"No. But you kept faith. That good has come of it. Don't say those things. It isn't the best of you that says them. And what are you doing here?"
"I often walk this way," he said. "Then I go up Oakley Street. The evenings are getting light now. Do you mind my doing that?"
Then something swelled in her throat forbidding speech.
"I—I must go on," she said at length.
"May I walk with you a little?"
"To the corner. I shall take a 'bus there."
There was but a little way to go, and they stood together, waiting for the 'bus, looking at the darkling river, down which poured the wild west wind.
"Sea-gulls," she said to him, pointing. "Sea-gulls and spring, Edward."
And she mounted quickly up the winding iron stairs, not looking back. But as the 'bus swung round a corner a little distance up the road she could not resist turning round. He was still there at the corner where she had left him, a minute speck on the pavement that glowed in the rose-coloured sunset, so minute, so significant. It seemed to her that all of her essential self, her heart, her power of love, was standing there with him; that he gazed but at an empty wraith of herself who sat on the pounding, swaying 'bus, while she stood by his side as the spring evening darkened and the sea-gulls hovered and wheeled.
Elizabeth, as requested by her stepmother, did not leave her concert that night until the very last note of all had died away. But it is doubtful whether that request had very much to do with it: the probability is that she was really incapable of doing so. Just as the hypnotized subject has his will taken possession of by his controller, so that all his wishes, his intentions, his desires are for the time in abeyance and the independence of his own powers completely paralysed, so that night Elizabeth was taken captive by the power of sound. Many times before she had felt that she was penetrating into a new kingdom, a fresh province of thought and feeling, but to-night a more surprising adventure held her bound. She penetrated into no fresh kingdoms, she saw no new peaks upraise themselves or valleys carve themselves at her feet. She was completely in familiar places; only a fresh light, one that for her had never lit sea or land, shone on them, which transfigured them not by fantastic effects and the sensationalism of musical limelights, but with the dawning as of the everlasting day.
She was unconsciously prepared for this, as she had never been before. She, or a hundred others whose souls were steeped with the love of melody, might have heard just what she heard that night, and have had their tastes gratified, their emotions roused, without being gripped in this manner so supreme, so enlightening. New sensations might have flitted through her, new beauties been perceived, new glories been manifested, without this ethical perception being awakened. But with her to-night, all the quiet patience of these past months, of the succession of dark and difficult days, to solve the meaning of which she had applied herself with efforts and strivings after the light, so unremitting, so unnoticed, had rendered her capable of receiving the true illumination. Cell by cell, she had stored honey in the dark; now with the coming of spring, the workers of her soul swarmed out with rush of joyous wings into the light. She was charged to the brim with supersaturated waters; it wanted but the one atom the more to be added that should solidify all that had been put into her, all that by the grace of God she had gathered. Probably the meeting with Edward gave her the last crystal of the salt, took out from her love the grain of bitterness that still lurked there. That made her ready to receive the ultimate gift that music has to bring, namely, the identification of it with all other noble effort, the perception of its truth, which is one with the truth of everything that is beautiful, and is lit by the light that illuminates the whole world, and turns it into the garden of God. Never again in those on whom one gleam of the light has shone can it be wholly quenched. For the future they know from their own selves, from the recollection of the one thing in the world which it is impossible to forget, that whatever storms of adversity, thunder-clouds of trouble lower, there is no such thing any more for them as a darkness quite untransfused, no place so slippery that they can doubt whether their feet are set on a rock and their goings ordered.
The hall was but half-filled, and Elizabeth, seated at the back of the amphitheatre, saw she would be uncumbered with the distraction of near neighbours. The concert opened with the Third Symphony of Brahms, and immediately she was carried into it. Even as one who looks at some superb statue has his mind modelled, as it were, into the image of what he sees, so that his body can, faintly following, unconsciously drop into a pose somewhat like it, so, listening to this, she was made one with it, fused into it, so that, while it sang its message to her, she knew of no existence separate from it. Her mind, her nature became part of it; she, like a sheet of calm waters, burned with the glories of the melodious sky. She became godlike, as she inhaled that ampler ether of glorified intellect through music, which perhaps alone of the arts can make wholly visible to the spiritual eye the wonder and the beauty of pure and abstract thought. No longer did its melodies suggest images to her; her brain strove not after similes to express, as it were, in mere black and white the effect of the rainbow song; it revealed itself, mind.
Then the hall swam into sight again; there was applause. It sounded quite meaningless; you did not clap your hands when daylight came.
There were but three items in the programme, and for the second, the grand piano in front of the stage was opened. The player was familiar enough to her, he with his magical fingers and exuberant youth, but just now he seemed a detached and impersonal figure, as nameless as the viol-holding cherubim in a canvas of Bellini, who make music for the reverie of the saints and angels who stand on either side of the Mother of God. But it was no song of heavenly soul and sexless quires that he was to sing; he was the interpreter of the joy of life and of love and of the myriad emotions that spring like flowers from the fruitful earth. Brahms had revealed what is possible to the wise mind of man, here in the great concerto Tschaikowsky poured out the inspired tale of its emotions; the splendour of their shining, the tenderness of their reveries. Instantly in the presence of this more concrete, more frail and human music the images leaped and danced again in Elizabeth's mind. The noonday shone on the innumerable smile of a blue sea; high above the sultry plain were fixed the spear-heads of Chitral; the dusk fell on the Indian garden with its tangle of Peshawar roses. More personal yet grew the appeal. She walked with her father there; she showed him, as never yet had it been given her to show him, how love had touched her, even as he had said, with its enchantment, how the loyalty of her renunciation of its material fulfilment had not withered its stem, but caused it to blossom with a rarer and more fragrant flowering. She told him how the bitter waters had been sweetened, how the sting had been sheathed, how through darkness love had felt its way up to the day. With tender glance at the pain of it that was passed they dwelt on it; with smiles for her miscomprehension of its growth, for her ignorance of where it led they traced its springing tendrils, on which there were the traces of healed scars where it had bled. But its bleeding was over, and strong grew its shoots over unsightly places. The whole world danced together, not men and women only, not only boys and girls, but sun and sea and sky, and the lions in the desert and the tigers burning bright in the jungle. The peaks and ledges of untrodden snow danced in a whirling magical maze of rhythmic movement. The angels of God joined in it; the devils of hell would have done so had there been such things as devils, or such a place as hell. Again the music grew more personal. All she had ever known of joy, and that was much, was marshalled round her, and through the dancers, this crowd of earthly elements, came he whom every nerve and agent of perception in her body loved. Her human power of emotion leaped to the supremest arc of that rainbow curve, and with him stood there poised. By some divine right he was hers, by a right no less divine he was separated from her. Yet that separation was somehow one with the union.
Then followed a pause of some ten minutes. But no reaction came to her, for it was no mimic show that was now over, no feigned dramatic presentment that she had watched or listened to (she hardly knew which), but something quite real, more real than the rows of dark red stalls, than the shaded scarlet lights, like huge inverted anemones, which hung above the orchestra, more real even than the actual music itself, which was but the husk or at most the temporary embodiment of the truth that underlay and illumined it. She had been shown the vision of mind at its highest, of emotion in its supremest degree. There was something still lacking, which should bind them together, exhibit them, as they truly were, parts of an infinite whole. She knew what was coming, and with the tenseness of an expectation that must be fulfilled, with a suspense that was not the less for the certainty of its coming resolution, she waited.
Half an hour later she came out into the mellow spring night, that teemed with the promise of the south-west wind. Just as the Brahms symphony had summed up for her the glory of mind, and the Tschaikowsky concerto had sung of the depth and sunlit splendours of human emotion, so the Good Friday music had bridged and connected the two, and shown her whence came the light that shone on them. But whereas the concerto had led her through generalities to its culmination of the appeal to her own individual personality, and its needs and longings, in this she was led across the dim threshold of herself, so to speak, into the halls that were full of light, into the house of many mansions. Vivid and ecstatic at first had been the sense of her own intense experience; she was bathed in sun and sea, and then was opened to her a communion of soul with those she loved that transcended all she had ever felt before. And yet, very soon, that faded into nothingness, it passed off the shield of her perception, as a breath is dispersed in frosty air; soon she was no longer the centre of her consciousness, but only an atom of infinite insignificance in it. It was no revelation of herself that was thus manifested, yet inasmuch as she was part of the vital essence of the love that crowned the human understanding, the human passions, inasmuch as she could give thanks for its great glory, that glory was part of her, her love part of it. One and indivisible it stirred in her, even as it moved the sun and all the stars....
It was with no sense of interruptions or of a broken mood that she came out into the jostling of the populous streets, for truth is not a mood, and they with their crowded pavements and whirring roadways were part of it also, and knew her solemn and joyful secret. Without doubt she would not always be able to feel with the same vividness of perception that the eternal peace encompassed her, but, having once realized it, she knew that it would be there always, a sure refuge, that it was the answer to all the riddles and difficulties that life assuredly would continue to ply her with. Again and again, she knew, they would puzzle and perplex her, again and again she would be mist-blinded by them. But she had seen an authentic glimpse, as from Pisgah, of the kingdom to which led the royal roads. They might wind over stony hill-sides, be packed with sand, or clogged with resistant mire, but they led to the promised land, to the kingdom that was within, the gates of which stood open night and day, for all who willed to enter.
It was late, already after eleven, when she dismounted from the 'bus at the corner of Oakley Street, and she half expected to find that her stepmother had gone to bed. It must be allowed that Elizabeth would not have been very sorry if this proved to be the case, for she felt that she could give but a vague attention to the voluble trivialities that would otherwise await her. But not till she had softly closed the street door behind her, did she bring into focus the fact that Mrs. Fanshawe had been dining alone with Sir Henry, or that the voluble trivialities might be supplanted by news not trivial at all.
The idea when first it had occurred to her had repelled her, with the repulsion that a deep love must naturally feel for any self-conscious and shallow affection. There was a sort of heart-breaking jar in the thought that Mrs. Fanshawe, with her pen still dipping for ink to write the Memoir, should be thinking about re-marriage. But now the repulsion had left her; she found herself less jealous for her father's memory, more ready to let the immortality of love look after itself, more capable of sinking her personal feeling. It was not that the idea had lost its sharp edges from her greater familiarity with it; she saw it as distinctly as ever; only the sharp edges now failed to fret her. Besides, how could the shallowness of her stepmother's affections, the insincerity that in itself was of so unreal a nature, affect anything that was real?
Mrs. Fanshawe had not gone to bed, but was sitting in a very pretty pensive attitude (hastily assumed when she heard Elizabeth's step on the stairs) over a brisk little fire, in front of which was standing in the fender a small covered dish. She had put on a white bedroom wrapper with little black bows of ribbon; her long, abundant hair streamed over her shoulders; there was never so bewitching a little widow. She held out her arm with a welcoming gesture as Elizabeth entered.
"Darling, how late you are!" she said. "But if you have been enjoying yourself that is all I ask of you. I could not bear to think that my little Elizabeth should come in and find a silent house, with no one to welcome her home."
She got up and gave Elizabeth a little butterfly kiss.
"See, dear, I lit the fire for you with my own hands, so that your supper might keep warm. There is a napkin which I spread for a tablecloth, and a little rack of toast, and some lemonade with plenty of sugar in it, and just the wing of a chicken, which I saved for you, and ate a leg myself instead. And a little bunch of grapes to follow and some gingerbread cake. And while you eat, dear, you shall tell me all about your concert. Fancy if some day you played at a concert at the Queen's Hall. How proud I should be! And should I not burst my gloves in applauding?"
To "tell all about the concert" was a somewhat extensive suggestion, but there was no need for Elizabeth to reply, as Mrs. Fanshawe went on without pause.
"I could not attend to anything, dear," she said, "until I had quite settled in my mind what would be the nicest little supper I could think of for you. I had quite a little squabble with Sir Henry about eating a leg myself, though I assured him that all epicures prefer the leg. And he helped me to light the fire; I assure you, he was as zealous on your behalf as I was. And he told me to be sure and give you his love, if I did not think you would consider that a liberty."
"Thank you, mamma," said the girl. "And it was good of you to take so much thought for me. I almost expected to find you had gone to bed; I am so late. I suppose Sir Henry has been gone some time?"
"A quarter of an hour ago perhaps. I had not more than time to take off my dress and brush my hair. But I could not go without a peep at you when you returned. And I promised myself a little cosy talk over the fire when you had finished your supper."
Elizabeth left the table and sat down in a big arm-chair near Mrs. Fanshawe. The latter took Elizabeth's hand as it lay on the arm, and held it in both of hers.
"I have been thinking of you so much, dear," she said, "all the time dear Sir Henry was here. You have been in my mind every minute. Such a wise, kind man he is, and so full of sympathy and tenderness for me. And he shows it with such wonderful tact, not by dwelling on my great loss, but by encouraging me and cheering me up. I declare I laughed outright as I have not done for months at some of his delicious, droll stories. He is the sort of man to whom one can open one's heart completely. All kinds of things we talked about—about old, dear, happy days, and about India, and oh, Elizabeth, how I long to see dear India again! He quoted something which I thought so true, about hearing the East a-calling, and said it ought to be 'when you hear the East a-bawling.' Was not that quaint of him? The East a-bawling! Yes. That is just what it does. Dear, happy days in India, with all its pleasant parties and society and balls! I miss the gaiety of it all in our sad, secluded life here in this little tiny house. Why, the drawing-room is not much bigger than my bathroom was at Peshawar. I think that I am naturally of a gay and joyous nature, dear. I was not made for sadness."
Apparently Mrs. Fanshawe was taking a rest from thinking about Elizabeth all the evening. She seemed to realize this and hurried back to her subject.
"And if it is sad for me, how much more sad it must be for you, darling, for you used to enjoy yourself so in India with your horses and dogs. I am sure you used to laugh fifty times a day out there, for once that I hear you laugh now. But it is not only of your loss of gaiety that I have been thinking so much. There are things more important than that, especially while you are young. The loss of your father's care and thought for you makes such a dreadful blank, and I, weighed down with all the petty cares and economies which we have to practise, cannot look after you as constantly as I used. My days are so full with the care of the house, and with writing your dear father's Memoir, which all these weeks has been to me nothing less than a sacred duty. And even if I was quite free, it would be impossible for me, a little weak, silly, helpless woman, to supervise your growing up with the wisdom and large grasp of a man. I have been doing my best, I think I can say that, but I know how feeble and wanting my best has been."
There had been no opportunity, so continuous had been the prattle of this monologue, for Elizabeth to speak at all. For this she was grateful, for she would have found it difficult enough to frame any sincere reply to this endless tissue of insincerities that were only half-conscious of themselves. Mrs. Fanshawe had been so long accustomed to look upon the utterly inaccurate picture of herself, of which she was the artist, so long unaccustomed to look on the actual origin of it, that she really had got to confuse the two, or, rather, to obliterate the one in favour of the imaginary portrait. But to-night Elizabeth did not feel the smallest resentment at this imposture; she regarded her mother as she would have regarded some charade-acting child, and was willing to encourage its belief in the reality of its acting. For Mrs. Fanshawe, as for a child, this dressing-up was real. And Elizabeth could almost see her father listening with a smile that for all its tenderness did not lack humour. He would have been amused, surely, at it all. For all his own simplicity and sincerity, he had never wanted to improve and edify others. At the most he only encouraged them, like the beloved plants in his garden, to grow and blossom. Besides, he had loved his wife (for the life of her Elizabeth had never been able to guess why), and that simple fact—a fact which no one should try to explain away—took precedence of everything else.
There was a pause for a few gentle applications of a very small lace handkerchief, and it became incumbent on Elizabeth to say something. She knew, of course, perfectly well what her stepmother was leading up to, and since she appeared to find it difficult to come to the point, Elizabeth decided to help her.
"And so you and Sir Henry——" she began.
That was quite enough. Mrs. Fanshawe rose swiftly from her chair, bent over her, and kissed her.
"My darling, yes," she said. "And I am so glad you have guessed. I was so afraid it would come as a shock to you, that I only promised Henry that I would tell you to-night, if I could. I said he must trust to my instinct, as to whether I should not only begin to prepare you for it. I told him that he could not know, as I knew, how deeply you loved your father, and that I must judge whether to tell you at once or not. I said I would not wound my dear little Elizabeth's heart for anything. But now you have guessed, how nice that is! And, oh, what a true and wise friend and second father you will find in him, Elizabeth! Do you wonder now, my darling, that I said how much I had been thinking of you all this evening!"
Suddenly it was borne in upon the girl that this play-acting was really going too far. It seemed impermissible to allow even a child to take its inventions quite so seriously. It was as if the child insisted on having real solid food and real champagne provided for its pasteboard banquet. Yet, yet—was there any gain to any one in saying, "Remember, you are only acting?" She knew well there was not. Detection and exposure of even such abominable insincerities as these never yet did any good to the—the criminal. It only made her resent the cruel perspicacity of their exposer, or possibly exercise a little more ingenuity in their inventions. She would be wiser to enter into the spirit of these imaginative flights. But it was like seeing somebody waving his arms, saying, "See, I am a bird; how high I fly!" and pretending to look upwards and be dazzled and made giddy by this reckless feat of aviation.
"It was sweet of you to think of me as well," was as much as could humanly be expected of the best intentions.
That did not nearly satisfy Mrs. Fanshawe.
"My dear, my central thought was of you," she declared. "Almost the first thing I said to Henry when—when he would not let me go, for he has such an affectionate nature, and oh, my darling, how he loves me!—almost the first thing I said was, 'What about Elizabeth? You must not think that I have said yes to you until you assure me that you will be a father to Elizabeth.' And he said—it was so like him—'We'll offer her a grandfather, anyhow, Birdie.' That was what he said he must call me—his bright-eyed little Birdie—so foolish of him."
The clock on the chimney-piece chimed twelve, and Mrs. Fanshawe rose to an apex of surprising fatuity.
"Gracious me, what an hour!" she said. "I believe I have not sat up till twelve this last two months. We must go to bed, or Henry will find a dull-eyed little Birdie when he comes back in the morning, and will never love her any more. He will think he has made a great mistake, and want to marry Elizabeth instead. Dear Henry! I shall tease him about that but only just for a minute. I would not vex his big, loving heart for anything."
She looked at Elizabeth with an expression that she was familiar with in her imaginary portraits of herself, an expression which she called wistful.
"Of course I shall not dream of marrying until a whole year has passed," she said, "nor, I am sure, would my Henry wish me to. He knows what a tender heart I have for my beloved memories. But I think, dear, that I shall put the Memoir on one side, or perhaps give it to your Aunt Julia to deal with as she likes. I dare say she would be glad of something to do in her poor, empty life. I will take it down with me on Friday. Perhaps it has done its work."
She did not explain exactly what this last sentence meant, and as there was no explanation whatever of it, except that it seemed to finish up with the Memoir in a vague and beautiful manner, it would have been idle to attempt any.
"So sleep well, my precious!" she said, kissing Elizabeth. "I think you will do that, won't you, now that all our little anxieties are removed? He is really immensely well-off. What a responsibility that will be for me! I hope I shall prove not quite unworthy of it."
Mrs. Hancock had never seen much of her sister-in-law, and perhaps she would not have been so kindly disposed towards the task of making herself better acquainted with her had she known that she had been pitied for her poor, empty life. For "poor, empty life" was indeed not a phrase that fitly described the passage of a pilgrim of Mr. Martin's gospel through this pleasant world. But Mrs. Hancock had no idea that so slanderous a thing had been said of her, and she looked forward to her sister-in-law's visit with considerable pleasure, which was enhanced by the prospect of having Elizabeth in the house again. She intended Elizabeth to be in the best of spirits, to play the piano to her very loudly and brightly (Mrs. Hancock knew she was just a little deaf and had seen four eminent specialists on the subject, who implored her, so she said, not to be in the least disquieted, but to eat rather less meat, as her very slight dullness of hearing was certainly gouty in origin), to drive with her on Saturday afternoon, and to sit constantly by her and admire her masterly methods with the "King of Mexico," which had rendered thrilling so many after-dinner hours in Egypt. Then Mrs. Fanshawe should drive with her on Saturday morning, and they would have a great deal of beautiful talk about the Colonel. In her mind's eye she saw her sister-in-law crying a little, and herself with touches and caresses administering the gospel of Mr. Martin, as through a fine hose, in the most copious and refreshing abundance. When she was quite refreshed and had been made to see that death is the gate into life, no doubt she would read her part of the Memoir in which Mrs. Hancock took a great interest, seeing that she had supplied so much material for the chapter (or chapters, it was to be hoped) on his early life. She expected to enjoy the account of the early life very much, in the sort of way that a mellow sunset may be imagined to enjoy thinking over its own beautiful sunrise. And if she found Mrs. Fanshawe very sympathetic and understanding, she thought, she almost thought that she would confide in her something that she had never yet confided in anybody, and after making clear to her what her own intentions in the matter were, ask her advice, if it appeared probable that it would turn out consonant with what she herself had practically made up her mind to do.
These last six months had been crowded with incident; Mrs. Hancock did not think any year in all her tale of forty-eight summers had held so much, except perhaps the one year when she had married and Edith had been born. For now Edith had married, Mrs. Williams had had an operation for the removal of a small tumour, her brother had died, she had been to Egypt and had brought back scores and scores of photographs, which she pasted at intervals into large half-morocco scrap-books procured at staggering expense from the stores. She had forgotten what precisely a good many of them represented, but Edith, with her wonderful memory, usually knew, and if she did not, Mrs. Hancock, in her exquisitely neat hand, wrote under them some non-committing title such as "Temple in Upper Egypt," or "Nile in January" (which it certainly was).
All this was sensational enough, and Mrs. Hancock, had she read about a year so full of incident in a novel, would have probably felt that fiction was stranger than truth, when she was asked to believe that so many things happened really "all together." But with her another thing had happened fraught with more potential significance than them all. For the death of her brother, of whom she had seen so little for so many years, had not really strongly moved her; Mrs. Williams had quite recovered and cooked just as well as ever; Edith still constantly drove and lunched with her, and agitating though the pasting in of the photographs was (she had pasted one in upside down, and not noticed it till the next day when the paste was quite dry and "stuck"), she did not ever look at them again. But one event seemed likely to make a real difference to her life, for while they were at Luxor, Mrs. Martin had been suddenly taken ill with pneumonia and had died three days later. She had proved herself a charming travelling companion, and Mrs. Hancock had been very much shocked and grieved at so sad an incident marring their holiday. But she did not break down under the bereavement; she ordered a beautiful tombstone, though not expensive (since she knew that Mr. Martin was not very well off), and left Luxor as soon as possible, bringing back with her a large photograph of the grave. The widower, being what he was, behaved with the most characteristic fortitude and faith, and she felt that she had been permitted to be a wonderful help and consolation to him since her return. Desolate though he was, he had not let his work suffer. Indeed, he added to his ordinary duties the supervision of the choir-practices which his wife had always managed, and after a suitable interval played golf as regularly as ever. And only last Sunday he had preached the most wonderful sermon that Mrs. Hancock had ever heard on the text of "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them." Thankfulness and joy was the keynote of it, and everybody understood that the wilderness was Egypt. He showed how that in the midst of death we are in life, and that joy cometh in the morning. He had lunched with Mrs. Hancock afterwards, and she had settled that it must be printed with a purple (not black) line round the cover, and with "In Memoriam, January 4, 1913," printed on the inner leaf. He did not go away till it was time for him to take the children's service at four, but before that he had asked her if, when his broken heart was healed (it appeared to be making excellent progress), she would become in name as well as in fact the partner of his joys and sorrows. She rather thought she would, though there were a great many things to be considered first, and she promised him his answer in a week's time. Mrs. Hancock had practically settled what that answer was to be, and at present she had told nobody, nor asked anybody's advice about it. She had, indeed, thought of seeing how Edith received the idea, but on the other hand she felt that she would not give her the encouragement she wanted. Edith, indeed, had been altogether rather discouraging for months past, ever since the party met at Cairo, and did not give the lively interest in and applause of her mother's plans which she would have liked. It was not that she seemed unhappy (if she had Mrs. Hancock would have applied the cheerful gospel to her), she simply appeared to be like a house shut up with blinds down and shutters closed. No face looked out from it; it was also impossible to penetrate into it. Perhaps, like a caretaker, Edward had the key, but Mrs. Hancock, as already noticed, did not like to pry into affairs that might possibly prove depressing, and she had not asked for it. Besides, it was difficult to imagine any cause of unhappiness that could be hers. Edward always came home by the train just before dinner; she expected a baby in July; and, after a tremendous struggle with herself, Mrs. Hancock had let her have her own peerless kitchenmaid as a cook.
But she felt that she would like to tell somebody who would probably agree with her what she contemplated, and she had great hope that her sister-in-law would prove sympathetic. It had been a prepossessing trait to find her buying soap in High Holborn, and she had received with touching gratitude all the stories about Mrs. Hancock which were to go into her husband's Memoir.
But there had been a great deal to think about before she made up her mind. She had a real liking, a real admiration for her vicar, about which there was, in spite of her eight and forty years, something akin to romance. He was a very wonderful and encouraging person, and certainly she had needed encouragement in the lonely month after Edith's marriage. Again, she felt sure that he would be devoted to her comfort, and though the ecstasy of youthful love might be denied them, she did not know that she was sorry for that. She was perhaps some five years older than he, but as youthful ardour was not part of her programme, that little discrepancy of years was but of small consequence. But there were other considerations; she could not possibly go to live at the vicarage, where the servants' entrance was close under the dining-room windows, and there was no garage. She could not also be expected to help in parish work beyond the knitting of thick mufflers, which went to warm deep-sea fishermen. But his golf-playing presented no difficulties at all. She could start rather earlier, drive him to the club-house, and pick him up on her way home. To be sure that would somewhat restrict her drives, if she always had to start and come back by the same road. Perhaps it would be better if Denton took him there first, and she could call for him. Then what was to happen to the present furniture in the vicarage, for she did not want any more in her own house? She did not intend that such difficulties should be obstacles of magnitude, but her mind, which so long had been completely taken up in affairs of detail, the whole general course of it being already marked out, could not resist the contemplation of them. Here again a woman who went all the way to High Holborn for soap might prove both comprehending and enlightening.
Mrs. Fanshawe, who, with Elizabeth, was met on the platform by Denton and by the car outside the station, was an immediate success. After the crude sort of harbourage in Oakley Street, with its small rooms and its "dreadful backyard," with its parlourmaid, who had a perennial cold and no notion of cleaning silver, this perfectly ordered house, with its smooth service and atmosphere of complete comfort, was as cream to a cat that had been living on the thinnest skim-milk. She admired, she appreciated with a childlike sort of pleasure; ate two buns with sugar on the top at tea, because they were so delicious ("Elizabeth, darling, you must eat one of these lovely buns!") and made herself instantly popular. All the time, in the depth of her heart, she hugged the knowledge that she would so soon be in a position of extreme affluence, and a ladyship, and pitied Mrs. Hancock for her poor, empty life. Simultaneously, Mrs. Hancock felt what a treat it must be for her sister-in-law to have a few days of comfort and luxury, instead of going all the way to High Holborn to get soap a little cheaper. Having seen her brother's will in the paper, she knew exactly how much she and Elizabeth had to live upon at five per cent. of the capital, and, doubting whether they got more than four, was warmed with a sense of her own benevolence in saving them three days of household books at the cost of a third-class ticket (she felt sure they had gone third-class) to Heathmoor. It was dreadfully sad for the poor thing to be left a widow, and it was not to be expected that she would find a second husband very easily. But her cordial admiration of all she saw was certainly prepossessing; Mrs. Hancock felt that she would probably prove a worthy recipient of her secret, and give exactly the advice she wanted. More metaphysically each of them felt drawn to the other by the striking similarity between them in the point of their lack of sincerity, and the success they both achieved in deceiving themselves.
The three dined alone that night, and soon after her stepmother having discovered that her sweetest Elizabeth looked tired, the two elder ladies were left alone.
"And now, my dear," said Mrs. Hancock (they had got to my-dearing each other before dinner was half over), "I so want to have a good talk to you. I want to know all your plans, and all about the Memoir, which I am sure will be most interesting. Shall I lay out a patience, while we talk? I can attend perfectly while I am playing one of the easier patiences. Elizabeth, too, it is such a joy to see Elizabeth again, after the sad, sad parting in the summer."
Mrs. Fanshawe put her head a little on one side wistfully.
"Elizabeth can hardly talk of the happy weeks she spent here," she said, "and I'm sure I don't wonder at her enjoyment of them. My dear, how happy it must make you to make everybody around you so happy. I don't believe you ever think of yourself."
Mrs. Hancock smiled; a long-wanted red queen had appeared.
"It does make one happy not to think of oneself," she said, "and how the time goes when you are thinking of other people. I am often astounded when Sunday comes round again, for the weeks go by in a flash. I take my dear Edith out for her drives—it is so good to her to have plenty of fresh air—and she comes to lunch with me every day almost, so that she shall not be alone in her house, with her husband away all day, and it is Sunday again, and I get what I call my weekly refresher from our dear Mr. Martin. Such a beautiful sermon he gave us last Sunday—ah, there is the ten I wanted—on the subject of his sad bereavement. His wife, you know. I took her out to Egypt with me; it was most important that she should get out of the winter fogs and damp of England, and she died at Luxor after three days' illness. How glad I was she had a friend with her—my dear, forgive me, how thoughtless I am."
"No, not thoughtless, my dear," said Mrs. Fanshawe. "Not thoughtless. And Mr. Martin. Tell me about Mr. Martin. I feel sure I should like Mr. Martin."
Mrs. Hancock bundled her patience cards together. She had not left a patience unfinished, except when the patience had finished her, for years. Perfectly as she could attend when she was playing it, she prepared now to be absolutely undistracted.
"Indeed, no one could help liking Mr. Martin," she said. "He has the noblest of characters, and with it all not a touch of priggishness. To see him play golf, or to hear him laugh, talk, you would never think he was a clergyman, but to hear him preach you would think he was a bishop at least. I know of nobody whom I admire more. Listen. Was not that the front-door bell? How tiresome if we are interrupted in our talk. Yes; I hear Lind going to open it. Now he has shut it again. Ah, it is only a note. Will you excuse me? Yes, from Edward. Just to say he and Edith will come to lunch to-morrow, as he is not going up to the City. No answer, Lind."
Now Mrs. Fanshawe had not failed to mark the expression of her sister-in-law's face when she spoke of Mr. Martin. If she had worn it herself she would have called it a "rapt expression," but it was not so admirable on the features of a woman who, to adopt Mrs. Fanshawe's point of view, was already aground, so to speak, on the shallows of advanced middle-age, where there is not sufficient youth to carry you over those emotional banks. Still, on a younger and perhaps a more spiritual face, it would have been rapt, and it occurred to her that in mind perhaps her sister-in-law was not as old as she looked or as she was. It would be very ridiculous if at that age a woman was the prey of sentimental notions—but then she had a very comfortable house, a delightful retreat from the stuffy little kennel in Oakley Street.
Mrs. Hancock waited till Lind had quite shut the drawing-room door, and then turned to her sister-in-law again.
"My dear, I want your advice," she said, "for you are a woman of the world and I am sure are wise. You see this spring, after poor Mrs. Martin's death, I saw a great deal of the vicar, and I think I was able to comfort and uphold him, so that he leans a good deal on me now, though of course we have been very great friends for years. Could you give that footstool just a little kick this way? He feels his loneliness very much; he wants some one whom he knows and trusts and, shall I say, admires?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Fanshawe. "Admires, I am sure."
"How kind of you! Well, admires, to take the place of her whom he has lost, and who was a very good, sweet sort of woman indeed."
Mrs. Hancock leaned forward.
"He has told all this to me," she said, putting her hand on Mrs. Fanshawe's arm. "Now you know what I think of him. Do advise me—what am I to say to him? Edith and Edward, you see, are both so young. It would be a wonderful thing for them to have a father to go to in those difficulties in which a man is so much more competent to advise them than a woman. Lind and Denton, too, there is a great deal that a master of a house can do to influence men-servants. What shall I say to him?"
Probably no more wholly original reason for matrimony had ever been put forward than that it would provide a man to look after the butler, but one of the stories about the Colonel's early life had shown that he had the highest opinion of his sister's originality. To-day if never before that opinion was justified. Mrs. Fanshawe did not remember the story, nor did the delirious originality strike her now. But she saw quite clearly what Mrs. Hancock, the owner of this comfortable house, wanted her to say. She got up from her chair and knelt on the footstool which she had kicked a little.
"My dear, I envy you your beautiful, unselfish nature," she said. "And let me be the first to congratulate Mr. Martin."
"You shall be," said Mrs. Hancock, kissing her.
Mrs. Hancock had made so touching a tale of the help she had been to Mr. Martin, and of Mr. Martin's devotion to her, and how the chief reason for her contemplated marriage was that he might exercise a wise and fatherly care over Edward and Edith and Denton and Lind, that Mrs. Fanshawe lay awake for quite a considerable time that night in spite of the extreme comfort of her bed, vividly exercising her imagination to see how she might paint with an even nobler brush the loves of Henry and Birdie. She flattered herself that she had far more promising material to work with, for what in point of romance was a middle-aged country vicar to compare with the Commander-in-Chief in India, or what was the elderly Mrs. Hancock in comparison with her young and graceful sister-in-law? She was slightly chagrined that Mrs. Hancock had already "bagged" as a motive for matrimony the care of a fatherless daughter, but she had rendered it ridiculous when it was thought over by the addition of a butler and a chauffeur. Besides, Edith was already married, and no longer in the touching desolation of a newly orphaned girl just growing up. However, she found she had many very beautiful things to say, and only hoped that Mrs. Hancock would prove as zealous and absorbed a listener as she herself had been. She had an opportunity of testing this when they started on their drive next morning. Mrs. Fanshawe was not quite ready when the motor came round, but after a prolonged debate it was decided to go round by the Old Mill just the same, and put off lunch for five minutes. Her unpunctuality, however, was quite forgiven her when she explained that she and Elizabeth had been "so wrapped up" in the tulips that she had no idea how late it was.
Mrs. Fanshawe began preparing for her exquisite revelation without loss of time.
"You've no idea how thrilled I was, dear, by what you told me last night," she said. "I lay awake so long thinking about it. And it is such a treat, oh such a treat to be confided in. I feel we are quite old friends already."
Mrs. Hancock beamed approval.
"Wehada nice talk," she said, "and I should not wonder if we saw Mr. Martin playing golf. In any case you will see him—oh, what a jolt! That must have been something big on the road. Do you think we might have your window a little more down, dear? I want you to profit by this lovely air. Yes, just like that. I wonder how I shall tell Mrs. Williams and Edith and them all about it. I shall feel so nervous. Perhaps I had better leave it to Mr. Martin. What do you think? Yes, if you look out of this window you will see him there. That is he hitting away with his golf-stick at that furze-bush. How vigorous, is he not? Oh, did you see his ball fly away then? He plays so beautifully! Indeed, dear, I feel such old friends with you, too, and to think that—there, he is talking to his partner. Now they are quite out of sight."
Mrs. Fanshawe could not at once decline from the high standard of sympathy and comprehension she had set last night.
"And I only just caught a glimpse of him!" she said. "I shall have to curb my impatience till I meet him at your house. But I warn you, my dear, I shall be very critical of the man who is going to take care of you. He will have to think about you much more than you ever think about yourself."
Mrs. Hancock shook her head.
"No, quite the other way round, dear," she said. "I shall have to take care of him. He wears himself out with work. I have no doubt that after his game to-day—he plays golf really entirely for the sake of the influence it gives him over the young men here, and he introduces a spirit of earnestness among the caddies—are they not called, who carry the sticks?—after his game, I dare say he will go straight to his study and finish up his sermon. There is the Great Western Railway. Look! What a long luggage-train! I wonder what it contains. Perhaps the new lawn-tennis net which I ordered from the stores yesterday. I know that when I have charge of Mr. Martin I shall not let him wear himself out so. He ought to have a curate, for instance. I wonder how much a good curate costs."
Mrs. Fanshawe had no data on which to base this calculation, and Mrs. Hancock allowed the conversation to veer a little in her direction.
"You are getting quite a colour in your cheeks, dear, already," she said, "with our good air. You must come here often and have plenty of it. I can't tell you how often I have meant to ask you here with dear Elizabeth, but I was determined to get everything straight first after my long absence so that you would be quite comfortable. And how often my heart has bled for you in your loneliness! I remember so well after my dear husband died I thought I should never enjoy anything any more. Even now sometimes I should feel dreadfully depressed if I allowed myself to. But I have always told myself what great causes I have for thankfulness. Mr. Martin——"
Mrs. Fanshawe broke in, feeling that there was a limit at which sympathy passes into drivel and comprehension into idiotic acquiescence. Besides, it was only fair that she should have some sort of an innings.
"I feel so much all that you say, dear," she said, "especially about causes for thankfulness. I am sure they are showered on me. And Bob was always so anxious and thoughtful for my happiness that I should feel that I should be failing in my duty to him if I lost any opportunity of securing it."
This sentence did not seem to come out exactly as she had meant; it sounded as if the imputation of selfishness might possibly be applied to it, which she did not at all wish to incur. She continued hastily—
"And happiness only lies, as you, dear, show so well, in the making of others happy. I wish I had more people to take care of and think about. At present there has been only Elizabeth who has needed me. I think I may say I have given myself to Elizabeth, for I am sure I have thought of little else but her and the Memoir since August last. I have brought down the Memoir, as far as I have got. You will like to see it. I might leave it with you when I go away on Monday after my happy visit."
Mrs. Hancock rapidly considered whether she wanted her new friend to stop till Tuesday. She felt she could not make up her mind on the spur of the moment.
"That will be a great treat!" she said. "Or perhaps you would read some of it aloud to me. I am sure you have written it beautifully, and I so much like being read aloud to. The chapter on his early life will bring back old times. Look, there are the towers of Windsor Castle. We can only see them on a very clear day. Mr. Martin has wonderfully long sight."
Mrs. Fanshawe wrenched the conversation back again. She was going to set up another standard for their joint admiration.
"But I want more to look after, more to take care of," she said. "And would you think it very weak of me if I said I wanted also to be a little taken care of myself? I am so inexperienced, and I am afraid Bob spoiled me and made me used to being so lovingly looked after. And there is somebody, dear, who wants, oh so much, to be allowed to look after me."
Mrs. Hancock was just about to remark that the towers of Windsor Castle were no longer visible, but this completely arrested her. She had a momentary sense that Mrs. Fanshawe had taken a mean advantage of her in allowing anything to interfere with the unique interest of her own situation. It came into her mind also that any one who had married her brother ought not to think of re-marriage for years and years, if ever. But both these impressions were overscored by curiosity. She gave a little excited scream.
"My dear, how you surprise me!" she said. "Yes, pray tell me more. Who is it?"
Mrs. Fanshawe pulled out this ace of trumps.
"Sir Henry Meyrick," she said. "Commander-in-Chief, you know, in India. Such devotion! I am sure that if I had the hardest heart in the world, instead of a very soft one, I should not be able to let such devotion go unrewarded. And Elizabeth—think how he will look after Elizabeth! He is so devoted to her, I declare I should be quite jealous if I did not know that it was just a fatherly affection."
This allusion to the daughter-motif seemed to Mrs. Hancock rank plagiarism, and spoiled in the stealing. Elizabeth was not Mrs. Fanshawe's daughter; she had no right at all to use that as a reason. She made up her mind (if that dim mirror which reflected fleeting emotions can be called a mind) that Mrs. Fanshawe should go away on Monday. Then immediately the mirror reflected another image—it would be rather interesting to speak about "my sister-in-law, Lady Meyrick." To be sure it was a very short time since Colonel Fanshawe's death ... but then it was a much shorter time since Mrs. Martin's.
Rapidly these evanescent images chased each other over the field. And before the pause grew uncordial she fixed on one of them, namely, "my sister-in-law, Lady Meyrick."
"My dear, I am quite overcome with your news," she said. "It is most interesting, and I am sure I wish you happiness with all my heart. I have often seen Sir Henry's name in the newspapers and wondered what he was like. And now to think that he is to become so near a relation!"
By an effort of great magnanimity she decided to pass over the plagiarism altogether.
"And what good fortune for Elizabeth," she said, "whose welfare was always such a source of thought and contriving to me. And what does she think of it all? Why, we are at the Old Mill already! If you could just reach that speaking-tube, dear, and call to Denton to stop, so that we may enjoy looking at it. Mr. Martin always calls it the most picturesque corner in Middlesex. How swiftly the water runs, does it not? Of course, you will not think of being married for a long time to come. Is it not a coincidence that our dear Bob should have married twice, and now you are going to do the same, and Mr. Martin, too, and me? I declare I never heard of such coincidences! You must be sure and tell Sir Henry to come down to see me. Mr. Martin and he must make friends. And who knows that I shall not flap my wings a little further yet and come out to see you in India? Where does the Commander-in-Chief live? Look, there is the miller fishing! I wonder if he has caught anything. I am afraid we must turn, or we shall be late for lunch, which would never do, as we have postponed it in order to be in time. And I hope you won't dream of going away on Monday. You must stop till Tuesday at the very least."
Mi's. Fanshawe was not perfectly satisfied, though she felt she was being envied. She determined not to be so easy of access.
"You must get Henry's leave for that," she said, "for I promised him I would be back on Monday. I don't know what he would do if I broke my promise to him. And such a business as I had to allow him to let me go away at all."
For the first time for many years Mrs. Hancock found herself in the position of one who asked instead of granted favours.
"Ah! I wonder if you could induce him to come down here on Monday to take you back the next day or the day after?" she said.
Mrs. Fanshawe greedily pursued her advantage and assumed an air of odious superiority.
"But, dear, we should be taxing the capabilities of your charming little house too much," she said, feeling certain of her ground. "I should not wonder if Henry was unable to go anywhere without his secretary, as well as a servant. He must have to keep in constant touch with the India Office. But it is delightful of you to suggest it, only we must not trespass on your good-nature."
"No difficulty at all!" cried Mrs. Hancock. "There is the pink room and the best blue bedroom and the lilac dressing-room next mine, into which Elizabeth can go. The thing is done, dear, if you will only say the word. And if Sir Henry plays golf, there will be Mr. Martin delighted to lend him some golf-sticks and go round with him, do they not call it? It will be a pleasure to him; he has always had such an admiration for soldiers, for, to be sure, as he says sometimes, he is a soldier himself, fighting battles continually. I will get up a little dinner-party for Monday night, and Edward and Elizabeth shall play afterwards, if Sir Henry likes music."
While this kittenish comedy was going on something younger and more tragical was in progress in the two adjacent houses. Edward had been sitting in his smoking-room after breakfast, with eyes that wandered over his uncomprehended newspaper, conscious of an overmastering desire to slip across to the house next door merely to see Elizabeth, to satisfy the eyes that ached for her and, as he knew well, but to render the more acute the aching of his heart. His wife, as was often her custom, had come in after she had attended to her household duties, and sat in her usual seat by the window, speaking occasionally to him, or replying in perfectly commonplace fashion, to his dropped observations. They had spoken of their plans for the day, of the arrival of Mrs. Fanshawe and Elizabeth, and now and then, focusing his eyes but not his mind, he had mentioned some newspaper topic. Such half-hours they had spent a hundred times before, but to-day each was intensely conscious of something that, always lying behind their intercourse and never spoken of between them, had suddenly enveloped and enshadowed, like the gathering of a tropical storm, the foreground of their life as well. He tried to imagine himself putting down his newspaper in a leisurely way, and forming his voice to say, lightly and casually, that he would stroll across to Mrs. Hancock's. But he felt that, as if intoxicated, his tongue would stammer and stumble on the words. Once he laid his paper down, and saw that on the instant she had started into attentive expectation, had fixed her eyes on him ready for what she knew would come from his lips, for she read, so he felt, his unspoken sentence, knowing what filled his mind. But still he sat there, unable to tell her what he ached to do, while she waited. In all the months of their marriage Elizabeth's name had been mentioned only as the name of some indifferent cousin might have been; never as one who held Edward's heart in the hollow of her hands.
For herself, even as bees build up in walls of impenetrable gluelike wax some intruder and enemy to their hive, Edith had walled away from her life all thought of her cousin. She had built her up into a separate chamber of her brain, so that her worker-bees, the conscious denizens of her mind, should have no access to her. Her love for Edward (that nipped and unexpanded bud, which had never blown), which had claimed possession of him, instead of giving him his liberty and seeking his happiness at the cost of the last drop of her heart's blood, had starved on its comfortless food, and the leanness of her desire had entered into her soul. For seven months she had been his wife, sharer in name in all that nominally was his, recipient of his unwearied kindness and affection, but never for a single moment possessing his essential self. She had no word or thought of complaint of him in his conduct or in his feelings towards her; he gave all that was his to give. She had demanded of him the fulfilment of his bargain, and to the full extent of his solvency, so to speak, he had paid it. But now she knew that he was absolutely insolvent towards her with regard to the coinage of the only true mint. She had thought that her love with its hopeless limitations could make his reef of gold hers. She had thought that they could settle down into a sham that would cheat both himself and her, that the mask of his face would either be withdrawn or would deceive her into the belief of its reality. Neither had happened; he must always wear a mask for her, and that mask would never grow so like the human face below it (so little way below, and yet withdrawn into impenetrable depths) that it would deceive her into believing in it. And now, before long, she would bear a child to him, and it seemed to her, in the enlightenment that these smooth, prosperous months of misery had brought her, that her baby would be no better than a bastard.
It must not be supposed that this misery was acute or the degree of enlightenment it brought clear and cloudless. Her perceptions were not of the kind that admit great poignancy either of wretchedness or of bliss. Once only perhaps in all her life had the engines of her being worked up to their full power, and that was when she claimed the fulfilment of Edward's promise. She had felt intensely and acutely then the impossibility of giving him up, but since that flash of deplorable intensity she had fallen back on to her normal levels, where the ground, so to speak, was solid and rather clayey, where there were neither peaks nor precipices. But it declined slowly and unintermittently into a place of featureless gloom. Yet, except to any one who was gifted with the divine intuition of love towards her, there were no signs in her normal behaviour of this inward wretchedness, and for poor Edith there was nobody thus inspired. She had always been rather reserved and silent, and even Mr. Martin, that brilliant seeker after the joys and sorrows of others, had neither missed in her the steady placidity that he knew nor had detected any other change. As for her mother, Edith's invariable punctuality, her quiet recognition of objects of interest like the towers of Windsor Castle and the trains on the Great Western Railway, were sufficient evidence of contentment, especially since Edward always got home by the dinner train and she was going to have a baby. Here were adequate causes for thankfulness, and she was sure that Edith, who had so strong a sense of duty, appreciated them.
Edith's enlightenment was of the same order, no noonday blaze, but only a diffused luminance that came veiled through those clouds, not dispersing them. But she no longer groped in darkness as she had done when she decided that she could not voluntarily give Edward his liberty. She could see more now. Not only could she see the utter unreality at which she had grasped, but that there was in existence a real light different altogether from the phantasmal will-o'-the-wisp which she had blindly followed into the quagmire. She had sought her own, thinking that it was love she followed. She would have sought her own no longer, if it had been possible for her to make choice again.
Vaguely, as she sat this morning by the window, these things passed before her mind, as the pictures of some well-known and familiar book pass before the eye of one who listlessly turns the leaves. At the end of the book, she knew, there were pictures she had not seen yet. It was as if Edward's finger as well as hers was on the page, doubting whether to turn on or not. Nearly an hour wore away thus, outwardly like many other hours, but in reality an hour of poise and expectancy. Then on the road outside the gate she saw pass, as she had so often seen, her mother's motor. Mrs. Fanshawe was with her, and next door Elizabeth was alone.
"Mother going out for her drive," she said mechanically.
She did not look round, but heard the paper flutter in Edward's fingers.
"Alone?" he asked. "Or with whom?"
"With Mrs. Fanshawe," said she. And again the silence fell.
Suddenly a desire and a doubt came to her. She did not know how they came, for the impulse that prompted them seemed to have taken no part in her thoughts. Apparently something behind that wall of gluelike wax had stirred—stirred imperatively, giving her quickness and decision. She rose.
"I shall go across and see Elizabeth," she said. "I know you have been wanting to do that all morning, Edward. But you couldn't say it. I understood."
He got up also.
"What do you mean?" he said. "What are you saying?"
"Something perfectly simple. Of course you want to see Elizabeth, and of course you find a difficulty in telling me so. Do you know that we haven't mentioned Elizabeth's name, except as a stranger might mention it, ever since our marriage, ever since the night, in fact, that—that I settled to marry you."
"No; and that was natural, wasn't it?"
Certainly something stirred behind the sealed-up partition. The bees themselves, the thoughts and workers in Edith's mind, were tearing the partition away.
"I suppose it was," she said. "But I want to see Elizabeth now. That is natural, too, because I was always fond of Elizabeth, and I don't blame her because you loved her. You see, she never loved you; she told me that herself."
He came close to her.
"Why do you speak of Elizabeth now," he said, "after all these months of silence?"
She shook her head.
"I don't know. Why does one do anything? It occurred to me, I suppose, to speak of Elizabeth because she is here, and because I was going across to see her. She never loved you, Edward."
"No. You told me that."
He spoke quietly and reassuringly, but it occurred to him that for some reason Edith was beginning to doubt that, for she looked at him, so it seemed, with a certain question and challenge in her eye. It was as if she weighed his answer, or took it, like a doubtful coin, and rang it to test its genuineness.
"I shall go now," she said, still lingering. "Or do you not wish me to go?"
She paused a moment.
"Why do you not wish me to go, Edward?" she said.
"I want you to do just as you wish, dear," he said.
For the moment a certain cloud of trouble and restlessness, quite alien to her normal reasoning, had seemed to disturb her. But it cleared, and she spoke naturally again.
"We lunch there, do we not?" she said. "I dare say I shall not come again before that. Till lunch-time, then."
She traversed the hall, hesitated as to whether she should take a hat, decided against it, and went out into the cool spring sunshine. The gate of communication between the two gardens (Mrs. Hancock had eventually decided that since Edith and Edward used it so much more than she did it was only reasonable that he should pay for half of it) had been made, and she went through it, leaving it aswing, with a tinkling latch. As she had said to Edward, she scarcely knew why the idea of Elizabeth and the desire to see her had taken hold of her mind. All these months she had deliberately and of set purpose put the idea of Elizabeth from her, consciously segregating it, refusing it admittance into the current of her thoughts. That had been natural enough, for it was on the elimination of Elizabeth from their joint lives that the success of their marriage, she had seen, must depend. And to-day she had registered, had contemplated and admitted the fact of its failure. Elizabeth had not been eliminated from their lives; when just now Edith had alluded, casually almost, to the fact of Edward's being in love with her, saying she did not blame Elizabeth for that, he had let that pass without challenge. It had not occurred to him, however lamely, to take exception to it. That had shown with a convincingness that she had not known before how her cousin was knitted into Edward's heart. It would have to be cut to bits before she could be disentangled from it.
Quietly, insensibly, throughout those months that conviction had been growing on her. It had been like some bulb buried in the earth; she had known in her inner consciousness, though there was no outward evidence of the fact, that it was growing. To-day the green, vigorous horn of its sprouting showed above the ground. It was not a shock to her any more than is a letter that confirms the bad news conveyed in a telegram. But its authenticity now was quite beyond dispute. In those seven months of their marriage Elizabeth's spell had lost none of its potency, and Edith stood between them just as she had done on the day when she had decided she could not give him up, holding them apart.
To-day, too, a definite doubt had come into her mind, and she knew that her desire to see Elizabeth was connected with its possible resolution. Months ago Elizabeth had told her that no idea of love for Edward had ever been hers; that she had never thought of him in such a light. To-day, for no definite reason, but by process probably of the general enlightenment that her misery had brought her, she wondered if that was true. At first when Elizabeth had told her that, she had implicitly believed it. Now she wondered whether Elizabeth had not said that for her sake; whether, seeing that she herself was determined not to give Edward up, Elizabeth had not splendidly lied. Certainly that statement, true or not, had had the effect of making Edith quite comfortable, as her mother would say. A dozen and a hundred dozen times she had told herself, relying on that, that Edward would have been no nearer his happiness if she had given him up. But Edith did not so far deceive herself as to say that it would have made any difference to her decision, even if Elizabeth had loved him. She knew herself but poorly, but she knew herself sufficiently well to be aware that nothing in the world just then would have induced her voluntarily to give him his freedom. It had been open to him to break his word, and not marry her, but it had not seemed morally possible for her to let him go.
Elizabeth was just coming out of the long window of the drawing-room when Edith passed through the gate, and the two cousins met on the croquet-lawn. These warm days of May had made it possible to play already, and Edward, at his wife's wish, had had several games in preparation for the Heathmoor Tournament. Ellis this morning had moved several seats out of the summer-house on to the grass, and the "Croquet set No. 1, complete in tin-lined box" (the most expensive set of all that could be bought at the stores), which had been Mrs. Hancock's wedding-present to Edward, stood open in case anybody wished to play. Just a year ago, as it now occurred to Edith, she had sat here when Elizabeth on the morning after her arrival from India had come out. She remembered how almost on the first mention of Edward's name, Elizabeth had guessed their engagement.
Edith greeted her with her usual precise and restrained manner.
"I heard you and Mrs. Fanshawe arrived yesterday," she said. "Mother was looking forward to your coming."
Elizabeth kissed her.
"I was glad to come," she said. "I was beginning to be afraid I should never see Heathmoor again."
Edith looked at her a moment in silence.
"Did you want to?" she asked.
"Yes. I wanted to see you, too, Edith. I—I hope you are happy."
Edith laughed a wretched little jangle of a laugh.
"I am very comfortable, mother will tell you," she said. "Edward is always very kind to me. He has made a great deal of money this year. He comes back from town every evening by the dinner train. And I am going to have a baby."
The semblance of ordinary conversation had to be kept up as long as Edith chose. If the talk was going to get more intimate, the deepening of it had to come from her. Quite suddenly it came.
"I am very unhappy, Elizabeth," she said. "I have not had a single happy moment since I married. It has all turned out different to what I expected. I wanted Edward so much that I could not give him up, and I thought that by degrees he would turn to me, and—and love me. He never loved me. He proposed to me and I accepted him because we both thought that we should be very comfortable together. So we should have been if he had not—had not fallen in love with you."
Elizabeth laid her hand on Edith's knee.
"My dear, is there any need to speak of that?" she said.
Edith turned quickly on her. All her secret self, suppressed through those months which by rights should have been months of such wonderful and magical expansion, fell on her, struggling to be allowed utterance. When she came here, with no more than her vague desire to see Elizabeth, she had not guessed how like highwaymen with cudgels and bludgeons her secret walled-up life would attack her, fighting to express itself.
"I think there is need to speak of it," she said, "and I have no one whom I can speak to but you. If I told mother, she would—she would recommend me to see Mr. Martin; if I told Edward, he would only try to be kinder to me. Elizabeth, his kindness chokes me. I can't breathe in it. It has all been an utter, utter failure. I thought that he would get to love me, so that it would be enough for me to be with him always; I thought I should be satisfied to be his wife. I thought, too, that he would be happy as well as I, for I was not, so I thought then, entirely selfish. I should not have refused to give him up, if I had thought that it would turn out so hopelessly. Then there was this as well; you did not love him, and so I was not standing in the way of his happiness."
Elizabeth felt her face go suddenly white. Had she, too, made an awful, a lifelong, mistake? She knew the integrity of her purpose, when she had told Edith she did not love him, how she had said that simply and solely for Edith's sake, so that having definitely and irrevocably chosen not to give Edward up she might not be the prey of back-thoughts and gnawings. But what if all this misery, all this hunger, this unslaked thirst could have been avoided? What if she had rejected her great renunciation, had avowed her love for Edward, had given rein to the steeds of desire? Had her renunciation been no more than some savage heathen rite, some mutilation of herself and him? For a moment the very foundations of her world seemed to sway, and all its noble superstructure to totter. But Edith did not notice the blanching of her face, nor saw her quivering eyelids. She was looking fixedly at the spot in the lawn in front of her with an intent and absent air, and went on speaking in the same unemotional voice.
"I may as well be honest," she said, "because there does not seem to be much else left. As a matter of fact, I should not have done differently even if you had loved him. I did not care two straws for your happiness, nor for his, but only for my own. And yet I did love him; I was passionately fond of him. I thought I could make him love me, or at any rate that he would forget you. I told myself anyhow that it was but a sudden wild fancy he had for you, that he had fallen in love with your music. I did not care what I told myself, so long as I got him. And now at this present moment, I would give anything in the world if it could be made possible that I should still love him. I don't love him any more. I am not even jealous that he loves you. He may do as he likes, if only he could cease being kind to me. If only I could go right out of his life, and never see him again. But that's impossible. Soon I shall be the mother of his child. And, besides, mother would think it so odd. So would Mr. Martin. They would call me wicked, but I think it is really much wickeder to go on living with him. Yes, all the time that I was trying to get his love I was only poisoning my own. I was poisoning that which was dearer to me than anything in the world. I am sorry for it now. It lies before me quite dead, killed by me. Well, I can say truthfully that I am sorry. When you have committed a crime like that, the only possible palliation is that you are sorry. But I did love him; even when I gave my love that first dose of poison in refusing to let him go, I loved him."
She got up in agitation.
"Let no one say I did not love him!" she cried in a voice suddenly strained and shrill.
Elizabeth got up also, forcing down her terror at this tragic figure suddenly revealed to her, and full of growing pity.
"Edith, dear, you are talking wildly," she said. "You don't know what you are saying."
Edith put up both hands to her head.
"It is not wild talk," she said, "it is sober truth. But I express it badly; I get confused. And there was something I wanted to ask you. Was it really true what you told me?"
Then her face changed. The hardness and restraint faded from it; it became humanized again by suffering.
"Elizabeth, I feel so ill," she said. "I am in pain, in great pain!"
Elizabeth was sitting in the window of Edward's smoking-room where two mornings ago he and Edith had sat talking and reading before she came over to the house next door. Late that night her baby, a seven-months child, had been born, flickering faintly into life and out again, and now in the room overhead Edith lay dying. An hour ago she had asked to see Elizabeth, but had passed into a state of unconsciousness before the girl could come to her. So now Elizabeth waited near at hand in case her cousin rallied again and again wished to see her. Edward, in the room upstairs, had promised to call her at once; Mrs. Hancock watched with him.