THUS time went on at Oakley as elsewhere with little happening, long lulls coming after the moments of active living which tell for so much in individual history, yet usually occupy so little space in it. Arthur was as much away from them as if he had been at Underhayes—more in one way, for he was now swallowed up in public life, embarked upon that bigger sea of business or pleasure which absorbs all individual interests. They did not hear much more of him than when he was absorbed by his bride, and yet how different it was. Though Arthur was less happy, though he was further off, yet he was restored to his family. They spoke of him freely to each other and to strangers. There was no longer any cloud upon him; he was in his natural position. It was true that the friends of the family would turn to each other and ask in a whisper, “Do you ever hear anything of his wife—what has become of his wife?” after the conversation about him, how he was liking his new appointment, and all about it, which was carried on openly. “What has been done with her?” the friends said; “or was it really a marriage after all?” Many people came expressly to put these questions to Mrs. Rolt, who, being a distant relative as well as the agent’s wife, naturally knew all about the family affairs. Cousin Julia was very prudent, all the more prudent that she knew nothing about the matter, no more than the questioners themselves. But about Arthur everybody talked openly now, inquiring how he liked Vienna, which was a great relief from the time when the country neighbours did not know how to manage, whether to remain silent about him altogether, which was the safest way, or to frame careful questions which could not compromise them. It was very lucky that all this was now at an end; but still nobody knew much of Arthur, and except that one rapid visit, he was never seen at home.
Arthur himself, it need not be said, had a great many convulsions to go through. Probably he had not expected that Nancy would acquiesce calmly in the arrangements made for her. He knew her pride, and he knew also the relentings of tenderness that were in the girl; and in his heart he believed that she would have scorned the money he had left for her, would repudiate the settlement altogether—which would have made a return necessary upon all their steps—and might, indeed, put out all calculations by rushing back into his arms suddenly, without rhyme or reason, and making an end of these miserable bargainings. The hope of this kept him up, though he would not acknowledge it even to himself. She might come, even, in her impetuosity, to Oakley—he could believe this possible, unlikely though it was—but at least to his lodgings in town, where he lingered, making preparations, and thinking that every sound outside his room meant the arrival of his penitent wife. But Nancy did nothing of the kind, as has been seen. She accepted the income, and settled down and took no notice of him. Was it possible that it had all been calculation from beginning to end, and that she had never loved him at all? He never said anything of this, never betrayed his expectation nor his disappointment, unless it might be to Durant, who knew his thoughts before they got into words, and who also on his part had expected better things of Nancy; for, naturally, neither of them knew how her practical father had cowed her, and how all her tempers and impetuosities had been quenched by the dull and vulgar obstacle of his determination not to have his daughter back upon his hands without a fit provision. Thus it was for the first time they did her absolute wrong in their thoughts. When Arthur, having finally given up all those delusions which at first had been so consolatory, but which now in their failure were so bitter, left England, the severance was real and complete. His mind was now at last turned violently away from the object of his love. Passion can be borne, that passion which impels a hasty spirit to foolish actions unintended in cooler moments; and even change can be forgiven; but who could forgive the bitter wrong of having been chosen from the first for interested motives, of having been the mere representative of wealth and advancement to the woman who had accepted his love? Was she never true at all, never tender, never touched by the flame of love which had burned in Arthur’s breast? This was the one intolerable thought; and when silence followed all these agitations, and Nancy accepted without a word what he could do for her, and left him without a word, to endure as he best might, taking mere vulgar comfort from his hands, instead of all that he had been willing to bestow, the poor young fellow’s heart closed with a pang against her. How much had she cost him! but she would not permit him to cost her anything. She would give up nothing to him, or for him. What could it have been all along that she cared for? Not him, but what he had to bestow; and all that had been said on this subject came back to Arthur’s mind—the discussions beforehand, which made it apparent that Nancy had hoped to be my lady very soon; and her complaints after, that she was so little the better of the fine marriage she had made. These were trifles, but such trifles as turn honey itself into gall, and make all evils ten times worse. He was in very low spirits when he left England. When Durant spoke of his return, he shook his head.
“It is much more likely that I will never come back,” he said. “Why should I come back? I shall be out of everybody’s way there.”
“Arthur, you know there is nobody who wants you out of the way.”
“I don’t know it; I know the reverse. I shall be out of her way. She will be left in quiet. If I came here, I might not be able to put up with it, Durant. And how can they look at me at home without thinking what a mess I have made of everything? My poor father! I believe he feels it most of all—all the more for having so little to say.”
“Come, come! Sir John will not break his heart.”
“You don’t know him,” said Arthur, glad of a reason which would justify the desolate misery in his own. “Poor old governor! he feels it more than my mother does. She will storm at you, or mock at you, or cry over you, and get it out. But he says nothing; and the disappointment in me, the failure of me! I shouldn’t wonder if they broke his heart.”
Arthur’s eyes grew red while he spoke. He was young enough to feel the tears in their fountains; but, poor boy! while he spoke of Sir John, it was Nancy of whom he thought. He loved her, and she thought nothing, except allowances and comforts, of him. She would allow him to pay her money, to share his income with her; but not to share his heart with her, and all his thoughts. These she did not want. Poor Arthur! if that would have done him any good, he would have laid down his head and wept. But as it was, he had to shake back indignantly into the depths all emotions which required stormy utterance. He could be sorry for his father, but he must not be sorry for himself.
And this was how he went away. An attaché of a foreign Legation is not supposed to be the most hardworking of men. Yet there are things which they may do when it is a matter of preference for them to be occupied; and Arthur went into society, almost vehemently, not caring to remember himself and his position. Perhaps he did not pass through the furnace entirely unscathed. He thrust Nancy’s image out of his heart, and shut the door on her, and pretended not to be conscious of the efforts that image made to get back. Not Nancy—Nancy herself made no attempt one way or another, no overture; but her image, her recollection, that reflection of her which had occupied him when she was gone, kept persistently upon the threshold of the temple whence she had been expelled. Perhaps he was not always faithful to her, but sought after new impressions, new sensations as a man may be excused for doing to whom the shrine of his heart has already been defiled; but he never got beyond the feeling that she was there—his rightful queen, and what was more his actual possessor, whatever he might think, or others might think. Meanwhile he lived a gay and busy life. He talked and danced, and, no doubt, flirted; for though he had made his position known, there were plenty of people in society to whom his position was quite indifferent; and Nancy, had she seen her husband, who was so devoted to her, in those early days of separation, would, no doubt, have had occasions for heavy enough thoughts on her part. But all the same, her image was never farther off than outside the door—artificially closed and bolted by curious devices, but of itself ever ready to open—of Arthur’s heart.
All this, however, makes an effect upon a man; and when Durant wrote to him, after the interval of those two years, that the parents were dead, and that Nancy had left Underhayes, it made a great commotion in his mind, no doubt, but it did not rouse him to instant action. His first thought, indeed, was to rush home himself, and come to her help in her trouble; but this was only a first thought. Why should he go, said a soberer impulse? Had she not rejected him, driven him from her, refused to be touched by any argument he could offer; and why should he humble himself to seek her again without any indication that he would be more successful this time? No, no, he would not risk a repetition of it all. Repetitions are always to be avoided. If any lingering feeling for him had been in her mind, would not she have had him informed of this new state of circumstances which might have modified affairs between them? But she had said nothing, she had taken no notice of his existence at this moment of trouble, when her heart, no doubt, must have been touched. He wrote to Durant to inquire into the circumstances, and to let him know how Nancy was. But he did nothing more.
As for Durant, his heart perhaps was softer, and he wondered at Arthur’s indifference; or, perhaps, it was only that he himself had not been the offended and slighted person; and no one, however warm a friend, can feel our grievances as we ourselves do. Durant had not himself been particularly happy during these two years. He had worked hard and made progress in his profession, but he had not made very wonderful progress. His father, who had spent his fortune when he had one, had shown no disinclination to go on spending when he had none; and all that Lewis got by his labours did not seem too much to keep the paternal house going. Whosoever will work and support other people who don’t, has to work and be eaten up in this world. It is a common enough fate; and with Durant, as with so many others, the miserable meanness of those who sucked his blood and mind, always wanting more, was a heavier affliction than the loss of his hard earnings which he took with greater philosophy. “For what good were they to himself,” he said somewhat bitterly. Lucy was as far, nay farther, from him than ever. He had not been asked to Oakley at all during the last year, and though he still saw the ladies of the family now and then, Sir John’s disapproval had been too distinct to make it possible to disregard it, so that everything was at a standstill in this respect. Lucy understood him, he believed; but what would it serve him to be secretly understood if he could go no further, if years like this were to float away before he could approach her openly; before he could break through the obstacles on all sides, and venture to present himself with his suit openly? Indeed, for the last year Durant had almost come to acquiesce in his banishment, to feel that it was better for him not to see her, not to vex her with a sight of his faithfulness. Rather that she should forget all about it, not linger, as he did, on the verge of despair, but be happy whether he was happy or not. He had come this length when Arthur commissioned him to make those inquiries at Underhayes, and it may be supposed with how many thoughts, with what suppressed impatience of these two, who were thus voluntarily wrecking their happiness, and destroying everything that was best in life to each other, this martyr to social prejudice and other people’s sins trod over again the road he had gone with Lucy, along those streets which he had hurried through to witness Arthur’s marriage. Had it been Lucy and he, who had pledged their faith that winter morning, what sweet years of righteous toil, softened and made joyful by love and sympathy, might his have been! while the other two, who had taken the matter into their own hands, defiant of duty, had wrecked themselves thus, and parted as lightly and easily as they had come together. But for his father’s folly, Durant might have had that to offer to the object of his faithful affection, which even Sir John could not despise, and but for her brother’s folly, Lucy would have been free to accept, or refuse, that honest offering. He did not know that she would have accepted it—but there had been moments in which his hopes had risen almost to certainty—only to be cast down again into more miserable depths. Thus the two to whom honour and duty ranked highest were kept apart, and might be kept apart all their lives—while the two who thought but little of either (was not this hard upon Arthur?) played with the happiness they had snatched in defiance of duty, and threw it away. Durant may be pardoned, all things considered, for these hard thoughts; for, modest as he was, hope had been high in his breast when he conducted Lucy to her brother’s wedding. But gradually, bit by bit, that hope had ebbed away. He had thought of winning her family’s favour by his devotion to their service. He had thought that their familiar friendship with him might have balanced the humbleness of his birth—he had once thought his money, now lost, might tell for something. But all had worked against him instead of for him; while Arthur who had got the happiness he wanted, the desire of his heart, had thrown it away. These thoughts filled his mind as he walked through the streets of Underhayes. He went to the little house in which the Bates’ had lived, from which it seemed impossible to believe that the flavour of the early dinners and the evening rum and water could have faded away. When lovely things are carried hence by death, the vacancy is less strange almost, less poignant than when that tragi-comic strain of grim amusement comes in, and we feel that things so earthy, things having no affinity with a higher sphere, have come under its sublimating touch. Could anything have made the tax-collector’s evening potations approach solemnity? and yet there was a kind of awe in the recollection of all those vulgar circumstances gone with the vulgar being to whom they belonged into the darkness—into the unknown which is not vulgar. Death is more akin to the noble and beautiful than it is to the paltry and commonplace. It is not unnatural that those should die and be translated into the sphere to which their finer impulses belong; but these, what have they to do with dying, with heaven and hell and the unseen? This was what Durant felt as he looked with a kind of strange pity into the room, now occupied by a young mother with her little children.
“All messages is to go to Raisins the grocer,” she said, opening the familiar door. It seemed to Durant impossible that Arthur was not there seated with Nancy upon the old haircloth sofa, within; but he met the haircloth sofa a little further on, standing out in the damp at a broker’s door; and Arthur and Nancy, where were they? never, it would seem, likely to sit together again.
“Oh la, Mr. Durant!” said Sarah Jane. She blushed, and gave a glance at her husband in his white apron, and felt a burning pang that she had not married a gentleman. “Won’t you step upstairs, Sir—do step upstairs;” she cried. She was glad that the customers in the shop, and even her husband, should see how intimate she was with a gentlemanlike-looking person, such as Durant undeniably was. And she told him all about the accident that had carried off papa, and mother’s inability to survive him. She was in all the freshness of her mourning, and shed a few natural tears, notwithstanding the pleasure she had in exhibiting her drawing-room to one of Arthur’s friends. “You would have thought she didn’t take much notice of him; but he had a deal more in him than people thought, Mr. Durant, and she couldn’t live without him. She lingered just seven weeks. I can’t say that she ever held up her head again.”
“And your sister has gone away?”
“Oh, yes, my sister has gone away. Mamma wasn’t one to say very much, but I say it’s as touching an instance of conjugal affection—like what they put in the newspapers; and I tell Mr. Raisins, I’m sure I hope I’ll do as much for him when our time comes,” said Sarah Jane, half laughing, half crying. “The doctor couldn’t say what it was.”
“And—Nancy?”
“You might be more civil, Mr. Durant. My sister isn’t one to be spoken of as if she was a housemaid; but I forgot—you were always such a friend of Arthur Curtis. I see his name sometimes in the papers. La, the difference marriage makes! I never used to look at the papers, but now I read them regular every morning; and I see Arthur’s name sometimes.”
“Yes,” said Durant, “and your sister, Mrs. Raisins—where has your sister gone?”
“Oh, it has been a trying time!” said Sarah Jane. “Charley went first, and I’m sure if it’s all true about New Zealand, I wonder we don’t all go; and then papa died, and then mamma, and now there’s Nancy.”
“But she has not died—or gone to New Zealand?”
“I never said she had, Mr. Durant. I was saying it was a trying time, one thing coming on the back of another. I’m thankful Mr. Raisins and me were married before it all began, for if we hadn’t been there’s no telling what might have happened. I couldn’t have been married in my mourning.”
“Has Mrs. Arthur Curtis removed far off? It would be very kind to give me an answer.”
“Oh la! how can I tell?” cried Sarah Jane. “She’s as self-willed as the old gentleman himself. Nothing stops her when she’s made up her mind. There’s no telling where she may get to, before she’s done.”
“She is travelling then? She may perhaps go to Vienna? Is that what you mean?”
“I couldn’t say what I mean—I don’t mean anything particular. You never can, when it’s Nancy. She may go here or she may go there, and nobody can tell.”
“But you must know something—you must have an address for her letters.”
“Bless you, she never has any letters; who would write to her? She always paid her way, I must say that for her—and what letters could she have? She never was one for writing letters herself, so I don’t expect to hear; and as for writing, if I don’t hear, I never would think of doing such a thing.”
“But you must know something of her,” said Durant, alarmed. “You cannot have lost sight of your sister.”
“Such things have happened,” said Sarah Jane, with a certain pleasure in his discomfiture. “When you’re married you’ve other things to think of than just your own family. I’ve got my house now and my husband; he don’t ask me to do anything in the business, not a thing; but I like to be serviceable when I can, though I’m glad to say I’ve no need, Mr. Durant. We’re doing very well, and I’ve got my nice drawing-room, all my own, and paid for, and my servants, and my front door to walk out of, as nice as any lady’s in the land.”
“I am very glad you are so well off; but there is something I wish to communicate to your sister.”
“Oh, you shan’t communicate with her through me; I have had enough of that; how foolish of Arthur, Mr. Durant, to make such a fuss! and Nancy too. They never could get on together. I don’t say it was her fault or it was his fault, but they never got on.”
“Then you will not tell me where she is?” said Durant.
“Oh, I never said anything one way or another,” said Sarah Jane; but he could not get any other reply from her, and left Underhayes as little informed as when he came. One other fact he ascertained, however, from Arthur’s banker, who informed him formally that Nancy’s allowance had been returned by the country banker to whom they were in the habit of remitting it, with the intimation that it would be received no longer, Mrs. Arthur Curtis having left the place without giving any address. Thus Nancy made the first use of her liberty. She disappeared, leaving no trace of which they could get hold, and the place that had known her, already knew her no more.