Part 9

If it ever had been, she outlived it before long. Its end was advertised by an hysterical outbreak, which Terence never could recall without a shudder.

They were both, at the time, in town, where they met two or three times a week, and he had called to bring her some tickets.

She was sitting on a lounge in a remote corner of the room, and gave him her hand with blank indifference.

Unequal always to resolve her moods, he sustained a monologue from the fireplace on the trifles of the hour, until her persistent silence compelled him to ask its cause.

She replied listlessly, after some pressing, that it must be of no importance since he could ignore it.

She had merely been deceived in him, that was all: a common thing with a woman. He had proved himself to be just a man, like every other; and not the man of men she had supposed him.

It had amused him, no doubt, to win her love; now, it seemed, he was tired of it.

He had spoilt her life, he had destroyed her faith; but such things, of course, weren't worth mentioning: the great matter was, naturally, that a man should not be bored.

Now, she supposed, they might as well end the farce between them, so that he could amuse himself elsewhere. All she had lived for was over for ever, and she did not care what became of her.

She poured out the indictment to his bewildered ears in the level tones of utter apathy; but when it was done she flung herself violently across the head of the lounge in a tempest of passionate tears.

Terence, despairing of any further fitness or sanity in the affair, resigned himself to the situation with a sigh, and knelt beside her for an hour, until she appeared to draw from his caresses a renewed confidence in life.

He left her, sufficiently depressed himself, and expecting anything but a letter which reached him on the morrow by the earliest post.

It must have been written very shortly after his departure, which she had done her utmost to delay, yet it proclaimed her as too shamed by what had happened ever to meet him again, unless he felt himself strong enough to prevent such scenes in the future.

Feeling strong enough for nothing, he left her letter unanswered for a day, and received, on the next, eight pages of aggrieved reproaches for having forsaken her in the hour of her greatest need.

That was but the prelude to many meetings of as strange a kind. He never knew in what mood he should find her, nor in which she might wish to find him.

He believed her revulsions of propriety to be sincere, but felt she had no business with so many, especially since he offered her every assistance to avoid the need of them. He respected her for the first, pitied her for the second, endured the third in silence, and then began to hate them.

He did not expect a woman to know her own mind, but he thought her ignorance might be more agreeable.

So passed what was for Terence a very melancholy winter. He bore it with a resignation nerved by the near prospect of escape to a berth in Paris, which had been as good as promised him when it became vacant. Meanwhile Downing Street saw more of him than usual, and he took every opportunity of immersing himself still deeper in his work.

The post he had been expecting became available in March, and, too modest to urge his claim or to remind his patron, he was mortified to find one morning that it had been filled by another.

He accepted his ill-fortune silently, and only learnt a month later to whom he owed it.

He was enlightened then by accident, the peer, in whose gift the appointment practically lay, happening to express a regret that Terence had not seen his way to accept it.

"To accept it!" he replied, laughing. "It wasn't offered me."

"It wasn't offered you," said the other slowly, "because a certain friend of yours told me you had determined definitely, for the present, not to leave England."

Terence met the speaker's searching glance, which smouldered with admonition.

"I see," he smiled. "My own fault entirely."

He understood to whom the "certain friend" referred, as well as the warning against feminine influence in his chief's eye; and, for a moment of sick disappointment, he burned to confront the woman who had betrayed him with his knowledge of her perfidy, to fling this piece of unimagined baseness in her face, and so be rid of her.

But he realized ruefully within an hour that no such release was possible, at least for him. She had but done this thing to keep him near her.

She would plead that to stoop to such an act of treachery to the one who was dearest to her only proved how ungovernable was her love. There would be another horrible scene. She would threaten again to kill herself. And in the end he would succumb. Each sacrifice he had made for her only committed him to a fresh one. She had cultivated weakness in order to revel in his strength; he had pauperized her with his soul. Had she been a woman of rages, of pride, of resentments, it would have proved another matter; but how was it possible to hurt a thing that clung about one's neck.

So he said no more of his discomfiture, bitter as it was to his ambition as well as to his hopes of freedom. Her querulous exactions had already alienated his sympathies, so that it was no harder now to be kind to her than it had been before.

And he was glad to know definitely what he had to fear from her, even though the definition was so inclusive. He determined to loosen, slowly and gently, those tendrils of sentiment by which she clung to him, which were so enfeebling her self-support.

But he saw that he had little to hope for save from time and the natural infidelity of her sex.

IV

Time, unfortunately, seemed arrayed against him, for it was in April of the same year that he met Miss Lilias Anstruther.

Their meeting summed up the possibilities of love at sight. He loved her as she passed him on the stairs, and she him, as she afterwards confided, while he was being led to her for introduction, an occasion which has--for an Englishman, at any rate--small opportunities of display.

But love at sight is such a miracle to the seer that he never imagines its duplication. Terence saw nothing on Miss Anstruther's features but the attention an intelligent woman might show to any man with a name in the making.

She imagined, in the stern set of his, boredom at having to make himself agreeable to a merely pretty girl.

There was, in his mind, no doubt, enough to complicate a glance of admiration, since he saw between him and her the jealous presence of another woman.

What that presence meant to him, now, he realized with despair.

He had endured in silence its unscrupulous intrigues; he had schooled himself to meet the most preposterous of its requirements. But then he stood alone; the worst that could be done him was the most that he need fear. He could live secure since only he could suffer.

Now! He lost his breath as he thought of it.

He saw Lilias several times that month. He did not notice that it seemed easy to see her. That she had a hand in that facility would have been the last thing to strike him.

Love had come to him in the extravagant splendours it only wears for those who find it late, with the eyes still unsoiled through which youth sought it. For, to the boy, love is only a white angel, but the man sees it iridescent with the colours of his accumulated years of hope.

It was not surprising that Terence, who had never even imagined himself in love before, and whose every instinct forbade a paltering with its substitute, should have been overwhelmed by this putting forth of an enchantment he had long ceased to expect.

He kept his head from early habit, which made the danger of losing it in Miss Anstruther's presence almost a delight, and he banished the acknowledgment of his happiness from every part of him but his eyes.

There, however, in the glow of an accustomed kindliness it could escape recognition, and there too it was often absorbed in a stern anxiety when he faced the risks of its discovery by the other woman.

From her he kept, with a man's timorous diplomacy, every echo of the girl's name, until he learnt they were acquainted. Then he had to endure an inquest on his concealment, and the woman's suspicions were fertilized by his replies.

They found food for growth later on in what she was pleased, perhaps rightly, to imagine a preoccupation in his manner.

She was, of course, aware of his effort to dilute what was emotional in their intercourse, and to replace it with a tender and unashamed fraternity.

Of that he made no secret; and she made very little of her resolve to thwart it.

He had but small success but more than he expected. He declined several invitations to Wallingford during the summer, where she had again a house; and when he went in August, found her, thanks partly to the persistence of some exacting and undesired guests, more malleable than she had ever been before.

He had been so attentively kind to her during the season that she found no excuse to upbraid him, yet she showed by a dozen disdainful poses how fiercely she resented his determined friendliness.

Meanwhile he had seen little of Lilias. His devotion to her was too sensitive and too entire to allow him even to offer her his company while he had still, however occasionally, to bestow his kisses on another woman. That woman too was still a moral charge upon him, and a source beside of incalculable danger.

What she would not do was clearly not everywhere conterminous with what she should not.

He had sufficiently realized that his happiness would never appeal to her apart from hers, and that there would be a stormy finish where hers ended. But he still trusted in time, and was satisfied with the slight progress towards reasonableness in their relationship.

Her letters continued to upbraid him with his neglect; but they began to hint at a reciprocal attitude.

She too, they threatened, could be indifferent; the time might come when to his appeal there would be no response.

Terence prayed devoutly for that day to hasten, as the months went on; and ran down in November, ostensibly for a week's hunting, to a house in Leicestershire where Miss Anstruther was staying.

Knowing the country better than he, she offered to pilot him, and took him under her charge with a delightful assurance, which allowed him no voice nor choice of his own while out of doors.

She rode straight, but used her head, in cutting out a line, to nurse her horse, and showed a most unfeminine appreciation of distances, save when the hounds were running late away from home.

During the long easy amble homeward in the dusk, on such occasions Terence might have been led to doubt that it was inadvertence which had secured him so much of her company, had he not arrived at conclusions of much greater moment.

To have found, at thirty-five when such discoveries are being despaired of the woman for whom his life had waited for whom, unknown, it had worn its innocence untainted, was sufficient of itself to monopolize his thoughts.

In her presence he became young again; young in interests, in expectancy, in purposeless energies. The whole desire of the man was in focus for the first time in his life.

Lilias gave him her company but no other sign of liking; yet her company was of itself sufficient to make him insanely content.

Still his fears made him cautious. The prize was too great, the thought of failure too consuming, to admit of risk.

So he let the winter go without a word to her of what was eating out his heart, using what chances offered for seeing her, but making none that might attract comment, and all the while attenuating the link that bound him to the other, and trying to accustom her to do without him.

He seemed in that to be making headway.

She wrote more and more rarely to him, and never in the expansive fashion of the past, and if he kissed her on parting, as occasionally she insisted, it added no warmth to his farewell. Yet he still misdoubted her, and would not have put his fortune to the touch had Fate not forced his hand with the announcement that Miss Anstruther was leaving for India in the spring.

He looked in vain for ways to stop her, but shyly, and conscious of a new distance in her manner, as though she thought his interest might be more explicit.

On that he spoke. Her evasions, chilly with the disdain of every honest woman for a philanderer, were intolerable. He saw the risk he ran either way of losing her, but chose that which gave him, at any rate, fighting chances, and told her of his love.

Three days followed in the blue of heaven; then he came back to earth, and took up his trouble.

The other woman was at St. Raphael, so he had to write. He would have vastly preferred to tell her face to face what he had done. He had no courage for a fight in the dark; he wished to see the blow come back, and meet it. But there were reasons insuperable against that.

He expected an intemperate reply, but nothing so wildly bereft of reason as that which reached him. It was shrill with threats which turned his blood to ice and then set it boiling with indignation; threats which seemed to echo from some shrieking purlieu of the Mile End Road.

Her soul revolted, she wrote, at what he had done. He had thrown her away like stale water. His selfishness had made her life unbearable. Her pride, her capacity for caring, her whole womanhood had been hurt and crushed to death.

She went about feeling there was no meaning any more in anything. He had hardened and embittered her nature to a terrible degree.

He had hurt her so unendurably that it didn't seem to matter how she hurt others.

Love and truth and honour had become a farce, and loyalty was an unnecessary scruple.

She ended by saying she did not know how long she could go on bearing it in silence. The only fair thing seemed to be to tell Miss Anstruther everything that had happened, and let her judge between them.

Despite the sense of his integrity, and a dreary memory of the months devoted to her whims, Terence almost felt himself to be, as he read her impeachment, the unspeakable brute that she described.

He even tried to excuse her horrid and unexpected forms of speech; the clamour, the invective, the dismal absence of reserve. If she had overleapt the bounds of decency he had given her the impetus, and to be startled by such an exhibition only argued his inexperience.

Yet even his generosity could not acquit her. He remembered her repeated wail, "Tell me I haven't spoilt your life!"--a cry which no ardour of his assurance seemed able to satisfy. Well, now she had the only proof that could appease her conscience, and this was the result. He showed her that his life was still whole, and she itched to break it beyond repair.

His resentment quickened. Surely it was more than should be asked of a man's benevolence to sacrifice his life to no purpose for a woman's mistake.

He wrote urgently, and as he thought in reason; but the letter read to her as a wrathful menace. He had explained that in trying to hurt others she might hurt herself the more, since to alienate Miss Anstruther would be to make a lifelong enemy of himself.

She replied in such spiritless dejection that he had to try to comfort her. She asked why he had been in such a hurry to supersede her; and though his patience of many months seemed to him misnamed as hurry, he explained the circumstance which made him speak.

Many letters passed between them: letters coloured on her part by a childish irresponsibility and persistence, and on his by an attempt, a fatal attempt, to treat her as a child, and to let her hug the little salves to her vanity which she invented daily and submitted piteously for his confirmation.

Terence discovered, when it was too late, that sooner than allow that any one could supplant her in his affection, she had pictured his proposal as a man's heroic sacrifice of himself to a girl's forwardness, and his letters had unconsciously confirmed her fatuous invention.

Consoled by it, she wrote to Lilias a letter of congratulation, and her correspondence with Terence grew heavy with the odour of a shared and precarious secret which she, at least, would make honourable pretences to ignore.

Terence, at his wit's end for peace, capitulated to her self-complacent theory, after a half-hearted attempt to take it from her.

To destroy her faith in it seemed needlessly unkind, seeing how much her faith in everything else appeared to be bound up therein. And if her comfort in it was false, false it had been all along, from the days when for her sake he had fostered it. Now, at any rate, it brought comfort to them both.

He was shown the letter Lilias had received from her, and thought his danger at an end. Yet he went softly, not daring to own the intensity of his happiness even to himself. He tried to keep the joy of it from his mind, to walk humbly as a mortal should, lest the gods might grow jealous of his exulting dreams.

Yet at times, despite his caution, at the higher tides of his delight, he would laugh up in the face of heaven, not arrogantly, but with the overrunning sense of his content.

A woman's lips had breathed their ephphatha upon his eyelids, and he looked out upon a new world.

New, since her beauty, like a crystal spar, lent a rainbow border to all things beyond it. His life seemed lifted by a spread of wings at every touch of her fingers.

There was a magic in her influence, that fed from the soft reluctance of her body the fuel that burned in his. A magic on which he lived between their meetings, and for whose strange infusion he fainted while they were apart.

He told her, laughing, that he was almost frightened to be such a slave; and though she paid no heed to the assertion, it sank with melting heat into her heart, and unknown to him the girl's breast throbbed, behind its shy demurs, with a fierce exultation in the sense that swayed him.

So two months passed, the two months when even the English earth seems mad, mad with the surge of its triumphant greenness, and with the singing flood of birds that fills it from the south.

From the south, too, came, in May, the other woman, giving Terence notice of her return, and telling him that she only wished to see him if he felt a meeting was not impossible.

He replied that nothing could make it impossible but his ignorance of her address, which she had omitted to send him.

He called the day after it arrived. He had no avidity for the interview; but, seeing that he would be certain some day to meet her, thought the sooner the safer.

She received him with a curious prescribed coldness, warmed in the strangest way by glances of reproachful pity. She spoke in a compressed tone, and Terence expected that at any moment she would scream and seize him. The prevision was so strong that, on leaving her, he practically backed to the door, keeping his eye deterrently fixed upon her, as though she were some savage creature that might spring upon him if he turned his head.

She took the line throughout that, despite his perfidy, he was to be regarded with a grieved compassion; and she met his profession of attachment to the woman he was about to marry with the sad smile of a lenient unbelief.

Once or twice the raging bitterness of a soul pent up behind it threatened to engulf the passive monotony of her speech, and the dull eyes glowed as though about to scorch him; but nothing deplorable happened, and Terence breathed a deep relief as the door closed behind him and shut off, as he trusted, from his future the only danger that threatened it.

His confidence, however, did not live for long. Scarcely more than a week later something serious in Miss Anstruther's face checked him as he greeted her.

"Yes," she answered to his eyes, "there's something I want to ask you. Is it true, as you told me, that you had never loved any one before you met me?"

"Yes," he said.

"Did you never give any one cause to think you loved her?"

"Not with intention."

"But you might have without meaning to?"

"I did, without meaning to."

"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed.

"Yes," he said, "I know. May I ask how you do?"

"No," she replied; "I'd sooner not tell you that. I only wanted to be told it wasn't true."

"But it is true!" he objected.

"Oh, not what matters," she breathed. "Did she care for you very, very much?"

"She cared a good deal more than I deserved," he said gravely; "and more unspeakably than I desired."

"But she didn't find that out?"

"No, she didn't find it out. Think what finding out would have meant to her."

The girl was silent for a moment.

"Did you kiss her?" she asked, below her breath.

"I did many things I would have preferred not to," he said quietly; "but what they were you could not wish, I think, to learn from me."

"On account of what I know?" she asked.

"I don't know what you know," he replied; "but I think that no man who has shared, however unwillingly, a woman's secret, has any rights over it but those of burial."

She gave him her lips with a smile, and made no further reference to the subject before they parted. She was going into the country, and he was not to see her for ten days.

He spent some part of them wondering idly whence her information had come, but he was in no mood to make enquiry where it might have been effective, and had put the question from his mind, when, at the end of the week, he received from Lilias a feverish note saying that everything between them depended on his reply to something that she must ask him. Would he let her know the first moment he could come.

He named the next morning, but, when leaving his rooms on the way to her the letter was delivered which changed the face of the world for him, and hung the future on his choice of an alternative.

The letter was short, and passionately scornful. It admitted no challenge, no reply. She had seen, it said, all he had written to the other woman, and she despised him so utterly that she felt no pain in parting from him for ever.

That was all. Yesterday he held for her all the beauty and the savour of the world, to-day she loathed him as a leper. In an hour she had repudiated the most sacred convictions of her soul.

She had learnt his fineness at every turn of his thoughts. Her spirit, that had touched his at first so timidly, had come to seek with passionate security its most intimate caress. There was nothing she had not revealed to him, no shame so sweet nor so secret which she had feared to let him know.

And now!

"If I had loved a devil unawares," reflected Terence sadly, "I hardly think I would have cast her out like that. Love should not, for its own dignity, degrade so easily what it has ennobled."

Yet not for a moment did he resent the ruthlessness of her letter. His love had indeed exalted her above possibility of that.

He had lost her! It was of nothing less that he could think. For some while he did not even wonder how the astounding change had come. Her brief note said nothing; nothing of what had happened in that momentous fortnight, nothing of the source of her enlightenment, nothing even to excuse the feeding of her suspicions on letters of his which were not addressed to her.

It left, indifferently, everything to his conjecture; but conjecture was not difficult.

The tragic ending of his hopes was the outcome, he had little doubt, of his last visit to the other woman. She saw him then as hers no longer; saw in him too, perhaps, in spite of his concealments, a radiance which her love had never wrought, and realized, with cruel clearness, how entirely he was another's.

And so, inflamed with jealousy beyond endurance, she had determined that no one should possess him if she might not, and had used her pain, malignantly, to poison the other's pleasure.