Silas was with Lady Malleson, more than usually morose. She lay upon the
sofa, while he prowled up and down the room.
“Dene, you scarcely speak to me to-day?”
(“She cringes,” he thought with pride.)
“My sister-in-law’s in love,” he replied tersely.
“With whom has she fallen in love?” asked Lady Malleson, thinking how
strange it was that she should be thus intimately conversant with a
group of work-people down in the village.
“With Morgan,—the young zany.”
“Why, you always seemed so fond of him! your one human frailty,” she
bantered. But he rounded on her with unwarrantable sharpness. “I think
your ladyship is mistaken: I never remember saying I was fond of Morgan.
They’re neither of them any more alive than a turtle-dove sunning itself
in a wicker cage.”
“You strange creature—have you _no_ natural affections?” she said, with
indolent curiosity. “None for that young man, who really devotes himself
to you? none for your little harmless sister-in-law?”
“I’m nothing to them—only a blind man to whom they’re kind out of their
charity.”
“I don’t believe, Silas, that you are so bleak as you make out.”
“My own solitude, my lady, is my own choosing.”
“Why shouldn’t you accept what comfort those two young things could give
you?”
“It’s weak,” he burst out, “why not stand alone? why depend on another?
Why shouldn’t the strength of one suffice? Why all this need to double
it? Love’s wholly a question of weakness; the weaker you are, the more
desperately you love. A prop.... Love’s the first tie for an independent
man to rid himself of. It’s a weakness that grows too easily out of all
proportion. I want my mind for other things, not for anything so trite.
So well charted. So ... so recurrent.”
“Another theory, Silas? Be careful,” she lazily teased him; “what we
most abuse, you know, is often what we most fear.”
“I shall break them,” he growled.
“What! your sister-in-law? that frail-looking little thing?”
“She, and ... her lover.”
“Silas, you scare me sometimes, you speak so savagely.”
“Scare you, my lady? even you?”
“Why ‘even me’?”
“You’ve explored me,” he said grudgingly; “you know me so well.”
“Do I? everything about you?”
“Not quite,” he said, in a tone of profound gloom.
“Do you know yourself, I wonder?”
“To the depths,” he replied.
“Do you enjoy having such complete self-knowledge?”
“It’s lonely,” he said, his face drawn.
“Lonely, but you have _me_ now to talk to.”
“Oh, your ladyship is very kind and gracious,” he said, with the
deferential manner he sometimes abruptly assumed, and through which she
always uncomfortably suspected the sarcasm; “I am very grateful to your
ladyship. But your ladyship....” and thus far he preserved his
deference, but abandoned it now to exclaim as though tormented, “You’re
a whetstone to my disquiet; you taunt me, you keep all peace from me.”
“I never knew you wanted peace.”
He was tired and dispirited that day, and had been dwelling upon his
blindness; he craved for peace, for some one to give him peace!—and she
knew it. But she must whip and provoke him back to the strain of his old
attitude. She did not know what urged her to say as she did, in her most
sneering tone, “I never knew you wanted peace.”
“Nor I do,” he snarled; “I wouldn’t have it as a gift.”