CHAPTER XI
When Kingston Darnley woke, the clouds had broken. Overhead was the clear vault of stars; beneath, a vast flocculent sea of milky whiteness. Already the eastern air was lightening with the first green tremors of dawn, and the warm calm of the night was giving place to the keen freshness of a new day.
Kingston could rest no longer. He rose, and wandered to and fro across the summit, thinking out the situation in which he had become involved. A force too great for his resistance had swept him into its dominion; so much was certain. The force was hateful, paradoxical, inexplicable. But its grip was at his throat, and no struggles could extricate him. The whole face of the world had suddenly changed; hidden things had been made clear, and things which had once been thought precious and sufficient were now shown in the light of this strange sunrise to be altogether false and valueless. No reluctance, no blinking of facts, no well-meant pretences, could alter the fact that life had suddenly opened out before him, enormous, passionate, in all its scope, and that, in the revelation the mountains of bygone days were dwarfed to molehills.
But these changes ruled only in the secret places of the heart. There remained the practical aspect of things. In the depths of his soul he now carried with him a knowledge of what was highest and most glorious in life, but that knowledge must for ever be buried in the depths. His own rash action, in the days before he had understood, before he had been awaked, had put it eternally beyond his power to stretch out his hands openly, and seize the happiness that his soul had found. Chains of diamond might bind him nowand for ever to this second self that he had discovered; but chains of his own making, of his own riveting, made him prisoner to another life, in the lower world of daily existence. In the clear cold of the dawn the heats and tempests of his brain seemed to grow calm; he saw more and more clearly into the future and its possibilities; passion and its stress had given way to a cooler appraisement of circumstances. His nature, emotional rather than sensual, helped him to regain his balance. It was on the spiritual, transcendental side of his feelings that he dwelt.
This love of his for Isabel, this love which came from outside, which had nothing to do with moral or æsthetic approval—it should be a thing altogether high and holy. To keep it clear of contamination, to sanctify it by restricting it to the loftiest regions of life—this was the task that lay before him. The task might be difficult. Isabel might try to increase the difficulty of it. But he would gather strength from the very difficulty of his position, the very intensity of his passion, which, by the sheer weight of it, must lay so great a responsibility upon him as his soul must needs rise to bear. For the heavier the weight, the easier it is to endure; the soul braces itself sternly, deliberately, to the labour, and carries off the burden of a crushing load more triumphantly than the straws which daily life and little desires impose—the straws which seem of no account, and for which, therefore, the soul makes no preparation, stiffens no muscles to sustain. Against a lapse Kingston felt himself defended as much by the solemn ecstasy with which he had come to accept the fact of his passion as by his sense of the redoubled duty which it made him owe to the other life that he had innocently involved.
Tragic affection possessed him as he thought of Gundred;—Gundred, giving her all—that all which nowappeared so little; Gundred, whose greatest gift had now become inadequate, yet must never be slighted or discarded. In a moment he saw the vast distance that now separated him from his wife. Had they ever, in reality, been close together? Now, without conscious treachery on either hand, time had removed them very far away from each other. He understood what impulse it was that had lately been making him try to pull her back into his life, and realized how completely she had passed out of it. There was no fault in her—at least, no other fault than a limitation of nature. How he himself could have escaped the penalty of his own character he could not see. The crisis of remorse was passing. He had committed no deliberate sin against his wife. What had come about had come about through no volition of his. If he loved Isabel that love was something outside himself—something that he could not kill, though he might duly cage it and control it. To cage it and control it accordingly was all that remained for him to do. Infidelity, treachery, adultery of the flesh would be an unpardonable treason to his love and his loyalty; the adultery of the heart is a thing instinctive, inevitable, committed sooner or later by many blameless men and women. This, the most important of human treasons, stands for ever beyond the reach of human restraint. No judge can analyze it, no jury weigh it; it can be valued by no damages, absolved by no divorce. The marriage of heart with heart is a matter outside the reach of law; the world and its laws are only concerned with external and visible manifestations. Let the outward life be clean and seemly; but nothing can govern the impulses of the inner secret life. Its movements can only be prevented from reacting shamefully on daily demeanour; they can never be measured, foretold, forbidden. Kingston knew thathis heart was faithless to his wife—knew that, in reality, it had never been pledged to her at all. Her heart to his, perhaps; but he had pledged her nothing, he found, but his approval, his affection, his respect. All the more reason, then, that, having bought so much of her, and for coin so innocently false, he should pay his debt to the uttermost farthing in the only money he had to pay. Respect, affection, approval, all that he had pledged and promised—these should be paid without grudge or chicane, and the very completeness and honesty of these tributes must atone as far as possible for the cruel fact that he had no more to give her. In the fullness of his tribute to Gundred he must find at once the redemption of his own self-respect, the safeguarding of her happiness, and the glorification of this love of his, that might sink so low, and might be made to rise so high.
The whole air, vibrating with cold intensity, was now of a poignant emerald. In the East it grew keener and keener from moment to moment. Beneath, at his feet, through the milky sea of cloud, the heavy presence of the lowlands began to pierce, and grew from mere darkness into dim husky purples. Against the fierce green of the dawn a few clouds stood out fiercely black against the pure sky. The deep abysmal blue of the night was flying westward, retreating, fading, passing. Now it looked wan and worn; the faint stars staled and grew sickly as morning lamps. Slowly, very slowly, the world began to stir, to reveal itself far down in the valleys and distances. Detail had not yet been delivered of chaos, but gradually the separate existence of hill and hollow showed itself in flat masses of obscurity. And then the tones began to change, to grow sharper, more real. In the first dawn outlines had been clear and hard, the blackness dense and without modification. Against the pale horizon moorlandand mountain had stood out hard and stark, as if cut from cardboard. Now the haze of atmosphere began to clothe the new-born world in glamour, faint, mysterious, phantasmal. Along the eastern rim of the darkness stretched the swooping profile of Ravensber, like a lion couchant, flushing now, from a thing grey, cold, and dead, to a living mass of opal. Diaphanous, vague, uniform in colour against the pulsing vividness behind, the far-off mountain came nearer, its azure and amethyst grew every moment keener. At its feet the lower hills still lay dim and indistinguishable, but to them also life was returning; and as the great leonine shape above took warmer and warmer shades, from the first vaporous dimness of opaque blue to the splendours of a transparent jewel, so the intervening fells grew deeper in their tones of violet, more solid, more easily discernible among the faint mists in which the dawn had vested them, and from which they now began to separate themselves, while out of the vaporous films of the sky long trails and volumes of cloud were beginning to condense.
Emerald was now passing into topaz, and the rolling masses of distance seemed every moment a shallower, greener blue. For the oldest and most primeval of all colours is blue—that vast, profound sapphire of midnight. But as darkness dies before the advance of dawn, each colour recedes westward as its successor presses hard upon it out of the East. Blue gives place insensibly to green—to green, faint at first and tremulous, then growing swiftly more sharp to its note of greatest pungency. And so, when the lucence of emerald is at its height, it rises abruptly into yellow—a yellow very pure and thin, and coldly pale. Blue has faded out altogether. The air has the vivid transparency of a topaz. Quickly the clear light intensifies itself, and passes on into richer, angrier tones ofsaffron and flame. Then, last of all, crimson and scarlet appear, final heralds of the approaching day.
Already, very far up in the shrill green of the zenith, a few feathered clouds were growing pink. The Ravensber, now, was of a rosy blue, and the sky behind it thrilled with gold. The air rippled cool with increasing keenness, and the awakening earth seemed to await an imminent summons. Gradually the details of the earth below could be discerned in blocks of uncertain light and shadow. It seemed as if the day were pausing on its road. The golden east grew increasingly golden, and the green overhead grew pale and melted; but to eyes that had watched the swift advance of the earlier stages this tantalizing moment of suspense seemed interminable. The world now was purple and azure; the Ravensber stood out no longer the phantom of a dream. Life was growing plain and plainer. But still the poignant moment hovered indecisively on its way. The path of the sun was barred with streaks of cloud. Ashen grey and violet in the beginning, they had kindled at last through wine colour to an ardent amethyst, and their lower surfaces were edged with rose. As their fluffy masses mounted the sky, their surfaces grew brighter, their purple warmer, till, high overhead, their last faint drifts were now of a uniform glowing pink. Everything was ready for the sun: the earth was clean and fresh from its sleep, the air was vivid and clean and sparkling.
When the last change came, it came with a blinding abruptness after its delay. The fire of the clouds grew swiftly fiercer, their purple turned to molten bronze, their edges broadened, became red, scarlet, flaming. Kingston saw now the exact spot where the sun was to rise. Down in a cleft of the hills, where far-off Ravensber tailed away into the first slopes of Fell End, there lay the heart of the cloud-drift, and there through itssombre curtains, the sun would have to break his way. Crimson and scarlet dominated the world now, throbbing from horizon to horizon. Splashes of infernal sanguine began to streak themselves across the East, growing every moment in number and in violence. The day was hurrying up in a leaping fury of splendour, and the path of the sun was a ladder of flame, leading upwards from the ravelled veil of darkness between the hills. And then, in a moment, the curtain of the clouded East was gashed suddenly and rent asunder: the earth seemed swept by a blast of blood and fire. The sun was up. Another instant, and his awful globe had leapt free of the broken masses of bronze beneath, and was mounting on its tyrannous way through heaven.
Instantly before his glory all rival splendours faded. Scarlet, crimson, gold, and orange paled and died in the glare of his presence. The magical moment was passed. Clouds, mountains, and valleys were mere clouds and mountains and valleys again; the transfiguring radiance was dead. Only the air was still pervaded by the red glow. The world was torn from dreams to reality again. Calm, clear, definite, it lay below, stripped of mystery, a world of men and women, fears and desires, eating and drinking.
Kingston walked round to where the western edge of the mountain dropped away to the fells far below. Beneath those, again, lay the narrow glen where Ivescar stood. Between the Simonstone and Carnmor it cut its way southward and then sloped down into the great valley beyond. The Vale of Strathclyde stretched softly through the distance, very broad and fertile, to the remote low hills that bounded it on the farther side. From where he stood Kingston could see its whole course mapped out before him, far away, clear and rosy in the fresh daylight. In a swooping curve it flowed westward under the wall of the mountaincountry, westward from its source away in the east, in the heart of Yorkshire, out to where its last placid ripples passed into the indistinguishable golden glory of the western sea. And there, beyond the low cleft in the woodlands, where a faint smoky haze betrayed the town of Lunemouth, the vast, flat glitter of the bay ran farther and farther out, till it was merged in the bright opalescence of the sky, against whose gleaming softness rolled northward, in dim sapphire, the jutting ranges that passed up into the tangled mountain chaos of Cumberland and Westmoreland.
Trees, steeples, villages, stood up clear and vivid everywhere in the valley beneath, remote and tiny in the depths; but where each river coiled and writhed through woodland, there coiled and writhed across the face of the earth a monstrous sleepy dragon of white vapour. Higher up, again, in the narrower mountain valleys, wherever water flowed, the runnels of its course were filled with a dense bellying mass like pale smoke. From the hills behind, too, from the stern, deep-channelled country of fell and moor, rolled down towards the lowlands of Strathclyde great sluggish remoras of mist, blotting out each hollow in a snowy void, and leaving only here and there a little islet of dark rock or heather in the white swirling sea of their tide, as they lapped and curled round the lesser hills below. As the sun grew stronger, their volume momentarily ebbed and melted, but in the first moments of day the glen of Ivescar brimmed over with their confused currents, beneath the brow of the Simonstone, and as Kingston gazed down over the edge, he looked into a blank and woolly vacancy.
While he stood there Isabel approached. There was no more battle, no more challenge in her air. Knowledge of the truth was enough for the hour. In the cold clear purity of dawn the ardours and agonies ofpassion could have no place. Kingston and she had found the great secret of their common life; no more words were needed.
Kingston turned to her.
‘We may as well be starting down,’ he said. ‘It will be easy enough now. I only hope Gundred has not been in a great state of anxiety. Did you get any sleep?’
‘It was a bony bed,’ replied Isabel, ‘but I managed to rest quite fairly. But I feel utterly tired and squashed. Do let us go home, and get fed and cleaned and decent again.’
‘In a few minutes,’ said he, ‘we shall hardly be able to believe we have ever been up here. This night will seem like fancy.’
‘Or else we shall feel that we have been up here all our lives, since the very beginning of things. Kingston, I was angry with you, but you have taken me up on to a mountain, and showed me more beautiful things than I ever thought there were in the world. I have been thinking. Perhaps I understand a little better now.’
He studied the calm radiance of her face. The sun fell full upon it, gilded and glorifying.
‘Yes, Isabel,’ he said, ‘we must do what we can. We must try to—to honour ourselves. I am glad you begin to understand. After all, nothing can take away the thought of what we have found together up here, you and I. And we must not let that thought get spoiled, Isabel. How pompous I sound, though!’
She sighed. ‘I am always running my head up against the walls of life,’ she answered. ‘I think I do see now what a mistake I made. I hurt myself and you. Oh, I shall never pretend to have conventional morals like you, but I am beginning to understand that self-denial is sometimes a splendid form of self-indulgence.’
The thrill of the new day, the glowing serenity of everything around him had their influence on Kingston. His emotions reached calmer, greater heights than before, above the reach of storms. His tongue was loosened for a moment.
‘We are above the world, Isabel,’ he said; ‘let us try to stay there.’
She looked at him, her smile touched with irony.
‘And yet,’ she answered, ‘you are going to lead me down into the valleys. Do you think one could always stay on the heights?’
‘At least we have been there once in our lives,’ he replied. ‘How many people can honestly say that?’
‘The valley is full of clouds and mists,’ said Isabel, peering down. ‘Death and horrors may lie below us.’
‘We are going there together, Isabel. We shall always be together now. We cannot help it, even if we wanted to. Nothing can release us from each other.’
‘Not even the deaths and horrors?’ asked Isabel slowly.
‘Why suppose that there will ever be any?’
‘Oh, I am cold and cramped, perhaps; I am frightened of things all of a sudden. Even you and I will have each to go alone into the Valley of the Shadow, Kingston. You will not be able to go with me there, not even if we are to meet again on the other side. I am dreadfully afraid of death and dying. Life has suddenly become more lovely than ever. I love it and worship it. Come with me into life. But, even with you, I don’t like passing out of this warmth down into the mists and cold damps below there.’
‘They will have disappeared by the time we get on to the lower flats,’ he answered. ‘Let us set off. They are thinning every minute.’
With a last look round the radiant plain of the hill-top, Isabel followed him over the edge, and down thefirst steep slope. Instantly they were out of the sunlight and the glow, in chill shadow as yet untouched by the influences of day. Down and down they plunged towards the mists beneath, while, far overhead now, the rosy beams of the day shot out across the world, cut off from them as they went by the intervening bulk of the mountain, sombre and stark. So they came at last to the pavement of white limestone below, and stood on its last, lowest ridge. Beneath them, grey, barren, inhospitable, lay suddenly revealed the topmost end of the little valley, hemmed in by its amphitheatre of cliffs. The mists were scattering now in desolate wisps of vapour, and the air was cold and dank in the shadow of the mountain behind. Through the torn veils of the white fog they could see clearly down upon every detail of the glen—the shape of each poor profitless field of brownish grass, enclosed by intersecting lines of stone wall, with here and there an ash-tree or a hawthorn, weird, tormented, witch-like, crouching eternally beneath the lash of the wind, and shivering in its sparse, blighted garment of leaves. Just below them rose the struggling stream, out of a stone slope thick with nettles that dropped away steeply from the foot of the cliff; it wandered homelessly through two or three grim meadows, where wiry herbage battled with the white outcrop of stone, then passed through a grated barrier into the domain of Ivescar. From the height of the cliff Ivescar itself, house and plantation, seemed more impudently vulgar than ever. The plantation filled the valley, glaringly artificial, glaringly unsuccessful, a serried army of wretched dwarfish little pines. And in the middle shone, steely and cold, the square expanse of the lake, and by its side, isolated on the desert of lawn, the house itself, dome, tower, pinnacles and all, raw, yellow, brutal in its contented ugliness.
Kingston and Isabel gazed down at it with distaste; then they turned from the mournful glen, filled with chill shadow and sterile discomfort, to look back at the mountain from which they had descended. Very high overhead towered the imperious western face of the Simonstone, and the whole mass was glowing now like a thing alive, flushed with pulsing blood and vitality. From crown to base it was kindled to an ardent and luminous crimson, at once sombre and gorgeous, at once brilliant and terrible. Kingston and Isabel looked up at it in silence for a moment, then plunged, without a word, down into the bleakness of the stony valley. Another moment, and the mountain had vanished from their sight. They were in the cold shade of the cliffs, and the upper glories were hidden. So, still silent, they made their way through the fields, through the elaborate iron gates of the park, and into the pretentious deserts of Ivescar.
Gundred had a quiet, practical spirit. When her husband and her cousin had failed to reappear in time for dinner, she wasted no energy in grief or anxiety, but came to the conclusion that they must have lost their way, and either found some other haven, or, at all events, taken the most prudent steps possible in the circumstances. It was never in her calm nature to be harassed without good cause; she always expected the best till she heard the worst, and gave everybody round her credit for coolness and imperturbable sagacity equal to her own. Accordingly on this occasion she made her husband’s apologies to Mrs. Mimburn, dined without agitation, and slept the night through in placid confidence that the wanderers would return with the morning. Her perfect trust in Kingston’s sense precluded all anxiety as to his welfare, and her perfect trust in his affection all anxiety as to his absence. When at last Kingston and Isabelreturned, Gundred received them with a complete lack of fuss or excitement, but with proper attention suited to their state. Warmed, washed, fed, they soon fell again into the orderly course of the life that she had arranged. She condoled with them on the misadventure that had kept them prisoners on the hill-top, and troubled no more about the matter, as soon as she had made certain that neither of them had contracted chills or colds. Very tiresome she felt the misfortune to have been, but a thing that might have happened to anyone, of no real lasting importance.
Not so, however, moved the keen mind of Minne-Adélaïde. That astute woman, ruffled by the inexplicable absence of her host, depressed by the barbarism of the view from her window, and at all times prone to the more passionate interpretation of life’s problems, set herself to the careful watching of Kingston in his relations with this strange new cousin of his wife’s. Mrs. Mimburn from the beginning was no friend to Gundred. She could not but suspect that Gundred disapproved of her. No persuasions could induce Gundred to call her ‘Minne.’ To Mrs. Mimburn’s complete disgust, the new niece persisted in calling her ‘Aunt Minna.’ Thus predisposed against her hostess, Minne-Adélaïde unfavourably noted all Gundred’s limitations, her apparent coldness, her lack of appetizing brilliancy, of appeal, of all the many attractions with which a wise wife arms herself against the inevitable satiety of marriage. In an evening’s space, Mrs. Mimburn became convinced that Kingston must be dreadfully bored by this unsalted wife of his, with her frigid little excellencies. She kept a sparkling eye wide open for complications. When she heard that Kingston was on the hills with a female cousin, she smiled in one corner of her mouth; when time went by, and he was discovered to be spending the nightwith her on a mountain, she smiled in both, and licked her lips with a delightful foreboding of catastrophe. She welcomed her nephew with perfunctory joy when he at last appeared, and devoted her keenest attention to the examination of Isabel. And at once her experienced glance discerned what it had taken Kingston weeks to discover, what Gundred was still a long way from discovering. She saw that Isabel was attractive—illogically, unreasonably so, but attractive all the same—even unusually so. And Minne-Adélaïde knew that it is just these illogically fascinating people who do the most harm, and establish the most devastating tyranny over men’s roving tastes. ‘Aha!’ thought Minne-Adélaïde. Time began to hang heavy on her hands, and she fell to scanning the future with a hopeful anticipation.
The days passed by in their usual lethargic orderliness. Nothing happened, nothing seemed likely to happen. Kingston and Isabel were rather better friends than before, perhaps, but Gundred was so clearly satisfied with the situation that no perils appeared to threaten. Minne-Adélaïde began to grow a little disappointed. Neither Kingston, Isabel, nor Gundred gave her anything to be interested in. Their behaviour continued merely amiable and ordinary. Perhaps Kingston had grown more ardent in his treatment of Gundred, but Mrs. Mimburn was not in a position to realize the fact. Certainly he grew daily more and more affectionate; he pulled her perforce into every conversation, he devoted himself to her comfort, he never allowed himself to be happy out of her sight.
As for Isabel, he and she had very little to say to each other in these few ensuing days. What had happened had happened; it had given them a blessed consciousness; there was no need to be putting it into words. Exhausted by emotions, they were content tolet themselves drift. That the situation was terribly unsafe and precarious Kingston knew in his heart. He realized that it could not long be continued. But for the moment he acquiesced, and trusted that, before the strain broke in catastrophe, Fate might provide some solution; and, meanwhile, there was nothing for Minne-Adélaïde to get hold of.
Mrs. Mimburn had made herself into one of those women who belong to the town, and are quite out of place in the country. Her dress, her voice, her every movement suggested the perpetual neighbourhood of shops, and an habitual dependence on their resources. Paris and London spoke in her, and she looked garish and inappropriate whenever she carried her elaborate boots or her silk petticoats into the country. Her rustic clothes and hats were never genuine. They overdid their effects, and only succeeded in looking like those of an actress at a garden-party on the stage. Mrs. Mimburn’s soul was as urbane as her body and its appointments. She could not live or breathe for long in the country. A nice suburban corner like Surrey might be all very well for a week-end or so. It had a saving artificiality—motors and bridge-parties and all kinds of gaieties seemed quite in place. One could wear decent clothes, and yet be in the picture. A civilized landscape like that was nothing more than a goodmise-en-scènefor an added last act to the “Drama of the Season.” Mrs. Mimburn could tolerate such an atmosphere without beginning to sigh for Bond Street. But Ivescar, dumped in its desolation, was nothing short of appalling. Minne-Adélaïde withered and shrank. She bitterly regretted that curiosity had brought her there. Nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to say: only clouds and rocks to look at, and the rain for ever spotting one’s hat, and midges biting one awfully through the openwork of one’s stockings,if ever one went out on the lawn in a presentable shoe! Minne-Adélaïde looked restlessly round for any possibilities of amusement. She felt completelydépaysée, out of her world, an exile in a desert that made her most brilliant gowns seem blatant and tawdry. She grew homesick, feverish, overexcited by sheer weight of dullness. She would not go away till she had well spied out the land. But in the meantime she must have something to do—or die.
‘So fascinating, your cousin,’ said Minne-Adélaïde one afternoon, suddenly wearied of counting the raindrops on the window-pane.
Gundred looked up from her needlework.
‘Isabel is quite attractive,’ she replied, her tone implying, ever so faintly, that it was a presumption of Mrs. Mimburn even to praise a Mortimer.
The two women sat alone in the picture-gallery, Kingston being gone on some errand to his mother, and Isabel writing letters upstairs. Of late days Gundred had begun to notice the increasing warmth of her husband’s nature, and in some strange way his affection seemed to set her at a distance from him instead of bringing him nearer. Though she had never thought twice of his night on the mountain, yet the faint chill that she had felt that evening had never since quite left her. She could find no fault in their relations, could guess no limitation in himself or her; yet now his love seemed to leave her outside his life. She felt cold and lonely—quite without reason, she knew, but yet cold and lonely she felt. Therefore she was more than usually on the defensive against the impertinences of Minne-Adélaïde.
Mrs. Mimburn noticed the implied snub.
‘Dear Kingston has a lot to say to her,’ she went on viciously. ‘He always has such a lively mind. He likes people with plenty ofélan.’
‘Doesn’t he—yes?’ replied Gundred quietly, yet feeling the stab as she would certainly not have felt it a fortnight ago. The skin of her self-contentment was wearing thin. But she saw the other woman’s intention to hurt, and brought all the resources of her pride to repel the attack. ‘Isabel and my husband are the greatest friends,’ she went on. ‘I am so glad of it. She can talk to him about so many things. Sometimes she can amuse him better than I.’
Her whole splendid pride shone in the calm with which she made these admissions. It was her crowning confession of faith in her husband. And yet, as she made it, the confession hurt her. Deep down in some secret place of her heart it touched a little hidden wound.
Minne-Adélaïde saw only the rebuffing self-complacency of the speech, and was spurred to angry indiscretion by her niece’s arrogant tranquillity. ‘So wise you are, dear Gundred,’ she said, ‘to let them go about so much together. Now so many young women ride their husbands on the curb, and end by boring them to death. Not that your system has not got its dangers, dear. I wonder you are never anxious. Men are men, when all is said and done, and at your age you cannot be expected to know the horrors they are capable of.’
Gundred gazed across at her husband’s aunt with cold grey eyes.
‘You have probably been unfortunate in your experiences, Aunt Minna,’ she replied. ‘Everything depends on the set in which one lives—yes?’
Mrs. Mimburn laughed—a high, giggling laugh, with a clever upward run at the end.
‘Nothing, my child—nothing,’ she replied. ‘All men are alike under the skin.’
Gundred had a flash of cleverness.
‘But the skin may be clean or dirty,’ she answered, ‘and that is what makes the difference—yes?’
‘Life, my dear,’ said Minne-Adélaïde sententiously, ‘is a garden of roses growing in manure. You cannot play about in that garden without getting dirty. And men like the gardening work, and they don’t trouble to put on gloves for it either. Life is a dirty affair,ma petite.’ Minne-Adélaïde honestly thought so, though her own life had been plain and clean in the most uninteresting degree, so far as its facts went. Gundred looked at her with chilly distaste. She misunderstood Mrs. Mimburn, thought her attitude genuine, instead of mere pose, and disliked her accordingly.
‘We shall never agree,’ she answered. ‘We see things very differently, Aunt Minna. We have always known different sorts of people.’
Mrs. Mimburn bit her enamelled lip. ‘Well,’ she answered, ‘I am sure I hope you will make a success of your life, dear Gundred. I do think the experiment is a little risky, though. Isabel is really a little dangerous, you know.’
‘Are you talking about my cousin?’ asked Gundred loftily. ‘Oh, please don’t trouble. I think we understand each other.’
‘No woman understands any other woman when there is a man in the case,’ replied Minne-Adélaïde. ‘Only misunderstandings happenthen. We are all cats together. One always has to be careful of other women.’
‘How kind of you—yes?’ said Gundred; ‘but there is really nothing to warn us against.’
‘Oh,ma chère, of course not. Dear Kingston is the best husband in the world. It is a pity, perhaps, he was not—well, a little morenoceurbefore he married. That would make one feel so much more secure of him as a husband. One has to remember, yousee, that marriage is not only a matter of—obvious things. It’s not a case of having a man, but of holding him. A woman should always have reserves and spices in her nature to keep her husband on the alert—ordinary women, I mean. But you are so brave. You are trying to run aménage à troison quite original lines——’
‘My dear Aunt Minna, there isn’t any need to give me so much good advice. I have no wish to interfere with my husband’s amusements.’
‘Not even to have any share in them? Now, that is so courageous. Of course you don’t seem able to amuse Kingston as much as Isabel can. I suppose you see that. He makes it plainer and plainer every day. Or perhaps you simply don’t care for the trouble, and so you give him a lively pretty creature to fill up the time with? So sweet of you. I only trust he won’t fill up the time so well that he won’t have any left for you. Men are so uncertain.’
This time Mrs. Mimburn had pierced Gundred’s armour. Her colour deepened. ‘I should think it a silly insult to have any doubts of my husband,’ she answered. ‘And—and—well, it’s not as if Isabel were very extraordinarily beautiful.’ She regretted the lapse as soon as she had committed it. But Minne-Adélaïde pounced mercilessly.
‘Let me tell you,’ she said, ‘if Isabel is not exactly beautiful, she is something much worse:elle est pire. She is fascinating. Now, mere prettiness is apt to get veryfadeand insipid after a time—the monotony of marriage, you know. And if there is anyone so attractive as Isabel anywhere near, a man is terribly ready to forget mere prettiness.’
‘Perhaps, but a gentleman does not forget his duty,’ answered Gundred, losing command of the situation for a moment.
Minne-Adélaïde pursued her advantages accordingly. ‘Oh, well,’ she laughed, ‘if one only wants to hold one’s husband by his duty! And even a gentleman—what else is he but a man, as soon as his clothes are off? And they do show the strangest forgetfulness at times.Icould tell you stories.’
Gundred hated herself for permitting such a dialogue. Mrs. Mimburn seemed to have entrapped her.
‘Please don’t,’ she answered. ‘These things are not interesting.’
‘You see,’ went on Minne-Adélaïde, ‘if one lets one’s self slide out of a man’s life, one is encouraging him to forget one—and to remember other people, which is worse. Now you—of course one can’t always fill one’s husband’s life, one can’t always talk to him, can one? Between ourselves, now, one can’t always understand him. And she does, this cousin of yours. And that may be all right, or, again, it may be all wrong.’
Thus baited, Gundred grew furious. Her colour came and went, her manner became neater, cooler, blander than ever. And yet she could say so little. Mrs. Mimburn’s darts had found the weak spot that she was hiding even from herself. Through all her anger at Minne-Adélaïde’s insolence, the dialogue had for her a fearful, poignant interest that forbade her to follow her own first angry instincts, and cut it off with a snub.
‘I think you are quite mistaken,’ she replied. ‘And, anyhow, I should always be glad to see my husband being amused—no matter who it was by.’
‘Ah, you have the reckless unselfishness of the very young,’ answered Minne-Adélaïde intolerably. ‘That has wrecked so many marriages. “Trust nothing and nobody” ought to be one’s motto, and do all the amusing that may be necessary one’s self. It is safest in thelong run—if one can do it, that is. However, you seem content to let someone else do it, and all I say is that I hope no harm will come of it. But when you want to take up your own position in your husband’s life again, you may find that someone else has filled it while you were ordering dinner and talking about the weather. It is even better, my dear, to bore your husband than to let him find that he can be kept amused all day and every day by someone else. I should get rid of the cousin, if I were you.’
‘Yes?’ answered Gundred, gelid with wrath, yet, despite herself, enthralled in Mrs. Mimburn’s dreadful foreshadowings. She began to have some notion what it was that she had been finding unsatisfactory in her relations with Kingston. He petted her more and more, but more and more did he talk to Isabel, and his recent efforts to include Gundred only revealed his inability to do so. This it was, this situation of her own making, that had been giving her secret, unacknowledged qualms, and feelings of vague hunger. The more proudly, then, did she revolt against Mrs. Mimburn’s insinuations, and the vigour of her anger was the measure of her inward conviction that the insinuations held some truth.
Minne-Adélaïde thought that she held Gundred helpless. She presumed on her power, made reckless at once by boredom and by gratified spite.
‘Oh, well,’ she pursued, ‘it may pay to leave your husband for ever alone with Isabel. I can’t say. It wouldn’t pay with any other man or any other woman. But, of course, your husbandmaybe an exception. Most husbands are—to their wives—until the catastrophe. Now, if I were you, I should want to know a great deal more about that night they got lost on the hill together—or said they did. That sort of thing isn’t done, you know. It wants a good deal of explaining.’
Confronted with the final insult, all Gundred’s pride, the best side of her courage rallied to her aid. Her manner betrayed no agitation, paid Mrs. Mimburn no compliment of excitement. Perfectly cool and level was her voice as she looked up and answered:
‘You seem to forget that we are not living in one of that dreadful man’s plays,’ she said. ‘I should despise myself if ever I were capable of having such thoughts of my husband or my cousin. As you said just now, such things are not done—in the class I know, at all events.’ She fixed a cool, contemptuous, grey stare on the astounded Minne-Adélaïde, who suddenly had an unaccustomed feeling of getting the worst of it.
Fluttered by this sudden revolt, Mrs. Mimburn made an effort to recover lost ground.
‘I am sorry you take it like that,’ she began. ‘Of course one does not mean to accuse——’
‘We will talk of something else—yes?’ said Gundred very coolly, but with complete decision.
Minne-Adélaïde gasped. She considered her attitude towards life all that waschic, up-to-date, and sound. She imagined that no man or woman could ever spend the dark hours in each other’s neighbourhood without the ultimate disaster, and piqued herself on the smart knowledge of the world that discerned adultery in the most casual compliments. Gundred’s sudden revolt was preposterous in its ignorance of human nature, as well as supremely insolent in its offhand condemnation of her own views. She completely lost her temper.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘one has to remember how little you know of things, poor dear! Your innocence is really beautiful—if it weren’t so pathetic. You will have a rude awakening one of these days. I am afraid there can be no doubt that your husband has already——’
She broke off, daunted by the look in Gundred’s eyes. The immemorial pride of the Mortimers gleamed and flashed in them. Gundred might have been brought up to be calm, unemotional, well mannered, but she came of a race that had never allowed itself to be baited by inferiors. And almost everyone else in the world was an inferior. Gundred fixed a chilling stare on Mrs. Mimburn’s excited face. ‘Be quiet, please,’ she said; ‘I am afraid you are a very vulgar woman.’
All was over; Mrs. Mimburn was summed up and condemned in that one placid sentence, so judicially delivered. She could make no appeal; for the life of her, she could not even finish her remark. For the moment she was dominated by the force that came from her rigidly decorous enemy.
Then in the silence, the door opened, and Kingston entered. Gundred turned towards him with a happy smile.
‘Isn’t it a pity,’ she said in pleasant, gentle tones. ‘Aunt Minna says she must go back to London to-morrow. Nothing can persuade her to stay, I find.’
Minne-Adélaïde stuttered and choked with wrath at this defeat. ‘Yes,’ she said, purple through her powder—‘yes—yes, I must positively go back to town—positively go back to town to-morrow.’
Gundred quietly resumed her work.