"Well, thank heaven for that anyhow!" said Grantley piously. "I hate spots above anything, Jeremy."
"She hasn"t got any, I tell you," said Jeremy, distinctly annoyed.
Grantley smiled sleepily, threw himself on to his favourite couch, laid down his cigar, and closed his eyes. After the strain he was weary, and soon his regular breathing showed that he slept. Jeremy had got his pipe alight and sat smoking, from time to time regarding his brother-in-law"s handsome features with an inquiring gaze. There was a new stir of feeling in Jeremy. A boy of strong intellectual bent, he had ripened slowly on the emotional side, and there had been nothing in the circ.u.mstances or chances of his life to quicken the process thus naturally very gradual. To-day something had come. He had been violently s.n.a.t.c.hed from his quiet and his isolation, confronted with a crisis that commanded feeling, probed to the heart of his being by love and fear.
Under this call from life nascent feelings grew to birth and suppressed impulses struggled for liberty and for power. He was not now resisting them nor turning from them. He was watching, waiting, puzzling about them, hiding them still from others, but no longer denying them to himself. He was wondering and astir. The manhood which had come upon him was a strange thing; the life that called him seemed now full of new and strange things. Through his fear and love for Sibylla he was entering on new realms of experience and of feeling. He sat smoking hard and marvelling that Grantley slept.
Connected with this upheaval of mental conceptions which had hitherto maintained an aspect so boldly fundamental, and claimed to be the veritable rock of thought whereon Jeremy built his church, was the curious circ.u.mstance that he suddenly found himself rather sensitive about Grantley"s careless criticism of Miss Dora Hutting"s appearance.
He had not denied the fact alleged about it, though he had the continuance of it. But he resented its mention even as he questioned the propriety of Grantley"s sleeping. The reference a.s.sorted ill with his appreciation of Dora"s br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes and over-br.i.m.m.i.n.g sympathies. That he could not truthfully have denied the fact increased his annoyance. It seemed mean to remember the spots that had been on the face to which those br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes belonged--as mean as it would have been in himself to recall the bygone grievances and the old--the suddenly old-grown--squabbles which he had had with the long-legged rectory girl.
That old epithet too! A sudden sense of profanity shot across him as it came into his mind; he stood incomprehensively accused of irreverence in his own eyes.
Yet the spots had existed; and Sibylla had been wrong--had been wrong, and was now, it appeared, unreasonable. Moreover, beyond question, Mumples was idiotic. Reason was alarmed in him, since it was threatened.
He told himself that Grantley was very sensible to sleep. But himself he could not think of sleep, and his ears were hungry for every sound from the floor above.
The stairs creaked--there was a sniff. Mrs. Mumple was at the door.
Jeremy made an instinctive gesture for silence because Grantley slept.
He watched Mrs. Mumple as she turned her eyes on the peacefully reposing form. The eyes turned sharp to him, and Mrs. Mumple raised her fat hands just a little and let them fall softly.
"He"s asleep?" she whispered.
"You see he is. Best thing for him to do, too." His answering whisper was gruff.
"She"s not sleeping," said Mrs. Mumple; "and she"s asking for him again."
"Then we"d better wake him up." He spoke irritably as he rose and touched Grantley"s shoulder. "He must be tired out, don"t you see?"
Mrs. Mumple made no answer. She raised and dropped her hands again.
Grantley awoke lightly and easily, almost unconscious that he had slept.
"What were we talking about? Oh, yes, Dora Hutting! Why, I believe I"ve been asleep!"
"You"ve slept nearly an hour," said Jeremy, going back to his chair.
Grantley"s eyes fell on Mrs. Mumple; a slight air of impatience marked his manner as he asked:
"Is anything wrong, Mrs. Mumple?"
"She"s asking for you again, Mr. Imason."
"Dear me, Gardiner said she should be kept quiet!"
"The doctor"s lying down. But she"ll not rest without seeing you; she"s fretting so."
"Have you been letting her talk about it and excite herself? Have you been talking to her yourself?"
"How can we help talking about it?" Mrs. Mumple moaned.
"It"s infernally silly--infernally!" he exclaimed in exasperation.
"Well, I must go to her, I suppose." He turned to Jeremy. "It"ll be better if you"ll keep Mrs. Mumple with you. We"ll get the nurse to go to Sibylla."
"I can"t leave her as she is," said Mrs. Mumple, threatening a fresh outburst of tears.
Grantley walked out of the room, muttering savagely.
The strain of irritation, largely induced by Mrs. Mumple"s lachrymosely reproachful glances and faithful doglike persistency, robbed him of the tenderness by which alone he might possibly have won his wife"s willing obedience and perhaps convinced her reason through her love. He used his affection now, not in appeal, but as an argumentative point. He found in her a hard opposition; she seemed to look at him with a sort of dislike, a mingling of fear and wonder. Thus she listened in silence to his cold marshalling of the evidences of his love and his deliberate enforcing of the claims it gave him. Seeing that he made no impression, he grew more impatient and more imperious, ending with a plain intimation that he would discuss the question no further.
"You"ll make me the murderess of my child," she said.
The gross irrational exaggeration drove him to worse bitterness.
"I"ve no intention of running even the smallest risk of being party to the murder of my wife," he retorted.
Lying among her pillows, very pale and weary, she p.r.o.nounced the accusation which had so long brooded in her mind.
"It"s not because you love me so much; you do love me in a way: I please you, you"re proud of me, you like me to be there, you like to make love to me, you like taking all I have to give you, and G.o.d knows I liked to give it--but you haven"t given the same thing back to me, Grantley. I don"t know whether you"ve got it to give to anybody, but at any rate you haven"t given it to me. I haven"t become part of you, as I was ready to become--as I"ve already become of my little unborn child. Your life wouldn"t be made really different if I went away. In the end you"ve been apart from me. I thought the coming of the child must make all that different; but it hasn"t: you"ve been about the child just as you"ve been about me."
"Oh, where on earth do you get such notions?" he exclaimed.
"Just the same as about me. You wanted me and you wanted a child too.
But you wanted both with--well, with the least disturbance of your old self and your old thoughts: with the least trouble--it almost comes to that really. I don"t know how to put it, except like that. You enjoyed the pleasant parts very much, but you take as little as you can of the troublesome ones. I suppose a lot of people are--are like that. Only it"s a--a little unfortunate that you should have happened on me, because I--I can"t understand being like that. To me it seems somehow rather cruel. So, knowing you"re like that, I can"t believe you when you tell me that you think of nothing but your love for me. I daresay you think it"s true--I know you wouldn"t say it if you didn"t think it true; and in a way it"s true. But the real, real truth is----" She paused, and for the first time turned her eyes on him. "The real truth is not that you love me too much to do what I ask."
"What else can it be?" he cried desperately, utterly puzzled and upset by her accusation.
"What else can it be? Ah, yes, what else?" Her voice grew rather more vehement. "I can answer that. What have I been doing these five months but learning the answer to that? I"ll tell you. It"s not that you love me so much, it"s that you don"t care about the child."
The words brought a suspicion into his mind.
"That old fool Mrs. Mumple has been talking to you? She"s been repeating something I said? Well, I expressed it carelessly, awkwardly, but----"
"What does it matter what Mumples has repeated? I knew it all before."
"Meddlesome old idiot!" he grumbled fiercely.
To him there was no reason in it all. The accusation angered him fiercely and amazed him even more; he saw no shadow of justice in it. He put it all down to Sibylla"s exaggerated way of talking and thinking. He was conscious of no shortcomings; the accusation infuriated the more for its entire failure to convince. "When two women put their heads together and begin to talk nonsense, there"s no end to it; bring a baby, born or unborn, into the case, and the last chance of any limit to the nonsense is gone." He did not tell her that (though it expressed what he felt) in a general form; he fell back on the circ.u.mstances of the minute.
"My dear Sibylla, you"re not fit to discuss things rationally at present. We"ll say no more now; we shall only be still more unjust to one another if we do. Only I must be obeyed."
"Yes, you shall be obeyed," she said. "But since it"s like that, I think that, whatever happens now, I--I won"t have any more children, Grantley."
"What?"
He was startled out of the cold composure which he had achieved in his previous speech.
She repeated her words in a low tired voice, but firmly and coolly.
"I think I won"t have any more children, you know."
"Do you know what you"re saying?"