CHAPTER I

MILLY

"It is the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack of response and understanding," said Milly. "It is as if I were always looking at a face that never really saw me or spoke to me. Such a mistake as I have made--or as others have made for me--is irretrievable. An unhappy marriage seems to ruin everything in you and about you, and you have to go on living among the ruins. You can't go away and leave them behind you, as you can other calamities in life."

Milly Quentyn and Mrs. Drent were alone this afternoon in the country-house where they had come really to know each other, and Milly, acting hostess for her absent cousin, had poured out Mrs. Drent's tea and then her own, leaving it untouched, however, while she spoke, her hands falling, clasped together, in her lap, her eyes fixed on vacancy. The contemplation of ruins for the last five years had filled these eyes with a pensive resignation; but they showed no tearful repinings, no fretful restlessness. They were clear eyes, large and luminous, and in looking at them and at the wan, lovely little face where they bloomed like melancholy flowers, Mrs. Drent's face, on the other side of the tea-table, grew yet more sombre and more intent in its brooding sympathy. "Why did you----" she began, and then changed the first intention of her question to--"Why did you--love him?" This was more penetrating than to ask Mrs. Quentyn why she had married him.

The extreme lowness of Mrs. Drent's voice muffled, as it were, its essential harshness; one felt in it the effort to be soft, as in her one felt effort, always, to quell some latent fierceness, an eager, almost savage energy. She was thirty years old, six years older than Milly Quentyn. Her skin was swarthy, her eyes, under broad, tragically bent eyebrows, were impenetrably black. Her features, had they not been so small, so finely finished, would have seemed too emphatic, significant as they were of a race-horse nervousness and of something inflexible in the midst of an expression all flexibility. Her hands were curiously slight and small, and as she now, in looking at her companion and in asking her question, locked them together with a force that made them tremble, they showed the same combination of an excessive strength informing an excessive fragility.

Milly Quentyn's gaze drifted to her and rested upon her in silence.

Presently she smiled.

"How kind you are to care so much, to care at all!"

"I do care."

"Are you, will you, be my friend, always?" asked Milly, leaning towards her a little, and the smile seemed to flutter to the other woman like an appealing and grateful kiss.

"I am your friend; I will be your friend, always," Mrs. Drent replied, in an even lower tone than before.

The tears came softly into Milly's eyes while they looked at each other she gently, Mrs. Drent still sombrely. Then leaning back again with a sigh, she continued, "Why I loved him? I didn't love him. Isn't that the almost invariable answer? I was nineteen; I had just left the schoolroom; I was in love with my own ideal of love--you know, you must know, the silly, pathetic, sentimental and selfish mixture one is at nineteen;--and Mamma said that he was that ideal; and he said nothing; so I believed her! Poor Dick! He was in love, I think, really, and not a bit with himself, and with only enough articulateness to ask me to marry him; and of course he was, and is, very good-looking. You know Mamma. She has married us all off very well, they say; you know how they say it. In her determination to ensconce the family type comfortably she is as careless of the single life as nature itself. In this case what appeared to be a very cosy niche offered itself for me and she shoved me into it. I have grown up since then; that is all my story."

"They are terrible, terrible, such marriages," said Mrs. Drent, looking away.

Her tone struck Milly, with all her consciousness of pathos, as perhaps a little misplaced. "Terrible? No, hardly that, I think. I did believe that I loved him. He did love me."

"You were a child who did not know herself, nor what she was doing."

"Yes; that is true."

"And it is terrible for him if he still loves you."

"Oh," said Milly, with another sigh, "if you can call it love. He is rather dismayed by the situation; sorry that we don't hit it off better, as he would express it; jocosely resigned to what he would call my unkindness and queerness. But as for tragedy, suffering;--one can't associate such perturbing things with imperturbable Dick. I haven't to reproach myself with having hurt his life seriously, and, Heaven knows! I don't reproach his simplicity and harmlessness for having broken mine. Marriage and a wife were incidents--incidents only--to him, and if they have failed to be satisfactory incidents, he has other far more absorbing interests in his life to take his mind off the breakdown of his domestic happiness. Indeed, domesticity, when he cares to avail himself of it, is always there in its superficial forms and ceremonies. I can't pretend to love him, but I take care of his money and his house, I entertain his friends, I give him his tea at breakfast and a decorous kiss when he comes back from shooting animals in some savage country. One could hardly call us separated, so discreetly do I bridge the chasm with all the conventional observances. Thank Heaven! the shooting is his one great passion, so that he is usually wandering happily in distant jungles and not requiring too many _tete-a-tetes_ at breakfast of me."

"He is probably very good and kind," said Mrs. Drent, "but it is incredible that such a man should be married to such a woman as you."

Again Milly gazed for a moment, aware of inappropriateness. "You have a very high ideal of marriage, haven't you?" she said. Mrs. Drent's husband had died five years before, and her baby when it was born. She wore black, exquisite and unobtrusive always, and, unobtrusively, she was known to be inconsolable. Yet Milly had heard it whispered that Gilbert Drent had married her for her money and that, charming person though he had been, she had passionately idealized him. There was, therefore, with these memories at the back of her mind, something painful as well as pathetic to her in the voice in which Mrs. Drent, crimsoning deeply, said: "My own marriage was ideal. I don't understand marriage unless it is ideal."

There was a silence after that for a moment and then Milly said, "It must be wonderful to have such a memory. All I know is that I wish with all my heart I had never married Dick, and I believe with all my heart that one shouldn't marry unless everything is there."

"That is it," said Mrs. Drent, "everything must be there for it to be right;--affinity, and understanding, and devotion. Some women can find enough in the mere fact of a home and a shared life to be satisfied without them; but not a woman like you."

"I think you idealize me," Milly said smiling a little sadly; "but I believe in that too. I don't claim at all any remarkable individuality; but what I have Dick doesn't understand at all, doesn't even see. He goes blundering about the dullest, most distant parks and preserves of a castle; that is as near as he ever gets to the castle, such as it is, of my personality. And he doesn't really care about the castle; it hardly worries him that he can't find it. There might be wonderful pictures on its walls, and jewels in its cabinets, and music in its chambers; but even if he got inside and were able to see and hear, he wouldn't care a bit about them; he would say: 'Awfully nice,' and look for the smoking-room. And there," said Milly, pressing her hands together while her eyes filled suddenly with tears, "there is the little tragedy. For of course every woman thinks that she has pictures and jewels and music, and longs--oh longs!--to show them to the one, the one person who will love to see and hear. And when she finds that no one sees or hears, or knows, even, that there is anything to look for, then the music dies, and the pictures fade, and the jewels grow dim, and at last everything magical vanishes from life and she sees herself, not as an enchanted castle, but as a first-class house in Mayfair, with all the latest improvements;--as much a matter of course, as much a convenience, as unmysterious and as unalluring as the telephone, the hot water pipes and the electric lighting. It is only as if in a dream--a far, far dream--that she remembers the castle, and feels, sometimes, within her, the ruins, the empty ruins."

"Oh--my dear!" breathed Mrs. Drent. It was as if she couldn't help it, as if, shaken from her passionate reserve, she must show her very heart. She leaned round the table and took one of Milly's hands. "Don't--don't let the magic vanish! There's nothing else in life! All the rest is death. It's only when we are in the castle--with our music and our pictures and our jewels--that we are alive. You know it; you feel it; it's what makes the difference between the real and the unreal people. You are one of the real ones, I saw it at once; you aren't meant to wither out and to become crisp and shallow. Don't cease to believe in the pictures, the jewels, the music. They are there. _I_ see. _I_ hear."

"How--_sweet_ of you!" faltered Milly.

She was startled, she was touched, she, who rarely felt it, felt shyness. She had known that this dark, still woman was observing her, and had known, for all the other's reserve, that the observation was not antagonistic. Something in Mrs. Drent had made her feel that it would be easy, a relief, to talk to her about all one's miseries and desolations. But the sudden leap of spiritual fire found her unprepared. She was a little ashamed, as though her own reality were somewhat unreal beside Mrs. Drent's belief in it. There had been something pleasant in the tracing of her little tragedy, something sweet in the thought of that sad castle of her soul, with its stilled music, its fading enchantments; but Mrs. Drent had seen only the tragedy; and had felt the danger of withering, of becoming acquiescent and commonplace, with an intensity of which she herself was incapable. Such response, such understanding, might well take one's breath away.

This scene was the beginning of their long friendship. It was a charming friendship. Milly Quentyn, for all the clouds of her background, was a creature of sunshine, of sunshine in a mist, a creature of endearing fluctuations. Indeed, Christina told her afterwards, when they analyzed the beginnings, it had been her childlike radiance, her smiles, her air as of rifts of blue over a rainy landscape--(for everybody knew that Dick and Milly Quentyn didn't hit it off)--it had been these sweet, these doubly pathetic qualities that had first attracted her. "I am not easily attracted," said Christina. "Had there been a languishing hint of the _femme incomprise_ about you, any air of self-pity, I should never have so longed to take care of you, to try to help to make you happier. But you were made for happiness and beauty, and if you didn't succeed in keeping them one saw that it would hurt you dreadfully. It was that that so appealed."

And Milly confessed to Christina that she had been at first a good deal afraid of her, as the distinguished young poetess, and had thought of her as a sombre and humourless little personage, only reassuring in being so enchantingly well-dressed.

In Christina Drent's poetry the numbness that had descended upon her after her husband's death had found a partial awakening. The poems were not great things, but they were written without a touch of artifice. They were sudden, spontaneous and swift, and it was as if, in reading them, one heard a distant wail or saw across a bleak sky the flight of an unknown bird. In her own little world of fashion they had made her a tolerably famous figure. But it was an echo only of her regrets and longings that Christina was able to put into her poems, all perhaps that she chose to put; they were never intimate or personal. The essence of her was that passionate reserve and, with it, that passionate longing to devote herself, lavishly, exclusively, upon one idolized and, inevitably, idealized object. She was full of a fervour of faith, once the reserve was broken down, and her idol, high on a pedestal in its well-built temple, was secure henceforth from overthrow.

Such an idol her husband had been. Such an idol her child would have been. The doors of that sanctuary were sealed for ever, the sacred emptiness for ever empty; Christina could never have remarried. But beside it rose a second temple, only less fair, and in it, lovingly enshrined, stood Milly Quentyn.

Happily Milly was an idol worthy of idealization, perhaps even worthy of temple-building. She was sweet and tender, in friendship most upright and loyal. She loved to be loved, to see her own tenderness blossom about her in responsive tenderness. She was not vain, but she loved those she cared for to find her exquisite, and to show her that they