It was the first day in Lent. Anne had come down in a state of
depression. She was silent during breakfast, and Majendie became absorbed
in his morning paper. So much wisdom he had learnt. Presently he gave a
sudden murmur of interest, and looked up with a smile. "I see," said he,
"your friend Mrs. Gardner has got a little son."
"Has she?" said Anne coldly.
The blood flushed in her cheeks, and a sudden pang went through her and
rose to her breasts with a pricking pain, such pain as she had felt once
in her dream, and only once in her waking life before. She thought of
dear little Mrs. Gardner, and tried to look glad. She failed miserably,
achieving an expression of more than usual austerity. It was the
expression that Majendie had come to associate with Lent. He thought he
saw in it the spiritual woman's abhorrence of her natural destiny. And
with the provocation of it the devil entered into him.
"Is there anything in poor Mrs. Gardner's conduct to displease you?"
She looked at him in a dull passion of reproach.
"Oh," she said, "how can you be so unkind to me!"
Her breast heaved, her lower lip trembled. She rose suddenly, pressing
her handkerchief to her mouth, and left the room. He heard the study door
open hastily and shut again. And he said to himself, as if with a sudden
lucid freshness, "What an extraordinary woman my wife is. If I only knew
what I'd done."
As she had left her breakfast unfinished, he waited a judicious interval
and then went to fetch her back.
He found her standing by the window, holding her hands tight to her
heaving sides, trying by main force to control the tempest of her sobs.
He approached her gently.
"Go away," she whispered, through loose lips that shook with every word.
"Go away. Don't come near me."
"Nancy--what is it?"
She turned from him, and leaned up against the folded window shutter. Her
emotion was the more terrible to him because she was so seldom given to
these outbursts. She had seemed to him a woman passionless, and of almost
superhuman self-possession. He removed himself to the hearth-rug and
waited for five minutes.
"Poor child," he said at last. "Can't you tell me what it is?"
No answer.
He waited another five minutes, thinking hard.
"Was it--was it what I said about Mrs. Gardner?"
He still waited. Then he conceived a happy idea. He would try to make her
laugh.
"Just because I said she'd had a little son?"
Her tears fell to answer him.
She gathered herself together with a supreme effort, and steadied her
lips to speak. "Please leave me. I came here to be alone."
A light broke in on him, and he left her.
He shut himself up in the dining-room with his light. He had pushed his
breakfast aside, too preoccupied to eat it.
"So that's it?" he said to himself. "That's it. Poor Nancy. That's what
she's wanted all the time. What a fool I was never to have thought of
it."
He breathed with an immense relief. He had solved the enigma of Anne with
all her "funniness." It was not that she had turned against him, nor
against her destiny. She had been disappointed of her destiny, that was
all. It was enough. She must have been fretting for months, poor darling,
and just when she could bear it no longer, Mrs. Gardner, he supposed, had
come as the last straw. No wonder that she had said he was unkind.
And in that hour of his enlightenment a great chastening fell upon
Majendie. He told himself that he must be as gentle with her as he knew
how; gentler than he had ever yet known how. And his heart smote him as
he thought how he had hurt her, how he might hurt her again unknowingly,
and how the tenderness of the tenderest male was brutality when applied
to these wonderful, pitiful, incomprehensible things that women were.
He accepted the misery of the last three months as a fit punishment for
his lack of understanding.
His light brought a great longing to him and a great hope. From that
moment he watched her anxiously. He had never realised till now, after
three months of misery, quite what she meant to him, how sacred and dear
she was, and how much he loved her.
The depth of this feeling left him for the most part dumb before her. His
former levity forsook him, and Anne wondered at this change in him, and
brooded over the possible cause of his serious and unintelligible
silences. She attributed them to some deep personal preoccupation of
which she was not the object.
Meanwhile her days went on much as before, a serene and dignified
procession to the outward eye. She was thankful that she had so
established her religion of the household that its services could still
continue in their punctual order, after the joy of the spirit had
departed from them. The more she felt that she was losing, hour by hour,
her love of the house in Prior Street, the more she clung to the
observances that held her days together. She had become a pale, sad-eyed,
perfunctory priestess of the home. Majendie protested against what he
called her base superstition, her wholesale sacrifice to the gods of the
hearth. He forbade her to stay so much indoors, or to sit so long in
Edith's room.
One afternoon he came home unexpectedly and found her there, doing
nothing, but watching Edith, who dozed. He touched her gently, and told
her to get up and go out for a walk.
"I'm too tired," she whispered.
"Then go upstairs and lie down."
She went; but, instead of lying down, she wandered through the house,
restless and unsettled. She was possessed by a terrible sense of
isolation. It came over her that this house of which she was the
mistress did not in the least belong to her. She had not been consulted
or thought of in any of its arrangements. There was no place in it that
appealed to her as her own. She went into the little grave old-fashioned
drawing-room. It had a beauty she approved of, a dignity that was in
keeping with her own traditions, but to-day its aspect roused in her
discontent and irritation. The room had remained unchanged since the days
when it was inhabited, first by her husband's mother, then by his aunt,
then by his sister. He had handed it over, just as it stood, to his wife.
It was full, the whole house was full, of portraits of the Majendies;
Majendies in oils; Majendies in water-colours; Majendies in crayons, in
miniatures and silhouettes. She thought of Mrs. Eliott's room in Thurston
Square, of the bookcases, the bronzes, the triptych with its saints in
glory, and of how Fanny sat enthroned among these things that reflected
completely her cultured individuality. Fanny had counted. Her rarity had
been appreciated by the man who married her; her tastes had been studied,
consulted, exquisitely indulged. Anne did not want more books, nor
bronzes, nor a triptych in her drawing-room. But such things were
symbols. Their absence stood for the immense spiritual want through which
her marriage had been made void. Brooding on it, she closed her heart to
her unspiritual husband. She looked round the room with her cold
disenchanted eyes. Numberless signs of his thought and care for her
rebuked her, and rebuking, added to her misery. As her restlessness
increased, it occurred to her that she might find some satisfaction in
arranging the furniture on an entirely different plan. She rang the bell
and sent for Walter. He came, and found her sitting on the high-backed
chair whose cover had been worked by his grandmother. He smiled at the
uncomfortable figure she presented.
"So that's what you call resting, is it?"
"Walter--do you mind if I move some of the furniture in this room?"
"Move it? Of course I don't. But why?"
"Because I don't very much like the room as it is."
"Why don't you like it?" (He really wanted to know.)
"Because I don't feel comfortable in it."
"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. Perhaps--we'd better have some new things."
"I don't want any new things."
"What do you want, then?" His voice was gentleness itself.
"Just to move all the old ones--to move everything."
She spoke with an almost infantile petulance that appealed to him as
pathetic. There was something terrible about Anne when armoured in the
cold steel of her spirituality, taking her stand upon a lofty principle.
But Anne, sitting on a high-backed chair, uttering tremulous absurdities,
Anne, protected by the unconscious humour of her own ill-temper, was
adorable. He loved this humanly captious and capricious, childishly
unreasonable Anne. And her voice was sweet even in petulance.
"My darling," he said, "you shall turn the whole house upside down if it
makes you any happier. But"--he looked round the room in quest of its
deficiencies--"what's wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong. You don't understand."
"No, I don't." His eye fell upon the corner where the piano once stood
that was now in Edith's room.
"There are three things," said he, "that you certainly ought to have. A
piano, and a reading-stand, and a comfortable sofa. You shall have them."
She threw back her head and closed her eyes to shut out the stupidity,
and the mockery, and the misery of that idea.
"I--don't--want"--she spoke slowly. Her voice dropped from its high
petulant pitch, and rounded to its funeral-bell note--"I don't want a
piano, nor a reading-stand, nor a sofa. I simply want a place that I can
call my own."
"But, bless you, the whole house is your own, if it comes to that, and
every mortal thing in it. Everything I've got's yours except my razors
and my braces, and a few little things of that sort that I'm keeping for
myself."
She passed her hand over her forehead, as if to brush away the irritating
impression of his folly.
"Come," he said, "let's begin. What do you want moved first? And where?"
She indicated a cabinet which she desired to have removed from its
place between the windows to a slanting position in the corner. He was
delighted to hear her express a preference, still more delighted to be
able to gratify it by his own exertions. He took off his coat and
waistcoat, turned up his shirt cuffs, and set to work. For an hour he
laboured under her directions, struggling with pieces of furniture as
perverse and obstinate as his wife, but more ultimately amenable.
When it was all over, Anne seated herself on the settee between the
windows, and surveyed the scene. Majendie, in a rumpled shirt and with
his hair in disorder, stood beside her, and smiled as he wiped the
perspiration from his forehead.
"Yes," he said, "it's all altered. There isn't a blessed thing, not a
chair, or a footstool, or a candlestick, that isn't in some place where
it wasn't. And the room doesn't look a bit better, and you won't be a bit
better pleased with it to-morrow."
He put on his coat and sat down beside her. "See here," said he, "you
don't want me really to believe that that's where the trouble is?"
"The trouble?"
"Yes, Nancy, the trouble. Do you think I'm such a fool that I don't see
it? It's been coming on a long time. I know you're not happy. You're not
satisfied with things as they are. As they are, you know, there's a sort
of incompleteness, something wanting, isn't there?"
She sighed. "It's you who are putting it that way, not I."
"Of course I'm putting it that way. How am I to put it any other way? Let
me think now--well--of course I know perfectly well that it's not a
piano, or a reading-stand, or a sofa that you want, any more than I do.
We want the same thing, sweetheart."
She smiled sadly. "Do we? I should have said the trouble is that we don't
want the same thing, and never did."
"I don't understand you."
"Nor I you. You think I'm always wanting something. What is it that you
think I want?"
"Well--do you remember Westleydale?"
She drew back. "Westleydale? What has put that into your head?"
He grew desperate under her evasions, and plunged into his theme. "Well,
that jolly baby we saw there--in the wood--you looked so happy when you
grabbed it, and I thought, perhaps--"
"There's no use talking about that," said she. "I don't like it."
"All right--only--it's still a little soon, you know, isn't it, to give
it up?"
"You're quite mistaken," she said coldly. "It isn't that. It never has
been. If I want anything, Walter, that you haven't given me, it's
something that you cannot give me. I've long ago made up my mind to
that."
"But why make up your mind to anything? How do you know I can't give it
you--whatever it is--if you won't tell me anything about it? What _do_
you want, dear?"
"Ah, my dear, I want nothing, except not to have to feel like this."
"What do you feel like?"
"Like what I am. A stranger in my husband's house."
"And is that my fault?" he asked gently.
"It is not mine. But there it is. I feel sometimes as if I'd never been
married to you. That's why you must never talk to me as you did just
now."
"Good God, what a thing to say!"
He hid his face in his hands. The pain she had inflicted would have been
unbearable but for the light that was in him.
He rose to leave her. But before he left, he took one long, scrutinising
look at her. It struck him that she was not, at the moment, entirely
responsible for her utterances. And again his light helped him.
"Look here," said he, "I don't think you're feeling very well. This isn't
exactly a joyous life for you."
"I want no other," said she.
"You don't know what you want. You're overstrained--frightfully--and
you ought to have a long rest and a change. You're too good, you know,
to my little sister. I've told you before that I won't allow you to
sacrifice yourself to her. I shall get some one to come and stay, and I
shall take you down this week to the south coast, or wherever you like to
go. It'll do you all the good in the world to get away from this beastly
place for a month or two."
"It'll do me no good to get away from poor Edie."
"It will, dearest, it will, really."
"It will not. If you go and take me away from Edie I shall get ill
myself."
"You only think so because you're ill already."
"I am not ill." She turned to him her sombre, tragic face.
"Walter--whatever you do, don't ask me to leave Edie, for I can't."
"Why not?" he asked gently.
"Because I love her. And it's--it's the only thing."
"I see," he said; and left her.
He went back to Edith. She smiled at his disarray and enquired the cause
of it. He entertained her with an account of his labours.
"How funny you must both have looked," said Edith, "and, oh, how funny
the poor drawing-room must feel."
"The fact is," said Majendie gravely, "I don't think she's very well. I
shall get her to see Gardner."
"I would, if I were you."
He wrote to Dr. Gardner that night and told Anne what he had done. She
was indignant, and expounded his anxiety as one more instance of his
failure to understand her nature. But she did not refuse to receive the
doctor when he called the next morning.
When Majendie came back from the office he found his wife calm, but
disposed to a terrifying reticence on the subject of her health. "It's
nothing--nothing," she said; and that was all the answer she would give
him. In the evening he went round to Thurston Square to get the truth out
of Gardner.
He stayed there an hour, although a very few words sufficed to tell him
that his hope had become a certainty. The President of the Scale
Philosophic Society had cast off all his vagueness. His wandering eyes
steadied themselves to grip Majendie as they had gripped Majendie's
wife. To Gardner Majendie, with his consuming innocence and anxiety, was,
at the moment, by far the more interesting of the two. The doctor brought
all his grave lucidity to bear on Majendie's case, and sent him away
unspeakably consoled; giving him a piece of advice to take with him. "If
I were you," said he, "I wouldn't say anything about it until she speaks
to you herself. Better not let her know you've consulted me."
In one hour Majendie had learnt more about his wife than he had found out
in the year he had lived with her; and the doctor had found out more
about Majendie than he had learnt in the ten years he had been practising
in Scale.
And upstairs in her drawing-room, little Mrs. Gardner waited impatiently
for her husband to come back and finish the very interesting conversation
that Majendie had interrupted.
"Who is the fiend," she said, "who's been keeping you all this time? One
whole hour he's been."
"The fiend, my dear, is Mr. Majendie." The doctor's face was thoughtful.
"Is he ill?"
"No; but I think he would have been if he hadn't come to me. I've been
revising my opinion of Majendie to-night. Between you and me, our friend
the Canon is a very dangerous old woman. Don't you go and believe those
tales he's told you."
"I don't believe the tales," said Mrs. Gardner, "but I can't help
believing poor Mrs. Majendie's face. _That_ tells a tale, if you like."
"Poor Mrs. Majendie's face is a face of poor Mrs. Majendie's own making,
I'm inclined to think."
"I don't think Mrs. Majendie would make faces. I'm sure she isn't happy."
"Are you? Well then, if you're fond of her, I think you'd better try and
see a little more of her, Rosy. You can help her a good deal better than
I can now."
Professional honour forbade him to say more than that. He passed to a
more absorbing topic.
"I must say I can't see the force of this fellow's reasoning. What's
that?"
"I thought I heard baby crying."
"You didn't. It was the cat. You must learn the difference, my dear.
Don't you see that these pragmatists are putting the cart before the
horse? Conduct is one of the things to be explained. How can you take it,
then, as the ground of the explanation?"
"I don't," said Mrs. Gardner.
"But you do," said Dr. Gardner. It was in such bickerings that they
lived and moved and had their happy being. Each was the possessor of a
strenuous soul, made harmless by its extreme simplicity. They were united
by their love of argument, divided only by their adoration of each other.
They now plunged with joy into the heart of a vast metaphysical
contention; and Majendie, his conduct and the explanation of it, were
forgotten until another cry was heard and, this time, Mrs. Gardner fled.
She came back full of reproach. "Oh, Philip, to think that you can't
recognise the voice of your little son!"
Dr. Gardner looked guilty. "I really thought," said he, "it was the cat."
He hated these interruptions.
He looked for Mrs. Gardner to take up the thread of the delicious
argument where she had dropped it; but something had reminded Mrs.
Gardner that she must write a note to Mrs. Majendie. She sat down and
wrote it at once while she remembered. She could think of nothing to say
but, "When will you come and take tea with me, and see my little son?"
Anne came that week, and saw the little son, and rejoiced over him. She
kept on coming to see him. She always had been fond of Mrs. Gardner, now
she was growing fonder of her than ever. In her happy presence she felt
wonderfully at peace. There had been a time when the spectacle of Mrs.
Gardner's happiness would have given her sharp pangs of jealousy; but
that time was over now for Anne. She liked to sit and look at her and
watch the happiness flowering in Mrs. Gardner's face. She thought Mrs.
Gardner's face was more beautiful than any woman's she had ever seen,
except Edie's. Edie's face was perfect; but Mrs. Gardner's was a simple
oval that sacrificed perfection in the tender amplitude of her chin.
There were no lines on it; for Mrs. Gardner was never worried, nor
excited, nor perplexed. How could she be worried when Dr. Gardner was
well and happy? Or excited, when, having Dr. Gardner, there was nothing
left to be excited about? Or perplexed, when Dr. Gardner held the
solution of all problems in his mighty brain?
Mrs. Gardner's bridal aspect had not disappeared with the advent of her
motherhood. She was not more wrapped up in the baby than she was in Dr.
Gardner and his metaphysics. She even admitted to Anne that the baby had
been something of a disappointment. Anne was sitting in the nursery with
her when Mrs. Gardner ventured on this confidence.
"You know I'd rather have had a little daughter."
Anne confessed that her own yearning was for a little son.
"Oh," said Mrs. Gardner, "I wouldn't have him different now. He's going
to have as happy a life as ever I can give him. I've got so much to make
up for."
"To make up for?" Anne wondered what little Mrs. Gardner could possibly
have to make up for.
"Well, you see it's a shocking confession to make; but I didn't care for
him at all before he came. I didn't want him. I didn't want anybody but
Philip, and Philip didn't want anybody but me. Are you horrified?"
"I think I am," said Anne. She had difficulty in believing that dear
little Mrs. Gardner could ever have taken this abnormal, this monstrous
attitude.
"You see our life was so perfect as it was. And we have so little time
to be together, because of his tiresome patients. I grudged every minute
taken from him. And, when I knew that this little creature was coming,
I sat down and cried with rage. I felt that he was going to spoil
everything, and keep me from Philip. I hadn't a scrap of tenderness for
him, poor little darling."
"Oh," said Anne.
"I hadn't really. I was quite happy with my husband." She paused, feeling
that the ground under her was perilous. "I don't know why I'm telling you
all this, dear Mrs. Majendie. I've never told another soul. But I
thought, perhaps, you ought to know."
"Why," Anne wondered, "does she think I ought to know?"
"You see," Mrs. Gardner went on, "_I_ thought I couldn't be any happier
than I was. But I am. Ten times happier. And I didn't think I _could_
love my husband more than I did. But I do. Ten times more, and quite
differently. Just because of this tiny, crying thing, without an idea in
his little soft head. I've learned things I never should have learned
without him. He takes up all my time, and keeps me from enjoying Philip;
and yet I know now that I never was really married till he came."
Mrs. Gardner looked up at Anne with shy, beautiful eyes that begged
forgiveness if she had said too much. And Anne realised that it was for
her that the little bride had been singing that hymn of hope, for her
that she had been laying out the sacred treasures of her mysteriously
wedded heart.
In the same spirit Mrs. Gardner now laid out her fine store of clothing
for the little son. And Anne's heart grew soft over the many little
vests, and the jackets, and the diminutive short-waisted gowns.
She was busy with a pile of such things one evening up in her bedroom
when Majendie came in. The bed was strewn with the absurd garments, and
Anne sat beside side it, sorting them, and smiling to herself that small,
pure, shy smile of hers. Her soft face drew him to her. He thought it was
his hour. He took up one of the little vests and spanned it with his
hand. "I'm so glad," he said. "Why didn't you tell me?"
She shook her head.
"Nancy--"
"I can't talk about it."
"Not to me?"
"No," she said. "Not to you."
"I should have thought--"
Her face hardened. "I can't. Please understand that, Walter. I don't
think I ever can, now. You've made everything so that I can't bear it."
She took the little vest from him and laid it with the rest.
And as he left her his hope grew cold. Her motherhood was only another
sanctuary from which she shut him out. There was something so humiliating
in his pain that he would have hidden it even from Edith. But Edith was
too clever for him.
"Has she said anything to you about it?" he asked.
"Yes. Has she not to you?"
"Not yet. She won't let me speak about it. She's funnier than ever. She
treats me as if I were some obscene monster just crawled up out of the
primeval slime."
"Poor Wallie!"
"Well, but it's pretty serious. Do you think she's going to keep it up
for all eternity?"
"No, I don't, dear. I don't think she'll keep it up at all."
"I'm not so sure. I'm tired out with it. I give her up."
"No, you don't, dear, any more than I do."
"But what can I do? Is it, honestly, Edie, is it in any way my fault?"
"Well--I think, perhaps, if you'd approached her in another spirit at the
first--she told me that what shocked her more than anything that night at
Scarby, was, darling, your appalling flippancy. You know, if you'd taken
that tone when you first spoke to me about it, I think it would have
killed me. And she's your wife, not your sister. It's worse for her.
Think of the shock it must have been to her."
"Think of the shock it was to me. She sprang the whole thing on me at
four o'clock in the morning--before I was awake. What could I do?
Besides, she got over all that in the summer. And now she goes back to
it worse than ever, though I haven't done anything in between."
"It was all brought back to her in the autumn, remember."
"Granted that, it's inconceivable how she can keep it up. It isn't as if
she was a hard woman."
"No. She's softer than any woman I know, in some ways. But she happens to
be made so that that is the one thing she finds it hardest to forgive.
Besides, think of her health."
"I wonder if that really accounts for it."
"I think it may."
"I don't know. It began before, and I'm afraid it's come to stay."
"What has come to stay?"
"The dislike she's taken to me."
"I don't believe in her dislike. Give her time."
"Oh, the time I have given her! A year and more."
"What's a year? Wait," said Edith. "Wait."
He waited; and as the months went on, Anne schooled herself, for her
child's sake, into strength and calm. Her white, brooding face grew full
and tender; but its tenderness was not for him. He remained shut out from
the sanctuary where she sat nursing her dream.
He suffered indescribably; but he told himself that Anne had merely taken
one of those queer morbid aversions of which Gardner had told him. And at
the birth of their child he looked for it to pass.
The child was born in mid-October. Majendie had sat up all night; and
very early in the morning he was sent for to her room. He came, stealing
in on tiptoe, dumb, with his head bowed in terror and a certain awe.
He found Anne lying in the big bed under the crucifix. Her face was dull
and white, and her arms were stretched out by her sides in utter
exhaustion. When he bent over her she closed her eyes, but her lips moved
as if she were trying to speak to him. He felt her breath upon his face,
but he could hear no words.
"What is it?" he whispered to the nurse who stood beside him. She held in
one arm the new-born child, hooded and folded in a piece of flannel.
The nurse touched him on the shoulder. "She's trying to tell you to look
at your little daughter, sir."
He turned and saw something--something queer and red between two folds of
flannel, something that stirred and drew itself into puckers, and gave
forth a cry.
And as he touched the child, his strength melted in him, as it melted
when he laid his hands for the first time upon its mother.