"No. The best dreams come through the gates that never open."
"It looks as if a good south wind would bring it down."
"It will last my time," he said.
L
Laura received her as if Prothero were not there; as if he never had
been, never would be there. She looked up from their embrace with a
blue-eyed innocence that ignored him in its perfect assurance that they
had kept their pledge, that nothing had ever come or would come between
them.
It struck Nina that he had no grounds for his anxiety. Laura was not
suffering; she was not going to suffer. She had no consciousness or
conscience in the matter.
It was made clear to Nina that she was too happy for that, too much in
love with Owen, too much aware that Owen was in love with her, though
their fineness saved them both from any flagrant evidences of their
state. They evaded as by a common understanding the smallest allusion to
themselves and their affairs. They suggested charmingly that what
excited them was the amazing performance of their friends, of Tanqueray,
of Jane, of Nina. In her smiling protest that she no longer counted
Laura gave the effect of serene detachment from the contest. She
surveyed it from an inaccessible height, turning very sweetly and
benignly from her bliss. She was not so remote, she seemed to say, but
that she remembered. She knew how absorbing those ardent rivalries could
be. Nina she evidently regarded as absorbed fatally, beyond recall; and
no wonder, when for her the game was so magnificent. If Nina cared for
the applause of a blessed spirit, it was hers.
It seemed to Nina's morbid sense that Laura overdid it; that the two of
them closed round her by a common impulse and a common fear, that they
rushed to her wild head to turn her to her course and keep her there. In
every word there was a sting for her, the flick of the lash that drove
her on.
Nina was then aware that she hated Laura. The hatred was not active in
her presence; it made no movement towards its object; it lay somewhere
in the dark; it tossed on a hot bed, sleepless in an incurable distress.
And Laura remained unconscious. She took her presently up-stairs to her
room, Owen's room. It was all they had, she said. Nina held her head
very straight, trying hard not to see Owen's coat that hung behind the
door, or his big boots all in a row beside Laura's little ones. Her face
in the glass met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. It demanded
why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all she _had_
stood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand.
But she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. She owed it
a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. Sun-burnt, coarsened a
little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose,
the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman
but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster.
She accentuated its effect by the masculine fashion of her clothes and
the way she swept back her hair sidelong from her forehead. Laura saw
her doing it now.
"I like your face," was her comment.
"It's more than I do," said Nina. "But I like my hands."
She began washing them with energy, as if thus dismissing an unpleasant
subject. She could admire their fine flexible play under the water; do
what she would with them her hands at least were feminine. But they
brought her up sharp with the sight of the little scar, white on her
wrist, reminding her of Owen. She was aware of the beast in her blood
that crouched, ready to fall upon the innocent Laura.
At the other end of the room, by the wardrobe, Laura, in her innocence,
was babbling about Owen.
"He's growing frightfully extravagant," she said. "He got fifteen pounds
for an article the other day, and what do you think he did with it? Look
there!"
She had taken a gown, a little mouse-coloured velvet gown, from the
wardrobe and laid it on the bed for Nina to admire.
"He went and spent it, every bit of it, on that. He said he thought I
should look nice in it. Wasn't it clever of him to know? And who ever
would have thought that he'd have cared?"
Nina looked at the gown and remembered the years when Laura had gone
shabby.
"He cares so much," said Laura, "that I have to put it on every
evening."
"Put it on now," said Nina.
"Shall I?" She was longing to. "No, I don't think I will."
"You must," said Nina.
Laura put it on, baring her white neck and shoulders, and turned for
Nina to "fasten her up the back."
Nina had a vision of Prothero standing over the little thing, his long
deft hands trembling as he performed this office.
The Kiddy, divinely unconscious, babbled on of Owen and the wonderful
gown.
"Conceive," she said, "the darling going out all by himself to get it!
How he knew one gown from another--how he knew the shops--what hand
guided him--I can't think. It must have been his guardian angel."
"Or yours."
"Yes--when you think of the horrors he might have got."
Laura had stroked the velvet to smoothness about her waist, and now she
was pulling up a fold of lace above her breasts. As she did this she
looked at her own image in the glass and smiled softly, unaware. Nina
saw then that her breasts were slightly and delicately rounded; she
recognized the work of life, shaping Laura's womanhood; it was the last
touch of the passion that had made her body the sign and symbol of its
perfection. Her own breasts heaved as the wild fang pierced them.
Then, as her fingers brushed the small white back, there surged up in
her a sudden virile tenderness and comprehension. She looked at Laura
with Prothero's eyes, she touched her almost with Prothero's touch.
There was, after all, some advantage in being made so very like a man,
since it compelled her to take Prothero's view of a little woman in a
mouse-coloured velvet gown.
The gown was fastened, and the Kiddy in an innocent vanity was looking
over her left shoulder and admiring her mouse-coloured tail. Of a sudden
she caught sight of Nina's eyes in the glass regarding her sombrely. She
turned and put up her face to Nina's, and paused, wavering. She closed
her eyes and felt Nina's arms about her neck, and Nina's hands touching
her hair with a subtle, quick caress, charged with confession. Laura's
nerves divined it. She opened her eyes and looked at Nina.
"Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me."
[Illustration: "Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me!"]
Nina bowed her head. "Poor Kiddy, dear Kiddy," she whispered. "How could
I?"
How could she?
She couldn't, even if she tried; not even afterwards, when she sat alone
in that room of hers that reminded her so intolerably of Prothero.
To-night it reminded her still more intolerably of her dreadful self.
She had been afraid to enter it lest it should put her to the torture.
It was the place where her beast had gone out and in with her. It still
crouched in the corner where she had kicked it. It was an unhappy beast,
but it was not cruel any more. It could have crawled to Laura's feet and
licked them.
For the Kiddy was such a little thing. It was impossible to feel hatred
for anything so soft and so unintentionally sweet and small. Life had
been cruel enough to Laura, before Owen married her. If it came to
suffering, it was not conceivable that she should have been allowed to
suffer more.
Nina put it to herself, beast or no beast, if she had had the power to
take Owen from the Kiddy, to make the Kiddy suffer as she had suffered,
could she have done it? Could she have borne to be, really, such a beast
as that? Even if the choice had lain, innocently, between her own
torture and the Kiddy's, could she have endured to see the little tender
thing stretched out, in her place, on the rack? Of course she couldn't.
And since she felt like that about it, beast or no beast, wouldn't even
Owen say that she was not so dreadful after all?
She remembered then that, though he had seen through her, he had never
at any time admitted that she was dreadful. He had spoken rather as if,
seeing _through_ her, he had seen things she could not see, fine things
which he declared to be the innermost truth of her.
He must have known all the time that she would feel like that when she
could bring herself to see Laura.
She saw through _him_ now. That was why he had insisted on her coming.
It was as if he had said to her, "I'm not thinking so tremendously of
her. What I mean is that it'll be all right for you if you'll trust
yourself to me; if you'll only come." He seemed to say frankly, "That
beast of yours is really dreadful. It must be a great affliction to have
to carry it about with you. I'll show you how to get rid of it
altogether. You've only got to see her, Nina, in her heartrending
innocence, wearing, if you would believe it, a mouse-coloured velvet
gown."
That night Laura stood silent and thoughtful while Prothero's hands
fumbled gently over the many little hooks and fastenings of the gown.
She let it slide with the soft fall of its velvet from her shoulders to
her feet.
"I wish," she said, "I hadn't put it on."
He stooped and kissed her where the silk down of her hair sprang from
her white neck.
"Does it think," he said, "that it crushed poor Nina with its beauty?"
She shook her head. She would not tell him what she thought. But the
tears in her eyes betrayed her.