BREAD AND SALT
Were you thinking how we, sitting side by side,
Might be dreaming miles and miles apart?
_Two out of the Crowd._
Lettice had had no tea, but she did not stay for it; she uprooted
herself, setting back her chair without a sound, and flitted
inconspicuously out of the exhibition. On her slow way home, in Tube
and omnibus, she did some concentrated thinking. She was not surprised
when Beatrice rushed up from the basement to inform her that a lady was
waiting in her room, a dazzling lady who had arrived in a taxi-cab; she
needed not Beatrice's ecstatic description to tell her who that lady
was. She had caught Dorothea's eye across the hall. Well, what must be,
must; screwing herself up to face a scene, she climbed the stairs.
Her visitor had not sat down; a slight sumptuous figure, she stood
posed against the mantelpiece, looking down into the fire. She started
at the opening door, and raised her beautiful gazelle-brown eyes filled
with tears.
"Oh, Lettice!"
Lettice made no reply. A wave of obstinacy rose to meet that appeal;
she came to the table and stood slowly taking off and smoothing out her
gloves. Lettice was sometimes possessed of a dumb devil. Dorothea's
eyes opened piteously; her lip quivered, the tears tumbled down her
cheeks, but in a flash she was across the room, had seized Lettice and
turned her round by force.
"I don't care, you can be as angry with me as you like, but you _shall_
listen, you _shall_ answer, if I stay here all night. That woman--what
was she doing with Denis?" Lettice was dumb. "Oh, don't _you_ begin
about being justly angry and taking righteous vengeance--see what
that sort of rubbish has done for me!" Dorothea cried with passion. "I
_must_ know about Denis. What has she done to him?"
"I should think you could see that for yourself," said Lettice, opening
her lips with extreme and ungracious reluctance.
"Yes; but is she--has she--"
"Ask some of your friends; they'll know all the London gossip."
"I did ask Maurice, but he either couldn't or wouldn't tell; he said
he'd been out of town. Lettice, oh, Lettice, you can't surely think--he
hasn't really--"
"If you mean, do I think he's living with her, I don't know; I should
think it very likely. But what does it matter to you? You've done all
you wanted--you've had your revenge, and sent Mr. Gardiner to prison."
She freed her hands resolutely and turned away. Dorothea flung herself
into the nearest chair. Beautiful graceful figure, with the long lines
of velvet sweeping to her feet, the plumed hat, the rich hair, the
ivory whiteness of cheek and throat above her dark luxurious furs!
Lettice hardened her heart. Let her go back to her Maurices and her
other friends--she would soon get over it. She turned away, turned her
back on her visitor, and began to prepare her solitary meal as though
Dorothea did not exist. There was ill will in the very curve of her
shoulders.
Dorothea looked up.
"But I do love him so, Lettice!"
"_You_ love _him_?" exclaimed Lettice, pausing with her egg on its way
to the saucepan.
"Why, of course--how could any one help it?
"You seem to have consoled yourself pretty easily," said Lettice, with
a doubtful glance at the violet velvet. Dorothea's eyes followed hers.
"Consoled myself? Do you mean this? _This?_" She crushed up the velvet
in her hand with scorn. "Oh, you are stupid. I didn't expect you to be
stupid, Lettice, I thought you would understand. What would you have
had me do, after that--that frightful day at Westby? One can't die to
order. One has to kill time somehow. I loved Denis--oh, I did, I did
love him--right from the very first. You may say I led him on, but I
didn't, I didn't, I never thought of such a thing, I never so much as
dreamed of its being possible, till one day I woke up and just found
it had happened, to us both. So then what could I do but tear it out,
and deny it, and _make_ myself be loyal to my husband? I--knew--yes, I
suppose I did know that Guy wasn't--I'd seen things--but never anything
really bad; and he was always good to me, truth he was, always. Because
of my money, I suppose. But I didn't know that then. I _had_ to believe
in him, because he was all I had in the world. Oh! I can't talk of it;
it sears me to think of those months. Lettice, Lettice, you haven't
been married, you don't know how close that brings you. To find you
have been mingled, made one with a nature like that--thinking, too,
those hideous thoughts my husband had about me--Yes, _look_ at that
idea, take it home to you, if you can; and then tell yourself that,
however you may try, you have _not_ been married, and you don't and
_can't_ know what that awful intimacy means. Oh! I've been thankful,
since, that my baby died. I was glad to know the truth; but it tore me
in two, Lettice, indeed, indeed it did. Console myself? Why, I've been
at Hendon, learning to fly. That man you saw me with, I met him there.
I believe he fancies I'm going to marry him. I don't care. I don't
know what I've said to him. It's all a blank. I never woke till I saw
Denis. Why, that alone might have told you; should I have gone to him
as I did, as though I were sure of my welcome, there in the face of
everybody, if I'd known what I was doing? I didn't know. I didn't know
anything, except that to see him again was like coming home; and I went
to him without another thought."
Lettice, who all this while had been standing stock-still, with her egg
in her spoon, began slowly to get under way. She slid the egg into the
water, noted the time, straightened her shoulders, and then said, in a
definitely milder tone: "Well, I don't see what you expect me to do."
"Can't we save him?"
She shook her head. "Denis goes his own way. It's no use interfering."
"If you were to say something--"
Another slow shake. "He wouldn't listen. I've seen him like this once
before, with a man he'd been good to, who cheated him. He was like a
stone." She paused, and added, slowly, slowly, drop by drop distilling
for Dorothea's comfort the essence of her meditations in the train: "I
don't suppose it will go far. Denis isn't made that way. He will soon
get tired of it." "_If he wanted to go wrong, he wouldn't know the
way!_" She seemed to hear Gardiner's very accents. The acuteness of the
pain took her by surprise--took away her breath and stopped her words.
Dorothea gave a miserable little sob.
"'Soon get tired of it!' Oh, Lettice, Lettice, but when you think of
what he was!"
To that Lettice made no reply; her face was grim. After a moment she
exerted herself to finish her former speech, still half unwilling,
for it took her heart long to forgive, though her head now acquitted
Dorothea of the worst of her guilt, of a deliberate betrayal: "As a
matter of fact, I don't believe there is anything wrong yet. I believe
so far he is only playing with the idea. It may go no further. He has
thirty years of habit to fight against." She did not say, "To-day will
probably settle it, one way or the other," but the thought was in her
mind.
Dorothea had sunk down on the rug in a miserable little heap, and was
propping herself against the mantelpiece. "Oh, I have been bad, I have
been bad," she said on a long quivering breath, twisting her hands
together, while the tears came tumbling down her cheeks and into her
lap. "Oh, it doesn't seem fair that a miserable little nobody like
me should be allowed to do so much harm. Oh, if there is a God, why
didn't he kill me when my baby died, and have done with it? To let me,
_me_ hurt a man like Denis--oh, I ought to have been squashed like
a blackbeetle! And Mr. Gardiner too. Wherever I go I seem to bring
nothing but trouble! Do lend me a hanky, Lettice, mine's all soppy."
"It's hardly worth while to think of Mr. Gardiner, is it?" suggested
Lettice with faint irony. Dorothea raised her wet eyes.
"Why, of course I think of him, only I think of Denis more. It's
everything with Denis, it was just because he wasn't like other men
you couldn't help loving him. And now--now, even if he gets over it,
as you say, it will never, never be the same." She stopped to swallow
a sob. "But Mr. Gardiner--I know prison is horrid, and I'm sorry, oh!
dreadfully sorry and ashamed whenever I think of him, but he'll come
out at the end none the worse. Why, it isn't even as if it were a
disgrace! You feel the same, Lettice, you know you do."
Lettice said nothing; her face might have betrayed her, had Dorothea
been on the alert; but she was already back with Denis. She did not
like Gardiner, and she would never understand him. But Lettice--by
that naïve assumption of her prime concern for her cousin Dorothea had
shown her, rather more plainly than she liked, where she stood. Her
center of interest had shifted. She was scarcely sorry for Denis; she
was almost angry with him. "He shouldn't have done it," she said with a
touch of sternness. "I am disappointed in him." Lettice expected a good
deal from her friends. Her feelings had changed, adjusting themselves
unconsciously to the change in Denis. The protective instinct was
dead. "When I was a child, I spake as a child...." Denis had put away
childish things, and as a man she judged him.
Gardiner had disappointed her too, yet with him she was not angry.
His failure had been involuntary; and he had redeemed it, coming back
of his own free will to put his manhood to the test. He was under the
question now, this minute, every minute of the day. For the first time
she let herself think of Denis's postscript: tacitly acknowledging
that if she had not done so before, it was because she dared not. She
could reason about Denis, she could not reason about this, though
it lay in her heart like a stone all the time. For Denis the issue
was decided; whether he went to Mrs. Byrne or not, his eyes had been
opened, he had tasted the fruit of the tree, he could never regain
that child-like quality of which Dorothea had robbed him. If he took
the one step further--well--yes, it did matter, it mattered horribly,
the constriction at her heart was only less than she felt in thinking
of the other sufferer. Still, it was less, for Denis would retrieve
himself; Gardiner would not. If he failed now, he would be a broken
man; he would go under. "Insubordination, assaulting a warder"--the
words seemed ominous as thunder on a sultry night.
And meanwhile here was the fount and origin of all this trouble,
sitting on the rug, leaning her small head, stuffed with tears,
against the wall, a dolorous little heap: poor child, she had punished
herself worse than her victims. What to do with her? Lettice had never
responded with enthusiasm to Dorothea's advances. Dorothea was intense;
Lettice preferred the humdrum. Nor, as has been said, could she easily
forgive. Still, if Dorothea really needed her, she supposed she would
have to produce some sort of response. She moved about, laying the
table, cutting the bread; presently she came to the fire to make toast.
Dorothea roused herself. "Let me do that," she said, her voice still
thick and languid with tears. "You go and sit down."
"You'll spoil your frock," said Lettice, with a last faintly
disparaging glance at the violet velvet. Dorothea's eyes glinted; she
set her teeth, stooped down, seized the hem of her skirt between her
strong little hands, and tore it, r-r-rip, half-way up to the waist.
"_That_ for my frock!"
What a baby it was, after all! "Now I shall have to mend that before
you can go home," Lettice admonished her, in a tone which, for
Dorothea, she had never used before.
"Don't care," retorted Dorothea, defiant chin in air. And then, with
a swift little snuggling movement, she nestled against Lettice. "Oh,
Lettice, Lettice, I've been bad, and hateful, and I don't deserve to
have any one like me, but--_may_ I come and see you sometimes? I do
seem to get into such muddles when I'm all by myself--and I haven't
any one in all the world to go to now but you!"
Lettice did not answer, because she was engaged in rescuing the
toasting fork from her guest's heedless hand, and blowing out the
flaming bread. She scraped off the cinders, and with a firmness that
admitted no question put that piece on her own plate, and the other,
which she had made herself, on Dorothea's.
"Now come and have your tea," was her sole reply.
Bread and salt--they ate it together.