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Title: The Helpmate


Author: May Sinclair



Release Date: February 26, 2006  [eBook #17867]

Language: English

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THE HELPMATE

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "Superseded," "Audrey Craven," Etc.







New York
Henry Holt and Company
1907
The Quinn & Boden Co. Press
Rahway, N.J.





BOOK I




CHAPTER I


It was four o'clock in the morning. Mrs. Walter Majendie still lay on
the extreme edge of the bed, with her face turned to the dim line of sea
discernible through the open window of the hotel bedroom.

Since midnight, when she had gone to bed, she had lain in that
uncomfortable position, motionless, irremediably awake. Mrs. Walter
Majendie was thinking.

At first the night had gone by her unperceived, black and timeless. Now
she could measure time by the dull progress of the dawn among the objects
in the room. A slow, unhappy thing, born between featureless grey cloud
and sea, it had travelled from the window, shimmered in the watery square
of the looking-glass, and was feeling for the chair where her husband had
laid his clothes down last night. He had thought she was asleep, and had
gone through his undressing noiselessly, with movements of angelic and
elaborate gentleness that well-nigh disarmed her thought. He was sleeping
now. She tried not to hear the sound of his placid breathing. Only the
other night, their wedding night, she had lain awake at this hour and
heard it, and had turned her face towards him where he lay in the divine
unconsciousness of sleep. The childlike, huddled posture of the sleeper
had then stirred her heart to an unimaginable tenderness.

Now she had got to think, to adjust a new and devastating idea to a
beloved and divine belief.

Somewhere in the quiet town a church clock clanged to the dawn, and the
sleeper stretched himself. The five hours' torture of her thinking wrung
a low sob from the woman at his side.

He woke. His hand searched for her hand. At his touch she drew it away,
and moved from under her cramped shoulder the thick, warm braid of her
hair. It tossed a gleam of pale gold to the risen light. She felt his
drowsy, affectionate fingers pressing and smoothing the springy bosses of
the braid.

The caress kindled her dull thoughts to a point of flame. She sat up and
twisted the offending braid into a rigid coil.

"Walter," she said, "_who_ is Lady Cayley?"

She noticed that the name waked him.

"Does it matter now? Can't you forget her?"

"Forget her? I know nothing about her. I want to know."

"Haven't you been told everything that was necessary?"

"I've been told nothing. It was what I heard."

There was a terrible stillness about him. Only his breath came and went
unsteadily, shaken by the beating of his heart.

She quieted her own heart to listen to it; as if she could gather from
such involuntary motions the thing she had to know.

"I know," she said, "I oughtn't to have heard it. And I can't believe
it,--I don't, really."

"Poor child! What is it that you don't believe?"

His calm, assured tones had the force of a denial.

"Walter--if you'd only say it isn't true--"

"What Edith told you?"

"Edith? Your sister? No; about that woman--that you--that she--"

"Why are you bringing all that up again, at this unearthly hour?"

"Then," she said coldly, "it _is_ true."

His silence lay between them like a sword.

She had rehearsed this scene many times in the five hours; but she had
not prepared herself for this. Her dread had been held captive by her
belief, her triumphant anticipation of Majendie's denial.

Presently he spoke; and his voice was strange to her as the voice of
another man.

"Anne," he said, "didn't she tell you? It was before I knew you. And it
was the only time."

"Don't speak to me," she cried with a sudden passion, and lay shuddering.

She rose, slipped from the bed, and went to a chair that stood by the
open window. There she sat, with her back to the bed, and her eyes
staring over the grey parade and out to the eastern sea.

"Anne," said her husband, "what are you doing there?"

Anne made no answer.

"Come back to bed; you'll catch cold."

He waited.

"How long are you going to sit there in that draught?"

She sat on, upright, immovable, in her thin nightgown, raked by the keen
air of the dawn. Majendie raised himself on his elbow. He could just see
her where she glimmered, and her braid of hair, uncoiled, hanging to her
waist. Up till now he had been profoundly unhappy and ashamed, but
something in the unconquerable obstinacy of her attitude appealed to the
devil that lived in him, a devil of untimely and disastrous humour. The
right thing, he felt, was not to appear as angry as he was. He sat up on
his pillow, and began to talk to her with genial informality.

"See here,--I suppose you want an explanation. But don't you think we'd
better wait until we're up? Up and dressed, I mean. I can't talk
seriously before I've had a bath and--and brushed my hair. You see,
you've taken rather an unfair advantage of me by getting out of bed."
(He paused for an answer, and still no answer came.)--"Don't imagine I'm
ignobly lying down all the time, wrapped in a blanket. I'm sitting on my
pillow. I know there's any amount to be said. But how do you suppose I'm
going to say it if I've got to stay here, all curled up like a blessed
Buddha, and you're planted away over there like a monument of all the
Christian virtues? Are you coming back to bed, or are you not?"

She shivered. To her mind his flippancy, appalling in the circumstances,
sufficiently revealed the man he was. The man she had known and married
had never existed. For she had married Walter Majendie believing him to
be good. The belief had been so rooted in her that nothing but his own
words or his own silence could have cast it out. She had loved Walter
Majendie; but it was another man who called to her, and she would not
listen to him. She felt that she could never go back to that man, never
sit in the same room, or live in the same house with him again. She would
have to make up her mind what she would do, eventually. Meanwhile, to get
away from him, to sit there in the cold, inflexible, insensitive, to
obtain a sort of spiritual divorce from him, while she martyrised her
body which was wedded to him, that was the young, despotic instinct she
obeyed.

"If you won't come," he said, "I suppose it only remains for me to go."

He got up, took Anne's cloak from the door where it hung, and put it
tenderly about her shoulders.

"Whatever happens or unhappens," he said, "we must be dressed."

He found her slippers, and thrust them on her passive feet. She lay back
and closed her eyes. From the movements that she heard, she gathered that
Walter was getting into his clothes. Once, as he struggled with an
insufficiently subservient shirt, he laughed, from mere miserable
nervousness. Anne, not recognising the utterance of his helpless
humanity, put that laugh down to the account of the devil that had
insulted her. Her heart grew harder.

"I am clothed, and in my right mind," said Majendie, standing before her
with his hand on the window sill.

She looked up at him, at the face she knew, the face that (oddly, it
seemed to her) had not changed to suit her new conception of him, that
maintained its protest. She had loved everything about him, from the
dark, curling hair of his head to his well-finished feet; she had loved
his slender, virile body, and the clean red and brown of his face, the
strong jaw and the mouth that, hidden under the short moustache, she
divined only to be no less strong. More than these things she had loved
his eyes, the dark, bright dwelling-places of the "goodness" she had
loved best of all in him. Used to smiling as they looked at her, they
smiled even now.

"If you'll take my advice," he said, "you'll go back to your warm bed.
You shall have the whole place to yourself."

And with that he left her.

She rose, went to the bed, arranged the turned-back blanket so as to hide
the place where he had lain, and slid on to her knees, supporting herself
by the bedside.

Never before had Anne hurled herself into the heavenly places in
turbulence and disarray. It had been her wont to come, punctual to some
holy, foreappointed hour, with firm hands folded, with a back that, even
in bowing, preserved its pride; with meek eyes, close-lidded; with
breathing hushed for the calm passage of her prayer; herself marshalling
the procession of her dedicated thoughts, virgins all, veiled even before
their God.

Now she precipitated herself with clutching hands thrown out before her;
with hot eyes that drank the tears of their own passion; with the shamed
back and panting mouth of a Magdalen; with memories that scattered the
veiled procession of the Prayers. They fled before her, the Prayers, in a
gleaming tumult, a rout of heavenly wings that obscured her heaven. When
they had vanished a sudden vagueness came upon her.

And then it seemed that the storm that had gone over her had rolled her
mind out before her, like a sheet of white-hot iron. There was a record
on it, newly traced, of things that passion makes indiscernible under its
consuming and aspiring flame. Now, at the falling of the flame, the faint
characters flashed into sight upon the blank, running in waves, as when
hot iron changes from white to sullen red. Anne felt that her union with
Majendie had made her one with that other woman, that she shared her
memory and her shame. For Majendie's sake she loathed her womanhood that
was yesterday as sacred to her as her soul. Through him she had conceived
a thing hitherto unknown to her, a passionate consciousness and hatred of
her body. She hated the hands that had held him, the feet that had gone
with him, the lips that had touched him, the eyes that had looked at him
to love him. Him she detested, not so much on his own account, as because
he had made her detestable to herself.

Her eyes wandered round the room. Its alien aspect was becoming
transformed for her, like a scene on a tragic stage. The light had
established itself in the windows and pier-glasses. The wall-paper was
flushing in its own pink dawn. And the roses bloomed again on the grey
ground of the bed-curtains. These things had become familiar, even dear,
through their three days' association with her happy bridals. Now the
room and everything in it seemed to have been created for all time to be
the accomplices and ministers of her degradation. They were well
acquainted with her and it; they held foreknowledge of her, as the
pier-glass held her dishonoured and dishevelled image.

She thought of her dead father's house, the ivy-coated Deanery in the
south, and of the small white bedroom, a girl's bedroom that had once
known her and would never know her again. She thought of her father and
mother, and was glad that they were dead. Once she wondered why their
death had been God's will. Now she saw very clearly why. But why she
herself should have been sent upon this road, of all roads of suffering,
was more than Anne could see.

She, whose nature revolted against the despotically human, had schooled
herself into submission to the divine. Her sense of being supremely
guided and protected had, before now, enabled her to act with decision
in turbulent and uncertain situations of another sort. Where other people
writhed or vacillated, Anne had held on her course, uplifted,
unimpassioned, and resigned. Now she was driven hither and thither,
she sank to the very dust and turned in it, she saw no way before her,
neither her own way nor God's way.

Widowhood would not have left her so abject and so helpless. If her
husband's body had lain dead before her there, she could have stood
beside it, and declared herself consoled by the immortal presence of his
spirit. But to attend this deathbed of her belief and of her love, love
that had already given itself over, too weak to struggle against
dissolution, it was as if she had seen some horrible reversal of the
law of death, spirit returning to earth, the incorruptible putting on
corruption.

Not only was her house of life made desolate; it was defiled. Dumb and
ashamed, she abandoned herself like a child to the arms of God, too
agonised to pray.

An hour passed.

Then slowly, as she knelt, the religious instinct regained possession of
her. It was as if her soul had been flung adrift, had gone out with the
ebb of the spiritual sea, and now rocked, poised, waiting for the turn of
the immortal tide.

Her lips parted, almost mechanically, in the utterance of the divine
name. Aware of that first motion of her soul, she gathered herself
together, and concentrated her will upon some familiar prayer for
guidance. For a little while she prayed thus, grasping at old shadowy
forms of petition as they went by her, lifting her sunken mind by main
force from stupefaction; and then, it was as if the urging, steadying
will withdrew, and her soul, at some heavenly signal, moved on alone into
the place of peace.




CHAPTER II


It was broad daylight outside. A man was putting out the lights one by
one along the cold little grey parade. A figure, walking slowly, with
down-bent head, was approaching the hotel from the pier. Anne recognised
it as that of her husband. Both sights reminded her that her life had to
be begun all over again, and to go on.

Another hour passed. Majendie had sent up a waitress with breakfast to
her room. He was always thoughtful for her comfort. It did not occur to
her to wonder what significance there might be in his thus keeping away
from her, or what attitude toward her he would now be inclined to take.
She would not have admitted that he had a right to any attitude at all.
It was for her, as the profoundly injured person, to decide as to the new
disposal of their relations.

She was very clear about her grievance. The facts, that her husband had
been pointed at in the public drawing-room of their hotel; that the
terrible statement she had overheard had been made and received casually;
that he had assumed, no less casually, her knowledge of the thing, all
bore but one interpretation: that Walter Majendie and the scandal he had
figured in were alike notorious. The marvel was that, staying in the town
where he lived and was known, she herself had not heard of it before. A
peculiarly ugly thought visited her. Was it possible that Scarby was the
very place where the scandal had occurred?

She remembered now that, when she had first proposed that watering-place
for their honeymoon, he had objected on the ground that Scarby was full
of people whom he knew. Besides, he had said, she wouldn't like it. But
whether she would like it or not, Anne, who had her bridal dignity to
maintain, considered that in the matter of her honeymoon his wishes
should give way to hers. She was inclined to measure the extent of his
devotion by that test. Scarby, she said, was not full of people who knew
_her_. Anne had been insistent and Majendie passive, as he was in most
unimportant matters, reserving his energies for supremely decisive
moments.

Anne, bearing her belief in Majendie in her innocent breast, failed at
first to connect her husband with the remarkable intimations that passed
between the two newcomers gossiping in the drawing-room before dinner.
They, for their part, had no clue linking the unapproachably strange lady
on the neighbouring sofa with the hero of their tale. The case, they
said, was "infamous." At that point Majendie had put an end to his own
history and his wife's uncertainty by entering the room. Three words and
a look, observed by Anne, had established his identity.

Her mind was steadied by its inalienable possession of the facts. She had
returned through prayer to her normal mood of religious resignation. She
tried to support herself further by a chain of reasoning. If all things
were divinely ordered, this sorrow also was the will of God. It was the
burden she was appointed to take up and bear.

She bathed and dressed herself for the day. She felt so strange
to herself in these familiar processes that, standing before the
looking-glass, she was curious to observe what manner of woman she had
become. The inner upheaval had been so profound that she was surprised
to find so little record of it in her outward seeming.

Anne was a woman whose beauty was a thing of general effect, and the
general effect remained uninjured. Nature had bestowed on her a body
strongly made and superbly fashioned. Having framed her well, she
coloured her but faintly. She had given her eyes of a light thick grey.
Her eyebrows, her lashes, and her hair were of a pale gold that had ashen
undershades in it. They all but matched a skin honey-white with that
even, sombre, untransparent tone that belongs to a temperament at once
bilious and robust. For the rest, Nature had aimed nobly at the
significance of the whole, slurring the details. She had built up the
forehead low and wide, thrown out the eyebones as a shelter for the
slightly prominent eyes; saved the short, straight line of the nose by a
hair's-breadth from a tragic droop. But she had scamped her work in
modelling the close, narrow nostrils. She had merged the lower lip with
the line of the chin, missing the classic indentation. The mouth itself
she had left unfinished. Only a little amber mole, verging on the thin
rose of the upper lip, foreshortened it, and gave to its low arc the
emphasis of a curve, the vivacity of a dimple (Anne's under lip was
straight as the tense string of a bow). When she spoke or smiled Anne's
mole seemed literally to catch up her lip against its will, on purpose to
show the small white teeth below. Majendie loved Anne's mole. It was that
one charming and emphatic fault in her face, he said, that made it human.
But Anne was ashamed of it.

She surveyed her own reflection in the glass sadly, and sadly went
through the practised, mechanical motions of her dressing; smoothing the
back of her irreproachable coat, arranging her delicate laces with a
deftness no indifference could impair. Yesterday she had had delight in
that new garment and in her own appearance. She knew that Majendie
admired her for her distinction and refinement. Now she wondered what he
could have seen in her--after Lady Cayley. At Lady Cayley's personality
she had not permitted herself so much as to guess. Enough that the woman
was notorious--infamous.

There was a knock at the door, the low knock she had come to know, and
Majendie entered in obedience to her faint call.

The hours had changed him, given his bright face a tragic, submissive
look, as of a man whipped and hounded to her feet.

He glanced first at the tray, to see if she had eaten her breakfast.

"There are some things I should like to say to you, with your permission.
But I think we can discuss them better out of doors."

He looked round the disordered room. The associations of the place were
evidently as painful to him as they were to her.

They went out. The parade was deserted at that early hour, and they found
an empty seat at the far end of it.

"I, too," she said, "have things that I should like to say."

He looked at her gravely.

"Will you allow me to say mine first?"

"Certainly; but I warn you, they will make no difference."

"To you, possibly not. They make all the difference to me. I'm not going
to attempt to defend myself. I can see the whole thing from your point of
view. I've been thinking it over. Didn't you say that what you heard you
had not heard from Edith?"

"From Edith? Never!"

"When did you hear it, then?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"From some one in the hotel?"

"Yes."

"From whom? Not that it matters."

"From those women who came yesterday. I didn't know whom they were
talking about. They were talking quite loud. They didn't know who I was."

"You say you didn't know whom they were talking about?"

"Not at first--not till you came in. Then I knew."

"I see. That was the first time you had heard of it?"

Her lips parted in assent, but her voice died under the torture.

"Then," he said, "I am profoundly sorry. If I had realised that, I would
not have spoken to you as I did."

The memory of it stung her.

"That," she said, "was--in any circumstances--unpardonable."

"I know it was. And I repeat, I am profoundly sorry. But, you see, I
thought you knew all the time, and that you had consented to forget it.
And I thought, don't you know, it was--well, rather hard on me to have it
all raked up again like that. Now I see how very hard it was on you,
dear. Your not knowing makes all the difference."

"It does indeed. If I _had_ known----"

"I understand. You wouldn't have married me?"

"I should not."

"Dear--do you suppose I didn't know that?"

"I know nothing."

"Do you remember the day I asked you why you cared for me, and you said
it was because you knew I was good?"

Her lip trembled.

"And of course I know it's been an awful shock to you to discover
that--I--was _not_ so good."

She turned away her face.

"But I never meant you to discover it. Not for yourself, like this. I
couldn't have forgiven myself--after what you told me. I meant to have
told you myself--that evening--but my poor little sister promised me that
she would. She said it would be easier for you to hear it from her. Of
course I believed her. There _were_ things she could say that I
couldn't."

"She never said a word."

"Are you sure?"

"Perfectly. Except--yes--she _did_ say----"

It was coming back to her now.

"Do you mind telling me exactly what she said?"

"N--no. She made me promise that if I ever found things in you that I
didn't understand, or that I didn't like----"

"Well--what did she make you promise?"

"That I wouldn't be hard on you. Because, she said, you'd had such a
miserable life."

"Poor Edith! So that was the nearest she could get to it. Things you
didn't understand and didn't like!"

"I didn't know what she meant."

"Of course you didn't. Who could? But I'm sorry to say that Edith made me
pretty well believe you did."

He was silent a while, trying to fathom the reason of his sister's
strange duplicity. Apparently he gave it up.

"You can't be a brute to a poor little woman with a bad spine," said he;
"but I'm not going to forgive Edith for that."

Anne flamed through her pallor. "For what?" she said. "For not having had
more courage than yourself? Think what you put on her."

"I didn't. She took it on herself. Edith's got courage enough for
anybody. She would never admit that her spine released her from all moral
obligations. But I suppose she meant well."

The spirit of the grey, cold morning seemed to have settled upon Anne.
She gazed sternly out over the eastern sea. Preoccupied with what he
considered Edith's perfidy, he failed to understand his wife's silence
and her mood.

"Edith's very fond of you. You won't let this make any difference between
you and her?"

"Between her and me it can make no difference. I am very fond of Edith."

"But the fact remains that you married me under false pretences? Is that
what you mean?"

"You may certainly put it that way."

"I understand your point of view completely. I wish you could understand
mine. When Edith said there were things she could have told you that I
couldn't, she meant that there were extenuating circumstances."

"They would have made no difference."

"Excuse me, they make all the difference. But, of course, there's no
extenuation for deception. Therefore, if you insist on putting it that
way--if--if it has made the whole thing intolerable to you, it seems to
me that perhaps I ought, don't you know, to release you from your
obligations----"

She looked at him. She knew that he had understood the meaning and the
depth of her repugnance. She did not know that such understanding is
rare in the circumstances, nor could she see that in itself it was a
revelation of a certain capacity for the "goodness" she had once believed
in. But she did see that she was being treated with a delicacy and
consideration she had not expected of this man with the strange devil.
It touched her in spite of her repugnance. It made her own that she had
expected nothing short of it until yesterday.

"_Do_ you insist?" he went on. "After what I've told you?"

"After what you've told me--no. I'm ready to believe that you did not
mean to deceive me."

"Doesn't that make any difference?" he asked tenderly.

"Yes. It makes some difference--in my judgment of you."

"You mean you're not--as Edith would say--going to be too hard on me?"

"I hope," said Anne, "I should never be too hard on any one."

"Then," he inquired, eager to be released from the strain of a most
insupportable situation, "what are we going to do next?"

He had assumed that the supreme issue had been decided by a polite
evasion; and his question had been innocent of all momentous meaning. He
merely wished to know how they were going to spend the day that was
before them, since they had to spend days, and spend them together. But
Anne's tense mind contemplated nothing short of the supreme issue that,
for her, was not to be evaded, nor yet to be decided hastily.

"Will you leave me alone," she said, "to think it over? Will you give me
three hours?"

He stared and turned pale; for, this time, he understood.

"Certainly," he said coldly, rising and taking out his watch. "It's
twelve now."

"At three, then?"

They met at three o'clock. Anne had spent one hour of bewilderment out of
doors, two hours of hard praying and harder thinking in her room.

Her mind was made up. However notorious her husband had been, between him
and her there was to be no open rupture. She was not going to leave him,
to appeal to him for a separation, to deny him any right. Not that she
was moved by a profound veneration for the legal claim. Marriage was to
her a matter of religion even more than of law. And though, at the
moment, she could no longer discern its sacramental significance through
the degraded aspect it now wore for her, she surrendered on the religious
ground. The surrender would be a martyrdom. She was called upon to lay
down her will, but not to subdue the deep repugnance of her soul.

Protection lay for her in Walter's chivalry, as she well knew. But she
would not claim it. Chastened and humbled, she would take up her wedded
life again. There was no vow that she would not keep, no duty she would
not fulfil. And she would remain in her place of peace, building up
between them the ramparts of the spiritual life.

Meanwhile she gave him credit for his attitude.

"Things can never be as they were between us," she said. "That you cannot
expect. But--"

He listened with his eyes fixed on hers, accepting from her his destiny.
She reddened.

"It was good of you to offer to release me--" He spared her.

"Are you not going to hold me to it, then?"

"I am not." She paused, and then forced herself to it. "I will try to be
a good wife to you."

"Thank you."




CHAPTER III


It was impossible for them to stay any longer at Scarby. The place was
haunted by the presence and the voice of scandalous rumour. Anne had the
horrible idea that it had been also a haunt of Lady Cayley, of the infamy
itself.

The week-old honeymoon looked at them out of its clouds with such an
aged, sinister, and disastrous aspect that they resolved to get away from
it. For the sake of appearances, they spent another week of aimless
wandering on the East coast, before returning to the town where an
unintelligible fate had decided that Majendie should have a business he
detested, and a house.

Anne had once asked herself what she would do if she were told that
she would have to spend all her life in Scale on Humber. Scale is
prevailingly, conspicuously commercial. It is not beautiful. Its streets
are squalidly flat, its houses meanly rectangular. The colouring of Scale
is thought by some to be peculiarly abominable. It is built in brown,
paved and pillared in unclean grey. Its rivers and dykes run brown under
a grey northeastern sky.

Once a year it yields reluctantly to strange passion, and Spring is
born in Scale; born in tortures almost human, a relentless immortality
struggling with visible corruption. The wonder is that it should be born
at all.

To-day, the day of their return, the March wind had swept the streets
clean, and the evening had secret gold and sharp silver in its grey. Anne
remembered how, only last year, she had looked upon such a spring on the
day when she guessed for the first time that Walter cared for her. She
was not highly endowed with imagination; still, even she had felt dimly,
and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and divine
uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.

But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne
Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie. Like some mourner for
whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral day of his beloved,
she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic Spring the immortal
cruelty and irony of Nature. She was bearing her own heart to its burial;
and each street that they passed, as the slow cab rattled heavily on its
way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable progress; it brought
her a little nearer to the grave.

From her companion's respectful silence she gathered that, though lost
to the extreme funereal significance of their journey, he was not
indifferent; he shared to some extent her mourning mood. She was grateful
for that silence of his, because it justified her own.

They were both, by their temperaments, absurdly and diversely,
almost incompatibly young. At two-and-thirty Majendie, through very
worldliness, was a boy in his infinite capacity for recoil from trouble.
Anne had preserved that crude and cloistral youth which belongs to all
lives passed between walls that protect them from the world. At
seven-and-twenty she was a girl, with a girl's indestructible innocence.
She had not yet felt within her the springs of her own womanhood.
Marriage had not touched the spirit, which had kept itself apart even
from her happiness, in the days that were given her to be happy in. Her
suffering was like a child's, and her attitude to it bitterly immature.
It bounded her; it annihilated the intellectual form of time,
obliterating the past, and intercepting any view of a future. Only,
unlike a child, and unlike Majendie, she lacked the power of the
rebound to joy.

"Dear," said her husband anxiously, as the cab drew up at the door of the
house in Prior Street, "have you realised that poor Edith is probably
preparing to receive us with glee? Do you think you could manage to look
a little less unhappy?"

The words were a shock to her, but they did her the service of a shock
by recalling her to the realities outside herself. All the courtesies
and kindnesses she owed to those about her insisted that her bridal
home-coming must lack no sign of grace. She forced a smile.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know I was looking particularly unhappy."

It struck her that Walter was not looking by any means too happy himself.

"It doesn't matter; only, we don't want to dash her down, first thing, do
we?"

"No--no. Dear Edith. And there's Nanna--how sweet of her--and Kate, and
Mary, too."

The old nurse stood on the doorstep to welcome them; her fellow-servants
were behind her, smiling, at the door. Interested faces appeared at the
windows of the house opposite. At the moment of alighting Anne was aware
that the eyes of many people were upon them, and she was thankful that
she had married a man whose self-possession, at any rate, she could rely
on. Majendie's manner was perfect. He avoided both the bridegroom's
offensive assiduity and his no less offensive affectation of
indifference. It had occurred to him that, in the circumstances, Anne
might find it peculiarly disagreeable to be stared at.

"Look at Nanna," he whispered, to distract her attention. "There's no
doubt about her being glad to see you."

Nanna grasped the hands held out to her, hanging her head on one side,
and smiling her tremorous, bashful smile. The other two, Kate and Mary,
came forward, affectionate, but more self-contained. Anne realised with a
curious surprise that she was coming back to a household that she knew,
that knew her and loved her. In the last week she had forgotten Prior
Street.

Majendie watched her anxiously. But she, too, had qualities which could
be relied on. As she passed into the house she had held her head high,
with an air of flinging back the tragic gloom like a veil from her face.
She was not a woman to trail a tragedy up and down the staircase. Above
all, he could trust her trained loyalty to convention.

The servants threw open two doors on the ground floor, and stood back
expectant. On such an occasion it was proper to look pleased and to give
praise. Anne was fine in her observance of each propriety as she looked
into the rooms prepared for her. The house in Prior Street had not lost
its simple old-world look in beautifying itself for the bride. It had put
on new blinds and clean paint, and the smell of spring flowers was
everywhere. The rest was familiar. She had told Majendie that she liked
the old things best. They appealed to her sense of the fit and the
refined; they were signs of good taste and good breeding in her husband's
family and in himself. The house was a survival, a protest against the
terrible all-invading soul of Scale on Humber.

For another reason, which she could not yet analyse, Anne was glad that
nothing had been changed for her coming. It was as if she felt that it
would have been hard on Majendie if he had been put to much expense in
renovating his house for a woman in whom the spirit of the bride had
perished. The house in Prior Street was only a place for her body to
dwell in, for her soul to hide in, only walls around walls, the shell
of the shell.

She turned to her husband with a smile that flashed defiance to the
invading pathos of her state. Majendie's eyes brightened with hope,
beholding her admirable behaviour. He had always thoroughly approved of
Anne.

Upstairs, in the room that was her own, poor Edith (the cause, as he
felt, of their calamity) had indeed prepared for them with joy.

Majendie's sister lay on her couch by the window, as they had left her,
as they would always find her, not like a woman with a hopelessly injured
spine, but like a lady of the happy world, resting in luxury, a little
while, from the assault of her own brilliant and fatiguing vitality. The
flat, dark masses of her hair, laid on the dull red of her cushions, gave
to her face an abrupt and lustrous whiteness, whiteness that threw into
vivid relief the features of expression, the fine, full mouth, with its
temperate sweetness, and the tender eyes, dark as the brows that arched
them. Edith, in her motionless beauty, propped on her cushions, had
acquired a dominant yet passionless presence, as of some regal woman of
the earth surrendered to a heavenly empire. You could see that, however
sanctified by suffering, Edith had still a placid mundane pleasure in her
white wrapper of woollen gauze, and in her long lace scarf. She wore them
with an appearance of being dressed appropriately for a superb occasion.

The sign of her delicacy was in her hands, smoothed and wasted with
inactivity. Yet they had an energy of their own. The hands and the weak,
slender arms had a surprising way of leaping up to draw to her all
beloved persons who bent above her couch. They leapt now to her brother
and his wife, and sank, fatigued with their effort. Two frail, nervous
hands embraced Majendie's, till one of them let go, as she remembered
Anne, and held her, too.

Anne had been vexed, and Majendie angry with her; but anger and vexation
could not live in sight of the pure, tremulous, eager soul of love that
looked at them out of Edith's eyes.

"What a skimpy honeymoon you've had," she said. "Why did you go and cut
it short like that? Was it just because of me?"

In one sense it was because of her. Anne was helpless before her
question; but Majendie rose to it.

"I say--the conceit of her! No, it wasn't just because of you. Anne
agreed with me about Scarby. And we're not cutting our honeymoon short,
we're spinning it out. We're going to have another one, some day, in a
nicer place."

"Anne didn't like Scarby, after all?"

"No, I knew she wouldn't. And she lived to own that I was right."

"That," said Edith, laughing, "was a bad beginning. If I'd been you,
Anne, whether I was right or not, I'd never have owned that _he_ was."

"Anne," said Majendie, "is never anything but just. And this time she was
generous."

Edith's hand was on the sleeve of Majendie's coat, caressing it. She
looked up at Anne.

"And what," said she, "do you think of my little brother, on the whole?"

"I think he says a great many things he doesn't mean."

"Oh, you've found that out, have you? What else have you discovered?"

The gay question made Anne's eyelids drop like curtains on her tragedy.

"That he means a great many things he doesn't say? Is that it?"

Majendie, becoming restive under the flicker of Edith's cheerful tongue,
withdrew the arm she cherished. Edith felt the nervousness of the
movement; her glance turned from her brother's face to Anne's, rested
there for a tense moment, and then veiled itself.

At that moment they both knew that Edith had abandoned her glad
assumption of their happiness. The blessings of them all were upon Nanna
as she came in with the tea-tray.

Nanna was sly and shy and ceremonial in her bearing, but under it there
lurked the privileged audacity of the old servant, and (as poor Majendie
perceived) the secret, terrifying gaiety of the hymeneal devotee. The
faint sound of giggling on the staircase penetrated to the room. It was
evident that Nanna was preparing some horrid and tremendous rite.

She set her tray in its place by Edith's couch, and cleared a side table
which she had drawn into a central and conspicuous position. The three,
as if humouring a child in its play, feigned a profound ignorance of what
Nanna had in hand.

She disappeared, suppressed the giggling on the stairs, and returned,
herself in jubilee let loose. She carried an enormous plate, and on the
plate Anne's wedding-cake with all its white terraces and towers, and (a
little shattered) the sugar orange blossoms and myrtles of its crown. She
stood it alone on its table of honour, and withdrew abruptly.

The three were stricken dumb by the presence of the bridal thing. Nanna,
listening outside the door, attributed their silence to an appreciation
too profound for utterance.

They looked at it, and it looked at them. Its veil of myrtle, trembling
yet with the shock of its entrance, gave it the semblance of movement and
of life. It towered in the majesty of its insistent whiteness. It trailed
its mystic modesties before them. Its brittle blossoms quivered like
innocence appalled. The wide cleft at its base betrayed the black and
formidable heart beneath the fair and sugared surface. These crowding
symbols, perceptible to Edith's subtler intelligence, massed themselves
in her companions' minds as one vast sensation of discomfort.

As usual when he was embarrassed, Majendie laughed.

"It's the very spirit of dyspepsia," he said. "A cold and dangerous
thing. _Must_ we eat it?"

"_You_ must," said Edith; "Nanna would weep if you didn't."

"I don't think I can--possibly," said Anne, who was already reaping her
sowing to the winds of emotion in a whirlwind of headache.

"Let's all eat it--and die," said Majendie. He hacked, laid a ruin of
fragments round the evil thing, scattered crumbs on all their plates, and
buried his own piece in a flower-pot. "Do you think," he said, "that
Nanna will dig it up again?"

Anne turned white over her tea, pleaded her headache, and begged to be
taken to her room. Majendie took her there.

"Isn't Anne well?" asked Edith anxiously, when he came back.

"Oh, it's nothing. She's been seedy all day, and the sight of that cake
finished her off. I don't wonder. It's enough to upset a strong man.
Let's ring for Nanna to take it away."

He rang. When Nanna appeared Edith was eating her crumbs ostentatiously,
as if unwilling to leave the last of a delicious thing.

"Oh, Nanna," said she, "that's a heavenly wedding-cake!"

Majendie was reminded of the habitual tender perfidy of that saint, his
sister. She was always lying to make other people happy, saying that she
had everything she wanted, when she hadn't, and that her spine didn't
hurt her, when it did. When Edith was too exhausted to lie, she would
look at you and smile, with the sweat of her torture on her forehead. He
knew Edith, and wondered how far she had lied to Anne, and what she had
done it for. He had a good mind to ask her; but he shrank from "dashing
her down the first day."

But Edith herself dashed everything down the first five minutes. There
was nothing that _she_ shrank from.

"I'm sorry for poor Anne," said she; "but it's nice to get you all to
myself again. Just for once. Only for once. I'm not jealous."

He smiled, and stroked her hair.

"I was jealous--oh, furiously jealous, just at first, for five minutes.
But I got over it. It was so undignified."

"It didn't show, dear."

"I didn't mean it to. It wouldn't have been pretty. And now, it's all
over and I like Anne. But I don't like her as much as you."

"You must like her more," he said gravely. "She'll need it--badly."

Edith looked at him. "How can she need it badly, when she has you?"

"You're a good woman, and I'm a mere mortal man. She's found that out
already, and she doesn't like it."

"Wallie, _dear_, what do you mean?"

"I mean exactly what I say. She's found it out. She's found _me_ out.
She's found everything out."

"Found out? But how?"

"It doesn't matter how. Edie, why didn't you tell her? You said you
would."

"Yes--I said I would."

"And you told me you had."

"No. I didn't tell you I had."

"What did you tell me, then?"

"I told you there was nothing to be afraid of, that it was all right."

"And of course I thought you'd told her."

"If I had told her it wouldn't have been all right; for she wouldn't have
married you."

Majendie scowled, and Edith went on calmly.

"I knew that--she as good as told me so--and I knew _her_."

"Well--what if she hadn't married me?"

"That would have been very bad for both of you. Especially for you."

"For me? And how do you know this isn't going to be worse? For both of
us. It's generally better to be straight, and face facts, however
disagreeable. Especially when everybody knows that you've got a skeleton
in your cupboard."

"Anne didn't, and she was so afraid of skeletons."

"All the more reason why you should have hauled the horrid thing out and
let her have a good look at it. She mightn't have been afraid of it then.
Now she's convinced it's a fifty times worse skeleton than it is."

"She wouldn't have lived with it in the house, dear. She said so."

"But I thought you never told her?"

"She was talking about somebody else's skeleton, dear."

"Oh, somebody else's, that's a very different thing."

"She meant--if she'd been the woman. I was testing her, to see how she'd
take it. Do you think I was very wrong?"

"Well, frankly, dear, I cannot say you were very wise."

"I wonder----"

She lay back wondering. Doubt of her wisdom shook her through all her
tender being. She had been so sure.

"How would you have liked it," said she, "if Anne had given you up and
gone away, and you'd never seen her again?"

His face said plainly that he wouldn't have liked it at all.

"Well, that's what she'd have done. And I wanted her to stay and marry
you."

"Yes, but with her eyes open."

She shook her head, the head that would have been so wise for him.

"No," said she. "Anne's one of those people who see best with their eyes
shut."

"Well, they're open enough now in all conscience. But there's one thing
she hasn't found out. She doesn't know how it happened. Can you tell her?
_I_ can't. I told her there were extenuating circumstances; but of
course I couldn't go into them."

"What did she say?"

"She said no circumstances could extenuate facts."

"I can hear her saying it."

"I understand her state of mind," said Majendie. "She couldn't see the
circumstances for the facts."

"Our Anne is but young. In ten years' time she won't be able to see the
facts for the circumstances."

"Well--will you tell her?"

"Of course I will."

"Make her see that I'm not necessarily an utter brute just because I----"

"I'll make her see everything."

"Forgive me for bothering you."

"Dear--forgive me for breaking my promise and deceiving you."

He bent to her weak arms.

"I believe," she whispered, "the end will yet justify the means."

"Oh--the end."

He didn't see it; but he was convinced that there could hardly be a worse
beginning.

He went upstairs, where Anne lay in the agonies of her bilious attack. He
found comfort, rather than gave it, by holding handkerchiefs steeped in
eau-de-Cologne to her forehead. It gratified him to find that she would
let him do it without shrinking from his touch.

But Anne was past that.




CHAPTER IV


For once in his life Majendie was glad that he had a business. Shipping
(he was a ship-owner) was a distraction from the miserable problem that
weighed on him at home.

Anne's morning face was cold to him. She lay crushed in her bed. She had
had a bad night, and he knew himself to be the cause of it.

His pity for her hurt like passion.

"How is she?" asked Edith, as he came into her room before going to the
office.

"She's a wreck," he said, "a ruin. She's had an awful night. Be kind to
her, Edie."

Edie was very kind. But she said to herself that if Anne was a ruin that
was not at all a bad thing.

Edith Majendie was a loving but shrewd observer of the people of her
world. Lying on her back she saw them at an unusual angle, almost as if
they moved on a plane invisible to persons who go about upright on their
legs. The four walls of her room concentrated her vision in bounding it.
She saw few women and fewer men, but she saw them apart from those
superficial activities which distract and darken judgment. Faces that
she was obliged to see bending over her had another aspect for Edith than
that which they presented to the world at large. Anne Majendie, who had
come so near to Edith, had always put a certain distance between herself
and her other friends. While they were chiefly impressed with her superb
superiority, and saw her forever standing on a pedestal, Edith declared
that she knew nothing of Anne's austere and impressive attributes. She
protested against anything so dreary as the other people's view of her.
They and their absurd pedestals! She refused to regard her sister-in-law
as an established solemnity, eminent and lonely in the scene. Pedestals
were all very well at a proper distance, but at a close view they were
foreshortening to the human figure. Other people might like to see more
pedestal than Anne; she preferred to see more Anne than pedestal. If they
didn't know that Anne was dear and sweet, she did. So did Walter.

If they wanted proof of it, why, would any other woman have put up with
her and her wretched spine? Weren't they all, Anne's friends, sorry for
Anne just because of it, of her? If you came to think of it, if you
traced everything back to the beginning, her spine had been the cause
of all Anne's troubles.

That was how she had always reasoned it out. No suffering had ever
obscured the lucidity of Edith's mind. She knew that it was her spine
that had kept her brother from marrying all those years. He couldn't
leave her alone with it, neither could he ask any woman to share the
house inhabited, pervaded, dominated by it. Unsafeguarded by marriage, he
had fallen into evil hands. To Edith, who had plenty of leisure for
reflection, all this had become terribly clear.

Then Anne had come, the strong woman who could bear Walter's burden for
him. She had been jealous of Anne at first, for five minutes. Then she
had blessed her.

But Edith, as she had told her brother, was not a fool. And all the time,
while her heart leapt to the image of Anne in her dearness and sweetness,
her brain saw perfectly well that her sister-in-law had not been free
from the sin of pride (that came, said Edith, of standing on a pedestal.
It was better to lie on a couch than stand on a pedestal; you knew, at
any rate, where you were).

Now, as Edith also said, there can be nothing more prostrating to a
woman's pride than a bad bilious attack. Especially when it exposes you
to the devoted ministrations of a husband you have made up your mind to
disapprove of, and compels you to a baffling view of him.

Anne owned herself baffled.

Her attack had chastened her. She had been touched by Walter's kindness,
by the evidence (if she had needed it) that she was as dear to him in her
ignominious agony as she had been in the beauty of her triumphal health.
As he moved about her, he became to her insistent outward sense the man
she had loved because of his goodness. It was so that she had first seen
his strong masculine figure moving about Edith on her couch, handling
her with the supreme gentleness of strength. She had not been two days in
the house in Prior Street before her memories assailed her. Her new and
detestable view of Walter contended with her old beloved vision of him.
The two were equally real, equally vivid, and she could not reconcile
them. Walter himself, seen again in his old surroundings, was protected
by an army of associations. The manifestations of his actual presence
were also such as to appeal to her memory against her judgment. Her
memory was in league with her. But when the melting mood came over her,
her conscience resisted and rose against them both.

Edith, watching for the propitious moment, could not tell by what signs
she would recognise it when it came. Her own hour was the early evening.
She had always brightened towards six o'clock, the time of her brother's
home-coming.

To-day he had removed himself, to give her her chance with Anne. She
could see him pottering about the garden below her window. He had kept
that garden with care. He had mown and sown, and planted, and weeded,
and watered it, that Edith might always have something pretty to look at
from her window. With its green grass plot and gay beds, the tiny oblong
space defied the extending grime and gloom of Scale. This year he had
planted it for Anne. He had set a thousand bulbs for her, and many
thousand flowers were to have sprung up in time to welcome her. But
something had gone wrong with them. They had suffered by his absence. As
Edith looked out of the window he was stooping low, on acutely bended
knees, sorrowfully preoccupied with a broken hyacinth. He had his back to
them.

To Edith's mind there was something heart-rending in the expression of
that intent, innocent back, so surrendered to their gaze, so unconscious
of its own pathetic curve. She wondered if it appealed to Anne in that
way. She judged from the expression of her sister-in-law's face that it
did not appeal to her in any way at all.

"Poor dear," said she, "he's still worrying about those blessed bulbs of
mine--of yours, I mean."

"Don't, Edie. As if I wanted to take your bulbs away from you. I'm not
jealous."

"No more am I," said Edie. "Let's say both our bulbs. I wish he wouldn't
garden quite so much, though. It always makes his head ache."

"Why does he do it, then?" asked Anne calmly.

Her calmness irritated Edith.

"Oh, why does Walter do anything? Because he's an angel!"

Anne's silence gave her the opening she was looking for.

"You know, you used to think so, too."

"Of course I did," said Anne evasively.

"And equally of course, you don't, now you've married him?"

"I _have_ married him. What more could I do to prove my appreciation?"

"Oh, heaps more. Mere marrying's nothing. Any woman can do that."

"Do you think so? It seems to me that marrying--mere marrying--may be a
great deal--about as much as many men have a right to ask."

"Hasn't every man a right to ask for--what shall I say--a little
understanding--from the woman he cares for?"

"Edith, what has he told you?"

"Nothing, my dear, that I hadn't seen for myself."

"Did he tell you that I 'misunderstood' him?"

"Did he pose as _l'homme incompris_? No, he didn't."

"Still--he told you," Anne insisted.

"Of course he did." She brushed the self-evident aside and returned to
her point. "He does care for you. That, at least, you can understand."

"No, that's just what I don't understand. I can't understand his caring.
I can't understand him. I can't understand anything." Her voice shook.

"Poor darling, I know it's hard, sometimes. Still, you do know what he
is."

"I know what he was--what I thought him. It's hard to reconcile it with
what he is."

"With what you think him? You can't, of course. I suppose you think him
something too bad for words?"

Anne broke down weakly.

"Oh, Edith, why didn't you tell me?"

"What? That Wallie was bad?"

"Yes, yes. It would have been better if you'd told me everything."

"Well, dear, whatever I told you, I couldn't have told you that. It
wouldn't have been true."

"He says himself that everything was true."

"Everything probably is true. But then, the point is that you don't know
the whole truth, or even half of it. That's just what he couldn't tell
you. I should have told you. That's where I bungled it. You know he left
it to me; he said I was to tell you."

"Yes, he told me that. He didn't mean to deceive me."

"No more did I. If my brother had been a bad man, dear, do you suppose
for a moment I'd have let him marry my dearest friend?"

"You didn't know. We don't know these things, Edith. That's the terrible
part of it."

"Yes, it's the terrible part of it. But _I_ knew all right. He never kept
anything from me, not for long."

"But, Edith--how _could_ he? How _could_ he? When the woman--Lady
Cayley--She was _bad_, wasn't she?"

"Of course she was bad. Bad as they make them--worse. You know she was
divorced?"

"Yes," said Anne, "that's what I do know."

"Well, she wasn't divorced on Walter's account, my dear. There were
several others--four, five, goodness knows how many. Poor Walter was a
mere drop in her ocean."

Anne stared a moment at the expanse presented to her.

"But," said she, "he was in it."

"Oh yes, he was in it. The ocean swallowed him as it swallowed the
others. But it couldn't keep him. He couldn't live in it, like them."

"But how did she get hold of him?"

"She got hold of him by appealing to his chivalry."

(His chivalry--she knew it.)

"It's what happens, over and over again. He thought her a vilely injured
woman. He may have thought her good. He certainly thought her pathetic.
It was the pathos that did it."

"That--did--it?"

"Yes. Did it. She hurled herself at his head--at his knees--at his
feet---till he _had_ to lift her. And that's how it happened."

Anne's spirit writhed as she contemplated the happening.

"I know it oughtn't to have happened. I know Walter wasn't the holy saint
he ought to have been. But oh, he was a martyr!" She paused. "And--he was
very young."

"Edith--when was it?"

"Seven years ago."

Anne pondered. The seven years helped to purify him. Every day helped
that threw the horror further back in time--separated it from her. If--if
he had not been steeped too long in it. She wanted to know _how_ long,
but she was afraid to ask; afraid lest it should be brought nearer to her
than she could bear. Edith saw her fear.

"It lasted two years. It was all my fault."

"Your fault?"

"Yes, my fault. Because of my horrid spine. You see, it kept him from
marrying."

"Well, but--"

"Well, but it couldn't have happened if he had married. How _could_ it?
How could it have happened if you had been there? You would have saved
him."

She paused on that note, a long, illuminating pause. The note itself was
a divine inspiration. It rang all golden. It thrilled to the verge of the
dominant chord in Anne. It touched her soul, the mother of brooding,
mystic harmonies.

"You would have saved him."

Anne saw herself for one moment as his guardian angel, her mission
frustrated through a flaw of time. That vision was dashed by another,
herself as the ideal, the star he should have looked to before its dawn,
herself dishonoured by his young haste, his passion, his failure to
foresee.

"He should have waited for me."

"Did you wait for him?"

A quick flush pulsed through the whiteness of Anne's face. She looked
back seven years to her girlhood in the southern Deanery, her home. She
had another vision, a vision of a Minor Canon, whom she had loved with
the pure worship of her youth, a love of which somehow she was now
ashamed. Ashamed, though it had then seemed to her so spiritual. Her dead
parents had desired the marriage, but neither she nor they had the power
to bring it about.

Edith had never heard of the Minor Canon. She had drawn a bow at a
venture.

"My dear," she said, "why not? It's only the very elect lovers who can
say to each other, 'I never loved any one but you.'"

"At any rate," said Anne, "I never loved any one else well enough to
marry him."

For, in her fancy, the Minor Canon, being withdrawn in time, had ceased
to occupy space; he had become that which he was for her girlhood, a
disembodied dream. She could not have explained why she was so ashamed
of him. What ground of comparison was there between that blameless one
and Lady Cayley?

"Edith," she said suddenly, "did you ever see her?"

"Never," said Edith emphatically.

"You don't know what she was like?"

"I don't. I never wanted to. I dare say there are people in Scale who
could tell you all about her, only I wouldn't inquire if I were you."

"Did it happen at Scarby?" She was determined to know the worst.

"I believe so."

"Oh--why did I ever go there?"

"He didn't want you to. That was why."

"Where is she now?"

"Nobody knows. She might be anywhere."

"Not here?"

"No, not here. My dear, you mustn't get her on your nerves."

"I'm afraid of meeting her."

"It isn't likely that you ever will. She isn't the sort one does
meet--now, poor thing."

"Who was she?"

"The wife of Sir Andrew Cayley, a tallow-chandler."

"Oh, how did Walter ever--"

"My dear, one meets all sorts of funny people in Scale. He was a very
wealthy tallow-chandler. Besides, it wasn't he that Walter did meet,
naturally."

"How can you joke about it? It makes me sick to think of it."

"It made me sick enough once, dear. But I don't think of it."

"I can't help thinking of it."

"Well, whenever you do, when it does come over you--it will,
sometimes--think of what Walter's life was before he knew you. Everything
was spoiled for him because of me. He was sent to a place he detested
because of me; put into an office which he loathed, shut up here in this
hateful house, because of me. And he was good to me, good and dear. Even
at the worst he hardly ever left me if he thought I wanted him--not even
to go to _her_. But he was young, and it was an awful life for him; you
don't know how awful. It would have been bad enough for a woman. It was
intolerable for a man. I was worse then than I am now. I was horribly
fretful, and I worried him. I think I drove him to her--I know I did. He
had to get away from it sometimes. Won't you think of that?"

"I'll try to think of it."

"And it won't make you not like him?"

"My dear, I liked him first for your sake, then I liked you for his, now
I suppose I must like him for yours again."

"No--for his own sake."

"Does it matter which?"

"Not much--so long as you like him. He really is angelic, though you
mayn't think it."

"I think you are."

Edith was not only angelic, but womanly and full of guile, and she knew
with whom she had to do. She had humbled Anne with shrewd shafts that
hit her in all her weak places; now she exalted her. Anne had not her
likeness in a thousand. She was a woman magnificently planned, of stature
not to be diminished by the highest pedestal. A figure fit for a throne,
a niche, a shrine. Edith could see the dear little downy feathers
sprouting on Anne's shoulder-blades, and the infant aureole playing
in her hair.

"You're a saint," said Edith.

"I am not," said Anne, while her pale cheek glowed with the flattery.

"Of course you are," said Edith, "or you could never have put up with
me."

Whereupon Anne kissed her.

"And I may tell Walter what you've said?"

It was thus that she spared Anne's mortal pride. She knew how it would
shrink from telling him.

Anne went down to Majendie in the garden and sent him to his sister. They
returned to the house by the open window of his study. A bright fire was
burning in the room. He looked at her shyly and half in doubt, drew up an
arm-chair to the hearth, and left her there.

His manner brought back to her the days of their engagement when that
room had been their refuge. Not that they had often been alone together.
She could count the times on the fingers of one hand, the times when
Edith was too ill to be wheeled into her room. It had been nearly always
in Edith's room that she had seen him, surrounded by all the feminine
devices, the tender trivialities that were part of the moving pathos of
the scene. She had so associated him with his sister that it had been
hard for her to realise that he had any separate life of his own. She
felt that his love for her had simply grown out of his love for Edith,
it was the flame, the flower of his tenderness. It was one with his
goodness, and she had been glad to have it so. There was no jealousy in
Anne.

It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she
had known of him. It was through Edith that she really knew him. And yet
it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly. Anne had
not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that
Walter was a ship-owner did not define him in the very least. What
remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must
partially reveal.

She remembered how she had first come there, and had looked shyly about
her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and
his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings
with the outer world. Now she rose and went round the room, searching for
its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old.
If the room told her anything it told her how little Majendie had used
it, how little he had been able to call anything his own. The things in
it had no comfortable look of service. He could not have smoked there
much, the curtains were too innocent. He could not have sat in that
arm-chair much, the surface was too smooth. He could not have come there
much at any time, for, though the carpet was faded, there was no
well-worn passage from the threshold to the hearth. As far as she could
make out he came there for no earthly purpose but to change his boots
before going upstairs to Edith.

The bookcase told the same story. It held histories and standard works
inherited from Majendie's father; the works of Dickens, and Thackeray,
and Hardy, read over and over again in the days when he had time for
reading; several poets whom, by his own confession, he could not have
read in any circumstances. One Meredith, partly uncut, testified to an
honest effort and a baulked accomplishment. On a shelf apart stood the
books that he had loved when he was a boy, the Annuals, the tales of
travel and adventure, and one or two school prizes gorgeously bound.

As she looked at them his boyhood rose before her; its dead innocence
appealed to her comprehension and compassion.

She knew that he had been disappointed in his ambition. Instead of being
sent to Oxford he had been sent into business, that he might early
support himself. He had supported himself. And he had stuck to the
business that he might the better support Edith.

She could not deny him the virtue of unselfishness.

She remembered one Sunday, three weeks before their wedding-day, when she
had stood alone with him in this room, at the closing of their happy day.
It was then that he had asked her why she cared for him, and she had
answered: "Because you are good. You always have been good."

And he had said (how it came back to her!), "And if I hadn't always?
Wouldn't you have cared then?"

She had answered, "I would have cared, but I couldn't marry you."

And he had turned away from her, and looked out of the window, keeping
his back to her, and had stood so without speaking for a moment. She had
wondered what had come over him.

Now she knew. He had not been good. And she had married him.

At the recollection the thoughts she had quieted stirred again and stung
her, and again she trampled them down.

She faced the question how she was going to build up the wedded life that
her knowledge of him had laid low. She told herself that, after all, much
remained. She had loved Walter for his unhappiness as well as for his
goodness. He had needed her, and she had felt that there was no other
woman who could have borne his burden half so well. Edith was too sweet
to be thought of as a burden, but it could not be denied she weighed. In
marrying Walter she would lift half the weight. Anne was strong, and she
glorified in her strength. That was what she was there for.

How much more was she prepared to do? Keeping his house was nothing;
Nanna had always kept it well. Caring for Edith was nothing; she could
not help but care for her. She had promised Walter that she would be a
good wife to him, and she had vowed to herself that she would live her
spiritual life apart.

Was that being a good wife to him? To divorce her soul, her best self,
from him? If she confined her duty to the preservation of the mere
material tie, what would she make of herself? Of him?

It came to her that his need of her was deeper and more spiritual than
that. She argued that there must be something fine in him, or he never
would have appreciated _her_. That other woman didn't count; she had
thrust herself on him. When it came to choosing, he had chosen a
spiritual woman! (Anne had no doubt that she was what she aspired to be.)
And since all things were divinely ordered, Walter's choice was really
God's will. God's hand had led him to her.

It had been a blow to Anne's pride to realise that she had
married--spiritually--beneath her. Her pride now recovered wonderfully,
seeing in this very inequality its opportunity. She beheld herself
superbly seated on an eminence, her spiritual opulence supplying Walter's
poverty. Spiritually, she said, it might also be more blessed to give
than to receive.

Their marriage, in this its new, its immaterial consummation, would not
be unequal. She would raise Walter. That, of course, was what God had
meant her to do all the time. Never again could she look at her husband
with eyes of mortal passion. But her love, which had died, was risen
again; it could still turn to him a glorified and spiritual face; it
could still know passion, a passion immortal and supreme.

But it was an emotion of which by its very nature she could not bring
herself to speak. It could mean nothing to Walter in his yet unspiritual
state. She felt that when he came to her he would insist on some
satisfaction, and there was no satisfaction that she could give to the
sort of claim he would make. Therefore she awaited his coming with
nervous trepidation.

He came in as if nothing had happened. He sank with every symptom of
comfortable assurance into the opposite arm-chair. And he asked no more
formidable question than, "How's your headache?"

"Better, thank you."

"That's all right."

He did not look at her, but his eyes were smiling as if at some agreeable
thought or reminiscence. He had apparently assumed that Anne had
recovered, not only from her headache, but from its cause. To Anne,
tingling with the tension of a nervous crisis, this attitude was
disconcerting. It seemed to reduce her and her crisis to insignificance.
She had expected him to be tingling too. He had more cause to.

"Do you mind my smoking? Say if you really do."

She really did, but she forbore to say so. Forbearance henceforth was to
be part of her discipline.

He smoked contentedly, with half-closed eyes; and when he talked, he
talked of the garden and of bulbs.

Of bulbs, after what he had discussed with Edith upstairs. She would
rather that he had asked his question, forced her to the issue. That at
least would have shown some comprehension of her state. But he had taken
the issue for granted, refused to face the immensity of it all. She had
had her first taste of sacrificial flames, and her spirit was prepared to
go through fire to reach him. And he presented himself as already folded
and protected; satisfied with some inferior and independent secret of his
own.

She felt that a little perturbation would have become him more than that
impenetrable peace.

It would make it so difficult to raise him.




CHAPTER V


The bell of St. Saviour's had ceased. Over the open market-place the air
throbbed with a thousand pulses from the dying heart of sound. The great
grey body of the Church was still; tower and couchant nave watched in
their monstrous, motionless dominion, till the music stirred in them like
a triumphant soul.

As they hurried over the open market-place, Anne realised with some
annoyance that she was late again for the Wednesday evening service. She
dearly loved punctuality and order, and disliked to be either checked or
hastened in her superb movements. She disliked to be late for anything.
Above all she disliked standing on a mat outside a closed church door, in
the middle of a General Confession, trying to surrender her spirit to the
spirit of prayer, while Walter lingered, murmuring profane urbanities
that claimed her as his own.

He had perceived what he called her innocent design, her transparent
effort to lead him to her heavenly heights. He had lent himself to
it, tenderly, gravely, as he would have lent himself to a child's
heart-rending play. He could not profess to follow the workings of his
wife's mind, but he did understand her point of view. She had been "let
in" for something she had not expected, and he was bound to make it up
to her.

There had been a week of concessions, crowned by his appearance at St.
Saviour's.

But that was on a Sunday. This was Wednesday, and he drew the line at
Wednesdays.

Oh yes, he saw her drift. He knew that what she expected of him was
incessant penitence. But, after all, it was difficult to feel much
abasement for a fault committed quite a number of years ago and
sufficiently repented of at the time. He had settled his account, and
it was hard that he should be made to pay twice over. To-night his mood
was strangely out of harmony with Lent.

Anne slackened her pace to intimate as much to him. Whereupon he lapsed
into strange and disturbing legends of his childhood. He told her he had
early weaned himself from the love of Lenten Services, observing their
effect upon the unfortunate lady, his aunt, who had brought him up.
Punctually at twelve o'clock on Palm Sunday, he said, the poor soul,
exhausted with her endeavours after the Christian life, would fly into
a passion, and punctually would rise from it at the same hour on Easter
Day. For quite a long time he had believed that that was why they called
it Passion Week.

She moaned "Oh, Walter--don't!" as if he had hurt her, while she
repressed the play of a little, creeping, curling, mundane smile.

If he would only leave her! But, as they crossed to the curbstone, he
changed over, preserving his proper place. He leaned to her with the
indestructible attention of a lover. His whole manner was inimitably
chivalrous, protective, and polite.

Anne hardened her heart against him. At the church gate she turned and
faced him coldly.

"If you're not going in," said she, "you needn't come any further."

He glanced at the belated group of worshippers gathered before the church
door, and became more than ever polite and chivalrous and protective.

"I must see you safely in," he said, and took up his stand beside her on
the mat.

Her eyes rested on him for a second in reproach, then dropped behind the
veil of their lids. In another moment he would have to go. He had already
surrendered her prayer-book, tucking it gently under her arm.

"You'll be all right when you get in, won't you?" he said encouragingly.

"Please go," she whispered.

"Do I jar, dear?" he asked sweetly.

"You do, very much."

"I'm so sorry. I won't do it again."

But his whispered vows and promises belied him, battling with her
consecrated mood. She felt that his innermost spirit remained in its
profanity, unillumined by her rebuke.

Once more she set her face, and hardened her heart against him, and
removed herself in the silence and isolation of her prayer.

Through the closed door there came the rich, confused murmur of the
Confession. He saw her lips curl, flower-like, with emotion, as her
breath rose and fell in unison with the heaving chant. He watched her
with a certain reverence, incomprehensibly chastened, till the door
opened, and she went from him, moving down the lighted aisle with her
remote, renunciating air.

The door was shut in Majendie's face, and he turned away, intending to
kill, to murder the next hour at his club.

Anne was self-trained in the habit of detachment. She had only to kneel,
to close her eyes and cover her face, and her soul slid of its own accord
into the place of peace. Her very breathing and the beating of her heart
were stayed. Her mind, emptied in a moment, was in a moment filled,
brimming over with the thought of God. To her veiled vision that thought
was like a sheet of blank light let down behind her drooped eyelids, and
centring in a luminous whorl. It fascinated her. Her prayer shot straight
to the heart of it, a communion too swift to trouble or divide the
blessed light.

In that instant her husband, the image and the thought of him, were cast
into the secular darkness.

She remembered how difficult it had once been thus to renounce him.
Her trouble, in the days of her engagement, had been that, thrust him
from her as she would, the idea of his goodness--the goodness that
justified her through its own appeal--would call up his presence,
emerging radiant from the outermost abyss. Inferior emotions then mingled
indistinguishably with her holiest ardours. Spiritually ambitious, she
had had her young eye on a hard-won crown of glory, and she had found
that happiness made the spiritual life almost contemptibly easy. It was
no effort in those days to realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of
the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she
heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand
touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace. She had
hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself. It was as if her
soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the
silver and fine gold of her wings.

It was the facility of the revelation that had first caused her to
suspect it. And she had thrown ashes on the flame, and set a watch upon
her soul, lest she should mistake an earthly for a heavenly content. She
could not bear to think that she was cheated, that her pulses counted in
her sense of exaltation and beatitude. She desired, purely, the utmost
purity in that divine communion, so as to be sure that it was divine.

Now, having suffered, she was completely sure. Her wound was the seal God
set upon her soul. It was easy enough now for her to achieve detachment,
oblivion of Walter Majendie, to pour out her whole soul in the prayer for
light: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great
mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night."

Her hands, as she prayed, were folded close over her eyes. Having
annihilated her husband, she was disagreeably astonished to find that he
was there, that he had been there for some time, in the seat beside her.

He was sitting in what he took to be an attitude of extreme reverence,
his head bowed and resting on his left arm, which was supported by the
back of the seat in front of him. His right arm embraced, unconsciously,
Anne's muff. Anne was vividly, painfully aware of him. Over the crook of
his elbow one eye looked up at her, bright, smiling with inextinguishable
affection. His lips gave out a sound that was not a prayer, but something
between a murmur and a moan, distinctly audible. She felt his gaze as a
gross, tangible thing, as a violent hand, parting the veils of prayer.
She bowed her head lower and pressed her hands to her face till the blood
tingled.

The sermon obliged her to sit upright and exposed. It gave him
iniquitous opportunity. He turned in his seat; his eyes watched her under
half-closed lids, two slits shining through the thick, dark curtain of
their lashes. He kept on pulling at his moustache, as if to hide the dumb
but expressive adoration of his mouth. Anne, who felt that her soul had
been overtaken, trapped, and bared to the outrage, removed herself by a
yard's length till the hymn brought them together, linked by the book she
could not withhold. The music penetrated her soul and healed its hurt.


  "Christian, doth thou see them,
     On the holy ground,
   How the troops of Midian
     Prowl and prowl around?"


sang Anne in a dulcet pianissimo, obedient to the choir.

Profound abstraction veiled him, a treacherous unspiritual calm. Majendie
was a man with a baritone voice, which at times possessed him like a
furious devil. It was sleeping in him now, biding its time, ready, she
knew, to be roused by the first touch of a _crescendo_. The _crescendo_
came.


  "Christian! Up and fight them!"


The voice waked; it leaped from him; and to Anne's terrified nerves it
seemed to be scattering the voices of the choir before it. It dropped on
the Amen and died; but in dying it remained triumphant, like the trump of
an archangel retreating to the uttermost ends of heaven.

Anne's heart pained her with a profane tenderness, and a poignant
repudiation. Her soul being once more adjusted to the divine, it was
intolerable to think that this preposterous human voice should have power
to shake it so.

She sank to her knees and bowed her head to the Benediction.

"Did you like it?" he asked as they emerged together into the open air.

He spoke as if to the child she seemed to him now to be. They had been
playing together, pretending they were two pilgrims bound for the
Heavenly City, and he wanted to know if she had had a nice game. He
nursed the exquisite illusion that this time he had pleased her by
playing too.

"Of course I liked it."

"So did I," he answered joyously, "I quite enjoyed it. We'll do it again
some other night."

"What made you come, like that?" said she, appeased by his innocence.

"I couldn't help it. You looked so pretty, dear, and so forlorn. It
seemed brutal, somehow, to abandon you on the weary road to heaven."

She sighed. That was his chivalry again. He would escort her politely to
the door of heaven, but would he ever go in with her, would he ever stay
there?

Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far. It gave
her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be. Not that
she relied upon herself alone. Her plan for Majendie's salvation was
liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences. There
was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.

"Walter," said she, "I want you to know Mrs. Eliott."

"But I do know her, don't I?"

He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne's home in
Scale. He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott. But for her slender acquaintance
with his sister, he would never have known Anne. This made him feel that
he knew Mrs. Eliott.

"But I want you to know her as I know her."

He laughed. "Is that possible? Does a man ever know a woman as another
woman knows her?"

Anne felt that she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led
by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it
she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted
by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted
with a magnificent irrelevance.

"You must know her. You would like her."

He didn't in the least want to know Mrs. Eliott, he didn't think that he
would like her. But he was soothed, flattered, insanely pleased with
Anne's assumption that he would. It was as if in her thoughts she were
drawing him towards her. He felt that she was softening, yielding. His
approaches were a delicious wooing of an unfamiliar, unwedded Anne.

"I would like her, because you like her, is that it?"

"It wouldn't follow."

"Oh, how you spoil it!"

"Spoil what?"

"My inference. It pleased me. But, as you say, the logic wasn't sound."

Silence being the only dignified course under mystification, Anne was
silent. Some men had that irritating way with women; Walter's smile
suggested that he might have it. She was not going to minister to his
male delight. Unfortunately her silence seemed to please him too.

"Never mind, dear, I do like her; because she likes you."

"You will like her for herself when you know her."

"Will she like me for myself when she knows me? It's extremely doubtful.
You see, hitherto she has made no ardent sign."

"My dear, she says you've never been near her. You've never come to one
of her Thursdays."

"Oh, her Thursdays--no, I haven't."

"Well, how can you expect--but you'll go sometimes, now, to please me?"

"Won't Wednesdays do?"

"Wednesdays?"

"Yes. It wasn't half bad to-night. I'll go to every blessed Wednesday, as
long as they last, if you'll only let me off Thursdays."

"Please don't talk about being 'let off.' I thought you might like to
know my friends, that's all."

"So I would. I'd like it awfully. By the way, that reminds me. I met
Hannay at the club to-night, and he asked if his wife might call on you.
Would you mind very much?"

"Why should I mind, if she's a friend of yours and Edith's?"

"Oh well, you see, she isn't exactly--"

"Isn't exactly what?"

"A friend of Edith's."




CHAPTER VI


There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston
Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century,
when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young. Each claims to be the
aristocratic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its
solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston
Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either
Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could
live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from
the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide
invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after
their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the
suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street
and Thurston Square.

Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre
symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its
atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on
the unlovely and unsacred street.

Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved
with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and
of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed
breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this
immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of
their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified
attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a
religious protest against the spirit of business.

But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the
Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They
utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.

Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation,
punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is
Mrs. Eliott's day.

The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of
trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries
met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the
place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled
by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian
furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects. There were
great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and
cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid
profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years
of Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent
culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few
diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome
and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych
with its saints in glory.

Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met,
Thursday after Thursday, the same fervid little company of ideas, of
aspirations and enthusiasms.

It was five o'clock on one of her Thursdays, and Mrs. Eliott had been
conversing with great sweetness and fluency ever since half-past three.
That was the way she and Mrs. Pooley kept it up, and they could have kept
it up much longer but for the arrival of Miss Proctor.

There was nothing, in Miss Proctor's opinion (if dear Fanny only knew
it), so provincial as an enthusiasm. As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley
was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be
what you were not? Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square's
preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever
conscious of. She announced that she had come to take dear Fanny down
from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip. She ignored Mrs.
Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to be ignored.

"I want," said she, "the latest news of Anne."

"If you wait, you may get it from herself."

"My dear, do you suppose she'd give it me?"

"It depends," said Mrs. Eliott, "on what you want to know."

"I want to know whether she's happy. I want to know whether, by this
time, she _knows_."

"You can't ask her."

"Of course I can't. That's why I'm asking you."

"I know nothing. I've hardly seen her."

Miss Proctor looked as if she were seeing her that moment without Fanny
Eliott's help.

"Poor dear Anne."

Anne Fletcher had been simply dear Anne, Mrs. Walter Majendie was poor
dear Anne.

Her friends were all sorry for her. They were inclined to be indignant
with Edith Majendie, who, they declared, had been at the bottom of her
marriage all along. She was the cause of Anne's original callings in
Prior Street. If it had not been for Edith, Anne could never have
penetrated that secret bachelor abode. The engagement had been an
awkward, unsatisfactory, sinister affair. It was a pity that Mr.
Majendie's domestic circumstances were such that poor dear Anne appeared
as having made all the necessary approaches and advances. If Mr. Majendie
had had a family that family would have had to call on Anne. But Mr.
Majendie hadn't a family, he had only Edith, which was worse than having
nobody at all. And then, besides, there was his history.

Mrs. Eliott looked distressed. Mr. Majendie's history could not
be explained away as too ancient to be interesting. In Scale a
seven-year-old event is still startlingly, unforgetably modern. Anne's
marriage had saddled her friends with a difficult responsibility, the
justification of Anne for that astounding step.

Acquaintances had been made to understand that Mrs. Eliott had had
nothing to do with it. They went away baffled, but confirmed in their
impression that she knew; which was, after all, what they wanted to know.

It was not so easy to satisfy the licensed curiosity of Anne's friends.
They came to-day in quantities, attracted by the news of the Majendies'
premature return from their honeymoon. Mrs. Eliott felt that Miss Proctor
and the Gardners were sitting on in the hope of meeting them.

Mrs. Eliott had been obliged to accept Anne's husband, that she might
retain Anne's affection. In this she did violence to her feelings, which
were sore on the subject of the marriage. It was not only on account of
the inglorious clouds he trailed. In any case she would have felt it as a
slight that her friend should have married without her assistance, and so
far outside the charmed circle of Thurston Square. She herself was for
the moment disappointed with Anne. Anne had once taken them all so
seriously. It was her solemn joy in Mrs. Eliott and her circle that had
enabled her young superiority to put up so long with the provincial
hospitalities of Scale on Humber. They, the slender aristocracy of
Thurston Square, were the best that Scale had to offer her, and they had
given her of their best. Socially, the step from Thurston Square to Prior
Street could not be defined as a going down; but, intellectually, it was
a decline, and morally (to those who knew Fanny Eliott and to Fanny
Eliott who _knew_) it was, by comparison, a plunge into the abyss. Fanny
Eliott was the fine flower of Thurston Square. She had satisfied even the
fastidiousness of Anne.

She owned that Mr. Majendie had satisfied it too. It was not that quality
in Anne that made her choice so--well, so incomprehensible.

It was Dr. Gardner's word. Dr. Gardner was the President of the Scale
Literary and Philosophic Society, and in any discussion of the
incomprehensible his word had weight. Vagueness was his foible, the
relaxation of an intellect uncomfortably keen. The spirit that looked
at you through his short-sighted eyes (magnified by enormous glasses)
seemed to have just returned from a solitary excursion in a dream. In
that mood the incomprehensible had for him a certain charm.

Mrs. Eliott had too much good taste to criticise Anne Majendie's. They
had simply got to recognise that Prior Street had more to offer her than
Thurston Square. That was the way she preferred to put it, effacing
herself a little ostentatiously.

Miss Proctor maintained that Prior Street had nothing to offer a creature
of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on
taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given
herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the
brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home
for spines, why, what must the man be like who could let her do it?

"My dear," said Mrs. Eliott, "he's a saint, if you're to believe Anne."

Even Dr. Gardner smiled. "I can't say that's exactly what I should call
him."

"Need we," said Mr. Eliott, "call him anything? So long as she thinks him
a saint--"

Mr. Eliott--Mr. Johnson Eliott--hovered on the borderland of culture,
with a spirit purified from commerce by a Platonic passion for the exact
sciences. He was, therefore, received in Thurston Square on his own as
well as his wife's merits. He too had his little weaknesses. Almost
savagely determined in matters of business, at home he liked to sit in
a chair and fondle the illusion of indifference. There was no part of
Mr. Eliott's mental furniture that was not a fixture, yet he scorned the
imputation of conviction. A hunted thing in his wife's drawing-room, Mr.
Eliott had developed in a quite remarkable degree the protective
colouring of stupidity.

"How can she?" said Miss Proctor. "She's a saint herself, and she ought
to know the difference."

"Perhaps," said Dr. Gardner, "that's why she doesn't."

"I'm sure," said Mrs. Eliott, "it was the original attraction. There
could be no other for Anne."

"The attraction was the opportunity for self-sacrifice. Whatever she's
makes of Mr. Majendie, she's bent on making a martyr of herself." Miss
Proctor met the vague eyes of her circle with a glance that was defiance
to all mystery. "It's quite simple. This marriage is a short cut to
canonisation, that's all."

Then it was that little Mrs. Gardner spoke. She had been married for a
year, and her face still wore its bridal look of possession that was
peace, the look that it would wear when Mrs. Gardner was seventy. Her
voice had a certain lucid and profound precision.

"Anne was always certain of herself. And since she cares for Mr. Majendie
enough to accept him and to accept his sister, and the rather _triste_
life which is all he has to offer her, doesn't it look as if, probably,
she knew her own business best?"

"I think," said Mr. Eliott firmly, "we may take it that she does."

Miss Proctor's departure was felt as a great liberation of the intellect.

Mrs. Pooley sat up in her corner and revived the conversation interrupted
by Miss Proctor. Mrs. Pooley had felt that to talk about Mrs. Majendie
was to waste Mrs. Eliott. Mrs. Majendie apart, Mrs. Pooley had many ideas
in common with her friend; but, whereas Mrs. Eliott would spend superbly
on one idea at a time, Mrs. Pooley's intellect entertained promiscuously
and beyond its means. It was inclined to be hospitable to ideas that had
never met outside it, whose encounter was a little distressing to
everybody concerned. Whenever this happened Mrs. Pooley would appeal to
Mr. Eliott, and Mr. Eliott would say, "Don't ask me. I'm a stupid fellow.
Don't ask me to decide anything."

Thus did Mr. Eliott wilfully obscure himself.

To-day he was more impregnably concealed than ever. He hadn't any
opinions of his own. They were too expensive. He borrowed other people's
when he wanted them. "But," said Mr. Eliott, "it is very seldom that I
do want an opinion. If you have any facts to give me--well and good." For
he knew that, at the mention of facts, Mrs. Pooley's intellect would
retreat behind a cloud and that his wife would pursue it there.

"I suppose," said Mrs. Eliott, "there's such a thing as realising your
ideals."

Her eyes gleamed and wandered and rested upon Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Gardner
had a singularly beautiful intellect which she was known to be shy of
displaying. People said that Dr. Gardner had fallen in love with it
years ago, and had only waited for it to mature before he married it.
Mrs. Gardner had a habit of sitting apart from the discussion and
untroubled by it, tolerant in her own excess of bliss. It irritated Mrs.
Eliott, on her Thursdays, to think of the distinguished ideas that Mrs.
Gardner might have introduced and didn't. She felt Mrs. Gardner's silence
as a challenge.

"I wonder" (Mrs. Eliott was always wondering) "what becomes of our ideals
when we've realised them."

The doctor answered. "My dear lady, they cease to be ideals, and we have
to get some more."

Mrs. Eliott, in her turn, was received into the cloud.

"Of course," said Mrs. Pooley, emerging from it joyously, "we must have
them."

"Of course," said Mrs. Eliott vaguely, as her spirit struggled with the
cloud.

"Of course," said Dr. Gardner. He was careful to array himself for
tea-parties in all his innocent metaphysical vanities, to scatter
profundities like epigrams, to flatter the pure intellects of ladies,
while the solemn vagueness of his manner concealed from them the
innermost frivolity of his thought. He didn't care whether they
understood him or not. He knew his wife did. Her wedded spirit moved
in secret and unsuspected harmony with his.

He had a certain liking for Mrs. Eliott. She seemed to him an apparition
mainly pathetic. With her attenuated distinction, her hectic ardour, her
brilliant and pursuing eye, she had the air of some doomed and dedicated
votress of the pure intellect, haggard, disturbing and disturbed. His
social self was amused with her enthusiasms, but the real Dr. Gardner
accounted for them compassionately. It was no wonder, he considered, that
poor Mrs. Eliott wondered. She had so little else to do. Her nursery
upstairs was empty, it always had been, always would be empty. Did she
wonder at that too, at the transcendental carelessness that had left her
thus frustrated, thus incomplete? Mrs. Eliott would have been scandalised
if she had known the real Dr. Gardner's opinion of her.

"I wonder," said she, "what will become of Anne's ideal."

"It's safe," said the doctor. "She hasn't realised it."

"I wonder, then, what will become of Anne."

Mrs. Pooley retreated altogether before this gross application of
transcendent truth. She had not come to Mrs. Eliott's to talk about
Mrs. Majendie.

Dr. Gardner smiled. "Oh, come," he said, "you _are_ personal."

"I'm not," said Mrs. Eliott, conscious of her lapse and ashamed of it.
"But, after all, Anne's my friend. I know people blamed me because I
never told her. How could I tell her?"

"No," said Mrs. Gardner soothingly, "how could you?"

"Anne," continued Mrs. Eliott, "was so reticent. The thing was all
settled before anybody could say a word."

"Well," said Dr. Gardner, "there's no good worrying about it now."

"Isn't it possible," said the little year-old bride, "that Mr. Majendie
may have told her himself?"

For Dr. Gardner had told her everything the day before he married her,
confessing to the light loves of his youth, the young lady in the Free
Library and all. She looked round with eyes widened by their angelic
candour. Even more beautiful than Mrs. Gardner's intellect were Mrs.
Gardner's eyes, and the love of them that brought the doctor's home from
their wanderings in philosophic dream. Nobody but Dr. Gardner knew that
Mrs. Gardner's intellect had cause to be jealous of her eyes.

"There's one thing," said Mrs. Eliott, suddenly enlightened. "Our not
having said anything at the time makes it easier for us to receive him
now."

"Aren't we all talking," said Mrs. Gardner, "rather as if Anne had
married a monster? After all, have we ever heard anything against
him--except Lady Cayley?"

"Oh no, never a word, have we, Johnson dear?"

"Never. He's not half a bad fellow, Majendie."

Dr. Gardner rose to go.

"Oh, please--don't go before they come."

Mrs. Gardner hesitated, but the doctor, vague in his approaches,
displayed a certain energy in his departure.

They passed Mrs. Walter Majendie on the stairs.

She had come alone. That, Mrs. Eliott felt, was a bad beginning. She
could see that it struck even Johnson's obtuseness as unfavourable, for
he presently effaced himself.

"Fanny," said Anne, holding her friend's evasive eye with the
determination of her query, "tell me, who are the Ransomes?"

"The Ransomes? Have they called?"

"Yes, but I was out. I didn't see them."

"Oh, my dear," said Mrs. Eliott, in a tone which implied that when Anne
_did_ see them----

"Are they very dreadful?"

"Well--they're not your sort."

Anne meditated. "Not--my--sort. And the Lawson Hannays, what sort are
they?"

"Well, we don't know them. But there are a great many people in Scale one
doesn't know."

"Are they socially impossible, or what?"

"Oh--socially, they would be considered--in Scale--all right. But he is,
or was, mixed up with some very queer people."

Anne's cold face intimated that the adjective suggested nothing to her.
Mrs. Eliott was compelled to be explicit. The word queer was applied in
Scale to persons of dubious honesty in business; whereas it was not so
much in business as in pleasure that Mr. Lawson Hannay had been queer.

"Mr. Hannay may be very steady now, but I believe he belonged to a very
fast set before he married her."

"And she? Is she nice?"

"She may be very nice for all I know."

"I think," said Anne, "she wouldn't call if she wasn't nice, you know."

She meant that if Mrs. Lawson Hannay hadn't been nice Walter would never
have sanctioned her calling.

"Oh, as for that," said her friend, "you know what Scale is. The less
nice they are the more they keep on calling. But I should think"--she had
suddenly perceived where Anne's argument was tending--"she is probably
all right."

"Do you know anything of Mr. Charlie Gorst?"

"No. But Johnson does. At least I'm sure he's met him."

Mrs. Eliott saw it all. Poor Anne was being besieged, bombarded by her
husband's set.

"Then he isn't impossible?"

"Oh no, the Gorsts are a very old Lincolnshire family. Quite grand. What
a number of people you're going to know, my dear. But, your husband isn't
to take you away from _all_ your old friends."

"He isn't taking me anywhere. I shall stay," said Anne proudly, "exactly
where I was before."

She was determined that her old friends should never know to what a
sorrowful place she had been taken.

"You dear," said Mrs. Eliott, holding out a suddenly caressing hand.

Anne trembled a little under the caress. "Fanny," said she, "I want you
to know him."

"I mean to," said Mrs. Eliott hurriedly.

"And I want him, even more, to know you."

"Then," Mrs. Elliot argued to herself, "she knows nothing; or she never
could suppose we would be kindred spirits."

But she carried it off triumphantly. "Well," said she, "I hope you're
free for the fifteenth?"

"The fifteenth?"

"Yes, or any other evening. We want to give a little dinner, dear, to you
and to your husband--for him to meet all your friends."

Anne tried not to look too grateful.

The upward way, then, was being prepared for him. Beneficent
intelligences were at work, influences were in the air, helping her
to raise him.

In her gladness she had failed to see that, considering the very obvious
nature of the civility, Fanny Eliott was making the least shade too much
of it.




CHAPTER VII


Anne presented herself that evening in her husband's study with a sheaf
of visiting cards in her hand. She thought it possible that she might
obtain further illumination by confronting him with them.

"Walter," said she "all these people have called on us. What do you think
I'd better do?"

"I think you'll have to call on them some day."

"All of them?"

He took the cards from her and glanced through them.

"Let me see. Charlie Gorst--we must be nice to him."

"Is _he_ nice?"

"I think so. Edie's very fond of him."

"And Mrs. Lawson Hannay?"

"Oh, you must call on her."

"Shall I like her."

"Possibly. You needn't see much of her if you don't."

"Is it easy to drop people?"

"Perfectly."

"And what about Mrs. Ransome?"

He frowned. "Has _she_ called?"

"Yes."

"I'll find out when she's not at home and let you know. You can call
then."

A fourth card he tore up and threw into the fire.

"Some people have confounded impudence."

Anne went away confirmed in her impression that Walter had a large
acquaintance to whom he was by no means anxious to introduce his wife. He
might, she reflected, have incurred the connection through the misfortune
of his business. The life of a ship-owner in Scale was fruitful in these
embarrassments.

But if these disagreeable people indeed belonged to the period she
mentally referred to as his "past," she was not going to tolerate them
for an instant. He must give them up.

She judged that he was prepared for so much renunciation. She hoped that
he would, in time, adopt her friends in place of them. He was inclined,
after all, to respond amicably to Mrs. Eliott's overtures.

Anne wondered how he would comport himself at the dinner on the
fifteenth. She owned to a little uneasiness at the prospect. Would he
indeed yield to the sobering influence of Thurston Square? Or would he
try to impose his alien, his startling personality on it? She had begun
to realise how alien he was, how startling he could be. Would he sit
silent, uninspiring and uninspired? Or would unholy and untimely
inspirations seize him? Would he scatter to the winds all conversational
conventions, and riot in his own unintelligible frivolity? What would he
say to Mrs. Eliott, that priestess of the pure intellect? Was there
anything in him that could be touched by her uncoloured, immaterial
charm? Would he see that Mr. Eliott's density was only a mask? Would
the Gardners bore him? And would he like Miss Proctor? And if he
didn't, would he show it, and how? His mere manners would, she knew, be
irreproachable, but she had no security for his spiritual behaviour. He
impressed her as a creature uncaught, undriven; graceful, but
immeasurably capricious.

The event surprised her.

For the first five minutes or so, it seemed that Mrs. Eliott and her
dinner were doomed to failure; so terrible a cloud had fallen on her, and
on her husband, and on every guest. Never had the poor priestess appeared
so abstract an essence, so dream-driven and so forlorn. Never had Mr.
Eliott worn his mask to so extinguishing a purpose. Never had Miss
Proctor been so obtrusively superior, Mrs. Gardner so silent, Dr. Gardner
so vague. They were all, she could see, possessed, crushed down by their
consciousness of Majendie and his monstrous past.

Into this circle, thus stupefied by his presence, Majendie burst with the
courage of unconsciousness.

Mr. Eliott had started a topic, the conduct of Sir Rigley Barker, the
ex-member for Scale. A heavy ball of conversation began to roll slowly up
and down the table, between Mr. Eliott and Dr. Gardner. Majendie snatched
at it deftly as it passed him, caught it, turned it in his hands till it
grew golden under his touch. Mr. Eliott thought there wasn't much in poor
Sir Rigley.

"Not much in him?" said Majendie. "How about that immortal speech of
his?"

"Immortal--" echoed Mr. Eliott dubiously.

"Indestructible! The poor fellow couldn't end it. It simply coiled and
uncoiled itself and went off, in great loops, into eternity. It began in
all innocence--naturally, as it was his maiden speech--when he rose,
don't you know, to propose an amendment. I take it that speech was so
maidenly that it shrank from anything in the nature of a proposal. It
went on in a terrified manner, coyly considering and hesitating--till it
cleared the House. And he was awfully pleased when we congratulated him
on his 'maidenly reserve.'"

"How did he ever get elected?" said Miss Proctor.

"My dear lady, it was a glorious stroke of the Opposition. They withdrew
their candidate when he contested the election. Of course, they felt that
he'd only got to make a speech and there'd be a dissolution. You simply
saw Parliament melting away before him. If he'd gone on he'd have worn
out the British constitution."

Dr. Gardner looked at Mrs. Gardner and their eyes brightened, as Majendie
continued to unfold the amazing resources of Sir Rigley. He breathed on
the ex-member like a god, and played with him like a juggler; he tossed
him into the air and kept him there, a radiant, unsubstantial thing. The
ex-member disported himself before Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party as he had
never disported himself in Parliament. Majendie had given him a career,
endowed him with glorious attributes. The ex-member, as a topic,
developed capacities unsuspected in him before. The others followed his
flight breathless, afraid to touch him lest he should break and disappear
under their hands.

By the time Majendie had done with him, the ex-member had entered on a
joyous immortality in Scale.

And in the middle of it all Anne laughed.

Miss Proctor was the first to recover from the surprise of it. She leaned
across the table with a liberal and vivid smile, opulent in appreciation.

"Well, Mr. Majendie, Sir Rigley ought to be grateful to you. If ever
there was a dull subject dead and buried, it was he, poor man. And now
the difficulty will be to forget him."

"I don't think," said Majendie gravely, "I shall forget him myself in a
hurry."

Oh no, he never would forget Sir Rigley. He didn't want to forget him. He
would be grateful to him as long as he lived. He had made Anne laugh. A
girl's laugh, young and deliciously uncontrollable, springing from the
immortal heart of joy.

It was the first time he had heard her laugh so. He didn't know she could
do it. The hope of hearing her do it again would give him something to
live for. He would win her yet if he could make her laugh.

Anne was more surprised than anybody, at him and at herself. It was a
revelation to her, his cleverness, his brilliant social gift. She was
only intimate with one kind of cleverness, the kind that feeds itself on
lectures and on books. She had not thought of Walter as clever. She had
only thought of him as good. That one quality of goodness had swallowed
up the rest.

Miss Proctor took possession of her where she sat in the drawing-room, as
it were amid the scattered fragments of the ex-member (he still, among
the ladies, emitted a feeble radiance). Miss Proctor had always approved
of Anne. If Anne had no metropolitan distinction to speak of, she was not
in the least provincial. She was something by herself, superior and rare.
A little inclined to take herself too seriously, perhaps; but her
husband's admirable levity would, no doubt, improve her.

"My dear," said Miss Proctor, "I congratulate you. He's brilliant, he's
charming, he's unique. Why didn't we know of him before? Where has he
been hiding his talents all this time?"

(A talent that had not bloomed in Thurston Square was a talent pitiably
wasted.)

Anne smiled a blanched, perfunctory smile. Ah, where had he been hiding
himself, indeed?

Miss Proctor stood central, radiating the rich afterglow of her
appreciation. Her gaze was a little critical of her friends' faces, as
if she were measuring the effect, on a provincial audience, of Majendie's
conversational technique. She swept down to a seat beside her hostess.

"My dear Fanny," she said, "why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you--"

"That he was that sort. I didn't know there was such a delightful man in
Scale. What have you all been dreaming of?"

Mrs. Eliott tried to look both amiable and intelligent. In the presence
of Mr. Majendie's robust reality it was indeed as if they had all been
dreaming. Her instinct told her that the spirit of pure comedy was
destruction to the dreams she dreamed. She tried to be genial to her
guest's accomplishment; but she felt that if Mr. Majendie's talents were
let loose in her drawing-room, it would cease to be the place of
intellectual culture. On the other hand she perceived that Miss Proctor's
idea was to empty that drawing-room by securing Mr. Majendie for her own.
Mrs. Eliott remained uncomfortably seated on her dilemma.

Sounds of laughter reached her from below. The men were unusually late in
returning to the drawing-room. They appeared a little flushed by the
hilarious festival, as if Majendie had had on them an effect of mild
intoxication. She could see that even Dr. Gardner was demoralised. He
wore, under his vagueness, the unmistakable air of surrender to an
unfamiliar excess. Mr. Eliott too had the happy look of a man who has fed
loftily after a long fast.

"Anne dear," said Majendie, as they walked back the few yards between
Thurston Square and Prior Street, "we shan't have to do that very often,
shall we?"

"Why not? You can't say we didn't have a delightful evening."

"Yes, but it was very exhausting, dear, for me."

"You? You didn't show much sign of exhaustion. I never heard you talk so
well."

"Did I talk well?"

"Yes. Almost too well."

"Too much, you mean. Well, I had to talk, when nobody else did. Besides,
I did it for a purpose."

But what his purpose was Majendie did not say.

Anne had been human enough to enjoy a performance so far beyond the range
of her anticipations. She was glad, above all, that Walter had made
himself acceptable in Thurston Square. But when she came to think of
what was, what must be known of him in Scale, she was appalled by his
incomprehensible ease of attitude. She reflected that this must have been
the first time he had dined in Thurston Square since the scandal. Was it
possible that he did not realise the insufferable nature of that
incident, the efforts it must have cost to tolerate him, the points that
had been stretched to take him in? She felt that it was impossible to
exaggerate the essential solemnity of that evening. They had met
together, as it were, to celebrate Walter's return to the sanctities
and proprieties he had offended. He had been formally forgiven and
received by the society which (however Fanny Eliott might explain away
its action) had most unmistakably cast him out. She had not expected him
to part with his indomitable self-possession under the ordeal, but she
could have wished that he had borne himself with a little more modesty.
He had failed to perceive the redemptive character of the feast, he had
turned it into an occasion for profane personal display.

Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party had not saved him; on the contrary, he had
saved the dinner-party.




CHAPTER VIII


Anne was right. Though Majendie was, as he expressed it, "up to her
designs upon his unhappy soul," he remained unconscious of the part to be
played by Mrs. Eliott and her circle in the scheme of his salvation. From
his observation of the aristocracy of Thurston Square, it would never
have occurred to him that they were people who could count, whichever way
you looked at them.

Meanwhile he was a little disturbed by his own appearance as a heavenward
pilgrim. He was not sure that he had not gone a little too far that way,
and he felt that it was a shame to allow Anne to take him seriously.

He confided his scruples to Edith.

"Poor dear," he said, "it's quite pathetic. You know, she thinks she's
saving me."

"And do you mind being saved?"

"Well, no, I don't mind a little of it. But the question is, how long I
can keep it up."

"You mean, how long she'll keep it up?"

He laughed. "Oh, she'll keep it up for ever. No possible doubt about
that. She'll never tire. I wonder if I ought to tell her."

"Tell her what?"

"That it won't work. That she can't do it that way. She's wasting my time
and her own."

"Oh, what's a little time, dear, when you've all eternity in view?"

"But I haven't. I've nothing in view. My view, at present, is entirely
obscured by Anne."

"Poor Anne! To think she actually stands between you and your Maker."

"Yes, you know--in her very anxiety to introduce us."

They looked at each other. Her sainthood was so accomplished, her union
with heaven so complete, that she could afford herself these profaner
sympathies. She was secretly indignant with Anne's view of Walter as
unpresentable in the circles of the spiritual _élite_.

"It never struck her that you mightn't need an introduction after all;
that you were in it as much as she. That's the sort of mistake one might
expect from--from a spiritual parvenu, but not from Anne."

"Oh, come, I don't consider myself her equal by a long chalk."

"Well, say she does belong to the peerage; you're a gentleman, and what
more can she require?"

"She can't see that I am (If I am. You say so). She considers
me--spiritually--a bounder of the worst sort."

"That's her mistake. Though I must say you sometimes lend yourself to it
with your horrible profanity."

"I can't help it, Edie. She's so funny with it. She _makes_ me profane."

"Dear Walter, if you can think Anne funny--"

"I do. I think she's furiously funny, and horribly pathetic. All the
time, you know, she thinks she's leading me upward. Profanity's my only
refuge from hypocrisy."

"Oh no, not your only refuge. You say she thinks she's leading you. Don't
_let_ her think it. Make her think you're leading her."

"Do you think," said Majendie, "she'd enjoy that quite so much?"

"She'd enjoy it more. If you took her the right way. The way I mean."

"What's that?"

"You must find out," said she. "I'm not going to tell you everything."

Majendie became thoughtful. "My only fear was that I couldn't keep it up.
But you really don't think, then, that I should score much if I did?"

"No, my dear, I don't. And as for keeping it up, you never could. And if
you did she'd never understand what you were doing it for. That's not the
way to show you're in love with her."

"But that's just what I don't want her to see. That's what she hates so
much in me. I've always understood that in these matters it's discreeter
not to show your hand too plainly. You see, it's just as if we'd never
been married, for all she cares. That's the trouble."

"There's something in that. If she's not in love with you--"

"Look here, Edie, you're a woman, and you know all about them. Do you
really, honestly think Anne ever was in love with me?"

"Oh, don't ask me. How should I know?"

"No, but," he persisted, "what do you think?"

"I think she _was_ in love."

"But not with me, though?"

"No, no, not with you."

"With whom, then?"

"Darling idiot, there wasn't any who. If there was, do you think I'd give
her away like that? If you'd asked me _what_ she was in love with--"

"Well, what then?"

"Your goodness. She was head over ears in love with that."

"I see. With something that I wasn't."

"No, with something that you were, that you are, only she doesn't know
it."

"Then," said Majendie, "you can't get out of it, she's in love with
_me_."

"Oh no, no, you dear goose, not with you. To be in love with you she'd
have to be in love with everything you're _not_, as well as everything
you are; with everything you have been, with everything you never were,
with everything you will be, with everything you might be, could be,
should be."

"That's a large order, Edie."

"There's a larger one than that. She might sweep all that overboard, see
it go by whole pieces (the best pieces) at a time, and still be in love
with the dear, incomprehensible, indescribable _you_. That," said Edie,
triumphant in her wisdom, "is what being in love is."

"And do you think she isn't in it?"

"No. Not anywhere near it. But--it's a big but--"

"I don't care how big it is. Don't bother me with it."

"Bother you? Why, it's a beautiful but. As I said, she isn't in love with
you; but she may be any minute. It's just touch and go with her. It
depends on _you_."

"Heavens, what am I to do? I've done everything."

"Yes, you have, but she hasn't. She's done nothing. She doesn't know how
to. You've got to show her."

He shook his head hopelessly. "You're beyond me. I don't understand.
There isn't anything for me to do. How am I to show her?"

"I mean show her what there is in it. What it means. What it's going to
be for her as well as you. Just go at it hard, harder than you did before
you married her."

"_I_ see, I've got to make love to her all over again."

"Exactly. All over again from the very beginning."

"I say!" He took it in, her idea, in all the width and splendour of its
simplicity. "And do it differently?"

"Oh, very differently."

"I don't quite see where the difference is to come in. What did I do
before that was so wrong?"

"Nothing. That's just the worst of it. It was all too right. Ever so much
too right. Don't you see? It's what we've been talking about. You made
her in love with your goodness. And she was in love with it, not because
it was _your_ goodness, but because it was her own. That's why she wanted
to marry it. She couldn't be in love with it for any other reason,
because she's an egoist."

"No. There you're quite wrong. That's what she isn't."

"Oh, you _are_ in love with her. Of course she's an egoist. All the
nicest women are. I'm an egoist myself. Do you love me less for it?"

"I don't love you less for anything."

"Well--unless you can make Anne jealous of me--and you can't--you've got
to love me less, now, dear boy. That's where I come in--to be kept out of
it."

She had led him breathless on her giddy round; she plunged him back into
bewilderment. He hadn't a notion where she was taking him to, where they
would come out; but there was a desperate delight in the impetuous
journey, the wind of her sudden flight lifted him and carried him on. He
had always trusted the marvellous inspirations of her heart. She had
failed him once; but now he could not deny that she had given him lights,
and he looked for a stupendous illumination at the end of the way.

"Out of it!" he exclaimed. "Why, where should I have been without you?
You were the beginning of it."

"I was indeed. You've got to take care I'm not the end of it, that's
all."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"I mean what I say. You don't want Anne to be in love with you for _my_
sake, do you?"

"N--no. I don't know that I do exactly. At least I should prefer that she
was in love with me for my own."

"Well, you must make her, then. That's why you've got to leave me out of
it. I've been too much in it all along. It was through me she conceived
that unfortunate idea of your goodness. I'm its father and its mother and
its nurse, I ministered to it every hour. I fed it, I brought it up, I
brought it _out_, I provided all the opportunity for its display. Nothing
else had a show beside your goodness, Wallie dear. It was something
monstrous. It took Anne's affection from you and concentrated it all on
itself. She worshipped it, she clung to it, she saw nothing else but it,
and when it went everything went. _You_ went first of all. Well, you must
just see that that doesn't happen again."

"You mean that I must lead a life of iniquity?"

"You mustn't lead a life of anything."

"Do you mean I mustn't be good any more?"

Majendie's imagination played hilariously with this fantastic, this
preposterous notion of his goodness.

"Oh yes, be good," said Edith, "but not too good. Above all, not too good
to me. Concentrate on her, stupid."

"I have concentrated," he moaned, mystified beyond endurance. "Besides,
you said I couldn't make her jealous."

"No, I wish you could. I mean, don't let her fall in love with your
devotion to me again. Don't hold her by that one rope. Hold her by all
your ropes; then, if one goes, it doesn't so much matter."

"I see. You don't trust my goodness."

"Oh, _I_ trust it, so will she again. But don't _you_ trust it. That
precious goodness of yours is your rival. A bad, dangerous rival. You've
got to beat it out of the field. Show that you're jealous of it. A little
judicious jealousy won't hurt." Edith's eyes were still and profound with
wisdom. "I don't believe you've ever yet made love to Anne properly.
That's what it all comes to."

"Oh, I say," said he, "what do you know about it?"

"I'm only judging," said Edith, "by the results."

"Oh, that isn't fair."

"Perhaps it isn't," she owned, her wisdom growing by what it fed on.

"You see, she wouldn't let me do it properly."

Edith pondered. "Yes, but how long ago is it? And you've been married
since."

"What difference does that make?"

"I should say it would make all the difference. Anne was a girl, then.
She didn't understand. She's a woman now. She does understand. She can be
appealed to."

He hid his face in his hands.

"I never thought of that," he murmured thickly.

"Of course you didn't."

"Edie," he said, and his face was still hidden, "however did you think of
it?"

"Oh, I don't know. I see some things, and then other things come round to
me. But you mustn't forget that _you've_ got to begin all over again from
the very beginning. You'll have to be very careful with her, every bit as
careful as if she were a strange lady you've just met at a dance. Don't
forget that she's strange, that she's another woman, in fact."

"I see. If there are to be many of these remarkable transformations of
Anne, I shall have all the excitement of polygamy without its drawbacks."

"You will. And it's the same for her, remember. You're a strange man.
You've just been introduced, you know--by me--and you're begging for the
pleasure of the first waltz, and Anne pretends that her programme is
full, and you look over her shoulder and see that it isn't, and that she
puts you down for all the nice ones. And you sit out all the rest, and
you flirt on the stairs, and take her in to supper, and, finally, you
know, you pull yourself together and you do it--in the conservatory. Oh,
it'll be so amusing, and so funny to watch. You'll begin by being most
awfully polite to each other."

"I suppose I may yet be permitted to call this strange young lady Anne?"

"Yes. That's because you remember that you _have_ known her once before,
a very long time ago, when you were children. You are children, both of
you. Oh, Walter, I believe you're looking forward to it; I believe you're
glad you've got to do it all over again."

"Yes, Edie, I positively believe I am."

He rose, laughing, prepared to begin that minute his new wooing of Anne.

"Good-bye," said Edith, "it _is_ good-bye, you know, and good luck to
you."

This time she knew that she had been wise for him.

Anne would have been horrified if she had known that the situation, so
terrible for her, was developing for her husband certain possibilities of
charm. His irrepressible boyishness refused to accept it in all its moral
gloom. There were, he perceived, advantages in these strained relations.
They had removed Anne into the mysterious realm her maidenhood had
inhabited, before marriage had had time to touch her magic. She had
become once more the unapproachable and unattained. Their first
courtship, pursued under intolerable restrictions of time and place, had
been a rather uninspired affair, and its end a foregone conclusion. He
had been afraid of himself, afraid sometimes of her. For he had not
brought her the spontaneous, unalarmed, unspoiled spirit of his youth.
He had come to her with a stain on his imagination and a wound in his
memory. And she was holy to him. He had held himself in, lest a touch,
a word, a gesture should recall some insufferable association.

Marriage had delivered him from the tyranny of reminiscence. No
reminiscence could stand before the force of passion in possession. It
purified; it destroyed; it built up in three days its own inviolable
memory.

And Anne, with the best will in the world, had had no power to undo its
work in him.

In herself, too, below her kindling spiritual consciousness, in the
unexplored depth and darkness of her, its work remained.

Majendie was unaware how far he had become another man and she another
woman. He was merely alive to the unusual and agreeable excitement of
wooing his own wife. There was a piquancy in the experiment that appealed
to him. Her new coldness called to him like a challenge. Her new
remoteness waked the adventurous youth in him. His imagination was
touched as it had not been touched before. He could see that Anne had
not yet got over her discovery. The shock of it was in her nerves. He
felt that she shrank from him, and his chivalry still spared her.

He ceased to be her husband and became her very courteous, very distant
lover. He made no claims, and took nothing for granted. He simply began
all over again from the very beginning. His conscience was vaguely
appeased by the illusion of the new leaf, the rejuvenated innocence of
the blank page. They had never been married (so the illusion suggested).
There had been no revelations. They met as strangers in their own house,
at their own table. In support of this pleasing fiction he set about his
courtship with infinite precautions. He found himself exaggerating Anne's
distance and the lapse of intimacy. He made his way slowly, through all
the recognised degrees, from mere acquaintance, through friendship to
permissible fervour.

And from time to time, with incomparable discretion, he would withhold
himself that he might make himself more precious. He was hardly aware of
his own restraint, his refinements of instinct and of mood. It was as if
he drew, in his desperate necessity, upon unrealised, untried resources.
There was something in Anne that checked the primitive impulse of swift
chase, and called forth the curious half-feminine cunning of the
sophisticated pursuer. She froze at his ardour, but his coldness almost
kindled her, so that he approached by withdrawals and advanced by
flights.

He displayed, first of all, a heavenly ignorance, an inspired curiosity
regarding her. He consulted her tastes, as if he had never known them; he
started the time-honoured lovers' topics; he talked about books--which
she preferred and the reasons for her preference.

He did not advance very far that way. Anne was simply annoyed at the
lapses in his memory.

He then began to buy books on the chance of her liking them, which
answered better.

He promoted himself by degrees to personalities. He talked to her about
herself, handling her with religious reticence as a thing of holy and
incomprehensible mystery.

"I suppose," he said one day, "if I were good enough, I should understand
you. Why do you sigh like that? Is it because I'm not good enough? Or
because I don't understand?"

"I think," said she, "it is because I don't understand you."

"My dear" (he allowed himself at this point the more formal endearment),
"I thought I was disgracefully transparent--I'm limpidity, simplicity
itself. I've only one idea and one subject of conversation. Ask Edith.
She understands me."

"Ah, Edith--" said Anne, as if Edith were a very different affair.

The intonation was hopeful, it suggested some slender and refined
jealousy. (If only he could make her jealous!)

On the strength of it he advanced to the punctual daily offering of
flowers, flowers for her drawing-room, flowers for her bedroom, flowers
for her to wear. After that he took to writing her letters from the
office with increasing frequency and fervour. Anne, too, was courteous
and distant. She accepted all he had to offer as a becoming tribute to
her feminine superiority, and evaded dexterously the deeper issue.

Now and then he reported his progress to Edith.

"I rather think," he said, "she's coming round. I'm regarded as a
distinctly eligible person."

They laughed at his complete adoption of the part and his innocent joy in
it.

That had always been his way. When he had begun a game there was no
stopping him. He played it through to the end.

Edith would look up smiling and say: "Well, how goes the affair?" (They
always called it the affair.) Or: "How did you get on to-day?"

And it would be: "Pretty well."--"Better to-day than yesterday."--"No
luck to-day."

One Sunday he came to her radiant.

"She really does," said he, "seem interested in what I say."

"What did you talk about?"

"The influence of Christianity on woman. Was that good?"

"Very good."

"I didn't know very much about it, but I got her to tell me things."

"That," said Edith, "was still better."

"But she sticks to it that she doesn't understand me. That's bad."

"No," said Edith, "that's best of all. It shows she's thinking of you.
She wants to understand. Believe me, the affair marches."

He meditated on that.

In the evening, the better to meditate, he withdrew to his study. It was
not long before Anne came to him of her own accord. She asked if she
might read aloud to him.

"I should be honoured," he replied stiffly.

She chose Emerson, "On Compensation." And Majendie did not care for
Emerson.

But Anne had a charming voice; a voice with tones that penetrated like
pain, that thrilled like a touch, that clung delicately like a shy
caress; tones that were as a funeral bell for sadness; tones that rose to
passion without ever touching it; clear, cool tones that were like water
to passion's flame. Majendie closed his eyes and let her voice play over
him.

"Did you like it?" she asked gravely.

"Like it? I love it."

"So do I. I _hoped_ you would."

"My dear, I didn't understand one word of it."

"You can't make me believe you loved it then."

He looked at her.

"I loved the sound of your voice, dear."

"Oh," said she coldly, "is that all?"

"Yes," he said, "isn't it enough?"

"I'd rather--" she began and hesitated.

"You'd rather I understood Emerson?"

Her blood flushed in the honey whiteness of her face. She rose, put the
book in its place, and left the room.

"Edith," he said, relating the incident afterwards, "I thought she was
coming round when she wanted to read to me. Why did she get up and go
like that?"

"She went, dear goose, because she was afraid to stay."

"Why afraid?"

"Because she's fighting you, Wallie. It's all right if she's got to
fight."

"Yes, but suppose she wins?"

"She can't win fighting--she's a woman. Her only chance is to run away."

That night Anne knelt by her bedside and hid her face and prayed for
Walter; that he might be purified, so that she might love him without
sin; that he and she might travel together on the divine way, and
together be received into the heavenly places.

She had felt that night the stirring of natural affection. It had come
back to her, a feeble, bruised, humiliated thing. She could not harbour
it without spiritual justification.

She kept herself awake by saying: "I can't love him, I can't love
him--unless God makes him fit for me to love."

Sleeping, she dreamed that she was in his arms.




CHAPTER IX


It was Anne's birthday. It shone in mid-May like the front of June.
Anne's bedroom was over Edith's and looked out on the garden. A little
rain had fallen over night. Through the open window the day greeted
her with a breath of flowers and earth; a day that came to her all
golden, ripe and sweet from the south.

Her dressing-table was placed sideways from the window. Anne, fresh from
her cold bath, in a white muslin gown, with her thick sleek hair coiled
and burnished, sat before the looking-glass.

There was a knock at the door, not Nanna's bold awakening summons, but a
shy and gentle sound. Her heart shook her voice as she responded.

"Is it permitted?" said Majendie.

"If you like," she answered quietly.

He presented his customary morning sacrifice of flowers. Hitherto he
had not presumed so far as to bring it to her room. It waited for her
decorously at breakfast time, beside her plate.

She took the flowers from him, acknowledged their fragrance by a
quiver of her delicate nostrils, thanked him, and laid them on the
dressing-table.

He seated himself on the window-sill, where he could see her with the day
upon her. She noticed that he had brought with him, beside the flowers, a
small oblong wooden box. He laid the box on his knee and covered it with
his hand. He sat very still, looking at her as her firm white hands
caressed her coiled hair into shape. Once she moved his flowers to find
her comb, and laid them down again.

"Aren't you going to wear them?" he inquired anxiously.

Her upper lip lifted an instant, caught up, in its fashion, by the pretty
play of the little sensitive amber mole. Two small white teeth showed and
were hidden again. It was as if she had been about to smile, or to speak,
and had thought better of it.

She took up the flowers and tried them, now at her breast, and now at her
waist.

"Where shall I put them?" said she. "Here? Or here?"

"Just there."

She let them stay there in the hollow of her breast.

He laid the box on the dressing-table close to her hand where it searched
for pins.

"I've brought you this," he said gently.

She smiled that divine and virgin smile of hers. Anne was big, but her
smile was small and close and shy.

"You remembered my birthday?"

"Did you think I should forget?"

She opened the lid with cool unhurried fingers. Under the wrappings of
tissue paper and cotton wool, a shape struck clear and firm and familiar
to her touch. A sacred thrill ran through her as she felt there the
presence of the holy thing, the symbol so dear and so desired that it was
divined before seen.

She lifted from the box an old silver crucifix. It must have been the
work of some craftsman whose art was pure and fine as the silver he
had wrought in. But that was not what Anne saw. She had always found
something painful and repellent in those crucifixes of wood which distort
and deepen the lines of ivory, or in those of ivory which gives again
the very pallor of human death. But the precious metal had somehow
eternalised the symbol of the crucified body. She saw more than the
torture, the exhaustion, the attenuation. Surely, on the closed eyelids
there rested the glory and the peace of divine accomplishment?

She stood still, holding it in her hand and looking at it. Majendie stood
still, also looking at her. He was not quite sure whether she were going
to accept that gift, whether she would hesitate to take from his profane
hands a thing so sacred and so supreme. He was aware that his fate
somehow hung on her acceptance, and he waited in silence, lest a word
should destroy the work of love in her.

Anne, too (when she could detach her mind from the crucifix), felt that
the moment was decisive. To accept that gift, of all gifts, was to lay
her spirit under obligation to him. It was more than a surrender of body,
heart, or mind. It was to admit him to association with the unspeakably
sacred acts of prayer and adoration.

If it were possible that that had been his desire; if he had meant his
gift as a tribute, not to her only, but to the spirit of holiness in her;
if, in short, he had been serious, then, indeed, she could not hesitate.
For, if it were so, her prayer was answered.

She laid down the crucifix and turned to him. They searched each other
with their eyes. She saw, without wholly understanding, the pain in his.
He saw, also unintelligently, the austerity in hers.

"Are you not going to take it, then?" he said.

"I don't know. Do you realise that you are giving me a very sacred
thing?"

"I do."

"And that I can't treat it as I would an ordinary present?"

He lowered his eyelids. "I didn't think you'd want to wear it in your
hair, dear."

She was about to ask him what he did mean then; but some instinct held
her, told her not to press the sign of grace too hard. She looked at him
still more intently. His eyes had disconcerted and baffled her, but now
she was sheltered by their lowered lids. Then she noticed for the first
time that his face showed the marks of suffering. It was as if it had
dropped suddenly the brilliant mask it wore for her, and given up its
secret unaware. He had suffered so that he had not slept. It was plain to
her in the droop of his eyelids, and in the drawn lines about his eyes
and mouth and nostrils. She was touched with tenderness and pity, and a
certain unintelligible awe. And she knew her hour. She knew that if she
closed her heart now, it would never open to him. She knew that it was
his hour as well as hers. She felt, reverently, that it was, above all,
God's hour.

She laid her hand on her husband's gift, saying to herself that if she
took that crucifix she would be taking him with it into the holy places
of her heart.

"I will take it." Her voice came shy and inarticulate as a marriage vow.

"Thank you," he said.

He wondered if she would turn to him with some sign of tenderness,
whether she would stoop to him and touch him with her hand or her lips;
or whether she looked to him to offer the first caress.

She did nothing. It was as if her intentness, her concentration upon
her holy purpose held her. While her soul did but turn to him in the
darkness, it kept and would keep their hands and lips apart.

He divined that she was only half-won. But, though her body yet moved in
its charmed inviolate circle, he felt dimly that the spiritual barrier
was down.

She turned from him and went slowly to the door. He opened it and
followed her. On the stairs she parted from him and went alone into his
sister's bedroom.

Edith's spine had been hurting her in the night. She lay flat and
exhausted, and the embrace of her loving arms was slow and frail.

Edith was what she called "dressed," and waiting for her sister-in-law.
The little table by her bed was strewn with the presents she had bought
and made for Anne. A birthday was a very serious affair for Edith. She
was not content to buy (buying was nothing; anybody could buy); she must
also make, and make beautifully. "I mayn't have any legs that can carry
me," said Edith; "but I've hands and I _will_ use them. If it wasn't for
my hands I'd be nothing but a great lumbering, lazy mass of palpitating
heart." But her making had become every year more and more expensive. Her
beautiful, pitiful embroideries were paid for in bad nights. And at six
o'clock that morning she had given her little dismal cry: "Oh, Nanna,
Nanna, my beast of a spine is going to bother me to-day, and it's Anne's
birthday!"

"And what else," said Nanna severely, "do you expect, Miss Edith?"

"I didn't expect this. I do believe it's getting worse."

"Worse?" Nanna was contemptuous. "It was worse on Master Walter's
birthday last year."

(Last year she had made a waistcoat.)

"I can't think," moaned Edith, "why it's always bad on birthdays."

But however badly "it" might behave in the night, it was never permitted
to destroy the spirit of the day.

Anne looked anxiously at the collapsed, exhausted figure in the bed.

"Yes," said Edith, having smiled at her sister-in-law with magnificent
mendacity, "you may well look at me. You couldn't make yourself as flat
as I am if you tried. There are two books for you, and a thingummy-jig,
and a handkerchief to blow your dear nose with."

"Edie--"

"Do you like them?"

"Like them? Oh, you dear--"

"Why don't you have a birthday oftener? It makes you look so pretty,
dear."

Anne's heart leaped. Edie's ways, her very words sometimes were like
Walter's.

"Has Walter seen you?"

Anne's face became instantly solemn, but it was not sad.

"Edie," she said, "do you know what he has given me!"

"Yes," said Edith. Her eyes searched Anne's eyes with pain in them that
was somehow akin to Walter's pain.

"She knows everything," thought Anne, "and it was her idea, then, not
his."

"Edith," said she, "was it you who thought of it, or he?"

"I? Never. He didn't say a word about it. He just went and got it. He
thought it all out by himself, poor dear."

"Can you think why he thought of it?"

"Yes," said Edith gravely, "I can. Can't you?"

Anne was silent.

"It's very simple. He wants you to trust him a little more, that's all."

Anne's mouth trembled, and she tightened it.

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Yes," she said, "I am."

"Because you think he isn't very spiritual?"

"Perhaps."

"Oh, but he's on his way there," said Edith. "He's human. You've got to
be human before you can be spiritual. It's a most important part of the
process. Don't you omit it."

"Have I omitted it?"

She stroked one of the thin hands that were out-stretched towards her on
the coverlet, and the other closed on her caress. The touch brought the
tears into her eyes. She raised her head to keep them from falling.

"Dear," said Edith, and paused and reiterated, "dear, you have about all
the big things that I haven't. You're splendid. There's only one thing I
want for you. If you could only see how divinely sacred the human part of
us is--and how pathetic."

Anne looked at her as she lay there, bright and brave, untroubled by her
own mortal pathos. In her, humanity, woman's humanity, was reduced to its
simplest expression of spiritual loving and bodily suffering. Anne was a
child in her ignorance of the things that had been revealed to Edith
lying there.

Looking at her, Anne's tears grew heavy and fell.

"It's your birthday," said Edith softly.

And as she heard Majendie's foot on the stairs Anne dried her eyes on the
birthday pocket handkerchief.

"Here she is," said Edith as he entered. "What are you going to do with
her? She doesn't have a birthday every day."

"I'm going," he said, "to take her down to breakfast."

Their meals so abounded in occasions for courtesy that they had become
profoundly formal. This morning Anne's courtesy was coloured by some
emotion that defied analysis. She wore her new mood like a soft veil
that heightened her attraction in obscuring it.

He watched her with a baffled preoccupation that kept him unusually
quiet. His quietness did him good service with Anne in her new mood.

When the meal was over she rose and went to the window. The sedate
Georgian street was full of the day that shone soberly here from the cool
clear north.

"What are you thinking of?" said he.

"I'm thinking what a beautiful day it is."

"Yes, isn't it a jolly day?"

"If it's beautiful here, what must it be in the country?"

"The country?" A thought struck him. "I say, would you like to go there?"

"Do you mean to-day?"

Her upper lip lifted, and the two teeth showed again on the pale rose of
its twin. In spite of the dignity of her proportions, Anne had the look
of a child contemplating some hardly permissible delight.

"Now, this minute. There's a train to Westleydale at nine fifty."

"It would be very nice. But--how about business?"

"Business be--"

"No, no, _not_ that word."

"But it is, you know; it can't help itself. There's a devil in all the
offices in Scale at this time of the year."

"Would _you_ like it?"

"I? Rather. I'm on!"

"But--Edith--oh no, we can't."

She turned with a sudden gesture of renunciation, so that she faced him
where he stood smiling at her. His face grew grave for her.

"Look here," he said, "you mustn't be morbid about Edith. It isn't
necessary. All the time we're gone, she'll be there, in perfect bliss
with simply thinking of the good time _we_'re having."

"But her back's bad to-day."

"Then she'll be glad that we're not there to feel it. Her back will add
to her happiness, if anything."

She drew in a sharp breath, as if he had hurt her.

"Oh, Walter, how can you?"

He replied with emphasis. "How can I? I can, not because I'm a brute, as
you seem to suppose, but because she's a saint and an angel. I take off
my hat and go down on my knees when I think of her. Go and put _your_
hat on."

She felt herself diminished, humbled, and in two ways. It was as if he
had said: "You are not the saint that Edith is, nor yet the connoisseur
in saintship that I am."

She knew that she was not the one; but to the other distinction she
certainly fancied that she had the superior claim. And she had never yet
come behind him in appreciation of Edith. Besides, she was hurt at being
spoken to in that way on her birthday.

Her resentment faded when she found him standing at the foot of the
stairs by Edith's door, waiting for her. He looked up at her as she
descended, and his eyes brightened with pleasure at the sight.

Edith was charmed with their plan. It might have been conceived as an
exquisite favour to herself, by the fine style in which she handled it.

They set out, Majendie carrying the luncheon basket and Anne's coat. He
had changed, and appeared in the Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and cap
he had worn at Scarby. The pang that struck her at the sight of them was
softened by her practical perception of their fitness for the adventure.
They became him, too, and she had memory of the charm he had once worn
for her with that open-air attire.

An hour's journey by rail brought them to the little wayside station.
They turned off the high road, walked for ten minutes across an upland
field, and came to the bridle-path that led down into the beech-woods of
Westleydale, in the heart of the hills.

They followed a mossy trail. The shade fell thin, warm, and
coloured, from leaves so tender that the light passed through their
half-transparent panes. Overhead there was the delicate scent of green
things and of sap, and underfoot the deep smell of moss and moistened
earth.

Anne drew the deep breath of delight. She took off her hat and gloves,
and moved forward a few steps to a spot where the wood opened and the
vivid light received her. Majendie hung back to look at her. She turned
and stood before him, superb and still, shrined in a crescent of tall
beech stems, column by column, with the light descending on the fine gold
of her hair. Nothing in Anne even remotely suggested a sylvan and
primeval creature; but, as she stood there in her temperate and alien
beauty, she seemed to him to have yielded to a brief enchantment. She
threw back her head, as if her white throat drank the sweet air like
wine. She held out her white hands, and let the warmth play over them
palpably as a touch.

And Majendie longed to take her by those white hands and draw her to him.
If he could have trusted her; but some instinct plucked him backward,
saying to him: "Not yet."

A mossy rise under a beech-tree offered itself to Anne as a suitable
throne for the regal woman that she was. He spread out her coat, and she
made room for him beside her. He sat for a long time without speaking.
The powers which were working that day for Majendie gave to him that
subtle silence. He had, at most times, an inexhaustible capacity for
keeping still.

Above them, just discernible through the tree-tops, veiled by a gauze of
dazzling air, the hill brooded in its majestic dream. Its green arms,
plunging to the valley, gathered them and shut them in.

Majendie's figure was not diminished by the background. The smallest
nervous movement on his part would have undone him, but he did not move.
His profound stillness, suggesting an interminable patience, gave him a
beautiful immensity of his own.

Anne, left in her charmed, inviolate circle, surrendered sweetly to the
spirit of Westleydale.

The place was peace folded upon the breast of peace.

Presently she spoke, calling his name, as if out of the far-off
unutterable peace.

"Walter, it was kind of you to bring me here."

"I am so glad you like it."

"I do indeed."

He tried to say more, but his heart choked him.

She closed her eyes, and the peace poured over her, and sank in. Her
heart beat quietly.

She opened her eyes and turned them on her husband. She knew that it was
his gaze that had compelled them to open. She smiled to herself, like a
young girl, shyly but happily aware of him, and turned from him to her
contemplation of the woods.

Anne had always rather prided herself on her susceptibility to the beauty
of nature, but it had never before reached her with this poignant touch.
Hitherto she had drawn it in with her eyes only; now it penetrated her
through every nerve. She was vaguely but deliciously aware of her own
body as a part of it, and of her husband's joy in contemplating her.

"He thinks me good-looking," she said to herself, and the thought came to
her as a revelation.

Then her young memory woke again and thrust at her.

"He thinks me good-looking. That's why he married me."

She longed to find out if it were so.

"Walter," said she, "I want to ask you a question."

"Well--if it's an easy one."

"It isn't--very. What made you want to marry me?"

He paused a moment, searching for the truth.

"Your goodness."

"Is that really true?"

"To the best of my belief, madam, it is."

"But there are so many other women better than me."

"Possibly. I haven't been happy enough to meet them."

"And if you had met them?"

"As far as I can make out, I shouldn't have fallen in love with them.
I shouldn't have fallen in love with _you_, if it hadn't been for your
goodness. But I shouldn't have fallen in love with your goodness in any
other woman."

"Have you known many other women?"

"One way and another, in the course of my life--yes. And what I liked so
much about you was your difference from those other women. You gave me
rest from them and their ways. They bored me even when I was half in love
with them, and made me restless for them even when I wasn't a little bit.
It was as if they were always expecting something from me--I couldn't
for the life of me tell what--always on the look out, don't you know, for
some mysterious moment that never arrived."

She thought she knew. She felt that he was describing vaguely and with
incomparable innocence the approaches of the ladies who had once designed
to marry him. He had never seen through them; they (and they must have
been so obvious, those ladies) had remained for him inscrutable,
mysterious. He could deal competently with effects, but he was not clever
at assigning causes.

He seemed conscious of her reflections. "They were quite nice, don't you
know. Only they couldn't let you alone. You let me alone so perfectly.
Being with you was peace."

"I see," she said quietly. "It was peace. That was all."

"Oh, was it? That was only the beginning, if you must know how it began."

"It began," she murmured, "in peace. That was what struck you most in me.
I must have seemed to you at peace, then."

"You did--you did. Weren't you?"

"I must have been. But I've forgotten. It's so long ago. There's peace
here, though. Why didn't we choose this place instead of Scarby?"

"I wish we had. I say--are you never going to forget that?"

"I've forgiven it. I might forget it if I could only understand."

"Understand _what_?"

"How you could be capable of caring for me--like that--and yet--"

"But the two things are so entirely different. It's impossible to explain
to you how different. Heaven forbid that you should understand the
difference."

"I understand enough to know--"

"You understand enough to know nothing. You must simply take my word for
it. Besides, the one thing's an old thing, over and done with."

"Over and done with. But if the two things are so different, how can you
be sure?"

"That sounds awfully clever of you, but I'm hanged if I know what you
mean."

"I mean, how can you tell that it--the old thing--never would come back?"

It _was_ clever of her. He realised that he had to deal now with a more
complete and complex creature than Anne had been.

"How could it?" he asked.

"If _she_ came back--"

"Never. And if it did--"

"Ah, if it did--"

"It couldn't in this case--my case--your case--"

"Her case--" she whispered.

"Her case? She hasn't got one. She simply doesn't exist. She might come
back as much as she pleased, and still she wouldn't exist. Is _that_ what
you've been afraid of all the time?"

"I never was really afraid till now."

"What you're afraid of couldn't happen. You can put that out of your head
for ever. If I could mention you in the same sentence as that woman you
should know why I am so certain. As it is, I must ask you again to take
my word for it."

He paused.

"But, since you have raised the question--and it's interesting, too--I
knew a man once--not a 'bad' man--to whom that very thing did happen. And
it didn't mean that he'd left off caring for his wife. On the contrary,
he was still insanely fond of her."

"What did it mean, then?"

"That she'd left off showing that she cared for him. And he cared more
for her, that man, after having left her, than he did before. In its way
it was a sort of test."

"I pray heaven--" said Anne; but she was too greatly shocked by the
anecdote to shape her prayer.

Majendie, feeling that the time, the place, and her mood were propitious
for the exposition, went on.

"There's another man I know. He was very fond of Edie. He's fond of her
still. He'll come and sit for hours playing backgammon with her. And yet
all his fondness for her hasn't kept him entirely straight. But he'd have
been as straight as anybody if he could have married her."

"But what does all this prove?"

"It proves nothing," he said almost passionately, "except that these two
things, just because they're different, are not so incompatible as you
seem to think."

"Did Edie care for that man?"

"I believe so."

"Ah, don't you see? There's the difference. What made Edie a saint made
him a sinner."

"I doubt if Edie would look on it quite in that light. She thinks it was
uncommonly hard on him."

"Does she know?"

"Oh, there's no end to the things that Edie knows."

"And she loves him in spite of it?"

"Yes. I suppose there's no end to that either."

No end to her loving. That was the secret, then, of Edie's peace.

Anne meditated upon that, and when she spoke again her voice rang on its
vibrating, sub-passionate note.

"And you said that I gave you rest. You were different."

He made as if he would draw nearer to her, and refrained. The kind heart
of Nature was in league with his. Nature, having foreknowledge of her own
hour, warned him that his hour was not yet.

And so he waited, while Nature, mindful of her purpose, began in Anne
Majendie her holy, beneficent work. The soul of the place was charged
with memories, with presciences, with prophecies. A thousand woodland
influences, tender timidities, shy assurances, wooed her from her soul.
They pleaded sweetly, persistently, till Anne's brooding face wore the
flush of surrender to the mysteries of earth.

The spell was broken by a squirrel's scurrying flight in the boughs above
them. Anne looked up, and laughed, and their moment passed them by.




CHAPTER X


"Are you tired?" he asked.

They had walked about the wood, made themselves hungry, and lunched like
labourers at high noon.

"No, I'm only thirsty. Do you think there's a cottage anywhere where you
could get me some water?"

"Yes, there's one somewhere about. I'll try and find it if you'll sit
here and rest till I come back."

She waited. He came back, but without the water. His eyes sparkled with
some mysterious, irrepressible delight.

"Can't you find it?"

"Rather. I say, do come and look. There's such a pretty sight."

She rose and went with him. Up a turning in the dell, about fifty yards
from their tree, a long grassy way cut sheer through a sheet of wild
hyacinths. It ran as if between two twin borders of blue mist, that
hemmed it in and closed it by the illusion of their approach. On either
side the blue mist spread, and drifted away through the inlets of the
wood, and became a rarer and rarer atmosphere, torn by the tree-trunks
and the fern. The path led to a small circular clearing, a shaft that
sucked the daylight down. It was as if the sunshine were being poured in
one stream from a flooded sky, and danced in the dark cup earth held for
it. The trees grew close and tall round the clearing. Light dripped from
their leaves and streamed down their stems, turning their grey to silver.
The bottom of the cup was a level floor of grass that had soaked in light
till it shone like emerald. A stone cottage faced the path; so small that
a laburnum brushed its roof and a may-tree laid a crimson face against
the grey gable of its side. The patch of garden in front was stuffed with
wall-flowers and violets. The sun lay warm on them; their breath stirred
in the cup, like the rich, sweet fragrance of the wine of day.

Majendie grasped Anne's arm and led her forward.

In the middle of the green circle, under the streaming sun, cradled in
warm grass, a girl baby sat laughing and fondling her naked feet. She
laughed as she lay on her back and opened one folded, wrinkled foot to
the sun; she laughed as she threw herself forward and beat her knees with
the outspread palms of her hands; she laughed as she rocked her soft body
to and fro from her rosy hips; then she stopped laughing suddenly, and
began crooning to herself a delicious, unintelligible song.

"Look," said Majendie, "that's what I wanted to show you."

"Oh--oh--oh--" said Anne, and looked, and stood stock-still.

The beatitude of that adorable little figure possessed the scene. Green
earth and blue sky were so much shelter and illumination to its pure and
solitary joy.

"Did you ever see anything so heart-rending?" said Majendie. "That
anything could be so young!"

Anne shook her head, dumb with the fascination.

As they approached again, the little creature rolled on its waist, and
crawled over the grass to her feet.

"The little lamb--" said she, and stooped, and lifted it.

It turned to her, cuddling. Through the thin muslin of her bodice she
could feel the pressure of its tender palms.

Majendie stood close to her and tried gently to detach and possess
himself of the delicate clinging fingers. But his eyes were upon
Anne's eyes. They drew her; she looked up, her eyes flashed to the
meeting-point; his widened in one long penetrating gaze.

A sudden pricking pain went through her, there where the pink and flaxen
thing lay sun-warm and life-warm to her breast.

At first she did not heed it. She stood hushed, attentive to the
prescience that woke in her; surrendered to the secret, with desire that
veiled itself to meet its unveiled destiny.

Then the veil fell.

The eyes that looked at her grew tender, and before their tenderness the
veil, the veil of her desire that had hidden him from her, fell.

Her face burned, and she hid it against the child's face as it burrowed
into the softness of her breast. When she would have parted the child
from her, it clung.

She laughed. "Release me." And he undid the clinging arms, and took the
child from her, and laid it again in the cradling grass.

"It's conceived a violent passion for you," said he.

"They always do," said she serenely.

The door of the cottage was open. The mother stood on the threshold,
shading her eyes and wondering at them. She gave Anne water, hospitably,
in an old china cup.

When Anne had drunk she handed the cup to her husband. He drank with his
eyes fixed on her over the brim, and gave it to her again. He wondered
whether she would drink from it after him (Anne was excessively
fastidious). To his intense satisfaction, she drank, draining the last
drop.

They went back together to their tree. On the way he stopped to gather
wild hyacinths for her. He gathered slowly, in a grave and happy passion
of preoccupation. Anne stood erect in the path and watched him, and
laughed the girl's laugh that he longed to hear.

It was as if she saw him for the first time through Edith's eyes, with
so tender an intelligence did she take in his attitude, the absurd, the
infantile intentness of his stooping figure, the still more absurdly
infantile emotion of his hands. It was the very same attitude which had
melted Edith, that unhappy day when they had watched him as he walked
disconsolate in the garden, and she, his wife, had hardened her heart
against him. She remembered Edith's words to her not two hours ago:
"If you could only see how unspeakably sacred the human part of us is,
and how pathetic." Surely she saw.

The deep feeling and enchantment of the woods was upon her. He was sacred
to her; and for pathos, it seemed to her that there was poured upon his
stooping body all the pathos of all the living creatures of God.

She saw deeper. In the illumination that rested on him there, she saw the
significance of that carelessness, that happiness of his which had once
troubled her. It was simply that his experience, his detestable
experience, had had no power to harm his soul. Through it all he had
preserved, or, by some miracle of God, recovered an incorruptible
innocence. She said to herself: "Why should I not love him? His heart
must be as pure as the heart of that little blessed child."

The warning voice of the wisdom she had learnt from him whispered: "And
it rests with you to keep him so."

He led her to her tree, where she seated herself regally as before. He
poured his sheaves of hyacinths as tribute into her lap. As his hands
touched hers her cold face flushed again and softened. He stretched
himself beside her and love stirred in her heart, unforbidden, as in a
happy dream. He watched the movements of her delicate fingers as they
played with the tangled hyacinth bells. Her hands were wet with the thick
streaming juice of the torn stalks; she stretched them out to him
helplessly. He knelt before her, and spread his handkerchief on his
knees, and took her hands and wiped them. She let them rest in his for a
moment, and, with a low, panting cry, he bowed his head and covered them
with kisses.

At his cry her lips parted. And as her soul had called to him across the
spiritual ramparts, so her eyes said to him: "Come"; and he knew that
with all her body and her soul she yearned to him and consented.

He held her tight by the wrists and drew her to him; and she laid her
arms lightly on his neck and kissed him.

"I'm glad now," she whispered, "that Edith didn't tell me. She knew you.
Oh, my dear, she knew."

And to herself she said proudly: "It rests with me."




BOOK II




CHAPTER XI


It was October, five months after Anne's birthday. She was not to know
again the mood which determined her complete surrender. Supreme moods can
never be recaptured or repeated. The passion that inspires them is
unique, self-sacrificial, immortal only through fruition; doomed to pass
and perish in its exaltation. She would know tenderness, but never just
that tenderness; gladness, but never that gladness; peace, but never the
peace that possessed her in the woods at Westleydale.

The new soul in her moved steadily, to a rhythm which lacked the diviner
thrill of the impulse which had given it birth. It was but seldom that
the moment revived in memory. If Anne had accounted to herself for that
day, she would have said that they had taken the nine-fifty train to
Westleydale, that they had had a nice luncheon, that the weather was
exceptionally fine, and that well, yes, certainly, that day had been the
beginning of their entirely satisfactory relations. Anne's mind had a
tendency to lapse into the commonplace when not greatly stirred. Happily
for her, she had a refuge from it in her communion with the Unseen.

Only at times was she conscious of a certain foiled expectancy. For the
greater while it seemed to her that she had attained an indestructible
spiritual content.

She conceived a profound affection for her home. The house in Prior
Street became the centre of her earthward thoughts, and she seldom left
it for very long. Her health remained magnificent; her nature being
adapted to an undisturbed routine, appeased by the well-ordered, even
passage of her days.

She had made a household religion for herself, and would have suffered in
departing from it. To be always down before her husband for eight-o'clock
breakfast; to sit with Edith from twelve till luncheon time, and in the
early afternoon; to spend her evenings with her husband, reading aloud or
talking, or sitting silent when silence soothed him; these things had
become more sacred and imperative than her attendance at St. Saviour's.
The hours of even-song struck for her no more.

For, above all, she had made a point of always being at home in time for
Majendie's return from his office. At five o'clock she was ready for him,
beside her tea-table, irreproachably dressed. Her friends complained that
they had lost sight of her. Regularly at a quarter to five she would
forsake the drawing-rooms of Thurston Square. However absorbing Mrs.
Eliott's conversation, towards the quarter, the tender abstraction of
Anne's manner showed plainly that her spirit had surrendered to another
charm. Mrs. Eliott, in letting her go, had the air of a person serenely
sane, indulgent to a persistent and punctual obsession. Anne divided her
friends into those who understood and those who didn't. Fanny Eliott
would never understand. But little Mrs. Gardner, through the immortality
of her bridal spirit, understood completely. And for Anne Mrs. Gardner's
understanding of her amounted to an understanding of her husband. Anne's
heart went out to Mrs. Gardner.

Not that she saw much of her, either. She had grown impatient of
interests that lay outside her home. Once she had decided to give herself
up to her husband, other people's claims appeared as an impertinence
beside that perfection of possession.

She was less vividly aware of her own perfect possession of him. Majendie
was hardly aware of it himself. His happiness was so profound that he had
not yet measured it. He, too, had slipped into the same imperturbable
routine. It was seldom that he kept her waiting past five o'clock. He
hated the people who made business appointments with him for that hour.
His old associates saw little of him, and his club knew him no more.
He preferred Anne's society to that of any other person. They had no more
fear of each other. He saw that she was beginning to forget.

In one thing only he was disappointed. The trembling woman who had held
him in her arms at Westleydale had never shown herself to him again. She
had been called, created, for an end beyond herself. The woman he had
married again was pure from passion, and of an uncomfortable reluctance
in the giving and taking of caresses. He forced himself to respect her
reluctance. He had simply to accept this emotional parsimony as one of
the many curious facts about Anne. He no longer went to Edith for an
explanation of them, for the Anne he had known in Westleydale was too
sacred to be spoken of. An immense reverence possessed him when he
thought of her. As for the actual present Anne, loyalty was part of the
large simplicity of his nature, and he could not criticise her.
Remembering Westleydale, he told himself that her blanched susceptibility
was tenderness at white heat. If she said little, he argued that (like
himself) she felt the more. And at times she could say perfect things.

"I wonder, Nancy," he once said to her, "if you know how divinely sweet
your voice is?"

"I shall begin to think it is, if you think so," said she.

"And would you think yourself beautiful, if I thought so?"

"Very beautiful. At any rate, as beautiful as I want to be."

He could not control the demonstration provoked by that admission, and
she asked him if he were coming to church with her to-morrow.

His Nancy chose her moments strangely.

But not for worlds would he have admitted that she was deficient in
a sense of humour. She had her small hilarities that passed for it.
Keenness in that direction would have done violence to the repose and
sweetness of her blessed presence. The peace of it remained with him
during his hours of business.

Anne did not like his business. But, in spite of it, she was proud
of him, of his appearance, his charm, his distinction, his entire
superiority to even the aristocracy of Scale.

She no longer resented his indifference to her friends in Thurston
Square, since it meant that he desired to have her to himself. Of his own
friends he had seen little, and she nothing. If she had not pressed Fanny
Eliott on him, he had spared her Mrs. Lawson Hannay and Mrs. Dick
Ransome. She had been fortunate enough to find both these ladies out when
she returned their calls. And Majendie had spoken of his most intimate
friend, Charlie Gorst, as absent on a holiday in Norway.

It was, therefore, in a mood of more than usual concession that she
proposed to return, now in October, the second advance made to her by
Mrs. Hannay in July.

Majendie was relieved to think that he would no longer be compelled to
perjure himself on Anne's account. The Hannays had frequently reproached
him with his wife's unreadiness in response, and (as he had told her) he
had exhausted all acceptable explanations of her conduct. He had "worked"
her headaches "for all they were worth" with Hannay; for weeks he had
kept Hannay's wife from calling, by the fiction, discreetly presented, of
a severe facial neuralgia; and his last shameless intimation, that Anne
was "rather shy, you know," had been received with a respectful
incredulity that left him with nothing more to say.

Mrs. Hannay was not at home when Anne called, for Anne had deliberately
avoided her "day." But Mrs. Hannay was irrepressibly forgiving, and Anne
found herself invited to dine at the Hannays' with her husband early in
the following week. It was hardly an hour since she had left Mrs.
Hannay's doorstep when the pressing, the almost alarmingly affectionate
little note came hurrying after her.

"I'll go, dear, if you really want me to," said she.

"Well--I think, if you don't mind. The Hannays have been awfully good to
me."

So they went.

"Don't snub the poor little woman too unmercifully," was Edith's parting
charge.

"I promise you I'll not snub her at all," said Anne.

"You can't," said Majendie. "She's like a soft sofa cushion with lots of
frills on. You can sit on her, as you sit on a sofa cushion, and she's as
plump, and soft, and accommodating as ever the next day."

The Hannays lived in the Park.

Majendie talked a great deal on the way there. His supporting and
attentive manner was not quite the stimulant he had meant it to be. Anne
gathered that the ordeal would be trying; he was so eager to make it
appear otherwise.

"Once you're there, it won't be bad, you know, at all. The Hannays are
really all right. They'll ask the very nicest people they know to meet
you. They think you're doing them a tremendous honour, you know, and
they'll rise to it. You'll see how they'll rise."

Mrs. Hannay had every appearance of having risen to it. Anne's entrance
(she was impressive in her entrances) set the standard high; yet Mrs.
Hannay rose. When agreeably excited Mrs. Hannay was accustomed to move
from one end of her drawing-room to the other with the pleasing and
impalpable velocity of all soft round bodies inspired by gaiety. So
exuberant was the softness of the little lady and so voluminous her
flying frills, that at these moments her descent upon her guests appeared
positively winged like the descent of cherubim. To-night she advanced
slowly from her hearth-rug with no more than the very slightest swaying
and rolling of all her softness, the very faintest tremor of her downy
wings. Mrs. Hannay's face was the round face of innocence, the face of
a cherub with blown cheeks and lips shaped for the trumpet.

"My dear Mrs. Majendie--at last." She retained Mrs. Majendie's hand for
the moment of presenting her to her husband. By this gesture she
appropriated Mrs. Majendie, taking her under her small cherubic wing.
"Wallie, how d'you do?" Her left hand furtively appropriated Mrs.
Majendie's husband. Anne marked the familiarity with dismay. It was
evident that at the Hannays' Walter was in the warm lap of intimacy.

It was evident, too, that Mr. Hannay had married considerably beneath
him. Anne owned that he had a certain dignity, and that there was
something rather pleasing in his loose, clean-shaven face. The sharp
slenderness of youth was now vanishing in a rosy corpulence, corpulence
to which Mr. Hannay resigned himself without a struggle. But above it the
delicate arch of his nose attested the original refinement of his type.
His mouth was not without sweetness, Mr. Hannay being as indulgent to
other people as he was to himself.

He received Anne with a benign air; he assured her of his delight in
making her acquaintance; and he refrained from any allusions to the long
delay of his delight.

Little Mrs. Hannay was rolling softly in another direction.

"Canon Wharton, let me present you to Mrs. Walter Majendie."

She had risen to Canon Wharton. For she had said to her husband: "You
must get the Canon. She can't think us such a shocking bad lot if we have
him." Her face expressed triumph in the capture of Canon Wharton, triumph
in the capture of Mrs. Walter Majendie, triumph in the introduction.
Owing to the Hannays' determination to rise to it, the dinner-party, in
being rigidly select, was of necessity extremely small.

"Miss Mildred Wharton--Sir Rigley Barker--Mr. Gorst. Now you all know
each other."

The last person introduced had lingered with a certain charming
diffidence at Mrs. Majendie's side. He was a man of about her husband's
age, or a little younger, fair and slender, with a restless, flushed face
and brilliant eyes.

"I can't tell you what a pleasure this is, Mrs. Majendie."

He had an engaging voice and a still more engaging smile.

"You may have heard about me from your husband. I was awfully sorry to
miss you when I called before I went to Norway. I only came back this
morning, but I _made_ Hannay invite me."

Anne murmured some suitable politeness. She said afterwards that her
instinct had warned her against Mr. Gorst, with his restlessness and
brilliance; but, as a matter of fact, her instinct had done nothing of
the sort, and his manners had prejudiced her in his favour. Fanny Eliott
had told her that he belonged to a very old Lincolnshire family. There
was a distinction about him. And he really had a particularly engaging
smile.

So she received him amiably; so amiably that Majendie, who had been
observing their encounter with an intent and rather anxious interest,
appeared finally reassured. He joined them, releasing himself adroitly
from Sir Rigley Barker.

"How's Edith?" said Mr. Gorst.

His use of the name and something in his intonation made Anne attentive.

"She's better," said Majendie. "Come and see her soon."

"Oh, rather. I'll come round to-morrow. If," he added, "Mrs. Majendie
will permit me."

"Mrs. Majendie," said her husband, "will be delighted."

Anne smiled assent. Her amiability extended even to Mrs. Hannay, who had
risen to it, so far, well.

During dinner Anne gave her attention to her right-hand neighbour, Canon
Wharton; and Mrs. Hannay, looking down from her end of the table, saw her
selection justified. In rising to the Canon she had risen her highest;
for the ex-member hardly counted; he was a fallen star. But Canon
Wharton, the Vicar of All Souls, stood on an eminence, social and
spiritual, in Scale. He had built himself a church in the new quarter of
the town, and had filled it to overflowing by the power of his eloquence.
Lawson Hannay, in a moment of unkind insight, had described the Canon as
"a speculative builder"; but he lent him money for his building, and
liked him none the less.

Out of the pulpit the Vicar of All Souls was all things to all men. In
the pulpit he was nothing but the Vicar of All Souls. He stood there for
a great light in Scale, "holding," as he said, "the light, carrying the
light, battling for light in the darkness of that capital of commerce,
that stronghold of materialism, founded on money, built up in money,
cemented with money!" He snarled out the word "money," and flung it in
the face of his fashionable congregation; he gnashed his teeth over it;
he shook his fist at them; and they rose to his mood, delighting in
little Tommy Wharton's pluck in "giving it them hot." He was always
giving it them hot, warming himself at his own fire. And then little
Tommy Wharton slipped out of his little surplice and his little cassock,
and into the Hannays' house for whiskey and soda. He could drink peg for
peg with Lawson Hannay, without turning a hair, while poor Lawson turned
many hairs, till his little wife ran in and hid the whiskey and shook her
handkerchief at the little Canon, and "shooed" him merrily away. And
Lawson, big, good-natured Lawson, would lend him more "money" to build
his church with.

So the Vicar of All Souls, who aspired to be all things to all men, was
hand in glove with the Lawson Hannays. He had occasionally been known to
provide for the tables of the poor, but he dearly loved to sit at the
tables of the rich; and he justified his predilection by the highest
example.

Anne, who knew the Canon by his spiritual reputation only, turned to him
with interest. Her eye, keen to discern these differences, saw at once
that he was a man of the people. He had the unfinished features, the
stunted form of an artisan; his body sacrificed, his admirers said, to
the energies of his mighty brain. His face was a heavy, powerful oval,
bilious-coloured, scarred with deep lines, and cleft by the wide mouth of
an orator, a mouth that had acquired the appearance of strength through
the Canon's habit of bringing his lips together with a snap at the close
of his periods. His eyes were a strange, opaque grey, but the clever
Canon made them seem almost uncomfortably penetrating by simply knitting
his eyebrows in a savage pent-house over them. They now looked forth at
Anne as if the Canon knew very well that her soul had a secret, and that
it would not long be hidden from him.

They talked about the Eliotts, for the Canon's catholicity bridged the
gulf between Thurston Square and vociferous, high-living, fashionable
Scale. He had lately succeeded (by the power of his eloquence) in winning
over Mrs. Eliott from St. Saviour's to All Souls. He hoped also to win
over Mrs. Eliott's distinguished friend. For the Canon was mortal. He had
yielded to the unspiritual seduction of filling All Souls by emptying
other men's churches. Lawson Hannay smiled on the parson's success,
hoping (he said) to see his money back again.

Money or no money, he left him a clear field with Mrs. Majendie. Ladies,
when they were pretty, appealed to Lawson as part of the appropriate
decoration of a table; but, much as he loved their charming society, he
loved his dinner more. He loved it with a certain pure extravagance,
illuminated by thought and imagination. Mrs. Hannay was one with him in
this affection. Her heart shared it; her fancy ministered to it, rising
higher and higher in unwearying flights. It was a link between them;
almost (so fine was the passion) an intellectual tie. But reticence was
not in Hannay's nature; and his emotion affected Anne very unpleasantly.
She missed the high lyric note in it. All epicurean pleasures, even so
delicate and fantastic a joy as Hannay's in his dinner, appeared gross
to Anne.

Majendie at the other end of the table caught sight of her detached,
unhappy look, and became detached and unhappy himself, till Mrs. Hannay
rallied him on his abstraction.

"If you _are_ in love, my dear Wallie," she whispered, "you needn't show
it so much. It's barely decent."

"Isn't it? Anyhow, I hope it's quite decently bare," he answered, tempted
by her folly. They were gay at Mrs. Hannay's end of the table. But Anne,
who watched her husband intently, looked in vain for that brilliance
which had distinguished him the other night, when he dined in Thurston
Square. These Hannays, she said to herself, made him dull.

Now, though Anne didn't in the least want to talk to Mr. Hannay, Mr.
Hannay displeased her by not wanting to talk more to her. Not that he
talked very much to anybody. Now and then the Canon's niece, Mildred
Wharton, the pretty girl on his left, moved him to a high irrelevance, in
those rare moments when she was not absorbed in Mr. Gorst. Pretty Mildred
and Mr. Gorst were flirting unabashed behind the roses, and it struck
Anne that the Canon kept an alarmed and watchful eye upon their
intercourse.

To Anne the dinner was intolerably long. She tried to be patient with it,
judging that its length was a measure of the height her hosts had risen
to. There she did them an injustice; for in the matter of a menu the
Hannays could not rise; for they lived habitually on a noble elevation.

At the other end of the table Mrs. Hannay called gaily on her guests
to eat and drink. But, when the wine went round, Anne noticed that she
whispered to the butler, and after that, the butler only made a feint
of filling his master's glass, and turned a politely deaf ear to his
protests. And then her voice rose.

"Lawson, that pineapple ice is delicious. Gould, hand the pineapple ice
to Mr. Hannay. I adore pineapple ice," said Mrs. Hannay. "Wallie, you're
drinking nothing. Fill Mr. Majendie's glass, Gould, fill it--fill it."
She was the immortal soul of hospitality, was Mrs. Hannay.

In the drawing-room Mrs. Hannay again took possession of Anne and led her
to the sofa. She fairly enthroned her there; she hovered round her; she
put cushions at her head, and more cushions under her feet; for Mrs.
Hannay liked to be comfortable herself, and to see every one comfortable
about her. "You come," said she, "and sit down by me on this sofa,
and let's have a cosy talk. That's it. Only you want another cushion.
No?--Do--Won't you really? Then it's four for me," said Mrs. Hannay,
supporting herself in various postures of experimental comfort, "one for
my back, two for my fat sides, and one for my head. Now I'm comfy. I
adore cushions, don't you? My husband says I'm a little down cushion
myself, so I suppose that's why."

Anne, in her mood, had crushed many innocent vulgarities before now; but
she owned that she could no more have snubbed Mrs. Hannay effectually
than you could snub a little down cushion. It would be impossible, she
thought, to make any impression at all on that yielding surface.
Impossible to take any impression from her, to say where her gaiety ended
and her vulgarity began.

"Isn't it funny?" the little lady went on, unconscious of Mrs. Majendie's
attitude. "My husband's your husband's oldest friend. So I think you and
I ought to be friends too."

Anne's face intimated that she hardly considered the chain of reasoning
unbreakable; but Mrs. Hannay continued to play cheerful elaborations on
the theme of friendship, till her husband appeared with the other three
men. He had his hand on Majendie's shoulder, and Mrs. Hannay's soft smile
drew Mrs. Majendie's attention to this manifestation of intimacy. And it
dawned on Anne that Mrs. Hannay's gaiety would not end here; though it
was here, with the mixing of the company, that her vulgarity would begin.

"Did you ever see such a pair? I tell Lawson he's fonder of Wallie than
he is of me. I believe he'd go down on his knees and black his boots for
nothing, if he asked him. I'd do it myself, only you mustn't tell Lawson
I said so." She paused. "I think Lawson wants to come and have a little
talk with you."

Hannay approached heavily, and his wife gave up her place to him,
cushions and all. He seated himself heavily. His eyes wandered heavily to
the other side of the room, following Majendie. And as they rested on his
friend there was a light in them that redeemed their heaviness.

He had come to Mrs. Majendie prepared for weighty utterance.

"That man," said Hannay, "is the best man I know. You've married, dear
lady, my dearest and most intimate friend. He's a saint--a Bayard." He
flung the name at her defiantly, and with a gesture he emphasised the
crescendo of his thought. "A _preux chevalier, sans peur_" said Mr.
Hannay, "_et sans reproche_."

Having delivered his soul, he sat, still heavily, in silence.

Anne repressed the rising of her indignation. To her it was as if he had
been defending her husband against some accusation brought by his wife.

And so, indeed, he was. Poor Hannay had been conscious of her
attitude--conscious under her pure and austere eyes, of his own
shortcomings, and it struck him that Majendie needed some defence against
her judgment of his taste in friendship.

When the door closed behind the Majendies, Mr. Gorst was left the last
lingering guest.

"Poor Wallie," said Mrs. Hannay.

"_Poor_ Wallie," said Mr. Hannay, and sighed.

"What do you think of her?" said the lady to Mr. Gorst.

"Oh, I think she's magnificent."

"Do you think he'll be able to live up to it?"

"Why not?" said Mr. Gorst cheerfully.

"Well, it wasn't very gay for him before he married, and I don't imagine
it's going to be any gayer now."

"_Now_" said Mr. Hannay, "I understand what's meant by the solemnisation
of holy matrimony. That woman would solemnise a farce at the Vaudeville,
with Gwen Richards on."

"She very nearly solemnised my dinner," said Mrs. Hannay.

"She doesn't know," said Mr. Hannay, "what a dinner is. She's got no
appetite herself, and she tried to take mine away from me. A regular
dog-in-the-manger of a woman."

"Oh, come, you know," said Gorst. "She can't be as bad as all that.
Edith's awfully fond of her."

"And _that's_ good enough for you?" said Mrs. Hannay.

"Yes. That's good enough for me. _I_ like her," said Gorst stoutly; and
Mrs. Hannay hid in her pocket-handkerchief a face quivering with mirth.

But Gorst, as he departed, turned on the doorstep and repeated,
"Honestly, I like her."

"Well, honestly," said Mr. Hannay, "I don't." And, lost in gloomy
forebodings for his friend, he sought consolation in whiskey and soda.

Mrs. Hannay took a seat beside him.

"And what did you think of the dinner?" said she.

"It was a dead failure, Pussy."

"You old stupid, I mean the dinner, not the dinner-party."

Mrs. Hannay rubbed her soft, cherubic face against his sleeve, and as she
did so she gently removed the whiskey from his field of vision. She was a
woman of exquisite tact.

"Oh, the dinner, my plump Pussy-cat, was a dream--a happy dream."




CHAPTER XII


"There are moments, I admit," said Majendie, "when Hannay saddens me."

Anne had drawn him into discussing at breakfast-time their host and
hostess of the night before.

"Shall you have to see very much of them?" She had made up her mind that
she would see very little, or nothing, of the Hannays.

"Well, I haven't, lately, have I?" said he, and she owned that he had
not.

"How you ever could--" she began, but he stopped her.

"Oh well, we needn't go into that."

It seemed to her that there was something dark and undesirable behind
those words, something into which she could well conceive he would not
wish to go. It never struck her that he merely wished to put an end to
the discussion.

She brooded over it, and became dejected. The great tide of her trouble
had long ago ebbed out of her sight. Now it was as if it had turned,
somewhere on the edge of the invisible, and was creeping back again. She
wished she had never seen or heard of the Hannays--detestable people.

She betrayed something of this feeling to Edith, who was impatient for an
account of the evening. (It was thus that Edith entered vicariously into
life.)

"Did you expect me to enjoy it?" she replied to the first eager question.

"No, I don't know that I did. _I_ should have enjoyed it very much
indeed."

"I don't believe you."

"Was there anybody there that you disliked so much?"

"The Hannays were there. It was enough."

"You liked Mr. Gorst?"

"Yes. He was different."

"Poor Charlie. I'm glad you liked him."

"I don't like him any better for meeting him there, my dear."

"Don't say that to Walter, Nancy."

"I have said it. How Walter can care for those people is a mystery to
me."

"He ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn't. Lawson Hannay has been a
good friend to him."

"Do you mean that he's under any obligation to him?"

"Yes. Obligations, my dear, that none of us can ever repay."

"It's intolerable!" said Anne.

"Is it? Wait till you know what the obligations are. That man you dislike
so much stood by Walter when your friends the Eliotts, my child, turned
their virtuous backs on him--when none of his own people, even, would
lend him a helping hand. It was Lawson Hannay who saved him."

"Saved him?"

"Saved him. Moved heaven and earth to get him out of that woman's
clutches."

Anne shook her head, and put her hands over her eyes to dispel her vision
of him. Edith laughed.

"You can't see Mr. Hannay moving heaven?"

"No, really I can't."

"Well, _I_ saw him. At least, if he didn't move heaven, he moved earth.
When nothing else could shake her hold, he bought her off."

"Bought--her--off?"

"Yes, bought her--paid her money to go. And she went."

"He owes him money, then?"

"Money, and a great many other things beside. You don't like it?"

"I can't bear it."

"Of course you can't. It hurts your pride. It hurt mine badly. But my
pride has had to go down in the dust before Lawson Hannay."

Anne raised her head as if she refused to lower her pride an inch to him.
She was trying to put the whole episode behind her, as it had come before
her. She had nothing whatever to do with it. Edith, of course, had to be
grateful. _She_ was not bound by the same obligation. But she was
determined that they should be quit of the Hannays. She would make Walter
pay back that money.

Meanwhile Edith's eyes filled with tears at the recollection. "Lawson
Hannay may not have been a very good man himself--I believe at one time
he wasn't. But he loved his friend, and he didn't want to see him going
the same way."

"The same way? That means that, if it hadn't been for Mr. Hannay, he
would never have met her."

"Mr. Hannay did his best to prevent his meeting her. He knew what she
was, and Walter didn't. He took him off in his yacht for weeks at a time,
to get him out of her way. When she followed him he brought him back.
When she persecuted him--well, I've told you what he did."

Anne lifted her hand in supplication, and rose and went to the open
window, as if, after that recital, she thirsted for fresh air. Edith
smiled, in spite of herself, at her sister-in-law's repudiation of the
subject.

"Poor Mr. Hannay," said she, "the worst you can say of him now is that he
eats and drinks a little more than's good for him."

"And that he's married a wife who sets him the example," said Anne,
returning from the window-sill refreshed.

"She keeps him straight, dear."

"Edith! I shall never understand you. You're angelically good. But it's
horrible, the things you take for granted. 'She keeps him straight!'"

"You think I take for granted a natural tendency to crookedness. I
don't--I don't. What I take for granted is a natural tendency to
straightness, when it gets its way. It doesn't always get it, though,
especially in a town like Scale."

"I wish we were out of it."

"So did I, dear, once; but I don't now. We must make the best of it."

"Has Walter paid any of that money back to Mr. Hannay?"

Edith looked up at her sister-in-law, startled by the hardness in her
voice. She had meant to spare Anne's pride the worst blow, but something
in her question stirred the fire that slept in Edith.

"No," she said, "he hasn't. He was going to, but Mr. Hannay cancelled the
debt, in order that he might marry--that he might marry you."

Anne drew back as if Edith had struck her bodily. She, then, had been
bought, too, with Mr. Hannay's money. Without it, Walter could not have
afforded to marry her; for she was poor.

She sat silent, until her self-appointed hour with Edith ended; and then,
still silently, she left the room.

And Edith turned her cheek on her cushions and sobbed weakly to herself.
"Walter would never forgive me if he knew I'd told her that. It was awful
of me. But Anne would have provoked the patience of a saint."

Anne owned that Edith was a saint, and that the provocation was extreme.

In the afternoon, Edith, at her own request, was forgiven, and Anne, by
way of proving and demonstrating her forgiveness, announced her amiable
intention of calling on Mrs. Hannay on her "day."

The day fell within a week of the dinner. It was agreed that Majendie was
to meet his wife at the Hannays, and to take her home. There was a good
mile between Prior Street and the Park; and Anne was a leisurely walker;
so it happened that she was late, and that Majendie had arrived a few
minutes before her. She did not notice him there all at once. Mrs. Hannay
was a sociable little lady; the radius of her circle was rapidly
increasing, and her "day" drew crowds. The lamps were not yet lit, and as
Anne entered the room, it was dim to her after the daylight of the open
air. She had counted on an inconspicuous entrance, and was astonished to
find that the announcement of her name caused a curious disturbance and
division in the assembly. A finer ear than Anne's might have detected an
ominous sound, something like the rustling of leaves before a storm. But
Anne's self-possession rendered her at times insensible to changes in the
social atmosphere. In any case the slight commotion was no more than she
had come prepared for in a whole roomful of ill-bred persons.

"Pussy," said a lady who stood near Mrs. Hannay. Mrs. Hannay had her back
to the doorway. The lady's voice rang on a low note of warning, and she
brought her mouth close to Mrs. Hannay's ear.

The hostess started, turned, and came at once towards Mrs. Majendie,
rolling deftly between the persons who obstructed her perturbed and
precipitate way. The perfect round of her cheeks had dropped a little; it
was the face of a poor cherub in vexation and dismay.

"Dear Mrs. Majendie,"--her voice, once so triumphant, had dropped too,
almost to a husky whisper,--"how very good of you."

She led her to a sofa, the seat of intimacy, set back a little from the
central throne. (Majendie could be seen fairly immersed in the turmoil,
struggling desperately through it, with a plate in his hand.)

Mrs. Hannay was followed by her husband, by the other lady, and by
Gorst. She introduced the other lady as Mrs. Ransome, and they seated
themselves, one on each side of Anne. The two men drew up in front of
the sofa, and began to talk very fast, in loud tones and with an
unnatural gaiety. The women, too, closed in upon her somewhat with their
knees; they were both a little confused, both more than a little
frightened, and the manner of both was mysteriously apologetic.

Anne, with her deep, insulating sense of superiority, had no doubt as to
the secret of the situation. She felt herself suitably protected, guarded
from contact, screened from view, distinguished very properly from
persons to whom it was manifestly impossible, even for Mrs. Hannay, to
introduce her. She was very sorry for poor Mrs. Hannay, she tried to make
it less difficult for her, by ignoring the elements of confusion and
fright. But poor Mrs. Hannay kept on being frightened; she refused to
part with her panic and be natural. So terrified was she, that she hardly
seemed to take in what Mrs. Majendie was saying.

Anne, however, conversed with the utmost amiability, while her thoughts
ran thus: "Dear lady, why this agitation? You cannot help being vulgar.
As for your friends, what do you think I expected?"

The other lady, Mrs. Dick Ransome, could not be held accountable for
anything but her own private vulgarity; and it struck Anne as odd that
Mrs. Dick Ransome, who was not responsible for Mrs. Hannay, seemed, if
anything, more terrified than Mrs. Hannay, who was responsible for her.

Mrs. Dick Ransome did not, at the first blush, inspire confidence. She
was a woman with a great deal of blonde hair, and a fresh-coloured,
conspicuously unspiritual face; coarse-grained, thick-necked, ruminantly
animal, but kind; kind to Mrs. Hannay, kind to Anne, kinder even than
Mrs. Hannay who was responsible for all the kindness.

Charlie Gorst hurried away to get Mrs. Majendie some tea, and Lawson's
Hannay's large form moved into the gap thus made, blocking Anne's view of
the room. He stood looking down upon her with an extraordinary smile of
mingled apology and protection. Gorst's return was followed by Majendie,
wandering uneasily with his plate. He smiled at Anne, too; and his smile
conveyed the same suggestion of desperation and distress. It was as if he
said to her: "I'm sorry for letting you in for such a crew, but how can
I help it?" She smiled back at him brightly, as much as to say; "Don't
mind. It amuses me. I'm taking it all in."

He wandered away, and Anne felt that the women exchanged looks across her
shoulders.

"I think I'll be going, Pussy dear," said Mrs. Ransome, nodding some
secret intelligence. She elbowed her way gently across the room, and came
back again, shaking her head hopelessly and helplessly. "She says I can
go if I like, but she'll stay," said Mrs. Ransome under her breath.

"Oh-h-h," said Mrs. Hannay under hers.

"What am I to do?" said Mrs. Ransome, flurried into audible speech.

"Stay--stay. It's much better." Mrs. Hannay plucked her husband by the
sleeve, and he lowered an attentive ear. Mrs. Ransome covered the
confidence with a high-pitched babble.

"You find Scale a very sociable place, don't you, Mrs. Majendie?" said
Mrs. Ransome.

"Go," said Mrs. Hannay, "and take her off into the conservatory, or
somewhere."

"More sociable in the winter-time, of course." (Mrs. Ransome, in her
agitation, almost screamed it.)

"I can't take her off anywhere, if she won't go," said Mr. Hannay in a
thick but penetrating whisper. He collapsed into a chair in front of
Anne, where he seemed to spread himself, sheltering her with his supine,
benignant gaze.

Mrs. Hannay was beside herself, beholding his invertebrate behaviour.
"Don't sit down, stupid. Do something--anything."

He went to do it, but evidently, whatever it was, he had no heart for it.

A maid came in and lit a lamp. There was a simultaneous movement of
departure among the nearer guests.

"Oh, heavens," said Mrs. Hannay, "don't tell me they're all going to go!"

Anne, serenely contemplating these provincial manners, was bewildered by
the horror in Mrs. Hannay's tone. There was no accounting for provincial
manners, or she would have supposed that Mrs. Hannay, mortified by the
presence of her most undesirable acquaintance, would have rejoiced to see
them go.

Their dispersal cleared a space down the middle of the room to the
bay-window, and disclosed a figure, a woman's figure, which occupied,
majestically, a settee. The settee, set far back in the bay of the
window, was in a direct line with Anne's sofa. That part of the room was
still unlighted, and the figure, sitting a little sideways, remained
obscure.

A servant went round lighting lamps.

The first lamp to be lit stood beside Anne's sofa. The effect of the
illumination was to make the lady in the window turn on her settee.
Across the space between, her eyes, obscure lights in a face still
undefined, swept with the turning of her body, and fastened upon Anne's
face, bared for the first time to their view. They remained fixed, as if
Anne's face had a peculiar fascination for them.

"Who is the lady sitting in the window?" asked Anne.

"It's my sister." Mrs. Ransome blinked as she answered, and her blood ran
scarlet to the roots of her blonde hair.

A cherub, discovering a horrible taste in his trumpet, would have looked
like Mrs. Hannay.

"Do let me give you some more tea, Mrs. Majendie?" said she, while Mrs.
Ransome signalled to her husband. "Here, Dick, come and make yourself
useful."

Mr. Ransome, a little stout man with a bald head, a pale puffy face, a
twinkling eye and a severe moustache, was obedient to her summons.

"Let me see," said she, "have you met Mrs. Majendie?"

"I have not had that pleasure," said Mr. Ransome, and bowed profoundly.
He waited assiduously on Mrs. Majendie. The Ransomes might have been
responsible for the whole occasion, they so rallied around and supported
her.

Hannay and Gorst, Ransome and another man were gathered together in a
communion with the lady of the settee. There was a general lull, and her
voice, a voice of sweet but somewhat penetrating quality, was heard.

"Don't talk to me," said she, "about women being jealous of each other.
Do you suppose I mind another woman being handsome? I don't care how
handsome she is, so long as she isn't handsome in my style. Of course,
I don't say I could stand it if she was the very moral of me."

"I say, supposing Toodles met the very moral of herself?"

"Could Toodles have a moral? I doubt it."

"I want to know what she'd do with it."

"Yes, by Jove, what _would_ you do?"

"Do? I should do my worst. I should make her sit somewhere with a good
strong light on her."

"Hold hard there," said her brother-in-law (the man who called her
Toodles), "Lady Cayley doesn't want that lamp lit just yet"

In the silence of the rest, the name seemed to leap straight across the
room to Anne.

The two women beside her heard it, and looked at each other and at her.
Anne sickened under their eyes, struck suddenly by the meaning of their
protection and their sympathy. She longed to rise, to sweep them aside
and go. But she was kept motionless by some superior instinct of disdain.

Outwardly she appeared in no way concerned by this revelation of the
presence of Lady Cayley. She might never have heard of her, for any
knowledge that her face betrayed.

Majendie, not far from the settee in the window, was handing cucumber
sandwiches to an old lady. And Lady Cayley had taken the matches from the
maid and was lighting the lamp herself, and was saying, "I'm not afraid
of the light yet, I assure you. There--look at me."

Everybody looked at her, and she looked at everybody, as she sat in the
lamplight, and let it pour over her. She seemed to be offering herself
lavishly, recklessly, triumphantly, to the light.

Lady Cayley was a large woman of thirty-seven, who had been a slender and
a pretty woman at thirty. She would have been pretty still if she had
been a shade less large. She had tiny upward-tilted features in her large
white face; but the lines of her jaw and her little round prominent chin
were already vanishing in a soft enveloping fold, flushed through its
whiteness with a bloom that was a sleeping colour. Her forehead and
eyelids were exceedingly white, so white that against them her black
eyebrows and blue eyes were vivid and emphatic. Her head carried high a
Gainsborough hat of white felt, with black plumes and a black line round
its brim. Under its upward and its downward curve her light brown hair
was tossed up, and curled, and waved, and puffed into an appearance of
great exuberance and volume. Exuberance and volume were the note of this
lady, a note subdued a little by the art of her dressmaker. A gown of
smooth black cloth clung to her vast form without a wrinkle, sombre,
severe, giving her a kind of slenderness in stoutness. She wore a white
lace vest and any quantity of lace ruffles, any number of little black
velvet lines and points set with paste buttons. And every ruffle, every
line, every point and button was an accent, emphasising some beauty of
her person.

And Anne looked at Lady Cayley once and no more.

It was enough. The trouble that she had put from her came again upon her,
no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had
shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined. She
grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her
in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of her own horror made flesh.

A terrible comprehension fell on her of that body, of its power, its
secret, and its sin.

For the first moment, when she looked from it to her husband, her mind
refused to associate him with that degradation. Reverence held her, and
a sudden memory of her passion in the woods at Westleydale. Mercifully,
they veiled her intelligence, and made it impossible for her to realise
that he should have sunk so low.

Then she remembered. She had known that it was, that it would be so,
that, sooner or later, the woman would come back. Her brain conceived a
curious two-fold intuition of the fact.

It was all foreappointed and foreknown, that she should come to this
hateful house, and should sit there, and that her eyes should be opened
and that she should see.

And the woman's voice rose again. "Do I see cucumber sandwiches?" said
Lady Cayley. "Dick, go and tell Mr. Majendie that if he doesn't want all
those sandwiches himself, I'll have one."

Ransome gave the message, and Majendie turned to the lady of the settee,
presenting the plate with the finest air of abstraction. Her large arm
hovered in selection long enough for her to shoot out one low quick
speech.

"I only wanted to see if you'd cut me, Wallie. Topsy bet me two to ten
you wouldn't."

"Why on earth should I?"

"Oh, on earth I know you wouldn't. But didn't I hear just now you'd
married and gone to heaven?"

"Gone to----?"

"Sh--sh--sh--I'm sure she doesn't let you use those naughty words. You
needn't say you're not in heaven, for I can see you are. You didn't
expect to meet me there, did you?"

"I certainly didn't expect to meet you here."

"How can you be so rude? Dick, take that tiresome plate from him, he
doesn't know what to do with it. Yes. I'll have another before it goes
away for ever."

Majendie had given up the plate before he realised that he was parting
with the link that bound him to the outer world. He turned instantly to
follow it there; but she saw his intention and frustrated it.

"Butter? Ugh! You might hold my cup for me while I take my gloves off."

She peeled two skin-tight gloves from her plump hands, so carefully that
the operation gave her all the time she wanted.

"I believe you're still afraid of me?" said she.

He was doing his best to look over her head; but she smiled a smile so
flashing that it drew his eyes to her involuntarily; he felt it as
positively illuminating their end of the room.

"You're not? Well, prove it."

"Is it possible to prove anything to you?"

Again he was about to break from her impatiently. Nothing, he had told
himself, would induce him to stay and talk to her. But he saw Anne's
face across the room; it was pale and hard, fixed in an expression of
implacable repulsion. And she was not looking at Lady Cayley, but at him.

"You can prove it," said Lady Cayley, "to me and everybody else--they're
all looking at you--by sitting down quietly for one moment, and trying to
look a little less as if we compromised each other."

He stayed, to prove his innocence before Anne; and he stood, to prove
his independence before Lady Cayley. He had longed to get away from the
woman, to stand by his wife's side--to take her out of the room, out of
the house, into the open air. And now the perversity that was in him kept
him where he hated to be.

"That's right. Thank heaven one of us has got some presence of mind."

"Presence of _mind_?"

"Yes. You don't seem to think of _me_," she added softly.

"Why should I?" he replied with a brutality that surprised himself.

She looked at him with blue eyes softly suffused, and the curve of a red
mouth sweet and tremulous. "Why?" her whisper echoed him. "Because I'm a
woman."

Her eyelids dropped ever so little, but their dark lashes (following the
upward trend of her features) curled to such a degree that the veil was
ineffectual. He saw a large slit of the wonderful, indomitable blue.

"I'm a woman, and you're a man, you see; and the world's on your side, my
friend, not on mine."

She said it sweetly. If she had been bitter she would have (as she
expressed it) "choked him off"; but Lady Cayley knew better than to be
bitter now, at thirty-seven. She had learnt that her power was in her
sweetness.

His face softened (from the other end of the room Anne saw it soften),
and Lady Cayley pursued with soundless feet her fugitive advantage.

"Poor Wallie, you needn't look so frightened. I'm quite safe now, or
soon will be. Didn't I tell you I was going there too? I'm going to be
married."

"I'm delighted to hear it," he said stiffly.

"To a perfect angel," said she.

"Really? If you're going up to heaven, he, I take it, is not coming down
to earth."

"Nothing is settled," said Lady Cayley, with such monstrous gravity that
his stiffness melted, and he laughed outright.

Anne heard him.

"Who, if I may ask, is this celestial, this transcendent being?"

She shook her head. "I can't tell you, yet."

"What, isn't even that settled?"

Majendie was so genuinely diverted at that moment that he would not have
left her if he could.

She took the sting of it, and flushed, dumbly. Remorse seized him, and he
sought to soothe her.

"My dear lady, I had a vision of heavenly hosts standing round you in
such quantities that it might be difficult to make a selection, you
know."

She rallied finely under the reviving compliment. "My dear, it's a case
of quality, not quantity--" Her past was so present to them both that he
almost understood her to say, "this time."

"I see," he said. "The wings. But nothing's settled?"

"It's settled right enough," said she, by which he understood her to
imply that the "angel's" case was. She had settled him. Majendie could
see her doing it. His imagination played lightly with the preposterous
idea. He conceived her in the act of bringing down her bird of heaven,
actually "winging him."

"But it's not given out yet."

"I see."

"You're the first I've told, except Topsy. Topsy knows it. So you mustn't
tell anybody else."

"I never tell anybody anything," said he.

He gathered that it was not quite so settled as she wished him to
suppose, and that Lady Cayley anticipated some possible dashing of the
cup of matrimony from her lips.

"So I'm not to have panics, in the night, and palpitations, every time
I think of it?"

"Certainly not, if it rests with me."

"I wanted you to know. But it's so precious, I'm afraid of losing it.
Nothing," said Lady Cayley, "can make up for the loss of a good man's
love. Except," she added, "a good woman's."

"Quite so," he assented coldly, with horror at his perception of her
drift.

His coldness riled her.

"Who," said she with emphasis, "is the lady who keeps making those awful
eyes at us over Pussy's top-knot?"

"That lady," said Majendie, "as it happens, is my wife."

"Why didn't you tell me that before? That's what comes, you see, of not
introducing people. I'll tell you one thing, Wallie. She's awfully
handsome. But you always had good taste. Br-r-r, there's a draught
cutting my head off. You might shut that window, there's a dear."

He shut it.

"And put my cup down."

He put it down.

Anne saw him. She had seen everything.

"And help me on with my cape."

He lifted the heavy sable thing with two fingers, and helped her
gingerly. A scent, horrid and thick, and profuse with memories, was
shaken from her as she turned her shoulder. He hoped she was going. But
she was not going; not she. Her body swayed towards him sinuously from
hips obstinately immobile, weighted, literally, with her unshakable
determination to sit on.

She rewarded him with a smile which seemed to him, if anything, more
atrociously luminous than the last. "I must keep you up to the mark,"
said she, as she turned with it. "Your wife's looking at you, and I feel
responsible for your good behaviour. Don't keep her waiting. Can't you
see she wants to go?"

"And I want to go, too," said he savagely. And he went.

And as she watched Mrs. Walter Majendie's departure, Lady Cayley smiled
softly to herself; tasting the first delicious flavour of success.

She had made Mrs. Walter Majendie betray herself; she had made her
furious; she had made her go.

She had sat Mrs. Walter Majendie out.

If the town of Scale, the mayor and the aldermen, had risen and given her
an ovation, she could not have celebrated more triumphally her return.




CHAPTER XIII


Anne and her husband walked home in silence across the Park, grateful for
its darkness. Majendie could well imagine that she would not want to
talk. He made allowance for her repulsion; he respected it and her
silence as its sign. She had every right to her resentment. He had let
her in for the Hannays, who had let her in for the inconceivable
encounter. On the day of her divorce Sarah Cayley had removed herself
from Scale, and he had shrunk from providing for the supreme
embarrassment of her return. He had looked on her as definitely,
consummately departed. She had disappeared, down dingy vistas, into
unimaginable obscurities. He pictured her as sunk, in Continental
abysses, beyond all possibility of resurgence. And she had emerged (from
abominations) smiling that indestructible smile. The incident had been
unpleasant, so unpleasant that he didn't want to talk about it. All the
same, he would have done violence to his feelings and apologised for it
then and there, but that he really judged it better to let well alone. It
was well, he thought, that Anne was so silent. She might have had a great
deal to say, and it was kind of her not to say it, to let him off so
easily.

Anne's interpretation of Majendie's silence was not so favourable. After
being exposed to the pain and insult of Lady Cayley's presence she had
expected an immediate apology, and she inferred from its omission an
unpardonable complicity. Any compliance with the public toleration of
that person would have been inexcusable, and he had been more than
compliant, more than tolerant; he had been solicitous, attentive,
deferent. And deference to such a woman was insolence to his wife. Anne
was struck dumb by the shameless levity of the proceedings. The two had
behaved as if nothing had happened, or rather (she bitterly corrected
herself) as if everything had happened, and might happen any day again
(she inferred as much from his silence). It would--it would happen. _Her_
intentions were, to Anne's mind, unmistakable; that was plainly what she
had come back for. As to his intentions, Anne was not yet clear. She had
not made up her mind that they were bad; but she shuddered as she said to
herself that he was "weak." He had come at that woman's call; he had hung
round her; he had waited on her at her bidding; at her bidding he had sat
down beside her; he had listened to her, attracted, charmed, delighted;
he had talked to her in the low voice Anne knew. How could she tell what
had or had not passed between them there, what intimacies, what
recognitions, what resurrections of the corrupt, ill-buried past? He had
been "weak--weak--weak." Henceforth she must reckon with his weakness,
and reckoning with it, she must keep him from that woman by any method,
and at any cost! It was something that he had the grace to be ashamed of
himself (another inference from his silence). No wonder, after that
communion, if he was ashamed to look at his wife or speak to her.

He went straight to Edith when they reached home, and Anne went upstairs
to her bedroom.

She had a great desire to be alone. She wanted to pray, as she had
prayed in that room at Scarby on the morning of her discovery. Not that
she felt in the least as she had felt then. She was more profoundly
wounded--wounded beyond passion and beyond tears, calm and self-contained
in her vision of the inevitable, the fore-ordained reality. She had to
get rid of her vision; it was impossible to live with it, impossible to
live through another hour like the last. Her desire to pray was a
terrible, urgent longing that consumed her, impatient of every minute
that kept her from her prayer. She controlled it, moving slowly as she
took off her outdoor clothes and put them decorously away; feeling that
the force of her prayer gathered and mounted behind these minute
obstructions and delays.

She knelt down by her bed. She had been used to pray there with her eyes
fixed upon the crucifix which he had given her. It hung low, almost
between the pillows of their bed. Now she closed her eyes to shut it from
her sight. It was then that she realised what had been done to her. With
the closing of her eyes she opened some back room in her brain, a hot
room, now dark, and now charged with a red light, vaporous and vivid,
that ran in furious pulses, as it were the currents of her blood made
visible. The room thus opened was tenanted by the revolting image of Lady
Cayley. Now it loomed steadily in the dark, now it leapt quiveringly into
the red, vaporous light. She could not see her husband, but she had a
sickening sense that he was there, looming, and that his image, too,
would leap into sight at some signal of her unwilling thought. She knew
that that back room would remain, built up indestructibly in the fabric
of her mind. It would be set apart for ever for the phantom of her
husband and her husband's mistress. By a tremendous effort of will she
shut the door on it. There it must be for ever, but wherever she looked,
she would not look there; much less allow herself to dwell in the unclean
place. It was not to think of that woman, his mistress, that she had gone
down on her knees. To think of her was contamination. After all, the
woman had no power over her inner life. She was not forced to think of
her. She had her sanctuary and her way of escape.

But before she could get there she had to struggle against the fatigue
which came of her effort not to think. Once she would have resigned
herself to this physical lassitude, mistaking it for the sinking of the
soul in the beatific self-surrender. But Anne's sufferings had brought
her a little further on her path. She had come to recognise that supine
state as a great danger to the spiritual life. It was not by lassitude,
but by concentration that the intense communion was attained. She lifted
her bowed head as a sign of her exaltation.

And as she lifted it, she caught, as it were, the approach of triumphal
music. Words gathered, as on wings, from the clean-swept heavenly
spaces--they went by her like the passing of an immense processional:
"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting
doors, and the King of Glory shall come in...." It came on, that heavenly
invasion, and all her earthly barriers went down before it. And it was as
if something strong in her, something solitary and pure, had cloven its
way through the mesh of the throbbing nerves, through the beating
currents of the blood, through the hot red lights of the brain, and had
escaped into the peaceful blank. She remained there a moment, in the
place of bliss, the divine place of the self-surrendered soul, where
mortal emptiness draws down immortality.

She said to herself, "I have my refuge; no one can take it from me.
Nothing matters so long as I can get there."

She rose from her knees more calm and self-contained than ever, barely
conscious of her wound.

So calm and so self-contained was she at dinner that Majendie had an
agreeable rebound; he supposed that she had recovered from the abominable
encounter, and had put Lady Cayley out of her head like a sensible woman.
Edith had received his account of that incident with a gravity that had
made him profoundly uncomfortable; and his relief was in proportion to
his embarrassment. Unfortunately it gave him the appearance of
complacency; and complacency in the circumstances was more than Anne
could bear. Coming straight from her exaltation and communion, she was
crushed by the profound, invisible difference that separated them, the
perpetual loneliness of her unwedded, unsubjugated soul. They lived a
whole earth and a whole heaven apart. He was untouched by the fires that
burnt and purified her. The tragic crises that destroyed, the spiritual
moments that built her up again, passed by him unperceived. If she were
to tell him how she had attained her present serenity of mind, by what
vision, by what effort, by what sundering of body and soul, he would not
understand.

And that was not the worst. She had learnt not to look for that spiritual
understanding in him. It mattered little that her unique suffering and
her unique consolation should remain alike ignored. The terrible thing
was that he should have come out of his own ordeal so smiling and so
unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he
could meet, after seven years, in his wife's presence, the partner of his
sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)--meet her, and not be
shaken by the shame of it. It showed how lightly he held it, how low his
standard was. She recalled, shuddering, the woman's face. Nothing in the
visions she had so shrunk from could compare with the violent reality.
For one moment of repulsion she saw him no less gross. She wondered,
would she have to reckon with that, henceforth, too?

She looked up, and met across the table the engaging innocence that she
recognised as the habitual expression of his face. He had no idea of what
dreadful things she was thinking of him. She put her thoughts from her,
admitting that she had never had to reckon with that, yet. But it was
terrible to her that, while he forced her to such thinking, he could sit
there so unconscious, and so unashamed. He sat there, bright-eyed,
smiling, a little flushed, playing with a light topic in a manner that
suggested a conscience singularly at ease. He went on sitting there,
absolutely unembarrassed, eating dessert. The eating of dinner was bad
enough, it showed complacency. But dessert argued callousness. She had
wondered how he could have any appetite at all. Her dinner had almost
choked her.

And she sat waiting for him to finish, hardly looking at him, detached,
saint-like, and still.

At last her silence struck him as a little ominous. He had distinct
misgivings as they turned into the study for coffee and his cigarette.
Anne sat up in her chair, refusing the support and luxury of cushions,
leaning a little forward with a brooding air.

"Well, Nancy," said he, "are you going to read to me?"

(Better to read than talk.)

"Not now," said she. "I want to talk to you."

He saw that it was not to be avoided. "Won't you let me have my coffee
and a cigarette first?"

She waited, silent, with a strained air of patience more uncomfortable
than words.

"Well," said he, lighting a second cigarette, and settling in the
position that would best enable him to bear it, "out with it, and get it
over."

"I want to know," said she, "what you are going to do."

"To do?" He was genuinely bewildered.

"Yes, to do."

"But about what?"

"About that woman."

He was so charmed with the angelic absurdity of the question that he
paused while he took it in, smiling.

"I can't see," he said presently, "that I'm called upon to take action.
Why should I?"

She drew herself up proudly.

"For my sake."

He was instantly grave. "For your sake, dear, I would do a great deal.
But"--he smiled again--"what action should I take?"

"Is it for me to say?"

"Well, I hardly know. I should be glad, at any rate, if you'd make a
suggestion. I can't, for instance, get up and turn the lady out of her
own sister's house. Do you want me to do that? Would you like me to--to
take her away in a cab?"

There was a long silence, so awful that he forced himself to speak. "I am
extremely sorry. It was, of course, outrageous that you should have had
to sit in the same room with her for five minutes. But what could I do?"

"You could have taken _me_ away."

"I did, as soon as I got the chance."

"Not before you had"--she paused for her phrase--"condoned her
appearance."

"Condoned her appearance? How?"

"By your whole manner to her."

"Would you have had me uncivil?"

"There are degrees," said she, "between incivility and marked attention."

He coloured. "Marked attention! There was nothing marked about it. What
could I do? Would you, I say, have had me turn my back on the unfortunate
woman? That would have been marked attention, if you like."

"I don't know what I would have had you do. One has no rules beforehand
for inconceivable situations. It was inconceivable that I should have met
her as I did, in your friend's house. Inconceivable that I should meet
such people anywhere. What I do ask is that you will not let me be
exposed in that way again."

"That I certainly will not. The Ransomes did their best to get her out
of the room to-day. They won't annoy you. I can't conceive why they
called--except that they have always been rather fond of me. You can't
hold people accountable for all the doings of all their relations, can
you?"

"In this case I should say you could--perfectly well."

"Well, I don't, as it happens. But you needn't have anything to do with
them; not, at least, while she's living in their house."

"It was in the Hannays' house I met her. But I'm not thinking of myself."

"I'm thinking of you, and of nothing else."

"You needn't," said she, cold to his warmth. "I can take care of myself.
It's you I'm thinking of."

"Me? Why me?"

"Because I'm your wife and have a right to. It's out of the question that
I should call on Mrs. Hannay or receive her calls. I must also beg of you
to give up going there, and to the Ransomes, and to every place where you
will be brought into contact with Lady Cayley."

He stared at her in amazement. "My dear girl, you don't expect me to cut
the Ransomes because she isn't brute enough to turn her sister out of
doors?"

"I expect you to give up going to them, and to the Hannays, as long as
Lady Cayley is in Scale. Promise me."

"I can't promise you anything of the sort. Heaven knows how long she's
going to stay."

"I ought not to have to explain that by countenancing her you insult me.
You should see it for yourself."

"I can't see it. In the first place, with all due regard to you, I don't
insult you by countenancing her, as you call it. In the second place, I
don't countenance her by going into other people's houses. If I went into
her house, you might complain. She hasn't got a house, poor lady."

She ignored his pity. "In spite of your regard for me, then, you will
continue to meet her?"

"I shan't if I can help it. But if I must, I must. I can't be rude to
people."

"You can be firm."

He laughed. "What have I got to be firm about?"

"Not meeting her."

"What if I do meet her? I sincerely hope I shan't; but what if I do?"

Her mouth trembled; her eyes filled with tears. He sprang up and leaned
over her, resting his arms on the back of her chair, bringing his face
close to hers and smiling into her eyes.

"No--no--no!" She drew back her head and shrank away from him. He put out
his hand and turned her face to him, gazing into her eyes, as if for the
first time he saw and could fathom the sorrow and the fear in them.

"What if I do?" he repeated.

She tried to push his hand from her, but she could not.

"You stupid child," he said, "do you mean to say that you're still afraid
of that?"

"It's you who have made me--"

"My sweetheart--"

"No, no. Don't touch me."

"What do you mean?" he asked gravely, still leaning over and looking down
at her.

"I mean--I mean--I can't bear it!" she cried, gasping for breath under
the oppression of his nearness.

He realised her repugnance, and removed himself.

"Do you mean," he said, "because of her?"

"Yes," she said, "because of her."

He laughed softly. "Dear child--she doesn't exist. She doesn't exist." He
swept her out of existence with a gesture of his hand. "Not for me at any
rate."

The emphasis was lost upon her. "It's all nonsense to talk in that way.
If she doesn't exist for you, you shouldn't have gone near her, you
shouldn't have sat talking--to her."

"What do you suppose we were talking about?"

"I don't know. I don't want to know. I saw and heard enough."

"Look here, Anne. You wanted me to be rude to her, didn't you? I _was_
rude. I was brutal. She had to remind me that she was a woman. By heaven,
I'd forgotten it. If you're always to be going back on that--"

"I'm not going back. She has come back."

"It doesn't matter. She doesn't exist. What difference does she make?"

She rose for better delivery of what she had to say.

"She makes the whole difference. It's not that I'm afraid of her. I don't
think I am. I believe that you love me."

"Ah--if you believe that--" He came nearer.

"I do believe it. It's to me that it makes the difference. I must be
honest with you. It's not that I'm afraid. It is--I think--that I'm
disgusted."

He lowered his eyes and moved from her uneasily.

"I was horrified enough when I first knew of it, as you know. You know,
too, that I forgave you, and that I forgot. That was because I didn't
realise it. I didn't know what it was. I couldn't before I had seen her.
Now I have seen her, and I know."

"What do you know?" he said coldly.

"The awfulness of it."

"Do you! Do you!"

"Yes--and if you had realised it yourself--But you don't, and your not
realising it is what shocks me most."

"I don't realise it?" His smile, this time, was grim. "I should think I
was in a better position for realising it than you."

"You don't realise the shame, the sin of it"

"Oh, don't I?" He turned to her, "Look here, whatever I've done, it's all
over. I've taken my punishment, and repented in sackcloth and ashes. But
you can't go on for ever repenting. It wears you out. It seems to me
that, after all this time, I might be allowed to leave off the sackcloth
and brush the ashes out of my hair. I want to forget it if I can. But you
are never--never--going to forget it. And you are going to make me
remember it every day of my life. Is that it?"

"It is not." She could not see herself thus hard and implacable. She had
vowed that there was no duty that she would omit; and it was her duty to
forgive; if possible, to forget. "I am going to try to forget it, as I
have forgotten it before. But it will be very hard, and you must be
patient with me. You must not remind me of it more than you can help."

"When have I--?"

She was silent.

"When?" he insisted.

She shook her head and turned away. A sudden impulse roused him, and he
sprang after her. He grasped her wrist as she laid her hand on the door
to open it. He drew her to him. "When?" he repeated. "How? Tell me."

She paused, gazing at him. He would have kissed her, hoping thus to make
his peace with her; but she broke from him.

"Ah," she cried, "you are reminding me of it now."

He opened the door, dumb with amazement, and turned from her as she went
through.




CHAPTER XIV


It was a fine day, early in November, and Anne was walking alone along
one of the broad flat avenues that lead from Scale into the country
beyond. Made restless by her trouble, she had acquired this pedestrian
habit lately, and Majendie encouraged her in it, regarding it less as a
symptom than as a cure. She had flagged a little in the autumn, and he
was afraid that the strain of her devotion to Edith was beginning to tell
upon her health. On Saturdays and Sundays they generally walked together,
and he did his best to make his companionship desirable. Anne, given now
to much self-questioning as to their relations, owned, in an access of
justice, that she enjoyed these expeditions. Whatever else she had found
her husband, she had never yet found him dull. But it did not occur to
her, any more than it occurred to Majendie, to consider whether she
herself were brilliant.

She made a point of never refusing him her society. She had persuaded
herself that she went with him for his own good. If he wanted to take
long walks in the country, it was her duty as his wife to accompany him.
She was sustained perpetually by her consciousness of doing her duty as
his wife; and she had persuaded herself also that she found her peace in
it. She kept his hours for him as punctually as ever; she aimed more
than ever at perfection in her household ways. He should never be able
to say that there was one thing in which she had failed him.

No; she knew that neither he nor Edith, if they tried, could put their
finger on any point, and say: There, or there, she had gone wrong. Not
in her understanding of him. She told herself that she understood him
completely now, to her own great unhappiness. The unhappiness was the
price she paid for her understanding.

She was absorbed in these reflections as she turned (in order to be home
by five o'clock), and walked towards the town. She was awakened from
them by the trampling of hoofs and the cheerful tootling of a horn. A
four-in-hand approached and passed her; not so furiously but that she had
time to recognise Lady Cayley on the box-seat, Mr. Gorst beside her,
driving, and Mr. Ransome and Mr. Hannay behind amongst a perfect
horticultural show in millinery.

Anne had no acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Scale and
Beesly Four-in-hand Club, and her intuition stopped short of recognising
Miss Gwen Richards, of the Vaudeville, and the others. All the same her
private arraignment of these ladies refused them whatever benefit they
were entitled to from any doubt. Not that Anne wasted thought on them.
In spite of her condemnation, they barely counted; they were mere
attendants, accessories in the vision of sin presented by Lady Cayley.

Nothing could have been more conspicuous than her appearance, more
unabashed than the proclamation of her gay approach. Mounted high,
heralded by the tootling horn, her hair blown, her cheeks bright with
speed, her head and throat wrapped in a rosy veil that flung two broad
streamers to the wind (as it were the banners of the red dawn flying and
fluttering over her), she passed, the supreme figure in the pageant of
triumphal vice.

Her face was turned to Gorst's face, his to hers. He looked more than
ever brilliant, charming and charmed, laughing aloud with his companion.
Hannay and Ransome raised their hats to Mrs. Majendie as they passed.
Gorst was too much absorbed in Lady Cayley.

Anne shivered, chilled and sick with the resurgence of her old disgust.
These were her husband's chosen associates and comrades; they stood by
one another; they were all bound up together in one degrading intimacy.
His dear friend Mr. Gorst was the dear friend of Lady Cayley. He knew
what she was, and thought nothing of it. Mr. Ransome, her brother-in-law,
knew, and thought nothing of it. As for Mr. Hannay, Walter's other dear
friend, you only had to look at the women he was with to see how much Mr.
Hannay thought. There could have been nothing very profound in his
supposed repudiation of Lady Cayley. If it was true that he had once paid
her money to go, he was doing his best to welcome her, now she had come
back. But it was Gorst, with his vivid delight in Lady Cayley, who amazed
her most. Anne had identified him with the man of whom Walter had once
told her, the man who was "fond of Edith," the man of whom Walter
admitted that he was not "entirely straight." And this man was always
calling on Edith.

She was resolved that, if she could prevent it, he should call no more.
It should not be said that she allowed her house to be open to such
people. But it required some presence of mind to state her determination.
Before she could speak with any authority she would have to find out all
that could be known about Mr. Gorst. She would ask Fanny Eliott, who had
seemed to know, and to know more than she had cared to say.

Instead of going straight home, she turned aside into Thurston Square;
and had the good luck to find Fanny Eliott at home.

Fanny Eliott was rejoiced to see her. She looked at her anxiously, and
observed that she was thin. She spoke of her call as a "coming back"; the
impression conveyed by Anne's manner was so strikingly that of return
after the pursuit of an illusion.

Anne smiled wearily, as if it had been a long step from Prior Street to
Thurston Square.

"I thought," said Mrs. Eliott, "I was never going to see you again."

"You might have known," said Anne.

"Oh yes, I might have known. And you're not going to run away at five
o'clock?"

"No. I can stay a little--if you're free."

Mrs. Eliott interpreted the condition as a request for privacy, and rang
the bell to ensure it. She knew something was coming; and it came.

"Fanny, I want you to tell me what you know of Mr. Gorst."

Mrs. Eliott looked exceedingly embarrassed. She avoided gossip as
inconsistent with the intellectual life. And unpleasant gossip was
peculiarly distasteful to her. Therefore she hesitated. "My dear, I
don't know much--"

"Don't put me off like that. You know something. You must tell me."

Mrs. Eliott reflected that Anne had no more love of scandalous histories
than she had; therefore, if she asked for knowledge, it must be because
her need was pressing.

"My dear, I only know that Johnson won't have him in the house."

She spoke as if this were nothing, a mere idiosyncrasy of Johnson's.

"Why not?" said Anne. "He has very nice manners."

"I dare say, but Johnson doesn't approve of him." (Another eccentricity
of Johnson's.)

"And why doesn't he?"

"Well, you know, Mr. Gorst has a very unpleasant reputation. At least he
goes about with most objectionable people."

"You mean he's the same sort of person as Mr. Hannay?"

"I should say he was, if anything, worse."

"You mean he's a bad man?"

"Well--"

"So bad that you won't have him in the house?"

"Well, dear, you know we are particular." (A singularity that she shared
with Johnson.)

"So am I," said Anne.

"And this," she said to herself, "is the man whom Edie's fond of,
Walter's dearest friend. And my friends won't have him in their house."

"Charming, I believe, and delightful," said Mrs. Eliott, "but perhaps a
little dangerous on that account. And one has to draw the line. I want to
know about you, dear. You're well, though you're so thin?"

"Oh, very well."

"And happy?" (She ventured on it.)

"Could I be well if I weren't happy? How's Mrs. Gardner?"

The thought of happiness called up a vision of the perpetually radiant
bride.

"Oh, Mrs. Gardner, she's as happy as the day is long. Much too happy, she
says, to go about paying calls."

"_I_ haven't called much, have I?" said Anne, hoping that her friend
would draw the suggested inference.

"No, you haven't. _You_ ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"Why I any more than Mrs. Gardner? But I am."

Mrs. Eliott perceived her blunder. "Well, I forgive you, as long as
you're happy."

Anne kissed her more tenderly than usual as they said good-bye, so
tenderly that Mrs. Eliott wondered "Is she?"

Majendie was late that afternoon, and Anne had an hour alone with Edith.
She had made up her mind to speak seriously to her sister-in-law on the
subject of Mr. Gorst, and she chose this admirable opportunity.

"Edith," said she with the abruptness of extreme embarrassment, "did you
know that Lady Cayley had come back?"

"Come back?"

"She's here, living in Scale."

There was a pause before Edith answered. Anne judged from the quiet of
her manner that this was not the first time that she had heard of the
return.

"Well, dear, after all, if she is, what does it matter? She must live
somewhere."

"I should have thought that for her own sake it was a pity to have chosen
a town where she was so well known."

"Oh well, that's her own affair. I suppose she argues that most people
here know the worst; and that's always a comfort."

"Oh, for all they appear to care--" Her face became tragic, and she lost
her unnatural control. "I can't understand it. I never saw such people.
She's received as if nothing had happened."

"By her own people. It's decent of them not to cast her off."

"Oh, as for decency, they don't seem to have a shred of it amongst them.
And the Hannays are not her own people. I thought I should be safe in
going there after what you told me. And it was there I met her."

"I know. They were most distressed about it."

"And yet they received her, too, as if nothing had happened."

"Because nothing can happen now. They got rid of her when she was
dangerous. She isn't dangerous any more. On the contrary, I believe her
great idea now is to be respectable. I suppose they're trying to give her
a lift up. You must admit it's nice of them."

"You think them nice?"

"I think _that's_ nice of them. It's the sort of thing they do. They're
kind people, if they're not the most spiritual I have met."

"You may call it kindness, I call it shocking indifference. They're worse
than the Ransomes. I don't believe the Ransomes know what's decent. The
Hannays know, but they don't care. They're all dreadful people; and their
sympathy with each other is the most dreadful thing about them. They hold
together and stand up for each other, and are 'kind' to each other,
because they all like the same low, vulgar, detestable things. That's why
Mr. Hannay married Mrs. Hannay, and Mr. Ransome married Lady Cayley's
sister. They're all admirably suited to each other, but not, my dear
Edie, to you or me."

"They're certainly not your sort, I admit."

"Nor yours either."

"No, nor mine either," said Edith, smiling. "Poor Anne, I'm sorry we've
let you in for them."

"I'm not thinking only of myself. The terrible thing is that you should
be let in, too."

"Oh, me--how can they harm me?"

"They have harmed you."

"How?"

"By keeping other people away."

"What people?"

"The nice people you should have known. You were entitled to the very
best. The Eliotts and the Gardners--those are the people who should have
been your friends, not the Hannays and the Ransomes; and not, believe me,
darling, Mr. Gorst."

For a moment Edith unveiled the tragic suffering in her eyes. It passed,
and left her gaze grave and lucid and serene.

"What do you know of Mr. Gorst?"

"Enough, dear, to see that he isn't fit for you to know."

"Poor Charlie, that's what he's always saying himself. I've known him too
long, you see, not to know him now. Years and years, my dear, before I
knew you."

"It was through Mrs. Eliott that I knew you, remember."

"Because you were determined to know me. It was through you that I knew
Mrs. Eliott. Before that, she never made the smallest attempt to know me
better or to show me any kindness. Why should she?"

"Well, my dear, if you kept her at arm's length--if you let her see, for
instance, that you preferred Mr. Gorst's society to hers--"

"Do you think I let her see it?"

"No, I don't. And it wouldn't enter her head. But, considering that she
can't receive Mr. Gorst into her own house--"

"Why should she?"

"Edie--if she cannot, how can you?"

Edith closed her eyes. "I'll tell you some day, dear, but not now."

Anne did not press her. She had not the courage to discuss Mr. Gorst with
her, nor the heart to tell her that he was to be received into her house
no more. She saw Edith growing tender over his very name; she felt that
there would be tears and entreaties, and she was determined that no
entreaties and no tears should move her to a base surrender. Her pause
was meant to banish the idea of Mr. Gorst from Edith's mind, but it only
served to fix it more securely there.

"Edith," she said presently, "I will keep my promise."

"Which promise?" Edith was mystified. Her mind unwillingly renounced the
idea of Mr. Gorst, and the promise could not possibly refer to him.

"The promise I made to you about Walter."

"My dear one, I never thought you would break it."

"I shall never break it. I've accepted Walter once for all, and in spite
of everything. But I will not accept these people you say I've been let
in for. I will not know them. And I shall have to tell him so."

"Why should you tell him anything? He doesn't want you to take them to
your bosom. He sees how impossible they are."

"Ah--if he sees that."

"Believe me" (Edith said it wearily), "he sees everything."

"If he does," thought Anne, "it will be easier to convince him."




CHAPTER XV


The task was so far unpleasant to her that she was anxious to secure the
first opportunity and get it over. Her moment would come with the two
hours after dinner in the study.

It did not come that evening; for Majendie telegraphed that he had been
detained in town, and would dine at the Club. He did not come home till
Anne (who sat up till midnight waiting for that opportunity) had gone
tired to bed.

Her determination gathered strength with the delay, and when her moment
came with the next evening, it came gloriously. Majendie gave himself
over into her hands by bringing Gorst, of all people, back with him to
dine.

The brilliant prodigal approached her with a little embarrassed youthful
air of humility and charm; the air almost of taking her into his
confidence over something unfortunate and absurd. He had evidently
counted on the ten minutes before dinner when he would be left alone with
her. He selected a chair opposite to her, leaning forward in it at ease,
his nervousness visible only in the flushed hands clasped loosely on his
knees, his eyes turned upon his hostess with a look of almost infantile
candour. It was as if he mutely implored her to forget yesterday's
encounter, and on no account to mention in what compromising company he
had been seen. His engaging smile seemed to take for granted that she was
a lady of pity and understanding, who would never have the heart to give
a poor prodigal away. His eyes intimated that Mrs. Majendie knew what it
amounted to, that awful prodigality of his.

But Mrs. Majendie had no illusions concerning sinners with engaging
smiles and beautiful manners. And with every tick of the clock he
deepened the impression of his insolence and levity. His very charm
and the flush and brilliance that were part of it went to swell the
prodigal's account. The instinct that had wakened in her knew them,
the lights and colours, the heralding banners and vivid signs, all the
paraphernalia of triumphant sin. She turned upon her guest the cold eyes
of a condign destiny.

By the time dinner was served it had dawned on Gorst that he was looking
in Mrs. Majendie for something that was not there. He might even have had
some inkling of her resolution; he sat at his friend's table so
consciously on sufferance, with an oppressed, extinguished air, eating
his dinner as if it choked him, like the last sad meal in a beloved
house.

Majendie, too, felt himself drawn in and folded in the gloom cast by his
wife's protesting presence. The shadow of it wrapped them even after Anne
had left the dining-room, as though her indignant spirit had remained
behind to preserve her protest. Gorst had changed his oppression for a
nervous restlessness intolerable to Majendie.

"My dear fellow," he said, "what is the matter with you?"

"How should I know?" said Gorst with a spurt of ill-temper. "I'm not a
nerve specialist."

Majendie looked at him attentively. "I say, _you_ mustn't go in for
nerves, you know; you can't afford it."

"My dear Walter, I can't afford anything, if it comes to that." He paused
with an obscure air of injury and foreboding. "Not even, it seems, the
most innocent amusements. At the rate," he added, "I have to pay for
them." Again he brooded, while Majendie wondered at him, in brotherly
anxiety. "I suppose," Gorst said suddenly, "I can go up and see Edith,
can't I?"

He spoke as if he doubted, whether, in the wreck of his world, with all
his "innocent amusements," that supreme consolation would be still open
to him.

"Of course you can," said Majendie. "It's the best thing you can do.
I told her you were coming."

"Thanks," said Gorst, checking the alacrity with which he rose to go to
Edith.

Oh yes, he knew it was the best thing he could do.

Edith's voice called gladly to him as he tapped at her door. He entered
noiselessly, wearing the wondering and expectant look with which a new
worshipper enters a holy place. Perpetual backslidings kept poor Gorst's
worship perpetually new.

Colour came slowly back into Edith's face and a tender light into her
eyes, as if from the springing of some deep untroubled well of life. She
seemed more than ever a creature of imperial vitality, bound by some
cruel enchantment to her couch. She held out her hands to him; and he
raised them to his lips and kissed her fingers lightly.

"It's weeks since I've seen you," said she.

"Months, isn't it?" said he.

"Weeks, three weeks, by the calendar."

"I say--tell me--I _am_ to come and see you, just the same?"

"Just the same? Why, what's different?"

"Oh, I don't know. But it seems to me, when a man's married, it's bound
to make a difference."

Edith's colour mounted; she made an effort to control the trembling of
her mouth, the soft woman's mouth where all that was bodily in her love
still lingered. But the sweetness deepened in her eyes, which were the
dwelling-place of the immortal, immaterial power. They met Gorst's eyes
steadily, laying on his restlessness their peace.

"Are you going to be married, Charlie?" said she, and smiled bravely.

He laughed. "Oh, Lord, no; not I."

"Who is, then?"

"Walter, of course. I mean he is married, don't you know."

"Yes, and is there any difference in him to you?"

"In him? Oh, rather not."

"In whom, then?"

"Well--I don't think, Edie, that Mrs. Walter--I like her--" he stuck
to it--"I like her, you know, she's charming, but--I don't think she
particularly cares for _me_."

"How do you know that?"

"How do I know anything? By the way she looks at me."

"Oh, the way Anne looks at people--"

"Well, you know, it's something tremendous, something terrible.
Unutterable things, you know. She knocks the Inquisition and the day of
judgment all to pieces. They're simply not in it. It's awfully hard lines
on me, you see, because I like her."

"I'm glad you like her."

"Oh, I only like her because she likes you, I think."

"And I like her. Please remember that."

"I do remember it. I say, Edie, tell me, is she awfully devoted and all
that?"

"To Walter? Yes, very devoted."

"That's all right, then. I don't think I mind so much now. As long as
I can come and see you just the same."

"Of course you'll come and see me, just the same."

He pondered for a long time over that. Seeing Edith was the best thing he
could do. To-night it seemed the only good thing left for him to do. He
lived in a state of alternate excitement and fatigue, forever craving his
innocent amusements, and forever tired of them. None of them were worth
while. Seeing Edith was the only thing that was worth while. He refused
to contemplate with any calmness a life in which it would be impossible
for him to see her. If the poor prodigal had not chosen the most elevated
situation for the building of his house of life, he was always making
desperate efforts to leave the insalubrious spot, and return to the high
and windswept mansions of his youth. To be with Edith was to nourish the
illusion of return. Return itself seemed possible, when goodness, in the
person of Edith, looked at him with such tender and alluring eyes. In
spirit he prostrated himself before it, while he cursed the damnable
cruelty that had prevented him from marrying her. Through that act of
adoration he was enabled to live through his alien and separated days.
It kept him, as he phrased it, "going," which meant that, wherever his
rebellious feet might carry him, he continued to breathe, through it, the
diviner air.

And Edith had lain for ten years on her back, and every year the hours
had gone more lightly, through the hope of seeing him. She had outlived
her time of torment and rebellion. There was a sense in which her life,
in spite of its frustration, was complete. The love through which her
womanhood struggled for victory in defeat had fulfilled itself by gradual
growth into something like maternal passion. There was no selfishness in
her attitude to him and his devotion. By accepting it she took his best
and offered it to God for him. With fragile, dedicated hands she nursed
and sheltered the undying votive flame. She seemed a saint who had
foregone heaven and remained on earth to help him. Her womanhood, wrapped
from him in veil upon veil of her mysterious suffering, had never removed
itself from him. She held him by all that was indomitable in her own
nature, and in spite of his lapses, he remained her lover.

She was aware of these lapses and grieved over them and forgave them,
laying them, as she had laid her brother's sin, to the account of her
unhappy spine. In Edith's tender fancy her spine had become responsible
for all the shortcomings of these beloved persons. If Walter could have
married Anne seven years ago there would have been no dreadful Lady
Cayley; and if she could have married poor Charlie she would not have had
to think of him as "poor Charlie" now. It had been hard on him.

That was precisely what poor Charlie was thinking. And if that
sister-in-law was to come between them, too, it would be harder still.
But Edith insisted that she would make no difference.

"In fact," said she, "you can come more than ever. For if Walter's
absorbed in Anne, and Anne's absorbed in Walter--"

He took it up gaily. "Then I may be absorbed in you? So, after all, it
turns out to my advantage."

"Yes. You can console me. You can console me now, this minute, if you'll
play to me."

He was always lamenting that he could do nothing for her. Playing to her
was the one thing he could do, and he did it well.

He rose joyously and went to the piano, removing the dust from the keys
with his handkerchief. "How will you have it? Sentimental and soporific?
Or loud and strong?"

"Oh, loud and strong, please. Very strong and very loud."

"Right you are. You shall have it hot and strong, and loud enough to wake
the dead."

That was his rendering of Chopin's "Grande Polonaise." He let himself
loose in it, with a rush, a vehemence, a diabolic brilliance and clamour.
The quiet room shook with the sounds he wrenched out of the little humble
piano in the corner. And as Edith lay and listened, her spirit, too,
triumphed, and was free; it rode gloriously on the storm of sound. It
was, she said, laughing, quite enough to wake the dead. This was the
miracle that he alone could accomplish for her.

And downstairs in the study, Anne heard his music and started, as the
dead may start in their sleep. It seemed to her, that Polonaise of
Chopin, the most immoral music, the music of defiance and revolt. It
flung abroad the prodigal's prodigality, his insolent and iniquitous
joy. That was what he, a bad man, made of an innocent thing.

Majendie's face lit up, responsive to the delight and challenge of the
opening chord. "He's all right," said he, "as long as he can play."

He listened, glancing now and then at Anne with a smile of pride in his
friend's performance. It was as if he were asking her to own that there
must be some good in a fellow who could play like that.

Anne was considering in what words she would intimate to him that Mr.
Gorst's music was never to be heard again in that house. Some instinct
told her that she was courting danger, but the approval of her conscience
urged her on. She waited till the Polonaise was over before she spoke.

"You say," said she, "he's all right as long as he can play like that. To
me, it's the most convincing proof that he's all wrong."

"How do you make that out?"

"I don't want to go into it," said Anne. "I don't approve of Mr. Gorst;
but I should think better of him if he had only better taste."

"You're the first person who ever accused Gorst of bad taste."

"Do you call it good taste to live as he does, as I know he does, and you
know he does, and yet to come here, and sit with Edie, and behave as if
he'd never done anything to be ashamed of? It would be infinitely better
taste if he kept away."

"Not at all. There are a great many very nice things about Gorst, and his
caring to come here is one of the nicest. He has been faithful to Edith
for ten years. That sort of thing isn't so common that one can afford to
despise it."

"Faithful to her? Poor darling, does she think he is?"

"She doesn't think. She knows."

"Preserve me from such faithfulness."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"I do know. And you know that I know." In proof of her contention she
offered him the incident of the four-in-hand.

Majendie made a movement of impatience. "Oh, that's nothing," he said.
"He doesn't like her. He likes driving, and she likes a front seat at any
show (I can't see her taking a back one); and if she insisted on climbing
up beside him, he couldn't very well knock her off, you know. You don't
seem to realise how difficult it is to knock a woman off any seat she
takes a fancy to sit on. You simply can't do it."

Anne was silent. She felt weak and helpless before his imperturbable
levity.

He smoked placidly. "No," he said presently. "Gorst mayn't be a saint,
but I will acquit him of an unholy passion for poor Sarah."

Anne fired. "He may be a very bad man for all that."

"There again, you show that you don't know what you're talking about. He
is not a 'very bad man'. You've no discrimination in these things. You
simply lump us all together as a bad lot. And so we may be, compared with
the angels and the saints. But there are degrees. If Gorst isn't as good
as--as Edie, it doesn't necessarily follow that he's bad."

"Please--I would rather not argue the point. But I am not going to have
anything to do with Mr. Gorst."

"Of course not. You disapprove of him. There's nothing more to be said."

He spoke placably as if he made allowance for her attitude while he
preserved his own.

"There is a great deal more to be said, dear. And I may as well say it
now. I disapprove of him so strongly that I cannot have him received in
this house if I am to remain in it."

Astonishment held him dumb.

"You have no right to expect me to," said she.

"To expect you to remain, or what?"

"To receive a man of Mr. Gorst's character."

"My dear girl, what right have you to expect me to turn him out?"

"My right as your wife."

"My wife has a right to ask me a great many things, but not that."

"I ought not to have to ask you. You should have thought of it yourself.
You should have had more care for my reputation."

At this he laughed, greatly to his own annoyance and to hers.

"Your reputation? Your reputation, I assure you, is in no danger from
poor Gorst."

"Is it not? My friends--the Eliotts--will not receive him."

"There's no reason why they should."

"Is there any reason why I should? Do you want me to be less fastidious
than they are? You forget that I was brought up with very fastidious
people. My father wouldn't have allowed me to speak to a man like Mr.
Gorst. Do you want me to accept a lower standard that his, or my
mother's?"

"Have you considered what my standard would look like if I turned my best
friend out of the house--a man I've known all my life--just because my
wife doesn't happen to approve of him? I know nothing about your Eliotts;
but if Edie can stand him, I should think you might."

"I," said Anne coldly, "am not in love with him."

He frowned, and a dull flush of anger coloured the frown. "I must say,
your standard is a remarkable one if it permits you to say things like
that."

"I would not have said it but for what you told me yourself."

"What did I tell you?"

"That Edith cared for him."

He remembered.

"If I did tell you that, it was because I thought you cared for Edie."

"I do care for her."

"You've rather a strange way of showing it. I wonder if you realise how
much she did care? What it must have meant to her when she got ill? What
it meant to him? Have you the remotest conception of the infernal
hardship of it?"

"I know it was hard."

"Forgive me; you don't know, or you wouldn't be so hard on both of them."

"It isn't I who am hard."

"Isn't it? When you're just proposing to stop Gorst's coming here?"

"It's not I that's stopping him. It's his own conduct. He is hard on
himself, and he is hard on her. There's nobody else to blame."

"Do you mean to say you think I'm actually going to tell him not to come
any more?"

"My dear, it's the least you can do for me after--"

"After what?"

"After everything."

"After letting you in for marrying me, you mean. And as I suppose poor
Edie was to blame for that, it's the least _she_ can do for you to give
him up. Is that it? Seeing him is about the only pleasure that's left to
her, but that doesn't come into it, does it?"

She was silent.

"Well, and what am I to think of you for all this?"

"I cannot _help_ what you think of me," said she with the stress of
despair.

"Well, I don't think anything, as it happens. But, if you were capable of
understanding in the least what you're trying to do, I should think you a
hard, obstinate, cruel woman. What I'm chiefly struck with is your
extreme simplicity. I suppose I mustn't be surprised at your wanting to
turn Gorst out; but how you could imagine for one moment that I would do
it--No, that's beyond me."

"I can only say I shall not receive him. If he comes into the house,
I shall go out of it."

"Well--" said Majendie judicially, as if she had certainly hit upon a
wise solution.

"If he dines here I must dine at the Eliotts'."

"Well--and you'll like that, won't you? And I shall like having Gorst,
and so will Edie, and Gorst will like seeing her, and everybody will be
pleased."

Overhead Mr. Gorst burst into a dance measure, so hilarious that it
seemed the very cry of his delight.

"As long as Edie goes on seeing him, he'll think it's all right."

Overhead Mr. Gorst's gay tune proclaimed that indeed he thought so. He
broke off suddenly, and began another and a better one, till the spirit
of levity ran riot in immortal sounds.

"So it's all right. She's a good woman. It's the only hold we've got on
him."

"If all good women were to reason that way--"

"If all good women were to reason your way, what do you think would
happen?"

"There would be more good men in the world."

"Would there? There would be more good men ruined by bad women. Because,
don't you see, there'd be no others left for them to speak to."

"If you're thinking of his good--"

"Have you thought of hers?"

"Yes. Supposing he ends by marrying somebody else, what will she do
then?--poor Edie!"

"If the somebody else is a good woman, poor Edie will fold her dear
little hands, and offer up a dear little prayer of thankfulness to
heaven."

Upstairs the music ceased. The prodigal's footsteps were heard crossing
the room and coming to a halt by Edith's couch.

Majendie rose, placid and benignant.

"I think," said he, "it's time for you to go to bed."




CHAPTER XVI


Majendie could never be angry with any woman for more than five minutes.
And this time he understood his wife better than she knew. He had seen,
as Edith had said, "everything."

But Anne was convinced that he never would see. She said to herself, "He
thinks me hard, and obstinate, and cruel."

She crept into bed in misery that suggested a defeated thing. The outward
eye would never have perceived that the pale woman quivering under the
eider-down was inspired with an indomitable purpose, the salvation of
a weak man from his weakness. To be sure, she had been worsted in her
encounter by something that conveyed the illusion of superior moral
force. But that there was any strength in her husband that could be
described as moral Anne would not have admitted for a moment. She
believed herself to be crushed, grossly, by the superior weight of moral
deadness that he carried.

It was, it always had been, his placidity that caused her most despair.
But whereas, at the time of their first rupture, it had made him utterly
impenetrable, she now took it simply as one more sign of his inability to
understand her. She argued that he would never have remained so calm if
he had realised the sincerity of her determination to repudiate Mr.
Gorst. Of course she didn't expect him to appreciate the force and the
fine quality of her feeling. Still, he might at least have known that, if
she had found it hard to pardon her own husband his lapses in the past,
she would not be likely to accept a recent and notorious evildoer.

She tried to forget that in this she herself had been wounded as a woman
and a wife. It was the offence to heaven that she minded, rather than her
own mere human hurt. Still, he had asked her to share his house and the
sad burden of it (her thought touched gently on the sadness and the
burden); and it was the least he could do to keep it undefiled by such
presences. He ought to have known what was due to the woman he had
married. If he did not, she said to herself sorrowfully, he must learn.

She never doubted that he would learn completely when he was once
persuaded that she had meant what she had said; when he saw that he was
driving her out of the house by inviting Mr. Gorst into it. To her the
question was of supreme importance. Whatever happiness was now left to
them must stand or fall by the expulsion of the prodigal.

If she had examined herself, Anne would have found that she hardly knew
which she really wished for more: that Majendie would at once surrender
to her view and leave off inviting Gorst, or that he would invite him at
once, and thus give her an occasion for her protest. That Majendie was
peaceable and disinclined to fight she gathered from the fact that he had
not invited him at once.

At last, one morning, he looked up quietly from his breakfast, and
remarked that he had invited Gorst (he laid a slightly irritating stress
upon the name) to dinner on Friday.

The day was Tuesday.

"And is he coming?" said Anne.

"He is," said Majendie.

When Friday came, Anne remarked at breakfast that she was going to dine
with Mrs. Eliott.

"I thought you would," said Majendie.

She had hoped that he would think she wouldn't.

They dined at seven o'clock in Thurston Square, and at half-past seven in
Prior Street, so that she would be well out of the house before Gorst
came into it. It was raining heavily. But Anne looked upon the rain as
her ally. Walter would be ashamed to think he had driven her out in such
weather.

He insisted on accompanying her to the Eliotts' door.

"Not a nice evening for turning out," said he as he opened his umbrella
and held it over her.

"Not at all," said she significantly.

At ten o'clock he came to fetch her in a cab.

Now, the cab, the escort, and the sheltering umbrella somewhat diminished
the grievance of her enforced withdrawal from her home. And Majendie's
manner did still more to take the wind out of the proud sails of her
tragic adventure. But Anne herself was a sufficiently pathetic figure as
she appeared under his umbrella, descending from the Eliotts' doorstep,
with delicate slippered feet, gathering her skirts high from the bounding
rain, and carrying in her hands the boots she had not waited to put on.

Majendie uttered the little tender moan with which he was used to greet a
pathetic spectacle.

"He sounds," said Anne to herself, "as if he were sorry."

He looked it, too; he seemed the very spirit of contrition, as he sat in
the cab, with Anne's boots on his knees, guarding them with a caressing
hand. But she detected an impenitent brilliance in his eye as he stood
in the lamplight and helped her off with the mackintosh which dripped
with its passage from the cab to their doorstep.

"I think my feet are wet," said she.

"There's a splendid fire in the study," said he.

He drew up a chair, and made her sit in it, and took off her shoes and
stockings, and dried them at the fire. He held her cold feet in his hands
to warm them. Then he stooped down and laid his face against them and
kissed them. And she heard again his low, tender moan, and took it for
a cry of contrition. He rose from his knees and laid his hand on her
shoulder. She looked up, prepared to receive his chivalrous submission,
to gather into her bosom the full harvest of her protest, and then
magnanimously forgive.

It was not surrender, certainly not surrender, that she saw in the
downward gaze that had drawn her to him. His eyes were dancing, dancing
gaily, to some irresistible measure in his head.

"It was worth while, wasn't it?" said he.

"What was worth while?"

"Getting your feet wet, for the pleasure of not dining with Gorst?"

There were moments, Anne might have owned, when he did not fail in
sympathy and comprehension. Had she been capable of self-criticism, she
would have found that her attitude of protest was a moral luxury, and
that moral luxuries were a necessity to natures such as hers. But Anne
had a secret, cherishing eye on martyrdom, and it was intolerable to her
to be reminded in this way that, after all, she was only a spiritual
voluptuary.

Still more intolerable was the large indulgence of her husband's manner.
He seemed positively to pander to her curious passion, while preserving
an attitude of superior purity. He multiplied her opportunities. A week
had hardly passed before Mr. Gorst dined in Prior Street again, and Anne
again took refuge in Thurston Square.

This time Majendie made no comment on her action. He seemed to take it
for granted.

But Anne, standing up heroically for her principle, was sustained by a
sense of moving in a divine combat. Every time she dined in Thurston
Square, she felt that she had thrown down her gage; every time that
Majendie invited Gorst, she felt that he stooped to pick it up. Thus
unconsciously she breathed hostility, and was suspicious of hostility in
him.

When she announced, at breakfast one Monday, that she had asked the
Eliotts, the Gardners, Canon Wharton, and Miss Proctor, for dinner on
Wednesday, she uttered each name as if it had been a challenge, and
looked for some irritating maneuver in response. He would, of course,
proclaim that he was going to dine with the Hannays, or he would effect
a retreat to Mr. Gorst's rooms, or to his club.

But Majendie lacked her passion and her inspiration. He simply said he
was delighted to hear it, and that he would make a point of being at
home. He would have to give up an engagement which he would not have made
if he had known. But that did not greatly matter.

They came, the Eliotts and the rest, and Miss Proctor again pronounced
him charming. To be sure, he was not half so amusing as he had been on
his first appearance in Thurston Square; but it was only becoming that
he should repress himself a little at his own table and in the presence
of the Canon. _He_, the Canon, was brilliant, if you like.

For that night the Canon was, as usual, all things to all men, and
especially to all women. He was the man of the world for Miss Proctor;
the fine epicure of books for Mrs. Eliott; for Mr. Eliott and Dr.
Gardner, the broad-minded searcher and enthusiast, the humble
camp-follower of the conquering sciences. "You are the pioneers,"
said he; "you go before us on the march. But we keep up, we keep up.
We can step out--cassock and all."

But he spread out all his spiritual lures for Mrs. Majendie. His eyes
seemed more than ever to pursue her, to search her, to be gazing
discreetly at the secret of her soul. They drew her with the clear and
candid flattery of their understanding. She could feel the clever little
Canon taking her in and making notes on her. "Sensitive. Unhappy.
Intensely spiritual nature. Too fine and pure for _him_." And over the
unhallowed, half-abandoned table, flushed slightly with Majendie's good
wine, the Canon drew up his chair to his host, and stretched his little
legs, and let his spirit expand in a rosy, broad humanity. As he had
charmed the spiritual woman he saw in Anne, so he laid himself out to
flatter the natural man he saw in Majendie. And Majendie leaned back in
his chair, and gazed at the Canon, the remarkable, the clever, the
versatile little Canon, with half-closed eyelids veiling his contemptuous
eyes. (He confided to Hannay, later on, that the Canon, in his
after-dinner moments, made him sick.)

Anne heard nothing more of Mr. Gorst for over a fortnight. It was on a
Saturday, and Majendie asked her suddenly, during luncheon, if she
thought the Eliotts would be disengaged that evening.

"Why?"

"Because I've asked Gorst" (again that disagreeable emphasis) "to dine
to-night."

"Very well. I will ask Mrs. Eliott if she can have me."

"Can you?"

"Perfectly."

"Oh--and I must prepare you for something quite horrible. Some time, you
know" (he smiled provokingly), "I shall have to ask the Hannays. Do you
think you can arrange that?"

"I shall have to," said she.

This time (it was the third) she was obliged to take Mrs. Eliott into her
confidence. She fairly flung herself on her friend's mercy.

"I feel as if I were making use of you," said she.

"My dear, make any use of me you please. I'm always here. You can come to
me any time you want to escape."

"To escape?" Anne's face flew a colour that was a flag of defiance to
any reflection on her husband. She would be loyal to him as long as she
lived. Not one of her friends should know of her trouble and her fear.

"From your Gorsts and Hannays and people."

"Oh, from them." Anne felt that she was shielding him.

Mrs. Eliott marked the flag of defiance and the attitude of defence. If
Anne had meant to "give him away," she could not have given him more
lavishly. Mrs. Elliott's sad inward comment was that there was more in
all this than met the eye.

And Anne's life now continued on this rather uncomfortable footing. The
Hannays came to dinner, and she dined with Mrs. Eliott. The Ransomes
came, and she dined with Mrs. Eliott. Mr. Gorst came (for the fourth
time in as many weeks), and she dined with Mrs. Eliott. She began to
wonder whether the Eliotts' hospitality would stand the strain. She also
wondered whether her other friends in Thurston Square were wondering; and
what Canon Wharton must think of it. It had not occurred to her to wonder
what Mr. Gorst would think.

At first he thought nothing of it. When he found that he had not to
encounter the terrible eyes of Mrs. Majendie, Mr. Gorst's relief was so
great that it robbed him of reflection. And when he began to think, he
merely thought that Majendie had asked him because his wife was absent,
rather than that Majendie's wife was absent because he had been asked.
Majendie had calculated on this. He was not in the least distressed by
Anne's absences. He believed that she was thoroughly enjoying both her
own protest and Mrs. Eliott's society. And the arrangement really solved
the problem nicely. Otherwise the whole thing was trivial to him. He
remained unaware of the tremendous spiritual conflict that was being
waged round the person of the unhappy Gorst.

But Christmas was now at hand and Christmas brought the problem back
again in a terrific form. For ten years poor Gorst had dined with his
friends in Prior Street on Christmas Day. His presence was considered
by Edith to borrow a peculiar significance and sanctity from the
festival. Did they not celebrate on that day the birth of the Divine
Humanity, the solemn advent of redeeming love? Punctually on Christmas
Day the prodigal returned from his farthest wanderings, and made for
Prior Street as for his home. He had never missed a Christmas. And how
could they expel him now? His coming was such a sacred and established
thing, that he had spoken of it to Edith as a certainty. And it was as
a certainty that Edith spoke of it to Majendie.

She asked him how they were to break the news to Anne.

"Better not break it at all," said he. "Just let him come."

"If he does," said Edith, "she'll walk straight out of the house."

"Oh no, she won't."

"Yes, she will. On principle. I understand her."

"I confess I don't."

"But I believe," said she, "if you explained it all to her, she'd give in
for once."

Rather against his judgment, he endeavoured to explain, "We simply can't
not ask him, you know."

"Ask him by all means. But I shall have to put myself on the Gardners, or
the Proctors, for the Eliotts are away."

"Don't be absurd. You know you won't be allowed to do anything of the
sort."

"There's nothing else left for me to do."

He looked at her gravely; but his speech was light, for it was not in him
to be weighty. "Don't you think that, at this holy season, for the sake
of peace, and good-will, and all the rest of it, you might drop it just
for once? And let the poor chap have a happy Christmas?"

She seemed to be considering it. "You think me very hard," said she.

"Oh no, no, not hard." But he was wondering for the first time what this
wife of his was made of.

"Yes, hard. I don't want you to think me hard. If you could understand
why I cannot meet that man--what it means to me--the effect it has on
me."

"What," he said, "is the precise effect?" He was really interested. He
had always been curious to know how different men affected different
women, and to get his knowledge at first hand.

"It's the effect," said she, "of being brought into contact with
something terribly painful and repulsive, the effect of intense
suffering--of unbearable disgust."

He listened with his thoughtful, interested air. "I know. The effect that
your friend Canon Wharton sometimes has on me."

"I see no resemblance between Canon Wharton and your friend Mr. Gorst."

"And I see no resemblance between my friend Mr. Gorst and Canon Wharton."

She was silent, gathering all her strength to deliver her spirit's last
appeal.

"Dear," said she (for she wished to be very gentle with him, since he had
thought her hard), "dear, I wonder if you ever realise what the thing we
call--purity is?"

He blushed violently.

"I only know it's one of those things one doesn't speak about."

"I must speak," said she.

"You needn't," he said curtly; "I understand all right."

"If you did you wouldn't ask me. All the same, Walter--" She lifted to
him the set face of a saint surrendered to the torture--"If you compel
me--"

"Compel you? I can't compel you. Especially if you're going to look like
that."

"It's no use," he said to Edith. "First she talks of dining with the
Gardners--"

"She will, too--"

"No. She'll stay--if I compel her."

"Oh, I see. That's worse. She'd let him see it. He wouldn't enjoy his
Christmas if he came."

"No, poor fellow, I really don't think he would. She's awfully funny
about him."

"You still think her funny?"

"My dear--it's the only way to take her. I'm sorry, but I can't let
Charlie spoil her Christmas; nor," he added, "Anne his."

So Mr. Gorst did not come to Prior Street that Christmas. There came
instead of him whole sheaves and stacks of flowers, Christmas roses and
white lilies, the sacred flowers which, at that festival, the poor
prodigal brought as his tribute to his adored and beloved lady.

He spent the greater part of his Christmas Day in the society of Mr. Dick
Ransome, and the greater part of his Christmas Night in the society of
pretty Maggie Forrest, the new girl in Evans's shop who had sold him the
Christmas roses and the lilies. "For," said he, "if I can't go and see
Edie, I'll go and see Maggie." And he enjoyed seeing Maggie as much as it
was possible to enjoy anything that was not seeing Edie.

And Edie lay among her Christmas roses and her lilies, and smiled, with
a high courage, at Nanna, at Majendie, and Anne; and did her best to make
everybody believe that she was having a very happy Christmas. But at
night, when it was all over, Majendie held a tremulous and tearful Edie
in his arms.

"Don't think me a brute, darling," he said. "I would have insisted, only
if he'd come to-day he'd have found out he wasn't wanted."

"I know; and he never would have come again."

He didn't come. For Canon Wharton enlightened Mrs. Hannay, and Mrs.
Hannay enlightened Mr. Hannay, and Mr. Hannay enlightened Mr. Gorst.

"Of course," said the prodigal, "if she walks out of the house when
I walk into it, I can't very well go."

"Well, not at present, perhaps, for the sake of peace," said Hannay. "It
strikes me poor old Majendie's in a pretty tight place with that wife of
his."

So, for the sake of peace, Mr. Gorst kept away from Prior Street and his
Edie, and spent a great deal of time in Evans's shop, cultivating the
attention of Miss Forrest.

And, for the sake of peace, Majendie kept silence, and his sister
concealed her trembling and her tears.




CHAPTER XVII


Gloom fell on the house in Prior Street in the weeks that followed
Christmas. The very servants went heavily in the shadow of it. Anne began
to have her bad headaches again. Deep lines of worry showed on Majendie's
face. And on her couch by the window, looking on the blackened winter
garden, Edith fought day after day a losing battle with her spine.

The slow disease that held her captive there seemed to be quickening its
pace. In January there came a whole procession of bad nights, without, as
she pathetically said, "anything to show for it," for her hands could
make nothing now. She lay flatter than ever; each day she seemed to sink
deeper into her couch.

Anne, between her headaches, devoted herself to her sister with a kind
of passion. Her keenest experience of passion came to her through the
emotion wakened in her by the sight of Edith's suffering. She told
herself that her love for Edith satisfied her heart completely; that she
fulfilled herself in it as she never could have fulfilled herself in any
other way. Nothing could degrade or spoil the spiritual beauty of this
relation. It served as a standard by which she could better judge her
relation to her husband. "I love her more than I ever loved him," she
thought. "I cannot help it. If it had been possible to love him as I love
her--but I have lowered myself by loving him. I will raise myself by
loving her."

She was never tired of being with Edith, sewing silently by her fireside,
or reading aloud to her (for Edith's hands were too tremulous now to hold
a book), or sitting close up against her couch, nursing her hands in
hers, as if she would have given them her own strength.

And thus her ardour spent and renewed itself, and left her colder than
ever to her husband.

At times she mourned, obscurely, the destruction of the new soul that had
been given her last year, on her birthday, when she had been born again
to her sweet human destiny. At times she had glimpses of the perfect
thing it might have been. There was no logical sequence in the events
that had destroyed it, the return of Lady Cayley and the spectacle of
her triumph. She could not say that her husband had deteriorated in
consequence. The change was in herself, and not in him. He was what he
always had been; only she seemed to see him more completely now. At
times, when the high spiritual life died down in sleep, she slipped from
her trouble, and turned, with her arms stretched towards him, where he
lay. In her dreams he came to her with the low cry she had heard in the
wood at Westleydale. And in her dreams she was tender; but her waking
thoughts were sad and hard.

Majendie found it more than ever difficult to realise that she had ever
shown him kindness, that her arms had opened to him and her pulses beaten
with his own. Her face and her body were changing with this change of
soul. Her health suffered. Her eyes became dull, her skin dry; her small,
reticent mouth had taken on the tragic droop; she was growing austerely
thin. She had abandoned the pleasing and worldly fashion of her dress,
and arrayed herself now in straight-cut, sombre garments, very
serviceable in the sick-room, but mournfully suggestive, to her husband's
fancy, of her renunciation of the will to please.

On her first appearance in this garb he enquired whether she had embraced
the religious life.

"I always have embraced it," said she in her ringing voice.

"I believe it's about the only thing you ever wanted to embrace."

"You need not say so," she returned.

"Then why, oh why, do you wear those awful clothes?"

"My clothes are suitable," said she.

"Suitable? My dear girl, they suggest a divorce-suit, Majendie _versus_
Majendie, if you like. You're a walking prosecution. Your face, with that
expression on it, is a decree _nisi_ with costs. You don't want to be a
libel on your husband, do you?"

"How can you say such things?"

"Well--look in the glass, dear, if you don't believe me."

She looked. The dress was certainly not becoming. She greeted the joyless
apparition with her thin, unwilling smile.

He put his arm around her and drew her to him. He loved her dearly, for
all her sadness and unsweetness.

"Poor Nancy," he said, "I _am_ a brute. Forgive me."

"I do forgive you."

The words seemed the refrain of her life's sad song.

And as he kissed her he said to himself, "That's all very well; but if I
only knew what I'm supposed to have done to her! Her friends must think
me a perfect monster."

And, indeed, there was more truth than Majendie was aware of in his
extravagant jests. His wife's face was so eloquent of misery that her
friends were not slow in drawing their conclusions. Thurston Square
prepared itself to rally round her. Mrs. Eliott was loyal in keeping what
she supposed to be Anne's secret, but when she found that the Gardners
also understood that young Mrs. Majendie wasn't very happy with her
husband, discussion became free in Thurston Square, though it went no
further.

"The kindest thing we can do is to give her a refuge sometimes from his
dreadful friends," said Mrs. Eliott. "I have to ask her here every time
they're there."

Mrs. Gardner declared that she also would ask her gladly. Miss Proctor
said that she would ask Mr. Majendie and Mr. Gorst, which would come to
the same thing for Anne, but that she would not have Anne without her
husband. Miss Proctor could be depended on to take a light view of any
situation, a view entirely her own.

So the Gardners, as well as the Eliotts, rallied round Mrs. Majendie, and
offered their house also as her refuge. And thus poor Anne, whose ideal
was an indestructible loyalty, contrived to build up the most undesirable
reputation for her husband in Thurston Square. Of this reputation she now
became aware, and it reacted on her own estimate of him. She said to
herself, "They don't approve of him. They seem to know something. They
are sorry for me." And she was humbled in her pride.

The one who seemed to know most, and to be sorriest of all, was Canon
Wharton. She was always meeting him now. It was positively as if he lay
in wait for her. His eyes seemed more than ever to have penetrated her
secret. They held it safe under the pent-house of his brows. They seemed
to be always making allusions to it, while his tongue preserved a
delicate reticence. At meeting they said to her, "It doesn't matter if I
know your secret. Do you suppose it is so evident to everybody? Why, in
all this town, there is no one--no one, dear lady--capable of discovering
it but I. It is a spiritual secret." And at parting they said, "When you
can bear it no longer you must come to me. Sooner or later you will come
to me."

And the weeks went on towards Lent. Anne longed for the time of
cleansing, and absolution and communion; for the peace of the week-day
services; and for the sweet, sharp, grey light of the young Spring at
evening, a light that recalled, piercingly, the long Lent of her
girlhood, and the passing of its pure and consecrated days.

She had not yet completely forsaken St. Saviour's for All Souls. She
loved the grey old church in the market-place. Set in the midst of that
sordid scene of chaffering and grime, St. Saviour's perpetuated for her
the ancient beauty and the majesty of her faith. When she desired to
forget herself, to sink humbly back into the ages, passive to a superb
tradition, she went to St. Saviour's. When she wished to be stirred and
strengthened, to realise her spiritual value, to feel the grip of divine
forces centring on her, she went to All Souls.

On the Sunday before Lent she was fairly possessed by this ardent
personal mood. In obedience to it she attended Matins at the Canon's
church.

She had had a scruple about going, for Edith had been worse that morning,
and more evidently unhappy. She went alone. Majendie had admitted lately
that he liked going to St. Saviour's, but he refused to accompany her to
All Souls.

She went in a strange, premonitory mood, expectant of some great
illumination. It came with the Collect for the day. Anne was deeply moved
by the Collect. She prayed inaudibly, with parted lips thirsting for the
sources of her spiritual help. Her light went up with the ascending,
sentence by sentence, of the prayer.

"Oh, Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are
nothing worth;

"Send Thy Holy Ghost and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of
charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues;

"Without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before Thee;

"Grant this for thine only Son, Jesus Christ's sake." The ritual rang
upon that note. The music of the hymns of charity was part of the light
that penetrated her, poignant, but tender.

Poignant but tender, too, were the aspect and the mood of the Canon as he
ascended the pulpit and looked upon his congregation.

There was a rustling, sliding sound as the congregation turned to listen
to their vicar.

"Though I speak,'" said the Canon, "'with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or as a
tinkling cymbal."

He gripped his hearers with the stress he laid upon certain words,
"angels," and "cymbal." He bade them mark that it was not by hazard that
the great prayer for Charity was appointed for the Sunday before Lent.
"The Church," he said, "has such care for her children that she does
nothing by hazard. This call is made to us on the eve of the great battle
against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Why, but that those among us
who come off victors may have mercy upon those weakly ones who are
worsted and fallen in the fight. The life of the spirit has its own
unique temptations. It is against these that we pray to-day. We are all
prepared to repent, to use abstinence, to mortify the body with its
corrupt affections. Are we prepared to bear the burden of our brother's
and our sister's unrepentance? Of their self-indulgence? Of their sin? To
follow in all things the Divine Example? We are told that the Saviour of
the world was the friend of publicans and sinners. We accept the
statement, we have gone on accepting it, year after year, as the
statement of a somewhat remote, but well-authenticated historical fact.
Have we yet realised its significance? Have we pictured, are we able to
picture to ourselves, what company He kept? Among what surroundings His
divine figure was actually seen? In what purlieus of degenerate
Jerusalem? In what iniquitous splendours? In what orgies of the Gentiles?
And who are they to whom He showed most tenderness? Who but the rich
young man? The woman taken in adultery? And Mary Magdalene with her seven
devils? Which is the divinest of the divine parables? The parable of the
prodigal son who devoured his father's living with harlots!"

The Canon's voice rose and fell, and rose again; thrilling, as his breast
heaved with the immense pathos and burden of the world.

Anne had a vision of the Hannays and the Ransomes, and of the prodigal
cast out from the house that loved him. And she said to herself for the
first time: "Have I done right? Have I done what Christ would have me
do?" The light that went up in her was a light by which her deeds looked
doubtful. If she had failed in this, in charity? She pondered the
problem, while the Canon approached, gloriously, his peroration.

"Therefore we pray for charity"--the Canon's voice rang tears--"for
charity, oh, dear and tender Lord, lest, having known Thy love, we fall,
ourselves, into the sins of unpity and of pride."

Tears came into Anne's eyes. She was overcome, bowed, shaken by the
Canon's incomparable pleading. The Canon was shaken by it himself, his
voice trembled in the benediction that followed. No one had a clearer
vision of the spiritual city. It was his tragedy that he saw it, and
could not enter in. Many, remembering that sermon, counted it, long
afterwards, to him for righteousness. It had conquered Anne. The tongues
of men and of angels, of all spiritual powers, human and divine, spoke to
her in that vibrating, indomitable voice.

The problem it had raised remained with her, oppressed, tormented her.
What she had done had seemed to her so good. But if, after all, she had
done wrong? If she had failed in charity?

She had come to a turning in her way when she could no longer see for
herself, or walk alone. She was prepared to surrender, meekly, her own
judgment. She must ask help of the priest whose voice told her that he
had suffered, and whose eyes told her that he knew.

She sent a note to All Souls Vicarage, requesting an interview, at Canon
Wharton's house rather than her own. She did not want Edith or the
servants to know that she had been closeted with the Canon. The answer
came that night, making an appointment after early Evensong on the
morrow.

After early Evensong, Anne found herself in the Canon's library. He did
not keep her waiting, and, as he entered, he held out to her, literally,
the hand of help. For the Canon never wasted a gesture. There was no
detail of social observance to which he could not give some spiritual
significance. This was partly the secret of his power. His face had lost
the light that illuminated it in the pulpit, but his eyes gleamed with a
lambent triumph. They said, "Sooner or later. But rather sooner than I
had expected."

Anne presented her case in a veiled form, as a situation in the abstract.
She scrupulously refrained from mentioning any names.

The Canon smiled at her precautions. "We are working in the dark," said
he. "I think I can help you a little bit more if you'll allow me to come
down to the concrete. You are speaking, I fancy, of our poor friend, Mr.
Gorst?"

She looked at him helplessly, startled at his penetration and her own
betrayal, but appeased by the pitying adjective which brought Gorst into
the regions of pardonable discussion.

"You needn't be afraid," he said. "I had to be certain before I could
advise you. I can now tell you with confidence that you are doing right.
I--know--the--man."

He uttered the phrase with measured emphasis, and closed his teeth upon
the last words with a snap. It was impossible to convey a stronger effect
of moral reprobation. "But I see your difficulty," he continued. "I
understand that he is a rather intimate friend of Miss Majendie."

Anne noticed that he deliberately avoided all mention of her husband.

"She has known him for a very long time."

"Ah yes. And it is your affection, your pity for your sister that makes
you hesitate. You do not wish to be hard, and at the same time you wish
to do right. Is it not so?"

She murmured her assent. (How well he understood her!)

"Ah, my dear Mrs. Majendie, we have sometimes to be a little hard, in
order that we may not be harder. You have thought, perhaps, that you
should be tender to this friendship? Now, I am an old man, and I have had
a pretty large experience of men and women, and I tell you that such
friendships are unwholesome. Unwholesome. Both for the woman and the
man."

"If I thought that--"

"You may think it. Look at the man--What has it done for him? Has it made
him any better, any stronger, any purer? Has it made her any happier?"

"I think so. It is all she has--"

"How can you say that, my dear Mrs. Majendie, when she has you?"

"And her brother."

The Canon gave her a keen glance. He seemed to be turning a little extra
light on to her secret, to see it the better by. And under that light her
mind conceived again a miserable suspicion.

"He knows something," she thought. "What is it that he knows? They all
seem to know."

She turned the subject back again to her sister-in-law and Mr. Gorst.
"She thinks she can save him."

"Her brother?"

It was another turn of the searchlight, but this time the Canon veiled
his eyes, as if in mercy. He really knew nothing, nothing at all; but, as
a man of the world, he felt that there was a great deal more than Mr.
Gorst and Miss Majendie at the back of this discussion, and he was very
curious to know what it might be.

Anne recoiled from the veiled condemnation of his face more than she had
from its open intimations. She was not clever enough to see that the
clever Canon had simply laid a trap for her.

She was now convinced that there was something that he knew. She lifted
her head in loyal defiance of his knowledge. "No," said she proudly, "Mr.
Gorst. It was of him I was speaking."

"Ah," said the Canon, as if his mind had come down with difficulty from
the contemplation of another and more interesting personality; and again
the significance of his manner was not lost upon Anne.

"I do not know Miss Majendie," he went on, still with the air of forcing
himself to deal equitably with a subject of minor interest; "but if I am
not much mistaken, she is, is she not, a little morbid?"

"She is a hopeless invalid."

"I know she is" (his voice dropped pity). "Poor thing--poor thing! And
she thinks that she can save him? Mark me, I put no limit to the saving
grace of God, and I would not like to say whom He may not choose as
His instrument. But before we presume to act for Him, we should be
very sure about the choice. Judging by the fruits--the fruits of this
friendship"--he paused, as if seeking for a perfect justice--"Yes. That
is what we must look at. I imagine Miss Majendie has been morbid on this
subject. Morbid; and, perhaps, a little weak?"

Anne flushed. She was distressed to think she had given such an
impression. "Indeed, indeed she isn't. You wouldn't say that if you knew
her."

"I do not know her. But the strongest of us may be sometimes weak. You
must be strong for her. And I"--he smiled--"must be strong for you. And I
tell you that you have been--so far--wise and right. As long as this man
continues in his evil courses, go on as you are doing. Do not encourage
him by admitting him to your house and to your friendship. But"--(the
Canon stood up, both for the better emphasis of his point, and as a
gentle reminder to Mrs. Majendie that his dinner-hour was now
approaching)--"but let him repent; let him give up his most objectionable
companions; let him lead a pure life--and _then_--accept him--welcome
him--"(the Canon opened his arms, as if he were that moment receiving a
repentant sinner) "rejoice over him"--(the Canon's face became fairly
illuminated) "as--as much as you like."

The peroration was rapid, valedictory, complete. He thrust out his hand,
displaying the whole palm of it as a sign of openness, honesty, and
good-will.

"God bless you."

The solemn benediction atoned for any little momentary brusquerie.

Anne went away with a conscience wholly satisfied, in an exalted mood,
fortified by all the ramparts of the spiritual life.

She was very gentle with Edith that evening. She said to herself that her
love must make up to Edie for the loss her conscience had been compelled
to inflict. "After all," she said to herself, "it's not as if she hadn't
me." Measuring her services with those of the disreputable Mr. Gorst, it
seemed to her that she was amply making up. She had a hatred of moral
indebtedness, as of any other, and she loved to spend. In reckoning the
love she had spent so lavishly on Edie, she had not allowed for the
amount of forgiveness that Edie had spent on her. Forgiveness is a gift
we have to take, whether we will or no, and Anne was blissfully unaware
of what she took.

Majendie watched her ministrations curiously. Her tenderness was the
subtlest lure to the love in him that still watched and waited for its
hour. That night, in the study, he was silent, nervous, and unhappy. She
shrank from the unrest and misery in his eyes. They followed or were
fixed on her, rousing in her an obscure resentment and discomfort. She
was beginning to be afraid of him. It had come to that.

She left him earlier than usual, and went very miserably to bed. She
prayed, to-night, with her eyes fixed on the crucifix. It had become for
her the symbol of her life, and of her marriage, which was nothing to her
now but a sacrifice, a martyrdom, a vicarious expiation of her husband's
sin.

As she lay down, the beating of her pulses told her that she was not to
sleep. She longed for sleep, and tried to win it to her by repeating the
Psalm which had been her comfort in all times of her depression. "I will
lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help. My help cometh
from the Lord, which made heaven and earth."

She closed her eyes under the peace of the beloved words. And as she
closed them she felt herself once more in the arms of the green hills,
the folding hills of Westleydale.

She shook off the obsession and prayed another prayer. She longed to be
alone; but, to her grief, she heard the opening and shutting of a door
and her husband's feet moving in the room beyond.

A few blessed moments of solitude were left her during Majendie's
undressing. She devoted them to the final expulsion of all lingering
illusions. She had long ago lost the illusion of her husband's immaculate
goodness; and now she cast off, once for all, the dear and pitiful belief
that had revived in her under her brief enchantment in the wood at
Westleydale. She told herself that she had married a man who had, not
only a lower standard than her own, but an entirely different code of
morals, a man irremediably contaminated, destitute of all perception of
spiritual values. And she had got to make the best of him, that was all.
Not quite all; for she had still to make the best of herself; and the two
things seemed, at moments, incompatible. To guard herself from all
contact with the invading evil; to take her stand bravely, to raise the
spiritual ramparts and retire behind them, that was no more than her bare
duty to herself and him. She must create a standard for him by keeping
herself for ever high and pure. He loved her still, in his fashion; he
must also respect her, and, in respecting her, respect goodness--the
highest goodness--in her.

Accustomed to move in a region of spiritual certainty, Anne was
untroubled by any misgivings as to the soundness of her attitude. It
was open to no criticism except the despicable wisdom of the world.

Her chief difficulty was poor Majendie's imperishable affection. She
tried to protect herself from it to-night by feigning drowsiness. She lay
still as a stone, stiff with her fear. Once, at midnight, she felt him
stir, and turn, and raise himself on his elbow. She was conscious through
all her unhappy being of the adoring tenderness with which he watched her
sleep.

At last she slept, and sleeping, she dreamed a strange dream. She found
herself again in Westleydale, walking in green aisles of the holy,
mystic, cathedral woods. The tall beech-stems were the pillars of the
temple. A still light came through them, guiding her to the beech-tree
that she knew. And she saw an angel lying under the beech-tree. It lay on
its side, with its wings stretched out so that the right wing covered the
left. As she approached, it raised the covering wing, and in the warm
hollow of the other she saw that it cradled a little naked child. And at
the sight there came a thorn in her breast that pricked her. The child
stirred in its sleep, and crawled to the place of the angel's breast, and
it fondled it with searching lips and hands. Then it wailed, and as she
heard its cry the thorn pressed sharper into Anne's breast; and the
angel's eyes turned to her with an immortal anguish, and pity, and
despair. She looked, and saw that its breast was as the breast of the
little child. And she was moved to compassion at the helplessness of them
both, of the heavenly and of the earthly thing; and she stooped and
lifted the child, and laid it to her own breast, and nourished it; and
had peace from her pain.




CHAPTER XVIII


It was the first day in Lent. Anne had come down in a state of
depression. She was silent during breakfast, and Majendie became absorbed
in his morning paper. So much wisdom he had learnt. Presently he gave a
sudden murmur of interest, and looked up with a smile. "I see," said he,
"your friend Mrs. Gardner has got a little son."

"Has she?" said Anne coldly.

The blood flushed in her cheeks, and a sudden pang went through her and
rose to her breasts with a pricking pain, such pain as she had felt once
in her dream, and only once in her waking life before. She thought of
dear little Mrs. Gardner, and tried to look glad. She failed miserably,
achieving an expression of more than usual austerity. It was the
expression that Majendie had come to associate with Lent. He thought he
saw in it the spiritual woman's abhorrence of her natural destiny. And
with the provocation of it the devil entered into him.

"Is there anything in poor Mrs. Gardner's conduct to displease you?"

She looked at him in a dull passion of reproach.

"Oh," she said, "how can you be so unkind to me!"

Her breast heaved, her lower lip trembled. She rose suddenly, pressing
her handkerchief to her mouth, and left the room. He heard the study door
open hastily and shut again. And he said to himself, as if with a sudden
lucid freshness, "What an extraordinary woman my wife is. If I only knew
what I'd done."

As she had left her breakfast unfinished, he waited a judicious interval
and then went to fetch her back.

He found her standing by the window, holding her hands tight to her
heaving sides, trying by main force to control the tempest of her sobs.
He approached her gently.

"Go away," she whispered, through loose lips that shook with every word.
"Go away. Don't come near me."

"Nancy--what is it?"

She turned from him, and leaned up against the folded window shutter. Her
emotion was the more terrible to him because she was so seldom given to
these outbursts. She had seemed to him a woman passionless, and of almost
superhuman self-possession. He removed himself to the hearth-rug and
waited for five minutes.

"Poor child," he said at last. "Can't you tell me what it is?"

No answer.

He waited another five minutes, thinking hard.

"Was it--was it what I said about Mrs. Gardner?"

He still waited. Then he conceived a happy idea. He would try to make her
laugh.

"Just because I said she'd had a little son?"

Her tears fell to answer him.

She gathered herself together with a supreme effort, and steadied her
lips to speak. "Please leave me. I came here to be alone."

A light broke in on him, and he left her.

He shut himself up in the dining-room with his light. He had pushed his
breakfast aside, too preoccupied to eat it.

"So that's it?" he said to himself. "That's it. Poor Nancy. That's what
she's wanted all the time. What a fool I was never to have thought of
it."

He breathed with an immense relief. He had solved the enigma of Anne with
all her "funniness." It was not that she had turned against him, nor
against her destiny. She had been disappointed of her destiny, that was
all. It was enough. She must have been fretting for months, poor darling,
and just when she could bear it no longer, Mrs. Gardner, he supposed, had
come as the last straw. No wonder that she had said he was unkind.

And in that hour of his enlightenment a great chastening fell upon
Majendie. He told himself that he must be as gentle with her as he knew
how; gentler than he had ever yet known how. And his heart smote him as
he thought how he had hurt her, how he might hurt her again unknowingly,
and how the tenderness of the tenderest male was brutality when applied
to these wonderful, pitiful, incomprehensible things that women were.
He accepted the misery of the last three months as a fit punishment for
his lack of understanding.

His light brought a great longing to him and a great hope. From that
moment he watched her anxiously. He had never realised till now, after
three months of misery, quite what she meant to him, how sacred and dear
she was, and how much he loved her.

The depth of this feeling left him for the most part dumb before her. His
former levity forsook him, and Anne wondered at this change in him, and
brooded over the possible cause of his serious and unintelligible
silences. She attributed them to some deep personal preoccupation of
which she was not the object.

Meanwhile her days went on much as before, a serene and dignified
procession to the outward eye. She was thankful that she had so
established her religion of the household that its services could still
continue in their punctual order, after the joy of the spirit had
departed from them. The more she felt that she was losing, hour by hour,
her love of the house in Prior Street, the more she clung to the
observances that held her days together. She had become a pale, sad-eyed,
perfunctory priestess of the home. Majendie protested against what he
called her base superstition, her wholesale sacrifice to the gods of the
hearth. He forbade her to stay so much indoors, or to sit so long in
Edith's room.

One afternoon he came home unexpectedly and found her there, doing
nothing, but watching Edith, who dozed. He touched her gently, and told
her to get up and go out for a walk.

"I'm too tired," she whispered.

"Then go upstairs and lie down."

She went; but, instead of lying down, she wandered through the house,
restless and unsettled. She was possessed by a terrible sense of
isolation. It came over her that this house of which she was the
mistress did not in the least belong to her. She had not been consulted
or thought of in any of its arrangements. There was no place in it that
appealed to her as her own. She went into the little grave old-fashioned
drawing-room. It had a beauty she approved of, a dignity that was in
keeping with her own traditions, but to-day its aspect roused in her
discontent and irritation. The room had remained unchanged since the days
when it was inhabited, first by her husband's mother, then by his aunt,
then by his sister. He had handed it over, just as it stood, to his wife.
It was full, the whole house was full, of portraits of the Majendies;
Majendies in oils; Majendies in water-colours; Majendies in crayons, in
miniatures and silhouettes. She thought of Mrs. Eliott's room in Thurston
Square, of the bookcases, the bronzes, the triptych with its saints in
glory, and of how Fanny sat enthroned among these things that reflected
completely her cultured individuality. Fanny had counted. Her rarity had
been appreciated by the man who married her; her tastes had been studied,
consulted, exquisitely indulged. Anne did not want more books, nor
bronzes, nor a triptych in her drawing-room. But such things were
symbols. Their absence stood for the immense spiritual want through which
her marriage had been made void. Brooding on it, she closed her heart to
her unspiritual husband. She looked round the room with her cold
disenchanted eyes. Numberless signs of his thought and care for her
rebuked her, and rebuking, added to her misery. As her restlessness
increased, it occurred to her that she might find some satisfaction in
arranging the furniture on an entirely different plan. She rang the bell
and sent for Walter. He came, and found her sitting on the high-backed
chair whose cover had been worked by his grandmother. He smiled at the
uncomfortable figure she presented.

"So that's what you call resting, is it?"

"Walter--do you mind if I move some of the furniture in this room?"

"Move it? Of course I don't. But why?"

"Because I don't very much like the room as it is."

"Why don't you like it?" (He really wanted to know.)

"Because I don't feel comfortable in it."

"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. Perhaps--we'd better have some new things."

"I don't want any new things."

"What do you want, then?" His voice was gentleness itself.

"Just to move all the old ones--to move everything."

She spoke with an almost infantile petulance that appealed to him as
pathetic. There was something terrible about Anne when armoured in the
cold steel of her spirituality, taking her stand upon a lofty principle.
But Anne, sitting on a high-backed chair, uttering tremulous absurdities,
Anne, protected by the unconscious humour of her own ill-temper, was
adorable. He loved this humanly captious and capricious, childishly
unreasonable Anne. And her voice was sweet even in petulance.

"My darling," he said, "you shall turn the whole house upside down if it
makes you any happier. But"--he looked round the room in quest of its
deficiencies--"what's wrong with it?"

"Nothing's wrong. You don't understand."

"No, I don't." His eye fell upon the corner where the piano once stood
that was now in Edith's room.

"There are three things," said he, "that you certainly ought to have. A
piano, and a reading-stand, and a comfortable sofa. You shall have them."

She threw back her head and closed her eyes to shut out the stupidity,
and the mockery, and the misery of that idea.

"I--don't--want"--she spoke slowly. Her voice dropped from its high
petulant pitch, and rounded to its funeral-bell note--"I don't want a
piano, nor a reading-stand, nor a sofa. I simply want a place that I can
call my own."

"But, bless you, the whole house is your own, if it comes to that, and
every mortal thing in it. Everything I've got's yours except my razors
and my braces, and a few little things of that sort that I'm keeping for
myself."

She passed her hand over her forehead, as if to brush away the irritating
impression of his folly.

"Come," he said, "let's begin. What do you want moved first? And where?"

She indicated a cabinet which she desired to have removed from its
place between the windows to a slanting position in the corner. He was
delighted to hear her express a preference, still more delighted to be
able to gratify it by his own exertions. He took off his coat and
waistcoat, turned up his shirt cuffs, and set to work. For an hour he
laboured under her directions, struggling with pieces of furniture as
perverse and obstinate as his wife, but more ultimately amenable.

When it was all over, Anne seated herself on the settee between the
windows, and surveyed the scene. Majendie, in a rumpled shirt and with
his hair in disorder, stood beside her, and smiled as he wiped the
perspiration from his forehead.

"Yes," he said, "it's all altered. There isn't a blessed thing, not a
chair, or a footstool, or a candlestick, that isn't in some place where
it wasn't. And the room doesn't look a bit better, and you won't be a bit
better pleased with it to-morrow."

He put on his coat and sat down beside her. "See here," said he, "you
don't want me really to believe that that's where the trouble is?"

"The trouble?"

"Yes, Nancy, the trouble. Do you think I'm such a fool that I don't see
it? It's been coming on a long time. I know you're not happy. You're not
satisfied with things as they are. As they are, you know, there's a sort
of incompleteness, something wanting, isn't there?"

She sighed. "It's you who are putting it that way, not I."

"Of course I'm putting it that way. How am I to put it any other way? Let
me think now--well--of course I know perfectly well that it's not a
piano, or a reading-stand, or a sofa that you want, any more than I do.
We want the same thing, sweetheart."

She smiled sadly. "Do we? I should have said the trouble is that we don't
want the same thing, and never did."

"I don't understand you."

"Nor I you. You think I'm always wanting something. What is it that you
think I want?"

"Well--do you remember Westleydale?"

She drew back. "Westleydale? What has put that into your head?"

He grew desperate under her evasions, and plunged into his theme. "Well,
that jolly baby we saw there--in the wood--you looked so happy when you
grabbed it, and I thought, perhaps--"

"There's no use talking about that," said she. "I don't like it."

"All right--only--it's still a little soon, you know, isn't it, to give
it up?"

"You're quite mistaken," she said coldly. "It isn't that. It never has
been. If I want anything, Walter, that you haven't given me, it's
something that you cannot give me. I've long ago made up my mind to
that."

"But why make up your mind to anything? How do you know I can't give it
you--whatever it is--if you won't tell me anything about it? What _do_
you want, dear?"

"Ah, my dear, I want nothing, except not to have to feel like this."

"What do you feel like?"

"Like what I am. A stranger in my husband's house."

"And is that my fault?" he asked gently.

"It is not mine. But there it is. I feel sometimes as if I'd never been
married to you. That's why you must never talk to me as you did just
now."

"Good God, what a thing to say!"

He hid his face in his hands. The pain she had inflicted would have been
unbearable but for the light that was in him.

He rose to leave her. But before he left, he took one long, scrutinising
look at her. It struck him that she was not, at the moment, entirely
responsible for her utterances. And again his light helped him.

"Look here," said he, "I don't think you're feeling very well. This isn't
exactly a joyous life for you."

"I want no other," said she.

"You don't know what you want. You're overstrained--frightfully--and
you ought to have a long rest and a change. You're too good, you know,
to my little sister. I've told you before that I won't allow you to
sacrifice yourself to her. I shall get some one to come and stay, and I
shall take you down this week to the south coast, or wherever you like to
go. It'll do you all the good in the world to get away from this beastly
place for a month or two."

"It'll do me no good to get away from poor Edie."

"It will, dearest, it will, really."

"It will not. If you go and take me away from Edie I shall get ill
myself."

"You only think so because you're ill already."

"I am not ill." She turned to him her sombre, tragic face.
"Walter--whatever you do, don't ask me to leave Edie, for I can't."

"Why not?" he asked gently.

"Because I love her. And it's--it's the only thing."

"I see," he said; and left her.

He went back to Edith. She smiled at his disarray and enquired the cause
of it. He entertained her with an account of his labours.

"How funny you must both have looked," said Edith, "and, oh, how funny
the poor drawing-room must feel."

"The fact is," said Majendie gravely, "I don't think she's very well. I
shall get her to see Gardner."

"I would, if I were you."

He wrote to Dr. Gardner that night and told Anne what he had done. She
was indignant, and expounded his anxiety as one more instance of his
failure to understand her nature. But she did not refuse to receive the
doctor when he called the next morning.

When Majendie came back from the office he found his wife calm, but
disposed to a terrifying reticence on the subject of her health. "It's
nothing--nothing," she said; and that was all the answer she would give
him. In the evening he went round to Thurston Square to get the truth out
of Gardner.

He stayed there an hour, although a very few words sufficed to tell him
that his hope had become a certainty. The President of the Scale
Philosophic Society had cast off all his vagueness. His wandering eyes
steadied themselves to grip Majendie as they had gripped Majendie's
wife. To Gardner Majendie, with his consuming innocence and anxiety, was,
at the moment, by far the more interesting of the two. The doctor brought
all his grave lucidity to bear on Majendie's case, and sent him away
unspeakably consoled; giving him a piece of advice to take with him. "If
I were you," said he, "I wouldn't say anything about it until she speaks
to you herself. Better not let her know you've consulted me."

In one hour Majendie had learnt more about his wife than he had found out
in the year he had lived with her; and the doctor had found out more
about Majendie than he had learnt in the ten years he had been practising
in Scale.

And upstairs in her drawing-room, little Mrs. Gardner waited impatiently
for her husband to come back and finish the very interesting conversation
that Majendie had interrupted.

"Who is the fiend," she said, "who's been keeping you all this time? One
whole hour he's been."

"The fiend, my dear, is Mr. Majendie." The doctor's face was thoughtful.

"Is he ill?"

"No; but I think he would have been if he hadn't come to me. I've been
revising my opinion of Majendie to-night. Between you and me, our friend
the Canon is a very dangerous old woman. Don't you go and believe those
tales he's told you."

"I don't believe the tales," said Mrs. Gardner, "but I can't help
believing poor Mrs. Majendie's face. _That_ tells a tale, if you like."

"Poor Mrs. Majendie's face is a face of poor Mrs. Majendie's own making,
I'm inclined to think."

"I don't think Mrs. Majendie would make faces. I'm sure she isn't happy."

"Are you? Well then, if you're fond of her, I think you'd better try and
see a little more of her, Rosy. You can help her a good deal better than
I can now."

Professional honour forbade him to say more than that. He passed to a
more absorbing topic.

"I must say I can't see the force of this fellow's reasoning. What's
that?"

"I thought I heard baby crying."

"You didn't. It was the cat. You must learn the difference, my dear.
Don't you see that these pragmatists are putting the cart before the
horse? Conduct is one of the things to be explained. How can you take it,
then, as the ground of the explanation?"

"I don't," said Mrs. Gardner.

"But you do," said Dr. Gardner. It was in such bickerings that they
lived and moved and had their happy being. Each was the possessor of a
strenuous soul, made harmless by its extreme simplicity. They were united
by their love of argument, divided only by their adoration of each other.
They now plunged with joy into the heart of a vast metaphysical
contention; and Majendie, his conduct and the explanation of it, were
forgotten until another cry was heard and, this time, Mrs. Gardner fled.

She came back full of reproach. "Oh, Philip, to think that you can't
recognise the voice of your little son!"

Dr. Gardner looked guilty. "I really thought," said he, "it was the cat."
He hated these interruptions.

He looked for Mrs. Gardner to take up the thread of the delicious
argument where she had dropped it; but something had reminded Mrs.
Gardner that she must write a note to Mrs. Majendie. She sat down and
wrote it at once while she remembered. She could think of nothing to say
but, "When will you come and take tea with me, and see my little son?"

Anne came that week, and saw the little son, and rejoiced over him. She
kept on coming to see him. She always had been fond of Mrs. Gardner, now
she was growing fonder of her than ever. In her happy presence she felt
wonderfully at peace. There had been a time when the spectacle of Mrs.
Gardner's happiness would have given her sharp pangs of jealousy; but
that time was over now for Anne. She liked to sit and look at her and
watch the happiness flowering in Mrs. Gardner's face. She thought Mrs.
Gardner's face was more beautiful than any woman's she had ever seen,
except Edie's. Edie's face was perfect; but Mrs. Gardner's was a simple
oval that sacrificed perfection in the tender amplitude of her chin.
There were no lines on it; for Mrs. Gardner was never worried, nor
excited, nor perplexed. How could she be worried when Dr. Gardner was
well and happy? Or excited, when, having Dr. Gardner, there was nothing
left to be excited about? Or perplexed, when Dr. Gardner held the
solution of all problems in his mighty brain?

Mrs. Gardner's bridal aspect had not disappeared with the advent of her
motherhood. She was not more wrapped up in the baby than she was in Dr.
Gardner and his metaphysics. She even admitted to Anne that the baby had
been something of a disappointment. Anne was sitting in the nursery with
her when Mrs. Gardner ventured on this confidence.

"You know I'd rather have had a little daughter."

Anne confessed that her own yearning was for a little son.

"Oh," said Mrs. Gardner, "I wouldn't have him different now. He's going
to have as happy a life as ever I can give him. I've got so much to make
up for."

"To make up for?" Anne wondered what little Mrs. Gardner could possibly
have to make up for.

"Well, you see it's a shocking confession to make; but I didn't care for
him at all before he came. I didn't want him. I didn't want anybody but
Philip, and Philip didn't want anybody but me. Are you horrified?"

"I think I am," said Anne. She had difficulty in believing that dear
little Mrs. Gardner could ever have taken this abnormal, this monstrous
attitude.

"You see our life was so perfect as it was. And we have so little time
to be together, because of his tiresome patients. I grudged every minute
taken from him. And, when I knew that this little creature was coming,
I sat down and cried with rage. I felt that he was going to spoil
everything, and keep me from Philip. I hadn't a scrap of tenderness for
him, poor little darling."

"Oh," said Anne.

"I hadn't really. I was quite happy with my husband." She paused, feeling
that the ground under her was perilous. "I don't know why I'm telling you
all this, dear Mrs. Majendie. I've never told another soul. But I
thought, perhaps, you ought to know."

"Why," Anne wondered, "does she think I ought to know?"

"You see," Mrs. Gardner went on, "_I_ thought I couldn't be any happier
than I was. But I am. Ten times happier. And I didn't think I _could_
love my husband more than I did. But I do. Ten times more, and quite
differently. Just because of this tiny, crying thing, without an idea in
his little soft head. I've learned things I never should have learned
without him. He takes up all my time, and keeps me from enjoying Philip;
and yet I know now that I never was really married till he came."

Mrs. Gardner looked up at Anne with shy, beautiful eyes that begged
forgiveness if she had said too much. And Anne realised that it was for
her that the little bride had been singing that hymn of hope, for her
that she had been laying out the sacred treasures of her mysteriously
wedded heart.

In the same spirit Mrs. Gardner now laid out her fine store of clothing
for the little son. And Anne's heart grew soft over the many little
vests, and the jackets, and the diminutive short-waisted gowns.

She was busy with a pile of such things one evening up in her bedroom
when Majendie came in. The bed was strewn with the absurd garments, and
Anne sat beside side it, sorting them, and smiling to herself that small,
pure, shy smile of hers. Her soft face drew him to her. He thought it was
his hour. He took up one of the little vests and spanned it with his
hand. "I'm so glad," he said. "Why didn't you tell me?"

She shook her head.

"Nancy--"

"I can't talk about it."

"Not to me?"

"No," she said. "Not to you."

"I should have thought--"

Her face hardened. "I can't. Please understand that, Walter. I don't
think I ever can, now. You've made everything so that I can't bear it."

She took the little vest from him and laid it with the rest.

And as he left her his hope grew cold. Her motherhood was only another
sanctuary from which she shut him out. There was something so humiliating
in his pain that he would have hidden it even from Edith. But Edith was
too clever for him.

"Has she said anything to you about it?" he asked.

"Yes. Has she not to you?"

"Not yet. She won't let me speak about it. She's funnier than ever. She
treats me as if I were some obscene monster just crawled up out of the
primeval slime."

"Poor Wallie!"

"Well, but it's pretty serious. Do you think she's going to keep it up
for all eternity?"

"No, I don't, dear. I don't think she'll keep it up at all."

"I'm not so sure. I'm tired out with it. I give her up."

"No, you don't, dear, any more than I do."

"But what can I do? Is it, honestly, Edie, is it in any way my fault?"

"Well--I think, perhaps, if you'd approached her in another spirit at the
first--she told me that what shocked her more than anything that night at
Scarby, was, darling, your appalling flippancy. You know, if you'd taken
that tone when you first spoke to me about it, I think it would have
killed me. And she's your wife, not your sister. It's worse for her.
Think of the shock it must have been to her."

"Think of the shock it was to me. She sprang the whole thing on me at
four o'clock in the morning--before I was awake. What could I do?
Besides, she got over all that in the summer. And now she goes back to
it worse than ever, though I haven't done anything in between."

"It was all brought back to her in the autumn, remember."

"Granted that, it's inconceivable how she can keep it up. It isn't as if
she was a hard woman."

"No. She's softer than any woman I know, in some ways. But she happens to
be made so that that is the one thing she finds it hardest to forgive.
Besides, think of her health."

"I wonder if that really accounts for it."

"I think it may."

"I don't know. It began before, and I'm afraid it's come to stay."

"What has come to stay?"

"The dislike she's taken to me."

"I don't believe in her dislike. Give her time."

"Oh, the time I have given her! A year and more."

"What's a year? Wait," said Edith. "Wait."

He waited; and as the months went on, Anne schooled herself, for her
child's sake, into strength and calm. Her white, brooding face grew full
and tender; but its tenderness was not for him. He remained shut out from
the sanctuary where she sat nursing her dream.

He suffered indescribably; but he told himself that Anne had merely taken
one of those queer morbid aversions of which Gardner had told him. And at
the birth of their child he looked for it to pass.

The child was born in mid-October. Majendie had sat up all night; and
very early in the morning he was sent for to her room. He came, stealing
in on tiptoe, dumb, with his head bowed in terror and a certain awe.

He found Anne lying in the big bed under the crucifix. Her face was dull
and white, and her arms were stretched out by her sides in utter
exhaustion. When he bent over her she closed her eyes, but her lips moved
as if she were trying to speak to him. He felt her breath upon his face,
but he could hear no words.

"What is it?" he whispered to the nurse who stood beside him. She held in
one arm the new-born child, hooded and folded in a piece of flannel.

The nurse touched him on the shoulder. "She's trying to tell you to look
at your little daughter, sir."

He turned and saw something--something queer and red between two folds of
flannel, something that stirred and drew itself into puckers, and gave
forth a cry.

And as he touched the child, his strength melted in him, as it melted
when he laid his hands for the first time upon its mother.




CHAPTER XIX


After the birth of her child Anne was restored to her normal poise and
self-possession. She appeared the large, robust, superb creature she had
once been. The serenity of her bearing proclaimed that in her motherhood
her nature was fulfilled. She had given herself up to the child from the
first moment that she held it to her breast. She had found again her
tenderness, her gladness, and her peace.

Majendie had waited for this. He believed that if the child made her so
happy, she could hardly continue to cherish an aversion from its father.

In the months that followed he witnessed the slow destruction of this
hope. The very fact that Anne had become "normal" made its end more
certain. There were no longer any affecting moods, any divine caprices
for him to look to, nor was there much likelihood of a profounder change.
Such as his wife was now, she always would be.

She had settled down.

And he had accepted the situation.

He had had his illusions. He loved the child. It was white, and weak, and
sickly, as if it drew a secret bitterness from its mother's breast. It
kept Anne awake at night with its crying. Once Majendie got up, and came
to her, and took it from her, and it was suddenly pacified, and fell
asleep in his arms. He had risen many nights after that to quiet it. It
had seemed to him then that something passed between them with the small
tender body his arms took from her and gave to her again. But he had
abandoned that illusion now. And when he saw her with the child he said
to himself, "I see. She has got all she wanted. She has no further use
for me."

Thus the child that should have united separated them. Anne took from
him whatever small comfort it might have given him. She was disposed to
ignore those paternal passages in the night-watches, and to combat the
idea of his devotion to the child. That situation he had accepted, too.

But Anne, in appearing to accept everything, accepted nothing. She was
conscious of a mute rebellion, even of a certain disloyalty of the
imagination. She disapproved of Majendie more than ever. She guarded
her own purity now as her child's inheritance, and her motherhood
strengthened her spiritual revolt. Her mind turned sometimes to the ideal
father of her child, evoking visions of the Minor Canon whom her soul had
loved. Lent brought the image of the Minor Canon nearer to her, and
towards his perfections she turned the tender face of her dreams, while
she presented to her husband the stern face of duty. She had never
swerved from that. There was no reason why she should close her door to
him, since the material bond was torture to her, and the ramparts of the
spiritual life rose high. Her marriage was more than ever a martyrdom and
a sacrifice, redemptive, propitiatory of powers she abhorred and but
dimly understood.

Majendie was aware that she had now no attitude to him but one of apathy
touched by repugnance. He accepted the apathy, but the repugnance he
could not accept. The very tenderness and fineness of his nature held him
back from that, and Anne found once more her refuge in his chivalry. She
made no attempt to reconcile it with her estimate of him.

By the time the child was a year old their separation was complete.

As yet their good taste shrank from any acknowledgment of the rupture.
Majendie did his best to cover it by a certain fineness of transition,
and by a high smooth courtesy punctiliously applied. Anne responded on
the same pure note; for, tried by courtesy, her breeding rang golden to
the test.

She was not a woman (as Majendie had reflected several times already) to
trail an untidy tragedy through the house; she had never desired to play
a passionate part; and she was glad to exchange tragedy for the decent
drama of convention. She was helped both by her weakness and her
strength. Her soul was satisfied with its secret communion with the
Unseen; her heart was filled with its profound affection for her child;
her mind was appeased by appearances, and she had no doubt as to her
ability to keep them up.

It was Majendie who felt the strain. His mind had an undying contempt for
appearances; his heart and soul had looked to one woman for satisfaction,
and could not be appeased with anything but her. Among all the things he
had accepted, he accepted most of all the fact that she was perfect. Too
perfect to be the helpmate of his imperfection. He shuddered at the years
that were in store for him. Always to do without her, always to be
tortured by the fairness of her presence and the sweetness of her voice;
always to sit up late and rise up early, in order to get away from the
thought of them; to come down and find her fairness and sweetness smiling
politely at him over the teapot; to hunt in the morning-paper for news to
interest her; to mix with business men all day, and talk business, and to
return at five o'clock and find her, punctual and perfect, smiling in her
duty, over another teapot; to rack his brains for something to talk about
to her; not to be allowed to mention his own friends, but to have to
feign indestructible interest in the Eliotts and the Gardners; to dine
with the inspiration drawn again from the paper; and then, perhaps, to be
read aloud to all evening, till it was time to go to bed again. That was
how his days went on. The child and Edie were his only accessible sources
of consolation. But Edie was dying by inches; and he had to suppress his
affection for the child, as well as his passion for the mother.

For that was the thorn in Anne's side now. The child was content with her
only when Majendie was not there. The moment he came into the room she
would struggle from her mother's lap, and crawl frantically to his feet.
Her tiny face curled in its white, angelic smile as soon as he lifted her
in his arms. Little Peggy had an adorable way of turning her back on her
mother and tucking her face away under Majendie's chin. When she was
cross or ailing she cried for Majendie, and refused to take food or
medicine from any one but him.

He was sitting one day in the nursery with the little year-old thing on
his knees, feeding her deftly from a cup of warm milk that she had pushed
away when presented by her mother. The nurse and Nanna looked kindly on
the spectacle of Majendie's success, while his wife watched him steadily
without a word. The nurse, presuming on her privileges, made an
injudicious remark.

"She won't do anything for anybody but her daddy. I never saw such a
funny little girl."

"I never saw such a shocking little flirt," said Majendie; "she takes
after her mother."

"She's the living image of you, ma'am," said Nanna, conscious of the
other's blunder.

"I wish she had my strength," said Anne, in a voice fine and trenchant as
a sword.

Nanna and the nurse retired discreetly.

The parents looked at each other over the frail body of the little girl.
Majendie's face had flushed under his wife's blow. He knew that she was
thinking of Edith and her fate. The same malady had appeared in more
than one member of his family, as Anne was well aware. (Her own strain
was pure.) Instinctively he put his hand to the child's spine. Little
Peggy sat up straight and strong enough. And another thought passed
through him. His eyes conveyed it to Anne as plainly as if he had said,
"I don't know about her mother's strength. She's the child of her
mother's coldness."

He set the child down on Anne's lap, told her to be good there, and left
them.

Anne saw how she had hurt him, and was visited with an unfamiliar pang of
self-reproach. She was very nice to him all that evening. And out of his
own pain a kinder thought came to him. He had been the cause of great
unhappiness to Anne. There might be a sense in which the child was
suffering from her mother's martyrdom. He persuaded himself that the
least he could do was to leave Anne in supreme possession of her.




CHAPTER XX


What with anxiety about his daughter and his sister, and a hopeless
attachment to his wife, Majendie's misery became so acute that it told
upon his health. His friends, Gorst and the Hannays, noticed the change
and spent themselves in persistent efforts to cheer him. And, at times
when his need of distraction became imperious, he declined from Anne's
lofty domesticities upon the Hannays. He liked to go over in the evening,
and sit with Mrs. Hannay, and talk about his child. Mrs. Hannay was never
tired of listening. The subject drew her out quite remarkably, so that
Mrs. Hannay, always soft and kind, showed at her very softest and
kindest. To talk to her was like resting an aching head upon the down
cushion to which it was impossible not to compare her. It was the
Hannays' bitter misfortune that they had no children; but this
frustration had left them hearts more hospitably open to their friends.

Mrs. Hannay called in Prior Street, at stated intervals, to see Edith and
the baby. On these occasions Anne, if taken unaware by Mrs. Hannay, was
always perfect and polite, but when she knew that Mrs. Hannay was coming,
she contrived adroitly to be out. Her attitude to the Hannays was one of
the things she undoubtedly meant to keep up. The natural result was that
Majendie was driven to an increasing friendliness, by way of making up
for the slights the poor things had to endure from his wife. He was
always meaning to remonstrate with Anne, and always putting off the
uncomfortable moment. The subject was so mixed with painful matters that
he shrank from handling it. But, with the New Year following Peggy's
first birthday, circumstances forced him to take, once for all, a firm
stand. Certain entanglements in the affairs of Mr. Gorst had called for
his intervention. There had been important developments in his own
business; Majendie was about to enter into partnership with Mr. Hannay.
And Anne had given him an opportunity for protest by expressing her
unqualified disapprobation of Mrs. Hannay. Mrs. Hannay had offended
grossly; she had passed the limits; having no instincts, Anne maintained,
to tell her where to stop. Mrs. Hannay had a passion for Peggy which she
was wholly unable to conceal. Moved by a tender impulse of vicarious
motherhood, she had sent her at Christmas a present of a little coat.
Anne had acknowledged the gift in a note so frigid that it cut Mrs.
Hannay to the heart. She had wept over it, and had been found weeping by
her husband, who mentioned the incident to Majendie.

It was more than Majendie could bear; and that night, in the drawing-room
(Anne had left off sitting in the study. She said it smelt of smoke), he
entered on an explanation, full, brief, and clear.

"I must ask you," he said, "to behave a little better to poor Mrs.
Hannay. You've never known her anything but kind, and sweet, and
forgiving; and your treatment of her has been simply barbarous."

"Indeed?"

"I think so. There are reasons why you will have to ask the Hannays to
dinner next week, and reasons why you will have to be nice to them."

"What reasons?"

"One's enough. I'm going into partnership with Lawson Hannay."

She stared. The announcement was a blow to her.

"Is that a reason why I should make a friend of Mrs. Hannay?"

"It's a reason why you should be civil to her. You will send an
invitation to Gorst at the same time."

She winced. "That I cannot do."

"You can, dear, and you will. Gorst's in a pretty bad way. I knew he
would be. He's got entangled now with some wretched girl, and I've got to
disentangle him. The only way to do it is to get him to come here again."

"And _I_ am to write to him?" Her tone proclaimed the idea preposterous.

"It will come best from you, as it's you who have kept him out of the
house. You must, please, put your own feelings aside, and simply do what
I ask you."

He rose and went to the writing-place, and prepared a place for her
there.

Anne said nothing. She was considering how far it was possible to oppose
him. It had always been his way to yield greatly in little things; to
drift and let "things" drift till he created an illusory impression of
his weakness. Then when "things" had gone too far, he would rise, as
he had risen now, and take his stand with a strength the more formidable
because it came as a complete surprise.

"Come," said he, "it's got to be done; and you may as well do it at once
and get it over."

She gave one glance at him, as if she measured his will against hers.
Then she obeyed.

She handed the notes to him in silence.

"That's all right," said he, laying down her note to Gorst. "And this
couldn't be better. I'm glad you've written so charmingly to Mrs.
Hannay."

"I'm sorry that I ever seemed ungracious to her, Walter. But the other
note I wrote under compulsion, as you know."

"I don't care how you did it, my dear, so long as it's done." He slipped
the note to Mrs. Hannay into his pocket.

"Where are you going?" she asked anxiously.

"I'm going to take this myself to Mrs. Hannay."

"What are you going to say to her?"

"The first thing that comes into my head."

She called him back as he was going. "Walter--have you paid Mr. Hannay
that money you owed him?"

He stood still, astounded at her knowledge, and inclined for one moment
to dispute her right to question him.

"I have," he said sternly. "I paid it yesterday."

She breathed freely.

Majendie found Mrs. Hannay by her fireside, alone but cheerful. She gave
him a little anxious look as she took his hand. "Wallie," said she,
"you're depressed. What is it?"

He owned to the charge, but declined to give an account of himself.

She settled him comfortably among her cushions; she told him to light his
pipe; and while he smoked she poured out consolation as she best knew
how. She drew him on to talk of Peggy.

"That child's going to be a comfort to you, Wallie. See if she isn't.
I wanted you to have a little son, because I thought he'd be more of
a companion. But I'm glad now it's been a little daughter."

"So am I. Anne would have fidgeted frightfully about a son. But Peggy'll
be a help to her."

"And what helps her will help you, my dear; mind that."

"Oh, rather," he said vaguely. "The worst of it is she isn't very strong.
Peggy, I mean."

"Oh, rubbish," said Mrs. Hannay. "_I_ was a peaky, piny baby, and look at
me now!"

He looked at her and laughed.

"Sarah's coming in this evening," said she. "I hope you won't mind."

"Why should I?"

"Why, indeed? Nobody need mind poor Sarah now. I don't know what's
happened. She went abroad last year, and came back quite chastened. I
suppose you know it's all come to nothing?"

"What has?"

"Her marriage."

"Oh, her marriage. She has told _you_ about it?"

"My dear, she's told everybody about it. He was an angel; and he's been
going to marry her for the last four years. I say, Wallie, do you think
he really was?"

"Do I think he really was an angel? Or do I think he really was going to
marry her?"

"If he _was_, you know, perhaps he wouldn't."

"Oh no, if he was, he would; because he wouldn't know what he was in
for. Anyhow the angel has flown, has he? I fancy some rumour must have
troubled his bright essence."

Mrs. Hannay suppressed her own opinion, which was that the angel, wings
and all, was merely a stage property in the comedy of respectability that
poor Sarah had been playing in so long. He was one of many brilliant and
entertaining fictions which had helped to restore her to her place in
society. "And you really," she repeated, "don't mind meeting her?"

"I don't think I mind anything very much now."

The entrance of the lady showed him how very little there really was to
mind. Lady Cayley had (as her looking-glass informed her) both gone off
and come on quite remarkably in the last three years. Her face presented
a paler, softer, larger surface to the eye. Her own eye had gained in
meaning and her mouth in sensuous charm; while her figure had acquired a
quality to which she herself gave the name of "presence." Other women
of forty might go about looking like incarnate elegies on their dead
youth; Lady Cayley's "presence" was as some great ode, celebrating the
triumph of maturity.

She took the place Mrs. Hannay had vacated, settling down by Majendie
among the cushions. "How delightfully unexpected," she murmured, "to
meet _you_ here."

She ignored the occasion of their last meeting, just as she had then
ignored the circumstances of their last parting. Lady Cayley owed her
success to her immense capacity for ignoring. In her way, she lived the
glorious life of fantasy, lapped in the freshest and most beautiful
illusions. Not but what she saw through every one of them, her own and
other people's; for Lady Cayley's intelligence was marvellously subtle
and astute. But the fierce will by which she accomplished her desires
urged her intelligence to reject and to destroy whatever consideration
was hostile to the illusion. It was thus that she had achieved
respectability.

But respectability accomplished had lost all the charm of its young
appeal to the imagination; and it was not agreeing very well with Lady
Cayley just at present. The sight of Majendie revived in her memories of
the happy past.

"Mr. Majendie, why have I not met you here before?"

Some instinct told her that if she wished him to approve of her, she must
approach him with respect. He had grown terribly unapproachable with
time.

He smiled in spite of himself. "We did meet, more than three years ago."

"I remember." Lady Cayley's face shone with the illumination of her
memory. "So we did. Just after you were married?"

She paused discreetly. "You haven't brought Mrs. Majendie with you?"

"N--no--er--she isn't very well. She doesn't go out much at night."

"Indeed? I _did_ hear, didn't I, that you had a little--" She paused, if
anything, more discreetly than before.

"A little girl. Yes. That history is a year old now."

"Wallie!" cried Mrs. Hannay, "it's a year and three months. And a darling
she is, too."

"I'm sure she is," said Sarah in the softest voice imaginable. There was
another pause, the discreetest of them all. "Is she like Mr. Majendie?"

"No, she's like her mother." Mrs. Hannay was instantly transported with
the blessed vision of Peggy. "She's got blue, blue eyes, Sarah; and the
dearest little goldy ducks' tails curling over the nape of her neck."

Majendie's sad face brightened under praise of Peggy.

"Sweet," murmured Sarah. "I love them when they're like that." She saw
how she could flatter him. If he loved to talk about the baby, _she_
could talk about babies till all was blue. They talked for more than half
an hour. It was the prettiest, most innocent conversation in which Sarah
had ever taken part.

When Majendie had left (he seldom kept it up later than ten o'clock), she
turned to Mrs. Hannay.

"What's the matter with him?" said she. "He looks awful."

"He's married the wrong woman, my dear. That's what's the matter with
him."

"I knew he would. He was born to do it."

"Thank goodness," said Mrs. Hannay, "he's got the child."

"Oh--the child!"

She intimated by a shrug how much she thought of that consolation.




CHAPTER XXI


The new firm of Hannay & Majendie promised to do well. Hannay had a
genius for business, and Majendie was carried along by the inspiration
of his senior partner. Hannay was the soul of the firm and Majendie its
brain. He was, Hannay maintained, an ideal partner, the indefatigable
master of commercial detail.

The fourth year of his marriage found Majendie supremely miserable at
home; and established, in his office, before a fair, wide prospect of
financial prosperity. The office had become his home. He worked there
early and late, with a dumb, indomitable industry. For the first time in
his life Majendie was beginning to take an interest in his business.
Disappointed in the only form of happiness that appealed to him, he
applied himself gravely and steadily to shipping, finding some personal
satisfaction in the thought that Anne and Peggy would benefit by this
devotion. There was Peggy's education to be thought of. When she was
older they would travel. There would be greater material comfort and a
wider life for Anne. He himself counted for little in his schemes. At
thirty-five he found himself, with all his flames extinguished, settling
down into the dull habits and the sober hopes of middle age.

To the mind of Gorst, the spectacle of Majendie in his office was, as he
informed him, too sad for words. To Majendie's mind nothing could well be
sadder than the private affairs of Gorst, to which he was frequently
required to give his best attention.

The prodigal had been at last admitted to Prior Street on a footing of
his own. He blossomed out in perpetual previous engagements whenever he
was asked to dine; but he had made a bargain with Majendie by which he
claimed unlimited opportunity for seeing Edie as the price of his promise
to reform. This time Majendie was obliged to intimate to him that his
reform must be regarded as the price of his admission.

For, this time, in the long year of his exile, the prodigal's prodigality
had exceeded the measure of all former years. And, to his intense
surprise, he found that Majendie drew the line somewhere. In consequence
of this, and of the "entanglement" to which Majendie had once referred,
the aspect of Gorst's affairs was peculiarly dark and threatening.

In the spring of the year they gathered to their climax. One afternoon
Gorst appeared in Majendie's office, sat down with a stricken air, and
appealed to his friend to help him out.

"I thought you _were_ out," said Majendie.

"So I am. It's because I'm so well out that I'm in for it. Evans's have
turned her off. She's down on her luck--and--well--you see, _now_ she
wants me to marry her."

"I see. Well--"

"Well, of course I can't. Maggie's a dear little thing, but--you see--I'm
not the first."

"You're sure of that?"

"Certain. She confessed, poor girl. Besides, I knew it. I'm not a brute.
I'd marry her if I'd been the first and only one. I'd marry her if I were
sure I'd be the last. I'd marry her, as it is, if I cared enough for her.
Always provided I could keep her. But you know--"

"You don't care and you can't keep her. What are you going to do for
her?"

Gorst in his anguish glared at Majendie.

"I can't do anything. That's the damnedest part of it. I'm simply cleaned
out, till I get a berth somewhere."

Majendie looked grave. This time the prodigal had devoured his living.
"You're going to leave her there, then. Is that it?"

"No, it isn't. There's another fellow who'd marry her, if she'd have him,
but she won't. That's it."

"Because she's fond of you, I suppose?"

"Oh, I don't know about being fond," said Gorst sulkily. "She's fond of
anybody."

"And what do you want me to do?"

"I'd be awfully glad if you'd go and see her."

"See her?"

"Yes, and explain the situation. I can't. She won't let me. She goes mad
when I try. She keeps on worrying at it from morning to night. When I
don't go, she writes. And it knocks me all to pieces."

"If she's that sort, what good do you suppose I'll do by seeing her?"

"Oh, she'll listen to reason from any one but me. And there are things
you can say to her that I can't. I say, will you?"

"I will if you like. But I don't suppose it will do one atom of good. It
never does, you know. Where does the woman live?"

He took down the address on the visiting-card that Gorst gave him.

Between six and seven that evening he presented himself at one of many
tiny, two-storied, red brick and stucco houses that stood in a long flat
street, each with a narrow mat of grass laid before its bay-window. It
was the new quarter of the respectable milliners and clerks; and Majendie
gathered that the prodigal had taken some pains to lodge his Maggie with
decent people. He reasoned farther that such an arrangement could only be
possible, given the complete rupture of their relations.

A clean, kindly woman opened the door. She admitted with some show of
hesitation that Miss Forrest was at home, and led him to a sitting-room
on the upper floor. As he followed her he heard a door open; a dress
rustled on the landing, and another door opened and shut again.

Maggie was not in the room as Majendie entered. From signs of recent
occupation he gathered that she had risen up and fled at his approach.

The woman went into the adjoining room and returned, politely
embarrassed. "Miss Forrest is very sorry, sir, but she can't see
anybody."

He wrote his name on Gorst's card and sent her back with it.

Then Maggie came to him.

He remembered long afterwards the manner of her coming; how he heard her
blow her poor nose outside the door before she entered; how she stood on
the threshold and looked at him, and made him a stiff little bow; how she
approached shyly and slowly, with her arms hanging awkwardly at her
sides, and her eyes fixed on him in terror, as if she were drawn to him
against her will; how she held Gorst's card tight in her poor little
hand; how her eyes had foreknowledge of his errand and besought him to
spare her; and how in her awkwardness she yet preserved her inimitable
grace.

He could hardly believe that this was the girl he had once seen in
Evans's shop when he was buying flowers for Anne. The girl in Evans's
shop was only a pretty girl. Maggie, at five-and-twenty, living under
Gorst's "protection," and attired according to his taste, was almost
(but not quite) a pretty lady. Maggie was neither inhumanly tall, nor
inhumanly slender; she was simply and supremely feminine. She was dressed
delicately in black, a choice which made brilliant the beauty of her
colouring. Her hair was abundant, fawn-dark, laced with gold. Her face
was a full short oval. Its whiteness was the tinged whiteness of pure
cream, with a rose in it that flamed, under Maggie's swift emotions, to a
sudden red. She had soft grey eyes dappled with a tawny green. Her little
high-arched nose was sensitive to the constant play of her upper lip; and
that lip was so short that it couldn't always cover the tips of her
little white teeth. Majendie judged that Maggie's mouth was the prettiest
feature in her face, and there was something about it that reminded him,
preposterously, of Anne. The likeness bothered him, till he discovered
that it lay in that trick of the lifted lip. But the small charm that
was so brief and divine an accident in Anne was perpetual in Maggie. He
thought he should get tired of it in time.

Maggie had been crying. Her sobs had left her lips still parted; her
eyelids were swollen; there were little ashen shades and rosy flecks all
over her pretty face. Her diminutive muslin handkerchief was limp with
her tears. As he looked at her he realised that he had a painful and
disgusting task before him, and that there would be no intelligence in
the girl to help him out.

He bade her sit down; for poor Maggie stood before him humbly. He told
her briefly that his friend, Mr. Gorst, had asked him to explain things
to her, and he was beginning to explain them, very gently, when Maggie
cut him short.

"It's not that I want to be married," she said sadly. "Mr. Mumford would
_marry_ me."

"Well--then--" he suggested, but Maggie shook her head. "Isn't he nice to
you, Mr. Mumford?"

"He's nice enough. But I can't marry 'im. I won't. I don't love 'im. I
can't--Mr. Magendy--because of Charlie."

She looked at him as if she thought he would compel her to marry Mr.
Mumford.

"Oh dear--" said Maggie, surprised at herself, as she began to cry again.

She pressed the little muslin handkerchief to her eyes; not making a show
of her grief; but furtive, rather, and ashamed.

And Majendie took in all the pitifulness of her sweet, predestined
nature. Pretty Maggie could never have been led astray; she had gone out,
fervent and swift, dream-drunk, to meet her destiny. She was a creature
of ardours, of tenderness, and of some perverse instinct that it would be
crude to call depravity. Where her heart led, her flesh, he judged, had
followed; that was all. Her brain had been passive in her sad affairs.
Maggie had never schemed, or calculated, or deliberated. She had only
felt.

"See here," he said. "Charlie _can't_ marry you. He can't marry anybody."

"Why not?"

"Well, for one thing, he's too poor."

"I know he's poor."

"And you wouldn't be happy if he did marry you. He couldn't make you
happy."

"I'd be unhappy, then."

"Yes. And he'd be unhappy, too. Is that what you want?"

"No--no--no! You don't understand."

"I'll try to. What do you want? Tell me."

"To help him."

"You can't help him," he said softly.

"I couldn't help him if 'e was rich. I can help him if he's poor."

He smiled. "How do you make that out, Maggie?"

"Well--he ought to marry a lady, I know. But he can't marry a lady. She'd
cost him pounds and pounds. If he married me I'd cost him nothing. I'd
work for him."

Majendie was startled at this reasoning. Maggie was more intelligent than
he had thought.

She went on. "I can cook, I can do housework, I can sew. I'm learning
dressmaking. Look--" She held up a coarse lining she had been stitching
at when he came. From its appearance he judged that Maggie was as yet a
novice in her art.

"I'd work my fingers to the bone for him."

"And you think he'd be happy seeing you do that? A gentleman can't let
his wife work for him. He has to work for her." He paused. "And there's
another reason, Maggie, why he can't marry you."

Maggie's head drooped. "I know," she said. "But I thought--if he was
poor--he wouldn't mind so much. They don't, sometimes."

"I don't think you quite know what I mean."

"I do. You mean he's afraid. He won't trust me. He doesn't think I'm very
good. But I would be--if he married me--I would--I would indeed."

"Of course you would. Whatever happens you're going to be good. That
wasn't what I meant by the other reason."

Her face flamed. "Has he left off caring for me?"

He was silent, and the flame died in her face.

"Does he care for somebody else?"

"It would be better for you if you could think so."

"_I_ know," she said; "it's the lady he used to send flowers to. I
thought it was all right. I thought it was funerals."

She sat very still, taking it in.

"Is he going to marry her?"

"No. He isn't going to marry her."

"She's not got enough money, I suppose. _She_ can't help him."

"You must leave him free to marry somebody who can."

He waited to see what she would do. He expected tears, and a storm of
jealous rage. But all Maggie did was to sit stiller than ever, while her
tears gathered, and fell, and gathered again.

Majendie rose. "I may tell Mr. Gorst that you accept his explanation?
That you understand?"

"Am I never to see him again?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Nor write to him?"

"It's better not. It only worries him."

She looked round her, dazed by the destruction of her dream.

"What am I to do, then? Where am I to go to?"

"Stay where you are, if you're comfortable. Your rent will be paid for
you, and you shall have a small allowance."

"But who's going to give it me?"

"Mr. Gorst would, if he could. As he cannot, I am."

"You mustn't," said she. "I can't take it from you."

He had approached this point with a horrible dread lest she should
misunderstand him.

"Better to take it from me than from him, or anybody else," he said
significantly; "if it must be."

But Maggie had not misunderstood.

"I can work," she said. "I can pay a little _now_."

"No, no. Never mind about that. Keep it--keep all you earn."

"I can't keep it. I'll pay you back again. I'll work my fingers to the
bone."

"Oh, not for me" he said, laughing, as he took up his hat to go.

Maggie lifted her sad head, and faced him with all her candour.

"Yes," she said, "for you."




CHAPTER XXII


Majendie owned to a pang of shame as he turned from Maggie's door. In
justice to Gorst it could not be said that he had betrayed the
passionate, perverted creature. And yet there was a sense in which
Maggie's betrayal cried to Heaven, like the destruction of an innocent.
Majendie's finer instinct had surrendered to the charm of her appealing
and astounding purity, by which he meant her cleanness from the mercenary
taint. He had seen himself contending, grossly, with a fierce little
vulgar schemer, who (he had been convinced) would hang on to poor Gorst's
honour by fingers of a murderous tenacity. His own experience helped him
to the vision. And Maggie had come to him, helpless as an injured child,
and feverish from her hurt. He had asked her what she had wanted with
Gorst, and it seemed that what Maggie wanted was "to help him."

He said to himself that he wouldn't be in Gorst's place for a good deal,
to have that on his conscience.

As it happened, the prodigal's conscience was by no means easy. He called
in Prior Street that evening to learn the result of his friend's
intervention. He submitted humbly to Majendie's judgment of his conduct.
He agreed that he had been a brute to Maggie, that he might certainly do
worse than marry her, and that his best reason for not marrying her was
his knowledge that Maggie was ten times too good for him. He was only
disposed to be critical of his friend's diplomacy when he learned that
Majendie had not succeeded in persuading Maggie to marry Mr. Mumford.
But, in the end, he allowed himself to be convinced of the futility, not
to say the indecency, of pressing Mr. Mumford upon the girl at the moment
of her fine renunciation. He admitted that he had known all along that
Maggie had her own high innocence. And when he realised the extent to
which Majendie had "got him out of it," his conscience was roused by a
salutary shock of shame.

But it was to Edith that he presented the perfection of his penitence.
From his stillness and abasement she gathered that, this time, her
prodigal had fallen far. That night, before his departure, he confirmed
her sad suspicions.

"It's awfully good of you," he said stiffly, "to let me come again."

"Good of me? Charlie!" Her eyes and voice reproached him for this
strained formality.

"Yes. Mrs. Majendie's perfectly right. I've justified her bad opinion of
me."

"I don't know that you've justified it. I don't know what you've done. No
more does she, my dear. And you didn't think, did you, that Walter and I
were going to give you up?"

"I'd have forgiven you if you had."

"I couldn't have forgiven myself, or Walter."

"Oh, Walter--if it hadn't been for him I should have gone to pieces this
time. He's pulled me out of the tightest place I ever was in."

"I'm sure he was very glad to do it."

"I wish to goodness I could do the same for him."

"Why do you say that, Charlie?"

The prodigal became visibly embarrassed. He seemed to be considering the
propriety of a perfect frankness.

"I say, you don't mind my asking, do you? Has anything gone wrong with
him and Mrs. Majendie?"

"What makes you think so?"

"Well, you see, I've got a sort of notion that she doesn't understand
him. She's never realised in the least the stuff he's made of. He's the
finest man I know on God's earth, and somehow, it strikes me that she
doesn't see it."

"Not always, I'm afraid."

"Well--see here--you'll tell her, won't you, what he's done for me?
That ought to open her eyes a bit. You can give me away as much as
ever you like, if you want to rub it in. Only tell her that I've chucked
it--chucked it for good. He's made me loathe myself. Tell her that I'm
not as bad as she thinks me, but that I probably would be if it hadn't
been for him. And you, Edie, only I'm going to leave you out of it."

"You certainly may."

"It's because she knows all that already; and the point is to get her to
appreciate him."

Edith smiled. "I see. And I'm to make what I like of you, if I can only
get her to appreciate him?"

"Yes. Tell her that, as far as I'm concerned, I respect her attitude
profoundly."

"Very well. I'll tell her just what you've told me."

She spoke of it the next day, when Anne came to read to her in the
afternoon. Anne was as punctual as ever in her devotion, but the passion
of it had been transferred to Peggy. The child was with them, playing
feebly at her mother's knee, and Anne's mood was propitious. She listened
intently. It was the first time that she had brought any sympathy into a
discussion of the prodigal.

"Did he tell you," said she, "what Walter did for him?"

"No."

"Nor what had happened?"

"No. I didn't like to ask him. Whatever it was, it has gone very deep
with him. Something has made a tremendous difference."

"Has it made him change his ways?"

"I believe it has. You see, Nancy, that's what Walter was trying for. He
always had that sort of hold on him. That was why he was so anxious not
to have him turned away."

Anne's face was about to harden, when Peggy gave the sad little cry that
brought her mother's arms about her. Peggy had been trying vainly to
climb into Anne's lap. She was now lifted up and held there while her
feet trampled the broad maternal knees, and her hands played with Anne's
face; stroking and caressing; smoothing her tragic brow to tenderness;
tracing with soft, attentive fingers the line of her small, close mouth,
until it smiled.

Anne seized the little hands and kissed them. "My lamb," she said, "what
are you doing to your poor mother's face?" She did not see, as Edith saw,
that Peggy, a consummate little sculptor, was moulding her mother's face
into the face of love.

"I should never have dreamed," said Anne, "of turning him away, if I had
thought he was really going to reform. Besides, I was afraid he would be
bad for Walter."

"It didn't strike you that Walter might be good for him?"

"It struck me that I had to be strong for Walter."

"Ah, Walter can be strong for all of us." She paused on that, to let it
sink in. Anne's face was thoughtful.

"Anne, if you believed that all I've said to you was true, would you
still object to having Charlie here?"

"Certainly not. I would be the first to welcome him."

"Then, will you write to him of your own accord, and tell him that, if
what I've told you is true, you'll be glad to see him? He knows why you
couldn't receive him before, dear, and he respects you for it."

Anne thought better of Mr. Gorst for that respect. It was the proper
attitude; the attitude she had once vainly expected Majendie to take.

"After all, what have I to do with it? He comes to see you."

"Yes, dear; but I shan't always be here for him to see. And if I thought
that you would help Walter to look after him--will you?"

"I will do what I can. My little one!"

Anne bowed her head over the soft forehead of her little one. She had a
glad and solemn vision of herself as the protector of the penitent. It
was in keeping with all the sanctities and pieties she cherished. She had
not forgotten that Canon Wharton (a saint if ever there was one) had
enjoined on her the utmost charity to Mr. Gorst, should he turn from his
iniquity.

She was better able to admit the likelihood of that repentance because
Mr. Gorst had never stood in any close relation to her. His iniquity had
not profoundly affected her. But she found it impossible to realise that
Majendie's influence could count for anything in his redemption. Where
her husband was concerned Anne's mind was made up, and it refused to
acknowledge so fine a merit in so gross a man. She was by this time
comfortably fixed in her attitude, and any shock to it caused her
positive uneasiness. Her attitude was sacred; it had become one of the
pillars of her spiritual life. She was constrained to look for
justification lest she should put herself wrong with God.

She considered that she had found it in Majendie's habits, his silences,
his moods, the facility of his decline upon the Hannays and the Ransomes.
He was determined to deteriorate, to sink to their level.

To-night, when he remarked tentatively that he thought he would dine at
the Hannays', she made an effort to stop him.

"Must you go?" said she. "You are always dining with them."

"Why?--do you mind?" said he.

"Well--when it's night after night--"

"Is it that you mind my dining with the Hannays, or my leaving you?"

"I mind both."

"Oh--if I'd thought you wanted me to stay--"

She made no answer, but rose and led the way to the dining-room.

He followed. Her arm had touched him as she passed him in the doorway,
and his heart beat thickly, as he realised the strength of her dominion
over him. She had only to say "Stay," and he stayed; or "Come," and she
could always draw him to her. He had never turned away. His very mind was
faithful to her. It had not even conceived, and it would have had
difficulty in grasping, the idea of happiness without her.

To-night he was profoundly moved by this intimation of his wife's desire
to have him with her. His surprise and satisfaction made him curiously
shy. He sat through two courses without speaking, without lifting his
eyes from his plate; brooding over their separation. He was wondering
whether, after all, it had been so inevitable; whether he had
misunderstood her; whether, if he had had the sense to understand, he
might not have kept her. It was possible she had been wounded by his
absences. He had never explained them. He could not tell her that she
had made him afraid to be alone with her.

The situation, which he had accepted so obediently, had been more than
a mere mortal man could endure. Especially in the terrible five minutes
after dinner, before they settled for the evening, when each sat waiting
to see if the other had anything to say. Sometimes Majendie would take up
his book and Anne her work. She would sew, and sew, patient, persistent,
in her tragic silence. And when he could bear it no longer, he would put
down his book and go quietly away, to relieve the intolerable constraint
that held her. Sometimes it was Anne who read, while he smoked and
brooded. Then, in the warm, consenting stillness of the summer evenings
(they were now in June), her presence seemed to fill the room; he was
possessed by the sense of it; by the sound of her breathing; by the
stirring of her body in the chair, or of her fingers on the pages of her
book; and he would get up suddenly and leave her, dragging his passion
from the sight of her.

As he considered these things, many perplexities, many tendernesses,
stirred in him and kept him still.

Anne watched him from the other end of the table, and her thoughts
debased him. He seemed to her disagreeably incommunicative, and she had
found an ignoble explanation of his mood. There had been too much salt in
the soup, and now there was something wrong with the salmon. He had not
responded to her apology for these accidents, and she supposed that they
had been enough to spoil his evening with her.

She had come to consider him a creature grossly wedded to material
things.

"It's a pity you stayed," said she. "Mrs. Hannay would have given you a
better dinner."

He had nothing to say to so preposterous a charge. His eyes were fixed
more than ever on his plate. She saw his face flush as he bowed his head
in eating; she allowed her fancy to rest in its morbid abhorrence of the
act, and in its suspicion of its grossness. She went on, lashed by her
fancy. "I cannot understand your liking to go there so much, when you
might go to the Eliotts or the Gardners. They're always asking you, and
you haven't been near them for a year."

"Well, you see, the Hannays let me do what I like. They don't bother me."

"Do the Eliotts bother you?"

"They bore me. Horribly."

"And the Gardners?"

"Sometimes--a little."

"And Canon Wharton? No. I needn't ask."

He laughed. "You needn't. _He_ bores me to extinction."

"I'm sorry it is my friends who are so unfortunate."

"It's your husband who's unfortunate. He is not an intellectual person.
Nor a spiritual one, either, I'm afraid."

He looked up. Anne had finished her morsel, and her fingers played
irritably with the hand-bell at her side. Poor Majendie's abstraction had
combined with his appetite to make him deplorably slow over his dinner.
She still sat watching him, pure from appetite, in resignation that
veiled her contempt of the male hunger so incomprehensibly prolonged. He
had come to dread more than anything those attentive, sacrificial eyes.

"I'm awfully sorry," he said, "to keep you waiting."

She rang the bell. "Will you have the lamp lit in the drawing-room or the
study?"

He looked at her. There was no lamp for him in her eyes.

"Whichever you like. I think I shall go over to the Hannays', after all."

He went; and by the lamp in the drawing-room Anne sat and brooded in her
turn.

She said to herself: "It's no use my trying to keep him from them. It
only irritates him. He lets me see plainly that he prefers their society
to mine. I don't wonder. They can flatter him and kow-tow to him, and I
cannot. He can be a little god to them; and he must know what he is to
me. We haven't a thought in common--not a feeling--and he cannot bear to
feel himself inferior. As for me--if I've married beneath me, I must pay
the penalty."

But there was no penalty for her in these reflections. They satisfied
her. They were part of the curious mental process by which she justified
herself.




CHAPTER XXIII


Up to that moment when he had looked across the dinner table at Anne,
Majendie had felt secure in the bonds of his marriage. Anne's repugnance
had broken the natural tie; but up to that moment he had never doubted
that the immaterial link still held. If at times her presence was a
bodily torment, at other times he felt it as a spiritual protection. His
immense charity made allowance for all the extraordinary attitudes of
Anne. In his imagination they reduced themselves to one, the attitude of
inscrutable physical repugnance. He had accepted (as he had told himself
so often) the situation she had created. It appeared to him, of all
situations, the crudest and most simple. It had its merciful limits. The
discomfort of it, once vague, had grown, to his thwarted senses, almost
brutally defined. He could at least say, "It was here the trouble began,
and here, therefore, it shall end."

He thought he had sounded the depths of her repugnance, and could measure
by it his own misery. He said, "At any rate I know where I am"; and he
believed that if he stayed where he was, if he respected his wife's
prejudices, her prejudices would be bound to respect him. He could not
make her love him, but at least he considered that he had justified his
claim to her respect.

And now she had opened his eyes, and he had looked at her, and seen
things that had not (till that moment) come into his vision of their
separation. He saw subtler hostilities, incurable, indestructible
repugnances, attitudes at which his charity stood aghast. The situation
(so far from being crude and simple) involved endless refinements and
complexities of torture. He despaired now of ever reaching her.

Majendie had caught his first clear sight of the spiritual ramparts.

"I'm not good enough for her," he said. She had kept him with her that
evening, not because she wanted him to stay, but because she wanted him
to understand.

He had shown her that he understood by going to the friends for whom he
was good enough, who were good enough for him.

He went more than ever now, sometimes to the Ransomes, oftener to Gorst,
oftenest of all to Lawson Hannay. He liked more than ever to sit with
Mrs. Hannay; to lean up against the everlasting soft cushion she
presented to his soreness. More than ever he liked to talk to her of
simple things; of their acquaintance; of Edith, who had been a little
better, certainly no worse, this summer; of Peggy, of Peggy's future and
her education. He would sit for hours on Mrs. Hannay's sofa, his body
leaning back, his head bowed forward, his chin sunk on his breast,
listening attentively, yet with a dazed and rather stupid expression, to
Mrs. Hannay's conversation. His own was sometimes monotonous and a little
dull. He was growing even physically heavy. But Mrs. Hannay did not seem
to mind.

There was a certain justice in Anne's justification. He didn't
consciously prefer the Hannays' society to hers; but he actually found it
more agreeable, and for the reasons she suspected. They did worship him;
and their worship did make him feel superior, perhaps when he was least
so. They did flatter him; for, as Mrs. Hannay said, "He needed a little
patting on the back, now and then, poor fellow." And perhaps he was
really sinking a little to her level; he had so lost his sense of her
vulgarity.

He used to wonder how it was that she had kept Lawson straight. Perfectly
straight, Lawson had been, ever since his marriage. Possibly, probably,
if he had married a wife too inflexibly refined, he would have deviated
somewhat from that perfect straightness. His tastes had always been a
little vulgar. But there was no reason why he should go abroad to gratify
them when he possessed the paragon of amenable vulgarity at home. The
Gardners, whose union was almost miraculously complete, were not in their
way more admirably mated. And Lawson's reform must have been a stiff job
for any woman to tackle at the start.

A woman of marvellous ingenuity and tact. For she had kept Lawson
straight without his knowing it. She had played off one of Lawson's
little weaknesses against the other; had set, for instance, his fantastic
love of eating against his sordid little tendency to drink. Lawson
was now a model of sobriety.

And as she kept Lawson straight without his knowing it, she helped
Majendie, too, without his knowing it, to hold his miserable head up. She
ignored, resolutely, his attitude of dejection. She reminded him that if
he could make nothing else out of his life he could make money. She
convinced him that life, the life of a prosperous ship-owner in Scale,
was worth living, as long as he had Edith and Anne and Peggy to make
money for, especially Peggy.

And Majendie became more and more absorbed in his business, and more and
more he found his pleasure in it; in making money, that is to say, for
the persons whom he loved.

He had come even to find pleasure in making it for a person whom he did
not love, and hardly knew. He provided himself with one punctual and
agreeable sensation every week when he sent off the cheque for the small
sum that was poor Maggie's allowance. Once a week (he had settled it),
not once a month. For Maggie might (for anything he knew) be thriftless.
She might feast for three days, and then starve; and so find her sad way
to the street.

But Maggie was not thriftless. First at irregular intervals, weeks it
might be, or months, she had sent him various diminutive sums towards the
payment of her debt. Maggie was strictly honourable. She had got a little
work, she said, and hoped soon to have it regularly. And soon she began
to return to him, weekly, the half of her allowance. These sums he put by
for her, adding the interest. Some day there would be a modest hoard for
Maggie. He pleased himself, now and then, by wondering what the girl
would do with it. Buy a wedding-gown perhaps, when she married Mr.
Mumford. Time, he felt, was Mr. Mumford's best ally. In time, when she
had forgotten Gorst, Maggie would marry him.

Maggie's small business entailed a correspondence out of all proportion
to it. He had not yet gone to see her. Some day, he supposed, he would
have to go, to see whether the girl, as he phrased it vaguely, was
"really all right." With little creatures like Maggie you never could be
sure. There would always be the possibility of Gorst's successor, and he
had no desire to make Maggie's maintenance easier for him. He had made
her independent of all iniquitous sources of revenue.

At last, suddenly, the postal orders and the letters ceased; for three
weeks, four, five weeks. Then Majendie began to feel uneasy. He would
have to look her up.

Then one morning, early in September, a letter was brought to him at the
office (Maggie's letters were always addressed to the office, never to
his house). There was no postal order with it. For three weeks Maggie
had been ill, then she had been very poorly, very weak, too weak to sit
long at work. And so she had lost what work she had; but she hoped to get
more when she was strong again. When she was strong the repayments would
begin again, said Maggie. She hoped Mr. Majendie would forgive her for
not having sent any for so long. She was very sorry. But, if it wasn't
too much to ask, she would be very glad if Mr. Majendie would come some
day and see her.

He sent her an extra remittance by the bearer, and went to see her the
next day. His conscience reproached him for not having gone before.

Mrs. Morse, the landlady, received him with many appearances of relief.
In her mind he was evidently responsible for Maggie. He was the guardian,
the benefactor, the sender of rent.

"She's been very ill, sir," said Mrs. Morse; "but she wouldn't 'ave you
written to till she was better."

"Why not?"

"I'm sure I can't say, sir, wot 'er feeling was."

It struck him as strange and pathetic that Maggie could have a feeling.
He was soon to know that she had little else.

He found her sitting by a fire, wrapped in a shawl. It slipped from her
as she rose, as she leaped, rather, from her seat like one unnerved by a
sudden shock. He stooped and picked up the shawl before he spoke, that he
might give the poor thing time to recover herself.

"Did I startle you?" he said.

Maggie was still breathing hard. "I didn't think you'd come."

"Why not?"

"I don't know," she said weakly, and sat down again. Maggie was very
weak. She was not like the Maggie he remembered, the creature of
brilliant flesh and blood. Maggie's flesh was worn and limp; it had a
greenish tint; her blood no longer flowed in the cream rose of her face.
She had parted with the sources of her radiant youth.

She seemed to him to be suffering from severe anæmia. A horrible thought
came to him. Had the little thing been starving herself to save enough to
repay him?

"What have you been doing to yourself, Maggie?" he said brusquely.

Maggie looked frightened. "Nothing," she said.

"Working your fingers to the bone?"

She shook her head. "I was no good at dressmaking. They wouldn't have
me."

"Well--" he said kindly.

"There are a great many things I can do. I can make wreaths and crosses
and bookays. I made them at Evans's. I could go back there. Mr. Evans
would have me. But Mrs. Evans wouldn't." She paused, surveying her
immense resources. "Or I could do the flowers for people's parties.
I used to. Do you think--perhaps--they'd have me?"

Maggie's pitiful doubt was always whether "they" would "have" her.

"Yes," he said, smiling at her pathos, "perhaps they would."

"Or I could do embroidery. I learned, years ago, at Madame Ponting's.
I could go back. Only Madame wouldn't have me." (Maggie was palpably
foolish; but her folly was adorable.)

"Why wouldn't she have you?"

Maggie reddened, and he forbore to press the unkind inquiry. He gathered
that Maggie's ways had been not unknown to Madame Ponting, "years ago."

"Would you like to see some of my embroidery?"

He assented gravely. He did not want to turn Maggie from the path of
industry, which was to her the path of virtue.

She went to a cupboard, and returned with her arms full of little rolls
and parcels wrapped in paper. She unfolded and spread on the table
various squares, and strips, and little pieces, silk and woollen stuffs,
and canvas, exquisitely embroidered. There were flowers in most of the
patterns--flowers, as it appeared, of Maggie's fancy.

"I say, did you do all that yourself, Maggie?"

"Yes, that's what I _can_ do. I make the patterns out of me head, and
they're mostly flowers, because I love 'em. It's pretty, isn't it?" said
Maggie, stroking tenderly a pattern of pansies, blue pansies, such as she
had never sold in Evans's shop.

"Very pretty--very beautiful."

"I've sold lots--to a lady, before I was ill. See here."

Maggie unfolded something that was pinned in silver paper with a peculiar
care. It was a small garment, in some faint-coloured silk, embroidered
with blue pansies (always blue pansies).

"That's a frock," said she, "for a little girl. You've got a little
girl--a little fair girl."

He reddened. How the devil, he wondered, does she know that I have a
little fair girl? "I don't think it would fit her," he said.

Maggie reddened now.

"Oh--I don't want you to buy it. I don't want you to buy anything. Only
to tell people."

So much he promised her. He tried to think of all the people he could
tell. Mrs. Hannay, Mrs. Ransome, Mrs. Gardner--no, Mrs. Gardner was
Anne's friend. If Anne had been different he could have told Anne. He
could have told her everything. As it was--No.

He rose to go, but, instead of going, he stayed and bought several pieces
of embroidery for Mrs. Hannay, and the frock, not for Peggy, but for Mrs.
Ransome's little girl. They haggled a good deal over the price, owing
to Maggie's obstinate attempts to ruin her own market. (She must always
have been bent on ruining herself, poor child.) Then he tried to go
again, and Mrs. Morse came in with the tea-tray, and Maggie insisted on
making him a cup of tea, and of course he had to stay and drink it.

Maggie revived over her tea-tray. Her face flushed and rounded again to
an orb of jubilant content. And he asked her if she were happy. If she
liked her work.

She hesitated. "It's this way," she said. "Sometimes I can't think of
anything else. I can sit and sit at it for weeks on end. I don't want
anything else. Then, all of a sudden, something comes over me, and I
can't put in another stitch. Sometimes--when it comes--I'm that tired,
it's as if I 'ad weights on me arms, and I couldn't 'old them up to sew.
And sometimes, again, I'm that restless, it's as if you'd lit a fire
under me feet. I'm frightened," said Maggie, "when I feel it coming. But
I'm only tired now."

She broke off; but by the expression of her face, he saw that her
thoughts ran underground. He wondered where they would come out again.

"I haven't seen anybody this time," said Maggie, "for six months."

"Not even Mr. Mumford?"

"Oh, no, not him. I don't want to see him." And her thoughts ran back to
where they started from.

"It hasn't come lately," said Maggie, "it hasn't come for quite a long
time."

"What hasn't come?"

"What I've been telling you--what I'm afraid of."

"It won't come, Maggie," he said quickly. (He might have been her father
or the doctor.)

"If it does, it'll be worse now."

"Why should it be?"

"Because I can't get away from it. I've nowhere to go to. Other girls
have got their friends. I've got nobody. Why, Mr. Majendie--think--there
isn't a place in this whole town where I can go to for a cup of tea."

"You'll make friends."

She shook her head, guarding her little air of tragic wisdom.

Mrs. Morse popped her head in at the door, and out again.

"Is that woman kind to you?"

"Yes, very kind."

"She looks after you well?"

"Looks after me? I don't want looking after."

"Takes care of you, I mean. Gives you plenty of nice nourishing things to
eat?"

"Yes, plenty of nice things. And she comes and sits with me sometimes."

"You like her?"

"I love her."

"That's all right. You see, you _have_ got a friend, after all."

"Yes," said Maggie mournfully; and he saw that her thoughts were with
Gorst. "But it isn't the same thing, is it?"

Majendie could not honestly say it was; so he smiled, instead.

"It's a shame," said she, "to go on like this when you've been so good to
me."

"If I wasn't, you couldn't do it, could you? But what you want me to
understand is that, however good I've been, I haven't made things more
amusing for you."

"No, no," said Maggie vehemently, "I didn't mean that. Indeed I didn't.
I only wanted you to know--"

"How good _you_'ve been. Is that it? Well, because you're good, there's
no reason why you should be dull. Is there?"

"I don't know," said Maggie simply.

"See here, supposing that, instead of sending me all you earn, you keep
some of it to play with? Get Mrs. What's-her-name to go with you to
places."

"I don't want to go to places," she said. "I want to send it all to you."

He lapsed again into his formula. "There really is no reason why you
should."

"I want to. That's a reason, isn't it?" said she. She said it shyly,
tentatively, solemnly almost, as if it were some point in an infant's
metaphysics. There was no assurance in her tone, nothing to remind him
that Maggie had been the spoiled child of pleasure whose wants were
always reasons; nothing to suggest the perverted consciousness of power.

"Well--" He straightened himself stiffly for departure.

"Are you going?" she said.

"I must."

"Will you--come again?"

"Yes, I'll come, if you want me."

He saw again how piteous, how ill she looked. A pang of compassion went
through him. And after the pang there came a warm, delicious tremor. It
recalled the feeling he used to have when he did things for Edith, a
sensation singularly sweet and singularly pure.

It was consolation in his misery to realise that any one could want him,
even poor, perverted Maggie.

Maggie said nothing. But the flame rose in her face.

Downstairs Majendie found Mrs. Morse waiting for him at the door. "What's
been the matter with her?" he asked.

"I don't rightly know, sir. But between you and me, I think she's fretted
herself ill."

"Well, you've got to see that she doesn't fret, that's all."

He gave into her palm an earnest of the reward of vigilance.

That night he sent off the embroidered pieces to Mrs. Hannay, and the
embroidered frock to Mrs. Ransome; with a note to each lady recommending
Maggie, and Maggie's beautiful and innocent art.




CHAPTER XXIV


As Majendie declined more and more on his inferior friendships, Anne
became more and more dependent on the Eliotts and the Gardners. Her
evenings would have been intolerable without them. Edith no longer
needed her. Edith, they still said, was growing better, or certainly no
worse; and Mr. Gorst spent his evenings in Prior Street with Edie. The
prodigal had made his peace with Anne, and came and went unquestioned. He
was bent on making up for his long loss of Edie, and for the still longer
loss of her that had to be. They felt that his brilliant presence kept
the invading darkness from her door.

Autumn passed, and winter and spring, and in summer Edith was still with
them.

Anne was no longer a stranger in her husband's house since her child had
been born in it; but in the long light evenings, after Peggy had been put
to bed at six o'clock, Peggy's mother was once more alien and alone. It
was then that she would get up and leave her husband (why not, since he
left her?) and slip from Prior Street to Thurston Square; then that she
moved once more superbly in her superior circle. She was proud of her
circle. It was so well defined; and if the round was small, that only
meant that there was no room in it for borderlands and other obscure and
undesirable places. The commercial world, so terrifying in its
approaches, remained, and always would remain, outside it. Sitting in
Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room she forgot that the soul of Scale on Humber
was given over to tallow, and to timber, and Dutch cheeses. But for her
constant habit of depreciation, she could almost have forgotten that her
husband was only a ship-owner, and a ship-owner who had gone into a
horrible partnership with Lawson Hannay. It appeased her to belittle him
by comparisons. He had no spiritual fineness and fire like Canon Wharton,
no intellectual interests like Mr. Eliott and Dr. Gardner. She had long
ago noticed his inability to converse with any brilliance; she was now
aware of the heaviness, the physical slowness, that was growing on him.
He was losing the personal distinction that had charmed her once, and
made her proud to be seen with him at gatherings of the fastidious in
Thurston Square.

Her fancy, still belittling him, ranked him now with the dull business
men of Scale. In a few years, she said, he will be like Lawson Hannay.

A change was coming over her. She was no longer apathetic. Now that she
saw less of her husband she thought more frequently of him, if only to
his disparagement. At times the process was unconscious; at times, when
she caught her thoughts dealing thus uncharitably with him, she was
touched by a pang of contrition and of shame. At times she was pulled up
in her thinking with a sudden shock. She said to herself that he used to
be so different, and her heart would turn gently to the man he used to
be. Then, as in the sad days of her bridal home-coming, the dear immortal
memory of him rose up before her, and pleaded mercy for the insufferably
mortal man. She saw him, with the body and the soul that had been once so
familiar to her, slender, alert, and strong, a creature of appealing
goodness and tenderness and charm. And she was troubled with a great
longing for the presence of the thing she had so loved. She yearned even
for signs of the old brilliant, startling personality, in face of the
growing dulness that she saw. She found herself recalling with a smile
sayings of his that had once vexed and now amused her. For Anne was
softer.

At times she was aware of a new source of uneasiness. She was accustomed
to judge all things in relation to the spiritual life. She had no other
measure of their excellence. She had found profit for her soul in its
divorce from her husband. She had persuaded herself that since she could
not raise him, she herself would have sunk if she had clung to him or let
him cling. She had felt that their tragic rupture strengthened the tie
between her soul and God. But more than once lately, she had experienced
difficulty in reaching her refuge, her place of peace. Something
threatened her former inviolable security. The ramparts of the spiritual
life were shaken. Her prayers, that were once an ascension of flamed and
winged powers carrying her to heaven, had become mere clamorous
petitions, drawing down the things of heaven to earth. Night and morning
the same passionate prayer for herself and her child, the same prayer for
her husband, painful and perfunctory; but not always now the same sense
of absolution, of supreme and intimate communion. It was as if a veil,
opaque but intangible, were drawn between her spirit and the Unseen. She
thought it had come of living in perpetual contact with Walter's
deterioration.

Yet Anne was softer.

Her love for Peggy had become more and more an engrossing passion, as
Majendie left her more and more to the dominion of her motherhood. He had
seen enough of the effect of rivalry. It was Anne's pleasure to take
Peggy from her nurse and wash her and dress her, to tend her fine limbs,
and comb her pale soft hair. It was as if her care for the little tender
body had taught her patience and gentleness towards flesh and blood; as
if, through the love it invoked, some veil was torn for her, and she saw,
wrought in the body of her child, the wonder of the spirit's fellowship
with earth.

She dreaded the passing of the seasons, as they would take with them each
some heart-rending charm of Peggy's infancy. Now it would be the ceasing
of her pretty, helpless cry, as Peggy acquired mastery over things; now
the repudiation of her delicious play, as Peggy's intellect perceived its
puerility; and now the leaving off for ever of the speech that was
Peggy's own, as Peggy adopted the superstition of the English language.
A few years and Peggy would have cast off pinafores, a very few more, and
Peggy would be at a boarding-school; and before she left it she would
have her hair up. There was a pang for Peggy's mother in looking
backward, and in looking forward pang upon intolerable pang.

But Peggy was in no hurry to grow up. Her delicacy prolonged her babyhood
and its sweet impunity. The sad state of Peggy's little body accounted
for all the little sins that weighed on Peggy's mother's soul. You
couldn't punish Peggy. An untender look made her tremble; at a harsh word
she cried till she was sick. When Peggy committed sin she ran and told
her mother, as if it were some wonderful and interesting experience. Anne
was afraid that she would never teach the child the difference between
right and wrong.

In this, by some strange irony, Majendie, for all his self-effacement,
proved more effectual than Anne.

They were all three in the drawing-room one Sunday afternoon at tea-time.
It was Peggy's hour. And in that hour she had found her moment, when her
parents' backs were turned to the tea-table. The moment over, she came to
Majendie, shivering with delight.

"Oh, daddy, daddy," she cried, "I did 'teal some sugar. I did 'teal it my
own self, and eated it all up."

Peggy had been forbidden to touch the sugar basin ever since one very
miserable day.

"Oh, Peggy, Peggy," said her mother, "that was very naughty."

"No, mummy, it wasn't. It wasn't naughty 't all."

She pondered, gravely working out her case. "I'd be sorry if it was
naughty."

Majendie laughed.

"If you laugh every time she's naughty, how am I to make her learn?"

Majendie held out his hand. "Come here, Peggy."

Peggy came and cuddled against him, smiling sidelong mischief at her
mother.

"Look here, Peggy, if you eat too much sugar, you'll be ill; and if
you're ill, mummy'll be unhappy. See?"

"I'm sorry, daddy."

Peggy's mouth shook; she turned, and hid her face against his breast.

"There, there," he said, petting her. "Look at mummy; she's happy now."

Peggy's face peeped out, but it was not at her mother that she looked.

"Are you happy, daddy?"

He stooped, and kissed her, and left the room.

And then Peggy said, "I'm sorry, mummy. Why did daddy go away?"

"I don't know, darling."

"Do you think he will come back again?"

"Darling, I don't know."

"You'd like him to come back, wouldn't you, mummy?"

"Of course, Peggy."

"Then I'll go and tell him."

She trotted downstairs to the study, and came back shaking her head
sadly.

"Daddy isn't coming. Naughty daddy."

"Why do you say that, Peggy?"

"Because he won't come when you want him to."

"Perhaps he's busy."

"Yes," said Peggy thoughtfully. "I fink he's busy." She sat very quiet on
a footstool, thinking. "I fink," she said presently, "I'd better go and
tell daddy he isn't naughty, else he'll be dreff'ly unhappy."

And she trotted downstairs and up again.

"Daddy sends his love, mummy, and he _is_ busy. S'all I take your love to
him?"

That was how it went on, now Peggy was older. That was how she made her
mother's heart ache.

Anne was in terror for the time when Peggy would begin to see. For that,
and for her own inability to teach her the stupendous difference between
right and wrong.

But one day Peggy ran to her mother, crying as if her heart would break.

"Oh, muvver, muvver, kiss me," she sobbed. "I did kick daddy! Kiss me."

She flung her arms round Anne's knees, as if clinging for protection
against the pursuing vision of her sin.

"Hush, hush, darling," said Anne. "Perhaps daddy didn't mind."

But Peggy howled in agony. "Y-y-yes, he did. I hurted him, I hurted him.
He minded ever so."

"My little one," said Anne, "my little one!" and clung to her and
comforted her.

She saw that Peggy's little mind recognised no sin except the sin against
love; that Peggy's little heart could not conceive that love should
refuse to forgive her and kiss her.

And Anne did not refuse.

Thus her terror grew. If it was to come to Peggy that way, her knowledge
of the difference, what was Peggy to think when she grew older? When she
began to see?

That was how Anne grew soft.

Her very body was changing into the beauty of her motherhood. The
sweetness of her face, arrested in its hour of blossom, had unfolded and
flowered again. Her mouth had lost its sad droop, and for Peggy there
came many times laughter, and many times that lifting of the upper lip,
the gleam of the white teeth, and the play of the little amber mole that
Majendie loved and Anne was ashamed of.

She had become for her child that which she had been for her husband
in her strange, immortal moments of surrender, a woman warmed and
transfigured by a secret fire. Her new beauty remained, like a brooding
charm, when the child was not with her.

And as the seasons, passing, made her more and more a woman dear and
desirable, Majendie's passion for her became almost insane through its
frustration.

Anne was aware of the insanity without realising its cause. He avoided
her touch, and she wondered why. Her voice, heard in another room, drew
his heart after her in longing. At the worst moments, to get away from
her, he went out of the house. And she wondered where. Hours of
stupefying depression were followed by fits of irritability that
frightened her. And then she wished that he would not go to the Hannays,
and eat things that disagreed with him.

Little Peggy helped to make his misery more unendurable. She was always
running to and fro between her father and her mother, with questions
concerning kisses and other endearments, till he, too, wondered what she
would make of it when she began to see. Everything conspired against him.
Peggy's formidable innocence was re-enforced by the still more formidable
innocence of her mother. Anne positively flaunted before him the
spectacle of her maternal passion. She showered her tendernesses on the
child, without measuring their effect on him, for whom she had none. She
did not allow herself to wonder how he felt, when he sat there hungry,
looking on, while the little creature, greedy for caresses, was given her
fill of love.

And when he was tortured by headache, she brought him an effervescing
drink, and considered that she had done her duty.

A worse headache than usual had smitten him one late Sunday afternoon in
August. A Sunday afternoon that made (but for Majendie and his headache)
a little sacred idyl, so golden was it, so holy and so happy, with Peggy
trotting between her father's and mother's knees, and the prodigal,
burning with penitence, upstairs in Edie's room, singing _Lead, Kindly
Light_, in a heavenly tenor.

Peggy tugged at Majendie's coat.

"Sing, daddy, sing! Mummy, make daddy sing."

"I can't make him sing, darling," said Anne, who was making soft eyes at
Peggy, and curling her mouth into the shape it took when it sent kisses
to her across the room.

Instead of singing, Majendie, with his eyes on Anne, flung his arms round
Peggy and lifted her up and covered her little face with kisses. The
child lay across his knees with her head thrown back and her legs
struggling, and laughed for terror and delight.

Anne spoke with some austerity. "Put her down, Walter; I don't care for
all this hugging and kissing. It excites the child."

Peggy was put down. But when bed-time came she achieved an inimitable
revenge. Anne had to pick her up from the floor to carry her to bed. At
first Peggy refused to be carried; then she surrendered on conditions
that brought the blood to her mother's face.

From her mother's arms Peggy's head hung down as she struggled to say
good-night a second time to daddy. He rose, and for a moment he and Anne
stood linked together by the body of their child.

And Peggy reiterated, "I'll be a good girl, mummy, if you'll kiss daddy."

Anne raised her face to his and closed her eyes, and Majendie felt her
soft lips touch his forehead without parting.

That night, when he refused his supper, she looked up anxiously.

"Are you not well, Walter?"

"I've got a splitting headache."

"You'd better take some anti-pyrine."

"I'm damned if I'll take any anti-pyrine."

"Well, don't, dear; but you needn't be so violent."

"I beg your pardon."

He cooled his hands against a jug of iced water, and pressed them to his
forehead.

She left her place and came and sat beside him. "Come," she said in the
sweet voice that pierced him, "come and lie down in the study." She laid
her hand on his shoulder, and he rose and followed her.

She made him lie down on the sofa in the study, and put cushions under
his head, and brought him the anti-pyrine. She sat beside him and dabbed
eau-de-cologne all over his forehead, and blew on it with her soft
breath. She paused, and sat very still, watching him, for a moment that
seemed eternity. She didn't like the flush on his cheek nor the queer
burning brilliance in his eyes. She was afraid he was in for a bad
illness, and fear made her kind.

"Tell me how you feel, dear," she said gently. She was determined to be
very gentle with him.

"Can't you see how I feel?" he answered.

She laid her firm, cool hand upon his forehead; and he gave a cry, the
low cry she had once heard and dreamed of afterwards. He flung up his
arm, and caught at her hand, and dragged it down, and held it close
against his mouth, and kissed it.

She drew in her breath. Her hand stiffened against his in her effort to
withdraw it; and when he had let it go, she turned from him and left him
without a word.

He threw himself face downwards on the cushions, wounded and ashamed.




CHAPTER XXV


It was Friday evening, the Friday that followed that Sunday when
Majendie's hope had risen at the touch of his wife's hand, and died
again under her repulse.

Friday was the day which Maggie Forrest marked in her calendar sometimes
with a query and sometimes with a cross. The query stood for "Will he
come?" The cross meant "He came." To-night there was no cross, though
Maggie had brushed her hair till it shone again, and put on her best
dress, and laid out her little table for tea, and sat there waiting, like
the ladies in those houses where he went; like Mrs. Hannay or Mrs.
Ransome who bought her embroidery; or like that grand lady with the
title, who had come with Mrs. Ransome--the lady who had bought more
embroidery than anybody, the scent on whose clothes was enough, Maggie
said, to take your breath away.

Maggie loved her tea-table. She embroidered beautiful linen cloths for
it. Every Friday it was decked as an altar dedicated to the service of a
god--in case he came.

He hadn't come. It was past eight, yet Maggie left the altar standing
with the cloth on it, and waited. It would be terrible if the god should
come and find no altar. Once, even at this late hour, he had come.

The house was very quiet. Mrs. Morse was out marketing, and Maggie was
alone. Friday was market night in Scale. She wondered if he would
remember that, and come. Her heart beat violently with the thought that
he might be beginning to come late. The others had come late when they
began to love her.

She had forgotten them, or only cared to remember such of their ways as
threw light on Mr. Majendie's. For he was, as yet, obscure to her.

It seemed to her that a new thing had come to her, a thing marvellously
and divinely new, this, that she should be waiting, counting hours, and
marking days on calendars, measuring her own pulses with a hand, now on
her heart, now on her throbbing forehead, and wondering what could be the
matter with her. Maggie was six-and-twenty; but ever since she was nine
she had been waiting and wondering. For there always had been somebody
whom Maggie loved insanely. First it was the little boy who lived in the
house opposite, at home. He had abandoned Maggie's society, and broken
her heart on the day when he "went into trousers." Then it was the big
boy in her father's shop who gave her chocolates one day and snubbed her
cruelly the next. Then it was the young man who came to tune the piano
in the back parlour. Then the arithmetic master in the little
boarding-school they sent her to. And then (for Maggie's infatuations
rose rapidly in the social scale) it was one of the young gentlemen who
"studied" at the Vicarage. He was engaged to Maggie for a whole term; and
he went away and jilted her, so that Maggie's heart was broken a second
time. At last, on an evil day for Maggie, it was one of the gentlemen
(not so young) staying up at "the big house." He watched for Maggie in
dark lanes, and followed her through the fields at evening, till one
evening he made her turn and follow her heart and him. And so Maggie went
on her predestined way.

For after him there was the gentleman who came to Madame Ponting's, and
after him, Mr. Gorst, who came to Evans's, and after Mr. Gorst--Last year
Maggie could not have believed that there could be another after him. For
each of these persons she would willingly have died. To each of them her
soul leaped up and bowed itself, swept forward like a flame bowed and
driven by the wind.

As long as each loved her, the flame burned steadily and still. Maggie's
soul was appeased for a season. As each left her, the flame died out in
tears, and her pulses beat feebly, and her life languished. Maggie went
from flame to flame; for the hours when there was nobody to love simply
dropped into the darkness and were forgotten. She left off living when
she had to leave off loving. To be sure there was always Mr. Mumford. He
was a tobacconist, and he lived over the shop in a house fronting the
pier, a unique and dominant situation. And he was prepared to overlook
the past and make Maggie his wife and mistress of the house fronting the
pier. Unfortunately, Maggie did not love him. You couldn't love Mr.
Mumford. You could only be sorry for him.

But though Maggie went from flame to flame, there were long periods of
placidity when she loved nothing but her work, and was as good as gold.
Maggie's father wouldn't believe it. He had never forgiven her, not even
when the doctor told him that there was no sense in which the poor girl
could be held responsible; they should have looked after her better, that
was all. Maggie's father, the grocer, did not deal in smooth, extenuating
phrases. He called such madness sin. So did Maggie in her hours of peace
and sanity. She was terrified when she felt it coming on, and hid her
face from her doom. But when it came she went to meet it, uplifted,
tremulous, devoted, carrying her poor scorched heart in her hand for
sacrifice.

Each time that she loved, it was as if her former sins had been blotted
out; for there came a merciful forgetfulness that renewed, almost, her
innocence. Her heart had its own perverted constancy. No lover was like
her last lover, and for him she rejected and repudiated the past.

And each time that she loved she was torn asunder. She gave herself in
pieces; her heart first, then her soul, then, if it must needs be, her
body. The finest first, then all that was left of her. That was her
unique merit, what marked her from the rest.

Majendie, she divined by instinct, had recognised her quality. He was the
only one who had. And he had asked nothing of her. She would have lived
miserably for Charlie Gorst. She would have died with joy for Mr.
Majendie. And Maggie feared death worse than life, however miserable.

But there was something in her love for Majendie that revealed it as a
thing apart. It had not made her idle. Her passion for Mr. Majendie
blossomed and flowered, and ran over in beautiful embroidery. That
industry ministered to it. Her heart was set on having those little sums
to send him every week; for that was the only way she could hope to
approach him of her own movement. She loved the curt little notes in
which Majendie acknowledged the receipt of each postal order. She tied
them together with white ribbon, and treasured them in a little box under
lock and key. All the time, she knew he had a wife and child, but her
fancy refused to recognise Mrs. Majendie's existence. It allowed him to
have a child, but not a wife. She knew that he spent his Saturdays and
Sundays with them at his home. He never came, or could come, on a
Saturday or Sunday, and Maggie refused to consider the significance of
this. She simply lived from Friday to Friday. No other day in the week
existed for Maggie. All other days heralded it, or followed in its train.
The blessed memory of it rested upon Saturday and Sunday. Wednesday and
Thursday glowed and vibrated with its coming; Mondays and Tuesdays were
forlorn and grey. Terrible were the days which followed a Friday when he
had not come.

He had not come last Friday, nor the Friday before that. She had always a
comfortable little theory to cheat herself with, to account for his not
coming. He had been ill last Friday; that, of course, was why he had not
come, Maggie knew. She did not like to think he was ill; but she did like
to think that only illness could prevent his coming. And she had always
believed what she liked.

The presumption in Maggie's mind amounted to a certainty that he would
come to-night.

And at nine o'clock he came.

Her eyes shone as she greeted him. There was nothing about her to remind
him of the dejected, anæmic girl who had sat shivering over the fire last
September. Maggie had got all her lights and colours back again. She was
lifted from her abasement, glorified. And yet, for all her glory, Maggie,
on her good behaviour, became once more the prim young lady of the lower
middle class. She sat, as she had been used to sit on long, dull Sunday
afternoons in the parlour above the village shop, bolt upright on her
chair, with her meek hands folded in her lap. But her eyes were fixed on
Majendie, their ardent candour contrasting oddly with the stiff modesty
of her deportment.

"Have you been ill?" she asked.

"Why should I have been ill?"

"Because you didn't come."

"You mustn't suppose I'm ill every time I don't come. I might be a
chronic invalid at that rate."

He hadn't realised how often he came. _He_ didn't mark the days with
crosses in a calendar.

"But you _were_ ill, this time, I know."

"How do you know?"

The processes of Maggie's mind amused him. It was such a funny, fugitive,
burrowing, darting thing, Maggie's mind, transparent and yet secret in
its ways.

"I know, because I saw--" she hesitated.

"Saw what?"

"The light in your window."

"My window?"

"Yes. The one that looks out on the garden at the back. It was twelve
o'clock on Sunday night, and on Monday night the light was gone, and I
knew that you were better."

"As it happens, you saw the light in my sister's room. She's always ill."

"Oh," said Maggie; and her face fell with the fall of her great argument.

"Sometimes," he said, "the light burns all night long."

"Yes," said Maggie, musing; "sometimes it burns all night long. But in
the room above that room, there's a little soft light that burns all
night, too. That's your room."

"No, that's my wife's room."

Maggie became thoughtful. "I used to think that was where your little
girl sleeps, because of the night-light. Then your room's next it."
Maggie desired to know all about the blessed house that contained him.

"That's the spare room," he said, laughing.

"Goodness! what a lot of rooms. Then yours is the one next the nursery,
looking on the street. Fancy! That little room."

Again she became thoughtful. So did he.

"I say, Maggie, how did you know those lights burned all night?"

"Because I saw them."

"You can't see them."

"Yes, you can; from the little alley that goes along at the back."

He hadn't thought of the alley. Nobody ever passed that way after dark;
it ended in a blind wall.

"What were you doing there at twelve o'clock at night?"

He looked for signs of shame and confusion on Maggie's face. But Maggie's
face was one flame of joy. Her eyes were candid.

"Walking up and down," she said. "I was watching."

"Watching?"

"Your window."

"You mustn't, Maggie. You mustn't watch people's windows. They don't like
it. It doesn't do."

The flame was troubled; but not the lucid candour of Maggie's eyes. "I
had to. I thought you were ill. I came to make sure. I was all alone. I
didn't let anybody see me. And when I saw the light I was frightened. And
I came again the next night to see. I didn't think you'd mind. It's not
as if I'd come to the front door, or written letters, was it?"

"No. But you must never do that again, mind. How did you know the house?"

Maggie hung her head. "I saw your little girl go in there."

"Were you 'watching'?"

"N-no. It was an accident."

"How did you know it was my little girl?"

"I saw you walking with her, one Saturday, in the Park. It was an
accident--really. I was taking my work to that lady who buys from
me--Mrs. 'Anny."

"I see."

"You're not angry with me, Mr. Magendy?"

"Of course not. What made you think I was?"

"Your face. You would be angry if I followed you. But I wouldn't do such
a thing. I've never followed any one--never. And I wouldn't do it now,
not if I was paid," she protested.

"It's all right, Maggie, it's all right."

Maggie clasped her knees and sat thinking. She seemed to know by
intuition when it was advantageous to be silent, and when to speak. But
Majendie was thinking, too. He was wondering whether he was not being a
little too kind to Maggie; whether a little unkindness would not be a
salutary change for both of them. Why couldn't the girl marry Mr.
Mumford? He didn't want to profit by the transaction. He would have
gladly paid Mr. Mumford to marry her, and take her away.

He put his hand over his eyes as a veil for his thoughts; and when he
took it away again, Maggie had risen and was going on soundless feet
towards the door.

"Don't go," she said, "I'll be back in a minute."

He flung himself back in the chair and waited. The minutes dragged. He
had wanted Maggie away; and now she had gone he wanted her back again.

Maggie did not stay away long enough to give him time to discover how
much he wanted her. She came back, carrying a tray with cups and a
steaming coffee pot, and set it on the table.

A fragrance of strong coffee filled the room. The service of the god had
begun.

She stood close against his side, yet humbly, as she handed him his cup.
"It's nice and strong," she said. "Drink it. It'll do your head good."

And she sat down opposite him, and watched him drink it.

Maggie's watching face was luminous and tender. In her eyes there was the
look that love gives for his signal--love that, in that moment, was pure
and sweet as a mother's. She was glad to think that the coffee was
strong, and would do his head good. She had no other thought in her mind,
at that moment.

After the coffee she brought matches and cigarettes, which she offered
shyly. Nature had given her an immortal shyness, born of her extreme
humility.

"They're all right," she said, "Charlie smoked them." (Charlie was at
times a useful memory.)

She struck a match and prepared to light the cigarette. This she did
gravely and efficiently, with no sign of feminine consciousness or
coquetry. It was part of the solemn evening service of the god. And, as
he smoked, the devotee retreated to her chair and watched him.

"Maggie," he said, "supposing Mr. Mumford was to come in?"

"He won't. Sunday's _his_ day; or would be, if I let him 'ave a day."

"Why don't you?"

She shook her head. "I've seen nobody."

There was silence for five minutes.

"Mr. Magendy--"

"Majendie, Maggie, Majendie."

"Mr. Mashendy--I'm beginning to be afraid."

"What are you afraid of?"

"What I've always told you about. That awful feeling. It's coming on
again, I think."

"It won't come, Maggie, it won't come. Don't think about it, and it won't
come."

He didn't understand very clearly what Maggie was talking about; but he
remembered that, last September, after her illness, she had been afraid
of something. And he remembered that he had comforted her with some such
words as these.

"Yes," said she, "but I feel it coming."

"Maggie, you oughtn't to live alone like this. See here, you ought to
marry. You ought to marry Mr. Mumford. Why don't you?"

"I don't want to marry anybody. And I don't love him."

"Well, don't think about that other thing. Don't think about it. You'll
be all right."

"I won't think," said Maggie, and thought profoundly.

"Mr. Majendie," she said suddenly.

"Madam."

"You mustn't be afraid. I shall never do anything I know you wouldn't
like me to."

"All right. Only don't think too much about that, either."

"I can't help thinking. You've been so good to me."

"I should try and forget that, too, a little more, if I were you. I'm
only paying some of Mr. Gorst's debts for him."

The name called up no colour to her cheek. Maggie had forgotten Gorst,
and all _he_ had done for her.

"And you're paying me back."

She shook her head. "I can't ever pay you back."

Poor little girl! Was that what her mind was always running on?

There was silence again between them. And then Majendie looked at Maggie.

She was sitting very still, as if she were waiting for something, and yet
content. Her eyes were swimming, as if with tears; but there were no
tears in them. Her face was reddening, as if with shame, but there was no
shame in it. She seemed to be listening, dazed and enchanted, to her own
secret, the running whisper of her blood. Her lips were parted, and, as
he looked at her, they closed and opened again in sympathy with the
delicate tremors that moved her throat under her rounded chin. In her
brooding look there was neither reminiscence nor foreboding; it was the
look of a creature surrendered wholly to her hour.

As he looked at her his nerves sent an arrow of warning, a hot tremor
darting from heart to brain.

"I must go now, Maggie," he said.

When he stood up, his knees shook under him.

"Not yet," said Maggie. "I'm all alone in the house, and I'm afraid."

"There's nothing to be afraid of," he said roughly. "I've got to go."

He strode towards the door while Maggie stared after him in terror. She
understood nothing but that he was going to leave her. What had she done
to drive him away?

"You're ill," she cried, as she followed him, panting in her fright.

He pushed her back gently from the threshold.

"Don't be a little fool, Maggie. I'm not ill."

Out in the street, five yards from Maggie's door, he battled with a
vision of her that almost drove him back again. "It was I who was a
fool," he thought. "I shall go back. Why not? She is predestined. Why not
I as well as anybody else?"

All the way to his own door an insistent, abominable voice kept calling
to him, "Why not? Why not?"

He went with noiseless footsteps up his own stairs, past the dark doors
below, past Edith's open door where the lamp still burned brightly beyond
the threshold. At Anne's door he paused.

It stood ajar in a dim light. He pushed it softly open and went in.

Anne and her child lay asleep under the silver crucifix.

Peggy had been taken into Anne's bed, and had curled herself close up
against her mother's side. Her arm lay on Anne's breast; one hand
clutched the border of Anne's nightgown. The long thick braid of Anne's
hair was flung back on the pillow, framing the child's golden head in
gold.

His eyes filled with tears as he looked at them. For a moment his heart
stood still. Why not he as well as anybody else? His heart told him why.

As he turned he sighed. A sigh of longing and tenderness, and of
thankfulness for a great deliverance. Above all, of thankfulness.




CHAPTER XXVI


The light burned in Edith's room till morning; for her spine kept sleep
from her through many nights. They no longer said, "She is better, or
certainly no worse." They said, "She is worse, or certainly no better."
The progress of her death could be reckoned by weeks and measured by
inches. Soon they would be giving her morphia, to make her sleep.
Meanwhile she was terribly awake.

She heard her brother's soft footsteps as he passed her door. She heard
him pause on the upper landing and creep into the room overhead. She
heard him go out again and shut himself up in the little room beyond.
There came upon her an awful intuition of the truth.

The next day she sent for him.

"What is it, Edie?" he said.

She looked at him with loving eyes, and asked him as Maggie had asked,
"Are you ill?"

He started. The question brought back to him vividly the scene of the
night before; brought back to him Maggie with her love and fear.

"What is it? Tell me," she insisted.

He owned to headaches. She knew he often had them.

"It's not a bit of use," she said, "trying to deceive _me_. It's not
headaches. It's Anne."

"Poor Anne. I think she's all right. After all, she's got the child, you
know."

"Yes. _She_'s got Peggy. If I could see you all right, too, I should die
happy."

"Don't worry about me. I'm not worth it."

She gazed at him searchingly, confirmed in her intuition. That was the
sort of thing poor Charlie used to say.

"It's my fault," she said. "It always has been."

"Angel, if you could lay everybody's sins on your own shoulders, you
would."

"I mean it. You were right and I was wrong. Ah, how one pays! Only
_you_'ve had to pay for my untruthfulness. I can see it now. If I'd done
as you asked me, in the beginning, and told her the truth--"

"She wouldn't have married me. No, Edie. You're assuming that I've lived
to regret that I married her. I never have regretted it for one single
moment. Not for myself, that is. For her, yes. Granted that I'm as
unhappy as you please, I'd rather be unhappy with her than happy without
her. See?"

"Walter--if you keep true to her, I believe you'll have your happiness
yet. I don't know how it's coming. It may come very late. But it's bound
to come. She's good--"

He assented with a groan. "Oh, much _too_ good."

"And the goodness in her must recognise the goodness in you; when she
understands. I believe she's beginning to understand. She doesn't know
how much she understands."

"Understands what?"

"Your goodness. She loved you for it. She'll love you for it again."

"My dear Edie, you're the only person who believes in my goodness--you
and Peggy."

"I and Peggy. And Charlie and the Hannays. And Nanna and the
Gardners--and God."

"I wish God would give Anne a hint that He thinks well of me."

"Dear--if you keep true to her--He will."

If he kept true to her! It was the second time she had said it. It was
almost as if she had divined what had so nearly happened.

"I think," she said, "I'd like to talk to Anne, now, while I can talk.
You see, once they go giving me morphia"--she closed her eyes. "Just let
me lie still for half an hour, and then bring Anne to me."

She lay still. He watched her for an hour. And he knew that in that hour
she had prayed.

He found Anne sitting on the nursery floor, playing with Peggy. "Edie
wants you," he said, loosening Peggy's little hands as they clung about
his legs.

"Mother must go, darling," said she.

But all Peggy said was, "Daddy'll stay."

He did not stay long. He had to restrain himself, to go carefully with
Peggy, lest he should help her to make her mother's heart ache.

Anne found Nanna busied about the bed. Nanna was saying, "Is that any
easier, Miss Edie?"

"It's heavenly, Nanna," said Edie, stifling a moan. "Oh dear, I hope in
the next world I shan't feel as if my spine were still with me, like
people when their legs are cut off."

"Miss Edie, what an idea!"

"Well, Nanna, you can't tell whether it mayn't be so. Anne, dear, you've
got such a nice, pretty body, why have you such a withering contempt for
it? It behaves so well to you, too. That's more than I can say of mine;
and yet, I believe I shall quite miss it when it's gone. At any rate, I
shall be glad that I was decent to the poor thing while it was with me.
Run away now, please, Nanna, and shut the door."

Nanna thought she knew why Miss Edie wanted the door shut. She, too, had
her intuitive forebodings. She was aware, the whole household was aware,
that the mistress cared more for her child than for the husband who had
given it her. Their master's life was not altogether happy. They wondered
many times how he was going to stand it.

"Anne" said Edith, "I'm uneasy about Walter."

"You need not be," said Anne.

"Why? Aren't you?"

"I know he hasn't been well lately--"

"How can you expect him to be well when he's so unhappy?"

Anne was silent.

"How long is it going to last, dear? And where is it going to end?"

"Edith, you needn't be afraid. I shall never leave him."

That was not what Edith was afraid of, but she did not say so.

"How can I," Anne went on, "when I believe the Church's doctrine of
marriage?"

"Do you? Do you believe that love is a provision for the soul's
redemption of the body? or for the body's redemption of the soul?"

"I believe that, having married Walter, whatever he is or does, I cannot
leave him without great sin."

"Then you'll be shocked when I tell you that if your husband were a bad
man, I should be the first to implore you to leave him, though he is my
brother. Where there can be no love on either side there's no marriage,
and no sacrament. That's _my_ profane belief."

"And when there's love on one side only?"

"The sacrament is there, offered by the loving person, and refused by the
unloving. And that refusal, my dear child, may, if you like, be a great
sin--supposing, of course, that the love is pure and devoted. I hardly
know which is the worst sin, then, to refuse to give, or to refuse to
take it; or to take it, and then throw it away. What would you think if
Peggy hardened her little heart against you?"

"My Peggy!"

"Yes, your Peggy. It's the same thing. You'll see it some day. But I want
you to see it now, before it's too late."

"Edie, if you'd only tell me where I've failed! If you're thinking of
our--our separation--"

"I was not. But, since you _have_ mentioned it, I can't help reminding
you that you fell in love with Walter because you thought he was a saint.
And so I don't see what's to prevent you now. He's qualifying. He mayn't
be perfect; but, in some ways, a saint couldn't very well do more. Has it
never occurred to that you are indulging the virtue that comes easiest to
you, and exacting from him the virtue that comes hardest? And he has
stood the test."

"It was his own doing--his own wish."

"Is it? I doubt it--when he's more in love with you than he was before he
married you."

"That's all over."

"For you. Not for him. He's a man, as you may say, of obstinate
affections."

"Ah, Edie--you don't know."

"I know," said Edith, "you're perfectly sweet, the way you take my
scoldings. It's cowardly of me, when I'm lying here safe, and you can't
scold back again. But I wouldn't do it if I didn't love you."

"I know--I know you love me."

"But I couldn't love you so much, if I didn't love Walter more."

"You well may, Edie. He's been a good brother to you."

"Some day you'll own he's been as good a husband as he's been a brother.
Better; for it's a more difficult post, my dear. I don't really think my
body, spine and all, can have tried him more than your spirit."

"What have I done? Tell me--tell me."

"Done? Oh, Nancy, I hate to have to say it to you. What haven't you done?
There's no way in which you haven't hurt and humiliated him. I'm not
thinking of your separation--I'm thinking of the way you've treated him,
and his affection for you and Peggy. You won't let him love you. You
won't even let him love his little girl."

"Does he say that?"

"Would he say it? People in my peculiar position don't require to have
things said to them; they _say them_. You see, if I didn't say them now
I should have to get up out of my grave and do it, and that would be ten
times more disagreeable for you. It might even be very uncomfortable for
me."

"Edie, I wish I knew when you were serious."

"Well, if I'm not serious now, when _shall_ I be?"

Anne smiled. "You're very like Walter."

"Yes. He's every bit as serious as I am. And he's getting more and more
serious every day."

"Oh, Edie, you don't understand. I--I've suffered so terribly."

"I do understand. I've gone through it--every pang of it--and it's all
come back to me again through your suffering--and I know it's been worse
for you. I've told him so. It's because I don't want you to suffer more
that I'm saying these awful things to you."

"Oh! _Am_ I to suffer more?"

"I believe that's the only way your happiness can come to you--through
great suffering. I'm only afraid that the suffering may come through
Peggy, if you don't take care."

"Peggy--"

It was her own terror put into words.

"Yes. That child has a terrible capacity for loving. And for her that
means suffering. She loves you. She loves her father. Do you suppose she
won't suffer when she sees? Her little heart will be torn in two between
you."

"Oh, Edith--I cannot bear it."

She hid her face from the anguish.

"You needn't. That's it. It rests with you."

"With me? If you would only tell me how."

"I can't tell you anything. It'll come. Probably in the way you least
expect it. But--it'll come."

"Edie, I feel as if you held us all together. And when you've gone--"

"You mean when _it's_ gone. When it's 'gone,'" said Edie, smiling. "I
shall hold you together all the more. You needn't sigh like that."

"Did I sigh?"

As Anne stooped over the bed she sighed again, thinking how Edith's
loving arms used to leap up and hold her, and how they could never hold
anything any more.

Of all the things that Edith said to her that afternoon, two remained
fixed in Anne's memory: how Peggy would suffer through overmuch
loving--she remembered that saying, because it had confirmed her terror;
and how love was a provision for the soul's redemption of the body, or
for the body's redemption of the soul. This she remembered, because she
did not understand it.

That was in August. Before the month was out they were beginning to give
Edith morphia.

In September Gorst came to see her for the last time.

In October she died in her brother's arms.

In the days that followed, it was as if her spirit, refusing to depart
from them, had rested on the sister she had loved. Spirit to spirit,
she stooped, kindling in Anne her own dedicated flame. In the white
death-chamber, and through the quiet house, the presence of Anne, moving
with a hushed footfall, was like the presence of a blessed spirit. Her
face was as a face long hidden upon the heart of peace. Her very grief
aspired; it had wings, lifting her towards her sister in her heavenly
place.

For Anne, in the days that followed, was possessed by a great and burning
charity. Mrs. Hannay called and was taken into the white room to see
Edith. And Anne's heart went out to Mrs. Hannay, when she spoke of the
beauty and goodness of Edith; and to Lawson Hannay, when he pressed her
hand without speaking; and to Gorst, when she saw him stealing on tiptoe
from Edith's room, his face swollen and inflamed with grief. Her heart
went out to all of them, because they had loved Edith.

And to her husband her heart went out with a tenderness born of an
immense pity and compassion. For the first three days, Majendie gave no
sign that he was shaken by his sister's death. But on the evening of the
day they buried her, Anne found him in the study, sitting in his low
chair by the fire, his head sunk, his body bowed forward over his knees,
convulsed with a nervous shivering. He started and stared at her
approach, and straightened himself suddenly. She held out her hand. He
looked at it dumbly, as if unwilling or afraid to take it.

"My dear," she said softly.

Then she knelt beside him, and drew his head down upon her breast, and
let it rest there.




CHAPTER XXVII


It was a Thursday night in October, three weeks after Edith's death. Anne
was in her room, undressing. She moved noiselessly, with many tender
precautions, for fear of waking Peggy, and for fear of destroying the
peace that possessed her own soul like heavenly sleep. It was the mystic
mood that went before prayer.

In those three weeks Anne felt that she had been brought very near to
God. She had not known such stillness and content since the days at
Scarby that had made her life terrible. It was as if Edith's spirit in
bliss had power given it to help her sister, to draw Anne with it into
the divine presence.

And the dead woman bound the living to each other also, as she had said.
How she bound them Anne had not realised until to-day. It was Mrs.
Elliott's day, her Thursday. Anne had spent half an hour in Thurston
Square, and had come away with a cold, unsatisfactory feeling towards
Fanny. Fanny, for the first time, had jarred on her. She had so plainly
hesitated between condolence and congratulation. She seemed to be
secretly rejoicing in Edith Majendie's death. Her manner intimated
clearly that a burden had been removed from her friend's life, and that
the time had now come for Anne to blossom out and enjoy herself. Anne had
been glad to get away from Fanny, to come back to the house in Prior
Street and to find Walter waiting for her. Fanny, in spite of her
intellectual rarity, lacked the sense that, after all, _he_ had, the
sense of Edith's spiritual perfection. Strangely, inconsistently,
incomprehensibly, he had it. He and his wife had that in common, if they
had nothing else. They were bound to each other by Edith's dear and
sacred memory, an immaterial, immortal tie. They would always share their
knowledge of her. Other people might take for granted that her terrible
illness had loosened, little by little, the bond that held them to her.
They knew that it was not so. They never found themselves declining on
the mourner's pitiful commonplaces, "Poor Edie"; "She is released"; "It's
a mercy she was taken." It was their tribute to Edith's triumphant
personality that they mourned for her as for one cut off in the fulness
of a strong, beneficent life.

For those three weeks Anne remained to her husband all that she had been
on the night of Edith's burial.

And, as she felt that nobody but her husband understood what she had lost
in Edith, she realised for the first time his kindred to his sister. She
forced herself to dwell on his many admirable qualities. He was
unselfish, chivalrous, the soul of honour. On his chivalry, which touched
her more nearly than his other virtues, she was disposed to put a very
high interpretation. She felt that, in his way, he acknowledged her
spiritual perfection, also, and reverenced it. If their relations only
continued as they were, she believed that she would yet be happy with
him. To think of him as she had once been obliged to think was to profane
the sorrow that sanctified him now. She was persuaded that the shock of
Edith's death had changed him, that he was ennobled by his grief. She
could not yet see that the change was in herself. She said to herself
that her prayers for him were answered.

For it was no longer an effort, painful and perfunctory, to pray for her
husband. Since Edith's death she had prayed for him, as she had prayed in
the time of reconciliation that followed her first discovery of his sin.
She was horrified when she realised how in six years her passion of
redemption had grown cold. It was there that she had failed him, in
letting go the immaterial hold by which she might have drawn him with her
into the secret shelter of the Unseen. She perceived that in those years
her spiritual life had suffered by the invasion of her earthly trouble.
She had approached the silent shelter with cries of supplication for
herself and for her child, the sweet mortal thing she had loved above all
mortal things. Every year had made it harder for her to reach the sources
of her help, hardest of all to achieve the initiatory state, the
nakedness, the prostration, the stillness of the dedicated soul. Too many
miseries cried and strove in her. She could no longer shut to her door,
and bar the passage to the procession of her thoughts, no longer cleanse
and empty her spirit's house for the divine thing she desired to dwell
with her.

And now she was restored to her peace; lifted up and swept, effortless,
into the place of heavenly help. Anne's soul had no longer to reach out
her hand and feel her way to God, for it was God who sought for her and
found her. She heard behind her, as it were, the footsteps of the divine
pursuing power. Once more, as in the mystic days before her marriage, she
had only to close her eyes, and the communion was complete. At night,
when her prayer was ended, she lay motionless in the darkness, till she
seemed to pass into the ultimate bliss, beyond the reach of prayer. There
were moments when she felt herself to be close upon the very vision of
God, the beatitude of the pure.

After these moments Anne found herself contemplating her own inviolate
sanctity.

There was in Anne an immense sincerity, underlying a perfect tangle of
minute deceptions and hypocrisies. She was not deceived as to the supreme
event. She was truly experiencing the great spiritual passion which,
alone of passions, is destined to an immortal satisfaction. She had all
but touched the end of the saint's progress. But she was ignorant, both
of the paths that brought her there, and the paths that had led and might
again lead, her feet astray.

Each night, when she closed her bedroom door, she felt that she was
entering into a sanctuary. She was profoundly, tenderly grateful to her
husband for the renunciation that made that refuge possible to her. She
accepted her blessed isolation as his gift.

This Thursday had been a day of little lacerating distractions. She had
gone through it thirsting for the rest and surrender, the healing silence
of the night.

She undressed slowly, being by nature thorough and deliberate in all her
movements.

She was standing before her looking-glass, about to unpin her hair, when
she heard a low knock at her door. Majendie had been detained, and was
late in coming to take his last look at Peggy before going to bed.

Anne opened the door softly, and signed to him to make no noise. He stole
on tiptoe to the child's cot, and stood there for a moment. Then he came
and sat down in the chair by the dressing-table, where Anne was standing
with her arms raised, unpinning her hair. Majendie had always admired
that attitude in Anne. It was simple, calm, classic, and superbly
feminine. Her long white wrapper clothed her more perfectly than any
dress.

He sat looking at the quick white fingers untwisting the braid of hair.
It hung divided into three strands, still rippling with the braiding,
still dull with its folded warmth. She combed the three into one sleek
sheet that covered her like a veil, drawn close over head and shoulders.
Her face showed smooth and saint-like between the cloistral bands.
Majendie thought he had never seen anything more beautiful than that face
and hair, with their harmonies of dull gold and sombre white.

"I like you," he said; "but isn't the style just a trifle severe?"

Anne said nothing. She was trying to forget his presence while she yet
permitted it.

"Do you mind my looking at you like this?"

"No."

(They spoke in low voices, for fear of waking the sleeping child.)

She took up her brush, and with a turn of her head swept her hair forward
over one shoulder. It hung in one mass to her waist. Then she began to
brush it.

The first strokes of the brush stirred the dull gold that slept in its
ashen furrows. A shining undulation passed through it, and broke, at the
ends, as it were, into a curling golden foam. Then Anne stood up and
tossed it backwards. Her brush went deep and straight, like a
ploughshare, turning up the rich, smooth swell of the under-gold; it went
light on the top, till numberless little threads of hair rippled, and
rose, and knitted themselves, and lay on her head like a fine gold net;
then, with a few swift swimming movements, upwards and outwards. It
scattered the whole mass into drifting strands and flying wings and soft
falling feathers, and, under them, little tender curls of flaxen down.
With another stroke of the brush and a shake of her head, Anne's hair
rose in one whorl and fell again, and broke into a shower of woven spray;
pure gold in every thread.

Majendie held out a shy hand and caught the receding curl of it. Its
faint fragrance reached him, winging a shaft of memory. His nerves shook
him, and he looked away.

Anne had been cool and business-like in every motion, unconscious of her
effect, unconscious almost of him. Now she gathered her hair into one
mass, and began plaiting it rapidly, desiring thus to hasten his
departure. She flung back the stiff braid, and laid her finger on the
extinguisher of the shaded lamp, as a hint for him to go.

"Anne," he whispered, "Anne--"

The whisper struck fear into her.

She faced him calmly, coldly; not unkindly. Unkindness would have given
him more hope than that pitiless imperturbability.

"Have you anything to say to me?" she said.

"No."

"Well, then, will you be good enough to go?"

"Do you really mean it?"

"I always mean what I say. I haven't said my prayers yet."

"And when you have said them?"

She had turned out the lamp, so that she might not see his unhappy face.
She did not see it; she only saw her spiritual vision destroyed and
scattered, and the havoc of dreams, resurgent, profaning heavenly sleep.

"Please," she whispered, "please, if you love me, leave me to myself."

He left her; and her heart turned after him as he went, and blessed him.

"He is good, after all," her heart said.

But Majendie's heart had hardened. He said to himself, "She is too much
for me." As he lay awake thinking of her, he remembered Maggie. He
remembered that Maggie loved him, and that he had gone away from her
and left her, because he loved Anne. And now, because he loved Anne, he
would go to Maggie. He remembered that it was on Fridays that he used to
go and see her.

Very well, to-morrow night would be Friday night.

To-morrow night he would go and see her.

And yet, when to-morrow night came, he did not go. He never went until
December, when Maggie's postal orders left off coming. Then he knew that
Maggie was ill again. She had been fretting. He knew it; although, this
time, she had not written to tell him so.

He went, and found Maggie perfectly well. The postal orders had not come,
because the last lady, the lady with the title, had not paid her. Maggie
was good as gold again, placid and at peace.

"Why," he asked himself bitterly, "why did I not leave her to her peace?"

And a still more bitter voice answered, "Why not you, as well as anybody
else?"




BOOK III




CHAPTER XXVIII


Eastward along the Humber, past the brown wharves and the great square
blocks of the warehouses, past the tall chimneys and the docks with
their thin pine-forest of masts, there lie the forlorn flat lands of
Holderness. Field after field, they stretch, lands level as water, only
raised above the river by a fringe of turf and a belt of silt and sand.
Earth and water are of one form and of one colour, for, beyond the brown
belt, the widening river lies like a brown furrowed field, with a clayey
gleam on the crests of its furrows. When the grey days come, water and
earth and sky are one, and the river rolls sluggishly, as if shores and
sky oppressed it, as if it took its motion from the dragging clouds.

Eleven miles from Scale a thin line of red roofs runs for a field's
length up the shore, marking the neck of the estuary. It is the fishing
hamlet of Fawlness. Its one street lies on the flat fields low and
straight as a dyke.

Beyond the hamlet there is a little spit of land, and beyond the spit of
land a narrow creek.

Half a mile up the creek the path that follows it breaks off into the
open country, and thins to a track across five fields. It struggles to
the gateway of a low, red-roofed, red-brick farm, and ends there. The
farm stands alone, and the fields around it are bare to the skyline.
Three tall elms stand side by side against it, sheltering it from the
east, marking its humble place in the desolate land. To the west a broad
bridle-path joins the road to Fawlness.

Majendie had a small yacht moored in the creek, near where the path
breaks off to Three Elms Farm. Once, sometimes twice, a week, Majendie
came to Three Elms Farm. Sometimes he came for the week-end, more often
for a single night, arriving at six in the evening, and leaving very
early the next day. In winter he took the train to Hesson, tramped seven
miles across country, and reached the farm by the Fawlness road. In
summer the yacht brought him from "Hannay & Majendie's" dock to Fawlness
creek. At Three Elms Farm he found Maggie waiting for him.

This had been going on, once, sometimes twice a week, for nearly three
years, ever since he had rented the farm and brought Maggie from Scale to
live there.

The change had made the details of his life difficult. It called for all
the qualities in which Majendie was most deficient. It necessitated
endless vigilance, endless harassing precautions, an unnatural secrecy.
He had to make Anne believe that he had taken to yachting for his health,
that he was kept out by wind and weather, that the obligations and
complexities of business, multiplying, tied him, and claimed his time.
Maggie had to be hidden away, in a place where no one came, lodged with
people whose discretion he could trust. Pearson, the captain of his
yacht, a close-mouthed, close-fisted Yorkshireman, had a wife as reticent
as himself. Pearson and his wife and their son Steve knew that their
living depended on their secrecy. And cupidity apart, the three were
devoted to their master and his mistress. Pearson and his son Steve were
acquainted with the ways of certain gentlemen of Scale, who sailed their
yachts from port to port, up and down the Yorkshire coast. Pearson was a
man who observed life dispassionately. He asked no questions and answered
none.

It was six o'clock in the evening, early in October, just three years
after Edith's death. Majendie had left the yacht lying in the creek with
Pearson, Steve, and the boatswain on board, and was hurrying along the
field path to Three Elms Farm. A thin rain fell, blurring the distances.
The house stood humbly, under its three elms. A light was burning in one
window. Maggie stood at the garden gate in the rain, listening for the
click of the field gate which was his signal. When it sounded she came
down the path to meet him. She put her hands upon his shoulders, drew
down his face and kissed him. He took her arm and led her, half clinging
to him, into the house and into the lighted room.

A fire burned brightly on the hearth. His chair was set for him beside
it, and Maggie's chair opposite. The small round table in the middle
of the room was laid for supper. Maggie had decorated walls and
chimney-piece and table with chrysanthemums from the garden, and autumn
leaves and ivy from the hedgerows. The room had a glad light and welcome
for him.

As he came into the lamplight Maggie gave one quick anxious look at him.
She had always two thoughts in her little mind between their meetings: Is
he ill? Is he well?

He was, to the outward seeing eye, superlatively well. Three years of
life lived in the open air, life lived according to the will of nature,
had given him back his outward and visible health. At thirty-nine,
Majendie had once more the strength, the firm, upright slenderness, and
the brilliance of his youth. His face was keen and brown, fined and
freshened by wind and weather.

Maggie, waiting humbly on his mood, saw that it was propitious.

"What cold hands," said she. "And no overcoat? You bad boy." She felt his
clothes all over to feel if they were damp. "Tired?"

"Just a little, Maggie."

She drew up his chair to the fire, and knelt down to unlace his boots.

"No, Maggie, I can't let you take my boots off."

"Yes, you can, and you will. Does _she_ ever take your boots off?"

"Never."

"You don't allow her?"

"No. I don't allow her."

"You allow _me_" said Maggie triumphantly. She was persuaded that (since
his wife was denied the joy of waiting on him) hers was the truly
desirable position. Majendie had never had the heart to enlighten her.

She pressed his feet with her soft hands, to feel if his stockings were
damp, too.

"There's a little hole," she cried. "I shall have to mend that to-night."

She put cushions at his back, and sat down on the floor beside him, and
laid her head on his knee.

"There's a sole for supper," said she, in a dreamy voice, "and a roast
chicken. And an apple tart. I made it." Maggie had always been absurdly
proud of the things that she could do.

"Clever Maggie."

"I made it because I thought you'd like it."

"Kind Maggie."

"You didn't get any of those things yesterday, or the day before, did
you?"

She was always afraid of giving him what he had had at home. That was one
of the difficulties, she felt, of a double household.

"I forget," he said, a little wearily, "what I had yesterday."

Maggie noticed the weariness and said no more.

He laid his hand on her head and stroked her hair. He could always keep
Maggie quiet by stroking her hair. She shifted herself instantly into
a position easier for his hand. She sat still, only turning to the
caressing hand, now her forehead, now the nape of her neck, now her
delicate ear.

Maggie knew all his moods and ministered to them. She knew to-night that,
if she held her tongue, the peace she had prepared for him would sink
into him and heal him. He was not very tired. She could tell. She could
measure his weariness to a degree by the movements of his hand. When he
was tired she would seize the caressing hand and make it stop. In a few
minutes supper would be ready, and when he had had supper, she knew, it
would be time to talk.

Majendie was grateful for her silence. He was grateful to her for many
things, for her beauty, for her sweetness, for her humility, for her love
which had given so much and asked so little. Maggie had still the modest
charm that gave to her and to her affection the illusion of a perfect
innocence. It had been heightened rather than diminished by their
intimacy.

Somehow she had managed so that, as long as he was with her, shame was
impossible for himself or her. As long as he was with her he was wrapped
in her illusion, the illusion of innocence, of happiness, of all the
unspoken sanctities of home. He knew that whether he was or was not with
her, as long as he loved her no other man would come between him and her;
no other man would cross his threshold and stand upon his hearth. The
house he came to was holy to her. There were times, so deep was the
illusion, when he could have believed that Maggie, sitting there at his
feet, was the pure spouse, the helpmate, and Anne, in the house in Prior
Street, the unwedded, unacknowledged mistress, the distant, the secret,
the forbidden. He had never disguised from Maggie the temporary and
partial nature of the tie that bound them. But the illusion was too
strong for both of them. It was strong upon him now.

The woman, Mrs. Pearson, came in with supper, moving round the room in
silence, devoted and discreet.

Majendie was hungry. Maggie was unable to conceal her frank joy in seeing
him eat and drink. She ate little and talked a great deal, drawn by his
questions.

"What have you been doing, Maggie?"

Maggie gave an account of her innocent days, of her labours in house and
farm and garden. She loved all three, she loved her flowers and her
chickens and her rabbits, and the little young pigs. She loved all things
that had life. She was proud of her house. Her hands were always busy in
it. She had stitched all the linen for it. She had made all the
tablecloths, sofa covers and curtains, and given to them embroidered
borders. She liked to move about among all these beautiful things and
feel that they were hers. But she loved those most which Majendie had
used, or noticed, or admired. After supper she took up her old position
by his chair.

"How long can you stay?" said she.

"I must go to-morrow."

"Oh, why?"

"I've told you why, dear. It's my little girl's birthday to-morrow."

She remembered.

"Her birthday. How old will she be to-morrow?"

"Seven."

"Seven. What does she do all day long?"

"Oh, she amuses herself. We have a garden."

"How she would love this garden, and the flowers, and the swing, and the
chickens, and all the animals, wouldn't she?"

"Yes. Yes."

Somehow he didn't like Maggie to talk about his child, but he hadn't the
heart to stop her.

"Is she as pretty as she was?"

"Prettier."

"And she's not a bit like you."

"Not a bit, not a little bit."

"I'm glad," said Maggie.

"Why on earth are you glad?"

"Because--I couldn't bear _her_ child to be like you."

"You mustn't say those things, Maggie, I don't like it."

"I won't say them. You don't mind my thinking them, do you? I can't help
thinking."

She thought for a long time; then she got up, and came to him, and put
her arm round his neck, and bowed her head and whispered.

"Don't whisper. I hate it. Speak out. Say what you've got to say."

"I can't say it."

She said it very low.

He bent forward, freeing himself from her mouth and clinging arm.

"No, Maggie. Never. I told you that in the beginning. You promised me you
wouldn't think of it. It's bad enough as it is."

"What's bad enough?"

"Everything, my child. I'm bad enough, if you like; but I'm not as bad as
all that, I can assure you."

"You don't think _me_ bad?"

"You know I don't. You know what I think of you. But you must learn to
see what's possible and what isn't."

"I do see. Tell me one thing. Is it because you love _her_?"

"We can't go into that, Maggie. Can't you understand that it may be
because I love _you_?"

"I don't know. But I don't mind so long as I know it isn't only because
you love _her_."

"You're not to talk about her, Maggie."

"I know. I won't. I don't want to talk about her, I'm sure. I try not to
think about her more than I can help."

"But you must think of her."

"Oh--must I?"

"At any rate, you must think of me."

"I do think of you. I think of you from morning till night. I don't think
of anything else. I don't want anything else. I'm contented as long as
I've got you. It wasn't that."

"What was it, Maggie?"

"Nothing. Only--it's so awfully lonely in between, when you're not here.
That was why I asked you."

"Poor child, poor Maggie. Is it very bad to bear?"

"Not when I know you're coming."

"See here--if it gets too bad to bear, we must end it."

"End it?"

"Yes, Maggie. _You_ must end it; you must give me up, when you're
tired--"

"Oh no--no," she cried.

"Give me up," he repeated, "and go back to town."

"To Scale?"

"Well, yes; if it's so lonely here."

"And give you up?"

"Yes, Maggie, you must; if you go back to Scale."

"I shall never go back. Who could I go to? There's nobody who'd 'ave me.
I've got nobody."

"Nobody?"

"Nobody but you, Wallie. Nobody but you. Have you never thought of that?
Why, where should _I_ be if I was to give you up?"

"I see, Maggie. _I_ see. _I_ see."

Up till then he had seen nothing. But Maggie, unwise, had put her hand
through the fine web of illusion. She had seen, and made him see, the
tragedy of the truth behind it, the real nature of the tie that bound
them. It was an inconsistent tie, permanent in its impermanence, with all
its incompleteness terribly complete. He could not give her up; he had
not thought of giving her up; but neither had he thought of keeping her.

It was all wrong. It was wrong to keep her. It would be wrong to give her
up. He was all she had. Whatever happened he could not give her up.

And so he said, "_I_ see. _I_ see."

"See here," said she (she had adopted some of his phrases), "when I said
there was nobody, I meant nobody I'd have anything to do with. If I went
back to Scale, there are plenty of low girls in the town who'd make
friends with me, if I'd let 'em. But I won't be seen with them. You
wouldn't have me seen with them, would you?"

"No, Maggie, not for all the world."

"Well, then, 'ow can you go on talking about my giving you up?"

No. He could not give her up. There was no tie between them but their
sin, yet he could not break it. Degraded as it was, it saved him from
deeper degradation.

He loved Anne with his whole soul, with his heart and with his body, and
he had given his body to Maggie, with as much heart as went with it. In
the world's sight he loved Maggie and was bound to Anne. In his own sight
he loved Anne and was bound to Maggie.

It had come to that.

He did not care to look back upon the steps by which it had come. He only
knew that, seven years ago, he had been sound and whole, a man with one
aim and one passion and one life. Now he and his life were divided, cut
clean in two by a line not to be passed or touched upon by either
sundered half. All of him that Anne had rejected he had given to Maggie.

As far as he could judge he had acted, not grossly, not recklessly, but
with a kind of passionate deliberation. He knew he would have to pay for
it. He had not stopped to haggle with his conscience or to ask: how much?
But he was prepared to pay.

Up to this moment his conscience had not dunned him. But now he foresaw a
season when the bills would be falling due.

Maggie had torn the veil of illusion, and he looked for the first time
upon his sin.

Even his conscience admitted that he had not meant it to come to that. He
had had no ancient private tendency to sin. He wanted nothing but to live
at home, happy with the wife he loved, and with his child, his children.
And poor Maggie, she too would have asked no more than to be a good wife
to the man she loved, and to be the mother of his children.

This life with Maggie, hidden away in Three Elms Farm, in the wilds of
Holderness, it could not be called dissipation, but it was division.
Where once he had been whole he was now divided. The sane, strong
affection that should have knit body and soul together was itself broken
in two.

And it was she, the helpmate, she who should have kept him whole, who had
caused him to be thus sundered from himself and her.

They were all wrong, all frustrated, all incomplete. Anne, in her sublime
infidelity to earth; Maggie, turned from her own sweet use that she might
give him what Anne could not give; and he, who between them had severed
his body from his soul.

Thus he brooded.

And Maggie, with her face hidden against his knee, brooded too, piercing
the illusion.

He tried to win her from her sad thoughts by talking again of the house
and garden. But Maggie was tired of the house and garden now.

"And do the Pearsons look after you well still?" he asked.

"Yes. Very well."

"And Steve--is he as good to you as ever?"

Maggie brightened and became more communicative.

"Yes, very good. He was all day mending my bicycle, Sunday, and he takes
me out in the boat sometimes; and he's made such a dear little house for
the old Angora rabbit."

"Do you like going out in the boat?"

"Yes, very much."

"Do you like going out with him?"

"No," said Maggie, making a little face, half of disgust and half of
derision. "No. His hands are all dirty, and he smells of fish."

Majendie laughed. "There are drawbacks, I must own, to Steve."

He looked at his watch, an action Maggie hated. It always suggested
finality, departure.

"Ten o'clock, Maggie. I must be up at six to-morrow. We sail at seven."

"At seven," echoed Maggie in despair.

They were up at six. Maggie went with him to the creek, to see him sail.
In the garden she picked a chrysanthemum and stuck it in his buttonhole,
forgetting that he couldn't wear her token. There were so many things
he couldn't do.

A little rain still fell through a clogging mist. They walked side by
side, treading the drenched grass, for the track was too narrow for them
both. Maggie's feet dragged, prolonging the moments.

A white pointed sail showed through the mist, where the little yacht lay
in the river off the mouth of the creek.

Steve was in the boat close against the creek's bank, waiting to row
Majendie to the yacht. He touched his cap to Majendie as they appeared on
the bank, but he did not look at Maggie when her gentle voice called
good-morning.

Steve's face was close-mouthed and hard set.

She put her hands on Majendie's shoulders and kissed him. Her cheek
against his face was pure and cold, wet with the rain. Steve did not look
at them. He never looked at them when they were together.

Majendie dropped into the boat. Steve pushed off from the bank. Maggie
stood there watching them go. She stood till the boat reached the creek's
mouth, and Majendie turned, and raised his cap to her; stood till the
white sail moved slowly up the river and disappeared, rounding the spit
of land.

Majendie, as he paced the deck and talked to his men of wind and weather,
turned casually, on his heel, to look at her where she stood alone in the
level immensity of the land. The world looked empty all around her.

And he was touched with a sudden poignant realisation of her life; its
sadness, its incompleteness, its isolation.

That was what he had brought her to.




CHAPTER XXIX


The rain cleared off, the mist lifted, and at nine o'clock it was a fine
day for Peggy's birthday. Even Scale, where it stretched its flat avenues
into the country, showed golden in the warm and brilliant air.

The household in Prior Street had been up early, making preparations for
the day. Peggy had waked before it was light, to feel her presents which
lay beside her on her bed; and, by the time Majendie's sail had passed
Fawlness Point, she was up and dressed, waiting for him.

Anne had to break it to her gently that perhaps he would not be home in
time for eight-o'clock breakfast. Then the child's mouth trembled, and
Anne comforted her, half-smiling and half-afraid.

"Ah, Peggy, Peggy," she said, as she rocked her against her breast, "What
shall I do with you? Your little heart is too big for your little body."

Anne's terror had not left her in three years. It was always with her
now. The child was bound to suffer. She was a little mass of throbbing
nerves, of trembling emotions.

Yet Anne herself was happier. The three years had passed smoothly over
her. Her motherhood had laid its fine, soft, finishing touch upon her.
Her face, her body, had rounded and ripened, year after slow year, to an
abiding beauty, born of her tenderness. At thirty-five Anne Majendie had
reached the perfect moment of her physical maturity.

Her mind was no longer harassed by anxiety about her husband. He seemed
to have settled down. He had ceased to be uncertain in his temper, by
turns irritable and depressed. He had parted with the heaviness which had
once roused her aversion, and had recovered his personal distinction, the
slender refinement of his youth. She rejoiced in his well-being. She
attributed it, partly to his open-air habits, partly to the spiritual
growth begun in him at the time of his sister's death.

She desired no change in their relations, no further understanding, no
closer intimacy.

To Anne's mind, her husband's attitude to her was perfect. The passion
that had been her fear had left him. He waited on her hand and foot, with
humble, heart-rending devotion. He let her see that he adored her with
discretion, at a distance, as a divinely, incomprehensibly high and holy
thing.

Her household life had simplified itself. Her days passed in noiseless,
equable procession. Many hours had been given back to her empty after
Edith's death. She had filled them with interests outside her home, with
visiting the poor in the district round All Souls, with evening classes
for shop-girls, with "Rescue" work. Not an hour of her day was idle. At
the end of the three years Mrs. Majendie was known in Scale by her broad
charities and by her saintly life.

She had fallen away a little from her friends in Thurston Square. In
three years Fanny Eliott and her circle had grown somewhat unreal to her.
She had been aware of their inefficiency before. There had been a time
when she felt that Mrs. Eliott's eminence had become a little perilous.
She herself had placed her on it, and held her there by a somewhat
fatiguing effort of the will to believe. She had been partly (though she
did not know it) the dupe of Mrs. Eliott's delight in her, of all the
sweet and dangerous ministrations of their mutual vanities. Mrs. Eliott
had been uplifted by Anne's preposterously grave approval. Anne had been
ravished by her own distinction as the audience of Fanny Eliott's loftier
and profounder moods. There could be no criticism of these heights and
depths. To have depreciated Fanny Eliott's rarity by a shade would have
been to call in question her own.

But all this had ceased long ago, when she married Walter Majendie, and
his sister became her dearest friend. Fanny Eliott had always looked on
Edith Majendie as her rival; retreating a little ostentatiously before
her formidable advance. There should have been no rivalry, for there had
been no possible ground of comparison. Neither could Edith Majendie be
said to have advanced. The charm of Edith, or rather, her pathetic claim,
was that she never could have advanced at all. To Anne's mind, from the
first, there had been no choice between Edith, lying motionless on her
sofa by the window, and Fanny at large in the drawing-rooms of her
acquaintances, scattering her profuse enthusiasms, revolving in her
intellectual round, the prisoner of her own perfections. To come into
Edith's room had been to come into thrilling contact with reality; while
Fanny Eliott was for ever putting you off with some ingenious refinement
on it. Edith's personality had triumphed over death and time. Fanny
Eliott, poor thing, still suffered by the contrast.

Of all Anne's friends, the Gardners alone stood the test of time. She had
never had a doubt of them. They had come later into her life, after the
perishing of her great illusion. The shock had humbled her senses and
disposed her to reverence for the things of intellect. Dr. Gardner's
position, as President of the Scale Literary and Philosophic Society, was
as a high rock to which she clung. Mrs. Gardner was dear to her for many
reasons.

The dearness of Mrs. Gardner was significant. It showed that, thanks to
Peggy, Anne's humanisation was almost complete.

To-day, which was Peggy's birthday, Anne's heart was light and happy.
She had planned, that, if the day were fine, the festival was to be
celebrated by a picnic to Westleydale.

And the day was fine. Majendie had promised to be home in time to start
by the nine-fifty train. Meanwhile they waited. Peggy had helped Mary the
cook to pack the luncheon basket, and now she felt time heavy on her
little hands.

Anne suggested that they should go upstairs and help Nanna. Nanna was in
Majendie's room, turning out his drawers. On his bed there was a pile of
suits of the year before last, put aside to be given to Anne's poor
people. When Peggy was tired of fetching and carrying, she watched her
mother turning over the clothes and sorting them into heaps. Anne's
methods were rapid and efficient.

"Oh, mummy!" cried Peggy, "don't! You touch daddy's things as if you
didn't like them."

"Peggy, darling, what do you mean?"

"You're so quick." She laid her face against one of Majendie's coats and
stroked it. "Must daddy's things go away?"

"Yes, darling. Why don't you want them to go?"

"Because I love them. I love all his little coats and hats and shoes and
things."

"Oh, Peggy, Peggy, you're a little sentimentalist. Go and see what
Nanna's got there."

Nanna had given a cry of joyous discovery. "Look, ma'am," said she, "what
I've found in master's portmanteau."

Nanna came forward, shaking out a child's frock. A frock of pure white
silk, embroidered round the neck and wrists with a deep border of
daisies, pink and white and gold.

"Nanna!"

"Oh, mummy, what is it?"

Peggy touched a daisy with her soft forefinger and shrank back shyly. She
knew it was her birthday, but she did not know whether the frock had
anything to do with that, or no.

"I wonder," said Anne, "what little girl daddy brought that for."

"Did daddy bring it?"

"Yes, daddy brought it. Do you think he meant it for her birthday,
Nanna?"

"Well, m'm, he may have meant it for her birthday last year. I found it
stuffed into 'is portmanteau wot 'e took with him in the yacht a year
ago. It's bin there--poked away in the cupboard, ever since. I suppose he
bought it, meaning to give it to Miss Peggy, and put it away and forgot
all about it. See, m'm"--Nanna measured the frock against Peggy's small
figure--"it'd 'a' bin too large for her, last birthday. It'll just fit
her now, m'm."

"Oh, Peggy!" said Anne. "She must put it on. Quick, Nanna. You shall wear
it, my pet, and surprise daddy."

"What fun!" said Peggy.

"_Is_n't it fun?" Anne was as gay and as happy as Peggy. She was smiling
her pretty smile.

Peggy was solemnly arrayed in the little frock. The borders of daisies
showed like a necklace and bracelets against her white skin.

"Well, m'm," said Nanna, "if master did forget, he knew what he was
about, at the time, anyhow. It's the very frock for her."

"Yes. See, Peggy--it's daisies, marguerites. That's why daddy chose
it--for your little name, darling, do you see?"

"My name," said Peggy softly, moved by the wonder and beauty of her
frock.

"There he is, Peggy! Run down and show yourself."

"Oh, muvver," shrieked Peggy, "it will be a surprise for daddy, won't
it?"

She ran down. They followed, and leaned over the bannisters to listen to
the surprise. They heard Peggy's laugh as she came to the last flight of
stairs and showed herself to her father. They heard her shriek "Daddy!
daddy!" Then there was calm.

Then Peggy's voice dropped from its high joy and broke. "Oh, daddy, are
you angry with me?"

Anne came downstairs. Majendie had the child in his arms and was kissing
her.

"Are you angry with me, daddy?" she repeated.

"No, my sweetheart, no." He looked up at Anne. He was very pale, and a
sweat was on his forehead. "Who put that frock on her?"

"I did," said Anne.

"I think you'd better take it off again," he said quietly.

Anne raised her eyebrows as a sign to him to look at Peggy's miserable
mouth. "Oh, let her wear it," she said. "It's her birthday."

Majendie wiped his forehead and turned aside into the study.

"Muvver," said Peggy, as they went hand in hand upstairs again; "do you
think daddy _really meant_ it as a surprise for _me_?"

"I think he must have done, darling."

"Aren't you sorry we spoiled his surprise, mummy?"

"I don't think he minds, Peggy."

"_I_ think he does. Why did he look angry, and say I was to take it off?"

"Perhaps, because it's rather too nice a frock for every day."

"My birthday isn't every day," said Peggy.

So Peggy wore the frock that Maggie had made for her and given to
Majendie last year. He had hidden it in his portmanteau, meaning to give
it to Mrs. Ransome at Christmas. And he had thrown the portmanteau into
the darkest corner of the cupboard, and gone away and forgotten all about
it.

And now the sight of Maggie's handiwork had given him a shock. For his
sin was heavy upon him. Every day he went in fear of discovery. Anne
would ask him where he had got that frock, and he would have to lie to
her. And it would be no use; for, sooner or later, she would know that he
had lied; and she would track Maggie down by the frock.

He hated to see his innocent child dressed in the garment which was a
token and memorial of his sin. He wished he had thrown the damned thing
into the Humber.

But Anne had no suspicion. Her face was smooth and tranquil as she came
downstairs. She was calling Peggy her "little treasure," and her eyes
were smiling as she looked at the frail, small, white and gold creature,
stepping daintily and shyly in her delicate dress.

Peggy was buttoned into a little white coat to keep her warm; and they
set out, Majendie carrying the luncheon basket, and Peggy an enormous
doll.

Peggy enjoyed the journey. When she was not talking to Majendie she was
singing a little song to keep the doll quiet, so that the time passed
very quickly both for her and him. There were other people in the
carriage, and Anne was afraid they would be annoyed at Peggy's singing.
But they seemed to like it as much as she and Majendie. Nobody was ever
annoyed with Peggy.

In Westleydale the beech trees were in golden leaf. It was green
underfoot and on the folding hills. Overhead it was limitless blue above
the uplands; and above the woods, among the golden tree-tops, clear films
and lacing veins and brilliant spots of blue.

Majendie felt Peggy's hand tighten on his hand. Her little body was
trembling with delight.

They found the beech tree under which he and Anne had once sat. He looked
at her. And she, remembering, half turned her face from him; and, as she
stooped and felt for a soft dry place for the child to sit on, she
smiled, half unconsciously, a shy and tender smile.

Then he saw, beside her half-turned face, the face of another woman,
smiling, shyly and tenderly, another smile; and his heart smote him with
the sorrow of his sin.

They sat down, all three, under the beech tree; and Peggy took, first
Majendie's hand, then Anne's hand, and held them together in her lap.

"Mummy," said she, "aren't you glad that daddy came? It wouldn't be half
so nice without him, would it?"

"No," said Anne, "it wouldn't."

"Mummy, you don't say that as if you meant it."

"Oh, Peggy, of course I meant it."

"Yes, but you didn't make it sound so."

"Peggy," said Majendie, "you're a terribly observant little person."

"She's a little person who sometimes observes all wrong."

"No, mummy, I don't. You never talk to daddy like you talk to me."

"You're a little girl, dear, and daddy's a big grown-up man."

"That's not what I mean, though. You've got a grown-up voice for me, too.
I don't mean your grown-up voice. I mean, mummy, you talk to daddy as
if--as if you hadn't known him a very long time. And you talk to me as if
you'd known me--oh, ever so long. _Have_ you known me longer than you've
known daddy?"

Majendie gazed with feigned abstraction at the shoulder of the hill
visible through the branches of the trees.

"Bless you, sweetheart, I knew daddy long before you were ever thought
of."

"When was I thought of, mummy?"

"I don't know, darling."

"Do you know, daddy?"

"Yes, Peggy. _I_ know. You were thought of here, in this wood, under this
tree, on mummy's birthday, between eight and nine years ago."

"Who thought of me?"

"Ah, that's telling."

"Who thought of me, mummy?"

"Daddy and I, dear."

"And you forgot, and daddy remembered."

"Yes. I've got a rather better memory than your mother, dear."

"You forgot my old birthday, daddy."

"I haven't forgotten your mother's old birthday, though."

Peggy was thinking. Her forehead was all wrinkled with the intensity of
her thought.

"Mummy--am I only seven?"

"Only seven, Peggy."

"Then," said Peggy, "you _did_ think of me before I was born. How did you
know me before I was born?"

Anne shook her head.

"Daddy, how did you know me before I was born?"

"Peggy, you're a little tease."

"You brought it on yourself, my dear. Peggy, if you'll leave off teasing
daddy, I'll tell you a story."

"Oh!--"

"Once upon a time" (Anne's voice was very low) "mummy had a dream. She
dreamed she was in this wood, walking along that little path--just
there--not thinking of Peggy. And when she came to this tree she saw an
angel, with big white wings. He was lying under this very tree, on this
very bit of grass, just there, where daddy's sitting. And one of his
wings was stretched out on the grass, and it was hollow like a cradle.
It was all lined with little feathers, like the inside of a swan's wing,
as soft as soft. And the other wing was stretched over it like the top of
a cradle. And inside, all among the soft little feathers, there was a
little baby girl lying, just like Peggy."

"Oh, mummy, was it me?"

"Sh--sh--sh! Whoever it was, the angel saw that mummy loved it, and
wanted it very much--"

"The little baby girl?"

"Yes. And so he took the baby and gave it to mummy, to be her own little
girl. That's how Peggy came to mummy."

"And did he give it to daddy, too, to be his little girl?"

"Yes," said Majendie, "I was wondering where I came in."

"Yes. He gave it to daddy to be his little girl, too."

"I'm glad he gave me to daddy. The angel brought me to you in the night,
like daddy brought me my big dolly. You did bring my big dolly, and put
her on my bed, didn't you, daddy? Last night?"

Majendie was silent.

"Daddy wasn't at home last night, Peggy."

"Oh, daddy, where were you?"

Majendie felt his forehead getting damp again.

"Daddy was away on business."

"Oh, mummy, don't you wish he'd never go away?"

"I think it's time for lunch," said Majendie.

They ate their lunch; and when it was ended, Majendie went to the cottage
to find water, for Peggy was thirsty. He returned, carrying water in a
pitcher, and followed by a red-cheeked, rosy little girl who brought milk
in a cup for Peggy.

Anne remembered the cup. It was the same cup that she had drunk from
after her husband. And the child was the same child whom he had found
sitting in the grass, whom he had shown to her and taken from her arms,
whose little body, held close to hers, had unsealed in her the first
springs of her maternal passion. It all came back to her.

The little girl beamed on Peggy with a face like a small red sun, and
Peggy conceived a sudden yearning for her companionship. It seemed that,
at the cottage, there were rabbits, and a new baby, and a litter of
puppies three days old. And all these wonders the little girl offered
to show to Peggy, if Peggy would go with her.

Peggy begged, and went through the wood, hand in hand with the little
beaming girl. Majendie and Anne watched them out of sight.

"Look at the two pairs of legs," said Majendie.

Anne sighed. Her Peggy showed very white and frail beside the red,
lusty-legged daughter of the woods.

"I'm not at all happy about her," said she.

"Why not?"

"She gets so terribly tired."

"All children do, don't they?"

Anne shook her head. "Not as she does. It isn't a child's healthy
tiredness. It doesn't come like that. It came on quite suddenly the other
day, after she'd been excited; and her little lips turned grey."

"Get Gardner to look at her."

"I'm going to. He says she ought to be more in the open air. I wish we
could get a cottage somewhere in the country, with a nice garden."

Majendie said nothing. He was thinking of Three Elms Farm, and the garden
and the orchard, and of the pure wind that blew over them straight from
the sea. He remembered how Maggie had said that the child would love it.

"You could afford it, Walter, couldn't you, now?"

"Of course I can afford it."

He thought how easily it could be done, if he gave up his yacht and the
farm. His business was doing better every year. But the double household
was a drain on his fresh resources. He could not very well afford to take
another house, and keep the farm too. He had thought of that before. He
had been thinking of it last night when he spoke to Maggie about giving
him up. Poor Maggie! Well, he would have to manage somehow. If the worst
came to the worst they could sell the house in Prior Street. And he would
sell the yacht.

"I think I shall sell the yacht," he said.

"Oh no, you mustn't do that. You've been so well since you've had it."

"No, it isn't necessary. I shall be better if I take more exercise."

Peggy came back and the subject dropped.

Peggy was very unhappy before the picnic ended. She was tired, so tired
that she cried piteously, and Majendie had to take her up in his arms and
carry her all the way to the station. Anne carried the doll.

In the train Peggy fell asleep in her father's arms. She slept with her
face pressed close against him, and one hand clinging to his breast. Her
head rested on his arm, and her hair curled over his rough coat-sleeve.

"Look--" he whispered.

Anne looked. "The little lamb--" she said.

Then she was silent, discerning in the man's face, bent over the sleeping
child, the divine look of love and tenderness. She was silent, held by an
old enchantment and an older vision; brooding on things dear and secret
and long-forgotten.




CHAPTER XXX


Though Thurston Square saw little of Mrs. Majendie, the glory of Mrs.
Eliott's Thursdays remained undiminished. The same little procession
filed through her drawing-room as before. Mrs. Pooley, Miss Proctor, the
Gardners, and Canon Wharton. Mrs. Eliott was more than ever haggard and
pursuing; she had more than ever the air of clinging, desperate and
exhausted, on her precipitous intellectual heights.

But Mrs. Pooley never flagged, possibly because her ideas were vaguer
and more miscellaneous, and therefore less exhausting. It was she who
now urged Mrs. Eliott on. This year Mrs. Pooley was going in for
thought-power, and for mind-control, and had drawn Mrs. Eliott in with
her. They still kept it up for hours together, and still they dreaded
the disastrous invasions of Miss Proctor.

Miss Proctor rode roughshod over the thought-power, and trampled
contemptuously on the mind-control. Mrs. Gardner's attitude was
mysterious and unsatisfactory. She seemed to stand serenely on the shore
of the deep sea where Mrs. Eliott and Mrs. Pooley were for ever plunging
and sinking, and coming up again, bobbing and bubbling, to the surface.
Her manner implied that she would die rather than go in with them; it
also suggested that she knew rather more about the thought-power and the
mind-control than they did; but that she did not wish to talk so much
about it.

Mr. Eliott, dexterous as ever, and fortified by the exact sciences, took
refuge from the occult under his covering of profound stupidity. He had a
secret understanding with Dr. Gardner on the subject. His spirit no
longer searched for Dr. Gardner's across the welter of his wife's
drawing-room, knowing that it would find it at the club.

Now, in October, about four o'clock on the Thursday after Peggy's
birthday, Canon Wharton and Miss Proctor met at Mrs. Eliott's. The Canon
had watched his opportunity and drawn his hostess apart.

"May I speak with you a moment," he said, "before your other guests
arrive?"

Mrs. Eliott led him to a secluded sofa. "If you'll sit here," said she,
"we can leave Johnson to entertain Miss Proctor."

"I am perplexed and distressed," said the Canon, "about our dear Mrs.
Majendie."

Mrs. Eliott's eyes darkened with anxiety. She clasped her hands. "Oh why?
What is it? Do you mean about the dear little girl?"

"I know nothing about the little girl. But I hear very unpleasant things
about her husband."

"What things?"

The Canon's face was reticent and grim. He wished Mrs. Eliott to
understand that he was no unscrupulous purveyor of gossip; that if he
spoke, it was under constraint and severe necessity.

"I do not," said the Canon, "usually give heed to disagreeable reports.
But I am afraid that, where there is such a dense cloud of smoke, there
must be some fire."

"I think," said Mrs. Eliott, "perhaps they didn't get on very well
together once. But they seem to have made it up after the sister's death.
_She_ has been happier these last three years. She has been a different
woman."

"The same woman, my dear lady, the same woman. Only a better saint. For
the last three years, they say, he has been living with another woman."

"Oh--it's impossible. Impossible. He is away a great deal--but--"

"He is away a great deal too often. Running up to Scarby every week in
that yacht of his. In with the Ransomes and all that disreputable set."

"Is Lady Cayley in Scale?"

"Lady Cayley is at Scarby."

"Do you mean to say--"

"I mean," said the Canon, rising, "to say nothing."

Mrs. Eliott detained him with her eyes of anguish.

"Canon Wharton--do you think she knows?"

"I cannot tell you."

The Canon never told. He was far too clever.

Mrs. Eliott wandered to Miss Proctor.

"Do you know," said Miss Proctor, searching Mrs. Eliott's face with an
inquisitive gaze, "how our friends, the Majendies, are getting on?"

"Oh, as usual. I see very little of her now. Anne is quite taken up with
her little girl and with her good works."

"Oh! That," said Miss Proctor, "was a most unsuitable marriage."

It was five o'clock. The Canon and Miss Proctor had drunk their two
cups of tea and departed. Mrs. Pooley had arrived soon after four;
she lingered, to talk a little more about the thought-power and the
mind-control. Mrs. Pooley was convinced that she could make things
happen. That they were, in fact, happening. But Mrs. Eliott was no longer
interested.

Mrs. Pooley, too, departed, feeling that dear Fanny's Thursday had been a
disappointment. She had been quite unable to sustain the conversation at
its usual height.

Mrs. Pooley indubitably gone, Mrs. Eliott wandered down to Johnson in his
study. There, in perfect confidence, she revealed to him the Canon's
revelations.

Johnson betrayed no surprise. That story had been going the round of his
club for the last two years.

"What will Anne do?" said Mrs. Eliott, "when she finds out?"

"I don't suppose she'll do anything."

"Will she get a separation, do you think?"

"How can I tell you?"

"I wonder if she knows."

"She's not likely to tell you, if she does."

"She's bound to know, sooner or later. I wonder if one ought to prepare
her?"

"Prepare her for what?"

"The shock of it. I'm afraid of her hearing in some horrid way. It would
be so awful, if she didn't know."

"It can't be pleasant, any way, my dear."

"Do advise me, Johnson. Ought I or ought I not to tell her?"

Mr. Eliott's face told how his nature shrank from the agony of decision.
But he was touched by her distress.

"Certainly not. Much better let well alone."

"If I were only sure that it _was_ well I was letting alone."

"Can't be sure of anything. Give it the benefit of the doubt."

"Yes--but if you were I?"

"If I were you I should say nothing."

"That only means that I should say nothing if I were you. But I'm not."

"Be thankful, my dear, at any rate, for that."

He took up a book, _The Search for Stellar Parallaxes_, a book that he
understood and that his wife could not understand. That book was the sole
refuge open to him when pressed for an opinion. He knew that, when she
saw him reading it, she would realise that he was her intellectual
master.

The front doorbell announced the arrival of another caller.

She went away, wondering, as he meant she should, whether he were so very
undecided, after all. Certainly his indecisions closed a subject more
effectually than other people's verdicts.

She found Anne in the empty, half-dark drawing-room waiting for her. She
had chosen the darkest corner, and the darkest hour.

"Fanny," she said, and her voice trembled, "are you alone? Can I speak to
you a moment?"

"Yes, dear, yes. Just let me leave word with Mason that I'm not at home.
But no one will come now."

In the interval she heard Anne struggling with the sob that had choked
her voice. She felt that the decision had been made for her. The terrible
task had been taken out of her hands. Anne knew.

She sat down beside her friend and put her hand on her shoulder. In that
moment poor Fanny's intellectual vanities dropped from her, like an
inappropriate garment, and she became pure woman. She forgot Anne's
recent disaffection and her coldness, she forgot the years that had
separated them, and remembered only the time when Anne was the girlfriend
who had loved her, and had come to her in all her griefs, and had made
her house her home.

"What is it, dear?" she murmured.

Anne felt for her hand and pressed it. She tried to speak, but no words
would come.

"Of course," thought Mrs. Eliott, "she cannot tell me. But she knows I
know."

"My dear," she said, "can I or Johnson help you?"

Anne shook her head; but she pressed her friend's hand tighter.

Wondering what she could do or say to help her, Mrs. Eliott resolved to
take Anne's knowledge for granted, and act upon it.

"If there's trouble, dear, will you come to us? We want you to look on
our house as a refuge, any hour of the day or night."

Anne stared at her friend. There was something ominous and dismaying in
her solemn tenderness, and it roused Anne to wonder, even in her grief.

"You cannot help me, dear," she said. "No one can. Yet I had to come to
you and tell you--"

"Tell me everything," said Mrs. Eliott, "if you can."

Anne tried to steady her voice to tell her, and failed. Then Fanny had an
inspiration. She felt that she must divert Anne's thoughts from the grief
that made her dumb, and get her to talk naturally of other things.

"How's Peggy?" said she. She knew it would be good to remind her that,
whatever happened, she had still the child.

But at that question, Anne released Mrs. Eliott's hand, and laid her head
back upon the cushion and cried.

"Dear," whispered Mrs. Eliott, with her inspiration full upon her, "you
will always have _her_."

Then Anne sat up in her corner, and put away her tears, and controlled
herself to speak.

"Fanny," she said, "Dr. Gardner has seen her. He says I shall not have
her very long. Perhaps--a few years--if we take the very greatest
care--"

"Oh, my dear! What is it?"

"It's her heart. I thought it was her spine, because of Edie. But it
isn't. She has valvular disease. Oh, Fanny, I didn't think a little child
could have it."

"Nor I," said Mrs. Eliott, shocked into a great calm. "But surely--if you
take care--"

"No. He gives no hope. He only says a few years, if we leave Scale and
take her into the country. She must never be overtired, never excited. We
must never vex her. He says one violent crying fit might kill her. And
she cries so easily. She cries sometimes till she's sick."

Mrs. Eliott's face had grown white; she trembled, and was dumb before the
anguish of Anne's face.

But it was Anne who rose, and put her arms about the childless woman, and
kissed and comforted her.

It was as if she had said: Thank God you never had one.




CHAPTER XXXI


The rumour which was going the round of the clubs in due time reached
Lady Cayley through the Ransomes. It roused in her many violent and
conflicting emotions.

She sat trembling in the Ransomes' drawing-room. Mrs. Ransome had just
asked whether there was anything in it; because if there was, she, Mrs.
Ransome, washed her hands of her. She intimated that it would take a good
deal of washing to get Sarah off her hands.

Sarah had unveiled the face of horror, the face of outraged virtue, and
the wrath and writhing of propriety wounded in the uncertain, quivering,
vital spot. During the unveiling Dick Ransome had come in. He wanted
to know if Topsy had been bullying poor Toodles. Whereupon Topsy wept
feebly, and poor Toodles had a moment of monstrous calm.

She wanted to get it quite clear, to make no mistake. They might as well
give her the details. Majendie had left his wife, had he? Well, she
wasn't surprised at that. The wonder was that, having married her, he had
stuck to her so long. He had left his wife, and was living at Scarby, was
he, with her? Well, she only wanted to get all the details clear.

At this Sarah fell into a fit of laughter very terrifying to see. Since
her own sister wouldn't take her word for it, she supposed she'd have to
prove that it was not so.

And, under the horror of her virtue and respectability, there heaved a
dull, dumb fury, born of her memory that it once was, her belief that
it might have been again, and her knowledge that it was not so. She
trembled, shaken by the troubling of the fire that ran underground,
the immense, unseen, unliberated, primeval fire. She was no longer a
creature of sophistries, hypocrisies, and wiles. She was the large woman
of the simple earth, welded by the dark, unspiritual flame.

Dick Ransome turned on his sister-in-law a pale, puffy face in which two
little dark eyes twinkled with a shrewd, gross humour. Nothing could
possibly have pleased Dick Ransome more than an exhibition of indignant
virtue, as achieved by Sarah. He knew a great deal more about Sarah than
Mrs. Ransome knew, or than Sarah knew herself. To Dick Ransome's mind,
thus illumined by knowledge, that spectacle swept the whole range of
human comedy. He sat taking in all the entertainment it presented; and,
when it was all over, he remarked quietly that Toodles needn't bother
about her proofs. He had got them too. He knew that it was not so. He
could tell her that much, but he wasn't going to give Majendie away. No,
she couldn't get any more out of him than that.

Sarah smiled. She did not need to get anything more out of him. She had
her proof; or, if it didn't exactly amount to proof, she had her clue.
She had found it long ago; and she had followed it up, if not to the end,
at any rate, quite far enough. She reflected that Majendie, like the dear
fool he always was, had given it to her himself, five years ago.

Men's sins take care of themselves. It is their innocent good deeds that
start the hounds of destiny. When Majendie sent Maggie Forrest's
handiwork to Mrs. Ransome, with a kind note recommending the little
embroideress, by that innocent good deed he woke the sleeping dogs of
destiny. Mrs. Ransome's sister had tracked poor Maggie down by the long
trail of her beautiful embroidery. She had been baffled when the
embroidered clue broke off. Now, after three years, she leaped (and
it was not a very difficult leap for Lady Cayley) to the firm conclusion.
Maggie Forrest and her art had disappeared for three years; so, at
perilous intervals, had Majendie; therefore they had disappeared
together.

Sarah did not like the look in Dick Ransome's eye. She removed herself
from it to the seclusion of her bedroom. There she bathed her heated face
with toilette vinegar, steadied her nerves with a cigarette, lay down
on a couch and rested, and, pure from passion, revised the situation
calmly. She was an eminently practical, sensible woman, who knew the
facts of life, and knew, also, how to turn them to her own advantage.

Seen by the larger, calmer spirit that was Sarah now, the situation was
not as unpleasant as it had at first appeared. To be sure, the rumour in
which she had figured was fatal to the matrimonial vision, and to the
beautiful illusion of propriety in which she had once lived. But Sarah
had renounced the vision; she had abandoned the pursuit of the fugitive
propriety. She had long ago seen through the illusion. She might be a
deceiver, but she had no power to hoodwink her own indestructible
lucidity. Looking back on her life, after the joyous romances of her
youth, the years had passed like so many funeral processions, each
bearing some pleasant scandal to its burial. Then there had come the
dreary funeral feast, and then the days of mournful rehabilitation. Oh,
that rehabilitation! There had been three years of it. Three years of
exhausting struggle for a position in society, three years of crawling,
and pushing, and scrambling, and climbing. There had been a dubious
triumph. Then six years of respectable futility, ambiguous courtship,
and palpable frustration. After all that, there was something flattering
in the thought that, at forty-five, she should yet find her name still
coupled with Walter Majendie's in a passionate adventure.

It might easily have been, but for Walter's imbecile, suicidal devotion
to his wife. He had got nothing out of his marriage. Worse than nothing.
He was the laughing-stock of all his friends who were in the secret; who
saw him grovelling at the heels of a disagreeable woman who had made him
conspicuous by her aversion. Of course, it might easily have been.

Sarah's imagination (for she had an imagination) drew out all the
sweetness that there was for it in that idea. Then it occurred to her
sound, prosaic commonsense that a reputation is still a reputation, all
the more precious if somewhat precariously acquired; that, though you may
as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, hanging is very poor fun when for
years you have seen nothing of sheep or lamb either; that, in short, she
must take steps to save her reputation.

The shortest way to save it was the straight way. She would go straight
to Mrs. Majendie with her proofs. Her duty to herself justified the
somewhat unusual step. And, more than her duty, Sarah loved a scene. She
loved to play with other people's emotions and to exhibit her own. She
wanted to see how Mrs. Majendie would take it; how the white-faced,
high-handed lady would look when she was told that her husband had
consoled himself for her high-handedness. She had always been possessed
by an ungovernable curiosity with regard to Majendie's wife.

She did not know Majendie's wife, but she knew Majendie. She knew all
about the separation and its cause. That was where she had come in. She
divined that Mrs. Majendie had never forgiven her husband for his old
intimacy with her. It was Mrs. Majendie's jealousy that had driven him
out of the house, into the arms of pretty Maggie. Where, she wondered,
would Mrs. Majendie's jealousy of pretty Maggie drive him?

Though Sarah knew Majendie, that was more than she would undertake to
say. But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered; and the
more she wondered, the more she desired to know.

She wondered whether Mrs. Majendie had heard the report. From all she
could gather, it was hardly likely. Neither Mrs. Majendie nor her friends
mixed in those circles where it went the round. The scandal of the clubs
and of the Park would never reach her in the high seclusion of the house
in Prior Street.

Into that house Lady Cayley could not hope to penetrate except by guile.
Once admitted, straightforwardness would be her method. She must not
attempt to give the faintest social colour to her visit. She must take
for granted Mrs. Majendie's view of her impossibility. To be sure Mrs.
Majendie's prejudices were moral even more than social. But moral
prejudice could be overcome by cleverness working towards a formidable
moral effect.

She would call after six o'clock, an hour incompatible with any social
intention. An hour when she would probably find Mrs. Majendie alone.

She rested all afternoon. At five o'clock she fortified herself with
strong tea and brandy. Then she made an elaborate and thoughtful
toilette.

At forty-five Sarah's face was very large and horribly white. She
restored, discreetly, delicately, the vanished rose. The beautiful,
flower-like edges of her mouth were blurred. With a thin thread of rouge
she retraced the once perfect outline. Wrinkles had drawn in the corners
of the indomitable eyes, and ill-health had dulled their blue. That
saddest of all changes she repaired by hand-massage, pomade, and
belladonna. The somewhat unrefined exuberance of her figure she laced in
an inimitable corset. Next she arrayed herself in a suit of dark blue
cloth, simple and severely reticent; in a white silk blouse, simpler
still, sewn with innocent daisies, Maggie's handiwork; in a hat, gay in
form, austere in colour; and in gloves of immaculate whiteness.

Nobody could have possessed a more irreproachable appearance than Lady
Cayley when she set out for Prior Street.

At the door she gave neither name nor card. She announced herself as a
lady who desired to see Mrs. Majendie for a moment on important business.

Kate wondered a little, and admitted her. Ladies did call sometimes on
important business, ladies who approached Mrs. Majendie on missions of
charity; and these did not always give their names.

Anne was upstairs in the nursery, superintending the packing of Peggy's
little trunk. She was taking her away to-morrow to the seaside, by Dr.
Gardner's orders. She supposed that the nameless lady would be some
earnest, beneficent person connected with a case for her Rescue
Committee, who might have excellent reasons for not announcing herself
by name.

And, at first, coming into the low lit drawing-room, she did not
recognise her visitor. She advanced innocently, in her perfect manner,
with a charming smile and an appropriate apology.

The smile died with a sudden rigour of repulsion. She paused before
seating herself, as an intimation that the occasion was not one that
could be trusted to explain itself. Lady Cayley rose to it.

"Forgive me for calling at this unconventional hour Mrs. Majendie."

Mrs. Majendie's silence implied that she could not forgive her for
calling at any hour. Lady Cayley smiled inimitably.

"I wanted to find you at home."

"You did not give me your name Lady Cayley."

Their eyes crossed like swords before the duel.

"I didn't, Mrs. Majendie, _because_ I wanted to find you at home. I can't
help being unconventional--"

Mrs. Majendie raised her eyebrows.

"It's my nature."

Mrs. Majendie dropped her eyelids, as much as to say that the nature of
Lady Cayley did not interest her.

"--And I've come on a most unconventional errand."

"Do you mean an unpleasant one?"

"I'm afraid I do, rather. And it's just as unpleasant for me as it is for
you. Have you any idea, Mrs. Majendie, why I've been obliged to come?
It'll make it easier for me if you have."

"I assure you I have none. I cannot conceive why you have come, nor how I
can make anything easier for you."

"I think I mean it would have made it easier for you."

"For me?"

"Well--it would have spared you some painful explanations." Sarah felt
herself sincere. She really desired to spare Mrs. Majendie. The part
which she had rehearsed with such ease in her own bedroom was impossible
in Mrs. Majendie's drawing-room. She was charmed by the spirit of the
place, constrained by its suggestion of fair observances, high decencies,
and social suavities. She could not sit there and tell Mrs. Majendie that
her husband had been unfaithful to her. You do not say these things. And
so subdued was Sarah that she found a certain relief in the reflection
that, by clearing herself, she would clear Majendie.

"I don't in the least know what you want to say to me," said Mrs.
Majendie. "But I would rather take everything for granted than have any
explanations."

"If I thought you would take my innocence for granted--"

"Your innocence? I should be a bad judge of it, Lady Cayley."

"Quite so." Lady Cayley smiled again, and again inimitably. (It was
extraordinary, the things _she_ took for granted.) "That's why I've come
to explain."

"One moment. Perhaps I am mistaken. But, if you are referring to--to what
happened in the past, there need be no explanation. I have put all that
out of my mind now. I have heard that you, too, have left it far behind
you; and I am willing to believe it. There is nothing more to be said."

There was such a sweetness and dignity in Mrs. Majendie's voice and
manner that Lady Cayley was further moved to compete in dignity and
sweetness. She suppressed the smile that ignored so much and took so much
for granted.

"Unfortunately a great deal more _has_ been said. Your husband is an
intimate friend of my sister, Mrs. Ransome, as of course you know."

Mrs. Majendie's face denied all knowledge of the intimacy.

"I might have met him at her house a hundred times, but, I assure you,
Mrs. Majendie, that, since his marriage, I have not met him more than
twice, anywhere. The first time was at the Hannays'. You were there.
You saw all that passed between us."

"Well?"

"The second time was at the Hannays', too. Mrs. Hannay was with us all