Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (924 page)

Had he been earlier, he fancied, he might have won her, for a gleam in her eyes seemed to reproach him.  He found scant comfort from the recollection that it had always been Wingate’s way to supersede him, even when they were at school together.

Five years after Roger Wingate’s marriage, at a time when his career had seemed secure against mischance, he had succumbed with appalling swiftness to a few days’ illness and an operation from which he never rallied. It was difficult for those who had known him to contemplate the idea of the extinction of one so vital.  The force which had emanated from him had seemed imperishable.

The news, revealed in course of time by the widow, that it had been Wingate’s definitely expressed wish that some memoir of himself should be compiled by his friend was to Philip Fadelle another, perhaps the last, manifestation of that overpowering will.  Though none else had contemplated Wingate’s death, he himself had done so, and in providing that his friend’s hand should raise him a memorial lucent and rare, he had linked to this evidence of his friend’s literary gift a sense of his own domination.

“Of course, had he lived longer, the biography would have been a work of importance; but as it is, with his letters — unique in their way, I believe — something not unworthy might be done.” Gertrude had hesitated at this point, and then, in a lower key, had given her tribute to that unseen power:

“One feels, somehow, constrained to obey what one knows to have been his wish.”

In this the man of letters had acquiesced, with a sigh that had a groan at its heart.  He knew that the telling of that brief though redundant life might with safety be left in his hands, and he was prepared to offer what slight fame he had already garnered as incense to his dead comrade’s memory.

“You have always been a most dear and generous friend to us both,” she added, with a smile that had in it as much of tenderness (it seemed) for the living, as regret for the dead.

The memory of the past bloomed between them like some wan flower of which both inhaled the faint perfume; till Fadelle suddenly remembered that his friend had now been dead for nearly six months, and that the time would soon be at hand when he might make that proposal so long delayed. His face brightened and a shadow passed from his eyes: he spoke of the memoir with interest, even with pleasure.  “It will be the last token that friendship can offer,” he said almost with emotion, and to himself he added that it would be in the nature of a seal set upon Wingate’s tomb.

As weeks passed and he gave himself wholeheartedly to the work he had undertaken he began to realise that here, under his hand, Wingate’s character was developing into such complexities as hitherto he had not suspected! Besides those sterner qualities which had impelled him onward in his chosen career there were suggestions of mystery, definite shades, of romance it might be, almost incredible in one who had mastered the hard facts of life so unshrinkingly. More wonderful still was the presumption that this side of that forcible character had been revealed to no-one! Gertrude, so far as he could gather, had never seen it.

The biography, he judged, would do full justice to a personality almost unique in its qualities of ingenuous comradeship allied to a wellnigh overwhelming dominance: a rare enough combination.

The summer following Wingate’s death had nearly passed when Fadelle decided to visit Gertrude, who had been living for some time with her mother in the country. He had refrained from accepting the invitation, often and pressingly repeated, until he had almost finished the biography.  Now that this had been accomplished for all practical purposes, and the anniversary of Roger Wingate’s death had come and gone, the way seemed clear for the furtherance of his chief desire.  He was filled with a pleasing certainty as his train carried him on to his destination, and when he alighted at a little country station he accepted it as a good omen that she was thereto meet him.

She had changed greatly.  He remembered that after a few months of married life she had seemed subdued to that strong will, had been absorbed into that overwhelming personality with which she had been mated.  Now, as she sat in the dog-cart, waiting to drive her guest to her house, he noted with a leaping heart that the Gertrude of her maiden days had been reincarnated.  In her bright face was all the arch vivacity of unfettered girlhood, and as they were carried swiftly between green hedgerows he rejoiced to hear again the gay inconsequence that Roger had always tacitly suppressed.

Glancing at her charming profile he wondered, once again, if she had ever plumbed that hidden well of sentiment which he fancied he had discovered in the secret writings of his friend.  Some day he might ask, — but not yet.

“I have a heap of things to show you,” she assured him triumphantly, “and ever so much to discuss.  It is easier to talk, don’t you think, than to write?”

“About what?”

“Oh, about the biography, of course.”

His gaze fastened itself upon the bracken at the side of the lane down

which they were passing and sought out the flecks of golden brown among the green.

“Ah, yes.”

When he turned to her again there was something so unwidow-like in her grey tweed, in the small jaunty plume of her hat, and her business-like dog-skin gloves that a smile hovered where doubt had been.

“Ah, that biography!  It will need days and days of discussion.  Of course it must be a tremendous thing.”

“Of course it must, but do you know — ” her eyes sought his with laughing embarrassment, “sometimes I am afraid that it is going to be something of an obsession.”

His glance held hers with amused assurance.

“I’m not quite sure that I have not found it something of that sort already.”  

Then mysteriously, a sense of loyalty to the dear husband and friend descended between them and froze their gaiety.

“Of course it must be great — powerful — like himself.”

“Of course.” He spoke dully and his mobile jaw grew rigid. Twice

already, within one brief hour, he had met with an invisible rebuff; yet the

hand that dealt it was one that he had thought bereft of power.

They passed a tiny lodge and swept up a drive.

“Here is the house; rather small; but a haven of rest for tired souls.  It is rather sweet, isn’t it?”

He thought it was, as he saw it nestling among the trees, grey walled and red roofed, and in front, walking on the wide gravel sweep before the door, as if to lend the final touch of domesticity, a mushroom-hatted and lace-shawled lady, Gertrude’s mother, who turned at the sound of wheels to greet her visitor.

The days of his visit passed, and deliberate and continued observation confirmed Philip Fadelle in the assurance that to Gertrude Wingate the past thirteen months had brought a virtual renewal of blithe girlhood; but when she discussed with him the biography she became preternaturally solemn, and assumed a delightfully important manner as of one in whose small hands weighty affairs of state have been placed.

At such times the author noticed, with a sense of irritated amusement, that his work had sufficed to raise Wingate on to a loftier pedestal than he had, in his wife’s estimation, previously occupied. She was pleased to be Fadelle’s divinity, but there were moments when he told himself bitterly that in spirit she remained Wingate’s slave.

This intuition, however, did not suffice to rob his holiday of any perceptible amount of charm, since Gertrude Wingate, as she rambled with him through woods and fields, betrayed the gaiety of a child who has escaped from the durance of a stern school. When she referred to her late husband it was in notes of eulogy rather than of regretful reminiscence.

“This immaculate man has only just begun to live,” Fadelle told himself with chagrin.  “He was born in the first chapter of the biography.”

Nevertheless he worked assiduously at his task: every stone set into that destined memorial must be polished and repolished, even though it were with bleeding hands.  There was something in Gertrude’s bright friendship that sustained him.  Often when she turned from the subject of the biography to discuss his other more per personal work she unconsciously gained in vividness, and her eyes beamed with a kindlier interest.  She was quickly appreciative of subtle intangible moods, she was swift to catch a meaning, and was there, with him, in a moment, when women of a more pronounced intellectuality would have been labouring painfully behind.

The best minutes of the day to him were those when, after dinner, they together paced up and down before the lighted windows of the house. As they turned again and again in their steady pacing, one luminous rectangle, which showed the calm figure of Gertrude’s mother knitting beside a shaded lamp, was to them a link with civilization; for, on the other hand, the lawn sloped away to a whispering darkness full of primeval mystery.

“You know, of course, that I took no part in the political life that Roger led,” she said suddenly one evening when walking thus.  “I might have understood, I suppose, all that there was; but I could never have really cared.  I belong more to that.” She thrust her hand through the darkness and waved it at the shrouded woods and fields beyond.

“Listen!”

There was a fair in the village some distance away, hidden behind the woods.  A hoarse murmur reached them faintly, and on the sky one sullen patch betrayed the reflected light of the flaming naptha-lamps that hung on the booths, and the screaming merry-go-round.

They pierced, venturously, further into the darkness, walking someway down the avenue, while the ghostly branches waved blackly overhead. It was then, he afterwards felt, that he should have spoken but, unlike his erstwhile friend and school-fellow, he let the decisive moment fall away. Together they returned to the house and the warm and lighted sanity of the drawingroom, to discuss a chapter dealing with a political crisis in which the inflexible will and insistent personality of Roger Wingate had not been found wanting.

It was as Fadelle had imagined it would be, during one of those late evening strollings and communings that he asked Gertrude to be his wife. When she slowly and reluctantly gave a refusal she tempered it with explanations of an unsuspected character, so that the listener, peering bewilderedly at a totally strange aspect of Roger Wingate, almost missed the sense of his own loss.

“If there was one thing that he hated, one thing which always worried and upset him,” she explained, “it was the idea, suggested to him in someway that I cannot understand, of my marrying again in the event of his early death. To him it seemed betrayal of the basest kind, utterly unforgiveable.”

“I remember,” she continued, “how he urged upon me the idea that the one who survived should remain faithful to the memory of the deceased.  I — ” here she flushed and lowered her eyes, “gave no actual pledge; but still — ”

“Then I — ” he returned with pale severity, “can say no more, — if you think you are in any way bound by an implied consent.”

This strangely enough, she disclaimed, faltering and hesitating: she was not bound, in one sense, she believed, but a sense of loyalty stood as such a bond. Had her husband been less true, for that he was made of truth no-one could deny, it would have been quite simple, for she had given no pledge. It might even be, she hinted, that in time to come she would feel her obligation less strongly.

“It is the biography, partly, I believe,” she uttered, laying her hand on his arm with a soft impulsiveness, “I don’t think that I ever — I am almost ashamed to say it — I don’t think I ever fully realised before I read what you have written, how strong, how true, how utterly loyal he was to me.”

There was the cadence of tears in her voice as she urged this point of view upon him. He had raised in her a finer appreciation of Wingate’s qualities, and this being so she could not repay loyalty with disloyalty: she felt that he would agree with her in that.

They stood together at the edge of the gravel sweep where it touched the darker line of the grass: beside them reared itself a tall yew, stern against the sombre purple of the sky.  He watched, and through his sense of this outward beauty there pierced the knowledge that he was conquered, overwhelmed by a far reaching power, and he knew how well his friend had gauged, weighed, and estimated his tendency to idealise, and how well he had made use of it.  Wingate had been working through himself as if he were still alive.

There seemed, under the circumstances, little that need be said, but as they moved slowly back to the opened and lighted porch Gertrude walked beside him, and, holding up her white skirt in one of the pretty ways she had at her command, pleaded that nothing should be altered, and that he must always be her dear and close friend.  Fadelle felt the groan he was too heartsick to utter aloud.  Yes, all was to remain as before; had not Wingate willed it so?

II

It was not later than the next morning that he announced in the worn formula that pressing affairs demanded his quick return to Town.  Mrs Norton, benignly presiding over the breakfast table, was puzzled and mildly reproachful: her daughter looked conscience-stricken, and her eyes, for an instant, grew wider and brighter as if with unshed tears.

“Is there nothing I can say?” she asked softly when they were alone together.  “Nothing that I can say to persuade you to remain with us a little longer?”

He feared not, unless — this with a poor smile, — she could induce his publishers to wait upon him here, in the country, and the authorities of the British Museum to send him several parcels of books and papers.

“And the biography?” she asked without the least pretence of accepting the laboured joke.

That, he replied, was practically finished, and he proceeded to enlarge upon the subject with much deliberation, while Gertrude listened with weary blankness. Her interest in the biography seemed to have passed.

‘There is something,” she said with sudden remembrance, “something that I have forgotten to tell you. I should have spoken about it before.” She told him that she had discovered an accumulation of papers and letters in an old bureau which had been sent down from her town house, together with other furniture. If he cared to look through them, he might be able to tell whether the letters were of any consequence. They were tied up carefully, dated and docketed, she thought, and a few minutes would doubtless serve to determine their importance.