30 Full Cold My Greeting Was, And Dry
STANDING here, waiting for Jemima Ann, her thoughts go back—back over these last seven months that have wrought so great a change in her, that she sits and wonders sometimes if “I be I.” Those months rise up before her, a series of dissolving views in the fire, the slow, first awakening to the fact that she has made a life-long mistake, that Sir Vane has married her fortune—only her fortune—that in his secret heart his feeling for her is more akin to hate than love. Two months of marriage suffice to show her this much; slowly but surely it has come home to her, through no one particular word or act, but simply from the fact that truth, like murder, will out. The innate brutality of the man has shown itself in spite of him, through the thin outer veneer of good manners, from the very beginning. The first overt act was upon the news of the death of Madam Valentine in Rome. Stunned by the suddenness of that tragic death, wild with all regret, Dolores’ first impulse was to fly back at once—at once. But Sir Vane, quite composedly, quite authoritatively, put the impulse and the hysterics aside.
“Nonsense, Lady Valentine,” he says, coolly,” she is buried by this time, or is certain to be before you can get there. If your friend, Macdonald, the marble carver, could not have sent you word in time to see her living, he need not have sent you word at all. And she was a very old woman—it was quite to be expected, even without the intervention of the railway. You did not suppose she would live forever, did you? Though ‘gad,” Sir Vane adds, sotto voce, “it is the conclusion I had about come to myself.”
There are tears, a very storm of wild weeping, prayers, supplications—an agony of grief. “Oh, grandmamma! grandmamma!” the poor child sobs—a sense of utter desolation rending her heart. It is a vehement scene, and Sir Vane is extremely bored. He bears it for awhile in silence, then the temper that is in the man asserts itself suddenly. He throws down the English paper he has been reading, and speaks loudly and harshly. “Enough of this,” he says; “don’t be a baby or a fool, Dolores. Madam Valentine is dead, and you are her heiress. What is yours is mine, and I have waited for it for twenty years. One may buy even gold too dear—I sometimes think I have had to do it. It is mine at last, and it is a noble inheritance, and I am not disposed to grieve, or let you grieve, too deeply, over this accident that has taken her off. It was quite time she went. When people get into a habit of dragging out life over sixty, they seldom know where to stop Dry your eyes, Lady Valentine; there is the dinner-bell. We are to dine at the table d’hote; it is less expensive, I find, than dining in one’s own apartments, and a great deal less dull.”
That is how the death is received. Indignant fire dries the tears in Lady Valentine’s blue eyes. She shrinks in a sort of horror from the man she has married, the man who has spoken those brutal words. From thenceforth her tears flow in secret, they trouble Sir Vane no more. But from thenceforth, too, a strong repulsion, she has never felt for him before, fills her, makes her shrink from his touch, with a sensation that is little short of loathing.
Her second repulse is on the subject of her mourning. Lady Valentine naturally wishes to order it at once; it seems to her she can find no black black enough to express the loneliness, the sorrow, that fills her at the loss of her best friend, who loved her so well. Here, too, marital authority steps in. “I hate black!” Sir Vane says, petulantly; “I abhor it. Crape and bombazine, and all the other ugly trappings of woe and death. I’ll have none of them! I object to mourning garments—on—conviction. I consider it wrong, and—er—flying in the face of Providence, who—er—must know best about this sort of thing, of course—when to remove people, and all that. It would give me the horrors to go about with. a lady looking like an ebony image, a perpetual memento mori. You shall not do it, Lady Valentine; it is of no use firing up, or looking at me like that. I am not easily annihilated by flashing glances, and I mean to be obeyed in this and all things. And if people make remarks I’ll explain. And a mourning outfit,” this added inwardly, “costs a pot of money, so Camilla writes me.”
The decree is spoken from which there may be no appeal. Dolores does appeal, passionately, vehemently, angrily it is to be feared—it cannot be that Sir Vane means these merciless words. He does mean them. As vainly as waves dash themselves against a rock, she beats her undisciplined heart against the dogged obstinacy of this man. “I never change my mind, Lady Valentine,” he says, grimly, “when once I am convinced I am right. I am convinced here. And tears and reproaches are utterly wasted upon me—you had better learn that in time. Let us have no more of these ridiculous, underbred scenes—these hysterics, and exclamations, and reddened eyes. It is all exceedingly bad form, and coarse and repulsive to a disgusting degree. You shall not return to Rome, you shall not put on black. If you force me to use my authority in this way, you must take the consequences. Be so good as to dry your eyes, and let all this end.”
And Dolores obeys—fiery wrath dries up the tears in the blue eyes, and in her passionate heart at that moment she feels that she abhors the man she has married. The feeling does not last, it is true; Dolores is not a good hater—it is a loving little soul, a tender, child-like, confiding heart, that must of its nature cling to something; that would cling, if it could, to the man who is her husband. Duty points that way, and Dolores has very strong instincts concerning duty, but try as she will she cannot. On every point she is repulsed. He wants none of her love, none of her confidence, none of her wifely duty. He has married her because otherwise a fortune would have slipped his grasp; he has been compelled to marry her, and he hates everything by which he is compelled. “She cared for that other fellow—the marble carver in Rome,” so run his thoughts, contemptuously, and he is base enough to set that down as the mainspring of her desire to go back. Without caring for her, himself, one jot, he is yet wrathful that it should be so. She married him to please her grandmother, against every girlish inclination of her own; he will make her feel that to his dying day. He bears her a bitter grudge; she came between him and the fortune for which he had served for a weary score of years—let her look to it in the days to come; let her not hope that he will ever forget, or spare, or yield, or forgive!
And so alone, forced ruthlessly to wake to the bitter truth, Dolores has had the fact that her life is spoiled brought home to her well, before the first two months of her “honey moon” are over. Alone! A dreary, a despairing sense that she will be, must be, alone for the rest of her life, fills her at times with a blank sense of horror and fear. Alone! with Sir Vane Valentine, till death shall them part. Alone! a stranger in a strange land, an intruder in her husband’s house, a home without love, without one friend. A panic of terror seizes her when she thinks of it, a fear that is like the fear of a child left alone in the dark. She clings to Jemima Ann, at such times, with a passionate clinging that goes near to break that faithful creature’s heart.
“Do not leave me, Jemima,” she cries out; “promise me you will not; promise me you will stay with me as long as I live. I have no one, no one, no one left but you.” And Jemima fondles, and soothes, and promises as she might a veritable frightened child. She sees, and understands, and resents it all, but she is especially careful not to let this resentment appear. Sir Vane eyes her, has eyed her from the first, with sour disfavor, mingled with contempt; he has striven to dissuade his wife from taking with her so outre a maid. Her honest heart aches for her pretty young mistress, who grows paler, and thinner, and sadder, and more silent day by day, who never complains, and who clings to Ler as the drowning cling to the last straw. It is her last straw, her last hold upon love; every one else seems to have slipped forever out of her life. She stands alone in the world, at the mercy of Vane Valentine.
All these months of post-nuptial wandering, Sir Vane keeps up a voluminous correspondence with the ladies of Manor Valentine. Lengthy epistles from his sister and cousin come to him with each post. His wife, of course, reads none of these; she has no desire to read them. His womankind must of necessity be like himself. She looks forward with unspeakable dread to the return to the house that is to be her home. The present is bad enough; with a sure prescience she feels that any change—that most of all—will be for the worse. Now, at least, there is the excitement of new scenes, new faces, kindly stranger voices; there a monotony worse than death will set in. There, there will be three to find fault with her instead of only one. For Sir Vane seems to take a rancorous, venomish pleasure in girding at his young bride. If she is silent, she is sullen; if she laughs aloud, as from pure youth she sometimes does, she is a hoiden; if she talks to Jemima, she is addicted to low and vulgar tastes. In all things her manners lack repose, and are childish and gauche to a degree; altogether unfitting the dignity of that station in life to which it has pleased Providence to elevate her.
What wonder that she looks onward in blank dismay and affright to the dismal home-going to Valentine Manor! With eyes of passionate longing and envy she looks at the peasant girls in the streets; at the grisettes, who go to their daily work; at the wandering gypsy women, with their brown babies at their backs. Oh, to be one of them—to be anything free, and happy, and beloved again! She looks back in a very passion of longing to the life of long ago—the life of Isle Perdrix, with her boys, and her boat, and her hosts of friends, and the gentle old doctor—to that other later life, with grandmamma—grandmamma indulgent and best loved—and even Sir Vane—a very different Sir Vane from this—the suave, guarded, deferential suitor. A strange, mournful, incredulous wonder fills her. Was that man and this the same? And Rene—but she stops here; that way madness lies. She covers her face, and sobs rend their way up from her heart; tears, that might be of blood, they so sear, and blister, and burn, fall. Rene! Rene! Rene!
” J have lived and loved, but that was to-day;
Go bring me my grave-clothes to-morrow.”
Her heart breaks over Thekla’s sad song. Life seems to have come to an end. It came to an end for her on the day it begins for other girls—her wedding day.
And now the revolving lights in the fire change; another series of pictures rise. It is a rainy March afternoon, and the express is thundering along the iron road to the station where the carriage from Valentine is to meet them, with the sister and cousin so much dreaded. Sir Vane has telegraphed from London. He is in a fever of nervous, restless impatience; his sallow cheeks wear a flush; his black eyes glitter; his lean fingers twist his mustache. He can only constrain himself to sit still by an effort; he cannot read his Times; he keeps putting up and letting down the window, until the other people in the compartment look at him in exasperated amaze. Lady Valentine sits back in a corner, and a more utter contrast to his restless fidgettiness it would .be difficult to find.
She is very pale, she is cold; the March breeze blowing in through the window Sir Vane opens at intervals chills her through, in spite of her furs; a silent great dread looks out of her eyes. She sits quite silent, quite motionless, quite white. The wind goes by with a shriek, like a banshee’s, she thinks, with a shiver; the rain falls in long, slanting lines. It is all in keeping with her heart—this dark and weeping day—her heart, that lies like lead in her breast. This is to be all of life for her, coldness, darkness, storm, and—Sir Vane Valentine! They rush into the station. Her hour has come.
“Is the carriage from Valentine waiting?” Sir Vane demands, authoritatively, and the reply is crushing:
“No, there ain’t no carriage from Valentine.”
Nothing is waiting but one forlorn, dejected, bedraggled railway fly. The baronet is furious, but the fact remains. His telegram has been unheeded, no carriage is in waiting; the lord of the land, and his bride, must perforce go in the stuffy fly, or walk through the rain. Sir Vane swears—anathemas “not loud but deep “—it is another of the objectionable things he never used to do, or if he did, “it must have been in his inside,” as Jemima Ann puts it. Dolores shrinks within herself, more and more repelled. There is no help for it, the fly it must be; he helps her in, follows, and so, through mire and rain, in silence and gloom Sir Vane and Lady Valentine ignominiously return to the halls of their ancestors.
Within those halls it is worse. No one awaits them—no one expects them. No train of retainers is drawn up in the entrance-hall to bid their lord welcome, no fires blaze, no smiling sister or cousin receives them with open arms. Black fire-places, cold rooms, surprised faces of servants alone meet them. What the— does it mean? Where is Miss Valentine? Where is Miss Routh? Where is his telegram? Sir Vane is savage beyond all precedent. Then it appears that the telegram is lying on Miss Valentine’s table, still unopened, and Miss Valentine and Miss Routh went up to town yesterday, and are not expected back until to-morrow. Direst wrath fills Sir Vane. but it is wrath expended on empty air. The servants fly to do his bidding, fires are lit, dinner is laid, my lady is shown to her room—a very pallid, and spiritless, and fagged my lady.
The servants look at her furtively and are disappointed. They have been told that master married a great beauty and heiress—she looks neither in the wet dreariness of this dismal home-coming. Left alone, she sinks down in the nearest chair, lays her arms on the table, droops her aching head upon them, and so lies—too utterly wretched even for the relief of tears.
Next day the ladies of the Manor return, full of dis may and regret at the contretemps. Sir Vane is bitter and unreasonable at first, but these being the only two creatures on earth he really cares for, he allows himself to be softened gradually, and forgives them handsomely. A prolonged family colloquy ensues. Dolores takes no part in it, but from a distance she has seen the meeting—seen Miss Valentine kiss her brother primly on the forehead, seen Miss Routh offer first one cheek, then the other, seen her husband stand with both her hands clasped in his, a look in his dark face that is altogether new in his wife’s experience of him. She dreads the ordeal of meeting these two women, and wishes it was over—it is something that must be, but it is an ordeal that sets her teeth on edge.
She dresses for dinner in one of the pretty trousseau dresses—that she has grown to hate, since she never puts them on without feeling it should be black instead, and goes down stairs. It is a cool but fine March afternoon, and meeting no one, she gathers up her train, and descends to a terrace that commands a wide view of the country road and the village beyond, and paces to and from, mustering courage for the coming ordeal. The ordeal comes to her ill the person of Miss Dorothy Valentine, in sad colored silk, not a confection of Madame Elise—Miss Dorothy Valentine, as grim as a grenadier and as tall. She is upright as a ramrod, and nearly as slim—she is a duplicate of Sir Vane, in slate-colored silk, and false front. She is lean like Sir Vane, she is yellow like Sir Vane, with a mustache that the very highest breeding cannot quite overlook; she has small black eyes like Sir Vane, she has a rasping bass voice, and a rigid austerity of manner, and she has—at first glance—some seven and fifty years. On her false front of bobbing black ringlets she wears an arrangement of lace and red roses. And she holds out two bony fingers in sisterly greeting to her brothers’s bride. “How do you do, Lady Valentine?” is what she says.
The black eyes go through the shrinking figure before her—they read every quivering, nervous, tremulous throb of her childish heart. “You are nothing but a baby,” that stern, black glance seems to say. “You will need a great deal of bringing up, and keeping down, and training in the way you should go, before you are fit for your position as my brother’s wife. You are a spoiled baby—a foolish, frivolous, flighty young thing; it shall be my business to change all that.”
The black, grim eyes say all this, and a chill of despair creeps over the victim. She feels crushed, as the captive in the iron shroud may have felt, watching with hopeless eyes the deadly walls of his prison closing, ever closing, down on his devoted head.
“Shall we go .n to dinner?” is Miss Valentine’s second austere remark; “that is the last bell. We are always punctual, most punctual, at meals in this house. It is one of my rules, and my brother approves.”
“And do you presume to be late at your peril, young woman,” add the black, snapping eyes. In silence Dolores turns to follow. What is there to say to this terrific chatelaine? She feels she will never be able to talk up to her awful level as long as she lives.
“We are very sorry—Camilla Routh and myself—at our misfortune in being absent yesterday when the telegram arrived. It was our duty- to be here, and welcome home my brother and his wife. My brother, with his customary goodness, has consented to overlook it. I trust, Lady Valentine, you do likewise.”
Lady Valentine bows. She would like to gasp out something—something conciliatory—but the command of language seems to have been frozen at its source. If she lives for a hundred years, she thinks desperately, she will never be able to talk to this terrible Miss Dorothy Valentine. A gay voice is singing blithely, a merry lilting Scotch song, as they go in. They are in time only to catch the refrain:
” Then hey for a lass wi’ a tocher,
The bright yellow guineas for me!”
Sir Vane is standing beside the piano. a smile on his face, as he looks down at the gay singer. She is looking up at him—mischief, malice, coquetry in her uplifted eyes. She rises as the two ladies enter, and comes forward—a small person in pale pink silk, with a most elaborate train, and a still more elaborate structure of chestnut puffs and ringlets on her head—a small, rather plump young lady—that is to say, as young as something over thirty years will permit—with a pink and white complexion, and the very palest blue eyes that ever looked out of a blonde woman’s face.
“My Cousin Vane’s wife,” she exclaims artlessly, and holds out the small, very ringed hands, “so very happy, I am sure!” The pink lips touch, the slightest touch, the pale cheek of Cousin Vane’s wife; the light, small eyes take in one comprehensive flash Cousin Vane’s wife from head to foot. Then Sir Vane comes forward and offers her his arm, and they all go in to dinner.
It is dinner in little but name and form to the bride. She sits in almost total silence, seldom addressed; the talk of the other three is of places and people unknown to her. There is a good deal of laughter and badinage on the part of Miss Routh, who is fairy-like and kittenish, as it is in the nature of some young things of thirty odd to be, and Miss Dorothy ballasts her with a solid and unsmiling observation, now and then. All through he long evening it is the same. Miss Valentine retires to a corner and a table, and adds up accounts, with a pair of spectacles over the black eyes, that glitter across the room in quite an awful way. Miss Routh, who, it appears, is extremely musical, adorns the piano-stool, and soothes them with silvery sounds. Sir Vane enthrones himself in an easy-chair near by, and listens, and reads that day’s Times at intervals. Dolores shrinks away into a seat, as remote from them all as possible, in the deep embrasure of a window, and looks out with eyes that are blind with tears. She is lonely, homesick, heart-sick—she is far away, kneeling beside a new-made grave in Rome. Oh! dearest grandmamma, friend of friends—generous heart that poured out love upon her lavishly, and without stint!
It is a dark, moonless night; outside the window there is little to be seen but a patch of cloudy sky, and tall trees rocking to and fro, in a rising gale, like black phantoms. Miss Routh’s singing, more shrill than sweet, if truth must be told, pierces drearily through her sad dream.
“Old loves, new loves, what are they worth?
Only a song! Tra-la-la-la!
Old love dies at new love’s birth,
Give him a song. Tra-la-la-la!
New love lasts for a night and a day,
Cares not for tears,
Mocks at all fears,
Flies laughing away !
Then what is love worth
At death or at birth?
Only a song. Tra-la-Ja-la!”
The song is a foolish one—it cannot be that—perhaps it is the desolate sighing of the night wind, but a hysterical feeling rises and throbs in the girl’s throat. Her heart is full—full to overflowing, of loneliness, and heart-break, and pain. She bears it—as long as she can—then with a hysterical feeling in her throat, she gets up, passes swiftly from the room, and runs down to Jemima Ann’s sanctum. There, alone, Jemima Ann sits, placidly sewing by the light of her lamp, and there her youthful mistress flings herself down on her knees beside her, in all the bravery of her silk dinner-dress, and buries her head in her lap, and cries—cries as if her very heart were breaking.
“Jemima! Jemima! Jemima!” she cries wildly out. And Jemima holds her fast, and kisses the golden hair, and murmurs broken words of fondness and caressing between her own tears of sympathy.
“There, there, there, my lamb, my pretty, my sweet young lady, don’t, don’t cry like that. I know you’re homesick—and they’re all old, and hard, and not what you’re used to. And you’re thinking of your grandma, and you ain’t nothin’ but a child when all’s said and done, and he’s—oh! my dear! my dear! my dear!”
That is Lady Valentine’s coming home.
