Читать книгу The Helpmate - Sinclair May - Страница 5

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It was broad daylight outside. A man was putting out the lights one by one along the cold little grey parade. A figure, walking slowly, with down-bent head, was approaching the hotel from the pier. Anne recognised it as that of her husband. Both sights reminded her that her life had to be begun all over again, and to go on.

Another hour passed. Majendie had sent up a waitress with breakfast to her room. He was always thoughtful for her comfort. It did not occur to her to wonder what significance there might be in his thus keeping away from her, or what attitude toward her he would now be inclined to take. She would not have admitted that he had a right to any attitude at all. It was for her, as the profoundly injured person, to decide as to the new disposal of their relations.

She was very clear about her grievance. The facts, that her husband had been pointed at in the public drawing-room of their hotel; that the terrible statement she had overheard had been made and received casually; that he had assumed, no less casually, her knowledge of the thing, all bore but one interpretation: that Walter Majendie and the scandal he had figured in were alike notorious. The marvel was that, staying in the town where he lived and was known, she herself had not heard of it before. A peculiarly ugly thought visited her. Was it possible that Scarby was the very place where the scandal had occurred?

She remembered now that, when she had first proposed that watering-place for their honeymoon, he had objected on the ground that Scarby was full of people whom he knew. Besides, he had said, she wouldn't like it. But whether she would like it or not, Anne, who had her bridal dignity to maintain, considered that in the matter of her honeymoon his wishes should give way to hers. She was inclined to measure the extent of his devotion by that test. Scarby, she said, was not full of people who knew her. Anne had been insistent and Majendie passive, as he was in most unimportant matters, reserving his energies for supremely decisive moments.

Anne, bearing her belief in Majendie in her innocent breast, failed at first to connect her husband with the remarkable intimations that passed between the two newcomers gossiping in the drawing-room before dinner. They, for their part, had no clue linking the unapproachably strange lady on the neighbouring sofa with the hero of their tale. The case, they said, was "infamous." At that point Majendie had put an end to his own history and his wife's uncertainty by entering the room. Three words and a look, observed by Anne, had established his identity.

Her mind was steadied by its inalienable possession of the facts. She had returned through prayer to her normal mood of religious resignation. She tried to support herself further by a chain of reasoning. If all things were divinely ordered, this sorrow also was the will of God. It was the burden she was appointed to take up and bear.

She bathed and dressed herself for the day. She felt so strange to herself in these familiar processes that, standing before the looking-glass, she was curious to observe what manner of woman she had become. The inner upheaval had been so profound that she was surprised to find so little record of it in her outward seeming.

Anne was a woman whose beauty was a thing of general effect, and the general effect remained uninjured. Nature had bestowed on her a body strongly made and superbly fashioned. Having framed her well, she coloured her but faintly. She had given her eyes of a light thick grey. Her eyebrows, her lashes, and her hair were of a pale gold that had ashen undershades in it. They all but matched a skin honey-white with that even, sombre, untransparent tone that belongs to a temperament at once bilious and robust. For the rest, Nature had aimed nobly at the significance of the whole, slurring the details. She had built up the forehead low and wide, thrown out the eyebones as a shelter for the slightly prominent eyes; saved the short, straight line of the nose by a hair's-breadth from a tragic droop. But she had scamped her work in modelling the close, narrow nostrils. She had merged the lower lip with the line of the chin, missing the classic indentation. The mouth itself she had left unfinished. Only a little amber mole, verging on the thin rose of the upper lip, foreshortened it, and gave to its low arc the emphasis of a curve, the vivacity of a dimple (Anne's under lip was straight as the tense string of a bow). When she spoke or smiled Anne's mole seemed literally to catch up her lip against its will, on purpose to show the small white teeth below. Majendie loved Anne's mole. It was that one charming and emphatic fault in her face, he said, that made it human. But Anne was ashamed of it.

She surveyed her own reflection in the glass sadly, and sadly went through the practised, mechanical motions of her dressing; smoothing the back of her irreproachable coat, arranging her delicate laces with a deftness no indifference could impair. Yesterday she had had delight in that new garment and in her own appearance. She knew that Majendie admired her for her distinction and refinement. Now she wondered what he could have seen in her—after Lady Cayley. At Lady Cayley's personality she had not permitted herself so much as to guess. Enough that the woman was notorious—infamous.

There was a knock at the door, the low knock she had come to know, and Majendie entered in obedience to her faint call.

The hours had changed him, given his bright face a tragic, submissive look, as of a man whipped and hounded to her feet.

He glanced first at the tray, to see if she had eaten her breakfast.

"There are some things I should like to say to you, with your permission. But I think we can discuss them better out of doors."

He looked round the disordered room. The associations of the place were evidently as painful to him as they were to her.

They went out. The parade was deserted at that early hour, and they found an empty seat at the far end of it.

"I, too," she said, "have things that I should like to say."

He looked at her gravely.

"Will you allow me to say mine first?"

"Certainly; but I warn you, they will make no difference."

"To you, possibly not. They make all the difference to me. I'm not going to attempt to defend myself. I can see the whole thing from your point of view. I've been thinking it over. Didn't you say that what you heard you had not heard from Edith?"

"From Edith? Never!"

"When did you hear it, then?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"From some one in the hotel?"

"Yes."

"From whom? Not that it matters."

"From those women who came yesterday. I didn't know whom they were talking about. They were talking quite loud. They didn't know who I was."

"You say you didn't know whom they were talking about?"

"Not at first—not till you came in. Then I knew."

"I see. That was the first time you had heard of it?"

Her lips parted in assent, but her voice died under the torture.

"Then," he said, "I am profoundly sorry. If I had realised that, I would not have spoken to you as I did."

The memory of it stung her.

"That," she said, "was—in any circumstances—unpardonable."

"I know it was. And I repeat, I am profoundly sorry. But, you see, I thought you knew all the time, and that you had consented to forget it. And I thought, don't you know, it was—well, rather hard on me to have it all raked up again like that. Now I see how very hard it was on you, dear. Your not knowing makes all the difference."

"It does indeed. If I had known——"

"I understand. You wouldn't have married me?"

"I should not."

"Dear—do you suppose I didn't know that?"

"I know nothing."

"Do you remember the day I asked you why you cared for me, and you said it was because you knew I was good?"

Her lip trembled.

"And of course I know it's been an awful shock to you to discover that—I—was not so good."

She turned away her face.

"But I never meant you to discover it. Not for yourself, like this. I couldn't have forgiven myself—after what you told me. I meant to have told you myself—that evening—but my poor little sister promised me that she would. She said it would be easier for you to hear it from her. Of course I believed her. There were things she could say that I couldn't."

"She never said a word."

"Are you sure?"

"Perfectly. Except—yes—she did say——"

It was coming back to her now.

"Do you mind telling me exactly what she said?"

"N—no. She made me promise that if I ever found things in you that I didn't understand, or that I didn't like——"

"Well—what did she make you promise?"

"That I wouldn't be hard on you. Because, she said, you'd had such a miserable life."

"Poor Edith! So that was the nearest she could get to it. Things you didn't understand and didn't like!"

"I didn't know what she meant."

"Of course you didn't. Who could? But I'm sorry to say that Edith made me pretty well believe you did."

He was silent a while, trying to fathom the reason of his sister's strange duplicity. Apparently he gave it up.

"You can't be a brute to a poor little woman with a bad spine," said he; "but I'm not going to forgive Edith for that."

Anne flamed through her pallor. "For what?" she said. "For not having had more courage than yourself? Think what you put on her."

"I didn't. She took it on herself. Edith's got courage enough for anybody. She would never admit that her spine released her from all moral obligations. But I suppose she meant well."

The spirit of the grey, cold morning seemed to have settled upon Anne. She gazed sternly out over the eastern sea. Preoccupied with what he considered Edith's perfidy, he failed to understand his wife's silence and her mood.

"Edith's very fond of you. You won't let this make any difference between you and her?"

"Between her and me it can make no difference. I am very fond of Edith."

"But the fact remains that you married me under false pretences? Is that what you mean?"

"You may certainly put it that way."

"I understand your point of view completely. I wish you could understand mine. When Edith said there were things she could have told you that I couldn't, she meant that there were extenuating circumstances."

"They would have made no difference."

"Excuse me, they make all the difference. But, of course, there's no extenuation for deception. Therefore, if you insist on putting it that way—if—if it has made the whole thing intolerable to you, it seems to me that perhaps I ought, don't you know, to release you from your obligations——"

She looked at him. She knew that he had understood the meaning and the depth of her repugnance. She did not know that such understanding is rare in the circumstances, nor could she see that in itself it was a revelation of a certain capacity for the "goodness" she had once believed in. But she did see that she was being treated with a delicacy and consideration she had not expected of this man with the strange devil. It touched her in spite of her repugnance. It made her own that she had expected nothing short of it until yesterday.

"Do you insist?" he went on. "After what I've told you?"

"After what you've told me—no. I'm ready to believe that you did not mean to deceive me."

"Doesn't that make any difference?" he asked tenderly.

"Yes. It makes some difference—in my judgment of you."

"You mean you're not—as Edith would say—going to be too hard on me?"

"I hope," said Anne, "I should never be too hard on any one."

"Then," he inquired, eager to be released from the strain of a most insupportable situation, "what are we going to do next?"

He had assumed that the supreme issue had been decided by a polite evasion; and his question had been innocent of all momentous meaning. He merely wished to know how they were going to spend the day that was before them, since they had to spend days, and spend them together. But Anne's tense mind contemplated nothing short of the supreme issue that, for her, was not to be evaded, nor yet to be decided hastily.

"Will you leave me alone," she said, "to think it over? Will you give me three hours?"

He stared and turned pale; for, this time, he understood.

"Certainly," he said coldly, rising and taking out his watch. "It's twelve now."

"At three, then?"

They met at three o'clock. Anne had spent one hour of bewilderment out of doors, two hours of hard praying and harder thinking in her room.

Her mind was made up. However notorious her husband had been, between him and her there was to be no open rupture. She was not going to leave him, to appeal to him for a separation, to deny him any right. Not that she was moved by a profound veneration for the legal claim. Marriage was to her a matter of religion even more than of law. And though, at the moment, she could no longer discern its sacramental significance through the degraded aspect it now wore for her, she surrendered on the religious ground. The surrender would be a martyrdom. She was called upon to lay down her will, but not to subdue the deep repugnance of her soul.

Protection lay for her in Walter's chivalry, as she well knew. But she would not claim it. Chastened and humbled, she would take up her wedded life again. There was no vow that she would not keep, no duty she would not fulfil. And she would remain in her place of peace, building up between them the ramparts of the spiritual life.

Meanwhile she gave him credit for his attitude.

"Things can never be as they were between us," she said. "That you cannot expect. But—"

He listened with his eyes fixed on hers, accepting from her his destiny. She reddened.

"It was good of you to offer to release me—" He spared her.

"Are you not going to hold me to it, then?"

"I am not." She paused, and then forced herself to it. "I will try to be a good wife to you."

"Thank you."