The task was so far unpleasant to her that she was anxious to secure the first opportunity and get it over. Her moment would come with the two hours after dinner in the study.
It did not come that evening; for Majendie telegraphed that he had been detained in town, and would dine at the Club. He did not come home till Anne (who sat up till midnight waiting for that opportunity) had gone tired to bed.
Her determination gathered strength with the delay, and when her moment came with the next evening, it came gloriously. Majendie gave himself over into her hands by bringing Gorst, of all people, back with him to dine.
The brilliant prodigal approached her with a little embarrassed youthful air of humility and charm; the air almost of taking her into his confidence over something unfortunate and absurd. He had evidently counted on the ten minutes before dinner when he would be left alone with her. He selected a chair opposite to her, leaning forward in it at ease, his nervousness visible only in the flushed hands clasped loosely on his knees, his eyes turned upon his hostess with a look of almost infantile candour. It was as if he mutely implored her to forget yesterday's encounter, and on no account to mention in what compromising company he had been seen. His engaging smile seemed to take for granted that she was a lady of pity and understanding, who would never have the heart to give a poor prodigal away. His eyes intimated that Mrs. Majendie knew what it amounted to, that awful prodigality of his.
But Mrs. Majendie had no illusions concerning sinners with engaging smiles and beautiful manners. And with every tick of the clock he deepened the impression of his insolence and levity. His very charm and the flush and brilliance that were part of it went to swell the prodigal's account. The instinct that had wakened in her knew them, the lights and colours, the heralding banners and vivid signs, all the paraphernalia of triumphant sin. She turned upon her guest the cold eyes of a condign destiny.
By the time dinner was served it had dawned on Gorst that he was looking in Mrs. Majendie for something that was not there. He might even have had some inkling of her resolution; he sat at his friend's table so consciously on sufferance, with an oppressed, extinguished air, eating his dinner as if it choked him, like the last sad meal in a beloved house.
Majendie, too, felt himself drawn in and folded in the gloom cast by his wife's protesting presence. The shadow of it wrapped them even after Anne had left the dining-room, as though her indignant spirit had remained behind to preserve her protest. Gorst had changed his oppression for a nervous restlessness intolerable to Majendie.
"My dear fellow," he said, "what is the matter with you?"
"How should I know?" said Gorst with a spurt of ill-temper. "I'm not a nerve specialist."
Majendie looked at him attentively. "I say,youmustn't go in for nerves, you know; you can't afford it."
"My dear Walter, I can't afford anything, if it comes to that." He paused with an obscure air of injury and foreboding. "Not even, it seems, the most innocent amusements. At the rate," he added, "I have to pay for them." Again he brooded, while Majendie wondered at him, in brotherly anxiety. "I suppose," Gorst said suddenly, "I can go up and see Edith, can't I?"
He spoke as if he doubted, whether, in the wreck of his world, with all his "innocent amusements," that supreme consolation would be still open to him.
"Of course you can," said Majendie. "It's the best thing you can do. I told her you were coming."
"Thanks," said Gorst, checking the alacrity with which he rose to go to Edith.
Oh yes, he knew it was the best thing he could do.
Edith's voice called gladly to him as he tapped at her door. He entered noiselessly, wearing the wondering and expectant look with which a new worshipper enters a holy place. Perpetual backslidings kept poor Gorst's worship perpetually new.
Colour came slowly back into Edith's face and a tender light into her eyes, as if from the springing of some deep untroubled well of life. She seemed more than ever a creature of imperial vitality, bound by some cruel enchantment to her couch. She held out her hands to him; and he raised them to his lips and kissed her fingers lightly.
"It's weeks since I've seen you," said she.
"Months, isn't it?" said he.
"Weeks, three weeks, by the calendar."
"I say—tell me—Iamto come and see you, just the same?"
"Just the same? Why, what's different?"
"Oh, I don't know. But it seems to me, when a man's married, it's bound to make a difference."
Edith's colour mounted; she made an effort to control the trembling of her mouth, the soft woman's mouth where all that was bodily in her love still lingered. But the sweetness deepened in her eyes, which were the dwelling-place of the immortal, immaterial power. They met Gorst's eyes steadily, laying on his restlessness their peace.
"Are you going to be married, Charlie?" said she, and smiled bravely.
He laughed. "Oh, Lord, no; not I."
"Who is, then?"
"Walter, of course. I mean he is married, don't you know."
"Yes, and is there any difference in him to you?"
"In him? Oh, rather not."
"In whom, then?"
"Well—I don't think, Edie, that Mrs. Walter—I like her—" he stuck to it—"I like her, you know, she's charming, but—I don't think she particularly cares forme."
"How do you know that?"
"How do I know anything? By the way she looks at me."
"Oh, the way Anne looks at people—"
"Well, you know, it's something tremendous, something terrible. Unutterable things, you know. She knocks the Inquisition and the day of judgment all to pieces. They're simply not in it. It's awfully hard lines on me, you see, because I like her."
"I'm glad you like her."
"Oh, I only like her because she likes you, I think."
"And I like her. Please remember that."
"I do remember it. I say, Edie, tell me, is she awfully devoted and all that?"
"To Walter? Yes, very devoted."
"That's all right, then. I don't think I mind so much now. As long as I can come and see you just the same."
"Of course you'll come and see me, just the same."
He pondered for a long time over that. Seeing Edith was the best thing he could do. To-night it seemed the only good thing left for him to do. He lived in a state of alternate excitement and fatigue, forever craving his innocent amusements, and forever tired of them. None of them were worth while. Seeing Edith was the only thing that was worth while. He refused to contemplate with any calmness a life in which it would be impossible for him to see her. If the poor prodigal had not chosen the most elevated situation for the building of his house of life, he was always making desperate efforts to leave the insalubrious spot, and return to the high and windswept mansions of his youth. To be with Edith was to nourish the illusion of return. Return itself seemed possible, when goodness, in the person of Edith, looked at him with such tender and alluring eyes. In spirit he prostrated himself before it, while he cursed the damnable cruelty that had prevented him from marrying her. Through that act of adoration he was enabled to live through his alien and separated days. It kept him, as he phrased it, "going," which meant that, wherever his rebellious feet might carry him, he continued to breathe, through it, the diviner air.
And Edith had lain for ten years on her back, and every year the hours had gone more lightly, through the hope of seeing him. She had outlived her time of torment and rebellion. There was a sense in which her life, in spite of its frustration, was complete. The love through which her womanhood struggled for victory in defeat had fulfilled itself by gradual growth into something like maternal passion. There was no selfishness in her attitude to him and his devotion. By accepting it she took his best and offered it to God for him. With fragile, dedicated hands she nursed and sheltered the undying votive flame. She seemed a saint who had foregone heaven and remained on earth to help him. Her womanhood, wrapped from him in veil upon veil of her mysterious suffering, had never removed itself from him. She held him by all that was indomitable in her own nature, and in spite of his lapses, he remained her lover.
She was aware of these lapses and grieved over them and forgave them, laying them, as she had laid her brother's sin, to the account of her unhappy spine. In Edith's tender fancy her spine had become responsible for all the shortcomings of these beloved persons. If Walter could have married Anne seven years ago there would have been no dreadful Lady Cayley; and if she could have married poor Charlie she would not have had to think of him as "poor Charlie" now. It had been hard on him.
That was precisely what poor Charlie was thinking. And if that sister-in-law was to come between them, too, it would be harder still. But Edith insisted that she would make no difference.
"In fact," said she, "you can come more than ever. For if Walter's absorbed in Anne, and Anne's absorbed in Walter—"
He took it up gaily. "Then I may be absorbed in you? So, after all, it turns out to my advantage."
"Yes. You can console me. You can console me now, this minute, if you'll play to me."
He was always lamenting that he could do nothing for her. Playing to her was the one thing he could do, and he did it well.
He rose joyously and went to the piano, removing the dust from the keys with his handkerchief. "How will you have it? Sentimental and soporific? Or loud and strong?"
"Oh, loud and strong, please. Very strong and very loud."
"Right you are. You shall have it hot and strong, and loud enough to wake the dead."
That was his rendering of Chopin's "Grande Polonaise." He let himself loose in it, with a rush, a vehemence, a diabolic brilliance and clamour. The quiet room shook with the sounds he wrenched out of the little humble piano in the corner. And as Edith lay and listened, her spirit, too, triumphed, and was free; it rode gloriously on the storm of sound. It was, she said, laughing, quite enough to wake the dead. This was the miracle that he alone could accomplish for her.
And downstairs in the study, Anne heard his music and started, as the dead may start in their sleep. It seemed to her, that Polonaise of Chopin, the most immoral music, the music of defiance and revolt. It flung abroad the prodigal's prodigality, his insolent and iniquitous joy. That was what he, a bad man, made of an innocent thing.
Majendie's face lit up, responsive to the delight and challenge of the opening chord. "He's all right," said he, "as long as he can play."
He listened, glancing now and then at Anne with a smile of pride in his friend's performance. It was as if he were asking her to own that there must be some good in a fellow who could play like that.
Anne was considering in what words she would intimate to him that Mr. Gorst's music was never to be heard again in that house. Some instinct told her that she was courting danger, but the approval of her conscience urged her on. She waited till the Polonaise was over before she spoke.
"You say," said she, "he's all right as long as he can play like that. To me, it's the most convincing proof that he's all wrong."
"How do you make that out?"
"I don't want to go into it," said Anne. "I don't approve of Mr. Gorst; but I should think better of him if he had only better taste."
"You're the first person who ever accused Gorst of bad taste."
"Do you call it good taste to live as he does, as I know he does, and you know he does, and yet to come here, and sit with Edie, and behave as if he'd never done anything to be ashamed of? It would be infinitely better taste if he kept away."
"Not at all. There are a great many very nice things about Gorst, and his caring to come here is one of the nicest. He has been faithful to Edith for ten years. That sort of thing isn't so common that one can afford to despise it."
"Faithful to her? Poor darling, does she think he is?"
"She doesn't think. She knows."
"Preserve me from such faithfulness."
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"I do know. And you know that I know." In proof of her contention she offered him the incident of the four-in-hand.
Majendie made a movement of impatience. "Oh, that's nothing," he said. "He doesn't like her. He likes driving, and she likes a front seat at any show (I can't see her taking a back one); and if she insisted on climbing up beside him, he couldn't very well knock her off, you know. You don't seem to realise how difficult it is to knock a woman off any seat she takes a fancy to sit on. You simply can't do it."
Anne was silent. She felt weak and helpless before his imperturbable levity.
He smoked placidly. "No," he said presently. "Gorst mayn't be a saint, but I will acquit him of an unholy passion for poor Sarah."
Anne fired. "He may be a very bad man for all that."
"There again, you show that you don't know what you're talking about. He is not a 'very bad man'. You've no discrimination in these things. You simply lump us all together as a bad lot. And so we may be, compared with the angels and the saints. But there are degrees. If Gorst isn't as good as—as Edie, it doesn't necessarily follow that he's bad."
"Please—I would rather not argue the point. But I am not going to have anything to do with Mr. Gorst."
"Of course not. You disapprove of him. There's nothing more to be said."
He spoke placably as if he made allowance for her attitude while he preserved his own.
"There is a great deal more to be said, dear. And I may as well say it now. I disapprove of him so strongly that I cannot have him received in this house if I am to remain in it."
Astonishment held him dumb.
"You have no right to expect me to," said she.
"To expect you to remain, or what?"
"To receive a man of Mr. Gorst's character."
"My dear girl, what right have you to expect me to turn him out?"
"My right as your wife."
"My wife has a right to ask me a great many things, but not that."
"I ought not to have to ask you. You should have thought of it yourself. You should have had more care for my reputation."
At this he laughed, greatly to his own annoyance and to hers.
"Your reputation? Your reputation, I assure you, is in no danger from poor Gorst."
"Is it not? My friends—the Eliotts—will not receive him."
"There's no reason why they should."
"Is there any reason why I should? Do you want me to be less fastidious than they are? You forget that I was brought up with very fastidious people. My father wouldn't have allowed me to speak to a man like Mr. Gorst. Do you want me to accept a lower standard that his, or my mother's?"
"Have you considered what my standard would look like if I turned my best friend out of the house—a man I've known all my life—just because my wife doesn't happen to approve of him? I know nothing about your Eliotts; but if Edie can stand him, I should think you might."
"I," said Anne coldly, "am not in love with him."
He frowned, and a dull flush of anger coloured the frown. "I must say, your standard is a remarkable one if it permits you to say things like that."
"I would not have said it but for what you told me yourself."
"What did I tell you?"
"That Edith cared for him."
He remembered.
"If I did tell you that, it was because I thought you cared for Edie."
"I do care for her."
"You've rather a strange way of showing it. I wonder if you realise how much she did care? What it must have meant to her when she got ill? What it meant to him? Have you the remotest conception of the infernal hardship of it?"
"I know it was hard."
"Forgive me; you don't know, or you wouldn't be so hard on both of them."
"It isn't I who am hard."
"Isn't it? When you're just proposing to stop Gorst's coming here?"
"It's not I that's stopping him. It's his own conduct. He is hard on himself, and he is hard on her. There's nobody else to blame."
"Do you mean to say you think I'm actually going to tell him not to come any more?"
"My dear, it's the least you can do for me after—"
"After what?"
"After everything."
"After letting you in for marrying me, you mean. And as I suppose poor Edie was to blame for that, it's the leastshecan do for you to give him up. Is that it? Seeing him is about the only pleasure that's left to her, but that doesn't come into it, does it?"
She was silent.
"Well, and what am I to think of you for all this?"
"I cannothelpwhat you think of me," said she with the stress of despair.
"Well, I don't think anything, as it happens. But, if you were capable of understanding in the least what you're trying to do, I should think you a hard, obstinate, cruel woman. What I'm chiefly struck with is your extreme simplicity. I suppose I mustn't be surprised at your wanting to turn Gorst out; but how you could imagine for one moment that I would do it—No, that's beyond me."
"I can only say I shall not receive him. If he comes into the house, I shall go out of it."
"Well—" said Majendie judicially, as if she had certainly hit upon a wise solution.
"If he dines here I must dine at the Eliotts'."
"Well—and you'll like that, won't you? And I shall like having Gorst, and so will Edie, and Gorst will like seeing her, and everybody will be pleased."
Overhead Mr. Gorst burst into a dance measure, so hilarious that it seemed the very cry of his delight.
"As long as Edie goes on seeing him, he'll think it's all right."
Overhead Mr. Gorst's gay tune proclaimed that indeed he thought so. He broke off suddenly, and began another and a better one, till the spirit of levity ran riot in immortal sounds.
"So it's all right. She's a good woman. It's the only hold we've got on him."
"If all good women were to reason that way—"
"If all good women were to reason your way, what do you think would happen?"
"There would be more good men in the world."
"Would there? There would be more good men ruined by bad women. Because, don't you see, there'd be no others left for them to speak to."
"If you're thinking of his good—"
"Have you thought of hers?"
"Yes. Supposing he ends by marrying somebody else, what will she do then?—poor Edie!"
"If the somebody else is a good woman, poor Edie will fold her dear little hands, and offer up a dear little prayer of thankfulness to heaven."
Upstairs the music ceased. The prodigal's footsteps were heard crossing the room and coming to a halt by Edith's couch.
Majendie rose, placid and benignant.
"I think," said he, "it's time for you to go to bed."
Majendie could never be angry with any woman for more than five minutes. And this time he understood his wife better than she knew. He had seen, as Edith had said, "everything."
But Anne was convinced that he never would see. She said to herself, "He thinks me hard, and obstinate, and cruel."
She crept into bed in misery that suggested a defeated thing. The outward eye would never have perceived that the pale woman quivering under the eider-down was inspired with an indomitable purpose, the salvation of a weak man from his weakness. To be sure, she had been worsted in her encounter by something that conveyed the illusion of superior moral force. But that there was any strength in her husband that could be described as moral Anne would not have admitted for a moment. She believed herself to be crushed, grossly, by the superior weight of moral deadness that he carried.
It was, it always had been, his placidity that caused her most despair. But whereas, at the time of their first rupture, it had made him utterly impenetrable, she now took it simply as one more sign of his inability to understand her. She argued that he would never have remained so calm if he had realised the sincerity of her determination to repudiate Mr. Gorst. Of course she didn't expect him to appreciate the force and the fine quality of her feeling. Still, he might at least have known that, if she had found it hard to pardon her own husband his lapses in the past, she would not be likely to accept a recent and notorious evildoer.
She tried to forget that in this she herself had been wounded as a woman and a wife. It was the offence to heaven that she minded, rather than her own mere human hurt. Still, he had asked her to share his house and the sad burden of it (her thought touched gently on the sadness and the burden); and it was the least he could do to keep it undefiled by such presences. He ought to have known what was due to the woman he had married. If he did not, she said to herself sorrowfully, he must learn.
She never doubted that he would learn completely when he was once persuaded that she had meant what she had said; when he saw that he was driving her out of the house by inviting Mr. Gorst into it. To her the question was of supreme importance. Whatever happiness was now left to them must stand or fall by the expulsion of the prodigal.
If she had examined herself, Anne would have found that she hardly knew which she really wished for more: that Majendie would at once surrender to her view and leave off inviting Gorst, or that he would invite him at once, and thus give her an occasion for her protest. That Majendie was peaceable and disinclined to fight she gathered from the fact that he had not invited him at once.
At last, one morning, he looked up quietly from his breakfast, and remarked that he had invited Gorst (he laid a slightly irritating stress upon the name) to dinner on Friday.
The day was Tuesday.
"And is he coming?" said Anne.
"He is," said Majendie.
When Friday came, Anne remarked at breakfast that she was going to dine with Mrs. Eliott.
"I thought you would," said Majendie.
She had hoped that he would think she wouldn't.
They dined at seven o'clock in Thurston Square, and at half-past seven in Prior Street, so that she would be well out of the house before Gorst came into it. It was raining heavily. But Anne looked upon the rain as her ally. Walter would be ashamed to think he had driven her out in such weather.
He insisted on accompanying her to the Eliotts' door.
"Not a nice evening for turning out," said he as he opened his umbrella and held it over her.
"Not at all," said she significantly.
At ten o'clock he came to fetch her in a cab.
Now, the cab, the escort, and the sheltering umbrella somewhat diminished the grievance of her enforced withdrawal from her home. And Majendie's manner did still more to take the wind out of the proud sails of her tragic adventure. But Anne herself was a sufficiently pathetic figure as she appeared under his umbrella, descending from the Eliotts' doorstep, with delicate slippered feet, gathering her skirts high from the bounding rain, and carrying in her hands the boots she had not waited to put on.
Majendie uttered the little tender moan with which he was used to greet a pathetic spectacle.
"He sounds," said Anne to herself, "as if he were sorry."
He looked it, too; he seemed the very spirit of contrition, as he sat in the cab, with Anne's boots on his knees, guarding them with a caressing hand. But she detected an impenitent brilliance in his eye as he stood in the lamplight and helped her off with the mackintosh which dripped with its passage from the cab to their doorstep.
"I think my feet are wet," said she.
"There's a splendid fire in the study," said he.
He drew up a chair, and made her sit in it, and took off her shoes and stockings, and dried them at the fire. He held her cold feet in his hands to warm them. Then he stooped down and laid his face against them and kissed them. And she heard again his low, tender moan, and took it for a cry of contrition. He rose from his knees and laid his hand on her shoulder. She looked up, prepared to receive his chivalrous submission, to gather into her bosom the full harvest of her protest, and then magnanimously forgive.
It was not surrender, certainly not surrender, that she saw in the downward gaze that had drawn her to him. His eyes were dancing, dancing gaily, to some irresistible measure in his head.
"It was worth while, wasn't it?" said he.
"What was worth while?"
"Getting your feet wet, for the pleasure of not dining with Gorst?"
There were moments, Anne might have owned, when he did not fail in sympathy and comprehension. Had she been capable of self-criticism, she would have found that her attitude of protest was a moral luxury, and that moral luxuries were a necessity to natures such as hers. But Anne had a secret, cherishing eye on martyrdom, and it was intolerable to her to be reminded in this way that, after all, she was only a spiritual voluptuary.
Still more intolerable was the large indulgence of her husband's manner. He seemed positively to pander to her curious passion, while preserving an attitude of superior purity. He multiplied her opportunities. A week had hardly passed before Mr. Gorst dined in Prior Street again, and Anne again took refuge in Thurston Square.
This time Majendie made no comment on her action. He seemed to take it for granted.
But Anne, standing up heroically for her principle, was sustained by a sense of moving in a divine combat. Every time she dined in Thurston Square, she felt that she had thrown down her gage; every time that Majendie invited Gorst, she felt that he stooped to pick it up. Thus unconsciously she breathed hostility, and was suspicious of hostility in him.
When she announced, at breakfast one Monday, that she had asked the Eliotts, the Gardners, Canon Wharton, and Miss Proctor, for dinner on Wednesday, she uttered each name as if it had been a challenge, and looked for some irritating maneuver in response. He would, of course, proclaim that he was going to dine with the Hannays, or he would effect a retreat to Mr. Gorst's rooms, or to his club.
But Majendie lacked her passion and her inspiration. He simply said he was delighted to hear it, and that he would make a point of being at home. He would have to give up an engagement which he would not have made if he had known. But that did not greatly matter.
They came, the Eliotts and the rest, and Miss Proctor again pronounced him charming. To be sure, he was not half so amusing as he had been on his first appearance in Thurston Square; but it was only becoming that he should repress himself a little at his own table and in the presence of the Canon.He, the Canon, was brilliant, if you like.
For that night the Canon was, as usual, all things to all men, and especially to all women. He was the man of the world for Miss Proctor; the fine epicure of books for Mrs. Eliott; for Mr. Eliott and Dr. Gardner, the broad-minded searcher and enthusiast, the humble camp-follower of the conquering sciences. "You are the pioneers," said he; "you go before us on the march. But we keep up, we keep up. We can step out—cassock and all."
But he spread out all his spiritual lures for Mrs. Majendie. His eyes seemed more than ever to pursue her, to search her, to be gazing discreetly at the secret of her soul. They drew her with the clear and candid flattery of their understanding. She could feel the clever little Canon taking her in and making notes on her. "Sensitive. Unhappy. Intensely spiritual nature. Too fine and pure forhim." And over the unhallowed, half-abandoned table, flushed slightly with Majendie's good wine, the Canon drew up his chair to his host, and stretched his little legs, and let his spirit expand in a rosy, broad humanity. As he had charmed the spiritual woman he saw in Anne, so he laid himself out to flatter the natural man he saw in Majendie. And Majendie leaned back in his chair, and gazed at the Canon, the remarkable, the clever, the versatile little Canon, with half-closed eyelids veiling his contemptuous eyes. (He confided to Hannay, later on, that the Canon, in his after-dinner moments, made him sick.)
Anne heard nothing more of Mr. Gorst for over a fortnight. It was on a Saturday, and Majendie asked her suddenly, during luncheon, if she thought the Eliotts would be disengaged that evening.
"Why?"
"Because I've asked Gorst" (again that disagreeable emphasis) "to dine to-night."
"Very well. I will ask Mrs. Eliott if she can have me."
"Can you?"
"Perfectly."
"Oh—and I must prepare you for something quite horrible. Some time, you know" (he smiled provokingly), "I shall have to ask the Hannays. Do you think you can arrange that?"
"I shall have to," said she.
This time (it was the third) she was obliged to take Mrs. Eliott into her confidence. She fairly flung herself on her friend's mercy.
"I feel as if I were making use of you," said she.
"My dear, make any use of me you please. I'm always here. You can come to me any time you want to escape."
"To escape?" Anne's face flew a colour that was a flag of defiance to any reflection on her husband. She would be loyal to him as long as she lived. Not one of her friends should know of her trouble and her fear.
"From your Gorsts and Hannays and people."
"Oh, from them." Anne felt that she was shielding him.
Mrs. Eliott marked the flag of defiance and the attitude of defence. If Anne had meant to "give him away," she could not have given him more lavishly. Mrs. Elliott's sad inward comment was that there was more in all this than met the eye.
And Anne's life now continued on this rather uncomfortable footing. The Hannays came to dinner, and she dined with Mrs. Eliott. The Ransomes came, and she dined with Mrs. Eliott. Mr. Gorst came (for the fourth time in as many weeks), and she dined with Mrs. Eliott. She began to wonder whether the Eliotts' hospitality would stand the strain. She also wondered whether her other friends in Thurston Square were wondering; and what Canon Wharton must think of it. It had not occurred to her to wonder what Mr. Gorst would think.
At first he thought nothing of it. When he found that he had not to encounter the terrible eyes of Mrs. Majendie, Mr. Gorst's relief was so great that it robbed him of reflection. And when he began to think, he merely thought that Majendie had asked him because his wife was absent, rather than that Majendie's wife was absent because he had been asked. Majendie had calculated on this. He was not in the least distressed by Anne's absences. He believed that she was thoroughly enjoying both her own protest and Mrs. Eliott's society. And the arrangement really solved the problem nicely. Otherwise the whole thing was trivial to him. He remained unaware of the tremendous spiritual conflict that was being waged round the person of the unhappy Gorst.
But Christmas was now at hand and Christmas brought the problem back again in a terrific form. For ten years poor Gorst had dined with his friends in Prior Street on Christmas Day. His presence was considered by Edith to borrow a peculiar significance and sanctity from the festival. Did they not celebrate on that day the birth of the Divine Humanity, the solemn advent of redeeming love? Punctually on Christmas Day the prodigal returned from his farthest wanderings, and made for Prior Street as for his home. He had never missed a Christmas. And how could they expel him now? His coming was such a sacred and established thing, that he had spoken of it to Edith as a certainty. And it was as a certainty that Edith spoke of it to Majendie.
She asked him how they were to break the news to Anne.
"Better not break it at all," said he. "Just let him come."
"If he does," said Edith, "she'll walk straight out of the house."
"Oh no, she won't."
"Yes, she will. On principle. I understand her."
"I confess I don't."
"But I believe," said she, "if you explained it all to her, she'd give in for once."
Rather against his judgment, he endeavoured to explain, "We simply can't not ask him, you know."
"Ask him by all means. But I shall have to put myself on the Gardners, or the Proctors, for the Eliotts are away."
"Don't be absurd. You know you won't be allowed to do anything of the sort."
"There's nothing else left for me to do."
He looked at her gravely; but his speech was light, for it was not in him to be weighty. "Don't you think that, at this holy season, for the sake of peace, and good-will, and all the rest of it, you might drop it just for once? And let the poor chap have a happy Christmas?"
She seemed to be considering it. "You think me very hard," said she.
"Oh no, no, not hard." But he was wondering for the first time what this wife of his was made of.
"Yes, hard. I don't want you to think me hard. If you could understand why I cannot meet that man—what it means to me—the effect it has on me."
"What," he said, "is the precise effect?" He was really interested. He had always been curious to know how different men affected different women, and to get his knowledge at first hand.
"It's the effect," said she, "of being brought into contact with something terribly painful and repulsive, the effect of intense suffering—of unbearable disgust."
He listened with his thoughtful, interested air. "I know. The effect that your friend Canon Wharton sometimes has on me."
"I see no resemblance between Canon Wharton and your friend Mr. Gorst."
"And I see no resemblance between my friend Mr. Gorst and Canon Wharton."
She was silent, gathering all her strength to deliver her spirit's last appeal.
"Dear," said she (for she wished to be very gentle with him, since he had thought her hard), "dear, I wonder if you ever realise what the thing we call—purity is?"
He blushed violently.
"I only know it's one of those things one doesn't speak about."
"I must speak," said she.
"You needn't," he said curtly; "I understand all right."
"If you did you wouldn't ask me. All the same, Walter—" She lifted to him the set face of a saint surrendered to the torture—"If you compel me—"
"Compel you? I can't compel you. Especially if you're going to look like that."
"It's no use," he said to Edith. "First she talks of dining with the Gardners—"
"She will, too—"
"No. She'll stay—if I compel her."
"Oh, I see. That's worse. She'd let him see it. He wouldn't enjoy his Christmas if he came."
"No, poor fellow, I really don't think he would. She's awfully funny about him."
"You still think her funny?"
"My dear—it's the only way to take her. I'm sorry, but I can't let Charlie spoil her Christmas; nor," he added, "Anne his."
So Mr. Gorst did not come to Prior Street that Christmas. There came instead of him whole sheaves and stacks of flowers, Christmas roses and white lilies, the sacred flowers which, at that festival, the poor prodigal brought as his tribute to his adored and beloved lady.
He spent the greater part of his Christmas Day in the society of Mr. Dick Ransome, and the greater part of his Christmas Night in the society of pretty Maggie Forrest, the new girl in Evans's shop who had sold him the Christmas roses and the lilies. "For," said he, "if I can't go and see Edie, I'll go and see Maggie." And he enjoyed seeing Maggie as much as it was possible to enjoy anything that was not seeing Edie.
And Edie lay among her Christmas roses and her lilies, and smiled, with a high courage, at Nanna, at Majendie, and Anne; and did her best to make everybody believe that she was having a very happy Christmas. But at night, when it was all over, Majendie held a tremulous and tearful Edie in his arms.
"Don't think me a brute, darling," he said. "I would have insisted, only if he'd come to-day he'd have found out he wasn't wanted."
"I know; and he never would have come again."
He didn't come. For Canon Wharton enlightened Mrs. Hannay, and Mrs. Hannay enlightened Mr. Hannay, and Mr. Hannay enlightened Mr. Gorst.
"Of course," said the prodigal, "if she walks out of the house when I walk into it, I can't very well go."
"Well, not at present, perhaps, for the sake of peace," said Hannay. "It strikes me poor old Majendie's in a pretty tight place with that wife of his."
So, for the sake of peace, Mr. Gorst kept away from Prior Street and his Edie, and spent a great deal of time in Evans's shop, cultivating the attention of Miss Forrest.
And, for the sake of peace, Majendie kept silence, and his sister concealed her trembling and her tears.
Gloom fell on the house in Prior Street in the weeks that followed Christmas. The very servants went heavily in the shadow of it. Anne began to have her bad headaches again. Deep lines of worry showed on Majendie's face. And on her couch by the window, looking on the blackened winter garden, Edith fought day after day a losing battle with her spine.
The slow disease that held her captive there seemed to be quickening its pace. In January there came a whole procession of bad nights, without, as she pathetically said, "anything to show for it," for her hands could make nothing now. She lay flatter than ever; each day she seemed to sink deeper into her couch.
Anne, between her headaches, devoted herself to her sister with a kind of passion. Her keenest experience of passion came to her through the emotion wakened in her by the sight of Edith's suffering. She told herself that her love for Edith satisfied her heart completely; that she fulfilled herself in it as she never could have fulfilled herself in any other way. Nothing could degrade or spoil the spiritual beauty of this relation. It served as a standard by which she could better judge her relation to her husband. "I love her more than I ever loved him," she thought. "I cannot help it. If it had been possible to love him as I love her—but I have lowered myself by loving him. I will raise myself by loving her."
She was never tired of being with Edith, sewing silently by her fireside, or reading aloud to her (for Edith's hands were too tremulous now to hold a book), or sitting close up against her couch, nursing her hands in hers, as if she would have given them her own strength.
And thus her ardour spent and renewed itself, and left her colder than ever to her husband.
At times she mourned, obscurely, the destruction of the new soul that had been given her last year, on her birthday, when she had been born again to her sweet human destiny. At times she had glimpses of the perfect thing it might have been. There was no logical sequence in the events that had destroyed it, the return of Lady Cayley and the spectacle of her triumph. She could not say that her husband had deteriorated in consequence. The change was in herself, and not in him. He was what he always had been; only she seemed to see him more completely now. At times, when the high spiritual life died down in sleep, she slipped from her trouble, and turned, with her arms stretched towards him, where he lay. In her dreams he came to her with the low cry she had heard in the wood at Westleydale. And in her dreams she was tender; but her waking thoughts were sad and hard.
Majendie found it more than ever difficult to realise that she had ever shown him kindness, that her arms had opened to him and her pulses beaten with his own. Her face and her body were changing with this change of soul. Her health suffered. Her eyes became dull, her skin dry; her small, reticent mouth had taken on the tragic droop; she was growing austerely thin. She had abandoned the pleasing and worldly fashion of her dress, and arrayed herself now in straight-cut, sombre garments, very serviceable in the sick-room, but mournfully suggestive, to her husband's fancy, of her renunciation of the will to please.
On her first appearance in this garb he enquired whether she had embraced the religious life.
"I always have embraced it," said she in her ringing voice.
"I believe it's about the only thing you ever wanted to embrace."
"You need not say so," she returned.
"Then why, oh why, do you wear those awful clothes?"
"My clothes are suitable," said she.
"Suitable? My dear girl, they suggest a divorce-suit, MajendieversusMajendie, if you like. You're a walking prosecution. Your face, with that expression on it, is a decreenisiwith costs. You don't want to be a libel on your husband, do you?"
"How can you say such things?"
"Well—look in the glass, dear, if you don't believe me."
She looked. The dress was certainly not becoming. She greeted the joyless apparition with her thin, unwilling smile.
He put his arm around her and drew her to him. He loved her dearly, for all her sadness and unsweetness.
"Poor Nancy," he said, "Iama brute. Forgive me."
"I do forgive you."
The words seemed the refrain of her life's sad song.
And as he kissed her he said to himself, "That's all very well; but if I only knew what I'm supposed to have done to her! Her friends must think me a perfect monster."
And, indeed, there was more truth than Majendie was aware of in his extravagant jests. His wife's face was so eloquent of misery that her friends were not slow in drawing their conclusions. Thurston Square prepared itself to rally round her. Mrs. Eliott was loyal in keeping what she supposed to be Anne's secret, but when she found that the Gardners also understood that young Mrs. Majendie wasn't very happy with her husband, discussion became free in Thurston Square, though it went no further.
"The kindest thing we can do is to give her a refuge sometimes from his dreadful friends," said Mrs. Eliott. "I have to ask her here every time they're there."
Mrs. Gardner declared that she also would ask her gladly. Miss Proctor said that she would ask Mr. Majendie and Mr. Gorst, which would come to the same thing for Anne, but that she would not have Anne without her husband. Miss Proctor could be depended on to take a light view of any situation, a view entirely her own.
So the Gardners, as well as the Eliotts, rallied round Mrs. Majendie, and offered their house also as her refuge. And thus poor Anne, whose ideal was an indestructible loyalty, contrived to build up the most undesirable reputation for her husband in Thurston Square. Of this reputation she now became aware, and it reacted on her own estimate of him. She said to herself, "They don't approve of him. They seem to know something. They are sorry for me." And she was humbled in her pride.
The one who seemed to know most, and to be sorriest of all, was Canon Wharton. She was always meeting him now. It was positively as if he lay in wait for her. His eyes seemed more than ever to have penetrated her secret. They held it safe under the pent-house of his brows. They seemed to be always making allusions to it, while his tongue preserved a delicate reticence. At meeting they said to her, "It doesn't matter if I know your secret. Do you suppose it is so evident to everybody? Why, in all this town, there is no one—no one, dear lady—capable of discovering it but I. It is a spiritual secret." And at parting they said, "When you can bear it no longer you must come to me. Sooner or later you will come to me."
And the weeks went on towards Lent. Anne longed for the time of cleansing, and absolution and communion; for the peace of the week-day services; and for the sweet, sharp, grey light of the young Spring at evening, a light that recalled, piercingly, the long Lent of her girlhood, and the passing of its pure and consecrated days.
She had not yet completely forsaken St. Saviour's for All Souls. She loved the grey old church in the market-place. Set in the midst of that sordid scene of chaffering and grime, St. Saviour's perpetuated for her the ancient beauty and the majesty of her faith. When she desired to forget herself, to sink humbly back into the ages, passive to a superb tradition, she went to St. Saviour's. When she wished to be stirred and strengthened, to realise her spiritual value, to feel the grip of divine forces centring on her, she went to All Souls.
On the Sunday before Lent she was fairly possessed by this ardent personal mood. In obedience to it she attended Matins at the Canon's church.
She had had a scruple about going, for Edith had been worse that morning, and more evidently unhappy. She went alone. Majendie had admitted lately that he liked going to St. Saviour's, but he refused to accompany her to All Souls.
She went in a strange, premonitory mood, expectant of some great illumination. It came with the Collect for the day. Anne was deeply moved by the Collect. She prayed inaudibly, with parted lips thirsting for the sources of her spiritual help. Her light went up with the ascending, sentence by sentence, of the prayer.
"Oh, Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth;
"Send Thy Holy Ghost and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues;
"Without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before Thee;
"Grant this for thine only Son, Jesus Christ's sake." The ritual rang upon that note. The music of the hymns of charity was part of the light that penetrated her, poignant, but tender.
Poignant but tender, too, were the aspect and the mood of the Canon as he ascended the pulpit and looked upon his congregation.
There was a rustling, sliding sound as the congregation turned to listen to their vicar.
"Though I speak,'" said the Canon, "'with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or as a tinkling cymbal."
He gripped his hearers with the stress he laid upon certain words, "angels," and "cymbal." He bade them mark that it was not by hazard that the great prayer for Charity was appointed for the Sunday before Lent. "The Church," he said, "has such care for her children that she does nothing by hazard. This call is made to us on the eve of the great battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Why, but that those among us who come off victors may have mercy upon those weakly ones who are worsted and fallen in the fight. The life of the spirit has its own unique temptations. It is against these that we pray to-day. We are all prepared to repent, to use abstinence, to mortify the body with its corrupt affections. Are we prepared to bear the burden of our brother's and our sister's unrepentance? Of their self-indulgence? Of their sin? To follow in all things the Divine Example? We are told that the Saviour of the world was the friend of publicans and sinners. We accept the statement, we have gone on accepting it, year after year, as the statement of a somewhat remote, but well-authenticated historical fact. Have we yet realised its significance? Have we pictured, are we able to picture to ourselves, what company He kept? Among what surroundings His divine figure was actually seen? In what purlieus of degenerate Jerusalem? In what iniquitous splendours? In what orgies of the Gentiles? And who are they to whom He showed most tenderness? Who but the rich young man? The woman taken in adultery? And Mary Magdalene with her seven devils? Which is the divinest of the divine parables? The parable of the prodigal son who devoured his father's living with harlots!"
The Canon's voice rose and fell, and rose again; thrilling, as his breast heaved with the immense pathos and burden of the world.
Anne had a vision of the Hannays and the Ransomes, and of the prodigal cast out from the house that loved him. And she said to herself for the first time: "Have I done right? Have I done what Christ would have me do?" The light that went up in her was a light by which her deeds looked doubtful. If she had failed in this, in charity? She pondered the problem, while the Canon approached, gloriously, his peroration.
"Therefore we pray for charity"—the Canon's voice rang tears—"for charity, oh, dear and tender Lord, lest, having known Thy love, we fall, ourselves, into the sins of unpity and of pride."
Tears came into Anne's eyes. She was overcome, bowed, shaken by the Canon's incomparable pleading. The Canon was shaken by it himself, his voice trembled in the benediction that followed. No one had a clearer vision of the spiritual city. It was his tragedy that he saw it, and could not enter in. Many, remembering that sermon, counted it, long afterwards, to him for righteousness. It had conquered Anne. The tongues of men and of angels, of all spiritual powers, human and divine, spoke to her in that vibrating, indomitable voice.
The problem it had raised remained with her, oppressed, tormented her. What she had done had seemed to her so good. But if, after all, she had done wrong? If she had failed in charity?
She had come to a turning in her way when she could no longer see for herself, or walk alone. She was prepared to surrender, meekly, her own judgment. She must ask help of the priest whose voice told her that he had suffered, and whose eyes told her that he knew.
She sent a note to All Souls Vicarage, requesting an interview, at Canon Wharton's house rather than her own. She did not want Edith or the servants to know that she had been closeted with the Canon. The answer came that night, making an appointment after early Evensong on the morrow.
After early Evensong, Anne found herself in the Canon's library. He did not keep her waiting, and, as he entered, he held out to her, literally, the hand of help. For the Canon never wasted a gesture. There was no detail of social observance to which he could not give some spiritual significance. This was partly the secret of his power. His face had lost the light that illuminated it in the pulpit, but his eyes gleamed with a lambent triumph. They said, "Sooner or later. But rather sooner than I had expected."
Anne presented her case in a veiled form, as a situation in the abstract. She scrupulously refrained from mentioning any names.
The Canon smiled at her precautions. "We are working in the dark," said he. "I think I can help you a little bit more if you'll allow me to come down to the concrete. You are speaking, I fancy, of our poor friend, Mr. Gorst?"
She looked at him helplessly, startled at his penetration and her own betrayal, but appeased by the pitying adjective which brought Gorst into the regions of pardonable discussion.
"You needn't be afraid," he said. "I had to be certain before I could advise you. I can now tell you with confidence that you are doing right. I—know—the—man."
He uttered the phrase with measured emphasis, and closed his teeth upon the last words with a snap. It was impossible to convey a stronger effect of moral reprobation. "But I see your difficulty," he continued. "I understand that he is a rather intimate friend of Miss Majendie."
Anne noticed that he deliberately avoided all mention of her husband.
"She has known him for a very long time."
"Ah yes. And it is your affection, your pity for your sister that makes you hesitate. You do not wish to be hard, and at the same time you wish to do right. Is it not so?"
She murmured her assent. (How well he understood her!)
"Ah, my dear Mrs. Majendie, we have sometimes to be a little hard, in order that we may not be harder. You have thought, perhaps, that you should be tender to this friendship? Now, I am an old man, and I have had a pretty large experience of men and women, and I tell you that such friendships are unwholesome. Unwholesome. Both for the woman and the man."
"If I thought that—"
"You may think it. Look at the man—What has it done for him? Has it made him any better, any stronger, any purer? Has it made her any happier?"
"I think so. It is all she has—"
"How can you say that, my dear Mrs. Majendie, when she has you?"
"And her brother."
The Canon gave her a keen glance. He seemed to be turning a little extra light on to her secret, to see it the better by. And under that light her mind conceived again a miserable suspicion.
"He knows something," she thought. "What is it that he knows? They all seem to know."
She turned the subject back again to her sister-in-law and Mr. Gorst. "She thinks she can save him."
"Her brother?"
It was another turn of the searchlight, but this time the Canon veiled his eyes, as if in mercy. He really knew nothing, nothing at all; but, as a man of the world, he felt that there was a great deal more than Mr. Gorst and Miss Majendie at the back of this discussion, and he was very curious to know what it might be.
Anne recoiled from the veiled condemnation of his face more than she had from its open intimations. She was not clever enough to see that the clever Canon had simply laid a trap for her.
She was now convinced that there was something that he knew. She lifted her head in loyal defiance of his knowledge. "No," said she proudly, "Mr. Gorst. It was of him I was speaking."
"Ah," said the Canon, as if his mind had come down with difficulty from the contemplation of another and more interesting personality; and again the significance of his manner was not lost upon Anne.
"I do not know Miss Majendie," he went on, still with the air of forcing himself to deal equitably with a subject of minor interest; "but if I am not much mistaken, she is, is she not, a little morbid?"
"She is a hopeless invalid."
"I know she is" (his voice dropped pity). "Poor thing—poor thing! And she thinks that she can save him? Mark me, I put no limit to the saving grace of God, and I would not like to say whom He may not choose as His instrument. But before we presume to act for Him, we should be very sure about the choice. Judging by the fruits—the fruits of this friendship"—he paused, as if seeking for a perfect justice—"Yes. That is what we must look at. I imagine Miss Majendie has been morbid on this subject. Morbid; and, perhaps, a little weak?"
Anne flushed. She was distressed to think she had given such an impression. "Indeed, indeed she isn't. You wouldn't say that if you knew her."
"I do not know her. But the strongest of us may be sometimes weak. You must be strong for her. And I"—he smiled—"must be strong for you. And I tell you that you have been—so far—wise and right. As long as this man continues in his evil courses, go on as you are doing. Do not encourage him by admitting him to your house and to your friendship. But"—(the Canon stood up, both for the better emphasis of his point, and as a gentle reminder to Mrs. Majendie that his dinner-hour was now approaching)—"but let him repent; let him give up his most objectionable companions; let him lead a pure life—andthen—accept him—welcome him—"(the Canon opened his arms, as if he were that moment receiving a repentant sinner) "rejoice over him"—(the Canon's face became fairly illuminated) "as—as much as you like."
The peroration was rapid, valedictory, complete. He thrust out his hand, displaying the whole palm of it as a sign of openness, honesty, and good-will.
"God bless you."
The solemn benediction atoned for any little momentary brusquerie.
Anne went away with a conscience wholly satisfied, in an exalted mood, fortified by all the ramparts of the spiritual life.
She was very gentle with Edith that evening. She said to herself that her love must make up to Edie for the loss her conscience had been compelled to inflict. "After all," she said to herself, "it's not as if she hadn't me." Measuring her services with those of the disreputable Mr. Gorst, it seemed to her that she was amply making up. She had a hatred of moral indebtedness, as of any other, and she loved to spend. In reckoning the love she had spent so lavishly on Edie, she had not allowed for the amount of forgiveness that Edie had spent on her. Forgiveness is a gift we have to take, whether we will or no, and Anne was blissfully unaware of what she took.
Majendie watched her ministrations curiously. Her tenderness was the subtlest lure to the love in him that still watched and waited for its hour. That night, in the study, he was silent, nervous, and unhappy. She shrank from the unrest and misery in his eyes. They followed or were fixed on her, rousing in her an obscure resentment and discomfort. She was beginning to be afraid of him. It had come to that.
She left him earlier than usual, and went very miserably to bed. She prayed, to-night, with her eyes fixed on the crucifix. It had become for her the symbol of her life, and of her marriage, which was nothing to her now but a sacrifice, a martyrdom, a vicarious expiation of her husband's sin.
As she lay down, the beating of her pulses told her that she was not to sleep. She longed for sleep, and tried to win it to her by repeating the Psalm which had been her comfort in all times of her depression. "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth."
She closed her eyes under the peace of the beloved words. And as she closed them she felt herself once more in the arms of the green hills, the folding hills of Westleydale.
She shook off the obsession and prayed another prayer. She longed to be alone; but, to her grief, she heard the opening and shutting of a door and her husband's feet moving in the room beyond.
A few blessed moments of solitude were left her during Majendie's undressing. She devoted them to the final expulsion of all lingering illusions. She had long ago lost the illusion of her husband's immaculate goodness; and now she cast off, once for all, the dear and pitiful belief that had revived in her under her brief enchantment in the wood at Westleydale. She told herself that she had married a man who had, not only a lower standard than her own, but an entirely different code of morals, a man irremediably contaminated, destitute of all perception of spiritual values. And she had got to make the best of him, that was all. Not quite all; for she had still to make the best of herself; and the two things seemed, at moments, incompatible. To guard herself from all contact with the invading evil; to take her stand bravely, to raise the spiritual ramparts and retire behind them, that was no more than her bare duty to herself and him. She must create a standard for him by keeping herself for ever high and pure. He loved her still, in his fashion; he must also respect her, and, in respecting her, respect goodness—the highest goodness—in her.
Accustomed to move in a region of spiritual certainty, Anne was untroubled by any misgivings as to the soundness of her attitude. It was open to no criticism except the despicable wisdom of the world.
Her chief difficulty was poor Majendie's imperishable affection. She tried to protect herself from it to-night by feigning drowsiness. She lay still as a stone, stiff with her fear. Once, at midnight, she felt him stir, and turn, and raise himself on his elbow. She was conscious through all her unhappy being of the adoring tenderness with which he watched her sleep.
At last she slept, and sleeping, she dreamed a strange dream. She found herself again in Westleydale, walking in green aisles of the holy, mystic, cathedral woods. The tall beech-stems were the pillars of the temple. A still light came through them, guiding her to the beech-tree that she knew. And she saw an angel lying under the beech-tree. It lay on its side, with its wings stretched out so that the right wing covered the left. As she approached, it raised the covering wing, and in the warm hollow of the other she saw that it cradled a little naked child. And at the sight there came a thorn in her breast that pricked her. The child stirred in its sleep, and crawled to the place of the angel's breast, and it fondled it with searching lips and hands. Then it wailed, and as she heard its cry the thorn pressed sharper into Anne's breast; and the angel's eyes turned to her with an immortal anguish, and pity, and despair. She looked, and saw that its breast was as the breast of the little child. And she was moved to compassion at the helplessness of them both, of the heavenly and of the earthly thing; and she stooped and lifted the child, and laid it to her own breast, and nourished it; and had peace from her pain.