He agreed with her, and pondered. Tanqueray had once said the very same thing to him, in talking about Jane. She ought not to marry. He, Tanqueray, wasn"t going to, not if he knew it. That was the view they all took. Not to marry.
He knew that they were under vows of poverty. Were they pledged to chast.i.ty and obedience, too? Obedience, immitigable, unrelenting? How wonderful they were, they and their achievements and renunciations, the things they did, and the things they let alone simply and as a matter of course, with their infallible instinct for the perfect. High, solitary priest and priestesses of a G.o.d diviner than desire. And She--he saw her more virgin, more perfect than they all.
"You think too then," the blameless youth continued, "that if Miss Holland--married it would injure her career?"
"Injure it? There wouldn"t be any career left to injure."
Was it really so? He recorded, silently, his own determination to remember that. It had for him, also, the consecration of a vow.
A thought struck him. Perhaps Laura, perhaps Tanqueray, had divined him and were endeavouring in kindness to take from him the poison of a preposterous hope. He preferred, however, not to explain them or the situation or himself thus. He was, with all possible sublimity, renouncing Jane.
Another thought struck him. It struck him hard, with the shock almost of blasphemy. It broke into speech.
"Not," he said, "if she were to marry Him?"
Laura was silent, and he wondered.
Why not? After all it was natural. She matched him. The thing was inevitable, and it was fitting. So supremely fitting was it that he could not very well complain. He could give her up to George Tanqueray.
X
Jane Holland and Tanqueray had left the others some considerable way behind. It was possible, they agreed, to have too much of Nicky, though he did adore them.
The wide high road stood up before them, climbing the ridge, to drop down into Wendover. A white road, between gra.s.s borders and hedgerows, their green powdered white with the dust of it. Over all, the pallor of the first white hour of twilight.
For a moment, a blessed pause in the traffic, they were alone; twilight and the road were theirs.
The two bore themselves with a certain physical audacity, a swinging challenge to fatigue. He, in his well-knit youth, walked with the step of some fine, untamed animal. She, at his side, kept the wild pace he set with a smooth motion of her own. She carried, high and processionally, her trophy, flowers from their host"s garden, wild parsley of her own gathering, and green fans of beech and oak. As she went, the branches swayed with the swinging of her body. A light wind woke on the hill and played with her. Her long veil, grey-blue and transparent, falling from her head to her shoulders, flew and drifted about her, now clinging to her neck, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, now fluttering itself free.
He looked at her, and thought that if Gisborne, R.A., hadn"t been an idiot, he would have painted her, not sitting, but like that. Protected by the charm of Rose, there was no more terror for him in any charm of Jane"s. He could afford to show his approval, to admit that, even as a woman, she had points. He could afford, being extremely happy himself, to make Jane happy too.
So sheltered, so protected was he that it did not strike him that Jane was utterly defenceless and exposed.
"Yes," he said, "it"s been a day."
"Hasn"t it?"
She saw him sustained by some inward ecstasy. The coming joy, the joy of his wedding-day, was upon him; the light of it was in his eyes as he looked at her, the tenderness of it in his voice as he spoke to her again.
"Have you liked it as much as you used to like our other days?"
"Oh more, far more." Then, remembering how those other days had been indeed theirs and n.o.body else"s, she added, "In spite of poor Nicky."
It was at this moment that he realized that he would have to tell her about Rose; also that he would be hanged if he knew how to. She had been manifestly unhappy when he last saw her. Now he saw, not only that she was happy, but that he was responsible for her happiness. This was worse than anything he had yet imagined. It gave him his first definite feeling of treachery toward Jane.
Her reference to Nicky came like a reprieve. How was it, he said, that they were let in for him? Or rather, why had they ever let him in?
"It was you, Jane, who did it."
"No, George; it was you. You introduced him."
He owned it. "I did it because I hoped you"d fall in love with him."
She saw that there was a devil in him that still longed to torment her.
"That," said she, "would have been very bad for Nicky."
"Yes. But it would have been very good for you."
She had her moment of torment; then she recovered.
"I thought," said she, "that was the one thing I was not to do."
"You"re not to do it seriously. But you couldn"t fall in love with Nicky seriously. Could you? Could anybody?"
"Why are you so unkind to Nicky?"
"Because he"s so ungovernably a man of letters."
"He isn"t. He only thinks he is."
"He thinks he"s Sh.e.l.ley, because his father"s a squire."
"That saves him. No man of letters, if he tried all night, could think anything so deliciously absurd. Don"t you wish _you_ could feel like that!"
He rose to it, his very excitement kindling his intellectual flame.
"To feel myself an immortal, a blessed G.o.d!"
They played together, profanely, with the idea that Nicky was after all divine.
"Such a tragic little G.o.d," said Jane, with a pitiful mouth, "a little G.o.d without a single apostle or a prophet--n.o.body," she wailed, "to spread the knowledge of him."
"I say--_we_"ll build an altar on Wendover, to Nicky as the Unknown G.o.d."
"He won"t like that, our calling him unknown."
"Let"s call him the Unapparent--the Undeveloped. He is the Undeveloped."
"In one aspect. In another he"s a finished poem, an incarnate lyric----"
"An ode to immortality on legs----"
"Nicky hasn"t any legs. He"s a breath--a perpetual aspiration."