“I don’t believe a single word of it,” he remarked.
All this—all it was and all it meant—Silvia now, as she waited for him, looked at, looked down on even from this crowning pinnacle, as on upward, ultimate slopes. Even, as in the cool scentless air of themorning, the miracle of the sunshine on the windless world was more itself than when its beams had drawn that response of fragrance from all living things, so shone for her, untroubled with passion and desire, the essence itself of love in its own crystal globe. Not less precious, now that it was conveyed to her in no material manifestation, would be the bodily presence of him through whom that essence was conveyed to her, who embodied love to her mortal sense, but for ever far more precious was it now that she, in this pause of content that crowned passion with a royal diadem, could for the moment see that in loving him she loved not him alone, but Love itself that “moved the sun and the other stars,” and being all, gave all....
The duration of the moment in which Silvia reached that point, not theoretically, but as a felt and experienced reality, was infinitesimal, just as in significance it was infinite.... At the sound of Peter’s step on the bare boards of the dining-room just within, the atmosphere of the summit where she stood grew laden and fragrant with the scents of the world. She did not come down from it: it did not rise up above her. She was there still, but she was there in body as well as in spirit, the fragrance of material sweetness was near her, even as when now she stepped back into the dining-room, a waft of rose-scent from the sun-warmed wall smothered her nostrils.
Peter was poking about among dishes on the side table, and gave her a grunt, neither more nor less, in answer to her salutation. He held that to be in good spirits at breakfast-time was a symptom that could not be taken too seriously. By that test there was nothing wrong with him this morning.
He sat down with an ill-used sigh.
“I’ve got a headache,” he remarked.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said she. “Where?”
“In my left ankle, of course,” said he.
Silvia, passing behind him, just tweaked the short hair at the back of his neck.
“Oh, don’t finger me,” said Peter angrily.
He gave her so quick a glance that she could scarcely tell whether he had actually looked at her or not, and went on without pause and without hurry, clinking out his words like newly-minted coins, separate and crisply cut and hot.
“Just let me alone sometimes,” he said. “You know how I hate dabbing and pressing and grasping. You’re the limit, you know.”
He had got her stiff and staring, and still without pause and in precisely the same voice he went on:
“Don’t let me have to speak to you like that again,” he said. “And don’t be so owlish, but confess that you’ve fallen into that trap.”
Still she stood staring, and he took one step towards her and flung his arms close round her neck, pressing her face to his, and then, more directly, finding and claiming her mouth.
“You utterly divine girl,” he said. “I never dreamed I should take you in. I did. Kiss me three times to signify ‘Yes,’ and three times more to signify that you are a darling, and once more to—well, once more.”
“Peter, I thought you were cross with me,” said she, when she could say anything.
“How perfectly splendid! That joke did come off, didn’t it?”
She could smile again.
“You brute!” she said. “But never take mein over that again, darling. Anything else; not that.”
Once more before his motor came round they strolled on the terrace outside. It was thick now with the web of scents, for the sun’s weaving was busy. The late roses gave their fragrance, and the verbena and the mignonette, but these were but strung like beads on to the smell of the damp, fruitful earth. By now Silvia could laugh at herself about that fierce phantom moment, for never had Peter seemed more utterly hers. Usually in these early half-hours he was rather silent, rather morose; to-day, penitent perhaps, or consolatory for the fright—it was no less—that he had unwittingly given her, there was something of the bath-intoxication about him.
“If you were in any sense a devoted wife,” he said, “you would drive up with me, deposit me at the F.O., and then wait three hours for me in the motor till lunch time. I could give you an hour then, after which you would wait four hours more and drive back with me. Therefore shall a woman leave her father and her mother and cleave to her husband.”
“Yes, of course I’ll come,” said she, “if you want me to. You must just say you really want me.”
He took hold of her elbows from behind and ran her along the terrace.
“Motor-bike,” he observed. “I’m pushing you till you get your sense of humour working on its own account.”
“It’s working—I swear it’s working,” shriekedSilvia. “Don’t be such a bully.”
A seat on the balustrade of the terrace seemed indicated after this violent exercise.
“There’s another thing,” said Peter. “My mental power of association of ideas is decaying, which is a sign of softening of the brain. Aren’t you sorry?”
“Is that the brain in your head?” asked she.
“No; in the same place that ached when I had a headache. Left ankle. Don’t interrupt. But there’s something in this house front, and I believe it’s the cornice, or whatever they call it, which runs all along there underneath the windows on the first floor, which—that’s the cornice—reminds me of some other house.”
Peter pointed to the broad frieze-like band which projected some foot or so from the wall of the house. It was of Portland stone, amazingly carved with masks at intervals, and ran, as he had said, just below the first floor windows from end to end of the façade. Then he gave a yodel which, consciously or not, was a hoarse and surprising parody of his father’s favourite method of indicating a general sumptuousness of sensation.
“That’s done it,” he said. “Just speaking of it has reminded me what it was. And there’s the motor, bother and blight it, confound and curse it.”
“And what is the house it reminds you of?” she asked.
“The flat belonging to Nellie’s mother. Just below the windows there ran a band like that. I noticed it one day last summer. She had said something about it, but at that point there’s softening of the brain again. All I said about the motor holds, though.”
“Send it away. Walk up to town instead,” suggested Silvia.
“Likely, with that headache in my ankle. But I would so much sooner sit here with you than do either.”
Silvia waved to him as he drove off, and waiting, waved again as he crossed the bridge over the lake. The air was thick with earthy fragrances now, and her mind with fragrant memories, and among them there was some new scent, not quite strange to her, but one from which she had always, whenever it presented itself, turned her head. Now it insisted on being analysed, on being recognized.
When, half an hour ago, she had just tweaked his hair as she passed him, his remonstrance, to her ears, had been wholly instinctive and sincere; he objected to being “fingered.” He had piled that up, so she seemed to see, making of it a joke against her, until the joke grew preposterous. Then, ever so convincingly, he had smothered her with kisses. Yesterday evening, too, how convincing had been, on some other plane, his “dearness”—that word must serve—with her mother and Mr. Mainwaring. On one side were bright tokens of affection, and to her of so much more than affection; on the other that one little hot coin that clinked with a true ring before, with admirable mimicry of himself, he had showered out a whole flood of such.
Which was the more real? And where, in these mists, was that austere and shining summit?
Justbefore Christmas, after three weeks in London, Silvia was driving down alone to Howes, in preparation for the party which was to arrive next day. Peter would come then: he had got a devastating cold, and it was far wiser, in this grim inclemency of weather, that he should not come down with her to-day, only to come up again for his work next morning. It was much more sensible—Silvia had suggested it—that he should nurse his cold that evening, and, well wrapped up, make a single instead of a double journey to-morrow. But that piece of good sense was subsidiary to the fact that she did not want, just for this evening, to be alone with him; even if his cold had not supplied an excellent argument in favour of this plan, she would have suggested her own solitary departure.
Wilton, the correct virginal Wilton, sat opposite her on the front seat. Wilton had, at the start, deposited herself next the chauffeur, but Silvia had made her come inside. But there was little use, so thought Wilton, in coming inside, if her mistress still kept both windows open.
The sleet had turned to uncompromising snow, and Silvia seemed to notice it no more than if she were a Polar bear. Eventually, as the car flowed up the long hill through Putney, Wilton had been able to stand the draught no longer.
“You’ll be catching a worse cold than Mr. Mainwaring’s, ma’am,” shesaid, “if you sit in that draught.”... That made it more comfortable. Silvia roused herself for a moment.
“His man doesn’t take such care of him as you do of me, Wilton,” she said.
“And so much pneumonia about, ma’am,” observed Wilton encouragingly.
Silvia began to think consecutively, starting not from far back, but from the immediate past. Nellie had lunched with her alone, just before she started, for Mrs. Wardour had been out, and Nellie had hailed thistête-à-têteas the most delightful thing that could have happened. Nellie had been at Wardour House, too, the night before for a concert; during this month of December, hardly yet three weeks old, she had been there half a dozen times, for Mrs. Wardour, resuming her social activities with extraordinary vigour after four months in the country, had, without the aid of any godmother, turned December into June.
“You know the real name of this delicious house, darling,” Nellie had said. “Everyone calls it the New Jerusalem, because its gates are never shut day or night. Your mother brings light into the darkest homes of the upper classes. There’s such dreadful discontent among them: if it wasn’t for people—angels—like your mother, they would all go and live in converted garages or in country cottages, and pretend to be the proletariat. It’s being amused and entertained that keeps the upper class together; otherwise they would be the leaders of Bolshevism. The Order of the British Empire now! Why isn’t she the only Dame in it? The stability of the upper class depends on her, and the King depends on the upper class, and the Empire, in fact, if you see what I mean. I’m not quite sure that I do, but I do mean something.We should all have groaned and grumbled if your mother hadn’t set such a brilliant example.”
With Nellie’s brilliant presence and charm to help out this engaging nonsense, it was a cheerful scintillation. Last June, so Silvia told herself, she would vastly have enjoyed such a month as she had just spent, and Nellie’srésuméof it made her wonder whether she—only she—had been dull and unappreciative....
The snow was driven against the glass which Wilton had put up: she could hear it softly tap at the window....
“And Peter!” Nellie had said. “What have you done to him, darling, or rather what haven’t you done to him? Everybody—I think I told you so once—used to be devoted to Peter: we used all to be in love with him, for he was so priceless, so marvellous, in not caring one atom for anybody. How long did it take you, do tell me, to discover his heart? Did you mine for it, and dredge for it, and blow up all the rocks round it? Or did you get an aeroplane and fly up to it. Perhaps, after all, it was in the sky—so tremendously remote that nobody ever thought of looking for it there. You and Peter, up in the blue like the queen bee and her lover! How wildly romantic! Or were you there, and did he fly up to you? You met in the blue, anyhow, and left us all staring up after you till our eyes watered with the glare.”
Silvia, as the car hooted its way through Kingston, did not concern herself to recall with what small accompaniment she had sustained those arpeggios. She must have said something, for Nellie had gone on talking, talking.... Silvia had blinked before that brilliant vitality, which so decorated all that lay under its beams; but for the first time, when shespoke like that about herself and Peter, the light hurt her. It dazzled rather than illuminated, and when it fell on certain dark places it did not illuminate them, it only showed up their blackness. She, with Nellie’s light, Nellie’s impressions, to help her, peered into them. Such glimpses as she caught between the dazzle and the darkness made her turn away with protest against this bull’s-eye that now seemed to intrude on privacy. What, after all, had her relations with Peter to do with Nellie?
The streets were slippery with the newly-fallen snow, and at some corner, while they were still passing through houses, there was a furious hooting of the horn outside, which to Silvia at that moment was not so much a warning of danger ahead on the road, as of danger lying somewhere deep within herself. They came to a dead stop, which made Wilton scream faintly and clutch the jewel-case, and for a yard or two they slid backwards. All that, too, seemed instantly translated in her mind into interior action, and, keeping pace with it, she slid a little farther back in her journey of thought.
She brought out from the locked cupboard of her very soul, where she had turned the key on it, one particular moment. It was yesterday that she had put it there. She was in a room of a house in Welbeck Street, and at the end of the consultation the great man, jovial and kindly, had got up from his chair, and smoothed the pillow of a sofa on which she had lain just before.
“Be quite active,” Dr. Symes summed up, “without overtiring yourself. Appetite good? That’s all right. Just go on with your ordinary life. What? No: no doubt of any kind. Your husband well? A cold? Everyone’s got a cold.”
Silvia paused over that while a wheel of her car slipped and skidded. Soon it hit the ground again. But in that pause she faced the fact that she had not told Peter. She meant to last night, but—but.... He had bewailed his cold; he had accepted her proposal that he should stop in London to-night. He had waved his hand at her and left her, not kissing her for fear of giving her his cold. But that was not the reason—it was only the excuse—for not telling him. She had welcomed it, at the time, as an adequate excuse; but if she had not found any such, she would have done without it.
For a second or two her thought paused, merely contemplating this fact as if looking at some picture. It seemed quite incredible that she had not gone straight to him with her news, blurted it, whispered it, kissed him with it. Yet if he had been sitting here now instead of Wilton, in this privacy of snow and twilight-travel, she knew that she would again be struggling, and in vain, to tell him.
From that point she swept back to one morning in October. It was then that some seed of knowledge which had previously lain dormant in her soul began to sprout. For two months now she had been conscious of its growth, and for two months she had steadily refused to acknowledge it. Her relations with him had been of the most normal and friendly, but the fact, as she saw now, of his content and tranquillity was sunshine and rain to the growth of it. Then, at the news Dr. Symes had given her, it burst into bitter blossom, and she could ignore it no longer.
Peter had never loved her: he had never, in finding her, lost himself. Mentally and sympathetically she knew that he liked her—liked her, she was prepared to say, immensely; physically she attractedand satisfied him. To think that he had married her “for” her money would be an exaggerated and hysterical estimate; her wealth had not been a counterweight that overcame some opposing disadvantage, but it was, so she now believed, a determining factor. Without it he would not have sought her.
It seemed odd to herself how little that mattered. Her wealth was an advantage—so, too, was her beauty; and even if he had married her “for” her wealth, that would have seemed to her no worse than if he had married her “for” her beauty, or “for” (had she been witty) her wit, or “for” any quality whatsoever of mind or body. All these were advantages, pleasant circumstances; but all of them, singly or together, compared with love, were no more than the bright shells on the seashore compared with the sea.
It was just here that she blamed him with a bitterness that appalled her; it was this that had made it possible for her to accept any excuse (or if necessary to have done without one) for not telling him what she had learned yesterday. He had bidden her shut her eyes, and picking up a shell had held it to her ear, and had told her that what she heard there was the sea.... He had looked, he had spoken, he had acted as if he brought close to her that splendid shining vastness. She had trusted him, and had listened with all the rapture of love to that murmuring. Therein he had cheated her, passed off on her a “fake” which, had she not been blinded by his hand over her eyes, he knew she must have recognized as such.
There was just one excuse for him; she hesitated to adopt it, because while it excused him, it far more terribly accused him. It was that he did not knowwhat love meant. From the very first, from the day when he had asked her to marry him, he had not known. She had told him that all she wanted in the world was to be allowed to love him, and he had never seen that her surrender presupposed his own. He could not burn in her love without being alight himself. There was the root of it all, his ignorance.
At that, compassion deep as love itself inundated her bitterness, not diluting it, but from its very nature neutralizing it. Sorrow was there, but “without sorrow” (who had said that?) “none liveth in love.” Not as by one drop out of the whole ocean was her love for him diminished; but, while he did not understand, he ploughed his way in drought and desert: he could not reach her.
It was through his constant affection for her and his gentleness, rather than through any failure in these, that the realization of this had come to her. She did not believe that she wearied him; she knew that she attracted him physically, that he was faithful to her not on principle, but by inclination, and yet all this was nothing. He had not begun (say for a minute or two) by loving her, and then dropped into mere affection, mere desire: simply he had never loved her at all as she understood loving. He did not love anybody else, and Silvia, so far from being consoled by that thought, found herself passionately wishing that he did. He might love Nellie, or that fool of a woman who screamed; for then, at any rate, he would know what love meant, and they would have common ground to meet on, though that very ground parted them. That might ruin her own life, which already she had given into his cool, careful hands; and if only, by smashing it to atoms, he could find his soul’s salvation!
There were problems ahead, and how they should be solved she did not know: she only knew what the upshot must be. Inconceivably dear as the mere touch of his hand was to her, she knew that never again, unless he learned what love was, or she forgot it, could hand clasp hand and mouth meet mouth. Not again could she give him those symbols of the infinite as the playthings for enjoyment. All that she had or was, was his, except just that; unless he loved her, the banners of her love must stay unfurled. Somehow she must let him know that, just as, somehow and soon, she must let him know about what she learned yesterday.
As the car turned in through the park gates the snow beat in from the other window. It fell unheeded on her face and hands, till Wilton, encouraged to take care of her, drew up the sash.
Peter’s head on her shoulder, his breath coming soft and slow through his mouth.... Peter’s eyes close to hers, so that if he winked his eyelashes brushed her cheek.... Peter’s arm lying languid and relaxed across her bosom.... She would give her body to be burned for him, but not with such burning as this. Anyone, not she alone, could supply such need as his; none could supply hers but he, and he only if he loved her. Loving him as she did, she could not (so the leaping firelight in her bedroom that night illuminated it for her), she could not shut out her ideal in some burning chamber of its own, and take the rest of her, in ordinary human manner, to him, nor could she take from him, even though it was the highest he could give, anything that made its approach on some other plane. He must want her as she wanted him, surrendered and lost, and foundagain in a new completeness, before they could come together as lovers. She conjectured that she was singular, exceptional in this: most men, most women gave what they could and got what they could. But there was no compromise possible for her that could produce this easily negotiable felicity. She could not, and if she could she would not, have accepted that in exchange for this drawn sword that lay between Peter and her. She had to tell him that.... She had to tell him also that the fruit of love on the one side, of affection on the other, was ripening. She must wait her occasion for that; some moment must be seized upon when he was most himself, most nearly, that is to say, what she had once thought him.
She had nothing of her own; all was his. That was her one inestimable possession, that she had given him all. Whatever happened, her utter penury was the one thing she must cling to.
Peter had rung up Dr. Symes before he left the Foreign Office that evening, asking for five minutes of his time at any hour of morning or afternoon next day. Perhaps it was rather fussy to consult a physician over a cold, but really there never had been such a cold. Dr. Symes gave you a cabalistic slip of paper which, being duly interpreted, proved to be some marvellous tonic stuff, or, when he had felt a pulse, and looked at a tongue, and tapped you on a stomach or made your knee jump in a curious manner, he even more probably told you that you had the constitution of an armadillo, and roared you out of his room for wasting his time. With a week of uncles and aunts ahead, even though Nellie was to partake in the secret joys of them, Peter felt he would like some robust reassurance of thatsort. Or, on the other hand, since there never was such a cold——
These speculations, as he drove to Welbeck Street next morning, were cut short by his arrival and his internment in a waiting-room. There were several persons there, reading illustrated papers with sad faces, who looked up when he entered, and thereafter regarded him with evident suspicion, fearing, so Peter figured it, that he might, though the latest arrival, be summoned before those who had waited longer. This, in fact, happened, and to the accompaniment of sour looks he was conducted down a long passage into the consulting room. As he went he considered whether he slept well, and whether he had a feeling of oppression on his chest, or a pain in his right side.
“How-de-do?” said Dr. Symes. “I’ve managed to squeeze you in between two of my patients, and I can give you just a couple of minutes, which will be quite enough. Naturally you wanted to see me. Well, there’s nothing that should give you a moment’s anxiety at present. Don’t think about it at all, and don’t let your wife think you’re thinking about it.”
He turned backwards over the leaves of his engagement book.
“Yes, as you know, I saw her the day before yesterday,” he said. “All healthy and normal. But don’t be fussed yourself, and certainly spare her all fuss. Of course, as I told her, there’s no doubt at all. Let her—if she doesn’t want to,makeher—lead an ordinary active, normal life.”
Peter had arrived by this time.
“My wife?” he asked.
Dr. Symes gave his great rollicking laugh.
“Yes, and your grandmother, too, for that matter,” he said. “Don’t let her confuse child-bearing with invalidism. They’re radically opposed. Mind you, the way she spends these months is important. Make her go out, make her busy and employed. Don’t let her get fancies into her head that she must coddle herself; there’s no greater mistake.”
“I see,” said Peter.
“Just use your common sense,” said the doctor. “She’s got to bear a healthy child, and so she’s got to be just as fit as we can make her. But take care of her too. What’s her age now? Twenty-two, I suppose. Well, regard her as a woman of forty in robust health. Make her behave like an older woman than she is.”
He rang a bell that stood on his table.
“I’ve told you everything,” he said. “You look fit enough, anyway, though you’ve got a bit of a cold, haven’t you? Getting down into the country for Christmas, eh? Change of air. I wish I was going to get some.”
He looked at his table of appointments.
“Ask Mrs. Lucas to step this way,” he said to the maid. “Good-bye. Good luck.”
As Peter drove down to Whitehall he kept detached, as by some dexterous jerk, such part of his mind as dealed in emotion, and contemplated with the same isolation, as through his closed car-window he looked out on the snow-slushy street, what he had just learned. He wanted to assimilate it before in any sense he studied it, and to do that he had first to wipe off his sheer surprise, which stood like condensed vapour on the glass of this astounding picture which had just been presented to him. Again and again he had to wipe that away before he couldget any clear vision of the fact itself, that Silvia knew that she was with child and had not told him. When he had assimilated that he could perhaps arrive at what it meant.
The glass was clear now; he had got it, and the enigma of it all stared him in the face; and the more he contemplated it the greater grew his bewilderment as to the meaning of it. How often, with the hesitation of an intensity that choked utterance, had she said a word or two, given him a glance, a smile that conveyed better than any stamped symbol of speech, what the incarnation of their union, his and hers, would be to her. She had wondered how, just how, she would tell him; no one knew into what shapes such joy would crystallize. And now it had come and she had not told him at all. Except for a trivial visit of his own, a superficial, unnecessary visit, he would still be ignorant. She had chosen to leave him in ignorance of what he had learned by accident.
Nellie had often told him that he went walking in the wet woods and telling nobody, and Silvia, in some frank chaffing discussion, had affirmed that she knew precisely what Nellie meant. Certainly, thought Peter now, it was likely enough she did know. Had anyone ever gone solitary so far into the wet woods as Silvia? Had anyone ever so immeasurably told nobody?
He searched back through his impressions and memories of these last two months to see if he could discover any clue that should lead him to an interpretation. As far as he knew, their relations had been uniformly harmonious, without hitch or check; there had been no sign, no warning of any sort on her part of an emotional change. As for himself——
Yes, there had been a change. A change was here, and as it was not in her it must be in him. Some psychical pigment, grain after grain, had been dropping, continually dropping, into his clean cup of life, each sinking down into it quietly, lying there at the bottom. Now it seemed that the astonishment of this morning’s discovery had violently stirred up the whole, and the whole, so he saw, was tinged with the colour of that which had been dissolving in the cool depths. For often and often, increasingly and ever more vividly—here was the dropping of those grains of colour—he had had the image of Silvia moving splendidly on sunny heights, the rays from which shone down on him through rent clouds and patches of blue. There those grains had settled, dissolving perhaps, but only locally tinging minute remote areas of his consciousness: they had not affected the full contents of the cup, that clear, cool, untroubled self of his. Now with this rough shaking and stirring, he was suffused with the colour of them. There, high above, was Silvia and her splendour, felt now, not only recognized. He had scrambled to his feet (was that it?), stung into standing, finger on mouth, instead of remotely contemplating. The ray that had merely shone on him now shone in him, and its light pierced the fogs of his egoism. It was the news itself, beyond doubt, not Silvia’s withholding of it, which gave him that enlightenment, for to his feminine nature the fact of his impending fatherhood struck more intimately than it would have done on one more virile. It evoked, too, a dormant virility; his fatherhood was the sequel of another relationship. Clearer shone the ray; he must climb, he must go to her, he must give....
Close on the heels of that, and swiftly as reflectionanswers light, came the remembrance, lost for that moment, that Silvia had withheld the knowledge from him. He could guess now with a conjecture that verged on certainty what the reason for that was, and his egoism, his deep-rooted vanity, returned and reinforced, cried out against the outrage of it. She from those heights, shining no longer, but merely superior, looked down on him, and judged him unworthy to share that white joy which crowned and enveloped her love. All his pride stiffened at the thought. He knew how to walk in the wet woods, sufficient unto himself.
Of intention Peter had started from London rather late, so that he should find the little party already assembled. His father, he rested assured, would have taken on himself the mantle of host, and would be wearing it far more superbly than he. That he found to be the case: John Mainwaring had complete possession of the place and all the members of what was, with the exception of Nellie and her husband, the same unique little family gathering which had preceded Peter’s marriage. There was Aunt Eleanor, stout and seal-like, there was a column of locomotive floral decoration around Aunt Joanna, there was Uncle Abe, now possessor of three monstrous cartoons, and Uncle Henry, the possessor of a nice stiff brandy and soda, for tea still continued to burn his heart. The cartoons, in fact, and the original sketches were the subject, as Peter entered, of debate between the aunts, to the glory and honour of their creator, who sat in clouds of incense. Mrs. Wardour had already got reconciled to the fact that her sister had been the purchaser, and bore it well.
“Lovely they look,” said Aunt Joanna; “all threein a row, with the rest to come opposite. Many a half-hour do I spend at my buhl writing-table there, not getting along at all with my correspondence by reason of looking at them. I’m sure I don’t know which I like best.”
“Tea, Peter?” asked Silvia. She had looked up at his entry; now she kept her eyes on her tray.
“Yes, indeed,” said Aunt Eleanor, “I’m sure they look very fine, Joanna. Three already finished! That’s wonderful. I suppose, Mr. Mainwaring, you’ll be soon wanting to borrow the fourth of my sketches?”
“Dear lady, I hesitate. I positively hesitate to ask you,” said he, “for I know how you will hate parting with it even for a week or two. But without it I can never paint the larger version. The inspiration, the first rapture, is there; I must study it again.”
Aunt Eleanor turned triumphantly to Nellie.
“You must positively come to see those sketches, Mrs. Beaumont,” she said. “I have all the original sketches of Mr. Mainwaring’s great cartoons. Such a treat!”
“I’m sure they’re charming,” said Nellie.
“Charming indeed! Masterpieces! Such fire! Such inspiration as never could be realized again.”
“The three great cartoons,” said Aunt Joanna firmly, while the floral decorations trembled, “fill up the whole side of Sir Abe’s last addition to our house. A new wing, I may call it, with bedrooms above.”
“My sweet little sitting-room,” said Aunt Eleanor absently. “All the sketches: the fire....”
“Yes, dear, and as I was telling you, the great cartoons,” said Aunt Joanna. “That was what I was telling you.”
Uncle Henry made a diversion. He liked peaceand plenty. “Capital good brandy this,” he said. “You should try my plan, Abe. Have a drop of brandy and leave the tea alone. A’most a pity to put soda into it.”
(He had not put much.)
“Well, I don’t say you’re not right, Henry,” said Uncle Abe. “But to my mind what’s given me at my dinner, if it’s a drop of something good, tastes all the better if I haven’t had—— There’s some old dry Pétiot now. There’s a wine! You must get on the right side of Peter for that.”
Silvia handed Peter his cup.
“And your cold’s better?” she asked.
“’Bout the same, thanks.”
Nellie more than once had tried to catch Peter’s eye in order to telegraph to him her rapt appreciation of the family. But though Peter had met her glance, he had nothing to send in reply.
“I see the whole history of the war in my sketches,” proclaimed Aunt Eleanor. “News from headquarters, I call them. Such insight! And the fourth, dear Joanna, the submarine, you know. Ah, no, you haven’t seen that yet, but if Mr. Mainwaring’s cartoon from it comes up to the sketch, there’ll be something for you to look at.”
“Capital good brandy,” said Uncle Henry. Something had to be said.
Peter drifted away from the tea-table and established himself next Nellie.
“So you got down all right,” he said.
She let a circular sweeping glance pause infinitesimally four times, once for each of the aunts and uncles.
“Yes, and what a delicious room,” she said. “You hadn’t told me half.”
Peter was surely rather distrait, she thought. Even now he didn’t catch the point of her appreciation.
“It’s good panelling,” he said. “There’s more of it in my sitting-room next door. We’ll go there after tea.”
She held out her cup. “Silvia, darling, one inch more tea, please,” she said. “An inch. Pure greed.”
Silvia had an absent smile for her but no speech, and took the cup from Peter’s hand without looking at him till he had turned again towards Nellie with the desired inch. She then followed him, quick as a lizard, with one glance of mute raised eyebrows. Nellie got that, too; plucked it off, put it in her book. She felt that she was surrounded by interests: there were the priceless uncles and aunts; there was also something else going on, not so farcical, not farcical at all, perhaps, but quite as interesting.
“My dear, you have got a cold,” she said to Peter.
“I thought I had,” said he wheezily.
“I rather like having a cold,” she went on. “It’s an excuse for going to a doctor and being told that one has a brilliant constitution. That’s Dr. Symes’s cure. You’re a Symite, aren’t you?”
Peter looked right and left, then for a single second straight in front of him, where Silvia sat.
“Rather,” he said. “We’re all Symites.”
He paused a moment.
“What a pity I didn’t go to see him this morning,” he said very deliberately, “before I left London. I might have been well by this time.”
Silvia did not look up: she turned away to Mr. Mainwaring, who was on her right. Some jerked movement of her hand caused a teaspoon to clatter from its saucer and fall on the floor.
His father gave a little yodel, adapted to the drawing-room.
“Let me have a word with you sometime, my Peter,” he said.
“Yes. I’ll come to see you before I dress. Just now Nellie and I are going to have a talk. Will that do? Come, Nellie.”
Peter drew two chairs up to the fire.
“That’s nice,” he said. “Priceless, aren’t they? Aunt Eleanor is really the most wonderful. Can you bear it for three days, do you think? They go day after Christmas.”
He lit a cigarette and threw it away again.
“Muck!” he said. “By the way, Nellie, do stop till we go up to town.”
“Oh, my dear, I wish I could,” said she. “But I know Philip’s got some county business on the twenty-eighth that obliges him to go home. Something ridiculous about forbidding people to shoot golden orioles, of which there aren’t any.”
“Can’t you let him go alone?” asked Peter.
“Well; yes, I think I might. I’ll get my mother to go down. Mother will always go anywhere for board and lodging.”
“Don’t I remember that feeling!” said Peter. “So do stop. I heard Silvia ask my father.”
Nellie produced an admirable mimicry of Aunt Eleanor’s views on art, which, however, elicited from Peter only:
“Very funny: yes, very like her,” and he subsided into silence and fire-gazing again.
“Silvia seemed rather silent,” said Nellie at length.
Peter roused himself.
“Did she?” he said. “The aunts were talking somuch that I didn’t notice it. This is the panelling I spoke to you of, by the way.”
“Charming. Just the same as in the drawing-room, isn’t it?”
“The green drawing-room, please,” said Peter.
“I beg its pardon,” she said.
“Granted, I’m sure,” said he without a smile.
Nellie tried a handful of other topics, and her curiosity to know what was the matter vastly increased. She had narrowed down the field of her conjectures to a certainty that, whatever it was, it concerned her host and hostess. Yesterday at lunch, when she had been alone with Silvia, she had the first impression of it, yet she had seen Peter that same evening in town (by way of nursing his cold he had come to the theatre with her), and he, in spite of that affliction, had been immensely cheerful, chuckling with prophetic delight at the feast that the uncles and aunts would spread for them. And he had not seen Silvia since (for she had already left London) until his entry into the green drawing-room half an hour ago.
She would much have preferred, as on that evening a month ago, when they dined alone together in London and he had been so pointedly reticent on the subject of Silvia, that he should volunteer a statement, but his reticence then seemed of totally different quality from what it was now.... She tried one more topic.
“Peter, dear, isn’t it lovely?” she said. “I’m going to have a baby.”
Peter jerked himself upright in his chair. “Really?” he said. “And here are you telling me that!”
He broke off.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” she said. “There’s something wrong.”
He got up and drove with his foot into the log fire.
“It’s really screamingly funny that you should tell me that,” he said.
Nellie felt that they were getting near it now.
“Funny?” she asked.
“Oh, Lord, I said funny, didn’t I?” said he.
She got up too, laying a hand on his shoulder.
“My dear, we’re very old friends,” she said.
He turned round to her with some unspoken bitterness souring in his eyes.
“Then I’ll let you have the joke,” he said. “You tell me that, and yet my wife, who knows the same thing about herself, has not told me.”
He paused a moment.
“I found it out by accident this morning,” he said. “I went to see Dr. Symes about my cold—odd that you should have spoken of him—and before I told him anything he began telling me, and that was what he told me. Of course, he assumed I knew; thought that I had come to him for some general directions, which he gave me. Silvia had been to him two days before. She hasn’t said a word to me. Not a word.”
Nellie heard herself give some ejaculation.
“Now you’re fond of psychological problems,” he said. “Also you’re a woman, and know how women feel. Under what circumstances, feelinghow, in fact, would a woman do that? Interesting point, isn’t it? It’s beyond me.”
“No quarrel? No misunderstanding? Nothing of that sort?”
“None. I’ve felt she was watching me sometimes. I’ve——”
“Well? Can you describe that? “ she asked.
“I’ve only thought of that this minute,” he said, “and now I don’t really see any connexion. But when my father knew my mother had gone, and was posing and posturing as a lost and stricken man, Silvia was watching me to see, I think, if I had real sympathy, real pity for him. I did feel then as if I was being tested. But I made that all right. I did it cleverly. I gave the most cordial welcome to his stopping on here—Lord, what evenings they were!—for endless weeks, and left him to tell her about it.”
“Are you quite sure you made it all right?” she asked.
“She told me she had been wrong; she told me she had misjudged me, when she thought me feelingless,” he said. “But even if she made a reservation, or reconsidered it, what then?”
Nellie’s hand still rested, now with pressure, on his shoulder.
“And what if Silvia put herself, so to speak, in your father’s place?” she said. “What if it occurred to her that you had been charming withher, and clever withher? Mind, that’s only a guess.”
Again Peter thrust the logs together.
“She trusts me too much,” he said at length, “She loves me too much.”
This time Nellie was silent.
“Well?” said he at length.
“She thinks you’ve been clever with her and charming with her,” she said. “That’s it. I think that she was quite wrong in keeping this news from you, but that’s why. Silvia isn’t like us, you must remember. We may be complicated and clever in our way, but she’s not like that. There’s something tremendous about Silvia. A simplicity, a splendour.”
“And just when I was beginning to realize that, to adore it, she does this. I can’t forgive it,” said he.
She felt then, as perhaps never before, the charm of his egoism: it really was such a charming fellow he was egoistic about.
“My dear, it’s just because you, as you say, are beginning to realize that and to adore it, that you feel you can’t forgive it. You would forgive it easily enough if you didn’t care. But put yourself in her place. Assume, as I feel sure we’re right in assuming, that we have got at the reason for her not telling you; it is exactly what a woman of that simplicity and splendour would do. With all there is of her, she loves you.”
“A charming way of showing it,” said Peter.
“You’re hurt; you’re smarting,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t say that.”
“She has spoiled everything,” exclaimed Peter. “Just when——”
All through their talk Nellie had been conscious of a dual stirring, not only in him—that was clear enough—but in herself. Not many weeks ago she would certainly have had her whole sympathies enlisted on his side. She would have fanned, secretly and stealthily no doubt, the flame of his resentment against Silvia, and with the same hidden action have insinuated into his mind that there was somebody who was eager to console, to help him to forget—one who gave him a welcome.... Even now some breath of woodland irresponsibility, the morality of Dryads and Satyrs, swept over her, with the whispering of wild things and the stirrings in the bushes. Like soughtlike there, deriding the consequences to others. Should she twang that string, let the wind blow on that harp in the trees, she knew well that something would answer it. He was hurt and sore; there were woodland balms....
Something within her again jerked back the finger that hovered over the string, ready to pluck it, and turned her hand into a shield instead, that prevented the wind from making the harp vibrate. Silvia had her harp, too, and he had begun, ever so faintly, to vibrate in answer to Silvia’s harp, and not to hers.... In this second impulse there was compassion for Silvia, there was motherhood. She made her choice.
“You can’t say that she spoiled it, my dear,” she said. “You know how she loved you when you asked her to marry you.”
Peter had a frown for this.
“I thought——” he began.
“I know what you thought. Silvia very likely told you that she wanted just to be allowed——”
“I never told you that,” said he quickly.
“Of course you didn’t. But wasn’t it clear that before you married, she loved you as a boy loves, with some tempestuous desire of possession?”
“But she’s got me,” said he. “It isn’t as if there were anyone else.”
“I know that, and she knows that for certain. It’s nothing, of that kind that revolts her.”
“Revolts?” asked he.
“Oh, my dear, short of that, wouldn’t she have told you what she has known for two days, and suspected long before? But you would be quite wrong to think that she loves you any less. What you don’t see, especially, beyond that, is that Silvia has become a perfectly changed person. She keeps her splendour.Keeps it? Good heavens! I should think she did. But what she learned the other day quite changes her. She has become a woman, and she must have not just a man to love, but a man to love her. You’ve hinted that she’s on the way to get one. That’s the sum of the consolation I’ve got for you.”
Nellie, having determined, having chosen, was being magnificent just then, and all the time the Dryad within her scolded and derided her.
“You fool, you conventionalist,” the Dryad shrieked. “He might be yours; he’s as weak as water, and vain, vain! You want him: wait a few months and see how you want him! Idiot!”
Nellie heard all that as plainly as she heard the whistle of the wind in the chimney.
“It won’t be easy,” she said. “You’ve got to get out of yourself, Peter, a thing, by the way, that I’ve never succeeded in doing. And when you’ve got out of yourself you’ve got to convince her that you’ve got into herself. I wouldn’t bet on your chance.”
“Have I been a brute?” asked he.
Nellie hesitated: she had never yet realized how close to love had been her intimacy with Peter, or how far from love her own marriage-bond. And now, when, bitterly resenting what Silvia had done, he turned to her....
Peter, in her silence, repeated his question.
“A brute?” he asked, and now his voice shook.
She took her hand briskly off his shoulder. They had stood there like that, comrades and friends, for ten minutes now, and her fingers had dwelt on his shoulder, the bone and the muscle of it.
“Not a brute at all,” she said. “You couldn’t be a brute, you darling. But a liar and a cheat.”
“Ha!” said Peter.
He walked round the room after this, with a whistle for her and him, and a kick for a footstool that got in his way.
“You don’t help me,” he said. “What’s to be done?”
Somehow, at his absence of resentment at what she had said, and at his appeal to her for help, the old delightful level of comradeship smoothed itself out.
“Tell her that you know,” suggested Nellie. “Do it nicely.”
“I couldn’t possibly do it nicely. Confound it all——”
She considered this.
“If you can’t do it nicely, it will only make it worse,” she conceded.
“What then?”
“Wait.”
“For her to tell me?” demanded Peter.
“Yes, or for you just to know. It won’t come to that. Oh, you absurd people! Shall I tell her that you know?”
Peter thought over this.
“It’s becoming comic,” he said presently. “That’s the silliest thing you’ve said yet.”
“Perhaps. But it isn’t comic, my dear.”
“I know it isn’t. That’s my ferocious flippancy. Gravediggers.”
“And it isn’t comic for Silvia,” she added.
The spasm of the woodland died away again.
“She hasn’t told me,” said Peter hopelessly. “I can’t get over that.”
“You’ve got to get over that. Otherwise there’s nothing ahead. She’s got to get over more than that.”
All the worst of him returned.
“You speak as if I hadn’t given her all I had got,” he said.
“You’re getting more, my dear. Keep on getting it, and keep on giving it.”
Peter looked at the clock.
“Here endeth the first lesson,” he said. “Not even out of the prophets. I must go and see my father. More acting. Necessary, you know.”
He flung his arms out.
“I daren’t be real,” he said. “No one knows what an abomination I am.”
Quite unexpectedly Nellie felt weary and done for. She pulled herself together for a final encouragement.
“Ah, what a hopeful sign!” she said.
He lingered a moment.
“Quarter to eight,” he said. “We dine at half-past. Think of the old quarter-to-eights! Ritz, opera, Mrs. Trentham! Charlie and Bobby and Tommy and me and you, and Sophy and Ella and any fool you like to mention. Lord Poole, now——”
“No, that won’t do,” said she. “He was real. I grant you the rest weren’t. But he was real: he completely enjoyed himself—does still, bless him!”
“Wish I did,” said Peter. “I used to. And I don’t.”
“You won’t as long as you think about it.”
There was the woodland touch to finish with.
“You’re only ninety, are you?” she said. “Or is it ninety-one?”
“Ninety,” said Peter, grinning.
Thegrin soon cleared off. His father rose from the sofa on which he had been so elegantly resting, as Peter entered, and clasped his hand, though he had seen him at tea a couple of hours before.
“Have you heard from your mother?” he asked. “My loved and lost one?” He smoothed his velveteen coat as he spoke.
My loved and lost one! The velveteen coat!... The little demons swarmed into Peter’s soul—the demons of ridicule and cynicism and contempt and all the host of such. But rebel and ridicule as he might, he knew that he had been sham and charlatan on an immeasurably greater scale than his father.
“I had a report of her a couple of days ago,” he said. “Just a message through her solicitors.”
Mr. Mainwaring put the tips of his fingers in a neat row into his mouth, as if, in his suspense, to gnaw the nails of them. But he committed no such feat of violence. He merely sucked them, and took them out again.
“Tell me,” he said.
Peter tried to evoke any sort of kindliness or sympathy from his mind, and failed.
“She is quite well apparently,” he said, “and she——”
“She asked after me?” suggested his father.
“Yes, she asked after you. She hoped you were—comfortable, I think she said.”
“Comfortable! My God! Comfortable!”
Peter waited till this paroxysm of irony was spent.
“I ought to have written to her to-day,” he said, “but I didn’t. I shall write to-morrow. What shall I tell her about you?”
“What your heart bids you,” said he. “Tell her about me, as I am. Miserable, homeless, except for the charity of my children. I count Silvia as a child,” he explained.
Peter felt absolutely relentless.
“So you long for her to come back to you,” he said. “I will tell her.”
He regarded Peter with his chin in the hollow of his hand.
“You don’t understand, my dear, the depth——” he began.
“Explain it to me, then, father,” said he.
“Take your own case, then. Supposing Silvia—I use your case for the absurdity of it—supposing Silvia left your house. What would you do? Would you not give her complete freedom to return or not to return? Would not your heart say, ‘My love for her wants only what she wants’?”
“Then I won’t say that you long for her to come back to you,” said Peter. “I only want to know your wishes. I will transmit them. But—but why not do it yourself? You know her solicitors. Anything you send them will be forwarded to her.”
“The scoundrels!” cried Mr. Mainwaring.
“Oh, I don’t see that,” said Peter. He stifled a yawn: it was all too stupid.
“Scoundrels!” cried Mr. Mainwaring. “Aren’t they——” He appeared unable to say exactly what they were, and Peter got up.
“I’ll convey any message you like, father,” he said. “I only suggest that you might just as wellsend it yourself. There are two things you can do. You can summon my mother back, and, if you choose, divorce her if she doesn’t come, on the grounds of desertion. The other is to acquiesce in her stopping away as long as she chooses. I don’t see why you put a hypothetical case about Silvia and me. You want her to come back, or you don’t.”
This point of view necessitated some more stridings on the part of Mr. Mainwaring”.
“My angel, your angel, your Silvia,” he said, “has asked me if I would not like to spend the rest of the winter on the Riviera. A little sun for me, she said only to-night, a little change, a little chance of the healing of my wound. She offers me two months on the Riviera. Should not I be wrong if I did not accept her sweet charity?”
“Leave it over, you mean, about my mother,” asked Peter, “till you get back? Get a little sun first, and that sort of thing. I think that would be a very sensible arrangement. That was a charming idea of Silvia’s.”
He laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder, and his voice broke.
“Make Silvia happier than I have made my Maria,” he said. “The love of a good woman! My God! What brutes we men are! No, not brutes: heaven forbid that I should call you, or indeed myself, a brute. But more tenderness, my Peter, more making of allowances.Experto crede.”
He paused a moment in a fine attitude.
“Abe Darley!” he said. “Henry Wardour! They and their wives! Their pleasant chaff: their gentle fun! Yes, when you begin to step down from the tableland of life you want to find such hands as those in yours. A brilliant woman, too, is Joanna Darley.How she appreciates the cartoons. And your Aunt Eleanor! Eleanor, as she suggested that I should call her. We are John and Eleanor. She has commissioned me to do her portrait before I attack the fourth, the tremendous cartoon. Submarines: you remember my sketch for it.”
Peter went down the corridor to his room and Silvia’s with the gravity that attaches to the conclusion of a comic interlude. The tragic burden, all the worse for its temporary suspension, must be taken up again, and the interlude had hardened rather than softened him. He despised his father for being a “fake,” and that contempt stung him also, as with the back-stroke of his own lash. Smarting from that his mind went back to what Silvia had withheld from him, and there was the shrewdest hurt of all....
His bath was ready for him, and as he soaked and sprayed himself some tautness of physical vigour pictured the usual sequence to his bath, the dressing-gowned and drying séance in the chair close to Silvia’s toilet table. He would sink his resentment; he would tap at her door and go in to her with a flood of normal nonsense. Then, if she told him now, as she must surely do, the news she had withheld, he would receive it as news hitherto unknown to him.
He arrived at this stage of resolution, finished his bath and came out. And at that moment, even as his knuckles were raised to inquire at her door, his resentment against her, seizing upon some new pretext of bitterness, poured over him again. His hand dropped as he turned and went into his own room. He was late also—that served for an excuse—for at the moment the sonorous bell in the turret above Silvia’s room made its proclamation to the listening earth that dinner was served at Howes.
On the other side of the door Silvia, fully dressed and following the familiar sounds, was waiting for him to enter. How often had she waited like that, longing for him! She longed for him now, though dreading his coming, and so intertwined were these two that she could not disentangle the one from the other. She would tell him just what she had determined that he must know, she would ask his pardon for not having told him of the news before. She had used up, so it seemed to her, all the emotion of which she was mistress; what lay immediately in front of her covered like some hard integument the longing and dread with which she waited for him, though it left her superficial perceptions alert. The clink of the coals in the grate, the flapping of the flame there, were more vivid to her senses than anything else. There was the beating of rain on her windows, for the snow had ceased, and a wind from the south-west was beginning to bluster outside.... Then she heard Peter come out of his bathroom, and presently the door of his bedroom shut. Already the bell sounded sonorously above her: she must tell him then that night, when he came up to bed. There was relief in that. For an hour or two more the only barrier between him and her was in her own knowledge: it was not formally erected. She was conscious now that her heart had been beating fast in the anticipation of his coming, and she sat down for a few minutes (Peter would be late also) to recover her poise before she went downstairs. There was to be a jollification that night for tenants and servants: a dance for the elders, a Christmas tree for the children.
The wind which just now she had heard flinging the rain against her windows rose to a scream, andPeter, hurrying on with his dressing next door, saw a cloud of smoke driven out from his grate, followed by another and yet another, till in a few minutes the room was thick with its pungency. He remembered then that the Jackdaw had told him that something had gone wrong with the cowl of the chimney, and no doubt this change of wind caused this regurgitation ... these things always happened just before Christmas or bank holidays, when the British work-man became even more deliberate than usual. Opening the window seemed only to make things worse, and, heavy with his cold, he had no intention on this chill and bitter night of sleeping fireless. As with choking throat and streaming eyes he redoubled the speed of his dressing, he rang his bell and told his servant to transfer the necessaries for sleep and toilet to some other room. The uncles and aunts occupied the next suites, but farther along, beyond the head of the main stairs, was an unoccupied bedroom and dressing room, and he ordered that a fire should be lit there, and the change made during dinner, so that he would find the room ready for his tenancy that night. As he came out from that mephitic fog on to the corridor Silvia also emerged from her room.
“My chimney’s smoking like the devil,” he said. “I remember now that the Jackdaw told me there was something wrong with it. It’s quite impossible to sleep there. I’m having my room changed.”
He finished buttoning a shirt-link as he spoke, not looking at her. Somehow this set a key of coolness, of casualness.
“How tiresome for you,” she said. “Where”—she stumbled over the question—“where have you gone?”
“Oh, somewhere down the passage,” said Peter.
Just now, if he had come in to talk to her after his bath, she would have told him what he had to know. Now her resolution had a little cooled: it was not hot enough to enable her to ask him to come and talk to her when he came upstairs that night, nor yet to ask him more definitely where his room was. Besides, with the entertainment for the servants they would all be very late, and to-morrow would furnish a more convenient occasion. Or if not then, and not spontaneously on her part, he would come to her some night, seeking her, and then she would tell him.... In the interval there was the family farce of jollity to be kept up: it would only add to the difficulty of that if from her communication to him something unconjecturably critical arose. She had no idea how Peter would take it: there could be no mortal wound, for that implied that she was to him all that she missed being. But his pride, his vanity; how she longed to kill it, and how she hated to hurt it.
On his side, as they went down the broad stairs, resentment at what he knew she had withheld out-shouted all the counsel Nellie had given him, out-shouted, too, the authentic whisper of his own heart. He had but to listen to that, to act when action came, and always to think and to feel and to be without forethought, just blindly following its suggestions. But for that small voice to be heard he must unstopper his ears from that cotton-wool of vanity which shut out from his hearing all but the complaints and self-justifications which trickled through it. It had been and it was her business to tell him....
“My father says you have treated him to a month or two in the South,” he said. “That is very good of you: he will enjoy it.”
There was the ring as of a duty discharged in thisthat robbed it of spontaneousness, and it gave to her its own woodenness. Peter had not meant it like that: he wanted to thank her for her kindness, to let her know that he appreciated it. But all that passed now had to travel through the falsity of that situation between them, as through some mould which made it take a shape not truly its own, and come out at the end grimed and distorted.
“January and February are delightful on the Riviera,” she said. “A change will do him good.”
To him that seemed to double-lock the wards of the gate that should have stood open. They looked at each other through its bars: the very attempt on both sides to meet the conventional needs of the moment—the friendly word or two on the stairs—had but served to sever them. The femininity of his nature, already resentful at what had been withheld from him, construed her reply into a further withdrawal of herself, overlooking the fact that it was his own resentment that had led him into conventionalities of speech. His pride choked him: was it nothing to her that she was ripening with his fatherhood? Had she no inkling that not his head only but his heart was, as in some belated dawn, beginning to glow with her splendour? The male element in him was awaking, like Adam from the sleep which the Lord God had laid on him, and was beginning to find, to realize that what he expunged and expelled from himself became the living glory and the complement of him. All such perception was still clouded with the blanketing vapours of his own resentment and egoism, but through the rifts, from high above Silvia shone....
His pride choked him. What choked her was her love, that could not breathe but in its own high air.
Uncle Henry, on the occasion of his first visit to Howes, just before Silvia’s marriage, had found (and deplored) a certain “standoffishness,” so he expressed it, in his new nephew. His wife had not agreed with him; she found Peter to be “very refined.” But during the three days that now followed Uncle Henry quite scrapped his previous verdict. There could not have been a more seasonable host: Peter was full of fun, and indeed Aunt Eleanor was almost disposed to follow her husband’s example and reconsider her favourable opinion of Peter’s refinement. It was really naughty of him to put up that bit of mistletoe without warning her of it, and Mr. Mainwaring’s chaste salute had come as a great surprise to her, before she realized the public temptation she was making of herself by standing so squarely and indubitably just below it. But there was no harm in a good old-fashioned Christmas, and if Peter would insist on having a bowl of wassail to usher in the midnight, after all, he was the host, and it would have been mere churlishness to refuse to drink that second (or was it third?) glass that he filled up for her when she was not looking. There were foolish games on these evenings, and when the ladies went to bed roars of laughter ascended from the billiard-room, where the men “kept it up” till any hour. There was no harm in being young, so she and Aunt Joanna agreed, melted into unwilling cordiality over this riotous hospitality.