CHAPTER I

REGENT'S PARK--BRETON AND LIZZIE

"Yes," said Mrs. Bright, "he missed it all the time."

"Missed what?" asked Miss Rankin.

"'Is good luck," sighed Mrs. Bright.--HENRY GALLEON.

I

Francis Breton had known, during the weeks that preceded his letter to Rachel, torture that became to him at last so personal that he felt deliberate malignant agency behind its ingenious devices.

At first it had seemed that that wonderful hour with Rachel would satisfy his needs for a long time to come; he had only, when life was hard, dull, colourless, monotonous, to recall it--to see again her movements, to hear her voice, to remember to the last and tiniest detail the things that she had said, to feel that clutch of her hand upon his coat, and instantly he was inflamed, exultant.

So, for a time, it was. Into every moment of his daily life he worked this scene--Rachel was always with him, never, for a single instant, did he doubt that, in some fashion or another, she was coming to him. He had purchased an interest in some little business that had to do, for the most part, with candles, and down to the City now every morning he went.

The candles prospered in a small but steady fashion and he found them of a more thrilling and romantic interest than he would once have believed possible. He had always known that he had a business head and now that his life was equable and regular he was astonished at the useful man that he was becoming.

He liked the men with whom he worked, he found that some of his friends of the old days sought him out ... he was a.s.sured that he had only to wait for the death of his grandmother for his restoration to the Beaminster bosom.

He was, during these first weeks, tranquil, almost happy, feeling that Mrs. Pont and the rest were, with every hour, pa.s.sing more surely from his world, nourishing always, like h.o.a.rded treasure, his consciousness of Rachel....

Then a faint, a very faint restlessness crept upon him. The repet.i.tion of those precious moments was growing dry; from the very frequency of their recounting came impatience. His a.s.surance that she would, ultimately, come to him grew chill.

He needed now something more tangible, and gradually there grew with him the conviction that she would write. She had said, very clearly and distinctly, that she would not--but, if she cared as he knew that she did, then this silence must be as impossible for her as for himself.

His state of mind now was that he expected a letter. When he came back from the City at half-past six or seven he expected to find lying there on the green tablecloth, the letter--In the morning his man appeared with a jug of hot water in one hand and the letters in the other--There, one of those tantalizing, mysterious envelopes, must be the letter.

At first disappointment was rea.s.sured with "Oh! it will be there to-morrow." But as the days pa.s.sed and the silence grew the torture developed. Now after that first search in the morning, after that swift sharp glance to the green tablecloth came physical pain--sickened heavy drooping of the spirits when the world looked one vast deserted plain of monotonous dullness, when the hours and hours and days and days that yet remained to life seemed intolerable in their dreary mult.i.tude.

He would go to bed early in order that the morning letters might come the sooner; he fled home from the City, his heart beating like a drum, as he mounted his stairs.

Only one line, one line, would have been sufficient. It needed only the rea.s.surance that she thought of him, that she still cared ... _such_ a short letter would have given him all the comfort he needed.

The need for some sign came as much from his impatience with the whole situation as from his love for Rachel, but this, because he always saw himself as a fine coloured centre of some pa.s.sionate crisis, he naturally did not perceive. His whole idea of Rachel was, as the days pa.s.sed, increasingly a picture that was far enough from reality--On the one side Rachel--on the other side his restoration to his family ... now as he waited it seemed to him that he was in danger of losing both the one thing and the other.

There was nothing that so speedily drove Breton to frenzy as enforced inaction.

After all, they had been together so little--

Breton was cursed with his imagination. All his instability of character came from his imagination. He looked ahead and saw such wonderful events, he knew why people did this or that; he could see so clearly what would happen did he act in such and such a way.... He traced future action through many hazardous windings into a safe, fair Haven, and for the sake of the Haven embarked on the preliminary dangers--discovered, of course, too late, that the Haven was a dream. He saw Rachel now, sitting alone, thinking of him, loving him, forcing herself to be fair to her blockhead of a husband, feeling at last that she could endure it no longer, and so writing! or he saw her falling in love with that same blockhead, forgetting everyone and everything else.

In all of this his grandmother played her part. He was aware that behind all the attraction that he had had for Rachel was the consciousness that he was a rebel against the d.u.c.h.ess--they were rebels together--that, he knew, was the way that she thought of it.

He was aware, however, that he was a rebel only because he was forced to be one. Let his grandmother hold out her old arms to him and into them he would run! He would be restored to the family--horribly he wanted it!

The spirit with which he had returned to England was one of hot vengeance that would, indeed, have suited the finest of Rachel's moods, but that spirit had, he knew, subtly changed--Here then, with regard to Rachel, he felt a traitor--Would she come to him, why then he would do anything for her even to pulling the d.u.c.h.ess's nose--but if she would not come to him, why then he would rather that the Beaminsters should take him to themselves and make him one of them.

But he felt--although he had no tangible arguments to support his feeling--that the old lady was "round the corner"--"she knows, you bet, all about things--what I'd give for just one talk with her.... I believe we'd be friends----"

His weakness of character came, as he himself knew, from his inability to allow life to stay at a good safe dull level. "To-day's dull--Something _must_ happen before evening; I must _make_ it happen,"

and then he would go and do something foolish--

London excited him--the lighted shops, the smell of food and flowers and women and leather and tobacco, the sky--signs flashing from s.p.a.ce to s.p.a.ce, the carts and omnibuses, the shouts and cries and sudden silences, the confused life of the place so that you could never say, "_This_ is London," but could only, in retrospect say, "Ah, _that_ must have been London," and still know that you had failed to grasp its secret.

The dirt and shabbiness and lack of plan and good humour and crime and indecency and priggishness--its life!

Many things out of all this glory called him--racing, women, drink, the gutter one minute, the stars the next--from them all he held himself aloof because of Rachel ... and Rachel meanwhile perhaps did not care.

As Christmas approached he became utterly obsessed by this one thought--that he must have a letter. His obsession had been able, during these weeks, to clutch the tighter in that he had seen nothing of Lizzie Rand. Throughout the autumn he had encountered her very seldom--

Ever since that night in the summer when he had taken her to the theatre she had avoided him, and he decided that she had been shocked at his confession about Rachel--"You never know about women--I shouldn't have thought that would have shocked her--But there it is; you never can tell." Lizzie had been very good for him; he missed her now. He would tackle her, he said, one day.

Then not only with every day, but with every hour the torture grew. He avoided Christopher, because Christopher might see things. His work faded like mist from before him--He could not sleep, but lay on his back thinking of what she would say if she _did_ write, whether she were thinking of him--how she found his own silence and what she felt about it.

Then he heard the astonishing news that Lizzie Rand had gone down to Seddon to stay.... At first he thought that he would write to her and beg her to find out for him all that she could as to Rachel's mind.

But Lizzie's avoidance of him checked him there--if she had been shocked at his just telling her, why then she would not be likely to help him now--No, that would not be fair to Rachel....

It occurred to him then that Rachel had asked Lizzie in order that she might speak of him, have with her someone who could tell her about his daily life, and so, without breaking her word, yet be in some kind of communication with him--

Soon this became with him a certainty. It a.s.sured him that her patience was exhausted and that she would forgive, and more than forgive, a letter from him.

He wrote--then in an agony would have s.n.a.t.c.hed it back again, and yet was glad that the post had taken it from him. He had broken his word, and shown himself for the miserable poor creature that he was. She would never trust him again, but surely now she would write were it only to dismiss him for ever.

He waited and the agony once again grew phantasmal in its terrors; then swiftly came word first that Roddy Seddon had been flung from his horse and was hovering between life and death, then that he would not die, but--"Paralysis of the spine--always have to lie on his back, I'm afraid" (this from Christopher)--then, finally this note:

"SEDDON COURT,

NEAR LEWES,

SUSs.e.x.

DEAR MR. BRETON,

I have to come up to London next Tuesday for the day--I shall return here that same evening. I have a message for you. Could we have tea together that afternoon--or what do you say to a walk in Regent's Park? Perhaps we could talk there more easily--I'll meet you at the entrance to the Botanical Gardens about 3.30 unless I hear from you.

Yours sincerely,

E. RAND."

II

The effect upon him of Roddy's accident was indescribable. He was sorry, terribly sorry--dreadful for a man whose whole interests are in physical things to be laid on his back, like this, for ever. Surely it would be better for him to die, and then, at that, sober thought would forsake him--He did not wish Seddon to die, but around the possibility of it, always turning, wheeling, his mind fluttered.