The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales/Fordham Castle
FORDHAM CASTLE
Sharp little Madame Massin, who carried on the pleasant pension and who had her small hard eyes everywhere at once, came out to him on the terrace and held up a letter addressed in a manner that he recognised even from afar, held it up with a question in her smile, or a smile, rather a pointed one, in her question—he could scarce have said which. She was looking, while so occupied, at the German group engaged in the garden, near by, with aperitive beer and disputation—the noonday luncheon being now imminent; and the way in which she could show prompt lips while her observation searchingly ranged might have reminded him of the object placed by a spectator at the theatre in the seat he desires to keep during the entr'acte. Conscious of the cross-currents of international passion, she tried, so far as possible, not to mix her sheep and her goats. The view of the bluest end of the Lake of Geneva—she insisted in persuasive circulars that it was the bluest—had never, on her high-perched terrace, wanted for admirers, though thus early in the season, during the first days of May, they were not so numerous as she was apt to see them at midsummer. This precisely, Abel Taker could infer, was the reason of a remark she had made him before the claims of the letter had been settled. "I shall put you next the American lady—the one who arrived yesterday. I know you'll be kind to her; she had to go to bed, as soon as she got here, with a sick-headache brought on by her journey. But she's better. Who isn't better as soon as they get here? She's coming down, and I'm sure she'd like to know you."
Taker had now the letter in his hand—the letter intended for "Mr. C. P. Addard"; which was not the name inscribed in the two or three books he had left out in his room, any more than it matched the initials, "A. F. T.," attached to the few pieces of his modest total of luggage. Moreover, since Madame Massin's establishment counted, to his still somewhat bewildered mind, so little for an hotel, as hotels were mainly known to him, he had avoided the act of "registering," and the missive with which his hostess was practically testing him represented the very first piece of postal matter taken in since his arrival that hadn't been destined to some one else. He had privately blushed for the meagreness of his mail, which made him look unimportant. That however was a detail, an appearance he was used to; indeed the reasons making for such an appearance might never have been so pleasant to him as on this vision of his identity formally and legibly denied. It was denied there in his wife's large straight hand; his eyes, attached to the envelope, took in the failure of any symptom of weakness in her stroke; she at least had the courage of his passing for somebody he wasn't, of his passing rather for nobody at all, and he felt the force of her character more irresistibly than ever as he thus submitted to what she was doing with him. He wasn't used to lying; whatever his faults—and he was used, perfectly, to the idea of his faults—he hadn't made them worse by any perverse theory, any tortuous plea, of innocence; so that probably, with every inch of him giving him away, Madame Massin didn't believe him a bit when he appropriated the letter. He was quite aware he could have made no fight if she had challenged his right to it. That would have come of his making no fight, nowadays, on any ground, with any woman; he had so lost the proper spirit, the necessary confidence. It was true that he had had to do for a long time with no woman in the world but Sue, and of the practice of opposition so far as Sue was concerned the end had been determined early in his career. His hostess fortunately accepted his word, but the way in which her momentary attention bored into his secret like the turn of a gimlet gave him a sense of the quantity of life that passed before her as a dealer with all comers—gave him almost an awe of her power of not wincing. She knew he wasn't, he couldn't be, C. P. Addard, even though she mightn't know, or still less care, who he was; and there was therefore something queer about him if he pretended to be. That was what she didn't mind, there being something queer about him; and what was further present to him was that she would have known when to mind, when really to be on her guard. She attached no importance to his trick; she had doubtless somewhere at the rear, amid the responsive underlings with whom she was sometimes heard volubly, yet so obscurely, to chatter, her clever French amusement about it. He couldn't at all events have said if the whole passage with her most brought home to him the falsity of his position or most glossed it over. On the whole perhaps it rather helped him, since from this moment his masquerade had actively begun.
Taking his place for luncheon, in any case, he found himself next the American lady, as he conceived, spoken of by Madame Massin—in whose appearance he was at first as disappointed as if, a little, though all unconsciously, he had been building on it. Had she loomed into view, on their hostess's hint, as one of the vague alternatives, the possible beguilements, of his leisure—presenting herself solidly where so much else had refused to crystallise? It was certain at least that she presented herself solidly, being a large mild smooth person with a distinct double chin, with grey hair arranged in small flat regular circles, figures of a geometrical perfection; with diamond earrings, with a long-handled eye-glass, with an accumulation of years and of weight and presence, in fine, beyond what his own rather melancholy consciousness acknowledged. He was forty-five, and it took every year of his life, took all he hadn't done with them, to account for his present situation—since you couldn't be, conclusively, of so little use, of so scant an application, to any mortal career, above all to your own, unless you had been given up and cast aside after a long succession of experiments tried with you. But the American lady with the mathematical hair which reminded him in a manner of the old-fashioned "work," the weeping willows and mortuary urns represented by the little glazed-over flaxen or auburn or sable or silvered convolutions and tendrils, the capillary flowers, that he had admired in the days of his innocence—the American lady had probably seen her half-century; all the more that before luncheon was done she had begun to strike him as having, like himself, slipped slowly down over its stretched and shiny surface, an expanse as insecure to fumbling feet as a great cold curved ice-field, into the comparatively warm hollow of resignation and obscurity. She gave him from the first—and he was afterwards to see why—an attaching impression of being, like himself, in exile, and of having like himself learned to butter her bread with a certain acceptance of fate. The only thing that puzzled him on this head was that to parallel his own case she would have had openly to consent to be shelved; which made the difficulty, here, that that was exactly what, as between wife and husband, remained unthinkable on the part of the wife. The necessity for the shelving of one or the other was a case that appeared often to arise, but this wasn't the way he had in general seen it settled. She made him in short, through some influence he couldn't immediately reduce to its elements, vaguely think of her as sacrificed—without blood, as it were; as obligingly and persuadedly passive. Yet this effect, a reflexion of his own state, would doubtless have been better produced for him by a mere melancholy man. She testified unmistakably to the greater energy of women; for he could think of no manifestation of spirit on his own part that might pass for an equivalent, in the way of resistance, of protest, to the rhythmic though rather wiggy water-waves that broke upon her bald-looking brow as upon a beach bared by a low tide. He had cocked up often enough—and as with the intention of doing it still more under Sue's nose than under his own—the two ends of his half-"sandy" half-grizzled moustache, and he had in fact given these ornaments an extra twist just before coming in to luncheon. That however was but a momentary flourish; the most marked ferocity of which hadn't availed not to land him—well, where he was landed now.
His new friend mentioned that she had come up from Rome and that Madame Massin's establishment had been highly spoken of to her there, and this, slight as it was, straightway contributed in its degree for Abel Taker to the idea that they had something in common. He was in a condition in which he could feel the drift of vague currents, and he knew how highly the place had been spoken of to him. There was but a shade of difference in his having had his lesson in Florence. He let his companion know, without reserve, that he too had come up from Italy, after spending three or four months there: though he remembered in time that, being now C. P. Addard, it was only as C. P. Addard he could speak. He tried to think, in order to give himself something to say, what C. P. Addard would have done; but he was doomed to feel always, in the whole connexion, his lack of imagination. He had had many days to come to it and nothing else to do; but he hadn't even yet made up his mind who C. P. Addard was or invested him with any distinguishing marks. He felt like a man who, moving in this, that or the other direction, saw each successively lead him to some danger; so that he began to ask himself why he shouldn't just lie outright, boldly and inventively, and see what that could do for him. There was an excitement, the excitement of personal risk, about it—much the same as would belong for an ordinary man to the first trial of a flying-machine; yet it was exactly such a course as Sue had prescribed on his asking her what he should do. "Anything in the world you like but talk about me: think of some other woman, as bad and bold as you please, and say you're married to her." Those had been literally her words, together with others, again and again repeated, on the subject of his being free to "kill and bury" her as often as he chose. This was the way she had met his objection to his own death and interment; she had asked him, in her bright hard triumphant way, why he couldn't defend himself by shooting back. The real reason was of course that he was nothing without her, whereas she was everything, could be anything in the wide world she liked, without him. That question precisely had been a part of what was before him while he strolled in the projected green gloom of Madame Massin's plane-trees; he wondered what she was choosing to be and how good a time it was helping her to have. He could be sure she was rising to it, on some line or other, and that was what secretly made him say: "Why shouldn't I get something out of it too, just for the harmless fun———?"
It kept coming back to him, naturally, that he hadn't the breadth of fancy, that he knew himself as he knew the taste of ill-made coffee, that he was the same old Abel Taker he had ever been, in whose aggregation of items it was as vain to feel about for latent heroisms as it was useless to rummage one's trunk for presentable clothes that one didn't possess. But did that absolve him (having so definitely Sue's permission) from seeing to what extent he might temporarily make believe? If he were to flap his wings very hard and crow very loud and take as long a jump as possible at the same time—if he were to do all that perhaps he should achieve for half a minute the sensation of soaring. He only knew one thing Sue couldn't do, from the moment she didn't divorce him: she couldn't get rid of his name, unaccountably, after all, as she hated it; she couldn't get rid of it because she would have always sooner or later to come back to it. She might consider that her being a thing so dreadful as Mrs. Abel Taker was a stumbling-block in her social path that nothing but his real, his official, his advertised circulated demise (with "American papers please copy") would avail to dislodge: she would have none the less to reckon with his continued existence as the drop of bitterness in her cup that seasoned undisguisably each draught. He might make use of his present opportunity to row out into the lake with his pockets full of stones and there quietly slip overboard; but he could think of no shorter cut for her ceasing to be what her marriage and the law of the land had made her. She was not an inch less Mrs. Abel Taker for these days of his sequestration, and the only thing she indeed claimed was that the concealment of the source of her shame, the suppression of the person who had divided with her his inherited absurdity, made the difference of a shade or two for getting honourably, as she called it, "about." How she had originally come to incur this awful inconvenience—that part of the matter, left to herself, she would undertake to keep vague; and she wasn't really left to herself so long as he too flaunted the dreadful flag.
This was why she had provided him with another and placed him out at board, to constitute, as it were, a permanent alibi; telling him she should quarrel with no colours under which he might elect to sail, and promising to take him back when she had got where she wanted. She wouldn't mind so much then—she only wanted a fair start. It wasn't a fair start—was it? she asked him frankly—so long as he was always there, so terribly cruelly there, to speak of what she had been. She had been nothing worse, to his sense, than a very pretty girl of eighteen out in Peoria, who had seen at that time no one else she wanted more to marry, nor even any one who had been so supremely struck by her. That, absolutely, was the worst that could be said of her. It was so bad at any rate in her own view—it had grown so bad in the widening light of life—that it had fairly become more than she could bear and that something, as she said, had to be done about it. She hadn't known herself originally any more than she had known him—hadn't foreseen how much better she was going to come out, nor how, for her individually, as distinguished from him, there might be the possibility of a big future. He couldn't be explained away—he cried out with all his dreadful presence that she had been pleased to marry him; and what they therefore had to do must transcend explaining. It was perhaps now helping her, off there in London, and especially at Fordham Castle—she was staying last at Fordham Castle, Wilts—it was perhaps inspiring her even more than she had expected, that they were able to try together this particular substitute: news of her progress in fact—her progress on from Fordham Castle, if anything could be higher—would not improbably be contained in the unopened letter he had lately pocketed.
There was a given moment at luncheon meanwhile, in his talk with his countrywoman, where he did try that flap of the wing—did throw off, for a flight into the blue, the first falsehood he could think of. "I stopped in Italy, you see, on my way back from the East, where I had gone—to Constantinople"—he rose actually to Constantinople—"to visit Mrs. Addard's grave." And after they had all come out to coffee in the rustling shade, with the vociferous German tribe at one end of the terrace, the English family keeping silence with an English accent, as it struck him, in the middle, and his direction taken, by his new friend's side, to the other unoccupied corner, he found himself oppressed with what he had on his hands, the burden of keeping up this expensive fiction. He had never been to Constantinople—it could easily be proved against him; he ought to have thought of something better, have got his effect on easier terms. Yet a funnier thing still than this quick repentance was the quite equally fictive ground on which his companion had affected him—when he came to think of it—as meeting him.
"Why you know that's very much the same errand that took me to Rome. I visited the grave of my daughter—whom I lost there some time ago."
She had turned her face to him after making this statement, looked at him with an odd blink of her round kind plain eyes, as if to see how he took it. He had taken it on the spot, for this was the only thing to do; but he had felt how much deeper down he was himself sinking as he replied: "Ah it's a sad pleasure, isn't it? But those are places one doesn't want to neglect."
"Yes—that's what I feel. I go," his neighbour had solemnly pursued, "about every two years."
With which she had looked away again, leaving him really not able to emulate her. "Well, I hadn't been before. You see it's a long way."
"Yes—that's the trying part. It makes you feel you'd have done better———"
"To bring them right home and have it done over there?" he had asked as she let the sad subject go a little. He quite agreed. "Yes—that's what many do."
"But it gives of course a peculiar interest." So they had kept it up. "I mean in places that mightn't have so very much."
"Places like Rome and Constantinople?" he had rejoined while he noticed the cautious anxious sound of her "very." The tone was to come back to him, and it had already made him feel sorry for her, with its suggestion of her being at sea like himself. Unmistakably, poor lady, she too was trying to float—was striking out in timid convulsive movements. Well, he wouldn't make it difficult for her, and immediately, so as not to appear to cast any ridicule, he observed that, whenever great bereavements might have occurred, there was no place so remarkable as not to gain an association. Such memories made at the least another object for coming. It was after this recognition, on either side, that they adjourned to the garden—Taker having in his ears again the good lady's rather troubled or muddled echo: "Oh yes, when you come to all the objects—!" The grave of one's wife or one's daughter was an object quite as much as all those that one looked up in Baedeker—those of the family of the Castle of Chillon and the Dent du Midi, features of the view to be enjoyed from different parts of Madame Massin's premises. It was very soon, none the less, rather as if these latter presences, diffusing their reality and majesty, had taken the colour out of all other evoked romance; and to that degree that when Abel's fellow guest happened to lay down on the parapet of the terrace three or four articles she had brought out with her, her fan, a couple of American newspapers and a letter that had obviously come to her by the same post as his own, he availed himself of the accident to jump at a further conclusion. Their coffee, which was "extra," as he knew and as, in the way of benevolence, he boldly warned her, was brought forth to them, and while she was giving her attention to her demi-tasse he let his eyes rest for three seconds on the superscription of her letter. His mind was by this time made up, and the beauty of it was that he couldn't have said why: the letter was from her daughter, whom she had been burying for him in Rome, and it would be addressed in a name that was really no more hers than the name his wife had thrust upon him was his. Her daughter had put her out at cheap board, pending higher issues, just as Sue had put him so that there was a logic not other than fine in his notifying her of what coffee every day might let her in for. She was addressed on her envelope as "Mrs. Vanderplank," but he had privately arrived, before she so much as put down her cup, at the conviction that this was a borrowed and lawless title, for all the world as if, poor dear innocent woman, she were a bold bad adventuress. He had acquired furthermore the moral certitude that he was on the track, as he would have said, of her true identity, such as it might be. He couldn't think of it as in itself either very mysterious or very impressive; but, whatever it was, her duplicity had as yet mastered no finer art than his own, inasmuch as she had positively not escaped, at table, inadvertently dropping a name which, while it lingered on Abel's ear, gave her quite away. She had spoken, in her solemn sociability and as by the force of old habit, of "Mr. Magaw," and nothing was more to be presumed than that this gentleman was her defunct husband, not so very long defunct, who had permitted her while in life the privilege of association with him, but whose extinction had left her to be worked upon by different ideas.
These ideas would have germed, infallibly, in the brain of the young woman, her only child, under whose rigid rule she now—it was to be detected—drew her breath in pain. Madame Massin would abysmally know, Abel reflected, for he was at the end of a few minutes more intimately satisfied that Mrs. Magaw's American newspapers, coming to her straight from the other side and not yet detached from their wrappers, would not be directed to Mrs. Vanderplank, and that, this being the case, the poor lady would have had to invent some pretext for a claim to goods likely still perhaps to be lawfully called for. And she wasn't formed for duplicity, the large simple scared foolish fond woman, the vague anxiety in whose otherwise so uninhabited and unreclaimed countenance, as void of all history as an expanse of Western prairie seen from a car-window, testified to her scant aptitude for her part. He was far from the desire to question their hostess, however—for the study of his companion's face on its mere inferred merits had begun to dawn upon him as the possible resource of his ridiculous leisure. He might verily have some fun with her—or he would so have conceived it had he not become aware before they separated, half an hour later, of a kind of fellow-feeling for her that seemed to plead for her being spared. She wasn't being, in some quarter still indistinct to him and so no more was he, and these things were precisely a reason. Her sacrifice, he divined, was an act of devotion, a state not yet disciplined to the state of confidence. She had presently, as from a return of vigilance, gathered in her postal property, shuffling it together at her further side and covering it with her pocket-handkerchief—though this very betrayal indeed but quickened his temporary impulse to break out to her, sympathetic ally, with a "Had you the misfortune to lose Magaw?" or with the effective production of his own card and a smiling, an inviting, a consoling "That's who I am if you want to know!" He really made out, with the idle human instinct, the crude sense for other people's pains and pleasures that had, on his showing, to his so great humiliation, been found an inadequate outfit for the successful conduct of the coal, the commission, the insurance and, as a last resort, desperate and disgraceful, the book-agency business—he really made out that she didn't want to know, or wouldn't for some little time; that she was decidedly afraid in short, and covertly agitated, and all just because she too, with him, suspected herself dimly in presence of that mysterious "more" than, in the classic phrase, met the eye. They parted accordingly, as if to relieve, till they could recover themselves, the conscious tension of their being able neither to hang back with grace nor to advance with glory; but flagrantly full, at the same time, both of the recognition that they couldn't in such a place avoid each other even if they had desired it, and of the suggestion that they wouldn't desire it, after such subtlety of communion, even were it to be thought of.
Abel Taker, till dinner-time, turned over his little adventure and extracted, while he hovered and smoked and mused, some refreshment from the impression the subtlety of communion had left with him. Mrs. Vanderplank was his senior by several years, and was neither fair nor slim nor "bright" nor truly, nor even falsely, elegant, nor anything that Sue had taught him, in her wonderful way, to associate with the American woman at the American woman's best—that best than which there was nothing better, as he had so often heard her say, on God's great earth. Sue would have banished her to the wildest waste of the unknowable, would have looked over her head in the manner he had often seen her use as if she were in an exhibition of pictures, were in front of something bad and negligible that had got itself placed on the line, but that had the real thing, the thing of interest for those who knew (and when didn't Sue know?) hung above it. In Mrs. Magaw's presence everything would have been of more interest to Sue than Mrs. Magaw; but that consciousness failed to prevent his feeling the appeal of this inmate much rather confirmed than weakened when she reappeared for dinner. It was impressed upon him, after they had again seated themselves side by side, that she was reaching out to him indirectly, guardedly, even as he was to her; so that later on, in the garden, where they once more had their coffee together—it might have been so free and easy, so wildly foreign, so almost Bohemian—he lost all doubt of the wisdom of his taking his plunge. This act of resolution was not, like the other he had risked in the morning, an upward flutter into fiction, but a straight and possibly dangerous dive into the very depths of truth. Their instinct was unmistakably to cling to each other, but it was as if they wouldn't know where to take hold till the air had really been cleared. Actually, in fact, they required a light—the aid prepared by him in the shape of a fresh match for his cigarette after he had extracted, under cover of the scented dusk, one of his cards from his pocket-book.
"There I honestly am, you see—Abel F. Taker; which I think you ought to know." It was relevant to nothing, relevant only to the grope of their talk, broken with sudden silences where they stopped short for fear of mistakes; but as he put the card before her he held out to it the little momentary flame. And this was the way that, after a while and from one thing to another, he himself, in exchange for what he had to give and what he gave freely, heard all about "Mattie"—Mattie Magaw, Mrs. Vanderplank's beautiful and high-spirited daughter, who, as he learned, found her two names, so dreadful even singly, a combination not to be borne, and carried on a quarrel with them no less desperate than Sue's quarrel with—well, with everything. She had, quite as Sue had done, declared her need of a free hand to fight them, and she was, for all the world like Sue again, now fighting them to the death. This similarity of situation was wondrously completed by the fact that the scene of Miss Magaw's struggle was, as her mother explained, none other than that uppermost walk of "high" English life which formed the present field of Mrs. Taker's operations; a circumstance on which Abel presently produced his comment. "Why, if they're after the same thing in the same place, I wonder if we shan't hear of their meeting."
Mrs. Magaw appeared for a moment to wonder too. "Well, if they do meet I guess we'll hear. I will say for Mattie that she writes me pretty fully. And I presume," she went on, "Mrs. Taker keeps you posted?"
"No," he had to confess—"I don't hear from her in much detail. She knows I back her," Abel smiled, "and that's enough for her. 'You be quiet and I'll let you know when you're wanted'—that's her motto; I'm to wait, wherever I am, till I'm called for. But I guess she won't be in a hurry to call for me"—this reflexion he showed he was familiar with. "I've stood in her light so long—her 'social' light, outside of which everything is for Sue black darkness—that I don't really see the reason she should ever want me back. That at any rate is what I'm doing—I'm just waiting. And I didn't expect the luck of being able to wait in your company. I couldn't suppose—that's the truth," he added—"that there was another, anywhere about, with the same ideas or the same strong character. It had never seemed to be possible," he ruminated, "that there could be any one like Mrs. Taker."
He was to remember afterwards how his companion had appeared to consider this approximation. "Another, you mean, like my Mattie?"
"Yes—like my Sue. Any one that really comes up to her. It will be," he declared, "the first one I've struck."
"Well," said Mrs. Vanderplank, "my Mattie's remarkably handsome."
"I'm sure—! But Mrs. Taker's remarkably handsome too. Oh," he added, both with humour and with earnestness, "if it wasn't for that I wouldn't trust her so! Because, for what she wants," he developed, "it's a great help to be fine-looking."
"Ah it's always a help for a lady!"—and Mrs. Magaw's sigh fluttered vaguely between the expert and the rueful. "But what is it," she asked, "that Mrs. Taker wants?"
"Well, she could tell you herself. I don't think she'd trust me to give an account of it. Still," he went on, "she has stated it more than once for my benefit, and perhaps that's what it all finally comes to. She wants to get where she truly belongs."
Mrs. Magaw had listened with interest. "That's just where Mattie wants to get! And she seems to know just where it is."
"Oh Mrs. Taker knows—you can bet your life," he laughed, "on that. It seems to be somewhere in London or in the country round, and I daresay it's the same place as your daughter's. Once she's there, as I understand it, she'll be all right; but she has got to get there—that is to be seen there thoroughly fixed and photographed, and have it in all the papers—first. After she's fixed, she says, we'll talk. We have talked a good deal: when Mrs. Taker says 'We'll talk' I know what she means. But this time we'll have it out."
There were communities in their fate that made his friend turn pale. "Do you mean she won't want you to come?"
"Well, for me to 'come,' don't you see? will be for me to come to life. How can I come to life when I've been as dead as I am now?"
Mrs. Vanderplank looked at him with a dim delicacy. "But surely, sir, I'm not conversing with the remains———!"
"You're conversing with C. P. Addard. He may be alive but even this I don't know yet; I'm just trying him," he said: "I'm trying him, Mrs. Magaw, on you. Abel Taker's in his grave, but does it strike you that Mr. Addard is at all above ground?"
He had smiled for the slightly gruesome joke of it, but she looked away as if it made her uneasy. Then, however, as she came back to him, "Are you going to wait here?" she asked.
He held her, with some gallantry, in suspense. "Are you?"
She postponed her answer, visibly not quite comfortable now; but they were inevitably the next day up to their necks again in the question; and then it was that she expressed more of her sense of her situation. "Certainly I feel as if I must wait—as long as I have to wait. Mattie likes this place—I mean she likes it for me. It seems the right sort of place," she opined with her perpetual earnest emphasis.
But it made him sound again the note. "The right sort to pass for dead in?"
"Oh she doesn't want me to pass for dead."
"Then what does she want you to pass for?"
The poor lady cast about. "Well, only for Mrs. Vanderplank."
"And who or what is Mrs. Vanderplank?"
Mrs. Magaw considered this personage, but didn't get far. "She isn't any one in particular, I guess."
"That means," Abel returned, "that she isn't alive."
"She isn't more than half alive," Mrs. Magaw conceded. "But it isn't what I am—it's what I'm passing for. Or rather"—she worked it out—"what I'm just not. I'm not passing—I don't, can't here, where it doesn't matter, you see—for her mother."
Abel quite fell in. "Certainly she doesn't want to have any mother."
"She doesn't want to have me. She wants me to lay low. If I lay low, she says———"
"Oh I know what she says"—Abel took it straight up. "It's the very same as what Mrs. Taker says. If you lie low she can fly high."
It kept disconcerting her in a manner, as well as steadying, his free possession of their case. "I don't feel as if I was lying—I mean as low as she wants—when I talk to you so." She broke it off thus, and again and again, anxiously, responsibly; her sense of responsibility making Taker feel, with his braver projection of humour, quite ironic and sardonic; but as for a week, for a fortnight, for many days more, they kept frequently and intimately meeting, it was natural that the so extraordinary fact of their being, as he put it, in the same sort of box, and of their boxes having so even more remarkably bumped together under Madame Massin's tilleuls, shouldn't only make them reach out to each other across their queer coil of communications, cut so sharp off in other quarters, but should prevent their pretending to any real consciousness but that of their ordeal. It was Abel's idea, promptly enough expressed to Mrs. Magaw, that they ought to get something out of it; but when he had said that a few times over (the first time she had met it in silence), she finally replied, and in a manner that he thought quite sublime: "Well, we shall—if they do all they want. We shall feel we've helped. And it isn't so very much to do."
"You think it isn't so very much to do—to lie down and die for them?"
"Well, if I don't hate it any worse when I'm really dead—!" She took herself up, however, as if she had skirted the profane. "I don't say that if I didn't believe in Mat—! But I do believe, you see. That's where she has me."
"Oh I see more or less. That's where Sue has me."
Mrs. Magaw fixed him with a milder solemnity. "But what has Mrs. Taker against you?"
"It's sweet of you to ask," he smiled; while it really came to him that he was living with her under ever so much less strain than what he had been feeling for ever so long before from Sue. Wouldn't he have liked it to go on and on—wouldn't that have suited C. P. Addard? He seemed to be finding out who C. P. Addard was—so that it came back again to the way Sue fixed things. She had fixed them so that C. P. Addard could become quite interested in Mrs. Vanderplank and quite soothed by her and so that Mrs. Vanderplank as well, wonderful to say, had lost her impatience for Mattie's summons a good deal more, he was sure, than she confessed. It was from this moment none the less that he began, with a strange but distinct little pang, to see that he couldn't be sure of her. Her question had produced in him a vibration of the sensibility that even the long series of mortifications, of publicly proved inaptitudes, springing originally from his lack of business talent, but owing an aggravation of aspect to an absence of nameable "type" of which he hadn't been left unaware, wasn't to have wholly toughened. Yet it struck him positively as the prettiest word ever spoken to him, so straight a surprise at his wife's dissatisfaction; and he was verily so unused to tributes to his adequacy that this one lingered in the air a moment and seemed almost to create a possibility. He wondered, honestly, what she could see in him, in whom Sue now at last saw really less than nothing; and his fingers instinctively moved to his moustache, a corner of which he twiddled up again, also wondering if it were perhaps only that though Sue had as good as told him that the undue flourish of this feature but brought out to her view the insignificance of all the rest of him. Just to hang in the iridescent ether with Mrs. Vanderplank, to whom he wasn't insignificant, just for them to sit on there together, protected, indeed positively ennobled, by their loss of identity, struck him as the foretaste of a kind of felicity that he hadn't, in the past known enough about really to miss it. He appeared to have become aware that he should miss it quite sharply, that he would find how he had already learned to, if she should go; and the very sadness of his apprehension quickened his vision of what would work with her. She would want, with all the roundness of her kind plain eyes, to see Mattie fixed—whereas he'd be hanged if he wasn't willing, on his side, to take Sue's elevation quite on trust. For the instant, however, he said nothing of that; he only followed up a little his acknowledgment of her having touched him. "What you ask me, you know, is just what I myself was going to ask. What has Miss Magaw got against you?"
"Well, if you were to see her I guess you'd know."
"Why I should think she'd like to show you," said Abel Taker.
"She doesn't so much mind their seeing me—when once she has had a look at me first. But she doesn't like them to hear me—though I don't talk so very much. Mattie speaks in the real English style," Mrs. Magaw explained.
"But ain't the real English style not to speak at all?"
"Well, she's having the best kind of time, she writes me—so I presume there must be some talk in which she can shine."
"Oh I've no doubt at all Miss Magaw talks!" and Abel, in his contemplative way, seemed to have it before him.
"Well, don't you go and believe she talks too much," his companion rejoined with spirit; and this it was that brought to a head his prevision of his own fate.
"I see what's going to happen. You only want to go to her. You want to get your share, after all. You'll leave me without a pang."
Mrs. Magaw stared. "But won't you be going too? When Mrs. Taker sends for you?"
He shook, as by a rare chance, a competent head. "Mrs. Taker won't send for me. I don't make out the use Mrs. Taker can ever have for me again."
Mrs. Magaw looked grave. "But not to enjoy your seeing———?"
"My seeing where she has come out? Oh that won't be necessary to her enjoyment of it. It would be well enough perhaps if I could see without being seen; but the trouble with me—for I'm worse than you," Abel said—"is that it doesn't do for me either to be heard or seen. I haven't got any side—!" But it dropped; it was too old a story.
"Not any possible side at all?" his friend, in her candour, doubtingly echoed. "Why what do they want over there?"
It made him give a comic pathetic wail. "Ah to know a person who says such things as that to me, and to have to give her up———!"
She appeared to consider with a certain alarm what this might portend, and she really fell back before it. "Would you think I'd be able to give up Mattie?"
"Why not—if she's successful? The thing you wouldn't like—you wouldn't, I'm sure—would be to give her up if she should find, or if you should find, she wasn't."
"Well, I guess Mattie will be successful," said Mrs. Magaw.
"Ah you're a worshipper of success!" he groaned. "I'd give Mrs. Taker up, definitely, just to remain C. P. Addard with you."
She allowed it her thought; but, as he felt, super ficially. "She's your wife, sir, you know, whatever you do."
"'Mine'? Ah but whose? She isn't C. P. Addard's."
She rose at this as if they were going too far; yet she showed him, he seemed to see, the first little concession—which was indeed to be the only one—of her inner timidity; something that suggested how she must have preserved as a token, laid away among spotless properties, the visiting-card he had originally handed her. "Well, I guess the one I feel for is Abel F. Taker!"
This, in the end, however, made no difference; since one of the things that inevitably came up between them was that if Mattie had a quarrel with her name her most workable idea would be to get some body to give her a better. That, he easily made out, was fundamentally what she was after, and, though, delicately and discreetly, as he felt, he didn't reduce Mrs. Vanderplank to so stating the case, he finally found himself believing in Miss Magaw with just as few reserves as those with which he believed in Sue. If it was a question of her "shining" she would indubitably shine; she was evidently, like the wife by whom he had been, in the early time, too provincially, too primitively accepted, of the great radiating substance, and there were times, here at Madame Massin's, while he strolled to and fro and smoked, when Mrs. Taker's distant lustre fairly peeped at him over the opposite mountain-tops, fringing their silhouettes as with the little hard bright rim of a coming day. It was clear that Mattie's mother couldn't be expected not to want to see her married; the shade of doubt bore only on the stage of the business at which Mrs. Magaw might safely be let out of the box. Was she to emerge abruptly as Mrs. Magaw?—or was the lid simply to be tipped back so that, for a good look, she might sit up a little straighter? She had got news at any rate, he inferred, which suggested to her that the term of her suppression was in sight; and she even let it out to him that, yes, certainly, for Mattie to be ready for her—and she did look as if she were going to be ready—she must be right down sure. They had had further lights by this time moreover, lights much more vivid always in Mattie's bulletins than in Sue's; which latter, as Abel insistently imaged it, were really each time, on Mrs. Taker's part, as limited as a peep into a death-chamber. The death-chamber was Madame Massin's terrace; and—he completed the image—how could Sue not want to know how things were looking for the funeral, which was in any case to be thoroughly "quiet"? The vivid thing seemed to pass before Abel's eyes the day he heard of the bright compatriot, just the person to go round with, a charming handsome witty widow, whom Miss Magaw had met at Fordham Castle, whose ideas were, on all important points, just the same as her own, whose means also (so that they could join forces on an equality) matched beautifully, and whose name in fine was Mrs. Sherrington Reeve. "Mattie has felt the want," Mrs. Magaw explained, "of some lady, some real lady like that, to go round with: she says she sometimes doesn't find it very pleasant going round alone."
Abel Taker had listened with interest this in formation left him staring. "By Gosh, then, she has struck Sue!"
"'Struck' Mrs. Taker———?"
"She isn't Mrs. Taker now—she's Mrs. Sherrington Reeve." It had come to him with all its force—as if the glare of her genius were, at a bound, high over the summits. "Mrs. Taker's dead: I thought, you know, all the while, she must be, and this makes me sure. She died at Fordham Castle. So we're both dead."
His friend, however, with her large blank face, lagged behind. "At Fordham Castle too—died there?"
"Why she has been as good as living there!" Abel Taker emphasised. "'Address Fordham Castle'—that's about all she has written me. But perhaps she died before she went"—he had it before him, he made it out. "Yes, she must have gone as Mrs. Sherrington Reeve. She had to die to go—as it would be for her like going to heaven. Marriages, sometimes, they say, are made up there; and so, sometimes then, apparently, are friendships—that, you see, for instance, of our two shining ones."
Mrs. Magaw's understanding was still in the shade. "But are you sure———?"
"Why Fordham Castle settles it. If she wanted to get where she truly belongs she has got there. She belongs at Fordham Castle."
The noble mass of this structure seemed to rise at his words, and his companion's grave eyes, he could see, to rest on its towers. "But how has she become Mrs. Sherrington Reeve?"
"By my death. And also after that by her own. I had to die first, you see, for her to be able to—that is for her to be sure. It's what she has been looking for, as I told you—to be sure. But oh—she was sure from the first. She knew I'd die off, when she had made it all right for me—so she felt no risk. She simply became, the day I became C. P. Addard, something as different as possible from the thing she had always so hated to be. She's what she always would have liked to be—so why shouldn't we rejoice for her? Her baser part, her vulgar part, has ceased to be, and she lives only as an angel."
It affected his friend, this elucidation, almost with awe; she took it at least, as she took everything, stolidly. "Do you call Mrs. Taker an angel?"
Abel had turned about, as he rose to the high vision, moving, with his hands in his pockets, to and fro. But at Mrs. Magaw's question he stopped short—he considered with his head in the air. "Yes—now!"
"But do you mean it's her idea to marry?"
He thought again. "Why for all I know she is married."
"With you, Abel Taker, living?"
"But I ain't living. That's just the point."
"Oh you're too dreadful"—and she gathered herself up. "And I won't," she said as she broke off, "help to bury you!"
This office, none the less, as she practically had herself to acknowledge, was in a manner, and before many days, forced upon her by further important information from her daughter, in the light of the true inevitability of which they had, for that matter, been living. She was there before him with her telegram, which she simply held out to him as from a heart too full for words. "Am engaged to Lord Dunderton, and Sue thinks you can come."
Deep emotion sometimes confounds the mind—and Mrs. Magaw quite flamed with excitement. But on the other hand it sometimes illumines, and she could see, it appeared, what Sue meant. "It's because he's so much in love."
"So far gone that she's safe?" Abel frankly asked.
"So far gone that she's safe."
"Well," he said, "if Sue feels it———!" He had so much, he showed, to go by. "Sue knows."
Mrs. Magaw visibly yearned, but she could look at all sides. "I'm bound to say, since you speak of it, that I've an idea Sue has helped. She'll like to have her there."
"Mattie will like to have Sue?"
"No, Sue will like to have Mattie." Elation raised to such a point was in fact already so clarifying that Mrs. Magaw could come all the way. "As Lady Dunderton."
"Well," Abel smiled, "one good turn deserves another!" If he meant it, however, in any such sense as that Mattie might be able in due course to render an equivalent of aid, this notion clearly had to reckon with his companion's sense of its strangeness, exhibited in her now at last upheaved countenance. "Yes," he accordingly insisted, "it will work round to that—you see if it doesn't. If that's where they were to come out, and they have come—by which I mean if Sue has realised it for Mattie and acted as she acts when she does realise, then she can't neglect it in her own case: she'll just have to realise it for herself. And, for that matter, you'll help her too. You'll be able to tell her, you know, that you've seen the last of me." And on the morrow, when, starting for London, she had taken her place in the train, to which he had accompanied her, he stood by the door of her compartment and repeated this idea. "Remember, for Mrs. Taker, that you've seen the last———!"
"Oh but I hope I haven't, sir."
"Then you'll come back to me? If you only will, you know, Sue will be delighted to fix it."
"To fix it—how?"
"Well, she'll tell you how. You've seen how she can fix things, and that will be the way, as I say, you'll help her."
She stared at him from her corner, and he could see she was sorry for him; but it was as if she had taken refuge behind her large high-shouldered reticule, which she held in her lap, presenting it almost as a bulwark. "Mr. Taker," she launched at him over it, "I'm afraid of you."
"Because I'm dead?"
"Oh sir!" she pleaded, hugging her morocco defence. But even through this alarm her finer thought came out. "Do you suppose I shall go to Fordham Castle?"
"Well, I guess that's what they're discussing now. You'll know soon enough."
"If I write you from there," she asked, "won't you come?"
"I'll come as the ghost. Don't old castles always have one?"
She looked at him darkly; the train had begun to move. "I shall fear you!" she said.
"Then there you are." And he moved an instant beside the door. "You'll be glad, when you get there, to be able to say———" But she got out of hearing, and, turning away, he felt as abandoned as he had known he should—felt left, in his solitude, to the sense of his extinction. He faced it completely now, and to himself at least could express it without fear of protest. "Why certainly I'm dead."
THE END