Chapter THREE: As You Sow

“. . . The morrow brought the task.
Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
By shutting all too zealous for their sin:
Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask.
But, oh, the bitter taste her beauty had! . . .

“. . . A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown
The pit of infamy: and then again
He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove
To ape the magnanimity of love. . . .”

GEORGE MEREDITH: _Modern Love_.

1

I hardly remember when the meaning became clear to me.

I was reading with but half my attention, when I met a reference to Croxton Hall, followed by familiar names. The letter was badly written, in pencil, and more than badly arranged. The writer had been ill; he was so ill at that moment that I could not make out the signature. I examined the envelope. There a different hand had traced the bold address; I noticed for the first time that the letter had been forwarded from the Crawleighs’ house in Berkeley Square; then I saw an American stamp and understood the faint pencil scratching.

It was from Eric Lane; and he was dying as he wrote.

2

The shock numbed me; and I read again with so little attention that I had to turn back in the middle. Then a second shock drove the first from my mind.

Eric was dying: yes, I realized that. He was bidding Barbara farewell; and, in my first uncaring glance, I had seen so much that I must now see all. After losing Barbara, he had found little inducement to live; and, though he had once hoped to marry little Ivy Maitland, John Gaymer had returned—almost on the eve of the wedding—to establish again his empire over Ivy’s will. Eric had made his failing lungs an excuse to set her free:

“_Two years would have cured me; but I wanted her to choose for herself. And, when she too dropped out of my life, I didn’t try to get well._” . . .

There followed pages of apology, pages of explanation. Eric’s love for Barbara was consuming him; and, as the flame died to a pale flicker, he forgot family, friends and self in desperate prayers for her happiness. Once more the name of Croxton Hall fell like a black shadow across his mind. There was an agonized reference to some rebuff that he had inflicted upon her. Then came the reason for the rebuff.

It was while I was in Ireland that Barbara had gone to the Pentyres. When the party broke up on the first night—Eric’s apology could not have been more damningly circumstantial if he had been indicting her—, she had concealed herself till he came up to bed, then invaded his room, finally begged him to take her, take her away. Her marriage to me was a mistake; I should not want to keep her when I realized my mistake; I loved her enough to forgive her. . . .

I remembered, I now understood her distraught questions whether I should be broken-hearted if I lost her, whether I was prepared to sacrifice life, honour, everything to secure her happiness. . . .

In the heartlessness and abandonment of that moment, I knew, as well as if I had seen her, that Barbara was wholly mad. I recalled the telegram in which she said that she was missing me; I remembered her loving welcome, on my return; I heard again her promise that she was going to make a new start. And then I called up any self-control that remained to keep me from going mad too. The child that lay buried at Crawleigh was not Eric’s. His letter told me that; and, when I found myself believing his letter, I felt that I was still sane. Barbara was innocent of everything but a whole-hearted will and intention to betray me; and Eric had saved her from that. After he had repelled her, she was innocent of everything but calculated hypocrisy, sustained triumphantly for fifteen months. I could never believe her again.

And what then?

A lust for revenge blinded me; and, though I could hardly hold a pen, I addressed an envelope to Barbara and thrust Eric’s letter, without comment, half inside it. Then I thought of him dying in California, by now perhaps dead. I burned the envelope. As it crinkled and scattered, I promised Eric’s letter the same fate; then I hesitated for fear that my lust for magnanimity might prove more deadly than my impulse of revenge. Was my life, also, to be a calculated hypocrisy?

I paced up and down the room till a clock struck midnight. I had lost the post, I realized.

Then I looked at the other letters. The first was from Barbara. If I intended to take a holiday at all this year, would I not come down to Crawleigh? Thanks to this Irish trouble—how remote it all seemed!—I had refused all my shooting invitations; but now that the McSwiney chapter was closed . . .

I knew, unreasoningly, that I could not meet Barbara. Whatever happened to us later, I must have time to think. I telephoned to O’Rane and asked him to accompany me on a motoring tour. I believe I told him—I, of all people!—that he seemed overwrought.

“No holidays for me, old man,” he answered with regret.

“I doubt if you’ll find it a holiday,” I said. “I want to discover what the great public’s thinking about.” . . .

“I wish I could manage it . . .”

And then my self-control left me:

“Raney, you must!,” I said. “I’m going through the worst time of my life, something more awful than I thought could ever happen to me. If you _knew_ . . .”

“You can lend me some pyjamas, I suppose?,” he interrupted in a changed voice. “I’ll have my gear sent round in the morning. I’m sorry, George. To the best of my poor ability, you know I’ll see you through to the grave and beyond.”

3

As I waited in the hall, I drafted a telegram to explain that I was being called away from London on business. O’Rane arrived in the middle; and I led him at once to his room. I could not unburden myself yet; and, as we drove out of London next day, I found it necessary to pretend that I was enquiring into unemployment.

“Bertrand’s afraid the men will get out of hand,” I explained.

I might have said that in some parts of England the men were already out of hand. It was at this time that the “Homes for Heroes” campaign was launched: as the government failed to provide sufficient houses, a homeless band of Welsh quarrymen seized a public hall and announced that they would stay there until cottages had been built for them. They were led by a man, then unknown, named John Griffiths, who followed up his first success by organizing similar raids on any convenient unoccupied land. No one was paying much attention at present; as Bertrand said, we were resigned to unemployment in London, but danger would march hand-in-hand with winter, when the government declared its housing-policy and when the official leaders of labour indicated whether they supported “Griffiths’ landgrabbers.”

“Where are you making for first?,” O’Rane asked.

Until that moment I had not thought of any destination.

“We’re half way between Reading and Hungerford. I don’t know. . . . I’ve had a bit of a shock; and you’ll find me rather disjointed. . . . God! I don’t know what I should have done without you!,” I broke out.

O’Rane’s fingers rested for a moment on my arm:

“Old man, you knew I was always at hand if you needed me!” His unseeing eyes softened; and his voice fell to a whisper:

“_‘I cannot come to you—I am afraid._
_I will not come to you. There, it is said._
_Though all night long I lie awake and know_
_That you are lying waking even so:_
_And all the day you tread a lonely road_
_And come at sunset to a dark abode._
_Yet, if so be you are indeed my friend,_
_Then, at the end,_
_There is one road, a road I’ve never gone,_
_And down that road you shall not pass alone;_
_And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—’_”

He paused; and I waited for the rime that should complete the couplet:

“How does it go on?”

“_‘And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—_
_. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died.’_

It’s . . . Chinese, I was told. Two or three hundred years before Homer.”

I drove on, staring drowsily ahead of me at the broad, unfolding ribbon of black road and the monotonous water-meadows on either hand. The tender warmth of the little poem made me forget for a moment the bleakness of the Kennet valley in late autumn; and, after a sleepless night, the rushing wind drugged my brain.

“_Though all night long I lie awake and know_
_That you are lying waking even so.” . . ._

I murmured the lines to keep myself from falling asleep. What had Barbara’s thoughts been when I lay waking the night before? Suddenly my sight was dimmed with a curtain of blood; and I stopped the car in twice its length because I could not see the road before me. If indeed I had fallen asleep, I had looked for a moment, through this red curtain, on a sun-washed verandah, where a dying man was gasping for breath.

“_And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—_
_. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died._”

The vision faded before I could make out whether Eric was speaking to Barbara or listening for her voice.

The unexpected jolt had flung O’Rane out of his seat; and, as he pulled himself back into place, he could hear me stopping the engine.

“Is anything the matter?,” he asked.

“Eric Lane’s just died.”

“Good God! When?”

“This moment. I . . . pulled up to avoid him,” I answered without knowing what I was saying. “He’s gone now. Poor devil! Oh, poor devil!”

If I was shaken, O’Rane was in no better case:

“Those lines . . . I had them from him.”

“I know.”

“You’d heard him . . .?”

“I heard him then . . . At least I think . . .” The road was once more stretching firmly ahead of me to a belt of leafless trees. In the meadows on either side I saw deliberate cattle splashing up to their knees in muddy water. “It’s ten to two, Raney. Shall we see if we can find a place for lunch?”

“That’ll wait. You’re not fit to drive any more at present. . . . You’d . . . better tell me everything, old man.”

“But I’ve told you! I knew Eric was dead or dying because I had . . . I saw a letter from him quite recently. My nerves are rather jumpy.” . . .

“It’ll break poor Lady Lane’s heart,” he murmured. “And it’ll be a shock for Ivy.”

Slipping his arm through mine, O’Rane led me into a field by the roadside. Though he must have guessed that Eric’s letter had something to do with my frantic appeal the evening before, I could not speak at present for fear of breaking down. ‘_Boyish to cry—can’t help it—bad fever—weak—ill._’ For many moments my head sang with Mr. Jingle’s clipped phrases. A shock for Ivy? Some one had told me her marriage was all the failure that Mr. Justice Maitland had predicted. It would have been better if she had married Eric: she might have kept him alive. It would have been better if Barbara had married him, better if he had never left America, best of all if he and she and I had never been born. . . .

“Babs can’t be ill,” O’Rane murmured as though he were thinking aloud; “or you wouldn’t be here. Sit down and smoke a cigarette.”

When he returned with the basket, I was able to tell him. I wondered at the time, I wonder still, whether I did right; but I know that I could not help it. He let me talk myself out, only asking dispassionately at the end:

“What are you going to do about it?”

And I talked myself out a second time, until the fever left me and I lay back on the rug, almost too much exhausted to move or think. Physical infidelity, committed in a moment of passion, stood in relation to this long infidelity of spirit as a blow struck in hot blood stands to a calculated and artfully concealed murder. Had Barbara left me and come back, as Sonia left and came back to Raney, I believe I could have forgiven her. After deceiving me once, she could deceive me again; to get what she wanted, in her own way, she would sacrifice me as she had sacrificed Jack Waring and Eric Lane.

It was all over. And I wanted her desperately. And it was all over.

Hitherto, I had always pretended that there was something I did not understand in her tragic entanglements: Jack and Eric were straight as the day; if they both fled from the woman they both loved, I wished to think that they were parted by a lover’s quarrel which both were too proud or obstinate to heal; I refused to believe that they had run from her in disgust.

“I’m here because Barbara will soon be coming back to London,” I told O’Rane. “I . . . couldn’t divorce her if I wanted to; but I can let her divorce me.” . . .

“She won’t be very . . . happy alone,” he answered reflectively. “When Jack Waring disappeared, she turned to Eric out of sheer loneliness and misery; when Eric went, she turned to you. If you go, George, she’ll turn to some one else. A married woman without children, without a husband, more lonely and miserable than ever before . . . Well, you won’t have long to wait for your divorce.”

Four-and-twenty hours earlier, I should have called my best friend to account if he had warned me that Barbara needed watching. Now she had convicted herself and robbed me of all temptation to defend her.

“I don’t see much difference,” I said, “between the woman who runs away with a man and the woman who only stays at home because the man won’t run away with her.”

“There’s still a difference between the woman who keeps her reputation and the woman who loses it. When women become reckless . . . It’s a big responsibility to give them the first push down the slope.”

The short sunlight of late autumn was fading; and I busied myself with packing our luncheon-basket. As I had not asked for sympathy, I could not complain if none was offered.

“If I give her the chance of divorcing me,” I said, “I’m not accountable for anything she does after that.”

There was a long silence. Then O’Rane asked:

“What will you do?”

I had not thought; but, in that moment, I had a vision of the blue water, the close-packed green woods and the vivid fuchsia hedges of Lake House.

“Go back to Ireland, I expect.”

I was making enough clatter with plates and knives to convince the least attentive that my patience was exhausted; but O’Rane lay with his hands clasped behind his head, frowning a little at his own thoughts and wholly unmoved by my demonstration.

“Will divorce make for Barbara’s happiness?,” he asked in a maddening drawl. “You can’t quite wash your hands of a woman you’ve married. You weren’t content, you see, with somebody of your own mould. Your wife had to be brilliant, beautiful, romantic, tragic. . . . You married Babs when you knew she’d been shaken to the depths of her soul by Jack Waring, when she’d been broken to the bottom of her heart by Eric Lane.”

“I thought she’d had so much romance and tragedy that she’d be glad to settle down quietly.”

“When she wasn’t in love with you? Has any one settled down quietly after gambling with death for nearly five years?”

“I’d have forgiven anything if she’d told me!,” I cried, as we went back.

We must have driven for an hour before he spoke again:

“Well, George, if you want my advice, I should recommend you to burn Eric’s letter and pretend you’ve never seen it. Then begin again at the beginning.”

“You imagine I can forget it?,” I asked.

“If you think more of her and less of yourself. The bigger the crime, the more she must have been tempted: try to understand that instead of counting up the things a man has a ‘right’ to expect of his wife. Rights here, rights there! _Every one’s_ thinking too much of his individual rights, George! Every group of nations, every nation, almost every man and woman.” . . .

4

After two years I can appreciate O’Rane’s patience better than was possible at the time. I know now that he was distracted by a civil war of his own; but I was too much preoccupied to enquire why Sonia and the children were in Hampshire; I should have been aggrieved if any one else had presumed to be unhappy.

“I suppose it’s all the same to you where we spend the night?,” I asked, several hours later, as we paused at a sign-post.

In the gathering dusk I could distinguish nothing but the gloomy contours of Stonehenge and the sharp, black outline of innumerable government huts. Then I saw O’Rane prick up his ears at the tramp of weary feet.

“Anywhere you like,” he answered, as a white-faced army advanced into the glare of my lamps. “I was in camp here in ’14. It’s a dam’ bad step. Recruits, I suppose. We should have been given hell if we hadn’t been smarter than that.”

As the column approached, I saw fifty or sixty men in tattered civilian clothes. Two or three wore medals; the rest had a brave line of ribbons on their coats. At their head marched two standard-bearers with the adequate device: “_Wanted in 1914. Not wanted now._”

“They’ve had their hell; and they’re not through with it yet,” I said.

It was the first time that I had encountered the searing reproach of that device; and, as I described it to O’Rane, I recalled—as in a dream of some other life—that I was the editor of a political review and that I had been sent to study unemployment. There was an external world, then. At this moment my uncle was probably taking the chair at our weekly dinner.

As the tramp of feet grew fainter, O’Rane half rose in his seat and then subsided with a groan:

“No, I _can’t_! It’s _not_ my business to pay other people’s debts. The state turned these men into soldiers, in a moment of blue funk; the state must turn them back into civilians. Sometimes I see so red that I want to hold this country to ransom. ‘You’ve no use for these fellows,’ I want to say. ‘Well, now I’m going to shew you what would have happened if they hadn’t come forward when they did.’ After a week of Belgian atrocities, there’d be a marked increase in popular gratitude! And I thought this war would produce a . . . spirit of fraternity!”

I had hoped for it, even if I had not expected it after the first months of 1915. Quick conversions are never permanent: and permanent conversions are never quick. Our drive that day, past great estates and big manufacturing towns, might have been chosen as an object-lesson in the aggressive competition that strangles fraternity at birth.

That night, when we lay at Gloucester, and next day, as we drove through the soul-searching loveliness of the Stroud valley, we talked of education and the gospel of humanity, as we had not talked since our Indian summer at Cannes; and once or twice, for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, I forgot to think consciously of Barbara. H. G. Wells, after years of criticism, was turning teacher on his own account; and _The Outline of History_ was conspicuous in every house and railway carriage I entered at this time. One man at least was pleading for the universal spirit; and his plea gave food for thought to the people who had shouted for blood and gold in the 1918 election. The havoc which Keynes had made in the economics of the peace-treaty was completed by the havoc which Wells made of its history and its spiritual trend.

“And yet,” I exclaimed in sudden reaction, “those books have left things where they were!” The treaty, which could not be enforced, had to be modified: the British representatives had to explain why their crazy election-pledges could not be fulfilled. At regular intervals Germany threatened to default; France retaliated with a threat of further occupation; a flustered knot of prime ministers collected at the first convenient watering-place; and a punctual press announced that the results of the conference were wholly satisfactory. “I sometimes despair of education. . . . And, damn it, Raney, you haven’t told me what to do when I get back to London!”

“You’ve not yet told me what you want to do. . . . It’s strange how people can hold mutually destructive opinions at the same moment! Lucien de Grammont talks piteously about German ‘revenge’ at a time when the French are pouring Senegalese troops into the occupied area!”

“Roger Dainton will tell you that a restored Germany means a new war and that an unrestored Germany is losing us our best customer.” . . .

At O’Rane’s skilled prompting, we argued our way farther west and farther until, at the end of a week, we stalled the car and strolled on foot, because we had reached Land’s End. Surrounded by water, in the spray and wind of the last rocky outposts of England, I felt my sanity and self-control returning to me; but a single day without the distraction of driving brought back the obsession. I flung myself into a voluminous report on _Unemployment and Public Feeling_, only to discover that my four folios might have been compressed into the single word “indifference”. There was no question of class or party: every one flabbily deplored the breakdown of industry, flabbily pitied the unemployed, flabbily felt that somebody should do something. Accent and idiom might change, but the stale thought and worn expression changed only by becoming more stale: the wayside tap echoed the slipshod reasoning of an Atlantic liner; a benighted book-maker in a forgotten Cornish village talked of trades unions in a way that I had thought only possible in my father-in-law; and there were Roger Daintons manipulating beer-engines in every bar.

I reminded O’Rane of his scheme for endowing schools and buying papers till the education of an entire people proceeded from a single pair of lips.

“I still believe a press-monopoly is possible,” he answered, “but who’s to be trusted with it? Horatio Bottomley is a political messiah to several millions; but I’d never give a messiah the power of a messiah unless he were ready to die as a messiah.”

“Talleyrand’s advice to those about to found new religions,” I said.

“‘Get yourself crucified’? Wasn’t he right? Since people began to doubt the old heaven and hell, the churches have been losing their power: they had less to offer, less to threaten; and their ministers became officials instead of martyrs. Christianity was born of one martyrdom; and it will only die when there are no more martyrs. There were martyrs in the war, if we could only make people remember them . . .”

“But the war’s over,” I interrupted. “How can you keep that exaltation alive in time of peace?”

The question was unanswered when I turned the head of the car, next day, towards London. We were both shirking our private difficulties; and, though we argued endlessly about the world as we wished to make it, the shadow of our own narrow troubles darkened that free, generous concern for humanity which we talked so eagerly of inculcating in people whose narrow troubles engrossed them no less blindly.

“I’d better tell Sonia we’re on our way back,” said O’Rane. “If you’ve any idea where we shall be to-morrow morning, I’ll say she can wire to the post-office.”

“Is she at Crowley Court?,” I asked.

“Yes. Remember taking her down there the night Tom’s death came through? She’d put her eyes on sticks for you over that, George.”

“She was at her wits’ end, poor child,” I began.

Then, whether or no he was spreading a snare for me, I thought of Barbara by herself at the Abbey, reading of a “well-known playwright’s death” and stumbling blindly through the dim, panelled rooms in vain search of some one to comfort her.

“We can go back by way of Crowley Court,” I said. “I’ll send Babs a telegram. If she’s still at the Abbey . . .”

“I’m entirely in your hands,” said O’Rane.

That night we lay at Exeter; and next day we headed for Southampton. As we got into the car, I was given a telegram from Barbara:

“_All well here hope you are enjoying yourselves can you
possibly return by way of Crawleigh I need you._”

5

Only when I was committed irrevocably did I realize that I had not decided how I was to meet her.

“I can’t pretend for five minutes,” I said. “I never could.”

“She’s . . . entitled to see her own letters,” O’Rane suggested. “You opened this at her request . . .”

“But, good God, man, she’s my wife!,” I broke out; and, remembering the sustained deceit of these fifteen months, I could not trust myself to say more.

We drove our last stage with heavy hearts. Southampton was shrouded in the first fog of the year; and, when it lifted on the confines of the New Forest, I saw bare trees, dead leaves and all November’s decay. Every few minutes O’Rane asked me what point we had now reached; and I knew that for him too every turn of the road was marked by a memory and guarded by a ghost. Through eyes half-closed I could see Jim Loring and the Daintons striding, three abreast, on a leave-out walk from Melton to Crowley; I could see Eric Lane piloting me through Lashmar village to call on his father. . . . Strange! Though he was now dead, though I had almost loved him and though we had both been punished for trying to play a game according to its rules, I could not forgive him for flinging this last shadow across Barbara’s life, I could not whisper his name without a shudder.

As we drove through a country that was haunted with the shades of our dead selves, I fell to thinking whether a man was happier in the discontent of eighteen or the disillusion of thirty-eight. I no longer aspired to Westminster Abbey and a nation’s gratitude; but, like other men on the threshold of middle-age, I made the discovery, incomprehensible to a schoolboy, that I had no heir to shelter himself under the trees which I had planted; and love seemed almost to have been left out of my life.

In Crawleigh village, my nerve broke and I headed for London; then, for very shame in the reproach of O’Rane’s silence, I turned, though I knew that no love was awaiting me here, and splashed through the floods to the Abbey. Neave was fishing perfunctorily by the bridge and volunteered to take the car up to the house if I wanted to look for Barbara.

“The guv’nor’s in London for this Unknown Soldier business,” he explained. “So it’s only the four of us. Just right for a nice game of cards.”

“How’s Babs?,” I asked, as unconcernedly as I could.

“Oh, fit as a flea,” he answered. “She’s wandering about the park, waiting for you.”

I made a pretence of hurrying forward as the car shot ahead; then, as it passed out of sight, I leaned against the parapet of the bridge till the low grey line of the refectory wall deepened to black and was gradually lost in the oncoming tide of darkness. I was still there when the first rare lights twinkled at the windows and paled as the curtains were drawn. Then I heard a distant whistle and turned to the house before my impulse to hurry away got the better of me.

I was halfway to the gardens when I saw the white coil of Barbara’s furs.

“Darling! I was expecting you hours ago!,” she cried. “Did you have a breakdown? I hope I didn’t upset your plans by asking you to come here, George: I wanted you most awfully.”

I could not see her face clearly; but her voice thrilled me till I had to bite my lip and look away. I wondered how I had existed without her all these weeks. The long rest had given her back her old vitality. Her eyes, when we entered the hall, were shining; and for a moment I fancied that I was seeing her in a vision or that I was emerging from twelve days’ delirium.

“My _dear_!,” I cried; and she laughed with childlike exultation at my joy in her.

“Pleased to see your deserted and ill-used wife?”

“Babs . . .” Her cheeks were pink from the biting cold outside; her hair and eye-lashes were spangled with tiny raindrops. As she flung her coat aside and twined her arms about my neck, a familiar, faint, warm fragrance rose from the carnations at her waist. As she clung to me and our lips met, I could have fancied that no other man had ever made her heart beat so quickly. “I’ve never _seen_ you like this before!,” I cried.

“I’ve been getting well . . . for _your_ sake, sweetheart. I’ve been so patient, so good. And I _did_ miss you so.”

“I’ve been thinking of you day and night,” I answered truthfully enough.

“The next time you go away, I’ll tell your secretary to send me a daily telegram: ‘_Missing you dreadfully best love George._’ You’d never do it on your own account. What’s the matter, darling?”

Unconsciously I must have drawn away from her embrace. The delirium was returning; and I could only think of the telegram which she had sent me the day after she asked Eric Lane to run away with her.

“Some bad news, I’m afraid. I didn’t want to spoil our first moment together, but you’ll have to be told some time. I’ve not seen any papers . . .”

Barbara’s hands fell from my shoulders; and she walked slowly to the fire.

“I . . . _have_,” she whispered; and her head drooped as though I had struck her.

“You mean . . . what . . . what _I_ mean?,” I stammered.

As she turned, her eyes were blinded with tears; and her hands groped for support.

“Darling, if it had been any one else, should I have had to say ‘I _need_ you’? . . . When I saw the great cruel headlines, I hoped and prayed that I might die . . . till I knew you were being sorry for me. You’re all I have; and I promised myself I’d repay you for all your patience.” She could go on no longer; and her terrible tearless sobbing shook her till I feared that her heart must break. “I _can’t_ be brave any longer.” As she once more hid her face against my chest, I could feel her whole body trembling in the last vain effort to restrain her weeping. “When . . . when . . . when did you hear?”

“Twelve days ago,” I answered, as I led her to a chair.

“The day he died. You . . . didn’t tell me, George. Did you think I shouldn’t see?”

“Strictly speaking, I didn’t hear for certain. I knew he was dying . . .”

“There was a long article in _The Times_. Oh, so _cold_! . . . I knew he was terribly ill. That’s what made _me_ so ill this summer, though I couldn’t tell you before. I thought you might guess; the doctor did. I’ve been going up and down, up and down, as he got better or worse. The afternoon he died I fainted; and they all thought I was dead too. Now you understand why I wrote such horrid letters: as he slipped away, I couldn’t bear myself. I _did_ try to keep it all to myself. I knew how I hurt you by talking about him. But no one told me anything! . . . I couldn’t ask Lady Lane for fear she’d say I’d killed him. And he died before I could ask him to forgive me.”

Barbara was no longer trying to control her tears; and I was no longer thinking of anything but a means of comforting her.

“He didn’t feel there was anything to forgive,” I assured her.

“Ah, that was the way he talked!”

“It was the way he thought, Babs.”

“Then he might have spared me this!,” Barbara broke out. “Just one word!”

As her head fell forward, I knelt down and chafed her hands.

“He may have been too weak,” I said.

“A message, then! I can’t _bear_ it! I didn’t think he _could_ be so cruel.”

In furious self-scorn, I remembered telling O’Rane I could not pretend for five minutes that I had not received Eric’s letter. Very little more than five minutes had passed since Barbara and I met.

“In justice to him,” I said, “there _was_ a message. I was paraphrasing it. He never dreamt you needed his forgiveness, he was begging for yours. He loved you as much at the end as he’d ever done. His last words—so faint I could hardly read them!—were ‘God bless you’. And we must assume that he died at peace. You’d forgiven him so often, he said, that, if God was disposed to judge him, he believed you would intercede.”

In her agony of spirit, Barbara’s thoughts were reflected as clearly as if she had spoken them. Her eyes lightened for a moment in unutterable relief; they clouded as she looked suspiciously to see if I was inventing this opportune comfort; then she stared through me and past me to Eric’s death-bed six thousand miles away.

“He . . . wrote to you?,” she enquired after a long silence.

I half nodded; but, with Barbara’s eyes on mine, I could not put a lie into words.

“The letter was to you,” I said. “I opened it with the rest.”

There was a single piteous whimper. Then she looked at me in perplexity:

“Where is it? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s in my despatch-box. . . . I didn’t want to harrow you, darling. I think he was delirious part of the time.” . . .

“Will you get it for me?”

“I’ve told you all that matters. It will only make you miserable to read it.”

She seemed not to have heard me; but a strangled laugh, more terrible than her crying, shewed the worth of my comfort:

“D’you think anything can make me more miserable than I’ve been these last twelve days?,” she asked. Then she tore herself from me and stood with her hands pressed to her temples, staring at me in mingled bewilderment and rage. “All the time . . .? And you . . .? The last thing he ever wrote . . . oh, I might have reached him while there was still time! When did you get the letter?”

“Just before I left London.”

“While he was still alive . . . Ah, God, the cruelty of kind people!” With the tears still wet on her cheeks, she forced a smile. “And you’ve been carrying it about ever since? George dear, you’ve punished me for all the crimes I’ve committed and all that I shall never have time to commit if I live to be a thousand. . . . May I have my letter?”

For an instant, as she stood limply drying her eyes, I thought of telling her that I had destroyed the letter; then I saw that this would never be forgiven me, even if I had not already told her that it was with my other papers.

“It will only hurt you to read it,” I said. “Forget it! Forget _him_, if you can. I’ve told you he had nothing but love for you . . .”

“Then why mayn’t I see it? George, I don’t understand! I’m not a child; and, if I didn’t know you were trying to spare me, I could almost kill you for your ghastly kindness. Pocketing it for twelve torturing days, as though it were a bill! Pretending he was too weak to write! Saying it was a _message_! You’ll send me mad if you’re not careful!,” she cried hysterically. “For the last time, please give me my letter.”

“For the last time please try to forget there ever was a letter. I’ve told you he must have been delirious when he wrote. I won’t answer for the consequences if you read it. All this time _I’ve_ been trying to forget it.” . . .

My voice told her all that I was trying to hide. Her eyes were startled, then compassionate, then defiant. I thought I heard a whisper of ‘Poor George’. She raised her eyebrows as though to ask what I was minded to do. Getting no answer, she shrugged her shoulders and turned wearily to the fire:

“Was that why you left London?” I said nothing. “You told me it was on business. And you’ve been . . . sitting in judgement on me ever since.” . . .

I took a step forward and tried to catch her hand:

“It has made no difference.” . . .

“Put it down to my curiosity!,” she taunted. “It’s not pleasant . . . to be . . . _condemned_ unheard; but I couldn’t _bear_ to be acquitted. Your despatch-box, you said?”

“Babs, I implore you!,” I cried, as she moved to the bell.

“You’re afraid of being certain?,” she interrupted scornfully. “I’m only afraid of sheltering myself behind a dead man. . . . Oh, Henry, Mr. Oakleigh wants his despatch-box. And will you see that there’s a good fire in the tapestry-room and have his things moved in there? The . . . peacocks make so much noise on my side of the house,” she added.

6

As I finished dressing, Barbara tapped at my door and came in with Eric’s letter in her hand.

“If you want this, I must give it you back,” she began. Her voice had almost left her; and the radiant vitality of an hour before had flown. “I hope you won’t have to quote it, because these things are so terribly vulgarized in court. Do I . . . have to be unfaithful? I wasn’t . . . with Eric,” she added carelessly.

“I know you weren’t.”

“I meant to be, . . . if I must use that . . . unclean word. For one moment I had a vision of perfect happiness, I forgot everything else. . . . It would be generous of you to say you won’t use this. Eric’s dead. And people would think he was to blame.”

“I certainly shan’t use it. Barbara, why are you talking like this?”

Before she could answer, the letter had to be thrust into safety. Then, with one hand clutching it to her breast, as though Eric’s heart were beating against hers, she looked up and forced her mind on to my question:

“Because father’s coming down to-morrow, and we must decide what we’re going to do. We had to fight him pretty hard to get married, but we shall have to fight much harder to get divorced.”

“But no one has mentioned divorce.”

“_I_ have. You said you could never forget that letter. . . . It was a great risk for us to marry; but you were so sweet and I was so miserable. . . . I see now that the thing never had a fair chance while Eric was alive. I heard his voice in the streets, wherever we’d been together, when I knew he was the other side of the world; and, as soon as I had a chance, I rushed to him. When he wouldn’t have anything to do with me, I _did_ try once more to make a success of our life. You wished for a son; and I did my best, though Eric was the only man I wanted as father of my children. Perhaps that’s why I . . . couldn’t keep him alive, poor mite. . . . It’s funny that little things should cause such big troubles. If I hadn’t asked you to open my letters, we _should_ have made a success.” . . .

There was a moment’s break in her terrible composure; and she turned away with a single dry sob.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Babs?”

“You wouldn’t have understood; you don’t understand now.”

“If I hadn’t understood . . . a little, should I have come?”

Unwittingly, I moved a step forward; and she held up her hand against me as though I were assaulting her:

“If you’d understood, you wouldn’t have waited twelve days.”

I was goaded beyond discretion by the scorn in her voice. I had understood and forgiven too little, it seemed, when I fancied that I had forgiven and understood too much.

“It was . . . a startling letter,” I answered in her own measure. “Whenever you told me you’d try to forget Eric . . .”

“You wondered for twelve days whether you could ever trust me again.” She did not trouble to look at me, but I felt myself flushing. “As though any other man could tear my heart out of me as Eric did! Why _did_ you come?”

“Because _I_ needed _you_.”

Barbara’s lip curled in derision:

“Your servant’s too useful to discharge, so you pretend you haven’t caught her stealing! When we met to-night, I noticed a difference. I thought you must have seen in the papers about Eric’s death. When you kissed me so tenderly, my heart leapt; and I thought you really understood. Now I know . . .”

The incisive scorn cut deeper as her failing voice died away.

“Well?”

“You _need_ me because I’m a woman. That’s why you insult me with your forgiveness. And that’s why you must divorce me, George. We’re divorced in spirit; and we should both be dishonoured if we put your _need_ in the place of love.”

In the distance I heard the gong booming for dinner. Neave’s door opened and slammed. A cautious footfall, accompanied by a warning whistle, told me that O’Rane was making his way downstairs.

“I shall not divorce you,” I told Barbara, “even if I could. And I can’t. You’ll be as independent of me in Seymour Street as if you were on a South Sea Island. But we mustn’t do anything irrevocable till we’re more cool-headed.”

“But . . . this is impossible!,” Barbara cried.

“If we find it impossible, I shan’t try to keep you.” As I followed her down to dinner, I wondered whether we either of us realized what we were saying. “Coming here to-day,” I told her, “I was thinking that life only becomes intolerable when there’s no love in it. If I can get back to the state we were in a fortnight ago . . .”

“You’ll never do that. You’ll be very kind and attentive, as you always are; but I married you because I thought you understood. Now you’ve become like any other man who puts a cushion at my back or tucks a rug round my knees. I’m utterly, utterly indifferent to you!”

On this, the first night of what she called for two years our “life in a gilded cage”, I was chiefly concerned that her indifference should be concealed from the sharp eyes of Neave and the abnormally sharp hearing of O’Rane. With the same intention or in her usual reaction to an audience, Barbara sparkled her way through dinner in a manner that set me wondering whether I had not waked from another nightmare; but, when we looked for her afterwards, she had disappeared; and, when I went—as a matter of form—to bid her good-night, she answered me through a locked door.

Neave had asked me at dinner how long I was staying; and, when I reached my room, I found a note from Barbara:

“_If I am to come at all, I had better come to-morrow. Mother has a big party this week-end._”

I sat down in front of the fire and tried to picture our life on the day after to-morrow. Could Bertrand direct my paper if I found it necessary to live in Ireland? Was Ireland tolerable or even safe? Could I afford to keep two houses in commission if my wife refused to live with me. And how long would Barbara endure this spiritual starvation?

“_Utterly, utterly indifferent._” I had never been the romance, the passion, the great love which she still demanded as of right; even with Eric Lane out of the way, I could not deck out my humdrum self as a fairy prince. If I failed in the “understanding” for which alone she had married me, how was her indifference ever to be overcome? The whole of our life must be such an evening as this, when she donned a brilliant mask of gaiety for dinner and discarded it when she locked her door against me.

A sudden thought urged me from my chair and sent me pacing up and down my room. How many other masks did Barbara employ? She dramatized her life so richly that, though her grief for Eric was unfeigned, I doubted if she could resist the temptation to make a romance out of his death. Had she been still unmarried, she would have cast herself for a part of inconsolable bereavement; as I obtruded awkwardly into her scene, she chose a blend of remorse for the injury she had done him and of heroic endeavour to forget him in her devotion to me. Unconsciously, in that queer childish brain that could never separate sincerity from pretence, the phrases had formed themselves; the emotion that fed the phrases had been fed by them. Instinctively she had changed her attitude and improvised a new part when she heard of Eric’s letter; and this trick of dramatizing her life was now so much ingrained in her nature that within half an hour she was perfect in her lines, her expression and her whole reading of the part. Henceforward she would continue to regard herself as “a damned soul”, with the added damnation of being tied to a crass, unsympathetic husband and of conspiring with him to deceive her neighbours as she had deceived O’Rane and Neave at dinner.

I readily believed that Barbara had forgotten half the agony of Eric’s death in the joy of playing her new part.

“But how long is it to go on?,” I asked myself in despair.

The new part had in some sort been forced upon her; she could not relinquish it without abandoning her attitude of moral superiority to one who already believed her to be morally in the wrong and would believe her to be yet more deeply in the wrong if she admitted that even her grand romance had been a piece of play-acting. And play-acting it had been for half the time! She could have married Eric if she had dared to admit that Jack Waring was tired of her, instead of pretending that she was pledged to him. . . .

Next day the Crawleighs arrived in time for luncheon; and we returned to London in the afternoon. Our departure was on the border-line between farce and tragedy. Muffled in furs and bathed in the warm fragrance of her beloved carnations, Barbara took her place by my side; her eyes were shining as when I came back to her the day before; and her undemonstrative mother was stirred to exclaim: “My dear, you really _do_ look very lovely.” Crawleigh, who had recently met my uncle at dinner and was overcharged with repartees that had not occurred to him in time, stood with one foot on the running-board and emphasized his endless rejoinders with excited cutting movements of a tremulous forefinger. In the background stretched the low grey walls of the Abbey, unchanged since the days when the first marquis criticized the treaty of Vienna, unchanged since Lord Chancellor Neave cavilled at the peace of Utrecht, unchanged since some nameless political abbot pointed the significance of Crécy and attacked the staff-work at Poictiers. I can no more reproduce my father-in-law’s arguments than I can reconstruct those of his predecessors; but I remember being told that now, two years after the armistice, we were in a more parlous state than when the war was still raging.

“That’s what my uncle always tells me,” I answered, though it was not worth while to remind Crawleigh that this was what I had been preaching in despised _Peace_ for fifteen months. “If you sow the wind, you must expect to reap the whirlwind.”

The reply probably bore no relation to the argument, but I wanted to get away; and I had not listened to the argument.

As the car turned out of sight, Barbara flung aside one mask and pulled another into place. Her eyes lost their colour; her whole body seemed to grow limp. Appearances no longer needed to be maintained.

So we returned home, to reap a whirlwind. My trite phrase haunted me. I wondered who had sown the wind.