Ian only came home just in time to scramble into his evening dress-suit
for a dinner at the Fletchers'. He needed not to fear delay either from
that shirt-button at the back, refractory or on the last thread, or from
any other and more insidious trap for the hurrying male. Milly looked
after him in a way which, if the makers of traditions concerning wives
were not up to their necks in falsehood, must have inspired devotion in
the heart of any husband alive. She had already observed that he had
been allowed to lose most of the pocket-handkerchiefs she had marked for
him in linen thread. That trifles such as this should cause bitterness
will seem as absurd to sensible persons as it would to be told that our
lives are made up of mere to-morrows--if Shakespeare had not happened to
put that in his own memorable way. For it takes a vast deal of
imagination to embrace the ordinary facts of life and human nature. But
even the most sensible will understand that it was annoying for Milly
regularly to find her own and the family purse reduced to a state that
demanded rigid economy. The Invader, stirring in that limbo where she
lay, might have answered that rigid economy was Milly's forte and real
delight, and that it was well she should have nothing to spend in
ridiculously disguising the fair body they were condemned to share.
Mildred certainly left behind her social advantages which both Ian and
Milly enjoyed without exactly realizing their source, while her
bric-à-brac purchases, from an eighteenth-century print to a Chinese
ivory, were always sure to be rising investments. But all such minor
miseries as her invasion might multiply for Milly, were forgotten in the
horror of the abyss that had now opened under her feet. For long after
that second return of hers, on the night of the thunderstorm, a shadow,
a dreadful haunting thought, had hovered in the back of her mind.
Gradually it had faded with the fading of a memory; but to-night the
colors of that memory revived, the thought startled into a more vivid
existence.
In the press and hurry of life, not less in Oxford than in other modern
towns, the Stewarts and Fletchers did not meet so often and intimately
as to make inevitable the discovery of Mildred Stewart's dual
personality by her cousins. They said she had developed moods; but with
the conservatism of relations, saw nothing in her that they had not seen
in her nursery days.
Ian and Milly walked home from dinner, according to Oxford custom, but a
Durham man walked with them, talking over a College question with Ian,
and they did not find themselves alone until they were within the
wainscoted walls of the old house. Milly had looked so pale all the
evening that Ian expected her to go to bed at once; but she followed
him into the study, where the lamp was shedding its circle of light on
the heaped books and papers of his writing-table. Making some
perfunctory remarks which she barely answered, he sat down to work at an
address which he was to deliver at the meeting of a learned society in
London.
Milly threw off her white shawl and seated herself on the old,
high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate
tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with
gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of
dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife
sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into
nothingness, like some Cassandra of the hearth, who listens to the
inevitable approaching footsteps of a tragic destiny. At last she said:
"I've got something awful to tell you."
Ian startled, dropped his pen and swung himself around in his pivot
chair.
"What about? Tony?"--for it was to this diminutive that Mildred had
reduced the flowing syllables of Antonio.
"No, your cousin, Maxwell Davison."
Now, Ian liked his cousin well enough, but by no means as well as he
liked Tony.
"About Max!" he exclaimed, relieved. "What's happened to him?"
"Nothing--but oh, Ian! I--hate even to speak of such a thing--"
"Never mind. Just tell me what it is."
"I was on the river with him this afternoon, and he--he made love to
me."
The lines of Ian's face suddenly hardened.
"Did he?" he returned, significantly, playing with a paper-knife. Then,
after a pause: "I'm awfully sorry, Milly. I'd no idea he was such a
cad."
"He--he wanted me to run away with him."
Ian's face became of an almost inhuman severity.
"I shall let Maxwell Davison know my opinion of him," he said.
"But it's worse--it's even more horrible than that. He was expecting me.
I--_I_ of course knew nothing about it; I only knew about the
garden-party at Lady Margaret. But he said I'd promised to come; he said
all kinds of shocking, horrid things about my having dressed myself up
for him--"
"Please don't tell me what he said, Milly," Ian interrupted, still
coldly, but with a slight expression of disgust. "I'd rather you didn't.
I suppose I ought to have taken better care of you, my poor little girl,
but really here in Oxford one never thinks of anything so outrageous
happening."
"I must tell you one thing," she resumed, almost obstinately. "He said
he knew I didn't love you--that _I_ didn't love _you_, my own darling
husband. Some one, some one--must be responsible for his thinking that.
How do I know what happens when--when I'm away. My poor Ian! Left with a
creature who doesn't love you!"
Ian rose. His face was cold and hard still, but there was a faint flush
on his cheek, the mark of a frown between his black brows. He walked to
a window and looked out into the moonlit garden, where the gnarled
apple-trees threw weird black shadows on grass and wall, like shapes of
grotesque animals, or half-hidden spectres, lurking, listening, waiting.
"We're getting on to a dangerous subject," he answered, at length.
"Don't give me pain by imagining evil about--about yourself. You could
never, under any aspect, be anything but innocent and loyal and all that
a man could wish his wife to be."
He smoothed his brow with an effort, went up to her, and taking her soft
face between his hands kissed her forehead.
"There!" he exclaimed, with a forced smile. "Don't let's talk about it
any more, darling. Go to bed and forget all about it. It won't seem so
bad to-morrow morning."
But Milly did not respond. When he released her head she threw it back
against her own clasped hands, closing her eyes. She was ghastly pale.
"No," she moaned, "I can't bear it by myself. It's too, too awful. It's
not Me; it's something that takes my place. I saw it once. It's an evil
spirit. O God, what have I done that such a thing should happen to me!
I've always tried to be good."
There was a clash of pity and anger in Ian's breast. Pity for Milly's
case, anger on account of her whom his inmost being recognized as
another, whatever his rational self might say to the matter. He sat
down beside his wife and uttered soothing nothings. But she turned upon
him eyes of wild despair, the more tragic because it broke through a
nature fitted only for the quietest commonplaces of life. She flung
herself upon him, clutching him tight, hiding her face upon him.
"What have I done?" she moaned again. "You know I always believed in
God, in God's love. I wouldn't have disbelieved even if He'd taken you
away from me. But now I can't believe in anything. There must be wicked
spirits, but there can't be a good God if He allows them to take
possession of a poor girl like me, who's never done any one any harm. O
Ian, I've tried to pray, and I can't. I don't believe in anything now."
Ian was deeply perplexed. He himself believed neither in a God nor in
evil spirits, and he knew not how to approach Milly's mind. At length he
said, quietly:
"I should have expected you, dear, to have reasoned about this a little
more. What's the use of being educated if we give way to superstition,
like savages, directly something happens that we don't quite understand?
Some day an eclipse of conscious personality, like yours, will come to
be understood as well as an eclipse of the moon. Don't let's make it
worse by conjuring up superstitious terrors."
"At first I thought it was like that--an eclipse of memory. But now I
feel more and more it's a different person that's here, it's not I.
To-night Cousin David said that sometimes when he met me he expected to
find when he got home that his Lady Hammerton had walked away out of the
frame. And, Ian, I looked up at that portrait, and suddenly I was
reminded of--that fearful night when I came back and saw--something. I
am descended from that woman, and you know how wicked she was."
Again the strange irritation stirred in the midst of Ian's pity.
"Wicked, darling! That's an absurd word to use."
"She left her husband. And it's awful that I, who can't understand how
any woman could be so wicked as to do that, should be so terribly like
her. I feel as though it had something to do with this appalling thing
happening to me. Perhaps her sins are being visited on me." She held the
lapels of his coat and looked tenderly, yearningly, in his face. "And I
could bear it better if--But oh, my Ian! I can't bear to think of you
left with something wicked, with some one who doesn't love you, who
deceives you, and--"
"Milly," he broke in, "I won't have you say things like that. They are
absolutely untrue, and I won't have them said."
There was a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard
before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new
to her. When she spoke it was in a gasp.
"You love her? You love that wicked, bad woman so much you won't let me
tell you what she is?"
He drew himself away from her with a gesture, and in a minute answered
with cold deliberation:
"I cannot cease to love my own wife because--because she's not always
exactly the same."
They sat silent beside each other. At length Milly rose from the sofa.
The tinselled scarf, that other woman's delicate finery, had slipped
from the white beauty of her shoulders. She drew it around her again
slowly, and slowly with bowed head left the room.