Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“How do you know he thinks things are my fault now?” asked Edith quickly.

“Have you ever known a man who didn’t hold the woman who loves him personally responsible for all the rubs of life?” asked Helen dryly.

Edith did not answer--she smiled a little. After a moment’s pause she said:

“You’re my friend, Helen?”

“Don’t speak as if I had dozens,” said Helen. “I’ve only had one, and I don’t forget.”

“Then you’ll laugh him away very gently--so gently that it won’t reach very far down?” cried Edith.

“There isn’t very far to reach,” replied Helen irritably. “I don’t see why you always want to be saving people pain; pain does good.”

“Does it?” asked Edith. Her eyes met Helen of Troy’s; they looked a long time into each other’s eyes.

“No,” said Helen at last, “it starves, it ages, it embitters, it doesn’t do good.”

“Well, I’d rather have it done to me than do it to other people,” said Edith. “It’s rather more responsibility than I care to undertake.”

“Oh, I don’t know!” said Helen of Troy with a reckless gesture; “it’s a game like any other game. I wanted to pay back your score for you. I knew _you’d_ never do it. I kept out of your way, I never let on, and I didn’t suppose you’d find out for a day or two. I’m going to-morrow. I thought the little fool couldn’t tell you enough for you to work on, the first time he had spoken to you for years.”

“He showed me your miniature,” said Edith gravely.

Helen laughed.

“My face is my fortune,” she said grimly. “Edith, I’ve made a lot of money!”

“Yes, dear--yes,” said Edith; and she spoke soothingly as you speak to a hurt child.

“I’ve made a lot of money,” repeated Helen of Troy. Then she looked away towards the window and the swaying pots of flowers alive in the sunshine. “And I’ve made nothing else,” she said with a little bitter laugh.

Edith did not speak, and the room seemed filled with an unanswerable silence. Helen of Troy got up at last and moved restlessly to and fro.

“I ought to be in the Park,” she said. “I’ve made heaps of engagements. It doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t your husband love you, Edith?”

“Oh, my dear--my dear!” murmured Edith, “don’t ask me that.”

“But that’s just what I’m going to ask you,” said Helen, coming to a stop in front of her friend. “Don’t pretend--with your eyes! Why, they were so sad when you came in, I thought--I thought--the pain in them would break everything in the room.”

“My husband,” said Edith quietly, “is the best man in the world.”

“As bad as that?” asked Helen, lifting her eyebrows. “Why, my dear, you might as well have married an institution or a reformatory outright.”

“No, not like that,” Edith said quickly; “he’s a dear!”

“Something can generally be done with a dear,” said Helen reflectively, “even a good dear. Edith, an idea has just occurred to me. The chief difference between a bad man and a good is that you know what a bad man wants and you don’t know what a good man wants.”

Edith smiled.

“I think you always know what the man you love wants, but you can’t always give it to him,” she said.

“Tell me about it,” Helen demanded briefly. And she sat down on the sofa again.

“There’s nothing to tell,” said Edith. “His first wife died a year after their marriage, and he is satisfied with that. He wants a sober, matrimonial kind of tie, with no romance. I have supplied more than he needed, but he does not know it.”

“And you thought when you married him--”

“Oh, don’t ask me what I thought,” cried Edith passionately. “I dreamed--and the people who dream get cast into pits. But all this is beside the point, Helen. You’ve got to give this boy up, you know--and do it so that he will not blow his brains out, or make some unprofitable spectacle of himself to Etta and Horace. You haven’t said you would yet, you know.”

“I never knew any one so fond of promises; you ought to belong to a law court or a registry or something,” said Helen impatiently. “Why should I give the boy up? He is pretty and pleases my fancy. I can assure you my fancy is very particular; it’s a great thing to get it pleased.”

“You are going to do it because you want to please me more,” said Edith imperturbably.

“Don’t you see, you stupid woman, that it’ll settle your hash?” Helen broke in; “the boy’ll find out somehow that you’re in it--”

“I shall tell him,” Edith interposed quietly.

“Oh, my Aunt Maria!” groaned Helen of Troy, “my sainted Aunt Maria! You’ll tell him? And what good do you suppose that’ll do?”

“I’m not responsible for results,” said Edith. “But I’ve got to tell him.”

“I’m glad I know nothing of the obligations of virtue,” said Helen. “I understand paying for my fun, but I don’t see why you should pay for other people’s.”

“I couldn’t deceive Horace or the boy,” said Edith, “to save myself. I don’t mind deceiving people at all for any other reason. Half of life is mutually tolerated deceit, but not for purposes of self-protection; that I don’t like, nor, my dear Helen, do you!”

Helen did not reply to this; she merely nibbled her pen, which she had taken up from an inlaid desk beside her.

“I suppose you are going to bully me into this thing?” she observed after a pause.

“Dear me, yes,” said Edith, “that’s what I’m here for!”

Helen laughed.

“Very well, then, my dear,” she said; “without waiting to reflect on the wits of the Lestrange family (and always excepting its head, who had, I imagine, more than a suspicion of the fact), allow me to remark that they should have a goose for their coat-of-arms. I’ve been married twice, and so far as I know the second ceremony still holds good. For professional purposes I do not lay much stress upon my husband’s existence; privately, we prefer our own lives to each other’s. I don’t need any pity. I never cared for either of my husbands, but I managed both beautifully. What do you want me to say to your step-son now? I may as well observe that in three years’ time he would take it much better.”

Edith hesitated.

“I think you ought to tell him that you’re forty-two,” she said at length.

Helen threw back her head and laughed.

“It isn’t twenty years ago,” she murmured. “It’s ten minutes. Now, Edith, if you’ll take my advice you’ll not decide this yourself. You seem to have overlooked for the moment the fact of your husband’s existence. Does he know what happened twenty minutes--years ago--I mean?”

“Oh, yes,” said Edith; “I told him.”

“Very well, then,” said Helen of Troy. “I happen to know that Leslie is dining out to-night. I will, therefore, invite myself to dinner with you. Do you trust me, Edith?”

“You’re a most unscrupulous woman,” said Edith. “Still, you can’t do much harm with a mere meal, so if you like we’ll risk it.”

Helen stooped towards her and kissed her.

“After all,” she said, “I’ve had something out of my life. I’ve had this.”

X

Horace was slightly surprised on coming down dressed for dinner to meet in his wife’s sitting-room a lady of such widely-spread picture-postcard fame. He had already seen Anastasia twice in the musical comedy which she had made famous, but his wife’s introduction arrested him.

“Horace,” she said, “this is Helen of Troy.”

For a moment he was baffled by memory, and then suddenly the old sacrifice of the impetuous girl who was now his strangely sensible wife came back to him. He held out his hand at once.

“I am most happy to meet Helen of Troy,” he said, smiling.

There was no one at dinner, and the house-hold dignity, the little vivid picture of delicate repose lived long in Anastasia’s memory. Horace was an excellent host, and Edith was a loadstone for other people’s minds. She drew out their best with a silent magnetic skill, hardly participating so much as forming an atmosphere in which it was very pleasant and easy to speak.

“I always could say anything to Edith,” observed Anastasia to her host, “but I had quite supposed that I should have to talk to you.”

Horace laughed.

“We’re so simple and dull,” he said. “We are like an old tune to a practised singer; we give her an easy swing.”

“Oh, you’re not dull,” said Anastasia; “it’s rather an art to be as simple as all this, and I’ve never met it in my own people. We’re smart, we’re clever, we’re attractive, we’re the most charming people in the world, but we’re not simple.”

“You can’t expect a young nation to have the quality of an old shoe,” said Horace. “English people have done the same things for a very long time. They stand on the basis of habit. Now all the Americans I ever met wanted to be individual, personal, impressive--and they very often were. When they were not, it was rather a strain to listen to them; but we don’t want, as a rule, to be like that; it amuses us to have people do it for us; but I expect that in our heart of hearts we don’t think it very solid. There’s something in finding such an easy old track, and knowing that among your own class you’ll find the same talk, the same purpose, the same _genre_. I’m not sure it isn’t good for conversation as well, because it makes you less self-conscious. You start with so much that can be taken for granted.”

Helen gave him a good deal of attention; she was thinking the man out; he wasn’t in the least like his son, nor had she expected him to be. She had imagined him to be good, solid, dull, and probably a shrewd man of business; now she saw that only her first two adjectives held. He might not see everything, but he saw what he looked at. The trouble really began in his never having looked at his wife. He had accepted her, proposed to her, married her, and she had done all the rest. The chances were that she would go on doing it till she died, unless some one interfered.

“What he wants,” said Helen of Troy to herself, as she continued the conversation, “is a shaking, and that is what he is going to get.”

After dinner Horace accompanied them to his smoking-room, and Anastasia cleared the field.

“Edith,” she said, “do you remember my giving you an old silk shawl when we stayed on the lakes; it was pretty, and warm, and soft, and fresh, like one of the little clouds we used to see hover over the lovely garden? I have an idea I want that shawl back to keep always; do you know where it is?”

Edith shook her head.

“At the bottom of one of my old trunks I expect, where I keep my treasures,” she said. “I could send it to you, perhaps.”

“I want it right away,” said Anastasia calmly, in the tone which took for granted that what she wanted right away would be immediately forthcoming.

Edith laughed.

“And I’m to get it?” she asked.

“You’re to get it,” said Anastasia, “and you needn’t hurry back, for I want to talk to your husband about his boy.”

Horace looked at Edith affectionately.

“She can share all that,” he said.

“You’re very kind,” said Anastasia, with hidden irony, “but anyway I want that shawl.”

Edith left them.

“Now, Mr. Lestrange,” said Anastasia, suddenly sitting up and fixing him with her eyes, “I’m not going to talk to you about your son much. I’ll say this, and then I’ll leave the subject alone. He’s not like you. I guess he’s like that picture you’ve got on the mantelpiece--the face is selfish, tyrannical, weak and mean. Hush! I see you’re going to tell me she’s dead. I know she’s dead, and Edith’s alive. She’s alive! How long are you going to keep the living woman buried and the dead woman taking all her share of life? How long is Edith to play second fiddle to a memory which isn’t even true? If your first wife had lived you’d have been worn tired of her by now. Do you suppose she’d have said, ‘I’ll give my heart and every quivering nerve to serve this man’s comfort? I’ll starve every sense I have got to give him friendship, since he’s so blind he won’t take more? I’ll not let pain, or time, or just resentment for a wrong he has allowed to take place against me make me bitter, or old, or blunted’? Would your dead wife have acted this way, Horace Lestrange?”

Horace looked at his patent leather shoes fixedly. Once he tried to interrupt her, but the tense sharpness of her voice struck his down into silence. Something stirred in his heart that was not all anger and indignation--it was pain--it was recognition! So he breathed hard and said nothing. And for a moment the pitiless voice was still. Anastasia was watching him.

“When a man looks down at his shoes, you’re moving him,” she observed to herself. “You can’t tell which way he’s going, but he’s being moved.”

Then she went on:

“I came here expecting to find you selfish and stupid,” she said; “and you’re neither. You’re a live man, and yet you’ve lived with this woman ten years and not loved her; you’ve looked at her and not seen her; you’ve taken all she had to give, and you’ve never counted what it cost her to give it to you. Oh, you’re slow, you English--you’re slow!”

“We’re quick to act,” interrupted the man opposite her gently. He was still looking at his shoes, and he spoke very quietly, but Anastasia suddenly thrilled; she was not accustomed to be thrilled by anything a man said.

“I suppose that’s the meaning of English history,” she thought to herself; aloud she merely deepened her note of scorn:

“Quick?” she said. “Mr. Lestrange--ten years? I’m afraid it’s not quick enough. Do you know what happens when a woman is unhappy too long? She gets used to it. The habit of unhappiness sets in, the heart gets eaten up, she gets haggard, and old, and sad; and not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can make the queen take to her throne again! (That’s my own alteration, and rather a good one.) The truth of the whole matter, Mr. Lestrange, is that you’ve made a domestic hack of a woman who had the spirit of Joan of Arc--”

“What on earth are you saying about Joan of Arc?” asked Edith’s voice suddenly.

Anastasia started. Horace never turned his head.

“I was saying,” said Anastasia, “that she was burned alive at a stake by the English intellect and the French nerves!”

“I’ve found the shawl,” said Edith, “but the pink’s turned almost gray in twenty years.”

Anastasia laughed shortly. Edith looked quickly at her husband; in a moment she knew that something had taken place--the very room seemed tense with recent passion. A look of anxiety came into her eyes. What had Helen said or done? She tried to stem the silence with the thin stream of talk which is against the current of thought.

Anastasia rose and held out her hand.

“I’ve got to get home in time to oversee my packing. I leave to-morrow,” she said, “and I’m going to write your boy a line, Mr. Lestrange; don’t you or Edith worry. I’ll make things as easy as I can, and youth’s elastic. It doesn’t break quickly. He won’t do anything violent, you can depend on that; he talks conversational suicide, and that’s pretty safe. Just whistle me a taxi, will you?”

They went out into the hall with her.

Horace said nothing. Once his eyes met hers. Horace’s eyes were blazing with fairly steady anger, but it was not all anger. Edith looked white and tired.

“Am I never going to see you again, Helen?” she murmured.

“In twenty years’ time,” said her friend. “Shan’t I make a nice old woman?”

Horace shook hands with her, and suddenly Helen of Troy smiled at him--it was a golden, appealing, melting smile. Her eyes took it up and held his in a kind of friendly laughter. Horace smiled back grimly.

“I am sure,” he said, “I needn’t wish you success.”

“You think I’ve got it?” she asked.

“Yes. I think you’ve got it,” said Horace Lestrange.

Then Edith kissed her, and standing together in the soft May weather the husband and wife watched her drive off into the night. Helen of Troy did not look back at them. She knew that they stood there together and loneliness was at her heart like a knife. What were all the shadows that surrounded her--the easy captives, the shallow victims of her radiant beauty--to that quiet union of strength? Countless, countless, they thronged the courts of memory, and unreal as the false dawn heralding the long gray hours they passed away.

“Oh, my God!” said Helen of Troy. “My men fight for me, but they leave me, and they never give me rest!”

* * * * *

“I’m very tired,” said Edith gently to her husband. “I think, if you don’t want me, I’ll go upstairs.”

“Come into my study just one moment,” he urged. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Once more the anxiety flashed back into his wife’s eyes. What had happened? What had Helen said? She followed him quickly into his room and closed the door.

“Oh, no, I don’t want to talk to you,” said her husband suddenly, and at the sound of his voice it seemed to Edith as if the whole earth changed.

In a moment she was held--she was immersed--she was lifted into uncontrollable joy. His arms were round her and his kisses were on her hair, her cheek, her forehead, quick as his tears.

“Oh, Edith,” he murmured, “my darling, all these years!”

“No, no Horace,” she cried, struggling desperately against his pity, against the terrible tenderness which seemed to drown the weak resistance of her heart. “I was never unhappy. Did she tell you I was unhappy? Why, I’ve been--you’ve been--oh, Horace, Horace! You’ve been pitying me--I can’t bear that, you know--not that--let me go.”

“Pitying you!” he laughed; he turned her face back with his hand and gazed into her eyes.

“I love you,” he said quickly. “I love you _best_--do you understand?”

And suddenly all the sad habit of the years fell from her, the weariness, the dull fret, the days of sober agony--they were as though they had never been.

The miracle of love swept her tears down into an ocean of bliss and carried them into laughing waters. Horace pressed his lips to hers; and they were all lost--the long intolerable hours--in the simplification of a kiss.

ROSE

ROSE