II

It was nearly two years since he had first seen his name written in

that hand, a very short while after he had made acquaintance with the

writer.

She had stirred his curiosity from the moment he met her; partly by

something tragic in her beauty, which was indubitable; partly by some

quality which he found repellent even in her attraction. She bore a

well known name, but her husband's estates were encumbered; every place

he had was let, and they entertained but little. Terence had known the

latter slightly for some years, and disliked him extremely. He was a

man with a predilection for any sport in which something suffered,

provided it could be followed in comfort; and he openly lamented having

married for love--as he termed it--instead of putting up his peerage to

the bidding of the States.

Terence had pitied any one who might have to do with him, and was thus

already at a sympathetic angle on meeting his wife.

She surprised him by her detachment from the world in which she lived.

She viewed it with vague eyes, knowing of its happenings only from what

was told her, and divining neither their probability nor their

consequence.

Nothing, dropped into her mind, seemed to fructify: it lay there like

seed upon a rock. To Terence, whose chief resource was his ignorance,

such detachment appeared incredible.

He thought her beauty of itself would have proved a sufficient link

with life, or with at least the deadlier forms of it which wear the

name in London. A woman with her eyes was generally enabled to foresee

some of the surprises in the Book of Judgment. Men looked to that.

But it was clear to Terence that she foresaw nothing. If corruption

had approached her, it had failed to get not a hearing only, but a

seeing. Whatever place there might be for it in her heart, there was

plainly none in her intelligence: she did not even know it by sight.

Terence guessed that from the men she knew, and by the way she knew

them. She had evidently no instructive sense of a bad lot. A bad

woman had that, and often added hatred to it; a good woman had it, and

added pity. She had it not at all.

He found consequently no compliment in the gracious way she had

received him, and no seduction in the enquiring sadness of her eyes.

Since the meeting was at Ascot, and she was exquisitely dressed, he

tried all the frivolous topics he thought might interest her; then some

of the serious ones which interested him. She seemed about equally

bored with either, and he was surprised when she asked on parting, with

a curious gravity of request, if he would come and see her.

He saw her twice in town. She had named her day, but he had forgotten

it and gone on another. So she wrote, finding his card, to arrange a

meeting, and, after it, offered him another afternoon. Terence was on

each occasion her only visitor, and surmised that he was not so by

chance.

Yet he found it difficult to account for the privilege.

They seemed to have little in common, not even the tongue in which they

talked. Both appeared to be translating their thoughts before speaking

them.

Terence felt stupidly ineffective, and wondered in what straits of

tedium she might be living on receiving, a day or two later, an

invitation to spend a week end at Wallingford, where her husband had

taken a summer house.

He hesitated; (to be desired despite such a show of dulness seemed

almost pathetic); accepted, hoping that work would intervene; but in

the end, went.

He told himself that it would be outdoor weather, a house party, and he

should see little of his hostess.

It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing,

and he saw little but his hostess.

They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into

the warm nights upon the lawn.

He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways.

Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him

of her groping soul.

He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with

reality as were her beliefs. Her idealism would have discredited a

schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some

merit in being deceived.

Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him.

"But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once.

"That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically:

"but why aren't they?"

He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying,

not in what men weren't, but in what they were.

He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success.

If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted

vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them.

But it was clear that she had higher hopes of humanity than she

confessed, and it would have been clear to any one but Terence that

those hopes were becoming centred on himself.

What men said of him had roused her incredulous admiration, and he

seemed to dislike women as much as he respected them. His honesty, his

deference, and his grave good looks attracted her from the first; his

sympathy and discernment riveted the attraction. He reproved her

optimism in vain; for was he not its embodiment?

Terence, unconscious of being anything but a somewhat poor companion,

discussed the sentiments she suggested, growing ever more astounded by

her severance from realities, and more touched by her unhappy days.

Of her husband's life he knew more than she had surmised, but she had

surmised enough to make wifehood an indignity. His unfaithfulness, as

a stye by which she had to live, soured for her every odour in the

world. She had not the vigour to ignore it, nor the courage to escape.

She had dreamed of marriage as a royal feast; she woke to find herself

among the swine.

The discovery would have hardened some women into defiance; some would

have sheltered with it their own intrigues; but the shock cowed in her

all further curiosity in existence. If life were really like the bit

she had tasted, she preferred to starve. The other men she met seemed

as horrible as her husband; they had the same speech, the same jests,

the same dissipations.

She shrank more and more into herself; even women revolted her by their

tolerance of men's presumptions.

Then Terence came. Like a plant grown in darkness, her anaemic

delicacy of thought responded with an unhealthy exuberance to the first

ray of sunlight. She listened to his silences and found them

refreshing; then she drew him into speech.

He spoke of much that she could not understand, but his obscurities

were an intoxication, and not, as those of other men, a dread. She

felt there was something wide and fine behind his words; a coherence,

an integrity; she was vaguely pleased to feel it there, though its

quality did not interest her at all. What did was her own expansion in

the atmosphere of sympathetic confidence it had created.

Her expansiveness was, at times, distasteful to him. The secrets of a

woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her

boudoir guarded. To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack

the finer reticence of life. A man's sight, if he could see at all,

was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed

him he might be suffered to enjoy. To label the false wherever one

found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools.

Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual.

He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men.

"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. "Do you suppose I do?"

He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay,

and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear. But

compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her

indiscretions than of her loneliness.

She asked him to spend a week at Wallingford when the season was over.

"I have very few friends," she said; "and no one but you has ever

helped me to understand."

He wondered to what he had helped her, and whether he would recognize

it if she told him; but he did not wonder if he might remit the

helping; the disadvantage in the gift of oneself being that the giving

is never at an end.

So he came to Wallingford again in September, when the moonlight fell

nightly on white veils of mist, and the world took on a golden ripeness

in the mellow silent days.

Some letters, in the meanwhile, had passed between them; letters which

might have made Terence uneasy had he known what they meant. Instead,

he answered them, and consigned their intentions to the chaos of

feminine incomprehensibility. Some of that chaos took a shape during

his second stay at Wallingford sufficiently definite and disconcerting.

It was probably only what had been put, to no purpose, in her letters,

but it had another significance when spoken with rather uncomfortable

pauses and lit with the intensity of a woman's very lovely eyes.

To mistake its meaning was impossible; to ignore it seemed to Terence a

contemptible discretion. He could not withdraw his sympathy because it

had been so dangerously misapplied, but he tried, with fraternal

frankness, to abstract from it the odour of personality with which she

had scented it.

He hoped to animate her with the big issues of life, but to a woman

there is often no issue bigger than a man's devotion.

As they hung in the skiff beneath the birches of the mill-pond one

breathless afternoon, she let him realize the fruitlessness of his

intentions.

The sun that filled the drowsy air fell in dazzling patches on her

white frock; there was not a sound save the dull drone of the weir, and

deep in the shade a kingfisher sat motionless above the water, like a

blue flame upon the bough.

She had been silent for some while after his last remark, looking away

from him towards the river; then, to Terence's dismay, she leant

forward, hiding her face in her hands, and began to sob.

He was paralyzed by his ignorance of any cause for tears, perplexed

with self-reproaches, helplessness, and pity. It seemed equally absurd

to ask why she was crying, or to offer comfort until he knew. He sat

wretchedly mute for some moments, and at last begged her to let him

hear what ailed her.

She did not answer till he had repeated the request, and then faltered

between her sobs: "Oh, you wouldn't understand, you couldn't

understand: I've got no one to care for me, no one, no one!"

He could think of no response to that which did not sound inane. He

had not heard a woman cry since his sisters left the schoolroom, and no

other form of consolation occurred to him than the brotherly caresses

which had served him then.

Yet not till his ineptitude and apparent apathy became intolerable did

he lean forward from the thwart and rest his hand upon her knee.

With the channel of that touch between them, the soothing trifles

became easy which had been impossible of speech before.

Uncertain of what she might find consoling, he spoke as to a child whom

he had found in tears; a murmur merely of the gentleness and pity which

were in his heart.

She paid, for some time, no heed to him, but her sobs relaxed, and

presently, though with her face still hidden, she laid a wet hand on

his.

"Do you really mean it?" she faltered searchingly.

"Of course I mean it," he replied, wondering what his meaning was

supposed to be, but resolute to stand to this poor creature for any

kindness and fortitude there might be in the world.

"You're very, very good," she said; but her eyes had in them, even to

his discernment, an appreciation of another sort of worth.

That was at the beginning of the afternoon; yet, though he sculled her

up stream later, to taste, melting in the heated air, the moist

coolness under Bensington weir, and higher, afterwards, to the "Swan"

for tea, she made no reference to that understanding which was by him

so little understood.

But she was more than usually silent, and there was a dream-haze across

the purple depths of her eyes, which only parted when she looked at

him. Then the wonderful colour seemed to flood them, and she smiled

faintly in the furthest crevice of her lips, as though they had been

touched by the tips of some feathery pleasure.

But to Terence that sweetness of a shared secret in her smile was

immensely discomposing.

That, he recognized, when he came to look back, was the moment of

warning.

At that he had his fears, never stirred before; at that he should have

taken flight.

Flight was the way of men; of men timorous and importuned; perhaps,

often, the only way. But he had not the courage for such a show of

fear; even flight seemed to affront a woman's confidence.

A sheaf of letters at breakfast offered him that bridge of fabulous

affairs over which so many a man of wider experience would have

escaped. But he gave it never a thought. Where was fraternity in the

world if one had to flee from the first woman who dared to claim it?

He would as soon have fled from an infectious fever!

There were closer points in the comparison than he supposed--though the

world does not equally admire the man who imperils the safety of his

life and him who risks the peace of it--but perception of them would

not have changed his mind.

He stayed because he could not go.

The morning of the day that followed was spent by every one on the

shady lawn. It was too hot for even the theory of movement, and plans

were postponed until the afternoon. Terence had meant to sketch a

piece of stonework at Ewelme Church, but found himself engaged by his

hostess to drive her to Nuneham.

Whether she intended to go there or not, she pleaded the heat as an

excuse for deferring the start till it became too late to make one.

They had tea in the little Doric shrine that overlooked the river, and

she took him afterwards up to the wood that rose behind the house.

Seated on a stile within it, against which he leaned, she told him the

dream with which her eyes had been clouded the day before; told it with

a hesitating persuasiveness which made dissent seem brutal; the dream

of an ethereal alliance to which the man should bring a life, and the

woman a use for it.

Terence listened stupefied as the naïve unsteady voice made out its

astounding offer. She had gathered somehow his desire for such a

thing; the magnifying power of her vanity must have revealed it in all

he did and said. And her abysmal lack of humour concealed its

grotesque disparities. He, so it seemed, was to contribute his

existence, and she, a smile.

But if its seriousness was an absurdity, its absurdities were serious.

Terence heard them with grave lips; heard in them, too, the diffident

whispers of his pity swollen by her fancy to a blare of passion.

It was serious enough as she sounded it, and sad enough too.

Disillusionment, even the gentlest, seemed out of the question.

How, to a woman who rides, triumphing in his devotion, through the

barriers of her decorum, is a man to say, "I do not love you"?

There was nothing less that could be said: nothing less, at least, that

was not a lie: for less, to her ears, would have said nothing. Love

alone was her warrant, her title; and she had thrust his love into her

helm.

There could be no other disillusionment but to take that from her, and

to take it from her was to drag her to the dust.

So Terence listened. The bronze stems of the hazel saplings shone

before him like prison bars, but he nodded now and then as she spoke

her faith, and gazed at the golden air that burned beyond them in the

west.

"I've never trusted any man enough," she ended, "to tell him all that

I've told you; but you've made me believe in you; I don't know how. I

suppose it really is because you're good and true. But are you quite,

quite sure I mean so much to you, and that caring for me won't spoil

your life?"

"One never knows what may spoil one's life," said Terence gravely "and

seldom what may spoil another's; but I think it's true that you may

trust me, and I'll try to be to you the friend that you desire."

He gave her his hand with boyish candour; and she held it, saying

nothing, and not looking into his face.

When she released it, presently, she slid from the stile; and, turning,

faced the sunset which had gilded his hair.

She was standing close to and partly in front of him, and so watched

with him for a while, in silence, the setting splendours of the day.

Then, with a little sigh, she leaned back against his shoulder. Thus

they stood some moments longer without a word; Terence braced to bear

her weight; braced mentally to meet whatever might be coming, conscious

of the beat against him of her quickened breath.

Then, with her dark head tilted back, she turned her face slowly

towards him till it almost touched his lips.

For an instant he hated her, fiercely, impotently. The next, he put

his hand gently upon her shoulder and kissed her cheek.