Then it was that, one afternoon, while the spring of the year was young
and new she met all in her own way his frankest betrayal of these alarms.
He had gone in late to see her, but evening hadn't settled and she was
presented to him in that long fresh light of waning April days which
affects us often with a sadness sharper than the greyest hours of autumn.
The week had been warm, the spring was supposed to have begun early, and
May Bartram sat, for the first time in the year, without a fire; a fact
that, to Marcher's sense, gave the scene of which she formed part a
smooth and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in its immaculate order and
cold meaningless cheer, that it would never see a fire again. Her own
aspect--he could scarce have said why--intensified this note. Almost as
white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as
fine as if they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies
relieved by a faded green scarf on the delicate tone of which the years
had further refined, she was the picture of a serene and exquisite but
impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or indeed all whose person, might have
been powdered with silver. She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals
and green fronds she might have been a lily too--only an artificial lily,
wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though
not exempt from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under
some clear glass bell. The perfection of household care, of high polish
and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now looked most as if
everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away, so that she might sit
with folded hands and with nothing more to do. She was "out of it," to
Marcher's vision; her work was over; she communicated with him as across
some gulf or from some island of rest that she had already reached, and
it made him feel strangely abandoned. Was it--or rather wasn't it--that
if for so long she had been watching with him the answer to their
question must have swum into her ken and taken on its name, so that her
occupation was verily gone? He had as much as charged her with this in
saying to her, many months before, that she even then knew something she
was keeping from him. It was a point he had never since ventured to
press, vaguely fearing as he did that it might become a difference,
perhaps a disagreement, between them. He had in this later time turned
nervous, which was what he in all the other years had never been; and the
oddity was that his nervousness should have waited till he had begun to
doubt, should have held off so long as he was sure. There was something,
it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head,
something that would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not
to speak the wrong word; that would make everything ugly. He wanted the
knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it could, by its own august
weight. If she was to forsake him it was surely for her to take leave.
This was why he didn't directly ask her again what she knew; but it was
also why, approaching the matter from another side, he said to her in the
course of his visit: "What do you regard as the very worst that at this
time of day _can_ happen to me?"
He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had, with the odd
irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, exchanged ideas
about it and then had seen the ideas washed away by cool intervals,
washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It had ever been the mark of
their talk that the oldest allusions in it required but a little
dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as new.
She could thus at present meet his enquiry quite freshly and patiently.
"Oh yes, I've repeatedly thought, only it always seemed to me of old that
I couldn't quite make up my mind. I thought of dreadful things, between
which it was difficult to choose; and so must you have done."
"Rather! I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else. I appear to
myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing but dreadful things.
A great many of them I've at different times named to you, but there were
others I couldn't name."
"They were too, too dreadful?"
"Too, too dreadful--some of them."
She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it, an
inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full clearness, were
still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only beautiful with a
strange cold light--a light that somehow was a part of the effect, if it
wasn't rather a part of the cause, of the pale hard sweetness of the
season and the hour. "And yet," she said at last, "there are horrors
we've mentioned."
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a
picture, talk of "horrors," but she was to do in a few minutes something
stranger yet--though even of this he was to take the full measure but
afterwards--and the note of it already trembled. It was, for the matter
of that, one of the signs that her eyes were having again the high
flicker of their prime. He had to admit, however, what she said. "Oh
yes, there were times when we did go far." He caught himself in the act
of speaking as if it all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the
consummation depended for him clearly more and more on his friend.
But she had now a soft smile. "Oh far--!"
It was oddly ironic. "Do you mean you're prepared to go further?"
She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at him,
yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread. "Do you consider that
we went far?"
"Why I thought it the point you were just making--that we _had_ looked
most things in the face."
"Including each other?" She still smiled. "But you're quite right.
We've had together great imaginations, often great fears; but some of
them have been unspoken."
"Then the worst--we haven't faced that. I _could_ face it, I believe, if
I knew what you think it. I feel," he explained, "as if I had lost my
power to conceive such things." And he wondered if he looked as blank as
he sounded. "It's spent."
"Then why do you assume," she asked, "that mine isn't?"
"Because you've given me signs to the contrary. It isn't a question for
you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It isn't a question now of
choosing." At last he came out with it. "You know something I don't.
You've shown me that before."
These last words had affected her, he made out in a moment, exceedingly,
and she spoke with firmness. "I've shown you, my dear, nothing."
He shook his head. "You can't hide it."
"Oh, oh!" May Bartram sounded over what she couldn't hide. It was almost
a smothered groan.
"You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as of something
you were afraid I should find out. Your answer was that I couldn't, that
I wouldn't, and I don't pretend I have. But you had something therefore
in mind, and I see now how it must have been, how it still is, the
possibility that, of all possibilities, has settled itself for you as the
worst. This," he went on, "is why I appeal to you. I'm only afraid of
ignorance to-day--I'm not afraid of knowledge." And then as for a while
she said nothing: "What makes me sure is that I see in your face and feel
here, in this air and amid these appearances, that you're out of it.
You've done. You've had your experience. You leave me to my fate."
Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair, as on a decision
to be made, so that her manner was fairly an avowal, though still, with a
small fine inner stiffness, an imperfect surrender. "It _would_ be the
worst," she finally let herself say. "I mean the thing I've never said."
It hushed him a moment. "More monstrous than all the monstrosities we've
named?"
"More monstrous. Isn't that what you sufficiently express," she asked,
"in calling it the worst?"
Marcher thought. "Assuredly--if you mean, as I do, something that
includes all the loss and all the shame that are thinkable."
"It would if it _should_ happen," said May Bartram. "What we're speaking
of, remember, is only my idea."
"It's your belief," Marcher returned. "That's enough for me. I feel
your beliefs are right. Therefore if, having this one, you give me no
more light on it, you abandon me."
"No, no!" she repeated. "I'm with you--don't you see?--still." And as
to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair--a movement she
seldom risked in these days--and showed herself, all draped and all soft,
in her fairness and slimness. "I haven't forsaken you."
It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assurance, and
had the success of the impulse not, happily, been great, it would have
touched him to pain more than to pleasure. But the cold charm in her
eyes had spread, as she hovered before him, to all the rest of her
person, so that it was for the minute almost a recovery of youth. He
couldn't pity her for that; he could only take her as she showed--as
capable even yet of helping him. It was as if, at the same time, her
light might at any instant go out; wherefore he must make the most of it.
There passed before him with intensity the three or four things he wanted
most to know; but the question that came of itself to his lips really
covered the others. "Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer."
She promptly shook her head. "Never!"
It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an
extraordinary effect. "Well, what's better than that? Do you call that
the worst?"
"You think nothing is better?" she asked.
She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply wondered,
though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief. "Why not, if one
doesn't _know_?" After which, as their eyes, over his question, met in a
silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his purpose came
prodigiously out of her very face. His own, as he took it in, suddenly
flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with the force of a perception to
which, on the instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp filled
the air; then he became articulate. "I see--if I don't suffer!"
In her own look, however, was doubt. "You see what?"
"Why what you mean--what you've always meant."
She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've always meant.
It's different."
"It's something new?"
She hung back from it a little. "Something new. It's not what you
think. I see what you think."
His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong. "It
isn't that I _am_ a blockhead?" he asked between faintness and grimness.
"It isn't that it's all a mistake?"
"A mistake?" she pityingly echoed. _That_ possibility, for her, he saw,
would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it
would accordingly not be what she had in mind. "Oh no," she declared;
"it's nothing of that sort. You've been right."
Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed,
speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a hole
if his history should prove all a platitude. "Are you telling me the
truth, so that I shan't have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know?
I _haven't_ lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion?
I haven't waited but to see the door shut in my face?"
She shook her head again. "However the case stands _that_ isn't the
truth. Whatever the reality, it _is_ a reality. The door isn't shut.
The door's open," said May Bartram.
"Then something's to come?"
She waited once again, always with her cold sweet eyes on him. "It's
never too late." She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance
between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if
still charged with the unspoken. Her movement might have been for some
finer emphasis of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say. He
had been standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a
small perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden
constituting all its furniture; and her hand grasped the shelf while she
kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encouragement.
She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited. It had
become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to
him that she had something more to give him; her wasted face delicately
shone with it--it glittered almost as with the white lustre of silver in
her expression. She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her
face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while their talk
of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as
inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the
more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some
minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably
pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, none the
less, was that what he had expected failed to come to him. Something
else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere
closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine
shudder, and though he remained staring--though he stared in fact but the
harder--turned off and regained her chair. It was the end of what she
had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.
"Well, you don't say--?"
She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back
strangely pale. "I'm afraid I'm too ill."
"Too ill to tell me?" it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips,
the fear she might die without giving him light. He checked himself in
time from so expressing his question, but she answered as if she had
heard the words.
"Don't you know--now?"
"'Now'--?" She had spoken as if some difference had been made within
the moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with
them. "I know nothing." And he was afterwards to say to himself that he
must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as to show
that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of the whole question.
"Oh!" said May Bartram.
"Are you in pain?" he asked as the woman went to her.
"No," said May Bartram.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room,
fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which,
however, he showed once more his mystification.
"What then has happened?"
She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet, and, feeling
withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and
had reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. "What _was_ to,"
she said.