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

a situation could have arisen as the unexpected return of your husband, your only safe and honourable course would have been to frankly tell Lord Ingleby: 'I grew to love Jim Airth while I believed you dead. I shall always love Jim Airth; but, I want before all else to be a good woman and a faithful wife. Trust me to be faithful; help me to be good.' Any man, worth his salt, would respond to such an appeal."

"And shoot himself?" suggested Lady Ingleby.

"I said 'man,' not 'coward,'" responded Mrs. Dalmain, with fine scorn.

"Jane, you are so strong-minded," murmured Lady Ingleby. "It goes with your linen collars, your tailor-made coats, and your big boots. I cannot picture myself in a linen collar, nor can I conceive of myself as standing before Michael and informing him that I loved Jim!"

Jane Dalmain laughed good-humouredly, plunged her large hands into the pockets of her tweed coat, stretched out her serviceable brown boots and looked at them.

"If by 'strong-minded' you mean a wholesome dislike to the involving of a straightforward situation in a tangle of disingenuous sophistry, I plead guilty," she said.

"Oh, don't quote Sir Deryck," retorted Lady Ingleby, crossly. "You ought to have married him! I never could understand such an artist, such a poet, such an eclectic idealist as Garth Dalmain, falling in love with _you_, Jane!"

A sudden light of womanly tenderness illumined Jane's plain face. "The wife" looked out from it, in simple unconscious radiance.

"Nor could I," she answered softly. "It took me three years to realise it as an indubitable fact."

"I suppose you are very happy," remarked Myra.

Jane was silent. There were shrines in that strong nature too wholly sacred to be easily unveiled.

"I remember how I hated the idea, after the accident," said Myra, "of your tying yourself to blindness."

"Oh, hush," said Jane Dalmain, quickly. "You tread on sacred ground, and you forget to remove your shoes. From the first, the sweetest thing between my husband and myself has been that, together, we learned to kiss that cross."

"Dear old thing!" said Lady Ingleby, affectionately; "you deserved to be happy. All the same I never can understand why you did not marry Deryck Brand."

Jane smiled. She could not bring herself to discuss her husband, but she was very willing at this critical juncture to divert Lady Ingleby from her own troubles by entering into particulars concerning herself and the doctor.

"My dear," she said, "Deryck and I were far too much alike ever to have dovetailed into marriage. All our points would have met, and our differences gaped wide. The qualities which go to the making of a perfect friendship by no means always ensure a perfect marriage. There was a time when I should have married Deryck had he asked me to do so, simply because I implicitly trusted his judgment in all things, and it would never have occurred to me to refuse him anything he asked. But it would not have resulted in our mutual happiness. Also, at that time, I had no idea what love really meant. I no more understood love until--until Garth taught me, than you understood it before you met Jim Airth."

"I wish you would not keep on alluding to Jim Airth," said Myra, wearily. "I never wish to hear his name again. And I cannot allow you to suppose that I should ever have adopted your strong-minded suggestion, and admitted to Michael that I loved Jim. I should have done nothing of the kind. I should have devoted myself to pleasing Michael in all things, and _made myself_--yes, Jane; you need not look amused and incredulous; though I _don't_ wear collars and shooting-boots, I _can_ make myself do things--I should have made myself forget that there was such a person in this world as the Earl of Airth and Monteith."

"Oh spare him that!" laughed Mrs. Dalmain. "Don't call the poor man by his titles. If he must be hanged, at least let him hang as plain Jim Airth. If one had to be wicked, it would be so infinitely worse to be a wicked earl, than wicked in any other walk of life. It savours so painfully of the 'penny-dreadful', or the cheap novelette. Also, my dear, there is nothing to be gained by discussing a hypothetical situation, with which you do not after all find yourself confronted. Mercifully, Lord Ingleby is not coming back."

"Mercifully!" exclaimed Lady Ingleby. "Really, Jane, you are crude beyond words, and most unsympathetic. You should have heard how tactfully the doctor broke it to me, and how kindly he alluded to my loss."

"My dear Myra," said Mrs. Dalmain, "I don't waste sympathy on false sentiment. And if Deryck had known you were already engaged to another man, instead of devoting to you four hours of his valuable time, he could have sent a sixpenny wire: 'Telegram a forgery. Accept heartfelt congratulations!'"

"Jane, you are brutal. And seeing that I have just told you the whole story of these last weeks, with the cruel heart-breaking finale of yesterday, I fail to understand how you can speak of me as engaged to another man."

Instantly Jane Dalmain's whole bearing altered. She ceased looking quizzically amused, and left off swinging her brown boot. She sat up, uncrossed her knees, and leaning her elbows upon them, held out her large capable hands to Lady Ingleby. Her noble face, grandly strong and tender, in its undeniable plainness, was full of womanly understanding and sympathy.

"Ah, my dear," she said, "now we must come to the crux of the whole matter. I have merely been playing around the fringe of the subject, in order to give you time to recover from the inevitable strain of the long and painful recital you have felt it necessary to make, in order that I might fully understand your position in all its bearings. The real question is this: Are you going to forgive Jim Airth?"

"I must never forgive him," said Lady Ingleby, with finality, "because, if I forgave him, I could not let him go."

"Why let him go, when his going leaves your whole life desolate?"

"Because," said Myra, "I feel I could not trust him; and I dare not marry a man whom I love as I love Jim Airth, unless I can trust him as implicitly as I trust my God. If I loved him less, I would take the risk. But I feel, for him, something which I can neither understand nor define; only I know that in time it would make him so completely master of me that, unless I could trust him absolutely--I should be afraid."

"Is a man never to be trusted again," asked Jane, "because, under sudden fierce temptation, he has failed you once?"

"It is not the failing once," said Myra. "It is the light thrown upon the whole quality of his love--of that _kind_ of love. The passion of it makes it selfish--selfish to the degree of being utterly regardless of right and wrong, and careless of the welfare of its unfortunate object. My fair name would have been smirched; my honour dragged in the mire; my present, blighted; my future, ruined; but what did _he_ care? It was all swept aside in the one sentence: 'You are mine, not his. You must come away with me.' I cannot trust myself to a love which has no standard of right and wrong. We look at it from different points of view. _You_ see only the man and his temptation. _I_ knew the priceless treasure of the love; therefore the sin against that love seems to me unforgivable."

Mrs. Dalmain looked earnestly at her friend. Her steadfast eyes were deeply troubled.

"Myra," she said, "you are absolutely right in your definitions, and correct in your conclusions. But your mistake is this. You make no allowance for the sudden, desperate, overwhelming nature of the temptation before which Jim Airth fell. Remember all that led up to it. Think of it, Myra! He stood so alone in the world; no mother, no wife, no woman's tenderness. And those ten hard years of worse than loneliness, when he fought the horrors of disillusion, the shame of betrayal, the bitterness of desertion; the humiliation of the stain upon his noble name. Against all this, during ten long years, he struggled; fought a manful fight, and overcame. Then--strong, hardened, lonely; a man grown to man's full heritage of self-contained independence--he met you, Myra. His ideals returned, purified and strengthened by their passage through the fire. Love came, now, in such gigantic force, that the pigmy passion of early youth was dwarfed and superseded. It seemed a new and untasted experience such as he had not dreamed life could contain. Three weeks of it, he had; growing in certainty, increasing in richness, every day; yet tempered by the patient waiting your pleasure, for eagerly expected fulfilment. Then the blow--so terrible to his sensibilities and to his manly pride; the horrible knowledge that his own hand had brought loss and sorrow to you, whom he would have shielded from the faintest shadow of pain. Then his mistake in allowing false pride to come between you. Three weeks of growing hunger and regret, followed by your summons, which seemed to promise happiness after all; for, remember while _you_ had been bringing yourself to acquiesce in his decision as absolutely final, so that the news of Lord Ingleby's return meant no loss to you and to him, merely the relief of his exculpation, _he_ had been coming round to a more reasonable point of view, and realising that, after all, he had not lost you. You sent for him, and he came--once more aglow with love and certainty--only to hear that he had not only lost you himself, but must leave you to another man. Oh Myra! Can you not make allowance for a moment of fierce madness? Can you not see that the very strength of the man momentarily turned in the wrong direction, brought about his downfall? You tell me you called him coward and traitor? You might as well have struck him! Such words from your lips must have been worse than blows. I admit he deserved them; yet Saint Peter was thrice a coward and a traitor, but his Lord, making allowance for a sudden yielding to temptation, did not doubt the loyalty of his love, but gave him a chance of threefold public confession, and forgave him. If Divine Love could do this--oh, Myra, can _you_ let your lover go out into the world again, alone, without one word of forgiveness?"

"How do I know he wants my forgiveness, Jane? He left me in a towering fury. And how could my forgiveness reach him, even supposing he desired it, or I could give it? Where is he now?"

"He left you in despair," said Mrs. Dalmain, "and--he is in the library."

Lady Ingleby rose to her feet.

"Jane! Jim Airth in this house! Who admitted him?"

"I did," replied Mrs. Dalmain, coolly. "I smuggled him in. Not a soul saw us enter. That was why I sent the carriage on ahead, when we reached the park gates. We walked up the avenue, turned down on to the terrace and slipped in by the lower door. He has been sitting in the library ever since. If you decide not to see him, I can go down and tell him so; he can go out as he came in, and none of your household will know he has been here. Dear Myra, don't look so distraught. Do sit down again, and let us finish our talk.... That is right. You