Part 8

He read the bitter words again, hoping their sharp edge would make a wound of self-respect in the consciousness they had benumbed. But he tried in vain to hurt his pride, or by any fresh vexation to escape from the torment of his thoughts.

Earth is jealous of its anodynes, even of pain that brings oblivion or of death that means release. He refolded the letter and returned it to his pocket, knowing that in half an hour he would be reading it again.

Meanwhile a new impulse moved him.

Leaning forward, he slid back a secret door in the top of his desk, and took from the space behind it a bundle of letters. They were in envelopes of almost every hue and shape, but all were directed by the same hand, in a vain weak sprawling character.

Terence drew the packet towards him, and set his fingers on the string.

Then with a shudder he pushed it from him, and thrust his face into his hands.

Under those harlequin covers were hidden the one chance of happiness for his life, and the reputation of a woman.

He could make them yield which of the two he chose; but the other must be destroyed.

II

It was nearly two years since he had first seen his name written in that hand, a very short while after he had made acquaintance with the writer.

She had stirred his curiosity from the moment he met her; partly by something tragic in her beauty, which was indubitable; partly by some quality which he found repellent even in her attraction. She bore a well known name, but her husband's estates were encumbered; every place he had was let, and they entertained but little. Terence had known the latter slightly for some years, and disliked him extremely. He was a man with a predilection for any sport in which something suffered, provided it could be followed in comfort; and he openly lamented having married for love--as he termed it--instead of putting up his peerage to the bidding of the States.

Terence had pitied any one who might have to do with him, and was thus already at a sympathetic angle on meeting his wife.

She surprised him by her detachment from the world in which she lived. She viewed it with vague eyes, knowing of its happenings only from what was told her, and divining neither their probability nor their consequence.

Nothing, dropped into her mind, seemed to fructify: it lay there like seed upon a rock. To Terence, whose chief resource was his ignorance, such detachment appeared incredible.

He thought her beauty of itself would have proved a sufficient link with life, or with at least the deadlier forms of it which wear the name in London. A woman with her eyes was generally enabled to foresee some of the surprises in the Book of Judgment. Men looked to that.

But it was clear to Terence that she foresaw nothing. If corruption had approached her, it had failed to get not a hearing only, but a seeing. Whatever place there might be for it in her heart, there was plainly none in her intelligence: she did not even know it by sight.

Terence guessed that from the men she knew, and by the way she knew them. She had evidently no instructive sense of a bad lot. A bad woman had that, and often added hatred to it; a good woman had it, and added pity. She had it not at all.

He found consequently no compliment in the gracious way she had received him, and no seduction in the enquiring sadness of her eyes. Since the meeting was at Ascot, and she was exquisitely dressed, he tried all the frivolous topics he thought might interest her; then some of the serious ones which interested him. She seemed about equally bored with either, and he was surprised when she asked on parting, with a curious gravity of request, if he would come and see her.

He saw her twice in town. She had named her day, but he had forgotten it and gone on another. So she wrote, finding his card, to arrange a meeting, and, after it, offered him another afternoon. Terence was on each occasion her only visitor, and surmised that he was not so by chance.

Yet he found it difficult to account for the privilege.

They seemed to have little in common, not even the tongue in which they talked. Both appeared to be translating their thoughts before speaking them.

Terence felt stupidly ineffective, and wondered in what straits of tedium she might be living on receiving, a day or two later, an invitation to spend a week end at Wallingford, where her husband had taken a summer house.

He hesitated; (to be desired despite such a show of dulness seemed almost pathetic); accepted, hoping that work would intervene; but in the end, went.

He told himself that it would be outdoor weather, a house party, and he should see little of his hostess.

It was outdoor weather; but the party had been arranged for pairing, and he saw little but his hostess.

They spent the days upon the dozing river, and sat together late into the warm nights upon the lawn.

He knew nothing about women, and did not understand their ways. Therefore he was gravely interested in the account she set before him of her groping soul.

He had never imagined any conception of existence so out of touch with reality as were her beliefs. Her idealism would have discredited a schoolgirl's fiction, and she clung to it as though there were some merit in being deceived.

Such determination to remain in the dark almost angered him.

"But men and women aren't like that," he expostulated more than once.

"That's what people are always telling me," she replied pathetically: "but why aren't they?"

He hadn't, as he assured her, the remotest notion; his interest lying, not in what men weren't, but in what they were.

He tried to impart that interest in her, but without success.

If men were the brutes they seemed proud to be, she asserted vigorously, she didn't care how ill she knew them.

But it was clear that she had higher hopes of humanity than she confessed, and it would have been clear to any one but Terence that those hopes were becoming centred on himself.

What men said of him had roused her incredulous admiration, and he seemed to dislike women as much as he respected them. His honesty, his deference, and his grave good looks attracted her from the first; his sympathy and discernment riveted the attraction. He reproved her optimism in vain; for was he not its embodiment?

Terence, unconscious of being anything but a somewhat poor companion, discussed the sentiments she suggested, growing ever more astounded by her severance from realities, and more touched by her unhappy days.

Of her husband's life he knew more than she had surmised, but she had surmised enough to make wifehood an indignity. His unfaithfulness, as a stye by which she had to live, soured for her every odour in the world. She had not the vigour to ignore it, nor the courage to escape. She had dreamed of marriage as a royal feast; she woke to find herself among the swine.

The discovery would have hardened some women into defiance; some would have sheltered with it their own intrigues; but the shock cowed in her all further curiosity in existence. If life were really like the bit she had tasted, she preferred to starve. The other men she met seemed as horrible as her husband; they had the same speech, the same jests, the same dissipations.

She shrank more and more into herself; even women revolted her by their tolerance of men's presumptions.

Then Terence came. Like a plant grown in darkness, her anaemic delicacy of thought responded with an unhealthy exuberance to the first ray of sunlight. She listened to his silences and found them refreshing; then she drew him into speech.

He spoke of much that she could not understand, but his obscurities were an intoxication, and not, as those of other men, a dread. She felt there was something wide and fine behind his words; a coherence, an integrity; she was vaguely pleased to feel it there, though its quality did not interest her at all. What did was her own expansion in the atmosphere of sympathetic confidence it had created.

Her expansiveness was, at times, distasteful to him. The secrets of a woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her boudoir guarded. To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack the finer reticence of life. A man's sight, if he could see at all, was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed him he might be suffered to enjoy. To label the false wherever one found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools.

Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual. He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men.

"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. "Do you suppose I do?"

He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay, and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear. But compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her indiscretions than of her loneliness.

She asked him to spend a week at Wallingford when the season was over.

"I have very few friends," she said; "and no one but you has ever helped me to understand."

He wondered to what he had helped her, and whether he would recognize it if she told him; but he did not wonder if he might remit the helping; the disadvantage in the gift of oneself being that the giving is never at an end.

So he came to Wallingford again in September, when the moonlight fell nightly on white veils of mist, and the world took on a golden ripeness in the mellow silent days.

Some letters, in the meanwhile, had passed between them; letters which might have made Terence uneasy had he known what they meant. Instead, he answered them, and consigned their intentions to the chaos of feminine incomprehensibility. Some of that chaos took a shape during his second stay at Wallingford sufficiently definite and disconcerting.

It was probably only what had been put, to no purpose, in her letters, but it had another significance when spoken with rather uncomfortable pauses and lit with the intensity of a woman's very lovely eyes.

To mistake its meaning was impossible; to ignore it seemed to Terence a contemptible discretion. He could not withdraw his sympathy because it had been so dangerously misapplied, but he tried, with fraternal frankness, to abstract from it the odour of personality with which she had scented it.

He hoped to animate her with the big issues of life, but to a woman there is often no issue bigger than a man's devotion.

As they hung in the skiff beneath the birches of the mill-pond one breathless afternoon, she let him realize the fruitlessness of his intentions.

The sun that filled the drowsy air fell in dazzling patches on her white frock; there was not a sound save the dull drone of the weir, and deep in the shade a kingfisher sat motionless above the water, like a blue flame upon the bough.

She had been silent for some while after his last remark, looking away from him towards the river; then, to Terence's dismay, she leant forward, hiding her face in her hands, and began to sob.

He was paralyzed by his ignorance of any cause for tears, perplexed with self-reproaches, helplessness, and pity. It seemed equally absurd to ask why she was crying, or to offer comfort until he knew. He sat wretchedly mute for some moments, and at last begged her to let him hear what ailed her.

She did not answer till he had repeated the request, and then faltered between her sobs: "Oh, you wouldn't understand, you couldn't understand: I've got no one to care for me, no one, no one!"

He could think of no response to that which did not sound inane. He had not heard a woman cry since his sisters left the schoolroom, and no other form of consolation occurred to him than the brotherly caresses which had served him then.

Yet not till his ineptitude and apparent apathy became intolerable did he lean forward from the thwart and rest his hand upon her knee.

With the channel of that touch between them, the soothing trifles became easy which had been impossible of speech before.

Uncertain of what she might find consoling, he spoke as to a child whom he had found in tears; a murmur merely of the gentleness and pity which were in his heart.

She paid, for some time, no heed to him, but her sobs relaxed, and presently, though with her face still hidden, she laid a wet hand on his.

"Do you really mean it?" she faltered searchingly.

"Of course I mean it," he replied, wondering what his meaning was supposed to be, but resolute to stand to this poor creature for any kindness and fortitude there might be in the world.

"You're very, very good," she said; but her eyes had in them, even to his discernment, an appreciation of another sort of worth.

That was at the beginning of the afternoon; yet, though he sculled her up stream later, to taste, melting in the heated air, the moist coolness under Bensington weir, and higher, afterwards, to the "Swan" for tea, she made no reference to that understanding which was by him so little understood.

But she was more than usually silent, and there was a dream-haze across the purple depths of her eyes, which only parted when she looked at him. Then the wonderful colour seemed to flood them, and she smiled faintly in the furthest crevice of her lips, as though they had been touched by the tips of some feathery pleasure.

But to Terence that sweetness of a shared secret in her smile was immensely discomposing.

That, he recognized, when he came to look back, was the moment of warning.

At that he had his fears, never stirred before; at that he should have taken flight.

Flight was the way of men; of men timorous and importuned; perhaps, often, the only way. But he had not the courage for such a show of fear; even flight seemed to affront a woman's confidence.

A sheaf of letters at breakfast offered him that bridge of fabulous affairs over which so many a man of wider experience would have escaped. But he gave it never a thought. Where was fraternity in the world if one had to flee from the first woman who dared to claim it? He would as soon have fled from an infectious fever!

There were closer points in the comparison than he supposed--though the world does not equally admire the man who imperils the safety of his life and him who risks the peace of it--but perception of them would not have changed his mind.

He stayed because he could not go.

The morning of the day that followed was spent by every one on the shady lawn. It was too hot for even the theory of movement, and plans were postponed until the afternoon. Terence had meant to sketch a piece of stonework at Ewelme Church, but found himself engaged by his hostess to drive her to Nuneham.

Whether she intended to go there or not, she pleaded the heat as an excuse for deferring the start till it became too late to make one.

They had tea in the little Doric shrine that overlooked the river, and she took him afterwards up to the wood that rose behind the house.

Seated on a stile within it, against which he leaned, she told him the dream with which her eyes had been clouded the day before; told it with a hesitating persuasiveness which made dissent seem brutal; the dream of an ethereal alliance to which the man should bring a life, and the woman a use for it.

Terence listened stupefied as the naïve unsteady voice made out its astounding offer. She had gathered somehow his desire for such a thing; the magnifying power of her vanity must have revealed it in all he did and said. And her abysmal lack of humour concealed its grotesque disparities. He, so it seemed, was to contribute his existence, and she, a smile.

But if its seriousness was an absurdity, its absurdities were serious. Terence heard them with grave lips; heard in them, too, the diffident whispers of his pity swollen by her fancy to a blare of passion.

It was serious enough as she sounded it, and sad enough too. Disillusionment, even the gentlest, seemed out of the question.

How, to a woman who rides, triumphing in his devotion, through the barriers of her decorum, is a man to say, "I do not love you"?

There was nothing less that could be said: nothing less, at least, that was not a lie: for less, to her ears, would have said nothing. Love alone was her warrant, her title; and she had thrust his love into her helm.

There could be no other disillusionment but to take that from her, and to take it from her was to drag her to the dust.

So Terence listened. The bronze stems of the hazel saplings shone before him like prison bars, but he nodded now and then as she spoke her faith, and gazed at the golden air that burned beyond them in the west.

"I've never trusted any man enough," she ended, "to tell him all that I've told you; but you've made me believe in you; I don't know how. I suppose it really is because you're good and true. But are you quite, quite sure I mean so much to you, and that caring for me won't spoil your life?"

"One never knows what may spoil one's life," said Terence gravely "and seldom what may spoil another's; but I think it's true that you may trust me, and I'll try to be to you the friend that you desire."

He gave her his hand with boyish candour; and she held it, saying nothing, and not looking into his face.

When she released it, presently, she slid from the stile; and, turning, faced the sunset which had gilded his hair.

She was standing close to and partly in front of him, and so watched with him for a while, in silence, the setting splendours of the day.

Then, with a little sigh, she leaned back against his shoulder. Thus they stood some moments longer without a word; Terence braced to bear her weight; braced mentally to meet whatever might be coming, conscious of the beat against him of her quickened breath.

Then, with her dark head tilted back, she turned her face slowly towards him till it almost touched his lips.

For an instant he hated her, fiercely, impotently. The next, he put his hand gently upon her shoulder and kissed her cheek.

III

That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in implication, in understanding.

Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had intended, tried to put the added time to profit.

He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her expectations.

Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive.

She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in accepting it. Everything in that land was so new to her that no one thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally and perturbingly improbable, and supreme.

Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which neither of them should go.

He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her reach.

The optimism of such a hope can only be accounted for by his absolute ignorance of women; but her shyness, in a situation so strange to her, seemed to justify it while he remained at Wallingford.

But later, as her letters began to multiply, he realized how profound was his mistake. She rode her fancy wherever it led her, and he might as well have tried to fix a frontier for the north wind.

She wrote persistently of his love, of its greatness, its gladness, its splendid illumination of her life.

Her exultation in a thing which had no real existence was terrible to Terence.

Her dull unhappy being was transformed by a miracle as wonderful as that which creates the glory of painted wings from a withered chrysalis.

And he had wrought it. He, by some ignorant magic, had set her life afloat on pinions frailer and more resplendent than a butterfly's, to touch which roughly was to destroy her.

That was, of course, too brutal to be thought of. He must accept what he had done, however little he had meant to do it; must trust to time to dull its marvel and bring the woman back to earth.

But there seemed little likelihood of that at first, and with the increasing rapture of her letters Terence grew ever more dismayed.

Yet if he tried to lure her down to sanity, an agonized reply would be flung at him by the post's return, only to make his fears more vivid, and to compel from him, in sheer abasement, an expression of sentiment which he not only did not possess, but would have shrunk from possessing.

"Swear," she had written, not once, nor twice; "swear that you love no other woman; that you have never loved another woman; that I fill all your thoughts!"

Those were easy oaths, and true; but they did not content her. It was not enough that no other woman had a lien upon his past: his whole existence must be proscribed for her.

"Tell me," she prayed, "that I shall be everything to you always! It kills me to think that any love could move you after mine. I cannot have renounced my pride, my honour, my self-respect, for less than that."

He could but smile unmirthfully at her renunciations. His were privileges, it seemed, to her thinking, that any man might sigh for; though apparently they were to include a monastic seclusion from the world of sense, a virginity devoted, not to her passion--and for passion a man might be content to live or die--but to her sentimental fancies.

"Say," she pleaded, unsatisfied by his replies, which to such extortionate demands could be but vague, "say that I alone of all the women in the world can ever satisfy all your longings; that it would seem a degrading sacrilege to let any other woman come after me even in your thoughts! Tell me, even though I die, that my memory must keep you true."

He gazed at that for a day to get his breath, but the delay was all too long for hers.

"Write, write," she panted, on the morrow; "I cannot live unless I hear from you. Have you no feeling for a woman's dignity that you can give me over in this way to its scorn? I fling everything that I possess before you, and you find it not even worth acknowledgment."

What could he say? How could he answer her? Her blindness was sublime, detestable, ridiculous, as you were pleased to view it; but to blindness one could never refuse a hand.

Distressed by a necessity of which he had been the unwitting cause, Terence extended his. But his ignorance mitigated his foreboding; he still trusted to time.

Time, however, brought him but little comfort. If her letters became saner, it was only since he had thrown her insanity a sop. When they met a month later his difficulties were increased.

At first she had entreated him to win her respect by a display of repression.

He was to be as other men were not, to keep her staunch by an undreamed-of virtue. The lover's heart must animate to her perception only the unimpeachable kindness of the friend.

She had her wish, but had it, perhaps, in a perfection for which she was not prepared.

She seemed determined to leave no doubts as to his fortitude. She hung upon him so literally that he had to exert not moral fibre only to support her.

She drooped like a wreath about his shoulders, while he gazed, grim and ashamed, upon her hair.

But she drew no consolation from his strength. It was not strength, she told him, but indifference; she had asked for a sentry, and he had given her a statue.

She tried to soften the statue by every feminine artifice, even, at last, by kissing its irresponsive face.

He, invincibly simple, smiled at the wiles he thought were used to try him; and stiffened himself into the pose he had been convinced was her desire.