CHAPTER XVIII
BY the next morning Robert had determined to leave town for a week or two, and take a holiday. He felt ill and nervous; his work was suffering; he would take advantage of a standing invitation from some friends at Maidenhead. A fortnight’s idling on the river would do him no harm, and relieve him from the necessity of meeting either his wife or Philippa. Quite early, he despatched two telegrams, and leaving a note for Cecily, he was on his way to Paddington before eleven o’clock. Cecily received the curt intimation of his departure with a sense of great relief. She was bitterly angry. Through a sleepless night she had followed again and again, with growing contempt, all the links in the chain of events which had preceded Robert’s outburst of the previous evening. Her anger burned the more fiercely with the memory of the impulse of tenderness which her husband’s words had quenched. She had thought herself so indifferent, she had so trained herself toforget, to ignore him, that it was with a sort of wonder she had felt her heart stirred lately by the sight of his obvious depression. Often she had longed to try to comfort him, and had found herself scornfully wondering what Philippa was about, to be unable to render this first aid to the wounded. She had been by no means displeased to find that Philippa did not understand him.
Now all her pity for him was forgotten in indignation. All night she had been anticipating their meeting and the inevitable renewal of their broken conversation. What would be its result? And now, for the present at least, she might leave that consideration. Rose Summers was coming for a fortnight’s visit. There was comfort in the thought that she should have her to herself.
“Well, lioness!” was her friend’s greeting when she arrived at the well-chosen tea-hour. She kissed Cecily and held her at arm’s length, nodding approval. “A very well-favored animal,” she remarked. “I congratulate you, my dear.”
Cecily laughed. “I’ve taken great pains with the grooming,” she said. “Do you groom lionesses, by the way?”
“For drawing-room use, certainly. In your case with admirable result. Now, for heaven’s sake, give me some tea and tell me things.”
Cecily complied with both requests, though to the latter she did not respond as thoroughly as her cousin wished. Except for an occasional half-hour now and then, they had not met for a year, and Rose was amazed at the change in Cecily. She struck her as looking prettier than she had been even in her early girlhood, but so different from that girlish Cecily that it was difficult to think of the two individuals as in any way related. Cecily was one of those women who develop late, in intellect, in all that makes personality, even, under favorable circumstances, in beauty. At twenty-five she had been still immature. Now, at thirty-two, she gave the impression of a woman self-possessed, if gracious and charming in manner; a woman who had looked close at life, and was under no illusions with regard to it.
As Rose listened to her, she gained the impression of a full and varied existence, full of interest, at least, if not of happiness. Of Mayne, Cecily spoke quite frankly. She saw much of him. She owed him much—“almost everything, in fact.” Of her husband, though Rose waited, she spoke not at all, beyond amention of the fact that he had gone into the country for a week or two.
“I didn’t ask any one to dinner,” Cecily said. “I thought we’d be alone the first evening—and not go out anywhere.”
“It’s a change for you to be quiet, I see,” remarked Rose.
Cecily laughed. “Yes,” she admitted. “There’s always some one here—or else I’m out.”
“A great change from Sheepcote?”
“Thank God! yes—in every way.”
The immediate reply was fervent, and Rose wondered, though at the time she said nothing. It was only after dinner, when they sat by the open window in the drawing-room, that she deliberately introduced the subject of her speculations.
“Do you remember the last time we sat by the window and talked?” she said.
Cecily was smoking. She broke off the ash of her cigarette against the window-sill before she replied.
“Yes,” she said. “I was in hell then.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m out of it.”
Rose paused a moment. There was no mistaking the quiet thankfulness of the tone.
“And Robert?” she ventured.
“I know nothing about Robert—or rather, to be strictly truthful, I didn’t till last night.” She laughed a little. “And then I made a discovery.”
“Yes?”
“I find that Robert is, or pretends to be, jealous of Dick Mayne.”
Almost imperceptibly, Rose started.
“Does that mean that——?”
Cecily shrugged her shoulders.
“Is she still his secretary?”
“Oh, yes.”
“But——?”
“I don’t know,” returned Cecily. “I don’t think it matters.”
Mrs. Summers waited a few moments.
“Cecily,” she said at last, “are you sincere? Are you as indifferent as that?”
“If you mean with regard to that, or any other woman—yes.”
“You don’t care for him? not any more at all?”
Cecily hesitated, then sighed rather wearily. “Oh, I don’t know. I thought not—but—I don’t know. He’s made me despise him; he’s robbed me of every illusion about him; I see him, and have long seen him—just as heis. Now he has insulted me in a way that’s so ludicrously unjust that I——” She laughed again. “That’s all one can do—laugh. And yet——” She stopped.
“Yes?” said Rose again.
“Yet I feel bound to him,” declared Cecily, slowly. “Not in any sort of legal way, of course, but just so that I can’t help myself. When he looks tired, or worried, or disappointed—and he so often looks all of them—my heart aches. I want to comfort him. It’s just as though he were my child, you know, my silly, naughty little boy.” She smiled to herself, quietly.
“Cis!” exclaimed Rose, involuntarily. “How you have grown up!”
“Grown up? I have grown old. Hundreds of years old.” The last words were uttered as though to herself. For some time neither of them spoke.
“What are you going to do about Dick?” asked Rose at last.
Cecily turned her head in surprise. “Do about him?”
“People are talking, you know. I heard it last year when I was in town, and, indirectly, once or twice since.”
“Are you thinking of Robert?” Therewas a note of contemptuous amusement in her voice.
“Not at all. Of you.”
“Then don’t trouble, dear. People will continue to talk. But as long as I don’t fizzle out, they’ll also continue to ask me to their parties.”
“And is there no danger—of anything else?” persisted Rose.
“Of my falling in love with Dick, you mean? Not the slightest.”
“Then you wouldn’t mind if he went off exploring again?”
Cecily started. “Yes, I should,” she returned, quickly. “I couldn’tbearit.”
“Why?”
“Why?” She looked at her friend in bewilderment. “Because of everything. Because of—— Why, he’s made everything possible. My book—all the people I’ve got to know. I was all to pieces when Dick came home. He put me together again, and stood me on my two feet, and——”
“And yet you are in no danger.”
Cecily looked at her a full moment without speaking, and it was Rose who again broke the silence.
“My dear, when a woman relies on a manlike that, when she can’t picture life without him, there is always danger.”
“If you only knew,” began Cecily, leaning forward and speaking impressively, “if you only knew how thankful I am to beoutof love. To have peace, to have freedom, to have found myself again. It’s just what I said. It’s just as though I had stepped out of hell, to find the blue sky over my head, and the grass underfoot, and the flowers everywhere, all the dear, beautiful, natural things—that never hurt one.”
“I know,” said Rose. “But that’s just a phase, Cis—a reaction. Don’t think you’re done with love because you dread it. You’re young. You have tremendous vitality. Look at yourself now in the glass, and think what you were two years ago. You’re not the sort of woman for whom things are very easily over.”
“And even so,” interrupted Cecily, passionately, “granted that what you say is true, would you have me give up Dick’s friendship?—a friendship which was forced upon me by my husband, for a reason which he has since made sufficiently obvious?”
“I would have you completely realize the situation, that’s all,” returned Rose, calmly.“After that, I’m quite content to leave it with you. What I can’t stand, is the silly way in which people deceive themselves, and then stand in amazement, or rend heaven with their cries, when their celestial palaces, whose foundation a fool might have seen to be rotten, come tumbling about their ears. Do what you choose as long as you know you’re doing it, is what I would say to any but the congenital idiot.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Cecily laughed.
“I like you when you turn on the vinegar and vitriol,” she said. “Have another cigarette?”