THE HELPMATE

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "Superseded," "Audrey Craven," Etc.







New York
Henry Holt and Company
1907
The Quinn & Boden Co. Press
Rahway, N.J.





BOOK I




CHAPTER I


It was four o'clock in the morning. Mrs. Walter Majendie still lay on
the extreme edge of the bed, with her face turned to the dim line of sea
discernible through the open window of the hotel bedroom.

Since midnight, when she had gone to bed, she had lain in that
uncomfortable position, motionless, irremediably awake. Mrs. Walter
Majendie was thinking.

At first the night had gone by her unperceived, black and timeless. Now
she could measure time by the dull progress of the dawn among the objects
in the room. A slow, unhappy thing, born between featureless grey cloud
and sea, it had travelled from the window, shimmered in the watery square
of the looking-glass, and was feeling for the chair where her husband had
laid his clothes down last night. He had thought she was asleep, and had
gone through his undressing noiselessly, with movements of angelic and
elaborate gentleness that well-nigh disarmed her thought. He was sleeping
now. She tried not to hear the sound of his placid breathing. Only the
other night, their wedding night, she had lain awake at this hour and
heard it, and had turned her face towards him where he lay in the divine
unconsciousness of sleep. The childlike, huddled posture of the sleeper
had then stirred her heart to an unimaginable tenderness.

Now she had got to think, to adjust a new and devastating idea to a
beloved and divine belief.

Somewhere in the quiet town a church clock clanged to the dawn, and the
sleeper stretched himself. The five hours' torture of her thinking wrung
a low sob from the woman at his side.

He woke. His hand searched for her hand. At his touch she drew it away,
and moved from under her cramped shoulder the thick, warm braid of her
hair. It tossed a gleam of pale gold to the risen light. She felt his
drowsy, affectionate fingers pressing and smoothing the springy bosses of
the braid.

The caress kindled her dull thoughts to a point of flame. She sat up and
twisted the offending braid into a rigid coil.

"Walter," she said, "_who_ is Lady Cayley?"

She noticed that the name waked him.

"Does it matter now? Can't you forget her?"

"Forget her? I know nothing about her. I want to know."

"Haven't you been told everything that was necessary?"

"I've been told nothing. It was what I heard."

There was a terrible stillness about him. Only his breath came and went
unsteadily, shaken by the beating of his heart.

She quieted her own heart to listen to it; as if she could gather from
such involuntary motions the thing she had to know.

"I know," she said, "I oughtn't to have heard it. And I can't believe
it,--I don't, really."

"Poor child! What is it that you don't believe?"

His calm, assured tones had the force of a denial.

"Walter--if you'd only say it isn't true--"

"What Edith told you?"

"Edith? Your sister? No; about that woman--that you--that she--"

"Why are you bringing all that up again, at this unearthly hour?"

"Then," she said coldly, "it _is_ true."

His silence lay between them like a sword.

She had rehearsed this scene many times in the five hours; but she had
not prepared herself for this. Her dread had been held captive by her
belief, her triumphant anticipation of Majendie's denial.

Presently he spoke; and his voice was strange to her as the voice of
another man.

"Anne," he said, "didn't she tell you? It was before I knew you. And it
was the only time."

"Don't speak to me," she cried with a sudden passion, and lay shuddering.

She rose, slipped from the bed, and went to a chair that stood by the
open window. There she sat, with her back to the bed, and her eyes
staring over the grey parade and out to the eastern sea.

"Anne," said her husband, "what are you doing there?"

Anne made no answer.

"Come back to bed; you'll catch cold."

He waited.

"How long are you going to sit there in that draught?"

She sat on, upright, immovable, in her thin nightgown, raked by the keen
air of the dawn. Majendie raised himself on his elbow. He could just see
her where she glimmered, and her braid of hair, uncoiled, hanging to her
waist. Up till now he had been profoundly unhappy and ashamed, but
something in the unconquerable obstinacy of her attitude appealed to the
devil that lived in him, a devil of untimely and disastrous humour. The
right thing, he felt, was not to appear as angry as he was. He sat up on
his pillow, and began to talk to her with genial informality.

"See here,--I suppose you want an explanation. But don't you think we'd
better wait until we're up? Up and dressed, I mean. I can't talk
seriously before I've had a bath and--and brushed my hair. You see,
you've taken rather an unfair advantage of me by getting out of bed."
(He paused for an answer, and still no answer came.)--"Don't imagine I'm
ignobly lying down all the time, wrapped in a blanket. I'm sitting on my
pillow. I know there's any amount to be said. But how do you suppose I'm
going to say it if I've got to stay here, all curled up like a blessed
Buddha, and you're planted away over there like a monument of all the
Christian virtues? Are you coming back to bed, or are you not?"

She shivered. To her mind his flippancy, appalling in the circumstances,
sufficiently revealed the man he was. The man she had known and married
had never existed. For she had married Walter Majendie believing him to
be good. The belief had been so rooted in her that nothing but his own
words or his own silence could have cast it out. She had loved Walter
Majendie; but it was another man who called to her, and she would not
listen to him. She felt that she could never go back to that man, never
sit in the same room, or live in the same house with him again. She would
have to make up her mind what she would do, eventually. Meanwhile, to get
away from him, to sit there in the cold, inflexible, insensitive, to
obtain a sort of spiritual divorce from him, while she martyrised her
body which was wedded to him, that was the young, despotic instinct she
obeyed.

"If you won't come," he said, "I suppose it only remains for me to go."

He got up, took Anne's cloak from the door where it hung, and put it
tenderly about her shoulders.

"Whatever happens or unhappens," he said, "we must be dressed."

He found her slippers, and thrust them on her passive feet. She lay back
and closed her eyes. From the movements that she heard, she gathered that
Walter was getting into his clothes. Once, as he struggled with an
insufficiently subservient shirt, he laughed, from mere miserable
nervousness. Anne, not recognising the utterance of his helpless
humanity, put that laugh down to the account of the devil that had
insulted her. Her heart grew harder.

"I am clothed, and in my right mind," said Majendie, standing before her
with his hand on the window sill.

She looked up at him, at the face she knew, the face that (oddly, it
seemed to her) had not changed to suit her new conception of him, that
maintained its protest. She had loved everything about him, from the
dark, curling hair of his head to his well-finished feet; she had loved
his slender, virile body, and the clean red and brown of his face, the
strong jaw and the mouth that, hidden under the short moustache, she
divined only to be no less strong. More than these things she had loved
his eyes, the dark, bright dwelling-places of the "goodness" she had
loved best of all in him. Used to smiling as they looked at her, they
smiled even now.

"If you'll take my advice," he said, "you'll go back to your warm bed.
You shall have the whole place to yourself."

And with that he left her.

She rose, went to the bed, arranged the turned-back blanket so as to hide
the place where he had lain, and slid on to her knees, supporting herself
by the bedside.

Never before had Anne hurled herself into the heavenly places in
turbulence and disarray. It had been her wont to come, punctual to some
holy, foreappointed hour, with firm hands folded, with a back that, even
in bowing, preserved its pride; with meek eyes, close-lidded; with
breathing hushed for the calm passage of her prayer; herself marshalling
the procession of her dedicated thoughts, virgins all, veiled even before
their God.

Now she precipitated herself with clutching hands thrown out before her;
with hot eyes that drank the tears of their own passion; with the shamed
back and panting mouth of a Magdalen; with memories that scattered the
veiled procession of the Prayers. They fled before her, the Prayers, in a
gleaming tumult, a rout of heavenly wings that obscured her heaven. When
they had vanished a sudden vagueness came upon her.

And then it seemed that the storm that had gone over her had rolled her
mind out before her, like a sheet of white-hot iron. There was a record
on it, newly traced, of things that passion makes indiscernible under its
consuming and aspiring flame. Now, at the falling of the flame, the faint
characters flashed into sight upon the blank, running in waves, as when
hot iron changes from white to sullen red. Anne felt that her union with
Majendie had made her one with that other woman, that she shared her
memory and her shame. For Majendie's sake she loathed her womanhood that
was yesterday as sacred to her as her soul. Through him she had conceived
a thing hitherto unknown to her, a passionate consciousness and hatred of
her body. She hated the hands that had held him, the feet that had gone
with him, the lips that had touched him, the eyes that had looked at him
to love him. Him she detested, not so much on his own account, as because
he had made her detestable to herself.

Her eyes wandered round the room. Its alien aspect was becoming
transformed for her, like a scene on a tragic stage. The light had
established itself in the windows and pier-glasses. The wall-paper was
flushing in its own pink dawn. And the roses bloomed again on the grey
ground of the bed-curtains. These things had become familiar, even dear,
through their three days' association with her happy bridals. Now the
room and everything in it seemed to have been created for all time to be
the accomplices and ministers of her degradation. They were well
acquainted with her and it; they held foreknowledge of her, as the
pier-glass held her dishonoured and dishevelled image.

She thought of her dead father's house, the ivy-coated Deanery in the
south, and of the small white bedroom, a girl's bedroom that had once
known her and would never know her again. She thought of her father and
mother, and was glad that they were dead. Once she wondered why their
death had been God's will. Now she saw very clearly why. But why she
herself should have been sent upon this road, of all roads of suffering,
was more than Anne could see.

She, whose nature revolted against the despotically human, had schooled
herself into submission to the divine. Her sense of being supremely
guided and protected had, before now, enabled her to act with decision
in turbulent and uncertain situations of another sort. Where other people
writhed or vacillated, Anne had held on her course, uplifted,
unimpassioned, and resigned. Now she was driven hither and thither,
she sank to the very dust and turned in it, she saw no way before her,
neither her own way nor God's way.

Widowhood would not have left her so abject and so helpless. If her
husband's body had lain dead before her there, she could have stood
beside it, and declared herself consoled by the immortal presence of his
spirit. But to attend this deathbed of her belief and of her love, love
that had already given itself over, too weak to struggle against
dissolution, it was as if she had seen some horrible reversal of the
law of death, spirit returning to earth, the incorruptible putting on
corruption.

Not only was her house of life made desolate; it was defiled. Dumb and
ashamed, she abandoned herself like a child to the arms of God, too
agonised to pray.

An hour passed.

Then slowly, as she knelt, the religious instinct regained possession of
her. It was as if her soul had been flung adrift, had gone out with the
ebb of the spiritual sea, and now rocked, poised, waiting for the turn of
the immortal tide.

Her lips parted, almost mechanically, in the utterance of the divine
name. Aware of that first motion of her soul, she gathered herself
together, and concentrated her will upon some familiar prayer for
guidance. For a little while she prayed thus, grasping at old shadowy
forms of petition as they went by her, lifting her sunken mind by main
force from stupefaction; and then, it was as if the urging, steadying
will withdrew, and her soul, at some heavenly signal, moved on alone into
the place of peace.




CHAPTER II


It was broad daylight outside. A man was putting out the lights one by
one along the cold little grey parade. A figure, walking slowly, with
down-bent head, was approaching the hotel from the pier. Anne recognised
it as that of her husband. Both sights reminded her that her life had to
be begun all over again, and to go on.

Another hour passed. Majendie had sent up a waitress with breakfast to
her room. He was always thoughtful for her comfort. It did not occur to
her to wonder what significance there might be in his thus keeping away
from her, or what attitude toward her he would now be inclined to take.
She would not have admitted that he had a right to any attitude at all.
It was for her, as the profoundly injured person, to decide as to the new
disposal of their relations.

She was very clear about her grievance. The facts, that her husband had
been pointed at in the public drawing-room of their hotel; that the
terrible statement she had overheard had been made and received casually;
that he had assumed, no less casually, her knowledge of the thing, all
bore but one interpretation: that Walter Majendie and the scandal he had
figured in were alike notorious. The marvel was that, staying in the town
where he lived and was known, she herself had not heard of it before. A
peculiarly ugly thought visited her. Was it possible that Scarby was the
very place where the scandal had occurred?

She remembered now that, when she had first proposed that watering-place
for their honeymoon, he had objected on the ground that Scarby was full
of people whom he knew. Besides, he had said, she wouldn't like it. But
whether she would like it or not, Anne, who had her bridal dignity to
maintain, considered that in the matter of her honeymoon his wishes
should give way to hers. She was inclined to measure the extent of his
devotion by that test. Scarby, she said, was not full of people who knew
_her_. Anne had been insistent and Majendie passive, as he was in most
unimportant matters, reserving his energies for supremely decisive
moments.

Anne, bearing her belief in Majendie in her innocent breast, failed at
first to connect her husband with the remarkable intimations that passed
between the two newcomers gossiping in the drawing-room before dinner.
They, for their part, had no clue linking the unapproachably strange lady
on the neighbouring sofa with the hero of their tale. The case, they
said, was "infamous." At that point Majendie had put an end to his own
history and his wife's uncertainty by entering the room. Three words and
a look, observed by Anne, had established his identity.

Her mind was steadied by its inalienable possession of the facts. She had
returned through prayer to her normal mood of religious resignation. She
tried to support herself further by a chain of reasoning. If all things
were divinely ordered, this sorrow also was the will of God. It was the
burden she was appointed to take up and bear.

She bathed and dressed herself for the day. She felt so strange
to herself in these familiar processes that, standing before the
looking-glass, she was curious to observe what manner of woman she had
become. The inner upheaval had been so profound that she was surprised
to find so little record of it in her outward seeming.

Anne was a woman whose beauty was a thing of general effect, and the
general effect remained uninjured. Nature had bestowed on her a body
strongly made and superbly fashioned. Having framed her well, she
coloured her but faintly. She had given her eyes of a light thick grey.
Her eyebrows, her lashes, and her hair were of a pale gold that had ashen
undershades in it. They all but matched a skin honey-white with that
even, sombre, untransparent tone that belongs to a temperament at once
bilious and robust. For the rest, Nature had aimed nobly at the
significance of the whole, slurring the details. She had built up the
forehead low and wide, thrown out the eyebones as a shelter for the
slightly prominent eyes; saved the short, straight line of the nose by a
hair's-breadth from a tragic droop. But she had scamped her work in
modelling the close, narrow nostrils. She had merged the lower lip with
the line of the chin, missing the classic indentation. The mouth itself
she had left unfinished. Only a little amber mole, verging on the thin
rose of the upper lip, foreshortened it, and gave to its low arc the
emphasis of a curve, the vivacity of a dimple (Anne's under lip was
straight as the tense string of a bow). When she spoke or smiled Anne's
mole seemed literally to catch up her lip against its will, on purpose to
show the small white teeth below. Majendie loved Anne's mole. It was that
one charming and emphatic fault in her face, he said, that made it human.
But Anne was ashamed of it.

She surveyed her own reflection in the glass sadly, and sadly went
through the practised, mechanical motions of her dressing; smoothing the
back of her irreproachable coat, arranging her delicate laces with a
deftness no indifference could impair. Yesterday she had had delight in
that new garment and in her own appearance. She knew that Majendie
admired her for her distinction and refinement. Now she wondered what he
could have seen in her--after Lady Cayley. At Lady Cayley's personality
she had not permitted herself so much as to guess. Enough that the woman
was notorious--infamous.

There was a knock at the door, the low knock she had come to know, and
Majendie entered in obedience to her faint call.

The hours had changed him, given his bright face a tragic, submissive
look, as of a man whipped and hounded to her feet.

He glanced first at the tray, to see if she had eaten her breakfast.

"There are some things I should like to say to you, with your permission.
But I think we can discuss them better out of doors."

He looked round the disordered room. The associations of the place were
evidently as painful to him as they were to her.

They went out. The parade was deserted at that early hour, and they found
an empty seat at the far end of it.

"I, too," she said, "have things that I should like to say."

He looked at her gravely.

"Will you allow me to say mine first?"

"Certainly; but I warn you, they will make no difference."

"To you, possibly not. They make all the difference to me. I'm not going
to attempt to defend myself. I can see the whole thing from your point of
view. I've been thinking it over. Didn't you say that what you heard you
had not heard from Edith?"

"From Edith? Never!"

"When did you hear it, then?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"From some one in the hotel?"

"Yes."

"From whom? Not that it matters."

"From those women who came yesterday. I didn't know whom they were
talking about. They were talking quite loud. They didn't know who I was."

"You say you didn't know whom they were talking about?"

"Not at first--not till you came in. Then I knew."

"I see. That was the first time you had heard of it?"

Her lips parted in assent, but her voice died under the torture.

"Then," he said, "I am profoundly sorry. If I had realised that, I would
not have spoken to you as I did."

The memory of it stung her.

"That," she said, "was--in any circumstances--unpardonable."

"I know it was. And I repeat, I am profoundly sorry. But, you see, I
thought you knew all the time, and that you had consented to forget it.
And I thought, don't you know, it was--well, rather hard on me to have it
all raked up again like that. Now I see how very hard it was on you,
dear. Your not knowing makes all the difference."

"It does indeed. If I _had_ known----"

"I understand. You wouldn't have married me?"

"I should not."

"Dear--do you suppose I didn't know that?"

"I know nothing."

"Do you remember the day I asked you why you cared for me, and you said
it was because you knew I was good?"

Her lip trembled.

"And of course I know it's been an awful shock to you to discover
that--I--was _not_ so good."

She turned away her face.

"But I never meant you to discover it. Not for yourself, like this. I
couldn't have forgiven myself--after what you told me. I meant to have
told you myself--that evening--but my poor little sister promised me that
she would. She said it would be easier for you to hear it from her. Of
course I believed her. There _were_ things she could say that I
couldn't."

"She never said a word."

"Are you sure?"

"Perfectly. Except--yes--she _did_ say----"

It was coming back to her now.

"Do you mind telling me exactly what she said?"

"N--no. She made me promise that if I ever found things in you that I
didn't understand, or that I didn't like----"

"Well--what did she make you promise?"

"That I wouldn't be hard on you. Because, she said, you'd had such a
miserable life."

"Poor Edith! So that was the nearest she could get to it. Things you
didn't understand and didn't like!"

"I didn't know what she meant."

"Of course you didn't. Who could? But I'm sorry to say that Edith made me
pretty well believe you did."

He was silent a while, trying to fathom the reason of his sister's
strange duplicity. Apparently he gave it up.

"You can't be a brute to a poor little woman with a bad spine," said he;
"but I'm not going to forgive Edith for that."

Anne flamed through her pallor. "For what?" she said. "For not having had
more courage than yourself? Think what you put on her."

"I didn't. She took it on herself. Edith's got courage enough for
anybody. She would never admit that her spine released her from all moral
obligations. But I suppose she meant well."

The spirit of the grey, cold morning seemed to have settled upon Anne.
She gazed sternly out over the eastern sea. Preoccupied with what he
considered Edith's perfidy, he failed to understand his wife's silence
and her mood.

"Edith's very fond of you. You won't let this make any difference between
you and her?"

"Between her and me it can make no difference. I am very fond of Edith."

"But the fact remains that you married me under false pretences? Is that
what you mean?"

"You may certainly put it that way."

"I understand your point of view completely. I wish you could understand
mine. When Edith said there were things she could have told you that I
couldn't, she meant that there were extenuating circumstances."

"They would have made no difference."

"Excuse me, they make all the difference. But, of course, there's no
extenuation for deception. Therefore, if you insist on putting it that
way--if--if it has made the whole thing intolerable to you, it seems to
me that perhaps I ought, don't you know, to release you from your
obligations----"

She looked at him. She knew that he had understood the meaning and the
depth of her repugnance. She did not know that such understanding is
rare in the circumstances, nor could she see that in itself it was a
revelation of a certain capacity for the "goodness" she had once believed
in. But she did see that she was being treated with a delicacy and
consideration she had not expected of this man with the strange devil.
It touched her in spite of her repugnance. It made her own that she had
expected nothing short of it until yesterday.

"_Do_ you insist?" he went on. "After what I've told you?"

"After what you've told me--no. I'm ready to believe that you did not
mean to deceive me."

"Doesn't that make any difference?" he asked tenderly.

"Yes. It makes some difference--in my judgment of you."

"You mean you're not--as Edith would say--going to be too hard on me?"

"I hope," said Anne, "I should never be too hard on any one."

"Then," he inquired, eager to be released from the strain of a most
insupportable situation, "what are we going to do next?"

He had assumed that the supreme issue had been decided by a polite
evasion; and his question had been innocent of all momentous meaning. He
merely wished to know how they were going to spend the day that was
before them, since they had to spend days, and spend them together. But
Anne's tense mind contemplated nothing short of the supreme issue that,
for her, was not to be evaded, nor yet to be decided hastily.

"Will you leave me alone," she said, "to think it over? Will you give me
three hours?"

He stared and turned pale; for, this time, he understood.

"Certainly," he said coldly, rising and taking out his watch. "It's
twelve now."

"At three, then?"

They met at three o'clock. Anne had spent one hour of bewilderment out of
doors, two hours of hard praying and harder thinking in her room.

Her mind was made up. However notorious her husband had been, between him
and her there was to be no open rupture. She was not going to leave him,
to appeal to him for a separation, to deny him any right. Not that she
was moved by a profound veneration for the legal claim. Marriage was to
her a matter of religion even more than of law. And though, at the
moment, she could no longer discern its sacramental significance through
the degraded aspect it now wore for her, she surrendered on the religious
ground. The surrender would be a martyrdom. She was called upon to lay
down her will, but not to subdue the deep repugnance of her soul.

Protection lay for her in Walter's chivalry, as she well knew. But she
would not claim it. Chastened and humbled, she would take up her wedded
life again. There was no vow that she would not keep, no duty she would
not fulfil. And she would remain in her place of peace, building up
between them the ramparts of the spiritual life.

Meanwhile she gave him credit for his attitude.

"Things can never be as they were between us," she said. "That you cannot
expect. But--"

He listened with his eyes fixed on hers, accepting from her his destiny.
She reddened.

"It was good of you to offer to release me--" He spared her.

"Are you not going to hold me to it, then?"

"I am not." She paused, and then forced herself to it. "I will try to be
a good wife to you."

"Thank you."




CHAPTER III


It was impossible for them to stay any longer at Scarby. The place was
haunted by the presence and the voice of scandalous rumour. Anne had the
horrible idea that it had been also a haunt of Lady Cayley, of the infamy
itself.

The week-old honeymoon looked at them out of its clouds with such an
aged, sinister, and disastrous aspect that they resolved to get away from
it. For the sake of appearances, they spent another week of aimless
wandering on the East coast, before returning to the town where an
unintelligible fate had decided that Majendie should have a business he
detested, and a house.

Anne had once asked herself what she would do if she were told that
she would have to spend all her life in Scale on Humber. Scale is
prevailingly, conspicuously commercial. It is not beautiful. Its streets
are squalidly flat, its houses meanly rectangular. The colouring of Scale
is thought by some to be peculiarly abominable. It is built in brown,
paved and pillared in unclean grey. Its rivers and dykes run brown under
a grey northeastern sky.

Once a year it yields reluctantly to strange passion, and Spring is
born in Scale; born in tortures almost human, a relentless immortality
struggling with visible corruption. The wonder is that it should be born
at all.

To-day, the day of their return, the March wind had swept the streets
clean, and the evening had secret gold and sharp silver in its grey. Anne
remembered how, only last year, she had looked upon such a spring on the
day when she guessed for the first time that Walter cared for her. She
was not highly endowed with imagination; still, even she had felt dimly,
and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and divine
uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.

But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne
Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie. Like some mourner for
whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral day of his beloved,
she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic Spring the immortal
cruelty and irony of Nature. She was bearing her own heart to its burial;
and each street that they passed, as the slow cab rattled heavily on its
way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable progress; it brought
her a little nearer to the grave.

From her companion's respectful silence she gathered that, though lost
to the extreme funereal significance of their journey, he was not
indifferent; he shared to some extent her mourning mood. She was grateful
for that silence of his, because it justified her own.

They were both, by their temperaments, absurdly and diversely,
almost incompatibly young. At two-and-thirty Majendie, through very
worldliness, was a boy in his infinite capacity for recoil from trouble.
Anne had preserved that crude and cloistral youth which belongs to all
lives passed between walls that protect them from the world. At
seven-and-twenty she was a girl, with a girl's indestructible innocence.
She had not yet felt within her the springs of her own womanhood.
Marriage had not touched the spirit, which had kept itself apart even
from her happiness, in the days that were given her to be happy in. Her
suffering was like a child's, and her attitude to it bitterly immature.
It bounded her; it annihilated the intellectual form of time,
obliterating the past, and intercepting any view of a future. Only,
unlike a child, and unlike Majendie, she lacked the power of the
rebound to joy.

"Dear," said her husband anxiously, as the cab drew up at the door of the
house in Prior Street, "have you realised that poor Edith is probably
preparing to receive us with glee? Do you think you could manage to look
a little less unhappy?"

The words were a shock to her, but they did her the service of a shock
by recalling her to the realities outside herself. All the courtesies
and kindnesses she owed to those about her insisted that her bridal
home-coming must lack no sign of grace. She forced a smile.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know I was looking particularly unhappy."

It struck her that Walter was not looking by any means too happy himself.

"It doesn't matter; only, we don't want to dash her down, first thing, do
we?"

"No--no. Dear Edith. And there's Nanna--how sweet of her--and Kate, and
Mary, too."

The old nurse stood on the doorstep to welcome them; her fellow-servants
were behind her, smiling, at the door. Interested faces appeared at the
windows of the house opposite. At the moment of alighting Anne was aware
that the eyes of many people were upon them, and she was thankful that
she had married a man whose self-possession, at any rate, she could rely
on. Majendie's manner was perfect. He avoided both the bridegroom's
offensive assiduity and his no less offensive affectation of
indifference. It had occurred to him that, in the circumstances, Anne
might find it peculiarly disagreeable to be stared at.

"Look at Nanna," he whispered, to distract her attention. "There's no
doubt about her being glad to see you."

Nanna grasped the hands held out to her, hanging her head on one side,
and smiling her tremorous, bashful smile. The other two, Kate and Mary,
came forward, affectionate, but more self-contained. Anne realised with a
curious surprise that she was coming back to a household that she knew,
that knew her and loved her. In the last week she had forgotten Prior
Street.

Majendie watched her anxiously. But she, too, had qualities which could
be relied on. As she passed into the house she had held her head high,
with an air of flinging back the tragic gloom like a veil from her face.
She was not a woman to trail a tragedy up and down the staircase. Above
all, he could trust her trained loyalty to convention.

The servants threw open two doors on the ground floor, and stood back
expectant. On such an occasion it was proper to look pleased and to give
praise. Anne was fine in her observance of each propriety as she looked
into the rooms prepared for her. The house in Prior Street had not lost
its simple old-world look in beautifying itself for the bride. It had put
on new blinds and clean paint, and the smell of spring flowers was
everywhere. The rest was familiar. She had told Majendie that she liked
the old things best. They appealed to her sense of the fit and the
refined; they were signs of good taste and good breeding in her husband's
family and in himself. The house was a survival, a protest against the
terrible all-invading soul of Scale on Humber.

For another reason, which she could not yet analyse, Anne was glad that
nothing had been changed for her coming. It was as if she felt that it
would have been hard on Majendie if he had been put to much expense in
renovating his house for a woman in whom the spirit of the bride had
perished. The house in Prior Street was only a place for her body to
dwell in, for her soul to hide in, only walls around walls, the shell
of the shell.

She turned to her husband with a smile that flashed defiance to the
invading pathos of her state. Majendie's eyes brightened with hope,
beholding her admirable behaviour. He had always thoroughly approved of
Anne.

Upstairs, in the room that was her own, poor Edith (the cause, as he
felt, of their calamity) had indeed prepared for them with joy.

Majendie's sister lay on her couch by the window, as they had left her,
as they would always find her, not like a woman with a hopelessly injured
spine, but like a lady of the happy world, resting in luxury, a little
while, from the assault of her own brilliant and fatiguing vitality. The
flat, dark masses of her hair, laid on the dull red of her cushions, gave
to her face an abrupt and lustrous whiteness, whiteness that threw into
vivid relief the features of expression, the fine, full mouth, with its
temperate sweetness, and the tender eyes, dark as the brows that arched
them. Edith, in her motionless beauty, propped on her cushions, had
acquired a dominant yet passionless presence, as of some regal woman of
the earth surrendered to a heavenly empire. You could see that, however
sanctified by suffering, Edith had still a placid mundane pleasure in her
white wrapper of woollen gauze, and in her long lace scarf. She wore them
with an appearance of being dressed appropriately for a superb occasion.

The sign of her delicacy was in her hands, smoothed and wasted with
inactivity. Yet they had an energy of their own. The hands and the weak,
slender arms had a surprising way of leaping up to draw to her all
beloved persons who bent above her couch. They leapt now to her brother
and his wife, and sank, fatigued with their effort. Two frail, nervous
hands embraced Majendie's, till one of them let go, as she remembered
Anne, and held her, too.

Anne had been vexed, and Majendie angry with her; but anger and vexation
could not live in sight of the pure, tremulous, eager soul of love that
looked at them out of Edith's eyes.

"What a skimpy honeymoon you've had," she said. "Why did you go and cut
it short like that? Was it just because of me?"

In one sense it was because of her. Anne was helpless before her
question; but Majendie rose to it.

"I say--the conceit of her! No, it wasn't just because of you. Anne
agreed with me about Scarby. And we're not cutting our honeymoon short,
we're spinning it out. We're going to have another one, some day, in a
nicer place."

"Anne didn't like Scarby, after all?"

"No, I knew she wouldn't. And she lived to own that I was right."

"That," said Edith, laughing, "was a bad beginning. If I'd been you,
Anne, whether I was right or not, I'd never have owned that _he_ was."

"Anne," said Majendie, "is never anything but just. And this time she was
generous."

Edith's hand was on the sleeve of Majendie's coat, caressing it. She
looked up at Anne.

"And what," said she, "do you think of my little brother, on the whole?"

"I think he says a great many things he doesn't mean."

"Oh, you've found that out, have you? What else have you discovered?"

The gay question made Anne's eyelids drop like curtains on her tragedy.

"That he means a great many things he doesn't say? Is that it?"

Majendie, becoming restive under the flicker of Edith's cheerful tongue,
withdrew the arm she cherished. Edith felt the nervousness of the
movement; her glance turned from her brother's face to Anne's, rested
there for a tense moment, and then veiled itself.

At that moment they both knew that Edith had abandoned her glad
assumption of their happiness. The blessings of them all were upon Nanna
as she came in with the tea-tray.

Nanna was sly and shy and ceremonial in her bearing, but under it there
lurked the privileged audacity of the old servant, and (as poor Majendie
perceived) the secret, terrifying gaiety of the hymeneal devotee. The
faint sound of giggling on the staircase penetrated to the room. It was
evident that Nanna was preparing some horrid and tremendous rite.

She set her tray in its place by Edith's couch, and cleared a side table
which she had drawn into a central and conspicuous position. The three,
as if humouring a child in its play, feigned a profound ignorance of what
Nanna had in hand.

She disappeared, suppressed the giggling on the stairs, and returned,
herself in jubilee let loose. She carried an enormous plate, and on the
plate Anne's wedding-cake with all its white terraces and towers, and (a
little shattered) the sugar orange blossoms and myrtles of its crown. She
stood it alone on its table of honour, and withdrew abruptly.

The three were stricken dumb by the presence of the bridal thing. Nanna,
listening outside the door, attributed their silence to an appreciation
too profound for utterance.

They looked at it, and it looked at them. Its veil of myrtle, trembling
yet with the shock of its entrance, gave it the semblance of movement and
of life. It towered in the majesty of its insistent whiteness. It trailed
its mystic modesties before them. Its brittle blossoms quivered like
innocence appalled. The wide cleft at its base betrayed the black and
formidable heart beneath the fair and sugared surface. These crowding
symbols, perceptible to Edith's subtler intelligence, massed themselves
in her companions' minds as one vast sensation of discomfort.

As usual when he was embarrassed, Majendie laughed.

"It's the very spirit of dyspepsia," he said. "A cold and dangerous
thing. _Must_ we eat it?"

"_You_ must," said Edith; "Nanna would weep if you didn't."

"I don't think I can--possibly," said Anne, who was already reaping her
sowing to the winds of emotion in a whirlwind of headache.

"Let's all eat it--and die," said Majendie. He hacked, laid a ruin of
fragments round the evil thing, scattered crumbs on all their plates, and
buried his own piece in a flower-pot. "Do you think," he said, "that
Nanna will dig it up again?"

Anne turned white over her tea, pleaded her headache, and begged to be
taken to her room. Majendie took her there.

"Isn't Anne well?" asked Edith anxiously, when he came back.

"Oh, it's nothing. She's been seedy all day, and the sight of that cake
finished her off. I don't wonder. It's enough to upset a strong man.
Let's ring for Nanna to take it away."

He rang. When Nanna appeared Edith was eating her crumbs ostentatiously,
as if unwilling to leave the last of a delicious thing.

"Oh, Nanna," said she, "that's a heavenly wedding-cake!"

Majendie was reminded of the habitual tender perfidy of that saint, his
sister. She was always lying to make other people happy, saying that she
had everything she wanted, when she hadn't, and that her spine didn't
hurt her, when it did. When Edith was too exhausted to lie, she would
look at you and smile, with the sweat of her torture on her forehead. He
knew Edith, and wondered how far she had lied to Anne, and what she had
done it for. He had a good mind to ask her; but he shrank from "dashing
her down the first day."

But Edith herself dashed everything down the first five minutes. There
was nothing that _she_ shrank from.

"I'm sorry for poor Anne," said she; "but it's nice to get you all to
myself again. Just for once. Only for once. I'm not jealous."

He smiled, and stroked her hair.

"I was jealous--oh, furiously jealous, just at first, for five minutes.
But I got over it. It was so undignified."

"It didn't show, dear."

"I didn't mean it to. It wouldn't have been pretty. And now, it's all
over and I like Anne. But I don't like her as much as you."

"You must like her more," he said gravely. "She'll need it--badly."

Edith looked at him. "How can she need it badly, when she has you?"

"You're a good woman, and I'm a mere mortal man. She's found that out
already, and she doesn't like it."

"Wallie, _dear_, what do you mean?"

"I mean exactly what I say. She's found it out. She's found _me_ out.
She's found everything out."

"Found out? But how?"

"It doesn't matter how. Edie, why didn't you tell her? You said you
would."

"Yes--I said I would."

"And you told me you had."

"No. I didn't tell you I had."

"What did you tell me, then?"

"I told you there was nothing to be afraid of, that it was all right."

"And of course I thought you'd told her."

"If I had told her it wouldn't have been all right; for she wouldn't have
married you."

Majendie scowled, and Edith went on calmly.

"I knew that--she as good as told me so--and I knew _her_."

"Well--what if she hadn't married me?"

"That would have been very bad for both of you. Especially for you."

"For me? And how do you know this isn't going to be worse? For both of
us. It's generally better to be straight, and face facts, however
disagreeable. Especially when everybody knows that you've got a skeleton
in your cupboard."

"Anne didn't, and she was so afraid of skeletons."

"All the more reason why you should have hauled the horrid thing out and
let her have a good look at it. She mightn't have been afraid of it then.
Now she's convinced it's a fifty times worse skeleton than it is."

"She wouldn't have lived with it in the house, dear. She said so."

"But I thought you never told her?"

"She was talking about somebody else's skeleton, dear."

"Oh, somebody else's, that's a very different thing."

"She meant--if she'd been the woman. I was testing her, to see how she'd
take it. Do you think I was very wrong?"

"Well, frankly, dear, I cannot say you were very wise."

"I wonder----"

She lay back wondering. Doubt of her wisdom shook her through all her
tender being. She had been so sure.

"How would you have liked it," said she, "if Anne had given you up and
gone away, and you'd never seen her again?"

His face said plainly that he wouldn't have liked it at all.

"Well, that's what she'd have done. And I wanted her to stay and marry
you."

"Yes, but with her eyes open."

She shook her head, the head that would have been so wise for him.

"No," said she. "Anne's one of those people who see best with their eyes
shut."

"Well, they're open enough now in all conscience. But there's one thing
she hasn't found out. She doesn't know how it happened. Can you tell her?
_I_ can't. I told her there were extenuating circumstances; but of
course I couldn't go into them."

"What did she say?"

"She said no circumstances could extenuate facts."

"I can hear her saying it."

"I understand her state of mind," said Majendie. "She couldn't see the
circumstances for the facts."

"Our Anne is but young. In ten years' time she won't be able to see the
facts for the circumstances."

"Well--will you tell her?"

"Of course I will."

"Make her see that I'm not necessarily an utter brute just because I----"

"I'll make her see everything."

"Forgive me for bothering you."

"Dear--forgive me for breaking my promise and deceiving you."

He bent to her weak arms.

"I believe," she whispered, "the end will yet justify the means."

"Oh--the end."

He didn't see it; but he was convinced that there could hardly be a worse
beginning.

He went upstairs, where Anne lay in the agonies of her bilious attack. He
found comfort, rather than gave it, by holding handkerchiefs steeped in
eau-de-Cologne to her forehead. It gratified him to find that she would
let him do it without shrinking from his touch.

But Anne was past that.




CHAPTER IV


For once in his life Majendie was glad that he had a business. Shipping
(he was a ship-owner) was a distraction from the miserable problem that
weighed on him at home.

Anne's morning face was cold to him. She lay crushed in her bed. She had
had a bad night, and he knew himself to be the cause of it.

His pity for her hurt like passion.

"How is she?" asked Edith, as he came into her room before going to the
office.

"She's a wreck," he said, "a ruin. She's had an awful night. Be kind to
her, Edie."

Edie was very kind. But she said to herself that if Anne was a ruin that
was not at all a bad thing.

Edith Majendie was a loving but shrewd observer of the people of her
world. Lying on her back she saw them at an unusual angle, almost as if
they moved on a plane invisible to persons who go about upright on their
legs. The four walls of her room concentrated her vision in bounding it.
She saw few women and fewer men, but she saw them apart from those
superficial activities which distract and darken judgment. Faces that
she was obliged to see bending over her had another aspect for Edith than
that which they presented to the world at large. Anne Majendie, who had
come so near to Edith, had always put a certain distance between herself
and her other friends. While they were chiefly impressed with her superb
superiority, and saw her forever standing on a pedestal, Edith declared
that she knew nothing of Anne's austere and impressive attributes. She
protested against anything so dreary as the other people's view of her.
They and their absurd pedestals! She refused to regard her sister-in-law
as an established solemnity, eminent and lonely in the scene. Pedestals
were all very well at a proper distance, but at a close view they were
foreshortening to the human figure. Other people might like to see more
pedestal than Anne; she preferred to see more Anne than pedestal. If they
didn't know that Anne was dear and sweet, she did. So did Walter.

If they wanted proof of it, why, would any other woman have put up with
her and her wretched spine? Weren't they all, Anne's friends, sorry for
Anne just because of it, of her? If you came to think of it, if you
traced everything back to the beginning, her spine had been the cause
of all Anne's troubles.

That was how she had always reasoned it out. No suffering had ever
obscured the lucidity of Edith's mind. She knew that it was her spine
that had kept her brother from marrying all those years. He couldn't
leave her alone with it, neither could he ask any woman to share the
house inhabited, pervaded, dominated by it. Unsafeguarded by marriage, he
had fallen into evil hands. To Edith, who had plenty of leisure for
reflection, all this had become terribly clear.

Then Anne had come, the strong woman who could bear Walter's burden for
him. She had been jealous of Anne at first, for five minutes. Then she
had blessed her.

But Edith, as she had told her brother, was not a fool. And all the time,
while her heart leapt to the image of Anne in her dearness and sweetness,
her brain saw perfectly well that her sister-in-law had not been free
from the sin of pride (that came, said Edith, of standing on a pedestal.
It was better to lie on a couch than stand on a pedestal; you knew, at
any rate, where you were).

Now, as Edith also said, there can be nothing more prostrating to a
woman's pride than a bad bilious attack. Especially when it exposes you
to the devoted ministrations of a husband you have made up your mind to
disapprove of, and compels you to a baffling view of him.

Anne owned herself baffled.

Her attack had chastened her. She had been touched by Walter's kindness,
by the evidence (if she had needed it) that she was as dear to him in her
ignominious agony as she had been in the beauty of her triumphal health.
As he moved about her, he became to her insistent outward sense the man
she had loved because of his goodness. It was so that she had first seen
his strong masculine figure moving about Edith on her couch, handling
her with the supreme gentleness of strength. She had not been two days in
the house in Prior Street before her memories assailed her. Her new and
detestable view of Walter contended with her old beloved vision of him.
The two were equally real, equally vivid, and she could not reconcile
them. Walter himself, seen again in his old surroundings, was protected
by an army of associations. The manifestations of his actual presence
were also such as to appeal to her memory against her judgment. Her
memory was in league with her. But when the melting mood came over her,
her conscience resisted and rose against them both.

Edith, watching for the propitious moment, could not tell by what signs
she would recognise it when it came. Her own hour was the early evening.
She had always brightened towards six o'clock, the time of her brother's
home-coming.

To-day he had removed himself, to give her her chance with Anne. She
could see him pottering about the garden below her window. He had kept
that garden with care. He had mown and sown, and planted, and weeded,
and watered it, that Edith might always have something pretty to look at
from her window. With its green grass plot and gay beds, the tiny oblong
space defied the extending grime and gloom of Scale. This year he had
planted it for Anne. He had set a thousand bulbs for her, and many
thousand flowers were to have sprung up in time to welcome her. But
something had gone wrong with them. They had suffered by his absence. As
Edith looked out of the window he was stooping low, on acutely bended
knees, sorrowfully preoccupied with a broken hyacinth. He had his back to
them.