Julian roused himself with the feeling that he had said only half of
what he had intended to say to Marian. It had been in his mind a long
time. It was while he was lying out under the pine-trees that he had
realized what he had got to say to Marian if he ever got back. There was
a complicated cipher message for the Government, which he had kept quite
clear in his mind, and eventually given to an intelligent doctor to send
off; and there was the message to Marian, which he himself would have to
say when he saw her.
"I've come back, as I promised; but I can't marry you now, of course.
I'm a crock."
The first time he saw Marian he had got through only the first part of
the sentence. There was no hurry about the rest of it. The doctor and
the sister had both assured him that there was no hurry. They had been
very kind, and quite as honest as their profession permitted. They said
Marian would come back, and he could tell her then.
They admitted, when he cross-questioned them with all the sharpness of
which he was capable, that he would be a cripple. They did not bother
him with futile commiserations. They gave him quietly and kindly the
facts he asked for. He would never be able to walk again, but he could
get about easily on crutches.
Julian did not want to live very much, but his mother's eyes hurt him
when he tried not to; and then Marian came again, and he got through the
rest of his sentence.
"You see," he explained in a low whisper which sounded in his head like
a gong, "marriage is quite out of the question."
Marian was there with smiles and flowers, just as he had so often
pictured her; but she sat down with a curious solidity, and her voice
sounded clearer than it had sounded in his dreams.
"Nothing alters our engagement, Julian," she said. "Nothing can."
She spoke with a finality that stopped his thinking. He had finished his
sentence, and it seemed hardly fair to be expected to start another on
the spur of the moment. He gave himself up to a feeling of intense
relief: he had got off his cipher to the Government and he had released
Marian.
He had known these were going to be difficult things to do. The cipher
had been the worst. The French doctor had taken some time to understand
that Julian must neither die nor be attended to until he had sent the
cipher off; and now the business about Marian was over, too. He had only
to lie there and look at her day by day coming in with roses. They did
not talk much. Julian never spoke of his symptoms, but they were too
radical to free him. He lay under them like a creature pinned under the
wreckage of a railway accident.
Slowly, day by day, his strength came back to him; and as it came back,
peace receded. His eyes lost their old adoring indulgence; they seemed
to be watching Marian covertly, anxious for some gift that she was
withholding from him. He did not demand this as a right, as the old
Julian would have done, breaking down the barriers of her pride to
reach it. He pleaded for it with shamed eyes that met hers only to
glance away. Something in her that was not cruelty as much as a baffling
desire to escape him made her refuse to give him what his eyes asked.
Julian had loved her for her elusiveness, and the uncaptured does not
yield readily to any appeal from the hunter. The prize is to the strong.
She would not have withstood a spoken wish of his; but there is
something in speechless suffering from which light sympathies shrink
away. Pity lay in Marian a tepid, quickly roused feeling, blowing
neither hot nor cold. She cried easily over sad books, but she had none
of the maternal instinct which seizes upon the faintest indication of
pain with a combative passion for its alleviation. She became
antagonistic when she was personally disturbed by suffering.
She was keeping her word to Julian while her heart was drifting away
from him; and he, while he desired her to be free, instinctively tried
to hold her back. They had both put their theories before their
instincts, and they expected their instincts to stand aside until their
theories had been carried out.
Perhaps if Julian could have told her his experiences he might have
recaptured her imagination; but when she asked him to tell her about
them, he said quickly, "I can't," and turned away his head. He was
afraid to trust himself. He wanted to tell her everything. He was afraid
that if he began, his reticence would break down, and he would tell her
things which must never pass his lips. He longed for her to know that
every day, and nearly every hour, he had fought and conquered intricate
abnormal obstacles. He had slipped across imminent death as a steady
climber grips and passes across the face of a precipice.
He had never faltered. All that he had gone to find he had found, and
more. At each step he had seen a fresh opportunity, and taken it. He had
been like a bicyclist in heavy traffic assailed on every side by
converging vehicles, and yet seeing only the one wavering ribbon of his
way out. And he had won his way out with knowledge that was worth a
king's ransom. He could have borne anything if Marian would realize that
what he had borne had been worth while. But after her first unanswered
question, Marian never referred again to what he had done. She behaved
as if his services had been a regrettable mistake.
She talked with real feeling about the sufferings of those who fought in
the war. Her eyes seemed to tell him what her lips refrained from
uttering, that she could have been more sorry for him if he had been
wounded in a trench, and not shot at and abandoned by a nervous sentry
firing in the dark. He could not remember the exact moment when out of
the vague turmoil of his weakened mind he gripped this cold truth:
Marian was not tender.
When she was not there he could pretend. He could make up all the
beautiful, loving little things she had not said, and sometimes he would
not remember that he had made them up. Those were the best moments of
all. He believed then that she had given him what his heart hungered
for. He was too much ashamed of his ruined strength to feel resentment
at Marian's coldness. It struck him as natural that she should care less
for a broken man.
His mind traveled slowly, knocking against the edges of his old dreams.
He thought perhaps a nursing home wasn't the kind of place in which
people could really understand one another, all mixed up with screens
and medicine bottles, and nurses bringing things in on trays. If he
could see Marian once at Amberley for the last time, so that he could
keep the picture of her moving about the dark wainscoted rooms, or
looking out from the terrace above the water meadows, he would have
something precious to remember for the rest of his life; and she
mightn't mind him so much there, surrounded by the dignity of the old
background of his race. One day he said to her:
"I want to go to Amberley as soon as I can be moved. I want to see it
again with you."
"In December?" asked Marian, with lifted, disapproving brows. "It would
be horribly damp, my dear Julian, all water-meadows and mist. You would
be much more comfortable here."
Julian frowned. He hated the word "comfort" in connection with himself.
"You don't understand," he said, a little impatiently. "I know every
inch of it, and it's quite jolly in the winter. We are above the water.
I want to see the downs. One gets tired of milk-carts and barrel organs,
and the brown tank on the roof across the way. You remember the downs,
Marian?"
His eyes met hers again with that new, curiously weak look of his.
Marian turned her head away. How could Julian bear to speak of the
downs?
She saw for a moment the old Julian springing up the hillside assured
and eager, the fine, strong lover who had taken her heart by storm. She
spoke coldly to this weaker Julian.
"Yes," she said, "I am not likely to forget the downs. I spent the last
happy hours of my life there; but I cannot say I ever wish to see them
again."
Julian's eyes fell, so that she could not see if he had even noticed how
bitterly she remembered Amberley.
The next day she found him sitting up for the first time. He was propped
up by cushions, but it made him look as if he had gained some of his
old incisive strength.
The other two men had been moved, and they had the large, bare room to
themselves.
No sound came from the square beneath them; in the house itself there
were passing footsteps and the occasional persistent buzzing of an
electric bell.
"Look here," said Julian in a queer, dry voice, "I've got an awful lot
to say to you--d'you mind drawing your chair nearer? I meant to say it
at Amberley. I'd have liked it better there. I rather hate this kind of
disinfected, sloppy place for talk. You must loathe it, too. But here or
there it's got to be said. You said something or other when I first put
it to you--about our engagement never being broken. It was awfully good
of you, of course. I couldn't see through it at the time. I wanted to
let things slide. But it's all nonsense my dear girl. Women like you
can't marry logs of wood."
[Illustration: "Women like you can't marry logs of wood"]
He looked at her anxiously. Her eyes were shut to expression. She sat
there, just as lovely, just as sphinx-like as some old smiling portrait.
There was the same unfluctuating, delicate color in her face, and the
same unharassed, straightforward glancing of the eyes. She was not the
least perturbed by what he said; she expected him to say it.
"We should be foolish," she answered quietly, "to try to ignore the
terrible difference in our lives, Julian, and I was sure you would want
to set me free; but you cannot do it. I took the risk of your accident,
unwillingly at first; but, still, eventually I accepted it, and I will
not be set free."
His eyes held hers compellingly, as if he were searching for some inner
truth behind her words, and then slowly reluctant tears gathered across
the keenness of his vision. He leaned his head back on his pillow and
looked away.
"I don't think," he said slowly, "you're glad to have me back. I don't
want to marry you, I couldn't marry you; but I wish to Heaven you'd been
glad! O Marian, I'm a coward and a fool, but if you'd been glad, I'd
have gone down under it! I'd have married you then. I oughtn't to say
this. It's all nonsense, and you're quite right. It's awfully fine of
you to want to keep your word; but, you see, I didn't want your word.
It's your heart I wanted. I used to say out there sometimes, when things
were a bit thick, 'Never mind. If I get through, she'll be glad.'"
Marian drew herself up. This did not seem to her fair of Julian. She had
prayed very earnestly to God for his safe return. Neither God nor he had
been quite fair about it. This was not a safe return.
"I don't know what more I can do, Julian," she said steadily, "than
offer to share my life with you."
"That's just it," said Julian, with that curious look in his eyes which
kept fighting her, and yet appealing to her simultaneously. "You can't
do more. If you could, I'm such a weak hound, I'd lie here and take it.
If you wanted me, Marian,--wanted a broken fragment of a man fit for a
dust-pan,--I'd land you with it. But, 'pon my word, it's too steep when
you don't want it. Out of some curious sense of duty toward the
dust-pan--I'm afraid I'm being uncivil to the universe, but I feel a
little uncivil to it just now. No; you've got to go. I'm sorry. Don't
touch me. Just let me be; but if you could say just where you are
before you go! But it doesn't matter. I shouldn't believe it. I wouldn't
believe the mother that bore me now. I've seen the end of love."
The tears burned themselves away from his eyes; they gazed at her as
sunken and blue as the sea whipped by an east wind. She turned slowly
toward the door.
"I want you to remember, Julian," she said, "that I meant what I said. I
mean it still. I _wish_ to carry out our engagement."
Julian said something in reply that Marian didn't understand. He was
repeating out loud and very slowly the cipher he had sent to the
Government.
After all, it had been easier to send the cipher to the Government than
to release Marian. His mind had sprung back to the easier task.