At midnight the great supper party
to celebrate the reconciliation of Mr. Beamish and
Duchess Susan broke up, and beneath a soft fair sky
the ladies, with their silvery chatter of gratitude
for amusement, caught Chloe in their arms to kiss
her, rendering it natural for their cavaliers to exclaim
that Chloe was blest above mortals. The duchess
preferred to walk. Her spirits were excited, and
her language smelt of her origin, but the superb fleshly
beauty of the woman was aglow, and crying, ’I
declare I should burst in one of those boxes just
as if you’d stalled me!’ she fanned a
wind on her face, and sumptuously spread her spherical
skirts, attended by the vanquished and captive Colonel
Poltermore, a gentleman manifestly bent on insinuating
sly slips of speech to serve for here a pinch of powder,
there a match. ‘Am I?’ she was heard
to say. She blew prodigious deep-chested sighs
of a coquette that has taken to roaring.
Presently her voice tossed out:
‘As if I would!’ These vivid illuminations
of the Colonel’s proceedings were a pasture to
the rearward groups, composed of two very grand ladies,
Caseldy, Mr. Beamish, a lord, and Chloe.
‘You man! Oh!’ sprang
from the duchess. ’What do I hear?
I won’t listen; I can’t, I mustn’t,
I oughtn’t.’
So she said, but her head careened,
she gave him her coy reluctant ear, with total abandonment
to the seductions of his whispers, and the lord let
fly a peal of laughter. It had been a supper of
copious wine, and the songs which rise from wine.
Nature was excused by our midnight naturalists.
The two great dames, admonished
by the violence of the nobleman’s laughter,
laid claim on Mr. Beamish to accompany them at their
parting with Chloe and Duchess Susan.
In the momentary shuffling of couples
incident to adieux among a company, the duchess murmured
to Caseldy:
‘Have I done it well.’
He praised her for perfection in her
acting. ’I am at your door at three, remember.’
‘My heart’s in my mouth,’ said she.
Colonel Poltermore still had the privilege
of conducting her the few farther steps to her lodgings.
Caseldy walked beside Chloe, and silently,
until he said, ’If I have not yet mentioned
the subject ’
‘If it is an allusion to money
let me not hear it to-night,’ she replied.
’I can only say that my lawyers
have instructions. But my lawyers cannot pay
you in gratitude. Do not think me in your hardest
review of my misconduct ungrateful. I have ever
esteemed you above all women; I do, and I shall; you
are too much above me. I am afraid I am a composition
of bad stuff; I did not win a very particularly good
name on the Continent; I begin to know myself, and
in comparison with you, dear Catherine ’
‘You speak to Chloe,’
she said. ’Catherine is a buried person.
She died without pain. She is by this time dust.’
The man heaved his breast. ‘Women
have not an idea of our temptations.’
’You are excused by me for all
your errors, Caseldy. Always remember that.’
He sighed profoundly. ‘Ay, you have a Christian’s
heart.’
She answered, ‘I have come to the conclusion
that it is a Pagan’s.’
‘As for me,’ he rejoined,
’I am a fatalist. Through life I have seen
my destiny. What is to be, will be; we can do
nothing.’
’I have heard of one who expired
of a surfeit that he anticipated, nay proclaimed,
when indulging in the last desired morsel,’ said
Chloe.
‘He was driven to it.’
‘From within.’
Caseldy acquiesced; his wits were
clouded, and an illustration even coarser and more
grotesque would have won a serious nod and a sigh from
him. ‘Yes, we are moved by other hands!’
‘It is pleasant to think so:
and think it of me tomorrow. Will you!’
said Chloe.
He promised it heartily, to induce
her to think the same of him.
Their separation was in no way remarkable.
The pretty formalities were executed at the door,
and the pair of gentlemen departed.
‘It’s quite dark still,’
Duchess Susan said, looking up at the sky, and she
ran upstairs, and sank, complaining of the weakness
of her legs, in a chair of the ante-chamber of her
bedroom, where Chloe slept. Then she asked the
time of the night. She could not suppress her
hushed ‘Oh!’ of heavy throbbing from minute
to minute. Suddenly she started off at a quick
stride to her own room, saying that it must be sleepiness
which affected her so.
Her bedroom had a door to the sitting-room,
and thence, as also from Chloe’s room, the landing
on the stairs was reached, for the room ran parallel
with both bed-chambers. She walked in it and threw
the window open, but closed it immediately; opened
and shut the door, and returned and called for Chloe.
She wanted to be read to. Chloe named certain
composing books. The duchess chose a book of sermons.
’But we’re all such dreadful sinners,
it’s better not to bother ourselves late at
night.’ She dismissed that suggestion.
Chloe proposed books of poetry. ’Only I
don’t understand them except about larks, and
buttercups, and hayfields, and that’s no comfort
to a woman burning,’ was the answer.
‘Are you feverish, madam?’
said Chloe. And the duchess was sharp on her:
‘Yes, madam, I am.’
She reproved herself in a change of
tone: ’No, Chloe, not feverish, only this
air of yours here is such an exciting air, as the doctor
says; and they made me drink wine, and I played before
supper Oh! my money; I used to say I could
get more, but now!’ she sighed ’but
there’s better in the world than money.
You know that, don’t you, you dear? Tell
me. And I want you to be happy; that you’ll
find. I do wish we could all be!’ She wept,
and spoke of requiring a little music to compose her.
Chloe stretched a hand for her guitar.
Duchess Susan listened to some notes, and cried that
it went to her heart and hurt her. ’Everything
we like a lot has a fence and a board against trespassers,
because of such a lot of people in the world,’
she moaned. ’Don’t play, put down
that thing, please, dear. You’re the cleverest
creature anybody has ever met; they all say so.
I wish I Lovely women catch men,
and clever women keep them: I’ve heard
that said in this wretched place, and it ’s a
nice prospect for me, next door to a fool! I
know I am.’
‘The duke adores you, madam.’
’Poor duke! Do let him
be sleeping so woebegone with his mouth
so, and that chin of a baby, like as if he dreamed
of a penny whistle. He shouldn’t have let
me come here. Talk of Mr. Beamish. How he
will miss you, Chloe!’
‘He will,’ Chloe said sadly.
‘If you go, dear.’
‘I am going.’
‘Why should you leave him, Chloe?’
‘I must.’
‘And there, the thought of it makes you miserable!’
‘It does.’
‘You needn’t, I’m sure.’
Chloe looked at her.
The duchess turned her head.
’Why can’t you be gay, as you were at the
supper-table, Chloe? You’re out to him like
a flower when the sun jumps over the hill; you’re
up like a lark in the dews; as I used to be when I
thought of nothing. Oh, the early morning; and
I’m sleepy. What a beast I feel, with my
grandeur, and the time in an hour or two for the birds
to sing, and me ready to drop. I must go and undress.’
She rushed on Chloe, kissed her hastily,
declaring that she was quite dead of fatigue, and
dismissed her. ’I don’t want help,
I can undress myself. As if Susan Barley couldn’t
do that for herself! and you may shut your door, I
sha’n’t have any frights to-night, I’m
so tired out.’
‘Another kiss,’ Chloe said tenderly.
’Yes, take it’ the
duchess leaned her cheek ’but I’m
so tired I don’t know what I’m doing.’
‘It will not be on your conscience,’ Chloe
answered, kissing her warmly.
Will those words she withdrew, and
the duchess closed the door. She ran a bolt in
it immediately.
‘I’m too tired to know
anything I’m doing,’ she said to herself,
and stood with shut eyes to hug certain thoughts which
set her bosom heaving.
There was the bed, there was the clock.
She had the option of lying down and floating quietly
into the day, all peril past. It seemed sweet
for a minute. But it soon seemed an old, a worn,
an end-of-autumn life, chill, without aim, like a
something that was hungry and toothless. The bed
proposing innocent sleep repelled her and drove her
to the clock. The clock was awful: the hand
at the hour, the finger following the minute, commanded
her to stir actively, and drove her to gentle meditations
on the bed. She lay down dressed, after setting
her light beside the clock, that she might see it
at will, and considering it necessary for the bed
to appear to have been lain on. Considering also
that she ought to be heard moving about in the process
of undressing, she rose from the bed to make sure
of her reading of the guilty clock. An hour and
twenty minutes! she had no more time than that:
and it was not enough for her various preparations,
though it was true that her maid had packed and taken
a box of the things chiefly needful; but the duchess
had to change her shoes and her dress, and run at
bo-peep with the changes of her mind, a sedative
preface to any fatal step among women of her complexion,
for so they invite indecision to exhaust their scruples,
and they let the blood have its way. Having so
short a space of time, she thought the matter decided,
and with some relief she flung despairing on the bed,
and lay down for good with her duke. In a little
while her head was at work reviewing him sternly,
estimating him not less accurately than the male moralist
charitable to her sex would do. She quitted the
bed, with a spring to escape her imagined lord; and
as if she had felt him to be there, she lay down no
more. A quiet life like that was flatter to her
idea than a handsomely bound big book without any print
on the pages, and without a picture. Her contemplation
of it, contrasted with the life waved to her view
by the timepiece, set her whole system rageing; she
burned to fly. Providently, nevertheless, she
thumped a pillow, and threw the bedclothes into proper
disorder, to inform the world that her limbs had warmed
them, and that all had been impulse with her.
She then proceeded to disrobe, murmuring to herself
that she could stop now, and could stop now, at each
stage of the advance to a fresh dressing of her person,
and moralizing on her singular fate, in the mouth
of an observer. ’She was shot up suddenly
over everybody’s head, and suddenly down she
went.’ Susan whispered to herself:
’But it was for love!’ Possessed by the
rosiness of love, she finished her business, with
an attention to everything needed that was equal to
perfect serenity of mind. After which there was
nothing to do, save to sit humped in a chair, cover
her face and count the clock-tickings, that said,
Yes no; do don’t; fly stay;
fly fly! It seemed to her she heard
a moving. Well she might with that dreadful heart
of hers!
Chloe was asleep, at peace by this
time, she thought; and how she envied Chloe!
She might be as happy, if she pleased. Why not?
But what kind of happiness was it? She likened
it to that of the corpse underground, and shrank distastefully.
Susan stood at her glass to have a
look at the creature about whom there was all this
disturbance, and she threw up her arms high for a languid,
not unlovely yawn, that closed in blissful shuddering
with the sensation of her lover’s arms having
wormed round her waist and taken her while she was
defenceless. For surely they would. She took
a jewelled ring, his gift, from her purse, and kissed
it, and drew it on and off her finger, leaving it
on. Now she might wear it without fear of inquiries
and virtuous eyebrows. O heavenly now if
only it were an hour hence; and going behind galloping
horses!
The clock was at the terrible moment.
She hesitated internally and hastened; once her feet
stuck fast, and firmly she said, ‘No’;
but the clock was her lord. The clock was her
lover and her lord; and obeying it, she managed to
get into the sitting-room, on the pretext that she
merely wished to see through the front window whether
daylight was coming.
How well she knew that half-light
of the ebb of the wave of darkness.
Strange enough it was to see it showing
houses regaining their solidity of the foregone day,
instead of still fields, black hedges, familiar shapes
of trees. The houses had no wakefulness, they
were but seen to stand, and the light was a revelation
of emptiness. Susan’s heart was cunning
to reproach her duke for the difference of the scene
she beheld from that of the innocent open-breasted
land. Yes, it was dawn in a wicked place that
she never should have been allowed to visit. But
where was he whom she looked for? There!
The cloaked figure of a man was at the corner of the
street. It was he. Her heart froze; but her
limbs were strung to throw off the house, and reach
air, breathe, and (as her thoughts ran) swoon, well-protected.
To her senses the house was a house on fire, and crying
to her to escape.
Yet she stepped deliberately, to be
sure-footed in a dusky room; she touched along the
wall and came to the door, where a foot-stool nearly
tripped her. Here her touch was at fault, for
though she knew she must be close by the door, she
was met by an obstruction unlike wood, and the door
seemed neither shut nor open. She could not find
the handle; something hung over it. Thinking
coolly, she fancied the thing must be a gown or dressing-gown;
it hung heavily. Her fingers were sensible of
the touch of silk; she distinguished a depending bulk,
and she felt at it very carefully and mechanically,
saying within herself, in her anxiety to pass it without
noise, ‘If I should awake poor Chloe, of all
people!’ Her alarm was that the door might creak.
Before any other alarm had struck her brain, the hand
she felt with was in a palsy, her mouth gaped, her
throat thickened, the dust-ball rose in her throat,
and the effort to swallow it down and get breath kept
her from acute speculation while she felt again, pinched,
plucked at the thing, ready to laugh, ready to shriek.
Above her head, all on one side, the thing had a round
white top. Could it be a hand that her touch had
slid across? An arm too! this was an arm!
She clutched it, imagining that it clung to her.
She pulled it to release herself from it, desperately
she pulled, and a lump descended, and a flash of all
the torn nerves of her body told her that a dead human
body was upon her.
At a quarter to four o’clock
of a midsummer morning, as Mr. Beamish relates of
his last share in the Tale of Chloe, a woman’s
voice, in piercing notes of anguish, rang out three
shrieks consecutively, which were heard by him at
the instant of his quitting his front doorstep, in
obedience to the summons of young Mr. Camwell, delivered
ten minutes previously, with great urgency, by that
gentleman’s lacquey. On his reaching the
street of the house inhabited by Duchess Susan, he
perceived many night-capped heads at windows, and one
window of the house in question lifted but vacant.
His first impression accused the pair of gentlemen,
whom he saw bearing drawn swords in no friendly attitude
of an ugly brawl that had probably affrighted her Grace,
or her personal attendant, a woman capable of screaming,
for he was well assured that it could not have been
Chloe, the least likely of her sex to abandon herself
to the use of their weapons either in terror or in
jeopardy. The antagonists were Mr. Camwell and
Count Caseldy. On his approaching them, Mr. Camwell
sheathed his sword, saying that his work was done.
Caseldy was convulsed with wrath, to such a degree
as to make the part of an intermediary perilous.
There had been passes between them, and Caseldy cried
aloud that he would have his enemy’s blood.
The night-watch was nowhere. Soon, however, certain
shopmen and their apprentices assisted Mr. Beamish
to preserve the peace, despite the fury of Caseldy
and the provocations ’not easy to
withstand,’ says the chronicler offered
by him to young Camwell. The latter said to Mr.
Beamish: ‘I knew I should be no match, so
I sent for you,’ causing his friend astonishment,
inasmuch as he was assured of the youth’s natural
valour.
Mr. Beamish was about to deliver an
allocution of reproof to them in equal shares, being
entirely unsuspicious of any other reason for the
alarum than this palpable outbreak of a rivalry that
he would have inclined to attribute to the charms
of Chloe, when the house-door swung wide for them
to enter, and the landlady of the house, holding clasped
hands at full stretch, implored them to run up to the
poor lady: ’Oh, she’s dead; she’s
dead, dead!’
Caseldy rushed past her.
‘How, dead! good woman?’
Mr. Beamish questioned her most incredulously, half-smiling.
She answered among her moans:
‘Dead by the neck; off the door Oh!’
Young Camwell pressed his forehead,
with a call on his Maker’s name. As they
reached the landing upstairs, Caseldy came out of the
sitting-room.
‘Which?’ said Camwell to the speaking
of his face.
‘She!’ said the other.
‘The duchess?’ Mr. Beamish exclaimed.
But Camwell walked into the room.
He had nothing to ask after that reply.
The figure stretched along the floor
was covered with a sheet. The young man fell
at his length beside it, and his face was downward.
Mr. Beamish relates: ’To
this day, when I write at an interval of fifteen years,
I have the tragic ague of that hour in my blood, and
I behold the shrouded form of the most admirable of
women, whose heart was broken by a faithless man ere
she devoted her wreck of life to arrest one weaker
than herself on the descent to perdition. Therein
it was beneficently granted her to be of the service
she prayed to be through her death. She died
to save. In a last letter, found upon her pincushion,
addressed to me under seal of secrecy toward the parties
principally concerned, she anticipates the whole confession
of the unhappy duchess. Nay, she prophesies:
“The duchess will tell you truly she has had
enough of love!” Those actual words were reiterated
to me by the poor lady daily until her lord arrived
to head the funeral procession, and assist in nursing
back the shattered health of his wife to a state that
should fit her for travelling. To me, at least,
she was constant in repeating, “No more of love!”
By her behaviour to her duke, I can judge her to have
been sincere. She spoke of feeling Chloe’s
eyes go through her with every word of hers that she
recollected. Nor was the end of Chloe less effective
upon the traitor. He was in the procession to
her grave. He spoke to none. There is a line
of the verse bearing the superscription, “My
Reasons for Dying,” that shows her to have been
apprehensive to secure the safety of Mr. Camwell:
I
die because my heart is dead
To
warn a soul from sin I die:
I
die that blood may not be shed, etc.
She feared he would be somewhere on
the road to mar the fugitives, and she knew him, as
indeed he knew himself, no match for one trained in
the foreign tricks of steel, ready though he was to
dispute the traitor’s way. She remembers
Mr. Camwell’s petition for the knotted silken
string in her request that it shall be cut from her
throat and given to him.’
Mr. Beamish indulges in verses above
the grave of Chloe. They are of a character to
cool emotion. But when we find a man, who is commonly
of the quickest susceptibility to ridicule as well
as to what is befitting, careless of exposure, we
may reflect on the truthfulness of feeling by which
he is drawn to pass his own guard and come forth in
his nakedness; something of the poet’s tongue
may breathe to us through his mortal stammering, even
if we have to acknowledge that a quotation would scatter
pathos.