The Sorceress (complete)

“I wrote to her, telling her the arrangement I had proposed to my wife, in the very letter which she has sent to you – that I would carry it out at once, and that I hoped she would perceive, as I did, that it was impossible we should remain under the same roof, or, indeed, meet again.”

“That was on what date?”

“The evening before my child’s funeral. Next day, as soon as it was over, I left the house, and have never set foot in it again.”

“Yet this lady, to whom you had, you say, sent such a letter, was at the funeral, and stood at the child’s grave leaning on your arm.”

“More than that,” cried Aubrey, with a gasp of his labouring breath, “she came up to me as I stood there and put her arm, as if to support me, within mine.”

The Colonel could not restrain an exclamation. “By Jove,” he said, “she is a strong-minded woman, if that is true. Do you mean to say that this was after she had your letter?”

“I suppose so. I sent it to her in the morning. I was anxious to avoid any scene.”

“And then, on your way to London, on that day, you went to your solicitors, and gave instructions in respect to Miss Lance’s annuity – which you say now had been determined on long before?”

“It was determined on long before.”

“But never mentioned to any one until that time.”

“I beg your pardon; on the day on which I wrote that letter to my wife I went direct to my lawyer and talked the matter over freely with Mr. Morell, who had known me all my life, and knew all the circumstances – and approved my resolution, as the best of two evils, he said.”

“This is the most favourable thing I have heard, Mr. Leigh. He will, of course, be able to back you up in what you say?”

“Mr. Morell!” Aubrey sprang to his feet with a start of dismay. “I think,” he cried, “all the powers of hell must be against me. Mr. Morell is dead.”

They looked at each other for a moment in silence. A half smile came upon the Colonel’s face, though even he was a little overawed by the despair in the countenance of the young man.

“I don’t know that it matters very much,” he said, “for, after all, Mr. Leigh, your anxiety to get rid of your wife’s companion might have two interpretations. You might have been sincerely desirous to free yourself from a temptation towards another woman, which would have given Mrs. Leigh pain. A man does not sacrifice two hundred a year without a strong motive. And subsequent events make this a far more likely reason than the desire to get rid of an unwelcome inmate.”

“I cannot tell whether my motive was likely or not. I tell you, sir, what it was.”

“Ah, yes – but unfortunately without any corroboration – and the story is very different from the other side. It appears from that that you wished to establish relationship during your poor wife’s life, and that it was the lady who was moved by pity for you in a moment of weakness – which is much more according to the rule in such matters.”

“It is a lie!” Aubrey cried. “Colonel Kingsward, you are a man – and an honourable man. Can you imagine another man, with the same principles as yourself, guilty of such villainy as that? Can you believe – ”

“Mr. Leigh,” said the other, “it is unnecessary to ask me what I can believe; nor can I argue, from what I would do, as to what you would do. That may be of good Christianity, you know, but it is not tenable in life. Many men are capable enough of what I say; and, indeed, I do you the credit to believe that you were willing to keep the temptation at a distance – to make a sacrifice in order to ease the mind of your wife. I show a great deal of faith in you when I say that. Another man might say that Mrs. Leigh had exacted it from you as a thing necessary to her peace.”

Aubrey Leigh rose up again, and began to pace the room from one side to the other. He could not keep still in his intolerable impatience and scorn of the net which was tightening about his feet. Anger rose up like a whirlwind in his mind; but to indulge it was to lose for ever the cause which, indeed, was already lost. When he had gained control over himself and his voice, he said, “We had neighbours; we had friends; our life was not lived in a corner unknown to the world. There is my mother; ask them – they all know – .”

“Does anyone outside know what goes on between a husband and wife?” said Colonel Kingsward. “Such discussions do not go on before witnesses. If poor Mrs. Leigh – ”

“Sir,” cried Aubrey, stung beyond hearing, “I will not permit any man to pity my wife.”

“It was beyond my province I allow, but one uses the word for those who die young. I don’t know why, for if all is true that we profess to believe they certainly have the best of it. Well, if Mrs. Leigh, to speak by the book, had any such burden on her mind, and really felt her happiness to depend on the banishment of that dangerous companion, it is not likely that she would speak of it either to your neighbours or to your mother.”

“Why not? My mother was of that mind, though not for that villainous reason; my mother knew, everybody knew – everybody agreed with me in wishing her gone. I appeal to all who knew us, Colonel Kingsward! There is not a friend I have who did not compassionate me for Amy’s insensate affection. God forgive me that I should say a word against my poor little girl, but it was an infatuation – as all her friends knew.”

“Don’t you think we are now getting into the region of the extravagant?” Colonel Kingsward said. “I cannot send out a royal commission to take the evidence of your friends.”

Aubrey had to pause again to master himself. If this man, with his contemptuous accents, his cool disdain, were not Bee’s father! – but he was so, and, therefore, must not be defied. He answered after a time in a subdued voice. “Will you allow me – to send one or two of them to tell you what they know. There is Fairfield, with whom you are acquainted already, there is Lord Langtry, there is Vavasour, who was with us constantly – ”

“To none of these gentlemen, I presume, would Mrs. Leigh be likely to unfold her most intimate sentiments.”

“Two of them have wives,” said Aubrey, determined to hold fast, “whom she saw familiarly daily – country neighbours.”

“I must repeat, Mr. Leigh, I cannot send out a royal commission to take the evidence of your friends.”

“Do you mean that you will not hear any evidence, Colonel Kingsward? – that I am condemned already? – that it does not matter what I have in my favour?”

Colonel Kingsward rose to dismiss his suitor. “I have already said, Mr. Leigh, that I am not your judge. I have no right to condemn you. Your account may be all true; your earnestness and air of sincerity, I allow, in a case in which I was not personally involved, would go far to making me believe it was true. But what then? The matter is this: Will I allow my daughter to marry a man of whom such a question has been raised? I say no: and there I am within my clear rights. You may be able to clear yourself, making out the lady to be a sort of demon in human shape. My friend, who saw her, said she was a very attractive woman. But really this is not the question. I am not a censor of public morals, and on the whole it is a matter of indifference to me whether you are guiltless or not. The sole thing is that I will not permit my daughter to put her foot where such a scandal has been. I have nothing to do with you but everything with her. And I think now that all has been said.”

“That is, you will not hear anything more?”

“Well – if you like to put it so – I prefer not to hear any more.”

“Not if Bee’s happiness should be involved?”

“My daughter’s happiness, I hope, does not depend upon a man whom she has known only for a month. She may think so now. But she will soon know better. That is a question into which I decline to enter with you.”

“Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love,” said Aubrey, with a coarse laugh. He turned as if to go away. “But you do not mean that this is final, Colonel Kingsward – not final? Not for ever? Never to be revised or reconsidered – even if I were as bad as you think me?”

“How needless is all this! I have told you your character does not concern me – and I do not say that you are bad – or think so. I am sorry for you. You have got into a rather dreadful position, Mr. Leigh, for a young man of your age.”

“And yet at my age you think I should be cut off for ever from every hope of salvation!”

“Not so; this is all extravagant – ridiculous! And if you will excuse me, I am particularly busy this morning, with a hundred things to do.”

Poor Aubrey would have killed with pleasure, knocked down and trampled upon, the immovable man of the world who thus dismissed him; but to be humble, even abject, was his only hope. “I will try, then, to find some moment of leisure another time.”

“It is unnecessary, Mr. Leigh. I shall not change my mind; surely you must see that it is better for all parties to give it up at once.”

“I shall never give it up.”

“Pooh! one nail drives out another. You don’t seem to have been a miracle of constancy in your previous relationships. Good morning. I trust to hear soon that you have made as satisfactory a settlement of other claims.”

CHAPTER X

Other claims! What other claims? Aubrey Leigh went out of the office in Pall Mall with these words circling through his mind. They seemed to have nothing to do with that which occupied him, which filled every thought. His dazed memory and imagination caught them up as he went forth in the fury of suppressed anger, and the dizzy, stifled sensation of complete failure. He had felt sure, even when he felt least sure, that when it was possible to tell his tale fully, miserable story as it was, the man to whom he humbled himself thus, not being a recluse or a mere formalist – a man of the world – would at least, to some degree, understand and perceive how little real guilt there might be even in such a fault as he had committed. It was not a story which could be repeated in a woman’s ears; but a man, who knew more or less what was in man – the momentary lapses, the sudden impulses, the aberrations of intolerable trouble, sorrow, and despair – . Aubrey did not take into account the fact that there are some men to whom such a condition as that into which he himself had fallen in the desolation of his silent house – when death came a second time within the sad year, and his young soul felt in the first sensation of despair that he could not bear it; that he was a man signalled out by fate, to whom it was vain to struggle, to whom life was a waste and heaven a mockery – was inconceivable. Colonel Kingsward was certainly not a man like that. He would have said to himself that the mother being gone it was only a blessing and advantage that the child should go too, and he would have withdrawn himself decorously to his London lodgings and his club, and his friends would all have said that it was on the whole a good thing for him, and that he was young, and his life still before him. So, indeed, they had said of Aubrey, and so poor Aubrey had proved for himself. Had there not been that terrible moment behind him, that intolerable blackness and midnight of despair, in which any hand that gripped his could lead him till the light of morning burst upon him, and showed him whither in his misery he had been led!

Satisfy other claims? The words blew like a noxious wind through his brain. He laughed to himself softly as he went along. What claims had he to satisfy? He had done all that honour and scorn could do to satisfy the harpy who had dug her claws into his life. Should he try to propitiate her with other gifts? No, no! That would be but to prolong the scandal, to give her a motive for continuance, to make it appear that he was in her power. He was in her power, alas, fatally as it proved, if it should be so that she had made an end of the happiness of his life. She had blighted the former chapter of that existence, bringing out all that was petty in the poor little bride over whom she had gained so complete an ascendancy, showing her husband Amy’s worst side, the aspect of her which he might never have known but for that fatal companion ever near. And now she had ruined him altogether – ruined him as in old stories the Pamelas of the village were ruined by a villain who took advantage of their simplicity. What lovely woman who had stooped to folly could be more ruined than this unhappy young man? He laughed to himself at this horrible travesty of that old familiar eighteenth century tale. This was the fin de siecle version of it, he supposed – the version in which it was the designing woman who seized upon the moment of weakness and the man who suffered shipwreck of everything in consequence. There was a horrible sort of ridicule in it which wrought poor Aubrey almost to madness. When the woman is the victim, however sorely she may be to blame for her own disgrace, a sort of pathos and romance is about her, and pity is winged with indignation against the man who is supposed to have taken advantage of her weakness. But when it is a man who is the victim! Then the mildest condemnation he can look for is the coarse laugh of contempt, the inextinguishable ridicule, to which even in fiction it is too great a risk to expose a hero. He was no hero – but an unhappy young man fallen into the most dreadful position in which man could be, shut out of all hope of ever recovering himself, marked by the common scorn – no ordinary sinner, a man who had profaned his own home, and all the most sacred prejudices of humanity. He had felt all that deeply when he rushed from his house, a man distraught not knowing where he went. And then morning and evening, and the dews and the calm, and the freshness and elasticity inalienable from youth had driven despair and horror away. He had felt it at last impossible that all his life – a life which he desired to live out in duty and kindness, and devotion to God and man – should be spoiled for ever by his momentary yielding to a horrible temptation. He had thought at first that he never could hold up his head again. But gradually the impression had been soothed away, and he had vainly hoped that such a thing might be left behind him and might be heard of no more.

Now he was undeceived – now he was convinced that for what a man does he must answer, not only at the bar of God, where all the secrets of the heart are revealed, but also before men. There are times in which the former judgment is more easy to think of than the latter – for God knows all, everything that is in favour of the culprit, while men only know what is against him. A man with sorrow in his heart for all his shortcomings, can endure, upon his knees, that all-embracing gaze of infinite understanding and pity. But to stand before men who misconstrue, mis-see, misapprehend, how different a thing it is – who do not know the end from the beginning, to whom the true balance and perfect poise of justice is almost impossible – who can judge only as they know, and who can know only the husk and shell of fact, the external aspect of affairs by the side which is visible to them. All these thoughts went through Aubrey’s mind as he went listlessly about those familiar streets in their autumnal quiet, no crowd about, nothing to interrupt the progress of the wayfarer. He went across the Green Park, which is brown in the decadence of summer, almost as solitary as if he had been in his own desolate glades at home. London has a soothing effect sometimes on such a still, sunny autumn day, when it seems to rest after the worry and heat and strain of all its frivolity and folly. The soft haze blurs all the outlines, makes the trees too dark and the sky too pale; yet it is sunshine and not fog which wraps the landscape, even that landscape which lies between Pall Mall and Piccadilly. It soothed our young man a little in the despair of his thoughts. Surely, surely at eight-and-twenty everything could not be over. Bee would in a year or two be the mistress of her own actions. She was not a meek girl, to be coerced by her father. She would judge for herself in such a dreadful emergency. After all that had passed, the whole facts of the case would have to be submitted to her, which was a thought that enveloped him as in flames of shame. Yet she would judge for herself, and her judgment would be more like that of heaven than like that of earth. A kind of celestial ray gleamed upon him in this thought.

And as for these other claims – well, if any claim were put forth he would not shrink – would not try to compromise, would not try to hide his shame under piles of gold. Now he had no motive for concealment, he would face it out and have the question set straight in the eye of day. To be sure, for a man to accuse a woman is against the whole conventional code of honour. To accuse all women is the commonplace of every day; but to put the blame of seduction upon one is what a man dare not do save in the solitude of his chamber – or in such a private inquisition as Aubrey had gone through that day. This is one of the proofs that there is much to be said on both sides, and that it is the unscrupulous of either side who has the most power to humble and to destroy. But the bravado did him good for the moment – let her make her claim, whatever that claim was, and he would meet it in the face of day!

Other ideas came rapidly into Aubrey’s mind when he strolled listlessly into his club, and almost ran against the friend in whose house he had first met Colonel Kingsward, and through whom consequently all that had afterwards happened had come about. “Fairfield!” he cried, with a gleam of sudden hope in his eyes.

“Leigh! You here? – I thought you were philandering on the banks of – some German river or other. Well! and so I hear I have to congratulate you, my boy – and I’m sure I do so with all my heart – ”