"How is your sister-in-law?" His colour rose.
"My sister-in-law?"
"Yes."
"She isn"t well."
"What--?"
"It"s hard to say. The doctor looked at her and said she needed quiet and must go to the sea. It"s her nerves."
"Her nerves?"
"Yes, they got very queer. She"s been sleeping badly."
"You quarrelled."
"She and I?--yes."
"What about?"
"Oh, I don"t know. She"s getting a little too much for me, I think."
She looked him in the face.
"No, you know it isn"t that. You quarrelled about me."
He said nothing.
"You quarrelled about me," she repeated. "She always disliked me from the beginning."
"No."
"Oh, yes, she did. Of course I saw that. She was jealous of me. She saw, more quickly than any one else, how much--how much we were going to mean to one another. Speak the truth. You know that is the best."
"She didn"t understand," Morris answered slowly. "She"s stupid in some things."
"So I"ve been the cause of your quarrelling, of your losing the only friend you had in your life?"
"No, not of my losing it. I haven"t lost her. Our relationship has shifted, that"s all."
"No. No. I know it is so. I"ve taken away the only person near you."
And suddenly turning from him to the back of the sofa, hiding her face in her hands, she broke into pa.s.sionate crying.
He stood for a moment, taut, controlled, as though he was fighting his last little desperate battle. Then he was beaten. He knelt down on the floor beside the sofa. He touched her hair, then her cheek. She made a little movement towards him. He put his arms around her.
"Don"t cry. Don"t cry. I can"t bear that. You mustn"t say that you"ve taken anything from me. It isn"t true. You"ve given me everything...
everything. Why should we struggle any longer? Why shouldn"t we take what has been given to us? Your husband doesn"t care. I haven"t anybody. Has G.o.d given me so much that I should miss this? And has He put it in our hearts if He didn"t mean us to take it? I love you. I"ve loved you since first I set eyes on you. I can"t keep away from you any longer. It"s keeping away from myself. We"re one. We are one another--not alone, either of us--any more...."
She turned towards him. He drew her closer and closer to him. With a little sigh of happiness and comfort she yielded to him.
There was only one cloud in the dim green sky, a cloud orange and crimson, shaped like a ship. As the sun was setting, a little wind stirred, the faint aftermath of the storm of the day, and the cloud, now all crimson, pa.s.sed over the town and died in fading ribbons of gold and orange in the white sky of the far horizon.
Only Miss Milton, perhaps, among all the citizens of the town, waiting patiently behind her open window, watched its career.
Chapter IX
The Quarrel
Every one has known, at one time or another in life, that strange unexpected calm that always falls like sudden snow on a storm-tossed country, after some great crisis or upheaval. The blow has seemed so catastrophic that the world must be changed with the force of its fall-- but the world is _not_ changed; hours pa.s.s and days go by, and no one seems to be aware that anything has occurred...it is only when months have gone, and perhaps years, that one looks back and sees that it was, after all, on such and such a day that life was altered, values shifted, the face of the world turned to a new angle.
This is plat.i.tudinous, but plat.i.tudes are not plat.i.tudes when we first make our personal experience of them. There seemed nothing plat.i.tudinous to Brandon in his present experiences. The day on which he had received Falk"s letter had seemed to fling him neck and crop into a new world--a world dim and obscure and peopled with new and terrifying devils. The morning after, he was clear again, and it was almost as though nothing at all had occurred. He went about the town, and everybody behaved in a normal manner. No sign of those strange menacing figures, the drunken painter, the sinister, smiling Hogg; every one as usual.
Ryle complacent and obedient; Bentinck-Major officious but subservient; Mrs. Combermere jolly; even, as he fancied, Foster a little more amiable than usual. It was for this open, outside world that he had now for many years been living; it was not difficult to tell himself that things here were unchanged. Because he was no psychologist, he took people as he found them; when they smiled they were pleased and when they frowned they were angry.
Because there was a great deal of pressing business he pushed aside Falk"s problem. It was there, it was waiting for him, but perhaps time would solve it.
He concentrated himself with a new energy, a new self-confidence, upon the Cathedral, the Jubilee, the public life of the town.
Nevertheless, that horrible day had had its effect upon him. Three days after Falk"s escape he was having breakfast alone with Joan.
"Mother has a headache," Joan said. "She"s not coming down."
He nodded, scarcely looking up from his paper.
In a little while she said: "What are you doing to-day, daddy? I"m very sorry to bother you, but I"m housekeeping to-day, and I have to arrange about meals----"
"I"m lunching at Carpledon," he said, putting his paper down.
"With the Bishop? How nice! I wish I were. He"s an old dear."
"He wants to consult me about some of the Jubilee services," Brandon said in his public voice.
"Won"t Canon Ryle mind that?"
"I don"t care if he does. It"s his own fault, for not managing things better."
"I think the Bishop must be very lonely out there. He hardly ever comes into Polchester now. It"s because of his rheumatism, I suppose. Why doesn"t he resign, daddy?"
"He"s wanted to, a number of times. But he"s very popular. People don"t want him to go."