"Your relations."
"How can I. I wouldn"t if I could."
"Your friends, then--Nina, Laura, Prothero, Nicky--me."
"You? I can"t do without you."
He smiled. "No, Jinny. I told you long ago you couldn"t."
He was moved, very strangely moved, by her admission. He had not had to help himself to that. She had given it to him, a gift from the unseen.
"Well," he said presently, "what are you going to do?"
"Oh--struggle along somehow."
"I wouldn"t struggle too hard." He meditated. "Look here, our natural tendency, yours and mine, is to believe that it"s people that do all the mischief, and not that the thing itself goes. We"ll believe anything rather than that. But we"ve got to recognize that it"s capricious. It comes and goes."
"Still, people do count. My brother-in-law, John Brodrick, makes it go.
Whereas you, Tanks, I own you make it come."
"Oh, I make it come, do I?"
He wondered, "What does Brodrick do?"
His smile persisted, so that she divined his wonder.
She turned from him ever so little, and he saw a sadness in her face, thus estranged and averted. He thought he knew the source of it and its secret. It also was a gift from the unseen.
When he had left her she went up-stairs and cast herself upon the bed where her little son lay naked, and abandoned herself to her maternal pa.s.sion.
And Gertrude stood there in the nursery, and watched her; and like Tanqueray, she thought she knew.
XLV
There were moments when she longed to be as Gertrude, a woman with one innocent, uncomplicated aim. She was no longer sorry for her. Gertrude"s pa.s.sion was so sweetly and serenely mortal, and it was so manifestly appeased. She bore within her no tyrannous divinity. She knew nothing of the consuming and avenging will.
Jane was at its mercy; now that she had given it its head. It went, it went, as they said; and the terror was now lest she should go with it, past all bounds.
For the world of vivid and tangible things was receding. The garden, the house, Brodrick and his suits of clothes and the unchanged garment of his flesh and blood, the child"s adorable, diminutive body, they had no place beside the perpetual, the ungovernable resurgence of her vision.
They became insubstantial, insignificant. The people of the vision were solid, they clothed themselves in flesh; they walked the earth; the light and the darkness and the weather knew them, and the gra.s.s was green under their feet. The things they touched were saturated with their presence. There was no sign of ardent life they had not.
And not only was she surrounded by their visible bodies, but their souls possessed her; she became the soul of each one of them in turn. It was the intimacy, the spiritual warmth of the possession that gave her her first sense of separation, of infidelity to Brodrick. The immaterial, consecrated places were invaded. It was as if she closed her heart to her husband and her child.
The mood continued as long as the vision kept its grip. She came out of it unnerved and exhausted, and terrified at herself. Bodily unfaithfulness seemed to her a lesser sin.
Brodrick was aware that she wandered. That was how he had always put it.
He had reckoned long ago with her propensity to wander. It was the way of her genius; it was part of her queerness, of the dangerous charm that had attracted him. He understood that sort of thing. It was his own comparative queerness, his perversity, that had made him fly in the face of his family"s tradition. No Brodrick had ever married a woman who wandered, who conceivably would want to wander.
And Jinny wandered more than ever; more than he had ever made allowances for. And with each wandering she became increasingly difficult to find.
Still, hitherto he had had his certainty. Her spirit might torment him with its disappearances; through her body, surrendered to his arms, he had had the a.s.surance of ultimate possession. At night her genius had no power over her. Sleeping, she had deliverance in dreams. His pa.s.sion moved in her darkness, sounded her depths; through all their veils of sleep she was aware of him, and at a touch she turned to him.
Now it was he who had no power over her.
One night, when he came to her, he found a creature that quivered at his touch and shrank from it, fatigued, averted; a creature pitifully supine, with arms too weary to enforce their own repulse. He took her in his arms and she gave a cry, little and low, like a child"s whimper. It went to his heart and struck cold there. It was incredible that Jinny should have given such a cry.
He lay awake a long time. He wondered if she had ceased to care for him.
He hardly dared own how it terrified him, this slackening of the physical tie.
He got up early and dressed and went out into the garden. At six o"clock he came back into her room. She was asleep, and he sat and watched her.
She lay with one arm thrown up above her pillow, as the trouble of her sleep had tossed her. Her head was bowed upon her breast.
[Ill.u.s.tration: It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife]
His watching face was lowered as he brooded over the marvel and the mystery of her. It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife, whose face had been so tender to him, whose body utterly tender, utterly compa.s.sionate. He tried to realize the marvel and mystery of her genius.
He knew it to be an immortal thing, hidden behind the veil of mortal flesh that for the moment was so supremely dear to him. He wondered once whether she still cared for Tanqueray. But the thought pa.s.sed from him; it could not endure beside the memory of her tenderness.
She woke and found his eyes fixed on her. They drew her from sleep, as they had so often drawn her from some dark corner where she had sat removed. She woke, as if at the urgence of a trouble that kept watch in her under her sleep. In a moment she was wide-eyed, alert; she gazed at him with a lucid comprehension of his state. She held out to him an arm drowsier than her thought.
"I"m a brute to you," she said, "but I can"t help it."
She sat up and gathered together the strayed ma.s.ses of her hair.
"Do you think," she said, "you could get me a cup of tea from the servant"s breakfast?"
He brought the tea, and as they drank together their mutual memories revived.
"I have," said she, "the most awful recollection of having been a brute to you."
"Never mind, Jinny," he said, and flushed with the sting of it.
"I don"t. That"s the dreadful part of it. I can"t feel sorry when I want to. I can"t feel anything at all."
She closed her eyes helplessly against his.
"It isn"t my fault. It isn"t really me. It"s It."
He smiled at this reference to the dreadful Power.
"The horrible and brutal thing about it is that it stops you feeling. It would, you know."
"Would it? I shouldn"t have thought it would have made _that_ difference."
"That"s just the difference it does make."