But it was necessary to consider the details of receiving him. This she did most carefully, and waited for the day of his visit.
It was about five in the afternoon when she heard a ring at the door and the editor’s brother’s voice in the hall. Although she was a poetess, she took the trouble to dress in a fashionable robe of rich material, in the Greek style just then in fashion among ladies of an artistic and romantic temper, which had been made by Ella’s Bond Street dressmaker when she was last in London. Her visitor entered the room. She looked behind him; nobody else came through the door. Where, in the name of the God, was Robert Trewe?
“O, I’m sorry,” said the painter, after the first words had been spoken. “Trewe is an odd fellow, you know, Mrs. Marchmill. He said he’d come; then he said he couldn’t. He’s rather dirty. We’ve been walking a few miles, you know; and he wanted to get home.”
“He – he’s not coming?”
“He’s not; and he asked me to make his apologies.”
She wanted to run away from this dreadful bore and cry her eyes out.
“When did you p-p-part from him?” she asked.
“Just now, in the road over there.”
“What! he has actually gone past my gates?”
“Yes. When we got to them – handsome gates they are, too – when we came to them we stopped, talking there a little while, and then he wished me goodbye and went on. The truth is, he’s a little depressed just now, and doesn’t want to see anybody. He’s a very good fellow, and a warm friend, but a little gloomy sometimes; he thinks too much of things. His poetry is rather too erotic and passionate, you know, for some tastes; and he has been upset by the Review that was published yesterday; he saw a copy of it at the station by accident. Perhaps you’ve read it?”
“No.”
“So much the better.[51] O, it is not worth thinking of; just one of those articles written to order. But he’s upset by it. That’s just Trewe’s weak point. He lives so much by himself that these things affect him much more than they would if he were in the middle of fashionable or commercial life. So he didn’t come here, making the excuse that it all looked so new and monied.[52]”
“But he knows there is sympathy here! Has he never said anything about getting letters from this address?”
“Yes, yes, he has, from John Ivy – perhaps a relative of yours, he thought, visiting here at the time?”
“Did he – like Ivy, did he say?”
“Well, I don’t think that he took any great interest in Ivy.”
“Or in his poems?”
“Or in his poems – so far as I know.[53]”
Robert Trewe took no interest in her house, in her poems, or in their writer.
The landscape-painter never realised from her conversation that it was only Trewe she wanted, and not himself.
The painter had been gone only a day or two when, while sitting upstairs alone one morning, she looked through the London paper, and read the following paragraph:
“SUICIDE OF A POET – Mr. Robert Trewe, who has been known for some years as one of our rising lyrists, committed suicide at his lodgings at Solentsea on Saturday evening by shooting himself with a revolver. Readers hardly need to be reminded that Mr. Trewe recently attracted the attention of a much wider public than had known him before, by his new volume of verse ‘Lyrics to a Woman Unknown,’ which has been welcomed in these pages, and which has been criticised in the Review. It is supposed, that the article has conduced to the sad act, as a copy of the Review was found on his writing-table; and he has been observed to be depressed since the article appeared.”
The paper also published his letter to a friend:
“Dear – , Before these lines reach your hands I shall be free from the trouble of seeing, hearing, and knowing more of the things around me. I will not trouble you by giving my reasons for the step I have taken, though they were sound and logical. Perhaps if I had a mother, or a sister, or a female friend tenderly devoted to me, I might think worth continuing my life. I have long dreamt of such a devoted female creature, as you know; and she inspired my last volume; the imaginary woman. There is no real woman behind the title. She has remained to the last unmet, unwon. I think it desirable to mention this so that no real woman were to blame as the cause of my death. Tell my landlady that I am sorry but I shall soon be forgotten. R. TREWE.”
Ella sat for a while motionless, then rushed into her room and fell upon her face on the bed.
Her grief shook her to pieces; and she lay in sorrow for more than an hour. Broken words came every now and then[54] from her: “O, if he had only known of me – known of me – me!.. O, if I had only once met him – only once; and kissed him – let him know how I loved him! Perhaps it would have saved his dear life!… But no – it was not allowed! God did not allow; and happiness was not for him and me!”
From this moment on her life was barren.
She wrote to the landlady at Solentsea, and informing Mrs. Hooper that Mrs. Marchmill had seen in the papers the sad account of the poet’s death, and as she had been much interested in Mr. Trewe during her stay at Solentsea, she asked Mrs. Hooper to obtain a small portion of his hair, and send it her as a memorial of him, as also the photograph that was in the frame.
By the return-post a letter arrived containing what had been asked. Ella cried over the portrait; she tied the lock of hair with white ribbon and put in her bosom, and she kissed it every now and then.
“What’s the matter?” said her husband, looking up from his newspaper on one of these occasions. “Crying over something? A lock of hair? Whose is it?”
“He’s dead!” she murmured.
“Who?”
“I don’t want to tell you, Will, just now!” she said.
“O, all right.”
He walked away; and when he got down to his factory in the city Marchmill thought of it again.
He, too, was aware that a suicide had taken place recently at the house where they had stayed at Solentsea. Having seen the volume of poems in his wife’s hand, and heard fragments of the landlady’s conversation about Trewe when they were her tenants, he at once said to himself, “Why of course it’s he! How the devil did she get to know him?[55]”
Then he went on with his daily affairs. By this time Ella at home had made a decision to attend the funeral. Thinking very little now what her husband or any one else might think of her, she wrote Marchmill a note, saying that she was called away for the afternoon and evening, but would return on the following morning. This she left on his desk, and having given the same information to the servants, went out of the house on foot.
When Mr. Marchmill reached home early in the afternoon the servants looked anxious. The nurse told him that her mistress’s sadness during the past few days had been such that she feared she had gone out to drown herself. Marchmill thought that she had not done that. He drove to the railway-station, and took a ticket for Solentsea.
It was dark when he reached the place. He asked the way to the cemetery, and soon reached it. The man told him where one or two funerals on the day had taken place. He walked in the direction and saw someone beside a newly made grave. She heard him, and sprang up.
“Ell, how silly this is!” he said indignantly. “Running away from home – I’ve never heard such a thing! How could you, a married woman with three children and a fourth coming, go losing your head like this over a dead lover!”
She did not answer.
“I hope it didn’t go far between you and him. I won’t have any more of this sort of thing; do you hear?”
“Very well,” she said.
He conducted her out of the cemetery. It was impossible to get back that night; and he took her to a miserable little hotel close to the station which they left early in the morning.
52
making the excuse that it all looked so new and monied – оправдываясь тем, что всё здесь выглядит новым и денежным