Chapter 23

INDIFFERENCE

Marie met her husband serenely at the breakfast-table next morning. She looked fair and fresh and had other things to do than to give him undivided attention. George and Minna were at table, behaving charmingly, though the baby, being yet at a sloppy stage, was taking her breakfast in the kitchen in deference to her father's return. Osborn paid his family some attention and his newspaper none; and he appeared to be in no hurry to be off.

"My first morning back," he remarked; "I need hardly turn up punctually."

"I suppose," said Marie, with interest, from behind her coffee-pot, "that your work will be rather different."

"It will, rather. I believe I'm to put in some days in town, and then run down to our various agents in the Midlands. There's quite a busy programme mapped out, I believe."

"You'll enjoy that."

"Shall you go away again, Daddy?" asked Minna.

"Don't talk at breakfast, dear," said her mother.

Osborn looked across at his wife.

"I shall be off your hands a good deal."

Bitterness savoured his voice. She smiled at him sympathetically, but he smarted under the knowledge that her sympathy did not go very deep. Yet he was strangely reluctant to hurry away. He remained until George had started for school; until Minna had begged to be allowed to get down and go to see baby finish her breakfast. Then he rose, and went rather heavily round the table to his wife, and laid a hand on her shoulder.

"I couldn't sleep. I was thinking of you and all the things you said last night."

"I'm sorry you didn't sleep. I expect you were rather tired with travelling; over-tired, perhaps."

"I was as fresh as paint when I got here yesterday and you know I was. _You_ took it out of me."

"We shan't be able to argue about this every day; I couldn't stand it, Osborn."

"I'm ready to say that I daresay we men are thoughtless sort of brutes; but you didn't marry one of the worst by a long chalk, you know."

A smile twitched her lips, goading him to desperation.

"No," she owned. "There was nothing lurid about you. But, heavens! it was dull!"

He took his hand off her shoulder and went to search for matches and pipe on the mantelpiece. He noticed many little things acutely in his unhappiness; how nicely the silver vases were cleaned, and that the piperack was kept on the righthand side now instead of the left.

"You'll come round."

"If you knew how impossible it seems to me you wouldn't say that."

"I suppose I shall be worrying over this business all day as well as all night?"

"I hope not. I'm lunching with you, at one, at the Royal Red."

"What! You'll come to lunch?"

"You asked me."

Pleasure, almost triumph, lit his face. "I'll give you a good time. Sure you wouldn't like some other place better than the Royal Red?"

"I've got, somehow, a special ache for it."

"Then you must have what you want, of course. I'll get away punctually, so as not to keep you waiting."

Marie accompanied him into the hall to help him on with his coat, and to remark that his muffler needed washing. But she did not kiss him on parting; before he could ask mutely for the salute she was on her way back to the breakfast-table.

She sat there some while after he had gone, comfortably finishing her own meal, which had been interrupted by attendance on the children, as if deliberately determining that Osborn's return should interfere in no whit with her recent ease. Only when she was quite ready, with no hurry and at her own pleasure, did she start out to the Heath to give the children their morning airing.

"Mummie," said Minna, "George said Daddy has promised to bring us some toys."

"That's very kind of Daddy, isn't it?"

She walked thoughtfully. "Things have changed," she said to herself, "I suppose money has changed them. It always can." She thought this with a certain enjoyment, yet down underneath, where that stony organ which used to be her heart lay, she knew that she wanted, more than thousands and thousands of pounds, the light and life of that first year over again. What joy was like the birth of such love? Or what regret like the death of it?

Their walk on the Heath lasted till eleven o'clock, when she returned to put the children under the charge of the maid. She was meticulous in her instructions for their care and requirements, almost passionate in her loving good-byes to them. Truly no one, she thought again, as their arms clung about her neck, could know all that they had been to her, how heavenly kind they were.

Minna, admiring her mother's clothes, walked with her to the door and waved her down the bleak staircase.

It was precisely one o'clock when Marie Kerr entered the lounge of the big restaurant, where she had waited some while for Osborn on a birthday evening which she remembered keenly this morning. But this time he was there before her, waiting anxious and alert, like a lover for the lady of his affections. He had booked a table and upon it, as she sat down, she saw, laid beside her cover, a big bunch of her favourite violets, blue and dewy.

"You still like them best?" he asked.

"Still faithful," she smiled back lightly and, when she had thrown open her coat, she pinned them at her breast.

She looked around her unafraid.

Her clothes were good; her hair was burnished; her hands were white; her man worshipped like the other women's men.

She was once more, after that long, that humble and tearful abdication, at the zenith of her power.

* * * * *

They did not rise from their table until nearly three o'clock. Twice she had asked: "How about the firm?" and twice he had answered irreverently: "Let them be hanged!" He looked into her eyes wondering and hoping, but in their clearness read no promise. He tried to lead their talk round to the one subject which pervaded and appalled him, but each time that he drove in his wedge of reference she shook her head at him, smiled and closed her lips, as a woman saying: "You don't talk me over in this world or the next."

But when he reminded her "It was here, to this very table, that I took you, on your birthday before last," she joined him in reminiscence.

"And I was miserable, envying every woman I saw, ashamed of my frock and my hands and my old shoes; ashamed of everything. I knew I couldn't compete."

"You could compete with any woman in the world." He cast a deprecating look around them.

"I couldn't then. There was a woman I specially envied, I remember, an actress whose name you knew. How long ago it seems."

"Only a year and a half," he replied quickly, plunging into a side issue.

"You admired her," she said curiously, "didn't you?"

He lied: "I don't remember."

"I do," she said. "I used to pray about you--that woman was in my mind when I prayed, and asked God to make you admire me for the children I'd borne, and not to let you see how old and ugly I should grow. Doesn't it seem funny?"

"It's not at all funny," he said, his eyes on the tablecloth. "I'm sorry you--if you'd told me--talked to me--"

"You'd have thought me more of a whining wife than ever."

"Well, it's over, anyway. Won't you forget it?"

"I'm just delighted to forget it. But there's a kind of joy in remembering all the same, such as a man feels in thinking of his starvation early days after he's made himself rich."

"And now I'm to be starved instead?"

Then she collected her muff and gloves, closed her coat, pinning the violets outside, thanked him for a nice lunch and left him. He paid the bill in a hurry and hastened after her, catching up with her upon the kerb.

"Well," he said in her ear, "I shall keep on asking. What do you think?"

She signalled a passing omnibus to stop and boarding it left him with a smile and wave of the hand. For a few seconds, he stood on the kerb, at grips with a feeling of humiliation and defeat, then he began to walk back to his work. He was not yet accustomed to the setting of this new act he was playing with his wife--he thought of it thus--though it was making him smart badly. As he went forward, threading his way among the hurrying after-lunch throngs, he was thinking hard. He attracted some attention from women's eyes as he swung along, oblivious, big, straight-shouldered and masculine. All the afternoon, while his mind was ostensibly upon his business, he fumed and fretted.

In taking up his job in London, he found a good deal to do and to book that first day. He had to pay rushing visits to two agents, talk over his tour with the head of the firm, and drive about the Park, in a Runaway, a rich undecided peer who couldn't make up his mind to buy her. But he bought the car _de luxe_ before they parted, and his cheque lay in Osborn's pocket.

Another twenty-pounds commission, and what for? To spend on a woman who coolly didn't want it. Osborn Kerr started for home, chafing sorely.

On his way to the Piccadilly Tube he passed the Piccadilly Theatre. Outside the doors hung a big frame of photographs of the entire cast of Sautree's new production, and he paused to look, absent-minded as he was, with male interest in that galaxy of charm. In the second row of faces he met Roselle's. She photographed well, her big, smooth shoulders bare, her hair smooth and smart, her chin uptilted so that she looked out, foreshortened. She smiled inscrutably. He knew the smile well, although he had never translated it so far as to guess that it covered stupidity in a sphinx's mask that baffled and piqued. That smile was of sterling value to Roselle; it was like so many pounds paid regularly into her pocket; it set men wondering what her meaning was when all the while she meant nothing. As Osborn Kerr paused before the rows of portraits, he wondered, a little yet, what Roselle meant when, so inscrutably, she smiled.

She was beautiful, there was no doubt of it. He remembered with some self-gratulation those hours spent with her in the blue Runaway with its silver fittings; Roselle in her fur coat and the purple velvet hat crushed close, in a cheeky fashion, over her night-black hair; and people turning to look at them both. He had seen in men's faces as they passed that they thought him a lucky fellow. They would have liked to be in his shoes, or rather, in his seat beside her, in the Runaway.

He passed on, the trouble in his heart a shade lighter for the intrusion of something else, something pleasant. It was like diluting a nasty draught, or soothing pain by partly anæsthetising it.

He reached home at his old time; it seemed so familiar to fit the key into the lock and step into the hall, redolent, even through the closed kitchen door, of the savoury preparations for dinner. But no little woman ran out, smiling and anxious, to ascertain his mood.

He had to go in search of her; he opened the sitting-room door and found her ensconced on the chesterfield, knitting those socks. This evening she had on a purply thing, a wrap, a tea-gown--he did not know what to call it--very graceful. It made her look slimmer than ever; and stranger. All these strange clothes had the effect of increasing the gulf between them. In the old days she had to ask him, and she did not do it very often, for what she wanted, and it was his to withhold or to give. Everything about her then had seemed familiar because, in a way, it was his. But now she had a horrible independence, a mastery of life, even to spending her own money upon her own clothes. He did not mind that, of course; he liked her to be able to buy what she wanted; but it made a difference.

She wore her amethyst earrings, but not the hair ornament from Paris.

Coming up behind her quickly, he bent over and kissed her cheek, it being all that she offered. He laid a box of sweets on a table near, and it reminded her of that evening before he went away, when he had brought home a packet of chocolates to sugar his news.

"Not lost your sweet tooth I hope," he smiled.

"It's sweeter than ever."

He untied the ribbons. "Do you still thread these in your cammies?"

"If they're pretty. That'll do for Minna--I'm wearing mauve now."

"I'd noticed."

"Because of poor mother, you know."

"Oh, of course." He put a bonbon in her mouth.

"What a nice baby it is!" he said softly, stroking her silk knee.

He knew himself to be a fool, but all that evening he let himself remain on the rack, wondering; wondering if she'd relent; if her stoniness wasn't just a mood, and if it hadn't passed away; wondering if he couldn't break down that unnatural opposition in her. And when at ten o'clock she rose and nodded "Good night," he detained her, asking again urgently:

"Can't we--can't we--be as we were before?"

"Thank heaven, no!" she replied, with a tiny shudder.

Osborn looked at her narrowly and spoke crudely:

"Do you know, if I were like some men, I should tell you that I wouldn't stand such fool nonsense; and there'd be an end of it?"

She went a trifle paler, but displayed no fear. "Don't you dare!" she said between her teeth. "I'd leave you next day."

Again he went a little way up the corridor, but stopped before the aloof reserve of her look.

"Believe me," she said gravely, "I couldn't stand you."

He bit his lip sharply. "It's dangerous, you know, what you're doing. I told you last night men are natural animals all the world over. I shan't stand being turned down like this for ever; it's absurd, unnatural; it's preposterous after we've been married all these years. I tell you what you're doing is not safe. You'll drive me elsewhere."

"Make your own life," she said, with a cheerful indifference; "I have all I want in mine."

Osborn turned away with a sharp exclamation; and heard her door click behind her while he still stood in the corridor.

"That's that!" he breathed hard.

The next morning he took a bag with him and in the afternoon he wired home: "Shall not be back for dinner."

She read the telegram, uncaring. Two years ago it would have made her fear. She would have trembled over it; her heart would have leapt as at a thunderbolt; she would have run to her glass and reckoned with the sallowness of her face, the little lines about her eyes, each representing little anxieties about little things; her chapped hands and her dull wits. She would have thought of the other women, the hundreds of them, the younger, freer and fresher women who passed him by every day in the streets. But now she smiled; she felt awfully old, experienced in reading under and between the brief message.

She mused: "Tactics! How funny men are! Can he think I'll mind?"

It occurred to her, too, that perhaps it was not tactics; perhaps he genuinely quested in other directions; perhaps, already, she had driven him elsewhere. And still she was unmoved; she could not care. She longed to care very deeply, tragically, to thrill to the pulse of life again, but she could not. She even told herself that she was a little glad on his behalf and her own, if such was the solution. As she went in to dinner, and seated herself at the solitary table, she liked it; privacy had returned to her. This was almost like the year of her grass-widowhood.