"Who is the lady sitting in the window?" asked Anne.

"It's my sister." Mrs. Ransome blinked as she answered, and her blood ran
scarlet to the roots of her blonde hair.

A cherub, discovering a horrible taste in his trumpet, would have looked
like Mrs. Hannay.

"Do let me give you some more tea, Mrs. Majendie?" said she, while Mrs.
Ransome signalled to her husband. "Here, Dick, come and make yourself
useful."

Mr. Ransome, a little stout man with a bald head, a pale puffy face, a
twinkling eye and a severe moustache, was obedient to her summons.

"Let me see," said she, "have you met Mrs. Majendie?"

"I have not had that pleasure," said Mr. Ransome, and bowed profoundly.
He waited assiduously on Mrs. Majendie. The Ransomes might have been
responsible for the whole occasion, they so rallied around and supported
her.

Hannay and Gorst, Ransome and another man were gathered together in a
communion with the lady of the settee. There was a general lull, and her
voice, a voice of sweet but somewhat penetrating quality, was heard.

"Don't talk to me," said she, "about women being jealous of each other.
Do you suppose I mind another woman being handsome? I don't care how
handsome she is, so long as she isn't handsome in my style. Of course,
I don't say I could stand it if she was the very moral of me."

"I say, supposing Toodles met the very moral of herself?"

"Could Toodles have a moral? I doubt it."

"I want to know what she'd do with it."

"Yes, by Jove, what _would_ you do?"

"Do? I should do my worst. I should make her sit somewhere with a good
strong light on her."

"Hold hard there," said her brother-in-law (the man who called her
Toodles), "Lady Cayley doesn't want that lamp lit just yet"

In the silence of the rest, the name seemed to leap straight across the
room to Anne.

The two women beside her heard it, and looked at each other and at her.
Anne sickened under their eyes, struck suddenly by the meaning of their
protection and their sympathy. She longed to rise, to sweep them aside
and go. But she was kept motionless by some superior instinct of disdain.

Outwardly she appeared in no way concerned by this revelation of the
presence of Lady Cayley. She might never have heard of her, for any
knowledge that her face betrayed.

Majendie, not far from the settee in the window, was handing cucumber
sandwiches to an old lady. And Lady Cayley had taken the matches from the
maid and was lighting the lamp herself, and was saying, "I'm not afraid
of the light yet, I assure you. There--look at me."

Everybody looked at her, and she looked at everybody, as she sat in the
lamplight, and let it pour over her. She seemed to be offering herself
lavishly, recklessly, triumphantly, to the light.

Lady Cayley was a large woman of thirty-seven, who had been a slender and
a pretty woman at thirty. She would have been pretty still if she had
been a shade less large. She had tiny upward-tilted features in her large
white face; but the lines of her jaw and her little round prominent chin
were already vanishing in a soft enveloping fold, flushed through its
whiteness with a bloom that was a sleeping colour. Her forehead and
eyelids were exceedingly white, so white that against them her black
eyebrows and blue eyes were vivid and emphatic. Her head carried high a
Gainsborough hat of white felt, with black plumes and a black line round
its brim. Under its upward and its downward curve her light brown hair
was tossed up, and curled, and waved, and puffed into an appearance of
great exuberance and volume. Exuberance and volume were the note of this
lady, a note subdued a little by the art of her dressmaker. A gown of
smooth black cloth clung to her vast form without a wrinkle, sombre,
severe, giving her a kind of slenderness in stoutness. She wore a white
lace vest and any quantity of lace ruffles, any number of little black
velvet lines and points set with paste buttons. And every ruffle, every
line, every point and button was an accent, emphasising some beauty of
her person.

And Anne looked at Lady Cayley once and no more.

It was enough. The trouble that she had put from her came again upon her,
no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had
shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined. She
grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her
in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of her own horror made flesh.

A terrible comprehension fell on her of that body, of its power, its
secret, and its sin.

For the first moment, when she looked from it to her husband, her mind
refused to associate him with that degradation. Reverence held her, and
a sudden memory of her passion in the woods at Westleydale. Mercifully,
they veiled her intelligence, and made it impossible for her to realise
that he should have sunk so low.

Then she remembered. She had known that it was, that it would be so,
that, sooner or later, the woman would come back. Her brain conceived a
curious two-fold intuition of the fact.

It was all foreappointed and foreknown, that she should come to this
hateful house, and should sit there, and that her eyes should be opened
and that she should see.

And the woman's voice rose again. "Do I see cucumber sandwiches?" said
Lady Cayley. "Dick, go and tell Mr. Majendie that if he doesn't want all
those sandwiches himself, I'll have one."

Ransome gave the message, and Majendie turned to the lady of the settee,
presenting the plate with the finest air of abstraction. Her large arm
hovered in selection long enough for her to shoot out one low quick
speech.

"I only wanted to see if you'd cut me, Wallie. Topsy bet me two to ten
you wouldn't."

"Why on earth should I?"

"Oh, on earth I know you wouldn't. But didn't I hear just now you'd
married and gone to heaven?"

"Gone to----?"

"Sh--sh--sh--I'm sure she doesn't let you use those naughty words. You
needn't say you're not in heaven, for I can see you are. You didn't
expect to meet me there, did you?"

"I certainly didn't expect to meet you here."

"How can you be so rude? Dick, take that tiresome plate from him, he
doesn't know what to do with it. Yes. I'll have another before it goes
away for ever."

Majendie had given up the plate before he realised that he was parting
with the link that bound him to the outer world. He turned instantly to
follow it there; but she saw his intention and frustrated it.

"Butter? Ugh! You might hold my cup for me while I take my gloves off."

She peeled two skin-tight gloves from her plump hands, so carefully that
the operation gave her all the time she wanted.

"I believe you're still afraid of me?" said she.

He was doing his best to look over her head; but she smiled a smile so
flashing that it drew his eyes to her involuntarily; he felt it as
positively illuminating their end of the room.

"You're not? Well, prove it."

"Is it possible to prove anything to you?"

Again he was about to break from her impatiently. Nothing, he had told
himself, would induce him to stay and talk to her. But he saw Anne's
face across the room; it was pale and hard, fixed in an expression of
implacable repulsion. And she was not looking at Lady Cayley, but at him.

"You can prove it," said Lady Cayley, "to me and everybody else--they're
all looking at you--by sitting down quietly for one moment, and trying to
look a little less as if we compromised each other."

He stayed, to prove his innocence before Anne; and he stood, to prove
his independence before Lady Cayley. He had longed to get away from the
woman, to stand by his wife's side--to take her out of the room, out of
the house, into the open air. And now the perversity that was in him kept
him where he hated to be.

"That's right. Thank heaven one of us has got some presence of mind."

"Presence of _mind_?"

"Yes. You don't seem to think of _me_," she added softly.

"Why should I?" he replied with a brutality that surprised himself.

She looked at him with blue eyes softly suffused, and the curve of a red
mouth sweet and tremulous. "Why?" her whisper echoed him. "Because I'm a
woman."

Her eyelids dropped ever so little, but their dark lashes (following the
upward trend of her features) curled to such a degree that the veil was
ineffectual. He saw a large slit of the wonderful, indomitable blue.

"I'm a woman, and you're a man, you see; and the world's on your side, my
friend, not on mine."

She said it sweetly. If she had been bitter she would have (as she
expressed it) "choked him off"; but Lady Cayley knew better than to be
bitter now, at thirty-seven. She had learnt that her power was in her
sweetness.

His face softened (from the other end of the room Anne saw it soften),
and Lady Cayley pursued with soundless feet her fugitive advantage.

"Poor Wallie, you needn't look so frightened. I'm quite safe now, or
soon will be. Didn't I tell you I was going there too? I'm going to be
married."

"I'm delighted to hear it," he said stiffly.

"To a perfect angel," said she.

"Really? If you're going up to heaven, he, I take it, is not coming down
to earth."

"Nothing is settled," said Lady Cayley, with such monstrous gravity that
his stiffness melted, and he laughed outright.

Anne heard him.

"Who, if I may ask, is this celestial, this transcendent being?"

She shook her head. "I can't tell you, yet."

"What, isn't even that settled?"

Majendie was so genuinely diverted at that moment that he would not have
left her if he could.

She took the sting of it, and flushed, dumbly. Remorse seized him, and he
sought to soothe her.

"My dear lady, I had a vision of heavenly hosts standing round you in
such quantities that it might be difficult to make a selection, you
know."

She rallied finely under the reviving compliment. "My dear, it's a case
of quality, not quantity--" Her past was so present to them both that he
almost understood her to say, "this time."

"I see," he said. "The wings. But nothing's settled?"

"It's settled right enough," said she, by which he understood her to
imply that the "angel's" case was. She had settled him. Majendie could
see her doing it. His imagination played lightly with the preposterous
idea. He conceived her in the act of bringing down her bird of heaven,
actually "winging him."

"But it's not given out yet."

"I see."

"You're the first I've told, except Topsy. Topsy knows it. So you mustn't
tell anybody else."

"I never tell anybody anything," said he.

He gathered that it was not quite so settled as she wished him to
suppose, and that Lady Cayley anticipated some possible dashing of the
cup of matrimony from her lips.

"So I'm not to have panics, in the night, and palpitations, every time
I think of it?"

"Certainly not, if it rests with me."

"I wanted you to know. But it's so precious, I'm afraid of losing it.
Nothing," said Lady Cayley, "can make up for the loss of a good man's
love. Except," she added, "a good woman's."

"Quite so," he assented coldly, with horror at his perception of her
drift.

His coldness riled her.

"Who," said she with emphasis, "is the lady who keeps making those awful
eyes at us over Pussy's top-knot?"

"That lady," said Majendie, "as it happens, is my wife."

"Why didn't you tell me that before? That's what comes, you see, of not
introducing people. I'll tell you one thing, Wallie. She's awfully
handsome. But you always had good taste. Br-r-r, there's a draught
cutting my head off. You might shut that window, there's a dear."

He shut it.

"And put my cup down."

He put it down.

Anne saw him. She had seen everything.

"And help me on with my cape."

He lifted the heavy sable thing with two fingers, and helped her
gingerly. A scent, horrid and thick, and profuse with memories, was
shaken from her as she turned her shoulder. He hoped she was going. But
she was not going; not she. Her body swayed towards him sinuously from
hips obstinately immobile, weighted, literally, with her unshakable
determination to sit on.

She rewarded him with a smile which seemed to him, if anything, more
atrociously luminous than the last. "I must keep you up to the mark,"
said she, as she turned with it. "Your wife's looking at you, and I feel
responsible for your good behaviour. Don't keep her waiting. Can't you
see she wants to go?"

"And I want to go, too," said he savagely. And he went.

And as she watched Mrs. Walter Majendie's departure, Lady Cayley smiled
softly to herself; tasting the first delicious flavour of success.

She had made Mrs. Walter Majendie betray herself; she had made her
furious; she had made her go.

She had sat Mrs. Walter Majendie out.

If the town of Scale, the mayor and the aldermen, had risen and given her
an ovation, she could not have celebrated more triumphally her return.




CHAPTER XIII


Anne and her husband walked home in silence across the Park, grateful for
its darkness. Majendie could well imagine that she would not want to
talk. He made allowance for her repulsion; he respected it and her
silence as its sign. She had every right to her resentment. He had let
her in for the Hannays, who had let her in for the inconceivable
encounter. On the day of her divorce Sarah Cayley had removed herself
from Scale, and he had shrunk from providing for the supreme
embarrassment of her return. He had looked on her as definitely,
consummately departed. She had disappeared, down dingy vistas, into
unimaginable obscurities. He pictured her as sunk, in Continental
abysses, beyond all possibility of resurgence. And she had emerged (from
abominations) smiling that indestructible smile. The incident had been
unpleasant, so unpleasant that he didn't want to talk about it. All the
same, he would have done violence to his feelings and apologised for it
then and there, but that he really judged it better to let well alone. It
was well, he thought, that Anne was so silent. She might have had a great
deal to say, and it was kind of her not to say it, to let him off so
easily.

Anne's interpretation of Majendie's silence was not so favourable. After
being exposed to the pain and insult of Lady Cayley's presence she had
expected an immediate apology, and she inferred from its omission an
unpardonable complicity. Any compliance with the public toleration of
that person would have been inexcusable, and he had been more than
compliant, more than tolerant; he had been solicitous, attentive,
deferent. And deference to such a woman was insolence to his wife. Anne
was struck dumb by the shameless levity of the proceedings. The two had
behaved as if nothing had happened, or rather (she bitterly corrected
herself) as if everything had happened, and might happen any day again
(she inferred as much from his silence). It would--it would happen. _Her_
intentions were, to Anne's mind, unmistakable; that was plainly what she
had come back for. As to his intentions, Anne was not yet clear. She had
not made up her mind that they were bad; but she shuddered as she said to
herself that he was "weak." He had come at that woman's call; he had hung
round her; he had waited on her at her bidding; at her bidding he had sat
down beside her; he had listened to her, attracted, charmed, delighted;
he had talked to her in the low voice Anne knew. How could she tell what
had or had not passed between them there, what intimacies, what
recognitions, what resurrections of the corrupt, ill-buried past? He had
been "weak--weak--weak." Henceforth she must reckon with his weakness,
and reckoning with it, she must keep him from that woman by any method,
and at any cost! It was something that he had the grace to be ashamed of
himself (another inference from his silence). No wonder, after that
communion, if he was ashamed to look at his wife or speak to her.

He went straight to Edith when they reached home, and Anne went upstairs
to her bedroom.

She had a great desire to be alone. She wanted to pray, as she had
prayed in that room at Scarby on the morning of her discovery. Not that
she felt in the least as she had felt then. She was more profoundly
wounded--wounded beyond passion and beyond tears, calm and self-contained
in her vision of the inevitable, the fore-ordained reality. She had to
get rid of her vision; it was impossible to live with it, impossible to
live through another hour like the last. Her desire to pray was a
terrible, urgent longing that consumed her, impatient of every minute
that kept her from her prayer. She controlled it, moving slowly as she
took off her outdoor clothes and put them decorously away; feeling that
the force of her prayer gathered and mounted behind these minute
obstructions and delays.

She knelt down by her bed. She had been used to pray there with her eyes
fixed upon the crucifix which he had given her. It hung low, almost
between the pillows of their bed. Now she closed her eyes to shut it from
her sight. It was then that she realised what had been done to her. With
the closing of her eyes she opened some back room in her brain, a hot
room, now dark, and now charged with a red light, vaporous and vivid,
that ran in furious pulses, as it were the currents of her blood made
visible. The room thus opened was tenanted by the revolting image of Lady
Cayley. Now it loomed steadily in the dark, now it leapt quiveringly into
the red, vaporous light. She could not see her husband, but she had a
sickening sense that he was there, looming, and that his image, too,
would leap into sight at some signal of her unwilling thought. She knew
that that back room would remain, built up indestructibly in the fabric
of her mind. It would be set apart for ever for the phantom of her
husband and her husband's mistress. By a tremendous effort of will she
shut the door on it. There it must be for ever, but wherever she looked,
she would not look there; much less allow herself to dwell in the unclean
place. It was not to think of that woman, his mistress, that she had gone
down on her knees. To think of her was contamination. After all, the
woman had no power over her inner life. She was not forced to think of
her. She had her sanctuary and her way of escape.

But before she could get there she had to struggle against the fatigue
which came of her effort not to think. Once she would have resigned
herself to this physical lassitude, mistaking it for the sinking of the
soul in the beatific self-surrender. But Anne's sufferings had brought
her a little further on her path. She had come to recognise that supine
state as a great danger to the spiritual life. It was not by lassitude,
but by concentration that the intense communion was attained. She lifted
her bowed head as a sign of her exaltation.

And as she lifted it, she caught, as it were, the approach of triumphal
music. Words gathered, as on wings, from the clean-swept heavenly
spaces--they went by her like the passing of an immense processional:
"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting
doors, and the King of Glory shall come in...." It came on, that heavenly
invasion, and all her earthly barriers went down before it. And it was as
if something strong in her, something solitary and pure, had cloven its
way through the mesh of the throbbing nerves, through the beating
currents of the blood, through the hot red lights of the brain, and had
escaped into the peaceful blank. She remained there a moment, in the
place of bliss, the divine place of the self-surrendered soul, where
mortal emptiness draws down immortality.

She said to herself, "I have my refuge; no one can take it from me.
Nothing matters so long as I can get there."

She rose from her knees more calm and self-contained than ever, barely
conscious of her wound.

So calm and so self-contained was she at dinner that Majendie had an
agreeable rebound; he supposed that she had recovered from the abominable
encounter, and had put Lady Cayley out of her head like a sensible woman.
Edith had received his account of that incident with a gravity that had
made him profoundly uncomfortable; and his relief was in proportion to
his embarrassment. Unfortunately it gave him the appearance of
complacency; and complacency in the circumstances was more than Anne
could bear. Coming straight from her exaltation and communion, she was
crushed by the profound, invisible difference that separated them, the
perpetual loneliness of her unwedded, unsubjugated soul. They lived a
whole earth and a whole heaven apart. He was untouched by the fires that
burnt and purified her. The tragic crises that destroyed, the spiritual
moments that built her up again, passed by him unperceived. If she were
to tell him how she had attained her present serenity of mind, by what
vision, by what effort, by what sundering of body and soul, he would not
understand.

And that was not the worst. She had learnt not to look for that spiritual
understanding in him. It mattered little that her unique suffering and
her unique consolation should remain alike ignored. The terrible thing
was that he should have come out of his own ordeal so smiling and so
unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he
could meet, after seven years, in his wife's presence, the partner of his
sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)--meet her, and not be
shaken by the shame of it. It showed how lightly he held it, how low his
standard was. She recalled, shuddering, the woman's face. Nothing in the
visions she had so shrunk from could compare with the violent reality.
For one moment of repulsion she saw him no less gross. She wondered,
would she have to reckon with that, henceforth, too?

She looked up, and met across the table the engaging innocence that she
recognised as the habitual expression of his face. He had no idea of what
dreadful things she was thinking of him. She put her thoughts from her,
admitting that she had never had to reckon with that, yet. But it was
terrible to her that, while he forced her to such thinking, he could sit
there so unconscious, and so unashamed. He sat there, bright-eyed,
smiling, a little flushed, playing with a light topic in a manner that
suggested a conscience singularly at ease. He went on sitting there,
absolutely unembarrassed, eating dessert. The eating of dinner was bad
enough, it showed complacency. But dessert argued callousness. She had
wondered how he could have any appetite at all. Her dinner had almost
choked her.

And she sat waiting for him to finish, hardly looking at him, detached,
saint-like, and still.

At last her silence struck him as a little ominous. He had distinct
misgivings as they turned into the study for coffee and his cigarette.
Anne sat up in her chair, refusing the support and luxury of cushions,
leaning a little forward with a brooding air.

"Well, Nancy," said he, "are you going to read to me?"

(Better to read than talk.)

"Not now," said she. "I want to talk to you."

He saw that it was not to be avoided. "Won't you let me have my coffee
and a cigarette first?"

She waited, silent, with a strained air of patience more uncomfortable
than words.

"Well," said he, lighting a second cigarette, and settling in the
position that would best enable him to bear it, "out with it, and get it
over."

"I want to know," said she, "what you are going to do."

"To do?" He was genuinely bewildered.

"Yes, to do."

"But about what?"

"About that woman."

He was so charmed with the angelic absurdity of the question that he
paused while he took it in, smiling.

"I can't see," he said presently, "that I'm called upon to take action.
Why should I?"

She drew herself up proudly.

"For my sake."

He was instantly grave. "For your sake, dear, I would do a great deal.
But"--he smiled again--"what action should I take?"

"Is it for me to say?"

"Well, I hardly know. I should be glad, at any rate, if you'd make a
suggestion. I can't, for instance, get up and turn the lady out of her
own sister's house. Do you want me to do that? Would you like me to--to
take her away in a cab?"

There was a long silence, so awful that he forced himself to speak. "I am
extremely sorry. It was, of course, outrageous that you should have had
to sit in the same room with her for five minutes. But what could I do?"

"You could have taken _me_ away."

"I did, as soon as I got the chance."

"Not before you had"--she paused for her phrase--"condoned her
appearance."

"Condoned her appearance? How?"

"By your whole manner to her."

"Would you have had me uncivil?"

"There are degrees," said she, "between incivility and marked attention."

He coloured. "Marked attention! There was nothing marked about it. What
could I do? Would you, I say, have had me turn my back on the unfortunate
woman? That would have been marked attention, if you like."

"I don't know what I would have had you do. One has no rules beforehand
for inconceivable situations. It was inconceivable that I should have met
her as I did, in your friend's house. Inconceivable that I should meet
such people anywhere. What I do ask is that you will not let me be
exposed in that way again."

"That I certainly will not. The Ransomes did their best to get her out
of the room to-day. They won't annoy you. I can't conceive why they
called--except that they have always been rather fond of me. You can't
hold people accountable for all the doings of all their relations, can
you?"

"In this case I should say you could--perfectly well."

"Well, I don't, as it happens. But you needn't have anything to do with
them; not, at least, while she's living in their house."

"It was in the Hannays' house I met her. But I'm not thinking of myself."

"I'm thinking of you, and of nothing else."

"You needn't," said she, cold to his warmth. "I can take care of myself.
It's you I'm thinking of."

"Me? Why me?"

"Because I'm your wife and have a right to. It's out of the question that
I should call on Mrs. Hannay or receive her calls. I must also beg of you
to give up going there, and to the Ransomes, and to every place where you
will be brought into contact with Lady Cayley."

He stared at her in amazement. "My dear girl, you don't expect me to cut
the Ransomes because she isn't brute enough to turn her sister out of
doors?"

"I expect you to give up going to them, and to the Hannays, as long as
Lady Cayley is in Scale. Promise me."

"I can't promise you anything of the sort. Heaven knows how long she's
going to stay."

"I ought not to have to explain that by countenancing her you insult me.
You should see it for yourself."

"I can't see it. In the first place, with all due regard to you, I don't
insult you by countenancing her, as you call it. In the second place, I
don't countenance her by going into other people's houses. If I went into
her house, you might complain. She hasn't got a house, poor lady."

She ignored his pity. "In spite of your regard for me, then, you will
continue to meet her?"

"I shan't if I can help it. But if I must, I must. I can't be rude to
people."

"You can be firm."

He laughed. "What have I got to be firm about?"

"Not meeting her."

"What if I do meet her? I sincerely hope I shan't; but what if I do?"

Her mouth trembled; her eyes filled with tears. He sprang up and leaned
over her, resting his arms on the back of her chair, bringing his face
close to hers and smiling into her eyes.

"No--no--no!" She drew back her head and shrank away from him. He put out
his hand and turned her face to him, gazing into her eyes, as if for the
first time he saw and could fathom the sorrow and the fear in them.

"What if I do?" he repeated.

She tried to push his hand from her, but she could not.

"You stupid child," he said, "do you mean to say that you're still afraid
of that?"

"It's you who have made me--"

"My sweetheart--"

"No, no. Don't touch me."

"What do you mean?" he asked gravely, still leaning over and looking down
at her.

"I mean--I mean--I can't bear it!" she cried, gasping for breath under
the oppression of his nearness.

He realised her repugnance, and removed himself.

"Do you mean," he said, "because of her?"

"Yes," she said, "because of her."

He laughed softly. "Dear child--she doesn't exist. She doesn't exist." He
swept her out of existence with a gesture of his hand. "Not for me at any
rate."

The emphasis was lost upon her. "It's all nonsense to talk in that way.
If she doesn't exist for you, you shouldn't have gone near her, you
shouldn't have sat talking--to her."

"What do you suppose we were talking about?"

"I don't know. I don't want to know. I saw and heard enough."

"Look here, Anne. You wanted me to be rude to her, didn't you? I _was_
rude. I was brutal. She had to remind me that she was a woman. By heaven,
I'd forgotten it. If you're always to be going back on that--"

"I'm not going back. She has come back."

"It doesn't matter. She doesn't exist. What difference does she make?"

She rose for better delivery of what she had to say.

"She makes the whole difference. It's not that I'm afraid of her. I don't
think I am. I believe that you love me."

"Ah--if you believe that--" He came nearer.

"I do believe it. It's to me that it makes the difference. I must be
honest with you. It's not that I'm afraid. It is--I think--that I'm
disgusted."

He lowered his eyes and moved from her uneasily.

"I was horrified enough when I first knew of it, as you know. You know,
too, that I forgave you, and that I forgot. That was because I didn't
realise it. I didn't know what it was. I couldn't before I had seen her.
Now I have seen her, and I know."

"What do you know?" he said coldly.

"The awfulness of it."

"Do you! Do you!"

"Yes--and if you had realised it yourself--But you don't, and your not
realising it is what shocks me most."

"I don't realise it?" His smile, this time, was grim. "I should think I
was in a better position for realising it than you."

"You don't realise the shame, the sin of it"

"Oh, don't I?" He turned to her, "Look here, whatever I've done, it's all
over. I've taken my punishment, and repented in sackcloth and ashes. But
you can't go on for ever repenting. It wears you out. It seems to me
that, after all this time, I might be allowed to leave off the sackcloth
and brush the ashes out of my hair. I want to forget it if I can. But you
are never--never--going to forget it. And you are going to make me
remember it every day of my life. Is that it?"

"It is not." She could not see herself thus hard and implacable. She had
vowed that there was no duty that she would omit; and it was her duty to
forgive; if possible, to forget. "I am going to try to forget it, as I
have forgotten it before. But it will be very hard, and you must be
patient with me. You must not remind me of it more than you can help."

"When have I--?"

She was silent.

"When?" he insisted.

She shook her head and turned away. A sudden impulse roused him, and he
sprang after her. He grasped her wrist as she laid her hand on the door
to open it. He drew her to him. "When?" he repeated. "How? Tell me."

She paused, gazing at him. He would have kissed her, hoping thus to make
his peace with her; but she broke from him.

"Ah," she cried, "you are reminding me of it now."

He opened the door, dumb with amazement, and turned from her as she went
through.




CHAPTER XIV


It was a fine day, early in November, and Anne was walking alone along
one of the broad flat avenues that lead from Scale into the country
beyond. Made restless by her trouble, she had acquired this pedestrian
habit lately, and Majendie encouraged her in it, regarding it less as a
symptom than as a cure. She had flagged a little in the autumn, and he
was afraid that the strain of her devotion to Edith was beginning to tell
upon her health. On Saturdays and Sundays they generally walked together,
and he did his best to make his companionship desirable. Anne, given now
to much self-questioning as to their relations, owned, in an access of
justice, that she enjoyed these expeditions. Whatever else she had found
her husband, she had never yet found him dull. But it did not occur to
her, any more than it occurred to Majendie, to consider whether she
herself were brilliant.

She made a point of never refusing him her society. She had persuaded
herself that she went with him for his own good. If he wanted to take
long walks in the country, it was her duty as his wife to accompany him.
She was sustained perpetually by her consciousness of doing her duty as
his wife; and she had persuaded herself also that she found her peace in
it. She kept his hours for him as punctually as ever; she aimed more
than ever at perfection in her household ways. He should never be able
to say that there was one thing in which she had failed him.

No; she knew that neither he nor Edith, if they tried, could put their
finger on any point, and say: There, or there, she had gone wrong. Not
in her understanding of him. She told herself that she understood him
completely now, to her own great unhappiness. The unhappiness was the
price she paid for her understanding.

She was absorbed in these reflections as she turned (in order to be home
by five o'clock), and walked towards the town. She was awakened from
them by the trampling of hoofs and the cheerful tootling of a horn. A
four-in-hand approached and passed her; not so furiously but that she had
time to recognise Lady Cayley on the box-seat, Mr. Gorst beside her,
driving, and Mr. Ransome and Mr. Hannay behind amongst a perfect
horticultural show in millinery.

Anne had no acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Scale and
Beesly Four-in-hand Club, and her intuition stopped short of recognising
Miss Gwen Richards, of the Vaudeville, and the others. All the same her
private arraignment of these ladies refused them whatever benefit they
were entitled to from any doubt. Not that Anne wasted thought on them.
In spite of her condemnation, they barely counted; they were mere
attendants, accessories in the vision of sin presented by Lady Cayley.

Nothing could have been more conspicuous than her appearance, more
unabashed than the proclamation of her gay approach. Mounted high,
heralded by the tootling horn, her hair blown, her cheeks bright with
speed, her head and throat wrapped in a rosy veil that flung two broad
streamers to the wind (as it were the banners of the red dawn flying and
fluttering over her), she passed, the supreme figure in the pageant of
triumphal vice.

Her face was turned to Gorst's face, his to hers. He looked more than
ever brilliant, charming and charmed, laughing aloud with his companion.
Hannay and Ransome raised their hats to Mrs. Majendie as they passed.
Gorst was too much absorbed in Lady Cayley.

Anne shivered, chilled and sick with the resurgence of her old disgust.
These were her husband's chosen associates and comrades; they stood by
one another; they were all bound up together in one degrading intimacy.
His dear friend Mr. Gorst was the dear friend of Lady Cayley. He knew
what she was, and thought nothing of it. Mr. Ransome, her brother-in-law,
knew, and thought nothing of it. As for Mr. Hannay, Walter's other dear
friend, you only had to look at the women he was with to see how much Mr.
Hannay thought. There could have been nothing very profound in his
supposed repudiation of Lady Cayley. If it was true that he had once paid
her money to go, he was doing his best to welcome her, now she had come
back. But it was Gorst, with his vivid delight in Lady Cayley, who amazed
her most. Anne had identified him with the man of whom Walter had once
told her, the man who was "fond of Edith," the man of whom Walter
admitted that he was not "entirely straight." And this man was always
calling on Edith.

She was resolved that, if she could prevent it, he should call no more.
It should not be said that she allowed her house to be open to such
people. But it required some presence of mind to state her determination.
Before she could speak with any authority she would have to find out all
that could be known about Mr. Gorst. She would ask Fanny Eliott, who had
seemed to know, and to know more than she had cared to say.

Instead of going straight home, she turned aside into Thurston Square;
and had the good luck to find Fanny Eliott at home.

Fanny Eliott was rejoiced to see her. She looked at her anxiously, and
observed that she was thin. She spoke of her call as a "coming back"; the
impression conveyed by Anne's manner was so strikingly that of return
after the pursuit of an illusion.

Anne smiled wearily, as if it had been a long step from Prior Street to
Thurston Square.

"I thought," said Mrs. Eliott, "I was never going to see you again."

"You might have known," said Anne.

"Oh yes, I might have known. And you're not going to run away at five
o'clock?"

"No. I can stay a little--if you're free."

Mrs. Eliott interpreted the condition as a request for privacy, and rang
the bell to ensure it. She knew something was coming; and it came.

"Fanny, I want you to tell me what you know of Mr. Gorst."

Mrs. Eliott looked exceedingly embarrassed. She avoided gossip as
inconsistent with the intellectual life. And unpleasant gossip was
peculiarly distasteful to her. Therefore she hesitated. "My dear, I
don't know much--"

"Don't put me off like that. You know something. You must tell me."

Mrs. Eliott reflected that Anne had no more love of scandalous histories
than she had; therefore, if she asked for knowledge, it must be because
her need was pressing.

"My dear, I only know that Johnson won't have him in the house."

She spoke as if this were nothing, a mere idiosyncrasy of Johnson's.

"Why not?" said Anne. "He has very nice manners."

"I dare say, but Johnson doesn't approve of him." (Another eccentricity
of Johnson's.)

"And why doesn't he?"

"Well, you know, Mr. Gorst has a very unpleasant reputation. At least he
goes about with most objectionable people."

"You mean he's the same sort of person as Mr. Hannay?"

"I should say he was, if anything, worse."

"You mean he's a bad man?"

"Well--"

"So bad that you won't have him in the house?"

"Well, dear, you know we are particular." (A singularity that she shared
with Johnson.)

"So am I," said Anne.

"And this," she said to herself, "is the man whom Edie's fond of,
Walter's dearest friend. And my friends won't have him in their house."

"Charming, I believe, and delightful," said Mrs. Eliott, "but perhaps a
little dangerous on that account. And one has to draw the line. I want to
know about you, dear. You're well, though you're so thin?"

"Oh, very well."

"And happy?" (She ventured on it.)

"Could I be well if I weren't happy? How's Mrs. Gardner?"

The thought of happiness called up a vision of the perpetually radiant
bride.

"Oh, Mrs. Gardner, she's as happy as the day is long. Much too happy, she
says, to go about paying calls."

"_I_ haven't called much, have I?" said Anne, hoping that her friend
would draw the suggested inference.

"No, you haven't. _You_ ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"Why I any more than Mrs. Gardner? But I am."

Mrs. Eliott perceived her blunder. "Well, I forgive you, as long as
you're happy."

Anne kissed her more tenderly than usual as they said good-bye, so
tenderly that Mrs. Eliott wondered "Is she?"

Majendie was late that afternoon, and Anne had an hour alone with Edith.
She had made up her mind to speak seriously to her sister-in-law on the
subject of Mr. Gorst, and she chose this admirable opportunity.

"Edith," said she with the abruptness of extreme embarrassment, "did you
know that Lady Cayley had come back?"

"Come back?"

"She's here, living in Scale."

There was a pause before Edith answered. Anne judged from the quiet of
her manner that this was not the first time that she had heard of the
return.

"Well, dear, after all, if she is, what does it matter? She must live
somewhere."

"I should have thought that for her own sake it was a pity to have chosen
a town where she was so well known."

"Oh well, that's her own affair. I suppose she argues that most people
here know the worst; and that's always a comfort."

"Oh, for all they appear to care--" Her face became tragic, and she lost
her unnatural control. "I can't understand it. I never saw such people.
She's received as if nothing had happened."

"By her own people. It's decent of them not to cast her off."

"Oh, as for decency, they don't seem to have a shred of it amongst them.
And the Hannays are not her own people. I thought I should be safe in
going there after what you told me. And it was there I met her."

"I know. They were most distressed about it."

"And yet they received her, too, as if nothing had happened."

"Because nothing can happen now. They got rid of her when she was
dangerous. She isn't dangerous any more. On the contrary, I believe her
great idea now is to be respectable. I suppose they're trying to give her
a lift up. You must admit it's nice of them."

"You think them nice?"

"I think _that's_ nice of them. It's the sort of thing they do. They're
kind people, if they're not the most spiritual I have met."

"You may call it kindness, I call it shocking indifference. They're worse
than the Ransomes. I don't believe the Ransomes know what's decent. The
Hannays know, but they don't care. They're all dreadful people; and their
sympathy with each other is the most dreadful thing about them. They hold
together and stand up for each other, and are 'kind' to each other,
because they all like the same low, vulgar, detestable things. That's why
Mr. Hannay married Mrs. Hannay, and Mr. Ransome married Lady Cayley's
sister. They're all admirably suited to each other, but not, my dear
Edie, to you or me."

"They're certainly not your sort, I admit."

"Nor yours either."

"No, nor mine either," said Edith, smiling. "Poor Anne, I'm sorry we've
let you in for them."

"I'm not thinking only of myself. The terrible thing is that you should
be let in, too."

"Oh, me--how can they harm me?"

"They have harmed you."

"How?"

"By keeping other people away."

"What people?"

"The nice people you should have known. You were entitled to the very
best. The Eliotts and the Gardners--those are the people who should have
been your friends, not the Hannays and the Ransomes; and not, believe me,
darling, Mr. Gorst."

For a moment Edith unveiled the tragic suffering in her eyes. It passed,
and left her gaze grave and lucid and serene.

"What do you know of Mr. Gorst?"

"Enough, dear, to see that he isn't fit for you to know."

"Poor Charlie, that's what he's always saying himself. I've known him too
long, you see, not to know him now. Years and years, my dear, before I
knew you."

"It was through Mrs. Eliott that I knew you, remember."

"Because you were determined to know me. It was through you that I knew
Mrs. Eliott. Before that, she never made the smallest attempt to know me
better or to show me any kindness. Why should she?"

"Well, my dear, if you kept her at arm's length--if you let her see, for
instance, that you preferred Mr. Gorst's society to hers--"

"Do you think I let her see it?"

"No, I don't. And it wouldn't enter her head. But, considering that she
can't receive Mr. Gorst into her own house--"

"Why should she?"

"Edie--if she cannot, how can you?"

Edith closed her eyes. "I'll tell you some day, dear, but not now."

Anne did not press her. She had not the courage to discuss Mr. Gorst with
her, nor the heart to tell her that he was to be received into her house
no more. She saw Edith growing tender over his very name; she felt that
there would be tears and entreaties, and she was determined that no
entreaties and no tears should move her to a base surrender. Her pause
was meant to banish the idea of Mr. Gorst from Edith's mind, but it only
served to fix it more securely there.

"Edith," she said presently, "I will keep my promise."

"Which promise?" Edith was mystified. Her mind unwillingly renounced the
idea of Mr. Gorst, and the promise could not possibly refer to him.

"The promise I made to you about Walter."

"My dear one, I never thought you would break it."

"I shall never break it. I've accepted Walter once for all, and in spite
of everything. But I will not accept these people you say I've been let
in for. I will not know them. And I shall have to tell him so."

"Why should you tell him anything? He doesn't want you to take them to
your bosom. He sees how impossible they are."

"Ah--if he sees that."

"Believe me" (Edith said it wearily), "he sees everything."

"If he does," thought Anne, "it will be easier to convince him."




CHAPTER XV


The task was so far unpleasant to her that she was anxious to secure the
first opportunity and get it over. Her moment would come with the two
hours after dinner in the study.

It did not come that evening; for Majendie telegraphed that he had been
detained in town, and would dine at the Club. He did not come home till
Anne (who sat up till midnight waiting for that opportunity) had gone
tired to bed.

Her determination gathered strength with the delay, and when her moment
came with the next evening, it came gloriously. Majendie gave himself
over into her hands by bringing Gorst, of all people, back with him to
dine.

The brilliant prodigal approached her with a little embarrassed youthful
air of humility and charm; the air almost of taking her into his
confidence over something unfortunate and absurd. He had evidently
counted on the ten minutes before dinner when he would be left alone with
her. He selected a chair opposite to her, leaning forward in it at ease,
his nervousness visible only in the flushed hands clasped loosely on his
knees, his eyes turned upon his hostess with a look of almost infantile
candour. It was as if he mutely implored her to forget yesterday's
encounter, and on no account to mention in what compromising company he
had been seen. His engaging smile seemed to take for granted that she was
a lady of pity and understanding, who would never have the heart to give
a poor prodigal away. His eyes intimated that Mrs. Majendie knew what it
amounted to, that awful prodigality of his.

But Mrs. Majendie had no illusions concerning sinners with engaging
smiles and beautiful manners. And with every tick of the clock he
deepened the impression of his insolence and levity. His very charm
and the flush and brilliance that were part of it went to swell the
prodigal's account. The instinct that had wakened in her knew them,
the lights and colours, the heralding banners and vivid signs, all the
paraphernalia of triumphant sin. She turned upon her guest the cold eyes
of a condign destiny.

By the time dinner was served it had dawned on Gorst that he was looking
in Mrs. Majendie for something that was not there. He might even have had
some inkling of her resolution; he sat at his friend's table so
consciously on sufferance, with an oppressed, extinguished air, eating
his dinner as if it choked him, like the last sad meal in a beloved
house.

Majendie, too, felt himself drawn in and folded in the gloom cast by his
wife's protesting presence. The shadow of it wrapped them even after Anne
had left the dining-room, as though her indignant spirit had remained
behind to preserve her protest. Gorst had changed his oppression for a
nervous restlessness intolerable to Majendie.

"My dear fellow," he said, "what is the matter with you?"

"How should I know?" said Gorst with a spurt of ill-temper. "I'm not a
nerve specialist."

Majendie looked at him attentively. "I say, _you_ mustn't go in for
nerves, you know; you can't afford it."

"My dear Walter, I can't afford anything, if it comes to that." He paused
with an obscure air of injury and foreboding. "Not even, it seems, the
most innocent amusements. At the rate," he added, "I have to pay for
them." Again he brooded, while Majendie wondered at him, in brotherly
anxiety. "I suppose," Gorst said suddenly, "I can go up and see Edith,
can't I?"

He spoke as if he doubted, whether, in the wreck of his world, with all
his "innocent amusements," that supreme consolation would be still open
to him.

"Of course you can," said Majendie. "It's the best thing you can do.
I told her you were coming."

"Thanks," said Gorst, checking the alacrity with which he rose to go to
Edith.

Oh yes, he knew it was the best thing he could do.

Edith's voice called gladly to him as he tapped at her door. He entered
noiselessly, wearing the wondering and expectant look with which a new
worshipper enters a holy place. Perpetual backslidings kept poor Gorst's
worship perpetually new.

Colour came slowly back into Edith's face and a tender light into her
eyes, as if from the springing of some deep untroubled well of life. She
seemed more than ever a creature of imperial vitality, bound by some
cruel enchantment to her couch. She held out her hands to him; and he
raised them to his lips and kissed her fingers lightly.

"It's weeks since I've seen you," said she.

"Months, isn't it?" said he.

"Weeks, three weeks, by the calendar."

"I say--tell me--I _am_ to come and see you, just the same?"

"Just the same? Why, what's different?"

"Oh, I don't know. But it seems to me, when a man's married, it's bound
to make a difference."

Edith's colour mounted; she made an effort to control the trembling of
her mouth, the soft woman's mouth where all that was bodily in her love
still lingered. But the sweetness deepened in her eyes, which were the
dwelling-place of the immortal, immaterial power. They met Gorst's eyes
steadily, laying on his restlessness their peace.

"Are you going to be married, Charlie?" said she, and smiled bravely.

He laughed. "Oh, Lord, no; not I."

"Who is, then?"

"Walter, of course. I mean he is married, don't you know."

"Yes, and is there any difference in him to you?"

"In him? Oh, rather not."

"In whom, then?"

"Well--I don't think, Edie, that Mrs. Walter--I like her--" he stuck
to it--"I like her, you know, she's charming, but--I don't think she
particularly cares for _me_."

"How do you know that?"

"How do I know anything? By the way she looks at me."