand. No wonder he seemed sometimes to have become stupefied. His mind and his heart were exhausted by the strain.

And she, too, was exhausted. She could argue no more. Argument, she had discovered at last, was a useless weapon. This was not, she knew now, a matter for argument. It was a matter of the heart. The most powerful arguments in the world were impotent against the heart. The only effect of argument was to embitter.

Meanwhile the hideous dilemma was sapping the health and happiness of all of them. Sylvia looked like a ghost. Charlotte watched her anxiously at meals; she was eating hardly enough to keep a bird alive. She never spoke unless spoken to, and her smile—that smile that Charlotte loved—had gone, it seemed, for ever. Charlotte had consulted the family doctor, and he had recommended a tour abroad, but Sylvia, when it was suggested, had begged so earnestly to stay at home that the project had been abandoned. Then there was that poor
boy eating his heart out in London. Alfred, she knew, was sick at heart, and she herself felt old and ill.

Their unhappiness was the harder to bear because each of them had to bear it alone. Charlotte herself and Alfred were so opposed in their views that what little sympathy was left between them grew less every day, and both of them felt the unspoken reproach of Sylvia, who, though she could allow for their attitude, could hardly be expected to sympathise with it. She held herself aloof from them; that, for Charlotte, was the hardest thing of all to bear. Her loyalty to Alfred even now prevented her from telling Sylvia that she was on her side, and so she was deprived even of the one consolation of comforting her.

So the three of them lived from day to day, forlorn and dejected, going to bed each night exhausted with the day's misery, and waking each morning, as to a daily nightmare, to the rediscovery of their inescapable wretchedness.

Next day Charlotte determined to try a last appeal. She could not argue this time; she had abandoned all faith in argument. If only she could persuade Alfred to trust his heart, and break through all those principles and conventions with which he had hedged himself in, the struggle would be over.

She found him sitting in the morning-room reading the paper. He laid aside the paper when she spoke his name, and raised his tired eyes to hers.

“I'm not going to argue any more, Alfred,” she said. “I've learnt at last that argument is worse than useless at such times as this; but I can't stop trying, Alfred. I feel so sure that, if only you would let yourself see and feel clearly, your own heart would convince you.”

She bent over him, and, putting her arm round his shoulders, broke out in passionate entreaty. “Do try, Alfred, I implore you, for my sake as well as theirs. It's too cruel—too dreadfully wrong. Can't you just give up thinking, dear—just abandon all these hopeless questions of right and wrong and obey your heart? Think only of Sylvia and Eric; they are all that matters, and they are quite, quite blameless. Can't you trust your heart, Alfred?”

He looked up at her, his face drawn with suffering.” If only life were as easy as that, dearest, how happy and simple everything would be. But it isn't.
Don't try to force me to act against my convictions, Charlotte. We must never do that. So long as we hold to what is right, all must be well some day.”

She leaned forward and looked into his eyes. “Alfred, tell me this. If you listened only to your heart, would you consent?”

A deeper shade of weariness crossed his face. “But we must not listen only to our hearts, Charlotte.”

Charlotte insisted, her voice intense and low. “But if you did, Alfred?”

“If I did, dear, of course I should consent—unhesitatingly.”

“Ah! If only you would! Try, Alfred. I know—know infallibly—that you would be right.”

He covered his face with his hands. “Charlotte, you'll drive me out of my mind. I know, much more surely than you, that I should be wrong.”

“You're determined, Alfred?”

He nodded his head; his voice was as weak as an invalid's. “Yes, Charlotte; quite determined.”

She took her arm from about his shoulders and left him.

• • • • • • • •

In the afternoon, in an attempt to escape from the strain and agitation which oppressed her, Charlotte set out for a walk alone. The frost which had held the country for so long had broken, and there was a faint sense of spring in the air. It was one of those dove-grey, sunless days when the sky and the haze of distance seem to be full of suppressed colours, held suspended in the prevailing grey and faintly visible through it. Charlotte felt that her heart, too, was thawing at that first promise of
spring. She felt that she had escaped for a while from the tangle of human affairs. How wonderful, she thought, to be like trees or grass—never to think or act or refrain from acting, but simply to be. The soft touch of the air on her forehead soothed her nerves. Although the frost had broken, the ice in the ditch at the side of the path had not yet melted. Through its transparent panes Charlotte could see small green plants enclosed as if under glass. In one place she saw that the water was flowing under the ice. An air-bubble like a swaying clot of quicksilver pulsed with the flow of the water, now round, now elongated, now shattering to fragments and then coalescing again. It was as if she were watching the blood beginning to circulate once more in a vein of the great body of the earth.

Crossing a field, she came to an enclosure of wattles thatched with straw; it was like a model of the village of some savage tribe. It was a shelter for ewes and their lambs, and when she reached it she saw that round the open space inside the fence were snugly thatched lambing-pens. The place was full of broad woolly backs, and here and there a small, thick-legged lamb stood by its mother's side, gazing solemnly at the new world. Half a mile farther on, on a southward-facing bank on the edge of a thicket, she found three primroses. She gathered them to take home to Sylvia. Perhaps they would give her a moment's pleasure. The thought of Sylvia turned her mind back to the trap in which they were so hopelessly caught. The spring, of which these first premonitions had thrilled her, would bring them no happiness this year. And yet how short a time
ago, on that afternoon after the Crofts' dance when Eric had called on his way back to London, she had felt, in the presence of the radiant happiness of those two beautiful young creatures, that life was breaking into a new springtime. And what was it that had killed that spring? The omission of a certain formula which should have been recited in the presence of a certain official in the days before Eric was born. From that small omission had sprung a torrent of conflicting views and emotions which had wrecked the happiness of four perfectly blameless people. Considered thus, how fantastic, how futile, the whole trouble appeared. Yet was not that, calmly regarded, what it amounted to? Was it credible that God, the God of love who reads the secrets of every heart, should feel honoured and gratified by the sacrifice of two of the sweetest and most innocent of His creatures in expiation of that omission? To believe such a thing was mere blasphemy. So Charlotte argued with herself.

But it would be useless to argue so with Alfred. Alfred would bring forward a hundred principles to combat what he would consider such a capitulation to emotion. He would condemn them all, including himself—oh! certainly including himself, poor Alfred—to the most cruel suffering rather than yield an inch. Charlotte heaved a weary sigh at the thought of her vain attempts to move him. Her attempts only made him the more immovable, for he believed that she had given in to her feelings in defiance of her sense of right, and he felt that he must be doubly on his guard against falling, under the stress of his sympathy for the two young people,
into her error. Oh, if only he would cease to think—if only he would trust his heart! Then all would be well, for Charlotte herself was ready to trust his heart; she believed in that, for she had seen it guide him boldly and infallibly on other occasions. Yet now, when they were in greater need of guidance than ever before, his heart had failed him and them.

Charlotte paused in her walking, and turned off the field path she was following to lean for a while against a five-barred gate in a high hawthorn hedge. She felt suddenly tired. The immense hopelessness of their dilemma had loomed up before her once more, and she felt hardly capable of facing it. Why had she come out alone on this long walk? The bare thought of the three miles between her and Haughton exhausted her. How would she ever get home? And what was there awaiting her, when she got home, but blank misery? It was too much. The daily spectacle of Sylvia's despair, and the constant thought of that boy, so like her lost Maurice, struck down, like Sylvia, in the moment of his new happiness, the happiness which had seemed for her a fulfilment of what Maurice and she had forgone, was more than she could endure. Again the heartrending vision of their good-bye on that dreadful day when Eric had come for the last time to Haughton swam up into her memory. In her overwrought state it was too much for her: leaning there against the gate, she broke down in a violent fit of weeping. In her agitation she dropped the primroses she had gathered for Sylvia, and, altering her position to search for a handkerchief, she put her foot on them. For a while she gave herself up
to her feelings, weeping on till her heart was empty of tears. Then with a deep sigh, as though the weeping had relieved her, she came to herself and looked about her. Then she missed something—something she had had in her hand. The primroses. Had she dropped them? She bent down and began to search on the ground. At first she could not find them; then her eye detected a green leaf half buried in the mud. Even that circumstance, desperate as she was, added its fraction to her pain. For a moment it seemed to her but another sign that all her efforts for Sylvia were doomed to fail. But her moment of weakness was over. She was aware of a growing resolution. It seemed that she had passed a crisis, and that her time of weakness and submission was ended. She leaned her arms along the top of the gate and gazed out over the country before her.