The Sorceress (complete)

Mrs. Leigh drew Bee to her and gave her a kiss of consolation. I think it was partly that the girl in her misery should not see the smile, which Mrs. Leigh, thinking that she now saw through this not uncommon mystery, could not otherwise conceal.

“My poor child,” she said, “my dear girl! This is hard upon you since you dislike her so much, but I am afraid it is quite natural, and a thing that could not have been guarded against. And then you must consider that your father may probably be a better judge than yourself. I don’t see any harm this lady has done, except that perhaps it is not quite good taste to make herself so agreeable both to the father and son; but perhaps in Charlie’s case that was not her fault. And I see no reason, my dear – really and sincerely as your friend, Bee – why you should be so prejudiced against a poor woman whose only fault is that everybody else likes her. Now isn’t it a little unreasonable when you think of it calmly yourself?”

“Oh, Mrs. Leigh!” Bee cried. The situation was so intolerable, the passion of injury and misconception so strong in her that she could only gasp in insupportable anger and dismay.

“Bee! Bee! this feeling is natural but you must not let it carry you away. Have you seen her? Let me come in when she is here and give my opinion.”

“I have seen her three times,” said Bee, solemnly, “once at the Baths, and once at the Academy, and once at Oxford;” and then once more excitement mastered the girl. “Oh, when you know who she is! Don’t smile, don’t smile, but listen! She is Miss Lance.”

“Miss Lance!” Mrs. Leigh repeated the name with surprise, looking into Bee’s face. “You must compose yourself,” she said, “you must compose yourself. Miss – ? My dear, you have got over excited, you have mixed things up.”

“No, I am not over-excited! I am telling you only the truth. It is Miss Lance, and they all believe in her as if she were an angel, and she is coming here.”

Mrs. Leigh was very much startled, but yet she would not believe her ears. She had heard Charlie delirious in his fever not so long ago. Her mind gave a little leap to the alarming thought that there might be madness in the family, and that Bee had been seized like her brother. That what she said was actual fact seemed to her too impossible to be true. She soothed the excited girl with all her power. “Whoever it is, my dear, you shall not take any harm. There is nothing to be frightened about. I will take care of you, whoever it is.”

“I do not think you believe me,” said Bee. “I am not out of my mind, as you think. It is Miss Lance – Miss Laura Lance – the same, the very same, that – and I have written, and she will be coming here.”

“This is very strange,” said Mrs. Leigh. “It does not seem possible to believe it. The same – who came between Aubrey and you? Oh, I never meant to name him, I was never to name him; but how can I help it? Laura, who was the trouble of his house – who would not leave him – who went to your father? And now your father! I cannot understand it. I cannot believe that it is true.”

“It is true,” said Bee. “But, Mrs. Leigh, you forget that no one cared then, except myself; they have forgotten all that now, they have forgotten what happened. It was only my business, it was not their business. All that has gone from papa; he remembers nothing about it. And she is a witch, she is a magician, she is a devil – oh, please forgive me, forgive me – I don’t know what I am saying. It has all been growing, one thing after another – first me – and then Charlie – and then papa – and then Betty. And now, after bringing him almost to death and destruction, here is Charlie, in this house, calling for her, raging with me till I wrote to call her – me!” cried Bee, with a sort of indignant eloquence. “Me! Could it go further than that? Could anything be more than that? Me! – and in this house.”

“My dear child,” said Mrs. Leigh, “I don’t wonder, I don’t wonder – it is like something in a tragedy. Oh, Bee! Forgive me for what is first in my thoughts. Was she the reason, the only reason, for your breach with my poor Aubrey? For at first you stood by him – and then you turned upon him.”

“Do not ask me any more questions, please. I am not able to answer anything. Isn’t it enough that all these things have happened through this woman, and that she is coming here?”

Mrs. Leigh made no further question. She saw that the girl’s excitement was almost beyond her control, and that her young mind was strained to its utmost. She said, half to herself, “I must think. I cannot tell in a moment what to do. I must send for Aubrey. It is his duty and mine to let it go no further. You must try to compose yourself, my dear, and trust us. Oh, Bee,” there were tears in her eyes as she came up to the girl and kissed her, “if you could but have trusted us – in all things! I don’t think you ever would have repented.”

But Bee did not make any response. Her hands were cold and her head hot. She was wrapt in a strange passion and confusion of human chaos and bewilderment – everything gone wrong – all the elements of life twisted the perverse way; nothing open, nothing clear. She was incapable of any simple, unmingled feeling in that confusion and medley of everything going wrong.

Mrs. Leigh, a little disappointed, went into the inner room, the little library, to write a letter – no doubt to consult or summon her son – from which she was interrupted a few minutes later by a faint call, and Bee’s white face in the doorway.

“Mrs. Leigh, papa will come to-morrow, and he will take us away; at least he will take me away. I – I shan’t be any longer in anyone’s way. Oh, don’t keep him apart from you – don’t send anyone out of the house because of me!”

CHAPTER XLVIII

There was a great deal of commotion next morning in the house in Mayfair.

Bee was startled by having a tray brought to her bedroom with her breakfast when she was almost ready to go downstairs. “Mrs. Leigh thought, Miss, as you had been so tired last night, you might like to rest a little longer,” said the maid; and Bee divined with a sharp pang through all the trouble and confusion of her mind that she was not wanted – that probably Aubrey was coming to consult with his mother what was to be done. It may be imagined with what scrupulousness she kept within her room, her pride all up in arms though her heart she thought was broken. Though the precaution was so natural, though it was taken at what was supposed to be her desire, at what was really her desire – the only one she would have expressed – yet she resented it, in the contradiction and ferment of her being. If Mrs. Leigh supposed that she wanted to see Aubrey! He was nothing to her, he had no part in her life. When she had been brought here, against her will, it had been expressly explained that it was not for Aubrey, that he would rather go away to the end of the world than disturb her. And she had herself appealed to his mother – her last action on the previous night – to bring him back, not to banish him on account of the girl who was nothing to him, and whose part it was, not his, to go away. All this, however, did not make it seem less keen a wound to Bee that she should be, so to speak, imprisoned in her own room, because Aubrey was expected downstairs. She had never, she declared to herself vehemently, felt at ease under the roof that was his; nothing but Charlie’s supposed want of her would have induced her to subject herself to the chances of meeting him, and the still more appalling chance of being supposed to wish to meet him. And now this insult of imprisonment in her bedroom, lest she should by any chance come under his observation, offend his eye! – Bee was contradictory enough at all times, a rosebud set about with wilful thorns; but everything was in tumult about her, and all her conditions nothing but contradictions now.

Thus it happened that while Betty was setting out with much excitement, but that all pleasurable, walking lightly among undiscovered dangers, Bee was suddenly arrested, as she felt, imprisoned in the little room looking out upon roofs and backs of houses, thrust aside into a corner that she might not be seen or her presence known – imperceptibly the force of the description grew as she went on piling up agony upon agony. It was some time before, in the commotion of her feelings, she could bring herself to swallow her tea, and then she walked about the room, gazed out of the window from which, as it was at the back of the house, she saw nothing, and found the position more and more intolerable every minute. A prisoner! she who had been brought here against her will, on pretence that her presence might save her brother’s life, or something equally grandiose and impossible – save her brother’s life, bring him back from despair by the sight of some one that he loved. These were the sort of words that Mrs. Leigh had said. As if it mattered to Charlie one way or the other what Bee might think or do! As if he were to be consoled by her, or stimulated, or brought back to life! She had affected him involuntarily, undesirably, by her betrayal of the vicinity of that woman, that witch, who had warped his heart and being. But as for influencing in her own person her brother’s mind or life, Bee knew she was as little capable as baby, the little tyrant of the nursery. Oh! how foolish she had been to come at all, to yield to what was said, the flattering suggestion that she could do so much, when she knew all along in her inmost consciousness that she could do nothing! The only thing for her to do now was to go back to the dull life of which in her impatient foolishness she had grown so weary, the dull life in which she was indeed of some use after all, where it was clearly her duty to get the upper hand of baby, to preserve the discipline of the nursery, to train the little ones, and keep the big boys in order. These were the elder sister’s duties, with which nobody could interfere – not any ridiculous, sentimental, exaggerated idea, as Charlie had said, of what a woman’s ministrations could do. “Oh, woman, in our hours of ease!” that sort of foolish, foolish, intolerable, ludicrous kind of thing, which it used to be considered right to say, though people knew better now. Bee felt bitterly that to say of her that she was a ministering angel would be irony, contumely, the sort of thing people said when they laughed at women and their old-fashioned sham pretences. She had never made any such pretence. She had said from the beginning that Charlie would care for none of her ministrations. She had been brought here against her judgment, against her will, and now she was shut up as in a prison in order that Aubrey might not be embarrassed by the sight of her! As if she had wished to see Aubrey! As if it had not been on the assurance that she was not to see Aubrey that she had been beguiled here!

When a message came to her that she was to go to her brother, Bee did not know what to do. It seemed to her that Aubrey might be lurking somewhere on the stairs, that he might be behind Charlie’s sofa, or lying in wait on the other side of the curtain, notwithstanding her offence at the quite contradictory idea that she was imprisoned in her room to be kept out of his way. These two things were entirely contrary from each other, yet it was quite possible to entertain and be disturbed by both in the tumult and confusion of a perverse young mind. She stepped out of her room as if she were about to fall into an ambush, notwithstanding that she had been thrilling in every irritated nerve with the idea of being imprisoned there.

Charlie had insisted on getting up much earlier than usual. He had not waited for the doctor’s visit. He was better; well, he said, stimulated into nervous strength and capability, though his gaunt limbs tottered under him and his thin hand trembled. When he got into his sitting-room he flung away all his cushions and wrappings as soon as his nurse left him and went to the mirror over the mantel-piece and gazed at himself in the glass, smoothing down and stroking into their right place those irregular soft tufts growing here and there upon his chin, which he thought were the beginnings of a beard.

Would she think it was a beard, that sign of manhood? They were too downy, fluffy, unenergetic, a foolish kind of growth, like a colt’s, some long, some short, yet Charlie could not help being proud of them. He felt that they would come to something in time, and remembered that he had often heard it said that a beard which never had been shaved became the finest – in time. Would she think so? or would she laugh and tell him that this would not do, that he must get himself shaved?

He would not mind that she should laugh. She might do anything, all she did was delightful to poor Charlie, and there would be a compliment even in being told that he must get shaved. Charlie had stroked his upper lip occasionally with a razor, but it had never been necessary to suggest to him that he should get shaved before.

He had to be put back upon his sofa when nurse re-appeared, but he only remained there for the time, promising no permanent obedience. When Laura came he certainly should not receive her there.

“When did your letter go? When would Betty receive it?” he said, when Bee, breathless and pale, at last, under nurse’s escort, was brought downstairs.

“She must have got it last night. But there was a dinner party,” said Bee, after a pause, “last night at Portman Square.”

“What do I care for their dinner parties? I suppose the postman would go all the same.”

“But Betty could not do anything till this morning.”

“No,” said Charlie, “I suppose not. She would be too much taken up with her ridiculous dress and what she was to wear” – the knowledge of a young man who had sisters, pierced through even his indignation – “or with some nonsense about Gerald Lyon – that fellow! And to think,” he said, in an outburst of high, moral indignation “that one’s fate should be at the mercy of a little thing like Betty, or what she might say or do!”

“Betty is not so much younger than we are; to be sure,” said Bee, with reflective sadness, “she has never had anything to make her think of all the troubles that are in the world.”

Charlie turned upon her with scorn.

“And what have you had to make you think, and what do you suppose you know? A girl, always protected by everybody, kept out of the battle, never allowed to feel the air on your cheek! I must tell you, Bee, that your setting yourself up for knowing things is the most ridiculous exhibition in the world.”

Bee’s wounded soul could not find any words. She kept out of the battle! She setting up for knowing things! And what was his knowledge in comparison with hers? He had but been deluded like the rest by a woman whom Bee had always seen through, and never, never put any faith in; whereas she had lost what was most dear, all her individual hopes and prospects, and been obliged to sacrifice what she knew would be the only love of her life.

She looked at Charlie with eyes that were full of unutterable things. He was reckless with hope and expectation, self-deceived, thinking that all was coming right again; whereas Bee knew that things would never more be right with her. And yet he presumed to say that she knew nothing, and that to think she had suffered was a mere pretence! “How little, how little,” Bee thought, “other people know.”

The house seemed full that morning of sounds and commotions, unlike ordinary times. There were sounds of ringing bells, of doors opened and shut, of voices downstairs. Once both Charlie and Bee held their breath, thinking the moment had come, for a carriage stopped at the door, there was the sound of a noisy summons, and then steps coming upstairs.

Alas! it was nothing but the doctor, who came in, ushered by nurse, but not until she had held a private conference with him, keeping them both in the most tremendous suspense in the bedroom. It is true this was a thing which happened every morning, but they had both forgotten that in the tension of highly-wrought feeling.

And when the doctor came he shook his head. “There has been too much going on here,” he said. “You have been doing too much or talking too much. Miss Kingsward, you helped us greatly with our patient yesterday, but I am afraid you have been going too far, you have hurried him too much. We dare not press recovery at railway speed after so serious an illness as this.”

“Oh, I have not wished to do so,” said Bee. “It is some friends that we are expecting.”

“Friends? I never said he was to see friends,” the doctor said.

“Come doctor,” said Charlie, “you must not be too hard upon me. It’s – it’s my father and sister that are coming.”

“Your father and sister are different, but not too much even of them. Recollect, nurse, what I say, not too much even of the nearest and dearest. The machinery has been too much out of gear to come round all in a moment. And, Miss Kingsward, you are pale, too. You had better go out a little and take the air. There must not be too much conversation, not too much reading either. I must have quiet, perfect quiet.”

“Am I to do nothing but think?” said Charlie. “Is that the best thing for a fellow to do that has missed his schools and lost his time?”

“Be thankful that you are at a time of life when the loss of a few weeks doesn’t matter, and don’t think,” said the doctor, “or we shall have to stop even the father and sister, and send you to bed again. Be reasonable, be reasonable. A few days’ quiet and you will be out of my hands.”

“Oh, Charlie, then you have given up seeing anyone else,” said Bee, with a cry of relief as the doctor, attended by the nurse, went downstairs.

“I have done nothing of the kind,” he cried, jumping up from the sofa and going to the window. “And you had better tell that woman to go out for a walk and that you will look after me. Do you think when Laura comes that I will not see her if fifty doctors were to interfere? But if you want to save me a little you will send that woman out of the way. It is the worry and being contradicted that does me harm.”

“How can I, Charlie – oh, how can I, in the face of what the doctor said?”

He turned back upon her flaming with feverish rage and excitement.

“If you don’t I’ll go out. I’ll have a cab called, and get away from this prison,” he cried. “I don’t care what happens to me, but I shall see her if I die for it.”