Anne trembled a little under the caress. "Fanny," said she, "I want you
to know him."

"I mean to," said Mrs. Eliott hurriedly.

"And I want him, even more, to know you."

"Then," Mrs. Elliot argued to herself, "she knows nothing; or she never
could suppose we would be kindred spirits."

But she carried it off triumphantly. "Well," said she, "I hope you're
free for the fifteenth?"

"The fifteenth?"

"Yes, or any other evening. We want to give a little dinner, dear, to you
and to your husband--for him to meet all your friends."

Anne tried not to look too grateful.

The upward way, then, was being prepared for him. Beneficent
intelligences were at work, influences were in the air, helping her
to raise him.

In her gladness she had failed to see that, considering the very obvious
nature of the civility, Fanny Eliott was making the least shade too much
of it.




CHAPTER VII


Anne presented herself that evening in her husband's study with a sheaf
of visiting cards in her hand. She thought it possible that she might
obtain further illumination by confronting him with them.

"Walter," said she "all these people have called on us. What do you think
I'd better do?"

"I think you'll have to call on them some day."

"All of them?"

He took the cards from her and glanced through them.

"Let me see. Charlie Gorst--we must be nice to him."

"Is _he_ nice?"

"I think so. Edie's very fond of him."

"And Mrs. Lawson Hannay?"

"Oh, you must call on her."

"Shall I like her."

"Possibly. You needn't see much of her if you don't."

"Is it easy to drop people?"

"Perfectly."

"And what about Mrs. Ransome?"

He frowned. "Has _she_ called?"

"Yes."

"I'll find out when she's not at home and let you know. You can call
then."

A fourth card he tore up and threw into the fire.

"Some people have confounded impudence."

Anne went away confirmed in her impression that Walter had a large
acquaintance to whom he was by no means anxious to introduce his wife. He
might, she reflected, have incurred the connection through the misfortune
of his business. The life of a ship-owner in Scale was fruitful in these
embarrassments.

But if these disagreeable people indeed belonged to the period she
mentally referred to as his "past," she was not going to tolerate them
for an instant. He must give them up.

She judged that he was prepared for so much renunciation. She hoped that
he would, in time, adopt her friends in place of them. He was inclined,
after all, to respond amicably to Mrs. Eliott's overtures.

Anne wondered how he would comport himself at the dinner on the
fifteenth. She owned to a little uneasiness at the prospect. Would he
indeed yield to the sobering influence of Thurston Square? Or would he
try to impose his alien, his startling personality on it? She had begun
to realise how alien he was, how startling he could be. Would he sit
silent, uninspiring and uninspired? Or would unholy and untimely
inspirations seize him? Would he scatter to the winds all conversational
conventions, and riot in his own unintelligible frivolity? What would he
say to Mrs. Eliott, that priestess of the pure intellect? Was there
anything in him that could be touched by her uncoloured, immaterial
charm? Would he see that Mr. Eliott's density was only a mask? Would
the Gardners bore him? And would he like Miss Proctor? And if he
didn't, would he show it, and how? His mere manners would, she knew, be
irreproachable, but she had no security for his spiritual behaviour. He
impressed her as a creature uncaught, undriven; graceful, but
immeasurably capricious.

The event surprised her.

For the first five minutes or so, it seemed that Mrs. Eliott and her
dinner were doomed to failure; so terrible a cloud had fallen on her, and
on her husband, and on every guest. Never had the poor priestess appeared
so abstract an essence, so dream-driven and so forlorn. Never had Mr.
Eliott worn his mask to so extinguishing a purpose. Never had Miss
Proctor been so obtrusively superior, Mrs. Gardner so silent, Dr. Gardner
so vague. They were all, she could see, possessed, crushed down by their
consciousness of Majendie and his monstrous past.

Into this circle, thus stupefied by his presence, Majendie burst with the
courage of unconsciousness.

Mr. Eliott had started a topic, the conduct of Sir Rigley Barker, the
ex-member for Scale. A heavy ball of conversation began to roll slowly up
and down the table, between Mr. Eliott and Dr. Gardner. Majendie snatched
at it deftly as it passed him, caught it, turned it in his hands till it
grew golden under his touch. Mr. Eliott thought there wasn't much in poor
Sir Rigley.

"Not much in him?" said Majendie. "How about that immortal speech of
his?"

"Immortal--" echoed Mr. Eliott dubiously.

"Indestructible! The poor fellow couldn't end it. It simply coiled and
uncoiled itself and went off, in great loops, into eternity. It began in
all innocence--naturally, as it was his maiden speech--when he rose,
don't you know, to propose an amendment. I take it that speech was so
maidenly that it shrank from anything in the nature of a proposal. It
went on in a terrified manner, coyly considering and hesitating--till it
cleared the House. And he was awfully pleased when we congratulated him
on his 'maidenly reserve.'"

"How did he ever get elected?" said Miss Proctor.

"My dear lady, it was a glorious stroke of the Opposition. They withdrew
their candidate when he contested the election. Of course, they felt that
he'd only got to make a speech and there'd be a dissolution. You simply
saw Parliament melting away before him. If he'd gone on he'd have worn
out the British constitution."

Dr. Gardner looked at Mrs. Gardner and their eyes brightened, as Majendie
continued to unfold the amazing resources of Sir Rigley. He breathed on
the ex-member like a god, and played with him like a juggler; he tossed
him into the air and kept him there, a radiant, unsubstantial thing. The
ex-member disported himself before Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party as he had
never disported himself in Parliament. Majendie had given him a career,
endowed him with glorious attributes. The ex-member, as a topic,
developed capacities unsuspected in him before. The others followed his
flight breathless, afraid to touch him lest he should break and disappear
under their hands.

By the time Majendie had done with him, the ex-member had entered on a
joyous immortality in Scale.

And in the middle of it all Anne laughed.

Miss Proctor was the first to recover from the surprise of it. She leaned
across the table with a liberal and vivid smile, opulent in appreciation.

"Well, Mr. Majendie, Sir Rigley ought to be grateful to you. If ever
there was a dull subject dead and buried, it was he, poor man. And now
the difficulty will be to forget him."

"I don't think," said Majendie gravely, "I shall forget him myself in a
hurry."

Oh no, he never would forget Sir Rigley. He didn't want to forget him. He
would be grateful to him as long as he lived. He had made Anne laugh. A
girl's laugh, young and deliciously uncontrollable, springing from the
immortal heart of joy.

It was the first time he had heard her laugh so. He didn't know she could
do it. The hope of hearing her do it again would give him something to
live for. He would win her yet if he could make her laugh.

Anne was more surprised than anybody, at him and at herself. It was a
revelation to her, his cleverness, his brilliant social gift. She was
only intimate with one kind of cleverness, the kind that feeds itself on
lectures and on books. She had not thought of Walter as clever. She had
only thought of him as good. That one quality of goodness had swallowed
up the rest.

Miss Proctor took possession of her where she sat in the drawing-room, as
it were amid the scattered fragments of the ex-member (he still, among
the ladies, emitted a feeble radiance). Miss Proctor had always approved
of Anne. If Anne had no metropolitan distinction to speak of, she was not
in the least provincial. She was something by herself, superior and rare.
A little inclined to take herself too seriously, perhaps; but her
husband's admirable levity would, no doubt, improve her.

"My dear," said Miss Proctor, "I congratulate you. He's brilliant, he's
charming, he's unique. Why didn't we know of him before? Where has he
been hiding his talents all this time?"

(A talent that had not bloomed in Thurston Square was a talent pitiably
wasted.)

Anne smiled a blanched, perfunctory smile. Ah, where had he been hiding
himself, indeed?

Miss Proctor stood central, radiating the rich afterglow of her
appreciation. Her gaze was a little critical of her friends' faces, as
if she were measuring the effect, on a provincial audience, of Majendie's
conversational technique. She swept down to a seat beside her hostess.

"My dear Fanny," she said, "why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you--"

"That he was that sort. I didn't know there was such a delightful man in
Scale. What have you all been dreaming of?"

Mrs. Eliott tried to look both amiable and intelligent. In the presence
of Mr. Majendie's robust reality it was indeed as if they had all been
dreaming. Her instinct told her that the spirit of pure comedy was
destruction to the dreams she dreamed. She tried to be genial to her
guest's accomplishment; but she felt that if Mr. Majendie's talents were
let loose in her drawing-room, it would cease to be the place of
intellectual culture. On the other hand she perceived that Miss Proctor's
idea was to empty that drawing-room by securing Mr. Majendie for her own.
Mrs. Eliott remained uncomfortably seated on her dilemma.

Sounds of laughter reached her from below. The men were unusually late in
returning to the drawing-room. They appeared a little flushed by the
hilarious festival, as if Majendie had had on them an effect of mild
intoxication. She could see that even Dr. Gardner was demoralised. He
wore, under his vagueness, the unmistakable air of surrender to an
unfamiliar excess. Mr. Eliott too had the happy look of a man who has fed
loftily after a long fast.

"Anne dear," said Majendie, as they walked back the few yards between
Thurston Square and Prior Street, "we shan't have to do that very often,
shall we?"

"Why not? You can't say we didn't have a delightful evening."

"Yes, but it was very exhausting, dear, for me."

"You? You didn't show much sign of exhaustion. I never heard you talk so
well."

"Did I talk well?"

"Yes. Almost too well."

"Too much, you mean. Well, I had to talk, when nobody else did. Besides,
I did it for a purpose."

But what his purpose was Majendie did not say.

Anne had been human enough to enjoy a performance so far beyond the range
of her anticipations. She was glad, above all, that Walter had made
himself acceptable in Thurston Square. But when she came to think of
what was, what must be known of him in Scale, she was appalled by his
incomprehensible ease of attitude. She reflected that this must have been
the first time he had dined in Thurston Square since the scandal. Was it
possible that he did not realise the insufferable nature of that
incident, the efforts it must have cost to tolerate him, the points that
had been stretched to take him in? She felt that it was impossible to
exaggerate the essential solemnity of that evening. They had met
together, as it were, to celebrate Walter's return to the sanctities
and proprieties he had offended. He had been formally forgiven and
received by the society which (however Fanny Eliott might explain away
its action) had most unmistakably cast him out. She had not expected him
to part with his indomitable self-possession under the ordeal, but she
could have wished that he had borne himself with a little more modesty.
He had failed to perceive the redemptive character of the feast, he had
turned it into an occasion for profane personal display.

Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party had not saved him; on the contrary, he had
saved the dinner-party.




CHAPTER VIII


Anne was right. Though Majendie was, as he expressed it, "up to her
designs upon his unhappy soul," he remained unconscious of the part to be
played by Mrs. Eliott and her circle in the scheme of his salvation. From
his observation of the aristocracy of Thurston Square, it would never
have occurred to him that they were people who could count, whichever way
you looked at them.

Meanwhile he was a little disturbed by his own appearance as a heavenward
pilgrim. He was not sure that he had not gone a little too far that way,
and he felt that it was a shame to allow Anne to take him seriously.

He confided his scruples to Edith.

"Poor dear," he said, "it's quite pathetic. You know, she thinks she's
saving me."

"And do you mind being saved?"

"Well, no, I don't mind a little of it. But the question is, how long I
can keep it up."

"You mean, how long she'll keep it up?"

He laughed. "Oh, she'll keep it up for ever. No possible doubt about
that. She'll never tire. I wonder if I ought to tell her."

"Tell her what?"

"That it won't work. That she can't do it that way. She's wasting my time
and her own."

"Oh, what's a little time, dear, when you've all eternity in view?"

"But I haven't. I've nothing in view. My view, at present, is entirely
obscured by Anne."

"Poor Anne! To think she actually stands between you and your Maker."

"Yes, you know--in her very anxiety to introduce us."

They looked at each other. Her sainthood was so accomplished, her union
with heaven so complete, that she could afford herself these profaner
sympathies. She was secretly indignant with Anne's view of Walter as
unpresentable in the circles of the spiritual _Г©lite_.

"It never struck her that you mightn't need an introduction after all;
that you were in it as much as she. That's the sort of mistake one might
expect from--from a spiritual parvenu, but not from Anne."

"Oh, come, I don't consider myself her equal by a long chalk."

"Well, say she does belong to the peerage; you're a gentleman, and what
more can she require?"

"She can't see that I am (If I am. You say so). She considers
me--spiritually--a bounder of the worst sort."

"That's her mistake. Though I must say you sometimes lend yourself to it
with your horrible profanity."

"I can't help it, Edie. She's so funny with it. She _makes_ me profane."

"Dear Walter, if you can think Anne funny--"

"I do. I think she's furiously funny, and horribly pathetic. All the
time, you know, she thinks she's leading me upward. Profanity's my only
refuge from hypocrisy."

"Oh no, not your only refuge. You say she thinks she's leading you. Don't
_let_ her think it. Make her think you're leading her."

"Do you think," said Majendie, "she'd enjoy that quite so much?"

"She'd enjoy it more. If you took her the right way. The way I mean."

"What's that?"

"You must find out," said she. "I'm not going to tell you everything."

Majendie became thoughtful. "My only fear was that I couldn't keep it up.
But you really don't think, then, that I should score much if I did?"

"No, my dear, I don't. And as for keeping it up, you never could. And if
you did she'd never understand what you were doing it for. That's not the
way to show you're in love with her."

"But that's just what I don't want her to see. That's what she hates so
much in me. I've always understood that in these matters it's discreeter
not to show your hand too plainly. You see, it's just as if we'd never
been married, for all she cares. That's the trouble."

"There's something in that. If she's not in love with you--"

"Look here, Edie, you're a woman, and you know all about them. Do you
really, honestly think Anne ever was in love with me?"

"Oh, don't ask me. How should I know?"

"No, but," he persisted, "what do you think?"

"I think she _was_ in love."

"But not with me, though?"

"No, no, not with you."

"With whom, then?"

"Darling idiot, there wasn't any who. If there was, do you think I'd give
her away like that? If you'd asked me _what_ she was in love with--"

"Well, what then?"

"Your goodness. She was head over ears in love with that."

"I see. With something that I wasn't."

"No, with something that you were, that you are, only she doesn't know
it."

"Then," said Majendie, "you can't get out of it, she's in love with
_me_."

"Oh no, no, you dear goose, not with you. To be in love with you she'd
have to be in love with everything you're _not_, as well as everything
you are; with everything you have been, with everything you never were,
with everything you will be, with everything you might be, could be,
should be."

"That's a large order, Edie."

"There's a larger one than that. She might sweep all that overboard, see
it go by whole pieces (the best pieces) at a time, and still be in love
with the dear, incomprehensible, indescribable _you_. That," said Edie,
triumphant in her wisdom, "is what being in love is."

"And do you think she isn't in it?"

"No. Not anywhere near it. But--it's a big but--"

"I don't care how big it is. Don't bother me with it."

"Bother you? Why, it's a beautiful but. As I said, she isn't in love with
you; but she may be any minute. It's just touch and go with her. It
depends on _you_."

"Heavens, what am I to do? I've done everything."

"Yes, you have, but she hasn't. She's done nothing. She doesn't know how
to. You've got to show her."

He shook his head hopelessly. "You're beyond me. I don't understand.
There isn't anything for me to do. How am I to show her?"

"I mean show her what there is in it. What it means. What it's going to
be for her as well as you. Just go at it hard, harder than you did before
you married her."

"_I_ see, I've got to make love to her all over again."

"Exactly. All over again from the very beginning."

"I say!" He took it in, her idea, in all the width and splendour of its
simplicity. "And do it differently?"

"Oh, very differently."

"I don't quite see where the difference is to come in. What did I do
before that was so wrong?"

"Nothing. That's just the worst of it. It was all too right. Ever so much
too right. Don't you see? It's what we've been talking about. You made
her in love with your goodness. And she was in love with it, not because
it was _your_ goodness, but because it was her own. That's why she wanted
to marry it. She couldn't be in love with it for any other reason,
because she's an egoist."

"No. There you're quite wrong. That's what she isn't."

"Oh, you _are_ in love with her. Of course she's an egoist. All the
nicest women are. I'm an egoist myself. Do you love me less for it?"

"I don't love you less for anything."

"Well--unless you can make Anne jealous of me--and you can't--you've got
to love me less, now, dear boy. That's where I come in--to be kept out of
it."

She had led him breathless on her giddy round; she plunged him back into
bewilderment. He hadn't a notion where she was taking him to, where they
would come out; but there was a desperate delight in the impetuous
journey, the wind of her sudden flight lifted him and carried him on. He
had always trusted the marvellous inspirations of her heart. She had
failed him once; but now he could not deny that she had given him lights,
and he looked for a stupendous illumination at the end of the way.

"Out of it!" he exclaimed. "Why, where should I have been without you?
You were the beginning of it."

"I was indeed. You've got to take care I'm not the end of it, that's
all."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"I mean what I say. You don't want Anne to be in love with you for _my_
sake, do you?"

"N--no. I don't know that I do exactly. At least I should prefer that she
was in love with me for my own."

"Well, you must make her, then. That's why you've got to leave me out of
it. I've been too much in it all along. It was through me she conceived
that unfortunate idea of your goodness. I'm its father and its mother and
its nurse, I ministered to it every hour. I fed it, I brought it up, I
brought it _out_, I provided all the opportunity for its display. Nothing
else had a show beside your goodness, Wallie dear. It was something
monstrous. It took Anne's affection from you and concentrated it all on
itself. She worshipped it, she clung to it, she saw nothing else but it,
and when it went everything went. _You_ went first of all. Well, you must
just see that that doesn't happen again."

"You mean that I must lead a life of iniquity?"

"You mustn't lead a life of anything."

"Do you mean I mustn't be good any more?"

Majendie's imagination played hilariously with this fantastic, this
preposterous notion of his goodness.

"Oh yes, be good," said Edith, "but not too good. Above all, not too good
to me. Concentrate on her, stupid."

"I have concentrated," he moaned, mystified beyond endurance. "Besides,
you said I couldn't make her jealous."

"No, I wish you could. I mean, don't let her fall in love with your
devotion to me again. Don't hold her by that one rope. Hold her by all
your ropes; then, if one goes, it doesn't so much matter."

"I see. You don't trust my goodness."

"Oh, _I_ trust it, so will she again. But don't _you_ trust it. That
precious goodness of yours is your rival. A bad, dangerous rival. You've
got to beat it out of the field. Show that you're jealous of it. A little
judicious jealousy won't hurt." Edith's eyes were still and profound with
wisdom. "I don't believe you've ever yet made love to Anne properly.
That's what it all comes to."

"Oh, I say," said he, "what do you know about it?"

"I'm only judging," said Edith, "by the results."

"Oh, that isn't fair."

"Perhaps it isn't," she owned, her wisdom growing by what it fed on.

"You see, she wouldn't let me do it properly."

Edith pondered. "Yes, but how long ago is it? And you've been married
since."

"What difference does that make?"

"I should say it would make all the difference. Anne was a girl, then.
She didn't understand. She's a woman now. She does understand. She can be
appealed to."

He hid his face in his hands.

"I never thought of that," he murmured thickly.

"Of course you didn't."

"Edie," he said, and his face was still hidden, "however did you think of
it?"

"Oh, I don't know. I see some things, and then other things come round to
me. But you mustn't forget that _you've_ got to begin all over again from
the very beginning. You'll have to be very careful with her, every bit as
careful as if she were a strange lady you've just met at a dance. Don't
forget that she's strange, that she's another woman, in fact."

"I see. If there are to be many of these remarkable transformations of
Anne, I shall have all the excitement of polygamy without its drawbacks."

"You will. And it's the same for her, remember. You're a strange man.
You've just been introduced, you know--by me--and you're begging for the
pleasure of the first waltz, and Anne pretends that her programme is
full, and you look over her shoulder and see that it isn't, and that she
puts you down for all the nice ones. And you sit out all the rest, and
you flirt on the stairs, and take her in to supper, and, finally, you
know, you pull yourself together and you do it--in the conservatory. Oh,
it'll be so amusing, and so funny to watch. You'll begin by being most
awfully polite to each other."

"I suppose I may yet be permitted to call this strange young lady Anne?"

"Yes. That's because you remember that you _have_ known her once before,
a very long time ago, when you were children. You are children, both of
you. Oh, Walter, I believe you're looking forward to it; I believe you're
glad you've got to do it all over again."

"Yes, Edie, I positively believe I am."

He rose, laughing, prepared to begin that minute his new wooing of Anne.

"Good-bye," said Edith, "it _is_ good-bye, you know, and good luck to
you."

This time she knew that she had been wise for him.

Anne would have been horrified if she had known that the situation, so
terrible for her, was developing for her husband certain possibilities of
charm. His irrepressible boyishness refused to accept it in all its moral
gloom. There were, he perceived, advantages in these strained relations.
They had removed Anne into the mysterious realm her maidenhood had
inhabited, before marriage had had time to touch her magic. She had
become once more the unapproachable and unattained. Their first
courtship, pursued under intolerable restrictions of time and place, had
been a rather uninspired affair, and its end a foregone conclusion. He
had been afraid of himself, afraid sometimes of her. For he had not
brought her the spontaneous, unalarmed, unspoiled spirit of his youth.
He had come to her with a stain on his imagination and a wound in his
memory. And she was holy to him. He had held himself in, lest a touch,
a word, a gesture should recall some insufferable association.

Marriage had delivered him from the tyranny of reminiscence. No
reminiscence could stand before the force of passion in possession. It
purified; it destroyed; it built up in three days its own inviolable
memory.

And Anne, with the best will in the world, had had no power to undo its
work in him.

In herself, too, below her kindling spiritual consciousness, in the
unexplored depth and darkness of her, its work remained.

Majendie was unaware how far he had become another man and she another
woman. He was merely alive to the unusual and agreeable excitement of
wooing his own wife. There was a piquancy in the experiment that appealed
to him. Her new coldness called to him like a challenge. Her new
remoteness waked the adventurous youth in him. His imagination was
touched as it had not been touched before. He could see that Anne had
not yet got over her discovery. The shock of it was in her nerves. He
felt that she shrank from him, and his chivalry still spared her.

He ceased to be her husband and became her very courteous, very distant
lover. He made no claims, and took nothing for granted. He simply began
all over again from the very beginning. His conscience was vaguely
appeased by the illusion of the new leaf, the rejuvenated innocence of
the blank page. They had never been married (so the illusion suggested).
There had been no revelations. They met as strangers in their own house,
at their own table. In support of this pleasing fiction he set about his
courtship with infinite precautions. He found himself exaggerating Anne's
distance and the lapse of intimacy. He made his way slowly, through all
the recognised degrees, from mere acquaintance, through friendship to
permissible fervour.

And from time to time, with incomparable discretion, he would withhold
himself that he might make himself more precious. He was hardly aware of
his own restraint, his refinements of instinct and of mood. It was as if
he drew, in his desperate necessity, upon unrealised, untried resources.
There was something in Anne that checked the primitive impulse of swift
chase, and called forth the curious half-feminine cunning of the
sophisticated pursuer. She froze at his ardour, but his coldness almost
kindled her, so that he approached by withdrawals and advanced by
flights.

He displayed, first of all, a heavenly ignorance, an inspired curiosity
regarding her. He consulted her tastes, as if he had never known them; he
started the time-honoured lovers' topics; he talked about books--which
she preferred and the reasons for her preference.

He did not advance very far that way. Anne was simply annoyed at the
lapses in his memory.

He then began to buy books on the chance of her liking them, which
answered better.

He promoted himself by degrees to personalities. He talked to her about
herself, handling her with religious reticence as a thing of holy and
incomprehensible mystery.

"I suppose," he said one day, "if I were good enough, I should understand
you. Why do you sigh like that? Is it because I'm not good enough? Or
because I don't understand?"

"I think," said she, "it is because I don't understand you."

"My dear" (he allowed himself at this point the more formal endearment),
"I thought I was disgracefully transparent--I'm limpidity, simplicity
itself. I've only one idea and one subject of conversation. Ask Edith.
She understands me."

"Ah, Edith--" said Anne, as if Edith were a very different affair.

The intonation was hopeful, it suggested some slender and refined
jealousy. (If only he could make her jealous!)

On the strength of it he advanced to the punctual daily offering of
flowers, flowers for her drawing-room, flowers for her bedroom, flowers
for her to wear. After that he took to writing her letters from the
office with increasing frequency and fervour. Anne, too, was courteous
and distant. She accepted all he had to offer as a becoming tribute to
her feminine superiority, and evaded dexterously the deeper issue.

Now and then he reported his progress to Edith.

"I rather think," he said, "she's coming round. I'm regarded as a
distinctly eligible person."

They laughed at his complete adoption of the part and his innocent joy in
it.

That had always been his way. When he had begun a game there was no
stopping him. He played it through to the end.

Edith would look up smiling and say: "Well, how goes the affair?" (They
always called it the affair.) Or: "How did you get on to-day?"

And it would be: "Pretty well."--"Better to-day than yesterday."--"No
luck to-day."

One Sunday he came to her radiant.

"She really does," said he, "seem interested in what I say."

"What did you talk about?"

"The influence of Christianity on woman. Was that good?"

"Very good."

"I didn't know very much about it, but I got her to tell me things."

"That," said Edith, "was still better."

"But she sticks to it that she doesn't understand me. That's bad."

"No," said Edith, "that's best of all. It shows she's thinking of you.
She wants to understand. Believe me, the affair marches."

He meditated on that.

In the evening, the better to meditate, he withdrew to his study. It was
not long before Anne came to him of her own accord. She asked if she
might read aloud to him.

"I should be honoured," he replied stiffly.

She chose Emerson, "On Compensation." And Majendie did not care for
Emerson.

But Anne had a charming voice; a voice with tones that penetrated like
pain, that thrilled like a touch, that clung delicately like a shy
caress; tones that were as a funeral bell for sadness; tones that rose to
passion without ever touching it; clear, cool tones that were like water
to passion's flame. Majendie closed his eyes and let her voice play over
him.

"Did you like it?" she asked gravely.

"Like it? I love it."

"So do I. I _hoped_ you would."

"My dear, I didn't understand one word of it."

"You can't make me believe you loved it then."

He looked at her.

"I loved the sound of your voice, dear."

"Oh," said she coldly, "is that all?"

"Yes," he said, "isn't it enough?"

"I'd rather--" she began and hesitated.

"You'd rather I understood Emerson?"

Her blood flushed in the honey whiteness of her face. She rose, put the
book in its place, and left the room.

"Edith," he said, relating the incident afterwards, "I thought she was
coming round when she wanted to read to me. Why did she get up and go
like that?"

"She went, dear goose, because she was afraid to stay."

"Why afraid?"

"Because she's fighting you, Wallie. It's all right if she's got to
fight."

"Yes, but suppose she wins?"

"She can't win fighting--she's a woman. Her only chance is to run away."

That night Anne knelt by her bedside and hid her face and prayed for
Walter; that he might be purified, so that she might love him without
sin; that he and she might travel together on the divine way, and
together be received into the heavenly places.

She had felt that night the stirring of natural affection. It had come
back to her, a feeble, bruised, humiliated thing. She could not harbour
it without spiritual justification.

She kept herself awake by saying: "I can't love him, I can't love
him--unless God makes him fit for me to love."

Sleeping, she dreamed that she was in his arms.




CHAPTER IX


It was Anne's birthday. It shone in mid-May like the front of June.
Anne's bedroom was over Edith's and looked out on the garden. A little
rain had fallen over night. Through the open window the day greeted
her with a breath of flowers and earth; a day that came to her all
golden, ripe and sweet from the south.

Her dressing-table was placed sideways from the window. Anne, fresh from
her cold bath, in a white muslin gown, with her thick sleek hair coiled
and burnished, sat before the looking-glass.

There was a knock at the door, not Nanna's bold awakening summons, but a
shy and gentle sound. Her heart shook her voice as she responded.

"Is it permitted?" said Majendie.

"If you like," she answered quietly.

He presented his customary morning sacrifice of flowers. Hitherto he
had not presumed so far as to bring it to her room. It waited for her
decorously at breakfast time, beside her plate.

She took the flowers from him, acknowledged their fragrance by a
quiver of her delicate nostrils, thanked him, and laid them on the
dressing-table.

He seated himself on the window-sill, where he could see her with the day
upon her. She noticed that he had brought with him, beside the flowers, a
small oblong wooden box. He laid the box on his knee and covered it with
his hand. He sat very still, looking at her as her firm white hands
caressed her coiled hair into shape. Once she moved his flowers to find
her comb, and laid them down again.

"Aren't you going to wear them?" he inquired anxiously.

Her upper lip lifted an instant, caught up, in its fashion, by the pretty
play of the little sensitive amber mole. Two small white teeth showed and
were hidden again. It was as if she had been about to smile, or to speak,
and had thought better of it.

She took up the flowers and tried them, now at her breast, and now at her
waist.

"Where shall I put them?" said she. "Here? Or here?"

"Just there."

She let them stay there in the hollow of her breast.

He laid the box on the dressing-table close to her hand where it searched
for pins.

"I've brought you this," he said gently.

She smiled that divine and virgin smile of hers. Anne was big, but her
smile was small and close and shy.

"You remembered my birthday?"

"Did you think I should forget?"

She opened the lid with cool unhurried fingers. Under the wrappings of
tissue paper and cotton wool, a shape struck clear and firm and familiar
to her touch. A sacred thrill ran through her as she felt there the
presence of the holy thing, the symbol so dear and so desired that it was
divined before seen.

She lifted from the box an old silver crucifix. It must have been the
work of some craftsman whose art was pure and fine as the silver he
had wrought in. But that was not what Anne saw. She had always found
something painful and repellent in those crucifixes of wood which distort
and deepen the lines of ivory, or in those of ivory which gives again
the very pallor of human death. But the precious metal had somehow
eternalised the symbol of the crucified body. She saw more than the
torture, the exhaustion, the attenuation. Surely, on the closed eyelids
there rested the glory and the peace of divine accomplishment?

She stood still, holding it in her hand and looking at it. Majendie stood
still, also looking at her. He was not quite sure whether she were going
to accept that gift, whether she would hesitate to take from his profane
hands a thing so sacred and so supreme. He was aware that his fate
somehow hung on her acceptance, and he waited in silence, lest a word
should destroy the work of love in her.

Anne, too (when she could detach her mind from the crucifix), felt that
the moment was decisive. To accept that gift, of all gifts, was to lay
her spirit under obligation to him. It was more than a surrender of body,
heart, or mind. It was to admit him to association with the unspeakably
sacred acts of prayer and adoration.

If it were possible that that had been his desire; if he had meant his
gift as a tribute, not to her only, but to the spirit of holiness in her;
if, in short, he had been serious, then, indeed, she could not hesitate.
For, if it were so, her prayer was answered.

She laid down the crucifix and turned to him. They searched each other
with their eyes. She saw, without wholly understanding, the pain in his.
He saw, also unintelligently, the austerity in hers.

"Are you not going to take it, then?" he said.

"I don't know. Do you realise that you are giving me a very sacred
thing?"

"I do."

"And that I can't treat it as I would an ordinary present?"

He lowered his eyelids. "I didn't think you'd want to wear it in your
hair, dear."

She was about to ask him what he did mean then; but some instinct held
her, told her not to press the sign of grace too hard. She looked at him
still more intently. His eyes had disconcerted and baffled her, but now
she was sheltered by their lowered lids. Then she noticed for the first
time that his face showed the marks of suffering. It was as if it had
dropped suddenly the brilliant mask it wore for her, and given up its
secret unaware. He had suffered so that he had not slept. It was plain to
her in the droop of his eyelids, and in the drawn lines about his eyes
and mouth and nostrils. She was touched with tenderness and pity, and a
certain unintelligible awe. And she knew her hour. She knew that if she
closed her heart now, it would never open to him. She knew that it was
his hour as well as hers. She felt, reverently, that it was, above all,
God's hour.

She laid her hand on her husband's gift, saying to herself that if she
took that crucifix she would be taking him with it into the holy places
of her heart.

"I will take it." Her voice came shy and inarticulate as a marriage vow.

"Thank you," he said.

He wondered if she would turn to him with some sign of tenderness,
whether she would stoop to him and touch him with her hand or her lips;
or whether she looked to him to offer the first caress.

She did nothing. It was as if her intentness, her concentration upon
her holy purpose held her. While her soul did but turn to him in the
darkness, it kept and would keep their hands and lips apart.

He divined that she was only half-won. But, though her body yet moved in
its charmed inviolate circle, he felt dimly that the spiritual barrier
was down.

She turned from him and went slowly to the door. He opened it and
followed her. On the stairs she parted from him and went alone into his
sister's bedroom.

Edith's spine had been hurting her in the night. She lay flat and
exhausted, and the embrace of her loving arms was slow and frail.

Edith was what she called "dressed," and waiting for her sister-in-law.
The little table by her bed was strewn with the presents she had bought
and made for Anne. A birthday was a very serious affair for Edith. She
was not content to buy (buying was nothing; anybody could buy); she must
also make, and make beautifully. "I mayn't have any legs that can carry
me," said Edith; "but I've hands and I _will_ use them. If it wasn't for
my hands I'd be nothing but a great lumbering, lazy mass of palpitating
heart." But her making had become every year more and more expensive. Her
beautiful, pitiful embroideries were paid for in bad nights. And at six
o'clock that morning she had given her little dismal cry: "Oh, Nanna,
Nanna, my beast of a spine is going to bother me to-day, and it's Anne's
birthday!"

"And what else," said Nanna severely, "do you expect, Miss Edith?"

"I didn't expect this. I do believe it's getting worse."

"Worse?" Nanna was contemptuous. "It was worse on Master Walter's
birthday last year."

(Last year she had made a waistcoat.)

"I can't think," moaned Edith, "why it's always bad on birthdays."

But however badly "it" might behave in the night, it was never permitted
to destroy the spirit of the day.

Anne looked anxiously at the collapsed, exhausted figure in the bed.

"Yes," said Edith, having smiled at her sister-in-law with magnificent
mendacity, "you may well look at me. You couldn't make yourself as flat
as I am if you tried. There are two books for you, and a thingummy-jig,
and a handkerchief to blow your dear nose with."

"Edie--"

"Do you like them?"

"Like them? Oh, you dear--"

"Why don't you have a birthday oftener? It makes you look so pretty,
dear."

Anne's heart leaped. Edie's ways, her very words sometimes were like
Walter's.

"Has Walter seen you?"

Anne's face became instantly solemn, but it was not sad.

"Edie," she said, "do you know what he has given me!"

"Yes," said Edith. Her eyes searched Anne's eyes with pain in them that
was somehow akin to Walter's pain.

"She knows everything," thought Anne, "and it was her idea, then, not
his."

"Edith," said she, "was it you who thought of it, or he?"

"I? Never. He didn't say a word about it. He just went and got it. He
thought it all out by himself, poor dear."

"Can you think why he thought of it?"

"Yes," said Edith gravely, "I can. Can't you?"

Anne was silent.

"It's very simple. He wants you to trust him a little more, that's all."

Anne's mouth trembled, and she tightened it.

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Yes," she said, "I am."

"Because you think he isn't very spiritual?"

"Perhaps."

"Oh, but he's on his way there," said Edith. "He's human. You've got to
be human before you can be spiritual. It's a most important part of the
process. Don't you omit it."

"Have I omitted it?"

She stroked one of the thin hands that were out-stretched towards her on
the coverlet, and the other closed on her caress. The touch brought the
tears into her eyes. She raised her head to keep them from falling.

"Dear," said Edith, and paused and reiterated, "dear, you have about all
the big things that I haven't. You're splendid. There's only one thing I
want for you. If you could only see how divinely sacred the human part of
us is--and how pathetic."

Anne looked at her as she lay there, bright and brave, untroubled by her
own mortal pathos. In her, humanity, woman's humanity, was reduced to its
simplest expression of spiritual loving and bodily suffering. Anne was a
child in her ignorance of the things that had been revealed to Edith
lying there.

Looking at her, Anne's tears grew heavy and fell.

"It's your birthday," said Edith softly.

And as she heard Majendie's foot on the stairs Anne dried her eyes on the
birthday pocket handkerchief.

"Here she is," said Edith as he entered. "What are you going to do with
her? She doesn't have a birthday every day."

"I'm going," he said, "to take her down to breakfast."

Their meals so abounded in occasions for courtesy that they had become
profoundly formal. This morning Anne's courtesy was coloured by some
emotion that defied analysis. She wore her new mood like a soft veil
that heightened her attraction in obscuring it.

He watched her with a baffled preoccupation that kept him unusually
quiet. His quietness did him good service with Anne in her new mood.

When the meal was over she rose and went to the window. The sedate
Georgian street was full of the day that shone soberly here from the cool
clear north.

"What are you thinking of?" said he.

"I'm thinking what a beautiful day it is."

"Yes, isn't it a jolly day?"

"If it's beautiful here, what must it be in the country?"

"The country?" A thought struck him. "I say, would you like to go there?"

"Do you mean to-day?"

Her upper lip lifted, and the two teeth showed again on the pale rose of
its twin. In spite of the dignity of her proportions, Anne had the look
of a child contemplating some hardly permissible delight.

"Now, this minute. There's a train to Westleydale at nine fifty."

"It would be very nice. But--how about business?"

"Business be--"

"No, no, _not_ that word."

"But it is, you know; it can't help itself. There's a devil in all the
offices in Scale at this time of the year."

"Would _you_ like it?"

"I? Rather. I'm on!"

"But--Edith--oh no, we can't."

She turned with a sudden gesture of renunciation, so that she faced him
where he stood smiling at her. His face grew grave for her.

"Look here," he said, "you mustn't be morbid about Edith. It isn't
necessary. All the time we're gone, she'll be there, in perfect bliss
with simply thinking of the good time _we_'re having."

"But her back's bad to-day."

"Then she'll be glad that we're not there to feel it. Her back will add
to her happiness, if anything."

She drew in a sharp breath, as if he had hurt her.

"Oh, Walter, how can you?"

He replied with emphasis. "How can I? I can, not because I'm a brute, as
you seem to suppose, but because she's a saint and an angel. I take off
my hat and go down on my knees when I think of her. Go and put _your_
hat on."

She felt herself diminished, humbled, and in two ways. It was as if he
had said: "You are not the saint that Edith is, nor yet the connoisseur
in saintship that I am."

She knew that she was not the one; but to the other distinction she
certainly fancied that she had the superior claim. And she had never yet
come behind him in appreciation of Edith. Besides, she was hurt at being
spoken to in that way on her birthday.

Her resentment faded when she found him standing at the foot of the
stairs by Edith's door, waiting for her. He looked up at her as she
descended, and his eyes brightened with pleasure at the sight.

Edith was charmed with their plan. It might have been conceived as an
exquisite favour to herself, by the fine style in which she handled it.

They set out, Majendie carrying the luncheon basket and Anne's coat. He
had changed, and appeared in the Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and cap
he had worn at Scarby. The pang that struck her at the sight of them was
softened by her practical perception of their fitness for the adventure.
They became him, too, and she had memory of the charm he had once worn
for her with that open-air attire.

An hour's journey by rail brought them to the little wayside station.
They turned off the high road, walked for ten minutes across an upland
field, and came to the bridle-path that led down into the beech-woods of
Westleydale, in the heart of the hills.

They followed a mossy trail. The shade fell thin, warm, and
coloured, from leaves so tender that the light passed through their
half-transparent panes. Overhead there was the delicate scent of green
things and of sap, and underfoot the deep smell of moss and moistened
earth.

Anne drew the deep breath of delight. She took off her hat and gloves,
and moved forward a few steps to a spot where the wood opened and the
vivid light received her. Majendie hung back to look at her. She turned
and stood before him, superb and still, shrined in a crescent of tall
beech stems, column by column, with the light descending on the fine gold
of her hair. Nothing in Anne even remotely suggested a sylvan and
primeval creature; but, as she stood there in her temperate and alien
beauty, she seemed to him to have yielded to a brief enchantment. She
threw back her head, as if her white throat drank the sweet air like
wine. She held out her white hands, and let the warmth play over them
palpably as a touch.

And Majendie longed to take her by those white hands and draw her to him.
If he could have trusted her; but some instinct plucked him backward,
saying to him: "Not yet."

A mossy rise under a beech-tree offered itself to Anne as a suitable
throne for the regal woman that she was. He spread out her coat, and she
made room for him beside her. He sat for a long time without speaking.
The powers which were working that day for Majendie gave to him that
subtle silence. He had, at most times, an inexhaustible capacity for
keeping still.

Above them, just discernible through the tree-tops, veiled by a gauze of
dazzling air, the hill brooded in its majestic dream. Its green arms,
plunging to the valley, gathered them and shut them in.

Majendie's figure was not diminished by the background. The smallest
nervous movement on his part would have undone him, but he did not move.
His profound stillness, suggesting an interminable patience, gave him a
beautiful immensity of his own.

Anne, left in her charmed, inviolate circle, surrendered sweetly to the
spirit of Westleydale.

The place was peace folded upon the breast of peace.

Presently she spoke, calling his name, as if out of the far-off
unutterable peace.

"Walter, it was kind of you to bring me here."

"I am so glad you like it."

"I do indeed."

He tried to say more, but his heart choked him.

She closed her eyes, and the peace poured over her, and sank in. Her
heart beat quietly.

She opened her eyes and turned them on her husband. She knew that it was
his gaze that had compelled them to open. She smiled to herself, like a
young girl, shyly but happily aware of him, and turned from him to her
contemplation of the woods.

Anne had always rather prided herself on her susceptibility to the beauty
of nature, but it had never before reached her with this poignant touch.
Hitherto she had drawn it in with her eyes only; now it penetrated her
through every nerve. She was vaguely but deliciously aware of her own
body as a part of it, and of her husband's joy in contemplating her.

"He thinks me good-looking," she said to herself, and the thought came to
her as a revelation.

Then her young memory woke again and thrust at her.

"He thinks me good-looking. That's why he married me."

She longed to find out if it were so.

"Walter," said she, "I want to ask you a question."

"Well--if it's an easy one."

"It isn't--very. What made you want to marry me?"

He paused a moment, searching for the truth.

"Your goodness."

"Is that really true?"

"To the best of my belief, madam, it is."

"But there are so many other women better than me."

"Possibly. I haven't been happy enough to meet them."

"And if you had met them?"

"As far as I can make out, I shouldn't have fallen in love with them.
I shouldn't have fallen in love with _you_, if it hadn't been for your
goodness. But I shouldn't have fallen in love with your goodness in any
other woman."