XXV
Asshe left him that night she wondered if her conscience troubled her. She was certainly encouraging Osprey. Standing in her own sitting room, she recalled vividly how, when he took her hand in good-night, she had felt the fierce stream that poured through him, and her very silence had given him permission to unburden himself. She was thankful for his restraint. Moreover her silence had been the result of pleasure, and not mere lack of words. How little she had known of anything quite so contained and yet so overpowering in Miles.... She could respond to that, she knew: she had only to yield a little and she could respond.
The thought of Osprey in this personal sense, of some one beside her husband in a personal sense, caused her to realize how much importance she had gone on attaching to Miles. How ridiculous and womanly of her! she reflected. Miles had taken his departure, and yet she had not until now seemed quite to believe in it. Perhaps even yet she did not believe in it. She had told Osprey that it was over; she kept repeating to herself that it was over. Everything pointed to it, Harlindew’s own unequivocal statement and her angryresentment of the manner of his desertion, particularly his letter. But in her real consciousness she had continued to expect his return ... during the whole of her talk with Osprey, Miles had been present as a reality—a definite bar—in her thought.
But now a new thing happened to her. She suddenly faced her whole life spread out before her as on a single canvas, or rather as a continuing panorama—and not just one small segment of it. Miles had not been her whole life; he had been but a part. He might have continued to be that part indefinitely and still not become her whole life. She had been magnifying him until she had lost sight of the rest, all that other strange web of adventure and catastrophe which had included her birth, her childhood, her love for Hal, her tragic discovery, her runaway, her struggle to help herself.... That would go on, no matter what happened, whether Miles returned or stayed away, and it would go on according to her own terms.
The notion of herself as an entity, surviving, growing, separate and alone, filled her for the first time with a curious excitement. It released so many fresh and irresistible currents within her. She began to think more consciously of other men, of Potter Osprey in particular. She rose and went out into the orchard. The painter had had constructed a table and seats for them earlier inthe summer, and she sat down in one of the gaily painted stationary benches which gave the children so much pleasure. They recalled to her his scores of other attentions; the flowers and delicacies of one sort or another which he had sent down regularly by Nana, his numerous subterfuges to help her with money, the little comforts that he had added to the house, his presents to young Miles and Joanna. These things, of which her husband—most younger men indeed—would never have thought, were dear to her. And once he had hinted, in a joking manner, of “leaving her the cottage” in his will.
“You can’t tell—I may be knocked off some day,” he had said. “I’ve become such an absentminded countryman that I’m always a little surprised to find myself alive after crossing a New York street.”
She had turned such overtures off with pleasantries, which they deserved, and yet she had entertained them; they had wooed her and become a part of her dilatory dreaming. As she sat there in the caressingly cool night she felt this keenly; she felt a sense of permanency and peace under the protecting boughs of the orchard. She could not remember such a feeling since long ago at Thornhill.
She rose reluctantly and went into the house. Unquestionably she had reached a point where she could regard Osprey’s passion without disturbance;and yet she longed for a temporary refuge from it, knowing that at any moment they might be brought together by some turn of the conversation such as that to-night and his reserve would give way. She wanted to escape that contingency for a long time, to think out her relationship to the future. But she had no reasonable means or excuse to flee. Her plans had not been made for the winter, and according to their informal agreement she was to remain in the cottage another month.
Robert Blaydon’s visit furnished a safe diversion for three days. She was able to keep him that long through the insistent hospitality of Osprey, and the fact that the two took a strong liking to each other. They sat up late together in the studio one night over a fine brand of Scotch whisky which Blaydon had brought with him, and the younger man submitted amiably to a questioning about Moira which disclosed little more than that he had been her boyhood companion at one time, and her circumstances had once been opulent. He told Osprey, however, that he had heard his own name often.
“Yes?” inquired his host. “Well, perhaps that’s natural, as you say we have been fellow townsmen.”
“Fact is,” replied Blaydon, “I’ve an aunt out there who has become vastly interested in painters,in her old age, and I’ve heard her speak of you. A Mrs. Seymour.”
“Don’t ask me to remember names back home,” laughed Osprey. “You would think me a pretty determined exile if I told you how long it had been since I was there.”
“In any case, she’ll be much excited when I tell her that I have met you,” said the other, reflecting on the humour and difficulty of his situation, in which discretion constrained him with Osprey from telling Moira’s connection to his aunt, and with his aunt from telling Moira’s connection with Osprey.
“Mysteries are a damned nuisance among such likeable people,” he concluded to himself. “I hope this one gets cleared up some day.” And his conviction was that it would.