TÊTE-À-TÊTE.
Lawrence allowed himself an uneasy movement in his chair, and he did
not answer.
Prudence sat stroking the head and neck of the crow, which still
remained on her knee.
"Since we are having such a very interesting conversation," she said,
"pray let's continue it. There's nothing so spicy and agreeable
as a _tête-à-tête_ between husband and wife who are thoroughly
disillusioned; don't you think so?"
Lawrence said nothing. He glanced about the room like one who would
be glad to escape. He was weary and faint, but he would not seem
weary if he could help it; and there was a weight like lead on his
heart. He thought, with seeming triviality, that he had never before
quite known what that phrase, "a heart as heavy as lead," meant.
"You have decided now that you never loved me," she continued.
"Why need we discuss that question?" he asked.
"Oh, because it suits me to discuss it. I feel analytical this
morning. Let us dissect a few feelings. My husband has just had an
interview with an old flame, and now he comes and tells me he thinks
he never loved me. You must believe that I shall be interested in
this subject. Pray, Rodney, if I may ask, what did you feel that made
it possible for you to take me to Boston that night?"
Lawrence sat gazing at Prudence as she spoke. He had a fanciful
notion that his heart was like ashes as well as like lead. How could
he have been so blind? He could not now imagine that he had felt what
he had felt for Prudence. Some one has said that there is nothing so
dead as a dead passion.
"I suppose," he said, slowly and drearily, "that I had a fancy for
you. You infatuated me; it was a kind of intoxication."
"Do you eliminate passion from love?"
She put the question as if she were making an inquiry concerning a
symptom of disease.
"No, but love is not all passion. It has a basis of tenderness and
respect; it is not a delirium."
"From which you recover to despise yourself?"
She seemed to add this to his sentence.
Lawrence rose; he stood a moment in front of his wife, gazing down
at her. He was bewildered by the tumult of his emotions, by his
strange indifference to Prudence, and, perhaps more than all, by his
physical weakness.
He turned towards the couch near and stretched himself out upon it.
His wife rose and put a shawl over him, and he said, "Thank you," in
a mechanical way. Then he asked, trying to prevent his voice from
showing irritation:
"Is it really necessary for us to continue this talk?"
"Perhaps not; but if I prefer to go on, dear Rodney?"
Lawrence closed his eyes.
"Go on," he said.
"How kind of you to let me have the last word! But you see I
think I'll take up the study of psychology, with you and me as
object-lessons. Can't we mount a scrap of our feelings on a bit of
glass and put it under that microscope of yours? Really, I didn't
think I should come to look back almost with envy to that time when
I nursed mamma at Carlsbad. At least I wasn't married then, and Lord
Maxwell came to the place. To be sure, he had symptoms, and a man
with symptoms isn't much better than a block of wood to flirt with."
Prudence's voice was running on with a semblance of gaiety; and now
she laughed.
"I wonder what sort of a flirter Caro finds Lord Maxwell. Of course
he's stupid, for is he not a man? I heard Mrs. Yorke say yesterday
that people began to talk as if Maxwell would marry Carolyn. She
may be the countess in the family, after all. Then mamma can say,
'My niece, Lady Maxwell,' instead of 'My daughter, Lady Maxwell.'
Of course it won't be quite so fine, but it will do. I suppose Caro
will visit every cottage on his lordship's estate, and will make no
end of flannel petticoats. In novels, you know, the good lady carries
petticoats and strong soups to the poor, and reads to them. Can't you
see Caro doing that, Rodney?"
Lawrence lay with his eyes closed. He opened them now to glance at
his wife. She was looking full at him, and their mutual gaze met as
two shining bits of steel might meet. It almost seemed as if one
listening might have heard the clash of metal on metal.
Lawrence immediately closed his eyes again.
"Can't you see Caro doing that?" repeated Prudence, relentlessly.
"I haven't an active imagination like you," he answered, at last.
"What a pity!"
Prudence, after a moment, turned to her writing again. Her husband
lay there, and heard her pen going over the paper.
He began to think more calmly, and it came to him that he had not
done a good thing in telling Prudence that he had never loved her.
There was no need of his saying that. He would give much now if he
could recall those words; but he knew he could not remove the sting
of them. What a brute he had been! What a very different person he
was, every way, from the person he had meant to be! He did not feel
able to understand it all. He wished he could banish the memory of
Carolyn's lovely, truthful face. He was sorry he had seen her. Did
human beings always want the thing they could not have?
For what seemed a long time, he heard his wife's pen on the paper;
then the noise grew indistinct, and Lawrence knew that he was going
to sleep, and was thankful for the knowledge.
But he did not sleep long. Nothing special awakened him, however. He
opened his eyes; they rested on Prudence, who had stopped writing.
She was sitting with her hands folded on her lap, gazing at him.
How old and hard her face appeared! She smiled immediately, smiled
brilliantly and without any softness.
"I was waiting for you to waken," she said.
"Well?"
"I hadn't quite had the last word yet," she said, with a slight laugh.
Lawrence sat up.
"I was a brute to tell you I had never loved you," he exclaimed,
abruptly.
"Never mind; we must always tell the truth, you know," she returned,
lightly.
He said nothing. He was trying to brush the clouds away from his
brain and think clearly.
"And since we must speak truth," she went on, "I was waiting
to tell you I was distractedly in love with you,--it was no
make-believe,--but that I was deadly tired of the whole thing
in a few months. It's not quite a year yet, is it? That's why I
wanted to amuse myself with Mr. Meramble, or somebody. But when you
flung Meramble into the ocean you did it so well, and he seemed so
insignificant, that I was almost in love with you again. But it
didn't last. Now I've had the last word; I imagine we understand each
other."
She rose and stretched her arms above her head. She glanced at her
watch.
"I'm going sailing with Mrs. Yorke and a few others. I hope you won't
need anything before I come back. Don't you think you'd better try to
have another nap? You look very tired. And I hope you won't forget
your medicine, and all that kind of thing."
She went into the inner room, and in a few moments came back with hat
on and parasol in her hand.
Lawrence was walking back and forth in the room. He paused near his
wife, and laid his hand on her arm.
"I hope you won't remember the foolish things a poor half-sick fellow
says," he began. "I hope, since we are to spend our lives together,
we may be on friendly terms, Prudence."
Prudence was occupied in furling her parasol, and in fastening the
folds. She did not raise her eyes, as she answered, "Of course we
shall be friendly. You didn't think I should begin to quarrel with
you, did you? I'm not quite so vulgar as that. I'm not going to mend
your stockings, or warm your slippers, or that kind of thing, you
know. We are like other people, that's all."
Prudence now glanced up at her companion. There was a fire in her
eyes that blazed still more, as she continued:
"I imagine I have a great deal of temperament, as the French say.
Now, good-by. I don't know whether we shall sail down to Plymouth, or
not."
She left the room. The crow walked after her to the door, made a
guttural sound, then occupied himself by pulling threads from the
carpet.
Lawrence leaned against a window-casing, and gazed vaguely at the
bird.
"What did she mean by that?" he asked, aloud. "What is it to have a
great deal of temperament? Perhaps I have it myself."
He turned towards the window, from which he could see the ocean.
"Not quite a year ago. Really, it's horrible to come to this in
less than a year. There they go. How charming Yorke thinks her! See
him take her parasol and carefully hold it between her and the sun.
His wife is carrying her own sunshade. See Prudence look up at her
cavalier and smile at him. Oh, what an egregious ass I have been. And
now let me drink what I have brewed."
He turned from the window. He gave a short laugh. "Why, I am actually
becoming a soliloquizer. To how much lower depths shall I sink, I
wonder?"
After a short time he left the hotel, and walked out to a group of
rocks that at low tide stood up bare and brown in the sunlight. Just
now no one was there so he chose them as a resting-place. His tall,
gaunt form, as it made its way slowly along the beach, looked out of
tune with its gay surroundings.
When he had seated himself, a sail came gaily round the little
promontory, and glided within a few rods of him. Some one waved a
handkerchief at him; he lifted his hat mechanically, and saw that it
was his wife who was saluting him. Then the craft gathered speed, and
reeled away out into the great blue space.
Prudence, sitting in the bows, leaned forward as if to greet still
more quickly the immensity and grandeur of the sea. She never tired
of the ocean. Her whole face seemed to kindle; beautiful curves came
to her lips as she sat there silently. The sensuous nature drank in,
with a kind of dainty greediness, the scene before her. To love the
beautiful passionately, to be moved strongly by it, and revel in it,
and be drunk with it,--perhaps Prudence did not actually formulate
the belief that to do this made her a refined person, somehow above
the merely upright human being; but she certainly had a nebulous
conviction to that effect. She had an unexpressed contempt for those
people who pretended to be guided by their consciences, or by what
they called religious principle. Of course it was all a matter of
temperament, she said. She once remarked, with one of her light
laughs, that she did not know what it was to be a pantheist, but she
rather thought that she was one; she would be either that or a devout
member of the Roman or Greek Church,--something which had a gorgeous
ritual into which she could plunge her senses and stimulate them with
sumptuous dreams, and images, and music, and perfume of incense. Yes,
after all, she believed she preferred that kind of thing to being a
pantheist; though, on second thoughts, perhaps pantheism included all
these.