BOOK II

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and the Project

Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/)

THE HELPMATE

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "Superseded," "Audrey Craven," Etc.

New York

Henry Holt and Company

1907

The Quinn & Boden Co. Press

Rahway, N.J.

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

It was four o'clock in the morning. Mrs. Walter Majendie still lay on

the extreme edge of the bed, with her face turned to the dim line of sea

discernible through the open window of the hotel bedroom.

Since midnight, when she had gone to bed, she had lain in that

uncomfortable position, motionless, irremediably awake. Mrs. Walter

Majendie was thinking.

At first the night had gone by her unperceived, black and timeless. Now

she could measure time by the dull progress of the dawn among the objects

in the room. A slow, unhappy thing, born between featureless grey cloud

and sea, it had travelled from the window, shimmered in the watery square

of the looking-glass, and was feeling for the chair where her husband had

laid his clothes down last night. He had thought she was asleep, and had

gone through his undressing noiselessly, with movements of angelic and

elaborate gentleness that well-nigh disarmed her thought. He was sleeping

now. She tried not to hear the sound of his placid breathing. Only the

other night, their wedding night, she had lain awake at this hour and

heard it, and had turned her face towards him where he lay in the divine

unconsciousness of sleep. The childlike, huddled posture of the sleeper

had then stirred her heart to an unimaginable tenderness.

Now she had got to think, to adjust a new and devastating idea to a

beloved and divine belief.

Somewhere in the quiet town a church clock clanged to the dawn, and the

sleeper stretched himself. The five hours' torture of her thinking wrung

a low sob from the woman at his side.

He woke. His hand searched for her hand. At his touch she drew it away,

and moved from under her cramped shoulder the thick, warm braid of her

hair. It tossed a gleam of pale gold to the risen light. She felt his

drowsy, affectionate fingers pressing and smoothing the springy bosses of

the braid.

The caress kindled her dull thoughts to a point of flame. She sat up and

twisted the offending braid into a rigid coil.

"Walter," she said, "_who_ is Lady Cayley?"

She noticed that the name waked him.

"Does it matter now? Can't you forget her?"

"Forget her? I know nothing about her. I want to know."

"Haven't you been told everything that was necessary?"

"I've been told nothing. It was what I heard."

There was a terrible stillness about him. Only his breath came and went

unsteadily, shaken by the beating of his heart.

She quieted her own heart to listen to it; as if she could gather from

such involuntary motions the thing she had to know.

"I know," she said, "I oughtn't to have heard it. And I can't believe

it,--I don't, really."

"Poor child! What is it that you don't believe?"

His calm, assured tones had the force of a denial.

"Walter--if you'd only say it isn't true--"

"What Edith told you?"

"Edith? Your sister? No; about that woman--that you--that she--"

"Why are you bringing all that up again, at this unearthly hour?"

"Then," she said coldly, "it _is_ true."

His silence lay between them like a sword.

She had rehearsed this scene many times in the five hours; but she had

not prepared herself for this. Her dread had been held captive by her

belief, her triumphant anticipation of Majendie's denial.

Presently he spoke; and his voice was strange to her as the voice of

another man.

"Anne," he said, "didn't she tell you? It was before I knew you. And it

was the only time."

"Don't speak to me," she cried with a sudden passion, and lay shuddering.

She rose, slipped from the bed, and went to a chair that stood by the

open window. There she sat, with her back to the bed, and her eyes

staring over the grey parade and out to the eastern sea.

"Anne," said her husband, "what are you doing there?"

Anne made no answer.

"Come back to bed; you'll catch cold."

He waited.

"How long are you going to sit there in that draught?"

She sat on, upright, immovable, in her thin nightgown, raked by the keen

air of the dawn. Majendie raised himself on his elbow. He could just see

her where she glimmered, and her braid of hair, uncoiled, hanging to her

waist. Up till now he had been profoundly unhappy and ashamed, but

something in the unconquerable obstinacy of her attitude appealed to the

devil that lived in him, a devil of untimely and disastrous humour. The

right thing, he felt, was not to appear as angry as he was. He sat up on

his pillow, and began to talk to her with genial informality.

"See here,--I suppose you want an explanation. But don't you think we'd

better wait until we're up? Up and dressed, I mean. I can't talk

seriously before I've had a bath and--and brushed my hair. You see,

you've taken rather an unfair advantage of me by getting out of bed."

(He paused for an answer, and still no answer came.)--"Don't imagine I'm

ignobly lying down all the time, wrapped in a blanket. I'm sitting on my

pillow. I know there's any amount to be said. But how do you suppose I'm

going to say it if I've got to stay here, all curled up like a blessed

Buddha, and you're planted away over there like a monument of all the

Christian virtues? Are you coming back to bed, or are you not?"

She shivered. To her mind his flippancy, appalling in the circumstances,

sufficiently revealed the man he was. The man she had known and married

had never existed. For she had married Walter Majendie believing him to

be good. The belief had been so rooted in her that nothing but his own

words or his own silence could have cast it out. She had loved Walter

Majendie; but it was another man who called to her, and she would not

listen to him. She felt that she could never go back to that man, never

sit in the same room, or live in the same house with him again. She would

have to make up her mind what she would do, eventually. Meanwhile, to get

away from him, to sit there in the cold, inflexible, insensitive, to

obtain a sort of spiritual divorce from him, while she martyrised her

body which was wedded to him, that was the young, despotic instinct she

obeyed.

"If you won't come," he said, "I suppose it only remains for me to go."

He got up, took Anne's cloak from the door where it hung, and put it

tenderly about her shoulders.

"Whatever happens or unhappens," he said, "we must be dressed."

He found her slippers, and thrust them on her passive feet. She lay back

and closed her eyes. From the movements that she heard, she gathered that

Walter was getting into his clothes. Once, as he struggled with an

insufficiently subservient shirt, he laughed, from mere miserable

nervousness. Anne, not recognising the utterance of his helpless

humanity, put that laugh down to the account of the devil that had

insulted her. Her heart grew harder.

"I am clothed, and in my right mind," said Majendie, standing before her

with his hand on the window sill.

She looked up at him, at the face she knew, the face that (oddly, it

seemed to her) had not changed to suit her new conception of him, that

maintained its protest. She had loved everything about him, from the

dark, curling hair of his head to his well-finished feet; she had loved

his slender, virile body, and the clean red and brown of his face, the

strong jaw and the mouth that, hidden under the short moustache, she

divined only to be no less strong. More than these things she had loved

his eyes, the dark, bright dwelling-places of the "goodness" she had

loved best of all in him. Used to smiling as they looked at her, they

smiled even now.

"If you'll take my advice," he said, "you'll go back to your warm bed.

You shall have the whole place to yourself."

And with that he left her.

She rose, went to the bed, arranged the turned-back blanket so as to hide

the place where he had lain, and slid on to her knees, supporting herself

by the bedside.

Never before had Anne hurled herself into the heavenly places in

turbulence and disarray. It had been her wont to come, punctual to some

holy, foreappointed hour, with firm hands folded, with a back that, even

in bowing, preserved its pride; with meek eyes, close-lidded; with

breathing hushed for the calm passage of her prayer; herself marshalling

the procession of her dedicated thoughts, virgins all, veiled even before

their God.

Now she precipitated herself with clutching hands thrown out before her;

with hot eyes that drank the tears of their own passion; with the shamed

back and panting mouth of a Magdalen; with memories that scattered the

veiled procession of the Prayers. They fled before her, the Prayers, in a

gleaming tumult, a rout of heavenly wings that obscured her heaven. When

they had vanished a sudden vagueness came upon her.

And then it seemed that the storm that had gone over her had rolled her

mind out before her, like a sheet of white-hot iron. There was a record

on it, newly traced, of things that passion makes indiscernible under its

consuming and aspiring flame. Now, at the falling of the flame, the faint

characters flashed into sight upon the blank, running in waves, as when

hot iron changes from white to sullen red. Anne felt that her union with

Majendie had made her one with that other woman, that she shared her

memory and her shame. For Majendie's sake she loathed her womanhood that

was yesterday as sacred to her as her soul. Through him she had conceived

a thing hitherto unknown to her, a passionate consciousness and hatred of

her body. She hated the hands that had held him, the feet that had gone

with him, the lips that had touched him, the eyes that had looked at him

to love him. Him she detested, not so much on his own account, as because

he had made her detestable to herself.

Her eyes wandered round the room. Its alien aspect was becoming

transformed for her, like a scene on a tragic stage. The light had

established itself in the windows and pier-glasses. The wall-paper was

flushing in its own pink dawn. And the roses bloomed again on the grey

ground of the bed-curtains. These things had become familiar, even dear,

through their three days' association with her happy bridals. Now the

room and everything in it seemed to have been created for all time to be

the accomplices and ministers of her degradation. They were well

acquainted with her and it; they held foreknowledge of her, as the

pier-glass held her dishonoured and dishevelled image.

She thought of her dead father's house, the ivy-coated Deanery in the

south, and of the small white bedroom, a girl's bedroom that had once

known her and would never know her again. She thought of her father and

mother, and was glad that they were dead. Once she wondered why their

death had been God's will. Now she saw very clearly why. But why she

herself should have been sent upon this road, of all roads of suffering,

was more than Anne could see.

She, whose nature revolted against the despotically human, had schooled

herself into submission to the divine. Her sense of being supremely

guided and protected had, before now, enabled her to act with decision

in turbulent and uncertain situations of another sort. Where other people

writhed or vacillated, Anne had held on her course, uplifted,

unimpassioned, and resigned. Now she was driven hither and thither,

she sank to the very dust and turned in it, she saw no way before her,

neither her own way nor God's way.

Widowhood would not have left her so abject and so helpless. If her

husband's body had lain dead before her there, she could have stood

beside it, and declared herself consoled by the immortal presence of his

spirit. But to attend this deathbed of her belief and of her love, love

that had already given itself over, too weak to struggle against

dissolution, it was as if she had seen some horrible reversal of the

law of death, spirit returning to earth, the incorruptible putting on

corruption.

Not only was her house of life made desolate; it was defiled. Dumb and

ashamed, she abandoned herself like a child to the arms of God, too

agonised to pray.

An hour passed.

Then slowly, as she knelt, the religious instinct regained possession of

her. It was as if her soul had been flung adrift, had gone out with the

ebb of the spiritual sea, and now rocked, poised, waiting for the turn of

the immortal tide.

Her lips parted, almost mechanically, in the utterance of the divine

name. Aware of that first motion of her soul, she gathered herself

together, and concentrated her will upon some familiar prayer for

guidance. For a little while she prayed thus, grasping at old shadowy

forms of petition as they went by her, lifting her sunken mind by main

force from stupefaction; and then, it was as if the urging, steadying

will withdrew, and her soul, at some heavenly signal, moved on alone into

the place of peace.

CHAPTER II

It was broad daylight outside. A man was putting out the lights one by

one along the cold little grey parade. A figure, walking slowly, with

down-bent head, was approaching the hotel from the pier. Anne recognised

it as that of her husband. Both sights reminded her that her life had to

be begun all over again, and to go on.

Another hour passed. Majendie had sent up a waitress with breakfast to

her room. He was always thoughtful for her comfort. It did not occur to

her to wonder what significance there might be in his thus keeping away

from her, or what attitude toward her he would now be inclined to take.

She would not have admitted that he had a right to any attitude at all.

It was for her, as the profoundly injured person, to decide as to the new

disposal of their relations.

She was very clear about her grievance. The facts, that her husband had

been pointed at in the public drawing-room of their hotel; that the

terrible statement she had overheard had been made and received casually;

that he had assumed, no less casually, her knowledge of the thing, all

bore but one interpretation: that Walter Majendie and the scandal he had

figured in were alike notorious. The marvel was that, staying in the town

where he lived and was known, she herself had not heard of it before. A

peculiarly ugly thought visited her. Was it possible that Scarby was the

very place where the scandal had occurred?

She remembered now that, when she had first proposed that watering-place

for their honeymoon, he had objected on the ground that Scarby was full

of people whom he knew. Besides, he had said, she wouldn't like it. But

whether she would like it or not, Anne, who had her bridal dignity to

maintain, considered that in the matter of her honeymoon his wishes

should give way to hers. She was inclined to measure the extent of his

devotion by that test. Scarby, she said, was not full of people who knew

_her_. Anne had been insistent and Majendie passive, as he was in most

unimportant matters, reserving his energies for supremely decisive

moments.

Anne, bearing her belief in Majendie in her innocent breast, failed at

first to connect her husband with the remarkable intimations that passed

between the two newcomers gossiping in the drawing-room before dinner.

They, for their part, had no clue linking the unapproachably strange lady

on the neighbouring sofa with the hero of their tale. The case, they

said, was "infamous." At that point Majendie had put an end to his own

history and his wife's uncertainty by entering the room. Three words and

a look, observed by Anne, had established his identity.

Her mind was steadied by its inalienable possession of the facts. She had

returned through prayer to her normal mood of religious resignation. She

tried to support herself further by a chain of reasoning. If all things

were divinely ordered, this sorrow also was the will of God. It was the

burden she was appointed to take up and bear.

She bathed and dressed herself for the day. She felt so strange

to herself in these familiar processes that, standing before the

looking-glass, she was curious to observe what manner of woman she had

become. The inner upheaval had been so profound that she was surprised

to find so little record of it in her outward seeming.

Anne was a woman whose beauty was a thing of general effect, and the

general effect remained uninjured. Nature had bestowed on her a body

strongly made and superbly fashioned. Having framed her well, she

coloured her but faintly. She had given her eyes of a light thick grey.

Her eyebrows, her lashes, and her hair were of a pale gold that had ashen

undershades in it. They all but matched a skin honey-white with that

even, sombre, untransparent tone that belongs to a temperament at once

bilious and robust. For the rest, Nature had aimed nobly at the

significance of the whole, slurring the details. She had built up the

forehead low and wide, thrown out the eyebones as a shelter for the

slightly prominent eyes; saved the short, straight line of the nose by a

hair's-breadth from a tragic droop. But she had scamped her work in

modelling the close, narrow nostrils. She had merged the lower lip with

the line of the chin, missing the classic indentation. The mouth itself

she had left unfinished. Only a little amber mole, verging on the thin

rose of the upper lip, foreshortened it, and gave to its low arc the

emphasis of a curve, the vivacity of a dimple (Anne's under lip was

straight as the tense string of a bow). When she spoke or smiled Anne's

mole seemed literally to catch up her lip against its will, on purpose to

show the small white teeth below. Majendie loved Anne's mole. It was that

one charming and emphatic fault in her face, he said, that made it human.

But Anne was ashamed of it.

She surveyed her own reflection in the glass sadly, and sadly went

through the practised, mechanical motions of her dressing; smoothing the

back of her irreproachable coat, arranging her delicate laces with a

deftness no indifference could impair. Yesterday she had had delight in

that new garment and in her own appearance. She knew that Majendie

admired her for her distinction and refinement. Now she wondered what he

could have seen in her--after Lady Cayley. At Lady Cayley's personality

she had not permitted herself so much as to guess. Enough that the woman

was notorious--infamous.

There was a knock at the door, the low knock she had come to know, and

Majendie entered in obedience to her faint call.

The hours had changed him, given his bright face a tragic, submissive

look, as of a man whipped and hounded to her feet.

He glanced first at the tray, to see if she had eaten her breakfast.

"There are some things I should like to say to you, with your permission.

But I think we can discuss them better out of doors."

He looked round the disordered room. The associations of the place were

evidently as painful to him as they were to her.

They went out. The parade was deserted at that early hour, and they found

an empty seat at the far end of it.

"I, too," she said, "have things that I should like to say."

He looked at her gravely.

"Will you allow me to say mine first?"

"Certainly; but I warn you, they will make no difference."

"To you, possibly not. They make all the difference to me. I'm not going

to attempt to defend myself. I can see the whole thing from your point of

view. I've been thinking it over. Didn't you say that what you heard you

had not heard from Edith?"

"From Edith? Never!"

"When did you hear it, then?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"From some one in the hotel?"

"Yes."

"From whom? Not that it matters."

"From those women who came yesterday. I didn't know whom they were

talking about. They were talking quite loud. They didn't know who I was."

"You say you didn't know whom they were talking about?"

"Not at first--not till you came in. Then I knew."

"I see. That was the first time you had heard of it?"

Her lips parted in assent, but her voice died under the torture.

"Then," he said, "I am profoundly sorry. If I had realised that, I would

not have spoken to you as I did."

The memory of it stung her.

"That," she said, "was--in any circumstances--unpardonable."

"I know it was. And I repeat, I am profoundly sorry. But, you see, I

thought you knew all the time, and that you had consented to forget it.

And I thought, don't you know, it was--well, rather hard on me to have it

all raked up again like that. Now I see how very hard it was on you,

dear. Your not knowing makes all the difference."

"It does indeed. If I _had_ known----"

"I understand. You wouldn't have married me?"

"I should not."

"Dear--do you suppose I didn't know that?"

"I know nothing."

"Do you remember the day I asked you why you cared for me, and you said

it was because you knew I was good?"

Her lip trembled.

"And of course I know it's been an awful shock to you to discover

that--I--was _not_ so good."

She turned away her face.

"But I never meant you to discover it. Not for yourself, like this. I

couldn't have forgiven myself--after what you told me. I meant to have

told you myself--that evening--but my poor little sister promised me that

she would. She said it would be easier for you to hear it from her. Of

course I believed her. There _were_ things she could say that I

couldn't."

"She never said a word."

"Are you sure?"

"Perfectly. Except--yes--she _did_ say----"

It was coming back to her now.

"Do you mind telling me exactly what she said?"

"N--no. She made me promise that if I ever found things in you that I

didn't understand, or that I didn't like----"

"Well--what did she make you promise?"

"That I wouldn't be hard on you. Because, she said, you'd had such a

miserable life."

"Poor Edith! So that was the nearest she could get to it. Things you

didn't understand and didn't like!"

"I didn't know what she meant."

"Of course you didn't. Who could? But I'm sorry to say that Edith made me

pretty well believe you did."

He was silent a while, trying to fathom the reason of his sister's

strange duplicity. Apparently he gave it up.

"You can't be a brute to a poor little woman with a bad spine," said he;

"but I'm not going to forgive Edith for that."

Anne flamed through her pallor. "For what?" she said. "For not having had

more courage than yourself? Think what you put on her."

"I didn't. She took it on herself. Edith's got courage enough for

anybody. She would never admit that her spine released her from all moral

obligations. But I suppose she meant well."

The spirit of the grey, cold morning seemed to have settled upon Anne.

She gazed sternly out over the eastern sea. Preoccupied with what he

considered Edith's perfidy, he failed to understand his wife's silence

and her mood.

"Edith's very fond of you. You won't let this make any difference between

you and her?"

"Between her and me it can make no difference. I am very fond of Edith."

"But the fact remains that you married me under false pretences? Is that

what you mean?"

"You may certainly put it that way."

"I understand your point of view completely. I wish you could understand

mine. When Edith said there were things she could have told you that I

couldn't, she meant that there were extenuating circumstances."

"They would have made no difference."

"Excuse me, they make all the difference. But, of course, there's no

extenuation for deception. Therefore, if you insist on putting it that

way--if--if it has made the whole thing intolerable to you, it seems to

me that perhaps I ought, don't you know, to release you from your

obligations----"

She looked at him. She knew that he had understood the meaning and the

depth of her repugnance. She did not know that such understanding is

rare in the circumstances, nor could she see that in itself it was a

revelation of a certain capacity for the "goodness" she had once believed

in. But she did see that she was being treated with a delicacy and

consideration she had not expected of this man with the strange devil.

It touched her in spite of her repugnance. It made her own that she had

expected nothing short of it until yesterday.

"_Do_ you insist?" he went on. "After what I've told you?"

"After what you've told me--no. I'm ready to believe that you did not

mean to deceive me."

"Doesn't that make any difference?" he asked tenderly.

"Yes. It makes some difference--in my judgment of you."

"You mean you're not--as Edith would say--going to be too hard on me?"

"I hope," said Anne, "I should never be too hard on any one."

"Then," he inquired, eager to be released from the strain of a most

insupportable situation, "what are we going to do next?"

He had assumed that the supreme issue had been decided by a polite

evasion; and his question had been innocent of all momentous meaning. He

merely wished to know how they were going to spend the day that was

before them, since they had to spend days, and spend them together. But

Anne's tense mind contemplated nothing short of the supreme issue that,

for her, was not to be evaded, nor yet to be decided hastily.

"Will you leave me alone," she said, "to think it over? Will you give me

three hours?"

He stared and turned pale; for, this time, he understood.

"Certainly," he said coldly, rising and taking out his watch. "It's

twelve now."

"At three, then?"

They met at three o'clock. Anne had spent one hour of bewilderment out of

doors, two hours of hard praying and harder thinking in her room.

Her mind was made up. However notorious her husband had been, between him

and her there was to be no open rupture. She was not going to leave him,

to appeal to him for a separation, to deny him any right. Not that she

was moved by a profound veneration for the legal claim. Marriage was to

her a matter of religion even more than of law. And though, at the

moment, she could no longer discern its sacramental significance through

the degraded aspect it now wore for her, she surrendered on the religious

ground. The surrender would be a martyrdom. She was called upon to lay

down her will, but not to subdue the deep repugnance of her soul.

Protection lay for her in Walter's chivalry, as she well knew. But she

would not claim it. Chastened and humbled, she would take up her wedded

life again. There was no vow that she would not keep, no duty she would

not fulfil. And she would remain in her place of peace, building up

between them the ramparts of the spiritual life.

Meanwhile she gave him credit for his attitude.

"Things can never be as they were between us," she said. "That you cannot

expect. But--"

He listened with his eyes fixed on hers, accepting from her his destiny.

She reddened.

"It was good of you to offer to release me--" He spared her.

"Are you not going to hold me to it, then?"

"I am not." She paused, and then forced herself to it. "I will try to be

a good wife to you."

"Thank you."

CHAPTER III

It was impossible for them to stay any longer at Scarby. The place was

haunted by the presence and the voice of scandalous rumour. Anne had the

horrible idea that it had been also a haunt of Lady Cayley, of the infamy

itself.

The week-old honeymoon looked at them out of its clouds with such an

aged, sinister, and disastrous aspect that they resolved to get away from

it. For the sake of appearances, they spent another week of aimless

wandering on the East coast, before returning to the town where an

unintelligible fate had decided that Majendie should have a business he

detested, and a house.

Anne had once asked herself what she would do if she were told that

she would have to spend all her life in Scale on Humber. Scale is

prevailingly, conspicuously commercial. It is not beautiful. Its streets

are squalidly flat, its houses meanly rectangular. The colouring of Scale

is thought by some to be peculiarly abominable. It is built in brown,

paved and pillared in unclean grey. Its rivers and dykes run brown under

a grey northeastern sky.

Once a year it yields reluctantly to strange passion, and Spring is

born in Scale; born in tortures almost human, a relentless immortality

struggling with visible corruption. The wonder is that it should be born

at all.

To-day, the day of their return, the March wind had swept the streets

clean, and the evening had secret gold and sharp silver in its grey. Anne

remembered how, only last year, she had looked upon such a spring on the

day when she guessed for the first time that Walter cared for her. She

was not highly endowed with imagination; still, even she had felt dimly,

and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and divine

uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.

But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne

Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie. Like some mourner for

whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral day of his beloved,

she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic Spring the immortal

cruelty and irony of Nature. She was bearing her own heart to its burial;

and each street that they passed, as the slow cab rattled heavily on its

way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable progress; it brought

her a little nearer to the grave.

From her companion's respectful silence she gathered that, though lost

to the extreme funereal significance of their journey, he was not

indifferent; he shared to some extent her mourning mood. She was grateful

for that silence of his, because it justified her own.

They were both, by their temperaments, absurdly and diversely,

almost incompatibly young. At two-and-thirty Majendie, through very

worldliness, was a boy in his infinite capacity for recoil from trouble.

Anne had preserved that crude and cloistral youth which belongs to all

lives passed between walls that protect them from the world. At

seven-and-twenty she was a girl, with a girl's indestructible innocence.

She had not yet felt within her the springs of her own womanhood.

Marriage had not touched the spirit, which had kept itself apart even

from her happiness, in the days that were given her to be happy in. Her

suffering was like a child's, and her attitude to it bitterly immature.

It bounded her; it annihilated the intellectual form of time,

obliterating the past, and intercepting any view of a future. Only,

unlike a child, and unlike Majendie, she lacked the power of the

rebound to joy.

"Dear," said her husband anxiously, as the cab drew up at the door of the

house in Prior Street, "have you realised that poor Edith is probably

preparing to receive us with glee? Do you think you could manage to look

a little less unhappy?"

The words were a shock to her, but they did her the service of a shock

by recalling her to the realities outside herself. All the courtesies

and kindnesses she owed to those about her insisted that her bridal

home-coming must lack no sign of grace. She forced a smile.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know I was looking particularly unhappy."

It struck her that Walter was not looking by any means too happy himself.

"It doesn't matter; only, we don't want to dash her down, first thing, do

we?"

"No--no. Dear Edith. And there's Nanna--how sweet of her--and Kate, and

Mary, too."

The old nurse stood on the doorstep to welcome them; her fellow-servants

were behind her, smiling, at the door. Interested faces appeared at the

windows of the house opposite. At the moment of alighting Anne was aware

that the eyes of many people were upon them, and she was thankful that

she had married a man whose self-possession, at any rate, she could rely

on. Majendie's manner was perfect. He avoided both the bridegroom's

offensive assiduity and his no less offensive affectation of

indifference. It had occurred to him that, in the circumstances, Anne

might find it peculiarly disagreeable to be stared at.

"Look at Nanna," he whispered, to distract her attention. "There's no

doubt about her being glad to see you."

Nanna grasped the hands held out to her, hanging her head on one side,

and smiling her tremorous, bashful smile. The other two, Kate and Mary,

came forward, affectionate, but more self-contained. Anne realised with a

curious surprise that she was coming back to a household that she knew,

that knew her and loved her. In the last week she had forgotten Prior

Street.

Majendie watched her anxiously. But she, too, had qualities which could

be relied on. As she passed into the house she had held her head high,

with an air of flinging back the tragic gloom like a veil from her face.

She was not a woman to trail a tragedy up and down the staircase. Above

all, he could trust her trained loyalty to convention.

The servants threw open two doors on the ground floor, and stood back

expectant. On such an occasion it was proper to look pleased and to give

praise. Anne was fine in her observance of each propriety as she looked

into the rooms prepared for her. The house in Prior Street had not lost

its simple old-world look in beautifying itself for the bride. It had put

on new blinds and clean paint, and the smell of spring flowers was

everywhere. The rest was familiar. She had told Majendie that she liked

the old things best. They appealed to her sense of the fit and the

refined; they were signs of good taste and good breeding in her husband's

family and in himself. The house was a survival, a protest against the

terrible all-invading soul of Scale on Humber.

For another reason, which she could not yet analyse, Anne was glad that

nothing had been changed for her coming. It was as if she felt that it

would have been hard on Majendie if he had been put to much expense in

renovating his house for a woman in whom the spirit of the bride had

perished. The house in Prior Street was only a place for her body to

dwell in, for her soul to hide in, only walls around walls, the shell

of the shell.

She turned to her husband with a smile that flashed defiance to the

invading pathos of her state. Majendie's eyes brightened with hope,

beholding her admirable behaviour. He had always thoroughly approved of

Anne.

Upstairs, in the room that was her own, poor Edith (the cause, as he

felt, of their calamity) had indeed prepared for them with joy.

Majendie's sister lay on her couch by the window, as they had left her,

as they would always find her, not like a woman with a hopelessly injured

spine, but like a lady of the happy world, resting in luxury, a little

while, from the assault of her own brilliant and fatiguing vitality. The

flat, dark masses of her hair, laid on the dull red of her cushions, gave

to her face an abrupt and lustrous whiteness, whiteness that threw into

vivid relief the features of expression, the fine, full mouth, with its

temperate sweetness, and the tender eyes, dark as the brows that arched

them. Edith, in her motionless beauty, propped on her cushions, had

acquired a dominant yet passionless presence, as of some regal woman of

the earth surrendered to a heavenly empire. You could see that, however

sanctified by suffering, Edith had still a placid mundane pleasure in her

white wrapper of woollen gauze, and in her long lace scarf. She wore them

with an appearance of being dressed appropriately for a superb occasion.

The sign of her delicacy was in her hands, smoothed and wasted with

inactivity. Yet they had an energy of their own. The hands and the weak,

slender arms had a surprising way of leaping up to draw to her all

beloved persons who bent above her couch. They leapt now to her brother

and his wife, and sank, fatigued with their effort. Two frail, nervous

hands embraced Majendie's, till one of them let go, as she remembered

Anne, and held her, too.

Anne had been vexed, and Majendie angry with her; but anger and vexation

could not live in sight of the pure, tremulous, eager soul of love that

looked at them out of Edith's eyes.

"What a skimpy honeymoon you've had," she said. "Why did you go and cut

it short like that? Was it just because of me?"

In one sense it was because of her. Anne was helpless before her

question; but Majendie rose to it.

"I say--the conceit of her! No, it wasn't just because of you. Anne

agreed with me about Scarby. And we're not cutting our honeymoon short,

we're spinning it out. We're going to have another one, some day, in a

nicer place."

"Anne didn't like Scarby, after all?"

"No, I knew she wouldn't. And she lived to own that I was right."

"That," said Edith, laughing, "was a bad beginning. If I'd been you,

Anne, whether I was right or not, I'd never have owned that _he_ was."

"Anne," said Majendie, "is never anything but just. And this time she was

generous."

Edith's hand was on the sleeve of Majendie's coat, caressing it. She

looked up at Anne.

"And what," said she, "do you think of my little brother, on the whole?"

"I think he says a great many things he doesn't mean."

"Oh, you've found that out, have you? What else have you discovered?"

The gay question made Anne's eyelids drop like curtains on her tragedy.

"That he means a great many things he doesn't say? Is that it?"

Majendie, becoming restive under the flicker of Edith's cheerful tongue,

withdrew the arm she cherished. Edith felt the nervousness of the

movement; her glance turned from her brother's face to Anne's, rested

there for a tense moment, and then veiled itself.

At that moment they both knew that Edith had abandoned her glad

assumption of their happiness. The blessings of them all were upon Nanna

as she came in with the tea-tray.

Nanna was sly and shy and ceremonial in her bearing, but under it there

lurked the privileged audacity of the old servant, and (as poor Majendie

perceived) the secret, terrifying gaiety of the hymeneal devotee. The

faint sound of giggling on the staircase penetrated to the room. It was

evident that Nanna was preparing some horrid and tremendous rite.

She set her tray in its place by Edith's couch, and cleared a side table

which she had drawn into a central and conspicuous position. The three,

as if humouring a child in its play, feigned a profound ignorance of what

Nanna had in hand.

She disappeared, suppressed the giggling on the stairs, and returned,

herself in jubilee let loose. She carried an enormous plate, and on the

plate Anne's wedding-cake with all its white terraces and towers, and (a

little shattered) the sugar orange blossoms and myrtles of its crown. She

stood it alone on its table of honour, and withdrew abruptly.

The three were stricken dumb by the presence of the bridal thing. Nanna,

listening outside the door, attributed their silence to an appreciation

too profound for utterance.

They looked at it, and it looked at them. Its veil of myrtle, trembling

yet with the shock of its entrance, gave it the semblance of movement and

of life. It towered in the majesty of its insistent whiteness. It trailed

its mystic modesties before them. Its brittle blossoms quivered like

innocence appalled. The wide cleft at its base betrayed the black and

formidable heart beneath the fair and sugared surface. These crowding

symbols, perceptible to Edith's subtler intelligence, massed themselves

in her companions' minds as one vast sensation of discomfort.

As usual when he was embarrassed, Majendie laughed.

"It's the very spirit of dyspepsia," he said. "A cold and dangerous

thing. _Must_ we eat it?"

"_You_ must," said Edith; "Nanna would weep if you didn't."

"I don't think I can--possibly," said Anne, who was already reaping her

sowing to the winds of emotion in a whirlwind of headache.

"Let's all eat it--and die," said Majendie. He hacked, laid a ruin of

fragments round the evil thing, scattered crumbs on all their plates, and

buried his own piece in a flower-pot. "Do you think," he said, "that

Nanna will dig it up again?"

Anne turned white over her tea, pleaded her headache, and begged to be

taken to her room. Majendie took her there.

"Isn't Anne well?" asked Edith anxiously, when he came back.

"Oh, it's nothing. She's been seedy all day, and the sight of that cake

finished her off. I don't wonder. It's enough to upset a strong man.

Let's ring for Nanna to take it away."

He rang. When Nanna appeared Edith was eating her crumbs ostentatiously,

as if unwilling to leave the last of a delicious thing.

"Oh, Nanna," said she, "that's a heavenly wedding-cake!"

Majendie was reminded of the habitual tender perfidy of that saint, his

sister. She was always lying to make other people happy, saying that she

had everything she wanted, when she hadn't, and that her spine didn't

hurt her, when it did. When Edith was too exhausted to lie, she would

look at you and smile, with the sweat of her torture on her forehead. He

knew Edith, and wondered how far she had lied to Anne, and what she had

done it for. He had a good mind to ask her; but he shrank from "dashing

her down the first day."

But Edith herself dashed everything down the first five minutes. There

was nothing that _she_ shrank from.

"I'm sorry for poor Anne," said she; "but it's nice to get you all to

myself again. Just for once. Only for once. I'm not jealous."

He smiled, and stroked her hair.

"I was jealous--oh, furiously jealous, just at first, for five minutes.

But I got over it. It was so undignified."

"It didn't show, dear."

"I didn't mean it to. It wouldn't have been pretty. And now, it's all

over and I like Anne. But I don't like her as much as you."

"You must like her more," he said gravely. "She'll need it--badly."

Edith looked at him. "How can she need it badly, when she has you?"

"You're a good woman, and I'm a mere mortal man. She's found that out

already, and she doesn't like it."

"Wallie, _dear_, what do you mean?"

"I mean exactly what I say. She's found it out. She's found _me_ out.

She's found everything out."

"Found out? But how?"

"It doesn't matter how. Edie, why didn't you tell her? You said you

would."

"Yes--I said I would."

"And you told me you had."

"No. I didn't tell you I had."

"What did you tell me, then?"

"I told you there was nothing to be afraid of, that it was all right."

"And of course I thought you'd told her."

"If I had told her it wouldn't have been all right; for she wouldn't have

married you."

Majendie scowled, and Edith went on calmly.

"I knew that--she as good as told me so--and I knew _her_."

"Well--what if she hadn't married me?"

"That would have been very bad for both of you. Especially for you."

"For me? And how do you know this isn't going to be worse? For both of

us. It's generally better to be straight, and face facts, however

disagreeable. Especially when everybody knows that you've got a skeleton

in your cupboard."

"Anne didn't, and she was so afraid of skeletons."

"All the more reason why you should have hauled the horrid thing out and

let her have a good look at it. She mightn't have been afraid of it then.

Now she's convinced it's a fifty times worse skeleton than it is."

"She wouldn't have lived with it in the house, dear. She said so."

"But I thought you never told her?"

"She was talking about somebody else's skeleton, dear."

"Oh, somebody else's, that's a very different thing."

"She meant--if she'd been the woman. I was testing her, to see how she'd

take it. Do you think I was very wrong?"

"Well, frankly, dear, I cannot say you were very wise."

"I wonder----"

She lay back wondering. Doubt of her wisdom shook her through all her

tender being. She had been so sure.

"How would you have liked it," said she, "if Anne had given you up and

gone away, and you'd never seen her again?"

His face said plainly that he wouldn't have liked it at all.

"Well, that's what she'd have done. And I wanted her to stay and marry

you."

"Yes, but with her eyes open."

She shook her head, the head that would have been so wise for him.

"No," said she. "Anne's one of those people who see best with their eyes

shut."

"Well, they're open enough now in all conscience. But there's one thing

she hasn't found out. She doesn't know how it happened. Can you tell her?

_I_ can't. I told her there were extenuating circumstances; but of

course I couldn't go into them."

"What did she say?"

"She said no circumstances could extenuate facts."

"I can hear her saying it."

"I understand her state of mind," said Majendie. "She couldn't see the

circumstances for the facts."

"Our Anne is but young. In ten years' time she won't be able to see the

facts for the circumstances."

"Well--will you tell her?"

"Of course I will."

"Make her see that I'm not necessarily an utter brute just because I----"

"I'll make her see everything."

"Forgive me for bothering you."

"Dear--forgive me for breaking my promise and deceiving you."

He bent to her weak arms.

"I believe," she whispered, "the end will yet justify the means."

"Oh--the end."

He didn't see it; but he was convinced that there could hardly be a worse

beginning.

He went upstairs, where Anne lay in the agonies of her bilious attack. He

found comfort, rather than gave it, by holding handkerchiefs steeped in

eau-de-Cologne to her forehead. It gratified him to find that she would

let him do it without shrinking from his touch.

But Anne was past that.

CHAPTER IV

For once in his life Majendie was glad that he had a business. Shipping

(he was a ship-owner) was a distraction from the miserable problem that

weighed on him at home.

Anne's morning face was cold to him. She lay crushed in her bed. She had

had a bad night, and he knew himself to be the cause of it.

His pity for her hurt like passion.

"How is she?" asked Edith, as he came into her room before going to the

office.

"She's a wreck," he said, "a ruin. She's had an awful night. Be kind to

her, Edie."

Edie was very kind. But she said to herself that if Anne was a ruin that

was not at all a bad thing.

Edith Majendie was a loving but shrewd observer of the people of her

world. Lying on her back she saw them at an unusual angle, almost as if

they moved on a plane invisible to persons who go about upright on their

legs. The four walls of her room concentrated her vision in bounding it.

She saw few women and fewer men, but she saw them apart from those

superficial activities which distract and darken judgment. Faces that

she was obliged to see bending over her had another aspect for Edith than

that which they presented to the world at large. Anne Majendie, who had

come so near to Edith, had always put a certain distance between herself

and her other friends. While they were chiefly impressed with her superb

superiority, and saw her forever standing on a pedestal, Edith declared

that she knew nothing of Anne's austere and impressive attributes. She

protested against anything so dreary as the other people's view of her.

They and their absurd pedestals! She refused to regard her sister-in-law

as an established solemnity, eminent and lonely in the scene. Pedestals

were all very well at a proper distance, but at a close view they were

foreshortening to the human figure. Other people might like to see more

pedestal than Anne; she preferred to see more Anne than pedestal. If they

didn't know that Anne was dear and sweet, she did. So did Walter.

If they wanted proof of it, why, would any other woman have put up with

her and her wretched spine? Weren't they all, Anne's friends, sorry for

Anne just because of it, of her? If you came to think of it, if you

traced everything back to the beginning, her spine had been the cause

of all Anne's troubles.

That was how she had always reasoned it out. No suffering had ever

obscured the lucidity of Edith's mind. She knew that it was her spine

that had kept her brother from marrying all those years. He couldn't

leave her alone with it, neither could he ask any woman to share the

house inhabited, pervaded, dominated by it. Unsafeguarded by marriage, he

had fallen into evil hands. To Edith, who had plenty of leisure for

reflection, all this had become terribly clear.

Then Anne had come, the strong woman who could bear Walter's burden for

him. She had been jealous of Anne at first, for five minutes. Then she

had blessed her.

But Edith, as she had told her brother, was not a fool. And all the time,

while her heart leapt to the image of Anne in her dearness and sweetness,

her brain saw perfectly well that her sister-in-law had not been free

from the sin of pride (that came, said Edith, of standing on a pedestal.

It was better to lie on a couch than stand on a pedestal; you knew, at

any rate, where you were).

Now, as Edith also said, there can be nothing more prostrating to a

woman's pride than a bad bilious attack. Especially when it exposes you

to the devoted ministrations of a husband you have made up your mind to

disapprove of, and compels you to a baffling view of him.

Anne owned herself baffled.

Her attack had chastened her. She had been touched by Walter's kindness,

by the evidence (if she had needed it) that she was as dear to him in her

ignominious agony as she had been in the beauty of her triumphal health.

As he moved about her, he became to her insistent outward sense the man

she had loved because of his goodness. It was so that she had first seen

his strong masculine figure moving about Edith on her couch, handling

her with the supreme gentleness of strength. She had not been two days in

the house in Prior Street before her memories assailed her. Her new and

detestable view of Walter contended with her old beloved vision of him.

The two were equally real, equally vivid, and she could not reconcile

them. Walter himself, seen again in his old surroundings, was protected

by an army of associations. The manifestations of his actual presence

were also such as to appeal to her memory against her judgment. Her

memory was in league with her. But when the melting mood came over her,

her conscience resisted and rose against them both.

Edith, watching for the propitious moment, could not tell by what signs

she would recognise it when it came. Her own hour was the early evening.

She had always brightened towards six o'clock, the time of her brother's

home-coming.

To-day he had removed himself, to give her her chance with Anne. She

could see him pottering about the garden below her window. He had kept

that garden with care. He had mown and sown, and planted, and weeded,

and watered it, that Edith might always have something pretty to look at

from her window. With its green grass plot and gay beds, the tiny oblong

space defied the extending grime and gloom of Scale. This year he had

planted it for Anne. He had set a thousand bulbs for her, and many

thousand flowers were to have sprung up in time to welcome her. But

something had gone wrong with them. They had suffered by his absence. As

Edith looked out of the window he was stooping low, on acutely bended

knees, sorrowfully preoccupied with a broken hyacinth. He had his back to

them.

To Edith's mind there was something heart-rending in the expression of

that intent, innocent back, so surrendered to their gaze, so unconscious

of its own pathetic curve. She wondered if it appealed to Anne in that

way. She judged from the expression of her sister-in-law's face that it

did not appeal to her in any way at all.

"Poor dear," said she, "he's still worrying about those blessed bulbs of

mine--of yours, I mean."

"Don't, Edie. As if I wanted to take your bulbs away from you. I'm not

jealous."

"No more am I," said Edie. "Let's say both our bulbs. I wish he wouldn't

garden quite so much, though. It always makes his head ache."

"Why does he do it, then?" asked Anne calmly.

Her calmness irritated Edith.

"Oh, why does Walter do anything? Because he's an angel!"

Anne's silence gave her the opening she was looking for.

"You know, you used to think so, too."

"Of course I did," said Anne evasively.

"And equally of course, you don't, now you've married him?"

"I _have_ married him. What more could I do to prove my appreciation?"

"Oh, heaps more. Mere marrying's nothing. Any woman can do that."

"Do you think so? It seems to me that marrying--mere marrying--may be a

great deal--about as much as many men have a right to ask."

"Hasn't every man a right to ask for--what shall I say--a little

understanding--from the woman he cares for?"

"Edith, what has he told you?"

"Nothing, my dear, that I hadn't seen for myself."

"Did he tell you that I 'misunderstood' him?"

"Did he pose as _l'homme incompris_? No, he didn't."

"Still--he told you," Anne insisted.

"Of course he did." She brushed the self-evident aside and returned to

her point. "He does care for you. That, at least, you can understand."

"No, that's just what I don't understand. I can't understand his caring.

I can't understand him. I can't understand anything." Her voice shook.

"Poor darling, I know it's hard, sometimes. Still, you do know what he

is."

"I know what he was--what I thought him. It's hard to reconcile it with

what he is."

"With what you think him? You can't, of course. I suppose you think him

something too bad for words?"

Anne broke down weakly.

"Oh, Edith, why didn't you tell me?"

"What? That Wallie was bad?"

"Yes, yes. It would have been better if you'd told me everything."

"Well, dear, whatever I told you, I couldn't have told you that. It

wouldn't have been true."

"He says himself that everything was true."

"Everything probably is true. But then, the point is that you don't know

the whole truth, or even half of it. That's just what he couldn't tell

you. I should have told you. That's where I bungled it. You know he left

it to me; he said I was to tell you."

"Yes, he told me that. He didn't mean to deceive me."

"No more did I. If my brother had been a bad man, dear, do you suppose

for a moment I'd have let him marry my dearest friend?"

"You didn't know. We don't know these things, Edith. That's the terrible

part of it."

"Yes, it's the terrible part of it. But _I_ knew all right. He never kept

anything from me, not for long."

"But, Edith--how _could_ he? How _could_ he? When the woman--Lady

Cayley--She was _bad_, wasn't she?"

"Of course she was bad. Bad as they make them--worse. You know she was

divorced?"

"Yes," said Anne, "that's what I do know."

"Well, she wasn't divorced on Walter's account, my dear. There were

several others--four, five, goodness knows how many. Poor Walter was a

mere drop in her ocean."

Anne stared a moment at the expanse presented to her.

"But," said she, "he was in it."

"Oh yes, he was in it. The ocean swallowed him as it swallowed the

others. But it couldn't keep him. He couldn't live in it, like them."

"But how did she get hold of him?"

"She got hold of him by appealing to his chivalry."

(His chivalry--she knew it.)

"It's what happens, over and over again. He thought her a vilely injured

woman. He may have thought her good. He certainly thought her pathetic.

It was the pathos that did it."

"That--did--it?"

"Yes. Did it. She hurled herself at his head--at his knees--at his

feet---till he _had_ to lift her. And that's how it happened."

Anne's spirit writhed as she contemplated the happening.

"I know it oughtn't to have happened. I know Walter wasn't the holy saint

he ought to have been. But oh, he was a martyr!" She paused. "And--he was

very young."

"Edith--when was it?"

"Seven years ago."

Anne pondered. The seven years helped to purify him. Every day helped

that threw the horror further back in time--separated it from her. If--if

he had not been steeped too long in it. She wanted to know _how_ long,

but she was afraid to ask; afraid lest it should be brought nearer to her

than she could bear. Edith saw her fear.

"It lasted two years. It was all my fault."

"Your fault?"

"Yes, my fault. Because of my horrid spine. You see, it kept him from

marrying."

"Well, but--"

"Well, but it couldn't have happened if he had married. How _could_ it?

How could it have happened if you had been there? You would have saved

him."

She paused on that note, a long, illuminating pause. The note itself was

a divine inspiration. It rang all golden. It thrilled to the verge of the

dominant chord in Anne. It touched her soul, the mother of brooding,

mystic harmonies.

"You would have saved him."

Anne saw herself for one moment as his guardian angel, her mission

frustrated through a flaw of time. That vision was dashed by another,

herself as the ideal, the star he should have looked to before its dawn,

herself dishonoured by his young haste, his passion, his failure to

foresee.

"He should have waited for me."

"Did you wait for him?"

A quick flush pulsed through the whiteness of Anne's face. She looked

back seven years to her girlhood in the southern Deanery, her home. She

had another vision, a vision of a Minor Canon, whom she had loved with

the pure worship of her youth, a love of which somehow she was now

ashamed. Ashamed, though it had then seemed to her so spiritual. Her dead

parents had desired the marriage, but neither she nor they had the power

to bring it about.

Edith had never heard of the Minor Canon. She had drawn a bow at a

venture.

"My dear," she said, "why not? It's only the very elect lovers who can

say to each other, 'I never loved any one but you.'"

"At any rate," said Anne, "I never loved any one else well enough to

marry him."

For, in her fancy, the Minor Canon, being withdrawn in time, had ceased

to occupy space; he had become that which he was for her girlhood, a

disembodied dream. She could not have explained why she was so ashamed

of him. What ground of comparison was there between that blameless one

and Lady Cayley?

"Edith," she said suddenly, "did you ever see her?"

"Never," said Edith emphatically.

"You don't know what she was like?"

"I don't. I never wanted to. I dare say there are people in Scale who

could tell you all about her, only I wouldn't inquire if I were you."

"Did it happen at Scarby?" She was determined to know the worst.

"I believe so."

"Oh--why did I ever go there?"

"He didn't want you to. That was why."

"Where is she now?"

"Nobody knows. She might be anywhere."

"Not here?"

"No, not here. My dear, you mustn't get her on your nerves."

"I'm afraid of meeting her."

"It isn't likely that you ever will. She isn't the sort one does

meet--now, poor thing."

"Who was she?"

"The wife of Sir Andrew Cayley, a tallow-chandler."

"Oh, how did Walter ever--"

"My dear, one meets all sorts of funny people in Scale. He was a very

wealthy tallow-chandler. Besides, it wasn't he that Walter did meet,

naturally."

"How can you joke about it? It makes me sick to think of it."

"It made me sick enough once, dear. But I don't think of it."

"I can't help thinking of it."

"Well, whenever you do, when it does come over you--it will,

sometimes--think of what Walter's life was before he knew you. Everything

was spoiled for him because of me. He was sent to a place he detested

because of me; put into an office which he loathed, shut up here in this

hateful house, because of me. And he was good to me, good and dear. Even

at the worst he hardly ever left me if he thought I wanted him--not even

to go to _her_. But he was young, and it was an awful life for him; you

don't know how awful. It would have been bad enough for a woman. It was

intolerable for a man. I was worse then than I am now. I was horribly

fretful, and I worried him. I think I drove him to her--I know I did. He

had to get away from it sometimes. Won't you think of that?"

"I'll try to think of it."

"And it won't make you not like him?"

"My dear, I liked him first for your sake, then I liked you for his, now

I suppose I must like him for yours again."

"No--for his own sake."

"Does it matter which?"

"Not much--so long as you like him. He really is angelic, though you

mayn't think it."

"I think you are."

Edith was not only angelic, but womanly and full of guile, and she knew

with whom she had to do. She had humbled Anne with shrewd shafts that

hit her in all her weak places; now she exalted her. Anne had not her

likeness in a thousand. She was a woman magnificently planned, of stature

not to be diminished by the highest pedestal. A figure fit for a throne,

a niche, a shrine. Edith could see the dear little downy feathers

sprouting on Anne's shoulder-blades, and the infant aureole playing

in her hair.

"You're a saint," said Edith.

"I am not," said Anne, while her pale cheek glowed with the flattery.

"Of course you are," said Edith, "or you could never have put up with

me."

Whereupon Anne kissed her.

"And I may tell Walter what you've said?"

It was thus that she spared Anne's mortal pride. She knew how it would

shrink from telling him.

Anne went down to Majendie in the garden and sent him to his sister. They

returned to the house by the open window of his study. A bright fire was

burning in the room. He looked at her shyly and half in doubt, drew up an

arm-chair to the hearth, and left her there.

His manner brought back to her the days of their engagement when that

room had been their refuge. Not that they had often been alone together.

She could count the times on the fingers of one hand, the times when

Edith was too ill to be wheeled into her room. It had been nearly always

in Edith's room that she had seen him, surrounded by all the feminine

devices, the tender trivialities that were part of the moving pathos of

the scene. She had so associated him with his sister that it had been

hard for her to realise that he had any separate life of his own. She

felt that his love for her had simply grown out of his love for Edith,

it was the flame, the flower of his tenderness. It was one with his

goodness, and she had been glad to have it so. There was no jealousy in

Anne.

It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she

had known of him. It was through Edith that she really knew him. And yet

it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly. Anne had

not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that

Walter was a ship-owner did not define him in the very least. What

remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must

partially reveal.

She remembered how she had first come there, and had looked shyly about

her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and

his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings

with the outer world. Now she rose and went round the room, searching for

its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old.

If the room told her anything it told her how little Majendie had used

it, how little he had been able to call anything his own. The things in

it had no comfortable look of service. He could not have smoked there

much, the curtains were too innocent. He could not have sat in that

arm-chair much, the surface was too smooth. He could not have come there

much at any time, for, though the carpet was faded, there was no

well-worn passage from the threshold to the hearth. As far as she could

make out he came there for no earthly purpose but to change his boots

before going upstairs to Edith.

The bookcase told the same story. It held histories and standard works

inherited from Majendie's father; the works of Dickens, and Thackeray,

and Hardy, read over and over again in the days when he had time for

reading; several poets whom, by his own confession, he could not have

read in any circumstances. One Meredith, partly uncut, testified to an

honest effort and a baulked accomplishment. On a shelf apart stood the

books that he had loved when he was a boy, the Annuals, the tales of

travel and adventure, and one or two school prizes gorgeously bound.

As she looked at them his boyhood rose before her; its dead innocence

appealed to her comprehension and compassion.

She knew that he had been disappointed in his ambition. Instead of being

sent to Oxford he had been sent into business, that he might early

support himself. He had supported himself. And he had stuck to the

business that he might the better support Edith.

She could not deny him the virtue of unselfishness.

She remembered one Sunday, three weeks before their wedding-day, when she

had stood alone with him in this room, at the closing of their happy day.

It was then that he had asked her why she cared for him, and she had

answered: "Because you are good. You always have been good."

And he had said (how it came back to her!), "And if I hadn't always?

Wouldn't you have cared then?"

She had answered, "I would have cared, but I couldn't marry you."

And he had turned away from her, and looked out of the window, keeping

his back to her, and had stood so without speaking for a moment. She had

wondered what had come over him.

Now she knew. He had not been good. And she had married him.

At the recollection the thoughts she had quieted stirred again and stung

her, and again she trampled them down.

She faced the question how she was going to build up the wedded life that

her knowledge of him had laid low. She told herself that, after all, much

remained. She had loved Walter for his unhappiness as well as for his

goodness. He had needed her, and she had felt that there was no other

woman who could have borne his burden half so well. Edith was too sweet

to be thought of as a burden, but it could not be denied she weighed. In

marrying Walter she would lift half the weight. Anne was strong, and she

glorified in her strength. That was what she was there for.

How much more was she prepared to do? Keeping his house was nothing;

Nanna had always kept it well. Caring for Edith was nothing; she could

not help but care for her. She had promised Walter that she would be a

good wife to him, and she had vowed to herself that she would live her

spiritual life apart.

Was that being a good wife to him? To divorce her soul, her best self,

from him? If she confined her duty to the preservation of the mere

material tie, what would she make of herself? Of him?

It came to her that his need of her was deeper and more spiritual than

that. She argued that there must be something fine in him, or he never

would have appreciated _her_. That other woman didn't count; she had

thrust herself on him. When it came to choosing, he had chosen a

spiritual woman! (Anne had no doubt that she was what she aspired to be.)

And since all things were divinely ordered, Walter's choice was really

God's will. God's hand had led him to her.

It had been a blow to Anne's pride to realise that she had

married--spiritually--beneath her. Her pride now recovered wonderfully,

seeing in this very inequality its opportunity. She beheld herself

superbly seated on an eminence, her spiritual opulence supplying Walter's

poverty. Spiritually, she said, it might also be more blessed to give

than to receive.

Their marriage, in this its new, its immaterial consummation, would not

be unequal. She would raise Walter. That, of course, was what God had

meant her to do all the time. Never again could she look at her husband

with eyes of mortal passion. But her love, which had died, was risen

again; it could still turn to him a glorified and spiritual face; it

could still know passion, a passion immortal and supreme.

But it was an emotion of which by its very nature she could not bring

herself to speak. It could mean nothing to Walter in his yet unspiritual

state. She felt that when he came to her he would insist on some

satisfaction, and there was no satisfaction that she could give to the

sort of claim he would make. Therefore she awaited his coming with

nervous trepidation.

He came in as if nothing had happened. He sank with every symptom of

comfortable assurance into the opposite arm-chair. And he asked no more

formidable question than, "How's your headache?"

"Better, thank you."

"That's all right."

He did not look at her, but his eyes were smiling as if at some agreeable

thought or reminiscence. He had apparently assumed that Anne had

recovered, not only from her headache, but from its cause. To Anne,

tingling with the tension of a nervous crisis, this attitude was

disconcerting. It seemed to reduce her and her crisis to insignificance.

She had expected him to be tingling too. He had more cause to.

"Do you mind my smoking? Say if you really do."

She really did, but she forbore to say so. Forbearance henceforth was to

be part of her discipline.

He smoked contentedly, with half-closed eyes; and when he talked, he

talked of the garden and of bulbs.

Of bulbs, after what he had discussed with Edith upstairs. She would

rather that he had asked his question, forced her to the issue. That at

least would have shown some comprehension of her state. But he had taken

the issue for granted, refused to face the immensity of it all. She had

had her first taste of sacrificial flames, and her spirit was prepared to

go through fire to reach him. And he presented himself as already folded

and protected; satisfied with some inferior and independent secret of his

own.

She felt that a little perturbation would have become him more than that

impenetrable peace.

It would make it so difficult to raise him.

CHAPTER V

The bell of St. Saviour's had ceased. Over the open market-place the air

throbbed with a thousand pulses from the dying heart of sound. The great

grey body of the Church was still; tower and couchant nave watched in

their monstrous, motionless dominion, till the music stirred in them like

a triumphant soul.

As they hurried over the open market-place, Anne realised with some

annoyance that she was late again for the Wednesday evening service. She

dearly loved punctuality and order, and disliked to be either checked or

hastened in her superb movements. She disliked to be late for anything.

Above all she disliked standing on a mat outside a closed church door, in

the middle of a General Confession, trying to surrender her spirit to the

spirit of prayer, while Walter lingered, murmuring profane urbanities

that claimed her as his own.

He had perceived what he called her innocent design, her transparent

effort to lead him to her heavenly heights. He had lent himself to

it, tenderly, gravely, as he would have lent himself to a child's

heart-rending play. He could not profess to follow the workings of his

wife's mind, but he did understand her point of view. She had been "let

in" for something she had not expected, and he was bound to make it up

to her.

There had been a week of concessions, crowned by his appearance at St.

Saviour's.

But that was on a Sunday. This was Wednesday, and he drew the line at

Wednesdays.

Oh yes, he saw her drift. He knew that what she expected of him was

incessant penitence. But, after all, it was difficult to feel much

abasement for a fault committed quite a number of years ago and

sufficiently repented of at the time. He had settled his account, and

it was hard that he should be made to pay twice over. To-night his mood

was strangely out of harmony with Lent.

Anne slackened her pace to intimate as much to him. Whereupon he lapsed

into strange and disturbing legends of his childhood. He told her he had

early weaned himself from the love of Lenten Services, observing their

effect upon the unfortunate lady, his aunt, who had brought him up.

Punctually at twelve o'clock on Palm Sunday, he said, the poor soul,

exhausted with her endeavours after the Christian life, would fly into

a passion, and punctually would rise from it at the same hour on Easter

Day. For quite a long time he had believed that that was why they called

it Passion Week.

She moaned "Oh, Walter--don't!" as if he had hurt her, while she

repressed the play of a little, creeping, curling, mundane smile.

If he would only leave her! But, as they crossed to the curbstone, he

changed over, preserving his proper place. He leaned to her with the

indestructible attention of a lover. His whole manner was inimitably

chivalrous, protective, and polite.

Anne hardened her heart against him. At the church gate she turned and

faced him coldly.

"If you're not going in," said she, "you needn't come any further."

He glanced at the belated group of worshippers gathered before the church

door, and became more than ever polite and chivalrous and protective.

"I must see you safely in," he said, and took up his stand beside her on

the mat.

Her eyes rested on him for a second in reproach, then dropped behind the

veil of their lids. In another moment he would have to go. He had already

surrendered her prayer-book, tucking it gently under her arm.

"You'll be all right when you get in, won't you?" he said encouragingly.

"Please go," she whispered.

"Do I jar, dear?" he asked sweetly.

"You do, very much."

"I'm so sorry. I won't do it again."

But his whispered vows and promises belied him, battling with her

consecrated mood. She felt that his innermost spirit remained in its

profanity, unillumined by her rebuke.

Once more she set her face, and hardened her heart against him, and

removed herself in the silence and isolation of her prayer.

Through the closed door there came the rich, confused murmur of the

Confession. He saw her lips curl, flower-like, with emotion, as her

breath rose and fell in unison with the heaving chant. He watched her

with a certain reverence, incomprehensibly chastened, till the door

opened, and she went from him, moving down the lighted aisle with her

remote, renunciating air.

The door was shut in Majendie's face, and he turned away, intending to

kill, to murder the next hour at his club.

Anne was self-trained in the habit of detachment. She had only to kneel,

to close her eyes and cover her face, and her soul slid of its own accord

into the place of peace. Her very breathing and the beating of her heart

were stayed. Her mind, emptied in a moment, was in a moment filled,

brimming over with the thought of God. To her veiled vision that thought

was like a sheet of blank light let down behind her drooped eyelids, and

centring in a luminous whorl. It fascinated her. Her prayer shot straight

to the heart of it, a communion too swift to trouble or divide the

blessed light.

In that instant her husband, the image and the thought of him, were cast

into the secular darkness.

She remembered how difficult it had once been thus to renounce him.

Her trouble, in the days of her engagement, had been that, thrust him

from her as she would, the idea of his goodness--the goodness that

justified her through its own appeal--would call up his presence,

emerging radiant from the outermost abyss. Inferior emotions then mingled

indistinguishably with her holiest ardours. Spiritually ambitious, she

had had her young eye on a hard-won crown of glory, and she had found

that happiness made the spiritual life almost contemptibly easy. It was

no effort in those days to realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of

the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she

heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand

touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace. She had

hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself. It was as if her

soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the

silver and fine gold of her wings.

It was the facility of the revelation that had first caused her to

suspect it. And she had thrown ashes on the flame, and set a watch upon

her soul, lest she should mistake an earthly for a heavenly content. She

could not bear to think that she was cheated, that her pulses counted in

her sense of exaltation and beatitude. She desired, purely, the utmost

purity in that divine communion, so as to be sure that it was divine.

Now, having suffered, she was completely sure. Her wound was the seal God

set upon her soul. It was easy enough now for her to achieve detachment,

oblivion of Walter Majendie, to pour out her whole soul in the prayer for

light: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great

mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night."

Her hands, as she prayed, were folded close over her eyes. Having

annihilated her husband, she was disagreeably astonished to find that he

was there, that he had been there for some time, in the seat beside her.

He was sitting in what he took to be an attitude of extreme reverence,

his head bowed and resting on his left arm, which was supported by the

back of the seat in front of him. His right arm embraced, unconsciously,

Anne's muff. Anne was vividly, painfully aware of him. Over the crook of

his elbow one eye looked up at her, bright, smiling with inextinguishable

affection. His lips gave out a sound that was not a prayer, but something

between a murmur and a moan, distinctly audible. She felt his gaze as a

gross, tangible thing, as a violent hand, parting the veils of prayer.

She bowed her head lower and pressed her hands to her face till the blood

tingled.

The sermon obliged her to sit upright and exposed. It gave him

iniquitous opportunity. He turned in his seat; his eyes watched her under

half-closed lids, two slits shining through the thick, dark curtain of

their lashes. He kept on pulling at his moustache, as if to hide the dumb

but expressive adoration of his mouth. Anne, who felt that her soul had

been overtaken, trapped, and bared to the outrage, removed herself by a

yard's length till the hymn brought them together, linked by the book she

could not withhold. The music penetrated her soul and healed its hurt.

"Christian, doth thou see them,

On the holy ground,

How the troops of Midian

Prowl and prowl around?"

sang Anne in a dulcet pianissimo, obedient to the choir.

Profound abstraction veiled him, a treacherous unspiritual calm. Majendie

was a man with a baritone voice, which at times possessed him like a

furious devil. It was sleeping in him now, biding its time, ready, she

knew, to be roused by the first touch of a _crescendo_. The _crescendo_

came.

"Christian! Up and fight them!"

The voice waked; it leaped from him; and to Anne's terrified nerves it

seemed to be scattering the voices of the choir before it. It dropped on

the Amen and died; but in dying it remained triumphant, like the trump of

an archangel retreating to the uttermost ends of heaven.

Anne's heart pained her with a profane tenderness, and a poignant

repudiation. Her soul being once more adjusted to the divine, it was

intolerable to think that this preposterous human voice should have power

to shake it so.

She sank to her knees and bowed her head to the Benediction.

"Did you like it?" he asked as they emerged together into the open air.

He spoke as if to the child she seemed to him now to be. They had been

playing together, pretending they were two pilgrims bound for the

Heavenly City, and he wanted to know if she had had a nice game. He

nursed the exquisite illusion that this time he had pleased her by

playing too.

"Of course I liked it."

"So did I," he answered joyously, "I quite enjoyed it. We'll do it again

some other night."

"What made you come, like that?" said she, appeased by his innocence.

"I couldn't help it. You looked so pretty, dear, and so forlorn. It

seemed brutal, somehow, to abandon you on the weary road to heaven."

She sighed. That was his chivalry again. He would escort her politely to

the door of heaven, but would he ever go in with her, would he ever stay

there?

Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far. It gave

her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be. Not that

she relied upon herself alone. Her plan for Majendie's salvation was

liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences. There

was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.

"Walter," said she, "I want you to know Mrs. Eliott."

"But I do know her, don't I?"

He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne's home in

Scale. He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott. But for her slender acquaintance

with his sister, he would never have known Anne. This made him feel that

he knew Mrs. Eliott.

"But I want you to know her as I know her."

He laughed. "Is that possible? Does a man ever know a woman as another

woman knows her?"

Anne felt that she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led

by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it

she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted

by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted

with a magnificent irrelevance.

"You must know her. You would like her."

He didn't in the least want to know Mrs. Eliott, he didn't think that he

would like her. But he was soothed, flattered, insanely pleased with

Anne's assumption that he would. It was as if in her thoughts she were

drawing him towards her. He felt that she was softening, yielding. His

approaches were a delicious wooing of an unfamiliar, unwedded Anne.

"I would like her, because you like her, is that it?"

"It wouldn't follow."

"Oh, how you spoil it!"

"Spoil what?"

"My inference. It pleased me. But, as you say, the logic wasn't sound."

Silence being the only dignified course under mystification, Anne was

silent. Some men had that irritating way with women; Walter's smile

suggested that he might have it. She was not going to minister to his

male delight. Unfortunately her silence seemed to please him too.

"Never mind, dear, I do like her; because she likes you."

"You will like her for herself when you know her."

"Will she like me for myself when she knows me? It's extremely doubtful.

You see, hitherto she has made no ardent sign."

"My dear, she says you've never been near her. You've never come to one

of her Thursdays."

"Oh, her Thursdays--no, I haven't."

"Well, how can you expect--but you'll go sometimes, now, to please me?"

"Won't Wednesdays do?"

"Wednesdays?"

"Yes. It wasn't half bad to-night. I'll go to every blessed Wednesday, as

long as they last, if you'll only let me off Thursdays."

"Please don't talk about being 'let off.' I thought you might like to

know my friends, that's all."

"So I would. I'd like it awfully. By the way, that reminds me. I met

Hannay at the club to-night, and he asked if his wife might call on you.

Would you mind very much?"

"Why should I mind, if she's a friend of yours and Edith's?"

"Oh well, you see, she isn't exactly--"

"Isn't exactly what?"

"A friend of Edith's."

CHAPTER VI

There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston

Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century,

when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young. Each claims to be the

aristocratic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its

solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston

Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either

Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could

live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from

the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide

invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after

their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the

suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street

and Thurston Square.

Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre

symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its

atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on

the unlovely and unsacred street.

Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved

with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and

of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed

breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this

immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of

their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified

attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a

religious protest against the spirit of business.

But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the

Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They

utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.

Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation,

punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is

Mrs. Eliott's day.

The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of

trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries

met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the

place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled

by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian

furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects. There were

great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and

cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid

profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years

of Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent

culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few

diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome

and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych

with its saints in glory.

Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met,

Thursday after Thursday, the same fervid little company of ideas, of

aspirations and enthusiasms.

It was five o'clock on one of her Thursdays, and Mrs. Eliott had been

conversing with great sweetness and fluency ever since half-past three.

That was the way she and Mrs. Pooley kept it up, and they could have kept

it up much longer but for the arrival of Miss Proctor.

There was nothing, in Miss Proctor's opinion (if dear Fanny only knew

it), so provincial as an enthusiasm. As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley

was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be

what you were not? Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square's

preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever

conscious of. She announced that she had come to take dear Fanny down

from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip. She ignored Mrs.

Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to be ignored.

"I want," said she, "the latest news of Anne."

"If you wait, you may get it from herself."

"My dear, do you suppose she'd give it me?"

"It depends," said Mrs. Eliott, "on what you want to know."

"I want to know whether she's happy. I want to know whether, by this

time, she _knows_."

"You can't ask her."

"Of course I can't. That's why I'm asking you."

"I know nothing. I've hardly seen her."

Miss Proctor looked as if she were seeing her that moment without Fanny

Eliott's help.

"Poor dear Anne."

Anne Fletcher had been simply dear Anne, Mrs. Walter Majendie was poor

dear Anne.

Her friends were all sorry for her. They were inclined to be indignant

with Edith Majendie, who, they declared, had been at the bottom of her

marriage all along. She was the cause of Anne's original callings in

Prior Street. If it had not been for Edith, Anne could never have

penetrated that secret bachelor abode. The engagement had been an

awkward, unsatisfactory, sinister affair. It was a pity that Mr.

Majendie's domestic circumstances were such that poor dear Anne appeared

as having made all the necessary approaches and advances. If Mr. Majendie

had had a family that family would have had to call on Anne. But Mr.

Majendie hadn't a family, he had only Edith, which was worse than having

nobody at all. And then, besides, there was his history.

Mrs. Eliott looked distressed. Mr. Majendie's history could not

be explained away as too ancient to be interesting. In Scale a

seven-year-old event is still startlingly, unforgetably modern. Anne's

marriage had saddled her friends with a difficult responsibility, the

justification of Anne for that astounding step.

Acquaintances had been made to understand that Mrs. Eliott had had

nothing to do with it. They went away baffled, but confirmed in their

impression that she knew; which was, after all, what they wanted to know.

It was not so easy to satisfy the licensed curiosity of Anne's friends.

They came to-day in quantities, attracted by the news of the Majendies'

premature return from their honeymoon. Mrs. Eliott felt that Miss Proctor

and the Gardners were sitting on in the hope of meeting them.

Mrs. Eliott had been obliged to accept Anne's husband, that she might

retain Anne's affection. In this she did violence to her feelings, which

were sore on the subject of the marriage. It was not only on account of

the inglorious clouds he trailed. In any case she would have felt it as a

slight that her friend should have married without her assistance, and so

far outside the charmed circle of Thurston Square. She herself was for

the moment disappointed with Anne. Anne had once taken them all so

seriously. It was her solemn joy in Mrs. Eliott and her circle that had

enabled her young superiority to put up so long with the provincial

hospitalities of Scale on Humber. They, the slender aristocracy of

Thurston Square, were the best that Scale had to offer her, and they had

given her of their best. Socially, the step from Thurston Square to Prior

Street could not be defined as a going down; but, intellectually, it was

a decline, and morally (to those who knew Fanny Eliott and to Fanny

Eliott who _knew_) it was, by comparison, a plunge into the abyss. Fanny

Eliott was the fine flower of Thurston Square. She had satisfied even the

fastidiousness of Anne.

She owned that Mr. Majendie had satisfied it too. It was not that quality

in Anne that made her choice so--well, so incomprehensible.

It was Dr. Gardner's word. Dr. Gardner was the President of the Scale

Literary and Philosophic Society, and in any discussion of the

incomprehensible his word had weight. Vagueness was his foible, the

relaxation of an intellect uncomfortably keen. The spirit that looked

at you through his short-sighted eyes (magnified by enormous glasses)

seemed to have just returned from a solitary excursion in a dream. In

that mood the incomprehensible had for him a certain charm.

Mrs. Eliott had too much good taste to criticise Anne Majendie's. They

had simply got to recognise that Prior Street had more to offer her than

Thurston Square. That was the way she preferred to put it, effacing

herself a little ostentatiously.

Miss Proctor maintained that Prior Street had nothing to offer a creature

of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on

taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given

herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the

brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home

for spines, why, what must the man be like who could let her do it?

"My dear," said Mrs. Eliott, "he's a saint, if you're to believe Anne."

Even Dr. Gardner smiled. "I can't say that's exactly what I should call

him."

"Need we," said Mr. Eliott, "call him anything? So long as she thinks him

a saint--"

Mr. Eliott--Mr. Johnson Eliott--hovered on the borderland of culture,

with a spirit purified from commerce by a Platonic passion for the exact

sciences. He was, therefore, received in Thurston Square on his own as

well as his wife's merits. He too had his little weaknesses. Almost

savagely determined in matters of business, at home he liked to sit in

a chair and fondle the illusion of indifference. There was no part of

Mr. Eliott's mental furniture that was not a fixture, yet he scorned the

imputation of conviction. A hunted thing in his wife's drawing-room, Mr.

Eliott had developed in a quite remarkable degree the protective

colouring of stupidity.

"How can she?" said Miss Proctor. "She's a saint herself, and she ought

to know the difference."

"Perhaps," said Dr. Gardner, "that's why she doesn't."

"I'm sure," said Mrs. Eliott, "it was the original attraction. There

could be no other for Anne."

"The attraction was the opportunity for self-sacrifice. Whatever she's

makes of Mr. Majendie, she's bent on making a martyr of herself." Miss

Proctor met the vague eyes of her circle with a glance that was defiance

to all mystery. "It's quite simple. This marriage is a short cut to

canonisation, that's all."

Then it was that little Mrs. Gardner spoke. She had been married for a

year, and her face still wore its bridal look of possession that was

peace, the look that it would wear when Mrs. Gardner was seventy. Her

voice had a certain lucid and profound precision.

"Anne was always certain of herself. And since she cares for Mr. Majendie

enough to accept him and to accept his sister, and the rather _triste_

life which is all he has to offer her, doesn't it look as if, probably,

she knew her own business best?"

"I think," said Mr. Eliott firmly, "we may take it that she does."

Miss Proctor's departure was felt as a great liberation of the intellect.

Mrs. Pooley sat up in her corner and revived the conversation interrupted

by Miss Proctor. Mrs. Pooley had felt that to talk about Mrs. Majendie

was to waste Mrs. Eliott. Mrs. Majendie apart, Mrs. Pooley had many ideas

in common with her friend; but, whereas Mrs. Eliott would spend superbly

on one idea at a time, Mrs. Pooley's intellect entertained promiscuously

and beyond its means. It was inclined to be hospitable to ideas that had

never met outside it, whose encounter was a little distressing to

everybody concerned. Whenever this happened Mrs. Pooley would appeal to

Mr. Eliott, and Mr. Eliott would say, "Don't ask me. I'm a stupid fellow.

Don't ask me to decide anything."

Thus did Mr. Eliott wilfully obscure himself.

To-day he was more impregnably concealed than ever. He hadn't any

opinions of his own. They were too expensive. He borrowed other people's

when he wanted them. "But," said Mr. Eliott, "it is very seldom that I

do want an opinion. If you have any facts to give me--well and good." For

he knew that, at the mention of facts, Mrs. Pooley's intellect would

retreat behind a cloud and that his wife would pursue it there.

"I suppose," said Mrs. Eliott, "there's such a thing as realising your

ideals."

Her eyes gleamed and wandered and rested upon Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Gardner

had a singularly beautiful intellect which she was known to be shy of

displaying. People said that Dr. Gardner had fallen in love with it

years ago, and had only waited for it to mature before he married it.

Mrs. Gardner had a habit of sitting apart from the discussion and

untroubled by it, tolerant in her own excess of bliss. It irritated Mrs.

Eliott, on her Thursdays, to think of the distinguished ideas that Mrs.

Gardner might have introduced and didn't. She felt Mrs. Gardner's silence

as a challenge.

"I wonder" (Mrs. Eliott was always wondering) "what becomes of our ideals

when we've realised them."

The doctor answered. "My dear lady, they cease to be ideals, and we have

to get some more."

Mrs. Eliott, in her turn, was received into the cloud.

"Of course," said Mrs. Pooley, emerging from it joyously, "we must have

them."

"Of course," said Mrs. Eliott vaguely, as her spirit struggled with the

cloud.

"Of course," said Dr. Gardner. He was careful to array himself for

tea-parties in all his innocent metaphysical vanities, to scatter

profundities like epigrams, to flatter the pure intellects of ladies,

while the solemn vagueness of his manner concealed from them the

innermost frivolity of his thought. He didn't care whether they

understood him or not. He knew his wife did. Her wedded spirit moved

in secret and unsuspected harmony with his.

He had a certain liking for Mrs. Eliott. She seemed to him an apparition

mainly pathetic. With her attenuated distinction, her hectic ardour, her

brilliant and pursuing eye, she had the air of some doomed and dedicated

votress of the pure intellect, haggard, disturbing and disturbed. His

social self was amused with her enthusiasms, but the real Dr. Gardner

accounted for them compassionately. It was no wonder, he considered, that

poor Mrs. Eliott wondered. She had so little else to do. Her nursery

upstairs was empty, it always had been, always would be empty. Did she

wonder at that too, at the transcendental carelessness that had left her

thus frustrated, thus incomplete? Mrs. Eliott would have been scandalised

if she had known the real Dr. Gardner's opinion of her.

"I wonder," said she, "what will become of Anne's ideal."

"It's safe," said the doctor. "She hasn't realised it."

"I wonder, then, what will become of Anne."

Mrs. Pooley retreated altogether before this gross application of

transcendent truth. She had not come to Mrs. Eliott's to talk about

Mrs. Majendie.

Dr. Gardner smiled. "Oh, come," he said, "you _are_ personal."

"I'm not," said Mrs. Eliott, conscious of her lapse and ashamed of it.

"But, after all, Anne's my friend. I know people blamed me because I

never told her. How could I tell her?"

"No," said Mrs. Gardner soothingly, "how could you?"

"Anne," continued Mrs. Eliott, "was so reticent. The thing was all

settled before anybody could say a word."

"Well," said Dr. Gardner, "there's no good worrying about it now."

"Isn't it possible," said the little year-old bride, "that Mr. Majendie

may have told her himself?"

For Dr. Gardner had told her everything the day before he married her,

confessing to the light loves of his youth, the young lady in the Free

Library and all. She looked round with eyes widened by their angelic

candour. Even more beautiful than Mrs. Gardner's intellect were Mrs.

Gardner's eyes, and the love of them that brought the doctor's home from

their wanderings in philosophic dream. Nobody but Dr. Gardner knew that

Mrs. Gardner's intellect had cause to be jealous of her eyes.

"There's one thing," said Mrs. Eliott, suddenly enlightened. "Our not

having said anything at the time makes it easier for us to receive him

now."

"Aren't we all talking," said Mrs. Gardner, "rather as if Anne had

married a monster? After all, have we ever heard anything against

him--except Lady Cayley?"

"Oh no, never a word, have we, Johnson dear?"

"Never. He's not half a bad fellow, Majendie."

Dr. Gardner rose to go.

"Oh, please--don't go before they come."

Mrs. Gardner hesitated, but the doctor, vague in his approaches,

displayed a certain energy in his departure.

They passed Mrs. Walter Majendie on the stairs.

She had come alone. That, Mrs. Eliott felt, was a bad beginning. She

could see that it struck even Johnson's obtuseness as unfavourable, for

he presently effaced himself.

"Fanny," said Anne, holding her friend's evasive eye with the

determination of her query, "tell me, who are the Ransomes?"

"The Ransomes? Have they called?"

"Yes, but I was out. I didn't see them."

"Oh, my dear," said Mrs. Eliott, in a tone which implied that when Anne

_did_ see them----

"Are they very dreadful?"

"Well--they're not your sort."

Anne meditated. "Not--my--sort. And the Lawson Hannays, what sort are

they?"

"Well, we don't know them. But there are a great many people in Scale one

doesn't know."

"Are they socially impossible, or what?"

"Oh--socially, they would be considered--in Scale--all right. But he is,

or was, mixed up with some very queer people."

Anne's cold face intimated that the adjective suggested nothing to her.

Mrs. Eliott was compelled to be explicit. The word queer was applied in

Scale to persons of dubious honesty in business; whereas it was not so

much in business as in pleasure that Mr. Lawson Hannay had been queer.

"Mr. Hannay may be very steady now, but I believe he belonged to a very

fast set before he married her."

"And she? Is she nice?"

"She may be very nice for all I know."

"I think," said Anne, "she wouldn't call if she wasn't nice, you know."

She meant that if Mrs. Lawson Hannay hadn't been nice Walter would never

have sanctioned her calling.

"Oh, as for that," said her friend, "you know what Scale is. The less

nice they are the more they keep on calling. But I should think"--she had

suddenly perceived where Anne's argument was tending--"she is probably

all right."

"Do you know anything of Mr. Charlie Gorst?"

"No. But Johnson does. At least I'm sure he's met him."

Mrs. Eliott saw it all. Poor Anne was being besieged, bombarded by her

husband's set.

"Then he isn't impossible?"

"Oh no, the Gorsts are a very old Lincolnshire family. Quite grand. What

a number of people you're going to know, my dear. But, your husband isn't

to take you away from _all_ your old friends."

"He isn't taking me anywhere. I shall stay," said Anne proudly, "exactly

where I was before."

She was determined that her old friends should never know to what a

sorrowful place she had been taken.

"You dear," said Mrs. Eliott, holding out a suddenly caressing hand.

Anne trembled a little under the caress. "Fanny," said she, "I want you

to know him."

"I mean to," said Mrs. Eliott hurriedly.

"And I want him, even more, to know you."

"Then," Mrs. Elliot argued to herself, "she knows nothing; or she never

could suppose we would be kindred spirits."

But she carried it off triumphantly. "Well," said she, "I hope you're

free for the fifteenth?"

"The fifteenth?"

"Yes, or any other evening. We want to give a little dinner, dear, to you

and to your husband--for him to meet all your friends."

Anne tried not to look too grateful.

The upward way, then, was being prepared for him. Beneficent

intelligences were at work, influences were in the air, helping her

to raise him.

In her gladness she had failed to see that, considering the very obvious

nature of the civility, Fanny Eliott was making the least shade too much

of it.

CHAPTER VII

Anne presented herself that evening in her husband's study with a sheaf

of visiting cards in her hand. She thought it possible that she might

obtain further illumination by confronting him with them.

"Walter," said she "all these people have called on us. What do you think

I'd better do?"

"I think you'll have to call on them some day."

"All of them?"

He took the cards from her and glanced through them.

"Let me see. Charlie Gorst--we must be nice to him."

"Is _he_ nice?"

"I think so. Edie's very fond of him."

"And Mrs. Lawson Hannay?"

"Oh, you must call on her."

"Shall I like her."

"Possibly. You needn't see much of her if you don't."

"Is it easy to drop people?"

"Perfectly."

"And what about Mrs. Ransome?"

He frowned. "Has _she_ called?"

"Yes."

"I'll find out when she's not at home and let you know. You can call

then."

A fourth card he tore up and threw into the fire.

"Some people have confounded impudence."

Anne went away confirmed in her impression that Walter had a large

acquaintance to whom he was by no means anxious to introduce his wife. He

might, she reflected, have incurred the connection through the misfortune

of his business. The life of a ship-owner in Scale was fruitful in these

embarrassments.

But if these disagreeable people indeed belonged to the period she

mentally referred to as his "past," she was not going to tolerate them

for an instant. He must give them up.

She judged that he was prepared for so much renunciation. She hoped that

he would, in time, adopt her friends in place of them. He was inclined,

after all, to respond amicably to Mrs. Eliott's overtures.

Anne wondered how he would comport himself at the dinner on the

fifteenth. She owned to a little uneasiness at the prospect. Would he

indeed yield to the sobering influence of Thurston Square? Or would he

try to impose his alien, his startling personality on it? She had begun

to realise how alien he was, how startling he could be. Would he sit

silent, uninspiring and uninspired? Or would unholy and untimely

inspirations seize him? Would he scatter to the winds all conversational

conventions, and riot in his own unintelligible frivolity? What would he

say to Mrs. Eliott, that priestess of the pure intellect? Was there

anything in him that could be touched by her uncoloured, immaterial

charm? Would he see that Mr. Eliott's density was only a mask? Would

the Gardners bore him? And would he like Miss Proctor? And if he

didn't, would he show it, and how? His mere manners would, she knew, be

irreproachable, but she had no security for his spiritual behaviour. He

impressed her as a creature uncaught, undriven; graceful, but

immeasurably capricious.

The event surprised her.

For the first five minutes or so, it seemed that Mrs. Eliott and her

dinner were doomed to failure; so terrible a cloud had fallen on her, and

on her husband, and on every guest. Never had the poor priestess appeared

so abstract an essence, so dream-driven and so forlorn. Never had Mr.

Eliott worn his mask to so extinguishing a purpose. Never had Miss

Proctor been so obtrusively superior, Mrs. Gardner so silent, Dr. Gardner

so vague. They were all, she could see, possessed, crushed down by their

consciousness of Majendie and his monstrous past.

Into this circle, thus stupefied by his presence, Majendie burst with the

courage of unconsciousness.

Mr. Eliott had started a topic, the conduct of Sir Rigley Barker, the

ex-member for Scale. A heavy ball of conversation began to roll slowly up

and down the table, between Mr. Eliott and Dr. Gardner. Majendie snatched

at it deftly as it passed him, caught it, turned it in his hands till it

grew golden under his touch. Mr. Eliott thought there wasn't much in poor

Sir Rigley.

"Not much in him?" said Majendie. "How about that immortal speech of

his?"

"Immortal--" echoed Mr. Eliott dubiously.

"Indestructible! The poor fellow couldn't end it. It simply coiled and

uncoiled itself and went off, in great loops, into eternity. It began in

all innocence--naturally, as it was his maiden speech--when he rose,

don't you know, to propose an amendment. I take it that speech was so

maidenly that it shrank from anything in the nature of a proposal. It

went on in a terrified manner, coyly considering and hesitating--till it

cleared the House. And he was awfully pleased when we congratulated him

on his 'maidenly reserve.'"

"How did he ever get elected?" said Miss Proctor.

"My dear lady, it was a glorious stroke of the Opposition. They withdrew

their candidate when he contested the election. Of course, they felt that

he'd only got to make a speech and there'd be a dissolution. You simply

saw Parliament melting away before him. If he'd gone on he'd have worn

out the British constitution."

Dr. Gardner looked at Mrs. Gardner and their eyes brightened, as Majendie

continued to unfold the amazing resources of Sir Rigley. He breathed on

the ex-member like a god, and played with him like a juggler; he tossed

him into the air and kept him there, a radiant, unsubstantial thing. The

ex-member disported himself before Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party as he had

never disported himself in Parliament. Majendie had given him a career,

endowed him with glorious attributes. The ex-member, as a topic,

developed capacities unsuspected in him before. The others followed his

flight breathless, afraid to touch him lest he should break and disappear

under their hands.

By the time Majendie had done with him, the ex-member had entered on a

joyous immortality in Scale.

And in the middle of it all Anne laughed.

Miss Proctor was the first to recover from the surprise of it. She leaned

across the table with a liberal and vivid smile, opulent in appreciation.

"Well, Mr. Majendie, Sir Rigley ought to be grateful to you. If ever

there was a dull subject dead and buried, it was he, poor man. And now

the difficulty will be to forget him."

"I don't think," said Majendie gravely, "I shall forget him myself in a

hurry."

Oh no, he never would forget Sir Rigley. He didn't want to forget him. He

would be grateful to him as long as he lived. He had made Anne laugh. A

girl's laugh, young and deliciously uncontrollable, springing from the

immortal heart of joy.

It was the first time he had heard her laugh so. He didn't know she could

do it. The hope of hearing her do it again would give him something to

live for. He would win her yet if he could make her laugh.

Anne was more surprised than anybody, at him and at herself. It was a

revelation to her, his cleverness, his brilliant social gift. She was

only intimate with one kind of cleverness, the kind that feeds itself on

lectures and on books. She had not thought of Walter as clever. She had

only thought of him as good. That one quality of goodness had swallowed

up the rest.

Miss Proctor took possession of her where she sat in the drawing-room, as

it were amid the scattered fragments of the ex-member (he still, among

the ladies, emitted a feeble radiance). Miss Proctor had always approved

of Anne. If Anne had no metropolitan distinction to speak of, she was not

in the least provincial. She was something by herself, superior and rare.

A little inclined to take herself too seriously, perhaps; but her

husband's admirable levity would, no doubt, improve her.

"My dear," said Miss Proctor, "I congratulate you. He's brilliant, he's

charming, he's unique. Why didn't we know of him before? Where has he

been hiding his talents all this time?"

(A talent that had not bloomed in Thurston Square was a talent pitiably

wasted.)

Anne smiled a blanched, perfunctory smile. Ah, where had he been hiding

himself, indeed?

Miss Proctor stood central, radiating the rich afterglow of her

appreciation. Her gaze was a little critical of her friends' faces, as

if she were measuring the effect, on a provincial audience, of Majendie's

conversational technique. She swept down to a seat beside her hostess.

"My dear Fanny," she said, "why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you--"

"That he was that sort. I didn't know there was such a delightful man in

Scale. What have you all been dreaming of?"

Mrs. Eliott tried to look both amiable and intelligent. In the presence

of Mr. Majendie's robust reality it was indeed as if they had all been

dreaming. Her instinct told her that the spirit of pure comedy was

destruction to the dreams she dreamed. She tried to be genial to her

guest's accomplishment; but she felt that if Mr. Majendie's talents were

let loose in her drawing-room, it would cease to be the place of

intellectual culture. On the other hand she perceived that Miss Proctor's

idea was to empty that drawing-room by securing Mr. Majendie for her own.

Mrs. Eliott remained uncomfortably seated on her dilemma.

Sounds of laughter reached her from below. The men were unusually late in

returning to the drawing-room. They appeared a little flushed by the

hilarious festival, as if Majendie had had on them an effect of mild

intoxication. She could see that even Dr. Gardner was demoralised. He

wore, under his vagueness, the unmistakable air of surrender to an

unfamiliar excess. Mr. Eliott too had the happy look of a man who has fed

loftily after a long fast.

"Anne dear," said Majendie, as they walked back the few yards between

Thurston Square and Prior Street, "we shan't have to do that very often,

shall we?"

"Why not? You can't say we didn't have a delightful evening."

"Yes, but it was very exhausting, dear, for me."

"You? You didn't show much sign of exhaustion. I never heard you talk so

well."

"Did I talk well?"

"Yes. Almost too well."

"Too much, you mean. Well, I had to talk, when nobody else did. Besides,

I did it for a purpose."

But what his purpose was Majendie did not say.

Anne had been human enough to enjoy a performance so far beyond the range

of her anticipations. She was glad, above all, that Walter had made

himself acceptable in Thurston Square. But when she came to think of

what was, what must be known of him in Scale, she was appalled by his

incomprehensible ease of attitude. She reflected that this must have been

the first time he had dined in Thurston Square since the scandal. Was it

possible that he did not realise the insufferable nature of that

incident, the efforts it must have cost to tolerate him, the points that

had been stretched to take him in? She felt that it was impossible to

exaggerate the essential solemnity of that evening. They had met

together, as it were, to celebrate Walter's return to the sanctities

and proprieties he had offended. He had been formally forgiven and

received by the society which (however Fanny Eliott might explain away

its action) had most unmistakably cast him out. She had not expected him

to part with his indomitable self-possession under the ordeal, but she

could have wished that he had borne himself with a little more modesty.

He had failed to perceive the redemptive character of the feast, he had

turned it into an occasion for profane personal display.

Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party had not saved him; on the contrary, he had

saved the dinner-party.

CHAPTER VIII

Anne was right. Though Majendie was, as he expressed it, "up to her

designs upon his unhappy soul," he remained unconscious of the part to be

played by Mrs. Eliott and her circle in the scheme of his salvation. From

his observation of the aristocracy of Thurston Square, it would never

have occurred to him that they were people who could count, whichever way

you looked at them.

Meanwhile he was a little disturbed by his own appearance as a heavenward

pilgrim. He was not sure that he had not gone a little too far that way,

and he felt that it was a shame to allow Anne to take him seriously.

He confided his scruples to Edith.

"Poor dear," he said, "it's quite pathetic. You know, she thinks she's

saving me."

"And do you mind being saved?"

"Well, no, I don't mind a little of it. But the question is, how long I

can keep it up."

"You mean, how long she'll keep it up?"

He laughed. "Oh, she'll keep it up for ever. No possible doubt about

that. She'll never tire. I wonder if I ought to tell her."

"Tell her what?"

"That it won't work. That she can't do it that way. She's wasting my time

and her own."

"Oh, what's a little time, dear, when you've all eternity in view?"

"But I haven't. I've nothing in view. My view, at present, is entirely

obscured by Anne."

"Poor Anne! To think she actually stands between you and your Maker."

"Yes, you know--in her very anxiety to introduce us."

They looked at each other. Her sainthood was so accomplished, her union

with heaven so complete, that she could afford herself these profaner

sympathies. She was secretly indignant with Anne's view of Walter as

unpresentable in the circles of the spiritual _elite_.

"It never struck her that you mightn't need an introduction after all;

that you were in it as much as she. That's the sort of mistake one might

expect from--from a spiritual parvenu, but not from Anne."

"Oh, come, I don't consider myself her equal by a long chalk."

"Well, say she does belong to the peerage; you're a gentleman, and what

more can she require?"

"She can't see that I am (If I am. You say so). She considers

me--spiritually--a bounder of the worst sort."

"That's her mistake. Though I must say you sometimes lend yourself to it

with your horrible profanity."

"I can't help it, Edie. She's so funny with it. She _makes_ me profane."

"Dear Walter, if you can think Anne funny--"

"I do. I think she's furiously funny, and horribly pathetic. All the

time, you know, she thinks she's leading me upward. Profanity's my only

refuge from hypocrisy."

"Oh no, not your only refuge. You say she thinks she's leading you. Don't

_let_ her think it. Make her think you're leading her."

"Do you think," said Majendie, "she'd enjoy that quite so much?"

"She'd enjoy it more. If you took her the right way. The way I mean."

"What's that?"

"You must find out," said she. "I'm not going to tell you everything."

Majendie became thoughtful. "My only fear was that I couldn't keep it up.

But you really don't think, then, that I should score much if I did?"

"No, my dear, I don't. And as for keeping it up, you never could. And if

you did she'd never understand what you were doing it for. That's not the

way to show you're in love with her."

"But that's just what I don't want her to see. That's what she hates so

much in me. I've always understood that in these matters it's discreeter

not to show your hand too plainly. You see, it's just as if we'd never

been married, for all she cares. That's the trouble."

"There's something in that. If she's not in love with you--"

"Look here, Edie, you're a woman, and you know all about them. Do you

really, honestly think Anne ever was in love with me?"

"Oh, don't ask me. How should I know?"

"No, but," he persisted, "what do you think?"

"I think she _was_ in love."

"But not with me, though?"

"No, no, not with you."

"With whom, then?"

"Darling idiot, there wasn't any who. If there was, do you think I'd give

her away like that? If you'd asked me _what_ she was in love with--"

"Well, what then?"

"Your goodness. She was head over ears in love with that."

"I see. With something that I wasn't."

"No, with something that you were, that you are, only she doesn't know

it."

"Then," said Majendie, "you can't get out of it, she's in love with

_me_."

"Oh no, no, you dear goose, not with you. To be in love with you she'd

have to be in love with everything you're _not_, as well as everything

you are; with everything you have been, with everything you never were,

with everything you will be, with everything you might be, could be,

should be."

"That's a large order, Edie."

"There's a larger one than that. She might sweep all that overboard, see

it go by whole pieces (the best pieces) at a time, and still be in love

with the dear, incomprehensible, indescribable _you_. That," said Edie,

triumphant in her wisdom, "is what being in love is."

"And do you think she isn't in it?"

"No. Not anywhere near it. But--it's a big but--"

"I don't care how big it is. Don't bother me with it."

"Bother you? Why, it's a beautiful but. As I said, she isn't in love with

you; but she may be any minute. It's just touch and go with her. It

depends on _you_."

"Heavens, what am I to do? I've done everything."

"Yes, you have, but she hasn't. She's done nothing. She doesn't know how

to. You've got to show her."

He shook his head hopelessly. "You're beyond me. I don't understand.

There isn't anything for me to do. How am I to show her?"

"I mean show her what there is in it. What it means. What it's going to

be for her as well as you. Just go at it hard, harder than you did before

you married her."

"_I_ see, I've got to make love to her all over again."

"Exactly. All over again from the very beginning."

"I say!" He took it in, her idea, in all the width and splendour of its

simplicity. "And do it differently?"

"Oh, very differently."

"I don't quite see where the difference is to come in. What did I do

before that was so wrong?"

"Nothing. That's just the worst of it. It was all too right. Ever so much

too right. Don't you see? It's what we've been talking about. You made

her in love with your goodness. And she was in love with it, not because

it was _your_ goodness, but because it was her own. That's why she wanted

to marry it. She couldn't be in love with it for any other reason,

because she's an egoist."

"No. There you're quite wrong. That's what she isn't."

"Oh, you _are_ in love with her. Of course she's an egoist. All the

nicest women are. I'm an egoist myself. Do you love me less for it?"

"I don't love you less for anything."

"Well--unless you can make Anne jealous of me--and you can't--you've got

to love me less, now, dear boy. That's where I come in--to be kept out of

it."

She had led him breathless on her giddy round; she plunged him back into

bewilderment. He hadn't a notion where she was taking him to, where they

would come out; but there was a desperate delight in the impetuous

journey, the wind of her sudden flight lifted him and carried him on. He

had always trusted the marvellous inspirations of her heart. She had

failed him once; but now he could not deny that she had given him lights,

and he looked for a stupendous illumination at the end of the way.

"Out of it!" he exclaimed. "Why, where should I have been without you?

You were the beginning of it."

"I was indeed. You've got to take care I'm not the end of it, that's

all."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"I mean what I say. You don't want Anne to be in love with you for _my_

sake, do you?"

"N--no. I don't know that I do exactly. At least I should prefer that she

was in love with me for my own."

"Well, you must make her, then. That's why you've got to leave me out of

it. I've been too much in it all along. It was through me she conceived

that unfortunate idea of your goodness. I'm its father and its mother and

its nurse, I ministered to it every hour. I fed it, I brought it up, I

brought it _out_, I provided all the opportunity for its display. Nothing

else had a show beside your goodness, Wallie dear. It was something

monstrous. It took Anne's affection from you and concentrated it all on

itself. She worshipped it, she clung to it, she saw nothing else but it,

and when it went everything went. _You_ went first of all. Well, you must

just see that that doesn't happen again."

"You mean that I must lead a life of iniquity?"

"You mustn't lead a life of anything."

"Do you mean I mustn't be good any more?"

Majendie's imagination played hilariously with this fantastic, this

preposterous notion of his goodness.

"Oh yes, be good," said Edith, "but not too good. Above all, not too good

to me. Concentrate on her, stupid."

"I have concentrated," he moaned, mystified beyond endurance. "Besides,

you said I couldn't make her jealous."

"No, I wish you could. I mean, don't let her fall in love with your

devotion to me again. Don't hold her by that one rope. Hold her by all

your ropes; then, if one goes, it doesn't so much matter."

"I see. You don't trust my goodness."

"Oh, _I_ trust it, so will she again. But don't _you_ trust it. That

precious goodness of yours is your rival. A bad, dangerous rival. You've

got to beat it out of the field. Show that you're jealous of it. A little

judicious jealousy won't hurt." Edith's eyes were still and profound with

wisdom. "I don't believe you've ever yet made love to Anne properly.

That's what it all comes to."

"Oh, I say," said he, "what do you know about it?"

"I'm only judging," said Edith, "by the results."

"Oh, that isn't fair."

"Perhaps it isn't," she owned, her wisdom growing by what it fed on.

"You see, she wouldn't let me do it properly."

Edith pondered. "Yes, but how long ago is it? And you've been married

since."

"What difference does that make?"

"I should say it would make all the difference. Anne was a girl, then.

She didn't understand. She's a woman now. She does understand. She can be

appealed to."

He hid his face in his hands.

"I never thought of that," he murmured thickly.

"Of course you didn't."

"Edie," he said, and his face was still hidden, "however did you think of

it?"

"Oh, I don't know. I see some things, and then other things come round to

me. But you mustn't forget that _you've_ got to begin all over again from

the very beginning. You'll have to be very careful with her, every bit as

careful as if she were a strange lady you've just met at a dance. Don't

forget that she's strange, that she's another woman, in fact."

"I see. If there are to be many of these remarkable transformations of

Anne, I shall have all the excitement of polygamy without its drawbacks."

"You will. And it's the same for her, remember. You're a strange man.

You've just been introduced, you know--by me--and you're begging for the

pleasure of the first waltz, and Anne pretends that her programme is

full, and you look over her shoulder and see that it isn't, and that she

puts you down for all the nice ones. And you sit out all the rest, and

you flirt on the stairs, and take her in to supper, and, finally, you

know, you pull yourself together and you do it--in the conservatory. Oh,

it'll be so amusing, and so funny to watch. You'll begin by being most

awfully polite to each other."

"I suppose I may yet be permitted to call this strange young lady Anne?"

"Yes. That's because you remember that you _have_ known her once before,

a very long time ago, when you were children. You are children, both of

you. Oh, Walter, I believe you're looking forward to it; I believe you're

glad you've got to do it all over again."

"Yes, Edie, I positively believe I am."

He rose, laughing, prepared to begin that minute his new wooing of Anne.

"Good-bye," said Edith, "it _is_ good-bye, you know, and good luck to

you."

This time she knew that she had been wise for him.

Anne would have been horrified if she had known that the situation, so

terrible for her, was developing for her husband certain possibilities of

charm. His irrepressible boyishness refused to accept it in all its moral

gloom. There were, he perceived, advantages in these strained relations.

They had removed Anne into the mysterious realm her maidenhood had

inhabited, before marriage had had time to touch her magic. She had

become once more the unapproachable and unattained. Their first

courtship, pursued under intolerable restrictions of time and place, had

been a rather uninspired affair, and its end a foregone conclusion. He

had been afraid of himself, afraid sometimes of her. For he had not

brought her the spontaneous, unalarmed, unspoiled spirit of his youth.

He had come to her with a stain on his imagination and a wound in his

memory. And she was holy to him. He had held himself in, lest a touch,

a word, a gesture should recall some insufferable association.

Marriage had delivered him from the tyranny of reminiscence. No

reminiscence could stand before the force of passion in possession. It

purified; it destroyed; it built up in three days its own inviolable

memory.

And Anne, with the best will in the world, had had no power to undo its

work in him.

In herself, too, below her kindling spiritual consciousness, in the

unexplored depth and darkness of her, its work remained.

Majendie was unaware how far he had become another man and she another

woman. He was merely alive to the unusual and agreeable excitement of

wooing his own wife. There was a piquancy in the experiment that appealed

to him. Her new coldness called to him like a challenge. Her new

remoteness waked the adventurous youth in him. His imagination was

touched as it had not been touched before. He could see that Anne had

not yet got over her discovery. The shock of it was in her nerves. He

felt that she shrank from him, and his chivalry still spared her.

He ceased to be her husband and became her very courteous, very distant

lover. He made no claims, and took nothing for granted. He simply began

all over again from the very beginning. His conscience was vaguely

appeased by the illusion of the new leaf, the rejuvenated innocence of

the blank page. They had never been married (so the illusion suggested).

There had been no revelations. They met as strangers in their own house,

at their own table. In support of this pleasing fiction he set about his

courtship with infinite precautions. He found himself exaggerating Anne's

distance and the lapse of intimacy. He made his way slowly, through all

the recognised degrees, from mere acquaintance, through friendship to

permissible fervour.

And from time to time, with incomparable discretion, he would withhold

himself that he might make himself more precious. He was hardly aware of

his own restraint, his refinements of instinct and of mood. It was as if

he drew, in his desperate necessity, upon unrealised, untried resources.

There was something in Anne that checked the primitive impulse of swift

chase, and called forth the curious half-feminine cunning of the

sophisticated pursuer. She froze at his ardour, but his coldness almost

kindled her, so that he approached by withdrawals and advanced by

flights.

He displayed, first of all, a heavenly ignorance, an inspired curiosity

regarding her. He consulted her tastes, as if he had never known them; he

started the time-honoured lovers' topics; he talked about books--which

she preferred and the reasons for her preference.

He did not advance very far that way. Anne was simply annoyed at the

lapses in his memory.

He then began to buy books on the chance of her liking them, which

answered better.

He promoted himself by degrees to personalities. He talked to her about

herself, handling her with religious reticence as a thing of holy and

incomprehensible mystery.

"I suppose," he said one day, "if I were good enough, I should understand

you. Why do you sigh like that? Is it because I'm not good enough? Or

because I don't understand?"

"I think," said she, "it is because I don't understand you."

"My dear" (he allowed himself at this point the more formal endearment),

"I thought I was disgracefully transparent--I'm limpidity, simplicity

itself. I've only one idea and one subject of conversation. Ask Edith.

She understands me."

"Ah, Edith--" said Anne, as if Edith were a very different affair.

The intonation was hopeful, it suggested some slender and refined

jealousy. (If only he could make her jealous!)

On the strength of it he advanced to the punctual daily offering of

flowers, flowers for her drawing-room, flowers for her bedroom, flowers

for her to wear. After that he took to writing her letters from the

office with increasing frequency and fervour. Anne, too, was courteous

and distant. She accepted all he had to offer as a becoming tribute to

her feminine superiority, and evaded dexterously the deeper issue.

Now and then he reported his progress to Edith.

"I rather think," he said, "she's coming round. I'm regarded as a

distinctly eligible person."

They laughed at his complete adoption of the part and his innocent joy in

it.

That had always been his way. When he had begun a game there was no

stopping him. He played it through to the end.

Edith would look up smiling and say: "Well, how goes the affair?" (They

always called it the affair.) Or: "How did you get on to-day?"

And it would be: "Pretty well."--"Better to-day than yesterday."--"No

luck to-day."

One Sunday he came to her radiant.

"She really does," said he, "seem interested in what I say."

"What did you talk about?"

"The influence of Christianity on woman. Was that good?"

"Very good."

"I didn't know very much about it, but I got her to tell me things."

"That," said Edith, "was still better."

"But she sticks to it that she doesn't understand me. That's bad."

"No," said Edith, "that's best of all. It shows she's thinking of you.

She wants to understand. Believe me, the affair marches."

He meditated on that.

In the evening, the better to meditate, he withdrew to his study. It was

not long before Anne came to him of her own accord. She asked if she

might read aloud to him.

"I should be honoured," he replied stiffly.

She chose Emerson, "On Compensation." And Majendie did not care for

Emerson.

But Anne had a charming voice; a voice with tones that penetrated like

pain, that thrilled like a touch, that clung delicately like a shy

caress; tones that were as a funeral bell for sadness; tones that rose to

passion without ever touching it; clear, cool tones that were like water

to passion's flame. Majendie closed his eyes and let her voice play over

him.

"Did you like it?" she asked gravely.

"Like it? I love it."

"So do I. I _hoped_ you would."

"My dear, I didn't understand one word of it."

"You can't make me believe you loved it then."

He looked at her.

"I loved the sound of your voice, dear."

"Oh," said she coldly, "is that all?"

"Yes," he said, "isn't it enough?"

"I'd rather--" she began and hesitated.

"You'd rather I understood Emerson?"

Her blood flushed in the honey whiteness of her face. She rose, put the

book in its place, and left the room.

"Edith," he said, relating the incident afterwards, "I thought she was

coming round when she wanted to read to me. Why did she get up and go

like that?"

"She went, dear goose, because she was afraid to stay."

"Why afraid?"

"Because she's fighting you, Wallie. It's all right if she's got to

fight."

"Yes, but suppose she wins?"

"She can't win fighting--she's a woman. Her only chance is to run away."

That night Anne knelt by her bedside and hid her face and prayed for

Walter; that he might be purified, so that she might love him without

sin; that he and she might travel together on the divine way, and

together be received into the heavenly places.

She had felt that night the stirring of natural affection. It had come

back to her, a feeble, bruised, humiliated thing. She could not harbour

it without spiritual justification.

She kept herself awake by saying: "I can't love him, I can't love

him--unless God makes him fit for me to love."

Sleeping, she dreamed that she was in his arms.

CHAPTER IX

It was Anne's birthday. It shone in mid-May like the front of June.

Anne's bedroom was over Edith's and looked out on the garden. A little

rain had fallen over night. Through the open window the day greeted

her with a breath of flowers and earth; a day that came to her all

golden, ripe and sweet from the south.

Her dressing-table was placed sideways from the window. Anne, fresh from

her cold bath, in a white muslin gown, with her thick sleek hair coiled

and burnished, sat before the looking-glass.

There was a knock at the door, not Nanna's bold awakening summons, but a

shy and gentle sound. Her heart shook her voice as she responded.

"Is it permitted?" said Majendie.

"If you like," she answered quietly.

He presented his customary morning sacrifice of flowers. Hitherto he

had not presumed so far as to bring it to her room. It waited for her

decorously at breakfast time, beside her plate.

She took the flowers from him, acknowledged their fragrance by a

quiver of her delicate nostrils, thanked him, and laid them on the

dressing-table.

He seated himself on the window-sill, where he could see her with the day

upon her. She noticed that he had brought with him, beside the flowers, a

small oblong wooden box. He laid the box on his knee and covered it with

his hand. He sat very still, looking at her as her firm white hands

caressed her coiled hair into shape. Once she moved his flowers to find

her comb, and laid them down again.

"Aren't you going to wear them?" he inquired anxiously.

Her upper lip lifted an instant, caught up, in its fashion, by the pretty

play of the little sensitive amber mole. Two small white teeth showed and

were hidden again. It was as if she had been about to smile, or to speak,

and had thought better of it.

She took up the flowers and tried them, now at her breast, and now at her

waist.

"Where shall I put them?" said she. "Here? Or here?"

"Just there."

She let them stay there in the hollow of her breast.

He laid the box on the dressing-table close to her hand where it searched

for pins.

"I've brought you this," he said gently.

She smiled that divine and virgin smile of hers. Anne was big, but her

smile was small and close and shy.

"You remembered my birthday?"

"Did you think I should forget?"

She opened the lid with cool unhurried fingers. Under the wrappings of

tissue paper and cotton wool, a shape struck clear and firm and familiar

to her touch. A sacred thrill ran through her as she felt there the

presence of the holy thing, the symbol so dear and so desired that it was

divined before seen.

She lifted from the box an old silver crucifix. It must have been the

work of some craftsman whose art was pure and fine as the silver he

had wrought in. But that was not what Anne saw. She had always found

something painful and repellent in those crucifixes of wood which distort

and deepen the lines of ivory, or in those of ivory which gives again

the very pallor of human death. But the precious metal had somehow

eternalised the symbol of the crucified body. She saw more than the

torture, the exhaustion, the attenuation. Surely, on the closed eyelids

there rested the glory and the peace of divine accomplishment?

She stood still, holding it in her hand and looking at it. Majendie stood

still, also looking at her. He was not quite sure whether she were going

to accept that gift, whether she would hesitate to take from his profane

hands a thing so sacred and so supreme. He was aware that his fate

somehow hung on her acceptance, and he waited in silence, lest a word

should destroy the work of love in her.

Anne, too (when she could detach her mind from the crucifix), felt that

the moment was decisive. To accept that gift, of all gifts, was to lay

her spirit under obligation to him. It was more than a surrender of body,

heart, or mind. It was to admit him to association with the unspeakably

sacred acts of prayer and adoration.

If it were possible that that had been his desire; if he had meant his

gift as a tribute, not to her only, but to the spirit of holiness in her;

if, in short, he had been serious, then, indeed, she could not hesitate.

For, if it were so, her prayer was answered.

She laid down the crucifix and turned to him. They searched each other

with their eyes. She saw, without wholly understanding, the pain in his.

He saw, also unintelligently, the austerity in hers.

"Are you not going to take it, then?" he said.

"I don't know. Do you realise that you are giving me a very sacred

thing?"

"I do."

"And that I can't treat it as I would an ordinary present?"

He lowered his eyelids. "I didn't think you'd want to wear it in your

hair, dear."

She was about to ask him what he did mean then; but some instinct held

her, told her not to press the sign of grace too hard. She looked at him

still more intently. His eyes had disconcerted and baffled her, but now

she was sheltered by their lowered lids. Then she noticed for the first

time that his face showed the marks of suffering. It was as if it had

dropped suddenly the brilliant mask it wore for her, and given up its

secret unaware. He had suffered so that he had not slept. It was plain to

her in the droop of his eyelids, and in the drawn lines about his eyes

and mouth and nostrils. She was touched with tenderness and pity, and a

certain unintelligible awe. And she knew her hour. She knew that if she

closed her heart now, it would never open to him. She knew that it was

his hour as well as hers. She felt, reverently, that it was, above all,

God's hour.

She laid her hand on her husband's gift, saying to herself that if she

took that crucifix she would be taking him with it into the holy places

of her heart.

"I will take it." Her voice came shy and inarticulate as a marriage vow.

"Thank you," he said.

He wondered if she would turn to him with some sign of tenderness,

whether she would stoop to him and touch him with her hand or her lips;

or whether she looked to him to offer the first caress.

She did nothing. It was as if her intentness, her concentration upon

her holy purpose held her. While her soul did but turn to him in the

darkness, it kept and would keep their hands and lips apart.

He divined that she was only half-won. But, though her body yet moved in

its charmed inviolate circle, he felt dimly that the spiritual barrier

was down.

She turned from him and went slowly to the door. He opened it and

followed her. On the stairs she parted from him and went alone into his

sister's bedroom.

Edith's spine had been hurting her in the night. She lay flat and

exhausted, and the embrace of her loving arms was slow and frail.

Edith was what she called "dressed," and waiting for her sister-in-law.

The little table by her bed was strewn with the presents she had bought

and made for Anne. A birthday was a very serious affair for Edith. She

was not content to buy (buying was nothing; anybody could buy); she must

also make, and make beautifully. "I mayn't have any legs that can carry

me," said Edith; "but I've hands and I _will_ use them. If it wasn't for

my hands I'd be nothing but a great lumbering, lazy mass of palpitating

heart." But her making had become every year more and more expensive. Her

beautiful, pitiful embroideries were paid for in bad nights. And at six

o'clock that morning she had given her little dismal cry: "Oh, Nanna,

Nanna, my beast of a spine is going to bother me to-day, and it's Anne's

birthday!"

"And what else," said Nanna severely, "do you expect, Miss Edith?"

"I didn't expect this. I do believe it's getting worse."

"Worse?" Nanna was contemptuous. "It was worse on Master Walter's

birthday last year."

(Last year she had made a waistcoat.)

"I can't think," moaned Edith, "why it's always bad on birthdays."

But however badly "it" might behave in the night, it was never permitted

to destroy the spirit of the day.

Anne looked anxiously at the collapsed, exhausted figure in the bed.

"Yes," said Edith, having smiled at her sister-in-law with magnificent

mendacity, "you may well look at me. You couldn't make yourself as flat

as I am if you tried. There are two books for you, and a thingummy-jig,

and a handkerchief to blow your dear nose with."

"Edie--"

"Do you like them?"

"Like them? Oh, you dear--"

"Why don't you have a birthday oftener? It makes you look so pretty,

dear."

Anne's heart leaped. Edie's ways, her very words sometimes were like

Walter's.

"Has Walter seen you?"

Anne's face became instantly solemn, but it was not sad.

"Edie," she said, "do you know what he has given me!"

"Yes," said Edith. Her eyes searched Anne's eyes with pain in them that

was somehow akin to Walter's pain.

"She knows everything," thought Anne, "and it was her idea, then, not

his."

"Edith," said she, "was it you who thought of it, or he?"

"I? Never. He didn't say a word about it. He just went and got it. He

thought it all out by himself, poor dear."

"Can you think why he thought of it?"

"Yes," said Edith gravely, "I can. Can't you?"

Anne was silent.

"It's very simple. He wants you to trust him a little more, that's all."

Anne's mouth trembled, and she tightened it.

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Yes," she said, "I am."

"Because you think he isn't very spiritual?"

"Perhaps."

"Oh, but he's on his way there," said Edith. "He's human. You've got to

be human before you can be spiritual. It's a most important part of the

process. Don't you omit it."

"Have I omitted it?"

She stroked one of the thin hands that were out-stretched towards her on

the coverlet, and the other closed on her caress. The touch brought the

tears into her eyes. She raised her head to keep them from falling.

"Dear," said Edith, and paused and reiterated, "dear, you have about all

the big things that I haven't. You're splendid. There's only one thing I

want for you. If you could only see how divinely sacred the human part of

us is--and how pathetic."

Anne looked at her as she lay there, bright and brave, untroubled by her

own mortal pathos. In her, humanity, woman's humanity, was reduced to its

simplest expression of spiritual loving and bodily suffering. Anne was a

child in her ignorance of the things that had been revealed to Edith

lying there.

Looking at her, Anne's tears grew heavy and fell.

"It's your birthday," said Edith softly.

And as she heard Majendie's foot on the stairs Anne dried her eyes on the

birthday pocket handkerchief.

"Here she is," said Edith as he entered. "What are you going to do with

her? She doesn't have a birthday every day."

"I'm going," he said, "to take her down to breakfast."

Their meals so abounded in occasions for courtesy that they had become

profoundly formal. This morning Anne's courtesy was coloured by some

emotion that defied analysis. She wore her new mood like a soft veil

that heightened her attraction in obscuring it.

He watched her with a baffled preoccupation that kept him unusually

quiet. His quietness did him good service with Anne in her new mood.

When the meal was over she rose and went to the window. The sedate

Georgian street was full of the day that shone soberly here from the cool

clear north.

"What are you thinking of?" said he.

"I'm thinking what a beautiful day it is."

"Yes, isn't it a jolly day?"

"If it's beautiful here, what must it be in the country?"

"The country?" A thought struck him. "I say, would you like to go there?"

"Do you mean to-day?"

Her upper lip lifted, and the two teeth showed again on the pale rose of

its twin. In spite of the dignity of her proportions, Anne had the look

of a child contemplating some hardly permissible delight.

"Now, this minute. There's a train to Westleydale at nine fifty."

"It would be very nice. But--how about business?"

"Business be--"

"No, no, _not_ that word."

"But it is, you know; it can't help itself. There's a devil in all the

offices in Scale at this time of the year."

"Would _you_ like it?"

"I? Rather. I'm on!"

"But--Edith--oh no, we can't."

She turned with a sudden gesture of renunciation, so that she faced him

where he stood smiling at her. His face grew grave for her.

"Look here," he said, "you mustn't be morbid about Edith. It isn't

necessary. All the time we're gone, she'll be there, in perfect bliss

with simply thinking of the good time _we_'re having."

"But her back's bad to-day."

"Then she'll be glad that we're not there to feel it. Her back will add

to her happiness, if anything."

She drew in a sharp breath, as if he had hurt her.

"Oh, Walter, how can you?"

He replied with emphasis. "How can I? I can, not because I'm a brute, as

you seem to suppose, but because she's a saint and an angel. I take off

my hat and go down on my knees when I think of her. Go and put _your_

hat on."

She felt herself diminished, humbled, and in two ways. It was as if he

had said: "You are not the saint that Edith is, nor yet the connoisseur

in saintship that I am."

She knew that she was not the one; but to the other distinction she

certainly fancied that she had the superior claim. And she had never yet

come behind him in appreciation of Edith. Besides, she was hurt at being

spoken to in that way on her birthday.

Her resentment faded when she found him standing at the foot of the

stairs by Edith's door, waiting for her. He looked up at her as she

descended, and his eyes brightened with pleasure at the sight.

Edith was charmed with their plan. It might have been conceived as an

exquisite favour to herself, by the fine style in which she handled it.

They set out, Majendie carrying the luncheon basket and Anne's coat. He

had changed, and appeared in the Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and cap

he had worn at Scarby. The pang that struck her at the sight of them was

softened by her practical perception of their fitness for the adventure.

They became him, too, and she had memory of the charm he had once worn

for her with that open-air attire.

An hour's journey by rail brought them to the little wayside station.

They turned off the high road, walked for ten minutes across an upland

field, and came to the bridle-path that led down into the beech-woods of

Westleydale, in the heart of the hills.

They followed a mossy trail. The shade fell thin, warm, and

coloured, from leaves so tender that the light passed through their

half-transparent panes. Overhead there was the delicate scent of green

things and of sap, and underfoot the deep smell of moss and moistened

earth.

Anne drew the deep breath of delight. She took off her hat and gloves,

and moved forward a few steps to a spot where the wood opened and the

vivid light received her. Majendie hung back to look at her. She turned

and stood before him, superb and still, shrined in a crescent of tall

beech stems, column by column, with the light descending on the fine gold

of her hair. Nothing in Anne even remotely suggested a sylvan and

primeval creature; but, as she stood there in her temperate and alien

beauty, she seemed to him to have yielded to a brief enchantment. She

threw back her head, as if her white throat drank the sweet air like

wine. She held out her white hands, and let the warmth play over them

palpably as a touch.

And Majendie longed to take her by those white hands and draw her to him.

If he could have trusted her; but some instinct plucked him backward,

saying to him: "Not yet."

A mossy rise under a beech-tree offered itself to Anne as a suitable

throne for the regal woman that she was. He spread out her coat, and she

made room for him beside her. He sat for a long time without speaking.

The powers which were working that day for Majendie gave to him that

subtle silence. He had, at most times, an inexhaustible capacity for

keeping still.

Above them, just discernible through the tree-tops, veiled by a gauze of

dazzling air, the hill brooded in its majestic dream. Its green arms,

plunging to the valley, gathered them and shut them in.

Majendie's figure was not diminished by the background. The smallest

nervous movement on his part would have undone him, but he did not move.

His profound stillness, suggesting an interminable patience, gave him a

beautiful immensity of his own.

Anne, left in her charmed, inviolate circle, surrendered sweetly to the

spirit of Westleydale.

The place was peace folded upon the breast of peace.

Presently she spoke, calling his name, as if out of the far-off

unutterable peace.

"Walter, it was kind of you to bring me here."

"I am so glad you like it."

"I do indeed."

He tried to say more, but his heart choked him.

She closed her eyes, and the peace poured over her, and sank in. Her

heart beat quietly.

She opened her eyes and turned them on her husband. She knew that it was

his gaze that had compelled them to open. She smiled to herself, like a

young girl, shyly but happily aware of him, and turned from him to her

contemplation of the woods.

Anne had always rather prided herself on her susceptibility to the beauty

of nature, but it had never before reached her with this poignant touch.

Hitherto she had drawn it in with her eyes only; now it penetrated her

through every nerve. She was vaguely but deliciously aware of her own

body as a part of it, and of her husband's joy in contemplating her.

"He thinks me good-looking," she said to herself, and the thought came to

her as a revelation.

Then her young memory woke again and thrust at her.

"He thinks me good-looking. That's why he married me."

She longed to find out if it were so.

"Walter," said she, "I want to ask you a question."

"Well--if it's an easy one."

"It isn't--very. What made you want to marry me?"

He paused a moment, searching for the truth.

"Your goodness."

"Is that really true?"

"To the best of my belief, madam, it is."

"But there are so many other women better than me."

"Possibly. I haven't been happy enough to meet them."

"And if you had met them?"

"As far as I can make out, I shouldn't have fallen in love with them.

I shouldn't have fallen in love with _you_, if it hadn't been for your

goodness. But I shouldn't have fallen in love with your goodness in any

other woman."

"Have you known many other women?"

"One way and another, in the course of my life--yes. And what I liked so

much about you was your difference from those other women. You gave me

rest from them and their ways. They bored me even when I was half in love

with them, and made me restless for them even when I wasn't a little bit.

It was as if they were always expecting something from me--I couldn't

for the life of me tell what--always on the look out, don't you know, for

some mysterious moment that never arrived."

She thought she knew. She felt that he was describing vaguely and with

incomparable innocence the approaches of the ladies who had once designed

to marry him. He had never seen through them; they (and they must have

been so obvious, those ladies) had remained for him inscrutable,

mysterious. He could deal competently with effects, but he was not clever

at assigning causes.

He seemed conscious of her reflections. "They were quite nice, don't you

know. Only they couldn't let you alone. You let me alone so perfectly.

Being with you was peace."

"I see," she said quietly. "It was peace. That was all."

"Oh, was it? That was only the beginning, if you must know how it began."

"It began," she murmured, "in peace. That was what struck you most in me.

I must have seemed to you at peace, then."

"You did--you did. Weren't you?"

"I must have been. But I've forgotten. It's so long ago. There's peace

here, though. Why didn't we choose this place instead of Scarby?"

"I wish we had. I say--are you never going to forget that?"

"I've forgiven it. I might forget it if I could only understand."

"Understand _what_?"

"How you could be capable of caring for me--like that--and yet--"

"But the two things are so entirely different. It's impossible to explain

to you how different. Heaven forbid that you should understand the

difference."

"I understand enough to know--"

"You understand enough to know nothing. You must simply take my word for

it. Besides, the one thing's an old thing, over and done with."

"Over and done with. But if the two things are so different, how can you

be sure?"

"That sounds awfully clever of you, but I'm hanged if I know what you

mean."

"I mean, how can you tell that it--the old thing--never would come back?"

It _was_ clever of her. He realised that he had to deal now with a more

complete and complex creature than Anne had been.

"How could it?" he asked.

"If _she_ came back--"

"Never. And if it did--"

"Ah, if it did--"

"It couldn't in this case--my case--your case--"

"Her case--" she whispered.

"Her case? She hasn't got one. She simply doesn't exist. She might come

back as much as she pleased, and still she wouldn't exist. Is _that_ what

you've been afraid of all the time?"

"I never was really afraid till now."

"What you're afraid of couldn't happen. You can put that out of your head

for ever. If I could mention you in the same sentence as that woman you

should know why I am so certain. As it is, I must ask you again to take

my word for it."

He paused.

"But, since you have raised the question--and it's interesting, too--I

knew a man once--not a 'bad' man--to whom that very thing did happen. And

it didn't mean that he'd left off caring for his wife. On the contrary,

he was still insanely fond of her."

"What did it mean, then?"

"That she'd left off showing that she cared for him. And he cared more

for her, that man, after having left her, than he did before. In its way

it was a sort of test."

"I pray heaven--" said Anne; but she was too greatly shocked by the

anecdote to shape her prayer.

Majendie, feeling that the time, the place, and her mood were propitious

for the exposition, went on.

"There's another man I know. He was very fond of Edie. He's fond of her

still. He'll come and sit for hours playing backgammon with her. And yet

all his fondness for her hasn't kept him entirely straight. But he'd have

been as straight as anybody if he could have married her."

"But what does all this prove?"

"It proves nothing," he said almost passionately, "except that these two

things, just because they're different, are not so incompatible as you

seem to think."

"Did Edie care for that man?"

"I believe so."

"Ah, don't you see? There's the difference. What made Edie a saint made

him a sinner."

"I doubt if Edie would look on it quite in that light. She thinks it was

uncommonly hard on him."

"Does she know?"

"Oh, there's no end to the things that Edie knows."

"And she loves him in spite of it?"

"Yes. I suppose there's no end to that either."

No end to her loving. That was the secret, then, of Edie's peace.

Anne meditated upon that, and when she spoke again her voice rang on its

vibrating, sub-passionate note.

"And you said that I gave you rest. You were different."

He made as if he would draw nearer to her, and refrained. The kind heart

of Nature was in league with his. Nature, having foreknowledge of her own

hour, warned him that his hour was not yet.

And so he waited, while Nature, mindful of her purpose, began in Anne

Majendie her holy, beneficent work. The soul of the place was charged

with memories, with presciences, with prophecies. A thousand woodland

influences, tender timidities, shy assurances, wooed her from her soul.

They pleaded sweetly, persistently, till Anne's brooding face wore the

flush of surrender to the mysteries of earth.

The spell was broken by a squirrel's scurrying flight in the boughs above

them. Anne looked up, and laughed, and their moment passed them by.

CHAPTER X

"Are you tired?" he asked.

They had walked about the wood, made themselves hungry, and lunched like

labourers at high noon.

"No, I'm only thirsty. Do you think there's a cottage anywhere where you

could get me some water?"

"Yes, there's one somewhere about. I'll try and find it if you'll sit

here and rest till I come back."

She waited. He came back, but without the water. His eyes sparkled with

some mysterious, irrepressible delight.

"Can't you find it?"

"Rather. I say, do come and look. There's such a pretty sight."

She rose and went with him. Up a turning in the dell, about fifty yards

from their tree, a long grassy way cut sheer through a sheet of wild

hyacinths. It ran as if between two twin borders of blue mist, that

hemmed it in and closed it by the illusion of their approach. On either

side the blue mist spread, and drifted away through the inlets of the

wood, and became a rarer and rarer atmosphere, torn by the tree-trunks

and the fern. The path led to a small circular clearing, a shaft that

sucked the daylight down. It was as if the sunshine were being poured in

one stream from a flooded sky, and danced in the dark cup earth held for

it. The trees grew close and tall round the clearing. Light dripped from

their leaves and streamed down their stems, turning their grey to silver.

The bottom of the cup was a level floor of grass that had soaked in light

till it shone like emerald. A stone cottage faced the path; so small that

a laburnum brushed its roof and a may-tree laid a crimson face against

the grey gable of its side. The patch of garden in front was stuffed with

wall-flowers and violets. The sun lay warm on them; their breath stirred

in the cup, like the rich, sweet fragrance of the wine of day.

Majendie grasped Anne's arm and led her forward.

In the middle of the green circle, under the streaming sun, cradled in

warm grass, a girl baby sat laughing and fondling her naked feet. She

laughed as she lay on her back and opened one folded, wrinkled foot to

the sun; she laughed as she threw herself forward and beat her knees with

the outspread palms of her hands; she laughed as she rocked her soft body

to and fro from her rosy hips; then she stopped laughing suddenly, and

began crooning to herself a delicious, unintelligible song.

"Look," said Majendie, "that's what I wanted to show you."

"Oh--oh--oh--" said Anne, and looked, and stood stock-still.

The beatitude of that adorable little figure possessed the scene. Green

earth and blue sky were so much shelter and illumination to its pure and

solitary joy.

"Did you ever see anything so heart-rending?" said Majendie. "That

anything could be so young!"

Anne shook her head, dumb with the fascination.

As they approached again, the little creature rolled on its waist, and

crawled over the grass to her feet.

"The little lamb--" said she, and stooped, and lifted it.

It turned to her, cuddling. Through the thin muslin of her bodice she

could feel the pressure of its tender palms.

Majendie stood close to her and tried gently to detach and possess

himself of the delicate clinging fingers. But his eyes were upon

Anne's eyes. They drew her; she looked up, her eyes flashed to the

meeting-point; his widened in one long penetrating gaze.

A sudden pricking pain went through her, there where the pink and flaxen

thing lay sun-warm and life-warm to her breast.

At first she did not heed it. She stood hushed, attentive to the

prescience that woke in her; surrendered to the secret, with desire that

veiled itself to meet its unveiled destiny.

Then the veil fell.

The eyes that looked at her grew tender, and before their tenderness the

veil, the veil of her desire that had hidden him from her, fell.

Her face burned, and she hid it against the child's face as it burrowed

into the softness of her breast. When she would have parted the child

from her, it clung.

She laughed. "Release me." And he undid the clinging arms, and took the

child from her, and laid it again in the cradling grass.

"It's conceived a violent passion for you," said he.

"They always do," said she serenely.

The door of the cottage was open. The mother stood on the threshold,

shading her eyes and wondering at them. She gave Anne water, hospitably,

in an old china cup.

When Anne had drunk she handed the cup to her husband. He drank with his

eyes fixed on her over the brim, and gave it to her again. He wondered

whether she would drink from it after him (Anne was excessively

fastidious). To his intense satisfaction, she drank, draining the last

drop.

They went back together to their tree. On the way he stopped to gather

wild hyacinths for her. He gathered slowly, in a grave and happy passion

of preoccupation. Anne stood erect in the path and watched him, and

laughed the girl's laugh that he longed to hear.

It was as if she saw him for the first time through Edith's eyes, with

so tender an intelligence did she take in his attitude, the absurd, the

infantile intentness of his stooping figure, the still more absurdly

infantile emotion of his hands. It was the very same attitude which had

melted Edith, that unhappy day when they had watched him as he walked

disconsolate in the garden, and she, his wife, had hardened her heart

against him. She remembered Edith's words to her not two hours ago:

"If you could only see how unspeakably sacred the human part of us is,

and how pathetic." Surely she saw.

The deep feeling and enchantment of the woods was upon her. He was sacred

to her; and for pathos, it seemed to her that there was poured upon his

stooping body all the pathos of all the living creatures of God.

She saw deeper. In the illumination that rested on him there, she saw the

significance of that carelessness, that happiness of his which had once

troubled her. It was simply that his experience, his detestable

experience, had had no power to harm his soul. Through it all he had

preserved, or, by some miracle of God, recovered an incorruptible

innocence. She said to herself: "Why should I not love him? His heart

must be as pure as the heart of that little blessed child."

The warning voice of the wisdom she had learnt from him whispered: "And

it rests with you to keep him so."

He led her to her tree, where she seated herself regally as before. He

poured his sheaves of hyacinths as tribute into her lap. As his hands

touched hers her cold face flushed again and softened. He stretched

himself beside her and love stirred in her heart, unforbidden, as in a

happy dream. He watched the movements of her delicate fingers as they

played with the tangled hyacinth bells. Her hands were wet with the thick

streaming juice of the torn stalks; she stretched them out to him

helplessly. He knelt before her, and spread his handkerchief on his

knees, and took her hands and wiped them. She let them rest in his for a

moment, and, with a low, panting cry, he bowed his head and covered them

with kisses.

At his cry her lips parted. And as her soul had called to him across the

spiritual ramparts, so her eyes said to him: "Come"; and he knew that

with all her body and her soul she yearned to him and consented.

He held her tight by the wrists and drew her to him; and she laid her

arms lightly on his neck and kissed him.

"I'm glad now," she whispered, "that Edith didn't tell me. She knew you.

Oh, my dear, she knew."

And to herself she said proudly: "It rests with me."

BOOK II