The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/Maud-Evelyn/Chapter 8
VIII
In relation to times and intervals I can only recall that if this visit of his to me had been in the early spring it was one day in the late autumn—a day, which couldn't have been in the same year, with the difference of hazy, drowsy sunshine and brown and yellow leaves that, taking a short cut across Kensington Gardens, I came, among the untrodden ways, upon a couple occupying chairs under a tree, who immediately rose at the sight of me. I had been behind them at recognition, the fact that Marmaduke was in deep mourning having perhaps, so far as I had observed it, misled me. In my desire both not to look flustered at meeting them and to spare their own confusion I bade them again be seated and asked leave, as a third chair was at hand, to share a little their rest. Thus it befell that after a minute Lavinia and I had sat down, while our friend, who had looked at his watch, stood before us among the fallen foliage and remarked that he was sorry to have to leave us. Lavinia said nothing, but I expressed regret; I couldn't, however, as it struck me, without a false or a vulgar note speak as if I had interrupted a tender passage or separated a pair of lovers. But I could look him up and down, take in his deep mourning. He had not made, for going off, any other pretext than that his time was up and that he was due at home. 'Home,' with him now, had but one meaning: I knew him to be completely quartered in Westbourne Terrace. 'I hope nothing has happened,' I said—'that you've lost no one whom I know.'
Marmaduke looked at my companion, and she looked at Marmaduke. 'He has lost his wife,' she then observed.
Oh, this time, I fear, I had a small quaver of brutality; but it was at him I directed it. 'Your wife? I didn't know you had had a wife!'
'Well,' he replied, positively gay in his black suit, his black gloves, his high hatband, 'the more we live in the past, the more things we find in it. That's a literal fact. You would see the truth of it if your life had taken such a turn.'
'I live in the past,' Lavinia put in gently and as if to help us both.
'But with the result, my dear,' I returned, 'of not making, I hope, such extraordinary discoveries!' It seemed absurd to be afraid to be light.
'May none of her discoveries be more fatal than mine!' Marmaduke wasn't uproarious, but his treatment of the matter had the good taste of simplicity. 'They've wanted it so for her,' he continued to me wonderfully, 'that we've at last seen our way to it—I mean to what Lavinia has mentioned.' He hesitated but three seconds—he brought it brightly out. 'Maud-Evelyn had all her young happiness.'
I stared, but Lavinia was, in her peculiar manner, as brilliant. 'The marriage did take place,' she quietly, stupendously explained to me.
Well, I was determined not to be left. 'So you're a widower,' I gravely asked, 'and these are the signs?'
'Yes; I shall wear them always now.'
'But isn't it late to have begun?'
My question had been stupid, I felt the next instant; but it didn't matter—he was quite equal to the occasion. 'Oh, I had to wait, you know, till all the facts about my marriage had given me the right.' And he looked at his watch again. 'Excuse me—I am due. Good-bye, good-bye.' He shook hands with each of us, and as we sat there together watching him walk away I was struck with his admirable manner of looking the character. I felt indeed as our eyes followed him that we were at one on this, and I said nothing till he was out of sight. Then by the same impulse we turned to each other.
'I thought he was never to marry!' I exclaimed to my friend.
Her fine wasted face met me gravely. 'He isn't—ever. He'll be still more faithful.'
'Faithful this time to whom?'
'Why, to Maud-Evelyn.' I said nothing—I only checked an ejaculation; but I put out a hand and took one of hers, and for a minute we kept silence. Of course it's only an idea,' she began again at last, 'but it seems to me a beautiful one.' Then she continued resignedly and remarkably: 'And now they can die.'
'Mr. and Mrs. Dedrick?' I pricked up my ears. 'Are they dying?'
'Not quite, but the old lady, it appears, is failing, steadily weakening; less, as I understand it, from any definite ailment than because she just feels her work done and her little sum of passion, as Marmaduke calls it, spent. Fancy, with her convictions, all her reasons for wanting to die! And if she goes, he says, Mr. Dedrick won't long linger. It will be quite "John Anderson my jo."'
'Keeping her company down the hill, to lie beside her at the foot?'
'Yes, having settled all things.'
I turned these things over as we walked away, and how they had settled them—for Maud-Evelyn's dignity and Marmaduke's high advantage; and before we parted that afternoon—we had taken a cab in the Bayswater road and she had come home with me—I remember saying to her: 'Well, then, when they die won't he be free?'
She seemed scarce to understand. 'Free?'
'To do what he likes.'
She wondered. 'But he does what he likes now.'
'Well, then, what you like!'
'Oh, you know what I like———!'
Ah, I closed her mouth! 'You like to tell horrid fibs—yes, I know it!'
What she had then put before me, however, came in time to pass: I heard in the course of the next year of Mrs. Dedrick's extinction, and some months later, without, during the interval, having seen a sign of Marmaduke, wholly taken up with his bereaved patron, learned that her husband had touchingly followed her. I was out of England at the time; we had had to put into practice great economies and let our little place; so that, spending three winters successively in Italy, I devoted the periods between, at home, altogether to visits among people, mainly relatives, to whom these friends of mine were not known. Lavinia of course wrote to me—wrote, among many things, that Marmaduke was ill and had not seemed at all himself since the loss of his 'family,' and this in spite of the circumstance, which she had already promptly communicated, that they had left him, by will, 'almost everything.' I knew before I came back to remain that she now saw him often and, to the extent of the change that had over taken his strength and his spirits, greatly ministered to him. As soon as we at last met I asked for news of him; to which she replied: 'He's gradually going.' Then on my surprise: 'He has had his life.'
'You mean that, as he said of Mrs. Dedrick, his sum of passion is spent?'
At this she turned away. 'You've never understood.'
I had, I conceived; and when I went subsequently to see him I was moreover sure. But I only said to Lavinia on this first occasion that I would immediately go; which was precisely what brought out the climax, as I feel it to be, of my story. 'He's not now, you know,' she turned round to admonish me, 'in Westbourne Terrace. He has taken a little old house in Kensington.'
'Then he hasn't kept the things?'
'He has kept everything.' She looked at me still more as if I had never understood.
'You mean he has moved them?'
She was patient with me. 'He has moved nothing. Everything is as it was, and kept with the same perfection.'
I wondered. 'But if he doesn't live there?'
'It's just what he does.'
'Then how can he be in Kensington?'
She hesitated, but she had still more than her old grasp of it. 'He's in Kensington—without living.'
'You mean that at the other place———?'
'Yes, he spends most of his time. He's driven over there every day—he remains there for hours. He keeps it for that.'
'I see—it's still the museum.'
'It's still the temple!' Lavinia replied, with positive austerity.
'Then why did he move?'
'Because, you see, there'—she faltered again—'I could come to him. And he wants me,' she said, with admirable simplicity.
Little by little I took it in. 'After the death of the parents, even, you never went?'
'Never.'
'So you haven't seen anything?'
'Anything of hers? Nothing.'
I understood, oh perfectly; but I won't deny that I was disappointed: I had hoped for an account of his wonders, and I immediately felt that it wouldn't be for me to take a step that she had declined. When, a short time later, I saw them together in Kensington Square—there were certain hours of the day that she regularly spent with him—I observed that everything about him was new, handsome, and simple. They were, in their strange, final union—if union it could be called—very natural and very touching; but he was visibly stricken—he had his ailment in his eyes. She moved about him like a sister of charity—at all events like a sister. He was neither robust nor rosy now, nor was his attention visibly very present, and I privately and fancifully asked myself where it wandered and waited. But poor Marmaduke was a gentleman to the end—he wasted away with an excellent manner. He died twelve days ago; the will was opened; and last week, having meanwhile heard from her of its contents, I saw Lavinia. He leaves her everything that he himself had inherited. But she spoke of it all in a way that caused me to say in surprise: 'You haven't yet been to the house?'
'Not yet. I've only seen the solicitors, who tell me there will be no complications.'
There was something in her tone that made me ask more. 'Then you're not curious to see what's there?'
She looked at me with a troubled—almost a pleading—sense, which I understood; and presently she said: 'Will you go with me?'
'Some day, with pleasure—but not the first time. You must go alone then. The "relics" that you'll find there,' I added—for I had read her look—'you must think of now not as hers———'
'But as his?'
'Isn't that what his death—with his so close relation to them—has made them for you?'
Her face lighted—I saw it was a view she could thank me for putting into words. 'I see—I see. They are his. I'll go.'
She went, and three days ago she came to me. They're really marvels, it appears, treasures extraordinary, and she has them all. Next week I go with her—I shall see them at last. Tell you about them, you say? My dear man, everything.