Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

"Why didn't you back me up?" said Phoebe. "She wanted to come all the time."

He turned, as he walked, to look at her.

"Why didn't I back you up? Do you really want to know why?"

Whenever he took that tone Phoebe looked solemn and a little frightened. She was frightened now, too frightened to answer him.

"Because," said he, "I wanted you all to myself."

"Oh----" Phoebe drew a long, terrified breath.

There are many ways of saying "Oh," but Gibson had never, never in his whole life heard any woman say it as Phoebe said it then. It meant that she was staggered at anybody's having the temerity to want anything all to himself.

"Do you think me very selfish?"

Phoebe assured him instantly that that had never been her idea of him.

"Shall I tell you who is selfish?"

Phoebe's little mouth hardened. She was so dreadfully afraid that he was going to say "Your father."

"You," he said, "you."

"I'm afraid I am," said she. "It's so hard not to be."

He stood still in his astonishment, so that she had to stand still, too.

"Of course it's hard not to give up things, when you like giving them up. But your sister likes giving them up, too, and it's selfish of you to prevent her, isn't it?"

"Oh, but you don't know what it's been--Effie's life and Mary's."

"And yours----"

"Oh, no, I'm happy enough. I'm the youngest."

"You mean you've had a year or two less of it."

"Yes. They never told me, for fear of making me unhappy, when Father's illness came."

"How long ago was that?"

"Five years ago. I was at school."

He made a brief calculation. During the two years of his married life Phoebe had been a child at school.

"And two years," said Phoebe, "is a long time to be happy in."

"Yes," he said, "it's a long time."

"And then," she went on presently, "I'm so much stronger than Effie and Mary."

"Not strong enough to go dragging that abominable bath-chair about."

"Not strong enough? Look----"

She held out her right arm for him to look at; under her muslin blouse he saw its tense roundness, and its whiteness through the slit above her wrist.

His heart stirred in him. Phoebe's arms were beautiful, and they were strong to help.

"I wish," he said, "I could make it better for you."

"Oh, but you _have_ made it better for us. You can't think what a difference you've made."

"Have I? Have I?"

"Yes. Effie said so only the other day. She wrote it to Mary. And Mary says it's a shame she can't be here. It is, you know. It makes us feel so mean having you all to ourselves like this."

He laughed. He laughed whenever he thought of it. There was nobody who could say things as Phoebe said them.

"I wish," said she, "you knew Mary. You'd like her so."

"I'm sure I should if she's at all like you."

(Her innocence sheltered him, made him bold.)

"Oh, but she isn't."

And he listened while she gave him a long list of Mary's charms. (Dear little, tender, unconscious Phoebe.)

"She sounds," he said, "very like you."

"She isn't the least bit like me. You don't know me."

"Don't I?"

"Mary's coming back at the end of the month. Then either I or Effie will go away. Do you think you'll still be here?"

He seemed to her to answer absently.

"Which of you, did you say, was going away?"

"Well--it's Effie's turn."

"Yes," he said, "I think I shall still be here."

One night, a week later, the two sisters sat talking together long after "Father" had been put to bed.

"Phoebe," said Effie, "why did you want me to come with you and Mr. Gibson?"

"Because----" said Phoebe.

"My dear, it's you he likes, not me."

"Don't, Effie."

"But it's true," said Effie.

"How can you tell?" said Phoebe, and she felt perfidious.

"Isn't he always going about with you?"

But Phoebe was ingenious in the destruction of her own joy.

"Oh," said she, "that's his cunning. He likes you dreadfully. He goes about with me, just to hide it."

"You goose."

"Are you sure, Effie, you don't care?"

"Not a rap."

"You never have? Not in the beginning?"

"Certainly not in the beginning. I only thought he might be nice for you."

"You didn't even want to divide him?"

Effie shook her head vehemently.

"Well--he's the only thing I ever wanted all to myself. If----" Then Phoebe looked frightened. "Effie," she said, "he's never said anything."

"All the same, you _know_."

"Can you know?"

"I think so," said Effie.

III

Gibson had been talking a long time to Phoebe. They were sitting together on the beach, under the shadow of the cliff. He was trying to form Phoebe's mind. Phoebe's mind was deliciously young, and it had the hunger and thirst of youth. A little shy and difficult to approach, Phoebe's mind, but he had found out what it liked best, and it pleased him to see how confidingly and delicately it, so to speak, ate out of his hand.

He puzzled her a good deal. And she had a very pretty way of closing her eyes when she was puzzled. In another woman it would have meant that he was boring her; Phoebe did it to shut out the intolerable light of knowledge.

"Ah!--don't," he cried.

"Don't shut my eyes? I always shut my eyes when I'm trying to think," said Phoebe.

He said nothing. That was not what he had meant when he had said "Don't."

"Am I boring you?" he said presently. His tone jarred a little on Phoebe; he had such a nice voice generally.

"No," said she. "Why?"

"Because you keep on doing that."

"Doing what?"

"That."

"Oh!--this?"

She put up her hand and untwisted the little tendril of brown hair that hung deliciously over her left ear.

"I always do that when I'm thinking."

He very nearly said, "Then, for God's sake, don't think."

But Phoebe was always thinking now. He had given her cause to think.

He began to hate the little brown curl that hung over her left ear, though it was anguish to him to hate anything that was Phoebe's. He looked out with nervous anxiety for the movement of her little white hand. He said to himself, "If she does it again, I can't come near her any more."

Yet he kept on coming; and was happy with her until Phoebe (poor, predestined little Phoebe) did it again. Gibson shuddered with the horror of the thing. He kept on saying to himself, "She's sweet, she's good, she's adorable. It isn't her fault. But I can't--I can't sit in the room with it."

And the next minute Phoebe would be so adorable that he would repent miserably of his brutality.

Then, one hot, still evening, he was alone with her in the little sitting-room. Outside, on the grass plot, her father sat in his bath-chair while Effie read aloud to him (out of her turn). Her voice made a cover for Gibson's voice and Phoebe's.

Phoebe was dressed (for the heat) in a white gown with wide, open sleeves. Her low collar showed the pure, soft swell of her neck to the shoulder-line.

She was sitting upright and demure in a straight-backed chair, with her hands folded quietly in her lap.

"That isn't a very comfortable chair you've got," he said.

He knew that she was tired with pushing the bath-chair about all day.

"It's the one I always sit in," said Phoebe.

"Well, you're not going to sit in it now," he said.

He drew the armchair out of its sacred corner and made her sit in that. He put a cushion at her head and a footstool at her feet.

"You make my heart ache," he said.

"Do I?"

He could not tell whether the little shaking breath she drew were a laugh or a sigh.

She lay back, letting her tired body slacken into rest.

The movement loosened the little combs that kept the coil of her brown hair in place. Phoebe abhorred dishevelment. She put up her hands to her head. Her wide sleeve fell back, showing the full length of her white arms.

He saw another woman stretching her arms to the man who leaned above her. He saw the movement of her hands--hands of the same texture and whiteness as her body, instinct with its impulses. A long procession of abominations passed through the white arch of her arms--the arch she raised in triumph and defiance, immortalizing her sin.

He was very tender with Phoebe that night, for his heart was wrung with compunction.

"She's adorable," he said to himself; "but I can't live with _that_."

Gibson left by the early train next day. He went without saying good-bye and without leaving an explanation or an address.

Phoebe held her head high, and said, day after day, "There's sure to be a letter."

Three weeks passed and no letter came. Phoebe saw that it was all over.

One day she was found (Effie found her) on her bed, crying. She was so weak she let Effie take her in her arms.

"If I only knew what I had done," she said. "Oh, Effie! what could have made him go away?"

"I can't tell, my lamb. You mustn't think about him any more."

"I can't help thinking. You see, it's not as if he hadn't been so nice."

"He couldn't have been nice to treat you that way."

"He didn't," said Phoebe fiercely. "He didn't treat me any way. I sometimes think I must have made it all up out of my own head. Did I?"

"No, no. I'm sure you didn't."

"It would have been awful of me. But I'd rather be awful than have to think that he was. What is my worst fault, Effie?"

"Your worst fault, in his eyes, is that you have none."

Phoebe sat up on the edge of the bed. She was thinking hard. And as she thought her hand went up, caressing unconsciously the little brown curl.

"If I only knew," said she, "what I had done!"

Gibson never saw Phoebe Richardson again. But a year later, as he turned suddenly on to the esplanade of a strange watering-place, he encountered the bath-chair, drawn by Effie and another lady. He made way, lifting his cap mechanically to its occupant.

The General looked at him. The courteous old hand checked itself in the salute. The affable smile died grimly.

Effie turned away her head. The other lady (it must have been "Mary") raised her eyes in somber curiosity.

Phoebe was not with them. Gibson supposed that she was away somewhere, recovering, in her turn.

WILKINSON'S WIFE

I

Nobody ever understood why he married her.

You expected calamity to pursue Wilkinson--it always had pursued him--; but that Wilkinson should have gone out of his way to pursue calamity (as if he could never have enough of it) really seemed a most unnecessary thing.

For there had been no pursuit on the part of the lady. Wilkinson's wife had the quality of her defects, and revealed herself chiefly in a formidable reluctance. It was understood that Wilkinson had prevailed only after an austere struggle. Her appearance sufficiently refuted any theory of unholy fascination or disastrous charm.

Wilkinson's wife was not at all nice to look at. She had an insignificant figure, a small, square face, colorless hair scraped with difficulty to the top of her head, eyes with no lashes to protect you from their stare, a mouth that pulled at an invisible curb, a sallow skin stretched so tight over her cheek-bones that the red veins stood stagnant there; and with it all, poor lady, a dull, strained expression hostile to further intimacy.

Even in her youth she never could have looked young, and she was years older than Wilkinson. Not that the difference showed, for his marriage had made Wilkinson look years older than he was; at least, so it was said by people who had known him before that unfortunate event.

It was not even as if she had been intelligent. Wilkinson had a gentle passion for the things of intellect; his wife seemed to exist on purpose to frustrate it. In no department of his life was her influence so penetrating and malign. At forty he no longer counted; he had lost all his brilliance, and had replaced it by a shy, unworldly charm. There was something in Wilkinson that dreamed or slept, with one eye open, fixed upon his wife. Of course, he had his blessed hours of deliverance from the woman. Sometimes he would fly in her face and ask people to dine at his house in Hampstead, to discuss Roman remains, or the Troubadours, or Nietzsche. He never could understand why his wife couldn't "enter," as he expressed it, into these subjects. He smiled at you in the dimmest, saddest way when he referred to it. "It's extraordinary," he would say, "the little interest she takes in Nietzsche."

Mrs. Norman found him once wandering in the High Street, with his passion full on him. He was a little absent, a little flushed; his eyes shone behind his spectacles; and there were pleasant creases in his queer, clean-shaven face.

She inquired the cause of his delight.

"I've got a man coming to dine this evening, to have a little talk with me. He knows all about the Troubadours."

And Wilkinson would try and make you believe that they had threshed out the Troubadours between them. But when Mrs. Norman, who was a little curious about Wilkinson, asked the Troubadour man what they _had_ talked about, he smiled and said it was something--some extraordinary adventure--that had happened to Wilkinson's wife.

People always smiled when they spoke of her. Then, one by one, they left off dining with Wilkinson. The man who read Nietzsche was quite rude about it. He said he wasn't going there to be gagged by that woman. He would have been glad enough to ask Wilkinson to dine with him if he would go without his wife.

If it had not been for Mrs. Norman the Wilkinsons would have vanished from the social scene. Mrs. Norman had taken Wilkinson up, and it was evident that she did not mean to let him go. That, she would have told you with engaging emphasis, was not her way. She had seen how things were going, socially, with Wilkinson, and she was bent on his deliverance.

If anybody could have carried it through, it would have been Mrs. Norman. She was clever; she was charming; she had a house in Fitzjohn's Avenue, where she entertained intimately. At forty she had preserved the best part of her youth and prettiness, and an income insufficient for Mr. Norman, but enough for her. As she said in her rather dubious pathos, she had nobody but herself to please now.

You gathered that if Mr. Norman had been living he would not have been pleased with her cultivation of the Wilkinsons. She was always asking them to dinner. They turned up punctually at her delightful Friday evenings (her little evenings) from nine to eleven. They dropped in to tea on Sunday afternoons. Mrs. Norman had a wonderful way of drawing Wilkinson out; while Evey, her unmarried sister, made prodigious efforts to draw Wilkinson's wife in. "If you could only make her," said Mrs. Norman, "take an interest in something."

But Evey couldn't make her take an interest in anything. Evey had no sympathy with her sister's missionary adventure. She saw what Mrs. Norman wouldn't see--that, if they forced Mrs. Wilkinson on people who were trying to keep away from her, people would simply keep away from them. Their Fridays were not so well attended, so delightful, as they had been. A heavy cloud of dulness seemed to come into the room, with Mrs. Wilkinson, at nine o'clock. It hung about her chair, and spread slowly, till everybody was wrapped in it.

Then Evey protested. She wanted to know why Cornelia allowed their evenings to be blighted thus. "Why ask Mrs. Wilkinson?"

"I wouldn't," said Cornelia, "if there was any other way of getting him."

"Well," said Evey, "he's nice enough, but it's rather a large price to have to pay."

"And is he," cried Cornelia passionately, "to be cut off from everything because of that one terrible mistake?"

Evey said nothing. If Cornelia were going to take him that way, there was nothing to be said!

So Mrs. Norman went on drawing Wilkinson out more and more, till one Sunday afternoon, sitting beside her on the sofa, he emerged positively splendid. There were moments when he forgot about his wife.

They had been talking together about his blessed Troubadours. (It was wonderful the interest Mrs. Norman took in them!) Suddenly his gentleness and sadness fell from him, a flame sprang up behind his spectacles, and the something that slept or dreamed in Wilkinson awoke. He was away with Mrs. Norman in a lovely land, in Provence of the thirteenth century. A strange chant broke from him; it startled Evey, where she sat at the other end of the room. He was reciting his own translation of a love-song of Provence.

At the first words of the refrain his wife, who had never ceased staring at him, got up and came across the room. She touched his shoulder just as he was going to say "Ma mie."

"Come, Peter," she said, "it's time to be going home."

Wilkinson rose on his long legs. "Ma mie," he said, looking down at her; and the flaming dream was still in his eyes behind his spectacles.

He took the little cloak she held out to him, a pitiful and rather vulgar thing. He raised it with the air of a courtier handling a royal robe; then he put it on her, smoothing it tenderly about her shoulders.

Mrs. Norman followed them to the porch. As he turned to her on the step, she saw that his eyes were sad, and that his face, as she put it, had gone to sleep again.

When she came back to her sister, her own eyes shone and her face was rosy.

"Oh, Evey," she said, "isn't it beautiful?"

"Isn't what beautiful?"

"Mr. Wilkinson's behavior to his wife."

II

It was not an easy problem that Mrs. Norman faced. She wished to save Wilkinson; she also wished to save the character of her Fridays, which Wilkinson's wife had already done her best to destroy. Mrs. Norman could not think why the woman came, since she didn't enjoy herself, since she was impenetrable to the intimate, peculiar charm. You could only suppose that her object was to prevent its penetrating Wilkinson, to keep the other women off. Her eyes never left him.

It was all very well for Evey to talk. She _might_, of course, have been wiser in the beginning. She might have confined the creature to their big monthly crushes, where, as Evey had suggested, she would easily have been mislaid and lost. But so, unfortunately, would Wilkinson; and the whole point was how not to lose him.

Evey said she was tired of being told off to entertain Mrs. Wilkinson. She was beginning to be rather disagreeable about it. She said Cornelia was getting to care too much about that Wilkinson man. She wouldn't have minded playing up to her if she had approved of the game; but Mrs. Wilkinson was, after all, you know, Mr. Wilkinson's wife.

Mrs. Norman cried a little. She told Evey she ought to have known it was his spirit that she cared about. But she owned that it wasn't right to sacrifice poor Evey. Neither, since he _had_ a wife, was it altogether right for her to care about Wilkinson's spirit to the exclusion of her other friends.

Then, one Friday, Mrs. Norman, relieving her sister for once, made a discovery while Evey, who was a fine musician, played. Mrs. Wilkinson did, after all, take an interest in something; she was accessible to the throbbing of Evey's bow across the strings.

She had started; her eyes had turned from Wilkinson and fastened on the player. There was a light in them, beautiful and piercing, as if her soul had suddenly been released from some hiding-place in its unlovely house. Her face softened, her mouth relaxed, her eyes closed. She lay back in her chair, at peace, withdrawn from them, positively lost.

Mrs. Norman slipped across the room to the corner where Wilkinson sat alone. His face lightened as she came.

"It's extraordinary," he said, "her love of music."

Mrs. Norman assented. It _was_ extraordinary, if you came to think of it. Mrs. Wilkinson had no understanding of the art. What did it mean to her? Where did it take her? You could see she was transported, presumably to some place of chartered stupidity, of condoned oblivion, where nobody could challenge her right to enter and remain.

"So soothing," said Wilkinson, "to the nerves."

Mrs. Norman smiled at him. She felt that, under cover of the music, his spirit was seeking communion with hers.

He thanked her at parting; the slight hush and mystery of his manner intimated that she had found a way.

"I hope," she said, "you'll come often--often."

"May we? May we?" He seemed to leap at it--as if they hadn't come often enough before!

Certainly she had found the way--the way to deliver him, the way to pacify his wife, to remove her gently to her place and keep her there.

The dreadful lady thus creditably disposed of, Wilkinson was no longer backward in the courting of his opportunity. He proved punctual to the first minute of the golden hour.

Hampstead was immensely interested in his blossoming forth. It found a touching simplicity in the way he lent himself to the sympathetic eye. All the world was at liberty to observe his intimacy with Mrs. Norman.

It endured for nine weeks. Then suddenly, to Mrs. Norman's bewilderment, it ceased. The Wilkinsons left off coming to her Friday evenings. They refused her invitations. Their behavior was so abrupt and so mysterious that Mrs. Norman felt that something must have happened to account for it. Somebody, she had no doubt, had been talking. She was much annoyed with Wilkinson in consequence, and, when she met him accidentally in the High Street, her manner conveyed to him her just resentment.

He called in Fitzjohn's Avenue the next Sunday. For the first time he was without his wife.

He was so downcast, and so penitent, and so ashamed of himself that Mrs. Norman met him halfway with a little rush of affection.

"Why have you not been to see us all this time?" she said.

He looked at her unsteadily; his whole manner betrayed an extreme embarrassment.

"I've come," he said, "on purpose to explain. You mustn't think I don't appreciate your kindness, but the fact is my poor wife"--(She knew that woman was at the bottom of it!)--"is no longer--up to it."

"What is the wretch up to, I should like to know?" thought Mrs. Norman.

He held her with his melancholy, unsteady eyes. He seemed to be endeavoring to approach a subject intimately and yet abstrusely painful.

"She finds the music--just at present--a little too much for her; the vibrations, you know. It's extraordinary how they affect her. She feels them--most unpleasantly--just here." Wilkinson laid two delicate fingers on the middle buttons of his waistcoat.

Mrs. Norman was very kind to him. He was not very expert, poor fellow, in the fabrication of excuses. His look seemed to implore her pardon for the shifts he had been driven to; it appealed to her to help him out, to stand by him in his unspeakable situation.

"I see," she said.

He smiled, in charming gratitude to her for seeing it.

That smile raised the devil in her. Why, after all, should she help him out?

"And are you susceptible to music--in the same unpleasant way?"

"Me? Oh, no--no. I like it; it gives me the very greatest pleasure." He stared at her in bewilderment and distress.

"Then why," said Mrs. Norman sweetly, "if it gives you pleasure, should you cut yourself off from it?"

"My dear Mrs. Norman, we have to cut ourselves off from a great many things--that give us pleasure. It can't be helped."

She meditated. "Would it be any good," she said, "if I were to call on Mrs. Wilkinson?"

Wilkinson looked grave. "It is most kind of you, but--just at present--I think it might be wiser not. She really, you know, isn't very fit."

Mrs. Norman's silence neither accepted nor rejected the preposterous pretext. Wilkinson went on, helping himself out as best he could:

"I can't talk about it; but I thought I ought to let you know. We've just got to give everything up."

She held herself in. A terrible impulse was upon her to tell him straight out that she did not see it; that it was too bad; that there was no reason why she should be called upon to give everything up.

"So, if we don't come," he said, "you'll understand? It's better--it really is better not."

His voice moved her, and her heart cried to him, "Poor Peter!"

"Yes," she said; "I understand."

Of course she understood. Poor Peter! so it had come to that?

"Can't you stay for tea?" she said.

"No; I must be going back to her."

He rose. His hand found hers. Its slight pressure told her that he gave and took the sadness of renunciation.

That winter Mrs. Wilkinson fell ill in good earnest, and Wilkinson became the prey of a pitiful remorse that kept him a prisoner by his wife's bedside.

He had always been a good man; it was now understood that he avoided Mrs. Norman because he desired to remain what he had always been.

III

There was also an understanding, consecrated by the piety of their renunciation, that Wilkinson was only waiting for his wife's death to marry Mrs. Norman.

And Wilkinson's wife was a long time in dying. It was not to be supposed that she would die quickly, as long as she could interfere with his happiness by living.

With her genius for frustrating and tormenting, she kept the poor man on tenter-hooks with perpetual relapses and recoveries. She jerked him on the chain. He was always a prisoner on the verge of his release. She was at death's door in March. In April she was to be seen, convalescent, in a bath-chair, being wheeled slowly up and down the Spaniard's Road. And Wilkinson walked by the chair, his shoulders bent, his eyes fixed on the ground, his face set in an expression of illimitable patience.

In the summer she gave it up and died; and in the following spring Wilkinson resumed his converse with Mrs. Norman. All things considered, he had left a decent interval.

By autumn Mrs. Norman's friends were all on tiptoe and craning their necks with expectation. It was assumed among them that Wilkinson would propose to her the following summer, when the first year of his widowhood should be ended. When summer came there was nothing between them that anybody could see. But it by no means followed that there was nothing to be seen. Mrs. Norman seemed perfectly sure of him. In her intense sympathy for Wilkinson she knew how to account for all his hesitations and delays. She could not look for any passionate, decisive step from the broken creature he had become; she was prepared to accept him as he was, with all his humiliating fears and waverings. The tragic things his wife had done to him could not be undone in a day.

Another year divided Wilkinson from his tragedy, and still he stood trembling weakly on the verge. Mrs. Norman began to grow thin. She lost her bright air of defiance, and showed herself vulnerable by the hand of time. And nothing, positively nothing, stood between them, except Wilkinson's morbid diffidence. So absurdly manifest was their case that somebody (the Troubadour man, in fact) interposed discreetly. In the most delicate manner possible, he gave Wilkinson to understand that he would not necessarily make himself obnoxious to Mrs. Norman were he to approach her with--well, with a view to securing their joint happiness--happiness which they had both earned by their admirable behavior.

That was all that was needed: a tactful friend of both parties to put it to Wilkinson simply and in the right way. Wilkinson rose from his abasement. There was a light in his eye that rejoiced the tactful friend; his face had a look of sudden, virile determination.

"I will go to her," he said, "now."

It was a dark, unpleasant evening, full of cold and sleet.

Wilkinson thrust his arms into an overcoat, jammed a cap down on his forehead, and strode into the weather. He strode into Mrs. Norman's drawing-room.

When Mrs. Norman saw that look on his face she knew that it was all right. Her youth rose in her again to meet it.

"Forgive me," said Wilkinson. "I had to come."

"Why not?" she said.

"It's so late."

"Not too late for me."

He sat down, still with his air of determination, in the chair she indicated. He waved away, with unconcealed impatience, the trivialities she used to soften the violence of his invasion.

"I've come," he said, "because I've had something on my mind. It strikes me that I've never really thanked you."

"Thanked me?"

"For your great kindness to my wife."

Mrs. Norman looked away.

"I shall always be grateful to you," said Wilkinson. "You were very good to her."

"Oh, no, no," she moaned.

"I assure you," he insisted, "she felt it very much. I thought you would like to know that."

"Oh, yes." Mrs. Norman's voice went very low with the sinking of her heart.

"She used to say you did more for her--you and your sister, with her beautiful music--than all the doctors. You found the thing that eased her. I suppose _you_ knew how ill she was--all the time? I mean before her last illness."

"I don't think," said she, "I did know."

His face, which had grown grave, brightened. "No? Well, you see, she was so plucky. Nobody could have known; I didn't always realize it myself."

Then he told her that for five years his wife had suffered from a nervous malady that made her subject to strange excitements and depressions.

"We fought it," he said, "together. Through it all, even on her worst days, she was always the same to me."

He sank deeper into memory.

"Nobody knows what she was to me. She wasn't one much for society. She went into it" (his manner implied that she had adorned it) "to please me, because I thought it might do her good. It was one of the things we tried."

Mrs. Norman stared at him. She stared through him and beyond him, and saw a strange man. She listened to a strange voice that sounded far off, from somewhere beyond forgetfulness.

"There were times," she heard him saying, "when we could not go out or see anyone. All we wanted was to be alone together. We could sit, she and I, a whole evening without saying a word. We each knew what the other wanted to say without saying it. I was always sure of her; she understood me as nobody else ever can." He paused. "All that's gone."

"Oh, no," Mrs. Norman said, "it isn't."

"It is." He illuminated himself with a faint flame of passion.

"Don't say that, when you have friends who understand."

"They don't. They can't. And," said Wilkinson, "I don't want them to."

Mrs. Norman sat silent, as in the presence of something sacred and supreme.

She confessed afterward that what had attracted her to Peter Wilkinson was his tremendous capacity for devotion. Only (this she did not confess) she never dreamed that it had been given to his wife.

MISS TARRANT'S TEMPERAMENT

I

She had arrived.

Fanny Brocklebank, as she passed the library, had thought it worth while to look in upon Straker with the news.

Straker could not help suspecting his hostess of an iniquitous desire to see how he would take it. Or perhaps she may have meant, in her exquisite benevolence, to prepare him. Balanced on the arm of the opposite chair, the humor of her candid eyes chastened by what he took to be a remorseful pity, she had the air of preparing him for something.

Yes. She had arrived. She was upstairs, over his very head--resting.

Straker screwed up his eyes. Only by a prodigious effort could he see Miss Tarrant resting. He had always thought of her as an unwinking, untiring splendor, an imperishable fascination; he had shrunk from inquiring by what mortal process she renewed her formidable flame.

By a gesture of shoulders and of eyebrows Fanny conveyed that, whatever he thought of Philippa Tarrant, she was more so than ever. She--she was simply stupendous. It was Fanny's word. He would see. She would appear at teatime. If he was on the terrace by five he would see something worth seeing. It was now a quarter to.

He gathered that Fanny had only looked in to tell him that he mustn't miss it.

Not for worlds would he have missed it. But the clock had struck five, and Straker was still lingering in the library over the correspondence that will pursue a rising barrister in his flight to the country. He wasn't in a hurry. He knew that Miss Tarrant would wait for her moment, and he waited too.

A smile of acclamation greeted his dilatory entrance on the terrace. He was assured that, though late, he was still in time. He knew it. She would not appear until the last guest had settled peaceably into his place, until the scene was clear for her stunning, her invincible effect. Then, in some moment of pause, of expectancy----

Odd that Straker, who was so used to it, who knew so well how she would do it, should feel so fresh an interest in seeing her do it again. It was almost as if he trembled for her and waited, wondering whether, this time, she would fail of her effect, whether he would ever live to see her disconcerted.

Disconcerting things had happened before now at the Brocklebanks', things incongruous with the ancient peace, the dignity, the grand style of Amberley. It was owing to the outrageous carelessness with which Fanny Brocklebank mixed her house parties. She delighted in daring combinations and startling contrasts. Straker was not at all sure that he himself had not been chosen as an element in a daring combination. Fanny could hardly have forgotten that, two years ago, he had been an adorer (not altogether prostrate) of Miss Tarrant, and he had given her no grounds for supposing that he had changed his attitude. In the absence of authentic information Fanny could only suppose that he had been dished, regularly dished, first by young Reggy Lawson and then by Mr. Higginson. It was for Mr. Higginson that Philippa was coming to Amberley--this year; last year it had been for Reggy Lawson; the year before that it had been for him, Straker. And Fanny did not scruple to ask them all three to meet one another. That was her way. Some day she would carry it too far. Straker, making his dilatory entrance, became aware of the distance to which his hostess had carried it already. It had time to grow on him, from wonder to the extreme of certainty, in his passage down the terrace to the southwest corner. There, on the outskirts of the group, brilliantly and conspicuously disposed, in postures of intimate communion, were young Laurence Furnival and Mrs. Viveash. Straker knew and Fanny knew, nobody indeed knew better than Fanny, that those two ought never to have been asked together. In strict propriety they ought not to have been at Amberley at all. Nobody but Fanny would have dreamed of asking them, still less of combining them with old Lady Paignton, who was propriety itself. And there was Miss Probyn. Why Miss Probyn? What on earth did dear Fanny imagine that she could do with Mary Probyn--or for her, if it came to that? In Straker's experience of Fanny it generally did come to that--to her doing things for people. He was aware, most acutely aware at this moment, of what, two years ago, she would have done for him. He had an idea that even now, at this hour, she was giving him his chance with Philippa. There would no doubt be competition; there always had been, always would be competition; but her charming eyes seemed to assure him that he should have his chance.

They called him to her side, where, with a movement of protection that was not lost on him, she had made a place for him apart. She begged him just to look at young Reggy Lawson, who sat in agony, sustaining a ponderous topic with Miss Probyn. He remembered Reggy? Her half-remorseful smile implied that he had good cause to remember him. He did. He was sorry for young Reggy, and hoped that he found consolation in the thought that Mr. Higginson was no longer young.

He remarked that Reggy was looking uncommonly fit. "So," he added irrelevantly, "is Mrs. Viveash. Don't you think?"

Fanny Brocklebank looked at Mrs. Viveash. It was obvious that she was giving her her chance, and that Mrs. Viveash was making the very most of it. She was leaning forward now, with her face thrust out toward Furnival; and on her face and on her mouth and in her eyes there burned visibly, flagrantly, the ungovernable, inextinguishable flame. As for the young man, while his eyes covered and caressed her, the tilt of his body, of his head, of his smile, and all his features expressed the insolence of possession. He was sure of her; he was sure of himself; he was sure of many things. He, at any rate, would never be disconcerted. Whatever happened he was safe. But she--there were things that, if one thing happened, she would have to face; and as she sat there, wrapped in her flame, she seemed to face them, to fling herself on the front of danger. You could see she was ready to take any risks, to pay any price for the chance that Fanny was giving her.

It really was too bad of Fanny.

"Why did you ask them?" Straker had known Fanny so long that he was privileged to inquire.

"Because--they wanted to be asked."

Fanny believed, and said that she believed, in giving people what they wanted. As for the consequences, there was no mortal lapse or aberration that could trouble her serenity or bring a blush to her enduring candor. If you came a cropper you might be sure that Fanny's judgment of you would be pure from the superstition of morality. She herself had never swerved in affection or fidelity to Will Brocklebank. She took her excitements, lawful or otherwise, vicariously in the doomed and dedicated persons of her friends. Brocklebank knew it. Blond, spectacled, middle-aged, and ponderous, he regarded his wife's performances and other people's with a leniency as amazing as her own. He was hovering about old Lady Paignton in the background, where Straker could see his benignant gaze resting on Furnival and Mrs. Viveash.

"Poor dears," said Fanny, as if in extenuation of her tolerance, "they _are_ enjoying themselves."

"So are you," said Straker.

"I like to see other people happy. Don't you?"

"Yes. If I'm not responsible for their--happiness."

"Who _is_ responsible?" She challenged.

"I say, aren't you?"

"Me responsible? Have you seen her husband?"

"I have."

"Well----" she left it to him.

"Where _is_ Viveash?"

"At the moment he is in Liverpool, or should be--on business."

"You didn't ask him?"

"Ask him? Is he the sort you can ask?"

"Oh, come, he's not so bad."

"He's awful. He's impossible. He--he excuses everything."

"I don't see him excusing this, or your share in it. If he knew."

"If he knew what?"

"That you'd asked Furny down."

"But he doesn't know. He needn't ever know."

"He needn't. But people like Viveash have a perfect genius for the unnecessary. Besides----"

He paused before the unutterable, and she faced him with her smile of innocent interrogation.

"Well," he said, "it's so jolly risky. These things, you know, only end one way."

Fanny's eyes said plainly that to _their_ vision all sorts of ways were possible.

"If it were any other man but----" He stopped short at Furnival's name.

Fanny lowered her eyes almost as if she had been convicted of indiscretion.

"You see," she said, "any other man wouldn't do. He's the one and only man. There never was any other. That's the awful part of it for her."

"Then why on earth did she marry the other fellow?"

"Because Furny couldn't marry her. And he wouldn't, either. That's not his way."

"I know it's not his way. And if Viveash took steps, what then?"

"Then perhaps--he'd have to."

"Good Lord----"

"Oh, it isn't a deep-laid plan."

"I never said it was."

He didn't think it. Marriages had been made at Amberley, and divorces, too; not by any plan of Fanny's, but by the risks she took. Seeing the dangerous way she mixed things, he didn't, he couldn't suspect her of a plan, but he did suspect her of an unholy joy in the prospect of possible explosions.

"Of course," she said, reverting to her vision, "of course he'd have to."

She looked at Straker with eyes where mischief danced a fling. It was clear that in that moment she saw Laurence Furnival the profane, Furnival the scorner of marriage, caught and tied: punished (she scented in ecstasy the delicate irony of it), so beautifully punished there where he had sinned.

Straker began to have some idea of the amusement Fanny got out of her house parties.

For a moment they had no more to say. All around them there was silence, born of Mrs. Viveash and her brooding, of young Reggy's trouble with Miss Probyn, and of some queer triangular complication in the converse of Brocklebank, Lady Paignton, and Mr. Higginson. In that moment and that pause Straker thought again of Miss Tarrant. It was, he said to himself, the pause and the moment for her appearance. And (so right was he in his calculation) she appeared.

II

He saw her standing in the great doorway of the east wing where the three steps led down on to the terrace. She stood on the topmost step, poised for her descent, shaking her scarf loose to drift in a white mist about her. Then she came down the terrace very slowly, and the measured sweep of her limbs suggested that all her movements would be accomplished to a large rhythm and with a superb delay.

Her effect (she had not missed it) was to be seen in all its wonder and perfection on Laurence Furnival's face. Averted suddenly from Mrs. Viveash, Furnival's face expressed the violence of his shock and his excitement. It was clear that he had never seen anything quite like Philippa Tarrant before, and that he found her incredibly and ambiguously interesting. Ambiguously--no other word did justice to the complexity of his facial expression. He did not know all at once what to make of Philippa, and, from further and more furtive manifestations of Furnival's, Straker gathered that the young man was making something queer. He had a sort of sympathy with him, for there had been moments when he himself had not known exactly what to make. He doubted whether even Fanny Brocklebank (who certainly made the best of her) had ever really known.

Whatever her inscrutable quality, this year she was, as Fanny had said, more so than ever. She _was_ stupendous; and that although she was not strictly speaking beautiful. She had no color in her white face or in her black hair; she had no color but the morbid rose of her mouth and the brown of her eyes. Yet Mrs. Viveash, with all her vivid gold and carmine, went out before her; so did pretty Fanny, though fresh as paint and burnished to perfection; as for the other women, they were nowhere. She made the long golden terrace at Amberley a desert place for the illusion of her somber and solitary beauty. She was warm-fleshed, warm-blooded. The sunshine soaked into her as she stood there. What was more, she had the air of being entirely in keeping with Amberley's grand style.

Straker saw that from the first she was aware of Furnival. At three yards off she held him with her eyes, lightly, balancing him; then suddenly she let him go. She ceased to be aware of him. In the moment of introduction she turned from him to Straker.

"Mr. Straker--but--how delightful!"

"Don't say you didn't expect to see me here."

"I didn't. And Mr. Higginson!" She laughed at the positive absurdity of it. "_And_ Mr. Lawson and Miss Probyn."

She held herself a little back and gazed upon the group with her wide and wonderful eyes.

"You look," she said, "as if something interesting had happened."

She had seated herself beside Straker so that she faced Mrs. Viveash and young Furnival. She appeared not to know that Furnival was staring at her.

"_She's_ the only interesting thing that's happened--so far," he muttered. (There was no abatement of his stare.) Mrs. Viveash tried to look as if she agreed with him.

Miss Tarrant had heard him. Her eyes captured and held him again, a little longer this time. Straker, who watched the two, saw that something passed between them, between Philippa's gaze and Furnival's stare.

III

That evening he realized completely what Fanny had meant when she said that Philippa was more so than ever. He observed this increase in her quality, not only in the broad, massive impression that she spread, but in everything about her, her gestures, her phrases, the details of her dress. Every turn of her head and of her body displayed a higher flamboyance, a richer audacity, a larger volume of intention. He was almost afraid for her lest she should overdo it by a shade, a touch, a turn. You couldn't get away from her. The drawing-room at Amberley was filled with her, filled with white surfaces of neck and shoulders, with eyes somber yet aflood with light, eyes that were perpetually at work upon you and perpetually at play, that only rested for a moment to accentuate their movement and their play. This effect of her was as of many women, approaching, withdrawing, and sliding again into view, till you were aware with a sort of shock that it was one woman, Philippa Tarrant, all the time, and that all the play and all the movement were concentrated on one man, Laurence Furnival.

She never let him alone for a minute. He tried, to do him justice he tried--Straker saw him trying--to escape. But, owing to Miss Tarrant's multiplicity and omnipresence, he hadn't a chance. You saw him fascinated, stupefied by the confusion and the mystery of it. She carried him off under Mrs. Viveash's unhappy nose. Wherever she went she called him, and he followed, flushed and shamefaced. He showed himself now pitifully abject, and now in pitiful revolt. Once or twice he was positively rude to her, and Miss Tarrant seemed to enjoy that more than anything.

Straker had never seen Philippa so uplifted. She went like the creature of an inspiring passion, a passion moment by moment fulfilled and unappeased, renascent, reminiscent, and in all its moments gloriously aware of itself.

The pageant of Furnival's subjugation lasted through the whole of Friday evening. All Saturday she ignored him and her work on him. You would have said it had been undertaken on Mrs. Viveash's account, not his, just to keep Mrs. Viveash in her place and show her what she, Philippa, could do. All Sunday, by way of revenge, Furnival ignored Miss Tarrant, and consoled himself flagrantly with Mrs. Viveash.

It was on the afternoon of Sunday that Mr. Higginson was seen sitting out on the terrace with Miss Tarrant. Reggy Lawson had joined them, having extricated himself with some dexterity from the toils of the various ladies who desired to talk to him. His attitude suggested that he was taking his dubious chance against Mr. Higginson. It was odd that it should be dubious, Reggy's chance; he himself was so assured, so engaging in his youth and physical perfection. Straker would have backed him against any man he knew.

Fanny Brocklebank had sent Straker out into the rose garden with Mary Probyn. He left Miss Tarrant on the terrace alone with Mr. Higginson and Reggy. He left her talking to Mr. Higginson, listening to Mr. Higginson, behaving beautifully to Mr. Higginson, and ignoring Reggy. Straker, with Mary Probyn, walked round and round the rose garden, which was below Miss Tarrant's end of the terrace, and while he talked to Mary Probyn he counted the rounds. There were twenty to the mile. Every time he turned he had Miss Tarrant full in view, which distracted him from Mary Probyn. Mary didn't seem to mind. She was a nice woman; plain (in a nice, refined sort of way), and she knew it, and was nice to you whether you talked to her or not. He did not find it difficult to talk to Mary: she was interested in Miss Tarrant; she admired her, but not uncritically.

"She is the least bit too deliberate," was her comment. "She calculates her effects."

"She does," said Straker, "so that she never misses one of them. She's a consummate artist."

He had always thought her _that_. (Ninth round.) But as her friend he could have wished her a freer and sincerer inspiration. After all, there _was_ something that she missed.

(Tenth round.) Miss Tarrant was still behaving beautifully to Mr. Higginson. Mary Probyn marveled to see them getting on so well together. (Fifteenth round.)

Reggy had left them; they were not getting on together quite so well.

(Twentieth round.) They had risen; they were coming down the steps into the garden; Straker heard Miss Tarrant ordering Mr. Higginson to go and talk to Miss Probyn. He did so with an alacrity which betrayed a certain fear of the lady he admired.

Miss Tarrant, alone with Straker, turned on him the face which had scared Mr. Higginson. She led him in silence and at a rapid pace down through the rose garden and out upon the lawn beyond. There she stood still and drew a deep breath.

"You had no business," she said, "to go away like that and leave me with him."

"Why not? Last year, if I remember----"

He paused. He remembered perfectly that last year she had contrived pretty often to be left with him. Last year Mr. Higginson, as the Liberal candidate for East Mickleham, seemed about to achieve a distinction, which, owing to his defeat by an overwhelming majority, he had unfortunately not achieved. He had not been prudent. He had stood, not only for East Mickleham, but for a principle. It was an unpopular principle, and he knew it, and he had stuck to it all the same, with obstinacy and absurdity, in the teeth, the furiously gnashing teeth, of his constituency. You couldn't detach Mr. Higginson from his principle, and as long as he stuck to it a parliamentary career was closed to him. It was sad, for he had a passion for politics; he had chosen politics as the one field for the one ponderous talent he possessed. The glory of it had hung ponderously about Mr. Higginson last year; but this year, cut off from politics, it was pitiable, the nonentity he had become. Straker could read that in his lady's alienated eyes.

"Last year," he continued, "you seemed to find him interesting."

"You think things must be what they seem?"

Her tone accused him of insufficient metaphysical acumen.

"There is no necessity. Still, as I said, last year----"

"Could Mr. Higginson, in any year, be interesting?"

"Did you hope," Straker retorted, "to make him so by cultivating him?"

"It's impossible to say what Mr. Higginson might become under--centuries of cultivation. It would take centuries."

That was all very well, he said to himself. If he didn't say that Miss Tarrant had pursued Mr. Higginson, he distinctly recalled the grace with which she had allowed herself to be pursued. She _had_ cultivated him. And, having done it, having so flagrantly and palpably and under Straker's own eyes gone in for him, how on earth did she propose to get out of it now? There was, Straker said to himself again, no getting out of it. As for centuries----

"Let us go back," he persisted, "to last year."

"Last year he had his uses. He was a good watch-dog."

"A _what_?"

"A watch-dog. He kept other people off."

For a moment he was disarmed by the sheer impudence of it. He smiled a reminiscent smile.

"I should have thought his function was rather, wasn't it, to draw them on?"

Her triumphing eyes showed him that he had given himself into her hands. He should have been content with his reminiscent smile. Wasn't he, her eyes inquired, for a distinguished barrister, just a little bit too crude?