“I DIDN'T ask your father, after all,” was one of the things that
Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing
a concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark
with a scant, silent nod.
Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the
terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day,
with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had
glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at
random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight
before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and
yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of
the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits
of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to
induce.
“About your father,” he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak
with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: “I'm afraid
I annoyed you the other day by what I said.”
“I have no recollection of it,” she told him, with tranquil politeness,
over her shoulder.
He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this
topic. “But I want you to recollect,” he said, as he rose to his
feet. There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her
attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched
herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant
against the parapet.
“I've thought of it a good deal,” he went on, in halting explanation.
His purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which
to define it. “I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't
want me to do--something that was a good deal more your affair than
mine--and I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to
do.”
Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for
an appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly
embarrassed as well. “I'm sure you always wish to be nice,” she said at
last. The words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them
somewhere a perfunctory note.
“Oh--nice!” he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the word.
“Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be 'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten
thousand times bigger than being 'nice.'”
“I withdraw the word immediately--unreservedly,” she put in, with a
smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew so well.
“You laugh at me--whenever I try to talk seriously,” he objected.
“I laugh?” she queried, with an upward glance of demurely simulated
amazement. “Impossible! I assure you I've forgotten how.”
“Ah, now we get to it!” he broke out, with energy. “You're really
feeling about it just as I am. You're not satisfied with what we're
doing--with the life we're leading--any more than I am. I see that,
plain enough, now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I got the idea
that you were enjoying it immensely--the greenhouses and gardens and all
that sort of thing. And do you know who it was that put me right--that
told me you hated it?”
“Oh, don't let us talk of him!” Edith exclaimed, swiftly.
Thorpe laughed. “You're wrong. It wasn't your father. I didn't see him.
No--it was my sister. She's never seen you, but all the same she knew
enough to give me points. She told me I was a fool to suppose you were
happy here.”
“How clever of her!” A certain bantering smile accompanied the words,
but on the instant it faded away. She went on with a musing gravity.
“I'm sorry I don't get to know your sister. She seems an extremely real
sort of person. I can understand that she might be difficult to live
with--I daresay all genuine characters are--but she's very real.
Although, apparently, conversation isn't her strong point, still I enjoy
talking with her.”
“How do you mean?” Thorpe asked, knitting his brows in puzzlement.
“Oh, I often go to her shop--or did when I was in town. I went almost
immediately after our--our return to England. I was half afraid
she would recognize me--the portraits in the papers, you know--but
apparently she didn't. And it's splendid--the way she says absolutely
nothing more than it's necessary to say. And her candour! If she thinks
books are bad she says so. Fancy that!”
He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. “You never mentioned
to me that you had gone there,” he told her, as if in reproach.
“Ah, it was complicated,” Edith explained. “She objects to knowing me--I
think secretly I respect her a great deal for that--and therefore there
is something clandestine about my getting to know her--and I could not
be sure how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest not to
mention it.”
“It isn't that alone,” he declared, grave-faced still, but with a softer
voice. “Do you remember what I said the other day? It would make all the
difference in the world to me, if--if you were really--actually my other
half!”
The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon the air, to
impregnate it with some benumbing quality. The husband and wife looked
dumbly, almost vacantly at one another, for what appeared a long time.
“I mean”--all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort of fluency as
he progressed--“I mean, if you shared things really with me! Oh, I'm
not complaining; you mustn't think that. The agreement we made at the
start--you've kept your part of it perfectly. You've done better than
that: you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy.”
“Oh no,” she interposed, gently. “It is not the fact that it has made me
unhappy.”
“Well--discontented, then,” he resumed, without pause. “Here we are. We
do the thing we want to do--we make the kind of home for ourselves
that we've agreed we would like--and then it turns out that somehow it
doesn't come up to expectations. You get tired of it. I suppose, if the
truth were known, I'm by way of being tired of it too. Well, if you look
at it, that fact is the most important thing in the world for both of
us. It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious to discuss, and
examine frankly in all its bearings--in order to see if we can't better
it--but that's precisely the thing that doesn't get talked about between
us. You would never have told me that you were unhappy----”
“You use the word again,” she reminded him, a wan smile softening her
protest.
Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair. He held her
glance with his own, as he stood then, his head bent, gravely regarding
her.
“Do you tell me that you are happy?” he asked, with sober directness.
She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture of comment. “You
consider only the extremes,” she told him. “Between black and white
there are so many colours and shades and half-tones! The whole spectrum,
in fact. Hardly anybody, I should think, gets over the edge into the
true black or the true white. There are always tints, modifications.
People are always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak. The worst that
can be said of me is that I may be in the blues--in the light-blues--but
it is fair to remember that they photograph white.”
Though there was an impulse within him to resent this as trifling,
he resisted it, and judicially considered her allegory. “That is to
say”--he began hesitatingly.
“To the observer I am happy. To myself I am not unhappy.”
“Why won't you tell me, Edith, just where you are?”
The sound of her name was somewhat unfamiliar to their discourse. The
intonation which his voice gave to it now caused her to look up quickly.
“If I could tell myself,” she answered him, after an instant's thought,
“pray believe that I would tell you.”
The way seemed for the moment blocked before him, and he sighed heavily.
“I want to get nearer to you,” he said, with gloom, “and I don't!”
It occurred to her to remark: “You take exception to my phraseology when
I say you always try to be 'nice,' but I'm sure you know what I mean.”
She offered him this assurance with a tentative smile, into which he
gazed moodily.
“You didn't think I was 'nice' when you consented to marry me,” he was
suddenly inspired to say. “I can't imagine your applying that word to me
then in your mind. God knows what it was you did say to yourself about
me, but you never said I was 'nice.' That was the last word that would
have fitted me then--and now it's the only one you can think of.”
The hint that somehow he had stumbled upon a clue to the mysteries
enveloping him rose to prominence in his mind as he spoke. The year had
wrought a baffling difference in him. He lacked something now that then
he had possessed, but he was powerless to define it.
He seated himself again in the chair, and put his hand through her arm
to keep her where she lightly rested beside him. “Will you tell me,” he
said, with a kind of sombre gentleness, “what the word is that you would
have used then? I know you wouldn't--couldn't--have called me 'nice.'
What would you have called me?”
She paused in silence for a little, then slipped from the chair and
stood erect, still leaving her wrist within the restraining curve of his
fingers. “I suppose,” she said, musingly--“I suppose I should have said
'powerful' or 'strong.'” Then she released her arm, and in turn moved to
the parapet.
“And I am weak now--I am 'nice,'” he reflected, mechanically.
In the profile he saw, as she looked away at the vast distant horizon,
there was something pensive, even sad. She did not speak at once, and as
he gazed at her more narrowly it seemed as if her lips were quivering.
A new sense of her great beauty came to him--and with it a hint that
for the instant at least her guard was down. He sprang to his feet, and
stood beside her.
“You ARE going to be open with me--Edith!” he pleaded, softly.
She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of her agitation.
“Oh, what is there to say?” she demanded, in a tone which was almost a
wail. “It is not your fault. I'm not blaming you.”
“WHAT is not my fault?” he persisted with patient gentleness.
Suddenly she confronted him. There were the traces of tears upon
her lashes, and serenity had fled from her face. “It is a mistake--a
blunder,” she began, hurriedly. “I take it all upon my own shoulders.
I was the one who did it. I should have had more judgment--more good
sense!”
“You are not telling me, are you,” he asked with gravity, “that you are
sorry you married me?”
“Is either of us glad?” she retorted, breathlessly. “What is there to be
glad about? You are bored to death--you confess it. And I--well, it is
not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach
you.”
“No, you keep saying that,” he observed, with gloomy slowness of
utterance. “But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as
well have it out.”
“Yes,” she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. Her eyes met his
with a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. “I married one
man because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another
because he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am.
There is bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am
his daughter; that explains everything.”
The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect
upon him. He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new
personage was being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced
cynicism, of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted; there was a
woman of flesh and blood beneath it, after all--a woman to whom he could
talk on terms of intimacy.
“Rubbish!” he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal
smile. “You didn't marry me for my money at all! What nonsense! I simply
came along and carried you off. You couldn't help yourself. It would
have been the same if I hadn't had sixpence.”
To his sharp scrutiny there seemed to flicker in her eyes a kind of
answering gleam. Then she hastily averted her glance, and in this action
too there was a warrant for his mounting confidence.
“The trouble has been,” he declared, “that I've been too much afraid of
you. I've thought that you were made of so much finer stuff than I am,
that you mustn't be touched. That was all a mistake. I see it right
enough now. You ARE finer than I am--God knows there's no dispute about
that--but that's no reason why I should have hung up signs of 'Hands
off!' all around you, and been frightened by them myself. I had the
cheek to capture you and carry you off--and I ought to have had the
pluck to make you love me afterward, and keep it up. And that's what I'm
going to do!”
To this declaration she offered no immediate reply, but continued to
gaze with a vaguely meditative air upon the expanse of landscape spread
below them. He threw a hasty glance over the windows behind him, and
then with assurance passed his arm round her waist. He could not say
that there was any responsive yielding to his embrace, but he did affirm
to himself with new conviction, as he looked down upon the fair small
head at his shoulder, with its lovely pale-brown hair drawn softly
over the temples, and its glimpse of the matchless profile inclined
beneath--that it was all right.
He waited for a long time, with a joyous patience, for her to speak. The
mere fact that she stood beneath his engirdling arm, and gave no thought
to the potential servants'-eyes behind them, was enough for present
happiness. He regarded the illimitable picture commanded from his
terrace with refreshed eyes; it was once again the finest view in
England--and something much more than that beside.
At last, abruptly, she laughed aloud--a silvery, amused little laugh
under her breath. “How comedy and tragedy tread forever on each other's
heels!” she remarked. Her tone was philosophically gay, but upon
reflection he did not wholly like her words.
“There wasn't any tragedy,” he said, “and there isn't any comedy.”
She laughed again. “Oh, don't say that this doesn't appeal to your sense
of humour!” she urged, with mock fervour.
Thorpe sighed in such unaffected depression at this, that she seemed
touched by his mood. Without stirring from his hold, she lifted her
face. “Don't think I'm hateful,” she bade him, and her eyes were very
kind. “There's more truth in what you've been saying than even you
imagine. It really wasn't the money--or I mean it might easily have been
the same if there had been no money. But how shall I explain it? I am
attracted by a big, bold, strong pirate, let us say, but as soon as
he has carried me off--that is the phrase for it--then he straightway
renounces crime and becomes a law-abiding, peaceful citizen. My
buccaneer transforms himself, under my very eyes, into an alderman! Do
you say there is no comedy in that--and tragedy too?”
“Oh, put it that way and it's all right,” he declared, after a moment's
consideration. “I've got as much fun in me as anybody else,” he went
on, “only your jokes have a way of raising blisters on me, somehow.
But that's all done with now. That's because I didn't know you--was
frightened of you. But I aint scared any more. Everything is different!”
With a certain graciousness of lingering movement, she withdrew herself
from his clasp, and faced him with a doubtful smile. “Ah, don't be too
sure,” she murmured.
“Everything is different!” he repeated, with confident emphasis. “Don't
you see yourself it is?”
“You say it is,” she replied, hesitatingly, “but that alone doesn't make
it so. The assertion that life isn't empty doesn't fill it.”
“Ah, but NOW you will talk with me about all that,” he broke in
triumphantly. “We've been standing off with one another. We've been
of no help to each other. But we'll change that, now. We'll talk over
everything together. We'll make up our minds exactly what we want to do,
and then I'll tuck you under my arm and we'll set out and do it.”
She smiled with kindly tolerance for his new-born enthusiasm. “Don't
count on me for too much wisdom or invention,” she warned him. “If
things are to be done, you are still the one who will have to do them.
But undoubtedly you are at your best when you are doing things. This
really has been no sort of life for you, here.”
He gathered her arm into his. “Come and show me your greenhouses,” he
said, and began walking toward the end of the terrace. “It'll turn
out to have been all right for me, this year that I've spent here,” he
continued, as they strolled along. There was a delightful consciousness
of new intimacy conveyed by the very touch of her arm, which filled his
tone with buoyancy. “I've been learning all sorts of tricks here, and
getting myself into your ways of life. It's all been good training. In
every way I'm a better man than I was.”
They had descended from the terrace to a garden path, and approached
now a long glass structure, through the panes of which masses of soft
colour--whites, yellows, pinks, mauves, and strange dull reds--were
dimly perceptible.
“The chrysanthemums are not up to much this year,” Edith observed,
as they drew near to the door of this house. “Collins did them very
badly--as he did most other things. But next year it will be very
different. Gafferson is the best chrysanthemum man in England. That is
he in there now, I think.”
Thorpe stopped short, and stared at her, the while the suggestions
stirred by the sound of this name slowly shaped themselves.
“Gafferson?” he asked her, with a blank countenance.
“My new head-gardener,” she explained. “He was at Hadlow, and after poor
old Lady Plowden died--why, surely you remember him there. You spoke
about him--you'd known him somewhere--in the West Indies, wasn't it?”
He looked into vacancy with the aspect of one stupefied. “Did I?” he
mumbled automatically.
Then, with sudden decision, he swung round on the gravel. “I've got a
kind of headache coming on,” he said. “If you don't mind, we won't go
inside among the flowers.”