The Duchess of Wrexe Part 62

He did not know what Lizzie would have to say to him, but, at his heart, he expected triumph--with so little encouragement, he would wait so faithfully--

It was a cold windy afternoon of early spring and up to the gates of the Botanical Gardens little eddies came sweeping: twigs and dust and pieces of paper tossing, under a grey sky, beneath branches that creaked and strained; Breton stood there impatiently; he was ten minutes before his time; this biting windy world took from him his confidence ... a dirty little brown dog walked round and round, wagging, now and again, a pessimistic tail.

There at last she was, coming, as orderly and neat as ever, up the road; her grey dress, her little s.h.i.+ning shoes, her hair that no breeze could disturb, her expression as though she were ready for anything and would be surprised at nothing--these all, to-day, irritated him. Good heavens!

was she so surely tied to her typewriter that she could understand nothing of the emotions that an ordinary human being might be feeling?

Had she no imagination? Because she had never herself known sentiment about anyone alive was it beyond her to consider what others might encounter?

Breton would have preferred any other amba.s.sador in this affair than the neat, efficient Miss Rand, forgetting that there had been a time when he had chosen her as his one and only confidante.

"How do you do, Mr. Breton?" she said, giving him her little gloved hand.

"It's just struck--I was a little early," he answered, feeling confused and hating himself for his confusion--

"Let's go round to the left here and turn over the bridge and then out past the Zoo and back--That makes quite a good round."

"Yes"--he said.

"I chose the Park because I thought that we could talk better--We might have been interrupted at home."

He caught then a little tremor in her voice and was grateful for it. She _did_ feel a little that this was important for him; she sympathized perhaps more than he should have expected.

"Let's come straight to the point, Miss Rand," he said, "you have a message for me."

She nodded, felt in the pocket of her dress and produced an envelope, which she gave him.

"She thought it better that I should give it you like this because then I could say something as well--something she had asked me to say----"

His hand trembled as he saw the writing on the envelope--"Francis Breton, Esq., 24 Saxton Square"--During what months and months he had longed for that handwriting and how often had he imagined that letter lying, just as it lay now, in his hand--

He read it, Lizzie walking gravely at his side--

"This letter is not easy to write and you must realize that and forgive me if I have not put things properly. These last weeks have all made such a demand on me that I'm tired out....

"I said once, Francis dear, that I would not write to you until I meant to come to you. Now I have broken my word--This is to tell you that everything, anything, that we have felt for one another must be ended, now and for ever.

"Don't think that I am angry with you for writing to me. Perhaps I should have been, but I understood--Only now all my life must be always, entirely, devoted to my husband. That is now all that I live for. I feel as though in some way I had been responsible for the disaster; at any rate his bravery and pluck are wonderful and it is a small thing that I can do to make his life as easy as I can, but it will take the whole of me.

"Perhaps after a time we shall meet--one day be friends--I can't look ahead or look back; I only know that I am now absolutely, entirely, my husband's--

"Don't hate me for this--it was taken out of our hands. I've asked Lizzie Rand to give you this. She knows everything and it would make me happy to think that you two had become great friends."

They had crossed the little bridge, left behind them the strange birds that chattered beneath it, and had pa.s.sed into the wide green s.p.a.ces, often given up to cricket or football, now empty of any human being--the Zoological Gardens, a deserted bandstand, a fringe of trees on which the first tiny leaves were showing; above them the grey sky had broken into blue and white, the cloud shaped with ribs and fleecy softness like a huge wing stretching above them from horizon to horizon.

Over the two of them, so tiny on that broad expanse, this wing brooded tenderly, gravely--

Breton had crushed the letter in his hand and stood looking in front of him, but seeing nothing. His one thought was that he had been brutally treated,--she had simply, without a thought, without a care, flung him aside.

He had, of course, known that this accident to her husband must, for a time, hold her, but now, in this fas.h.i.+on, she had pa.s.sed on without hesitation--leaving him anywhere, anyhow; was it so long ago that she had said to him that, whether she came to him or no she would always love him? Had she already forgotten that kiss, that moment when she had clung to him, held to him?

He stood there, filled with self-pity. This restraint, this self-discipline all done for her and now all useless. It was not wanted; _he_ was not wanted....

Had she only preserved some relations.h.i.+p, told him to wait, a.s.sured him that he meant something to her, anything but this--

But there was greater pain at Breton's heart than thought of Rachel brought him. To every man comes in due time the instant of revelation; it had flashed before Breton now.

He saw that his relations.h.i.+p with Rachel was at an end, utterly--However he might delude himself that, in his soul, he knew. There had been a moment when they had met and the moment had pa.s.sed. But he saw more than this. He saw that he was a man to whom life had always been a succession of moments--moments flas.h.i.+ng, stinging, flying, gone--he, always, helpless to grasp and hold.

Had he, on that day, been strong, held Rachel, conquered her, made her his.... He was weak through the fine things in him as surely as through the base--His ideals forced his purpose to tremble as often as his regrets....

Standing there, he faced himself and saw that, whether for good or evil, Life for him had always been evasive, fluid, a thing grasped at but never caught.

Rachel was not for such as he--

Lizzie had watched him and her face had grown very tender--"I know I'm a nuisance just now," she said--"it hasn't, naturally, been a very pleasant thing for me to have to do--but I thought that I could tell you a little about her--I've seen her through all of this."

He strode along fiercely, his eyes staring in front of him; he looked, she thought, like a boy who had been forbidden some longed-for pleasure; she found it difficult to keep pace with him.

"She's so very, very young," Lizzie went on, "I expect you forget that--she's filled, above everything else, with a determination to express her own individuality, a protest, you know, against its having been squashed by her family.

"Anything that helps her to express it she seizes on. You helped her--she seized on you. Now all her heart is stirred by this disaster to her husband, the most active person she's ever known absolutely helpless, so now that has seized her. She can't have two things in her mind at once--that's where her troubles come from--she cares for you.

You'll always be something to her that no one else can ever be, and oh!

it's so much better, so much, much better, than if you'd gone off, made a mess of it all, spoilt all your beautiful ideas of one another."

The thrill in her voice made him, even though he was intensely concerned with his own wrongs and losses, consider her. What Lizzie Rand was this?

It flung him back, almost against his will, as though he hated to throw over all the ideas he had formed of her, to that first meeting when they had stood at the window and looked out on the grey square and he had called it the Pool. Then he had suspected her of emotion and sentiment; it was afterwards, when he had made her his wise Counsellor and common-sense Adviser, that he had thought of her as unemotional.

He felt now that he had been treating her rather badly. He stopped abruptly and looked down at her; there was something in her earnest gaze at him, something rather nervous and hesitating that did not belong at all to the efficient Miss Rand.

"It _is_ good of you, Miss Rand, to have come and given me this note.

I'm finding it all rather difficult at the moment, as I'm sure you'll understand. I'd better go off somewhere by myself a bit, I think, but it was good of you." He broke off and stared desolately about him. He was not very far from tears, she thought.

She too remembered their first meeting. She had found him melodramatic then, a little insincere--Now she knew that she had been wrong. He was sincere as a child is sincere; the world was utterly black, was transcendently bright as it was for a child.

She understood him so well--so much better than Rachel. She knew that neither he nor Rachel would ever have had the wisdom to endure that romantic impatience that was in both of them--"They would have been fighting in a week--But I--should know how to deal with him----"

The green park and the brooding sky seemed to join in her tenderness--She had never loved him so surely, so unselfishly as she loved him now.

"Tell me," he said gruffly. "I wrote to her ... did she tell you anything about that?"

"Yes," Lizzie answered--"I don't know what might have happened if he hadn't had the accident.... But as it is, I know she's glad you wrote--She likes to look back on it, but it's on something that died--gone altogether. And it's much, much better so."

"To you," he said, "it may be so."

"Only because through these weeks I've got to know her so well. She's strange--unlike any other woman I've known. Her great charm is that she's so unattainable. Men will always love her for that and sometimes she may think she loves them in return, but no man will ever call the _real_ woman out of her. If she were to have a child, perhaps that would ... but we--all of us--you, I, Dr. Christopher, her husband--all of us who love her will always love her without quite knowing why and without, in the end, her belonging to any one of us.

"I've grown to love her during these last weeks and I've thought it was because I was sorry for her and admired her pluck--but it isn't that really--It's simply because--well, because--there's something wonderful in her that isn't for any of us."

"Well, you've been very kind, Miss Rand, I shan't forget it. You've said just the thing to put it all straight and clear. I wouldn't do anything now to disturb her or hurt her husband, poor devil ... it must be h.e.l.l for him ... and it don't anyway matter much what happens to me--it never has done.