THEY had all been disturbed by it beyond expression; by his absence, by his silence, his sudden, strange departure which, natural enough at the minute, appeared now, in the light of subsequent events, so extraordinary, which now looked like a flight, but—from what? From happiness, from well-being, from everything that the heart of man could desire. Mr. Ford was a person of a very sturdy mind, not given to fancies like his wife, but after a fortnight had passed he was almost more anxious than she was. He questioned her closely as to Oliver’s past life. Had she ever heard of any entanglement?
‘There must be some one who has a claim upon him, who would expose him to Grace, if not worse,’ he said; at which Trix was naturally indignant.
‘You men have such bad imaginations,’ she cried. ‘How should he have any entanglements? He has been fond of Grace since—since—’
‘Since he saw her here six months ago, Trix.’
Trix grew very red, and the tears came into her eyes. ‘You mean, Tom, that Oliver, that—that my brother got fond of Grace only when—’
‘I don’t mean anything of the sort,’ said Tom Ford, ‘it is women who have bad imaginations, though, perhaps, in a different way. I mean that he had forgotten all about her. But when he saw her again, and saw how nice she was—for she is a very nice woman, poor thing! far too nice to be made a wreck of for the sake of some baggage—’
‘Tom! you have taken leave of your senses, I think.’
‘My dear, you know well enough, just as well as I do, that Oliver hasn’t been immaculate. But why the deuce didn’t he have the courage to tell the truth? Why didn’t he speak to you, or me, if it comes to that? If he had made a clean breast of it—’
‘We don’t know yet that there is anything to make a clean breast of,’ said Trix, beginning to cry. And she put on her bonnet in a disturbed way and went over to Grace for comfort, who might be supposed to want comfort more than she did. Grace was very pale, but composed, and met her friend with a smile.
‘I don’t know anything,’ she said, ‘but he asks me to wait, and I mean to wait. Why should we condemn him? There must be a reason, and when he can he will tell us. It is not out of mere wantonness he is staying away.’
They had all given up tacitly the pretence about the sick friend. That had been dismissed at a quite early date; the reality that was in it being beyond any guesses they could make.
‘Oh, Grace, you are the best of us all! You are the one that is the worst treated, and you are the most kind.’
‘Trix, we don’t know that there is any ill-treatment at all,’ said Grace. She was very subdued, very pale. It almost overcame her composure altogether when a servant came in with a large packet, one of the many wedding presents that were arriving daily. ‘I have not the heart to open them,’ she said, leaning her head upon Trix’s shoulder, who flew to her with instant comprehension: ‘and yet I want to open them that nobody may suppose—Look,’ she said, pointing to a table covered with glittering spoils. ‘Look at all that, and the congratulations that come with them. And to think that I don’t know, I don’t know even—’
‘Oh, Grace, all will be well, all will be well! long before that.’
Grace did not say anything, but she shook her head. ‘He does not even say that all will be well; he says only—wait. But I will wait,’ she said, composing herself. Trix did not get much comfort out of this visit. She went home indignant, angry beyond telling with her brother, though she could not bear that her husband should give utterance and emphasis to her fears. And for some days after the talk of those two people was of nothing but Oliver and what his meaning could be. Mrs. Ford sent off a long and eloquent letter to him the night after these discussions, but received no answer to that any more than to her former letters. And Ford, too, wrote one, which was very much more serious. Ford, who never wrote a letter except on business, leaving everything else to his wife. Ford put before his brother-in-law indeed the business view of the matter. He had come under certain engagements, did he intend or not to fulfil them? He told Oliver that his conduct was mere madness, that it was against all his interests, that he was destroying his own credit and cutting his own throat. What did he mean by it? but adding that whatever he meant, which was his own concern, he ought not to lose a moment in coming back, and doing what he could to repair the fearful mistake he was making. The letter was curt and business-like, but very much in earnest. Oliver had come by that time to a condition of mind in which arguments of that or any other kind were of no avail. He never read this letter; did he not know everything that could be said to him? had he not said it all and twenty times more to himself?
After this appeal, however, and that much more eloquent, certainly more lengthy, one of Trix’s, silence fell again, and the days so anxiously watched at every post for letters passed on and brought nothing. The excitement, the tension, the fear of suspense grew hourly. As yet they had managed to keep it to themselves. Nobody knew, unless it might be the servants, who know everything. Grace was the best in this effort; she replied with so composed a look, so steady a smile to the many curious questions addressed to her as to Mr. Wentworth’s long absence, that curiosity was baffled. Trix did not know how she could do it. She herself grew red, the tears came to her eyes when she was questioned, in spite of herself. It was always on the cards that she might break down altogether, and take some sympathetic visitor into her confidence. She was like her brother, not of so steady a soul as Grace, and this was to her insupportable, as his more terrible anguish was to him.
It was from Tom Ford, however, the man without nerves, the cool-headed, mercantile person whom Trix had so often stormed at as unsensitive and hard to move, that the touch of impatience came. He said one day at breakfast suddenly, without warning, ‘I think, Trix, if there is no word to-day, I shall run up to town and see with my own eyes what Oliver is up to. We cannot let this go on.’
‘Run up to town to-day? Tom, you have heard something; you know more than we do—’
‘Nothing of the sort: but I feel a responsibility. He is your brother, and that poor girl met him in our house. I must see what it means. I can’t let it run on like this. She has no brother to stand up for her. I want to know what the fellow means.’
‘Tom, you must not go and bully Oliver. He would never stand that, even when he was a boy.’
‘I have no intention of bullying him. I want to know what he means,’ Mr. Ford repeated doggedly. And then Trix, what with fear lest his interference should be resented, what with eagerness to solve the mystery, insisted on going too; to which her husband did not object, having foreseen it. She went out immediately and told Grace. The sense of being about to do something is a great matter to a woman who in most emergencies of her life is compelled to wait while others do what is to be done. Action restores trust to her, and a sense that all must come right.
‘Tom and I are going. Tom has business of his own, and he takes this opportunity: and he thinks I may as well go too, and then this mystery will be cleared up. I shall telegraph to you at once, the moment I have seen him, Grace.’
Grace was greatly startled by this sudden resolution, though she said very little. But when they started by the afternoon train, she was there at the station to meet them.
‘I think I will go, too,’ she said. ‘You know I have a great deal of—shopping to do.’ And not a word was said by which a stranger could have divined that this was an expedition, not of shopping, but of outraged love and despair. They arrived late with a sort of understanding that nothing could be done that night. But when the ladies had been settled in their hotel, Mr. Ford went out to take, as he said, a walk. He went through the gloomy streets; through the Strand, with all its noise and crowd, to the Temple, where Oliver’s chambers were. He had not told his wife even where he was going. He thought there might be something to learn which it would be better these women should not hear; and perhaps he thought, too, that it would be a triumph, without their aid, to lead the wanderer back. He went all that long way on foot, thinking within himself that the later he was the more likely he was to find Oliver, and turning over in his mind what he should say. He would represent to him the folly of his behaviour, the madness of throwing thus his best hopes away. Ford was very anxious, more anxious than he would have confessed to anyone. He did not, indeed, think of such a possibility as that which had really happened; but his mind was prepared for some complication, some entanglement that had to be got rid of; perhaps even some tie made in earlier years which Oliver believed himself to have got rid of, and which had come to life again, as such things will. Who could tell? He might have married and have thought his wife was dead, and have been roused out of his happiness by the terrible news that this was not true. Such a thing is not uncommon in fiction, for instance; and Mr. Ford, like many busy men, was a great novel reader. He was ready even, terrible though it would be, to hear that this was the cause of his brother-in-law’s disappearance. But, perhaps, he hoped, it might be something not so bad as that.
He was a long time gone, so long, that Trix got alarmed, and in her uneasiness burst into Grace’s room, who was going to rest, to wait with what patience she might for the morning, which, she said to herself, must end all suspense. Her self-restraint was sadly broken by the irruption into her room of Trix in all her fever of alarm.
‘Where do you think he can have gone? Oh, what do you think can have happened to him?—such dreadful things happen in London,’ Mrs. Ford cried, rising gradually into higher and higher excitement. She thought of garroters; of roughs who might have followed him along the Embankment (though she scarcely knew where that was), and already her imagination figured him lying on the pavement senseless, perhaps unconscious, unable to tell anyone where to carry him.
‘The only address that would be found upon him would be our address at home, and if they telegraphed there, and then telegraphed here, how much time must be lost? And it is too late even to telegraph,’ she cried, as these miserable anticipations gained upon her. But what could two women do in a London hotel? They could not go out with a lantern and search for his body about the streets, and they did not even know where or in what direction he had gone. ‘He has gone to find your brother,’ Grace suggested once; but Trix would not hear of this. ‘Never,’ she said, ‘without letting me know.’
At last, when it was long past midnight, a hansom drove up to the hotel, and Mr. Ford appeared, exceedingly pale and with an air of great agitation and distress. He told them that Oliver had been very ill: that he would have to leave England, to get into a milder climate. He would not be more explicit; a milder climate and to get out of England, that was all he would say. He had a letter in his hand which he had been reading as best he could by the lamplight as he drove back, and by the dying candles in Wentworth’s room, into which he had forced his way. He told his wife as soon as they were alone that he had found on Oliver’s desk this long letter addressed to himself, and gave her an outline of the story, which brought out such a shriek from Trix, as sounded through the partition and startled Grace once more in the solitude of her room, to which she had returned. She appeared between the husband and wife a minute after in her white dressing gown, white as the gown she wore.
‘There is something you have not told me. Tell me what it is,’ she said. It had been a momentary relief to her to know that Oliver was ill. If that was so, everything might be explained; but—And now she heard that there was something more.
‘Oh, Grace, go to bed; oh, go to bed. We don’t know ourselves yet. To-morrow morning, the very first thing, after you have had a night’s rest—’
‘I cannot rest to-night,’ she said, with parched lips, ‘until I know. There is nothing that cannot be borne,’ she added, a moment afterwards, ‘except not to know.’
They made a curious contrast. Trix all flushed with excitement and distress, her voice choked with tears, her eyes overflowing; and she who was even more concerned, she who believed herself to be Oliver Wentworth’s bride, in that breathless silence of suspense, afraid to make a sound, to waste a word, lest perhaps she should miss some recollection, some indication of what to her was life or death.
‘I have something here to read, if you think you can bear it. It is not good news.’
‘Oh, Tom, for the love of Heaven, don’t! Grace, go to your room, dear! Oh, go to bed, and I’ll come—I’ll come and tell you as soon as we know.’
‘It is Oliver’s hand,’ said Grace. ‘I can bear whatever he has written. But let me hear it at once, for this suspense is more than I can bear.’
‘Grace—Grace!—’
But Mr. Ford interrupted his wife. He saw that Grace was not to be put off any longer, and indeed was capable of nothing but knowing the truth. He brought the easiest chair for her, with that pathetic instinct which makes us so careful of the bodies of those whose hearts we are about to crush. She made no opposition. She would have done anything—anything, so long as it brought her nearer the end. Ford had the discrimination to see this, and that the only thing she could not bear was delay. He began at once to read the letter, of which he had already told the chief facts to his wife. The two candles flickered, placed together on the mantelpiece, and drearily doubled in the mirror behind, while the bare hotel room, with its big bed and wardrobes, formed an indistinct, cold background. Mr. Ford stood by the mantelpiece, and read slowly, in a voice of which he had not always command. Trix behind him, sobbing, crying, exclaiming, unable to restrain herself, moved up and down, sometimes stopping to look over his shoulder, sometimes throwing for a moment herself into a seat. In the centre, the white figure of Grace, all white, motionless, sat rigid, scarcely breathing. Grace was prepared for everything. Except a start and shiver when she heard of the marriage, she scarcely made a sign from beginning to end. The others were distracted, even in their own horror and pity, by an anxious desire to know how she would take it. But Grace was disturbed by no such secondary feelings. At that point her hands, which had been lying in her lap, closed in a convulsive clasp, but save this she made no sign, listening to every word till the end. Even after the end, it was some time before she moved or spoke. Then she pointed to it, and said faintly, ‘It is a letter—is he—has he gone away?’
‘You have heard all this. I must tell you more—I must tell you all I know,’ said Ford. He was much agitated, his lips quivering, his voice now and then failing altogether. ‘I believe,’ he said, struggling to get out the words, ‘that the noise I made at his door saved his life, that he had thought for a moment of putting an end to everything; there was a pistol on the floor.’
She rose to her feet with a quick, sudden cry, ‘That! That!’ and clutched for support at the mantelpiece, against which Mr. Ford was leaning, and where there seemed to rise in the mirror a pale, white ghost, facing the darker figure.
‘Oliver,’ she cried, ‘Oliver! tell me everything. That is his last word, and he is dead!’
‘No, no, no—oh, no!’ came in Trix’s voice from behind.
Ford took her hands from their clutch on the marble, and put her back into her chair. All he was afraid of was that she might faint, or die, perhaps, in their hands.
‘He is not dead, so far as I know. He has gone away. How could he meet you? Oh, Grace, what can we say to you, Trix and I? It is our fault! My poor girl, cry or something. Don’t look like that. You must put him out of your thoughts.’
She shook herself free of him with impatience. ‘I am asking you about Oliver,’ she said. ‘Oliver! Where is he? Have you left him, with no one near him, no one to comfort him? Trix, are you going to him, or shall I?’
The husband and wife looked at each other in dismay. Mrs. Ford stilled in a moment her sobs and exclamations, not knowing what to reply.
‘You are nearest him in blood, but I am nearest in—’ Grace paused for a moment. ‘He will want to know that I—understand,’ she said slowly, as if speaking to herself.
‘He has no right to know anything about you,’ Ford said roughly, in the agitation of his mind. ‘You must think no more of him, Grace. He has no claim upon you. This miserable marriage—’
‘Marriage,’ she said, again rising, resisting his attempt to support her. ‘You think a woman has no idea but marriage. What is that to me? I have been fearing I knew not what—and now my mind is relieved, I understand. It is not that I forgive him,’ she added, after a moment, with an indescribable look of tender pride and dignity, ‘I approve. You may blame him if you will—I approve. And if he should die, I accept his legacy. I thank God he had that trust in me, and that he did what was right. Though it should kill us both, what does that matter? He has done only what was right, and I approve!’