Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (909 page)

Once or twice later on they met; the next interview being shorter and sadder perhaps than the last. The one that followed it ended in bitterness.

“This had better be our long good-bye, I suppose?” said she.

“Perhaps it had. . . . You seem to be always looking out for causes of reproach, Rosalys. I don’t know what has come over you.”

“It is you who have changed!” she cried, with a little stamp. “And you are by far the most to blame of us two. You forget that I should never have contemplated marriage as a possibility! You have made me lie to my mother, do things of which I am desperately ashamed, and now you don’t attempt to disguise your weariness of me!”

It was Jim’s turn to lose his temper now. “You forget that you gave me considerable encouragement! Most girls would not have come out again and again to surreptitious meetings with a man who was in love with them, — girls brought up as you have been!”

She started as in a spasm. A momentary remorse seized him. He realised that he had been betrayed into speaking as no man of kindly good-feeling could speak.  He made a tardy, scarcely gracious apology, and they parted.  A few days afterwards he wrote a letter full of penitence for having hurt her, and she answered almost affectionately.  But each knew that their short-lived romance was dead as the wind-flowers that had blossomed at its untimely birth.

IV

In August this pair of disappointed people met once more amid their old surroundings. Perhaps their enforced absence from one another gave at first some zest to their reunion. Jim was at times tender, and like his former self; Rosalys, if sad and subdued, less sullen and reproachful than she had been in London.

Mrs Ambrose had fallen into delicate health, and her daughter was inconsequence able to dispose of her time outside the house as she wished.  The moonlight meetings with Jim were discontinued, but husband and wife went for long strolls sometimes in the remoter nooks of the park, through winding walks in the distant shrubberies, and down paths hidden by high yew-hedges from intruding eyes that might look with suspicion on their being together.

On one especially beautiful August day they paced side by side, talking at moments with something of their old tenderness. The sky above the dark-green barriers on either hand was a bottomless deep of blue. The yew-boughs were covered in curious profusion by the handiwork of energetic spiders, who had woven their glistening webs in every variety of barbaric pattern. In shape some resembled hammocks, others ornamental purses, others deep bags, in the middle of which a large yellow insect remained motionless and watchful.

“Shall we sit for a little while in the summer-house?” said Rosalys at last, in flat accents, for a tete-a-tete with Jim had long ceased to give her any really strong beats of pleasure.  “I want to talk to you further about plans; how often we had better write, and so on.”

They sat down, in an arbour made of rustic logs, which overlooked the mere.  The wood-work had been left rough within, and dusty spider-webs hung in the crevices; here and there the bark had fallen away in strips; above, on the roof, there were clumps of fungi, looking like tufts of white fur.

“This is a sunless, queer sort of place you have chosen,” he said, looking round critically.

The boughs had grown so thickly in the foreground that the glittering margin of water was hardly perceptible between their interlacing twigs, and no visible hint of a human habitation was given, though the rustic shelter had been originally built with the view of affording a picturesque glimpse of the handsome old brick house wherein the Ambroses had lived for some three centuries.

“You might have found a more lively scene for what will be, perhaps, our last interview for years,” Jim went on.

“Are you really going so soon?” she asked, passing over the complaint.

“Next week.  And my father has made all sorts of arrangements for me. Besides, he is beginning to suspect that you and I are rather too intimate.  And your mother knows, somehow or other that I have been up here several times of late.  We must be careful.”

“I suppose so,” she answered absently, looking out under the log roof at a chaffinch swinging himself backwards and forwards on a larch bough.  A sort of dreary indifference to her surroundings; a sense of being caged and trapped had begun to take possession of Rosalys.  The present was full of perplexity, the future objectless.  Now and then, when she looked at Jim’s lithe figure, and healthy, virile face, she felt that perhaps she might have been able to love him still if only he had cared for her with a remnant of his former passionate devotion.  But his indifference was even more palpable than her own. They sat and talked on within the dim arbour for a little while.  Then Jim made one of the unfortunate remarks that always galled her to the quick.  She rose in anger, answered him with cold sarcasm, and hastened away down the little wood. He followed, a rather ominous light shining in his eyes.

“Your temper is really growing insufferable, Rosalys!” he cried, and clenched his hand roughly on her arm to detain her.

“How dare you!” said the girl. “For God’s sake leave me, and don’t come back again! I rejoice to think that in a few days it will not be in your power to insult me any more!”

“Damn it — I am going to leave you, am I not! I only want to keep you here for a moment to come to some understanding! . . . Indeed you’ll be surprised to find how very much I am going to leave you, when you hear what I mean! My ideas have grown considerably emancipated of late, and therefore I tell you that there is no reason on earth why any soul should ever know of that miserable mistake we made in the spring.”

She winced a little; it was an unexpected move; and her eyes lingered uneasily on a copper-coloured butterfly playing a game of hide-and-seek with a little blue companion.

“Who,” he continued, “is ever going to search the register of that old East-London church? We must philosophically look on the marriage as an awkward fact in our lives, which won’t prevent our loving elsewhere when we feel inclined. In my opinion this early error will carry one advantage with it — that we shall be unable to extinguish any love we may each feel for another person by a sordid matrimonial knot — unless, indeed, after seven years of obliviousness to one another’s existence.”

“I’ll — try to — emancipate myself likewise,” she said slowly. “It will be well to forget this tragedy of our lives!  And the most tragic part of it is — that we are not even sorry that we don’t love each other any more!”

“The truest words you ever spoke!”

“And the surest event that was ever to come, given your nature — ”

“And yours!”

She hastened on down the grass walk into the broad gravelled path leading to the house.  At the corner stood Mrs Ambrose, who was better, and had come out for a stroll — assuming as an invalid the privilege of wearing a singular scarlet gown and a hat in which a number of black quills stood startlingly erect.

“Ah — Rosy!” she cried.  “Oh, and Mr Durrant?  What a colour you have got, child!”

“Yes.  Mr Durrant and I have been having a furious political discussion, mamma.  I have grown quite hot over it.  He is more unreasonable than ever.  But when he gets abroad he won’t be as he is now.  A few years of India will change all that.” And to carry on the idea of her unconcern she turned to whistle to a bold robin that had flitted down from a larch tree, perched on the yew hedge, and looked inquiringly at her, answering her whistle with his pathetic little pipe.

Durrant had come up behind.  “Yes,” he said cynically.  “One never knows how an enervating country may soften one’s brains.”

He bade them a cool good-bye and left.  She watched his retreating figure, the figure of the active, the strong, the handsome animal, who had scarcely won the better side of her nature at all.  He never turned his head. So this was the end!

The bewildering bitterness of it well-nigh paralysed Rosalys for a few moments.  Why had they been allowed — he and she — to love one another with that eager, almost unholy, passion, and then to part with less interest in each other than ordinary friends?  She felt ashamed of having ceded herself to him. If her mother had not been beside her she would have screamed out aloud in her exasperating pain.

Mrs Ambrose lifted up her voice. “What are you looking at, child? . . . My dear, I want a little word with you. Are you attending? When you pout your lip like that, Rosalys, I always know that you are in a bad frame of mind. . . . The vicar has been here; and he has made me a little unhappy.”

“I should have thought he was too stupid to give anyone a pang!  Why do they put such simpletons into the churches!”

“Well — he says that people are chattering about you and that young Durrant. And I must tell you that — that, from a marrying point of view, he is impossible. You know that. And I don’t want him to make up to you. Now, Rosalys, my darling, tell me honestly — I feel I have not looked after you lately as I ought to have done — tell me honestly: Is he in love with you?”

“He is not, mother, to my certain knowledge.”

“Are you with him?”

“No. That I swear.”

V

Seven years and some months had passed since Rosalys spoke as above-written. And never a sound of Jim.

As she had mentally matured under the touch of the gliding seasons, Miss Ambrose had determined to act upon the hint Jim had thrown out to her as to the practical nullity of their marriage-contract if they simply kept indifferent hemispheres without a word. She had never written to him a line; and he had never written a line to her.

He might be dead for all that she knew: he possibly was dead. She had taken no steps to ascertain anything about him, though she had been aware for years that he was no longer in the Army-list. Dead or alive he was completely cut off from the county in which he and she had lived, for his father had died a long time before this, his house and properties had been sold, and not a scion of the line of Durrant remained in that part of England.

Rosalys had readily imbibed his ideas of their mutual independence; and now, after the lapse of all these years, had acted upon them with the surprising literalness of her sex when they act upon advice at all.

Mrs Ambrose, who had distinguished herself no whit during her fifty years of life saving by the fact of having brought a singularly beautiful girl into the world, had passed quietly out of it.  Rosalys’ uncle had succeeded his sister-in-law in the possession of the old house with its red tower, and the broad paths and garden-lands; he had been followed by an unsatisfactory son of his, last in the entail, and thus unexpectedly Rosalys Ambrose found herself sole mistress of the spot of her birth.

People marvelled somewhat that she continued to call herself Miss Ambrose.  Though a woman now getting on for thirty she was distinctly attractive both in face and in figure, and could confront the sunlight as well as the moonbeams still.  In the manner of women who are yet sure of their charms she was fond of representing herself as much older than she really was.  Perhaps she would have been disappointed if her friends had not laughed and contradicted her, and told her that she was still lovely and looked like a girl.  Lord Parkhurst, anyhow, was firmly of that contradictory opinion; and perhaps she cared more for his views than for anyone else’s at the present time.

That distinguished sailor had been but one of many suitors; but he stirred her heart as none of the others could do.  It was not merely that be was brave, and pleasing, and had returned from a late campaign in Egypt with a hero’s reputation; but that his chivalrous feelings towards women, originating perhaps in the fact that he knew very little about them, were sufficient to gratify the most exacting of the sex.

His rigid notions of duty and honour, both towards them and from them, made the blood of Rosalys run cold when she thought of a certain little episode of her past life, notwithstanding that, or perhaps because, she loved him dearly.

“He is not the least bit of a flirt, like most sailors,” said Miss Ambrose to her cousin and companion, Miss Jennings, on a particular afternoon in this eighth year of Jim Durrant’s obliteration from her life. It was an afternoon with an immense event immediately ahead of it; no less an event than Rosalys’ marriage with Lord Parkhurst, which was to take place on the very next day.

The local newspaper had duly announced the coming wedding in proper terms as “the approaching nuptials of the beautiful and wealthy Miss Ambrose of Ambrose Towers with a distinguished naval officer, the Lord Parkhurst.” There followed an ornamental account of the future bridegroom’s heroic conduct during the late war. “The handsome face and figure of Lord Parkhurst,” wound up the honest paragraphist, “are not altogether unknown to us in this vicinity, as he has recently been visiting his uncle, Colonel Lacy, High Sheriff of the County. We wish all prosperity to the happy couple, who have doubtless a brilliant and cloudless future before them.”

This was the way in which her acceptance of Durrant’s views had worked themselves out. He had said; “After seven years of mutual oblivion we can marry again if we choose.”

And she had chosen.

Rosalys almost wished that Lord Parkhurst had been a flirt, or at least had won experience as the victim of one, or many, of those precious creatures, and had not so implicitly trusted her. It would have brought things more nearly to a level.

“A flirt! I should think not,” said Jane Jennings. “In fact, Rosalys, he is almost alarmingly strict in his ideas. It is a mistake to believe that so many women are angels, as he does.  He is too simple.  He is bound to be disappointed some day.”

Miss Ambrose sighed nervously.  “Yes,” she said.

“I don’t mean by you to-morrow!  God forbid!”

“No.”

Miss Ambrose sighed again, and a silence followed, during which, while recalling unutterable things of the past, Rosalys gazed absently out of the window at the lake, that some men were dredging, the mud left bare by draining down the water being imprinted with hundreds of little footmarks of plovers feeding there.  Eight or nine herons stood further away, one or two composedly fishing, their grey figures reflected with unblurred clearness in the mirror of the pool.  Some little water-hens waddled with a fussy gait across the sodden ground in front of them, and a procession of wild geese came through the sky, and passed on till they faded away into a row of black dots.