“Has Captain Thornton gone?” I inquired, knowing, also, that he hadn’t.
“No; Lady Vera is reading to him in the flagged garden,” said Mollie in
the voice that showed me how little she had to learn about spiritual
control. “Lady Vera is going to take him out for a run in her two-seater
before dinner. He enjoys that a great deal more than the big car.”
“It’s far pleasanter, certainly,” I agreed. And I went on: “They are
reading, you mean, in the dream-garden. You mustn’t forget that it’s a
dream-garden--where one goes to be alone.”
She looked round at me quickly, and after a moment I saw that she
faintly coloured. She said nothing, leaving it to me to follow up my
graceless gibe. I was quite ready to follow it up.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, knitting the loops along the side of my
heel, “Vera hardly ever is alone there. It’s always, with Vera, a
_solitude à deux_. She’s not at all the sort of woman for real solitude.
She is the sort of woman who likes to feel, or, rather, to look lonely
and not to be alone.”
To this, after a pause, Mollie said:
“She is very charming; Clive finds her very charming.” And, forced to
it, apparently, by my crudity, she added, “Aren’t you fond of her,
then?”
“No, I’m not; not particularly,” I said. “Especially not just now. Vera
is not at her best, to my mind, when she is being angelic to young
married men.”
Mollie Thornton now blushed deeply.
“I am perfectly contented that she should be angelic to Clive,” she
said.
“You are very loyal,” I returned. “But you’ll own that he is getting
more out of it than you are. It’s a place, Compton Dally, for wounded
heroes rather than for a wounded hero’s wife.”
“Do you mean,” she asked after a moment, “that I oughtn’t to have come?”
She had indeed owned to everything in the bewilderment of the question.
I laughed at it.
“Oughtn’t to have been with your husband at a time like this! Even Vera
could hardly ask that, could she? And that’s my quarrel with her; that
it’s the time of all times that you should be together and that she
never lets you see him, practically.”
She looked away, and after a moment I saw that her eyes had filled with
tears.
“He hasn’t an idea of it,” she said at last.
“That fact doesn’t make you happier, does it?”
“He thinks I’m as happy as he is. He thinks that we are together in it
all, and that she is an angel to me, too,” said Mollie. “She always is
an angel to me when she sees me.”
“All men are rather stupid when it comes to knowing whether their wives
are happy,” I remarked. “I think your Clive is a great dear; but I like
you best because you see things he doesn’t. You, for instance, see that
Vera isn’t an angel, though she may look like one.”
“He has no reason to think anything else, has he?” said Mollie, and I
saw that I had brought her to the point to which I had intended to bring
her. “I don’t let him guess that I’m not happy; it would be horrid of me
if I did, for it would only mean that he’d feel at once that we must go
away, and all this loveliness would be over for him. A stuffy little
flat in Bayswater isn’t a very alluring alternative; and that’s where
we’d have to go--to my aunt’s--till Clive was better.”
“How you’d love the stuffy flat! How glad you’d be to be there with him!
And, to do him justice, how happy he’d be there with you! He will be in
a month’s time. The only question is, the month. No, Vera isn’t an
angel. If she were an angel, she’d have seen to it that you were happy
here, too. But when it comes to being nice to other women,--really nice,
I mean,--she can be a cat. And what I’d like very much to see now is
what she’d make of it if you could show her that you could look like an
angel, too. It’s so much a matter of looks.”
“Make of it? But I couldn’t look like an angel.”
“You could look like a rival; that’s another way of doing it. You could
look like another woman of her own sort. You could make her see you. She
simply doesn’t see you now. I suspect that if Vera saw you and saw that
you were charming, she’d show her claws. I’d like Captain Thornton to
see her showing her claws.”
In silent astonishment, her blue eyes fixed upon me, Mollie gazed.
“No, I don’t hate Vera, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said. “I
like you, that’s all, and I don’t intend that she shall go on making you
unhappy.”
“But I don’t want Clive made unhappy,” Mollie said. “I can’t imagine
what you mean; but, whatever it is, I don’t want it. I couldn’t bear all
this to be spoiled for him. I couldn’t bear it not to be always, for
him, a paradise.”
It was my turn to gaze at her, and I gazed penetratingly.
“And what if it all came to mean that you yourself, because of it, were
never to be more to him than a second-rate paradise? What if she were to
spoil you for him?”
I brought out the cruel questions deliberately, and for a moment Mollie
faced them and me.
“Why do you say that? How cruel to say that!” she murmured, and then
suddenly she bowed her head upon her hands. “It’s been my terror. I’m
ashamed of myself for thinking it. And now--you see it!”