Part 3

There it was, indeed, and no wonder he had shrunk. If it had come to him as a test before the war, how easy it would have been, with a sincerity sad, for all its personal gain, to say, "I don't know; I really don't know what I believe, darling; but it doesn't seem to me at all likely." But now, leaning over her, still looking at her, he had to answer in the only verbal form that fitted with his thought, and as he did so he felt himself grow pale. "Yes," he said; "I do believe in immortality, Tony."

She, too, then grew very pale. It was as he had foreseen. She had not really believed. It had only been a haunting dream. And her hope had been that he would tell her that to him, too, it was only a dream. Poor child! Poor, poor child. And poor Malcolm. Was it with this face he was welcomed back among the realities of her world? She continued to look at him in silence, taking it all in, with a trust, an acceptance, pitiful indeed; and suddenly, seeing in her despair his full justification, he took her into his arms;--was it to comfort, or to claim her, against his conviction and her despair? "My darling," he said, pressing his head against hers, "it can't part us. It shan't part us. I won't let you destroy your life and mine."

She had, piteously, put her arms around his neck and she clung to him like a frightened child.

"Listen, dearest," he said; "when I say it I don't mean it in the way you feel and fear it. I don't know how to say what I believe. It doesn't go into words. But it all means love. That's what I've come to know. I can't explain how. It came to me, one night, in a sort of inner vision, Tony, after dreadful things had happened--over there, you know. But he is safe and we are safe. We are all held round by love. That's what I believe, Tony. It's God that makes the meaning of immortality, not immortality that makes the meaning of life."

Nothing, he knew it as he held her, could ever bring them nearer than this moment. He had never in his life been so near any creature. Reticent, and, with his English nature, passionately shy, never in his life could he have believed himself capable of uttering such words. It was doing himself a violence to utter them, yet sweet to do himself the violence for her. And, as if he had cut out his heart to show to her, it seemed to him that it must bring her his conviction: must light faith in her from the flame it bared.

But, in the silence that followed and as she still clung to him, his child and not his lover, it came to him that he had lighted nothing. She groped in a bewilderment of darkness.

"But he's there," she said. "He knows and feels and suffers, if he's there."

"No, no, Tony. It's not like that. We are all together, your love and his and mine, in the eternity where Malcolm is."

"All together? When you tell me that it's you I want--not him? I don't know what you mean, Bevis. How can he not suffer when I forget him in loving you?"

"You don't forget him in loving me. But we're not made in such a way that we can think of everything at once. I don't believe he suffers. Our love may be happiness to him." But now he was using mere words. He had fallen back into the world of words. This was not the light he had tried to show her.

"But if love is around us there, it's around us here, too; yet people, here, suffer terribly. They may go on suffering terribly when they are gone. You can't know what they feel when they are gone, Bevis."

"No; I can't know. We can know nothing, of course. It's a question of feeling, rather. I don't feel it as you do, and the reason for that is, I think, that I see more of the truth than you do; that I have more faith."

He knew his faith; but he no longer felt it. That was because his body was becoming very tired. And her fear, too, had its infecting power. A pang did stir his heart.

Poor Tony. She never knew when to stop; never knew when there was nothing more to be gained. Mercilessly and pitifully she went on: "If it's still Malcolm, must he not be waiting for me; wanting me? Hasn't love like that something special and unsharable? Oh, you know it has. It must be two; it can't be three. How could I go to him, with you? Which of you would be my other self? You know you could not share me. We could not hold each other, like this, and love each other, if Malcolm stood before us now."

"I know," he said, and his deep fatigue was in his voice. "Perhaps one must accept that there is loss and suffering always. Perhaps Malcolm does grieve to see you with me. Who can tell? I can't. I can only say that I don't feel it so. I can only say that if I felt it so I'd not want to marry you; I couldn't want you if I felt it so. And even if you yourself felt him so near and real that my love could only hurt you, I'd go away and leave you in peace. But it's not like that, Tony. It wouldn't be to leave you in peace. You couldn't bear to have me go. Something quite different has happened. You've fallen in love with me."

She sat silent in his arms, her head still leaning on his shoulder, and he knew from her slow, careful breathing that she was intensely thinking and that he had not helped her. If only he had not been so tired to begin with, perhaps he might have found something more. But he was now horribly tired and his artificial leg began to pull at him, and though he sat very still, she must at last have guessed at his growing exhaustion, for, raising herself, she drew away, saying, in a dulled and gentle voice: "Shall we walk back? Your leg must be getting stiff."

He took her hand as she stood beside him and kissed it without speaking, and he saw that she turned her head away then to hide her tears.

They walked slowly up toward the house by the winding path among the heather. Wyndwards stood high and they had to climb a little. Only when they drew near did she speak, and in a trembling voice.

"You've shown me all the truth. I've been unfaithful. I am unfaithful. If I'd loved him enough, if I'd loved him as he should have been loved, I couldn't have fallen in love with you."

"Perhaps," said the young man.

"What I say to myself is this," Antonia went on. "If he had been alive and had gone away, as you said, to Australia or Patagonia, and during his absence I had grown fond of you and fallen in love--what I say to myself is that of course I should have fought against the feeling and avoided seeing you, and when he came back I should have confessed to him what had happened. And he would have forgiven me. It would make him very unhappy; but I know that Malcolm would forgive me."

"Right you are, my dear Tony; he would. And you'd have fallen out of love with me and gone on living happily ever after."

She ignored his jaded lightness. "Well--isn't it like that now? Can't I do that now?" She stopped in the little path and her soft, exhausted face dwelt on him.

"No," said Bevis patiently, but his own exhaustion was in his voice; "it isn't like that now. As I've said, the difference is that he won't come back; that he is dead."

"But immortal, Bevis."

"I believe, immortal."

"Couldn't I in the same way, when I find him again, confess and be forgiven?"

"You'd not need to, my child." A certain dryness was in his voice. "He knows all about it, I imagine; and more than you do."

"You mean that he knows and has forgiven already?"

"He hasn't much to forgive!" Bevis could not repress, with a drier smile.

"You are unkind."

"I know. Forgive me, Tony dear; but you are tormenting. Don't let us talk about it any more. There's nothing to be gained by it."

"I don't mean to be tormenting. Isn't it for your sake, too?"

"I can bear more," he laughed now, "if you can assure me of that!"

"There may be a way out, Bevis; there may be a way out, although you can't show it to me, although I can't find it yet. Because you don't feel as I do; and you may be right and I wrong. You do believe that everything is changed, quite changed, after we die? You do believe that it does not hurt him?"

He was aware, with a dim, a tender irony, of the so feminine impulse in her that, when she no longer found any help in him, sought help for herself in her own misconceptions of his beliefs. Irony deepened a little, and tenderness, as he set her straight.

"I don't believe it hurts him; but I don't believe, either, that everything is changed. It depends on what you call change."

"You believe it's all peace and love; that people there don't feel in the way we do here?" She was supplicating him.

"You might put it like that, perhaps," he acquiesced, "though even here we feel peace and love sometimes." And, glancing up at the house, as she had laid her hand on his arm, he added: "Miss Latimer is looking out at us. Don't take your hand off quickly, all the same."

She had not controlled herself, however, from glancing round at the house, in an upper window of which they saw a curtain fall.

"It makes no difference," she said. "She must know why you are here. She must know that I am very fond of you."

"You mean she must know how faithless? There's no point in her thinking you faithless--unless you're going to be, is there?"

"Why do you gibe at me," she murmured, "and taunt me, when I need help most of all? Why are you so dry and cold?"

"My dear," he said, "I'm frightfully tired. You're twice as strong as I am, and I think my case is safer in your hands than in my own. That's what it comes to. I'm not dry and cold. Only worn out. What I'd like"--and putting his hand within her arm, indifferent to the possible spectator, he glanced round at her with a smile half melancholy and half whimsical--"would be to be with you in the firelight somewhere, and stillness; and to put my head on your breast and go to sleep, for hours and hours; held in your arms. Is that cold, Tony?"

IV

Was one not, when one could make speeches like that, to be listened to as Tony had listened to him--was one not, implicitly, an accepted lover? They had hurt and misunderstood each other and their talk had left a strain; yet such hurts, in natures as intimately united as his and Tony's, only brought one the nearer. After all, in spite of his essential failure with her, he had shown her, in a clear light, the shapes of her half-seen fears. That was all to the good. She must now, for the first time, accept such fears fully; and might she not, as a result, find herself the readier to live with them? And though she had not seen his truth, he had, through his very unkindness, what she had felt to be his gibes and taunts, made her see her own; and Tony's truth was, simply, that she could never give him up. So he had computed and analyzed during the evening, while Tony had again sung to them and while Miss Latimer sat, her head bent beneath a lamp, and put fine darns into an embroidered tea-cloth. And what most came to him next morning, with the sense of shock, was an awareness of hidden things; of hours in which he had no part, when Tony said to him, "I talked to Cicely last night."

They were, as usual, in the drawing-room, after breakfast, and Antonia had seated herself on the low cane settee before the fire, for the grey day was chilly and she had, to an unbecoming extent, the look of being cold. When Tony looked least beautiful, she looked most childlike, and it was for her childlike self that he felt, always, his deepest tenderness aroused. And he was aware now, as he meditated her announcement, of the curious check it gave to his tenderness. "Did you?" he said. His tone was dry. He was not glad to hear that Miss Latimer was in their counsels; but it was a more subtle disquiet than that that took his thoughts from Tony's dear pouting lips and tightened eyelids. Miss Latimer had all sorts of chances that he didn't have. His love was like a steady vase into which Tony's fluidity inevitably poured and shaped itself when he was with her. But when he was not there, Miss Latimer had spells that dissolved her again into wistful, wandering water.

"I didn't tell her, of course, that I was in love with you and was wondering whether I might marry you," Antonia went on, "though I think she must know it. I said nothing about myself, really. What we talked of was immortality. I asked her what she believed."

He kept his eyes upon her, though she did not meet them, standing before her, his cigarette between his teeth. And she felt his displeasure in his silence.

"She doesn't think as you do," Antonia went on, in a carefully steady voice. "I mean, her belief is much more definite than yours; much deeper; for she's always believed, and you, I think, from what you told me, haven't;--and, oh, passionate. I can't express to you how I felt that. A white flame of certitude."

"Ah," Bevis murmured. He knocked the ash from his cigarette and examined the tip. "No; I've no white flames about me."

She did not pause for his irony. "And we spoke of Malcolm. We never have spoken of him before. I asked her if she expected to see him again, as she knew him here; unchanged. And she does. No; expect is not the right word. She is sure of it. And she told me something else. Malcolm believed like that. He and she had talked about it; twice. Once when he was hardly more than a boy. And once before he went to France, on the last night he spent here, with her and his mother. He was sure, too. He believed that he was to see me, and her, again. Cicely cried and cried in telling me. I never saw her cry before."

"Did Malcolm ever talk to you about it?" Bevis asked her after a moment. If he had computed and analyzed new hopes last night, how much more, this morning, he found himself analyzing and computing new difficulties. He had more than Tony's fluidity to deal with now. Like a tragic, potent moon, Miss Latimer drew her tides away from the rest and safety of the shores he stretched for them.

"No," she answered, still in the careful, steady voice. "Never like that. Though I remember, in looking back, things he said that meant it."

He recognized then, and only then, when she answered with such unsuspecting candour, the treacherous suggestion that had underlain his query. Could he really have wanted to hint that Malcolm's deepest confidence had been given to his cousin and not to her? Could he really have hoped that a touch of spiritual jealousy might help him? How complete her trust in her husband, and how justified, was further revealed to him, for his discomfiture, as she went on: "It was of me they talked that last night; of our love for each other. He wanted to thank her, again, for having helped him to win me."

They were silent for a little after that; he cast down upon the sofa beside the fire and Antonia on her settee, her hands holding it on either side, her eyes fixed before her, a new hardness in their gaze. She was, this morning, neither the frightened child nor the helpless lover. She had withdrawn from him, and whether in coldness or control he could not tell. But it was not with her own strength she was armed. She had withdrawn in order to think, without his help, and with the help of Miss Latimer.

"Well, what does it all come to for you, now?" he asked, and he heard the coldness in his voice, a coldness not for her, but for that new opponent he had now to deal with.

"It makes it all more terrible, doesn't it?" she said, sitting there and not looking at him.

"You mean her belief has so much more weight with you than mine?"

"Does it contradict yours?"

"You know it does; or why should things be more difficult--terrible you call them--for you this morning? You say she is more definite than I am. I think definiteness in such matters pure illusion, and I only ask you to realize that it's easy to a simple nature like Miss Latimer's. She is unaware of the complexity of the problem."

"You think that Malcolm, too, was so simple?"

"I do. Not so simple as Miss Latimer; but simpler than you, and you know it; and far simpler than I am; and you know that, too, my dear."

She sought no dispute. Almost with a hard patience she went on. "Wasn't their definiteness intuition rather than illusion? Isn't intuition easier for the simple than for the complex?"

"Intuition isn't definiteness; that's just what it isn't. As for it's being easier; everything is easier, of course, to simple people." She, like himself, and she had admitted it, was complex; yet his terrible disadvantage with her was that, while too clever to be satisfied by anything she did not understand, she was too ignorant, really, to understand the cogency of what he might have found to say. Miss Latimer's simplicities would have more weight with her.

"Something must be definite," she said. "Immortality means nothing unless it can in some way be defined. It must mean a person, and a person means memory, feeling, will. So, if Malcolm is immortal, he exists now, as he existed here; unchanged; loving me, as he told Cicely he should always love me; and waiting for me, as he told her he would wait." She had come back to it and Miss Latimer had fixed her in it.

"Perhaps he's fallen in love with some one else," Bevis suggested. "You've changed to that extent, after all. And you are not longing for him. Quite the contrary."

Somehow he could not control these exhibitions of his exasperation, nor could he unsay them, ashamed of them as he immediately was.

Her dark gaze rested on him at last, unresentful still, but with, at last, an almost recognized hostility. He was ashamed, yet more exasperated than ever as he saw it.

"It's almost as if you tried to insult me with my infidelity," she murmured. "It's as if, already, you had no respect for me because you know I am unfaithful. Take care, Bevis, for, after all, I may get over you."

"And I may get over you," he said, looking not at her, but at the fire and slightly wagging his remaining foot, crossed over the artificial knee.

She was very silent at that, and, shame deepening and anger dropping (it wasn't anger against her; she must know that) he glanced up at her and found her gaze still on him.

"My dear," he muttered, smiling wryly, "you stick your needles too deeply into my heart. What's sport to you is death to me.--No; I don't mean that.--All I really mean is that we mustn't be like children in a nursery slapping at each other. You're as unlikely to get over me as I am to get over you, and I ask you, in deep seriousness, to accept that fact with all its implications. There it is and what are you going to do with it and with me?"

She had now risen from her seat and walked away from him, vaguely, and she went toward the third window and stood looking out.

She stood there a long time, without moving, and, remembering what she had said to him of it the other day, and of her fear, a discomfort--yet, comparatively, it was a comfort to feel it after their personal dispute--stirred him, so that, rising, with a sigh, he followed her, and, as he had done the other day, looked out over her shoulder at the cedar, the fountain, and the white fritillaries in their narrow beds. He saw from her fixed face that she had forgotten her fear of the harmless scene. Her gaze, with its new, cold grief, was straight before her.

"Tony; dear Tony," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder. She did not move or look at him.

"Let's go away," he said. "Let's leave this place. It's bad for us both. Sell it. Give it to Miss Latimer. Chuck it all, Tony, and start a new life with me. Chuck the whole ghoulish business of Malcolm and his feelings and your own infidelity. It has nothing to do with love and heaven; really it hasn't. You'll see it yourself some day. Let's go away at once, darling, and get married." The urgency of what he now saw as escape was suddenly so strong in him that he really meant it, really planned, while he spoke, the Southern flight; Tony deposited at her safe London house that very evening and the license bought next day. Why not? Wasn't it the only way with her? As long as she was allowed to hesitate, her feet would remain fixed in this quagmire.

She hardly heard his words; he saw that as she turned her eyes on him; but she heard his ardour and it had broken down her withdrawal.

"I'm so frightened, Bevis," she murmured. "You don't understand. You are so bitter; so cruel. You frighten me more than I can tell you. I seemed to see, just now, when you said that, about getting over me, that I should lose your love, and his love, too; that that would be my punishment."

This, after all, was a fear easy to deal with. He passed his arm in hers and drew her from the window, feeling a foretaste of the final triumph as he did so, for, child, adorable child that she was, she had forgotten already the former fear.

"But you know what a nasty, cantankerous creature I am, darling," he said, making her walk up and down with him. "You don't really take my flings seriously. And didn't you begin! How like a woman! What a woman you are! You know that I shan't get over you. And I assure you that I don't think less well of Malcolm's fidelity."

"But the bitterness, Bevis. Why were you so bitter?" Her voice trembled. "I am never bitter with you."

"And I'm never bitter with you--though I'm a bitter person, which you aren't. You know perfectly well that it was Miss Latimer whose neck I wanted to wring.--Beastly little stone-curlew, with her stare and her wailing."

"It felt like my neck. Was it only Cicely's, then? Poor little Cicely."

"Poor little Cicely as much as you please. Only I'm sick of her, and want to get away from her, and to get you away. Seriously, Tony, why shouldn't we be off at once?"

"At once?" Her wavering smile, while her eyes dwelt on him, showed the plaintive sweetness of reviving confidence. "But that's impossible, dear, absurd Bevis."

"Why impossible?"

"Why I couldn't get married like that; at a day's notice. And I couldn't run away. I'm not afraid of Cicely, though you seem to be. And I couldn't leave her like that, when I've only just arrived. It would be too unkind."

The fact that she felt it necessary to argue it all out was in itself a good augury. He could afford to relinquish his project, though he did so reluctantly. "I'm not afraid of her," he said. "Except when she frightens you."

"She doesn't, Bevis. You are the only one who frightens me; when you tell me the truth; when you tell me that I am unfaithful and that I've fallen in love with you, although my husband isn't really dead; and that perhaps, if I go on tormenting you too much, you'll get over me." She looked steadily at him while she spoke, though still she tried to smile.

"Do you want another truth, Tony?" he said, putting her hair back from her forehead, doting on her, in her loveliness, her foolishness, her pathos, while he drew her more closely to him; "it's the last that frightens you most of all, and it never can come true."

"Never? Never?" she whispered, while she, too, came closer, yielding to his arms. "Nothing can ever come between us? You will be able to take care of me, always?"

"It's all I ask," he assured her, with his dry, cherishing smile.

V