The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

Westboro' had it all laid out for himself – his ready answer showed it.

"You say I'm not a lover," he reminded his friend; "no doubt you're right, but I'm an affectionate chap, at any rate, I can't bear this – " He looked about hopelessly. The words were forced out by the high mark of his unhappiness: " – this infernal solitude. Even when a good comrade like yourself is in it, the house seems to speak to me from the empty rooms in this wing." (Bulstrode knew he was thinking of the nurseries with the low latches and little gates.) "I can't stand it. When I get out of England and abroad the place fetches me back again like a magnet. I'm a home-keeping sort of man, and I want my home."

His friend gently urged in the silence: "Well?"

"I shall wait," the Duke went on with the plan he had been forced to make out for himself. "I shall hold on, keep along a bit, and then —I shall go to the other woman." And the Duke, as he raised his eyes to his companion, fixed his glass firmly and felt that he challenged in every way Bulstrode's disapproval. "The Duchess will get her divorce – it goes without saying – will get her divorce. Why she has not already done so I can't imagine."

As Westboro' appeared inclined to leave the subject there, Bulstrode pressed him further: "And then?"

"I fancy I shall marry the other woman."

Bulstrode started. The complexion of the idea was so foreign to him that he could not for a moment let himself think that he understood it.

"You will," he said, "marry one woman whilst you distinctly love another?"

The Duke nodded. "Love," he reflected, "I begin to believe I don't know anything about. It must, of course, suppose some sort of return. If, as you say, I love another woman, I'm not made of the stuff that can go along doing so without anything on her side."

The dressing clock at the bedside on the little stand chimed the hour. It was two o'clock. The Duke of Westboro' rose.

"You must think me a colossal ass, my dear friend, but if it had not been for your awfully good companionship and your kindness, I dare say that by now I should have already made some sort of fatal blunder."

At the door Bulstrode put his hand on his friend's arm, and, as though nothing in the conversation apart from the Duchess had any real significance, he said simply:

"You are then, in sum, simply waiting…?"

"Oh, yes," agreed the other rather blankly. And the other man knew that he had been told only half the thought in his friend's mind.

"She may get a divorce at any time, you know, quite easily, without my taking any further steps."

"Oh, I see perfectly," Jimmy accepted; and as the door closed after his host, he said, almost aloud: "He thinks, then, there is half a chance that the Duchess will return." And wondering very much how far a woman is willing to sacrifice herself for a man, granted that she loves him, he did not finish his phrase.

The next day Bulstrode, no longer able to resist the beckoning country, went out, as it were, to it as if he said "Here I am – what will you do with me?"

If Glousceshire could, for a while, make him forget the problems he had been housed with, brush him up a bit, he thought it would be a good thing. Therefore, when his horse came up to the door he threw himself on the animal in a nervous haste to be gone, and setting off in the direction of Penhaven, obeyed its summons at last.

Westboro' had run up to London for overnight, and Bulstrode, at the Duke's something more than invitation, a sort of appeal, was to stay indefinitely on. It must be confessed that he rather selfishly looked forward to the course of an untroubled afternoon, to an evening amongst the books whose files had tempted him for days.

But the pity of all he had sympathetically been closeted with was great in his mind. Whereas his native delicacy and slow judgment had led him to keep silent until now towards his host, it was in no wise because Jimmy had not quite made up his mind that he would not spare Westboro' at all when the moment, if it ever came, should present itself for him to speak.

As he rode along he thought of the Duchess naturally in Paris, surrounded by a train of ardent admirers; she had them always, everywhere. She was disillusioned, of course, probably angry, piqued, and unfortunately she had been betrayed; and he shrugged with a gentle desperation as he made a mental picture of the last scene: the inevitable divorce, the wrecking of another household, unless – unless – one of them loved sufficiently to save the situation.

His thoughts came to a standstill as his horse stopped short before a gate: his riding had fetched him up before it. The mare stretched out her long neck, set free by a relaxing rein; she sniffed the latch and put her head over the wicket, and the rider saw that they had come across fields, and were at the entrance of a deserted property. The gate gave access to a forest road where the thick underbrush was untidy, and on whose walk the piles of leaves lay as they had fallen. He could see no farther in, and thinking to come at the end upon a forsaken garden, the precincts of an untenanted country house, he leaned down, tried the gate which fairly swung into his hand, and the mare passed through. There was the delicious intimacy about the woods which the sense of coming alone and unexpectedly upon the old and forsaken gives the traveller. He is a discoverer of secrets, a legitimate spy upon stories which he flatters himself he is the first to read. He becomes intimate with another man's past, and as he must necessarily, in all ignorance, tell himself his own tales, indiscretion may be said to be a doubtful quantity.

A bit back in the bare brown woods he saw the flash of a marble pillar; it shone white and clear in the setting of russet and against the boles of the trees. A little farther away gleamed another figure on its base of fluted marble, and still farther along, leaf-overlaid and thus effaced, he could discern the contour of a sunken garden. The place grew more pretentious as he slowly picked his way, and he was unprepared for coming suddenly onto a gravel path from which he thought the leaves had been blown away. Here Bulstrode dismounted, and, with the bridle over his arm, walked towards the path's end, pleasantly interested, and now, as he thought it should by this do, the house struck on him through an archway contrived by the training of old trees over a circle of stone. The house broke on him in the shape of an Elizabethan manse; long and old with soft rose-color of brick in places, and the color of a faded leaf in others where the dampness had soaked in and had, through countless mid-summer suns, been burned out again. Before the windows flashed the red of bright curtains. The house was distinctly, and he thought it seemed happily, occupied. He stopped where he stood by the arch, a little confused and a little balked in his romantic treat, and not the less feeling himself an intruder. But before he could turn his horse and unobtrusively lead her back the way they had come, the house's occupant, no doubt she who gave it the air of being so happily tenanted, had come out with a garden hat on her head, a pair of garden shears in her hands, and with the precision of intention, turned sharply towards the arched forest walk, and in this way squarely upon Bulstrode.

The surprise to him was, without doubt, the greater, for she knew him at once, and he for a second did not recognize her. Her extreme English air – the straw hat tied under her chin and the face it framed, so decidedly altered, bewildered him. His first greeting, mentally, before he spoke aloud to her, was masculine. "Why, her beauty! What in heaven's name had she done with it?"

"What are you doing here?"

They both asked it at once, and the lady having lived so long in an insular country was adept in its possibilities of great hospitality as well as of freezing out an unwelcome visitor. She froze the poor gentleman and then, touched by his utter bewilderment and his innocence of wilful intrusion, she smiled more humanly.

"Won't you, since you are here, Mr. Bulstrode, come in and have a cup of tea?"

She at once followed their mutual question by saying: "As for being here, you will admit that given the part of the country it is, no one has a better right!"

"Oh, I'll admit anything you like," he laughed, "if you'll only admit us. You see we are two."

The lady came up to him in a more friendly manner; she gave him her hand and she really smiled beautifully. Then she put her hand on the nose of the horse, with the touch one has for familiar things.

"She's a perfect dear, isn't she – a dear. So you are riding her then? Well, you'll find her easy to tie, she stands well. There's nothing she can spoil, that's the charm of such an old, tumble-down place."

As Bulstrode followed after the trailing dress just touching the gravel with a rustling sound, he had the feeling of being suddenly, willy-nilly, taken and put into the heart of a story book. He smiled. "Well, I've done the first chapter and now I've got to go on in the book, I suppose, whether I want to be here or not, to the end."

"I thought I was making a voyage of discovery," he told her as they sat in the low room before a fire and before her table and tea cups. "I fancied I was the only person within miles round. I expect no one has a right to be so bold, but I really didn't dream the place was lived in, as, of course, you know."

"Drink your tea," she bade, "and eat your toast before I make you tell me if you have come to see me as a messenger."

"And if I have?"

It was delicious tea, and the American of her had somehow found cream for it, which, un-English luxury, the American in him fully appreciated. The liquid in the blue-and-white cups was pale as saffron and the toast was a feather.

"At five o'clock there's nothing like it in the world," he breathed. "I didn't hope for this to-day. I had recklessly thrown five o'clock over, for I'm alone at the castle." He drank his tea, finished, and with a sigh. Then he said: "I can actually venture to ask you for another cup, for I am nobody's messenger or envoy, my dear, nobody's. I'm just an indiscreet, humdrum individual who has been too charmingly rewarded for an intrusion. You saw my surprise, didn't you? And I'm not very clever at putting on things."

The Duchess tacitly accepted, it is to be supposed, for she made him a second cup of tea, slowly.

"You don't know that I've been thinking about you all day," he said, "and I can frankly say that I've been making a very different picture of you indeed."

She took no notice whatsoever of his personality.

"You are in England, then," she said rather formally. "I never think of my own country people as being here. I always think of Americans as being in the States, men above all, for they fit so badly in the English atmosphere, don't they? It's always incongruous to me to hear their "r's" and "a's" rattling about in this soft language. It's horrid of me to speak so. You, of course, are out of the category. But as you stood there, with Banshee's nose over your shoulder you fitted quite beautifully in with everything. I don't believe I should mind you, ever, anywhere, and yet I more naturally think of you at Newport, don't you see?"

Her companion cried: "Oh, no, I'm in England, and you can't alter the fact, at least if you can, please don't; for Newport on the fifteenth of December, and with no such tea or fire – "

"Oh," she permitted, "you may stay. I said you fitted – only – "

Bulstrode interposed: "Don't at least for a few moments entertain any 'buts' and 'onlys' – they are nearly as bad as those magical travelling trunks that would transport me to the United States. It is so – let me say – neutral in this place, I should think I might remain. I don't know why you are here or with whom, nor for how long, or for how deep, but it is singularly perfect to have found you."

His hostess had left her seat behind the table, and taking a chair by the fireside where Bulstrode was sitting, undid the ribbons of her garden hat and let the basket-like object fall on the floor.

"You must promise me, first of all, that you will not say you have seen me. Otherwise I shall leave here to-morrow and nobody shall ever again know where I am."

However her command might conflict with what was in his mind, he was obliged to give her his word. He had no right not to do so.

"And nothing," she said, "must make you break this promise, Mr. Bulstrode. I know how good you are, and how you do all sorts of Quixotic funny things, but in this case please – please – "

"Mind my own business?" he nodded. "I will, Duchess, I will."

She looked at him steadily a moment and seemed satisfied, for she relaxed the tensity of her manner, which was the first Americanism she had displayed, and in her pretty soft drawl asked him, with less perfunctory interest than her words implied: "You are at Westboro'?"

"Yes, since the twenty-fifth."

"And you're staying on?"

"I seem to be more or less of a fixture – until the holidays, I expect."

"Lucky you," she breathed, and at his expression of candid surprise she half laughed. "Oh, I mean as far as the castle goes – isn't it really too delightful?"

He was able to say honestly: "Quite the most beautiful house I have ever seen."

"Yes, I think so too," she nodded. "It's not so important as many others but it's more perfect, more like a home."

Bulstrode sat back in his chair and tried to make her forget him. Between the fire and the shadow he wanted to watch her face from which he now saw that the beauty he remembered had not faded but had been transformed. She was beautiful in another way: the brilliant, blooming girl, fully blown at eighteen, with the dazzling charm of health, no longer existed in the Duchess of Westboro'. She had refined very much indeed. The aggressive bearing of the American princess had been replaced by the colder, more serene hauteur of the English Duchess. She was evidently a very proud woman, the arch of her brows said so, and the line of her lips. All her lines were sharper and finer. Her color, and he could not, as he studied her, quite regret it; her color was quite gone. Her pallor made her more delicate, and her eyes – it was in them that Bulstrode thought he saw the greatest change of all; they were now fixed upon him, there was something melancholy in their profound and deeply circled gray.

"What rooms will they have given you?" she asked after a moment. Then – "Wait," she commanded, "I know. The south wing, the Henry IV. rooms that look into the gardens. I always gave those to the men. There's something extremely homelike about them, don't you think so? And have you ever seen anything like those winter roses in that court? Did any bloom this year? The trellis runs up along the terrace balustrade – or possibly you don't care for flowers? Of course you wouldn't as a girl does."

A girl– with that face and those eyes? Why, she must have been talking back ten years. Bulstrode drew a breath.

"I know the roses you mean. It would be difficult to forget them. Your gardener takes such pride in them. For some reason they are never gathered; they fall as they hang. The gardener, it so happened, told me so."

She was looking at him with an intensity almost painful, but she said nothing further, and after a moment more Bulstrode replied to another question.

"As it happens I don't occupy the Henry IV. rooms. I have mine quite on the other side of the castle. Don't they call them the 'West Rooms'?"

She caught her breath a little, but she was in splendid training with all her years of English life behind her. Her face, nevertheless, showed how well she knew those rooms, without the added note in her voice as she said:

"Oh, those West Rooms – you have those."

And in the quiet that fell as her eyes sought the fire, he quite knew how her thoughts travelled down the hall to the open nursery doors with their waiting gates. Whatever were her reasons for being here, Bulstrode saw that he had surprised her in a moment of sadness, and that his visit in spite of his indiscretion, was not wholly unwelcome. But in the sudden way coming upon some one connected with her own life, she had been completely taken unawares, and her lapse into something like sentiment was short. Even as he looked at her she hardened.

"You have naturally not asked me anything, Mr. Bulstrode," she said, coldly enough now, "and more naturally still I have no explanations to give. By to-morrow I may be gone. I may live here for the rest of my life. I never leave my garden, I am quite unknown to the people about. If any one in Westboro' learns that I am here I shall leave at once. You will not come again. It is discourteous to say so – to ask it."

He had risen from his chair.

"Oh, but it's quite, quite dark. However will you manage?"

"We'll pick our way back well enough," he assured her. "The distance to the road is nothing, and from here on it runs straight to the abbey."

The Duchess followed him slowly to the door, and there she asked abruptly: "Is Westboro' to be down all winter? I didn't know it. I thought he was out of England or I should not have come here at all."

"Oh," Bulstrode answered, "he's too restless to be long anywhere. I expect he'll pack up and be off before we know it. He's away just now at any rate, and I'm kicking my heels up there quite alone. I'm not to return – ever?" he ventured. "You may so fully trust me that – " and he saw that she hesitated and pursued, "I shall ride up to the little gate again, and if it is unlatched…"

"Oh, don't count on it," she advised him, "don't – it's against all my plans."

Somebody in the shape of a lad had unfastened the mare, and preceded Bulstrode on foot with a lantern, by whose flicker, with much delicate caution and pretended shyness, Banshee picked her way to the road, through the woods which Bulstrode an hour before had fancied led into a deserted garden.

"You see," he put it to her delicacy to understand, "it's scarcely, in a way, fair to him – I feel it so at least. It gives me the sensation of knowing more than he does in his own house about that which presumably should be Westboro's secret."

"You mean to say," – the Duchess pinned him down, "that you'll give me away because of one of those peculiar crises of honor that makes a person betray a trust in order to salve his conscience?"

Bulstrode had come again faithfully, making the pilgrimage to the forest road, and he was not surprised that it should have finally turned out so that one day the gate yielded to his touch, and he found the Duchess if not waiting for him, distinctly there. During their delightful little talks – and they had been so – not once had the name of Bulstrode's host been mentioned; and if the lady had a curiosity concerning her lord and once master, she did not display it to the visitor.

"I mean to say," Bulstrode replied in answer to her challenge which was fiery, "that I really don't want to play false to Westboro', more false than I shall in the course of events be forced to be. Of course, your secret – I need not say so – is entirely safe. But the Duke comes back in a day or two, and rather than face him with this silence which you have imposed upon me I am going back to London before he returns."

The sewing she had chosen to finger – a Duchess, and an American one at that, is not expected to do more – lay at her feet. By her side was a basket of considerable proportions, and it was full to the brim with linen: the very fine white stuff overflowed from the basket like snow. The Duchess of Westboro's handiwork had already caught the eye of her guest. And now, as her long hands and her long finger, tipped by its golden thimble, handled her sewing, Bulstrode watched her interestedly and found great loveliness in her bending face.

"I didn't think any of you knew how to sew," he mused aloud.

"Any of us!" she smiled. "Do you, by that, mean American Duchesses? Or do you mean women who have left their husbands? Or in just what class do you think of me, regarding your last remark?"

She folded up her work and dropped her thimble in the nest of snow. Bulstrode acknowledged that his conclusion, whatever it had been, was wrong.

"When I married," the Duchess said, "I was the best four-in-hand whip for a woman in my set. I don't think I am a keen needlewoman, really, and I know then I didn't recognize a needle by sight. When my little boys were born I sent to Paris for everything they wore, and I can remember that I didn't even know for what the little clothes were intended, many of them, when they came home in my first son's layette. I have learned to sew since I came here to The Dials. I've been three months here, now, and I really must have proved a clever pupil, for I assure you that they tell me I have made some pretty things." As she spoke she held up the seam she ran, and Bulstrode, who himself confessed to not knowing a needle by sight, was forced to peer over the seam and endeavor to find her tiny stitches. He exclaimed:

"Three months! You must have been terribly dull!"

"No."

"You are known," he said, "throughout the countryside – not that I've been making inquiries, but in spite of myself I have heard – as a stranger, presumably a Frenchwoman, a widow who will probably buy The Dials."

"Oh, I shall never buy the place," she assured him, and then abruptly: "Had you been free to speak of me, what would you have told Westboro'?"

He waited a second, then answered her lightly, but with a feeling which she did not mistake: "I should have asked him to come and see you run up that seam."

"He would not have come."

Remembering very clearly how determined Westboro's decision had been, he did not affirm to the lady his belief that Westboro' would in reality have flown to her.

At the door, later, she bade him good-bye and appeared to gather her courage together, and, with a lapse into a simplicity so entire that she seemed only Frances Denby and to possess no more of title or distinction than any lovely woman, she said to him:

"Mr. Bulstrode, please don't leave the castle."

"Oh, I couldn't sit opposite my friend at dinner, I couldn't meet his eyes now, my dear child."

The Duchess touched his arm. "It's sweet of you to call me so. You are really as young as I am, and certainly I feel an age beyond you. Please stay."

The pleasure which his visits had been to her had brought something of an animation and interest to her cold face. Dressed in a dark and simple gown, her fur stole about her neck, she had this afternoon followed him out of the house into the garden and walked slowly along by his side towards the gate.

"Of all the people in the world one would choose you, I think, to be the friend of…" She caught herself up. "I mean to say, can't you forget those stupid little ideas of honor and friendship and all that?" She put it beautifully. "I, of course, will give up seeing you," she renounced, "but it will be a world of comfort just to feel that you are there."

As he did not at once succumb to her blandishments, she asked point blank:

"Promise me to stop on."

"I at least won't go without letting you know of it."

"Without my permission?"

"I won't say that."

"But I'm sure that you mean it," she nodded happily, "and you're such a help."

She was so affectionate as she bade him good-bye, that only at the little road did he begin to wonder just what help he was. Was he aiding her to detective poor Westboro'? Was he adding an air of protection to some feminine treachery?

"Oh, no," he decided; "she's incapable of any thing of the sort. But I must clear out;" and he decided that at once, so soon as Westboro' should be at home, he would take himself to ground still more neutral than The Dials had proved to be. But Westboro' showed no intention of coming immediately home. Instead, with a droll egoism, as if the fact that he had made poor Bulstrode a party to his unhappiness gave him thereafter a right to the other's time even in absence, he laid a firm hold on Jimmy. Westboro' finally put pen to paper, and the scrappy letter touched the deserted visitor; it proved to have been written at a bureau de poste in Paris:

"Don't, for God's sake, go off, old man. Keep up your end." (His end!) "Stop on at Westboro' – Use the place as if it were all put up for your amusement. Just live there so I may feel it's alive. Let me find a human being at home when I turn up. I'll wire in a day or so."