The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

"So he is in Paris, then." Bulstrode had supposed so, and did not doubt that the Duke had gone there to find news of his wife, possibly as well to see Madame de Bassevigne.

Poor fellow, if he were searching for the Duchess! Well, Bulstrode would keep up his end, he had nothing else for the time being to do but to mind other people's business. He put it so to himself. Indeed he could not but believe it was fortunate for more than one person that something could keep him from minding his own.

An undefined discretion kept him from going to the Moated Grange, as to himself he styled the retreat the Duchess had made of The Dials. And, in spite of the absolute freedom now given him to prowl about amongst the books, in spite of his "evenings out" as he called them, Jimmy found the time at Westboro' to drag lamentably. His own affairs, which he so faithlessly denied, came to him in batches of letters whose questions could not be solved by return mail. He became over his own thoughts restless, and he sent a telegram to his host: "Better have a look at things here yourself. Can't possibly stop on longer than…" And he set a day.

"If Westboro', poor devil, has to look forward to a life of this unaccompanied grandeur," he pitied him. The lines and files of soft-footed, impersonal servants, the perfect stilted attention, the silence, and the inhumanness of a man's lonely life, became intolerable to Jimmy Bulstrode. Even though Frances, Duchess of Westboro', had truly said that the castle was a delightful home, Bulstrode began to wonder what that word comprised or meant: certainly nothing like his occupation of another man's house or like any life that is lived alone.

At the end of the week that the American spent at Westboro' he had condensed the castle, as he said to himself, as far as possible, to the proportions of a Harlem flat, and he lived in it. In the almost small breakfast room whose windows gave on the terrace, and where all the December sun that was visible came to find him, he took his meals; each of them but dinner, which was determinedly and imperially served by five men in one of the dining-rooms, and at which function, as he expressed it, he shut his eyes and just ate blindly through. He lived out of doors all day, took his tea in his dressing-room, and read and smoked until the august dinner hour called him down to dress and dine alone. For a week he lived "without sight of a human being," so he said, for the domestics were only machines. And, towards the end of the week, he would have gone to see any one: an enemy would have been too easy, and the only person within range was, of course, the Duchess of Westboro'.

Westboro' had made a confidant of Bulstrode, and the woman had not. Bulstrode liked it in her. To be sure, the cases were quite different: there was no reason why the man deserted and bruised in his pride and in his heart, should not have talked to his old friend. Westboro' accused himself of weakness.

"I've blabbed like a woman," he acknowledged ruefully.

The Duchess had not spoken nor had she, on the other hand, with the fine courage of the true woman, been in any eager haste to discover what her husband had said of her, nor had she asked if he had spoken at all. On the other hand, aided by an extreme patience and with still greater delicacy, she had waited, understanding that her guest, whose mettle and character she knew would not permit him to betray a trust, might, however naïvely, disclose what he knew without being conscious of it.

But if Bulstrode gave himself or his host away, the Duchess made no sign that she had profited by indiscretions. The impersonality of their conversations was indeed a relief to Bulstrode, and it made it possible for him to feel himself less a traitor at the Duke's hearth. But she talked very sweetly, too, of her children. She had the second picture to the Duke's of the little boys, a picture like the one Bulstrode had seen at the castle, and showed it to him as the father had done.

"Westboro' has the companion to this," he had not minded telling her as they sat together in the small room he had grown to know as well as the larger rooms of the castle. And at the end of a few moments Bulstrode quite blurted out: "Why, in Heaven's name do you women make men suffer so?"

The Duchess, who had been working, dropped her bit of muslin and looked, with her cherry lips parted and her great serious eyes, for all the world like a lady in a gift book. Her face was eighteenth century and child-like.

Bulstrode nodded. "Oh, yes, you've got so easily the upper hand, the very least of you, you know, over the best of us. It's such an unfair supremacy. You've got such a clever knowledge of little things, such a sense of the scale of the feelings, and you certainly make the very most of your power over us all. Can't you – " and his eyes, half serious and half reproachful, seemed, as he looked at her, to question all the womankind he knew – "Can't you ever love us well enough just quite simply to make us happy?"

The Duchess had taken up her sewing again, and her eyes were upon it. Bulstrode waited for a little, following her stitches through the muslin and the flash of her thimble in the light.

"Can't you?" he softly repeated. "Isn't it, after all, a good sort of way of spending one's life, this making another happy?"

"American women aren't taught so, you know," she said. "It isn't taught us that the end and aim of our existence is to make a man happy."

Her companion didn't seem at all surprised.

"And so you see," she went on, "those of us that do learn that after all there may be something in what you say – those of us that learn, only find it out after a lot of hard experiences, and it is sometimes too late!"

She seemed to think his direct question called for a distinct answer, for she admitted: "Oh, yes, of course there are some of us who would give a great deal to try. And you see, moreover," she went on with her subject as she turned the corner of her square, "you put it well when you said 'love enough.' You see that's the whole thing, Mr. Bulstrode, to love enough. One can, of course, in that case, do nearly all there is to do, can't one?"

"Nearly all," he had smiled, and added: "And a great deal more."

The household gods, whose dignity and harmony had not been disturbed during the absence of the master of Westboro', were unable, however, to give him very much comfort on his return. The Duke's motor cut quickly up the long drive and severed – clove, as it were – a way through the frosty air and let him into the park. The poor man had only a sense of wretchedness on coming home – "coming back," he now put it. Huddled down deep in his fur coat, its collar hunched round his ears, his face was as gloomy as that of a man dispossessed of all his goods; doors thrown open into the fragrant and agreeably warmed halls fetched him further home. But the knowledge that the house had been lived in during his absence was not ungrateful. He sniffed the odor of a familiar brand of cigar, and before he had quite plumbed the melancholy of the place to its depths, Jimmy Bulstrode had sunned out of one of the inner rooms, and the grasp of the friendly hand and the sound of the cheerful voice struck a chord in Westboro' that shook him.

"I've been like a fiend possessed," he said to Jimmy, in the evening when they found themselves once more before the fire. "I've scarcely known what I've been doing, or why; but I know one thing, and that is that I'm the most wretched man alive."

Bulstrode nodded. "You did go to Paris, then!"

"Yes," said the Duke, "and what I've found out there has driven me insane."

Although ignorant of the variations of his friend's discovery, Bulstrode was pretty certain of one that had not been made.

"You may, old chap," he said smoothly, "not have found out all the truth, you know."

Westboro' raised his hand. "Come," he said, "no palliations; you can't smooth over the facts. Frances is not in Paris. She has not been in Paris for several months." He paused.

"In itself not a tragedy," murmured his friend. "Paris is considered at times a place as well not to be in."

But Bulstrode's remark did not distract his friend from his narrative.

"She has not been in Paris since I saw her twelve months ago, and she has left no sign or trace of where she has gone. There is no address, no way that I can find her. Not that a discovery is not of course ultimately possible, but what, in the interval, if I should wish to write to her? What if I should need to see her? What if I should die?"

"Would you, in any of those cases, send for her?"

"I don't know," the Duke admitted.

"But," Jimmy asked him, "did you go to Paris this time to see the Duchess?"

"Since you ask me frankly," the Duke admitted, "I don't think that I did."

"At all events," the other said, "you surely did not go to spy on her, Westboro'?"

The Duke was silent, then answered quietly:

"I should never ask a question – not if it meant a certain discovery of something that I feared or suspected. I don't think I should ever seek to find out something she didn't want me to know."

Bulstrode, at the blindness of a man regarding his own intentions, smiled behind his cigar. "Well?" he helped.

"I went over to France," said the Duke – "and I suppose you'll scarcely believe a man who you say is not a lover to be capable of such sentimentality – simply, if possible, to have a sight of my wife, to see her go out of the door, or to see her go in, to see her possibly get into a carriage; and how did I know that it would not be with another man?"

"How did you find out that she had left?"

"I asked for her at her hôtel."

"The first question, then," Jimmy smiled.

"A fair one?"

"Oh, perfectly."

"I was told that the Duchess had left Paris months before."

"And then?" the other man's voice was placid as he spoke for the Duke. "Then you went to her bankers, her bakers and candlestick makers; in short, you asked all over the place, didn't you?"

The Duke swore gently. "Well, what would you have a man do?"

"Why I would have him do that," nodded Jimmy, "by all means. Any man would have done so."

In the half second of interval whilst the Duke was obliged to swallow his friend's sarcasm, Bulstrode had time to think: "Here I am, once more in the heart of an intrigue. Its fetters are all about me and I am wretchedly bound by honor not to do the simple, natural thing." Then he asked boldly: "Well, what do you think about it, Westboro'?"

"Think?" Westboro' repeated, "why, that she has deliberately escaped from me, put herself out of any possible reach; she doesn't want a reconciliation and she has gone away. She may have gone away alone and she may not, that I don't know, and I don't believe I want to know."

"Oh, you'll find her." It was with the most delightful security and contentment that his friend was able to tell the Duke this. But the cheerful note struck the poor husband the disagreeablest of blows.

"Gad!" he laughed, "what a cold brand of creature a bachelor is! 'Find her!' as one might speak of finding an umbrella that you've left by mistake at your club. Of course she can be found. There are not many mysteries that search can't solve in these days. And Duchesses don't drop off the face of the earth. I could no doubt have found her in twenty-four hours, but I didn't try to. I don't know that I want to find her. It isn't the fact of where she's gone that counts – that she wanted to go – that she has voluntarily made the separation final and complete."

"Then," persisted the bachelor, "you don't really want to find her?"

"Jove!" the Duke turned on him. "You don't know what it is to love a woman! You've got some imagination – try to use it, can't you? Can't you?"

He met the American's handsome eyes. A flush rose under Bulstrode's cheek. Westboro' put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "I beg your pardon, dear old chap."

"Oh, that's all right, old chap," Bulstrode assured cheerfully.

"My dear Duchess, it seems an unconscionable waste of time and life for any one to ignore the inevitable! It's such a prodigal throwing out of the window of riches!"

Bulstrode took her hands, both of them, in his as she stood in the winter sunshine, the open house door behind her, the terrace and its broken stairs of crumbling stone before her.

"Why, my dear lady, if I kept a diary of daily events I couldn't write down one page of good reasons why you should be living here and Westboro' up there, and I a comic go-between, in the secret of both and the confidence of one."

"Oh," she interrupted, "then you're in the confidence…?"

"Of your husband, yes," Bulstrode found himself startled into betrayal.

She drew her hands from him and walked on a little in the sunshine, and he followed by her side.

"I don't mind," she permitted, "you're such a perfect dear. I shouldn't mind at all if I thought that the confidence were a good one."

Her tone was light and cool, but the gentleman never failed to notice when the Duchess spoke of the Duke that there was a tremor under her words, a warmth, an agitation, which she vainly tried to control.

"Confidences," she said, "are very rarely just, you know, and les absents ont toujours tort."

"Oh, you don't mean…?" Jimmy emphasized.

"It was a confidence, wasn't it?"

"A real one," she was assured.

"Well then, you'll keep it, of course."

She drew the stole up round her long fair neck; her delicate head came out of the soft fur like a flower. But before she could follow up her words Bulstrode said:

"You, of course, then know how he loves you."

He felt more than knew that she trembled, and he saw an instinctive gesture which he understood meant that he should be silent.

"You and I put it quite clearly, Mr. Bulstrode, the other day." Her voice was serene again. "If only one cares enough – that's the necessary thing for every question."

"Well?"

She half shrugged, made a little motion with her white hands, and this answer said for her: "That is indeed the question, and I haven't solved it."

They stopped at the terraced walk. The low stones, dark and black, were filled in their interstices with fine lines of greenish moss. On the sunny corner the dial's shadow fell across the noon. The Duchess put her hand on the warmed stones.

"It's a heavenly day," she said, "I don't believe that the Riviera is warmer. I never have seen such an English December."

Her eyes, which had been fixed on the woods below the garden, now turned towards the house and rested on one of the upper windows where the sun fell on the little panes. The Duchess remained looking up a few seconds, then she came back to her guest.

"I started, you know, to tell you something," Bulstrode smiled at her. "I once served on a jury in the West, and although the case was a miserably sad one in every way, I suppose, I couldn't take it as seriously as I should have done, for from the first the whole thing seemed so unnecessary, and the crisis could so easily have been avoided."

"I know," she interrupted him, "but you're rather wrong. Not from the first."

He capitulated. "Well, grant it so if you like, only agree with me when I say from my own – " he put his hand down on the dial's edge. "From this lovely noon-time on, every hour you waste is clear loss. The Duke loves you as women are rarely loved, and after all," he said with something like passion in his agreeable voice "what do you all expect? Love doesn't hang on every tree for a woman to pluck at will, and you have the great luck, my dear Duchess, to be loved by your own husband. Why don't you go to him?"

"Go to him?" she echoed.

He curtly replied: "Why not?"

"My dear friend!"

"Why, didn't you forbid him to go to you?"

"Ah," she nodded, "the confidence, it was intimate indeed. But since you have got it, won't you agree that any man, if he loved a woman, would disobey her?"

"Westboro' would not."

The Duchess said coldly: "Pride is not love."

"You didn't mean him, then, to keep his vow?"

"Yes," she slowly thought out, "I did indeed, with all my heart."

"And now?"

She turned towards the house again, and as she walked back, said: "I don't quite know."

And Bulstrode asked her: "That is why you are here, to find out?"

"Partly."

Her companion's face grew stern. The Duchess did not see it for her eyes had again swept the upper window. At her side Bulstrode went on: "You have taken ten years to discover that you did not love your husband. You have taken one year to begin to wonder, to doubt, to suspect, to half think that you do; it's an unstable state of heart, Duchess, terribly unstable."

The woman stopped short at his side, and now as she lifted up her eyes and saw him, was a little startled if not frightened at his expression.

"Unstable," she repeated, with a world of scorn in her voice. "How can you use that word to me, knowing the facts of the case?"

"Oh, a man," said Bulstrode rather impatiently, "is a worthless, wretched piece of mechanism altogether. I grant you that – utterly unworthy the love and confidence of any good woman. He is capable of all the vagaries and infidelities possible. We'll judge him so. But," he continued, "these wandering, vagrant derelicts have been known to tie fast, to find port, to drop anchor. They have even brought great riches and important treasure into harbor, fetched a world of good luck home. There's only one thing in the universe that can keep a man, Duchess, only one."

"Well?" she encouraged him.

"A woman's heart," he said deeply, "a woman's true tenderness; and it needs all that heart, all its love, all its patience and sacrifice to keep that man – all and forever."

He saw her bosom heave; she had thrown her fur off, as if its warmth stifled her. Vivid color had come into her face. Her pallor for the time was destroyed, and as she flashed a rebellious look at him, a look of revolt and selfhood, he seemed to see again the American girl – wilful, egotistical, spoiled – an imperious creature whose caprices had been opposed to the Duke's Anglo-Saxon temperament and national egoism.

At this moment, the window the Duchess looked towards opened part way: it was under the eaves and there must have been a dovecote near, for there came the soft sound of cooing like the call of a young bird. Possibly the gentle note reached the woman's hearing as well, for her face transcendently softened.

"I think," she said with evident effort to speak in a commonplace tone, "it would be quite futile to urge Cecil to come."

"Oh, I shan't advise him so."

Bulstrode's quick answer made her look at him in so much surprise that he went on to say: "I would not, in justice to him, in justice to the great love I have been permitted to see, advise him to come."

The Duchess, during the months of analysis, suffering and experience, had not admitted to herself that should her husband return she would receive him, nor had she decided as to quite how obdurate she would be, and she was curious at the attitude of this gentle friend. She naïvely asked:

"Why would you not advise him so?"

Bulstrode said, still continuing his pleasant sententiousness, "The woman's heart must be as stable as the man's is uncertain, and the man who comes back after such a separation must not find a woman who does not know her own mind. He must, on the contrary, find one who has no mind or will or life but his."

As he looked at the person to whom he spoke he was somewhat struck by the maternal look in her: he had never clearly discovered it before. Her breast from which the fur had fallen, as it rose and fell under her soft gown, was full, generous, and beautiful; even as he spoke in a certain accusation against her, she seemed to have altered.

"Westboro'," he said a little confused, "must come back to a woman, Duchess, to a woman – to a consoler. I wish I could express myself – almost to a mother – as well as to a wife."

The ardent color dyed her face again; her lips moved. She put out her hand towards him, and as he took it he understood that she wished him to bid her good-by and to leave her alone. He heard what she struggled to say:

"He must not come, he must not come."

"No," he accepted sadly for his friend, "No, he must not come."

Bulstrode had chosen those times for going to The Dials when his host was least likely to take note of his absence; but it happened that more than once the Duke missed him at just the wrong moment, and more than once had been given the direction in which Bulstrode's footsteps had turned.

One morning, during a talk with his agent, Westboro' – the map of the district before him – enquired what had ever been done with the property known as The Dials, and into whose hands the old place had fallen. It seemed that it had been let for some months to a foreigner, a widow, who lived there, and alone.

Westboro' considered the farms and forests, as they lay mapped out before him, at the extreme foot of the castle's parks. It was a little square of some fifty acres by itself; it had never interested him before.

How long did the lease run on? Did the agent know? He believed for another year.

The Duke gave instructions to have the property looked into, with a view to purchase. And as the man put up his papers, he vouchsafed to his employer:

"The present tenant is very exclusive; she sees nobody, has never, I believe, even been to the Abbey. An old gardener who has been kept on says the servants are all foreign."

The Duke gave only a tepid interest to the information which would have passed entirely from his mind had it not been for his next meeting with Jimmy Bulstrode.

As much to shake off the impression his last talk with the Duchess had left on his mind, as to prolong his exercise, Jimmy had gone down out of the garden and across the place on foot over the rough winter fields with their rimy furrows and their barren floors. As he made his way towards the bottom hedge, looking for a stile he knew would be there a little farther on, cutting an entrance out through the thorn to the road, he met Westboro', like himself, on foot, and with his hand upon the stile. The presence of the Duke where Bulstrode knew he was least thought to be, and where he was now sadly sure he was not opportune, made Jimmy stop short, troubled, and, not for a moment thinking that the fact of his being there himself was singular, he made his way determinedly through the stile. As he greeted his friend, his own demeanor was decidedly one which said: "Don't go on in that direction, follow rather out of the turnstile with me." And he led his friend rather brusquely down the bank, hitching his arm in Westboro's, forced him along with him into the road.

"I ran down here to look over these meadows," said Westboro.' "You seem yourself, in a way, to be pacing the land off!"

"Oh, I love cross-country walking," said Bulstrode warmly.

"You must," smiled the Duke, "to have cut off into those barren fields. Were you lost?" Westboro' stopped and looked back. "You must have come directly down through The Dials."

"The Dials?" the American helplessly repeated. "Do you mean the old house and garden?"

Bulstrode's manner and speech were rarely curt and evasive, but he seemed this time embarrassed and taken unawares. As the two men sat in the motor which waited for the Duke down the road, Westboro' fixed his glass in his eye and looked hard for a second at his friend. Bulstrode's cheerful face was distinctly disturbed.

"I'm thinking something of buying The Dials," Westboro', after a moment, said against the wind.

Poor Jimmy. If the house had not sufficiently up till now materialized out of his fancy as a possession, it declared itself at once, without doubt, as something he must look after. It was only a little bit of England, luckily —

"Well," he exclaimed, "to be frank, old man, I've, too, been thinking I should like to buy that property. You could surely spare me this little corner of Glousceshire."

"Spare it!" cried Westboro', "my dear chap, fancy how ripping to have you a landlord here! To catch and hold you so! We'll go over the whole place together. My agent shall put the matter through for you."

"Good God, no!" said Bulstrode, "don't let your man have wind of any such a deal. The place would go up like a rocket in price. If you really yourself care to withdraw as much as possible, that's the most you can do. But for God's sake keep off the place, like a good fellow."