It was abominably expressive and sufficient. And it did not admit of pleading or of extenuation. It showed her touching, on one extreme, Blake"s shallow and spurious sentiment; on the other, Harriet Courtland"s licence of anger. It pointed her attention to the ruin of Tom"s life, to the piteous plight of his children, to Harriet"s fate, to Blake"s facile forgetfulness of love too heedlessly and wantonly offered. It stripped her fantastic ideas of their garish finery, leaving them, in the revulsion of her feelings, bereft of all beauty and attractiveness. Impelled to look back, she seemed to find the same trail over everything--even in those childish days of which Jeremy Chiddingfold had once given a description that would not have rea.s.sured her; even in the beginning of her acquaintance with Grantley, in the ready rapture of her first love, in the intoxication of the fairy ride.
Changing its form, now hostile to her husband instead of with him, the same temper showed in all the events which led up to the birth of little Frank: its presence proved that her madness over Blake was no isolated incident, but rather the crown of her development and the truest interpreter of a character empty of worth, strength, or stability. Many bitter hours brought her to this recognition; but when light came, the very temper which she condemned was in her still, and turned the coolness of recognition and a.n.a.lysis into an extravagant heat of scorn and self-contempt.
What was the conclusion? Was she to throw herself at Grantley"s feet, proclaiming penitence, imploring pardon, declaring love? "No, no!" she cried. That would be so easy, so short a cut, so satisfying to her roused feelings. She put the notion from her in horror; it was the suggestion of her old devil in a new disguise. Her love for Grantley had bitten too deep into her nature to be treated like that, with that levity and frivolity of easy impulse, that violence of headstrong emotion, those tempests of feeling so remote from true sincerity of heart. The cure did not lie in pampering sick emotions into a plump semblance of healthy life. Where did it lie, if it were possible at all?
It must lie in the most difficult of all tasks--a change not of other people or of their bearing and feelings towards her, but a change of herself and of her own att.i.tude towards others and towards the world, and in her judgment and her ruling of herself. If things were to go differently with her, she must be different. The arrogance of her nature must be abated, the extravagant claims she had made must be lowered. The thought struck on her almost with despair. So hard seemed the lesson, so rough the path. And it seemed a path which must be trodden alone. It was not as the easy pleasant road of emotion, beguiled by enchanting companionship, strewn with the flowers of fancy, carpeted with pleasure.
This way was hard, bleak, and solitary. Merely to contemplate it chilled her. Even that happiness with her child, which had so struck Christine and afforded matter for one of those keen thrusts at Grantley Imason, appeared to her in a suspicious guise. She could not prevent it nor forgo it--nature was too strong; but she yielded to it with qualms of conscience, and its innocent delights were spoilt by the voice of self-accusation and distrust. Could it be real, genuine, true in the woman who had deserted the child and been indifferent to his fate?
Both penitents, both roused to self-examination, Grantley Imason and his wife seemed to have exchanged parts. Each suffered an inversion, if not of character, yet of present mood. Each sought and desired something of what had appeared to deserve reprobation when displayed by the other.
Their own propensities and ideals, carried to an extreme, had threatened ruin; they erected the opposite temper of mind into a standard, and thereto sought to conform their conduct at the cost of violence to themselves. It seemed strange, yet it was the natural effect of the fates and the temperaments which they had seen worked out and displayed before their eyes, in such close touch with them, impinging so sharply on their own destinies.
Sibylla had not been at home when Grantley arrived. She met him first in the nursery, when she went to see little Frank at his tea. No mood, be it what it would, could make Grantley a riotous romping companion for a tiny child: that effort was beyond him. But to-day he played with his son with a new sympathy; talked to him with a pleasant gravity which stirred the young and curious mind; listened to his broken utterances with a kindly quizzical smile which seemed to encourage the little fellow. Grantley had never before found so much answering intelligence.
He forgot the quick development which even a few weeks bring at such a time of life. He set all the difference down to the fact that never before had he looked for what he now found so ready and so obvious.
Anything he did not find for himself the nurse was eager to point out, and with the aid of this enthusiastic signpost Grantley discovered the road to understanding very readily. He and the boy were, without doubt, enjoying one another"s society when Sibylla came in.
She stood in the doorway, waiting with an aching heart for the usual thing, for a withdrawal of even such sign of interest as Grantley had ever shown in old days. It did not come. He gave her a cheery recognition, and went on playing with Frank. Irresistibly drawn, she came near to them. Something was signalled in Frank"s struggling speech and impatiently waving arms. Grantley could not follow, and now turned his eyes to Sibylla, asking for an explanation. The nurse had gone into the other room, busied about the preparations for the meal. Sibylla took Frank in her arms.
"I know what he means," she said proudly.
Her eyes met Grantley"s. His were fixed very intently on her.
"I don"t," he said. "Is it possible for a man to learn these mysteries?"
His tone and words were light; they were even mocking, but not now with the mockery which hurts.
She flushed a little.
"You"d like to learn?" she asked. "Shall we try to teach him, Frank--to teach him your code?"
"I"ll watch you with him."
For a moment she looked at him appealingly, and then knelt on the floor and arranged the toys as Frank had wanted them. The little fellow laughed in triumph.
"How did you know?" asked Grantley.
"I"ve not lost that knowledge--no, I haven"t," she answered almost in a whisper.
The scene was a spur to his newly stirred impulses. He had rejoiced in his wife before now; but the clouds had always hung about the cot, so that he had not rejoiced nor gloried in the mother of his child. His heart was full as he sat and watched the mother and the child.
"You"ve got to watch him very carefully still; but he"s getting ever so much more--more----"
"Lucid?" Grantley suggested, smiling.
"Yes," she laughed, "and, if possible, more imperious still. I believe he"s going to be like you in that."
"Oh, not like me, let"s hope!"
He laughed, but there was a look of pain on his face.
Sibylla turned round to him and spoke in a low voice, lest by chance the nurse should hear.
"You mustn"t be sure I agree altogether with that," she said, and turned swiftly away to the child again.
Grantley rose.
"Lift him up to me and let me kiss him," he said.
With grave eyes Sibylla obeyed.
But the natural man is not easily subdued, nor does he yield his place readily. In the end Grantley was not apt at explanations or apologies.
The evening fell fair and still, a fine October night, and he joined Sibylla in the garden. Christine remained inside--from tact perhaps, though she was very likely chilly too. Grantley smoked in silence, while Sibylla looked down on the little village below.
"This thing has shaken me up dreadfully," he said at last. "The Courtlands, I mean."
"Yes, I know." She turned and faced him. "And isn"t there something else that concerns you and me?"
"I know of nothing. And you can hardly say the Courtlands concern us exactly."
"They do; and there is something else, Grantley. I know what Janet Selford wrote."
"That"s nothing at all to me."
"But it is something to me. You know it is."
"I won"t talk of that. It"s nothing." He put his hand out suddenly to her. "Let"s be friends, Sibylla."
She did not take his hand, but she looked at him with a friendly gaze.
"We really ought to try to manage that, oughtn"t we? For Frank"s sake, if for nothing else. Or do you think I"ve no right to talk about Frank?"
"Suppose we don"t talk about rights at all? I"m not anxious to."
"It"ll be hard; but we"ll try to be friends for his sake--that he may have a happy home."
Grantley"s heart was stirred within him.
"That"s good; but is that all?" he asked in a low voice full of feeling.
"Is it all over for ourselves? Can"t we be friends for our own sakes?"
"Haven"t we lost--well, not the right--if you don"t like that--but the power?"
"I"m an obstinate man; you know that very well."
"It"ll be hard--for both of us; but, yes, we"ll try."
She gave him her hand to bind the bargain; he gripped it with an intensity that surprised and alarmed her. She could see his eyes through the gloom. Were they asking friendship only? There was more than that in his heart and in his eyes--a thing never dead in him. It had sprung to fresh vigour now, from the lessons of calamity, from the pity born in him, from the new eyes with which he had looked on the boy in his mother"s arms. She could not miss the expression of it.
"Is that the best we can try for?" he whispered. "There was something else once, Sibylla."
He had not moved, yet she raised her hands as though to check or beat off his approach. She was afraid. All that the path he again beckoned her on had meant to her came to her mind. If she followed him along it, would it not be once more to woo disillusion, to court disaster, to invite that awful change to bitterness and hatred?