Althea had intended to fix the time of her marriage for the end of
November; but, not knowing quite why, she felt on her return to England
that she would prefer a slightly more distant date. It might be foolish
to give oneself more time for uneasy meditation, yet it might be wise to
give oneself more time for feeling the charm. The charm certainly
worked. While Gerald opened his innocent, yet so intelligent eyes,
rallied her on her dejection, called her a dear little goose, and kissed
her in saying it, she had known that however much he might hurt her she
was helplessly in love with him. In telling him that she would marry him
just before Christmas--they were to have their Christmas in the
Riviera--she didn't intend that he should be given more opportunities
for hurting her, but more opportunities for charming her. Helplessly as
she might love, her heart was a tremulously careful one; it could not
rush recklessly to a goal nor see the goal clearly when pain intervened.
It was not now actual pain or doubt it had to meet, but it was that mist
of confusion, wonder, and wistfulness; it needed to be dispersed, and
Gerald, she felt sure, would disperse it. Gerald, after a questioning
lift of his eyebrows, acquiesced very cheerfully in the postponement.
After all, they really didn't know each other very well; they would
shake down into each other's ways all the more quickly, after marriage,
for the wisdom gained by a longer engagement. He expressed these
reasonable resignations to Althea, who smiled a little wanly over them.
She was now involved in the rush of new impressions. They were very
crowded. She was to have but a fortnight of London and then, accompanied
by Mrs. Peel and Sally, to go to Merriston for another fortnight or so
before coming back to London for final preparations. Gerald was to be at
Merriston for part of the time, and Miss Harriet Robinson was coming
over from Paris to sustain and guide her through the last throes of her
trousseau. Already every post brought solemn letters from Miss Robinson
filled with detailed questionings as to the ordering of _lingerie_. So
it was really in this fortnight of London that she must gain her
clearest impression of what her new environment was to be; there would
be no time later on.
There were two groups of impressions that she felt herself, rather
breathlessly, observing; one group was made by Helen and Franklin and
herself, and one by Gerald's friends and relatives, with Gerald himself
as a bright though uncertain centre to it.
Gerald's friends and relations were all very nice to her and all very
charming people. She had never, she thought, met so many people at once
to whom the term might be applied. Their way of dressing, their way of
talking, their way of taking you, themselves, and everything so easily,
seemed as nearly perfect, as an example of human achievement, as could
well be. Life passed among them would assuredly be a life of gliding
along a sunny, unruffled stream. If there were dark things or troubled
things to deal with, they were kept well below the shining surface; on
the surface one always glided. It was charming, indeed, and yet Althea
looked a little dizzily from side to side, as if at familiar but
unattainable shores, and wondered if some solid foothold on solid earth
were not preferable. She wondered if she would not rather walk than
glide, and under the gliding she caught glimpses, now and then, of her
own dark wonders. They were all very nice to her; but it was as Gerald's
wife that they were nice to her; she herself counted for nothing with
them. They were frivolous people for the most part, though some among
them were serious, and often the most frivolous were those from whom she
would have expected gravity, and the serious those whom, on a first
meeting, she had thought perturbingly frivolous. Some of the political
friends--one who was in the Cabinet, for instance--seemed to think more
about hunting and bridge than about their functions in the State; while
an aunt of Gerald's, still young and very pretty, wrote articles on
philosophy and was ardently interested in ethical societies, in spite of
the fact that she rouged her cheeks, wore clothes so fashionable as to
look recondite, and had a reputation perfectly presentable for social
uses, but not exempt from private whispers. Althea caught such whispers
with particular perturbation. The question of morals was one that she
had imagined herself to face with a cosmopolitan tolerance; but she now
realised that to live among people whose code, in this respect, seemed
one of manners only, was a very different thing from reading about them
or seeing them from afar, as it were, in foreign countries. Gerald's
friends and relatives were anything rather than Bohemian, and most of
them were flawlessly respectable; but they were also anything but
unworldly; they were very worldly, and, from the implied point of view
of all of them, what didn't come out in the world it didn't concern
anybody to recognise--except in whispers. It all resolved itself, in the
case of people one disapproved of, into a faculty for being nice to them
without really having anything to do with them; and to poor Althea this
was a difficult task to undertake; social life, in her experience, was
more involved in the life of the affections and matched it more nearly.
She found, when the fortnight was over, that she was glad, very glad, to
get away to Merriston. The comparative solitude would do her good, she
felt, and in it, above all, the charm would perhaps work more
restoringly than in London. She had been, through everything, more aware
than of any new impression that the old one held firm; but, in that
breathless fortnight, she found that the charm, persistently, would not
be to her what she had hoped it might be. It did not revive her; it did
not lift and glorify her; rather it subjugated her and held her helpless
and in thrall. She was not crowned with beams; rather, it seemed to her
in moments of dizzy insight, dragged at chariot wheels. And more than
once her pride revolted as she was whirled along.
It was at Merriston, installed, apparently, so happily with her friends,
that the second group of impressions became clearer for her than it had
been in London, when she had herself made part of it--the group that had
to do with Helen, Franklin, and herself. In London, among all the wider
confusions, this smaller but more intense one had not struck her as it
did seeing it from a distance. Perhaps it had been because Franklin,
among all that glided, had been the raft she stood upon, that, in his
company, she had not felt to the full how changed was their relation.
His devotion to her was unchanged; of that she was sure. Franklin had
not altered; it was she who had altered, and she had now to look at him
from the new angle where her own choice had placed her. Seen from this
angle it was clear that Franklin could no longer offer just the same
devotion, however truly he might feel it; she had barred that out; and
it was also clear that he would continue to offer the devotion that she
had left it open to him to offer; but here came the strange
confusion--this devotion, this remnant, this all that could still be
given, hardly differed in practice from the friendship now so frankly
bestowed upon Helen as well as upon herself; and, for a further
strangeness, Franklin, whom she had helplessly seen as passing from her
life, no longer counting in it, was not gone at all; he was there,
indeed, as never before, with the background of his sudden millions to
give him significance. Franklin was, indeed, as firmly ensconced in this
new life that she had entered as he chose to be, and did he not, as a
matter of fact, count in it for more than she did? If it was confusing
to look at Franklin from the angle of her own withdrawal, what was it to
see him altered, for the world, from drab to rose-colour and to see
that people were running after him? This fantastic result of wealth,
Althea, after a stare or two, was able to accept with other ironic
acceptations; it was not indeed London's vision of Franklin that altered
him for her, though it confused her; no, what had altered him more than
anything she could have thought possible, was Helen's new seeing of him.
Helen, she knew quite well, still saw Franklin, pleasantly and clearly,
as drab-colour, still, it was probable, saw him as funny; but it was
evident that Helen had come to feel fond of him, if anything so detached
could be called fondness. He could hardly count for anything with
her--after all, who did?--but she liked him, she liked him very much,
and it amused her to watch him adjust himself to his new conditions. She
took him about with her in London and showed him things and people,
ironically smiling, no doubt, and guarding even while she exposed. And
Helen wouldn't do this unless she had come to see something more than
drab-colour and oddity, and whatever the more might be it was not the
millions. No, sitting in the drawing-room at Merriston, with its
memories of the two emotional climaxes of her life, Althea, with a
sinking heart, felt sure that she had lost something, and that she only
knew it lost from seeing that Helen had found it. It had been through
Helen's blindness to the qualities in Franklin which, timidly,
tentatively, she had put before her, that his worth had grown dim to
herself; this was the cutting fact that Althea tried to edge away from,
but that her sincerity forced her again and again to examine. It was
through Helen's appreciation that she now saw more in Franklin than she
had ever seen before. If he was funny he was also original, full of his
own underivative flavour; if he was drab-colour, he was also beautiful.
Althea recalled the benignity of Helen's eyes as they dwelt upon him,
her smile, startled, almost touched, when some quaint, telling phrase
revealed him suddenly as an unconscious torch-bearer in a dusky,
self-deceiving world. Helen and Franklin were akin in that; they
elicited, they radiated truth, and Althea recalled, too, how their eyes
would sometimes meet in silence when they both saw the same truth
simultaneously. Not that Helen's truth was often Franklin's; they were
as alien as ever in their outlook, of this Althea was convinced; but
though the outlook was so different, the faculty of sight was the same
in both--clear, unperturbed, and profoundly independent. They were
neither of them dusky or self-deceived. And what was she? Sitting in the
drawing-room at Merriston and thinking it all over, Althea asked herself
the question while her heart sank to a deeper dejection. Not only had
she lost Franklin; she had lost herself. She embarked on the dangerous
and often demoralising search for a definite, recognisable
personality--something to lean on with security, a standard and a prop.
With growing dismay she could find only a sorry little group of
shivering hopes and shaken adages. What was she? Only a well-educated
nonentity with, for all coherence and purpose in life, a knowledge of
art and literature and a helpless feeling for charm. Poor Althea was
rapidly sinking to the nightmare stage of introspection; she saw,
fitfully, not restoringly, that it was nightmare, and dragging herself
away from these miserable dissections, fixed her eyes on something not
herself, on the thing that, after all, gave her, even to the nightmare
vision, purpose and meaning. If it were only that, let her, at all
events, cling to it; the helpless feeling for charm must then shape her
path. Gerald was coming, and to be subjugated was, after all, better
than to disintegrate.
She drove down to meet him in the little brougham that was now
established in the stables. It was a wet, chilly day. Althea, wrapped in
furs, leaned in a corner and looked with an unseeing gaze at the
dripping hedgerows and grey sky. She fastened herself in anticipation on
the approaching brightness. Ah, to warm herself at the light of his
untroubled, unquestioning, unexacting being, to find herself in him. If
he would love her and charm her, that, after all, was enough to give her
a self.
He was a little late, and Althea did not feel willing to face a public
meeting on the platform. She remained sitting in her corner, listening
for the sound of the approaching train. When it had arrived, she heard
Gerald's voice before she saw him, and the sound thrilled through her
deliciously. He was talking to a neighbour, and he paused for some
moments to chat with him. Then his head appeared at the window, little
drops of rain on his crisp hair, his eyes smiling, yet, as she saw in a
moment, less at her in particular than at the home-coming of which she
was a part. 'Yes,' he turned to the porter to say, 'the portmanteau
outside, the dressing-case in here.' The door was opened and he stepped
in beside her. 'Hello, Althea!' He smiled at her again, while he drew a
handful of silver from his pocket and picked out a sixpence for the
porter. 'Here; all right.' The brougham rolled briskly out of the
station yard. They were in the long up-hill lanes. 'Well, how are you,
dear?' he asked.
Althea was trembling, but she was controlling herself; she had all the
pain and none of the advantage of the impulsive, emotional woman;
consciousness of longing made instinctive appeal impossible. 'Very well,
thank you,' she smiled, as quietly as he.
'What a beastly day!' said Gerald, looking out. 'You can't imagine
London. It's like breathing in a wet blanket. The clean air is a
comfort, at all events.'
'Yes,' smiled Althea.
'Old Morty Finch is coming down in time for dinner,' Gerald went on. 'I
met him on my way to the station and asked him. Such a good fellow--you
remember him? He won't be too many, will he?'
'Indeed no.'
Gerald leaned back, drew the rug up about his knees, and folded his
arms, looking at her, still with his generally contented smile. 'And
your guests are happy? You're enjoying yourself? Miss Arlington plays
the violin, you said. I'm looking forward to hearing her--and seeing her
again, too; she is such a very pretty girl.'
'Isn't she?' said Althea. And now, as they rolled on between the
dripping hedges, she knew that the trembling of hope and fear was gone,
and that a sudden misery, like that of the earth and sky, had settled
upon her. He had not kissed her. He did not even take her hand. Oh, why
did he not kiss her? why did he not know that she wanted love and
comfort? Only her pride controlled the cry.
Gerald looked out of the window and seemed to find everything very
pleasant. 'I went to the play last night,' he said. 'Kane took a party
of us--Helen, Miss Buchanan, Lord Compton, and Molly Fanshawe. What a
good sort he is, Kane; a real character.'
'You didn't get at him at all in the summer, did you?' said Althea, in
her deadened voice.
'No,' said Gerald reflectively, 'not at all; and I don't think that I
get much more at him now, you know; but I see more what's in him; he is
so extraordinarily kind and he takes his money so nicely. And, O Lord!
how he is being run after! He really has millions, you know; the mothers
are all at his traces trying to track him down, and he is as cheerful
and as unconcerned as you please.' Gerald suddenly smiled round at her
again. 'I say, Althea, don't you regret him sometimes? It would have
been a glorious match, you know.'
Althea felt herself growing pale. 'Regret him!' she said, and, for her,
almost violently, the opportunity was an outlet for her wretchedness; 'I
can't conceive how a man's money can make any difference. I couldn't
have married Franklin if he'd been a king!'
'Oh, my dear!' said Gerald, startled; 'I didn't mean it seriously, of
course.'
'It seems to me,' said Althea, trying to control her labouring breath,
'that over here you take nothing quite so seriously as that--great
matches, I mean, and money.'
Gerald was silent for a moment; then, in a very courteous voice he said:
'Have I offended you in any way, Althea?'
Tears stood in her eyes; she turned away her head to hide them. 'Yes,
you have,' she said, and the sound of her voice shocked her, it so
contradicted the crying out of her disappointed heart.
But though Gerald was blind on occasions that did not seem to him to
warrant any close attention, he was clear-sighted on those that did. He
understood that something was amiss; and though her exclamation had,
indeed, made him angry for a moment, he was now sorry; he felt that she
was unhappy, and he couldn't bear people to be unhappy. 'I've done
something that displeases you,' he said, taking her hand and leaning
forward to look into her eyes, half pleading and half rallying her in
the way she knew so well. 'Do forgive me.'
She longed to put her head on his shoulder and sob: 'I wanted you to
love me'; but that would have been to abase herself too much; yet the
tears fell as she answered, trying to smile: 'It was only that you hurt
me; even in jest I cannot bear to have you say that I could have been so
sordid.'
He pressed her hand. 'I was only in fun, of course. Please forgive me.'
She knew, with all his gay solicitude, his gentle self-reproach, that
she had angered and perplexed him, that she made him feel a little at a
loss with her talk of sordidness, that, perhaps, she wearied him. And,
seeing this, she was frightened--frightened, and angry that she should
be afraid. But fear predominated, and she forced herself to smile at him
and to talk with him during the long drive, as though nothing had
happened.