CHAPTER III

CHRISTINA

He was gone. She had triumphed. And only pain and horror, as if for the innocent life she had taken, were about her. No joy, no triumph, in having snatched Milly from degradation.

At the thought of Milly the fear that drove upon her was so intense that it induced a curious lightness of head. She was uplifted and upheld above her own fear. The unnatural buoyancy became almost a lightness of heart. All was over. If she were a criminal she must profit by her crime and shelter herself from suspicion. They would be happy--of course they would be happy again--she and Milly. "Love begets love. Love begets love." She heard herself muttering the words almost gaily, like an incantation, as she walked down Sloane Street.

When she crossed the street and looked up at the house she saw that Milly was standing at the drawing-room window looking down at her. Something in Milly's attitude there, in her beautiful dress and in her unsmiling gaze, suggested to Christina the thought of a captive princess watching the approach of some evil enchantress. Milly--her prisoner--her victim! Her darling Milly!--She beat away the black vision.

She went slowly upstairs and came slowly into the drawing-room. Milly had turned from the window and, with the same hard, unsmiling gaze, stood and watched her enter. Christina sank into a chair.

"Well," said Milly after a moment, and in a voice that Christina had never heard from her, "he did not come, you see. I am up and dressed--yes--you know that I intended to get up and dress as soon as you were gone, I am sure--and I have been waiting here for an hour--and he has not come. He has not cared enough to come. So there are no roundabout questions for you to ask or evasive answers for you to hear. You have the truth before you."

Christina was not at all surprised, though there was something so horrible in this unshrinking frankness from one so reticent, so delicate as Milly. She knew, as she heard her speak, that it was what she had expected. The subterfuges of the past weeks lay in ruin about them. She sat, her eyes fallen, drawing off her gloves, and she said gently, "I am sorry, Milly, if you hoped that he would come."

"No," said Milly, not moving from her place. "You are not sorry, Christina. You are glad. You are sorry that I care and you are glad that he does not care, because you think that it will keep us together. But that is your mistake. It is all impossible now, and you have made it so. I am going away. I am going back to the country. I want to be alone."

Again Christina was not surprised; this was the fear which she had glanced down at from her haze of uncanny lightness.

"Have I made it so impossible? What have I done, Milly?" she asked, after a moment.

Milly sat down in the nearest chair. She had passed beyond fear. There was no mist or illusion in her calmness. "You didn't give us a chance," she said. "Not a chance. You saw how I cared. You saw how I had come to need him. You saw how stupid he was and unless he were helped he would see nothing. I was afraid to hurt you. Of course I was. Of course I was sorry for you, horribly sorry. And you traded on that. You saw that unless you stood aside I could do nothing."

"I thought that I did stand aside, Milly," said Christina after another moment.

"Never really," said Milly.

"I don't quite see what you mean by really, Milly," said Christina. "I left you with him whenever you gave me the opportunity for doing so. Perhaps you mean that I ought to have committed suicide."

"No; I don't mean that," Milly returned sullenly, with an unaltered hostility. "There are different ways of standing aside. You could have made it possible for me to tell you, openly, what I felt; you could have made me feel that you would be glad to have me happy with him. You need not have made me feel in everything you did and said--and didn't do or say--that if I went back to Dick I should be going to him over your dead body."

"I think you mean, Milly," Christina answered in her dull and gentle voice, "that I ought not to have loved you. That is my crime, is it not?"

"Yes; perhaps that is your crime, if you want to put it so," said Milly. "I don't blame you, you know. You could not help it. But your love has always been a prison. As long as I was contented in the prison you made it a very charming place to live in. But when I wanted to be free, to have other, deeper, realler loves, I knew that I had a gaoler to get past, a gaoler who would not kill me, but whom I would have to kill. So that I sat in my cell and did not dare turn the key in the lock for fear of what would happen to you. And it isn't true to say that you left the door open. You pretended to, of course. But when I did make my one effort, when I did try to creep out under your eyes, you turned the key on me quickly enough. The walk this morning. You knew that I hoped for it alone. You knew that it was our last chance."

While Milly spoke these words to her, Christina sat with her head bent down and her hands pressed tightly together in her lap, and it seemed to her that she was weeping inwardly, tears of blood. It was shame, unutterable shame, that she felt, mixed with the anguish, and weighing her down to the earth. Shame for what she had done in sacrifice to the love she heard thus abused; shame for the truth, the cruel half-truth, in Milly's words; and shame for Milly that she could find it in her to speak such words to her. Deeper? Realler? Could any love, though tricked out in romantic conventions, be deeper or realler than the love she had for Milly? In the innermost chambers of her heart she knew that, in spite of the cruel half-truth, what Milly said was not the whole. She would--oh yes, she would have given her up--with gladness--as a mother gives up her child--to a love that she could have recognized as ennobling. It had not been her own selfish clinging, only, that had nerved her. It had been the thought of Milly's truest good. And if she were to say this to Milly, she knew now what withering laughter she would hear.

The thought of this laughter from Milly's lips, of Milly's cruelty to her, hunted her down the first turning of concealment open to her. "I didn't want to come with you," she said. "You made me come. But I was glad--for your sake--because it shielded you. You had made it so obvious to him that you wanted it to be alone. I thought that you had made it too obvious."

Milly drew a long breath and a vivid red mounted to her cheeks. For some moments she sat still, saying nothing. Then, not meeting her friend's eyes, for they were now fixed on her, she rose.

"Yes. I have been unfair," said Milly. "I have been ungrateful and unkind, and unfair. I know that you have thought only of me; and you saw what I've only realised in this last hour. It has hurt so terribly to realise it--to realise that I've had my chance of happiness and thrown it away and that now it's too late to get it back again--it's hurt so terribly that it has made me cruel. You have been right all along and I have been a fool. But there it is. I love him and I'm broken-hearted, and now all that I can do is to go away and hide myself."

She was going, actually going. Their life together was over, shattered. The intolerable realisation crashed down upon Christina's abasement. She stood up, staring at her friend. "You are going to leave me, Milly?" she asked.

Milly averted her eyes. "Yes, Christina. I want to be alone."

"But you will come back?"

"I don't know," said Milly. Still she averted her eyes; but, in the rigid silence that followed, compunction evidently wrought upon her. She glanced round at her suffering friend and Christina's eyes met hers. They hurt her. They were glazed, like the eyes of a deer, waiting for the hunter's final blow.

"Christina," she said, and her voice showed her pity; "won't you try to learn to live without me? Really--really--it can't come back again, as it was. You must see that. Not after all that we have said, all that has happened. Learn to live without me. Get some nice woman and go to Greece and try to forget me. I can only mean suffering for you now, and I'm not nearly good enough for you."

At this Christina broke into dreadful sobs. She did not move towards her friend, but she stretched her clasped hands out towards her and said, while her voice, half-strangled, came in gasps: "Milly--Milly--Have you forgotten everything?--All the years when we were so happy together?--When he was nothing to you?--For all these years, Milly--nothing--nothing.--How can you care--suddenly--like this--when you have almost hated him for so long?--You know what you said, in the winter, Milly--that you would not care if he were to die."

Milly's eyes had hardened. She moved towards the door.

"Milly!" Christina's cry arrested her. She had to stop and listen, though her hand was on the door. "Wait! Forgive me!--I don't know what I am saying!--And it was true! It was! You did not care!--Oh don't be cruel to me. I shall die if you leave me. What have I done that you should change so?"

"You have done nothing, Christina," said Milly in a voice of schooled forbearance. "It is I who have changed, and been cruel, first to Dick and then to you. I am a shallow, feeble creature, but the shallowness was in thinking that I couldn't love my husband--not in loving him now. I don't want the things you and I had together. I only want the stupid, simple things that he could have given me. I want someone to be in love with me. That is it, I think. I am the most usual, common sort of woman, who must have someone in love with her and be in love. And I am in love with Dick. And I am too unhappy to think of anyone but myself."

Christina stood with her face covered. Convulsive sobs shook her.

"Good-bye," said Milly.

She did not reply. She moved her head a little, in negation? acquiescence? appeal?--Milly did not know. And since Christina still said nothing, she turned the handle softly and left her.

* * * * *

Milly went down to Chawlton. In the country, alone, she could sit and look at her life and at the wreckage she had made in it without feeling that another's eyes were watching her. It pained her, when she could turn her mind from the humiliation of her own misery, to see how completely all love for poor Christina had died from her, to see how the perhaps crude and elemental love had killed the delicate, derivative affection. It was even sadder to realise that under the superficial pain lay a deep indifference. She was very sorry for Christina. She had accepted Christina's life and used it, and now, through the strange compulsion of fate, she must cut herself away from it, even if that were to leave it broken and bleeding. For if she were to remain sorry for Christina, to look back at her with pity and compunction, she must not see her. Words, glances, silences of Christina's rankled in her, and when she thought of them she could not forgive her. Christina had seen too much, understood too much. She was a blight upon her love, a menace to her tragic memory of it. Under everything, deeper than anything else in her feeling about Christina, was a dim repulsion and dislike.

That Christina had submitted showed in her letters, for Milly, before many days had passed, wrote kindly and mildly, in the tone which, for the future, she intended to use towards Christina. Milly surprised herself with her own calm ruthlessness. She found that the gentle and the cowardly can, when roused, be more cruel than the harsh and fearless. Her letters to Christina were serene and impersonal. They recognised a bond, but they defined its limits. They might have been letters written to a former governess, with whom her relation had been kindly but not fond. They never mentioned her husband's name, nor alluded, even indirectly, to her mistimed love; and to ask Christina's forgiveness again for her unjust arraignment of her would have been to allude indirectly to it.

And Christina's letters made no appeal. They were infrequent, hardly affectionate; amazingly tactful letters. Milly shrank in recognising how tactful. It showed Christina's power that she should be so tactful, should so master herself to a responsive calm. Milly had come to dread Christina's tact, her patience and her reticence, more than all the vehemence and passionate upbraidings of former years. Beneath the careful words she knew that a profound, undying hope lay hidden; pain, too, profound and undying. The thought of such hope, such pain, made Milly feel at once the pity and the repulsion.

In none of Christina's letters was there any mention of her health. Milly knew how fragile was her hold on life and how much had happened of late to tax it; but it was with a shock of something unrealisable, unbelievable, that she read one autumn morning, in a blurred and shaking hand: "I am very ill--dying, they say. Come to me at once. I must tell you something."

Christina dying. She had said that it would kill her. And what had she not said to Christina that might not well have killed her? Milly was stricken with dreadful remorse and horror.

She hastened to London.

The maid at the door of the little house in Sloane Street told her that Mrs. Drent was rapidly sinking. Milly read reproach in her simple eyes. "I did not know! Why was I not told?--Why was I not told?"--she repeated to the nurse who came to meet her. Mrs. Drent, the nurse said, would not have her sent for, but during these last few days she had become slightly delirious and had spoken of something she wished to tell, had, at last, insisted on writing herself. She could hardly live a day longer. Heart-failure had made her illness fatal.

In the sick room, Milly paused at the door. Was that Christina? That strange face with such phantom eyes? Christina's eyes did not look at her with reproach or with sorrow, but, it seemed, with terror, a wild, infectious terror; Milly felt it seize her as she stood, spellbound, by the door. Then a rush of immense pity and comprehension shook her through and through. Christina was dying, delirious, and what must she be feeling in her haunted abandonment and desolation? She ran to the bed weeping. She knelt beside it. Her tears rained upon Christina's hands, as she took her in her arms and kissed her. "Christina!--dearest Christina!--Forgive me! Forgive me!--I did not know!--Why did you not let me come and nurse you?--I have always nursed you! Why did you not tell me?--Oh, Christina!"

Holding her, kissing her, she could not see clearly the illumination that, at her words, illuminated the dying woman's face. Life seemed suddenly to leap to her eyes and lips. The terror vanished like a ghost in the uprising of morning sunlight. With a rapture of hope and yearning which resumed all her ebbing power, physical and spiritual, she stretched out her arms and clasped them about Milly's neck. "Do you love me again?" she asked. Her voice was like a child's in its ecstasy.

"My darling Christina!--Love you?--Who is there in all the world but you!" Milly cried. No affirmation could be too strong, she felt, no atonement too great.

"Better than you love him?"

Milly did not even hesitate. Lies were like obstacles hardly seen as, in the onrush of her remorse and pity, she leaped them.--"Yes,--Yes. You are everything," she reiterated. "I love you best. It has passed--that feeling."

"It has passed! I knew that it would pass!" Christina seemed to gasp and smile at once. "You know, now, that it was not right;--that it was not you;--that it was an illness;--something that would pass?--You see it too, Milly?--And you will be happy with me again?"

"Yes, yes, dearest Christina."

Still smiling, Christina closed her eyes and Milly laid her back upon her pillows. Her fingers closed tightly on Milly's hand. "It has passed," she said. "It could not have been right. You were everything to me. And he could not have seen the pictures, the jewels, Milly; or heard the music."

"No, dear, no." Milly covered her own eyes. Ah!--those cravings to which Christina had responded;--now so dead.

"I shall get better," said Christina. "I feel it now; I know it. I shall get better and be always with you. My darling. My Milly. My little Milly." Her voice had sunken to a shrouded whisper.

Held by those cold, clutching fingers, Milly sat sobbing. Christina would not get better; and, with horror at herself, she knew that only at the gates of death could she love Christina and be with her. And, glancing round at the head on the pillow--ah!--poor head!--Christina's wonderful head!--more wonderful than ever now, so eager, so doomed, so white, with all its flood of black, black hair--glancing at its ebony and marble, she saw that she need have no fear of life. Christina would not get better.

She spoke again, brokenly. "If you had loved him, you would have hated me. Now you will never hate me."

"I love you."

"You will not send for him? You will not see him alone? You will stay with me?"

"I will stay with you."

"And be glad with me again."

"With you again, dear Christina."

"I shall get better," Christina repeated, turning her head on Milly's arm. But the disarray of her mind still whispered on in vague fragments.--"It was not useless.--I was right.--I did not need to tell; you were mine; I had not lost you."

A few hours afterwards, her head still turned on Milly's arm, Christina died.

* * * * *

Sitting alone on a winter day in the library of Chawlton, Milly heard the sound of a motor outside. Since Christina's death she had shut herself away, refusing to see anyone, and she listened now with apathetic interest, expecting to hear the retreating wheels. But the motor did not move away. Instead, after some delay at the door, steps crossed the hall, familiar, wonderful, dear and terrible. Dick had returned.

All the irony and humiliation of her married life rose before her as she felt herself trembling, flushing, with the joy and terror. He had come back; and so he had not guessed. Or was it that he had guessed and yet was too kind not to come? She had only time to snatch at conjecture, for Dick was before her.

Dick's demeanour was as unemphatic as she remembered it always to have been. It was almost as casual as if he had returned from a day's hunting merely. Yet there was difference, too, though what it was her hurrying thoughts could not seize. She felt it as a radiance of pity, warm and almost vehement.

"My dear Milly," he said coming to her and taking her hand; "I only heard yesterday.--I only got back yesterday.--And I felt that I must see you. I'm not going to bother you in any way. I've only come down for the afternoon. But I wanted to ask you if I could do anything--help you in any way, be of any use." In spite of his schooled voice his longing to see her, his delight in seeing her, showed in his clouded, candid eyes. Milly felt it as the difference, the vague warmth and radiance.

"How kind of you, dear Dick," she said, and her poor voice groped vainly for firmness. "I am so glad to see you. It was good of you to come. Yes; it has been dreadful. You know;--Christina--our friendship"--But how to confess to Dick her remorse or explain to Dick why she had left Christina? Her pride broke. With this human kindness near her, she could not maintain the decorum of their tangled relations as man and woman; the simple human relation alone became the most real one; the loneliness and the grief of a child overwhelmed her. She sank, sobbing helplessly, into her chair.

"Oh--Milly!"--said poor Dick Quentyn. And the longing to comfort and console effacing his diffidence and the memory of her long unkindness towards himself, he knelt down beside her and took her into his arms.

Milly then said and did what she could never have believed herself capable of saying and doing. No pride could hold her from it, no dignity, not even common shame. She could not keep herself from dropping her face on his shoulder and sobbing;--"Oh--Dick--try--try to love me again. I am cold and selfish. I have behaved cruelly to everyone who loved me;--but I can't bear it any longer."

It was a startling moment for Dick Quentyn, the most startling of his life. "Try to love you?" he stammered. He pushed her back to look at her. "What do you mean, Milly?"

"What I say," Milly gasped.

"But what does it mean?" Dick repeated. "It isn't for you to ask me to love you. You know I love you. You know there's never been another woman in the world for me but you. It's you who have never loved me, Milly."

Her appeal had been like a diving under deep waters--she had not known when or where or how she would come up again. Now she opened her eyes and stared at her husband. She seemed, after that whirlpool moment of abysmal shame, to have come up from the further reaches of darkness, and it was under new, bewildering skies. Strange stars made her dizzy.

"Then why didn't you come and say good-bye to me--that day--in London this spring?" was all she found to say.

Dick was not stupid now. The lover's code was at last open between them, and he as well as she could read the significance of seemingly trivial words.

"Did you expect me?" he asked.

"Of course I expected you. I thought you saw how much," said Milly.

"I didn't think you expected me at all; why should I have thought it? But I did come. Didn't you know it?" said Dick.

"You did come?" In its extremity her astonishment was mild.

"That is to say--I never got there. Mrs. Drent met me. She told me how you'd gone to sleep, you know. She thought you'd gone to sleep, Milly. She didn't know you expected me either, you see. It was in the park we talked, just there by the rhododendrons."

"She told you I had gone to sleep?--But why did that keep you from coming?" Milly had suddenly risen to her feet. She had grown pale.

"Why--it was obvious--you wouldn't want to be disturbed. She said that. And--everything else. She told me--for I confided in her then--she'd always been so kind to me; and I thought she might help me--but she told me how little you cared for me."

Milly had grasped his shoulder as she stood above him. "What did Christina tell you? What did she say about me? Let me understand."

"Why, Milly--what is it?--She told me--I didn't blame you, though it hurt, most unconscionably--because I'd always believed that, in spite of everything, you had some sort of kindly feeling for me--as though I'd been a well-intentioned dog who didn't mean to get in your way--she told me that I mustn't have any hopes. And she told me that that very winter you had said to her that you'd feel my death less than that of any of the men who came to tea with you. Yes, she told me so, Milly--and wasn't it true?"

Milly now looked away from him and round at the room, stupor on her face. "Yes, it was true I said it," she said in the voice of a sleep-walker. "Yes; I said it, Dick. But it was so long ago. How did she remember?--And I knew when I said it that it wasn't true."

"But she thought it was true." Dick now had risen, and he, too, very pale, looked at his wife.

"Yes; then, she may have thought it. I wanted her to think it because I did not want her to guess how much I was getting to care. But, afterwards--after you had come back--she did not think it then. She knew, then, everything. She knew before I did. It was she who showed it to me.--Oh, Dick!--She knew that I loved you--and she kept you from coming to me!" She was gazing at him now, stupefied, horrified, yet enraptured. It was of him she thought, her lover, her husband, rather than of the unhappy woman who had parted them. But Dick still did not see.

"What do you mean, Milly?" he said. "Kept me from coming? But she loved you, Milly? She'd given her life to you. You can't mean what you are saying."

"Yes," Milly kept her grasp of his shoulder. "It is true. She loved me, but it was a madness of jealousy. Her love was a prison. I told her so. We spoke of it all on that day, when she came back from seeing you and did not tell me that she had seen you. I told her that her love was a prison and that she had kept you from me, and that I was going to leave her. And even then she did not tell me. We parted and I did not see her again until the day she died. She sent for me to come to her. Yes--" her eyes, deep with joy and horror, were on him.--"That is what she was going to confess to me; and died without confessing. She kept us apart because she knew that we loved each other and she could not bear to give me up."

They stood in the firelight and he took her hands and they looked at each other as though, after long wanderings, they had found each other at last. There would yet be much to tell and to explain, but Dick saw now what had happened. Only after many moments of grave mutual survey, did he say, gently, with a sudden acute wonder and pity--"Poor thing."

"Horrible, oh horrible!" said Milly, leaning her head on his shoulder. "You might have died away from me--never knowing.--I might never have seen you again.--Horrible woman!--Horrible love."

"Poor thing," Dick repeated gently. He kissed his wife's forehead and, his arm around her;--"I haven't died.--She is dead. I do see you again.--She doesn't see you. I have got you.--She has lost you."

Milly still shuddered; she still looked down the black precipice, only just escaped. "Yes, she has lost me for ever. I wish I did not feel that I hate her; but I do. It may be cruel, it is cruel. But all that I can feel for her now is hatred."

"Ah--but she loved you tremendously. And she's dead," said Dick. "All that I can feel is that."

But Milly only said: "I love you all the more for feeling it."

MISS JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE