As she left him that night she wondered if her conscience troubled her.
She was certainly encouraging Osprey. Standing in her own sitting room,
she recalled vividly how, when he took her hand in good-night, she had
felt the fierce stream that poured through him, and her very silence
had given him permission to unburden himself. She was thankful for his
restraint. Moreover her silence had been the result of pleasure, and
not mere lack of words. How little she had known of anything quite so
contained and yet so overpowering in Miles.... She could respond to
that, she knew: she had only to yield a little and she could respond.
The thought of Osprey in this personal sense, of some one beside her
husband in a personal sense, caused her to realize how much importance
she had gone on attaching to Miles. How ridiculous and womanly of her!
she reflected. Miles had taken his departure, and yet she had not until
now seemed quite to believe in it. Perhaps even yet she did not believe
in it. She had told Osprey that it was over; she kept repeating to
herself that it was over. Everything pointed to it, Harlindew’s own
unequivocal statement and her angry resentment of the manner of his
desertion, particularly his letter. But in her real consciousness she
had continued to expect his return ... during the whole of her talk
with Osprey, Miles had been present as a reality--a definite bar--in
her thought.
But now a new thing happened to her. She suddenly faced her whole life
spread out before her as on a single canvas, or rather as a continuing
panorama--and not just one small segment of it. Miles had not been her
whole life; he had been but a part. He might have continued to be that
part indefinitely and still not become her whole life. She had been
magnifying him until she had lost sight of the rest, all that other
strange web of adventure and catastrophe which had included her birth,
her childhood, her love for Hal, her tragic discovery, her runaway, her
struggle to help herself.... That would go on, no matter what happened,
whether Miles returned or stayed away, and it would go on according to
her own terms.
The notion of herself as an entity, surviving, growing, separate and
alone, filled her for the first time with a curious excitement. It
released so many fresh and irresistible currents within her. She began
to think more consciously of other men, of Potter Osprey in particular.
She rose and went out into the orchard. The painter had had constructed
a table and seats for them earlier in the summer, and she sat down in
one of the gaily painted stationary benches which gave the children so
much pleasure. They recalled to her his scores of other attentions; the
flowers and delicacies of one sort or another which he had sent down
regularly by Nana, his numerous subterfuges to help her with money, the
little comforts that he had added to the house, his presents to young
Miles and Joanna. These things, of which her husband--most younger men
indeed--would never have thought, were dear to her. And once he had
hinted, in a joking manner, of “leaving her the cottage” in his will.
“You can’t tell--I may be knocked off some day,” he had said. “I’ve
become such an absentminded countryman that I’m always a little
surprised to find myself alive after crossing a New York street.”
She had turned such overtures off with pleasantries, which they
deserved, and yet she had entertained them; they had wooed her and
become a part of her dilatory dreaming. As she sat there in the
caressingly cool night she felt this keenly; she felt a sense of
permanency and peace under the protecting boughs of the orchard. She
could not remember such a feeling since long ago at Thornhill.
She rose reluctantly and went into the house. Unquestionably she
had reached a point where she could regard Osprey’s passion without
disturbance; and yet she longed for a temporary refuge from it,
knowing that at any moment they might be brought together by some turn
of the conversation such as that to-night and his reserve would give
way. She wanted to escape that contingency for a long time, to think
out her relationship to the future. But she had no reasonable means
or excuse to flee. Her plans had not been made for the winter, and
according to their informal agreement she was to remain in the cottage
another month.
Robert Blaydon’s visit furnished a safe diversion for three days. She
was able to keep him that long through the insistent hospitality of
Osprey, and the fact that the two took a strong liking to each other.
They sat up late together in the studio one night over a fine brand of
Scotch whisky which Blaydon had brought with him, and the younger man
submitted amiably to a questioning about Moira which disclosed little
more than that he had been her boyhood companion at one time, and her
circumstances had once been opulent. He told Osprey, however, that he
had heard his own name often.
“Yes?” inquired his host. “Well, perhaps that’s natural, as you say we
have been fellow townsmen.”
“Fact is,” replied Blaydon, “I’ve an aunt out there who has become
vastly interested in painters, in her old age, and I’ve heard her
speak of you. A Mrs. Seymour.”
“Don’t ask me to remember names back home,” laughed Osprey. “You would
think me a pretty determined exile if I told you how long it had been
since I was there.”
“In any case, she’ll be much excited when I tell her that I have met
you,” said the other, reflecting on the humour and difficulty of his
situation, in which discretion constrained him with Osprey from telling
Moira’s connection to his aunt, and with his aunt from telling Moira’s
connection with Osprey.
“Mysteries are a damned nuisance among such likeable people,” he
concluded to himself. “I hope this one gets cleared up some day.” And
his conviction was that it would.