The Mistress of Shenstone by Florence Louisa Barclay (fantasy novels to read TXT) 📕

you wish it? The thing would haunt us! It would be evil--unnatural. Night and day, it would be there. It would come between us. Some day you would reproach me----"

"Ah, hush!" cried Myra, sharply. "Not that! I am suffering enough. At least spare me that!" Then, putting aside once more her own pain: "Would it not be happiness to you, Jim?" she asked, with wistful gentleness.

"Happiness?" cried Jim Airth, violently, "It would be hell!"

Lady Ingleby rose, her face as white as the large arum lily in the corner behind her.

"Then that settles it," she said; "and, do you know, I think we had better not speak of it any more. I am going to ring for tea. And, if you will excuse me for a few moments, while they are bringing it, I will search among my husband's papers, and try to find those you require for your book."

She passed swiftly out. Through the closed door, the man she left alone heard her giving quiet orders in the hall.

He crossed the room, in two great strides, to follow her. But at the door he paused; turned, and came slowly back.

He stood on the hearthrug, with bent head; rigid, motionless.

Suddenly he lifted his eyes to Lord Ingleby's portrait.

"Curse you!" he said through clenched teeth, and beat his fists upon the marble mantelpiece. "Curse your explosives! And curse your inventions! And curse you for taking her first!" Then he dropped into a chair, and buried his face in his hands. "Oh, God forgive me!" he whispered, brokenly. "But there is a limit to what a man can bear."

He scarcely noticed the entrance of the footman who brought tea. But when a lighter step paused at the door, he lifted a haggard face, expecting to see Myra.

A quiet woman entered, simply dressed in black merino. Her white linen collar and cuffs gave her the look of a hospital nurse. Her dark hair, neatly parted, was smoothly coiled around her head. She came in, deferentially; yet with a quiet dignity of manner.

"I have come to pour your tea, my lord," she said. "Lady Ingleby is not well, and fears she must remain in her room. She asks me to give you these papers."

Then the Earl of Airth and Monteith rose to his feet, and held out his hand.

"I think you must be Mrs. O'Mara," he said. "I am glad to meet you, and it is kind of you to give me tea. I have heard of you before; and I believe I saw you yesterday, on the steps of your pretty house, as I drove up the avenue. Will you allow me to tell you how often, when we stood shoulder to shoulder in times of difficulty and danger, I had reason to respect and admire the brave comrade I knew as Sergeant O'Mara?"

* * * * *


Before quitting Shenstone, Jim Airth sat at Myra's davenport and wrote a letter, leaving it with Mrs. O'Mara to place in Lady Ingleby's hands as soon as he had gone.

"I do not wonder you felt unable to see me again. Forgive me for all the grief I have caused, and am causing, you. I shall go abroad as soon as may be; but am obliged to remain in town until I have completed work which I am under contract with my publishers to finish. It will take a month, at most.

"If you want me, Myra--I mean if you _need_ me--I could come at any moment. A wire to my Club would always find me.

"May I know how you are?
"Wholly yours,
"Jim Airth."

To this Lady Ingleby replied on the following day.

"DEAR JIM,

"I shall always want you; but I could never send unless the coming would mean happiness for you.

"I know you decided as you felt right,

"I am quite well.

"God bless you always.
"MYRA."


CHAPTER XX


A BETTER POINT OF VIEW

In the days which followed, Jim Airth suffered all the pangs which come to a man who has made a decision prompted by pride rather than by conviction.

It had always seemed to him essential that a man should appear in all things without shame or blame in the eyes of the woman he loved. Therefore, to be obliged suddenly to admit that a fatal blunder of his own had been the cause, even in the past, of irreparable loss and sorrow to her, had been an unacknowledged but intolerable humiliation. That she should have anything to overlook or to forgive in accepting himself and his love, was a condition of things to which he could not bring himself to submit; and her sweet generosity and devotion, rather increased than soothed his sense of wounded pride.

He had been superficially honest in the reasons he had given to Myra regarding the impossibility of marriage between them. He had said all the things which he knew others might be expected to say; he had mercilessly expressed what would have been his own judgment had he been asked to pronounce an opinion concerning any other man and woman in like circumstances. As he voiced them they had sounded tragically plausible and stoically just. He knew he was inflicting almost unbearable pain upon himself and upon the woman whose whole love was his; but that pain seemed necessary to the tragic demands of the entire ghastly situation.

Only after he had finally left her and was on his way back to town, did Jim Airth realise that the pain he had thus inflicted upon her and upon himself, had been a solace to his own wounded pride. His had been the mistake, and it re-established him in his own self-respect and sense of superiority, that his should be the decision, so hard to make--so unfalteringly made--bringing down upon his own head a punishment out of all proportion to the fault committed.

But, now that the strain and tension were over, his natural honesty of mind reasserted itself, forcing him to admit that his own selfish pride had been at the bottom of his high-flown tragedy.

Myra's simple loving view of the case had been the right one; yet, thrusting it from him, he had ruthlessly plunged himself and her into a hopeless abyss of needless suffering.

By degrees he slowly realised that in so doing he had deliberately inflicted a more cruel wrong upon the woman he loved, than that which he had unwittingly done her in the past.

Remorse and regret gnawed at his heart, added to an almost unbearable hunger for Myra. Yet he could not bring himself to return to her with this second and still more humiliating confession of failure.

His one hope was that Myra would find their separation impossible to endure, and would send for him. But the days went by, and Myra made no sign. She had said she would never send for him unless assured that coming to her would mean happiness to him. To this decision she quietly adhered.

In a strongly virile man, love towards a woman is, in its essential qualities, naturally selfish. Its keynote is, "I need"; its dominant, "I want"; its full major chord, "I must possess."

On the other hand, the woman's love for the man is essentially unselfish. Its keynote is, "He needs"; its dominant, "I am his, to do with as he pleases"; its full major chord, "Let me give all." In the Book of Canticles, one of the greatest love-poems ever written, we find this truth exemplified; we see the woman's heart learning its lesson, in a fine crescendo of self-surrender. In the first stanza she says: "My Beloved is mine, and I am his"; in the second, "I am my Beloved's and he is mine." But in the third, all else is merged in the instinctive joy of giving: "I am my Beloved's, and his desire is towards me."

This is the natural attitude of the sexes, designed by an all-wise Creator; but designed for a condition of ideal perfection. No perfect law could be framed for imperfection. Therefore, if the working out prove often a failure, the fault lies in the imperfection of the workers, not in the perfection of the law. In those rare cases where the love is ideal, the man's "I take" and the woman's "I give" blend into an ideal union, each completing and modifying the other. But where sin of any kind comes in, a false note has been struck in the divine harmony, and the grand chord of mutual love fails to ring true.

Into their perfect love, Jim Airth had introduced the discord of false pride. It had become the basis of his line of action, and their symphony of life, so beautiful at first in its sweet theme of mutual love and trust, now lost its harmony, and jarred into a hopeless jangle. The very fact that she faithfully adhered to her trustful unselfishness, acquiescing without a murmur in his decision, made readjustment the more impossible. Thus the weeks went by.

Jim Airth worked feverishly at his proofs; drinking and smoking, when he should have been eating and sleeping; going off suddenly, after two or three days of continuous sitting at his desk, on desperate bouts of violent exercise.

He walked down to Shenstone by night; sat, in bitterness of spirit under the beeches, surrounded by empty wicker chairs;--a silent ghostly garden-party!--watched the dawn break over the lake; prowled around the house where Lady Ingleby lay sleeping, and narrowly escaped arrest at the hands of Lady Ingleby's night-watchman; leaving for London by the first train in the morning, more sick at heart than when he started.

Another time he suddenly turned in at Paddington, took the train down to Cornwall, and astonished the Miss Murgatroyds by stalking into the coffee-room, the gaunt ghost of his old gay self. Afterwards he went off to Horseshoe Cove, climbed the cliff and spent the night on the ledge, dwelling in morbid misery on the wonderful memories with which that place was surrounded.

It was then that fresh hope, and the complete acceptance of a better point of view, came to Jim Airth.

As he sat on the ledge, hugging his lonely misery, he suddenly became strangely conscious of Myra's presence. It was as if the sweet wistful grey eyes, were turned upon him in the darkness; the tender mouth smiled lovingly, while the voice he knew so well asked in soft merriment, as under the beeches at Shenstone: "What has come to you, you dearest old boy?"

He had just put his hand into his pocket and drawn out his spirit-flask. He held it for a moment, while he listened, spellbound, to that whisper; then flung it away into the darkness, far down to the sea below. "Davy Jones may have it," he said, and laughed aloud; "_who e'er he be!_" It was the first time Jim Airth had laughed since that afternoon beneath the Shenstone beeches.

Then, with the sense of Myra's presence still so near him, he lay with his back to the cliff, his face to the moonlit sea. It seemed to him as if again he drew her, shaking and trembling but unresisting, into his arms, holding her there in safety until her trembling ceased, and she slept the untroubled sleep of a happy