"It is the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack of response and understanding," said Milly. "It is as if I were always looking at a face that never really saw me or spoke to me. Such a mistake as I have made—or as others have made for me—is irretrievable. An unhappy marriage seems to ruin everything in you and about you, and you have to go on living among the ruins. You can't go away and leave them behind you, as you can other calamities in life."
Milly Quentyn and Mrs. Drent were alone this afternoon in the country-house where they had come really to know each other, and Milly, acting hostess for her absent cousin, had poured out Mrs. Drent's tea and then her own, leaving it untouched, however, while she spoke, her hands falling, clasped together, in her lap, her eyes fixed on vacancy. The contemplation of ruins for the last five years had filled these eyes with a pensive resignation; but they showed no tearful repinings, no fretful restlessness. They were clear eyes, large and luminous, and in looking at them and at the wan, lovely little face where they bloomed like melancholy flowers, Mrs. Drent's face, on the other side of the tea-table, grew yet more sombre and more intent in its brooding sympathy. "Why did you——" she began, and then changed the first intention of her question to—"Why did you—love him?" This was more penetrating than to ask Mrs. Quentyn why she had married him.
The extreme lowness of Mrs. Drent's voice muffled, as it were, its essential harshness; one felt in it the effort to be soft, as in her one felt effort, always, to quell some latent fierceness, an eager, almost savage energy. She was thirty years old, six years older than Milly Quentyn. Her skin was swarthy, her eyes, under broad, tragically bent eyebrows, were impenetrably black. Her features, had they not been so small, so finely finished, would have seemed too emphatic, significant as they were of a race-horse nervousness and of something inflexible in the midst of an expression all flexibility. Her hands were curiously slight and small, and as she now, in looking at her companion and in asking her question, locked them together with a force that made them tremble, they showed the same combination of an excessive strength informing an excessive fragility.
Milly Quentyn's gaze drifted to her and rested upon her in silence.
Presently she smiled.
"How kind you are to care so much, to care at all!"
"I do care."
"Are you, will you, be my friend, always?" asked Milly, leaning towards her a little, and the smile seemed to flutter to the other woman like an appealing and grateful kiss.
"I am your friend; I will be your friend, always," Mrs. Drent replied, in an even lower tone than before.
The tears came softly into Milly's eyes while they looked at each other she gently, Mrs. Drent still sombrely. Then leaning back again with a sigh, she continued, "Why I loved him? I didn't love him. Isn't that the almost invariable answer? I was nineteen; I had just left the schoolroom; I was in love with my own ideal of love—you know, you must know, the silly, pathetic, sentimental and selfish mixture one is at nineteen;—and Mamma said that he was that ideal; and he said nothing; so I believed her! Poor Dick! He was in love, I think, really, and not a bit with himself, and with only enough articulateness to ask me to marry him; and of course he was, and is, very good-looking. You know Mamma. She has married us all off very well, they say; you know how they say it. In her determination to ensconce the family type comfortably she is as careless of the single life as nature itself. In this case what appeared to be a very cosy niche offered itself for me and she shoved me into it. I have grown up since then; that is all my story."
"They are terrible, terrible, such marriages," said Mrs. Drent, looking away.
Her tone struck Milly, with all her consciousness of pathos, as perhaps a little misplaced. "Terrible? No, hardly that, I think. I did believe that I loved him. He did love me."
"You were a child who did not know herself, nor what she was doing."
"Yes; that is true."
"And it is terrible for him if he still loves you."
"Oh," said Milly, with another sigh, "if you can call it love. He is rather dismayed by the situation; sorry that we don't hit it off better, as he would express it; jocosely resigned to what he would call my unkindness and queerness. But as for tragedy, suffering;—one can't associate such perturbing things with imperturbable Dick. I haven't to reproach myself with having hurt his life seriously, and, Heaven knows! I don't reproach his simplicity and harmlessness for having broken mine. Marriage and a wife were incidents—incidents only—to him, and if they have failed to be satisfactory incidents, he has other far more absorbing interests in his life to take his mind off the breakdown of his domestic happiness. Indeed, domesticity, when he cares to avail himself of it, is always there in its superficial forms and ceremonies. I can't pretend to love him, but I take care of his money and his house, I entertain his friends, I give him his tea at breakfast and a decorous kiss when he comes back from shooting animals in some savage country. One could hardly call us separated, so discreetly do I bridge the chasm with all the conventional observances. Thank Heaven! the shooting is his one great passion, so that he is usually wandering happily in distant jungles and not requiring too manytête-à-têtesat breakfast of me."
"He is probably very good and kind," said Mrs. Drent, "but it is incredible that such a man should be married to such a woman as you."
Again Milly gazed for a moment, aware of inappropriateness. "You have a very high ideal of marriage, haven't you?" she said. Mrs. Drent's husband had died five years before, and her baby when it was born. She wore black, exquisite and unobtrusive always, and, unobtrusively, she was known to be inconsolable. Yet Milly had heard it whispered that Gilbert Drent had married her for her money and that, charming person though he had been, she had passionately idealized him. There was, therefore, with these memories at the back of her mind, something painful as well as pathetic to her in the voice in which Mrs. Drent, crimsoning deeply, said: "My own marriage was ideal. I don't understand marriage unless it is ideal."
There was a silence after that for a moment and then Milly said, "It must be wonderful to have such a memory. All I know is that I wish with all my heart I had never married Dick, and I believe with all my heart that one shouldn't marry unless everything is there."
"That is it," said Mrs. Drent, "everything must be there for it to be right;—affinity, and understanding, and devotion. Some women can find enough in the mere fact of a home and a shared life to be satisfied without them; but not a woman like you."
"I think you idealize me," Milly said smiling a little sadly; "but I believe in that too. I don't claim at all any remarkable individuality; but what I have Dick doesn't understand at all, doesn't even see. He goes blundering about the dullest, most distant parks and preserves of a castle; that is as near as he ever gets to the castle, such as it is, of my personality. And he doesn't really care about the castle; it hardly worries him that he can't find it. There might be wonderful pictures on its walls, and jewels in its cabinets, and music in its chambers; but even if he got inside and were able to see and hear, he wouldn't care a bit about them; he would say: 'Awfully nice,' and look for the smoking-room. And there," said Milly, pressing her hands together while her eyes filled suddenly with tears, "there is the little tragedy. For of course every woman thinks that she has pictures and jewels and music, and longs—oh longs!—to show them to the one, the one person who will love to see and hear. And when she finds that no one sees or hears, or knows, even, that there is anything to look for, then the music dies, and the pictures fade, and the jewels grow dim, and at last everything magical vanishes from life and she sees herself, not as an enchanted castle, but as a first-class house in Mayfair, with all the latest improvements;—as much a matter of course, as much a convenience, as unmysterious and as unalluring as the telephone, the hot water pipes and the electric lighting. It is only as if in a dream—a far, far dream—that she remembers the castle, and feels, sometimes, within her, the ruins, the empty ruins."
"Oh—my dear!" breathed Mrs. Drent. It was as if she couldn't help it, as if, shaken from her passionate reserve, she must show her very heart. She leaned round the table and took one of Milly's hands. "Don't—don't let the magic vanish! There's nothing else in life! All the rest is death. It's only when we are in the castle—with our music and our pictures and our jewels—that we are alive. You know it; you feel it; it's what makes the difference between the real and the unreal people. You are one of the real ones, I saw it at once; you aren't meant to wither out and to become crisp and shallow. Don't cease to believe in the pictures, the jewels, the music. They are there.Isee.Ihear."
"How—sweetof you!" faltered Milly.
She was startled, she was touched, she, who rarely felt it, felt shyness. She had known that this dark, still woman was observing her, and had known, for all the other's reserve, that the observation was not antagonistic. Something in Mrs. Drent had made her feel that it would be easy, a relief, to talk to her about all one's miseries and desolations. But the sudden leap of spiritual fire found her unprepared. She was a little ashamed, as though her own reality were somewhat unreal beside Mrs. Drent's belief in it. There had been something pleasant in the tracing of her little tragedy, something sweet in the thought of that sad castle of her soul, with its stilled music, its fading enchantments; but Mrs. Drent had seen only the tragedy; and had felt the danger of withering, of becoming acquiescent and commonplace, with an intensity of which she herself was incapable. Such response, such understanding, might well take one's breath away.
This scene was the beginning of their long friendship. It was a charming friendship. Milly Quentyn, for all the clouds of her background, was a creature of sunshine, of sunshine in a mist, a creature of endearing fluctuations. Indeed, Christina told her afterwards, when they analyzed the beginnings, it had been her childlike radiance, her smiles, her air as of rifts of blue over a rainy landscape—(for everybody knew that Dick and Milly Quentyn didn't hit it off)—it had been these sweet, these doubly pathetic qualities that had first attracted her. "I am not easily attracted," said Christina. "Had there been a languishing hint of thefemme incompriseabout you, any air of self-pity, I should never have so longed to take care of you, to try to help to make you happier. But you were made for happiness and beauty, and if you didn't succeed in keeping them one saw that it would hurt you dreadfully. It was that that so appealed."
And Milly confessed to Christina that she had been at first a good deal afraid of her, as the distinguished young poetess, and had thought of her as a sombre and humourless little personage, only reassuring in being so enchantingly well-dressed.
In Christina Drent's poetry the numbness that had descended upon her after her husband's death had found a partial awakening. The poems were not great things, but they were written without a touch of artifice. They were sudden, spontaneous and swift, and it was as if, in reading them, one heard a distant wail or saw across a bleak sky the flight of an unknown bird. In her own little world of fashion they had made her a tolerably famous figure. But it was an echo only of her regrets and longings that Christina was able to put into her poems, all perhaps that she chose to put; they were never intimate or personal. The essence of her was that passionate reserve and, with it, that passionate longing to devote herself, lavishly, exclusively, upon one idolized and, inevitably, idealized object. She was full of a fervour of faith, once the reserve was broken down, and her idol, high on a pedestal in its well-built temple, was secure henceforth from overthrow.
Such an idol her husband had been. Such an idol her child would have been. The doors of that sanctuary were sealed for ever, the sacred emptiness for ever empty; Christina could never have remarried. But beside it rose a second temple, only less fair, and in it, lovingly enshrined, stood Milly Quentyn.
Happily Milly was an idol worthy of idealization, perhaps even worthy of temple-building. She was sweet and tender, in friendship most upright and loyal. She loved to be loved, to see her own tenderness blossom about her in responsive tenderness. She was not vain, but she loved those she cared for to find her exquisite, and to show her that they did. Like a frail flower, unvisited by sunlight, she could hardly live without other lives about her, fortifying, expanding her own. Her disappointment in her husband had turned to something like a wan disgust. His crude appreciations of her, which, in the first girlish trust of her married life, she had taken as warrant of all the subtle, manifold appreciations that she needed, were now offences. Poor Dick Quentyn blundered deeper and deeper into the quagmire of his wife's disdain. His was a boyish, unexacting nature. He asked for no great things, and the lack of even small mercies left him serene. As he had never thought about himself at all, it did not surprise him that his wife thought very little of him; he did not, because of it, think less well of himself. Milly's indifference argued in her a difference from most women, facilely contented as they usually seemed. It did not change or harm him or make him either assertive or self-conscious.
He had soon discovered that the things he cared to talk about wearied her—sport, the estate, very uncomplex politics or very uncomplex books; and after a little while he discovered, further, that for him to try to adapt himself to her, to try to talk about the things she cared for, exasperated her. She listened, indeed, with a bleak patience, while he admired, with a genial endeavour to do the right thing, all the wrong pictures at the shows where they went together. She sat silent, her eyes aloof, dimly smiling, while he tried to win her interest in a very jolly book,—watered Dumas, as a rule, decantered into modern bottles. He saw that she made an effort to care about the big game he shot—the hall and dining-room bristled with trophies, one walked over them everywhere—and she looked at pictures of them in the books of travel he eagerly put before her; but it was as pictures that they interested her, remotely, not as animals suitable for shooting.
Dick Quentyn, with an unmysterious, undifficult wife, could have been a very gracefully affectionate husband; his manners were as charming as his mind was blundering; but with this chill young nymph any attempt at marital pettings and caressings seemed clumsy and grotesque. With Milly, he soon felt it, the barrier between their minds was inevitably a barrier shutting him out from even these manifestations of tenderness. He was not at all dull in feeling that; not at all dull in his quick withdrawal before her passive distaste; not dull in knowing that if he were not to withdraw the distaste would become more than negative. He had now, cheerfully, it seemed, recognized that his marriage was a failure and, as Milly had said, it did not seem, after an unpleasant wrench or two when he did show an uncontrollable grimace of pain, to make very much difference to him. She endured him; she did not dislike him at all—at a distance; and, very gaily, with a debonair manner of perfect trust, he kept at a distance. He travelled constantly, and it was rarely that he required her to pour out his tea for him.
Milly poured out his tea for a fortnight during Christina's first visit to Chawlton House, the Quentyns' country-place. Christina looked forward to meeting her friend's inappropriate husband almost with trembling. She felt that she might be called to the great and happy mission of reconciliation, that Milly might have been mistaken and Dick undervalued. Milly's trust in her and dependence upon her had grown with leaps and bounds, and she hoped that with tact and time she might do much to rebuild the broken life, if there were materials with which to build it. The first glance at Dick showed her the futility of such hopes. He was a dear; that at once was obvious to her; and he was delightful looking; his small head well set on broad shoulders, his short nose expressive of courage and character; his grey eyes as free from all malice and uncharitableness as they were from introspection. But he was a boy, a kind, good boy, an ingenuous, well-mannered materialist, living, as it were, by automatic functions, and as incapable of spiritual initiative as he was of evil. What ground of meeting could there be between him and her Milly, compact as she was of subtleties, profundities and possibilities? No; Dick offered no materials for the building of a shrine, and unless marriage was a shrine Christina could not contemplate it. There had been a deep instinct, like one of nature's cruel yet righteous laws, in Milly's withdrawal; to have consented, to have compromised, would have been to stifle and stultify herself.
Christina so justified her, and yet it pained her that Milly, in her treatment of her husband, should be almost unbeautiful. The streak of hardness, almost of cruelty, like nature's own, showing itself in her darling, distressed her. She did not care so much about Dick's very problematic discomfort. He showed none; he talked with great good spirits, made cheerful, obvious jokes and looked eminently sane, fresh and picturesque in his out-of-door attire. Yet even he must know that every fibre of Milly's face, every tone of her voice, expressed her indifference and her oppression. "Really, dear, you are not kind," Christina protested. Milly opened innocent eyes. "You think I'm wrong about Dick?"
"Not wrong about him; wrong to him. Surely, just because you are so right in what you feel to be impossibility, you can afford to be kind."
"You think I behave badly to Dick? Oh, Christina!—you are displeased with me?"
They were very sincere with each other, these two, and bared their souls to each other relentlessly.
"Only because you are so dear to me, Milly." Mrs. Drent flushed a little as she looked tenderly at her friend. "Only because I want to see you always right, exquisitely right. You make me uncomfortable when you are not. He has done you no wrong. Why should you treat him as you did this morning, using me as a foil to show him his own stupidity? Not that I do find him stupid, Milly; only very, very simple."
"I know it! Oh, I know it!" Milly wailed. "If only he had done me a wrong it would be so much easier! He irritates me so unspeakably, and I seem to feel it more, now that I have you. That laboured chaffing of you at breakfast—how could you have borne it? I can't pretend amusement, and chaff is his only conception of human intercourse. I know I'm horrid—I know it; but it is the long, long accumulations of repressed exasperation that have made me so—worse than exasperations. I remember, during the first months of our married life, when I was becoming dreadfully frightened, catching glimpses on every side of my awful mistake—I remember once kissing him and saying something playful that hid an appeal for comfort, comprehension, reassurance. And do you know, he answered me with a chaffing jest—a stupid, stupid jest—some piece of would-be gallant folly. It was like a dagger!"
"Perhaps it pleased him so much, your kissing him, that it made him shy," Christina suggested, but Milly said:—"Dick shy! Oh no, he is not sensitive enough for shyness. He doesn't feel things at all as you, with your exquisiteness, imagine. He isn't shy at all, and I'm afraid he is sometimes immensely, hideously stupid."
After all, as Christina came to see, Dick's inevitable loss was her own gain. Milly, who could not be her husband's, was hers, almost as a child might have been. Christina, for the first time in her life, knew the intoxicating experience of being sought out and needed. It was Milly who turned to her; Milly who put out appealing hands, like a lonely child; who nestled her head on her shoulder, contentedly sighing, as she begged her please, please not to go until she had to—and couldn't she, wouldn't she, stay on until the winter?
Why shouldn't she? Her own life was empty. It ended in her passing most of the winter with Milly in the country after Dick had gone off to India. It was a blissful winter, the happiest, in reality, that Christina had ever known, though she was not aware of this nor aware that it was the first time in her life that she was the recipient of as much devotion as she gave. They read and rode and walked and talked and carried on energetic reforms and charities in the village. Christina was full of ardent enthusiasms which infected Milly. In spite of her physical delicacy, for she had a weak heart, she showed an enterprise and endurance that Milly was not capable of. The winter went by and life was full of significance.
Then Christina asked Milly to come and stay with her in London for the spring, and so, by degrees, they both came to think of home as the being together. Christina's little house in Sloane Street became a centre of discriminating hospitality; they had an equal talent for selection and recognition, and Milly possessed the irradiating attractive qualities that Christina lacked. Together they became something of a touchstone for the finer, more recondite elements in the vortex of the larger London life. All their people seemed to come to them through some pleasant affinity, the people who had done clever things; the people who, better still, shone only with latent possibilities and were the richer for their reticences; and dear, comfortable, unexacting people who were not particularly clever, but responsive, appreciative and genuine.
Christina still wrote a little, but not so much. She and Milly studied and travelled and, in the country, at the proper seasons, rusticated. With all its harmony, their life did not want its more closely knitting times of fear, as when Milly was dangerously ill and Christina nursed her through the long crisis, or when Christina's heart showed alarming symptoms and hurried them away to German specialists.
There were funny little quarrels, too, funny to look back upon, though very painful at the moment; for Milly could be fretful, and Christina violent in reproach. The swift reconciliations atoned for all, when, holding each other's hands, they laughed at each other, each eager to take the blame. Certain defects they came to recognize and to take into account, tolerant, loving comprehension, the ripest stage of affection, seeming achieved. Milly was capricious, had moods of gloom and disconsolateness when nothing seemed to interest her, neither books nor music nor people, not even Christina, and when, sunken in a deep armchair, she would listlessly tap her fingers on the chair-arms, her eyes empty of all but a monotonous melancholy. These moods always hurt Christina,—Milly herself seemed hardly aware of them, certainly was not aware of their hurting,—and she hid the hurt in a gentle sympathy that averted tactful eyes from her friend's retirement. But she did not quite understand; for she never wished to retire into herself and away from Milly.
And Milly discovered that Christina could be unreasonable—so she tolerantly termed a smouldering element in her friend's nature; Christina, in fact, could be fiercely jealous. They shared all their friends, many of them dear friends, but dear on a certain level, below the illuminated solitude where they two stood in their precious isolation. And Milly protested to herself that she was the last person to wish that isolation disturbed. No one knew her, understood her, helped and loved her as Christina did; there was no one like Christina, no one so strong, so generous, so large-natured. Why then should Christina, like a foolish school-girl, show unmistakably—her efforts to hide it only making her look dim-eyed, white-lipped—a sombre misery if Milly allowed anyone to absorb her? This really piteous infirmity was latent in Christina; she did not show it at all during the first years of their companionship; it grew with her growing devotion to Milly. Milly discovered it when she asked little Joan Ashby to go to Italy with them. Christina, at the proposal, had been all glad, frank acquiescence. Unsuspectingly Milly petted and made much of the girl whose adoration was sweet to her. She went about with her sight-seeing, when Christina said that she was tired and did not care to see things, not remembering that when they were alone together Christina had never seemed tired. She laughed and talked till all hours of the night with Joan, when Christina had gone to bed saying that she was sleepy. All had seemed peaceful and normal. Milly was stupefied when, by degrees, a consciousness of a difference in Christina crept upon her.
Christina smiled much, was alert, crisply responsive; but ice was in the smile, the response was galvanized. She was suffering—the realization rushed upon Milly once her innocent eyes were opened, and all her strength went to hiding the suffering. Milly, watching, felt a helpless alarm, really a shyness, gaining upon her in the face of this development. She found Christina sobbing in her room one night when she cut short her talk with Joan and came upon her unexpectedly.
Milly's tender heart rose at a bound over alarm and shyness. But when she ran to her, Christina pushed her fiercely away. "You know! Of course you know! Go back to her if you like her better!"
She was like a frantic child. Milly could have laughed, had not the exhibition in her grave, staunch Christina frightened her too much, made her too terribly sorry and almost ashamed for her.
Later, when Christina, laughing quiveringly at her own folly, yet confessing her own powerlessness before it, put her arms around her neck and begged for forgiveness, Milly in all her soft, humorous reproaches daring now to tease and rally, had yet the chill of a new discovery to reckon with. A weight seemed to have come upon her as she realised how much Christina cared. It was as if Christina had confessed that she cared so much more than she, Milly, could ever do. She had not before thought of their friendship as a responsibility. It was too dear, and silly and pathetic in Christina, but it seemed to manacle her.
She must be very careful to like no Joans too much in the future. Christina protested passionately that she must talk to Joan and love Joan—any number of Joans, young or old, male or female, as much as before, more than before, since now her folly was dissipated by confession; but Milly in her heart knew better than to believe her. She filled Christina's life completely, to the exclusion of any other deep affection, and Christina could never be happy unless her friend's life were equally undivided.
Four years passed, and during them Dick Quentyn had wandered about the world, not at all disconsolately. He spent several seasons with friends in India; he went to Canada and to Japan; when he came home he filled his time largely with shooting and hunting.
It was almost as a guest that, in the country and in his own house, he passed a few weeks with Milly and Christina and entirely as a guest that he dined now and then with them in London.
It was a rather ludicrous situation, but he did not seem depressed or abashed by it. Christina always felt that by some boyish intuition he recognized in her a friendly sympathy, a sympathy which he must certainly see as terribly detached, since it was she who had now fixed definitely Milly's removal from his life, made it permanent and given it a meaning. But it was a sympathy very friendly, even slightly humorous. He would catch her dark eyes sometimes as he sat, a guest at her dinner-table—(he never took Milly in, all the negations of married life were still his)—and in them he saw and responded to an almost affectionate playfulness. He evidently saw the joke and it amused him. Christina often reflected that Dick was a dear, in all his impossibility, and that Milly was not nearly nice enough to him. But Milly was nicer than she had been; the new effectiveness and happiness of her own life made it less of an effort to be so. From her illumined temple she smiled at him, a smile that gained in sweetness and lost its chill. She handed on to him a little of the radiance.
"Since we can't hit it off together, Milly, I must say there is no one you could have chosen for a friend that I could have liked so much as Mrs. Drent," Dick said to his wife one evening in the drawing-room after dinner. They often had an affable chat before the wondering eyes of the world. Milly chatted with great affability. Dick, as Christina so often reminded her, was a dear. No one could have less suggested shackles.
"Now, Dick," she said, smiling, "what doyoufind to like in Christina?" Even in her new tolerance there lurked touches of the old irrepressible disdain.
Dick, twisting his moustache, contemplated her. "Do you mean that I'm not capable of liking anything or anybody that you do?" he inquired. Milly flushed, though the mildness of her husband's tone, one of purely impersonal interest, suggested no conscious laying of a coal of fire upon her head. It was what she had meant. That Dick should like Christina, Christina Dick, was wholly delightful, but that Dick should seem to like what she liked for the same reasons irked her a little. It was rather as if he had expressed enthusiasms about her favourite Brahms Rhapsody. She rather wanted to show him that any idea he might entertain of a community of tastes was illusory. How could Dick like a Brahms Rhapsody, he whose highest ideals of music were of something sedative after a day's hard riding? And how could Dick really like Christina? If he really did, and for any of her reasons, there must be between them the link, if ever so small a one, of a community of taste—a link that she had never recognized.
"I think that we could only like the same things in a very different way," she confessed. "Why do you like Christina?"
He did not reply at once, and she went on, looking at him, smiling—they were sitting side by side on a little sofa; "it isn't her charm, for you think her ugly."
"Yes; she's ugly certainly," Dick assented, quite as dully as she had hoped he would, "though her figure is rather neat."
Milly's smile shifted to its habitual kindly irony. "She is subtle and delicate and sensitive," she said, rehearsing to herself as much as to him all the reasons why Dick could not really like Christina. "Her truths would never blunder and her silences never bore." "As Dick's did," was in her mind. It was cruel to be so conscious of the contrast when he looked at her with such unconsciousness; to reassure herself with the expression of it was rather like mocking something blind and deaf and trusting. A sudden pity confused her, and, with a little artificiality of manner which masked the confusion, she went on: "One could never be unhappy without her knowing it, and then one would be glad she did know, for she can sympathise without hurting you with sympathy. She feels everything that is beautiful and rare, everything that is sad and tragic; she feels everything and sees everything, and she sees and feels in order to act, to give, to help. Is it all this you like in her?" Milly finished.
Dick Quentyn still looked mildly at his wife. "Yes; I suppose so," he said.
"You see these things in Christina?"
"In a different way," he smiled. It was almost a very clever smile.
Milly might have felt startled at it had he not gone on very simply:—"One sees that she is such a thoroughly good sort; so loyal; she would go through thick and thin for anyone she cared about; and so kind, as you say; she would talk as nicely to a dull person as to a clever one; she'd never snub one or make one feel a duffer."
For a moment Milly was silent. "Do you mean that I used to snub you—and make you feel a duffer?" she then asked.
"Oh, I say, Milly!" Dick, genuinely distressed, looked his negative. "You didn't suppose?——"
"I know that I was often horrid."
"Well, if you were, you didn't suppose I'd tell you in that roundabout fashion. Besides, all that's done with long ago." He looked away from her now and down at the floor.
Again Milly was silent. Strangely to herself, she felt her eyes fill with tears. She waited to conquer them before saying very gently: "Dick, do forgive me for having been so horrid."
He stared up at her. "Forgive you, Milly?" The request seemed to leave him speechless.
She was able to smile at him. "You do?"
"You never were. It's more to the point for me to ask you to forgive me."
"For what, pray?" She had to control a quiver in her voice.
"Oh—for everything—for being so wrong, so altogether the wrong person, you know," said Dick, smiling too. He again looked away from her, across the room, now, at Christina; and, after a silence, filled for Milly with perplexing impulses, he added: "But the real reason I like her so much is that she is so tremendously fond of you."
Milly had to bring her thoughts back with an effort to Christina; she must let his remark about being forgiven remain as casual as he had evidently felt it; and it was something else that he had said which more emphatically held her attention. She thought of it all the evening, after he had gone; and, while her hair was being brushed, she looked at her reflection in the mirror and saw herself in that time, "long ago." It was as if Dick had shown her a dead thing, and had turned the key on it with his quiet words of acquiescence.
She looked in the mirror. Surrounded by the softly falling radiance of her hair, her face was still girlish in tint and outline; but already her eyes had in them the depth of time lived through, her cheeks and lips were differently sweet; and as the realization of time's swift passage stole upon her, a vague, strong protest filled her, a sense of deep, irremediable disappointment with life.
Dick Quentyn went that winter to Africa, and Milly gave her husband a farewell all kindness and composure, when he came to bid Christina and her good-bye. Composure was a habit, and she was unaware of a new discontent and protest that stirred beneath it, though aware that the kindness she felt for her husband was greater than what her words of farewell expressed.
Dick always wrote punctually, once a fortnight, to his wife, short bulletins, to which, as accurately and as laconically, she responded. This winter the bulletins were often delayed, sometimes altogether missing.
Dick had joined an exploring party, and his allusions, by the way, to "Narrow shaves," "Nasty rows with natives," and "A rather beastly fever," explained these irregularities.
"He really ought to write a book about it. They have evidently been in danger, and had an heroic time of it altogether," Christina said, during a sympathetic perusal of these documents which were always handed on to her, as, for any intimacy they contained, they might have been handed on to anybody. They began—"Dear Milly"; and ended—"Yours aff'ly, D. Q." The "affectionately" was always abbreviated.
"I suppose they really are in a good deal of danger," said Milly, nibbling at her toast,—they were at breakfast.
"That, I suppose, was what they went for," Christina replied, her eyes passing over the letter.
Milly, leaning her elbow on the table, watched and read. "Poor Dick!" she said presently.
Christina had laid down the letter and was going on with her coffee.
"Why poor, dear? It's what he enjoys."
"If he were killed to-morrow I suppose it would hardly affect us more than the death of any of the men who had tea here yesterday."
"Milly!" said Christina. She put down her cup.
"Would it?" Milly insisted. "Would you really mind more?"
"Your husband—my child!" This elder-sister mode of address was often Christina's.
"Why should a husband one hasn't been able to live with count for as much as a friend one is glad to see?"
"Because he has counted for so much."
"But, Christina, you can't deny that you would hardly be sorry, and that you would not expect me to be sorry—only solemn."
"I should expect you to be both."
"Sorry because a man I have no affection for—a man I have almost hated—is dead?"
"Yes; if only for those reasons; and that it should be only for those reasons is what you meant when you said: 'Poor Dick,'" Christina demonstrated with an air of finality that showed her displeased with what she felt to be an unbecoming levity.
Milly was thinner, paler; Christina noticed that, though she did not notice how often she returned to the subject of her husband's danger and the irony of her own indifference to it. And Milly's listless moods followed one other so closely this winter as to become almost permanent. She was evidently bored. More and more frequently, when they were talking over theirtête-à-têtetea, the very dearest hour of the day, Christina saw that Milly did not hear her. After these four years of comprehension and mutual forbearance the apparent indifference or preoccupation could not, at first, seriously disturb her; hurt her it always did. Picking up a book she would read and cease to talk. The mood always passed the sooner for not being recognised, and Milly would come out of the cloud, unaware of it, sunnier, sweeter, more responsive than before. But this winter she did not come out. That she should be so bored, so apathetic, began to disturb as well as to hurt Christina. There came a quick pulsing of fear; did some new attachment account for it? Her mind, in a swift, flame-like running around the circle of possibilities, saw them all as impossibilities, and put the fear away.
One day, taking Milly's face between her hands, yet feeling, strangely, a sudden shyness that made the complete confession of her alarms too difficult, she asked her if she were unhappy.
"Unhappy, dear Christina? Why should I be?" Milly put an affectionate arm about her friend's neck.
"But are you? Is there anything you would like to do? Anywhere you would like to go? I am sure that you are frightfully bored," Christina smiled. "Confess that you are."
"Have I seemed bored? No. I can't think of anything that would interest me. One comes on these Sahara-like times in life, you know—stretches of dull sands. Or is it that I am getting old, Christina?"
"You old? You, child!"
"I feel old," said Milly. "Really old and tired."
Christina still smiled at her, but smiled over a sudden choking in her throat. It was not sympathy for her friend'sWeltschmertz; it was the recognition of something in her eyes, her voice—something she could not analyze, as if a faint barrier wavered, impalpable, formless, between them, and as if, did she say that it was there, it would change suddenly to stone and perhaps shut her out for ever.
What was it in Milly that made her afraid that to cry out her fears might make them permanent? She battled with them all the winter. They had arranged to go to Sicily and Greece for the spring, and Christina looked forward to this trip as a definite goal. It would break the spell, turn the difficult corner,—for all her fierce idealism she was too wise a woman not to know that every human relation must have corners; and, indeed, in talking over plans, getting up information, burnishing historical memories, Milly showed some of her old girlish eagerness. She and Christina even read the Greek tragedies over together, in order, Milly said, that they should steep themselves in the proper atmosphere. It was therefore with a shock of bitter surprise and disappointment that Christina, only a fortnight before the time fixed for their departure, heard Milly announce, with evident openness, though she flushed slightly, that she thought she would rather put off the trip; she would rather spend April at Chawlton; and, at once going on, looking clearly at her friend: "You see, dear, I have just had a letter from Dick. He gets back next week and is going down there. He says that he wants to see the primroses after that horrid Africa;—quite a poetical touch, isn't it,—for Dick! And I think it would be really a little too brutal of me, wouldn't it, if I sailed off without seeing him at all—without pouring out his tea for even one week."
Milly was smiling, really with her own soft gaiety; the flush had gone. Christina was convinced of her own misinterpretation. Duty had called Milly away from pleasure, and she had feared, for a moment, that her friend would think too much sacrifice to it.
"Of course, dearest, of course we will put it off," she said. "And of course we will go down to welcome home the wanderer. It is sweet of you to have thought of it."
Milly kissed her. "You see I am becoming quite a virtuous woman," she said. "And it is a pity to miss the primroses."
The packing projects turned topsy-turvy, servants to be redistributed, Christina saw to all, while Milly, with still her new cheerfulness, flitted in the spring sunshine from shop to shop, decking herself in appropriate butterfly garments. They were to get to Chawlton only a day or two before Dick's arrival.
The gardens, the lawns, the woods, were radiant, and Milly, in the environment of jocund revival, shared the radiance. All barriers seemed gone, were it not that Christina, full of strange presages, felt the very radiance to make one.
Milly gathered primroses in the woods, hatless, her white dress and fair head shining among the young greys and greens. She came in laden with flowers, and the house smiled with their pale gold, their innocent and fragile gaiety. "Isn't the country delicious?" she said to Christina. "Much nicer than dreary Greece and tiresome ruins, isn't it?"
"Much," said Christina, who was finding the country, the spring, the sunshine, the very primroses, full of a haunting melancholy.
"I have a thirst for simplicity and freshness and life," Milly went on, looking at the sky, "and how one feels them all here. Oh, the cuckoo, Christina, isn't it a sound that makes one think of tears and happiness!"
Of tears only, not of happiness, thought Christina; of regret—regret for something gone; lost for ever. The cuckoo's cry pierced her all day long.
Simplicity and freshness and life; Christina did not recall the words definitely when she saw Dick Quentyn spring up the steps to greet his wife at the threshold of the house; but something unformulated echoed in her mind with a deepened sense of presage.
Milly stretched out both her hands. "Welcome home, Dick," she said. And she held her cheek to be kissed. There was no restraint or shyness in her eyes. She looked at the bronzed, stalwart, smiling being with as open and happy a gaze as though he had been an oak-tree. The happiness of gaze was new; but then it was only part of Milly's revival; and then, he had been in danger. Christina took comfort, she knew not for what.
"It is good to be at home again," Dick asseverated more than once during the day; and, "I say, how jolly those primroses look," he exclaimed in the long drawing-room.
Milly, her arm in Christina's, stood beside him. "I gathered them, Dick, all of them, and arranged them, in honour of your return."
"Oh, come now!" Dick Quentyn ejaculated with humorous incredulity.
Milly smiled, making no protest. He, she and Christina walked about the grounds. Christina had felt a curious shrinking from joining them, a shrinking, in any normal condition of things between husband and wife, so natural that it was only with a shock of amazement that she recognized its monstrousness as applied to the actual one. She leave Milly alone with her husband! What a revolution in all their relations would such a withdrawal have portended! To leave them would have been to yield to morbid imaginations, to make them almost real; at all events to make them visible to Milly; and Milly certainly did not see them. Milly, indeed, seemed to see nothing.
She still held Christina's hand drawn through her arm while they walked and listened to Dick's laconic and much prompted recital of his African adventures.
"I do hope you won't go off on any more terrible expeditions of this sort for a very long time, Dick," said Milly. "I expected every morning to read in the newspaper that you'd been eaten by savages."
"Well, I wasn't among cannibals, you know," literal Dick objected, "and I think I'll have to have another brush at it. Harvey is going out in a month or so."
"And you are going with him?"
"Well, I rather think I shall," said Dick. "He is a splendid fellow, and it seems my sort of thing."
Before dinner, in the drawing-room, he joined Christina, who was sitting alone looking out at the evening. "As inseparable as ever, you and Milly, aren't you?" he said, coming and standing over her, his genial eyes upon her.
"Just as inseparable," she assented, looking up at him. She smiled with an emphasis that was faintly defiant, though neither she nor Dick recognized defiance.
"Milly is looking a little fagged, don't you think," he went on. "Has she been doing too much this winter? You are frightfully busy, aren't you? Milly always likes going at a great pace, I know."
"I should not have thought there was anything noticeable," said Christina. "She was a little fagged, perhaps; but the country has already refreshed her wonderfully."
"London always does pull one down, I hate the beastly place," said Dick. And he went on: "She is being awfully nice to me. I don't remember her ever having been so nice—since, I mean, we decided that we couldn't hit it off. One would really say that she rather liked seeing me!" and Dick smiled, as if the joke were very comical.
"You have been in such danger. Milly can but feel relief." Her voice was full of an odd repression, discouragement, but Dick was altogether too innocent of any hope to be aware of discouragement or repression.
"She was worried about me? Really? That was awfully good of her," he said.
Christina was remembering that Milly had only expressed indifference as to Dick's danger.
The ensuing evening was, to Christina, uncanny in its unapparent strangeness. She and Dick were both aware of novelty and Milly was aware of none. Her cheerful kindness was as natural and spontaneous as though she had been a girl greeting a long absent brother. She questioned Dick, and, as her questions showed interest—interest and a knowledge horribly surprising to Christina—Dick talked with unusual fluency. Christina looked at them and listened to them, while Milly, leaning an arm on the table, gazed with gravely shining eyes at her husband. The arm, the eyes, the lines of the throat, were very lovely. Christina's mind fixed upon that beauty, and she wished that Milly would not lean so and look so. Milly, again, was unaware. It was Christina who was aware; Christina who was quivering with latent, unformulated consciousness. After dinner, Milly and Dick still talked; she still listened. She knew nothing about Africa.
For three or four days this was the situation; a reunited brother and sister; a friend, for the time being, necessarily incidental. Then, suddenly, the presages grew plainly ominous. Was it her own realization of loneliness, of not being needed, that so overwhelmed her? or the sense of some utter change in her darling—a change so gradual that until its accomplishment it had seemed madness to recognize it? The moment of recognition came one day, when, on going into the library, she found Dick and Milly sitting side by side at the table, their heads bent over a map; and they were not looking at the map; they were looking at each other; still like brother and sister, but such fond brother and sister, while they smiled and talked.
Milly turned her head and saw Christina, and Christina knew that some evident adjustment went over her own face, for Milly jumped up, eagerly, too eagerly, and pulled a chair back for her and said; "Sit down, dearest. Dick is telling me adventures."
What was it that drove into Christina's heart like a knife? Milly smiled at her, eagerly smiled; and yet she was miles and miles away; had she been in the jungles of Africa with her husband she could not have been further; and she was greeting her as though she were a guest, greeting her with conventional warmth and courteous sweetness. Christina was not wanted; through the warmth and sweetness she felt that.
Smiling, she said she had come for a book. Going to the book-cases she sought for one accurately—why she should seek, as though she had come in with the intention of finding it, a volume of frothy eighteenth century French memoirs she could not have told—and, smiling again upon them with unconstrained lightness, she left them. She walked steadily to her room, locked the door, and, falling upon her knees beside the bed, broke into an agony of tears.
The end had come; not of Christina's love, not of her need, but of Milly's. At first her mind refused to face the full realization—groped among the omens of the past, would not see in Dick, even now, the cause of all. She could trace the gradual, the dreadful severance; Milly's slow loss of interest in her and in their life together. It was at first only for the fact of loss that she wept, that loss, only, she could look at. But by degrees, as her stifled sobs grew quieter, she was able to think, to think clearly, fiercely, with desperate snatchings at hope, while she crouched by the bed; pushing back her hair from her forehead; pressing her hot temples with icy hands.
Why should Milly lose interest? How could she? How could love and truest sympathy, truest understanding—how could they fail?
"Love begets love. Love begets love," she whispered under her breath, not knowing that she spoke, and, in this hour of shipwreck, clinging unconsciously to such spars and fragments of childish, unreasoning trust as her memory tossed her. No other friendship threatened hers; she was first as friend, irrevocably, she knew it. First as friend did not mean to Milly, could never mean, the deep-dwelling devotion that it meant to her; but such affinity and attachment as Milly felt could not die without some other cause than mere weariness. And the truth no longer to be evaded broke over her. It was the simplest while the most absurd of truths. Milly was falling in love; Milly was falling in love with Dick; and she was frank and happy because she did not know it; and he did not know it. Like two children with a fresh day of play and sunshine before them, they were engaged in merry, trivial games, picnics, make-believes, no thought of sentiment or emotion in them to account for the new sympathy; but from these games they would return hand in hand, all in all to each other, bound together in the lover's illusion and needing no one else. Maps! Travels! Africa! Did they not see these things as silly toys, as she did? What could Milly care for such toys? That she should play with them, as if she placed tin soldiers and blew a tin trumpet, showed the fatal glamour that was upon her; glamour only, a moonshine mood of vague restlessness and craving. How dignify by the sacred name of love this sentiment, all made of her weakness, her emotionalism, her egotism, that swayed her now so ludicrously towards the man whom, open-eyed, she had rejected and scorned for years?
Passionate repudiation of the debasement for Milly swept through the stricken friend and mingled with the throes of her anguish for herself. For how was she to live without Milly? How could she live as Milly's formal friend, kept outside the circle of intimate affection, the circle where, till now, she had reigned alone? Ah! she understood Milly's nature too well; she saw that with all its sweetness it was slight. Love, with her, would efface all friendships. Like a delicate, narrow little vase, her heart could hold but one deep feeling. She would come, simply, not to care for Christina at all. Would come? Had she not come already? In her eyes, her smiles, the empty caressing of her voice, was there not already the most profound indifference? And all the forces of Christina's nature rose in rebellion. She felt the rebellion like the onslaught of angels of light against powers of darkness; it was the ideal doing battle with some primal, instinctive force. She must fight for Milly and for herself. For she, too, had her claim. She measured herself beside Dick Quentyn, her needs beside his. His life was cheerful, contented, complete; hers without Milly would be a warped, a meaningless, a broken life. Strangely, her thoughts, in all their anguish, turned in not one reproach upon her friend; rather, her comprehension, from maternal heights of love, sorrowed over her with infinite tenderness. For, so she told herself, she could have resigned her, in spite of her own bereavement, to true companionship, true fulfilment. But Milly—her Milly—made hers by all these years—in love with Dick Quentyn! It was a calamity, a disease which had befallen her darling. Asking no heights, this love would lead her down to contented levels, and Milly's life, too, in all true senses, would be warped and meaningless and broken.
Meanwhile, in the library, Dick said to his wife: "An't I interrupting you? Don't you read or talk or do something with Mrs. Drent at this time of the day?"
And at the question alone, contentedly alone with him as she was, dimly enlightened, too, by Christina's guarded glance, Milly made a swift, surprised survey of the situation. She did not want to talk to Christina; she wanted to go on talking to Dick. She had not as yet realized that Christina's presence had become an interruption, a burden; Christina's personality had seemed blurred, merely, and far away. She was now aware of this, aware, for the first time, of something to hide from Christina, and a sense of awkwardness and almost of confusion came upon her.
"Oh no, you are not interrupting us. Christina and I will have heaps of time for talking and reading when you are gone," she said, smiling and blushing faintly.
Dick, even more unconscious than she of its meaning, gazed at the blush, and then they went on with their talk about crocodiles.
When Christina saw Milly again that evening, it was evident to her that Milly had at last become aware of something changed, and that her own composure urged Milly into a self-protecting overdemonstrativeness. She was completely composed. She stood aside, mild, unemphatic, unaware, seeming not to see, making no effort to hold; and as her desperate dread thus instinctively armed her, she saw that no other attitude could have been so efficacious. When she stood aside, Milly was forced to draw her in; when she pretended to see nothing, Milly must pretend—to her and to Dick—that there was nothing to see. Milly was afraid of her; that became apparent to her during the ensuing days, terrible, lovely days of spring, when, as if with drawn breath and cold, measuring eye, she crossed an abyss on a narrow plank laid above the emptiness. Milly was afraid; of her scorn and incredulity, perhaps; perhaps only of her pain. Milly was cowardly in her shrinking from giving pain; it would be impossible for her to go to her friend and say:—"I have fallen in love with my husband, and you and I must part." In that impossibility for Milly lay her only hope. If Milly and Dick could be held apart, and by Milly's own cowardice rather than by any word or gesture of her own, the wretched interlude might pass and Milly come to look back upon it with shame and amazement and to thank her friend for the strength and control that had made escape possible.
And the first-fruits of her strategy were soon apparent. Milly saw less and less of Dick. Dick, as of old, made no attempt to seek her out and, obviously, it was now impossible for Milly, with Christina's quiet eyes upon her, to seek him. Milly took up again the idea of Greece and said that, after all, they must go that spring. They would all, she gaily declared, go up to London and depart to their different quarters of the globe at the same time, Dick to Africa and she and Christina to Greece. This was said in Dick's presence and he cheerfully acquiesced. Christina wondered if Milly had not hoped for some protest or suggestion from him. In Dick's blindness lay, she began to see, an even greater hope than in Milly's cowardice. Milly could not very well come to her and avow her love for Dick when Dick, it was evident, did not dream of avowing his for her. And Milly became aware of this as she did. Her manner towards Dick changed. She rallied him with a touch of irritability; she scored off him as she had used to do, by means of Christina; she put forward Christina and her relation to Christina constantly, and seemed to taunt him, as of old, with his own inadequacy. All her innocent gaiety was gone; she hid her deep disquiet under an air of feverish brightness, and poor stupid Dick, accepting Milly's alteration as he had always accepted things from her, showed no hurt and no reproach; he merely effaced himself, cheerfully, once more.
Christina understood it all and the breathless subterfuges in which Milly's perturbation concealed itself. She was longing that Dick should see what she could not show, and that he should break through the web with an avowal. She was longing that Christina, if Dick remained blind, should mercifully give Dick and her their chance. Christina knew the horrible risk she ran in remaining blandly unaware, in continuing to take Milly at her word, in keeping there, between her and Dick, where Milly herself placed her. She might part them, but Milly might come to hate her.
Milly's plan was carried out: they all went up to town together, Milly to her friend's house, Dick to his bachelor's chambers. And it was Christina who asked Dick to come and dine with them the night before he left for Africa. She maintained every appearance. The very air that night was electric with the restraints ready to burst into reverberations which would surprise no one but Dick. Christina herself was aware of a strange little dart of impatience with him. His stupidity helped her as nothing else could have helped; yet, while she blessed it, she could feel for Milly, and actually, while she blessed, resent it. It was true that she read in his eyes a slight shyness as they rested upon his wife. He was bewildered, and it was evident he was not happy. And Milly had dropped her shield of flippancy. She sat silent, absent, absorbed, looking up at her husband now and then, with curious eyes, eyes cold and deep and suffering. Christina saw it all. Should she leave them now, it was inevitable that the revelation would come, and it would come from Milly. Mutely, in their respective unconsciousness and consciousness, they were begging her to go; and she sat on. Her inflexible determination upheld her over the terrible falsity of her position. Milly, now, must know that she knew; yet she sat on, smiling, talking, until the hour was late.
Then, as Dick rose, it was Milly who went towards the barrier that she herself had raised and showed Dick that it had an unlocked gate. From her deep knowledge of Milly's nature, Christina could gauge, with a dreadful accuracy, what the strength of the feeling must be that could nerve her, rising and sauntering to the door beside him, to say in a strange, in a nonchalant voice: "How about a walk in the park to-morrow, Dick? You don't go till the evening, do you?"
Dick stared for a moment. He was pitiably, mercifully stupid. His stare might really have been interpreted as one of mere astonishment. Then:
"Really?" he asked. "Aren't you and Mrs. Drent too busy?"
"No, indeed. Our arrangements are all made."
"Shall I come for you here?"
"Do. At eleven."
They shook hands, and Dick took Christina's hand. She felt, always, that Dick looked upon her as a friend. His eyes, now, revealed to her his boyish wonder and gladness. She and Milly were left alone. Milly, still with the sauntering step, went to the mantelpiece and touched her hair, looking in the glass. "Dear me, how late!" she said, her eyes turning to the clock. "How dreadful of us to have kept poor Dick up so late. Shall we go to bed, dearest? I'm dreadfully sleepy."
"You didn't mean me to come for the walk, too, did you?" Christina asked, in a voice as easy, putting up her hand to hide a yawn. "It's our usual hour;—that's why I ask. But you meant him to understand that you wanted it to be atête-à-tête, didn't you? It's all right. I can go to Mrs. Pomfret's for my fitting at eleven."
"But, dearest, of course you are coming," said Milly instantly.
Their eyes were on each other now, and their faces armed and masked. Christina measured the depth of estrangement in all that the flexible, disingenuous acquiescence hid of disappointment, bitterness, even hatred.
"Oh no, no, indeed; I think you ought to have your good-bye walk alone," she insisted. "He will expect it now. I'm sure he thought that you particularly wanted it to be alone."
"He couldn't have thought anything so unlikely," said Milly. "It is our good-bye walk with you."
So Christina went with them. She felt herself still trembling in every nerve from the appalling risk she had run, and ran; for which was the greater risk, that Milly should realize her guile and hate her, or that Milly and Dick should come to an understanding? She could not tell; nor where she stood; yet triumph trembled in her fear. She had succeeded. They had not spoken together. In the park she and Milly bade Dick good-bye. Dick's train was to go in the early evening. Milly, when they reached home—and she had talked lightly if not gaily in the hansom—said that she had rather a headache. She would have her luncheon in her room and sleep through the afternoon and be fit and fresh for the play that night. Christina knew in an instant that a last desperate hope cowered beneath the affected languor and lightness; and it watched her, feverishly, like the eyes of a tracked animal creeping in an underbrush past enemies' guns. When she replied, kissing her friend tenderly, that a good rest was the best of cures for a headache and that she herself would do some shopping and go to the tea for which they were engaged, these large, sick eyes of Milly's hope and fear widened and shone with a recovered security. She wanted to be left alone that afternoon. She would not go to Dick; Christina knew her too accurately to believe that possible, and Dick had been too stupid to make it conceivable; but what Milly hoped for was a sudden illumination of Dick's stupidity; some tug of unendurable pain or surmise that would bring him back on the chance of seeing her again. Milly's logic was instinctive, but Christina believed that it was sound. Dick, she, too, felt sure of it, would come. She lunched and then she sat at her writing-table and wrote some notes, looking out at the street, and then, when an hour approached in which a caller might appear, she went out.
It was one of the suddenly hot days in May that London sometimes offers. It was so hot that Christina's head, as she walked slowly up Sloane Street, swam and turned, and the lines of cabs and omnibuses and carriages in the roadway, upon which she fixed her eyes, seemed to pulse and float as they went by. Three o'clock had struck. Dick, if he came, must come before five, and she must walk up and down Sloane Street for perhaps nearly two hours. If she lay in wait in the house, Milly, who no doubt was already up and dressed and waiting, would discover her. Milly, too, might be watching from the drawing-room windows. Her peril was desperate, and her safest course was to walk on the side of the street near the house where Milly could not see her. This she did, turning regularly in her little beat, indifferent to the odd spectacle she must present, and scanning the passers-by. She had not long to wait. Half-an-hour had not elapsed, when, in an approaching hansom, she saw the broad shoulders and perplexed yet resolute features of Dick Quentyn. He, too, had come to final decisions on this fateful day.
Christina walked towards the hansom smiling. With her opened parasol and delicate dress of white and black she had the most unalarming and casual air. She seemed to have just stepped from her own doorway. She had held up her hand in signal, and Dick, arresting his cabman, sprang out. Christina greeted him gaily.
"Well, this is very nice. Can you really stop and speak to me? You're not running a risk of losing your train?"
Dick hardly smiled in answer. His face showed his uncertainty, his anxiety, his trouble.
"My train? Oh no;—I've over an hour yet. Heaps of time.—In fact—I was on my way to your house. I thought I'd have a last glimpse of you and Milly. Are you just going out?"
"Just going out. And as to Milly,—it's too bad," said Christina, "but she is getting a little sleep this afternoon and particularly asked that she shouldn't be disturbed. We are going to the play to-night. You'll walk with me for a little way, though, won't you?"
There was nothing ambiguous in her words or manner. They were certainly in keeping with the situation, and poor Dick Quentyn, although he looked almost haggard, turned obediently and walked beside her. He walked silently for a little way, while Christina talked, then, as they came out into Knightsbridge, he said, suddenly;—"Mrs. Drent,—may I ask you about something?—Do you mind? Shall we go into the park for a little while?"
"Of course; of course," said Christina, kindly and mildly.
They went into the park and sat down on two chairs that faced the stream of carriages and had rhododendrons behind them. When they sat down, Christina's head swam so giddily that she feared she might be going to faint. She closed her eyes for a moment, mastering her weakness with a desperate effort. Dick did not notice her pallor. "You see," he said, leaning forward and boring small holes in the gravel with the point of his stick—"You see,—I think I must tell you—ask you for your advice—because you know Milly so much better than any one else in the world. You can tell me if I'm mistaken—or advise me what to do, you know. It's just this: I thought, when I first came home, that Milly had begun to care for me again—or, at all events, that she'd got over disliking me."
"Care for you? Dislike you?" Christina murmured vaguely. "Oh—I don't think it was ever that—of late years—since you'd so tactfully and charmingly understood and made everything so easy for her."
"No. Yes; it seemed she'd particularly got over it," Dick, rather puzzled, assented. "And I mean, by caring, that she seemed so happy when I was there—at first, happier than I'd ever known her."
"She can dare to be happy with you now, you see; just because you have made her so secure."
"So secure?"
"Yes," Christina met his eyes. "So sure that you'll never ask anything of her, make anything difficult for her again."
Dick Quentyn grew red. "I never did do that, as far as I remember, after I understood."
"That is what Milly so deeply appreciates," Christina returned.
There was a little silence after this and Christina, in it, controlled her breaths from trembling. Then Dick, groping painfully among his impressions, put forward another. "She did mind, very much, my being in danger last winter; you told me that. She was worried, really worried about me?"
Like a hurried, jangling bell somewhere in the background of her mind Christina, as she, too, gathered together her impressions and memories, seemed to hear a reiterated "No lies; above all, no lies." But he had put the weapon into her hand, and though she felt as if she held it lifted above some innocent life, it fell relentlessly.
"Did I say that Milly was worried about you? It was hardly that, I think; though, of course, she was glad to see you out of danger. Of course she was glad; how could anyone so gentle-hearted as Milly not be? But if you ask me what she did feel, I must tell you the truth. You want the truth, don't you? It is much better—for you and for Milly, isn't it, that there should be no misunderstandings?"—Dick nodded—his eyes fixed on her. "What Milly said, in the winter, when we had news of your danger,—was that it was rather dreadful to realize that if you were killed it would hardly affect her more than the death of any of the men who had come to tea with us the day before."
The knife had fallen and her victim, after a moment, turned dazed eyes away from her. "Milly said that? About me?"
"I was shocked," Christina murmured. She heard, as if from a far distance, the strange, hushed quality of her voice. Her own blood seemed to have been arrested.
"She wouldn't have minded more than that?"
"She said, when I reproached her, that I could only expect her to be solemn, not sorry, over the death of a man for whom she had no affection, a man she had almost hated. Mr. Quentyn, I am so grieved for you. Of course, she doesn't hate you now; but I am afraid you have allowed yourself false hopes about Milly."
Dick, now, had risen to his feet and, facing her as she sat, he gazed over her head at the rhododendrons. "I wonder why she wanted me to come for a walk this morning. Yes, I did have false hopes. I thought that meant something. I've thought that all sorts of little things might mean something."
"Milly is so sweet and kind when she feels no pressure, no alarm. I thought, for a moment last night, that she meant you to have the walk alone. But as soon as you were gone she insisted on my coming with you. I've tried to help you, Mr. Quentyn. I've given you every chance. But there isn't any chance." It was well to do it thoroughly.
There was bewilderment and humiliation—at last humiliation—on Dick's face; but of incredulity not a trace. "I know how kind you've been," he said. "I've felt it."
Christina, now, had also risen. A dart of keenest pity, even admiration, went through her, horridly painful. "I am so dreadfully sorry," she murmured. "I had to tell you—since you asked me;—I didn't want you to hurt Milly—and yourself—uselessly."
"I know. I perfectly understand," said Dick.
They walked in silence to Albert Gate, and there, as they paused in farewell, Christina suddenly, seizing his arm and speaking in a hurried whisper, said: "You have been splendid. I can't tell you how I feel it. If I can ever—at any time—do anything——" It was the truth, yet the falseness of such speech, from her to him, appalled her while she spoke. Her voice trailed off. "Forgive me. Good-bye—" she said.
They grasped each other's hands and Dick, as she broke away, saw that the tears were running down her face.