Thelma

M >> Marie Corelli >> Thelma


Lorimer, left alone for a few minutes, seated himself in an easy chair
and began absently turning over the newspapers on the table. But his
thoughts were far away, and presently he covered his eyes with one hand
as though the light hurt them. When he removed it, his lashes were wet.

"What a fool I am!" he muttered impatiently. "Oh Thelma, Thelma! my
darling!--how I wish I could follow and find you and console you!--you
poor, tender, resigned soul, going away like this because you thought
you were not wanted--not wanted!--my God!--if you only knew how one man
at least has wanted and yearned for you ever since he saw your sweet
face!--Why can't I tear you out of my heart--why can't I love some one
else? Ah Phil!--good, generous, kind old Phil!--he little guesses," he
rose and paced the room up and down restlessly. "The fact is I oughtn't
to be here at all--I ought to leave England altogether for a long
time--till--till I get over it. The question is, _shall_ I ever get over
it? Sigurd was a wise boy--he found a short way out of all his
troubles,--suppose I imitate his example? No,--for a man in his senses
that would be rather cowardly--though it might be pleasant!" He stopped
in his walk with a pondering expression on his face. "At any rate, I
won't stop here to see her come back--I couldn't trust myself,--I should
say something foolish--I know I should! I'll take my mother to
Italy--she wants to go; and we'll stay with Lovelace. It'll be a
change--and I'll have a good stand-up fight with myself, and see if I
can't come off the conqueror somehow! It's all very well to kill an
opponent in battle but the question is, can a man kill his inner,
grumbling, discontented, selfish Self? If he can't, what's the good of
him?"

As he was about to consider this point reflectively, Errington entered,
equipped for travelling, and whip in hand. His imagination had been at
work during the past few minutes, exaggerating all the horrors and
difficulties of Thelma's journey to the Altenfjord, till he was in a
perfect fever of irritable excitement.

"Come on Lorimer!" he cried. "There's no time to lose! Britta knows what
to do--she'll meet me at the station. I can't breathe in this wretched
house a moment longer--let's be off!"

Plunging out into the hall, he bade Morris summon a hansom,--and with a
few last instructions to that faithful servitor, and an encouraging kind
word and shake of the hand to Neville, who with a face of remorseful
misery, stood at the door to watch his departure,--he was gone. The
hansom containing him and Lorimer rattled rapidly towards the abode of
Sir Francis Lennox, but on entering Piccadilly, the vehicle was
compelled to go so slowly on account of the traffic, that Errington, who
every moment grew more and more impatient, could not stand it.

"By Jove! this is like a walking funeral!" he muttered. "I say Lorimer,
let's get out! We can do the rest on foot."

They stopped the cabman and paid him his fare--then hurried along
rapidly, Errington every now and then giving a fiercer clench to the
formidable horsewhip which was twisted together with his ordinary
walking-stick in such a manner as not to attract special attention.

"Coward and liar!" he muttered, as he thought of the man he was about to
punish. "He shall pay for his dastardly falsehood--by Jove he shall!
It'll be a precious long time before he shows himself in society any
more!"

Then he addressed Lorimer. "You may depend upon it he'll shout 'police!
police!' and make for the door," he observed. "You keep your back
against it, Lorimer! I don't care how many fines I've got to pay as long
as I can thrash him soundly!"

"All right!" Lorimer answered, and they quickened their pace. As they
neared the chambers which Sir Francis Lennox rented over a fashionable
jeweller's shop, they became aware of a small procession coming straight
towards them from the opposite direction. _Something_ was being carried
between four men who appeared to move with extreme care and
gentleness,--this something was surrounded by a crowd of boys and men
whose faces were full of morbid and frightened interest--the whole
_cortege_ was headed by a couple of solemn policemen. "You spoke of a
walking funeral just now," said Lorimer suddenly. "This looks uncommonly
like one."

Errington made no reply--he had only one idea in his mind,--the
determination to chastise and thoroughly disgrace Sir Francis. "I'll
hound him out of the clubs!" he thought indignantly. "His own set shall
know what a liar he is--and if I can help it he shall never hold up his
head again!"

Entirely occupied as he was with these reflections, he paid no heed to
anything that was going on in the street, and he scarcely heard
Lorimer's last observation. So that he was utterly surprised and taken
aback, when he, with Lorimer, was compelled to come to a halt before the
very door of the jeweller, Lennox's landlord, while the two policemen
cleared a passage through the crowd, saying in low tones, "Stand aside,
gentlemen, please!--stand aside," thus making gradual way for four
bearers, who, as was now plainly to be seen, carried a common wooden
stretcher covered with a cloth, under which lay what seemed, from its
outline, to be a human figure.

"What's the matter here?" asked Lorimer, with a curious cold thrill
running through him as he put the simple question.

One of the policemen answered readily enough.

"An accident, sir. Gentleman badly hurt. Down at Charing Cross
Station--tried to jump into a train when it had started,--foot
caught,--was thrown under the wheels and dragged along some
distance--doctor says he can't live, sir."

"Who is he,--what's his name?"

"Lennox, sir--leastways, that's the name on his card--and this is the
address. Sir Francis Lennox, I believe it is."

Errington uttered a sharp exclamation of horror,--at that moment the
jeweller came out of the recesses of his shop with uplifted hands and
bewildered countenance.

"An accident? Good Heavens!--Sir Francis! Up-stairs!--take him
up-stairs!" Here he addressed the bearers. "You should have gone round
to the private entrance--he mustn't be seen in the shop--frightening
away all my customers--here, pass through!--pass through, as quick as
you can!"

And they did pass through,--carrying their crushed burden tenderly along
by the shining glass cases and polished counters, where glimmered and
flashed jewels of every size and lustre for the adorning of the children
of this world,--slowly and carefully, step by step, they reached the
upper floor,--and there, in a luxurious apartment furnished with almost
feminine elegance, they lifted the inanimate form from the stretcher and
laid it down, still shrouded, on a velvet sofa, removing the last number
of _Truth_, and two of Zola's novels, to make room for the heavy,
unconscious head.

Errington and Lorimer stood at the doorway, completely overcome by the
suddenness of the event--they had followed the bearers up-stairs almost
mechanically,--exchanging no word or glance by the way,--and now they
watched in almost breathless suspense while a surgeon who was present,
gently turned back the cover that hid the injured man's features and
exposed them to full view. Was _that_ Sir Francis? that blood-smeared,
mangled creature?--_that_ the lascivious dandy,--the disciple of
no-creed and self-worship? Errington shuddered and averted his gaze from
that hideous face,--so horribly contorted,--yet otherwise deathlike in
its rigid stillness. There was a grave hush. The surgeon still bent over
him--touching here, probing there, with tenderness and skill,--but
finally he drew back with a hopeless shake of his head.

"Nothing can be done," he whispered. "Absolutely nothing!"

At that moment Sir Francis stirred,--he groaned and opened his
eyes;--what terrible eyes they were, filled with that look of intense
anguish, and something worse than anguish,--fear--frantic fear--coward
fear--fear that was almost more overpowering than his bodily suffering.

He stared wildly at the little group assembled--strange faces, so far as
he could make them out, that regarded him with evident compassion,--what
--what was all this--what did it mean? Death? No, no! he thought madly,
while his brain reeled with the idea--death? What _was_ death?--darkness,
annihilation, blackness--all that was horrible--unimaginable! God! he
would _not_ die! God!--who _was_ God? No matter--he would live;--he
would struggle against this heaviness,--this coldness--this pillar of
ice in which he was being slowly frozen--frozen--frozen!--inch by--inch!
He made a furious effort to move, and uttered a scream of agony, stabbed
through and through by torturing pain.

"Keep still!" said the surgeon pityingly.

Sir Francis heard him not. He wrestled with his bodily anguish till the
perspiration stood in large drops on his forehead. He raised himself,
gasping for breath, and glared about him like a trapped beast of prey.

"Give me brandy!" he muttered chokingly. "Quick--quick! Are you going to
let me die like a dog?--damn you all!"

The effort to move,--to speak,--exhausted his sinking strength--his
throat rattled,--he clenched his fists and made as though he would
spring off his couch--when a fearful contortion convulsed his whole
body,--his eyes rolled up and became fixed--he fell heavily
back,--_dead_!

Quietly the surgeon covered again what was now nothing,--nothing but a
mutilated corpse.

"It's all over!" he announce briefly.

Errington heard these words in sickened silence. All over! Was it
possible? So soon? All over!--and he had come too late to punish the
would-be ravisher of his wife's honor,--too late! He still held the whip
in his hand with which he had meant to chastise that--that distorted,
mangled lump of clay yonder, . . . pah! he could not bear to think of
it, and he turned away, faint and dizzy. He felt,--rather than saw the
staircase,--down which he dreamily went, followed by Lorimer.

The two policemen were in the hall scribbling the cut-and-dry
particulars of the accident in their note-books, which having done, they
marched off, attended by a wandering, bilious-looking penny-a-liner who
was anxious to write a successful account of the "Shocking Fatality," as
it was called in the next day's newspapers. Then the bearers departed
cheerfully, carrying with them the empty stretcher. Then the jeweller,
who seemed quite unmoved respecting the sudden death of his lodger,
chatted amicably with the surgeon about the reputation and various
demerits of the deceased,--and Errington and Lorimer, as they passed
through the shop, heard him speaking of a person hitherto unheard of,
namely, Lady Francis Lennox, who had been deserted by her husband for
the past six years, and who was living uncomplainingly the life of an
art-student in Germany with her married sister, maintaining, by the work
of her own hands, her one little child, a boy of five.

"He never allowed her a farthing," said the conversational jeweller.
"And she never asked him for one. Mr. Wiggins, his lawyer--firm of
Wiggins & Whizzer, Furnival's Inn,--told me all about his affairs. Oh
yes--he was a regular "masher"--tip-top! Not worth much, I should say.
He must have spent over a thousand a year in keeping up that little
place at St. John's Wood for Violet Vere. He owes me five hundred.
However, Mr. Wiggins will see everything fair, I've no doubt. I've just
wired to him, announcing the death. I don't suppose any one will regret
him--except, perhaps, the woman at St. John's Wood. But I believe she's
playing for a bigger stake just now." And, stimulated by this thought,
he drew out from a handsome morocco case a superb pendant of emeralds
and diamonds--a work of art, that glittered as he displayed it, like a
star on a frosty night.

"Pretty thing, isn't it?" he said proudly. "Eight hundred pounds, and
cheap, too! It was ordered for Miss Vere, two months ago, by the Duke of
Moorlands. I see he sold his collection of pictures the other day.
Luckily they fetched a tidy sum, so I'm pretty sure of the money for
this. He'll sell everything he's got to please her. Queer? Oh, not at
all! She's the rage just now,--I can't see anything in her myself,--but
I'm not a duke, you see--I'm obliged to be respectable!"

He laughed as he returned the pendant to its nest of padded amber satin,
and Errington,--sick at heart to hear such frivolous converse going on
while that crushed and lifeless form lay in the very room
above,--unwatched, uncared-for,--put his arm through Lorimer's and left
the shop.

Once in the open street, with the keen, cold air blowing against their
faces, they looked at each other blankly. Piccadilly was crowded; the
hurrying people passed and re-passed,--there were the shouts of omnibus
conductors and newsboys--the laughter of young men coming out of the St.
James's Hall Restaurant; all was as usual,--as, indeed, why should it
not? What matters the death of one man in a million? unless, indeed, it
be a man whose life, like a torch, uplifted in darkness, has enlightened
and cheered the world,--but the death of a mere fashionable "swell"
whose chief talent has been a trick of lying gracefully--who cares for
such a one? Society is instinctively relieved to hear that his place is
empty, and shall know him more. But Errington could not immediately
forget the scene he had witnessed. He was overcome by sensations of
horror,--even of pity,--and he walked by his friend's side for some time
in silence.

"I wish I could get rid of this thing!" he said suddenly, looking down
at the horsewhip in his hand.

Lorimer made no answer. He understood his feeling, and realized the
situation as sufficiently grim. To be armed with a weapon meant for the
chastisement of a man whom Death had so suddenly claimed was, to say the
least of it, unpleasant. Yet the horsewhip could scarcely be thrown away
in Piccadilly--such an action might attract notice and comment.
Presently Philip spoke again.

"He was actually married all the time!"

"So it seems;" and Lorimer's face expressed something very like
contempt. "By Jove, Phil! he must have been an awful scoundrel!"

"Don't let's say any more about him--he's dead!" and Philip quickened
his steps. "And what a horrible death!"

"Horrible enough, indeed!"

Again they were both silent. Mechanically they turned down towards Pall
Mall.

"George," said Errington, with a strange awe in his tones, "it seems to
me to-day as if there were death in the air. I don't believe in
presentiments, but yet--yet I can-not help thinking--what if I should
find my Thelma--_dead_?"

Lorimer turned very pale--a cold shiver ran through him, but he
endeavored to smile.

"For God's sake, old fellow, don't think of anything so terrible! Look
here, you're hipped--no wonder! and you've got a long journey before
you. Come and have lunch. It's just two o'clock. Afterwards we'll go to
the Garrick and have a chat with Beau Lovelace--he's a first-rate fellow
for looking on the bright side of everything. Then I'll see you off this
afternoon at the Midland--what do you say?"

Errington assented to this arrangement, and tried to shake off the
depression that had settled upon him, though dark forebodings passed one
after the other like clouds across his mind. He seemed to see the
Altenguard hills stretching drearily, white with frozen snow, around the
black Fjord; he pictured Thelma, broken-hearted, fancying herself
deserted, returning through the cold and darkness to the lonely
farm-house behind the now withered pines. Then he began to think of the
shell-cave where that other Thelma lay hidden in her last deep
sleep,--the wailing words of Sigurd came freshly back to his ears, when
the poor crazed lad had likened Thelma's thoughts to his favorite
flowers, the pansies--"One by one you will gather and play with her
thoughts as though they were these blossoms; your burning hand will mar
their color--they will wither and furl up and die,--and you--what will
you care? Nothing! No man ever cares for a flower that is withered,--not
even though his own hand slew it!"

Had he been to blame? he mused, with a sorrowful weight at his heart.
Unintentionally, had he,--yes, he would put it plainly,--had he
neglected her, just a little? Had he not, with all his true and
passionate love for her, taken her beauty, her devotion, her obedience
too much for granted--too much as his right? And in these latter months,
when her health had made her weaker and more in need of his tenderness,
had he not, in a sudden desire for political fame and worldly honor,
left her too much alone, a prey to solitude and the often morbid musings
which solitude engenders?

He began to blame himself heartily for the misunderstanding that had
arisen out of his share in Neville's unhappy secret. Neville had been
weak and timid,--he had shrunk nervously from avowing that the notorious
Violet Vere was actually the woman he had so faithfully loved and
mourned,--but he, Philip, ought not to have humored him in these
fastidious scruples--he ought to have confided everything to Thelma. He
remembered now that he had once or twice been uneasy lest rumors of his
frequent visits to Miss Vere might possibly reach his wife's ears,--but,
then, as his purpose was absolutely disinterested and harmless, he did
not dwell on this idea, but dismissed it, and held his peace for
Neville's sake, contenting himself with the thought that, "If Thelma
_did_ hear anything, she would never believe a word against me."

He could not quite see where his fault had been,--though a fault there
was somewhere, as he uneasily felt--and he would no doubt have started
indignantly had a small elf whispered in his ear the word "_Conceit._"
Yet that was the name of his failing--that and no other. How many men,
otherwise noble-hearted, are seriously, though often unconsciously,
burdened with this large parcel of blown-out Nothing! Sir Philip did not
appear to be conceited--he would have repelled the accusation with
astonishment,--not knowing that in his very denial of the fault, the
fault existed. He had never been truly humbled but twice in his
life,--once as he knelt to receive his mother's dying benediction,--and
again when he first loved Thelma, and was uncertain whether his love
could be returned by so fair and pure a creature. With these two
exceptions, all his experience had tended to give him an excellent
opinion of himself,--and that he should possess one of the best and
loveliest wives in the world, seemed to him quite in keeping with the
usual course of things. The feeling that it was a sheer impossibility
for her to ever believe a word against him, rose out of this inward
self-satisfaction--this one flaw in his otherwise bright, honest, and
lovable character--a flaw of which he himself was not aware. Now, when
for the third time his fairy castle of perfect peace and pleasure seemed
shaken to its foundations,--when he again realized the uncertainty of
life or death, he felt bewildered and wretched. His chiefest pride was
centred in Thelma, and she--was gone! Again he reverted to the miserable
idea that, like a melancholy refrain, haunted him--"What if I should
find her _dead_!"

Absorbed in painful reflections, he was a very silent companion for
Lorimer during the luncheon which they took at a quiet little restaurant
well known to the _habitues_ of Pall Mall and Regent Street. Lorimer
himself had his own reasons for being equally depressed and
anxious,--for did he not love Thelma as much as even her husband
could?--nay, perhaps more, knowing his love was hopeless. Not always
does possession of the adored object strengthen the adoration,--the
rapturous dreams of an ideal passion have often been known to surpass
reality a thousandfold. So the two friends exchanged but few
words,--though they tried to converse cheerfully on indifferent
subjects, and failed in the attempt. They had nearly finished their
light repast, when a familiar voice saluted them.

"It _is_ Errington,--I thocht I couldna be mistaken! How are ye both?"

Sandy Macfarlane stood before them, unaltered, save that his scanty
beard had grown somewhat longer. They had seen nothing of him since
their trip to Norway, and they greeted him now with unaffected
heartiness, glad of the distraction his appearance afforded them.

"Where do you hail from, Mac?" asked Lorimer, as he made the new-comer
sit down at their table. "We haven't heard of you for an age."

"It _is_ a goodish bit of time," assented Macfarlane, "but better late
than never. I came up to London a week ago from Glasgie,--and my heed
has been in a whirl ever since. Eh, mon! but it's an awful place!--maybe
I'll get used to't after a wee whilie."

"Are you going to settle here, then?" inquired Errington, "I thought you
intended to be a minister somewhere in Scotland?"

Macfarlane smiled, and his eyes twinkled.

"I hae altered ma opee-nions a bit," he said. "Ye see, ma aunt in
Glasgie's deed--"

"I understand," laughed Lorimer. "You've come in for the old lady's
money?"

"Puir body!" and Sandy shook his head gravely. "A few hours before she
died she tore up her will in a screamin' fury o' Christian charity and
forethought,--meanin' to mak anither in favor o' leavin' a' her warld's
trash to the Fund for Distributin' Bible Knowledge among the
Heathen--but she never had time to fulfill her intention. She went off
like a lamb,--and there being no will, her money fell to me, as the
nearest survivin' relative--eh! the puir thing!--if her dees-imbodied
spirit is anywhere aboot, she must be in a sair plight to think I've got
it, after a' her curses!"

"How much?" asked Lorimer amused.

"Oh, just a fair seventy thousand or so," answered Macfarlane
carelessly.

"Well done, Mac!" said Errington, with a smile, endeavoring to appear
interested. "You're quite rich, then? I congratulate you!"

"Riches are a snare," observed Macfarlane, sententiously, "a snare and a
decoy to both soul and body!" He laughed and rubbed his hands,--then
added with some eagerness, "I say, how is Lady Errington?"

"She's very well," answered Sir Philip hurriedly, exchanging a quick
look with Lorimer, which the latter at once understood. "She's away on a
visit just now. I'm going to join her this afternoon."

"I'm sorry she's away," said Sandy, and he looked very disappointed;
"but I'll see her when she comes back. Will she be long absent?"

"No, not long--a few days only"--and as Errington said this an
involuntary sigh escaped him.

A few days only!--God grant it! But what--what if he should find her
_dead_?

Macfarlane noticed the sadness of his expression, but prudently forbore
to make any remark upon it. He contented himself with saying--

"Weel, ye've got a wife worth having--as I dare say ye know. I shall be
glad to pay my respects to her as soon as she returns. I've got your
address, Errington--will ye take mine?"

And he handed him a small card on which was written in pencil the number
of a house in one of the lowest streets in the East-end of London.
Philip glanced at it with some surprise.

"Is _this_ where you live?" he asked with emphatic amazement.

"Yes. It's just the cleanest tenement I could find in that neighborhood.
And the woman that keeps it is fairly respectable."

"But with your money," remonstrated Lorimer, who also looked at the
card, "I rather wonder at your choice of abode. Why, my dear fellow, do
you _know_ what sort of a place it is?"

A steadfast, earnest, _thinking_ look came into Macfarlane's deep-set,
grey eyes.

"Yes, I do know, pairfectly," he said in answer to the question. "It's a
place where there's misery, starvation, and crime of all sorts,--and
there I am in the very midst of it--just where I want to be. Ye see, I
was meant to be a meenister--one of those douce, cannie, comfortable
bodies that drone in the pulpit about predestination and original sin,
and so forth a--sort, of palaver that does no good to ony resonable
creature--an' if I had followed out this profession, I make nae doot
that, with my aunt's seventy thousand, I should be a vera comfortable,
respectable, selfish type of a man, who was decently embarked in an
apparently important but really useless career--"

"Useless?" interrupted Lorimer archly. "I say, Mac, take care! A
minister of the Lord, _useless_!"

"I'm thinkin' there are unco few meen-isters o' the Lord in this warld,"
said Macfarlane musingly. "Maist o' them meen-ister to themselves, an'
care na a wheen mair for Christ than Buddha. I tell ye, I was an altered
man after we'd been to Norway--the auld pagan set me thinkin' mony an'
mony a time--for, ma certes! he's better worthy respect than mony a
so-called Christian. And as for his daughter--the twa great blue eyes
o' that lassie made me fair ashamed o' mysel'. Why? Because I felt that
as a meen-ister o' the Established Kirk, I was bound to be a sort o'
heep-ocrite,--ony thinkin', reasonable man wi' a conscience canna be
otherwise wi' they folk,--and ye ken, Errington, there's something in
your wife's look that maks a body hesitate before tellin' a lee.
Weel--what wi' her face an' the auld _bonde's_ talk, I reflectit that I
couldna be a meen-ister as meen-isters go,--an' that I must e'en follow
oot the Testament's teachings according to ma own way of thinkin'.
First, I fancied I'd rough it abroad as a meesionary--then I remembered
the savages at hame, an' decided to attend to them before onything else.
Then my aunt's siller came in handy--in short, I'm just gaun to live on
as wee a handfu' o' the filthy lucre as I can, an' lay oot the rest on
the heathens o' London. An' it's as well to do't while I'm alive to see
to't mysel'--for I've often observed that if ye leave your warld's gear
to the poor when ye're deed, just for the gude reason that ye canna tak
it to the grave wi' ye,--it'll melt in a wonderfu' way through the hands
o' the 'secretaries' an' 'distributors' o' the fund, till there's
naething left for those ye meant to benefit. Ye maunna think I'm gaun to
do ony preachin' business down at East-end,--there's too much o' that
an' tract-givin' already. The puir soul whose wee hoosie I've rented
hadna tasted bit nor sup for three days--till I came an' startled her
into a greetin' fit by takin' her rooms an' payin' her in advance--eh!
mon, ye'd have thought I was a saint frae heaven if ye'd heard her
blessin' me,--an' a gude curate had called on her just before and had
given her a tract to dine on. Ye see, I maun mak mysel' a _friend_ to
the folk first, before I can do them gude--I maun get to the heart o'
their troubles--an' troubles are plentiful in that quarter,--I maun live
among them, an' be ane o' them. I wad mind ye that Christ Himsel' gave
sympathy to begin with,--he did the preachin' afterwards."