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[Illustration: bookcover]
THE THIRD WINDOW
BY
ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
(MRS. BASIL DE SELINCOURT)
[Illustration: colophon]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
_The Riverside Press Cambridge_
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY ANNE DOUGLAS DE SELINCOURT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
THE THIRD WINDOW
I
"I love this window," said Antonia, walking down the drawing-room; "and
this one. They both look over the moors, you see. This view is even
lovelier." She stopped at the end of the long room, and the young man
with the pale face and the limping step followed and looked out of the
third window with her. "But--I don't know why--I hate it. I wish it
weren't here."
Captain Saltonhall looked out and said nothing.
"I wonder if you see what I mean," said Antonia.
"No; I don't. I like it." The young man spoke gently and with something
of a drawl, unimpressed, apparently, by her antipathy and putting up the
back of a placid forefinger to stroke along the edge of his moustache.
"One gets the hills, peaceful and silvery; one gets the walled garden
and the cedar," she enumerated.
"The little pond with its fountain is as serene as a happy dream. It's
all like a happy dream. Yet--I wish there weren't this window here."
"You could wall it up if you don't like it," Captain Saltonhall
suggested, his eyes, as he stood behind her, turning from the walled
garden beneath to fix themselves with a rather sad attentiveness upon
the head of the young woman. Her dark hair was near him and the curve of
her cheek; he thought that he felt against his the warmth of her
shoulder in its thin black dress.
She looked out, motionless, for a little while; then, turning suddenly,
as if with impatience of her thoughts, found him so near, and his eyes
on hers. She, too, was pale and tall; but all in her was soft, splendid,
and almost opulent, while he was sharp-edged and wasted. He looked much
the older, though they were of the same age; both, indeed, were very
young.
He did not move away as she faced him nor did his look alter. Sad and
attentive, it merely remained attached upon her, and if he felt any
nervousness it showed itself only in the slight gesture of his
forefinger passing meditatively along the edge of his moustache. It was
she who spoke. "Well, Bevis?" she said gravely. Her look asked: "Have
you anything to tell me?"
"Well, Tony," he returned. He had, apparently, nothing to say.
She studied him for a moment longer, and then, with an added
impatience--if anything so soft could so be called--walking away to an
easy-chair before the fire, she said, "You think me very silly, I
suppose."
"Silly? Why?"
"Because of the window. My hating it."
He came and leaned on the back of her chair, looking across her head up
at the mantelpiece where a row of white fritillaries stood in tall
crystal glasses, their reflections showing as if through a film of
sea-water in the ancient mirror behind them. There had been white
fritillaries among the flagged paths of the walled garden, and, finding
them again, he recognized that they had been the only things he had felt
uncanny there; for he had always felt them wraith-like flowers.
"I think you'd better wall it up, quite seriously, if you really hate
it." He repeated his former suggestion. "It would rather spoil the room.
But I wouldn't, if I were you, live with a discomfort like that--if it's
really a discomfort."
The young woman beneath him laughed, a little sadly, if lightly. "How
you suspect me."
"Of what, pray?"
"Oh--of unconscious humbug; of unconscious posing. Of induced emotions
generally. It's always been the same."
"I rather like induced emotions in you," said Captain Saltonhall. "They
suit you. They are like the colour of a pomegranate or the taste of a
mulberry or the smell of a branch of flowering hawthorn; something rich,
thick, and pleasingly oppressive."
"Thanks. I don't take it as a compliment."
"I don't mean it as one. I merely said I liked it in you; and if I do
it's only because I'm in love with you."
He lowered his eyes now from the fritillaries to watch the very faint
colour that rose, very slowly, in her cheek. It could hardly be called
a response. It was merely an awareness. And after a moment she said,
still with her soft impatience: "Do come and sit where I can see you.
It's bad for your leg to stand too long, I'm sure."
He obeyed her, limping to a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace,
laying his hands on either arm as he lowered himself with some little
awkwardness. He was not yet accustomed to the complicated mechanical
apparatus, the artificial leg, that, always, he felt hang so heavily
about his thigh.
Antonia Wellwood's dark eyes watched him, with solicitude, it seemed,
rather than tenderness; though indeed their very shape--the outer
corners drooping, a line of white showing under the full iris--expressed
a melancholy so sweet that their most casual glance seemed to convey
tenderness.
The young people sat then for a little while in silence. Though the
spring day was sunny, it was sharp. On a bed of ashes the log-fire
burned softly and clearly. The silvery light of the high, Northern sky
shone along the polished floor.
The room was modern, like the house, and imaged carefully, but not too
carefully for ease, eighteenth-century austerities and graces. The walls
were panelled in white; the chintzes were striped in white and
citron-colour. In spite of bowls of flowers, books and magazines, a
half-knit sock here, its needles transfixing the ball of
heather-coloured wool, and the embroidery there, with tangled skeins, it
was an impersonal room, an object calmly and confidently awaiting
appraisal rather than a long-memoried presence, making beauty forgotten
in significance. It was not a room expressive of the young woman sunken
in the deep chair. Appointed elaborately as she was, in her dense or
transparent blacks, her crossed feet in their narrow buckled shoes
stretched before her, her hands lying along the white and citron chintz,
she was neither disciplined nor austere. Brooding, melancholy, restless,
and with a latent exasperation, her eyes dwelt on the flames and her
wide, small lips puckered themselves at moments as if with the
bitterness of unshed tears.
She did not move for a long time, nor did the young man who, his elbows
propped, rested his chin on the backs of interlaced hands and surveyed
her over them. He noted her, as he had done for many months now; just
as, for months before that, he had, in France, dreamed over her; not her
mystery; her clouded, drifting quality; he had perhaps got round that or
perhaps given it up, sometimes he did not himself know which; but the
pictorial incidents of her appearance; the black velvet bow in the gauze
upon her breast; the heavy pins of tortoise-shell that held up her great
tresses; the odd, dusky mark on her eyelids that looked like the
freaking of a lovely else unblemished fruit; her pale cheek; her
childlike forehead; her hand, beautiful and indolent, with its
wedding-ring. He dwelt on all these appearances with a still absorption,
and whether with more delight or irony he could not have told; but it
was an irony at his own expense, not at hers; for he had always been a
young man aloof from appearances, tolerant yet contemptuous of their
appeal, and he knew that they absorbed him now because he was in love
with her, and he sometimes even wondered if he was in love with her
because of them. He did not, however, wonder much. Before the war he
would have computed, analyzed, perhaps done away with his passion with
the fretting of over-acute thought. That sort of vitality, the analytic,
destructive sort, had been, he imagined, bled, beaten, and cut out of
him. He was now a wraith, a wreck of his former self, fit only for
contemplation and acceptance. She was enough for him now, just as she
was; ignorant, for all her accomplishment; indolent and self-absorbed;
and she could more than satisfy him. The old acuteness remained, but it
no longer tormented. He was aware of everything and all he asked was to
possess it all. That, however, didn't mean that he pretended anything.
If he had no illusions and asked for none, he did not let her think he
had them.
"When did you begin to know you were in love with me?" she said at last,
and now, in spite of the tearful pucker in her lips and liquid fullness
of her eyes, he knew that the theme was the one to which she had
intended to bring him. But it hadn't been deviously; for all her
shifting shadows and eddies she was one of the straightest creatures he
had ever known. Perhaps, after all, it was that quality in her, rather
than the appearances, that accounted for his state.
"How long? Since I've loved you? Oh--since before Malcolm's death, I'm
afraid."
It was what she had feared; he saw that, and that it hurt her. Yet it
pleased her, too.
"I never guessed," she said.
He laughed. "Rather not! How could you have guessed?"
"Women do--these things."
"Perhaps you are less clever than other women, then, or I more clever
than other men."
"I don't think I'm less clever than other women," said Antonia, and a
smile just touched her lips; another evidence of that straightness in
her. She was willing to smile, even though smiling might be
misunderstood. Yes, more than anything, perhaps, it was her genuineness
he cherished.
"You're cleverer than most," he assured her. "Far. But I'm cleverer than
most men."
"We are a wonderful pair!" she exclaimed, and he agreed: "We are
indeed."
"And why was it?" she went on, more happily now, for, another precious
point, and it seemed more than anything else to pair them, they were
happy with each other. Apart from her woman's craving to feel her power
over him, apart from his definitely amorous condition, they were
comrades, and it crossed his mind, oddly, at the moment of thinking it,
that this could not have been said of Antonia and Malcolm. Their
relation had been that, specially, of man and woman, lover and beloved.
He doubted, really, whether Antonia would have cared much about Malcolm
had he not been a man and a lover. Whereas, had he himself been another
woman, Antonia, he felt sure, would have made a friend of him. These
reflections took him far from her question, and before the vague musing
of his look she repeated it in an altered form. "Why did you
begin--after having known me so long without?"
"Ah, that I can't tell. Perhaps it didn't begin. Perhaps it was always
there. I knew it for the first time when I was ordered to France; that
day I came to say good-bye to you and Malcolm in London--before he
went."
The name of her dead husband brought the cloud about her again. "Oh,
yes," she murmured. "I remember that day. I was horribly frightened over
the war. I had a presentiment. I knew he was going to volunteer."
"It could hardly have been a presentiment. He evidently would."
She showed no resentment for his clipping of her dark pinions. It was as
if she still hovered on them as she said: "Of course. I mean
presentiment of what came after that. What had to come. Don't you
believe in Fate, Bevis? Perhaps it was that you felt in me. You had
never seen me suffering before."
"Perhaps," said the young man, sceptically if kindly. "However, I don't
want to talk about it," he added. "That is, unless you do, very much."
She looked up at him, still unresentful, but now a little ironic, though
irony was not her note. "You are an odd lover, Bevis."
"Am I?"
"You don't like declaring your love."
"I have declared it."
"You don't like talking about it."
"Why should I? Unless you'll talk about yours, too. What you mean, I
suppose, is that you miss pleading and passion in me and would like to
see them displayed. I quite understand that in you. Perhaps it's what's
needed to bring you round. But I'm not that sort of person. I couldn't
do it naturally. I think, though you miss it in me, you'd not really
find it natural, either. We're too clever, too civilized, I suppose."
"I suppose we are," she conceded, though a little wistfully. "I don't
exactly miss it. I know it's there. It's merely that I'd like you to
talk about it, even if you don't display it."
"I'm glad you recognize that it's there," said the young man.
"Shall I tell you what I really feel about the window?" Antonia now
asked. Her back was to it as she sat, and its great cedar, cutting
against the pale blue sky, made a distant background to her head. Like
a Renaissance portrait, sombre, serene, splendid in tone, the picture
she made was before him; an allegorical figure of poetry, youth or
melancholy, with its dwelling eyes and spacings dark and pale. He was
often to see her afterwards as she then looked across at him.
"We never lived at Wyndwards, you know, Malcolm and I," she said,
"though Malcolm, of course, spent his life here until we married. But we
visited his mother, often, and I never thought about the window then. It
was only after Malcolm's death, and hers; when I stayed here alone for
the first time; a year ago. Alone except for Cicely."
"Miss Latimer has always lived here, hasn't she?" Captain Saltonhall
inquired.
"Yes. But she is so much a part of it that it was like being alone. I
used to walk up and down here and look out. Just a year ago it was;
spring like this. And, as I walked, I found that while I loved looking
out of the front windows, I shrank, I couldn't tell why, from looking
out of the third; the end one." Antonia turned herself still farther in
her chair, leaning both elbows on the wide arm. "I shrank from it, yet
it drew me, too. And when I yielded, and looked, I felt frightened. And
one day it came over me, as I looked out, that what I feared was that I
should see Malcolm standing there, beside the fountain." Her voice had
dropped. Her eyes dwelt on him, full of their genuine distress.
"Ah, I see." Captain Saltonhall nodded. "That was very natural, I
think."
"Why natural?"
"He had died so shortly before. Your thoughts were full of him. The
place is full of him--with all the years he lived here."
She listened to his alleviations, finding them, apparently, irrelevant.
"But why the third window? Why only that one? Why not the others? He is
more on the moors than in the flagged garden."
"A flagged garden with a fountain and a cedar tree is obviously a more
suitable place for a ghost than the moors would be."
"You do believe in ghosts and apparitions, then?"
"I don't know whether I believe in them or not. There may be appearances
we can't account for. There's a good deal of evidence for them. But I
don't believe they embody any consciousness. It's far more likely, from
what I've read, that they are a kind of photograph of some past
emotion."
"But, Bevis, wouldn't it frighten you dreadfully to see one, whatever it
was?"
"Perhaps. Yes. It might be very nasty," he agreed.
"Yet if I could be sure that it embodied consciousness it might frighten
me, but it would mean such rapture, too. I should know then that Malcolm
had survived death and still thought of me."
"Yes. I see," Captain Saltonhall murmured, rather awkwardly. "Yes. Of
course. That would be a great comfort to you."
"Comfort hardly expresses it, Bevis."
Silence fell between them for a little while, and when the young man
next spoke it was still with the slight awkwardness. "But then, if
that's what you need, you ought to like the third window and the chance
you feel it gives you."
She heaved a weary, exasperated sigh, stretching out in her chair,
stretching up her arms, letting them fall again along her sides, while,
sunken, extended, she seemed to abandon to him the avowal of her own
perplexity and extravagance. "I don't know what I want. I don't know
what I fear. I don't know anything," she said.
A step came outside at this point and, the door opening, there entered a
woman, older than the other two, though still not old, with a bleached
face and bleached hair; a straight, old-fashioned little fringe showing
under her hat. She paused at once on the threshold. "Am I interrupting?"
she asked. Her voice was curiously high; not sharp or shrill; but high
and reedy, like a child's.
"No. Not a bit. Of course not. Come in, Cicely," said Antonia sadly. She
did not turn her eyes on the newcomer, but Captain Saltonhall did so,
watching her as she crossed the room with her basket of spring flowers.
She was dressed in weather-beaten mourning, with a knitted black silk
scarf thrown back from her open jacket. The basket she carried was full
of primroses and windflowers, and, setting it down on a distant table,
she began to fill the bowls and vases that she had evidently placed
there in readiness. Her entry and her presence, which might be
prolonged, were, he felt, very inopportune; yet Antonia showed no
impatience of the interruption. Perhaps, indeed, Miss Latimer's presence
was a relief to her, since she had really no answer to give to his
rather arid and even provocative logic. It had been a little vicious of
him to put it to her like that; but there was, he recognized, an
instinct in him to show her that her perplexities were irrelevant and
even absurd rather than to argue with them. She remained silent and
sunken in her chair, slowly twisting her wedding-ring round and round
her finger, and it must be apparent to Miss Latimer that she had
interrupted an intimate conversation. He felt this to be a little
unfortunate; why, he could not quite have said.
Miss Latimer, whom he had seen for the first time the night before, at
dinner, after his late arrival, had not endeared herself to him. He had
not liked her stillness, nor her whiteness, nor her sudden piping
voice. She was effaced, but not insignificant, and had an air, for all
her silence, of taking everything in. Her small face, peaked and pinched
rather than delicate, would have been childish, like her voice, were it
not for her eyes. He reflected now, watching her move quietly among her
flowers, that it was really because of her eyes he had not liked her.
They were so unchildish; so large; so bright; so pale; and her broad
eyebrows, darker in tint than her faded hair, gave them an almost
startling emphasis. Her face seemed barred across by these eyebrows,
and, beneath them, her eyes were like captives looking out.
The flowers at last were finished and placed, beautifully placed,
beautifully arranged, the primroses in shallow white earthenware, the
windflowers in glasses that showed their thin, rosy stems, and when
Cicely Latimer went at last, closing the door softly behind her, he felt
himself draw a long breath of relief.
"That's a singular little person," he remarked.
Antonia, it was evident, was not thinking of Cicely Latimer. Her eyes
came back to him from far distances. Or, were they far, those distances?
Was it in shallows or in depths that her mind had lain dreaming?
"Is she a cousin, did you tell me?" he asked.
"Cicely?" She recovered his comment as well as his question and answered
that first. "She's a great dear, not singular at all. Yes; a cousin;
Malcolm's first cousin. A niece of old Mrs. Wellwood's."
"And she's always lived here?"
"Almost always. Mr. and Mrs. Wellwood built the house, you know, when
they were first married, and Cicely came to them here as a child. She
had been left an orphan."
"How old is she, then?"
"Oh, she must be quite old now," Antonia in her secure youth computed.
"She was older, a good deal, than Malcolm; nearly forty, perhaps."
"She's still in mourning, I see."
"Yes. So am I," said Antonia, not resentfully, but with an added
sadness. "It's not yet two years, Bevis. And hardly more than a year
since Mrs. Wellwood's death."
"It's a matter of feeling, naturally. One doesn't expect a cousin to
wear mourning as long as a widow. But they were like brother and sister,
I suppose."
"Absolutely. Malcolm went to her with everything. He told her all about
me when he first fell in love, and she helped him in it all."
"Will she go on living with you here?"
"Go on? Cicely? Of course she will. I can't think of this place without
her. I think it would kill her if she were to be taken from it. Mrs.
Wellwood spoke to me about it before she died. It's like a sacred trust.
She has a little money. It's not that. But she's as much a part of it as
the trees and hills. She came to me at once, all the same, after
everything happened, and said she would perfectly understand if I would
rather start anew, quite by myself. There wasn't a quaver or an appeal.
She was, I saw, quite ready. She is the sort of person who is ready for
anything. I told her that as long as she lived it was her home. I took
her into my arms," said Antonia, "and, in a sense, she's been there ever
since. Though, in another sense, perhaps the deeper, it's I who am in
hers. She takes such wonderful, such devoted care of me."
"I see." Captain Saltonhall was feeling for his cigarette-case. "It's
lucky you are so much attached to each other.--Do you mind?--Will you
have one?"
"Please."
He was preparing to hoist himself out of his chair with the
cigarette-case and matchbox, but she sprang up and came to him. "You
can't give yourself these luxuries of convention," she smiled, rather as
if at an unruly patient. "You must let me wait on you, rather. At all
events, till you get more used to it. Dear old Bevis. You're so brave
that one forgets all about it."
She leaned over him, while he gave her a light, and then, the match
having gone out in his rather unsteady fingers, leaned still nearer to
light his cigarette from hers. But, gently, he laid his hands upon her
arms and held her there, looking closely into her eyes. "Do you love
me?" he asked.
Her cigarette was between her lips. She could not answer. He released
one hand so that she might free herself, and although the gesture might
have brought an element of mirth into their gravity she sought no
refuge in it. Half leaning, half kneeling beside him, she made no
attempt to draw away and he saw her eyes widen in their grief, their
perplexity, and their delight. "I don't know, Bevis dear. I don't know.
How can I know?" she almost wept.
"You do know. I can tell you that you know, for I do. You love me." He
had laid his hold again upon her and he slightly shook her as he spoke.
"I can't. I can't. You must let me wait. You must give me time."
"All the time you want. I've nothing to do but go on waiting. I'm ready
for it. But don't be too cruel. What do you gain by it?"
"I don't mean to be cruel. Please believe that; please do."
"You don't mean it; but you are. It's enough for you to have me here,
waiting, and making love to you, day after day, month after month, as I
did in London. I understand it all. You keep him like that, and you keep
me. And what torments you is that you can't see how you can keep us both
if you give me more."
"Oh--Bevis. You are so horrible. So horribly clear. You are far, far
clearer than I can ever be. Yet--no, that's not all there is to it. Give
me time to think. I told you that I should think better up here, in his
home--with you to help me. I can only think clearly if I'm given time."
"You can't do anything clearly. You're always in a mist. You want to
know yourself; I grant you your honesty; but your feeling makes a mist
around you. Listen to me. Let me show it to you. You love him still, of
course. I shouldn't care for you if you didn't. You'll go on loving him.
And it will hurt sometimes. It will hurt me, too. People are made up of
these irreconcilable knots. It can't be helped. We're here in life
together, and we belong to each other, and there's nothing between us
but a memory. Perhaps you could go on holding out against me; but you
can't go on holding out against yourself. You want to be mine nearly as
much as I want you to be. Darling Tony--your eyes are full of love as
you look at me now."
He had held her more tightly, drawn her more near, and now, his haggard
young face lighted with the sudden ardour of his conviction, he saw his
light flash back to him from her, so that dropping his hands from her
arms, he seized her, drew her down to him, enfolded her, and, feeling
her yield, kissed her again and again.
"Bevis!" she whispered, amazed, aghast, yet, in her yielding, confessing
everything.
When she drew herself away and stood up beside him, it was blindly,
putting her hand out for the table, her face averted; and so she stood
for a moment, while he saw that the colour bathed her face and neck.
Then he saw that the tears rained down. He had, strangely, never seen
her cry before, though he had seen her at the earlier moments of her
great grief. She had been frozen, gaunt, lost, then.
"Darling Tony--forgive me."
"Oh," she wept, "it's not your fault!"
"Yes, it is. Don't ask me to regret it; but it is."
"No; no. It's not your fault," she repeated. And she began to move away,
blindly.
"Tell me you forgive me." He had drawn himself up in his chair and
looked after her.
"Of course I forgive you. I can't forgive myself."
"That's just as bad. Must you go?"
"I must. I must. Later--we'll talk. I'll try to think. I'll try to
understand. I'll try to explain everything."
She had got herself to the door and she had not turned her face to him
again. "Don't despise me," she said as she left him.
II
Though the traces of her tears were still visible, Antonia met him at
lunch with composure. Like all the rooms at Wyndwards, the dining-room
was too accurate and intended and, darkly panelled as it was, the low
mullioned windows looking out on the high ring-court, it had, through
some miscalculation in the lighting, an uncomfortably sombre air. They
sat there, the three of them, around the polished table, with its
embroidered linens, its crystal and silver, highly civilized and modern
in the highly civilized and modern room. He and Antonia, at all events,
were that. Miss Latimer, perhaps, belonged to a more primitive
tradition. It struck him that he would have liked Wyndwards better if it
had kept to that tradition; the tradition, in fact, of making no
attempts. As it was, it didn't match Miss Latimer, nor, though modern
and civilized, did it match him and Tony. It was neither sceptical nor
sophisticated, nor indifferent.
Antonia leaned her elbow on the table while she ate and looked out at
the ring-court. Miss Latimer stooped, but did not lounge. She still wore
her hat and ate in a business-like manner, throwing from time to time a
bit of bread or biscuit to the dogs. The task of talking to her fell
entirely upon him, for Antonia, though composed, was evidently in no
mood for talking. He asked her questions about the country and its
birds, beasts, and flowers, and she answered, if not affably, yet with
an accuracy that betrayed a community of taste.
She told him that they were rather too far north to get stone-curlews,
as he had hoped they might. "I found a nest once," she said: "but that
was when I was staying with some people ten miles away."
"What luck! Did you see the birds?"
"Yes. I hid near by for some hours and saw them going to and fro. I
could have photographed them if I had had a camera."
"What luck!" Captain Saltonhall repeated, with sincerity. "I've only
once had a glimpse of one, flying. Queer, watchful, uncanny creatures,
aren't they, with great, clear eyes."
"They are rather strange-looking birds."
It struck him suddenly that Miss Latimer herself looked like a
stone-curlew.
"They've the same cry, nearly, as the ordinary curlew, haven't they?" he
continued. "You get plenty of those up here, I suppose?"
"Oh, yes. You can hear them any day. It is rather the same sort of cry."
Antonia knew little about the country and was not observant of nature;
but now, leaning her head on her hand and looking out of the window, she
remarked, unexpectedly: "I hate their cry; if it is the cry of curlews I
mean. Aren't they the birds that have that high, bleak, drifting wail?"
"Oh, I rather like it," said Captain Saltonhall. "Yes, that's the bird.
It's the sort of melancholy ordained by Providence to go with tea-time
and a wood-fire, as eggs are ordained to go with bacon."
"No," said Antonia. "It's ordained to go with nothing. It makes me think
of something that has been forgotten; something that has given up even
the hope of being remembered, yet that laments."
"But the curlew isn't forgotten. It is probably calling to its mate."
"Probably. I am not talking of the natural history of the bird. Its cry
sounds like the cry of a creature that has been forgotten by its mate."
"What do you think it sounds like?" he asked Miss Latimer. He distrusted
the direction taken by Antonia's thoughts.
And, looking before her, seeming not to follow their definitions, she
answered coldly:
"I think Antonia describes it very beautifully."
After lunch Antonia said that Miss Latimer must show them the garden. He
saw that she intended to keep this companion near them and would not,
for the present, be alone with him.
In the flagged hall, wide and light, there were oaken chests and tables
and large framed engravings of cathedrals. Antonia selected a sunshade
from the stand. None were black; they were all pre-war sunshades, and
the one she found made her lovely head, when they went out into the
sunlight, seem still paler and darker against its faded poppy-red.
She led them first into the little walled garden of her fears. One
stepped out into it from a door in the hall, and, wondering if she had
put a wholesome compulsion upon herself, he expressed an indirect
approval of her good sense by pausing to look about him and to say, "How
delightfully planned this is."
He had never seen so many white fritillaries growing together; their
jade green and alabaster white, rising from narrow beds among the flags,
seemed like another expression of the stone. The fountain was musical,
and the stone bench under the great cedar invited to poetical reverie.
"That cedar is the oldest thing here, isn't it?" he asked.
Antonia stood, gently turning the handle of the sunshade on her
shoulder, and she, too, looked about her, her eyes meeting his for a
moment as if, with a grateful humour, acknowledging his approbation.
"I'm not quite as foolish as you may think," they told him.
"It's the only old thing in the place," she said--"except for the bits
of ruin in the garden walls. There was a border castle here, long ago,
and the cedar must have belonged to its later days. I'm glad it's all so
new, aren't you? I don't like old places. Not to live in."
It was, perhaps, only as looked down at from the third window that the
flagged garden had its uncanniness for her. She seemed quite content to
stand there in the sunlight and admire it with him. Any distaste or
reluctance was Miss Latimer's, and he did not know why it was that he
divined it beneath her air of detachment. It was she who, presently,
moved away, passing out into the high-walled kitchen garden, and they
followed her.
There were cordon fruit-trees round the vegetable-beds, and daffodils,
at one end, grew thickly against the walls. Wide, herbaceous borders ran
on either side of the central path, showing already their clumps and
bosses of green and bronze.
"Cicely plans it all, you know," said Antonia, going now before them,
"and does heaps of the work herself, with spade and fork. Mrs. Wellwood
had only the one gardener and a boy. I can't think how Cicely contrives
to keep it all so beautifully."
"It was Mrs. Wellwood who planned it all," said Miss Latimer. But she
could not disown the work.
He was seeing her more and more clearly as one of those curious beings
whose personalities are parasitic on a place. He doubted whether her
thoughts ever wandered beyond Wyndwards. All her activities, certainly,
were conditioned by it. It would not be only that she dug and planted,
hoed and watered, mulched and staked and raked in the garden. He felt
sure, too, acute young man that he was, that she cut out the loose
chintz covers for the furniture, superintended the making of marmalade
in spring and jam in summer, kept a careful eye on the store-cupboard
and washed the dogs with her own hands. There were two dogs: an old
Dandie Dinmont and a young fox-terrier; and he had, all the while they
walked, a feeling, not a bit ghostly, amusing rather than sad, that they
were bits of Malcolm's soul, detached bits, remaining on earth behind
him; the Dandie Dinmont the soul of his happy boyhood at Wyndwards and
the fox-terrier the soul of his maturity. Miss Latimer would find in
tending them the same passionate satisfaction she had in all of it; the
place, and the persons it still embodied for her and who for her
survived in it, indistinguishably mingled. All of it was her life and
she could imagine no other.
Antonia would never be that sort of woman. Places, if not parasitic upon
her, at least were mere settings and backgrounds. She made the silvery
forms of the distant hills subservient to her beauty as, with the faded
silken sunshade, she drifted before them along the paths. She wore
still, rather absurdly, though the day was so fine and the paths so dry,
her little black satin house-shoes, high-heeled and laced about the
ankle with satin ribbon; and as she walked she cast her admiring,
unobservant glances to right and left or stooped now and then to pat the
dogs. The dogs were very fond of her, racing forward and then returning
to look up at her with interrogative delight. That, too, made him think
of Malcolm. They were much fonder of Tony than of Miss Latimer, to whom
they owed so much.
It was he who had to do all the talking to Miss Latimer, and it was
difficult to talk to her and to express his accurate appreciation of her
gardening exploits, or his admiration of the changing views of the house
that their walk disclosed, since, in answering him, it was always as if
she avoided some attempt at intimacy and as if he could make no
reference to the place without being too personal. This was especially
funny since, behind his praise, was the judgment that what the place
lacked was personality; and he hadn't the faintest wish to be intimate
with Miss Latimer.
It was not until after tea that he again found himself alone with
Antonia. They were in the drawing-room, the tea-table had been taken
away, the lamps lighted, and Antonia was embroidering before the fire.
"Would she hate me if I ever did come to marry you?" he asked. He asked
it without seeming to recall the morning and its avowal.
Antonia, following his advice, was selecting a shade of azalea-green to
lay against her pearly grey. She had always asked his advice about such
matters, and the cushions and firescreens in her London house recalled
to him how many summer afternoons before the war when, on week-ends in
the country, she had held up her work to ask, "_Is_ that right, Bevis?"
while Malcolm smoked beside them, amused by their preoccupation over the
alternative of pink or orange.
"Cicely, you mean?" Antonia asked.
"Yes. Would she resent it? Would she hate me for it?--and you?"
Antonia considered, and he knew while she considered, her eyes on the
azalea silk, that he filled her again with deep delight. He and his
passion were there, encompassing, yet not pursuing her. She gave nothing
and betrayed nothing and she was secure of all.
"I don't think she could hate me. That sounds fatuous; but I believe
it's true. I don't know about you. But no; I don't think she'd resent
it. Why should she?"
"Well, caring for him so much and seeing me here in his place."
"How brave you are, Bevis," said Antonia after a moment, drawing out her
silk. It was the quality in him to which she most often reverted.
"Am I? Why?"
"You are not afraid to remind me."
"Why should I be afraid? I know your thoughts. But I'm not going to talk
about them, or about mine. I want you to explain Miss Latimer."
"There's not much to explain. She shows it all, I think. She's deep and
narrow and simple. You don't like her. I can see that."
"I can't imagine how. I'm constantly making myself agreeable."
"To me; not to her. She knows as well as I do why you take trouble over
her. Not that I blame you. I didn't think I should like her when I first
saw her. And then I came to find that I did; more and more; very, very
much. Or, perhaps, it is trust, rather than liking," Antonia mused.
"Poor little Cicely. Do you know, I don't think any one has ever really
liked her much. Not old Mrs. Wellwood, really, nor even Malcolm. It hurt
me to feel, in a moment, that Mrs. Wellwood liked even me, whom she
hardly knew, better."
"I am not surprised," Captain Saltonhall commented.
"No; but that's not relevant, Bevis; because one doesn't expect one's
mother-in-law to like one, however charming one may be. What I felt
about it was that Cicely had starved her, just as she starved Cicely.
Neither could give the other anything except absolute trust. Cicely was
the fonder, I think, for old Mrs. Wellwood was cold as well as shy, cold
to every one but Malcolm; even with me she was cold; and even with
Malcolm she was, always, shy."
"Dismal it sounds, for all of them."
"No; it wasn't that. Cheerful and serene rather. But all the same Cicely
is pathetic. And the more I think of her, the more I admire her. She's
so individual, yet so impersonal, if one can make the distinction.
There's no appeal of any sort; no demand. She never seems to need
anything or to ask anything; perhaps that is why she doesn't gain
devotion; the more self-absorbed and demanding people are, the more
devotion they get, I'm afraid. At all events, she's absolutely devoted;
absolutely selfless and straight."
"What did they do with themselves, she and Mrs. Wellwood, when Malcolm
wasn't here to give them an object? I never saw his mother. He said she
hated coming to town."
"Oh, it was miserable to see them in town, as I did once; forlorn, caged
birds. Malcolm was their object, you see, even when he wasn't here. And
they lived together just as Cicely lives now alone. There are country
neighbours--Mrs. Wellwood was scrupulously sociable--and the village,
and the garden. Cicely still goes to read to old bed-ridden women and to
take them soup. I thought, in my London ignorance, that the
lady-bountiful was a figure of fun to every one nowadays, flouted from
the cottage door, and all the rest of it. But I've found out that
there's nothing the cottage really loves so well. Independence and
committees bore them dreadfully; they have all that here; there's an
energetic vicar's wife, and she got even poor Mrs. Wellwood on her
committee; it bores the village people, but it frightened her. Cicely
never would. I can't imagine Cicely on a committee. She'd have nothing
to say, though it wouldn't frighten her."
He had always savoured Antonia's vagrant impressionism. "Did they read?"
he asked.
"I should rather think so!" she laughed a little. "They were great on
reading. All the biographies in two volumes and all the travels, and
French _mémoires_--translated and expurgated. Cicely has the most
ingenuous ideas about the court of Louis the Fourteenth. Novels, too;
but they contrived always to miss the good ones. I don't suppose they
ever attempted a Henry James or heard of Anatole France."
"And never danced a tango, _à plus forte raison_, or saw a Russian
ballet."
"They did see a Russian ballet, that once they were up. Malcolm and I
took them. I think it bewildered Mrs. Wellwood, and Cicely was very dry
about it. And they saw me dance the tango; I did it for them, here,"
said Antonia, and involuntarily she sighed, although she did not look up
at her companion. She and Bevis, adepts of the dance, had, before the
war, danced together continually. "They liked seeing me do it," she
said. "They liked my differences and what they felt to be my audacities.
But they'd have liked anything Malcolm did." And then she came back to
his first question. "As far as that goes, my remarrying, if I ever did,
as long as it wasn't too quickly, and some one Malcolm liked, I don't
for a moment think she'd mind."
Captain Saltonhall did not agree with her, but he did not say so. They
talked, thus, very pleasantly, till the hour for dressing, and after
dinner Antonia sang to him and Miss Latimer. "What shall it be, Cicely?"
she asked, and Miss Latimer said, "The old favourites, please." So that
Captain Saltonhall, who had only heard her sing Brahms, Duparc, and
Debussy, heard now old English folk-songs and "Better lo'ed you could
na' be." She had a melancholy, sweet, imperfect voice, and though her
singing had magic it was the flutelike, expressionless magic of the
wood-land. She sang indolently, like a blackbird, and the current of the
song carried her. But it was a voice that moved him more than any other
voice he knew, and as he sat, impassive, apparently, his hands clasped
round his knee, he felt the tears, again and again, rising to his eyes.
Miss Latimer sat staring into the fire. She was dry-eyed. But he felt
sure that she, too, was only apparently impassive. He felt sure that
these songs had been Malcolm's favourites, too.
III
They were sitting next day in a sunny hollow of the moors. Above their
heads the spring air was chill, and as they had walked they had felt the
wind; but, sunken in this little, sheltered cup, summer was almost with
them and the grass and heather exhaled a summer fragrance. Bevis had
insisted on the walk, saying that he could manage it perfectly, and
indeed they were half a mile from the house before he had owned that
they had gone far enough for his strength; a little too far, he was
aware, as they sank down on the grass, and he was sorry, for he knew
from Antonia's face that she was going to talk to him and that all his
strength and resource would not be too much for the interview.
"I've been thinking, Bevis," she began at once, sitting a little below
him, her hands clasped round her knees. "I want to tell you everything.
In the first place, let me be quite straight. I do love you," she said,
without looking round at him. "I am in love with you."
"Yes," he assented.
"What happened yesterday morning couldn't have happened had I not been,"
she defined for herself. "Not that I mean it exonerates me."
"Or me?"
"You don't need exoneration. You are not unfaithful."
"No, I'm not unfaithful; and I don't think you are. But go on."
She paused for a moment as though his assurance hurt rather than helped
her. "That is what it all comes back to, for me, Bevis. Am I unfaithful?
If Malcolm were alive, I should be."
"If Malcolm were alive, you wouldn't be in love with me," he set her
straight.
"I'm so glad you see that and believe it," she murmured, while he saw
the slow flush in her cheek. "That's one of the things I most wanted to
make clear."
"You had no need to, my dear girl. I know how it was with you and
Malcolm."
"You know. You remember. Yes." She drew a deep breath. He had comforted
her. "So, you see, I'm only in love with you because he isn't here any
longer. If he were here, I couldn't love any one but him." She stopped
for a moment. "Bevis, that is what it comes to. Is he here?"
"Here? How do you mean?" the young man asked.
"Are we immortal? Do we survive death? Does Malcolm, somewhere, still
love me?" She kept her face turned from him and he was aware that he
felt her questions irrelevant and that this was wrong of him or perhaps
came of his being tired. Or perhaps it came from the fact that the soft
edges and tips of Antonia's averted profile, soft yet so clear, shadowed
yet so pale, against the sky, were more relevant than any such
questions. He looked away from her, calling himself to order, and then,
in a different voice, for though he still felt her questions irrelevant,
he was able to think of them, he said, "I see."
What he seemed first to see was himself as he had been not many years
ago, a youth in his rooms at Oxford. Books piled beside him, a pipe
between his teeth, he saw himself staring into the fire, while, in a
sad yet pleasant perplexity, he had brooded on such questions. Body and
soul; appearance and reality; the temporal and the eternal
consciousness;--the old words chimed in his brain. Then came a swift
memory of Antonia and himself dancing the tango in London, and then the
memory of the dead face of a little French _poilu_ he had come upon one
evening in France, by the roadside, a face sweet and childlike. How many
dead faces he had seen since he had danced the tango with Antonia, and
how wraith-like, beside the agonies he had since passed through, were
the mental disciplines and distractions of his studious youth! Yet it
all held together. It was because of the agonies that the answers had
come.
Antonia's voice broke in upon his reverie and his eyes were brought back
to her. "Help me, Bevis," she said.
Something in that made him dimly smile. "Help you in what way, my dear
girl? Which do you want most--to have me and to believe that Malcolm
doesn't exist any longer; or to believe him immortal and to lose me?"
He had not meant to be cruel; he was placing the dilemma before himself
as well as her; but he saw he had been, when her slow, helpless gaze of
pain turned upon him and her eyes filled with tears.
"Why do you always show me that I must despise myself?" she said. "How
can I know what I want?"
"Dear Tony," he said gently, "what you want, what you really want, is
me. And I don't despise you for that."
"Oh--it's not so simple, Bevis;--oh, it's not! I want you; but if he
were here I'd go to him and leave you without a pang."
"No, you wouldn't," he smiled grimly. "You'd leave me, of course,
because he has been far more in your life than I have;--and he is your
husband. But it wouldn't be without a pang."
"With a pang, then," she was brave and faced it. "But that would pass
when I had told him everything and been forgiven. Malcolm, I know, would
forgive me."
"I should rather say he would!" Still the young man laughed a little
grimly. "Why shouldn't he? If a man returns from the dead, he must
expect to find that the world has gone on without him, mustn't he? After
all, Tony dear, Malcolm hasn't merely gone to Australia or Patagonia;
he's dead; and that does make a difference."
She was the most generous and unresentful of creatures. A warm flood of
recognition filled him as he saw how he still hurt her and how she took
it. And he was harsh and crabbed. He had always had an ironic tongue and
an ironic eye for reality, in himself and in others. And now, entangled
in his own passion and in the webs of her dreams and difficulties, he
recognized something perfidious in his nature, something that, while it
adored her, yet found pleasure, or relief, in dealing her now and then,
as a punishment for what she made him suffer, the light lash of his
unentangled and passionless perception. And who was he to lash Tony?
"Forgive me," he said, leaning over and looking down at her. "I am a
brute, as I told you. Why am I not more merely grateful to you for
loving any one so useless? I'll help you in any way I can, Tony. What
do you really want to ask me? Perhaps what makes me so odious to you is
that I've got no help for you."
Perhaps it was. A shrinking from the issue she put before him had been
in him from the first.
And poor Tony did not suspect what he meant; did not, for all her
attempt at clearness, see in what way she really wanted him to help her.
"Please, please do," she said. "Try to be gentle and to understand. I'll
go by what you say. So there it is: Do _you_ believe in immortality,
Bevis?"
There it was, indeed, and no wonder he had shrunk. If it had come to him
as a test before the war, how easy it would have been, with a sincerity
sad, for all its personal gain, to say, "I don't know; I really don't
know what I believe, darling; but it doesn't seem to me at all likely."
But now, leaning over her, still looking at her, he had to answer in the
only verbal form that fitted with his thought, and as he did so he felt
himself grow pale. "Yes," he said; "I do believe in immortality, Tony."
She, too, then grew very pale. It was as he had foreseen. She had not
really believed. It had only been a haunting dream. And her hope had
been that he would tell her that to him, too, it was only a dream. Poor
child! Poor, poor child. And poor Malcolm. Was it with this face he was
welcomed back among the realities of her world? She continued to look at
him in silence, taking it all in, with a trust, an acceptance, pitiful
indeed; and suddenly, seeing in her despair his full justification, he
took her into his arms;--was it to comfort, or to claim her, against his
conviction and her despair? "My darling," he said, pressing his head
against hers, "it can't part us. It shan't part us. I won't let you
destroy your life and mine."
She had, piteously, put her arms around his neck and she clung to him
like a frightened child.