IV

THEY met again, inevitably, before Dawnish left; but the thing she

feared did not happen--he did not try to see her alone.

It even became clear to her, in looking back, that he had deliberately

avoided doing so; and this seemed merely an added proof of his

"understanding," of that deep undefinable communion that set them alone

in an empty world, as if on a peak above the clouds.

The five days passed in a flash; and when the last one came, it brought

to Margaret Ransom an hour of weakness, of profound disorganization,

when old barriers fell, old convictions faded--when to be alone with

him for a moment became, after all, the one craving of her heart. She

knew he was coming that afternoon to say "good-by"--and she knew also

that Ransom was to be away at South Wentworth. She waited alone in her

pale little drawing-room, with its scant kakemonos, its one or two

chilly reproductions from the antique, its slippery Chippendale chairs.

At length the bell rang, and her world became a rosy blur--through

which she presently discerned the austere form of Mrs. Sperry, wife of

the Professor of palaeontology, who had come to talk over with her the

next winter's programme for the Higher Thought Club. They debated the

question for an hour, and when Mrs. Sperry departed Margaret had a

confused impression that the course was to deal with the influence of

the First Crusade on the development of European architecture--but the

sentient part of her knew only that Dawnish had not come.

He "bobbed in," as he would have put it, after dinner--having, it

appeared, run across Ransom early in the day, and learned that the

latter would be absent till evening. Margaret was in the study with her

husband when the door opened and Dawnish stood there. Ransom--who had

not had time to dress--was seated at his desk, a pile of shabby law

books at his elbow, the light from a hanging lamp falling on his

grayish stubble of hair, his sallow forehead and spectacled eyes.

Dawnish, towering higher than usual against the shadows of the room,

and refined by his unusual pallor, hung a moment on the threshold, then

came in, explaining himself profusely--laughing, accepting a cigar,

letting Ransom push an arm-chair forward--a Dawnish she had never seen,

ill at ease, ejaculatory, yet somehow more mature, more obscurely in

command of himself.

Margaret drew back, seating herself in the shade, in such a way that

she saw her husband's head first, and beyond it their visitor's,

relieved against the dusk of the book shelves. Her heart was still--she

felt no throbbing in her throat or temples: all her life seemed

concentrated in the hand that lay on her knee, the hand he would touch

when they said good-by.

Afterward her heart rang all the changes, and there was a mood in which

she reproached herself for cowardice--for having deliberately missed

her one moment with him, the moment in which she might have sounded the

depths of life, for joy or anguish. But that mood was fleeting and

infrequent. In quieter hours she blushed for it--she even trembled to

think that he might have guessed such a regret in her. It seemed to

convict her of a lack of fineness that he should have had, in his youth

and his power, a tenderer, surer sense of the peril of a rash

touch--should have handled the case so much more delicately.

At first her days were fire and the nights long solemn vigils. Her

thoughts were no longer vulgarized and defaced by any notion of

"guilt," of mental disloyalty. She was ashamed now of her shame. What

had happened was as much outside the sphere of her marriage as some

transaction in a star. It had simply given her a secret life of

incommunicable joys, as if all the wasted springs of her youth had been

stored in some hidden pool, and she could return there now to bathe in

them.

After that there came a phase of loneliness, through which the life

about her loomed phantasmal and remote. She thought the dead must feel

thus, repeating the vain gestures of the living beside some Stygian

shore. She wondered if any other woman had lived to whom _nothing had

ever happened?_ And then his first letter came....

It was a charming letter--a perfect letter. The little touch of

awkwardness and constraint under its boyish spontaneity told her more

than whole pages of eloquence. He spoke of their friendship--of their

good days together.... Ransom, chancing to come in while she read,

noticed the foreign stamps; and she was able to hand him the letter,

saying gaily: "There's a message for you," and knowing all the while

that _her_ message was safe in her heart.

On the days when the letters came the outlines of things grew

indistinct, and she could never afterward remember what she had done or

how the business of life had been carried on. It was always a surprise

when she found dinner on the table as usual, and Ransom seated opposite

to her, running over the evening paper.

But though Dawnish continued to write, with all the English loyalty to

the outward observances of friendship, his communications came only at

intervals of several weeks, and between them she had time to repossess

herself, to regain some sort of normal contact with life. And the

customary, the recurring, gradually reclaimed her, the net of habit

tightened again--her daily life became real, and her one momentary

escape from it an exquisite illusion. Not that she ceased to believe in

the miracle that had befallen her: she still treasured the reality of

her one moment beside the river. What reason was there for doubting it?

She could hear the ring of truth in young Dawnish's voice: "It's not my

fault if you've made me feel that you would understand everything...."

No! she believed in her miracle, and the belief sweetened and illumined

her life; but she came to see that what was for her the transformation

of her whole being might well have been, for her companion, a mere

passing explosion of gratitude, of boyish good-fellowship touched with

the pang of leave-taking. She even reached the point of telling herself

that it was "better so": this view of the episode so defended it from

the alternating extremes of self-reproach and derision, so enshrined it

in a pale immortality to which she could make her secret pilgrimages

without reproach.

For a long time she had not been able to pass by the bench under the

willows--she even avoided the elm walk till autumn had stripped its

branches. But every day, now, she noted a step toward recovery; and at

last a day came when, walking along the river, she said to herself, as

she approached the bench: "I used not to be able to pass here without

thinking of him; _and now I am not thinking of him at all!_"

This seemed such convincing proof of her recovery that she began, as

spring returned, to permit herself, now and then, a quiet session on

the bench--a dedicated hour from which she went back fortified to her

task.

She had not heard from her friend for six weeks or more--the intervals

between his letters were growing longer. But that was "best" too, and

she was not anxious, for she knew he had obtained the post he had been

preparing for, and that his active life in London had begun. The

thought reminded her, one mild March day, that in leaving the house she

had thrust in her reticule a letter from a Wentworth friend who was

abroad on a holiday. The envelope bore the London post mark, a fact

showing that the lady's face was turned toward home. Margaret seated

herself on her bench, and drawing out the letter began to read it.

The London described was that of shops and museums--as remote as

possible from the setting of Guy Dawnish's existence. But suddenly

Margaret's eye fell on his name, and the page began to tremble in her

hands.

"I heard such a funny thing yesterday about your friend Mr. Dawnish. We

went to a tea at Professor Bunce's (I do wish you knew the

Bunces--their atmosphere is so _uplifting_), and there I met that Miss

Bruce-Pringle who came out last year to take a course in histology at

the Annex. Of course she asked about you and Mr. Ransom, and then she

told me she had just seen Mr. Dawnish's aunt--the clever one he was

always talking about, Lady Caroline something--and that they were all

in a dreadful state about him. I wonder if you knew he was engaged when

he went to America? He never mentioned it to _us_. She said it was not

a positive engagement, but an understanding with a girl he has always

been devoted to, who lives near their place in Wiltshire; and both

families expected the marriage to take place as soon as he got back. It

seems the girl is an heiress (you know _how low_ the English ideals are

compared with ours), and Miss Bruce-Pringle said his relations were

perfectly delighted at his 'being provided for,' as she called it.

Well, when he got back he asked the girl to release him; and she and

her family were furious, and so were his people; but he holds out, and

won't marry her, and won't give a reason, except that he has 'formed an

unfortunate attachment.' Did you ever hear anything so peculiar? His

aunt, who is quite wild about it, says it must have happened at

Wentworth, because he didn't go anywhere else in America. Do you

suppose it _could_ have been the Brant girl? But why 'unfortunate' when

everybody knows she would have jumped at him?"

Margaret folded the letter and looked out across the river. It was not

the same river, but a mystic current shot with moonlight. The bare

willows wove a leafy veil above her head, and beside her she felt the

nearness of youth and tempestuous tenderness. It had all happened just

here, on this very seat by the river--it had come to her, and passed

her by, and she had not held out a hand to detain it....

Well! Was it not, by that very abstention, made more deeply and

ineffaceably hers? She could argue thus while she had thought the

episode, on his side, a mere transient effect of propinquity; but now

that she knew it had altered the whole course of his life, now that it

took on substance and reality, asserted a separate existence outside of

her own troubled consciousness--now it seemed almost cowardly to have

missed her share in it.

She walked home in a dream. Now and then, when she passed an

acquaintance, she wondered if the pain and glory were written on her

face. But Mrs. Sperry, who stopped her at the corner of Maverick Street

to say a word about the next meeting of the Higher Thought Club, seemed

to remark no change in her.

When she reached home Ransom had not yet returned from the office, and

she went straight to the library to tidy his writing-table. It was part

of her daily duty to bring order out of the chaos of his papers, and of

late she had fastened on such small recurring tasks as some one falling

over a precipice might snatch at the weak bushes in its clefts.

When she had sorted the letters she took up some pamphlets and

newspapers, glancing over them to see if they were to be kept. Among

the papers was a page torn from a London _Times_ of the previous month.

Her eye ran down its columns and suddenly a paragraph flamed out.

"We are requested to state that the marriage arranged between Mr. Guy

Dawnish, son of the late Colonel the Hon. Roderick Dawnish, of Malby,

Wilts, and Gwendolen, daughter of Samuel Matcher, Esq. of Armingham

Towers, Wilts, will not take place."

Margaret dropped the paper and sat down, hiding her face against the

stained baize of the desk. She remembered the photograph of the

tennis-court at Guise--she remembered the handsome girl at whom Guy

Dawnish looked up, laughing. A gust of tears shook her, loosening the

dry surface of conventional feeling, welling up from unsuspected

depths. She was sorry--very sorry, yet so glad--so ineffably,

impenitently glad.

V

THERE came a reaction in which she decided to write to him. She even

sketched out a letter of sisterly, almost motherly, remonstrance, in

which she reminded him that he "still had all his life before him." But

she reflected that so, after all, had she; and that seemed to weaken

the argument.

In the end she decided not to send the letter. He had never spoken to

her of his engagement to Gwendolen Matcher, and his letters had

contained no allusion to any sentimental disturbance in his life. She

had only his few broken words, that night by the river, on which to

build her theory of the case. But illuminated by the phrase "an

unfortunate attachment" the theory towered up, distinct and immovable,

like some high landmark by which travellers shape their course. She had

been loved--extraordinarily loved. But he had chosen that she should

know of it by his silence rather than by his speech. He had understood

that only on those terms could their transcendant communion

continue--that he must lose her to keep her. To break that silence

would be like spilling a cup of water in a waste of sand. There would

be nothing left for her thirst.

Her life, thenceforward, was bathed in a tranquil beauty. The days

flowed by like a river beneath the moon--each ripple caught the

brightness and passed it on. She began to take a renewed interest in

her familiar round of duties. The tasks which had once seemed

colourless and irksome had now a kind of sacrificial sweetness, a

symbolic meaning into which she alone was initiated. She had been

restless--had longed to travel; now she felt that she should never

again care to leave Wentworth. But if her desire to wander had ceased,

she travelled in spirit, performing invisible pilgrimages in the

footsteps of her friend. She regretted that her one short visit to

England had taken her so little out of London--that her acquaintance

with the landscape had been formed chiefly through the windows of a

railway carriage. She threw herself into the architectural studies of

the Higher Thought Club, and distinguished herself, at the spring

meetings, by her fluency, her competence, her inexhaustible curiosity

on the subject of the growth of English Gothic. She ransacked the

shelves of the college library, she borrowed photographs of the

cathedrals, she pored over the folio pages of "The Seats of Noblemen

and Gentlemen." She was like some banished princess who learns that she

has inherited a domain in her own country, who knows that she will

never see it, yet feels, wherever she walks, its soil beneath her feet.

May was half over, and the Higher Thought Club was to hold its last

meeting, previous to the college festivities which, in early June,

agreeably disorganized the social routine of Wentworth. The meeting was

to take place in Margaret Ransom's drawing-room, and on the day before

she sat upstairs preparing for her dual duties as hostess and

orator--for she had been invited to read the final paper of the course.

In order to sum up with precision her conclusions on the subject of

English Gothic she had been rereading an analysis of the structural

features of the principal English cathedrals; and she was murmuring

over to herself the phrase: "The longitudinal arches of Lincoln have an

approximately elliptical form," when there came a knock on the door,

and Maria's voice announced: "There's a lady down in the parlour."

Margaret's soul dropped from the heights of the shadowy vaulting to the

dead level of an afternoon call at Wentworth.

"A lady? Did she give no name?"

Maria became confused. "She only said she was a lady--" and in reply to

her mistress's look of mild surprise: "Well, ma'am, she told me so

three or four times over."

Margaret laid her book down, leaving it open at the description of

Lincoln, and slowly descended the stairs. As she did so, she repeated

to herself: "The longitudinal arches are elliptical."

On the threshold below, she had the odd impression that her bare and

inanimate drawing-room was brimming with life and noise--an impression

produced, as she presently perceived, by the resolute forward dash--it

was almost a pounce--of the one small figure restlessly measuring its

length.

The dash checked itself within a yard of Margaret, and the lady--a

stranger--held back long enough to stamp on her hostess a sharp

impression of sallowness, leanness, keenness, before she said, in a

voice that might have been addressing an unruly committee meeting: "I

am Lady Caroline Duckett--a fact I found it impossible to make clear to

the young woman who let me in."

A warm wave rushed up from Margaret's heart to her throat and forehead.

She held out both hands impulsively. "Oh, I'm so glad--I'd no idea--"

Her voice sank under her visitor's impartial scrutiny.

"I don't wonder," said the latter drily. "I suppose she didn't mention,

either, that my object in calling here was to see Mrs. Ransom?"

"Oh, yes--won't you sit down?" Margaret pushed a chair forward. She

seated herself at a little distance, brain and heart humming with a

confused interchange of signals. This dark sharp woman was his

aunt--the "clever aunt" who had had such a hard life, but had always

managed to keep her head above water. Margaret remembered that Guy had

spoken of her kindness--perhaps she would seem kinder when they had

talked together a little. Meanwhile the first impression she produced

was of an amplitude out of all proportion to her somewhat scant

exterior. With her small flat figure, her shabby heterogeneous dress,

she was as dowdy as any Professor's wife at Wentworth; but her

dowdiness (Margaret borrowed a literary analogy to define it), her

dowdiness was somehow "of the centre." Like the insignificant emissary

of a great power, she was to be judged rather by her passports than her

person.

While Margaret was receiving these impressions, Lady Caroline, with

quick bird-like twists of her head, was gathering others from the pale

void spaces of the drawing-room. Her eyes, divided by a sharp nose like

a bill, seemed to be set far enough apart to see at separate angles;

but suddenly she bent both of them on Margaret.

"This _is_ Mrs. Ransom's house?" she asked, with an emphasis on the

verb that gave a distinct hint of unfulfilled expectations.

Margaret assented.

"Because your American houses, especially in the provincial towns, all

look so remarkably alike, that I thought I might have been mistaken;

and as my time is extremely limited--in fact I'm sailing on Wednesday--"

She paused long enough to let Margaret say: "I had no idea you were in

this country."

Lady Caroline made no attempt to take this up. "And so much of it," she

carried on her sentence, "has been wasted in talking to people I really

hadn't the slightest desire to see, that you must excuse me if I go

straight to the point."

Margaret felt a sudden tension of the heart. "Of course," she said

while a voice within her cried: "He is dead--he has left me a message."

There was another pause; then Lady Caroline went on, with increasing

asperity: "So that--in short--if I _could_ see Mrs. Ransom at once--"

Margaret looked up in surprise. "I am Mrs. Ransom," she said.

The other stared a moment, with much the same look of cautious

incredulity that had marked her inspection of the drawing-room. Then

light came to her.

"Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have said that I wished to see Mrs.

_Robert_ Ransom, not Mrs. Ransom. But I understood that in the States

you don't make those distinctions." She paused a moment, and then went

on, before Margaret could answer: "Perhaps, after all, it's as well

that I should see you instead, since you're evidently one of the

household--your son and his wife live with you, I suppose? Yes, on the

whole, then, it's better--I shall be able to talk so much more

frankly." She spoke as if, as a rule, circumstances prevented her

giving rein to this propensity. "And frankness, of course, is the only

way out of this--this extremely tiresome complication. You know, I

suppose, that my nephew thinks he's in love with your daughter-in-law?"

Margaret made a slight movement, but her visitor pressed on without

heeding it. "Oh, don't fancy, please, that I'm pretending to take a

high moral ground--though his mother does, poor dear! I can perfectly

imagine that in a place like this--I've just been driving about it for

two hours--a young man of Guy's age would _have_ to provide himself

with some sort of distraction, and he's not the kind to go in for

anything objectionable. Oh, we quite allow for that--we should allow

for the whole affair, if it hadn't so preposterously ended in his

throwing over the girl he was engaged to, and upsetting an arrangement

that affected a number of people besides himself. I understand that in

the States it's different--the young people have only themselves to

consider. In England--in our class, I mean--a great deal may depend on

a young man's making a good match; and in Guy's case I may say that his

mother and sisters (I won't include myself, though I might) have been

simply stranded--thrown overboard--by his freak. You can understand how

serious it is when I tell you that it's that and nothing else that has

brought me all the way to America. And my first idea was to go straight

to your daughter-in-law, since her influence is the only thing we can

count on now, and put it to her fairly, as I'm putting it to you. But,

on the whole, I dare say it's better to see you first--you might give

me an idea of the line to take with her. I'm prepared to throw myself

on her mercy!"

Margaret rose from her chair, outwardly rigid in proportion to her

inward tremor.

"You don't understand--" she began.

Lady Caroline brushed the interruption aside. "Oh, but I

do--completely! I cast no reflection on your daughter-in-law. Guy has

made it quite clear to us that his attachment is--has, in short, not

been rewarded. But don't you see that that's the worst part of it?

There'd be much more hope of his recovering if Mrs. Robert Ransom

had--had--"

Margaret's voice broke from her in a cry. "I am Mrs. Robert Ransom,"

she said.

If Lady Caroline Duckett had hitherto given her hostess the impression

of a person not easily silenced, this fact added sensibly to the effect

produced by the intense stillness which now fell on her.

She sat quite motionless, her large bangled hands clasped about the

meagre fur boa she had unwound from her neck on entering, her rusty

black veil pushed up to the edge of a "fringe" of doubtful

authenticity, her thin lips parted on a gasp that seemed to sharpen

itself on the edges of her teeth. So overwhelming and helpless was her

silence that Margaret began to feel a motion of pity beneath her

indignation--a desire at least to facilitate the excuses which must

terminate their disastrous colloquy. But when Lady Caroline found voice

she did not use it to excuse herself.

"You _can't_ be," she said, quite simply.

"Can't be?" Margaret stammered, with a flushing cheek.

"I mean, it's some mistake. Are there _two_ Mrs. Robert Ransoms in the

same town? Your family arrangements are so extremely puzzling." She had

a farther rush of enlightenment. "Oh, I _see!_ I ought of course to

have asked for Mrs. Robert Ransom 'Junior'!"

The idea sent her to her feet with a haste which showed her impatience

to make up for lost time.

"There is no other Mrs. Robert Ransom at Wentworth," said Margaret.

"No other--no 'Junior'? Are you _sure?_" Lady Caroline fell back into

her seat again. "Then I simply don't see," she murmured helplessly.

Margaret's blush had fixed itself on her throbbing forehead. She

remained standing, while her strange visitor continued to gaze at her

with a perturbation in which the consciousness of indiscretion had

evidently as yet no part.

"I simply don't see," she repeated.

Suddenly she sprang up, and advancing to Margaret laid an inspired hand

on her arm. "But, my dear woman, you can help us out all the same; you

can help us to find out _who it is_--and you will, won't you? Because,

as it's not you, you can't in the least mind what I've been saying--"

Margaret, freeing her arm from her visitor's hold, drew back a step;

but Lady Caroline instantly rejoined her.

"Of course, I can see that if it _had_ been, you might have been

annoyed: I dare say I put the case stupidly--but I'm so bewildered by

this new development--by his using you all this time as a pretext--that

I really don't know where to turn for light on the mystery--"

She had Margaret in her imperious grasp again, but the latter broke

from her with a more resolute gesture.

"I'm afraid I have no light to give you," she began; but once more Lady

Caroline caught her up.

"Oh, but do please understand me! I condemn Guy most strongly for using

your name--when we all know you'd been so amazingly kind to him! I

haven't a word to say in his defence--but of course the important thing

now is: _who is the woman, since you're not?_"

The question rang out loudly, as if all the pale puritan corners of the

room flung it back with a shudder at the speaker. In the silence that

ensued Margaret felt the blood ebbing back to her heart; then she said,

in a distinct and level voice: "I know nothing of the history of Mr.

Dawnish."

Lady Caroline gave a stare and a gasp. Her distracted hand groped for

her boa and she began to wind it mechanically about her long neck.

"It would really be an enormous help to us--and to poor Gwendolen

Matcher," she persisted pleadingly. "And you'd be doing Guy himself a

good turn."

Margaret remained silent and motionless while her visitor drew on one

of the worn gloves she had pulled off to adjust her veil. Lady Caroline

gave the veil a final twitch.

"I've come a tremendously long way," she said, "and, since it isn't

you, I can't think why you won't help me...."

When the door had closed on her visitor Margaret Ransom went slowly up

the stairs to her room. As she dragged her feet from one step to

another, she remembered how she had sprung up the same steep flight

after that visit of Guy Dawnish's when she had looked in the glass and

seen on her face the blush of youth.

When she reached her room she bolted the door as she had done that day,

and again looked at herself in the narrow mirror above her

dressing-table. It was just a year since then--the elms were budding

again, the willows hanging their green veil above the bench by the

river. But there was no trace of youth left in her face--she saw it now

as others had doubtless always seen it. If it seemed as it did to Lady

Caroline Duckett, what look must it have worn to the fresh gaze of

young Guy Dawnish?

A pretext--she had been a pretext. He had used her name to screen some

one else--or perhaps merely to escape from a situation of which he was

weary. She did not care to conjecture what his motive had

been--everything connected with him had grown so remote and alien. She

felt no anger--only an unspeakable sadness, a sadness which she knew

would never be appeased.

She looked at herself long and steadily; she wished to clear her eyes

of all illusions. Then she turned away and took her usual seat beside

her work-table. From where she sat she could look down the empty

elm-shaded street, up which, at this hour every day, she was sure to

see her husband's figure advancing. She would see it presently--she

would see it for many years to come. She had a sudden aching sense of

the length of the years that stretched before her. Strange that one who

was not young should still, in all likelihood, have so long to live!

Nothing was changed in the setting of her life, perhaps nothing would

ever change in it. She would certainly live and die in Wentworth. And

meanwhile the days would go on as usual, bringing the usual

obligations. As the word flitted through her brain she remembered that

she had still to put the finishing touches to the paper she was to read

the next afternoon at the meeting of the Higher Thought Club.

The book she had been reading lay face downward beside her, where she

had left it an hour ago. She took it up, and slowly and painfully, like

a child laboriously spelling out the syllables, she went on with the

rest of the sentence:

--"and they spring from a level not much above that of the springing of

the transverse and diagonal ribs, which are so arranged as to give a

convex curve to the surface of the vaulting conoid."