That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly
at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in
implication, in understanding.
Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had
intended, tried to put the added time to profit.
He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her
expectations.
Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire
with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what
might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive.
She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in
accepting it. Everything in that land was so new to her that no one
thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of
peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally
and perturbingly improbable, and supreme.
Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of
conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which
neither of them should go.
He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to
promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her
reach.
The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute
ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her,
seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford.
But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound
was his mistake. She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might
as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind.
She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its
splendid illumination of her life.
Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to
Terence.
Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as
that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis.
And he had wrought it. He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life
afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to
touch which roughly was to destroy her.
That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of. He must accept what
he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time
to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth.
But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the
increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed.
Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be
flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid,
and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment
which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from
possessing.
"Swear," she had written, not once, nor twice; "swear that you love no
other woman; that you have never loved another woman; that I fill all
your thoughts!"
Those were easy oaths, and true; but they did not content her. It was
not enough that no other woman had a lien upon his past: his whole
existence must be proscribed for her.
"Tell me," she prayed, "that I shall be everything to you always! It
kills me to think that any love could move you after mine. I cannot
have renounced my pride, my honour, my self-respect, for less than
that."
He could but smile unmirthfully at her renunciations. His were
privileges, it seemed, to her thinking, that any man might sigh for;
though apparently they were to include a monastic seclusion from the
world of sense, a virginity devoted, not to her passion--and for
passion a man might be content to live or die--but to her sentimental
fancies.
"Say," she pleaded, unsatisfied by his replies, which to such
extortionate demands could be but vague, "say that I alone of all the
women in the world can ever satisfy all your longings; that it would
seem a degrading sacrilege to let any other woman come after me even in
your thoughts! Tell me, even though I die, that my memory must keep
you true."
He gazed at that for a day to get his breath, but the delay was all too
long for hers.
"Write, write," she panted, on the morrow; "I cannot live unless I hear
from you. Have you no feeling for a woman's dignity that you can give
me over in this way to its scorn? I fling everything that I possess
before you, and you find it not even worth acknowledgment."
What could he say? How could he answer her? Her blindness was
sublime, detestable, ridiculous, as you were pleased to view it; but to
blindness one could never refuse a hand.
Distressed by a necessity of which he had been the unwitting cause,
Terence extended his. But his ignorance mitigated his foreboding; he
still trusted to time.
Time, however, brought him but little comfort. If her letters became
saner, it was only since he had thrown her insanity a sop. When they
met a month later his difficulties were increased.
At first she had entreated him to win her respect by a display of
repression.
He was to be as other men were not, to keep her staunch by an
undreamed-of virtue. The lover's heart must animate to her perception
only the unimpeachable kindness of the friend.
She had her wish, but had it, perhaps, in a perfection for which she
was not prepared.
She seemed determined to leave no doubts as to his fortitude. She hung
upon him so literally that he had to exert not moral fibre only to
support her.
She drooped like a wreath about his shoulders, while he gazed, grim and
ashamed, upon her hair.
But she drew no consolation from his strength. It was not strength,
she told him, but indifference; she had asked for a sentry, and he had
given her a statue.
She tried to soften the statue by every feminine artifice, even, at
last, by kissing its irresponsive face.
He, invincibly simple, smiled at the wiles he thought were used to try
him; and stiffened himself into the pose he had been convinced was her
desire.
If it ever had been, she outlived it before long. Its end was
advertised by an hysterical outbreak, which Terence never could recall
without a shudder.
They were both, at the time, in town, where they met two or three times
a week, and he had called to bring her some tickets.
She was sitting on a lounge in a remote corner of the room, and gave
him her hand with blank indifference.
Unequal always to resolve her moods, he sustained a monologue from the
fireplace on the trifles of the hour, until her persistent silence
compelled him to ask its cause.
She replied listlessly, after some pressing, that it must be of no
importance since he could ignore it.
She had merely been deceived in him, that was all: a common thing with
a woman. He had proved himself to be just a man, like every other; and
not the man of men she had supposed him.
It had amused him, no doubt, to win her love; now, it seemed, he was
tired of it.
He had spoilt her life, he had destroyed her faith; but such things, of
course, weren't worth mentioning: the great matter was, naturally, that
a man should not be bored.
Now, she supposed, they might as well end the farce between them, so
that he could amuse himself elsewhere. All she had lived for was over
for ever, and she did not care what became of her.
She poured out the indictment to his bewildered ears in the level tones
of utter apathy; but when it was done she flung herself violently
across the head of the lounge in a tempest of passionate tears.
Terence, despairing of any further fitness or sanity in the affair,
resigned himself to the situation with a sigh, and knelt beside her for
an hour, until she appeared to draw from his caresses a renewed
confidence in life.
He left her, sufficiently depressed himself, and expecting anything but
a letter which reached him on the morrow by the earliest post.
It must have been written very shortly after his departure, which she
had done her utmost to delay, yet it proclaimed her as too shamed by
what had happened ever to meet him again, unless he felt himself strong
enough to prevent such scenes in the future.
Feeling strong enough for nothing, he left her letter unanswered for a
day, and received, on the next, eight pages of aggrieved reproaches for
having forsaken her in the hour of her greatest need.
That was but the prelude to many meetings of as strange a kind. He
never knew in what mood he should find her, nor in which she might wish
to find him.
He believed her revulsions of propriety to be sincere, but felt she had
no business with so many, especially since he offered her every
assistance to avoid the need of them. He respected her for the first,
pitied her for the second, endured the third in silence, and then began
to hate them.
He did not expect a woman to know her own mind, but he thought her
ignorance might be more agreeable.
So passed what was for Terence a very melancholy winter. He bore it
with a resignation nerved by the near prospect of escape to a berth in
Paris, which had been as good as promised him when it became vacant.
Meanwhile Downing Street saw more of him than usual, and he took every
opportunity of immersing himself still deeper in his work.
The post he had been expecting became available in March, and, too
modest to urge his claim or to remind his patron, he was mortified to
find one morning that it had been filled by another.
He accepted his ill-fortune silently, and only learnt a month later to
whom he owed it.
He was enlightened then by accident, the peer, in whose gift the
appointment practically lay, happening to express a regret that Terence
had not seen his way to accept it.
"To accept it!" he replied, laughing. "It wasn't offered me."
"It wasn't offered you," said the other slowly, "because a certain
friend of yours told me you had determined definitely, for the present,
not to leave England."
Terence met the speaker's searching glance, which smouldered with
admonition.
"I see," he smiled. "My own fault entirely."
He understood to whom the "certain friend" referred, as well as the
warning against feminine influence in his chief's eye; and, for a
moment of sick disappointment, he burned to confront the woman who had
betrayed him with his knowledge of her perfidy, to fling this piece of
unimagined baseness in her face, and so be rid of her.
But he realized ruefully within an hour that no such release was
possible, at least for him. She had but done this thing to keep him
near her.
She would plead that to stoop to such an act of treachery to the one
who was dearest to her only proved how ungovernable was her love.
There would be another horrible scene. She would threaten again to
kill herself. And in the end he would succumb. Each sacrifice he had
made for her only committed him to a fresh one. She had cultivated
weakness in order to revel in his strength; he had pauperized her with
his soul. Had she been a woman of rages, of pride, of resentments, it
would have proved another matter; but how was it possible to hurt a
thing that clung about one's neck.
So he said no more of his discomfiture, bitter as it was to his
ambition as well as to his hopes of freedom. Her querulous exactions
had already alienated his sympathies, so that it was no harder now to
be kind to her than it had been before.
And he was glad to know definitely what he had to fear from her, even
though the definition was so inclusive. He determined to loosen,
slowly and gently, those tendrils of sentiment by which she clung to
him, which were so enfeebling her self-support.
But he saw that he had little to hope for save from time and the
natural infidelity of her sex.