CHAPTER XVIII
Gundred, however, was too good a wife to make useless difficulties. As her husband had invited this young man, this young man must clearly be endured. After all, the visit would soon be over, and she herself need not put in more than a bare appearance. To tell the truth, she was not quite easy as to her own attitude in the matter. It could not be altogether right to conceive such violent antipathies, and she was painfully surprised to find herself entertaining such a feeling. She told herself that there could be no smoke without fire, and that sooner or later her infallible female instinct would be found justified. But until it should be so found justified, she was far too conscientiously good a woman to be happy in the indulgence of an unreasonable hatred. Accordingly, she deliberately suppressed her annoyance, and made it her penance to receive Ivor Restormel on the morrow with her usual quiet grace. The effort brought its own reward; dislike him mysteriously, instinctively, she still did and always would, but there was no longer the uncomfortable vehemence about the feeling. She could tolerate him, though she could not make him welcome.
Ivor Restormel walked over in the afternoon. Gundred gave him tea and then left him to her husband’s care, on the plea of a post to catch. Kingston took his guest into the new wing that had been built on the promontory after the fire, and proceeded to question him and talk to him more exhaustively than had been possible the night before amid the exigencies of a party, no matter how scandalously disregarded. There was no beginning about their friendship, it seemed to Kingston, no breaking of new ground. It was simply the picking up of a dropped thread whereit had fallen. The feeling was strange and almost uncanny, the more so that it was evidently not shared by Ivor Restormel. He received his host’s overtures with diffidence, seemed ill at ease, at a loss to understand the warmth of his treatment. Mr. Darnley was nothing more to him than a chance acquaintance of the night before. As the dialogue went forward, too, the visitor’s uneasiness became more and more marked. His face took on a strange look of strain and anxiety; in his speech could be heard from time to time that note of abstraction which can be heard in a voice whose owner is trying hard to keep up a conversation, while his mind is fixed far away on the contemplation of unpleasant private matters. Kingston watched the expression of his guest’s eyes, the curious hunted fear that his whole manner began to suggest, and again experienced more strongly than ever the mysterious feeling of having seen that manner, that strained expression, somewhere before. His memory must be playing him the maddest tricks; for he could have sworn that this boy was well known to him in every detail of face and disposition; yet by now it was clearly proved—as clearly proved, at least, as anything in this world could ever be—that the two had never met, and never even set eyes on each other before. But Kingston still hoped against hope that a chance discovery in the dialogue might reveal some hint or glimpse of a former meeting, however brief, partial, trifling. Thus, and thus alone, could his instinct be justified.
But, as the conversation went forward, the visitor’s uneasiness grew keener and more unsettling. At last it could no longer be controlled.
‘I should awfully like to see some more of the Castle,’ he said. ‘You said something last night about showing me the pictures.’
But the boy’s evident wish to move was too interesting to be gratified. Kingston saw it, could not understand it, meant to understand it.
‘Oh, there will be heaps of time,’ he replied. ‘You must come over again some afternoon. But it takes at least a day to see the Castle thoroughly. We may just as well stay here peacefully. Really, these are the most comfortable rooms in the whole building, although they are quite modern.’
‘Modern, are they?’ answered young Restormel. It was a silly answer, and betrayed the inattention of his mind. For the rooms were too obviously modern for any comment on the fact to be other than fatuous.
‘Yes, they were only built about—yes, twenty years ago.’
Ivor Restormel leapt to his feet. His anxiety culminated, seemed mysteriously confirmed. His eyes were filled with a horror he was trying to conceal. ‘Surely,’ he stammered, ‘these are not the rooms that were restored after the——’
‘After the fire? Yes. This was where the old wing stood.’
‘I thought so; I knew they must be,’ replied Ivor Restormel with forced calm. ‘And they have not got rid of the smell yet. I noticed it as soon as I got inside.’
‘The smell! What smell?’ asked his host, amused by this odd notion of his visitor’s, and sniffing about for the aroma of dead rats.
‘The smell of fire,’ said Ivor Restormel, speaking in a low voice, as of a thing too dreadful to be talked of in normal tones. ‘The whole place is full of the smell of fire. Don’t you notice it, Mr. Darnley? I suppose nothing can be on fire now? No; it is the stale old smell of a fire that has been out for a long time—the sharp, beastly smell of charred wood andburnt stone. I know it so well.’ He shivered against his will.
Kingston was startled at this strange new development. He had heard nothing of Ivor Restormel’s hidden horror. Gundred had disliked the whole subject too much to tattle about it. Kingston was astounded at the sudden fantastic anxiety of his guest, the perturbation of his manners, his evident discomposure. So vivid was Ivor Restormel’s apprehension that it even impressed itself on Kingston. The host inhaled the air sharply. There was not the faintest suggestion of fire or smoke. The room was sleepily fragrant with potpourri from the old perforated jade censer on the corner table. Otherwise there was nothing in the air. And yet it was evident that Ivor Restormel was dodging some secret terror that was almost on the point of breaking covert and declaring itself.
‘You have got a most wonderful imagination,’ said Kingston at last. ‘There is no smell of fire here. On my word, there isn’t. There couldn’t be. The fire was put out twenty years ago, hang it all! The smell of it could not very well be hanging about here still.’
‘No; I suppose not,’ answered the other, obviously quite unconvinced.
Then, lamely, hesitatingly, he explained the reasons why the memories of the catastrophe at Brakelond had become so closely involved with his own life, and what a troublesome legacy it had left him through the shock that his mother had suffered. Kingston was more and more stirred.
‘I never heard anything more extraordinary,’ he replied. ‘Suggestion, I suppose it must be. And this room makes you feel uncomfortable even now, I can see, and you manage to smell fire where therehas been no fire for twenty years. And yet you have no more recollections?’
‘Recollections? I don’t quite know what there could be for me to recollect.’
‘Well, to tell you the truth, when I first saw you on the road, I had a vague and yet a very strong feeling that you and I have met before, and known each other quite well. I imagine that was all a mistake? See if you can’t remember any previous meeting between us, though. It would be interesting if you could, for my instinct was quite extraordinarily clear on the point, though my memory seems to say accurately and definitely that I had never seen your face till I passed you in the car yesterday afternoon.’
Ivor Restormel shook his head positively, and made haste to answer in the negative. The question did not interest him in the least. The one feeling of which he was conscious was his tyrannous need of getting away from those serene and pleasant modern rooms, which, to his excited fancy, seemed full of horrid ghosts.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am pretty well certain we can never have met before. I was brought up abroad, you see, by my mother, after they sold Restormel. And the last two or three years I have been living at Oxford. I have not been to London or anywhere where we could have met. No—no.... I say, I am a most awful idiot to-day. I can’t imagine what has come over me,’ he cried abruptly. ‘But this jolly room of yours—well, it feels to me horribly uncanny. You say there is no fire, and of course there isn’t; yet the smell is in my nostrils and my throat all the time, choking and stifling me. Did you ever hear such rot? Do you mind if we go out in the garden or somewhere? I’m not often taken like this, please believe me. I have never felt anything like this in my life. I told you how I hate and dread fire, though I have never sufferedfrom it; but nothing has ever given me such an awful impression of fire as I feel here to-day.’
He had been standing ever since he rose from his chair, or walking uneasily from end to end of the room. Now he stood in front of his host, gazing at him with eyes which, for all his tongue’s pretence at ease, were filled with a haunting dread. Kingston was deeply moved by the spectacle of this fighting terror before him. The terror moved his pity, the courage of its victim moved his admiration. And, behind everything else lay the curiosity that this manifestation woke in him. But he could no longer disregard his visitor’s eagerness to be gone elsewhere. He rose from the window-seat.
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I cannot understand it. Yes, let us go, if you wish. We might take a turn in the garden. I would not have brought you in here if I had had the slightest idea that you feel like this. But I never could have believed that such a stretch of imagination was possible.’ Kingston broke off, studying the controlled fear in the young man’s face. Then he abruptly began again. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘do tell me exactly what it is you see and feel that gets on your nerves so. I cannot understand it.’
Ivor Restormel glanced round the room. Under Gundred’s supervision it had been rebuilt in a cool and placid modern style. Everything in it was pretty, graceful, harmonious. The walls were panelled in white; flowers were standing about in tall blue glasses. The big windows admitted shafts of soft afternoon light through their drawn white blinds, and the whole impression was one of fragrant, comfortable peace.
But Ivor Restormel’s eyes saw something very different.
After a pause he answered, huskily, in broken, difficult tones:
‘You will think me more of an ass than you do already,’ he replied. ‘I suppose it must be my mother’s stories that account for it. But, besides the awful smell of burning here, I seem to see a horrible wreckage of charred ruins. Oh, I can see these walls and all the jolly decorations. And yet, somehow, when I look again they are not there any longer. There is only the shell of some other building, something all fallen in and blistered and blackened with fire. Great heaps of ashes and bleached rubbish are piled high between what is left of the walls. The whole place is choking with the stale fumes of smoke. And the rooms are open to the grey sky far overhead; and grey drifts of rain come dashing in from time to time on the smouldering masses.’
Kingston watched his visitor’s face with an amazement that bereft him of words.
‘By God!’ he said slowly, wondering where his thoughts would lead him in the next few minutes. ‘By God! you describe it exactly as if you had been here twenty years ago.’
Ivor Restormel shook his head fiercely, as if trying to shake off some horrid, persistent memory.
‘I feel as if I had,’ he replied suddenly. ‘I feel just as if I had been here twenty years ago, worse luck. The moment I came into the room I saw it all. I felt—oh, well, I felt that I must have been here in the ruins ever so long ago, and had the worst time here that anyone ever had—as if I had been tied by the leg here, somehow, and pinned down in damnable terror and pain.’
‘Come along out of it,’ said Kingston quietly, after a pause. He dared not trust himself to say more. An idea had been born in his brain—born, or called once more to life?—an idea so wild, so fantastic, that he hardly dared to entertain it. And yet, in the depthsof his heart, he knew that it was the truth. In silence he led the way towards the Castle, while his visitor tried to impress upon his unheeding ears a dozen apologies for the gross and idiotic folly of which his nerves had made him guilty.
As soon as he was out of the fateful room all his self-possession seemed to have returned, and he could not account for the sudden vertigo of terror that had haunted him there. What had come over him he could not imagine. Mr. Darnley must certainly think him the most confounded idiot. What must Mr. Darnley think of anyone who could let himself be made such a rude, mannerless idiot of by a sort of hysterical schoolgirl qualm? The whole thing was too asinine for words. He had no excuse to make.
And all the time Mr. Darnley said nothing, heard nothing of his guest’s protestations. This beautiful nervous boy had no interest for Kingston Darnley; he did not care what he said or felt or looked like. But the terror that haunted Ivor Restormel was not his; the mysterious attraction that filled him was not his own. Somewhere, deep down in his being, lived Something that had felt that terror, Something that exercised that attraction over Kingston, Something that called to Kingston as an old friend. And that Something, Kingston knew it, heard it calling to him imperiously out of the eternal past. It was the Something that had once carried the name and shape of Isabel. There was no mistaking it. Now at last Kingston understood what it was that had gripped him yesterday on the road, what inexplicable summons of old friendship. The dead had come back to him after many years. But clothed in alien flesh, forming part of a new personality, shut off from recognition by the barriers of the body. For in this boy lived only the one fragmentary recollection of the final catastrophe.Nothing in Kingston’s soul, no call of ancient kinship, no appeal to bygone pledges, could penetrate to the ears of that secret self. The dead had come back, known to him, but incapable of knowing him again. How could he wake memory in that changed thing which had returned, at once the same, and yet so different, in its freedom from that bond which once had made them one, and now, still as strong as ever in the hold it had over himself, had broken and fallen away for ever from the other soul it had gripped? Kingston looked at his visitor with a feeling that drew near to hatred. This stranger held the thing he still loved. The body and the shape of it was an irrelevant, a maddening accident; it was the secret thing that Kingston called to, the secret thing that was prevented from hearing by this new personality in which it had clothed itself. Kingston felt a sharp grudge against Ivor Restormel, his body, his brain, his beauty. That body, that brain, that beauty made the locked casket that imprisoned the living dead. And yet, inasmuch as Ivor Restormel was the shrine of that lost passion, he was, on the other hand, ineffably precious and sacred. He could not be let go. The boy himself was less than nothing; but what he held was more than everything.
Ivor Restormel thought his host justifiably offended, and tried to mitigate the effect of his own silly rudeness. But his pleasant chatter fell on unheeding ears, and he began to think that he had alienated Mr. Darnley beyond reconciliation. And no wonder. Who could be expected to put up with a puling idiot like that? Ivor Restormel mentally kicked himself, and felt that he would gladly have vindicated his character by returning into those haunted rooms. Without having any special wish to please either of the Darnleys, he was one of those people who alwayslike to be popular, and grow faintly unhappy when they fail to make a favourable impression. He did all he could to mollify his host, and was distressed, though not surprised, to find all his efforts fall flat. In ordinary circumstances he would not have minded so much; but now he felt that he really owed Mr. Darnley some extra pleasantness, if only to make up for having just made so egregious an ass of himself. He tried his level best to set matters right; but for a long time he got no answer—or at most an absent-minded monosyllable. Kingston was not yet equal to conversing with this tiresome young interloper who had come between himself and the dead, while, at the same time, revealing at last to him the return of the lost. They walked in silence up and down the garden together, while Gundred watched them from an upper window, disliking the visitor as much as ever, and wondering when in the world he would begin to think about going.
‘Wanted to see the pictures, didn’t you?’ said Kingston abruptly at last, cutting, regardless, into something that the other was saying.
Ivor Restormel felt more and more out of place. Evidently he would do well to say good-bye. However, he could not escape from this civility of his host, however perfunctory. So he followed Kingston as he strode into the Castle, paying no attention to the boy at his heels. Gradually Kingston was beginning to recover his composure and face the inevitable. This wonderful secret certainty of his must be cherished and acted on, though already he began to taste something of the pain that had been foretold him, from incessant yearning knowledge of a thing that could not recognise him in turn, and could never recognise him again. The door between them was of locked iron—a vain agony to beat against. And yet it was not anagony that he could spare himself, for, though the door was of locked iron for ever, yet behind it dwelt the thing he had sought for so long. He saw now the irony of his fate. But nothing could divert its course. Ivor Restormel found his host growing calmer and more courteous again. Soon he was even cordial, and the tension of the situation seemed at an end. The two men passed through the picture-gallery, giving a share of attention to every picture, though each, in reality, was busy with his own thoughts, Ivor feeling the satisfaction of successful effort, and Kingston foreboding the anguish of an effort that could never be successful. At last they had gone the length of the gallery, and stood before the old panel of Queen Isabel.
‘Here is the She-wolf,’ said Kingston pleasantly. ‘Don’t you think she looks her name? Isabel of France and England.’
The younger man laughed uneasily.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘An evil lady, I suppose? It is curious what a horror I have of the very name. Isabel—it seems to stand to me for everything I hate most in the world, fire included. I must have some beastly memory somewhere connected with the name of Isabel, but I cannot lay my hands upon it.’
The little artless admission roused Kingston to the highest point of excitement. He must penetrate to the secret haunt of that soul which had such clear flashes of recognition. The taskmustnot be hopeless. He turned almost savagely upon his guest.
‘Restormel,’ he said, ‘what do you mean by that? For God’s sake, think—think hard, and tell me what you mean by that. Think, man, think.’
The vehemence of his attack, however, had no effect upon the younger man. Kingston had hoped that by its sheer sudden intensity it must inevitably strike a chord of memory, must inevitably rouse up the sleepingsoul with its cry of eagerness. But it failed—failed utterly, and his mood fell back baffled.
‘I’d tell you if I could,’ protested Ivor. ‘But, upon my soul, I can’t. It is just another of my idiotic crazes. I wish I had not told you now. It only makes one seem more of an ass than one did before. Anyhow, I think I must be getting back to Restormel, Mr. Darnley. Thanks so much for letting me come over. I have awfully enjoyed seeing the Castle. Will you say good-bye for me to Lady Gundred?’
‘Look here,’ said Kingston, suddenly kindled to anxiety by this threat of departure—‘look here. What are you going to do, Restormel, when you leave the Hoope-Arkwrights? I mean, what are your plans in life?’
‘Mine? Oh, well, I hardly know. I have got to make some money somehow. There isn’t a penny-piece for us to live on. I shall have to be a clerk, or something of the kind, I imagine. My mother sent me to Oxford because she wanted me to make my living by teaching. But it does not seem that there is much chance of that nowadays. The world swarms with tutors and masters.’
Kingston saw his chance. It was unthinkable that this recovered joy of his life should be allowed to pass away again immediately, leaving him in the darkness that he had endured for twenty years. He could not bear the thought of parting with Ivor Restormel. The very notion was a pain.
‘But look here,’ he said abruptly, ‘why not come to us and be my secretary, and do tutor to my son Jim, perhaps, in the holidays? I am sure we should all get on capitally together, and, honestly, I don’t think that you could easily pick up anything much better. And we’d do our best for you. What do you say?’
Ivor, confounded at this sudden proposition, thelast thing that he had expected after his behaviour of that afternoon, lost himself in thanks and self-depreciation. Kingston would hear of no such hesitations.
‘We might just as well settle it now,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to consider much, or think over—that is, if you really care to try this kind of work. You know about us, and we know about you; and, so far as we are concerned, I don’t see that anything could possibly have fallen out more conveniently.’
‘But I—do you think I should be able to do what you want?’ asked Ivor Restormel. ‘Remember, please, I have never attempted anything of the sort before. You may not find me what you like, after all.’
‘One knows that sort of thing as well at the end of five minutes, very often, as at the end of five years. I am quite certain that you are exactly the sort of fellow we want. I knew it the first moment we met. So don’t make any more difficulties or apologies, but just say that you will come to us.’
‘But of course, if you really think—well, I shall be delighted, of course.’
‘That’s right. And there’s no particular reason for putting things off, is there? So come to us as soon as you can. To-morrow, or the day after. You won’t want to stay much longer with those Hoope-Arkwright people. And I should like you to get accustomed to us and the place before we go off to my place in Yorkshire and our son Jim comes home.’
And so, after a few more faint demurrings, Ivor Restormel, bewildered and dazed by the rapid development of events, found himself pledged to take up his residence at Brakelond with the least possible delay. Matters being thus settled to Kingston’s satisfaction, he allowed his visitor to depart, and then began to brace himself to the task of breaking his latest plan to Gundred.
The good wife neither raves nor flouts. But, if she be good enough, she has the power of being quite wonderfully disagreeable in a mild and dutiful manner. Gundred had never countered Kingston with any ill-bred vehemence, but by now he knew that on occasions she could don a pious resignation inexpressibly hard to bear. Some such display, he was afraid, might greet his announcement, for, to his experienced eye, it was already plain that she did not approve of Ivor Restormel. Her sweetness to him had had a certain glacial tone which Kingston well knew. He anticipated that she might make difficulties.
But events were moving too rapidly for Gundred’s orderly habit of mind. She was too much taken aback when she heard the arrangement that her husband had made to offer any coherent or valid opposition. A vague passion of wrath possessed her, and her anger lost half its efficacy with all its usual crushing calm. For Gundred, the imperturbably gentle and correct, so far forgot herself as to combat Kingston’s plan with violent obloquy. Never before had he seen her unreasonable, or hysterically bellicose; and the unusual spectacle, so far from compelling his sympathy, only hardened his decision by its contrast with her usual well-regulated temper. Had a glimpse of the past been vouchsafed to him, after all these years, that he should now forego the agonizing joy of it, simply because his wife chose to abandon herself to a groundless antipathy against a young man, a perfect stranger, in whom she, of all people, could certainly not discern that inmost inhabitant whose presence gave him so strong a claim on Kingston? No, her foolishness justified him in disregarding her opposition.
As for Gundred, she lost her head, lost it completely, in the complete surprise that overwhelmed her. Imagining that a meal or so at Brakelond would markthe extent of her husband’s ridiculous fancy for the boy against whom her instinct so urgently warned her, she had been content to allow matters their course, considering resistance unnecessary. And now, while she acquiesced, matters had suddenly grown to such a pitch that resistance was no longer possible. The situation had passed beyond her control. At first she could hardly believe that Kingston really meant to disregard her hostility. Hitherto, through all their married life, husband and wife had never seriously clashed. A quiet tolerance towards each other’s plans had marked their relations. In fact, neither had really been sufficiently excited over the other’s actions ever to make a fuss. They trusted each other, and lived in the amity of confident indifference. Ideal as their union had been, though, it had been the union of two parts, not fused, but cemented; now at last, after twenty years, surged up the hot water of opposition, and in the moment of trial the cement revealed itself by melting. At a touch the two lives fell apart, and were separate once more. The revelation was a shock to Gundred.
‘Kingston,’ she cried, ‘I tell you, I distrust that young man. I cannot think what you mean by proposing to have him in the house. The very moment I set eyes on him I felt that there was something wrong about him. A woman’s instinct is never mistaken, Kingston.’
‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous, Gundred,’ answered her husband. ‘Have you anything definite to say? If so, say it, by all means, and we’ll think no more of the matter. But if you have not, don’t dishonour yourself by making scenes and abusing a young fellow of whom you know nothing but what is perfectly good.’
‘And Jim?’ replied Gundred, taken at a disadvantage, and stripped in an instant of the lovely calm thatusually clothed her like a Paquin frock—‘my Jim? Am I to see my only child, Kingston, handed over to the company of a man against whom I have the very strongest feelings of fear and horror? Kingston, I tell you I look on that young man with positive fear and horror. Have I ever said anything like this before about anyone else? Do you think I am mad enough and unchristian enough to take prejudices like this without a reason? But it is stronger than I am, this feeling. It is so strong that I feel it would be wicked to disregard it. It is Heaven’s warning to us all. I know that it speaks the truth, Kingston; don’t be so obstinate.’
Knowing in his secret heart what secret tie it was that bound him to the occupant of Ivor Restormel’s personality, Kingston could not but feel it strange and impressive that Gundred should have conceived so violent and instinctive animosity against the young fellow. Could it be a blind feeling of jealousy, recrudescent from the past? Anyhow, it was the very devil and all of an inconvenience. And, as no sort of wrong was meditated to Gundred, as no sort of wrong was possible, Kingston saw clearly that her unreasonableness not only allowed him, but enjoined him, in her own interests, to take a firm way of dealing with these hysterical passions. Had she been cool and staid as usual, he would have found the situation much more difficult to cope with; as it was, her dishevelled zeal gave him the advantage, and enabled him to assume the high position of one who has right and reason on his side.
‘Hang it all, Gundred,’ he protested. ‘What a piece of work to make about nothing! One would have thought you would have been only too glad to help an old neighbour’s son. You are generally so keen to do what you can for people. Do try and getover these absurd fancies. Do you suppose I am not just as anxious as you are that Jim shall be kept out of undesirable hands? Come, you don’t think me a fool, I hope? You don’t imagine that I should pick out a scoundrel for a whim? I tell you, I like this young fellow; I like him more than I can say. He attracts me strongly; I am sure we shall find him a great addition.’
Gundred looked up at him with righteous wrath in her eyes. ‘He must have bewitched you,’ she said, devoutly and sincerely. ‘The Forces of Evil sometimes have the most awful power. Oh, Kingston, listen to me. Be wise, and repent in time. Oh, I never thought it would come to this. Why,whydid we ever dine with those dreadful people?’
‘Gundred, you are either hysterical or medieval. And in either case, really one cannot argue with you. I have never seen you like this before. Poor boy! can you soberly think him an emissary of the devil?’ Kingston laughed.
But Gundred, among many other antiquated notions in which she took pride, retained a most steadfast belief in the bodily existence of Satan. To be old-fashioned in manners, mind, morals—in everything but clothes—was her especial glory. In London she claimed to be conspicuous by her old-world excellencies. When she met, or heard—for they did not frequent her set—of other Dukes’ wives and daughters who were frivolous and freethinking and modern, Gundred took pride in asserting the obvious fact that she was not as they, that she continued to give a rare and beautiful example of pristine decorum to her order. Her friends might find the spectacle dull, but they could never deny that it was edifying. And among the old-fashioned adornments with which she persisted in decking her habit of mind, her belief in the Powersof evil, of witchcraft and possession, were given not the least important place. She described herself complacently as an old-fashioned Christian, and never passed a palmist’s placard in Bond Street without feeling that the law ought to have more scruples about allowing a witch to live. Now, accordingly, she primmed her lips fiercely at Kingston’s scepticism.
‘All I know is,’ she answered, ‘that these warnings are sent us for our good, and that the Powers of Evil are for ever round us, seeking whom they may devour. Kingston, will you, or will you not, pay attention to what I say?’
By this time her truculent attitude had dissipated her husband’s last lingering scruples. Looked at very minutely, very casuistically, perhaps it was not perfectly fair to force upon Gundred someone she disliked, simply because he himself desired to keep watch and communion with the precious personality that dwelt within the object of her hostility, and probably was the unknown cause of it. But nothing of all this could Gundred possibly know, for one thing; and, for another, her attitude had become so grotesquely exaggerated and defiant that no husband of any sense or spirit could be justified in giving way to it. Why, the situation was preposterous and transpontine to an intolerable degree. His own sudden fantastic instinct had been strange and grotesque enough, in all conscience; but Gundred’s fury of opposition lent yet a further touch of grotesqueness which removed the whole episode into the domain of mystical melodrama. Why, they might be living in a novel of Lytton or Mortimer Collins, instead of in a very comfortable and orderly present into which had suddenly flashed a gleam of romance out of an equally comfortable and orderly past. Kingston would not recognise his own instinct as anything abnormal, and was bent on keepingall suggestion of the abnormal out of his human relations. The prenatal memory, he knew, was not only a fact, but a fact—at any rate, in the East, where memory and its training are better understood than over here—of no uncommon occurrence. There was nothing strange in the fact that in this boy of twenty, there should still be lurking some fragmentary elements of the woman whose martyrdom and courage he reincarnated. Kingston would not decorate the situation with any romantic glamour; it was a plain, indisputable occurrence, and his whole life should insist on treating it as a matter of course. In his violent resolve to keep the young fellow close at hand there was no sentiment, no idiotic feeling of attachment for the young man himself, or any objectionable nonsense of that kind. The young fellow was of no account at all. Kingston’s wish to secure his continued presence must be put down simply prosaically, solely, to his recognition of the fact that in the boy’s personality the lost Isabel sometimes spoke again, and therefore his company was doubly and trebly desirable; but only for what it conveyed, not in the least for what it was. And, all this being so, Kingston was the more irritated by the instinctive knowledge of the truth that Gundred’s absurd behaviour seemed to hint at, the more bent on resenting it, ignoring it, and, by determination in his own way, crushing out the signs of resistance that she was so vehemently showing.
‘Oh, let’s have no more of this, Gundred,’ he exclaimed. ‘You do not know what you are saying. I am exceedingly sorry to annoy you, but you know you would despise yourself and me if I gave way to such ridiculous nightmares. You will see things quite differently to-morrow. Do try and look at the matter more sensibly.’
‘Man sends sense,’ cried Gundred, ‘and God sends instincts. Listen to God, Kingston, or you will be sorry for it.’
He shrugged his shoulders cruelly.
‘There is no coping with religious exaltation,’ he answered coldly, with a weary feeling that this woman at his side was quite alien to him in all her thoughts and ways.
Gundred rose. ‘If that is what you call it,’ she replied, with more of her habitual dignity, ‘I think there is no more to be said.’
‘I agree with you. There is nothing more to be said.’
‘And this young man, Ivor Restormel, he is to come here in a day or two?’
‘Yes,’ answered Kingston. ‘I settled it all up with him this afternoon.’
‘And you absolutely refuse to give me what I ask for?’ went on Gundred, returning now, after the heat of the conflict, to the impressive calm of her usual manner. She was preparing a new attack.
‘My dear Gundred,’ answered her husband, more gently now that he saw her more amenable, and therefore more worthy of consideration, ‘I will gladly spend the rest of my life doing what you wish, as long as you ask me for things I can in decency do.’
‘Ah,’ replied Gundred, ‘that is what people always say. They will do everything in the world to please one, except the only thing one asks them for.Thatis never reasonable or right.’
‘Well, it certainly was not in this case, now, was it, Gundred—honestly, now, was it? You asked me to throw this wretched young man over, to break my promise to him, to upset all his plans, to cast him adrift again after I had offered him our help. And why? All simply because you had been bored at theHoope-Arkwrights’ tedious dinner, and eaten something which disagreed with you, and made you look on all the world with a bilious, peevish eye, and on your luckless dinner-neighbour in particular. For that is what it all comes to, you know; that is what your wonderful edifice of instincts and suspicions and righteous qualms is founded on.’
‘Yes; you may sneer,’ answered Gundred coolly, regaining her supremacy with her self-control. ‘It is always very easy to sneer. Well, I see that you must have your way; you will not listen to me. Somehow, I feel that there is something in the boy that stands between us—something that has been between us, somehow, for a long time, though we did not know it, and has now come to life again, or wakened up and set to work moving us apart. That may be my fancy, perhaps. I know I am upset. I am surprised and shocked. I expected better, happier things of you, Kingston. But this I will say, that if you won’t listen to what you call my foolish instincts, you will be very sorry for it some day. God will certainly punish you for disregarding the clear message that He sent you through me. And this obstinacy of yours will bring its own penalty in time. I know it. I know what you are doing is altogether wrong. And, as your wife, I shall put up with it. But day and night I shall pray God to remove this dreadful thing from our home. I shall pray that something may open your eyes.’
Kingston smiled uneasily, to disguise the impression that her appeal was making on his mood. ‘My dear Gundred,’ he said. ‘Pray by all means. The prayers of a good woman can never bring harm or pain.’
‘Not even if you love the harm? Not even if you are wedded to the harm?’ asked Gundred. ‘Perhaps they might divorce you from the harm, and then that separation might be painful.’
‘Oh, don’t talk as if you meant to put poison in poor Ivor Restormel’s soup,’ cried Kingston, to relieve the tension of the situation. He did not, however, in his own conscience feel altogether easy. The more bent was he, therefore, on laughing down his wife’s denunciations.
‘God chooses His own instruments for His own purposes,’ answered Gundred earnestly. Then she rose, her demeanour filled with tranquil decision, with a stern majesty of protest that stirred again a twinge of remorse in her husband’s heart. Was it she that was foolish, or was it he that was selfish? After all, no sort of harm was planned against her, no disloyalty of any kind, no cooling of affection. If here and there a boy’s chance words contained the spirit of a long-dead woman, well, what was that to Gundred—especially as she could never know it? And his indulgence in the secret pleasure of those words could give no reasonable pain to her. And yet, so long as they did give her pain, did it very much matter whether the pain were reasonable or not, as far as the inflictor’s innocence or guilt was concerned? For what pain in the world is reasonable, if one looks far into the causes and the future of things? Kingston made haste to conclude that his actions could not possibly be expected to have reference to any silly feelings of Gundred’s that might engender pain in her, as the result of their own incalculable developments. Perhaps he made himself too many excuses, defended himself too vehemently, was in too great haste to declare himself convinced by his own arguments. He accepted Gundred’s last words without any symptom of yielding.
And she who, up to the last moment, had never thought that her big guns could be fired without effect, was left helpless, defeated, plunged in the bathos of the situation.
‘Good-night,’ she said, quietly disguising the black bruise that her heart had sustained.
Had Kingston suspected it, he might, perhaps, have softened. But Gundred by now was once more the cool, self-righteous little faultless person he had always known. Her serene rectitude of voice and manner annoyed him.
‘Good-night,’ he answered with equal coolness. Husband and wife went to their several rooms, after the first real quarrel of their married life. Innocently, ignorantly, Ivor Restormel had come between them—or, rather, the Thing that lived again in him had stirred again, as Gundred had divined, to intervene, as once before, between the two stranger-souls who, in the flesh, were contented husband and wife.