WHEN Mrs. Waring got the sketches of her children—for Strange had used
almost physical force to compel Dacre to run over to Paris to sit to
Brydon—the very first minute she found herself alone with them she cried
her heart out over the two, then she sat herself down and systematically
adored them.
She had them hung in the library where she could see them from her
writing-table and only for their weight she would have had them carried
to her room every night.
Mr. Waring, in his emotionless way, valued his daughter’s gift, but this
chronic passion of adoration was beyond him. He had already borne much
with divine patience; he had seen his wife carried away from his side
for hours at a stretch, to waste her mind and soul in the duties of an
ordinary squire’s wife, and she had come back to babble of babies in a
way that made his blood run cold. He had caught her thoughts wandering
at moments when the crisis of a discovery was setting in, and with tears
in her eyes that the subject under discussion could in no wise account
for. Ah, he had suffered in a thousand indefinable ways!
But yet there were moments when he had her still, just as in the sweet
old times, body and soul and brain, all to himself; when she still put
out all the force of her keen fine intellect and saw, with her beautiful
intuition, puzzles that had made his great man’s brain reel.
Through all time had ever any man such a wife, he would think, as he
watched her softly frowning, pondering over a thought and bringing out
the result with that charming diffidence, that wonderful veneration for
the nice intricacies of truth that characterized her, looking withal so
young, so soft, so serene.
No wonder that the man’s heart clave unto her!
And now those pictures! That sublimely haughty young woman—that big
strong soldier with pluck of a most soulless British order stamped all
over him, came in and robbed him of the better part of himself.
They still sat side by side, hand in hand, and worked together, but they
were no longer one. No wonder indeed, that untimely age fell upon the
man and forced him with its chill hand down on his stick, a little
heavier as each day passed!
Mrs. Waring did not go out every day, her restless yearning often took
her no farther than the children’s old nursery, where she would sit by
their little chests of drawers and finger their old yellowing baby
clothes with a shy sad wistful wonderment; she had never put a stitch
into one of them, and their shapes and intricacies were sealed mysteries
to her.
Mary, now grown aged and gray, looked upon the state of affairs with
much dissatisfaction, and seemed likely to continue to do so, for things
instead of getting better got worse. Mr. and Mrs. Fellowes did all they
could to turn her gentle persistent grief into a more healthy channel
and were by no means careful to spare her any plain speaking, but it
seemed impossible to get her to fit her new sweet sad experience into
her old life and to make a whole of it.
It is a frightful grind to get a great heartful of fresh emotions, of
new sorrows and joys, into a middle-aged woman, and not to cause a
general disruption. It seemed rather hard, however, that Mr. Waring
should half perish in his wife’s own particular earthquake. But though
his grief lay down with him at night and rose with him day by day, he
cherished her with ever-increasing tenderness, and never by word or look
expressed the smallest atom of reproach.
Towards the end of July a little fleecy cloud of hope, no bigger than a
man’s hand, appeared upon the horizon, and Mr. Waring grasped it with
nervous despair.
After repeated puttings off, Gwen was coming for certain in a week or
two, to remain until the shooting took them North.
“Perhaps now,” the poor man thought, “perhaps now she will find what she
wants, and can rest and be satisfied, and our life will return to us.
This maternal feeling must certainly be a very powerful and a very
precious factor in a woman’s making, or such an one as my wife would not
be so touched and shaken by its advent and growth in her. It is a
mystery, in truth, thus to come so late, born out of due season as it
were, and so strongly to take possession of her. I certainly never
should have classed her among the true mothers, the producing women;
they should be of a more robust, a more animal type altogether. It is a
most remarkable case, with curious complications. It is the daughter—the
feminine part of her—my wife yearns and pants for, the masculine element
seems to affect her but little; when our son Dacre visits us I have in
vain looked for any symptoms of satisfaction or restfulness.
“I feel so unusually depressed and aged, this afternoon,” he went on,
slowly, laying down his fruitless pen, and gazing with sad eyes out of
the window, “even my ordinary lucidity of brain seems clouding and
thickening. It cannot be that I have already reached the ultimatum, and
that the period of decadence is now upon me—that cannot surely be! Only
just forty-seven,” he cried softly, and his face sank down in his hands
on the study table.
He raised it again, and went over to his cabinet and touched his heaps
of manuscript one by one with loving lingering tenderness, but a little
shakily.
“This but just begun!” he murmured; “this but just wanting the
verification of an experiment or two; these, notes for a new work, the
most comprehensive, the most exact we have yet made—ah! this book would
have been very close up to the truth, nearer to it than anything yet
produced.—She looked with such keen, such very youthful pleasure to the
lighter task of compilation; that youthfulness in her intellectual
pleasures is a very precious gift of my wife.
“Here is a little satirical skit she wrote in a playful moment, how
charming it is, how delicate! Ah, my sweet young wife! More
notes—more—and so few worked out to their final conclusion! Must I then
take these symptoms as those of untimely decay,” he whispered sitting
down again, “I, who looked to long years of honest labour in which I
might have forged on farther than my fellows, and have erected some
fresh finger-posts on the road to everlasting truth? To stop now, when
the world is crying and wailing in the darkness of its ignorance, when
men grasp any scrap of verified knowledge as a drowning man a straw, and
must I be swept down the hill before I have breasted the crest? Must I
sink to oblivion with my work but just begun, and with the heat of
battle strong upon me—and she—my wife, my own, my helpmeet——Do none of
these things strike and touch her, does this overmastering strange
tumult of new emotions shut her heart to the awful beauty of truth?
“It is strange,” he repeated, “strange, and very sad. The swift-running
smooth course of life has been paralyzed for me, I am oppressed with
torturing doubts, and—and—I believe it is not age, it is not the years
which have stunned my powers, I believe it is this new phase of her
life; then comes the consideration: is this a passing phase, or is it
permanent? I cannot face the question!” he cried with a groan, holding
his head in both hands to steady it.
Then he took his hat and stick, and made mechanically for the Rectory.
She always came from that direction, and always sadder than when she
went forth.
But to-day she was different. When she saw her husband she did not keep
to her ordinary soft listless movements, and then when she reached him,
slip her hand into his mechanically from mere reflex action, and strike
out eagerly into an infant anecdote.
She started and flushed, and ran towards him with outstretched hands,
and looked wistfully up in his face, and her mouth trembled as, for the
first time, the great change in the man flashed itself into her, and her
heart stood still and her brain reeled.
“Henry!” she cried, “My Henry, you are tired!”
He stooped wonderingly closer to her. “Dearest, no!”
She gazed with sickening dread up into his face.
“Ah, yes, you are tired and sad. Mr. Fellowes has been telling me so
much, making things clear, and—and—yes, you are older, and I never saw
it until this instant.”
“My love, I am well!” he said, caressing her softly.
“It is I who have done this, Henry”—she silenced his protest with a soft
imperious motion—“they saw it weeks ago; I am a bad wife now, as I have
been a bad mother—ah, that is very sad!”
She laid her head down on their clasped hands and with a little shudder
broke into soft sobbing.
“You are a most true, most noble wife,” he whispered, “my helpmeet in
all things!”
“I have gone away and neglected you, and you have grown older.”
“Come home, my best beloved, come home and rest.”
“If I only could,” she said wistfully, “but dear, I am restless, I
cannot stay still.
“After Gwen went away,” she continued softly, with bent head, as they
paced slowly up the drive, “my heart seemed to fill with restless
growth, new thoughts and feelings were for ever astir in me, I could not
rest; old feelings that should have had their budding and birth long ago
only then awoke, and beset me with sweet pain.”
She stopped and leaned up against him. “I have never been able to tell
you all this before, except indirectly. Ah, Henry, such strange new
thoughts torture and soothe me, they war with one another continually
and there is not one drop of sweetness that has not two drops of
bitterness to temper it withal.
“Let’s walk on, dearest, you are cold.—I have such strange yearnings,
Henry, for baby touches and baby kisses, I, who have never felt them for
my own, have to seek them among babies not of my flesh and blood. I have
to find the pale ghosts of them amongst my lost children’s little
clothes.”
“My love, not lost.”
“Yes, Henry, lost, more than if the grave had closed over them; those
forfeited things do not return. I have a mother’s heart now when I no
longer need it,” she said, with a wan smile, “and I know—ah, I know so
many things, such pitiful things. The other day a tiny baby grasped at
my breast and tried to nestle his head there—to suck my breast, Henry—it
was worse than death, for I knew I had lost the best sweetness of life.”
“My love, my love, those things are not lost,” cried her husband, and
then with sudden and surprising astuteness, he added, “there will be
Gwen’s children.”
She clutched his hand in a sudden tremor of excitement.
“Ah, and then—_then_, too, Gwen might understand—now—” she coughed
softly and broke off.
“But, Henry, I have you, we will go together as we used to do; perhaps
work, regular work, may make me feel better.”
“My love,” he cried eagerly, “I am certain it is just the thing you
want, the very thing.”
“Perhaps,” she said sadly, “perhaps it is.”