"You do not wish to come!"
"To be honest, no. I should feel--" She hesitated. She wished to be
frank; but how could she be, when he was in that mood of doubt? How
could she explain again that, in some respects, she loathed the memory
of the times they had been stealthily together--the alarms, the narrow
escapes from discovery--the commonness of it all--like those low
intrigues that get into the newspapers, to make coarse mouths water and
vulgar eyes sparkle? If she tried to tell him, he would misunderstand.
"Not just yet," she went on. "I'm in a queer mood--not myself.
You----"
She was so tender, so loving, so deeply distressed that, in shame and
contrition, he embraced her. "I'm sorry I said anything. But you'll
understand. How can I help longing for you? It's your own fault--you
beautiful, wonderful _woman_!"
And their first clash ended in kisses, in serenity restored, with him
saying--and thinking--"How much braver and better you are than I! Yours
is the love that makes a man stronger and decenter."
Her look was eloquent of gratitude and happiness. But the happiness in
it was forced, at least in part, was rather what she felt she ought to
feel than what she actually did feel--as is so often the case. And she
went back to work with a certain heaviness of heart--and a foreboding.
The slightest alarm, however fanciful, was enough to call up the specter
of those months of loneliness and despair after he left. That specter
haunted her, was in her mind the fixed idea that becomes an obsession.
She knew that to quiet it, she would if necessary stop at nothing. "I
can never give him up again. I'd do anything--anything--rather than
even risk it." Pride and self-respect were all very well, but those who
could put such things before love had not loved. She hoped and prayed
Basil would not force her to the test. But--if he did-- She sighed,
and bade herself wait until that situation arose before worrying over
it.
*XIX*
Now that the throes of birth were over, their love bade fair to be like
those robust infants that almost kill mothers in the bearing but
thereafter give not a moment's anxiety. Outdoors it was rivalling the
previous winter; indoors--at the house and at the laboratory--there
reigned mid-summer serenity. Nanny--always a shadow, though very faint
indeed latterly--had yielded before her arch enemy, rheumatism, had been
pensioned off, had gone to her brother's, seventeen miles into the
wilderness. She would shadow them no more. Richard had come to another
crisis in his researches; and a mind in the act of gestation is like a
hen on eggs--solitary, brooding, best left utterly alone. He was as
unconscious of Courtney and Basil as of himself; all three were, for
him, simply instruments to the strange and terrible marvels of chemical
action that were unfolding. Soon Basil felt about him as did
Courtney--that is, lost all sense of his being related to her or to the
life of the household. As they held to their compact, they experienced
none of passion's inevitable alternations of rapture and revulsion.
Habit is equally the friend of virtue and of vice. It was not a matter
of months but of weeks when they were looking on their love as not only
moral but even exalted, since they were self-restrained.
The chief factor in the tranquillity was the work. Courtney began at the
laboratory solely that she and Basil might be together. Soon she had
another reason--love of the work itself. Everything worth while,
whether for achievement or for amusement, involves drudgery at the
outset--tennis or bridge no less than a trade or an art. Although
Courtney had done at school the worst part of the drudgery in acquiring
chemistry, it was nearly a month before she began to enjoy. Then came
the first haunting alluring glimpses of the elusive mystery which makes
chemistry the most fascinating of the sciences; and from that hour forth
she forgot the difficulties in the delights. She often stole in to gaze
longingly at Richard's work--for, he kept the main part of the great
task of finding a new and universal fuel altogether in his own hands and
used the other two as mere helpers. She would have liked to work with
him; and, as she understood better and better what he was about, the
temptation to try to bring her skill and her knowledge to his attention
became strong at times. But she was afraid that if he began to think
attentively about her being there, he would send her away. No, it was
best to remain hidden behind Basil, to do nothing to remind Richard of
her existence.
At first Basil assumed she was toiling like another Richard because she
wished quickly to get knowledge enough to make plausible her necessary
pretense of interest. But after a few weeks he saw she was in earnest,
or thought she was--for, he could not believe one so pretty, so
charming, so light of spirit and of mind, could be deeply in earnest
about such a heavy, unwomanly matter as chemistry--or about anything
else, except of course love. He was fond of chemistry; but it was in
the fashion of most men's fondness for serious effort--to get excuse and
appetite for idling. However, partly through pride, partly because her
enthusiasm was contagious, he buckled to and worked as Richard had never
been able to make him.
"Really, you needn't crowd yourself quite so hard," said he to Courtney,
when his own energy began to flag.
"I've got to choose between being a drag and a help. Besides--" She
glanced down with the shy, subtle smile he had learned to recognize as a
cover for something she meant very much indeed--"don't you find that
being occupied is a great aid?"
"I'd not have thought it possible to live as we're living--and be
happy."
"You are happy?" As she asked this, she scrutinized his face in woman's
familiar veiled fashion. She was always watching, watching, for the
first faint dreaded sign of discontent.
"So much so," answered he, earnestly, "that I'd be afraid to change
anything."
She saw that he meant it, that he felt it with all the intensity of the
fine side of his nature. And she breathed a secret sigh of relief. She
said: "Every day--time and again--I say to myself, 'If only this will
last!'"
"It will!" declared he.
And, pessimist though she had been made by disappointment on
disappointment in small things and large her whole life through, she
began to hope that this would last, that the worst of her life was
perhaps over, that her life problem was settling and settling right.
The watchdogs of presentiment are like their much overrated animal
prototypes. They bark at everything, that they may get credit for
usefulness if by chance they once do happen to vent their nerve-racking
warnings in advance of a real peril. Even presentiment called its dogs
off duty.
She had been brought up among people who imagine they see the operations
of natural law in the artificial conventions of morality that differ for
every age and race and creed, really for every individual. She had long
discarded as superstition the creed of her parents; but she had not been
able wholly to uproot all the ramifications of beliefs dependent upon
that creed for vitality. Thus, she vaguely felt a relationship of
effect and cause between her sufferings in the autumn and early winter
and those fear-shadowed, shame-alloyed but ecstatic moments of joy in
the summer. And in the same vague way, there seemed to her some sort of
connection between their present happiness and their self-restraint.
She would have, quite honestly, denied, had she been accused of
harboring such a "remnant of superstition." Nevertheless, it was the
fact. However, she did not analyze or reason about her happiness. She
simply accepted and enjoyed it--and forgot the foundations on which it
rested.
And the days--the long, long days that only people who live in quiet
places have--moved tranquilly and happily by, swift yet slow. The weeks
seemed to be flying, and the days went very fast; but each hour
presented its full quota of sixty minutes for enjoyment. In those
dreadful days of the previous fall she had wished every hour that she
was living in a city, because in the city a thousand resolute intrusions
compel distraction, make the moments seem to fly, whether the heart is
heavy or light. Now, she was glad with all her heart that she was
living and loving where there were no distractions, where each moment
could be lived as a connoisseur drinks his glass of rare old wine drop
by drop.
One day late in April she and Richard, it so happened, were alone for a
few minutes before supper. He abruptly emerged from his abstraction to
say, "Basil and Helen are getting on famously."
She startled, then lapsed into her usual isolation when alone with him.
"I expect there'll be a marriage before the summer is out."
"Yes?" said Courtney, absently.
"Well, it's a good match. They're both comfortably shallow. They're
fond of the same kind of harmless pretenses. They look well
together.... I hope they'll stay on with us--at least until the first
baby comes."
She shivered, rose abruptly. "Supper must certainly be ready," said
she.
"Then," pursued Dick, intent upon his train of thought, "they might get
the Donaldson place. The Donaldsons want to sell."