XXIX.
THE Drovers had wanted Mrs. Clephane to return to Long Island with them that afternoon; Nollie Tresselton had added her prayer; Anne herself had urged her mother to accept.
“How can I drive away thinking of you here all alone?” the girl had said; and Kate had managed to smile back: “You won’t be thinking of me at all!” and had added that she wanted to rest, and have time to gather up her things before sailing.
It had been settled, in the last days before the wedding, that she was to go abroad for the winter: to Italy, perhaps, or the south of France. The young couple, after a brief dash to Florida, were off for India, by Marseilles and Suez; it seemed only reasonable that Mrs. Clephane should not care to remain in New York. And Anne knew—though no one else did—that when her mother went abroad she would not go alone. Nothing was to be said ... not a word to any one; though by this time—an hour after bride and groom had driven away to the Palm Beach express—Chris Fenno was no doubt in the secret.
Anne had left without anxiety; she understood her mother’s wish to keep her plans to herself, andrespected it. And in a few days now the family would be reassembling at St. Stephen’s for another, even quieter wedding.
Aline came downstairs to the long drawing-room, where Mrs. Clephane was sitting alone in a litter of fallen rose-petals, grains of rice and ends of wedding-cake ribbon. Beyond, in the dining-room, the servants were moving away the small tables, and carrying off the silver in green-lined baskets.
The house-keeper had come in to give the butler the address of the hospital to which Mrs. Fenno wished the flowers to be sent, and a footman was already removing the baskets and bouquets from the drawing-room.
“Madame will be much more comfortable upstairs than in all this untidiness; and Mr. Landers has telephoned to ask if he may see Madame in about half an hour.”
Aline, of course, knew everything; news reached her by every pore, as it circulates through an Eastern bazaar. Erect in the handsome dress that Mrs. Clephane had given her for the wedding, she smiled drily but approvingly upon her mistress. It was understood that Mr. Landers wasun bon parti; and the servants’ hall knew him to be generous. So did Aline, whose gown was fastened by the diamond arrow he had offered her that morning.
“There’s a nice fire in Madame’s sitting-room,” she added persuasively.
Kate Clephane sat motionless, without looking up. She heard what the maid was saying, and could have repeated her exact words; but they conveyed no meaning.
“Madame must come up,” Aline again insisted.
The humiliation of being treated like a sick person at length roused Mrs. Clephane, and she got to her feet and followed the maid. On the way upstairs she said to her: “Presently I will tell you what I shall need on the steamer.” Then she turned into the sitting-room, and Aline softly closed the door on her.
The fire was burning briskly; Anne’s last bunch of violets stood on the low table near the lounge. Outside the windows the winter light was waning. Kate Clephane, sitting down on the lounge, remembered that the room had worn that same look of soothing intimacy on the day when Anne had first led her into it, little more than a year ago; and she remembered that, then, also, Fred Landers had joined her there, hurriedly summoned to reassure her loneliness. It was curious, in what neatly recurring patterns events often worked themselves out.
The door opened and he came in. He still wore his wedding clothes, and the dark morning coat and the pearl in his tie suited him, gave him a certainair of self-confidence and importance. He looked like a man who would smooth one’s way, manage all the tiresome details of life admirably, without fuss or bluster. The small point of consciousness left alive in Kate Clephane registered the fact, and was dimly comforted by it. Steamer chairs, for instance, and the right table in a ventilated corner of the dining-saloon—one wouldn’t have to bother about anything....
“I wish we could have got off tomorrow,” he said, sitting down beside her, and looking at her with a smile. “I would have, you know, if you’d thought it feasible. Why shouldn’t we have been married in Liverpool?”
“Or on board! Don’t they provide a registry office on these modern boats?” she jested with pale lips.
“But next week—next week I shall carry you off,” he continued with authority.
“Yes; next week.” She tried to add a word of sympathy, of affection; the word he was waiting for. But she could only turn her wan smile on him.
“My dear, you’re dead-beat; don’t you want me to go?”
She shook her head.
“No? You’d rather I stayed—you really would?” His face lit up. “You needn’t pretend with me, Kate, you know.”
“Needn’t I? Are you sure? All my life I seemnever to have done anything but pretend,” she suddenly exclaimed.
“Well, you needn’t now; I’m sure.” He sealed it with his quiet smile, leaning toward her a little, but without moving his chair nearer. There was something infinitely reassuring in the way he took things for granted, without undue emphasis or enthusiasm.
“Lie down now; let me pull that shawl up. A cigarette—may I? I suppose there’ll be tea presently? We needn’t talk about plans till tomorrow.”
She tried to smile back. “But what else is there to talk about?” Her eyes rested on his face, and she read in it his effort to remain the unobtrusive and undemanding friend. The sight gave her a little twinge of compunction. “I mean, there’s nothing to say about me. Let’s talk about you,” she suggested.
The blood mounted to his temples, congesting his cheek-bones and the elderly fold above his stiff collar. He made a movement as if to rise, and then settled back resolutely into his chair. “About me? There’s nothing to say about me either—except in relation to you. And there there’s too much! Don’t get me going. Better take me for granted.”
“I do; that’s my comfort.” She was beginning to smile on him less painfully. “All your goodness to me—”
But now he stood up, his pink deepening to purple.
“Oh, not that, please! It rather hurts; even at my age. And I assure you I can be trusted to remind myself of it at proper intervals.”
She raised herself on her elbow, looking up at him in surprise.
“I’ve hurt you? I didn’t mean to.”
“Well—goodness, you know! A man doesn’t care to be eternally reminded of his goodness; not even if it’s supposed to be all he has to offer—in exchange for everything.”
“Oh—everything!” She gave a little shrug. “If ever a woman came to a man empty-handed....”
With a slight break in his voice he said: “You come with yourself.”
The answer, and his tone, woke in her a painful sense of his intense participation in their talk and her own remoteness from it. The phrase “come with yourself” shed a lightning-flash of irony on their reciprocal attitude. What self had she left to come with? She knew he was waiting for an answer; she felt the cruelty of letting his exclamation drop as if unheard; but what more had she to say to him—unless she should say everything?
The thought shot through her for the first time. Had she really meant to marry him without his knowing? Perhaps she had; she was not sure; she felt she would never again be very sure of her own intentions. But now, through all the confusion and exhaustion of her mind, one fact had become abruptlyclear: that she would have to tell him. Whether she married him or not seemed a small matter in comparison. First she must look into those honest eyes with eyes as honest.
“Myself?” she said, echoing his last word. “What do you know of that self, I wonder?”
He continued to stand before her in the same absorbed and brooding attitude. “All I need to know is how unhappy you’ve been.”
She leaned on her arm, still looking up at him. “Yes; I’ve been unhappy; horribly unhappy. Beyond anything you can imagine. Beyond anything you’ve ever guessed.”
This did not seem to surprise him. He continued to return her gaze with the same tranquil eyes. “But I rather think Ihaveguessed,” he said.
Something in his voice seemed to tell her that after all she had not been alone in her struggle; it was as if he had turned a key in the most secret ward of her heart. Oh, if he had really guessed—if she were to be suddenly lifted beyond that miserable moment of avowal into a quiet heaven of understanding and compassion!
“You have guessed—you’ve understood?”
Yes; his face was still unperturbed, his eyes were indulgent. The tears rushed to her own; she wanted to sit down and cry her heart out. Instead, she got to her feet and went to him with outstretched hands. She must thank him; she would find the words now;she would be able to tell him what that perfect trust was to her, or at least what it would be when the present was far enough away for anything on earth to help her.
“Oh, Fred—you knew all the while? You saw I tried to the utmost, you saw I couldn’t do anything to stop it?”
He had her hands in his, and was holding them against his breast. “Stop it—the marriage? Is that what’s troubling you?” He was speaking now as if to a frightened disconsolate child. “Of course you couldn’t stop it. I know how you must have loathed it; all you must have suffered. But Anne’s happiness had to come first.”
He did understand, then; did pity her! She let herself lie in his hold. The relief of avowal was too exquisite, now that all peril of explanation was over and she could just yield herself up to his pity. But though he held her she no longer saw him; all her attention was centred on her own torturing problem. She thought of him only as of some one kinder and more understanding than any one else, and her heart overflowed.
“But wasn’t it just cowardice on my part? Wasn’t it wicked of me not to dare to tell her?”
“Of course it wasn’t wicked. What good would it have done? It’s hard that she made the choice she did; but a girl with a will like Anne’s has to take her chance. I always felt you’d end by seeingit. And you will, when you’re less tired and overwrought. Only trust me to look after you,” he said.
Her tears rose and began to run down. She would have liked to go on listening without having to attend to what he said. But again she felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and she tried to smile back at him. “I do trust you ... you do help me. You can’t tell the agony of the secret....” She hardly knew what she was saying.
“It needn’t be a secret now. Doesn’t that help?”
“Your knowing, and not loathing me? Oh,that—.” She gave a faint laugh. “You’re the only one of them all who’s not afraid of me.”
“Afraid of you?”
“Of what I might let out—if they hadn’t always stopped me. That’s my torture now; that I let them stop me. It always will be. I shall go over it and over it; I shall never be sure I oughtn’t to have told them.”
“Toldwhat?”
“Why—what you know.”
She looked up at him, surprised, and saw that a faint veil had fallen over the light in his eyes. His face had grown pale and she felt that he was holding her hands without knowing that he held them.
“I know you’ve been most unhappy ... most cruelly treated....” He straightened his shoulders and looked at her. “That there’ve been things in the past that you regret ... must regret....” Hepaused, as if waiting for her to speak; then, with a visible effort, went on: “In all those lonely years—when you were so friendless—I’ve naturally supposed you were not always ... alone....”
She freed herself gently and moved away from him.
“Is that all?”
She was conscious in him of a slowly dawning surprise. “All—what else is there?”
“What else? The shame ... the misery ... the truth....”
For a moment he seemed hardly to take in the words she was flinging at him. He looked like a man who has not yet felt the pain of the wound he has received.
“I certainly don’t know—of any shame,” he answered slowly.
“Then you don’t know anything. You don’t know any more than the others.” She had almost laughed out as she said it.
He seemed to be struggling with an inconceivable idea: an idea for which there were no terms in his vocabulary. His lips moved once or twice before he became articulate. “You mean: some sort of complicity—some sort of secret—between you and—and Anne’s husband?”
She made a faint gesture of assent.
“Something—” he still wavered over it—“something you ought to have told Anne before ... beforeshe....” Abruptly he broke off, took a few steps away from her, and came back. “Not you—not you and that man?” She was silent.
The silence continued. He stood without moving, turned away from her. She had dropped down on the foot of the lounge, and sat gazing at the pattern of the carpet. He put his hands over his eyes. Presently, hearing him move, she looked up. He had uncovered his eyes and was staring about the room as if he had never seen it before, and could not remember what had brought him there. His face had shrunk and yellowed; he seemed years older.
As she looked at him, she marvelled at her folly in imagining even for a moment that he had read any farther into her secret than the others. She remembered his first visit after her return; remembered how she had plied him with uncomfortable questions, and detected in his kindly eyes the terror of the man who, all his life, has tried to buy off fate by optimistic evasions. Fate had caught up with him now—Kate Clephane would have given the world if it had not been through her agency. Sterile pain—it appeared that she was to inflict it after all, and on the one being who really loved her, who would really have helped her had he known how!
He moved nearer, and stood in front of her, forcing a thin smile. “You’ll think me as obtuse as the rest of them,” he said.
She could not find anything to answer. Her tears had stopped, and she sat dry-eyed, counting the circles in the carpet. When she had reached the fifteenth she heard him speaking again in the same stiff concise tone. “I—I was unprepared, I confess.”
“Yes. I ought to have known—” She stood up, and continued in a low colourless voice, as if the words were being dictated to her: “I meant to tell you; I really did; at least I suppose I did. But I’ve lived so long with the idea of the thing that I wasn’t surprised when you said you knew—knew everything. I thought you meant that you’d guessed. There were times when I thought everybody must have guessed—”
“Oh, God forbid!” he ejaculated.
She smiled faintly. “I don’t know that it much matters. Except that I want to keep it from Anne—that I must keep it from her now. I daresay it was wicked of me not to stop the marriage at any cost; but when I tried to, and saw her agony, I couldn’t. The only way would have been to tell her outright; and I couldn’t do that—I couldn’t! Coming back to her was like dying and going to heaven. Itwasheaven to me here till he came. Then I tried.... I tried.... But how can I ever make you understand? For nearly twenty years no one had thought much of me—I hadn’t thought much of myself. I’d never really forgiven myself for leaving Anne. And then, when she sent for me, and I came, andwe were so happy together, and she seemed so fond of me, I thought ... I thought perhaps after all it hadn’t made any difference. But as soon as the struggle began I saw I hadn’t any power—any hold over her. She told me so herself: she said I was a stranger to her. She said I’d given up any claim on her, any right to influence her, when I went away and left her years ago. And so she wouldn’t listen to me. That was my punishment: that I couldn’t stop her.”
“Oh, Anne—Anne can look out for herself. What do I care for Anne?” he exclaimed harshly. “But you—you—you—and that man!” He dropped down into his armchair and hid his eyes again.
She waited a minute or two; then she ventured: “Don’t mind so much.”
He made no answer. At length he lifted his head, but without looking directly at her.
“It was—long ago?”
“Yes. Six years—eight years. I don’t know....” She heard herself pushing the date back farther and farther, but she could not help it.
“At a time when you were desperately lonely and unhappy?”
“Oh—not much more than usual.” She added, after a moment: “I don’t claim any extenuating circumstances.”
“The cad—the blackguard! I—”
She interrupted him. “Not that either—quite.When he first met Anne he didn’t know; didn’t know she was even related to me. When he found out he went away; he went away twice. She made him come back. She reproached me for separating them. Nothing could have stopped her except my telling her. And I couldn’t tell her when I saw how she cared.”
“No—” There was a slight break in the harshness of his voice.
Again she was silent, not through the wish to avoid speaking, but from sheer inability to find anything more to say.
Suddenly he lifted his miserable eyes, and looked at her for a second. “You’ve been through hell,” he said.
“Yes. I’m there still.” She stopped, and then, drawn by the pity in his tone, once more felt herself slipping down the inevitable slope of confession. “It’s not onlythathell—there’s another. I want to tell you everything now. It was not only for fear of Anne’s suffering that I couldn’t speak; it was because I couldn’t bear the thought of what she would think of me if I did. It was so sweet being her mother—I couldn’t bear to give it up. And the triumph of your all thinking she’d done right to bring me back—I couldn’t give that up either, because I knew how much it counted in her feeling for me. Somehow, it turned me once more into the person I was meant to be—or thought I was meant to be.That’s all. I’m glad I’ve told you.... Only you mustn’t let it hurt you; not for long....”
After she had ended he continued to sit without moving; she had the impression that he had not heard what she had said. His attention, his receptive capacity, were still engrossed by the stark fact of her confession: her image and Chris Fenno’s were slowly burning themselves into his shrinking vision. To assist at the process was like peeping into a torture-chamber, and for the moment she lost the sense of her own misery in the helpless contemplation of his. Sterile pain, if ever there was—
At last she crossed over to where he sat, and laid a touch on his shoulder.
“Fred—you mustn’t let this hurt you. It has done me good to tell you ... it has helped. Your being so sorry has helped. And now it’s all over ... it’s ended....”
He did not change his attitude or even look up again. She still doubted if he heard her. After a minute or two she withdrew her hand and moved away. The strain had been too great; she had imposed on him more than he could bear. She saw that clearly now: she said to herself that their talk was over, that they were already leagues apart. Her sentimental experience had shown her how often two people still in the act of exchanging tender or violent words are in reality at the opposite endsof the earth, and she reflected, ironically, how much success in human affairs depends on the power to detect such displacements. She herself had no such successes to her credit; hers was at best the doubtful gift of discerning, perhaps more quickly than most people, why she failed. But to all such shades of suffering her friend was impervious: he was taking his ordeal in bulk.
She sat down and waited. Curiously enough, she was less unhappy than for a long time past. His pain and his pity were perhaps what she had most needed from him: the centre of her wretchedness seemed the point at which they were meant to meet. If only she could have put it in words simple enough to reach him—but to thank him for what he was suffering would have seemed like mockery; and she could only wait and say to herself that perhaps before long he would go.
After a while he lifted his head and slowly got to his feet. For a moment he seemed to waver; then he crossed the space between them, and stood before her. She rose too, and held out her hand; but he did not appear to notice the gesture, though his eyes were now intensely fixed on her.
“The time will come,” he said, “when all this will seem very far off from both of us. That’s all I want to think of now.”
She looked up, not understanding. Then she began to tremble in all her body; her very lipstrembled, and the lids of her dazzled eyes. He was still looking at her, and she saw the dawn of the old kindness in his. He seemed to have come out on the other side of a great darkness. But all she found to say was the denial of what she was feeling. “Oh, no—no—no—”; and she put him from her.
“No?”
“It’s enough; enough; what you’ve just said is enough.” She stammered it out incoherently. “Don’t you see that I can’t bear any more?”
He stood rooted there in his mild obstinate kindness. “There’s got to be a great deal more, though.”
“Not now—not now!” She caught his hand, and just laid it to her cheek. Then she drew back, with a sense of resolution, of finality, that must have shown itself in her face and air. “Now you’re to go; you’re to leave me. I’m dreadfully tired.” She said it almost like a child who asks to be taken up and carried. It seemed to her that for the first time in her life she had been picked up out of the dust and weariness, and set down in a quiet place where no harm could come.
He was still looking at her, uncertainly, pleadingly. “Tomorrow, then? Tomorrow morning?”
She hesitated. “Tomorrow afternoon.”
“And now you’ll rest?”
“Now I’ll rest.”
With that—their hands just clasping—she guidedhim gently to the door, and stood waiting till she heard his step go down the stair. Then she turned back into the room and opened the door of her bedroom.
The maid was there, preparing a becoming tea-gown. She had no doubt conjectured that Mr. Landers would be coming back for dinner.
“Aline! Tomorrow’s steamer—it’s not too late to call up the office?”
The maid stood staring, incredulous, the shimmering dress on her arm.
“The steamer—not tomorrow’s steamer?”
“The steamer on which I had taken passages,” Mrs. Clephane explained, hurriedly reaching for the telephone book.
Aline’s look seemed to say that this was beyond all reasonable explanation.
“But those passages—Madame ordered me to give them up. Madame said we were not to sail till next week.”
“Never mind. At this season there’s no crowd. You must call up at once and get them back.”
“Madame is not really thinking of sailing tomorrow? The boat leaves at six in the morning.”
Mrs. Clephane almost laughed in her face. “I’m not thinking of doing it; I’m going to do it. Ah, here’s the number—” She unhooked the receiver.