On their return to Oxford the young couple were fêted beyond the common.
People who had known Milly Flaxman in earlier days were surprised to
think how little they had noticed her beauty or guessed what a fund of
humor, what an extraordinary charm, had lurked beneath the surface of
her former quiet, grave manner. The Master of Durham alone refused to be
surprised. He merely affirmed in his short squeak that he had always
admired Mrs. Stewart very much. She was now frequently to be found in
the place of honor at those dinners of his, where distinguished visitors
from London brought the stir and color of the great world into the
austere groves, the rarefied atmosphere of Academe.
Wherever she appeared, the vivid personality of Mrs. Stewart made a kind
of effervescence which that indescribable entity, a vivid personality,
is sure to keep fizzing about it. She was devoutly admired, fiercely
criticised, and asked everywhere. It is true she had quite given up her
music, but she drew caricatures which were irresistibly funny, and was a
tremendous success in charades. Everything was still very new to her,
everything interesting and amusing. She was enchanted with her house,
although Milly and Lady Thomson had chosen it, preferring to a villa in
the Parks an old gray house of the kind that are every day recklessly
destroyed by the march of modern vulgarity. She approved of the few and
good pieces of old furniture with which they had provided it; although
Lady Thomson could not entirely approve of the frivolity and
extravagance of the chintzes with which she helped the sunshine to
brighten the low, panelled rooms. But Aunt Beatrice, girt with
principles major and minor, armed with so Procrustean a measure for most
of her acquaintance, accepted Mildred's deviations with an astonishing
ease. The secret of personal magnetism is not yet discovered. It may be
that the _aura_ surrounding each of us is no mystic vision of the
Neo-Buddhists, but a physical fact; that Mildred's personality acted by
a power not moral but physical on the nerves of those who approached
her, exciting those of some, of the majority, pleasurably, filling
others with a nameless uneasiness, to account for which they must accuse
her manners or her character.
To Ian Stewart the old panelled house with the walled garden behind,
where snowdrops and crocuses pushed up under budding orchard boughs, was
a paradise beyond any he had imagined. He found Mildred the most
adorable of wives, the most interesting of companions. Her defects as a
housekeeper, which Aunt Beatrice noted in silence but with surprise,
were nothing to him. He could not help pausing sometimes even in the
midst of his work, to wonder at his own good fortune and to reflect
that whatever the future might have in store, he would have no right to
complain, since it had been given to him to know the taste of perfect
happiness.
Since his marriage he had been obliged to take more routine work, and
the Long Vacation had become more valuable to him than ever. As soon as
he had finished an Examination he had undertaken, he meant to devote the
time to the preparation of a new book which he had in his mind. Mildred,
seemingly as eager as himself that the book should be done, had at first
agreed. Then some of her numerous friends had described the pleasures of
Dieppe, and she was seized with the idea that they too might go there.
Ian, she said, could work as well at Dieppe as at Oxford or in the
country. Ian knew better; besides, his funds were low and Dieppe would
cost too much. For the first time he opposed Mildred's wishes, and to
her surprise she found him perfectly firm. There was no quarrel, but
although she was silent he felt that she did not yield her opinion and
was displeased with him.
Late at night as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive
imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry,
scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the
"sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage
as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and
do work which counted. She had no fixed habits, and he flung down pipe
and pen, hoping to find her still awake. But she was already sound
asleep. The room was dark, but he saw her by the illumination of
distant lightning, playing on the edge of a dark and sultry world. His
appointed task was not yet done and he returned to the study, a long,
low, dark-panelled room, looking on the garden. The windows were wide
open on the hushed, warm, almost sulphurous darkness, from which frail
white-winged moths came floating in towards the shaded lamp on his
writing-table. He sat down to his papers and by an effort of will
concentrated his mind upon them. Habit had made such concentration easy
to him as a rule, but to-night, after half an hour of steady work, he
was mastered by an invading restlessness of mind and body. The cause was
not far to seek; he could hear all the time he worked the dull, almost
continuous, roar of distant thunder. All else was very still, it was
long past midnight and the town was asleep.
He got up and paced the room once or twice, grasping his extinguished
pipe absently in his hand. Suddenly a blast seemed to spring out of
nowhere and rush madly round the enclosed garden, tossing the gnarled
and leafy branches of the old orchard trees and dragging at the long
trails of creepers on wall and trellis. It blew in at the windows, hot
as from the heart of the thunder-cloud, and waved the curtains before
it. It rushed into the very midst of the old house with its cavernous
chimneys, deep cellars, and enormous unexplored walls, filling it with
strange, whispering sounds, as of half articulate voices, here menacing,
there struggling to reveal some sinister and vital secret. The blast
died away, but it seemed to have left those voices still muttering and
sighing through the walls that had sheltered so many generations, such
various lives of men. Ian was used to the creaking and groaning of the
wood-work; he knew how on the staircase the rising of the boards, which
had been pressed down in the day, simulated ghostly footsteps in the
night. He was in his mental self the most rational of mortals, but at
times the Highland strain in his blood, call it sensitive or
superstitious, spoke faintly to his nerves--never before so strongly, so
over-masteringly as to-night. A blue blaze of crooked lightning
zigzagged down the outer darkness and seemed to strike the earth but a
little beyond the garden wall. Following on its heels a tremendous clap
of thunder burst, as it were, on the very chimneys. The solid house
shook to its foundations. But the tide of horrible, irrational fear
which swept over Ian's whole being was not caused by this mere
exaggerated commonplace of nature. He could give no guess what it was
that caused it; he only knew that it was agony. He knew what it meant to
feel the hair lift on his head; he knew what the Psalmist meant when he
said, "My bones are turned to water." And as he stood unable to move,
afraid to turn his head, abject and ashamed of his abjectness, he was
listening, listening for he knew not what.
At length it came. He heard the stairs creak and a soft padding footstep
coming slowly down them; with it the brush of a light garment and
intermittently a faint human sound between a sigh and a sob. He did not
reflect that he could not really have heard such slight sounds through a
thick stone wall and a closed door. He heard them. The steps stopped at
the door; a hand seemed feeling to open it, and again there was a
painful sigh. The physical terror had not passed from him, but the
sudden though that it was his wife and that she was frightened or ill,
made him able to master it. He seized the lamp, because he knew the
light in the hall was extinguished, rushed to the door, opened it and
looked out. There was no one there. He made a hasty but sufficient
search and returned to the study.
The extremity of his fear was now passed, but an unpleasantly eery
feeling still lingered about him and he had a very definite desire to
find himself in some warm, human neighborhood. He had left the door open
and was arranging the papers on his writing-table, when once again he
heard those soft padding feet on the stairs; but this time they were
much heavier, more hurried, and stumbled a little. He stood bent over
the table, a bundle of papers in his hand, no longer overcome by mortal
terror, yet somehow reluctant once more to look out and to see once
more--nothing. There was a sound outside the door, louder, hoarser than
the faint sob or sigh which he had heard before, and he seized the lamp
and turned towards it. Before he had made a step forward, the door was
pushed violently back and his wife came in, leaning upon it as though
she needed support. She was barefooted and dressed only in a long
night-gown, white, yet hardly whiter than her face. Her eyes did not
turn towards him, they stared in front of her, not with the fixed gaze
of an ordinary sleep-walker, but with purpose and intensity. She seemed
to see something, to pursue something, with starting eyes and
out-stretched arms; something she hated even more than she feared it,
for her lips were blanched and tightened over her teeth as though with
fury, and her smooth white forehead gathered in a frown. Again she
uttered that low, fierce sound, like that he had heard outside the door.
Then, loosing the handle on which she had leaned, she half sprung, half
staggered, with uplifted hand, towards an open window, beyond which the
rush of the thunder shower was just visible, sloping pallidly across the
darkness. She leaned out into it and uttered to the night a hoarse,
confused voice, words inchoate, incomprehensible, yet with a terrible
accent of rage, of malediction. This transformation of his wife, so
refined, so self-contained, into a creature possessed by an almost
animal fury, struck Ian with horror, although he accepted it as a
phenomenon of somnambulism. He approached but did not touch her, for he
had heard that it was dangerous to awaken a somnambulist. Her voice sank
rapidly to a loud whisper and he heard her articulate--"My husband!
Mine! Mine!"--but in no tone of tenderness, rather pronouncing the words
as a passionate claim to his possession. Then suddenly she drooped, half
kneeling on the deep window-seat, half fallen across the sill. He sprang
to catch her, but not before her forehead had come down sharply on the
stone edge of the outer window. He kneeled upon the window-seat and
gathered her gently in his arms, where she lay quiet, but moaning and
shuddering.
"My husband!" she wailed, no longer furious now but despairing. "Ian! My
love! Ian! My life!--my life! My own husband!"
Even in this moment it thrilled him to hear such words from her lips. He
had not thought she loved him so passionately. He lifted her on to a
deep old sofa at the end of the room, wrapped her in a warm Oriental
coverlet which hung there, and held her to his heart, murmuring love and
comfort in her cold little ear. It seemed gradually to soothe her,
although he did not think she really awoke. Then he put her down,
lighted the lamp outside, and, not without difficulty, carried her up to
bed. Her eyes were half closed when he laid her down and drew the
bedclothes over her; and a minute or two later, when he looked in from
his dressing-room, she was evidently asleep.
When he got into bed she did not stir, and while he lay awake for
another hour, she remained motionless and breathing regularly. He
assured himself that the whole curious occurrence could be explained by
the electrical state of the atmosphere, which had affected his own
nerves in a way he would never humiliate himself by confessing to any
one. Those mysterious footsteps on the stairs which he had heard,
footsteps like his wife's yet not hers; that hand upon the door, that
voice of sighs, were the creation of his own excited brain. In time he
would doubtless come to believe his own assurances on the point, but
that night at the bottom of his heart he did not believe them.