Silas was with Lady Malleson, more than usually morose. She lay upon the sofa, while he prowled up and down the room.
“Dene, you scarcely speak to me to-day?”
(“She cringes,” he thought with pride.)
“My sister-in-law’s in love,” he replied tersely.
“With whom has she fallen in love?” asked Lady Malleson, thinking how strange it was that she should be thus intimately conversant with a group of work-people down in the village.
“With Morgan,—the young zany.”
“Why, you always seemed so fond of him! your one human frailty,” she bantered. But he rounded on her with unwarrantable sharpness. “I think your ladyship is mistaken: I never remember saying I was fond of Morgan. They’re neither of them any more alive than a turtle-dove sunning itself in a wicker cage.”
“You strange creature—have younonatural affections?” she said, with indolent curiosity. “None for that young man, who really devotes himself to you? none for your little harmless sister-in-law?”
“I’m nothing to them—only a blind man to whom they’re kind out of their charity.”
“I don’t believe, Silas, that you are so bleak as you make out.”
“My own solitude, my lady, is my own choosing.”
“Why shouldn’t you accept what comfort those two young things could give you?”
“It’s weak,” he burst out, “why not stand alone? why depend on another? Why shouldn’t the strength of one suffice? Why all this need to double it? Love’s wholly a question of weakness; the weaker you are, the more desperately you love. A prop.... Love’s the first tie for an independent man to rid himself of. It’s a weakness that grows too easily out of all proportion. I want my mind for other things, not for anything so trite. So well charted. So ... so recurrent.”
“Another theory, Silas? Be careful,” she lazily teased him; “what we most abuse, you know, is often what we most fear.”
“I shall break them,” he growled.
“What! your sister-in-law? that frail-looking little thing?”
“She, and ... her lover.”
“Silas, you scare me sometimes, you speak so savagely.”
“Scare you, my lady? even you?”
“Why ‘even me’?”
“You’ve explored me,” he said grudgingly; “you know me so well.”
“Do I? everything about you?”
“Not quite,” he said, in a tone of profound gloom.
“Do you know yourself, I wonder?”
“To the depths,” he replied.
“Do you enjoy having such complete self-knowledge?”
“It’s lonely,” he said, his face drawn.
“Lonely, but you havemenow to talk to.”
“Oh, your ladyship is very kind and gracious,” he said, with the deferential manner he sometimes abruptly assumed, and through which she always uncomfortably suspected the sarcasm; “I am very grateful to your ladyship. But your ladyship....” and thus far he preserved his deference, but abandoned it now to exclaim as though tormented, “You’re a whetstone to my disquiet; you taunt me, you keep all peace from me.”
“I never knew you wanted peace.”
He was tired and dispirited that day, and had been dwelling upon his blindness; he craved for peace, for some one to give him peace!—and she knew it. But she must whip and provoke him back to the strain of his old attitude. She did not know what urged her to say as she did, in her most sneering tone, “I never knew you wanted peace.”
“Nor I do,” he snarled; “I wouldn’t have it as a gift.”
III
So they wrangled always; indispensable she might be to him, but peace was certainly not what she brought him. And although they maintained the disguise afforded by her tone of slight condescension, and by his of conventional respect, underneath this disguise fomented the perpetual and manifold contest, of class against class, of the rough against the fastidious, of the man against the woman. She had very little real fear that its full strength would ever break over her,—little real fear, only enough to provide the spice she exacted. She trusted to her appraisement of him: too proud to risk a rebuff; too fiercely recalcitrant under the thongs of affection. Under their menace he snorted and reared, while she laughed indolently, and incited him to further indignations. Yet she held him, she held him! and though she knew full well that she fretted and exasperated him, she held him still; seeing his struggles, but toying with him, pretending to let him go, pulling him back, distracting and confusing his spirit that was always beating round in the search for escape; and all the while she heard from various quarters the pleasant flattery of her guilt extolled under the name of charity.
IV
“You’ll be happy soon: you’ll have the spring,” Silas said to Nan. He did not speak with the customary note of derision in his voice,—this was the newer Silas,—but she thought she detected it very painstakingly concealed.
She went away from him, and her going was after the manner of a flight. Had she followed her impulse, she would have gone running, with her head bent down between her protecting hands. It seemed that she could keep nothing from Silas; he laid his grasp without mercy upon her shyest secrets. She had tried to keep her joy in the coming spring a secret; although reserve was hard of accomplishment to her, she had achieved it, hiding her delight away in her heart, or so she believed, not knowing that her laughter had rung more clearly, or that she had been singing so constantly over her work in the two cottages. She was conscious of no impatience and no desires. She would not, by a wish, have made herself a month older. She was happy now, she told herself, because the country would presently become a refuge from the factory, instead of its dismal and consonant setting, wide and level as the sea itself, in its centre the sinister hump of theabbey and the factory. By walking a little way in the opposite direction, and turning her back upon the village, she would dismiss the factory and look across the liberated country, as it was impossible to do in these days when the floods accompanied the factory for miles around as a reflection of its spirit. She told herself that she wanted nothing more. She knew that she could be happy,—perhaps not indefinitely, but she did not look far ahead, the present was too buoyant and suspended,—happy for the moment if Silas would but leave her alone.