Ainslee's Magazine/The Key/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X.
The sudden wrath and anger that had moved Hector, died away when Anne and Felicia left the room, and a great pity, not unmixed with pity for himself and a dull lamentation of the spirit, moved him instead. And yet, what were she and Felicia doing there that night? And what of this paper, this little sign of white, projecting beneath the door of the cabinet? Surely it had been tampered with since he had first left the room. And then Anne's face had been a confession. Felicia had been speechless. Yet why were they together? He knew well the girl hated Anne. She had sat by the fire with her head on Anne's shoulder. What did it all mean?
The drawer which he had pulled out and which now contained the letters, had been nearly full of odd papers, mostly miscellaneous sketches done in Hale's literary hours. They had been in the front of the drawer. Hector saw vaguely that there were some papers at the back of it, but the front was almost empty. He rose suddenly, and, going to the cabinet, pulled at the sheet of paper. A little of it came out. He read a few lines in Hale's writing. It was part of a sketch of the Barbadian negro, which Hector had noticed in that very drawer before he went up to his room. The cabinet, then, had been opened during the interval! By whom? Certainly by Felicia and Anne.
What had they found in it?
Hector looked up at the portrait again. Ah, yes, it was true enough what he feared. Had he not cried out: “Oh, how you triumph there!” Yes, it was true. Anne had been—what she had been! And Hale was still triumphant, even though found out at last!
Hector went back to the desk again and pulled the drawer open to its full extent. The letters lay before him; he reached out his hand and took the first packet with no notion of what he was handling. It was a square, heavy thing, done up and sealed with Hale's crest. The motto was: “Gradatim.” On the parcel there were initials, C. I. C., and two dates. If Hector knew the truth they stood for a certain woman that he knew. But how was it that they were in the open drawer? He took another packet. This was the one which bore the legend: “My estate is the more gracious.”
“These are his private letters—from women!” said Hector suddenly. “By God! how many are there? And how came they here?”
He pulled them all out, nearly a dozen bundles of them, and put them on the desk, and stared at them. Then he stared at the cabinet. Perspiration burst out on his forehead. He understood.
“They got the cabinet open, and yet—”
Why had they not taken what they wanted and put the rest back? As he said “they” he meant “Anne.” In his heart he acquitted Felicia, for why should she want anything? He misjudged Hale even now.
“Why put them back?”
For, of course, when “they” had taken what “they” wanted, what need to do any folly like this?
Suddenly he took another packet. On it were the initials F. St. J. Hector gasped, and then sighed and wiped his forehead. It was, then, Felicia, after all. In the old days in Barbados she had fallen into the hands of Hale. Was that the explanation?
His relief lasted but a moment. If she had opened the cabinet for the letters why were they there yet? It was nonsense to suppose she had found them. And where had she got the key, and why had she not taken them before this? Had Anne come down and caught her? He ranged the other packets in order and found the one marked A. P. with two dates and “Eheu!”
“Aye! it's true, then,” said Hector. He held the letters in his hand, and turned to the portrait.
“You damned scoundrel!” he said. Then he laughed. Hadn't Hale taken him as if he were a child and rolled him, as it were, upon a table and flattened and molded and modeled, aye! and made him? What could a woman do with such a man, if he set himself the task of conquering her? Even as Hector stared at the mere portrait he recognized the underlying force that was there, and in his own soul wished he had it, too. Was it not power, after all? And it was only one sign of power in Hale. It seemed possible that in some unknown society this might be the very ideal man.
“You were more than a mere man, damn you!” said Hector furiously.
And once again he could not hate him. He fell into a maze considering why he could not. And he held the letters in his hand. He sought for a solution.
These two women were together and had taken the letters out of the cabinet. Perhaps they conspired together; perhaps they knew about each other's trouble. Or one had come down and had almost caught the other. Had the first one, then, hidden the letters? No, they were both too much disturbed for that.
“I nearly caught them myself!” said Hector. “That's it; oh, surely, that's it.”
Yet why had they put the letters in the drawer again? He could not get that quite, yet went near it.
“They hoped I'd go, and I would not.”
He walked the room.
“I wish I had, I wish I had! I didn't want to know, Anne, I didn't want to know!”
He sat down again and looked at the one packet. The last date was two years ago. Then came the “Eheu.”
“For two years he's been dead to her!”
Not for one moment did Hector desire to read the letters. Had they been open he would not have read a line, not a syllable. This was not wholly due to a sense of honor. If he knew what he did know, why increase his own agony? It was the merest wisdom not to look at them. He felt for her an infinite pity. For the moment he did not love her. One does not love when one is stunned. But, as he said to himself, he was very sorry for her. She must have had a bad time, a very bad time, while he was talking to her this night.
She had been very brave. Yes, that was true. He nodded and muttered. Suddenly he woke, as it were, out of a dream, and stared about him.
Why was she so keen to get the letters? She must have run terrible risks. How she must have suffered!
“I should have found and burned them for her,” he said.
He looked up at the portrait—and suddenly rose in a flame of excitement.
“By God! she never loved you,” he cried passionately.
He turned to the letters and beat his hand on them.
“She loves me—now! She didn't want me to find them. That's it, that's it!”
There is a quality in truth which shows it is truth. It satisfies not only the reason, but the instincts, and thereby calms a man even when the truth is terrible. He fell into a kind of peace at once.
“And I'll burn them for her now,” he said. “Do I love you, Anne? God knows, but I don't!”
And he had made up the fire to a blaze before the thought came to him that he dare not burn them, but must give them to her. If he burned them, what guarantee would she have that they were burned at all? She would believe him, doubtless, at the time, but what about the after years? Would she be sure then? What does any one know of any one else? In all his passion and pain there was a little cold, wise devil at the back of his mind who prophesied that passion was not always at its height.
Up to this time Hector had believed himself infinitely wise and tolerant in all the things where passion rules. Had any friend come to him and told him such a story he would have shown himself capable of the most enlarged sympathy. Why should not one marry such as Anne? To say one should not was to argue one's self ignorant of the very meaning of life, to declare that any law should never be transcended. This affair had been an accident. No, it was rather a fatality.
That was the word, and it struck him now, when he revolted against tolerance and wisdom. This man Hale had been so powerful that his power stood for Anne's excuse without any labored apologetics. Hale had known it himself. Hector recalled what in others might have been the merest braggadocio. One day Sir George had said to him:
“I could have been anything I liked. But when one knows that that is so, ambition rounds into itself, my boy, and one ceases to be ambitious.”
Hale dominated his surroundings utterly. Nothing lost its savor to him, he remained a boy till his death. Here and now, thinking of his dealings with women, Hector felt that even they were not a sign of disease as they would have been with most men; they were only a part of his intense life, the necessary outcome of it. In their inmost hearts, putting aside the moral law as men do in their dreams at any rate, to be like Hale, always youthful, always gay, magnificently well, intellectually sound and balanced, was the very ideal they would desire. How vain, then, to judge him as one judges others, or to judge those who succumbed to him.
Yes, that Anne had loved him for a time, or yielded to him as a slender flower may to the fire, was a fatality that needed no excuse. Hector spoke of her to himself as one who had been wounded in a battle, struck down by superior force. He was very sorry, but still loved her. He understood and pardoned. And now she loved him; perhaps had loved him all through.
“It shall be as it must be,” swore Hector, “but I'll not hold anything against her in my heart. Why, there is even poor Felicia!”
As Hector sat by the fire, which now again began to die down, he drew away from himself and thought of her who must be wondering in agony how they would meet upon the morrow. On the morrow? No, to-day already! There was a beginning even now of the resurrection of great London. The momentary relaxation of the traffic's roar had ceased. The renewed sound came to his overwrought nerves like an anodyne, a dim and monstrous lullaby. This day he would meet her, and must give her the letters without a sign of the emotion that would be surging in him. He rehearsed the scene to himself.
“Oh, Lady Anne, by the way” He would begin like that. “Perhaps some papers marked A. P. are yours. If they are, will you take them?”
“Thank you, Mr. Durant. Oh, yes, I remember. Thank you again, so much.”
That was the way the big things often went in life, was it not?
And he must also speak to Felicia. To her he would be more open. She was very young. A little advice—yes, he would give her a little advice, poor thing. It was a strange, strange world, and by no means what one was brought up to think. Even now at his age he was struggling to reconcile the facts with an old ridiculous hypothesis thrust on him by his teachers and by tradition. Perhaps we stood at the beginning of a new era, after all. But we always do, thank Heaven!
He rose suddenly, locked up the drawer with the letters in it, and turned out the lights. As he did so the clock struck five. He went up-stairs slowly. When he came to Lady Anne's door he stopped.
“I'll ask her to marry me,” he said.
He nodded firmly, and was pleased with himself. He went to bed and slept. Anne was asleep, too. One comes to the end of the possibilities of emotion though on the eve of execution, so folks say.