"Now" said Mr. Hannay, "I understand what's meant by the solemnisation of holy matrimony. That woman would solemnise a farce at the Vaudeville, with Gwen Richards on."
"She very nearly solemnised my dinner," said Mrs. Hannay.
"She doesn't know," said Mr. Hannay, "what a dinner is. She's got no appetite herself, and she tried to take mine away from me. A regular dog-in-the-manger of a woman."
"Oh, come, you know," said Gorst. "She can't be as bad as all that. Edith's awfully fond of her."
"Andthat'sgood enough for you?" said Mrs. Hannay.
"Yes. That's good enough for me.Ilike her," said Gorst stoutly; and Mrs. Hannay hid in her pocket-handkerchief a face quivering with mirth.
But Gorst, as he departed, turned on the doorstep and repeated, "Honestly, I like her."
"Well, honestly," said Mr. Hannay, "I don't." And, lost in gloomy forebodings for his friend, he sought consolation in whiskey and soda.
Mrs. Hannay took a seat beside him.
"And what did you think of the dinner?" said she.
"It was a dead failure, Pussy."
"You old stupid, I mean the dinner, not the dinner-party."
Mrs. Hannay rubbed her soft, cherubic face against his sleeve, and as she did so she gently removed the whiskey from his field of vision. She was a woman of exquisite tact.
"Oh, the dinner, my plump Pussy-cat, was a dream—a happy dream."
"There are moments, I admit," said Majendie, "when Hannay saddens me."
Anne had drawn him into discussing at breakfast-time their host and hostess of the night before.
"Shall you have to see very much of them?" She had made up her mind that she would see very little, or nothing, of the Hannays.
"Well, I haven't, lately, have I?" said he, and she owned that he had not.
"How you ever could—" she began, but he stopped her.
"Oh well, we needn't go into that."
It seemed to her that there was something dark and undesirable behind those words, something into which she could well conceive he would not wish to go. It never struck her that he merely wished to put an end to the discussion.
She brooded over it, and became dejected. The great tide of her trouble had long ago ebbed out of her sight. Now it was as if it had turned, somewhere on the edge of the invisible, and was creeping back again. She wished she had never seen or heard of the Hannays—detestable people.
She betrayed something of this feeling to Edith, who was impatient for an account of the evening. (It was thus that Edith entered vicariously into life.)
"Did you expect me to enjoy it?" she replied to the first eager question.
"No, I don't know that I did.Ishould have enjoyed it very much indeed."
"I don't believe you."
"Was there anybody there that you disliked so much?"
"The Hannays were there. It was enough."
"You liked Mr. Gorst?"
"Yes. He was different."
"Poor Charlie. I'm glad you liked him."
"I don't like him any better for meeting him there, my dear."
"Don't say that to Walter, Nancy."
"I have said it. How Walter can care for those people is a mystery to me."
"He ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn't. Lawson Hannay has been a good friend to him."
"Do you mean that he's under any obligation to him?"
"Yes. Obligations, my dear, that none of us can ever repay."
"It's intolerable!" said Anne.
"Is it? Wait till you know what the obligations are. That man you dislike so much stood by Walter when your friends the Eliotts, my child, turned their virtuous backs on him—when none of his own people, even, would lend him a helping hand. It was Lawson Hannay who saved him."
"Saved him?"
"Saved him. Moved heaven and earth to get him out of that woman's clutches."
Anne shook her head, and put her hands over her eyes to dispel her vision of him. Edith laughed.
"You can't see Mr. Hannay moving heaven?"
"No, really I can't."
"Well,Isaw him. At least, if he didn't move heaven, he moved earth. When nothing else could shake her hold, he bought her off."
"Bought—her—off?"
"Yes, bought her—paid her money to go. And she went."
"He owes him money, then?"
"Money, and a great many other things beside. You don't like it?"
"I can't bear it."
"Of course you can't. It hurts your pride. It hurt mine badly. But my pride has had to go down in the dust before Lawson Hannay."
Anne raised her head as if she refused to lower her pride an inch to him. She was trying to put the whole episode behind her, as it had come before her. She had nothing whatever to do with it. Edith, of course, had to be grateful.Shewas not bound by the same obligation. But she was determined that they should be quit of the Hannays. She would make Walter pay back that money.
Meanwhile Edith's eyes filled with tears at the recollection. "Lawson Hannay may not have been a very good man himself—I believe at one time he wasn't. But he loved his friend, and he didn't want to see him going the same way."
"The same way? That means that, if it hadn't been for Mr. Hannay, he would never have met her."
"Mr. Hannay did his best to prevent his meeting her. He knew what she was, and Walter didn't. He took him off in his yacht for weeks at a time, to get him out of her way. When she followed him he brought him back. When she persecuted him—well, I've told you what he did."
Anne lifted her hand in supplication, and rose and went to the open window, as if, after that recital, she thirsted for fresh air. Edith smiled, in spite of herself, at her sister-in-law's repudiation of the subject.
"Poor Mr. Hannay," said she, "the worst you can say of him now is that he eats and drinks a little more than's good for him."
"And that he's married a wife who sets him the example," said Anne, returning from the window-sill refreshed.
"She keeps him straight, dear."
"Edith! I shall never understand you. You're angelically good. But it's horrible, the things you take for granted. 'She keeps him straight!'"
"You think I take for granted a natural tendency to crookedness. I don't—I don't. What I take for granted is a natural tendency to straightness, when it gets its way. It doesn't always get it, though, especially in a town like Scale."
"I wish we were out of it."
"So did I, dear, once; but I don't now. We must make the best of it."
"Has Walter paid any of that money back to Mr. Hannay?"
Edith looked up at her sister-in-law, startled by the hardness in her voice. She had meant to spare Anne's pride the worst blow, but something in her question stirred the fire that slept in Edith.
"No," she said, "he hasn't. He was going to, but Mr. Hannay cancelled the debt, in order that he might marry—that he might marry you."
Anne drew back as if Edith had struck her bodily. She, then, had been bought, too, with Mr. Hannay's money. Without it, Walter could not have afforded to marry her; for she was poor.
She sat silent, until her self-appointed hour with Edith ended; and then, still silently, she left the room.
And Edith turned her cheek on her cushions and sobbed weakly to herself. "Walter would never forgive me if he knew I'd told her that. It was awful of me. But Anne would have provoked the patience of a saint."
Anne owned that Edith was a saint, and that the provocation was extreme.
In the afternoon, Edith, at her own request, was forgiven, and Anne, by way of proving and demonstrating her forgiveness, announced her amiable intention of calling on Mrs. Hannay on her "day."
The day fell within a week of the dinner. It was agreed that Majendie was to meet his wife at the Hannays, and to take her home. There was a good mile between Prior Street and the Park; and Anne was a leisurely walker; so it happened that she was late, and that Majendie had arrived a few minutes before her. She did not notice him there all at once. Mrs. Hannay was a sociable little lady; the radius of her circle was rapidly increasing, and her "day" drew crowds. The lamps were not yet lit, and as Anne entered the room, it was dim to her after the daylight of the open air. She had counted on an inconspicuous entrance, and was astonished to find that the announcement of her name caused a curious disturbance and division in the assembly. A finer ear than Anne's might have detected an ominous sound, something like the rustling of leaves before a storm. But Anne's self-possession rendered her at times insensible to changes in the social atmosphere. In any case the slight commotion was no more than she had come prepared for in a whole roomful of ill-bred persons.
"Pussy," said a lady who stood near Mrs. Hannay. Mrs. Hannay had her back to the doorway. The lady's voice rang on a low note of warning, and she brought her mouth close to Mrs. Hannay's ear.
The hostess started, turned, and came at once towards Mrs. Majendie, rolling deftly between the persons who obstructed her perturbed and precipitate way. The perfect round of her cheeks had dropped a little; it was the face of a poor cherub in vexation and dismay.
"Dear Mrs. Majendie,"—her voice, once so triumphant, had dropped too, almost to a husky whisper,—"how very good of you."
She led her to a sofa, the seat of intimacy, set back a little from the central throne. (Majendie could be seen fairly immersed in the turmoil, struggling desperately through it, with a plate in his hand.)
Mrs. Hannay was followed by her husband, by the other lady, and by Gorst. She introduced the other lady as Mrs. Ransome, and they seated themselves, one on each side of Anne. The two men drew up in front of the sofa, and began to talk very fast, in loud tones and with an unnatural gaiety. The women, too, closed in upon her somewhat with their knees; they were both a little confused, both more than a little frightened, and the manner of both was mysteriously apologetic.
Anne, with her deep, insulating sense of superiority, had no doubt as to the secret of the situation. She felt herself suitably protected, guarded from contact, screened from view, distinguished very properly from persons to whom it was manifestly impossible, even for Mrs. Hannay, to introduce her. She was very sorry for poor Mrs. Hannay, she tried to make it less difficult for her, by ignoring the elements of confusion and fright. But poor Mrs. Hannay kept on being frightened; she refused to part with her panic and be natural. So terrified was she, that she hardly seemed to take in what Mrs. Majendie was saying.
Anne, however, conversed with the utmost amiability, while her thoughts ran thus: "Dear lady, why this agitation? You cannot help being vulgar. As for your friends, what do you think I expected?"
The other lady, Mrs. Dick Ransome, could not be held accountable for anything but her own private vulgarity; and it struck Anne as odd that Mrs. Dick Ransome, who was not responsible for Mrs. Hannay, seemed, if anything, more terrified than Mrs. Hannay, who was responsible for her.
Mrs. Dick Ransome did not, at the first blush, inspire confidence. She was a woman with a great deal of blonde hair, and a fresh-coloured, conspicuously unspiritual face; coarse-grained, thick-necked, ruminantly animal, but kind; kind to Mrs. Hannay, kind to Anne, kinder even than Mrs. Hannay who was responsible for all the kindness.
Charlie Gorst hurried away to get Mrs. Majendie some tea, and Lawson's Hannay's large form moved into the gap thus made, blocking Anne's view of the room. He stood looking down upon her with an extraordinary smile of mingled apology and protection. Gorst's return was followed by Majendie, wandering uneasily with his plate. He smiled at Anne, too; and his smile conveyed the same suggestion of desperation and distress. It was as if he said to her: "I'm sorry for letting you in for such a crew, but how can I help it?" She smiled back at him brightly, as much as to say; "Don't mind. It amuses me. I'm taking it all in."
He wandered away, and Anne felt that the women exchanged looks across her shoulders.
"I think I'll be going, Pussy dear," said Mrs. Ransome, nodding some secret intelligence. She elbowed her way gently across the room, and came back again, shaking her head hopelessly and helplessly. "She says I can go if I like, but she'll stay," said Mrs. Ransome under her breath.
"Oh-h-h," said Mrs. Hannay under hers.
"What am I to do?" said Mrs. Ransome, flurried into audible speech.
"Stay—stay. It's much better." Mrs. Hannay plucked her husband by the sleeve, and he lowered an attentive ear. Mrs. Ransome covered the confidence with a high-pitched babble.
"You find Scale a very sociable place, don't you, Mrs. Majendie?" said Mrs. Ransome.
"Go," said Mrs. Hannay, "and take her off into the conservatory, or somewhere."
"More sociable in the winter-time, of course." (Mrs. Ransome, in her agitation, almost screamed it.)
"I can't take her off anywhere, if she won't go," said Mr. Hannay in a thick but penetrating whisper. He collapsed into a chair in front of Anne, where he seemed to spread himself, sheltering her with his supine, benignant gaze.
Mrs. Hannay was beside herself, beholding his invertebrate behaviour. "Don't sit down, stupid. Do something—anything."
He went to do it, but evidently, whatever it was, he had no heart for it.
A maid came in and lit a lamp. There was a simultaneous movement of departure among the nearer guests.
"Oh, heavens," said Mrs. Hannay, "don't tell me they're all going to go!"
Anne, serenely contemplating these provincial manners, was bewildered by the horror in Mrs. Hannay's tone. There was no accounting for provincial manners, or she would have supposed that Mrs. Hannay, mortified by the presence of her most undesirable acquaintance, would have rejoiced to see them go.
Their dispersal cleared a space down the middle of the room to the bay-window, and disclosed a figure, a woman's figure, which occupied, majestically, a settee. The settee, set far back in the bay of the window, was in a direct line with Anne's sofa. That part of the room was still unlighted, and the figure, sitting a little sideways, remained obscure.
A servant went round lighting lamps.
The first lamp to be lit stood beside Anne's sofa. The effect of the illumination was to make the lady in the window turn on her settee. Across the space between, her eyes, obscure lights in a face still undefined, swept with the turning of her body, and fastened upon Anne's face, bared for the first time to their view. They remained fixed, as if Anne's face had a peculiar fascination for them.
"Who is the lady sitting in the window?" asked Anne.
"It's my sister." Mrs. Ransome blinked as she answered, and her blood ran scarlet to the roots of her blonde hair.
A cherub, discovering a horrible taste in his trumpet, would have looked like Mrs. Hannay.
"Do let me give you some more tea, Mrs. Majendie?" said she, while Mrs. Ransome signalled to her husband. "Here, Dick, come and make yourself useful."
Mr. Ransome, a little stout man with a bald head, a pale puffy face, a twinkling eye and a severe moustache, was obedient to her summons.
"Let me see," said she, "have you met Mrs. Majendie?"
"I have not had that pleasure," said Mr. Ransome, and bowed profoundly. He waited assiduously on Mrs. Majendie. The Ransomes might have been responsible for the whole occasion, they so rallied around and supported her.
Hannay and Gorst, Ransome and another man were gathered together in a communion with the lady of the settee. There was a general lull, and her voice, a voice of sweet but somewhat penetrating quality, was heard.
"Don't talk to me," said she, "about women being jealous of each other. Do you suppose I mind another woman being handsome? I don't care how handsome she is, so long as she isn't handsome in my style. Of course, I don't say I could stand it if she was the very moral of me."
"I say, supposing Toodles met the very moral of herself?"
"Could Toodles have a moral? I doubt it."
"I want to know what she'd do with it."
"Yes, by Jove, whatwouldyou do?"
"Do? I should do my worst. I should make her sit somewhere with a good strong light on her."
"Hold hard there," said her brother-in-law (the man who called her Toodles), "Lady Cayley doesn't want that lamp lit just yet"
In the silence of the rest, the name seemed to leap straight across the room to Anne.
The two women beside her heard it, and looked at each other and at her. Anne sickened under their eyes, struck suddenly by the meaning of their protection and their sympathy. She longed to rise, to sweep them aside and go. But she was kept motionless by some superior instinct of disdain.
Outwardly she appeared in no way concerned by this revelation of the presence of Lady Cayley. She might never have heard of her, for any knowledge that her face betrayed.
Majendie, not far from the settee in the window, was handing cucumber sandwiches to an old lady. And Lady Cayley had taken the matches from the maid and was lighting the lamp herself, and was saying, "I'm not afraid of the light yet, I assure you. There—look at me."
Everybody looked at her, and she looked at everybody, as she sat in the lamplight, and let it pour over her. She seemed to be offering herself lavishly, recklessly, triumphantly, to the light.
Lady Cayley was a large woman of thirty-seven, who had been a slender and a pretty woman at thirty. She would have been pretty still if she had been a shade less large. She had tiny upward-tilted features in her large white face; but the lines of her jaw and her little round prominent chin were already vanishing in a soft enveloping fold, flushed through its whiteness with a bloom that was a sleeping colour. Her forehead and eyelids were exceedingly white, so white that against them her black eyebrows and blue eyes were vivid and emphatic. Her head carried high a Gainsborough hat of white felt, with black plumes and a black line round its brim. Under its upward and its downward curve her light brown hair was tossed up, and curled, and waved, and puffed into an appearance of great exuberance and volume. Exuberance and volume were the note of this lady, a note subdued a little by the art of her dressmaker. A gown of smooth black cloth clung to her vast form without a wrinkle, sombre, severe, giving her a kind of slenderness in stoutness. She wore a white lace vest and any quantity of lace ruffles, any number of little black velvet lines and points set with paste buttons. And every ruffle, every line, every point and button was an accent, emphasising some beauty of her person.
And Anne looked at Lady Cayley once and no more.
It was enough. The trouble that she had put from her came again upon her, no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined. She grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of her own horror made flesh.
A terrible comprehension fell on her of that body, of its power, its secret, and its sin.
For the first moment, when she looked from it to her husband, her mind refused to associate him with that degradation. Reverence held her, and a sudden memory of her passion in the woods at Westleydale. Mercifully, they veiled her intelligence, and made it impossible for her to realise that he should have sunk so low.
Then she remembered. She had known that it was, that it would be so, that, sooner or later, the woman would come back. Her brain conceived a curious two-fold intuition of the fact.
It was all foreappointed and foreknown, that she should come to this hateful house, and should sit there, and that her eyes should be opened and that she should see.
And the woman's voice rose again. "Do I see cucumber sandwiches?" said Lady Cayley. "Dick, go and tell Mr. Majendie that if he doesn't want all those sandwiches himself, I'll have one."
Ransome gave the message, and Majendie turned to the lady of the settee, presenting the plate with the finest air of abstraction. Her large arm hovered in selection long enough for her to shoot out one low quick speech.
"I only wanted to see if you'd cut me, Wallie. Topsy bet me two to ten you wouldn't."
"Why on earth should I?"
"Oh, on earth I know you wouldn't. But didn't I hear just now you'd married and gone to heaven?"
"Gone to——?"
"Sh—sh—sh—I'm sure she doesn't let you use those naughty words. You needn't say you're not in heaven, for I can see you are. You didn't expect to meet me there, did you?"
"I certainly didn't expect to meet you here."
"How can you be so rude? Dick, take that tiresome plate from him, he doesn't know what to do with it. Yes. I'll have another before it goes away for ever."
Majendie had given up the plate before he realised that he was parting with the link that bound him to the outer world. He turned instantly to follow it there; but she saw his intention and frustrated it.
"Butter? Ugh! You might hold my cup for me while I take my gloves off."
She peeled two skin-tight gloves from her plump hands, so carefully that the operation gave her all the time she wanted.
"I believe you're still afraid of me?" said she.
He was doing his best to look over her head; but she smiled a smile so flashing that it drew his eyes to her involuntarily; he felt it as positively illuminating their end of the room.
"You're not? Well, prove it."
"Is it possible to prove anything to you?"
Again he was about to break from her impatiently. Nothing, he had told himself, would induce him to stay and talk to her. But he saw Anne's face across the room; it was pale and hard, fixed in an expression of implacable repulsion. And she was not looking at Lady Cayley, but at him.
"You can prove it," said Lady Cayley, "to me and everybody else—they're all looking at you—by sitting down quietly for one moment, and trying to look a little less as if we compromised each other."
He stayed, to prove his innocence before Anne; and he stood, to prove his independence before Lady Cayley. He had longed to get away from the woman, to stand by his wife's side—to take her out of the room, out of the house, into the open air. And now the perversity that was in him kept him where he hated to be.
"That's right. Thank heaven one of us has got some presence of mind."
"Presence ofmind?"
"Yes. You don't seem to think ofme," she added softly.
"Why should I?" he replied with a brutality that surprised himself.
She looked at him with blue eyes softly suffused, and the curve of a red mouth sweet and tremulous. "Why?" her whisper echoed him. "Because I'm a woman."
Her eyelids dropped ever so little, but their dark lashes (following the upward trend of her features) curled to such a degree that the veil was ineffectual. He saw a large slit of the wonderful, indomitable blue.
"I'm a woman, and you're a man, you see; and the world's on your side, my friend, not on mine."
She said it sweetly. If she had been bitter she would have (as she expressed it) "choked him off"; but Lady Cayley knew better than to be bitter now, at thirty-seven. She had learnt that her power was in her sweetness.
His face softened (from the other end of the room Anne saw it soften), and Lady Cayley pursued with soundless feet her fugitive advantage.
"Poor Wallie, you needn't look so frightened. I'm quite safe now, or soon will be. Didn't I tell you I was going there too? I'm going to be married."
"I'm delighted to hear it," he said stiffly.
"To a perfect angel," said she.
"Really? If you're going up to heaven, he, I take it, is not coming down to earth."
"Nothing is settled," said Lady Cayley, with such monstrous gravity that his stiffness melted, and he laughed outright.
Anne heard him.
"Who, if I may ask, is this celestial, this transcendent being?"
She shook her head. "I can't tell you, yet."
"What, isn't even that settled?"
Majendie was so genuinely diverted at that moment that he would not have left her if he could.
She took the sting of it, and flushed, dumbly. Remorse seized him, and he sought to soothe her.
"My dear lady, I had a vision of heavenly hosts standing round you in such quantities that it might be difficult to make a selection, you know."
She rallied finely under the reviving compliment. "My dear, it's a case of quality, not quantity—" Her past was so present to them both that he almost understood her to say, "this time."
"I see," he said. "The wings. But nothing's settled?"
"It's settled right enough," said she, by which he understood her to imply that the "angel's" case was. She had settled him. Majendie could see her doing it. His imagination played lightly with the preposterous idea. He conceived her in the act of bringing down her bird of heaven, actually "winging him."
"But it's not given out yet."
"I see."
"You're the first I've told, except Topsy. Topsy knows it. So you mustn't tell anybody else."
"I never tell anybody anything," said he.
He gathered that it was not quite so settled as she wished him to suppose, and that Lady Cayley anticipated some possible dashing of the cup of matrimony from her lips.
"So I'm not to have panics, in the night, and palpitations, every time I think of it?"
"Certainly not, if it rests with me."
"I wanted you to know. But it's so precious, I'm afraid of losing it. Nothing," said Lady Cayley, "can make up for the loss of a good man's love. Except," she added, "a good woman's."
"Quite so," he assented coldly, with horror at his perception of her drift.
His coldness riled her.
"Who," said she with emphasis, "is the lady who keeps making those awful eyes at us over Pussy's top-knot?"
"That lady," said Majendie, "as it happens, is my wife."
"Why didn't you tell me that before? That's what comes, you see, of not introducing people. I'll tell you one thing, Wallie. She's awfully handsome. But you always had good taste. Br-r-r, there's a draught cutting my head off. You might shut that window, there's a dear."
He shut it.
"And put my cup down."
He put it down.
Anne saw him. She had seen everything.
"And help me on with my cape."
He lifted the heavy sable thing with two fingers, and helped her gingerly. A scent, horrid and thick, and profuse with memories, was shaken from her as she turned her shoulder. He hoped she was going. But she was not going; not she. Her body swayed towards him sinuously from hips obstinately immobile, weighted, literally, with her unshakable determination to sit on.
She rewarded him with a smile which seemed to him, if anything, more atrociously luminous than the last. "I must keep you up to the mark," said she, as she turned with it. "Your wife's looking at you, and I feel responsible for your good behaviour. Don't keep her waiting. Can't you see she wants to go?"
"And I want to go, too," said he savagely. And he went.
And as she watched Mrs. Walter Majendie's departure, Lady Cayley smiled softly to herself; tasting the first delicious flavour of success.
She had made Mrs. Walter Majendie betray herself; she had made her furious; she had made her go.
She had sat Mrs. Walter Majendie out.
If the town of Scale, the mayor and the aldermen, had risen and given her an ovation, she could not have celebrated more triumphally her return.
Anne and her husband walked home in silence across the Park, grateful for its darkness. Majendie could well imagine that she would not want to talk. He made allowance for her repulsion; he respected it and her silence as its sign. She had every right to her resentment. He had let her in for the Hannays, who had let her in for the inconceivable encounter. On the day of her divorce Sarah Cayley had removed herself from Scale, and he had shrunk from providing for the supreme embarrassment of her return. He had looked on her as definitely, consummately departed. She had disappeared, down dingy vistas, into unimaginable obscurities. He pictured her as sunk, in Continental abysses, beyond all possibility of resurgence. And she had emerged (from abominations) smiling that indestructible smile. The incident had been unpleasant, so unpleasant that he didn't want to talk about it. All the same, he would have done violence to his feelings and apologised for it then and there, but that he really judged it better to let well alone. It was well, he thought, that Anne was so silent. She might have had a great deal to say, and it was kind of her not to say it, to let him off so easily.
Anne's interpretation of Majendie's silence was not so favourable. After being exposed to the pain and insult of Lady Cayley's presence she had expected an immediate apology, and she inferred from its omission an unpardonable complicity. Any compliance with the public toleration of that person would have been inexcusable, and he had been more than compliant, more than tolerant; he had been solicitous, attentive, deferent. And deference to such a woman was insolence to his wife. Anne was struck dumb by the shameless levity of the proceedings. The two had behaved as if nothing had happened, or rather (she bitterly corrected herself) as if everything had happened, and might happen any day again (she inferred as much from his silence). It would—it would happen.Herintentions were, to Anne's mind, unmistakable; that was plainly what she had come back for. As to his intentions, Anne was not yet clear. She had not made up her mind that they were bad; but she shuddered as she said to herself that he was "weak." He had come at that woman's call; he had hung round her; he had waited on her at her bidding; at her bidding he had sat down beside her; he had listened to her, attracted, charmed, delighted; he had talked to her in the low voice Anne knew. How could she tell what had or had not passed between them there, what intimacies, what recognitions, what resurrections of the corrupt, ill-buried past? He had been "weak—weak—weak." Henceforth she must reckon with his weakness, and reckoning with it, she must keep him from that woman by any method, and at any cost! It was something that he had the grace to be ashamed of himself (another inference from his silence). No wonder, after that communion, if he was ashamed to look at his wife or speak to her.
He went straight to Edith when they reached home, and Anne went upstairs to her bedroom.
She had a great desire to be alone. She wanted to pray, as she had prayed in that room at Scarby on the morning of her discovery. Not that she felt in the least as she had felt then. She was more profoundly wounded—wounded beyond passion and beyond tears, calm and self-contained in her vision of the inevitable, the fore-ordained reality. She had to get rid of her vision; it was impossible to live with it, impossible to live through another hour like the last. Her desire to pray was a terrible, urgent longing that consumed her, impatient of every minute that kept her from her prayer. She controlled it, moving slowly as she took off her outdoor clothes and put them decorously away; feeling that the force of her prayer gathered and mounted behind these minute obstructions and delays.
She knelt down by her bed. She had been used to pray there with her eyes fixed upon the crucifix which he had given her. It hung low, almost between the pillows of their bed. Now she closed her eyes to shut it from her sight. It was then that she realised what had been done to her. With the closing of her eyes she opened some back room in her brain, a hot room, now dark, and now charged with a red light, vaporous and vivid, that ran in furious pulses, as it were the currents of her blood made visible. The room thus opened was tenanted by the revolting image of Lady Cayley. Now it loomed steadily in the dark, now it leapt quiveringly into the red, vaporous light. She could not see her husband, but she had a sickening sense that he was there, looming, and that his image, too, would leap into sight at some signal of her unwilling thought. She knew that that back room would remain, built up indestructibly in the fabric of her mind. It would be set apart for ever for the phantom of her husband and her husband's mistress. By a tremendous effort of will she shut the door on it. There it must be for ever, but wherever she looked, she would not look there; much less allow herself to dwell in the unclean place. It was not to think of that woman, his mistress, that she had gone down on her knees. To think of her was contamination. After all, the woman had no power over her inner life. She was not forced to think of her. She had her sanctuary and her way of escape.
But before she could get there she had to struggle against the fatigue which came of her effort not to think. Once she would have resigned herself to this physical lassitude, mistaking it for the sinking of the soul in the beatific self-surrender. But Anne's sufferings had brought her a little further on her path. She had come to recognise that supine state as a great danger to the spiritual life. It was not by lassitude, but by concentration that the intense communion was attained. She lifted her bowed head as a sign of her exaltation.
And as she lifted it, she caught, as it were, the approach of triumphal music. Words gathered, as on wings, from the clean-swept heavenly spaces—they went by her like the passing of an immense processional: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in...." It came on, that heavenly invasion, and all her earthly barriers went down before it. And it was as if something strong in her, something solitary and pure, had cloven its way through the mesh of the throbbing nerves, through the beating currents of the blood, through the hot red lights of the brain, and had escaped into the peaceful blank. She remained there a moment, in the place of bliss, the divine place of the self-surrendered soul, where mortal emptiness draws down immortality.
She said to herself, "I have my refuge; no one can take it from me. Nothing matters so long as I can get there."
She rose from her knees more calm and self-contained than ever, barely conscious of her wound.
So calm and so self-contained was she at dinner that Majendie had an agreeable rebound; he supposed that she had recovered from the abominable encounter, and had put Lady Cayley out of her head like a sensible woman. Edith had received his account of that incident with a gravity that had made him profoundly uncomfortable; and his relief was in proportion to his embarrassment. Unfortunately it gave him the appearance of complacency; and complacency in the circumstances was more than Anne could bear. Coming straight from her exaltation and communion, she was crushed by the profound, invisible difference that separated them, the perpetual loneliness of her unwedded, unsubjugated soul. They lived a whole earth and a whole heaven apart. He was untouched by the fires that burnt and purified her. The tragic crises that destroyed, the spiritual moments that built her up again, passed by him unperceived. If she were to tell him how she had attained her present serenity of mind, by what vision, by what effort, by what sundering of body and soul, he would not understand.
And that was not the worst. She had learnt not to look for that spiritual understanding in him. It mattered little that her unique suffering and her unique consolation should remain alike ignored. The terrible thing was that he should have come out of his own ordeal so smiling and so unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he could meet, after seven years, in his wife's presence, the partner of his sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)—meet her, and not be shaken by the shame of it. It showed how lightly he held it, how low his standard was. She recalled, shuddering, the woman's face. Nothing in the visions she had so shrunk from could compare with the violent reality. For one moment of repulsion she saw him no less gross. She wondered, would she have to reckon with that, henceforth, too?
She looked up, and met across the table the engaging innocence that she recognised as the habitual expression of his face. He had no idea of what dreadful things she was thinking of him. She put her thoughts from her, admitting that she had never had to reckon with that, yet. But it was terrible to her that, while he forced her to such thinking, he could sit there so unconscious, and so unashamed. He sat there, bright-eyed, smiling, a little flushed, playing with a light topic in a manner that suggested a conscience singularly at ease. He went on sitting there, absolutely unembarrassed, eating dessert. The eating of dinner was bad enough, it showed complacency. But dessert argued callousness. She had wondered how he could have any appetite at all. Her dinner had almost choked her.
And she sat waiting for him to finish, hardly looking at him, detached, saint-like, and still.
At last her silence struck him as a little ominous. He had distinct misgivings as they turned into the study for coffee and his cigarette. Anne sat up in her chair, refusing the support and luxury of cushions, leaning a little forward with a brooding air.
"Well, Nancy," said he, "are you going to read to me?"
(Better to read than talk.)
"Not now," said she. "I want to talk to you."
He saw that it was not to be avoided. "Won't you let me have my coffee and a cigarette first?"
She waited, silent, with a strained air of patience more uncomfortable than words.
"Well," said he, lighting a second cigarette, and settling in the position that would best enable him to bear it, "out with it, and get it over."
"I want to know," said she, "what you are going to do."
"To do?" He was genuinely bewildered.
"Yes, to do."
"But about what?"
"About that woman."
He was so charmed with the angelic absurdity of the question that he paused while he took it in, smiling.
"I can't see," he said presently, "that I'm called upon to take action. Why should I?"
She drew herself up proudly.
"For my sake."
He was instantly grave. "For your sake, dear, I would do a great deal. But"—he smiled again—"what action should I take?"
"Is it for me to say?"
"Well, I hardly know. I should be glad, at any rate, if you'd make a suggestion. I can't, for instance, get up and turn the lady out of her own sister's house. Do you want me to do that? Would you like me to—to take her away in a cab?"
There was a long silence, so awful that he forced himself to speak. "I am extremely sorry. It was, of course, outrageous that you should have had to sit in the same room with her for five minutes. But what could I do?"
"You could have takenmeaway."
"I did, as soon as I got the chance."
"Not before you had"—she paused for her phrase—"condoned her appearance."
"Condoned her appearance? How?"
"By your whole manner to her."
"Would you have had me uncivil?"
"There are degrees," said she, "between incivility and marked attention."
He coloured. "Marked attention! There was nothing marked about it. What could I do? Would you, I say, have had me turn my back on the unfortunate woman? That would have been marked attention, if you like."
"I don't know what I would have had you do. One has no rules beforehand for inconceivable situations. It was inconceivable that I should have met her as I did, in your friend's house. Inconceivable that I should meet such people anywhere. What I do ask is that you will not let me be exposed in that way again."
"That I certainly will not. The Ransomes did their best to get her out of the room to-day. They won't annoy you. I can't conceive why they called—except that they have always been rather fond of me. You can't hold people accountable for all the doings of all their relations, can you?"
"In this case I should say you could—perfectly well."
"Well, I don't, as it happens. But you needn't have anything to do with them; not, at least, while she's living in their house."
"It was in the Hannays' house I met her. But I'm not thinking of myself."
"I'm thinking of you, and of nothing else."
"You needn't," said she, cold to his warmth. "I can take care of myself. It's you I'm thinking of."
"Me? Why me?"
"Because I'm your wife and have a right to. It's out of the question that I should call on Mrs. Hannay or receive her calls. I must also beg of you to give up going there, and to the Ransomes, and to every place where you will be brought into contact with Lady Cayley."
He stared at her in amazement. "My dear girl, you don't expect me to cut the Ransomes because she isn't brute enough to turn her sister out of doors?"
"I expect you to give up going to them, and to the Hannays, as long as Lady Cayley is in Scale. Promise me."
"I can't promise you anything of the sort. Heaven knows how long she's going to stay."
"I ought not to have to explain that by countenancing her you insult me. You should see it for yourself."
"I can't see it. In the first place, with all due regard to you, I don't insult you by countenancing her, as you call it. In the second place, I don't countenance her by going into other people's houses. If I went into her house, you might complain. She hasn't got a house, poor lady."
She ignored his pity. "In spite of your regard for me, then, you will continue to meet her?"
"I shan't if I can help it. But if I must, I must. I can't be rude to people."
"You can be firm."
He laughed. "What have I got to be firm about?"
"Not meeting her."
"What if I do meet her? I sincerely hope I shan't; but what if I do?"
Her mouth trembled; her eyes filled with tears. He sprang up and leaned over her, resting his arms on the back of her chair, bringing his face close to hers and smiling into her eyes.
"No—no—no!" She drew back her head and shrank away from him. He put out his hand and turned her face to him, gazing into her eyes, as if for the first time he saw and could fathom the sorrow and the fear in them.
"What if I do?" he repeated.
She tried to push his hand from her, but she could not.
"You stupid child," he said, "do you mean to say that you're still afraid of that?"
"It's you who have made me—"
"My sweetheart—"
"No, no. Don't touch me."
"What do you mean?" he asked gravely, still leaning over and looking down at her.
"I mean—I mean—I can't bear it!" she cried, gasping for breath under the oppression of his nearness.
He realised her repugnance, and removed himself.
"Do you mean," he said, "because of her?"
"Yes," she said, "because of her."
He laughed softly. "Dear child—she doesn't exist. She doesn't exist." He swept her out of existence with a gesture of his hand. "Not for me at any rate."
The emphasis was lost upon her. "It's all nonsense to talk in that way. If she doesn't exist for you, you shouldn't have gone near her, you shouldn't have sat talking—to her."
"What do you suppose we were talking about?"
"I don't know. I don't want to know. I saw and heard enough."
"Look here, Anne. You wanted me to be rude to her, didn't you? Iwasrude. I was brutal. She had to remind me that she was a woman. By heaven, I'd forgotten it. If you're always to be going back on that—"
"I'm not going back. She has come back."
"It doesn't matter. She doesn't exist. What difference does she make?"
She rose for better delivery of what she had to say.
"She makes the whole difference. It's not that I'm afraid of her. I don't think I am. I believe that you love me."
"Ah—if you believe that—" He came nearer.
"I do believe it. It's to me that it makes the difference. I must be honest with you. It's not that I'm afraid. It is—I think—that I'm disgusted."
He lowered his eyes and moved from her uneasily.
"I was horrified enough when I first knew of it, as you know. You know, too, that I forgave you, and that I forgot. That was because I didn't realise it. I didn't know what it was. I couldn't before I had seen her. Now I have seen her, and I know."
"What do you know?" he said coldly.
"The awfulness of it."
"Do you! Do you!"
"Yes—and if you had realised it yourself—But you don't, and your not realising it is what shocks me most."
"I don't realise it?" His smile, this time, was grim. "I should think I was in a better position for realising it than you."
"You don't realise the shame, the sin of it"
"Oh, don't I?" He turned to her, "Look here, whatever I've done, it's all over. I've taken my punishment, and repented in sackcloth and ashes. But you can't go on for ever repenting. It wears you out. It seems to me that, after all this time, I might be allowed to leave off the sackcloth and brush the ashes out of my hair. I want to forget it if I can. But you are never—never—going to forget it. And you are going to make me remember it every day of my life. Is that it?"
"It is not." She could not see herself thus hard and implacable. She had vowed that there was no duty that she would omit; and it was her duty to forgive; if possible, to forget. "I am going to try to forget it, as I have forgotten it before. But it will be very hard, and you must be patient with me. You must not remind me of it more than you can help."
"When have I—?"
She was silent.
"When?" he insisted.
She shook her head and turned away. A sudden impulse roused him, and he sprang after her. He grasped her wrist as she laid her hand on the door to open it. He drew her to him. "When?" he repeated. "How? Tell me."
She paused, gazing at him. He would have kissed her, hoping thus to make his peace with her; but she broke from him.
"Ah," she cried, "you are reminding me of it now."
He opened the door, dumb with amazement, and turned from her as she went through.
It was a fine day, early in November, and Anne was walking alone along one of the broad flat avenues that lead from Scale into the country beyond. Made restless by her trouble, she had acquired this pedestrian habit lately, and Majendie encouraged her in it, regarding it less as a symptom than as a cure. She had flagged a little in the autumn, and he was afraid that the strain of her devotion to Edith was beginning to tell upon her health. On Saturdays and Sundays they generally walked together, and he did his best to make his companionship desirable. Anne, given now to much self-questioning as to their relations, owned, in an access of justice, that she enjoyed these expeditions. Whatever else she had found her husband, she had never yet found him dull. But it did not occur to her, any more than it occurred to Majendie, to consider whether she herself were brilliant.
She made a point of never refusing him her society. She had persuaded herself that she went with him for his own good. If he wanted to take long walks in the country, it was her duty as his wife to accompany him. She was sustained perpetually by her consciousness of doing her duty as his wife; and she had persuaded herself also that she found her peace in it. She kept his hours for him as punctually as ever; she aimed more than ever at perfection in her household ways. He should never be able to say that there was one thing in which she had failed him.
No; she knew that neither he nor Edith, if they tried, could put their finger on any point, and say: There, or there, she had gone wrong. Not in her understanding of him. She told herself that she understood him completely now, to her own great unhappiness. The unhappiness was the price she paid for her understanding.
She was absorbed in these reflections as she turned (in order to be home by five o'clock), and walked towards the town. She was awakened from them by the trampling of hoofs and the cheerful tootling of a horn. A four-in-hand approached and passed her; not so furiously but that she had time to recognise Lady Cayley on the box-seat, Mr. Gorst beside her, driving, and Mr. Ransome and Mr. Hannay behind amongst a perfect horticultural show in millinery.
Anne had no acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Scale and Beesly Four-in-hand Club, and her intuition stopped short of recognising Miss Gwen Richards, of the Vaudeville, and the others. All the same her private arraignment of these ladies refused them whatever benefit they were entitled to from any doubt. Not that Anne wasted thought on them. In spite of her condemnation, they barely counted; they were mere attendants, accessories in the vision of sin presented by Lady Cayley.
Nothing could have been more conspicuous than her appearance, more unabashed than the proclamation of her gay approach. Mounted high, heralded by the tootling horn, her hair blown, her cheeks bright with speed, her head and throat wrapped in a rosy veil that flung two broad streamers to the wind (as it were the banners of the red dawn flying and fluttering over her), she passed, the supreme figure in the pageant of triumphal vice.
Her face was turned to Gorst's face, his to hers. He looked more than ever brilliant, charming and charmed, laughing aloud with his companion. Hannay and Ransome raised their hats to Mrs. Majendie as they passed. Gorst was too much absorbed in Lady Cayley.
Anne shivered, chilled and sick with the resurgence of her old disgust. These were her husband's chosen associates and comrades; they stood by one another; they were all bound up together in one degrading intimacy. His dear friend Mr. Gorst was the dear friend of Lady Cayley. He knew what she was, and thought nothing of it. Mr. Ransome, her brother-in-law, knew, and thought nothing of it. As for Mr. Hannay, Walter's other dear friend, you only had to look at the women he was with to see how much Mr. Hannay thought. There could have been nothing very profound in his supposed repudiation of Lady Cayley. If it was true that he had once paid her money to go, he was doing his best to welcome her, now she had come back. But it was Gorst, with his vivid delight in Lady Cayley, who amazed her most. Anne had identified him with the man of whom Walter had once told her, the man who was "fond of Edith," the man of whom Walter admitted that he was not "entirely straight." And this man was always calling on Edith.
She was resolved that, if she could prevent it, he should call no more. It should not be said that she allowed her house to be open to such people. But it required some presence of mind to state her determination. Before she could speak with any authority she would have to find out all that could be known about Mr. Gorst. She would ask Fanny Eliott, who had seemed to know, and to know more than she had cared to say.
Instead of going straight home, she turned aside into Thurston Square; and had the good luck to find Fanny Eliott at home.
Fanny Eliott was rejoiced to see her. She looked at her anxiously, and observed that she was thin. She spoke of her call as a "coming back"; the impression conveyed by Anne's manner was so strikingly that of return after the pursuit of an illusion.
Anne smiled wearily, as if it had been a long step from Prior Street to Thurston Square.
"I thought," said Mrs. Eliott, "I was never going to see you again."
"You might have known," said Anne.
"Oh yes, I might have known. And you're not going to run away at five o'clock?"
"No. I can stay a little—if you're free."
Mrs. Eliott interpreted the condition as a request for privacy, and rang the bell to ensure it. She knew something was coming; and it came.
"Fanny, I want you to tell me what you know of Mr. Gorst."
Mrs. Eliott looked exceedingly embarrassed. She avoided gossip as inconsistent with the intellectual life. And unpleasant gossip was peculiarly distasteful to her. Therefore she hesitated. "My dear, I don't know much—"
"Don't put me off like that. You know something. You must tell me."
Mrs. Eliott reflected that Anne had no more love of scandalous histories than she had; therefore, if she asked for knowledge, it must be because her need was pressing.
"My dear, I only know that Johnson won't have him in the house."
She spoke as if this were nothing, a mere idiosyncrasy of Johnson's.
"Why not?" said Anne. "He has very nice manners."
"I dare say, but Johnson doesn't approve of him." (Another eccentricity of Johnson's.)
"And why doesn't he?"
"Well, you know, Mr. Gorst has a very unpleasant reputation. At least he goes about with most objectionable people."
"You mean he's the same sort of person as Mr. Hannay?"
"I should say he was, if anything, worse."
"You mean he's a bad man?"
"Well—"
"So bad that you won't have him in the house?"
"Well, dear, you know we are particular." (A singularity that she shared with Johnson.)
"So am I," said Anne.
"And this," she said to herself, "is the man whom Edie's fond of, Walter's dearest friend. And my friends won't have him in their house."
"Charming, I believe, and delightful," said Mrs. Eliott, "but perhaps a little dangerous on that account. And one has to draw the line. I want to know about you, dear. You're well, though you're so thin?"
"Oh, very well."
"And happy?" (She ventured on it.)
"Could I be well if I weren't happy? How's Mrs. Gardner?"
The thought of happiness called up a vision of the perpetually radiant bride.
"Oh, Mrs. Gardner, she's as happy as the day is long. Much too happy, she says, to go about paying calls."
"Ihaven't called much, have I?" said Anne, hoping that her friend would draw the suggested inference.
"No, you haven't.Youought to be ashamed of yourself."
"Why I any more than Mrs. Gardner? But I am."
Mrs. Eliott perceived her blunder. "Well, I forgive you, as long as you're happy."
Anne kissed her more tenderly than usual as they said good-bye, so tenderly that Mrs. Eliott wondered "Is she?"
Majendie was late that afternoon, and Anne had an hour alone with Edith. She had made up her mind to speak seriously to her sister-in-law on the subject of Mr. Gorst, and she chose this admirable opportunity.
"Edith," said she with the abruptness of extreme embarrassment, "did you know that Lady Cayley had come back?"
"Come back?"
"She's here, living in Scale."
There was a pause before Edith answered. Anne judged from the quiet of her manner that this was not the first time that she had heard of the return.
"Well, dear, after all, if she is, what does it matter? She must live somewhere."
"I should have thought that for her own sake it was a pity to have chosen a town where she was so well known."
"Oh well, that's her own affair. I suppose she argues that most people here know the worst; and that's always a comfort."
"Oh, for all they appear to care—" Her face became tragic, and she lost her unnatural control. "I can't understand it. I never saw such people. She's received as if nothing had happened."
"By her own people. It's decent of them not to cast her off."
"Oh, as for decency, they don't seem to have a shred of it amongst them. And the Hannays are not her own people. I thought I should be safe in going there after what you told me. And it was there I met her."
"I know. They were most distressed about it."
"And yet they received her, too, as if nothing had happened."
"Because nothing can happen now. They got rid of her when she was dangerous. She isn't dangerous any more. On the contrary, I believe her great idea now is to be respectable. I suppose they're trying to give her a lift up. You must admit it's nice of them."
"You think them nice?"
"I thinkthat'snice of them. It's the sort of thing they do. They're kind people, if they're not the most spiritual I have met."
"You may call it kindness, I call it shocking indifference. They're worse than the Ransomes. I don't believe the Ransomes know what's decent. The Hannays know, but they don't care. They're all dreadful people; and their sympathy with each other is the most dreadful thing about them. They hold together and stand up for each other, and are 'kind' to each other, because they all like the same low, vulgar, detestable things. That's why Mr. Hannay married Mrs. Hannay, and Mr. Ransome married Lady Cayley's sister. They're all admirably suited to each other, but not, my dear Edie, to you or me."
"They're certainly not your sort, I admit."
"Nor yours either."
"No, nor mine either," said Edith, smiling. "Poor Anne, I'm sorry we've let you in for them."
"I'm not thinking only of myself. The terrible thing is that you should be let in, too."
"Oh, me—how can they harm me?"
"They have harmed you."
"How?"
"By keeping other people away."
"What people?"
"The nice people you should have known. You were entitled to the very best. The Eliotts and the Gardners—those are the people who should have been your friends, not the Hannays and the Ransomes; and not, believe me, darling, Mr. Gorst."
For a moment Edith unveiled the tragic suffering in her eyes. It passed, and left her gaze grave and lucid and serene.
"What do you know of Mr. Gorst?"
"Enough, dear, to see that he isn't fit for you to know."
"Poor Charlie, that's what he's always saying himself. I've known him too long, you see, not to know him now. Years and years, my dear, before I knew you."
"It was through Mrs. Eliott that I knew you, remember."
"Because you were determined to know me. It was through you that I knew Mrs. Eliott. Before that, she never made the smallest attempt to know me better or to show me any kindness. Why should she?"
"Well, my dear, if you kept her at arm's length—if you let her see, for instance, that you preferred Mr. Gorst's society to hers—"
"Do you think I let her see it?"
"No, I don't. And it wouldn't enter her head. But, considering that she can't receive Mr. Gorst into her own house—"
"Why should she?"
"Edie—if she cannot, how can you?"
Edith closed her eyes. "I'll tell you some day, dear, but not now."
Anne did not press her. She had not the courage to discuss Mr. Gorst with her, nor the heart to tell her that he was to be received into her house no more. She saw Edith growing tender over his very name; she felt that there would be tears and entreaties, and she was determined that no entreaties and no tears should move her to a base surrender. Her pause was meant to banish the idea of Mr. Gorst from Edith's mind, but it only served to fix it more securely there.
"Edith," she said presently, "I will keep my promise."
"Which promise?" Edith was mystified. Her mind unwillingly renounced the idea of Mr. Gorst, and the promise could not possibly refer to him.
"The promise I made to you about Walter."
"My dear one, I never thought you would break it."
"I shall never break it. I've accepted Walter once for all, and in spite of everything. But I will not accept these people you say I've been let in for. I will not know them. And I shall have to tell him so."
"Why should you tell him anything? He doesn't want you to take them to your bosom. He sees how impossible they are."
"Ah—if he sees that."
"Believe me" (Edith said it wearily), "he sees everything."
"If he does," thought Anne, "it will be easier to convince him."