Gerald had decided to stay on for another week at Merriston and to come
up to town with Althea, and she fancied that the reason for his decision
was that he found Sally Arlington such very good company. Sally played
the violin exceedingly well and looked like an exceedingly lovely muse
while she played, and Gerald, who was very fond of music, also expressed
more than once to Althea his admiration of Miss Arlington's appearance.
There was nothing in Gerald's demeanour towards Sally to arouse a hint
of jealousy; at least there would not have been had Althea been his
wife. But she was not yet his wife, and he treated her--this was the
fact that the week was driving home--as though she were, and as though
with wifely tolerance she perfectly understood his admiring pretty young
women who looked like muses and played the violin. She was not yet his
wife; this was the fact, she repeated it over her hidden misery, that
Gerald did not enough realise. She was not his wife, and she did not
like to see him admiring other young women and behaving towards herself
as though she were a comprehending and devoted spouse, who found
pleasure in providing them for his delectation. She knew that she could
trust Gerald, that not for a moment would he permit himself a
flirtation, and not for a moment fail to discriminate between admiration
of the newcomer and devotion to herself; yet that the admiration had
been sufficient to keep him on at Merriston, while the devotion took for
granted the right to all sorts of marital neglects, was the fact that
rankled. It did more than rankle; it burned with all the other burnings.
Althea had, at all events, been dragged from her mood of introspection.
She had lost the sense of nonentity. She was conscious of a passionate,
protesting self that cried out for justice. Who was Gerald, after all,
to take things so for granted? Why should he be so sure of her? He was
not her husband. She was his betrothed, not his wife, and more, much
more was due to a betrothed than he seemed to imagine. It was not so
that another man would have treated her; it was not so that Franklin
would have handled his good fortune. Her heart, bereft and starving,
cried out for Franklin and for the love that had never failed, even
while, under and above everything, was her love for Gerald, and the cold
fear lest he should guess what was in her heart, should be angry with
her and turn away. It was this fear that gave her self-mastery. She
acted the part that Gerald took for granted; she was the tolerant,
devoted wife. Yet even so she guessed that Gerald had still his instinct
of something amiss. He, too, with all his grace, all his deference and
sweetness, was guarded. And once or twice when they were alone together
an embarrassed silence had fallen between them.
Mrs. Peel and Sally left on Saturday, and on Saturday afternoon Miss
Harriet Robinson was to arrive from Paris, to spend the Sunday, to
travel up to town with Althea and Gerald on Monday, and to remain there
with Althea until her marriage. Saturday morning, therefore, after the
departure of Mrs. Peel and Sally, would be empty, and when she and
Gerald met, just before the rather bustled breakfast, Althea suggested
to him that a walk together when her guests were gone would be nice, and
Gerald had genially acquiesced. A little packet of letters lay beside
Gerald's plate and a larger one by Althea's, hers mainly from America as
she saw, fat, friendly letters, bearing the Boston postmark; a thin note
from Franklin in London also, fixing some festivity for the coming week
no doubt; but Sally and Mrs. Peel engaged her attention, and she
postponed the reading until after they were gone. She observed, however,
in Gerald's demeanour during the meal, a curious irritability and
preoccupation. He ate next to nothing, drank his cup of coffee with an
air of unconsciousness, and got up and strolled away at the first
opportunity, not reappearing until Mrs. Peel and Sally were making their
farewells in the hall. He and Althea stood to see them drive off, and
then, since she was ready for the walk, they went out together.
It was a damp day, but without rain. A white fog hung closely and
thickly over the country, and lay like a clogging, woollen substance
among the scattered gold and russets of the now almost leafless trees.
Gerald walked beside Althea in silence, his hands in his pockets.
Althea, too, was silent, and in her breast was an oppression like that
of the day--a dense, dull, clogging fear. They had walked for quite ten
minutes, and had left the avenue and were upon the high road when
Gerald said suddenly, 'I've had some news this morning.'
It was a relief to hear that there was some cause for his silence
unconnected with her own inadequacy. But anger rose with the relief; it
must be some serious cause to excuse him.
'Have you? It's not bad, I hope,' she said, hoping that it was.
'Bad? No; I don't suppose it's bad. It's very odd, though,' said Gerald.
He then put his hand in his breast-pocket and drew out a letter. Althea
saw that the writing on the envelope was Helen's. 'You may read it,'
said Gerald.
The relief was now merged in something else. Althea's heart seemed
standing still. It began to thump heavily as she opened the letter and
read what Helen wrote:
'DEAR GERALD,--I have some surprising news for you; but I hardly
think that you will be more surprised than I was. I am going to
marry Mr. Kane. I accepted him some days ago, but have been getting
used to the idea since then, and you are the first person, after
Aunt Grizel, who knows. It will be announced next week and we shall
probably be married very soon after you and Althea. I hope that both
our ventures will bring us much happiness. The more I see of Mr.
Kane, the more I realise how fortunate I am.--Yours affectionately,
'HELEN.'
Althea gazed at these words. Then she turned her eyes and gazed at
Gerald, who was not looking at her but straight before him. Her first
clear thought was that if he had received a shock it could not be
comparable to that which she now felt. It could not be that the letter
had fallen on his heart like a sword, severing it. Althea's heart seemed
cleft in twain. Gerald--Franklin--it seemed to pulse, horribly divided
and horribly bleeding. Looking still at Gerald's face, pallid, absorbed,
far from any thought of her, anger surged up in her, and not now against
Gerald only, but against Franklin, who had failed her, against Helen,
who, it seemed, did not win love, yet won something that took people to
her and bound them to her. Then she remembered her unread letters, and
remembered that Franklin could not have let this news come to her from
another than himself. She drew out his letter and read it. It, too, was
short.
'DEAREST ALTHEA,--I know how glad you'll be to hear that happiness,
though of a different sort, has come to me. Any sort of happiness
was, for so many years, connected with you, dear Althea, that it's
very strange to me to realise that there can be another happiness;
though this one is connected with you, too, and that makes me
gladder. Helen, your dear friend, has consented to marry me, and the
fact of her being your dear friend makes her even dearer to me. So
that I must thank you for your part in this wonderful new opening in
my life, as well as for all the other lovely things you've always
meant to me.--Your friend,
'FRANKLIN.'
Althea's hand dropped. She stared before her. She did not offer the
letter to Gerald. 'It's incredible,' she said, while, in the heavy
mist, they walked along the road.
Gerald still said nothing. He held his head high, and gazed before him
too, as if intent on difficult and evasive thoughts.
'I could not have believed it of Helen,' said Althea after a little
pause.
At this he started and looked round at her. 'Believed? What? What is
that you say?' His voice was sharp, as though she had struck him on the
raw.
Althea steadied her own voice; she wished to strike him on the raw, and
accurately; she could only do that by hiding from him her own great
dismay. 'I could not have believed that Helen would marry a man merely
for his money.' She did not believe that Helen was to marry Franklin
merely for his money. If only she could have believed it; but the
bleeding heart throbbed: 'Lost--lost--lost.' It was not money that Helen
had seen and accepted; it was something that she herself had been too
blind and weak to see. In Helen's discovery she helplessly partook. He
_was_ of value, then. He, whom she had not found good enough for her,
was good enough for Helen. And this man--this affianced husband of
hers--ah, his value she well knew; she was not blind to it--that was the
sickening knowledge; she knew his value and it was not hers, not her
possession, as Franklin's love and all that Franklin was had been.
Gerald possessed her; she seemed to have no part in him; how little, his
next words showed.
'What right have you to say she's taking him merely for his money?'
Gerald demanded in his tense, vibrant voice.
Ah, how he made her suffer with his hateful unconsciousness of her
pain--the male unconsciousness that rouses woman's conscious cruelty.
'I know Helen. She has always been quite frank about her mercenary
ideas. She always told me she would marry a man for his money.'
'Then why do you say it's incredible that she is going to?'
Why, indeed? but Althea held her lash. 'I did not believe, even of her,
that she would marry a man she considered so completely insignificant,
so completely negligible--a man she described to me as a funny little
man. There are limits, even to Helen's insensitiveness, I should have
imagined.'
She had discovered the raw. Gerald was breathing hard.
'That must have been at first--when she didn't know him. They became
great friends; everybody saw that Helen had become very fond of him; I
never knew her to be so fond of anybody. You are merely angry because a
man who used to be in love with you has fallen in love with another
woman.'
So he, too, could lash. 'How dare you, Gerald!' she said.
At her voice he paused, and there, in the wet road, they stood and
looked at each other.
What Althea then saw in his face plunged her into the nightmare abyss of
nothingness. What had she left? He did not love her--he did not even
care for her. She had lost the real love, and this brightness that she
clung to darkened for her. He looked at her, steadily, gloomily,
ashamed of what she had made him say, yet too sunken in his own pain,
too indifferent to hers, to unsay it. And in her dispossession she did
not dare make manifest the severance that she saw. He did not care for
her, but she could not tell him so; she could not tell him to go. With
horrid sickness of heart she made a feint that hid her knowledge.
'What you say is not true. Franklin does not love her. I know him
through and through. I am the great love of his life; even in his letter
to me, here, he tells me that I am.'
'Well, since you've thrown him over, he can console himself, I hope.'
'You do not understand, Gerald. I am disappointed--in both my friends.
It is an ugly thing that has happened. You feel it so; and so do I.'
He turned and began to walk on again. And still it lay with her to speak
the words that would make truth manifest. She could not utter them; she
could not, now, think. All that she knew was the dense, suffocating
fear.
Suddenly she stopped, put her hands on her heart, then covered her eyes.
'I am ill; I feel very ill,' she said. It was true. She did feel very
ill. She went to the bank at the side of the road and sank down on it.
Gerald had supported her; she had dimly been aware of the bitter joy of
feeling his arm around her, and the joy of it slid away like a snake,
leaving poison behind. He stood above her, alarmed and pitying.
'Althea--shall I go and get some one? I am so awfully sorry--so
frightfully sorry,' he repeated.
She shook her head, sitting there, her face in her hands and her elbows
on her knees. And in her great weakness an unbelievable thing happened
to her. She began to cry piteously, and she sobbed: 'O Gerald--don't be
unkind to me! don't be cruel! don't hurt me! O Gerald--love me--please
love me!' The barriers of her pride, of her thought, were down, and,
like the flowing of blood from an open wound, the truth gushed forth.
For a moment Gerald was absolutely silent. It was a tense, a stricken
silence, and she felt in it something of the horror that the showing of
a fatal wound might give. Then he knelt beside her; he took her hand; he
put his arm around her. 'Althea, what a brute--what a brute I've been.
Forgive me.' It was for something else than his harsh words that he was
asking her forgiveness. He passed hurriedly from that further, that
inevitable hurt. 'I can't tell you how---- I mean I'm so completely
sorry. You see, I was so taken aback--so cut up, you know. I could think
of nothing else. She is such an old friend--my nearest friend. I never
imagined her marrying, somehow; it was like hearing that she was going
away for ever. And what you said made me angry.' Even he, with all his
compunction, could but come back to the truth.
And, helpless, she could but lean on his pity, his sheer human pity.
'I know. He was my nearest friend too. For all my life I've been first
with him. I was cut up too. I am sorry--I spoke so.'
'Poor girl--poor dear. Here, take my arm. Here. Now, you do feel
better.'
She was on her feet, her hand drawn through his arm, her face turned
from him and still bathed in tears.
They walked back slowly along the road. They were silent. From time to
time she knew that he looked at her with solicitude; but she could not
return his look. The memory of her own words was with her, a strange,
new, menacing fact in life. She had said them, and they had altered
everything. Henceforth she depended on his pity, on his loyalty, on his
sense of duty to a task undertaken. Their bond was recognised as an
unequal one. Once or twice, in the dull chaos of her mind, a flicker of
pride rose up. Could she not emulate Helen? Helen was to marry a man who
did not love her. Helen was to marry rationally, with open eyes, a man
who was her friend. But Helen did not love the man who did not love her.
She was not his thrall. She gained, she did not lose, her freedom.