Althea, since the misty walk with Gerald, had been plunged in a pit of
mental confusion. She swung from accepted abasement to the desperate
thought of the magnanimity in such abasement; she dropped from this
fragile foothold to burning resentment, and, seeing where resentment
must lead her, she turned again and clasped, with tight-closed eyes, the
love that, looked upon, could not be held without humiliation.
Self-doubt and self-analysis had brought her to this state of pitiful
chaos. The only self left seemed centred in her love; if she did not
give up Gerald, what was left her but accepted abasement? If she let him
go, it would be to own to herself that she had failed to hold him, to
see herself as a nonentity. Yet, to go on clinging, what would that
show? Only with closed eyes could she cling. To open them for the merest
glimmer was to see that she was, indeed, nothing, if she had not
strength to relinquish a man who did not any longer, in any sense, wish
to make her his wife. With closed eyes one might imagine that it was
strength that clung; with open eyes one saw that it was weakness.
Miss Harriet Robinson, all alert gaiety and appreciation, had arrived at
Merriston on Saturday, had talked all through Sunday, and had come up
to London with Althea and Gerald on Monday morning. Gerald had gone to a
smoking-carriage, and Althea had hardly exchanged a word with him. She
and Miss Robinson went to a little hotel in Mayfair, a hotel supposed to
atone for its costliness and shabbiness by some peculiar emanation of
British comfort. Americans of an earnest, if luxurious type, congregated
there and found a satisfactory local flavour in worn chintzes and uneven
passages. Lady Blair had kindly pressed Althea to stay with her in South
Kensington and be married from her house; but even a week ago, when this
plan had been suggested, Althea had shrunk from it. It had seemed, even
then, too decisive. Once beneath Lady Blair's quasi-maternal roof one
would be propelled, like a labelled parcel, resistlessly to the altar.
Even then Althea had felt that the little hotel in Mayfair, with its
transient guests and impersonal atmosphere, offered further breathing
space for indefiniteness.
She was thankful indeed for breathing space as, on the afternoon of her
arrival, she sat sunken in a large chair and felt, as one relief, that
she would not see Miss Robinson again until evening. It had been
tormenting, all the journey up, to tear herself from her own sick
thoughts and to answer Miss Robinson's unsuspecting comments and
suggestions.
Miss Robinson was as complacent and as beaming as though she had herself
'settled' Althea. She richly embroidered the themes, now so remote, that
had once occupied poor Althea's imagination--house-parties at Merriston;
hostess-ship on a large scale in London; Gerald's seat in Parliament
taken as a matter-of-course. Althea, feeling the intolerable irony, had
attempted vague qualifications; Gerald did not care for politics; she
herself preferred a quieter life; they probably could not afford a town
house. But to such disclaimers Miss Robinson opposed the brightness of
her faith in her friend's capacities. 'Ah, my dear, it's your very
reticence, your very quietness, that will tell. Once settled--I've
always felt it of you--you will make your place--and your place can only
be a big one. My only regret is that you won't get your wedding-dress in
Paris--oh yes, I know that they have immensely improved over here; but,
for cut and _cachet_, Paris is still the only place.'
This had all been tormenting, and Miss Buckston's presence at lunch had
been something of a refuge--Miss Buckston, far more interested in her
Bach choir practice than in Althea's plans, and lending but a
preoccupied attention to Miss Robinson's matrimonial talk. Miss
Buckston, at a glance, had dismissed Miss Robinson as frothy and
shallow. They were both gone now, thank goodness. Lady Blair would not
descend upon her till next morning, and Sally and Mrs. Peel were not due
in London until the end of the week. Althea sat, her head leaning back,
her eyes closed, and wondered whether Gerald would come and see her. He
had parted from her at the station, and the memory of his face,
courteous, gentle, yet so unseeing, made her feel like weeping
piteously. She spent the afternoon in the chair, her eyes closed and an
electric excitement of expectancy tingling through her, and Gerald did
not come. He did not come that evening, and the evening passed like a
phantasmagoria--the dinner in the sober little dining-room, Miss
Robinson, richly dressed, opposite her; and the hours in her
drawing-room afterwards, she and Miss Robinson on either side of the
fire, quietly conversing. And next morning there was no word from him.
It was then, as she lay in bed and felt the tears, though she did not
sob, roll down over her cheeks upon the pillow, that sudden strength
came with sudden revolt. A revulsion against her suffering and the cause
of it went through her, and she seemed to shake off a torpor, an
obsession, and to re-enter some moral heritage from which, for months,
her helpless love had shut her out.
Lying there, her cheeks still wet but her eyes now stern and steady, she
felt herself sustained, as if by sudden wings, at a vertiginous height
from which she looked down upon herself and upon her love. What had it
been, that love? what was it but passion pure and simple, the craving
feminine thing, enmeshed in charm. To a woman of her training, her
tradition, must not a love that could finally satisfy her nature, its
deeps and heights, be a far other love; a love of spirit rather than of
flesh? What was all the pain that had warped her for so long but the
inevitable retribution for her back-sliding? Old adages came to her,
aerial Emersonian faiths. Why, one was bound and fettered if feeling was
to rule one and not mind. Friendship, deep, spiritual congeniality, was
the real basis for marriage, not the enchantment of the heart and
senses. She had been weak and dazzled; she had followed the
will-o'-the-wisp--and see, see the bog where it had led her.
She saw it now, still sustained above it and looking down. Her love for
Gerald was not a high thing; it called out no greatness in her;
appealed to none; there was no spiritual congeniality between them. In
the region of her soul he was, and would always remain, a stranger.
Sure of this at last, she rose and wrote to Franklin, swiftly and
urgently. She did not clearly know what she wanted of him; but she felt,
like a flame of faith within her, that he, and he only, could sustain
her at her height. He was her spiritual affinity; he was her wings.
Merely to see him, merely to steep herself in the radiance of his love
and sympathy, would be to recover power, poise, personality, and
independence. It was a goal she flew towards, though she saw it but in
dizzy glimpses, and as if through vast hallucinations of space.
She told Franklin to come at six. She gave herself one more day; for
what she could not have said. A lightness of head seemed to swim over
her, and a loss of breath, when she tried to see more clearly the goal,
or what might still capture and keep her from it.
She told Amelie that she had a bad headache and would spend the day on
her sofa, denying herself to Lady Blair; and all day long she lay there
with tingling nerves and a heavily beating heart--poor heart, what was
happening to it in its depths she could not tell--and Gerald did not
write or come.
At tea-time Miss Robinson could not be avoided. She tip-toed in and sat
beside her sofa commenting compassionately on her pallor. 'I do so beg
you to go straight to bed, dear,' she said. 'Let me give you some sal
volatile; there is nothing better for a headache.'
But Althea, smiling heroically, said that she must stay up to see
Franklin Kane. 'He wants to see me, and will be here at six. After he is
gone I will go to bed.' She did not know why she should thus arrange
facts a little for Miss Robinson; but all her nature was stretched on
its impulse towards safety, and it was automatically that she adjusted
facts to that end. After the first great moment of enfranchisement and
soaring, it was like relapsing to some sub-conscious function of the
organism--digestion or circulation--that did things for one if one
didn't interfere with it. Her mind no longer directed her course except
in this transformed and subsidiary guise; it had become part of the
machinery of self-preservation.
'You really are an angel, my dear,' said Miss Robinson. 'You oughtn't to
allow your devotees to _accaparer_ you like this. You will wear yourself
out.'
Althea, with a smile still more heroic, said that dear Franklin could
never wear her out; and Miss Robinson, not to be undeceived, shook her
head, while retiring to make room for the indiscreet friend.
When she was gone, Althea got up and took her place in the chintz chair
where she had waited for so long yesterday.
Outside, a foggy day closed to almost opaque obscurity. The fire burned
brightly, there were candles on the mantelpiece and a lamp on the table,
yet the encompassing darkness seemed to have entered the room. After the
aerial heights of the morning it was now at a corresponding depth, as if
sunken to the ocean-bed, that she seemed to sit and wait, and feel, in
a trance-like pause, deep, essential forces working. And she remembered
the sunny day in Paris, and the other hotel drawing-room where, empty
and aimless, she had sat, only six months ago. How much had come to her
since then; through how much hope and life had she lived, to what
heights been lifted, to what depths struck down. And now, once more she
sat, bereft of everything, and waiting for she knew not what.
Franklin appeared almost to the moment. Althea had not seen him since
leaving London some weeks before, and at the first glance he seemed to
her in some way different. She had only time to think, fleetingly, of
all that had happened to Franklin since she had last seen him, all the
strange, new things that Helen must have meant to him; and the thought,
fleeting though it was, made more urgent the impulse that pressed her
on. For, after all, the second glance showed him as so much the same,
the same to the unbecomingness of his clothes, the flatness of his
features, the general effect of decision and placidity that he always,
predominatingly, gave.
It was on Franklin's sameness that she leaned. It was Franklin's
sameness that was her goal; she trusted it like the ground beneath her
feet. She went to him and put out her hands. 'Dear Franklin,' she said,
'I am so glad to see you.'
He took her hands and held them while he looked into her eyes. The face
she lifted to him was a woeful one, in spite of the steadying of its
pale lips to a smile. It was not enfranchisement and the sustained
height that he saw--it was fear and desolation; they looked at him out
of her large, sad eyes and they were like an uttered cry. He saw her
need, worse still, he saw her trust; and yet, ah yet, his hope, his
unacknowledged hope, the hope which Helen's magic had poured into his
veins, pulsed in him. He saw her need, but as he looked, full of
compassion and solicitude, he was hoping that her need was not of him.
Suddenly Althea burst into sobs. She leaned her face against his
shoulder, her hands still held in his, and she wept out: 'O Franklin, I
had to send for you--you are my only friend--I am so unhappy, so
unhappy.' Franklin put an arm around her, still holding her hand, and he
slightly patted her back as she leaned upon him. 'Poor Althea, poor
dear,' he said.
'Oh, what shall I do, Franklin?' she whispered.
'Tell me all about it,' said Franklin. 'Tell me what's the matter.'
She paused for a moment, and in the pause her thoughts, released for
that one instant from their place of servitude, scurried through the
inner confusion. His tone, the quietness, kindness, rationality of it,
seemed to demand reason, not impulse, from her, the order of truth and
not the chaos of feeling. But pain and fear had worked for too long upon
her, and she did not know what truth was. All she knew was that he was
near, and tender and compassionate, and to know that seemed to be
knowing at last that here was the real love, the love of spirit from
which she had turned to lower things. Impulse, not insincere, surged up,
and moved by it alone she sobbed on, 'O Franklin, I have made a mistake,
a horrible, horrible mistake. It's killing me. I can't go on. I don't
love him, Franklin--I don't love Gerald--I can't marry him. And how can
I tell him? How can I break faith with him?'
Franklin stood very still, his hand clasping hers, the other ceasing its
rhythmic, consolatory movement. He held her, this woman whom he had
loved for so many years, and over her bent head he looked before him at
the frivolous and ugly wall-paper, a chaos of festooned chrysanthemums
on a bright pink ground. He gazed at the chrysanthemums, and he
wondered, with a direful pang, whether Althea were consciously lying to
him.
She sobbed on: 'Even in the first week, I knew that something was wrong.
Of course I was in love--but it was only that--there was nothing else
except being in love. Doubts gnawed at me from the first; I couldn't
bear to accept them; I hoped on and on. Only in this last week I've seen
that I can't--I can't marry him. Oh----' and the wail was again
repeated, 'what shall I do, Franklin?'
He spoke at last, and in the disarray of her sobbing and darkened
condition--her face pressed against him, her ears full of the sound of
her own labouring breath--she could not know to the full how strange his
voice was, though she felt strangeness and caught her breath to listen.
'Don't take it like this, Althea,' he said. 'It's not so bad as all
this. It can all be made right. You must just tell him the truth and set
him free.'
And now there was a strange silence. He was waiting, and she was waiting
too; she stilled her breath and he stilled his; all each heard was the
beating of his and her own heart. And the silence, to Althea, was full
of a new and formless fear, and to Franklin of an acceptation sad beyond
all the sadnesses of his life. Even before Althea spoke, and while the
sweet, the rapturous, the impossible hope softly died away, he knew in
his heart, emptied of magic, that it was he Althea needed.
She spoke at last, in a changed and trembling voice; it pierced him, for
he felt the new fear in it: 'How can I tell him the truth, Franklin?'
she said. 'How can I tell you the truth? How can I say that I turned
from the real thing, the deepest, most beautiful thing in my life--and
hurt it, broke it, put it aside, so blind, so terribly blind I was--and
took the unreal thing? How can I ever forgive myself--but, O Franklin,
much, much more, how can you ever forgive me?' her voice wailed up,
claiming him supremely.
She believed it to be the truth, and he saw that she believed it. He
saw, sadly, clearly, that among all the twistings and deviations of her
predicament, one thing held firm for her, so firm that it had given her
this new faith in herself--her faith in his supreme devotion. And he saw
that he owed it to her. He had given it to her, he had made it her
possession, to trust to as she trusted to the ground under her feet,
ever since they were boy and girl together. Six months ago it would have
been with joy, and with joy only, that he would have received her, and
have received the gift of her bruised, uncertain heart. Six months--why
only a week ago he would have thought that it could only be with joy.
So now he found his voice and he knew that it was nearly his old voice
for her, and he said, in answer to that despairing statement that
wailed for contradiction: 'Oh no, Althea, dear. Oh no, you haven't
wrecked our lives.'
'But you are bound now,' she hardly audibly faltered. 'You have another
life opening before you. You can't come back now.'
'No, Althea,' Franklin repeated, and he stroked her shoulder again. 'I
can come back, if you want me. And you do want me, don't you, dear? You
will let me try to make you happy?'
She put back her head to look at him, her poor face, tear-stained, her
eyes wild with their suffering, and he saw the new fear in them, the
formless fear. 'O Franklin,' she said, and the question was indeed a
strange one to be asked by her of him: 'do you love me?'
And now, pierced by his pity, Franklin could rise to all she needed of
him. The old faith sustained him, too. One didn't love some one for all
one's life like that, to be left quite dispossessed. Many things were
changed, but many still held firm; and though, deep in his heart, sick
with its relinquishment, Helen's words seemed to whisper, 'Some things
can't be joys when they come too late,' he could answer himself as he
had answered her, putting away the irony and scepticism of
disenchantment--'It's wonderful the way joy can grow,' and draw strength
for himself and for his poor Althea from that act of affirmation.
'Why, of course I love you, Althea, dear,' he said. 'How can you ask me
that? I've always loved you, haven't I? You knew I did, didn't you, or
else you wouldn't have sent? You knew I wasn't bound if you were free. I
understand it all.' And smiling at her so that she should forget for
ever that she had had a new fear, he added, 'And see here, dear, you
mustn't delay a moment in letting Gerald know. Come, write him a note
now, and I'll have it sent to his club so that he shall hear right
away.'