So the summer went by; a hot summer, passed brightly enough to all
appearance in the spacious rooms and gardens of Clewes and in
expeditions among the neighboring fells. But to Ian it seemed rather an
anxious pause in life. His work was at a stand-still, yet whatever the
optimistic Aunt Beatrice might affirm, he could not feel that the shadow
was lifting from his wife's mind. To others she appeared cheerful in the
quiet, serious way that had always been hers, but he saw that her whole
attitude towards life, especially in her wistful, yearning tenderness
towards himself and Tony, was that of a woman who feels the stamp of
death to be set upon her. At night, lying upon his breast, she would
sometimes cling to him in an agony of desperate love, adjuring him to
tell her the truth as to that Other: whether he did not see that she was
different from his own Milly, whether it were possible that he could
love that mysterious being as he loved her, his true, loving wife. Ian,
who had been wont to hold stern doctrines as to the paramount obligation
of truthfulness, perjured himself again and again, and hoped the
Recording Angel dropped the customary tear. But, however deep the
perjury, before long he was sure to find himself obliged to renew it.
To a man of his sensitive and punctilious nature the situation was
almost intolerable. The pity of this tender, innocent life, his care,
which seemed like some little inland bird, torn by the tempest from its
native fields and tossed out to be the plaything of an immense and
terrible ocean whose deeps no man has sounded! The pity of that other
life, so winged for shining flight, so armed for triumphant battle, yet
held down helpless in those cold ocean depths, and for pity's sake not
to be helped by so much as a thought! Yet from the thorns of his hidden
life he plucked one flower of comfort which to him, the philosopher, the
man of Abstract Thought, was as refreshing as a pious reflection would
be to a man of Religion. He had once been somewhat shaken by the dicta
of the modern philosophers who relegate human love to the plane of an
illness or an appetite. But where was the physical difference between
the woman he so passionately loved and the one for whom he had never
felt more than affection and pity? If from the strange adventure of his
marriage he had lost some certainties concerning the human soul, he had
gained the certainty that Love at least appertains to it.
One hot afternoon Milly was writing her Australian letter under a
spreading ilex-tree on the lawn. Lady Thomson and Ian were sitting there
also; he reading the latest French novel, she making notes for a speech
she had to deliver shortly at the opening of a Girls' High School.
It is sometimes difficult to find the right news for people who have
been for some years out of England, and Milly, in the languor of her
melancholy, had relaxed the excellent habit formed under Aunt Beatrice
of always keeping her mind to the subject in hand. She sat at the table
with one hand propping her chin, gazing dreamily at the bright
flower-beds on the lawn and the big, square, homely house, brightened by
its striped awnings. At length Aunt Beatrice looked up from her notes.
"Mooning, Milly!" she exclaimed, in her full, agreeable voice. "Now I
suppose you'll be telling your father you havn't time to write him a
long letter."
"Milly's not mooning; she's making notes, like you," Ian replied, for
his wife.
Milly looked around at him in surprise, and then at her right hand. It
held a stylograph and had been resting on some scattered sheets of
foolscap that Ian had left there in the morning. She had certainly been
scrawling on it a little, but she was not aware of having written
anything. Yet the scrawl, partly on one sheet and partly on another, was
writing, very bad and broken, but still with a resemblance to her own
handwriting. She pored over it; then looked Ian in the eyes, her own
eyes large with a bewilderment touched with fear.
"I--I don't know what it means," she said, in a low, anxious tone.
"What's that?" queried Aunt Beatrice. "Can't read what you've written?
You remind me of our old writing-master at school, who used to say
tragically that he couldn't understand how it was that when that
happened to a man he didn't just take a gun and shoot himself. I
recommend you the pond, Mildred. It's more feminine."
"Please don't talk to Milly like that," retorted Ian, not quite lightly.
"She always follows your advice, you know. It--it's only scrabbles."
He had left his chair and was leaning over the table, completely
puzzled, first by Milly's terrified expression, then by what she had
written, illegibly enough, across the two sheets of foolscap. He made
out: "You are only miserab ..."--the words were interspersed with really
illegible scrawls--"... Go ... go ... Let me ... I want to live, I want
to ... Mild ..."
Milly now wrote in her usual clear hand: "Who wrote that?"
He scribbled with his pencil: "You."
She replied in writing: "No. I know nothing about it."
Lady Thomson had taken up the newspaper, a thing she never did except at
odd minutes, although she contrived to read everything in it that was
really worth reading. Folding it up and looking at her watch, she
exclaimed:
"A quarter of an hour before the carriage is round! Now don't go
dawdling there, young people, and keep it standing in the sun."
Milly stood up and gathered her writing-materials together. Aunt
Beatrice's tall figure, its stalwart handsomeness disguised in uncouth
garments, passed with its usual vigorous gait across the burning
sunlight on the lawn and broad gravel walk, to disappear under the
awning of a French window. Milly, very pale, had closed her eyes and her
hands were clasped. She trembled, but her voice and expression were calm
and even resolute.
"The evil spirit is trying to get possession of me in another way now,"
she said. "But with God's help I shall be able to resist it."
Ian too was pale and disturbed. It was to him as though he had suddenly
heard a beloved voice calling faintly for help.
"It's only automatic writing, dear," he replied. "You may not have been
aware you were writing, but it probably reflects something in your
thoughts."
"It does not," returned she, firmly. "However miserable I may sometimes
be, I could never wish to give up a moment of my life with you, my own
husband, or to leave you and our child to the influence of this--this
being."
She stretched out her arms to him.
"Please hold me, Ian, and will as I do, that I may resist this horrible
invasion. I have a feeling that you can help me."
He hesitated. "I, darling? But I don't believe--"
She approached him, and took hold of him urgently, looking him in the
eyes.
"Won't you do it, husband dear? Please, for my sake, even if you don't
believe, promise you'll will to keep me here. Will it, with all your
might!"
What madness it was, this fantastic scene upon the well-kept lawn, under
the square windows of the sober, opulent North Country house! And the
maddest part of it all was the horrible reluctance he felt to comply
with his wife's wish. He seemed to himself to pause noticeably before
answering her with a meaningless half-laugh:
"Of course I'll promise anything you like, dear."
He put his arms around her and rested his face upon her golden head.
"Will!" she whispered, and the voice was one of command rather than of
appeal. "Will! You have promised."
He willed as she commanded him.
The triple madness of it! He did not believe--and yet it seemed to him
that the being he loved best in all the world was struggling up from
below, calling to him for help from her tomb; and he was helping her
enemy to hold down the sepulchral stone above her. He put his hand to
his brow, and the sweat stood upon it.
Aunt Beatrice's masculine foot crunched the gravel. She stood there
dressed and ready for the drive, beckoning them with her parasol. They
came across the lawn holding each other by the hand, and Milly's face
was calm, even happy. Aunt Beatrice smiled at them broadly with her
large, handsome mouth and bright brown eyes.
"What, not had enough of spooning yet, you foolish young people! The
carriage will be round in one minute, and Milly won't be ready."