Some days before this the Duchess of Darte had driven out in the
morning to make some purchases and as she had sat in her large
landau she had greatly missed Miss Brent who had always gone with
her when she had made necessary visits to the shops. She was not
fond of shopping and Miss Brent had privately found pleasure in
it which had made her a cheerful companion. To the quiet elderly
woman whose life previous to her service with this great lady had
been spent in struggles with poverty, the mere incident of entering
shops and finding eager salesmen springing forward to meet her
with bows and amiable offers of ministration, was to the end of
her days an almost thrilling thing. The Duchess bought splendidly
though quietly. Knowing always what she wanted, she merely required
that it be produced, and after silently examining it gave orders
that it should be sent to her. There was a dignity in her decision
which was impressive. She never gave trouble or hesitated. The
staffs of employees in the large shops knew and reveled in her
while they figuratively bent the knee. Miss Brent had been a happy
satisfied woman while she had lived. She had died peacefully after
a brief and, as it seemed at first, unalarming illness at one of
her employer's country houses to which she had been amiably sent
down for a holiday. Every kindness and attention had been bestowed
upon her and only a few moments before she fell into her last
sleep she had been talking pleasantly of her mistress.
"She is a very great lady, Miss Hallam," she had said to her nurse.
"She's the last of her kind I often think. Very great ladies seem
to have gone out--if you know what I mean. They've gone out."
The Duchess had in fact said of Brent as she stood a few days
later beside her coffin and looked down at her contentedly serene
face, something not unlike what Brent had said of herself.
"You were a good friend, Brent, my dear," she murmured. "I shall
always miss you. I am afraid there are no more like you left."
She was thinking of her all the morning as she drove slowly down
to Bond Street and Piccadilly. As she got out of her carriage to
go into a shop she was attracted by some photographs of beauties in
a window and paused to glance at them. Many of them were beauties
whom she knew, but among them were some of society's latest
discoveries. The particular photographs which caught her eye were
two which had evidently been purposely placed side by side for
an interesting reason. The reason was that the two women, while
obviously belonging to periods of some twenty years apart as the
fashion of their dress proved, were in face and form so singularly
alike that they bewilderingly suggested that they were the same
person. Both were exquisitely nymphlike, fair and large eyed and
both had the fine light hair which is capable of forming itself
into a halo. The Duchess stood and looked at them for the moment
spell-bound. She slightly caught her breath. She was borne back so
swiftly and so far. Her errand in the next door shop was forgotten.
She went into the one which displayed the photographs.
"I wish to look at the two photographs which are so much alike,"
she said to the man behind the counter.
He knew her as most people did and brought forth the photographs
at once.
"Many people are interested in them, your grace," he said. "It was
the amazing likeness which made me put them beside each other."
"Yes," she answered. "It is almost incredible." She looked up
from the beautiful young being dressed in the mode of twenty years
past.
"This is--WAS--?" she corrected herself and paused. The man
replied in a somewhat dropped voice. He evidently had his reasons
for feeling it discreet to do so.
"Yes--WAS. She died twenty years ago. The young Princess Alixe of
X--" he said. "There was a sad story, your grace no doubt remembers.
It was a good deal talked about."
"Yes," she replied and said no more, but took up the modern
picture. It displayed the same almost floating airiness of type,
but in this case the original wore diaphanous wisps of spangled
tulle threatening to take wings and fly away leaving the girl
slimness of arms and shoulders bereft of any covering whatsoever.
"This one is--?" she questioned.
"A Mrs. Gareth-Lawless. A widow with a daughter though she looks
in her teens. She's older than the Princess was, but she's kept
her beauty as ladies know how to in these days. It's wonderful to
see them side by side. But it's only a few that saw her Highness
as she was the season she came with the Prince to visit at Windsor
in Queen Victoria's day. Did your grace--" he checked himself
feeling that he was perhaps somewhat exceeding Bond Street limits.
"Yes. I saw her," said the Duchess. "If these are for sale I will
take them both."
"I'm selling a good many of them. People buy them because the
likeness makes them a sort of curiosity. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless is
a very modern lady and she is quite amused."
The Duchess took the two photographs home with her and looked at
them a great deal afterwards as she sat in her winged chair.
They were on her table when Coombe came to drink tea with her in
the afternoon.
When he saw them he stood still and studied the two faces silently
for several seconds.
"Did you ever see a likeness so wonderful?" he said at last.
"Never," she answered. "Or an unlikeness. That is the most wonderful
of all--the unlikeness. It is the same body inhabited by two souls
from different spheres."
His next words were spoken very slowly.
"I should have been sure you would see that," he commented.
"I lost my breath for a second when I saw them side by side in the
shop window--and the next moment I lost it again because I saw--what
I speak of--the utter world wide apartness. It is in their eyes.
She--," she touched the silver frame enclosing the young Princess,
"was a little saint--a little spirit. There never was a young
human thing so transparently pure."
The rigid modeling of his face expressed a thing which, himself
recognizing its presence, he chose to turn aside as he moved towards
the mantel and leaned on it. The same thing caused his voice to
sound hoarse and low as he spoke in answer, saying something she
had not expected him to say. Its unexpectedness in fact produced
in her an effect of shock.
"And she was the possession of a brute incarnate, mad with unbridled
lust and drink and abnormal furies. She was a child saint, and
shook with terror before him. He killed her."
"I believe he did," she said unsteadily after a breath space of
pause. "Many people believed so though great effort was made to
silence the stories. But there were too many stories and they were
so unspeakable that even those in high places were made furiously
indignant. He was not received here at Court afterwards. His own
emperor could not condone what he did. Public opinion was too
strong."
"The stories were true," answered the hoarse low voice. "I myself,
by royal command, was a guest at the Schloss in the Bavarian Alps
when it was known that he struck her repeatedly with a dog whip.
She was going to have a child. One night I was wandering in the
park in misery and I heard shrieks which sent me in mad search.
I do not know what I should have done if I had succeeded, but I
tried to force an entrance into the wing from which the shrieks
came. I was met and stopped almost by open violence. The sounds
ceased. She died a week later. But the most experienced lying could
not hide some things. Even royal menials may have human blood in
their veins. It was known that there were hideous marks on her
little dead body."
"We heard. We heard," whispered the Duchess.
"He killed her. But she would have died of horror if he had not
struck her a blow. She began to die from the hour the marriage
was forced upon her. I saw that when she was with him at Windsor."
"You were in attendance on him," the Duchess said after a little
silence. "That was when I first knew you."
"Yes." She had added the last sentence gravely and his reply was
as grave though his voice was still hoarse. "You were sublime
goodness and wisdom. When a woman through the sheer quality of
her silence saves a man from slipping over the verge of madness
he does not forget. While I was sane I dared scarcely utter her
name. If I had gone mad I should have raved as madmen do. For that
reason I was afraid."
"I knew. Speech was the greatest danger," she answered him. "She
was a princess of a royal house--poor little angel--and she had
a husband whose vileness and violence all Europe knew. How DARED
they give her to him?"
"For reasons of their own and because she was too humbly innocent
and obedient to rebel."
The Duchess did not ask questions. The sublime goodness of which
he had spoken had revealed its perfection through the fact that
in the long past days she had neither questioned nor commented.
She had given her strong soul's secret support to him and in his
unbearable hours he had known that when he came to her for refuge,
while she understood his need to the uttermost, she would speak
no word even to himself.
But today though she asked no question her eyes waited upon him
as it were. This was because she saw that for some unknown reason
a heavy veil had rolled back from the past he had chosen to keep
hidden even from himself, as it were, more than from others.
"Speech is always the most dangerous thing," he said. "Only the
silence of years piled one upon the other will bury unendurable
things. Even thought must be silenced. I have lived a lifetime
since--" his words began to come very slowly--as she listened she
felt as if he were opening a grave and drawing from its depths
long buried things, "--since the night when I met her alone in a
wood in the park of the Schloss and--lost hold of myself--lost it
utterly."
The Duchess' withered hands caught each other in a clasp which
was almost like a passionate exclamation.
"There was such a night. And I was young--young--not an iron bound
vieillard then. When one is young one's anguish is the Deluge
which ends the world forever. I had lain down and risen up and
spent every hour in growing torture for months. I had been forced
to bind myself down with bands of iron. When I found myself, without
warning, face to face with her, alone in the night stillness of
the wood, the bands broke. She had dared to creep out in secret
to hide herself and her heartbroken terror in the silence and
darkness alone. I knew it without being told. I knew and I went
quite mad for the time. I was only a boy. I threw myself face
downward on the earth and sobbed, embracing her young feet."
Both of them were quite silent for a few moments before he went
on.
"She was not afraid," he said, even with something which was like
a curious smile of tender pity at the memory. "Afterwards--when I
stood near her, trembling--she even took my hand and held it. Once
she kissed it humbly like a little child while her tears rained
down. Never before was there anything as innocently heartbreaking.
She was so piteously grateful for love of any kind and so heart
wrung by my misery."
He paused again and looked down at the carpet, thinking. Then he
looked up at her directly.
"I need not explain to you. You will know. I was twenty-five. My
heart was pounding in my side, my blood thudded through my veins.
Every atom of natural generous manhood in my being was wild with
fury at the brutal wrong done her exquisiteness. And she--"
"She was a young novice fresh from a convent and very pious," the
Duchess' quiet voice put in.
"You understand," he answered. "She knelt down and prayed for
her own soul as well as mine. She thanked God that I was kind and
would forgive her and go away--and only remember her in my prayers.
She believed it was possible. It was not, but I kissed the hem of
her white dress and left her standing alone--a little saint in a
woodland shrine. That was what I thought deliriously as I staggered
off. It was the next night that I heard her shrieks. Then she
died."
The Duchess knew what else had died--the high adventure of youth
and joy of life in him, the brilliant spirit which had been himself
and whose utter withdrawal from his being had left him as she had
seen him on his return to London in those days which now seemed
a memory of a past life in a world which had passed also. He had
appeared before her late one afternoon and she had for a moment
been afraid to look at him because she was struck to the depths of
her being by a sense of seeing before her a body which had broken
the link holding it to life and walked the earth, the crowded
streets, the ordinary rooms where people gathered, a dead thing.
Even while it moved it gazed out of dead eyes. And the years had
passed and though they had been friends he had never spoken until
now.
"Such a thing must be buried in a tomb covered with a heavy stone
and with a seal set upon it. I am unsealing a tomb," he said. Then
after a silence he added, "I have, of cause, a reason." She bent
her head because she had known this must be the case.
"There is a thing I wish you to understand. Every woman could
not."
"I shall understand."
"Because I know you will I need not enter into exact detail. You
will not find what I say abnormal."
There had been several pauses during his relation. Once or twice
he had stopped in the middle of a sentence as if for calmer breath
or to draw himself back from a past which had suddenly become again
a present of torment too great to face with modern steadiness. He
took breath so to speak in this manner again.
"The years pass, the agony of being young passes. One slowly
becomes another man," he resumed. "I am another man. I could not
be called a creature of sentiment. I have given myself interests
in existence--many of them. But the sealed tomb is under one's feet.
Not to allow oneself to acknowledge its existence consciously is
one's affair. But--the devil of chance sometimes chooses to play
tricks. Such a trick was played on me."
He glanced down at the two pictures at which she herself was looking
with grave eyes. It was the photograph of Feather he took up and
set a strange questioning gaze upon.
"When I saw this," he said, "this--exquisitely smiling at me under
a green tree in a sunny garden--the tomb opened under my feet,
and I stood on the brink of it--twenty-five again."
"You cannot possibly put it into words," the Duchess said. "You
need not. I know." For he had become for the moment almost livid.
Even to her who so well knew him it was a singular thing to see
him hastily set down the picture and touch his forehead with his
handkerchief.
She knew he was about to tell her his reason for this unsealing
of the tomb. When he sat down at her table he did so. He did not
use many phrases, but in making clear his reasons he also made
clear to her certain facts which most persons would have ironically
disbelieved. But no shadow of a doubt passed through her mind
because she had through a long life dwelt interestedly on the many
variations in human type. She was extraordinarily interested when
he ended with the story of Robin.
"I do not know exactly why 'it matters to me'--I am quoting her
mother," he explained, "but it happens that I am determined to
stand between the child and what would otherwise be the inevitable.
It is not that she has the slightest resemblance to--to anyone--which
might awaken memory. It is not that. She and her mother are of
totally different types. And her detestation of me is unconquerable.
She believes me to be the worst of men. When I entered the room
into which the woman had trapped her, she thought that I came as
one of the creature's damnable clients. You will acknowledge that
my position presents difficulties in the way of explanation to
a girl--to most adults in fact. Her childish frenzy of desire
to support herself arises from her loathing of the position of
accepting support from me. I sympathize with her entirely."
"Mademoiselle Valle is an intelligent woman," the Duchess said as
though thinking the matter out. "Send her to me and we will talk
the matter over. Then she can bring the child."